But it's not, nor is it a simple mindless, do your job get your money, task. It's big and complex and people here, for as much as they might say or feel differently about themselves aren't very bright or ambitious. They are however willing to clutch onto your strings and go kicking and screaming for whatever ride you take them on. As long as they feel as if love the entire or most gratifying part of your being.

Detroit is a city with a thing for variations of the phrases "I have" and "My thing", suggesting, implying and demanding ownership of everything they feel a strong sense of like for. Conversely of that is pure apathy. In Detroit people love you, you don't exist to them or they wish you didn't exist and they express it with every toxic breath and cancer cell in their being. We don't like competition here, that's why we have so many losers and until two thousand eight no losers of any real import.

We are a place that prides itself in the magnitude of its mediocrity. People often comment about our monolithic communities, I want to correct them and explain that we're not monolithic as much as self-centered. We don't like people who don't remind us of ourselves in a pleasing way. I say all of this while waiting for something, I've been waiting so long that I can't remember whether it is the bus or a change in the weather. Anyway it gives me lots of time to look around at the empty shells of buildings that once were clones of replicas of identical businesses that competed to serve a shrinking population of people who chose not to or could not afford to live anywhere other than inside the five square blocks of their province.