filled with gray.

I can no longer think in a linear fashion, so instead I am going to throw random things out here onto the Internet.

Ernesto Laclau is coming to UCLA on Friday to discuss post-Marxist theory and I can't go because I work at a magazine on Fridays that promotes the kind of positive social change that ultimately reinforces the socially inscribed class system and the idea of paternalism to its fullest.

My Uncle Tommy passed away this morning and my dad is flying to Tennessee for the funeral. I can't go. He and my dad were very close (he's actually my dad's uncle, my grandpa's brother, but we call him my uncle). I can see his face in my mind, hear his laugh tinged with East Tennessee goodwill. I see his house on the river bend, the porch swing, the old Chevy he restored in their dirt driveway. I think of his patio and the paddleboat and the family reunions and the potato salad. And I can't help but think of how everything is falling away, my connection to my southern identity. My grandpa has passed away, one of my grandmas has dementia and can no longer remember my name, I missed my cousin's wedding (still very upset about this), my Uncle Tommy is gone.

Tennessee is inscribed in me. But what happens when my family no longer owns the land? What happens when I can't afford to fly to see my cousins and aunts and uncles and my grandmas? I guess the most honest answer would be to say that I simply cannot let that happen. No matter how deeply I want to travel the world, I need to come full circle. And not in the single lifetime sense, but in the deeply ingrained family ties and blood connection and hundreds of years old psychological connection to the landscape kind of sense. None of my friends from California seem to understand this. My parents probably know exactly how I feel, not that we ever speak of it. To move away from Tennessee is only to move away bodily. It is always with you: the guitars and the harmonicas and the jokes and the cold chill wind in the winter and the barbecue joints.

There is a homesickness in me deeper than I understand. It's not a homesickness for the Bay Area, but for the place where my family actually really truly belongs. And that place is not San Francisco. It's on that old dirt road leading up to the house my grandpa built or running down the hills or even at Wal-Mart. It's strange. Very strange. Perhaps my thesis on the Southern connection to place, which became dislodged and redefined in the Great Depression through photographic and journalistic representation is my way of exploring this hardly understandable, certainly inexpressible nostalgia.

I was going to keep going, but that really took everything out of me. I will miss you, Uncle Tommy.