One of many flashes:
It’s easy to love the dead. The dead is unchanging and more often than not, idealized. It can be what you want it to be, crystallizing the supportive memories and abandoning the painful ones. It conforms to your needs the way you need it to.
It’s not that easy to love life. Because what is life but the abused? The violated? The ugly? The never going to be ‘fixed’ or leave the asshole either total frustration?
It’s not easy to love the fierce vitality of life–because it fights back. It’s what keeps getting up after it’s been hit. It’s the Cool Hand Luke that becomes the ‘problem’ you never intended it to become and just won’t go away.
Why do we love this problem?
In the ugly factory’s parking lot is the secret, the answer.
The concrete that plasters the ground is thick and huge. It takes up at least a block worth of space. And every last inch of that concrete is broken–busted through by weeds.
Ugly, awkward, fierce weeds that grew anyway, even when they were told not to.
And that is what South East Michigan overflows with.
I've been to Michigan thrice. Twice to Detroit via the scary airport; once by train to East Lansing to see friends, over twenty-five years ago; most of the friends have moved away, but I think one, at least, is holed up in Ann Arbor. My memories of Detroit: RenCen, the Book-Cadillac, and the wood-panelled restaurant in Greektown where I drank ouzo and somebody had something flambé. I had a ride to and from the airport, and the place probably was as devastated as Newark, NJ (in both cases ten years after major riots), but I don't really remember. I don't even know whether the Tigers were in town. East Lansing has a duck pond and lots of large old houses.
I will never know the Michigan bfp knows.
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