O the dark, dark, dark

Just received my Bluetooth keyboard, which I hope to utilize for blogging on the bus. 

Riding down Woodward Avenue right now - the main non-highway thoroughfare (is that the right word?) that cuts from the heart of downtown Detroit all the way to the upper northwest of the metro area.  In any season but winter it's a visually fascinating journey through a perfect cross-section of all that is Detroit; currently, however, it is a long dull trip through a mind-numbing darkness.  Which wouldn't be so bad if I didn't also ride home in the same darkness. 

My only real complaint about my life at the moment centers around the length of my commute.  I leave the house at 6:15 a.m. and return twelve hours later.  Dark to dark.  Waking weariness to sleeping weariness.  Short evenings at home; even shorter mornings.  Many, many personal goals and hobbies and activities for which I have neither time nor energy before or after the bookends of my days.

So as I look ahead to the expiration of my lease this summer I am considering my living options.  Two years is long enough to be living in an apartment that I have always considered a placeholder; it's time to find a place I can love.  My favorite dwellings have always been old, spacious, charming.  And I have grown weary of the suburbs with their soulless uniformity of sprawl; I want, for the time being, something a little more urban. This means something closer to the city (fortunately YB knows the neighborhoods and can tell me which ones I won't get mugged, robbed or murdered in), which also means, oh please dear god, a shorter commute. 

Currently my commute consumes two and a half hours of my day.  I can make use of the time (reading in the mornings, and, now that this Bluetooth keyboard is working so beautifully, writing in the evenings), but oh my fuck, I miss being able to work out in the mornings and actually have time and energy to DO SHIT at home in the evenings.  This present lifestyle is shitting all over my life satisfaction outside of work.

I want to love it here.  I've been holding back for two years, like I've held back my whole life, never quite allowing myself to grow attached to a geographical area.  And Detroit isn't that loveable.  It's worn down and tired and empty and sprawling and devastated and ugly and depressing.  But I have a knack for seeing the promise in difficult things (not for nothing did I take as my confirmation name, back when I became Catholic and before emerging out of faith altogether, the identity of my favorite patron saint, Jude: I passionately resist the concept of lost causes), and this city, this life of mine that I live around it, have a lot of promise. 

I still spend the bulk of my metacognition on a dissonance between the two things I want for myself: on the one hand, a deep involvement in something that brings change and meaning to the world around me; on the other, a quiet, peaceful, simple life.  I am arriving at the annoying conclusion that the two are not mutually exclusive.  I can have both - I just need to take the leap.

This is the year that I leap, I think.  This is my city, my life.  This is my time.