Aimless thoughts - the rust belt, a favorite bookstore

 A few weeks back, I took an overnight trip to Milwaukee. Partly to wander around and re-learn the vibes of the city I've chosen as the main setting for my science fiction novel, but mostly just to see the sights and get away from home for a bit. A futuristic version of the city's Public Museum is a major location in my book and I neglected to visit the museum at all on this trip. Oh well, they're moving to a new building in a few years anyway. Christ I'm gonna miss that place. Y'know, my dad says a good chunk of the museum was almost the same when he was visiting it in the '70s. The museum has become a piece of history in itself; the financial burden of keeping history alive is bringing that to an end. I hope the Streets of Old Milwaukee always continues to exist in some way. That bizarre Doctor Who set of an exhibit constitutes half my childhood memories of Milwaukee. A lot of people say the mannequins and the slightly uncanny vibe freaked them out as kids. I always found it strangely comforting and alluring.
    I suppose the same could be said of Milwaukee at large, couldn't it? This city has problems. Mind you, all Rust Belt cities have issues. I visited a cousin in Chicago this time last year and remember being warned away from certain places. My home town of Oshkosh is a place whose downtown veers wildly - sometimes in the span of a single building - from hypermodern gentrification to abandoned husks that have been left actively rotting for decades. All these cities have histories full of racism and segregation that they've yet to fully reckon with. Milwaukee in particular remains one of the country's most segregated cities.
    And yet I find these places strangely alluring. There is, to me at least, a kind of comfort to be found in places where your very safety is an uncertain matter. This is the kind of place I grew up in. Crumbling bricks; strange rambling homeless drunks crossing rusted-out train bridges; the smell of mold in every school bathroom. One of my earliest memories is being late to school in kindergarten because my mom actually threw out her back hitting a pothole. She was bedridden for weeks. This is the world I grew up in, and it's only marginally better now than it was then. The infrastructure in this country isn't just dying, it's actively suicidal. A trillion dollars is nowhere near enough to save it.
    I could never explain to you why I find cities like this a little cozy. Why I feel better among festering places long since left to raccoons than I do inside modern spaces that were specially made to get young, fairly well-off white people like me to cum instantly and spend all our money on watered-down coffee and overpriced apartments. Is it simple nostalgia? Stockholm syndrome? A subconscious desire to retain some kinda 'realness' in the face of the reality that I've found ways to become financially stable in this goddamn economy? The simple fact that the modern architecture they're selling as the only replacement for this stuff looks like the product of an alien invader from a science fiction flick?
    Whatever the case, the long and short of the matter is I find Rust Belt cities to be very charming little hellholes. Even right in the heart of downtown there's always that one little blemish they can't quite shake. Some shitty pile of bricks nobody wants to buy, so it becomes a squatter's paradise right next to their pretty little riverwalk trail.
    A favorite musician of mine, Dan Barrett, had this to say about Giles Corey (one of the most gruesome victims of the Salem Witch Trials): "I know Giles Corey refused to be humane. Refused to pretend, Refused to say, 'Everything is alright; this is all part of everything that happens; I accept what happens to us and I will take part in it'. He was not executed. He made them murder him. He made it ugly. Made them see it for what it was." I think that might be it. The places where rot and pain are visible are places that won't let the Man's happy shiny gentrified world forget what was lost in that world's creation. Every hollowed-out mom and pop shop tells a story. Every fire-hazard-ass factory whose owners moved to Mexico or China tells a story. To say nothing of the abandoned malls, the empty lots, the thousand-dollar roach motels, the underfunded libraries... these are the places that won't let you forget. In an era when teaching kids the true history of our country is considered divisive, hellholes are more important places than ever. From my first time in Milwaukee as a kid all the way to the present day, this town has never let me go. I've never forgotten. I hate it here. That's why I love it here. Maybe I don't have a future on the city's tourism board, but hell, I'm speaking my damn truth. At the end of the day I'm still saying I think this place is worth visiting. Decay aside, it really offers a lot if you know where to go. It's got a nice zoo, an incredible public museum, a downtown with a fair bit to do... and it happens to be home to my favorite bookstore in the state. That's actually all I wanted to talk about when I hopped on Blogger an hour ago, if you can believe it.

(pretend there's a smooth transition here)

    Milwaukee's Downtown Books is the kind of store you can see from a mile away. Occupying the first floor of a taller building, the facade of its single story is painted a painfully bright yellow. There's a chair within a little inset entrance. Like every bookstore in existence, they've got a set of wide windows used to display books pertaining to some central theme. Last time I went, it was a political theme to coincide with election season. This time they had music books, mostly classic rock. There's a bookshelf to your left right as you walk in. I forget exactly what's in it, except a copy of Craig Thompson's Blankets that I regret not grabbing at $13. To the immediate right is the checkout counter, to the immediate left are several surprisingly worthwhile shelves of comic books. I'm not used to that from indie bookstores, it's always a very pleasant surprise.
    I don't want to bore you with the whole layout of this place. It's huge, and far deeper than I remember it being. Here's a picture to illustrate the scale of the operation, taken near but not quite at the front:

It goes on for quite a ways on either side, and if you can believe it there are a few side-rooms. These are mostly nonfiction including all the science writing, military history, esoterica and so on - the more immediately relevant nonfiction can be found to the left of the entrance, about a shelf in(I think?) not far from literary fiction. Almost every portion of wall space not occupied by books is taken up with a framed picture. From sports photographs to Star Trek posters to a painted pinup of a girl in a skull mask (Fashion Paradox?), there's something for everybody here. I'm always scared to buy one lest I kill the vibe.
    There are various chairs, ladders and stepstools throughout the building that all appear to be from drastically different points in time. Either side of the central aisle is flanked with hand-made signage, which is just absolutely adorable to me. The building has no AC; in the summer the front and back doors are both wide open and a single fan near the tail end of paperback science fiction provides something you could almost mistake for comfort. At least one of the little side rooms has a rug in it smattered in mysterious stains. More than a few of the walkways between shelves have janky-looking wooden planks sat across them containing even more books. To either end are bare brick walls and those old-school radiators. You know the ones I mean. It's even got a little annex full of VHS tapes, and another for CDs and DVDs - which is also where they keep a lot of their books on TV and music.

    This place is exactly what the hell I mean when I say 'indie bookstore'. It's at once easily navigable and maddening. Beautiful and cerebral-feeling yet utterly, undeniably scuzzy. The perfect retreat from uncertain city streets; a bizarre shambling mess of rooms that, for all intents and purposes, is just as chaotic as the city it calls home. This is where I go when the city starts to get too much for me. This is the kind of overwhelming I take solace in, the brand of chaos I can handle. This is the same feeling I get standing in my own basement, which also struggles with sustaining a livable temperature and also contains more books than I'll ever read. I miss it already. And despite everything, I miss the city already. 

    I don't have any profound conclusion or punchline here. I think I used all my punchy lines at the beginning of this aimless rambling excuse for an essay. I hope you enjoyed whatever this was. Thanks for reading, I'll be back in six months.