barbie

I'm crossing an anniversary, which is harder to see than a waxing crescent on a cloudy night. Identity is fluid so princesses train to discern the presence of the pea until they're ready to evolve into queens with the power to assert and assign identity while princes apprentice kings as they transform and enforce state. Internalizing all the family roles is a dialectic of self, and I felt stagnant in mine before forgetting I'd been worried at all the weekend of the Barbie release. I made a point of attending a Free at Noon while I could and had a chat with a woman on our way out of the venue. She said that she works nearby and plans her Friday so she can attend and that her father who was with her is retired.

I met with friends in Old City afterwards for drinks and Barbie before hopping the train home and thought more about the identity of this period of my life. I've used sabbatical, temporary retirement, and extended vacation, which have been enough of a placeholder to carry me forward, but I have no absolute bookends to delineate before and after, especially as I drift and drag my feet on writing this. My last working day was in July, but my employment ended in August. I was fully unemployed for a few months then picked up volunteer jobs. By those inflections I could delineate three stages though I've been thinking with the perspective of one long frame of reference from when I left until the present. My last paycheck was in August and that included unused PTO, which felt like getting paid not to work for a few extra days at the end. At some point my cash flow turned negative and I began living exothermically, now everything looks the same but feels a little different.

I overheard a guy on a hike last year mention some other guy who'd make his bed every morning. I wondered how many men have seen the beds of other men or witnessed their morning routines. I don't think I actually spoke with the person telling the story and for all my changing and adventuring I'm still socially strange but my bed has been well made since the thought entered my head, and half the men of the tri-state area could attest to that. I began to incorporate hotel aesthetics into my own bedroom when I was traveling for work. Through the COVID years and after Leo I leaned on aromatherapy and spa day at home then in my Yankee Doodle way bought myself a retreat there.

Revisiting Joyce helped reignite my own religious and philosophical interests. I couldn't recognize the right angles of myself in Stephen, and I was such a wallflower I couldn't fully appreciate Bloom's own outsiderness. Dubliners feels familiar now, framed by Polyester. Recognizing the same wild homes was comforting, and I thought about how to write about home honestly and lovingly. The stories can be discomforting, and neighbors airing grievances can leave social scars, which makes the authentic thing seem even more valuable in its earnestness. I felt sympathetic to the old mythologizers stuck at home that witnessed their families' dysfunction and had to invent archetype to tell their stories. I leaned on distance through abstraction to gain my own footing writing and recognized a similar roundabout style reading old newspapers. I feel less accountable to the standards of journalistic reporting in what is my own personal journal, and I felt I better understood Thoreau's denigration of newspapers as gossip rags. I was put off by those remarks, and I felt I recognized a precursor of the more unsavory sides of today's populism in Walden. By comparison to newspapers a hundred years ago I think there is refinement in how stories are reported, though I have become more critical of indulgent reporting. One of the Ulysses commentaries I read made some dramatic point about how dangerous it is for Stephen as an artist to get lured into the newspaper instead of leaving Dublin. I think growth is the evolution of perspective from unaware to aware of sameness, and if it's difficult it's because the reaction is exothermic, it's draining to let go.

As much of a challenge as it is to show grit without moralizing it I think modern art at all times iterates asymptotically towards a more terse linearization so that stories begin and end in medias res. The expression of values is massaged out of the words themselves and encoded into the edges of the narrative to make entire chunks of life digestible for those with compatible receptors. For instance I once met a guy from Bucks who married his mom at six then filed for divorce at 30 and moved to the city. They didn't speak for a bit but now he takes the train up for a long weekend on some feast day every year and occasionally to visit his old barber.

I thought that our collective body might lack granularity, that we have more life stages in common than the four or five broad strokes we usually paint with, and that too few princesses have succeeded at distinguishing them, but I couldn't say how many is too many. Adolescence is difficult enough to identify, and the language of "internal biological clock" throws people for a metaphysical loop. At a social level I think the accumulation of experience acts like the ticking of an external clock so that we're induced to transform by sets of interactions. Communal tragedy like a 9/11 or COVID, extreme weather events, meeting people, losing them, moving to a different town, retiring, and all the same things then done differently without the veil of work, have intermediate sums that add up to similar totals given sufficient time.

I read a bit about Reconstruction after leaving work, and Marley Me wanted to shout at the screen like at a movie. I wondered what life in the North would have been like if we'd had a better Civil War divorce lawyer who could have tweezed apart Fort Sumter with the precision of a neurosurgeon. I don't think the language of "employer" would exist here, and these contours around life shaped by our current approach to labor would be incomprehensible. We'd have flying cars, well funded public transit, peace, and infinite free energy. The South would be Florida At Scale, where people are sold and fed to each other as a way of life. And we'd doom scroll through images of Southerns playing and washing themselves in a polluted Mississippi, avoiding the question of why they don't live as comfortably as we do.

I had wondered about the appeal of the hemlocks to early settlers when I set out and managed to stumble through local history as well. Somebody on another group hike last year remarked about the vibrancy and diversity of the local foliage compared to England, and around the anniversary of Penn's landing in Chester last October the newspaper pointed out that the fall foliage would have been near its colorful peak as he debarked the Welcome. A Lenape speaker shared a story about how the cedar was the only tree to offer shelter to an injured bird, and so the oaks and maples who denied it help were made to drop their leaves. I felt repulsed by the thought of the deciduous trees discarding leaves like people discarding people, to say nothing of the chloroplasts enslaved within. I became a Tree Tender and was gifted a baby peperomia for the effort because I too was entranced and ensnared by the trees. The evergreen seemed noble by comparison in their treatment of their needles, so long as nothing is said of the chloroplasts enslaved within. Heartbroken by the thought and dismayed by the cedars I felt the same revelation, that for all the running away from kings and religion and politics and home the same old familiar shapes emerged in Pennsylvania. I left Fauna for the alluring land of Flora only to be frightened underground to Fungi. We reached out to touch hyphae and held hands while the wars above shook the soil around us, until I saw the mushrooms feast on flesh and I was animal again.

I visited a former coworker in Brooklyn last week. I walked and rode trains all the way from North Wales. We caught up over lunch and I hopped the last train out of Philly on the way home. I went to a concert in Doylestown last month and made my first visit to Musikfest this week. I drove up then rode two shuttles into the festival. The mill is dilapidated, the casino is thriving, and I'm riding the rails everywhere but here. I spoke with a guy in town who worked all week and had to wait until Friday to go. I thought if they really wanted to call it a free music festival then everybody in Bethlehem would be free from work for the week. All the best acts would be booked during the day, and the old street cars would be revived with service from Philly. And then we'd build the same there and in Allentown.

A few years ago I read a theory that so many movies are filmed around Philly that it shapes people's mental image of the suburbs, though I've since come to see Levittown as the salt in that recipe. Some material chunk of life around me in Florida came from the mid-Atlantic, but I didn't identify with the region. I still sense some ineffable difference between the two but I had to grapple with the sameness I discovered. Even the weather here has become familiar as the long, slow rains that used to soak the area have given way to short, heavy storms that skip entire blocks. When I first moved up people were surprised I'd leave Florida, now when I tell them they turn somber and say that they understand. I've started to wonder if there's a Florida Man diaspora in Pennsylvania, refugees of the culture war and climate change, a thought that froze me when Mastriano proposed making Pennsylvania more like Florida. The Foulkes left monarchy in Wales for freedom, the Landises left Switzerland similarly in pursuit of pacifism and religious liberty. There are more reasons than Wawa that Pennsylvania would seem familiar to those emigrating. Awareness of the shared connection is a wind break for the kindling of an unnamed spirit that summons us here, and watching the flame fail to take is like watching the stone slip from Sisyphus in slow motion. Florida Man sees the celebration of filth and centers it, relinquishing freedom to fight like birds at the feeder. One of the gods of the mid-Atlantic, a distant descendant of Aphrodite and Hephaestus, himself horny and worn down by the furnaces, paints pictures of his ancestors, even dear old uncle Ares. The two disregard each other while another meadow or meeting place is paved into a parking lot.

I went to the Phoenixville Vegan Fest last weekend then to the Panico's punk show. I made a trip to the city this weekend then spent Saturday at a block party in Lansdale and met a guy whose band was playing in Ambler the next day. I followed him and his wife over to St. Stan's for a Journey cover band and beer sponsored by Local Tap, who supplied Middle Child and Miller, of which we had two pitchers. The walls outside the bathrooms were finished with plywood spray painted in large letters "WOMEN ←" and "MEN →". There were no dividers between the five urinals and every 10 seconds or so I heard the moaning of a ghost trying to speak. On the way out I thought about the dads and I peeing on each other in the atrium just out of sight of the Turbo Ducks.

I went for a walk down the Wissahickon nearly a month ago on the anniversary of my last working day to start gathering these thoughts, about four hours from home to Ambler. It began to pour on my way up Butler as I was crossing Maple so I ran to the train station for shelter. On the ride home I heard a woman behind me realize we wouldn't be stopping at Locust Street, then a week later I boarded the wrong train out of Glenside so I hopped off at Ardsley and took a night walk down Keswick Avenue. Last year for Leo's birthday I washed myself in the Appalachian air and this year I returned to Ambler to let the boro wash over me. I had a beer and left a flower at the bar. I walked down Butler to the Wissahickon then to a punk show at the yards. I brought a roach to smoke by the creek but I dropped it on the walk. I felt I'd lost something I'd taken for granted and thought that while it's concise for Utnapishtim to be one person it's more useful for him to be one symbol. Surely more survived the flood, and their collective humanity is itself the immortal thing. I made it to the cemetery late in the afternoon and had a more emotional talk with the stone than I did last year, feeling the cresting weight of his absence in my return to the Cedar Forest. I can trace threads of my life back through him, and I can see where I carved up life with him and how I redistributed the pieces to sew new life. The peaches didn't reach their full potential but they did grow enough to brew one liter of wine that's still fermenting. I left him one of the peaches and three clippings of anise hyssop then stopped at his parents' for a visit. I had prepared tomatoes, onions, and basil the day before and filled up on hummus and fried cauliflower at the block party. I made it home around 9 and had leftovers with the dogs before bed.