Keeping up with the Jeffersons.

You know how the song goes. I’ll just put a verse of it here:

Fish don’t fry in the kitchen;
Beans don’t burn on the grill.
Took a whole lotta tryin’,
Just to get up that hill.
[…]

Finally got a piece of the pie, hi, hi, hi, hiyah, uh, hi.

Something like that.  My memory may fail me, but I love the song. And, like the Jeffersons, I’ve moved on up, got my pie (no meringue because that’s like pudding, and I hate pudding).

My piece of the pie? I’ve created a website.  I have. I’m just not entirely sure how.

I got mine, but there's still a whole lotta pie left.

I know, I know, I can hardly believe it…now.  When I was trying to put it together, however, that held a completely different set of beliefs, trust me on that. A set of beliefs that included a reality where there were no computers, ever, and people still had to pump their own water, except I wouldn’t, I would hire someone else to do that. It was a long couple of days, hard and anger-filled.  I mean, I’m not a man given to cursing. But I gave a lot, yesterday. 

Trying to establish my own website, even one as simple as mine is, also provided me the unique experience of achieving one of my most sustained and powerful stress headaches, ever.  I took more Ibuprofen than I’m sure the FDA permits, during this last 48 hour period. I eyed a bottle of Xanax so long, the day before, that I’m not wholly sure I didn’t have a stroke. I kept steeling myself against the inevitable “throwing in of the towel,” by saying, When it’s all done, you can maybe have one.

And maybe I did, and maybe I didn’t.

What I will admit to though is my flagrant vaunting, right-now-this-very-moment, of the fact that when faced with something I both hated and loved and wanted and hated (again), i.e. a website for what reason I cannot tell you, perhaps peer pressure? (though my friends are hardly a gang of Internet-pushers), I was pleased that deep inside, and I mean like Jules-Verne-20,000-leagues deep, I still had the will power to make it so. I was shocked. Where on earth had that thing been? And could I survive such sleep and etc. deprivation for something else this difficult, should anything else rear its ugly head?

I am not ashamed to say it: user-friendly is neither.

I know where some of my determination came from, though: Reader Reviews. I saw on godaddy.com what others were saying:

I’m so tired of people saying  I hate ____________, or that it doesn’t work. It does work, just don’t be lazy about it. — John Q., Washington

There’s nothing wrong with _____________! It takes time, get a bigger attention span!” Miriam S., Arkansas

Whoever they are, I wasn’t about to be cold-shouldered by comments like that, not by people who didn’t even have full last names. I wasn’t about to become a statistic for them to laugh at. No. So, I soldiered on, despite the cat, the dog, the spaghetti on the stove, the electric bill…I knew the only way to win was to stay focused and make it happen.

And I did: www.cleverkris.com.

I only wish it looked better, or that I understood more about HTML, or code, or host management.  It all sounds either too sci-fi for me to comprehend or that I’m aiding and abetting a parasite. But I’m giving myself a wide berth of permission, as I’ve never tried to tie myself to the Web’s dock before.

And I’m, all the same, more than a little proud of myself at getting this far because heaven knows yesterday I came very close to throwing this computer, with all its cords and accoutrement, out the back door…which I’m glad I started to do because I realized that the backyard gate was wide open.

Now that’s odd in and of itself as I don’t really know anyone to go back there except for me to turn on the water hose, and the slightly hypo-schizoid man who cuts the yard, with a weedeater, the whole yard with a weedeater.

He also has no delineation as to what should be cut.  If it is green, it is cut. If it is your bed of petunias, they are cut. If it is a tree, it is cut. It doesn’t matter.

I'm not against hiring a goat.

I once caught him, as if in a scene from Apocalypse Now decimating, demolishing my wysteria, which I had over the course of three years, taken great pains to train along the frontyard fence. I was mortified. I didn’t know I could scream with such volume, despite the fact that the neighbors on the good side of the house were outside barbecueing. I can only imagine what they thought, seeing a full-grown man run down what appears to be an innocent older man merely doing his job with a weedeater asking him to stop, you know, weedeating.

Of course, they would also have to have seen that he was weedeating a fence. I doubt that’s normal.

But, he hadn’t been there in over a week.  Had the gate been open this entire time? What if I’d let Max out, not realizing the gate wasn’t closed?  Good god, he heads out the back door, primed to go after any cat or squirrel, or small dirt devil, he sees.  It would have been a disaster.

I know because I’ve twice accidentally lost him that way. Thankfully, he’s a creature or habit, much more so than I am, and is usually either spotting at the grancy graybeard (a tree) in the backyard of the man who owns the Hundred Cats, or he’s anywhere else in town. (He wasn’t at any of the bars downtown, though, those two times; I checked there, first). 

Even though I love the idea of having my own parking place on the Web, truthfully I must say, and if anyone at WordPress is reading this – here’s my Piece of Honesty For The Day – I’m enjoying WordPress so much that I think I’m going to keep my blog here, for now, anyway.

I mean, why wouldn’t I?  You could post a grocery list on here, and it looks good, classy, and my website needs so much work still, that I’d almost be embarrassed at directing traffic there for my blog…just yet.

But feel free to take a look at it, if you want. The only issue I’m really having, where functionality is concerned, is I tried to send myself a Comment Email from my website and when I checked my Host Email it wasn’t there. So, god only knows who got that random Kudos.

That’s right, I sent myself a Kudos email.

I just…I just didn’t get it.

You can go home again…it’s just frustrating.

Thomas Wolfe wrote, “You can’t go home again.”  (At least, I think he did).

But you know what: you can.

I do it every Sunday. Mainly because I don’t want to miss Nana’s cooking; it’s in a class of its own…and I love going home, I do, but you want to know a secret:  It’s also quite often very aggravating.

Why is that?  Why is going home such a frustrating experience?

I've lost my keys...and the doorknob.

Sometimes, I think, it’s because as soon as I open that front door and step inside, I’ll see that nothing has changed, and I’ll feel like I haven’t changed either. And I hate that feeling.

Despite the unusuality (I’m creating this new word right this second; I think I am, anyway) of my family circumstances, I had a fairly conventional upbringing: a solid home life, food each evening, love, and church. But, I was reared by a great uncle, in Mississippi, and so…like many families in the Deep South, change was avoided, and at our most hospitable, conveniently forgotten when wedding invitations went out, or when pressed, allowed to sit at the table but thoroughly ingnored and not given a linen napkin or salad fork.

The couch had been the family couch since before I was born; the curtains had cost a fortune when purchased, pre-Depression, and so they were tolerated with their heaviness and coatings of dust and memory. The chairs at the dining room table had been in the family since before there was a family, they weren’t going anywhere…so much had been sacrificed for the minutiae and detritus, if you will, that we lived in, and splendidly, and all those little things that went into making the home a home…well, it’s understandable that it became a necessary security to make the home remain that way – unchanged.

It wasn’t a coffee table; it was a story. It wasn’t a piano; it was religion. And it wasn’t china, it was our history. We were curators as much as members of a family, and you don’t become a curator in a day. And a curator has great responsibility.  (They’re not exactly a docent, for godsake).

To ignore that is a wide sin.

I’ve thought on this for quite awhile, as a means to calm myself from frustration.  It’s not so much the expected conversations: you need insurance, check your tires, stop putting things on the credit card; any child, I think, would feel unloved without these petty nitpickings.

No, what it is, at least for me, is the lack of understanding about major things…at least the reciprocation of it.

But, I think I realize now why. 

I look around the house and see things that I didn’t have to work for; things I expected to always be there: plates, sweet tea, arm chairs. My uncle looks around and sees things he’s given a life up to get, to take care of me when no one else would. He lives in a house of prior burden, and in it, he’s carried everything over and worked hard to deserve it, to keep deserving it. For me to turn a nose up at that is an insult, of course. He’s living in his major things. So, the reciprocation is difficult to measure. And, truth be told, all I really want, is a house like his…of my own.

But, here’s what the makes Deep South, deep:  guilt.

We don’t grow up to move away, we’re not supposed to…even within the state, it seems, sometimes. We are “grown up” to be representatives of our people, our church community, our neighbors; it’s one reason we make great politicians, those of who do get away.

Down here, everyone has a vested interest, I guess, which is a great support but not the most Platonic of ideals. It takes a village, Hillary Clinton has remarked, and yes it does, but this village has a drawbridge.

They are scared because they can’t imagine another village, or why in the world, after all they’ve done for you, you’d want to go there, and stay, and trust me: no suitcase in the world is big enough to pack that kind of guilt.

There’s also no way to explain this need, which many of my generation have, on a routine, clockwork Sunday afternoon…and so what happens is you begin to talk about anything else under the ecclesiastical sun to steer the bulk of conversation away from “where you’re going” and you just talk about “where you’ve been, and what that was like.” You avoid the future, because it must involve the unknown and the unknown is built on change, and that avoidance takes so much energy that you leave home each weekend exhausted…and a weekend spent in exhaustion is aggravating. And you know, next Sunday is not that far away. 

You keep squirreling away your privacy and plans and realize that the only way this will work is to jump ahead, make the move, then a U-Turn, then an announcement on your way out of town, and then you put your seatbelt on and drive and drive and drive until you realize you hadn’t packed anything, and that’s ok, because nothing is still better than guilt. Shock is the only salvation we still possess.

 Yet, we keep going home, don’t we? Either to prove Wolfe wrong, or dig a deeper hole in the front yard. Ironically, you can’t dig a deep hole anywhere hear a magnolia.  The roots are too hungry.

I guess the biggest frustration, really, in going home again, is that of expectation.  Because buried beneath the heart in all of us is a fear of meeting that expectation: I’m sure parents, even great uncles, know this – the dreaded what ifs – what if my child is that rare breed who can’t wait to be kicked from the nest?  I was that child. What if my child is the one who thinks he can make a difference? I was that child, too…still am. What if my child is a dreamer, a writer, an actor, a singer, a lover, a mover? What if, what if, what if.  I am, I’m all of them, and everyday I try to decide just which child I am, was, or want to be, still.

I love my uncle more than anything else in the world. But, I’m also not through with the world, yet. The other side of the problem is that I’m too ready to move. The timing’s not right, then. But, the need, the desire, the drive is.

Still, I stall on the idea of expectation.

I’m supposed to be working on one of my new plays, right now, for instance, and even though I argue with editors and friends and workshoppers on my slow progress(es) with anything I write, strung out over a strange array of “valid excuses,” the truth is I’m scared to death I won’t meet their expectations. Just like I keep straddling the fence on my next move, literal and meta, because I’m scared not of what I can’t see ahead of me, but of what I’ll see when I look back.

And for the record, I rarely use salt in my cooking; the last thing I need is a pillar of it.

So, for the time being, I keep going home.  Out of respect, which some in my life never understood, and to learn a little more before heading out again. There’s something, I suppose, that seems regressive about keeping a finger on old roots; but, for me, there’s something so necessarily alluring about the roughness of those old roots that I’m not sure I could remember if I let go of them just yet.

It’s what writers do. And that’s what I am.

At least, today.