During my final year of graduate school, I shared the ground floor of a Georgian house on the outskirts of campus with my friend Andrew and a revolving crowd of artists, writers, actors, and assorted local cognoscenti of southwest Kentucky. We had all-night parties that prompted letters from our landlord about “reports of loud music and guests hanging from the trees,” making out with whatever boy and/or girl we were with, having 3AM conversations in the dark night of the soul while dressed in each other’s clothes, and starting the next night with the optimistic wonder at whom we would end up with by the end of that night. We all felt we knew each other better than anyone had known anyone else in the history of the world. It was the closest I’ve ever come to hedonism, and it saved me from my inborn nihilism. Whenever one of us left another, we said, “I love you.”
Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties