Old And Strange

I believe I may be as depressed as I've ever been in my life, or at least situationally so, here in the Eiffel Tower room of the New Perry Hotel. It is gloomy outside and almost raining but not quite and I feel as if I might just melt into something awful that someone finds on the bottom of their shoe and scrapes off, a nasty, disgusted look on their face.

I am blaming Perry, Georgia. This town is used-up. That's how it feels to me. You know how some places you go and you think, Boy, I could live here. I really could?
Well, this ain't one of them.

Mr. Moon and I walked around this morning and that took maybe two hours and that included reading an entire magazine at the coffee shop and also walking around an old cemetery.

The shops have crazy crap in them that no one in their right mind could use although we did get Owen a floor puzzle at a book shop where they had a display for Father's Day, I guess, where you could purchase a copy of a book entitled something like, "Daily Devotions for the Man on the Go."

The puzzle is nice.

A fellow stopped us on the street and asked if we were from around here. We told him that no, we were not, and he asked us if we knew how to get to Fort Valley and we said no, and began to walk on but he really wanted to tell us about the peach festival they are having there and advised us we should go and by god, we did, which was not that much fun.

I have decided that "festival" is now another word like "club" which, if any activity includes it, count me the fuck out. People were selling even crappier crap than they sell in the shops here and crappy food and crappy drinks and they were making the world's biggest peach cobbler and people were lined up for half a mile to get a free styrofoam bowl of it. Somehow a man scored a bowl for Mr. Moon without any line-standing, entirely unasked, and Mr. Moon paid for four scoops of ice cream to go on it (25 cents a scoop) and I went and looked at this world's biggest peach cobbler as they were stirring it with giant paddles and I did not say a word about how disgusting it had looked until he had eaten it because he seemed pretty happy about that bowl of cobbler and I didn't want to take that away from him, but I did not accept his offer to share it.

I'm sure it was fine. I just didn't want any of it after I'd seen that sloppy mess.

But most of the people at the festival looked like they were having fun, young and old, black and white, everyone out for a nice day in the park but boy, I couldn't get out of there fast enough. The band playing in the gazebo was quite possibly one of the worst bands I've ever heard, a group of old men in white shirts who were painfully unaware of how to play their instruments or sing and certainly old enough to know better. The crowd was polite though, I have to say that.

We came back to the room and had a nap and I dreamed I was putting a diaper on a baby and it took me approximately forty-five minutes to complete that task and for once, while having a depressive moment, I am not blaming myself one bit and thinking that if I could just change my shitty attitude, I would be fine, just FINE. Nope. I am blaming this area of Georgia, all used up like a tablecloth that's gone through the wash too many times or a field planted in cotton too many years or a hotel which too many feet have walked through, too many people have laid down to have dreams in which have used up all the goodness of any possibility of joy or rest.

The southern rock band will be begin playing in an hour.
If I had had any hopes at all about their possible entertainment value, I think I have lost them in the last twenty-four hours, even though I hear that the mayor's son plays guitar in it.
I think that's what I heard. Things seem to be different here, vague around the edges and they don't always make much sense.

Here's a magnolia tree, though, which is right in front of the hotel, and if I could buy it and magically transport it back to Lloyd, I would, because I can't imagine anything a child would want to play on or in more than this tree which stretches up tall but begins down at the ground like an octopus, its arms reaching out in strange and tortured enchantment. Something not quite right and not quite used up,  even in its age, but beautiful for all of it.