Just a Quickie

This week I've mostly been writing other, non-bloggy things, reading Running With Scissors, and taking brief forays into Manhattan. I know, I know, everyone thinks New York is the greatest city ever, and that "Cleveland will never be New York," but remember this: New York smells awful, and even those of us with the healthiest breathing apparatus possible still get phlegmy and congested with too much traipsing around Midtown, and that those pathetic little fenced in patches of grass on the curb do not a green space make.

Hearken Unto My Words

It's all in the "a", baby.

I Have Six Weeks of Vacation and No Plans Yet

This year, I want to use part of my obscenely generous vacation time to explore American and perhaps (gasp!) Canadian cities that Cleveland could learn something from. Cities that might be of a similar size, or have a similar history. Or that are just cool places doing cool things.

For those friends out there who aren't from Cleveland, like Marielle, here's the best succinct description of Cleveland I can squeeze into the five minutes before I have to leave for work:

The bad:
Cleveland is a mid-sized city whose industrial heyday is long gone, leaving in its place a crumbling infrastructure, rampant poverty, an abysmal public school system, and a sprawling ring of upper middle class suburbs whose ancestors fled the city because of racial tension, and whose current residents all seem to know what's best for Cleveland yet staunchly refuse to move back within city limits.

The good:
Cleveland has astonishingly beautiful and underused geographical assets, world class cultural institutions, ethnic diversity that some places could only dream of, low cost of living, and a dedicated (though at times, factious) network of people who want to see it truly develop into the Comeback City.

What do you guys think? Where should I visit? What cities have really turned themselves around and become cool people havens?

"There's Fennel For You...and Columbines"

Today is the sixth anniversary of Columbine. An event which, despite the fact that I was in my last year of college at the time, became a hinge to my life before and my life after.

Call me cynical, but I've been troubled by the media undersaturation and lack of scapegoating in the Red Lake incident. How many times did Ted Koppel and his ilk cut to Cassie Bernall's lovely blonde visage and remind us sanctimoniously that "she said yes"? And isn't it about time blogging - which we all know is as dangerous as inviting a sex offender into your bedroom - got blamed for something big?

Somehow, on April 20, 1999, although I didn't have a TV or a computer, I knew all about Columbine. This time, when I saw that trigger-phrase "school shooting" in the Google News lineup I was shocked - not so much because it had happened, but because it had happened several days earlier, because I felt a discombobulated shame at being so out of the loop for the deaths of 10 people. One click later: oh. It was on the Rez. Dismally, I imagined that if the kid had only killed one or two people, it wouldn't have even registered on America's "won't somebody please think of the children?" radar.

But I'm not going to write about race and class inequities here - a) I'll leave that to other people and b) I fancy my small coterie of readers to be pretty enlightened on those things anyway. I just got a sharp bout of the bitterness that must be voiced. What's more, the whole thing has exhumed some internal junk of mine that got set in motion six years ago, but which has been around far longer.

Some say that Columbine was the defining event in the lives of the Millennial Generation. I'm not a Millennial, but I've thought about it every day since. When I was in grad school I scrounged OhioLINK for every book written about Columbine - I found books about the victims, I found books casting the event in a pointedly Christian light, but I didn't find any written by people who felt quite like I did.

After people started talking about Red Lake, a couple of my Boomer coworkers, tsking at the tragedy of it all and lamenting how "things aren't like what they used to be", asked me if I'd ever worried about that kind of thing happening at my school. Columbine happened when I was finishing college, and neither had I been a teen for Pearl, Mississippi or Paducah or Kip Kinkel. Maybe school shootings were after my time. "I guess not," I answered noncommittally.

Then a few hours later the real memory of high school squeezed messily out of its repression. Of course I wasn't worried about that kind of thing happening, I was too busy gleefully imagining it.

Now before you say "who is this psychopath with a Really Bad Cleveland Accent?" I want to point out the five things that kept me from ever actually doing anything worse than skipping gym to hide out at the public library:

1. An actual respect for human life.

2. A deep-seated fear and aversion to publicly humiliating my parents. Only my sister knows completely how Mad Mom = Definite Bad Juju, and she was smart enough to marry a man who lived on another continent.

3. The fact that I wouldn't know how to use a slingshot, let alone toss out a few dozen rounds from a firearm of the most heinous, illegally obtained variety.

4. A firmly entrenched self-centeredness. One might think this would make me care less about the consequences of my would-be rampage, but the thought of spending the rest of my life in prison for offing a bunch of dumb jocks who surely wouldn't be able to make the world a better place (like I would be able to, of course) didn't seem very sensible.

5. Creativity, innovation, and a runaway imagination. Yes, all those virtues that kept showing up on my kindergarten report cards - in spite of consistently "needing improvement" in "being a team player" - truly paid off. As many teens ultimately discover about sex, daydreaming about it is much better and doesn't get you in any trouble.

That said, kids can ruin each others' lives. I am always troubled by those who think of children as sweet, innocent little lambs who know not what they do. Have these people ever worked with children? Have these people ever even seen children? Weren't they children themselves, or did they just hatch fully formed and smug from some pious, otherworldly egg? Perhaps we need a culture-wide shift back to the 19th century mindset that children are inherently evil and must be "corrected" with character education.

There must be other adults that feel like I do. That don't condone what the school shooters do, but understand exactly what motivates it. I'm not talking about those adults who clamor for anti-bullying programs. I mean those among us who nursed a silent, fierce, abject hate for our peers, and not without good reason.

I do acknowledge that it is hard as an adult to remember that kids' lives are serious. Now in my late twenties, I've realized that I'm mostly over adolescence. Which means I'm in a dangerous spot: as someone who works with teens, it would be irresponsible to let myself forget that giant splatter of dark, sick misery that a lot of kids live in.

Because I lived in it too.

The Sun Also Sets

Another benefit of living in Cleveland: Cleveland is fairly westerly as far as Eastern Standard Time is concerned, so when the sun's gone down on New York, Clevelanders can still frolic in daylight for another hour or so.

So remember how lucky you are, and pay an after-work visit to the Metroparks, Edgewater, or the Cuyahoga Valley National Park for me. I'll be thinking of you while I'm sitting in the dark watching prime time!

Losing Sleep Over Scott Savol

Damn it all, I've spent the last two hours in an insomniac web-surfing fit, and I was about to go to bed when I came across this article from Blogcritics, and since I seem to be one of the 32 million sad sacks who plunks down on Tuesday nights to hear a pocketful of would-be corporate tools sing their little hearts out, I got to thinking.

Why is Scott Savol still on American Idol? Who is voting for him? I'll tell you, because right now I'm blessed with the infinite wisdom of the sleepless:

America loves Scott Savol for the same reason America loved Twin Peaks. Not because of any inherent brilliance (although I loved Twin Peaks for that reason), but because everyone's so freaking sick of having primped, fluffed, bleached, poufed, dumbed down, homogenized little packages of a fake beautiful life radiated forcefully at them from their TV sets. American TV watchers, let's admit it: we have an icky little secret. We love ugly people. We feel dirty and guilty because we know we're not supposed to like looking at ugly people, but we love it. We should thank Scott Savol for breaking up the brassy blonde monotony.

Am I the only person who thinks so-called beautiful people all look unremarkably the same? Am I the only person who surreptitiously tries to connect with misshapenness in all those I meet? Who would be pleased to catch someone studying the rules which my notoriously unplucked eyebrows refuse to follow?

If I was, Scott Savol wouldn't have such a cult following. The more bombarded we are by pretty people and things, the more we starve for the hideous and different. Hey, if only Fox had harnessed the power of this formula when filming the ill-fated Point Pleasant. If only they'd filmed it on the real Jersey Shore, where they would have found more ugly, scarred, psychological yuck than would have fit on camera. It would've been a smash hit!

10 Observations About Cleveland From a Drained Brain

I came back from Cleveland on Tuesday. Now that I've had some time to swill about in a pool of self-analysis, here is what I think:

1. A lot of Cleveland looks like shit.

2. The parts that don't look like shit look like someone put an enormous amount of meticulous, handwringing passion into them.

3. Transportation in and around Cleveland is efficient and expedient.

4. Ummm, why the heck can't you get to the waterfront?

5. Cleveland isn't big enough for the East vs. West crap. Knock it off already!

And some personal observations:

1. To borrow Frank Jackson's phrase, I am Cleveland.

2. The building I lived in on Lake Avenue has been sold to a different management company. Metaphysically, it's not mine anymore, which makes me less sad than I would've expected.

3. You only have so much time to spend with people and places that are significant to you.

4. It's surprising to see who misses you, and how much.

5. I am utterly, utterly in love with Cleveland. I am struck with the love so deep it hurts, it hurts the way a freezing wind off the Great Lakes whips and burns clear through your ears on an otherwise sunny day. I love Cleveland like a friend who's gone crazy, a friend who I'm eternally chasing through a revolving door, a friend who is just so painfully far away from me I want to get off at the next exit and turn around and drive as fast as I can back to the reality that I really want. God, I just wanted to touch every brick in the park in front of the Old Stone Church, every violet growing weedily outside the abandoned Christian Science building at the corner of Lake and West 117th, every window of every empty storefront in the entire metro area. Cleveland needs someone to love it that much. It needs every grouchy nay-saying one of you to love it that much.

The Green, Green Treelawn of Home

Well, I'm going home tomorrow morning - this'll be the first time I've been in Cleveland since last July. People at work have been asking me, "Are you excited?" The answer is a pensive no, not really: I'm not a newbie at relocation, and I know how one can over-glamorize the old hometown. In reality, it can look pretty disappointing. I remember coming home for Christmas when I lived in Missoula, and after a few days, going back to the airport and getting really stressed because they'd overbooked and it looked like I'd have to wait another day to get back to Montana. I also remember the frustrated tears of entrapment that spurted to my little eyes upon witnessing Cleveland after three weeks abroad last spring. Truly, it looked like the Mistake on the Lake, and I was barreling toward it with (literally) jet speed.

I also remember a sweltering afternoon in early May 2000, being driven to the Convocation Center for my college graduation, at which time my ever-jolly father started in about an article he'd read about how most people die within 50 miles of where they grew up. About to be handed a degree that ensured few prospects and with little idea of how I wanted to fill up the next 70 years (except that I knew I wanted to get as far away as possible), I blurted out "God that's so f@#*ing depressing!" Which made my dad laugh, but made the unseasonable heat seem that much more oppressive to me.

Do most people have such a complicated relationship with Home? It seems to me that most of my friends who've never left say, "You're so lucky, you can just pick up and go whenever you want" or "You're always going out and doing interesting things, and I'm just hanging around here" or "I wish I could get the gumption to move away." But here's the key thing: they don't. And probably most people never move away from where they grew up.

Though I love Cleveland, my foremost goal in life seems to be to live everywhere I can. I think, God, I can't die until I've Done Something, and when I sit down and think about what that something is, it's living in other places and talking to library patrons with funny accents who can't quite understand the way I talk and eating pizza of a variety I look down upon because it's "different" and not being able to buy beer at the grocery store and pooh-pooh-ing pine trees that look like this because I know real pine trees look like this.

So anyway, I'm not expecting anything this time. I'm not expecting to have tender feelings toward Cleveland, I'm not expecting to be disappointed. I just want to watch cable TV with an Angelo's Pizza in front of me and an Edmund Fitz in my hand. I just want to wait it out and see how I feel when I circle north over the hopefully unfrozen Lake.

Plus, I'm sure nature will see fit to punish me for fleeing The Year We Broke the Record - I'm bringing a heavy coat.

Reminds Me of a Simpsons Episode

Anybody else catch Frank Gehry's appearance on The Simpsons last night? It gave me a chuckle to see his work lightly made fun of, since every trip past the Peter B. Lewis building filled me with a millisecond of disoriented shock ("I don't remember hearing about an industrial disaster in University Circle...oh, wait.")

More than that, though, the episode touched on some interesting city planning issues. The gist: annoyed at how upwardly mobile Shelbyvillians look down upon Springfield, Marge tries to inject some culture into the city by building a concert hall (enter Frank Gehry). Needless to say, the concert hall doesn't get much business (Mayor Quimby moans, "why didn't you people tell me you didn't like classical music?")

It reminded me of the time my sister and I went to see a midweek Cleveland Orchestra concert. My sister, fresh from a 9-year stint as an art student / restaurant manager in San Francisco, was less than thrilled at being thrust by financial burden back to her humble hometown. So a trip to the Orchestra seemed welcome respite from the hoardes of grotesque, uncultured Old Clevelanders she now so heartily disdained.

She had to absorb a bit of culture shock when we got to Severance and found the aud less than a third full, and where a seat was occupied, it was occupied by an arse several decades older and in a much higher tax bracket than our own. In the City on the Bay, she instructed me, everyone goes to the symphony. Stinky hippies in sandals go to the symphony, and they sit alongside the chic and fur-coated in an über-diverse festival of wholesome liberal values.

The auditorium, she assured me as if describing the Promised Land, is always full.

It's been on my mind ever since. What's up with Cleveland? Why don't we fill our concert halls? Why couldn't we hold on to the Ballet? Why do charming little areas like Shaker Square struggle like ailing houseplants? And (more puzzling to me now that I'm on the Jersey Shore) why aren't our beaches clean? Part of it is the obvious "it's the economy, stupid" but there's more than that. Part of Cleveland's psyche detests beauty. Part of Cleveland's psyche sees beauty and wants to destroy it.

Part of Cleveland's psyche derides and resents the entire Creative Class, too. What, after all, is art good for? You can't eat it, it doesn't raise anyone's test scores, and you sure as hell can't make cars out of it. At one point, Cleveland's whole economy was based on filthying up the landscape. Those were the good old days, back when honest, hardworking people could make a living for their family. Right? Now we have all those sissies and fancy-boys saying that what'll really bring Cleveland back is a few lousy pictures spray-painted on the side of the empty factory where my old man used to work. Hell, things aren't like they used to be. Cleveland just sucks.

Yes, I'm aware that I've left people like the Progressive Arts Alliance, Dobama Theatre, and Lakewood Public Library completely out of the picture. That's for the time being only. But every Wednesday comes around and I get Cool Cleveland in my inbox, and that starts a flurry of excitable, crazy, half-baked "if only I were in Cleveland I could start X cultural initiative, or Y small business, or get Z startup grant" schemes, and I have to remember there's a reason why I left. I have to remember that even though I love Cleveland dearly, I'm still too vulnerable to its infamous pessimism. And I don't want to get sucked into that, I want to tour around and see other cities' good ideas first, and then come back. Because whatever scheme I end up adopting, it's gonna be good, and I don't want it to go bust due to my lack of life preparation.

So thanks Bart and Lisa, Lenny and Carl, and especially you, Mr. Burns, for reminding me of my life's course.

I'm Packing Up My Bags...

...I'll soon be leeeaving. I'm going to Polka Town!

Yes, this time next week I'll be in Cleveland, for a long weekend of pierogi-eating, porter-drinking, grey-skied family time. In celebration I'll do a Clare-inspired Three Beautiful Things, Cleveland edition:

1. Flopping down on the dog hair-covered couch in the living room where I grew up

2. Eating a My Friends Omelette with my dear friend Ruth

3. Driving up and down Clifton Boulevard over and over and over and appreciating the most beautiful street in the Cleveland area like no one ever has