Spam and Cobwebs

In November, Red’s General Store stopped selling cigarettes.

Red said it was because of the taxes, but we (meaning everyone else in Lonesome Valley besides Red) knew the taxes were only half of the story, maybe less than half of it.

The next signs came when the winter set-in.  As usual, Red stopped giving shifts to his cashiers, preferring to mind the store himself while the college kids were on holiday.

Only when the college kids came back, the cashiers (including Red’s niece and nephew, not to mention Bob) didn’t.  They weren’t invited.

Week by week, the shelves began to empty out, unreplenished.  First the frozen pizzas.  Then the cough medicine, the acetaminophen.  The baked goods went next, followed by the cookies.  And most alarmingly, the beer–even now, two refrigerated rooms that were once stocked like a fratboy bomb shelter remain all but empty (though for reasons that likely escape even Red, they are still refrigerated).

Bob and I don’t even go in the store these days.  To say hi, sure, but not to buy things.  You’ll ask for a bottle of Mountain Dew, then find out he’s only got orange juice…then feel bad and buy it anyway.  You’ll go for a can of Dinty Moore beef stew and leave with an Ace comb.

Besides, it’s creepy in there.  Not because of Red, either.  We all know he’s going to be fine–when he’s not talking about trips overseas, he’s forever perfecting his property.  He’s the sort of guy who digs into retirement like a weevil.

The trouble is not retirement at all.  It’s what Red is unwittingly creating around him while he drags his feet on that linoleum:

An undead grocery store.

Amnesia

I’m writing this entry by the side of the water in downtown of Coleberry Lake.  Which, you’ll remember, is not to say that I’m writing you from the side of the actual Coleberry Lake–because I’m not.

I’m not even writing this from the side of that beautiful lake across the road from The Practice, which I often mistake for Coleberry Lake.  No, I’m writing you from the side of the lake at the center of town.  Which is also not Coleberry Lake.

Just wanted to clear that up.

At any rate, whatever it’s called, this is the very lake that I wrote beside all this past summer.  And it feels amazing to be back here doing this, because something about this past winter felt so irrevocable, I forgot it was even possible: Namely, going outdoors and enjoying the fresh air without having it freeze something off you.

The winter weather in Lonesome Valley renders everything it touches moonscapean, like the environment itself has clinical depression.  It becomes difficult to believe that the land (and/or your spirits) will ever climb back out.  But here comes spring again, and thereby summer.

I tell you: I never wanted a season so bad as I want this summer.  In the city it was such a miserable and sticky time that it just seemed like a set of inconveniences–one that equalled, and cancelled out, the complimentary inconveniences of winter.  Whereas out here, the barest sign of summer’s approach is like taking your first breath of air after not-realizing-you-were-holding-it for four months straight.

And while I don’t know if it’s “worth it” to go through such a rough winter just to learn how to better appreciate summer, I do know that I’ve never gotten my emotions this confused with a climate before.

It’s all so fricking Elvish…

Oh, Industry!

One thing I love about Bob is how his high tolerance for weirdness gradually seeps into you.

Alas for him, sometimes this can mutate a person into someone who is even more tolerant of weirdness than he is.

Case and point, our recent cooler conversation:

As you know, when our fridge went kaput, Bob and I started using a beer cooler in its place.  With weather like this, we merely needed to put the thing outside our trailer.

But you might not know that my friends at The Practice quickly came up with a great idea for rejiggering this rejigger: Instead of merely leaving the cooler out in the cold (amateurs!) they suggested that I line it with the freezie-blocks packing our office’s endless vaccine shipments.  (This is just the sort of thing the people of Lonesome Valley would suggest–they have a talent for making it work, no matter how improvisational “it” may be.)

As expected, the “freezie block” method worked like a charm, making it possible for Bob and I to store anything we liked during the winter.  But now that the cold is on the wane, it’s getting harder to keep the freezie blocks chilled.

So I mentioned this to my work friends, and one of them just shrugged and suggested keeping two sets of freezie blocks.  One would be left in the fridge at work, and another set would be left at the trailer.  I could rotate them, and thereby ensure that our “cooler” continues to live up to its name.

Seized by the sheer two-tin-cans-and-a-stringdom of this idea, I offered it to Bob as a brilliant solution to the electricity drain of an actual fridge.  “Just think of it!” I said.  “We don’t need a fridge at all!  We can just keep rotating freezie blocks all summer long!”

I thought that Bob would love this idea.  We are, after all, the men who were only recently taking “showers” by scooping well-water out of an Ace Hardware bucket with a used tub of Country Crock.

But he just shook his head.  “At this point, I think I’d rather get a fridge…”

I was reminded of the moment in Tim Burton’s “Batman” when the thugs render the caped crusader briefly unconscious, and discover that he’s just a dude covered in body armor.

“He’s human after all,” they say.

A Tale of Three Lakes

Lonesome Valley has innumerable lakeside towns and hamlets, but the three that loom largest in my regional worldview are nearby Coleberry Lake, Lake Crane and Morris Lake.  Here’s how to tell them apart…

Coleberry Lake

This is the faintly-creepy village that Bob and I fell in love with during our very first visit to Lonesome Valley.  With its cozy small-town streets, and inclines that put hilltop houses where you’d expect to find clouds, it seems long overdue for invasion by some ancient evil. (Oh won’t a sinister carnival roll into town?  Please?)

As for the locals, they are self-reliant and quite friendly when pressed.  But nothing ever happens here, and can you sometimes see the twitch of stir-craziness in their eyes.

Fun Fact: Coleberry Lake is not situated on Coleberry Lake.  Which is to say that the picturesque lake at the center of town, overlooked by the park with the concrete teddy bears, is not Coleberry Lake, but some other lake whose name I can’t remember because…if it’s not Coleberry Lake, what the hell is it doing here?  Needless to say, the impostor lake is the subject of much local conversation, much of it related to its brazen Non-Coleberriness.

Lake Crane

Lake Crane is dotted with expensive hotels and pricier homes. Its main drag looks suspiciously like Disney World’s “Main Street U.S.A.”–which is to say, it looks like a plastic version of Coleberry Lake.  But I still enjoy hanging out in Lake Crane, mostly because…well, it reminds me of Disney World.

People-wise, Lake Crane is infested with yuppies and sports buffs.  Its locals are generally windblown, athletic and (at least to me) mordantly asexual.  But to be fair, gold medal winners are bred here–the homecoming parade for this year’s olympics winner was just this week.

Fun Fact: Lake Crane is not built along Lake Crane, but along some other lake whose name escapes me for reasons explained in the previous Fun Fact.

Morris Lake

First off, everything in Morris Lake looks sketchy–but not in a way that suggests economic depression, more like a general unwillingness to dress up.  You sense that this town could look less like it’s just endured a zombie attack, if only its people gave a shit what you thought.  (Referring to the Morris Lakers, my work friend Joelynn once told said, “I’ve never met anyone like them.  And I’ve lived in Queens.”)

At The Practice, these fine folks are notorious for showing up without appointments for complicated visits that normally require months of notice to accommodate. In the local community, they’re notorious for more than that: I am told (as intimated by the Secret Homosexual Society of Lonesome Valley, and corroborated by Joelynn) that Morris Lake has more than its share of closeted gay Dads, all of whom are getting together on the weekends for more than just cigars.

Fun Fact: Queer underworld aside, Morris Lake has the distinction of being built along the muddy banks of, you guessed it, Morris Lake.

Each of these towns has its charms, but my runaway favorite is Morris Lake, if only for its crazy factor.  Every time I visit that place, I leave aglow with madness–though knowing Morris Lake, I wouldn’t be surprised to find it’s just run-of-the-mill radioactivity.

Snapshot

Quick update…

Bob has a temp job, playing clarinet for a local High School production of “One of Those Musicals Every High School Does Every Twelve Years Because It’s Got A Big Enough Cast to Accommodate The Whole Drama Department”.  We also have some tax money coming, which is much-anticipated.

So financially anyway, there’s a tentative sense that, if we can remain cheap for a little while longer, we ‘ll eventually be able to buy Pop Tarts again without guilt.  (Well, without guilt for having spent money on them, anyway–every other aspect of Pop-Tartdom seethes with The G Word, and that’s as it should be.)

Creatively-speaking, I’m closing-in on my third draft, which makes me feel very fulfilled.  The plot problems that used to be big enough for me to drive an imaginary truck through are now only imaginary-motorcycle-sized, at least to my mind.  The next draft will go to a wider readership, so we’ll see what they think.  (Frankly, if you’re reading this, you may even be getting a copy!  If so, be cruel to be kind.)

The trouble is, as I emerge from the book neuron by neuron, I’m realizing that there really is nobody to hang out with up here.  My friends from The Practice make me feel old and weird.  My neighbors make me feel like I’m hanging out with my relatives–which says a lot about their hospitality, but not a lot about the prospect of our being able to successfully improvise a drinking game based on John Carpenter’s “Assault on Precinct 13”.

Today, I desperately googled “Lonesome Valley D & D”, but found only a propane supply company.  So I googled “Lonesome Valley Mahjong”, and my computer found a site about things to do while you’re in The City.  (No shit, Sherlock.)

I’m probably barking up the wrong tree.  I’ll need to figure a kind of fun that’s tuned to this place, and have it.

But I tell you this my brothers and sisters, it will not be curling.

I’m Calling for Martha

Here’s a tip for anyone who makes their living making phonecalls in Lonesome Valley, or for that matter, anywhere else where ubiquitous cigarette smoking and advanced age have rendered a quarter of the population’s voices gender-neutral: Avoid the use of the terms “sir” or “ma’am” until such time that you have definitively determined which brand of genitals the person on the other end of the line is packing.

It does not matter how much the person who picked up the phone sounds like the Martha you’re looking for, just tell “her” you’re calling for Martha.

I gained this knowledge the hard way.

Seasonal Affective Disorder Parade

Lonesome Valley is noted for its, well, lonesomeness.

So much so that a winter festival is organized here each year, to take place precisely between the holiday season and the spring months still-to-come.  Its inception can be traced to the years when the area featured a noted health retreat, whose patients often contracted cabin fever at precisely this time.

This year’s version of the celebration geared-up two Saturdays ago, with too-close-to-the-crowd fireworks and the ceremonial “lighting” of a lakeside ice castle, its illumination embedded in its walls.  After that, the local venues hosted constant musical happenings, broom-hockey tournaments, you name it–Bob even played clarinet in a baroque orchestra, to a packed house.  Finally, the festival culminated in a Western-themed parade whose floats featured enough pairings of anthropomorphic moose bondage and cowboy gear to suggest the birth of a new American fetish.

I was shaken to my core by all this.  Not by the moose bondage; that was awesome.  Just the crowds, and the revelry.  I had assumed that, like the killer plants in “The Happening”, the people of Lonesome Valley were immune to gatherings of more than nine people.  There has been no life here for so long, and now all of a sudden, there was way too much to go round.  More than I gave this place credit for having.

Every person in that parade, from the guy riding the giant blackfly to the ladies clanging synchronized lawnchairs to each individual member of the bagpipe brigade, was a resident of this wilderness.

There is more room for my kind of crazy in this town than I thought.

Tammy’s

I got the call at 9:30pm in the evening, which is more like 11:30pm Lonesome Valley time.

It was from an unlisted number, so I didn’t pick up.  Then Bob’s phone rang; same number.

He took the call in the next room–which is to say, he opened the bathroom door so that it blocked off the other half of the trailer.

When he opened it again barely a minute later, he was already putting on his coat.  “What’s up?” I asked.

“Tammy’s house is on fire.”

Tammy is a local friend, the daughter of our cross-the-street neighbor.  The caller had been Tammy’s Mom.  The firemen had already arrived, she told Bob.  She just didn’t want to drive there alone.  So he went over with her.

Twenty minutes after they left for Tammy’s, I was still sitting in the trailer freaking out, so I texted Bob for an update.  He texted back: “every1 safe house is gone”

I was stunned.  We spent Christmas at Tammy’s place.  The idea of it being gone, and gone so quickly, was hard to absorb.

Just about the only person who understood how to approach the news was Tammy’s 5 year old, Elaine.  Bob saw her thirty minutes after the fire, over at Tammy’s father’s, where the rest of the family had regrouped.

“Our house is on fire,” she told Bob.  According to him, she said this matter-of-factly, as if he he didn’t know already.

Then she smiled:  “We’re having a sleepover!”

Volumes That I Prize Above My Prowler

You can always tell a great deal about a person from their library, but a public library ups the ante on that, and winds up telling you about the inner life of a whole community.  As Bob and I discovered anew this weekend, ours captures this town to a T.

For one, its general nonfiction section may as well be called “the birds, dogs and gardens” section; the last time I saw this many 747s, I was at an airport.  Standout titles included “The Book of Taxidermy and Tanning”, “How to Know The Lichens” and “The Private Lives of Garden Birds”–the latter of which I took out because come on, aren’t you dying to know?

And while other libraries may feature signs pointing you in the direction of the history section, the biographies and the reference room, the signs in Lonesome Valley are reserved for its larger divisions: A deer points you to the wildlife books, while the way to the hiking room is marked by a pair of backpacking mens’ room logos.

Thankfully, not everything about this library is so obvious–and when I saw a prominent display featuring Rick Geary’s graphic novel renditions of popular massacres and serial murders, I understood that there might be a place for me in this town after all.

I just wasn’t sure what to make of its being in kid’s section…

Layers

In The City, I used to walk.

It was one of the ways I compensated for being too cheap to join a gym—walking every chance I got, even timing my evening appointments so that I could clomp the thirty blocks uptown to get there.

This never felt like exercise, because walking in The City is so infinitely entertaining, like surfing the net with your feet. There’s always something to see, some new piece of architecture, some new brand of weirdo.

Unfortunately, for all its world-class weirdo-watching, Lonesome Valley’s ambulatory opportunities are few and far between. Especially in winter; you can’t walk by the side of the road unless you want to wind up impaled on a snowmobile, and most other surfaces are a Zamboni shy of rinkitude.

I might not have noticed this problem if it weren’t for the night last month when I bent over to tie my boots and realized that I was wearing a sweater under my skin. I hopped on the scale for proof, and sure enough, found that I had surreptitiously gained ten pounds. I figured this was just the “holiday aftermath”, so I curbed my eating, waited a couple of weeks, and discovered that I had gained five more.

Now, I’m not going to lie: I’ve always had good metabolism. I don’t tell many people that, because I don’t want to make enemies. But now it’s looking like I needn’t have worried–that it had more to do with my feet than anything else.  Without the walking, I’m on the highway to schlubdom.

So, what to do? I can’t afford a treadmill, and would have nowhere to put it anyway. As for the standard calisthenics—let’s just say that when a 6’5” man tries to do jumping jacks in a trailer, a concussion can’t be far behind.

The wildly inelegant solution so far: Every night, for twenty minutes, I crank Destroyer and pace the trailer like a panther with a compulsive disorder.

And it’s working, though part of me thinks I’m breaking a sweat out of sheer embarrassment.