PLACEBO

Lake Michigan Diary 94

"Raised outside Chicago, Len had been taught to see the limit as well the horizon of a Midwestern sky, and it served him in good stead." -Sarah Blake, The Guest Book

I assigned to a writing class the task of keeping a diary in some area where they frequent daily, after showing them a little of this Lake Michigan Diary. For the month of May—when a lot of change is happening—they observed and wrote and sought a narrative for that change. One watched a bird sanctuary, another how his roommates did and didn't do the dishes. One is a barista and tried to guess the drinks of his regulars and saw whether they appreciated it when he anticipated their biz (they didn’t) and another saw how busy a parking lot was from day to day and why. There is something marvelous about the quotidian, the glory of the ordinary, ordinary, which I never wanted to be when a kid, and now only want to be.

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I look around and see the back of buildings with uglier bricks, and all of these alleys that have their own little lives that we never think about, but where kids tag and sticker. Two years ago, some jerkweed fam had a party and a mylar balloon that said “REGRET NOTHING” got stuck in a tree, and obviously, it ruined my life. And every morning, I cursed it, through all the postal carrier’s meteorological challenges, and now it’s almost gone, and what will I do with myself, enemy mine, when you are gone, you stupid “REGRET NOTHING” mylar balloon?

I love the word quotidian. I think it would make a great name for a pharmaceutical. But maybe for a placebo. I have assigned both anger and sorrow to this supid-ass balloon. John Ruskin, that old game board thrower, despised late Romantic poetry’s obsession with assigning inappropriate and untrue emotions onto nature. He called such an act the “pathetic fallacy”. He quoted William Cullen Bryant (remember that guy? nah):

“The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mold/ Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold.”

And then he said, “This is very beautiful, and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a spendthrift, but a hardy plant; its yellow is not gold, but saffron. How is it that we enjoy so much the having it put into our heads that it is anything else than a plain crocus?”

But every day I assign emotions to a dang-damn almost-gone mylar balloon and also to Lake Michigan and I give myself permission, because Ruskin, however crabby and correct, shunned untrue emotional states. All of my emotions about the mylar ballon and the lake and the land from which I watch the balloon and lake are true. I call Chicago home, but the native Algonquin called this place “shikaakwa”, which got bastardized and acculturated into “Chicago”, but which always, originally, meant, “Stinking Onion”. Oh John Ruskin, we are both wrong.