Small Southern Cities
If Jackson and Charlottesville can balance an equation, then what I want to be doing in Jackson is stalking books, reraveling myself, making a hardwood-floored hippie Eden in the middle of everyone else's everyday, flirting with serendipity and accepting her spare change. I have feverishly spent the last month insisting that that if is no if at all. I developed a resume fetish and began committing my days and hours indiscriminately. Teacher Corps? Sure! Shady alternate route program? Check! Piles and piles of the TPR paperwork and phonecalls I've gloated about not having to be responsible for? I'm your woman!
Ya see, I don't believe (I want to believe) that the scale will balance. I know that Jackson is not Charlottesville. There is no backyard, no cloud-colored rain, and no time for the impudent and the bare-breasted in Jackson.
Jackson -- the word -- is rapidly being paved and repaved gray and heavy with connotations (albeit the kind that beg long Latinate words 'cause they may or may not carry the sober sheen of truth). In Jackson, roads only lead to roads and the lake is manmade. In Jackson, one learns to live with situations that are irreparably broken. In Jackson, whimsy and insistent people from the North are just grimly digested. In Jackson, everybody tells everybody else that they don't know enough to solve the problem. In Jackson, if I am lucky, I am on Jake's coattails or under Jake's arm. If I am not lucky in Jackson, I am the remaindered backwater-city unnotable that Thoreau came so shockingly close to being.
When Johnny Cash sings about Jackson, you can almost hear the tears swallowed in the thickness of his voice. You can put off the worst things you can think of -- the implacable cliche of gender, blank pages, a mind with no counterweight, the asphalt trap, the daily cold surprise of living someone else's life -- with work and being steady and drinking; you can show yourself that everyone else is doing the same thing, so it must be okay. And maybe that's true. But's it's no fucking Charlottesville.
Ya see, I don't believe (I want to believe) that the scale will balance. I know that Jackson is not Charlottesville. There is no backyard, no cloud-colored rain, and no time for the impudent and the bare-breasted in Jackson.
Jackson -- the word -- is rapidly being paved and repaved gray and heavy with connotations (albeit the kind that beg long Latinate words 'cause they may or may not carry the sober sheen of truth). In Jackson, roads only lead to roads and the lake is manmade. In Jackson, one learns to live with situations that are irreparably broken. In Jackson, whimsy and insistent people from the North are just grimly digested. In Jackson, everybody tells everybody else that they don't know enough to solve the problem. In Jackson, if I am lucky, I am on Jake's coattails or under Jake's arm. If I am not lucky in Jackson, I am the remaindered backwater-city unnotable that Thoreau came so shockingly close to being.
When Johnny Cash sings about Jackson, you can almost hear the tears swallowed in the thickness of his voice. You can put off the worst things you can think of -- the implacable cliche of gender, blank pages, a mind with no counterweight, the asphalt trap, the daily cold surprise of living someone else's life -- with work and being steady and drinking; you can show yourself that everyone else is doing the same thing, so it must be okay. And maybe that's true. But's it's no fucking Charlottesville.
posted by Ms. Blue Jeans | 5:35 PM
1 Comments:
i feel incensed to comment, and yet i don't really know where to begin. suffice it to say, perhaps you will be under jake's wing, on his coattails, or [preposition] whatever other part of him presents himself, but you will have me, and hell, we're the same person, right?
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