Irony takes new form, changes its own definition

People more famous than me have written songs about unfortunate situations and labeled them, in collective, Ironic. This has led to an entire generation of self-imagined angsty middle schoolers who use the term irony incorrectly until a later age, at which point the real definition is learned and the singer-song writer is blamed for poorly educating our (then) youth; or the misunderstanding of Irony continues to an eventless, irony-free death, probably caused by eating one too many ingredients in the canned cheese product on the unrefrigerated grocery store shelves.

I'm not really wondering how this ties into anything that's happened in my life lately, but I need to go make pickles, so I'll start.
Back in April or March or one of those inspirational months near the beginning of the year when temperature changes rapidly and it becomes much easier to make out with several different girls throughout the calendar week, I decided I would leave Lawrenceville. Friends in California, New Orleans, Ohio, down the hall; I alerted them all. I would finish one bedroom in my parents' investment home by June, move away and hide from everyone who thinks that just because our blood is the same (not true, because mine is fueled by oxygen, Awesome Salsa and donuts) is enough to keep me holed up in a Retirement Investment, or How I Learned the Gentrification Vaccination isn't for Everyone.
After purchasing a new belt sander and a random orbital sander (from Porter Cable), I finally got all the leftover black glue residue off the 100+year-old pine, and then stained it with Ipswitch. And it looks nice, but since I don't care for cameras and couldn't find a picture of the job I'd done on the internet, you get nothing. Then B.F. (not bob faltin) came over and gave me a lesson on rewiring to get rid of the Motherfucking Knob and tube, which is all over the second floor. With just one circuit to the entire upstairs, and countless Ghost Lights left from the old first floor ceiling (covered up under drop ceiling now), we cursed today's atheists for leaving yesterday's gods under my floorboards and behind my walls.

See. Look at that motherfucking spirit escaping from the knob and tube behind those hapless suckers. That's what they get for posing for a picture.

We rewired the room and cut the bathroom from any sort of power, because we're all dumb and like to play with extension cords in the tub. Snipped the fucking line coming from the divided knob and tube, ending the circuit at the light switch by the stairs. Tore and bashed out the old electrical outlets and tossed them to the curb for trash night.

New drywall with Nicole! Stopped drinking!

But at this point, it's mid-to-late July. I've changed my mind three and a half times since declaring my Moving Day in early spring. Lynn is set to move into the room and bring her two long-haired cats with her. Lynn moves in; lives on couch; cats make dander; sneezing commences, wheezing follows. Hiding in private bedroom at end of hall.

Grievances aired, as mucous flies and dries, tissues as disposable reservoirs. Lynn moves out, moves in, moves out in a week. Cats leave, breathing's good again.

No irony here, just a vacancy. Want to live with me?

You can't gentrify and drill at the same time...

Where do people hear these things?
From a handful of decent (and at least one trustworthy) sources, it has become my knowledge that Lawrenceville's sublayers will soon be hosting a fracking party, as some of Pennsylvania's finest groups of Life and those Who Like to Live It offenders come in with their drilling equipment, chemicals, and money.
Money to Lawrenceville? Why do we need chemical and energy money when the neighborhood is already making slave cash off of robots and boutique-goods purveyors?
As a lurker in the Lawrenceville Stakeholders google group, I see concerned citizens who are looking to set up a watching party for Josh Fox's Gasland, but not much beyond that.
If we didn't have the documentary, we wouldn't have the concern. So I thank this man, Mr. Fox. But if we didn't have his documentary, we wouldn't be able to seek out the expected fear and dread that comes from viewing disaster documentaries. These emotions can be sought out and evoked so easily in front of a screen, and in a dark room full of thrill-seekers, the shared emotions fill the air like charred hot dog smell from using too thin a pan to pop popcorn. And the smell sticks around; yes it does.
In Lawrenceville, we have many options for making easy cash, some of which I will hand out to you, now, for free, because I don't feel like making money; I'm not sure what I want to do within myself, so you can take my suggestions and do what you will with them.
1. Open a coffee shop on 10th Ward Butler Street! We still don't have one, and while I won't drink there, I will take an interest in the quirky owner and or fashionable barista, but only a passing interest. A shit-talking interest.
2. Garden legally, and then go to sell it at the farmer's stand beside the kids selling organic produce grown in Allegheny Cemetery.
3. Garden Illegally, and then eat the food that you won't have to pay for, so that you can spend the money you were going to spend on fruit and veg to buy coffee from some asshole who judges people for doing the same things he did at one point in his life (and still probably does).
This is
where
a picture
of City Cafe Guy
Would Go.

4. Open a Boutique.
5. Open a Second Boutique next door after your 100th customer at the first Boutique.
6. Work for Wylie Holdings. They're probably the ones leasing out their storefronts for Gas Drilling, as they own every storefront on Butler Street, most of which are empty and not generating any income.
7. Have a yard sale and block traffic.
8. Sell dope from the ice cream truck that plays 8-bit Nintendo theme music.
9. Open a bakery that never bakes bread, or anything at all.
10. Tear down houses and use pieces of the old houses to restore houses that dumb people fucked up years ago, who are probably related to the people who left our neighborhood in a fucked up condition when they decided that White Flight was Hip and Green and Sustainable and Grass Fed (or whatever the buzzwords were in 1978) and who are probably related, at least in a self-serving sense, to the people who have accepted offers of $5,000 per acre for gas drilling within the city.
Why within the city? If you're looking to assist, with malevolent intent, the gas companies that expect you to take the money and rent a Uhaul to move to the South Hills (where land owners probably won't let this happen) when your water is flammable and your moustache hair is falling out (if it was ironic in the first place, isn't it still ironic on the floor? [The further implications of this line infer that hipsters own property. Do they?]); then the city is the best place, at least as far as chemically-assisted efficiency, to do the most harm.
Despite the guaranteed (no scientific studies necessary!) damage to our entire living being, there are some patriotic advantages to selling the fuck out and allowing gas companies to tell us that fracking is a clean, Local, sustainable way of powering our hungry little lives until we run out of such fuels and die, horribly, painfully, hungrily. Jingoists love that; they'll sacrifice good of country for good of country, as long as they make money from it that they'll later have to use for a cleanup, potable water supply, or all-out relocation. But the part about not being dependent on foreign oil, that's the line that matters.
Slum lords won't even have to replace the copper and throw down a coat of white paint--they'll just lease their abandoned properties to GasGassed, or whatever company is willing to put up their Warning! No smoking in Public! signs, which should be an obvious offense to smokers' rights and a paradoxical conundrum: with smokers limited to the Point Downtown and a 12 foot by 12 foot square in Frick Park after all the drilling has been done, and has contaminated every source of flowing water in the city by penetrating PWSA's Trademarked 100-year-old perforated water pipes, we'll side with the smokers and encourage them and their right to infringe upon our rights to clean air.
After all, the vampire knocks on the window and asks for an invite before coming into your home, but even if you don't sign the papers to allow for drilling on your own land, the whole hillside of slumlord property (and city-owned wilderness) will still play host.
It would be really easy to say, Hey, let's all get together and die of secondhand smoke-caused lung cancer AND sell our souls (aka property) to the gas companies so we can finish up the rest of those storefronts on Butler Street before we have to deal with the after effects of chemical inoculation of the land around us; but I'd rather take a more optimistic approach to our impending doom.

But I won't, so let's just all kill ourselves right now.

Fear of a Bloomfield-Garfield Planet

Yeah, remember in 1990 when Public Enemy was ready to drop their followup to the massive bomb that was 1988's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Prevent a Few White-Catholic Stalwarts who Stuck Around During White Flight from taking credit for the Comparatively Recent in-flight of Young, Hip White Folks back into the same Neighborhoods that Are Now Pretty Dark?

Yeah, I was too young to remember when they dropped their followup, Fear of a Black Planet. I bet you thought I was going to do something with that album title to reference the title of this blog, which in turn references the progenitor of today's subject, which I will get to in a minute. I'm not going to name any names other than Bloomfield-Garfield Corp. and Lawrenceville United, but only because I don't want these people to do a google search for their names and find my blog and realize that I, in fact, was the young man that sat down with them last winter in the offices of Bloomfield-Garfield Corp. to discuss my and my lawyer friend's acquisition of a building that the corp did not even own at the time.

Well, now that we know the particulars and the players, let's proceed.
So, you know how when I was younger, I wanted to run the Pittsburgh Steelers? Yeah, I had to give up real quick, cause them Rooneys have been running shit like cracking cast iron drain pipes since the mid-30s. There's no way I'm going to get my head, chest or foot in that door, although I can show up and watch the fans watching the game from outside the stadium with no problem.
When I found out I could never own, operate and control all operations for my favorite football team, I had to set my sights much lower: Mayor of The City of Pittsburgh!
But then I realized that my Dad was never running shit like, uh, modern waste removal pipes that superseded cast iron pipes in both residential and commercial use; that is, he was never district magistrate of the people in wards 26 and 27; and he didn't bestow upon me the surname of Ravenstahl, which combines the root word, stall, a place in which to shit, and Raven, which is a delicate and dominant songbird/scavenger rare to the East End of Pittsburgh. Our current mayor's fake ass Indian name, when he was attending sucker-ass North Catholic High School in Troy Hill, was "Singing in Bird Shit." Mine was Tommy Jarvis.

And so I lost out to Luke Ravenstahl in the November Election, and he had Snoop Dogg perform at his victory party.
So, when denied rule over the Steelers and the entire city, I remembered: Pittsburgh has 90 unique neighborhoods. With that many separate groups of needy people, and just as much opportunity for neighborhood (re-, un-, and exo-)development in each set, who could deny me my god-given right to rule over, influence, and make decisions for people I might someday meet, whose names I will immediately forget, and whose feelings I will never care about?
So, with goals large and unhinged, I moved to Lawrenceville to step up and take care of a people that needed guidance. I even met some of them at neighborhood meetings and street cleanups. Now, I admit that I didn't give most of them a fair chance, but they need my guidance nonetheless, no matter how little they matter to the future development of our species.
I went to my room and started mailing out packages; the return address read: Tommy Jarvis, King/Mayor/Lord of Lawrenceville. With a little bit of cooperation from the mail delivery folks, I succeeded in my dream of controlling and influencing people whose hands I would never shake. The power tasted great, tangy with a bit of satiating umami even, but I wanted more. When then Director of Lawrenceville United Toe-knee Choffee announced his bid for District Six Magistrate back in early 2009, I realized this was my chance: I could take control of the neighborhood and help scared black people leave Lawrenceville, just like my precursor.
But I couldn't run my election campaign on the same principles as my predecessor: Sure, most of the black people in Lawrenceville own guns and can fend for themselves, but so do most of the white people. And the black people with guns in the neighborhood are much younger than the white folks with guns, which means the guns owned by black folks are much more likely to hit their targets than those owned by older, shakier, weaker white folks, who are likely to choose the wrong targets.
Young black folks are the wrong targets in this neighborhood, I thought. We've got to get them out of here, for their own safety. But what about the old people who make snap judgments about those living in their communities; whose own physical handicaps will prevent them from reversing their age, bettering themselves and moving out of the ghetto? Shouldn't we be running after-nap programs to make sure these latchkey elders aren't causing trouble?
Apparently not. I lost the battle of Lawrenceville. On December 15, 2009, Choffee sent out an excited email about his real successor, whose name will not be mentioned in text, but rather in jpeg. format.



She sounds cool enough, eh? Grants, budgets and community programming? Sounds like she would be just as qualified to work at a little more fascist-leaning public broadcasting station, but I hear they're all on hiring freezes anyway.


It wasn't until I sat down to Poop after waking up New Year's day that I made the connection: This Community Development is A Family Affair.


In the new issue of The BGC's publication, The Bulletin, the family tree is drawn out, limb by xenophobic limb.


And there it is. Grand daughter moves in to take control of the neighborhood down the hill from her grandmother's neighborhood. As Director of Lawrenceville United, she will assume control over all new real estate development, the welcoming of new, young white people to the neighborhood, and all editorial content on the neighborhood's wikipedia page. Her grandmother was responsible for the last third of the job description, which allows all to follow these tenets to bring with them the pioneering ignorance of encyclopedic tone and tense, the irrelevance of objectivity and the understanding that just because you say you serve the community in an online encyclopedia means that it's yours to shape into what you think a neighborhood ought to be in real life. All because of who you know, or who knew your grandparents before you were born, or who you were fucking in a previous life.

"Here, son, why don't you run this Football team? I'll keep it warm for you."
"Here, son, why don't you run this city? I'll keep it hilly for you."
"Here, grand daughter, why don't you run this neighborhood? I've established a precedence in my neighborhood up the hill and think you'll do fine with a completely different gang set down by the river."

Winter Pleasures

I tore down the closet in my room a few days ago. Unlike the preparations I didn't make for the wall I tore apart last year about this time, I actually covered my bed and furniture with blankets to avoid soaking the plaster and coal dust into my property.

My private property.

And I thought I had documented that wall. I guess not.

This is where this ends. Bye. No Pictures. No proof.

updates

I come back sometimes. Sometimes it's with pictures of my house and my new plans. Other times it's to pretend I'm an anarchist and complain about how my friends receive negative attention from the state while I burn the world and ask everyone why they're not looking at me.
This time it's neither.

It's almost a wish list or a Coming Attractions reel before the film. Or we'll call it what it really is: A Self-Aggrandized To Do List. (Look at me!)

+Rescue enough appropriate Pine from a sign-making business to recover my second floor's fucked hardwood.
+Get busy on finishing the insulation in the drop-ceiling area between first and second floors.
+Make the hype for a Winter To-Do list much bigger than the actual list.

Post-G20 Wrapup

I guess if Luke Ravenstahl can wait until the next official work week to talk about G20, then I can wait until the end of my G20 vacation from Cashiering to give up my feelings about a city's self-defense against unwanted visitors.

I'd like to compare our response to the G20 in Pittsburgh to Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, but I'm not really interested in such pop-adventure metaphors. Thursday's illegal meeting and march was akin to a Parade for Pedophiles, except if we had been pedophiles on parade, the media would have at least let the scared folks inside their homes know about our politics.

After I stayed up all night into Thursday morning, I was ready to crash by the end of the unpermitted march. So I had some more coffee and went back to Oakland, where I had the misfortune of running out of real energy before everyone decided to smash the state after 10:00.
My tattoo artist friend went to jail. She was doubled over coughing on CNN, running up Liberty Avenue with tear gas in her eyes. I later found out another friend and neighbor was arrested, but for not much more than failing to pay attention with riot cops a few feet away.

But now Pittsburgh's seekers of social justice (and property damage) have to apologize to the world for not putting on a big enough anti-capitalist/globalization/free-trade display to burn down our own town. I'm not certain that comparing Pittsburgh to other globalization-focus party host cities that have larger populations is fair. Pittsburgh, as far as I can tell, is fairly local in its allegiance. PrestoGeorge in the Strip took place of Starbucks, which was around for a minute but was deemed inappropriate in such an intimate, familiar setting. Pittsburgh has its chains, and I don't know what percentage of businesses in an average city of over 500k is local or independent, but it could be that we value the local and appreciated it before it became a bumper sticker.


This is where the assumptions jump out: While Pittsburgh is a good home for anarchists because of its cheap living and sometimes empty neighborhoods, greenscape and rich history in class struggle, it doesn't really breed anarchists like the hipper locales across the nation. I've never been anywhere else for an extended period of time, but we're small, we're aging/old, and we have a very large transient student population. We've started to attract new anarchists, but only because anarchists here are starting to advertise Pittsburgh for what it is: Cheaper than where you are now and not what it was 25 years ago.

Maybe other cities with higher cost of living and less winter allow for anarchists to do more romantic training exercises, like, oh, running successful bookstores that compete with real businesses. Or maybe they're forced into being more successful within a slightly more predatory market than the less ambitious, less pricey rustbelt in which we reside, work, and fuck shit up.

But since G20 was announced in May and every anarchist across the country with access to national news had time to save up or request paid time off or hop a train and hitchhike to visit our town and wade in the riot cop moat protecting this summit, I shouldn't even have to come up with excuses as to why Pittsburgh didn't destroy more buildings, businesses and cops.

We didn't have an Alexandros Grigoropoulos to spark stronger resistance and endless riots. I'm happy no one in Pittsburgh had to die to release our hatred for the state.
We aren't appealing to anarchists because we don't really have the best climate; I'm not sure if that's all we don't have going for us, but it has to be a step down from Oregon.
And as much as I can tell, most of our anarchists are pretty busy with other things, even if our infoshop can't legally call itself an infoshop because it would prevent us from donating to prisons.
So while the G20 inconvenienced us without allowing us to inconvenience it too much in return, we really just wanted to act like it wasn't here, even though the itchy pitching shoulder in all of us was covered in poison ivy this entire week.

I will apologize for Pittsburgh's inability to end capitalism before Halloween 2009, but only because I half-promised it to a fellow cashier at work. But I will not apologize for our efforts.
Where were you when cops were running my city? I thought this was about mutual aid?

Oh, you were on the internet talking shit and reading the news. (Which is exactly where I would have been if I didn't live here, minus the shit talking part--I can't make focused, logical points.)

Veggie Dogs for Watch Dogs

I stayed up all night with Landslide kids. We sat on the porch with walkie talkies, looking down at the intersection of Kirkpatrick, Beelen and Allequippa.
This is all I saw all night.

View Larger Map

Nothing happened. There was a scare here and there, but when during a police state the biggest scare of the night comes from a suspicious delivery of the Wall Street Journal at 5 a.m., then I think we're all right.
Actually, when I followed a friend up to the woods after dawn to let the chickens out of their house for the day, two strange cars pulled in. Over the walkie talkies, which make everything inaudible except laughter (which could be maniacal or good-natured, it's never clear), all I could make out was that it was of my friend's concern to return from the woods.
As we were making our way back down the hill, we found out it was a false alarm: two men had pulled over and were having an altercation; the one in the rear smashing the other's back window and driving away before anyone realized that the cars weren't there to raid the house or step on pepper plants.
I ate two-and-a-half veggie dogs with saurkraut and pickled jalapeno peppers from the farm, drank one heavy cup of coffee and pooped at least three times.
I'd like to think I helped keep the farm safe, but I realized as the sun was rising that I had no clue what to do if confronted with a cop and a warrant. This week's special legalities equal total disregard for visiting friends: To anyone with a badge, a visitor is an out-of-town protester with a gallon of fermented piss and a five-gallon bucket of flingable shit.
I forgot to mention the welcome and supportive presence of several ACLU Legal Observers, one of whom is a new Landslide lawyer who was working earlier in the evening at the convergence space in Greenfield.
One could assume that the ACLU would have no trouble dealing with police, but it's hard to remember that while trying to stay up and remain comfortable perched from above the scenic violence.
Helicopters flew overhead once every five minutes before midnight, search lights getting lost in the fog like measuring scoops in a jar of flour. Every time a light on Fifth Ave. turned green, the anticipation for a cop coming up the hill quickly grew to a head, and then deflated just as quickly. If someone was walking up toward the bus stop at Kirkpatrick and Fifth, then it was worth pulling out the binoculars to see what they were up to, even if it really was just a plan to wait for the bus.
Every transistor box with a plexiglass cover and rivets around the edge is a scene-monitoring, electronic cop. Every vehicle without obvious markings is an unmarked police vehicle.

The moon was hiding from our vantage point on the porch last night, but it really wasn't what we were looking for.