pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SHINY HAPPY PEOPLE I'm in my mother's family room on a day that the deejay reports has a heat index of 112°. Welcome back to South Carolina. My father and sister Penelope (sort of) and brother Dopeboy and I dug a foundation in red clay, tore down the brick along one side of the house, and added this room, another room, a deck, and a basement apartment to the house. And nothing in the room is even because Daddy let my brother Lad nail up most of the sheetrock when he was maybe eleven (although moulding mostly covers this fact). There's no air conditioning and man is it hot! This is the room I lived in when I ran out of money and had to return to my parents' house. Couldn't go back into the room my two sisters and I once shared because my little sister had finally gotten her own room and was not about to give it up, so I was put out here where I would try to fall asleep with people watching television all around me so that I could be at work by 5:30 a.m. before my classes. Very strange to be in here again. • CeeCee sings to herself all day in this little angel voice. I realized at one point that she was in the back seat of my car singing "Why did he die? Why did he die?" and wonder if she processes her emotions through music as I used to do. This morning, we played the Alphabet Game during a traffic jam, and she asked me to make up the names of animals as she called out letters. This was a really fun twist on the Alphabet game I usually play, and I wish I remembered the names of some of the ones that made us howl, but all I remember are the Rat-a-tat-a-saurus and HipHopapotamus. Meanwhile, the VCR I bought in 1987—so that I could record PBS's Voices and Visions series on American Poets—just went kaput. (That Panasonic sure did last for a long time!) And, anyway, I mostly watch DVDs on my laptop now but have all of Filmgrrl's films on VHS and two home movies and a few regular movies on VHS too, and so kept it plugged in. O well. So lucky CeeCee, she is now the proud owner of my VHS tape of The Nightmare before Christmas and that's what we're watching right now. Tim Burton, the writer of this tale, must have grown up in a dysfunctional house and later found himself surrounded by shiny happy people who would like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony and all that shit (people who are surely represented by the people of Christmastown). Those starry-eyed people—I usually refer to them as PLs, or prelapsarians—can startle those of us whose world produced monsters and sometimes we scoff at their innocence. Jack's wonder at the saccharine sweetness of Christmastown is just priceless: What's this? What's this? The kids are starry-eyed. ...No one's trying to harm them and there's music everywhere. What is this? Yeah. I used to work for a liberal peace and justice organization that delivered humanitarian aid to Nicaragua, where a well-meaning Bible student volunteer was waxing eloquent and long about the endless supply of goodness and truth and simple beauty in this world—guess she hadn't been keeping up with those killings in El Salvador or Guatemala, where we supplied aid, or with the disappeared* (*poem to follow). And, finally, one of the priests in our organization said "Sleep fast, love. We need the pillows." So yeah. Like him, those Kum Ba Yah people scare me and just seem naive and clueless, especially because their protected innocence can create some goddamn scary policies that write off whole swarms of people who aren't like them and so either make them uncomfortable or whose frame of reference is so far removed from their own that they cannot even comprehend it. I identify more with the citizens of Burton's town of Halloween, the ones who are handed sweet presents that they then "fix" to reflect their world. Don't know if that makes sense to people who grew up in a place without monsters, but I can tell you that my friends who did and I joke about our monsters in a really morbid way. For example, I might say to my pal Zulu over beers "and then he swung an ax at me and I jumped off the chair sideways, spilling my Nehi all over my white T-shirt" or she might say "I came back home wearing sexy camisoles because I knew he could no longer touch me even though he wanted to," and then we laugh. • Now it's 9:30 Wednesday morning. I've showered and packed and eaten breakfast and had a cup of my mother's instant Nescafé with real sugar. (ick) I am a decaf latte Splenda girl these days, so this oughta keep me going for a while. The TV is, of course, already on. In fact, it's practically never off. And CeeCee just sits in a chair glued to it, gaining weight. Mama said it's nearly impossible to tear her away from it and, from the little I saw, I don't think she's getting very good messages about little girls. Cartoon Network girls always seem to be changing who they are in an effort to get boys to notice them or riffing about make-up or nail polish or the many ways they can decorate themselves instead of simply being who they are in the world with confidence. And I still want them to be portrayed instead as strong and competent and adventuresome and smart the ways boys are typically portrayed. I live a mostly quiet life and rarely turn on the television, so am just not used to so much distraction and can't believe how loud it is. Maybe that helps me notice those stereotypes though, how ridiculous most of it is ... and I wish I'd said more when I let her surf the Barbie website. • Today, Pottergrrl is taking her officemate's kids on a Thomas the Tank Engine train ride. I gave her four free tickets that I managed to nab from someone at work. Hee. Can't wait to hear all about their day! Okay, I better download pictures now so I have room for new ones. I'm leaving the poor part of my hometown, where all the cars are rusted and all the roofs are sagging and all the signs are hand-painted, and over to the winter-colony/horse farm/lush resort side of town, where people who own racehorses live for half a year, before it gets so hot that the take off to their other farm/mansions in New York. The horse section of my hometown has made the place famous. Most of the most famous race horses trained here and the two-year races are held here. And most of the roads in the horse district are not paved because there are so many horse farms and racetracks and stables and steeplechases and winter-colony mansions and polo chukkers and people who ride on horseback in their red coats with tails and tall black top hats and they do not want to ride on pavement. It's all very picturesque, especially the twisted live oaks with their Spanish moss, but so very different from where and how I grew up. It was nice to escape here on my bike though and just watch the beautiful strong horses run. • (7 PM) I have put 1,337 miles on my car since Saturday morning and my back and I are sick and tired of driving! Got home about thirty minutes ago and could hardly stay awake for the last half hour of the trip. Didn't sleep much last night because it was so damn hot that I was sticking to myself and the sheets. I grew up without air conditioning, but we're in the middle of an intense heat wave right now and I am no longer used to sweating myself to sleep at night. And I appreciate my air conditioner a whole lot more now that I have returned home, even though I'm very afraid of what my electric bill is going to be for this month. I restocked my mother's groceries and bought a few special (healthy) treats for CeeCee before I left. Also asked my mom about her weight loss. My mother is five-foot-nine and now weighs just 136 pounds. And this is actually heavy compared to how she looked for most of her adult life but she went on medication for schizophrenia. Since then she has weighed 180 pounds, so it's a shock to see her this thin again. She says that she is exercising every day (inside) and that she and Glittergrrl went to the gym regularly before Glittergrrl joined the Army, so now I'm happy about her weight loss instead of concerned. We ran into Martha, our next-door neighbor, at the Food Lion. Martha's daughter Jan, who is forty-seven, has apparently inherited the early-onset Alzheimer's that left her father bedridden at fifty-six. So Jan, who is only five years older than me, now wears a diaper and drools out of the side of her mouth and does not know who or where she is. (Gawd, I didn't even realize that you could get Alzheimer's so young!) Martha's eyes were rimmed with red and threatening to overflow the entire time she was telling me this. Good lawd! Jan's sister Cynthia, who must be forty-five now, beat me up my entire childhood. She was three years older than me, which matters a great deal in terms of size when you're a kid, and always drew a line and dared me to cross it. And when I did—which I always did—she beat me up ... at least until I finally got big enough to finally kick her ass but good. Then my childhood tormenter left me alone. At last. She must be so scared of losing her mind right now.... So ssd. Sad. Sad. • Today I stopped at Maurice Bessinger's barbecue pit in Columbia. Maurice is an unreconstructed bigot, so I try to buy his brother Marvin's barbeque instead (the barbecue of which I speak is a noun, not a verb, folks. Maurice and Marvin Bessinger used to own Piggy Park Barbecue, which was famous in South Carolina, until Maurice's bigotry forced a schism. Then the brother's split and opened their own restaurants an the government sued Maurice because he refused to let black people enter his doors. And I am ashamed to say that I nevertheless stop at Maurice's sometimes on my way home because it's the only place to get South Carolina style barbecue. And I check out the latest extremist literature while I'm there. Last time I stopped, he had a booklet about the evil Abe Lincoln and one about honoring the noble southern heritage (and no doubt calls the Civil War "the war of northern aggression"). I have a copy of the Abe Lincoln book somewhere and will probably eventually quote it here. This time the books were for sale though and I ain't paying good money for this garbage, so I just checked out the titles and the confederate flags on the wall and the bumper stickers and all that shit and snarfed down my wonderful scrumptious delicious sandwich and then left. Maurice's is infamous because his restaurant was the last one in the nation to be integrated, and it was only integrated then because the government forced him to do so. I always look at the customers in line and wonder how many of them are there just because of who Maurice is, how many just saw the barbecue billboard on the interstate and decided to grab lunch, and how many have no clue about his racist past. Some subtle South Carolina racism to report this week. First, a former neighbor at my uncle's funeral said something about all the dogs in his neighborhood that he wanted to shoot, but he didn't because two women live next door. (Okay, that not-so-subtle sexism.) Then he said "all those blacks live behind us, you know." And I know I was supposed to derive some meaning from this, but I cannot fathom what in the world it is. Was I supposed to assume that black people having lots of dogs? Or that he considers black people dogs and wants to shoot them? Weird. Then my mother was talking about the rental house that my brother Drugboy and his family just moved into. "It's a nice house," she said, "but it's in a black neighborhood. People have been real nice every time we've been there though." And, believe me, this is mild stuff. I switched from radio station to radio station for most of the way home and even listened to freaky Jebus stations sometimes. And here's insight for people who have never been to South Carolina: those "Stop bitching. Start a revolution" bumper stickers that are on the cars of liberals in DC are on the cars of conservatives in the south. And their conversations center around the need to take this country back from the queers and the blacks and the uppity bitch women who don't know our places. My radio surfing also reminded me of a once-popular pop song that goes "I'm just a love machine. I won't work for nobody but you."'
SINGING IN THE SHOWER: "And I, Jack, the pumpkin king..." (from The Nightmare before Christmas) READING: excerpts from Fascinating Facts about the Bible which was on my mother's coffee table and so I copied some of it into my journal LISTENING TO: silence and cicadas, thank goodness, and not that goddamn TV 8:39 a.m. - 2005-07-28 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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