Detroit, I love you

This last weekend was my birthday. I turned 28. I’ve waited a long time for this year to come, all talk about how that was going to be my year. The truth was that I had no real idea of what the shape of that year could look like. You’ve seen my life. There is no sense in trying to plan anything. The night before this day I walked up the hill to East Hall to look out over this drizzly, drunken college town and to reflect on where I’ve been and where I was going. If only I knew then.

The next day, my birthday, I treated myself with a Greyhound ticket to Detroit and a phone call to the Veterans Administration to check in on a recent education package I had submitted to be an apprentice at a tattoo shop. Low and behold I was “VA’d” which is to be told that I was ineligible for benefits because the guidelines of the apprenticeship program state that the recipient must be paid hourly wages. No tattoo shop in the history of the trade has ever paid an apprentice. As far as I have heard we are expected to pay them. So that was a no go.

I got to chew on this despair while priming the walls of a house that my highschool friendhad purchased for $1300. We taped off the entire apartment and primed the second floor with two coats. We were elated to find that when we pulled the old carpeting up the hardwood floors underneath were beautiful and varnished. All told the house was really charming.

I had had this fear that I believe I share with a lot of people that these open, cheap hood homes in a crumbling city are probably beyond repair and in places where nobody would want to live. I was preconditioned to a state of pity for a place that I had never been for more than a few days.

But in this house I felt this real possibility to take these things that have been left like garbage by a fleeing population and to make them ours, to turn them into things that we can be proud of, and things that can house our new kind of life. Our generation has a unique challenge set ahead of it. We have been handed a miserable condition and Detroit is the very picture of this deal. But to me every one of these houses is an opportunity for our generation to excersize a discipline that nobody expects of us.

It is true of us that we are lazy when it comes to manual labor. We have all preferred to go to school for liberal academic careers and for the dream that we can make a lot of money without ever doing any physical work ever again. That is what the older generations think, and they are right. And sure we can say that they are fucked up too, and they are the ones that abandoned this whole city in the first place because they were scared of black people, but I’m not going to sit here and condone living out the story of the previous generation. Forget them. They fucked it all up and bought into debt. Look what happened. We should fight our laziness for ourselves because there is a good deal on the table.

Seeing all of this with the house and stewing on my recent disappointment I decided to do something a little drastic after seeing a commercial for a Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning Trade School which loudly advertised its openness to veterans. I thought about it for all of five minutes and made the call, signed the paperwork, the whole deal.

We finished priming in two days and by the end of it I’d changed my entire life plan and decided to move into a house with no heat, water, electricity or internet. I’m sure that living without each will light a fire under my ass to resolve each issue quickly.

It is difficult for me to convert my dream of how I wanted my life to be now that I am at the point where I wanted to be really announcing my career and in reality I am only announcing that I will be one of the slavish millions lost to American labor. I am not sure I am ready to give up the hipster dream of the luxurious life without taxation and labor, dressed to the nines and always glamorously high. The ambition to have every dreamy eyed dynamo burning a little brighter to outdo me, like I worked so hard to outdo the dynamos that burned before me. It was all very selfish but I wanted it very much and worked very honestly for it.

But nay, it never worked anyway. My career ends with me as a no named hack, a self indulgent whore who got too far ahead of himself, but catching himself in time made the stately decision to go out with some pride and get himself a real job doing things that men do. I will sooth myself with the deluded fantasy that I am moving out to the wastelands where my freak flag can fly as wildly as it pleases, where I will devote myself to bringing heat to the fragile artists trying to live like rats in nearly condemned houses. There is some romance in that. The first Dadaist Heating and Cooling Specialist.

I think it is an internal struggle that I might share this fear of trades, probably from condescension. To actually be a laborer instead of an intellectual speaking about the labor movement. Well, there is work to be done. That city will rot if we don’t pick up this treasure.