Fake Plastic Trees

Thirty years have past; thirty summers, with the length of thirty long winters, and all that jazz. The spirit in which I revised this one, now called The Rustic Inscrutable, was about the eternity of living through that time— the autumn of 1996 in State College— and recollecting it in a way or manner only semi-tranquil. Too many questions remain, even thirty years later. One thing is not in question— Carrie had the ops over Jen about music. As we drifted into our version of Nowheresville, Carrie set up The Bends as a mood-enhancing soundtrack. This was the Radiohead platter that had made them famous in the States. I heard it briefly in the spring of '95, then forgot it for eighteen months. Now, it lit up all the incidents and situations of that time for me— Jen and I united, then severed. Then, Jen herself disappeared off-campus into a foggy mist, after which she was never seen again in State College. Even as, unfortunately, bylines continued to appear with her name on them in The Daily Collegian. Carrie and I smearing our blood on various walls, groping towards real contact we couldn't make with each other. A brief anti-marriage. The fragility, the sense of alienation in The Bends was in us, too. The sense was, of course, that Jen's departure was planned to coincide with Carrie's arrival. I was a dummy-doll to be passed between them. Creepy stuff. It's all covered in Fake Plastic Trees, down to the fact that Carrie's physiology was famously an exhausted one. State College, and the drama department, wore her out. I happened to be stalled on the way to Outlaw Playwrights at that time. I tried the quaalude exuberance of Third/Sister Lovers with her, but that was (come on!) too extreme. Winter was coming. And spring.