Ohio!!...?

Yes friends, Ohio!!...? But Brian, didn’t you just return from Costa Rica? Yes, yes, but this entry was almost finished before I left so, here it is.

Our hero’s services were required up in the Buckeye state and so I was off. I was accompanied by my good friend, Becky the vegetarian. Becky also doesn’t eat. During our wondrous two day jaunt through the verdant Ohio countryside, Becky consumed 4 ounces of digestible material. This is not that alarming considering it’s approximately 20% of her body weight. What was alarming was when she unceremoniously returned 3.75 of those ounces to Mother Earth (via the kitchen sink) after one and a half glasses of vodka tonic Saturday night. For those of you unfamiliar with one and a half glasses of vodka tonic, it’s what is fed to Russian infants in their bottles.

Our droll adventure started in Cleveland, home of the Indians, Browns, and the worst subway system in the world (more on that later). Cleveland was once a bustling community specializing in bright steel and burning rivers (pollution does that). However, try as trade tariffs may, most of the steel and automotive jobs in that area were lost overseas. As a result, a very nice city with much to offer is inhabited primarily by those who originally grew up here, seeing most of the young population leave. I spoke with a lawyer who owned a 3500 sq ft house on an acre of land 10 minutes from downtown Cleveland. He estimated it was worth about $250-300,000. That is approximately equal to two months rent in an LA studio apartment.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum was an absolute must. Here I am standing in the Eerie dusk in front of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame after three hours inside.

I was rocked out.

After our time in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame we attempted to head to Shaker Square to enjoy some dinner. We spotted a stop for Cleveland’s subway, the RTA (Regional Transit Authority). “Ah! What a quick and painless way to reach our destination!” we emphatically exclaimed. Upon entering the station we found nobody at the ticket windows and the automatic ticket dispensers to be covered in the plastic, walking back to the entrance we inquired from the only uniformed worker to be found who was busy sweeping the floor. Initially it appeared that all the tendons on one side of her neck were severed. Upon closer inspection, however, she simply had formed a permanent cell phone sandwich between her ear and shoulder.

Us (mild as lambs): “Is this station open?”

Her (angrily removing cell phone sandwich from ear): “What? Yes!!”

Upon which she promptly replaced the cell phone sandwich and went back to sweeping. We walked through the turnstyles to the platform where a handful of people waited. “Ah, we must be in the right spot!”

So we waited, and waited, and waited. Finally our cell phone sandwich, severed-tendon sweeper arrived, busily sweeping and chatting when she was interrupted by a man.

Him (mild as a baby deer): “Excuse me, do you know when the train is arriving?”

Her (looking at him askew as if he were a rodent): “I saw it pass by a few minutes ago, it should be here in a few minutes.”

Evidently we were fortunate enough to have the singular honor of riding the only train on the line.

This story drags: the short version is that it took us an hour and 20 minutes to go 3 city blocks on the RTA in addition to being told to buy the wrong ticket and the wrong place to get off by the indifferent conductor. What could cause such a poorly run transit system to continue poorly running? I found my answer on the first train: An emblem of the Amalgamated Transit Union stuck to the driver’s booth. Ah, unions! Those bastions of apathy, pervasive sense of entitlement, and inverse proportionality between wages and productivity! Thank you for proving once again that the necessity of your existence ended 60+ years ago.

Please welcome the most ironic statement ever printed:

Evidently there’s even a union that gives awards to unions, though the sign probably was created over a period of 6 months by one new union member while nine others managed him while being paid at a rate 5 times the minimum wage with full benefits, after a strike. Enough, I’ve become embittered.

We also met up with Becky’s brother and sister in law in Toledo. Toledo is another nice city that makes me sad. Here they are standing on the shore of the Maumee River, which flows through Toledo to Lake Eerie in the north.

Toledo, like Cleveland, used to be a booming town of industry until the jobs went overseas and people left. As a result, the downtown skyline is populated with stately, early 20^th century buildings that stand completely abandoned, or with only a few floors of occupancy. Attempts by local government to attract new life and vitality to the city have fallen flat. The main industry, in fact, that northern Ohio now sports is medicine and hospitals, an industry that our young friends are being schooled in, with the plans to leave immediately upon graduation. We drove by a few of the nicer neighborhoods, viewing houses that had sat on the market for literally two years. Being a staunch capitalist doesn’t mean I can’t feel the depression of a city that has lost the battle with competitive advantage. Yes, the Asian markets that have taken the industry that once thrived here will, in the future, be in need of services from the United States and in the end most people will have more of everything. But that’s a long time coming, maybe not in the span of the lifetime of most of the occupants of Toledo.

A short hour’s drive north, however, found us in the piney town of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Oh now, that’s a nice little joint. We first patronized a tasty little vegetarian place: Sheva.

I’m half hippie, so I enjoyed Sheva's organic, locally grown ingredients in a symphony of sustainable sustenance. Here we are, after the rondo.

Post consumption, we meandered about the streets and shops in Ann Arbor. Google even has a little shop here, though I don't know if there's room for the Google pool, gourmet chefs, or massage parlours that glamorize their other locations.

At first I was perfectly peeved at this picture as the speeding bus zipped right in front of the pillared arcade/alleyway.

But then I realized that this serendipitously captured the ambience of the Ann Arbor. A standing man, an old fashioned arcade eclipsed by a bus blurred in transit. What marvelous juxtaposition! What does it all mean? You decide (translation: I don’t know and I’m trying to end the topic before I stop sounding intelligent).

Here’s the picture without the layered meaning:

Our cheeks rosy with the glow of Ann Arbor’s evergreen air, we returned to Toledo, then to Cleveland, then to Austin. Next stop, Costa Rica!