A Substitution for Astrology That Makes Way More Sense

So what? The axis of the earth has betrayed us, oh silly 3000 years of movement and gravity, and now those little scrolls Mom used to buy in the grocery store checkout line are false, though I suspect they aren't going out of business any time. So what? So we no longer need the stars to tell us when to harvest, when to go to war, when to have babies, when to fall in love. All those bibles of books going page by page explaining the various reasons I have yearnings for authority and am obsessed with lighting, burn them all, the ones telling me not to like you because you want loyalty and I want adventure. Buy a map. Because, hey, guess what, we've created our own stars. I've seen them.

The proposition, the substitution then, for our post modern horoscopes is this. Define ourselves by the stars we live in, the ones we've created and spread across the sky that is our land, that used to be dark and now glows with our ideas and energy and love and hate and all of those longstanding lovable awful terrible true traits of humanity. Your city is your constellation. Isn't that so much more telling of who you are? Where you walk every day and what buildings you ride the elevator in every morning, where you shop for food and where you drink and where you fuck? The houses you grew up in, the places you drove to by streetlight, where you fell down in the street and caught the bus and kissed in alleyways. The place you were born or the place you choose to live, or maybe they are one and the same. The dirt and stone you interact with, and all that webbing of wiring surrounding you all the time, no matter where you are. Don't you think that defines who you are so much more accurately than what position a chunk of rock was in somewhere amid the Great Vacuum the day you were expelled from your mother's uterus?

And maybe I'm a Cleveland, and I'm not compatible with a Boston, or an Atlanta, or a Spokane. Maybe my best signs are Chicagos, or Detroits. Maybe Cincinnatis have better sex with Phoenixes. Maybe Charlestons argue all the time and Tampas are worthless fools when it comes to money. Or, if you want to read your charts really specifically, figure out the orientation of your eyelids and the beat of your financial success, pick out the part of the constellation you belong to. The Parma tentacles only get along with other tentacles. The Ohio City hearts partner on projects more effectively with other hearts. People from the river arteries should marry people from other arteries, or possibly smaller veins, but only in regards to the proximity of the bladders.

Anyway, the most important and great part about this is it's your choice, what kind of place you want to belong to.

We could also create constellations out of the darkness too, the uncivilized places. The negative spaces are still shapes. They exist too.

This is a prime business opportunity people, this could be the start of a whole new use for Google Maps. And the world grew just a little bit larger and the men in hats took their hats off and looked at the storefronts and shopping malls around them, and started to think about location less in terms of foot traffic and more in terms of lust and loss and hunger for guidance. Which is what this is really all about, just having something tell us what to do.

Why isn't Thanksgiving here already?

I seriously just want an excuse to cook and drink all day. In my mother's kitchen, which is nicer and has counter space. Also, I want permission to put my Christmas lights up without being pigeonholed as a scum sucking obnoxious twat. Or being struck by lightning. Which is what happens, right?

The Bridge Project

People in Cleveland are always trying to create festivals, right? We may be a hardened artery city of pierogi eaters, but god damn if they aren't always trying to get some culture down our gullets. Every single street in Lakewood and Cleveland Heights has their own arts festival. There are beer festivals, food festivals, volleyball festivals, festivals to celebrate environmental disasters. It's impressive, and good, and very commendable.

But whoever came up with the idea to hold an arts festival in the streetcar tunnels under the Detroit Superior bridge, the ABANDONED streetcar tunnels, is a honest to god freaking genius.


So the Ingenuity folks were just sitting around brainstorming, and someone said "hey, why don't we open up this entire tunnel that spans a mile across the river, light it up all cool, and have artists create things and show stuff in all the dark corners? And we'll make it free." Slam dunk guys. You should do this every month next summer.

It was open in the daylight hours too, but I think the best time to see it had to be at night, when everybody was ogling the lights and the music echoing down the girders gave you a soundtrack for being completely tripped out by the views underneath your feet.

Yeah, cause see, there was this long section where you could walk on a grate over the Cuyahoga, and look down on all the little toy buildings. And strangers put their hands on my shoulders to gently guide me out of their way, since I was looking down the entire time, like some sort of stoned 12 yr old.

It makes sense to do this in this space. Clevelanders are bridge people, tunnel people, steel and concrete people. We belong down (up) in places like this, like ducks in water. We've been denied our natural habitat. As you know by now, I feel most comfortable in places like this, that are bigger than me, because up and in are the best directions to have. And it was so much fun to be with other people who were just as impressed as me. It was a big happy Cleveland Glow.

Every little piece of art, like the sitting rooms and the random movies on the wall, shone like little plastic gems.

Walking across the river was like a museum tour. You would be surrounded by people and sound one moment, everyone smiling, and the next moment you were completely alone, in the darkness, with the water and the lights.

And there was a 3d movie! With people in 3d glasses sitting enrapt like a scene from their own movie. And a 6 person bicycle that kept careening randomly down the walkway. And people just sitting around drumming. And kids, and fireworks from the stadium for like forty minutes, and semi trucks hurtling above you making everything shake.





It was a pretty perfect night, and besides my buildings, like the best thing I've done all summer.

More photos from the 2009 Bridge Project can be found here.