On Losing Friends

Years ago, I heard a comedian – no memory of who it was, for years I thought it was Bill Burr, but I couldn't find a record of Bill Burr saying it – that aging was like a program that ran behind Windows that you didn't notice.

It's something I've been thinking about as it becomes increasingly difficult to justify myself as a “young person” in any meaningful way. Not that I ever found youth all it was cracked up to be, but it was at least a reassurance, a reassurance that something could change, that no matter how shit things were right now, they could somehow be better.

And the cult of youth is, of course, one of the major myths of late capitalism, the idea that no matter how old you are, you have the ability to feel young. Ask your doctor if Cialis is right for you.

Everyone knows, intellectually if not intuitively, about the downsides of getting older. About the wrinkles, the expanding waistlines and sagging cheeks and breasts and ballsacks, the introspection, the hangovers, the sense of failure and unhappiness with one's own success, the realization – another quote I can't attribute – that one will never play the Prince of Denmark.

But what I wasn't told was how many people you'd wind up no longer talking to, and the odd realization, one night when you're at home, alone, and you hear a certain song from five, ten, fifteen years ago, and you thought about a party you'd gone to, a camping trip you'd gone on, a dumb thing you said in class in high school and their response, and the first thing that comes to mind in your internal monologue is “what the hell happened to them?”

You lose friends to marriages and kids, to the difficulties of trying to make two lives into one, to the need to keep those kids clothed and fed.

You lose friends to addiction, whether they've OD'd and departed this planet or simply disappeared into the ether, last heard talking about their new demo tape somewhere in Portland.

You lose friends to mental illness, because maybe they disappeared into their parents' basement in Kansas City, only emerging to pick up a pack of Pall Malls at the Kum and Go, or an eighth from a guy they knew in community college, or maybe you just lose them to a garage filled with monoxide fumes.

You lose friends because you were an asshole to them and still think you're in the right, at least to the extent that you don't forgive them, and you can tell your current friends when you show up to the same party that “it's a little awkward.” The two of you had both had too much Bushmills that night when you'd fallen out, and neither of you were on your best behavior.

You lose friends to ideologies and religions, to their newfound faith in the Pentecostal Christ or anarcho-primitivism, and their Facebook wall is suddenly filled with oddly interpreted scripture quotes or something about how a keto diet saved their life.

You lose friends to careers as financial analysts and psychiatric nurses, their 14-hour days eating through their free time, and you wonder if they're happy with these arrangements, and maybe they are and maybe they're not, but on the rare occasions you see them, you realize that the two of you have nothing left to talk about, and you see in their eyes that they know it too.

You lose friends, probably not many, to fame and/or fortune, and you realize that you represent a past step in their life, a step on the way to somewhere else.

You lose friends to what you call “drifting apart,” but which is you really just being bored with or pissed off at one another, and neither of you being able to expend the energy to call the other out on it, both of you ultimately subject to your own inertia.

You lose friends to their moving back to Idaho Falls to take care of their aging father, all of their social connections drying up as they pay more attention to long calls on hold with insurance companies and the arrangements of feeding tubes.

You lose friends to a boyfriend you consider to be abusive, but she says he's just insecure and that deep down, he 's really a good guy. You didn't want anything to do with him after the last time you saw him, his last post-midnight blowup at an Uber driver.

You lose friends to an eyeroll from your wife after you say you're going over to his house to play video games and smoke weed, and however that judgment plays out in terms of your self-loathing, your love for your wife, your occasional contempt for your friend.

You lose friends to not being able to face another night out, and looking in the mirror at the lines that will eventually become the crow's feet around your eyes.

You lose friends to the look the snide look they gave you when you said you'd done too much coke last weekend.

You lose friends because of the fucking werewolf they turned into when they'd done too much coke last weekend. Or the vodka-soaked mess you left them in the last time you saw them, and the apologies you had to make to the waitress. Or the way you saw them after they'd had a vodka-soaked mess, hungover and having a cigarette on the corner outside a cafe with $4 Bloody Marys at brunch, and their incomprehensible rant about every fucking asshole in this town.

You lose friends to suddenly realizing they've deleted their Facebook account and you didn't have another means of reaching them, even though you have enough mutual friends that it wouldn't be too much effort to find another means of contact.

You lose friends because the only reason the two of you were friends in the first place was because you were stuck in the same shitty little town and roughly the same age, so fuck it, might as well hang out.

You lose friends to the 50 bucks they promised to pay you back, and the fact that the next time you saw them they were ordering 15 dollar cocktails.

You lose friends to the fourth lie you caught them in.

You lose friends to the way they tried to kiss you that one night. Or the way you tried to kiss them. Or the way you kissed, and then fucked, and then went for brunch, and that was it, and you don't know what to make of it.

You lose friends to prison, and the military, and the way they are when they come back from prison or the military.

You lose friends even when they're still in contact, and you wonder if it would be awkward to contact them out of the blue.

You lose friends because they picked up rugby or homebrewing or samba dancing, and that's all they do now, and all their friends do the same, and their Instagram is only rugby or homebrewing or samba dancing.

You lose friends because they went back to school, and their life now consists of long nights working on their night-school undergraduate degree or their dissertation and the vague hope that all of this might someday be worth it, when they have to somehow have to help the kids with their homework and do their own homework.

You lose friends because they messaged you too much and you internalized the Will Rogers line about how you'd never want to be part of a club that'd have you as a member.

And, perhaps most of all, you lose friends because you were never really friends to begin with, and the thinnest of barriers was enough to separate you.

***

And then you're back to those memories of them, of the things that separated you, almost as much as what connected you to begin with, maybe more.

This of course supposes that this was an act of agency on your part, when it quite likely wasn't. You only know your perceptions. You only see an unanswered message, only hear an unflattering remark. And you wonder how many boxes on the list of rationales for distance you tick, and for how many people.

A quick glance through social media reveals the ghosts of your past, transfixed in present time.

I should point out that I'm generally terrible at keeping up with people over electronic means, which at the end of the day seem all too ephemeral to form anything other than a tenuous connection, even if I know that if I was to see a certain person face-to-face, five years after we'd seen each other, that within half an hour it would be as if no time had passed at all.

And I know that if I was to see other people, it would be like the two of you looking at distorted versions of one another. We slowly change, until, like photocopies of photocopies, we are no longer recognizable as such. We could be in the same room, invisible to one another.

But at the end of the day, I mostly feel like the same person, even as the rest of the world blurs and shifts.

And so I have to wonder will I ever become unrecognizable to myself?

Global South

It's hard when traveling through those parts of the world loosely described by optimists as developing, by less-than-optimists as underdeveloped, by cold-warriors as the Third World, by the vaguely left academy as the Global South, not to feel as if one is in the human zoo. Sure, people, travel to learn, but it's really not that different than an updated version of Victorian slum tourism as was practiced in the East End of London and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And I mean that on multiple levels. Not only were those well-heeled inhabitants of Belgravia and Central Park East interested in seeing how the other half lived – the poor dears! – there was also a libidinal aspect to it. Given the staid, conformist restrictions of late Victorian mores (notwithstanding the spiritualist-rituals and erotic-spanking underbelly), they wanted an antidote to bourgeois dullness, an environment of real risk and sexual frankness, some kind of transcendental link to a supposed core of human experience and earthy humanity that had been obscured by arguments over the proper way to instruct one's maids to fold the napkins.

So it is with backpackers today, and I regrettably have to include myself in their ranks, despite my protestations to the contrary at the time. It was what I was doing. When I first went to Cambodia, for example, it was largely because it was about as dissimilar a place from my middle-class, middlebrow, Middle-American hometown as I could imagine. I wanted to go someplace where the veil would be lifted.

I was in Satun Province, in the far south of Thailand, where I was to spend time with the Sakai, the indigenous forest pygmies of the Malayan Peninsula. Looking nothing like the surrounding peoples – ebony-skinned, with tightly curled hair, closer in appearance to New Guineans than East Asians, they lived in a somewhat fugitive state, trying, with limited success, to preserve the lifeways of their ancestors.

Giggling Thai schoolchildren whispered and took photos. Which was gross, but not nearly as gross as the fact that the village was filled with our shit. Plastic 7-Eleven bags, the butts of cheap Thai Tobacco Monopoly-branded cigarettes, crumpled toilet paper.

Repeat for Myanmar, Cambodia, the Philippines, Mexico.

This is the pattern of the Global South, as seen time and time again. Despite the vast differences in geography and religion, a certain typology emerges.

Barking dogs and roosters pecking at the ground, young men squatting close to the dirt, pausing in the day's work, tossed-aside cups of instant noodles, adorable children with dark eyes and skinny legs laughing and playing and running around in broken rubber sandals, flickering TVs playing the sort of broad-stroke entertainment beloved throughout the less irony-damaged parts of the world (the soap operas and variety shows that Americans have long-since eschewed in favor of pre-hated reality shows), men with bruised faces wearing t-shirts advertising Harley-Davidson dealerships in San Antonio, old women chewing something mysterious, plastic bottles filled with local hooch, the cinder-block homes of wealthier residents, and the universal smell of burning waste on a hot day, bamboo and coconut shells and firewood mingled with polystyrene.

Critics of globalization like to claim that late capitalism engenders a monoculture, a Shake Shack on every continent, what the French like to call “coca-colonization.” I've always been rather skeptical of that argument – while every local pattern of life is going to be inevitably altered, it's not necessarily going to mean that everything is going to look like a third-ring suburb of Chicago. Rather, if there is a monoculture resulting from globalization, this is what it looks like.

As rates of profit tend to fall, the forces of capital inevitably need to seek markets deeper and deeper into the Global South, and ideally add a few hundred million to the reserve army of labor. This isn't development along the Japanese or Korean model, where rural regions were developed with intelligent, long-term planning. This is the vulgarity of rent-seeking, regulatory capture, predatory lending from both institutions in the Western world as well as local loan sharks, the hand-greasing and wholesale buyout of local politicians, hell, whole states. Of ceaseless exploitation of natural and human resources with absolutely no consideration given as to who that affects and in what way.

If birthrates and economic patterns are anything to go by, then this will be a truer representation of our planetary future, by and large, than anything else: an empty sachet of Nescafe on a burning fire in the steamy tropical dawn.

In the Islands

This is how it went.

I arrived in Manila early in the morning, sleepless, with an upbeat taxi driver, vaguely Latin-sounding radio in Tagalog announcing NBA games (“Kyrie Irving, wowwww!!!”), before segue'ing into what I have long-known in Bangkok as “Filipino karaoke music,” those cheesy '80s power ballads that have been completely forgotten in the rest of the world, but remain close to the hearts of the 100 million-odd inhabitants of this benighted archipelago. The sun is rising, and Starship's 1987 number 1, “Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now” is playing. The kick drums come in, and Grace Slick starts to sing.

“Let 'em say we're crazy, I don't care about that

Put your hand in my hand, baby don't ever look back”

We come down off the freeway into a tangle of shacks and machine shops and freeway exits and railway sidings, and as we pull into our first stoplight, a gang of street urchins surround the taxi on all sides.

“Let the world around us fall apart”

“Lock the door! Lock the door!” the cab driver screams. I'm slamming the manual locks down, reaching over my luggage.

“Baby we can make it if we're heart to heart!”

The American-style street signs with Spanish names are smeared with smog, nine-story high slum towers spiral above us, tiny shops on their ground floors, young men of questionable mental capacity squatting on the curb, staring into the distance with vacant expressions.

“And we can build this dream together, standing strong forever, nothing's gonna stop us now!”

That is what set the tone for Manila. Mabuhay, motherfucker.

It is a city of greasy noodles and traffic-choked streets, Diego Rivera-type murals and hand-painted signs alternating with gorgeous mid-century graphics on the billboards, screaming transsexual hookers on Adriatico Street, cheery groups of youths harmonizing Taylor Swift songs and playing guitars at early morning coffee stands, jeepneys painted in peacock tones announcing “CHRIST IS KING!,” solitary teen mothers on park benches, the only other Westerners being beer-gutted American expats sweating through their tucked-in polo shirts, a cathedral full of schoolboys screaming English-language hymns with the lyrics on video screens, and ruin after ruin after ruin, dating from the Golden Age of Spanish exploration to just last week.

But the Philippines in general are an assault on the senses, and I say this who has spent years in Southeast Asia. It is a riot of color, a sublimely beautiful landscape subjected to every form of destruction known to man – earthquakes and volcanoes, typhoons and tsunamis, mudslides, insurrections both Maoist and Islamist, countered by even more horrifying state violence, most recently in Rodridgo Duterte's death squads sent for small-time drug offenders, political clan wars, petty street crime, far less petty mass-scale exploitation by the insulated, grotesque ruling classes (safely ensonced in the freakishly clean, heavily policed, Singapore-aping streets of Makati and Bonifacio) with the quiet backing of countless Chinese- and American-based multinationals, a vicious Spanish colonial regime, the suppression of Emilio Aguinaldo's revolt by the American “commonwealth,” the corrupt dictat of Ferdinand Marcos and his shoe-collecting wife, the naval assault on Corregidor, the largest naval battle history in the Leyte Gulf, the soldiers left by the wayside on the Bataan Peninsula, and in the case of Manila, wholesale destruction, a city savaged, bombed, and gang-raped into oblivion by both the retreating Japanese army and the American bombers at the end of World War II, leaving a city of smoldering craters and cordite-scarred marble Virgins Mary wondering what became of their shrines.

The Catholics came in the Spanish colonial quest for gold and soul, and they imprinted the ideals of Spain at the height of the Inquisition on the populace, bringing with them the icons of Medieval Catholicism, the eerie-eyed doll that would become the Santo Niño of Cebu, and the dark-faced Christ figure that would become the Nazareno Negro of Manila, and the combination of religious zeal and bodily mortification that continues to play out in the processions of penitentes flogging themselves, in the men who crucify themselves each year during Holy Week on the high plains of Pampanga, blood and sweat hitting the volcanic-ash soil in the height of the hot season.

Then came the Americans, winning the islands in William Randolph Hearst's manufactured war, Rooseveltian men with bushy mustaches in broad-brimmed cavalrymen's hats suddenly filling the islands, occupying the country for a few decades with all the brashness of a newly ascendant empire, leaving a city plan for Manila modeled on Chicago – subbing Manila Bay for Lake Michigan, and Roxas Boulevard for Lake Shore Drive, along with streets named Taft and McKinley, Forbes and Lawton, Babbittian institutions like the Rotary Club and the Jaycees, diners and art deco hotels and billboards taken straight from Humphrey Bogart film noir, archaic English-language first names left as if preserved in amber from the Coolidge administration, men named Archie and Gilbert, women named Edith and Daisy, along with odd constructions that sound like English names but which aren't, “Marzee” and the like, along with a taste for Hormel corned beef and Del Monte canned pineapple, the Jackie Gleason diet still going strong.

And so the whole country becomes a whirlwind tour of the 20th Century in all of its disastrous unfoldings.

Yet as soon as you get out of Manila, the country reveals itself to be a marvel. I ran into relatively few international tourists. Most of those that come stick to the beach towns of the South, Coron and El Nido, Puerto Princesa and Boracay. I was alone as I walked along the rim of the volcanic caldera in Tagaytay, overlooking the island on a lake on an island on a lake on an island. I was alone as I walked through the streets of Taal lined with ancient, earthquake-proof houses with oyster-shell windows and whitewashed arcades, the belfries of its Spanish basilica crumbling, ancient women in dresses with leg-of-mutton sleeves fanning themselves in the doorways. I ran into few other tourists in the rice terraces of the Cordillera that tumble down the sides of the deliriously high mountains like giants' stairwells, or in Sagada, where coffins are perched on piney cliffs, or in cozy Baguio, another town planned by the Americans and heavily bombed during the war, where I sat in the appropriately named “Cafe by the Ruins,” where elderly Filipino bohemians drank coffee brewed with cardamom and listened to Joan Baez, where I ate freshly made sweet potato rolls and local buffalo cheese and chocolate rice porridge to stave off the evening chill.

In 1884, a graduate of the local merchant marine academy from the Ilocos region in the Northern Philippines named Juan Luna de San Pedro y Novacio Ancheta went to Madrid to show his painting Spoliarium. He followed the old Spanish style of bloody and aquiline saints, of chiaroscuro and martyrdom, as pioneered by El Greco, Velazquez, and Goya, and painted the dead gladiators of the Roman Colosseum being stripped of their armor and dragged through the sand.

It hangs on the first floor of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Rizal Park, near where the park's namesake was executed for his resistance against the sclerotic Spanish regime, where it stands as a metaphor for a long-suffering people struggling for freedom.

And yet when I looked at it on that sweltering day it still seemed hopelessly modern. The incomparably sweet, wonderful people with whom I drank shots of gin and San Miguel beers, the betel-chewing guitarists who bade me to sing Merle Haggard songs with them, the balut vendors who chuckled as I tried to suck down a half-formed duck fetus in the shell on the streets of Ermita, I saw them all in the painting.

I don't put much stock in the Bible, but it comes to mind when I'm in a Catholic country, and I'm always struck by Ecclesiastes 1:9.

“The thing that has been, it is that which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun.”

And it says something that in 2019, I see the greatest of truths in a 140 year old painting of a dead gladiator and the weeping Christians in the catacombs beneath Rome.

Pictures of Vietnam

To write about Vietnam seems, at first, to be an impossibility. They've said it all, haven't they? A million travel blogs, novels, war correspondents? Every metaphor is exhausted, every photograph is taken, whether that was napalmed children running along a road in Tay Ninh Province in 1972, or a British Instagrammer posing in front of the setting sun over the spires of Ha Long Bay in 2019. #wanderlust.

And so, before I went to Vietnam, I had in my mind a set of images, the ones everyone who travels a lot has – the rice farmers in conical hats, the Haussmannized boulevards lined with little cafes serving syrupy sweet coffee, along with the older photos, the burning monks and the choppers on Saigon rooftops.

And yet what was most conspicuous was the prioritization of those more recent photos over the older ones, the absence of the history that has etched the name “Vietnam” in the American imagination. There are traces everywhere – the memorials to the fact that this was once the village of My Lai, that this was where the French came a cropper at Dien Bien Phu, the prison cells at Hanoi's Hoa Lo, with captions about the “serenity” of downed American fighter pilots who were held there (including photos of a visit by the late douchebag John McCain), a concrete bunker in the middle of a rice paddy somewhere near Da Nang, the gaps in the French-built cantilevers of the Long Bien Bridge in Hanoi, the occasional dusty case in an old museum captioned with the Politburo verbiage of another era (“The poison of reactionary culture of US-Quisling troops”), the mention that a temple had been a Viet Cong Hospital, the sight of an occasional Agent Orange victim.

But ultimately these are vague traces, hidden behind the present, like a painting painted over.

One goes to the imperial citadel of Hue, or rather, what's left of it after the bombing of the city as part of the Tet Offensive, and most of what you see are reconstructions resembling a Disney version of the Nguyen Dynasty, with barely a word as to their destruction. Or to the fact that to a generation of Westerners, their main knowledge of Hue came from the last scene of Full Metal Jacket, Matthew Modine belting out the Mickey Mouse Club theme as he marches through the burning city.

And when the remnants are made apparent, they are transformed into other tourist attractions, more things to see, more moments of sublimity for the shutter-happy traveler. You go to the Hanoi Hilton as part of the standard things-to-do-in-Hanoi list. Whole tourist shops are dedicated to propaganda posters.

So I spent a bare minimum of time encountering the recent past. What was presented to me was the mythic past, the trading city of Hoi An, old Confucian temples, the self-conscious romance ingrained in the French colonial architecture, the folkways of Hmong villagers on display in Sa Pa. The past that is presented with enough distance that the present can approach it without apprehension.

And as for the present, I can't hate. I can think of few better ways to enjoy the dusk than to sit by the Hoan Kiem Lake with a glass of bia hoi and a plate of sauteed clams.

Or any of the other moments of loveliness and transcendence – the rainfall on ancient cedars, plates of pigeons nested in fresh herbs, an old cannon fort on top of an island, crumbling concrete overlooking a crumbling limestone landscape, eating at by the relentless interaction of acid and base, whispering palms on beachsides, the delight of local hooch served in a reused water bottle, sliced green figs and starfruit, the pattern of the sun through the brise-soleil, the crusty old waiter who only addressed me in French – “l'addition, monsieur” – and the woman singing a Vietnamese-language cover of France Gall's “Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son,” the almost certainly false presumption that a gorgeous Vietnamese woman getting into a taxi on a Friday night in Hanoi was smiling at me.

I travel for two reasons: the first is the understanding.

There's the Gauguin painting of Tahitian natives that I always keep in mind, undoubtedly in my mind my favorite Gauguin, possibly the strangest of his paintings, with the cryptic phrase, equally cryptically capitalized and punctuated, written in the upper left-hand corner:

D'où Venons Nous

Que Sommes Nous

Où Allons Nous

Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going?

To travel is to position oneself in the grand arc of history, geological, biological, anthropological, sociological, psychological. Not to answer the question, but to extend one's understanding of the question itself.

But the second reason is also embedded in the painting, in the sheer sensuous delight of it.

That second reason is what I found in Vietnam, as cliché as it might be. And the knowledge that memory, as cursed as it can be, is the one thing the bastards can't take from me. I can always spend my time among the arabesques of my past, point to point, city to city, mountain to mountain, sea to sea. In 20 years' time, I might be keeping out the acid rain, three months' behind on my rent, holes in my shoes in a city threatened by the rising tide. But I'll have that bia hoi and those clams.

On one of my last days in the country, I climbed to the top of a hill on Cat Ba Island, only to find my intended location, an old cannon fort, closed. “Hey,” some French tourists called at me, “go up that path instead.”

I climbed up a rough trail, past the graves of the workmen who built it, to a new transmitter station embedded in the concrete of part of the old fort, a relic of the colonial era, with a view to the hundreds of tiny limestone spires below, the boats. I sat alone with the dust and the sun, amid the ruins for nearly an hour, not wanting to leave for anything in the world.

The two pictures intersected, old and new. And somewhere in my mind I knew it.

The Haunted Landscapes of The Simpsons

I've been finding myself drawn, during odd periods of downtime at work, or on solitary late Saturday nights, to a point of nostalgia, probably my most salient point of nostalgia, and probably the thing that shaped my worldview more than anything else – classic episodes of The Simpsons. 

I say, “classic episodes,” because like most 30+ year olds (and like many younger), I stopped watching as the show got shittier. This is a woefully unoriginal observation, to the point where every time someone brings it up I cringe a little. And besides, many people more talented than myself have written whole essays on how and why this happened, as well as why this tends to happen with long-running series in general (jumping the shark and all that). But the fact remains that watching newer episodes feels a little like running into the coolest kid from your elementary school – the one whose parents shelled out for a pair of L.A. Lights and could sing all of the lyrics to Green Day's “Longview” – and seeing him 50 pounds heavier than his high-school prime at a Main Street bar, before he cashes out his tab and drunkenly swerves his car out of diagonal parking.

In a way, I never left those episodes behind – I still remember banks of dialogue, and it's how I received so much of my early cultural education.

Here is a story about how this works in a different time. In 1944, Patrick Leigh Fermor was sent to Crete to capture a notorious Nazi officer. Having found that the general hat already left the island, he went for a secondary target, a career soldier named General Heinrich Kleipe. For days, he had marched the general through the rain and over the desolate terrain, until in a cave, having a smoke together, they see the peak of Mount Ida emerge from the clouds.

“Looking across the valley at this flashing mountain-crest, the general murmured to himself:

Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte…

It was one of the ones I knew! I continued from where he had broken off:

nec jam sustineant onus
Silvae laborantes, geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto,

and so on, through the remaining five stanzas to the end. The general’s blue eyes had swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine – and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: “Ach so, Herr Major!” It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before.”

Being of this century, my points of resonance with strangers from across the ocean are nothing like the odes of Horace. Rather, my version of Fermor's encounter with Kleipe is bound to be something more like me running into an asshole Irish expat going off about something, and muttering across the table: 

Itchy runs afoul of an Irishman... 

And one of my tablemates responds: 

Look out Itchy, he's Irish! 

Fermor had Horace. I have season 7, episode 18 of The Simpsons.

Of course, I'm pretty sure that classic episodes of The Simpsons does have far more universal appeal than Horace, even Horace 100 years ago when your options were far fewer. But not everyone took the deep dive like I did, although quite a few did, and wherever I've lived, I've found those fellow souls who, as Fermor put it, drank at the same fountain.

So the dialogue was at the surface of my mind, that I knew. But there were still things to be discovered.

The thing I notice more than anything else, that I never really understood before, was that part of the reason I was drawn to The Simpsons was that there was a loneliness at its core. Sure, a lot is made of the show's much-vaunted “heart,” which it had in spades in its golden years, but that sense of heart hinges on a deep-seated sadness. This is a family consisting of a father who worked a job he hated day in and day out, the housewife who once had dreams, the fundamentally good kid whose rebellion was inevitable, the isolated intellectual daughter, the youngest child who literally doesn't have a fucking voice.

And the aesthetics of Springfield bear this out. I know I'm late to the party in discovering it, but I keep finding myself drawn to the Scenic Simpsons Instagram page. Each image is by and large devoid of human presence, and consists of all of the background stuff that forms the show – an open telephone book, a flickering television screen, interior shots of familiar buildings, landscape.

Its creator uses the word “beautiful” to describe the imagery collected there, but that to me is missing the point. Rather, the first thing I am reminded of is the terrifyingly empty piazzas of Giorgio De Chirico.

 As a kid, I adored maps and photos of unknown places – my first childhood hero was Indiana Jones – and Springfield was just such another place, fictional and unknown and yet totally familiar to any American in the '90s. It was another thing I wasn't aware of then, but the background drawings of Springfield are hyperreal. It is a painfully anodyne suburban or small-town landscape, simplified and abstracted to almost childlike levels, and yet with the colors exaggerated and the occasional touch of the absurd, the laconic simplicity almost evoking something hidden, the scenery becomes resonant.

And this, too, reflects De Chirico's idea of the pittura metafisica. To De Chirico, the haunting effect comes through contrast, between light and dark, between monolith and emptiness, and, like Springfield, between the everyday scenery of the Italian city and the patently surreal.

 

It has embedded itself deeply in my consciousness. I need only look to the peace lily on my coffee table, my tweed sofa, the garden outside with its potted palms, and it takes only the slightest stretch of imagination to see it stylized, oversaturated, and transformed into flat fields of color, odd details haunting the corners.

Main Street USA

When I was in the fourth grade, I went to Disneyworld for the first and only time. For the most part it was a pretty standard experience. Like all kids, I was both totally pumped and completely shit-scared on Splash Mountain, I was just as shit-scared on the It's a Small World ride for completely different reasons, and I somehow realized, even then, that the Epcot Center reflected a kind of techno-optimism that already seemed passe, even to a child in 1996.

But my first view of Disneyworld was Main Street USA. This isn't exactly a hallmark attraction, but it's what you see when you first come through the gate, and its equivalent, which I'd experienced much younger, is also what you see when you first come through the gate at Adventureland in Altoona, Iowa, where I had my formative funnel cake and log-ride experiences.

And maybe that's because the welcoming experience is designed to be a comforting, familiar Americana, reproduced at 3/5 scale. It is an imagined America of the sort that Ronald Reagan invoked in his speeches about the horse-and-buggy days in Dixon, Illinois. We want to believe that at some point in America, there was this transcendent and indivisible notion of community. Nowadays, we think of the 1950s. But when the first Disney park opened, in the actual 1950s, the time of nostalgia was the 1910s, a time when Main Streets were indeed more vital, when small towns were still served by the railroad. And even in the 1910s, in the era of Fords and suffragettes, nostalgists invoked some kind of vaguely Jeffersonian or Jacksonian ideal.

It's hard to escape this particular cultural delusion. Both left and right political currents continue to appeal to “Main Street,” despite the fact that this is by and large a hologram.

Sure, there was a Main Street in my hometown – the “Main Street Cultural District” as it was eventually re-branded. What was “cultural” about it I never quite figured out. What it actually is and was is a strip, a few blocks long, of largely characterless early 20^th Century buildings, occupied by an American Legion hall, full of shops selling things like quilting supplies and diabetic footwear, and a clutch of bars at one end under the shadow of a coal-burning power plant -- an area I remember from my childhood as a vaguely sinister but somehow thrilling strip smelling of stale cigarette smoke and spilled beer, filled with the sound of clacking billiard balls and the roar of trucks from the nearby lumberyard.

Maybe the people in the 1950s or 1910s thought differently. But even in the 1910s... that was when Sinclair Lewis wrote Main Street, the landmark work about the hypocrisy and loneliness of life in a small Minnesota town, considered a classic, but increasingly little-read as that world becomes a memory of a memory.

Yet fewer books have had a greater impact on me. His store-by-store description of the Main Street of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota on a hot summer day, as experienced by the young doctor's wife, Carol Kennicott, of the rotten bananas in the shop-windows, the feckless locals at the saloon door, the rusticated masonry designed to provide a semblance of architectural manners. More than anything else, this seemed to be something that related to what I knew.

At that age, 15 or 16, I devoured books that seemed to get to that idea, reading nearly forgotten writers like Sherwood Anderson and Thomas Wolfe and Booth Tarkington – writers whose books I found on dusty library shelves and under cats at used bookstores. And I didn't just love them because they spoke to my experience, I loved them because they seemed to see through the veil in a way that contemporary writers didn't (and still by and large don't, but I'll leave that for another day).

We look to the Main Street iconography nowadays because of the spiritual poverty and hopelessness of the present, in the same way that people of Lewis' and Anderson's day looked to Main Street because it seemed to represent a purer America than the industrial cities. And more often than it ought to, it forms the backbone of a grotesque and reactionary politics.

So I decided to go back to where it all began – not in person, but through the all-seeing eye of Google Street View. And not to Disneyworld's Main Street USA, which is probably the same simulacrum it has always been and always will be, but to the basis for Main Street USA, Walt Disney's hometown of Marceline, Missouri.

I knew what to expect. Few areas of America have been as thoroughly depopulated over the past 100 years as Northern Missouri, an area of soil too poor to compete with the rich black loam of Northern Iowa and Minnesota, and rangeland too constricted to compete with the plains of Kansas and Texas. Lacking in substantive industry, mineral resources other than a sulfurous coal only suited to steam engines, or towns of any size to serve as hubs, largely isolated from major transit routes, and without the mountains and lakes of the southern part of the state that attract droves of tourists, Northern Missouri, along with adjacent areas of Southern Iowa and Western Illinois, has become a dead zone.

What one sees in Marceline, Missouri, is a town, like many others, destroyed, with a vacated town square, American flags fluttering outside abandoned shops.

 

Meanwhile, in Anaheim and Orlando, and at the versions Disney has exported to its properties in the greener pastures of the Far East, it is still a place of parades and baton-twirlers, barbershop quartets and soda fountains. Somewhere in the distance, "In My Merry Oldsmobile" or "Daisy Bell" plays.

Most of the clientele has never seen a quartet sing in a barbershop, never been to a soda fountain, and the songs that are playing were hits before even their grandparents were born. But the nostalgia is not their nostalgia, it's the national nostalgia. And like most nostalgias, it acts as a cover for the fact that we have given up hope.

Travelers' Conversations

You're on a long trip somewhere, and after a day on the road, you've finally come to a place where you can rest -- maybe it's a coffee shop, or a bar, or the common area of a hostel. The fact that it is a place popular among other travelers is its sole distinguishing characteristic. It doesn't matter what the specifics are, and it certainly doesn't matter what country you're in. This could be Cambodia or Costa Rica, Antwerp or Agra. What matters is the company that you're among.

You have settled in. Maybe your coffee has arrived, or a glass of the local beer.

Suddenly, you realize that someone is looking at you.

"Oh, hey, you're reading that book? Oh my god, I loved it but not as much as I loved The Martian. Have you read The Martian? So much better than the movie, right? Oh you haven't read it? You have to!"

And with that, the book goes on your lap, and you politely smile and nod in assent, neither really agreeing nor disagreeing, nor really giving a shit.

"Oh you were in Laos too? How long? Just a week? I was there for two."

A man with dreads rolling a cigarette in the corner pipes in. "Yeah, Laos was cool. I was there three weeks."

They begin to compare notes. "Yeah, I went on this trek." "Of course I went to the Four Thousand Islands." Another chimes in. "Ohhhhh, well I was supposed to go to Si Phan Don" -- using the Lao name, a surefire way to establish credibility -- "but I had stopped over at this gorgeous riverside temple, and I just couldn't bear to leave."

The variations of this game of one-upsmanship are endless. The most places you've been, of course, is the main competition, but there are countless others. Whether you went somewhere or really went somewhere, really experienced it. The allotted minimum of time needed in a certain place. The roughest country bus rides, the spiciest meals, the foulest local hooch, the friendliest locals, the wildest parties, the most miserable hangovers (contrasted with whatever intense activity they were supposed to be doing that day, which usually involves having to climb a mountain), the most unspoiled beaches, the most overrated destinations, all one great footrace towards some very nebulous and very Eurocentric notion of "authenticity."

There is also, of course, the conflation of a brutal tight-fistedness and transcendence. These conversations tend to be long gripe-fests involving flight deals, discounts, haggling skills, hand-wringing about how much someone overpaid for something, the most exorbitant tourist scams, the best way to avoid said exorbitant tourist scams, and of course beefs with "dumb tourists" (which can generally be interpreted to mean most anyone other than the person speaking).

Somewhere, typically around beer number three, the ethnic divisions start to show. This is where you meet the Japanese tourist who tells you the Rape of Nanking never happened, the Brit who defends his arrogance and pettiness by saying "you don't understand English sarcasm," the German who mutters something about Muslims, the American who loudly and bitterly complains about the lack of vegan and gluten-free options.

When I'm in this situation, this is typically the point where everyone else goes to the club, and I go to bed.

And it's the point where, when I go up to my hotel room and stare at the ceiling, then at my phone, then back at the ceiling. In my cheap room, I can hear the water run through old pipes, see the headlights sweep across the walls, again and again.

I'll be thinking about my own attempts to try to escape the fucking chokehold of late-capitalist expectations, about my own frugality and the very Protestant way in which I see it as a sign that I'm winning, about my own gripes as I travel, about my annoyance at the sanitized tawdriness in Amsterdam, the unsanitized tawdriness in Phnom Penh, about my self-consciousness about my American traits -- the terminology I use, the tendency to act like a big kid while drunk -- about how I get just as pissed at the people I consider to be the dumb tourists.

But then I wake up in the morning. I see the steeple of a Medieval church cutting across the sunrise, or smell baking empanadas from a back alley kitchen entrance, or hear the sounds of drums in a Chinese temple. And in that moment, the breeze crossing my face, it is mine and mine alone.