The End of Place

 All the young people pouring in here and into the few remaining destination-refuges in America remind me so much of myself. I was like them once I sought what many of them were looking for---a place to reboot one's life in young adulthood, to cast off the past of one's childhood, and to find a niche and place in America where one can set down roots.

But there are hardly any places like that in America anymore in part because we don't have places anymore. We just have one big place We all live online connected to each other. The physical world, including our physical location, is the shadow of this real world through which we are connected by continuous almost ubiquitous media.

It was 32 years ago this spring when at age 24, coming into full adulthood, I went down to Austin, Texas to start graduate school. I had barely been to Texas before. It was a strange and exotic idea, as it is for many Americans. The idea that I would live there had seemed bizarre. 

I drove my car down from Fort Collins, all night through the beautiful late spring darkness. The night sky was cloudless. On the big empty bridge over the Red River, in pitch blackness and solitude, I parked my car and walked to the edge and looked out over the river, throwing some loose change in my pocket into the darkness for good. This was the start of a brand new chapter for me, I decided. My last few undergraduate years in Oregon had been full of drama that I wanted to forget. I wanted to become a person that even my high school friends would not recognize. I wanted to become me. It was the year 1989.

It was a hugely success in many ways, although I learned that drama will come back into your life no matter. Still it was everything of the reboot into maturity that I hoped it would be. Later in my life I found myself looking for that same kind of successful renewal. It had had become the blueprint for that.

Austin was a great place to do that in 1989 in part because hardly anyone talked about it. This was before the Internet existed. Information traveled through the mainstream media and word of mouth. Austin, like most cities, was invisible on the natural stage. Each city was a universe unto itself. Underground and youth culture traveled around the country by slow motion, by people photocopying underground magazines in Kinkos and mailing them to their friends via the US Postal service.

Austin was dirt cheap. Apartments could be had for almost nothing. Because of the saving and loan collapse, half the city was for sale, even in the quaint old neighborhoods near campus where shacks probably now sellf for a million bucks. Back then you could pick them up for almost nothing, and everything stayed for sale for about two years before the market recovered.

That meant youth could pour in, undetected, and incubate its own culture.

None of this can happen anymore. There are no city-universes. Everything is hip all at once. There is no such thing as place, only the simulation of it. The hippest cities are the most expensive ones, not the cheapest ones. 

I feel incredibly lucky that I got to live in places like Austin, New York City, and Portland, Oregon before they became burnt up in the fire that has consumed all placeness and left us with one big place (ant throw in Colorado, where I got to grow up, and a few other places too). Youth now bounce in nomad fashion from one place to another, seeking their place and discovering all cities are now alike with the same sterile diversions that leave one lonely. Not only has true underground culture (which requires cheap rental housing) disappeared, but all the cities are becoming the same monotonous architecture inside themselves and with each other. 

Going to a new city to reboot yourself and escape drama was always an illusion. But it was an illusion that one used to be able to leverage, in the breathing space of newness, if one took advantage of it to actively change one's lie and grow in the new place, temporarily free of the burdens of the past.

But the illusion is gone. One carries one's life with one wherever one goes now. One updates one's address in one's online accounts. Amazon delivers to your new address. Your phone number doesn't change like it used to (which seems both horrifying and refreshing now to think of). 

No wonder youth neuroses are skyrocketing. Everything that was let me fumble my way through my youthful mistakes to build up a life seem stripped away. The stereotype of the Baby Boomer is one of someone who doesn't realize the profound difference between the world of their youth and the world of today, thinking that youngsters can simply follow the same steady life path they did. Nothing confirms to me more that I am a GenXer that the consciousness of this change, as those of us born after the mid Sixties know that the world that came before us was disappearing before our eyes. I took advantage I could, of that disappearing world.

I wouldn't now how to be young now. I would go mad, I think. I wouldn't know what the heck to do, or how to live life at all. I would be pulled into all the trends and phony remedies, like joining social justice political movements that create solidarity with other depressed youth, and a means to express their tantrum-like anger. I am amazed at the youth who don't succumb to this.