Soul Kitchens
The best thing about college for me was the radio station. Not just for the usual reasons people enjoy college radio (shared coolness, access to free stuff, the magic of radio itself), but because it was a place to hang. Ever since then I’ve needed a hangout.
A hangout has certain features. It’s open long hours, or always. It is semi-public; maybe anyone can be there, but generally a known group is there. It’s a place where you can do something if you want, or do nothing. It should also be a place where you can have a function if you want, such as working there or helping out in some way. And it should be a place where arriving and leaving are easy, without a lot of explanation.
I pretty well trashed my education at the college radio station. When that task was complete, I left to become a music critic and journalist, and the newspaper became my hangout as well as my employer. I was there from the start of the day until the last bus back home over the hill.
My next few hangouts have been a series of coffee houses. I had already been a regular at the college coffee house, and the arrival of lots of these places en masse in the 90’s made it easy to find congenial haunts. There were a couple in West L.A. that I haunted, and made some casual friends at, but never really hit the mark. They were open late and I could socialize or not, as the specification above demanded, but I never clicked with the people there. Partly this was because my main hangout turned out to be almost entirely full of people in 12-step recovery from substance abuse, which isn’t my situation.
When I moved back to Orange County ten years ago, I pretty quickly found my current hangout, a branch of the local coffeehouse chain. It’s an expansive place, open from early morning until late evening, with a patio outside. People come and go like sitcom characters, and no particular reason is required for entering or leaving. Some work there, some work next door, some just hang out there. The crowd changes periodically as another group of young people matures for a few years there and moves out to other things. I’ve been there fairly constantly at least since 1996.
As much as I enjoy having a hangout, I think it’s symptomatic of some nasty neuroses. I like to bail out of social situation when they make me nervous, which is way too often. I’m afraid of progress in my life, so a nice static place suits me. I’m socially passive, so having a stream of people who know me drifting past is comforting, like a warm bath.
Probably if I was a more normal social type, I’d have done the bar scene or some other typical activity and found my mate by now, and had 1.5 children and a mortgage. I still can’t decide whether it was a good or a bad thing that I slipped into hangout mode at age 18 and have stayed there for 20 years. I look at the older men sitting around the patio, smoking and talking, occasionally chatting up the younger kids, and I think: me in 10 years? Is that what’s up?
Was David Byrne right when he sang “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens”?
June 22nd, 2003 at 3:58 am
I don’t think having a hangout is symptomatic of anything. I for one am envious that you have such a place. You’ve derived a lot of wisdom and a repertoire of interesting stories from your hangouts.
For better or worse, you didn’t pledge yourself to someone eternally at a kegger when you were 21. Maybe it’s both good and bad?
I’m like you; I’ve never had a decent long-term relationship in my adult life, for various reasons. It feels like I’ve missed out on much of what being young was supposed to be.
An ex-date of mine has *only* had long term relationships (with the exception of a brief summer rebound period, when I met her.) But she regards a lot of her life as lost time too.
She has tried to make me see that relationships are not all wine and roses, there’s a great deal lost. Think of all the sucky jobs you couldn’t have left. Or the career changing you did. Think of coming home from a concert to hear your SO deride your interest in popular music as childish. Of not being able to zip up to Vancouver on a whim. All that for someone who you might not even like 10 years later.
Your past is what made you who you are now, and dammit but I think you’ve got a hell of a lot more than you know. I can already hear the defenses snapping up to reject that, but try to consider it anyway?
In time, you might learn to see this period of your life as not being as wasted as you thought it was.
June 22nd, 2003 at 5:15 pm
Unless you spent it in front of the TV, it’s rare that anyone wastes their life to any degree. Sure, you take different branches through the decision tree, but unlike most role-playing video games, you can’t visit everything. Even more importantly, most time spent with other humans is certainly not wasted, so a hangout can save you from sitting on your can alone and really wasting time.
Stay out of jail, stay away from the TV, keep talking to humans, and you can’t possibly be wasting anything. Hmm, even jail might be turned into something useful (if you like weightlifting and learning more about successful breaking and entering).
September 3rd, 2003 at 5:02 pm
What are you supposed to do when you’ve long since had your soul sucked away, or maybe it floated off, but is gone, and your left to walk with this emptiness, like you always wore a watch but now cannot find the time to look at anyone, least of all yourself?
David Byrne is always right. “I see all the people standing out there and I call that education.”