$tay ¢old

just when you thought it was relatively safe to step outside in the cold, the cold got hot and the rug got pulled out from under.

the stay cold family lost a good friend in October, derailing ideas and plans to restart this space. its been a few months, and tonight i’m dealing with a bout of insomnia and reflecting. i reside in what is trumpeted as a hotbed of youthful creativity, spontaneous intelligent combustion, at times lauded and derided for its contributions to society; bad hair, engaging art, weird music, vandalism. i’d never say i’m better than anyone (except people who don’t hold the door for old ladies. fuck those people.) so i’d venture to say that i’m somewhere in the middle between whippersnapper and old man, between my mother and father’s working class roots and this new sort of unworking-class. back in the day around the stay cold brainstorm table (any and all bars) we threw around the word “crust yuppie”. i find it more fitting than anything; struggling with student debt, spendthrift tendencies, and a voracious appetite for excess somehow comported with a head full of radical ideas and little to no patience for mediocrity.

we have to bear witness to a renaissance of sorts. i’m looking out of my window tonight and thinking about how the lot of us are preoccupied with our own survival, emotionally, economically, physically, to such an extent that we forget that we live practically on top of each other. we won’t always be sitting this pretty. my point is that instead of exclaiming what i have to do, i want to do more of what i should be doing. so that brings us here, tonight.

this space has laid fallow for a while, i don’t intend to revive it with some sort of fanfare. perhaps a long, low whistle, much like you would have let out at a long fly ball, or a Dodge Challenger rumbling down the street on a sunday afternoon. here we are, in the middle passage, between wide-eyed naivete and folding-chair-on-the-stoop wisdom. i am not really sure what will happen next, only that i am sure i am not fully prepared. i cannot promise you that i will not screw this up. i may have already. i’m not sure it matters. we will make mistakes together.