Thursday Thread (On Friday): A Place in Your Life That Will Not Let You Go? 😂
Do you have one of those? I was stuck there last night.
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Hello, Lovelies, How the hell are you?
So, whenever I go home to visit my dad, the place itself is very Twin Peaks-creepy but also extraordinarily beautiful. Part of the creepiness involves a catastrophically annoying Hotel California vibe where… as the song goes… “You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave.” And I mean, never.
Every time I try to leave Lost Coast as it’s known (not only for its geographic isolation but also for its cliché tendency to attract individuals who want to get lost and stay lost), it’s a bust. The weather cancels all the flights, or some hillbilly elegy type sabotages the WiFi at the tiny airport, or the one puddle jumper they have, breaks (like last night) and they have to find the only airplane mechanic within a 300-mile radius who will agree to come out and fix it while you wait shivering—crumple-faced—on the tarmac.
And no matter how hard you try to leave, or how many times, by God, this place will dig its psychic claws right back into you like the mythic Catamount herself and she will not make it easy for you to get out. Nope.
You can book your ticket months in advance, and plan everything down to the millisecond. Still, the best you can hope for is to wing it out on a rickety bucket of bolts surrounded by bitter yokels in MAGA hats and maybe an indifferent stoner or two—carping at each other about the state of the world—all the way back to it! It is surely a life and an age apart.
What does it mean to hail from such a “lost place”—one so inordinately wild and brutal? Especially in an era where there’s so little left on our planet that is wild? Does it confer a permanently unmoored or unruly status on you?
And why is the journey back to “ordered life” always so arduous? For all of our modern technology, so often it’s still a perennial trifecta sh*tstorm—mentally, spiritually, and logistically. How do you reset after a perilous re-entry?
But what about you, intrepid reader? Do you have one of those places in your life? One that has its hooks in you? In a bad way? Or maybe a good way? Do you have any stress about returning there or maybe special hacks for getting out?
Don’t be shy… Yours from the tarmac - xoxo - gotham girl
PS - I am a human typo. Amnesty appreciated.
I’m in LA. I grew up here and never liked it. Even when I was 5 I asked my parents why would they leave New York. Hooks be gone. I’m here for my sis. 🙏
This one hits hard. It's a great topic, and I'll save it for an in-person discussion. Suffice to say that I've learned a valuable lesson in recent years, which is that when a place a has a deep hold on me I usually need to check myself, because often there is some associated trauma, and I need to work hard on that. Some of my places I used to idealize, which was also a mistake. Places in our history are inevitably bittersweet. They will break your heart just like people, and I know that now, and that knowing is also bittersweet.