LORD, Do I have Stories!

Mmm!


I got back last night from two weeks in some podunk, all-White town in North Alabama, unaffected by natural disasters and poor race relations.
That's not true. I was in New Orleans.

Hania, a girl who I've been slyly referencing for about two years (especially when the story is about self-pity), hooked me up with a trip to The Big Easy.

Service Work.

It's a beautiful, muggy mess, man. Hurricane Katrina killed some serious employment foundations and continues to wink at the residents with abandoned homes and empty lots, five years down the road. The oil spill has brought some would-be rig workers to the Easy, too.
On top of those environmental catastrophes, alcohol there is like meth here: Plentiful. Half of the French Quarter is washouts with great stories and hungry hearts.
Bruce Springsteen lives in New Orleans.

Education in the city is horrid, also. I met too many people with illiterate leanings. Adults, middle-class. Too many. This is the West, isn't it?

No, Joel. This is where the "Global South" got its name.

The whole time, or at least the time when I wasn't reveling REALLY loathing my neighbor or looking lustfully at everything downtown or in a(as of yet) unspoiled gulf of Mexico,
I wondered, I refuted what the difference was.
Had I done anything of substance? Had I contributed to the rise of a once cosmopolity?

I packed boxes of books in Capdau Elementary, I painted baseboard in a church office, I handed and shook the homeless looking for a good camping spot, I dug a ditch, killed weeds, smiled, witnessed, Strove to make a difference,
but this city is shattered.

Not ruins, but perpetual shatter. There is much room for improvement.
And of the thousand, maybe tens of thousands of volunteers that come down, is my time drop in the water?

Am I faceless many? I must be, right? I have to be. I can't have an ego in this place, staring out the soul-crushing shattered windows of a charter school.
I can't.

I just can't.

That was until I was standing next to a VCR and Hania, talking with Miss Luvenia about faith and race. Our host, whose house we were painting "Winter Hedge," said, as if in a dream,
"You have no idea how much difference you're making.
"This means the world."

Or something.
I paraphrase because the moment passed like all others, and her sincerity struck me.

I hope I didn't get preachy.
I have cooler stories about getting stuck groggy in a what could have been a tropical storm at six in the morning, swimming with fish, falling in and out of perspective,

But what struck me about the trip, past the breast-beating and the evangelism, was the thing Miss Luvenia said to me. An old, black widow, hardly walking, telling me she'd rather be me.
And I told her that I'd rather be her.

That was the crux of it. I think. The crux of the whole trip, of my life so far. Or something.
Or nothing.

For those of us who lack faith, who struggle with the idea, or feel outside the club that already has meaning pre-attached because of the One Truth of their faith,

We have to find our own meaning. Miss Luvenia smiled and told me I'd be a good father.

Go Big or

So I went home.

I failed at college. I did nothing but study and curse the season for changing.
I seethed like an old man.
That attitude gets you a one-way ticket home. Shape up for next time.

I'm enjoying being home, sort of.
I mean, I'm doing less than I did in college.
I'd peak outside my window, "Is the sun shining?
Better go back to sleep."

I don't even see the sun anymore, now that I've been home.
Portland has been ugly and drizzly, too. More than usual. I thought I lived in England, for a while. I wanted to colonize so bad!

I wanted to write about my experience at the Sasquatch Music Festival, with apparent rants about the pervasive white youth culture,
contrast and compare it to my recent visit with my Other grandmother (not the foul-mouthed, but the foul-spirited) on the topic of drug use and abuse both to numb the pain and open the eyes as well as the ironic conformity of the eternally nonconformist youth and the seeming conformity of the elderly who have lived completely different lives,
but
Not only was my commentary going to be cruel, but
It's really not that interesting.
You could read that anywhere on the internet, I bet.

Summer is about unwinding, not analyzing (and refuting) the lives of others, Joel.

I think you should focus on something lighter while you float between unemployment, hunger and philanthropy:

I don't care what anyone says. I'm glad I'm growing out my hair.


Proof of success!

Train of Thought 5, 6 and the Rest

This is why I don't post series.
And this is why we don't have nice things.

I have long since ended my trek, but I will still recant the end as it was so powerfully inspiring.

The last two days drove by slowly with Illinois, Ohio, Montana, Indiana and eastern Washington rolling on by my window, by every window. I don't have these states in an accurate order because they don't need to be.
What wasn't dilapidated houses and shut-down steel mills still coughing smoke from the years past of poor health and union busts
was fields, open fields underneath the worst of overcast heavens.

Big Sky Country was wide, rambling country.
I sang "Wide Open Spaces" by The Dixie Chicks to my Dad for two days.

He told me about a History Channel special about ruins before I graduated. The show glossed over the ruins of previous civilizations and stated that the modernity's lust for progress and rebuilding has arrested our ruins.
Well Dad, I beg to differ.
These are our ruins: The empty factories and the abandoned homes next to the train tracks. They are our ruins. The Iron Age is over for America.

On a lighter note, some two-seated woman totally hit on my dad as he was stumbling back from the bathroom. Thank you Gods of Contrast.

As we came up on the Rockies, he told me a couple stories about his childhood and why he loves trains. For the first time in my life, I could imagine him as a child, not as an addled young man in the Village or a fisherman off the Oregon Coast, but as innocent and ignorant.
There were a lot of people in the 50s that didn't know any better. That's as much as I can say before I'm stealing stories.

Indirectly, I learned that one thing that can't be taught or explained is nostalgia. We were cooped in a box slightly smaller than the 50 square feet of my dorm room and forced to stare at each other or the dull and dying outside world partly because he was attached to the grandeur of the railroad in his memory.
I'll tell you what, I was born with jetfighters and space ships. We don't need trains like the baby boomers.

It was still a journey and I've seen middle, run-down America.
Amtrak won't go out of business, at least, for the next five years, so if you want to get nauseous and glue yourself to window across the States, I'll tell you, it's an experience.