I promised myself I wouldn’t oversentimentalize the process, and I think I’ve done a reasonably good job of that. I threw away, sold, or donated a lot of things I’d been holding onto long past their usefulness even as mementos, and I still think this move sets a new record for the least amount of garbage produced and cheap plastic purchased from Target to replace it.

But old habits die hard, and there’s nothing that turns the gears of sentimentality—or at least retrospect, wrapped in a skein of sentimentality and garnished with shavings of nostalgia marinated in Weltschmertz—better than looking at my newly empty old apartment after giving it the most thorough cleaning I’ve ever given anything (at least, thorough by my lazy bachelor standards; execrable by anyone else’s) and knowing that for three years it was my Home with a capital H. Nothing says transition—or ending—quite like a series of empty rooms.

As a kid, I loved the sitcom Growing Pains. The series finale, after several years of Learning Some Important Lessons and Having a Few Laughs Along the Way, hinged on one of many can’t-fail tropes for ending a series: the Seaver family was moving away, leaving the cozy three-walled house where Alan Thicke’s firm but fair patriarch practiced psychology in his home office and the family gathered on the lawn at the end of the theme song every week. When the Seavers relocated, they literally ceased to exist.

In my dim memory of the finale, Seaver daughter Carol, played by Tracy Gold, was the last one to leave the house. (I’m not sure why she got the last shot, and not Mike, or even better, Boner). She looked around the living room, ground zero for so many comic misunderstandings and Very Special Episode third-act denouments, and bid the place goodbye.

That’s kind of how I felt on Sunday night, which I realize makes me a grade-A sap. But that apartment was my homebase for three years, the longest I’ve stayed in one place since I went to college at 19. It was my first legitimately adult apartment—not a dorm room, not shared with a roommate, not a basement. It’s where I finished my thesis. It’s where I peaked as a filmmaker.

So if all this makes me a sap, then bring on the theme song.

When I was seven and Thriller was released, I begged my mother for it, and she was all like, “Why don’t you just have Uncle Henry make a tape of it for you?”

“That’s not the point!” I whined. With all due respect to my uncle Henry—definitely one of my hipper, more musically aware uncles— I wanted the official album on tape, the complete package: that shimmery white suit reproduced in a tiny 3×4″ format, and the ugly beige cassette itself, with the song titles and everything stamped on the plastic. That was my holy grail.

So I wore my mother down and eventually got it, and played the hell out of it, and eventually lost it, and a couple years later moved onto the second album I ever owned, Songs From the Big Chair. But that album, the video for “Shout,” and the ensuing 25 years of pop music couldn’t have existed without Thriller, or the man who created it.

As soon as I heard the news yesterday, my brain performed that curious elision that allows adults to reckon with nuance, controversy, and cognitive dissonance: I immediately forgot the past 20 years of Michael Jackson’s narrative—the weirdness and the plastic surgery and the baby-dangling and the allegations of impropriety—and thought only about Thriller and Bad, about being a single-digit age in the 1980s—an era I consider more frequently even as it continues to recede.

The bells at Minneapolis’ City Hall are playing Michael Jackson songs. You can hear them all over downtown. I recorded them playing “I’ll Be There.”

Several times during my time in the Twin Cities, I’ve heard, or seen online, the following statement: “There are no black people here / in Minneapolis / in the Twin Cities.” This happened most recently just the other day, and since it’s one of my pet peeves I decided it was time for me to work myself up into a semi-informed lather and sound off about it.

I know it might seem absurd that anyone would actually say there are no black people (or Hispanics, or Asians) in a metropolitan area like the Twin Cities. But I am not expending 800 words on a straw man argument. I assure you that I really have heard people say this—bright, progressive, conscientious people—about not just blacks but the other groups I mentioned.

I’m not sure what the people who utter this statement are trying to say. Well, that’s not entirely true—I think what they’re trying to say is that this part of the country is so provincial, so culturally and ethnically homogeneous, that persons of color and other minorities are all but invisible.

There is some truth to this—the Twin Cities are, like much of the United States, still predominantly white. Maybe the people who make this irksome declaration are bothered by what they perceive as a lack of diversity in the Twin Cities. But this dismissive claim does nothing to further diversity, and it is not only inaccurate, but insidiously harmful and patronizing.

Because guess what? There are black people in the Twin Cities. Quite a few, actually. And they’re not just confined to North Minneapolis or Cedar-Riverside, though yes, you will find quite a few African-Americans and Somali immigrants living there. After all, Minneapolis saw a 127% increase in foreign-born residents between 1990 and 2000, and is home to the one of the largest U.S. Somali populations, and St. Paul has the largest U.S. Hmong population—though I have heard, appended with a straight face to the “There are no black people here” formulation, the corollary, “and Somalis don’t count.”

Just a few of the African-Americans who apparently don’t live in the Twin Cities

Even if we concede whatever semantic or anthropological gymnastics are required to arrive at that dubious conclusion, there are many, many non-Somali African-Africans in the Twin Cities. Yes, they are mostly segregated into specific parts of the Cities, far away from the boutiques of Uptown and the massive homes along the chain of lakes. Yes, their neighborhoods are generally poorer and their schools are in trouble. Yes, the foreclosure, crime, and murder rates are higher in those neighborhoods. Yes, they get harassed a lot by the city’s white cops. It is, in other words, the sadly typical predicament of urban minority populations all over this country.

Which is all the more reason why saying “There are no black people here” isn’t doing them any favors. You are rendering them even less visible than they already are. Maybe your dismissal is, perversely, made in an attempt to appear more liberal, worldly and cosmopolitan; maybe you moved here from Chicago, or New York, or LA, whose minority populations apparently register on some arbitrary metric of demographic legitimacy whereby a given group has to reach a certain percentage of the greater population before it can be recognized, and against which Minneapolis’ 17.7% African-American composition is statistically insignificant.

Some more non-existent black Minneapolitans

(What I really suspect is that, when people say there are no black people here, what they really mean [but of course would never admit] is that there aren’t enough [and I get nervous even typing this] of the right kind of black people: You know, the urbane, put-together, educated kind. The safe kind. Not the “thugs” that make too much noise on the bus and cluster on corners in the run-down parts of town, but the smart, dapper, professional articulate kind. You know, the Malcolm Gladwells and the Cornell Wests. And this gets into precisely the sort of subtle institutionalized racism that makes me so uncomfortable to even write about that I’m going to end this paragraph before it goes any further.)

Minnesota’s chimeral Fifth-District Representative.

Here’s another question, existence-of-black-people-deniers: Would you still say there are no black people here if a black person was actually in the room? Of course not. Because it would be a logical absurdity.

Well, guess what? It still is a logical absurdity, because while they may not be in the room, they are not too far away. They’re in the apartment next door, in the office where you work, in the stores where you shop and yes, in North Minneapolis. They’re in the classes I’ve taught and the places I work and the concerts I go to. They’re even in (gasp) the suburbs, like Deborah Watts, the cousin of Emmett Till, who I interviewed for a magazine article. So stop saying they aren’t here. It’s insulting, and racist, and you should know better.

(End rant. I promise to go back to blogging about innocuous topics like sensitive indie pop and 1998.)

“I chose, with not too much deliberation, a nice new desk at which I will accomplish many accomplishments for at least the next three years.” - Me

I’m not an animator, but I still get sentimental about inanimate objects. At the end of this month, in order to be closer to my job(s) and friends, I’m going to move to a new apartment. My last few moves were marked by ill-preparedness and last-minute all-nighters spent haphazardly throwing things into boxes. I’m trying to be a little more organized about it—I consider this my first “adult” move—but I still can’t help but feel overwhelmed by all the shit I have to do before July. Not to mention the emotional strain of vacating a place I’ve inhabited for three years—the longest I’ve lived anywhere since my parents’ house in high school.

So I’m trying to get started early. Today my project was to disassemble the aforementioned behemoth of a desk. It’s served me well in two apartments and through the entirety of my MFA program. I wrote a lot at that desk. But because it’s from IKEA, and because I probably didn’t care for it as well as I should have, it’s basically falling apart, its bolts missing and its famous IKEA particleboard disintegrating. I don’t think it can survive another move and I don’t relish the idea of carrying it up three flights of stairs.

So I threw it out. I broke it into pieces and put it out on the curb, this thing I spent a couple hundred dollars on four years ago. It’s out there right now, literally sitting in the rain, which “SOLID WASTE” scrawled on the side per city code.

I haven’t quite gone as far around the bend as to give it human attributes, but whenever I throw something out—especially in the midst of a move—I get embarrassingly sentimental. The childhood agony of deciding which Transformer got to sit on my bedside table on a given night (sorry, Bumblebee) is manifest in my extreme reluctance to get rid of pretty much anything.

(Not to mention the environmental considerations of sending all that wood and metal to a landfill, exacerbated by viral-video guilt trips—but that’s a whole other kettle of horse-colored fish.)

I’m getting better, though. I don’t cling to things as long as I used to, and I do semi-regular purges to keep my closets and my mental environment relatively clear. I try not to throw away anything I can’t recycle, and I make liberal use of Craigslist and eBay.

It still rankles, though, occasionally. Like last weekend when a woman whose name I never learned hauled away the desk chair I pilfered from my dad’s den after he died, and took with me to Minnneapolis, but haven’t used for a couple years. But I had to be pragmatic: I didn’t need it. A fellow Craigslist user did.

And maybe 700 years in the future a cute little robot will find a good use for that chair, and that desk.