It was twenty years ago today that I most likely noticed that it’d been five years since I’d decided to move to the Twin Cities.<\/p>\n
Did I remember that booze-fueled night in September of 1985<\/a>? \u00a0My drunken promise to a table of college friends at a homecoming party that I was leaving North Dakota in two weeks<\/em>? \u00a0The madcap seventeen days that followed?<\/p>\n To tell you the truth, I don’t remember. I had other things on my mind at the time. \u00a0I was still working – still \u00a0– <\/em>at the sleazy DJ service. \u00a0Still spinning records in crappy bars six nights a week. \u00a0Still looking for work in talk radio. \u00a0Or news. \u00a0Or sports. \u00a0Or as a DJ, for that matter. \u00a0And getting absolutely nowhere. \u00a0To the point that the search had more or less tailed off to nothing.<\/p>\n Oh, yeah – and I was getting married in about two weeks.<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n I started writing this series five years ago.<\/p>\n I took a drive the other day through South Minneapolis – past the house I used to share with the five women<\/a>, around Lake Harriett where I used to run every evening, past my first apartment<\/a> down on 37th and Minnehaha. \u00a0It’s kind of amazing how changes sneak up on you; the row of dumpy little stores, the Snyder Drug and the greasy old gas station on 46th and Nicollet have been replaced by a gleaming new strip mall. \u00a0The old firehouse is now a Bruegger’s. \u00a0The dumpy little grocery store is now some sort of “art space”. \u00a0 The neighborhood bar on 44th and Nicollet is…something else.<\/p>\n The striking part, to me, is how very, very much longer those five years seemed to take, the first time around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was twenty years ago today that I most likely noticed that it’d been five years since I’d decided to move to the Twin Cities. Did I remember that booze-fueled night in September of 1985? \u00a0My drunken promise to a table of college friends at a homecoming party that I was leaving North Dakota in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-twenty-years-ago-today"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12885"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13768,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12885\/revisions\/13768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}