Nashville After Ten Years...

People ask me all the damn time about the difference between Detroit and Nashville and I feel like I've got my rote, patter down on this one that now is as good a time as ever to carve it into this digital cave wall.

Detroit was a GREAT place to live in my twenties. No real responsibilities. On the hustle. Didn't matter if I was touring with the Dirtbombs, running Cass Records, working for the White Stripes, pretending at Car City Records, freelancing for the Metro Times, busting my hump as a production assistant for the auto show...that haphazard amalgam of low-impact responsibilities kept me busy and just barely compensated enough where I didn't feel too much stress.

The past ten years in Nashville has been a PERFECT place to live in my thirties. To work professionally, at a job with a salary and benefits, to get married, to buy a house, to buy a car (how did I never do that in Detroit?), to have three mediocre daughters and just barely maintain a blog at the same time.

Yeah, that house could use a coat of paint, and missing alot of people in Detroit oftentimes makes feel like I NEED to be involved in the re-imagination of that city...but complaints or FOMO exist wherever you are and also wherever you are not.

I LOVE telling people that I never had allergies until I moved to Nashville. It's vaguely appealing enough for an anecdote while talking at a child's birthday party and is on-brand for the apocryphal tale I've heard repeated ad infinitum that the local Native American population in the area originally called the general Nashville area "The Valley of Sickness" and supposedly would not live here themselves because of it.

But the truth is...I suffered all kinds of allergic nonsense during my last spring in Detroit back in '08. Maybe that's when I grew up. Maybe that's when my body gave up. All I know is that my roommate gave me some Claritin and it was a godsend.

Cut to now, my yearly tradition is whenever that day in hits March where I sneeze three consecutive times, I pop a Zyrtec the next morning and continue to do so every morning for the next six weeks or so and I'm golden. No symptoms at all. Like a well Zyrtec'd machine.

But the past two days, Zyrtec ain't doing shit. Shit is so bad I'm rubbing my eyes like a kid in a "we'll convince you Santa is real" movie.  For a couple of hours today, with symptoms at their most annoying, I just decided to not touch my eyes. At all. Trying to approach this ailment with the zen-like focus of a monk. After an hour or so it was out of my head. And a few hours later, looking into my eyes in the mirror, seeing they legitimately needed to be de-gunked, with purpose and focus, I cleaned those sumbitches out and it was spine-tinglingly amazing.

So, just another curve in life to lean into. Like tricking this six-month-old to down five ounces of milk right in the middle of me trying to sneak this thing out before the clock strikes next month. I pause, I give her my undivided attention, we bond, and an hour later, she's back to sleep and I'm back to work here.