summer coda

My weekend began with an unexpected dinner on the back porch, with my roommate's family and some other friends downing Ethiopian-spiced spaghetti, injera, and curry.

Since the nights are finally cool and the evening was already feeling festive, we got out the fire pit and roasted marshmallows, and invited the little punks who run around the neighborhood over where they proceeded to be hilarious in the way that only middle school kids can be, pretending to be older than they obviously are and trying to talk up my roommate's sister who responds, "what are you, like 12 or something?" which they are.

Saturday was a weird day with a lot of random errands, the general frustration of the earlier post, and existential spiritual questions being pondered by candlelight in my kitchen over cups of citrus tea, but Sunday was full of art-making and east side adventuring with the partner in crime.

We had originally planned on going in search of Jamaican food but every single place we drove by was closed, so we called Joe, the source of all knowledge of directions, interesting places, diners, and dives, and he sent us to "Everything and Then Some," a soul food spot in East Cleveland.

The sun was so perfect and golden and everything was chill, we were singing along to the Fugees and driving down Euclid past cheap motels, storefront churches, corner stores with handpainted signs and silver Cadillacs parked out front.



We finally found it, across from the I Have A Dream Cafe and the Superfly Barber Shop, and as promised, it was so good even if I did get the side-eye from every woman there.

"They think you're another girl stealing their men..." "Little do they know the ugly truth that we're just friends..."

(photo courtesy of ClevelandSGS)

Totally satisfied with our greens, sweet potatoes, and cornbread, we went to my new favorite lakefront spot at Villa Angela (thanks Bridget!) and lay on the rocks by the water listening to music, talking, drifting in and out of sleep as the lake breeze rustled the cottonwood trees above us. and then walked up the beach taking photos of the rocks, the sand, and the people before heading back to the west side.

I can't believe this summer has gone so quickly. It's been absolutely crazy and incredibly beautiful in so many unexpected ways. School's back in session and I'm wondering if I should bother with this creative writing class I'm signed up for because when it's nice out like this I just don't have the time to be inside watching plays or people read poetry, I want to be doing my own creating.

crying out in the wilderness

As I've mentioned before, I was Catholic until I was about ten years old, and since then I've been hurtling through various strains of what might be defined as the American evangelical movement. I started really believing around the time it seems that almost everyone around me stopped thinking it meant anything and I'd run into friends from way back when who say "you still believe in that organized religion stuff?"

And I do.

I'm thankful that I have the Nicene creed burned into my memory, that I grew up raised with the whole idea of loving God with one's heart, soul, mind, and strength, where it was okay to ask questions and deal with hard answers in a search for truth.

I hear people say "I stopped believing in God when I look at the people that believe in him" is like saying a band sucks because you don't like the fans. Yes, they might sometimes be losers, but that has nothing to do with it.

And thus I have no patience for bishops who say that congregants will be excommunicated for meeting on their own after a church has closed. Who is any mere mortal to say that when it is between God and each individual?

I don't have much patience with the culture warriors on either side and the dominionistic attitudes of both. If we revert back to the nonexistent past when everyone "had values," how good is that, and it's not realistic. People were just as bad then as they are now, it was just that certain things weren't talked about.

And even if we all "fought poverty," lived communally, and bought fair trade coffee, that would not end the power struggles and global conflict that have plagued this planet for thousands of years, only now instead of spears and knives, it's "smart bombs" and kalashnikovs.

I don't even want to talk about this whole "Ground Zero Mosque" thing. Yes, you can't build a church in Saudi Arabia and you can't go to Mecca if you're not Muslim. Whatever. I really don't care where people build their houses of worship and the thing isn't probably going to happen anyway.

Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin don't speak for me. I don't understand how so many people talk about this guy who's a Mormon who believes in all sorts of weird things and is raking in loads of cash by antagonizing and stoking the fires of fear and paranoia. But when I went to DC in '06 with some friends and ended up on the Mall, I saw the same arrogance in Brian Mclaren and Jim Wallis as a church service became a political statement saying "we care more than George Bush does" rather than a sacred act of communing with God in the presence of each other. So often we become like those we criticize and cannot see it.

I love that among the closest followers of Christ, there was Matthew, who worked for a corrupt and bloated government that made a fortune off of ripping off the powerless and Simon who had spent most of his time trying to overthrow that same government. Both of them left where they were in life to follow, though I'm sure they had arguments about "the system" too. But that ceased to matter because of the transcendence of who God is.

I can't stand all these other things we do that we say are "of God" and are justified by scriptures taken out of context that usually amount to social control and also the occasional session of something resembling group therapy with a religious veneer. This is such a waste of time, and I have no shame in saying that I have walked out when I've realized this more times than I could count.

I can't deal with leaders who talk mostly about themselves and their personal views on things that have nothing to do with their Creator but they claim that it does. And when I or someone else speaks up and says, "Hey! There's something wrong here!" we are ignored, shouted down, claimed to be unholy for questioning, claimed to be judgmental or critical, told we "don't care" about good American values or morals, or "don't care" about the poor. It's easy to end on that because it's so severe and so absurdly not true.

But we need critical thinking. God asks for us to trust Him, but He also tells us to be discerning of those who speak in His name.

I crave truth, and with that I crave love. Truth spoken without love can often be so cruel and unfeeling, but love without truth is lethal because it says everything is okay when it's not.

I'm a dying breed who still believes...

"How are you?"

"I'm ok."

Ok meaning, "I really don't want to tell you that I'm exhausted, frustrated, overwhelmed, discouraged, burned out, in need of a vacation but there's nowhere to go and no one to go with and because I feel like a bother to everyone."

"You're always smiling."

Smiling because despite the depths of despair I find myself in, I know that God is good. But it's easy and takes less face muscles to do and goes a lot further when dealing with others, especially feeling precarious in this unfriendly world. Don't look at my eyes which would show that I may or may not have been crying about 10 minutes ago. Thankful for glasses to hide that fact.



"Nothing seems to faze you. You're so chill."

Depends on what it is. But there are things that do keep me up at night.

It's easy to keep myself running and running so I can just fall asleep and not spend too much time getting tangled in my own thoughts and things that make me nervy, that my dad isn't doing as well as we thought, the stress of dealing with arrogant people who think they're better than you because they have letters after their names, the whole messiness that is writer's block when I need my creativity to thrive and survive.

Then there's the whole messiness of my own human frailty and that of others, which always generates friction, knowing that I'm going to have to go through the new roommate process all over again when my amazing current housemate finally gets to pursue what she truly loves to do in a country very far away. The concept of flying solo scares me, especially living in a first floor apartment in a sometimes sketchy neighborhood. I have options, that's not the thing, there are so many others in my position trying to get by. It's the always running, always moving, always feeling so vulnerable, learning not to cling to anything too tightly.

I know things always seem to work out, but everything all at once is too much.

Stone Temple Pilots / Scott Weiland Comedy and Laser Spectacular

I planned to get a crew together to relive our middle school musical years by going down to the usual spot to check out the Stone Temple Pilots, but it ended up just being me & Vanessa for the musical tailgating adventures. A terrible local band played before Cage the Elephant, and we watched various characters debate the best way to hop the fence, while a lot of people who looked like they were in their 30s filed in below us.

One guy gets in by wearing scrubs and saying he's part of the EMS crew but he got kicked out, and then a ghostly pale older metalhead guy in a black cutoff t-shirt started talking to us about "killer songs," Salvador Dali, Alice Cooper, "The Man,"("the cops are always hassling the hippies and the artists, the poets and the freaks. tryin' to keep us down maaan..." and so on.

People are serious about this tailgating thing. There were lawn chairs, minivans with the backs opened up, coolers of beer. The cops would drive by or perch on top the hill above with binoculars and while this wouldn't have bothered me before, the sight of the blue and white cars makes me jumpy but they didn't bother anyone.

Evidently there were hundreds of people down here for 311 ("They come through every year") and there was a great crew for Slayer earlier this summer and some of the guys are regulars and come down here for everything but were especially saddened that it rained during REO Speedwagon the night before. I'm thinking about coming down again for "Fake Sublime" in two weeks just for the people-watching awesomeness that could ensue.



I forgot how many of those songs were in constant rotation on the radio when I was in high school even though by then they were getting close to a decade old. They were one of those bands that really wasn't held in the same regard as others, but seemed to have some kind of universal appeal in the burbs. One of the girls in my English class in 7th grade explicated on "Lady Picture Show" and another friend of mine used to bellow "STONE TEMPLE ROCKS" at inopportune moments, and my dad was a big fan of "Interstate Love Song."

The light show alternated between being interesting and having that look of those Windows Media Player visualizations with names like "Vortex" or something someone's kid did in Photoshop and often made no sense whatsoever. Scott Weiland's weird white boy dancing and stage banter was absurd as only a recovering 90s junkie can be ("and, uh, this song, is like, off of Purple. I think you know it... Uh, yeah, we actually practiced our songs again before, uh, going out on the road... yeah Cleveland, like those were the best years of my life.." and they played all the hits and a few I didn't expect (though I would've loved a few more off "Tiny Music"), like their cover of "Dancing Days" that I've always loved.





And I enjoyed the crowd of bros and their lady friends watching the show with us, and the odd ones that showed up too, like the quiet guy in khakis and sperry topsiders who showed up by himself and knew all the words to "Dead and Bloated," and the couple slow dancing on the bed of a red pickup truck to "Plush."

It felt like such a Cleveland night, with the strange mix of characters hanging out in a barbed wire parking lot in the industrial part of town looking down across the valley to the stage singing all the songs and clapping and saying "no way in hell I'm paying $60 for that show" while singing lyrics that don't make a whole lot of sense in a totally unironic way.

bad music Friday

So along with the Best of the Blotter, this might become a new thing.

The previous DJ before me gets ahold of some pretty bad stuff in his "Make It or Break It" segment and I got to come in to the terrible terribleness that is 50 Tyson, who looks and sounds like if 50 Cent and Mike Tyson had a baby together. And, he's born to be a ballplayer evidently.



Also, for the metalheads and rock and/or rollers, we have possibly the worst Guns & Roses cover ever.



Also, we had a debate earlier this week at work over which song is worse: weigh in on this one please, dear readers...

things that don't mean much to me.

"Why aren't you married?"
"Don't you want to 'move up?''
"You could've been anything you wanted, and you chose to do this?"
"You've got this degree and you deserve more."
"You don't want to buy a house?"
"Don't you want to get another degree? You know, there's other fields out there where the money is."
"You should be hanging out with different people, ones that are going somewhere."

Everybody's got their own ideas about how one is supposed to live their life. Usually this corresponds to what they did, and what they value, and how they measure the worth of others.

Some of these life decisions are beyond my control. Others are things that don't mean much to me. To get married involves having someone around worth getting married to, buying a house means work and responsibility that I can't handle myself and the prospect of being stuck with crazy neighbors and not being able to get away from them.

If I was into making money and moving up, I wouldn't be living here. I would have gone to law school or med school or some prestigious place to get a PhD in something rather than going to library school at a state university. I would have moved to a bigger city with richer people and honestly that's not my bent.

I have friends who've left, who've looked down on those who stay as provincial and backward, who talk about how I need to expand my world and be somewhere that's more interesting and diverse. And I would love to see other places someday, but looking at what they do and who they hang out with, it's exclusively with other white upwardly mobile professional people who live in the same neighborhood who maybe like ethnic food or something.

I'd rather stay in my peon status because for me it means freedom. It means that I bring no work home with me, that I have enough to pay my rent and my bills and have a little fun once in awhile. It's given me time and opportunity to enroll in art classes without the pressure of grades or academic politics, to learn how to take pictures and play the drums and learn Swahili and hang out with people who inspire me and whose company I enjoy.

I don't pick my friends based on social class or what connections they have. The people I hang out with and make an effort to see are the ones I enjoy. My job is a means to these ends, I enjoy it and even find it meaningful, but it's not what I define myself by.

And until I can see some other parts of the world, the world has come to me. I can dance to bhangra, Lebanese pop, Americana, salsa, hip-hop, or Jamaican dancehall when I want to, share meals and drinks with neighbors from all over the world, hit up any number of street festivals, art openings or live music venues if I want my "culture," and hang out with my great crew of people that I've found since I moved back here.

I don't know what this weekend holds, if I'll hang out with my roommate and her people tonight or end up at Compound Fest or check out someplace new... it's so weird to have so many options.

I learned the hard way...

We met up for dinner and walked down to the Rock Hall to see Sharon Jones, and while the acoustics of the venue weren't exactly ideal, she puts on a great show and it sounded great, I had some of the best company I could ask for and was immensely entertained by the phenomenon of White People Who Think They're Groovy Dancers of which there were many. My friends' grandma came along also and she had a great time, even taking us up to the front of the stage with her for the encore, smiling at the security as they moved aside the velvet rope for us.

I had so much respect watching her and thinking of all of us who know that we've got some serious gifts and go through life being told we're not good enough that we're too short or too tall or don't have the "right look" and go on with daily life and then, after the longest time, someone finally gets it and those gifts are appreciated and shared with the world.

I love the song below because this has been the complaint of almost every girl I know who feels like less of herself because of the way that the eyes of her companion wander. One of my friends who went through a particularly nasty breakup said this song articulated everything she felt and made her feel somehow less alone. To hear a singer telling women they don't have to settle and for men to appreciate the good thing they've got is something so rare and it was just this awesome thing.



There was a spectacular fireworks show going on at the ballpark, so we drove over the bridge to Tremont singing along to the Police to watch the rest of it and did our usual late night pancakes and coffee having decided that we were too sleepy for meteor showers and afterparties.

The rest of the weekend was family from out of town and the usual suspects and my lack of sleep catching up with me. I took a nap between my show and work this morning in the breakroom and I'm hoping that the coffee is strong today, because I'm going to need it.

The rest of the weekend I took pretty slow, hanging out with the family in from out of town, the usual suspects, working on photos, not sleeping, and now I'm trying to figure out how to catch up on that when the summer's ending and I just want to stay up all night.