The Decision

Space ships don't come equipped with rear view mirrors

Movement. It’s our oldest magic trick. 

Norman Conquest. The Pilgrims. The Gold Rush. The Decision. History’s made by people who MOVE. 

This is not a diss against the folks that don’t. Believe me, I’m jealous. Some people are good in one spot. Tim Duncan had no envy. These are the folks that invest in their communities. Join softball teams. Become a local at a dive bar. That all sounds f#cking amazing and I wish I could do it. But I’ve always had the illusional itch to find something better somewhere else. Not so much thinking that the grass is greener, but that the answers to whatever existential crap I’m dealing with can be found in a new neighborhood. 

Maybe I’ve been looking for love. Not the type of love that you get from your partner – the type of love you get from people who don’t know you. True, unadulterated, fake love from strangers. 

It’s like opium to writers like me. 

Maybe what I’m really doing is avoiding accountability – which you feel when you live in one place. People get to know you beyond your practiced first impressions. Maybe I’m afraid of letting anyone get too close – and maybe that’s a disease unto itself. 

But sometimes you have to get outside of yourself to figure those things out. And for me, that’s always been the case. The less roots I grow the less comfortable I am. I’ve always felt that comfort begets complacency. And complacency begets regression. 

I’m saying all of this because I just moved to New York. A town with so much motion that it will leave you behind at the station if you can’t keep up. A town with no love lost. I’ve been cooking up this move for half a decade. People will say: how hard could it be? You know people there. You wear crazy pants, you’ll fit in. Why the wait? You’ll like it. 

But it was always about the money that I didn’t have (the mistake would be thinking that I have the money now).

I got sick of waiting for something as fluid as my money to be right. I don’t know if that’s smart or stupid. And I don’t really care. If I drown in debt I’ll be like everyone else. I’ll probably write a nice poem about it. White guy in crippling credit card debt – a collection of prose by Brian Hamlin. Sounds exciting. I might be able to give away a few copies in Prospect Park. 

I want fake love now. 

I think the reason I waited so long to move to New York was that I was afraid of failure. I think if I did 22-27 in NYC I would’ve used all my “my bad” tokens with the better parts of my personal and professional networks. It’s easy to drink too much and f&ck up when you’re 23. Or get too big for your britches at work and burn some bridges when you find a new role that pays you 5% more. I took my time for fear of making the mistakes all young adults make in front of people I really cared about. The material ambiguity that makes you plastic in a foreign place disappears when you’re in front of people who know you. There are consequences. There are stakes. There are people who will hold you accountable. 

Is this why Lebron left Cleveland? Accountability? 

Maybe Lebron left for fake love too. I’m not sure about the pilgrims though. That was probably just about God. Same with the Church of the Latter Day saints. 

But me, Lebron, William Braford and Joseph Smith. We all love to move around and avoid accountability. 

It will always be easier to run away than it will be to confront a problem. It will always be easier to say “love you” instead of “I love you.” There’s more accountability in the latter. There’s more ownership. It feels real.

I think that might be what real love is. Accountability. Expectation. Ownership, even. Not of another person like in a creepy, possessive way, but of your own actions within that relationship. Someone that loves you will tell you when you’re being a f#cker because they know what the stakes are. They’ll hold you to a higher standard because they believe in your union. There’s a lot of selflessness in unsolicited advice from a friend because they’re fighting for your friendship. 

That’s gotta be love. 

To an extent, my past moves were a way to hide. This time I’m running naked, straight into the burning building that is both real love from friends and fake love from strangers. 

Joke’s on me: I’ve been in that building the whole time.