glassy eyed - foto by Smith

I didn’t give Cleveland her due due in yesterday’s blog.

Not only was she chosen by Forbes as the city with the worst winter weather as well as the most miserable city to live in, Cleveland was also judged the poorest city in the nation in 2004, 2008 and 2009. So we end 2009 the poorest city and begin 2010 as the most miserable city with the worst winter weather.

Cleveland’s just rolling in awards.

My wife Lady K and I are miles apart in our life philosophies, yet oddly enough we both chose to move to Cleveland in our thirties — me in the 1970s, she in the 2000s.

We are wired differently — she is skittish, often worries, frets for the future and is frequently unsure of both herself and today, while I am a more mellow fellow, a free flow-er, mostly hopeful about the future even though I suspect we’re all doomed. I live in today while she worries more about tomorrow and the validity of what she said, wrote and did yesterday. I’m also essentially lazy while she’s driven. One could say she’s humble while I’m arrogant.

I’m mostly grasshopper; she’s partly grasshopper with a serious side serving of ant.

I suspect one major cause of our difference is generational - I am from the first bubble of the baby boomers while she is mid Gen-X. I grew up in a much more innocent time — not that it really was innocent back then because the same shit that goes down today with war and murder and theft by those in power and corporate malfeasance and racism and sexism went on in the 1940s and 50s too, but most of us didn’t know it then because TV was in its infancy and we believed what we read in the paper media and heard on the radio and saw in the movies.

I was born in 1946 and grew up in gentled times, pre-information flow times, on a 40-acre farm in Norman Rockwell Land, raised by poor but loving and playful parents. As a result, I am a cock-eyed romantic optimist who has since developed a sincere veneer of cynicism due to my real-life real-time experiences with folks and systems along the way.

Lady was born in 1972. She’s the MTV Generation, Scooby Doo, big 80’s hair. She was born into TV, raised on computers, grew into internet. There weren’t many nice lies left in the world by the time she came into her faster, meaner, more dangerous and stressful environment.

I formed my optimism in more hopeful times, she her paranoia in an era tinged in atomic armageddon. . . I had the hippies, she the geeks and goths . . . I rock n roll, she the boy bands . . . I ran with the flower children, she was born out of them. . . plus there’s our differing exo-skeleton situation — I’m tall, male; she’s short, female.

We are both the product of our own distorted envelopes, our displaced times, desperate trials, disparate trails, and differing nature nurture notations.

And yet with all that there’s this — we’re each each other’s favorite person.

sunset striation - foto by Smith