Filthadelphia (pt. 1)

Philly. 

That gritty, grungy city. 

Something about it always turned my head down, always made me want to tell it to fuck off. Sitting on the crest of the highway it sat like a bouncer over my suburb, daring us small town folk to take a swing. 

For 18 years, I watched it sneer. 

Driving the Betsy Ross Bridge always felt like descending into the mouth of some beast; it’s cabled fangs ready to snap down. An unforgiving landscape of broken down factories, crumbling brownstones and barred corner stores laid on the other side of that portal. It was a place where cobblestones met cracked asphalt and history had weathered down into a prop. Walking it’s streets, I never knew if there was actually a shadow behind me, or if it just felt that way. 



Misdirection is Direction.

I envy people who have always had a dream - something that has resonated through their bones and called to them from the universe beyond. You hear those stories about the make up artist who would break in her Mothers room and paint her face brilliant shades, or the policeman who would go around giving people fake tickets with his little notepad.

But me? I had abstract hobbies. Those one’s you can’t commit into something tangible. I read like a nerd and made beanie babies talk to each other. What the fuck does that turn into? A children’s show host? 

I used to enter (and win, thank you very much) little creative contests. I’d write cruedly put together essays or photograph my dogs in costumes, yet somehow I don’t see that as my foreshadowing to a Pulitzer.

I envy the dreamers’ sense of direction. I look down and see four million arrows sticking out under my feet, each pointing to a different horizon; they look down and see one arrow, one horizon. They take one calculated step after another towards the clear figure in the distance, and I stumble like a mad woman towards an obscurity of a mirage.

The ironic thing is my only sense of direction is to go in all directions. I crave adventure. I’m dying to see as much of the world as I can possibly take in. I give some of this credit to an Aunt of mine who travels the world in wide, Goliath steps. When I was seven she began sending me post cards, each one a small photograph of my fantasy. Up onto a huge world map a sticker dot would mark their origins, and underneath it’s shadow I’d pour over the post cards, astrally projecting myself to streets of Paris and peaks of the Alps, trying to imagine my perfect sense of wonderment as I turned each new corner. 

So far, misdirection has taken me in the right direction. I’ve lived in a place like this: 

And this: 

Have seen places like this: 

And now, go on to live in one like this: 

My quest is over. My next home has been marked. T-minus 38 days, and my urgency for flight will have me touching down in another frontier. One so foreign to me that my mind drools over the thought of such new material it shall gather. Yes, off I go…  

A Lot of Movin’

This is my current local: 

Well, sorta. It takes me 15 minutes to drive to Philadelphia from my quite little suburb town. But I didn’t always live in a stacked container outskirt, no… I once lived in a place that looked like this: 

And this: 

In fact, where I lived was so picturesque, Nicholas Sparks legitimately lived there. Nicholas Fucking Sparks.  

But ah, those days have passed into my past. Sunk deep into the recesses of a heart that will never let go of my sun soaked summers and moss dripped days along the Southern coast. My body was raised in the North and my soul in the South, and now it’s time to let the two converge to tackle the next step in life… which, it seems, will land me in New York City. 

The biggest American city that isn’t really American at all. As R.L. Stine once said: “I’m so glad I live in New York City and not the United States.” 

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