Backstory

This blog has a trajectory, an agenda if you like, in that I know where it wants to go. I know where I want to go with it – a handful of specific memories and experiences I’d like to share, in pieces, about a particular friend I had and a few of our shared experience. Kindred spirits, he and I, and I’d like you to get to know him through the impact he’s had (and having now) on me – I suppose that’s really the only way you could know him now if you didn’t before. It will take some time, but we’ll get there, I think. We will come to the place that this blog wants to go. Tell you what, if you keep reading I’ll keep writing and we’ll see what takes shape. Deal?

But before we can get to where we’re going, I need to share where I’ve been and how I arrived at this point. If all that comes next is to make sense, I need to provide insight into the two things that happened my last year living in Chicago that altered my own trajectory. Every once in a while, flaming cosmic debris (better know as meteorites) come blazing through the atmosphere impacting the earth with enough force, in some cases, to forever alter the environment. My last year in Chicago, I experienced two events which, like the aforementioned meteorites, rocked and tilted my personal world.

The first was painful – one of my closest friends, Steven, died suddenly. I had spoke to him the night before, which likely makes me the last person outside of his home that he talked to. I remember that it was late in Chicago, probably around midnight, which made it even later for him (eastern versus central time zones). For just a second I thought about just letting it go to voicemail and following up the next day, but I answered instead (a kindness that the universe extended to me, if you believe in such things). And we talked about nothing in particular and nothing of any earth-shattering significance whatsoever. He told me about summer plans with his two sons and his wife. We agreed to pin down a date in August or September to see each other – it had been a few years (the last time I saw him he was one of the best men in my wedding). And that was it – nothing profound, nothing unusual. Certainly nothing that would suggest that in about 18 hours my wife would be telling me as I got out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, that Steven was dead. My mother had called and spoke with her to pass on the news. I tried to think of who I knew named Steven. Oh God, did she mean my cousin? Seeing the confusion on my face, Jen put her hand gently on my wet shoulder and said very slowly, Steven Josselson.

Steve and I - we're probably about 16 years old here.

Game three of the Stanley Cup playoffs was happening in the background. It all suddenly went weird on me and became just a lot of loud, incomprehensibly garbled images and noise to me. Maybe that’s what having a stroke is like.

It still took me a couple minutes, I tried to explain to her that it was a mistake, I just spoke to Steve the night before and he was fine. Either she or my mom or someone in the chain of communication had gotten it very, very wrong.

But he wasn’t fine. It wasn’t a mistake.

Apparently he’d had a bad drug reaction. The combination of pain meds and a new antidepressant. Or a new pain meds and the old antidepressant. I don’t remember which. I’m actually not sure I ever learned which. I didn’t, couldn’t ask. Even now I haven't really heard the full story. Maybe I don’t want to know it, because knowing how his story end make it irrefutable, final and complete. The ultimate cosmic spoiler, as the end becomes un-unknowable. But I wasn’t thinking about all that at the time. All I knew was the feeling of my personal history collapsing without one of its central pillars for support. The one person who knew me best and across all the different phases and chapters from preteen to middle age, was gone.

It shocked me. It pissed me off. It sent me into a brief spiral of despair. Yes, I went through all the phases in more or less the correct order before I could accept it. And then something unexpected happened. It galvanized me. It became a constant reminder that any of us can be gone tomorrow. Or tonight. Or right this very moment, before we even finish writing and reading this sentence. All those things I so desperately wanted to do, places to see, artworks to create, books to write, trips to take, projects upon projects upon projects, time now to stop putting them off. Every tick of the clock became a countdown, and I found a hunger that was hungry to become something even bigger – to fill the absence where my friend had been. But what to fill it with?

Which brings me to the second event.

Jen and I decided to leave Chicago and move to Florida. Steve’s death had put me in the right mind for a life change. Jen and I had talked about it before, about not waiting until we’re too old to enjoy living by a beach. Our neighborhood, all of Chicago it seemed, was becoming more violent. Twice in a matter of weeks the convenience store at the corner had been robbed at gunpoint and both times I’d been arrived just minutes after it happened. The cost of living seemed to keep going up every month and what we got for the money we spent seemed to keep shrinking. And so we scouted out Tampa and we decided to do it.

I did, however, have one condition.

I didn’t want to have another tearful farewell, like saying goodbye to Steve. This time, I would control the how and why and when. And as I thought about my ten years in the city, I realized that I didn’t know it all that well. I knew parts of it like the back of my hand, but far more of it was a mystery to me. Terra Incognita. I decided to spend my final months there seeing and experiencing as much of it as I could – filling up new rooms in my mind. Celebrating the city by deepening my knowledge and experience of it.

Jen and I set about making our first bucket list – researching all of the experiences unique to the city, from eating Chicken Vesuvio to seeing a Cubs game at Wrigley Field, having a shot of Malört and visiting the old home of Nelson Algren. In doing so, I stumbled across resources like Roadside America, Weird USA, and Atlas Obscura. And collectively, these opened my eyes to a new way of seeing the place I lived. I was suddenly reborn to Chicago, to all cities, to everywhere. I read up on and visited streets that had been built up around and over, literally swallowed by the city; about strange and unusual monuments and collections; and in this manner the city and I were made new to each other. The sense of there being the possibility of something wondrous hiding around the corner of every alley returned to me.

Reading Nelson Algren on the steps
up to the place he once lived.

The city was alive with magic again. It really hadn’t changed in any tangible way, but I’d found a fresh set of eyes with which to see and feel it again as if for the first time.

Jen and I are still working on that Chicago Bucket List – every time we visit for a few days we knock off another couple items. And we’ve created more lists for other places we’ve visited. Tampa, New York, Key West, New Orleans, Philadelphia. Places I’ve never been to before now offer up their unique oddities, begging, it seems, to have them seen. And those places I thought I knew by heart continue to surprise me and yield unexpected treasures.

Losing my friend Steve led me, circuitously, to discover the city I lived in, and ultimately to resume chasing down the sort of childhood wonder and adventures that he and I shared growing up. Tragic and beautiful and fleeting and strange. That’s the journey I’m on now - the one you’re sharing with me.

And I’m glad you’re here, by the way. You could be watching the game. Or playing a game. Or shopping. Or out on your boat/sled/plane/camel. Whatever and wherever you are, you’ve chose to be here, reading this. Reading my backstory.

So thank you. I’m finding that conveying these experience gives them a new dimension. I think of it as the difference between being a tour guide and being a tourist. I hope you’ll stick around – I’ve got a lot more I want to share. I am - we are - in fact, just getting started.