freedom blog

I love you, Memorial Day weekend. To me, you’re High Americana, shot through with just enough melancholy to keep things from getting too cheesy. While the Fourth of July is all about the tacky machismo of, say, losing an eye in a firecracker injury, you’re more about feeling nostalgic for something that never existed.

I’m all for emo patriotism.

I want to peel off a hundred dollar bill

and slap it down on the counter.

You can pick out a dress. I’ll pick out a tie: polka dots

spinning like disco balls. Darling let’s go

two-stepping in the sawdust at the Broken Spoke.*

Memorial Day weekend offers a sense of expansiveness, a certain generosity of spirit that I admire in others but have never quite managed in myself.

Let’s get hitched in Nevada. Just you, me, and Elvis.

We could sell cheese curd in Wisconsin.

We could rent the sky in Montana.

I could pay off my bills.

There’s this sense that anything’s possible.

This weekend, I want to make mudpies with Walt Whitman. I'll teach him to hum rock songs and he'll teach me not to be so afraid of birds.

I want to drink real Coke and watch old movies with Frank O’Hara. (And I don’t even like old movies. Or real Coke.)

I want to take a road trip with Sufjan Stevens and stare at him the whole way to California.

I want to have my beastly way with Matthew Dickman at one of the rest stops. Then we'll drive to some weird hotel in a state that I’m too dumb to find on the map.

We’ll walk to the community theater and invite the cast out for drinks after. We’ll sing Billy Joel songs at a bar that doesn’t believe in irony.

(Basically, I’m a gay man in my secret heart.)

You are everywhere, sweet Carolinas.

You’re my boss, Tennessee, you honeysuckle.

Sadly, my real life doesn’t have the plot of a quaint porno. So instead of doing those things, I’m going to hunker down on a patio somewhere and drink some beer, which also sounds pretty good.

America, let’s put our feet in the water! Let’s tie a rock

around our waist and jump in. The river

is rolling by. Tom Petty is singing about a girl from Indiana

and I am buying you another drink. I am trying to take you home.

Outside it’s the kind of warm where your skin feels charged after a spell in the sun. Maybe you’ll glow like a lightstick when it gets dark.

Summer is starting and your heart is so fucking full that a few lazy afternoons might make up for the unfairness, the pity, that we're not allowed to hold these fleeting gifts in our grubby human hands.

*All excerpts are from “All-American Poem,” by Matthew Dickman.

o hammond!

While there may be few things sadder than a neglected blog (sigh, time to dust off the old hairshirt), I can speak the True Name of at least one of them: the Horseshoe, an Indiana casino, circa Monday night.

Pre-Monday, I had never in my life been to a casino because, you know, I have no desire to live under a bridge. For one thing, I’m bad at math. For another, I associate casinos with Las Vegas, a city near the top of my list of places in which I have no interest whatsoever. I just can’t understand a town where the cultural touchstones are Hunter S. Thompson, Elvis impersonators, Barry Manilow, and Siegfried & Roy.

Casinos have this weird sensibility that I can only describe as...drag queen machismo? It’s sort of like a check-cashing facility meets the most depressing gay bar on the planet.

Now, all of that said, I was super-excited to go to the Horseshoe, mostly because sometimes I like to pretend that I live in a Bruce Springsteen song.

I suppose the first sign that the whole experience would be more depressing than I could have imagined was the sign in the elevator that informed patrons that it’s illegal to leave children alone in the parking garage. I mean, that’s impressive, and I’m from Tennessee.

But that fascinating little reminder was nothing compared to the epiphany I had upon walking onto the casino floor, which is when every futuristic dystopian novel I’ve ever read suddenly seemed less like preachy NPR fan fic and more like war-zone reportage. The pleasing pings and hypnotizing lights were interrupted only by my (not infrequent) observation that polyester short-shorts and lace-up corsets aren’t really a great look for most of the cocktail waitresses of Indiana.

Was the Horseshoe casino, as its website purports, the “ultimate gambling experience?” As a first-timer, it’s hard for me to say. If the ultimate gambling experience involves an empty back room with five-dollar slot machines, plus a lot of disabled people at penny slot machines, well, it was definitely up there.

If you think I’m being judgmental, I hasten to add I can vouch for the surge of dopamine that shoots through one’s addled brain when one wins, let’s say, three dollars at the slots. The same machine that celebrates a one-nickel gain like it’s 1999 is diplomatically silent when you’re on a losing streak. You pump these machines full of dirty dollars (not a bucketful of quarters, much to my disappointment) and they return your winnings on small slips of paper that resemble receipts.

Which, I suppose, they are—receipts for whatever price you’ve paid (around $30, for me) to inhabit an unreal city for a while, to be taken in by its soothing bleeps and bloops before you’re spit out into the sobering sprawl of a concrete parking garage that seemingly goes on for miles. We staggered to the car like overstimulated toddlers, all disoriented and dizzy. I saw spots. Here now, a day later, I’m still blinking extra hard.