While recently attending a writing fellowship on Martha’s Vineyard, I decided to keep a journal documenting my day-to-day when I wasn’t writing other things. The following installments have been minimally edited to preserve the initial spirit of spontaneous discovery and synthesis of the journal’s assembly.
Monday, June 17
Less time to write today, but also less to say today.
I have gone for a run every morning down the same street, Edgartown Main Street, to the beach. I stop only once, on one block of the downtown that has been crowded with slow walkers each time I’ve attempted to make it through. I walk briefly with the herd before I am able to turn off onto a residential street and resume my pace.
Today I noticed an odd building, initially for its doorway being covered by a large American flag. A sign on the front said “Dukes County Jail, Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted,” and presumably held in Dukes County Jail. In a large window on the second floor of the building, a mannequin was displayed in a gray sheriff’s uniform. A perennial sentinel to keep a sense of peace in the area, it seemed. Upon googling when I returned home, I learned that the Dukes County Jail is not a museum, but a functional containment facility for inmates housed inside of a Colonial-style house.
Mark Fisher defines “the eerie” as “the (highly metaphysically freighted) opposition between presence and absence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing where there should be something.” A sense of nothingness abounds on the Vineyard, perhaps because it’s only June; July and August are supposed to be much busier (“Don’t come in July and August, it’s hell,” a local cautioned me). But I do not mean to conflate the lack of inhabited presence with the lack of business in Edgartown. There are still tourists and residents milling about on Main street, and occasionally the side streets of the miniaturized suburbs just beyond it. There is a sense that it has been left to run itself autonomously, like a self-operating amusement park. The mannequin sheriff is merely a figurehead to keep everything in line.
I think I am the most sunburnt person on Martha’s Vineyard. I am practically salmon-pink, the same color as the Vineyard Vines shorts in the boutique window. This is my preppy costuming, I think as I walk down the street to poorly concealed horror of the denizens of the Vineyard. I am hot pink embodied, which I think on the vineyard is one of the primary colors through which their light refracts: baby blue, hot pink, and eggshell.
I am the outsider, made obvious by the singed pallor of my skin. I am clearly unaccustomed to the violence of the ultraviolet rays, the constant beating of sun on skin they have learned to ignore. I no longer move as a silent opposition to its customs, not that I blended in particularly well at any point in time.
I was served a ten dollar beer by a girl wearing a hot pink wristband from the Gov Ball music festival and body glitter. Her nose contour was so sharp that it could spear a crab from a tidepool.
I will find something more pleasant to say tomorrow.
Tuesday, June 18
More fake designer clothing today. This time a Fendi baguette.
911 Services were down today in Massachusetts for an hour. Imagine experiencing societal collapse while staying in someone else’s house for a writer’s retreat. Myself and another writer compared it to “Leave the World Behind.” Book reference.
I have noticed that the roads on the island are very small and all of the cars are very large. Many would actually be considered trucks: Chevy pickups, Jeep Wranglers, minivans. They do very little driving around the island. They mostly sit in traffic while the other massive vehicles in front of them trickle into parking spots. The parking spots must be massive to accommodate the vehicles inside of them so as a result many of the streets are only one way, the other potential lane taken up by stationary vehicles.
Everything here is too big for its allotted space. The houses are colonial-style McMansions without the spacing in between to dwarf them by comparison. The square footage is nearly overfilled as a result, encroaching onto one another like the shops on Main Street, Disneyland. Everything about the infrastructure is larger-than-life and much too close together, which lends itself to the amusement park feel of the whole place (People also travel around by golf cart. That adds to the notion that this place is much like a giant theme park, though it is a more sensible way to travel). A house can be thirty feet high on a property line sixty feet long, and still only have a forearm’s length of grass between itself and the next one. It is this awkward scaling that causes much of my agitation (I think).
A house is currently being built on the Main Street, and a medium sized group of people had crowded to watch the construction workers enter and exit the frame. They were mostly silent, with a few hushed conversations emerging sporadically and then dispersing with the wind off the Atlantic Ocean. It was the first example of the cultish Vineyard, a (mostly) homogenized group awaiting the arrival of an outsider. It would be creepy if it wasn’t such a cliche.
I turned off my music but left my earbuds in as I joined their gathering to eavesdrop. Two people were discussing the potential for the Supreme Court to strike down Social Security:
“You just have to live forever. It’s why we try to eat healthy, to stay active, but it’s such a crazy thing especially when it’s in the hands of such a crazy court… What happened to the court?” said a woman.
“It makes you wonder what happened, how we got here,” replied a man
Edgartown is dark today, briefly, before the crowd will disperse for ice cream at one of the many shops downtown with small scoops beginning at $7.
Wednesday, June 19
Went to Oak Bluffs today. I have been told it’s “hipper” than Edgartown. I hope that translates to cheaper prices. The “hipness” of Oak Bluffs is debatable but relative to Edgartown it is undeniable. Then again, most things are hipper than Edgartown: unironic Greaser fashion, Disneyland pride, an unbuttered piece of white bread.
Oak Bluffs is laid out with the compression as Downtown Edgartown, as if a series of buildings collided into one another halfway meshing their contents into one another. Doors are strange here. At any point you may walk through an otherwise innocuous entryway and be spat out into the middle of another building entirely.
I saw signs for a resale shop in an enclosed plaza made up of different attractions: a cafe, a souvenir shop, and little quarter-operated rides. The woven pattern of a charcoal shirt caught my eye from outside the resale shop. The fibers were held together loosely, a pattern distinctive of natural fibers. The shirt looked linen, and I was enticed to it for that reason—though I had previously shown no deference to linen. Perhaps the Island had begun to take hold of my brain.
The shirt was indeed linen. 60% of it, at least. The other 40% was rayon. It had been previously marked down by half of its previous price: $164.
A small woman approached me from behind the checkout counter, so small in fact that she barely cleared half of my height. She was unassuming on account of her stature and heavily tanned, so much so that I could have mistaken her for a leather handbag on the shelf.
“That piece is beautiful…” she said, wilting into the fabric as she rubbed it between her bejeweled fingers. “And there’s a pair of pants to match it…” her voice trailed off each time she spoke, as if fighting the effects of delayed-release chloroform. She pulled the pants from the rack. “There are buckles around the ankles…” Indeed there were buckles around the ankles, and a buckle on the built-in belt around the waist. There was otherwise nothing special about the pants. She looked at me expectantly, as if her comment about the buckles had sold me on her overpriced secondhand pants.
I looked back, offering nothing.
“It’s made of…” she checked the tag, “Yeah, it’s made of linen…”
“And rayon…” I sighed. I left and was abruptly spat into the dining room of a Mexican restaurant overlooking the harbor.
Strange tattoo sighting: an upper pubis tattoo on a man depicting the comedy and tragedy masks. I don’t want that area of my body to be associated with either emotion.
Part 2 of 3
Image credits (in order): “Open Wide” by Renee Vetter, “Limited SPF” by Renee Vetter