Dispatch from Castillo Blanco
I’ve never really been the type that can sit still and just do the day’s work. It’s not for a lack of determination or ideas, but I need room to pace around and talk to myself; and sitting at a desk simply doesn’t compliment that kind of rambling mind. That’s why I’ve spent the majority of my week long residence here wandering the mean streets of Carmel, IN.
I have really enjoyed spending time with my girlfriend, but while she’s at work, I feel like a rogue detective trying to figure out what it is about this place that is so vaguely unsettling to me. There’s nothing weird or ugly or old or unpleasant about this place. At first, I felt like they were all hiding something from me. Like they were a quaint ranching family with a half-retarded man/monster (manster) hidden in their attic; or perhaps they were concealing an old timey pagan fuck carnival in their basement. But alas, there is no seedy hidden world here. They’re mostly just people trying to live their lives.
I think I wanted these people to secretly go home at night, put the children to bed, and then do coke off their kid’s 2nd generation iPad with the ‘Dora the Explorer: Reading is Fun’ app still open. Or, at the very least, have the decency to meet my predetermined notions of them and congregate in dark Mason halls and yell like a cliched gay friend, “Who wants to gentrify?” Because if that were the case, then it wouldn’t mean that I was the one who had a problem with pleasant places.
I need to see some outward manifestation of myself in this place to relate to it. I need some bit of chaos and deterioration, but all the buildings were constructed in the last 15 years and by law have to be made of that charming aged brick. I need people that look like they feel bloated and uncomfortable, but they all look very satisfied. I need some affirmation that things aren’t alright in the world. Also, I’m 75% sure ever family in Carmel has an even number of children—I’ll get back to you on that.
But more than anything I think I resent this place because of the things we do share. Carmel is the Mecca of my white guilt. The amount of white prosperity here is uncomfortable. There are more polo fields here than minorities. It’s like if the Apple Store was a whole town. I just don’t trust places where white hegemony has gone unchecked for so long. I study history, which could really be called, “A List of the Terrible Things White People Did While They Had the Chance.”
However, I’m not above these people or separate from their culture, but of their culture. I grew up basically a single child—both my brother and sister were out of the house by the time I was 4—in a white middle class family in the Midwest. Being here brings out the worst elements of that upbringing. Some part of me—the part that relates—wants to dig in, create an impenetrable fortress of Caucasianess made of Fossil wallets and fear. There would be a moat to protect me from the decline of White American Imperialism and I could spend my days writing important pseudo-intellectual thoughts in my gray Moleskines. Here, I get that middle-class white urge to consume, hoard and protect.
Of course, these are the petty existential problems my situation affords. I dont have to fight some mysterious other, The Man, who I must struggle against in response to repression. The only struggle is dealing with yourself. That’s probably not so bad.
