tuckova

ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things

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Interests: Alfons Mucha, Archibald Leach, big words, Bob Hicok, Brian Eno, Cat Power, Charles Bukowski, Charlotte Masaryk, cheese, clarity, dark chocolate, David Byrne, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Douglas Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Frank O’Hara, Fred Rogers, garlic, Gaudi, Gertrude Stein, ginger, Gustav Klimt, Iva Pekarkova, Jane Austen, Jaromir Nohavica, Jeanette Winterson, Josef Skvorecky, Joseph Campbell, Joss Whedon, Just a Minute, Kate Bush, Kurt Vonnegut, laughing until it hurts, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, little kids singing, Lloyd Alexander, mandarin oranges, making lists, Margaret Atwood, Miss Manners, New Yorker, Paul Simon, performance, P.G. Wodehouse, poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Rob Brezsny, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Creeley, salt, Salvador Dali, secrets, silence, Star Trek, Stephen Dunn, Talking Heads, Terry Gilliam, things that stain, This American Life, Tom Waits, T.S. Eliot, vegetable juice, veiled cultural references, vinegar, water, wine, W.H. Auden

unpacking

You know the observation of how once a person gets famous enough to go on tour, all their stories are about travel? Yeah, so. This won't be a regular thing, but holy smokes did I pack and unpack a ridiculous lot this March, only some of which was in my suitcase.
 
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I am extremely good at watching television, getting intoxicated, and creating extended metaphors, and it was pretty awesome to see people sweeping their calendars clear so they could fill their time with me and some or all of those exact entertainments. I'm good at other things too, like listening and chewing with my mouth closed most of the time, but I think it's interesting that people like to do things with me that they don't do with others. Like, have I convinced people that this is a fantastic way to spend time? Am I having so much fun that it's infectious? Did people just want me to have a good time? Isn't a YES to any of those answers a good thing? It is, it is. 
 
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I saw you in a secondhand bookstore in Seattle, it wasn't you but it was, the same eyes and a haircut I can imagine you would have, based on who you were then; obviously I have no idea how you look now and I don't know if you'd recognize me, either. Sometimes I think I look exactly the same; sometimes I think I look like the ogre version of myself. Sometimes I think I just look older and that's fine. Same with you, bookstore clerk who was not you, with a little gray hair and some wrinkles around the eyes that would make sense for how old you would be now, plus maybe a few years of smoking cloves. It wasn't you, though I looked at not-you's eyes for a good long minute to be sure. The last time we talked, I hung up on you, or anyway one of us hung up on the other, and it still feels like that was a good call, pun intended, though sometimes I would like to talk to you about books for example but that wasn't you in the bookstore and I talked to her anyway and it was a perfectly good conversation about books so there's that.
 
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I did not spend my time in the Seattle airport this year sobbing uncontrollably, as I was mostly annoyed at the mumbly walrus of a TSA agent and at the blatant capitalism of expedited treatment. Annoyance is not ideal but it was a step up from despair. I have wept openly for a range of reasons on a variety of forms of transportation, including two solid hours on a bus after a breakup, and I have to say Sacramento is a far better airport to cry in than Seattle, so if you're planning a possible sobfest, try SMF.  
 
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On one plane I made small talk with a woman who was in her late 70s. She admired my tattoos and told me she wanted some, and over the course of the 90 minute flight we talked about how it feels to have a stroke, whether airline travel has improved by becoming more available, why people seem to think they can tell us what to do, and hobbies. She'd been a psychiatrist before her stroke, and told me that there was a time in her life when people paid to talk to her but now she was sitting with me and she couldn't stop talking and what was that about. She wept when she told me about her husband's death, and then we laughed about crying in public so I pretty much think I rode the plane with future someversion of me. When we disembarked, another passenger remarked they wished they'd been sitting with me because I had the best smile on the plane and it didn't feel like a line. 
 
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On the day I left your town I drove past you, standing on the stairs outside. I didn't have time this year, I just didn't and if you could see everything I had to do I know you would understand but not seeing you is a regret worth mentioning. 
 
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I understand that part of being in this life is that I am always missing someone. I understand that I chose this. I believe I came by this genetically, that the compulsion to keep moving and missing people is almost a unifying feature of Americans, as compared to for example Czechs who seem to have a homing beacon installed that goes off at a certain age. Americans seem to think that if we keep moving we can find happiness, just up there around the corner, and then we go back for high school reunions or annual pilgrimages or whatever and compare ourselves to our younger versions and wonder: are we happy? are we happy now? could we be happier still? And I am so ridiculously happy really most of the time but I still wish we could all live in the same building, or even just the same town.
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