So let's see. Yesterday I saw a lecture at the Natural History Museum that was part of the Archeology series. It was by a Greek professor, about the excavation of a city called Sikyon. It was technical, the guy went into the geology of the area just like a guy talking to a room full of people he assumes know what he's talking about - conglomerate rocks and Pliocene layers, the shape of the coastal terraces. It wasn't that hard to follow though, there were lots of maps, and what really stuck with me was one satellite map he showed with an image of the old city grid. Old meaning oh my god old, not just sort of old. Streets six meters across, 20 feet, in big square blocks across the whole of the plateau stretching before the acropolis, and all oriented north south. What was interesting about this was that the streets were not laid out following the natural walls of the landscape, which would have not been the cardinal points but would have been easier certainly and made more sense space wise. They had pulled meteorological data for the area, consulted with experts who study ancient weather (I KNOW what the hell are we doing with our lives?), and it didn't look like it was done for any weather related reasons. So this professor is talking about their theories about the city grid, rectangular blocks versus square ones, and how there was no zoning because houses were right on top of the industrial quarter, and in my head like silly putty there poured in a sudden awareness of the real and true and tangible existence of ancient urban planning theory. Ancient so close to prehistoric it practically hurts men daydreaming up perfect civic centers, how to best shelter a populace, how to arrange the parade routes so they don't go straight through the kilns. Then the engineers! They dug up all this bedrock and threw it up against the natural slope to make amphitheater seating and stadium walls. It gave me a whole new appreciation for those of you I know who have careers in this stuff, a long hallowed classical legacy and what not, like doctors and farmers. Working in insurance does not have that same tradition, obviously. I mean, someday it will probably will. How depressing is that thought?
Afterwards it rained, and I met my sister up at a bar where I had a bourbon and she had a burger and we talked about shit. Then a friend who went to school for urban planning showed up, and the conversation turned pretty much how that last paragraph went. So that was Wednesday.
Tomorrow (Today) is Ingenuity. You're an idiot if you don't go to that. Seriously, I'm not being glib. If you live in this area and you do not go underneath the Detroit Superior bridge either tomorrow night (tonight) or Saturday night when it's all lit up and the most gorgeous place in the whole city to be, then I don't even know why you know me. A friend of mine from Chicago is coming into town to do the standup showcase Friday, and then Pechakucha is before that. Saturday and Sunday there are some bands I want to see. It's a highlight guys, a genuine highlight.
But Sunday I hope will be warm enough to go to the beach. I feel the beach slipping away from us. Today for instance I had to put on my fake Ugg slippers for the day because my feet were freezing. Oh Fall, when a young woman's thoughts turn from how long she can afford to keep the air conditioner on to how long she can afford to keep the space heater running. I came out of Labor Day weekend kinda tan, and I'm just getting attached to this new color of skin and now Ohio is gonna go mess all that up.
I finally watched Downton Abbey for the first time tonight. It was pretty much just another British serial, I don't understand why everyone is so gung ho about it, but I like those things, so I enjoyed it. Afterwards, there was a show about the history of India, and it was the episode about the reign of the Moguls, the legacy of Akbar the Great who believed in the Unified Theory of One God Many Religions, the beginning and quick end of an attempted Hindu-Muslim civilization of enlightenment and tolerance and reason. I turned it off before the British invaded, because I couldn't take much more English Imperialism at the moment.
I met a friend in Chagrin Falls the other day. It's funny how if you live here in Cleveland, Chagrin Falls brings to mind this very cutesy town square, with adorable clapboard houses, white picket fences and rose bushes, pretty bridges. But the name is actually very sinister. I didn't realize that till just now when I wrote it out. Chagrin - Regret, Shame, Guilt. What you would name a town in a murder mystery. Something very much like what my friend said as we wondered along the river park with her little girl, with our artisan 2 dollars a half scoop poached pear and cardamon ice cream, past gaggles of moms who are now my age and have somehow morphed from girls with tattoos to girls with strollers that cost more than my car is worth, and all of them in khaki floods and plain v neck tshirts that also cost more than my entire outfit that day. That this is where bad things might happen.
When I was in high school, and was the social outcast among my classmates' parents for living in the City with the Poor People and the Dangers, Chagrin Falls was still money. But it was much more small town back then, and gave off a vibe of professorial money, teaching money or design money, creative money. It felt like wholesome educated money. Now it looks like Legacy Village or Crocker Park, a cookie cutter fake facades mall vibe, the really expensive kind. Where people go to blow hundreds of dollars on purses and shoes, positively greasy with money. It rubbed off on you and stained the sheets in my happy off day frame of mind. It was an amusement park. Where once we were the misfit hippie kids wandering the town square smoking opium, spending a lot of time contemplating the waterfalls, loitering in bookstores and bars where our favorite bands used to play before they got big, now it was women on the higher side of thirty their bodies tanned and slimmed and coiffed in that way that screams "I married a lawyer", staring straight ahead with practiced intent as they sashayed across the crosswalks. Older men with expensively cut gray manes and more expensive suits leaving their business lunches to smoke cigars in the park and ogle the young mothers.
It felt dirty in a way that I never felt on W. 25th and Lorain, waiting for my bus. Even that particular hallowed corner of sincerity is going away, succumbing to a Friday bar scene with valet parking and girls in ridiculous stilettos. Money is taking places away from me, places I knew like the back of my hand, with their rusty edges and dirty wet sidewalks and windy miserable bus stops. I know the money is supposed to be good, money is better than no money I guess. And I know that I should have grown up and left these haunts behind a long time ago, replaced them with better places. I've waited too long to leave, and now my memories are all being torn down to put up cheap plastic card houses. It's my fault, I spend too much time in these places, trying to connect with people my own age who really have nothing in common with me, because I am poor and unplanned, and they are on career paths with investment portfolios. But I want people to hang out with and the people from where I grew up are not the adults with expendable income now. Frankly, I don't want to hang out with them on porches in backyards with their kids. I want to go out and spend money. I want to drink beautiful drinks with men who wear suits. This thing in me, it rebels and growls and snarls, chokes at the chain of it. I feel the absurdity and meaninglessness of the situation. I push it back and try to have a good time. I try hard to not give in to my bitter class war ways. I try really hard to not fall the other way too, into a pit of prettily attired expectations. It's exhausting, either way I lean. I feel displaced.
Then, that's when you go up on the roofs, and look at the city from where the people can't get to it, where it still smells like gray wet rain and steel exhaust. There is a still a flame sometimes from the mill and Cleveland is still a weak and gasping place that needs love, concrete steel rebar love. Love in the form of commitment to the people that actually live there, not the people you want to live there. I'm not the person, I think, to give that love, I'm not the person to give any kind of love really (being essentially a very ineffective person all together), but it helps to wipe the glitter out of your eyes frequently. It blinds you if you leave it in too long, makes you blink and suddenly you're seeing things through a funnel of wealth. The glitter and constant affirmation convinces you it's somehow normal to spend hundreds of dollars on a purse, or to wear heels in the snow. To have a new car every few years. To spend money at the bar 4 days a week, on happy hours and sushi and pork belly. How ridiculous to be made to feel inadequately rich in a place like Cleveland, in the places where we all grew up poor but felt lucky sometimes to not be That Poor, where my family looked rich because we had Lands End backpacks and didn't have to eat school lunches. Another friend mentioned, as we drove over 90W through the construction zones, how happy everyone was at her local union that all the boys had work now on the new bridge, and there that's a thing that actually matters. Workers getting jobs and paying bills and buying groceries. Maybe I am ineffective, a dilettante not an activist, but I guess in between martinis I can remember they exist and make their form and function and weight permanent in my memory. I just don't want to get lost. I desperately don't want to get lost. That's probably a sign I already am.
Things Bones do: shatter splinter crack break bruise grow cancer hollow out with calcium deficiency mold themselves over foreign objects glow in the dark laugh like a mindless maniac in cartoons turn into rock curve like bonsai pit and chip like sandstone get tired dissolve in acid crumble quiver shake shiver
Bone:
n.
1.
a. The dense, semirigid, porous, calcified connective tissue forming the major portion of the skeleton of most vertebrates. It consists of a dense organic matrix and an inorganic, mineral component. When buried underneath a house, especially in the case of murder, will rattle and shake and sometimes whisper strange things.
b. Any of numerous anatomically distinct structures making up the skeleton of a vertebrate animal. There are more than 200 different bones in the human body. There are no bones in a squid.
c. A piece of bone. Will choke you someday, and you'll lay there gasping and dying in the middle of the restaurant while everyone around you freaks out and watching their inept panicked faces, you will realize in a hard moment that you care nothing for any of them, not even as humans, the only thing you care about is yourself and not dying right now and none of these fuckers are qualified to help you at all.
2. bones
a. The skeleton. Dead.
b. The body. Dead.
c. Mortal remains. Dead.
3. An animal structure or material, such as ivory, resembling bone. Poached and cut and sawed off.
4. Something made of bone or of material resembling bone, especially:
a. A piece of whalebone or similar material used as a corset stay.
b. bonesInformal Dice. Roll those bones, shake those stays, snake eyes.
5. bones The fundamental plan or design, as of the plot of a book, or the broken remains of a building, or the arches of a mine.
6.
a. bones Flat clappers made of bone or wood originally used by the end man in a minstrel show.
b. Bones(used with a sing. verb) The end man in a minstrel show. Because that was a thing once that everyone knew.
tr.v.boned, bon·ing, bones
1. To remove the bones from. As fast as you, tearing the animal carcass apart in smooth practiced butchery.
2. To stiffen (a piece of clothing) with stays, as of whalebone. He peeled the bones from her torso like the skin of a peach, each panel tearing off in slow careful rags.
Phrasal Verb:
bone up
Informal To study intensely, usually at the last minute: boned up for the final exam. To drink so much coffee you have more fear that your heart will explode than of whatever it is you are studying for.
Idioms:
bone of contention
The subject of a dispute.
bone to pick
Grounds for a complaint or dispute.
To Bone: to fuck
When they came to eat you, it was not because they were hungry and you looked the tastiest. It was because they were mindless vicious murderous beasts intent on tasting the blood of every living thing that skittled and scuttled across their path.
Have you ever actually touched or held a reptile egg? They are the most fucked up alien things ever. Rubbery and artificial looking and soft. They make no sense in this world when compared to the nice hard sensible bird egg. The point at which a reptile looks most prehistoric is in the egg, it is a snapshot of what the end of world domination really looks like. The actual fall of a life form, millenia, not just piddly centuries, something that actual might matter in the universe even in footnote fashion.
What is, I think, most intriguing to little kids about dinosaurs is the complexity of them. For instance, they have huge scary wonderful unpronounceable names. They are the size of buildings. They have brains in other parts of their bodies. There are two types of monsters - animal based and human based. Dinosaurs are the ultimate animal based monsters, which makes them inherently more sympathetic. Anything large and dumb, even the villainous, T rex, is instantly fantastic for it's pet potential. It's funny how we try to turn these crazy dangerous monsters into happy fuzzy things for children, because it's supposed to encourage them to get into science, which is of course the best thing for any child to be into. But I was always way more interested in the really scary dinosaurs. I think everyone naturally is. So I don't understand why there aren't more children's shows about dinosaur death matches. Children respond to bloodshed and natural order. And then of course, there's Shark Week.
Bones though. I don't have the same emotional reaction to human bones that I do dinosaur bones. Dinosaur bones fill me with a sense of really huge history and time and place and looking at their giant joints makes me feel the tendons in my elbows and knees so clearly, the movement of my neck too, staring at the size and shape of their elongated vertebrae. Human bones, even the earliest ones, give me nothing. I feel no connection to them. They are like toys. The frozen ash shadow people of Pompeii are statues to me, there is no proper communication of pain, no empathy. That tragic experience of human frailty that people exclaim over? Nope, I am a cold blooded girl. I understand the hunger and instinct in the shape of the dinosaurs better.
The relics of human development that affect me are the creations of it, the cave paintings and the rough tools. The closest I ever got to the same feeling from humans was when I went to the Bodies exhibit, the one where that guy filled cadavers with plastic resin? And you could see all the strings of the muscles and the impossibly delicate filigree of veins and arteries. After all, that was sort of the perfect combination of human remains and human creation. We are such morbid fucking things.
Its hard to not look at things like this as an example of Nature trying and failing, as if we are a superior species, an improvement. It's the Mammal's Bias. Maybe we are. Or maybe we are just another form of life, rising up and falling as they do all the time. In five hundred thousand years our entire world order will be different - the plants, the skies, the continents and ocean. Notice how science fiction sort of tops out at a certain length of time into the future? You don't have a lot of scifi that takes place millions of years from now, because jesus, who can even start to think of that? That's the sort of shit that will drive you crazy for sure. That's like looking into a black hole. We won't even be around. What the fuck will genes have done by then? It reminds me of that awful song they used to play on the oldies station, before the oldies became the eighties, that "In the year 2525" song. I hate that song, it makes me so uncomfortable.
The future is what dinosaurs do to me. They make it exist. They make me have to keep my eyes open to the void.
They entered the Territories by water, on small light canoes. The canal was the easiest way to get close to the creatures, the vibrations of trucks or jeeps would wake them in their deepest chambers. As they approached the first coastal nests, she felt how vulnerable and small the canoes were. Minuscule. Dots on the horizon compared to the fully grown adult males snoring in the waves. How tiny they must look to anyone watching, like fruit flies. It was quiet in a way that suggested everything here was waiting, the tapping splash of the waves and the scrapes of the boats were the only noise.
They aren't really asleep all the way, he told them. They are never actually asleep, there is always one eye opened, like a cat. But they are starting to grow roots at this age, and we are betting that we are too small for them to bother getting up for. This was hardly comforting.
As they reached further inland, floating silently, bobbing along with the current, the population grew denser. Here, towards the center of the nests, were the teenagers. Grown up, but not yet seeking out their own patches of land along the river, they crowded around each other, still not independent of the touch of family. They were surprisingly sleek. It is getting dangerous, he warned them, but she couldn't resist letting her canoe get just a little closer to the shore, to marvel at the curve of their great muscles and bones and necks.
The whole party had gotten a little bolder by then, feeling the high of the conqueror, the adrenalin starting to flush up their cheeks. The guide tried to hush them, but when the first comment said out loud in a regular voice elicited no reaction from the giants, the whole class was soon talking full speed among themselves. I heard they can live for centuries, said one elderly gentleman from Minnesota who was touring with his towheaded adult son, that means some of these animals were here before the Territories were even settled the first time! The group shook its head in uncomprehending awe.
The First Settlers, she thought, must have been brave as all shit to come up the rivers and see these things and think, sure why not stay? She knew that the laughter of the others was coming from fear, because she could feel it settling in her chest like a lead heavy tumor. What dreams they must have had, sleeping in tents in the shadows of the Giants! Dreams of planets crashing into each other, mountains falling down, great landslides and caves. She wondered how many had run out in the middle of the night to hand himself over to a Giant, succumbed to their ever present hypnotic pulse of Come Here Come Inside Come Here Come Inside. She could feel the itch in her fingers to reach out and touch one.
No matter how pretty they looked now, sleeping in the fading September sun, she could see the oncoming storm clouds creeping on the edge behind them dark, and she could not forget what had happened to those First Settlers. It was a preserve now, but once it had been a place they had failed to take over.
Few other creatures lived among the Giants. They spotted and kept far away from the River Snakes, and he even pointed out a rare camouflaged Terminal living on the edges of the nest, spreading it's thick tentacles out around it, the air purring with it's pleasure at being alone and untouched. What else could a happy Terminal ask for, but to be left alone to grow bigger and wilder? A Terminal would take over an entire continent if given the chance.
As the group started the river loop to the outer edges, the stragglers and banished leaders became visible. Unwelcome in the nest either from power struggle or injury, these were the truly dangerous ones, and each canoe stayed as close to the center of the canal as they could. A gutted Giant growled at them from right at the waters edge, bricks spewing from its lungs in unsatisfied dormant rage. The man from Minnesota was quiet, and his son turned a whiter shade of pale, which she didn't think was possible in the people from the Snow Lands. The group paddled just a bit faster.
The skies were terrible now, shades of gray blue and purple all boiling and rolling in. The temperature dropped ten degrees, so that now she regretted not wearing her parka. We are lost, she whispered, he has taken us around this loop already. They are going to notice. We are going to die here. I'm going to freeze to death trapped on this river by ravenous monsters.
It was, a bit, dramatic of her.
But when finally, after what seemed like an hour in the freezing bursts of rain and wind, they finally reached the mouth of the river and emptied into the lake, she found she couldn't bear to leave the sight of them, standing tall and powerful and unrelenting, guarding their coastline and their own little patches of kingdom, each parcel fought for with tooth and nail. So powerful and huge, and yet so pedestrian, bourgeois, middle class in their concerns. Do they think of anything else besides territory and food and family? Do they look at us coming and going, and wonder where we are disappearing to?
They reminded her of ex boyfriends. And land wars.
When I first started to try and write something to go along with these photos, I wrote this very long diatribe against the idea of blind peppy regionalism. It felt really good to erase that. But there were two parts I liked, and saved.
1)"I fear the instinct that creates well meaning self promoting civic pep squads is the same one that leads desperate and lonely people to gods - defensiveness of their inherent right to special, first, beloved above others no matter what. Delusional. Greatness is not something one achieves by telling everyone how great you are. You don't need to fake orgasms all the time to make people think you enjoy your life. You just have to calm the fuck down and actually be happy."
2) "There's a softer kind of love for things that doesn't ask for validation, praise, or flashy easily digestible meaning. Take inventory of each thing you see with wide open eyes, and give it existence, name it. Let it flow into you and be stored in that aquifer of bodily fluids, leaving the nets free to catch more. Then maybe someday, through practice, you'll learn to be curious again."
I've been thinking of what my own religion would be a lot lately. I've been playing around a lot with the idea of the god that didn't exist until all of us got on the internet and it was born from all our words and remains trapped there. No God until Suddenly there was A God. If ever there was a creation myth I would be willing to believe, it's probably that one. Score one for enchanted techno babble.
Or maybe really mine would be some sort of Zen Observer of Physical Existence thing. Like, these things are here! Now! How amazing is that? Why bother with why? Look at them move!
None of which has anything to do with the Fairgrounds at night. But it is a magical planet. Magic that comes from seeing how all these people make a living, and what people in the country care about, and watching creatures working and walking all around you with completely foreign purposes, closing up shop and pulling levers and putting chickens away.
Maybe what I should mention here is what a city girl I am. And what that means exactly is this: I am afraid of going over 50mph on roads that aren't interstate highways. I am afraid of living in a house where no one would hear me scream if someone walked across the fields and came in. I am nervous of the mouths of animals. I can't see well in the dark. I imagine horrible things watching me if it's too quiet. I am overly aware of the judgement of others, and yet disdainful of that opinion in a way that one gets when you are used to people you don't know being around you all the time at the bus stop. I don't like to walk barefoot in grass, because I am more afraid of thistles and bees than broken glass.
I don't understand people who never go out anywhere because they have kids and regular jobs. I don't understand churches, and why people put up with that kind of social prison. I would say rude things without understanding why they were rude. I care very little for the consequences that come from exposing yourself to others. None of this makes me a better person. I am just different.
But I do appreciate the possibility of solitude, and the husbandry of species you can only communicate with through touch. I understand the beauty of clean air, and wide open green spaces and the possession of self that brings with it. I like that almost no one at the fair had a life like mine, and I had no life like theirs, and we orbited around each other in uncaring accepting hedonistic purpose. I wish I could have read all their thoughts as they looked at our group of hip pretty little kids, and I would let them have access to mine if they wanted, because mostly I looked at each couple walking by and wanted to just latch onto them and follow them home and see what that was like.
Mostly I just wanted to curl up with the all the different crazy impossible machines and glow with them. And I want to go drink at the reservoir with the girls in jean shorts and the boys in cut off plaid shirts, and see what they know that I don't. Because everything is interesting the first time.
I didn't get my license till I was, I don't know, 21, 22? We took buses everywhere always, through out high school and college and Phoenix. My parents couldn't get me one and I didn't save up for one. I just figured why bother getting my license at that moment in my life if I didn't have a car? When I finally ponied up, I remember my friend Margaret let me use her car to take the driving test the second time. It was a beat up old light blue hatchback, and it died as soon as she parked it at the beginning of the course, in front of the instructors. I don't remember actually passing my test, but obviously I did, later, at some point. It wouldn't be till years later that I would buy my first car. And even more years till I would think of spending more than 500 dollars on a car.
My very first vehicle was an '85 Celebrity. It had no working speedometer, and I was dating David at the time, who told me it would be good for me to learn how to tell how fast a car was going just by paying attention. He was always overly positive like that. I did learn how to go about the right speed, and I never got a ticket, but it was terrifying. I did not love my first car.
There was another car in between there somewhere maybe? I don't remember, honestly. Maybe there was, maybe there wasn't.
Then I bought my first used car from a JD Byrider, which is where you go if you work at a record store and have bad credit from that 500 dollar credit card you got that one time at the student union and never paid off after you blew all of your limit on beer and hemp beads. I picked my Sonata over the Taurus because it had less miles and a CD player. It meant I had to make car payments for the first time, which was my first experience with a bill that I had to pay no matter what, if I had a job or not. There was no leeway or moving back in with my parents once I had that car payment. Within the first year, the engine blew, and it was still under warranty. I am still a huge believer in warranties. Maybe that sounds stupid, to "believe" in warranties, maybe to everyone that was always obvious, but I labored under the impression they weren't worth the money till exactly that moment.
I still have that car, and it's about to die. Poor thing is all beat up, no hubcaps and a hood that's peeling off all of its paint. A giant gash in the quarter panel where I hit my parents' fence. The alternator has been replaced a couple times. It had a power steering leak. I replaced the radiator and the brakes. I've bought tires a couple times. The suspension is just shaking apart, and there is some chirping noise coming from the left front wheel that squeaks every time I hit a bump. I will probably bother to fix it really soon, but what I'm really worried about is the transmission, which will someday leave me stranded in nowhere Ohio on a back road with limited cell reception. A couple of times, me or other people have started driving with the emergency brake engaged. I have no idea what that does, but I know it's not good. The inside of the car is full of junk and filthy, because I'm constantly throwing stuff in the back seat. Like, right now it's full of beach stuff, books, and a bag of clothes I had to move from the trunk when they replaced the taillights. There is SO MUCH stuff in the trunk. I should just throw it all out, since I haven't needed any of it in months, but like, there's probably stuff in there I need. My winter coat maybe, I'm not sure.
This darling beautiful wonderful car has taken me so many places. It's trucked me out 2 hours to the office and back in winter blizzards. It's gone through tornado chasing, and hail, and me just driving it around the potholes of East Cleveland aimlessly for hours. And when it gets nondriveable, just simply dangerous and not okay and not worth fixing, I desperately want to shove it into a demolition derby ring and ram it into other cars until every last inch of that frame is ripped and torn and falling off. It would take five minutes, cause that piece of junk body is like foil.
I saw my first demolition derby at the Lorain County Fair this weekend. It was a lovely day beforehand. I met my friends out in Wellington, which is one of my favorite places, it's so pretty and random to drive out there. I have adventures in Wellington, every time, storms and elk and catfish and reservoirs. We met that day at one of their parents' houses, where two goats stood cautiously on the wide green lawn watching us talk by the pool, and chickens huddled under pine trees going to sleep. The fair was right around the corner, which out there means a 4 mile drive. The parking lot was big, and full of trucks. A giant inflatable American eagle stood guard over the entrance. Immediately inside, we looked for fried cheese on a stick, and then wandered around looking at the farm animals. When it was time, we got up into the bleachers, and sat waiting for the derby to start while the finest of rural Americana paraded past us in t-shirts and tank tops, clutching lemonades and nachos and ice cream and children. I felt like maybe the sundress I had worn was cut just a bit low, because in every direction nice looking older ladies were glaring at me. Then it started.
It took me a minute to adjust to what was happening. I knew conceptually what to expect, but actually seeing it, well that's like every live event is. Football fans, horse racing fans, everyone will tell you the same thing. You don't understand it until you're there. The funny thing is, that doesn't mean it's better than what you thought. For one, it was much slower than I was expecting. But I hadn't also thought of how that slowness, the mud and the falling off wheels, contributed to the momentous feel of these giant machines crashing and creaking into each other. The air was full of crunching. The crowd was surprisingly well behaved, like real church people. They let out whoops and screams when something really cool happened, but mostly everyone just sat on the metal slats and watched intently. It was, if our ears hadn't been filled with the roar of cars, very much like tennis. Imagine each tennis match had multiple players, and each player could randomly start to play against any player he had a clear hit to. And the players were barreling hard rough machinery fighting desperately to the death.
It's like a tournament, right? So there were three matches, and the cars left "running" after each match graduated to the finale. Even the winning ones ended up getting pushed out of the ring by miniature bull dozers. There were several volunteer firemen just standing around watching from the platform in their uniforms . The announcer was affable and joking. The carnival rides all spun around behind the backdrop, shining silver and gold in the setting evening sun. The derby cars were covered with words, scrawled across in bright spraypaint ads for collision shops,chiropractors, salvage yards, pizza places. A few of them had R.I.Ps and In Memorials on their doors, grandmothers and friends who had died in car accidents on the country roads in the dark after parties. My friend sat next to me and we talked about what it was like to grow up in Wellington, the churches and the derby contestants. Apparently, everyone dies in Wellington. I suspect the same is true in small towns all over Ohio. Everyone dies and everyone has babies, and they just keep trying to balance the whole thing generation after generation.
You have a different relationship with a car once you rely upon it solely. Growing up in the city, I had the advantage of being able to get a ride, or catch the bus, if something happened like my car was suddenly stolen for parts. But when you live 20 miles from anything useful, and there are no buses, and your closest family members are in Elyria maybe, or North Ridgeville,I mean, you need that car. You are in that car all the time. You know that car. The car is a major contributing factor to the quality of your life. There are no dates without a car. There is no shopping, or picking up people, or going places. There is no spontaneity.
And me, not only do I use my car for exploring, road trips, shows and the beach and lightning storms, but I also talk about cars all day for work. I talk about their broken pieces and their worth to people, emotional and physical. The first moment one car exploded the fender and hood of another car into a miracle of welded bent catastrophic steel, I felt this cathartic rush in my chest, and all the stress and pain of the work week melted. The laugh that came out of me when a car's whole entire tire flew off over the concrete barrier was pure and sincere glee.
I think that means something, the love and hate for cars as an extension of ourselves, and the desire to smash them violently to bits until they're dead. Drive them until they can't go any further down the road, and then let them fall fighting.
As we were waiting to leave, standing in the slow moving emptying current, my friends decided to hop down to the lower boxes, which involved a quick jump over the poles and stepping on some wooden folding chairs. A lady in a pink sweatshirt saw me about to go over, and said quickly "but she's wearing a dress!". I smiled sweetly at her and said "it's okay, I'm wearing leggings", and we ran off to look at the glowing dregs of the rest of the fair in the falling night.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
I'm warning you right now that at some point in the future this blog will degenerate into me just posting Britney songs. It's impossible to say when exactly. I need my own Britney doomsday clock for the sidebar.
In the beginning, it was a different world, but this does not take place in the beginning. It takes place at the end, when the beginning had finally given in, and started the slow crumble, a stumbled crawl to its finale. If you have ever watched a building slowly die, the gradual push of earthly forces, the creeping shimmy of moss and bugs in the wood, that's the best way to open your eyes up to the erosion which eats at all things open to air and wind. Make some allusion to the sands of time here, that's probably appropriate.
I don't personally understand the fear of hurricanes, because I've never experienced a full on one myself. In Ohio, we just get the dregs. Sometimes we have big storms, and occasionally roads and cities get closed down because of snow. In general though, we're the most temperate place in the country. A good light mix of phenomenon, just enough to keep you on an emotional high, a little uncomfortable and a little too happy in the summer, a little too desperate in February. Point is that when we have hurricanes in other parts of the continent, I feel that pull to go there and see it. I want to be in the storm. In a storm, parked in a car watching, with the heat on, is the best place.
No, of course it's not. But that's just it, I lack understanding on these matters. I sympathize with the storm surfers.
Last night I saw the movie City of Life and Death, which is about the Rape of Nanking. Rape is not metaphorical in this sense. It's not a movie you can feel comfortable saying you really liked, because it's just scene after scene of horrible nightmarish violence. There is a beautifully coordinated segment of simultaneous mass executions of chinese soldiers. It is very serious and long and epic. It will create, by the end, a feeling of heavy traumatized numbness in your chest. You will never be tempted to just turn it off, or walk out. But you will be stuck.
The Cinematheque projector was down, so they were using a backup projector, and had to reload something or other halfway through the movie. There was a black out pause, everything just stopped, for a few minutes. Nobody in the theater moved or talked. We just all sat there in contract with each other, still, waiting for it to start again. It occurred to me, as I waited listening to people shift around in their creaky seats somewhere in the darkness behind me, that I am able to withstand much more violence in a movie when it is in a historical context. Wars, documentaries, ect. I don't cringe or turn away like I do at horror movies. I'm the worst at scary movies. I flinch and gasp and close my eyes. But I don't have any of those responses when the violence is about something that actually happened. I have a completely different reaction when it's violence that is currently at this moment happening. Then I can still keep my eyes open, but they fill up pretty quick.
All these pictures, by the way, are the original facebook group like.
I'm finding it difficult to write this past week, ever since I got the new computer. I was sort of slowing down before that happened anyway. It's just the end of summer, and doing anything that involves sitting around inside seems...well it doesn't seem anything, because it doesn't occur to me. I have like twelve day trips I need to take in the next 2 months. And I didn't get hardly any buildings this summer, which sucked. I miss the version of Jere that didn't work Mondays. Sundays just aren't the same, I feel much more exposed. I prefer it when there are lots of cars and workers around, seeing how the whole place functions. And it's very hard to find people you can just ride around in the car with for long periods of time. Still a great summer, but I spent it all at the beach and now it's a little colder and I'm starting to remember the other things you can't do in the winter.
This is definitely an "I" post. I guess they mostly are, it's the nature of the thing, but I'm (i i i i i i i i) I'm starting to feel the burn of facebook and twitter muscles worked too hard. I'm becoming a hardcore twitter watcher. I love getting even just a tiny glimpse of the crazy pre apocalyptic group think. If you chipped a hole through a giant skull ten million times bigger than you, you would see just one little part of the pulsing beating wet brain muscle, but it would still give you a feeling of the enormity. That's Twitter. I want to put my hand in the middle of the oozy gooey mess and feel it breathing. The other day, there was a topic trending, Aaliyah'sAirplanePlaylist, and when I looked at the other posts they were nothing but condemnations of the topic, but no one was actually offering up suggestions, just ranting about how awful a trend topic it was, how offensive, how Twitter ought to ban it. A topic that was only trending because they themselves were perpetuating it. That's crazy! That's what Twitter is dudes. It's crazy shit like that, and then your actual friends sometimes saying something funny, and all the time a scrolling list of people who have died in the world thanks to the Breaking News feed. Bombed here, famine here, car crash, no power, helicopters down. Twitter is the most Vietnam thing ever.
On Twitter, we make jokes about hurricanes so that the gods will spare us, because nothing really tragic can happen if we are joking about it right? Twitter is how Man laughs at the Gods now. Nervously. Edit: As proof I offer up the Humanoid Robot who Tweets from the Space Station. And has a gold helmet head. And will never come back to Earth. Maybe they will someday give him legs.
I had no idea Aaliyah was this kind of tragic folk hero either. I knew like three of her songs, but I thought she was just a mid par pop star, a three album girl. Apparently she is like, a 90s Buddy Holly or Selena. Also, I completely forgot she was in Queen of the Damned and now I want to watch that right now.
I consider my ability to enjoy doing everything at least once to be my selling point. I think by the time you are my age, there's no shame in being able to identify your selling points. Like the proverbial job interview, here are my strengths and my weaknesses. I am messy and irresponsible and emotional, but I know how to have fun no matter what. I'm good at that. Its delusional, but a delusion I believe in.
One consequence of this eagerness to love everything new is that I somehow convinced myself I loved everything about Ohio. Thankfully, Dayton exists.
We went down there to see an old amusement park, but they had sold off all the rides and there was a guard and it was really exposed and it just wasn't a good bet. That was outside Middletown. Then we tried an old abandoned Carnegie library, but it turns out a ton of people were playing bingo on the lawn outside it. Both of these things were horribly disappointing at the time, but really, it says something about the town that both their abandoned spots were taken care of and cared about. The only other thing of note about that place was that every bar seemed open at 5:30am, one assumes because of the steel mill there. Which was also not abandoned.
So then we tried to go to Dayton, just to look around. You know how a lot of fantasy worlds always feature some country that is made up of nomadic horsemen, and its really flat and plain countryside, with lots of tall grass? And their capital city is a collection of wooden huts, but like, really complicated wooden huts? Dayton reminds me of that. Only instead of horsemen, its all nomadic tech people. But the land especially is flat and full of low lying rivers with super grassy shorelines and weird white and beige concrete structures crossing the empty metropolis. Also, there were an inordinate amount of signs for piano stores. So possibly there's some weird underground piano war happening in Dayton.
I was frustrated already from the morning, so as we drove through deserted Sunday afternoon Dayton, looking forlornly around for some place to try, I developed an unreasonable hatred of the place. Like, it was just so boring. SO boring. And that's just it, I'm not a person who bores easily. I get bored by almost nothing. So, I'm just saying, what kind of place does that make you?
I will be going back at some point soon though, I hope, to go on a tour of this place which looks amazing. So I guess, I'm not entirely uninterested. I wonder if my desire to stay happy is so strong it can be activated by a better mood and another try? It makes me want to test it, and just keep going to worse and worse places until finally one day I just can't find one single good thing to say about a place.
