My current job allows me serious freedom and serious “vacation time.” So as I get serious about selling overpriced textbooks for the Fall 2012 semester, I also get serious about thinking about what to do with my time this summer.
With this serious thinking comes the inevitable question for the 4th time round now:
Where in the World will Kevin Go? Where should he go?
Summer 1: Grosse Pointe City Pool, the birthplace of my life (swam in this pool 3 days after birth)
Summer 2: Rome, the birthplace of Western Civilization
Summer 3: Barcelona, the most urban beach experience possible
Summer 4: ___________, the most __________ in the whole wide world
When I started flirting with this idea in my head, I had a depressing thought:
nothing in the world looks all that intriguing to me right now.
What do you do when no area of the world strikes your current fancy? Where do you escape to, to feel special? To feel unique? I think I’m reaching the end of the road of being able to escape somewhere for some trip of exploration to ‘find myself.’
I’ve found myself wishing I could just go on some globe-trotting trip to find myself. I wish the True Kevin Krease was hidden in some bookshelf or at the bottom of some cafe cup in some far flung abode on the other side of the world. Then, all I’d need to do would be to buy a plane ticket there, and kindly ask for a flat white in that cafe and find myself at the bottom. I think he’d say “o well hello there Big Kev, so glad you finally found me! If you had only come sooner we could have avoided that whole longing process you had to go through! But worry no more, you’ve arrived!”
While I’ve read numerous books on the notion of longing and living in tension, having to actually participate in this reality is quite frustrating. Our desires are so contradictory! I thought if I knew about this whole tension thing, then it’d make it actually easier to endure and work through. Bahahaha silly Kev, what were you thinking?
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Travel for me is mostly always about exploration. I love planning the basics, but then just exploring streets and talking to strangers in a strange land. I don’t really enjoy most tourist sights that are in guidebooks. I prefer talking to the grocery store clerk about the quality of their organic chicken, or chatting up local immigrants selling cheap beer on the beach and inquiring about where they’re taking college classes for free. I love meeting new people.
This love of meeting new people is part of my struggle with living in Detroit. If being a traveler is more a state of mind and life perspective, than it is a competition of traveling to the most far-flung places, then my time in Detroit has been somewhat stifling. The people I meet in Detroit are pretty odd, doing pretty odd things, having lived so far, a pretty odd life. But also, oddly awesome. Being the most ‘normal’ person to ever have lived in Portland for a period of time, I feel at many times out of place in Detroit, which is ironic, because it’s my hometown.
The tension I live in then, is attempting to be a traveler in Detroit, my hometown, and dealing with the acceptance and rejection you encounter in a new land. Sometimes I love it; sometimes I hate it. One constant though is my struggle to leave it. It’s almost as if I feel like a have a right to this land and the future people here and were I to leave, I’d give that up.
Like any good traveler though, we realize that we’ll be back.
When travel is rare, there is a sense of loss when you leave a great place. But when you have a desire to travel and explore and sense you’ll maintain this your whole life, when you leave a great place, you’re excited to rediscover it all over again in the future. Perhaps this is how I need to view Detroit: a city that is my home, that will forever be my home, and one that will change and grow up just like I will.
So rather than feeling a sense of loss if I leave ‘her’, perhaps I should kiss her adieu and say “till next time.”
So tonight I got invited to a fun little campfire bbq celebrating a friend’s recent artist-residency venture in which he has called it “PonyRide.” Upon being invited, my first question was naturally “will there be PonyRides??” “Of course not, that’s silly Kevin.” Well I say, why not?
5 years ago I traveled for 4 months and took some classes on the side. During my spring break from not studying, I spent part of my time in Lublijana, Slovenia. Yearning for connection with some locals like any good ‘white person’ w/ a Rick Steves book, I discovered the local student hangout, Red-Hot-Horse. As I made my way through the line, loving the student scene, I jovially asked the burger-maker, “this isn’t actually horse meat is it? heh” Looking slightly confused, she responded w/ “uhhh yea it is?” Thinking, “this is obviously horse meat, why is this guy asking?” Ponyrides…horse meat, you must think I have a horse fetish. At this point, that is not the case. What is the case though is that these two things are about doing things differently. Living in a historically relevant city and state in such disrepair and in need of transformation, I constantly ask myself: are we doing things differently here? Are we approaching our host of issues with a set of beginner’s eyes and trying to see things differently? What ponyrides are we offering and when will we start our own horse burger joint? There are wonderful people doing wonderfully creative things here. They often speak about a slow growth, a slow change, a slow, sustainable transformation. That’s great news if you’re under 30 without student loan debt, a family or house payment. But if you’re a typical midwesterner, you can’t wait. Your mind is in the present and making sure you can meet present needs. The time for transformation and doing things differently is now. Not when our economy rightsizes. Not when the automakers make more profits. Not when…. Because with every passing day is another lost Michigan grad, another family moving to a job in Rick Perry’s state, another sad story of loss and the bleeding of our state’s talent. How many more Groupon’s need to be created by our former resident’s until we start taking drastic measures to do things differently here? How many parent’s need to mourn the loss of their kids to Chicago/NYC/San Francisco, until they start asking themselves, what we can all do differently here? How many lawmakers need to be replaced until we start doing things radically different here?
When people ask me about Detroit and my decision to live here, I always say the same thing. If I’m not going to live in an elite city at the top like a NYC/LA/Chicago, I’d rather live at the bottom, where equally creative and different things are occurring and will occur. The question I consistently ask myself is this: ”Kevin, what are you doing to further the transformation of this city and state? What are you doing differently in your life to help along a renewal of this region?”
I’m not really sure yet. But I can assure you that if you decide to open a HorseBurger, I’ll be the first in line.
So I just was in Rome for 8 days and I was eating gelato at….
Whoa. Kevin. Did you just say ROME? Like, Rome, Italy?
Well, yes, yes I did.
Why the heck were you in Rome??
Well, I have some free time in the summer with my job, and I thought, hey why not?
So, who did you go with, why Rome?
O I went by myself.
Whoaaaaa. You went by yourself to Rome for a week??
Well, 8 days to be precise. 2 days traveling, 8 days in the city.
That’s nuts.
Yea, I mean no one else really wanted to travel, and I’m sick of waiting around for other people to be open to adventure so I just decided to pull the trigger and go to Rome, a historic city, the heart of Western Civilization. A place I had never been to before.
That’s usually how the conversation went the past couple weeks. I could bore you with stories about my first euro cheek kiss with Elise, the Italian med student I sang happy birthday to in Italian, or the evening I dressed up like an Italian, rented a scooter and ‘roamed’ the city yearning to utilize my second helmet, but that would be too Kevin Krease storytelling time, and not enough Kevin Krease the Blogger.
The facts of the matter are this: I used to crave traveling. It was this lifeline that seemed to jumpstart your heart whenever you were feeling paralyzed. It was this activity you could partake in to enliven your soul. You could go to new places, see new things, and supposedly find yourself anew every time you explored. This is the allure that traveling used to hold for me. Key phrase there: used to.
See I sat there on that plane, as we took off on my direct flight to Rome, thinking/praying/hoping that flying halfway around the world might set my life anew. It might stretch me in new ways; shine light into new places. It might invigorate my soul, just like a cold river does to your sore, freshly blistered feet.
But it didn’t.
I came home feeling not like a new man, rather the same man with just a couple more stories to tell. The same man who struggles to find purpose and meaning in this post-modern existence. While I’m insanely grateful for all the people I met and the fortunate job and finances which allowed me to travel, the truth is, traveling didn’t deliver what it used to.
It didn’t get me high. It didn’t make me never want to go home. It didn’t make me feel like “man I gotta do this all the time, forever and ever.” The cliches about traveling were vanquished on this trip. Which in many ways is right where Detroit is as a city.
Detroit has practically 0 chain restaurants and “scenes” in the city center. I find myself longing for some sort of creative culture scene like you find in many other cities. We have some creative flavors in Ferndale and Royal Oak etc. But those are all suburban flairs. I want something authentically Detroit…or do I? I often think that I long for something truly Detroit, but what I really want, and have come to admit this, is some Brooklyn-cool meets San Diego-laidbackness crossed with a hint of LA superficialness and some Pacific NW coffee. I want a mixture of other places, rather than something totally original.
My Dad often says “People say, ‘Why can’t Detroit be more like ________, or if only Detroit did it how ________ does it. Well guess what, we aren’t ________ or ______, we are Detroit. And we do things our own way here.” I didn’t like this at first because all I knew was how cool OTHER cities were. I had no respect for how great Detroit was/is. That’s different now. Or at least it’s changing.
So was Rome great? Of course. Not many times you get to tour the Basilica or see the Pope in his pimp hat and prada shoes. Was it life changing? No. Are you a new man because of your wild travel? Nope. Same ole Kevin Krease here. Selling the same ole textbooks. Do I have some great stories to share because of the trip? Offff course. But ask me in person sometime, it’s always better that way.
One of the major perceived benefits of living at home is that you’re wonderful mother, cooks all your dinners for you. And if she’s really awesome she’ll do your laundry too. Anddd if she’s extremely awesome, she’ll iron your shirt before you go on that rare date with another girl who also lives at home and is yearning to get out of the house.
A major reason I moved into my own apartment was to stop the loss or perceived loss of the ownership I had over my life. Many friends would say “Kevin, why are you moving out when you get free rent while living at home?? You can save SO much money!” This is true. Your Scottrade account balloons while you live at home. Unfortunately, the ownership of your life, dwindles. Anyone that has lived on their own and moved home, can understand this. I will say there is definitely something very humbling about sleeping in a twin bed, with a lilly pulitzer duvet in your sisters old bedroom…when you’re 24 and working a corporate job. A friend did tell me though, that in her eyes “good guys sleep in twin beds.”
Well now that I’ve crossed over to the dark side and bought my queen mattress, I also have to learn how to cook. You’d think that when your mother is a great cook/baker and an excellent schoolteacher, that her children would be well trained su chef’s when they move out on their own. Wrong on both fronts. A legitimate reason I wanted my own place, was that I wanted to learn how to cook, all on my own. Be forced to cook. And let me tell you, the journey has been rough.
This is the journey a 24 year old, who only knows how to make sandwiches and scrambled eggs, goes through when moving into his own place:
Step 1: Search Amazon for trendy cookbook with a chef you identify
Step 2: Go to grocery store without a list, hungry, and confused. Buy many frozen stir frys, asian noodle bowls, cereal and cookies to last for 1 week.
Step 3: Eat all said food, sporadically, at random hours…end up disappointed and hungry.
Step 4: Eat out. Alot.
Step 5: Eat out some more
Step 6: Be mad at yourself because eating out is expensive and you thought you’d be an expert bachelor chef by now
Step 7: Go to bed hungry
Step 8: Put on jeans and notice they are getting looser…weight loss? I haven’t been exercising…hmmm
Step 9: Go Grocery shopping with mother to learn what to buy
Step 10: Start to actually cook….
I’m not sure if you noticed, but all of this was the lead up to cooking. Zero cooking has occurred on this cooking journey so far. I’ll add more to this list soon. Maybe write about my Chronicles of Cooking. We’ll see.
A major issue when it comes to living in Detroit is the proximity of grocery stores. Everyone outside of the city, especially the suburbanites, confusingly ask “where do you do your grocery shopping? There is no neighborhood Krogers!” The hip urban planners then study this with numbers and maps and call a city without grocery stores a “food desert.” I used to think that this city was a food desert and understandably so. There isn’t a major chain grocier in the city. When you’re used to shopping the modern American way, by going to Krogers and Costco, you’re going to be out of luck. What most of the people writing about the city fail to realize is that there are independent grociers scattered throughout the city. Just a mere couple blocks from my apartment too. You also have one of the largest and oldest public farmer’s markets in the country, Eastern Market. Take that Seattle/Portland!
I’ll admit, these grociers are a little ‘hood. No dancing around that. But when you get down to it, everything you buy at Krogers, you can mostly buy there. Sure it looks run down. Sure, it doesn’t carry that safe brand-name you are used to (so far the Spartan house brand seems to be just fine for me). But you can get what you need. Once I learn where to get some legit amish/organic meat and produce I’ll be set!
So I got my first big shop done and I’m rolling my cart back to my car. I unload it all and start to push the cart back to the cart-collector cage. But.suddenly.the.cart.just starts sei.zing.up.pp.I push the cart and then.BAM.STOP.rollllllll.STOP.rolllll. It’s like you’re driving with your grandma, who drives with two feet and shes trying to tell you some story as she pulls up to a red light.
I look to see if something’s caught in the wheels. Nope. Wheels clear. I think if this was happening in the store. Nope, this was a fine cart for shopping. I think maybe I bumped a little wheel locking mechanism. Nooope. Extremely confused and laughably frustrated with this situation, a car starts to back up and I can’t get by him in time! So I just pick the cart up and then set it down past the car.
This is embarrassing now. These two girls are walking through the lot, snickering as they watch this escapade, and I engage them. “This cart is RIDICULOUS. The wheels just keep locking up!” They smile and say “that’s because you’re too far away from the store! If you get too far away, the wheels lock to prevent people from stealing it.”
Wow. This old, beaten up cart, had a theft protection system installed on it?? I looked at the wheels to see if there had been some after-market add on. Nothing that I could see. I wonder if the black girls were just pulling my leg as I did look out of place at this store.
While driving home, I decided that it’s much more fun to believe that this ‘hood grocier had high tech, invisible, theft prevention devices installed on their old carts, than to think it was just janky old wheels.
4 weeks ago today, I woke up to the smell of toxic fumes. No this was not some burnt out factory or some abandoned building burning outside of my window, rather it was my new memory foam mattress from Costco.
See when you get one of these mattresses in a box, you open this vacuum sealed package, allowing air to fill this foam and expand into a 12in thick, Queen size, mattress. It’s magical. The downer though is that you have to live with this glue-like smell for, ehhhh, about a week. Not bad if you used to huff in middle school. Personally, I preferred letting Elmers dry on my hands, and then rubbing it off. To each their own though.
My decision to get the memory foam mattress is in many ways like my decision to move to Detroit. At first glance it can ‘smell’ real bad. You see empty urban prairies, you see struggling homeless lingering left and right, you read, you read, you read about all the corruption and sadness and strife. Your heart breaks and you think that this place is ROUGH. But just like my mattress, the smell goes away. You start to enjoy how great of a mattress you have. You love that you paid half of what people get duped into spending on a traditional mattress.
A couple facts:
Fact - Grosse Pointe (my hometown) was and in many ways, is, incredibly wealthy.
Fact - Detroit (city proper) is poor, unemployed and struggling.
Fact - These two cities border each other directly, and have one of the most racially historical borders in the country: Alter Rd.
When I was younger my mom would take me downtown to the DIA on my half days off to see new exhibits. Right when we crossed Alter Rd. she would lean across me and lock my door (we had a 1989 Dodge Caravan that they bought with the stock radio, no tapedeck until later, and of course no power locks or windows). This action by her was so routine that it was just a part of driving into the city. Most people when they drive into cities they arrive via freeway. When you drive downtown from Grosse Pointe, you usually take Jefferson. Before it turns into Jefferson, it’s Lakeshore, which has some of the most magnificent houses in Grosse Pointe. But as it turns into Jefferson, and you arrive at the Detroit border, things start to change. And they don’t change gradually. They change abruptly. We’re talking on one side of the road you have healthy manicured lawns, painted shutters, and copper gutters, yet on the other side you have a plethora of graffiti, burnt out buildings, and caved in roofs. The contrast is as glaring as a white preppy kid riding his new Schwinn through the ‘hood on a Friday night.
While Alter Rd has been like this my whole life, me riding my new Schwinn through the ‘hood is a recent development. See my curiosity and passion for urbanity has lead me to investigate the city, which was a stones throw away from me my whole life. After studying abroad and bringing a tourist perspective back to my own city, I began my journey to understand Detroit, as I felt like I wasn’t a Detroiter at all. I still remember lecturing my Dad right before I left for college. on how I’d never tell people I was from Detroit, rather I was from Grosse Pointe, because who in their right mind would want to be from Detroit?? He patiently laughed and thought I was crazy. Which I was.
I want this blog to be about a suburban kid who falls in love with a city he always lived next to, but never ventured into. I want it to be about discovery and rediscovery; about finding something new, which has always been; exploring what is, yet what has never left.
Hopefully I’ll enlighten, entertain and engage you in ways you never thought Detroit could. I love many other blogs being written in the city right now, and will work to weave those into my stories as they’re essential to my well-being and sanity in a city like this.
Well I better get writing, as there no shortage of things to talk about.
