"The City. The City. The City"

When I was a young man . . just getting my first tastes of recreational drugs and staying out late and trying to define myself . . .I wanted to be a hobo. I wanted a hermetic lifestyle in which I could simply live off the land, far-removed from the protuberances and attachments of the semi-urban lifestyle. Write haikus and drink dandelion wine. That sort of thing. There was something about the aesthetic and ascetic of being alone that appealed to me strongly. Under the microscope, this penchant seems to have come from that fact that I was existentially dissatisfied with my surroundings. The triteness of suburbia, the various Freudian and familial love/hates, the herd mentality of high schools, the beauty of art that was so obviously not engendered in the place I lived. I saw no alternatives but giving up on humanity and making communion with some sort of nymph of the woods.

And then I moved to the hood. Fell in love with an entire tribe of the disaffected. Just like me in that they didn't know anyone that was like them. Saw that humanity was not boring, but tragic! Saw that life was not stifling, but demanding. Saw that interactions were not debilitating but exfoliating. And so now I'm in love with You. I'm in love with Your cities. Warts and all.

So the problem. I moved to Boise, Idaho. This is not a city. This is not the gross desperation of humanity exploding out into panicked art, this is not droves of mankind clawing all over each other for love, this is not even a place with a definitive feel (Detroit August feels a certain way even in your room by yourself, the air in NYC is laden with New York vibrations, etc etc). Boise feels like an advertisement for Levitra. Its nice and clean and growing, the children of feckless and atavistic people that have convinced themselves of something. Religious and conservative because they haven't bothered to think about it much. Not that there aren't good people here. I've met some vibrant individuals, but they don't seem to belong here either.

In short, I need a place with soul, with grit, with honesty, a place somehow connected, a place with its own traditions and personality. I need to get the fuck out of here before I become from here.