I Used to Live Here

So this is a video of a place I used to live, Michigan and Minnie's Cooperative Houses (Mich Haus & Minnie's) in Ann Arbor, MI. The two houses are an extension of the Inter-Cooperative Council of the University of Michigan.



Basically it's like this. You're a young person in Ann Arbor, and you're either a student at U of M, or if you're like me, you're a nearby community college student trying to get into U of M. You find out about the co-ops: they're a series of about 20 big-ass townhouses peppered throughout the city. Most attractively, the rent is cheap (even cheaper during summer months), and it covers both utilities, and the delivering of food to your house every week in a big truck.

Equally attractive to me is that it's a self-contained set of houses (Mich-Minnie's is the only two-house set of all the cooperative houses, unless you count Joint House, which is arguably one big, insane establishment) filled with people my age. I was a few years younger than everyone when I moved in, and I stayed there for three years.

The residents change along with U of M's academic periods. New people move in and out all the time. Some people stay on for several years and become well-known within the system, but eventually, everyone moves out. It's a constant cycle.

Sadly, it thusly leaves behind, in a way, former members like myself. I pine for those days. There was always someone around, either running in and out, going back to school to study or to their rooms, or just hanging out making food, being social. The front porch was a great time in and of itself, for both houses.

Mich Hausers were always a bit less cultured than us purple Minnie's people, but we had to mingle with them cause they had the working kitchen, so there you have that relationship struggle every day.

 I jest, Mich Hausers. You troglodytes.

So anyway, back to the video above. Everyone who lives there shares work duties, right? But once a year, they have an extra-thorough work holiday, where from 9-5, everyone pitches in and, as one co-opper says in the video, "We clean stuff that doesn't normally get cleaned."

There was a certain air about living in those two houses. You had a sense you were part of something greater than the standard bullshit living situation you see so many apartment-dwellers in. We all forsook a little bit of privacy and put in a little more of our own time working to keep us and the collective happy, but it was infinitely more fulfilling than having my own place was as soon as I moved out.

Yes, after I moved out of the co-op, my life kinda started to suck. It took me a year to pull it all together. My co-op roommate one year was Tim ... Tom Waits, and we moved into this apartment in an alley that was so dismal I don't even want to describe it. The most depressing place I ever have and ever will live. My friend Chuck Thompson visited me there once. We had a bit of an adventure, and it all didn't end so great, but he's like, the only friend of mine from Manistee that ever saw the place. Oh yeah, Jessie Hojo came there a few times, and Leah Somsel too. And my brother and Mike Casey.

Oh, and Joy Shaeffer met Emily Elert one time and that's another high school connection.

Bit of Manistee gossip mixed in with Ann Arbor gossip there. From the nineties and early 2000s. C ya.