The above photo of me was taken on the day that I moved into the Sweet Little Dude House (before it even had that name) 2 years ago.
This past weekend, I moved out of our house, the Sweet Little Dude house in the near west side of Bloomington. It was the place where I lived in Bloomington when I “lived” in Bloomington. I guess I still live in Bloomington, though even for two years it’s been a struggle to figure out exactly where I fit in. Matt, David, Ryan, Theo, Sparky, Greg, Mike, Joe, and Mykel all lived here and countless others spent a night on the couch or the floor or the treehouse. As much of an impact as visitors can have on a house, I will always love seeing old friends and the excitement of sharing a morning on the front steps with a stranger who just rolled off your couch. I once had the grand plan of interviewing everyone who slept on the couch at our house, but could never get the recording equipment to work right and I eventually lost interest. There would have been some good stories though, of great journeys, new loves, broken relationships, punk rock tours, new towns, and all the other changes and adventures in life that bring you to someone’s couch. The Legion of Doom in Columbus had a history tacked to the wall in the living room, and I’d like this to be like that – a comprehensive account of our time together as a house – but I guess I wasn’t even in town for a lot of it, and as this summer has left me saturated with experience, I doubt my ability to recount history anyway.
I’m always nostalgic about houses, and my memory tends to make the times seem better than they were, perhaps. I have a tatoo, on my left ankle, a stick-and-poke that some of us gave ourselves in one of the last evenings of the Sweet Life house in Columbus. I once teased a former housemate about her lack of tattoo and she replied, essentially, “Why would I want one of those? That house wasn’t so great.” The same could be said about the SLD, I guess, because there were house meetings that went on forever, and unfinished projects, fallings out with landlords, days when housemates would pass each other without a word, broken pipes, and astronomical gas bills.
Ultimately, I don’t think that the time I spent in that house was so amazing or so terrible. What gives it the emotional weight is that it can be so formal. You move your things in and, two years later, you move them out in the same silver station wagon that belongs to your parents. Despite this formality, your life experience measured by the dates on a lease, the end of this episode hasn’t yet given me a way of defining these past two years of my life. I moved to Bloomington from Columbus because I fealt done with one part of my life and somewhat certain about where the next part would begin. The fact that I’m still in Bloomington, but with only a P.O. Box to tie me here illustrates a new lack of certainty that has been swirling around these last two years. I like it here though. A few nights ago, we ate food for Kevey’s birthday. Libby and Tristan made salsa, Steven grilled tofu dogs and kebobs and afterwards some of us went to play four square. And I just had this feeling of “oh yeah, these are the things you do in Bloomington.” If I were to try to articulate these things – sharing food with friends, playing games in a parking lot, riding bikes around town and crossing paths with friends as a reason to live somewhere, I would find the words increasingly hollow, but that night, after months of itinerancy, living them felt great.
I wrote in an e-mail today to a friend that moving out of a house can feel like ending a romantic relationship, which I now think is hyperbole because I don’t know if I’ve ever intentionally avoided someone the way I’ve avoided riding past the old house these last few days. Still, whether its the akwardness I feel riding past the house and seeing strangers move their things in, or, more gently, my altered cartography of this town, they still say the same thing – things are changing.
—
Its a hard question, what to do with your things when you move out and it sucks, with all the shit we talk about wasteful consumerism to see the mountains of stuff that a punk house can throw into a dumpster. I like to believe in the Internet and I found that Amazon was an easy way to sell shit and Freecycle was an easy way to give it away. I didn’t manage to make it to the “Really Free Market” that was part of the Crimethinc. convergence in Bton, but I admire Freecycle projects because they encourage the idea of freely sharing things amongst a wide variety of people – from suburbanites to grandmas, and I feel like things like the free market might have been off the radar for them.