Notes on Returning to my Hometown, Palmer Alaska, Upon Graduating College
adapted from various entries in Journal 17
Dates noted.
p 84-85. 24/June/2017
I’ve done so much today! I booked flights, negotiated housing for Austin and Houston, talked Kirby down from crying this morning, and now I’m at Vagabond Blues having driven myself! An Americano was way too much of their terrible coffee! I drove on the Glenn! Alone! The road that my entire life kept me separate from the little town has been conquered, by me!
Vagabond Blues is the only local coffee shop in Palmer, a city of one intersection. There’s a Starbucks in the grocery store, but if you want a coffee you go to Vagabond Blues, despite their coffee being bad, bitter, and difficult to drink. There’s a young pair over at the little window table. When I was young child the table would open up, magically, and become an oversized chess set. Now it has been replaced by a normal table. In the right hand chair there is a woman, young, white, as hip as anyone can be here, wearing converse sneakers and a sidearm. Not like a service pistol, but a well-designed, almost minimalist, semi-automatic handgun in a muted grey. There are no black people here (that is why white people buy guns, they are afraid of black people), the only person of color in this large, semi-crowded cafe is a white-passing native woman at the next table over from me, but she is also just trying to drink a cappuccino quietly and read her phone, like everyone else. No rumble’s going down at the Vagabond Blues, you dip.
There was a spider in the car, but I still drove here.
Sidearm Girl’s friend, a young thin white man, is wearing a trucker cap with a generic t-rex decoration. Like something a child would wear. The pair are either planning a new civilization or a D&D campaign. T-Rex Trucker Cap’s shirt is printed upside-down “Because I was Invented” or perhaps “Because I was inverted”. A personal invocation?
Fred Meyer, Palmer (the new one) outdoor seating area. Sunny.
An old woman yelled from out of her car at me “I like your style!” I was suprised, but yelled back “Thank you!” And then a moment later “have a nice day!” I’ve gotten several approving nods from young men in town as well, they appreciate a bold tie here. There was a small pack of three rainbow-clad teens in the toy section. This Fred Meyer is Brand New, and I do not like it. The old Fred Meyer, while it was dark and small had a certain character. This one is like the one in Anchorage or Olympia. Too big and new and the fonts are too swoopy. You can buy sushi now which seems to me almost a crime. When they abandoned the old Fred Meyer, instead of tearing down and building anew, they tore down the Carr’s, the back up grocery store to be used in emergencies, which a year previously had moved across the street. The Old Carr’s had been there since my mom was young, when her dad designed the aisles and whose handwriting was used for a time as the font for the displays. There was an ugly strip mall attached to the old Carr’s, before it was demolished, which had a strange smell and a Waldenbooks, where I would go when I was three and a half feet tall to lustily eye the hardbound archival sets of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. One day when I was maybe four I walked up the man behind the counter at Waldenbooks and asked him, haughtily, where they kept the anatomy books because “I want to know what’s underneath my skin. Not the epidermis, because I know all about that, but beneath that. What is between everything and keeps it all in place.” He did not understand my question, and tried to direct me to the the colorfully-illustrated children books on the subject, which I had already read. I ended up buying a new edition of Gray’s Anatomy, which I tried to read in the car and when we got home I realized I could never finish because I did not understand any of the words at all. This was something of a blow to my self-image because I thought of myself as smart, so I struggled along and gave myself a headache. This was before wikipedia, so I didn’t have a ton of other options. I never did find out the answer to my question, and if you look at a cross-section of the human skin it is confusingly labelled, you have the follicle and the epidermis and so on, but there is never a label pointed right at the meat of the skin saying “this is called X and it is made of Y”.
25/Jun p 89
I’m a real ‘man of the people’ today, I’m wearing my blue Italian shirt. I feel immoral, I’ve had a small bag of patriotic skittles and I’m working my way through, of all things, a bag of Organic Doritos. They are not as disastrously flavorful as the normal kind. Does that makes then any less sinful?
p 90
No man can be taught without first admitting ignorance. No man can be taught who does not want to learn. No man can change without first admitting wrong-doing.
p 94
Woman at shoe store (white) had dreadlocks and a large number of tattoos, most notably one which encompassed the entire front of her neck, from just below her chin down to her collarbone. The pattern was difficult to distinguish, and may have been either native or floral, but it gave me the overall impression of her neck being one giant hole, with her head floating eerily above her shoulders. She was accommodating and helpful, and seemed to deeply understand the shoe business.
Kaladi Bros. Coffee (Wasilla)
Comment from a mid-20s snowmachine hoodlum, on the subject of my clothes, (ersatz blue suit and floral bow tie): “You’re killing it today, bro! Whoo Hoo!” He said this enthusiastically and unironically.
Waiting in line Wasilla Fred Meyer Starbucks, p 95
A little girl says conversationally to the nearby world, including myself, “I Don’t Like Cheese” as if she is just feeling out how those words feel to say, not inviting conversation. Cheese is bad, kid, (I silently agree) don’t let anyone tell you different. Stick to your convictions.
Right ahead of me is a white man wearing decent if baggy khaki slacks and a dark grey long-sleeved t-shirt advertising “The worlds most battle-proven firearm” in big white block letters. Printed on the shirt clearly and twice is the logo of the company, two circular and intertwined letters that I could not decipher. No name. When it is his turn he orders a medium latté with additional special instructions for its manufacture. One barista asks the other when (man’s name) was coming back, and she replied that he was on his way “Even at this moment” and that she had not seen him since the third, several weeks ago.
1/July/2017
One time at my grandparents cabin we were going to eat some weird old-person food that I was not stoked on. I forget how old I was, but teenaged. I was standing in the living room, it was dark, and I could clearly hear everyone else in the other room talking, so I started absently singing whatever was on my mind, which at that moment was the Sicilys pizza jingle, one of the cornerstone jingles of my childhood. It went as follows, set to the tune of Offenbach’s Infernal Gallop:
call, 333 8 thousand
333 8 thousand
333 8 thousand
call for Sicily’s
piz-zaaa!
It’s very catchy, although from a meta-narrative perspective the Sicilians are not usually associated with the can-can. As I finished my hushed rendition Grandpa Bill said from behind me “What are you mumbling?” I got all flustered and deflected, he always put me on my guard. “Well, okay. Dinners ready.” And left. We are having Sicilys at his wake, and the car smells like pizza. I’ve never actually had it before. I heard their ad on the radio on the way up here again, and it’s all different. The radio station got bought by a big conglomerate and all the jingles changed. It’s difficult to reconcile this Alaska with the one in which I grew up, all the audio signposts are different, and they’re tearing down all the trees in my neighborhood to build more houses. I don’t know why they’ll move here, the big appeal is the forest and the privacy, there’s nothing else around.
AD: CITY DINER, OUR EGGS ARE SERVED ON WARM PLATES.
Is this a prideful boast or a dire warning? Did the management finally figure out how the warming oven works, or was there an accident that never made it to the papers?
12/jun/2017
An ant is plotting an almost totally random course across my floor. He’ll be going along fine and then take a sharp turn to the left or right, spinning madly and continuing unresponsive to my indictments of “Shoo!” “Scram!” And “HEY!” After watching him twist along for a short moment I felt the hair of my leg twitch inside my wool sock and I jumped up shouting “Ahh!” Thinking for sure some little etymological comrade had started slithering up my shin.