Visiting family in Illinois. The suburbs are awfully bleak. The only “thriving” area is downtown Naperville, though every part of it with any character is being bought or torn down or painted over. Usually when I’m there I hang out at Java & Juice, what felt like the last non-corporate business downtown. Last winter I asked the 17-year-old hipster employees if they knew of any good music stores in the western suburbs, they just laughed. Now Java & Juice is an empty storefront. I can’t imagine what they’ll put in its place, as the suburban canon of mall-like stores/restaurants has seemingly been exhausted. Maybe a fourth Starbucks?

I drove aimlessly and dismayed up to downtown Wheaton, which has always reliably been more dirty and human, to find a surreal scene of skeletal frameworks of new buildings and a town without power, the recent result of a brief and torrential afternoon thunderstorm. Business owners stood stationed outside their dark buildings, some smoking and all casually observing the powerless, customerless, slate-gray surroundings. There was an air of resignation to the fact that even with electricity, these blocks aren’t any more lively. Telling, that it took several minutes of driving in loops before I even realized the power was out.

Rifling through boxes full of childhood ephemera, helping reduce the clutter my folks are forced to put up with every time they move, finding college admission letters and Programs of Study booklets was terribly depressing. The promises of huge, ancient institutions for a duration that now seems largely insignificant in many respects, housing only several dozen or so salient, robust memories in its four years, few of which have anything to do with education, and many of which feel as distant and dryly historical-factual as junior high or, say, my birth — I feel guilty about them now, but naively so; crammed up against only slightly more yellowed marker drawings and Cub Scout certificates, peppered with paper-mache and bookmarked with high school IDs, these catalogues are beginning to inherit the quaint futility of those things meant to prove my life. What once felt like the beginning of my adulthood will before long feel like the end of my childhood, and I imagine this is how things will continue to develop. I took comfort in college nostalgia, and even in my remorse for not having appreciated it, because those feelings are predicated on the importance of it, on the belief that at one time, at least, I had access to something “real,” grounded. It was one of the few things in my life I believed I could count as not arbitrary, when, really, my faith in it was based mostly in its visibility, in its confirmation by tens of thousands of students every day. I wonder how I’d feel if it had been a tenth of its size.

I guess this all falls into my pattern of only trusting external validation. Internal validation is not only hollow, but dangerous; but something’s telling me I’m just supposed to get over it.