message from the border

I'll bet you've been asking, "How come he don't write?"

Actually, I'll bet you've been asking, "Oh, God, him again?"

I'd love to report that I've retired to a palatial villa on the Pacific Ocean, sipping cold drinks with paper umbrellas in them, and watching the beautiful women in string-floss bikinis running and cavorting in the surf nearby. Sadly, not the case at all.

I'm on the border, currently. It's a place which I dearly hoped that I would never return. Twice. And yet, here I am again, trying to get the smell of 40-year-old bacteria and tile and fiberglass and the memories of twenty years ago out of my skin.

And I haven't even mentioned what the goats next door have been doing at five in the morning. Let's just say that they are quite loud and not too particular about who hears them.

James Agee once said that you can never go home again. I suspect that he barely knew the half of it. I think that the reason you can never go back to a place you've once lived in is because you change. You become a different person. And the places and people that once meant something to you change or die or go away. And you return and find that everything you once knew has moved on, and the scenery has changed, and everything you once remembered with fondness is no more, and you really don't matter that much in the grand scheme of things, because hey, you moved on, too.

Humbling, really. Especially when you need to find things on a map all over again, in a place you once knew like the back of your hand.

And you'd think I'd stop doing this. You think I'd stop goping back to those places that meant something to me, hoping to see those old faces and older places, only to find that time, that old bastard of a thief, has changed everything around once again.

Maybe I'll feel better after a nap. And a drink.

And after I give the goats next door some hormone suppressant.