Then, it was the El Riad Shrine Mosque. Then, I was dressed in a black tux with a blue pocket square, with my date and then-girlfriend wearing a matching blue dress. My friends were there. My future wife was there. And though I’ve never been much of a dancer or public performer, I gave in. I loosened up. I had fun.

Tonight, it was also The El Riad Shrine Mosque. Tonight, I was dressed in a black vest, weighed down by a camera and flash, sweating as much as I did in that tux but for a COMPLETELY different reason this time.

I didn’t participate. I only took pictures. And I had a blast.

I had forgotten in the past 14 years just how fresh faced we were, and what’s amazing is that these kids are no different. Senior prom is the last step before graduation. It’s the last stand for teenage butterflies, our queasiness shifting from girls and boys to “life after high school,” our friends becoming memories and our relationships becoming real.

Everyone smiled. Everyone danced. Everyone sang. The DJ would drop another song, and the crowd would rise as one. With a kind of solidarity I know we didn’t have, they jumped and moved and acted in one movement. As a cohesive unit. Everyone, from the uneasy loners to the homecoming queen.

This wasn’t a class. This was a family. I’ll be honest: I didn’t think things like that happened in high school.

A lot has changed in the past 14 years. The music has changed. The trends have changed. My customs are no longer relevant. But there was still the same optimism and puppy love and excitement and bravery on that dance floor tonight. And a little grinding, yes. But mostly excitement and bravery.

Fourteen years ago, I went to my senior prom. I remember it for looking across the dance floor and falling in love with Kerrie. But it was also when I gave every last ounce I had, because it wasn’t long until graduation and who knew when we’d see each other again after that.

Tonight, they played Lady Gaga. The crowd roared in approval. The student body jumped in unison, their fists pumping the air as if they were forming a mosh pit at an Earth Crisis concert.

Then, goosebumps. Not from nostalgia, but from pride.

It wasn’t that I hated MySpace, it was just that I didn’t use it. It was stagnant. I didn’t need it out there floating around, collecting sparkly badges and developing an identity of its own.

So I deleted it. In 2007.

A little over three years later, it’s back. Apparently.

Real, live footage of a deleted account that is no longer deleted.

What happened?

I’m going to assume it’s an oversight. I’m deleting it again, naturally. Because I didn’t want it in 2007, and one would assume that means I don’t want it now.

But it makes me laugh – a bitter, angry, spiteful laugh, mind you – to see this message as I attempt to delete the account for what will now be the SECOND time.

Yeah, I know, MySpace.

That’s what they told me LAST time.

Year by year, we added and adapted. The open backyard gained a white picket fence. The far yard gained a beautiful raised bed garden. A herb garden was planted. Quartz was dug up and re-appropriated as landscaping border. Perennials were planted. A fire pit slab was built out of slate.

Over time, we had everything perfected. This, ultimately, helped in selling our house. The yard work was already finished. All someone had to do is keep up with the plants and mow the lawn.

If only that were the case.

We drive by our old house on occasion. Over the past year and a half we have seen it regress.

First, the raised bed garden was torn out. Then, the garden bed was covered with sod. Soon, the quartz edging was taken out. After the summer, we noticed that the perennials had disappeared and the herb garden had been stripped away.

We were effectively watching our legacy in that home taken out, piece by piece, like burning copies of an author’s manuscript. The time and work and sweat and money we put into making the house beautiful was being disregarded, the current owners not privy to what emotional connections we still had to that garden, that border, those plants.

But what can I expect?

When we hand things over, we hand them over with the understanding that, in fact, it is no longer ours. That’s the deal. That’s what selling the house means. We built it up to pass it on, selling our dreams and selling out those gardens. In return, we were able to move to a new home, one that was filled with another previous owner’s dreams and ambitions – dreams and ambitions we too reverse and tear down and disregard.

That yard is no longer our yard. It never will be again. And we were the ones who made it that way.

So, as we drove by today and saw that the white picket fence – the first act of business when we moved in and the most lasting and recognizable piece of our involvement with that house – was being torn down, I had to bite back scorn.

It’s out of our hands. And we’re all healthier when we recognize that point.

But come on. It’s a lie. I know it. You know it.

It’s obvious. On one hand, you’ve got candy. On the other: CANDY. All caps, serious candy.

Sorting candy on Halloween isn’t an act of taste as much as an it’s act of classification and comparison. When we were kids, we’d all dress in different costumes and we’d all stalk different neighborhoods and we’d all return to different homes but, in the end, we all shared one common experience.

In the end, we all dumped out our pillow cases and orange pumpkin buckets and began mentally ranking the haul.

To a kid, choosing candy is an exercise in competition. We visualize the Baby Ruth lining up alongside the Starburst to be mercilessly examined, our decision releasing them from their cardboard cell and into the freedom of our stomachs. Like the BCS, we weigh wins and losses and, ultimately, place one candy brand atop the others.

It’s a candy power poll, and in developing this ranking we each focused on different attributes. A friend of mine, for instance, chose candy based on its sophistication, as if eating a Snickers would somehow help him develop chest hair and a deeper voice. Another friend was less specific, seemingly relying on wind change and moon phases.

My comparisons ran along two lines: fruit flavor and longevity.

The first cut dropped most traditional candy bars out of the running. No chocolate, no nougat, no cay-ra-mell. The next cut separated the suckers from the rest of the fruit-flavored candy because, let’s face it, I was eight and suckers were for BABIES.

Ultimately, it came down to which candy came with the most pieces. I chose Starburst. I chose Skittles. When I was feeling daring, I’d buy Now & Later. Most of all, I chose Mamba, an exotic seeming alternative to the traditional Starburst flavors.

Since that day, the fruit factor has been devalued, as has longevity. Now, Butterfinger tops the list. The candy bars I once saw as sophisticated now crowd the top of the standings. What’s more, I haven’t eaten a Mamba in more than a decade.

The champion is dead. Long live the champ.

—

Inspired by Jason Santa Maria‘s fantastic Candygram guest posts.

Who cares. It doesn’t matter. I haven’t been afraid of thunderstorms since I was three.

That is, until this past week.

Now, every rumble scares me. A severe weather forecast makes me nauseous. The mere mention of rain causes my bowels to churn, my forehead to sweat, my entire disposition to revert into panic.

We’ve spent the last ten days dealing with a too-high water table and a constant threat of leaking water. A once-in-a-lifetime weather event, one we’re fortunate enough to receive only a portion of, has left us scared. We’ve finally torn out floorboards and sheet rock. We’ve fretted over the future. We even cancelled Sierra’s 3rd birthday party.

Don’t even ask me about that one. It’s enough to bring me to tears.

But it’s not the rain we’re worried about. We’ve got that covered through a system of wet-vac hoses and split second deployment processes that would qualify us for medals and special compensation from most major U.S. military branches. And it’s not the flooding, either – we’ve got everything torn out, so we certainly won’t be ruining anything new. It’s not the repairs. It’s not the money. It’s nothing material.

It’s that we don’t know when this will end.

We go through life with a series of end dates, our plans developing natural conclusions, our dreams the only items worth putting off indefinitely. We know when things will end and we feel safe in saying, “Well, this won’t last much longer,” even though sometimes it does last a lot longer and even though sometimes things never really end. We have that date. We live by that date. We understand the date, what it is that we’re working toward, what it is that will save us from the unspeakable fate of falling into confusion and uncertainty and utter shame.

Right now, we don’t have that. We don’t know what the weather will do. We understand that a sudden inch of rain will throw us back into the frantic wet-vac switching monsters we have become over the past week.

We as humans use knowledge as a crutch, assuming we’re in full control of our situation as long as we’re totally comfortable with the facts. If we know the outcome, we can plan for the outcome, and we can learn to live with the outcome, and we can move forward, the outcome a major part of our life but still there’s an outcome to understand so we’re richer and more lively human beings because of it.

Without that knowledge, however, we melt. We become useless. We snap at our kids and break down into tears and feel so utterly helpless that nothing else matters.

I know. I’ve been working through it, living with this stupid fear of rain, of waking up knee deep in the water that’s been haunting me even in my dreams, forcing me to misinterpret our dog’s curled up torso as a water leak in the middle of the night, causing me to reach for the floor to feel if it’s dry.

I know that someday I won’t be afraid of thunderstorms. Instead, I might be afraid of the future of my industry. Or of what my kids are doing when I’m not around. Or of the march of time and its effects on my personality and health. Or of dying. Certainly, I’ll be afraid of dying.

Ultimately, it’s just the fear of the unknown. And as much as we all may try to deny it, we all suffer from it.

If anyone has any cure, let me know.

1. Pink Floyd – Animals
2. Tool – Aenima
3. Modest Mouse – The Moon and Antarctica
4. The Mountain Goats – Sunset Tree
5. Jets to Brazil – Perfecting Loneliness
6. The Hold Steady – Heaven is Wherever

So. Tired.

Go ahead. We dare you to find an ordinary wedding in the NYT Weddings section. Every single one of them has something extraordinary about it.

I guess that’s the idea. But it sure serves up an unrealistic view of the populace as a whole.

I was in a band. It was called Phake. The name was a play on the idea that, though we had attempted to infiltrate the local punk rock scene, we weren’t punk rock at all. We were fake punkers, fighting for a niche in the local hardcore punk scene, and in the early days of ironic t-shirts I threw together a self-made number that proclaimed our not-punk-though-really-we-wished-we-were status.

It was our fifth name in a year of practicing. It stuck.

With it came a distressing label: “Not Very Good.” But, let’s be honest. That label might have been deserved.

We weren’t very good.

At that time, we didn’t care. Or we didn’t know it. A little of both, really.

But we tried, and here’s the thing: we eventually worked our way into the public conscience, like worm wriggling into rotten wood. We got better – still not good, but BETTER – and, as things often work, we stumbled into some kind of routine. Our practices sounded something like this [WARNING - shitty garage band alert.]

Then, one guy got kicked out and another guy decided he was done and soon the band was over, just as we had supposedly found our niche and identity.

I don’t bring this up because I’m nostalgic, or because I needed an excuse to play this video that our friend Jim inexplicably kept long past its freshness date, but because I realize how badly we all needed to flail and stumble and fail before we could really belong.

Except for me (the non-musician in the group) all four members ended up becoming fantastic musicians and songwriters and people in general. Some still play today. Bring the five of us back together, and there might be something special.

And while I didn’t gain anything musically, I did gain confidence, which I suppose is the ultimate instrument of a lead vocalist.

I failed. We all failed. We had a whole lot of fun and made a bunch of friends that we still hang out with today and, hey, we can all say “Yeah, we were in a band once,” and that kind of cool points doesn’t come around that often.

Given the chance – and given the friends and experiences and confidence I gained – I’d fail all over again.

Something Thai, I’m sure. Something expensive and trendy.

Go ahead. I know I’ve never formally lived in the Jackson Hole area. I’ve never called it home, and that nowadays I only visit every four years and barely have any family connection in the town. Even my grandma had to ditch the place. Probably the fault of people like you. I’ll pin that you y’all, if you don’t mind.

Here’s the thing. I might not be from Jackson, but I’m fiercely protective of it. That Thai restaurant wasn’t here when I wandered its streets every summer for years. Teton Village was just a tiny little ski resort. Jackson was still overrun by cowboys, not Subarus; ranchers, not transplants.

Maybe you’ve got your own personal Jackson – some place you’ve never lived but still stick to, allowed to become a part of your soul, of which you shun visitors and push away the people who just don’t get it. That’s it, right?

They just don’t get it, do they?

Jackson isn’t my home. It never has been. Still, I consider myself a local – thanks to generations of family and history and a bunch of my own experiences – and I’ll be damned if I’m going to feel guilty about it.

Sorry, man. I know you just moved here.

But unless you’re new place has some way to replicate three decades of tradition and sheer force of connection, you’ll never be a local.

At least not in my eyes. Not in my experience.

Not to THIS local-who-never-was.

Something about the simplicity, about brush filling in the prairie gaps between mountains, about rivers that go on forever, about altitude changes that form sawtoothed horizons. Where every fence is wooden. Every bagel shop generous. Every tourist in awe, and every resident following suit.

For me, it’s the Jackson Hole area. For others, it might be the northwest. New York City. The lake district in England, or the hills of Tuscany. An area that invites painful longing; that we experience but never own, our vacations and trips merely a rental of the area, backed by deposits, contracted to be returned unscathed.

We need these areas. Not because we enjoy being someplace we’re not, but because it puts our homes in perspective.

I love northwest Wyoming – it’s the area my family settled, and the area where I spent my summers. Take away all of my ties, and I might be there in a second. Take away my family, my job, my friends, my opportunities, and I’d move to the valley in a second.

But those things are what make Sioux Falls so good.

Those things make this home.

Jackson Hole is no home. And while I still long to be back there, helping my grandmother with the lawn and staring down the Snake River, I know that it offers nothing of what good ol’ Sioux Falls does.

The valley holds my desires. The prairie holds my life.