Sometimes it’s nice to be at the mercy of things… I feel like I’ve been noticing relations in aspects of my life. It’s all probably coincidence, but maybe going home for the holidays has given me some time to be more observant of coincidence. I’m writing this as I ride the shuttle bus back to Bloomington. The relevence of my first line was that my plane arrived late and I had to sit around the airport for a few hours until the next shuttle came. It wasn’t quite as fun as the time last year when Ryan and I sat at the bar at TGI Fridays waiting for Sparky’s flight to arive, but I appreciated the chance to just sit around and think about things before heading back to the fray of Bloomington. The idea that it’s nice to get that unexpected time out was echoed in regard to the snow storm that hit Bloomington before I left for Pennsylvania, about a week ago. It came up in conversation with the women at the Appalachian Trial office in Boiling Springs when I was there with my mom planning a summer backpacking trip. The women at the AT office said that a coworker had family in Bloomington and had to battle the weather to arrive there. In Bloomington, the snow and ice fell all night and it was beautiful and soft as it covered everything in sight. As I rode my bike to work on Wednesday, the first day that it snowed a lot, I was excited about how still and quiet the town was and not at all dismayed about having to trudge through the snow. That night, riding around town was an excercise in futility, but not unpleasant as the snow started falling again. It came down so hard that I decided to forgo work the next morning and stay up until sunrise talking with a friend and watching the snow fall. It was really nice and I fealt like I could get my head around some of the craziness that has marked the last few months for me. I feel like I’ve written this a lot in e-mail to people, but ever since the election I’ve fealt maybe the worst that I’ve ever fealt. Just a feeling of impotence and a feeling like all the words I had uttered to try to be inspired, or optimistic had failed. I found myself unable to talk to others at a time when that was what I needed to do the most. This corresponded with a period in town marked by lots of fun shows and new people moving to town, so there was so much activity, but through it all, I fealt a real distance from people and it was really overwhelming. The last week before the holidays, as people left town for their hometowns, or left for tour, town, and people seemed like something I could manage.
My mom’s expression, as I leave her in the airport makes me feel like I wasn’t home long enough, but in retrospect, I really did do a lot of things. I feel like I got to do all of the important nostalgic things. We went to Pakha’s Thai House, a surprisingly good Thai restaurant in an unexpected little PA town. Eating there around the holidays has started to become a tradition and it’s nice because eating good food is definitely one of the few times I find my father at ease and able to communicate pleasantly. I went hiking with my mom a few times, on trails that were still familiar from my childhood. We hiked once at King’s Gap, a state park and environmental education center. The paths lead up into the hills and when you reach the high points you can look out across a good deal of the Cumberland valley. I don’t trust my memory, but looking out now, there is a wrongness to what I see. Bland, identical, subdevelopments now bespeckle the landscape, static that breaks up the past serenity of the old corn fields. Everywhere I go around my old hometown there are new houses, new businesses. They pop up, suprising me, and it is strange how noteable the absence of emptiness can be. We drove past a mall. Much of one wing had been demolished. I saw that wing newly constructed while I was in high school. From rubble to rubble in less than a decade. How can that make any sense? But still, it is good to visit the old places, to do the old things, and especially hiking, which my brother and father have an aversion to, gives me time to talk with my mother. We’re planning to hike the Appalachian Trial from Harpers Ferry to Boiling Springs after I finish with the Plan-It-X tour and that’s really exciting. I haven’t spent much lengthy time outdoors since I was young and in Boy Scouts, and living so close to the AT, it seems ridiculous that I haven’t spent more time exploring it. Hiking it is one of those things that just seems stupid not to do. And, moreover, it takes on huge significance doing it with my mom, who I rarely see these days. In some ways, I’m way more excited about this trip than even european tour, or PIX tour. I went snowboarding with Tim, and found little to have changed since the last time I went, years ago. The resort was the same as it was when we would travel up there weekly with a school group during the winters of our youth. It seems that high school is the prime demographic for skiing and snowboarding, because we found ourselves significantly older than most of the other kids riding the lifts. It’s a neat feeling to feel your body remember how to do something and even though the ice from the snowblowers blasted me in the face, and I had to listen to the prattle of annoying adolescents, it was awesome to feel my body swirl and meander around the piles of snow.
Steve’s band Derringer played their last show and Tim and I went. The show was at an all-ages show space and record store called Championship that an old friend Colby runs and it was pretty neat. The atmosphere definitely fealt more positive than the show I went to last winter. The place was pretty full, a couple hundred kids, and it seemed like everyone had a good time.