Leaving the Compound: an excerpt from "Anecdotes from the Western Bubble" by Thoreau Lovell

Hick Planet magazine

tryna find the grownups table on a hick planet

an unperiodical:

on arts, endeavors, musings, sites, sights, & other senses

Thursday, 2019 November 28th

issue 1

When the talent show began, a woman sang a song she wrote the night before. There were stories about cancer coming and going—miracle tales and unbelievable grief. I stood up and told a couple of jokes disguised as poems. Next morning it was time for airplanes and taxicabs, time to turn the technology back on. Danny the masseur gave me a ride to the train station. His mother told me she wrote a book about a Montana cowboy and the healing power of apple cider vinegar. I could see the compound in the rearview mirror as we headed toward the freeway.

The neighborhood looked like it could use a detox, like the neighborhood I grew up in. What was working class then is what now? Double, triple, quadruple working class? Everyone working all the time or else not working at all. The moving van backed into the driveway of the foreclosed house like a huge eraser. Swipe. There goes 10 years of your life. Swipe. There goes another family that may as well have never existed. 83 degrees in January—there is bliss in warmth—in closing my eyes. I felt relief approaching, like a full moon rising over a cold glass of beer. It felt like the dog that had been chasing me most of my life had gotten run over by a refrigerated tractor-trailer and I was free—free as long as the car kept moving—free as long as there were palm trees pointing toward the horizon—free as long as the sandy beach in my mind’s eye was warm and uncrowded and not an ad for prurient productivity.