The room I’m sitting in now — different furniture, but the same room.

The problem with railing against nostalgia as a cultural phenomenon is that when you experience it yourself, you feel like a phony.

I write these words sitting in One More Cup, one of my favorite coffee shops in Kansas City – it's closing down after about a decade or so of operation. I mourn its passing, because it's one of about three coffee shops I know of that is not run by one of the International House of Prayer, a megachurch out in Grandview (I think?) that insists on having its shops specialize in making pour-over coffee because it gives the barista a chance to tell you about Jesus.

On the wall in front of me, there are printed posters, advertising local record stores, tattoo shops, events, and calling for attendance at rallies and help finding lost pets. It's the sort of neighborhood shop that gets pushed out when a city is on an upswing. It's crowded by people who are visiting the shop, as you would a relative in hospice.

Earlier this year, the Tivoli, our arts cinema, closed down with about a week's notice. Likewise, the Westport Arts bar was bought out and shut down. The Writers' Place ended a few years before that. There are so many defunct punk bars that they seem like the social equivalent of gold fish (El Torreon is a church; Vandals is a fairly good, if expensive, gay bar; I think the Gun Factory got turned into a speakeasy.) Even the Cinemark on the plaza, the chain movie theater that had $4.50 matinee showings during the day during the week (a boon to those of us working service industry schedules,) has been scooped out and construction has begun on a new Nordstrom's.

I worked at that movie theater for a month, back in 2005. I viewed it as a soul-sucking corporate job, and now I miss the theater. Textbook irony.

Winstead's our local hamburger chain, has contracted from a regional powerhouse to one or maybe two locations – but we got a shake shack a while back, isn't that nice?

Honestly, the construction is just as bad. There are so many buildings that seem to be aiming to raise boredom to a transcendent thing, anonymous blocks of glass, concrete and stone.

Edgar pointed out yesterday that gentrification is signaled by your friends talking about how nice their neighborhood is and your parents talking about how dangerous it is. Poor artists flee high rent and stagnant culture and move into rough areas, and then when there's a thriving art scene, the hipsters get replaced with Yuppies and the people who were living there before, the working-class folks, get priced out and forced elsewhere.

While I'm not happy about the baggage carried by the term, I'm conscious of the fact that I'm a hipster. I'm also conscious of the fact that a lot of people in my demographic are moving across Troost, Kansas City's de facto racial dividing line (with the exception of a few enclaves on either side.) My parents comment about how it is dangerous over there – logic from the 1970s and 1980s, when their opinions about the area were last reshaped. It isn't out of conscientious respect for parental wishes that I'm staying on this side of that street: I don't want to be a footsoldier of gentrification. I'm not going to put anyone on blast about doing it – there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and housing is consumable for a renter.

No, all this week, we've been moving south, not east, into a new apartment on Rockhill road. It's another third story walk-up, as Edgar and I are obviously the sort of people who live in a garret. We've been carrying books up and down flights of stairs – a materialist mortification of the flesh aimed at reminding us that there is a cost to our desire to learn more.

We still have more moving to do. I just couldn't keep moving at the moment. After I finish typing this piece and this cup of coffee, I'm going to get back to work.

The Lorenz diagram, the archetypal strange attractor.

This spring, we were lined up to move to another country for graduate school. It was going to be a rough transition. It was going to be difficult, but ultimately good. The money fell through and the barrier of entry was higher than expected, and so we're here, trapped in orbit around the strange attractor that is my home town.

And here we are, carrying books up creaking stairs. I've often said, on observing friends and acquaintances returning from living elsewhere that Kansas City – and Kansas City's midtown area in particular – has a dire gravity. A black-hole-like attractive power from which it is difficult to escape.

But I'm not sure it will, in the future. Yeah, it's cheap to live here, but it used to be that there were things to do. It used to be that there was a thriving arts scene that gave space for people to experiment and develop as artists.

It used to be.

That's the phrase I've been saying for so long, and I fear that here I am on the cusp of 33 and already becoming an old man, my knees destroyed and my back aching and caught in the nostalgia trap for my home town.

The Nelson-Atkins. We hated the shuttelcocks for ten years, and now we’ve adopted them as a symbol of the city. Typical Kansas City.

Kansas City claimed to be an arts town, once. We still do, I suppose: there are grants, there are galleries, we have a world-class museum. But what made us distinct is leaking out. We used to be someplace, and now we're anyplace.

And I much prefer the former to the latter.

There are still things that recommend my hometown. It's got some beautiful neighborhoods, and there are good people and good bars here, but I feel like it's caught a fever and it's trying to sweat me and people like me out. It's trying to pure itself of the people and things that are undesirable – not dangerous; I wouldn't position myself as “dangerous” by any stretch.

Perhaps it's masturbatory to think I or those like me even register. Perhaps it's more like the changes in the environment that we see all around us: no one wants to kill off the monarch butterfly, but no one wants milkweed in their yard. The things that are necessary for a self-identified population to strive are inconvenient and insufficiently profitable, and so it withers and dies.

I realize that a lot of this is inside baseball for people who aren't from Kansas City. I realize also that there are people out there that don't really think of Kansas City – despite our size and centrality, we lack the cultural penetration of Saint Louis or Cincinnati or Milwaukee. We're larger (and more violent, it turns out) than Atlanta, a city that Kansas City desperately seems to want to be, despite the fact that Atlanta seems to really want to be Los Angeles.

So here's the uptake, a message for other artists and creatives and those who, like me, aspire to be that in their lives: don't wait for a space to be given to you. Don't let yourself get pushed out of anyplace you have a toehold. Busk. Set up an open-mic in the laundromat. Meet at a picnic table in the park and declaim poetry and read your writing. Get a french press and some store-brand coffee, sit around a table in your home with people who want to talk ideas.

The world, it seems, wants us to feel scared and alone. As far as the world can be said to want anything from us.

I, for one, don't see why we should give the world what it wants.

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Closed for Construction: on Leaving Midtown.