Random pics of Destruction

I know, I know. What's up with all the firework pictures lately Bridget? Can't find anything more interesting to show us? Well first of all, fireworks are the Rorschach test of my dreams. In my world, the entire cityscape is the canvas for my sick interpretations of reality and nightmare, and you all just gape and deal with it.

Second, I took a lot of pictures on July 4th.

Third, these are not actually fireworks, July 4th just happened to be a date of catastrophe for the City of Cleveland.


Catastrophe Exhibit# 1: An immense monster, towering hundreds of feet above the skyscrapers, emerged from the lake. The lake water slid off its muddy pelt in a torrential waterfall, completely destroying the beaches and marinas with a tidal wave of shipwrecked waverunners and confused sheephead. It's eyes were giant glittery orbs, vacant and robotic, and it barely noticed the city as it followed the river south to its true prey, Canton.


Catastrophe Exhibit #2: Evil baseball hating aliens from Epsilon Eridani B bombard the stadium with death rays. Thank god that the Downtown Cleveland Alliance spent all that money putting a force field over it.

Oh.


Catastrophe Exhibit #3: The Rock Bottom Brewery explodes.

30 is the gradient of yellow in my skin

The notable things from New York: (and yes, these are pictures of Cleveland)

1) KT was the most drivingest driving man around. He drove to NY. He drove from NY. He drove in NY. He found parking places only two blocks away from everywhere we went. He never once got annoyed or angry at the fact that we got lost anytime we went anywhere. He is he is he is he is he IS....The Driving King.

2)David and Maggie, who put us up, were the really decent couple that you know are just going to stay really decent and cute and interesting no matter how old they get.

3)On Saturday, we found the place where old Italian men give you kisses and opera singers hang out and do requests late into the night. Also, it rained while they were doing it. This was the thing I most enjoyed.

4) The play, Cocktails At the Center of the Earth, M.'s star robot turn, was good Friday night, and then great on Sunday night. The dialogue and the songs and ski-bass, they were inventive and funny and interesting. They, the cast and assorted followers, were all seemingly nice people, except for maybe that guy who gave me the chocolate chip whiskey in your hand shot. The writer was dressed like a sailor and handing out gin. One girl ran out after the show to buy herself a new outfit at American Apparel, because she didn't like the breeziness of what she was wearing. I liked this girl, so no diss, but that seems to me to be the most New York moment.

5) Any time anyone not born in New York who now lives in New York hears the phrase "I live in Cleveland and I like it", their nose inevitably, imperceptibly, ever so slightly curls up. Or they actively snarl and tear out your throat. Native New Yorkers don't do that. Maybe like immigrants are more patriotic than 7th generation Irish?

6) I really have no desire to move there. Sorry Kat. Unless somehow you can work it that I get to hang out with opera singers all the time, and live in a French restaurant. And really, if you can do that anywhere, I'll take it. Whatever magic it is that people see in New York City that makes them so crazy to possess it, I don't see it. I mean, it's a big city. I like big cities naturally, with huge buildings and bridges and docks. I like doing culturally cultured sort of things, and its nice when there's lots of them. However, I can barely afford the selection I have here. And most of all, when I was in the middle of the city, it just seemed so small and insular. Like walking around in a not that pretty diorama. I liked NYC for all the reasons I like any other new city I visit, nothing more, nothing less. I'll write more about this later, when I wake up and when I figure out how to articulate this sentiment without losing all of my East Coast readers.



Now I'm back, broke as a goat on its back and sensationally depressed. Everything is tasteless and touch-less and smell-less. It started before we got back, but I managed to fight it until safe in my own bed. Like, I sit at home on the couch with a giant stab wound in my gut, and just watch the fluids drain for hours. I have some books I should be reading, and instead I chain smoke and watch network tv, which everyone knows is the sign of failing interior workings. I barely cleaned up my house when I got back, at least my hallway. It was a big deal for me. That was like, the most positive thing I've done. Music makes me mad. Alcohol makes me sad. Not having a cell phone for the last few days has been a good thing for everyone involved, I'm in no decent condition to communicate with other sentient beings. I was fine with 30, until I found myself 30 and alone. Which is not where I expected to be. Fuck 30.

War

On July 4th, our cities recreate battlefields, covered in gunsmoke and chemical agents, every man competing for glory against those who used to be his neighbors and now, frankly, are the enemy. I love it. I think its the best thing ever. I think every man for himself and the virgins to the victor. Unless he's blown his thing off by then.

This is the cake Buddy made, the night we went to battle on the mean streets of Old Brooklyn. And by battle I mean drank a lot while wearing glowstick bracelets, playing Rockband, and being bit up by mutant bugs on the weed infested hills of the river valley. Seriously, some shitty thing bit me on the tip of my thumb.

Buddy is, obviously, better at making cakes than you.

The best thing that happened tonight is that C told some guy in a Bauhaus t-shirt his unborn baby was a cunt.

P.S. and then he asked if she would sleep with him.

That DJ does not love you, girl in the flowery dress

pictures from the Dan Deacon show at the CMA Solstice party.

That DJ does not love you little girl, who styled her hair so carefully before she put on her mother's curtains and ventured into the world of benefactors and sponsors. He wants to love you, moppet head, but he knows you are 22, and bereft of the way of the world. Let me explain...take off your messenger bag and listen.

First, here is the first time you fall in love, and poof, there goes that love up in smoke, like a pellet gun shooting pigeons. After this moment, you know that trust is non-existent, and connections fluid like the saliva in your ex boyfriends mouth.

Then oops, here is your first long term job, the one that was only supposed to pay the bills before you hightailed it to Chicago, and now suddenly it's your five year anniversary and you're on the Spirit Team. Decorating people's cubicles in streamers, people who would probably not talk to you if they knew what you thought about at night.

Here is your hope for a stable beautiful existence. The kind that exists in coming of age movies, where the old person shakes their head knowingly and drinks some lemonade and doesn't tell you about the body in the basement on purpose. Boom, there it goes! Erased by kitty litter, and smelly shoes, and those bananas you never threw away in the fridge even though trash day was Sunday and you were waiting for Sunday to throw them out because otherwise they would just stink up the trash bin. You are going to die of potassium deficiency. Or that horrible cat dementia caused by contact with feline feces.

There are all the little dreams, dying like stars, right? Bullshit metaphors. More like rotting away in a phosphorescent garbage heap in the dark sea that is your middle school days. You are a dying Angler Fish. Want to go back to school? Want to join the Peace Corps? Want to be beloved? Want a dog? Want to go into space? Want to write Catcher in the Rye? Kablooey. Drink some more.


And as you grow old, out of your glowing twenties when everything was so vibrant, so color saturated, so photo-shopped into memories of rag-tag-ness and sluttiness and nights you didn't spend with him, lying on the ground watching shooting stars because he never took you to do that, but he took every other girl with a name ending in y, though you talked about nights in sleeping bags so often. Those things are exploding before your eyes, disintegrating into crappy domestic abuse pamphlets, into conversations about assholes and crazies, and life will never be as good as it looked like it could be then. You'll never be cold together again. You'll never crawl shivering into the covers after showers, or fall asleep on the way home, or stop to drive around strange villages in Southern Ohio with gaming arcades. Those things never really existed, they were just in your mind. In fact, as the smoke dissipates, you'll realize those things never happened for him. Just for you. And with every 2 am conversation involving a man named Jacques and another pineapple vodka, you'll feel yourself slipping deeper and deeper into the disconnection. Into the realm where people are vague shadows and hugs don't actually touch and names are all anybody knows, where politics and music become excuses for talking about yourself and if you have to go to the grocery store one more time by yourself, you might just buy a carton of cat food and call it quits.

Here's a bunny. The fucking bunny doesn't care either.

We are the cause of Global Warming, at least for most of June and all of July.

Here are the things I like about the Fourth of July:

1) blowing things up
2) permission to make exceptionally loud noises late into the night
3) drinking
4) opportunities to take zombies pictures
5) watching otherwise grown people act like kids at Christmas who cannot wait to open the package and blow up all the cool ones.

Here is what I hate about the Fourth of July:

1) freedom

Last Sunday, Marty gave me an awesome painting of a unicorn for my birthday, and Rebecca made me strawberry pie, and then we all gave ourselves future cancer by running around in chemically laced gunpowder clouds for no real reason.

We also made sandwiches, which were pretty good. And drank cherry limeade. And had a paint-off. Because everything can be made an -off. The subject was bathrooms. Rebecca painted a polka dot Dali dream of flying toilets. I had cockroaches on my mind. Marty scanned it for me and then sent me a trick email designed to make me see God in the 0s and 1s. I don't open emails from Buddhists!


The Macedonia

Ingredients:

-ciabatta rolls
-mozzarella, sliced
-washed baby spinach leaves
-sliced tomatoes
-2 large portabello caps
-1/4 cup fresh chopped basil
-garlic powder
-onion powder
-oregano
-olive oil
-soy sauce
-worchestire
-paprika

First slice the tomatoes and cheese, and marinate them at room temperature with the basil, olive oil, garlic, onion, oregano, and S&P. All measurements to taste.

Slice the portabellos and marinate them in the soy sauce, worchestire, paprika, and garlic. If there's anything else in there that Marty snuck in, I don't know it. This isn't exactly a science as you can see. Leave for about twenty minutes. Have a drink. Blow up some smoke bombs.

Wash the spinach and set aside.
Saute the portabellos.
Stack everything together. Voila. The cheese should get a little melty from being on the counter and then having the hot mushrooms on top. The tomatoes should remind you that at some point in your life you are going to have to try growing the damn things (after all, you're thirty and you have a cat, what are you waiting for). And after you eat it, you should be completely stuffed and incapable of doing anything more than flicking a bic and watching Green Porno in the basement.

The Black Kitty of Inle

South quadrant, third level, Section139

In this building, in the basement, is a cadre of thugs, planning the kidnapping of the Haitian ambassador's daughter. They are smoking cheap cardboard cigars and making margaritas.

On the first floor lives a small lonely brown dragon. He broke his wing against an antenna, when he got turned around in the fog, and has been surviving on rats and possums while it heals. The security staff has been leaving it the occasional sandwich as well, and is trying to sell it's picture to Perez Hilton.

The second floor is for lost children.

The third floor is for clandestine coke deals in tinted Buicks. They also manufacture fake nikes using stolen Filipinos. The denizens of this floor are looked down upon by the Haitian thugs, who wish the neighborhood wasn't going to such shit.

The fourth floor is not your friend.

On the fifth floor, in the center of the parking pillars, is a very old tree who's branches wrap around the reinforced steel and concrete like poisonous vines into the bricks of a house. The tree smells like licorice, and bleeds silver sap which pools on the floor like tiny mercury fish. The fish shiver and sliver their bodies into the cracks of the building, where they glow incandescent as the cells of their bodies multiply, divide, and fall away. They are seeding the electrical wires. On the branches of the tree grow golden apples, heavy and rich. They roll easily into crowds. Once picked, they will not rot for at least 20 years, but once they hit thirty, they instantly become moldy black piles of sewage inside, though they may keep their golden glow for another 100 years.

The 6th Floor is for aspiring photographers and latent republicans.

The 7th Floor promises a lot more than it offers.

On the roof, once you have climbed the well lit, incredibly empty stairways and emerged into the starless city night, there is a large computer with a steady blinking light. This computer has been waiting for you. It smells you as you approach, and hums happily, its screen flashing electric joy. You stand in front of it, and its insides can barely take the proximity, as all its wiring and fans and chips vibrate violently. You touch it, and it explodes into a million tiny contented pieces.

Last Night in Collinwood

Of course these pictures have nothing to do with it. But they're symbolic right? Am I starting the race or finishing it?

I didn't get to go to the actual Waterloo Arts Fest yesterday because I was working, but after work I headed over to check out Low Life's closing party for This Is Cleveland (all the stuff I see) exhibit. Connected with my friend Wolf again, and spent some quality time hanging out on the sidewalk meeting people. Headed over to the gallery, where there was a movie I didn't know about - "Battle for Collinwood". Wish I could tell you the name of the guy who made it, but whoever you are, man in the green shirt, it was awesome. A good plot (the story of Danny Greene), and an excuse to have all your friends dress up as gangsters and shoot the shit out of each other to punk music? Always a winning combination. Arte Povera played, and I liked them an awful lot, very danceable, but staying inside was too hot. Their guitarist looks like Paul Rudd.

So, I wandered over to Waterloo 7 to look around. Got greeted by painted puppies at the door, and then hung out in the sculpture garden chatting with some guys who showed me their books of art. The owner Jerry told some good stories about gangsters in Cleveland. Then back across the street to say goodbye, and meet up with some cool kids from Youngstown who try to convince me there is an art and music scene in Youngstown no one knows about, so that's a weekend trip there I guess. An Ethiopian Jew tells me I have the cutest nose and asks if I have pretty feet. I tell him no, and he's very disappointed.

It's a good scene in that neighborhood. Everyone's friendly, everyone wants to meet you. It's relaxing.

Finally back across town to Laura's housewarming party. Small, but I'll always listen to Dawn and Lori talk about shit, and Laura is a consumate hostess. I hang out for about an hour, but then it's 1:30? And it's home to bed.

As a final thought, let me just mention how impressed I am by CB's devotion to the Cleveland scene. I was talking to him outside the gallery, smoking, and I ask if there's any good small shows coming up? Oh, he has a calendar filled on his iphone. He's got a show for every day in July. He is fanatically successful at going places. He is the man with the plans.

Now I'm off to a picnic in the woods, maybe. If it doesn't rain on us.

Getting rid of the aftertaste

, originally uploaded by sharpshinyclaws.

Ugh. Just even writing that long ass catalog of pain makes me feel like, I don't know, 24 again. Also it makes my blog look ugly. So here's a pretty picture of my mom's garden (flowers! a world of violence and territorialism and drugs!) and some thoughts:

1. Synecdoche, NY was a fantastic film. I loved it. I loved it as much, and in the same way as Stranger than Fiction.

2. My sneakers were being held captive by the villain Gimley, and I have to rescue them tonight. It reminds me I have to buy more shoes. Going two days without sneakers is like, tough man.

3. Going off number one - I only like comedians in serious films and vice versa. This is probably why I don't like Jack Black.

4. I honestly feel like Michael Jackson died a long time ago. And I actually thought Farrah Fawcett did.

5. I'm contemplating a proposal for an article to this small local magazine, but I can't decide on a topic. What are you most curious about in Cleveland? Please don't say the single scene.

6. Popsicles. I love popsicles.

7. I have to get some pedals, so I can actually ride this bike I bought. Or it needs to rain more, so I get distracted.