I'm tired of watching the things I love die...
Dance venues...other social circles...friendships... I look at how many things--things that I've cherished so deeply over the years--have come & gone, & it makes me so incredibly sad...
The Weber State Swing Club... It was my first introduction to social dancing, something new to belong to (where I didn't "fit in" with the Band crowd anymore), & it led me to the first thing in my life where I could be confident with girls. But once the Dance Team formed, we lost our core group of regulars...& it floundered on & off for several more years... Then once the Union Building started getting renovated, we got kicked out of the Ballroom, & into the the carpeted Gallery. And it came to the point where there were several times more High Schoolers than College-age kids coming. That was such a depressing fall & winter...watching the Swing Club die was so painful...
The Golden Skillet... It was such an awesome dance venue, with such quality dancers, & then it died down for no apparent reason... They "remade" it as the Downtown Stomp, & it had its moments on & off for a year or so, but with the economy, it kept struggling...& went down to 1 night a month...then died altogether...all because not enough people were willing to support it, & no one new wanted to be in charge...
The Murray Arts Centre... More than any other dance venue, more than Game Night, more than Frisbee, more than school, more than Institute, more than church, more than any other social scene, the MAC felt like "my arena". It was the place I felt most comfortable, most confident, & most at home. The first few years were so amazing... But with the downturn in the economy, it slowed down...and kept going down...until the point that hardly any people were coming...it was like Weber all over again... The gigantic crowds at the final dance, & at the Masquerade the next spring, gave me hope that things could come back, even if only once a month--but the lackluster attendance for the Halloween Dance was so depressing... As much as I love my other social circles, nothing has even come close to filling the hole that losing the MAC left...
Uru... It was such an amazing computer game... An incredibly original idea, with heart, & depth, & a rabidly devoted fan-base, & so much potential... But like so many other things, it was held back by the economy, & limited & fiddled around with by fear-based investors afraid to give any untested idea a decent chance... And it died... It knocked the wind out of us...it absolutely broke our legs... We managed to keep it alive on a small-scale, & eventually got another full-blown chance for it to succeed--but it was just held back again, & doomed to die once more... And while there's so much potential for what it could become in the hands of the fans, the Community is simply floundering...steeped in squabbling, narrow-mindedness, fear, & a lack of motivation...
Friends... I've seen so many friends come & go... And I know that it happens All kinds of people come & go in your life--it's unavoidable. But I've seen so many people go that I wanted not to so badly... A lot simply because they moved away or moved on in life. But other friends whose loss...hurts...so much more... People who were around almost every week, & then completely disappeared once they got married, literally never to be seen again... And several people who drifted away for no apparent reason...no matter how much effort I put in to prevent it...
And now the University of Utah Swing Club... It's far from dead, but it's in such a lull... I've been a regular there for nearly 7 years, & I've lost count of how many times I've seen it come close to dying in that time... We've always stuck it out until a change of the seasons brings in an influx of new people, but I'm having such a hard time with it this time... I've been a regular at Swing Club for longer than at any other venue or social scene in my life--it's where the core of my group of friends has come from. But our group has changed so much over the last year, & with this new downturn...
A lot of my pain over all this goes back to one of my Blog-Posts from about a year & a half ago--"Change". With so little change for the better in my life to fill the holes left by things that have changed for the worse, the change for the worse hurts so much more... So I guess the key is to learn how to make the good kind of change happen... I know there's no strict formula for it, but it's not something anyone ever really helped me learn...in anything in life... And until I can figure out how to do that, I'm so afraid that I'm going to have to watch more of the things I love--more venues, more circles, & more friendships--die... Including ones I'm not sure I can bear to lose...
"Fate has cast us into the mouth of a crucible, without knowing whether we are to be tempered by the flames or utterly consumed by them."
