greatgmf

Seems like this blogging thing just ain't me.  I gotta get back to secret pen and paper.  But let me leave you with this thought...
http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/i_got_what_america_needs_right

Does't totally feel like my New Life yet even though all the trappings are there.  Maybe when I actually completely move in to the run down farm house and actually start hauling manure around, as opposed to just painting, cleaning, and talking about a truck?

a friend on the topic...
http://forlackofbetterwords.wordpress.com/2007/12/14/i-call-her-detroit/#comments

Oh Detroit.  Here I am, back again already, but only for another two weeks before really leaving, and maybe just plain not coming back.

How can I explain this city that I love?  When I was in Portland, I had  dinner with a friend who said he was reading a book by a Detroiter.  He was frustrated because it seemed the fellow couldn't articulate much in the way of the nature of Detroit.  My friend felt sure other Detroiters would get the cultural references, but he didn't think the book was accessible to a general audience.

Well, how could it be?  I have never never been able to explain this place to anyone who has never lived here.  And people who grew up here can't even explain it to someone like me who has lived here for five years. 

Race is surely a big part of the obstacle.  When a city is 85% black, then it turns out that a lot of white people really like to hear you tell them that it is also a city chock full of crime and poverty.  I don't just mean the bigots, probably most of us like to assume at some level that we belong to a set of people that are superior to other sets of people.  We dress this assumption up as politely as possible, but really plenty of white people do seem to smile all too knowingly when I talk about Detroit's many many problems.

And anyway, it's not just a city of problems.  I think the problems are what cause the most immediate culture shock to country girls like me, and so when I try to explain how different it is to live in Detroit as opposed to living absolutely anywhere else I've ever lived (which does include some but not much in the way of other urban locales) I find the crime an easy place to start.  Tell people about all the murders right on my block and most of my friends and family immediately understand that my part of Detroit is not like the place they live.  But when I realize how firmly they have grasped the distinction, I also realize that I have lost the ability to describe my great love for this city.

And honestly, the things I love are not easy to describe, because while it is true that I love the fact that one of the worlds most precious organs is housed in a dilapidated theatre in the red light district of SW Detroit and also true that I love the fact that one time I watched a guy try REALLY HARD to steal an enormous concrete tube from a worksite and that if he had even been successful in moving that tube an inch he still would have never been able to get it all the way to his car and even if he could have it was a COMPACT car and could not have held the enormous tube and also true that I love the art museum and the incredible street art and community gardens and also true that I even love that one day a giant table top fell out of the sky (no, not from a window, but the sky as there were not tall buildings around) and smashed my car window, none of these nor all of these together justify the love that swells in my heart for this city. 

You see, I have loved Detroit the way I love a person.  It has qualities I admire, and a personality that can be annoying at times, and I take it for granted quite a bit, and then it will do something quirky and my heart just swells with unaccountable love.  Sometimes I find out something so stupid about it that I wonder what I've been doing with it for so long, other times it is so remarkable that I am swept off my feet all over again.

And like a love for a person, the topic can only be of marginal interest to people not feeling that love. And like a lover, I never tire of wanting to explain the nature of the feeling. 

what a fine month.  camping in 15 degrees in Iowa, visiting friends in Denver, cutting a swath across southern Utah's weird and wonderful terrain, sweating it out in Death Valley, hanging for a day in a cabin near Reno with an old wobbly freight train hopper, a brief stint in San Francisco, followed by a week in the company of one of the planet's finest beings in Portland.  All with my sweetheart by my side.  Rather a shame I have to return to producing income.

http://tdu.org/node/1563

Some of the best news I've had in awhile.  I'm trying to resist the urge to post here all my feelings of waiting for the other shoe to drop, and instead am just enjoying the fact that the good guys won.

Their opponents were from a corrupt old guard regime that in a previous election sent ballots to Russian bathhouse that is a hangout place for the mob instead of to members' homes. 

So yesterday afternoon some neighborhood kids started to set the next door building on fire.  I noticed kids in the side yard and they didn't seem related to any of the tenants in that building, who I know at least by sight.  I also smelled gasoline.  Honestly, it's not so out of the ordinary to smell unhealthy odors in Detroit, so I didn't think that hard about the fact that I smelled gas, I just checked to make sure my pilot light was lit.  The kids in the yard didn't seem to be trying to break in, and I couldn't think of anything they would hurt, so I was sort of inclined to ignore them, but I decided to go out to my porch so at least they knew they were being observed.  They had the hose going and they were laughing, they didn't seem to notice me too much.  I called my sweetie, whose job it is to care for the building, and then I went out to see what was going on.  They were gone by the time I got there.  J. had told me she did have gasoline cans back there, and sure enough, they seemed to have poured some of it around, and then perhaps got freaked out and sprayed water on it.  Later J. arrived and she did find a small area that had caught fire. 

What's funny is that I grew up in the country, where everyone was scared of the city because they imagined a lot of incidents just like this.  I sort of hate to confirm those fears.  Yep, this sort of thing sure does happen.  But you know, it's not actually so bad.  I have developed a new sort of intelligence in the five years I've lived here.  I guess you'd call it "street smarts" except that in my case it's more like "street barely-functional-literacy." 

Only two weeks left in Detroit, and here I sit wishing for a friend to call up for beers.  An unusual sentiment for my agoraphobic self.  The real kicker is that most of my friends have already split town.  This is the sadness of Detroit.  So many of us love this city, but it's a damn hard place to live, let alone find a job.  One of my remaining friends has so many food allergies that it would just be way too complicated to call her up to suggest an outing to a tavern.  Another was excited at the prospect, but knee-deep in laundry at the laundromat.  My sweetie doesn't find bars a very pleasant place to be.  I've certainly been known to go on my own to such places, but I'm not so much in the mood tonight.  A darn shame. 

I need to make a new word.  Here is definition:

n. 1. A person who fails to meet any reasonable test of competency, yet is so likable as to avoid all reproach.  2. A person who inspires fondness even as their incompetence causes extra work on the part of others, and causes others to receive undeserved blame.

Is there such a word?

My mother and her three remaining sisters are taking a road trip.  Aunt Ruth lives about an hour from me, so the other three drove up there to start the trip and I came up to join them for dinner.  I parked the car and started walking towards the house.  A fairly small woman with short gray hair came out  to greet me.  At first I thought it was my mom, but that didn't quite fit.  So I guessed Aunt Freda.  But then the woman told me that she hadn't told her children I was coming because she wanted to surprise them, and it didn't make sense that Aunt Freda's kids would be there so I knew it had to be Aunt Ruth.  Then I came inside, and the next woman with short gray hair I guessed at first was Aunt Freda, but then realized that was Mom.  When I finally turned and saw Aunt Freda I realized that she looks pretty distinctive.  She has a certain poised beauty which I hadn't remembered noticing before.  Aunt Edna looked about like I remembered her.  Then came the cousins, who I could tell apart pretty well.  The two youngest women (cousins once removed, or else second cousins, however that works) were pretty interchangeable until I realized they carry themselves very differently. 

For some reason, family members are harder than just about anyone else for me to tell apart.  I think it's because the best ways for me to tell people apart are voice, body shape, carriage.  But on my mom's side of the family there is a great deal of similarity in those things.  Anyway. I'm just glad that's over.

went to pick raspberries in the garden across the street this morning, but the corner of my eye detected motion in the pit that's been dug out at the back central part of the lot.  Seeing's how it had only just turned light and seeing's how low characters are sometimes about, I stood still until I could make out the source.  People having sex.   Was it a drug for sex thing?  Was it two teenagers trying to catch some private time on their way to school?  Don't know.  All I know is that it deterred me from my berries AND that there is really no good reason to have sex in that pit.  People use it for a toilet sometimes and it's just plain gross.

Much as I love this city, there will be some real upsides to the upcoming move.

Yesterday evening just after work, my girlfriend stopped in to say hi.   She  told me how right outside my door she had seen two skinny white people, a man wearing only shorts and a scantily clad woman, approach a fancy car.  The man took a package from the guy in the car, then started walking down the sidewalk while the woman got into the car.  The guy called back to her, "you sure you'll be okay?"  She said, "yeah, this will only take a minute."  The car drove away.

I heard this story and I just registered it in the file of stories about my neighborhood that isn't the neighborhood I know.  Yes, right under my nose we've got drug deals, prostitution, gunfire, and even murder (the shrine for the 19-year-old boy gunned down a year ago Thanksgiving doesn't get as many flowers as it used to, but sometimes I still see a woman pause there for a moment).  But my overlap with the denizens of this other neighborhood is scant.  The neighborhood my mind resides in is the one where my girlfriend lives next door, the funky artists live across the street, lots of queer people here, and of course my big garden.  I know the mailman, I chat with the neighbors though I don't know them all that well, and with the young boys who have  a love-hate relationship with my garden (sometimes they mutilate it, sometimes they tag it, sometimes they help mulch or ask reverent questions about the process of planting).  Yet, this same neighborhood (by which I mean about 4 square blocks) has seen at least two murders, at least one severe beating, at least one kidnapping and brutal rape, in the last two years.  One day my girlfriend came home and found a bullet through her door. A few months before that we were sitting together inside when a flurry of shots rang out down the street and a car sped away.  My former workplace also has some mystery bullet holes (which I SWEAR I did not put there!).  One of my co-workers was beaten and robbed right outside my workplace door.  As was the old woman who works at a convenience store right across the street.  It's not unusual to see drug deals at my street corner, or the drugs-for-sex arrangement being made.  I should hasten to add, that I do know this is not a rough neighborhood by inner city American standards.  There are far harder places to live right here in Detroit, and places I've seen in other cities that seem downright dangerous.

It can be hard to know what to feel about this incredible city, where I have found a home amid the decay and the hope that won't die.  I love this city, where the stores have names like "King of Refrigerator" "Johnny's Ham King" and the best name ever for a bowling alley "Luxury Bowl".  I love this city where the only time anything good happens, it's because people get together and make it happen.  I love this city that has taught me so much good and bad about myself because I always prefer knowing to not knowing, though it's a trait that causes many problems. 

Anyway,

 

Spent some time on the picket line today with UAW workers.  It's quite a privilege to be able to walk a picket line that extends across the country and affects a major industry.  When was the last time that happened?  Maybe the 1997 UPS strike.  There have been some other important strikes (or strike/lockout combinations) such as the port workers, the grocery workers, and of course the Detroit Newspaper Strike that technically lasted until, what, 2001 maybe?  But this one is the first major general strike in a while.

And yet...people don't even really know for sure why they are striking.  It's not because they are apathetic (no more so than the average American these days), not because they can't grasp the issues.  It's simply that their leadership won't tell them.  Gettlefinger said in his press conference "we believe that collective bargaining should stay in the collective bargaining room." i.e. information should not leave that room.

 Here is how a strike SHOULD go:
1. Members elect their bargaining committee
2. Members raise important issues.
3. Members vote on bargaining proposals
4. Members receive updates on bargaining after every bargaining session.  Updates should be full and complete.
5. Members should be encouraged to attend bargaining sessions so they can see first hand how it operates and to show the company that they support the bargaining committee.
6. Stewards and a contract support committee should develop materials for people to wear in and around the plant so the company can see that the members care about the issues.
7. A union committee should do outreach to the community to let them know why these issues are important.
8. If the company refuses to budge around issues that are critical, the members need to know that.  Members should be invited to contribute ideas about how to ratchet up pressure on the company.
9. People should start wearing shirts and such that say they are willing to strike (if indeed they are)
10. The contract support committee should start working out the logisitcs of a strike.  How will a strike fund be managed, how many people need to be at each gate, etc.?
11. Members should take a meaningful strike vote, after free and open discussion.  They should not vote as a bluff, but only if they are willing to strike for real. If they vote to strike, they should also elect strike captains and the union should train them.
12. Members should receive education about the importance of strong picket lines. 
13. As the strike deadline approaches the contract support committee should plan a big rally to happen at the plant gates at the moment the strike begins.  Bring in the ministers, the musicians, the city leaders, anyone who supports the strike should be there, and the union should be chanting about their demands.
14.  Everyone should know the basic way to win a strike: last one day longer than the company.

Why are all these steps so important?  One reason is that you are much more likely to avoid a strike if you follow this advice, since the company will understand what it's up against.  Another reason is that you are much more likely to win a strike if you follow this advice, since the members will have made the decision themselves.  But there is another very important reason, and that is that following this advice means that you are, in fact, a union.  A union is different than an advocate for workers.  A union is the workers themselves trying to make the fundamental crappiness of work just a little less crappy, a little less likely to cause injury, a little more likely to provide a decent income.  And a union is about changing the power dynamics on the shop floor.

I hesitate to write any of this at a time when there is a major strike happening.  After all, it's easy to be an armchair critic.  But I guess I wanted to get it off my chest, and since so few actually read this blog, this seems a pretty safe space to vent.

Okay, not actually me.  He managed to dig the hole himself, and then brave whistleblowers gave me the scoop.  All I did was write it up about a year ago and get it into the right hands.  And at last it bore fruit.  Why do people have to be so rotten?
http://tdu.org/node/1479

Never having posted before, I figured I'd start with a long drawn out story about what I did a couple summers back and