I'm listening to Tv on the Radio and thinking back to ten years ago. That's when I first heard them. Funny, how music can do that to you.
Ten years ago this month I was on the brink of homelessness, though I didn't know it at the time. I was spending a lot of time in the city. (By city I mean New York. New York has and always will be 'The City', despite how I feel about it now.)
I was on a lot of drugs at the time. By 'a lot' I mean more than what would be necessary to sedate an elephant. I was wild, impulsive. I wrapped up that last semester of my junior year in a daze and on the Deans List again. I went to a lot of SG events that summer. That was back when regional groups were integral to the life of the site.
I spent the summer of 2004 surfing the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn, bouncing from couch to couch or bed to bed. To be honest, it was mostly bed to bed. Yeah, that's how I rolled. You see, I was somewhat of a weirdo bitch when I was 21. My illness wasn't diagnosed yet and I did various, random, and sometimes terrible and dangerous things in order to run away from the feelings I was experiencing. I didn't know why one day I was more than fine, that I felt that I could conquer the world, that I had so much energy I couldn't sit still and then it would seem that the next day that I couldn't get out of bed or make myself do anything. So I did a lot of drugs and had a lot of sex in order to keep everything slightly level.
Now, I don't regret any of that because it's made for some really amusing stories and life experiences. In retrospect it was the best summer of my life. I even miss it sometimes. I don't miss the homelessness per se, but I do miss the impetuousness of youth. Damn being wiser!
The hot temperatures here that we've been experiencing lately really have me thinking about the heat of the city; the frying pan heat that emanated from the pavement beneath my feet, the exhaust from the air conditioners being dumped onto the sidewalk, the sun finding its way through the canyons the buildings formed and beating down on my neck. People complain about the heat in the south, but its nothing like the combination of man made and natural heat that saturated the city.
Today, I was thinking that I'd like to venture into the city and re-visit the places of my youth that are still standing. Then I remembered that I'm 12 hours away.
