Coffee, Grass, Blood and Bugs

Even with my continual attempts at lateness (I fumble for the snooze button, get back into bed after I’ve taken a shower, check my e-mail, collapse into my piles of clothes desperately strewn), my father demands that we arrive in downtown Philadelphia a good 30 to 45 minutes before I want to go anywhere near the building where my internship is located. Instead of going straight there from the car, I’ve taken to wasting my first coffee while sitting in Rittenhouse Square and reading. It’s sort of comforting to be there, watching all the badly dressed, frenzied business people walk past. Rittenhouse Square always smells a little disgusting, but the kind of pleasant putrid that is comforting to me. Rotten grass and bags from Dunkin Donuts left in the rain. I sit on a bench that isn’t too close to obvious trash or sleeping bums, and I don’t smoke, not because I don’t want to, but because I’m giving myself a break from that for now. The random guys in too-thin t-shirts who congregate in the square howl at each other (“Motherfuckin’ bitch! Man, how you doin’?) and they pick through the trash cans and cackle and I sort of hold in my smile in. It’s so very Philadelphia, all of this incongruity: beautiful statues, wealthy commuters, cursing regulars, a girl reading boyish Westerns.

I’ve been into very male books lately. First D’ambrosio, and now I’m on a Cormac McCarthy kick. I never took McCarthy seriously before this year, but in my attempts to embrace things that were dark in a different way than the angsty stuff I usually favor, I found myself really liking him. He’s light on character development, but everything in his books is perfect, pulsing, and starkly glowing. He’s a true modernist writer with almost psychedelic spells of beauty that overcome his vague, somewhat cliché characters. The men he writes about are burns, or tattoos—they don’t change, just harden. There’s always more to see out of what they are, but they don’t become anything else. And the world he writes: the timeless Mexico of All the Pretty Horses shocks you with a truck, a radio. In Blood Meridian, which I’m working on again now, the struggle is almost Biblical, but the characters are from Texas, Kentucky, Tennessee. These are books about power, but not the pure aesthetic emotional power that McCarthy could have used (he has the talent of words, certainly). They about evil and love and a weird brand of subtlety-- descriptions of snake-bit horses that entrance me enough to read them again and again, shriveled hearts, and a world of dust and blood that is so seductively gorgeous it seems scary.

So I close my book, and I walk the seven blocks to work with these images in my head. I may not enjoy my job so much, and I certainly wouldn’t want to live in the epic that is McCarthy’s world. But holding one close to me when I have the other, knowing they can both exist through me, through anyone—that’s the idea, and that’s what I’m floating this summer past. Half an hour of gorgeous veins spraying like geysers against a campfire and dead animals prepares me for a day of researching higher education affordability in Pennsylvania. It’s not forever, but I’m glad I have it now.