Tag: place

Same Old Love

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

NFL football. Divisional playoffs. Top-seeded Detroit Lions, following a franchise-best 15-2 regular season record, host the Washington Commanders. It’s Saturday night, Saturday, Saturday. I had to fiddle around for an hour to get viewing options to work, as Sling Blue disappointed, then Fubo seemed fubar, and then finally I could dial in via a YouTube TV free trial (streaming medley relay can be such a drag!). Ford Field, bluelit and roaring. Despite being favorites, the Lions lose, 45-31. A two touchdown margin. No shade to the Commanders, but I do think it’s apt to say the Lions lost more than that the Commanders won. Detroit turned the ball over five times. That’s too many. Notwithstanding sixteen players on injured reserve, the Lions defense pressed again and again, aggressive style reduced to too many big gain giveaways, wide open receivers, running lanes the berth of a country road, all while committing fewer errors. Good on the Commanders for doing what they had to. But about those Lions:

I’m from Michigan. I grew up with the Lions on TV most Sundays, CBS 9 out of Cadillac because we didn’t have cable and nobody I knew had cable, though satellite dish receivers were coming on by the late 1980s. Adjust the antenna and Wayne Fontes comes to mind. Monty Clark. James Jones and Gary James. Chuck Long. Coaches and players from around the time I was 10, 11, 12. The refrain was “same old Lions,” after a loss, which was most of the time. From the time I was 10 until I was 14, the Lions season total wins amounted to this: 4, 7, 5, 4, and 4, with double-digit losses every year except 1985, when they finished 7-9. I suppose there is nothing special about my fandom for the Detroit Lions. In fact, around that same time, I took a stand, shifted my affinity to the then-and-only-briefly-ascendent Cleveland Browns (who, arguably, became the Baltimore Ravens a few years later in 1995). There was that subscription to the tabloid-paginated Browns Digest, with its full-color posters accompanying each issue, and there was that Browns bomber jacket, shiny in a way that was singular and rare in my school’s one long hallway joining together the middle school and high school. The digest and the jacket were splurges, probably two of the most expensive gifts my parents footed in those years, and the jacket especially was such a curious choice in retrospect because I wore it proudly but also took an impactful amount of crap and scrutiny and teasing for wearing it. At the scale of school experiences, which in those days were the main hub of socialization, that Browns jacket galvanized a deeply personal knowledge about community, belonging, testing alternative gravities akin to centripetal outsiderness. I could be making too much of it; I could also be making too little.

All the while, the Lions were still there, patterned results. I kidded that a Lions-Browns superbowl was my dream. And as I’ve grown older, I’ve marveled in moments at how far out of reach that ultimate matchup continues to be (forgiving, of course, the warp-wobble-weirdness of the Browns becoming the Ravens followed by the Browns rebeginning, a classic gone-noting where the gone comes back). As I watched on Saturday night, Saturday, Saturday, I felt disappointment. Dan Campbell is different. Wow, what heart. The disappointment is not for me but instead, somehow, it’s almost but not quite in that orbit of a solastalgia variant, growing up with the bookends of pigskin-headed rowdiness and shambling commercialism, where the s-o-l is “same old Lions.” A high anticipation, high expectations loss carries me back, reminds me of a time when to root for the Lions and to know serial disappointment as a regional phenomenon was also to feel a peninsular place, the ground underfoot, hold something. This is here, where I am from. Winning by contrast is easier, emotionally. But losing and knowing the aftermath of losing, long losing, its accrual too touches feeling even all these years later and from 500 miles away–in such a way that I wanted to note, here, in a low key entry. Carry on and go back to what you were doing and no big deal just a flit.

Coaches and players revolve, leave, turnstile churning, and change is skipping afoot after a 15-2 season with an early exit from the playoffs. This team’s coordinators are going elsewhere to become head coaches (OC Ben Johnson to the Bears is yesterday’s news). Yet this season wasn’t without its rewards. I’ll be pulling for them again next year. Wearing from time to time the Lions sweatshirt Ph. gifted me this past Christmas, knowing what losing knows, knowing its affective rinse as reaching long before me and far around.

Perimeters

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

A few clicks south along a gravel road and you’re there, a property serendipity or dumb luck or the Fates queued up for a look last Wednesday, just as I was giving up on the ridiculous Montgomery County, Va., housing market. Figured I would be renting indefinitely because who can spend all that time online sifting for leads, then schedule and go for a showing, only to find “pending” by the end of the day. Escalation clauses to 50k over asking. Same day cash offers. Waived inspections. But against the grain of improbabilities, then there’s one, and you only need one.

At 5.8 acres in an unincorporated part of the county, I thought it was a long shot. Right-priced. Low taxes. House plus a small guest cottage in back. Pair of workshop-studios. Went to see it. Another prospective buyer crowding in behind us, arriving early as we walked the perimeter, much of it across angular inclines then declines of as much as 200 feet, what in this region is, if you’re talking about the landform, known as a hollow, and if you’re talking about the auditory call-across-a-distance, then it’s a holler. Hollow or holler, it’s always only pronounced holler. Neither a valley nor a cove, a holler comes with a watercourse and little to no flat land. So I put in a good faith bid and waited. Extenuating circumstances had me waiting an extra day and then part of another. On Friday night, a decision: there was a second matching bid, but if we’d waive inspection, it was ours.

Aerial (drone) photograph with approximate property boundary added for southside Christiansburg house now under contract.

The waived inspection doesn’t worry me too too much.

Offer accepted and heaps of paperwork in motion, we went again this evening, a week later, to walk the perimeter again—having also done so on Saturday when we met the sellers who spend 2.5 hours generously going over the finer features, in addition to some idiosyncrasies I’m going to need reminded about. The water pump especially. For the creek or the pond. The electrical configurations for the two wired garages. The quality of HughesNet versus HollerNet. The spigot buried in the front yard. The location of the septic and drain field. Dwelling sorts it out one way or another.

But bears! This evening while walking the perimeter, there a mossy shelf, maybe 15×30-feet, there a knuckled ledge overlooking the holler, there a place for chickens, there a hoop house and garden, there a series of hooks for ladder storage, and there a dispatch of bear scat. And another. I think? I mean, what else? And it’s not like there is a cell signal available to Google bear isht til you get back to the apartment later on. No apps for identifying it definitively. Seller said they’d had a bear pull a trash barrel better than three-quarters of the way up the embankment. Presence of a bear or two accentuates a holler with special caution ahead of moving and planning. But they’re no more worrying than a waived inspection, and obviously they aren’t especially concerned about the location of the septic or drain field.

Ark

/ Derek Mueller

⏳ Approximate reading time: < 1 min

This Ypsinews.com story of The Ark reminded me of Brand’s How Buildings Learn: Huron-side tannery, disassembly, reassembly, blacksmith shop, furniture store, deterioration, pigeon training. Ypsilanti’s The Ark, its adrift, undecidable architecture fittingly named, an example of an early “portable.” Here’s an excerpt about its initial site:

The site was likely chosen on purpose. Tanneries were smelly places, where piles of cow skins were scraped of their remaining flesh and soaked in vats of chemicals in order to process them into leather. A location downstream from downtown meant that meat scraps and used-up chemicals could be drained into the river without creating a stench in the stretch of river traveling through town.

The lazy Sunday morning click with Brand’s book, however, (un)builds toward The Ark’s demise, which, as parallels go, blightfully suggests another end-variant true for so many buildings in aging cities: How Buildings Learn No More.

Wonder how many of those century-old pigeons are out there homing on this missing place?

Ark.jpg

Student Center

/ Derek Mueller

⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

EMU Student Center

I am enjoying a few minutes of light computing in the Student Center at Eastern Michigan University right now: coffee, sunlight, email, Google Reader, Fantasy Football results. I try to spend an hour in the Student Center every Tuesday. The weekly, non-essential outing contributes to my New Faculty Continuing Orientation Plan. Basically, the NFCOP goes like this: leave your office every so often, develop a feel for the place. Frequently I run into students or colleagues as I make my way across campus, and we talk. Also, I walk alternative routes, get to know the landscape, the distances. These semi-strategic excursions are refreshingly ordinary, far less in the vein of anthropological scrutiny (a la Marc Augé) than in slow, deep, you-are-here mapping (a la William Least Heat-Moon). Walks less motivated by ground-truthing this "rhetorical country" than in walking, being here.

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The Steep Approach

/ Derek Mueller

⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

I finished up Iain Banks’

The Steep Approach to Garbadale a couple of days ago. Took me
about a week, and it felt like a faster-than-usual read, though it’s not like I
spend all that much time reading fiction for the sport of it (at least not these
days). Faster than expected, a surprisingly engaging novel, a story well
told–exactly as promised in the approbative cover matter.

The upshot: Alban Wopuld deals with a hiatus from the family circle,
resurfacing at the behest of a cousin who recruits him to stir up dissent among
family members in favor of approving the sale of their rights to a popular game,
Empire!. Alban re-emerges as an influential presence in the family, all
the while coping with two formative events from earlier in his life (and, in
different degrees, these events are at the root of his alienation): his
mother’s suicide and a cousinly love affair.

This little summary doesn’t ruin it. And I fully intend to be getting
along with other novels by Banks just as soon as…one of these days. I only had
time for this one because I am purposefully neglecting the diss for a couple of
weeks while on a back-to-back conferences jag (seriously, it must appear that I
have been shitting around for a couple of weeks now; lazing through some books
about maps, etc.). Anyhow, by this point, I sure I have done enough to pique
your interest in The Steep Approach that I should give a little bit more,
so, then, two passages from dog-eared pages:

Also, third, she tried to quantify how hopelessly, uselessly,
pathetically weak she felt. It took a long time–she was a
mathematician, after all, not a poet, so images were not normally her strong
suit–but eventually she decided on one. It involved a banana. Specifically,
the long stringy bits you find between the skin and flesh of a banana. She
felt so weak you could have tied her up with those stringy bits of banana
and she wouldn’t have been able to struggle free. That was how weak she
felt. (220)

This comes as VG–Alban’s other love interest–remembers swimming near
a reef when the disastrous tsunami welled up from the Indian Ocean in ’04.

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Talks

/ Derek Mueller

⏳ Approximate reading time: 3 mins

Before a full week cycles around, I wanted to tack up a few notes about the
Digital and Visual Rhetorics Symposium hosted at SU last Thursday and Friday. 
Each of the talks was stimulating/evocative; w/ these notes: I’m going for a patchwork of what was said and what it got me
thinking about (highlights plus commentary).  Fair enough?

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From: Zonal Memoria

/ Derek Mueller

⏳ Approximate reading time: 4 mins

Considering that the del.icio.us bookmark that led me to it included a note
describing MSN Virtual
Earth (via) like this: "Cheap knock off of google maps done with crappy USGS
satellite data," I wasn’t expecting much.  Yet, although the perspectives from
MSN present black and white satellite images, the site is, in some ways, better
than Google Maps because of resolution covering some of places I identify
with. 

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