xtcian

2/2/03 Day 43 of the

2/2/03

Day 43 of the Forgotten Farm Where Dreams Go To Die Road Trip of Forsaken Homesteads

Houston, TX to Austin, TX

I've visited my old houses before, usually out of some morbid curiosity about what my childhood rooms look like, or to resurrect the ancient whisp of a spirit still embedded in the rocks and mortar I may have deposited from the intensity and omnidirectional energy of being a child. It's an only vaguely satisfying venture, lemme tellya, and can usually lower you into the still, warm waters of depression.

Tessa had that going on today as we passed through Brenham, TX the rural homestead that her father had planned as the place where all his descendants would congregate, hoist ram's heads of mead aloft, and send convocations to him in the sky. He built a beautiful Southern plantation, along with two artists colleges on either side, in arguably the prettiest part of Texas. He was to buried here on Carolina farm, and the troubles of the world would never lap this far.

Problem is, he didn't really have much use for family, and his gestures of grandeur almost always disintegrated into Who Gets What, and the plantation now sits, like an unwritten Faulkner novel, full of empty rooms, clean squares on the walls where pictures once hung, and wasps building nests in the curtains of every room. It is truly where Blakey's inconsistent and conditional dreams of family went to perish. The last party ever held at the estate is actually in Tessa's film, and I wonder what all of them would think if they knew what an empty bug's husk of a place it would become.

Tessa fondles the chandelier her mother decorated in happier years

Some things you just have to let alone, and I let Tessa howl at the house and her father – for letting her down. I know we are building a better farm upstate for our (god willin') family, but you have to let someone say goodbye to an era any way they'd like.

Chopin the dog, of course, was having none of this maudlin horseshit. I think he understood - in some primal way that this was his ancestral homeland, and promptly stormed off to get covered in green pond scum and chase sticks under the dock. He was born mere yards from here, to a neurotic and genocidal mother no less, so I made him sit for about .03 nanseconds, while I took this picture of him in his original cur dog environment, 13 years after his birth:

click for bigger

Getting the hell out of there was Priority One, so I floored it to Austin, where we commiserated with the very talented Jim Lewis over Mexican food. He knows all the same NYC literati we do (i.e. Tessa does), so there was much gossip afloat. His new novel The King is Dead will be out later this year, so buy one and keep the money in the family.

Over dinner, I got the same pangs of regret I usually do when discussing people's literary careers in New York: why didn't I move to the City in 1993 when everyone wanted a piece of my spleen? Instead, I retreated into myself, wrote an unsellable novel and went to Pi Phi pledge formals. God slacks with those who slack unto themselves, I guess.