WHO IS RICHEY PIIPARINEN
This is a really good question. Is a person their profession? Are they their abilities that define their professional standing? Are they their attributes that influence their abilities and their professional standing? Or is a person something deeper? What has been called "the self".
If I am my profession and professional standing, then I would say that in 2015 I was selected as one of Cleveland's "Most Interesting People" by Cleveland Magazine, largely for my work in demography, specifically in the discerning of emergent trends in Cleveland that challenge the city's concretized Charlie Brown attitude. One of the first research pieces I did in this regard is the research brief "Not Dead Yet: The Infill of Cleveland's Urban Core" published in 2012 while I was at Case Western Reserve University. The research predicted Cleveland's gentrification back when it was a laughable prognostication. See also, the Cleveland Plain Dealer piece “Visualizing Cleveland's future without 'rust-colored' glasses” that discusses the concept of psychogeography, or the tendency for cities to become what they perceive to believe. My professional career, then, was beginning to form its arc.
But as I settled into my role as a public intellectual something happened, a thing evoking the old Yiddish proverb that says, "We plan, God laughs." In January 2021, I was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, or brain cancer. This existential blow swept me off the more conventional professional path, placing me firmly on the path toward the self. This path, as I’ve come to find out, is carved out by two questions that define all of us: Who am I? What does it all mean? I attempt to answer these questions in the book Octopus Hunting, released in January 2024 by Red Giant Books. An excerpt is below:
“It was early Springtime in Cleveland, 2021. The weather
patterns were jumping from lamb to lion to lamb to lion again.
In between, colors were popping up and then kneeling back
down by morning’s frost. Each successive day is a display of
the razor’s edge that is the oscillating, slow-motion hand-off
of winter’s grip. A sunny, deep blue sky is met with a biting
wind. The birds’ songs give way to the noises of Lake Erie
crashing violently. Everything is edging and a continuum.
Yet it’s hard to see. We are conditioned for Machiavellian
endpoints. It’s cold. Then it’s hot. You’re here. Then you’re not.
Never mind the multitudes in between. My life, too, is being
lived on a line. Am I dying or living? Where am I going and
where was I? What’s up ahead and behind me? Meanwhile,
each side of the line is a tilt toward the opposite of itself:
Accepting loss and believing otherwise. Saying goodbye and
saying hello. Fearing, and finding the stillness in me that goes
beyond fear, or me for that matter. Losing that peace to be left
with the fear in me and of me.”
