Red House Painters - "Mistress"
Radiohead - "Sit Down, Stand Up"
Squirrel Nut Zippers - "Club Limbo"
I was just trying to finish the last few chapters of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, but my mind kept wandering. Here's where it wandered to:
I remember one day very specifically from last summer. It was a Sunday, and I started the day as usual for a Sunday attending Chez Luther with the family, but afterwards I went hiking with Kristen. I picked her up in the blue Jeep Cherokee, and we stopped at Publix first to get some cheese (Gouda), meat, and a loaf of French bread. Then we started north on GA 400. For some reason we were playing my Autumn CD, which has a bunch of jazz and Almost Famous songs on it, and Kristen was berating me for loving Todd Rundgren and "It Wouldn't Have Made Any Difference." I was trying to make some point about how most everyone believes that their musical taste is better than everyone else's. I believed that I was the exception, because I have always considered Kristen's musical taste as superior to mine. Part of that is because I spent most of middle school and early high school trying to impress her and Aniele by frantically searching out the music they listened to. I still consider Kristen's taste to be better, even though now I devour new bands like potato chips. I like to play her stuff I think I might like; if she doesn't like it, I still listen to it, but I greatly prefer it if I have her approval.
Anyway, that was a good part of our conversation until we passed Burt's Pumpkin Farm and arrived at Amicalola Falls. The sky was threatening rain, but we hadn't come this far not to see some bitchin' waterfall action. We climbed some of the trails up to the waterfall, and then we hiked around some of the meandering trails in the woods until we came down to the picnic area. That's when we got out the bread and cheese and had some lunch amidst all breeds of screaming redneck children. I was one of those kids once. My family and our neighbors used to come up to Amicalola Falls every October in conjunction with our trip to Burt's Pumpkin Farm; and even though I always complain about the lack of the autumn season in Georgia, these trips to north Georgia always strike me as perfectly picturesque in my memory.
After lunch, we climbed back to the car and decided to drive over to nearby Ellijay, GA. In case you're uninformed, Ellijay is Georgia's Apple Capital and the home to the annual Ellijay Apple Festival. Unfortunately, the festival wasn't due for many months, and Ellijay was virtually a ghost town. We drove past all manners of apple shacks that were boarded up for the summer. We did find one or two that were open, though. The first we tried looked fairly friendly, but when we went inside, there was just some crazy old man at the counter surround by empty rooms full of empty crates where apples should have been. We got a little creeped out that this man was keeping an essentially empty shop, so we ran out and sped away in the car. We found a better place, though, a place that had the really innovative idea of selling peaches in the off-season, instead of just living off the paltry apple savings like the rest of the town was apparently doing. I got some sort of home-made frozen peach beverage that was unbearably saccharine.
So we started home, passing all the outlet malls that north Georgia is speckled with, and we passed the part of the Chattahoochee where my family stopped for picnics and near the place where we get in the river to go tubing, and we passed the DMV where we'd all gotten our learner's permits. Kristen started feeling sick, though, and so we got home quickly and we spent an hour just lying in her bed until she had shaken it.
After that I went home to eat with my family, of which I have no recollection. Then I went back to Kristen's and we started for Hollywood Video, our greatest source of home entertainment other than Video Galaxy (where we go when we're at my house). We rented Tully, which is, from my recollection, about a Nebraskan family and the son named Tully and his brother and their friend, Ella, who has come back to her hometown to work at the vet for the summer. I don't quite remember because I fell asleep on Kristen's couch, which is the most comfortable thing in the world by virtue of its having been made in the 1970's, which was the beginning and end of comfortable furniture. So I missed most of the movie, but I remember liking it very much, and admiring its poetic simplicity, which is probably the primary reason why I fell asleep. So I woke up when the movie was over, and I was in that weird post-nap daze that you only seem to get from sleeping on a couch. I remember feeling, in that brief daze, how very wonderfully comforting it is to wake up when the credits are rolling on the movie you've just slept through, and your favorite person in the world is looking down at you, wide awake, smiling, about to tell you what you've missed. But all you're thinking about, in your post-nap daze, is this moment, and how you're not missing any thing at all.
I don't know if that's some perfect day that I'm destined to relive in heaven, but the fact that the whole memory of the day survived, intact, to resurface while I was reading Nietzsche speaks oceans to me. Or maybe it just has something to do with Nietzsche.
Radiohead - "Sit Down, Stand Up"
Squirrel Nut Zippers - "Club Limbo"
I was just trying to finish the last few chapters of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, but my mind kept wandering. Here's where it wandered to:
I remember one day very specifically from last summer. It was a Sunday, and I started the day as usual for a Sunday attending Chez Luther with the family, but afterwards I went hiking with Kristen. I picked her up in the blue Jeep Cherokee, and we stopped at Publix first to get some cheese (Gouda), meat, and a loaf of French bread. Then we started north on GA 400. For some reason we were playing my Autumn CD, which has a bunch of jazz and Almost Famous songs on it, and Kristen was berating me for loving Todd Rundgren and "It Wouldn't Have Made Any Difference." I was trying to make some point about how most everyone believes that their musical taste is better than everyone else's. I believed that I was the exception, because I have always considered Kristen's musical taste as superior to mine. Part of that is because I spent most of middle school and early high school trying to impress her and Aniele by frantically searching out the music they listened to. I still consider Kristen's taste to be better, even though now I devour new bands like potato chips. I like to play her stuff I think I might like; if she doesn't like it, I still listen to it, but I greatly prefer it if I have her approval.
Anyway, that was a good part of our conversation until we passed Burt's Pumpkin Farm and arrived at Amicalola Falls. The sky was threatening rain, but we hadn't come this far not to see some bitchin' waterfall action. We climbed some of the trails up to the waterfall, and then we hiked around some of the meandering trails in the woods until we came down to the picnic area. That's when we got out the bread and cheese and had some lunch amidst all breeds of screaming redneck children. I was one of those kids once. My family and our neighbors used to come up to Amicalola Falls every October in conjunction with our trip to Burt's Pumpkin Farm; and even though I always complain about the lack of the autumn season in Georgia, these trips to north Georgia always strike me as perfectly picturesque in my memory.
After lunch, we climbed back to the car and decided to drive over to nearby Ellijay, GA. In case you're uninformed, Ellijay is Georgia's Apple Capital and the home to the annual Ellijay Apple Festival. Unfortunately, the festival wasn't due for many months, and Ellijay was virtually a ghost town. We drove past all manners of apple shacks that were boarded up for the summer. We did find one or two that were open, though. The first we tried looked fairly friendly, but when we went inside, there was just some crazy old man at the counter surround by empty rooms full of empty crates where apples should have been. We got a little creeped out that this man was keeping an essentially empty shop, so we ran out and sped away in the car. We found a better place, though, a place that had the really innovative idea of selling peaches in the off-season, instead of just living off the paltry apple savings like the rest of the town was apparently doing. I got some sort of home-made frozen peach beverage that was unbearably saccharine.
So we started home, passing all the outlet malls that north Georgia is speckled with, and we passed the part of the Chattahoochee where my family stopped for picnics and near the place where we get in the river to go tubing, and we passed the DMV where we'd all gotten our learner's permits. Kristen started feeling sick, though, and so we got home quickly and we spent an hour just lying in her bed until she had shaken it.
After that I went home to eat with my family, of which I have no recollection. Then I went back to Kristen's and we started for Hollywood Video, our greatest source of home entertainment other than Video Galaxy (where we go when we're at my house). We rented Tully, which is, from my recollection, about a Nebraskan family and the son named Tully and his brother and their friend, Ella, who has come back to her hometown to work at the vet for the summer. I don't quite remember because I fell asleep on Kristen's couch, which is the most comfortable thing in the world by virtue of its having been made in the 1970's, which was the beginning and end of comfortable furniture. So I missed most of the movie, but I remember liking it very much, and admiring its poetic simplicity, which is probably the primary reason why I fell asleep. So I woke up when the movie was over, and I was in that weird post-nap daze that you only seem to get from sleeping on a couch. I remember feeling, in that brief daze, how very wonderfully comforting it is to wake up when the credits are rolling on the movie you've just slept through, and your favorite person in the world is looking down at you, wide awake, smiling, about to tell you what you've missed. But all you're thinking about, in your post-nap daze, is this moment, and how you're not missing any thing at all.
I don't know if that's some perfect day that I'm destined to relive in heaven, but the fact that the whole memory of the day survived, intact, to resurface while I was reading Nietzsche speaks oceans to me. Or maybe it just has something to do with Nietzsche.
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