I'm on the fence...

...about a couple of writing things right now, but one of them does not concern the cathartic Drive-Up-The-Highway Day I had to myself in my hometown last Friday; just me and my camera and a list of places to re-see. (Pictures below.)

I pulled off the interstate in the 'good part of town' to take the first picture - of the last house I owned when I lived in the suburbs of the city.



And it was the first time I ever noticed that this house was only a mile or so from the first full-time job I had - a crap job I fucking hated in a large office building that was part of the 'development' my tony little neighborhood bordered.



The thing is, though, the me that moved into that house in the mid 1990's didn't wanna think about the me that had worked that crap job in the mid 1970's, so I'd shut down vision on that building for close to three years. Shopped at a grocery store almost right across the street. Had a membership at a ‘fitness and swim club’ only one stoplight away. But even with this proximity, I'm not exaggerating when I say that the first time I saw how close my Crap-Job-Life had been to my Nice-House-Life, geographically speaking, was last Friday, when I turned off I-64 onto the exit ramp, and saw the building when I looked over at the outskirts of my former neighborhood. (Recently it's come to my attention that I've had a habit of slicing up my life times into episodes that seem on the surface to be completely unrelated, but knowing something analytically and seeing something starkly laid out on the road in front of me was, as they say, a whole different ball a wax.)

I hadn't put that building on my list of pictures to take, even though it has a minor scene in my first novel. I hadn't put that house in the novel, but I'd promised the Blondster I'd take the picture for her, which was the only reason I even looked right when I drove near that exit. I was going on past, except I couldn't, because I'd promised to take a picture, so that exit ramp scene (of sorts) turned into one of those 'Ha! Made Ya Look!' moments.

From there, I pulled back onto the interstate and drove to the far side of the county, a place where I hid out one summer and turned into someone else.



And then I drove back to the old parts of the backside of downtown where I once had a home with a sad man...




And to a house that hosted endless parties a while back, and to some other houses in that neighborhood that I lived in or halfway lived in, depending on the particular address.



..and to the suburbs close to that area, where I lived when I was a kid, and where I was subject to bouts of mystical thinking that both got me through and kept me unengaged.



It was cathartic, visiting these in one day and on a purposeful timeline; I coulda been my own Greek thingie up on stage…maybe had a walk-on part in one of their plays (a la the Greek version of Pink Floyd, or vice versa).

I have a boatload of pictures and I was gonna put more on, but if I did, and explained them all and how they fit into the woven fiction of the novel I've written, and the ones to come, I might as well just set those suckers up as combo plan picture-books/memoirs, another genre entirely, and make it the truth instead of The Truth, and that would be much too much information, and besides, I think the best fiction lends universality to the concrete, the mundane and the every day, so if I send too many pictures along, I think...

but that's for another day this week.