To find a way to turn the signal back to heaven sounding blue

A detour off the ramp because the front end was dragging on the ground, trying to find a parking lot to examine the damage in a neighborhood of abandoned buildings and skeezy strip clubs, and everyone's cars look better than mine in the hood so The Local Kids were scoffing and the men in cadillacs disdaining at my duct tape repair job (incidentally Family Dollar sells the duct tape in the automotive section so there!), but we turned around and got to the museum where the Finster exhibit was everything I hoped for and more, paintings on mirrors with truck enamel, cheetahs as guardians of paradise, visions of spaceships and the towers of Planet Heaven, whimsical hellfire and brimstone, an exuberant and consistent strange vision part Flannery O'Connor, part William Blake.

We decided to make a day of our time down south of Clevelandia, and detoured through lands of strip malls that haven't changed since the 1960s to Grace Cathedral, home to the local toupeed televangelist who's gotten a bit senile in recent years, and despite scriptural admonitions about gluttony and greed, has a buffet and gift shop full of cornball crystal jewelry, sentimental tchotchkes, and shrinkwrapped tissues for when the sermon gets emotional I'm guessing.

I only had the giant camera, and said gift shop, buffet, and wax museum were closed and despite theoretically worshiping the same God, we probably looked more like snarky jaded heathens than actual acolytes, and so we headed north to Kent, land of bibliotheque school and frat party rioters extraordinaire.

Much of downtown has been torn down and redeveloped and while I'm generally not a fan of destroying old buildings, there's actually stuff downtown besides Bars for Bros and aging punk townies. The best burrito place ever satisfied our hunger, we ambled through sundry stores and then down to the river where the sunlight filtered through the trees,  the honeysuckle smelled incredibly good and there were teens being angsty under the overpass spraypainted with graffiti.

 (as I didn't get the pictures off the memory card, this photo is courtesy of someone on flickr)

We drove up through Ravenna, hometown of a certain singer, marveled at the signage and the proliferation of non-vacant storefronts and this strange sculpture on the children's elementary school playground.

 Someone's not Thinking Of The Children.

Drove back through the darkness and the heat lightning, spent the next day errand-running and filling out the garden with okra plants and mini pumpkins and hanging out at my favorite record store talking about literature and outsider art and listening to the Rolling Stones before heading up to the lake on Sunday to hang out with the family and sit alone on the breakwall in the darkness with the swirling of the waves like a Winslow Homer painting, to contemplate and re-examine some already existing sad things that swirled to the surface in the past couple of days that have left me a little wrecked and questioning every interaction and motivation. It's not that it isn't good, it's just that this growing up thing is really hard and painful. 

Akron calling

Wheelie bus in ten, an hour later I'll be on the way to Beautiful Akron Ohio, land of Devo and the Cramps and other weird folk, for the Howard Finster exhibit, and sundry other weirdness and opportunities for pithy social commentary and snark with the Queen of the Bondo. It's not every day yours truly gets to escape from Ye Olde Towering Slabbe, but I promised Randal pictures, and I need to occasionally leave the county or the state so this will satisfy the urge for now.

talking past each other

the following dialogue more or less took place in my car yesterday.  Sorry if it offends everyone.

If America doesn't vote Democrat this fall we're screwed! Romney's declared war on women!

Um... and Obama's declared war on everyone? We've been bombing Afghanistan and Libya and droning Yemen and Pakistan and fighting proxy drug wars in Mexico and Honduras!

But Romney wants to overturn Roe V. Wade, and he'll put Supreme Court justicies in to do that!

Ummm... that didn't happen under Bush, and probably won't ever happen. Both sides need that spectre to rally the masses against the other side while everyone's rights get trampled on (other person in this argument also forgets that I've got that whole weird pro-life Jesushead thing going on but I'm not even going to go there).

Imagine how bad it'll be when Romney takes away your rights!
 Lest we forget that a Democrat president has kept Gitmo open, Bradley Manning locked up,  signed NDAA (which was authored by McCain, but one didn't have to sign it), and also the whole cops beating the snot out of and intimidating protestors and laws being passed to make it really hard to exercise one's right to political expression. I'm just sayin'...

Why don't you care about women? They don't want you to get paid equally!

Well, considering that I'm already considered less worthy of equal pay for equal work being a single chick without a family to feed and there's ways to get around such things, I'm a little more concerned about human rights around the world as a whole at this point, not just white women who are employed.



But the Republicans are way worse!
Ummm, two sides of the same coin financed by the same super bankers and mega military industrial corporations. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.  Screw that, I'm voting third party this fall. 


Well you're throwing away your vote.
I'm sick of picking between the lesser of two evils every year and holding my nose. Stalin was all "yay women" but killed 40 million people. Hitler picked on only certain groups and killed 6 million. Both of them were awful evil people whose ideology meant misery for anyone not on their side. Is one less evil than the other? If I lived in Poland in 1940, couldn't I just not pick either?

Also, I'm sick of the War on Terror and the War on Drugs. Both sides are perpetuating this. It's not like I have that much faith in libertarians but at least Gary Johnson doesn't care what you do in your bedroom or with the cannabis plants on your porch and wants to get the hell out of these countries. And he won't win so he won't screw anything up and I'll feel like I have less blood on my hands than I do right now. This whole process is stupid anyway and I don't want to play this game anymore.

Silence.

all I wanted was a day off

Sometimes I try to do things
And it just doesn't work out the way I want it to
And I get real frustrated, and like I try hard to do it,
And I take my time, but it just doesn't work out the way I want it to
It's like I concentrate on it real hard
But it just doesn't work out
And everything I do and everything I try
It never turns out, it's like, I need time to figure these things out

 and it was stupid of me to forget about three-day-barbecue holiday weekends, because I want to get down to Akron for that Finster art exhibit and maybe hit up the wax museum of the local televangelist and some weird flea markets and that fabulous burrito place in Kent, but everyone and their mom wants the day off too, and despite clearing it with the usual parties, others still deservedly enveloped in a golden glow of newfound domestic bliss have inadvertently left me possibly stuck covering the office where the phone will probably not even ring instead of documenting the absurdity south of the borders of Clevelandia.

Maybe it'll all work out, but right now it's not, and, well, it gets old to be doing the right thing and always feel like I'm getting shortchanged and stiffed, hitting the glass ceiling, being told I should be thankful for the pittance thrown my way.

First world problems, rust world problems, whatever. It gets frustrating to feel so stuck. I shouldn't complain, especially since I've got the best fellow peons one could ask for and work that is consistently meaningful and interesting, but the dynamics above all that, the absurdity of middle management and the stupidity of my city and country, it really starts to get me down.

the voice of many waters

Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the Almighty? They are higher than the heavens above—what can you do? They are deeper than the depths below —what can you know? Their measure is longer than the earth and wider than the sea.

  One of the strange silver linings of living in a dying town is even the peons have access to cheap rent within walking distance of the lake. It is true that most of our lakefront is cut off by highways and salt mines and the homes of the affluent, but to have the simple primal pleasure of being near rocks and water, it is there, and we make use of it. It keeps us alive, keeps us from killing ourselves, lets us clear our heads. Is it some kind of thing wired in us to love rivers, oceans, lakes, to live near them, to drink and baptize and immerse, because they are our lifeblood, we would die without what they give.

The rational side of my weird brain knows that these moments of extra intense melancholia have their reasons and that they'll pass, that feelings and reality are not always congruent, and so I let the waterworks dry up and went to the park where the rocks and water are, and walked down, navigating the concrete breakers and the scrubby trees growing between the boulders that keep the shoreline from washing away.

I try not to think of all the people who used to come down here with me, all the memory of this place,  I try not to think of the occasionally encroaching loneliness that hovers closer like a bird of prey each year.

The waves were too high to walk across to the beach of pebbles beneath the cliffs so I made my way to a flat rock not completely soaked by water, far enough to not infringe upon someone doing the same thing. And I sat there for a couple hours at least, in non-yogic quiet meditation, silently pouring out my soul to the creator of all this beauty, seeking some kind of oneness with indescribable longing, with the waves breaking and the water undulating through watering the deep green moss on the sides of the rock where I perched, taking a break only to grab a sweater out of the car as the sun sank lower and changed from orange to pink.

The water in this lake may be dirty, and I haven't swam in it since I was in my teens, but there was this cathartic cleansing in the moment, of the sense of smallness of one's self and one's inner drama in the face of elementals that made me realize I should seek out this place and others like it much more than I do.

Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.

I walked up to the top of the hill to watch the swollen pink sun sink into the violet waters, with the sounds of the birds and the sweet smell from the honey locust trees, we were all enraptured by the newest installation of the endless cycle, the teenage girl scrawling in a notebook, the Muslim family on the park bench, the dead ringer for latter-day Kerry King, the couple with the big hair and the couple embracing on the breakwall, and the old man on his night walk. As the light vanished, we walked back to our cars, back to the neighborhood, experiencing some small moment of transcendence.

For the grace of the presence, be grateful.
Touch the cloth of the robe,
but do not pull it toward you,
or like an arrow it will leave the bow.

Images. Presence plays with form,
fleeing and hiding as the sky does in water,
now one place, now nowhere.

Imagination cannot contain the absolute.
These poems are elusive
because the presence is.

I love the rose that is not a rose,
but the second I try to speak it, any name
for God becomes so-and-so, and vanishes.

What you thought to draw lifts off the paper,
as what you love slips from your heart.

 - rumi

things

times when the words would bleed too much so the songs of others speak instead.

carnivalesque

Summer in Clevelandia officially begins with the first of the street fairs and festivals all over the city and last night, me and one of my fellow Parmastanis made a pilgrimage out to the Hessler fair to meet up with sundry folk and mingle with the tiedyed masses fighting the conformity of The Man by engaging in overpriced capitalism of another kind, as we observed the sartorial performance art of art school kids and boomers clinging to their glory days, busking musicians, and the kind of beat-writer inspired poetry that will be eternally terrible. It's strange to me that the more "leftward" I've swung politically (as far as being fed up with the whole perpetual warfare goonsquadery both at home and abroad), the less patience I have for the Lennonistas and their ilk.

It was hard to not openly chortle at the Che Guevara crepe paper festooning one of the booths, considering that the jerkface who got iconic by being good-looking had no use for arty folk or gay people in his concept of revolucion and what's more capitalistic ultimately than $10 parking (we parked down the street and walked), overpriced (vegan) fair food and $40 batik skirts? But I digress. After all, I've sold out as it is and was disappointed in the lack of Jamaican chicken and rice and ended up eating one of my friends' couscous plate because he didn't like it.

I'm also convinced that afrobeat will eventually undergo the transformation into cracker party music the way ska did in the 1980's and especially the 90's, because it takes a legitimate and often political black music form with an intense sociopolitical history that you can co-opt to make party music with all of your nerdy friends from marching band. Mark my words, you heard it here first.
 

That being said, I had a good time hanging out and such, drove back through Parmastan to drop off my traveling companion and continue the conversations that we usually have, and then drove home under sunsetting skies, made peace in the garden with relevant parties, drank tea and watched Buffy with the cat.  It was a good weekend, and much harder to come back to the routine when the sun and the breeze just feels so perfect.