How do you say goodbye to a city you have sexual tension with?

Copy this link for a short URL

August 13, 2009 at 2:08am

If you were to leave a city you’ve lived in for 8 years, how would say goodbye? 8 years isn’t 30 years, so it’s not like your leaving an imprint. 8 years isn’t 1 year either, so it’s not like your a dirty transient who thinks he knows his way around but can only name drop the cool kids area.

A better question is, why do you say goodbye on the internet?

I’ve been watching this American Life, on an Xbox, streaming it from Netflix, fulfilling the circle of a fat white American watching TV about a country he could experience. Watching This American Life (or listening) has a profound effect on you. You initially think only one thing.

These people are fucking boring.

That’s probably what I would say if I met most of them. I’d talk to them, dismiss them and think “man what a normal person”.

It also has another, almost opposite effect when you reach the end of the show.

These people are amazing.

Ira Glass has a way of illuminating the everyday, mundane and possibly local-newspaper-worthy elements of everyone’s lives; expanding upon their dim luminescence. This glow then slowly creeps its way into your skull lighting up the dying, pathetic neurons you’ve destroyed already with too much exposure to the LCD light reflected in your glasses currently.

It makes you want to do what everyone does when they feel a small, but significant turning point in their life. It makes you want to blog.

As when a small child vomits, any rather insignificant move you make becomes an attention-getting cry and near apocalypse-level attention with the magic of the blog. I am no better man than this.

So, here I am, Ira and blog. To tell you how to say goodbye. Hear my cry.

First, you must start with a story of how you got here.

I arrived in Seattle to attend the University of Washington. This took me around the bend from being a complete asshole and humiliating myself while drunkly stumbling around Haggett Halls to idly playing Halo on Xbox while drinking a Natty Ice.

I came to get a degree in computer science. I took my first introductory computer science course and hated it. Not only was it pedantic, but insulting and my apathy towards higher learning began sprouting.

There were the girls, the cigarettes, the cheap booze we could score from some 21 year old kid going into 7-11 to get himself a Slurpee: they all factored in. Then slowly, after I had arrived here I knew this was home. Never before had I experienced such freedom with a city or a place and they became closely tied together to this giant sparkle of god-damn silver in the Northwest.

Second, you must explain some tragedy in your life. 

It was only when I had dropped out of school, destroyed by lack of motivation, that I began to feel the weight, both literal and figurative, of my decisions. There was no money management, there was no cooking, very little cleaning. I descended into a pit that only an idiot at 20 could delve into with questions that, as they always do, seem so minute.

I became something unlike what I am or what I was and it was unlikable.

Third, you must explain your rise from the ashes and why you’re moving.

But you, you emerald colony of kings, you came to my rescue after humbling me to a very bitter corner and opened my eyes to the greatness that was your city. I soon returned to you re-energized, finishing my degree, finding the girl of my dreams and finally claimed happiness. Now I’m a complete asshole, humiliating myself while drunkenly stumbling around my own halls, then playing Halo 3 on Xbox and drinking Dogfish Head.

I’m leaving because I can.

Finally, finish it off.

Seattle. You are mocked by many for your weather: most of whom are laughed at by the locals for not realizing the gem that you are.

You brought me great friends, many problems, better solutions and the love and support of great people.

You taught me to be self-aware… then after that awareness had crushed a bit o’ me, you taught me how to deal with it.

Seattle, you’re just a collection of steel and lakes. I could care less about your buildings, but I fell in love with the things you carried.

Seattle, I love you. Goodbye.

...I’m going to live with your gay cousin down south.