Oh Jesus Christ, Where To Begin?

Well, after a month-long break, the blog is back! And so much has happened in that month that it feels like it's been so much longer. My hopes of catching you up in a single entry are probably a bit foolish, so for the next couple weeks, these entries might be all over the place in space and time. Like a Doctor Who episode. But let's start start where we left off:

Before arriving in France, I stopped in Chicago before I headed off to New York. The MegaBus from Chicago to New York is ten dollars if you schedule it well enough in advance, so I couldn't really pass up the opportunity to visit a few old friends before I crossed the ocean. In Chicago, I met up with Marko and Paul. But after two days in Chicago, it was off to New York.

The ride to New York took a long time. A really long time. It was eighteen hours of molasses-class purgatory. I got on the bus at midnight, and I arrived in New York at seven pm. Eighteen hours on a bus wasn't as bad as you'd think though. They had plugs for your computer and phone, and there was rudimentary wifi service. But my sense of reality had started to warp a little bit, and soon I began to believe that there was only the bus, there could only ever be the bus, that there was never anything before the bus and there's nothing after the bus. The bus was the end and the beginning, the alpha and the omega, all that there is. So when I saw Frank's familiar face waiting for me when I got off in my once beloved home, it was surreal.

There is only the bus.
The bus is all there is.
The bus is everything.

After I had gotten rid of the suitcase of what was to become my only belongings henceforth, I cleaned myself back up into something resembling a sane human, and Frank and I feasted on the delicious vegetarian meatballs of Meatball Shop and headed to The Eagle for Jockstrap Night, because there really just aren't cultural activities like that in Indianapolis. Or Colombia. Or really anywhere else. At the end of the night, I came back to Frank's feeling like I had started the visit out right and that I was getting to see the arts of New York I loved without that pesky rent issue.

That feeling started to change the next day. I had no real plans lined up, so I decided to just go out into the city and see all the places I missed. Then I realized that there were no specific places (that still existed) that I actually missed. Try as I did, there was just nothing I could come up with that I felt like I needed to see, besides Central Park, which was closed because of the president or the pope or both. And then it started to set in again: The feeling that my time there had ended, that the city that once welcomed me with open arms as the bizarre, vagrant creature I was had changed and I woke up one day to realize it was no longer the same place at all. But now there was something new, an emotion with which I have little acquaintance: jealousy. I was jealous of all the people walking up and down the streets, hurrying to get to this place or that place. That's when I realized that the only thing I missed about New York was living there, feeling like I was, in at least some small way, part of the machinery that moved the world. I didn't miss any specific place or thing, just living there, just the rhythm of the city and the interesting people everywhere. Everyone had a story and a motivation. Few people there are just moving through life without trying to leave their mark or achieve some goal. And I do miss some people I know there, yet slowly but surely, my friends are also fleeing, branching out to other parts of the country with lower rent and less stress. That visit was sad but necessary, perhaps particularly then, right before another adventure. So it was with a heavy heart and with the perpetual forward motion that having no home brings you, that I got on an airplane that took me from New York to Russia and then from Russia to France.