It was cloudy. It was always cloudy, that’s what I remember.
People in Indiana chuckle a lot. Life moves slow. Actually, it’s like an oversized college basketball team that bullies other teams on the low rebounds: it slows YOU down. It makes you play at its pace. Think you’re walking through this room, think you’re exhibiting this people skill, this professional skill, well you better make sure it jibes with the locals, or you’re entering a world of sh**.
I was driving through the middle of Indiana in early February. This was my idea of a vacation. It’s safe to say I was masochistic. But whatever, Frisco, Cali just didn’t do it for me, the south was weird, nobody lived in the Dakotas or Idaho, and New York and the Pacific Northwest were too far away to drive, from my temporary, transplant, lost-soul home in suburban Denver. I had made it up to Minnesota, felt the biting cold of northern Iowa and thought to myself, “THIBIBIBISSS ISN’T THAT COBOBOBOLLLD…” Then back out west, in Kansas, it was just like floating on a cloud again. I could see how The Wizard of Oz could take place here. It’s that kind of place.
Indiana is the land of Rudy and Hoosiers. It’s the land of working hard, of trying harder than the other guy. There’s no being blown away, you’re firmly wedged in reality, and young black dudes will chuckle menacingly with hateful eyes if they think their sister is scorning you. There’s a set of eyes around every corner. The land is old, fetid and frustrated. There are 63 people in line to do your job, if you’re not good at it, until then they’re going to watch TV and chainsmoke cigarettes, ‘cause sugah there’s jack squat else to do. The world is lined with new, arbitrary faces, that are in line to take the place of the other new, arbitrary faces.
It’s like Pittsburgh without the color. Literally. Race relations aren’t as good. It’s like Pittsburgh without the punk band rallying Belvedere’s after the Califone show at the Thunderbird, without the crazy kid skateboarding at like 30 mph down the hill on 36th St., without that buxom, beautiful whore in the red dress on Penn Ave smiling at you, just before that five-way intersection, you just wishing you had a balconied apartment to invite her back to, that and maybe 50 bucks and some rubbers.
Indiana is a pointless place. The point of it is that it’s what you drive through when you’re going from Ohio to Chicago. That, and it’s a way to escape Michigan, in the state capital of which I was once forced to watch the movie American Psycho on full blast on all three TV’s, since it was still two hours ‘til the Clergymen show (great now defunct Chicago pop/punk act) and there were literally no other bars around, just get-’er-done type little empty lots and people’s private homes. Homes, you couldn’t walk into those. If you did, you were a criminal. So you watched a dude chainsaw naked ladies after making them go a**-to-mouth on each other. But remember that, YOU’RE intrinsically a criminal. You, at home, reading this. You are intrinsically bad. That’s important to remember, folks, especially in Michigan or Indiana. Have some respect for perverted naked chainsaw massacre, it’s less creepy than you are. At least, intrinsically.
Nothing is stopping in 2010. Against all logic. Everything is keeping going. And the less you know, the better, The stupider you are, the more likely you are to be able to keep a job, and to have friends. Don’t let anybody tell you differently. Nothing is as harmful to one’s sum total of social potential as a positive, galvanized mental identity. Or inspiration, in other words.
There’s a town in Kansas on I-70 called Selena, but that’s not what this story is about. This story is about a girl named Celina. These things are related, and they’re unrelated. If you knew this girl Celina, you’d know what I mean.
Celina was buxom, not petite, probably every bit of five-eight, exaggerated posterior and bust, but well in shape, not unbecoming. She carted that body around with an inimitable swank, too.
Celina had gotten raped when she was 17. At a party, a party where a lot of people were at, at something like four or five in the morning, when everybody was asleep, including her, except for one sick fu**. It was just finger-raped, though, but still, a guy entered her when she was drunk, unconscious, and virgin, making her bleed from the pelvis.
I saw Celina later that summer, we went to a concert with a group of for or five others, again driving the flat route on down through Indiana to Indianapolis, “Indy,” from our home in the northern anti-college-town of South Bend. It’s called South Bend because it’s lodged on the southern bend of the St. Joe River, the smell of which a certain perversion set on by living in the area for long enough can actually make you enjoy, believe me. It’s a South Bend thing.
And you learn to deal with people, with how people are, too. It’s a similar occurrence. You live among atrocities, you listen to Weezer and Pearl Jam, you take out the trash. It’s “money,” dude. Except it never seems like that. It never actually seems fake, in Indiana. Because it’s not.