“Do you see that house? I used to know a kid who lived there,
he had the biggest tongue in the world. ”- Jeffrey Beaumont
One final recap from the road-trip, hopefully posting this last series has been somewhat of an interesting or at least amusing insight.
While helping my dad do chores at his sister's farm, I noticed an embroidered plaque up on the wall of the cabin: it was one of the several poems my grandmother had gotten published in her lifetime. After writing it down, like a lot of things I've warped out of context, this reinterpretation of family history from my perspective got all messed up somehow.
There's always this inner amalgamation when you spend most of your life thousands of miles away from anywhere remotely resembling a "home." Also spending most of a childhood being uprooted yearly undermines any sense of security as far as a conventional homestead goes. There's both a mental Photoshop (blur filter mostly) that lets you focus in on only what you want to see, and if it's an idyllic, pastoral perspective, hey, that's cool. But both a romanticized, or a critical, view of the past has tended to erode somewhat over time, and soon enough reverts to the reality of anywhere else and everybody else alive. Not to mention the adage "wherever you go... there you are." I spend an inordinate amount of time traveling around inside my head while hunched over a sheet of paper, and still use the same filters while observing and contemplating the places one is from, and the things one has done and had happen to, and strain them through experience and memory. In the same way Lynch's unflinching portrayal of the darker underbelly to idyllic home-town life de-mythologizes the rosy-hued scrapbook tucked away in the attic of our brain. There's always a sordid side to family, and personal, history, and the accompanying loss of naiveté or innocence
“I'm seeing something that was always hidden.
I'm in the middle of a mystery and it's all secret.”- Jeffrey Beaumont
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