Holidays in a small town almost always mean a night out drinking with a weird mixture of people. There’s your friends, the ones who live here. Your brother is next to you, and that always feels good. There’s a few of his friends, some guy I don’t even know who was the main competition in the “Who lives in the most hellhole apartment” contest.
If you’re interested, it was a close call. His place sounds roomier, but is more of a death trap in a fire situation. It’s funny how when you live in a crappy apartment, one of the signs is the likelihood that you’ll burn alive. If you’re living in an apartment that can’t be escaped in the event of fire, believe me, there’s going to be a moment when you’re looking at the wall of flames and thinking, “Well, it’s not like my life was nearing perfect up to this point…” I’m not saying a crappy apartment will make you want to die by burning alive. Just saying that you’re probably more prepared than someone spinning his way to the ground in a smoking private helicopter.
When drinking, one of my favorite things to do, besides singing “Simple Man” or any of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s hits at painful volume, is to talk about where we should all go.
Dude, my brother only lives 15 hours away. We should drive there for the weekend. Get out of the snow.
Dude, it’s not that far to Chicago. We could leave now and be there in the middle of the afternoon.
For whatever reason, whatever liquor reason, the idea that a person really could just be somewhere else by the time a beer buzz wore off blows my mind.
Dude, I’m moving to Portland.
That was the most recent one. The big ‘un. The one that’s been on my mind for a while.
I live in a shit town. When I say that, I don’t mean the quality of the place or the people. I mean there is literally shit particles in the air. The huge feedlots on the northeast side.
This is not imaginary. Every person who comes to town, college students or visiting bands, whoever, will mention the smell. The couple times a standup comedian has blown through, how long do you think it took to get to that one?
People say it smells like shit. Some people say it smells like money. There’s an Odor Hotline you can call to make complaints about the smells. They keep track of the complaints people make.
“like a bar serving poop in their food.”
“bad sports shoes”
“sour milk”
“wet goose feathers”
“dead rotting corpses set in rotting cheese then set on fire”
“old man breath”
There was a day when the lamb plant burned. There were a couple visits before that, graffitti about animal liberation and murder. Then another with the message “this is my final attack next time burn.”
Then it burned. 135,000 lamb skins. 250,000 pounds of wool. The smell of scorched onions covered the entire town. The smell of money, somewhere between $2 and $5 million if we’re getting exact. There was a yellow fog all day, made up of particles of burned lamb skins.
Believe it or not, this isn’t enough to scare me off of living here. People never believe me, but you get used to it. I almost never smell it anymore. I don’t smell the shit or the burning blood anymore. Just the way people who live next to the airport say they don’t hear the planes, most times I don’t even smell death.
Which is part of the problem.
I’m a guy who has habits. Good habits, sort of. I jog almost every day. Long runs. When you live in a town this big, a long run takes you through the neighborhood, up the hill that cuts through your college, then through two stoplights to your high school, then another stop light and you’re running past the hospital where you were born. Then two more stop lights and you’re on the road that goes past your mom’s house, the street with the Dick’s Electric truck parked at the curb that always signaled dad where to turn when he was bringing me home from a weekend at his house. The couple times it wasn’t there, he missed the turnoff. I always loved those times. It was like the weekend wasn’t over. School wasn’t coming back.
You can’t hardly get in 5 miles without passing a spot where you lit fireworks by a dumpster as a kid or threw up in the gutter when you discovered drinking. On a long run I’ll see no less than 3 homes my good friends grew up in. 3 homes where I slept in the basement in Ninja Turtles sleeping bag.
This isn’t enough to scare me off either. Like I said, I have habits. Running the same streets and sidewalks doesn’t bother me. It’s nice. I run at night most times, and I know the spots where snow runs off during the day and leaves icy sheets at night. I don’t even have to look.
There aren’t lots of good things about living here, but there are lots of good people. Well, not lots. A surprising number. And I’m not talking about some kind of good ol’ fashioned, down-to-earth folks or some kind of bullshit like that. Those people are here, but I’m really talking about the friends I have and my mom.
But.
This year I turned 30. And maybe this is some kind of mid-life crisis. Maybe a person can predict how old he’s going to die by how early his mid-life crisis sets in. If you have your mid-life crisis at 10, that’s a tragedy. At 20, it means you’ll be leaving a lot of unfinished business behind. At 30. Well, it’s sad, but people won’t think of you as going early, early. Dying at 60 is within the socially acceptable death period. It’s reasonable, as death goes. Young enough to have people surprised, depending on how you’re holding up. But not so young that people see your birth and death dates and do the math, panicking about what this means and how you fucked up the stats and made it more likely they’re going to pass tomorrow.
Everybody does that when they see a headstone, right?
My personal crisis is low on the crisis meter. It’s not on the level of someone axing down my front door. It’s not even on the level of how I’m going to get by until my next paycheck. I’m not going to be rich. But I won’t be hungry. And I probably won’t die in the next 30 years.
But if I was going to die in 6 months, I would move to Portland. I would. I would move there, rack up debt living on coffee and books and rainwater, and then I would die. That’s what I would want to do.
And what’s really crazy about that thought, to me, it’s that the thing I would do with the last 6 months of my life is something that’s actually possible to do with the next thirty years. It’s not impossible to move and have that life. It’s really not.
What’s there that’s not here?
Well, look. I could write about all the things I love about it. About how it feels like the right place. Then I could go back on myself and say that I’ve only ever been there on vacation, and vacation mode is different than real life mode. I could write about visiting Tom Spanbauer’s writing workshop, how that was. I could ask what you would do if you could live in the city where…I don’t know, where the Fortress of Solitude was. Wouldn’t people move to Metropolis just to be in the same city as Superman? Just because maybe they’d catch a glimpse of him flying past now and then?
But I know it’s not all about that.
It’s about having a different life than the one I have now. It’s about paying off student loans, which is about being able to live off any job I want, which is about not being trapped in a job ever again. It’s about paying off braces and getting them off my face. It’s all about untying all the knots that keep a person stuck, I think.
This is all getting very cosmic. I feel like I’m channeling the 20 year-old version of myself here.
Which is, in some ways, what’s happening.
Let’s face facts. Most of the people I know have moved on with their lives. They have spouses and children and homes and cars manufactured after they graduated high school. They have a lot of life outside of, well, of me. I would think this would be easy to accept at age 30. People have their own lives, and they don’t NEED me. I’m working on it. People like having me as a friend, and being someone’s friend doesn’t mean you have to be their first priority. Your friends will pick hanging out with their spouses or kids or other people before you almost all the time. It doesn’t mean they aren’t your friends. Again, I’m working on it.
I have this memory from college. One of those things where you feel so embarrassed and remember it forever. You remember the pants you were wearing that day, the jeans with the tiny hole in the pocket so your pens kept slipping down your pant leg. The white t-shirt, the kind that you can’t buy in singles.
A guy asked me about living where I grew up. Why I never left. Why I didn’t go somewhere else.
I said, I don’t think most of my problems have anything to do with geography.
Instantly, I was embarrassed. I wished a pen would fall through the hole in my pocket so I could shake it out of my pant leg and pick it up off the floor. The thing I said, it didn’t sound like me at all. It sounded like a kid trying to sound clever or profound. I would have given anything for the pen to fall through the hole in my pocket, that simple thing to be a huge fan that cleared away the smokescreen of bullshit, the particles of actual shit that you could taste in the air right then.
There was truth to what I said then. I stand by that. It’s just the way I said it.
The problems I had, the loneliness and always running right through a parade of memories every couple days, that never bothered me. They were problems, but I never felt like moving away would solve any of them. You can still be completely alone when you’re in a huge city, a huge group. I complain about traveling all the time, and I think one of the unspoken hardships of travel is that you go to the airport, you stand in all these lines, but you’re completely alone. At least when you’re crammed in at a restaurant or a concert, at leas you have something in common, something you came for. With the airport, it’s like meeting up in a crowded hall when the only thing you have in common is a tool, that you all bought the same stapler at some point.
I don’t think moving to a bigger city with more people and more people who like the things I like will make me less lonely. I’m not an idiot. I know that. I know that moving to a city with so many great writers won’t make me a writer. I know that swimming in the same pool as Michael Phelps doesn’t make a person a good swimmer.
But the thing is, I have to try. I have to. I have to try to not be so lonely. If I died in 6 months or 30 years, either way I would die thinking that I didn’t even try. That it’s my fault that I was so lonely.
The hardest problems, for me, are the ones that I don’t know how to solve. I get frustrated with environmentalism because I can recycle anything and everything and still walk out my front door and trip on a Lunchables packet someone threw out their car window. I get frustrated at my job because I can see money going to waste and there’s nothing I can do to really change that. I get frustrated when I talk to my mom about feminism because I feel like I live a life that treats people nice and that’s the most of what I can do, and it isn’t helping much.
The easiest problems are the ones that have answers.
The problem of being lonely, that doesn’t have an answer. And before you suggest things like making new friends and online dating, think about it from my perspective, which is Go fuck yourself.
The problem of depression is impossible. The other night I googled “Why do I sleep on the couch?” There were a lot of different answers, and way too many came from depression forums. I didn’t even know it was a depression thing. I thought maybe someone would suggest a different kind of pillow.
The problem of not living in a place where i want to live. That’s solvable. It really is. Of the problems out there, this one is pretty goddamn doable.
Over the next couple years, I want to move. I want to do everything I can to get ready, and then I want to move.
So from time to time you’ll probably see a post here related to that goal, or sort of related. No promises, like always. I’ll do my best to keep this site from turning to total boring shit where it sounds like I’m writing about how getting high on shrooms for the first time ever is an important experience. I promise not to use phrases like “Doors of perception” unless I’m testing them out as euphemisms for someone’s sexy parts.
There will be some stuff about the little things I’m doing to save money. Riding my bike to work. There will be some things about how I’m trying to be a better dude by doing some recycling. There will be some stuff about my plans to get a part time gig, for pay or not. All kinds of stuff.
The other big part of this plan, over the next year or two I want to try and do something once a month. It doesn’t have to be anything big or brand new. Just something, some experience of some sort. Beer fest. Santa Rampage. Ikea trip.
I visited my grandma when she was dying, right about this time a year ago. Leading up to the visit, talking to her on the phone, she would say how much she was looking forward to a visit. She would ask about how many days. Before, I thought it was bad to plan a visit too far out. Saying I was coming in four months, that seemed like forever. But for her, it was something to live towards. If I get through today, that’s one more day I don’t have to live through again, one day closer to something. I don’t want to overblow the value of those visits. But I think that there should always be SOMETHING on the calendar. Something that you’re looking forward to. Something planned so you have to go, have to get out and do something here and there.
So I hope you’ll all be a part of those things too. We’ll have Santa Rampage. I’ve already got a thing in the works for late winter. Without saying too much, if you always wanted to get a tattoo or are thinking about getting another one, hold off. It’ll be worth the wait. Oh, and Frozen Dead Guy Days.
In a couple years, who knows? Maybe I’ll be feeling great, feeling at home somewhere new. Maybe all this stuff will make living where I am happier. And that’s good too. Maybe a misery spiral will continue and I’ll lash out at all of you and then something else will come of that. Who knows.
But thanks for reading, and I think it’s going to be a fun ride.