Tag Archives: anniversaries

Where I Was From

As I mark seven years back in Duluth, my mind is not back on my move home in 2016, but instead on an earlier return, the one some ten years ago that set me on my current path. It would be very easy to write off those two years right after college as misspent youth, and indeed I would not rank it as a time I lived a life I much wanted. I was underemployed, with no budget to feed my wanderlust or appetites, and for a time had no grand plan for what would come next. I churned out large quantities of fiction no one would ever read and hated most of it; I am now thankful I had enough discretion to spare the world these pained missives. My social circles, such as they were, primarily featured high school friends who happened to be around, many of whom have since drifted out of my orbit. My college friends barreled forward with life, but enough of them were in grad school or two-year public service programs that they had yet to accrue much financial advantage that would have put them on a visibly different trajectory. It was not an exciting time. My journey only looked rebellious if I told myself it was.

Which is exactly what I did. Those were heady days in my struggle to make sense of my world. For the first time in my life I had stepped off the meritocratic hamster wheel I’d inhabited in my school years, and I began to poke holes in the system, tread in more contrarian circles. In my early political writing at city council and school board meetings I fixated on the vocal minorities and appreciated the points they made, even if I often thought they made them poorly. My intellectual ferment, thanks to a few Georgetown influences, took on a few small-c conservative flavors as I gained more appreciation for limits and rootedness, two radical words in an era of overwhelming open-endedness that had, momentarily, paralyzed me. In my floundering writings, I wrote stories that reflected that sensibility, and through much disgust at my own words started to find my voice. As I have aged, I’ve drifted away from some of that strain of thought: at the end of the day that restless striver is closer to my core being than some staid, crochety agrarian soul. But that quest is now grounded in deeper core convictions, and with that foundation I can never spend too long drifting in the breeze.

I felt my own past deeply upon my return. Never was this truer than on meandering nighttime walks through Lakeside, when I went block by block pulling out some memory of a friend’s old house here, a passing adventure there, some acquaintance of my parents just beyond, my history spelled out in silent streets. They were once the world to me, but now they were shrinking, dwarfed by other adventures, those intricate details my mind has always had a talent for retaining made less and less relevant to my immediate needs.

And yet my life had broken decisively from that past in key ways, and as a result, my appreciation never romanticized my hometown or consigned it to some realm of paradise lost. I knew there was no going back to the way things had been, and I found new life in Duluth. At the time my mother, back herself after a brief stint away, settled into an apartment on Park Point, a first floor one-bedroom on the lakefront side two blocks past the Lift Bridge. Life on the Point had its drawbacks—the bridgings, the nonstop wind, the steady stream of people strolling through the backyard to borrow the ostensibly private gate down to the lakefront—but if I was to have a quarter-life crisis it may as well have come on a beach, a quick stroll from Canal Park institutions from which an apartment-sitting twentysomething could stumble home at the end of a long night. (Rest in peace, Sports Garden.) There was just enough forward motion to feed that latent ambition, enough for me to marry it all in my mind and create a path for myself that intertwined with that of a city.

Duluth at the time felt born anew after a long, inglorious Rust Belt phase; Duluthians tentatively poked their heads outward, skeptical this city could have nice things. Lincoln Park had new energy for the first time in decades, and there was new investment downtown. The housing market was reasonable. There was a visible, public win over the Last Place on Earth, a triumph of order and sobriety over a manufactured, life-ruining agent of chaos. City politics was a realm of relative consensus carried by all those good vibes; while some of the councilors had obvious broader political allegiances, they were often immaterial to the issues at hand, and not their lens for viewing all things. (The school board was another story, perhaps a canary in the coal mine for broader societal divisions to come.) Outside the national spotlight—and with occasional laudatory bursts in it—Duluth was going about making itself a better place.

The view from ten years later is a bit more complicated. The investment goes on, sometimes at rapid paces in certain places. Duluth’s housing market is spiraling upward while downtown hollows out, and I feel certain malaises intensely. I step around bodies sprawled in the skywalk on my way into the office. Out in Irving Park, a strung-out man screams racial epithets at his dog. A client who works in addiction treatment tells me the normal origin story for an addict has gone from “beers among high school friends in the woods” to “meth with mom at age ten.” Local politics, as a recent shocker of a mayoral primary shows, are unsettled, roiling with certain fierce currents but not cohering into anything like the consensus of a decade ago.

I could here try to put a neat bow on this essay by relating some personal frustrations with my time back in Duluth, sweep it up in some grand tale of youthful idealism lost. Such literary flourishes, however, would sacrifice truth for art. Yes, there have been challenges here and there in my seven years back, unexpected burdens and hockey trouble and underlying concerns about my project proven accurate, but nothing to challenge the foundational premises of the Duluth that made me want to build a life here. I went back knowing what those Ithakas are for, and am pleased by how well that younger self knew I was making certain sacrifices. (Too many of us, I think, are far too uncharitable to our younger selves.) I work a good job and I have a good house and any sources of great frustration seem fixable.

I can’t say that Duluth is worse off, either. Rising real estate can also mean rising wealth, at least for those of us fortunate enough to get in on the ground floor. Any memory of the Last Place on Earth days, with lines for unregulated synthetic drugs that cause overdoses by the dozen wrapped around the block, does rather dim the nostalgia for some earlier downtown Duluth. The truth is that Duluth has always had some rust on the underside, the spots where the salt eats away after a long, cold winter. They are all the more glaring in a Duluth where Park Point has teardowns and the east side has nonstop renovations and people speak of gentrification on the west side. The paths diverge, and people in my line of work have a lot to do. But this city retains its allure, and whatever ails me, I am only ever one quick jaunt along the shoreline away from a good mood.

There is certainly some intellectual malaise baked into my project: since I moved back in 2016, things have generally gone to shit for localists. Donald Trump’s election radicalized everyone and made every issue national, much to our collective detriment. Local media, already floundering, is now on life support, replaced by people yelling into online voids or a simple absence of coverage. Covid pounded away at opportunities for community gathering, all while compounding a housing crisis, lowering trust, and making it ever easier to drift into rootlessness. It strained schools, one of the deepest bedrocks of community, to a breaking point. Deaths of despair surged, with more lonely people making terrible decisions, often aided by ever more powerful drugs, and in general we seem to be drifting into the medication of problems instead of considering them with any semblance of reason.

And yet none of this makes me doubt that the solutions to the problems are all right here. They are not secrets, simply harder and harder for people to grasp. There are of course the technical corrections: community schools, community policing, a switch in our housing regime that lets us build things; good local reporting, and politicians who focus on the things in front of them instead of the talking points that trickle down from national movements. My work is not my life, and other areas of focus have also emerged relative to any political project over the past several years. (I’ll save that story for an upcoming post.) But more than ever I believe in this agenda, and am need of allies who will also try to enact it instead of nodding along and smiling at what they read but doing little else to get away from staring at screens. It isn’t easy work, but it is a clear enough road that I found, back on those meanders down Duluth’s trails in my early twenties.

The intensity of the feeling I felt in that era is something some people claim fades with time. I have not found this to be true. Maybe they are all fooling themselves and misremembering the long periods of monotony at that age; maybe I am just wired differently, or frozen in an arrested state that will someday pass. But I’m skeptical it ever will.

This past July, at a bachelor party for a grad school friend, two college runners undertook a passionate four AM dialogue on whether they could ever reclaim that shared team bond they once had. The lament was heartfelt, and the frathouse vibe may indeed fade some as we age into creakier bodies and somewhat better judgment. But losing the depth of that commitment, even when resurrected for just one weekend? Not one ounce. The gravitational pull of that homing instinct does not wane. I owe the strength of that pull to the intensity of feeling in those early twenties years, back when I learned where I was from.

An Alternative History

I have survived one year back in Duluth. My first year back, I think, has charted on to what a sober assessment of it would have looked at the start. When I look back on the “why I should and shouldn’t move back to Duluth” chart I drew up last summer, it’s all accurate, the good and the bad. Obviously I’m here, so the good outweighs the bad, but I won’t pretend this has been a flawless return, either. I didn’t expect it to be.

As I pondered one complete year of adult life during a weekend of fiction-writing and raindrop-dodging in northern Itasca County last weekend, I revisited the two essays I had ready to go at this time a year ago, as I awaited a decision on my current job: the one that appeared here, overflowing with pride that a quixotic path was cycling back home, and the concession speech that was left unpublished. Much as I love the success story that became reality, the more depressing version hit home in new ways. It was one of the most unsparing pieces of self-examination in a life rarely lacking in such examination. I share it here:

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Like any good PR person, I had two blog posts written for today, a victory speech and a concession address. Alas, what you are about to read is the latter. Losing out on a dream job, for all its disappointment, gives me a chance to look back on these three months, and let out a little more than I normally do.

If nothing else, this period of post-grad school marginal employment has given me some understanding of life on the edge. I humor myself, of course: I have safety nets ready for me. Outwardly, I’ve probably seemed my usual self, and I’ve traveled some and stayed highly social and spent many a relaxing afternoon reading in a park or running around lakes. I’ve developed strong coping mechanisms to keep me from lapsing into depression, or the hyper-anxiety that was a feature of my uncertain prospects after my undergraduate days (this blog being one of them). Much of my frustration is blatantly of my own making, as the earnest desire to have a rewarding first post-grad school job unites with the entitlement of a Georgetown graduate to make me exceptionally picky, perhaps too disdainful of the entry-level work that would earn me my dues.

But the peaks and valleys are so much more extreme amid this waiting game, ranging from exhilaration over possible life courses to despair over a lack of breaks from one second to the next. One grad school professor, commenting on a survey he did of public housing residents, said the biggest takeaway from the survey was the uselessness of surveys: his subjects of study ran the gamut of emotions about their experience based on how their ever-so-tenuous financial, health, and emotional situations were playing out on a given day. Over the past three months, I’ve come to understand how violently a person can lurch from one extreme to the other.

My valleys usually take the form of detachment and removal, in long hours staring at a screen. Much of this procrastination is enlightened, as I survey reams of articles on the Trump campaign or the fate of Western Civilization or some distant conflict, but it loses touch with some of the more fundamental things I believe. It substitutes ivory tower analysis for opening up my eyes and seeing the world around me. I’m not getting out enough, and while finances are a fine excuse here, they are just that: an excuse.

I’m headed back to Duluth shortly, though it’s hardly the triumphant return of my dreams. My return may also prove very brief, depending on job prospects in different places. I love the place, but I also know not to make an idol of earthly things, and as time goes on, different options start to seem more attractive. I wonder vaguely if I’m invested too much in a fleeting dream for a childhood that never was. It may be time to soldier outward; perhaps to take full advantage of that Georgetown degree in certain circles, perhaps time for something a bit more unexpected. I’m open to ideas.

Near the end of my time in graduate school, on a day when I felt particularly drained by the onslaught of school and work and life-related stresses, I sent out an email to everyone in my program. Its premise was simple: I’d find time to meet with anyone who needed a beer, a coffee, or even just a walk around a lake. We could talk about these important decisions we needed to make in the coming months, or about nothing related to them at all; whatever the other person wanted. There were a handful of takers before it petered out, and while the sentiment was and is genuine, too often, it seems to fade as new issues emerge. The more I venture into the adult world, the more I marvel at how many things hinge on communication, and how often that communication winds up being so sadly incomplete, if not downright bad.

I’m writing about this not to show off my altruism, but to remind myself that this commitment didn’t die with commencement, and that it extends to my many connections beyond graduate school. These are the sorts of connections to reality that too many of us don’t exemplify often enough. On the verge of a new round of good-byes, however fleeting they might be, I often lament how little we know about each other, even if we’ve spent significant time together. It is these human stories, these genuine connections, that are still the foundation of everything I believe in and hope to work for someday, and if I can’t live that out, why am I here?

And so I head north to continue this absurd quest to live out a life of virtue in a world that barely knows what the word means anymore. My appeal to virtue may be the fallback of an uncertain kid; God knows I’d rather be making a solid salary than go the way of Diogenes. But the choice isn’t always mine to make, and I’ve approached most interviews under the assumption that my questioners would rather hear more about skills than a meticulously argued philosophy on life. That may be a mistake: there is no substitute for sincerity.

This could have been a triumph, but things are never so easy, even for us careful planners: the virtuous road is a murky one. My summer wanderings, whether in a car across the country or around my Chain of Lakes here in Minneapolis, have provided little clarity beyond short-term spurts. I must continue to make peace with uncertainty, to depose of false idols, and to reach always toward that excellence that I always aspire to but, too often lately, have fallen short of. I can only hope to recover the wonder, still there beneath all these layers of frustration and cynicism, but just not visible often enough. What other choice do I have?

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Heavy, but true. If there is a lesson from my first year in the working world, it’s that being a member of that world does not answer any of those more existential questions I asked in this history that wasn’t. I’m very good at critiquing, but my record at putting a positive vision into place is a bit more mixed. So, if you’re in Duluth, let me know if you’re in the mood for a beer or a coffee or a walk, and if you’re not, you’re always welcome here. I still have a lot of work to do, and need a lot more people to be part of it.

Four More Years

Hey, I’ve managed to keep this blog thing alive for four years. I had no idea where this was going to go when I started barfing thoughts on here four years ago, but whether due to continued spurts of inspiration or sheer stubborn inertia, I’ve kept plugging along with this ever-so-natural blend of Duluth affairs, philosophizing, and high school hockey. Thanks to those of you who put up with the stuff you don’t like or even take some time to learn about it, and congratulations to the handful of you who come for it all on your excellent taste.

It’s been a grand experiment in self-discipline, staying fresh, and seeing how the things I write resonate with different people. (I don’t do this for views, but it can be fascinating to see what does get read and what doesn’t. Long story short: the hockey stuff gets at least ten times the views of everything else, especially these days since this isn’t the Duluth politics destination, such as it was, a couple years back.) I’ll continue to plug away, and may also think outside the box a little going forward. I also won’t pretend that I don’t aspire to a certain level of influence—talking to empty rooms is never fun—though certain fundamentals won’t change. This blog does aspire to a certain ethos, a blend of some fairly scattered threads of life that have gone into creating me as I am today, all channeled through a voice that aims to be creative, easily readable, and makes it clear I’m having fun with all of this. Above all, this has to stay fun, or it won’t be worth it.

This blog is also only the tip of the iceberg of everything I write. I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of words I’ve produced over the past nine years or so. The majority has actually been fiction, though there’s also a fair amount of non-fiction and autobiography lurking in the shadows. There is still a layer to my writing that is very much for my eyes only. Funnily enough, the blog—the only real stuff I’ve written that’s made it into the public—began at the exact time I decided I wasn’t going to go down the road of trying to make a living off of writing. That was one of the wisest choices I ever made, both for my sanity and my bank account. But I’m also a perpetual wanderer who needs somewhere to come home at the end of the day, and that’s what this blog is for: to organize thoughts, frame them in a way that other people can follow, and to provide an avenue to bring a little bit of that submerged ice out into daylight.

I’ve been a lot of different places over these four years: recent college grad, returnee to Duluth, struggling writer, aspiring intern, harried grad student, unemployed and driving the American West, and now, gainfully employed in both a field and a place that I don’t see myself leaving. The world beyond this little corner of the internet has changed plenty over the past four years, too. Through it all, though, I don’t think my outlook on life has changed all that much. Things have crystallized, and with my house now largely in order, who knows, maybe some of that other stuff I’ve written will make its way out into the world someday. I’ve never felt better about the direction of my writing, both for the humbling amount of respect my hockey stuff gets and the increasing certainty in the direction of my more political stuff.

And so I look forward to four more years of adventures in investigative journalism, from Emily Larson’s coalition construction to Mike Randolph’s line construction, from travel journals and thinkpiece reactions to my quest to discover where the hell Duluth keeps its single, cute, well-read, civically engaged, genuinely open-minded, ambitious, and yet well-grounded mid-to-late 20-something women. (Who, me? Picky? Never!)

Enough about me, though. Whatever brings you here, thanks for coming along for the ride, and I hope you stick around for the next four years, too. It’s been a delight.

A Year-Long Cycle

I’ve had this blog for a year now. I’ve spilled out 138 posts and somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 words. I’ve shared my thoughts on a year’s worth of political meetings, the past and present of a hockey team, broader sports issues, scattered-but-somehow-ultimately-related philosophical prompts, dead Greek people, and a handful of other bits of randomness. They all have audiences of varying sizes, and a committed core reads all three. Thanks, readers, no matter what draws you here.

The honest truth is that I don’t care much about the audience size. I write what I want to write, and do this as a fun outlet for lots of thoughts. I’m not here to launch some sort of journalism career, and while I don’t mean to belittle everyone who writes for local papers or blogs, I don’t exactly want to turn into the sort of person who jumps up and down on his weekly soapbox in the Reader Weekly. I’ve always written a lot and will continue to write a lot, but I don’t want my writing to become my sole public persona. This is something I do for fun, no matter who reads. And if I ever stop having fun and turn into some local crank or even simply find that I’m just blogging for the sake of blogging and nothing more, I’m done.

Still, it is never any fun to yell at empty rooms, and writing for an audience forces a bit more refinement than when writing for oneself. The result is almost always more pleasant, with none of the earnest moaning and far less blathering jargon than in some earlier stuff. Presentation matters. I won’t bore readers with too much self-absorption, but that’s just some of what I’ve learned, or had reinforced, by doing this. I’m glad I’m doing it, and I take pride in the handful of cases where this blog has made a modest impression or led to connections beyond a computer screen. The internet is often a poor substitute for live interaction, but at its best it can be an excellent extension of life when face-to-face contact isn’t practical, and I’m also happy to cover things—political meetings, hockey games—that other media may not have the time to cover, or at least not in great detail due to time and space constraints. I’d like to think I’ve found a nice little niche, or perhaps a series of semi-related niches.

Most importantly, though, this allows for reflection that isn’t always possible in the midst of a spirited conversation. I like being able to step back, think a little bit, and put things together slowly, without rushing to meet a deadline. That has always been the goal here: patient reflection instead of a rush to judgment. While I make no claim to objectivity, I really do try to look at things from every possible angle, and only move to judge when I’m confident I understand what’s going on. I choose my battles carefully and prefer to play with things from a distance—and keeping that distance is usually a good way of reminding oneself what really matters in the grand scheme of things.

But, of course, even that balance needs a counterbalance: a life out in the land of detachment and reflection can get pretty lonely and boring. Aside from the obvious financial difficulties, that’s another reason why I don’t really aspire to a writing career; I don’t enjoy the person I become when I spend too much time in that world. I see it as a necessary complement to a life oriented around the very real dramas in life, both great and small. So it’s time to wrap up this self-conscious post, toast to another year, and head out there and enjoy what (finally!) looks like a fine spring evening in Duluth.