so i was reading the city paper today, and its tool bag editor chris potter had some words about the sienna miller incident. basically, in additon to saying that she should be ashamed of what she said, he said that the people of pittsburgh acted immature in their response. he basically accuses pittsburgh of being way too defensive when attacked by the media/b-list celebrities. the outpouring of hatred towards her, as he cites in headlines taking cheap shots at her "semi-fame" and other reactions from the last few weeks. i have some thoughts on this:

get a life. fuck if i want to be from a city that lies back and takes obnoxious, uncalled for criticism without reaction. sienna miller is a bitch. she is pissed because she's getting paid nothing to do low-budget movies in cities that aren't london, nyc or la. boo hoo. first of all, a headline calling sienna a "semi-famous" actress isn't an insult, it's a statement of fact. she's done rather obscure movies, other than alfie (which bombed). she is more or less famous for her crash-and-burn relationship with jude law. she's not julia roberts; she's not making $20 million a picture. sorry, "semi-famous" is pretty accurate.

regardless, even if it was an insult, she deserves it. she is working in a city and thought it appropriate to trash talk that city to a national publication, and not even intelligently. a coworker of mine had a friend who happened to run into sienna up on mt. washington after a day of filming at the lemont -- apparently, all she did was feel bad for herself because she's all alone in this city, has nothing to do and is regretting taking a job in such a small-time movie. GET OVER YOURSELF. you're not hot shit, and apparently you aren't even a nice person, either. before she trashed pittsburgh, there were 250,000 or so people here who would have opened their arms to her. i don't doubt that for a minute.

pittsburgh may not have the size or glitz of NYC, but one thing we do have is a population that is fiercely loyal (unless your name is kordell stewart). no matter what happens here, or where they go, pittsburghers will always love pittsburgh. who can say they wouldn't step up and defend themselves when attacked? potter's article cited pittsburgh's constant concern with its national image as a reason for its defensiveness. we should be concerned with our image -- its shit. unless you're from here, chances are you are either a. not a fan of the city or b. unconcerned. in a city that has a floundering economy and is searching for an identity to replace the one given by the steel industry, of course our national image is important. pittsburghers will give anyone a chance; any person from here will lend you bus money, chat you up at the bar or demonstrate their friendliness in any other way possible.

i expect nothing less than defensiveness from a city that gets so much criticism. a few weeks back i spent an hour in kopy's on the south side listening to some jackass from philly talk shit on steelers fans and eventually the city of pittsburgh in general. he was mad because the fans gave him so much shit for being from philly (this coming from a guy from a city whose fans booed santa claus, threw batteries and made fun of TO for his suicide attempt. classy.) i tried to reason with him, and tell him that yeah, philly is a wonderful city but pittsburgh has much to offer, too. he refused to understand. okay dude, then don't live here if you hate it. go to temple.

basically, i think any reaction we give sienna is warranted and frankly, i hope she feels terrible about it. anyone with such a low level of class doesn't deserve our respect unless its earned back. waving your actress flag to a bouncer at a bar when you forgot your ID won't do it.

basically, chris potter, who are you to criticize your city's response? a semi-famous editor of a mediocre newspaper? yeah i thought so.

man, i'm so mad. go pittsburgh.

i'm promising myself i'm going to write more frequently. it's october now; it's been since early august. that's sad. october is my favorite month of the year. perfect weather -- days that are chilly, not needing a jacket to be outside quite yet, but past the days of sweat-soaked clothes and constant sunlight. i prefer when it's overcast. i hate sun. call me dreary and pessimistic if you must.
i'm keeping my window open as long as i can. i need to be cocooned in the down comforter to stay warm, but it's worth it: nothing makes a bed feel more comfortable than the snapping of october air in the window. it does, however, make getting out of bed the most heartbreaking thing. and showers in the morning are terrible. still, i'd rather be cold.
i'm having that itch again -- i want to get out of my apartment, the city, this state. maybe i just want something from home -- a connection with a person, a chance to sit on the red-plaid couch and watch television, or to drive to wal*mart or blockbuster. i never claimed to love greensburg, and i'm sure i'll never go back, but sometimes just unapologetically leaving a place behind feels too empty. if i've got nothing to salvage from twelve years, are those twelve years gone? what does it mean if i didn't leave my mark on that place? and i'm wondering how i will reflect on pittsburgh next year or a few years down the line -- i hope i feel differently. all i want right now is to go home and have someone welcome me, but it's changed so much since i lived there. maybe i learned a lesson about so frivolously letting something go.

only a few more days until i move into the apartment on south bouquet. alicia is on vacation until sunday, so she'll be moving in monday. i picked up the keys yesterday from our landlord, an older woman who lingered at the foot of the steep cement stairs outside our place while i stood on the porch, fiddling with the lock for the first time. the apartment is a little more run-down than i remember -- it's weird, when you're looking at apartments, desperate just to sign a lease to guarantee not being homeless in the fall, how even the worst apartments don't seem so bad. then in august, empty in the interim between tenants, the living room is smaller, the tile is grimier, one of the cabinet doors in the kitchen has a fist-shaped dent in its lower-left corner.

august is one of my favorite months of the year, not because of the weather or the fact that school is still out (its hot, i'm always anxious to go back), but because oakland is completely in motion. for a few weeks, dumpsters on sidewalks are full of the remnants of the old place that aren't important enough to drag across town. on my way to work today i was tempted to garbage-pick -- there were a few beige chairs, seemingly untainted, that would be perfect to fill up the kitchen table. i had to catch myself. cars are packed up, u-hauls park on front lawns. in the week before school, traffic lines the streets as the live-at-home-for-the-summer students return. then there's all the excitement of a new place: buying furniture, kitchen appliances, new sheets for the bed, new bath towels. meeting new neighbors. carving the groove of how things will be for the next eleven or twelve months -- which way to walk to and from the apartment, which chair is yours in the living room, where certain pieces of permanent decor reside about the apartment. all of this while it's still 90 degrees out; you can have something new, and still hang on to summer.

something i will miss about my apartment on neville street (things which might be impossible to call right now, with little distance, as the things i miss about mckee place were things i hated or was indifferent to when i lived there):
an across-the-street neighbor plays the saxophone, usually in the late afternoon. he's not any good; i never realized how difficult it must be to master this instrument until the warm months of this year. he usually plays scales, the notes separated, not smooth. i never figured out the musician and i don't know why i attribute them with a masculine pronoun. i'll miss laying on the couch, or sitting on the back porch, listening to him practice for hours in the afternoon. this is a phenomenon that doesn't occur where i grew up, where houses are too far apart for the neighbor's noise to drift in. the only time i can remember was driving past the house at the bottom of penn adamsburg road -- an old man lived there, played the organ all the time. that is one of the things i love about the city; even in an empty apartment, you can feel the presence of people living in houses not spaced out by green and miles of back roads.

i ran into my friend brandon at bootleggers wednesday night, haven't seen him in months, maybe a year. he used to hang out when we lived at mckee. he told me he'd just been thinking about that year, how he had such a good time and it may have been one of his favorite years ever. it seemed like all we ever did was play beer pong in our living room, considering whether or not to skip piano class on thursday morning. we drank american light, we pissed amber off, we woke up to the smell of leftover beer and cans strewn across the living room and kitchen.

someone in those houses around mckee-louisa-meyran played the bagpipes: my favorite thing about mckee place. i just bought a typewriter on ebay, a smith-corona silent from the 40s. i hope its loud; i can make up for never becoming good at the guitar by filling south bouquet street with the click-clack of typewriter keys.

"the things we hold on to" - senior seminar story, part 1

After my dad succumbed to lung cancer on December 15, 2003, my mom started playing what she calls “the garbage game.”

The garbage game is essentially an aggrandized version of beat the clock. Time runs out when my brother, who is now nineteen and living on his own, moves out of our dad’s house, either to live on his own someplace else or with my mom and her boyfriend, Dale, in Penn Hills. Her goal is chip away at the mountain of junk in the basement one Sunday night at a time until his move-out day, when we will leave the two-bedroom house on the rear of 204 Penn Adamsburg Road behind forever.
I was nineteen when my dad died; my brother, sixteen. We found ourselves suddenly living alone together surrounded by the residue of our lives with our dad. I began stumbling upon the less-obvious packed-away things after my dad died because then, it seemed okay to open the lockbox or dig through the piles of papers in the center drawer of the desk. I found things in three levels. There were the things I always knew to be there – the kind of things you save for no real purpose other than to say you have, like miss-stamped quarters that escaped the Philadelphia Mint and the Tooth Fairy’s silver dollars. There was important documentation – our birth certificates and Social Security cards. Then, I found the things that existed only in concept to me: my dad’s wedding band, pictures of my mother, pictures of mother and father on their wedding day, match books saved from their honeymoon in Aruba. The kind of things my dad only ever showed himself.

The box was filled with things like this – things I’d never seen before, but my mom knew the meaning behind. I found a necklace – gold, with a long chain. The pendant was a gold elephant, adorned with tiny cubic zirconium jewels up and down its legs and on the blanket slung on its back.

“What is this?” I asked her. She walked over to me, touched the elephant with the tips of her fingers hidden under long, mauve-painted acrylic fingernails.

“Oh, that probably belonged to your dad’s aunt.”

I searched around the box some more.

“Isn’t this dad’s wedding ring?” I said. I had fished a gold ring from my dad’s jewelry box. It had a black face and a diamond set in the middle. My mother sat in the blue armchair (the chair my dad sat in every day), watching a black-and-white movie on AMC. She is forty-seven; her hair would be gray, but she dyes it, renews its medium brown and highlights it with blonde. She loves old movies; her hair is cut short like Audrey Hepburn’s in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. At this time, since my dad got sick, I lived at home and commuted forty-minutes everyday to the University of Pittsburgh – my mom slept over a few nights a week.

“No, our wedding bands were gold,” she said.

I had never seen these rings. I remembered my mother’s engagement ring – slung on the neck of a ceramic swan when she did the dishes – and the huge black ring on my dad’s finger. I always assumed it was his wedding band. Turns out he kept it hidden in the lockbox with the rest of the remnants of their marriage.

part 2

“The Giarrussos are pack rats,” my mother said to me once about the volume of belongings stashed in attics, in closets, under beds, in desk drawers, in the Secretary in the living room, in stacks under the glass of the coffee table, in the drawers of the entertainment center, and, to the highest degree, in the basements of the houses we had lived in.

I like to keep things; I also like to throw them away. Being this kind of pack-rat is a self-perpetuating hobby – I keep things so that, when they build up to a certain level, I will have lots of things to choose from when I start pitching. My dad kept everything he ever owned, I think, and never threw any of it away. Most of this followed him from the basement of 426 Ross Avenue, to the garage of 9 Gratz Street after he and my mother divorced, to our two-bedroom on Penn-Adamsburg Road. There were boxes full of never-opened children’s toys (trucks, dolls, Mork and Mindy figurines). A box of vintage Playboy magazines from the seventies. His mother’s sewing machine, jars full of screws, nails, bolts, salvaged squares of Velcro. Scattered throughout the house were treasure chests of things saved over two or three decades. Camping equipment saved since he was an Eagle Scout: tents, thick, green sleeping bags, a canteen, pots and pans, at least six different Swiss Army knives. A fire-proof metal box containing back-up disks for every computer he had ever owned. There’s a recycled wine box of pictures, thousands of them, from the mid-seventies until the time of my parent’s divorce. There’s a glass book case full of his old college textbooks (psychology, business, a Webster’s unabridged dictionary) and, of course, the lockbox in the bottom-left drawer of his desk.

part 3

In my mind, I see the black ring on my dad’s finger, his hands on the steering wheel, driving two Turnpike-exits away to my aunt and uncle’s house in Oakmont. There are two ways to ride in the car – just riding, listening to music, eyes on the telephone wires along the highway, or having such a deep conversation that you lose track of time and scenery.

Car trips with my dad were always the former. Because of this, I don’t remember specific things my dad and I talked about when we drove; I remember what cars he drove in what years (the red Nissan, the silver Mazda 626, the green Saturn, the gold Saturn), I remember things from alongside the highway, I remember the songs that he played. Our trip went from mile-marker 67 to 48; right around mile 51, I’d look out my window on the passenger side for the Mushroom house (it was rounded on top, like an igloo, but calling it that made less sense). The play list – cassette tapes dubbed from compact discs to preserve the originals – rarely changed over the span of my childhood. The Eagles, The Beach Boys, Chicago, and Simon and Garfunkel (The Concert in Central Park, recorded on September 19, 1981).

When I think back, these seem like the only albums we ever listened to. My dad would sing along, always harmonizing, never leading, in an airy, raspy voice that spoke not only of his years spent in a barbershop quartet but also of the decades he spent smoking Marlboro lights.

“Am I a good singer?” I asked my dad once.

“You have a good voice, but you aren’t a good singer,” he said. “You don’t sing enough.”

“I want to take voice lessons.”

“You don’t need to take lessons, just sing along. Learn Art Garfunkel’s parts – they’re in your range. Practice them, you’ll get it.”

I’ve listened to The Concert in Central Park so many times now that I know both Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s parts. I can tell you the banter they exchanged in between songs: the jokes about selling joints in the crowd, the reference to then-mayor of New York city, Ed Koch, the way that Garfunkel stumbled on the first few lines of “The Boxer” in the encore, starting the line “I have squandered my existence on a pocketful of mumbles, such are promises” too early. I put it on when I walk to class, when I’m trying to sleep, when I’m playing the garbage game in my own apartment.

part 4

Riding in cars with my mom’s boyfriend, Dale, is the latter, the type that finds the riders deep in conversation. The times I’ve spent alone with Dale are usually returning from holiday functions at his parent’s house in Ligonier. I remember specific conversations we had; one, about his relationship with my mother, happened on Thanksgiving. We stayed behind to watch the Pitt football game – we listened to the second half on the radio, but I can’t remember any of the play-by-play. We tuned it out. I don’t remember how, but our conversation ambled toward Dale and my mom.

“How long did you and my mom date before she moved in?” I asked.

“We didn’t really date too long before that – but we had known each other for years. I always had affection for her.”

As we passed through green lights going west on Route 30, Dale told me why he loves my mom. These are things I never heard from my dad; there was no explanation, it was just a fact that he loved her. I knew that from the things he kept around, the pictures and the wedding band; I knew because we weren’t allowed to see Dale while my dad was still alive.
“I’ve never fought with your mother, ever,” Dale says.

“Well, are there things worth fighting about that you just don’t bring up?”

“No. We just don’t do things to each other like that; I think your mother and I are cut from the same cloth. Once, maybe, that time that your brother wrecked his car, two or so years ago. She knew about it, but she didn’t tell me. She knew I would have things to say about it, and she didn’t want to deal with it. She didn’t need to be hiding things. But that’s it.”

I tried to think back, to remember if my mom is just non-confrontational. She is; I could picture her being upset about things and not saying it. But I had never heard her say one thing about fighting with Dale, in the fifteen years she had known him.

“Why don’t you get married?” I asked. I remembered a conversation I’d heard my mom having with Dale’s mom on the way home from one of our trips to an arts and crafts festival in Westmoreland County. I could tell she wanted to, and Dale’s mom wished they would.

“I never wanted to get married. I don’t want kids. It’s just not something that’s in the cards.”

part 5

“If I get a hot dog, do I have to eat the bun?” I asked my dad. Every time we went to Eat N Park, I got the hot-dog-and-fries kid’s meal. And every time we had this argument.

“Yes,” he said.

“Can I ask them not to grill it?”

“Fine,” he said. “Hey, did you know I used to sell the ice machines that make these ice cubes?” He flicks his cigarette into the ashtray near the window, and then tries to fish one of the cubes out of his class of Coke.

“Why don’t you just eat your dinner,” my brother said. He kicked my leg under the table. My brother was probably seven years old, making me ten. He was short and thin, his hair still light brown but by this time the curls had grown out and his hair had flattened, parted down the middle. He had glasses; he had his first round of braces. At this age (and pretty much until I left for college), our favorite past time was fighting with each other.

“Stop it. Can’t we get through dinner just once without any bickering from you?”

The nights my Mom didn’t waitress at Tivoli’s Restaurant she visited– usually Mondays and Wednesdays. These were “mom days,” – she would arrive before my dad got home from work and take my brother and me out to eat dinner or to Westmoreland Mall. When we lived in the house on Gratz Street, my dad would stay in his room, watching television by himself, while my brother and I sat with our mom in the living room. From time to time he’d ask if we all wanted to go out to dinner together – which is how we ended up at Eat N Park.

When dinner was over, my mom reached for the check. She began shuffling through bills in her wallet.

“I’ll pay tonight,” my dad offered. He pulled his silver Discover Card out of his wallet.

“You don’t have to do that,” my mom said.

“I want to. You can leave the tip.”

I think he liked to pretend, on these Mondays and Wednesdays, when we went out to dinner together, that we were still a family.

part 6

I’m cleaning the bathroom of my apartment, tossing out old magazines; I stop at the copy of Coastal Living my mom sent to me a few weeks earlier.

It seems to me that Coastal Living is the cruelest publication in existence.

I mentioned to my mom, just once, that I had flipped through an issue of this magazine at work. Myself and my coworkers were having one of those discussions about having an interim year, driving across the country, getting jobs in romanticized American cities like New York or San Francisco – the same things that every almost-graduate talks about. There it was, sitting on the table in the break room. The magazine had pages and pages of double-spaced type, pictures of clear-blue water and skies, kids dressed in sweaters and jeans playing on porch-swings, and plans for beach homes. It included quotes like “I wake up in the morning and just look out the window at the ocean.” That was that day that I decided living somewhere completely opposite of Pittsburgh, somewhere like California, for a few years was reasonable.

"I don't see how anyone enjoys Coastal Living," I said to her. We were talking on the phone. I was pacing the kitchen, probably cooking something; by cooking, I mean heating up a frozen Green Giant side dish.

"Oh, I love that magazine," she said.

"Why? Doesn't it only make you feel sad about living in Pittsburgh?"

"No. It's good because you can compare different places to live, decide what you might want your house to look like."

The key to this conversation is my mother's certainty that she will, someday, live on the beach. I contemplate living on the beach from time to time, usually in early February while I'm walking to class through a few inches of snow, hair frozen, scarf wrapped around my face. Frankly, I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I lived on the beach -- or any place it wasn't cold or rainy at least some of the time. It seems that a good percentage of Pittsburgh conversation revolves around the weather; if it's going to snow and how much, the first time it will be warm enough to play beer pong outside, how miserable it is to walk to class in the rain because no matter what you do, your jeans will be wet up to the knees for the rest of the day. What do coastal residents talk about?

"I want to live on a houseboat," Dale said. We're sitting around the table at his parents' house in Ligonier. It's Christmas day; you can tell because Dale is wearing "the Christmas shirt," which is a short-sleeved button-down featuring the members of the band AC/DC. Also you can tell because it's snowing, Mrs. Young is cooking a ham, and Mr. Young is inevitably questioning some soon-to-be-adult in the house about his or her life plans.

"I can't live on a boat," my mom replied. She sipped Asti Spumante sparkling wine out of a green champagne flute. "Plus, do you think we can have cats on a houseboat? Won't they jump into the water?"

"Cats don't like water," Dale said. My mom and Dale have been vacationing to Myrtle Beach together for years. The last time I remember my parents going to the beach, I was one year old. It doesn't make sense that one day I will be visiting my mom at her home on Myrtle Beach -- and that home might be a boat. I can’t decide if my mom was always a beach person – if that was a quality that made an intermittent appearance, beginning with my dad, fading away and then resurfacing with Dale – or if she had become a beach person with Dale, revealing a new side of herself that never showed itself when she was with my dad.