You should never read the PD before going to bed...
...because you will have dreams like this:
I'd just bought a house. For whatever reason, I had to go over to visit the neighbor to my right. He was busy lighting up a crack pipe while he opened the door. Small children spilled out and started grabbing at my legs - "you got anything to eat? you got anything to eat?" The man appeared to be the kids' grandfather; the parents were MIA. Behind the wildness and desperation in his eyes, you could see shadows of his former self. He frightened and fascinated me. I felt pity for him, but also wanted to be away from him.
I went home and thought about this for a while.
Then my doorbell rang. It was my neighbors to the left. They looked like they'd walked out of a J.Crew catalog. I think they might have been holding martini glasses.
"Hi, we just wanted to see what you looked like. Are you that girl with the blog? Yeah, we've read it. It's not very good. Those are really ugly shoes, by the way."
Then they tittered and the whole world dissolved into fog.
I'm interpreting this dream to mean that I feel stuck in the middle between the forces of poverty and drugs on one hand, and too-much gentrification on the other.
I'd just bought a house. For whatever reason, I had to go over to visit the neighbor to my right. He was busy lighting up a crack pipe while he opened the door. Small children spilled out and started grabbing at my legs - "you got anything to eat? you got anything to eat?" The man appeared to be the kids' grandfather; the parents were MIA. Behind the wildness and desperation in his eyes, you could see shadows of his former self. He frightened and fascinated me. I felt pity for him, but also wanted to be away from him.
I went home and thought about this for a while.
Then my doorbell rang. It was my neighbors to the left. They looked like they'd walked out of a J.Crew catalog. I think they might have been holding martini glasses.
"Hi, we just wanted to see what you looked like. Are you that girl with the blog? Yeah, we've read it. It's not very good. Those are really ugly shoes, by the way."
Then they tittered and the whole world dissolved into fog.
I'm interpreting this dream to mean that I feel stuck in the middle between the forces of poverty and drugs on one hand, and too-much gentrification on the other.
posted by Christine at 9:27 AM
4 Comments:
That's what your small town is supposed to look like, eventually absent the crack pipe and the martini glasses, when everybody is doing something productive. That's why we live here, in the small town of Brooklyn Centre, near the zoo, in the city.
Homogeneity (spelling?) is something we should studiously avoid, as we rebuild our communities. The higher income over in Tremont who occupy the tax-abated stuff are skewing the dialogue their way, and they're not even paying their fair share. A few years ago I had a disappointing discussion with a young weenie (good neighbor Sam) who runs a downtown seafood restaurant and lives over in Mill Creek, and he let me know we were damned lucky to get his high-end ass living here among us, in town, and that tax abatement was the tribute we should be glad to pay to him, and to his ilk.
Having heard this story, now maybe you understand why the guy on the other side is still smoking crack. The other hallmark of a mixed community is that it is fair and treats all equally.
Wow, first off that sounds EXACTLY like my neighborhood.
Second, I read The Plain Dealer for eight hours every night before I go to bed. I read it like it's my job or something.
Spooky ...
And I agree with Tim -- I love living somewhere that has all types. It's just the drugs and murder and armed robbery and domestic abuse and child neglect that kind of drag the place down.
Hmm. The more I thought about it, the more I felt like it wasn't so much that I was stuck in the middle, but more that I was the middle. As in middle-class. (Despite the education, I don't think we can call ourselves yuppies - we make less than $40K between us, we've got an old car, and we eat a lot of subsistence food like cabbage and noodles.)
The feeling in the dream was that it was lonely in the middle, and that there were too much wealth and too much poverty on either side. I didn't feel like I was balancing the seesaw or anything, but more like the middle was about to collapse.
Interesting--your instincts are good, your dreams are telling a story of positioning.
It IS lonely until you realize that you are not alone. At some point you realize that your connection to the rest of us is what is truly valuable. You are also realizing that the other two ends of the spectrum are bleeding you (one's stealing from you, the other's feeding off you and stealing from you), and that the balance needs to be restored.
We need to consolidate our position before we lose more. We need to take our money and our neighborhoods back.
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