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The Downtown Kid
  • The Curse of Overthinking…

    Trying to ward off the curse of overthinking seems futile. You know you’re going down sketchy paths of your own creation, but you can’t stop yourself from careening into the abyss. The struggle is real …and exhausting. That’s where I’ve been. Between wrapping up the school year and a sideways personal life, I just kinda struggled to come up with something important to say. I want to post regularly, of course, but I find myself, well, overthinking the whole thing and stagnating in a pit of doubt. If you’re an overthinker, you get it. Try as you might, sometimes you just can’t get out of the feedback loop. Then one…

  • You Can’t Go That Way…

    The other day, I was walking down my alley to go to the City Market around the corner, and I stopped to talk to a former student of mine (we’ll call her “M”) who’s now a member of the Blue Suede Brigade, downtown’s boots-on-the-ground safety and hospitality personnel. As she and I are celebrating her fifth day without a cigarette (good for you, chica!), this lady in a minivan drives up the alley and stops beside us. I immediately think, “But you can’t go that way.” She tells us that she wants to drive across Main Street to get on Front Street. And while continuing straight down that alley was…