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TALES OF AN ORANGEPEELER

an archive of pleasures, wounds, sublimations
& other curiosities :: profile


08.14.22


One of those weird hot summer evenings, rife with thunderstorms, the bar lively with the afters of a wedding party. Earlier I had gone to the castle cafe where I wrote about a trip to Joshua Trip undertaken with my cousin and his friend in the summer of 2010, the summer when I was between relationships and homes. At that time I wasn't sure where I was going, and I thought I might quit my Phd studies in Galway. My ex was making noise about how Galway was his city, I should leave, and I thought: Why not? I didn't think I could endure living in the city, haunted by our past together.

Unsure of what to do, I returned to California for a month. I was always doing that when things got tough, going away somewhere faraway with just a suitcase and never enough money, staying with friends and pondering things via pen and notebook. In San Diego, my parents were very angry. Well, really my mother, who of course disapproved of my separation from the ex. Only “bad” women do that. (Never mind that her mother divorced her father, at a time when noooobody did that in Cambodia.) My cousin must have guessed I needed a break, and whisked me away for the day, hence the trip northeast to Joshua Tree.

Along the way we stopped at Salvation Mountain, Slab City, and the Salton Sea, where brown pelicans perched on the remains of docks, uncanny, like monuments to the prehistoric or apocalyptic, I wasn't sure. It was a strange, fervid country, of mesquite and cacti, lonesome diners and hungry cattle, the desolate and the ramshackle. Towns appeared as hallucinations, tumbledown heaps of shacks and trailers thrown on the side of the road. When the sun sank out of sight, night poured over the bones of the desert.

The break from my old life had been abrupt, the future shapeless and obscure. The past was cluttered, insistent, like the dashboard strewn with parking tickets. But before us was a long dusty road into desert, flanked by surprises, and above all the vast blue sky.

Writing about that trip this afternoon, I understood that if I feel at all queasy about the present and unsure of my place in the world, I must remember that even in that summer, homeless and untethered, I could still face reality, I could still endure it, as long as I remained poised and ready, open to the wonder and strangeness of it all.




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