Nolan Chessman

Professor Perl

Evocative Objects, Draft 1

25 February 2014

 

For the first eighteen years of my life, I lived in one town, on one street, and in one house. All those years, I even slept in the same, second-floor room, and, while the walls took on different hues and donned an array of images torn from music and skateboard magazines, the room’s energy remained stable–a reliable stillness cultivated over nearly two decades.

I got my first “moving bug” when it came time to apply for college. I applied to–and luckily got into–only one school, located in downtown Chicago, which is where my fellow high-school graduates, and those that preceded me, went to escape the urban-decay-cum-suburban-sprawl that Detroit had become ever since our parents or their parents fled the city limits (along with the auto industry).

During my first semester at college, I lived in a dorm on East Congress and Wabash–fifth floor, which happened to be El train-level. Every seven minutes, an orange-line train dragged worn-out tourists and bored businessmen and women to Midway International while my roommate and I studied to straight edge hardcore records and chatted idly about the girls on the seventh floor. Dorm life was simple, clean. I moved in with a black plastic crate of LPs and a gym bag.

By the time second semester rolled around, I was getting the bug again. I enlisted my roommate Justin and an acquaintance from the 6th floor to get an apartment with me in what was then cheap and edgy Wicker Park–a few miles from campus, but a real neighborhood, complete with 24-hour cafes like Filter (now an Urban Outfitters), legendary bookstores like Myopic (better still fucking be there), and far enough away from the girls on the seventh floor to cultivate some kind of mystique.

We moved into a three-bedroom, 1600-square-foot greystone for $1,100 a month (a deal I dream of sometimes sleeping in my overpriced, one-bedroom railroad shithole in Brooklyn). It was here that I began to surround myself with things–records (more records, that is), plants, furniture, and, of course, books. The problem with collecting things such as records, plants, furniture, and books is that they began to define my living space and, by extension, me. It’s an old cliche that the things we own come to own us, but, for me, this wasn’t the case. Rather, these things became like pets, and, as I began to move more or less once a year (as twenty-something-year-olds tend to do), they came along. From Augusta Boulevard to Potomac Street to St. Louis Avenue, I dragged a dozen crates of records, several dozen boxes of books, a solid oak (shamelessly trash-picked) table, a handmade Persian rug the size of a Manhattan apartment, and two terracotta-potted peace lilies. I surrounded myself with these things, and, during my college years, I never felt right without them. I couldn’t write unless I was within arm’s length of Karen Volkman’s book of poems, Spar, which unlocked something in me when I felt stuck. I couldn’t sleep without Radiohead’s Kid A spinning quietly in one corner. I couldn’t think without the stacks of notebooks, workshopped poems, and sidewalk-bought science books piled high upon my sturdy coffee table hunkered heavily atop my dirty, sun-bleached rug.