I got an unex­pected free hair­cut today from the ladies who run the Gentlemen’s Bar­ber Shop in Tremont. Appar­ently they’ve got­ten some busi­ness from my Tremon­ter post­ing about the place. I tried to talk them out of it, but there was no dice. They wouldn’t even take a tip. I’m just glad to know that I helped out a local busi­ness. I finally got back a few pieces that I took to have framed at Kelly-Randall Gallery awhile back. I got an unex­pected 20% off there since I’m a res­i­dent and have got­ten sev­eral things framed there now. Liv­ing in Tremont has its unex­pected perks.

One of those perks is not nearly gag­ging from steel mill sul­phur first thing in the morn­ing after leav­ing my apart­ment though.

Almost a year ago I made my first Google Map for the redesign of the TWiFi site. I didn’t touch the API again until I finally started redesign­ing Tremon­ter a few months back. The idea for cre­at­ing a neigh­bor­hood map for Tremont had been rat­tling around in my head since I first started the site, but I knew how tedious the work would be and so kept putting it off.

Now that the Tremont map is finally tak­ing shape, I must admit that the tedium is still present, but is cur­rently out­weighed by the fact that the map looks so cool. I’d bet­ter be care­ful though, or I’ll start putting Google Maps on everything.

I still need to fig­ure out the right javascript tweaks to make no mark­ers appear until their respec­tive boxes are checked in the leg­end, but oth­er­wise the only thing left to do is cob­ble together the addresses, phone num­bers, web­sites and coor­di­nates for sev­eral hun­dred busi­nesses in the few square miles that is Tremont, and plug the data into the xml file. Look­ing at it in that direc­tion seems a bit daunt­ing, so I’ll just take it one marker at a time.

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.

I’ve got so much web-based work to do that I’m con­sid­er­ing drop­ping the $50/mo it would cost to have inter­net access at home again. The redesign of Tremon­ter is mov­ing fit­fully, I’m hav­ing to teach myself much mySQL, and Dru­pal’s doc­u­men­ta­tion assumes a cer­tain level of devel­oper exper­tise that I’m just now get­ting. The inter­ac­tive Google API–dri­ven neigh­bor­hood map I have plans for hasn’t even been glanced at. I run into too many peo­ple that I know at Civ­i­liza­tion to accom­plish much, and the Jef­fer­son Library dis­al­lows FTP access. I’ll prob­a­bly just ride on over to Talkies.

Actu­ally, it looks like Adel­phia has a $24/mo for 3/mos deal going on if you sign up online. Of course, there is a $35 acti­va­tion fee along with that and their online sign-up form is busted. So much for that deal.

So it looks like I’m not going to be able to afford a house in Tremont. With only one excep­tion, every house that I researched [about 2 dozen] would sell for sig­nif­i­cantly more than what I can get a mort­gage on. There was one house on Auburn, pur­chased in 1997 for $13k, that was sold in 2004 for $134k. It appre­ci­ated 10× its orig­i­nal value in less than ten years. The cur­rent owner is prob­a­bly try­ing to flip it for another $20k or so. Many of the prop­er­ties that are for sale are owned by the same peo­ple. Two folks in par­tic­u­lar had 3 or 4 prop­er­ties on the mar­ket. Not that any of this mat­ters, I don’t want a house until I have a bet­ter source of income.

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.

The house across the street from my apart­ment is for sale for $50k. The house pay­ment would be cheaper than my rent, but upon look­ing at the inside I esti­mated another $50k would need to be invested just to make it liv­able. I don’t have the time, money or incli­na­tion to do that kind of work on a house. The place does have sig­nif­cant pos­si­bil­ity, but you know it is bad when the most liv­able room in the place is the attic.

I fixed Pesto Chicken and Pancetta and Romano cakes and Banana Pies and had my buddy Steve help me eat it. Actu­ally he pre­pared the dijon glaze for the chicken and was chief baster. It was a rather meh meal in my esti­ma­tion, but “I’ll Eat Any­thing” Gold­berg didn’t mind. The Banana Pies, how­ever were com­pletely ined­i­ble. I swear, for a per­son that likes to bake, I have the hard­est time mak­ing good dough. Always too much flour. Maybe it is because I don’t have a sifter.

I spent my run think­ing about words that I liked, but can only remem­ber “loi­ter” at this point.

I ate a Sokolowski’s with Wasco and man­aged to com­plete my first Lit­er­ary Café Week­end Tri­fecta. I met another local blog­ger and fixed a local resident’s wire­less con­nec­tion, but locked her out of her own work com­puter when try­ing to change its work­group to allow her to have a home net­work. Nev­er­the­less, she still agreed to tango with me this evening.

I was sup­posed to work on a web­site for a local busi­ness owner/resident yes­ter­day, but every 34sp hosted site was down for I don’t know how long. So I’m a day behind and don’t par­tic­u­larly like that.

Tonight I’ll be read­ing some of Steve Smith’s poetry at the Lit­er­ary Café. Steve has tons of street cred with the Cleve­land poetry folks and was recently diag­nosed with throat can­cer from smok­ing lots of pot for much longer than I’ve been alive. So this edi­tion of the Lit’s poetry night is focus­ing on Steve’s body of work, a bunch of dif­fer­ent poets are read­ing his stuff and then after­ward we’re hav­ing an open mic. I might try out some of my own crap if the crowd is right.

Thurs­day is also typ­i­cally con­sid­ered “geek night” at the Lit, so you can bring your WiFi enabled what­ev­ers and do what­ever you want with ‘em. Even unto down­load­ing pr0n. If you do down­load pr0n, you have to share, so make sure you bring enough cock­tail sauce for everyone.

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.

I posted this at Craigslist:

I was at the Tremont Laun­dro­mat, which inci­den­tally, didn’t have raw sewage flood­ing out the front door today, and after I brought my clothes back to my apart­ment I found it. Yes, it. At first I thought I’d inher­ited a raggedy piece of pink dryer lint, but upon closer inspec­tion I dis­cov­ered that it was, in fact, your thong. Not just any thong, though. Your thong. This one is also, appar­ently, made of cheese­cloth. The lit­tle bits of fab­ric that approx­i­mate cov­er­ing are only dis­tin­guish­able by being slightly wider than the actual thong, and a lesser shade of pink. Also, com­pletely sheer.

Wear­ing see-through under­wear [if one could be said to actu­ally “wear” this item, and if a thong counts as “under­wear”] is some­thing of a conun­drum. Roland Barthes’s essay Strip-tease may offer some insight into the para­dox­i­cal nature of cov­er­ing that is, in fact, not cov­er­ing; but I think it is rather obvi­ous that this thong serves as lit­tle more than gar­nish for a care­fully orches­trated rap­proche­ment between var­i­ous and sundry genitalia.

Steal­ing a page from Duchamp, I have taken to wear­ing your thong on my head, with the lit­tle tri­an­gle doohicky act­ing as a nose-guard. Thank­fully this under­gar­ment had been washed before I attempted this exper­i­ment. As a nose-warmer, the thong lacks a cer­tain effi­cacy that I can only attribute to its screen-door like consistency.

Cur­rently, your thong is pinned to my bul­letin board, between a pic­ture of my first dog and a polit­i­cal flyer from the Ward 13 Councilman.

In any case, Miss, if you would like me to facil­i­tate the return of this sex­u­ally charged under­gar­ment you may send me an email and I am sure that an agree­ment can be reached.

I believe that I have now seen every full length Hol­ly­wood film that was at least par­tially shot in Tremont. They are: The Deer Hunter, A Christ­mas Story and Amer­i­can Splen­dor. I watched The Deer Hunter last night, it was pretty weird see­ing what Stark­weather looked like back in the 1970s, before I-490 cut the neigh­bor­hood in half. From what I could tell, they just used east­erly shots of St. Theodosius’s and an exte­rior of Lemko Hall. Since I’ve never been inside St. Theo’s or Lemko Hall I don’t know about the inte­ri­ors. Also, some of the neigh­bor­hood shots could have been shot in the parts of the ‘hood that are under 490. I’m still try­ing to find out where, exactly, the house from A Christ­mas Story is located. I know it is on W. 11th, south of 490, so maybe I’ll ride my bike over that way today and see if I can spy it out. Amer­i­can Splen­dor just had some exte­ri­ors of Tremont houses and an estab­lish­ing shot of St. Theo’s. This is prob­a­bly com­pletely bor­ing to any­one but me. That’s what I get for being a film geek.

Edison’s Pub started hav­ing Tues­day open mic nights three weeks ago. I made it to this week’s install­ment of music, poetry and stand-up com­edy and had a great time. It is a pretty relaxed atmos­phere, with no real set sched­ule or pace to the per­for­mances, and Tremon­sters all over the place. I even picked up a self-published book of poetry by one of my neigh­bors and short sto­ries from Leeds, UK for the price of a PBR. It was an evening for multi-tasking, while lis­ten­ing to peo­ple rock­ing out and watch­ing the Indi­ans game, I had the chance to look over part of a book about the his­tory of Brandt Gallery. I also chat­ted with everyone’s favorite pho­tog­ra­pher, lis­tened to a Lucky’s barista do some stand-up, gave Steve a lit­tle good-natured rib­bing and hung out Erin from Inside/Outside.

While eat­ing a pesto and tomato pizza from Edison’s Next Door Deli, I finally met another Tremont entre­pre­neur, Des Schmitt, who runs South­side Clean­ers and Concierge and is work­ing on open­ing a cha­peaux shop, had the chance to inform myself about cer­tain local trou­ble­mak­ers, and did I men­tion that there was an open mic night going on? Lou said he would go up and do some­thing if I did, but I gave out a good excuse. Any­way, you couldn’t really ask for a bet­ter time on a Tues­day night, or a more crowded bar. The atmos­phere was really spe­cial, what Jack would call an appre­cia­tive one. It seemed like every­one who went up in front of the mic was com­fort­able, even if they weren’t exactly con­fi­dent in their per­for­mances. Open mics are good for build­ing con­fi­dence though, and it takes plenty of guts to get up there in the first place. I am con­stantly reminded of the rea­sons why Tremont is so great, and it isn’t the fancy restau­rants and art gal­leries, it’s my neigh­bors, hang­ing out, drink­ing beers and sup­port­ing each other in their pas­sions. I think I know where I’ll be on Tues­day nights from now on. Who knows, maybe I’ll even per­form one day.

When I went to get my laun­dry out of the dryer at the laun­dro­mat, raw sewage was float­ing out of the main doors. And the guy that man­ages the places what squeegee­ing shit down a drain. Bonus.

If you go over to Tremon­ter you can check out the pro­gres­sively drunker reviews I did for all the places in Tremont that have Guin­ness on tap. This post links to all of ‘em. I was alone for most of the tour, but Jeff Schuler caught up with me at The Tree­house. He’s a cool guy, just moved to Tremont a few weeks back and lives on W. 11th. He gave Steve Gold­berg a ring, but he was busy get­ting his hands done at the Lit­er­ary Café. I’ve finally found a good place to toss darts in the neigh­bor­hood. The Stark­weather has excel­lent real dart­boards. I do think at times I drifted away of my true pur­pose, the sci­en­tific study of Guin­ness and instead I sci­en­tif­i­cally stud­ied the girls. I hope my exper­i­ments didn’t mud­dle up each other’s results. I’m not much of a drinker, 8 pints in 6 hours had me pretty well sauced, and if I keep up the tour of all the local bars in Tremont, I might need that extra liver that Jaclyn offered me last week.

Last evening was the per­fect evening to be out­side. So I hopped on my bike for a nice leisurely ride, intend­ing to explore Ohio City. I never made it out of Tremont. I ran into Lou Muenz, com­ing from the Lin­coln Park Pub and their $1.25 taco night. We rode around the neigh­bor­hood a bit, caught sight of Steve Gold­berg, and Lou told me lots about the his­tory of Tremont. For instance, many of the shots from A Christ­mas Story were shot on Thur­man street, and he told me the exact loca­tion of the house from the same movie. He intro­duced me to a cou­ple of his friends who were chill­ing in the park and then I took off again for more rid­ing. Of course, I almost imme­di­ately saw a sauced democ­racy guy who told me to meet him and George at the South­side for beers in a bit. To kill time I went to Scoops where I talked with the scoop­ers. Then I ran into Sandy who wanted me to put up a new forum topic on Tremon­ter for her Gar­den Club. After that I hit the South­side to meet up with George and Tim. They never showed up, but I watched a few innings of the Indi­ans game and had a Nos­fer­atu [which was too hoppy for me] and a Guin­ness. Then I rode my bike home.

Last night was some sort of weird art nir­vana in Tremont. For the 150th Art­Walk no punches were pulled. I started out at Inside-Outside where I ended up buy­ing a small paint­ing, then I headed over to the Scran­ton Gallery for some poetry read­ings, then I stopped by the park for some Sum­mer Shake­speare, then I went to the Ukrain­ian Museum for some egg dec­o­rat­ing, then I stopped by the Lit­er­ary Cafe for a beer, then I went to Brandt Gallery to see Robert Bank’s lat­est flick, then I went to Aster­isk and Doubt­ing Thomas and then back to Inside-Outside to watch Pet Mon­ster and a lit­tle flirt­ing. Then I hauled my ass across Tremont for approx­i­mately the 77th time and went to Pat’s in the Flats for Lou’s Birth­day Bash where I heard some punk bands per­form “sweet music to make my ears bleed”. Then I stum­bled home and went to sleep.

I’ve been spend­ing a lot of time hang­ing out at the local ice cream place. I killed a cou­ple of hours there early Fri­day evening, shoot­ing the shit with the folks that work there and a cou­ple more hours yes­ter­day, where one of the work­ers directed me to the site of her semi-nude pho­tos. [!] I think I know every­one that works there by name now. In between these dairy dis­cus­sions I spent a few hours grilling dogs and burg­ers for my Auburn Block club, where I met Scott Radke and his wife Sara and baby daugh­ter, Bella. Scott is the dude respon­si­ble for most of the out­door art that can be found in Tremont. On Sat­ur­day evening, after I warshed off the grill smell I went to another party which cul­mi­nated in drunken truth-or-dare Jenga and street-licking. I thought I had a good dare “Pick two more dares”, but another par­ty­goer came up with the dare “Knock over the Jenga tower.” Which, I believe, has now had its jer­sey retired. Knock­ing over the Jenga tower means you have to do 3 more dares. It seemed like every­one in the neigh­bor­hood was hav­ing a lit­tle get-together on Sat­ur­day. Even stum­bling home at 2:15am I still ran into peo­ple I knew, stum­bling in the oppo­site direc­tion. That was a pretty cool feel­ing. Or maybe I was just drunk.

I’m heart­ened by the ini­tial response I’ve got­ten with Tremon­ter. I’ve received an email from a pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher who would like to take some pic­tures for me, an email from a Tremont res­i­dent who has B&W pho­tos that she’s will­ing to have posted, encour­age­ment from fel­low blog­gers and most impor­tantly, vis­i­tors I’ve never heard of.
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Well, I’m fin­ished putting together my Tremont spe­cific weblog and bul­letin board. I was going to wait till May to tell every­one, but since I’m only left with the nev­erend­ing “adding of con­tent” phase, I thought I might as well get it over with. Now I’ve just got to get the word out around Tremont. The site is tremonter.com. Any and all sug­ges­tions are welcome.

The Auburn Block Club is a whole dif­fer­ent beast than the Professor-Thurman-Valley View club. I guess my ini­tial con­fu­sion as to which I belonged to was well-founded; My build­ing sits right on the divid­ing line.
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This was a big meet­ing last night and the upshot of it is that I finally dis­cov­ered which block club I’m sup­posed to be going to, offi­cially. It ain’t this one. No big deal though, because both block clubs have stuff to do with my street and I’ll take any excuse to visit Lucky’s.
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I just got back from the March Professor/Thurman/Valley View block club meet­ing. Coun­cil­man Cim­per­man was present to lis­ten to our con­cerns and to tell us a bit about what is going on with Steel­yard Com­mons and other items of Tremont inter­est.
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I went to a block club meet­ing for Tremont res­i­dents last evening. It doesn’t mat­ter which block club because appar­ently I can go to any block club I want to go to and every­one will wel­come me. As expected, most of the mem­bers there were older, the youngest prob­a­bly being in the late 30s to early 40s, except for the rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Tremont West Devel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion, who was prob­a­bly around 27 or 28.
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