Merry Christmas all. Hope you all had a good one this year, and that the year 2018 treats you well.

I’m on a train leaving my hometown, heading to the city. I come from a place where you say you’re going to the city and everyone knows what you mean, even though it’s four hours away. This state is large and old and filled with the spirit of better times had. When we talk of two America’s this is the one we speak of in a lesser light. Or at least view it as a dimming light. There’s a feeling of if stagnancy that is unsettling to me and is something I finally put a pulse to this year. Now, there are some pocketed gasps or maybe grasps at revitalizing this small rust belt city which hasn’t been in the limelight since before WWII. Those places are great for my hometown. But there are so many unfulfilled promises, plans which fall apart immediately or in the last hour, and a general air of wanting things to get better but never truly believing it. These are the people who are the salt of the Earth, those who have never left the northeast or even their own home state. Some of them have never wanted to leave, the rest have never had the means or ambition to actually get out and explore. The attitudes are, at times, as calcified as the economic situation.

I’m happy to be heading back west tomorrow. It feels more like home, or at least I’ve made more of a home there than I have anywhere else at this point in my life.