in which I will probably offend and be misunderstood by 85% of my not-so-devoted readers

So the first thing I heard on the radio this morning was CSNY's "Ohio," and I was a bit surprised not to hear any commentary from the Boomer Overlords about the anniversary day of the most significant event to happen at my alma mater.

There's a parking lot now where the shooting happened and every year lots of aging hippies crawl out of the woodwork to protest downtown, women with hair down to their knees and faded Oberlin College t-shirts, men with coolie hats and t-shirts with the Vietnam flag on them telling you "I was there, maaaan!" and all sorts of other types who show up for such things.

Because of my reputation as a "random force of chaos" and because despite my introverted tendencies I somehow get acquainted with a strange mix of people, I ended up hanging out with a crusty punk kid with feathers in his matted hair who called himself Cobalt who'd ridden on top of trains to get here for the big protest (this was in the heart of Dubya's second term). His clothes smelled so bad that the ARA girl he knew here had to hang them outside her dorm room window.

He joined our dinner table and watched the Black Keys with my crew of friends (who told me afterwards "we just all assumed that he was someone you knew"). We all went to the playground at midnight to go on the swings and hang out in the parking lot and then the next day me and him sat outside debating politics and religion while while eating out of a jar of ancient organic peanut butter with our fingers. He was "fighting capitalism" by stealing pens from campus offices so people couldn't write checks and coughing up blood every five minutes and I'm amazed I didn't get sick, but I did buy him food on my meal plan because I had a week of school left and a few hundred dollars to burn. I wonder where he is now.

We had a May 4th room in the library that was a popular destination for vacationing Freedom Rockers and a haunt for dirty old men as it had a computer and was dark, and every year the school has a big symposium where the likes of Bobby Seale and Jello Biafra speak, music by people like Country Joe, and a lot of general hagiography and accompanying mythology surrounding the event. It's like 9/11 for the Woodstockers and their acolytes more or less. "Tell me Father, did they aim?, and all that.

I asked my dad about it, since I grew up on his record collection full of Creedence, Neil Young, and Hendrix, and since he had neither money or grades for college and didn't want to Vietnam if he didn't have to (being skeptical of our reasons for being there), he was in the National Guard at the time, but stationed in Toledo (going off base to see the MC5 at Bowling Green and feeling like he looked like a spook) and he says that the 60's had a lot of great music but were hell to live through.

He doesn't have much patience for most of his generation and this probably explains a lot of my cynicism about suburban crackers who listened to Zeppelin and now dig smooth jazz, who wax poetic about "True Revolutionaries like Che Guevara" but drive new SUVs and live in the suburbs away from all "those people" but will tell you about that one black friend they had in college who had an Afro and was down with Malcolm X.

There were a lot of activist groups when I was there, and while there were some really great people who've no doubt gone on to try to save the world, there were also a lot of holier-than-thou types who believed that bathing was "fascist" and more than a few trust-fund socialists from Hudson who drove nice cars and wore Nautica chinos with their Che shirt and it was very hard for me to take them seriously when I was selling my books and CDs for grocery money, working 30 hours a week, and walking everywhere.



Certain members of my family blame my Kent State education for making me a flaming liberal but if anything, my time there soured me on both sides so completely as things like Abu Ghraib and the torture memos began to come out and the rank hypocrisy of those who claim to be more moral and Christian justified the unjustifiable but the left wasn't a friendly place to born-again pro-lifers like yours truly who are too skeptical about general human nature to believe that we can build a better tomorrow through greater bureaucracy and Kum-Ba-Yah.

this is getting old and so are you...

Teenage angst has paid off well, though I'm not so bored and not that old yet. Life's gotten more interesting, even as it's settled into some kind of conventional routine.

I remember hearing on the radio about Kurt Cobain but I was eleven and didn't pay much attention but when Layne Staley died, it wasn't unexpected but still heartbreaking and me and my fellow slackers mourned together on a rainy Tuesday in the basement of Tri-C.

Every time someone talks about "The Voice of a Generation" I'm wary because not every person born after 1970 is an angsty suburban cracker and we tend to project our likes on the rest of the world just like our boomer overlords. My younger cousins don't know who Kurt Cobain is, and because people on the Internet don't know how to read, the first search on Youtube comes up as "Smells Like Team Spirit" which sounds like a hilarious trainwreck of a customer service program.

I know that the cryptic lyrics and perfect squalls of guitar spoke to my lonely soul who'd just discovered the guitar and music at the same time, tuning my dad's instrument down to D and a half step to play like Jerry Cantrell.



Who needed boy bands and love songs when there was cathartic angst to wallow in?



I learned how to play that song from a guy who went to rehab, and did the painting below my first year as an art student, and it hung in every dorm room and apartment I lived in until I moved home in '06 and it sat in a portfolio stuffed with old projects and band posters I forgot I owned. I see more hipster kids with flannel shirts than usual and know that the inevitable revival will eventually happen.

every week I need a new address....

Having a week of vacation without school or work for the first time since I was fifteen was amazing but I really don't mind coming back to the routine, now that the apartment is as clean as it'll get, I got plenty of socializing and time to read books, listen to good music, drink tea and watch awesomely terrible Ernest Angley Christmas specials ("And Jee-zus IS the Christmas Tree!), white rapper videos from the likes of House of Pain, 3rd Bass, and Snow, and Krull with my neighbors around the corner.

Everyone acts shocked when we get the annual thaw, and it was great to leave the house in a hoodie instead of a winter coat to pick up a fellow DJ and go up to the station on Friday afternoon to do a "Grungy New Year" with the sweet and sludgy sounds of the Pacific Northwest. We did the more obscure bands (Green River, Mudhoney, the Wipers, the Gits) and then the b-sides and rare cuts from the ones that get played on the radio still.



It being the middle of the day meant that we couldn't play most of the requests we got for fear of being smacked by the almighty FCC so we threw in some Stooges and midwest 80's punk like Naked Raygun but it was fun to play Nirvana covers, dig through the racks of vinyl, and have guys in Lakewood singing this song over the phone to us.



I wanted to take pictures of the frozen lighthouse on the lake but it had already begun to melt like a wicked witch but we went to Whiskey Island and took pictures anyway and I fell through a snow drift into the lake but the water was only up to my ankles. The park was closed technically but everyone was out there with their cameras and pets.



It's days like that when I feel damn lucky to live in this city when the lake is greenish blue and icy, the shore is littered with sticks and Black & Mild stubs and I got a full tank of gas and no plans except to be a slacker for the day.



We got food and went up on the balcony at the West Side Market before making excursions to the Glass Bubble Project to hang out with random friendly people who give me history of Parma while I take pictures of Morty the chicken, random stuff on the walls, and lamps that I would have in my house if I had money.





I took her to the graffiti walls before it started to rain, and we took pictures of paint and general Rust Belt disintegration that never gets old. It was too cold for the skaters and the gangbangers, but "Cleveland/LA" graffiti covered the art that was left and the skaters had built jumps and ramps on the concrete.





I had a lot of New Year's Eve invites, but really wasn't in a mood to be social among strangers, or drink so Lindsay and I went to Algebra for strong cardamom-laced coffee and Scrabble and overhearing earnest conversations from zealous recent converts to Islam on the evils of Facebook as a tool of Western fornication. It seemed like every major social ill went back to the other major branch of Abraham's descendants owning the media or fornication which I should have counted because it was said more times than I've ever heard anyone use it.

Meanwhile, we dispensed with scoring and the banning of proper nouns and Shabba made an appearance on the Scrabble board before going back to her parents' house to watch the ball drop and bang on pots and pans. I still don't understand boy bands or Ke$ha, but I probably never will.



I came home and stayed up awhile longer thinking about all the crazy that transpired over the past year as the gunfire crackled a few streets over. One of my friends stopped over the next night with her dog and we're plotting trips to Boston and road trip excursions to weird places, with my flexible vacation time and her teacher's schedule. It's too bad This Noah's Ark/Tabernacle extravaganza is on the other side of the country because she said it's amazing.

My great-aunt died this weekend as well, making it into the new year at the age of 99. She was sassy and completely lucid up until the end and spent most of her last days going to Mass and playing pinochle. It's the side of the family I don't know nearly as well with cousins I only see at funerals, but the ones I did know outside of that were telling me about their trip to Poland, giving me some family history and asking when I'm going to make something of myself and go to law school, considering my lack of income and matrimony.

"I'm happy with the way things are," I insist, knowing that I can't explain my cynicism about the rat race of modern society or this whole idea of romance, that I prefer cheap rent and something that looks like bohemianism but is really more that my interests are eclectic and that all my furniture has been inherited from previous roommates and elderly relatives.

And yet I enter 2011 with uncertainty, wondering if I'll still be employed by the end of the year, wondering if having something on my record really means it's expunged if I try to get another job, wondering what proverbial shit is going to hit the fan this year, trying to trust God with an increasingly uncertain future.

I'm ok with the possibility of downward mobility but I know that there's not too much further down that I can go, knowing that while there's a lot I contribute, I'm ultimately disposable, with little seniority and being constantly reminded that I'm just a kid by my boomer overlords even though I'm closer to 30 than 20. We were all young once, right? Right? Or maybe everything was just handed out back then, the right hands were shook, the right credentials earned back when it meant something.

Is part of the fight of climbing the ladder a response to this anxiety, because it's better to be knocked down a few rungs than be at the bottom completely? Is the whole culture of sucking up and tooting one's horn born just as much out of desperation as ambition?

everyone knows this is nowhere...

My dad and I took a roadtrip to beautiful Belmont County to visit relatives and get out of the city and it was the perfect day to drive around listening to "Everyone Knows This is Nowhere" and "The Joshua Tree," as I'm wondering why these two records feel so American when they're not, but they sound so good and epic when driving through tiny towns under huge blue skies as the colors turn to yellow and rust.

I wonder how these towns hold on, and I see creeks where the water is rusty and hills that have been carved out by strip mining, empty farmhouses with torn curtains waving in the breeze, old cars rusting in back yards.

We stopped and visited relatives and I heard stories about working in coal mines, the way that things have changed since then, and caught up on the family gossip, since my grandma's passed away, no one knows what everyone's up to anymore since she was the link between us in Cleveland and them in Maynard.

A lot of people weren't home, so we didn't end up staying overnight like we planned, but it was good to see the aunts, uncles, and cousins that I did know, and to end up in places that I've never been to before as we took detours and back roads so steep and narrow I wondered if we were going to get stranded and also how my relatives drive their big old Cadillacs and Crown Vics up and down these steep gravel roads on precarious hills.



We stopped by to visit a few of my uncles but nobody was home. I'd never been to some of these places before, but my dad knew every watering hole and uncle's house including Joe's where he jokes about his six Cadillacs that rust in the yard along with all the ephemera he's picked up over the last few decades.




The drive home was beautiful and I got to have some great conversations with my dad and indulge my artistic id by taking photos of everything I could snap from the car windows. I'd love to get down there more, to be somewhere so different and yet so familiar, the place where my roots were and where I came from.



I crashed on a friend's couch that night when I came home and then painted my new kitchen and moved more stuff over. I couldn't stay over that night and didn't want to go home so I studied for my Latin American History midterm at a coffeeshop and walked around Lakewood talking to the partner in crime on the phone before tiring myself out sufficiently.

My dad and adopted uncle and a couple friends of mine helped me move the big stuff that morning, I got free tickets to see "The Screwtape Letters" that afternoon and then picked up my former college roomie to go see Greg Dulli do an "intimate set" at the Grog Shop, which made me realize that I am still more of a fan of the full band setup (even though the violinist/cellist was amazing) and that his fanbase has a surprising amount of very drunk and obnoxious people.

I mean, really, it's the first time my personal space was blatantly violated, the women (I say "women" because they were older than me) were trying to throw themselves at this aging rock icon with a serious self-hating streak, the dudes were completely wasted and couldn't keep their hands to themselves, and I was a bit cranky and sore from having moved all day and seen enough dysfunction in the past few months to really not want to hear about more of it.

It's back to the daily for me after two days off and a weekend of moving and movement, trying to impose order on the jumble of boxes and bags, adjust to living upstairs and taking into consideration that the floors are thinner than I thought, and the little kids living below me need to go to bed early, that my gas doesn't get turned on until Thursday when I can be home and therefore I have no heat, hot water, or a working stove, so I pile up the covers and my grandma's feather bed, eat takeout, and wait for things to start to feel a little more stable than they do right now.

wind and water

we went again to Edgewater, waited for someone else to show up who didn't, and went down to the other beach, where there was spraypaint on the jettys and a bus full of crusty punks and their dogs and great photos to be taken.

The colors were so beautiful and intense I knew I couldn't capture them with my Canon's limited lens, but tried anyway, because sometimes I have gotten lucky and more and more I have some clue what I'm doing, with better ways of seeing and looking at things. He explains "See, photography and kung fu really aren't all that different..."



I loved the way the wind felt, the purple grey blue of the sky and the deep silvered aquamarine color of the water. I'll never have money but if I could, I'd live next to a large body of water with waves, so I could watch the storms come in, let the water kiss my feet as I walk up the beach, stumble down the rocks looking for beach glass to sit on the abandoned picnic tables at the end by the cliffs where the shale is perfect for skipping stones across the waves. I turn into a damn hippie every time I go there and I have no shame.



We could see the rain coming across the lake and when it finally hit it was like a baptism, washing away the sand and the crushed shells of zebra mussels off my skin.

It was just too beautiful out to go home so we took the new Roots album on a drive along the lake as the heat lightning flashed and there was nothing to say, just the windows rolled down and the radio on. It's been a long time since I've had an epic Cleveland drive and I needed one.

This weekend was nonstop things all the time, helping people move, baby shower, meeting up in Berea with an old friend for Thai food, walks downtown, and conversation, hanging out at Edgewater again on Sunday, and painting. I've got two more weeks of class but my works in progress are starting to look interesting.



Also, evidently the visiting church group wants to buy some of my photos to take back to rural Minnesota with them, so I'll be printing up some of my graffiti shots and a few other Cleveland/rust belt-ish looking ones that might look nice on somebody's wall. I never thought anyone would like my work that much, but it'll help offset the costs I'll incur when I find out how much I owe the city of Cleveland for my youthful indiscretions.

bright lights

This weekend's gone so much better than the last. It helps to have no expectations and anticipations and see what happens.

I walk the dog and come back to a missed call from one of my picture taking crew who's thankfully isn't blaming me for ruining his pristine record and we kept it legit, shooting photos of the funwall, the bridges, walked over the Abbey bridge and down the hill from Tremont before heading over to Edgewater as the sun set and the water was this deep epic blue as the sky burned red and orange.









We got some amazing shots and I learned more about how to use my camera but I couldn't help stiffening every time a police car went by.

Stopped over to see my mom in the morning, came back and got some groceries and snarky comments at the African/Caribbean mart where I ran into Alex and the other Burundians who reminded me that "only foreigners shop here," as I loaded up on plantains, hot sauce from Barbados, Jamaican grapefruit pops, and ginger tea.

The Our Lady of Mount Carmel Italian festival/carnival was going on tonight so I rode my bike down there to observe the festivities, which did not disappoint. Found it a bit ironic that the raffle item this year was Lady Gaga tickets but I did get to take pictures of carnies, witness a dance-off, which was very entertaining and everyone there looked really Italian, and watching teenagers interact with each other made me so glad I'm not their age anymore.



Pope Benedict was there too, hanging out next to the Freedom Fries.



And might as well throw Martina Topley-Bird, Tricky's muse in there too.



Sunday was hanging out with good people watching the World Cup final and going to my cousin's graduation party out in the exurbs. I have culture shock every time I go out that far away from the city, it's such a different world than the one around me.

I was frustrated this week because I sometimes wish that life wouldn't be as crazy as it is, that other people my age are buying houses and taking their kids to t-ball games while I'm doing whatever I'm doing, but then, well, I guess I wouldn't have as many stories to tell, would I?

take me down to the desert sea...

When I was a kid, I read books all the time. I still read books all the time. With the exception of 2 weeks of retail hell, I have worked in places full of books and places where you could spend a slow day at the register reading. I used to read a book a day.

When people ask me why I do this whole exploring-abandoned-buildings thing, I think the seed was planted way before I thought I'd be an art student and listened to a lot of gritty punk rock and was totally into stark black and white photos of broken things.

When I was in first grade, I wanted to be an archaeologist, or someone who dug up dinosaur bones. I was also fascinated by natural disasters like volcanos, and how the city of Pompeii was buried for centuries under layers of ash. This was probably why I didn't have many friends, because I was pretty weird and not into Barbie dolls or New Kids on the Block.

I was either going to have 20 kids and move to Wyoming (don't know why looking back now) or spend my honeymoon with my future husband digging up dinosaur bones in Mongolia. But the Valley of the Kings had already been dug up completely and that involved being out in the hot sun and being detail-oriented.

I'm not detail oriented. But I loved reading about bygone eras and places where civilization once flourished and I still do. Around this time, I was homeschooled and the missionary kid curriculum my mom used for me was way more multicultural than my peers in grade school learning about Kwanzaa.

I was ten years old and reading anthologies of Korean and Chinese folklore, did a huge paper on Islam, learned about the Greeks and the Romans and the Renaissance but also Byzantium, the Inca, the Maya, Sundiata and Mansa Musa and Genghis Khan and more.

One of my favorite writers as a kid was Elizabeth Enright, who wrote about the kids I wanted to be. I lived vicariously through the Melendy kids exploring New York City and the grounds of their Four-Story Mistake and Portia and her cousin hanging out in abandoned Victorian houses on Gone-Away Lake. I thought that was so cool.

I realized quickly that no one else cared about stuff like this in our teens and so it got substituted by subculture, which helps a person find a lunch table to eat at but ultimately only takes you so far because you realize eventually that the worth of a person and their character is greater than what bands they like.

And now I'm rediscovering this part of me that loves old things and strange things that no one cares about, like warrior queens and world music and I love that my roommate rocks out to Ethiopian mezmur and Saturday night Arabic pop on the radio and that there are other people who like obscure byways and abandoned places.

a little more conversation

I was running errands last night and I saw police cruisers and cops with shotguns in my general vicinity. I kept driving and when I came back the street was blocked off and when I turned the corner to go down the next one, there were even more police cars, a crashed car and police gathering evidence to put in a bag and the whole neighborhood out because evidently some guy went crazy and they found 4 guns and a hundred knives in his apartment.

Viva Cleveland.

And the rest of the night was quiet. I listened to music, gessoed boards from a generous friend, bought some lemonade from the kids down the street, and spray painted canvases and painted on the back porch until the sun set.

I bought a projector off Craigslist at the suggestion of my art instructor and it's opened up whole new worlds to me as far as taking images and doing something larger scale with them than what I've been doing. I can't draw realistically to save my life so it's good to know that I have a nice crutch and that what I'm doing actually looks like what I want to do.

And since I work at a job where I interact with a lot of people and I tend to make small talk with everyone. this also means that I get asked out a lot and it's awkward. I've lived my life so long being "just friends" with everyone that the whole "Can I take you out to dinner?" so quickly freaks me out. I think I'm just a sucker for the ones with better game than that, who take it a little bit slower instead of "you're pretty, will you go out with me sometime?"

I don't know what I prefer, but that's a little too much. I want a few months of casual conversation so I can get a good read on you, see if there's any red flags that come up. Even then, there's some that I've known for three years when suddenly something happens and someone's not who I thought they were.

I've made a lot of mistakes in the past and I don't want to make them again. Yet as we get older, the time gets shorter, and the stakes are higher, and everyone around us is pairing off for better or worse and so I understand the desperation. And I know we all get lonely.

They say the best person to end up with is your best friend. But no one wants to be your best friend. No one wants to have conversations and chill hanging out where we ponder deep things and laugh at absurdity and see where things go naturally. Is that too much to ask?

This whole let's go on a date to get to know each other because I think you're cute is so not the way I do things. I feel embarrassed when my meals are paid for and I'm given things when I know that my heart isn't in it that way. I don't do that whole playing games thing because that's cruel and I'm wasting someone's time. I feel bad when cross cultural signals get screwy and something seems to mean something that it doesn't or when it seems like they hope it goes somewhere so they can get citizenship and stay here. I can't tell you how many times this has happened too.

Maybe men and women just can't be friends once one gets attracted to the other.

And I'm cursed with this general English-major-ish interest in people in general. I love life stories and hearing perspectives and experiences vastly different than my own. But just because I'm interested and intrigued by humanity in itself doesn't mean I'm interested in you that way.

heat.

The weather's getting warmer, but it's not warm enough yet for things to get really crazy, but the stirrings are beginning.

The sirens didn't stop the other night. Usually I can tune out one or two but this was one after another after another.

Then last night me and a friend were walking down by Case's campus last night when some students came towards us and said that the campus police were asking if they'd seen a guy dressed in black wielding a machete.

Awesome.

So we walked the other way through Little Italy, where the streets are lit more brightly than the campus because it was too beautiful outside to run away.

I had a ticket for the RJD2 show last night but didn't see anyone I knew and was too sleepy to wait through the opening acts so I drove home and saw the firetrucks and bystanders watching an abandoned building burn.

Usually I would have stopped, but I was tired and didn't have a camera anyway.

When the weather heats up, so do the tempers, and things start to get a little more crazy.

None of this really scares me. If it did, I wouldn't live where I live, go to the places I go.

"The space between the dime and the dollar
The space between the city and the suburb"

roots

So this weekend there was much photography, and it was good.

I came home Friday night all restless because the light was so beautiful and I wanted to capture the glow that I saw that made the snow golden and the city gleaming.

Who's going to want to go out with me to take pictures on a Friday night? As I agonized over this, the wonderful roomie offered to come along and we drove down by Whiskey Island (which is closed right now) and I ended up shooting photos through all the barbed wire fences down there and just off the shoreway.



Then we went down to the Flats and I got a few more shots before being satisfied enough to come home and finally chill.





It's kind of crazy to think about how much of the lakefront and how much in general is fenced off. Or maybe that's where I end up. No one else seems to see it this way.

Saturday I drove down with my dad and some family to an 80th birthday party for my third cousin down in Maynard, Ohio, which is outside of St. Clairsville down on the Ohio/West Virginia border. I spent the afternoon hanging out at the local Polish National Alliance hall eating pierogi, drinking fruit punch, and catching up with my extended family, some of whom I don't remember meeting before or it's been a very long time.



My dad spent many summers down there with his brothers and cousins doing "back in the day" kind of things that people don't do now, like shooting at bottles floating down the river, blowing off M-80s and cherry bombs, going down into old mine shafts, my uncles taking them trashpicking and down to dive bars near Wheeling and all that kind of thing.

He told me stories when I was a kid about what it was like down there, and would take us down there once a year or so to visit the relatives. Some of the great-uncles would mess with us because we were clueless city people but they were so much fun, and as I've gotten older I've realized how much I take after that side of the family, with the bikers and the rusty Cadillacs in the front yard and the piano in the barn that's falling to pieces. We all have the same facial features and the weird sense of humor and a dash of eccentricity even though most of us look pretty normal.

I'm sitting there listening my dad and his cousins tell these stories about how the radio waves of WWVA was so powerful down there that you could hear Big Country News coming out of your toaster and laughing because even if they've been embellished, they're still great stories and I could hear them again and again. I got this sense of my roots that I'd never had before, like this is where I come from, and this explains so much about who I am and what I like to do.

I wanted to go out and take pictures again Sunday but no one was free. Cleaned out the kitchen and realized how much food was left over from the previous roommates, made a huge pot of lentils that will last me until we finish moving, cleaned and listened to Soundgarden and chilled with a friend of mine who stopped over to chill after work.

west to east and east to west.

Took some vacation time today. Me and roommate had grand road trip plans for Columbus or Kent and ended up exploring more of our city with much success, making the jump from the old familiar parts of Parma to the heart of the east side.

We stopped at Timeless Guitars and while I'd still love an upright bass, I played a beautiful vintage short-scale bass with great sound and style that would make more sense right now and she found some banjos down in the basement that she liked. Hung out in Parma for a little bit to visit my sister and get some groceries and then drove out to Euclid to pick up free moving boxes we saw on Craigslist.

By this time we were hungry and craving something spicy so we called Muk to see where he likes getting Jamaican so he sent us to DK & A down on 120th & St Clair. It's easy to miss but the food is amazing and there's a lot of it. And despite the catcalls from the passing drivers, I'd go back there again if I'm out that way. The spices were comforting and made me think of warmer sunny days.

We met up with him at the food co-op parking lot and ate curry chicken and drank fruity organic stuff in the car as the windows fogged up, and then went out to some party in Mayfield. While I'm so intimidated by groups of new people, I ended up having a nice time and I'm thankful that the frustrations of past experiences don't always need to repeat in the present.

And even though it's started snowing, we're back home and it's warm.

high culture, low class

Lindsay had to go see a play at the Cleveland Public Theater for her English class so we checked it out Friday night. Evidently the pay-what-you-can thing is hard to actually pull off in real life, and we felt a little scammed by $19 student tickets. I know one should be supporting the independent arts, but really now...

I know its intent was supposed to be some metaphysical Appalachian gothic tale of grief and loss, but it just came across as profoundly cliched and absurd. Maybe that was the point. I couldn't stand any of the characters (crazy wife lady, psycho next door neighbor who keeps yelling "I AM THE LAW!," husband who goes and cheats on her but actually makes more sense than anyone else).

And honestly, I found the whole Appalachian thing kind of insulting (especially since I've got loads of extended family down in St. Clairsville)> But it seemed like the writer watched "Deliverance" a few too many times and decided to try and make it all deep and literary. Shotguns, bad accents, Jack Daniels, ignorance about doctors and technology, cheatin' on yer wife down at the pool hall? PLEASE.

The two of us being English majors of course meant that we took a walk around the neighborhood and spent the rest of the evening at IHOP eating pancakes, drinking coffee, and gleefully deconstructing. So all was not lost. We were immensely entertained.

I'm convinced that as a writer you have to either be doing serious research or write what you know, because if you don't, it's almost always a disaster.

photoweekend

And of course, life in Cleveland is not all mid-20s angst all the time...

There is still graffiti to be photographed, even as it looks like the Metalcrete building by the funwall is being buffed and fixed up (who would buy that anyway) and there's a camp of homeless people now living underneath the 25th Street bridge.









And, on the way out to the east side, we had an encounter with the Heaventrain in a parking lot on East 30th.





I need to start carrying my camera with me everywhere. There's too much I'd miss otherwise.

we roll deep

I forgot my USB cord, so pictures from this weekend will be forthcoming, but it was yet another fabulous 4th of July this year. Every year since we stopped going to the next-door neighbor's pool party, it's been a good time and a different thing every year.

Last year, I crashed parties and spent the next day with two compadres running down the train tracks off 107th and Cedar with a camera taking pictures of graffiti, and the year before that was a family reunion in southern Ohio that involved kegs, polka music, and my cousins blowing off illegal fireworks at the bottom of the hill. The year before that was in Kent, where I watched fireworks at the community festival, went to a show in the back of Turnup Records, and spent the fourth itself with the elderly neighbors of one of my friends, who were completely drunk and when I asked for a water, was somehow served a gin and tonic instead. Thankfully the porch swing we were on collapsed and my glass broke so I didn't have to drink it.

I spent my Friday off slacking around the house before going out to Berea to hang out with some of the family and then Jerusha and I were supposed to go to Udupi but the power went out in the neighborhood minutes after we got there so we drank mango lassis in the dark before going back to my parents' house in Parma to chill for awhile.

My dad was off on the 4th so I got to hang out with him and help my sister cook for the festivities. My sister and her fiance are moving to an apartment in Lakewood just a block from the park, so we went up on the roof to watch the fireworks.

There ended up being a huge crowd of us, between my family and my aunts and uncles and cousins, the future in-laws, and a few phone calls later, eight of my friends came up too, prompting jokes about my "entourage" from my cousins and aunts.

Most of us parked by my apartment and walked, and I love how on this holiday everyone's out and hanging out on their porches, walking in the streets, there's the smell of firecrackers and food on the grill. Mukhtar brought along some firecrackers and we were taking turns lighting them and throwing them into the street as we were walking down.





The mood on nights like these is so festive and we were all having such a great time and finding everything entertaining.

Since a lot of the suburbs have canceled their fireworks this year, everyone seemed to be coming up this way for them, and the streets were packed by the time we got to my sister's place (which is beautiful by the way). We climbed up all these stairs just as the fireworks were starting and it was the best view for fireworks, never seen them so big or so loud in such a good place.

From summer09

Part of the ambiance I'm sure is from watching "Mary Poppins" as a kid and movies where people live in big cities and chill on the rooftops all the time. But it really was the perfect night and the perfect ending.

blast from the past

Don't know how I stumbled across this, but someone has old Camcorder footage of Marc's Funtime Pizza Palace, the low-budget answer to Chuck E. Cheese, where I attended numerous grade-school birthday parties that were spent eating greasy pizza and playing endless games of skee-ball by myself because I really wasn't friends with any of the kids but it was something to do.

I'd come home with prizes like cheap Chinese fans that always broke a day later or those necklaces they used to have that looked like seashells and contained bubble-blowing liquid that reminded me of the Little Mermaid, which had come out around that time. Back then, it was the best place ever, and it never seemed weird to me that the puppet show was out of sync and the moonwalk was always broken whenever I was there.



But yeah, this looks exactly how I remember.

funereal

If you're Catholic, you can't get buried during Holy Week, we had the funeral yesterday and the wake the night before. I'm more morbid than some, but I can't stand funeral homes. I thought it'd be hard to see her in a casket but it looked so much unlike her, it didn't even seem real. I didn't tell too many people initially because I hate going to those places and I'd hate to drag other people to them.

Even though I haven't been Catholic for about 15 years, I still know all the words to the mass. It's strange how that sticks, even if I no longer remember when I'm supposed to kneel.

I was glad I got to see the extended family. When I get old I want to be like them, still able to get around and laugh. I look around at all of us and I see what I'll look like when I'm older. We all have the same eyes and the same weird sense of humor. My great uncles (her brothers) are joking about growing their cash crop marijuana in the vegetable garden back home and asking us how we can stand living in Cleveland with all these people around. I forget that for many of them, Canton's a thriving metropolis.

We all went out for Polish comfort food (stuffed cabbage, kielbasa, noodles,passed on the czernina (duck-blood soup) that was on special). I was tired and it was rainy so I was glad to get home.

other places

I was looking at some slideshow of photos that some journalist took of Cleveland on Time Magazine's website.



Sometimes it's hard to believe that this is what the rest of the world sees when they hear about my city. A place where entire streets are abandoned. But maybe it's just become what I'm used to. Slavic Village was starting to look this way ten years ago, when I was barely in my teens and me and my friend would sit on her porch and watch her neighbors deal crack.

It seems like there's hardly a street anywhere that doesn't have some place that is vacant and covered with plywood, and the black and white makes the starkness more evident.

The town where my grandma grew up in southern Ohio is getting to be that way. No one has lived in some of those places for years either. The kids aren't going to come back when they get older, and no one is going to move down there to revitalize it because the closest thing to city is St. Clairsville or Wheeling.

I sometimes wonder where all the people go. I guess it's out east or down south or out west. No one seems much happier out there, and I think about how impossible it is to sustain most of those places in the middle of the desert where the lawns are freakishly green like the water's going to last forever.

For those of us who are left, I wonder... Is it still a neighborhood if all the people are gone? When does it become a ghost town?

One of my friends grew up off of 105th and Superior. Another of my friends lives off St. Clair, around the corner from where my great-uncles used to hang out, where my dad was born, before they were part of the white flight exodus and scattered to places like Parma and Garfield.

We drove through his old neighborhood via East Boulevard, where there are truly beautiful homes overlooking the Cultural Gardens, but so many of these old houses have been unloved and neglected for years. There are so many, and we think about how many families grew up there, how people used to hang out in the parks. We wonder if it will ever be like that again.

We're blessed enough to still have employment, but we're in no position to move back into neighborhoods where our grandparents fell in love and reclaim them. We can't afford to. People from past generations tell us about the jobs in factories and downtown, but few of us have those.

Few of us have stability in our relationships, and even fewer of us can even think about kids or houses right now because most of the time we're treading water as it is. A lot of us are still living with our parents, splitting rent with housemates, because we don't have another alternative if we want to fight to stay.

progressions can't be made if we're separate forever

For some reason, the shooting earlier this week seems to have brought out the worst in people. I hear some of the dumbest racist comments by people who consider themselves oh so enlightened and liberal and it just makes me my skin crawl. I'm not so oblivious to think that people don't think this way, but I wasn't raised like this. It goes so much against my way of thinking and my way of life.

It seems like every three days someone is murdered on our streets but the only time anyone makes a big deal about it is when it happens to someone from the suburbs rather than some 17-year-old who lives on 79th and whatever. Suddenly everyone goes "that could be my child," but you know what? That could be anyone's kid who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time, whether or not they were doing the wrong thing.

I know that stereotypes often have some origination, but this kind of crap is so toxic to the way we live our lives and the culture of this city. Saying that everyone who lives on the east side is a "thug" is just as stupid as saying that everyone in Parma is racist or everyone in Lakewood is gay or that everyone in Westlake or Beachwood is stuck up. That's not going to get anyone anywhere.

When I first heard about Eric Holder's speech, I understood where he was coming from, but it does not reflect the reality of my life and the lives of many others that I know. Me and some of my east side dwelling friends joke about how we've ripped the space-time continuum because we cross over the river to hang out with each other and haven't let history or geography prevent us from having a good time.

It's a beautiful thing, and I wish people knew what they were missing out on when they knowingly isolate themselves.

where the streets have no name.

I spent my day off pretending that I really didn't have a cold, popping cough drops, drinking orange juice, and going out on photography adventures with Mukhtar. He had to work later on that day, but we hit up a few spots and got some good pictures.







Usually there's no one around when we go on adventures like these, just the occasional kids wandering around like us, but there seemed to be people everywhere this time around.

We encountered a wild dog, random vagrants, and shady junkyard creeps who assumed that my parked car was fair game ("oh I'm sorry... looked like a piece of junk to me") but that didn't stop us from taking some good photos and chilling at the West Side Market, sitting on the balcony enjoying falafel and spinach pies from Maha's.

I'm an amateur who can't afford crazy good equipment and considers the upgrade from disposable to digital something epic. But I get endless inspiration from this place where I've spent most of my life and I honestly get uncomfortable in areas where there aren't rusty bridges and old buildings and the possibility of undiscovered corners and small wonders.

a kitten named drama

I was driving home from work yesterday when I saw a car had crashed into the fence at the bottom of the hill on west 65th. There were three girls standing outside the wreck, none of whom looked old enough to drive, and one explained that their crackhead neighbor up the street got high and rear-ended them and driven off and they definitely did not want to call the police.

The one girl's mom shows up and they start cussing each other out. The mom threatens to beat her down but the girl says she'd better not because there's other people here, gesturing to me and the young mom with two kids in the car who stopped to be sure everything was okay. Her mom takes the keys and says she'll claim that she was the one who was driving and I go my separate way, realizing that my life is really not all that messed up.

Dropped off some food for the family of one of my kids last night. Met her dad and her older cousin Jamal who introduced us to his pet kitten named Drama because he says that he always has a little drama around him all the time.