Timon of Tuba City

If my presence here next week is less than usual, it's partly because I'll be at the locale above. Perhaps I should take some heirloom tomatoes for the journey. Do they count as part of the carry on gels and liquids.? I can't remember.

For those who don't remember my last journey through this state, barely more than two months ago, it is a place that reminds me of my favorite character chronicled by Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, a once glorious party giver who went on to become a sever misanthrope before going mad in the desert. A pivotal scene in the play is when the once generous host throws a water banquet for his fair weathered friends who are expecting the usual display of opulence he can no longer afford. The play has meant different things at different moments in my life. I keep coming back to it, expecting to find meaning that may never have been there. Typically simultaneously discredited and revered as Shakespeare's most challenging, weired, incomplete, and profound work, I find that I cannot push it away. At once fearful of it yet also intrigued, like German tourists walking in fascination into Death Valley with fascination or like the characters in Eric Von Stroheim's Greed, staggering in the heat with bags of bounty but not a drop of water to drink.