We are here. Oh my god.

another stretch of roadlife and our grand arrival

Tomorrow, I’ll wake up in the same motel from which I write this, which will be the first time that’s happened in a week. These are nice enough digs, with a spacious writing desk, and they don’t immediately suggest that it would be the kind of place where an hour after your arrival the grounds are surrounded by cops and when Ian comes back with takeout the receptionist says, “normally we close that gate after 7, but it’s open right now because we’ve got a Situation.” But that did happen, and I think we have reason to be grateful for being none the wiser as to what said situation was.

Prior to checking in, we walked around downtown Milledgeville, and for a few unavoidable minutes I fantasized about my alternate life in New York where I had said yes to the Prom King of all MFA programs, accepted their paltry financial aid package that wouldn’t even have begun until my second year, and lived the rest of my bustling urban life in debt and shackled to the ever-more-misery-inducing hustle. I don’t actually wish we’d done that. But Milledgeville in the summer is not the kind of college town where Life Goes On when the students flow out. Life is very, very, very, very, very, very still.

I’ve got my Southern humidity back and that pleases my heart and my skin. June’s gettin’ hot and July should be hotter and in this hemisphere that IS AS IT SHOULD BE. I don’t miss San Francisco. But after six years in California I am a little shocked that my life there is actually over, at least in the day-to-day sense. I’ll be drawing inspiration from it til the day I die at least, and that’s obviously just what I’ve come here to do.

Ian says I need to tell all of you what happened in Oxford, Mississippi, even though I don’t really wanna talk about it. It’s on theme, though, and I have a responsibility here, even if it’s one I took on myself. We were, from the car, taken with posh, elegant, walkable little Oxford. Ian and I like nice things, which is unfashionable in this age of cottagecore and shabby chic, as well as not readily understood in New Orleans which is all about Beautiful Decay. I appreciate the poetry of Beautiful Decay and, to borrow a phrase from quintessential Southern literary voice Nancy Lemann, Faded Glory. But when I walk around, I like shit shiny (which is not to say uniform! Just kept up), unless I’m in a very specific melancholy frame of mind.

So we figured we’d like Oxford, and when we smelled God’s own BBQ on the air we enthusiastically concluded that we needed to find out from whence that heavenly aroma was wafting and eat our lunch there. When we opened the door, we saw a steep set of stairs going down into the place, and I don’t fear stairs, but we’d been on the road for a week and I was exhausted and hungry and maybe can we not? We glanced around and were relieved to find an Accessible Entrance not far away.

So we moseyed on over, opened the door that led to the elevator, and pressed the button for the Basement floor. Nothing happened. We tried several more times. Still nothing.

Eventually we gave up, and when we got downstairs I made sure to report to the college student in the Nebraska shirt behind the counter that the elevator wasn’t working.

“Oh it’s working,” he told me nonchalantly. “We just forgot to turn it on.”

“Well people with disabilities need that elevator,” I said. “What would I do if I were in a wheelchair?”

“We forget,” he told me again. “It happens. I’ll go turn it on now.” Then he walked away, as a certain kind of white person loves to do when they’re being told anything contrary to, “you are perfect and better than your parents.” I raised my voice, because people like this never count on my theater minor or general temperament, and made sure he heard me say, “Forgetting about people with disabilities is a PROBLEM.” No apology. What’s to apologize for? How can anybody be expected to remember those people?

My French dip was good but not good enough for that shit and the housemade potato chips were far too salty. When I asked the sweet blond woman behind the counter if I could speak to the manager she was very sweet about it. When the manager sat down at our table and listened to my tale he was very sweet about it, though I really couldn’t tell how he was reacting to me.

All right, Hot and Disabled mission accomplished. Let’s go back and talk about the gorgeous tall woman with shampoo-commercial curly hair in Nevada who theatrically hit on Ian (I was out of view). Honestly I am thrilled for him, so much so that I might have said “Go for it” if he had been as interested as I was.

He was coming back from the car, having gotten our stuff after checking into the Holiday in Express in Fallon, and I was waiting for him in the lobby. She was leaving as he was coming in, and the minute they crossed paths she gave him such a blatant once-over I didn’t even know what to feel. Then, as though that weren’t obvious enough, she grabbed the door as he opened it and said, “I was just trying to hold the door for you!”

I can’t reproduce her tone here, I wish I could. I’ve seen porn that sounded less like porn.

I didn’t feel passed over, either, because the Vacation Dads of Nevada didn’t hide that they liked the cut of my jib just as much. On an adorable note, though, there was a little girl in the glassed-in pool who was lowering herself into the water as we walked by, and she looked at us with the sweetest expression of open curiosity, then she waved.

It was so cute! We waved back, of course, endeared forever.

I also happened to be flipping channels exhaustedly in Utah when I landed on the BYU channel, Brigham Young University of course. I gotta say, I’ve gotten mildly sucked into a show called Heartland, which is about these sisters who own a ranch and the troubled youths they help through the therapeutic power of horses and listening to their problems. I’m particularly invested in the story of a Bad Girl teenage character named Jade who threw an unauthorized party at the place that had just hired her and she and her ridiculous friends made a gigantic bonfire using furniture that was lying around and ended up falling asleep and burning down a fraction of the ranch. The acting on the show varies in quality but it’s all entirely mesmerizing, particularly if you’re really stressed out.

I also relate to her because as Bad Girls go she can’t even Bad Girl right. At one point she’s on the phone covertly planning this crazy party and she says to her best friend, “Invite everyone you know. Okay I know you don’t know many people but invite people who do know people!”

Maybe it’s only charming if you’re writing from the desk of the 7th motel you’ve stayed at in as many days and have 3 days booked at this particular location in which stretch of time you’re hoping to find a place to live, which, this very second, is not a thing you do have. Oh, and to clear up any possible confusion as to where all our worldly possessions are, they’ve been transported by truck to the UPod location in Macon, GA and will be driven to our door as soon as we have a door that’s ours.

I’ve got a lot of lovely stories about a lot of lovely people we’ve had the fortune to meet along the way, but I’m not going to quote them here because I’ve written those singularly regional American exchanges down for larger works. What I will say is that I completely understand why the first millionaire author was someone who published a novel called The Ozarks in 1907.

There is no way to end what’s actually signifying a beginning, so why not have some amaranth, courtesy of the Sleep Inn in Birmingham?

That was also the only place we stayed that offered us proper hotel stationery. I am simultaneously sad and relieved about this, because I secretly value proper hotel stationery a half-a-notch above a good bed and a shower with solid water pressure. But wait, this is an even more fitting note to end on:

I cannot keep to myself this gentleman on a motorcycle without, not just a helmet, but a shirt. It was not that hot in Missouri at the moment that I snatched this photo. “If he falls, he is so fucked,” I said to Ian, who sagely exhaled and said, “He doesn’t care.”

I’ll be thinking about that a lot.