I moved out of Chicago in 2010 and moved to Denver. That was hard.
In 2012 I moved from Denver to Boston. That? Not so hard. Not to knock Denver, but leaving it was pretty easy. It wasn’t, of course, like leaving Chicago, a city I lived in all my life and where nearly everyone I know and everyone who really knows me lives – family, friends I’ve known since I was 10, that sort of thing. I welcomed the adventure of moving to Denver and residing in an entirely new place, but the reality of leaving Chicago was something I held down and tried not to think about. But leaving Denver, even after living there for almost three years, was rather easy. Now some people might say, “Sure, it’s easy, it was only three years.” But they’d be surprised at the number of people who absolutely fall in love with Denver after, oh, say, three hours of living there. They gush about their new city and walk around like kids who’ve been given $1,000 and sole access to a toy store. You hear “Awesome” a lot about everything in Denver: the mountains (which are not actually IN Denver, but whatever…), the rock climbing (again, not actually in Denver, but I won’t quibble), the music scene (which leans toward the semi-obscure indie rock bands, so not a lot for me personally to get nuts about) and the beer culture (OK, I got on board with that pretty quickly). But everything else was, as the kids say, “meh.” Of the activities that actually occurred in Denver proper – the weekly jazz fests in the summer, the street fairs, the citywide celebrations, etc., they were nice, but… you know, sort of not what I was used to. Oh, everyone appeared to be having a good time, but to me it seemed as if they were having a good time because they assumed they were supposed to be having a good time. At the jazz fest, people would occasionally get up and dance to music, despite the fact that most jazz really isn’t music for dancing. But they do so because, you know, it’s music and it’s a festival and, well, we’re supposed to be having a good time. Argue with me if you must whether jazz is a dancing music, but I think to truly appreciate it you have to listen to it, to hear that whole “notes between the notes” thing to appreciate the skill. But, yeah, dance if you want to, I guess. Note: Not that I’m Michael Jackson, but I know not-good dancing when I see it. In fact, I concluded they were moving their feet into the spaces BETWEEN where their feet was supposed to be. I cringed. Despite my “underwhelmedness” with Denver, I liked the city. And I was growing to appreciate it. Not love it, but appreciate it. I learned to keep my mouth shut when people – again, mostly newcomers to the city – raved about everything around them (again, “awesome,” or “fucking awesome” or some other variation utilizing the word “awesome”) and just let them go on. “Don’t you think that’s awesome?” they’d ask about some innocuous thing – a restaurant that had ping-pong tables, a bar that served peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Tim Tebow. I’d respond with a non-committal “Mmmmm.” Which sounds like an answer, sounds like an agreeable answer, but is really just a vibrating of the vocal chords signifying nothing. I used to counter those raves with stories about similar things back home in Chicago and how much better they were there. A bar with ping-pong tables? Eh, back in Chicago there’s a bar that has nightly axe-throwing contests. That bar sells peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? Well, in Chicago there’s a bar that makes s’mores over a fire in a metal trashcan in the middle of the room. I found myself trying to one-up almost everything with a similar comparison to something bigger, badder and bolder that was to be found in Chicago. And I started to realize it was not only obnoxious but unfair. I figured out I did it partly because I missed a lot about Chicago for a number of reasons. And partly because it was all true. But just because something’s true doesn’t mean it needs to be said. But that’s what you do when you’re from a big city: you make instant comparisons to wherever you are. And wherever you are is always inferior to wherever you’re from. It can be world capitals like London, Paris, Madrid or Moscow and a resident of New York City, Los Angeles or, yes, Chicago will always find ways in which their city is better and more badass. “Soccer hooligans? Whatever. A couple of Gangster Disciple shorties would kick their ass.” “Damn, the streets of Paris are fucked up…at least Chicago laid them out where they make some fucking sense.” “Those Russian fuckers think they can drink, but in Chicago the bars stay open until 4 in the morning… 5 on Saturdays!” So I finally decided to let Denver be Denver. It is what it is, even if it may not really doesn’t know what “it” is. (In the course of writing this, I tried to figure out the Denver “identity.” A lot of other places, both big and small, have a distinct civic identity. And as far as I could determine, Denver didn’t really have one, as far as I could tell. And “chill” is not an appropriate city identity). From that point, when people walked up to me in their skinny jeans and told me how “awesome” that bar that featured ‘70s music is, I pushed down the urge to respond, “Not if you actually LIVED in the ‘70s.” Instead, I merely agreed with them. It was difficult, like trying not to tell your best friend that his girlfriend offered to give you blowjob in the bathroom. But I held it in until we finally moved away and I exhaled as we crossed the state line. But now we’re in Boston and the game is completely different. This is a different fight. Denver was Ali vs. Chuck Wepner. Boston is Ali vs. Frazier, or at the very least, Ali vs. Foreman. In this corner, a city with a hugely diverse population, a very distinct personality, a strong character, a definite edge, a crazy devotion to sports and an abundance of dark bars where old guys sip cheap beers for hours on end and bitch about whatever the last thing they saw on television when they left the house. In the other corner…the same thing. I keep wondering if I can or should play that “yeah, but in Chicago…” game here in Boston. I could probably win the “which city is more dangerous” game. Yeah, that’s a real game played by people who are lifelong residents of a big city. Nobody wants their city to be a thought of as a “punk” city so a guy from Chicago will debate a guy from Boston on which city has the most dangerous neighborhoods, the roughest bars, how you have to watch your ass at all times on the subway. It’s a stupid argument that nonetheless happens. As of now, I believe have the lead over a Bostonite in the dubious contest of which city is more badass, thanks to an average of, oh, 30 people shot per weekend in Chicago. Boston does has its share of crazy/dangerous people and situations. A while back, a guy chased down a bus and took a couple of swings at a bus driver because he passed him by at a previous stop. Sure, it’s crazy, but it’s not exactly “Chicago crazy.” I try not to play the game, but a few Boston people have managed to pull me in. I made an off-handed comment a while back on Facebook that joked about a couple of guys in Boston who got in trouble with the law for playing hacky-sack near the subway. I wrote: “In Chicago, the guys play hacky-sack with an actual guy’s sack…with his sack still attached.” A Boston friend instantly felt the urge to immediately respond with tales of violent “Southies” (aka South Boston residents), the thugs in Mattapan, and dire warnings of the consequences of wearing a New York Yankees cap, which mostly consisted of getting “beat up.” Beat up. How quaint. I think next year I’ll own this town.
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August 2015
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