7.25.2025 - Weekly Digest

Having an outstanding time running amok in Southeast Michigan but falling behind here a bit. Please enjoy this shorter (and late) digest and I'll have some more for you all next week, promise.

7.22.2025

This is what happens when I return to Michigan after being gone a while. It's like I flip the handle on a Manoogian, then I hear a noise in the next room and go in there to investigate, discover it's nothing, and forget the faucet's on in the kitchen. I settle in for a long read or a nap, get up and puzzle over why my socks are wet. The landscape of Detroit. There's a specific way things are laid out in post-industrial cities. It's green here. It's like Nam here, says my uncle who worked on supply boats in the Mekong and caught himself a dose of lymphoma from lugging around crates filled with Agent Orange. Allegedly, of course. But what he meant was how jungly it gets in the summer. All these empty lots sprout full biospheres that become sentient and climb up the sides of the red brick three-flats. The plants need somewhere to go. It's a short cycle and I'm sure the plants' genes know that to some degree. In a couple months already they'll be withering as the roots recede into the ground away from the frost. Humans mimic vegetation in this way. Festivals and music everywhere. On my way to the pharmacy I heard what I thought was the percussive thump of a piece of heavy equipment breaking up ground or concrete; the sound resolved and I could tell it wasn't a single report but dozens or hundreds all at once like concentrated hail. Snares, the drum section for a marching band, practicing outside the Public School for the Arts. On a Monday morning in July. My uncle is fine by the way. He beat the lymphoma. He credits Zumba for his health and resilience. By July you can almost forget what winter feels like, but in August already you see a leaf turn yellow and you look for ways to fend it off.

7.23.2025

I borrowed a bicycle, a little small for me, the brakes weren't great, but I rode from Midtown through downtown Detroit and onto the Riverwalk and looked up at the Renaissance Center. The last time I'd been there was Election Night 2008. A group of us stayed in town for a couple days and just wandered around, drifted into bars, told people we'd worked on the campaign, let them buy us drinks. On Woodward I saw a squad of old sedans on stilts, whatever you call those, riding in a pack and I remembered the day after the election being in about that same place in the Pontiac Vibe I'd about lived in for several months, next to a guy in a black car jacked up like these were and he was blaring not music from his speakers but Obama's speech from the night before. It was an incredible time to be here and I thought I was going to stay. There was supposed to be a program for those of us who'd worked as organizers to take what we'd learned and work in cities like Detroit to help implement the administration's policies. To contribute, to try to keep that sense of community and optimism going. It was a nice idea and I was ready to commit to it. But then nothing happened and I went back to Chicago without much of a plan, as I sometimes do.

7.24.2025

I was going to write about visiting the Museum of Contemporary Art with BK and his son but it's closed due to excessive heat. The friendly barista at the coffee shop I've been camping out in all week acts as my docent for all things local. It gets really hot in the museum, she says. They don't really have good ventilation or anything. Another under-funded institution, I guess. Who knows what the problem is. I'd like to think it's a conceptual art piece, that the museum is intentionally uncomfortable. I've seen more sadistic art in my time. The idea is to track how long each visitor lasts and cross-reference that with the heat index. After ten years of this there will be a readout displayed on a big wall in the foyer, thematically linked to the climate change phenomenon but also a statement on manipulation, among other things. The word quantification will appear several times on the document. The project will suffer a setback when a museum-goer suffers heat stroke in one of the innermost galleries, where several dead birds are mounted on the walls in an exhibit called "Investigating Decomposition", but the commitment to the long game by the museum's directors and the shadowy artist behind the project will stay steady as they spiral into a funnel of deflections and lies, and a journalist in some civilization in the future will ask the question Was it Worth it? and no one will know the story or the museum and the City of Detroit will be a mythical green place made of stories like this one.