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A City of Two Tails

I’ve been back in Detroit exactly a month and a day. A few folks I know, mostly my relatives, wonder if I’m crazy. My son even asked me if I’d gone senile. Well, crazy yes, but then I’ve always been a bit crazy. Senile? Who knows. Could be.

Detroit has a bad rap. From Motor City to Murder City, an urban landscape of burned out and abandoned houses, empty, trash strewn lots, crime and crack-heads. But there is another side to her, a side not often acknowledged in the if-it-bleeds-it-leads mentality this country seems so enamored of.
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No More Nothing To Do

Don Watts, a long time friend, once said to me that owning a home means never having nothing to do. That’s especially true if the house you buy has been sitting vacant for a number of years. The one I’m sitting in at the moment, listening to rainwater drip into a bucket near the front door, is just such a house. As of the 21st of this month, it’s mine: lock, stock and leaky roof.

Structurally sound, it sits on a slight rise from the street which has helped to keep the foundation strong and the basement dry. Two bedrooms on the ground floor and a long, low-ceilinged bedroom upstairs, it has a huge living room, a tiny kitchen and an extremely damaged bathroom. Damage-wise, the bathroom is the worst of it. The entire back wall is torn out. I guess, if you’re going to steal a bathtub, it’s easier to tear out the wall then to drag the thing out the smashed-in backdoor.
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Never Say Never

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The title of this post is a bit of a contradiction, not to mention a bit cliche, but, as far as sound advice goes, it has its salient points.

Back in late 81 – or was it early 82? Winter in any event – I packed up the last of the luggage, tossed the cats in the back seat of the Volkswagen and headed southwest, out of Detroit to parts unknown, the vow to never return trailing behind like the sleet and slush and ice bound streets I was escaping from.

Never say never.

It’s nearly thirty years later. The last six have not, overall, been pretty. A few highlights here and there; my novel Stealing The Marbles has been published, my second, Meter Maids Eat Their Young, will be out before Father Time sweeps his scythe across 2011 but, in general, it’s been a downhill tumble from California to New Mexico to this bug infested junk yard in the armpit of Florida.

Never say never.
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