'there's something waiting for us in the hot, wet air.'
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Dear ones,
All the posters for upcoming shows on the wall of the vegan cafe are for bands I listened to twenty years ago. I notice this at a table with two friends I’ve known for just as long, and we talk about aging as punks, as queers, as artists. Meeting people in your late teens, when you’re all living on your own for the first time, in a city like Chicago, in a time like the early/mid 2000s, when there was a war going on, and when we downloaded mp3s, and uploaded pictures from our digital cameras, and danced at shows and punk house parties, and dove through dumpsters, and laughed too loud on the el, and didn’t know enough to name our trauma or anxiety so we kind of just rode our bikes through the city with giant emotions and wrote songs and poetry about it…..Well, it’s hard not to bond under conditions like those. Me, E, and C definitely have a bond.
I am in Chicago to give a book talk at DePaul, where I did my BA and MA, a place, despite being my only source of debt, is a place I loved and love. I had actually good teachers, I met friends and comrades who would change my life, I fell in love so big and so hard, I played in bands, and organized protests, and that school was the backdrop of it all. It was an honor to speak there, it was so meaningful to give a talk to an audience that included professors I spent years admiring (and also young people who seemed to think I was cool?).
The campus is mostly the same; some slightly shinier corner stores, some updates to some buildings, but mostly the sidewalks were the same sidewalks that held me through, hands down, the dreamiest chapter of my life. For years when I went back to Chicago after moving away, that nostalgia would hit me in the face, pummel me with longing. This time, I felt more measured, more intellectually than emotionally reflective. “I’ve lived so many lives since I was last here,” I explain to B when trying to make sense of some of the distance I feel.
There was a time when I felt sad that I didn’t live life at a volume as big as I did during my Chicago era, but I know that kind of intensity wasn’t sustainable. Still, it’s fun to revisit, and I spent time at the airport reading my old Livejournal, pushing on the faded nostalgia bruise for some sensation. I want to share some of these because I am so tender for that 20, 21, 22 year old girl, feeling things so wild. I know she’s still in there — the past couple of year especially have taught me that I am just as capable of life-altering love, and of staying true to radical commitments, and to feeling just as moved by music — but this young one had so much life ahead of her, and you can feel it. It’s a sweet thing to witness, so here we go; a sampling of Livejournal posts c. 2006-2007. (Alt text is available via the link which gives access to the full post.)
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