It’s been a minute. There’s a lot to say about the last six months of so, how a semester-ish of a life can comprise such extraordinary highs and literally catastrophic lows as the flabby ass end of 2024. Rest assured, my idle time been both necessary and not entirely idle. There have been things written. Day job takes a little more of my time since I upgraded the business card. I’ve done a little traveling, by which I mean borderline so much traveling that I may waste away in the poorhouse, but I watched the sun rise over the Rockies and the sun set above a castle in the hills of Connemara within the space of about three weeks. Also, I saw Pulp. I beached round the corner from Joe Biden. I have yet another adorable nephew. A hurricane trashed my hometown. Both of my parents had surgery. There was a disappointing election. Day to day life in this last gasp of 2024 feels like I’m bracing myself for the final number in “Cabaret” whilst sliding down the deck of the Titanic. I’ve been practicing my keep calm and carry on face and lamenting that I wasted all my quality cigarette smoking years well before the need for any real-deal French Resistance-style activity eventuated.
But we’re here for clothes I think.
But we’re here for clothes I think.
Sweater: It is the exact color of the Baskin-Robbin Daiquiri Sorbet, which was always in the case with the other most brilliantly hued of the thirty-six flavors.
Sometimes I’d even request a taste because the pale green a nicely set against the bright salmon-y pink of the plastic sample spoons. Of course, I’d always revert to either chocolate or strawberry in a sugar cone, please, and leave the shop ashamed at my conventional selections, scurrying past the beardy heckling man who always hung out at the laundromat next door and probably lose at least one scoop from my cone descending back down the hill to Weaver Park.
There I’d retreat to a table in under the picnic shelter many North Asheville parents believed housed legions of invisible but lurking perverts and drug dealers. I never saw any of them, but I did run into toddlers, boy scout troops and sobbing, filthy teenaged girls who’d failed the local high school sorority initiation, a yearly even that consisted of having canned dog food and tubs of mayonnaise dumped over your head in the middle of little league baseball diamond while horrible blonde seventeen-year-olds pretended to retch at how fat your thighs were. As deeply unpopular middle schooler, the idea that anyone would willingly sign up for this was beyond my comprehension. I remember saying something to my dad about it, after an afternoon of ice-cream in the park, and he said I’d probably end up a GDI. Then he talked about what fun he’d had as a member of a fraternities at both his first college and then the second he ended up at after getting kicked out of the first one for heaving too much fun in a fraternity.
People are into all kinds of crazy shit.
I could never exactly figure out how a public high school could officially endorse Greek organizations that had arbitrary, exclusive membership criteria and an initiation process run entirely on hazing. I have no idea if this is still the case. I hope it’s not.
How did I get here again?
Oh right. Sweater. Daiquiri green. Cashmere. Feels like a getting hugged by a cloud. Check.
Skirt: Once upon a time, there was a mall in Asheville called Biltmore Square. It was built when I was a teenager and intended to be the fancy mall. It had giant arched glass skylights and grand columns and some kind of off-brand Cinnabon that was, frankly, better than Cinnabon. The mall’s developers, who may or may not have been descended from Gilded Age tycoons, brought in local sculptors to fill the fountains and reflect Asheville’s artistic spirit. One of these works (a giant, marble abstracted woman’s face in profile) was carved by one of Dad’s friends, and in the months following my parents’ divorce, my sister and I would occasionally be put to work buffing the marble with sponges in Dad’s friend’s studio while the two men drank beer and talked about their lives as single men about town or whatever.
Biltmore Square Mall never took off the way it was intended. It was pretty much DOA, a dead mall way before dead malls were a thing. By the early 2010s, a scant twenty years since it opened, about the only thing that existed there was a Dillard’s outlet, a cluttered shell of a department store where you could buy armloads of $10 dresses from brands you’d never heard of, especially if you got there on double discount days. Many of my peers could not handle the place— “It gives me major anxiety and thrift store fingers” said a friend, at the time. But I love a quest, a discount, and sparkly gowns I do not, technically, need. When I’d get stressed out visiting my hometown, sometimes I’d go try on forty dresses, occasionally I’d even buy a few.
I bought this sequin skirt there for about nine dollars, somewhere back in the prelapsarian days of 2014. I wore it to see Aretha Franklin play at the Fox Theater in Atlanta. I sat in the orchestra section under the grand, ersatz night sky listening to my favorite singer of all time gently rib family members from the stage and sing Sam Cooke at the piano, and for a moment, it felt like everything was okay with the world.
Also in 2014: they finally tore down Biltmore Square Mall , lock, stock, and 1marble sculptures. It became an outlet mall, no bells, no whistles, no precocious skylights. he Dillard’s Outlet is still there, I think. I haven’t checked since Covid.
Earrings: I spent about five days in Bantry, a small coastal town in West Cork, this past July because won a short story contest. I read at a literary festival, hung out with some extraordinary fellow writers at a workshop held in a Catholic boys’ school perched high up the hill overlooking the bay, and edited fiction at a pub table while drinking Guinness alongside a sea wall. I want to tell you that the time I spent there was somewhere near the top of my Desert Island All Time Top Tier Best life experiences. Sometimes I think the only thing keeping me in a functional frame of mind post October/November the memory of winding down the hill from class, flush with intention and weird story ideas, chatting with new friends about books and art and history as I passed.
I bought these earrings at a little gallery about halfway down that hill. I could have bought about a dozen pairs, but I’d already spent most of my travel fund on books. My suitcase could hold no more. These were my favorite.
The Night: A couple friends invited me to their holiday cocktail on Friday. I stopped at a bookshop on way to their house to buy gifts and swan around the fiction section in sequins like you do. When I got to their house, roughly twenty minutes past start time, I was immediately suspicious at the lack of cars, noise or visible partygoers. The real tip-off should have been when I peered through at their dinner table, and instead of finding platters of hors oeuvres, saw three dinner plates set out with a nice green salad. I knocked anyway, apologizing before the door was already open because I’d come on the wrong night.
They were delighted, extremely hospitable, and invited me in for pizza. I met a charming statistician and ended up in a long, meandering conversation that touched on The Folk Implosion, “Kids,” medical research, and my shocking inability to do even basic math. A fine night and a sweet, lowkey launch to the social holiday.
Next Up: A Gala.
Sweater: Vince, Nordstrom, October 2024
Skirt: Antonio Melani, Dillard’s Outlet, 2014
Earrings: Forest & Flock, Bantry, West Cork, 2024
Shoes: Dr. Martens
- I’m happy to report that the sculpture found a new home. ↩︎
Tiny Commotions 