Asheville, North Carolina

Ahhhhhh.... I feel like life is beginning to return back to some sense of normalcy. My beloved MacBook has returned to my hands (completely refurbished... thank you Apple! I will forever be a life-long customer...) and other more delicate matters are returning to completion as well.

As I've said before, I have so much to write about... I don't really know where to start, but I'm going to do it piecemeal. Now that I have my computer back I am hellbent on writing everyday.

I'll start tonight with my most recent experience--traveling to Asheville, North Carolina.

Asheville has always held a distant fascination for me. I read Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel when I was but a young, culturally famished, ADD-suffering teenager. My eleventh-grade high school teacher shared this book with us (thank you, L.D.) and I probably wouldn't have paid attention had it not been for his passionate orchestrations, climbing onto his desk and acting out O Lost! A Stone, a leaf, an unturned door... or maybe it was W.O.'s rantings and ravings. Whether it was my beloved high school teacher's dramatic attempts at reaching our nullified teenaged brains or Thomas Wolfe's elegiac prose, the book stuck with me.

I've always wanted to visit Asheville, North Carolina.

So, I went. I drove the four hours from Liberty, my heart heavy with the recent drama spent with Indigo Boy. I went despite him, too. Or in spite of him. Before the drama, I came across an event calendar that said one of our favorite bands was going to play there on the 12th. I didn't want to be reminded of him, but then I wondered: who in Asheville, North Carolina would go see Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings? Maybe I might meet someone cool there...

So I went. Despite him; in spite of him. I went mostly for myself. It almost didn't work out. I didn't buy tickets ahead of time and I had to wait outside the entrance for an hour trying to find someone selling tickets. An older, tall White man dressed expensively, but slovenly tried making smalltalk with me, encouraging our "connection" because we were both waiting for scalpers. I didn't give him the time of day. He paid me back by elbowing his way into the first person who came our way selling tickets, pulling out two crisp twenty-dollar bills and, smiling at me the whole time, said, "Here. Take this. Don't listen to her." I hated him instantly. What an ass. What a fuckin bastard. I paid him back, or karma paid him back, by randomly finding a kind man at the eleventh hour, ten minutes before the show was about to start, who came to sell his tickets because his wife was sick and they couldn't go. He sold me a ticket at face value: $21. Thank you kind man; take that, rich prick.

I spent the evening wandering at first, not really enjoying the opening band (save for the kick-ass Black back-up singer who stole the show with her rich voice and stealthy moves). I befriended a trio of cousins from Connecticut who were there, reunioned after many years apart, and then another trio of guys, who admittedly I befriended because I thought one of them was hot. I hung out with them for most of the night, talking, dancing, and working some Indigo Boy/That Girl shit out to Sharon Jones' wealthy voice. Moving to her songs of recognition, renunciation, grief and reclamation. I werked it out.

I ended up going to a local bar with one of the guys from the group. I was ambivalent at first to go traipsing around with him, but he proved to be a first-class gentleman and a wonderful guide for my one evening in Asheville. We walked through the streets of downtown Asheville--brick buildings from the turn-of-the-century, everything closely knit. He ran into people he knew along our walk and then carefully steered me toward a bar a few doors down from the hostel I decided to stay at. I have to make a note here because I haven't stayed at a hostel since I was a teenager, but this particular hostel was lovely--clean (ever so clean!), comfortable, quiet, and modern. They just opened this past January. I highly recommend staying at Sweet Peas Hostel for anyone traveling budget luxe in Asheville....

Anyway, The Vault, the bar we ended up at was great! Sophisticated but neighborhood-ey. R, the guy who took me there, knew most everyone and we proceeded to have a quiet, intellectual evening talking with folks in their 30s, drinking slowly on the patio lining the street and just enjoying the conversation and company. I met a very interesting man--a dapper, bespectacled writer working on a non-fiction book about an integrated summer camp during the Civil Rights Movement. We talked for most of the evening...

I stumbled home at some point, feeling thoroughly comforted and fulfilled from my evening with R and his friends. I woke up with a terrible hangover, but managed to still make the most of my day in Asheville. I had a great, gourmet greasy Southern breakfast (two eggs over medium with grits and fresh white cheddar cheese, homemade cheddar and green onion biscuits, soft, fluffy bacon gravy) at a place called Over Easy. Then I made my way a few blocks down to Thomas Wolfe's boyhood home--filled with the giddiness of my youth of meeting someone famous for the first time and also of reverence for meeting someone who I admired so.

The Thomas Wolfe Memorial is, as I imagine most other historical places in Asheville are, a well-kempt, modernized building suited for tourists and a pleasant educational experience. The exhibition about Thomas Wolfe's life and work was scrupulously clean and thought-out; scientific and artistic in its display--a professional museum-piece. There was a twenty-minute documentary that played every hour or half-hour or so and charming wooden phones that played different recorded voices of people in Wolfe's family recounting their memories of him and the Old Kentucky Home.

I paid the $1.00 entry fee to take a tour of the boarding house he grew up in and save for the dour tour guide who led me and a pair of two older women--one White, fat and full of questions, the other Black, thin and thoughtful--we, I think, had a wonderful experience. I was half-expecting a ghost to pop in at any point or to show himself or herself to me in the reflection of a 19th-century mirror or in the corner of my eye through one of the half-skewed doorframes that Eliza Gant or Julia Wolfe made to cut costs. Things were uneven in that house and I was sure I would run into a ghost because it was so old and creaky. But the historical committee in Asheville has made sure that their famous, prodigal son would have a home to be proud of--to celebrate the sanctity of his house and what he recorded in such depth and detail so many years ago.

I bought the unedited, original manuscript of Look Homeward, Angel at the clean, well-lit gift shop and spent the evening pouring over the pages, reading nearly one hundred that same night. Hardly anyone remembers Thomas Wolfe nowadays. They confuse him with the 80s writer, Tom Wolfe--of the "Bonfire of the Vanities" fame, et al. They both are guilty of long-winded, erudite sentences, but Thomas Wolfe was in a league of his own: Joycean in his prose, Keats-like in his elegy, Wolfe-ian in his gusto and grasp of humanity. This man hungered and wrote... and wrote and wrote and wrote. I thirst and hunger for that kind of writerly drive. Fill me, Oh Wolfe! Lost, sundered, hungry for words... fill me with words, please. Oh Lost!

I walked the streets of downtown Asheville that day, still full of images of what it might have looked like when Wolfe was alive, but seduced, instead, by the drawls of modern life: cute signage, interesting clothes, a stationary shop!, a shoe store!, vintage clothing like you wouldn't believe, a hippie, kind of spiritual store that sold gorgeous windchimes, incense, deities, and t-shirts just for the hell of it!

Finally, I tried making my way out of Asheville, but on a lark and at the suggestion of a woman I befriended there, decided to take the scenic route and stopped in Hot Springs--because they had natural hot springs there and I am a sucker for anything bath-worthy or sulphuric that might cure my skin.

I drove my little Toyota Corolla through the mountains of North Carolina and found myself in the middle of nowhere. Literally, deep in the mountains of North Carolina, close to the Appalachian Trail, I found myself with no Internet reception or ability to contact anyone through my iPhone. It was discomforting at first and then a relief. I don't have to contact anyone or hear from anyone or know that what's who's or silly-what-it-is if I don't want to to. Goodbye. I'm here now and I soaked naked in a tub filled with natural hot springs, a creek making its trickle water sound and the woods and birds and insects just flying by and doing their natural thing. So lovely. Just soaking. Just feeling and breathing and letting it all soak in.

I fell in love with Asheville for its charm and historical grace. Then, I fell in love with Hot Springs for its absolute quiet and generous spirit. I thought for a moment that I might settle in Hot Springs. I could write there. I would be undisturbed... and if I needed my city fix, I could go to Asheville--it's only a half-hour away. These thoughts still roam in my mind...

In regards to the South, or at least where I have been thus far, this is one little observation I have made: the fireflies in Hot Springs make the trees sparkle; the fireflies in Liberty are ghostlike in the brush....