Rethink.

for David Solis & Damien Gaffney

Sun­light scorched; almost imme­di­ately, shirt dripped with sweat and I retreated into a Star­bucks. Inside, told this was dry heat, that humid­ity would arrive and make this that much worse. People-watched from the win­dow for an hour or two. Lots of gor­geous women wear­ing loose-fitting clothes, seem­ingly unaf­fected by any­thing else. A few home­less peo­ple strug­gling to even walk prop­erly. One parked him­self in front of a trash can and dug through it; his expres­sion turned to glee as he dis­cov­ered a whole con­tainer of food there. I made myself watch, think­ing what I had said at the Twit­ter con­fer­ence: This is my coun­try. This is not acceptable.

I walked around a bit more: 5 hours before Col­legium would arrive, 6 before rehearsal. Went look­ing for my favorite brand of pens, the finer the tip (0.5 is just accept­able enough for me) the bet­ter. I don’t get them up North and I don’t feel like buy­ing $25 worth of stuff from Ama­zon all the time. Ended up back at the hotel writ­ing about Dick­in­son, hav­ing bought an infe­rior brand of pen.

Saw a woman drop off her son at the hotel, com­plain­ing the whole time about the traf­fic and wor­ry­ing about how to get back. A bit too famil­iar: I love my par­ents, but my whole life any and every excuse to not do some­thing was offered even while doing that some­thing. Even­tu­ally this turned me into being scared of doing things myself while mak­ing bad excuses. A good friend has told me I “walk ner­vous,” and that’s true. — I won­der how Dick­in­son felt, almost never leav­ing home. -

After rehearsal, a few of us vis­ited Rice Uni­ver­sity. Val­halla was neat: an attempt to cre­ate a dive bar atmos­phere for geeks. Reminded me of Sugar Mom’s in Philadel­phia, but with­out the artsy/trashy crowd (at least on this visit). Of sig­nif­i­cance was Dun­can Hall, but I don’t want to get into the aca­d­e­mic debates about schools of archi­tec­ture. Rather, I’ll say this: the build­ing is awe­some. Rice’s cam­pus was awe­some. You felt like this school cared for learn­ing, cared for its stu­dents, cared to stand for some­thing. I real­ize that the mid­dle state­ment is debat­able — a quick con­trast with my under­grad­u­ate years should suf­fice.

Writ­ing stopped as going around with choir led to lots of neat build­ings to behold: an alumni’s home with beau­ti­ful wood floors, and despite a lot of nice-looking stuff, a feel­ing of space and com­fort. The church we sang the wed­ding in: awful acoustics but a Gothic look. Finally, Annun­ci­a­tion, with good acoustics and much beauty and no real com­fort: we had a job to do.

In the air­port, a reservist head­ing off to train­ing soon. He had joined shortly after 9/11 because he wanted to serve. He wasn’t bit­ter about Army life: he talked about how he had seen many new places — Ger­many, Spain, Eng­land, France, etc. and loved them all. He spoke well of his time in Iraq. But he was clear about its lim­i­ta­tions: he mar­ried a fel­low sol­dier and they were divorced now. He had been in Hous­ton vis­it­ing his child. We talked about Trans­form­ers, foot­ball, Star Trek and watched gor­geous women pass by.

Finally, on the plane, an evan­gel­i­cal pro­fes­sor try­ing to con­vince his cir­cles to take the Great Books seri­ously. Again, no writ­ing: the con­ver­sa­tion began by talk­ing about film. He was very excited about the books he was writ­ing and the pro­grams his school had set up. I heard a lot about Dante. At this point, I wasn’t a ter­ri­bly patient lis­tener, I must con­fess. There’s a cer­tain “in Texas, every­thing is big­ger” men­tal­ity that I both love and hate; like lit­er­ary the­ory, it attempts to define things by genre, as opposed to see­ing how indi­vid­u­als com­pose a whole. We didn’t debate, I was eager to hear about his approaches to texts, and I’m more than will­ing to rec­om­mend his work. I just need to be at Star­bucks, with pens I like, slightly removed from the scorch­ing heat.

• See­ing
• Strange…
• Beyond
• Should I Go See “The A-Team?”
• Resum­ing post­ing the 20th…

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