The Triggering Town

by Alexi Vontsolos

The tone of anything: a piano, the voice or face of someone you let go from your life, or especially of a seemingly abandoned town you step into off a Greyhound bus, will set the stage for the entire experience. Tone is the opening and lasting remark in a town, just as it is in your mind as you slowly exit the vehicle that brought you here today.

To set the tone of this small chapter in your life, I would like to say something about something we may all know of and for what Richard Hugo, the now dead poet, refers to as “The Triggering Town.” Such a town is a town that compels you to think about your life, your father’s life, your mother’s life, why you might run into your ex-wife, your plans to educate your son, whatever you think about when you are deep in thought so much so that you realize the essential, universal scope of your thinking while you are thinking.

Because of the impact of the town you have discovered, and the sensations that are building in your mind, you might find yourself wanting to write about the “it” you are experiencing right now, though you have absolutely no idea what this “it” you are about to write about is. Your interest in writing about the sensation is the result of being in a place that triggers deep-rooted emotions that become alive when you are in the presence of something you consider universally human. Something happens in your mind, something intangible is set, triggered, into motion. Hence, the words “the triggering town.”

When you land in a triggering town it is, indeed, a rare moment in your fleeting, rather banal, and occasionally artistic life, yet you have an urgency to capture something universal to others, to scream out across the street to the homeless people as if to suggest you found yourself and humanity all at once. You may even choose to express yourself at this moment in writing or other forms of expression, to grab hold of the sensation you have discovered and to express it in terms that last for eternity. You want to baptize the experience. You reach for paper, any paper, even a piano, though you cannot find one at the bus station. You settle for a napkin.

The town is a special town because you realize, for the first time in a long time, a sense of clarity. When such moments occur in your life, they are the result of the epiphany of being in the face of humanity at its most pure and essential level. The triggering town you are in is real. This place and this town influence you so that you have a calling to viscerally create something unique and everlasting for the world at large to appreciate. The metaphors are flying through the air of a small diner you found. The diner has Formica tables and bright lights, and a server named Betty Sue, or Mary Jane. These simple things make your town even more special.

You may have landed in this town of yours for a brief moment, stopping intentionally for gas, yet remaining there for some reason to have dinner. This place you are in puts your mind into a mode of great and unique creativity probably because you feel natural and safe there. It affects you and takes you on a journey. Your waiter does not understand the glassy look in your eyes as you order from the menu.

As you gaze outside the slightly dirty window of your non-descript diner, you feel a slight level of compassion for the homeless person pushing a carriage. You want to write something about the homeless person, to offer your observations about poverty and capitalism and greed. You want to be the director of a great scene in an Oscar-winning movie in which the homeless person finds a way back to something other than the life of pushing a carriage down the street at midnight.

The town is a location somewhere, someplace on the horizon, or some place you re-visit when your eyes open in the morning.