“Life is beautiful” my mother used to say.
And I’d respond, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Each time I commit pen to paper, finger to key, I write about the Midwest. It calls to me, after having lived here for so long you could call me committed. Committed to our washed out landscapes of gold, broken corn. Committed to our half-toothed diner denizens. Committed to the way snow attaches to the ground only to leave it dark and wet. The pale Earth stretches out for miles and miles in every direction. I am far from the coasts.
I am very far.
These worn and weary people grew up on stories about Jesus and his followers. Biblebeaters calling out that Heaven was waiting for them and condemning sinners. Kneeling in pews contained by stained-glass windows they watch their daughters confess their sins and smile. Their smiles are nods to the tradition that they are keeping even if it is entirely insignificant to humanity. It keeps them in unison.
News flash: no strangers wanted.
The Middle Western states are ugly and beautiful. They are as timid as they are forceful. Filled with killers and heroes. Farmers and pseudo-yuppies. Between the grey sky and the playgrounds with chipped paint there are cities that rise like archaic lamplight beacons in the horizon. They are reminders that time does pass, that deviance and tolerance may progress in a traditionally-minded region. To the old the reasons for a metropolis’ existence was something that could never be explained.
What could we tell them?
We lack perverse beauty pageants but make up for them with social stigmas and intolerance. Even the oldest person in a town couldn’t tell you when they originated.
Laws against men being out after midnight, sundown towns, segregation, and against womens’ rights to their own bodies. Traditions that separate us, yet bind us intrinsically. You chose to submit or you chose to fight. Some would call it an offense to partake in either side. Eventually, the lucky ones realize that they’ve created their own eternal prison.
Midwesterners won’t admit it but they are paranoid. Despite our freedom we are afraid of change. It is in our nature to stifle any immediate adaptation to a new way of life. We are happy controlling others in order to continue our own traditions. Control makes us content to be ourselves. If you were born on the inside of the Midwest you know exactly what I’m talking about.
You’re here for life.
Sometimes being happy can be easy. Sometimes being happy comes at the expense of others’ happiness. I’ll never leave the Midwestern states.
Chock it up to tradition.
So now I sit on the edges of the Midwest. Ready to tell stories about the unknown and ready to touch the abyss and let it know I’m unafraid. Prepared to look for the last remnants of the American Dream or the first signs of a new one.
I’m terrified to find it.
It is such a critically simple thought; to consider what the source of my interest in my native region is. I’ve asked myself, what is the Midwest anyway? Is it children dressed in their Sunday clothes, holding their parents hands and waiting for the right moment to please their parents? Or is it the spilled liquor dripping quietly onto the muddy floor of a bar’s darkest corner? How could I tell you what it is that made me love the Midwest?
It is a description too hard to put into plain words. Too hard to paint in lavish imagery and supreme vocabulary because it isn’t any of those things. The hills roll and the roads crack. Decay is a simple word. We cover up the faults only after they’ve been chastised and broken for years. We’re quick to condemn but slow to conceive. Our simplicity chokes us.
Our bloody remains are fuel for others.
But is that even the truth?
I told myself that when I was younger I’d tell my family members that I was going to move and escape. That I could do it because it made sense. That the East held possibility and that the West could send me off into a world of film and glamour. My family never spoke ill of the notions. My grandfather told me that I was the one that had to live with the decision to leave. That he could live with it, that my mother would have to live with it, and that everyone else didn’t have to understand.I understood that the future meant sacrifice. That sometimes sacrifice could be an everlasting thing.
At the time, I didn’t understand that. Freedom comes with a price, whether or not anyone ever tells you that is neither here nor there. It is true. Then pass that information on but never add in the omniscient “I told you so.” I told myself that the Midwest kept me mentally subdued. That the real enemy was the rampant corporatism that spread throughout the middle of America. That perhaps society from the outer rim states was brought in to keep us feeling cultured.
My older, less radical mind is inclined to question my younger self. Did the Midwest really matter? Or are we the people built on traditions that time forgot? It is an anxious thought to consider. But what is the point in succumbing to fear? There is none.
There is one thing about the Midwest that is spectacular. Stop and appreciate the stars and planets hanging above. Planes and satellites flicker in and out of our window to the cosmos. In the areas that light pollution leaves untainted planetary order seems undoubtedly in place.
But, as the Midwesterner would say, “Dreams don’t fill your stomach.”
Though often, I remember my dreams. My dreams consist of familiar places with familiar faces. There was one dream I still haven’t forgotten. I stumbled down the streets of my hometown looking to my left and to my right. I saw nothing in any direction. It was in the moment I realized my utter loneliness that I began to burst into deep red and orange flames. My hands and arms became wings as I fell to my knees, screaming. My view zoomed outward and I saw myself laying there in the middle of Main Street, eyes and mouth dripping fire. I watched myself burn for a while. It seemed as though I made peace with what was happening. In that moment my back grew the wings of a cardinal.
I woke up.
My girlfriend used to tell me about Freud while we lay in bed. I’d laugh about his dated appeal, she’d remind me about his theory of dreams. That dreams were simple in nature in comparison to true human emotions and needs. She says to me in her soft voice, “Dreams are our wishes spun and distorted into makeshift scenes.” I always wondered if that was true. That if the possessions, the locations, the companions that I saw were true desires or just figments of brain activity.
Before I closed my eyes and before the darkness of the room turned to the darkness of my eyes I thought to myself, “I wonder if she will haunt my dreams.” It was strange to me, the understanding that what I wanted and what I needed were at this moment in time were the same thing. She laughs frequently. It was infectious. I rarely give in to sleep when she’s around. She keeps me awake even when she’s asleep. I tell myself that it’s the way her skin smells. The way her lips taste. The way her hips curve and then curve upward. She gives me the chance to feel human without feeling reserved in my actions.
She gives me the idea that homes and families can be different. I asked myself after every conversation, how could I be so naive? How could I overlook this detail or that detail? Was I purposefully trying to isolate myself or was it bred into me inadvertently. Or maybe I am living out the life of my father; build up something only to leave it when times grew hard.
His ghost always seemed to haunt me throughout my youth. I always wondered where he was or what he was doing. Not out of care per say, but out of curiosity. I looked around my town for tiny glimmers of his existence. Homes I knew he’d lived in, people I knew he’d met. I tracked them down through my mother’s high school yearbook. I read every signature and every signed picture. I tried piecing together their lives together because I’d never seen a world with them happily together. And there he was, constantly over my shoulder. My ethereal father.
I’d tell myself, “I’ll never be like you, running away from everything. I’ll never abandon my family.”
Yet here I am, trying to leave my family behind as the end of college looms. My family is a striking example of the common Midwesterner. Their complete acceptance of their life condition is dignifying. They are content with the worlds they build for themselves and the world that they live in. While they may complain and curse about their losses they willingly sleep at night and wake the next day to do it all over again. I envy them. Though I wonder if they only truly live in dreams.
The reality is that I am responsible for what I do when I’m alive. That if I am alive I am doing something. That if I am alive I am going somewhere.
Often I wake at night to the sound of thunder and the sound of wind licking my windows. I slide open the glass to let the cool, wet air into my bedroom and inhale. The Midwestern rain has its tricks through; it can easily turn the scent of clarity into the scent of musty decay. It is in those moments that the storms become painful instead of cathartic. I discovered that the rain only washed away peoples’ tears if they desired it. And I discovered that regardless of intention even the heaviest of storms gave way to the softest rain.
Again came the thunder. The sound was deafening.
But there I stood. Lucky to be inside where it was warm. Where I could find solace in the woman in my bed. Where I could discover the truths and the secrets of another. My bed, a place where I could lose myself alone or with another. It felt good.
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All of this was a stream of various topics / ideas written over the course of a few hours in December of 2011. It is jumbled and it'll be rewritten and reworked into various other ideas and eventually take on a more honed form. For the most part, these topics are things I hope to address in the eventual graphic novel I'm starting in summer 2012 tentatively titled,"'Westerner".
