My, but There's a lot of Banjo

Yesterday I said goodbye to a friend of mine I haven't seen in two years. She had come in from Durham the night before to see me and reconnect a bit, and we'd spent a couple of days wandering around town. We had seen a Klezmer Gypsy Tango Punk band (the combination of genres sounded very promising and delivered on it abundantly) play at a pirate/goth club owned by an old friend of ours, who, as my friend from Durham pointed out, always threw the best parties anyway, so it really made sense that he opened a bar.

After the show, we crashed on sofas at a big old semidilapidated house where I know people. My friend was a bit mortified by the entire idea of just dropping in on a group of people for the night and was doubly mortified when she saw the place we were dropping in on. I think it was the giant spider in the bathroom. Or the squatters we displaced coming back at two in the morning, looking for a place to sleep.

The next morning, we had breakfast at Tupelo Honey and spent the rest of the day window shopping in galleries too expensive for either of us to ever afford . Then we said our goodbyes in the afternoon in a parking garage and I walked off happy to have seen my friend and wishing it was more than just a couple of hours in a couple of years. Wishing I had someone around to talk to. I walked into the Everyday Gourmet to check my e-mail and to write a bit, and as I fixed my coffee, I got into a conversation with an elderly lady who spent the next hour telling me her life story--a hell of a life story, at that. By the time she was done and I was off to get dinner, my blues were gone and I was ready to move on with the night.

This is the kind of town Asheville is. It's the kind of town where you can have the most interesting conversation of your life with a complete stranger and you can spend hours sitting in a coffee shop refilling the same cup of coffee for a dollar fifty. It's a quiet mountain town whose streets are alive at night with bluegrass musicians and street artists of varying quality. It's a place where the worst poverty you've ever seen exists side by side with grotesque wealth. It's a town of rastafarian white kids who drive to downtown in fancy cars with leather interiors and hang out talking about bringing down Babylon, not seeing their own part in it. It's a town where even being open minded means corraling your thoughts into a specific viewpoint. It is it's own bubble, and what a pretty bubble it is, a self-contained little generator of a kind of energy I find I need from time to time. It would be easy for me to forget why I left in the first place, but ultimately I find myself thankful for what I've had since I left. For opportunities I've been given and for the people I've got.