Permanence

So Myrtle Beach. WTF. It kinda sucks! I was all “Beach is Beach, yo. Might as well go to a new place with beach, and experience that, right?” But no! Beach is not all the same! The town surrounding beach is not all the same, either! Let me tell you about it! (Warning: this is not a cheerful post, and it’s not even all that funny. It doesn’t wrap up with a feel-good, upbeat ending or anything.)

Savannah? Prettiest place in the world.

See, for the past few years I have vacationed in/around Savannah, Georgia, either in the city itself, or on Tybee Island. Savannah is the prettiest place in the world. If it weren’t for me not knowing a single soul there, I do believe I’d just move there. It’s lovely. It’s graceful and charming and it’s got a slow-paced, languid quality to it that speaks to me of imaginary times gone by when things just might have been easier to deal with. Seriously. Everything there is gorgeous. I’ve said before it’s the kind of beautiful you can’t even photograph, because it’s collective. It’s just beautiful thing after beautiful thing and you’re in the middle of all this enchantment and you can’t even capture it without being there. Old, perfectly restored homes, exquisite gardens and public parks, gigantic old live oaks dripping with Spanish Moss, cobblestone streets, hidden little corners and shops, magical, sleepy things to find everywhere. Tybee is also small, pretty and old fashioned.

Myrtle Beach is none of that.

Driving into town, one is inundated with signage. All the tacky, peeling indicators of impermanence. Fast food, discount stores, designer outlets, big box madness, all the awful, temporary things that make up our world right now. Flashing traffic lights, decaying billboards, nudie bars. When you get into the main part of town, “Ocean Boulevard,” you’re in the middle of a disaster of tacky surf shops, ice cream parlors, miniature golf, go-kart racing, stands selling everything from air-brushed t shirts to tattoos and cheap jewelry. Everything you think you want for five minutes, and discard easily five minutes later.

The buildings are huge and towering, 18 floors and up, each one studded with tiny jutting balconies at odder and odder angles, so that every room can boast an “ocean view” (you just have to crane your neck a bit.) You know none of these buildings were here forty years ago, and none of them will be here forty years hence. The people in this place are pretty much what you’d expect, too. It’s easy to see that this is probably a popular spring break destination, and there are plenty of spring-break types hanging around. There are families too, but there are a lot of young people. Sorry while I whack you with my cane here, but I am not a fan of young people in troupes. They’re loud and erratic and they tend to posture and flail about and altogether they can go sit in the basement with the kids until they know how to act right in public.

So my hotel room (Actually, quite nice. With ocean view!) had a small kitchenette, and I determined to go and get some bottled water/other drinks to take out on the beach with me. I made a trip to the mall (all the same things you can get in St. Louis! Only now you also get to transport them 1000 miles home!) and on the way back the only place I saw to stop and get snacks/drinks was… Wal-mart. Now, being a card-carrying progressive liberal pro-union, anti-waste feminist, I have not shopped in a Wal-mart in probably 15 years. Back when I was in college I went to the one in my town, because that was the only place to go, really. But since then, I’ve avoided them. But this time, I was hot and tired and I didn’t want to look for another place, so I went in. And you know, I realize this will sound very dramatic, but inside that store, I saw everything that’s wrong with our society. All in one tidy little big-box hellhole. Honestly. First of all, it’s clearly set up not for the comfort of patrons or workers, but to maximize profits. It was hot. The A/C was at a barely-tolerable level, and I was just walking around. I can’t imagine having to work all day in that place, as the air did not seem to move. Also, the light? It was gray. I do not know how they managed to make gray artificial light, but  they did somehow. Presumably they’d found some kind of hideous, gray light bulbs, designed to save $.03 per bulb, per year! Increasing shareholder value! And I felt like that awful gray light was leeching the will to live out of my damn soul. So it was hot and stagnant, with evil gray light that cast a deathly pall on everything. And dirty? It was awful, spills on the ground that no one had cleaned up, things flung everywhere in the aisles. The signage was awful, it made no sense, I could not find things. People were going up and down the aisles randomly, so the whole place was a traffic jam. They had some weedy, dirty looking produce, but the main action was in the pre-packaged convenience foods. There, there were cases of crap ripped open, plastic packaging everywhere, carts piled with high-fructose death and destruction. And I looked around at all these people randomly grabbing at this crap with their dirty, mewling children, and I realized just how far out of the mainstream I am.

The other day I was talking to a friend about American attitudes, and how if you took a snapshot of the country’s views, mine (and his) would not be represented. That even though we believe our own liberal ideals are where the country needs to go, that is nowhere near where the majority of the country actually is. And that’s what I saw so clearly at this Wal-mart from hell. That I live a rarefied, organic-produce kind of life. That I have the money and the spare time and the personal interest in leading a very different type of life than most people. That the things that concern me do not concern them. That they’re not worried about high-fructose corn syrup and over-packaged, over-processed food. They don’t care that they’re spending WAY LESS MONEY! to get WAY INFERIOR, DISPOSABLE PRODUCTS! They are fulfilling their needs in the way that’s been presented to them to do so. And it’s cheap. Jesus, I checked out with two big bags of (for me) snacky, crappy food, and it was less than $25. When I shop at home, I buy $4 loaves of bread and $6 organic preserves and $5 organic butter and $6 organic milk. It’s not enough that I have the free-range eggs, or the organic eggs, I have to have the free-range, organic eggs. And they do not come cheap. (And even then I worry that they come in plastic packaging. And my milk is organic, but it’s not in glass bottles, and really, should be I be spending more to get milk in glass? Am I Doing It Wrong?) So typically, breakfast for the week costs me $30. And I know that sounds like an assholish thing to say, and I understand the privilege I have in being able to live my life that way. Honestly I do. But I really had forgotten that the vast majority of people have no such interests and concerns. They want to get some food in their stomachs, and their kids’ stomachs, and they want things for the kids to play with, to shut them up (I agree, they should be shut up!) and they don’t care that those things are going to break by the time they get to the car.

Bizarre, baby-pageant style Paula Deen.

And to top it all off, I am standing there, sweltering, in the gray light, waiting to check out, and I am next to the magazine rack. And on sale are two “lifestyle” magazines, meant to be aspirational for the common person, I think. And they were “O” magazine, and “Cooking with Paula Deen.” And you know what, Oprah and Paula? I am sorry, but you do not look like that. Paula’s pic was a variation on this one from last year (couldn’t find the actual current cover) and Oprah’s featured her laying in a hammock. Analyzing the way that Oprah’s leg and hip intersected, it was pretty clear that some serious Photoshop chicanery had occurred. And gosh-bless, Paula, but no one’s skin looks like this. And this is not even mentioning the other awful “Ten Worst Beach Bods!” and “What does he really think about your skin tone?!” bullshit “women’s” magazines. This is just… non-reality here. Aspirational non-reality. Maybe I, too, can buy enough plastic products so that one day I can look like someone on the cover of a magazine! Except, the people on the covers of magazines do not look like the people on the covers of magazines.

Actual Paula Deen. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with the actual Paula Deen.

And so I checked out. (the checker was wearing medical gloves so that she did not have to touch the products she was ringing out.) And I drove back to the hotel past all the signage (Fine Art Gallery! Giant Clearance Sale!; Live! Nude! Girls! at Club Toxic!; REAL Myrtle Beach Discount Souvenirs!; Exotic Shells and Fireworks!; Keepsake T-Shirts Sold Here!) and I felt like the world was just one giant, overflowing trash can of temporary, plastic, hideous shit. And that no one sees it but me. And that, try as I might, I am also embedded in this process, I take part in it. I support it.

And so, Myrtle Beach? Not for me. The beach itself was lovely, it was wonderful to get sun and be in the ocean. But the environs were not conducive to a healthy state of mind for me. St. Louis has issues aplenty, and the neighborhood where I live has many. Blowing garbage and flying bullets being chief among them. But at least the homes around here have been standing for 100 years, and there is some sense of history, and things that are restored instead of being thrown away.

And so now I go back to my privileged, rarefied life, and I don’t know what it all means, or if it even means anything, really.