Hello, Cleveland friends. I hope you enjoyed the eclipse as much as I enjoyed you enjoying the eclipse!
Last week it was my turn to do an About Me presentation at work, assigned because we simultaneously combined two teams into one superteam and hired a bunch of new program managers. If you attended this presentation, you would have learned that among my likes are complaining and solitude, and my dislikes are crying children and the sun.
No, not because of my genetically delicate Irish flesh, but because I am a darkness creature who thrives on thick, oppressive, Cleveland grey, which I have been hashtag blessed to find in abundance lately here in Minnesota, thanks global warming. Also, frankly, I don’t like light at all — I would rather not see too closely how shit everything is, as exemplified in A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley:
…I remembered a friend of Daddy’s who told me once about when rural electrification came through. Unlike Daddy’s family, Jim’s family hadn’t had a gasoline generator to light the house. When the wires were strung and the family gathered in the kitchen to witness the great event, the mother’s first words of the new era were, “Everything’s so dirty!” [Recall, too, how I adhere to the Shirley Jackson school of housekeeping].
Speaking of (a) total darkness and (b) how shit everything is, I had a conversation yesterday morning with a friend about just how wholesome the eclipse was, how everyone was outside enjoying themselves, having cookouts, engaging in the friendly neighborly banter that should be normal, not limited to a once-in-a-lifetime event. The morning after, her friend’s son, a student where she works, remarked: “it felt like we were in Denver, like someplace where the median income is $40,000 more and people aren’t as depressed.”
This is something I feel pretty hard. For the first few years I lived in Minnesota, I felt freed from that rust belt stuckness, that feeling like the economy will never grow in your favor, that $11 an hour is something to strive not to lose. Our previous big boss at work used to schedule annual chats with us, and the first year I worked here, which was 2017, like a slack-jawed deplorable I yakked about how I’d just moved someplace where it seemed like the economy was boundless and I no longer had to shrink my expectations about what was possible or be afraid of running out of money before I croaked. Reader, I don’t think she grokked me, but she put her game face on and I was grateful for it, at the time.
Back in 2004, when I had youthful ideals, I went to see Dennis Kucinich speak at the City Club Forum. He was running for President, and after he was done passionately delivering his “I’m Howard Dean but with better street cred” argument I asked him what he would say to young people who were thinking about leaving Cleveland for more fortuitous economic climes. “Don’t go,” he admonished. “Everyplace is going to be Cleveland in a generation.” God, given how whackadoodle Dennis has gone, it pains me to say this, but Dennis was right.
When I first started this job working for students, I was constantly buoyed by how hopeful they were for the future. Granted, at the time, even I couldn’t have predicted how weird their lives would get. But I don’t get this sense from them anymore, that the future is something worth having expectations from, and even as a rust belt Gen Xer who had given up on life by the time Reagan was re-elected, this kind of nihilism freaks me out a little.
But! Then yesterday as I dragged my ornery old carcass into the community center to vote on a single bond issue, because I love democracy out of pure spite anymore, I encountered a very young woman taking a post-vote selfie. Right on, I told her. This person who dragged her svelte young carcass out of the house to vote on a single bond issue gave me hope for the future,* and at this point I will glom onto whatever shred of hope or cheeseburger that crosses my path.
—CB
*Your reminder that when I am the one urging you to look on the bright side, we are super-duper FUBAR.