Please, Pardon the Sap

I suppose that because I'm in my Saturn Return, I feel compelled to dispense advice to younger twentysomethings.

Being that I'm not that creative, I'll steal some advice from The Wind in the Willows.

As the old, wayfaring Sea Rat says to the young, homebody Water Rat:

Take the adventure, heed the call, now ere the irrevocable moment passes! 'Tis but a banging of the door behind you, a blithesome step forward, and you are out of the old life and into the new! Then some day, some long day hence, jog home here if you will, when the cup has been drained and the play has been played, and sit down by your quiet river with a store of goodly memories for company.

In other words, leave your home, leave where you grew up, and seek out new things. It's better to do it than not do it and regret it later. You can always go home again.

Gun Shy

I get all pumped up about how great Cleveland really is and how I should go home immediately and then I do something stupid like look at cleveland.com, and realize that Cleveland is not only full of people who have lost perspective on what's important to complain about and what's not, but there's an icky underculture of fratty sports-bar type young people who I seem to have either romanticized or forgotten about (or blocked out, more likely).

The suggestion that city leadership concentrate on carting in cool people from elsewhere used to piss me off, but maybe a little bit of that wouldn't be so bad. Or maybe there should be a concerted effort to send young people away for a tour of duty elsewhere. I just get a little gun shy about coming home when I remember that Clevelanders can decry a 50-cent raise in RTA fares (look, I make less than $27K, so don't accuse me of being a rich New York snob, but I've lived in 4 different states and $2 a ride is not unreasonable) and the state of Cleveland public schools with equal intensity. Regardless of what you think RTA's motives are, urban revitalization efforts like the Euclid Corridor Project don't pay for themselves, and decaying urban cores don't get better without urban revitalization efforts.

What's more, I'm starting to be grossed out by the obsession the Plain Dealer has with young people staying in Cleveland. Youth doesn't automatically equal creativity or enthusiasm. There are an awful lot of really dull-eyed, uninteresting young people out there with no good ideas whatsoever. Is it worth slobbering over Jenny and Johnny Gen-X who haul their Scion in from Avon Lake for a few overpriced novelty martinis in the Warehouse District? Maybe this has something to do with my Saturn Return, but I've decided to look for answers amongst the older and wiser right now.

The bottom line is, when I come back, I'll need to surround myself with intensely pro-Cleveland friends. If not, that old cocktail of feeble wannabeism (wannabe Chicago, wannabe New York), lack of perspective, and negativity is just going to clamp onto me like a Dementor's Kiss.