Today might have been one of the muggiest days all summer here. It seems like bad form to bitch about it, so I won’t. Last night I came home late and saw and heard my favorite and least favorite about this area in late august; cicadas, crickets and fireflies and students. I know, it sounds like all the same thing, but I like the first three. The first three don’t wander around aimlessly or try and hump things in the road. Fireflies and cicadas are actually pretty shy; I like that in an insect.
Wow, snarky, hours old, stale snarky.
I’ve been watching old seasons of Six feet under; you know in-between doing other things, real things, grown up things. There is this episode where the guy goes into a record store and he’s buying a Beck CD (it’s 2003, right) and the clerk is this snarky LA record store chick and she has one line something like “Oh, this is a great album to take diet pills and clean the bathroom too”. I haven’t seen her in anything since. She’ll have a kid or a nephew or niece and either she’ll show that scene to them or somebody else will and … I don’t know. A lot of people go places to find their fame and fortune in the arts and don’t get a speaking part in a hit show.
It’s somehow heroic to go and try. I don’t know why. I guess it’s more heroic than not trying. There are a lot of people who wait tables because they wait tables and they aren’t waiting to be discovered, they just have a job that pays their bills and they the shit that people do and a thousand years later don’t look back with regret or remorse and maybe that’s too fucking common to be heroic, but it’s the same thing. I don’t know, performance is kind of useless without an audience I guess, but an audience doesn’t necessarily make it useful. I guess all I really mean is that fame is an odd motivation. Robin Williams and Hunter Thompson were both famous and they killed themselves. I know a lot of waiters and waitresses who are still alive and the dead ones I know aren’t deader than those guys.
Cicadas; June Bugs, big fucking crickets, locusts, they make this sound like electricity buzzing through the wires by rubbing their legs together just like crickets or grasshoppers. It’s rare to see one; you have to look for them. There are thousands of different birds around here so it’d be a stroke of luck and timing to find one dead that hasn’t been eaten; they are like filet mignon to a bird.
I knew this girl, Leslie Birdwell, her father was the minister at this sort of hippie-Jesus-is-groovy church, and throughout grade school and middle school we were the weird artsy kids. Um, she was the weird artsy kid; I sometimes joined her in weird artsy projects. Things got different in high school. They shouldn’t have, but they did. We had different odd connections. A few years ago, maybe five now, I lose time here, I talked to her about life and shit and what we’d been doing for the last few decades. I don’t really remember, I had some kids, she had some kids, we had good marriages and bad marriages, and that sort of shit. Her name was Birdwell; she didn’t eat June Bugs; cicadas.
That church is run by a radical feminist now. I’m not really sure it matters. Imagine for a moment if there was a god, a guy who created all this stuff; why, of all the places in the universe, would he hang out in a church on some arbitrary seven day cycle of this little planets turn on its axis in orbit around a golden star? Even in the cartoonist white guy with a gray beard in the sky version of Sunday school god, why would it make a difference to god that the hippie was replaced by the bull dyke?
I liked Paige Birdwell, the minister, my childhood friend’s dad. I think he’s dead now, that sucks. If he’s not dead that probably sucks less, you know, depending on what stage of not dead yet he’s in. I probably actually know, I mean if I think hard enough. I lived a long ways away from here for most of my life. I don’t even recognize most of the names of the people I grew up with or they blur with people I knew in my real life, a whole other set of people who lived and died or will die or will live. My circle is fairly small now, but it’s tight. Neither Leslie nor Paige Birdwell are in it, but they aren’t too far out.
Again, there is a sideways connection, even now. I’m not going to mention the how or why, but I didn’t just pull Leslie and her father from a hat.
I bought a pair of boots for the winter. It seems a very long way off.
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