Hello new visitors. It’s quite possible you’ve found this site because of the Newsweek article. If you haven’t already read it, I recently wrote about 10 Cities/10 Years for Newsweek’s “My Turn” feature, which is a space for people to share their unique life experiences. In the article, I discuss the details of the project, what I learned about myself through doing it, and what I learned about America in general.
It was an honor to write for the feature and I’m quite pleased how the article came out. You can read it here:
City living is a great way to be reminded that America is uniquely complex, that there are millions of Republicans in “blue” America and millions of Democrats in “red” America. One of the silliest notions I’ve ever heard is that there is a “Real America.” According to many politicians, because I grew up in a town of less than 80,000 people, I’m from “Real America.” This concept, that “Real America” exists in the heartlands of the country, outside of our main metropolises, led me to wonder: What does that make the over 15 million Americans I lived among, in big cities, from 2005 to 2015?
After Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, I heard frequently about the “liberal bubble,” but that never fit with the country I experienced. In the cities I lived in—many considered liberal strongholds—I met all kinds of people whose views fit more neatly in the “conservative” box. There was the transgender woman in New York who adamantly defended the U.S. government’s use of torture on terrorism suspects after 9/11. There was the co-worker in Nashville who assumed, because I am an atheist, that I “sacrificed” children—her interpretation of abortion. For that matter, there were all the residents of so-called liberal cities who went to church every Sunday. I encountered all types of political and religious views over my 10 years; rarely did they fit in an easy category.
If you’d like more background on what exactly the 10 Cities project was (and continues to be), there’s always the About section. If you want to read some stories from the road, you can check out “The Book” section (scroll down and start with the Prologue). You can also check out other Press coverage. Or just take a look around the site; you may stumble across something I’ve totally forgotten I wrote.
Whether you’re a regular reader of this site, someone who used to be a regular reader and is just checking in, or someone who came across 10 Cities/10 Years because of the Newsweek article, I’d love to hear your thoughts: on the article, on the project, on life, on the 1962 Chicago Cubs, whatever. Leave a comment, show some love.
Cheers from Madrid,
L
P.S. Anyone who is interested in keeping up with my ongoing adventures, including my life in Spain and future publications, can add your email address over on the righthand side.
P.P.S. If you live in Madrid or are going to be in the city in mid-October, I’ll be doing a talk about the project and my writing at The Secret Kingdoms, a recently opened English-language bookstore in Barrios de las Letras. Get tickets here.
I’ve been known to indulge in my share of excavating. As I prepare for my next big move, I’ve been looking back, not only on the decade-long 10 Cities/10 Years, but also on my youth and even more recent history. Writing these chapters from my life has been rewarding, allowing me to scrutinize my memories and re-examine pivotal moments in my history, recontextualizing my history as it relates to my present. But there are other ways to explore the past.
One of my favorite tools for documenting my life in real time is Last.fm, a website I’ve mentioned not infrequently in these pages. It’s the simplest of ideas: the website tracks the music you listen to on your various devices and compiles that information into charts and data points. It’s extremely nerdy and entirely unnecessary, and I love it.
I started using Last.fm just a few months before I set out on my decade of travel, so I have a document of all the music I listened to throughout the entire journey from day one: my ups and downs, my relationships come and gone, my periods of depression and moments of hysteria, all of it soundtracked. It’s the kind of thing that I can nerd out over for hours, and often do.
I decided it would be informative to look at my Top Songs charts for the various years of my 10 city project to get a sense of the tenor of each year through my musical obsessions. I’ve taken a snapshot of my Top 5 tracks, so now, if you’ll indulge me, I’m going to take another look back at my project, this time through song.
How predictable. In my first year of traveling, I was still mostly listening to the artists who had gotten me through college, so Radiohead and Rufus Wainwright had been getting heavy rotation for a few years by this point (and still do). “Fake Plastic Trees” was my go-to favorite song for years, though its stature has diminished some over the years.
In terms of evolving musical tastes, The Decemberists were one of the many new artists a friend introduced to me while I was living in Charlotte. Especially in those early days, the Pacific Northwest band was known for their whimsical and eccentric mix of British folk and sea shanties. I was besotted with “The Engine Driver” which has this one verse:
I am a writer, writer of fictions I am the heart that you call home And I’ve written pages upon pages Trying to rid you from my bones
It’s the kind of melodramatic sentiment that I absolutely adored back then. (Eh, still do.)
Not much had changed in terms of favorite artists, though I was definitely listening to a more varied selection. “Come Pick Me Up” is my all-time most listened song and has never lost its “Favorite Song” status, but by this point I was starting to seek out more obscure artists. Mirah was another new discovery from my year in Charlotte, and she rapidly ascended into the realm of favorites. Though I’ve only followed her career intermittently recently, I was fortunate enough to see her play live just a few months ago at an intimate benefit show for LGBT youth. She was lovely.
Ghosty, for those that don’t know, is (was?) a band from my hometown in Kansas. They played a set at the famous World Café in Philadelphia and I saw them perform. Staying after to talk with the guys, I was surprised when the lead singer said that he actually knew me because he had seen me read poetry back in Lawrence. That was wholly unexpected and kind of cool.
For a time, Beirut was the musical artist I felt most spoke to my increasingly disparate tastes in music. I used to say that if I had any musical talent (I do not), I would make music exactly like Beirut. It’s interesting how, as especially so-called “indie” music has expanded in form and genre, the once unique Baltic sounds of Beirut have become just another common trope. I still enjoy Beirut, but my fervor has lessened considerably.
Starting to see some more female artists gain prominence in this list, though none of these three particular artists would be in my favorites. Still, Beth Orton’s Central Reservation did receive considerable play for a few years. “Concrete Sky,” which is off of a different album, features one-time Orton beau, Ryan Adams, so that probably helps explain its high chart position here. It’s also just a beautiful song.
“No Children” is, for me, the perfect song about a doomed relationship, that kind of love where the two people are terrible for each other but still work in a twisted sort of way. John Darnielle is a storyteller, and the entire Tallahassee album is arguably the best novel he’s ever written (though his two actual novels are worth a read).
My fifth year was, at times, arduous, as you might recall, so it’s not really surprising that the songs that got the most airplay in that year were in large part downcast affairs. I adore Neko Case’s entire oeuvre, and I consider her song, “Star Witness,” to be one of the defining songs of 10 Cities/10 Years (I’m frankly shocked at its absence on these lists). Although “Don’t Forget Me” is a Harry Nilsson cover, she definitively makes it her own.
Yeasayer’s “Tightrope” stands out from the other songs on the chart with its propulsive and infectious rhythms. It appeared on the Dark Was the Night charity compilation (along with Iron & Wine’s “Die”) and was basically the standout track from two discs of excellent but mostly similar sounding indie rock and folk music. Worth tracking down.
In the wake of a bad break up in Chicago, Nashville’s list consists of a lot of old favorites; comfort food, I suppose. Ironic that the one Adele song that I was really into that year was actually one of her more upbeat tracks. Also, “Dear Chicago”? How on the nose could I be? (Granted, it’s a fantastic song.)
Ryan reclaims the top track, but this time with a song that was never officially released. Both “Karina” and “Angelina” appear on the famously unreleased 48 Hours (bootlegs are available, obviously), which was scrapped in favor of Demolition, a solid but ultimately less cohesive album. I’ve said this elsewhere but, after Heartbreaker, 48 Hours is Ryan’s greatest album, and the fact that it has never officially been released is a tragedy (a few songs appear on Demolition). “Karina” is his most sympathetic and piercing character piece and deserves to be loved by millions.
Otherwise, this list clearly reflects the counter-intuitively sunnier times I was having in Seattle. Also, funny to note just how much Childish Gambino has evolved as a writer and performer since those early days. “Freaks and Geeks” is still a banger.
This was another hard personal year, but still a year with a lot of partying, which is nicely exemplified in the dichotomy of Justin Timberlake and a pair of The National’s bleakest songs. The Divine Fits’ “Shivers” splits the difference, an old school proto-punk cover with the lyrics:
I’ve been contemplating suicide But it really doesn’t suit my style So I guess I’ll just act bored instead And contain the blood I would’a shed
Considering my state of mind that year, the song was clearly speaking to me. (The song also includes one of my all-time favorite lines of shade: “My baby’s so vain / She’s almost a mirror”.)
I’d been a fan of Death Cab for Cutie since college, and yet, somehow, I had never bothered to acquire their most critically acclaimed album, Transatlanticism. I rectified that in Boston and soon after became enthralled with the eight minute centerpiece. I was also still obsessing over Hurray for the Riff Raff, a folk/mixed genre band from New Orleans that you should also be obsessed with. Get on that.
(Also, yes, Justin Timberlake made the list two years in a row; no shame.)
And then came Brooklyn. Kanye West is an asshole. Kanye West is too full of himself. Kanye West lacks impulse control. All true. Also true: Kanye West can produce some amazing music. When Boston roommate, Emily, helped drive me to my tenth and final city, “Power” literally started playing the moment we passed the city limit sign. There couldn’t have been a more thematically appropriate song for that moment.
I had a brief fling with a French girl when I first moved to Brooklyn; my infatuation with The Stills’ french-language “Retour a Vega” lasted much longer. At the same time, I fell absolutely head-over-heels in love with HAIM’s debut. Their latest release is very good, but I still play the hell out of Days Are Gone.
Goddamn right JT threepeated.
Album Credits
Notably, while many of my favorite artists are represented in these lists, there are plenty of others that don’t appear (no Sufjan Stevens, no Elliott Smith, no Spoon, no Rilo Kiley), while a number of artists who I barely listen to anymore (Night Terrors of 1927, really?) showed up.
I could have done this kind of list with my Top Artists or my Top Albums and gotten some very different results. For instance, these were my top albums from my year in Charlotte:
All five albums came out between 2005 and 2006, yet only one, Picaresque, is represented on the most played songs. I suspect that I was still getting to know these albums and thus listening to them straight through instead of just cherry picking my favorite tracks.
I chose to look at my top songs instead of albums or artists because I think they reflect my moods in those years more accurately. The album lists lean heavily towards recent releases, and my top artists stay pretty static from year to year (Radiohead and Ryan Adams are almost always in the top spots). By contrast, my ever-changing top song lists across my ten year journey illustrate not only an evolving musical taste, but they also provide insight into my mental state in those particular years.
Perhaps this sort of thing is only interesting to me (if so, you probably aren’t still reading, so who cares), but if you have a Last.fm account, I recommend taking a gander into your own past. Maybe you’ll learn something about yourself.
Epilogue
For the completists in the continually dwindling crowd, I’m including my second and third year lists from my time in Brooklyn. As I’ve written about previously, the music of Songs: Ohia carried me through a very difficult post-project year, hence The Lioness charting so many tracks. And then, this current year’s list is a result of my concerted effort to seek out more diverse artists and voices, in particular more women.
Brooklyn (Year 2)
Brooklyn (Year 3)
Ideally, the list will continue to evolve every year because I will continue to evolve. In that way, these charts serve both as a document of the past and a challenge for the future. Who knows what my playlist will look like after a year in Spain? I look forward to making fresh comparisons next August.
Over the weekend, I traveled through Boston to Gloucester, Massachusetts to attend the wedding of my old friend, Kate (yes, that Kate). The ceremony and reception were held atHammond Castle, the ornate mid-20th century creation of an eccentric millionaire rocket scientist, complete with artwork imported from Europe and the Gothic vibe of a Scooby Doo haunted mansion.
The last time I saw Kate was a week before I moved from Chicago to Nashville, some seven years ago. To say a great deal has happened in our respective lives since then would be a colossal understatement. The roads have been long and winding.
I’ve been to my share of weddings over the years, some rigidly traditional, others idiosyncratic and wholly individualized; most find a balance, maintaining the well-established structure but punctuating the traditions with unique touches or turning them on their head. Naturally, each couple has a way of injecting their personalities into the ceremony, especially those with, shall we say, strong personalities. Kate would fit into that category.
As a friend of the bride and the de facto date of one of the bridesmaids (former girlfriend), I spent most of my time in the company of Kate and her female coterie. I don’t have a lot of experience with the male version of a wedding party. I’ve never been a groomsman and the only bachelor party that I’ve been to was for my brother, a rather chaste event in every since of the word – it began with 30 minutes of prayer.
By contrast, I’m rather well acquainted with bridal parties; for reasons surpassing understanding, I tend to be closer with more brides than grooms.
Marriage: It’s, like, a whole thing
The language of marriage is steeped in notions of commitment, which is obvious, but still of interest to me: “vows” and “dedication,” “taking the plunge” and “ball and chain” (admittedly, not all the terminology has a positive connotation). Reaching back to its roots, the institution of marriage is simultaneously a business arrangement and a romantic bond, a facilitator of families and a symbolic gesture. In all its iterations, though, marriage remains a blind leap into the future, the unknown.
Blind leaps of faith are kind of my forte, and yet I find marriage almost unimaginable for myself. It’s not due to some cliché, “I don’t believe in the concept” political stance, or any desire to remain a bachelor forever. I actually find the notion of being married to the right person quite enticing, always have. Even having witnessed my share of marriages dissolve – including my parents – I still see the appeal.
What I imagine a marriage to be has changed considerably since my younger years.In my Christian youth, marriage was the end all, be all of existence. I believed all future happiness would be found within its boundaries. So powerful was this belief – and so insistently was it emphasized by my spiritual leaders – that even once I left the faith, it took me a great deal of time to shake the idea that being married with the only natural conclusion to a relationship, and by extension, to a life.
Based on my experiences, I feel I’ve had the opposite development of a lot of people. Most people spend their 20s saying they’ll never get married and then as their 30s approach, they open up to the concept. I spent much of my 20s absolutely convinced that marriage was the natural next stage in my life, but now in my 30s, I no longer put much stock in it, if only because I can imagine a life without it and – for me – it doesn’t seem like a tragedy.
There are any number of reasons why I’m not ready for marriage (besides for the obvious fact that I’m single by necessity). A more charitable person might suggest I haven’t met the right person, or haven’t reached that destination in my journey yet. If you were feeling less than charitable, you might suggest I’m just too selfish or immature to make such a commitment. All good reasons. I can’t argue with any of them.
I do know that at this moment in my life, there’s something I want more than wedded bliss, and that’s the open road. My dedication, my commitment – the plunge I will always rush to take – is travel. Honestly, I reject the idea that I’m a commitmentaphobe. At 22, I set aside ten years of my life for a travel project and I followed through with it. How many people could honestly say they could’ve successfully made a decade-long commitment to their significant other at 22?
This guy crashed the wedding.
I’m right at ten weeks from making the next big blind leap of my life, one that is even less knowable than 10 Cities/10 Years, and there are a lot of conflicting thoughts going through my head, a mix of “This is going to be amazing” and “You aren’t doing enough to prepare.” There’s so much that could go wrong; it’s what could go right that pushes me to take the risk.
Over the two days in Gloucester, I couldn’t help but see parallels to my own unknowable travels in everything that was going on around me. The excitement and fear, the uncertainty about the future and the memories of the past, the physical and mental exhaustion, all of these reactions are part and parcel with a a big move in the same way they are at a wedding. That wave of emotions is inevitable whenever you take a risk; it can become intoxicating. When it’s all said and done, we leap because we believe.
At the wedding, tears were in abundance before, during, and after the ceremony, from Kate and her groom, from the bridesmaids and the guests, and even from the officiant. There was talk of nerves and moments of stress throughout the weekend, but before the sun had set on Sunday evening, a new couple had taken the plunge together and the long path to their union was completed, one journey having reached its end, another just beginning.
Congratulations to Kate and Aaron; here’s hoping that every leap they take together only raises them higher and higher.
As for me, well, I don’t know if I’ll ever take the matrimonial leap. It’s always an option, but it’s not the only road out there. I’ve got plenty of other plunges ahead of me.
We watched the SUV sail across all three lanes of Storrow Drive. It was Saturday night and Amanda was giving three of us rides home after work. The bars had just let out and Storrow, which runs alongside the Charles River and connects the West End to Allston, was pocked with traffic. Not that it deterred the drunk in front of us.
That year, Boston was launching a pilot program to keep a selection of subway and bus lines running until 3 a.m. on the weekend, up from 1 a.m. Working in the service industry, I welcomed the change – unfortunately, only temporary – as finding a Taxi on a Boston Saturday night is cutthroat business. Plus, Boston roads are less than ideal that time of night.
After the SUV narrowly clipped our rear bumper, Amanda judiciously let him pass. In awe, we watched the drunk race ahead, swerving across all three lanes to sideswipe the cement barrier on the left side before ricocheting back across the lanes and nearly careening off the road into the river before correcting.
From the shoulder, a sitting police cruiser watched the scene but didn’t move. We called 911. To our dismay, the drunk slid off the same exit as us. The SUV must have pulled off down a side street as we merged into traffic because we lost sight of him. I have no idea where the driver ended up, whether back home, in a police car, or with his head bisected by a tree trunk.
Watching the SUV abuse the road evoked a visceral response in me, a seemingly gratuitous anger. I’ve done my share of idiotic things while drunk but my reaction wasn’t because the driver almost collided with us; or, it wasn’t just that.
There is a beauty to a road at night, the serenity of a world viewed only in the high beams. Red and white lights passing in streaks, chaotic yet rhythmic. It’s game theory and ballet; it’s sacred. And one drunk was fucking that up.
Forget it Jake, it’s Allston
My arrival in Boston coincided with the beginning of the school year, and since the city is one giant college campus with a town threaded in the cracks, hundreds of thousands of students had already gobbled up every rental well before I began my search.
Only a few weeks out from my ninth move, I received an email from a guy named Lucas. He and another roommate, Emily, had locked down a four bedroom apartment in Allston, but two of the other renters had dropped out unexpectedly and now they were scrambling to fill the rooms. Their misfortune was my… not misfortune.
On Moving Day – the bitterest Boston holiday – I drove into the city under a torrential downpour to meet my three roommates. Together, the four of us would survive our apartment.
Allston is the cirrhosis-stricken liver of Boston’s college nexus. Calling it rat-infested inaccurately characterizes the natural ecosystem: Allston is human-infested; the rats just tolerated us. Our first floor apartment included easy access to the basement laundry and a quarter-inch layer of black, indeterminable grease coating every surface. It was a week before I realized our floor was actually made of hardwood.
Like any classic sitcom setup, the four roomies had one dynamic as a group, but split into pairs we developed distinct relationships. With Lucas, I chatted pop culture and liquor, money and politics; life. He worked in fraud prevention for a major bank and, of the four of us, was the only one with a traditional 9-5 job. He was also a practiced cook and spent many weekends with his out-of-state girlfriend.
Adam, the youngest of the four, had been studying film at UCLA before transferring cross country. He required little prompting to expound endlessly on his passions. He and I frequently debated art at length, somehow always circling back to David Lynch (he a devoted fan, me, not so much). An off-hand comment about a superhero movie trailer could unexpectedly turn into a three hour exegesis on the shifting classification of film genres.
Finally, there was Emily. She’d relocated to Massachusetts from Arizona for nursing school. Demonstratively bright and from a family of means, she could’ve studied anywhere in the country but was drawn out East by a desire to expand the borders of her world. With Lucas’s regular schedule and Adam being a morning person, Emily and I handled the late night conversation shifts and became fast friends from our first meeting.
On any given night, we could kill a bottle or two of wine while weaving through a range of topics, whether travel, music, mental health, or any tangents that might shake loose after midnight. Or, we might just have a 2 a.m. dance party, to Lucas’s chagrin.
Lucas, Emily, and I barhopped together – Adam, to our occasional amusement, wasn’t a drinker. We partied vicariously with the Founding Fathers on the Freedom Trail and danced to 90s songs in sweaty clubs. Sometimes we stayed closer to home to drink among the crystalline youth of Allston. My roommates could still pass for undergrads, in looks if not in lack of cynicism, but next to collegiate eternal youth, I couldn’t help but feel (and look) worn. The threshold for old age in Allston isn’t high.
In our apartment, indignities stacked up quickly. Even after we – well, Emily – gave the place a thorough cleaning, rodents were a fact of life. The rats and the mice maintained separate territories. Outside, long-tailed, beady-eyed rat bastards rustled incessantly in the garbage before retiring under the tires of passing cars, painting the streets like some sort of gut-splattered Jackson Pollock.
Though slightly less aesthetically repulsive, the mice were nevertheless a more persistent problem, scampering inside our walls and hungrily devouring anything within two feet of the ground. They got so comfortable in our home that they even invented a fun game: They’d hide in the trashcan and race up Emily’s arm when she went to throw something away. Boy how she howled with laughter.
As our landlord unhelpfully – but rightly – pointed out, mice were just a fact of life in Allston. The same could apparently be said of an apartment whose power grid had inexplicably been rerouted through the oven. Half of the apartment, including Lucas and Adam’s bedrooms, lost power unless one of the stovetop burners was left on. Not ideal.
When we eventually found a non-incompetent electrician (third times the charm), he discovered that the fuse box in the basement had previously caught fire and partially melted. Now, I’m no building inspector, but I suspect one or two codes had probably been broken to get to that point.
Then there was the paper thin ceiling. Usual college kid noises infiltrated our space, but we – again, mostly Emily – also had our upstairs neighbor’s awkward sexcapades projected down at us as if by loudspeaker. And yet, the true cherry on top of our shit sundae apartment didn’t arrive until New Year’s Eve.
With Adam and Emily out West, Lucas having an NYE dinner with his girlfriend, and me working the holiday shift, our apartment was visited by freelance movers. Climbing in through a broken window in Emily’s room, the intruders ransacked the place. In terms of financial loss, Lucas probably suffered the worst – I lucked out; though they swiped a couple hundred dollars I had sitting out, they unplugged but ultimately left behind my laptop, my only possession of any value.
The police were predictably unable to do anything about the break-in. While we could accept our material losses, it was the psychological intrusion that invoked the deepest absence. I’ve been robbed before, but never from inside my own apartment, even when living in some of the purportedly worst neighborhoods in the county. For Emily, especially, the use of her window as the point of entry was an unrectifiable invasion.
With the passage of years, we’ve come to appreciate the dark humor in our garbage dump of an apartment. Even at the time, though, the various frustrations never perturbed me quite as much as they did the others. In part, this was because I’d lived in my share of hovels. Even more so, though, I felt comfortable with concrete issues, problems with solutions. We could set mouse traps, put bars on the windows, call repair men. I didn’t feel, as I had in New Orleans, like returning home was a prison sentence. I actually liked the apartment; I enjoyed my roommates.
Lest I give the impression that I only experienced one Boston neighborhood, I did enjoy life outside Allston. I served tables at a pub in the Financial District, working alongside a diverse and rowdy crew, including my co-closer and concert partner, Amanda. I celebrated St. Patty’s Day in Southie with Emily and attended the Red Sox’s World Series parade with Lucas.
When the city started feeling too small, I left. The Northeast has an advantage over any other region of the US because a day trip in almost any direction will bring you somewhere entertaining and beautiful.
Meanwhile, Emily and I worked to bend Boston to our inebriated will. Boston doesn’t permit happy hour and its nightlife is mostly constrained to weekends. Allston dives were fine, but half the fun was in wandering. On one late night, in fruitless search of a rooftop to lounge on, we surreptitiously climbed the fire escapes of strangers, dodging the headlights of passing cars.
One Sunday evening, we trekked half of the city until we finally located an open liquor store. Stashing bottles of champagne, we entered Boston Common and reclined on the grass while the dusk burnt away to night.
For all its posturing as a city, Boston is a small town, for better and worse. It didn’t take long to feel like we’d experienced most of what it had to offer. When the city felt constraining, we sought out fresh avenues. Emily was a fellow traveler, accustomed to taking detours in life. Restlessness was our bond.
Twenty-four hours after the NYE break-in, I arrived in Phoenix, Arizona. The trollies and subways of Boston could be inefficient, especially in winter, so Emily was transporting her car across the country. To give her parents peace of mind, I volunteered to co-pilot. They expressed their appreciation, but fact is, I’d drop a baby to go on a road trip.
We had a loosely planned route: Avoiding winter in the Midwest, we cruised across thirteen hours of hypnotic, Texas nothing, then dropped into New Orleans overnight for Emily’s first visit. From the bayou, we crept through eerily quiet Mississippi and Alabama towns in pursuit of plantations and any restaurants open on a Sunday afternoon. Our progress was hampered by a snowstorm as we approached Nashville. Finally, we reached the coast, dining with Marianne and her beau in D.C. before swinging past New York on our way back home.
Somewhere in the lull between Texas and Tennessee, while I sat behind the wheel with Emily asleep in the passenger seat, I had a moment of such transcendent calm that it bordered on religious. With the road stretching to each horizon, no cars in sight, I was overwhelmed by a sense of timelessness, as if there was no future, no past, just that road, that instant. Maybe I wasn’t meant to have a home; I’d be okay.
I could’ve driven forever.
Separate Paths
In the waning months of my year in Boston, while I focused on my final move, my roommates were also resolving plans. Adam jumped the Charles River to live in Cambridge; Lucas moved in with his soon-to-be fiancé in Connecticut; and Emily found a new apartment with Amanda so she could finish her final year of nursing school.
As for me, it was almost literally the last hour before I had a place in New York. It didn’t matter. Even if I ended up homeless, come September 1st, I was driving my few belongings the four hours to Brooklyn to begin Year 10.
When I started, my beard resembled a mess of pubes glued to my face; now white hairs spike out from it (the beard, not my pubes). If you need a less hirsute way to appreciate the time span, think about this:
The best selling album of 2005 was by Mariah Carey. The show Supernatural aired its 1st episode the same year. David Letterman was still on television! (Crazy, I know.) No one had even heard of an iPhone when 10 Cities / 10 Years began.
It’s, quite literally, a different world than it was in 2005.
I’ve been doing this a long time, long enough to feel simultaneously old yet fresh to the world. I’m relearning how to think about life in terms longer than year blocks, but I have no idea what sits ahead of me even a few months from now. I remain, to my core, a stranger.
Currently, I bartend, and I find myself listening with quiet bemusement as people rant confidently, definitively about this nation from the singular, narrow perspective of their hometown. As if the whole world could be seen from one window.
People ask me where I’m from, and I say Kansas, because, yes, technically that’s true. But when it’s said back to me – “Oh, he’s from Kansas!” I hear whenever someone mentions the Midwest – it rings false. “Kansas” (or any small state) is essentially code for “Inexperienced rube.” To city-dwellers it’s quaint; to hippies it’s idyllic. In reality, it was neither.
I grew up in Kansas, sure, but in a more accurate sense, I grew up in the United States. I discovered how to be on my own in Philadelphia. I learned how to survive famine in San Francisco. I found out how to recover from heartbreak in Nashville and then thrive on isolation in Boston. My perspective is not born of one town, one city, one state, but one country.
In that way, it’s still limited. The map is vast and I’ve only explored one corner of it.
Most people define themselves by where they’re from.
For a decade, I’ve defined myself by where I’ve yet to go.
I’m not done yet. My year in Brooklyn officially wraps at the end of August, meaning that there is still 3 more months until this project ends. And even then…
It looks like I got out of Boston at the right time.
The timing of my project has been mostly fortuitous, it seems. When I move to a new city, there is no way for me to predict what will come next. The job market might be booming or it might be abysmal. My new roommates may be fun to hang out with or they might be disgusting pigs who leave a centimeter of grease caked onto the pans. My favorite bands might play ten minutes away from me, or they might skip my city altogether to play in Bumsfuck, ID.
The most unpredictable aspect of my journey, though, is the weather. I’ve spent time in every climate in the contiguous United States, whether it be tropical New Orleans, or marine Seattle, Sunny Southern California or frigid Chicago. But I’ve been lucky. In the entire span of my 10 year project, I have yet to face the wrath of a major storm.
10 Cities / 10 Years began in the summer of 2005, the same summer that New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. I was 700 miles away in Charlotte where the storm system barely made a blip. When Superstorm Sandy devestated the Northeast in the fall of 2012, I was down in New Orleans. For almost every city I’ve lived in, the year before or the year after I arrive seems to result in a near catastrophic storm (you’re welcome).
I haven’t missed everything. I was living in Seattle in 2012 when one of the biggest blizzards in recent history hit the area. While Seattle did get its share of snow and the city was largely disrupted because the locals didn’t know how to drive on the stuff, for the most part I was unaffected. In 2007, while I was living in Costa Mesa, Southern California had a series of wildfires that forced the governor (Arnold) to declare a state of emergency. From my apartment I could see the smoke, but it never reached anywhere close enough to be a worry to me.
And then there was the summer I moved to New Orleans. Hurricane Isaac hit the United States on Wednesday morning, the 29th of August. It caused widespread flooding and power outages throughout the south, including in a small neighborhood named St. Roch where I was set to move on Saturday. My future roommate suggested that I put off my move but that’s not how my project works. I was set for the 1st, I was going to arrive on the 1st.
As longtime readers might recall, it wasn’t pleasant. In the wake of Isaac’s passing, the city was bathed in 100% humidity with temperatures easily in the triple digits. No electricity meant no air conditioning and five minutes after stepping out of the shower I was soaked in sweat yet again. Two days later when the power came on, my roommate and I literally hugged each other we were so happy.
Despite those close calls, though, I would still say I’ve had a fairly lucky run of moves.
Last year at this time, I was living in Allston, the college student-infested hub of Boston. We had a lot of snow and it was very cold, but for the most part it was an average winter. This year… poor, poor Boston, buried in mounds of snow and more still on the way. I hear my friends are getting to work via the Iditarod.
I’m sure a lot of my ‘fortune’ is due to perception bias. Some part of this country is going to get hit by a major storm every year, no matter what. I just happen to notice when it hits a place I’ve lived or am planning on living.
But I still feel lucky. It’s possible that in this, my final year, New York City could get pummeled by a massive blizzard. But so far, while I can see a few fluffy flakes gently floating to the ground outside my window, a mere 200 miles away, Beantown is getting a decade’s worth of powder.
I guess there is no other conclusion to come to other than, New York City is safe as long as I’m still living here.
Or, maybe next year the big storm will come for us.
You know, I should probably start planning a trip now…