Excursion

A number of things went wrong early today. However I did not budge and let them wash over me, processed into a delicate sense of humor. Not the English way. There was that man in the diner coming back from the Hamptons. He was gross. There was tendrils of booger and snot which hung from his nose as he loomed above you in your seat to take your order. If you did not want a joke to happen, he would do it anyway. We were in good spirits from having escaped a place of decay and were good for any human contact, even this nasty man. Mumbled a bit. Excused himself from dealing with us after the act was over. Is that all I have to say? I could go for longer. So I will. This type of gross Englishman seems to revel in the nasty aspects of life. Normally, this would not offend me. But you are a waiter. Perform your station. Leave the Hamptons if you do not want to be there. This is all easy. I have trapped myself in places, am trapped in the room I am in right now with the high walls and fireplace. Engage your entrapment or escape, I would say to this man, but he has figured it out, and he has been trapped, and so are you, at Fairway Restaurant! It is on a golf course. The land as you move eastwards on Long Island becomes more condensed and narrow. The air is good because the converging notions of ocean and bay crash into one another in fresh pine tree forests. We were out there in the winter, when there is not much to do. I had wanted to go to the island of New Shoreham. An island felt more right, although to expand the metaphor into infinity dissolves John Donne’s metaphor. You are an island.

The great swath of land stuck out before me as we drove over it on the way to where our parents had been born. Both of their homes were contained on this one long stretch of land extending from its eastern to farmost western tips. I used to not know directions and felt some sort of justification in doing so by feeling it somehow obscured deep knowledge of the innermost self. Now I know this was wrong. The opposite is in fact true. I now believe direction is good because you are allowed to place yourself within space and feel yourself as real and in relation to others and the other things which people call home. And thus your home becomes more beautiful. And the people and things with which you use to inhabit this place and call home are illuminated and in their splendor it is easier to tell who is who and what is what. Being from the farmost western tip will tell you not much about the conditions on the east. Things are more pristine although rapidly approaching a level of if not outright cleanliness than at least perfected modernity. Suburbs. The east has a separate problem of deep relationships as conditioned by this form of housing. Luxury estates dot and control the composition of landscapes. Perfection of this type which is inhabited by the people of the easternmost tip grants no allegiance to those outside their community. I intend to change this. And the next generation of family moves in an elongated circle on the bottom turn up and east. One Mecca Morning. We pick them up and go slack. Winter. Eileen Curran is back at the house that one day will be sold because the lack of necessary economic resources to keep it as part of the ongoing consciousness of our clan.