Ah! My home town. The city where I spent much of my life, where I lived at times like a rat, and may soon return to. Several of my organization’s founders come from that ruined place which could be out of Dickens, or Hugo’s “Hunchback of Notre Dame.” One can’t understand us without understanding that background. We’ve walked through such ruins for real. It’s a postindustrial America (mirrored in other cities of the Midwest) which the precious literati don’t want to know about. Too much of the reality of the true nature of this great and awful civilization.
Be careful, Ed, that you don’t give your boozhie audience too much reality. Better stick to Marisha, she of the nice hair.

Wow – thanks for the link. The sociology department in my school sends students each summer to Detroit to help fix up communities there, I have a few friends that have gone. They do stuff like start public biking programs, start community farming, or remove graffiti. I’ll have to send this link to them.

My hometown as well! Is it incredibly messed up that I now find images and landscapes like this achingly beautiful? It reminds me of home and a kind of limitless possibility.