Southern Comfort
Well, as Sam Gamgee said, I'm back.
I have no explanation for that Burtonesque character with the Victorian diction who apparently succeeded in passing off his deranged ramblings as my own "journal entries" (recovered via time machine from the future!) while I was gone. None. Although I did enjoy reading that Dickey poem.
But I'll tell you this, honest and true: it was nice to go home for a while.
Living in Los Angeles is a wearing experience. You arrive with sparkling eyes, expecting overnight success, and for a time the city seems full of possibility, like the girl at the punch stand at your high school prom who seems a bit out of your league but you'd swear is giving you friendly looks. When the overnight success doesn't come, you adjust. You grow accustomed over time to the superficiality, the rudeness, the Machiavellian careerism, the high school girls with breast implants and the middle-aged men with lifted faces. You learn to tune them out and focus on the weather - although after a few years even a 80-degree sunny day starts to feel oppressive in its own way. Living in LA is perhaps the most pleasant form of auto-anesthesia ever devised by the human mind.
Of course, if you're not careful with the anesthesia, it can become auto-euthanasia.
Don't worry; I am not going to sit here and wax sentimental about the place I was born and grew up in, because it merits no so such treatment. Atlanta is, in the words of a high school friend of mine, The Big Sofa: it's really comfortable, and if you know what's good for you you really need to drag yourself up off it and go outside. It's perhaps as unsouthern as a southern city can be.
But.
Those of you whose experience of the southern United States is limited to "Dukes of Hazzard" may have entrenched assumptions about that part of the country. I will not sully myself with attempting to change them. Ignorance takes many forms, regional self-superiority being one of the more common, and we southerners are used to being whipping boys for the rest of the country. If it makes you feel better about yourself to be able to think, "Well, at least I'm not from THERE," as if poverty, racism, corruption and lack of education don't exist in your little corner of the world, you go right ahead. Like I said, I'm over trying to enlighten the willfully ignorant on this subject.
But I will attest that being southern does most certainly shape the way you see things. There is a connectedness with the land, a sense of history that comes with the birth certificate - not the "We shall rise again" crap, just a tacit understanding that there IS a history to be learned and wrestled with. (Americans as a group don't really "do" history; we prefer looking forward, so as not to have to wrestle with our national history and the holes it would poke in our national mythology. Southerners, on the other hand, have no choice; we got beat, and the ones who beat us have never let us forget it.)
Enlightened southerners, who exist in only slightly smaller proportion than enlightened people in other parts of the world, are thus burdened from the beginning with a rich and mournful knowledge of what casual evil human beings are capable of. It gives us depth in a way I believe people from other parts of America are hard pressed to match. Angelenos are skin-deep.
(By the way, don't mistake anything I'm saying for the faux populism so in vogue among the current beneficiaries of flyover-state ignorance. David Brooks can stuff his bobos up his nose. I'm an overeducated, coastal, blue-state intellectual and proud of it.)
The point is, when I go home - for that is what it always will be - and spend a little time among dogwood trees and people who age normally, it recharges me. It's like putting a live wire to the earth; I feel grounded, put back in touch with the real. LA is a big movie set, and as on any studio backlot, if you look around you'll see the buildings are nothing more than hollow façades. It's a convincing simulacrum of reality, but only from a distance. (Angeleno readers will recognize this as the "Angelyne" principle.)
Did it change my life, this six-day respite in the land that birthed me? Fix all my problems? Of course not. But one thing I have come to know unshakably about myself is that I yearn always for connection, for intimacy, for truth, for passion, for chances to commune with the real. For six days last week, I did that. Like that Victorian imposter said, it was a balm for my soul. I wish you all a similarly healing experience sometime soon.
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming, already in progress...
I have no explanation for that Burtonesque character with the Victorian diction who apparently succeeded in passing off his deranged ramblings as my own "journal entries" (recovered via time machine from the future!) while I was gone. None. Although I did enjoy reading that Dickey poem.
But I'll tell you this, honest and true: it was nice to go home for a while.
Living in Los Angeles is a wearing experience. You arrive with sparkling eyes, expecting overnight success, and for a time the city seems full of possibility, like the girl at the punch stand at your high school prom who seems a bit out of your league but you'd swear is giving you friendly looks. When the overnight success doesn't come, you adjust. You grow accustomed over time to the superficiality, the rudeness, the Machiavellian careerism, the high school girls with breast implants and the middle-aged men with lifted faces. You learn to tune them out and focus on the weather - although after a few years even a 80-degree sunny day starts to feel oppressive in its own way. Living in LA is perhaps the most pleasant form of auto-anesthesia ever devised by the human mind.
Of course, if you're not careful with the anesthesia, it can become auto-euthanasia.
Don't worry; I am not going to sit here and wax sentimental about the place I was born and grew up in, because it merits no so such treatment. Atlanta is, in the words of a high school friend of mine, The Big Sofa: it's really comfortable, and if you know what's good for you you really need to drag yourself up off it and go outside. It's perhaps as unsouthern as a southern city can be.
But.
Those of you whose experience of the southern United States is limited to "Dukes of Hazzard" may have entrenched assumptions about that part of the country. I will not sully myself with attempting to change them. Ignorance takes many forms, regional self-superiority being one of the more common, and we southerners are used to being whipping boys for the rest of the country. If it makes you feel better about yourself to be able to think, "Well, at least I'm not from THERE," as if poverty, racism, corruption and lack of education don't exist in your little corner of the world, you go right ahead. Like I said, I'm over trying to enlighten the willfully ignorant on this subject.
But I will attest that being southern does most certainly shape the way you see things. There is a connectedness with the land, a sense of history that comes with the birth certificate - not the "We shall rise again" crap, just a tacit understanding that there IS a history to be learned and wrestled with. (Americans as a group don't really "do" history; we prefer looking forward, so as not to have to wrestle with our national history and the holes it would poke in our national mythology. Southerners, on the other hand, have no choice; we got beat, and the ones who beat us have never let us forget it.)
Enlightened southerners, who exist in only slightly smaller proportion than enlightened people in other parts of the world, are thus burdened from the beginning with a rich and mournful knowledge of what casual evil human beings are capable of. It gives us depth in a way I believe people from other parts of America are hard pressed to match. Angelenos are skin-deep.
(By the way, don't mistake anything I'm saying for the faux populism so in vogue among the current beneficiaries of flyover-state ignorance. David Brooks can stuff his bobos up his nose. I'm an overeducated, coastal, blue-state intellectual and proud of it.)
The point is, when I go home - for that is what it always will be - and spend a little time among dogwood trees and people who age normally, it recharges me. It's like putting a live wire to the earth; I feel grounded, put back in touch with the real. LA is a big movie set, and as on any studio backlot, if you look around you'll see the buildings are nothing more than hollow façades. It's a convincing simulacrum of reality, but only from a distance. (Angeleno readers will recognize this as the "Angelyne" principle.)
Did it change my life, this six-day respite in the land that birthed me? Fix all my problems? Of course not. But one thing I have come to know unshakably about myself is that I yearn always for connection, for intimacy, for truth, for passion, for chances to commune with the real. For six days last week, I did that. Like that Victorian imposter said, it was a balm for my soul. I wish you all a similarly healing experience sometime soon.
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming, already in progress...
posted by Hotspur at 9:56 AM
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