There's a sweetness in us that lives long past the dust

A couple of weeks ago I learned, in short succession, of the deaths of two people. Neither person was someone I knew personally, but both were people who had played some small part in my life, and both deaths moved me deeply.

The morning of November 12, 2018 started like any other Monday, and then everything changed when I saw a friend's Facebook post reporting the shocking news that Nikki Delamotte had been murdered.

As I said, Nikki was not someone I knew personally, but her name was very familiar to me. A local journalist, I'd seen her name many times on wonderfully written articles about Cleveland's music and arts and culture scenes. As time progressed on that Monday I saw more and more posts popping up on my Facebook feed from friends expressing their grief and horror at the event. Many of the posts contained a picture of a face that was familiar to me despite my never having known her. I went to her Facebook profile and saw that I had 34 mutual friends with Nikki. She'd probably shown up in my "suggested friends" at some point. She'd undoubtedly been to a number of concerts and other events I'd attended. The more I read about her, the more I wished I had gotten to know her.

I felt a deep sense of grief for Nikki, for her family, for all my friends who had known her, and for our community for losing such a special figure. As details came out of her tragic death, I felt sickened at what had happened - at 30 years old and with such a bright future ahead of her, Nikki had reconnected with an uncle of hers she had not seen in years, and had made plans to go hang out with him, and then, after entering her uncle's trailer, had been shot to death by that uncle before he turned the gun on himself. It's one of the saddest things I think I've ever heard.

This isn't a political post, but I have to mention it. I hate guns.

It's rare for me to be moved so deeply by the death of a single person who I did not know, but Nikki's death deeply moved me, especially because of all the tributes and remembrances I saw my friends post.

One of those posts helped lead me to the line of thought that made me want to write this blog entry.

I have a friend named Annie who I met in a rather unusual way. I met her because when Cara died Annie, then an undergraduate student at Case, reached out to me to ask if I'd be willing to be interviewed for an article in Cara's memory in the Case student newspaper. I gladly granted the request, and the article turned out to be quite a beautiful tribute. Since then, our paths have occasionally crossed. Annie is now a reporter for cleveland.com writing primarily about music, and in the past year especially we've run into each other at a number of concerts. The most recent of those was the Case radio station WRUW's Studio-A-Rama music festival held in October, at which we were both excited to see headliner Lucy Dacus.

Annie was a coworker of Nikki's and was very close to her. On November 13, Annie shared the Lucy Dacus song "Pillar of Truth" and wrote this on Facebook:

I just remembered and wanted to share.

This song brought Nikki some comfort when her grandma passed away. She even got to see Lucy perform it live, the same day as her grandma's memorial. I remember that she was excited that she made it to Cleveland in time for Lucy's performance, after spending the evening driving back from Toledo.

I don't know but maybe now it can bring us a little bit of comfort too.

"Pillar of Truth" is a heartrendingly beautiful song that Lucy had described as being written about her own grandmother, and I was taken back to that night in October when I had stood there mesmerized by Lucy Dacus's performance of that song (the final song of the night), and there in the crowd not far from me had been Annie, and Nikki, as well. And I thought of the feelings that Nikki must have had that night, and that Annie must now have, for the story reminded me so much of things I myself had experienced in 2015. Things that in some way simultaneously feel like they could have been just the other week or could have been a lifetime ago.

I thought of seeing Lady Lamb perform at the Grog Shop on July 28, 2015, the day after Cara's grandmother Margie passed away, and little over three months from Cara herself's passing. And how the day after the show I had shared the song "Ten" (the final song of the night) on Facebook, tagging both Cara and Gram in the post, and quoted the line, "There's a sweetness in us that lives long past the dust on our eyes when our eyes finally close." That live performance of that song gave me some comfort after Cara's grandmother, who had become to me like my own grandmother, passed away, and I thought that perhaps what Nikki had felt at that Lucy Dacus concert was a little something like what I had felt at that Lady Lamb concert.

And I thought of seeing Sufjan Stevens perform at the Masonic Auditorium on April 16, 2015. Cara was supposed to go to that concert with me but ended up not going because she didn't feel well. Our good friend Troy ended up going with me instead. Troy, as it happens, was also a good friend of Nikki's and posted beautiful tributes to her as well. Cara and I had a tradition running back to very early in our friendship where when I was at a concert of an artist Cara liked and Cara wasn't at the concert with me, I would call her on the phone during the concert so she could listen to a song. There's one Sufjan Stevens song that was especially meaningful to us, because it was our wedding recessional. So when Sufjan played "Chicago" (the final song of the night), I called Cara.

It was the last time I would ever do that, because she passed away barely more than a week later.

So I thought that perhaps what Annie felt, thinking back on sharing a special concert experience with her friend who it turned out was unexpectedly short for the world, was a little something like what I had felt thinking back on that Sufjan Stevens concert after Cara's death.

The next day, November 14, was when I learned of the other death. There's a radio show on WJCU, the John Carroll University station, called Beautiful Mess (for the Diamond Rio song of the same name), that airs every Wednesday from 6-8 pm, and because I'm usually driving home during that time frame I often have it on in the car. It's a country music show, playing a wide variety of country and related genres from a wide range of years. I've been a listener of the show, albeit a casual one, for probably five years now. Which is kind of funny because as a kid and into my early adult years I couldn't stand country music. But I've become much more open-minded about music in general, and although I don't love all country music (especially the sort you'd most tend to hear on modern country radio), there's a lot I do enjoy. And the show Beautiful Mess has been one of the things that has helped broaden my tastes in that direction.

Anyway, the show is hosted by a woman named Holly, whose age I don't know but who I'd guess is a bit younger than me. Over the years one of the things I've most enjoyed about her show is how she started occasionally having her dad on as a guest DJ, co-hosting the show with her, and eventually it became a regular thing. And between songs you'd get to hear this father and daughter talking about the music and the memories that went with it. It was just one of the sweetest things.

For the previous show or two, there had been a substitute DJ for the show instead of Holly, but I hadn't thought much of it (and I'm usually only listening to the show for ten or fifteen minutes if I'm simply driving straight home). On November 14 I was driving to Target before going home, meaning I'd be spending a longer time with the show. Holly was back, and after a song finished she started talking, and at first I was only half-listening to what she was saying, but then it struck me somehow that she seemed to be talking about her dad in the past tense, and this feeling of dread overtook me, and I gave the words coming out of my car speakers my rapt attention, and soon it was confirmed for me. Her dad was gone.

Already full of sorrow that day because of Nikki's recent death, the sorrow in me grew for the rest of my drive. I remember sitting behind the steering wheel staring at the road and just feeling this immense feeling of loss for this man I had never met. And at the same time there was something beautiful about the way that Holly was using the songs on her show to try to begin to work through that horrible loss.

I don't know the details of Holly's dad's passing, but I do know it was unexpected. In the subsequent weeks, she's continued to use the show as a tribute to her dad. This past Wednesday found me with an unusually large amount of driving to do in the 6-8 pm time slot, and I listened as Holly described how she was carrying on with playing music her dad had picked out for the coming weeks on the show. I smiled at the appearance of "Piazza, New York Catcher" by Belle and Sebastian (a surprising selection for a country-centered show), remembering seeing it live in concert with Cara. I don't know whether that song was one Holly or her dad picked out. Perhaps they had a memory involving it too. My strong sense of sorrow returned as I listened to Holly's show this week, but as I've written before, feeling sad is not necessarily a bad thing.

As you might have picked up on, the theme that's emerging here is that I'm struck by the way music helps connect us to loved ones who have left this world. I think it's a special power that music can have and it's almost hard to describe it.

I have a few other anecdotes that have reinforced this to me.

A few months ago, Karyn and I were watching John McCain's funeral on TV. I remember being struck by how, throughout the lengthy proceedings, McCain's wife Cindy's face betrayed little emotion. There was just one moment when tears were evident. It was during a performance of an especially meaningful song.

Earlier this year, Karyn and I were watching the Tony Awards. (That, incidentally, is something I never would have imagined myself doing before meeting Karyn, but I'm glad we did it.) By far the most moving moment of the night came when students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School drama department, months after the horrific gun massacre at their school, took the stage and performed "Seasons of Love" from the musical Rent. It was so powerful and so beautiful and I remember Karyn and me sitting there side by side on the sofa, both awestruck, with tears forming in our eyes.

There's something really profound about the effect music can have on us and the way it can help us connect to lost loved ones. I'm fascinated by this phenomenon. Why does music have this power? Why, come to think of it, do we even have music? It's actually quite easy to imagine an alternate reality in which humans had never developed music and society was otherwise much the same as it is (in contrast to, for instance, the written word, the lack of which would result in a tremendously different society). And yet music must be something that we've had for a very long time. It existed, in fact, long before there were any humans. We aren't the only species that sings songs - so do many birds, and some whales, to name a couple of diverse examples. I find that music has an almost mystical power, and although I wouldn't presume that it has the same effect on everyone, I know I'm far from alone in feeling this way.

I have countless other examples of songs, particularly during live performances, stirring deep emotion in me because of their connections with Cara. I've written about many such instances in the past and I'm not going to go back over them here, but I did want to share one other personal anecdote. My Aunt Donna, my mom's oldest sister, passed away early last year from multiple system atrophy, a cruel disorder of the nervous system that presents as similar to Parkinson's. The last time I visited her, just days before her passing, while I was there she asked her husband Dave to look up and play a song. The song was "Joy to the World" by Three Dog Night. Donna had requested that the song be played at her funeral. While listening to the song, Donna, who by that point had little remaining ability to control her muscles, was lightly moving her hand and head in time to the music. One of the other people in the room asked Donna if she was remembering dancing to the song.

"I was remembering joy," Donna corrected her faintly, for speaking was also becoming a struggle for her. Then she looked at me and continued, "Joy was Cara's middle name, wasn't it?"

I answered in the affirmative. "I'm going to dance with Cara in heaven," Donna said, one of the most touching things anyone has ever said to me. And I'd like to think she was right.

Year of the cats

On the evening of November 17, 2017, when I was walking into (sadly now closed) wine bar La Cave du Vin at the corner of Euclid Heights and Coventry for my first date since the traumatic ending of my previous relationship, I don't think I'd have predicted that one year later I would be celebrating the anniversary of that date.

And yet last weekend found Karyn and me in Chicago, happily commemorating our first anniversary.

The two of us have done a whole lot of traveling together in that year. The list of destinations for our trips includes: Columbus, Detroit, Washington DC, Toronto, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Pymatuning Lake, Sandusky, Steubenville (yes, Steubenville - a day trip for a concert by Typhoon's Kyle Morton, and one of my favorites of the whole bunch), Put-in-Bay, Los Angeles, and now Chicago. Quite a year of traveling, and the year was quite a journey for both of us in other ways too. This last trip was perhaps the best of all, so I decided to write about it.

Karyn likes to come up with hashtags for trips. For this trip she decided on #yearofthecats, which I quite liked. The meaning of the "year" part is obvious; as for the "cats" part, many of you are probably aware that we have a lot of cats. Eight cats, to be precise - my Eponine and Gavroche, plus Karyn's Grady, Hogan, Rupert, Martin, Rusty, and Tortellini. One big happy family!

We said goodbye to our cats and headed out to Chicago on a cold and windy Friday morning. The weather we had for the weekend was not particularly nice, but you don't go to Chicago in November for the weather. At least the high winds of Friday did not stick around for the rest of the weekend.

One of the big themes of the weekend was delicious food. This started with a brief stop at Eataly after we finished getting settled into our posh accommodations at the Loews Downtown Chicago hotel. Eataly is a massive two-story market full of Italian food for eating in, taking out, or grocery shopping. We were both in awe of the place. We didn't have much time to spend there that day so we vowed we'd return before we had to leave town. That we did on Sunday afternoon, our last excursion before departing, and I'm pretty sure that Sunday visit led to the largest grocery bill of my life, but I have no regrets!

After we grabbed a quick bite, we headed to a nearby barber shop where Karyn got a haircut. She was pleased to find a place that did not discriminate by gender on pricing.

I wanted to go eat in Chinatown at some point during the weekend, something I've greatly enjoyed doing on several previous Chicago visits, so we caught a train there early Friday evening. Before dinner, I decided I wanted to stop in at a gift shop I'd previously visited with Cara. I recalled how on that previous visit, we had bought one of Cara's numerous Chococat plushes. Chococat is another character from Sanrio, the company responsible for Hello Kitty, but Chococat is not nearly as well known. Cara adored Chococat, who she nicknamed "Boco." I honestly did not go into that shop last weekend with the intention of purchasing more Chococat merchandise, but once inside I naturally started looking for Chococats as I always had when visiting any sort of Asian gift shop either with Cara or by myself in search of a gift for Cara. And I was saddened to see that there were absolutely no Chococat plushes in the shop.

As I said, Chococat is not as popular as Hello Kitty, and there was never a great abundance of different Chococat products at any given time. But it now appears that Sanrio has almost completely stopped producing Chococat merchandise. And that makes me very sad.

Karyn has also come to like Chococat. We have a gigantic Chococat pillow on the sofa and she has said that it's seemingly impossible to lie on it and not fall asleep. Seeing my desire to find a Chococat in the gift shop, Karyn joined my search, and I have to say I was deeply moved by her great determination to find something, anything, with that familiar wide-eyed feline face on it.

Ultimately we did succeed in finding three Chococat-branded items: a phone case, a pocket-sized notebook, and, best of all (and discovered by Karyn), my new wallet!

You see, for most of this year I have been saying that I needed a new wallet because my old one (a pretty standard-looking leather wallet) is very worn out. And from time to time we'd be out somewhere and see some wallets and I'd look at them but I hadn't come across one that caught my fancy. So when Karyn presented this wallet to me in that Chinatown gift shop I instantly realized that this was exactly what I had been looking for. I think she was surprised at first at my intent to actually use a Chococat wallet as my everyday wallet. "You're a very confident man," she said. True, I suppose.

It goes without saying that it's because of how much Cara liked Chococat, but it's still hard to exactly put into words just how happy it made me to get this wallet, and I'm very grateful to Karyn for finding it. I told her that it might be one of my favorite things I've ever bought, and I really meant that.

So finding the Chococat wallet was for me one of the highlights of the trip, but it was one of many highlights. The stop at the gift shop was followed by a delicious dinner at MingHin Cuisine, and after dinner, because it was right there I could not resist getting a bubble tea from Joy Yee, as I've done on more than one previous visit to Chicago's Chinatown. We then headed back to the hotel.

Saturday was a very busy day for the two of us and it was a very wonderful day as well. It started with another great meal, breakfast at Cupitol Coffee & Eatery. After a brief stop back at the hotel, we headed out for a day spent wandering the streets of Chicago and enjoying various holiday festivities. It was a dreary day, and a light rain fell for much of the morning and early afternoon, leading us to remark that at least it wasn't windy like the day before.

We began the journey from our hotel by heading south across the river and toward Millennium Park. Now, the one unfortunate thing about our hotel's location was the skyscraper obnoxiously and aggressively emblazoned with the letters TRUMP staring across the river at us. As we crossed the river, Karyn paused to take a photo of the skyscraper, its upper levels disappearing into the misty sky. It would have been quite a pretty sight if not for those letters:

Karyn posted the image to Facebook and called it "The Tower of Kefka in real life." She had to explain to me the Final Fantasy VI reference she was making, because I knew nothing about that video game. As she told me, Kefka was the game's villain and was an evil, clownish, self-obsessed nihilist character who pretty much destroyed the world, and built a massive tower from the wreckage of all that he'd destroyed. And apparently in the early part of the game Kefka seemed like a minor threat worthy more of mockery than anything else, but then in a surprising twist he rose to power and went on to wreak enormous destruction. Good comparison, right? I really enjoyed listening to Karyn describe this as we walked.

At Millennium Park we of course enjoyed seeing "The Bean," although the weather was far less than ideal for taking in the scenery.

Fortunately our main reason for visiting Millennium Park that day, the Millennium Park Art Market, was held inside a giant tent. We went there with the intention of doing some holiday shopping and also buying something for our new apartment. We found plenty of great offerings to choose from! I really was amazed by the tremendous display of creativity and talent and effort from all the art students whose wares were displayed. I was also struck by how much of the artwork, almost all produced by people younger than Karyn and me, clearly reflected the world in which our generation and the generation after ours is growing up. The uncertain future in a society and a planet plagued by climate change and growing inequality and other ills. The technological advances that have so dramatically changed the ways in which we communicate and interface with the world. The never-ending struggle for basic human rights and dignity fought by members of various marginalized groups and the growing sense of solidarity among members of those groups and their allies in a nation where reactionary forces have seized power and are desperately and viciously trying to stem and even reverse that tide of progress.

We ended up making purchases from a number of the artists. When we checked out I remarked that the total bill was actually not bad at all for all the great stuff we were getting. And I always like to support small independent artists like those at the market. One of my favorite items we bought was this poster by a young woman named Meha Ray:

She has a series of robot illustrations and Karyn suggested that she should make a book based on her robot character.

Our next stop after the art market was Macy's, where Karyn suggested we go get our picture taken with Santa Claus. While waiting in line, we were amused by the fact that we were the only ones without children, but it was fun! When Santa asked what we wanted for Christmas, Karyn said a Cleveland Browns Super Bowl win and I said world peace. Santa said world peace might be easier.

We ended up spending quite a while in Macy's, where we both bought (among other things) much-needed new winter gloves. By the time we returned to the street, it had thankfully stopped raining. Our next stop was Christkindlmarket, a German-themed outdoor holiday market with plenty more artwork and plenty more delicious food. The cheese melted directly off the wheel onto a toasted baguette was a revelation.

We couldn't resist making a few more purchases, including these adorable hand-carved wooden animals, a cat and a snail:

(I picked the snail because it was the closest thing to a slug. If anyone ever comes across a wooden sea slug, please let me know.)

The main attraction that weekend in Chicago was the Magnificent Mile Lights Festival and we next made our way to the Magnificent Mile on Michigan Avenue where we joined the throngs who were waiting for the festive parade and the accompanying lighting of the trees. It really was quite cool to see all the Christmas lights on our block's worth of trees simultaneously spring to life at the command of Mickey Mouse who was passing by on a parade float. I also greatly enjoyed seeing the high school marching bands in the parade (including one from Akron) and, of course, Santa Claus and his reindeer on the final float. It was a chilly night to be standing outside for that long, but we had fun! One of my favorite parts, to be honest, was seeing the excited reactions of all the children near us.

After the parade we returned to our hotel, but our busy day was still not over. The last item on the agenda was a late night anniversary dinner at Gilt Bar, a restaurant Karyn had found. She said that she had picked it because, from the pictures, it seemed to have the most similar vibe to La Cave du Vin's dimly lit interior. It was a good choice! The roasted garlic appetizer was amazing, our salad and our pasta entrees were great, and our meal concluded with an enormous and delicious slice of carrot cake on the house. While dining, our conversation turned to everything we had been through together over the course of that year. It really is remarkable. And the trip to Chicago was a perfect way to celebrate that year.

At some point earlier in the weekend, we had walked by the original Pizzeria Uno on Ohio Street in downtown Chicago and then just up the street its sister restaurant Pizzeria Due. My thoughts instantly turned to my first visit to Chicago, for a cross country meet as a sophomore in college in the fall of 2002, and how the team had dined together at Pizzeria Due (Uno having had a longer wait). I looked up from the street and could see the room where I remembered sitting all those years ago. Karyn wondered what I was looking at and I explained it to her and how it was hard to believe all that time had passed.

In March 2011 Cara and I took a trip to Chicago and I wrote a blog post about it and one thing I wrote, regarding our visit to the park where the aforementioned cross country meet was held, was: "Going to a place that you've visited before and remember well but haven't seen in years is an interesting experience. Memories rush back at you. In a way, I'm a different person now than I was then, yet there's obviously a very strong connection with my past self." That's even more true now. I guess I've always had that keen interest in staying in touch with my own past. But it all has an extra poignancy now after all the things that have happened in my life in between that 2011 visit and today. And reading something you wrote many years ago can be a similarly interesting experience to visiting a place you haven't seen in years, one of the reasons I'm glad I've kept this blog.

My and Karyn's visit to Chicago had to end on Sunday, but the good times and good eating were not quite over when we got up that morning. For brunch we decided to try a restaurant called Beatrix and there we found what was not only perhaps the best meal of the weekend, but also almost undoubtedly the best customer service we've ever experienced. Karyn decided to order the pecan French toast special, while I opted for lemon pancakes and a side of brown sugar bacon. Before ordering, Karyn had told our waitress (named Kelsey) that she was thinking about the cauliflower grits, which Kelsey had recommended as her favorite. When our food came out, the first item was the cauliflower grits. We hadn't ordered that, we said, surprised. The rest of the order was correct, so the server returned to the kitchen with the cauliflower grits. A minute later Kelsey came back to the table with the grits and explained that she had wanted us to be able to try them, so she had added them (the full size plate) to our order, and they were on her!

And that wasn't all. We both expressed our tremendous gratitude, and after we finished eating Karyn told Kelsey how it was our anniversary weekend and this meal had been a perfect conclusion to it, and then Kelsey brought us a slice of pecan pumpkin pie to go, also on her. It really was an extra special way to cap off a very special weekend.

After brunch we made that final excursion to Eataly, and then headed to the car and made the drive back home to Cleveland, where we returned very tired but happy to our new apartment and our eight cats.

Life is a roller coaster

When I was in seventh grade, one of the major school projects was the writing of an autobiography. Mine was entitled Life is a Roller Coaster, or at least I'm pretty sure it was; I don't have a physical copy and the computer file I have does not include the cover. But I can still picture in my mind the cover art I drew, a roller coaster with the train coming toward the reader and a cut-out photo of my face pasted onto the body of the front seat passenger.

Edit - thanks to my mother for sending me this picture:

This post is about both that autobiography and roller coasters.

I read the autobiography recently for the first time in many years and decided I'd like to share some of the more interesting tidbits. It's fascinating for me to be able to look back at how I viewed my life at the age of 12 and I'm really glad I still have all my old computer files from over the years.

So here are some noteworthy moments from my seventh grade autobiography:

• I listed a number of "firsts" from my very early life. "The first time I slept all night was August 13-14, 1983" (I was born June 20) and because August 13 is my dad's birthday I'm sure my parents probably said that it was a birthday present from me! "The first time I saw snow was November 4, 1983." I've always loved snow so I do think that was a significant first, funny because November 4 is also my dating anniversary with Cara.
• I mentioned that I didn't have any nicknames "unless you count Jeff" (the content of most of the book is clearly a series of responses to questions that were asked in the assignment prompt), but that my dad used to call me "Buddy" a lot (something I remembered) and that at one point my sister had even thought that was my name (that part I had forgotten until reading it)!
• Here's a story I've told to many people over the years: "My earliest memory is from when I was three.  My best friend was Joe Delphia, a kid who lives on our street.  He is only a few weeks younger than I but he's a grade below me.  We went to preschool together.  Anyway, I remember that we were always arguing about one subject.  It was actually quite humorous.  I said that we were "tree," while he said we were "free."  My mom finally told us that we were three.  I probably remember this because it was funny."
• My response to a prompt about what influenced me the most cracks me up: "Nothing really influences me a whole lot right now.  I am probably influenced by my peers more than anything else.  I am also influenced by my parents, teachers, and the media.  What really influences me the most is my own brain.  This is probably true because I am an intelligent person and I know, for the most part, what I should and shouldn't do." Okay, Mr. Smart Guy!
• I correctly foresaw my career path: "For my career I would like to be a scientist.  There are a lot of different kinds of scientists, and I don't know which one I would want to be.  I would want to be a scientist because I enjoy science in school and am very interested in science-related stuff.  I would probably want to be some kind of biologist.  I really enjoy observing animals.  Other organisms can be interesting, too." Looking back, I think ever since middle school I had a vague sense that I might become a biologist, but there was never any moment where I thought, That's definitely what I want to do! It was more that I never felt any other strong calling so I just continued on that path, perhaps due more to inertia than anything else. But it is work that I've come to enjoy.
• In one part of the book I was asked to look ahead to what my life might be like at the ages of 20 and 40. At 20 I of course thought I would be in college. At 40? "Since that's so far away, I really don't have a very good idea.  By that time, I would probably be married and have kids." I'm sure it would have been very difficult for me back then to comprehend the path my life would take, but 40 is still five years away and that married with kids part could still end up being true.
• Also from the age 40 prediction: "I would still like to use the computer.  I would probably be on the Internet." Probably.
• And this struck me: "I'll probably always still be a kid at heart." I think there was a lot of truth in that. Karyn has told me that she thinks I'm still like a kid in some ways (good ways, I think!). It's interesting that at the age of 12 I was able to see that about my future self. I suppose most everyone retains some element of still being a kid at heart, but I feel I have more than most.
• The last chapter is devoted to interviews with three relatives. One of the interviewees was my Great-Uncle Bob. The last question in the interview was clearly something along the lines of, "What major changes have you seen in your lifetime?" My summary of Bob's response: "He has seen that people have gotten meaner and more skeptical, and says that civility is disappearing from human intercourse.  He has also found that the revolution in communications is altering the entire planet, in both good and bad ways." I'm sure many would read these words from over two decades ago as prophetic, and I do think there is a lot of truth in those words, but I also think there's another aspect of the apparent decline in "civility" that a lot of people would rather not consider. Back in the days when society was more "civil," who was it more civil for? A lot of people would undoubtedly say there is less civility today than there was in the 1950s. What if you could go back in time and ask Emmett Till's family how "civil" society was back then? Our country has always been a place in which certain groups of people have not had the full set of human rights that others take for granted. The history of our country has been a long struggle to extend the principle of "equal justice under law" to more and more people, and inevitably when marginalized groups gain rights, there's a backlash from some in the more privileged group. We're seeing that right now and it's no coincidence that it's coming in the wake of the first non-white President and the first woman major party nominee. I think a lot of the reason society used to seem "more civil" was because the people to whom society was not civil had much less ability to make their voices heard. And now that those people are more able to speak loudly, the reactionary voices seeking to keep the underprivileged in their place have likewise become louder in response.

Those are the main observations I wanted to share about my autobiography, save one, which is that the main thing that comes across from the autobiography is that I really loved roller coasters. There are several places where I mentioned my love for roller coasters, and the chapter "The Best Day of My Life" describes my family's visit to the Cedar Point amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio. My passion for, and knowledge about, the thrill rides is very evident from the way I wrote about them (it's also evident to me that my writing in this section was influenced by posts on the Usenet group rec.roller-coaster that I avidly read in those days). Here's a description of my ride on the Magnum XL-200: "After climbing 205 feet we dropped 196 at a 60 degree angle.  The top speed at the bottom is 72 miles per hour, and it seems faster because of all the wind you create.  The next hill is taller than most first hills at 150 or so feet.  The second drop goes into a tunnel before going over another hill and then into a pretzel-like turn around.  After another tunnel you turn and go over the return hills.  As you fly over them the only thing stopping you from being ejected from the train is your lap bar.  After another tunnel you finally hit the brakes before slowly coasting to the station.  It's a pretty intense ride!"

One of my predictions of my life at age 40 was "I would still be into roller coasters then." So it's interesting that, although my passion for roller coasters continued through high school and college, at some point I just... stopped going to amusement parks. At some point early in my getting to know Cara I told her that I really liked roller coasters and she told me they gave her motion sickness, and because we did most everything together, trips to amusement parks just didn't happen. It's not like Cara made me stop. I remember her encouraging me to go to Cedar Point with another friend some time. I just never did. It's funny how without me even really thinking about it, something that was once my very favorite thing to do gradually just ceased to be a part of my life. People's interests can change over time, of course, but that's not really what this was, because I never actually stopped liking roller coasters. I guess I let myself forget how much I liked them.

Two months after Cara died I took a trip to Denver for a Belle and Sebastian concert at Red Rocks and while there I went to Lakeside Amusement Park and rode its classic Cyclone roller coaster, my first ride on a coaster in many, many years. It was fun, but for whatever reason it didn't spark a resurgence of my roller coaster fanaticism. (I also remember it giving me a mild backache.)

This past summer, the weekend before my family's Adirondack vacation started, Karyn suggested we take a little getaway to visit Pymatuning Lake on the Ohio/Pennsylvania border, a place she'd been many times with her family. She mentioned that if she had a tent we could camp on the trip, which surprised me, because I remembered her saying early in our relationship that she wasn't into camping. I was glad to hear she now wanted to try it! "I have a tent," I said. Then Karyn looked up campgrounds in the area of our trip and decided on a place called Camperland in Conneaut Lake, PA, which was very fortuitous. I didn't realize until we arrived that the campground was across the street from the old Conneaut Lake amusement park, home of the classic Blue Streak wooden roller coaster that I remembered reading about in my old Usenet browsing days. I also didn't realize that the amusement park was open; I thought I had remembered it shutting down and I found out later that it had shut down for a year earlier this decade but it had since been brought back to operation.

The whole trip was great. Karyn was surprised at how much it turned out she actually liked camping. We also did a little bicycling and hiking. And since the amusement park and the Blue Streak were right there, I decided I wanted to make a stop there before we drove home, and Karyn agreed. At $10 for an unlimited rides pass, it was an affordable little afternoon excursion. Karyn did not go on the Blue Streak because some roller coasters, especially old wooden ones, are painful for her, but we did enjoy a few other rides and mini golf together. For my first ride on the Blue Streak I got in the back seat, which I remembered very well from my coaster enthusiast past would provide the most "airtime," and settled in for the ride.

The train exited the station, dipped slightly into a dark, winding tunnel, and then started its climb up the lift hill and out from among the trees. At 78 feet high, the ride isn't a terribly imposing structure compared to some of the behemoths at Cedar Point, but it still provides its share of thrills! I tend to scream on roller coasters, but it's usually not because I can't help myself - it just makes it more fun. The speed of the Blue Streak's first drop took me by surprise, though, and I let out an involuntary yelp as we plummeted downward and I felt myself lifted from my seat. As the train traversed its out-and-back circuit, that familiar old giddy feeling washed over me. I ended up going on the ride three times (the line was quite short), and Karyn said she liked seeing how excited I was about the roller coaster.

I guess I had a little epiphany that day. I still really like roller coasters. In fact, in certain ways the thrill of my newest favorite pastime, mountain biking, can be similar to the thrill of riding a roller coaster. For all those years I had left behind 12-year-old me's most favorite thing, but there was no reason it couldn't still be part of my life.

The next week I left for the Adirondack family vacation. Going to the Adirondacks with my family was another thing I wrote about in my autobiography. And in addition to swimming and canoeing and hiking in the mountains, one of my favorite parts of those trips was going to the Great Escape amusement park in Lake George: "On another day, which was one of the best days of my life, we went to the Great Escape amusement park.  I rode the Comet roller coaster five times."

I'd been to the Great Escape several other times in high school and college, but despite my family's near annual trips to the Adirondacks, it had been over a decade since I last visited the amusement park. On this latest trip, my rides on the Blue Streak fresh in my memory, I decided I'd return to one of those favorite places from my childhood. The Comet is a fantastic ride. Like the Blue Streak, it's a classic wooden coaster, but taller and longer and faster and filled with more thrills. With typical waits of less than five minutes, I rode the Comet sixteen times that day (I'm pretty sure my all-time record was eighteen) and it really did make me feel like a kid again.

I also rode the Great Escape's other four operating coasters once each (the Alpine Bobsled was shut down that day) and quite frankly none of them were at all remarkable, but to me the Comet alone makes admission to the park worth it. As a bonus there's a water park included in the same admission, so I spent a little time there. Water slides were another thing I loved as a kid and had not experienced (beyond fairly small slides at swimming pools) in many years. There has been some great innovation in water slide design since I had last visited a water park. In a new style of slide called a "drop slide," riders stand upright in an enclosed chamber, and then after a countdown the floor drops away and you plummet straight downward into the slide. Not for the faint of heart, but I absolutely loved it.

Not long after I returned from vacation, Karyn and I took a day trip to the water park at Cedar Point, Cedar Point Shores (although I still think of it as Soak City). We had a great time. When I was growing up, I loved going to the large water park called Wyandot Lake (now Zoombezi Bay) near Columbus. This took me back to those days in a wonderful way.

During the drive across the causeway to the park, the sight of the roller coasters looming in the distance recalled in my mind the incredible excitement I felt early in the morning on August 2, 1995, "the best day of my life" up to that point. And as we enjoyed the water park I also enjoyed watching the trains on the Magnum roar past and those of other coasters cresting hills and traversing loops in the distance. And I knew I wanted to go there again too. Luckily, I was able to get an incredible discount from work, only $25 for admission plus parking. Two weeks ago Karyn and I went on another camping trip, this time to East Harbor State Park. It was an all around great weekend that included a nice day riding our bikes and seeing various attractions at Put-in-Bay. My favorite? Crystal Cave, the largest known geode in the world. I'd had no idea such a thing existed until I read about it on a Put-in-Bay tourism website that day. It was magical to be able to stand in that little underground cavern surrounded by crystals on all sides.

And on Sunday we went to Cedar Point, and although going to Cedar Point no longer merits "best day of my life" status, I had a great time again. Despite the fact that I lost one of the earpieces from my glasses on Top Thrill Dragster. It's a bit of a complicated story; ask me if you want the details.

Roller coasters aren't my most favorite thing in the world anymore, but that's more because there are other things I've become even more passionate about rather than me liking roller coasters less. I'm very happy that I was able to reconnect with my childhood in this way - with help from Karyn.

Life is a roller coaster. I'm struck by the fact that when I used that phrase as the title of my seventh grade autobiography, I had no real idea of what was signified by that comparison. I had no idea what a roller coaster my life would be. It's been quite a ride so far, and I don't know where that ride is going in the future, but I'm glad I'm taking it.

Home

I've been thinking this year about what makes a place a desirable one for me to call home.

I've lived in Ohio for my whole life. One year in Canton, seventeen years in Columbus, and now seventeen years in Cleveland. Undoubtedly that's molded my views, what I find comfortable in a place to live. I wonder to what extent those views are inherent to me, and to what extent they're a result of where I've lived, or of life experiences that I could have had no matter where I lived.

My sister has lived in New York City for more than a decade. Earlier this year I visited her there and I found it to be a great place to visit but my suspicions were confirmed that I could never see myself living there. Even if the higher cost of living could be ignored, there's one very important obstacle to my ability to enjoy living in such a place. I really, really like spending time in nature. I've realized that it's very beneficial to my mental health. New York is a huge city that is basically devoid of anything resembling wilderness. Spending time in nature for an NYC resident requires going far out of one's way. It's not something you can just casually do after work. I'd go crazy in a place like that.

Two weeks ago I returned from a trip to another, very different, part of New York State - my family's annual Adirondacks vacation. I love visiting the Adirondacks every year. The mountains and lakes and trees and air are refreshing to the soul. In fact, I realized that there are three places now that have come to feel at least a little something like home to me. Cleveland, first and foremost. And Columbus, of course. The Adirondacks are the third. (And yes, there was a period of time last year when Nashville also felt like home, but that's obviously no longer the case.)

I have two interests that I feel especially passionate about, though - nature is one, and music is the other. Although I could imagine myself living in the Adirondacks (setting aside the fact that there's not much there in my current line of work) more than I could in New York City, the huge reduction in concertgoing opportunities would be hard to bear. And although the Lake Placid dining scene has improved a great deal since my family first vacationed there, I'd also miss the many wonderful restaurants of all different cuisines I can frequent back home.

New York City, of course, has far more to offer in the realms of live music and dining than Cleveland. And the Adirondacks have more nature to offer than Northeast Ohio. So for someone who is strongly pulled in those two conflicting directions of city life and outdoor life, Cleveland is a nice middle ground.

It's not just Cleveland, though, that fits me so well. It's the specific location I now call home, in Cleveland Heights, a large suburb just east of the city proper. I live on a lovely street lined with large trees (much like the one on which I grew up) in a neighborhood where I can easily walk to numerous restaurants and bars, a drugstore, a grocery store, a bakery, a movie theater, and a library. At the same time, just a mile away from my house, and easily accessible within minutes by bicycle or on the way home during my short commute from work, is a gorgeous park system, running along the course of the Doan Brook waterway. Roughly marking the border between Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights are two beautiful lakes (Horseshoe Lake and Lower Shaker Lake) at which great blue herons and other wildlife can be spotted, and in between the two lakes, there is the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes.

The early evening moon reflecting off of Horseshoe Lake.

A wintery scene at the Nature Center.

Lower Shaker Lake at sunset.

My mountain bike leaning against a tree in front of a very calm Lower Shaker Lake reflecting the sky.

The lakes are beautiful, but undoubtedly my favorite part of the Doan Brook waterway is Roxboro Ravine, a narrow gorge that takes the brook downhill from Lower Shaker Lake. I've written about the ravine before, on more than one occasion, and in fact dubbed it my favorite place in the world. Cleveland is known for its great "Emerald Necklace" of Metroparks surrounding the city, and the Metroparks are certainly a reason for civic pride, but the ravine, a park hidden in plain sight in the middle of a residential neighborhood and that most people don't know exists, is to me more wonderful than anything the Metroparks have to offer. One can walk down a trail just tens of meters away from an at times busy street and instantly be transported to a place that feels like it could be miles away from civilization.

Certainly there are more remote and more secluded and yes, more beautiful natural locations that I've visited in my many travels, including in the Adirondacks, but there's just something extra special about the ravine existing in this rugged and gorgeous state right smack dab in the midst of densely populated inner ring suburbs, and the instant escape it provides from city life. Due to the thick tree cover, steep walls, and rushing water, there are places in the ravine where if one didn't know better, it would be easy to think there were no other humans for miles around. I've had so many great times there over the years, going running, hiking, riding my mountain bike, and (of course) getting engaged to Cara.

The ravine and the lakes are truly a treasure, cherished by many who live in the area. So it might be hard to imagine the threat they faced half a century ago. A plan was put forward that, had it come to fruition, would have made the Heights a far different place from the one I now love to call home.

In 1964, Cuyahoga County Engineer Albert Porter proposed the creation of a new system of freeways to connect the eastern suburbs to downtown Cleveland. These freeways would have run through Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights - the Clark Freeway would have run almost directly along the path of Doan Brook.

I have been aware of this history for some time, but recently, perhaps due both to my continuously growing love for Doan Brook and my growing unease about all the troubling changes happening in our country and world, I've taken a greater interest in learning more about this history. I happened upon the existence of a limited run 2011 book called The Legacy of Clark Freeway Fighters that recounts the history with a focus on interviews with the now elderly women who took the lead in fighting the freeway plan, and I quickly decided to track down and purchase a copy for myself. Once I had the book in hand, I fittingly took it after work one day to the spot by the ravine's waterfall where I've come to enjoy doing so much of my leisure reading. As it turned out, a seemingly endless torrential downpour stranded me under the rock overhang there for almost two hours (much longer than it took me to read the book), but I didn't really mind. I had nowhere else I needed to be, and it was great fun to experience the sights and sounds of the storm, including the sudden rapid expansion of the waterfall, as well as the two very wet raccoons I spotted in a tree on the other side of the ravine.

Getting back to the Legacy book... as I sat there, and began reading the book, and looked at the map of the proposed freeways on one of the early pages...

...I suddenly felt overcome with emotion, as I thought about the wonderful community I call home, and the fact that one of the freeways on that map would have run a stone's throw away from the waterfall by which I sat, and another of the freeways would have run pretty much right through or next to the house in which I live. In one of my recent posts, I wrote, "It's absurd the extent to which our society has prioritized fast automobile travel over so many other things that are so much more important." In that post my focus was on the lives lost as a result of that excess prioritization of fast automobile travel, but those lives are just a part of the "so many other things that are so much more important." I'm so, so grateful to the residents of the community who knew their homes and parks were more important than the ability to get downtown a few minutes faster and who got together and organized and succeeded in stopping the freeway plan. And not only did they stop a negative outcome, they turned it into an additional positive outcome, as the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes was intentionally created at the site of a proposed freeway interchange to help demonstrate the value of what would be lost if the freeways were built.

It was the women of the community, members of garden clubs and civic organizations, "little ladies in tennis shoes" as they called themselves, who took the lead in the fight, and it was a wonderful thing that the editors of this book were able to obtain (via interviews conducted by students at The Intergenerational School in Cleveland) and share the decades later perspectives of some of those women. I'd like to share with you a few of my favorite quotes from the interviews.

"I just couldn't believe that they would put a freeway through there. It was too beautiful of a park.... Many people who lived east of Shaker Heights and beyond just couldn't wait for the freeway to be built because they wanted to hop onto it and whiz downtown.... It is a challenge to get other people to appreciate nature because they're accustomed to looking at it but not seeing it." - Kay Fuller

"The whole thing is just unthinkable and Albert Porter, then County Engineer, boasted that he was not afraid of a bunch of Shaker Heights matrons being able to interfere with his freeway. He was stomped on in the end. I think it was the first time in many people's lives that they realized that they could do something.... I think that it should be evident to young people that with a well-organized protest - and this was very well-organized with lots of people with expertise in many areas - you can achieve a lot. The lesson is you can't say, 'I can't possibly do that.' or 'We can't possibly stop that.'" - Gloria Reske

"Activism was in the air. The Civil Rights Movement was inspiring to everybody. The fact that there were people out there who were fighting for their rights, and who were marching, and really taking a position, often at great risk to themselves, was a model for us. If they can do that, what are we doing sitting around doing nothing, twiddling our thumbs? When people were so active in defense of their rights, how could we just sit?" - Kathy Barber

"My mother was a tremendous nature lover and we would drive down to her hometown in Wellington, which we thought of, as little girls, as a very long trip - it was 60 miles and she liked to go the hilliest way. We would get to the top of a hill and she'd stop the car and gasp, 'Let's just look at this beautiful view!' This sort of excitement about beauty was a big part of her life and that carried over to me and I hope to my children." - Sally Burton

I'll be forever grateful to those "little ladies in tennis shoes" for standing up for what was right and for helping preserve and shape for the future the amazing place I now call home. Their actions and the effects of those actions are a lesson for us all of the importance of activism, and it's a lesson that's especially important today. We all have a role to play in deciding what the world in which we live and in which our children will grow up looks like. Not all such actions will be successful, but if no one takes action on an issue, failure is assured - you never know until you try. And in a world with so many big and seemingly consuming threats, the Freeway Fighters remind us that even at the small local level, people working together can make a meaningful difference.

It does occur to me that the Freeway Fighters had advantages that many activists don't. It saddens me to think of all the other communities, disproportionately populated by people with less wealth and darker skin, that have been destroyed by America's obsession with freeway building. How many other places with homes and parks just as beautiful as those in my neighborhood have been torn apart so that people who lived somewhere else could "hop onto" a freeway and "whiz downtown"?

(It's also worth noting that the Shaker Lakes are not natural lakes but were created by the Shakers who settled in this area in the 19th century - so human beings are capable of shaping their environments for the better as well as for the worse.)

Near the end of the book is a short essay titled "Proving That Trend is Not Destiny" by David Beach, director of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History's GreenCityBlueLake Institute. It's a great distillation of the issues that I want to highlight in this post so I'm going to quote extensively from it:

In a narrow sense, Albert Porter was right. In the '60s he was the Cuyahoga County Engineer, and when he looked at Cleveland and the eastern suburbs he saw that there was going to be a mess if more roads were not built.

With his rational, engineer's mind, he studied projections of population migration and increasing traffic flows. He saw that the east side was going to need more road capacity to keep traffic flowing smoothly - a lot more capacity. Indeed, the east side would need enormous freeways in multiple locations, so everyone would have easy freeway access.

The overriding concern was "the convenience of the motoring public," as the highway planners were fond of saying. Our whole society had to change so more people could drive more cars faster. And this made perfect sense if you cared more about speeding through places than the quality of places - if your vision of "progress" was the development of a sprawling, frenetic, high-mileage, high energy-consuming society.

For Porter, these were the inexorable trends, and he had to plan for them. But some people in the path of those freeways refused to be held captive by such trends. They believed, as urban critic Lewis Mumford once wrote, that trend is not destiny. People can have a different vision. Behaviors can change. Different public investments can be made. And the trends can be deflected to create a different future.

So they rose up and stopped the freeways that would have destroyed what they loved about their communities. The battle against the Clark Freeway, especially, became one of the iconic struggles for conservation in the history of Greater Cleveland. It was a training ground for dozens of community and environmental activists. It inspired thousands of people to believe that they could have a voice.

Fifty years later, this area on the east side of Cleveland is the hole in the regional highway donut. It's a very inconvenient place for the motoring public. And that is wonderful!

A lot of people who don't live in the Heights complain about the lack of convenient freeway access to this area. I've come to realize that my home is a great place to live not in spite of the lack of convenient freeway access. It's a great place to live in large part as a result of the lack of convenient freeway access.

I read another book recently called Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. It's a collection of personal little stories (published in 2012) about what makes Cleveland the place it is and I liked it a lot for the diversity of perspectives it presented to paint a realistic picture of Cleveland with all its grandeur and all its flaws. As I read the book, I of course enjoyed every mention of a place that was special to me. The beginning of Stephanie Gautam's "One that Denver Lost" especially struck me:

As a child growing up in Cleveland Heights, I felt that my hometown was a paradise. The ravine off North Park Boulevard was just steps from our duplex on South Overlook, yet to me, it was a wilderness promising adventure and otherworldly discoveries.

I never set foot in Cleveland Heights as a child, and yet as an adult, the ravine to me has been much as it was to young Stephanie. I've found so much adventure and made so many discoveries there. How wonderful it would be to grow up in such a place. How much we owe to the activists who preserved it. And how important it is that we carry that same spirit of activism into the future.

Say it ain't so

Karyn and I saw Weezer at Blossom last week. It was my first time ever seeing the quintessential "geek rock" band; it was Karyn's first time in over a decade. At one point in time, many years ago, Weezer played important roles in both our lives. I got very heavily into the band my junior and senior years of college. They were actually most important to me for the fact that they served as a gateway to my Ozma fandom, and I subsequently became completely obsessed with Ozma, and Ozma played a major role in my and Cara's friendship. But there was definitely a time when I considered Weezer one of my very favorite bands; there are few bands I've ever loved more that I still haven't seen in concert.

Karyn had an even stronger connection to Weezer than I did, which is probably why she now has a "love/hate relationship" with the band, which basically means she used to love them and now seems to despise them. Here's the thing about Weezer. Their first two albums, 1994's Weezer (a.k.a. "The Blue Album") and 1996's Pinkerton, were masterpieces. They've released nine more albums since and, although there have been good songs here and there, every one of those nine albums has fallen somewhere in the range of mediocre to terrible, with more of a tendency toward the "terrible" side of that spectrum in the last decade. I stopped caring about new Weezer albums a long time ago and am happy to still occasionally listen to the old ones, so I guess I have more of a "love/indifference" relationship to Weezer, but Karyn seems to get viscerally angry at the fact that the band continues to release more and more bad music. Since I had never seen the band live I decided I'd like to go, knowing the setlist would be heavy on the old (read: good) stuff. Karyn begrudgingly agreed to join me and repeatedly said she couldn't believe she was going to see such a garbage band, but it was all in good fun (I think!).

Karyn showing her enthusiasm for Weezer with the "flying W."

So how was the show? I enjoyed it, but it was a very different experience from any other concert I've attended. The setlist was 20 songs in length. Three of the songs were covers. Of their own music, Weezer played six songs from their first album, two songs each from albums two through six, and a whopping one song total from their last five studio albums - that is, one song total that was released less than ten years ago. And those six songs from The Blue Album (to reiterate, a band with eleven different studio albums played a set in which over one-third of their own songs that they played came from the very first of those eleven albums) were quite obviously the ones most members of the audience most wanted to hear. At least the band is aware of this and not in denial about it. And don't get me wrong, I loved seeing and hearing and singing along with classics like "Buddy Holly," "My Name Is Jonas," "Undone (The Sweater Song)," and "Say It Ain't So" that were such a part of the soundtrack of my life. But at the same time, I found there was something almost profoundly sad about a band that has put out so many albums and here they are playing a show where the real reason most people are there is to hear songs from the band's very first album that is now 24 years old. (Indeed, if I had looked up Weezer setlists ahead of time and seen that their typical shows were heavier on new than on old material, I absolutely would not have attended the concert.)

I did, of course, say that the band's first two albums are masterpieces, and I was also very happy to witness a live performance of "El Scorcho" from Pinkerton, but did the second song Weezer played from that album really have to be "Across the Sea" or should I say the creepiest song ever? Okay, yes, I loved the song thirteen years ago, but I was also basically still a kid lacking any experience with dating or relationships. Here are some lyrics from the song, but first, bear in mind that this song was written by a 25-year-old Rivers Cuomo about a teenage girl from Japan who sent him a fan letter:

They don't make stationery like this where I'm from
So fragile, so refined
So I sniff and I lick your envelope
And fall to little pieces every time
I wonder what clothes you wear to school
I wonder how you decorate your room
I wonder how you touch yourself
And curse myself for being across the sea

Looking back on those lyrics as a more mature adult, they're undeniably creepy, but you know what's even creepier? Those lyrics being sung by a 48-year-old man! (Rivers Cuomo is very strange. Karyn has met him and said he's just as awkward in person as his songwriting and stage persona would suggest. That strangeness is likely a factor in both the brilliance of his early work and in the incessant unsuccessful attempts to recapture that brilliance in the years since.) Karyn and I looked at each other, covered our faces in embarrassment, and laughed.

I'm glad I went to the Weezer concert. Overall, I definitely enjoyed it. Yet as I said, there was something sad about the whole thing. I concluded afterwards that one time seeing Weezer was enough for me. The night before the Weezer concert, Karyn and I saw Arcade Fire in Pittsburgh, my fifth time seeing the Canadian indie rock band, and it was a fantastic concert as usual. Admittedly, as with Weezer, the Arcade Fire songs I was most excited to hear were from their debut album (2004's Funeral), especially always incredible crowd singalong show closer "Wake Up," but I was also very excited for songs like "Sprawl II" from 2010's The Suburbs, "Afterlife" from 2013's Reflektor, and "Creature Comfort" from last year's Everything Now. And that's how a concert should be. I also saw a great War on Drugs show at the Agora on Friday. I can only imagine the Weezer-crazed me of 14 years ago being told I'd see a Weezer concert and it would be my least favorite of three shows I'd attend that week.

If you went to the Weezer concert and loved it, I don't want to rain on your parade or say you're doing music appreciation wrong. I also can't fault Weezer for continuing to earn a living by giving their fans what they want at concerts. And as I said, I enjoyed the concert and I'm glad I went. But I'm more glad to be a fan of a lot of great bands who are continuing to make vital and wonderful music today rather than having to rely mainly on a single breakout album over two decades old.

In the blink of an eye

Last week on Tuesday afternoon I got an email at work informing Cleveland Clinic employees that there had been a serious automobile crash at the intersection of Carnegie and E. 105th and it was causing traffic delays in the area of the Clinic campus. At the end of the afternoon I left work and, as I do every work day, walked across that intersection on the way to my parking garage. There I saw two very damaged vehicles. I also saw that traffic on Carnegie was very backed up.

I walked the rest of the way to the garage, took the elevator to the roof (the 9th level of the garage), and was surprised and dismayed by the sight that greeted me as I completed the walk to my car. Cars waiting to exit the garage were backed up all the way to the roof! I'd never seen anything like it. After I got into my car it soon became apparent that the line of cars was basically not moving at all. I began to wonder how long it would take me to get out of the garage. A half hour? An hour? And I began to feel very irritated.

Looking at the faces of the other drivers I could see from my vantage point, it was clear I was not alone in feeling irritated.

But then a thought came to me. I was going to be delayed in leaving work. It was annoying, but it wasn't anything more than annoying. It was a very minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things. There was no reason for me to let it ruin my day. The people who were in that crash? Their days had really been ruined. A delay in leaving work was really not that big a deal. I put some calming music on my car stereo and basically just chilled out for the rest of the wait, which ended up being a little more than half an hour in length.

Not surprisingly, I observed that a lot of the other drivers were not nearly as chill. There were some angry faces and gestures when people disagreed on whose turn in line it was. Of course, we all see this all the time on our journeys by automobile.

I later learned that a 49 year old woman had been killed in the crash. The crash was caused by a man speeding and running a red light.

Later last week, Karyn had a scary incident when she was driving and had to swerve to avoid someone who was... speeding and running a red light. She related to me how the driver had been going at least 50 mph in a 35 zone and had sped through the intersection seconds after the light had changed to green in Karyn's direction.

It really puts things in perspective, doesn't it? Maybe we shouldn't let being stuck in traffic bother us so much. It could be a lot worse.

And it occurred to me that there's a connection. We've created this society where the ability to speedily get from point A to point B in an automobile often takes precedence over almost everything else. And so we feel entitled to that ability to speedily get from point A to point B in our automobiles. And so when something interferes with that ability we tend to get frustrated and angry. And so also some among us feel so entitled to that ability to speedily get from point A to point B that we take risks and skirt or ignore rules - and horrific injuries and deaths are the result.

It's absolutely crazy if you really think about it. Automobiles are deadly weapons. And so many people are so neglectful of the responsibility that should come with operating such a deadly weapon. A human life is an incredibly precious thing. How could saving a few seconds on your commute possibly be worth risking ending a life?

I've seen many times, in gun control arguments, that when someone in favor of stricter gun control brings up the fact that guns kill over 30,000 people per year in the United States, someone will counter with that fact that cars also kill over 30,000 people per year, so should we have car control, they ask rhetorically?

The obvious response is that those deaths are an unfortunate side effect of the primary purpose of cars, transportation, whereas causing death is the primary purpose of a gun. But over the last few years I've become inclined to say that actually yes, we do need better car control.

It's absurd the extent to which our society has prioritized fast automobile travel over so many other things that are so much more important. We know for a fact that faster speeds lead to more deaths, and yet we keep raising speed limits on highways. We know that we could make our roads safer with speeding and red light cameras, and yet here in Cleveland we've done away with those cameras. We know that SUVs are much more likely to kill pedestrians than are normal cars, and yet bigger and deadlier SUVs continue to increase their share of the auto market. (I want to give a shout out to my friend Angie Schmitt who has done a lot to raise my, and hopefully a lot of other people's, awareness on these issues with her writing on the website StreetBlog - here's a good post about SUVs, for example.)

Not to mention texting while driving...

What can we do about all this? Raising awareness can only do so much. There's probably some element of human nature that causes that impatience in traffic that most of feel, but it's something that has undoubtedly been amplified by the structure of the society in which we live, a structure that was created by choices people made over the years. The way things are is not the way things have to be. A functional society does not require over 30,000 traffic-related deaths per year. If commercial airline travel was as dangerous as automobile travel, the airlines would go out of business because people would be too afraid to get on planes. And yet with cars we just take it for granted.

A woman died next to my workplace last week because someone flouted the responsibility of handling an automobile and it was barely a blip in the news because it happens all the time. Something to think about the next time you feel annoyed about being stuck in traffic.

Memory/The way it was before

It's not often that you get the chance to see your two favorite bands in concert on consecutive days. It's certainly never happened to me before. Last week not only did it happen, but it happened coincident with my and Cara's wedding anniversary.

June 12, the seventh anniversary of our wedding, brought Typhoon to the Beachland Ballroom, my favorite music venue and one where I have so many wonderful memories. It was another amazing show by Typhoon, a band that I have written so much about recently that there's no need to really review the show itself. But I did want to mention some things that lead singer Kyle Morton said both during the show and during our conversation after it.

At one point in between songs, Kyle talked about how new album Offerings (which I just blogged about) is centered around the theme of memory. He said the album describes a worst case scenario of total memory loss, but also that Kyle had become interested in exploring the topic in part due to things he sees happening in society. We seem to be losing our memories, he said. Although he did not directly mention Donald Trump, his remarks made it clear he was alluding to the horrifying way that events in this country today are echoing events from the past and how we as a culture seem to have learned nothing from that past.

He also brought up how (in a not unrelated way) people today seem to have such short attention spans, and tied this to the omnipresent phone screens that we often seem unable to go more than a few minutes without looking at. This is something I've thought a lot about myself. Just as one example, when I was a kid, when I watched sports on TV I didn't feel a need to have something else besides the game on TV to hold my attention. Now when I watch sports on TV I'm often constantly glancing back and forth between my phone screen and the TV screen because my brain rebels at just focusing on one thing for an extended period of time. Of course the TV is just another "screen" and in the past TVs were cited as a cause for shortened attention spans, so these issues aren't novel to the smartphone era. But I do think there has been a major acceleration over the course of my lifetime and the effects, both on individual people's minds and on society's collective consciousness, are in many ways alarming.

Kyle encouraged us not to get too caught up in the digital world of phones and the Internet and to be sure to give attention to real connections with real people and with the real world. Now, I know as well as anyone that the Internet, when used in certain ways, can greatly bolster those real connections - after all, not only did I meet Cara via an online game, but online messaging was the primary way we got to know each other, as we lived in different cities. So context matters, and I'm certainly not saying that online interactions should be completely shunned. But at the same time, it's important to not get trapped in that online world, many aspects of which are designed to give our brains instant gratification but not genuine long term fulfillment. There are so many things in the real physical world - a beautiful day outside, a friend with whom we're conversing, a concert we're attending, a delicious meal we're consuming - that merit our full attention and are cheapened if that attention is constantly split with that little screen in our hand.

The topic of memory and memory loss also hits close to home because I've become increasingly aware of changes in my own cognitive function and ability to remember things since last fall. My brain doesn't seem to work quite as well as it used to. This has multiple aspects, I've noticed. When I think back over my life going back to October, especially the first few months of that period, there's a certain haziness to the memories, a sort of mental fog. As well, I feel I've become somewhat absentminded about everyday tasks and things I'm doing and should be doing. There's a well known phenomenon that can be referred to as "widow brain" - but the interesting thing is I don't feel like these effects happened nearly as much after Cara's death as they did after the breakup last fall. So perhaps that breakup triggered a sort of delayed onset widow brain by compounding on my previous trauma. I don't want to overstate this - I don't feel like I'm losing my mind or anything like that, and overall I think my brain still works well. And I also think things have improved compared to a few months ago. But still, this has all been very noticeable to me.

Trauma affects our ability to remember things. And not remembering things (see: the parallels between Trump and the rises of past fascist dictators that so many seem willfully ignorant of) can help bring on more traumas. Not a good feedback loop.

On a happier note now, the show, as I said, was excellent, and I again got to talk to Kyle afterwards, and he (like his wife Danielle, of the band Wild Ones, in Toronto) was so genuinely pleased to get to see me and talk with me again. I'm very moved by that. I told Kyle about how it was my wedding anniversary, and he, like me, was startled by the odd coincidence. I also mentioned having gotten to see the Decemberists on the anniversary of Cara's death this year. Kyle said something that I really liked, something along the lines of, "We're all mortal. We're all going to go sooner or later. But when someone you love dies, I think a part of that person does live on in the people who loved them. And I think you can especially see that when those sorts of coincidences happen." I like that attitude!

The Typhoon show was a perfect way to mark my and Cara's anniversary. The day after found me driving to Detroit, having decided I didn't want to pass up the opportunity to see Okkervil River - especially considering that back on that wonderful weekend in June 2011, on the day before the wedding, Cara and I attended an Okkervil River concert in Columbus. So there was a nice parallelism there, and it was one I unintentionally added to. The concert in Detroit was at El Club in Mexicantown, and given that I was in Mexicantown I naturally decided to go to an authentic taqueria for dinner - and as my tacos were served to me, it suddenly struck me that Cara and I had had a taco truck cater our wedding rehearsal dinner. So not only was I replicating the night before our wedding by going to an Okkervil River concert, I was replicating it by having tacos for dinner and then going to an Okkervil River concert! I laughed at the realization. (Oh, and the tacos, at Taqueria El Rey, were delicious.)

El Club is a cool little venue that I'd been to once previously. It was in January of this year, and it was to see Typhoon (obsesssed much?). In retrospect I'm so glad that I went to that show, because on the same trip I visited my great friends Adam and Jackie in Ann Arbor, and then in April Jackie's mother Carol, a wonderful person who had lived with MS for decades, passed away. So that Typhoon show resulted in me getting to see Carol one last time, and I'm grateful for that. There's another interesting parallel there. In January 2015 Cara and I visited Adam and Jackie (and their two young boys and Carol), and then Cara passed away in April 2015, and I became especially glad we had made that trip, just as I became especially glad I made the January 2018 trip after the April 2018 passing of Carol.

The show this week was my eleventh time seeing Okkervil River in concert. It was my fourth time since Cara's death. Each of the three previous post-Cara's death concerts, I realized, had been unusual in some way, distinctly different from a "normal" Okkervil River show. The show in 2015 was for the tenth anniversary of the album Black Sheep Boy and featured (rather than a normal setlist) that album and the accompanying EP Black Sheep Boy Appendix played in their entireties. The show in 2016 was in support of the album Away, and after it I blogged about what a totally different experience that show was. The setlist largely consisted of songs from Away, which is a very different album from any other by the band, and on top of that, "every single non-Away song in the main set was a very heavily reworked version of the original song." And the show in 2017 featured a stripped down, three person, acoustic version of the band, playing an all requests setlist (and that show included probably the most emotional moment for me at any show ever when Will Sheff said "This is a very special request for Jeff McManus" and played a song I had described in my request as being linked to a special memory of my late wife).

So all three of those shows had been major divergences from what I'd think of as a "normal" Okkervil River concert. At the 2016 Away tour show, I wondered if the approach Will was taking to his music at that show would become the new norm going forward, and if perhaps I'd never again experience a "normal" Okkervil River show. I keyed in on a lyric from the last song played at that show, "Black": "It'll never be the way it was before," and I wrote these words:

Perhaps Okkervil River shows will never be the way they were before. Very certainly, my life will never be the way it was before. Before Cara got lung cancer and then died of it. But I will always carry that past with me. And the future? It can still be pretty great.

It's eerie now, looking back, that just weeks later another "It'll never be the way it was before" moment happened and at the time I wasn't even a bit concerned about it because I just didn't think it was going to happen. I'm referring, of course, to Donald Trump's election to the presidency. I realize that I keep going back to Trump even in posts that are mainly about non-political topics, but it's hard to overstate just how much the ongoing crisis in this country has affected me and my view of the world. And I'm a privileged white guy who hasn't even been directly affected by it in any significant way. There are so many people who unfortunately can't say that. It's a collective trauma that's happening to all of us and even if we do turn things back around, there are going to be scars that will remain for as long as this country exists. And there's a part of me that fears our country, as we know it, won't exist anymore in the not so distant future. Trump clearly wants to be a dictator, and although he isn't one at this point in time, our Republican elected officials have so far collectively shown basically no willingness to meaningfully stand up to his corruption and abuses. So what if he just refuses to leave office, and the Republicans just go along with it? I don't see that as the most likely outcome, but I can't discount the possibility. So this is probably another appropriate time to say: make sure everyone you know gets out and votes in November.

This blog entry that is centered around two concerts at which I had fantastic times sure has some unhappy little asides in it!

Anyway, it turned out that my idea that Okkervil River shows might never be the way they were before did not actually come to pass. This show, finally, for the first time for me in almost five years, was an Okkervil River show the way it was before. The band played a set full of songs both from excellent new album In the Rainbow Rain and from most of the other albums in their catalog, and while there were some interesting variations thrown in on the older songs they were generally much more faithful interpretations of the original versions, and the band had so much energy, and for 90 minutes it really did feel like old times again and it was so great and I had so much fun and I kind of just wanted that show to never end! Seriously, it was magical!

Will Sheff is the sole songwriter for Okkervil River and he's actually been for a while now the only original member still in the band; he's gone through a lot of lineup changes over the years, and while the shows have always been fantastic, at times they've felt more like a group of musicians performing Will Sheff's music rather than a performance by a band, if that makes sense. But the current lineup is just clicking in an incredible way and at times I felt like I was transported back to, say, the Pepper Jack Cafe in Hamilton, Ontario on Cara's birthday in 2007. And it's really special how music can do that. Life as a whole is never going to be "the way it was before," but it's nice, for a little while, to be able to recapture that feeling. I think the fact that it had been so long since I had seen a "normal" Okkervil River show made this one all the more special. The last previous "normal" show was also the last time I saw Okkervil River with Cara - at the Beachland in 2013 just about a month after she was diagnosed with lung cancer. At that show she sat right in front of the stage in a wheelchair and she reveled in the fact that she had enough lung capacity to sing along with those familiar songs. After the show she was handed from the stage a setlist from the show, written on a paper plate, and that plate remains on display in my living room. At the show the other day I was able to obtain another such souvenir.

I drove home from Detroit after the show and, although I did not get home until about 3 am, I was so amped up and giddy from the show that I had not the least bit of trouble staying awake - I didn't even feel the need to stop for a caffeinated beverage, as I typically would on such a late night trip. And then, just as I was pulling into the garage, what band's music came onto the college radio station I had playing?

Yep, Okkervil River. Naturally I sat in my car and listened to (and sang along with) the whole song ("The Latest Toughs" from 2005 masterpiece Black Sheep Boy). Another one of those funny, weird little coincidences and a perfect way to cap off a thrilling and emotional two days.