The Light Side of Life, Lived to the Extreme

Baby’s first red eye! I was very afraid of it but it ended up being okay. I intentionally went to Dove Vivi right before going to the airport and ate half a pizza and a huge kale salad and a red wine and so I think I just kind of mellowed it on out. We then got upgraded to economy plus and I was disproportionately thrilled.

Anyway, a 2 hour layover at six in the morning in Newark was perhaps not my finest hour, but at the same time it could have been worse. Everything on the east coast is weird, from their “burritos” to the shape of their coffee lids to the way their lines work. It really is like going to England, except with shittier public services.

We argued about whether or not North Carolina is the east coast or whether it’s the south. It doesn’t exactly feel like either, although it also doesn’t feel like neither. For example, everyone has truly insane southern accents, grits are on every menu, every person in the diner where we had breakfast ordered sweet tea, there are cockroaches the size of your face, and Fox News is blasting everywhere you go. On the other hand, it is technically on the east coast of our continent. What to do?!

It was very beautiful. So woodsy! It was fitting that I read Ballard’s Drowned World while there, because the postlapsarian jungle wasteland he describes therein was such a good match for my actual surroundings. The air was like pea soup, and everywhere lush mossy greenery was bustin’ out. We saw all manner of gross swamp creature, from black crab to a rumored alligator that we didn’t actually see.

On our first night there we ate strange pizza at “The Mellow Mushroom,” which appears to be modeled after the fantasy of the sixties held by someone born in the 80s. Their drink specials that night were mimosa and bloody mary. We’re game though, so mimosas it was! Earlier we had gone to the beach and ordered false burritos before I remembered you aren’t supposed to eat Mexican food if you’re anywhere but Texas, the rest of the West, or actual Mexico. So many parts of the world have no relationship with Mexico! You forget. Death to false burritos! Why are you even trying!? Just serve gumbo and fried shrimp, that’s what you’re good at and that is FINE. Still, the blame lies with us.

I dipped my toes in the Atlantic and realized I don’t think I’ve done that but maybe once or twice in all my life. The Atlantic! What a strange ocean! In my mind it is cold, murky and unknowable, but the old man told me that the Pacific is much colder, much bigger, and hence much more unknowable. You learn something every day. The beach was made of crushed up shells that I bet are great for corns and bunions.

After our strange pizza we went to a bonfire at the groom’s friends’ house and bonded for hours by telling stories about how weird the groom is and laughing until tears ran down our cheeks. Then the groom was made to eat a symbolic ear of corn, and we told him about how a good marriage is like this fire: you throw a bunch of wet wood down in a pile, argue for a long time about how to arrange it, and then just spray lighter fluid on it and hope for the best.

The next day we drove past a restaurant whose sign promised “Pig Feet EVERY Day” and a condemned-looking building called “El Scorpion Nightclub” whose sign said “Zumba Classes Mon, Wed, Fri” and ate at a horrible diner that was awesome and just what we wanted. We wanted fried green tomatoes instead of bacon, and she said the cooks wouldn’t do it, but then when she brought us our food there they were! She said she’d called in a favor with the cooks–earlier in the day, Taylor Swift had come on the radio and the cooks were complaining, and our waitress changed the station. Upon being reminded of this epic debt they owed her, they grudgingly performed the requested substitution. “And so our breakfast was saved thanks to the extreme antipathy male short order cooks have toward Taylor Swift,” intoned the old man. Mark Duplass and his equally talented wife Katie Aselton were sitting at a table within my sight line. They looked great. We watched their toddler have an extremely psychedelic encounter with another older child.

I hung out all day in town while the old man frantically tried to finish the thing he said he’d do for the wedding, which was in four hours. This is when the first of a two-part Best Of Trip happened for me!

I found this weird old bookstore filled with piles and stacks of books, and I started browsing as is my wont. There was no order to the books and whole sections of the store were roped off with untidy strips of packing tape, behind which were piles of broken-open boxes spilling books out on the floor. Every available surface was covered with crumpled piles and stacks of things: a 19th century map of Europe; a Mariah Carey tape; a book that teaches you how to glue things in a scrapbook; a sort of rare André Breton book about surrealism, in French. Thousands and thousands of books, sort of roughly grouped in general sections but then also not really. For example, just to see if I could get a handle on the organizational structure, I tried to find a Stephen King book, and couldn’t. Your average used bookstore has an inventory that consists roughly of 45% Stephen King, so this seemed surprising.

While I browsed I slowly realized that this store serves a dual purpose. In the hour that I was in there, at least three different women came in and told the owner very long, shockingly personal stories about problems in their lives and marriages, and the owner just listened. She didn’t really give advice, and she also didn’t get emotionally engaged. She listened, and periodically she’d say something like “it’s hard to be married to someone you don’t trust, isn’t it?” One woman was telling her about how she’d had all these past life regressions done and it had turned out that she had a cosmic connection and unfinished business with her boyfriend. Another woman was upset about the way her boss treats her (the boss’s) children. So many deep talks about marriage and commitment and connection ensued, so many musings on everyone’s different journeys and how we can only come to realizations in our own time.

It felt so old-school, almost medieval! Like the owner lady was the local good witch, who you’d go see about all manner of problems. Going to see Old Mother Johnson about those nightmares you’ve been having. The lady’s energy was so calm and collected. She listened to people’s crazy problems and you could tell they felt better after talking to her. It didn’t even seem like the women she was talking to really even knew her that well–it wasn’t like it was all her good friends just popping in to chat. It seemed like a destination. It was really like overhearing therapy sessions. And then at one point, one of the women she was counseling said in an embarrassed voice, “oh well, anyway, I’m just blabbing and blabbing!” and the owner said very seriously, “well, that’s what this place is for.”

!!!

I loved it so much. The vibe was so intense and sort of out-of-time that at one point I was THIS CLOSE to going up and saying “excuse me, but I have my tarot cards with me and I’d love to do a reading for you” because I know without a doubt that they both would have just been so into it.

I actually bought this next one. It opens with all these quotes from people like Victor Hugo about how the body is merely a vessel for the soul. It is a book published in 1985 by a French Hare Krishna practitioner. Maybe the greatest artifact in history?

I considered this one but ultimately didn’t go for it

Look how in the 70s a yoga mat was just a sheepskin. #wehavetogoback

I got this next one for Katy. The moment I saw it my heart started pounding. I am bad at presents but I really feel like I nailed this one:

I read the entire thing aloud to the old man on our 3 hour drive to Greensboro. It is so strange. I’m not sure what it is? It’s the size and dimensions of a menu, but I’m not sure if that was the point. I don’t think it was meant to accompany a particular album, although possibly it came with a box set. There’s no publication date but I extrapolated from various other clues that it maybe was put out in 1992. It’s got lots of predictably incredible photographs but the truly amazing thing is the actual writing. Whoever made this compiled quotes and information from all kinds of different articles and interviews, but then presented it all in Jimmy Buffet’s voice, as though he sat down and wrote the whole thing in one sitting.

In today’s world of fax machines, cellular phones and call waiting, we need to spend a little time with the fun part of ourselves, and that is what a Jimmy Buffet concert is all about

We were really struck by how dark the Buffet enterprise is. You spend your whole life just kind of laughing affectionately at it, but then once we actually dug into this little book we uncovered this powerful vein of nihilism and maybe not super healthy escapist tendencies. What Jimmy Buffet loves, according to his self mythology, is drinking in bars, not having a job, and being on a boat. Every other anecdote begins with “I was running from a bad marriage.” He says he bought a bar in the Caribbean just so that he could “sit on a stool” and tell people he owned a bar in the Caribbean. He bought a bar so that he could go to other bars and tell people he had a bar! There’s this long chapter all about how much he loves his airplane. He describes flying from the island where he lives, up to New York, and how he gets up into the air and then serves himself this amazing seafood lunch, and then lands at all kinds of little private airports so he can hang out and talk shop with other airplane enthusiasts. Then he says maybe not everyone can understand it, but he just really prefers this way of travel to being cramped on a plane with a bunch of stressed out businessmen. And I’m sorry, but NO SHIT, JIMMY BUFFET.

His dog is named Cheeseburger. There is one chapter devoted to a list of all the places where he’s had a good cheeseburger. There is also a recipe for margaritas. He gives the story behind each one of his songs–it’s interesting to note that he thinks of his songs primarily as stories. He never discusses melodies or chords or rhythms or tempos, only the narratives presented in each song.

“Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes.” Rhyming unusual words is something I have always tried to do. Anybody can rhyme cat and rat. I look for things beyond two syllables–like attitudes and latitudes.

His story as he presents it in all these different interviews, apparently, is basically that he felt alienated from anything resembling the regular stream of life. All he cared about was booze, pulling tail, and the beach, and when he realized he could have a life consisting of exclusively those things by becoming a recording mega-star, then that’s what he did. He opens with this long poetic musing about what “margaritaville,” the concept, means to him. Margaritaville is a place as much in your mind as in reality. It’s a place where the real world slides away and all that’s left is the ice cold lime and tequila concoction in your hand, good tunes on the radio, and the rhythmic crash of the waves. He has this wonderful line I wish I’d written down before I gave it to Katy, it’s something like “I wanted to take the light side of life and live it to the extreme.” Such an incredible summation of the Buffet ethos. The light side of life lived to the extreme.

Darkness and light!

The first hit was “Come Monday” off an album called “Livin’ & Dyin’ in 3/4 Time.” Everyone asked me why there was no reference in any of the songs to 3/4 time. I was still working on a song called Nautical Wheelers” then, and I said I knew there were no songs titled “Living & Dyin’,” but I liked the line and decided to use it as the title for the album. That’s when the people at the record company knew I was crazy and probably uncontrollable.

–emphasis mine

The wedding was on CAPE FEAR, which obviously ruled. We got there hours ahead of time because the old man was doing a cool performance, unfortunately in lieu of dancing, after the ceremony. The wind was literally insane. For about four hours it blew so hard I couldn’t believe it. All the wine glasses blew over. The chairs blew over. The music stands blew over. Gary ran down to the end of the pier, where the ceremony was going to be held, and jammed the PA speakers into a weird boat closet so they wouldn’t blow into the water. Blackest clouds rumbled in. The time of the wedding drew ever more nigh. Suddenly there was a tornado watch, a hailstorm watch, and a severe thunderstorm alert. The guy in charge of setting up the huge movie screen packed up all his equipment and left. I thought we were going to have to have the wedding in a basement.

As the storm brewed I went out to the end of the pier and did yoga, which was very dramatic and exciting, and then I read one of the books I got at that awesome bookstore. This is the second part of that thing I told you about! As I was going to pay for my French reincarnation book, my Parrothead handbook, and a book by Alain Corbin about the history of bells in France (Corbin specializes in these books that sound like they would be so boring you would rather die, but then are so riveting and incredible you remember them forever. His book about the history of SMELL in French society still haunts me. Run, don’t walk!), the lady said it wasn’t enough money to use my credit card, and I didn’t have cash. I had just idly picked up a book about tarot cards and she said if I got that too I could use my card. It was only 8 bucks so without thinking or even looking at it, I said yes. I instantly regretted this. BUT THEN, once I got out on the pier and opened it up, I realized what it was: it’s the unabridged, unedited text of the 1911 book by A.E. Waite–the first English-language book about the tarot! It includes this epic bibliography where Waite describes and makes fun of every book mentioning tarot cards since 1781. Waite was a weird gentleman mystic who created the deck of cards that is today most commonly known. The book is almost impossible to read, (a) because it’s so old-timey and (b) because it’s written in that turn of the century pseudoscientific dialect you associate with Theosophists and Mesmerists.

So anyway, it ended up being a more than worthwhile purchase.

There were all these black crabs with huge claws making their way across the bubbling, steaming shore, moving into the tall weeds surrounding the pier. Everyone said an alligator lived around there and I wished he would show himself but he never did. The wind died down and the tornado watch was lifted and somehow in spite of what truly seemed like apocalyptic weather symptoms the wedding was performed in an evening of perfect stillness.

Play Enjoyed By ALL

While we were gone, the snoopy stayed for two nights with Mike and Marijke, and two nights at boarding school. He had such a good time at his sleepover! It was really nice to test him and to discover that he can do it without being the world’s biggest crybaby. I think those guys have excellent Calm Dog Energy, because he stopped barfing as soon as he got there, and Marijke even said he rode in the car and seemed to enjoy it, which has not been experienced by me at all. Whenever he’s in the car with me he sobs brokenheartedly the entire time and pants so hard I’m scared he’s dying. “stupid is as stupid does,” though, and so it’s clearly my fault, for snoopys can sense the deep roots of uptightness in their mistresses no matter howsoever hard she shall try to cover up or even murder those roots.

We got him this morning from boarding school. I’ve never seen him so tired. He hasn’t even moved in four hours.

I’m realizing the snoopy is unusually barfy. He barfs kind of a lot. We’ve already got him on this ludicrously fancy diet that’s single protein-source simple food for little crybabies with sensitive stomachs, what more can we do? Everyone says if he’s barfy we should be feeding him on a raw diet where you have to make your own chicken every day or something, a concept I utterly loathe and dread. Fuck this guy! When I found him he was living in a cage in rural Iowa and now he thinks he’s Little Lord Fauntleroy! He can shove it.