Here in the City We Try Not to Think About What's Happening

Re: Occupy Wall Street:

Journal Entry 2006

Now I see it the way I did, in the beginning… It is almost complete – like in the dreams… The cliffs in the southern distance, past the docks, and then here to the north where the high hills split off and roll to level land, and across all of it, Lake Michigan’s waves iridescent, cold, even then in summer, now too polluted for even the healthiest swimmer… How this shoreline in that brief space resembled Maine to Florida, now fills with strange architecture and hedge-fund condos that will, in a few years be obsolete as the blue work shirt piece sculpture, protested as soon as it was erected at the airport, Ponce de Leon of botox, grail of plastic to fill an aging face – or the bright orange 18’ wrench outside the art museum where the wings were opened one night at Mick Jagger’s request. So the lake, like the county, quickly consumed by nouveau riche and richer people, decays like poverty, eroding in pieces like shards of broken glass.
Here in the city we try not to think of what's happening...the way the same freeways are torn up every other year, unexpectedly bringing new turns each week, then changing them again, we skid at 60 mph, slide through narrow channels, unsure anymore where we’re headed.
And in the heart of the town, always under reconstruction, even street lights are dim. People asking for food have been shuffled near what was the old Milwaukee road station where Jim O’Shea took us with him to pick up the Chicago Tribune, and shuffle dollars with the mafia. But at night it haunts our dreams, the way things change every day. We see ourselves asleep suddenly in the middle of someone's lawn. And when we wake, we're not even alone. Even those who were wealthy walk with us, couples 50-70 still young, still ndressed in chic casuals, but sitting in the next yard talking quietly togrther as if a play is unfolding somewhere near the lake. they get up, start walking. but the lake isn't wild anymore. All the trees have been torn down, huge structures conceal all but bits of blue -- cut like calico.
Then you are alone again without help. Night after night, you walk, looking for something that was, yet trying to escape even that -- the factories and offices that stole our minds long before something else took over, promising the dream -- a dream of freedom, of ownership, of a society, quick shiny images flashing night and day from countless screens. You can't escape them anymore, even during these nightly walks.
The offices wait with their illness like the factories that gobbled up even the strongest, turning them to drink just to bear it – until there were no factories with high-paid jobs.
But others, those who are safe, those who haven't felt it at their throats, can sip wine and say, "Yes, these things happen, too bad for the poor. Pity the sick. It is mental illness that makes them drink."
Cultural illness even the best cannot see...goosestepping from another era, saluting the shiny coin, not stopping to listen to the sound of the waves.
The dead are waiting for us. Waiting to scoop us up before it gets any worse. They are great clouds gathering above the water, waiting to take you in.
But even this terrifies those of us who feel it, like a great wind, so that soon walking into it will be even harder. Birds will fall out of flight, transfigured suddenly. Wings will be hard as steel, black and oily flying above us. And every night a conflict, no night knows a way out of. Every night whispers this is the end, take the quickest route to water, throw yourselves into the clouds. Even now I can hear them goosestepping only moments away – where the waves hit the endless concrete – in a world of too-much snow.