Thursday, April 21, 2005
Back in Atlanta.
And a few moments ago, half an hour ago, perhaps, my head was filled up with things I wanted to write in this entry, but all those thoughts seem to have deserted me. Er. Hmmm. Well, okay, I know was going to mention the bizarre hair salon in downtown Leeds called Running With Scissors. We wandered past it yesterday afternoon, and I truly wish we'd taken photos. The plateglass is emblazoned with CHOOSE HELL on one side and CHOOSE HEAVEN on the other. Baffled, I peeped through the window and saw that the walls were decorated with bible verses. "Yep," I said to Spooky. "It's Jesus hair." Turns out, the place has recieved some national attention recently, thanks to the street-theatre antics of its Pentacostal proprietor, who's clearly seen The Passion of the Christ at least one time too many. Yeah. I was gonna tell you about that, and now I have. This is Reason #698 why I could never live in Leeds again (I last lived there in December 1989). Sooner or later, I'd run into this fekik, and he'd probably drive a stake through my heart or something. I wanted to sneak back to the place last night and use white shoe polish to write I DON'T TAKE SIDES between the two choices provided by the kind folks at Running With Scissors.
But there were other things, too.
Early today, as we were leaving Leeds, we stopped by the house near the cement plant again, the house that I used as the model for Spyder Baxter's house (see last night's entry), because I wanted to get shots of the rear of the house, back where my bedroom was. The room that was my bedroom became Spyder's, the one she sealed up after Byron and Robin broke in. Spooky drove down the long alleyway, then I got out and quickly took two or three shots. And that sensation I wrote of yesterday, the premonition of a psychotemporal tesseract returned. I half-expected a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old me to look out the window and see me standing there. I actually had a moment of utter terror that precisely this thing would happen. And the overlap, the touching of now to then would instantly change everything. Having, at such an early age, glimpsed the strange androgynous person standing in the alley behind my house taking photos with a weird little camera, my life would be nudged just enough to take an entirely different course. I'd become someone else. I'd never write Silk, so I'd never come back to take that picture, so that me would never see this me, and so on and so forth, thank you Einstein.
I did catch a black cat (with a bit of white about his chin) watching me suspiciously from the end of the alley, but I assume he was part of this continuum.
Anyway, here are a couple of the pix. My bedroom (and Spyder's) was the room at the left-hand corner of the house. When I was a kid, as I've said, this house was a bit of a wreck. It was also white with red trim. It didn't have that big back deck thing, and where the shed is now there was a collapsing barn-type thing. We had a vegetable garden in the very back, and the fence seperating the yard from the alley was sagging chicken wire, not chain link. There was no cute playhouse, either.
I was actually very fond of this house, despite it being a wreck, despite the fact there was almost no heat in the winter and no air-conditioning in the summer. It had the aforementioned Caspak woods there in front of it (even though I had to trespass to explore them, as they belong to the cement plant). In fact, next to the beachouse in Jacksonville (Fla), it was probably my favorite place we lived when I was a kid. So maybe it seems odd that I chose it for Spyder's "sick" house. It was a very poltergeist-ridden house, but that may have more to do with me and my sister than imagined mischievous spirits. Anyway...that's enough for tonight. Pretty good, really, considering I forgot everything I was going to write about.
11:08 PM
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