Honda thinks they’re being cute by running some commercials for their new bitch-ass minivan by comparing it to the badass tank-vans of yesteryear. If you haven’t seen it, here goes
Ridiculousness at it’s finest. While it’s proof that no matter how absurd your commercials are you can still outsell your American counterparts, that’s neither here nor there. In Detroit, we’ve always done the van justice. Check out this beauty I discovered along Michigan Avenue today.
The fun thing about keeping Myspace around, even though most of us have graduated on to Facebook, is that you actually get some good friend requests from local pubs, merchants, festivals, and products. Something that caught me the other day is Motor City Incense, a product of Motorcity Candleworks.
First off, any candle that looks like this is pretty badass:
So my expectations for the incense are high.
It’s cool because you can have them brand the incense for whatever you want to do, and it’s good to see a local company getting involved in this game instead of the usual players from India that we have all become used to. The flavors are all about Michigan places, from Ann Arbor Berry Bash to Ypsi Ylang Ylang.
It all sounds exciting. I’ll be picking some up soon. Grab it at:
For the past 50 years or so, the city of Detroit has gained it’s infamy and reputation as one of the most dangerous places on the planet. While in the 1950s we still viewed far-off lands, ripe with savagery and untouched by modern man, to be the last places to be made civilized. Yet in many places, we find ourselves having to recover from taking a few steps back. With things getting worse faster than they are getting better, you can’t help but wonder if we are even recovering at all, or regressively falling back into the ways of life we worked for thousands of years to pull ourselves out of.
Bar fights, prostitution, hard liquor, gunslingers, robbers, roving gangs, and utter lawlessness sound like the taglines from a John Wayne movie about the old west. A time when you made your own rules and lived by them accordingly. But today, the same scenario can be described to represent Detroit. The once proud city has turned into an “each man for himself” ecosystem riddled with every kind of crime imagineable.
When you go to Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, or Miami, the city itself is an event. It doesn’t matter if there’s a game or festival going on, the lure of the hustle and bustle will suffice the average American’s thirst for adventure. You get adventure in Detroit as well, just a different kind.
The urban decay is rampant and apparent everywhere you look. While foreclosed homes are now commonplace all over the country, homes and industrial buildings that are literally falling apart are quite another site. In most of the western world these places would be demolished and the land used for new developments, in Detroit nobody wants to put the money fourth to take over land and develop it when little opportunity. It’s not uncommon to see a house completely caved in from abandonment and neglect next to a 2-story victorian home to a family of five.
You don’t realize how bad it is until you see it’s worse than a bombed Iraqi Palace.
Saddam's Palace, post bombing
A charming home on the east-side.
Such abandonment leaves property open to squatters, vandals, and thieves. Many derelect buildings sport spray-painted signs saying “NO COPPER” as all the copper and other metals have been stripped and sold for scrap. Abandoned warehouses and industrial complexes become storing facilities for stolen cars, merchandise, or places of residence for the homeless. The word “gasm” is written all over the east side of the city, and it seems to be popping up more and more each day. The city is, at best, a canvas for drug messages and urban artwork.
Ever had a powerful fudgasm?
With all this, you’d think the crime would be through the roof and we would have the police transformed into urban SWAT, but that’s nowhere near the case. In addition to the “new” territory to discover, city jails are full of vacancies, despite real crime continuing to skyrocket. Why? It’s simple: nobody cares.
With all the problems in the city involving homicide, sex crimes, and others, even grand theft auto means you’re most likely to be screwed and get little help, if any from the police. The police just don’t care. If they spend their time trying to chase down every stolen vehicle, that would be all they’d do. Most likely the car would be firebombed or stripped, if it hasn’t been chopped and never recovered at all. Minimal crimes like burglery or someone snatching your purse while you pump gas aren’t even worth reporting. Nothing will get done, you’ll waste your time filling out paperwork and getting shit from the police department who know they will never catch your criminal, and as such aren’t even going to give you the time of day to help you file charges.
Realistically, you’ll be fine and safe. In all my years, the worst I’ve ever gotten are bums begging me for money. But others haven’t been so lucky, it won’t take much more than a small search on google to find Detroit horror stories of theft and assault. But this is the new frontier. And if you don’t play by your own rules, realize that the ones set by society can easily eat you alive.
Back in the old west, you never knew if the bank was about to get robbed or if some act of violence was going to erupt anywhere you looked. Yet people were unphased by it, they knew it was part of life and you have to be tough and act accordingly. The similarities are uncanny. The liquor store you’ve wandered into just may be the subject of a hold-up. Or an argument between crackheads outside the store could end up with someone getting the shit kicked out of them right before the shifting residents, passers-by, or Detroit’s Finest.
The right mindset is the difference. Don’t expect anyone from the government to help you. The police will do you no good and probably arrest you for leaving the scene of a crime if you try to report something aftr they fail to respond. The your own law, take matters into your own hands, play safe, and be ready to deal with the consequences of your actions if you overstep your boundaries.
Even with all the restoration and rebirth efforts, drugs, alcohol, and violence run the show. Long-time mayor Coleman Young once said that there wasn’t a single problem in Detroit that couldn’t be solved by giving every one who lived there a job. It looks like we’ve hit the point where that is no longer true.
So since the election ended (I lost by about 100 votes, btw), I’ve been deciding what I want to do with this blog since I’ll now have the time and the energy to conjue up some content.
Before I could decide on a new look, I had to decide what I was going to do with it. The Infinity theme, was beautiful and I put a lot of work into modding it, but ultimately, it didn’t fit what I wanted to do. I also found myself finding a hard time deciding what content to view when I saw the same theme on other blogs and realized that as awesome and futuristic as it was, it was much better off if it:
Matched your content in any way shape or form
Your blog was about some kind of hallucinogenic experiences
or
You have a touch screen monitor
As I met none of this criteria, it had to go. Plus it was a pain in the ass to make the little thumbnails for each post. Plus it was more or less set up for long articles, which require tons of time and effort to be well thought out and well presented. Plain and simple, I’m just not in the mood to do an online magazine kinda thing right now. Writing, long editing and revising, etc. It was also way too many clicks to get around to different content. Hopefully that’s all eliminated now. I’ll be integrating more features that were on the old site as well in the next few days.
I found this awesome Width Smasher theme, which truly is the bee’s knees. And with it comes more improvements. The photos section has been completely re-done so it has true integration with Picasa, no more bullshit clicking around
So here’s the direction I’m going in: Little quips about what’s up with my life, stuff I find online, and the random thoughts about what’s going on, overly opinionated stuff, etc.
So it’s time to pump up da motherfuckin volume. More fun. More music. More Detroit. More myself.
The thoughts have been Conveniently Misplaced right here, so enjoy.
