If Chicago is the guy masturbating in his basement to porn, then telling his wife he was working and that everything is ok. In Detroit, the guys wife is down there with him enjoying it just as much, smoking a cigarette and laughing a horse laugh from the futon they dragged down there.. it's an honest city... it doesn't have much choice, but it gives an honest product, for better or for worse..
It's the biggest victim of the luxury it allowed by creating the age of the personal automobile, white flight, but it also seems to enjoy the rewards of it's freedom, convenience, and easy access to out of the way places, broad boulevards, and the weird safety you feel in a big hunk of steel as your cruise around and get to watch the worst of urban blight America has to offer from the safety of your car like a kid at the aquarium checking out the invasive species exhibit. Hell, it even has America's first aquarium of all things.
Anyone who knows my interests would know that I love the urban 'archeology' that abounds in a place like this, the relics of a bygone greatness, like an Indiana Jones adventure.. the museum like quality of a bunch of hulking old structures mutely telling you something great happened here, something explosive, and it was so intense there could be no follow up, the big bang led to a similarly big contraction, which burned out all the oxygen, soaked up by the lungs of the Motown Greats. Detroit is defiant to simple urban planning fixes, the Disney-fication option. It´s as if it's saying:You can't put a Jimmy Johns sandwich in my bottom floor, some lofts and call me good, I fucking changed the lifestyle of the world, perhaps for the worse, but you wanted it. It's like a drug dealer doing a long stretch, his consolation being that he gave people what they wanted, gave em a thrill, and no one else inside has much of an issue with it besides the damn prosecutor and the pissed off victims.. He gets left alone or even lauded in the joint.. crazy fucker with the long hair and the placid calm was big before the 70's, when life caught up with him.. fucking prosecutor named Nader! (Half of me kids... and I don't always put on my seat belt.. oh yeah.. I'm wild Nader, watch me dance.. oh and by the way, did you know that Ralph Nader grew up like 4 miles from where John Brown was born I believe it was, Winchester CT. Always thought that was interesting. Anyhow..). Detroit then functions with a clean conscience of someone who just bet big on the wrong horse, took a risk in life he has no regrets about, but knows it's luck will change.. sure there is a sad side to it all, but like Florida, it's so bad it's good. If you can't have a sense of humor about it you wouldn't last there anyways.
But what's funny is that it ain't about saving Detroit for Detroiters. They are long past that. People kept telling me they got everything they need, it just ain't where you expect it to be, and as a local showed me around, it proved to be true. They don't pity or pooh over what happened, a city of 3 million or so shrunk down to 700k.... they know where they all went, just the other side of 8 mile, a whole gaggle of honkeys hanging out living the way honkeys live.. that's OK, they might be the ones missing out is the feeling you get if you hit some of the towns haunts like in Corktown or Midtown or West Village. Motown ain't got to apologize.. if it ain't for you, it ain't for you. You can go someplace warm, go to the Burbs and never come back, or just give up, but you might be missing out, and if you don´t realize that, who needs you anyways...
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