RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

May 1, 1998

When moving out on my own, I had visions of base, raw survival. One bad week and I’d end up like that bird in the post below this one. On the streets, dead and discarded. It turned out a lot better than that.

On May 1, 1998 I moved to my first apartment. For all you slow witted people, that was 10 years ago today. It was a $650/month 2 bedroom at 46th and Osage. I worked at a video store and ate a lot of Rami’s lunch-cart falafel. My deep seething and totally unfair hatred of Penn students was also born.

My then unrealized goal was to move to West Philly and to find a job with Penn. After that I could enjoy their staff benefit of free classes and work my way to a free elitist degree. I eventually found my job and started classes 8 months later.

West Philly was a lot different back then. Penn still had a virtual wall up around its campus. There wasn’t much glitz around. The cute little renovated rowhouse across the street from my apartment was still a rundown place for local crackheads to gather and argue into the night. You could buy a house then for 1/5 of what it would cost you now. The bowling alley next to the video store was still an abandoned warehouse where my colleagues and I went for “coffee breaks.”

The apartment was great. Like any self respecting 19-year-old we socialized heavily. Weekend get-togethers swelled into small parties. There was sex, drugs, debauchery, dancing, drama, video cameras and thank fucking god, no such thing as youtube. But stupid college kids we weren’t. Half of us weren’t even in college. And beside that, there was also plenty of discussion of photography, music, movies, theology and art. But we weren’t a bunch of know-it-all, pretentious assholes either. There was a respectable balance.

Most of all, I liked lying in bed in the dead of night with the window behind me cracked. I loved the sound of the train off somewhere in the distance. I still do.

But back to May 1. In what would become a ritual, when the truck was returned and the heavy lifting done, my roommate and I got a six-pack and some take out. Ten years ago today, I opened one of the windows in my massive new bedroom, cracked a beer with my roommate and sat there feeling something I will never feel again.