The finite sadness

"Love, love / it's who you know"
-Smashing Pumpkins "Love"

np: Twilight to Starlight

Last night as I was driving home from a friend's house two things happened. First, my iPod played a song from Mellon Collie followed by a song from Thom Yorke's solo album The Eraser. Then I realized that it might be the last time time I make that drive from Gilbert to Tempe. In about three weeks I'm going to drive from Tempe to Austin.

Two years ago, as I prepared to move from Shreveport to Tempe, I listened to The Eraser and Mellon Collie constantly. They both have a peculiar resonance for me, so much that I haven't been able to listen to The Eraser since I've been in Arizona and usually will skip the tracks that come up in shuffle. When it first came out in 2006 I was reading a lot of Philip K. Dick novels and going through withdrawal in more ways than one, including the usual meaning. So everytime I hear any of the songs it reminds me of this uncanny gnostic alienation and freaks me out a little.

Mellon Collie has more complex shades for me. When it first came out I was in the middle of the deepest depression of my life (so far). I was still mourning the move from Iowa to Ohio and spent most of the 2 years in Canton leaving the house only for visits to the shrink (or the hospital if it was really bad), alternating my time between the basement and attic of our little house and listening to this album over and over. Flash to 10 years later and I'm sitting in an apartment in Shreveport by myself going through the accumulation of the years preparing to leave a place I've finally allowed to feel like home for I don't know what, and Mellon Collie is on infinite repeat.

There are some clear differences between leaving Shreveport and leaving Tempe. Although I like Arizona a lot, I don't feel it has defined who I am the way Shreveport has. ASU has obviously refined my career path. I've met some great people who I love a lot. And I think Arizona is a great place to live with the big-city advantages of Phoenix and the outdoors experience of the rest of the state. But at the same time, especially over the past few months, I've felt somewhat uncomfortable in the culture of the place, if that makes sense.

I won't talk about the department as such, because I don't want to talk shit when I really have no animosity at all, let's just say there is a difference of "value(s)" that has made me feel like the odd one in the department from the beginning. What I'm really talking about when I say "culture of the place," though, is Arizona and the obession with image and overall superficiality that I feel is at work here. Maybe I'm just projecting. It is the plastic surgery capital of the world though. And plastic, along with vanilla, are good words to describe it. The overwhelming aura of "sameness." Obviously this judgement isn't absolute (like I said, I've met a lot of interesting and genuine people) and may just be a way of me trying to say "hey I'm different, I'm special" but it just feels like Arizona is where the boring people of the world go to conform. I do believe that it will develop more character, but as it is a lot of it feels like a facade. Prefab. People and buildings. Interchangable. Commodities constantly marketing themselves. Because our value as people is defined by how much others buy our bullshit. Lame.

When people ask where I'm from I tell them Louisiana and I "identify" as Southern even though I spent my formative years in the Midwest. When I was leaving Shreveport I had no idea what I was in for. I came to graduate school not knowing exactly what I was going to study, just knowing I'm interested in culture and how it shapes us and we shape it. I didn't know anyone here. I hadn't been in school for three years and was tired of the "real world." Though I was unsure if I was up to the discipline of graduate school, I left Shreveport because I knew that I had to do something with my life besides being the night manager at a liquor store. And my nomad soul needed wandering.

Moving to Austin I already know some people. I have a rough idea of what the path ahead of me looks like. I'll be closer to family. I'll be closer to my friends back in Louisiana. I anticipate feeling more at home in the culture of Austin and fitting in better with the department at UT. At the same time there are some people here I'm going to miss a lot. Some of them I'll get to see on a semi-regular basis at conferences. But some of them I won't and that's probably what hurts the most. This is what Mellon Collie means to me: sadness tempered by the knowledge it comes from love, bittersweet. Not knowing if I'll ever see these people closest to my heart again. When I was leaving Shreveport I felt heartbroken because I had to leave people I loved and continue on my journey always alone. Da capo.

mm

"Love is suicide"
-Smashing Pumpkins, "Bodies"