feather2pixels

My just-completed voyage to the US easternlands resulted in some interesting artifact finds at home, as well as the creation of some new ones. Now I am back.

Some pictures of note:

And finally, a video of me and Danny dominating The Looper at Knoebels in Elysburg:

[flv:knoebels.flv 600 400]

I found a UC Berkeley MFA student who does robot art. Robot art! What could be more perfect for Creative Geometry class? The artist, Laura Greig, a fellow ex-engineering student from eastern Pennsylvania built Nila for her thesis project out of a coupe of servo motors, some fishing wire, and a few spare parts. So it was that on a hot Tuesday, I took my two classes for a cross-campus field trip to the art building to meet a painting robot.

Turns out Nila also takes a photo every minute and Laura compiled this YouTube clip of the day. I’ll be damned if it isn’t the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.

How lucky are you when a friend finds a way to carry on a case of beer for you because it does not taste like rope and is therefore not available west of the Sierras? Now if I can only protect them.

I seem to be back from the coast. The south coast. Of Lake Erie. Ben and Joe (barely) flew in from New York, I came in from Pittsburgh, and we all rendezvous-ed with Shal in his newish, possibly semi-permanent home. The night before, driving a Korean rental car upstate, I watched the aggressively uniform landscape of Ohio (is any part of this state uninhabited?) kind of give way to the sprawling, post-industrial mass bisected by river that is the greater Cleveland area. We spent most of time sprawling ourselves: in next-to-back row seats of a tight Indians/Yankees game, in corners of the kind of bars that pull you in with a seven thousand beer menu and keep you there with a Labatt special, and of course on Shal’s living room floor, where approximately one thirtieth of his media collection still fills an entire bookshelf two rows deep. Cleveland is a good place to hang out.

Then I got on the same United States Route 80 of my daily commute and drove East out of the state of Ohio and towards the state of squalor. I was headed to State College, Pennsylvania, where Danny was about to complete his last week ever of studying at the state college in question in a fantastically shitty shell of a house (further ravaged from a party the weekend before). At this point, studying is the generous description of what he does there, though we did wake up at 9:30 AM, after a night of watching DVDs in his warm bedroom, and slashed though a thicket of Ugg boots into middle campus to learn about monopoly. Later on, we went out with his friends to the kind of bars that pull you in with their $5 pitchers of bottom shelf liquor and keep you there because you are not physically free to leave. It was fun and it all made miss college. But not that much.

I completed my five hundred mile circle on PA Route 22 West, where central Pennsylvania transforms to western Pennsylvania via the Altoona Valley.  Freight trains still do things like chug up proud green hills and cross sturdy steel truss bridges here. Once in Pittsburgh, I tried to make the most of my time there by visiting PA’s superior state college, eating a kielbasi fried pirogi sandwich, pinball, and meeting up with Stef and Alicia, who spend less on their new mortgages than what I’m thinking about spending on a studio space. As Alicia’s pup was licking my face over a distracted game of Guitar Hero, I thought, she’s got a pretty nice life.

Fall was in ridiculously full effect over Thanksgiving week. I don’t remember Southeast Pennsylvanian leaves ever being that out of the tube yellow–I certainly don’t remember Morris Road invoking the feeling of an SUV commercial–but my friends and family insist it’s no fluke. Even my neighborhood, which usually resembles the scrolling set of a 1930’s cartoon, this year looks way quainter than it has a right to, as the powers that be took it upon themselves to plant corn in the field behind my house that usually just accommodates two rows of 110,000 volt transmission lines.

Foliage or not, autumnal is way that describes the way the way home feels now. My household has matured into Plowshare Road‘s equivalent of the grand old estate, with a new tiled patio and, thanks to my sister and Andy living in the area, a legitimate family quorum. Better to shelter everyone from the entire region, which is under a ravenous development that somehow feels like a collective burying of heads in the sand. New soulless shopping plazas. New nostalgia radio stations that anonymously program soulless nineties rock. More traffic. A CVS for every square mile. Blue Bell Country Club is practically a legitimate city-state. What the fuck is going on?

Beth’s shoes stand out in my mind. The Saturday after our ten year high school reunion, Joe, Nowell, and I ran into her and a few friends who you couldn’t have hand picked for more awkwardness–in the period spanning ninth grade to a year ago, we’ve been involved with all of their private parts in some way or another. All with bad results. For my part, I haven’t spoken with Beth in over a decade for no reason that carries any legitimacy, and I was vaguely regretting missing my chance at the reunion. But for whatever obstacles that existed the night before (like, um, the inexplicable rock band rendering communication next to impossible) they were outdone by extreme awkwardness during breakfast the morning after. Even the timing seem intelligently designed for maximum weirdness. We arrived, ate, left in unison, and as we all shuffled back to our SUVs I noticed her shoes: brown and simple, outmoded.

Suddenly, it occurred to me that that in the center of a rapidly metastasizing cancer of bullshit threatening to destroy what little here I like, Beth was standing before me, passing on a quiet fuck you to the mall with her ugly loafers. Beth is not my enemy. She never has been. In fact, she’s one of the only girls that ever found a way overlook a whole lot of uncoolness and give me a chance in high school. I admire Beth. No: for what she has shown me today, I love Beth!

At that moment, the point of my entire life became Beth quickly walking away from my Mom’s black Rav4 in the parking lot of Rich’s Other Place. If she makes it it to her car, I lose. Everything in myself that I am too afraid to face wins, the easy suburban targets that I pretend made me an angry fucked up little kid become real, and five years of self reflective walks through the misty California chaparral become pointless. I ran up to her from behind. “Hey,” I said, and hugged her.

This week I returned from a trip home–or whatever Blue Bell is to me. Do I have a home? What does that even mean? Is home just one of the many fictions I have invented to deal with myself? Argh! I have been desperately trying to claw out of my imaginary worlds; you would think a trip back East would provide some much needed clarity.

But at least it was an efficient trip. In four days and five nights I was able to do everything I wanted to do without down time. Time is sanity at home. More importantly, I was able to eat (almost) everything I was hoping to eat. Plus, I got to fulfill my lifelong dream of experiencing live reggae in Blue Bell. It did not disappoint.

That particular excursion happened to be the first time I have drank (Yuengling, none the less) legally with Danny, as he reached the end of his twenty-first year last January. From now on, the powers that be will have to think of a better reason to kick us out of Slim’s. The entire family, which, more and more is starting to resemble a bona fide clan, also made it down to Philly Chinatown, where I sampled the worst carrot juice and the best wonton soup of my life in the same meal.

OK, so there was a little clarity.

On Saturday, the clan traveled to a barbecue near the nuclear power plant, where tomatoes apparently grow to the size of dodge balls. Those were enjoyed with burgers and bottled water on the lovely little ranch of my dad’s longtime lab manager, Marella. Danny, Michelle & Andy (Mandy?), and I got a casual game of whiffle ball/frisbee/tennis/football (fiffle ball?) going and that was really the main event.

That nigt, Joe was cast into the final weeks of his bachelorhood with a party designed to, um, be like, the opposite of a wedding? Or something. I guess I don’t really understand bachelor parties. Maybe this mental block is linked to why I will be the last of my friends to get married. But, as with the family, everyone was together for the first time in a while, and that was good. I’ve got good friends. Plus, Shal and I got scrapple–that’s good too. Especially in a crowded diner at 2AM.

The next day I had probably the best pastrami half sandwich of my life. I use the term sandwich loosely to describe what was more of a small mountain of freshly carved, hot meat, dripping with pastrami goodness between slices of bread. The Rascal, sitting across from me in a busy corner of the Reading Terminal Market, ate the other half, which was slathered with an ill-advised layer of mustard. Not only did she decline my mustard advice, but that girl still insists I love mustard, which is like saying that Donkey Kong loves short Italian plumbers. Just because I once ate half a jar of it rather than risking certain starvation strikes me as irrelevant. Irrelevant!
Speaking of advice, some of the too hip for their own good SF coffee shops could learn something from the quiet dignity of La Colombe at Rittenhouse Square.

Finally: cheesesteaks and baby cows. It was a surprisingly good combination, the cheesesteaks in question coming from Palermo’s in Blue Bell (because at the time it was not one of Pudge’s four hours of operation) and the baby cows from Merrymead Farms, where one can watch really cute feedings in the early evening, complete with oversized baby bottles.

Christmas Eve. The most boring night of the year. I couldn’t even find an open grocery store, so instead of running an errand for my family I listened to Joanna Newsom’s new album the way it was meant to be heard: in a dark corner of the Super Fresh parking lot locked in my mom’s brand new SUV.

Joe and Anna announced their engagement at Rich’s Other Place on Friday, which is as good a place to tell your friends you are getting married as it is a place to cut high school. She wore black gloves until the unveiling and I am glad to report that Rich’s grilled corn muffins are back to the excellent standards of ten years ago. It was actually the first time I met Anna. Even if I didn’t like her, I would obviously never trash talk her on the internet, but she was friendly and I took to her right away. A smart woman makes her fiance’s best friends feel welcome. I can see what Joe sees in her.

After breakfast, Joe and I bowled a three game series and played six games of air hockey. He bowls with his dad’s old eighteen pound ball, heaving it in to the air as high as possible so that it lands with a left hook. When hit just right, it detonates the pins with a furious explosion to hell. Any other time it splits them. On Friday, though, he was rusty and I beat him with a reliable 13 pound house ball that apparently used to belong to a Chun C. Chung. Back at my house, we realized that Joe never signed my senior yearbook and so I handed him a pen and he got his big chance. I had almost forgot what it felt like to have friends who know the way to your house without directions. (Not to downplay the significance of Ben, who probably still needs a map for his own special reasons).

That night, Shal and Ammora joined us for drinks at the nation’s second largest mall, where she works (and had just personally completed $33,000 in home theater sales). Our server has a thick, juicy Philadelphia accent but there was an unsettling lack of smoke in the bar. Side note: apparently in Philadelphia proper, there is now an official smoking ban. I went down there last night with my cousin Rebecca to investigate and I am happy to report that at the Locust Bar–on tenth at Locust, where The Rascal and I used to get loaded when she was still nineteen–there is not only smoking, but an ashtray at each table.