From Nashville Right Now

On a walk today, I saw that someone had drawn a heart on the pavement with garbage juice from a ripped trash bag. This made me irrationally happy.

It’s finally warm enough to walk again, and so I am slowly regaining my sanity. See, we are currently in the sweet spot between the dreary, wet, winter and the blazing hot, unbearable summer. 

The thing about living in the South, the proper South, is that summer days are scorching and summer nights are not for you–they’re for the mosquitos. Spring and fall are all we’ve got

The funny thing about living in Nashville is that your body doesn’t belong to you, and you realize this twice. Once, under the rule of Christian extremists and gun lobbyists, and again because you will be eaten alive if you show skin on a summer evening. Your body is at the mercy of bloodsucking pests. 

It isn’t a bad place to live, Nashville. I have met the most truly liberal people I’ve ever known here–made determined by lawmakers who could not give less of a shit about them. They’re persistent and strong and unbending in the face of seeming impossibility. The people who live in Nashville are, if I am to generalize, tough. Tough because their existence is invalidated–ignored–and they get up every morning and make some of the best art in the world.

One thing Nashville is not, is posturally liberal. Postural liberalism is sickening. I lived in Boulder for three years, where every sprinkler-watered front lawn of every multi-million dollar home had a sign reminding us that “Love is Love” and “Science is Real.” We know this–we know this is virtue signaling. Thing is, unhoused people are not allowed to sleep in tents inside the city limits of Boulder–they are an apparent threat to the houses where Love is Love. Unhoused people are drug tested before being allowed into shelters. Love is Love though, right? 

Boulder isn’t a bad place either. In fact, it is probably my favorite place to remember. It’s where I met my best friends and it’s where I did the most important parts of growing up and where I ran down to the creek in the middle of a Monday afternoon to submerge my entire body into the frigid mountain snow-melt. I love Boulder maybe more than anywhere–it’s where I was the happiest I’ve ever been. 

Place is a funny thing to organize your life by. I was walking in East Nashville today–through some residential neighborhood (one of the very few with sidewalks) and I realized I could be anywhere. I could be in the small town in Northern New York where I was born or Boulder where the rich call themselves hippies or Elmira, New York or Providence, Rhode Island or Walden, Massachusetts–any of these places I’ve lived. On a spring evening, when it’s cold enough to need a sweater and the sun has just set, every neighborhood is the same. Houses sit together between trees and bushes and telephone poles, and someone’s locking their car and going inside. Someone is walking their dog and they smile at you. 

Familiarity is usually comforting. It can also be detrimental. I’ve lived in more than one city that sends thoughts and prayers to the victims of massive, public shootings. I’ve lived in more than one city that has grieved the loss of strangers that could have been prevented. It doesn’t matter where we live. We are all between telephone poles and bushes and sidewalks and street lights. We could be anywhere–and we are. 

I don’t want to be alone in this feeling, and I don’t want you to be either. I don’t want to feel helpless and scared and frustrated, and worst of all, numb. I don’t want you to feel that either. I want you to know that people like you are everywhere–sharing your beliefs and fighting for the same things. I want you to feel safe, more than anything. 

We have to do our best to take care of each other–to think long and hard and truly about what that looks like. And we have to talk about it, fight for it, persistently. Not just posturally.

I want to walk through a city that isn’t grieving, and I want that for you too.