for ten long years

After the tempest of the local newsrag's misgendering of a murder victim, a subsequent arrest for that, I think I used to ride the same bus as that kid, and I don't know what the semantics are but no one should die like that. Not to excuse our newsrag, but given the way things are on their way out, I don't expect good journalism and find myself reading the Guardian for the local news stories these days.They've got the best coverage here.

And then this whole thing, which I saw on CNN when my Internet was acting wonky. I remember when those girls disappeared, and thought it was probably the same person. facebook wasn't even working I think there were so many Clevelandians collectively freaking out and rejoicing that these girls who've been missing and presumed dead the last ten years were found alive.

 I know that neighborhood, I live a few blocks north and slightly west of where they were found, almost two blocks north exactly of where they disappeared. My friend used to work at the auto parts store across from where the one girl got kidnapped and always worried about me being over there.  I've probably driven by that house, and that gives me chills. And of course there's the usual ignorant folk who make fun of the local color but screw them. These folks are pretty much my neighbors, the people I go to church with, the people I rub shoulders with at the grocery store. The Queen of the Bondo points out that if the guy below was walking on the same street as most of these people calling him a hero, they'd probably avoid him. That being said, mad props to him.

I can't even begin to comprehend the horror and disbelief. I just can't process the emotions of being glad they're alive, hoping that they recover from the hell of the last decade, frustration at a city's law enforcement who seems more concerned about generating city revenue than protecting vulnerable people. A couple years ago we found out 12 women were rotting in someone's house, this year it's three women being imprisoned in someone's basement for ten years. What the hell. And it seems like the neighbors did call the police but nothing was really ever done. This makes me so angry.

And then I wonder how many other situations are like this, and how many other times we've called the police and nothing's been done. I can think of at least two times when this has happened in my world, and then that other time when that girl's body was dumped on the side of the highway and the cops couldn't get bothered to look. 

We live in a city where human life is devalued, where the response time and whether or not you're taken seriously when you call for help depends on which neighborhood you're in, where new developments are built downtown while neglected neighborhoods continue to deteriorate because they're not gentrified, where police fire 137 shots at an unarmed car, where people would rather talk about condos than schools, where we close schools and build more prisons, where bike lanes are more important than safe places for kids to play, where women go missing all the time, where rape is a regular thing, where the infant mortality rates across the street from said hospital are comparable to third-world countries. I could go on here, but it makes me sick to think about.

I am happy for these girls, I am happy to see people come together to rejoice that what's lost is found, but this place, I can't even describe how I feel.

a new kind of sameness

So I've been trying to figure out why I get a little bothered at the whole gentrification new urbanista movement people, because yeah, cities that actually work with viable transportation options and relatively safe streets and whatnot are good things, but the general attitude sometimes gets a little grating, kind of the secular reverse of the people I grew up with who somehow thought they were more virtuous because they lived in the country because that's where real life and the good people were.

I shouldn't be so hard on them, because I had my time when youthful idealism was tempered by the realities of the occasional driveby shooting, the hookers on the corner, getting hollered at from every other front porch and having invasive comments made about the color of my lady parts, having to pick routes to places based on which corners were sketchy.

Even if the neighborhood is walkable and there's lots of places where people go out to eat, the population has never been dense enough that I felt safe walking alone after sunset. There were vast swaths of dead zones between one area of development and another, and enough robberies and rapes within a few blocks of me, and a drive-by shooting two doors down that it only cemented a fortress mentality on my part that I'm only beginning to shake myself free of. It's what happens when you live alone and you get accosted for bunga-bunga when you're in your driveway and it's painfully obvious that there's no one looking out for you.


In conversation the other night with some friends who still live over there, we were wrestling with the implications raised by a block club meeting one of them attended where the local folks and the development corporation locked horns over what to do with a stretch of streetscape. I've always kind of liked the way it looked, with the handpainted signage and the little enterprises that go in and out, the dilapidated 19th century facades and such... antique stores and all-night diners, ethnic grocery stores and auto parts shops and so on, though others see it differently and would rather supplant the barbershops and used car lots with art studios and other such enterprises.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, but come on now, young white people.There are a lot of vacant storefronts, but that area is one of the few stretches that does have small locally owned businesses that serve the surrounding area. And here's the thing, barbershops and hair braiding salons  may not cater to you, but it's a regular thing for other people. As is the Vietnamese market, and the Puerto Rican bakeries, the Lebanese social clubs and the auto parts shops. Most people can't afford Priuses so they stop at the used car lot. Some people have kids and can't ride their bikes everywhere.

If you're going on about "food deserts" because there's no Trader Joe's or food co-op down there, you obviously haven't been inside any of the ethnic markets down there that sell rice and beans and fresh vegetables very cheaply and sell the kind of things that you'd pay dearly for at World Market or Whole Foods but it's within walking distance. I know most of you haven't been there because the people who work there ask why I, as a white person, shop there, because either few or none do.


But this is the thing that gets me. All these people talk about how they want to live in the city because there's life there and it's not bland and generic and cookie-cutter like the cracker suburbias they grew up in. But what I see a lot of these people doing is just trying to impose a different kind of sameness in their new neighborhoods, it has to be the right kind of people into the right kind of things. Instead of big box stores, it's little boutiques or whatever, instead of Dairy Queen, it's yuppie ice cream. But every "art district" or "restaurant district" pretty much looks exactly the same. Maybe the period of the architecture is different, but it's the same aesthetic repeated over and over again everywhere.

For all of its "funkiness" and "uniqueness" and "localness" every single gentrified urban area looks like this, at least from what I've seen in DC, Buffalo, Boston, Columbus.Any semblance of local culture is ultimately co-opted and wiped out, maintaining only a patina of grit to make it seem authentic, when it's just as much a manufactured culture as what its acolytes rail against. Not only that, but it's damn expensive for even us arty white folks who don't have swank jobs. If your dream is to sell organic cupcakes to the masses, that's cool and go you, but remember that there's a whole rest of the world out there that can't afford such things or may not care that they exist.

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.

solitudinous

I don't want to sit next to him on the bus and hear about "those people" on "those bus lines" going into "those neighborhoods" because I know some of "those people" and I've even hung out in some of "those neighborhoods" because the places that "those buslines" go to may not be as nice as where I live, but there are good people there too that I love deeply. I wonder if I should invest in headphones, not so much maybe to listen to tunes so much as to tune out unwanted interactions.

I come home to peacefulness, awakening to a second wind, of no longer being in thrall to a computer screen  under the cold flourescent glow, of changing into old jeans and the comfortable grungy layers of baggy t-shirt, thermal, hoodie, flannel, to take a walk to accomplish sundry errands as the sun sets, and curling up on the couch once more with reheated leftovers, the theological writings of Hans Kung, and the Screaming Trees on the stereo, to spend the evening playing guitar, rediscovering the fretboard, and painting.


I know that we're all selfish by nature, but I fear the ease with which self-absorption comes when living alone. I vacillate between relishing the solitude and the peace of returning to my own domain, of not having to step on anyone's toes, the ability to create that flourishes when I'm alone most often. I have neighbors above and below but no roommates anymore, and I realized how for years I've lived this constant tiptoe dance of consideration and maintaining the equilibrium, which are good things, but how so often I excused their unreasonableness and took undue culpa upon myself.

I do, however, miss the sense of community that comes from shared space, of the cross-pollination of each others' friendships, of eating dinner with someone else, sharing the leftover riches after work functions, the ways that my world cracked open and broadened so naturally during those years because of everyone who crossed our doorstep. We felt safer because we knew that someone would notice if we went missing, we could invite people up without it being weird, and being able to mutually vent after stressful work weeks was cathartic. I miss these things, even when there were times I wished everyone would just go away, or maybe one of them felt that way. I miss the sharing profoundly.

One of my friends, a more idealistic soul who gets arrested in front of the White House and invites me to events that involve watching documentaries, wants to do the communal living Dorothy Day kind of thing with some other younger folk, which I think is wonderful, I really do. If it was the medieval times, I probably would have ended up in a convent, due to my ambivalence about coupling, and I love to see people come together with their resources and visions. I just can't bring myself to do it now. Comfort? Complacency? Attempting to maintain my sanity after a crazy season of life? Fear of the drama that inevitably comes when we become too familiar? I'm against rugged individualism in theory but in my own domain, it's what I practice, and that bothers me.