A Place to Call Home

(from 1/13/09)
First, an update. I bought a ticket and went to Prince Joe's funeral. I got a chance to meet his family, and I was given the opportunity to speak in front of everyone- to say how Joe affected my life and how I'd gotten to know him. I'll always be grateful for that opportunity.

The funeral was on a Thursday, but I used a couple of sick days to spend the rest of the weekend in St. Louis. Being back there showed me how much I really missed the city. Don't get me wrong, I love living in New York, I've had a wonderful time and I know that looking back I will always appreciate being able to live in the biggest city in our country. Riding the subway, eating at the carts, people everywhere, going to see the symphony in Central Park during the late summer. It's so exciting being young in New York, even if it's just for a little while. Even if it's just so I could say I did it.

But there's something to be said for having a place you call home, and as much as I'd like to, I don't think I'll ever develop that feeling about New York. When I was just a young high school student in Milwaukee, me and my brother would always get paper copies of the Onion. There was this one comic strip that we'd always laugh at, I forget the name, the sole purpose of it being to highlight pathetic losers at their absolute lowest moments. In one particular edition, this teenager was up late at night watching syndicated shows when the theme song for Cheers came on. Without any warning, he started crying because he "really wanted to go someplace where everbody knew his name." At the time, me and my brother laughed hysterically over someone who would cry over a popular TV theme song. But, all snarkiness aside, it's kind of how I feel when I go back to St. Louis.

For instance, that Friday night I went to this art gallery/hip-hop event that was put on by some of my people. Along with being a hip-hop artist and DJ, they respectively did fashion design and drawing/sketching/painting, and were both really good. In addition, there was plenty of free Schlafly beer (yeah St. Louis beer) and Vitamin Water. But more to the point of this story, I saw dozens of people that I knew. I had brought one of my friends along, but I was constantly bumping in to one person I'd known from doing anti-death penalty lobbying in Jefferson City, or someone I planned a concert with while working at the radio station. Looking back on it, I got a chance to do a lot of things during my time there. Now that I'm working, it's hard to imagine being involved as heavily, or really at all. I'm trying my hand at some volunteering, but it's not the same and on the weekends I just want to stay at home and read or rest. Part of it no doubt is the sheer energy it takes to truly get to know a place like New York. For a naturally curious person, getting to know St. Louis is pretty easy and once you're in with people, whether its the music scene, politics, volunteering, whatever, you're in there for life and you get to know everyone else in that life pretty quickly.
It was nice to talk about old times, catch up on who is getting married or having babies. It was also pretty cool telling people how life was going for me in New York. Most of my acquaintances told me how lucky I was to be in New York, and more to the point, out of St. Louis. It's an easy sentiment to understand. New York is one of the top three cities in the world (with London and Tokyo) by almost anyones metric, and St. Louis is a decrepit, mid-sized, former industrial city smack dab in the Rustbelt Midwest. But, I moved around all of my life, never really had a place to call home, it was pretty exciting to actually start to build a life somewhere. I had my favorite bar, knew where most things were happening at any given time, got to go to fundraisers for the now Governor of Missouri- it was stuff that my parents never did. We moved around too much to ever get settled, losing that continuity means losing friends but also losing all of your ocnnections, that social capital built up by familiarity. It's just makes things a lot easier to navigate your way through situations, or to build up a potential career when those relationships are still intact. St. Louis is small enough where building those relationships is a possibility for a young kid who just moved there, but large enough for them to be rewarding with hard work. I'm not sure if I'll eventually make my way back there; life's got too many possibilities at this age to know for certain. I really wouldn't mind it though, if that's how it's gonna be.