I wish you guys would write and share even more about what Rochdale was like.  Perhaps I also romanticize it, but it just sounds like it must have been an absolute blast.

And Peyton responded:

Well, Dickens said it perfectly, I figger, in his first words in A Tale Of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”  I reached some great heights in Rochdale, felt pretty f*cked up other times.  I think of the Neil Young lines too, from one of my many favourite songs of his: “I’m a little drifter on the road, carrying such an easy load…why do I keep f*cking up?”  There’s a lightness to his phrasing of it, nothing morose.  Point being that Rochdale was a very original, very unique place to experience and learn to understand both the best and worst.  Full of contradictions to resolve.  For me, for my own benefit, I mean, without making any presumptions as to how it reads to others, I got it down perfectly in the poem titled “Rochdale”, the first poem in the first collection I contributed to our website.