My hometown basketball team from East Lansing, Michigan State had reached the NCAA basketball championship today, by beating highly favored Connecticut in Detroit. They will face North Carolina on Monday for the title, which is an exact rematch of December 3, 2008 meeting between these two schools at the same venue, Ford Field in Detroit, for which UNC had walloped MSU.

This guy, Goran Suton, is a local product from Lansing Everett, my high school's rival. The same school Magic Johnson played for before taking MSU to its first national title in 1979.

He immigrated with his family to Lansing from the war-torn Bosnia of 1990's, arriving in the U.S. just few days after MSU won its second national title in 2000. He thought maybe he should go on to play for them someday.


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Sometimes I had to remind myself that creativity comes from within, it's how I got through my life growing up. When I came back to this old theory of mine, I realized I hadn't applied to any of the five graphic novel ideas. I realized that I keep putting the settings into the cities where I'm not as familiar with, such as Chicago or San Francisco. Everyone does their best by working with what they really know best.

I will need to recollect my ideas and theories from my childhood days, because they may actually be pure and relevant, but I will mix it in pot with my experience and understanding of this world.

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Anyway.

The city is Lansing. I cannot believe how I passed over the idea of using Lansing as a backdrop to some of my stories ideas. I knew the city and its metro like back of my hand. I knew of the economy dwindling back in early 2000's. I knew crime would rise. I knew the culture. I knew the people. I knew the jobs.


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What I didn't expect is the downfall of GM as of late. The major focus was on Detroit. What most people didn't know that virtual every large cities in Michigan also employs automobile manufacturing in its own economies, as branches that reached from Detroit, including Flint, Lansing, and Grand Rapids.

For decades, 1 out of 4 Lansing citizen works, or related to one, for one of these automobile factories and manufacturing. Lansing was once one of the most boisterous and thriving cities to live and work in, because of high pay to work in automobile manufacturing. The middle class was never stronger back then.

In the late 1990's, the Detroit Big Three drastically reduced the employment in its GM/Chrysler factories, and forced the closure of Lansing's biggest automobile company, Oldsmobile. The unemployment shot through the roof. The employment of these manufacturers were reduced to about 1/10th of the original number.

I was in Lansing during most of December 2008 and some of January 2009. My mother had purchased a home in central Lansing. Since she luckily landed a nursing job, after the divorce of my parents few years back, and her tireless effort to go back into nursing job she had left for homemaking when my sister and I were born. The house is in one of the better neighborhood in central city, where there are communities of families. But all around, it was grim. The house prices had been falling in its own right because of Lansing's ailing economy.

I had never seen such a large small city reduced to a near ruin, and of a ghost town. I drove by the GM and Oldsmobile factories several times. It's colossal parking lots for employees and newly made cars ready for shipment, lays completely empty. The winter weather certainly didn't help the gritty and depressing scenery. Many houses were abandoned and some were ruined, without any effort to fix them back up. Many local businesses closed out. The spirit and hope were nonexistent.

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Along with Detroit, the Michigan State basketball making into the national championship lifted spirits all around Michigan, away from the infinity flurry of bad news in its economies. For at least one week. Now it will be two days more as we wait for Monday.


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My heart was always, and is, heavy when I think of Lansing.