Thursday, March 29, 2012

YOUNG MINNESOTA WOMANSWIM

Late morning in Starbucks on N Sheridan. She sits by the window, drinking, eating, planning, fanning out her evolving thoughts across the table for idle introspection inspection. Ageless early 20s. Shortish dark-brown modish self-cut-and-dyed hair, straight from the successful home hairdresser fashion lab. There is a delicious twinkle in her glasses-clad chameleon-color beautiful eyes as she says and then sees what she thinks about things, reflected back in an off-kilter refracting Celtic mirror, turning stray thoughts in her mind behind those sometimes-knitted-in-bemusement brows, curiosity killed the categories once available to and defining her past present future. Visiting Minnesota just isn’t the same or home anymore, the Mississippi is just a puddle next to the great elegant mystery and stationary heft of Lake Michigan, she’s glad now to get back to her true home sweet home, the Windy City. She came to Chicago as a grateful foreign member of the Midwestern student diaspora, studying the past, taking chances, making changes, meeting strange and interesting or weird and wired new people, wide-eyed and wild-hearted and drinking it all in, smalltown frown to big city big girl smile, all or nothing, noting all, devoting time to study and dance and drinking and basketball, far far away from the naïve girl of her youth, tectonic plates shifting in her life grinding against each other and splitting off to create whole new future countries of infinite possibility, continental shifts and drifts from MN to IL to A-OK, family ties stretching over roads weary of separating distance, muted summer dreams of sibling homecoming, shooting her presence quick sharp and gone again into the Minnesota old home territories by stealth bus trip under cover of mission-obscuring night through Wisconsin and silent public dark, tidemarks of where the Mississippi used to reach to in her dreams receding under summer droughts of waterkiller education, cracked mudtracks of youthful expectation, storms of confused coming-adulthood post-collegiate tears never enough to fill a thimbleful of the lost liquid of hometown black hole suction, the MN gravity pull never strong enough to hold her and her unconquerable ambitions to know it all and more or less, knowledge sponge, mind stretching and growing nimble and muscular with concepts and precepts long-way removed from hometown arguing with the state fair Godboys, a religious education in moral depths and theories of relative existence, good and bad and black and white and right and wrong and write her jazzlover song, soulseeker, bluestweaker,I love it I love it I love it can’t get enough of it, played sax in high school, sweet thing it’s just a singswingthing, Heaven-11, sometimes the books speak and sometimes they speak with forked tongues twisting old views and fables methodically into something new and exciting and revelationary and revolutionary and evolutionary strands of Minnesotan rebirth, they certainly know it all and nothing don’t they, all those hierarchies of knowledge and pain and aggression under progression, tell me some more of your old-worldview-reinforcing swept-away-soon stormsong, I see the coming cleansing scholastic fire, the sweeping away of the lies, the capitalistic furies and harpies, the rumors, the suppressed histories, the vicious female mysteries, teach me it all and more, I’ll throw your dead dry bookbones up into the air and laugh as I explain the new unprecedented patterns they fall down into, hieroglyphs of tradition and sedition and new raw deal invention and suppression and resurrection of human dignity and grace and sanity and my new iPhone makes me just like them I wanna help heal the world hold the world in my loving arms and balmy charms and make it all alright again make the people tight with each other it’s the way it should be you know, don’t be so cynical, the mass of people aren’t so bad, they’re just confused deluded protested and planned against and the Occupy movement has its moments but there’s a goal-sullying class divide there, the bohos versus the blue collar street people, anarchists, homeless, jobless, money-obsessed-goal-free, void of the strictures of middle-to-upper-middle-class entitlement dramas and dreams of the perfect job they were promised since privileged birth, I don’t know, it’s just a mass debating point, just a thought or two, it’s all there to be played with or played for, all or nothing or something like that, and I don’t know, really, and nor do you, so let’s just finish up this coffee and go out into the ever-appealing-or-appalling early spring sunshine and say goodbye to idle unsurprising nothing-solving chattering classes in coffee house discourse and catch some rays there’s still a million things to do so I’ll catch you later on the other side of the new born breed takeover.

1 comment:

  1. (Third and best in my female wordsketch series. I like this one a lot, and enjoyed immensely thinking and writing about the excitement of moving to a brainbuzzing new place, being totally able to relate, and still having so much pure and unbeatable and untainted life in front of you. Which we all have, if you only think about it. Written from 2.00-3.15pm, 3/28/2012. Need say no more. Yep)

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