Winter Skin Issues

My Brightest Diamond, "High Low Middle" by asthmatickitty

Working late at night, cooped up in the second bedroom of my apartment hunched over my computer, thinking what an archaic term "computer" was, I dreamed of being outside in the sunshine. The next day I had to work as well, but on actually work stuff, not the really important work. It was dark all day anyway, also snowing thick and sticky. I still went out, had to get out and get my blood moving again. The problem with living by yourself for a long time is it gets easier and easier to slip into the deep murky vapors of your own head. What used to take months to induce a state of desperate boredom now happens in days. I need to see my thoughts reflected off of other people. So whatever, the fucking point is I really really really wanted to be outside during the day, even if it was the dead dog end of January.

 So I made plans with two people I didn't know very well but have wanted to get to know better, which is the most entertaining way to do brunch, I like that in-between stage. Where you know each well enough to be pretty comfortable, but there's still an element of mild surprise sometimes. I was feeling pretty good, dehydrated and sleepwalking as I was, because it turns out that Saturday's desperate drinking had worked. I felt the emotional poison draining out of me the minute I stepped outside on my porch to meet them. It's important when you feel a bubble of hate and bitterness swelling inside you to lance it, drain out the black fluid, before it gets established enough to grow a shell. The blackness was clear though, gone, and it was wonderful outside, to feel the sunny winter air and smell the snow. This whole weekend the weather was swinging back and forth, making out with itself in between styrofoam snow, horrible knife cold rain, and beautiful blue sunny skies with crispy cold 60 mph winds. The weather was proud of itself. I was pretty proud of it too.

We were leaving the diner, and the coffee was starting to enter my veins like a slow drip, when the temperature suddenly dropped. The shock of it was sharp, and my skin jumped, detached all at one in a piece, and ran away. It looked like a ghost, sort of there but with no substance, as it disappeared down the street. The sun in front of it (her?) shown through like I used to hold a pen light against the bottom of my thumb to see the nails light up.

If you think you get nervous hanging out with new people when wrapped up in nice warm skin, try entirely universally naked. I still had my dress on of course, only wicked girls let their clothes get away from them. But it's not attractive to see the arteries and muscles in your forearms either, or and especially the large beating one on your neck just underneath your ear. It certainly doesn't help with convincing new people you're not a weirdo. Plus now I was super cold. The small hard pellets of snow were falling faster now, and the wind stung every inch of me. I felt more exposed than I had ever been before, save that one weekend.

We tracked my runaway skin, easy enough since it had no real muscle and there were little drops of residual blood left on the snow, though no actual footprints so we had to look closely and squint as the afternoon light dimmed and disappeared in the whitening sky. It led us through the closed up storefronts and bare tree boulevards, till finally the trail brought us to a low dark building. The boys helped pry open the door, which my skin had thoughtfully stuck shut with a large metal shred under the bottom. It's my skin after all, it understands tricks. I stood there as they fought with the door, shivering so hard I expected at any moment to vibrate at exactly the wrong sequence, causing me to fall out of the universe completely. When they got it open, I jumped right inside just to get out of the wind. It took my eyes a minute to adjust to the darkness. One of the boys closed the doors against the storm, and there we were.

The floor was covered with rotting ceiling wood and melted carpet mold. We stumbled through the dark hallways, sunshine spilling from the holes in the roof, falling on the floor in concentrated spots. A pile of cinderblocks in the corner. Monitors disintegrating on wet wooden desks. So many things run away. And at the end of the longest hallway, in a cavernous rotunda with the sunshine coming through the peaked broken roof glass in a bright circle at the middle of the room. It felt like church. And there was my skin. It was paler than I remembered it, and obviously tired. It looked at us in panic, and I saw the rest of the objects sitting all around us. All the things left behind in the winters - gloves and spare times, sidewalk rubble and shopping carts. They surrounded us menacingly, defensive, attacking. I moved closer, and gave a quick call. My skin ran over just as fast, and hopped right back on me. We stood there a moment, the two of us, feeling the elation at being connected again.

The boys and I left immediately. I could feel the calculators and bath towels, the running shoes and air conditioners pressing in the darkness against our retreat. If I am in the backseat of a car, I cannot stop looking at my self in the rearview mirror. It's terrible but true, and oh so much more true this particular ride home, as I stared at the color of my eyes, and the tone of my cheeks, and ran my fingers over my ears over and over again, to seal it up again tight.

I Hate Every Title I Come Up With For This

I read this last night at an event. Or rather, I made everyone else read it out loud, paragraph by paragraph, and that was fantastic. I might make that my thing, making audience members read for me, I'm terrible at reading my own stuff and it's pretty fantastic to hear your words in other people's mouths.

I am incapable of change.
I long for it. I look around at my house, my car, my job, at my body in the bathroom mirror getting out of the shower and I want it all to be different. But when I concentrate hard, when I try to gather up motivations, to suction out the fog in my head and replace it with cold hard strategy, those motivations and strategies and plans are slowly eaten away by my brain’s naturally produced poison of staying put. They are eroded until there is nothing left but a lacey shadow on my brain of what I intended to do. An xray memory. A blot on an otherwise smooth surface.

I live in a city that is as poisoned as my brain.
I drive to work in the early morning hours, when the molecules of the City are still and quiet, and the only movements are the sparse cars gliding along grey empty highways, and the buzzing from street lamps and gas station signs. I drive past monstrous hunks of architecture that have been killed in the battle between industry and flight, the remains of wealth and power. These rotting buildings are the physical incarnations of my shadows, proof positive that no willpower can exist for very long in the Wasteland. Nobody knocks them down. Nobody fixes them. Nobody remembers what they used to be for. We hardly see them anymore, they lay invisible in the background of our lives, full of power but cold and dead.

This is what I think about as I’m at the gas station, the sun rising behind the Citgo sign, (listening to the man on his cellphone at the pump next to me who apparently doesn’t care if we blow up) - Before we had horizons and linear perspective, art had hierachy, an aristocracy. A character’s size was based on his or her’s importance to the story of the painting. This was called vertical perspective. It was left behind in the dust of the modern centuries, because it was illogical, and the concept of abstract art wasn’t due to be reborn on the scene for another hundred thousand million light years. The Horizon was invented and stabilized and everyone started using it, not just sailors on their little toy wooden boats, but writers and artists and soldiers. Like when people who weren’t lawyers first started using cell phones. The Horizon was at one point a modern technological miracle. A shining beacon of what humanity could accomplish - the Horizon!

It comes first from the Horizon. I am driving to work one morning, listening to the same CD I’ve had in the car for a year, when on the edge of my vision I catch a light. Not a flickering street light, or rushing lights of another car, but a gleaming glow coming from the mouth of the river, on the horizon of the large cold block of grey that is the Lake. It is pulsing a silent gold, which reflects on my windshield and shines against the concrete walls of the old City. This light, coming from an unknown awe inspiring enigmatic far far away point on the Horizon, gets stronger and stronger throughout the day. It turns the winter sky pink and silver. It transforms the dirty windows of the warehouses to twinkling prisms.

By the time we are all driving home, during what would normally be a pitch black rush hour, the entire City is lit up like a spotlight. But this light does not just reflect, it sticks, like gold dust settling on the streets. Our car tires turn up storms of sparkles like snow. It settles on our hair and eyelashes and clothes as glitter. It absorbs into the asphalt and turns the soot covered bricks, black with a century of manufacturing coughs, into jewels and shingles into irridescent shells. Those old dinosaur buildings, they become living breathing animals, snuggled in their nests.

The best part though is what happens when you breathe in the gold light. First you choke a little, with the tingling of it down your throat. Then you feel a warmth settle in your chest, as if you had just sipped a glass of bronzed whiskey. Next you feel it spreading through your veins, and up into your head. You want to lie down in grass and stare spinning at the sky, only it’s January in Cleveland so there is no grass. Instead you sit in your car with the heat blasting, and close your eyes, feel the light reaching up your spine behind your eyeballs, and into your corneas, and out through your lashes. I hadn’t realized how slow my heart was beating before, but I notice now in retrospect, as my heart beats faster and faster.

I am dizzy with a kind of universal caffeine. I open my eyes, and everything seems cleaner. The snow is whiter and the brown sludgey ice around the edges is gone. The sky is no longer grey, but shades of mauve and cream and violet. The siding on the houses is newer, the cars nicer, the people better dressed. The City has been gilded through and through. Everyone is happier. I am happier. All my memories are scrubbed clean. I barely remember my disgust with the never ending sameness, instead that familiarity seems to be a power, something that makes me strong, knowing where everything comes from and everything goes. Being “stuck here” is suddenly “ideal cost of living” “affordable amenities” “friends and family.”

There are lots of words thrown around the next few months, and I hear them all the time, online and on the radio, from the mouths of my friends. Revitilization. Civic Rebirth. Renaissance. There are not more jobs suddenly, people are no less poor and miserable, everyone is still bored. But now that the light has made everything seem prettier, nobody seems to mind those other things as much. The mysterious dust is gone, has absorbed into the groundwater and steel, but the euphoria remains. I know deep inside my head, beyond the reach of the Light, that this is not a Golden Age. This is the last huzzah before the end. This is the revenge of all those rotting brick husk buildings, the forgotten schools and masonic temples, the sprawling abandoned factories, they are gasping out their last boomtown breaths. But I just can’t bring myself to protest.

Cinema Park

The other day, some boys and I went to the batting cages on the far east side. We go to that one, even though it's a drive, because the high school boys who work the counter don't care when we show up in civvies, and hog the cages, then duck out to the bar for a bit, and come back. Also, I always get a free token from the guy. You can tell he does not really care about his job, except that it's an easy after school job where he just has to pass helmets and bats, and spend the rest of the time watching sports. I was wearing a sequin dress, and a sweater that was cut low on my shoulders which always stretches out the more hours I wear it, and by the time we got there it was pretty much falling off. I must have looked a little bit like a mess, and this time there was a little girls' little league practicing on the courts next to the cages. All the preteens were hanging out in front of the softball cage, which is the one I use because I don't like blisters, and they stared at me hitting balls for 30 minutes, stopping after every throw to hitch my sweater up so my boobs didn't fall out. I'm pretty sure their parents were less than pleased. Messy thirty year old women showing up with hipster boys in t-shirts, playing around, with bad stances.

Afterwards, we went to Fairmount to eat burgers, and on the tv was 60 Minutes. We sipped mildly fancy drinks. My dad used to watch that show religiously growing up, and because of the nostalgia factor I still enjoy it, but it's very old now. The story that came on was about the foreclosure crisis, the one big claim to fame Cleveland has now in the national news, and they interviewed people in a neighborhood who were refusing to give up their houses, despite being really underwater on the values. They showed footage from a place called Cinema Park, which was a housing development started and then abandoned when the company went bankrupt. The pictures were stark, half finished houses and acres of gas line caps. We immediately decided to go the next day. Later we went to our friends house, where an American Apparel employee christmas party was happening. All the people were incredibly weirdly thin and small, and wearing very nice clothes. We left there and went to the hipster bar, to watch Japanese skate videos and I bought 23 yr old girls shots for someone's birthday ( I was all about being the role model that day), and tried to parse out the correct french terms for military tactics used by Napoleon and then later in the Civil War. It turned out, later on FB, that everyone else had seen that foreclosure segment too, which is sort of nice, that people still watch 60 Minutes.

The next day though, we did go, found the place on google maps and went in the middle of the afternoon. This is the kind of stuff you do in Cleveland. You listen to Drake and drive around spying for things the news told you about in the place where you live. The land used to be a drive in theater, thus the name. There were a dozen houses, and people living in six of them, and the rest all empty plots. It was very gray and cold, and the sky looked like a down comforter spinning in an industrial dryer. One woman called out to us from her bedroom window, in a pink bathrobe. I could only catch half of what she was saying, but it made me feel weird, being there only to take photos of how tragic her street looked like. She was fine with it, presumably having dealt with reporters already for a while. Just don't break into any of them, she said. No problem. We understood each other, that this was just a reality of living in this city. They were boarded up tight anyways, Playmobil houses that just weren't ready to be shipped yet. The sidewalks started and ended in odd places, and there were several missing driveways. At the end of the street was a very nice large park with lots of benches, more benches than there were actual people living there. It was a park with expectations.

Malls are useless for everything, especially apocalypses and zombie attacks

It's hard sometimes, I know, to understand how anyone could be against Christmas. It's so sparkly and lit up, with bows and shiny paper and pretty dresses. Everyone goes around telling people how much they love them. Even if you don't believe in god or America, how can you be against people having a good time, right?

But listen, Randall Park Mall is how. This is the dark aftermath of Christmas, like the morning after a coke binge where even though you haven't slept at all, something in your brain clears and you wake up and realize you can't feel anything in the middle of your face but you feel the rest of your body with intensity, and you have no cigarettes left, and check out time in this hotel is in 5 minutes so you don't even have time to take a very hot shower and try to rehydrate the channels of dried snot in your sinuses. This is what consumerism has done to us, left us hollowed out wrecks of past booms sitting in the nonexistent sun, the Ohio December afternoon gloom.

Also, and I can't stress this enough, malls are the worst places to go if there is a zombie attack. There are too many entrances to defend.

Of course, the other annoying thing is if you are a white middle aged girl named Bridget, every stranger you talk to assumes you are a christian with their constant Merry Christmases, and it just reminds you over and over how racist we all are, how if you were a Turkish girl, or an Indian Girl no one would feel comfortably making that assumption. Then they ask you if you have kids, and there's a whole nother stereotype/expectation/disappointment to slam against, rubbing like onion skin against your already raw "I don't believe in god thanks" nerves.

Usually this rolls off my back like water, but this year I've had two customers at work so far get audibly mad at me for saying Happy Holidays to them instead of Merry Christmas, and seriously, fuck off then. As John Stewart said, if you want a War on Christmas, fine, it's War. You've planted the seed of bitterness in my chest, and the roots push up into my eyes every time someone says anything Christmas related to me now.

I wonder if people who aren't white but are christian get upset because people assume they can't say Merry Christmas to them?

I know if I was more militant about it to my own friends, if I actively railed against it to them, they would try to remember and keep it non-christian. But I love them more than strangers, so I forgive them their trespasses.

The Mayans came up a lot yesterday. There was some half truth internet based story about a pyramid in Georgia being identified as Mayan. It probably wasn't. But it probably is a pyramid, or something. It is lodged against the side of hill, a 1000 yr old pile of broken rubble underneath centuries of earth. Or course, it came out right around the pre-anniversary of the expected date of the end of the world, which is 12/21/2012. I feel like they could have done better with the symmetry of that number. 12/20/2012 for instance, or if you want to keep it simple, 12/12/12. Mayans are the new Y2K, or the new Leprechauns, the new Bigfoots. Someday we will hear rumours about hidden leftover Mayan tribes, somewhere in the wilds of Montana, with the secret to everlasting life hidden in a cave.  Not that the Mayans didn't actually exist at some point, but not these Mayans. These Mayans are citizens of Atlantis. They invented the telephone. They could turn dirt to gold. Their women were better at head. They were the first punk rockers. And now they are coming to destroy us all, out of revenge. Or because God told them to.

If I allow the side of me inclined to spiritual belief, the side that used to be obsessed with how Saints died, and who knew all the astrological personalities my particular Sign should have sex with, then here is what I think about the Mayan Calendar, bearing in mind no actual knowledge about the calendar other than what I've gleaned from numerous New Age crap over the past 20 years (the calendar, like the pyramid, does exist, but only as a scientific object, a relic, like an abacus or macbook). If the world resets on that date, then it will be a metaphorically End of the World, because it will be the Beginning of a New One, only in the sense that how time is measured will be different. If the very thing that creates our structured universe is how we quantify that imaginary force Time, then the end of the known calendar will be a New Universe. I like that idea, mostly because I think we could all use being reminded of the arbitrary nature of our laws every few hundred years.

Of course, if you all want to live like the world is going to burn in one year, I really encourage that. Do it. I want to see what happens. I think even if the End of the World was a government sanctioned event, verified and plotted and expected by the entire population as a thing as real as the Superbowl, I suspect most people would do nothing different. I suspect, in fact and for real, most people are already living like they assume it doesn't matter. They are still ringing up bills they can't pay for pleasures same day, and they still sleep with people they shouldn't. We tell ourselves all the time how much we are holding back because of convention, but frankly, I don't think you are. Humans are selfish and hedonistic, and inclined to getting what we want regardless. But we are also cowards, afraid of things touching our very fragile skins. So I think modern society has basically balanced out our desire versus our fear to exactly what limit we are willing to take our irresponsibilities. Which, the world is really really fucked up, right? Don't we talk about that all the time, how fucked up everything is? So why are we so loathe to believe we are at rock bottom now? We cling to the idea there is still time to stop the train before it gets there.  Some people see that as "still time to save us", but  with my perspective, it's more like "only way to go is up". Both ways are wrong. There is no more time left to save us, and there are plenty of other directions to go in that aren't up. Some of those directions are more fun than others though.

Which is pretty much how you can tell the people who are really into New Years.

Before and After Shots of St. Joseph's

Hymn of the Cherumbim (Ize Cheruvimy)


I was at a party over Halloween weekend when a guy came up to me who had seen my Pechakucha Cleveland Monsters presentation, and recognized one of the Monsters as the church his family had attended, my beloved St. Joseph's. So beloved in fact that I've been mistakenly calling it St. John's this whole time, oops, thanks Internet research. He said there were some old photos of the church in it's heyday that I might want to see. I said "might" is an understatement. And so I figured you might want to see them too. The audio file above is from an album of hymns by the choir that was actually recorded in St. Joseph's.










I was at a party last night and had a conversation with a girl about family holidays. She identified herself as coming from a large Italian family, second generation, but when I said I thought that holidays in families that still had a lot of ties back to the old country were best, she got defensive and quickly pointed out that her family didn't really do anything ethnic. They instead got very dressed up for the holiday dinners, with formal place settings and pretty clothes. She said they had stopped doing all that kind of Italian stuff when her grandfather died. What I meant though was not that we all necessarily performed the old rituals, but that a certain kind of family mental structure was passed down, a pattern of thinking about holidays. Even if your grandparents were long dead and your mom no longer remembered how to speak Polish, there was a general feeling of specialness that got passed on, especially in ethnically religious families. As Catholics, we were taught that every day was some saint's holy day, and the high holy days - Christmas and Easter and Ascensions of various personages - you were supposed to behave, because you were in mass. Maybe that's it, a slight genetic memory of holidays being religious, that causes families not far removed from those days to treat them with more deference. Sure, we're all atheists now, but your mother and father remember being little and put through the motions, so their way of thinking about it is unconsciously passed down to you their child, a way of proper behavior. That's what I like the most about the ethnic holiday celebrations, the desire to act like a saint. I don't know, I was drunk when I was trying to explain this to her, and even now I don't think I'm articulating the concept quite right.







From a letter I wrote back to the guy who gave me the photos....

"The reason I like exploring and writing about places like this in the
Rust Belt is that they need new identities now that they've been
abandoned by people. It's the idea that a building is born, put
together piece by piece, and then matures and soaks in all the stories
and experiences of the people that use it. Then when it's abandoned,
it grows up into another creature, something living in the environment
like a mountain or a river, even more permanent than a tree or people,
a natural organic new landscape. So building a city is like breeding
new mountains. In the same way that we value looking at a cliff face
or a rhinoceros, we should value looking at what these places become
after we leave them. Actually, even more so, because of the people
they came from, like they are our children sort of. I had this
discussion with A. the other day, about how I don't like buildings
that are all glass because they are fragile, and won't last the way
the stone and brick ones will. He felt it was okay for a building to
be temporary and only around for it's use. I think we should build
things that last for centuries, and you know, KEEP using them, or if
they get abandoned, use them again. You would never breed children to
be pretty but breakable, you want them to be survivors."

You want them to have experience is maybe what I mean. You want them to have that slight quiet whisper of "this is how you behave on holidays." But like so many things with experience, people dogs cars, most of the time they just get thrown away. I just made you think of that Sarah McLachlan ad didn't I? Sorry. That one makes me cry every time.

The Story of Christmas Ale

I originally posted this last year, but since today IS the first pour of Christmas Ale for the season, and because I AM super busy with other stuff and have been a terrible blogger, this seems about right.

Once upon a time, on a unshoveled stretch of dirty snow called W. 54th, between the Animal Feed Store and the bodega, there lived a very little girl and her smaller less articulate sister. They lived with their mom and dad, who were both very sincere young people in their 30s with hipster glasses and nonprofit aspirations. But underneath her J.Crew sweaters, the mom was very much a third generation polish girl, and so Christmas was a big deal to her. There were traditions, and pierogis, and making cranberry chains to put on the tree. There were huge boxes of Christmas ornaments, new ones that the little girl and her sister had made in school, old ones from grandmother’s house with pretty painted angels and white bearded men.

The little girl and her sister got up very early on December 25th 1991, and ran downstairs. The only lights on were the ones on the tree, and the little girl deliberately took off her glasses, so she could look at the colors blended together in blurry stained glass window spots. But what was this crap! There were no presents under the tree! They searched high and low around the living room, but nothing! No boxes, no wrapping, no weird awkward shaped forms to rattle and bounce. They ran crying to their mom and dad, standing in the dark doorway of their bedroom sobbing. Mom and Dad got up, looked all around, called the police even. But the presents were gone. Zipped Zoomed Znatched.

All across Cleveland that morning, it was the same tragic mystery. All the presents were gone, stolen! evaporated! and no one knew how. Little Jimmy Casterelli in Cleveland Heights didn’t get his Legos sets, and therefore never became an engineer. Patricia Kowalski from Fairview Park never found out that in that very large box her boyfriend had put under the tree was a very small ring, and she ended up dumping him after New Years for not being serious enough. In the snowbound suburb of Berea, the Christmas lights sparkled on the ranch houses, but inside it was nothing but tears, disappointment, and fathers escaping to the garage to drink. The news stations deployed their sparkling vans and sculpey faced reporters to the farthest ends of Cuyahoga County, and the police sent all their available men around to interview “Witnesses”, but other than drunks and schizophrenics, no one had seen anything.

It was the saddest day in Cleveland history.

So the next week, when a local brewery announced they would be a releasing a new craft beer, a holiday seasoned ale, something with a little punch, it was barely noticed. Soon though, the little brewery was regularly packed, with people humming about this strange new beer. They sat at the long wooden counter, enrapt in their work thoughts and unhappiness. But after taking a sip, a change would start to steal over their faces, brows magically unfurrowed, mouths relaxed, shoulders sagged down. The bar was surprisingly quiet the first hour, as everyone focused on the gold brown liquid, and you could almost hear the contemplation, it was thick in the air. But after 1 or 2, the drinker started to become louder just a little, more excited. And by the end of the night, even the most sober faced of adults would be laughing with glee. It was instantly addicting, exactly what anyone could want in a beer, not taste or smell, but effectiveness. It made you feel full of holiday cheer, even though your kids were crying and your wife spent all her time thinking about the credit card debt. They called it Christmas Ale.

The little girl’s parents went there too, having heard about it from friends. They sat in a booth, tired and worried about money and work tomorrow and the babysitter who was a slovenly fat teenage blonde from down the street. The Dad ordered a burger, and the Mom ordered a wrap, they both ordered two Christmas Ales. When they came to the table, the Mom took a drink first. “It tastes like legos. I think. New legos.”

Dad took a drink. “No honey, you’re wrong, it tastes like that time Little Girl put watercolors in my coffee to make it pretty. And it smells like that set of coloring pencils we got her for….”

“It tastes like happiness, is what it is.” Mom said dreamily, drinking and thinking of that set of plastic horses she had got when when she was 11, how shiny and new the painted colors were.

Of course, you can’t steal a city’s Christmas presents every year, and though they had stolen enough joy to last a few batches if they were careful, it soon ran out. Which is why they have a warehouse now, underneath St. Ignatius, where forgotten and stolen children toil year around making shining amazing presents to give each other, each little worker getting excited just thinking of how much work he’s put into the gifts, which are then gathered up and taken away as they sleep. No child there ever gets a present. After all, Christmas Ale is very popular.

2012 Edit: Historians often cite Oct.30th 2011 as the first major viral urban outbreak of Christmas Cannibalism. The virus was thought to have been administered to large holiday weekend crowds starting in a near west side neighborhood. The deadly mutation was triggered by a dangerous combination of Christmas Ale, organic lip gloss, and strenuous drunken biking. Though there are some experts that contend the stage had already been set for Cleveland as the "reanimated dead" epicenter a month before, when a new species of beverage, Yeungling, was introduced to a virgin population whose immune systems were dangerously weakened by the foreign substance. Thus making the victims that much more susceptible to the Christmas Ale infection

Bastille Day

So I knew it was going to be coming down any day now completely, and I dragged my sick and burnt carcass out of the house to try and get some shots before it was all the way non existent. I don't know why, but I assumed that everyone would make the Bastille Day/ Cold Storage connection, massive fortresses coming down by the will of the people ect, and while I was talking to this photographer out there I mentioned it too, like "so everyone should have some good shots up tomorrow, right?" and she was totally confused. But still nice. We stood precariously on the tip of the concrete barriers, to lean cautiously out over the fence. There were tons of people there taking pictures with their cell phones and cameras. When they first started tearing it down, I had thought about going out every day at the same time to the same spot to take a picture. But then it took SO long. And someone else for sure did that right? Like, someone's going to send me the link to those right?

Dear Cold Storage, this is how I will remember my 32 years staring at your visage.

- Coming home on family trips when I was a kid, seeing you hovering over 90,and thinking I had to know what exactly they did inside you, and also that it was tacky they let other people paint ads on you.
- Using you as the landmark to navigate my way down into the Flats to go to Nate's houseboat.
- Walking past you on my way home from the Rapid station, when my first apartment was in Tremont.
- Being scared of you because Boots told me that's where all the homeless people lived, when I lived that place briefly with Zelda and Dan and him, and it was right there behind the highway bridges, the fortress of the Bridge People.
- Hanging out staring at you while I waited in the parking lot of the Gateway Clinic with a stray cat in a box, cause they opened at 9am and it was first come first serve and I had to be at work at 10.
- When they knocked your smokestack down and Allison and I loaded a bunch of the bricks from it in the backseat of my car, to make a fire pit out of. Since they were curved and fire proofed. Then those bricks sat in the back seat for like a month, because I was too lazy to unload them all myself, until one day my landlord and I took them all out and set them up in the backyard.
- Watching fireworks next to you July 4th, with all the neighborhood people crowded around on the railings, and the cars all playing radios, and freaking spiders everywhere. Then driving home the first year we did that, and W. 25th was this dense thick smog of firework ash, and in the distance you could hear them going off like a war, and we thought for sure that there had to have been a giant fire somewhere to cause all this.
- stopping by you on the first day of me going out with my new camera to take pictures of the graffiti along Columbus Rd.
- later using that same picture for Nate's 30th birthday present.
- Trying to go inside you and finding everything so pitch black of course, there was no point in endangering myself on your crappy staircase. You remained completely unfriendly to photographers, a belligerent old cranky elephant of a building.

I'll miss you. The fact that so many people come down day after day to take photos of your demolition in stages is testament to the impression you have left in our minds of the Cleveland landscape. You were the guard at the gate to the West Side, our own personal fortress. Nothing is ever going to look the same again in Tremont, or Duck Island. Abbey Rd, which has for so long been the predictable same old street that I drive down at least once if not 4 times a day for the 10 years I've been driving (or taking that little RTA shuttle they used to have back and forth), is going to be completely alien, will be fucked up, like visually, forever. I can't even process that. It's sort of like if they took down the West Side Market. No, actually, it's exactly as if one day they just tore down the Market. Or the Masonic Temple. Or the Guardians.

But anyway, Old Thing, there you have it. Them's the brakes. You were totally loved.

The Best Thing I've Seen, Since the Day I Saw My First Stalactite. Or You, I Guess

It was a rough weekend. I needed to get away. It was 82 degrees, and though it had rained earlier, the sun beat down hard and bright on the railroad tracks. We walked on the sparkling granite gravel, the track tar sticky on my sneakers, and my hair falling in sweaty lank locks on my forehead. There were 80s coming of age movie references made. Through the maze of warehouses we followed the tracks, until we came upon the cave.

It was a shallow cave, but dark. The dock had been unused for as long as it took the tracks to grow a coat of rust. As we wandered past, I spotted snow and stopped, piled up dirty all through the cave entrance, like it always is at the end of March, half melted. The way you see it in parking lots, where it used to be mountainous in January. Only it's mostly June now, and I was sweating through my tshirt. So what the fuck.

You couldn't believe it just looking at it. Just looking at it, it was so much real snow it was unbelievable that it could exist. It inspired a feeling of something being wrong with the world, as if one day you woke up and the sky was green all the way through. Or water was suddenly red. Or maybe more like if you looked in the mirror and there was a bright lilac purple blotch on your face. I was almost scared of it, I'll admit it. I stopped feet away, trying to figure out any other sort of explanation for what it what could be, all the other things maybe, all the reasons I shouldn't touch it, should stay away from it.

But then you put your fingers on it, actually feel it, and the world snapped back to reality, the axis suddenly centered again, and I was touching a rock. Fossilized snow. When I took my hands off it, it became snow again. When I touched it again, rock. Back and forth. Drifts of snow. Salt boulders. Blizzard remnants from another world, from another decade.



Jere thought maybe perhaps the snow had fallen through the dock, and then crystallized? All calcite and salt. How long had it been there then, how to even tell? A brand new fucking geology. Melissa carved her initials in it, and broke off a chip of it for me, which was harder than it looked because it was a rock. We kicked it and the impact on our feet was shocking, because you expected that crunch and give, not this unmovable unbreakable coral. I have it in my pocket now, that tiny little piece. I think maybe if I always keep this magic snow chip on me, it will act like a talisman against snow in my future? Like, you wear the shark tooth or the bear claw to protect against the predator, to channel the spirit of the hunter? Well I believe this, the magic snow, it will stop the snow from every coming back near me, protect me while I sleep, make every morning sunny and warm. Or at the very least, protect my car from sliding off the road or the ice from freezing my locks or me from falling on the unshoveled walk. All those things I have already successfully forgotten only a month later and want to never remember again.

You can choose to see your world how you want it to be, or you can put faith in the fact that the universe has a better imagination than you.

Under the Cave is the Water, and Under the Water is a Deeper Cave

I saw the paintings in that cave, in this movie, and it was as if someone plugged a memory card into my brain and in the theater people were gasping quietly and the place fell silent in a way that means no really no ones moving, no one's even breathing for a minute. The quiet was amazing.

When you enter a cave, there is this first moment when it breathes out at you, and it's when you realize you are somewhere else. There may be no other sentient creatures in the place, you may be completely alone, but the rocks and walls, even the floors, are alive and growing and moving around you. The darkness is dense, and the air smells different, wet, hard, cold, blind. You are walking into something's mouth. Something so large it is not even aware you are treading on it's tongue.

And then people came in, and they did what people always do, they made it theirs. They found the cave, and they used it. Can you imagine the bravery needed to keep crawling and walking in the darkness, with only a small flickering light to illuminate the bones crunching beneath your feet, and the cave breathing all around you? The fear you must have of the outside world to venture that deep into a rockface, and then because that fear exists out there, you imagine it and scratch it into a wall, and you are the first human being ever to make a figure? To paint a figure? To paint a horse? There was one human being one time the only time ever who drew the first horse. Who saw them, and studied the lines of their muzzles, the curl of their backs, and took those lines in his head and made them with his fingers.

The faces of the animals were the most moving things. They had personality. They looked like individual horses, like individual lions. The ibex looked like an ibex - the wave of its horns and the black patch on it's chest, the white markings on it's neck. Moving fighting living animals. These were things that the artist had seen with his own eyes, and hunted, and ran from. The walls of the cave curved and shook and waved so that if I were to just reach out and touch those lines, if I were to put my palm on the rockface to steady it, the whole earth would stay still just for a moment.

And its incredible, miraculous, holy, that in 2011, on another continent, in another body, I could understand the feeling that they all must have had, thousands of years apart in different bodies, to leave a painted handprint on the wall.

They told me that at one point, 5,000 years passed between painting. That 5,000 years after the first rhino was painted, another rhino was also painted. 5,000 years. 5,000 years. 5,000 years. Where were we 5,000 years ago? And if you and me today were to walk into a room with paintings from 5,000 years ago, which may as well be from another species of man, aliens, we would never dare to just add our own painting. At least, we would know we weren't allowed to. But these people, us, they had no history. There was no concept of 5,000 years. There was no concept of a 100 years. Is it better for us? To not add ourselves to the cave, to instead seal it back up to save it so the future can see it too? Does that make us better people, or does it reek of a presumption that the future will be ours? Either way. When woolly rhinos roamed the hills of Southern France, and people drew them. Either way, reels of film with faces and words.

Fluidity: The idea that any one thing can become another thing. A man can become a tree. A rock can become a man. A bison can speak. A woman may be a horse.

Permeability: Nothing is solid. The cave can accept you or reject you. The man can channel the animal he dreamed of last night. Through the woman comes the future. The rock communicates to you, and you are not in control, but instead these drafts coming from between trees and water and air, these drafts blow the spirits into you, and then the spirits come out of you, and everything is drifting in a wake. The dream world.

A scientist spoke about dreaming of lions. I dreamed of squid. I saw the black purple tentacles of the squid, gathered into the folds of all our worlds, the things that connect us. The internet. Television. Radio. Even the waves of our own voices. Books. Print. Paintings. Every form we use to try and make a bond between us, a shared experience. And this squid curled silently over all of our sleeping beds, breathing.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face (toe to toe, shoulders squared)

And in this world that I live in now, I came home and there were messages for me from Spain, from London, missals from Iceland, comments from New York. He showed me a shirt from Pakistan, I drank coffee from South America, ate meat from Middle America, purchased oil from the Earth's core, dredged up and traveled through miles of pipe large enough for us to hide in. So this is the situation now, that I think of people half across the hemisphere and on the other side of this monitor, which is my mirror now. Like polished stones we used to use, before we learned how to melt sand and paint ourselves and send our image across country lines, and oh its amazing true, but now how common now how used to this now how conveniently distracting.

And here in Cleveland it is rainy and windy and warm. Like a hot wet breath exhaling before the snow comes.

We walked in the green light with purpose, and still slow, still hearing acutely the glass breaking under our feet and crunching into the cement. Each pool of water sitting quiet, like that wood between the worlds where Digory and Polly held hands and switched rings, and splashed through dimensions into dead planets and crawl spaces. Something like that will happen to me someday, I know it. Someday I'll go in and not come back.

Maybe I'll leave my name scrawled somewhere on the wall too, before I disappear, like a log of brave faces traveling before us. It's common too, people disappearing into other places, sending notes back that may or may not be true. Perhaps you're really drinking coffee there, like you say. Perhaps it's just a decoy note, sent from behind the curtain, to maintain our play time world. Maybe you'll never come back, or you, or you, or him, or her, or they, maybe you are all stolen, trapped in a cold white space waiting to come back. Or maybe I am closing the walls in around me, setting up the rules of my world, drawing up the manifesto, and you are either part of it or not, but whether it's you in reality, or just my crude sketch of your character is irrelevant. I regularly ask the boys I wake up next to if this is true, someday one of them will understand what I mean.

And here is a list of things I don't understand: the difference between Four Loko and an Irish coffee, the need for a prophet in every end of the world scenario, why the hairs on my arms never lie down flat, why my bathroom floor gets so dirty when I'm just walking in barefoot and coming out clean, how to make almond croissants, the science of a horn section, how to jump in and come out on the other side without being being stalled in the middle by what I'm sure can be described as fascination without too much sarcasm, why my cat hates me and yet longs for my undivided attention.