Spiders.
Hordes of spiders live in my garage. Brown Widows, most of them. Josh tells me they're poisonous, but I don't have the guts to look it up myself. I work down here a lot, and they seem to like my desk -- specifically the part where the chair scoots in, the dark cubbyhole that my legs fidget around in when I can't think of the next thing to write.
It might be cognitive dissonance. I hate spiders more than I hate most other creepies, but there are simply too many of them in here for my brain to handle fearing them all. If I did, I'd never get anything done down here. I could just write upstairs, I guess, but the upstairs land reeks of daytime labor and whatever weird thing we cooked for dinner, mingled with the airy sludge of incense past. It's not very conducive to creative endeavors, and the garage has always harbored more juju, l'appel du vide, el duende than upstairs land ever did.
We are talking about fleeing this place, soon, once and for all. Maybe not forever, I guess, but every time I've ever landed in that lovely, arid, mountainous state of Colorado, I have wished I never had to leave it. I've never lived anywhere else but this weird place though; the perpetually moist, fertile swamp-ass buttcrack of America, wedged deep within the anus of the Mississippi River, a beautiful temporary land slowly being dissolved by the suicidal affair between the great river and the sprawling refineries and port city commerce that line its banks. Only one can survive, and it seems some form of We has chosen to keep the refineries.
My dad explained coastal erosion to me when I was very young, maybe 8 or 9, on one of many long drives home from Grand Isle -- the most unpretentious place I've ever been intimate with. The river naturally changed its course in the past, creating strange, stagnant bodies of water like False River, literally shreds of the Mississippi. But when major ports sprouted up inside the river bends, the River's shifty nature became a threat to the booming commerce, so the levees were built -- brackets, braces, retainers that anchor the beast, sentencing it to eternal leg cramps for the sake of Exxon Plastics and sea-bound shipping containers.
And, as dad explained, when that much water is forced to flow over the same bed of sand and mud for years and years, that bed will eventually disappear. With the River locked into place, the fatigued corners of the Delta aren't given the necessary rest periods they require to exist, and the River can't spread itself over enough fresh earth to redeposit the rich silt that makes up the Delta. It so happens that I've lived some of my best days on that vanishing bed of sand and mud, and despite the manmade rock jetties and artificial windbreaking structures Grand Isle has acquired over the past decade, I know that the place will be gone within my lifetime.
If just one more of those apocalyptic hurricanes makes landfall in that wide-open sweet spot, all I'll be able to pass on to my kids of it is the tragic weight of the memories I made there; the rich depth of my childhood vacations will not be something I can share with them, because though I'll try, I'll never do it justice. There are pictures, but it's not the kind of place that poses for a camera. You just have to be there, and at the present rate, that bridge won't lead to an island for too much longer.
All the compartments of my life thus far have been built out of the stuff and the people I found here -- not just in Grand Isle, but in South Louisiana. I've talked about leaving for as long as I can remember, but the past few years have made the words come out a different shade of blue. I know I have to leave, but it's no longer because I think I'm done with this place. It's exactly the opposite, in fact -- I'll never be done with it. It's too thick of a familial jungle to organize in one lifetime -- I clear one tract and two grow back when I'm not looking, more tangled and thorned than before. It's an illegible mess, inseparable from my own heart despite so many failed attempts to decipher it. The older I get, the clearer it is to me that it was never not this way, that I am who I am because I was born in this sweltering, cultural mess; because I somehow managed to carve a life from my chunk of it.
I've hit the cliff at this point. I can feel the instinct that urges you to jump from high places, the one you only experience after an equally powerful urge not to. Of the heaps of times I've been within an inch of driving west in the middle of the night, I see now that I would've been jumping the gun -- no matter where I'd have landed when I ran out of gas or engine, no matter how beautiful the place might have been, I would have had to come back to face what I was running away from. I'm grateful that I had the sense not to flee, because coming back with a grudge on my shoulders would have been infinitely harder than leaving in peace.
I've found my peace with Baton Rouge and the contextual wonders that surround it. As fucked up and backwards as it is and might always be, I now have what I was missing as a lost college student: hope. I'll always be rooting for my homeland, no matter how many crooks they vote into office, even if they never get around to realizing how unique their dying ecosystems are, or just how rare of a gem they're sitting on. Even if they shut down LA Swift and all parts of their shriveled turd of a public transportation system, I will be in love with Baton Rouge, and I expect that only to grow when I can finally observe it from a distance.
I fear the day I have to pack up this garage, because there is an unfathomable amount of shit in here, but I'll do my best to let the spiders live. They've made do for this long, and they've passed up millions of chances to kill me. I can't even start to blame them for loving this garage as much as I do -- I've written millions of inspired and uninspired words alongside them over the five or six years I've lived in this apartment. They might have even had something to do with it. There's nothing quite so invigorating as building a home with a constant memento mori, chillin' right next to your feet, just webbin' away. And there's nothing quite like the rush of escaping it, either...it is something like Stockholm Syndrome, maybe; I am grateful that they've allowed me to live long enough to finish the damn chapter.
Hordes of spiders live in my garage. Brown Widows, most of them. Josh tells me they're poisonous, but I don't have the guts to look it up myself. I work down here a lot, and they seem to like my desk -- specifically the part where the chair scoots in, the dark cubbyhole that my legs fidget around in when I can't think of the next thing to write.
It might be cognitive dissonance. I hate spiders more than I hate most other creepies, but there are simply too many of them in here for my brain to handle fearing them all. If I did, I'd never get anything done down here. I could just write upstairs, I guess, but the upstairs land reeks of daytime labor and whatever weird thing we cooked for dinner, mingled with the airy sludge of incense past. It's not very conducive to creative endeavors, and the garage has always harbored more juju, l'appel du vide, el duende than upstairs land ever did.
We are talking about fleeing this place, soon, once and for all. Maybe not forever, I guess, but every time I've ever landed in that lovely, arid, mountainous state of Colorado, I have wished I never had to leave it. I've never lived anywhere else but this weird place though; the perpetually moist, fertile swamp-ass buttcrack of America, wedged deep within the anus of the Mississippi River, a beautiful temporary land slowly being dissolved by the suicidal affair between the great river and the sprawling refineries and port city commerce that line its banks. Only one can survive, and it seems some form of We has chosen to keep the refineries.
My dad explained coastal erosion to me when I was very young, maybe 8 or 9, on one of many long drives home from Grand Isle -- the most unpretentious place I've ever been intimate with. The river naturally changed its course in the past, creating strange, stagnant bodies of water like False River, literally shreds of the Mississippi. But when major ports sprouted up inside the river bends, the River's shifty nature became a threat to the booming commerce, so the levees were built -- brackets, braces, retainers that anchor the beast, sentencing it to eternal leg cramps for the sake of Exxon Plastics and sea-bound shipping containers.
And, as dad explained, when that much water is forced to flow over the same bed of sand and mud for years and years, that bed will eventually disappear. With the River locked into place, the fatigued corners of the Delta aren't given the necessary rest periods they require to exist, and the River can't spread itself over enough fresh earth to redeposit the rich silt that makes up the Delta. It so happens that I've lived some of my best days on that vanishing bed of sand and mud, and despite the manmade rock jetties and artificial windbreaking structures Grand Isle has acquired over the past decade, I know that the place will be gone within my lifetime.
If just one more of those apocalyptic hurricanes makes landfall in that wide-open sweet spot, all I'll be able to pass on to my kids of it is the tragic weight of the memories I made there; the rich depth of my childhood vacations will not be something I can share with them, because though I'll try, I'll never do it justice. There are pictures, but it's not the kind of place that poses for a camera. You just have to be there, and at the present rate, that bridge won't lead to an island for too much longer.
All the compartments of my life thus far have been built out of the stuff and the people I found here -- not just in Grand Isle, but in South Louisiana. I've talked about leaving for as long as I can remember, but the past few years have made the words come out a different shade of blue. I know I have to leave, but it's no longer because I think I'm done with this place. It's exactly the opposite, in fact -- I'll never be done with it. It's too thick of a familial jungle to organize in one lifetime -- I clear one tract and two grow back when I'm not looking, more tangled and thorned than before. It's an illegible mess, inseparable from my own heart despite so many failed attempts to decipher it. The older I get, the clearer it is to me that it was never not this way, that I am who I am because I was born in this sweltering, cultural mess; because I somehow managed to carve a life from my chunk of it.
I've hit the cliff at this point. I can feel the instinct that urges you to jump from high places, the one you only experience after an equally powerful urge not to. Of the heaps of times I've been within an inch of driving west in the middle of the night, I see now that I would've been jumping the gun -- no matter where I'd have landed when I ran out of gas or engine, no matter how beautiful the place might have been, I would have had to come back to face what I was running away from. I'm grateful that I had the sense not to flee, because coming back with a grudge on my shoulders would have been infinitely harder than leaving in peace.
I've found my peace with Baton Rouge and the contextual wonders that surround it. As fucked up and backwards as it is and might always be, I now have what I was missing as a lost college student: hope. I'll always be rooting for my homeland, no matter how many crooks they vote into office, even if they never get around to realizing how unique their dying ecosystems are, or just how rare of a gem they're sitting on. Even if they shut down LA Swift and all parts of their shriveled turd of a public transportation system, I will be in love with Baton Rouge, and I expect that only to grow when I can finally observe it from a distance.
I fear the day I have to pack up this garage, because there is an unfathomable amount of shit in here, but I'll do my best to let the spiders live. They've made do for this long, and they've passed up millions of chances to kill me. I can't even start to blame them for loving this garage as much as I do -- I've written millions of inspired and uninspired words alongside them over the five or six years I've lived in this apartment. They might have even had something to do with it. There's nothing quite so invigorating as building a home with a constant memento mori, chillin' right next to your feet, just webbin' away. And there's nothing quite like the rush of escaping it, either...it is something like Stockholm Syndrome, maybe; I am grateful that they've allowed me to live long enough to finish the damn chapter.
