you will jog for the master race

I haven't painted in months, haven't written anything, haven't messed around on the guitar too much, when it's warm like this and I'm bouncing from couch to couch keeping the lights on for out of town friends, it's the time of the summer when I'm walking dogs and slacking on porches and in dining rooms drinking tea and libations, because these days fly by so quickly.

I took the dog on a walk last night from the house where I'm staying to where I live, and wonder why I don't walk more, because we traveled six miles round trip together, me and the Jungle Puppy, but in part it was having no timetable and the relative invincibility of having a canine companion that somehow immunizes yours truly from getting hollered at or propositioned on those parts of Detroit Avenue where that's a regular line of work. I used to walk everywhere in Kent, but part of that was knowing that there were lots of people out and it was relatively safe as opposed to living in the tenth-most-dangerous locale in the country where stuff does happen.

There are security cameras on the street to the south of me, which doesn't seem to do much to deter the 4am crack dealers or the punkass kids tagging on the punk rock bar or the people getting randomly shot on the corner. My part of the street is mostly chill people so I sleep sound at night, but the all-seeing eye and then the more pedestrian lowlifery is daunting enough that I either run up and down the street or drive to see bands play there. 

And tonight, we have girl talk on the balcony, about love lives and politics, the human condition and tuneage over pots of yerba mate and homemade last-minute dinner. It starts raining but there's enough of an overhang that we can push the chairs beneath and keep the candles lit. The neighbor across the street is playing showtunes on the piano, we gaze down at the people walking dogs and riding bikes as the grey clouds swirl past. We don't agree on some things but we do agree on wanting to respect the basic humanity of others.

The conversation inevitably turns to the events of the day and a tiff on my facebook page originating from the news that Dear Leader Mike, along with banning big gulps and wanting to regulate smoking and salt content, also wants sparklers and other little Things That Go Bang banned because: Terrorists and Thinking of the Children. I juxtaposed this with the general treatment of non-white people, what with stop-and-frisk, surveillance of Muslim communities, and that whole pesky business of consistent police brutality both against minorities and dissenters.

Evidently this is less of a problem to some people because of bike lanes and because he cares about public health. But I really think that the treatment of society's vulnerable says a lot about someone's overall character. That, and the way he talks about women. Tell me again, how am I supposed to admire this person? A billionaire asshole who shares his police force with big banks and brags about his private army? Suddenly our kind of clueless Republican governor doesn't seem so bad.

And so I've been thinking, pretty much We The People on most sides are totally cool with giving up freedoms and acceding to the power of the state and the ones with the big purses if we get the right carrots dangled in front of us. Gay rights, unless you're Bradley Manning or Glenn Greenwald, abortion either way (I swing more pro-life but I absolutely hate being told by men that I'm supposed to be more angry about the state of my uterus than I am about the state of our world at large and both sides are manipulative as hell), jobs and a false sense of security, because of course the state will only go after bad foreign people and you've got nothing to hide. The urban planning vision you desire, which of course is more important than the day to day hell that people in a lot of urban areas deal with.

a case of the Mondays

I didn't want to wake up this morning, wanted to roll over again and again. A few pots of coffee later and I'm rolling my eyes and being more abrupt than usual as it seems that everyone who walked in got hit with the stupid stick a little bit extra, got especially exasperated with the males who just stood there slackjawed and couldn't seem to remember what they came in there for. Almost fell asleep in class, retreated to the Batcave to listen to sludge metal and attempt to drown out the chatter ala valley girl. Some days are better than others I guess.

some days are better than others

Attempting to tune out the madding crowd and the condescenders, might try and sneak out early because the absurdity is a bit much on a lack of sleep and mutual snarkers. Whoever said the freaks only come out at night?

Don't ask me about why my hair isn't growing, don't say you've been "admiring me from afar" don't tell me I don't know what I'm doing.

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...

golden dystopian

Friday night commiserations with sundry friends, philosophical meandering keeping us up til 2am before I drove back to the east side and wondered if the mix CD I made for him made any sense, considering most of it wasn't in English and the sequencing was somewhat idiosyncratic.

I've been walking so much the past couple days, the carnivalesque festivities of Parade the Circle with good people, wandering through the art museum seeing things anew yet also missing the Asian and Islamic art that's been AWOL for years now with the renovations, was mercifully bailed out from waiting for the trolley back to the west side by my old college roommate who worked the event. This is one of my favorite festivals in Clevelandia because I always like seeing what different ideas everyone comes up with every year.

 photos courtesy of the daily rag since I haven't gotten my shots off my camera yet.

A friend of mine calls me as I'm out walking on Sunday afternoon and we kill some time together before he goes to work, driving in his rusty car that makes him look like a "person of interest" despite his legal blank slate, listening to hip-hop, devouring Turkish food and he tells me tales of valet parking (Bruce Springsteen fans treat him the best, Young Jeezy fans were the worst) and of what he's reading in 1970s textbooks found in his grandma's basement.

I don't see much of him anymore and I miss the ease of the conversation and the laughter and the shared love of strange beauty, nature, and good tuneage and the mutual skepticism about the way the world is that comes from growing up around adults who harbored a distrust of the state in all its forms, though those in my world sometimes had memberships in the NRA and those in his were involved in the Black Panthers. He's a car guy and fascinated by machines at the air show but disconcerted by the blase attitude toward blowing things up. I remember us standing on top of an abandoned factory as warplanes roared overhead on Labor Day Weekend and the spooky feelings we got in that urban wasteland.

I head up to the garden to pull weeds and hang out, and I come home with a huge bag of strawberries and me and the lady across the street are picking mulberries off the tree in the back yard and I pick up more at the abandoned church around the corner to make some weird amalgam of granola and fruit cobbler like a good hippie. Some kids walk by and ask if they're edible, I hope the cop watching me isn't going to bust me for trespassing, and there's more berries than I know what to do with. It might be time to learn how to make wine.

I wake up at 1am this morning to the smell of burning and wander through the house looking for the source and realize that if there was an actual fire in there I'd be dead or aflame by now, and also that there's no smoke detectors in my apartment. Fun times. Someone on the bus tells me there was a fire a few blocks over, and when I get downtown there's helicopters in the square and while the press release talks about how it's "occupied" I feel a bit creeped out, like someday this kind of invasion for the week will be normal. Because nothing says Fighting The Man like glorifying the military industrial complex, you know...

paper and ink

 I was at a bookstore last night flipping through the anthologies of folklore, overhearing a conversation between a clerk who looked like an extra from a Creation Records britpop band and a woman who said the last two books she read were The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Da Vinci Code. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I know there's countless others, and maybe that's what does it for some people, the way I devoured Nancy Drews even though they all ran together. Not everyone thinks that Welsh mythology is awesome, and that's ok I guess, as someone else tells their significant other that they can just download that book instead of buying it and that DVD is streaming on Netflix now.

I came out with a pile of CDs and movies and books, filling gaps in the collection, realizing that despite my love of Nirvana, I've never actually owned a copy of Nevermind and that my sister has all the Tolkien that wasn't worn out from much love and reading when we were kids, and The Master and Margarita is just fantastic.

I've been reading bits and pieces of Pamuk's Istanbul, and his Nobel Prize speech keeps coming back to me as I look around my apartment, at the pile on my desk at work, consider the correspondence and conversations I overhear, knowing that everything says people are reading more but that books in themselves are being devalued. My mom took us to the library when we were kids, and I fell in love with the atmosphere so much that half of my life has been spent working at one or another, in part for the access to the wide wealth of text and tunes voraciously indulged. It was a comfort in my introverted childhood, and a source of pleasure in adulthood, when I come home in the winter to wrap up in a blanket with tea and read, and stretch out on the balcony in the summer.


But once we shut ourselves away, we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other people's stories, other people's books, other people's words, the thing we call tradition. 

One of the losses when things are withdrawn, thrown away, packed off to a depository is that this wealth of knowledge is inaccessible and lost to most. There has been so much good stuff in old bindings that can tell us about the past, to understand the future. I guess the population wants to be happy, and ignorance is bliss, and learning about other places or how other people are might destroy our sense of smugness and superiority.


I believe literature to be the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us. 

It's not so much that books are burned, but devalued in an age of everything being downloadable, instant gratificational, and disposable. I went to library school post-English lit because I loved books, and realized quickly that this wasn't true of most of my colleagues, which was profoundly disillusioning, when they debated the minutiae of terminology that no one outside of middle management cares about or what was "relevant" to people who wouldn't be interested in learning anyway or tried to out-liberal each other.

But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other people's stories and books.


A writer talks of things that everyone knows but does not know they know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader is visiting a world at once familiar and miraculous


What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity's basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears; the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kind ... Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know they touch on a darkness inside me.


Books aren't burned anymore, but they're disappearing from shelves when they get old and "irrelevant" and most of the libraries seem to look more like Borders with the newest and the brightest and the most easiest to digest as opposed to the repository of knowledge that I remember these places once being. People keep saying that this is the way of the future and that I fetishize the bindings, the paper, and ink and illustrations, that I need to get with the times. It kind of freaks me out that books can vanish from one's Kindle at the behest of a publisher or other entity. Who needs burning when text can just disappear into a digital void?

What happens when there's a blackout, or a power grid goes down, or one doesn't have an Internet connection. There are people who don't, believe it or not. Sure, you can share on a Kindle, but I've loved sharing physical copies of my favorite tomes with others, trading dogeared underlined paperbacks in the mail. Maybe I'm a hopeless romantic in my own weird way, maybe it's some kind of consumerism that feels good to me the way other women buy shoes.

I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

I write because it's the only way to get these thoughts out, hoping that maybe someday there will be something good and enduring.