So it’s Thanksgiving Day, the traditional start of that period known as the “holiday season.”
For a variety of reasons, I’m having a hard time working up much enthusiasm for the holidays this year, but here we are just the same. Today brings lunch with my dad’s side of the family in Greensboro (in a suburb, actually, but it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference) and tomorrow we’re leaving for a few days at the beach. I make it a habit never to go to the beach during the summer; November through February is beach season for me.
A few extremely busy weeks of work follow. I’m on two search committees right now, and I’m also hiring a temp and several student workers in my department in a mad dash to spend as much money as possible before the state budget crisis comes crashing down around us. The next six months will be really hectic, which is actually a very good thing for me right now.
The week before Christmas brings ten-plus days in California visiting Mark‘s family in Fresno with side trips to Los Angeles and San Francisco. It will be my first trip west in two years, my first multi-day visit to the City of Doom™ in maybe four years, and my first time in Southern California since 2005. I wish the circumstances and timing of the trip were different but it will be good to see some old friends, some palm trees, and Clifton’s again. And lest I forget, there’s that whole exciting option of choosing cancerous death rays vs. getting felt up by a (probably ugly) complete stranger at the airport.
After my long flight home comes the new year and what I anticipate will be a very long and cold winter. But I’m not even going to think about that just yet…
Last week, I went to a great Indian place I’d never visited before and thought about telling Mark we should go there sometime for lunch. Then I realized there wasn’t much point since we won’t really be going to lunch anymore after next week. That was kind of a melodramatic moment. Now that he’s posted about the specifics, I figure I owe some of my longtime readers and friends a little explanation as to what’s going on here. I’ll make it quick and snappy:
- Yes, Mark and I will no longer be living together after the first of the year. He will be moving back to San Francisco. I will be staying put in the Triad. Unlike before, there is no specific timeline for when we might be living together in the future.
- No, we are not calling it quits, no matter how much it may sound like it. I love my boy very much (and I know it’s mutual) but we’re adjusting to the fact that our relationship will look rather different in the future than it has for the past nine years–in many ways.
- Yes, I want Mark to be happy. He’s not happy now, which is making us both unhappy. So we’re giving this bi-coastal thing another shot in the absence of other mutually acceptable options. Hopefully, this option will work. I realize that doing nothing will definitely not work.
- No, I will probably not be discussing this further in this space (1) because this part of my life is personal and not for public consumption, (2) because I want to avoid oversimplifications like this one, (3) because I want to avoid any temptation to communicate by website rather than “face to face”, and (4) because it’s just not what I want to be writing about here.
So that’s where we are. Please join me in wishing Mark well in San Francisco. And don’t worry too much about me either. I’m not in a very happy place right now (big understatement there), but I’ve proven over the years to be nothing if not resilient. I’ve got a job I love and lots of new toys to occupy my mind until we have our first rendezvous in Minneapolis or Omaha or wherever. And I’m really trying to see the positives in all this, albeit with mixed success in certain Indian restaurants.
And by “red” I mean “not much down time at work this week.”
There’s a little ice storm this morning, which means, as usual, that I have to hear lots of highway workers and state troopers with heavy southern accents saying “treacherous” and”solid sheet of ice” over and over again on TV. A little variation in terminology would be nice once in a while.
Random intrestingness from 30,000 feet:
- Great Torontoist post on Christmas at Eaton’s.
- Richard Burr surprises everyone by supporting legislation allowing American queers to die for the rights we don’t have.
- New York Times on commercial archaeology.
- How do I always manage to make it to Southern California just in time for record rainfall?
Free wifi and a first class upgrade (thanks, m’luv) make air travel almost tolerable.
My mom tells me that when I was a very small child, specifically on our trip to Montreal in 1967 for the World’s Fair, I was fascinated by “No U-turn” signs. Like so many things we hear all our lives about our childhood, I’ve sort of absorbed this as gospel truth and even convinced myself that I have some memory of it, when in fact I’m sure I really don’t. That’s part of how we process the past, creating digestible tidbits that we can organize into stories whose plots vaguely resemble our lives. Ironically, the real constant in these stories is that in real life, there aren’t really any U-turns. It’s a one-way street and there’s only forward momentum–even though it sometimes doesn’t seem that way.
Nostalgia (the late, great Herb Caen called it “the white man’s burden”) and the study of the past are both my passion and my career. Personally, I spend a lot of time thinking about the past. I can rattle off milestones and anniversaries, tell you what I was doing twenty years ago on a given date, and produce with reasonable accuracy a list of past tenants of any given building or plot of land which was part of my routine in the past. When I visit a place where I’ve spent a lot of time, my natural inclination is to reflect on my time there and to explore the area, looking for whatever relics might remain. Lord knows I’ve done a lot of that on this site, and at times when my life is unsettled, I’m even more prone to it. Witness this account of my 2001 trip to Atlanta, which strikes me as a pretty good example.
So far, I’ve lived what I think has been a pretty interesting life. I’ve made some very stupid mistakes and some incredibly brilliant moves. I regret none of them, including all those years I spent in San Francisco. Despite all the whining I did in the later years (none of which I regret either), that was one of the most important periods in my life. Without having experienced it, I wouldn’t even resemble the person I am today. And I generally like the person I am today, thanks.
One thing I recognize, though, is that my years in San Francisco are part of my past. They’re an important part and a part that I enjoyed, but they’re not something I’ll ever experience again. I could move back to San Francisco tomorrow and probably have some sort of life. I could eat at some (but sadly, not all) of the same restaurants and even cruise some of the same bars. I could even start working at Kinko’s again. But I will never again be a 28-year-old experiencing it all for the first time in 1992. I will never again be happy living in a dingy hovel just beacuse it’s within walking distance of the sex club. It can never again be the same. In fact, within a year or two, it already wasn’t the same for me. To be honest, the version of it that I recall today probably never quite happened either. The tendency is to dwell on the highs and the lows rather than on the mundane middle ground that is the majority of our life experience at any given moment. We tend to remember the joy and the drama and to have very little recall of the tedium of getting to and from work every day. And trying to park the car. And doing the laundry. And the lines at the grocery store everywhere.
An analogy that only I could come up with is that it’s like visiting a Lucky supermarket in San Francisco. Lucky was a chain that was absorbed into a bigger chain more than ten years ago. It didn’t work out well, and the Bay Area locations were sold to a different chain a few years ago, and this company restored the Lucky name and the old logo. But the restored logo doesn’t make it a Lucky store. There will never be Lucky stores again as I remember them. These are just Save-Mart stores with Lucky logos and a bunch of vintage photographs (many of which I supplied, but that’s a different story).
I don’t miss San Francisco (or Charlotte or Atlanta) so much as I miss being a lot younger in a very exciting place and time. That’s not coming back, no matter how much I may want it to, and it’s become very important to me in the past couple of years to realize that and start looking at the future rather than the past. As an individual, I’m shaped by my life experience, but there are some parts of that experience that are over now. It’s not that I’ve gotten old and “changed my evil ways” or started moralizing. I don’t drink now because I don’t like how it makes me feel. I don’t smoke because I’d like not to die anytime soon. I don’t spend lots of money on clothes and other doodads because I just don’t care that much about “fashion” anymore. I don’t chase boys because I found the one I loved and chasing other ones stopped seeming like something I wanted to waste time and energy on. It’s not that I regret doing any of this stuff in the past. I merely realize that it’s just that: part of my past.
That’s not to say that I don’t think of the past; I think of it very often and quite fondly and it colors every decision I make. I just recognize now (or at least I’m trying) that there’s no turning back. There is only the present and the future. So much has changed in my life just in the past six months that even the July version of my life is now irretrievable.
There are no U-turns in life. And that’s probably a good thing so long as you’re not counting on one.