Lonelytown, USA

I would say that today is like Freaky Friday, because I wrote a post on Lauren's blog: Hipstercrite, and she is here haunting my soul...er, My Soul is a Butterfly.


But it's not Friday, and when Lauren writes, I see things through her eyes in beautiful, tragic colors. Sometimes I even feel them. Sometimes they are sad, faded polaroids, and sometimes they are happy crayon drawings or bittersweet watercolors or fun fingerpaints. But they are always beautiful.



Since the root of the conflict in Freaky Friday was that the mother and daughter could not do this, could not see tragic colors through each others eyes, I must conclude that Lauren and I are not like Freaky Friday at all.


We are simply swapping blogs, which sounds a whole lot less exciting.


However, I know you will enjoy Lauren's words and hope that you tell her so. I also hope you will stop by her place to read mine.


Be sure leave some evidence in comment form.


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Sunday Night Salvation


"I wonder whatever happened to my art teacher in Potsdam," the old man in a flannel overcoat says to no one in particular.


"No one even knew that we were dating." 

He sits alone at the counter, rubbing his starched Elks Lodge cap.

"She wanted to marry me, you know?" he excitedly tells the short order cook who suggests the slightest nod of interest.

"I wonder where she is."

The old man trails off. Lost in his own thoughts, his memories.

Completely unaware to the fact that no one is listening to him.

It's Sunday evening in Lonelytown, NY. A town of 19,000 and dropping. One of the many forgotten children born from the Northeastern Rust Belt. The child, strong and willful, always did what he was told, never once questioning authority, never once breaking down. The child bled the blood and sweat the sweat of a good Christian boy. Until one day, the child watched all the fruits of his labor plucked from his cracked, begrimed fingers and hidden away, never to be returned. Without warning or explanation, the child was told that he was no longer needed, that his existence simply no longer mattered. Lost, the child spent his days walking through the shadows of gray empty boxes, walking and walking until he became old and talked to no one in particular about his art teacher in Potsdam.

I'm sitting in Frank and Mary's Diner. The only place open after 5PM in Lonelytown.

The only salvation for the forgotten.

As a child, my mother told me never to go into Frank and Mary's.

"It's smoky," she'd say. "It's smoky and only the riff raff go in there."

She's right, but maybe it's the only thing left that can connect me to this lonely town. This town I ran from as soon as I was old enough. Tonight, as I drove through the shadows of what this town could have been, trying to conjure some semblance of sadness, I found myself here, standing below the broken neon sign, gazing into the milky opaque of the windows, forcing myself to remember that this town, this statistic, this darken spot on the map of the World, is my hometown.

Frank and Mary is a symbol. A hazy staple, stuck in time, refusing to adapt. The resistance of change, would be good if there was nothing to change, but this town has only everything to gain.

Lonelytown, NY simply gave up.

The waitress asks me for my order. She can't be much older than myself, but the dullness in her eyes says that she understands life more than I can pretend. The automated rhythm of her writing down my order, pouring my coffee, handing the slip to the cook implies a monotony I will only fully understand on my drive home this evening.

I try to drum up something, anything, as I sit here watching the old man quietly eating his eggs alone, but all I feel is a cold wind.

Only a realization that I'm forcing a sentiment that I have already mourned- the death of ignorance that this town could be anything more for me than the place of my birth.

Nothing more than a town that showed this child everything she didn't want to be. A way out.

The old man will come back here tomorrow and the next day.

And I am sitting in any diner, any story, in the wake of opportunism.