Dudes, I am in Oklahoma, and am going on 48 hours of doing so. This is where I spent 8 or so months of miserable late teen life, a place that should be so much like Texas but is unmistakably not. Not like the South, not like the West, not like anywhere but sprawling, smelly, broken down, like everywhere.
In Davis, which is as much a Niagra Falls of Oklahoma, we went to the drive-thru wilderness park, the place that has commercials on Dallas tv, where in fact you can feed giraffes and zebras out of your car. We ate at the diner with an overweight grown woman waiting tables in CHEER butt shorts, a probably teen dude in a back brace talking to whomever about painkillers and unemployment.
When I went to school and lived in Norman I got drunk and lived in a dorm, and at the time everyone seemed so much older, so permanent in their college-age college town lives. I saw one of the old-er guys on the street today, wearing a purple t-shirt and a guatemalan vest, balding, but looking the same.
The purpose for all this is a corny regional organization’s corny conference in Oklahoma City, seemingly always in shitty cities. (Like consciously enjoyable cities abound in this part of the country.) Conference hotel is huge rotting structure by the airport, and our room in back had stained carpet in the outdoor breezeway and a feral, crucifix-bearing toddler and an unattended bbq grill ad-hoc installed in the parking lot. I felt justafiably prissy for pulling out, and am anticipating the squawking complaints of the following days.
While I was heading out, I caught the door for a woman coming to the conference, who lives and works in the same city as me. I’ve met her half a dozen times, at least. I said hello and got no reply. She was dressed in sweatpants.
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