It's Better in the Mountains

I arrived in Asheville on Sunday after a painless flight spent mostly sleeping. The night before the flight was a jumble of business, running around buying bottles for samples, packing, racking a batch of muscadine wine from the plastic bucket in my kitchen to its fancy secondary, a Carlo Rossi jug, piling organic fruit into my freezer so the fruit flies don't get it. At ten o'clock, as I made myself some angel hair pasta with peppers and eggplant, my friend Biddle called and asked if I wanted to have a walk-on role in a burlesque show. I did, so at eleven o'clock, with my luggage only half packed and my kitchen still not fruit-fly proof, I put on my best used-car salesman costume and made my way down to The Playground to walk on during the Belmont Burlesque and hand the MC divorce papers. Then I watched the rest of the show, went back home, finished packing, and slept for two hours before heading off to the airport. I boarded the plane, put my head against the window, and fell sound asleep.

I woke in Charlotte, caught a puddle-jumper over to Asheville, and was met at the airport by Sam and his boy, Nate. They drove me into town for some brunch at the Frog Bar, formerly the New French Bar, with folks in town for my friend Tracy's wedding. As Sam and I found parking in town, we drove past the Frog Bar, and there was everyone--Tracy, his bride Julie, Lauren and Jeremy, Terry; my old college friends--sitting outside drinking bloody Marys and beers as they had on Sunday mornings years ago. It was strange. I might have been staring at a memory.

It's strange to me how much has stayed the same as it once was. I'm sitting in Gold Hill right now, which was the coffee shop where I spent the entire summer after I graduated college. I sat in the same seat everyday, writing plays and chatting with my friend Kim, my friend Sam the jazz musician. The name of the cafe has changed. It's the Everday Gourmet, now, but they still serve the same coffee and I'm still there in the same seat, the same age, writing in my notebook. I'm incognito at the moment, wearing a beard, and I bet my name is different, but it's still basically me there. My replacement. Someone to fill the space I left. A great deal of the town is like this. Names have changed to protect the innocent--The World Coffee Cafe for Old Europe, The Frog Bar for the New French Bar--but even under new management, they're still basically the same places they always were.

Still, not to sound like I'm not enjoying my time here. On the contrary, there's a certain beauty to it all. There's a joy in coming back and reconnecting that I haven't experienced in other homecomings. Although Asheville hasn't changed so much, I have, and in returning, I have the opportunity to change who I am to this city. To fill a new space.

If You Stare Long Enough into the Abyss, It Asks You a Quant-Comp Question

The GRE is officially over and done with. I took it yesterday afternoon on the sixteenth floor of 20 N. Clark St. in an office absolutely devoid of any markings. A room could potentially be more colorless, but I'm at a loss for how. There's an interesting kind of ritual to taking the GRE. I'm forbiddent to talk about the test in any explicit detail, so there will be no nudity in this post, but I can say that before you go into the testing room, you have to place everything on you into a locker. Bare of all cellphones, pagers, books, paper, pens, hats, jackets, little knicknacks that remind you of your mother, the photograph of the girl you left waiting for you like a war bride back home, you pass from the first room into a second room. A kind of holding area where they ask you if you are prepared--Is this your name? Did you leave all of your worldly possessions behind? Did we give you enough scratch paper?--and then they take your photograph and lead you into the room where you will take your test.

Not to romanticize it, but the whole ordeal is rather like the rites of manhood in some tribal cultures. The entry into a special area, the power relationship between priest and boy/proctor and test taker. It makes me think that Albee must have written Zoo Story just after taking his GRE.

Anyway, it's over. My score, for anyone interested, was a 1370. 690 verbal; 680 quantitative.
Afterward, I made a bonfire of my study materials and sat on my back porch drinking beers and watching them burn. Tomorrow, I leave for Asheville to visit with old friends I haven't seen in far too long.

1380<1450

I woke up this morning with something of a panicky sweat on my brow. The GRE is eleven days away, and I woke up feeling less prepared to take it than I ever have before. So I took a sick day to take a practice exam and study. I did better on the practice exam than I thought. 760 verbal and 620 math. Which means, not surprisingly, that I'm better with the English language than I am with the numeric language. I can up that math score some, but I mainly want to spend the next eleven days writing essays. Thanks to Sam, who was nice enough to send me essay topics. I'll post my answers here soon. I promise.

The essay section actually remindes me of a poetry professor I had in college. His name was Garland and he was a fantastic guy, but he let me get away with things I really shouldn't have gotten away with. Such as my answer to essay question that asked us to compare and contrast three poets we had read. I had compared and contrasted them according to their sexes and whether the first letters of their names were vowels or consonants. I remember thinking I was pretty clever at the time. How wrong I was.

Garland, if you're reading this, rest assured it's come back to bite me in the ass. I'm off to go write essays arguing whether--well who knows what topic they'll want me to argue.