Progress, Not Perfection in the Cities

It all happens so fucking fast. One minute you’re swimming through a fiery field of frantic forever agos and the next minute, that memory has been paved over and turned into a parking lot of endless hopes and dreams and open ended anythings. Every thought you ever had of “I can’t” or “I’m not worthy of any shining star placed in front of me” suddenly bursts like an atomic explosion of a million diamonds dancing across Lake Calhoun as the blooming sun shines intently through every crested wave. I can see the surface now and I pray to god that I don’t get tangled in the weeds again. Because, while an escape from the reality of the shoreline can be freeing, you’ll eventually run out of energy and sink to the murky bottom trying to find where it was you were running to in the first place.

False hope is a funny thing. It tells you stories that you didn’t know you needed to hear. I could’ve probably lived without most of it, but why? The lies I tell myself while waiting for sleep have kept me going, to some extent. It probably isn’t the path most would ever wander down, but at least it’s been interesting. If you had asked me ten years ago where I thought I would be at the age I am now, I would have absolutely no answer for you. I mean, sure, I had my ill conceived plans of fortune and fame, but I had no idea how to accomplish anything. I lived one day at a time, not worrying what happened tomorrow or the day after that. I just wish I had a better idea of what could happen if I kept going the way I was. Then again, there’s really no one to blame but myself, and my stubborn, idealistic ways. I think the thing that I have gotten the best at is breaking my own heart and spirit. I mean, I really know how to let myself down. There's always that fear that creeps back into your mind every time you’re afraid of losing something so you run away from it before it can run away from you. Why do I do that? It really makes no sense at all. I suppose you can call it a defense mechanism.

So here I am, back where I started all those years ago. As I walk down Lyndale Avenue, taking notice that the breeze is a little warmer than it was the day before, I notice everything that has changed on this stretch of urban pavement that is in desperate need of repair. There are the new shops that have taken shape over the old ones I remember seeing the last time I wandered down this street. There’s the new cars rolling on their way, new condos and parking lots where my favorite restaurants, bars, record stores, and thrift shops used to mold the still impressionable mind of my younger self. I suppose they call this growth or advancement, over charging the underpaid and undermining an entirely new generation of hopeful young dreamers. But, as long as someone’s getting paid, we’ll just call it progress for now.

It wanes, it weakens the grasp on reality I’ve managed to win back over the last year. It makes me question every goal or promise that I’ve made for myself since putting the bottle down. Was it all just a dream? This isn’t the same city I remember. Where’s the chaos and uncertainty? Where’s the panic and the back stabs? Where are the bruises and the burns and the scars and the words I regret and keep regretting until it sends me back to a barroom on the corner of 22nd & Como?

When you get so used to nothing ever going according to plan you begin to expect things to naturally slip out of order. When this doesn’t happen it creates a new sense of panic that I don’t even know how to begin to explain. After all, I was lucky enough to have come out alive on the other side of the valley of the shadow of death and pick up most of the pieces I had lost along the way. But, what do I do with those pieces now? Thirty is a strange age to realize what reality actually is, the fantasy of love at first sight and half assed success stories are in the city dump with the thousands of empty bottles that I drank up and the rest of the promises I forgot to follow through with.

Now, as I wander down this familiar stretch of road that almost seems as foreign to me as the first time I was introduced to its name, I can’t help but to think back to the woman I met back home in Sioux Falls several months earlier and why I had waited until two days before she moved to Alabama to have the foresight to meet her for coffee. I dive backwards to the moment when I made the ride share driver turn the car around after leaving her empty apartment the night before she left, so I could do something I know I would regret if I didn’t. We kissed and talked and touched until 2 am and now the only thing I regret is not being able to see her again tonight.

I have scurried through life like this too many times, always trying to steal another inch out of every mile of track laid in front of me. I have waited and waded for something to happen without really doing anything to earn it. There will always and forever be the “what could have happened?” moments that I keep running back to in my mind. How is that fair to anyone else? I mean, I doubt they have any recollection of the moments that swim and buoy through the pools of my memories. I have to learn to not let those thoughts rule the reality I have finally found, because all that will do is lead me back to the fantasy world I had crafted out so perfectly in my mind while sitting alone on dive bar barstools surrounded by strangers I thought were my friends. I don’t need that life anymore, I have what I came looking for in it and all it’s given me is an arsenal of heartaches and reasons not to do something.

What do you do when you are my age and just figuring out how to live a normal life? Try to retrace my steps to see where I went wrong? Try to find a reality in the fantasy I had built this city up to be in my head all of these years? Right now, I’m trying anything that works, cause the booze quit working along time ago. Maybe that’s why the city seems different to me, because I’m noticing everything it has to offer instead of just the bars and liquor stores that dot each corner and what false sense of joy or clarity I can find inside them.

I continue south along the criss crossing patterns of each cracked slab of old cement toward Lake Street. Each person that I pass is expressionless and looks straight ahead as I attempt to peer into their seemingly empty soul. No matter how old I get I keep looking for something, whether that be acceptance or love, and it seems the older I get the harder it is to come by. The world around me is jaded, it no longer seems to care about anything. It’s running and standing still at the same time, like the sun is actually revolving around us instead of the other way around. But, I’ve been stuck standing still for too long and need to figure out a way to get the world around me moving again.

As I approach Lake Street I decide to head east under the interstate overpass and past the shops that only advertise in Spanish slang. It’s like traveling to a different country along the same stretch of road in a matter of twenty minutes on foot. One of my best friends in the world lives in a second floor apartment house off Lake Street on Oakland Avenue behind one of those shops. It’s actually a auto repair shop that doubled as an all night party room for the owner and his buddies. My buddy, Eddie, didn’t mind his neighbors, though. In fact, if this were ten or even five years ago he and I might get blackout drunk and wander in to join them. But, we’re both worn out and no longer look forward to the chaos that collapsed around our entire lives when we were younger.

All walks of life surround me as I make my way to Eddie’s place this April afternoon. From the gentrified yuppies to the Central American and Somali immigrants. There’s the well known homeless man who trades me a cigarette for a chance to sign my name along with the hundreds of others that grace his tattered coat. There are the hipsters and urban farmers who have come from their parents house in the suburbs or some small town in the tri-state area. Then there was me in the middle of it all. I came here at eighteen in search of something I didn’t even know I had lost or never had. I’m still not exactly sure what it was I was looking for in all the famous bars and clubs on the corners of eminent cross streets in each nook and cranny of the city I have tattooed on my sleeve. Maybe it was here at one time, but I’m not sure it has stuck around long enough for me to find my way back. It’s sort of like chasing a ghost that was never dead to begin with or chasing a high that you wanted to last forever but can never return to.

The ice never truly melts on these northern streets. There’s always the cracks and the pot holes just so we don’t forget it ever left and will be on it’s way back once we make our way closer to the other side of the sun again. There’s always a slippery slope toward some death or destruction that forced me to run away time and again. It’s evident as the setting sun makes its way closer to the horizon line behind me as I walk through the drug turfs and past the the infamous Lake Street prostitutes setting up shop for the night. I don’t even notice these scenes that I once found so abnormal as the years of gutter maids and drunken nose parades have taught me all about what a person will do at the very bottom of their existence. Even now, that I haven't touched a mind altering substance in over a year, I’m still as jaded as ever. It’s not quite as a common occurrence to my line of sight as it once was, but it by no means surprises me. I don’t take pity or disgust on them like so many others do though, because I get it. All of these right wing Christian denominations are always trying to save the ones that can’t or don’t want to be saved, because no matter how hard you try a person will only see what reality is when they’re ready to see it. I’m just lucky the law caught up with me and forced me to see it whether I wanted to or not. Who knows how many drunken, empty bellied, dry heaving nights I would’ve survived, because I don’t. All I have now are my all too vivid drunk dreams and the dress rehearsal going on in front of me of beggars and bleeders and rock bottom stargazers to realize how very close I came to never coming back at all.

As I turn left on Oakland and approach Eddie’s place, I text him to let him know that I’m smoking out front. I’m standing facing the tributary of a street, slowly feeding into the river of cars flowing steadily along Lake Street, with my back to the duplex apartment house when I hear a screen door slam behind me and a slow but elated “Hey, how’s it goin?”

I turn around to see my old friend standing there lighting up a cigarette of his own and making his way over to where I stand on the sidewalk. “Not much,” I respond, “What’s up with you.”

“Nothin’,” Eddie says again in the same half-assed-hooray tone as he turns around and begins walking toward Lake Street. “Let’s put these out in the trash can on the corner. I don’t need to give my landlord a reason to be pissed at me.”

I shrug my shoulders and slowly trudge behind him a little confused as I don’t recall him ever being the tidiest person I’ve ever met. Then again, I don’t recall much of the last twelve years that we’ve known each other because a good chunk of it was spent at the other end of a bottle watching countless sunrises and piecing together blackout moments to one another hoping to gain at least a little perspective along the way. I suppose you could call it organized chaos to some degree, because we both seemed to have made it out alive up to this point.

Like a couple of beaten down, worn out soldiers returning from the front, we made our way up the angry wooden stairs to Eddie’s apartment. As he cracks open another beer from the fridge he says I can crash on the couch for as long as I need. The sound and sight of the bottle of beer stirs my head for a moment before asking where a glass for water can be found. I just need something to occupy my hands and lips to take my mind off of wanting a beer along with him. I know he still drinks at least a six pack every night, but he was always able to get up in the morning and go to work. I on the other hand was never that lucky, because I could never get enough and before I knew it, it was too late to even think about getting up for work or doing anything that didn’t involve more drinking. I’m trying to leave that all behind now, though, and I think I’ve got a good start if I can just take each moment as it comes and not get so hypnotized by each fantasy that sways across my imagination.

One of Eddie’s roommate’s comes through the door at that moment and I immediately recognize him as Brian, the lead guitarist of our short lived band back when we were twenty-two or twenty-three. We shake each other’s hands with giant elated grins on both our faces. It’s been at least two years since I saw him briefly at Eddie’s old place one winter and even longer before that.

I respond to his informal inquiry of how I’ve been with an immediate, “I’ve been sober for over a year!” Thinking it an apocalyptic answer of sorts as I didn’t ever seem to be sober in the many times he’s seen me.

“Nice, man!” he says, “I’ve got three!”

I immediately feel my nerves ease up a bit on my psyche knowing that I won’t be alone in a world full of all of the things I’ve been trying to leave behind for a better or at least a different outcome.

Eddie and I sit at the dining room table as Brian makes dinner for himself. We sit in silence for a while, Eddie holding his half empty beer bottle crooked on his outstretched right leg and I hold the glass of water in front of me on the table like it would escape if I ever eased up my grip. I stare blindly out the large bay window looking north as the sun slowly slips away and the westward horizon line illuminates the skyscrapers towering like the emerald city off in the distance. It still draws me in but not like it did before. It will always hold a special place in my heart and will always be my neverland, but at thirty years old I suppose it’s time to start growing up. It’s a sobering thought to think about. I was never just intoxicated by the booze or the drugs that floated around me, but by the idea that the party never had to end. It still scares the living hell out of me sometimes, that it’s all really over. The idea that we can always find another house or club or concert to indulge in all the excitement and chaos that a life like that had to offer and not really pay any price for it. But, looking back, I suppose I’ve paid a big price for my decadence and debauchery. I just wish I could’ve eased into the real world instead of having it come crashing down around me like it did.

“Pick it and it won’t ever heal” is all I keep hearing in my head the way Townes Van Zandt’s hauntingly beautiful, rough southern drawl said it once when I saw him sing "Poncho and Lefty" in a film. It’s the constant reminder that I need in order to keep my head level. I’ve always tried to control every situation around me and it’s gotten me nowhere but, well here. Everyone has their own life to live and the more I want them to act the way I want or say the things I want them to say, the more I will drive myself further into the depths of impending sadness and insanity.

I’m slowly getting better I think. Do I still wander around in circles wondering what the hell I’m supposed to do like a little child in an oversized backpack on the first day of kindergarten? From time to time, yes, I get lost in my own delusions and have to fight my way out of myself and into the forefront of the world around me and what I want to make out of this life I was given. Each line drawn on the map is still written in pencil, though, just in case I need to change the course at some point.

Eddie, Brian and I reminisce like we always do. Right now, it’s mostly the drunken or stoned advice that pours out of Eddie’s mouth from time to time. Sometimes he’s spot on and uses metaphors I couldn’t believe existed, though. Sometimes if you think about the things he says long enough, the more you realize what a radical, unassuming genius he can actually be. I tell him that I still remember what he told me ten years ago as an off the cuff, apathetic comment he made for some reason that I can’t quite pinpoint anymore. He told me to never get too comfortable, that I would lose what I had for drive or creative edge. I’ve unfortunately and unintentionally took that to heart, because I tell him that I don’t think I’ve been comfortable for most of the years since hearing him say that. I tell him that I don’t remember much from that time, but I remember that and when the alcohol and drugs weren’t turning everything backwards and upside down, he was right. He knows it too, because as he swallows the last sip of his beer and gets up to head to his bedroom for the night he says, “At least you’ve got plenty to write about.”

With that said and the city slowing down in the darkness outside, I move over to the couch to lay my head down for the night and hope to have a better idea of the future this new life of mine holds. Tomorrow is always either a new beginning to move forward or move backward, and though I’m trying to leave my old ways behind, I’m not sure if they’re completely done with me yet. But, here’s to hoping they are.