Because we are largely indifferent to sportsball, Quinn and I went for dinner Saturday night at a restaurant in Blacksburg called McClain's that is basically an enormous sports bar. (Instagram told me it was good, and it was.) We grabbed a table on the massive, empty porch, then watched the restaurant fill to fever pitch over the course of an hour and a half before we finally realized, "Oh, yeah, it's game night." The first Virginia Tech football game of this weird, truncated season was being blasted on approximately 8,000 TV screens.
And all of a sudden I'm like, "Wait. Maybe we'll hear 'Enter Sandman.'"
I'm slightly obsessed with this rock anthem that blasts as the Hokie football team enters the field at Lane Stadium because it's this ecstatic communal experience. When I was a newbie, the "Enter Sandman" moment helped establish my place identity here in Blacksburg in a way that goes beyond the "I like this place" of attachment and enters into the realm of "I am a part of this community."
Place identity is like being a Deadhead at a Grateful Dead concert. It's the strange thing we share. For my town, it's "Enter Sandman." For yours, I don't know, your abandoned igloo hotel. As Andrew Solomon points out in Far From the Tree, identity often stems from shared defects. We just have to learn to be weird together.
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