This was the open­ing week­end for the epony­mous Bằc, the new Asian food place in Tremont. I’d spent most of the day yes­ter­day tramp­ing around Cleve­land in the snow, so it was a wel­come change of pace to spend some time in a warm room with great atmos­phere and cute wait staff. The change in the space from what used to be La Tor­tilla Feliz is remark­able. Gone is the yellow-orange paint, and the stuc­coed walls are now a sooth­ing green. All of the decor was picked by some­body (I’m assum­ing Bằc him­self) who under­stands that classy looks, com­fort, and util­ity do all go together.

When I met Bằc at the Vel­vet Tango Room a few months ago, he said that his goal was to cre­ate a place where you can get an appe­tizer, a drink and a din­ner for around $20. He did a good job. The menu is struc­tured in such a way that you’ve got an array of options that meets this goal, and an equal array for a diner who wants to shell out a bit more. There’s even a cus­tom cock­tail menu (most run around $7), and $2 PBR’s that are $1.50 dur­ing happy hour.

I wanted to get every­thing on the menu, but whit­tled it down to the Banh Mi sand­wich ($8) or the pad thai ($11). The Banh Mi sand­wich sounds deli­cious, so I’ll get that next time I go there. I got the pad thai, “family-hot”, and since Bằc’s fam­ily is in the kitchen mak­ing the food, this was hot. Also, since Bằc’s fam­ily is in the kitchen, the hot­ness was such that it enhanced rather than over­pow­ered the fla­vor of the pad thai. The spring roll appe­tizer ($5) was also amaz­ing. Fried just enough, but not greasy, the inter­nal bits were chopped finely enough that you didn’t pull them all out when you took a bite, and the roll had enough ten­sile strength that it didn’t dis­in­te­grate once one end was bit­ten off.

Look, I can’t empha­size enough that Bằc’s fam­ily is in the kitchen mak­ing the food. So we’re talk­ing generations-old fam­ily recipes here.

Since today is Chi­nese New Year, we were even served com­pli­men­tary coconut jien duy (a sesame seed dumpling) after dinner.

Bằc hits all of the restau­rant sweet spots. Go there.

Just about every Sat­ur­day morn­ing, early, I take Abra­ham to Dave’s to do the weekly gro­cery shop­ping. Just about every Sat­ur­day morn­ing, Dave him­self is there, and never fails to greet the kid and I with a nice word and a smile. It isn’t really Dave Saltz­man in the flesh [that would be gross]. The man­ager just hap­pens to be named Dave. I’m pretty sure he rec­og­nizes me, since not very many peo­ple are at the gro­cery store on a reg­u­lar basis before 9am on the week­end. I like the guy.

Though he’s not the Dave, I think he prob­a­bly feels as if the store is his, even more so than other man­agers because it car­ries his name. There’s no logic behind that kind of feel­ing, but I can tell that this Dave is proud to run his store well, and happy to be feed­ing fam­i­lies in this neck of the woods.

Cleve­land is a small-town city.

Today I would have had three great pho­tos if I’d had my cam­era with me. The empty-socketed win­dows of the Schofield Build­ing on East 9th and Euclid, (it looks noth­ing like this any­more), a sod­den couch and smashed bigscreen TV sit­ting in the mid­dle of a vacant lot next to a shut­tered porn shop on West 25th — like some­thing out of The Wire — and a fes­tively dec­o­rated run-down with the words “Merry Chrit­mas” [sic] sprayed on the win­dow. See­ing all this in my first Cleve­land snow­fall of the sea­son was appro­pri­ate. There are signs of poverty every­where you look. You can ignore it, mock it, or give it a hand, and whichever you choose, it prob­a­bly says a lot about how you treat Cleveland.

Most of us should choose the third choice more often, I know I should.

Pretty much right after I shut down Tremon­ter, I was con­tacted by a local guy who was inter­ested in start­ing a new weblog for the Cleve­land area. He brought me on board for sev­eral rea­sons: my famil­iar­ity with Word­press, my pas­sion for Cleve­land, my knowl­edge of the local blog­ging com­mu­nity and my writ­ing abil­ity. I’ve sort of been his point man for set­ting up this new site, scroung­ing up writ­ers and gen­er­ally mak­ing sure his vision is well trans­lated to cyberspace.

From the mini-about us section:

BLACKHEART Cleve­land brings the best and worst of Cleve­land to light in order to show you what Cleve­land was, is, and can be.

The BLACKHEART Man­i­festo is our first real post. Head on over, and take a look. I hope you enjoy it.

My adven­tures with the 23 con­tinue. Last week I essen­tially raced it home every day. Three con­sec­u­tive days I passed it at the cor­ner of Carnegie and Ontario and caught up with it on the other side of the bridge. I’ve got no pseudo-math to throw at this exper­i­ment, but my gut tells me that, at least on the return trip, it is a wash deter­min­ing which is faster: my bike or the bus.

The bus always gets to the cor­ner of Clark and Scran­ton about a minute before me, but I’d have to walk home from there so the bike makes up for that. Sim­i­larly, I’d have to walk to the bus stop on Ontario by Pub­lic Square to catch the 23, which means that I’d have to wait for the one after the one I’ve been rac­ing since I can’t walk twelve blocks as quickly as I can ride them.

I know for sure that my morn­ing com­mute is faster than the 23, since I don’t have to make all of those early morn­ing stops to pick folks up. I know that no one cares, even I don’t, really.

While I was watch­ing the Celtics/Bulls game, some­one set fire to the aban­doned build­ing just cater­corner from me on Holm­den Court (the alley behind my house). Either the fire started back up around 3am or the arson­ist came back to fin­ish the job because the street was clogged with fire trucks. This is the sec­ond arson less than a block from me in two months, and the fifth (that I know of) within half a square mile from me in the last 2 years.

These last two were both “aban­doned” houses with squat­ters in them. Rumor has it that the bank who owned the house behind me (which was slated for demo­li­tion) had the house set aflame so they could recoup as much from the prop­erty as pos­si­ble. Rumor also holds that some kids set the fire, or, less likely, some­one set fire to keep warm.

The house had been aban­doned since I moved into the neigh­bor­hood and over the course of two years it was peeled like an onion and pit­ted like an avo­cado. By the time whomever set fire to the place set fire to the place, all that was left inside the struc­ture was some crazy-looking linoleum.

Now, there are quite a few seri­ous prob­lems that are touched on directly or tan­gen­tially in this post:

• Habit­ual Arson
• Fore­closed Homes
• Squat­ters
• Folks steal­ing sid­ing, wiring and any­thing of value from aban­doned properties
• Crazy Linoleum

and one very good thing. Thank you Cleve­land Fire Depart­ment, you guys are great.

While the arsons are trou­bling, there is much that is great on my street and in my neigh­bor­hood. I have new neigh­bors who are ren­o­vat­ing the home next door to me, and the chil­dren who appear to own the house cater­corner from me on Holm­den Avenue are fix­ing the place up quite nicely.

The new Buhrer Ele­men­tary school one block away is near­ing com­ple­tion, and I just found out, will be remain­ing a Dual Lan­guage School. Now if only Deb­bie could get a job as an art teacher there, all would be set. How­ever, find­ing an open posi­tion in the CMSD isn’t the easiest.

A month or so ago I was talk­ing with Pultz about all of the things two bearded, over-educated, Cleve­land trans­plants are likely to talk about when forced by neces­sity to drink in a bar they nor­mally wouldn’t fre­quent. I admit to my snob­bery. One of the top­ics that came up was the impend­ing Saint Patrick’s Day Ama­teur Drink­ing Hour Vari­ety Show that Down­town Cleve­land turns in to every year. Pultz, as a self-described pro­fes­sional drinker, does not imbibe pub­licly on this day.

I have another friend, a fel­low Notre Dame alum­nus named Liam, who is a con­nois­seur of the great Saint Patrick’s Day cel­e­bra­tions in the US: Chicago, Savan­nah, Cleve­land, New York City and Boston. The man knows his Irish-American celebrations.

I have a Notre Dame cap with a sham­rock on it. I wear it year-round, but only feel like an idiot when I wear it on Saint Patrick’s Day.

I wish every day in Down­town Cleve­land was as crowded with peo­ple as Saint Patrick’s Day. Euclid Avenue in par­tic­u­lar feels less like a road through ‘90s Sara­jevo and more like an actual city.

This is the part where I sound like a grouchy old man.

The major­ity of young peo­ple who roll down­town on this day, unfor­tu­nately, are ani­mals. The sense of enti­tle­ment and lack of respect for any­one else in the vicin­ity was astound­ing. Catholic schools in Cleve­land are closed for the day, and the hordes appear. I saw sev­eral home­less peo­ple loudly insulted by groups of drunken young’uns who then pro­ceeded to run into the traffic-packed street, bang on car hoods, and yell pro­fan­ity in front of fam­i­lies; gen­er­ally not know­ing their ass from a hole in the ground.

Look, the peo­ple I’m talk­ing about are puk­ing green beer on street cor­ners, and hav­ing their friends haul them to West 6th so they can fin­ish the boot & rally. The afore­men­tioned home­less folks have more deco­rum, and [if you par­don the delib­er­ate insen­si­tiv­ity for the sake of some lev­ity] can hold their liquor better.

On my twelve block walk to my bus stop, I saw rel­a­tives to this sort of behav­ior pretty much the whole time. I was actu­ally thanked by an old lady for not run­ning into her and let­ting her have the right-of-way. This is because the crowds of young’uns refuse to devi­ate from their course, which, due to drunk­en­ness, takes up the whole of the extended side­walks on Euclid. They’ll walk right through you.

The bus was filled with passed out kids from Padua head­ing back toward Parma, and the bus dri­ver almost had to pull over when one of them lit a cig­a­rette and wouldn’t put it out when the reg­u­lar pas­sen­gers hollered at him. There was an addi­tional RTA employee on the bus, whether for secu­rity sake or just headed home, who was mocked by the drunken white kids for not hav­ing the best English.

I’m pretty sure the solu­tion to this is to get these mall­fratrats to come down­town more often, so they can get a chance to learn how to act in public.

Maybe next year I won’t wear my hat.

• I went for a run for the first time in a dog’s age today. Put in a lit­tle over 3.5 miles at 11 min­utes a mile. Not so good, but not that bad for a 28 year old with an arthritic knee, a 9 month old, and a year plus of mostly seden­tary liv­ing. My knee hurts, but the weather is beautiful.
• What the hell, man. When I come to the cash reg­is­ter to pur­chase my item, all I want to do is exchange money for prod­uct and get the hell out of your store. I do not:
  1. have the store credit card;
  2. want the store credit card;
  3. and will not give you my phone number/zip code;
  4. want to search around for another item that will enable me to save $5 while spend­ing $10 more; and
  5. care about the cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion sur­vey that I can fill out online or by phone that will enable me to get an addi­tional 10% off my pur­chase of $50 or more within the next five days.
• Went to a show at Now That’s Class. Wish­ing the hip hop scene was big­ger or more eas­ily acces­si­ble, not sure which it needs to be.
• I was excited that the generic brand of instant oat­meal was on super sale.
• I’m plan­ning on build­ing a road bike again this sum­mer, hope­fully I’ll actu­ally get to do it. The first order of busi­ness is find­ing a 62-64cm early-80s steel frame from the Ohio City Bike Coop. Some­how I don’t think a frame that size is going to be easy to come by.

Times are tough. Com­pared to mil­lions of Amer­i­cans, times aren’t that bad for my fam­ily; but in some ways we’re poster chil­dren for the social, infra­struc­tural and eco­nomic chal­lenges that the coun­try cur­rently faces. For instance:

• My home has decreased at least 15% in value since I pur­chased it due to the fore­clo­sure crisis.
• Refi­nanc­ing my mort­gage to take advan­tage of the lower-interest rates is not cost-effective, as I would have to pay the dif­fer­ence in appraised value and pay for mort­gage insur­ance, even though I’m in no dan­ger of default­ing on my loan.
• We had to spend a hefty chunk of sav­ings (around $3,000) on a new fur­nace this winter.
• Debbie’s char­ter school shut down last year because they didn’t pay their rent, and none of the for­mer employ­ees were eli­gi­ble to receive unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits because the school admin­is­tra­tion told the unem­ploy­ment folks that the entire staff quit.
• As soon as Abra­ham left Debbie’s body, he was no longer cov­ered by her insur­ance. Since it took a few days to get him on my insur­ance, his doc­tor visit in the hos­pi­tal wasn’t cov­ered and we had to pay it out of pocket. $200.
• My old insur­ance, Kaiser Per­ma­nente, refused cov­er­age for Abraham’s first two vis­its to the pedi­a­tri­cian. $1300.
• Debbie’s cur­rent job as a part-time art teacher is at a parochial school that pays its teach­ers $75 a day. We spend more send­ing Abra­ham to day­care than Deb­bie makes at work. Her school may close after next year because the Dio­cese of Cleve­land can’t afford to keep so many schools open.
• There is lit­tle hope that Deb­bie can find a full-time posi­tion as an art teacher. Even though Buhrer Ele­men­tary was just rebuilt a block north of where we live, her con­stant search­ing is dis­heart­en­ing sim­ply because there is noth­ing to find.
• Due to a pre-existing con­di­tion, Deb­bie was unable to get ade­quate med­ical insur­ance after los­ing her job. The six-month pol­icy she pur­chased has refused to cover all of the care she received dur­ing the time of the pol­icy. From what I’ve read lately, these poli­cies are a joke, and the com­pa­nies that sell them are rack­e­teers. She’s out another $700.
• I lost my shirt with my pen­sion plan and my deferred com­pen­sa­tion plan.

To sum up, banks don’t want to loan, employ­ers screw their employ­ees, the school sys­tem is in an abysmal state, and health insur­ance is a giant malig­nant leech. This is why we voted for Obama. After the matroshka Gauss­ian Copula-derived, over-leveraged, shell-game orgy that Wall Street engaged in after being dereg­u­lated and handed a few buck­ets of lit­tle blue pills by the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion, well it was time for some change we could believe in.

But you know what, things could be much worse. We’re lucky in the fol­low­ing ways:

• I own a solidly con­structed home, built in 1900, that has an upper apart­ment that we rent for some sup­ple­men­tal cash.
• I have a great job that I love, and good job security.
• I have much bet­ter health insur­ance, and live just blocks from Metro Hos­pi­tal, which has given me noth­ing but excel­lent care from cour­te­ous staff since I’ve lived in Cleveland.
• We have plenty to eat, and are warm at night.
• We have fam­ily and friends that look out for us.
• We live on a street of good peo­ple, who are friendly and keep an eye on each other’s prop­er­ties. There are no blighted homes.
• The non-bank-bailout stim­u­lus pack­age might actu­ally mean that Deb­bie can get a job as a teacher. She’s got a Master’s Degree in Art Edu­ca­tion after all.
• The cost of liv­ing in Cleve­land is great. The art and music scenes are vibrant, all you have to do is look around your neigh­bor­hood. I’ve been all over Cleve­land and I’ve yet to be in a neigh­bor­hood that didn’t have reg­u­lar folks doing extra­or­di­nar­ily enter­tain­ing stuff.
• We are all healthy.
• Abra­ham is awesome.

I’m sens­ing new kinds of life in Cleve­land; or at least com­ing out of my year-long infant-induced social hiber­na­tion. In the past cou­ple of weeks I’ve got­ten my mitts, mugs and mallei prepo­si­tioned by all kinds of var­i­ous NEO.neo-creativity.

Of course, I’m sure behind the times with a bit of most of it. My schtick seems to be ‘per­ma­nently late to the party’.

Pink Eye Mag­a­zine — Cleveland-regional arts & cul­ture news. Cur­rently seek­ing more writ­ers.

Messy Mag­a­zine — web-only, submission-focused lit­er­ary guer­rilla art mag.

DEFEND Cleve­land — In-progress [by me et al] site design for a cer­tain bearded prophet of Cleve­land sports named Mike James.

Fare Trade Records — emerg­ing Hip Hop label brought to you by the Muamin Col­lec­tive.

I’ve been try­ing to get my fin­gers into these sort of things for awhile now, but I seem to be all thumbs. Hope­fully not so much any more. I’m race­horse ready for warm weather action. Are you going to get your hands dirty?

I smelled smoke just a bit ago yes­ter­day and saw quite a bit blow­ing past my win­dow. Turns out a fire had just started in an almost empty house a block south of me. The down­stairs res­i­dents had vacated a week ear­lier, and the upstairs fel­low got out before the fire started. The address is 3279 West 17th Street, just north of Metro Hos­pi­tal. I called it in to 911 and it had already been reported. Fire trucks from Sta­tions 20, 24 and 4 were on the scene right away. The nearby Fire Sta­tion 21, which has been closed, wasn’t on the scene. I grabbed my cam­era, took some video, and after I saw that some stringers from WKYC showed up, decided to see if I could get the video online before them. This ain’t gonna hap­pen since com­press­ing and export­ing from Final Cut took frig­gin’ for­ever and upload­ing an 800MB file to YouTube ain’t no speed-along nei­ther [been upload­ing for 5 hours, now going to bed]. Nar­rated using my best smarmy weblog­ger voice.

Update: the fire was arson:

The best RTA route in Cleve­land is the 23. This is my third year rid­ing it, and I could set my watch by the morn­ing bus; if I wore a watch. The dri­vers are friendly, deft and will put on the brakes if they see some­one hoof­ing it after them, and the bus doesn’t stop every two feet like the 81 [that isn’t a knock on the 81].

For the most part no one talks on the bus. This is the unspo­ken rule on every pub­lic tran­sit sys­tem I’ve been on [NYC, Chicago], when per­sonal space is con­stricted, eye con­tact and speech become inva­sions. Lots of peo­ple rid­ing the bus I’ve been see­ing for three years but hardly know them. I’m going to run an exper­i­ment. Instead of being civil and unob­stru­sive, I’m going to start being reservedly friendly to the famil­iar faces. If this goes well, I will increase my friend­li­ness incre­men­tally until the bus is full of joy­ous singing, improper danc­ing and sundry gal­li­vant­ing. Yeah right. It might end up mak­ing Cleve­land a lit­tle less crabby though. Worth a shot.

The most com­mon semi-smarmy ques­tion I get about rid­ing my bike to work is: “How many MPG do you get with that thing?” So I decided to do more bike math. There are 2080 calo­ries in one gal­lon of 2% milk. Using the calo­ries burned count from last year [220 calo­ries per day [6.6 miles per day]] I get 62.7 miles per gal­lon of milk while rid­ing my bike.

2080/220 = 9.454545

9.5 days * 6.6 miles per day = 62.7 mpg.

If the aver­age cost of milk is $3.50 a gal­lon, it costs me a lit­tle more than 5 ¢ per mile.

3.5/62.7 = 0.0558 $ per mile.

So the next time some­one asks, I’ll tell them that I get 62.7 mpg of milk which is about 5¢ per mile; and secure my nerd­dom for all time.

This year it seems like it is tak­ing for­ever to warm up. I was rid­ing to work ear­lier this week, head­ing north­bound on West 25th when I noticed that the flags on my side of the street were blow­ing at me. Which is nor­mal since I usu­ally ride into the wind on my way to work. On the other side of the street, I noticed that the flags were blow­ing with me, which also makes sense, because on my way back from work I usu­ally ride into the wind. Nor­mally this is just slightly annoy­ing, but even though I’ve lived in Cleve­land for 5 years now, I’m still not used to the late cold and hav­ing frozen hands and ears in late May. Thank­fully it is sup­posed to get into the 60s this week­end. By late next week it will prob­a­bly be 90 until Novem­ber when it will drop to 40 again. Heh.

There are some good inter­ac­tive util­i­ties out there for deter­min­ing hous­ing afford­abil­ity based upon var­i­ous met­rics. The Cen­ter for Neigh­bor­hood Tech­nol­ogy has a Hous­ing + Trans­porta­tion Afford­abil­ity Index and the New York Times has a cal­cu­la­tor that deter­mines whether it is bet­ter to rent or buy based upon selec­table cri­te­ria. There’s also WalkScore, which deter­mines the walk­a­bil­ity of your res­i­dence to basic needs. My place gets a 68/100.

Before the hous­ing dis­as­ter­ba­cle here in Cleve­land, afford­abil­ity based upon the NYT cal­cu­la­tor would have been giv­ing me returns on home-ownership after 3 years. Who knows how that’s changed. The Hous­ing and Trans­porta­tion visual for Cleve­land basi­cally fit what I expected. The poorer areas with lower prop­erty taxes fit the cri­te­ria for afford­abil­ity, while the nicer areas [outer rings, non-Cleveland-incorporated] are over the sug­gested bench­mark. Of course, the map just pro­vides basic data, there isn’t much inter­pre­ta­tion going on in terms of sta­tis­ti­cal com­par­isons of other data asso­ci­ated with our area. The advanced menu is a bit more informative.

Not only did my crazy yelling neigh­bor get evicted, but the dude that lives upstairs, a relaxed and friendly guy, just got taken away by the cops on sus­pi­cion of gun pos­ses­sion. Based on what his dis­traught girl­friend was yelling from the bal­cony, some­one gave a false report about it and she blamed the folks who live across the street. Deb­bie and I have been hold­ing a the­ory that drug deal­ing has been going on in front of our house for awhile, lots of quick traf­fic stops and vis­its. The dis­traught girl­friend sup­ported this in her yelling about how “peo­ple just don’t want peo­ple deal­ing drugs in front of they house.” I’m not sure if she was actu­ally say­ing that her or her baby daddy were sell­ing drugs, or just that folks were sell­ing drugs in front of their house, much like folks are sell­ing drugs in front of my house. Since we live next door to each other, I’m inclined to agree with the sec­ond the­ory, espe­cially since it would be the height of fool­ish­ness for her to admit to sell­ing drugs when there are three cars full of cops in front of the house.

One of the cops was being unnec­es­sar­ily rude to her, telling her she had a potty mouth in a mock­ing tone and say­ing he was going to throw a snow­ball at her if she didn’t calm down. I’m not con­don­ing Dis­traught Girlfriend’s behav­ior, but I’d expect a bit more matu­rity from Cleveland’s Finest.

I wasn’t out rub­ber­neck­ing ini­tially, I went out to shovel the side­walk and Debbie’s car, I was about 30% done before I even noticed the cops. So much for my obser­va­tional skills. Every­where I’ve lived in the GCA, I’ve had drug deal­ing occur­ring out­side my res­i­dence. I’m rather inured to it now.

While most of the rest of the county focuses on the vote counts tonight, I’m up late with a few fel­low crew-members mak­ing sure that the web­site runs smoothly and doesn’t crash. Look­ing at the same page but see­ing dif­fer­ent sto­ries. Really, I’m the least crit­i­cal night-owl, I just have to make con­tent updates if requested. The devel­oper and net­work engi­neer are the real impor­tant ones. The site was really get­ting pounded at 7:30 when I posted the View Results block on the BOE home page, even on our load-balanced blades, but one of the engi­neers turned on the sec­ond core on each server and page load-time decreased by 2000%.

The web group did exten­sive test­ing, grab­bing only the tables and rows from the data­base that we needed, opti­mized the index­ing of the data and cached it in such a way that the servers wouldn’t get too steamed. Time Warner finally got around to giv­ing us our fat band­width too; with­out all of that every­thing prob­a­bly would have been crushed by about 7:45, since we’re toss­ing out much more than we used to.

Vot­ing this morn­ing went fine; I’ve voted punch bal­lots, opti­cal scan, and elec­tronic vot­ing now, and have never had a prob­lem. It did seem that the opti­cal scan pro­ce­dures were a bit need­lessly com­pli­cated; weird card­board sleeves, con­tra­dic­tory tabs and bal­lot boxes, var­i­ous checks and double-checks and “take this lit­tle card to that per­son who will give you another card to take to that per­son” Brazi­lesque red-tape, but I sup­pose that’s the inevitable bureau­cratic response to the kind of crap­tac­u­lar high-profile elec­tion dis­as­ter­ba­cles that have been hap­pen­ing around the coun­try for the last decade.

It’ll never hap­pen, but I think fed­eral elec­tion days should be national hol­i­days to encour­age more folks with 9-5s to par­tic­i­pate as poll work­ers. It’d sure take a load off of the ancient among us, even if the only addi­tional peo­ple avail­able would be those in bank­ing, gov­ern­ment and education.

Awe­some, I just got the go-ahead to catch some shut-eye. Since I’m at home and con­nected to work via VPN that’s good news. Now I just have to hope for no 3am phone calls.

• $110 will get you approx­i­mately 250 items of sec­ond­hand baby clothes. No one needs to buy us any­thing resem­bling a baby cloth for at least the next 9 months.
• The Bobby web­site acces­si­bil­ity val­ida­tor is no longer avail­able online. It is now bun­dled into a piece of IBM soft­ware for pur­chase only. This makes it harder, not eas­ier, for web design­ers to build acces­si­ble websites.
• It is faster to ride RTA down­town than drive, since the E 9th and Euclid inter­sec­tion snarls every­thing up. It is actu­ally faster to exit on E 22nd Street and backtrack.
• No one is used to the bus lanes yet, they’re being used as right turn lanes, which fur­ther snarls traffic.
• After 3 years of pay­ing my con­sol­i­dated col­lege loans on time, I just received at 1% reduc­tion in the inter­est rate. Now it is at 2.375%, which is awe­some. I can pay it off faster now.

I pissed off a cop today. He was sit­ting at the inter­sec­tion of West 20th and Lorain at the light and chat­ting with a car in the other lane on West 20th. I was two cars back. The light turned green and they just kept talk­ing, so I honked my horn. The car in the other lane got the hint and moved on, but the cop glared in his rearview mir­ror at me and waited until the light turned yel­low before turn­ing out onto Lorain. The car between us also made it through the light, but I got stuck at the red. The cop pulled over on Lorain to wait for me until he real­ized that I was stuck at the red, and then drove off. I won­der what he would have tick­eted me for, or whether he was just going to waste my time and bitch at me for honk­ing at him.

Hey man, I was hun­gry and he was between me and the grocery.

These signs have been around Down­town for a month or so now. I still don’t quite know how I feel about them. I don’t know how bad the homeless/panhandling sit­u­a­tion is here in Cleve­land, and whether or not it war­rants a cam­paign with this level of blunt­ness or scope. It is sup­ported by The Home­less Grapevine, and var­i­ous other homeless-targeted social ser­vice agen­cies, but it cer­tainly doesn’t give off a very char­i­ta­ble vibe. The Down­town Cleve­land Alliance [DCA] web­site offers some elu­ci­da­tion:

One of the ulti­mate goals of the cam­paign is to show a dis­tinc­tion between pan­han­dlers and the home­less. Many of the pan­han­dlers down­town are in fact not home­less and dam­age the image of the home­less that are in need. Our goal is to make sure people’s gen­eros­ity is not mis­guided, but rather goes towards orga­ni­za­tions mak­ing a real dif­fer­ence. Instead of giv­ing money to a stranger on the street, peo­ple can now donate money to help rep­utable orga­ni­za­tions that have been pro­vid­ing food, shel­ter, coun­sel­ing and job train­ing to the home­less for years.

Nev­er­the­less, it hurts to see those imper­sonal signs next to the panhandlers/homeless, on the streets. At the same time, it is an inter­est­ing chess game between this ini­tia­tive and those it tar­gets, and the ter­ri­tory being fought over is the moral mind of any­one walk­ing the streets down­town. I’ve wres­tled with this issue before, but now that there is another player it is eas­ier to exam­ine my own reac­tions to home­less­ness and charity.

The DCA is try­ing to cur­tail pan­han­dling and simul­ta­ne­ously force the home­less to accept the social ser­vices avail­able to them by remov­ing the DCA’s main com­pe­ti­tion, folks who donate on the street. I’m not mak­ing a moral judg­ment here, just show­ing what I see as the mech­a­nism behind this effort. The ads play on the guilt of passers-by, and absolve them for not giv­ing while simul­ta­ne­ously offer­ing them an alter­na­tive to assuage the guilt on their own by donat­ing to the DCA.

The homeless/panhandler response has been instinc­tive and quite clever, I think. By just about every sign there are one or two homeless/panhandlers with their cups out. Their inten­tional jux­ta­po­si­tion com­pletely sub­verts the intent of the sign and strength­ens the guilt one feels by not giv­ing. The sign, next to an actual human in need, seems inhu­man. Too bad the whole sit­u­a­tion is emo­tion­ally abus­ing to the bat­tle­field. A bit hyper­bolic in this sit­u­a­tion, but:

When two ele­phants are fight­ing, the grass is what suffers.

This past Fri­day was an event that I’d been look­ing for­ward to for sev­eral months. Tower Con­trol Records’ CD Release Party for The X Bolex and Jerk. 12 bands, $5 cover and free food pre-show. It was super-well orga­nized, no chance to miss a band’s per­for­mance and just enough time in between them to snag a smoke if you swung that way. I def­i­nitely did my duty drop­ping bills on the local music scene releases. I had the intent of get­ting video of every band but many of the sets were too dim for effec­tive tap­ing. What I did man­age to cap­ture follows:

I’m a dum­b­ass and thought Shawn Flow­ers was Theodore Vril when I first started hang­ing out with these folks a cou­ple of years ago. Yeah. Dum­b­ass. This was a good open­ing set, but nec­es­sar­ily short due to the fact that 11 other bands were playing.

Low Lamps aka Brian Straw was a dif­fer­ent per­for­mance than I’m used to see­ing from him; but one well-appointed to this noise-oriented show. He does some crazy and inter­est­ing things with his gui­tar in this clip.

Par­don the worth­less­ness of view­ing this video, but the joy that is Giants of Gen­der shouldn’t be tossed aside due to lack­light. I don’t know much about this trio, but I’m guess­ing they’re con­ser­va­tory stu­dents. Improv sax/clarinet, vio­lin and vibraphone.

This is the first song off of The X Bolex’s new record, so it is called Mastodon. Their funky jazz-jam riffage and time-change col­lapses have made them a favorite around here for awhile and I was happy to pick up their disk, so I can have ‘em with me everywhere.

It was great see­ing Nep­tune again after last year’s recock­u­lous show at The Church. I bought their newest release, on 220g orange vinyl. They made the trip out from Boston for just this one show and hit the road back to play a Sat­ur­day show. Thats some seri­ous respect for them to make the trip for TCR. I’m even more con­vinced that Nep­tune is what heavy metal should have become.

Alto­gether a great night. I was sup­posed to go to Fear of a Black Planet at Touch the next night to see TMIBH, Muamin and The New Surah Orch­es­tar, but I fum­bled on that play.

• I was talk­ing with an employee at the Steel­yard Best Buy over the week­end and was told that they’re doing much worse than cor­po­rate had set for them, about $10k-less-than-estimate-per-week it sounded like. I was also told that other busi­nesses down there are hurt­ing too, they’re all wait­ing for Wal-Mart to open in the hopes that busi­ness will spike then. It is pretty bad when my pur­chase likely accounted for 1/7th of their Sun­day business.
• I’ve called the Cleve­land Green Build­ing Coali­tion three times about get­ting infor­ma­tion on green­ing my home and haven’t heard back once.
• My Collinwood Drum­line video keeps get­ting com­ments from Collinwood youth. I think it means a lot to them to see one of their sources of pride out there on the Inter­net, posted by a stranger.
• I finally met some­one from the Greater Cleve­land area who is just as geeked up about liv­ing in Cleve­land as I am. That says some­thing, but I’m not sure what.
• Whiskey Island is a great place, and I’m actu­ally glad it is a bit hard to access. I want to spend a day there hang­ing out and toss­ing a ‘bee around. Espe­cially with a dog. Or a girl, I suppose.
• I must find taro in the area before Wednesday.

On my walk to work today I saw that another busi­ness on Euclid Avenue is clos­ing. Before long the only things that are going to be open along Euclid are the House of Blues and the bowl­ing alley.

Down­town is inter­est­ing. For the most part Euclid Avenue is rem­i­nis­cent of an empty tomb, just about every building-front is empty and dirty, with trash col­lect­ing where the wind blows it. There is also a con­stant of home­less peo­ple, they’ve each got their own ter­ri­to­r­ial cor­ner and they tend to place them­selves right where it is least pos­si­ble to avoid them, say for exam­ple, right where a side­walk becomes con­stricted so that only one per­son can walk down it at a time. I’m start­ing to get city-blind to them, there are only so many times you can buy them donuts and have them ask you for money instead, so many times you can give them some change, so many times of hear­ing their daily hus­tle before you get inured to it. At last count I walk by the same six pan­han­dlers every day on my way to work, and in a down­town as empty as Cleveland’s is, they don’t blend in with crowds very easily.

I don’t like that this is hap­pen­ing to me, but it is obvi­ous that what I try to do to help isn’t mak­ing any dif­fer­ence in their lives, and that they aren’t really grate­ful for it when I do try. Home­less folks in Canada are a dif­fer­ent breed alto­gether. They thank you even if you don’t give ‘em change. It is sad but true, as Niet­zsche said:

Beg­gars should be entirely abol­ished! Truly, it is annoy­ing to give to them and annoy­ing not to give to them.

There are two places I really like to get my lunch, both have terse ser­vice, unas­sum­ing atmos­pheres, and good food in good por­tions for not much money. The first is Juji’s in the Statler Arms. I can get a three-egg omelet, a bunch of home fries, and toast for $5.50 and the best part is that I can order it as I leave the gym and pick it up when I walk by. A burger and fries is also some­thing like $5.25 and they’re made fresh. The place is owned by a Lebanese guy, but the man­ager is a tough tat­tooed Ital­ian from NYC and I crack up on a reg­u­lar basis deal­ing with him and his crew because they’re so mouthy to each other. Since I go there fairly reg­u­larly, they’re start­ing to mouth off to me now too, which is great.

The other place is the New Yorker Deli. One of my cowork­ers calls it Con­vict Café because of the crowd that you’ll find there. This is another place run by a guy from NYC and it is just down the street from Juji’s. Their motto is “Where Qual­ity Tastes Deli­cious” but it should be “$6 of meat of a $5 sand­wich”. Their corned beef and pas­trami sand­wiches are excel­lent, and I’m pretty sure they make their own pickles.

Hav­ing a monthly RTA pass might be pay­ing off finally, I get $1 off any ticket to any show at the Cleve­land Film Fes­ti­val if I show my pass at the box office.

Here is the link to the bal­lot [PDF] I’ll be vot­ing on in the upcom­ing elec­tion. Here is how I’ll be vot­ing on the issues and why:

Issue 1: Ref­er­en­dum on Work­ers’ Compensation:

Although I might be miss­ing some nuances to this leg­is­la­tion, espe­cially in light of Bill Peirce’s stance against BWC, it appears to me that Issue 1 is pro­vid­ing some sen­si­ble amend­ments to cur­rent Work­ers’ Com­pen­sa­tion law. As of now, I’ll be vot­ing for Issue 1.

Issue 2: Min­i­mum Wage Rate Increase:

I am vot­ing for Issue 2. Hav­ing felt the pinch of min­i­mum wage labor myself, I know how dif­fi­cult it can be sur­vive on a min­i­mum wage job.

Issue 3: Allow in-state gambling/casinos:

I am vot­ing against Issue 3. The rea­son­ing behind this is sim­ple. Every­thing I’ve seen about their cam­paign strat­egy is a three-card monte game, often gam­bling isn’t even men­tioned in the ads, only an appeal to emo­tion, “Please think of the chil­dren!” Also, fol­low­ing much of the dis­cus­sion at Brewed­Fresh­Daily on the issue, I am con­vinced that gam­bling as an eco­nomic ini­tia­tive is fun­da­men­tally flawed.

Issue 4: Smok­ing Issue #1:

This pro­posal would amend the Ohio Con­sti­tu­tion to allow indoor smok­ing in a vari­ety of pub­lic places and would coun­ter­act or cre­ate a loop­hole in any other law that would ban indoor smok­ing in pub­lic places. This bill is spon­sored by tobacco com­pa­nies. Vot­ing Yes in Issue 4 would mean you would want to vote No on Issue 5, which is in direct oppo­si­tion to this Issue. I’m vot­ing against Issue 4, because although every­one talks about how it will be bad for busi­ness, I think peo­ple like beer more than cig­a­rettes, and peo­ple who cur­rently don’t go out to bars and other places because of the smoke [like me] will be more likely to do so if smok­ing in enclosed pub­lic places is restricted. Also, I don’t think an amend­ment about smok­ing belongs any­where near the constitution.

Issue 5: Smok­ing Issue #2:

So I guess that means I’m vot­ing for Issue 5, which is just a law and not a con­sti­tu­tional amend­ment. I grew up in a two-smoker house­hold and my asthma and the chunks of yel­low phlegm I used to cough up when I first started run­ning are tes­ta­ment to the ill effects of second-hand smoke. I liken smok­ing in enclosed pub­lic places to any other sort of dis­tur­bance. Take it out­side. Vot­ing Yes on 5 means you want to vote No on 4, oth­er­wise your votes will can­cel each other out.

Issue 18: Cig­a­rette Tax to fund the Arts in Cleveland:

Issue 18 would impose a 30¢ per pack cig­a­rette tax on cig­a­rettes pur­chased in the Cuya­hoga County. The money from this tax would go to fund arts and cul­tural orga­ni­za­tions through­out the county. At a Neigh­bor­hood Con­nec­tions meet­ing I heard from a woman in favor of the Issue on the cur­rent state of Arts and Cul­tural fund­ing in the county. Appar­ently all of the money to fund these insti­tu­tions is pri­vate, from the Cleve­land Foun­da­tion, or the Gund Foun­da­tion mainly. Other cities typ­i­cally fund their arts and cul­ture through the hotel tax, but in Cleve­land that rev­enue goes to the Con­ven­tions and Visitor’s Bureau and to pay bond oblig­a­tions on pub­lic build­ings. Also, their cam­paign slo­gan is “It’s NOT a prop­erty tax.” which is the stu­pid­est way to con­vince some­one to vote for some­thing as I’ve ever seen. I am vot­ing against Issue 18, because while fund­ing Arts and Cul­tural insti­tu­tions and events is impor­tant, the prob­lem in Cleve­land is insti­tu­tional, some­thing a tax will only appear to fix.

Issue 19: Levy Adjust­ment to fund Health and Human Ser­vices in Cleveland:

Issue 19 will reap­por­tion 1-thousandth of a cent from an exist­ing levy for four years to fund health and human ser­vices orga­ni­za­tions. As this is a tax-payer directed reap­por­tion­ment of fund­ing I will vote for Issue 19. The League of Women Vot­ers offers the pros and cons [pdf] of this issue.

Issue 42: Should a local gas sta­tion be allowed to sell beer on Sundays:

There is a gas sta­tion down the street that wants to amend their liquor license to sell beer on Sun­days. That’s fine with me. I will vote for Issue 42.

I swung on up to Ohio City last night for some sushi from Kimo’s before going to the last night of inter­views for this round of Neigh­bor­hood Con­nec­tions Grant-making. Kimo’s was closed again. The third time in a row this has hap­pened to me. I know he does the sushi for the Indi­ans, and that its a big account for him, but it is a has­sle to get there and find out he is closed. I guess I’ll have to start call­ing first. Maybe he could use a web­site to keep folks informed? Instead I went to Heck’s again. I’d last been there over a year ago with Patrick in our quest for the best burger in Cleve­land. I wasn’t impressed with their burger then, and I wasn’t impressed with the pasta dish I got last night. The food was good enough, but I can and have made bet­ter at home.

The six inter­views we had last night switched back and forth between sports/exercise pro­grams and edu­ca­tional pro­grams. Unfor­tu­nately the same prob­lem we’ve had in the past also came through with sev­eral of these groups. Most or all of the money would go to pay them­selves or their busi­ness. I’m sorry, but if you request $5000 and all of that money is going to pay for mem­ber­ships to the busi­ness you own you aren’t going to get the money. Sim­i­larly, if you request $5000 and all of that money is being split between the work­ers at the busi­ness while claim­ing their hours as in-kind con­tri­bu­tions, you’re not going to get the money. I think that is one of the pos­i­tives hav­ing com­mu­nity activists as the grant-making com­mit­tee. We know all of the tricks peo­ple will use to make a buck. I won­der what it says for the Cleve­land econ­omy that small busi­nesses are so des­per­ate for patron­age or cash that they’ll cre­ate one-off pro­grams and hope the fund­ing source doesn’t look too closely at their application.

The night before last I met a rel­a­tively new Tremont res­i­dent for beer and tacos at the Lin­coln Park Pub. We spent nearly two hours chat­ting about the var­i­ous places we’d lived in Indi­ana, job prospects and how to fix Cleve­land. Yes­ter­day I was going to write more about this, but due to a power out­age, I had no inter­net access. They ended up send­ing us home from work at 11, after nearly three hours of sit­ting in the dark. So, I did what any red-blooded Amer­i­can man would do with an extra 4 hours of time in a day; I went shop­ping. I finally found a replace­ment hoodie, even though it is brown, not black, slightly dis­tressed and from a com­pany called Amer­i­can Rag. At least it doesn’t have a logo on it and I am now warm. It does have an inside breast pocket which will be per­fect for my cam­era when I’m out and about.

When I got back to Tremont, Rafiq needed a ride out to E.91st and St. Clair so I took him and a friend out there and spent a solid forty min­utes talk­ing poetry and the artis­tic process with the friend. I’ve for­got­ten his name because I’m a jerk. Friend is going to LA for a few months for some inten­sive writ­ing with a cre­ative part­ner in crime and from the few glimpses I had of the work he has done and has planned, he’s going to cre­ate some fierce stuff.

The weather yes­ter­day was the sort that only appears in the fall. Brisk and mostly cloudy, mostly nim­bus but ragged in shape and errant in move­ment that light from the sun kept leak­ing around them all and mak­ing the whole day into a fleet­ing golden hour.

Last evening was the sec­ond night of inter­views for the sev­enth round of Neigh­bor­hood Con­nec­tions grant-making. We had six inter­views on the sched­ule, but one can­celled due to ill­ness. The other inter­vie­wees pre­sented on beau­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­grams, safety pro­grams, and edu­ca­tional programs.

One thing that I’ve started to notice, from attend­ing the Tremont Strate­gic Invest­ment meet­ing last week, sit­ting through these grant inter­views, and just talk­ing to peo­ple around the city is a dis­tinct fear of youth. Time after time I hear peo­ple com­plain that chil­dren and youth are play­ing in the streets and that peo­ple don’t feel safe going out­doors because of this. Their answer is always “get the kids off the street and into super­vised activ­i­ties and edu­cate them about what­ever we think they ought to know.” The sense I get is that they don’t think chil­dren should play in the streets. This makes no sense to me. Chil­dren every­where have always played in the streets. This is not the problem.

The prob­lem is that adults are afraid of chil­dren they do not know. Espe­cially in an urban set­ting, it appears that, to them, unsu­per­vised chil­dren play­ing in a neigh­bor­hood equals crime. These folks all want to do some­thing about it, or actu­ally, they want to tell other peo­ple what they should do about it. “We need a rec-center;” “The police should keep them from rid­ing their bikes all over;” “Our seniors are afraid to go out­doors.” Bless them for their good inten­tions, but do they ever think to ask the youth what they want? No. They’re too afraid to go out­doors and talk to them. They want struc­tured envi­ron­ments with specif­i­cally tar­geted youth and a cur­ricu­lum that usu­ally doesn’t address the real needs of the youth.

The eight of us who went from Cleve­land to Nashville ear­lier this year all came away with this same real­iza­tion. Youth are min­is­tered to imper­son­ally, insti­tu­tion­al­ized instruc­tion always seems to be the answer offered instead of actual rela­tion­ship build­ing, com­mu­nity build­ing, neigh­bor­hood build­ing organic inter­ac­tion. The more I learn about the com­mu­nity orga­ni­za­tions and grass­roots efforts in Cleve­land, the more I become con­vinced that there needs to be a net­work­ing group that con­nects dif­fer­ent groups work­ing on the same projects, offers advice, tech­ni­cal assis­tance and pro­gram infor­ma­tion that might be unknown to those groups and acts as a whet­stone for their mis­sion and ideas. A sort of net­work­ing clear­ing­house of insti­tu­tion­al­ized knowl­edge that seeks out the groups that need the assistance.

That is sort of what I’m involved in with the 2007 Cleve­land Lead­er­ship Sum­mit [includ­ing focus­ing on youth involve­ment], but that is only a one off thing and not the tar­geted sus­tain­able orga­ni­za­tion I have in mind.

The first night of inter­views for Round VII of the Neigh­bor­hood Con­nec­tions grant pro­gram was last night. I didn’t have to haul ass out to Mt. Pleas­ant this time, since my group was meet­ing at St. Ignatius. We were sup­plied with cof­fee and tea which was great since I was fight­ing some sinus stuff. We had six inter­views to cover in three hours, from stray ani­mal care to beau­ti­fi­ca­tion to school read­ing pro­grams. One fledg­ling block club had a grant writ­ten for beau­ti­fi­ca­tion, but the per­son who wrote the grant from Clark Metro Devel­op­ment, didn’t show up to the inter­view, and the woman who came in his place had never seen the grant and had no idea what it was about.

I felt sorry for her because it was obvi­ous that her block club had started some­thing good that wasn’t being served by the CDC. One of the other mem­bers of my com­mit­tee wanted to call the per­son who wrote the grant and give him the what for. The grant was hand-written and dashed off in about ten min­utes. Typ­i­cally we choose to inter­view this kind of grant because it indi­cates that the peo­ple apply­ing for it are first-time grant-seekers and truly grass­roots. That explains our sur­prise and indig­na­tion when we real­ized that an employee of a com­mu­nity devel­op­ment cor­po­ra­tion had writ­ten it. The rea­sons Clark Metro has lost its fund­ing are becom­ing self-evident.

Another grant was for a good project but the funds being requested, all $5000 are essen­tially going to a middle-man non-profit that has been back­ing the same pro­gram city-wide and apply­ing to NC under the guise of PTAs from dif­fer­ent schools. They’ve received fund­ing from NC at least 4 times, which could be up to $20k in fund­ing that they’ve gar­nered from us using engaged par­ents and teach­ers as a proxy. This non-profit gets all the money and the par­ents and teach­ers do all the work as vol­un­teers. The tough part is that if we don’t fund it, the pro­gram dies at those schools. So who gets hurt? The chil­dren of course. At the next meet­ing of the full com­mit­tee we’re def­i­nitely going to be dis­cussing this type of disingenuousness.

I tried to stop at Dave’s because we got out at a 8:45, but they were locked up tight, despite their store hours until 9. So instead of get­ting bananas and some oranges, I stopped at Tremont Con­ve­nience and got potato chips and oreos. I got home, popped a Sudafed, and my nose slowly stopped run­ning. This is com­mu­nity meet­ing week for me. Tues­day was a Tremont Strate­gic Invest­ment meet­ing [another 3 hour tour], yes­ter­day was grant inter­views and tonight is the Auburn Block Club meet­ing and ice cream social.

The Neigh­bor­hood Con­nec­tions grant-making com­mit­tee met again last night to start the fall round of grant dis­cern­ment. We had deli­cious food from Luchita’s. This round only had about 60% the num­ber of pro­pos­als com­pared to the spring round. This is, appar­ently, typ­i­cal. But it means that you have a bet­ter chance of being funded if you apply for a grant in August.

I’m review­ing pro­pos­als from Clark-Metro, Detroit-Shoreway and Old Brook­lyn this time ’round. The grants were good for the most part, we only culled three from our group, one had a cou­ple hun­dred thou­sand in fund­ing already, so they got the axe even though the project was a good idea.

I had a full and excel­lent week­end, full of superla­tives. I had sushi at Pacific East because Kimo’s was closed for the Indian’s game, watched A Mur­der of Crows by Mac Well­man at The Lim­inis and had a Pisco Sour and Bour­bon Daisy at the VTR. A Mur­der of Crows [I’m prob­a­bly going to go see it again to make sure] may very well be my new favorite play. I didn’t really have an old favorite play, but this one fit right up my alley. I got a sweet ‘biner clip with built-in flash­light at the VTR too.

On Sat­ur­day I grilled some kebabs from the WSM and made the most deli­cious pork chop I’ve ever had. Yes, a few weeks ago I said the same thing, but this chop was bet­ter. Heir­loom toma­toes and roasted corn on the cob com­pleted the meal. I also put­tered around Mar­ket Square and the City Xpres­sionz [God I hate typ­ing like I’m l33t] spray-paintathon.

Sun­day I did my laun­dry and went to see Thee Sil­ver Mt. Zion and BLKTYGR at the Grog Shop. Rafeeq & Co. put on the best show I’d seen from them and Thee Sil­ver Mt. Zion made me think about the meld­ing of pol­i­tics and art. How all too often art is used in the ser­vice of pol­i­tics instead of the other way ’round. Thee Sil­ver does it the other way ’round and the music def­i­nitely ben­e­fits from it.

I should also men­tion that I made my first [and hope­fully last] visit to Crocker Park over the week­end. That place is the flag­ship of Amer­i­can deca­dence and moral bank­ruptcy. An enclosed sub­ur­ban “lifestyle cen­ter” [“mall” is too prole, appar­ently] designed to look urban, com­plete with res­i­den­tial lofts above the big boxes, speak­ers vom­it­ing top-40 muzak from the ‘80s hid­den behind the care­ful land­scap­ing and the whole place made my skin crawl. Seri­ously. Sub­ur­ban faux-urban loft apart­ments above a rich-person-only mall where you can buy a park­ing space so you don’t have to walk as far to the stores. I didn’t see one non-white per­son the entire time I was there. WASP city. The place made my skin fuck­ing crawl. More on Lit­tle Citadels.

I went to the Grove­wood Tav­ern last night to meet Chas Rich and final­ize the site design for his rein­car­nated Pitt sports weblog: Pitt Blather. George Nemeth showed up as well and hooked me up with the CDs I won at Blog­ga­palooza and in trade I finally got rid of gave him my lava lamp. I had BBQ Craw­fish and Pis­ta­chio Creme Brulee [per­haps the most deli­cious thing ever], but like a dum­b­ass, I deleted the pics from my thumb­drive as they were upload­ing to Flickr. I guess this proves that it can even be too early for me in the morning.

The Great Lakes Com­modore Perry IPA I had and the dim­ness of the Grove­wood was cer­tainly needed in yesterday’s heat. I spent the longest, hottest night of my life in bed until I melted through my mat­tress and on to the floor, flowed out into my liv­ing room and con­gealed on the couch. It was bloody awful.

I was asked a good ques­tion yes­ter­day. How well do you deal with ambi­gu­ity? Which prob­a­bly only seems like an ambigu­ous ques­tion to some­one like me. It is clever in its self-reference. I think I answered well enough, and even moreso if the ques­tioner real­ized that I applied my way of deal­ing with ambi­gu­ity in for­mu­lat­ing the answer.

I ran in to Jeff Schuler while he was car­ry­ing his blown-tire bike down Abbey from the RTA sta­tion and offered to give him a ride to his apart­ment. He accepted and as we fin­ished load­ing his bike into my back seat a cop pulled up and started has­sling us for “block­ing a lane of traf­fic” which he him­self was doing. We were on W. 20th, which isn’t exactly the busiest street in Cleve­land and he told us we should have turned on to Abbey, which is about 400% busier, and park there. I said “I’m just help­ing my friend load his busted bike into the car.” and “We’re leav­ing now.” so he just looked at me sourly and drove off. I wanted to tell him to go arrest the crack dealer by Lin­coln Park instead of has­sling a guy in cuff links and a beater car help­ing out a friend, but that wouldn’t have been very constructive.

Yes­ter­day was bee-like in busi­ness; I needed a beer. Since the weblog­ger meetup was at the Town Fryer I decided to head on down there for some fried cat­fish and deli­cious green beans and fried oreos. I con­vinced Jeff to come with me and he fixed his bike in an instant and I busted out the Mon­goose and we headed on down. I got home around 9:30 and was com­pletely spent.

It was almost like a weblog­ger meet-up last night. Quar­rel With The World came up from Akron to go see the curated show by Erie Effu­sion where we ran into the Ferris’s, Beer and Cloth­ing and a red­head with a MySpace account. Later, we went to the Lit where we ran into What’s in the Bag and Cleve­land Hap­pen­stance. Hot Cof­fee Girl was sup­posed to join but didn’t.

I got up early this morn­ing and rode my bike from Tremont to the Mem­phis Drive-in for the flea mar­ket. I killed about an hour and a half brows­ing through all the booths, eat­ing some soft-serve and shoot­ing the breeze. I ended up buy­ing Dr. Mario and Pro Wrestling for my NES for $5. Then I went from Brook­lyn to Detroit-Shoreway and the 84 Char­ing Cross Book­store. This is a book collector’s book­store and they have some absolutely amaz­ing stuff, includ­ing some edi­tions of Edgar Rice Bur­roughs adven­tures with great cover art. They’ve got a huge selec­tion of poetry, first edi­tions of many books and lots of signed works as well. I ended up get­ting a fenc­ing man­ual from the turn of the cen­tury [the 20th cen­tury]. They’re only open on Thurs­days, Fri­days and Sat­ur­days, or by appoint­ment, but if you love books, you should make the effort to visit. They also have a bea­gle with really soft ears.

I rode on home and put some nice thick pork chops in a mari­nade and then went to do my laun­dry where I chat­ted with a cool girl and her Papil­lon. Then I grilled my pork chops on the char­coal grill I picked up last week and they were sim­ply deli­cious. I think pork chops are prob­a­bly always best grilled. Now I’m at Tremont Scoops, where I just pol­ished off a pint of Choco­late Peanut But­ter Cup ice cream. I’m sit­ting out­side, using their WiFi and watch­ing loaded sub­ur­ban­ites pack them­selves into Lolly the Trol­ley for this weekend’s Tremont House Tour. I think I’m gonna go home and play some Dr. Mario now.

My con­tract with Ver­i­zon Wire­less is almost up, and since I’ve had con­sis­tently bad expe­ri­ences with them when I got my con­tract two years ago I switched to T-Mobile. Not only did Ver­i­zon not send me the rebate for my phone, they fudged up my num­ber trans­fer and had ridicu­lously crappy cus­tomer ser­vice. Oh yeah, they also turned over my call records to the NSA, which was in direct vio­la­tion of my con­tract. T-Mobile hooked me up with a new phone, and more min­utes at the same price that Ver­i­zon was charg­ing and refused the NSA’s demand. Acti­va­tion was a cinch, and I even got a prompt email response from an actual human to a sug­ges­tion I had. Go T-Mobile, even if you need shorter con­tracts and a plan with low any­time min­utes but unlim­ited nights and week­ends. [Yeah right, no one has that.]

Oh yeah, if you get a new cell phone remem­ber to recy­cle the old one. If you live in Cleve­land there are three dif­fer­ent places I found that will take your old phone:

1. League of Women Vot­ers
2. Cleve­land Metroparks Zoo
3. Cleve­land Museum of Nat­ural History

The League of Women Vot­ers will be get­ting mine.

•The Cleve­land Plan­ning Com­mis­sion has this awe­some inter­ac­tive map that I was shown last evening while plan­ning the 2007 Cleve­land Lead­er­ship Sum­mit. If you like play­ing with sta­tis­tics, or try­ing to get an overview of basic city sit­u­a­tions, this is the site for you.
• Here is a 2004 pdf from Juve­nile Court with data on juvy crime based on Sta­tis­ti­cal Plan­ning Area. Some inter­est­ing cor­re­la­tions can be found com­par­ing this data to the map.
• If you are famil­iar with any resources and pro­grams for youth and you live in the City of Cleve­land, please give me that infor­ma­tion, includ­ing Ward # and con­tact infor­ma­tion if possible.

This is an essen­tial part of our youth need assess­ment which, cou­pled with an in-school sur­vey, will be pre­sented to Mayor Jack­son with a request that city employ­ees be allowed flex time each month to do vol­un­teer work with Cleve­land youth, in the types of pro­grams that Cleve­land youth want to par­tic­i­pate in. Our angle is that the city might not have money to use for our kids, but it cer­tainly has the manpower.

I’m respon­si­ble for gath­er­ing data on pro­grams in Ward 13, but I’m also going to call up Neigh­bor­hood Con­nec­tions to see if they can pro­vide me with some data on youth-oriented pro­grams affil­i­ated with them. Adam, remem­ber to call:

• Coun­cil­man Cim­per­man
• Mer­rick House
• TWDC
• Churches

and follow-up on what­ever leads you get, instead of sit­ting on your duff drink­ing hard liquor.

I just called the Cleve­land Munic­i­pal School Dis­trict to request some pretty gen­eral data about the dis­trict; specif­i­cally, the num­ber of schools in the dis­trict and how they break­down between ele­men­tary, K-8 and high schools. I need this data for some of the prepara­tory work for the 2007 Cleve­land Lead­er­ship Sum­mit. The recep­tion­ist who answered the phone and the PR per­son I was ulti­mately directed to were per­haps the rud­est peo­ple I’ve ever spo­ken with on the tele­phone. Great pub­lic face, CMSD.

So I talked to some com­mu­nity devel­op­ment old-hatters about the CMSD and they all chuck­led at me in my naïvete, since they’ve had first-hand expe­ri­ence for ages at just how rude the CMSD can be.

I just spoke to the board of Neigh­bor­hood Hous­ing Ser­vices Cleve­land [whoa 1994 site design!] about my trip to Nashville. They footed the bill so it was only right that I tell them about it. The board has folks from all kinds of Cleve­land ser­vices as mem­bers and the City Coun­cil Chair­man Mar­tin Sweeney was there speak­ing about a pos­si­ble col­lab­o­ra­tion between Coun­cil and NHS. Two other fel­low trip-takers also talked about their workshops.

I ran into Lou Tisler from NHS this morn­ing at Lucky’s, pick­ing up bagels. The only thing is, I didn’t real­ize he was Lou Tisler until I arrived at NHS, since I’d not met him before. The NHS build­ing is also hous­ing a curated gallery by Brid­get Gin­ley. When com­mu­nity activism, third-space coin­ci­dences and local art col­lab­o­rate, it is a recipe for a happy Adam. Some­times I feel like some­thing huge is about to hap­pen in Cleveland.

A group of folks from all over the coun­try was in town learn­ing about the small grant pro­gram spon­sored by The Cleve­land Foun­da­tion. You know, the one I’m on: Neigh­bor­hood Con­nec­tions. A few of the com­mit­tee mem­bers [and one lucky alter­nate] were asked to go along for a neigh­bor­hood tour yes­ter­day and then share din­ner at Fire in Shaker Square.

Our first stop was at the St. Clair CDC, where we lis­tened to a cou­ple of grantees dis­cuss their projects, one group has cre­ated this excel­lent wel­come bag for all of the renters in their com­mu­nity. Not only does it include coupons and perks for local busi­nesses, but it also pro­vides a local busi­ness phone direc­tory, voter reg­is­tra­tion mate­ri­als, city and coun­cil infor­ma­tion and a wealth of other things to make new peo­ple feel at home. The other group received fund­ing to have a sum­mer fes­ti­val for the chil­dren in the neigh­bor­hood. The area, which the res­i­dents refer to as the ‘40s, is pretty diverse, with old Eastern-European pop­u­la­tions, as well as hefty chunks of Chi­nese and African-American com­mu­ni­ties as well. It seems to be a neigh­bor­hood just get­ting started in its revi­tal­iza­tion [and unavoid­able gen­tri­fi­ca­tion, as some lake­front con­dos are being built]. I was actu­ally rid­ing my bike through this area a few weeks ago, and it is worth exploring.

Then I was asked to speak a lit­tle about my story involv­ing Tremont, and since I can talk about Tremont all day, I tried to hit the major points only. It has become increas­ingly obvi­ous to me within the past few weeks that I moved in to Tremont at exactly the right time, since hous­ing prices have increased enough [due, once again, to gen­tri­fi­ca­tion] that I couldn’t afford to live here now.

After I spoke, a com­mit­tee mem­ber from Glenville told his tale, as we arrived in Glenville. This is an area that used to have pow­er­ful block clubs but had fallen on hard times. His­tor­i­cally, it was a heav­ily Jew­ish neigh­bor­hood but it is mostly African-American now. The hous­ing stock in Glenville is absolutely amaz­ing, and not sur­pris­ingly, lots of peo­ple affil­i­ated with the Cleve­land Clinic and Uni­ver­sity Cir­cle are mov­ing in and tak­ing advan­tage of the low prop­erty val­ues and restor­ing the places. [Read: gen­tri­fi­ca­tion]. Our stop here was at a com­puter lab for seniors and and its com­pan­ion lab which trains the black com­mu­nity into IC³ cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

Our next stop was The Pass­port Project in Buck­eye, where we heard from sev­eral grantees on how another project of The Cleve­land Foun­da­tion, Con­nect­ing Cir­cles, had ben­e­fited them. They were the pilot group for this pro­gram, which encour­ages net­work­ing and knowledge-sharing among the groups, with assis­tance from a lady who teaches about non-profit work and com­mu­nity orga­niz­ing at Case. Each group [some which have been in exis­tence for 40 years] was very enthu­si­as­tic and engaged in the Con­nect­ing Cir­cles pro­gram, so it seems to be a suc­cess, espe­cially since the peo­ple said that it had reen­er­gized their own per­sonal projects and had borne fruit already. The pro­gram, for them at least, had already fin­ished but they decided to keep meet­ing nonetheless.

Then we went to Fire and I was told to order what­ever I wanted [Dan­ger! Dan­ger, TCF!]. So we got a bot­tle of Mark West Pinot Noir, I had flat bread with ramp pesto, roasted toma­toes and melted brie, a water­cress and other stuff salad, and filet mignon with onion rings and some other sort of onion/potato fried thing. [Obvi­ously, the only thing I mem­o­rized was the appe­tizer]. The appe­tizer was deli­cious, and is a recipe I shall steal. The Mark West was excel­lent, the salad was deli­cious, and the filet mignon was out of this world. I don’t get steak but once a year, in Canada, so I indulged. I wasn’t a big fan of the onion rings or the onion/potato thinger because they just tasted like fry­ing. For dessert I had creme brulee. Oh how I love creme brulee.

There are so many engaged and involved peo­ple in Cleve­land, doing their neigh­bor­hood activist work to make their com­mu­ni­ties stronger that I’m glad TCF is giv­ing them tac­ti­cal assis­tance to encour­age their growth. Talk­ing with the folks last night from other foun­da­tions gave me some great proof that engaged peo­ple are engaged peo­ple no mat­ter if you’re from Con­necti­cut or from Texas. Oh, the thinks we could think [and do] if more of us were as involved in our own communities.

I received over a ream of Neigh­bor­hood Con­nec­tions grant pro­pos­als by courier yes­ter­day. I have a week and a half to review 41 pro­pos­als from Cleve­landers who have ideas for improv­ing their neigh­bor­hoods. And here I thought I was run­ning out of stuff to read. I think I know what I’ll be doing this weekend.

Recently I’ve been doing my laun­dry in the evenings, and there is always a very old lady play­ing lot­tery with scratch off tick­ets the entire time I’m there. It doesn’t mat­ter which day, or what time, she’s there. She only scratches off one ticket at a time, then leaves the table in the laun­dro­mat, goes out­side, walks next door to the fake Dairy Mart, buys one more lot­tery ticket, comes back into the laun­dro­mat, sits down at the table and starts scratch­ing again. For God knows how long. She mum­bles to her­self as she does this, and scratches off every sin­gle par­ti­cle of scratch-offiness that is present on the card.

She has a friend who doesn’t talk to any­one but her. This friend talks approx­i­mately 73 gril­lion miles a minute to Lot­tery Lady about any­one and every­one who is sick and dying, and oh how ter­ri­ble it is and did you know what kind of head­stone he had and he was buried two weeks ago today and so and so’s sis­ter is in hos­pice and he has “Altheimer’s” and starts to scream and the bills they have are so expen­sive did you know that his lungs are filled with this yel­low fluid…

The Tremont Laun­dro­mat is a never-ending source of sur­re­al­ity. It is almost worth the $2.75 I pay for each load of laundry.

I feel a bit mer­ce­nary doing this, because money isn’t the only rea­son I’m seek­ing a non-dead-end job. But while I’m craft­ing my online State­ment of Ambi­tion as it per­tains to my career, I might as well dish out some basic met­rics for what cer­tain salaries would mean to my lifestyle; at least in Cleve­land. I’ve tried to frame it so that it should be easy to see how much money I’d actu­ally end up giv­ing back to the com­mu­nity. $30k won’t get me far in NYC.

If I had a job in Cleve­land that paid me $30k a year I could:

• Drink more than one beer at local bars like Edison’s and The Lit­er­ary Café.
• Buy beer for my friends at afore­men­tioned bars.
• Go out to eat at local places like Stevenson’s Ham­burg­ers and the Lin­coln Park Pub on Taco Tues­days.
• Have an inter­net con­nec­tion at home.

If I had a job in Cleve­land that paid me $35k a year I could:

• Drink more beer at local bars, and do a Bar Crawl of the fancy places like The Vel­vet Tango Room and 806 for Tremon­ter.
• Buy more beer for my friends at afore­men­tioned bars.
• Take girls on dates.
• Pay off my stu­dent loans twice as fast and save a bit.
• Go out to eat at local places and con­tinue my search for the best burger in Cleve­land. I could also prob­a­bly eat at a fancy restau­rant like Fahren­heit once or twice with­out hav­ing to save up for it first.
• Join Cleve­land Colec­tivo.
• Take a pro­gram­ming class at Tri-C or another local col­lege.
• Move into a larger apart­ment that would allow me to have a dog.
• Take a small vaca­tion to go camp­ing and fish­ing.
• Buy a small piece of art from a local artist.
• Have an inter­net con­nec­tion at home.
• Start fenc­ing again.

If I had a job in Cleve­land that paid me $40k a year I could:

• Drink more beer at local bars.
• Buy more beer for my friends at afore­men­tioned bars.
• Pay off my stu­dent loans thrice as fast and also save or invest a bit.
• Go out to eat at local places and con­tinue my search for the best burger in Cleve­land. I could also prob­a­bly eat at a fancy restau­rant and even take a girl on a date there.
• Join Cleve­land Colec­tivo.
• Take a pro­gram­ming class at Tri-C or another local col­lege.
• Buy a fixer-upper house and get a dog.
• Afford to enter Notre Dame Foot­ball Ticket lot­tery.
• Cre­ate a small schol­ar­ship for walk-on fencers at ND.
• Take a fun vaca­tion some­place.
• Buy a small/medium piece of art from a local artist.
• Have an inter­net con­nec­tion at home.
• Start fenc­ing again.

Life in Cleve­land is becom­ing increas­ingly unful­fill­ing for me. I have spent the last 9 months look­ing for another source of employ­ment in this area, and have been most unsuc­cess­ful. This is my third Cleve­land win­ter, and in the time I’ve been here I feel that I have offered plenty of myself to Cleve­land through time and effort, yet Cleve­land hasn’t offered me much in return. And by much I mean one thing: a decent job. I like the peo­ple, the cul­ture, the pace, but when, as a young pro­fes­sional, I make so lit­tle money that I have to bud­get whether or not I can afford to go down the street for a beer at the Lit, there is a prob­lem. I’ve tried the net­work­ing routes, cold call­ing, brows­ing through every career board and clas­si­fied and even out on the limb things like search­ing through my refer­rer logs for pos­si­ble leads [Pen­ton Media, I’m look­ing at you]. My skillsets are wel­come as long as there is no price tag attached, but oth­er­wise, this area doesn’t seem to have much use for them.

Peo­ple talk about catch­ing breaks, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it hap­pen. Every suc­cess I’ve had, I’ve had to fight for tooth and nail, but me ver­sus Cleve­land is a fight I can’t win. So today begins my search for employ­ment else­where. I’m going to start in the big metro areas, NYC, Chicago and LA [where I’ve recently started cor­re­spond­ing with some old friends from the ND Film Depart­ment], places I already have friends in, and places that might feel that they could use me. If all else fails, by mid-summer I’ll move back to Indi­ana and go back to school in order to get my teacher’s license. Cleve­land has had its chance.

Ear­lier this year I was nom­i­nated to be a mem­ber of the Neigh­bor­hood Con­nec­tions Grant Mak­ing Com­mit­tee which is funded by The Cleve­land Foun­da­tion [a pub­lic char­ity with super nice digs]. I didn’t think the inter­view went to well, mainly because of my age, lack of expe­ri­ence and the inten­sity of the com­pe­ti­tion [three weeks of inter­views and only one posi­tion and six alter­nates to fill], but I got a call from Joel Rat­ner today, telling me that I had been selected as an alter­nate. This basi­cally means I do all the work that the full com­mit­tee mem­bers do, but don’t get a vote. This is still bet­ter than I had hoped for, as this will look very nice on a résumé and will allow me to expand my par­tic­i­pa­tion and knowl­edge of and in the Cleve­land com­mu­nity. This is the type of civic involve­ment that I most enjoy, help­ing folks empower them­selves. Hope­fully the process will be as rosy as I hope, although I’m sure read­ing through all the grants and research­ing them will be a bit of a chore.

I spent two hours and fif­teen min­utes yes­ter­day lis­ten­ing to Denny Lar­son talk about air pol­lu­tion and how cit­i­zens can take action when the gov­ern­ment won’t. I wasn’t expect­ing to spend two hours and fif­teen min­utes there, but the deferred pay­off and Denny Larson’s love for hear­ing him­self talk [and who wouldn’t enjoy talk­ing with 4 pho­tog­ra­phers and two reporters present] ensured that we were stuck there for two hours and fif­teen min­utes. My impres­sion might be inac­cu­rate though, because, after two hours and fif­teen min­utes, and no appar­ent end in sight, I left early.

The entire rea­son I showed up was to learn how to assem­ble home-made air pol­lu­tion mon­i­tors, using five gal­lon buck­ets. Sim­i­lar “bucket brigades” as they’re called exist else­where and have worked with some suc­cess. Although they aren’t very high-tech, they are rather expen­sive. Denny Lar­son men­tioned, two hours into the meet­ing, after I asked him, that each bucket costs about $125 dol­lars to make, mostly because of the pro­fes­sional grade valves that are used. Ever since I started sub­mit­ting pol­lu­tion logs to OCA, they’ve been call­ing me about once a week ask­ing me to help more. I agreed to do some bucket mon­i­tor­ing, but I can’t afford to drop $125 dol­lars for a bucket and pay the lab fees for the pro­cess­ing. Pol­lu­tion logs will have to do.

I did hear, although no proof was offered, that the Ohio EPA and the Cuya­hoga County Air peo­ple are get­ting paid for doing noth­ing, that they have no portable equip­ment, and that the mon­i­tor­ing sta­tions are either far away from the pol­lu­tion or not mon­i­tor­ing for the right things at the right time. I already knew that the Ohio EPA doesn’t work before 8 or after 5, so that pol­lut­ing dur­ing off hours is basi­cally given free rein. I also learned that one short-lived acci­dent can pol­lute more than an entire year of nor­mal pro­duc­tion. And even though agen­cies in this area are being paid to mon­i­tor envi­ron­men­tal impact, they aren’t doing their job and folks in Tremont and Slavic Vil­lage have to take mat­ters into their own hands. If you’ve got an extra $125 lay­ing around, that is.

The fact that it took two hours and some prompt­ing to get to the actual meat of the process is what has me so grouchy this morn­ing. Some­one should have been mon­i­tor­ing the hot air being emit­ted from Denny Lar­son. He should have taken no more than an hour, includ­ing the assem­bly of the buckets.

Link of the day: Make a Paper Box in five min­utes. Not two hours and fif­teen min­utes. If you’re crafty you can use inter­est­ing things printed on paper to make indi­vid­u­al­ized boxes to hold the sev­ered body parts of those dear­est to you. Or not.

Where in Cleve­land can I take my dead bat­ter­ies for proper disposal?

Attend­ing this meetup at Metro Joe’s:

Jim East­man
Martha Lat­tie
Craig Lyn­dall who had free CDs for his band, The Com­pany Line.
Bob Rhubart
Rick Bohan
Ger­ardo Orlando
Tim Russo
Bill Calla­han
Will Kessel
Bill Bar­row
Ken Dun­can
Lori Kozey
Daniella Lindquist
Jerry Ritcey
George Nemeth
Jeff Hess
Adam Har­vey
Tim Fer­ris and Glo­ria Fer­ris
Mary­Beth Matthews
Pho’s Norka Pages
Jaclyn Stacy
Matt Mar­tinez
Scott Gear­ity
Jack Ric­chi­uto waltzed in after an hour and a half. Hmph.

9 attend­ing con­sid­ered them­selves polit­i­cal bloggers.

We dis­cussed peo­ple who get irate about com­ments left on blogs and then threaten lit­i­ga­tion. We deter­mined that there is already legal prece­dent pro­tect­ing blog­gers from third party com­ment­ing and libel. We dis­cussed the dif­fi­cul­ties of nav­i­gat­ing the FEMA web­site in help­ing NOLA refugees, how to drive traf­fic to your web­site, mainly through com­ment­ing on other people’s blogs. The intri­ca­cies of Track­backs, RSS, and Word­press plu­g­ins, includ­ing one which will help defend against AdSense pirates. Tim thinks Google Alerts is bet­ter than RSS. There was also the ubiq­ui­tous copy­right dis­cus­sion. Jaclyn, who is still work­ing on fight­ing Wal-Mart in Cleve­land, brought to our atten­tion their Higher Expec­ta­tions Week. Will brought up Mint as a source of site traf­fic log­ging and Jeff men­tioned AWstats.

Scott Gear­ity had the quote of the night:

The blo­gos­phere is dom­i­nated by this sort of lib­er­tar­ian con­ser­v­a­tive cabal.

Around 9 the group adjourned to Ful­ton Bar and Grille for tasty bev­er­ages. I rode my bike home.

There is too much to do around here. Seriously.

Things I would like to do this Labor Day weekend:

Inge­nu­ity Fes­ti­val
Taste of Cleve­land
Cleve­land Air Show
St. John Can­tius Pol­ish Fes­ti­val
Pat’s in the Flats 60th Anniver­sary Bash
Notre Dame Game Watch at The Blind Pig

I can prob­a­bly man­age to get to two of these things. The week­end of the 17th and 18th is going to be just as bad too, because The Tremont Arts and Cul­tural Fes­ti­val is going on, and EVERY­body is doing some­thing. And me? I’ll be out of town.

In my ongo­ing quest [pre­vi­ous reviews: Heck’s; Swenson’s] to find the best burger in Cleve­land, I took a trip out to Euclid with Five Dol­lar Beer last night to check out Stevenson’s Ham­burg­ers. We learned about this place from the hon­or­able Food­Goat. This was a damn good ham­burger, def­i­nitely the win­ner from the three burger-centric places I’ve been so far. Damned inex­pen­sive too, which makes this cheap bas­tard quite happy.
(more…)

Being bred a Hoosier, 4th of July fire­works in Indi­ana typ­i­cally aren’t any­thing all that impres­sive. Most of the cool ones are ille­gal, so my child­hood was filled with those lit­tle snappy bug­gers and those grow­ing snake thingys, with a wimpy foun­tain thrown in now and then. As I grew older, my uncle and cousin would pur­chase some of the mortar-like job­bies and 4th of July cel­e­bra­tions perked up a bit over home­made ice cream. Cleve­land fire­works on the other hand…
(more…)

Where in Cleve­land are men’s cloth­ing stores? I need to buy some black pants before Wednes­day. I’m picky. I want flat fronted, heavier-than-dress-pants mate­r­ial, black pants. I was at Express­Men and Kohl’s the other day [which is where I usu­ally shop for clothes] and they didn’t have any­thing even approx­i­mat­ing what I wanted. I real­ized I should try to buy clothes from local folks. Unfor­tu­nately, still being a rel­a­tively new Cleve­lander, I have no frick­ing clue what local cloth­ing stores exist, where they are and what their price ranges are. Help!

I had lunch at Swenson’s Drive-In in Seven Hills. It was unlike Kunkel’s Drive-in in Con­nersville, they didn’t have the old boxes to call inside, instead you turn on your lights. The carhops run to and from the vehi­cles, I imag­ine they stay in good shape doing this. One of the carhops looked like she was prob­a­bly a com­pet­i­tive run­ner. I got burg­ers. Part of my quest to find a decent ham­burger in Cleve­land.
(more…)

I got invited to attend three days of com­mu­nity lead­er­ship train­ing and last night was the first night. We did a lot of dis­cus­sion on what makes a com­mu­nity, what makes a neigh­bor­hood, what makes a stake­holder, what makes a leader. Since I’ve been to sev­eral lead­er­ship work­shops, camps and all that it was a good refresher. Unfor­tu­nately, when they start in on the stuff I’m not famil­iar with, I’ll be in Canada. Hope­fully I’ll be able to make it to the third Mon­day meet­ing which occurs the day after I get back.

From a Plain Dealer Edi­to­r­ial:

This is not much more than an argu­ment for con­ve­nience, while at the same time stat­ing that there are local busi­nesses already fill­ing the need. It also seems to be say­ing that if Wal-Mart hurts local busi­nesses then that is good for Cleve­land. Right.

And in Sam Ful­wood III’s col­umn:

What is all this giv­ing up crap? What is all this spread­ing our legs for ubiq­ui­tous big boxes? “Oh, please, Wal-Mart, smack me around and treat me like a two-bit whore! Move in with me, I’ll pay for your every need, just give it to me good.”

Bah.
(more…)

The Blog­ger Meetup was last night, and when we got most of the gos­sip out of the way, we started in on Wal-Mart and pos­si­bly using this issue, which a few of us feel quite strongly on, to test our effi­cacy as a blog­ging com­mu­nity. See if we can’t make a dif­fer­ence instead of just talk­ing. If you’d like to join in, a good first resource is over at Democ­racy Guy. There is an infor­ma­tional and orga­ni­za­tional meet­ing next Wednes­day at the Tree­house. I also ate at the Grove­wood Tav­ern, Beer, Food and free WiFi. I got a Bison Steak Sand­wich with spicy mayo, cheese, romaine let­tuce and baby beef­steaks and house fries for $8.50. I also had a He’Brew, The Cho­sen Beer.

I ate at Johnny Mango’s. In my com­pli­cated inner ratio of quan­tity and taste ver­sus price they score very highly. It also helped that I’d not had much to eat before­hand. I plowed through my plate like those dogs in kib­ble com­mer­cials. Well, maybe not that bad. I got the Mush­room, Tomato, Gar­lic Bur­rito Big Plate and we had fried plan­tains for our appe­tizer. The whole meal was what my friend Macal­is­ter was talk­ing about last week, a quest for the per­fect bite. I’m sure I’ll head back there some­time, most likely on a night not quite so busy.

I went salsa danc­ing with a friend for the first time last night. We went to Modä and took advan­tage of the the offered lessons we dis­cov­ered through clevelandsalsa.com. I think this is some­thing I could become addicted to, see­ing as I woke up this morn­ing with the salsa beat still churn­ing through me.
(more…)

Noth­ing glam­orous hap­pened at the weblog­ger meetup last night. We talked a bit about putting together a Cleve­land Wiki, but other than that we just schmoozed, which, while not glam­orous, was still impor­tant. We can build a bet­ter rap­port with each other if we know each other more per­son­ally. The Ter­mi­nal Stout at Rock Bot­tom was pretty tasty too.

The week­end is here and in cel­e­bra­tion, I’m going to put together as much Cleve­land Poetry [and per­haps a bit of music] infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble. Maybe you can catch some­thing on the flip side.
(more…)

I had din­ner with Five Dol­lar Beer last night. We went to Heck’s Cafe over on Bridge Avenue, because they appar­ently have the best burg­ers in town. The burg­ers were good, but if they are the best burg­ers in town then Cleve­land sorely needs a really good burger joint. Some­thing akin to CJ’s out of South Bend.
(more…)

I went to the Cleve­land Film Fes­ti­val on Fri­day for a show­ing of six short films. Short reviews of each, and spoil­ers of course, past the jump.
(more…)

The com­bined blog­ger/pod­cast­ing meetup last night was the best yet. There were so many peo­ple there that we broke up into three small groups: one for pod­cast­ers, one for blog­gers and one for peo­ple to dis­cuss with Denise Polver­ine [who paid for the beer!] how cleveland.com can incor­po­rate more blog con­tent into their site. I didn’t get a chance to browse the Cleveland.com or the pod­cast­ing groups because the blog­ger dis­cus­sion was so lively. Hope­fully oth­ers from the other groups will blog about their stuff. I know I’d like to know.

Updates:

Col­li­sion Bend and Sar­donic Views on the cleveland.com group.
(more…)

These are a few of the fine folks that were at the rather huge blog­ger/pod­cast­ing meetup. The list is incom­plete, as some peo­ple might’ve signed up after I left. If I mis­spelled your name I apologize.

Mike Baker @ Cleve­land Yucks
Tim Bakke @ Geek Zen
Will Kessel @ Col­li­sion Bend
Bruce Kratofil @ Bug­blog
Chas Rich @ Sar­donic Views
Tim Russo @ Democ­racy Guy
Lori Kozey @ Vir­tual Lori
Jim Fisher @ Wazopia
Rob Walch @ Pod­cast 411
Kur­tiss Hare @ Kurtiss.org
Martha Lat­tie @ Your Daily Art
Jerry Ritcey @ Red Wheel­bar­row
Bill Calla­han @ Cleve­land Diary
John Ettorre @ Work­ing with Words
George Nemeth @ Brewed Fresh Daily
Adam Har­vey @ Organic Mechanic
Daniella @ Amer­i­can Pink Col­lar
Nate Paige @ Pop Life
Steve Fitzger­ald @ Lake­wood Life & Lake­wood Buzz
Bob Rhubart @ Bob Rhubart’s Weblog

If you were there and I missed you, let me know and I’ll add you to the list. I’ll post a recap of our small group dis­cus­sion tomorrow.

The Cleve­land Art Museum is slated for a $258M expan­sion in the com­ing year. I’m glad that they’ll have a chance to get more of their large col­lec­tion on dis­play, but I can’t help but think that $258M dol­lars [and the $8M chipped in by the state] could do a lot more good else­where. Yes, pri­vate donors can donate wher­ever the hell they want to, but what’ll it take to make ‘em donate to the eco­nomic devel­op­ment of the region? Hope­fully the $80M/yr esti­mate will hold true by attract­ing more vis­i­tors to the area, and I’m glad to see that they say admis­sion will still be free, but we’ll see what six years of con­struc­tion does to that tune. I wish they’d got­ten a Cleve­land archi­tect for the design instead of Rafael Viñoly. A friend of mine also took excep­tion to this:

Appar­ently norteam­er­i­canos don’t get really excited about stuff? Wel­come to Cleve­land, bub.

Hey, I’m grouchy today; I’m com­plain­ing about good things. I’m also igno­rant and not rich so I’m sure by tomor­row I’ll have changed my mind some­what. I’m still glad it is hap­pen­ing. Shaddup Adam.

Today is the first day that peo­ple in the Mid­west [includ­ing Ohio!] can take advan­tage of The Fair and Accu­rate Credit Trans­ac­tions Act of 2003. You can now get a free credit report on your­self once a year. Just make sure you print it out right away, at least from Equifax. They only give you once chance to do it and the site doesn’t have the best usability.

(more…)

Now that I’ve opened my eyes and started look­ing around, I’m really amazed at how much there is to be involved in around the Greater Cleve­land area. It makes it hard to choose. I’ve gone to a cou­ple blog­ger mee­tups and they have been quite eye-opening in regard to eco­nomic devel­op­ment in this area. While I’m still too wet behind the ears in regard to civic action and pol­i­tics, their fer­vor is infec­tive.
(more…)

The Feb­ru­ary 2005 Cleve­land Blog­ger Meetup was last night. Most of the group was dif­fer­ent than last time, although Will Kessel, Jeff Hess and I, not to men­tion George, were all there again.
(more…)

BFD posted a notice for The Daniel Thomp­son Poet Stone Fund ben­e­fit that is hap­pen­ing on Feb­ru­ary 12, in Lit­tle Italy. Here are some of his poems and some other press. The event is free, billed as “an evening of poetry, polemics, and per­for­mance,” and the rest of the details are past the jump. I’ll see you there.
(more…)

After spend­ing three hours at H&R Block on Sat­ur­day, fig­ur­ing out my taxes with the guy there, I needed a nice bit of relax­ation. I also needed a hair­cut. So I finally tracked down this hereto­fore unnamed but very well rec­om­mended bar­ber shop on Madi­son in Lake­wood and when I went to The Great­est Bar­ber Shop in the World: T.D. & Son Bar­ber Shop.
(more…)

Awhile back a friend of mine told me how I could sign up for the North­east Ohio Per­form­ing Arts List­serv [NEo­hioPAL]. A gen­tle­man named Fred Stern­feld main­tains it, and mem­bers of the list­serv send in events in which they are involved, audi­tions, cast­ing calls, free or dis­count shows, you name it. It is heav­ily theatre-centric but also has crew calls for films and poetry and other groovi­ness. It has over 37 hun­dred mem­bers and best of all, it is free and deliv­ered daily to your inbox. If you want to know more, read the FAQ.

I had The Great Lakes Brew­ing Com­pany’s lat­est con­coc­tion last night, the Black­out Stout. I don’t know much about beer, but stouts are my favorite, and I truly appre­ci­ate a place that can pour a good pint of Guin­ness. Here is a link to peo­ple who seem to actu­ally know what they are talk­ing about when they review the Black­out Stout. Mine is after the jump.
(more…)

I went to the Cleve­land Blog­ger Meetup last night. It wasn’t quite what I expected it to be because it exceeded my expec­ta­tions. I was, of course, the youngest buck there, but the dis­cus­sion that took place has inspired me to mildly but sig­nif­i­cantly change my present style of blog­ging into some­thing a bit more use­ful to the clam­or­ing masses that are fruit­lessly search­ing the inter­net for the spe­cific type of infor­ma­tion I am going to pro­vide. [yeah, right]
(more…)

On Fri­day I went to a Cool Cleve­land event and then saw the Momix dance group put on a mod­ern dance per­for­mance enti­tled Opus Cac­tus. I’d never been to a dance per­for­mance before and this par­tic­u­lar one was a good cherry-popper.
(more…)

I received a hair­cut yes­ter­day. I think the bar­ber was drunk. I’d never been to this place before. Joe’s Bar­ber­shop in Lake­wood. Right next to the crap­pi­est fenc­ing club in Cleve­land. I walk in and the place is dead quiet. Empty.
(more…)

Wednes­day evening was the annual com­pany ‘event.’ Since no one really knows if it is a Christ­mas din­ner or a fall party or what, it is just known as the ‘event.’ It was at the Craw­ford Auto Museum, so I pretty much only went to see the antique cars. I saw an elec­tric car from 1906 and a mag­netic car from 1912. Had a cou­ple of vodka mar­ti­nis and played about ten min­utes worth of black­jack before leav­ing. It was alright.
(more…)

Over the past year I’ve done quite a bit of bitch­ing about my apart­ment. That will all soon end, since I now have a new apart­ment else­where that is loads bet­ter than my present leaky shoe­box. Rejoice ye chil­dren of Ctown. Ver­ily I say unto thee, w00t! Any­way, on with the descrip­tion.
(more…)

Finally picked up my Spencer Tunick print from MOCA Cleve­land this week­end. Now I just have to get it framed. If you can find me in this photo you are lying since I’m noth­ing more than a lit­tle splotch way up in the distance.

Click the pigs for some context.

Click the peo­ple for a larger picture.

Base­ball is near the pin­na­cle of bore­dom but I’ve gone to two games in five days and not had a ter­ri­ble time.
(more…)

I went to Jimmy Daddona’s for din­ner some­what dri­ven by this review in the Free Times. It wasn’t very good at all. Now, I’ve gained a lit­tle knowl­edge at the ways of foodie-ness just by hav­ing prox­im­ity to Five Dol­lar Beer, so I am using some of his cri­te­ria in this review [or, what I think he cri­te­ria are].
(more…)

I went to Half Price Books on Fri­day and man­aged to not buy the whole store. Instead I bought three illus­trated books of fables and folk­tales. All brand new and all rather cheap.
(more…)

Help me write my for­mal let­ter of com­plaint to my apart­ment build­ing. I’ve got the gist below, but it needs some tweak­ing.
(more…)

I have absolutely lost every last smidgen of patience when it comes to deal­ing with inte­gral busi­nesses and their busi­ness hours. Let me tell you about the title bureau. Pre­tend it is Andy Rooney speak­ing.
(more…)

There was a Metafil­ter meetup this Sat­ur­day over on the east side. There was a grand total of 3 of us there, which is about what I expected judg­ing from the num­ber of MeFis nearby. It was pretty laid back. I sorta felt like I was talk­ing too much but I sup­pose if I really think about it, I’m prob­a­bly always talk­ing too much. We started out at Ara­bica on the CWRU cam­pus and then went to this place called the Bark­ing Spi­der which was about 20 feet from Ara­bica. I had a Woodchuck’s there and then we went to the Falafel Cafe where a very ami­able Greek man hooked my up with a hum­mus and kafta plat­ter that was really good. The por­tion was large as well, so I had the left­overs yes­ter­day. I stuck the last chunk of kafta in with a bunch of hum­mus and the left­over let­tuce and tomato, dou­ble wrapped it in pita and stuck it in the oven for a few min­utes. It was crun­chily deli­cious when I took it out.

After the Falafel cafe we went to Gilly’s donut place in lit­tle Italy, which had really good crullers, despite the fact that they were yeast donuts instead of cake donuts. The more I visit the East side the more I like it. After walk­ing back through Lit­tle Italy, I left my fel­low MeFiers who were going to check out a jazz club and came home. Other than that my week­end was supermundane.

Took the day off from work yes­ter­day and cel­e­brated the hol­i­day with Liam and Mike, who were seniors when I was a fresh­man. I got my mop chopped at some weirdo wig salon [the hair looks fine thank­fully] and then skedad­dled over to Liam’s apart­ment for a break­fast of eggs and Jame­son. I had to show Liam how to crack and egg and make them over-easy. He broke the yolks. After Jame­son and eggs we went to the Exchange and checked out the CDs and DVDs — that lasted about fif­teen min­utes. We headed over to the RTA to take the train down­town. The ride costs $1.50 but the teller won’t pro­vide change. So really, the ride cost $2.00. The plat­form and train itself was inun­dated with drunken horny high school kids. Directly in front of us were two cou­ples who were liplocked pretty much the whole time. It was pretty obvi­ous they were enjoy­ing being spec­ta­cles. High school was never fun like that for me.

When the train finally stopped and every­one burst from the doors Liam, Mike, and I headed toward Flannery’s with the inten­tion of hav­ing a brew or two and going to watch the parade. Three hours later, after being accosted by some folks we met at the Hal­loween party and after a few drinks we saw the last two lame floats of the parade. Some­thing called Weed Man, and the Ohio State Buck­eyes semi. Whoop-dee-shit. We grabbed a cou­ple of dirty-water dogs from a street ven­dor [ketchup, mus­tard and stank sauer­kraut on mine] and went to Panini’s to see if Liam could get free Linkin Park tick­ets for being in the mil­i­tary. Panini’s was like any col­lege bar, rowdy with cheap beer. I did get a 4oz shot of orange Stoli for the price of a reg­u­lar shot though. While we were there a fight broke out. Liam didn’t get his tick­ets, which, although I wish he had got­ten tick­ets — I still hate Linkin Park. Yes, that was a ter­ri­bly con­structed sentence.

We met up with Craig, a life­long friend of Liam’s who was also from Long Island but is now liv­ing in Michi­gan near Mike. Try to fig­ure that one out. We had some more to drink and finally I reached drunk­en­ness. Then we piled into Craig’s car [he only had one] and went back to Liam’s apart­ment to wait for his wife Ann to get home and drive us around for more drink­ing. Dur­ing this time I decided to use a day of dis­pen­sa­tion and I had choco­late brown­ies and choco­late Girl Scout cook­ies. They weren’t very good. I hope this isn’t because I haven’t had choco­late in a very long time. I’m going to blame it on all the alco­hol I’d had. When Ann showed up I found out that she was preg­nant and after the con­grat­u­la­tions we went to Sullivan’s. By this time I was start­ing to get tired so I bailed from Sullivan’s and went home. Then I burned a CD, talked on the phone for a bit and went to sleep. I’ll post the three or four pic­tures I took when I get home later today.

I went to the Cleve­land Auto Show today and checked out what is going on the in the world of auto­mo­biles. Boy was it a zoo. I don’t like crowds that con­sist of myr­iad groups of peo­ple all going in dif­fer­ent direc­tions with atten­tions not nec­es­sar­ily directed in the direc­tion they are direct­ing them­selves, all mov­ing at dif­fer­ent speeds. Espe­cially when I want to walk slowly and look at things. Saw a cou­ple of cool things, includ­ing a V-16 1000hp bat­mo­bile look­ing thing called the Cadil­lac 16. Appar­ently they run about $300k and are spe­cial order items only. They prob­a­bly only get 5 miles to the gal­lon as well. The car I liked best is a Sat­urn con­cept called Curve, which I think, is due to be released next year. It is quite sharp look­ing and around $20k, or so rumor has it. I saw a Volk­swagon Phaeton [a sweet name that I am glad has been brought back, even if by a for­eign car com­pany]. It was a $104k Volk­swagon though, which was incon­gru­ous to say the least.

Then I went down­stairs to where the clas­sic cars were. One of the first I saw was a 1961 Corvette Con­vert­ible, one year younger than my dream Corvette, but in almost all other ways iden­ti­cal. There was also a sweet, Auburn Boat­tail and even a Hud­son. I think one of the rea­sons I like well main­tained and restored clas­sic auto­mo­biles is that each one is a tes­ta­ment to the love and ded­i­ca­tion their own­ers have for these works of art. Each car has its own story and they are all so much dif­fer­ent than the cookie-cutter autos of today’s man­u­fac­ture, that I can’t help but be drawn to them.

Here are some pictures:

I’m some­what back in the sad­dle when it comes to film­mak­ing. For the next two weeks, as my sched­ule allows, I am going to help out on a Super 16mm film called Saves the Day, which con­cerns itself with a boy who thinks his older brother is a super­hero. I’m just a PA, and the posi­tion is unpaid, but this is only nat­ural since no one in the Cleve­land film com­mu­nity has any idea who the hell I am. [and, indeed, who the hell am I when it comes to filmmaking?]

Saves the Day is directed by a first timer — appro­pri­ately googly-eyed over his film, but the D.P. is one of those guys who has been doing the film thing for so long that he doesn’t get ruf­fled eas­ily. Every­one else seems to be the typ­i­cal assort­ment of film folks, some styl­ish, some not, every­one con­stantly talk­ing about sex, insin­u­a­tion and innu­endo galore. The sound guy acted like every other sound guy, the gaffer was more inter­ested in hit­ting on the girls and find­ing crafty than replac­ing a burned bulb or find­ing a scrim. The cam­era assis­tants were like tribal shamans, aloof and privy to the mys­ter­ies of the cam­era [although I think every­one there was at least some­what famil­iar with the Arri­flex being used]. I was imme­di­ately at ease, since these are my people.

I have had a few ideas start to crawl ashore from the pri­mor­dial ooze that is con­stantly slosh­ing around in my head. Whether or not their prim­i­tive lungs and flip­pers will per­mit them to evolve toward real­ity is another thing alto­gether. I am now get­ting the chance to see what other film­mak­ers are think­ing about. It is nice nice.

I went to the Cavs/Knicks game last evening with Liam and Anne, and Amy. This was my first time actu­ally being present at pro­fes­sional bas­ket­ball game. We bought the tix from a scalper for 20 bucks a pop [they were reg­u­lar priced at $65] and I am sure glad I didn’t pay full price. The game was pretty bor­ing. I’m not one for sport­ing events [excep­tions being hockey and base­ball, but the lat­ter more for being out­side than any other rea­son]. LeBron has a meh night, and I was root­ing for the Knicks any­way. They pretty much stopped play­ing mid­way through the sec­ond quar­ter. Pro­fes­sional bas­ket­ball needs some rerul­ing and dis­ci­pline. Every­thing looked lazy last night and since it only takes three steps for a player to get from one end of the floor to air­borne at the goal, noth­ing really hap­pens. Of course, the Cavs and Knicks both blow. Per­haps that has some­thing to do with it. This is the most action packed shot I took. The adver­tise­ment along the far side says it all.

cleve­land has been good for the muse. in the approx­i­mate month i have been here i have writ­ten around 5 poems and have jot­ted down a ridicu­lous amount of ran­dom things that sound cool. words have begun to lose their mean­ings for me again, and this is most def­i­nitely good, because i’ve to remem­ber what i want them to mean. which doesnt make any sense and doesnt really need to. ive also been o’erwhelmed with new musi­cal inputs. i stream my always and for­ever favorite radio sta­tion 97X WOXY from Oxford, Ohio and write down the ran­dom names of ran­dom bands that rok in ran­dom ways.

i have also dis­cov­ered sev­eral peo­ple who are great sources for said input. im wal­low­ing like a pig in shit.

1. I ran my car into a tree.
2. WCSB is a hel­luva good col­lege radio sta­tion. They stream too.
3. Come hell or high water, Glazen Cre­ative will hire me.

Believe it or not all of these are related.

I was dri­ving my reel to Glazen and lis­ten­ing to WCSB as I was exit­ing I-90 toward East 9th Street. I was brak­ing around on the ramp when instead of anti-locking, as they are wont to do, my brakes anti-anti-locked i spun 90 degrees, slid toward the edge of the road and when I hit dirt I slammed on the brakes and swung the wheel, putting me back on course, albeit on the grass embank­ment. My for­ward momen­tum suc­cess­fully dis­tracted, my car merely slid down a bit and hit a tree. A small tree.

The net result, a ding on the side of my car, and align­ment knocked out from here to the Lesser Mag­el­lanic Cloud.

Its a good thing this is the right time of year to be a Scor­pio.
Its also a good thing I had a chat with Jeho­vah this morn­ing.
I don’t nec­es­sar­ily know if it is a good thing or not, but my pact with the legions of hell might of had some­thing to do with it as well.

i am mov­ing to cleve­land. thus forc­ing myself to become gain­fully employed. then, i will cease being that guy who lives at home with his mother. the apart­ment is known as an ‘effi­ciency’ which i believe is a syn­onym to micro­scopic. but it is all i need. apart from a job that is. but that will come.

what i am seek­ing is an envi­ron­ment that gives me enough stim­u­lus to be pseudo-creative yet enough time to put that quasi-initiative to some gen­er­ally obscure pur­pose. i will also be able to resume fenc­ing, and said phys­i­cal exer­cise is sure to help work off my over­abun­dant energy sup­ply. thusly i should be able to con­cen­trate on doing what i want instead of frit­ter­ing about like a man­drill anti­tranked on amphetamines.

i will also be able to indulge in my latent or ram­pant whichever nerdi­ness and play mad magic and/or goof off with var­i­ous or sundry whichever old­timey weapons.

then i should be able to rebe­gin pompous analy­ses of books, albums, movies –as well as use­less philo­soph­i­cal navel-gazing redun­dan­cies, tak­ing pic­tures, writ­ing things, telling myself to take gui­tar lessons and pre­tend­ing to be some sort of pana­chioso babe magnet.

things might return to nor­mal around here.
(more…)