Hometown Blahs

I think it has a lot to do with the psychic cooties that linger, acting like brain rats in the associations to certain people, places and things in a given location, that happened in approximation to my victimization experience.

I moved away from my hometown pittsburgh back in 1999, and I was never so glad to leave a town. Pittsburgh was the place that bore and bred me. It became the place I was physically and sexually abused, psychologically traumatized and emotionally aborted by my own family. I had moved to Minneapolis and created a new life, one that had no connections, no semiotic referential points in regards to the external signifiers which represented victimization, self-loathing, shame and defeat. In Minneapolis my life and self esteem flourished under a banner a freedom that could not be attained as long as I remained bound in chains of ensconced subliminal associations to persons places and things of my hometown. I needed a fresh outlook, a clean slate. But I needed also to face and resolve the unrecognized schemas and seculae that connected me from one moment to the next, triggering reactivity, keeping me blind to the objectivity I so desperately needed, were I to truly know freedom from the tethering past.

Part of my process led me to return to my hometown Pittsburgh, and now that I am back, I want to throw up; all I see is dead people. I see so clearly why I left in the first place, and without my children here, except my son Chris, there is really no purpose for me to be here. I had romanticized my reasoning for returning to my hometown, like an elephant seeking its graveyard, a resting place to make peace with ghosts of the past.

But, now, here all I find is that I have arrived prematurely. That I am not ready to die, but rather, I feel the potential for giving up far too soon to be a very real possibility; an inner urgency makes me wonder if it's time to leave again, to seek and seed a new perspective.

I had always thought that at some point age would force me to return 'home', but from where I stand there is no 'home'. There is only negotiating compromise. I have been back here for almost 2 years, and have very little to show for the experience. Yes, I have unraveled huge mental/emotional knots, and I have started to make a few new connections, and perhaps I have not given them a fair enough shake yet; and while I am thrilled that my life is intersecting on a musical level with that of my son, as I am a member of his band, still, I feel that I have one more attempt at flight to make before I yield to the inevitable call to put down my life's burden once and for all.

For today, I want to leave this nesting town, this place that has such great significance for others; its breathtaking landscape, with its hills, trees and rivers, flowers. But for me, it seems its fresh meaning will always elude me, because of the reasons mentioned above, the potential of its culture to further form and shape my ideals and hopes and dreams will be forever tarnished. I can never wipe clean the slate as long as I live in Pittsburgh, and I am torn between two quests: should I stay and simply face my demons, risking allowing them to devour me, as I challenge myself to live beyond their tendrils that keep me inexorably linked to the past, or should I turn my face toward a new Jerusalem.... a new set of questions, challenges, crucifixions, deaths and resurrections.