Fear and Loathing in Kansas City

I’m back from my visit to Kansas City. Actually, I would have posted sooner, but my Internet access is extremely limited. Anyway, considering how much Dean (aka “the Reverend”) and I ended up doing, I suppose it was a good thing that no one else was available. We had a few drinks with Herr Vogler Friday night, but I didn’t see the new dojo, Metro, my cousin, aunt and uncle, or anyone else. I was Dean’s partner-in-crime all weekend.

I did some things that I haven’t done in a long time and some other things that I’ve never done before. So many familiar places, so many nice things just out of reach. So many irritating Johnson County folks, so many would-be companions in my future posse.

It was too much to take in. Everything was too fast-paced. We’d be walking along the Plaza to meet his family for dinner, and I’d look around at the multi-layered backdrop of the various condos and hotels and back at the merrymakers bustling around the almost Mediterranean scene, unable to even understand what it made me think. Sensory overload, culture shock, and a nostalgia high all at once.

So I can’t really talk about my weekend coherently. I can’t do anything justice. Is it possible to have a subdued overwhelming feeling?

As I prophesied, I would visit KC and be a little withdrawn and distracted by the sensory overload, and the moral picketers on the Plaza would offend me by automatically assuming that, simply because I’m there, it obviously must mean that I’m an over-indulgent reveler who’s going to Hell (the one with the capital “H”), which would trigger my inner Statham. My lifestyle demands more restraint than any of those people’s, I’ll wager. But take me out of context and group me with the others, then why not just simplify my entire persona to the point of fitting me into a tiny bottle labeled “Wretched Being?”

Herr Vogler posed the concern that, especially based on my previous post, I might think the same about him if I just saw him walking amongst the crowd and didn’t recognize him. Not so.

Herr Vogler and the Reverend, who met for the first time since an isolated, passing encounter at Too Talls Two, agreed that I am essentially Rorschach from Watchmen. I understand that someone like a certain vocalist friend of mine would read the previous post and lambast me for being a hypocrite, but you must understand that I don’t automatically assume people are scum. But they invariably, inevitably demonstrate it to me. I don’t see a total stranger and have my IFF transponder label them as “foe,” regardless of their transponder.

As I said in the previous post, I know my level of participation. I’m at the Plaza, so I must need to be Saved. It must mean that I’m out every weekend getting drunk and laid, right? Then again, you also have the positive messengers at the Plaza, proclaiming God’s love instead of Final Judgment, and that I have no problem with. By all means, yell it from the highest mountaintop, because it’s totally inoffensive. It’s good to hear once in a while. But I hate it when the Order of the Douche Bag sends its acolytes to warn people of the End Times. It assumes too much.

I knew it would happen. I went to Kansas City this weekend to get some respect for a change, so I ignored them just as everyone else ignores them. It added to a sense of familiarity, I suppose. A reminder that there are still many things about living there that bugged me. One of many unpleasant wastes of time and space. And when I have but a precious, short weekend to spare, I have no tolerance for people wasting my time or space. It’s all part of the flood of familiarity, taking the good with the bad.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I told you, I can’t really talk about my weekend coherently and I can’t do it justice.

But one thing is certain: I must live there again as soon as possible. It was my life, and I left it behind on April 19, 2008. The simple elements people take for granted, the tiny freedoms and hopes other people have but ignore, those are the things that whispered to me. While I could try to fabricate a blog post about how money Dean and I can be when we’re paired together, while I could give an epic, scene-by-scene synopsis of our martial arts adventures, I have the nagging feeling that it would only cause this blog post to backfire (like all the others). But the one thing I know is that I actually do need to move back there. I thought, after so many months of yearning and pontificating, that I was mistaken. I thought that maybe I’d discover upon revisiting that I hate the whole city.

Nope. I still want to be there. Permanently.

I was right all along.