I'm moving out of Baker St today. There's something surreal about
this day, I don't really trust that it's actually here, but it is,
and I'm about to start packing up my bed once I can wake up Benny and
ask him if he's still got my alan key.
I've been living in this house for over a year – by far the longest I've stayed anywhere other than my parents' house in Adelaide – and it's been a great year. When I first moved in I was just relieved to be out of the Melbourne Connection Travellers' Hostel where bed bugs tore through the night and my food was stolen from the fridges weekly. I moved into the house and the environment that I had always wanted to live in; when I was nineteen I pined for a 'party house' and lamented that the house I lived in in Clearview wasn't one. Brodie the Instigator proved to be the catalyst that my house had lacked, and so almost every weekend here there was something happening and my house was turned into a revolving door of beautiful drug people.
At first I felt at peace with the whole thing and felt that I couldn't be happier with my surroundings, but this is what went wrong: I am no longer an active part of that lifestyle. Sure I go out to clubs every now and then, like maybe once a month or so, but this household is predicated on the every-weekend lifestyle. Benny and Brodie live for clubs and clubbing and pounding techno music, but for me, the night is only a passing fancy. The ever-changing circus of people coming in and out of my house began to blur, faces coming and going like a merry-go-round, and I found myself adrift in a sea of strangers every Sunday morning. And I was a stranger to them too, a stranger in my own house.
So I've started to withdraw into my room and not speak, not move, never emerge when the house is alive and the air is full of basslines, because I know that if I do, I'd be greeted by a bunch of people who I don't know, and who are operating on a different level than me, because I've not been up all night and they have. I don't know them, as much as I want to and would love to, I can't, because I can't commit to that world. On Sunday mornings I really fucking wish I had been out all night just so that I could sit down comfortably and feel normal. Fuck.
So my ever-present scrambling to fit in and forcibly identify with some group of people has led me to this, moving out after a year of living at 45 Baker St, Richmond. It's been a good year, and although I've been less and less comfortable with it in the last few months, I'm glad that I have ticked 'live in a party house' off of my teenage bucket-list, if only so that now I have that book of stories to tell people too, full of embellishments and characters whose names I never knew myself. I can't help but be subject to a feeling of slight melancholy as I finish this blog post, knowing full well that as soon as I do I'm going to have to start picking up the clothes from my floor and packing them into drawers, ready to be carried the 300m and then up stairs, into the room that waits for me above Station 59, one block over. I think I'm finished here though. Actually, I almost certainly am. Now at least I can come back, after an actual absence, and be a part of this world on my own terms and surely be more comfortable. A stranger in a strange house, at 45 Baker St, Richmond.
Peace, Taco.
I've been living in this house for over a year – by far the longest I've stayed anywhere other than my parents' house in Adelaide – and it's been a great year. When I first moved in I was just relieved to be out of the Melbourne Connection Travellers' Hostel where bed bugs tore through the night and my food was stolen from the fridges weekly. I moved into the house and the environment that I had always wanted to live in; when I was nineteen I pined for a 'party house' and lamented that the house I lived in in Clearview wasn't one. Brodie the Instigator proved to be the catalyst that my house had lacked, and so almost every weekend here there was something happening and my house was turned into a revolving door of beautiful drug people.
At first I felt at peace with the whole thing and felt that I couldn't be happier with my surroundings, but this is what went wrong: I am no longer an active part of that lifestyle. Sure I go out to clubs every now and then, like maybe once a month or so, but this household is predicated on the every-weekend lifestyle. Benny and Brodie live for clubs and clubbing and pounding techno music, but for me, the night is only a passing fancy. The ever-changing circus of people coming in and out of my house began to blur, faces coming and going like a merry-go-round, and I found myself adrift in a sea of strangers every Sunday morning. And I was a stranger to them too, a stranger in my own house.
So I've started to withdraw into my room and not speak, not move, never emerge when the house is alive and the air is full of basslines, because I know that if I do, I'd be greeted by a bunch of people who I don't know, and who are operating on a different level than me, because I've not been up all night and they have. I don't know them, as much as I want to and would love to, I can't, because I can't commit to that world. On Sunday mornings I really fucking wish I had been out all night just so that I could sit down comfortably and feel normal. Fuck.
So my ever-present scrambling to fit in and forcibly identify with some group of people has led me to this, moving out after a year of living at 45 Baker St, Richmond. It's been a good year, and although I've been less and less comfortable with it in the last few months, I'm glad that I have ticked 'live in a party house' off of my teenage bucket-list, if only so that now I have that book of stories to tell people too, full of embellishments and characters whose names I never knew myself. I can't help but be subject to a feeling of slight melancholy as I finish this blog post, knowing full well that as soon as I do I'm going to have to start picking up the clothes from my floor and packing them into drawers, ready to be carried the 300m and then up stairs, into the room that waits for me above Station 59, one block over. I think I'm finished here though. Actually, I almost certainly am. Now at least I can come back, after an actual absence, and be a part of this world on my own terms and surely be more comfortable. A stranger in a strange house, at 45 Baker St, Richmond.
Peace, Taco.
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