NB: According to my index, there’s supposed to be a flashback post from about 3 years ago that deals with January 2007. And yet, I don’t see it when flipping through the archives, and I suspect it may have been a casualty of moving from MT to WP, or from ecto to MarsEdit, or who knows what. But since that era has crossed my mind again lately, I’ll just write a new one. – The Mgmt
NB: Oh, and it’ll sit in the drafts folder for a couple of weeks while my life goes on super donkey tilt and I’ll find it and clean it up and post it now instead. -The Mgmt
A few nights ago, I was wandering around the neighborhood. It was clear, and it was freezing cold, and I realized it’s been a while since I did it. We walk – and sometimes run – around the neighborhood regularly enough, but we have an established route that serves us as the regular track. But back when I started wandering around the neighborhood a few years ago, it was in between areas, down alleys, along fences and rail tracks and back passages by swimming pools and clubhouses. Basically just a good way to get lost.
Six years ago, I was coming off one of the better years of my life. A little travel for family, an office move at work, a new roommate, but by and large it was the long-awaited dull moment for the first time in almost a decade. In a lot of ways it seems like my life never stopped moving from the moment I came flying out of Vanderbilt against my will until I settled in at Christmas of 2005 with a new wife and a new house and started going through the detritus of twenty years stuffed in the old footlocker at home. It left me in something of a fugue state, where it was abundantly clear I wasn’t the kid I had been decades earlier. January of 2007 was when I first started wondering “well then what am I now?”
One of the first things that tripped it was hearing some Irish music that immediately sent me on the search for the 4Ps pub experience again, which was a fool’s errand – back in greater DC you can’t throw up without hitting an Irish bar of some sort, but the sons of the Auld Sod are thin on the ground here in Silly Con Valley. Indeed, I’ve only ever found two in the entire South Bay and none on the Peninsula that even offer live music, and it’s of the seisiun pickup variety, which isn’t exactly the McTeggarts kicking off the third set with “On The One Road” at 11 PM.
The pub quest led to the third-space quest in general, which took me to Trials in San Jose – a bar near the light rail, with no televisions at all and lots of soccer and 2-Tone artifacts on the walls. And so I boomed “This Are Two Tone” through the iPod, because I was hearing a lot of that on Virgin Party Classics with Suggs every Friday morning at work, where I was enjoying an actual desk job with an actual desk in an actual office with an actual door.
And I did a lot of walking around the neighborhood at night, thinking about who I was and what my life was going to be like now. Something was missing, and I couldn’t put a finger on what I’d lost. It sort of felt like I missed my gang, missed my crew, missed going out and solving problems – after all, that cushy desk job could probably have been done by a well-written shell script if there’d been a competent developer around to bang one out. It felt like one of those liminal moments – like December 1984 or September 1997 or January 2000 – where in retrospect I was in transition without realizing it. I just did a very poor job directing the transition in 2007, but that story’s been told before.
Still, the urge to sit quietly in a dark public house on a Sunday night in January with the music in the background comes around with every new year, even if it never seems to last past March Madness. Maybe this year, with no rooting interest to disrupt, I’ll make it out a little more regularly. Then again, it wouldn’t do to leave the pub after a couple of hours and find it still light…