long gone day

Melancholia cured by tea and time, of sitting on the porch in the old almost-hood and wandering the streets of the city, routine can cure so many ills, as do the joys of conversation with those whose company I like, the purring of the cat next to me on the pillow, good books and some incomprehensible divine grace.

There are straunge folk afoot with the changing of seasons and such, scowling at the creep doing the eye-rape because there's no other way to combat lecherous gaze and pass-making without getting written up especially since the race card will inevitably get played, wondering how the hell all these people who are supposed to be helping the down and out seem to be in need of mental help themselves, if not for being crazy, then for having no heart whatsoever. Such eternal questions of existence may remain unanswered until the end of time like the ones that I constantly scream to God on the days when nothing makes sense and only the logic of some updated queen-free great chain of being seems to hold my view of the universe together.


And Layne Staley would have been 45 today, so of course an Alice posting is mandatory. All of you except Randal are probably rolling your collective eyes but dayum those harmonies were swank, and they've yet to be co-opted into any voice-of-a-generation hipster thing. Mad Season's one-off and Dirt are desert island discs, Jar of Flies too. I love it all.

One of my britpop loving friends referred to them as 'Camaro Rock' and she's not entirely wrong. But yeah, no apologies, no guilty pleasures here, sheer enjoyment maybe.

 I was too young to remember when grunge was cool, never did the flowered dresses or the floppy hats, being too young and hand-me-down dweeby as it was, and the unfortunately gigantic baggy jeans and t-shirts gave way to skinnier jeans and longer skirts still mostly black, but more bibliotheque gothique than displaced Portlandia.

 I get leery at burgeoning cultural zeitgeist nostalgia for things I love without apology, like grunge and rusty smokestacks and overgrown teenage angst and slackitude that befits this region I call home. I can't wait til everyone moves on from rust belt chic, because I love this stuff out of familiarity and comfort with my low station in life and its attendant trappings rather than a kitschy aesthetic of ironic quaintness.

I can't get condescending about the taste of other folks anymore, because of what I like, and because I know that most of my fellow rust belt denizens are wearing Affliction instead of vintage bowling shirts, and that they like Bon Jovi unironically and watch a lot of sports and drink non-artisan beer and while none of these are my thing, there's nothing really wrong with that. It's stupid to be a snob when you're the butt of everyone else's jokes and you just look more insecure. What we're all respectively into might not do it for others, but that was never the point as it was.

When it's all worn out, I'd rather go without...

I don't know if it was something I did or something I said except for maybe blurting out in a conversation among many of us that I wasn't sure I felt at this point like I was wanting to be tied down to anyone currently in my world, that I'm still trying to sort through all the feelings of prior losses, but since then the communication has lapsed completely, and in one way maybe it's a relief, and in another I wonder how many other things I inevitably implode with verbiage, but then I wasn't sure what to feel if anything, there were so many unsureties all the way around, attempting to figure out how to conform to norms and relationals that make me skittish by default. Not so much a breakup or a bang but a whimper and I still say this is better.

think about the things I said, read these pages cold and dead...

Attempts at highway driving foiled by accidents and sundry, somehow ended up traveling to Parmastan via the route of white flight down Broadway, past sokols and social halls and pawnshops, old churches with decaying facades, through the parts of Clevelandia I rarely traverse, the sun and the trees making even the lands of crack and foreclosed homes and things-falling-apart for decades still look strangely beautiful.

There are so many people at my parents' house, cousins and uncles and old friends who have taken on the status of cousins and uncles. I find I don't have much to say to anyone, not because of anyone's fault, but that's just how it is this time, so I play with the nephew and look through old photos culled from my great-uncles house and mingle my way through and try to keep in check my own weird opinions on things, because I know there's no point in debating when certain people are so ensconced in suburbia that it's obviously one's own fault if they can't find a good-paying job because they're lazy.

I don't even know what to say to this because I think of all my friends with degrees who did everything the way they were supposed to, and sure, the unemployment rate might not have changed all that much, but everyone, including yours truly is working, but underemployed by the standards of older generations who had jobs or prospects lined up within months of graduation. I was one of the lucky ones but I couldn't raise kids or buy a house on what I make, while my friends are living at home or with multiple roommates, paying down student loans stringing together part-time gigs in food service or second shift at the gas station or the group home, looking into beauty school or the Peace Corps because what else is there? There are slackers in every generation, but just because someone isn't able to afford two cars and a home in the exurbs doesn't mean they're failures either.

But the night is beautiful, and I listen to Jar of Flies, harmonizing to the vocal lines, howling along because no one can hear me except God, these streets are so empty, until I get back to my neighborhood where the punks are watching the police cars fly down the road blue and read. These songs are familiar and uncomplicated, comforting in their warmth and resignation and brilliant flashes of hope in the bleakness.Everything feels tired, it's just the beginning of summer...

dirt

Once upon a time, my parents were aspiring back to the landers, in keeping with the ancestry of peasantry on both sides. They still have books in the basement about living on a few acres and cooking while using a minimum of the world's resources. We never took vacations to big cities, and always ended up hiking in the metroparks or in the middle of nowhere somewhere in the mountains along the eastern half of the country when we weren't going to something "historical."


My mom spent the 1970s in southern Ohio exploring the wilderness, excavating Hopewell burial mounds, and teaching kids at summer camps about building fires and what to eat in the wild. I still know the names of most of the wildflowers and what parts can be used for what. It was a long time before I realized that most of my peers weren't into this kind of thing, that knowing things like constellations and herbal lore were deemed a bit weird so I kept most of this to myself, though I know I don't know enough to keep me sustained in the hypothetical wilderness that's nonexistent in Clevelandia.

It's said that we become our parents, and I inherited my dad's enthusiasm for loud tunes and my mom's love of Brit-lit and nature. Having come late to the Foxfire party, which is currently fascinating me to no end, because being a city slicker, I probably won't be building my very own log cabin or having to learn how to skin a rabbit, but to know what's edible, how to make my own booze, what corners to cut, how to make do, and in the event of something crazy, have some idea of what to do. My mom's amused by my interest in this stuff and it seems that her collection of Foxfire books ended up in a Goodwill box at least a couple of decades ago, so I'm hoping that I can scrounge some copies up somewhere, because this is how the people before me just a few generations lived, and we in the city often look down on those who have way more practical knowledge than we do.

I spent most of yesterday in the cool sun mixing humus with compost and beads of sulfur to plant berry bushes along the railroad tracks, throw down more seeds and spend time with the neighbors, crushing leaves of lemon balm, lavender, and thyme between my fingers for the pleasure of the smell.  coming home with dirty hands and dusty jeans, the adrenaline of accomplishment fueling endeavors on the back porch, where I filled the strawberry pot with tiny plants with big roots, looking forward to when there will be greenery rather than plastic containers filled with dirt.

One of my friends once pointed out that The Kids are now emulating the 1970's in the very worst way, and I guess the ersatz environmentalism of wearing "green " products while disposing of last year's iPhone for the newest model and the newest after that is the equivalent of gas guzzling volkswagen busses for road trips now unaffordable to the average kid working part-time and polyester muumuus with floral prints adopting an air of bohemian and natural but uncomfortably synthetic. My sister has lots of save the earth and World Wildlife Fund slogans plastered to her walls but leaves the space heater on the whole day and the ceiling fan running while she's gone and tells me I'm a control freak for turning lights off in rooms that I'm not in. Then again, she's never paid a utility bill and I do.

slow suicide's no way to go...

I can't believe he's dead!
Dude, you knew it was going to happen sometime. 

The Internets waxes poetic about Kurt Cobain, who will probably be viewed by the Kids of the Future with the same eye-rolling that accompanies Bob Dylan hagiography. It's cool to like grunge again I guess, now that the second-rate Vedders have been replaced by hipster-lites and Eddie's playing a ukulele instead of trying to be all about women's issues, and the kids who may or may not have listened to In Utero are snatching up fake vintage Nirvana shirts at Urban Outfitters and Topshop. This doesn't bother me much, since it was already marketed once and I came along to this in a time when it wasn't very cool.

I was ten years old when Kurt died, and I don't remember much, except that other people died too, like Biggie, Tupac, and Shannon Hoon. . The girl down the street that I rode bikes to the pool with had an older brother who had friends with long hair and black t-shirts who skateboarded and shoplifted and were listening to Dirt. They scared me and the cover looked freaky too and it sounded disturbing and messed up. I guess it kind of is. My love affair with heroin addicts with ethereally spooky harmonies and riffs that straddled that gap between the Sunset Strip and Seattle would come much later.

Fast forward five years, I didn't realize that my dad was into this "alternative rock" thing that seemed scary to my sheltered and uninterested ears and that these songs on the radio that spoke to a generation of middle schoolers who didn't know very much about heroin except that DARE said it was bad, failed to generate any memories until much later on, around the time I was 15 and suddenly things like God and rock and or roll went from being background noise to powerful entities in my subconscious and expression. I learned how to play "Heaven Beside You" from one of his old guitar magazines, and remember hearing it for the first time on the radio. It was storming and the swirling guitars in the coda and the blueness of the world just crystallized in this moment of father-daughter bonding.

I found that the 'scary kids' that seemed so intimidating were the people that tended to accept me and the splashy hand-me-downs of dorkness and florals gave way to an increasingly dark-toned wardrobe, baggy jeans and my dad's national guard army green pants hanging loose on my skinny frame and bony hips, baggy, often-black t-shirts from the thrift store, hair grown long like Jerry Cantrell's out of slackerness more than any fashion statement, heavy chain around my neck, converse all-stars that were once still a badge of subcultural tendencies, and one didn't have to try too hard.

I was smuggling home CDs from the library I worked at stashed in my backpack because while this was stuff my dad liked, it was something that would cause my mom to be even more concerned than she was, and these songs were reserved for times when no one was home and I'd run downstairs to turn off the stereo when I heard the garage door open. Someone stole 'Dirt' so I had to content myself with the self-titled, MTV Unplugged, and a greatest hits compilation no doubt to fulfill some recording contract. Some of my former bandmates gave me a hard time for still liking this band that they were "so over" by now, but they were into the Goo Goo Dolls so what did they know.

While we were waiting for our parents to pick us up my senior year, a skinny kid with long hair who looked like a dead ringer for Bender from the Breakfast Club asked me if I was into Nirvana because of those tattered black low-tops with the glitter and scribbles. Like me, he was an oddball among oddballs, a straight-and-narrow who grew up Catholic and still believed in something, reverberating to the tunes of stoners, junkies and freaks who waxed poetic over those otherworldly harmonies.

Our group of miscreants sat around outside, cut class at the community college where no one took attendance and you were still allowed to smoke, and no one had a social networking site outside of livejournal or a cell phone. It sounds utopian to say that it was a refuge for us weirdos of various stripes, because there was always some drama or other, but when Layne died, he came to school dressed in the usual flannels, a stocking cap with a blond wig, and a backpatch on his denim jacket vowing that we'd never forget. We cried in the basement next to the vending machines as the TV showed reruns of Sabrina the Teenage Witch and ended up bored at prom a few months later yelling out requests for Slayer. We're still friends to this day. Teenage angst has paid off well,I guess.

My first year of college was socially isolating and profoundly lonely, but my next door neighbor in the dorms grew up on the same records as me, and I did a painting with a bunch of little squares of Kurt Cobain and no one there knew who he was because it was a small town and somewhat conservative. Who's that guy and why's he wearing eyeliner? This painting hung in every house I lived in until I moved home.

I transferred schools and found that my beloved grunge figureheads made for great art-making music and my roommate and I would make trips to the Record Exchange in Canton for bargain bin CDs. I ended up with her Meat Puppets album and her copy of Jar of Flies that she didn't listen to much anymore. When we rented the church building that used to belong to the local fundie cult and began painting and cleaning it up, that album was in constant rotation along with Paul's Boutique and Nothing's Shocking.  My pastor remembers sitting in a cold apartment in Pittsburgh listening to Dirt as snow blew through a hole in the roof.  

What was once an adolescent subculture that involved the littlest sartorial effort is still my comfort music, my bad day music, my driving around with the windows down music, my cartharsis and creative fuel. I still wear the tattered jeans and flannels and black t-shirts around the house, though having to go and get a Real Office Job means that I've carried over the almost-monochrome to the world of academic peonage. My fellow peon and homie in all things literate and heavy Randal's writeup is pretty damn good, by the way, though he'd probably say otherwise. 

I've found that Alice has stuck with me way more than I thought it would, and Mad Season is definitely on my desert island disc list and makes me cry sometimes when I think about what could have been. I still want to ask God someday why Layne is dead and Dave Navarro is still alive.