Noodles!

Things that can now happen in Cleveland because Noodlecat is open.

1) I may finally have to learn to use a different parking garage when I go to that area. I am so ashamed I use a parking garage at all, but there it is. I may have to diversify my shame. This is basically just to say I will come to downtown way more often.

2) I no longer have to walk into any of the fancy places on E. 4th to get a drink in ridiculous grungy concert clothes. I can just go to the noodle shop in ridiculous grungy concert clothes. I really can't stand HOB, guys. Let's revisit that again some time. But now when people ask where I want to meet up before a show, I will have an opinion other than "meh" and "no, not the fucking way too expensive bowling alley again".

3) At some point I have faith there will spring up competing noodle houses and maybe, just maybe, one of them will be 24 hours? Or maybe...hint hint hint...Noodlecat could stay open really late? Because I swear to god, a 24 hour noodleshop would be AMAZING and I would probably move downtown for that.



4) I may actually order a vegetarian option at a restaurant willingly over one with meat. I am still thinking about that mushroom broth. The smell of it. Even the color of it was beautiful. Like, I would drink that for breakfast every day and probably live forever.

5) I have faith there is very good chance that someday the place will get an accidental shipment that includes a magical dragon's egg, and someone's kid will find it and hatch a baby dragon, and then this whole pg rated conflict between good and evil will occur in the city and usually there's fireworks in those movies at some point, so I'm looking forward to that.

6) You know what else would be nifty? A well choreographed yakuza battle on Euclid. I'd be okay with that too. Like, a dancing one. Accompanied by a parade of kittens in costume?



7) I will finally stop being annoyed at people raving about restaurants that all have versions of the same dishes. Because they will start raving about this one, and then I will totally be like "yeah, no, that's right." (I have been waiting so long for something like this to open here. I was like, c'mon food scene, catch the fuck up, please please please. So I'm extremely biased here. Also, does that sound snobby? I feel like it does, and man, you should have heard my snob factor the other night about Neutral Milk Hotel. )

8) Every good second date ever will probably be here.



9) I may also try to make sure there is at least one breakup that happens there too. It seems like a good casual breakup place. I mean, that's a compliment. Those are hard places to find. I only know like one other.

10) I will finally figure out a good way to get broth stains out of a dress. I hope.

Glass Slippers Made Into Towers

Pittsburgh should really have a different name. Like Paragon. Or Oval City. The Glass Cage. Not as if that makes any sense, but Pittsburgh sounds like a small farm city. Like a place where you go to buy fertilizer. I guess it is pretty small, space wise. It's all compact and squeezed between the hills. Cities in hills always have that magical feeling when you approach them on a highway. Like, you come around a curve, having driven for hours at approximately the same speed, coffee and ice melted together in a warm sticky cup at your side and this being the third time you have listened to this same mix CD in a row, and then oh There It Is. I can see it. I may actually be able to stop driving at some point and I wonder if I'll remember how to brake. What if my brakes suddenly don't work? I'm almost finally there.

If I ever get a speeding ticket, it will be on the approach to a city I'm visiting.



The reason I went up Tuesday was to see a show, but then I mostly missed it thanks to drinking sangria with lawyers, which is a particularly odd thing to do when you just got out of the car, and you're sweaty and hardly put together but they are all dressed up coming from work for happy hour. I think I've covered this before, the slow drag that driving a long ways has on my face. I'm one of those people who is overly nice to toll booth people because I feel so weird driving alone that I think I must be acting weird, trying to talk to someone in a normal way after not saying a word out loud all day. Point is, making chit chat with nicely dressed young men and women is more of an effort. I try really hard to not seem odd. A guy in a suit talked to me about visiting Maine, and biking the coast, and man, maybe I should move to the coast. Maybe?

The point is we missed the show. So we went to the bar instead and as a matter of course. These developments were accepted as a danger long ago. A dancer named Jade sold me a cherry bomb and talked to me about local dance companies. Nobody believed me when I came back and said how nice she was, and smart, because she was a bar girl named Jade selling cherry bombs from a tray.


I saw a bit more of Pittsburgh in daylight this trip. We walked a little ways downtown, and then drove through it again after breakfast the next morning. Everything was very clean and proper and active on a Wednesday morning. I don't know, maybe someday I'll understand the roads in that city. I will never understand the highways though. They twist in and out like some giant was trying to teach its kid how to tie knots. I don't get terrified getting lost though. I mean, I don't really. I'm getting to know the main idea of it, Pittsburgh. It's starting to make sense a little. I need a map of every major urban center tattooed in my brain. How useful would that be? I don't think I would ever stay in one place again.

I thought briefly on the road home about getting a tattoo that says "Brave." In that typeface, with a period. That's what Bridget is supposed to mean anyways, sort of. Strength. I've been into the idea of a tattoo lately. Well, I want one that is very difficult and pretty, I have one in mind, but it's expensive enough that I will probably never get it. One word, that's not so bad.

It was the longest road home though, and 99 degrees. I wanted to hang my head out of the window like a dog, but you're not supposed to drive like that, so I had to make do with my hand out the window. I do that with my feet under blankets too in the summer, hang one foot outside and off the bed. That's more lizard than dog-like, using a small exposed body part to stay cool. We are all such lizards some of us. Maybe I'm just also feeling a bit more reptilian than usually these days. Cold blooded and addicted to sun. Feeling hardened and baked, with glaze dripping off me and turning the air around me thick with chemical burn. It's not surprising we imagine lizards as the most dangerous of the radioactive mutants. They seem like the only creatures who would willingly eat toxic waste.

The Quietest Place

Is up in the sky.

Is in between the canyons.

Is in a place out of time.

Like how you use to imagine the neighborhood houses talked to each other, only now you understand that they are not actually talking, but communicating on the level that only rocks understand. Flighty chatter from the fast moving glass. Low infrequent murmurs from the concrete. Superiority complexes from the quarried quarters.

Downtown was empty when I took these, their cars sitting like dead weight on the streets while they stuffed themselves in the stadium for a football game. I had to pay to park, which made it even more apocalyptic. But I wandered around alone and perfectly happy for an hour, looking at all the pretty colors and shiny windows.

I was taking this shot when the game started to let out, and like lake monsters, they crawled onto dry land and invaded the city. All oranges and brown gimmicks. I thought it was kinda cute as I saw them swarming towards me, very, you know, game day. I can't get into crowd sports. But I can understand the appeal, the festivity and military brotherhood of it. Getting drunk and cheering for stuff is good! But then the wave hit, and I became a barrier to them. It started with sullen petulant looks, distaste that I would just be standing there on the sidewalk taking pictures, of what? Buildings? Some guy, as I was trying to frame this, actually said to me "there's no point in taking a picture of that, they should just knock it down." Are you fucking serious?

Every time I stopped, I could hear people in the crowd talking about me. "What is she doing?" "Why would anyone do that?" "No, stay away from her, I don't know what she's doing." I was floored. Fine, so you don't wander around Cleveland thinking how pretty it is. But are you so barren that you can't even comprehend why someone else might take a picture of it? You just come down here for games, complain about the walk, stare at the sidewalks and girls' tits at packed bars, then clog up the highways with your fucking Hummers and Lexus (oh my god, when I left, every goddamn car I got stuck behind was a Lexus crossover, and none of them knew how to merge) and at not a single point do you look up or around and have any ghost of appreciation for the monuments around you? I cannot even comprehend how someone like that functions on a day to day basis, and frankly, it's so ugly a thought I don't even want to. That's not a person. That's a thing. That's a cog.

Maybe people only exist to build things and then they should disappear into the ground, and let the rocks talk to themselves. But it doesn't matter. A couple of asshole Browns fans can't stop things from being beautiful and scary. Did you know the BP building is a tiger shark? It's true.



more photos here.