Detroit, Darling, You.

Lately this is my experience outside of Cleveland: these gray rainy places are growing tentacles and groping at me as I speed on past. But not in the shiny collectible way they were before, all fun and games. Instead in this sincere desperate shoving pressing grope, like the cities want to crawl on me and inside me and just snuggle up all round in my warm intestines. Yeah, that's what it's like, it's like a cat stuck outside in April. Millvale and Toledo and Akron and Detroit and Youngstown. Strays that I've been feeding and now they're expecting the next step. And maybe that's right, maybe I'm meant to be moving down the circles of decay, find new wet gritty corners. Maybe I notice the groping and grasping because I'm so ready to fall in love with something new I'm falling in love with everything.

Also I think it's funny how many people I've known in my life with the last name Jones, and they've all been decent sorts. Wendy and Nate and Sarah. So this is what happened. Sarah got these tickets for the Pixies in Detroit, and Perren couldn't go, so I went because it takes nothing, literally nothing, to convince me to go to Detroit. I fucking love Detroit. It's so goddamn blue and gray, all of it, always. So we made this mad rush, and got there in plenty of time, and talked about stuff and made plans. We go over the Great Sailboat Bridge, and I'm all like Sarah, watch and tell me if you see Michigan get flatter, and she does! Cause it does it immediately. I'm getting a little obsessed with this idea of state borders, that the whole terrain changes so drastically along these little thin lines I had believed were basically arbitrary. And of course if I had thought that through all the way, I would have long ago realized the subtleties of them not being arbitrary at all, but that was a theme this night, the realizations of obvious but not necessarily important things. Point is, I can tell when I'm in Ohio, or Pennsylvania, or Michigan, or Indiana. The trees are all different, the low bushes too. In Michigan for instance, along the border and into the city are all these little thick dark pointy trees, that give the place the look of an orchard. It's real lake country, not just part of it like Ohio, but all of it. It's marshy and northerly. The color scheme is cargo ship.



She failed to mention that this was the Doolittle Anniversary Tour, and they were going to play the entire album, like in entirety. Once she mentioned that, my chest just sort of jumped and seized up and stayed that way, which is what happens when I get excited of course, and that's the feeling I go searching for every day. Being really excited and filled with anticipation is the absolute best most addictive feeling, and I wonder if that's why I don't watch horror movies because it's the same physical reaction as being scared right? Only without wanting to think about it over and over again for days.

I thought I had been the Fox theater before when Belle and Sebastian came, but now I wonder, because this theater is so very shiny and decked out, I feel sure I would have remembered that. But that show was a long time ago, and we had a whole group that had been sitting on the van floor for hours, and we were young and way less comfortable in our skins, so far less prone to look around and notice things like hidden windows. Turned out the seats Sarah got were Row A, which wasn't orchestra pit but right before it, and we were basically 6 rows from the stage in a packed theater of 5,000. That's a power rush itself. Though I do wonder about who spends 150 on a seat when you can be the 6th row for 60? Where's the real difference there? These guys in front of us kept turning around and waving imperiously at the peasants. I would have thrown a beer at them in a more productive life. I had quite enough beer soaking into my leather boots though, running like a little hillside creek down the seats to pool at the railing. The show was so good, I didn't care, and didn't even notice till we left.

First it was some B Sides, then all of Doolittle, and then like three sets of encores that were basically an entire other concert. The whole place full of 30 year olds and forty year olds screaming and laughing, something you don't get to see enough of in the real world. People had dressed up for the nineties. All gathered together in huge groups of friends they had known since high school, having planned this night in advance the carpooling and the calling off work and stuff. The young ones, who could usually be found isolated and aloof in corners on their phones, stood out like sore self aware thumbs.



I think I would have taped every minute of that show, except I consciously kept telling myself to put the fucking camera down asshole. BUT IT WAS SO GOOD. Like, these clips don't even begin to do it justice, because I had planned to tape these songs, and I Love You was the crowning moment of the night but it was too late, I was already into it. U-Mass too. I did record Debaser, it's on my youtube if you wanna watch, but the it's not as good a recording. But it does sort of show you that jump of OH THE ALBUM'S BEGINNING.



After the show, I waited in the lobby while Sarah braved the merch table for 30 minutes. A guy who was either crazy or drunk walked by me, could have been either really. Didn't look crazy, but then he stopped and turned around and got really up in my face and said very seriously "I'm a poet and I have two published books and you, you have the bluest eyes. Your eyes are just swimmable." See, that first part of the sentence? Definitely crazy right? And he didn't leave. He just stood there looking at me, and giving me his number, and talking in his sort of sane drunken charmingly fracture way that I did actually like against my best judgement. Which was fun, but at one point he asked if he could touch my chin, and I was like sure. He cupped my chin in his hand, and lifted it up just a bit to look me in the eyes. "It's not just that they're blue, they're also almond shaped, they have this dip. Oh that dip! And your eyebrows, you have the most complete eyebrows. And a little pug nose. You're so beautiful." Then he just went back to talking about nonsense, and would stop again and stare again and then run off to his friends and then run back. It was the most flattering drunk attention from a stranger I've ever had, but it crazy. He asked if he could kiss my neck and I said uh uh, no, I've been sick, I'm covered in sick, and then he asked if we'd come have a drink at the casino and I declined cause we had to go back to Cleveland, but you know what drunk or crazy man? You were cute enough. If I didn't have to work, I would have stayed and had a drink. I did give him my number. I said to myself, at the very least some crazy guy can entertain me on the phone every once in a while. I'm back into talking on the phone these days, not texting or emailing, but like talking for a while. I missed that a lot it turns out.

The lesson here is I am the world's biggest sucker for compliments. There has never been a girl more willing to listen to what you like about me than me.

After Michigan tried to kiss me, Ohio tried to drown us in thunder and glass as we slid our way home, over the sailboat bridge and past the chemical plants with American flags painted on their sides, and billboard for strip clubs and dark lit scrap yards with mysterious flames and miles and miles of wet wet road.



More photos from the concert here.

Michigan Central: of the Universe

The reason we think of hell as hot, and heaven as slightly chilly, is that they were created in the minds of desert nomads. People who spent their fevered lives trying to avoid the heat. But in modern thought, cold people are considered "deviant" and good people are "warm." So where are we supposed to fall in between, in our self-endorsement infomercial dreams of neutrality and empathy and gray, are we Fall? Are we the Fall? We don't believe in glory and victory. We believe in nightlights and staying away from barbed wire.

The fathers had no idea of this genetic waterfall when they built these fortresses of industry. They beat their wives and children, they drank their internal organs dry, they stuck their cocks in all sorts of disease, and they knew for sure they were going to hell when they died. But when he showed up at the devil's waiting room, scorched and pleading, The Stone Mason knew he had done at least one great thing in his lifetime. One piece of art to save his entire sodden soul. He had built this thing that would last as his badge of worthiness, for centuries. Sobbing wasted on a street corner while his wife and babes slept under blood soaked shingles, he could look into the distance and see this stone temple rising on the darkness, glowing with commerce and money and usefulness. The heartbeat of populations headed West, the expanding country, the tide of America came racing through on those tracks. He was a vital cog in the machine of Open Spaces. His children would grow up and become other cogs in the machine, in the flashing vital machinery that moved us forward into deserts and forests and condo complexes, cars cars cars pumping out of Michigan like blood, like serotonin from the punch drunk neurons of party kids, never to be replaced. Only they were poker chips, like manufactured medicine, emulsified into the blood supply.

When the future was over, it became plastic. Plastic brittle scabs of money and risk and glass. The children stopped going to the factories, because there were no more factories to be had. They broke into their fathers' temples, and tried desperately to take them back, to keep the stone from running away. I am here, they screamed in the empty places, Pay Attention To Me. But the country had moved on, to Open Spaces, and the one-time palaces on the lakes became places instead to fuck and fight and bleed and eat and sleep and grow up and/or die. Like a glowstick dying, the temporary toxic energy bled from the walls, fading into the atmosphere. Until all that was left was Echo. Echo climbing through the rusting rebars and chipped staircases. Echo walking slowly through the loading dock doors and broken office windows. Echo whispering in your ear it's intangible dry breeze wishes. Kiss. Scream. Cry. Expand. Wither.

Why is everyone afraid to be dirty? They want it either straight up disgusting, unbearably nauseating. Or else dust-free and shiny. No one wants that medium, the dusty gravel coated dirty. Slime is funny and dramatic. Sanitized is virtuous. Dusty dirty is the sheen of someone who crawled under a fence, and held onto rusty plumbing, and rubbed their face unthinkingly, distracted by something larger than themselves. I think it's hot. Any time someone does something, or says something, or is something because they for once aren't thinking about themselves at all? It's the very thing. Maybe only to inherently selfish people like us.

Which is why museums are so hot right? All those eyes and brains walking around, concentrating on something other than themselves? And the doctorate students, the crazy artists, the aspiring business owners. The religious zealots, the newly married, the physicists, the zoo-keepers, the cathedral builders, the stay at home mothers. Fanatically obsessed with something other than how they personally are interacting with you. America's dirty secret? We want to fuck these people and steal away their focus. We want to distract them. We want to suck that genius into our own plodding, renaissance weakened souls. This is a gross generalization I cannot in any way back up, other than by saying it's a feeling. It's the feeling I get in a room of people watching their favorite band. Its the feeling that invades when you unveil something you love to a group of people who didn't make it.

I didn't make this Terminal. My ancestors had zilch to do with the construction of this, or any other edifices. I get no feeling of connection with history, or of decay and abandonment. Instead I see it, and it's as if it was built exactly like this, and is instead perfectly preserved. It will be this way forever. I touch the bricks, and I'm not touching history. I'm touching present warm brick and mortar; rock not broken, only re-adjusted. The crunching of glass under my feet is what the architect was going for. The lighting is precisely designed. The moment I'm smelling and feeling and touching and seeing is the only way this will stay. I want to touch every one else in the place, hold hands and touch wall, complete a circle which could only lead to some enlightenment of the secret places.

It's true what they say. We guided our way by memorizing the silhouettes of casinos. We used the valets, not the police, to find the mummies. We stared at the wizen leather genitalia of Mexican laborers who's families couldn't pay the crypt dues, and their bodies were trotted around the old steel cities of Canada and the States, a traveling exhibit of people who should have had it worse off than us. The scorpions were nesting in their torsos, the spiders in their cheeks. At least if we're buried here, we have a fairly good chance of one day becoming permafrost.

We watched a movie about a man who climbed mountains. Three days of sleeping in the clothes you're wearing, of not pissing from dehydration, of tying yourself against your enemy so you don't roll off in the middle of the night. Unfortunately, it was accompanied by the musical styling of Queen, and a dead father. But the message shouldn't be lost. Sometimes you do things by staring at the small things around you, staring intently for a foothold or a rock to jam your hammer into, to keep you safe for a few minutes. Some people can do that for years.

So cops, dust, mohawks, knives, grease from machinery coating his hands, diners and turning around on the highway thirteen times. Casino valets, mummies, crawling into air ducts of black storefront boxes. Debris, oil tanker baby farms, burnt insides, tires, junkyard dogs, and over all the landscape a spiderweb of lights that every sign for reads Bridge to Canada.

It's never consensual. It's always someone winning. The winner is the one who does something first.


Maybe caffeine, hormones, and alcohol are the only magic left.

But that's the attitude of a person who needs nightlights.