I think I'm in an excellent place to start a new blog. I've just had the experience of a lifetime living in Los Angeles, and I've made a mostly smooth transition from there back home to Milwaukee for the holidays. I have yet to feel the re-entry culture shock that is typical of someone moving back to regular life after living in a far-off place, which is probably because coming to Milwaukee this time of year is normal thing for me to do. I'm sure the dissatisfaction with no longer living in L.A. will come a few weeks into next semester, when I'm in facing school, work, and what's sure to be a brutal winter in Minneapolis. But I'll talk about that when the time comes. And even though its the day after Christmas and I've just had a couple crazy nights with my crazy family, I want to focus on something else, something that my best friend of nine years and I have been discussing a lot since I got back from LA: the fact that everything in both of our lives seem to have come full circle from from when we were young.
There's no easy way to describe this other than giving you some examples. The example dating back the farthest begins with me as a very young child. Every couple of weeks, my mother and I would make the trek down I-94 E, past the old whale mural (forgot about that, didntcha?), to my great-grandma's apartment. I can't recall what the complex was called back then, but it is now known as Arlington Court and is located in an awesome part of Milwaukee, right off Brady Street. But back then, this wasn't such a nice part of town. My mother constantly worried about my very frail great-grandmother living there, and I remember always being hustled to and from the car. For being as young as I was when my great-grandma was still alive, I have some surprisingly vivid memories of that apartment building; the long, endless wall of cold steel mailboxes in the lobby, the piss-soaked elevator, the creepy incinerator my mom and I were sent to to dispose of Grandma Millie's trash. Despite the things I remember best about it, I know I liked visiting my great-grandma. My mom tells me stories of how I adored playing with her box of ancient jewelry, and how I was always rewarded for being well-behaved with one of the candies from her ever-full bowl of Reece's and Kit-Kats. But Grandma Millie died when I was very young, so those memories are just as ancient as that jewelry box.
Fast-forward a decade or so, and Brady Street becomes the place-to-be for my group of friends. The area really cleaned up after the death of my great-grandma, now boasting some really nice bars, the tattoo parlor I first got inked at, the favorite coffee-shop hangout of my high school years, and various yummy restaurants. They even have an annual festival, complete with street vendors, plenty of drinking and a drag show. Adorable. Now, I could relate the full-circle come-around of Brady Street to my high school years since I spent a decent amount of time drinking coffee at Rochambo and just generally longing to be a part of that area, but that doesn't do justice to the immensity of this full-circle happenstance. As of two summers ago, Courtney, my best friend, lives in a house right off Brady Street. And this house just happens to be built in the shadow of what is now Arlington Court, my great-grandmother's old apartment building. I can't explain to you how strange it is to drunkenly stumble home to Courtney's for the night and look up at that building that I spent to much time in as a child. I probably comment on it every single time. But seriously, what are the chances?
There are a ton of other examples of this. After spending countless nights at shows at the
Rave, the location of the majority of my teenage fantasies that involved screamo bands and tour buses, I now hang out and spend every New Year's Eve at the apartment right across the street. I remember driving around Milwaukee with my Dad as a kid and seeing 'I closed Wolski's' bumper stickers and not having the faintest idea what that meant. Well, I closed
Wolski's last Thursday.
Life is strange. I wonder what's next.
There's no easy way to describe this other than giving you some examples. The example dating back the farthest begins with me as a very young child. Every couple of weeks, my mother and I would make the trek down I-94 E, past the old whale mural (forgot about that, didntcha?), to my great-grandma's apartment. I can't recall what the complex was called back then, but it is now known as Arlington Court and is located in an awesome part of Milwaukee, right off Brady Street. But back then, this wasn't such a nice part of town. My mother constantly worried about my very frail great-grandmother living there, and I remember always being hustled to and from the car. For being as young as I was when my great-grandma was still alive, I have some surprisingly vivid memories of that apartment building; the long, endless wall of cold steel mailboxes in the lobby, the piss-soaked elevator, the creepy incinerator my mom and I were sent to to dispose of Grandma Millie's trash. Despite the things I remember best about it, I know I liked visiting my great-grandma. My mom tells me stories of how I adored playing with her box of ancient jewelry, and how I was always rewarded for being well-behaved with one of the candies from her ever-full bowl of Reece's and Kit-Kats. But Grandma Millie died when I was very young, so those memories are just as ancient as that jewelry box.
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