COLUMBIA, MD -

I grew up in a small village on the Connecticut River in northern New Hampshire. There were more trees and cows than there were people and up until I was a surly teenager, I loved it.

Then puberty hit and I despised my little hamlet. Outside of my family, there wasn’t a single reason to stay and every day brought me closer to college and escape.

Now I’m 10 years past that day and 4 years past the day I left New England completely behind and every fall my heart hurts. It’s like the ache you associate with an old injury, the kind of pain cold weather and rainy days bring.

Leaving New England was like breaking up with a childhood romance.

I often wonder if I’ll ever get over it completely.

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA-

It certainly wasn’t THE mistake; there were probably a number of those, but the first thing I did wrong was have the cab driver drop me off three blocks from my apartment, instead of right at the front door, especially knowing that neighborhood’s reputation.  I must have felt like walking a bit.  It was five in the morning after a long Sunday night and I was drunk.  Most of the time drunk means you’re stumbling about, a bit stupider than when you began the night but, sometimes, when you’ve been drunk long enough, when you’ve started early in the night and kept it up, somehow teetering on the line between life-of-the-party and asshole-of-the-evening, you manage a kind of comfort with the drunk, a sort of calm-in-the-storm.  It’s hard to imagine but some part of your mind gets used to the world from inside the bottle, maybe the way veterans, having seen too much of the shit, can just nod their heads at the most atrocious things and whisper, ‘FUBAR,’ and just know they must go on.  I prefer to think of it like musical theater, all optimism, the way the drunk character in the play can magically stand up and exhibit textbook choreography, dancing down the pavement, toes tapping on benches, where even the stumbling has style.  So I was when I got out of the cab on the Avenue Gran Via, a notoriously seedy street in Madrid, clad in Tyler Durden’s three-quarter length, red-leather Jacket.  Some girl has kissed me that night, and I was grinning a silly grin.  I’m sure it wasn’t the grin the mugger saw.

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PITTSBURGH, PA -

Perhaps I should open with the fact that I am politically independent. While I have Libertarian inclinations, I have a tendency to rock back on my heels, wait patiently, and hum a little tune while parties throw around emotionally-freighted abstractions like ‘hope’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘change’. To me, this is fog-generating rhetoric that offers nothing substantial. Who doesn’t want change—that is, positive change—specifically, improvement? And I can confidently say that, yes, we all want freedom and are grateful to have hope in times of distress. However, I am often skeptical that the current political landscape can support hope for a genuinely positive, progressive political path that will lead us towards a more solid infrastructure and away from so much international watch-dogging.

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HOUSTON, TX -

I have never professed to be the quintessential man’s man. I’m not the type of person that has a garage full of tools or a project car that I work on every other day. I’m not that guy. Still, I’m pretty good with my hands and I’m definitely not afraid to get them dirty. I’ve always thought most men sort of fell in that category.

Cut to 1:00 am outside a bar.

There are four guys standing around each other huddled in a frantic circle. Two of them have on pink shirts, one of them has a popped collar, one has a backwards hat with a chunk of hair sticking out of the front, none of them are gay. A typical pile of frat boy nothingness, standing there… are you ready for this?

…Calling Triple A to come change the tire on their BMW.

Come the fuck on. (more…)