Headache Outta Hades

I had high hopes for this weekend. So many fun projects to do and places to go. Letters to write. Packages to put together. A lovely shift at the zoo on a warm afternoon. But my head had other ideas.

I got a nasty migraine, seemingly impervious to Imitrex and sleep, that ground through me for just about 40-odd hours. After nearly two days of lying in bed and slowly moving around the house with my neck held as still as possible, the pain finally broke. While clearly relieved that my head no longer felt on the verge of exploding, the duration of the headache left my brain muddled and fuzzy and loopy and shaky. I felt (and looked) like I had just fallen out of a nest.

But, goddammit, I needed to get out of the house.

After a short round of begging Matt agreed to take me to McKay Used Books, one of my favorite shops in the city. While the Sunday afternoon crowds were a bit much for me to handle, it was an immense pleasure to be doing something other than lying horizontally. I spent a half hour loading up on used books (mostly Margaret Atwood with a side of Clan of the Cave Bear) and replenishing my all-important VHS collection (first mentioned here).


QUESTION: What kind of movies peak your interest after a 40+ hour migraine leaves you essentially brain dead?

ANSWER:




Anyone want to come over for a movie?

Parallel Lives in St Louis

Three years ago, I thought I was going to live in St Louis. Matt and I had a deposit on an adorable 1920's apartment with built-in shelves and a hutch in the kitchen, and Matt had all but printed up his syllabi for Wash U. Then, two weeks before move, Matt got off the waiting list for Vanderbilt.



Crap.


Life is funny so we scratched our plans and started a new existence in Tennessee. It has been interesting, and frustrating, and lonely and satisfying by turns, and at the very least I can attest that the experience of living somewhere totally unexpected for a few years is a worthwhile one. But in the back of my heart I still regret never putting in my years in St Louis, looking over the vast Mississippi to the Illinois shore.

So when my birthday rolled around (and it was THE BIG ONE this year) I decided we should spend a long weekend investigating our lives in a parallel universe.





When you cross the Mississippi you are most certainly in the city. Factories still churn and puff smoke downtown. St Louis feels like Pittsburgh on steroids, or Cincinnati stretched and flattened, or Philly with more infrastructure and meat. Walking around the half-deserted downtown it's obvious that this was once the second largest city in the country.

My mom and stepdad put us up in a fancy hotel as a gift. The room was large and opulent, with a tv somehow installed behind the bathroom mirror and a walk-in shower that rainfalled water and a minibar stocked with champagne and grey goose. But when you looked out the window the next block was a hilariously ramshackle scooby-doo ghost town.





(Note: I wish I could claim the descriptor "scooby-doo ghost town" but it comes from this incredibly funny video.)

It was cold in Missouri, the first and only time I've felt bitter temperatures this winter. We spent a 25 degree day exploring the St Louis Zoo, and enjoying the privacy of the nearly empty park.





A few of the more tender animals were locked away, and we visited them in their barns or squinted into their empty enclosures. However, some of the animals were quite happy with the chilly air.





The next day we visited a friend at his t-shirt shop / screen printing emporium, STyLe House. We talked cities, pet the resident kitty, perused the shop, and ended up getting two very stylish STL shirts.





That afternoon we headed to the City Museum, achieving a dream I've had since I heard about the place from Matt three years ago. I have tried to explain the city museum several times, but I can't quite find the right words for it. It describes itself as "eclectic mixture of children's playground, funhouse, surrealistic pavilion, and architectural marvel". There are no maps, no rules, and a liability waiver. It's a warehouse-sized sculpture you can climb all over, that also houses an architectural museum, and a shoelace factory. And a thrift store. And an aquarium. And a bar. And the largest mosaic in the country. Oh, and it's open until midnight on weekends. Look, I don't think I'm doing a very good job here but check out these pictures and promise me you'll go if you are ever in that part of the country, ok?













(Note: Yes, this is a ten-story spiral slide. Yes, we slid down it and stood wobbling until our brains stopped spinning. )




In this picture I am taking a breather after crawling through a cave full of dragon sculptures and petting a giant catfish. It was such an amazing afternoon, and the city museum definitely clinched a spot on my top ten list of magical places.

We spent the rest of the weekend eating tasty food, drinking delicious Schlafly beer, walking around gorgeous neighborhoods and playing penny slots at the casino. But, like all good things, our time in St Louis came to an end.

We left on a Sunday morning so foggy all we could see were the great white feet of the arch, the apex lost above our heads. As we left we spoke of the regret of all the places we'll never live, and promises to travel more.


















BONUS: check out this hilarious turtle we saw at the St Louis Zoo.

Meanwhile, at the Nashville Zoo...

August - December

I took a season's sabbatical from blogging, and here is what you missed:


I visited the Yazoo Brewery here in Nashville, and drank a lot of straight off the conveyer-belt beers while walking around the giant stainless steel tanks.




I also saw Tall Glenn Danzig there, checking out the Dos Perros.




I spent two 100+ degree days wandering around Memphis with my mother, including an incredibly moving trip through the Civil Rights Museum. It is built into the back of the Lorraine Motel, and the last stop on the self-led tour is standing inside the room Dr. King had rented, staring out at the site of his assassination.




Halfway through August Matt came back from Pittsburgh! It was sweet to live together again, and we did lots of fun things like look for Monkey Balls.



Monkey Balls, or Osage-Oranges as they are properly called, are giant green fruits filled with seeds that are altogether inedible. Nothing can eat them, except domesticated horses and mules and the occaisonal determined squirrel (and they don't seem too hot on them either). But wait, you may be saying. Dr. Carrie, isn't the whole point of fruit to entice animals to eat them and shit the seeds elsewhere, thereby perpetuating the species?




Well, I'm glad you asked that.

The osage-orange, along with other fruits like the pawpaw and honey locust pods, are thought to have co-evolved with the now extinct megafauna that once roamed North America. Animals like mastodons, gomphotheres and giant sloths could easily eat the fruits whole and pass the seeds, spreading the osage-orange throughout North America. This article, entitled Anachronistic Fruits and the Ghosts Who Haunt Them (ie Best Title Ever), explains the process well. For those of you who might need a little additional clarification, I worked up this diagram:




The tail end of summer turned into a long, warm Autumn. October was consumed with Halloween witchcraft, including some very elaborate costume planning and throwing a rad Halloween party. Here I am in costume as Frank Rossitano from 30 Rock:



My hat says "HOLLOW WEENIE".

Here is Matt as "the white guy from All-4-One":




Then November came and I disappeared socially, hermiting myself up to compete in NaNoWriMo, aka National Novel Writing Month. Over the course of 30 days I wrote a 144 page feminist sci-fi epic called In the Shadow of the Mechanical Planet. I was among the 14% of contenders who finished, and December 1st looked pretty sweet from the winner's circle:





Now it's 11 days into December and the leaves are off the trees and the garden is finally dead. The blackened cores of the okra stalks still raise up four feet above my head, between me and the clear winter sky.





But if you brush aside the leaves piled up in the garden, you can still find cilantro growing, verdant and strong, 14 days before Christmas.






It's nice to be here and it's nice to be back.

Worst Case Scenarios

I've been living alone this summer, which gives me lots of time to imagine worst case scenarios. Here are the top 10.

10) You look out the window to find the entire view filled with the giant eye of an monstrously immense beast.

9) You hang your leg over the side of the bed only to be grabbed at the ankle by the withered hand of a zombie demon.

8) You unsuspectingly sit on the couch only to be grabbed at the ankle by the withered hand of a zombie demon.

7) You stand by the toaster heating up a poptart only to be etc etc etc zombie demon.

6) Corpse behind the shower curtain.

5) The cat runs away (and never really liked you).

4) Mucous tentacle crawls out of shower drain.

3) A hairy yelling monster barges through the door and jumps on you.

2) You get pantry moths.

1) You die right before the good part.

I Heart Kennywood

When I was in Pittsburgh I had the good fortune to spend the afternoon at one of my favorite places in the world: Kennywood. For those unacquainted with this particular slice of heaven, here is Kennywood in a teacup:

It opened in 1898 as a trolley park and since then has been open continuously, featuring such wholesome attractions as picnic groves, dance halls, games of chance, swimming pools and rides. Today it is a top notch amusement park, maintaining both a collection of modern thrill rides as well as some shambling mechanical marvels that date back to 1918 (The Whip) and 1927 (The Turtles) as well as two wooden coasters dating back to the 1920's (The Jack Rabbit - 1920 and The Racer - 1927).

I could go on about Kennywood forever, but fortunately I don't have to. Rick Sebak and WQED were kind enough to make a documentary about this park back in the 1980's, which will provide you with all you need to know.

Kennywood Memories, Part One


I was too busy having fun to get many snapshots, but here are a few of my favorites. Unfortunately we had so much fun we didn't get to stay past dark and see the wonderful transformation as all the neon buzzes to life.



The last I heard, this is one of the two last remaining Noah's Ark dark attractions left in the world. The other one, if it is still alive and kicking, resides in Blackpool, England. For however shabby it gets from season to season, it remains close to my heart.




The Bayern Kurve, a bobsled themed go-round-and-round-and-round-till-you-puke ride is back in action after being in storage for many years. The best part of this ride is that right when you are at your fastest and most disoriented, an air horn blasts right in your face. I think I actually traveled to another dimension.


Kennywood is home to an arcade that features such diverse entertainment as a wall of skeeball machines (50% actually functional), the world's largest claw machine (filled with child-sized Domo-kuns), as well as a variety of pseudo-gambling machines, creepy fortune tellers that thrust their mechanical chests out with simulated sighs, and video games spanning the past 30 years.

I was totally blown away by the stencil work on some of these old cabinets.



This is an Asteroid cabinet, in all its terrifying jagged space monster glory.




Here an original Ms. Pacman cabinet stands back-to-back with an AMAZING Moon Patrol cabinet (are you seeing this??)

Seeing these machines persisting unchanged from the 1980's brought to mind the Polybius urban legend. If you are looking for a little reading material, check out this site: The Polybius Home Page . I love creepy urban legends and this one certainly hits the spot.


In short, Kennywood, you are the best. See you next summer!




Postscript - This is the advantage of having a father-in-law who runs an antique store: when you come home flushed and gushing about how much you adore Kennywood, he will surprise you the next day with an authentic 1950's Kennywood propeller beanie. I am so lucky.

Inspiration on the Streets

Somehow in my months away I had forgotten about the art that swells in every corner of Pittsburgh: painted by a grant from the city, thrown up overnight on bridges and brick walls, shipped and assembled in galleries or just hanging out in the street, faded from years of drizzle and sun. In the steel city, inspiration is never far from you.






These murals, a bit worse for wear, are on the side of a community center in Mount Oliver.





A corner of an installation at the Society for Contemporary Craft, titled "The Captains Congress."





A statue of Leda and the Swan, spotted in a strip district parking lot.





A husky walrus spouts Italian for "Bitten Alive" on a wall in Bloomfield.





A few KIDS pieces (RIP) are still going strong in the city. This one is on the side of a property on Butler Street.





Two birdies peck in the window of a restaurant in progress... very slow progress.





My personal favorite, a reminder of what it's all about, currently residing on the pavement outside the Quiet Storm in Garfield.