"You don't think I'm boring, do you?" Em asks, bashfully.
"What? No, I think you're infinitely interesting. Why would you say that?"
"You just know so much cool stuff. You've seen all these movies and all these bands and I'm just some bumpkin from West Virginia."
"The hell are you talking about? You're amazing. First, I've got ten years on you. That's a lot of time to rack up cool stories and I really spent a lot of my youth watching movies and going to shows and generally seeking out silly shit that would make a good story. So, now I can make some recommendations for cool stuff for you to get into, you know?"
What I don't mention is that I didn't do much else. Maybe Emily doesn't have my expertise in late nineties rock music or an encyclopedic knowledge of horror movies, but I don't have things that she has. Things that are important like, I don't know, a college degree. A career. A plan. She's got that stuff on lock and now she has time to explore pop culture with me. Hopefully, this writing thing continues to have an upswing or once she's seen all the Evil Deads and Coen flicks and Gilliam oddities of the world, I won't have much else to offer.
We are having a great time. Em is interested at taking a crack at 60 Days of Horror Movies. So, that might be back this year. We buy cool old books from the bookstore every week. I am my store's best customer, but I also make it so that we don't have stuff like Tropic of Cancer in stock because Em needs these books on her bookshelf. And, of course, I get stuff like the Gene Wolfe book for me. (And don't get me wrong, Em is no slouch when it comes to recommending cool stuff. This blog is just about me.)
I got rid of all of my DVDs before I hit the road. They were just a sad reminder of the things that I tried to use for happiness, but now I'm with a girl who has never seen Wizards, or Fargo. I couldn't be happier. It's like I have a little stock in the story of how she discovered things like Eraserhead (which she loved, by the way). At the very least I'll be 'the guy who turned her onto Tom Robbins', which I also did in a big way. She burned through Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and was so into it that she came home one night with a cool idea. She had been wanting to get another tattoo, and she felt like the whooping cranes, who play such a pivotal part in a novel that is a testament to the power of women, would be an ideal choice. We found out that Robbins spent a good amount of time in Richmond, VA and Em found a tattoo artist who does great work there. I've written about Richmond before. Last I was there, it was with a crazy Scotsman in cowboy boots in the middle of the night. We were on our way to the inauguration, where I met Em. But this was a different experience.
The artist (Sara at Lucky 13, if you want to know) was excited about the subject, compatible with the canvass, so down we went, for me, back to Richmond. When we got there, we discovered that Sarah was an amazing painter with an X-Files obsession and ferrets at home, so all was well.
It was the busiest and, for what it's worth, one of the coolest tattoo parlors I've ever been in. One of the artist (or security guards, I'm not sure which) regaled us with a story about working a Marlyn Manson show where he was sent out to buy 50 pounds of cat litter that was on the rider. "Yeah," he said, "Manson poops in a box."
We had a good time with the other artists and customers. As Sarah worked, one little girl came over to inspect Em's new ink. "I thought it was Peter Pan," she said before asking Emily if it hurt.
"No, not really," Emily replied. Have I mentioned that my girlfriend is a tough bird? And now she has a dancing bird on her arm.
All in all, it's been nice just hanging out. I frequently ask Em if she wants to 'Just chill out for a while.' She calls me 'old' when I say things like that or 'moonwalk' across the kitchen floor in my socks (moonwalk in quotes because it's not moonwalking. It's pretty much just sliding around in a general backwards way). I write every day, have fun at the bookstore, and Em and I are making plans for some sort of tomorrow.
The wilderness has been fleshed out. Even the town of Martinsburg, which is simply a weigh station, a facsimile of a place, a set that has new details every day, is starting to yield interesting contributions to this journey. Whoever is in charge of wildlife on this set must have gotten a deal on bumblebees for this production, because they were everywhere as we walked out in the warm spring stillness of an odd, small town Sunday.
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| last pic before tattoo |
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