NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Since the whole point of this Hall Pass journey has been to travel to new places, explore the campus/city, and report back with my findings, what exactly am I supposed to say about spending a weekend in my hometown of Bloomington, Ind.?

With most of these destinations, I’m staying 48 or 72 hours tops, then getting out alive with a story to tell. But I’ve lived in Bloomington for 12 years now: I’m beyond the honeymoon stage. (I may very well be in the “divorce” stage.)

I can’t (and won’t) pretend to write my usual, cheeky “oh, how quaint” story about B-Town from an outsider’s perspective. It would be a farce. I’d be kidding myself, and most importantly, I’d be cheating you out of an honest review.

For the Graduate Hotels brand ambassadors reading this: Celebrating a birthday with a special view of the city was fun, and hosting friends in a festive space was undeniably cool. I try to do something a little different for my birthday each year, and this was an awesome checkbox to mark off. 100% glad I stayed there. Would party on the top floor again. Thanks for making it happen and buying the first round, sincerely.

But with that being acknowledged, I figured I’d take a brief departure from my usual travelogue of bar reviews and hotel stories to let you know what I really think about Bloomington — and what Monroe County tourists could probably stand to know, if they were invested in seeing what I see as a resident, homeowner, alumnus, career journeyman, and former news-gatherer here.

Living in Bloomington long-term, candidly, is like watching a family member with an addiction problem: You love them. You’ve made and shared incredible memories together. You’ll always have a spot for them in your heart and at your dinner table.

But they’ve said and done some ugly things, and there’s no signs of them dramatically improving anytime soon — the best “solution” is usually just everyone else learning to handle the madness a little better, usually internally, and at the expense of your own mental health.

You try and remember the good days, and find what joys you can in the now.

That, of course, wasn’t how I first felt about the city. Moving to Bloomington in 2009 to enroll at Indiana University felt, reasonably, like the early, exciting stage of dating someone new. “Puppy love.” I was all-in on a brand-new college community that promised me thousands of diverse neighbors and passionate peers. It completely destroyed the humdrum and monotony of growing up on a farm lot in a small, white rural town. Everyone in my dorm hall was spirited and proud and ready to be their own adults, as they so chose, footloose and fancy free.

Perhaps it’s embarrassing to admit, but a true symbol of the transformation that was happening to me when I moved here is this: I met my first outwardly Jewish person when I was a freshman at IU, and we shared a community Hanukkah celebration later that fall. I also shared a dorm floor with a black guy from Gary, Ind., and it was really meaningful to have a conversation with him directly instead of just relying on the dismissive stuff about Gary I heard parroted from people who have never been there. I came to town with my own inexperiences and biases, but at every corner it was framed as an opportunity for learning. I was meeting people. I was growing. That’s the idea of college.

A common legend is that fish will grow in proportion to the size of the bowl, tank, or pond they live in, and that’s exactly what was happening to my worldview in my four years of undergrad.

By the time I graduated in 2013, I had only fallen more in love with Bloomington. Perhaps this related to me finally reaching bar age and being showered in support. All of my friends were at concerts and celebrating and partying every weekend. Our livers were dodging shots like John Rambo in a bamboo shack. We were unstoppable. Cooler. Cultured. Matured. Graduates.

Aside from a brief, yet formative 7-month span I spent working at a newspaper and living with a generous host family in Chattanooga, Tenn., I’ve called Bloomington my permanent home since everyone else got a degree and moved across the country in start of new, better things.

That’s the thing about college towns: The whole shebang is designed for kids to get their diploma in 4 (sometimes 5, sometimes 7) years and then go do something with it as refined, prepared adults. Your training is over, and now it’s time for the real thing — plus, we gotta make room for the new young minds, too. That’s part of life, man.

For the first few years in Bloomington after college (say, 2014 and 2015), it was still pretty easy to fit in with the local student culture. Even though I was working nights as a news reporter/page designer, I could get off work at 1 a.m. and pop over to Kilroy’s for $1 Wells or “Bladder Bust” like it was no big deal. I looked like someone who would be there. I still had friends one, or two, or sometimes three grades below mine, who was still familiar with, and they were glad to see me. I was virtually a grad student. A “Super Senior,” like D-Day from “Animal House,” or something more romantic than simply sticking around.

But the years pass on.

The color of Bloomington’s picturesque portrait started to fade for me around 2016 — the same year I bought my small house near Bryan Park — because the Big Wheel of College Culture was beginning to rotate significantly. While I readied my backyard for cookouts and hangouts, my friends group was slowly filtering out all the classmates and apartment neighbors.

The years pass on.

All of the memories I had doing improv at the student union or smoking weed in a buddy’s dorm room (sorry, Mom) now exist solely with me, in my mind and there alone. The cast players are gone, and the new play is perpetually starting. I am simply an audience member, an outdated actor hoping he could maybe be seen reading his favorite line once during the next bit. (“Those were good times, you know!“)

While it’s easy to make new friends, and I have no problem with a growing list of acquaintances, Bloomington has mentally become filled with ghosts, on every block and in every bar. They’re still there today, and it’s not hard to feel somber as I visit them. Sometimes, I feel like a janitor who’s cursed to clean the same haunted house every night, with each hallway and patio bringing back intimate reunions that, quite likely, will never, ever happen again. College, for me, is gone. Over. It’s someone else’s playground now.

And that’s a hard fact you eventually accept about living in a college town: Nobody stays here forever.

I’m 31 now. I’ve been in Bloomington as a townie for twice as long as I was ever a student, and it means I’ve now seen three separate generations of 4-year students pass through the process.

I’m the enigma. I’m the odd one. I’m the Oxymandian statue standing near the backyard where I once shotgunned a can of PBR and threw it at a stranger to win “Beer-lympics” for my team, forever bragging in my mind to people who have long been unable to listen.

The years pass on.

I’ve stopped associating IU as “Bloomington,” and vice versa. I’ve become the adult who is now emotionally attached to the larger community that isn’t featured on campus marketing postcards, because that’s what my actual life here looks like now. Things like utility rates and property taxes rule my life more than free pizza and promotional T-shirts ever did.

The rent rates are skyrocketing, and career opportunities are generally limited to serving the college crowd or corporate work with a few companies. The friends I’ve made here in the professional sector generally live very modestly, because it’s the only way to afford the area without a mortgaged home — which is going out of stock quickly as well.

According to some city directory research I did in the county library, a single black woman who worked as an hourly maid at the university hotel lived in my very house and was able to afford the neighborhood for more than 30 years. She retired in the home and died there having lived a full life. Without much of a stretch of the imagination, it’s obvious how unlikely that story would be today, with the discrepancies in demographic salary and housing inflation alike.

Concerned citizens regularly flood the Planning Commission’s meetings at City Hall (or on Zoom, as necessary) to plead against another premium apartment chain and instead offer something someone who wants to live and work here could afford. The board is usually sympathetic, but even more usually approves the project because the development trend is viewed as more of an inevitability — and if you’re not actively working to keep pace with peer cities who are doing the same thing, you’re basically driving in reverse, economically speaking.

Again, these things are not a problem unique to Bloomington, but we as a city have our own unique fresh hells that come with it:

Masses of unhoused people live in the community parks, mostly Seminary Square, and many of them are living in a perpetual freefall as heroin and meth and grain alcohol destroys their lives. While there are benevolent and altruistic outreach programs and shelters, their resources are limited, and their beds, numbered. Even so, the city tends to make more headlines for evicting transient people from their tents without notice in the middle of winter, or marching them out of a place named “Peoples Park” so they could “renovate” it and paint an Instagram-ready mural that reads “You Belong Here!”

(That last morsel of irony is entirely true. That mural puts a sick feeling in my stomach whenever I see it and remember how the local police sat someone there in an ATV for the whole summer after to make sure nobody started being down on their luck on THAT specific block near Sample Gates, the heart of campus. Last winter, the mayor even insensitively told people protesting his actions against homelessness by showing up at his house that they shouldn’t do that because “he live(s) there.”)

During the school year, it’s not uncommon to see several sexual assault/rape cases appear in the news every week. It’s all a solemn reminder that we played host to one of the nation’s most notorious cold cases starting 10 years ago, and that 6 years ago, we saw the cold-blooded murder of a student during our most famous party weekend. We’re the place Jim Jones first went to school before forming his suicide cult in Jonestown, and we’re the place that educated notorious discriminator Mike Pence on law.

Oh, and there was a famous pedophile who lived above a Subway, which finally closed its doors last month.

Down the block from my house, there’s a drug den carefully disguised as apartments. Legally, they’re called the “Arial Apartments,” but there’s no signage or lease advertisements or amenities. It’s a complete hole-in-the-wall shoebox. With the exception of carefully reviewing MLS data, it doesn’t exist in the world as we know it. One time there, a man chased someone out of the parking lot with a hatchet for shooting up in his car. I’ve seen no fewer than 20 people get arrested from my front porch in the five years I’ve had my modest little house, usually as I’m doing something idyllic like reading a book or sipping some ice water.

Bloomington as a brand likes to tout our public spaces and community vibes, but check the local newspaper and you’ll see a different story: One local playground has had two drive-by shootings in the past week — eyewitness adults are afraid to speak up, in fear of retribution — and the city is investing $600,000 in hiring a security firm to patrol our new Switchyard Park, which gets up to 30 calls regarding public safety in a weekend’s time.

Even on Monday, when I was briefly at my actual house to mow the lawn for the first time in two weeks, some motherfucker fired a bottle rocket at me from their moving vehicle, and I didn’t think much of it. That’s just life here. Real life, at least.

The message is this: to live in Bloomington long-term is to live with cognitive dissonance, and to try to find some sort of complex truth in between. It’s the most socially liberated and cultured place I’ve ever found in Indiana. It’s also one of the most ghastly realities of the stark differences between the Haves and the Have-Nots.

I really wish I could sit here and tell you with a straight face that $3 pints of beer and dance parties and film festivals and college basketball makes all of the conflict worth it. But to be honest, I think we focus on those aspects of our city to cope with the heavy depression of what we don’t focus on.

Do I like living here? Sure. Home is what you make it. And I’m proud to mow the lawn and clean the gutters and walk the dog in a place that feels familiar. I like to think that being a good neighbor is the best way to inspire better neighbors.

It’s like that old parable about the starfish washing up on the shore, you know? Thousands of starfish are stranded on the sand, and an elderly man is diligently, slowly, putting them back into the waters so they might live. A young boy approaches him, saying he will make no difference compared to the epic scale of certain death that awaits most of the echinoderms. The old man puts another starfish back in the ocean, and says “it made a difference to that one.”

And I suppose that’s where I like to think of myself in Bloomington these days. I don’t exactly know why I’m still here, and I don’t exactly know what the future will have in stock for any groups of people that live here.

And if I’m going to do this whole tutti-frutti boutique hotel road trip, I’d be remiss to not use this platform to shed light on reality in my backyard.

Bloomington is not a perfect place. It’s a good place. It’s a flawed place that’s trying.

But Bloomington is the place I know best, and it’s the city most available to accept my working hands in whatever labor of love I’m prepared to offer it.

And because it’s my home, I’ll be doing just that, even as the years pass on.

So there. That’s your honest review of my time in Bloomington — 12 years and counting.

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-moose