inner city interlude

I drove out to the usual study spot for my cardamom-laced coffee and fix of art-schoolers and Saudis mingling in the old Italian neighborhood. I'm working on a paper and chilling out massively, booking tickets for a trip in December but then start getting text messages Saturday night from the neighbors asking if I'm okay because someone got shot in front of my house.

well. I'm okay.

The phone calls and messages keep coming, that the street is blocked off, that someone ran up my driveway, that someone got taken away in a stretcher, that the police are all over my yard. Meanwhile, studying is not going to happen, the coffeeshop's closing in ten minutes, I'm giving a friend old lady relationship advice, and I'm glad at least I'm prepared for the chaos that's going to be there when I get home.

The street is still blocked off, there is crime scene tape in my front yard, so many cop cars, one tells me that the guy who got shot is dead, that the shooter ran off, that I can't go in my back yard because there's evidence back there so I go through the front and can't do anything but pace around because this is all just too weird, and then a friend getting off work who has no idea calls me and I tell her what's going on and say I'll drive out to see her, because I've had too much coffee and I'm not going to sleep with all this going on. The irony of driving through the sketchiest parts of the east side to see her because I don't want to be around where the crack deal went bad happened in my own yard is not lost on me. 

So evidently this is how I cope with homicides in front of my house, I eat pancakes and get morbid and then talk about other things because it takes me a few days to process things. When I come home, everyone's gone, it's like nothing ever happened. I'm still a little shellshocked and numb but strangely peaceful for reasons I can't explain other than invoking spiritual things. The songs I sing on Sunday morning beating the heck out of my guitar feel more meaningful, it's grace that's brought me safe thus far and grace will lead me home, this my glad commemoration that til now I've safely come... melt the clouds of sin and sadness drive the dark of doubt away... 

I go to the beach afterwards with my camera, to gather my thoughts and take pictures of blowing sand and autumn leaves and the debris that washes up on shore, driftwood and bones and shells. There's no one out but me and the windsurfers and I'm sure I look a little strange wandering around by myself taking pictures of dead things with homie's keffiyeh scarf wrapped around my face to keep out the blowing sand and the sunglasses I only use while driving. But I feel like being anonymous especially when I come home and am standing on my porch talking to the neighbor across the street and there are news crews on my tree lawn.

Since neither of us were home, we have nothing to say to them which is a relief and I go over to my parents' house for a family function where I refrain from spouting off political opinions and strangely enough, my folks aren't nearly as freaked out by this as I thought they would be. It wasn't like things didn't happen in our neighborhood either, but this is a whole other thing.

And no, I have no plans to move, no plans to buy a gun or a security system or a dog or whatever. I don't lose sleep over this. I grieve the loss of life and wish it didn't feel so necessary to have a guy friend walk me home from the bar at the end of the night. But I have neighbors who care about me, friends who offer me places to crash and listen to me process all this out. I may be vulnerable but I feel strong, because I've realized even more now that I'm not alone. 

 

words, words and expressions, all these confessions of where we stand....

Words are as strong and powerful as bombs, as napalm. How much the government counts on those words, pays for those words to exalt our own way of life, to build up fear of the enemy. Deliver us, Lord, from the fear of the enemy. That is one of the lines in the psalms, and we are not asking God to deliver us from enemies but from the fear of them. Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them. 

There is plenty to do, for each one of us, working on our own hearts, changing our own attitudes, in our own neighborhoods. If the just man falls seven times daily, we each one of us fall more than that in thought, word and deed. Prayer and fasting, taking up our own cross daily and following Him, doing penance, these are the hard words of the Gospel. - Dorothy Day

 I find I read the Psalms and Dorothy Day more and more, seeking a measured response to what I see around me, the fear of the Other abroad, the fear of the Other at home.


There were two instances of gay-bashing that happened at a bar around the corner from me. It's in a sketchy neighborhood, and the men there aren't the most tough so I'm not terribly surprised, but it still grieves me. A group of young black kids were the ones who perpetrated this, so I see the outrage in comments sections and the neighborhood association's facebook page and it makes me cringe. These folks who said they'd never shoot Trayvon Martin and what a crazy cracker that Zimmerman guy was are the same ones threatening to go vigilante on those "thugs" in their neighborhood and have developed the same suspicion that they abhor in those down south. Is it wrong of me to observe that those marginalized by their sexuality are the ones who have the most bile towards those of a different skin color?

When your neighbors start freaking out because a young black man walks a pit bull down their street because he might be casing the neighborhood we have a problem. When your neighbors are freaking about the guy who rides a motorcycle, we have a problem. When you wonder if your best guy friend who is black is going to have trouble with the neighbors if he moves in upstairs, we have a problem.When your neighbors are disturbed that black teenagers are hanging out at the playground and have the potty mouths we all have, we have a problem.

Also, I should note here, that I live in Cleveland proper. Not the suburbs, not the exurbs. Cleveland. Statistically, you're more likely to have neighbors of African American descent than other places so I don't understand what's so shocking about this though I get the feeling sometimes that the new urbanists want things to be just as crackerific as the milquetoast neighborhoods they left behind, just with less Applebees and more brewpubs. Dudes who are creepy in general bother me, but that cuts across all demographics and is a different thing entirely.

When 9/11 happened, I was a senior in high school living in a suburb with a relatively high population of Arab immigrants. A guy crashed his car into the local mosque. The kids at my high school with last names like Hasan and Abdallah got a lot of grief, even though most of them were Christian and went to the Coptic church nearby or the Maronite church downtown. My dad delivered to the corner stores owned by their parents. It really disconcerts me to see the way that they're now profiled and viewed with suspicion, to the point where certain friends of mine disliked using their last names for fear of the social repercussions despite having no religious affiliations whatsoever.

I feel like it's the same toxic fortress mentality that pervades all of these interactions and I hate it so much. I can't even express how much I hate it that we the people are so ugly and find it so hard to even be decent to our neighbors let alone love them.

“We do not know, we do not know. We shall live from day to day, and put more locks on the doors, and get a fine fierce dog when the fine fierce bitch next door has pups, and hold on to our handbags more tenaciously; and the beauty of the trees by night, and the raptures of lovers under the stars, these things we shall forego. We shall forego the coming home drunken through the midnight streets, and the evening walk over the star-lit veld. We shall be careful, and knock this off our lives, and knock that off our lives, and hedge ourselves about with safety and precaution. 

And our lives will shrink, but they shall be the lives of superior beings; and we shall live with fear, but at least it will not be a fear of the unknown. And the conscience shall be thrust down; the light of life shall not be extinguished, but be put under a bushel, to be preserved for a generation that will live by it again, in some day not yet come; and how it will come, and when it will come, we shall not think about at all.”

acid tongued

I was going to walk yesterday and then the rain came, and then the hail, which was marble-sized. There's home movie footage of me in 1985 or so picking up chunks of sky ice in someone's driveway. I don't remember this, which is surprising because I have other toddler memories and that feels like something that would have been strange.

I crashed from all the caffeine needed to get through a work day post-rocking out, watched a movie with the usual suspects, talked politics and tunes out under the street lights as people hit us up for cigarettes (none of us smoke) and a guy drove by showing off the TV he was going to scrap. They identified the third girl who was murdered in East Cleveland and she was in one of my former coworker's summer programs. This city gets so small and sad so quickly no matter how the image consultants spin it.

One of my old coworkers knew the third girl that was murdered. I find that I agree with Cornel West way more than I ever thought I would. I never dreamed I'd say that five years ago but such is the world. This morning we talked about how people should be stripped of nobel peace prizes if they suck at not bombing their neighbors or promoting war by other means. Kind of like how Barry Bonds has an asterisk, we need these disclaimers for things more important than sports. Of course, dissenting in the face of tribalism obviously means I'm shilling for the other side, which is like saying if I say that Stalin sucks than I must love Hitler. Can't I just opt out? I think so.

Sociality has its downside, and with a plethora of acquaintanceships, I become more choosy, because I crave intellectual honesty, humility, the willingness to listen, the ability to admit that one is wrong and not to stick with what's comfortable when the truth is anything but. Randal once asked me why I enjoy the company of curmudgeons so much but it's for these reasons, because there's infinitely less platitudes and a way more realistic outlook that I crave when most discourse I see involves food and television or recycled flowerpower things that sound nice until you start thinking about them. Also, my cranky friends make me laugh way more, because unlike the idealists, they have a sense of humor.

In the meantime, I am amused by Tom Waits' Jewish curses, by the continued existence of traveling Estonian encyclopedia salesmen in the Arctic Circle, the discovery of the PanArabian Enquirer for my satire about douchey expats and Dubai, and Soviet bus shelters.

Also, holy crap it's a new Subrosa song. 
Female vocals, downtuned guitars, and those freaking violins of awesome.

on surf guitar and the east side

On the other side of the river there's a suburb that's got a reputation for being openminded and progressive. They're a nuclear-free zone after all. When I think of the song California Uber Alles, I think of that part of Greater Clevelandia, the home of Harvey Pekar, where my older friends would tell me old tales of Coventry back when it was full of subcultural denizens before the city made a concerted effort to apply a veneer of bohemian sheen to what is now mostly chain restaurants and bars full of bros and yuppies and drunk girls.

The hacky-sackers, the buskers, the punks and skins and five-percenters, the guys trading rhymes, those are harder and harder to find down there. Yes, there's still a couple of bookstores that sell marxist lit, esoterica, and Kerouac, and a good music venue there, but it's hardly a bohemian mecca by any means. Trendy boutiques and boomer holdovers perhaps, but not what it once was. It almost makes those aspirations seem crass.

Also, they're the kind of town that loves to distribute parking tickets and tickets for everything. Heaven forbid you don't have a bicycle license. There's no late night greasy spoon diners here anymore, just an IHOP in the strip mall near the Wal-Mart. You can get ticketed for jaywalking. It's still a place to meet up with my east siders, but I find they like coming west now, more often than not.

I used to like hanging out down here, sometimes I still don't mind. We would park at R.'s house and walk over, the four of us, two interracial couples don't raise eyebrows over here, and we'd get dollar cans of Arizona tea and dollar slices of pizza and loiter in the plaza. We went to hip-hop shows in the basement of a shoe store where me and K were the only white girls in the room where a generation of young kids still swore by Native Tongues like we did our grunge bands.

But young black males freestyling in the public space is evidently more threatening than burned-out beatniks so usually they get moved along, and there's signs on the doors of a lot of these venues denying entry to those wearing hoodies and baseball caps and do-rags and whatnot, though if I was wearing a hoodie I'm sure that'd be completely different.

I find the sanctimony of the usual suspects reprehensible but on the other hand, the iron fist in paisley glove somehow bothers me more, be it this side of town or Bloomberglandia. A few years ago, some punkass kids decided to brawl at the street fair and the city council instituted a 6PM curfew. Which sucks if you're a teenager and you live near an area which has places to go out to eat and see good bands and you don't want to be chaperoned or have a note from your parents or saying you're studying at the library or working minimum wage bagging groceries or making smoothies. 

Like most emergency measures that inhibit the daily lives of people for the good of the well-heeled, this curfew is still in place two years later, and it's amusing to me to watch aging boomer liberals justify something that generally seems to single out teenagers of a certain profile, which disparaging my hometown, which, despite its crackerific history, doesn't have such things. And yeah, I've seen some pretty nasty fights go down there, but still. It seems like overkill. And they're not even having the festival anymore, which, despite my not having an affinity for tie-dye and 60's cover bands, is still a bummer.

But I end up here anyway on Saturday night, because one of my homies invited me to see Dick Dale with some of his coworkers. Like most people, I know him for maybe two songs, but I appreciate good guitar work and have a soft spot for surf music, and he delivered, with a good bit of curmudgeon and snark, and some divergences involving banging out melodies on the bassist's fretboard with some drumsticks and a harmonica solo that seemed to leave a lot of people confused. He said he pretty much plays whatever he wants, which he did, from the instrumentals that everyone knows to the oldies the boomers dig and 'Amazing Grace,' and such.

He's an amazing guitarist, and eschewed the wankery that comes with that whole realm of technical ability, and I think I appreciated it way more watching him do those weird harmonics and everything, with no pedals or sonic gimmicks, just an upside-down Strat and some hefty tube amps that were probably older than me. He looked like he was genuinely having fun, and I guess this might be one of his last tours, because the cancer he's been fighting for forever keeps coming back.

Crowd-watching was fun too, ex-biker couples, bros who probably like 'Pulp Fiction,' punk and rockabilly kids, underage kids who look like they stumbled out of an Urban Outfitters ad, boomers on a night out, the local Hell's Headbangers contingent, probably the most eclectic crowd I've seen since Godspeed You Black Emperor ten years ago. I still find it ironic that the guy who pretty much got everyone tremolo-picking is of a nationality that isn't terribly beloved by the more xenophobic cornerse of the black metal world.

We drove back in D's hoopty-jeep through East Clevelandia, where he told stories of delivering black and milds to corner stores and gas stations and he thinks I'll be freaked out, but I'm not, because I've been through here before, my friends live here too despite my lack of criminal teenagehood and suburban-white-girl visage.

The next day I realize that we drove past where they found all those bodies, and when I hear that they're going through abandoned buildings in the area, I wonder which ones, because there are so many. When I get accosted walking past the apartment building full of sex offenders down the street from me, I wonder which of them is plotting something, considering that neighbors said this guy behaved aggressively towards women in his neighborhood. I wish I didn't have to think like this, and I know that to some degree white privilege means I'm way less likely to go missing than the women I see on the corner at 2am and that's disconcerting to me too.

heat coming down

It wasn't until Monday morning that I found out about all this current events business after everyone else, kind of like how I didn't hear about the Boston bombing manhunt until after the fact. My friends who are sane folk say to stay off the interwebs but like a car crash I just can't look away completely and very few people are acting sane about the whole thing, because as advanced and progressive as people think they are, there's still that bloodlust. I did jury duty once for a civil suit and it was awful, and if you don't have enough evidence stacked up one way or another that's really concrete, these kinds of things happen. At any rate, there seemed to be a lot of testosterone, and something that could have been prevented if both parties hadn't decided to mutually escalate.Not to mention the whole racism thing that goes without saying.

But some people on my corner of the Internet are spewing race war rhetoric and others the usual tropes about punkass kids and a lot of smug yanqui feelings about southerners although we're not that much different. Kids get shot every day in my part of the world, and in lots of parts, and our government evidently was cool with blowing a teenage boy off the face of the earth because his dad had dubious political affiliations and won't even say I'm sorry.

So I guess I'm more bothered by powers that be who brag about their "kill lists" because that's ongoing and unaccountable? I don't know. It sucks. This is also the state where a white chick got off with killing her kid, so I'm just going to chalk it up to bad courtroomness with a sizable side of racism on top of that? Also, seriously people, it's like you just realized that the odds in a courtroom are stacked against the white guy? Where have you been the last two hundred years? And I'm wary about giving that already failed system more power than it has to do anything circumstantial, as Ken astutely points out here.

Anyways, I got to escape to Pittsburgh to go to a nice record store, eat pizza, and hang out with sundry folk, and we ended up going up some crazy hills to get to Trundle Manor to gawk and geek at absinthe-drinking taxidermied bears, sundry things in jars, a bottle of Bela Lugosi's grave dirt, and whatnot. 

 And then I hung out with nephews, and slacked on the front porch drinking libations left over from book club, (where we really couldn't come up with much to say about 100 Years of Solitude except that the Oprah analysis sucked mightily (Ooh exotic Latino bunga-bunga with MAGIC!)), with an old friend from the library school days. Strange how people cycle in and out, it doesn't bother me too much, as long as the terms are good.

And today is Jeremy Enigk's birthday, he was in one of my favorite bands in high school. Sunny Day Real Estate was something I heard on college radio and got from the library and from there delved further into indie rock and other strands of underground. My entry point was "how it feels to be something on," and I think I put bits and pieces of these albums on every mixtape I made for anyone between the ages of 16 and 18, back before Myspace and asymmetrical hair and whatnot. It's overwrought and emotional, and quite possibly the equivalent of Yes for indie rockers, but it sounded really good this morning for the last hour of my show.

at the corner

so last night, I got a text from my pastor and facebook messages from some people who go to an awesome church on the corner of Scranton and Clark that they were going to be doing a prayer vigil thing at the corner of Scranton and Seymour, just a block or so north, so I ended up going down there to show some solidarity, to give comfort, to listen, even though the introvert in me wasn't sure if I even belonged there, because I want to respect that people are trying to live their lives and stuff and not become part of the inevitable media circus. Whether I did or not is up for others to judge if they want.

I drive over and I can already tell it's going to be crazy when I get off the exit and there's hundreds of motorcycles roaring down 25th, handmade signs thanking God for this miracle, people in the streets everywhere like it's 4th of July or something. I park in the church lot and walk over, and it's quiet over here, I see a few people I know that I haven't seen in a couple years since me and the roommate fell out and I dropped out of that social circle, but a commonality of belief and vision makes it seem like days. It is quiet over on our side, except for people praying and singing on the steps of a church at the corner.

Most of them are more charismatic than me, so I don't get too loud, it's hard enough to string coherent thoughts together with the emotions so overwhelming and I find myself grieving that this took ten years and that there's so many others who've gone missing, and that awful things happen to women in this city and around the world all the time. We pray for the girls, for the families, for the neighborhood, for the law enforcement that they would start doing their job in a way that doesn't hurt others, for the men themselves. A woman who says she's the aunt of the one of the girls asks us to pray for the Castro family because of the pain they're dealing with and the inevitable blowback to come.
 

And there were so many news cameras and vehicles everywhere and people with their cameras gawking and taking pictures of everything with their iPhones and people just kind of milling around who were hoping to get interviewed. Neighbors sitting on porches observing, people riding by on their bikes,  I've never been around that kind of thing really and to see the level of production, the incongruity of impeccable broadcasters and us regular folk. 

There are four of us left hanging out in a parking lot under the stars, trying to figure out what we could and should be doing, because these emotions subside, but we live here, this is where we need to be connected and trying to love, and trying to figure out how to do that more.
 

agnostic on security

And in theme with yesterday, I went to my very first block club meeting last night. There were a lot of people there who were older than me, most of them I'm guessing were homeowners, and we listened to talks by the CDC representative, the police sergeant in charge of our district, and a guy who was trying to sell us on some kind of surveillance camera setup on our main drags.

I noshed on homemade cookies and bottled water and found that despite my frustration with law enforcement, at least this guy seemed to give us some practical solutions and not a whole lot of "those people" paranoia, some degree of common sense, and a caution that just going out and packing heat isn't the wisest idea if you really don't know what you're doing with a gun. 

The big problem in my almost-hood is heroin, which also corresponds with prostitution and the rise of burglaries around here. There's also a bunch of kids who call themselves a gang who've been stealing a lot of stuff and putting up pictures of them toting guns on Facebook. It's sad that even yours truly on the straight-and-narrow knows where to score drugs within a block of where I live each way.

And just like even my former conservative self was creeped the heck out by the Patriot Act ten-plus years ago, and is even more disturbed now, I'm just as averse to the "for our own good and our own protection" on the neighborhood level too. One person a little louder than me raises the issue of privacy and is ignored at first and then told she has nothing to worry about and when she insists that this is creepy the guy says 'well only me and a couple of other people will be watching," to which someone else says well if this is accessible on your smartphone can't it be hacked, and then they do a raffle for a security alarm and I'm left feeling slightly more informed about some non-emergency numbers, but a little weirded out yet unsurprised by this twist at the end.

When the CDC people find out I'm a renter, they try to sell me on a first-time homebuyers program but the last thing I want is a house down here, to be living alone with all this going on so I just tell them that I'm too irresponsible to own a house. This is partly true, but I feel like everyone's trying to sell me a bill of goods with a lot of catches that I just don't want to buy into.

city mouse and suburb mouse

So I live in the city now, I've been in various doubles and such for the last three years, I grew up in an inner-ring burb with a reputation for crackerism and general uncool dorkery that's now evidently kitschy chic in certain circles. I still think of rust belt chic as a white thing for canny marketers and the Instagram generation with no sense of history, but that's a whole other post.

I don't have the animosity towards the suburbs that my peers do because everyone's got their thing, and our things are different, and if you have kids, you probably want to send them to schools that don't suck if you have the means and having a yard where they can run around and not be cooped up in an apartment building is kind of nice. Not that suburban schools don't suck, but I get why it appeals to people because in a strange way, it kind of appeals to me. I never thought I'd say this.

The smugness and snobbery of the new urbanistas gets a little old because it really hits me as being self-absorbed at best and mean-spirited at worst. It's just as snooty to look down one's nose at people who like Nickelback and go to Applebee's (is it just me or is this lady kind of mean and profoundly unfunny) as it is to condescend to those of us who decide to live in the Big Bad City in proximity to Those People If You Know What I Mean.

But when I go back to where I grew up, it's not so bad. My parents have awesome neighbors who look out for each other, there's a lot of stuff within walking distance. I rode my bike way more in the suburbs than I do in the city for reasons not limited to but including crazy people on the road, not very nice Bike People, and the whole solo female thing that makes certain activities more complicated. 

I know there's crime everywhere, but things must have gotten dicey enough that even our lackluster CDC is starting to have meetings involving the local cops, the community and such. I feel way safer here than I did in the old almost-hood, but sometimes I dream of having a yard I can grow vegetables in instead of always living on the second floor of doubles and to know that if I call the cops they'll actually show up soon and not say things like "that's what you get for living in the city," as they said to the girls up the street when they got robbed.

I'm finally shedding the fortress mentality I developed at the old place, but the suburbs make more sense to me now than they ever did. I don't know what that says about me, but it's the truth. I love where I'm at right now, because my entire world is in such close proximity and the woes of the city are everywhere, but more and more I get the sense of things falling apart that I once did, and my roots here can only go down so far and I now wonder how long I'll stick around.

one hand will wash the other

My new place of residence is way better than the almost-hood, but between me and the Punk Bar of Good Music there is an apartment building housing three recently-released rapists. It is the scarlet letter of the modern age but still it is kind of disconcerting when one wants to go up and see some doom bands on a late night and doesn't want to end up like Mia Zapata especially when the comings and goings in front of said building tend to involve a lot of drugs and sketchy characters in the lobby.

So the other night I was doing homework, one of my friends offered to pick me up to go see Samothrace and some other bands but he ended up working late and I ended up just going to sleep because I'm getting old and I've been up since 4am. By all accounts they were excellent of course but it frustrates me that I have to strategize these things in my activities.

I tend to believe in the whole safety in numbers/good common sense thing and I don't live in too much fear, but I'm way more skittish than I used to be when I'm going it alone, which happens more and more, since I don't want to have to rely on other people to do what I feel like doing. Maybe it's a greater awareness of the surroundings, or those times when I'm walking and I get propositioned or hollered at or intimidated or whatever. Knowing that things do happen in these parts doesn't help.

I was talking about this to a friend of mine last night, about the frustrations of urban life, especially as a single woman. I wish I had more freedom of movement, even though guy friends of mine have gotten mugged and such too, and he told me one of his friends who lives down there got mugged on his front porch after walking home from a show. I guess I do live in the environs of one of the most dangerous cities in the United States, but still! I don't feel like it's a warzone, but there's always that lingering thought in the back of my mind.

Some of my friends are really into feminist theory to deal with these kind of things and I get a little bored with the strawmanning of the usual suspects or screeds about the patriarchy, because the thing that turns me off more is the posturing that I got from overly earnest undergrads or the type of girls who talked about how emancipated they are and within six months were hitched, taking their dude's last name, and getting all twee with their homemaking skills. It doesn't generally address the day-to-day issues at hand and veers into parody all too quickly. Maybe it's the generally contrarian nature of yours truly, or that estrogen heavy gatherings tend to get kind of mean so it's hard for me to have a whole lot of gender solidarity and I just don't always find the same things interesting as a rule.


I guess it's a human problem, and men dominate and injure with their bodies, and women with their words and politic-playing, and instead of taking sides, I just end up adapting as best I can, forming the alliances and friendships with the likeminded souls, seeking peace and solace above, and holding out for the best.

automotive incinerate

 Despite a stolen gas cap and general frustrations of the vehicular kind, it could be much worse, given that much of my life is situated within busline and walking distance as it is. One of my wonderful neighbors gave me a ride to the radio station at 4:30 in the morning so I could beg people for money and lo and behold someone was kind enough to bequeath. A couple hours of answering phones, listening to lurid tales of Illuminati Hanna-Barbera-Sugary-Cereal conspiracy theories from callers to the show after mine, and then waiting forever to catch a non-rush-hour wheelie bus back to the best side to meet up with the sister and nephew for sundry hanging out.

The place I dropped my car off to get it checked out wanted a bit too much, so I picked it up and took it to my usual spot where the Lebanese mechanic and I are on a first-name basis at this point because the car has been giving me more and more trouble as it ages. I bring the Jungle Puppy I'm petsitting up with me for a car ride and we walk back through the darkening west side streets under papery flakes of snow.

Having a dog beside me, even a small Anubis-looking one, evidently makes one immune on the city streets from the hollers and the propositions out of car windows and shadowy figures on the street after sunset, which was one of the reasons why I moved out of the Almost-Hood. Not having the time to be a good canine owner, and enjoying the pleasure of after-work flaneur as the streetlights come on and the sky darkens is a dubious gamble for a solitary slim female on streets with not nearly enough streetlights and general pedestrians.

There was one time in conversation with a friend where I likened having a car in the city as having a tank in a warzone not because it's oh-so-dangerous in Clevelandia, but it's a conveyance used over short distances in less savory times of day to get from Point A to Point B with a minimum of anxiety. This, and the general fortress mentality of former residence in the Almost-Hood drove me a little bit crazy, because I hated feeling that I couldn't walk around the corner to visit friends and had to drive there because the unlit streets populated by a few too many outpatients from the mental facilities one block over and people high or otherwise strung out on one substance or another looking for a fight or an easy victim, or the violating feeling of getting propositioned by a lech in a big car every time you leave the house alone, even if you're walking out of church or carrying bags of groceries.

My feet were cold when I got to the house I'm staying at, the dog curled up on the couch waiting for me. I made tea, and read this excellent book before getting picked up by one of my station homies for cinematic excursions and such. It's a bit frustrating to get around, but still, these nights when the pace slows down, sometimes it doesn't seem all bad.

heartbeating

So some conversations had last night, between laughter and plumbing the serious depths, made me think and ponder, this theme over the past few weeks, upon observing the trickles of partisan insanity, of seeing the more close-to-home troubles in a world that brushes up against my own so frequently but yet that I am not a part of, trying to see beyond the surface, to see the humanity and the hurt beneath such externals, so easy to judge and sometimes justifiably, and then to ponder a God who hung out with the lostest of lost souls that I find it hard to even look in the eye.

There are kids in my world where I've never met the parents, or I know who the parents are and see the fronts of respectability that fail to mask the damage done by hard drugs and hard living. It's hard for me to not get angry when I deal with these adults who don't let their children be children, to see kids who've never learned to read cop an attitude to hide the shame, who don't have crayons at home but the TV's always on, who don't know where their children are and are too busy working a corner or scoring another hit to care.

 I've never walked in another's shoes and should not presume to condemn, this continual re-evaluation of attitudes dredges things I'd rather not see, that pharasaical attitude of I've-got-my-shit-together-why-can't-you instead of let me walk beside you. I can't stand by necessarily, and last night we talked, we grieved, we raged and laughed, and pondered and planned. There's no guarantee that you can help pull someone out, but it's better to try than to turn away. We may not have widows in our world but we have women who are alone, not so much orphans as much as those who might as well be, and fatherlessness at this point is assumed. If this is who God loves, there's no way I can't too.

awakeners

An exchange of texts and me being blunt and saying I was depressed as hell the other night led to a long conversation in which I was damn near incoherent attempting to explain the little dark cloud that's hovered over my head as long as I can remember, that yes, I really am okay, because know that there is still some light in these dark nights of the soul, that the frustration and despair is not nearly what it was back in the teenage years, ironically enough before I found God and doomy tuneage around the same time and learned to cope.

But this was brought on by stupid writer's block, which extrapolated to not just sucking at creating, but sucking at everything, knowing that this is irrational, and totally firstworldproblem and I tell him that I feel even worse for feeling this way because my life's been way easier than his and I'm sitting on a back porch with a mug of tea while he's stuck in Erie. But we make each other laugh, so everything is fine. And now my laptop's dead for the time being at least so I have even more excuses.

And of course the clouds pass, and the laughter returns. I'm still tired from staying up too late and rocking out too much. I spent last night drinking tea with someone I rarely get to see, the morning with the ladies of the family and the absurdly cute nephe, the afternoon darkthroning with a friend's dog along rivers through the woods and wetlands. The sky was so perfectly azure and the leaves were green and golden. I finally feel like my soul's back to normal.