caffeinenation

The need for caffeine and the urge to write have me sitting in the corner, attempting to conjure up verse and rust belt writing because I'm feeling existential and the paper from hell is finally done, so I'm people watching all the lonely souls of Clevelandia too young to drink too old to stay at home, who are too busy with their own drama to really pay attention.

It's one of those nights where the cold and the unspooling of continual thought makes for things maybe worth scrawling about. The conversations about life and love and trying to think in a sad city where sometimes we get so tired that it's hard to. But tonight I am too awake and too verbose to try and paint, too alert to kick back and be entertained by a screen so I take the long way down Lorain past the dollar stores and dive bars, the boarded up buildings, the halal markets and Irish pubs, to sit in the corner at Common Grounds, to write poetry alone like a teenager.

I was invited to a birthday party tonight, but I'd rather be among strangers where it's not expected to socialize, where there's caffeine instead of alcohol, and nobody thinks they're cool. When I'm at parties like that the last thing I want to do is be around people, I get this freaked out urge to disappear into the backyard or sit on the porch, wishing I had the excuse of cigarette breaks to be introverted, wanting to take a walk with the other person there who feels antisocial, amble around the block in the cool October air and talk about everything and nothing.

Thinking about wars and rumors of wars, of American exceptionals and the provincialism of small cities with big orchestras and bigger problems, so many things I wish I could say before the battery on my laptop dies, but I'm tired, and I've written, so it's a beautiful thing.

driving music

Things that sound absolutely amazing when one is driving home at night through empty streets past a glittering skyline, the perfect soundtrack to equal parts euphoria and resignation. I miss my late night Cleveland drives so much.

transitionals

Housesitting the Awesome Kitties and the Jungle Puppy tonight and the cats have already made a great escape, sliding open the screen door with their claws while I was outside with the dog and sliding under the fence into the neighbor's garden. The quietness of the house made me suspicious especially after the clink of food in the bowls elicited no response and then the guy across the street came over to tell me that the cats were out running around.

Of course the little punks were sitting on the patio when I came back as if they'd been minding their own business all this time, giving me withering looks as I shooed one inside and the dog chased in the other. Cats have no conscience after all, and there's no way to make them feel guilty.

It's been almost a month straight of dog-walking and cat watching, which is nice for the change of scenery and thankfully I was able to escape to the lake for the day to read, nap under trees with the sound of the waves, and sing songs to my nephew when he cries because that's all he can do to express himself "I'm TEN WEEKS! and I don't know what I want...! He doubles in size every time I see him and it astounds me to see life grow like that, since I'm so used to seeing the decline rather than the ascent.

My little sister called me last night to see if I wanted to hang out, which never happens as our ideas of what's awesome to do on a weekend are a bit different, but she had a lot on her mind because one of her friends got murdered a couple weeks ago and her friends are moving to Portland and there's been other small frustrations that she needed to vent about over coffee in Coventry and a long Cleveland drive which I was more than happy to oblige because it's been awhile since I've done one, leaving Sonic Youth on repeat as we drove from west to east and back.

We ended the night at the Arabica I once haunted in my teens and early twenties when like most coffee establishments was full of subcultural souls and usually the guy working the counter was someone from your art class or something. It's now overrun with 14-year-olds who watch too much Jersey Shorechasing each other up the sidewalk, boys with cracking voices and girls in the shortest shorts I've ever seen tottering in high heels.

The motherly instincts I didn't know I had wanted to ask what they were doing out so late and why were they wearing that and where are their parents, but mostly for all the crazy that comes with knowing more of the world, I'm glad I'm not that age anymore, even though my Friday nights at that age involved trying to learn Soundgarden riffs and disappearing into my bedroom with a pile of CDs from the library and a stack of art supplies. It reminded me of the first weekend in Kent when fresh-faced freshman girls would go down to their first fraternity row college party and come back drunk with half their clothes gone. It probably starts earlier I guess, and with most things I seem to exemplify the exception rather than the rule.

And still, it's a Saturday night and I'm enjoying the solitude. It's been needed.

i can't think of a better way to spend the night, than cruising around underneath the yellow lights...

a good friend of mine is moving back to the 216 from columbus at the end of this month.

when she would come up to visit, we'd end up doing these drives through cleveland, often late at night, soaking it in and exploring.

her friends in high school used to drive around the east side looking for where bone thugs grew up but we never did that.

this became a tradition, partly because everything else was closed and we wanted to catch up since we hadn't seen each other. for some reason, this has become one of my favorite things to do, and i know it will be one of my favorite memories when i look back on this time in my life.

since then, i've take others on what has become my 'grand tour of cleveland,' which usually involves taking the shoreway to the east side, driving through little italy, down through chinatown through downtown to the industrial part of the flats, and up through tremont.

these are the things i'll remember from these ventures...

the guy on detroit releasing a cage full of doves on christmas eve
wanting to join the kids climbing up the free stamp
dancing to elton john and bob dylan on the rock hall plaza
bats swarming around the national city bank tower,
all the candy-colored cars with the big rims on west 6th
driving over the lit-up bridges because they're beautiful
ending up on streets we didn't know existed
singing along to the clash
the christmas lights and snow blowing down detroit road
doing the "axl rose snakedance" at a gas station at 2am
the gorgeous solitude of cuyahoga valley national park
cops in riot gear and people running everywhere on st clair
the perfect view of downtown on the other side of the lorain-carnegie bridge
wondering who lives in those city-block sized mansions in bratenahl
getting lost on the east side all the time
singing 'this land is your land' while driving through the flats
finding van gogh's starry night rendered in spraypaint under a bridge.



i don't know why driving and music go together so well, it must be some weird american ingrained cultural thing. but there's something exhilarating about being out with a good friend and having good music on the stereo and the windows rolled down seeking small adventures that does it for me every time.