golden dystopian

Friday night commiserations with sundry friends, philosophical meandering keeping us up til 2am before I drove back to the east side and wondered if the mix CD I made for him made any sense, considering most of it wasn't in English and the sequencing was somewhat idiosyncratic.

I've been walking so much the past couple days, the carnivalesque festivities of Parade the Circle with good people, wandering through the art museum seeing things anew yet also missing the Asian and Islamic art that's been AWOL for years now with the renovations, was mercifully bailed out from waiting for the trolley back to the west side by my old college roommate who worked the event. This is one of my favorite festivals in Clevelandia because I always like seeing what different ideas everyone comes up with every year.

 photos courtesy of the daily rag since I haven't gotten my shots off my camera yet.

A friend of mine calls me as I'm out walking on Sunday afternoon and we kill some time together before he goes to work, driving in his rusty car that makes him look like a "person of interest" despite his legal blank slate, listening to hip-hop, devouring Turkish food and he tells me tales of valet parking (Bruce Springsteen fans treat him the best, Young Jeezy fans were the worst) and of what he's reading in 1970s textbooks found in his grandma's basement.

I don't see much of him anymore and I miss the ease of the conversation and the laughter and the shared love of strange beauty, nature, and good tuneage and the mutual skepticism about the way the world is that comes from growing up around adults who harbored a distrust of the state in all its forms, though those in my world sometimes had memberships in the NRA and those in his were involved in the Black Panthers. He's a car guy and fascinated by machines at the air show but disconcerted by the blase attitude toward blowing things up. I remember us standing on top of an abandoned factory as warplanes roared overhead on Labor Day Weekend and the spooky feelings we got in that urban wasteland.

I head up to the garden to pull weeds and hang out, and I come home with a huge bag of strawberries and me and the lady across the street are picking mulberries off the tree in the back yard and I pick up more at the abandoned church around the corner to make some weird amalgam of granola and fruit cobbler like a good hippie. Some kids walk by and ask if they're edible, I hope the cop watching me isn't going to bust me for trespassing, and there's more berries than I know what to do with. It might be time to learn how to make wine.

I wake up at 1am this morning to the smell of burning and wander through the house looking for the source and realize that if there was an actual fire in there I'd be dead or aflame by now, and also that there's no smoke detectors in my apartment. Fun times. Someone on the bus tells me there was a fire a few blocks over, and when I get downtown there's helicopters in the square and while the press release talks about how it's "occupied" I feel a bit creeped out, like someday this kind of invasion for the week will be normal. Because nothing says Fighting The Man like glorifying the military industrial complex, you know...