This is such a short blog entry that a long introduction would be misleading. Those who hate random binges of nostalgia can rejoice. During 2014, I had to make a number of work trips to Chicago and on August 11, I made one of them. During the Ohio portion of my drive, I managed to take a few photographs. Some of those I have included here. That’s all she wrote.
Artists, they say, can become fascinated with certain subjects, returning to them over and over again because the subjects are so compelling. Of course, the same is true for stalkers. I am no artist, but I do confess that certain sights I see on my excursions manage to exert a certain hold on me, sending out their siren call long after I have departed the premises. Though I always want to explore and see new things, in the time I have been engaging in this little hobby, a few places have so intrinsically interested me that I have returned to them, sometimes more than once.
Once upon a time, before thumb drives and smart phones, people actually had to remember things. Do you remember that? No? Look it up on your smart phone; I’ll wait. The ancient Greeks and Romans sometimes used a technique called the Method of Loci (i.e., places). It’s more commonly called a memory palace. The idea behind a memory palace—an idea stolen by the movie Inception—is that you create in your mind some sort of reality, like a house or museum or row of shops—or a palace. When you want to remember something, you “store” it in a particular place in this mindscape. For example, you may remember your locker combination by “storing” it inside the disgustingly pink vase on the mantel over the fireplace in the living room of your mind mansion. It is the combination of the item and its virtual surroundings that create a memory connection for you. It’s kind of like a mnemonic only in space rather than via words or sounds.
I have such an odd memory. I remember things that I read or write extremely well, and I have a historian’s command of the irrelevant detail. But when it comes to my personal life, my memory is such an odd jumble. I can’t really compare it with someone else’s memory, of course, having experienced only my own, but it is so fragmentary, so impressionistic. My oldest memories are all just a few seconds long, if that: my mother outside the house trying to use a broom to keep water from the basement, rolling a Hot Wheel down a table (I don’t know if our house was completely level), pedaling a Big-Wheel-like contraption around my grandmother’s store/house, seeing something weird (a bat?) flying around in my bedroom, being in the back seat of our car when my parents spelled the word “i-c-e-c-r-e-a-m.” Things like that. Concrete or sequential memories are much rarer. I do remember one, perhaps because I learned a lesson. I remember watching “I Love Lucy” on television, then us turning off the tv and going somewhere. When I got back, I turned the tv on to finish watching “I Love Lucy” only to discover some other program was on. That was when I discovered that when you turned the tv set off, tv programs kept going. Well, they used to, my young on-demand, streaming darlings, they used to.
That is what you might expect for memories of someone 3-4 years old, but the thing is, that is the way all my memories are. That is the way my high school memories are—momentary, fragmentary, mixed up. That is the way my college memories are. Oh, I remember more things, but what is amazing to me is how much I have not remembered—whereas I can tell you with certainly the most obscure details about World War II, something I never came close to experiencing. In some respects I know more about the world I did not live in than the world I lived in. That’s reality giving me an atomic wedgie, that is. Continue reading
There’s a right-wing extremist movement in the United States called the “sovereign citizen” movement. I won’t go into their whole set of beliefs here but one consequence of their ideology is that they love creating counterfeit entities. They create bogus courts, bogus juries, bogus states, bogus governments, bogus colonies, bogus law enforcement agencies, bogus post offices—you name it, they can create their own counterfeit versions of it. About a dozen years ago, some sovereign citizens created a fake Indian tribe that they dubbed the “Little Shell Pembina Band of North America.”
You didn’t actually need to have native blood to joint his group; for $40, they’d “adopt” you. They were generous that way. They would sell fake tribal license plates, fake drivers’ licenses, and other similar documents. On the back of the Little Shell “identification card,” they listed all the wonderful rights and privileges that members had, including the right to explore the North American continent, immunity from military service, immunity from taxes, and so forth. But my favorite is this: “Every Indian is entitled to purchase a railway ticket at half price.” Now just think about this for a second. You are making up, out of whole cloth, any sort of immunity or privilege or right that your mind could possibly imagine. The sky’s the limit, right? But the person who created this card used up one of his precious magic privilege slots with half-price train tickets! You gotta think, that was one train-loving right-wing extremist, you betcha.
I couldn’t help thinking of this locomotophile sovereign citizen as I encountered a fascinating site while driving back home to Columbus from East Liverpool.
Sadly, a large part of my life has consisted of impatiently lusting after some material object, driven by an ever increasing desire to have it, only to experience great disappointment and letdown upon finally obtaining—usually at great cost or effort—said object itself. Even when the item lived up to its allure, the wait—that damnable, endless wait—was torture. I remember as a kid in the early 1980s when I did my first mail order. I ordered the wargame Pearl Harbor from Wargames West in Albuquerque. UPS only took a few days to deliver from Albuquerque to El Paso, but it seemed like an eternity to me and every time I heard a vehicle coming down the street I would rush to the door to look for the UPS truck.
Sadly, decades later I have not changed a bit. So when camera lensmaker Tamron announced an upcoming new lens, I was hooked.
In mid-May 2014 I had to travel to Chicago for work. I brought my camera with me so that, on the way home, I might be able to take a few photographs once I crossed back into Ohio. As I actually did so, I found myself in front of a major spring storm heading east from Indiana into Ohio. I wasn’t storm-chasing—the storm was chasing me. As I drove home, this game me some nice opportunities to turn around and take some photographs of the oncoming storm. Which I now present to you.
In 2014, I had to travel to and from Chicago quite a bit, for work, and on those occasions I tried to squeeze some extra drive time so I could, for the Ohio portion of the trip, go on some back roads and take a few photographs. These photographs, from May 2014, were taken on one trip to Chicago. I did not have much extra time, so once I threw away the discards, there are only a few photographs here from this trip. But if you like western Ohio, these might be worthwhile for you.
Western Ohio is essentially the stereotypical place that non-Ohioans tend to think of when they envision Ohio: a flat expanse of farmland punctuated by the occasional town or city. Most of Ohio doesn’t actually look like that, but western Ohio does fit the bill. If you like plenty of sky in which to view approaching thunderstorms, western Ohio is your destination. It is not that populated; really, you have Dayton to the south and Toledo way up in the northwest, and that’s about it in terms of cities (Cincinnati is another world). In 2014-2015, I would have opportunity to traverse chunks of western Ohio because I had to travel a lot to Chicago for work. Each time I would go, I’d take another route so that I could try and find some things to photograph. On April 19, 2014, I was travelling in the region on a Saturday, just to see what sights were to be seen.
It is a shame that Appalachian Ohioans cannot replicate some of the successes that West Virginians have had bringing federal money to help their struggling state. But the problem is that all of West Virginia lies in Appalachia, while only part of Ohio does. None of the power centers of Ohio, all urban or suburban, are in Appalachia; the region does not have the population to have political clout nor money to purchase politicians’ attention. With no real economy, plus underfunded and under-attended schools, the region cannot attract money from the state of Ohio, to say nothing of the federal government. The region is a fairly equal mix of “red” and “blue” counties, but neither party pays attention to them, Republicans because they care nothing for the poor and Democrats because they know and care little about the rural white poor.
Unearthed Ohio 