The Courageous Transitions Building

How does an architect design a rehab house? What are the thought processes that go into that? Vomit and blood and piss proof? Providing a sense of privacy without giving any of the actual thing? What does the architect think about while drawing these doors and hallways meant to keep people together and visible, like expensive daycares, teaching us to stay in groups. Does he think about trying to make it pretty? How the sunlight will shine through windows in order to give spots of happiness to the concrete and tile. How best to make someone feel safe and secure while still imprisoned. Do architects collect design features? I think they must, like I collect thoughts or musicians collect chords. People who want to change the topography must be aware of the details.





Things that people are addicted to: sensations, endorphins, superiority, wind, cable tv, sugar, cigarettes, filth, shame, self loathing, compliments, noise, sex, power, weakness, makeup, alcohol, approval, animals, speed, sleep, money, love, heroin, stupor, escape, hero worship, politics, sarcasm, g.o.d (good orderly direction), newness, the golden light.

Reasons Why: the speeding up of the notes in the song as the guitar gets faster and faster like an approaching train, the sharp thrill of the tiny little hairs of your arm at a foreign touch, the cunningness of nature, the tininess of ears, the fear of obscurity, a loneliness that increases with every conversation that doesn't live up to expectations which you have with someone you'd like to sleep with, the niceness, the pleasantness, the relief, the relaxing into something familiar, the hormonal imbalances, the chemical cravings on a deep trained cellular level, the desire to distract, the fun of it, the Just Because, the Why Not.

Reasons Why Not: Because there is a deep well inside you, one that you keep boarded up in order to stop town children from falling into. The well is dark and goes very far down, and when you look into the graduating blackness of it, you hear a sound coming up from the bottom, a sigh, a long whisper. It tells you that you will always be alone, because no one is ever really going to understand the thoughts you have. Not all the way. Not even if they have similar ones. The thoughts you have are unique completely to yourself, your particular random compilation of genetics and experience. You are a snowflake, a special all together by yourself snowflake. Everyone has this dark place. Sometimes people like that place a lot. Sometimes people go and sit in that cool dark place when its really hot outside. But its a terrible place to be helpless.

There were so many spiders living here. There were spiders in every corner, every door jamb and windowsill. Long skinny red ones and fat crunchy brown ones. Tiny little worker ones scurrying alongside out of the sight of the giant aristocratic great white shark ones. Better to be small and unseen than hated and unloved for being the obvious monster, but ah such an admiration-less path. Can't be loved unless you risk being unloved. Dear little spiders, I didn't take any pictures of you. Instead I looked to the hungry and dangerous ones.

But I didn't really want to get to know any of the people who had been here. I wanted to avoid them, and thus avoid having to think about the unhappiness of probably people I've known and people I'll meet. Their pictures made me sad, their still packed bags and coats hanging in the closet, and the chairs outside where they would sit and smoke cigarettes, their motivational posters. I felt a repulsion to the human presence, as if it had soiled the beauty of the building of itself, the tiny little rooms like a honeybee cell and the thick glass walls. It should be an aquarium, or a pool, or a museum. Now it's been used up by dirt and despair and left to be subjected to black mold and insect invasions. It's insensitive of me. When the war comes, I'm on the side of the inanimate creations.

One of these closets leads to your happy place, where he pushed you against walls and whispered in your ear. The other one takes you to smoking cigarettes in the car during a rainstorm with a mix cd that your friend in California made you. The third one is just a closet, simple and plain and ready for curling up and shutting the door. The last one gets you out of here.

We've got obsessions. Go ahead, transition me. Try.

Not My Memories

When I commit my thoughts to paper, handwritten I mean, they immediately seem cheap and trite. I feel the same way about hearing my voice recorded now. I sound stuffy and sick to myself, like I have a permanent cold. All of this over documentation of ourselves these days is strange to me, and I try to imagine the side effects on society, but come up against that black matte wall of the unknown that happens when we stretch our thoughts. I had no way of recording myself when I was growing up, you either kept a journal or you didn't, but there were no videos of me, or voice mails, and very few photographs. I'm not calling it bad or good, but it's something, it's definitely different. There can be as many public footprints of you as any celebrity decades ago, like physically as many, numerically. I remember now my daughter sitting at her boombox, making cassette tapes of her own voice, pretending to be a dj, and even that's old now. I was going to make a point about all this online stuff in danger of disappearing any time, but I don't remember where those cassette tapes are, and most likely they are buried underground somewhere in Indiana.


Back when we were children, before television reruns of Stargate, we would spend our afternoons at the matinee, watching drivel and tripe dreamed up for us by cinematic scientists. Beautiful men and women would make eyes at each other 12 feet high in front of us, and in the seats the children all giggled and shrieked and threw popcorn at each other or made out in the back rows, while these black and white Perfections tried to teach us about good and evil, patriotism, love. How to be successful human beings.


One time my friends father won a live turkey at the matinee. He brought it home and took it to the basement to kill it. It was a huge old thing, with shiny yellow eyes and a mottled hairless blue neck. Her father chased it around the basement for twenty minutes until he able to corner it. It was making frantic scared bird noises. My friend cried the first time she told me about it, but then later learned to make it a funny story to the kids we knew at school. There developed, in the repeated retelling, a way of mimicking her father and the turkey so successfully, it became a conversation between the hunter and the prey, a comedic dialogue like we heard on radio shows.


We lived in a city block, and there was a large barn or garage behind our house, where we would find large black stag beetles living in the donut holes of left behind mill stones and brick debris. The Polish neighbors to the right of us had chickens, and we had chickens too, a few, I had a pet chicken myself. One day she escaped and the neighbors caught her and killed her. At least I assumed they did, my childish mind filling with thoughts of revenge and justice. More likely a dog got her. I knew how chickens died, how people liked to laugh at the body running and twitching while blood ran from the decapitated neck. And I ate chickens. I understood the relationship between this animal that was my pet and what I would be eating for dinner. But I never forgave them, because she had been mine and they took her. I remember how her body cavity fluttered with breath when I held her tight against my chest, and the short quick fragile movements of her red brown head.


People talk about the difference in national character then and now, but the only real difference I ever saw was this. When I was a child, it was not about "being great at being me." There was none of this idea that to make people like you, you only had to act like your true and natural self. No, in fact, we were taught that to make people like you, you had to act an exact and certain prescribed set of ways. You had to smile a particular way, and make sure your hair was cut just so, and have the right kind of figure. The truth of the matter, the absolute fact of human interaction has not changed since. Everyone wants to talk to an attractive confident person. This is genetic. But now, instead of telling you how to be, society wants you to invent the next cool thing. Being new and different is an asset. If you do it right. If you do it wrong, then you're a fool and everyone laughs at you. But there has to be a risk in there somewhere or everyone would do it. It's all very free flowing and natural now, capitalizing on your own personality rather than emulating. That stands the test of time, because now so many people who were ostracized in my generation are now heroes of culture. Hasn't it always been that way? The weirdos win, but only a very small minority of them. The attractive ones.


I had my bedroom painted several colors as I was growing up. I shared a sloped second floor room with my little sister when I was very little, and maybe it was painted light green? Or eggshell gray blue? Later, when my little brother was born, I moved into a room downstairs all by myself, that used to be my mother's personal space. It was painted this fuchsia pink, very bright. I remember sleeping by myself in that bed, with the door cracked open, and I could hear my parents as they talked late at night. All of my first secrets started in that room, my first personal thoughts, the things I snuck into the corners of the room, me singing to myself at night or talking to myself. Your very first own room is special. Later still, in the new house, I got to choose my color, and I picked a pale yellow to go with the white lace curtains. Colors were important to me as a child. The first recurring dream I remember having was being in a toy shop, and getting this marvelous machine, on which you could draw any pattern for fabric you wished, spots and stripes and pictures, and it would print it out. I had no idea as a kid that this would be possible one day, that in fact when I was older I would be able to draw these colors out in a computer and have it program the dye machines with satellite accuracy, and then be able to make clothes in any color I wished. When I was 6, I dreamed the future and didn't even know it. Over and over again, I went back to that place in my head, and created amazing clothes. Later I was obsessed with paper dolls. I cut out womens models from the Sears catalog, and drew clothes for them by hand, to scale, with little paper tabs drawn around the shoulders and legs, so I could cut them out and fold them onto my homemade dolls. As I got better, I made men dolls too, but often they were permanently frozen in positions of sports or lounging around pools, because they were from the mens leisure section. I don't remember what my men characters were like in my stories. The women were always tomboys, loud and funny. I wish I could remember how I made the men talk, I think now it would have been helpful in how I got along with men later, some perspective on my native inclinations. My true self.

Pursuing the Life

He was not a special man, waking up in the morning every day to go to work, singing along to Willie Nelson in the car as he rolled through the grey and rising morning Ohio highways, because he found talk radio grating. Stopping to get a large black coffee in a styrofoam cup, blowing through the plastic lid to try and cool it down. His eyes felt heavy and dirty, full of sleep. 5am shift in the laundry room was quiet until everyone's coffee kicked in. There were 5 of them, and they all basically got along because that's what you do when you have to be at work that early. It took them 5 weeks to get accustomed to each other, and then someone would inevitably leave - move up to security or switch shifts or something, so that there was always a new person to have to teach and answer questions and walk that thin line between supportive and insufferably condescending because how many times can you explain the functions of a washer, even an industrial one?



The building they worked in was set across the parking lot from the main hospital building. Gwen said it was like they were importing and exporting laundry with another country - little trucks made deliveries to the dock door, and picked them up again, even though it was only half an acre away. She was constantly reading Anne Rice stories in between loads. They all sat around reading or listening to music in the pauses while the huge machines whirred and clunked and sssshhhed, creating a white noise din which isolated them in the building, fell like a blanket over the afternoon, wrapping them up the thick steamy air, and the food coma from lunch creeped up their central nervous systems. It was, in a way, extremely relaxing.


It was an afternoon like this that the accident happened. The big steam roller had been repetitively clunking and whirring for an hour when suddenly there was a screech, and the hard slow motion of the machine became frenetic and panicked. It reminded him for a flash of a moment of that moment you see in animals fucking, the sudden pitch forward in urgency. Another guy rushed forward to try and pull a lever, a plug, something. And in that moment, he saw something flash against the tight cotton sheets, he was sure of it. The guy, his name was Terry, slipped on a hanger on the floor and hit his head on the steel frame. He was okay, he didn't die, but it was a lot of blood, which meant a lot of paperwork, and Terry was gone for six weeks on workers comp.

It meant they were short handed during that time. No one new could be hired because Terry was coming back. It didn't really affect their workload, but it threw the balance of the group off. The 4 of them paired off, and he found himself talking to Gwen a lot more, about things like his girlfriend and her dogs and one day they were suddenly talking about Terry's accident, and he remembered the thing he had seen that seemed like something he maybe made up. Gwen didn't think so. She had a theory, but she said she couldn't tell him until she got some collaboration. Gwen had a lot of theories. Sometimes it is true that a person can read too much. Especially of the wrong sort of thing.


A few weeks later he was loading the giant dryers with Tom, and as he shut the massive door and bolted it shut, deep in the bowels of the chamber he saw another flash. More than one flash in fact, a quick burst of glints, like a piece of glass had been left in the laundry. To his left, Tom slammed his finger in the door, and it broke off immediately, not clean like a knife wound, but bruised and horrible and raw. There was screaming, and paramedics, and more paperwork. He told Gwen about it the next day, whispering so that the loan in from cleaning services who they had been forced to bring in now wouldn't overhear his craziness.

This time she was sure, she told him. "The machines are warning you," she said sincerely under her breath. He rolled his eyes. "They are trying to tell you something bad is going to happen, they are reaching out to you, which means they think you are the closest to them."

He thought about that, if one could be close to a machine. A computer maybe, he could see that. But huge industrial dinosaurs? It would be like a woolly mammoth trying to talk to a Rubix cube. At least that was the first thing that popped into his head. Who was the Rubix cube, he wasn't sure. He tried to think about the machines, sat there at the desk tuning out whatever nonsense Gwen was spouting now, and he focused on the Roller, sitting there impenetrable in the middle of the room. He listened for it's particular instrumental sound in the orchestra of the workday. He heard nothing.

That night he went home to his girlfriend, and they went out to a bar for dinner. She was talking excitedly about something that had happened to a friend of hers, and barely noticed that he was drinking his gin and tonics quickly. Later that night, after she fell asleep, he sat in the living room in the dark, beer in hand, and contemplated all the machinery he could see without getting up off the couch. The big tv. The computer. The air conditioner. The refrigerator singing off to the side, and the clock ticking on the wall, the light on the microwave flashing. He could hear all their individual hums, and if he shut his eyes and sipped the beer, each one seemed to be on a particular rhythm with his own heart pumping.

The next morning he stopped in the supervisors office, in the main hospital, and requested to be transferred to Security. The supervisor did not seem hopeful. "We're pretty short staffed in the laundry room right now," she said, "you know that." Walking back into work later that day, he looked around the room, at the mute humans going through their paces, amid a clockwork of moving pieces and turning barrels, and he desperately wanted to run away, his heart was gripped with a strange and sudden fear that he couldn't articulate, a feeling that he was not in control of this building, that in fact no one here had a choice, the hospital existed as a independent collective of consciousness that had nothing to do with human decision. We are not even worker ants, he thought, we are red blood cells. Pumping through the Hospital, carrying oxygen and nutrients and janitors.

Some Hype

I have your weekly Monday abandonment. However this time it's up at Rootspeak. Go check them out, mostly cause they like me. And how many times can you refresh Gawker in a work day? (note, I know it's at least 24...)

The Oracle of Madison High

The narrative of high school: that here is where your little slimy parts coalesce, like a comic book villain (Clayface), pieces of animated goo sliding themselves together from all directions. Pull yourself together, Man No Longer Child, Woman No Longer Girl. And it is assumed that out of this hazy slurry of childhood experience, the best in you will rise to the top, like cream fat. You will discover your talents. You will be young and sexy. You will do bad things with your friends and learn how to not get caught. You will have sentimental moments that will be the foundation of your in depth drunk phone calls later in your thirties, after you are married and have kids and are old enough to look back and laugh at how silly, how very SILLY it was to hold things like passion, fun, reputation so seriously.

So year after year these children, these young spotty faced giraffes, are transferred from the war-like, gladiatorial cages of middle school into the strict structure of Teenage Temple. You know what makes high school so fucking long? The constant unwavering, unmerciful introspection. Find yourself. Be Yourself. Don't Be That Bad Version of Yourself. Make Friends. Don't Listen to Your Friends. Be Aware That This is the Only Acceptable Time to Mistakes, But Don't Make Any Mistakes.

Now here's the other thing, on top of that, you also have to become an Adult. Because children can't be Adults. They don't understand what goes into that title. The knowledge of bills, of costs, of arguments and requirements and schedules, of struggling to make sure people like you, and hating them intensely when they don't. Learning how to ignore criticism of yourself as stupid, foolish, shallow, and be all those things despite the warnings. Memorizing the alternate meanings of words like Bitch, Diva, Geek, Player.Inventing your own definitions about what they try to inject in your head, and being unconcerned with the fact versus the perception.

And everyone you meet has gone through some version of this conversion. Everyone had a high school experience, even if it consisted of quitting high school. The messages are clear to everyone who has touched these walls, if only for a moment. Some have good stories. Almost all have bad stories. Sometimes, every once in a while, a prescient kid comes along who gets that stories don't have to be one way or the other, that sometimes stories just are and just continue and end where they want to. Those are the ones who later forget what happened in that school, and it washes away in a blur of unimportance later. Not necessarily a virtue, not a fault, just what it is.

So some of you will be assholes, and some of you will be good people. Some will be nurses. Some will go the army. Some will work in shitty jobs for a little while, some will work at shitty jobs always. Some will get married. Some will get divorced. Some will never be able to stay in relationships. Some will hate their parents forever. Some will wish they were closer to them. Some will have children. Some will not. Some will do cool things, like travel, or work on important scientific things. Others will slowly ascend the corporate ladder with no intentional momentum, and retire after 30 years with the same company. Some will be on unemployment at multiple points in their life. Some will do drugs and then quit. Some will be 40 yr old potheads with engineering degrees. They will become cat or dog people. They will find they have a type. They will get fat, or thin, or develop chronic conditions. This is what we learn in high school.

It seems important in high school to collect momentos. Dresses. Dried flowers. Sketches. Notes. Cds. Pictures of yourself, your friends, your life. It's like your body is actually warning you of the impending flood of life waiting outside, trying to build a nest against the coming cold. Our DNA has coded pubescence with an imperative to document the maturation.

The only things really important to keep in high school are the books they made you read. Those were the only things that didn't bullshit you. It's good to pick up A Separate Peace again, with your name and the name of all previous owners written on the front page, so it couldn't be lost among the identical copies of all your classmates and the three other classes also reading it.



More photos can be seen here.

Return to the Castle

The Queen wanders back to the construction site, every once in a while. She stands on what used to be, what was supposed to be, her parapet, thinking of the day when the Doctor first brought her here, this spot in the wilds of Western Ohio, undeveloped yet in the early 70s. She remembers the vision he had built for her, standing in the spring mud, in the middle of nowhere. A huge fortress, 7 bedrooms, 5 baths, a pool. She always wanted a pool. She had always wanted lots of things, this little girl now trapped in a grown woman's lumbering body. And if he wasn't going to marry her, at least he was going to build her a castle of her very own.

She had spent the following months imagining all the parties she was going to throw, with all the other doctor's wives. Nobody gave the King his share of respect at the clinic, she knew all those wives looked down on him, with his shiny suits and salesman face. But wasn't he a doctor too? And wouldn't they be jealous when they saw the 4 towers rising up out of the trees, and walked through the courtyard shining with lamps. Into the rooms warm with rich thick carpets and parquet floors. She wanted mirrors in every room, throwing light into all the corners. She wanted to be able to sit in her grand parlor, turn her head in any direction, and see herself sitting there in that beauty, a queen finally.

Together they had excitedly drawn out plans, on paper towels one night at the kitchen counter in their two bedroom Colonial. A moat! Floating staircases! Diamond paned windows! And most importantly a pool! For the pool parties they would have. A huge dining room, for the dinner parties she would host. And a giant bedroom, worthy of a royal couple, just for the two of them. In there, together, they would hide from the judgments that had followed them. Couldn't ever be good enough for the rest of the world huh, couldn't be anything but cheap, shallow, trash huh? Fuck them. The King was a doer, a player, a man of means. He had built his kingdom from the ground up.

It was all going so well. Every day she came out to the site to watch the construction crews lay bricks and foundations, bronzed and sweating in the summer sun. The men treated her with respect to her face, though she imagined the lurid things they whispered once she had left, she repeated them in her mind late at night. She wore white, and in her mind, she was their cool ice queen descending from the heights to bless the indentured servants with a thin but sincere smile. The walls slowly but surely went up. She felt sure it was because of her.

The King didn't tell her directly when things began to unravel, but she sensed the trouble clouding around him, smelt the fear like a thunderstorm gathering. He was distracted and irritated. He hardly went out to the site, instead staying huddled in his office drinking. He dosed himself more often, and started to skip meals.

Then some people died. They were patients of his, addicts at the clinic. It was ridiculous, they would have died either way and all the Doctor had been doing was trying to help. And it wasn't like he was selling heroin. Methadone was legal. But the lawsuits started coming, and into their living room a parade of other suits. Grim faced lawyers, trailing the smoking remains of papers and triplicate wherever they went. She hated their devious little lizard faces, tongues flicking nervously, all the "ahs" and "well..."s that slipped out of their mouths in nasty whispers. She stayed in her room, and maybe on some days, she helped herself to the medication. Lay on the bed, dozey and high, thinking of all the rooms that might have been.

They arrested the King, he went to jail. There was no more castle, the crews had been dismissed. The Queen found herself taking a condo in North Olmsted, because there was no money left after the lizard bills had been paid. A rumour had started among the construction crews that the King had hidden his drug money in the walls of the castle, and they told their brothers, and their friends, who told their friends. Soon vandals were attacking the walls daily, punching holes in the brick like woodpeckers, looking for the gold of Treasure Castle. It was ridiculous. They were hick idiots. At first she was mad, but later it didn't bother her so much. She had nothing left, not even the status of a widow, and who was she to care if the locals tore the very walls of that incomplete husk apart?

So every once in while she comes back here. She tried to sell it, but even in the real estate boom of the 80s, there were no takers. The driveway has been worn away and covered with the trash of partying kids. Graffiti is here and there, but for the most part the castle remains clean, except the holes. Everywhere holes. She wishes her own life hadn't been the same way, years of punching walls, always hoping to find the ship coming in.


More pictures can be seen here. And from the first time we went there. Also, some required listening..

Lupe Fiasco - Kick Push download at emp3