On The Going Of Home Again

Pensively he stares and wonders, feeling all alone /
Re-living his missteps and blunders; all the misplaced bones...

This past weekend I had the joyous opportunity to return the the land of plenty from which all of my post-college hang-ups sprung: DC! Of course I had been down to visit our nation's capital a few times since abandoning ship three years ago, but never had I showed up with a great wave of many of my old friends from back in the day. Thanks to a mid-Atlantic based bachelor party, I Bolt Bus'd my way through the highway that is New Jersey and strapped on my old school party shoes for a night out with a dozen of my closest friends/fellow idiots to see if we were able to pick up where we left off so very long ago.

Spoiler alert, we can. Follow-up spoiler alert, it takes a serious toll on the body.

Yes, apparently the collective will of a score of newly-turned-30-year-olds is greater than the sum of its parts, and we were each made stronger by the desire to outdo those around us. The evening started with a biergarten style dinner that escalated quickly out of control thanks in part to liter-beers and pretzel-sandwiches. What was to be a fast, no-nonsense pit-stop before the evening began devolved into a screaming sausage-fest, meant both literally because of the bratwurst entrees and figuratively for the high-volume-dude attendance rate. Undeterred however, each of us pushed forward in a sort of reversion-to-our-20-something-selves that played out in a series of separate vignettes across the night.

Highlights included drinks being spilled, heads being butted, ruffians being arrested, crashing an Asobi Seksu show without paying a cover, jamming out front with a homeless dude who had a guitar, and ultimately a severe case of heartburn from the Bulleit Bourbon / weisswurst combination. Seemed like a good idea at the time.


Anywho, the weekend clipped forward with the usual level of inside jokes and stupid human tricks one would expect from juveniles such as ourselves, and as I pushed through each day I thought to myself, "I could totally move back to DC! This still seems like a great place!" When I shared this sentiment with some of the other guys I received about 7 variations on the "you're not serious, are you?" theme. Ultimately I ran through their arguments, recalling also the 6 months or so I just spent traveling the world essentially by myself and each lonely night that I sat wishing I was back in Gotham to hang out with my friends and family, and decided my delusions of grandeur, my creatively retold histories of DC, were just that...delusions.

So much separation from the ups and downs of normal life in the District allowed me to forget all the badness and just remember the happy shiny. Just like as I move forward from my trip abroad, I'm sure that all the bad pieces about it, like the crushing loneliness or getting attacked by a rat in the john, will soften into a soupy milieu of joyous escapism. For now though I can at least learn my lesson and keep re-establishing life in NYC unabated. 

All things told I had an awesome weekend, and it was super sweet to get back down for another night of old-school chillin in my old hood...but it certainly was hard to separate the glories of the past from the potential for fun in the future. My DC time was great, but even if I do go back it wouldn't be the same. To paraphrase Heraclitus, "you can never step into the same river twice, for they have gentrified that area of town and built a Whole Foods over it."