So JUST today I turned off paid subscriptions because I havenāt posted in so long. I donāt really know what Iām doing here with this blog.
I just donāt want to feel chained to it if itās not fun. Because I donāt get paid enough for it to be worth it. And Iām working on some other fun stuff right now anyway. So apologies about that FWIW. I just know how much work trying to keep websites fresh is and donāt want to fully commit to that.
But all the sudden I had an idea anyway. And I do like having an outlet for random stuff.
Anyway, a friend of mine who I love a lot once complained to me about āThe Ohio Mentality,ā and I honestly think about it a lot. She said, people in Ohio poo poo any big ideas you have.
Like āTravel for a year?! You canāt do that!ā I canāt remember exactly what she used as an example but you get the idea.
Midwesterners are really practical. This is the culture I grew up in.
I had to do a bunch of traveling to the West this spring. And I have to admit I like it a lot. My family was just in California, and Iām sorry, itās not fair for a state to have both mountains and the ocean. That is really how I feel! It is not fair that some people are born in California and some people are born in Ohio.
But I did think everyone in LA was insane also. The drug use and the homelessness was really kind of hard to watch. There was a woman who sat all day on the street corner by our hotel, every day. She sat all day on the street corner in the hot sun carrying on a loud conversation with herself next to her tent. It was a busy street too. She didnāt seem to like me either. I didnāt blame her. I didnāt like myself too much either, walking past her every day.
Another time, I was walking, and this woman was standing on the street corner holding a strangely shaped megaphone. She was singing into it kind of softly. There werenāt many people around even. And she didnāt even have a very nice voice. I have no idea what she was doing. She didnāt even seem crazy or troubled, otherwise.
Nevertheless, there were so many things about it that were great, and by that I mean the culture specifically. We stayed near Venice Beach and I loved the way people were so active. Another thing I loved was the way performance was kind of built into the public spaces. In Venice Beach you have the big skating area, which amateurs perform for a crowd in, thereās also the basketball courts and the weightlifting area.
Also we went to Yosemite, and maybe the national park service deserves the credit here, but the vibe there was A+. I liked that people seemed opened to taking some reasonable risks, rock climbing etc. For example, we sat around one day at a beach in a mountain stream. And the swimming area ā the pond ā it had a large boulder in the middle kids were jumping off. Parents sat around and cheered for the kids to jump. It reminded me, for a moment, of Never Never Land. Like a land of adventure, the way it used to be idealized for kids.
Anyway, it was refreshing just to be in a place that didnāt seem as heavily policed as most public spaces Iām familiar with. And that was a comfortable place to be with kids. Just with regards to kinda like safety theater and litigiousness or whatever.
I could move to California, or I could have. But then Iād have to make all new friends and be far away from my family, and thatās a big sacrifice to make to live somewhere cool. Along the way, I decided it wasnāt worth it.
One thing that made it easier, is that my family has Ohio money not California money. We were middle class, sorta. I think my parents, in like the best years, were maybe flirting with upper middle class, but they were sweating every cent they spent when I was a kid. We were doing okay, we were not poor, but we also were not rich, certainly not by the standards of coastal states, anyway.
One thing that Ohio has going for it, I will say, is that it still has a pretty large middle class. Ohio isnāt like New York City with a bunch of billionaires. Thereās a few of course, but they donāt rub elbows with the normies ā AT ALL. Also in Ohio, most people live in pretty racially and socioeconomically segregated places. So most people I knew growing up were in the same boat as us or had less money for the most part.
I never knew anyone who went to Harvard, or really any Ivy League school, as far as I know, until I was an adult living in Cleveland and had finished grad school. And even now, in Cleveland, Iām not actually sure having a degree from a really prestigious Ivy League school would even help you that much. I guess it depends.
Like I poked around on Rodeo Drive in LA and I was just like, this wouldnāt even make sense to wear, in sorta the context I live. No one would even recognize this like $900 shoe for being good, or maybe even special, and if they did know what it was, whatever mega expensive designer label, theyād probably just think it was a weird red flag. (Point, Ohio!)
When I think about my parentsā ambitions for me, looking back, the were pretty modest. My dad, really wanted me to get a college scholarship for sports (I played soccer). But while I was pretty good, I was not that good. My mom used to say, she wanted us to get masterās degrees. Both my parents were college educated but didnāt have advanced degrees.
So that was sort of it. They werenāt like, we dream of you becoming a famous poet or something. That wasnāt a path that seemed to be available. (It didnāt help that I wasnāt all that amazing of a student either, or even that well behaved, at least in high school.)
I think something like that, like trying to become a poet, never even occurred to me.
One time I read this book by this woman. She was from Los Angeles, but she went to school in Oberlin, which is technically in Ohio, but most of the students come from the coasts, and many from pretty wealthy families.
Anyway, that book was decent, but it was a lot about her Oberlin days. She she discussed with complete sincerity, going around Oberlin aspiring to be a poet and telling people she was going to be a poet, and I just thought, āwow.ā
I went to Ohio State, and if you went around there telling people you were going to be a poet, you would have been loudly mocked right to your face. Not just by like mean girl types, like EVERYONE, your parents would have told you to touch grass, or get real, or whatever an Ohio parent would say.
I dated a guy briefly at OSU who had studied English, and he was a pretty artsy alternative kinda guy and he seemed to think pretty highly of himself, heh. Anyway, he went straight from undergrad in English to getting a masterās degree in teaching. He didnāt even attempt to do any writing in any sort of professional way whatsoever.
(Itās ironic, the poet Maggie Smith, actually lives in Columbus now and is doing well, something I would never have thought was possible 10 years ago. I personally am not a big fan of her work though, or poetry in general.)
Even though I STUDIED JOURNALISM as an undergraduate, it never even really occurred to me I could like write for a newspaper, until the school made me write for the student newspaper as a requirement for graduation, and I got wind of this story that was kinda big and I got excited about and then randomly shipped it off to the alternative weekly, which passed on it, but did ship it over to chain of suburban advertorial news weeklies owned by the same company.
The first jobs I did for them, I swear to God, were writing the police beat for Whitehall, Ohio. And they paid me $20 per story, (their stringer rate). This was in 2005. But I could write three in a night, if I worked hard, so net $60 LOL, at least thatās how I justified it anyway. A few years even before I got my undergraduate degree I could make $100 cash in tips working as a waitress, FWIW.
After I graduated, that company offered me a full time job and I took it. And it was a fun job but it was pretty dead end and it paid terribly. At the time some newspapers in Ohio were still doing some really good work and well resourced, but they didnāt want anything to do with someone who worked at the suburban weekly.
Still though it wasnāt until I was offered a newspaper job, I even considered that a possibility. That was something famous people did and I was normal, that was just the attitude. Even for myself, I think, getting past that was a process.
Now Iām this person who wrote a book and travels around speaking, which is weird honestly. I donāt think anyone expected that, including myself.
Iāve been going back and forth about writing another book. Maybe a bigger book. And the āOhio mentalityā is still there. I donāt even think people know what to do with the fact that I wrote a book or appear on radio around here. Itās kinda embarrassing. I think in Brooklyn it would like increase my status, pretty straightforwardly. Like if I came from a literary family of professors. But thatās not my background at all.
My mom told me recently sheād never known anyone in her life whoād written a book.
The thing is though, Iāve read a lot of books. Publishers are sitting around and their job is to publish some books. They canāt all be written by Brooklyn based daughters of professors at private liberal arts schools.
The possibilities for what you can do with your life are endless. Iām not advising anyone to study English, by the way, or try to make a living as a writer, necessarily. Iām still a middle class Midwesterner. Now, that Iām 40, that Iāve published a book, worked in these crappy journalism jobs and all, I know people who have done it. And they are real normal people and some of them live in Ohio.
Hannif Abdurriquib, who LIVES IN COLUMBUS AND MOSTLY ALWAYS HAS, is probably the hottest writer working right now, or one of them.
Itās confusing. I still think Westerners are sorta nuts. But I think we can learn something from their sense of limitlessness.