Small Towns and Love

The Smashing Pumpkins were coming to Melbourne and I was anxious. Visibly, notably, tight. When the waitress started grinding parmesan cheese on my Tour of Italy it took me several awkward minutes to tell her to stop (she insisted she could grind all night, but no, I in-turn insisted, that would not be necessary). My sweet girlfriend commented that I was tense and defensive. I had no idea why or what it could be related too.

                                                                                                                             

About one song into the concert from my long-term favorite band in my long-term serious home-town I got it: I was nervous for them. For the band I followed and supported: I was worried how they’d meet my hometown. In some ridiculous and mentally strained way, I thought that I was the intermediary between the Band and the Town. And in a weird way I was. I knew more about both of them then they knew about each other: I was introducing my secret big-city hyper-sensitive diva girlfriend to my small-town Eastern Conference Finals watching parents. Melbourne, this is the Pumpkins, Pumpkins this is Melbourne. Please just fucking get along.

We’re going to have dinner, listen to a few songs, have a glass of wine, and then we’ll be back on a plane to (insert-big-city-here) and we can talk about each other behind our backs like God intended. And somewhere in the confused applause after a strange (and superb) 8-minute b-side, a second realization hit me: I live in a really small town. This should have hit me, unquestionably, dozens of times in my life. This has hit me, dozens of times in my life, but never before so brutally, with so much clarity, with so much power.

It’s not like it’s an unknown. Melbourne isn’t a cultural metropolis: it’s not a cultural anything. If you’re in Melbourne reading this (and a lot of you are, I track you), just know that a large majority of the town would consider your current reading action very Sex in the City-ish, and my writing like that of some queer in some queer coffee shop.

But I didn’t know, and I should have known. I wrote a weird weekly column (specifically for This City) for over half a year that was cancelled because it was too weird and we couldn’t sell adds. Some of the things I wrote about: Obama calling me on a black phone (get it), fake letters from suicidal readers, lottery scams, the death(s) of my family members, gambling on solar power, multiple addictions, a corrupt police department (threats did ensue) and drinking, drinking, drinking. My friends got it, my family got, and a few other degenerates around town did as well. One loyal reader e-mailed me nightly hoping that I would shed light on the government sucking her soul out of her eyes with some sort of laser. Nightly.

My life: I buy fireworks at the end of an interstate highway and gamble on horses at a broken down dog-track whose old unused scoreboard smells like dead-bodies if you drunkenly sneak into it.  I fish in a river whose bottom is mostly composed of scrap metal and whose liquid content is essentially that of a Goodyear tire. We voted 55 to 42 for Romney. Fifty-fucking-five to forty-two for a guy that future historians will chuckle at and even the modern country generally rejected. And in case anyone is wondering, Brevard’s population is nearly 600,000. It’s not a numbers issue.

It’s a dumb town with pockets of brilliance. I’d even argue hyper-brilliance. But the brightest fish swim over the waterfall and break free of a collective soma that makes the skin purr and the brain love. I always want to save her, I’m chained to her either way, and we’ll stay in this basement together until one of us is willing to break free or form an orchestra of sounds. I’ve said many times that Melbourne was but one small step away from becoming a real city with a driver’s license, a prom date and everything else. Just a few small steps from connecting that brilliance to the under-rated huge population (Oklahoma City is one of but many cities considered large in this country but whose populace is actually 100k or less then Melbournes).

One small step from concerts and paintings and Lisa Simpson and vegan-food restaurants with Serbian named chefs and an additional army of stuck-up assholes like myself.  So I was nervous. I needed this to go well. I loved them both and I needed them to get along.

They didn’t. Neither got each other. And I walked out excited, as did a few others in attendance, but most didn’t, and more critically neither we written about, documented, photographed, drugged or noted. We don’t exist even to ourselves.

Wait, what? Yeah. No I’ll be done soon. Huh? I thought you got a present for her? Will a card work? No? Hold on, let me just finish- OK. Baby, I’m not ignoring-

Well…. listen, I have to go. Life at home, you know. Moonrise nightmares and catalsytic sunburns: the top soil of the butterfly wing, ankles of solitary cement stomping towards the dimensions that western horizons flame skyward and into infinity. Civil life.

I’m still anxious. I hope they do well. I hope we all do well. I wish everyone the best. We have so little time, and so much death, we need so little space and are given the bare minimum. We should encourage; we hate all. We should all be worried about everyone, including our small towns, perhaps, mainly our small towns. We need to help the weakest tugboat cross the deep bay.

And we are all weak. That said, the strongest turned up this weekend at our first annual golf tournament, and equally strong, to me anyway, we're those who sent your well wishes from afar. Small town, true, I'm fairly certain, but that says nothing about heart. Heart pure and an true: never hidden from the shadows like unguarded caterpillar nests. Just true. And you are all true and I love you all.