To find a way to turn the signal back to heaven sounding blue

A detour off the ramp because the front end was dragging on the ground, trying to find a parking lot to examine the damage in a neighborhood of abandoned buildings and skeezy strip clubs, and everyone's cars look better than mine in the hood so The Local Kids were scoffing and the men in cadillacs disdaining at my duct tape repair job (incidentally Family Dollar sells the duct tape in the automotive section so there!), but we turned around and got to the museum where the Finster exhibit was everything I hoped for and more, paintings on mirrors with truck enamel, cheetahs as guardians of paradise, visions of spaceships and the towers of Planet Heaven, whimsical hellfire and brimstone, an exuberant and consistent strange vision part Flannery O'Connor, part William Blake.

We decided to make a day of our time down south of Clevelandia, and detoured through lands of strip malls that haven't changed since the 1960s to Grace Cathedral, home to the local toupeed televangelist who's gotten a bit senile in recent years, and despite scriptural admonitions about gluttony and greed, has a buffet and gift shop full of cornball crystal jewelry, sentimental tchotchkes, and shrinkwrapped tissues for when the sermon gets emotional I'm guessing.

I only had the giant camera, and said gift shop, buffet, and wax museum were closed and despite theoretically worshiping the same God, we probably looked more like snarky jaded heathens than actual acolytes, and so we headed north to Kent, land of bibliotheque school and frat party rioters extraordinaire.

Much of downtown has been torn down and redeveloped and while I'm generally not a fan of destroying old buildings, there's actually stuff downtown besides Bars for Bros and aging punk townies. The best burrito place ever satisfied our hunger, we ambled through sundry stores and then down to the river where the sunlight filtered through the trees,  the honeysuckle smelled incredibly good and there were teens being angsty under the overpass spraypainted with graffiti.

 (as I didn't get the pictures off the memory card, this photo is courtesy of someone on flickr)

We drove up through Ravenna, hometown of a certain singer, marveled at the signage and the proliferation of non-vacant storefronts and this strange sculpture on the children's elementary school playground.

 Someone's not Thinking Of The Children.

Drove back through the darkness and the heat lightning, spent the next day errand-running and filling out the garden with okra plants and mini pumpkins and hanging out at my favorite record store talking about literature and outsider art and listening to the Rolling Stones before heading up to the lake on Sunday to hang out with the family and sit alone on the breakwall in the darkness with the swirling of the waves like a Winslow Homer painting, to contemplate and re-examine some already existing sad things that swirled to the surface in the past couple of days that have left me a little wrecked and questioning every interaction and motivation. It's not that it isn't good, it's just that this growing up thing is really hard and painful. 

this is not for you

OfficeSpaced snark aside, it's not that I want to be down here on a lovely Saturday in May when there's a lot of swank stuff going on, homies occasionally getting a weekend off instead of stuck dealing with angry women and space cadets takes precedence and with the weather warm, the day is still young at 5:15 as it is. Whether or not this is used against me because I've outed myself as a sometimes sucker will be evidenced later on. And maybe it'll rain. Despite what the overlords would have one believe, this is not because I'm a good little worker or want to score any brownie points with them. It's all about peonage solidarity.

 But time spent there equals to less time later so inshallah I'll be roadtripping down to the Rubber City recently vacated by certain now-famous folk to see the works of the wonderful Howard Finster, who in a fair world would get more recognition than, say, Thomas Kinkade. His fans include Michael Stipe and David Byrne, but I stumbled across not by that trajectory but a random library search for outside art.

By all accounts, he seems to be a nice guy, and as far as what I've read, doesn't seem to be super crazy unless one counts spirituality as such.

So yeah, take that, The Man, or something.

in memory

I know that with the continuation of time, and the inevitability of mortality, that more and more people who have been in my life will have shuffled off the mortal coil, and so I grieve, but sometimes distance blunts the rough edges just a little bit.

My great-uncle passed on this weekend thanks to cancer that made him almost blind near the end of his life. He'd slowed down a lot from what he was when I was a kid, before his wife passed away, when he had a house on the other side of Catawba Island that had a real beach, not just rocks like our side and would take all of us kids out in his rowboat with a motor, prompting comments from our parents about how we looked like a bunch of Cuban refugees packed into the back. He always had jellybeans in a dish in the living room and at least five different kinds of Faygo in the fridge and would build us driftwood bonfires on the beach doused in paint thinner that we'd roast marshmallows over as we watched the sunset.

One summer, the winds were such that there was all this rich loam Nile delta kind of soil deposited and he planted a cornfield on the beach like the fields of his native Indiana, and the incongruity of the setting sun and the nuclear power plant and the beach and the husks standing up in the water made me smile. He was one of the most warm and welcoming people I've ever met, and I can't remember ever having a bad time at his house, which he left to his son and moved into assisted living, but he would always come by and visit when we were up there.

And then this morning, I learned of someone else, and if I was superstitious beyond the 'organized religion' thing I'd be wondering who the third would be, but Robert was a recoccurring figure in my Kent State days. It was a long time before I made the connection of "F.U. Bob" as he was derided by people on campus who saw him on days when his Tourette's or whatever it was acted up, and the quiet man who sat at a table at my church with a collection of multicolored sharpie markers and a sketchbook with the big beard who sat and drank coffee and occasionally delved into deep philosophical questions with my pastor at the time. At the old church building, before I started going there, he had his own couch, where he'd sketch the congregants and musicians and paint with watercolors until the couch was covered in as many shades as a technicolor dreamcoat.

He described himself as a "skeptic" but enjoyed our company nonetheless week after week, sharing coffee and conversation, and would show me the sketches he did of me playing bass next to Scott or drinking tea at a nearby table. When people on campus would make fun of him, I'd talk about who he was as a person and that he wasn't just some crazy guy, that he was a really wonderful person that just didn't fit with the expectations of others. It seemed like anyone who actually took the time to talk to him instead of mocking him from afar learned that quickly, and unlike most outsider artists, to some degree his work was recognized in his lifetime, if the continual help of the community down there and the outpouring of emotions I've seen is any indication. I really can't imagine that little town without him.

the poet's junkyard

This sign was on I-480 just down the street from my parents' house. I must have been a morbid kid because once I figured out it wasn't for a real amusement park, I still thought it was really cool, even if some of the lights had burned out or been shot out.

The sign pointed not to a nuclear playground of doom but a junkyard where a couple guys from my parents' church worked and where the local poets once read their works at night under the neon among the rusting cars. Sometimes I feel like I was born too late and missed out on so much. I want to make a pilgrimage someday to this place I drive by more than weekly.


The sign is gone, and its creator now resides in New York City. I hope against hope that it returns to where it once was.