why that old place keeps bringing me back

Oh, I haven't left for the trip yet. I thought I should get into a little backstory. This summer kind of story. See, I just got back from Kentucky where I visited my family and where I go visit a couple of times each year. It is a long and arduous ten-hour journey and while I don't love it, I feel marginally obligated to go there. I do love driving through West Virginia on the way though. I like to think I'll find something that is no longer there or that I'll see something that is so disgusting and destructive that I won't be able to take my eyes away, but I'll stare, memerized and disgusted. I hope to see a strip mine, a petroleum refinery, or even, as I did see, a big old Dupont Teflon factory.

But I am back now from that Kentucky trip and this summer was meant for traveling, even if I am not leaving the country, not yet, and even if when I return home I want to hide out in my air-conditioned apartment for a long time, not even daring to travel down the street.

I figured it out. I am taking all of these trips this summer to try to feed a big case of nostalgia. As I was driving up to Kentucky and driving through that very familiar landscape of gently rolling, soft limestone hills and shady hackberry trees, I came to the conclusion that returning to land that I have been to before and had wonderful, and horrific, experiences atop of, won't bring anything back. I could sit under a tree now and just feel a longing but not a reinactment.

So, with this realization, I should just stay home. Give up my little addiction to movement and false activity through action. But I'm not going to! Summer is for feeding addictions and fall is for working it out. I would get bored anyway, like my son who lays on the floor and whines that he is bored. I would too.

As for Wilmington, all of you travelers interested in this fine and seedy town, it is a place that may be worth visiting. It's got the sticky browness of a tannin river and the smell of old beer and pine sol pervades the sidewalks downtown. They must have ran off the homeless people because I don't see much of them anymore. It has a few nice blocks and a line of crowded beaches next to a hot ocean. Not quite a tourist town, but we like to try. Violent, sometimes. Slick and crusty, yes. But old.