Last of the Savannah trip…advanced learning…sometimes you kill the zombies, sometimes they eat you.
This one’s mostly going to be about Thursday and Friday last week in Savannah. But I have to brag. A friend of mine’s in Savannah right now and DID successfully get googly-eye pix in the same place. More on that below.
Other, more recent stuff first, though.
Most of the interesting stuff I’ve been doing since we got back involves working on an advanced writing class by Kris & Dean, on building characters. I got through the (fairly difficult) first assignment and the (much more difficult) second assignment by invoking my secret superpower of Being Wrong Very Quickly. The assignments themselves were not THAT hard. I didn’t have to juggle WD-40-coated eggs or stop a train with my bare hands or anything. No physics or math was involved.
But we’re working around the edges of “what is a character? how is a character built? what can you use characters *for*?” on a really deep level. The assignments are just there to define the space so you can take apart your ideas and rebuild them as a professional writer, not as a reader or an amateur.
So far, it’s been successful; it’s already harder for me to tolerate some characters I used to like and harder for me to tolerate other writers who were already doing this without taking these classes, as if by fucking instinct. Intense jealousy has ensued, which is actually part of my process and a good sign in this type of case, as long as I don’t dwell in the jealousy but instead use it to drive me to pick up the same skillset.
It got me thinking, though:
There are some seemingly purely mental things I can’t learn by just thinking about them. I have to practice, and, more than that, fail. It’s the failure that drives the change; it’s the failure that creates the path ahead. The person that I am can’t possibly solve the problem; only the person who will have navigated the broken parts where there *is* no path can solve it. And that person won’t exist if I don’t spend some serious time beating my head against the wall.
The stuff I’ve been struggling with for the last two weeks now seems like a no-brainer. Of course there’s an even harder assignment ahead. I don’t dread it. The thought of it pisses me off: we’re basically being asked to find things that are not just invisible, but top-tier writers using their powers to distract from already-invisible things. “Hey! You know that clever magic trick you like and can’t solve? That you like BECAUSE it’s so hard to figure out how to even begin pulling it off? Next week! Tell us how it was done…but not by studying the trick, but by studying the magician’s assistants in the background! LOL!!!”
@#$%^^ &&*(%$% #~!!!! FFFFFFFF
+++ OUT OF CHEESE ERROR. REDO FROM START +++
I mean, it does make sense tho.
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Thursday the 16th: downtown and/or riverside Savannah! and more.
Getting up Thursday morning was much slower…and stiffer…than Wednesday morning. The issues I was having with pollen in Tampa were starting to crop up. Lots of sore joints, swollen hands/feet, and gummy eyes. It makes sense; further north = slightly later plant cycles = jumping from the frying pan into the fire, pollen-wise.
BUT that’s what allergy meds are for.
At any rate, we got going slower on Thursday morning. Stopped at the Waffle House again.–For all that I’m a foodie, and I can’t really explain to you how much of a foodie I am, because it sneaks up on me how non-foodie other people are, we didn’t eat at the fanciest or even most memorable places in Savannah by a long shot. Or probably even the places with the best food. On the other hand, I’ve never had a Waffle House visit that wasn’t, in its own way, to the most perfect Waffle House I’ve ever been to, its own ne plus ultra Waffle House experience. Ray got the same thing she did on Wednesday but felt slightly embarrassed about doing so, which means she doesn’t know the pleasure of being A Regular yet. I got the All the Things plate with a side of waffle with peanut-butter chips. Plus OJ. Plus coffee.
My idea of luxury: ordering both the coffee and the orange juice.
En route to the downtown area via the bus (a woman behind us was chanting her health symptoms at the top of her voice, so loud that even the bus driver was getting annoyed), someone asked the bus driver to reroute to drop them off somewhere not on the route. The bus driver complied graciously, then dropped off everyone headed downtown at a stop that wasn’t even on the map. Eh. Whatever.
We walked through the downtown area to the Bay Street/River Street area next to the river. The whole area is basically a line of old buildings, both old shipping warehouses that have been converted into three stories of shops and big fancy government buildings.
They all just *happen* to look like one of the maps from a favorite zombie game, Left 4 Dead II, the first sequence from the mission The Passing.
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Ray and I geeked out about the area for about an hour, walking around all the walkways and stairs to scope them out. We even climbed down the historic FUCKING STAIRS FROM HELL, a set of extremely narrow and steep stairs that also feature in the game (if in a slightly different context). DANG. I made a comment about at least there not being as many steps as there are on the Manitou Incline and a woman next to me startled and said, “I’ve done those!” So we chatted about the Manitou Incline for a minute. Small world. She’d done the whole thing, but AFTER the rebuild. I’ve only done half, but before, which was less work but eeeeeeeeeeeee scaryier. Particularly if you’re scared of heights. Looking over all the balconies and working my way down those stairs was not pleasant, even though it was fun (a subtle distinction, I know). Had to be done.
While we were there, we planted a pair of googly eyes (sent over the winter holidays by a friend) on one of the stones at the bottom of Factor’s Walk in the heart of the zombie area, and took selfies. Ray initially freaked out about vandalizing rocks with stick-on googly eyes. She is not nearly as much of a punk as she ought to be, but she’s working on it. (She bought some stickers this week and stuck them to a few things around her campus.) We left the googlies there in the hopes that the friend traveling to Savannah THIS week would find them and take selfies–and she did!
After that, we went to the Graveface Museum.
Ray was the one who picked it out. IT WAS AMAZING. I highly recommend it if you’re interested in Weird Shit or serial killers. Caution, though, it’s only open Thursday thru Sunday.
The entry is on the ground level of Factor’s Walk, and opens into a gift shop full of things like t-shirts, hoodies, and possum feet. Skulls abound. There are vinyl records, although I didn’t look through them to see what kind. (There was TOO MUCH to look at.) I flitted from thing to thing to thing, but eventually they called us to the museum entrance:
“Y’all, it’s time to go in! Gather ’round the giant mouth of Satan!”
Yes. There is a giant, neon-red mouth of Satan.
The first room is supposed to be a recreation of what a roadside museum would look like; it reminded me of the Mystery Shack in the cartoon Gravity Falls. (Highly recommend if you’re a fan of Rick and Morty but have soured on it; Gravity Falls is fabulously written, pure genius, but not as unkind.)
Inside the room were a number of taxidermied animals with multiple heads, etc., as well as a number of “gaffs,” which is carnie slang for a con or a trick: mummies, wolf boys, fake (and real) shrunken heads. There’s also a fake wall with a hoodoo altar behind it–and a fake floor with a whole sub-basement below it (not mentioned in the tour, but Ray and I looked through a crack in the floor and saw it). The gaffs were crafted by the infamous Homer Tate, who would make them and sell them via mail-order catalogue to roadside attractions and circuses around the country in the 1950s, before getting busted using real human skulls for his shrunken heads. Oops.
Past that was room after room of curiosities: voudou/hoodoo artifacts, International Order Of Friends (IOOF) materials including mesh masks and a full skeleton in a coffin, possessed dolls, a room full of pinball machines, a museum-within-a-museum for Ed Gein (quite gory but super-interesting!), and a second museum-within-a-museum full of info on murderers, featuring artwork by John Wayne Gacy and other serial killers and similar.
I was fine up until the room with the artwork. By then I was getting hungry, tired, and footsore (because of the swelling from the allergies more than anything else). The murderer museum area focused on the 1990s, that is, stuff that I’d lived through. So it was interesting, but not something new.
Then I stepped into the area with the art and it just hit me. UGH. So much of it resembled the childish “artwork” of fuckwits I knew in highschool who doodled SATAN and mutilated women on their notebooks in ball-point pen. Gacy at least had an eye, and that’s a weird thing to have to think: in a room full of useless bra-snappers who took their game to the next level and then some, it was the guy obsessed with clowns whose art was well-formed, easiest on the eyes.
Anyway, I was done. We went out, soaked up the sun for a bit, then went into the Savannah’s Candy Kitchen for candy and gelato. The store is on the bottom level facing the river, and occupies about half a block of room after room of candy: big barrels of it, shelves of it, cases of it. Ray danced from flower to flower, collecting pollen–or rather gummis–and I sat down and stared into space for a while. I hopped on social media for a while (thank you, smart phone) and felt better by the time Ray was done.
We got gelato and went out to the river to watch boats and recharge. That was excellent. A woman on roller skates passed us several times.
After that, we hauled ass over to the nearest bus stop and rode out for Bonaventure Cemetery (my pick). We took the bus out as far as it would go, then walked the rest of the way.
I’m not sure why I was obsessed with going to this cemetery, but it was a Mood for sure. I think I was hoping to see more mausoleums, a la New Orleans. Am I still upset that I didn’t get to go into any of the cemeteries while Ray and I was passing through from Colorado? I am. But I *do* really like cemeteries in general.
Bonaventure was OLD, so not a lot of the accoutrements of recent grave visits. A few graves were recent (like, the 1990s), but they were clearly the scions of older families.
The grounds were big and wandery and full of live oaks with Spanish moss. The dogwoods were in bloom. It was quiet. There were a lot of what looked like Jewish graves, with the smaller stones on top of the gravestones. There seemed to be a fair number of Masonic-type elements as well, although I’m not informed enough on that to be sure.
It was the kind of peaceful that drains the yuck out of your head. I liked it.
We walked back to the bus stop, during the wait for the bus we vegged out and I started to second-guess what I was doing: should we call an Uber? But no, sitting in the sun next to Ray and vegging out was about as good as it gets, really. No need to rush.–If we’d spent the two days we were there rushing from place to place, it wouldn’t have felt right, I think. Being the people we both are, we would have seen more stuff but felt it less. Being tired but not exhausted, hungry but not starving: those were good things. Walking along roads with no sidewalks, passing by the wildly differing houses, listening to frogs, walking on dirt roads, feeling the deep shade on us, smelling some of the flowers–those things were all good. Taking a bajillion pictures, making snarky commentary to each other.
I’ve never really understood the “we don’t have a lot of time, so let’s slow down” thing, but it worked well here. Doing the research ahead of time was helpful, but soaking in everything, including the things that went wrong, that was the good part.
The bus picked us up. Either it was mostly a quiet ride, or I was so mentally checked out that I missed the scheduled spoken-word piece
We walked to the buffet that Ronald the Uber Driver from Wednesday recommended and ate far, far too much. I kept hoping someone would tip me on my side and roll me back to the hotel, like that character in the original Willy Wonka movie. I had three desserts: Watergate salad, buttermilk pie, I forget what else. A pile of greens and fried shrimp (especial favorites). Our driver did not do us wrong.
Then we went back to the hotel. I tried to write, couldn’t, tried to work on classwork, couldn’t do that either, packed and got everything ready for the morning, snuggled with Ray a bit, and eventually just crashed. Midjourney and ChatGPT both came out with updates somewhere in there and I played with them; some nice improvements for both.
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Friday, March 17th (St. Paddy’s Day):
People kept asking whether we were staying for the St. Paddy’s Day parade. NO. While I like a drink now and then and I definitely like a good revel, a drunken revel with hundreds of thousands of visitors (400,000 of them) is not my jam.
We got up early, caught our Uber to the train. I sat up front with the driver, a pleasantly nutty gentleman who was probably my age but seemed lots older. He kept talking to the GPS lady in a raspy drawl, asking her whyyy she was wanting him to go a certain way that was just plain stupid. I was slightly nervous at first–where WERE we going, in the dark? with us having a train to catch?–but I eventually just chilled and went with it, and got him talking. He liked my hat. I told him she should get a hat and a cane, because clearly he would look good with them. He left the recommended route again and I said something about how the Google lady always screws up my directions when she gets rebooted, and that set him off on AIs, models and simulations, and even a little chaos theory. I never did figure out whether he was a genius or an idiot–or just a smart guy pulling my leg. He was trying to convince me that you could stop hurricanes by pumping water off the ocean floor and using it to cool the ocean surface, because hurricanes won’t form if the water’s not warm enough. I didn’t argue with him (I was having too much fun) but did ask some questions about how he’d figure out WHERE to put the pumps. No answer on that. He did eventually conclude that his plan would disrupt life on the ocean floor, though, so it might not be worthwhile. He also at one point said Elon Musk was a smart guy.
At any rate, he dropped us off exactly at the scheduled time (that is, about half an hour early) and we went in, waving our fond (and somewhat bemused) farewells.
I’d done something to my foot and limped around all day. Ray put up a pair of googly eyes in our train car, behind the curtain. I wrote. All the rest of the food I’d bought on Wednesday night was consumed, bit by bit. At Orlando, when we switched over to the bus, the bus driver called us by our names and took off early after we got on.
The rest of Friday was a crash, Saturday was a blur of homework and handling stuff over email, Sunday we went over to St. Pete to get our hair done with our beloved stylist (yay!) and ate good Hipster food at a place downtown St. Pete called Datz.–I don’t know if Hipsters will ever be a people per se, but it sometimes feels like it, with slang, injokes, and traditions all of their own.
An excellent trip. Ray’s back to school, I’m back to work, everything’s busy for a while. Tuesday Ray and I played the Left 4 Dead map in question. And got eaten.
Sometimes you kill the zombies; sometimes they eat you. More of the former of the latter, one hopes, but the pleasure is in going, “Hang on, you’re on your own.” “I’m with you now.” “Good to go.” “Covering.” “I’m going to set the witch on fire and run for it.” “Keep running.” “Still keep running.” “Okay, we got her, come on back.”
It’s all about the little things that say: “I’m here with you, I have your back.”
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I redid my “About” page on my website as part of my site redesign…and decided to use an AI “selfie” as my (first) bio pic. But I also used an actual selfie, too.
If you ever needed a lesson in why “perfection” isn’t something you want to chase as any kind of artist…here ya go.
Here’s the page itself.
Here’s the Midjourney-generated selfie I picked!
And here’s the actual pic of me (and Ray <3). This was taken at the lighthouse on Tybee Island. Flaws, spots, super-thick glasses lenses, extra chin, wrinkles, stray hairs, loose threads, and all.