The Cave

I hadn't been there for many years, I don't know how many. Certainly I hadn't hung out there since I quit drinking, so a quarter century or so. But I was sad to hear that it was closing, so, after some internal back and forth, I pulled on some jeans after Graham and I had watched our show yesterday evening and went up there.

It was packed, sweaty, and stinky. At first I didn't see anybody I knew, just an endless sea of people who looked like I used to look back in the day. Scruffy, bearded, smelly, funky. They looked right past me as if I wasn't there, because to them I was just encroaching on their scene and its twilight. I would have done the same in my day.

Then I found a few people I knew and settled in. A few more happened by. Also a guy who had a pretty decent-sized dog on his shoulders. There was barely room for him to make it through the crowd. The dog was remarkably chill.

I was surprised and pleased to see the size of the crowd, it made me nostalgic for those "good old days." In truth, they weren't all that great, as epochs of my life go. The years between college and grad school were hard times, I was fucked up and kind of clueless. But I was surrounded by similar people who supported me, and they were by no means bad people, just wayward idealists, many of them with substance abuse problems. But not evil. A necessary part of society. It is sad to figure out where they will go in Chapel Hill in the future. Probably Durham. Hopefully Roxboro, eventually. We have some land to sell, and the "creative class" plays an important role in the lifecycle of communities.

At the same time, I've started reading Leslie Jamison's The Recovering, in which she details her own path to sobriety. In the early chapters she focuses a lot on the mythology of the drunken writer which guided her in some of her early days:  Dylan Thomas, John Berryman, Raymond Carver, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Rhys. Frankly, I am bored by that stuff. I think her editor could have trimmed a little.

But I'll keep going.