Mississippi got me twisted

So I’m trying to write these little travel creative fiction things. I start with what I know, then I do research, then I go. That’s what I did last year. It was the first trip on my effit list and I’m trying to get the thing done so I can just publish it and see if people like that sort of thing. It’s a fairly bad plan.  It actually took me years to get in that car and go. I quit the job. My Dad died. Stuff happened.

Right now the place I wanted to be this spring, Wisconsin, is off-limits. Everything is off-limits. I would have been in West Virginia in a month or so if everything was on track. N0othing is going to be on track for a while so I decided just to sit myself down and take a charge at the first two steps in the process. I was fine until I got to Louisianna. Then it got emotional. There’s a history. But I made it through that and started to breeze along again when dammit, Florida. Florida was a really pretty good thing to go through.  It just took time. Wow, I’m good there, making progress.

Then I got to Mississippi. Even Alabama didn’t mess me up like Mississippi. I unpacked those bags and realized a lot of things. First I really don’t know a damn thing about most of the places I’ve actually been. I’ve never really been a good tourist. If I was somewhere I had a purpose. I was trying to get something important done. I learned a lot about people but not about my surroundings. The next thing is I was pretty manipulated by one big baby ruth that had no business playing in that pool. Rough sketch, someone made me an offer I did in fact refuse. The no that I said set me up for some really stalkerish behaviors I still haven’t fully processed in the last 35 years. I mean nice people were asked to date me so this person could know where I was, who with, what I was doing. It gave me a lot of trust issues. People told me what this married person who should have been minding his own business (even the marriage was a weird kind of spite play I can’t quite get my head around) was trying to pry into my life and manipulate my relationships. That was kind of the upside if there was one. I was treated decently when many could have taken advantage. That only proves how obviously wrong the whole thing is.

Going forward I ran away as fast as I possibly could and made a nice life for myself. So when I ask myself what I know about the place I actually lived for nearly a year I’m appalled.  For starters there were hurricanes. It changed a lot. It changed me. It changed the things I knew. Then I think about things like the night I was sitting eating a hamburger on the Sunday of the president’s day weekend after a long complicated situation involving my car trying to blow itself up. A girl walks in and says “my boyfriend took me to New Orleans and was an asshat the whole time. There is no way I’m going to the Loverboy concert with him. Want my ticket?” So ok, I got up and went to see the Hooters and Loverboy. The guy in the seat next to me bought me a beer. He also asked me out. I said no but thank you for the beer.  It was 35 years before I realized that would have been the asshat. If it wasn’t the asshats then it was the guy the asshat gave his ticket to. Maybe equally interesting if I had been aware enough to question it a little. Oh well, but then I realized stalkerish turd’s favorite band that year was Loverboy. Good grief. How dense was I back then? So I was very likely spotted if not manipulated into another position where someone amused themself playing puppet master.

What’s that got to do with now? Well, that little exercise put me in park for 2 days. I got muscle cramps and couldn’t sleep. I had weird dreams. What was all that about? It’s about I actually had signs of PTSD on my QEEG when they did the last one. That seemed weird. What the hell happened to cause that? A lot actually. Not just that one thing but a lifetime of things.

And now another hurricane. I’m not anywhere near that mess but I still have the weird heartsick urge to run toward the storm and try to get people away. You can’t always do that.

Tonight I bulled my way through about 20 pages on that topic and put it away, probably for the next few years. I need a writer’s retreat but there is nowhere to go. Everyplace wants a resume, a telephone interview, and then still I’m giving them my money. It’s not like it’s a paying job. Maybe that’s what I should tell them. I worked myself into the ground for 40 years so I could do this big important thing and I need a quiet private place to hammer it down. Maybe anyplace would do. It doesn’t have to be so fussy and pretentious. I have the mothership but she’s 42 years old. People actually want to see a picture of your RV before they will take your money to let you park it somewhere quiet. I guess I could drive it to someplace like slab city where I would very literally die like a frog on a hot rock…but no, not serving my needs.

Now I’m weary. I’m just going to drag myself off to bed for a few hours until that damn rooster forces me upright in his predawn revelry and I have to deal with NC and SC. Those are pleasant though. That was happy last December and we came home feeling like we could maybe do more of thsat someday, and so we will if I get to the research part.