Those who did it from a distance erased the people’s language. Once they could claim their fiction of terra nullius they flooded in close and put up fences. They erased the history of their conquest and they erased the lake’s history too.
Notes on fatherhood and petroleum
Every time I moved felt like facing my entire life all over again.
On this day in end-times 1999, Jimmy Carter, the former president of the United States, that sweetheart, was on a flight I was working. It was a shuttle flight, D.C. to New York, maybe. No First Class, no fuss.
Now there's an ubiquitous phrase on the Plains: we excel at "putting down roots"...Growing up in Kansas there is quite the opposite idea. Less so roots and more so treacherous vines.
John was unbelievable with a trash bag. He threw the lighter ones from his hip, like an uppercut. The heavier bags were more like a hammer throw. You could tell he was accustomed to using, and needing to use, all the muscle he had left.
I get sentimental about places, especially forgotten ones like Monarch Park. They’re a bit of a bummer, a bit sobering, a bit sad. But I think it’s a good kind of sadness.
The untamed energy of the show woke something in me. Carmy’s life in Chicago was real. Authentic. Social. I knew that restaurant and those people. How many times had I eaten at a joint like that?
We would laugh so hard in a place not meant for laughter, feel family in a place not meant for home. We had built a brotherhood in a place meant only to be punitive.
She came from a dying Rust Belt town in southeast Ohio, and I came from a famously dying Rust Belt town an hour north of Detroit. We were both oldest children, with the same letter leading our first and last name. Our birthdays were one day apart. And, we both loved Fleetwood Mac.
Why were these guys alive and my dad dead? My dad’s long game wasn’t good.
By now I should understand that when every choice starts to feel like a miscalculation, a mistake, I’m up against forces bigger than myself. Yet I was secretly, irrationally angry at them for succumbing too willingly to death without any burning or raving or raging. If they’d just tried hard enough, I sometimes thought.