Table Talk

I had never seen such shameless, community-ridden obsession. People carried trays stacked upon trays of impatiens, marigolds, pansies, petunias and whatever else you can get at the most overblown farmer’s market you’ll ever see. How I lived here for eighteen years and never realized the absurdity of my daily life now blows my mind, but it’s something that can only be realized now, as I am but a visitor to this place. Painfully manicured lawns and multi-thousand dollar sprinkling systems and yearly paint jobs on peeling cupola’s and god awful dinner plates that hang from the wall that bear no sentimental value to their owner’s, who couldn’t reproduce their image if you offered them a gift certificate to Speedway or Nordstrom--this is what drove me to insanity and what drove me out of Birmingham, Michigan.


Garage sales here are an ordeal--hell, everything here is an ordeal. Whatever event my family hosts follows a stringent and always broken formula for success reached through purgatory: time for preparations requires no less than five times the length of the suggested event (a four hour wedding shower demands at least 20 hours of prep time, and exactly 18 of those hours must take place in the 24 hours leading up to the party), and the event must feign the appearance of luxury, supplying cheap wine and Smirnoff and bottles of Labatt Blue in hand-painted and monogrammed glasses.


What cheap bastards live in the Midwest, and why then, is it noted for its prosperity? Why is Speedway always 4 or 5 cents cheaper per gallon, but more importantly why does everyone know that? Why is the main street that links downtown Detroit to the suburbs of Ferndale, Royal oak, and Birmingham lined with businesses whose storefront i image is burned into the back of my retinas, yet i have never been in? Why are stores organized by the product they sell (all the mattress stores are on the same block; same with the home theater warehouses) Why are there so many fucking stores? And on the opposite side of the street there’s a cemetery a mile wide and who the fuck knows how deep? I see the same guy sitting at the same grave every week, more dead than the lover he mourns, and he’s the only person I ever see in there. 


Maybe he's the only human person here. The only person capable of finding something to care about that is real. Or maybe he's just holding onto the memory of a world that used to be real. It's sad. Not only do the fucking people obsess over television, and have parties worshiping the idols they project onto their walls, but the fucking parents work for the TV company. It’s all so wrong. Kids here will buy ecstasy, but they don’t even have a reason to eat it. How can anyone retain sanity in this creative void? Its different from places like Nebraska or North Dakota, because those places are supposed to be boring--in fact they pride themselves on it. This is supposed to be better. Better than what?

After the Gold Rush

The air smells of burning leaves and burning wallets. The town feels like two models--a miniature--with a newer model built inside an antique, like the elaborate workings of a Lionel train master who devotes their basement to a web of railroad tracks and miniature shacks, with fake moss creeping up the side of a paper machete mountain ridge and a town built around a train depot.

It’s all one big attempt to refurbish past prosperity and find some sense of nostalgia. Houses built by withering sticks and tin siding climb outward from the main road and the faint sound of a stout, aged woman losing her last nickels at the slots echoes through the foothills of the mountains that I am not prepared to pass. This used to be a mining town, and in that time it was known as the Richest Square Mile on Earth; now it favors a more conventional form of gambling. Casinos line the main road, though they forgo the bright lights and sounds of the desert oasis of Vegas in favor of a more rustic approach. A mile and a half ago I passed through the more extroverted and subsequently more successful casino haven Black Hawk; this town lives in its shadow.

Both cities bloomed at their inception during the mining rush of the late 1850’s, bringing well over ten thousand eager, foolish gold-seekers--all gamblers in their own right. Their population retreated ever since, never returning to the glory they knew at birth and currently hovers around a collective 600 today. They continue to attract gamblers of a different kind and accept the donations of travelling drunks and honeymooners on their way to the more luxurious Vail.

Dostal Alley, Easy Street and Famous Bonanza--these are products of an underwhelming experiment of the early 90’s, when Colorado attempted to reinvent the town as a caricature of its former self, forbidding people from building houses of any style other than the traditional brick houses of its mining days and create a new angle on chance that drew greedy men there in the first place.

I stop for a soda at Annie Oakley’s Emporium, but I’m a quarter short. Oh well, I could always get a few Owl Cigars, whose building reads ‘still only 5 cents’ in my rearview mirror as I leave the city, soon to be forgotten amongst the peaks and valleys of the jagged, rocky mountains.

Why I Write

I write because Patrick McDunn, my senile high school English teacher who didn't even know my name told me I could. 'You use the right words,' he said, and I often question whether that's a semi-legitimate
reason for doing anything or if I'm wasting my time magnifying the scope and meaning of my life with words like 'self-discovery' and 'transformation.'

But in ways that is exactly why. It's all an effort to get closer to the truth of myself or to make some precise, profound realization, which has been biding its time beneath a trap door in my mind's labyrinth until it decides to reveal itself to me. When I don't write, I end up vocalizing all the obsessive compulsive thoughts that belong on the page to no audience except myself, ignorant of the fact that strangers observe, eavesdrop, or stare. Writing gives me free therapy sessions, whenever I want them (I don't claim to be insane--that would be an injustice to the truly insane--but I was once advised by a professional to investigate Stockholm Syndrome. Don't ask). Yet I still find myself grasping onto my training wheels with a death grip, terrified at what might happen should I fully devote myself to the craft.

I write to retain some sanity within myself, and perhaps because of this my writing is still very scattered, unfocused. It consists of scribbled notes of potentially pertinent information and lists of words and titles and ideas. Ideas which, at their conception, had every intention to follow through with the promise they captured in the moment, yet were thrown into a box with a litter of similar moments and shoved in the cobweb friendly area of my brain. I want to write in order to make sense of the cyclonic chaos and create something worth reading.