You don’t ever realize how much you learn from working in obscure jobs while in school. You don’t realize how much fun you are having while working in these capacities until you turn around and are all of a sudden thrust into the normal career oriented work force. I got into a debate last night with an old friend of mine (Bart), about tax codes and how billionaires are hoarding all of the money and dragging down the economy. I couldn’t help but find it funny how the two of us were able to have such a debate when 12 years ago we were working in a carpet warehouse in Ohio.
The Carpet Warehouse:
12 years ago, Bart and I were working together in a carpeting warehouse, cutting pieces of carpet for a bunch of asshole carpet installers who did nothing but complain and give us shit while doing so. They called me a hippy because I had long hair at the time. I tried to fight several of them on more than one occasion. To this day, every time I see a carpet installer on the road, I give them the finger. They are all cut from the same douche-bag cloth. I will always have hard wood floors throughout any house I own.
Although I do look back at that particular job and recognize it as the job that taught me about hard work. I think Bart would look at it in a similar light. Our boss at the time, Al, was the walking personification of a crotchety, racist, chain-smoking, hard working, ball busting, American old white man. I am convinced that Al didn’t even know what my name was as he always referred to me as “Lazy Cock”. Bart and the other help were also given their own names by Al.
We had a fork lift, with a massive metal boom on the front of it that everyone, including Al, referred to as “The Dick”. On more than one occasion, I managed to ram “The Dick” through the drywall that separated our carpet warehouse with the Paint warehouse next door. I am pretty sure we were supposed to have some sort of a license to operate that thing but it didn’t ever seem to come up.
Then of course were the circumstances where the entire dick would just fall off of the fork lift and smash into the ground. Mind you, this thing weighs 300+ pounds. And the only person who could properly reattach the Dick, were Al and some butch lesbian lady who would come out of the warehouse office like a professional wrestler walking into the ring whenever she would hear the dick smash into the pavement. This lady was not messing around. We were all absolutely terrified of her.
We were very young, so we often showed up to work, hung over or still drunk, often late. Bart would often show up for work, climb on top of the carpet padding and fall asleep, sometimes for hours. Horrific cuts on your hands were a daily occurrence. You wouldn’t believe how sharp a razor has to be in order to slice a straight line through a roll of carpeting. So that blade would need changing often and even the most minor slip while doing so, could lead to massive blood loss.
Al was always telling us to go buy him packs of cigarettes but we weren’t even old enough to buy them. So we were forced to drive around town until we could locate a gas station that would sell cigarettes to minors on behalf of our 72 year old boss.
Al, also never had any concept of what was available for order at any sort of a fast food restaurant. Once a day, one of us would go and get lunch for everyone in the warehouse. Everyone besides Al knew what they wanted from Burger King or McDonald’s or wherever. When it came time for Al to make his selection, he would always say something like, “Gimme one of those big sandwiches ya lazy cock!” And that was as specific as it got, just go get Al some sort of a “Big Sandwich”. And no matter what sort of crap you brought back, Al would eat the shit out if. He used to walk around the warehouse, while he ate his big sandwich and just stare at the rolls of carpeting on the racks as though he was at the louver looking at ancient works of art.
I remember the day that I had to leave the carpet warehouse in order to go back to college, I thanked Al for the opportunity he gave me and he walked me out to my truck and just before I left, he looked me straight in the eye and told me, “I got 10 to 1 odds you flunk out of that school you dumb fuck”. I never heard from Al again. He was and possibly still is, a great man.
Landscaping:
My best friend owned a landscaping company and still does. When you watch him do this job, it quickly becomes apparent that he was put on this Earth to landscape. What he manages to do with a few cubic yards of dirt and some trees can only be described as an art form. Me on the other hand, not so much.
It was fun and all working for my best friend over the summer while I was still in High School so we got to spend a lot of time together but the work was extraordinarily hard which lead to mistakes on my part.
There was one yard, in Newbury Ohio, which we referred to as “The Beast” where quite a few mishaps occurred. My friend Matt was always the one who would mow the lawns while I weed whacked. Earlier in the year, the muffler had broken off of our weed whacker, so this thing sounded like a 747 on takeoff. After a while using the thing, it would become so loud that it would begin to skew ones sense of reality and decision making.
At one point, Matt was on the mower and I was weed whacking as usual and I look up to see Matt in a full wind sprint towards me, he is yelling something and waving his arms in the air, but I could not hear anything. I then noticed that his mower was still running, about 30 yards behind him, but still I had no clue why he was running away from it. Finally, in a veritable panic at this point, I managed to locate the choke on the whacker and shut it down. Immediately, I heard Matt yelling, “BEES!!!! BEEES!!! GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!!!!”
I dropped the weed whacker and began running alongside of Matt through this person’s back yard. Apparently there was a hornets’ nest that Matt had run over and destroyed. You could see a formidable cloud of bees chasing us. This person basically lived on an undeveloped golf course so it was a good 200 yard sprint back to the safety of the truck. By the time we got into the truck, Matt had been stung at least 10 times; I managed to escape with none. We had to sit there for an hour before either of us became brave enough to go back out and get the equipment and finish the job.
We often mowed The Beast first, often around 7:30 am and I am not a morning person. On a separate morning from the bee incident, we arrived bright and early and got to work. I always grabbed my weed whacker and did the front yard and ditch first. I was completely out of it on this particular morning and was just kind of in a zone, not really paying attention.
I noticed for some reason that the lady who owned the place kept staring at me out her front window as I was trimming the weeds directly in front of the window. She had kind of a shocked and humored look on her face. I just smiled back at her as I remember thinking to myself, “See something you like lady?” Just as I was thinking this, I noticed that the air from the exhaust of the weed whacker seemed especially hot this morning below the waist. I looked down, thinking that there was something wrong with the weed whacker only to find out that my penis was hanging completely out of my shorts taking the full brunt of the exhaust as it was exposed to the world.
I immediately zipped up as the lady in the house gave me the thumbs up and began laughing her ass off. I remember wondering how long it had been like that. I had gone to the gas station that morning and bought iced tea and a Honey Bun, was I exposed that entire time? When we got back into the truck to leave, Matt informed me that the lady had included a 100 dollar tip, 50 for each of us. So that was nice of her.
One particularly sweltering morning, we arrived in University Heights to put in a new front lawn at a mansion. We both had F150 pickup trucks and in order to properly replace a lawn, you first have to remove the old one. So we began taking turns, loading the trucks and one would drive the load to the dump and we would rotate. While the other one was gone, at the dump, the other would stay back and grade out new top soil on top of where we had previously removed the old lawn.
When my time came to stay back while Matt drove a load to the dump, it was around 2 pm and about 92 degrees. And for some insane reason, all I had to drink were five cans of Coors Beer. I tried to avoid it, but I was so thirsty that I swear my tongue was stuck to the top of my mouth. So I drank one beer, then two, then 3. Eventually, I had pounded all five beers in these rich peoples driveway of their mansion. I went back to grading top soil. I got tired quickly and decided to sit up against a tree in the front yard and take a breather. Well I ended up passing out. For an hour, drunk in this person’s front yard, up against a tree. Finally Matt came back from the dump and I had heard his truck pull up. So I sprang to my feet and acted like I had been grading top soil the entire time. But there was no hiding it. I smelled like beer, I had left five empty beer cans on the drive way, no work had been done since he had left, and at that point, I was just kind of stumbling around the front yard with a rake, trying to remember what the hell I was supposed to be doing.
The Lumber Yard:
I worked in a lumber yard while in college in the winter time. Basically, contractors would show up, order the lumber they needed for whatever they were supposed to build, I would get a form from my boss with the order, then I had to drive around on a fork truck and put the load together, band it and eventually put it on a truck. This is fine in the summer but is a pain in the ass in the winter.
Believe it or not, most builders prefer to work in the winter to avoid heat so we were still busy as hell. And the store I worked at had just hired a new manager "Ernie" who would only let us come into the store to get our forms. Ernie was a huge asshole. But he needed us, just as much as the store needed him. Without us, he would have been forced to take all the orders and put all the loads together and load/unload all the trucks. So we got creative.
Whenever Ernie would answer the phone in his office, he would grab it hastily and jam it into his ear as though he was expecting a call from the President. So we, on more than one occasion would take black caulk which matched the color of his black phone and spray it onto his ear piece. We would then call him with our cell phones. He would then pick up the call and jam a glob of black caulk into his own ear. If you have any experience with caulk or caulking, you know how difficult it is to get that crap off of your skin. So dumbass Ernie, would have to walk around the rest of the day, talking to customers and working the register, with the caulk all over his ear and head.
He also backed his truck into every spot that he parked in all day. So at least once a day we would take an one of our Lumber Store Bumper Stickers that we were supposed to include in our loads and stick it to the back of his truck. It got to a point where he had about 28 of the same Lumber Store bumper stickers on the back of his truck. And he would have to drive all the way home to Eerie PA looking like an absolute moron.
One time we found a dead cat in the yard and placed it under his windshield wiper. Amazingly, Ernie had no problem with us starting fires out in the lumber yard in order to keep ourselves warm. That is basically how much he didn’t want us inside of the store. As my friend and fellow yard worker were standing around one of our fires out in the yard one afternoon, I noticed that he had his can of spray paint tucked into the front of his pants as we often did. Unfortunately, it was whistling, which is an abnormal thing for a can of spray paint to be doing. It was going to explode as it was too close to the heat. So he panics and pulls it out of his pants and drops it on the ground, directly into the fire. We had no time to get out of the way of the fireball that ensued. The explosion that a full can of spray paint creates when thrown into a fire is incredible. I dove out from behind the building like Howie Long in Firestorm with an absolute wall of flames curling up my back. My Carhart caught on fire, and my knit hat was smoldering, my jeans were hot to the touch. And just as this fiasco was taking place, we had our first drive in customer of the day; some guy looking for tomato stakes. “What the hell is going on here?!!” he yelled. I told him something like, “don’t worry, this happens all the time sir, nothing to worry about”. Unfortunately we didn’t sell tomato stakes. So we had to turn him away. Shockingly our store eventually closed.
Friday, July 22, 2011
Thursday, July 14, 2011
From a Clevelander to a Bostonian: What could Cleveland learn?
I left a lot of really great friends when I left Ohio. I had no idea who I would meet in Boston and if I would make new friends. To be honest, New England doesn’t exactly have a reputation for producing the friendliest of people. Most of my perception of New England was based off of watching Indian’s/Red Sox and Cavaliers/Celtics playoff series’ on television while growing up. After moving to the area I realized that I was stupid for judging an entire region based off of its sports fans. If everyone else took my approach the civil war would be an ongoing, ever-evolving conflict.
I have a trip planned in August that will finally pair one of my good Boston area friends with my best Ohio friend for a weekend of golf and booze. I am extremely interested in seeing how they interact. Knowing the two of them, it should be profoundly hilarious. On one hand, my Bostonian friend is an ex-marine, wise-ass; on the other hand my Ohio friend is arguably the most self confident human being since Howard Hughes and has the absolute worst impression of the Boston accent imaginable.
One bad rap that Boston get’s a lot is with regards to its roads and traffic and highway system. Whatever sort of horror stories you have heard on this topic are absolutely true, if not worse than whatever you’ve heard. There is no possible way to know round about when you will arrive anywhere in the region via automobile. Fifteen minute trips can and often do turn into hour long trips. If FDR could have seen what has become of his Interstate Highway System idea in New England, I think he would have just pulled the plug on the whole thing.
But most things that make up a “reputation” couldn’t be further from reality. People are certainly different here but just as friendly, if not friendlier then where I come from. And the people would probably be even more friendly with better roads. People are just as passionate here about their sports teams as in Cleveland with the exception of the Red Sox. People here, love the Boston Red Sox like Clevelanders love the Browns. I have always seen Cleveland as a city where somewhat of a subculture of folks love the Indians but here everyone loves the Sox as part of their birthright, much like Clevelanders with the Browns. This passion for sports has played a key role in my ability to fit in with people here.
People here are, I think by nature, somewhat wise-ass, which helps me. I come from a very long line of wise-assed culture where it would have been impossible to survive without such a skill.
Here, people have a history of having played hockey and baseball whereas in Ohio Football is the religion. And to be honest I always considered hockey to be sort of weird and silly until I went to a Boston Bruins game and realized how closely the atmosphere in that place resembled that of the Dog Pound at a Browns game. If Cleveland ever has the opportunity to get an NHL Franchise, they should do everything they can to do so. It is hands down the most exciting professional sport outside of the NFL.
I do miss my family. Since I moved here, my sister has had a baby boy and now has a baby girl on the way. My inability to be a part of their lives weighs heavily on me but I do what I can for their birthdays and holiday’s. Some days, I feel like I abandoned my parents. But I talk to them often enough and they have never given me the impression that I did anything of the sort.
I also owe a lot to my girlfriend. Generally when a girlfriend introduces you to her friends, it becomes more of an obligatory errand, however, in my current case, nearly every single friend of hers that I have met, with the exception of one guy I pushed across a bar on Halloween, has been awesome. She has surrounded herself and subsequently me, with some of the most down to Earth, funny, intelligent people I have ever met. When left to my own instincts, I generally tend to surround myself with the, let’s get as drunk as humanly possible and fight someone crowd but these folks are much classier and I love her for introducing me to them.
Nobody from where I come from wants to hear it, but Cleveland could learn a thing or two from Boston. Unfortunately I think most Clevelanders are like me prior to me arriving in New England. The first thing that pops into a Clevelanders head when they think of Boston is C.C. Sabathia getting shelled in the ALCS, at Fenway, with the entire crowd chanting “over-rated”, basically allowing a snapshot of 30 thousand people mold their impression of this enormous population center.
Clevelanders also, and I was certainly guilty of this prior to moving here, think that everyone in New England sounds like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in Good Will Hunting when they talk. Well they don’t, there are areas where these accents are more noticeable but for the most part everyone speaks normally. I have noticed that the really thick accents are generally reserved for the over 40 crowd in New England. The younger the people get, the less the accent seems to come out.
I think Clevelanders take things more personally then just about any populous of any city on Earth with the exception of maybe Kabul Afghanistan. The city has been the subject of plenty of abuse. Basically since the Cuyahoga River lit on fire like 300 years ago. Since, it has been a non-stop turn-style of media organizations badgering Cleveland for all they are worth.
But it’s not like Cleveland is the only city where bad/embarrassing things happen. They happen everywhere. Boston is the city where the 9/11 terrorists managed to board airplanes and where the “Big Dig” happened. New York is the city that nearly managed to collapse our entire financial system three years ago. Chicago and Detroit nearly burnt themselves down on multiple occasions. Los Angeles, has managed to become flat broke while being the residence of the richest populous in the country. Finding someone who knows how to read in Miami is like trying to find a Democratic Atheist in Texas. Texas gave us George Herbert Walker Bush. Philly fans booed Santa Claus. Cleveland is the city that accidently managed to light a river on fire like 70 years ago and that Lebron James embarrassed on ESPN. Oh, let’s all just kill ourselves now.
So what’s the difference? Cleveland vehemently, to the point of a fault, defends itself in the face of opposition. All that this accomplishes is more attention for a sore topic. Nobody is ever going to stop talking about “The Decision” as long every time they do, they receive 3 million hits to their news story or a record breaking television broadcast. While they might be assholes, media moguls are not stupid people. Controversy sells and they are in the business of making money. Whether you agree with, disagree with, are hurt or offended by something does not matter, it will still make them money. So if you have a large population center of overly defensive people who are more than willing to pay attention to negative press, of course people will take advantage of that. And they will keep doing so until the gravy train stops. There is no better, clearer cut example of this then Forbes magazine rating Cleveland America’s most miserable city in 2009. Obviously there is no such method of properly indexing misery of millions of people. Anyone who made it through the fourth grade realizes this. But they publish these sorts of “ratings” once a year, with the statistics purposely manipulated in order to best piss off the most sensitive crowds. And sorry Cleveland, you are by far the most sensitive crowd so it makes sense for the shitheads at Forbes to do these things.
In my opinion, other cities do a better job of owning their “issues”. If you tell a Clevelander that their town is full of corn fields, they will bark back at you about how “there are no farms in Greater Cleveland.” It will generally spur a heated retort from them. Meanwhile, if you call someone from Boston a “Chowder Head”, they will generally tell you something about the industry and what it has accomplished for the region and the rich history behind it. And how much money it is still making and how many people have jobs because of it. They own it. They realize that these are the things that made Boston, Boston and they aren’t anything to be ashamed about.
So what made Cleveland, Cleveland? It’s convenient location as a gateway between the Midwestern and Eastern population centers as well as the steel and the manufacturing industry all the while, producing the media and ideas behind this country’s Rock & Roll Industry. More recently, it has built itself into the leading city for Biomedical, Health and related research in the entire United States of America. Not far outside of the city lies the single greatest amusement park on Earth (and that is not just my opinion) that nobody has ever heard of in Cedar Point, which is surrounded by a chain of what seem like borderline tropical, party islands that are only a 30 minute ferry ride away in Put in Bay. And don’t even get me started on the dining and food industry downtown anchored by the absolute standard in farmers markets “The West Side Market”. But they don’t own it.
People outside of Cleveland wouldn’t ever know about things like the Cleveland Clinic managing to transplant faces of attack victims successfully or their finding proven methods of creating new spinal cords for paralyzed people using stem cells or any number of the royalty and celebrities that refuse treatment at any other hospital system outside of the Cleveland Clinic. No, if you ask anyone what they think is going on in Cleveland, they will tell you that it is the city that Lebron James left or a city that has lousy weather in the winter.
Just about everyone who I meet after I tell them that I grew up in the Cleveland area asks me “So did you grow up on a farm”. These aren’t dumb people. One of the guys who asked me this is one of the industry leaders in the sports medicine field along the Eastern Seaboard. They’re not trying to be rude, they just honestly don’t know so the natural inclination is to generalize.
However, if you ask someone from around here, what they think is going on in Chicago, they will say something like “Oh, I love Chicago, such a fun city; I would love to get back there.” So what’s the difference? Chicago has just as bad, if not worse weather in the winter, is smack dab in the middle of this countries grain belt with nearly three times as many farms in its home state of Illinois, but nobody identifies Chicago that way, why?
To me, the answer is branding. More people were murdered last year in “Chicago land” then any other region in this country but that story comes and goes and the positive aspects of Chicago again overshadow the negatives. Before you know it people are again talking about the airline industries resurgence and their merchandising prowess of Chicago and how proud everyone is of Obama. This is the way their town is branded. They realize their identity and they own it.
Imagine for a minute if Cleveland held that statistic: we would hear about Cleveland being the murder capital of America, every day of our lives for years to come. This is because, the local population enables the story to live on and on with their own stubbornness and protesting. They don’t let things die. Thanks to this reputation alone, every media company in the country would continuously pound home the point via the internet and television and late night talk show hosts all because they know they are going to get a major reaction out of the city. And that reaction draws attention, which boost ratings and in turn fills their pockets. Because Cleveland is a town who’s brand is in a constant state of flux based off of whatever the flavor of the week is. And that is often a lousy flavor. One year it will be Lebron leaving for Miami, the year before will be all the crime around town, the year before that will be how bad the Browns are, the year before that will be how the infrastructure is old and ugly and too expensive to fix. So the circle never completes. You never get back to the positive aspects when every time you open up a paper the first three pages are dedicated to everything bad around town. The image never revolves back to great healthcare, or how a Cleveland Ship Builder just won a multi-billion dollar deal to develop Naval Destroyer’s. By the amount of time it takes for one bad thing to finally die, something else will inevitably have gone wrong.
My advice, find your identity as a city, once and for all and to hell with what anyone else thinks about it. There is far too much that is great about the city that I grew up in and fell in love with to take such a half glass empty approach about.
And Boston, build some better friggin roads for the love of all that is holy.
.
I have a trip planned in August that will finally pair one of my good Boston area friends with my best Ohio friend for a weekend of golf and booze. I am extremely interested in seeing how they interact. Knowing the two of them, it should be profoundly hilarious. On one hand, my Bostonian friend is an ex-marine, wise-ass; on the other hand my Ohio friend is arguably the most self confident human being since Howard Hughes and has the absolute worst impression of the Boston accent imaginable.
One bad rap that Boston get’s a lot is with regards to its roads and traffic and highway system. Whatever sort of horror stories you have heard on this topic are absolutely true, if not worse than whatever you’ve heard. There is no possible way to know round about when you will arrive anywhere in the region via automobile. Fifteen minute trips can and often do turn into hour long trips. If FDR could have seen what has become of his Interstate Highway System idea in New England, I think he would have just pulled the plug on the whole thing.
But most things that make up a “reputation” couldn’t be further from reality. People are certainly different here but just as friendly, if not friendlier then where I come from. And the people would probably be even more friendly with better roads. People are just as passionate here about their sports teams as in Cleveland with the exception of the Red Sox. People here, love the Boston Red Sox like Clevelanders love the Browns. I have always seen Cleveland as a city where somewhat of a subculture of folks love the Indians but here everyone loves the Sox as part of their birthright, much like Clevelanders with the Browns. This passion for sports has played a key role in my ability to fit in with people here.
People here are, I think by nature, somewhat wise-ass, which helps me. I come from a very long line of wise-assed culture where it would have been impossible to survive without such a skill.
Here, people have a history of having played hockey and baseball whereas in Ohio Football is the religion. And to be honest I always considered hockey to be sort of weird and silly until I went to a Boston Bruins game and realized how closely the atmosphere in that place resembled that of the Dog Pound at a Browns game. If Cleveland ever has the opportunity to get an NHL Franchise, they should do everything they can to do so. It is hands down the most exciting professional sport outside of the NFL.
I do miss my family. Since I moved here, my sister has had a baby boy and now has a baby girl on the way. My inability to be a part of their lives weighs heavily on me but I do what I can for their birthdays and holiday’s. Some days, I feel like I abandoned my parents. But I talk to them often enough and they have never given me the impression that I did anything of the sort.
I also owe a lot to my girlfriend. Generally when a girlfriend introduces you to her friends, it becomes more of an obligatory errand, however, in my current case, nearly every single friend of hers that I have met, with the exception of one guy I pushed across a bar on Halloween, has been awesome. She has surrounded herself and subsequently me, with some of the most down to Earth, funny, intelligent people I have ever met. When left to my own instincts, I generally tend to surround myself with the, let’s get as drunk as humanly possible and fight someone crowd but these folks are much classier and I love her for introducing me to them.
Nobody from where I come from wants to hear it, but Cleveland could learn a thing or two from Boston. Unfortunately I think most Clevelanders are like me prior to me arriving in New England. The first thing that pops into a Clevelanders head when they think of Boston is C.C. Sabathia getting shelled in the ALCS, at Fenway, with the entire crowd chanting “over-rated”, basically allowing a snapshot of 30 thousand people mold their impression of this enormous population center.
Clevelanders also, and I was certainly guilty of this prior to moving here, think that everyone in New England sounds like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in Good Will Hunting when they talk. Well they don’t, there are areas where these accents are more noticeable but for the most part everyone speaks normally. I have noticed that the really thick accents are generally reserved for the over 40 crowd in New England. The younger the people get, the less the accent seems to come out.
I think Clevelanders take things more personally then just about any populous of any city on Earth with the exception of maybe Kabul Afghanistan. The city has been the subject of plenty of abuse. Basically since the Cuyahoga River lit on fire like 300 years ago. Since, it has been a non-stop turn-style of media organizations badgering Cleveland for all they are worth.
But it’s not like Cleveland is the only city where bad/embarrassing things happen. They happen everywhere. Boston is the city where the 9/11 terrorists managed to board airplanes and where the “Big Dig” happened. New York is the city that nearly managed to collapse our entire financial system three years ago. Chicago and Detroit nearly burnt themselves down on multiple occasions. Los Angeles, has managed to become flat broke while being the residence of the richest populous in the country. Finding someone who knows how to read in Miami is like trying to find a Democratic Atheist in Texas. Texas gave us George Herbert Walker Bush. Philly fans booed Santa Claus. Cleveland is the city that accidently managed to light a river on fire like 70 years ago and that Lebron James embarrassed on ESPN. Oh, let’s all just kill ourselves now.
So what’s the difference? Cleveland vehemently, to the point of a fault, defends itself in the face of opposition. All that this accomplishes is more attention for a sore topic. Nobody is ever going to stop talking about “The Decision” as long every time they do, they receive 3 million hits to their news story or a record breaking television broadcast. While they might be assholes, media moguls are not stupid people. Controversy sells and they are in the business of making money. Whether you agree with, disagree with, are hurt or offended by something does not matter, it will still make them money. So if you have a large population center of overly defensive people who are more than willing to pay attention to negative press, of course people will take advantage of that. And they will keep doing so until the gravy train stops. There is no better, clearer cut example of this then Forbes magazine rating Cleveland America’s most miserable city in 2009. Obviously there is no such method of properly indexing misery of millions of people. Anyone who made it through the fourth grade realizes this. But they publish these sorts of “ratings” once a year, with the statistics purposely manipulated in order to best piss off the most sensitive crowds. And sorry Cleveland, you are by far the most sensitive crowd so it makes sense for the shitheads at Forbes to do these things.
In my opinion, other cities do a better job of owning their “issues”. If you tell a Clevelander that their town is full of corn fields, they will bark back at you about how “there are no farms in Greater Cleveland.” It will generally spur a heated retort from them. Meanwhile, if you call someone from Boston a “Chowder Head”, they will generally tell you something about the industry and what it has accomplished for the region and the rich history behind it. And how much money it is still making and how many people have jobs because of it. They own it. They realize that these are the things that made Boston, Boston and they aren’t anything to be ashamed about.
So what made Cleveland, Cleveland? It’s convenient location as a gateway between the Midwestern and Eastern population centers as well as the steel and the manufacturing industry all the while, producing the media and ideas behind this country’s Rock & Roll Industry. More recently, it has built itself into the leading city for Biomedical, Health and related research in the entire United States of America. Not far outside of the city lies the single greatest amusement park on Earth (and that is not just my opinion) that nobody has ever heard of in Cedar Point, which is surrounded by a chain of what seem like borderline tropical, party islands that are only a 30 minute ferry ride away in Put in Bay. And don’t even get me started on the dining and food industry downtown anchored by the absolute standard in farmers markets “The West Side Market”. But they don’t own it.
People outside of Cleveland wouldn’t ever know about things like the Cleveland Clinic managing to transplant faces of attack victims successfully or their finding proven methods of creating new spinal cords for paralyzed people using stem cells or any number of the royalty and celebrities that refuse treatment at any other hospital system outside of the Cleveland Clinic. No, if you ask anyone what they think is going on in Cleveland, they will tell you that it is the city that Lebron James left or a city that has lousy weather in the winter.
Just about everyone who I meet after I tell them that I grew up in the Cleveland area asks me “So did you grow up on a farm”. These aren’t dumb people. One of the guys who asked me this is one of the industry leaders in the sports medicine field along the Eastern Seaboard. They’re not trying to be rude, they just honestly don’t know so the natural inclination is to generalize.
However, if you ask someone from around here, what they think is going on in Chicago, they will say something like “Oh, I love Chicago, such a fun city; I would love to get back there.” So what’s the difference? Chicago has just as bad, if not worse weather in the winter, is smack dab in the middle of this countries grain belt with nearly three times as many farms in its home state of Illinois, but nobody identifies Chicago that way, why?
To me, the answer is branding. More people were murdered last year in “Chicago land” then any other region in this country but that story comes and goes and the positive aspects of Chicago again overshadow the negatives. Before you know it people are again talking about the airline industries resurgence and their merchandising prowess of Chicago and how proud everyone is of Obama. This is the way their town is branded. They realize their identity and they own it.
Imagine for a minute if Cleveland held that statistic: we would hear about Cleveland being the murder capital of America, every day of our lives for years to come. This is because, the local population enables the story to live on and on with their own stubbornness and protesting. They don’t let things die. Thanks to this reputation alone, every media company in the country would continuously pound home the point via the internet and television and late night talk show hosts all because they know they are going to get a major reaction out of the city. And that reaction draws attention, which boost ratings and in turn fills their pockets. Because Cleveland is a town who’s brand is in a constant state of flux based off of whatever the flavor of the week is. And that is often a lousy flavor. One year it will be Lebron leaving for Miami, the year before will be all the crime around town, the year before that will be how bad the Browns are, the year before that will be how the infrastructure is old and ugly and too expensive to fix. So the circle never completes. You never get back to the positive aspects when every time you open up a paper the first three pages are dedicated to everything bad around town. The image never revolves back to great healthcare, or how a Cleveland Ship Builder just won a multi-billion dollar deal to develop Naval Destroyer’s. By the amount of time it takes for one bad thing to finally die, something else will inevitably have gone wrong.
My advice, find your identity as a city, once and for all and to hell with what anyone else thinks about it. There is far too much that is great about the city that I grew up in and fell in love with to take such a half glass empty approach about.
And Boston, build some better friggin roads for the love of all that is holy.
.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
The Anti-Social Network
Try to visualize the world as it is in the Social Network as though it were a real world and ask yourself, if that is a place you would like to be. It would be a world, where you were constantly surrounded by people who you sort of know but not really, often dislike, who never seem to shut the fuck up about the most random, annoying, crap imaginable. Every now and again some person you don’t know will come out of nowhere and “poke” you. People will constantly be asking you to be their friend or telling you they don’t want to be friends with you anymore like a bunch of five year olds. Everyone would be older and less attractive then how you vaguely remembered them. There would constantly be some bogus survey gauging which 80’s metal band best suits your personality being shoved in your face. Everyone would be constantly, annoyingly, attached to their significant others at all times. Everyone would have an endless supply of boring pictures that they were dying for you to look at and give your opinion on. Everyone in the world would be able to instantly give you their opinion about every single thing you did. And this entire fiasco would take place in a town called Farmville which has been gripped for years by a Mafia War of which millions of people are involved.
In the social networking world, the term “friend” is used much more loosely then in the real world. In order to be friends with someone, you just have to have spent time in the same building as them at some point in your life. You don’t have to have ever spoken with them, liked them or hung out with them. People make friends in this world just because they went to the same school or have worked in the same place, in some cases not even at the same time but they are friends because they share that vague common interest with one another. I have about 300 Facebook”friends”, here is a breakdown.
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People from High School:
When you really look at it, Facebook is really just reunion.com on steroids for me. Because just about all of my friends are people that I went to High School with. In reality, I have managed to keep in contact, via phone or email or in person with the old High School Friends that I want to have as part of my life. And then Facebook came along and forged a brand new bullshit means of connectivity to a whole ton of other ones that I don’t care about and in many cases have no intention of ever speaking with again.
I can’t imagine a situation where I would ever need to converse with Joe from 11th grade shop class about anything. Or any of the girls who used to be hot and now have like 14 kids and look like sunburned sea lions slowly dying on a rocky beach someplace, in all of their photos. Or how about I strike up a chat with one of the couples, from High School, who have been married and having kids together since 1996, before we graduated, and who I am sure have never re-evaluated that decision since. The fact that I have to be reminded that these people exist is not cool. These are mental lashings that didn’t exist 8 years ago. I suppose we all need to be reminded of where we come from, even if where we come from is not memorable.
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Married women who use their maiden name and then their new last name (pretty much all married women):
Everyone has dozens of these “friends”. I don’t really have a problem with this practice but it really does hammer my point home about not really being friends with people on Facebook. If you need to include whatever your last time used to be when people knew you, in order for them to recognize who you are, you are not really friends with those people. I like to think that I can recognize my true friends by sight alone without needing them to state their full names, including their given surname as though we are at the BMV or filling out foreign immigration forms on an airplane.
This is another situation that is completely indigenous to the Facebook world. In no other capacity on Earth could a single guy be friends with so many married women without getting the shit kicked out of him every 20 minutes.
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People you don’t like, who keep talking to you:
It’s not so bad having friends who you don’t like sitting buried in your “friends” list. At least most of them probably don’t like you back and won’t talk to you. But at least once a month, some person, who you dislike, will leave some kind of dumbass message on your “wall”, usually asking something stupid like, “When you coming to my town again Matt?” or “We really miss you over here bud.” As though I am going to make an expensive trip halfway across the country to visit a bunch of people I hate. That’s like paying someone to hit you in the nuts with a rolling pin. And do you really miss me, really? Is that what you did today, you sat around missing people from High School who you haven’t seen or talked to in going on 20 years? Because, if you did, then that’s fucking crazy and you should probably get on some kind of serious meds.
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Old work “friends”:
This is another large group of people you are friends with on Facebook. People who used to work in the same place as you did. Now I have made some great friendships through work in my life but I have not made friends with the 124 people I used to work with whom are now friends with me on Facebook. This is the group of friends who makes up the vast majority of the “I don’t even know who the fuck these people are” category. This situation is made worse in the event you left that place of work on bad terms. Now every time you scroll through your friends list, you are forced to be reminded of how you had to work someplace that you hated, in most cases for years of your life. This is another mental blow that you must endure, which did not exist prior to the magic of Social Networking.
![]()
Ex Girlfriends/Ex Boyfriends:
Breaking up with someone used to mean, you get your clothes and DVD’s back from them, you get one or two last harsh words in, you delete their number from your phone, you throw the stuff they left at your place in a river and that was pretty much it. Now, thanks to the wonderful world of social networking, this process is a lot more involved. Now, on top of everything else there are relationship status’s that must be changed, mutual friends who must be deleted before you meet someone else so they don’t act as some kind of spy for your ex, old couples photo’s that must be deleted or in more sociopathic cases, cropped so as to no longer include your ex, security settings that must be updated so that they can’t see any future photo’s or relationship status’. And if you forget a single one of these items, then god help you my friend because you are entering a world of pain. But computers are here to make our lives simpler.
![]()
People who consistently write bummer comments:
I don’t mind if every once in a while, one of my friends is bummed out and writes something on Facebook about it. Fine, you know whatever makes you feel better, I guess. But I’ve got some friends, who must feel like it is their personal calling in life, to publish every stupid little thing that goes wrong in their life to the entire world on Facebook. I don’t want to come off as completely insensitive, but I don’t need to be made aware of your ingrown toenail or a missing cat or how you feel about gas prices or the new light bulbs. Just quit bitching. Your toenail will heal, gas prices will go down, you will get used to the new light bulbs and your cat is probably dead.
![]()
People who won’t stop writing comments about political crap:
We’ve all got them. Friends, usually republican friends, who have never visited FoxNews.com, without posting a link to some article they read on their Facebook Page. Usually, accompanying their link is some kind of biased, opinionated, racist comment from them about the contents of the link. Out of my 286 friends, I currently know of one who works in any sort of political capacity. If he were to, and never does, post something political on his page, I would take it seriously. Otherwise, I don’t give a shit how my Facebook Friend Steve, who works as a night supervisor at a Valero, feels about our foreign policy in regards to South Africa as reported by Fox News.
![]()
Your guy friends who seem to have made friends with every whore on Facebook:
There are a lot of guys who seem to use Facebook as a channel to become “friends” with slutty women. It is easy to find these guys. All you have to do is look at their friends list and every other photo is of some women in a bikini or in her underwear or in a sexually suggestive position of some kind. I could understand this practice if they were ONLY friends with these sort of women and nobody else. But waters often become muddied when these men mix these sorts with their family members or their non-whore friends, or their girlfriends etc. These men usually find out the hard way, that you have no control over what anyone posts on your wall that everyone can read. And when you surround yourself with a bunch of whores, you are going to eventually get some shit posted up there that you don’t want anyone else to see. I liken it to a guy going to a strip club with his mom and his girlfriend and then knowing every single stripper in the club.
In conclusion, social networking has improved our lives in some capacities, it provides entertainment value, it does add another avenue with which we can stay in contact with each other, it, in my opinion unfortunately, gives people an outlet for their frustrations, but I am sure a lot of people think that this is a good thing. And like everything else, you take the good with the bad even if the bad far outweighs the good. There have been other advancements in communication and convenience that I can’t imagine how we ever lived without, email, cell phones etc. But I have never once asked myself, what did I ever do before Facebook?
In the social networking world, the term “friend” is used much more loosely then in the real world. In order to be friends with someone, you just have to have spent time in the same building as them at some point in your life. You don’t have to have ever spoken with them, liked them or hung out with them. People make friends in this world just because they went to the same school or have worked in the same place, in some cases not even at the same time but they are friends because they share that vague common interest with one another. I have about 300 Facebook”friends”, here is a breakdown.
People from High School:
When you really look at it, Facebook is really just reunion.com on steroids for me. Because just about all of my friends are people that I went to High School with. In reality, I have managed to keep in contact, via phone or email or in person with the old High School Friends that I want to have as part of my life. And then Facebook came along and forged a brand new bullshit means of connectivity to a whole ton of other ones that I don’t care about and in many cases have no intention of ever speaking with again.
I can’t imagine a situation where I would ever need to converse with Joe from 11th grade shop class about anything. Or any of the girls who used to be hot and now have like 14 kids and look like sunburned sea lions slowly dying on a rocky beach someplace, in all of their photos. Or how about I strike up a chat with one of the couples, from High School, who have been married and having kids together since 1996, before we graduated, and who I am sure have never re-evaluated that decision since. The fact that I have to be reminded that these people exist is not cool. These are mental lashings that didn’t exist 8 years ago. I suppose we all need to be reminded of where we come from, even if where we come from is not memorable.
Married women who use their maiden name and then their new last name (pretty much all married women):
Everyone has dozens of these “friends”. I don’t really have a problem with this practice but it really does hammer my point home about not really being friends with people on Facebook. If you need to include whatever your last time used to be when people knew you, in order for them to recognize who you are, you are not really friends with those people. I like to think that I can recognize my true friends by sight alone without needing them to state their full names, including their given surname as though we are at the BMV or filling out foreign immigration forms on an airplane.
This is another situation that is completely indigenous to the Facebook world. In no other capacity on Earth could a single guy be friends with so many married women without getting the shit kicked out of him every 20 minutes.
People you don’t like, who keep talking to you:
It’s not so bad having friends who you don’t like sitting buried in your “friends” list. At least most of them probably don’t like you back and won’t talk to you. But at least once a month, some person, who you dislike, will leave some kind of dumbass message on your “wall”, usually asking something stupid like, “When you coming to my town again Matt?” or “We really miss you over here bud.” As though I am going to make an expensive trip halfway across the country to visit a bunch of people I hate. That’s like paying someone to hit you in the nuts with a rolling pin. And do you really miss me, really? Is that what you did today, you sat around missing people from High School who you haven’t seen or talked to in going on 20 years? Because, if you did, then that’s fucking crazy and you should probably get on some kind of serious meds.
Old work “friends”:
This is another large group of people you are friends with on Facebook. People who used to work in the same place as you did. Now I have made some great friendships through work in my life but I have not made friends with the 124 people I used to work with whom are now friends with me on Facebook. This is the group of friends who makes up the vast majority of the “I don’t even know who the fuck these people are” category. This situation is made worse in the event you left that place of work on bad terms. Now every time you scroll through your friends list, you are forced to be reminded of how you had to work someplace that you hated, in most cases for years of your life. This is another mental blow that you must endure, which did not exist prior to the magic of Social Networking.
Ex Girlfriends/Ex Boyfriends:
Breaking up with someone used to mean, you get your clothes and DVD’s back from them, you get one or two last harsh words in, you delete their number from your phone, you throw the stuff they left at your place in a river and that was pretty much it. Now, thanks to the wonderful world of social networking, this process is a lot more involved. Now, on top of everything else there are relationship status’s that must be changed, mutual friends who must be deleted before you meet someone else so they don’t act as some kind of spy for your ex, old couples photo’s that must be deleted or in more sociopathic cases, cropped so as to no longer include your ex, security settings that must be updated so that they can’t see any future photo’s or relationship status’. And if you forget a single one of these items, then god help you my friend because you are entering a world of pain. But computers are here to make our lives simpler.
People who consistently write bummer comments:
I don’t mind if every once in a while, one of my friends is bummed out and writes something on Facebook about it. Fine, you know whatever makes you feel better, I guess. But I’ve got some friends, who must feel like it is their personal calling in life, to publish every stupid little thing that goes wrong in their life to the entire world on Facebook. I don’t want to come off as completely insensitive, but I don’t need to be made aware of your ingrown toenail or a missing cat or how you feel about gas prices or the new light bulbs. Just quit bitching. Your toenail will heal, gas prices will go down, you will get used to the new light bulbs and your cat is probably dead.
People who won’t stop writing comments about political crap:
We’ve all got them. Friends, usually republican friends, who have never visited FoxNews.com, without posting a link to some article they read on their Facebook Page. Usually, accompanying their link is some kind of biased, opinionated, racist comment from them about the contents of the link. Out of my 286 friends, I currently know of one who works in any sort of political capacity. If he were to, and never does, post something political on his page, I would take it seriously. Otherwise, I don’t give a shit how my Facebook Friend Steve, who works as a night supervisor at a Valero, feels about our foreign policy in regards to South Africa as reported by Fox News.
Your guy friends who seem to have made friends with every whore on Facebook:
There are a lot of guys who seem to use Facebook as a channel to become “friends” with slutty women. It is easy to find these guys. All you have to do is look at their friends list and every other photo is of some women in a bikini or in her underwear or in a sexually suggestive position of some kind. I could understand this practice if they were ONLY friends with these sort of women and nobody else. But waters often become muddied when these men mix these sorts with their family members or their non-whore friends, or their girlfriends etc. These men usually find out the hard way, that you have no control over what anyone posts on your wall that everyone can read. And when you surround yourself with a bunch of whores, you are going to eventually get some shit posted up there that you don’t want anyone else to see. I liken it to a guy going to a strip club with his mom and his girlfriend and then knowing every single stripper in the club.
In conclusion, social networking has improved our lives in some capacities, it provides entertainment value, it does add another avenue with which we can stay in contact with each other, it, in my opinion unfortunately, gives people an outlet for their frustrations, but I am sure a lot of people think that this is a good thing. And like everything else, you take the good with the bad even if the bad far outweighs the good. There have been other advancements in communication and convenience that I can’t imagine how we ever lived without, email, cell phones etc. But I have never once asked myself, what did I ever do before Facebook?
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