Excuses, Excuses

It's amazing how quickly you can go from gung-ho to heave-ho. I started emdashery, all zeal and zest and dedication and fell flat within weeks. I have plenty of excuses for what went wrong, but in the end, I realize that F. Scott Fitzgerald was right: "A writer not writing is a maniac within himself." And while I'm in no way lumping myself into the category of FSF's greatness - nor am I suggesting that blogging will be the cure-all for my mental faculties - I am quite certain that more regular postings will make for a less em-bittered ash. Even though I don't have a presidential pardon to show for it, I do have a list of "buts" to explain my absence.

* But my computer died.
Sadly true. After many threats and allegations that it would make its exit, the whirring clicking mess finally went kaput. I feel like it had a remarkably short life given its purchase price, but I suppose I was rather abusive to it during my thesis-writing days. It was also unmercifully shuttled back and forth from North Carolina to Georgia, was owned by a PC-incompetent writer, and gave me fair warning before its final click-tastrophy.

* But I was on vacation.
I took a trip to Cleveland to see my best friend from grad school. It was the first time I'd seen her since her wedding in October more than a year ago, and it was my first real trip to Cleveland. (The trip for her wedding which mostly afforded me views of the hotel, her parent's house and a white dress doesn't count.) And while I'm guessing that your notion of vacation does not include Cleveland as a destination, it proved to be quite enjoyable. I left feeling like Cleveland gets a very bad rap...and also, that these two videos are hysterically accurate.

* But I've been house hunting.
When I moved back to Georgia after living in North Carolina for almost six years, I set up shop at my parents' house. After realizing that I sometimes go to the storage unit to visit the rest of my life, I decided that it was time to settle down and find somewhere to get my life out of a metal box. As one of the world's most deliberate human beings, this excuse gets extra merit. For me, house hunting isn't just an activity. It's a moral dilemma. I'm trying to be persistent, but it's so easy for me to get overwhelmed and think I can just live at home until I die. But then, I remember all my books, boxed and moldering, and a few pair of shoes that didn't seem to make it in "not storage" boxes, and I go back to the Real Estate Book with a Sharpie.

* But I'm getting old.
Also, sadly true. I celebrated my 30th back in July. I thought that reaching the three-decade mark would make me feel desperate and panicked about all that I hadn't accomplished before the end of my 20s. Like going to Europe and New York City. Or writing a book and getting published. Or, you know, like getting married. But instead, turning 30 felt like a relief in some ways. An opportunity to start fresh, to reorient those goals for the next decade, and to feel like I have plenty of time for everything.

None of these excuses may truly beg my pardon for being absent for two-plus months. I started to throw in that I also experienced a moderate bout of writer's block, but that seemed like too much of a dog-ate-my-homework. So now that I've made my excuses, I will get back on the blog-wagon and be more diligent. If for no other reason than no one wants to see me become a maniac.

Cat Lady Chic

I am a Wikipedia junkie. I'm prone to time-warping through what I refer to as "Wikipedia rabbit holes." It usually starts with a headline on Yahoo! news. Take, for instance, Saturday's featured Yahoo nugget on child star survivors. It mentioned Drew Barrymore, who was recently featured in the HBO film Grey Gardens. Her performance in the film is garnering acclaim from critics, so I went to IMDB to see the details, and I discovered that Grey Gardens chronicles the sensational story of the riches-to-rags branch of the Bouvier family tree. And that's when the time-warp opened up and sucked me into the Wikipedia rabbit hole.

I found myself fascinated by Jackie Kennedy's aunt and cousin, both named Edie, who took a spacious estate in the Hamptons and turned it into a feline infested garbage dump. Both women aspired to stardom, had haphazard careers that never really took off, and ended up squirreled away in the playground of the rich and famous performing skits for one another until the health inspector showed up to evict them.

That's when the story became tabloid fodder and spurred Jackie O to spend more than $30,000 to clean up the mess. But just two years later, the women had once again allowed Grey Gardens - an estate with one of the most notable gardens in the Hamptons - to drift into disrepair. Ironically, it was their eccentricity that finally led to their fame when the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens made them cult icons.

"Little Edie" suffered from alopecia and wore colorful, dramatic headscarves to mask her condition. Though she lived in a weed-choked dilapidated house filled with catfood cans and raccoon feces, Little Edie managed to pioneer a fashionable garbage chic that turned her into a style icon.

The squalor's extremity was appalling; and yet, the photographs depicted a house well-loved with touches of whimsy and affection. And the women looked curiously happy. The whole story was fantastical - the kind of truth you'd swear was fiction. Perhaps my preoccupation, my willingness to go down so many rabbit holes, was my own predilection to derelict spaces. You could almost imagine Little Edie pirouetting through the dashes of sunlight slanting through holes in the roof, skipping around piles of moldering books, skirting broken furniture and humming a tune...one that only she could appreciate.

Abandoned

Last Saturday, I spent the better part of the day in the dimmed corridors of several abandoned buildings. Strapped with cameras, my friend Tommy and I worked our way through the slightly damp and musty innards of empty factories and their dilapidated outbuildings. The factories themselves were cavernous - at the same time airy and stifled. The other buildings were in varying states of disrepair, from splintered roofs that let slivers of sunlight cut through the dust to completely open to the blinding blue sky that looked all the more clean and bright against the gloom.

We picked through glass shards from broken windows, rusted metal machinery and the weeds that worked their way through the concrete. And there were the other signs of man: stacks of time cards from the 40s and 50s; a list of money saving measures still tacked to a bulletin board; piles of carpet samples; scattered hard hats.

I took a photo of a door with no knob. Tommy noted that there was something poetic about it. Perhaps it was the contradiction of silent factories. Quiet spaces that once hummed. Empty stillness instead of deafening industry. Concrete fortresses filled with rain pools and lush vines. The mundane items that somehow seemed exceptional because they had been abandoned. The strange beauty of neglect.

I'm almost certain that Willie Mae Hollis never thought that a time card from 1944 noting a standard 8-hour workday in December would one day be fascinating just because it had been left behind.