Tralfamadorian

09.21.09-09.22.09

Arrival: Huntington, West Virginia

New Players:
Tiana
Nich
Tim
Heather
Erin

Huntington was pleasant surprise, past West Virginian hills, shaved down in layers, steppes, finally leading down brick alleys to a big house well over a hundred years old with plenty of brick and room. Here a woman had lived her life and died here, and hustlers had come and gone leaving furniture behind and the non-biodegradable remnants of a growing operation.

Tiana gave us a tour round through the house and finally outside to the garden, lined up in rows of carrots, beets, raddishes, more. A soundscape of growling cicadas like grounded helicopters above our heads.

We ate at Hillbilly Hotdog, sort of a local common-cultural landmark. Tires for tables, toilets for seats, gumball machines that don’t dispense gum. Menu consisted mostly of hotdogs dressed up in fiesta wear, Italian, or however you like it next to the fifteen pound hamburger for $50 and the fifteen inch hotdog.

And the rest of the night hung out with the gang playing Katamari, a game seemingly based on the concept of a dung beetle’s life and mixed with a good degree of cosmology. You started rolling pencils and popcans into a ball ending with rolling stars, planets and universes. The end point being some sort of mass oneness. And this all because God went on a bender one day leaving you to put it back together.

From there it was Yuengling beer and conversations about fear and life. All of it personal and vital and all because the unbearable lightness of existence behind our breath. After hummus and green salsa, Nich finally walking us through neighborhoods, all of us a beer warmth and slightly stoned satisfaction, tramping through yards of boarded houses, following massive chains meant for ocean hydras, following them back up from the beach through a playground and finally to the Ohio River (Ohio-West Virginia River anyone?).

All us by then just Karl, Emily, Joe, Tiana, and Nich wanting to swim but knowing we’d get sick if we did. But content watching the pillars of light melt and reform in the shadows of the river. Watching a single barge with a giant finger of light tracing up and down the banks. We sat on logs kicking at a pesticide spray cannister and a wire rope noose, stepping on plastic bottles talking about Twain, about Failblog, and desires to leave school, leave the debt behind and trying to figure out how. But how with complex social mazes. We can go forward but only with some degree of full consideration.

We left town eating at Biscuit World, local chain, Tudors, leaving in the morning with the sense that friends are easy to make and you hope they can get a chance to come to Duluth and Minnesota.