Dinner finished, wine in hand, in a vaguely competitive spirit
of disclosure, we trail Google Earth’s invisible pervert
through the streets of our hometowns, but find them shabbier, or grossly
contemporized, denuded of childhood’s native flora,
stuccoed or in some other way hostile
to the historical re-enactments we expect of our former
settings. What sadness in the disused curling rinks, their illegal
basement bars imploding, in the seed of a Wal-Mart
sprouting in the demographic, in Street View’s perpetual noon. With pale
and bloated production values, hits of AM radio rise
to the surface of a network of social relations long obsolete. We sense
a loss of rapport. But how sweet the persistence
of angle parking! Would we burn these places rather than see them
change, or would we simply burn them, the sites of wreckage
from which we staggered with our formative injuries into the rest
of our lives. They cannot be consigned to the fourfold,
though the age we were belongs to someone else. Like our old
house. Look what they’ve done to it. Who thought this would be fun?
A concert, then, YouTube from those inconceivable days before
YouTube, an era boarded over like a bankrupt country store,
cans still on its shelves, so hastily did we leave it. How beautiful
they are in their poncey clothes, their youthful higher
registers, full screen, two of them dead now. Is this
eternity? Encore, applause, encore; it’s almost like being there.
This appeared in the April 2012 issue.
