August 27, 2008
Dear Clusterflock
Why do you live where you do?
What brought you there? What holds you?
What’s driving you away, or calling from afar?
Why here, and not there?
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31 Responses to “Dear Clusterflock”
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Why do you live where you do?
What brought you there? What holds you?
What’s driving you away, or calling from afar?
Why here, and not there?
31 Responses to “Dear Clusterflock”
Leave a Reply
Circumstance.
The town I was in was dying. Love.
More fulfilling work.
Ease.
Oh, Mike! Good questions!
Why do you live where you do? I can’t explain it, Kansas City came to me as a place that felt like “home” the first time I experienced it. It was like I already knew my way around, not that I didn’t have to use a map to get around at first, but it seemed, somehow, “natural.”
What brought you there? The Jones Store, where I had my first job out of college, now defunct, now “absorbed” by Macy’s. I’ve been out of retail for many years now. To be “out” is a blessing beyond description.
What holds you? The people I’ve met here who have become “long-lasting” friends, some of which I hardly see now, some of which I’ve scarce come to know. I met Danny here, then we moved around to Tulsa, Minneapolis, Detroit over the course of several years. We came back, we’ve been here, in our most recent incarnation, 12 years.
What’s driving you away, or calling from afar? I’m “called” by a desire to make “something.” I have a little “belief” that I “will” make “this something,” though I don’t necessarily believe I have to be “here,” necessarily, to make it.
Why here, and not there? Danny loves to travel and does a lot for work. Almost everytime he goes someplace I haven’t been, he comes back and describes wonderful places where I “could” be, and it seems “plausible.” Kansas City? I can’t explain it, it just “feels” right, at least for now.
a mistake - i never meant to return to KC
a misjudgement
family
still the sea
…
My wife and I were just talking about this very thing while driving down the coast to visit her parents.
We live in Sacramento because, after college, we couldn’t afford to leave.
We’re held here by our house.
We want to move to the Monterey Bay.
Doc, yes still. The sea calls..
Rick,
Like edith piaf.
.
..or opium.
I’ve been living nomadically for a while. Right now I’m in the south east corner of Clare, Ireland. I am planning to travel to New York again soon. It’s a question of layers of meaning, layers of what I could call ‘reasons’. I overheard two people talking about where they lived a few days ago, and one of them said, “ah well, if it’s home, it’s home”. I found this to be as wise and deep as anything I have ever heard on the subject.
Sometimes you just end up where you end up, and it doesn’t feel like home at all. I lived in Denmark for three and a half years, feeling like that pretty much all the time. It was absolutely where I lived, and I learned the language, and made homes there, moved through the culture, but I was never settled there. Every flat I lived in had a quality of ‘just for a couple of months’ about it, often written into the contract. I worked on an entirely freelance basis. Having lived in a number of different cultures, I think that home for me will always be a multiple of places, that I return to, regularly.
What I’ve learned is that finding love and engagement in and for the place you live in is an important thing, and there is no ‘perfect place’. If it’s home, it’s home, and you enjoy the good things and deal with the bad ones. When the bad ones overwhelm the good ones, you do everything you can do to move. Usually the blend is more nuanced than ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
Sometimes you just can’t leave a place until your time there is done. I am still living on a ‘couple of months’ kind of basis, whether here in Clare, or Barcelona where I spent most of the summer, or New York which I am electronically connected to daily, or Denmark which I have left but whose influence I can still feel, or Dublin where I lived for a long time and which is a rich seam of memory for me, or the internet, where I spend so much of my time. It is not restlessness. It is the circumstances of my sense of home. It is a constantly evolving circumstance.
great fucking question. and so big. give me a minute to think.
1) family
2) guilt
3) guilt
4) guilt
5) fear of guilt
6) guilt avoidance
7) government cheese
Why do you live where you do?
St. Louis, MO
What brought you there? What holds you?
Seminary, originally. I left school, moved back to New Jersey, then back to California, then back to St. Louis in one years time.
I suppose the decaying beauty of a city that was once great drew me back (such places are good places to be lost), but it is the people that cause me to stay. My friends here bring the best out of me.
What’s driving you away, or calling from afar?
Far is two days drive, so roughly either coast. I have drive coast-to-coast seven times.
Why here, and not there?
Not here is easy. Princeton is a terrible town that causes a person take themselves too seriously and it reminds me of my academic failures. Plus I grew up there.
California is beautiful but vacuous. Everyone is too busy for substantive friendship and all they do is lounge about, drinking and eating. This sounds good until you do it for a few months. Oh, and rent (there is no possibility to buy) is absurd.
St. Louis allows for substance but doesn’t require academic credentials or shit-tons of money to legitimize your existence. A man can simple stand on his own two wobbly feet.
—
Of course à la Lucy, this is all subject to change.
as broad as it sounds, Texas feels like home. I live in Dallas, the Oak Cliff section of Dallas specifically, in a plus 80 year old house we are turning into a combination of modernism and arts and crafts. but I don’t think of Dallas as home. I think of Texas as home. and I have no clear or fucking idea why. when I am somewhere beautiful, somewhere obviously beautiful, like California or Colorado, the choice of living in a place like that makes perfect sense. when I am in a city with culture and history and beauty, the obviousness of living in a place like that makes perfect sense. I think I’m afraid of that obviousness. I want my life to be a little bit harder. a little bit less obvious. Texas is exactly that. there is beauty here but it will kick the shit out of you and it is lonely and isolating. I love the way the sky looks. I love the food and the openness. the people are beautiful when you don’t think of them politically. the people in the cities who are proud, and christian, and republican are evil. there is no simpler way to put it. being around them kills me. but what if I left? that would be a false sense of security. it is their evilness, their vileness partially that compels me to stay here. if I left, I think they would haunt me more. I would try to forget about them and think that life was beautiful and safe. but it isn’t and Texas isn’t. and it is ugly and cavernous and breathtaking. I can’t get it out of my system.
yet.
Deron, I just read your comment aloud to Daryl, and we exchanged many knowing looks. Your description is perfect–you are speaking for us as well as yourself.
If I leave Texas, it will be to leave the country. And I’m really hoping it won’t come to that.
Excellent question, MD. I think cities are sexy, too. And countryside is nice. I hope to visit Europe someday!
p.s. do you hunt?
Cindy, what if Texas follows us?
I left Calgary for Toronto in 93. I was unhappy, drunk, single, and without a career to speak of.
Since then I’ve become sober, married, the father of two unquestionably beautiful daughters, and a career that satisfies me both emotionally and financially.
Sometimes geography, and the chance to start over, is the cure.
That said, I miss my brothers and sister, and my mom, and my best friend, who is my still my best friend going on 37 years (I’m 43 now) But there is no going back now. This is where I belong. This is where my roots are now. I will probably die here, quite happily.
The right wing politics of Alberta aren’t missed either, by the way. (For you non-Canadians, Alberta’s about as Red State as you can get without actually being in the USA.)
Thanks for the thoughtful answers, y’all. And feel free to keep them coming. I’ve been pondering this, of late. I’ve moved a sum total of 60 miles from my birthplace, and I do see the quiet beauty of this place. And yet. I’ll go ahead and answer my own questions.
Why do you live where you do?
Convenience, mainly. An old college roommate provided a soft landing after my divorce; we eat well, drink well, and get just enough culture here to feel alright. Florida–old Cracker Florida–is a secret that so few here know; it’s mosquito bites and hush puppies and the knowledge that the hurricanes never do much of anything. Its beauty is slowly being concreted in under housing developments, but goddammit, some of us walk out of the A/C into that 90 degree heat and smile: this is real, and we can take it like our daddies did.
What brought you there? What holds you?
Born and bred. Family and fear.
What’s driving you away, or calling from afar?
Car culture is slowly killing me; if I never see another interstate, I’ll be just fine. Frigging intersections… twelve lanes of heat and death and hanging wires. Deserts are beautiful by comparison; lizards and horny toads wouldn’t last a day here.
I’m called by the big city (yeah, that one.) I want to ride trains, walk past graffiti and vomit, and be surrounded by human beings doing their business smashed together, a thousand to the block. I want tall, dirty, fast, noisy, but…real, in a way that isn’t sold in strip malls, that doesn’t pop up in a field by a new highway in 6 months time.
Why here, and not there?
Temp gig ends in December. Lease is up in Feb. Beyond that, I have no idea.
It’s cheap.
School. Inertia.
Job market. “West”
No resources to beat inertia.
I live in New York City. I grew up about 50 miles outside the City but my father lived here from the time I was 12 so I was always here on the weekends. My mother says she knew I would move to the City as soon as I was able. She says she knew this by the time I was 13. She says my love affair with NY was palpable even at that age. And I hate to say she was right, but she was. Please don’t tell her.
I’ve visited many places and enjoyed most of them. San Fran, Chicago, New Hampshire, Ireland, Paris. But the only place I click - I mean a real, audible, no-doubt-about-it click - is here in the City. My City. There’s a pulse here I don’t feel anywhere else. Like the City itself is alive.
I’m not leaving. My family - both the one I was born with and the one I have gathered around myself - is here. My past is here. My future is here. My life is here.
Cindy, what if Texas follows us?
I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if it did.
I just dug out something I wrote to a clusterflock friend recently, appropriate to this thread:
I lived briefly in NYC, and one of the things that first struck me was the absolute lack of inhibition among the inhabitants. I realized early on that no one seemed to care if I walked down the street reciting poetry aloud, or paid any attention to the unusual clothes I wore. I loved it at first, but after a time it became tiresome, as if eccentricity were an expectation. I found myself longing for the perplexed stares of Texans, wallowing in their certainties and completely oblivious to the real eccentricities that define their lives. I guess I need context.
Texas is my context. Every time I leave it–even for a few days–I end up seeing something on the news about some crazy thing going on in Texas and I feel a palpable pull to return, like a magnet. The older I get, the more I realize that I just have to be here.
Cindy, Deron, your answers are beautiful and insightful. I’ve often wondered, aloud or silently, “how could any thinking person live in [Texas, a small town, the burbs]?” and your answers show that you do it not by ignoring a place’s disfunctions or mythologizing “simple, honest folk,” but by putting it in relation to the whole flawed-yet-beautiful mess that is the world.
For a few years, I lived in the small town in which I figured I would grow old; it was inexplicably the perfect place for me. Then I changed, and it just wasn’t the home it was before. I suppose no place is “perfect,” if even “better.” Happiness is a complicated thing, but I guess it wouldn’t be worth so much were it easy.
But happiness comes and goes, and when it’s present there’s nothing complicated about it at all. The only thing that’s complicated about happiness is the search for it. I used to think that I needed to love everything about Denmark in order to be content living there, but that was never going to happen, because it just wasn’t the right chemistry. So some people get a kick out of being stared at unselfconsciously by the local wildlife, and other people want nothing more than to feel entirely ordinary in the place that they live, not the weirdy one that lives on the corner. I think it is entirely dependent on the chemistry of the person in the place. When you find a place or a person that draws love out of you daily for it or him or her, then it’s just a question of getting on with it. There is no more search, or expectation of finding happiness. There’s just living.
Thank you, Mike. The thing is, I do still require a certain beauty and counter balance to the Texas stereotype. We live in a beautiful old house in a wonderfully quirky neighborhood. I’m pretty sure I’d die in a big hurry if I had to live in a suburb, for instance–I need what Virginia Woolf referred to as “the jolt of the city.” And perhaps because of the greater prevalence of crafty Christians and self-righteous believers that “common sense” should govern all, Dallas has a very active counterculture that helps to keep all in perspective. I think Daryl, Deron, (Amy, perhaps?) and I all feel pretty much the same way–we wouldn’t be able to take it if we were the only liberal-minded atheists around these parts, but we thrive as a confident minority.
Lucy, I’m enjoying your comments.
Thanks Cindy. I’ve been digging the community vibe around this site for a while. Sometimes it’s nice not just to lurk.
I live here because I have obligations that require my presence in this city. Some more obvious than others, some harder to explain.
A relationship brought me here from Ohio in 2001. Although it has since dissolved, my children and my close friends give me the roots I need to stop myself from jumping in the car and driving as far as I can in any direction.
Ohio calls the loudest, but it’s not alone.
Rick put it best, “Kansas City? I can’t explain it, it just “feels” right, at least for now.”
Why do you live where you do?
I commuted out of the city, way down to San Jose for over two out of the three years I’ve lived in San Francisco. So it’s only just begun to feel like home to me here. I need to give this place a chance.
What brought you there? What holds you?
I moved back to the Bay Area for my rapidly expanding family. The weather, green parks, ocean beach, and a bike-friendly bridge keep me here. I’m probably taking for granted the fact that I haven’t lived somewhere that requires a car for eight years.
What’s driving you away, or calling from afar?
This city is severely segregated by interest groups. I miss the way New Yorkers can be so different and yet so much less judgmental. The Bay Area lacks perspective — the people are too wealthy here. When the iPhone came out last year, I could have sworn my neighbors thought it was going to bring sanitation to the world’s poor.
My mother moved to a small town on a lake in the Colorado mountains five years ago. I crave that expanse of sky. A wide, grassy backyard calls to me too.
Why here, and not there?
My family and the few friends I’ve made since I got here. But if my best friend were to move back to Vancouver, I might follow her.
Lucy, thanks for your comments. You’re always welcome here. That goes for all you lurkers.
thoughtful lurkers, I guess I should say.
Why do you live where you do?
We thought Kenya might have suitable pastures for a goat.
What brought you there? What holds you?
The desire to have a goat. Nothing.
What’s driving you away, or calling from afar?
Greener pastures.
Why here, and not there?
Not sure where there is. For that matter not sure where here is.
Why do you live where you do?
It’s the happiest place I know. My parents moved here when I was two and I’ve never wanted to live permanently anywhere else.
What brought you there? What holds you?
Luck. Inertia.
What’s driving you away, or calling from afar?
The desire to have the experience of returning home.
Why here, and not there?
Convergence of sun, artesian springs, oak trees, and really wonderful people.
i live in the White Rock area of Dallas held hostage with 20,000 books 4 dogs and 5 cats. HELP !