I guess I don't really know what Detroit was like in 1995, say. I'll say that I didn't used to get called cracker and whitey while walking around, in 2005, and that I find it hard to imagine that that was a constant state of affairs back then. I had a positive impression of Detroiters and Michiganders, notwithstanding that there were outliers, of course. So she dwells on being a minority in Detroit way too much.

But I can relate to parts of what she's talking about as well. I'm surely betraying my "spoiled" frame of reference, but the drive down Lafayette from my downtown apartment to the dry cleaner, which was on Van Dyke or thereabouts, was jaw-droppingly surreal on its own, due to the degree of blight. If you're not from a place like Detroit, it's just a total stunner, the burned down buildings, the buildings in the process of falling over, the empty lots. Never mind if you then make a wrong turn, or maybe you're gonna check out the neighborhoods, and you run into a block with stuffed bunnies and junk tacked to all the houses [[Heidelberg Project). Jimminy Cricket!

It would be wrong to represent that as being entirely representative of my time in Detroit, and I don't ever hold it out as that. But yeah, I'll believe that she drove down I-75, the hood flew off her car, and it did not provoke an accident, or that one night, a gaggle of clowns showed up and threw faygo bottles at her building, sure, why not. After all, on my way to the dry cleaners, I drove past a block of houses with stuffed bunny siding. I gather it's a work of art, perhaps an ironic comment on blight?

Let's keep it real, people. I doubt that the Seattle fan-board holds itself out as the home of the fabulous ruins of Seattle. There's a lot to love about Detroit, but it is one of those places where weird things like these can happen.