Keep Life Shitty
So we remember why we’re alive.
I saw a bumper sticker on a cash register once that said, “Keep East Austin Shitty.” If you’ve spent time in East Austin, you know what that means.
It means don’t crush it. Don’t suck the life out of it. Don’t kill it. There’s a heartbeat here. Don’t suffocate it in artificial gloss when it has true beauty pumping in its veins.
In your town maybe it’s the South Side or the North Side. It really doesn’t matter which direction it takes. It’s a place for workers and artists, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, abandoned lots. Cars parked on lawns. Houses that look like junk yards. Junk yards that look like museums.
Keeping it shitty doesn’t mean keep it poor. People shouldn’t have to struggle. Keep Detroit Shitty doesn’t mean deny people clean water and their basic human rights. It means give them the infrastructure they need, but also, keep it the place Sixto Rodriguez knew. Keep it the place Axel Foley and Eminem are from.
Keep America Shitty in our hearts so we don’t forget the point of being alive.
In Denver, the current fashion for architecture on the formerly shitty side of town is a tall cube that takes up nearly the entire footprint of the property, shooting up like a phallic prison or zoo, where the rest of us are both invited to look in floor-to-ceiling windows and seemingly shamed for it. These houses say, “Admire us, but don’t look at us!” Nature is boxed and contained. Angles are perfectly 90-degree, made of wood, sand, and stone from far-off places.
Money works wonders. But what if we didn’t whitewash everything? What if we didn’t pour bleach all over it and strip it of color, culture, and flavor? Blind gentrification robs us of so much collective knowledge. Yes, it’s harder to keep a community’s lifeblood intact. Absofuckinglutely. It’s much easier to just erase what was there before.
Keep it shitty means keep it accessible. When things are shitty, security is usually pretty minimal, which leaves the possibility of connection. The more something costs, the more it gets walled-off and locked out of reach. The nicer the house, the harder it is to get to know who’s inside.
“What if they’d kept the South of France shitty? What if instead of glamour and exclusivity, they’d developed spaces guided by values like connection and accessibility?”
I went to the French Riviera once. At first, it was exciting to be in places like Monaco, Nice, and Cannes, but we learned pretty quickly that without money almost everything is off-limits. You can walk by the storefronts of jewelers and famous designers, but that’s about it.
Unless you’re staying at one of the fancy hotels, you’re relegated to the small strip of public beach with all the other have-nots, while cabanas and beach chairs sit empty on large expanses of open sand on the other side of the invisible barrier between us and them.
It makes you wonder: What if they’d kept the South of France shitty? What if instead of glamour and exclusivity, they’d developed spaces guided by values like connection and accessibility?
Art, film, and music are other areas where keeping things a little shitty is often preferred. Again, shitty doesn’t mean bad. It doesn’t mean no one is trying. It just means that it’s not so polished that it loses its soul. Don’t auto-tune out the heart.
Stephen King opens his book On Writing with a story about joining a band in the early 1990s with other writers like Dave Barry, Barbara Kingsolver, and Amy Tan. At a book signing event, I heard Amy Tan tell a story about Bruce Springsteen watching the band and advising, “Just don’t get too good.”
The Boss knows that too much gloss suffocates art. You end up with something meticulously made, but dead under the glass. Just don’t get so good that you can’t feel anymore. Don’t iron out so many wrinkles that you end up too stiff to move. Don’t groove with your eyes closed for so long that you can’t read the room.
Americans are pathologically afraid of embarrassment. The thought of being canceled for any mistake, sour note, or clunky sentence stops a lot of us from even trying. No one wants to make bad art. No one wants to live in a shitty neighborhood. But when we keep raising the expectations for flawlessness and demand purity, we risk overdoing it, burning out, and cleaning ourselves to death. We kill off all the good bacteria. We screw up the microbiome in our guts. We make diseases stronger and create superbugs. We cover up “bad” smells with carcinogenic chemicals. (Because who cares if you get cancer, just as long as no one has to sniff anyone else’s poop!)
If we demand that every inch of our lives be antiseptic and sanitized, then we might achieve a kind of cold beauty, but it will never smell like life. It will never grow anything. It will be a mausoleum, a memorial to ourselves, a shrine to human control. Life is shitty. Let’s expect it, and anticipate what to do with it, and turn it into compost to grow new things.
