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Uxbridge or The Rural Survival Guide to Overcoming Sublime
Realizations of Meaninglessness Small towns feel like re-runs of old TV shows. I should know; I grew up in one. I still live in one. The same tired actions are performed daily by the same people. I’ve heard people ask why. Why do small town people continue performing re-runs of work, of school, of sports, of church, of meetings, of loitering, of loving and hating one another for reasons that don’t really matter? Why? Because that’s the way things have always been done. That’s
reason enough. One night I asked a different question – how? "Those things are gonna kill ya," Veau told me, half-kidding. I rolled my eyes a little and took a drag. "I know, I know," was my usual reply, but then I added, "The only good thing about cigarettes is the smoke. Not its taste, or its smell, or how it makes your lungs feel like a used coffee filter, but the way it acts in the air. Have you ever really watched smoke before? It finds wind that you didn’t know was there and plays with it. It forms a stream if you hold it still. The stream isn’t straight; it flows like an upside down curtain. Smoke is a gravity defying, carbon-chemical mock-waterfall. Its really beautiful in its own way." "Is that why you smoke?" Veau asked. I was slightly annoyed that he regarded my aesthetic rant so lightly, so I just shrugged and continued smoking until my cigarette went out. Then we just sat there for a second until we got bored. I rose and put on my sweatshirt. Veau grabbed his coat and we walked out into the night air. Once again the air rushed into my lungs and shocked my breath a little. It felt as I imaged mustard gas must have felt just before it sucked all the air out of a trench soldier’s lungs. "Where to now?" I asked as we climbed into the Blazer. Veau made a face and matching gesture to show he had no idea. We sat for a second, and then we agreed to decide while we drove. Driving at night in a town like Uxbridge requires one’s eyes to adjust rather quickly. There are just enough streetlights so that the whole town gains a haunted glow, not as bright as a city, but not dark either. The town was not lit; it was illuminated. Unfortunately, most of this illumination came from the plastic abomination that was the convenient store on the corner. The convenient store/gas station was built only a few years back and, surrounded by all the old brick buildings and standing adjacent to the Uxbridge Inn, the gaudy, colorful building could only be appropriately described in one way - it looked like shit. People put up a big stink about the store when it was being built. They
said a Fisher-Price convenient store would ruin the town’s "historic
integrity." That’s small town survival tip number one –
make a big deal out of things that don’t really matter, like "historic
integrity." Small towns must have no molehills, only mountains. Seeing as there wasn’t anyone there we knew, which was, of course, the reason for pulling into the convenience store in the first place, we left and headed east on Route 16. We passed Lynch’s Package store, the high school and the ball fields. We passed a Polish hall, St. Mary’s Catholic Church and Stanley Woolen Mill. Just as we passed Countryside Garden Center a few flakes of snow began to fall. "It’s snowing," commented my observant partner. I just nodded. As we approached the sign that marked the Mendon/Uxbridge town line, the snow began to fall harder. Once the line was in sight, Veau turned around and headed back towards home. I remember looking over at Veau and realizing that he was probably the only person I knew with something real going on in his head. His thoughts never deviated much from reality, from the way things really were. Small town survival tip number two is make up a life in your head. Make up a life where you are the protagonist and everything you do actually impacts something or someone, or, if you are truly ambitious, make up a life where you impact everything and everyone. Live in your head. Veau never needed to make anything up. I never figured out why. Once we returned to the center of town, we drove by a few people we knew at the convenient store. Veau pulled into the parking lot and beeped to hail our friends. They turned around and after a second of squinting and a moment of recognition, sauntered over to the Blazer. We got out to greet them. There were three kids - Matt, Kurt and Mark. I graduated a year or two ahead of them in school, but they could skateboard unlike anyone else in town, so I used to photograph them jumping over random stuff. We exchanged "What’s ups" under the "LOITERERS WILL BE PROSECUTED" sign screwed into the brick wall. Of course nothing was really up with them, but they told all sorts of stories about how they had been wronged by cops or bosses or parents. They told of their exploits with girls and with law enforcement, which contained obvious dramatization. One story, which I believe Matt told, went something like this: "Dude, I was going, like ninety-five on the highway when the blues came on behind me. I was like, ‘Shit" ‘cause I knew the cop was gonna pull me over. When he did he was like, ‘Do you know how fast you were going?’ and I was like, ‘That’s what the speedometer’s for’ and he called me a wise-ass. Then he took my license and registration and went back to the cruiser. I didn’t give a shit, so I lit up a smoke. He came back to the car and asked if Ricky T_ _ _ was my uncle. He’s a cop in Sutton. I only got a verbal warning. It was sweet." Kurt and Mark told comparable stories. Such as this which Kurt provided: "Dude, I was at this party and this girl who was wicked hot wanted my shit. She kept lookin’ at me and I was like ‘What’s up’ and she asked if Kim was my sister and I said ‘Ya.’ Then we drank some more beer and I gave her a few shots of J.D. I thought that if I got her wasted I could get with her, but she could drink a lot. Some bitches have crazy alcohol tolerance. It sucked. We only made out and Matt was driving and he wanted to leave so I left." Matt confirmed the story, with the exception of the girl being attractive. The snow began to fall harder and accumulate all around, so we left the Three Stooges and drove back to Veau’s house. Small town survival tip number three – embellish the shit out
of everything that happens to you. The truth will reveal what is mundane,
what is mundane is you. Fabrications are essential to you own sense of
legitimacy. We laughed a little about the stories they told until we pulled into Veau’s driveway. We sat in the car for a few minutes. I wasn’t eager to leave the heated Blazer for the refrigerator of a Dodge Shadow that would take me home. "You know," I said to Veau," there’s really something rather sad about Matt and Kurt’s stories." "What’s that?" Veau asked, half listening. "Well," I began, "I guess their lives must be truly shaped by this town. Didn’t you notice that their stories were almost entirely fabricated, or at least embellished or altered." "Of course," Veau agreed as if it was nothing that he had just listened to twenty minutes of fiction played off as real life. "To them everything they said was true," I said, "they lead really boring lives. Everyone here lives a really boring life. That’s why small town people do one of two things: either they give an inappropriate amount of importance to really insignificant things, such as high school football or selectman meetings or who is mad at who for what, or they live their lives almost entirely inside their heads. Some people, like Matt and Kurt, simply cannot cope with how mundane pizza parlors and mills and football games really are, so they take actual events and change them. They add aggression were there was seriousness, they add eroticism where there was interest, they say everything they wish they had really said. Each person is the protagonist in their own story. Their stories are altered by the perfection of hindsight and the lies that we hear are the final product of an attempt to live a real life - a movie life." "We don’t do that do we," Veau asked, showing some concern. I just shrugged, shook Veau’s hand and drove home in the snow. I suppose Veau saved me from unraveling the mysteries of small town living. Somehow he unknowingly shot down my theories and attempts to explain of rural folk deal with the sublime meaninglessness of their lives. Maybe I was just being stupid. I walked through the door and saw a whole bottle of Clorox sitting on the back of the washing machine. I wasn’t meant to understand; Veau didn’t need to.
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