jurassicsquid:

marshmallowmegamama:

dear halo burger.

you are the only one that i love.

xo

I miss the tin ceiling so much. 

This corner is my life partner

hedgerows:

do any of you live in detroit?

no but

but

but

that’s the state I’m in

“See, I grew up in Vegas,” you WHAT WHAT (me too.) WHAT

My grandpa, the only person in my family who went to college, spent the end of the eighties in Saudi Arabia. The government hired a bunch of American artists, architects, engineers, and urban planners to design a bunch of completely oil-independent futuristic communities in the middle of nowhere so that they would be prepared for a shortage. Those still exist. He spent most of his time on the peninsula hiding his cameras from the authorities. He didn’t wanna share state secrets, he just wanted to take pictures of ancient architectural details and public art and sandscapes. He got really into desert gardening, and his wife got really into supervised shopping for gaudy gilded housewares in air-conditioned markets.

When the towns were finished, he got offered a job in Vegas. He was a city planner, a fucking architect of the worst-designed metropolitan area to ever be conceived. None of that was his fault, mostly he just commissioned small-scale greenspace projects on traffic islands and took the aerial photographs they put in maps and reservoir reports. He helped found the neon sign museum in the desert outside of the city and he got a job as a graphic design professor in the architecture department at UNLV. My sister’s name is Rebel and even though she moved back to Michigan a decade ago she still has all kinds of shit with UNLV Rebels insignia on it. She graduated from Durango, the only daughter of five to graduate high school under the care of my father.

I guess my dad wanted to be with his parents and he probably said something to my mother like “it’s not like you have any family anyway.” He flew my sister Rachel and I out there and I’m not really sure if he had my mother’s consent.

“Where are we going?”
“Nevada.”
“I thought we were going to Las Vegas?”
“That’s in Nevada.”
“Are we in Ne-va-da?”
“No, were in Texas.”
“You said we were going to Ne-va-da!!”
“We have to stop here first.”
“What’s it like?”
“It’s a desert.”
“How can there be a desert in America?!”

I was four-going-on-five and I drew pictures the whole plane ride over. I drew this flowering cactus with crayons and I was secretly upset when everyone thought it was a rose but I pretended like it was a rose because everyone told me I was such a good artist and I took after my grandpa. He had that framed and hung in his studio—the sprawling studio over the garage, packed with drafting tables and scorching lightboxes and pricy drawing equipment he let me play with, the studio I lived in for some months before we moved out. He’s the kind of guy that frames kids’ art and leaves it up for decades. Framing arrangements are one of his passions. I’m inclined to doubt it’s still hanging, as I’ve always considered myself the lost daughter. But it’s probably still there, because I know my grandpa, and he’s old and I guess all these years he thought it was me that never wanted to see the family again. Because my family might still love me, somewhere inside of them, but they’re fucked up enough to think it’s a ten-year-old’s responsibility to keep in touch.

My mom stayed home to sell all our stuff on the lawn and drive the rest of it out West in a Ryder truck, which was, at the time, a U-Haul for white trash. The cat, Spritz, wasn’t even in a cage. That motherfucker rode in the cabin the whole way there. The snake, Snickers, was in a pillowcase. I accused my mother of selling my prized Barbie Folding Funhouse at the garage sale. She has always denied it and I know she’s lying but I carry nothing but guilt for trying to make her feel guilty over that. Last year I found out that Rachel had begged for that toy but my mom told her she was too old for it and got it for me instead.

I can’t imagine my parents were together in Vegas long. I know now that they had been splitting even before we went out West but I can’t figure out if the move was an attempt to repair the marriage or if my mother was chasing him across the country so he couldn’t take me from her. I say “me” instead of “us” because with Rachel it’s weird.

When I was a freshman in a Michigan high school I wrote a poem about pink stucco houses. Really giant and ugly and poorly-designed box subdivisions full of fake pine trees, the kind of visual stand-ins for “suburbia” you’d see in any movie. Except they were all hot pink and peach and thick stucco. And the lawns—lawns! why were there lawns?!—were the brightest green ‘cause they were hardly even real. I wrote a poem about how the stucco was sharp and it would always make you bleed.

That’s what I think of when I think of Vegas: bloody knuckles, bloody stucco, fake air, fake grass, fake pine trees, fake palm trees, bald palm trees, real cactus quills in my butt. All-you-can-eat pancakes at Arizona Charlie’s and then stepping out of the conditioned air into the sun and puking on the sidewalk. (It’s why I don’t eat syrup anymore.) Eating so much lobster and prime rib ‘cause it was cheaper than groceries when the casinos just hope you’ll forget yourself on your way to the buffet. I could order a steak (medium rare) by the time I was five. The fear that everything in your environment is a half-second away from killing you: the heat, the sun, the spiders hiding in your shoes, thousands of adult men on vacations from their wives eying you weird ‘cause they know that kids that go missing in Vegas never get found in Vegas.

My mom and I moved out of my dad’s parents’ house—he never has—and moved from apartment to apartment then from couch to couch. One woman we stayed with locked us out and stole all of my toys and gave them to her daughter. The cops wouldn’t come so my mom took me to my dad’s, went back, and broke into the house to get my Mista Bear and whatever else she could grab. We spent the last month our two in Nevada staying on a futon in Rebel’s apartment, which was really a re-purposed motel. Rebel was eighteen and married, I spent most of my time playing on the balcony. It overlooked the UNLV campus. That was the summer “Don’t Speak” was playing everywhere, but my favorite song was still, naturally, “Don’t Look Back In Anger.” I had my first pair of high heels, black strappies with a half inch.

I experienced it as if it all made sense and was planned, controlled. But of course I know now that my mother was in crisis, isolated, needed to get the fuck out of that city and be with what family she had. She put everything we had in storage. My aunt talked to me on the phone before we flew back,
“We’re setting up a room for you here. What’s your favorite color?”
“Teal.”
“What color do you want us to paint your walls?”
“Black.”

They settled on a hot magenta dresser, painted just for me. They must have paid for that plane ticket, there’s no way my mother could have. We left in August of 1997 and we stepped off the plane in Detroit into one of the worst blizzards in years.

god damn it the ask reminds me of the rich girl from new jersey I went to college with who said “oh, you’re from Michigan? I’m so sorry you grew up so financially destitute. I hope you do better for yourself than your parents”… my dad has a phD.

my dad doesn’t have a phD

what are you doing in michigan

get outta here

Also, they say “pop” in Washington and much of Oregon, so, like … people from California have heard “pop” before.

Washington is California’s dad

Fresno, CA gets compared to Detroit in nasty ways and it pisses me off. I’ve never been to Detroit, but people act like it’s hell on earth. Same with Flint. Even internet ex-gf says gross shit about it. She’s from Davis, I believe.

Can you eat a full meal *in Fresno for $2 and live somewhere not-too-bad for $200/month? Because if so, I am sold.

* by full meal I mean “delicious regional fast food”

otherxcore asked: Does Michigan suck as much as my internet ex-gf claims it does? It looks scenic to me, but I live in a desert. Also, it still totally amuses me that you guys usually say "pop" instead of "soda." I used to make fun of her for it because I'm Californian and I can.

Honestly, no. It doesn’t. It’s economically one of the most fucked up states, (see: “poorest”) but it’s also close to (if not singularly) the easiest state to get by in if you don’t have money. Not because we have good welfare programs (we don’t, but many states have worse) but because there’s a culture of salvage and scrap and steal. Genesee County is nothing if not a place where any and all economic exchange happens on people’s lawns. That’s how I grew up; I could haggle with toothless dudes in their driveways* before I was old enough to know what a barcode is. It’s weird and gross but it’s also pretty beautiful. And everything is cheap.
*not being classist, just describing my family

Politically speaking, we have a terrible reputation. And for good reason. But, really, the conservatism (you know, uh, Timothy McVeigh) that gives us a bad name has historically excluded itself from electoral politics. It is literally, strictly, honest-to-God off-the-grid libertarians with guns. It’s really hard to explain my fascination with them to people who aren’t from this area, but they’re such an important part of the climate that I grew up in. (Sometimes MMM talks about that weird fascination with Michigan milita-types, too.)

Part of it has to do with how growing up in that political climate that de-emphasized a reliance on electoral politics, created a more volatile-feeling sense of democracy. Which is good, in some ways? I would say that this climate just doesn’t exist in the wealthy suburbs of Detroit, though.

Remember, also, that Michigan has one of the most radical histories of any state in the nation (in conjunction with the rest of the shore of Lake Michigan). We invented the UAW, we invented the labor union as we know it, we both invented and destroyed a particular socialist discourse that responded to industrialism, we practically invented industrialism, we pretty much invented late capitalism and the democratic-socialism/business unionism that responded to it. It’s good and bad, but not a lot of people outside of Michigan talk about it and how there wouldn’t be capitalism (or radicalism) in the U.S. as we know it without this. Consider the lives and careers of the Reuther brothers (as they parallel and diverge)—Walter, Victor, Roy—as sort of allegories for a totally bizarre political history. (If you want to complicate things even more, consider that we were home to Frank Murphy but also the Romneys, George Dondero, Coleman Young, the Boggs, etc. It’s weird and not always good and complicated but I think it says a lot about Michigan and the way we [again, along with Chicago] shaped the dominant conversation between marxism, anarchism, liberalism, and electoral politics.)

As much as I think it’s interesting to talk to outsiders about Michigan’s white culture, I’m constantly mad and confused by people that characterize this state as a white one. (Obviously “talking about white culture” is different from “erasing non-white culture” and I’m guilty of the same when I talk about, say, the South or whatever; and you can’t talk about how this state ended up in the racial position it is in without talking about the white culture of Oldsmobile plants and UAW and KKK and agricultural segregation and northern European mining and Frankenmuth.)

I live in a major regional immigration hub. When I taught (ugh) in this city’s public school system, there were at least 120 different languages represented as the home language spoken by the district’s students. It’s hard to qualify racial makeup of any city (I always use census tracts rather than stats), but the city where my mother lives (Flint) is around 60% African-American. But Flint was one of the most segregated cities in the U.S. (more so even than Detroit) for most of the twentieth century. (They didn’t pass a housing ordinance until ‘67 or ‘69, which is nuts.) So each block in Flint is still almost completely racially segregated. (My mother and one family of juggalos are the only white people in her neighborhood, but the neighborhood a mile or two away from that where I used to work was almost exclusively white.) (This is all neither here nor there, and might be the same everywhere, but I wrote pages and pages and pages about it back when I was still a good history major, and I can talk about it for ages).

But anyway, yeah: this state’s history has been defined, in my opinion, most by its complicated race relations, and yet we are pretty much known only as a white state. Or, you know, “a white state that got stuck with Detroit.” (Except, if you are to believe the media, there are no black people in Detroit. Just corpses, sexy abandoned buildings, and white college students with cameras.) (I was born in Pontiac, which is a fascinating post-GM town that is mostly non-white and has a non-white + straight-up white hillbilly industrial history and is very, very poor but which is in the middle of one of the richest, whitest counties in the U.S.)

And I talk a lot about agriculture. Of course there is no agriculture in the U.S. (anywhere) whose labor doesn’t come primarily from non-white migrant forces. But Michigan is the historical end point of one of the earliest and most influential streams of Mexican migrant laborers, who worked mostly in the sugar beet industry. (The development of sugar as an industry in the U.S. is close to the most important factor in creating our racialized immigration climate and in the history of Mexican labor in the U.S., and these communities were actually one of the major sparks in the reactionary white militia movement in Michigan’s thumb, but of course nobody knows about that because everyone likes to pretend like there are no Mexicans in rural Michigan which, um.) Traverse City has become, since the civil wars in Guatamala, Nicaragua, etc., one of the U.S.’s important Central American migrant destinations. The same children that famously pick tomatoes for fast food restaurants in Florida are also picking cherries and blueberries in Michigan’s fingertips.

Does this convince you that it’s great here?

See, I grew up in Vegas, so basically I will rhapsodize on any place that isn’t Vegas and I will mean it. I am kind of a dick about Michigan but there is so much I love about everywhere. I may not understand how a person could live without all the things I take for granted—(which is why I identify so much with MPLS, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Madison, and even Chicago, they share so many of these things)—but I think a lot of states are really great. When I’m making fun of people who live other places, what I’m really making fun of are people who don’t really live anywhere. City ex-pats without a sense of geography or history, and the flattening this creates. Fight for regionalism til death or maybe you should just die, you know? That’s how I feel.

I joke about how we’re a bunch of hill folk to everyone on the internet, but it’s mostly to make fun of the fact that everyone is so smug about living in Real Places but I dress, look, and eat better than alla y’all combined (COME AT ME) and I don’t have to sell my soul to do it.

But everyone knows that Pennsylvania is the best state. Even I’m willing to admit that.

(PS, everyone should talk to blair about geography, because blair knows everything about Detroit while I just know everything about every Poor Man’s Detroit, and blair has been everywhere for free or cheap and loves something about every state.)

ETA: I love deserts, though! And I’m fascinated by them! And I miss them! But I’ll save that for another time except to say that every time my dad and sister visit they’re like,
“Yeah, four kids died on schoolbuses this week. You know, from the heat.”
or
“The news was all, ‘another water alert! you might die today! might wanna stock up on Sunny-D!’”
and I am like WHY DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT YOUR GEOGRAPHY WAS NOT MEANT FOR HUMANS.

My sister’s an ex-traveler/crusty with an obsession with zombie apocalypse sort of narratives and full of post-apocalyptic plans. It always confuses me, because it honestly wouldn’t be that hard to survive if everything collapsed in Michigan, you know? But you’d be dead in four days if there was no electricity in Las Vegas.

Diamond REO Truck Division by michigandriveins

I like making jokes about cityfolk because I am also cityfolk. I live in the 39th most populous city in the midwest, thank you very much.