The spell of the corn.

OK, who's totally imagining a cob with a wand there? Y'all are freaks.

I came to the corn two years ago this August, I realized with a start yesterday. If I squint my eyes hard enough and concentrate until I exude rosy perfume (a la Teresa de Avila), I can remember that day with clarion detail. My car was packed so full that my tires visibly sagged; shoes were crammed under my seat and I rode astride half my wardrobe. As I crossed the border from Ohio (Motto: We May Be Flat, But We're Also Dull) into Indiana landspace, I stopped in a tiny "town" near the border so that I could sleep; this town was chosen entirely because of its name (Spiceland) and the delight it brought me. Had I known that I would be sleeping above my sheets with a bat, a baling hook and a taser under my pillow listening to a biker orgy next door degenerating into a fist/broken bottlefight, I might have reconsidered sleeping in a swampy culvert with the kaiser-roll-sized leeches. As I listened to the moans of "eff yeah!" and "right there, do that right there" for about three hours, harmonized with the revving of Harleys, I thought: what the hell am I doing? Why have I done this to myself? Will they notice if I steal away to that snack machine for a HoHo? I've lived many places far away from my beloved Maine, but going to Indiana seemed like a uniquely hellish folly. I mean, for the love of Benji, until that hearthstone-hot August day, I'd never even BEEN to Indiana. I was going to be going to a school I'd never seen for two years. As I puked a little in my mouth, I remembered how, two years before that, I'd done the same thing to myself by picking up and moving for a half-year to THE MIDDLE EAST. There was going to be no language barrier in Indiana. I wouldn't need to eat goat entrails. Plus, if the going got rough, it was only a four hour plane ride to my doorstep.

I moved into my eleventh floor dorm room in 105 degree heat (80% humidity), sweating through two outfits like a Thai whore's first night on the corner, and looked out over the corn. What was I going to find out here? Would I be happy? Also, what exactly does heatstroke feel like?

So much has happened in two years. The job I began in my third week of school transformed into a Graduate Assistanceship, and now I wait in my pupa to use what I've learned servicing internationals in what has now become my bizarrely unanticipated passion. I've seen people in my life whom I've adored come and go in the strange biorhythms of life in a college town. I've endured the most challenging coursework of my entire life and come out (academically) unscathed. And, in a development that still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up when I think too hard about it, I've found a powerful, youthful, childlike happiness I've never felt before.

There have been things that have profoundly blown, to be sure. I'm not entirely thrilled with my current living situation, a direct result of (apparently) mushroom-induced hallucinations. I've been emotionally sacrificed upon an offal-strewn altar by the kinds of assholes you read about in books and about whom your mother warned you. I've come to loathe Indianapolis, the "premier" metropolitan area in the state, with the white-hot heat of ten thousand suns and would rather orally pleasure the homeless than spend time there.

But then, there's the corn. "Knee high by the Fourth of July", they say out here. I drive out of the Republic in any direction and the verdant fields rustle in the gentle summer zephyrs under an impossibly enormous sky, hopelessly exotic to a boy raised in the lush fecundity of omnipresent conifers; it is the soundtrack and backdrop to a new life I'd never dreamed for myself. Two crops have come and gone since I've been here, and a third is pushing its way up as we speak; you can almost hear it. It's saying "eaaaaaaaaaaat meeeeeee", oh-so-faintly, Field-Of-Dreamsy.

Oh, I will, bitches. You wait and see.

This morning I watched a man in a wheelchair get down out of his van with the aid of his little van lifty-thing. The entire process took about ten minutes, and when all was done, he smartly closed the van door and briskly spun his wheels and began moving towards me. "Whaddya know?", he asked sunnily. "Not too much, I have to say", I replied. "How are you?", I asked.
"Well", he said, "I can't complain."

He couldn't complain. His legs were the size of a five-year-old's and it takes him ten minutes just to get into a car, and he can't complain. I complain when my coffee is off or when my car smells like feet, and here's a guy who will never be able to run through the corn without being carried. Hey: maybe I've got it good. Maybe I've got it really good.

But I still want a unicorn.

I remain, as ever,

Dom