This span of unemployment has given me the mental space needed to think about how I want to arrange my life. I’ve spent about a year now exploring various scenes in Minneapolis… Which biking clubs interest me, which don’t. Several of the dive bars and live music venues here. Unhappily, there isn’t anything comparable to the Icehouse here in NE. But biking down to there or Eat Street Crossing isn’t a huge burden to me.

Music, dance, biking—that’s what’s important to me. Live music more than anything else at this point. (And I should also really make it a point to visit the MIA soon… I haven’t been there in a while.) I like biking, it’s important to me. But as I explained to her earlier, and which she and my former supervisor understand very deeply—biking is my walkies. You don’t talk to me when I bike. Well, I don’t have extended conversations when I bike. Pointing out something, discussing a landmark, sure. Going over our careers and hobbies and children and other current affairs? Hard pass. Biking. Is my walkies.

So I’m not really that emotionally close to the various biking scenes here, even though I’ve made a reputation for myself as that cool guy who brings good music and who’s a good conversationalist over the table. People like me… and it’s still very strange to me, how much they like me. I suppose because I always bring something to the table, I should expect that sort of affection—I have very little experience with such social relations. Nothing in how I was raised—the first 18 years of my life—prepared me for this. And after that? It was mostly work, isolated… No social life. Video games, reading, art. Not an entirely empty existence, but.

Almost completely lacking in that human contact that adds texture and depth of flavouring to one’s days.

Now, in Minneapolis, after about a year, I’ve made interesting acquaintances: every outing has been a venture into new, unfamiliar territory. But I suppose that’s life. I suppose on Tuesday, I’ll go back out to Grumpy’s, spend more time with the burners and burner-adjacent—it’s a nice crew that I really like. I vibe more with them than with some others whom I spend more regular time with; I ought to spend more of my Thursdays with Venture Bikes, too. Their slow rolls are… slow. But the community is unmatched. I’ve spent a good amount of time trying to find my tribe here in Minneapolis—it turns out I have a bunch, but there are some tribes that I’m closer to than others.

Navigating all these relationships, all these communities. Finding out “who you are” isn’t a singular, lonesome atomic process, but also a question of “Who do I want to spend time with?” Nobody had taught me that. I didn’t learn it from movies, music, stories, TV. Games like Persona focus only on individual relationships, not tribes or groups of people. The World Ends With You showed the embryonic stages of what I’ve undergone this year. Do people not know how to tell stories about cities? Do people not have them? Not only the stories, but the city?