“there is beauty in every season around these parts, even and sometimes especially in winter; as a host (we are tourists here, if you think about it) its welcome becomes a bit worn, the party is overlong with inevitable stragglers. nevertheless all (or most, at least) is forgiven once it finds itself beyond our rear view. we say ‘let’s do this again sometime’, hoping we won’t have to.”
So one may say to one’s self, “Why stay?”
Beside the fact that for three months of the year leaving town means going outside. After that, summers are as lovely as they are fleeting, who wants to waste those doing the thought and work of moving?
Okay then, let’s back up a step – why come here to begin with?
Well, I can say there’s the music. As an Ohio U. student in the early ’80s, a passing encounter here in Cleveland with David Thomas from Pere Ubu (he was reading a fanzine in the Drome record store when it was downtown) the week after Ubu’s “Dub Housing ” record had become my favorite clued me that this could be a righteous place to be. The experience (he excused himself as I passed him, didn’t think that was going to happen anytime soon with someone from Pink Floyd, nope) spoke to the immediacy I felt within the nascent punk/new wave/whatever music we were playing, listening to and witnessing in clubs at the time.
So again, why stay?
It’s been said that if the music leads you here, the lake could make you stay – unforgiving in winter, yet as generous in summer, many shades of gray and just enough blue to give you hope, sunsets and fresh air if that’s what you like. It goes from quiet to whispers and roars in a way that some may think of as going 0 to 60 in a gentle almost lumbering manner, the sound subsuming the noise in one’s head if standing or walking nearby.
There are more reasons here, but perhaps the question is wrong to find the right answer, which is:
It’s never been time to leave.
It was time for the terrible parade to stop, not gone perhaps, but certainly at rest. It was time for Sputnik to fall back to earth, the second bounce being the one that smarted the most.
But even with open door and invitation elsewhere I never heard that voice say “it’s time to go” (as opposed to a bouncer closing the night, “You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here”, that I’ve heard…).
So here we go friends, greetings from the Erie Sea – cheers!
http://charliemosbrookmusic.bandcamp.com/track/erie-shore
sound of the sea 
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