theology&geometry

Asheville is the shit. Let’s just get that out of the way real quick. Because Asheville, for whatever reason, is one of those places that has flown completely under my radar. It wasn’t until I was trying to think of interesting places to visit on the last half of my pre-Christmas vacation that my pal Shane suggested it to me, since it’s so dang close to Gatlinburg (less than a two-hour drive). He said his parents make the trek every year to see the Biltmore, and that when he visited the city many moons ago, he had a good time. Asheville, huh?

So I set about doing a bit of research and enlisting more of my very savvy, very awesome, very well-traveled friends for their input and suggestions. Saraclark sent me this amazing list of places to eat and visit and I set about, Lesley-style, making a spreadsheet of sorts. Of course, when we actually got there and started walking around the neighborhood where our hotel was, the spreadsheet went more or less out the window but its spirit lived on.

We stayed in the Downtown Inn, which is this giant former Days Inn just barely notched into the cusp of an adorable and super walkable area of Downtown where — happily — much of what I had put on the spreadsheet resides. Downtown Inn, I can say without guilt, looks sort of sketchy and run down, even when you get into the lobby and elevator, the latter of which is lined in ancient pink Formica. When we arrived on Wednesday evening, we pulled into a parking lot so empty we wondered if the hotel was even open. I think that night we were the only people there (the clerk said that time of year, in the days leading up to Christmas, they are pretty dead). Based on some hotel reviews I’d read, I requested a room on a high floor facing the mountains and not the street. The hotel people were super accommodating, and you can see what our view was below, at left.

Despite the not-so-swanky nature of the hotel’s exterior and lobby, our room was clean and well-appointed, with a little coffee maker and a blowdryer and a mini-fridge and microwave — all the things you’d expect from a modern hotel. But the absolute selling point of the place is the location. We walked everywhere and just kept stumbling upon cool stuff to do and see.

Our first evening, we did a little exploring and ended up at the Thirsty Monk, which was just across the street from the hotel. This place was pretty cool, and they had a ton of interesting craft beers on tap that they kept track of with a wall of placards, each one bearing a beer’s name. Once that keg was tapped, the placard would come off the wall and you’d have to move on to the others. I settled down with a Sweetwater Festive, which was delicious. I can’t remember what the boyfriend had. Both of us were pretty buzzed off of one high-alcohol beer, though, and hungry. But the Monk menu just wasn’t doing it for us, so we set off on foot to see what else we could see. We stumbled upon a Mellow Mushroom, and both of us instantly wanted to share some of their pizza. Also it was cold and we wanted to get inside. We walked in and realized that trivia night was about to kick off, and in a grand spectacle of spontaneity, we decided we’d play, since there was cash money at stake. Ray went to the bathroom and I sat down with the quizmaster to get the details, and while he explained the answering/scoring procedure to me, I think I had a mild stroke. Because I could not fucking pick up what the man was putting down. He was not even speaking English anymore. It was just clicks and buzzes and beeps and farts. I don’t know. I nodded brightly and acted like I knew exactly what he meant by “TAP” (do you quizmeisters know this system?) and I went back to our table with an answer sheet and a stricken look on my face. You can imagine how it went down when Ray returned and I had to explain to him that, while I had just sat through a detailed explanation of the entire trivia procedure, I had no fucking clue what we were supposed to do. So he had to go back to the quizmaster and have a little man-to-man, during which many crises were solved, including the one of our team being fucked from the get-go.

Ahem.

So we snarfed down pizza and beer and kicked a lot of ass at the questions (I’m telling you, knowing the American presidents in order is the most useful thing I have ever learned). We were running tied for third out of 10 or 12 for a while (which was especially good, I thought, because at least two of those teams had eight people on them!) but we got a little cocky and wagered too many points on the final question, which we got wrong. So we dropped down out of the top three and left the place drunk and with less money than we’d had when we went in. But you know what? We felt like kings. Motherfucking Michelob Kings, which was our team name, for whatever reason.

The next day brought more exploration by foot. We checked out the Asheville Art Museum, which had a visiting exhibition of Sewell Sillman‘s line drawings, which are these super repetitive studies in spatial relationships and patterns. At first they seem sort of simple and pointless but if you give it some time and really trace those pencil markings with your eyes, and try to imagine not just planning a composition like that but executing it without having to erase and re-trace, well, the skill becomes quickly evident. Ray was bored by most of the sketches but I really was sort of taken with them. Maybe it’s a graphic designer thing, who knows.

We are giant museum nerds, so when we happened upon the Thomas Wolfe homestead and museum, we kind of had to check it out, even though neither of us had read anything by Wolfe. Getting a tour of the giant homestead was ridiculously cheap, like a $1 a head or so, and for some reason I didn’t take a single picture inside the house, even though we were the only two on the tour. That big yellow house is 29 rooms huge, and the story of Wolfe’s childhood as a little boy living in a big, swingin’ boarding house was fairly interesting, although — here is where my inner asshole is going to shine like a polished nickel — I don’t quite understand the pain and anguish that Wolfe apparently felt as a result of living in a boarding house. Yes, yes, he didn’t have his own room and his mother tended to him after the guests were taken care of, but as far as I can tell, he had it pretty good, all things considered. I mean, there was crazy shit going on in that house, but crazy shit happens so that people can write books about it, right? I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t pay very good attention on the tour. I was too busy trying to count all 29 rooms.

Anyway, there’s this cool little statue thing downtown showing the landscape and layout of Wolfe-era Asheville. It’s a neat visual trick.

Hm, what else did we do? We walked around the Pack Square area, which is pretty swanky, and we witnessed what looked like the aftermath of a horrible Santa tragedy.

We had absolutely delicious meals at Tupelo Honey Café and Fioré’s.

There are some outstanding food options in Asheville. I’m sad that I lost my wallet one night and we ended up eating two-for-one chicken sandwiches at Burger King out of fear that we wouldn’t have enough cash to get back home if we ate anything fancier. That’s a whole meal lost to the gods of My Absentmindedness. (Happy ending! I found the wallet; the good people at Bruisin’ Ales hung onto it for me until I could come pick it up the next day.) The entire city seems to have a nicely developed palate. Between the surfeit of local breweries and all the chef-curated eateries, you could spend a lot of time and money tasting your way through Asheville. Which, if I continue to go with the family to Gatlinburg every year, sounds like the kind of thing I just might do.

We sampled several local beers (many of which we picked up at Bruisin’ Ales) and, on Friday night, walked down just south of our hotel to Craggie Brewing Co. and Green Man Brewery, both of which have little bars in them where you can get their brews on tap. Boyfriend tried Craggie’s Antebellum Ale and found it to be offensively sprucey on first sip, and then spent the remainder of the trip wistfully wishing he had more of the stuff, because it was the best beer ever in the history of the world. I had Craggie’s Herkulean IPA, which is a dark beer, and quite tasty. Over at Green Man, I had their porter, which ended up being my favorite of the trip, I think. (We had a lot of beer.) Green Man was hopping that night, and there were lots of middle-aged people dancing to Michael Jackson songs, which were the only tunes playing that night for whatever reason.

We had so much fun in our little pocket of downtown that we didn’t even bother driving out to the Biltmore. Even though I do want to see it some day, I just couldn’t justify the price vs. all the cool stuff we could do for much cheaper. Asheville’s a good time, and we barely even scratched the surface. I definitely want to go back and get to know it a little better.

Full Flickr set here.

I duped Ray into traveling across the state with me for my annual trek to the family timeshare in Gatlinburg. The first day was a complete tear-filled wash (seriously, I thought we were going to die) but when we finally made it to East Tennessee, things got better and more vacation-y. The fella had never been to that neck of the woods before, and while I declined to immerse him in the Black Bear Jamboree school of Southern culture, I hope his time spent in the mismatched blinking lights of Pigeon Forge helped educate him on the idiosyncrasies of the modern South.

Actually, I’m fairly sure that he got the biggest possible dose of edumacation about the South when he and my dad got into a heated two-hour political/social/historical argument in the middle of Golden Corral buffet, during which my dad only ate one plate of ham and taters. One plate. The rest of his time and mouth action was spent imparting conspiracy theories about 9/11, the end of the world, our Muslim president, the awfulness of Abraham Lincoln, and much much more. I have, for several years now, maintained that I will not engage my father in political discussions, even when provoked unfairly, because said discussions are less discussions per se and more me crying and him yelling and everyone around us looking on in horror. And yet, there sat my lawyer-in-training boyfriend — who has never met an argument he can’t chime in on with confidence — across from my dad — AKA He Who Loves to Turn Any Discussion Into a Political Argument — and the tense words just began to flow like so much blood from the neck of a slaughterhouse cow.

Figure one: Dad mid-argument.

I felt emboldened by having someone on my ideological team, so I chimed in plenty. More than I should have, given how upset I was getting. I eventually checked out and started Tweeting about the goings-on, listening and shushing them when I felt like our table was getting dirty looks from fellow patrons (none of whom were sitting very near us anymore) but Ray and Dad just kept on keeping on. Until, that is, Ray said something that sounded a lot like, “I dunno, I think Lincoln was an all right dude,” which caused my dad to snatch up his coat and spit, “LET’S GO!!!” and storm outside. My dad never leaves an argument first. Ever. He was pisssssssssed.

We got outside and he was already in the truck, yelling at us to hurry up and get in so we could get the hell out of there, but I refused to get in until they would at least call a truce and agree to disagree. The whole way back to the room, we were lectured on how we had a lot to learn about Real History, and did we know Lincoln was most likely a homosexual?

I think Ray sees now why I don’t engage.

Anyway, that was but one amusing blip on the Gatlinburg radar. The rest of the time was spent hootin’ and hollerin’ at the stuff in the Ripley’s museum, walking through the snowy streets of Gatlinburg, feeding coins into arcade games, buying sweets at a candy shop, kicking ass at Guitar Hero (on easy!), and turning up the fireplace in our very own private suite — a major development, considering we were told while planning the trip that we would be expected to sleep in separate suites.

Turned out to be not so shabby after all. But I foresee some refereeing in my future.

I like Asheville. A lot. We’re staying right downtown near a neat strip of bars and shops and a cute little park. Internet’s not working in the room, which is turning out to be kind of quite lovely. It’s nap time for me and the feller. Then maybe going out tonight. We’re keeping it low key.

Consisted of seven hours in a car to get from Memphis to Dickson (a trip that normally takes three hours), where we are currently staying in a Motel 6, after being stuck in snarled, crawling traffic that sat helpless as it became surrounded by accumulating snow and packed ice on an increasingly unsalted interstate, watching car after car slide off the road and get stuck in the drifts on the side of the road.

In other words, fuck vacation day one.

Let’s see if my brain can rally and get back to being only half crazy, shall we?

Tuesday brought much milling about and squirreling away. Pigeon Forge is lined with places you never want to go into but that you always end up buying shit at. Why? I don’t know. It’s some kind of universal law involving the eventual depletion of your checking account.

Amber and I were sitting and waiting on the folks to meet us when my mom walked up to us. “Y’all!” mom started, then laughed. “I was going to say, ‘Y’all make a good couple!’ but that’s not what I mean!”

I looked at Amber and back at mom with a smirk on my face. “Well, actually, I’ve got something to tell you…” I said dramatically.

Mom froze in her tracks and a look of complete terror overtook her. I laughed, suddenly completely embarrassed. “I’M JUST KIDDING!” I screeched. Mom looked more relieved than I have perhaps ever seen her. Amber and I devolved into nervous laughter and I realized that my parents must actually wonder about my sexuality since I never bring boys for them to meet and I am creeping up on thirty, unmarried and unashamed.

We sat down for dinner at a place that will not only make your food, but will make the plates it’s served on. The food was great and Amber and I were really bad at being sneaky about paying the tab for everyone. Oh well. Free food is clumsy sometimes.

We spent the remainder of the evening at the outlet mall, trolling for bargains or shiny things to catch our eye. Part of me feels guilty for spending so much time shopping, but then I realized that A) What was I going to do? Camp in the woods? HA HA HA B) I was helping our battered economy! C) I was buying much-needed Christmas presents for friends and loved ones! D) My other cultural options were pretty much dictated by Dolly Parton’s corporate handlers. So. I deal with the guilt pretty easily.

At some point, I managed to take this photo, which cracks me up, without exception, every time I look at it:

Amber and I came back to the cabin with a car full of sweet sweet swag, and tucked in, determined to watch The 12 Men of Christmas since that scamp Stephanie had given me a review copy and I was determined not to let her down. We made s’mores in the fireplace and drank champagne and I yelled at the television when I realized that my protagonist was a 3-foot-tall, obnoxious PR hack with a supersonic voice. Fun fact: That movie had not a damn thing to do with Christmas. Or men, really. Or the number twelve. Except that there are 12 months in a year and that is roughly the amount of time it will take me to forget that this movie exists. Fun fact part two: There’s a token black dude who gets roughly seven seconds of screen time. Hilarious!

Two bottles of champagne, another s’more, and an untold amount of honey bourbon liqueur later, we passed out.

Vacation!

[Project 365]

Pigeon Forge is so bizarre. There’s these big, big rolling hills in the distance, but to get there, you’ve got to crawl past mounds of kitsch draped in rope lights that make your eyes hurt. I don’t even know what the point of Pigeon Forge is. I just opened a new tab so I could read the wiki. Huh.

FAMILY VACATION HUB

Yes, okay. If you insist. Jeez, Pigeon Forge. Step the eff off, Pigeon Forge. We’re all friends here, pal.

Amber and I rolled into town Sunday night (a leisurely drive on our part, with no less than TWO pee stops where we allowed ourselves coffee and things wrapped in cellophane and time to gawk at all the weird “regional” shit pumped out by factories in China. Part of the trip we spent trying to come up with questions for the students in an online English composition course Amber teaches. Don’t worry; we were completely sober. When we arrived at the resort (I can’t say “hotel” because we have a timeshare (*places monocle over left eye*), and the timeshare place is also a hotel and resort, so, yeah, resort), we went to the front desk to get our parking pass and directions to the cabin (indulge me, please, for another parenthetical as I point out that these places are hotel suites dressed up as cabins; my family is a sucker for the creature comforts). We crept up the mountain on the winding asphalt road and parked when we saw my parents’ truck. We were greeted by my brother, who was outside schmoozing with a neighbor (my brother is basically the third-best schmoozer I know) because this neighbor happened to be the father of two cute girls (one of whom, by Wednesday, had made a date with Evan).

The cabin itself was pretty motherclucking swank. I mean, I am kind of into hotels anyway, but usually when I’m paying for my own room, I am staying in budget rooms with scratchy Polyester comforters and not thinking about how many speeds the kitchenette’s dishwasher can run. Our half of the suite opened onto a really lovely balcony overlooking the downslope of the hill — I get uncomfortable calling something a mountain until it’s technically east of Gatlinburg — and had a fireplace and a washer/dryer and big glass shower and big fat sauna tub thingy and leather couches a kitchen full of shiny utensils. It was connected to my parents’ half and they insisted that we keep the doors propped open so that Sissy had open trotting access to the whole compound.

Amber had to go file her test questions so we dropped her off in the lobby (wireless hadn’t been set up in our building yet, we were told) and my mom and I took off to Kroger after I called to make sure they were open 24 hours (it was pushing 10 p.m.). Because if you bring the Turners to a place with a kitchen, you can bet your ASS we are going to buy a shit-ton of food for that place. Empty pantries make us anxious. So mom and I traipsed up and down every aisle in the Pigeon Forge Kroger (I presumptuously assume there’s just one), filling up a proud, bulging cart and finally, after both agreeing we had scoured every aisle for everything we could possibly need while staying more or less on a budget, headed toward what looked to be the checkout aisle, where a dour lady with long stringy brown hair was dragging grocery items across a scanner.

“I’m closed!” she said with exhaustion and utter contempt. We shuffled our feet and smiled meek smiles and looked over the remainder of the aisles for the other open aisle, and found none of the numbers lit. An even more miserable-looking man with white hair pointed us down toward the U-Scan area. “You’ll have to use the U-Scan,” he said. “Everyone but one person who runs the U-Scan leaves at 12.” So we walked toward the U-Scan. Except white-haired sad man wasn’t done. “But you can’t go to the U-Scan. You’ve got too much stuff.” He heaved a colossal sigh that could have made a butterfly in China shudder. Mom and I flushed with embarrassment, like, THE SHAME OF BUYING SO MANY GROCERIES. “So what are we supposed to do?” we asked. “Who’s open?”

The white-haired man, now joined by dour lady and milquetoasty mustachioed man No. 1, all mumbled things about everyone getting off work at midnight (it was 12:05) and how only one dude was left to man the U-Scan and we had too much shit for the U-Scan.

I don’t know if that’s true or not; I only ever buy cereal and cheese when I go to the grocery.

But mom, ever the Southern lady who will slap someone with a metaphorical white glove if they sass her, held her hands up off the cart like she was a bank teller confronted by a masked man. “We will be more than happy to leave all this right here and go on down the road,” she said. It was a standoff. A standoff in Kroger at midnight with my fucking brie and crackers at stake! Mustachioed man No. 2 — the post-midnight U-Scan Wrangler — stepped in and relieved dour lady and waved us on through the line because there were even MORE people ready to check out behind us. My mother, flushed and flustered and taken aback by this less-than-friendly treatment, mumbled grievances under her breath as we both shoved things onto the conveyor belt and watched mustachioed man No. 2 scan them all with a quickness and watch them pile up at the end of the counter. “So everyone but you leaves at midnight,” I said to the guy. “Yep. And I run the U-Scan,” he said. “Which can only handle certain orders,” I said. “That sucks for you! I mean, it puts the burden on you!” All I wanted was for the guy to say that Kroger had a bullshit policy but he was a pro and clammed up.

I shop at Schnucks post-11 p.m. quite a bit, so I am no stranger to the bag-your-own-shit game. I hopped down to the end of the counter and plastered a middleman smile on my face and shoved packed bag after bag back into the cart while mom just got angrier and angrier at being embarrassed in front of all those people. My carton of blueberries slipped between the wires and spilled into the floor, sending purple juice splattering everywhere. “Poetic justice,” my mother said while watching mustachioed man No. 2 attempt to mop up the mess after my failed attempts to pick up and salvage each berry one by one. She asked him for his manager’s name and he evaded like a champ. “Never in my life,” mom said, holding her hand over her heart. “I have shopped at Kroger for years.” When everything was bagged I thanked the mustachioed men for their help and threw my weight against the cart to get it moving as my mom went to the customer service counter to get a comment card. I tossed everything into the back of the truck and, like a sullen teenager, dicked around with my phone while mom talked to the New Yorker lady who had been in line behind us about how horrible an experience we had apparently just had. I don’t know. I just can’t handle hyperdramatic 2-hour bouts of grocery shopping with any sort of grace, I guess.

We drove back to the cabin and I was probably short with mom and tired of talking. I’m not grown yet, am I?

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Monday morning. I wake up vacationlate, 9 or so, bed empty because my sleeping partner had retreated to the living-room couch when my snoring proved relentless. Amber and Evan told me I had stopped breathing in my sleep … a lot. Both my parents and my one remaining biological grandparent have sleep apnea and have to wear C-PAP machines. I don’t want that. Not now. Not yet. Not until I convince someone to sleep in my bed longterm. THEN maybe. Nocturnal horizontal SCUBA divers. Not yet.

We’re having coffee in mom and dad’s suite. Mom is moving slow because of a headache. We finally convince her to take something and lie down. Next door a racket is brewing. We think someone is laughing but we quickly realize it’s someone shrieking … about a phone … being taken away by a parent. And it takes ten or so foggy-brain minutes of us listening, slack-jawed, to some teenage girl shrieking about her unfair parents before that obnoxious I HAVE GOT TO GET THIS ON VIDEO thing that’s always with me kicks in. TEN MINUTES!

And then I got this video, which makes me lol and lol and lol because the girl’s shrieking is straight-up COMIC and then at the end it looks like I do some kind of ninja roll.

Our brilliant plan when we bolted once the neighbors’ door opened excluded CLOSING OUR OWN DOOR, so the mom just peeked in and apologized for their “unruly teenager” and then gushed over Sissy a bit and then did some laundry, seeing as how we were basically eavesdropping right there beside their suite’s laundry room.

Amazingly, even though I had bounded through my mother’s bedroom like a frightened, very stupid gazelle when that door had opened, mom remained asleep. Which is how we knew she was really feeling unwell, which is why Evan and dad got ready and went out while Amber and I hung back, taking our time getting ready and making sure mom was okay. When she woke up, she insisted that she was okay and that we get out and about. She seemed better but tired, so we didn’t feel too bad about leaving her to putter around the suite by herself (I think I got my love of solitude entirely from her).

So Amber and I took to the nooks and crannies of Gatlinburg and handled trinkets and candles and dreamcatchers and wolf shirts and free dip samples and tiny shots of free coffee. We had lunch at a “pub” with actually decent food and then followed the rest of the family up into the mountains since it wasn’t rainy and gross and my dad insisted that I’d be able to get good photos (which I, probably out of sheer laziness, was unable to do). Mom’s head was still kinda hurting her so dad said they were heading back 17 miles short of Clingman’s Dome. We had the choice of going on to North Carolina or turning around too. Amber was powering down and the sun was setting, so I saw no reason to go to Cherokee.

Back at the cabin, everyone crashed but Evan and me. I got a text from work saying, basically, where is the biz cartoon for this week?!, and I realized with great eye rolling that I had forgotten on Saturday to import the upcoming week’s comics, blah blah work minutiae hooey. I dug into my e-mail on my phone and forwarded the files, and they converted into one big bitmap. I realized my phone and I were going to fight so I needed to talk to my laptop ASAP. Except … no internet except the $12 internet in the lobby. So Evan and I made for the lobby and I pushed us on through to the bar because I knew that’s where he was wanting to go anyway. We bellied up to the bar and exchanged squinty glances when our bartender turned out to be probably the most unlikeable, sour bartender I have ever encountered in my entire life. She was bitchy — and not in the funny, you’re-in-on-the-joke, sassy way either — and took the duration of my brother’s entire first beer to get my first glass of wine (when I reordered, thinking she’d forgotten me, she gave me the same look of utter contempt I’d gotten with my mother at Kroger and said, “I’m getting it!” without even a hint of a smile) and then had the fucking nerve to chastise me for having my laptop out in the bar. “You’re on vacation,” she sneered. “No technology!” A giant television screen flickering a basketball recap show made her into a silhouette. “There’s a TV!” I said, smiling thinly. “That’s different!” she scoffed.

“Where are all the women?” my brother asked, half joking. The bartender curled her lip and looked at him. “Sweetie, I hate to break it to you, but this isn’t a singles bar. If you’re looking to meet women, you’re better off going to some other bar. Of which there is none.” My brother downed his third beer and muttered a curse word under his breath, and it was time to go. I drank the last of my wine as he paid the tab. He didn’t leave a tip, so I threw $2 on the counter as we shuffled out. “Awwwww,” the bartender called. “Y’all were the coolest people I’d had all night!” I smiled and wanted to hit something.

$12 for 24 hours of internet and she had sucked so bad that we couldn’t stand to spend more than 30 minutes in her bar. Now THAT’S a moneymaking strategy, Westgate.

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Amber awoke before midnight and I had gotten into the whiskey. We stayed up, clucking, until past four.

[Project 365]

This lovely setting is not, I repeat NOT inside our cabin in Gatlinburg. It is, however, in the lobby, where we had to go to get online (for a nominal fee) so Amber could file her students’ final essay questions since wireless was not working in our cabin.

First-world problems, jeeeeez.

[Project 365]

My sister said she’d never ridden the big swings before. So we rode them.

[Project 365]