The mysteries of Pittsburgh

[sanpaku_backup]

Back in Boston, now, having returned from the time warp that was my room. Not so much a cleaning as a trip into my own subconscious. Because every game, toy, piece of paper, tape, photograph, etc. that I ever came across in my early life was in that room, waiting all those years for me. In my strange youth I was always very self-conscious that I was building my own life, so I kept everything I came across. This little piece of tile from a crumbling school mosaic? Might need it one day!

So it was the expected vaguely depressing experience. I turned on the ole Jethro Tull and dismantled the train set, plowed through newspapers I wrote with my friend Ken when I was 14, pitched "meat" books from my first year of college... Finally threw out my Legos, my Merlin, that nifty little football game with the three lights, about 20 kinds of Rubik's Cube. All the various strata of 1980s culture there was. Did I mention recently how much I hate the 1980s?

And of course what was the point of saving all that if not to reflect on my ineptitude with the opposite sex. Pittsburgh was and always will be the site of multiple unrequited obsessions, and for each I seem to have saved some cryptic memento of my pathetic aspirations. I suppose it is psychologically liberating to put all that in the trash, but also draining in some strange way. I suppose it was the realization that after all these years, I don't entirely recognize myself in the big mess of documentation about my own life. Far more than on any previous trip, I feel disconnected from who I was, and plunging back into it instills that morbid solipsism that I used to be famous for.

I realized some years ago that Pittsburgh is for me a really haunted place, where I always left feeling like I had something important to say about my life and everyone else's -- that there was some sort of intersection there between things -- that if I could just figure them out and write them down, I would say something important. (And impress those girls who never though much of me, which was of course the entire point.) But you can't really live in the well of your own dreams and nightmares forever. Mrs. and I play the where-shall-we-live game all the time, and she likes Pittsburgh, and I suppose I do too, but I really don't know if I could live there without going crazy on some level. There's too many weird associations in my head, and now that the house is being packed up and I have no friends there, they've now crossed the last threshold into unreality.

Anyway... appropriately enough I spent the week reading H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness and really digging it. Seemed particularly appropriate for a meditation on the meaning of place.

Also met IRL a fellow LJer (and celebrity extraordinaire) Mamarama at the Carson St. Beehive, which was very cool. She gave us a whole ton of new places to see, which we didn't get around to seeing, because we're losers. All we really managed to do was to go to the Aviary and to Fallingwater, the latter about the 4th time for me. I see more every time I go, actually. We also drove around the hollows above the city for a while, got lost in Beltzhoover and some other not so great places... but the views are always worth it.

Also, Frank may or may not be glad to hear that his ancestral homestead still stands, though with no apparent signs of life beyond a beige car under a half-closed garage door... we didn't exactly stick around to investigate.

Home again, jiggity jog. What shall I do with my "vacation" tomorrow? Hm.

Comments

Legoland

[flw.livejournal.com]

Apparently, there is a place called "Legoland" out here in California. You oughtta sue those bastards.

In any case, thanks for driving by the ole homestead.

I have read At The Mountains Of Madness. It reminded me of how small the world was just a little while ago. Antarctica was the last chance for an extraordinary world at that time. AMM is his finest work, in my opinion.

Re: Legoland

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Yes, well when I said "a meditation on place," I didn't so much mean that particular story! Antarctica and all. (Though it really was a good piece.) I meant more the Providence stories. As I will write about soon, we went to Providence yesterday to walk around the area on Benefit St. that he wrote about, like the "Shunned House," which is still there. Pretty nifty.

But yeah, pretty much all the stories in that collection were good -- AMM itself, Charles Dexter Ward, the Shunned House. Thanks for turning me on to him. Which one should I find next?

Also, are you going to update us on your adventures at some point?

Re: Legoland

[flw.livejournal.com]

Oh, I understand. I think of HP's stories as individual units because they are in so many different collections with different titles.

When I think of the "place" where they happen, I often think of that neighborhood in Baltimore (I think it's name begins with an "E") you and Mrs. S. drove me through. The narrow twisting streets, tiny houses, tall rock walls, sense of mystery, and general density there are all remind of a Lovecraftian story. Though I never read HPLC before I first saw ... was it Ennis, or Ennistown?

I am doing CA update presently.

Re: Legoland

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Hm, I can think of Stone Hill, which was right near us, but I think you probably mean Dickeyville, which certainly was a lot like a small, haunted New England village. Or maybe you mean Ellicott City, which was a little busier but also somewhat preserved in amber. I remember driving around both with you. (If you ever saw the surprisingly underrated Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, the Ellicott City Courthouse is where they take them at the end. But the creepiest place, the guy's loft -- that was filmed in Woodberry, a half a mile from our house.)

Surprisingly there seem to be fewer such places in New England itself, or at least this corner of it. Actually where we live right now is pretty close to an old village. The buildings are too recent, but it has meandering paths and hidden, crumbling outbuildings, and steep stone outcroppings you can't build on, and impenetrable gullies.

Elsewhere, every so often you will drive through some busy neighborhood in Boston and you'll see some strange white farmhouse and cottage behind a bunch of trees. That farmhouse probably dates to the mid-18th century! But it is surrounded by more recent things. That's sort of what the houses in Charles Dexter Ward are like in Providence. The Shunned House area around Benefit Street, though, is all colonial. You walk by the front of these tiny two-story houses overlooking the city. It's not a village lane, but it has a quietness to it.

Can you tell I am very bitter that we can't find a damn place in Providence?