NEW POST!!!!! An elegy for the weekend getaway bender
As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in a café in near my friend Cory Poolman’s house in Philadelphia. I’ve been hung over for days, I haven’t showered in approximately that same amount of time and having left my toothbrush at the hotel in DC, my breath is zombie rotten. This current trip I’m on is similar to a lot of short, wild drinking trips I’ve taken in the last decade, where I spend a few short days in a city with at least one old friend, drinking, eating, not sleeping, carousing, wearing the same “one cool” outfit I brought in my daypack for days on end, chasing the dirty hipster bars, the classy cocktail joints, the button-down-broseph brewpubs for (mostly) ironic purposes, the grimey weeknight dance parties, the latenight drunkfood hotspots, carousing, laughing, exploring the various neighborhoods of whatever city it is and pretending that if I actually lived there, it would be like this all the time.
Sometimes, the trip has been coupled with a work trip (usually to New York), meaning in between the roistering and bopping, there were times when I had to pitch a client or supervise a shoot or perform some other imposition of maturity. Other times, it’s been driven by an impulsive urge to skip town for few days, maybe by the chance to reunite with a larger group of friends or just a cheap last-minute airfare. These quick getaway benders could also be tacked on to other trips, an extended ticket after a wedding or an elongated stopover between an intercontinental trip. The current trip that I’m on is driven by the fact that I got a free flight to Washington, DC, to watch my older brother give a speech at a fundraiser for an organization called Best Buddies, which has helped him immensely. I’ll come back to this trip, because it’s been exhilarating enough to recount the details, but one persistent thought which has continually come up during the trip, beyond, ‘where are we going next’ and ‘whiskey or beer’ and ‘god I feel like dogshit this morning’, has been, ‘how much longer do I get to do this’? I began writing for this blog because I was interested in the juxtaposition between how I both wanted to grow up at the same time that I didn’t want to grow up at all. But when I think about how much fun I’ve had on these little excursions, how hopeful I’ve felt about life, this is a habit I don’t want to grow out of.
