136.25 Hours in Cleveland (Finale)

I don’t want to be one of those people that starts large projects and then flakes out (Mobilize anyone?) so I will conclude the story of my last trip to the FORMER mistake-on-the-lake. When I last left off I had spent my first 24 hours attempting to save the REACH closing ceremony.

Friday
1:00 – Showtime
The ceremony begins with the kids on stage singing “Shining Star” by Earth, Wind, and Fire. Click here for a short clip.

Then, the speeches. After hours of practice, rewrites and panic, everything actually managed to work out exceedingly smooth. The first couple speakers did solid jobs and the keynote speaker hit every line perfectly.

He put in such an amazing performance that d the crowd gave the kid a standing ovation. Crisis averted.







4:00 - East Coast Frozen Custard
Best Ice Cream Ever. You don’t have to throw a bunch of shit in ice cream to make it delicious Ben, Jerry, and Coldstone. Just make it taste good.

6:30 - Rally's
Do they have these on the coasts? If not you are missing out on delicious fast food for cheap. It beats the shit out of White Castle.

Saturday
12:30 – Coventry
After finally getting a night’s rest I decide to go for a run in the 95 degree heat to Coventry. Speaking of which, according to the am-i-fat.com (where you can figure out how many calories you lose doing "sex: moderate effort) body mass index calculator, I am no longer “You are overweight!” I am simply “Hmm..Marginal!”

Coventry is the stetch on Coventry road between Euclid Hts. Blvd. (my street) and Mayfield that is like Cleveland Heights’ Thayer Street. Home to Hunan on Coventry, it is our cultural and culinary hub.

One of my favorite places is Big Fun, our version of Shades Plus, just better. Basically it’s a store with all the useless shit that you never knew you wanted.

Wearied by the weather and the REACH debacle, I pass out for the rest of the day. I wake just in time for my Saturday episode of Big Brother. I’m rooting for Howie to take it all. Why you may ask?

“As loud as his mouth, Howie is also the house “farter”, farting on Kaysar’s face leading Kaysar to comment that he was going to start working on Howie and his manners.” – Live Feeds Update on mortystv.com

After BB6 I took a trip to the exurbs for a reunion with some of my high school jews. In the process, I learned a lesson about post-modern culture, human behavior, and experimental economics that I will elaborate on in a future post.

A few quick notes on the geography of Cleveland thanks in part to Google maps:
The red area is Cleveland proper, the yellow area the so-called inner-ring suburbs, and the the areas outside of the yellow are the exurbs. Cleveland is one of the top ten most segregated cities in the nations because as blacks moved into the red area, whites fleed to the yellow area. When blacks moved to the yellow inner-ring suburb area (such as Cleveland Heights, my house is marked by the red pointer), whites flocked to the exurbs. Exurbs include Hunting Valley (circled in green to the East) where I went to high school and Parma (to the southwest) which is a major hub for the KKK and home of Extreme Futuristic Wrestling. The exurbs are supposedly what tiltled the election in Bush's favor.

Sunday
11:00 – Inn on Coventry
Tell me that this doesn’t look delicious. Big-ass pancakes filled with fruit and spices, and omelettes with spinach and feta chesse served at reasonable prices. This is what those bourgeois (pronounced buh-zhee) fucks at Rue de l’Espoir need to learn how to do.

I spend the rest of the day catching up with family and watching TV with Eddie.

Monday
9:55 – Back to the PVD
136 hours and 15 minutes after I’d landed, I was back on the plane. I would say something very deep and retrospective right now but since I’m back in Cleveland as I write this, its hard to be nostalgic.

Instead, I will solve one of the mysteries that I presented at the beginning of this series. You may recall that Nathan caught me jerking off about a month ago and I said that I would explain the circumstance of that masturbatory occasion.

The site is http://www.sickogames.com/. I don’t want to prejudice you to the site so I suggest you explore it yourself but make sure to download the rules video and "requiem" video and read through the concept of the site and the "games". The circumstances, social significance, and how this will relate to my senior year thesis will be discussed in a future posting.

In the meantime, a homework assignment for our infamous readers. Y’all need to start leaving comments. Perhaps you don’t leave comments because you don’t have any specific question to prompt you. Well here’s one:

What pleasures (textual, sociopolitical, sexual, or otherwise) do sickogames.com seek to fulfill? What deeper social/cultural/psychosexual needs and desires may be responsible for these pleasures? What greater social significance may the game structure of sickogames hold for social/political/genderistical structures? If you need help, you might want to check this out for some research. Leave no assumption unquestioned.

Finally, a few quick links.

• Providence has Saccucci. We have this.
• My mom sent me this. Did they really have to do a study to figure this out?
• Maybe its not just Providence squirrels...