the good earth

I went on a walk with a friend around the corner, with her dog and the greenery of the trees in June, the welcome shade, the river, were welcome sights and a blessed escape and I mostly avoided anything political and volatile despite the thoughts inherent with unsurprising revelations and my amazement that others really don't seem nearly so bothered. I guess there have always been cassandras who warned about trojan horses and conquistadors and whatnot.

And it just felt so good to be outside, to deal with plants and neighbors and get my fingers dirty in the earth, lovingly insert plants into soil to grow, anticipating the rain, washing off the crustypunky patina from my skin and hair. I guess this is how we continue to survive, hovering between frustration and inevitable bliss.

of riffs and rants

In the slow boil of dystopian creep, there are no secrets, there have been none for most of my adult life, everything is out there, or easy to find, especially when one has all the power and the analytics at one's disposal. It's creepy and disconcerting and my heart breaks for the wrongfully ensnared and my mind rages against the willful obliviousness because as long as we have the right bones thrown to us, it doesn't matter that we're being robbed as long as someone else we don't like is getting hurt more than we are. I could write so much more, but I've said it so often already, and others say it better, and willful ignorance or justification of the unjustifiable will never be palatable to me. .

And as I continue to say, that is our fundamental problem, our universal common denominator of suck, a lack of compassion, a lack of love for God and fellow human and created beings and the ground we walk on and the air we breathe.

Yet I distract myself, because I can't believe in survivalism either, because I want to love my neighbors and because every era of life has had its dehumanizing factors that need to be overcome, and there is so much beauty here still even in the midst of so much wrong and the best thing to do is not live in fear but continue to live.

I'm having friends over for dinner tonight, I'm figuring out how to fix my side-view mirror and realize I'm bereft of useful tools. While I was taking apart the contraption, I saw there was a goldfinch trapped in the netting of the cherry tree who seemed to have given up on life so I got a pair of scissors and cut him free and felt so uplifted watching it fly away.

 A homie from the station gave me some super amazing hot pepper plants and I provided him with cabbage and kale in return. There are flowers on my front porch now and vegetables on the back and I'm trying to figure out how to make my landlady's yard look less ugly in the front without really spending too much money.

I end up at a show last night, because this is my escapism, and there's not too many people there, a couple radio people that I don't know as well, so I get lost in the big riffs alone, amazed that I used to do these kinds of things without earplugs, or maybe it's just gotten louder. Like Randal, I dig the big riffs and the stoner rockery of Columbus dudes Lo-Pan. For those of us who grew up on classic rock and grunge in inner ring suburbs, it's satisfying and solid riffage with big excellent vocals that'd probably be on some modern rock rotation if the band was more photogenic and The Kids weren't all listening to dubstep. That being said, I'm glad they're getting love in the underground, and I enjoyed it enough to pick up a CD with a t-shirt thrown in.

Hipsters might disapprove of the accessibility but I'd go see these guys again and I infinitely preferred them to the next band that reminded me of the hardcore shows I used to go to as a teenager where it was trying to be intense and just ended up being uninteresting. The guys were young, so I guess I could cut them some slack, since it's not my thing at all.  If it wasn't so cold and I had some homies with me, I would have loitered outside for most of their set because despite their technical abilities, it didn't do much for me.

Torche on the other hand, loud and sludgy and strangely poppy and exuberant, was a different story, as they were the last time I saw them, unpretentious and unrelenting and constantly having to retune, but damn there's something so satisfying about loud crunchy guitars and dudes who can sing in this world of twee milquetoast indie and metallers trying to out-brootal each other. One dude who decided this would be a great time to start a moshpit, shoved me out of the way and proceeded to pummel everyone within five feet of him before realizing that no one else wanted to mosh at all and just wants to watch the band rock out and I didn't see him for the rest of the night and was backed up by a pair of heshers who stood behind me to get a better view of the band and insulate me from any hooliganery. Thanks guys for being chivalrous, I guess.

They started off with the first four songs off the last full length and a smattering of cuts from the previous records and ended with 'Harmonslaught' which might be one of my favorites.

Drove home listening to a fellow DJ play Black Flag bootlegs, it rained this morning and watered my plants, I need more coffee, and life continues in its strange way.

pierce me

I got my ear repierced this afternoon, going over to the tattoo parlor on the west side that a friend of mine recommended. Looking a little more clean cut than usual, no band shirt, no grotty jeans, I listened to people waiting daring each other to pierce their nipples as I perused the seemingly infinite combinations of tribal tattoos, gothic lettering, dragons, well-endowed women, and various edhardyisms. It felt a little culture-shockish I guess, more of the ghetto neck tattoo crowd than the hipsters with obscure musical references and art nouveau motifs inked on their shoulders. It was short and relatively painless, it's been five years since I took the gauges out and I now have a little hoop in my left ear that goes with nothing in my jewelry box, but I feel like I accomplished something as I hear the guy doing mine say he's not going to pierce that other girl "down there."

but this weekend, I decided to stay home Friday night and drink tea and be all spinster with Armenian comedies from the library and books, woke up early and went to the community garden meeting with my neighbor and hung out with people from other neighborhoods where there's otherwise very little cultural exchange and while I tend to avoid ascribing too much to "community," I felt a sense of what that might be like.

And then I took a couple college radio folks and the Queen of the Bondo on an epic east side jaunt through Slavic Village, the hood, a fabulous bookstore, a nice record store where I came home with two Pentangle records, and Heart and Mott the Hoople for a dollar each. My compadres found more esoteric material and the Queen of the Bondo and I chortled over old copies of Hit Parader explaining how to be punk before heading back west to non-foodie mecca Parmastan for damn good Indian food and sundry tale-telling. Not too shabby, I guess.

missing verdant

While I love the near-perpetual greyness of Clevelandian climes, and the stark beauty of blowing snow and bare trees, I am starting to really miss the greenery that comes with summer, resisting the urge to spend way too much on seeds for flowers now for sale at the drugstore when I've got so many left over from last year. In the meantime, I am reveling in the gloom, attempting to keep the houseplants alive, and dreaming of verdant hues returning.

(tunnel of love, Ukraine)

Peter Steele's Tree is not as cool as Thomas Hardy's Tree

 

Stan Hywet and its birches are closer to home.  Come to think of it, it's been a few years since I've gotten down there.

quinta da regaleira

Esoteric straungeness, opulent yet airy architecture, and lush mossy grounds and grottoes, in other words, everything awesome. Dammit, Portugal, why do you have to be so awesome. Oh I want to go here so badly.

the fruit is rusting on the vine...

Coming home to sleep on the couch with the cat on my stomach and doominess in the CD player, walking down to the garden, which yielded three pods of okra, some beans, and a handful of radishes. I'm hoping next year will be better for the squash and that the mold that has beset the vines won't take my pumpkins and melons too.It all goes so fast each time.

It seems that all around me everyone's being sucked dry, and five years into banker's hours I have yet to feel it, maybe there's enough right now to keep me sane, enough laughter and coffee with a handful of kindred souls as an antidote to the slow toxicity. I don't have all the answers, but maybe that's just fine.

I walk through the ghost town, this would be my city...

Two huge cups of coffee in front of me, woke up to the dog whimpering last night, I don't know from loneliness or kidney stones, her family comes back today and I've become adept at administering medication through canine teeth but end up opting to sprinkle the contents of the capsules atop the kibbles and bits like sugar on corn flakes. If austerity ever really hits, maybe I can work at a kennel or something. It'll be nice to come home and sleep at my own place.

I think the cat actually misses me, because I hear her crying when I come up the stairs to check on her water and food while I've been gone the last two weeks. I'm sure we'll have a movie night soon because I'm still sleepwalking and while the weekend felt like a vacation, I don't know how I got through grad school taking a full load, working 30 hours a week and still finding time to go see bands every couple days back when such acts came through Clevelandia, Kent, and Akron on a frequent basis.

With the game cancelled, I took the other dog I watched down to the valley where the lush canopy of green filtered the sun like stained glass, the river sparkled, and we ambled through side trails down the side and if I was home more, maybe I'd get a dog, because I kind of like this companionship thing. Having another breathing mammal along for protection and accompaniment, with its drooling adoration for you are the one who pours the water and the food, and takes it on car rides with the windows down, it's something I could get used to.

There's a garden walk even in Clevelandia so me and one of my community garden people end up driving around parts of the west side I've never explored getting inspired by these green spaces created in other almost-hoods, these serene enclaves with spiraling wisteria vines and repurposed scraps as trellises. Her son isn't interested so we drop him off and drive out to the east side with a map that isn't terribly accurate, driving through the parts of the city where my relatives once lived before white flight.

She's not from around her so she has no loaded assumptions or fears of environs like St. Clair, Hough, Superior, and it's been awhile since I've come through these parts now that my friend who used to live down there now lives further down in the hood and would rather come to the west side to see me than have me drive over to his parts where drive-by shootings have escalated more to the occasional mortar round being tossed on someone's lawn.

We drive by a couple of gardens in vacant lots, and I think about all of the data that I pore through at work about the problems of the urban core, one of which was once overcrowding and now there are vacant lots everywhere, and where there are no vacant lots there are so many houses empty, curtains blowing in deglassed windows, crumbling front porches, because not only did white flight decimate these neighborhoods, the people that moved in get out if they can.

But yet, there is a greenhouse on the land of a deconsecrated church in the heart of a forgotten neighborhood, across the street from the Hell's Angels clubhouse, where the vast space has some people from the neighborhood singing soulful acapella renditions of Steely Dan songs and people playing piano in the former sanctuary and chalkboards scrawled with ideals, and the girl who shows us around shows us heating built with adobe for the greenhouses in winter and the former nunnery getting restored to be livable again and it reminds me of some hippie commune or crusty squat but the people were pretty friendly. I think about how I would have been all about this when I was 22 and idealistic and prospects for life were bleak, and I'm glad The Kids still have this energy even if I've more or less sold out to The Man.

I took her through the streets of the old Polish neighborhood, where St. Casimir's just reopened, and where my grandpa's side first settled, where he played tennis and went to dances, where his brother got mugged on East 79th, the house that my dad was born in, the house where one of my best guy friends lived where I'd sleep on his couch beneath the African mud cloth on the wall listening to the Fugees while he got ready.

And then we ended up in Hough, where there were race riots back in the day, and shiny new homes where the streets once burned, and an older lady there shows us and the cops who came through her massive gorgeous garden on a side lot, full of flowers from Alabama and vegetables and I wonder how she does it. We're all talking about what we're growing and I'm finding it kind of surreal that we're all here together with common ground that we otherwise wouldn't have if we weren't connected to the earth that we walk on. I'm also kicking myself for not having a camera with me even though that might have ruined some of these moments.

But I love driving these streets, getting lost in forgotten corners of shuttered factories and crumbling towers, to the amusement of the old men sitting on front porches at these crazy white girls driving through with the windows down and the Screaming Trees on the CD player in the beatup car with the front end taped together. She's of a similar mind, someone who appreciates the grit without romanticism, curious, friendly, and pondering. I feel so thankful that I get to see these places with her and that we're equally willing to explore.

It feels like a coda to to the end of the day when I pick up a former bandmate to go see Agalloch at the Beachland again. I wasn't feeling the opener all that much, but we got two hours of meandering alternately beautiful and heavy tuneage, and while the vocals will never be my thing, the songs hit me in that place I can't explain, those guitars and the bass lines and Aesop's drums. She wasn't as into it, but one of my fellow DJs was there so we enjoyed it together. I guess I'm not the only one who goes alone, there were a lot of solitary folk there. Once again, I wish I had a camera, but at least Randal was there to document a little closer.

Drove back to the house of my friends for one last night to get five hours of sleep, feeling like there were few wasted moments in the past days, and so much strange and surprising beauty.

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.

nightshade and daylight

An afternoon spent ripping out belladonna and disposing of slugs over the fence with a shovel, noting with satisfaction that the little peas are poking their way through the soil.+ I realize for the first time that my connection to the dirt is somewhat ancestral, being peasant stock on both sides not so far removed.

I hung out with the women in my world yesterday morning, where we drank coffee and swapped the clothes we no longer wear and being small and having never borne children, I end up with a bag full of things I would have never picked out for myself but that somehow work, it's funny how much more comfortable in everything I am now that I'm finally comfortable in my own skin. One of them is moving out of state and her husband gives me a pile of his old records... Talking Heads, Violent Femmes, sundry pub rock and such, some of which I pull for my first time doing a real DJ kind of thing.

I get to the store with a crate full of records and CDs and a mix I compiled from my hard drive as a backup that comes in handy when the one turntable is acting wonky, and I feel like a goddess or a muse up the stairs looking out over the store as the records spin and I finagle with the mixing board, watching people nod their heads and tap their fingers, the kids dancing, I'm yelling down the names of the bands they ask me about as they're treasure hunting through the record bins and rows of 7-inches. The nervousness washes away and the hour goes by too quickly. I could get used to this.

slouching towards spinsterhood: garden edition

The great seed-starting experiment has had mixed results. It seems that plastic works better than peat pots (some have rings of mold where the water soaked into the sides rather into the starter), and I should have marked what they were with sharpie rather than crayola, and I wish I had an acre for the five kinds of squash that I want to cook with this summer.

This year I'm also hoping to get super geeky and attempt my own blends of herbal tea, though this probably won't happen. I love the smell of rosemary and lavender though.

Here's some of what I'm hoping works out.

Scarlet runner beans for the porch. I don't wear them often, but I love bright colors in nature like no other, in part because it breaks through the grey and sepia of Clevelandia's urban landscape.

I don't know where I'll put these blue pumpkins that I'm seed-starting because they take up space like no other. But the color is so cool and they'd make amazing jackolanterns.

Nasturtiums were the first flowers I tried to grow as a kid and actually succeeded. Phyte Club pointed me towards nasturtium pesto, which sounds delicious.

A lot of people don't like okra which is how I ended up with these seeds, but I like it in Indian food and the flowers have that whole hibiscus look that I like.

Japanese eggplants are long and skinny and way less seedy.

Sweet peppers are crazy expensive at the store and the hot ones are good for everything.

assorted sunflowers for the front yard...

California poppies are lovely. Notice, Randal, I didn't say "cute" this time.

gardens

There are seeds sprouting in boxes on my kitchen table, the conversations with the other women in my life thankfully aren't about what shoes are in this season, but about politics and pondering out concepts of life and humanity and how to make good compost and grow things. I've learned so much sitting there and taking in all this knowledge that seems to get more archaic when everything can be bought and is so convenient even if it includes gratuitous amounts of high fructose corn syrup.

There's a community garden up the street and I've been given a small strip to grow things on. The coordinator says she hopes I don't mind that everyone's a couple decades older, but I don't mind that at all. I find that people my own age who are into the hobbies of previous generations like to act as if they are the first people ever to do such thing and that gets old.

The winter was so mild that the kale and the collard greens never stopped growing, and the path is overgrown. I want to start putting seeds in the earth now because it feels like summer not two months before the last frost date, but my eternal pessimism curbs my impulses. She says they're an easygoing group of people, and I hope so. I'm looking forward to making this small patch blooming and fruitful.

My mom had a big garden at the first house they lived in, and I remember going out there to pull carrots and pluck peppers and pick the plums off the trees in the back yard. I didn't like the dirt and the getting thorns under my skin when I was younger, but then one summer, me and the girl up the street spent the summer months cutting paths through the overgrown lilacs and flower bushes in her parents' yard to make ourselves a place to play and chase the boys down the street through the bushes with supersoakers. 

When I moved to a first-floor apartment, I ended up with a plot of land in the back, the process started upon the news of a suicide and almost-murder in a sphere of my world and as the phone calls came in, I was so sad I couldn't cry and instead ended up ripping out weeds and undergrowth with my bare hands for lack of any way to otherwise mentally process.  I grew herbs, tomatoes, zinnias, beans, and hot peppers in soil that was full of glass and pulverized brick without having a clue as to what I was doing and things grew, were cooked at my dinner table, and shared with guests and neighbors. Last year I had more than I could have possibly used on an 8X8 foot plot, living on eggplant and tomato curries and basil leaves in pasta all summer, and tremendously satisfied to see labors come to fruition and shared.

The lushness of green and the innumerable variations of growing things continue to astound me. I wish I had more space sometimes or that I had more lush climes, because I love the brightness and the colors that I see in the greenhouse and in pictures of places that have to worry less about frost. Sometimes I wish I had more land for something more whimsical than vegetables and zinnias, but maybe that'll come in time, while I get inspired by other places.

 

Villa Demidoff, Florence

 Waldspirale, Germany (I would love to live in apartments like these).

 

Bridget found this picture, and being a sucker for both installations of the organic kind and abandoned houses of worship, it fills me with strange joy. More sweetness and straungeness of this kind findable at Atlas Obscura.

slow motions

This week has gone ever so slowly, despite the sundry commitments and obligations, and falling asleep on the couch next to the dog, hoping that the things that go bump in the night are just the cats, because despite the weaponry in this house, I'd never want to be called upon to use it.

But the weather gets warmer, and my landlady gave me the okay to do some gardening and such at the new place so I'm trying to figure out what to grow on the balcony, how to fit as much as I can on that small back porch until the front one is done, what blooms to plant in the rows of pots alongside the house. She says there's lots of critters that will eat things on the ground so I'll have to be inventive and try not to be disappointed, though it's probably a good thing if there's more wildlife, as opposed to the almost-hood.

I don't have the space or the same amount of sun to go as crazy as I did last year, with giant sunflowers and poppies and morning glories tangled on the fence, and the plot in the back yielding more squash, beans, and eggplant than I could ever consume on my own and therefore was shared with everyone, but I want to try, I guess and see what I can do with some ingenuity. There was something cathartic about ripping out the weeds with my bare hands, getting my fingernails dirty and knowing that the benefits would be reaped in a few months.

And tonight, dinner with the sister, bowling ala Lebowski with the grunge buddy and his homies. I don't have much compared to some, but the abundance and lushness within my world continues to stun me.