of dislocation & graceful unravelling

Bonus smartypants trivia: the phrase “redd up” is of Scotch-Irish origin and is used in Jane Eyre, a piece of Important Classic Literature. I got so excited when I read it that I called my mom to tell her.

& bonus personal anecdotes:

1. I can’t wait ‘til I have a kid and my I’m-becoming-my-mother transformation is complete. My Pittsburgh accent isn’t as thick as hers because: I read books more often than I spoke as a kid; I got a lot of phrases corrected into submission by overbearing grammar dudes (“you’re forgetting something, SM… your helping verb! loop-de-doo!”); and I was embarrassed about my accent when I moved away from Pittsburgh. Now I’m often homesick and am accidentally-on-purpose cultivating a Southern drawl with Northern snappiness and holding onto my old slang terms while trying to assimilate new ones. HEY Y’ALL WHADDAYA MEAN YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT A GUMBAND IS, GEEZ-O-MAN!

2. At work I processed a dictation that was clearly from a Pittsburgher; they said n’at and I was so bummed that we have to transcribe in “proper” English so I had to type out “and that.” Ugh, blasphemy.

(Source: pittsburgh-sports, via champagnelikealady)

cyclocosm:

Might as well rename this blog “Eff Yeah Canton Ave”, right? Most of the climbs looks pretty gruesome, but the real fun starts at 2:23 or so.

(thanks to Cycling Inquisition for passing this along)

Scenes from the Dirty Dozen bicycle race in my ancestral homeland, Pittsburgh PA, 11/27/10. Canton Avenue is (possibly) the steepest street in the world.

peripatetic (ramble)

Most of my writing comes from my 1.7-mile walk home from work at night:

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Cub Scouts viewing the Foucault Pendulum at the Buhl Planetarium, Pittsburgh PA, 1956

“The Foucault Pendulum provides a classic demonstration that the Earth rotates on its axis. Contained within a beautiful brass and marble Pendulum Pit, the true cardinal points of the compass are displayed below the swing of the Pendulum.

“The Foucault Pendulum is one of the original exhibits [and, was one of Buhl’s ‘talking exhibits’] in The Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science, on display when the building and all contents were dedicated and gifted to the City of Pittsburgh by the Buhl Foundation on 1939 October 24. The steel pendulum wire was fabricated at the Jones and Laughlin Steel Works on the South Side. To ensure there would be no bias in the swing of the pendulum, this long wire was transported from the South Side Works to Buhl Planetarium completely straight, with no bends or curves in the wire. A special truck permit had to be secured from the city, to allow this specially-long load to travel over city streets, to reach Buhl Planetarium.” (via Exhibits … of the Buhl Planetarium)

I visited the Foucault Pendulum at the Buhl when I was very, very young. It’s the kind of childhood memory that happened so long ago that it feels surreal and foreboding in my mind, even though nothing particularly weird happened. It was one of the first times I remember feeling Small in the Universe.

In re: P-Fuzz’s recent “embarrassing” GPOY, this is a photograph of me taken by friedzombiebrain on deviantArt. This is from 1/6/2003 (I was 18 years old) at a big anti-war rally in Pittsburgh PA. I’m wearing a Corporate American Flag that I bought from Adbusters back when I used to think that Adbusters was the greatest, most thought-provoking magazine ever. And I still have that same red hat, too, which was given to me by Tina, my favorite barista at the Beehive, where I spent my Formative Radical Years.

I wasn’t aware of this photograph being taken & didn’t discover it until months later. I’m glad it’s still online & I still like to show it off sometimes as proof that I was once, like, totally punk rock (or whatever). But this photo is also indicative of the time when I became disillusioned with practicing activist tactics that “follow the rules” and comply with authority (ie, getting a protest permit with a police escort, then acting shocked and outraged when the riot cops become violent before anyone so much as picks up a brick), not to mention totally disillusioned with the concept of democracy in America. These protests were replicated in multiple cities worldwide — there were thousands of people at the one in Pittsburgh alone — yet what seemed to be a majority of public outcry still failed to Impeach Bush and/or Stop the War.

Also, that Corporate American Flag probably cost about $25, so this was also shortly before the time I began to realize that there is a hugely profitable racket in pushing “radical” consumables on people who think they need to spend money to look the part of being totally alternative. (See also: Commodify Your Dissent, which I wish I’d read when I was 17 instead of 27.) Ah, misguided youth!

“Dock Ellis & the LSD No-No” illustrated by James Blagden

This is an amazing short featuring three of my favorite things: Pittsburgh, baseball, and a Positive Drug Story.

Pittsburgh, 11.24.04 | selenographie

ETA: I remembered the story about this photograph. I was 20 & lived at the House of the Rising Moon with my best friend Suzn. We’d spent the day together working ourselves into a frenzy Making Art — maybe working on our collaborative zine, or screenprinting t-shirts or something. This was a time when it didn’t matter how many hours we had to work at shitty jobs as long as we could stay up all night Making Art. We could go on like that forever and it didn’t even feel like Just Scraping By. By afternoon we were so manic and sleep-deprived, and on impulse we visited Jester’s Court Tattoo Parlour, where I got a skeleton drummer tattooed on my arm. This was a time when there really was no disposable income, but the consequences didn’t seem to bother me as much. Suzn had to go to work after that, so I rode the bus downtown with her. You can ride the loop around town and stay on the same bus all the way back to our street. When I was a teenager and didn’t have any money, sometimes my friends and I would just ride the buses around and around, sitting in the back and causing a ruckus. After she left, I noticed the sky changing almost a sickly yellow — like tornado yellow. I got off the bus and ran to stand on a bridge and watch the sunset. This was a time when I used to carry a camera with me, always. It was a little point-n-shoot 35mm; I called it the semi-automatic. I always used Kodak film ISO800 speed stopped down to ISO400 to get the most vibrant colors. People were walking across the bridge, going home from work, stopping to watch the sunset. Other people were getting off buses to stand on the bridge and watch. I took out my camera and snapped a few photos, and a businessman standing next to me caught my eye and we smiled and he said, “Isn’t this amazing?”

My Job Is: Typing

So my job is somewhat mindless in the sense that I have to sit in front of a computer and transcribe voicemails. This is a service Important Business Professionals pay for so that they don’t have to write/type their own Important Notes. One of the reasons that I like this job is because I’m getting paid (and occasionally complimented) for a lot of seemingly-useless skills that I’ve acquired over time due to Having Interest in Things. For example, it’s really helpful that I have a good grasp of English grammar. & I have a personal interest in things like etymology so I’m good at transcribing medical terms or uncommon last names because I understand about Latin roots and cognates and all those kinds of things, so that makes me feel really useful in a way since I can process dictations with few errors and question marks. (We have special question marks to use for when we’re uncertain of spelling — and we have no Internet access to look that stuff up because presumably no one would get any work done if there was Internet…)

But my favorite secret prideful moments are when I know how to spell the names of different locations — and I don’t have to put little sp?s next to them because I am totally sure about spelling Bryn Mawr & Kedzie & Cicero because I rode the train in Chicago, and I know that the Parish should be capitalized in New Orleans locales and Marigny and Tchoupitoulas still sound like incantations. Names of streets and neighborhoods and rivers and cities all sound magical and I know how to spell them and where they are because I like to travel when I can and I like to read and I like to look at maps and figure out how to pronounce things.

I love getting a dictation from a client in Pittsburgh because I know all of the places he’s talking about and I know the proper way to type out the addresses and streets. Part of my job is also reviewing/correcting jobs that were pre-scribed by others, and sometimes I can tell before even listening to the dictation that the message is from Pittsburgh and the neighborhoods are misspelled in a valiant attempt to phonetically depict some crazy Polish names. Then I listen as some anonymous client talks about all the meetings he went to all over the city and I can picture all of these places in my mind and start to feeling very homesick.

Colby said he loves going to Pittsburgh with me when we visit because seeing my family interact makes sense to him, witnessing the background that made me (and then I wonder how I got to be a thousand miles away). I came from a big family in a small house & we were always fighting to fiercely protect personal space while sharing bedrooms. Also I came from a long line of Putting Up With Shit Because Nobody Said Life Was Fair and this is a useful life skill, most times.

We go to Pittsburgh and visit my friends and family all over the town, and Pittsburgh is huge compared to Athens (where downtown is about five blocks squared). We’d take the bus or trolley or a car ride to all these different neighborhoods and Colby would keep asking, is this still Pittsburgh? Are we still in Pittsburgh? Because you can spend an hour going across town and still be in the same city and county. And it’s real strange to think that when I left the city six years ago I felt trapped, riding the same bus routes to and from my job and my house and the coffeeshop… sometimes when people find out I’m from Pittsburgh they’ll ask me if I know so-and-so or if I’ve been to a certain bar and most times I haven’t, because it’s not that kind of town, even though all the neighborhoods feel like their own little towns so I could see how it would feel like that to a visitor. So each time I go back to visit I find all these new things I never saw when I was younger and angsty and I always how it would feel if I went back there to live, if I would feel small or the city would feel small.

"‘The lights,’ Malkin smiles. ‘Wow.’ They appeared small at first, gold and silver flecks at the end of a kaleidoscope. Then, as the tunnel yawned wider and wider and the car raced through its mouth, the Pittsburgh skyline exploded. Towers levitating on the shoulders of endless bridges. A ghost of the city reflecting in the waters below. ‘I never been so surprised when I see all the lights,’ Malkin says. ‘So many lights! And the bridges, the most I have ever seen. Downtown looked so amazing. Not bad place to be for a new home, I think.’"

Evgeni Malkin Would Like A Word With You. (via paperballpotluck)

EDITED 12.05.11 as per the original quote (via peter—nincompoop)

(via fuckyeahtheburgh)

Jerry’s Records in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh PA

When I was 13, I’d go across town to visit my bestfriend, and Jerry’s Records was right upstreet (as yinz say) from her house. I had recently “discovered” David Bowie as a relieving alternative to the Top 40 radio my peers listened to, so to my young self, Jerry’s was like this secret cavern of musical genius. We clutched worn copies of Ziggy Stardust, Lou Reed’s Transformer, Pink Floyd The Wall, and Mick Ronson’s post-Stardust solo excursions, running back home to lay on the floor in the stifling hot attic and listen for the first time to these scratchy songs calling across decades, feeling this impossible regret that we weren’t born early enough to experience these artists live in the flesh.

(Source: mostlypittsburgh)