tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-71316714976677920312024-02-18T22:34:19.194-08:00MoQev SpeaksMeandering rants as I study to become a crotchety old man...MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.comBlogger37125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-73103109494640551252022-01-02T22:17:00.003-08:002022-02-26T22:07:28.465-08:00Walt Disney Lied To Me!<p>Happy New Year, Everyone! I spent the afternoon behind my refrigerator, toweling up poop and bleaching surfaces. I guess it's an apt finish to 2021, but I could have done without 2022 introducing itself with me bagging a corpse and putting it out into the subzero cold.</p><p>This past Autumn, when Lisa and I winterized our back porch off the kitchen, we found some droppings in the bin that holds our lanterns and bug spray. There were apparently mice living in the shelter of the porch. We found the storm door wasn't fully sealed, and so I fixed that after a full Clean'n'Bleach of the room. About two weeks later, I was in the kitchen standing at the sink and I saw something scurry from under the kitchen island to under the fridge. It would seem that when I sealed off the porch, there was someone still inside, who then came into the kitchen when outdoor access was cut off.</p><p>At this point I was pretty naive, and panic didn't even cross my mind. I bought traps, confident that this would be a minor hiccup in the holiday season, but the traps went neglected. We pulled the fridge out and discovered the extent of infrastructure that a mouse can build when left to his/her own devices. There was very little evidence of anyone living in the kitchen, other than the distinct, hamster-cage odor when we pulled the fridge out of its cubby.</p><p>But then I crawled back there and pulled the access panel off the back of the fridge, and I began to comprehend just how heedless I had been to the original evidence of infestation. I found the remains of two towels, disassembled and reimagined into a nest surrounding the nice warm compressor, along with a quarter cup of pilfered kibble from the cat dishes. This mouse meant to hang out for a bit. So we took away the nest. I cleared the area of all fibers and food, and I bleached the bottom of the tray. We re-baited the traps and figured we'd have a dead mouse to dispose of soon.</p><p>But then we went out of town for Christmas. We were only gone for three days, but when we got back the kitchen smelled like the old pet shop at Har Mar Mall. I actually got my hopes up - had we caught the thing in one of the traps? I checked, and no. It was still living here, mocking us with its nonchalance. Now dread was starting to take hold, but we all have work and the holidays to deal with, so we let it go until I had a day off. On New Year's Eve we pulled the fridge back out and I again took the panel off, only to find that they were still pooping under there. I spent more time than I'd like to admit cleaning poop again and scrubbing again and bleaching again.</p><p>Throughout this ordeal, I feel I need to state that a prominent proprietor of cartoon mouse content, et al., lied to me. I was led throughout my youth to believe that if mice chose to grace my life with their presence, it would be in a benevolent way: tailoring my suits, cleaning my kitchen, helping me solve mysteries... No one ever once implied they would just shit under my refrigerator. That is not helpful to me <i>at all!</i> And so prolifically - this has been a LOT of mouse shit. According to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_NIMH" target="_blank">Don Bluth</a> they're always wearing colorful shawls and offering sage advice, but in reality they don't even understand English. And it makes sense, I mean they obviously have to poop somewhere - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Twas_the_Night_Before_Christmas_(1974_TV_special)" target="_blank">Rankin & Bass</a> just never zoomed in on their asses when they were dropping pellets all over the clock tower.</p><p>Meanwhile, Jebus the cat had really dropped the ball. She had two choices, and she neither chased down and drove out the menace, nor did she strike up an unlikely friendship with it in an adorable way.</p><p>So I got a couple more traps. The mean kind. We had the little igloo-shaped spin traps originally, with the tiny door that Mickey goes in, which then slams shut and crushes his head. But those require engagement from the mouse. This time I bought the old-fashioned, tried and true, Snap Shut On Their Necks type of traps. I didn't use the recommended peanut butter as bait - since this prick was just stealing cat food, I piled three kibbles on each trap under the island, took the cat dishes up off of the floor, and went about my holiday evening.</p><p>Then, after I went to bed, Lisa was still out in the living room when she heard the snap. She got me up, and had me look under the kitchen island. This fucker was <i>big.</i> No wonder it hadn't gone into the igloo traps - there's no way it would have fit. I even did some research into the difference between mice and rats, but it turns out it was just a VERY LARGE mouse. So big in fact that the mean trap had not snapped shut on its neck, but smashed across its head. When we moved the island to reveal the horror show it still had its face stuck in the trap, but it was most decidedly dead. We dropped it into a bag and put it out into the -12F temps out back.</p><p>I am ambivalent about the killing of household pests. I don't like to be personally responsible for the end of living things (except centipedes - fuck those guys), but at the same time they can't live in my house. They shit a LOT, and they carry diseases and they steal kibble from my cat. I do not apologize for crushing this giant mouse's skull, but I still felt a pang dropping it into the bag and putting it out into the cold. And this speaks to the Disney point I raised earlier. I have been conditioned to believe a mouse is an adorable anthropomorphic oaf who just wants to be a sidekick to whatever adventures I am piloting. This is not the case. A mouse is 100% id. It wants to eat and poop, and it absolutely does not want to die. Even when you slam a metal bar across its face it'll take a couple minutes to expire, legs twitching while it respires agonally. Again, no apologies, but mixed feelings nonetheless.</p><p>Don't shit under my fridge though.</p>MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-22572543537359264442020-03-22T22:51:00.000-07:002020-03-22T22:51:02.459-07:00Cherry Crumble<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I just started cutting up my cherry tree. His name is Steve. Of all the things I was most excited about when I bought my house fifteen years ago, the prospect of having a fruit tree in the backyard so that I could have company over and present a bowl of cherries that I made was at the top of my list.<br />
As it turned out, Steve produced tart cherries. Good for baking and preserving, but not so much setting in a bowl on the coffee table for guests. And while I myself disagree with this assessment (I actually love sour cherries right off the Steve), I accepted the fact that Steve was, like me, a bit antisocial. His talents were better appreciated with a little behind-the-scenes finessing.<br />
Over the years Steve and I have made crowd-pleasing slab pies, decadent sorbets, and even infused some Basil Hayden's with tart cherries and orange peel to the tune of a campfire manhattan for the ages. Now that I'm thinking of it, about the only thing I haven't used his fruits for over the years was drying. That would have been a perfect way to introduce him to company - some dried cherries on a coffee-table cheese board next to a funky blue and some salted almonds? Missed opportunities, for sure.<br />
The first few summers, while he ramped up production, I had to fight the birds. Those little pricks were relentless in their pursuit of Steve's goods. I tried netting, foil strips, and even a slingshot, until he finally got big enough in about the fourth year that there were plenty of cherries for the birds to take the top third and I could still get around a quart per day for my own use. The birds and I had an understanding.<br />
One of the things I used Steve's cherries for most often was to make jelly that I then submitted to the MN State Fair. Repeatedly. Over and over I spent hot summer afternoons pitting, mashing, straining, and processing dozens of pounds of cherries into jelly, and it was always delicious but it never judged well. I spent hours passing the juice through coffee filters until that shit shone like stained glass, leveling off the top and measuring a quarter inch of headspace without allowing any bubbles on the surface. And though I never got a ribbon for my efforts, they did make judging notes so I got some free advice on how to improve my product.<br />
Meanwhile, Steve himself grew to absurd proportions. He's a North Star Cherry, a cold-hardy dwarf hybrid developed by the University of Minnesota to thrive in our frost-heavy climate. And thrive he did. He was supposed to top out at 8-10 feet, but in the last few summers he's grown up into our electrical lines, which are at least 16 feet off the ground. Either I have magical soil or Steve is a goddamn wizard of a tree. Every year just before Memorial Day or so he would explode into a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Zj5hZUCjxn/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link" target="_blank">thousand beautiful tiny white blossoms</a>, and a couple weeks later, for almost a month straight, I had to spend an hour a day picking, pitting, and refrigerating a quart or more of small tart cherries just to keep up with production.<br />
So two summers ago, I'd finally given up on a positive outcome for the cherries from the wise elders at the state fair, so while I went ahead and made jelly, I had all kinds of other things going on too. I froze some, made some cobblers, was planning some infusions. That year I had three other Fair submissions because I expected nothing more than free input on my process for Steve's jelly. As it turned out though, all three other submissions were busts, and the jelly garnered me a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BYOddy4gT7R/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link" target="_blank">State Fair Blue Ribbon</a>. The best cherry jelly in the state of Minnesota came from my backyard - it came from Steve! I considered setting a couple jars out on the coffee table when we had guests over, just for effect.<br />
Then, we had an unusually hard winter. The following summer Steve blossomed out like he always had, but all his fruit was kind of smallish and shriveled. We didn't really have a decent harvest, but I chalked it up to the harsh January that we weren't used to after being spoiled by a series of easy winters in the early teens.<br />
Last summer though, Steve checked out even further. He has three main branches coming off his trunk, one growing toward the garage, and the other two arching houseward. The house-facing two had no leaves or fruit last year, and the garage side branch leafed out and seemed to bloom just fine, but the fruit didn't come. They were tiny pea-sized pebbles that just didn't develop into cherries. And the trunks of the dead two branches had these scaly, lichen-y fungi on them. Sadly, it looks like Steve has bloomed his last.<br />
It's weird that he stuck around long enough for the accolades to roll in, and literally as soon as he had won the recognition that he'd reached a zenith, that was that. Steve had done what he'd come here to do, and was done doing it. So I started cutting him up today. Mostly he'll provide twigs for kindling to start bonfires next summer once they're dry, but a decent amount of trunk cherrywood for smoking will also be harvested and dried. I'm already thinking of the pork tenderloin that I'll cook over his charred torso alongside my next summer's sapling. Is that macabre? I think maybe I'll try pears next. Those look good in a bowl on the coffee table, right?</div>
MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-68079105501923431472018-03-10T23:10:00.000-08:002018-03-10T23:10:58.557-08:00Spring Feverish<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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We went to MN Monthly's Food & Wine Experience at Target Field last Sunday. It was a beautiful, sunny March afternoon at the ballpark, tasting local wines and brews alongside samplings from well-known restaurants in town and thinking of the upcoming Twins season, followed Monday by six inches of frozen precipitation. I say precipitation because in March we don't have snowstorms. We have multi-precipitory events. It started overnight with standard sleet, laying a slick base layer of ice under everything to come. Then, throughout most of the day what was primarily falling is technically called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graupel">Graupel</a>. It is a horror. Half snow, half hail, it is essentially tiny hardened snow pellets that pebble the ice layer previously laid down. After this it went dry for a couple hours while the temperature dropped, followed by the main event, four more inches of crisp powder over the top of the pebbled ice layer. I'm currently looking at my tomato seeds and experiencing some spring fever. Springtime in Minnesota is essentially a game of chicken. It's looking really good for an early thaw and you're putting your coats and boots away for the season and the next morning you wake up to seven inches of snow on your car. And just when you're ready to end it all and drive into the Mississippi, you come home after work to see the crocuses are finally peaking out of the boulevard garden.<br />
Minnesota is a spectacular place to live. We have the longest summer days but we pay for them with cold and snowy winters that will test anyone’s resolve. Minnesota is physically a large enough state to have a geographic optimism gap, too: The southern and western portions of the state rely mainly on farming the land, and coaxing nutrients out of it, to provide both income and sustenance. The northern and eastern parts rely heavily on mining the land, and selling what they take out of it, to get their incomes. In northern Minnesota they know that eventually they’ll wake up and all the iron will be gone. All they’ll have left is some glacial soil too rusty and sandy to grow anything in. In the south it’s different – they plant crops in their loamy soil every time the frost goes away, and even if they have a bad year, there will be some harvest, sparse or lush.</div>
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I am of northern descent. While I am a mildly successful home gardener, I still originate from that fatalistic stock of Midwesterners who know how finite their fortunes are. The first time my cousin took me out into the forty acres of woods behind my grandmother’s house she told me a story about the <a href="https://i.pinimg.com/736x/e2/71/e7/e271e7419b309224fd6e438e4c6ac16b--witch-craft-wendigo-sightings.jpg">Windigo</a> and snuck away to leave me to find my own way back to the house. I was eight, and it was January. It gets dark at four-thirty in January in northern Minnesota. In short, I was raised knowing this land (or something in it or inherent to it) will eventually kill me. Like the aforementioned cold and/or snow.<br />
But that’s the price we pay for our ridiculous quality of life in the upper midwest. Whenever we sit in an inner tube in the middle of a lake drinking a mimosa in sunglasses on the 4th of July weekend with only a half dozen other boats on the lake we have the obligatory moment when we have to imagine that same lake frozen damn near solid in January, covered in blowing snow dunes, and realize how fortunate we are that the winter keeps anything more nefarious than a tent caterpillar from being able to pupate and survive in this place. This year in fact was the first since 1924 that the overall temperature between Christmas and New Year’s Eve averaged sub-zero Fahrenheit, and they think it may have some impact on our <a href="https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/01/04/3-bad-bugs-cold-weather-can-help-kill">fight against some invasive insects</a>, saving some berries in the garden and some boulevard trees.</div>
So let's talk about cold. Zero degrees Fahrenheit is cold. And you may have experienced some extreme cold and think that you know about cold. You do not. At zero degrees Fahrenheit we have to bring our beers in from the porch or they’ll freeze. Zero degrees Fahrenheit is nothing. For a solid week in January, the temperature outdoors (in the world your god supposedly made for us), dips as low as -17F (-27C). This is a temperature few humans know how to behave in. It does however provide us with a convenient blast chiller adjacent to our kitchen - January is when the best pot pies and other multi-layered savory dishes are prepared, due to our porch being a walk-in freezer for a few weeks.</div>
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When it gets brutally cold in the winter many people think that once it gets to a certain point it’s as cold as it can get, or at least as cold as one can perceive. Once it gets to -2F for instance, it can’t get any colder, and any colder it gets doesn’t register because the body can’t compute that kind of cold. That is a fallacy. At -2F you need some serious layering, but with long underpants, an undershirt, some jeans, and a wool sweater, with a fleece or wool vest under your outer coat, and with gloves under mittens, a good hat, and a scarf you should be okay as long as you move your body. If you’re walking briskly for a few blocks you’ll be fine. At -17F, it doesn’t matter how many layers you have on - if you’re outdoors for more than a minute or so and you’re not moving you will start to die. I have felt this sensation waiting for the bus - where my legs, despite three layers of wool, start to go numb in the wind. My fingers, despite being inside fur-lined leather gloves, will begin to ache if they’re not also in a second layer (coat pockets or mittens). I honestly don’t know how bears and other hibernating animals do it…</div>
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We’ve gotten spoiled in recent years with mild winters, and I can only assume it’s because all eyes were on our Super Bowl this year that real, honest to god, frost-your-nuts winter has returned to us. But I recall winters from my youth where it wouldn’t get above 0F for five or six days at a time. I remember a Christmas in my mother’s hometown of Eveleth when everyone was at a Christmas Eve church service, and I was at the house alone and I went out for a smoke in -30F (that’s -35C for our worldly friends), and I was so addicted that I put on three separate pairs of gloves so I could stay out there and smoke a whole cigarette. I should probably take this opportunity to apologize to my aunts, since I’m pretty sure one of them came back to find their gloves reeking of cigarette smoke that Christmas.</div>
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I honestly have been amazed in the nadir of winter crossing I-94 into downtown on the bus and I know it's -15F outside because I just waited in that cold for the bus to come (my beard is probably just getting thawed by now), and it's dark, but there's still a heavy stream of headlights coming out of the Lowry Hill Tunnel and tail lights going in, and life continues unimpeded by this ridiculous obstacle of cold that's been set before us at six or seven in the morning. Minnesotans seem impervious to the cold that winter throws at us. This is just where we live, and we'll work through the winter in order to see the Twins win a bunch of games next summer only to choke in August yet again, because that's what we do, goddamnit! Even if we're not baseball fans, but just gardeners with weak tomato yields, this is still our ritual - crippling cold, then guarded optimism, then mild disappointment. It's the Minnesota way.<br />
So let's talk about snow. If you live in Minnesota you can expect to push a stranger's car out of a snowbank approximately once per winter. If you're doing winter right, you'll only be on the receiving end of that charity once every six or so years. I'm going on seven winters myself, and feeling pretty good about it (I can't believe <a href="http://moqev.blogspot.com/2010/12/2-minneapple-neighborly-connections.html">this</a> was already seven years ago!)... This year wasn't too bad until after the holidays, but some Monday in January we had our first real Roads Are Useless snowfall in a few winters, reminding us that winter can end us whenever it feels the whim, and I found myself driving home through ten inches of fresh powder. I followed a trio of plows out Olson Memorial Highway, but as soon as I turned on Penn Ave I knew it was going to take some luck to get all the way home. The car right in front of me kept skidding off to the right, but pulled back into the traffic ruts every time. It took a while, but we got up to my neighborhood.<br />
When I finally turned on 35th Ave, there was a white car at the alley hung perpendicularly across the entire drivable road. The driver got out and put floor mats under the back tires (of course it was rear-wheel drive), and after she got back in they were still going nowhere. So I turned off my car and got out, and two other neighbors coming from the other direction came over to help, and we gave her a shove backwards into the alley so she could then angle out with our help into a parallel spot against the curb.<br />
When I got back into my car and drove past her I nearly got hung up myself turning from 35th to go the half-block to my house, but luckily the Malibu has a high enough undercarriage that it soldiered through the snow mess left by evacuating neighbors. And I was back out after it finally stopped snowing at 11pm because it is way better to shovel and then go to bed than to have to shovel before you go to work. I dug both cars out, shoveled the walk, and slept like a baby - for five hours until my alarm went off. In most cities this would begin round two of the "Snow Might Kill You" show, but in MSP? There was a snow emergency declared, which meant the entire Mpls fleet of plows was out overnight from 9pm to 9am plowing major arterial streets, which is great for my commute downtown. By the time my wife and I came home after work at least half (the even side) of all non-snow emergency streets were also plowed to the curb. And by the next morning? Life moves on - the third day they plow the other (odd numbered) side of lesser streets, and then everything should be able to go back to normal. And this just happens, several times per winter, whenever more than six inches of snow falls, the city says "parking is weird for three days," and then you just keep going about your business. But going about you business starts to seem bleak after six months. That's how the snow demoralizes you. Prince was not kidding around - it actually snows pretty often in April. I've seen it snow here as early as mid-October (ask any Minnesotan about the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Halloween_blizzard">Halloween Blizzard</a>, we all have a story), and I've seen it snow as late as <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Y9Mtsaij2g/">May 5</a>. And it's not like it snows and goes away either - between those calendar extremes you can sometimes have to navigate through <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/ku1Lfyij-F/">this</a>. So when those crocuses show up, or when I can get the tomatoes started in the basement, it feels like a remarkable victory against the forces of the Windigo, and I get to spend a few glorious days living in the mind of a Southern Minnesotan, with my eyes on the harvest rather than the eternal frost.</div>
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MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-88117813488332779582012-10-07T20:42:00.000-07:002012-10-07T21:04:48.206-07:00Infinite Potential<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I love having an autumn birthday. A birthday is a great time for self-assessment. And autumn is a great metaphor for
inevitable decay. Getting intimate
with my own mortality at a time of year when my entire habitat is shutting down
to hibernate and go numb has made me the existentialist powerhouse I am
today. Yes I did just take a
couple of 8-hour courses in CPR & first aid, so yes it’s on the front
burner, but even aside from that, how does one live in the Northland and not
think often of death? I don’t mean
that in a morbid way, but every October I watch my garden wither, and well, I’m
used to it. And I know in the
spring when new plants come they won’t be the same plants, but they will offer
the same fruit by the 4<sup>th</sup> of July. It’s not sad when they finish producing, it just means I
need to get out the canning kettle.
We are tilting away from the sun, and it’s about to get cold for a
while.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Sometimes on a September morning on the bus, if the sky to
the east over the river has the right light and the right mixture of low
Stratus and high Cirrus clouds, I begin to think about infinity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I look at the clouds and think of
the enormity of things, I am sometimes over-awed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have to look away because it is just too vast to
comprehend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I look down at the
skyline of the city I love, and the small scale makes sense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can see the building where I work
from the bus, and this is a comfort.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I am headed toward a warm tower where I have created my own world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The clouds above are not gigantic
quivering pools in the infinite sky, but just a backdrop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are decoration behind the tangible
play that is my life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDS_Center">The building where I work is 792 feet tall.</a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
work in the basement (or concourse), about 16 feet below street level.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The parking ramp goes down three more
levels, so I would guess all told that adds another sixty feet at most to the
overall height.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I walk
through the dock from the tower to my office, I see these giant concrete
columns, and they enclose steel beams.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Beams that are around nine-hundred feet long.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s .17 miles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That’s a long piece of steel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But I can make sense of it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I’ve been to both ends of it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I work at the bottom, and I’ve eaten (and served) holiday brunches at
the top.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a long elevator
ride, but I can fit it in my head.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>When I see a jet contrail against an orange sky, that’s sometimes 36,000
feet in the air.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s almost
seven miles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Think of something
seven miles away from you on the surface of the earth, and try to imagine
seeing it from where you are.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Imagine
everything that exists between you and it isn’t there – that’s just space.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Seven miles is a longer distance than
you think it is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To put it
differently, it takes roughly 45 seconds to get from the basement to the 50<sup>th</sup>
floor, but imagine that times forty-five to get to 36K ft.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s a <i>really</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> long elevator ride.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thirty-three and a half minutes of </span><i>express </i><span style="font-style: normal;">elevator.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>On top of this mindfuck, there are clouds that you can see up to eight
times further away than that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not
to mention the satellites blinking cheerfully as they traverse the night
sky.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are barely clinging to
Earth’s gravity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I sometimes think
I’ll understand the scale of the universe better once I die.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once I’m not trying to fathom eternity,
but rather am a part of it, it may all be clearer to me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Neil Armstrong recently died.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is the fourth moon-walker to leave us, of twelve.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His peers were all born in the 1930’s,
and soon there will be no one left alive who went to the moon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s weird – it’s like old
Tolkien-esque fantasy books, where there’s this mythical land that’s been
mapped and explored, but no one alive has seen it, and no one can recall how to
get to it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It made me think about our collective lore a little.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is lore?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s wisdom passed down generationally, or the fundamental
narrative of a people, no?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A
people, of course, is the collective description of a person.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is like a school of fish or a murder
of crows. More than that though, it is a tribe or a nation – it is a group of
persons who all share a similar origin story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The words, ideas, and solutions to problems may be
different, debatable, or even diametrically opposed, but the frameworks in
which the texts are built are the same.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Name a common exclamation of frustration when someone can’t
accomplish something because of a technological shortfall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’d bet that by “Family Feud” rules,
the phrase “we can put a man on the (God-damned) moon, but we can’t _____!”
would be on the board.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The moon,
and the fact that our peers have been there, is such an inherent part of our
culture that I can’t even imagine someone coming back and saying, “Wait – <i>can</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> we put a man on the moon?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A man on the moon is the concrete model of an abstract
American Ingenuity that still exists, and still drives us to strive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s the original <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mtvmoon.png">MTV logo</a>, for
Christ’s sake.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So we went to the moon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So what?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well,
for one thing, it is one of the oldest recurring characters in our
discourse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you want to wax
poetic about it, it has gazed down upon every moment of our history, yet it has
always been out of our reach.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
very concept of flying through space to reach it is kind of absurd.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Can you blame the ancients for
anthropomorphizing it as a god?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The peak of Everest is one thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You’re still standing on the planet where you originated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The bottom of the ocean is one
thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You couldn’t live there,
and there are a lot of hostile conditions between you and home, <i>but you’re
still standing (submarining) on the planet where you originated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;">When
you stand on the moon the hostile conditions between you and home are </span><i>literally
nothing.</i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is an actual lifeless </span><i>void</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> between you and the place that made you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And you’re outside of its gravitational
pull.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is weird for me to think of all the moon-walkers being
gone because it’s not like in my family when my mom says, “Grandpa came from
Vermont,” and none of my cousins have been there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is a road between Vermont and me, and if I wanted to
go there, all I’d need is a long weekend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If no one remains who has been to the moon though, we actually do lose
some real experience, via collective memory, that we can’t get back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That road closes, and the moon passes
into our history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I’ve seen
enough 1960’s TV to know that the moon has always been our future, not our
past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The popculturephile in me
cries out against this relegation of the moon to some musty academic “seen it,”
but a certain voice in the back of my head tells me it doesn’t really
matter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On a larger scale, we can
lose the voices that came back from the moon, but we can never lose the
knowledge gained from the moon trips, or any other space explorations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<span style="font-family: Times;">Speaking
of enormous distances, remember the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot">Pale Blue Dot?</a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot"> </a> </span>Dr. Carl Sagan’s single pixel of light is an <i>actual
photograph</i></span><span style="font-family: Times;"> of our<i> entire</i></span><span style="font-family: Times;"> world in its greater
context. That is what I think of
sometimes in the morning on the bus.
Because I am in that photograph.
And if you were born before 1990, so are you. I was likely riding my bike with my friend Jon to Krinke’s
Korner Grocery in New Brighton, or building one of a dozen or so tree forts in
the forests of Arden Hills. But
I’m on that tiny blue speck living my life in that photo, just like the boy
hustling in the streets of Santo Domingo is in that photo. Just like the girl fishing a Norwegian
fjord is in that photo, and like the old man hunting in the jungles of the
Congo is in that photo. And if you
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Solar_System_Portrait_-_View_of_the_Sun%2C_Earth_and_Venus.jpg">zoom out on that photo</a>, there is no way to tell what time of year it is on
Earth. For the record, it was
taken between March and June of 1990, so springtime in the northern
hemisphere. On half of that blue
dot the days were getting longer.
On the other half, they were tilting away from the sun, and it was about
to get cold for a while.</span><!--EndFragment-->
</div>
MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-79920100823915442792012-08-11T23:10:00.001-07:002012-08-12T09:34:37.619-07:00Ode à la Grand Marais<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">When I was twenty-two, my best friend Jon and his girlfriend
Jill invited me to join them for a weekend festival in Grand Marais on the
North Shore of Lake Superior.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
was something of a family tradition for Jill, and apparently that year was the
first summer the honors had been opened up to non-family members.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was flattered, and didn’t have
anything else going on that weekend, so I said I’d be there, on a lark.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I haven’t missed the Fisherman’s Picnic
since.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first few years I was
there I learned the history of the group – who the regulars were and how the
stateside kids had gone up and met the Canadians and they had all hiked up the
rivers and jumped from bluffs and played in rapids together and other harrowing
feats.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Near-death experiences in
the formative years nourish life-long bonds; this I know as someone who was
once seventeen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know how
romantically dangerous a street dance on a Saturday night can be, juxtaposed
against afternoons leaping forty feet into an icy brook with complete confidence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But by the time I showed up, we were older, if not
necessarily wiser.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I started
going up we were walking back to the campground from town as cautionary tales –
with our cigarettes, and our liters of vodka and the innocent DQ Mr. Misties we
poured the Karkov into.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We were
higher than the kites we flew all afternoon Saturday on the beach, but we
didn’t care, because it was the most fun we’d have in one weekend all year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To be a hedonist among puritans, just
once a year, is an experience I highly recommend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It will discombobulate you, but luckily that word sounds a
little dirty, so you’re already on the right track.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We went on for several years, kayaking in the harbor,
Bingo-ing at the legion hall, and climbing on the rocks overlooking the bay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One weekend per year, we got to get all
our crazy out at the end of summer and come back to the city to be serious for
the oncoming winter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is,
until Jill’s parents bought a house in town. We all claimed to have figurative roots in the town, now suddenly they had put down literal ones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> And it's an adorable little cottage a block from the main drag, with an extra bedroom. </span>Then something different happened.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jill, who had long since broken amicably from my best man,
married the guy she <i>was</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> destined
for.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And they had twins.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Twins!<br /><o:p></o:p></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Ages on, most of us still make the pilgrimage every August,
though now things have changed slightly, and not in any way I could have
predicted. My friends and I still go up north every summer, and those with kids bring them
along.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We all have mellowed,
though we’ve done so at different paces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Some of us have children, others don’t.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of us still camp, others don’t. Most of us still hike out to the bonfire one of the nights, and get just a little bit silly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I was the first at the campsite this year, and that’s never
happened before (I didn’t even make it up first the year that I paid for
it).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My initial priority was
getting my tent up and checking out the rainbow over the bay to the East.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When my campmate arrived, he & I
enjoyed a couple beers and some homemade brittle and waited for the familied
friends to get in touch.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After
they did, we were anchored in the town with them and in the festival for the weekend. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I don’t have children, but I know quite a few of them, and
it is a humbling moment the first time you turn to the baby you think you know
and realize you’re talking to a fully formed human child, capable of running, and
laughing, and skipping stones, and you have stories that <i>predate her.</i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She did
not exist when most of your life took place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is a Descendant.<br /><o:p></o:p></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">When
you have so many years of history in a place it is tempting to claim it as your
own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When you can no longer
differentiate the years you were down by the lake from the years you were up on
the hill – and no one thing happened in any specific summer or another – you
don’t just have a history, you have a mythology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet while it’s tempting to claim it as <i>your</i> festival,
it is so much bigger than you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i>It</i> is the one
who shaped <i>you</i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">, not the other way around.</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">It went on for decades before you arrived, and it will go on
just as merrily if you never come back.</span> But y<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">ou are that little girl.</span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">You are a product, a Descendant, of it, and you owe a little piece of
who you are to it.</span> Here’s to you,
Grand Marais… may you shape and mold many good friends to come.</span></div>
</div>
</div>MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-60570197947592148122012-07-02T21:22:00.000-07:002012-07-02T21:40:28.853-07:00A Few Observations on Weather<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Talk about your second takes. Banana Blossom reopened. I know, that’s old news, it happened months ago, but it’s
great news to me because I <i>still</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> haven’t
dropped in yet, and I am so excited to try this place. I thought I had missed my chance. They were open for a couple years with
me driving by at least five times a week and thinking </span><i>I really wanna
try the food there.</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> Then it was hit by a tornado. Not just grazed, either, but </span><i>really</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> slammed into like a hockey puck to the larynx. It was over. I lost my chance.
And chances don’t come along everyday on the north side. When I moved into this neighborhood
seven years ago there was a fantastic Caribbean joint a block from my
house. They had the best food, a
spectacular happy hour, and plans for a delightful & sunny patio. They got a </span><i>glowing </i>review<span style="font-style: normal;"> from <a href="http://blogs.mspmag.com/dara/">Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl</a> back when she
was with the City Pages. Even with
all of this going for them they took on too much debt and closed within the
year. I’ve read the statistics -
60% of restaurants fail in the first three years, and by five years the failure
rate jumps to 75%. I’ve worked in
the industry for over a decade (I even waited on Dara once, when I briefly
worked at Tryg’s), and I knew how the cards were stacked. I knew I had completely missed my
window of opportunity to try <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Banana-Blossom/159643450714393">Banana Blossom’s fare</a>, and that they were </span><i>not</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> coming back.
Yet somehow they did come back after the tornado! Last fall the new glass went into their
large front windows, and now they’ve been reopened for some time, and their
food looks spectacular in photos!
I shall not continue to squander this blessing. I shall support these ridiculously
lucky NoMi entrepreneurs, and go there this week, I promise.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The end of May was the anniversary of that North Minneapolis
tornado. MPR made a huge deal
about it. I was on the bus on my
way to work the next week, and noticed they had taken another house on the
block on the northwest corner of Broadway & Penn Aves. Now there is the old fast food place
that’s boarded up, and one house still standing. That is all.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I honestly don’t know if anyone is living, or considering
living, in this house (it’s doubtful, but there’s no plywood over the doors or
windows, so it’s not unthinkable), but still it occurred to me how odd it would
be to wake up one morning and be the only house left on your block. What do you do, with no fences, no
hedges, no gates or delineations whatsoever, when you have a WHOLE CITY BLOCK
to yourself? On a major
crossroads? It’s not like this
house is down by the park or tucked away along the creek or anything – it is
smack in the geographical center of the poorest neighborhood in the city, and
it’s alone on an EMPTY block. The
building I wanted my start-up business in used to be there, but has since been
torn down (a result of the tornado).
St. Anne’s Catholic Community is right across 26<sup>th</sup> Ave, too, so it’s not like no one is
ever walking around here.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Take a moment to imagine yourself at home. Now imagine waking up one morning to
find you could peer across the street in every direction without
obstruction. Weird, right? One recent Sunday I found myself on the
50<sup>th</sup> floor where I work, and from 750 feet above street level you
can definitely see the stripe of no trees slash diagonally across North, from
Broadway & Penn to Lyndale & 42<sup>nd</sup>. I always found it difficult to locate my house from up
there, now it’s right next to the white stripe, half way up, a few blocks off
the left side.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
No, we haven’t completely recovered. A year later there are still houses
with bright blue tarps on their roofs.
Many of these houses will probably never again support human life. Many have already been taken by the
bulldozers and the excavators, but of those that remain, few will stand in
another year. My favorite anchor
on Penn & Broadway is trying to recoup & rebuild across the street from
their now demolished building, on the empty block – I assume just because they
have half a century’s worth of ties to the neighborhood. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I was at ALDI the other day buying some groceries, and there
was a woman in front of me in line with the words “Project Bitch” tattooed just
above her waistline, in a cursive tramp stamp. I thought it was an apt metaphor for our shared
neighborhood. It IS a
project. It is a project that
we’ve been working on for years, and one that is consistently frustrated by
profiling, or stereotyping, or tornadoes.
It is something of a bitch, and there is still a narrative on the north
side of a person with their fists up, a person who resents the scrutiny. We take care of our own here; it’s just
what we do. We don’t need local TV
news to pat us on the back for it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So now everybody’s impressed with how many things have
returned to normal on the north side.
Really? It’s been A
YEAR. Many homes weathered the
winter snows (thankfully sparse this year, but still…) <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/moqev/6818713026/in/photostream">WITHOUT ROOFS INTACT</a>. That is not normal. Nor, in any other neighborhood, would
you dream of saying, “wow, they’ve come <i>so far”</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> if that were the case for any fraction of the housing stock. A year later they are still bulldozing
tornado homes. </span><i>That’s</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> how many were affected. And the sad thing is most of them had only minor
damage. They just didn’t have any
tenants or non-bank related interested parties to fix the minor damage, so
exposed to the elements for a year it has become major damage. If you want to know how far we’ve come
in a year, come park at Penn & Broadway and get out of your car. Take a moment to turn 360 degrees and
really take in the cityscape.
You’ll wonder how many DAYS it’s been since the storm.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">So feel
free to congratulate us on the progress we’ve made, but don’t pretend there
aren’t still empty lots full of crabgrass that no one wants to own. We live in a vacuum that can only be
filled by investment. We need
people to want to live where we live in order to recover, and right now on the
north side of Minneapolis that prospect seems like something of a pipe
dream. All I can say is how much I
love my neighborhood, and how much you’d love it, if only we could get some
commerce up in here, and if only we could get some positive press. I’m still waiting to see a billboard
that says, “North Side: Come weather the storm with us, and rebuild something
today.”</span>
</div>MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-16910634898421193372012-06-17T11:02:00.001-07:002012-06-17T12:32:21.356-07:00Thanks, Pop.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
I recently saw <a href="http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/news_cut/archive/2012/06/pictures_of_father.shtml">this post</a> on the Newscut Blog by Bob
Collins. It got me to
thinking. I <i>have</i> seen pictures of
my dad when he was younger than I am now.
In fact, I once made a lamp for him and my mother made from slides from
when they were first married. It
didn’t occur to me then, but now I am a couple years older than he was in those
old photos. I’ve heard stories
from when he was younger than me.
The only problem with this is, the things people tell stories about are
the exceptional things: great accomplishments,
life-altering journeys, epiphanies, and the like. I don’t feel my personal story-worthy life events even
compare with what I knew about my dad when I turned 19 and moved into my first
apartment. He was an Infallible
Elder to me then. All of the
wonderful, relatable things I know about him, the things that have made us peers,
I’ve learned since then. I’ve
learned that we’re a lot more alike than I ever assumed growing up. I remember going to a Twins game with
him and my friend Jill at the HHH Metrodome and having Jill tell me afterwards
how weird it was to see the two of us sitting together, both leaning forward,
arms on our knees, fingers interlocked, our weight on the balls of our feet, in
the exact same pose as one another without intending it. It was made more noticeable by the fact
that white guys with beards tend to look alike, but at age 23 I was already
becoming my father.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You think by the time you move out of your parents’ house
that you know everything there is to know about these people who raised
you. I know I did. After all, I’d spent every day of my
life either with them or in relation to them. What I hadn’t considered was that <i>they</i> hadn’t spent <i>their</i> every day in relation to <i>me</i>. They
had a whole life together before I came along. A life when they made some of the same choices and mistakes
that I have since made, because there are certain lessons that cannot be
taught, but must be learned.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When I was 20 I moved to California, and my dad helped me
get there. When you spend two and
a half days in a truck cab with someone, sleeping in rest stops with all your
possessions just behind the back wall, there’s no way to not learn a few new
things about them. On that trip I
learned about Dad's college weekend road trips, but also that he had a lot more
wisdom to impart than just how to use a band saw <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/moqev/4949898099/in/photostream/">(although this has proven helpful too)</a>. That trip is also
why, when Mom tells me that Dad is driving solo from my sister’s house in
Seattle to my parents’ home in Tucson, I don’t worry. I still want my mother to check in when I know she’s on the
road. Dad I know I don’t need to
worry about on crazy feats of endurance travel. I’ve seen the man do it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
After I bought a house back in Mpls, Dad came north to help
me paint it. I recall coming home
one day to find he had climbed up the ladder to the porch roof with the
six-foot A-frame ladder over his shoulder. He had then propped the A-frame against the side of the
house on the pitched roof to hang onto my louvered attic vent with one hand and
use the other hand to paint the peak of the gable of my house (I assume he did
this while I was at work because he knew I’d talk him out of it if I were
home). That is something I would
never do. Not for anyone. I don’t necessarily have a fear of
heights, I just don’t trust my own sense of balance that much. If he ever asked, though, I’d do it for
Dad. Because I know he’d do the
same for me, and has. I won’t go
into specifics, because I don’t want to give him ideas, but there are countless
things that I’d never dream of doing ordinarily that I wouldn’t hesitate to do
for my father. When someone has
your back like that, you have to reciprocate. The man taught me how to be me, for god’s sake. You can’t ever hope to repay that – all
you can do is pay it forward.
Thanks, Dad. I love
you. Happy Father’s Day.<o:p></o:p></div>MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-83806611082008180552011-07-04T23:41:00.000-07:002011-07-05T00:09:59.870-07:00Call me a Beverage Enhancement TechnicianI had to stop in at the hotel to use the phone when I was downtown a couple weeks ago and I noticed something when I walked in. Since I normally come in through the back entrance, I seldom take note of anything in the front lobby. Up until recently, the big wooden desk to the right of the bell stand, the purview of the front desk staff, had a little name card on it saying “Manager on Duty.” Now, the plaque is less specific. It says “Hotel Information/Journey Ambassador.”<br />I am not making that up. It actually says “Journey Ambassador.”<br />That’s a bogus title. You’re not a Journey Ambassador. You’re a Concierge. And that’s cool. Say I’m staying at a hotel on business. I don’t need a “Journey Ambassador.” I’m just not that important. All I need is someone who can tell me where the nearest Walgreen’s is because my shaving foam, unwelcome in my carry on, depressurized and exploded. That is not a Journey Ambassador. Again, that’s a Concierge. I work for an international hotel chain. I won’t say which one, just in case our HR people stumble across this blog, but we have the same loyalty program every chain has. If you stay with us a lot, we’ll give you upgrades. If you stay with us a ton, we’ll learn your name and how you take your coffee. If you really drop some change our way, we’ll go out of our way to make sure you never feel want while you’re in our building. Hence the Journey Ambassador.<br />Here’s the thing: people want us to think right now that we’re special. You. And me. And all those people over there. Every one of us is deserving of an elaborate title, because every one of us is providing a unique service to society. We each, in turn, deserve to have an equally elaborately titled footman to acquiesce to whatever whim we may have. It’s like a short story by Gogol. Everybody has an important sounding sobriquet and a feeling of entitlement, but no one is actually providing a service anyone would miss if the position were gone. You’re not special. Neither am I, nor are any of those people over there. We are not doing anything so important that we need everything we want the moment we want it.<br />I’ve noticed a trend in T.V. ads lately. Both Starbuck’s and McDonald’s, two of the most faceless corporations on the planet, have started new campaigns that are <span style="font-style:italic;">really</span> heavy on the individuality. Coffee is not only brewed, but also grown, roasted, and ground specifically for <span style="font-style:italic;">you</span>. Every Big Mac is assembled with you, and your personal culinary preferences, in mind. This is incongruous with the very premise of Starbuck’s or McDonald’s. The whole point was that it was fast. It was pre-made and served up the minute you drove through because everybody wants a Big Mac the way a Big Mac is made. Now everybody wants a Big Mac <span style="font-style:italic;">to order?!</span> That’s not part of the freaking deal. You either go to a chain and get what you expect, or you go to a neighborhood joint and get what they give you. You don’t get to walk into a Target and say, “well I think the pharmacy should be over <span style="font-style:italic;">there.</span>” It’s laid out on a template.<br />So the government of my state officially shut down on July 1st. And this isn’t some sissy, Only The Poor People Feel It shutdown. This work stoppage means business. 22,000 state employees have been laid off. Everyone was turned out of state park campgrounds for the July 4th weekend. Highway rest stops are closed. You can renew your license plate tabs, but if you just turned 16 you can’t take your exam. If you want to get married, you can get a license for that through the county registrar, but if you want to catch and eat a Walleye, that license if you don’t already have it is unobtainable. <a href="http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/shutdown/archive/2011/07/quick-list-whats-open-whats-not.shtml?refid=0">Yes, I realize all this is goddamned absurd.</a><br />On Thursday I went to the DMV because no one knew yet what would remain open if the government shut down on Friday. I had to renew my auto registration, and figured it would be a while, so with earbuds in, I grabbed a number and sat down in the front windows while U2’s “Where the Streets Have No Name” blared forth from my ipod. If you’ve never listened to “Where the Streets Have No Name” at the DMV, I cannot recommend it highly enough. This is the situation that this song was designed for. Of course, I recognize the song was written about 1980’s Belfast, but through its ambiguous lyrics and first-track placement on the Joshua Tree album it has become an ultimate anthem to freedom and endless horizons; while hearing it from tiny cauliflowers in your ears that no one else can share while sitting in a fluorescently-lit hanging-ceiling cavern may be interpreted by some as depressing, for me it was nothing short of inspiring. And if you ever need assurance that you’re not that special, this experience will sear it onto your mind. Because hearing this song, all I wanted to do was get on the highway and drive. <span style="font-style:italic;">Fast.</span> But before I could, I had to wait for the woman with the elaborate title to call my number and take my money. The DMV does not do Made To Order, nor should it.<br />So we really have the two extremes meeting in the middle. There is the Orwellian bureaucratic dystopia where you are a subject to the titled people, or there is the free-market, unregulated utopia where you have the title and everyone in your world is subject to you. Of course, in both worlds you still answer to someone. Both worlds have titled people, but some titles are more regal than others. Is one version inherently better or worse than the other? I mean, for anyone other than those with titles? I personally prefer a world where there is familiarity I can make for myself, where I have a home where everything is to my specifications, but anything outside of that sphere is up for grabs. Maybe I have to educate myself on what the norms and mores are for a different place. Maybe it seems weird, or even unpleasant to me. Maybe I grin and bear it. Maybe I become a better person for it before returning to my comfort-sphere. Maybe that’s the real world we all live in.<br />Really the only situation where I could justify a Journey Ambassador is in a world where nothing is ever the same. That is the world where I need a Journey Ambassador. When every day I wake up with a different set of rules, I need someone there to show me how to navigate the place. But when every hotel I stay in has the same offerings, amenities, and menu items in the on-site restaurant, I don’t need a Journey Ambassador. I need a more exciting life.MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-53498974948877270572011-06-16T13:05:00.000-07:002011-06-16T13:21:35.124-07:00Stormy WeatherOn Sunday, May 22nd, I was at home watching a thunderstorm roll in from the southwest. I had all the windows open to air out the house (our house has deep eaves, so I wasn’t worried about the rain). When the power went off I started closing windows for the oncoming storm. Then the sirens started. I went out the (open) back door to the deck into a noise unlike anything I have heard in my yard before. When I looked eastward, toward the front yard, I could see a cloud of debris beyond the neighbor’s houses moving from south to north, brown and chunky in the yellow-green light of the afternoon. They have said that by the time the warning was issued and the sirens went off the funnel cloud was already on the ground. I went back inside, and downstairs.<br />Over the last three and a half weeks I have seen things in my neighborhood that I haven’t seen in six years of living in my home. I have seen people who may have lived next to one another for years without exchanging hellos, but now are out working together getting a limb off of a porch, or clearing shingles out of a driveway so the construction crew can get through, or nailing a tarp over a gaping hole in a roof.<br />It’s almost a cliché to point out the Coming Together and Neighbors Helping Neighbors aspect of it all, but it truly is something of a surprise. The day of the storm my favorite neighborhood liquor store was hit pretty hard. The conventional thought is “liquor store – can’t be a good thing for the neighborhood,” but this place really was an asset. They had wine tastings, they were always out front putting annuals in the giant flower pots on the sidewalk, they almost never had panhandlers around; they were just a locally run small business with a fifty-plus year history on West Broadway – a fixture of the north side. The storm came on a Sunday, when liquor stores aren’t open. No one was there when the windows blew out. They were looted. That is sadly what I expected to hear more of, but as far as I’ve heard it was an isolated incident. I’ve heard stories about renters caught up in bureaucratic snafus with the city inspections division, which do not surprise me in the least (don’t get me started on the city of Minneapolis inspections division – if you’re interested, see the comment from Kevin Moberg after the Newscut link below). But I am embarrassed to admit that, even after six years of saying hi to my neighbors and lending them yard tools and such (even the one or two whom I didn’t care for), it surprised me to see the level of cooperation this neighborhood has risen to.<br />In the day or two directly after the storm, there were people who just sat in their vans in vacant parking lots on corners, waiting for someone to need a ride somewhere. <a href="http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/news_cut/archive/2011/06/price_of_volunteering_is_steep.shtml">There was one guy who got kicked out by the city for his volunteer efforts.</a> There were shops that, as soon as they had plywood over the still-exposed broken glass in their windows, immediately spray-painted “We’re open!” all over the outside of said plywood and threw their doors open to the people of the neighborhood. Monday morning Lisa and I went to the <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/the-lowry-cafe-minneapolis">Lowry Café</a> for some breakfast, and our waitress said they were the only building on that corner with electricity. People were coming in all morning to charge cell phones and blackberries, without being made to purchase anything. Now that’s neighborhood.<br />I grew up in an insular suburban community. We all would have pooled our resources to help Mrs. Pearson, or the Sawyers, if they needed it, so I’m familiar with neighborly bonds. What is weird is that in that community we all already knew each other. In north Minneapolis, some dude could walk up from the alley and tell me he’s lived here for ages, and needs some help getting debris out of the way down the block, and I’d grab a saw. I wouldn’t ask who he is. I wouldn’t question his motives. Because <a href="http://moqev.blogspot.com/2010/12/2-minneapple-neighborly-connections.html">I’ve been on the receiving end of this Good Samaritanism</a>, and I am more than happy to pay it forward.<br />I have nothing against suburbs - I loved growing up in them. And I love visiting my friends on the south side of town, or across the river, or outstate. I love living in a state where everyone is happy to help one another no matter where they come from or what their background may be, but I will say that I really love my neighborhood, and my neighbors. We on the North Side are a resilient people, more resilient than may be obvious to most of the Metro Populace, and I am proud of my neighborhood for having set a high bar as the standard for communities working together in the Twin Cities. God bless, and god speed your recovery, friends.MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-14311143095354368622011-01-23T22:17:00.000-08:002011-01-24T07:41:09.982-08:00Abraham, Martin, and John.Right now in Minneapolis there is a controversy raging. A racially sensitive controversy. The kind of controversy that tears communities apart. It’s about an off-leash dog area in a park. I will repeat that. In Minneapolis right now, respected elders of the civil rights movement are arguing to prevent an off leash dog park from being opened between a soccer field and a freeway because the larger park is named for Martin Luther King Jr.<br />I admit, as a white guy raised in one of the whitest suburbs of one of the whitest cities in America, I maybe don’t have the kind of historical or cultural perspective to comment on such a controversy. However, I have owned a home in the poorest and highest-crime area of this city for the last six years, which in this town tends to mean it is populated mainly by people of color. Not that this issue is more economic than racial – it would appear from reports of the park board meetings that it is divided exactly along lines of race.<br />Here’s why I think that’s unfortunate: It <span style="font-style:italic;">should</span> be about socio-economics. Dr. King’s namesake park in Minneapolis is on the more affluent south side, but it is still wedged between a freeway sound wall and a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. It is a memorial park, yes, but it is not solely a memorial. <a href="http://www.minneapolisparks.org/default.asp?PageID=4&parkid=282">Here’s its park board website.</a> You will see, I believe, numerous sports facilities, youth recreation areas, public art installations, and if you GoogleMap "4055 Nicollet Avenue, Minneapolis, MN," some quality wooded knolls in the corners. Dogs are (& I can’t believe I have to say this) allowed on leashes in public parks in Minneapolis. The only controversy about the proposal is the idea that the city would allow a small parcel of these (approximately) 20 acres to be fenced in and free for unleashed dogs.<br />As someone who lives in an area of the city where <a href="http://mplscrimewatch.blogspot.com/2011/01/4th-precinct-weekly-highlights_4881.html">people of all ethnicities try to kill each other every day</a> (and we’ve lost a few in the surrounding blocks over the last twelve months), this offends me. How can someone spend their energy fighting a dog park (F.Y.I. the nearest dog park is over two miles away) on racial grounds, while in my neighborhood poor black people are killing other poor black people because they associate with the wrong crowd? How is a dog shitting in the woods more offensive to the memory of Dr. King than a hoodlum catching a baby girl in the crossfire of some stupid turf war that adds another tally to the homicide rate of an ordinarily peaceful city?<br />Let’s build a city where people in any geographical space have a chance to create something good and profitable for everyone. Let’s dwell not on past superficial slights, but on future opportunities for the common good.<br />If the opponents to the dog park really care about creating a place for the majority of minority constituents in the city of Minneapolis to raise children free of violence, they should embrace my neighborhood too, and they should try to keep guns off of our streets, on the north <span style="font-style:italic;">and </span>south sides, but they should also allow dogs to shit in the grass next to I-35W, because that has nothing to do with race or economics, but everything to do with the responsibility of cleaning up after oneself, a healthy dose of which I think could benefit anyone in any neighborhood in this city.MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-48314097099782028872010-12-13T23:19:00.000-08:002010-12-13T23:54:04.302-08:00Blessing Count 2010Lisa and I worked both days this blizzarific weekend at The Hotel in Downtown Minneapolis. Saturday morning we got up and I had to give myself a little extra time to clear off the car before we left. We decided to park in the heated garage under The Hotel to avoid what we’d already heard would be a snowstorm of biblical proportions. It was crazy downtown. Everything was closed. The people in The Hotel had nowhere else to eat. We were busier than we’ve been on a weekend in months. By 2:00 P.M. when we were done with work, the airport had closed. The people who were supposed to check out ended up having to stay another night before flying home, so there were no extra rooms for employees. We thought about leaving the car in the garage (since we don’t have one at the house) and busing home and back downtown the next morning, but by that point the buses had stopped running. We didn’t have a choice. We had to drive home.<br />Everything went well at first. The thoroughfares were passable. Not clear, but flat-ish, and about ten feet wide between canyon walls of plow deposits. The problem came when we turned off of Penn Avenue to travel the one block to our house. The snow was just a bit higher than the undercarriage of my Geo Prism, and we couldn’t go. A car was trying to pass around the protruding rear end of the Geo, so I had to run a half-block to the house and grab two shovels. When I returned they tried to help me dig out of the bank, but the car wasn’t going anywhere. Out of sheer luck a guy drove up with a plow on his pickup truck. He opened his window and hung his stubbled face out, cigarette hanging unattended from his mouth, and asked if we could roll back far enough for him to clear us a parking space on the curb of 34th. Seriously, if he hadn’t come along at that moment we would likely have been digging out for hours into the night. He looked a little like a young Billy Joel, if Billy Joel drove a plow for a living. That was the first Christmas miracle.<br />The next morning we came out to the car to drive back to the hotel for day two of Blizzaricious. We turned around without incident (since Billy had cleared the whole intersection the day before), and got up to the light to turn back onto Penn. The problem was this: Penn Ave is a snow emergency route – it’s the first to be plowed. 34th is not – it’s low priority. So turning from 34th to Penn involves barreling through the plow contrail left the night before and ice-hardened into a car stopping rampart. We hadn’t had the foresight to stow shovels in the car before we left, so we sat, hung halfway between the street we lived on and the street that would take us to work, while I poked at the snowpack under the car with my windshield scraper and cursed. Our neighbor, a man we had met on the street but not really exchanged more than a moment’s pleasantries with, happened to be waiting at the corner for a bus that I assume was never coming. He came over and helped us push off of the plowridge, to universal delight. We weren’t sure if buses had been reinstated at that point, but offered him a ride downtown anyway. He doesn’t speak English super fluently, but we shared some laughs on the drive nonetheless. That was the second Christmas miracle.<br />By the time we were done with work at 1:00 on Sunday life was almost back to normal. The snow was manageable, the streets were clear, and the populace was self-absorbed again. People had dealt with the adversity and moved on and were either gearing up for the workweek or heading home to finally relax, but I won't forget that twice over the stormy days we were rescued by an unlikely Samaritan. To mystery plow man, thank you, and you may in fact be right – I may be crazy. To our neighbor, come up the block, friend, and we shall feed you. I’d love to hear more about where you have come from, and how much we have in common, while we share some dinner together. Skol.MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-11995849588643508032010-12-02T22:28:00.000-08:002010-12-02T22:30:25.531-08:00Do Not DisturbThere’s snow here now, and there has been for about a month. It was weird: unseasonably warm autumn with low squinty sun but comfortable afternoons on the porch, and 48 hours later there were nine inches of snow on the ground. Later this weekend we’re supposed to pick up another six inches or so. I think that’s cool. Last fall I was a little miffed – we’d had an anemic summer without any real heat and the snow came early. I felt cheated out of a season. This year, our last snow fell in late February. We had an almost unprecedented snowless March. I had our garden entirely planted by the first of May. Then September was dry, and October was warm enough to give us a second crop of heirloom tomatoes. This might be the longest I’ve gone (except when I lived in Eureka CA for a year) without trudging through snow. I can honestly say I’ve missed it.<br />I was prepared. I raked the yard, I drained the hose and shut off the spigot, I cleared out the garden. I was just waiting for mother nature to tell me I didn’t have any work to do outside for the next few months. The window boxes were all blank, and ready for a covering of reflective white insulation. In short, it was time to hibernate. This summer was awesome, it was long, it was hot, it was glorious, but now I had a new winter coat from Old Navy and a pantry full of canned vegetables and jams, and I was fully prepared to make the shift from grilling green and red things in a citrus marinade over flames to frying orange and brown things in animal fat over cast-iron.<br />Plastic went up on windows, salt went out on sidewalks, and Kev went into a warm bath. Seriously, if it’s going to get dark this early in the afternoon I’m going to put on pajamas and check out before dinner. And thank god I live in a place where such is possible. All summer I keep sandals on and stand in front of the grill until 9 P.M., but come November I can step into slippers and sink down into the LaZBoy at 5 when it gets dark and watch the news, or a movie, or all six seasons of The Sopranos (over the span of several weeks, of course).<br />Since buying a house I’ve come to realize that this is an important time of year. And perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself with it, as well, for first must come the holidays. There’s shopping to be done, and family parties to attend, brittle and bark to be made, gifts to be wrapped, et al. There is really no relaxing, in the true hibernatory sense, until after the first of the year. However, the winding down of the outdoor activities and the battening down of the homestead for the impending winter is an essential first step. <br />The Earth itself will actually cocoon us into idleness if we let it, and after New Year’s Day I fully intend to let it. It’s one of the glories of this landscape: In the summer our workshop is the whole of the world (or the whole of our world, anyway), an immense expanse waiting to be subjugated and controlled by us in the form of lawns, gardens, parks, etc. In the winter our purview moves indoors to a smaller, more controlled, and more insular kingdom. My basement is finally going to be tamed, if only because it is my only habitable frontier for the foreseeable future. In the mean time, the raspberry sticks in the side yard will have free reign over the sidewalk because it’s cold and no one else would want to walk on it. I’m inside with a book, or a pie recipe, or a band saw and a blueprint. Eventually though, this house will bore me to tears. I love my house, but it is small, and doesn’t offer the kind of creative challenges I would enjoy. I will organize my basement, and repaint the bedroom, and want another canvas on which to work. With any luck, by then most of the snow will be gone and I will be able to move my operations back outdoors to rebuild the herb beds, expand the lettuce garden, shape the hedge just so, or adjust the boulevard garden for larger and more extravagantly humble stock. Anything to keep me busy and out of the house until I need to hibernate once more.MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-13670758183072568742010-08-17T08:23:00.000-07:002010-08-17T08:32:37.018-07:00My God Can Beat Up Your GodI am an atheist. As such, it is easy for me to worship in America, as I can do so pretty much anywhere I please. I worship in the North Woods whenever the Aurora Borealis show their face. I worship in the great Southwestern Desert when I experience true silence in the face of the enormity of the landscape. In the Northwest I worship with oceanic mist splashing up on my face from the rocks below. Sometimes I worship in my own backyard when I think about the bounty of vegetables my little plot of land in the city has offered up for me. I worship a very different God, though, than that which many of my neighbors revere.<br />I cannot imagine a situation where I would tell one of those neighbors, “please, don’t pray to your God here.” There is neither a physical place nor a metaphysical space where I would ever ask someone not to commune with their higher power.<br />I don’t understand how a person in the United States of America can “respectfully” ask another person not to worship somewhere. I, as a non-believer, can walk into any church I want and pray in my head to whatever deity I choose. Muslims can go right up to the fences surrounding ground zero and pray – I don’t think even Sarah Palin would try to stop them. What difference, exactly, is there if they choose to build a community center nearby in which to carry out their prayers and ministries?<br />There is no disrespect taking place here. Disrespect would be if someone were recruiting martyrs from nearby neighborhoods to brainwash them and set them loose on the populace. We’re talking about a Cultural Center and Gym. The plans even include a 9/11 memorial. How can anyone claim the people behind this project are being insensitive to the memories of the people who died?<br />I give up. I really can’t make a better case than <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypolitics/2010/08/bloomberg-stands-up-for-mosque.html">Mayor Michael Bloomberg did</a> at Governor’s Island on August 3, and thank whatever God you believe in that New York has this guy now instead of the Giulli-turd. I never really felt that connected with Bloomberg, but after this speech I’d give him a kidney. Him and any other American who makes it in before we change the 14th Amendment.<br />It’s about ideals, people. It’s not about commandments. It’s not about prohibitions. It’s not about arbitrary sanctions. It’s America. It’s about freedoms. Anyone who tells you different hasn’t been paying attention for the last 200 years. And it’s not just about freedom of religion; it’s about freedom of interpretation. It’s about tearing along I-80 at 120 MPH up the Donner Pass. That is when I worship my God – when said God reminds me that s/he could end me at any given moment. If the exercise of your freedoms does not impinge on anyone else’s exercise of their freedoms, you can worship or do just about anything else any damn place you want.<br />So the <a href="http://www.doveworld.org/">Dove World Outreach Center</a> wants us all to burn a Koran on September 11th. How is this helpful? How a dove, the symbol of peace, can be turned into an omen, is beyond me. In fact, how the Dove Outreach Center can call itself that while the only out-reaching it is doing is to sucker-punch those of us who have compassion, is beyond me. Apparently, they’ve out-reached their welcome. I for one plan to spend this coming September 11th how I spend most Saturdays since my hours have been cut back at work – exulting in my own idleness. I’ll probably pick some tomatoes from the garden to make a BLT, maybe go for a bike ride, maybe mail a Koran to the Dove World Outreach Center. I’d like it if they read it, but I can’t stop them from using it however they see fit. It is America, after all.MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-12620244069186313182010-07-05T13:08:00.000-07:002010-07-05T13:37:11.201-07:00Independence DayzWe were getting ready to light off some fireworks last night at Lisa’s parents’ place, and one of her sisters asked where we were going to watch real fireworks. We chuckled, and proceeded to show them how we do things in our neighborhood. We tossed some mortar shells up, and everyone oohed and aahed. The joke, however, was on them. Because in North Mpls, every house has a box of mortar shells. I have gone downtown for the ‘official’ fireworks displays, I’ve watched Stillwater’s display from a private boat on the St. Croix, I’ve watched the St. Paul display over the capitol building, but I’ve never seen anything like the Fourth of July on the north side. This year we were feeling bold after our detonations in the libertarian northland, and decided the cannons could make a stop on the front lawn before returning to the garage. We launched a half-dozen or so to the universal approval of our neighbors, but it really could not compare to the others on the block.<br />North Minneapolis has such a grassroots fireworks display that from dusk until midnight or so, you think you’re in a war zone. Literally every other household is gathered in the alley behind their home, launching professional-grade Kamuros and Spiders into the night sky. God knows where these people get the hundreds of dollars required for these ridiculous explosions when I see all these neighbors every day buying off-brand milk with EBT cards, but God Bless ‘em, these displays are beautiful, and plentiful. We got back into town around sundown, lit our few, and then sat with beers in the balmy summer dark until 11:00 P.M. or so watching some anonymous pyrotech artist across the alley shooting impressively crazy misdemeanors into the air. The battery on my camera was, unfortunately, dead, but here are some photos from a couple years ago that are comparable to last night’s display:<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ-1xCusdeXW1szbLZ3av-DlfOSiWY7U_5z6HXvPVhjqDYuzMcGjQ16bXihx-1izh3TGAaD8wp2xH096RlR-kDmkVz9c5fDzGoD4mCMKKao_Zz3ofU5W8HWa_C0HG4GU7h6b-NwhwFQ6Q/s1600/DSCF1226.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ-1xCusdeXW1szbLZ3av-DlfOSiWY7U_5z6HXvPVhjqDYuzMcGjQ16bXihx-1izh3TGAaD8wp2xH096RlR-kDmkVz9c5fDzGoD4mCMKKao_Zz3ofU5W8HWa_C0HG4GU7h6b-NwhwFQ6Q/s200/DSCF1226.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5490519239135689122" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghh_yBUBdxPPMun7P4S1gPUyeIsFcLpW0plGG4M2idYMcFv5iMIc2Hi4gpJzrq9FtXWE7H-RBhX0vfuiSw8sHGp4M1WCKleFpzg4FqVKYWzUhCntsf4s4geMAQD1S610rsP2A1qpsf3KU/s1600/DSCF1228.JPG"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghh_yBUBdxPPMun7P4S1gPUyeIsFcLpW0plGG4M2idYMcFv5iMIc2Hi4gpJzrq9FtXWE7H-RBhX0vfuiSw8sHGp4M1WCKleFpzg4FqVKYWzUhCntsf4s4geMAQD1S610rsP2A1qpsf3KU/s200/DSCF1228.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5490520303397725954" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo4ICoOCUGyeBisjVGp5wqM9eYRfJFFT-2ypc_zIn1K-Uk55v8SCOTvYPVwHwPK4X3YCF4M67OJb1nTcc6CTSIlujHg0L_82xLqXtTQym_meqA8FMP2IgNVsR05rc2-9yg_D3AGcl9z8Q/s1600/DSCF1236.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo4ICoOCUGyeBisjVGp5wqM9eYRfJFFT-2ypc_zIn1K-Uk55v8SCOTvYPVwHwPK4X3YCF4M67OJb1nTcc6CTSIlujHg0L_82xLqXtTQym_meqA8FMP2IgNVsR05rc2-9yg_D3AGcl9z8Q/s200/DSCF1236.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5490523154362559858" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc-MubNlgSsRzMSZsXg1DwEVL36li2j-JF4QX7LwD1ClhyphenhyphenQAsD_oV8y6_fSJFoHIkYaRYNetw99i0Ldt0-7Yqx6KfpwjjvkNn3UAvGiYHSv_ypoCkYVKrDmdR9qoOpqer3xgFtYrHf0E8/s1600/DSCF1234.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc-MubNlgSsRzMSZsXg1DwEVL36li2j-JF4QX7LwD1ClhyphenhyphenQAsD_oV8y6_fSJFoHIkYaRYNetw99i0Ldt0-7Yqx6KfpwjjvkNn3UAvGiYHSv_ypoCkYVKrDmdR9qoOpqer3xgFtYrHf0E8/s200/DSCF1234.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5490520723692163538" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3PsepkvEW9XNIf-tzu-XYha_pxZPVGJ5bPWJ5wl6wA6Xvsa-JmuMJMjQEwD24HSWgn2neqgXq4zVOueAc-BXY8ZRv_Zh8PPd4bUvtikoFb-9Nc9LKUjzJ5Y64z49Qvue8R3q65_MgUCE/s1600/DSCF1242.JPG"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 200px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3PsepkvEW9XNIf-tzu-XYha_pxZPVGJ5bPWJ5wl6wA6Xvsa-JmuMJMjQEwD24HSWgn2neqgXq4zVOueAc-BXY8ZRv_Zh8PPd4bUvtikoFb-9Nc9LKUjzJ5Y64z49Qvue8R3q65_MgUCE/s200/DSCF1242.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5490521040809949682" /></a>MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-79387780820809614762010-06-15T12:13:00.000-07:002010-06-15T21:41:55.307-07:00A Summer Weekend in the CountryThree-hundred-sixty days a year, this hillside is an ordinary hillside. Full of unmown grass and unchecked groves of old growth trees. Five days out of the year though, <a href="http://www.hennepincountyfair.com/">Hennepin County</a> descends on this place and turns it into something grand. The striped canvas canopies go up, the rides are erected, and the livestock are unloaded into their sawdust-floored tent. Funnel cakes and corn dogs are fried, and the air is filled with music, mud, and aromas of all kinds.<br />Twine goes up in horizontal lines to demark parking spaces. Signs appear on the two-lane county highways surrounding the grounds. The majority of people in the county, being city-dwellers, don’t notice. But the most talented bakers, quilters, musicians, and demolition drivers from Hennepin County converge on this park in Corcoran to show off their skills and wares, and to be judged by their peers. Teenagers come from far and wide around the area to preen, to parade, and to pretend they don’t know their whole world is watching them.<br />The county fair is a microcosm of Americana in the Midwest. By daylight, the respectable elders showcase their learned skills and crafts to the universal admiration of one and all, while the kids pet goats and eat mini-donuts. Then, once the sun goes down and the faux calliope on the carousel starts up, all of our progeny line up to be happily loaded into an iron cage by a mustachioed man and hurled into the night in every direction, against all the advice we’ve given them (and remember, this is in contrast to the demolition derby drivers). By night, there are all kinds of unsavory joys – mud, beer, rock and roll, cotton candy. There is an unspoken element of the unsafe in a county fair. Something that harkens back to ages ago, it may be a horticultural gathering place for the families of the county, but it still has an air that might just seduce your son to run away with the traveling circus.<br />I once met a girl who later ended up running away with a carny from the state fair midway. I never really understood why until I went to the Hennepin County Fair for the first time. There is in fact a romantic element to the fair (by which I refer to number <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/romantic">4a in the Merriam-Webster definition</a>). The exhibitions and petting zoos are contrasted with the traveling people who turn it into a spectacle. Without the carnival aspect, it’s just a quilting bee. With them, it becomes an event. It is impressive to imagine that these people, these travelers, create this much awe and wonder from an ordinary hillside wherever they go, and to want to imagine we can become such catalysts for adventure ourselves. <br />I am old enough to know better. I have moved beyond the barking and preening, and I am comfortable not creating awe wherever I go. I am content to pet the goats and I am impressed by the ribbons on the jelly jars. My fiancée, as it turns out, makes the best corn relish in Hennepin County. We found this out last summer, when an impartial panel of judges bestowed a ribbon and a very proletarian $8 prize on her. The eight bucks I’m sure we spent on beer, or produce, or maybe a movie ticket, but the fact that the relish came in first is something we’ve yet to grow tired of. I myself entered some of my Swedish Rye Bread this year, and Octoberfest Mustard, and Maple Nut-Brown Ale, just because I can, and for zero dollars, it’s the best price for feedback.<br />But what I’m really going to the fair for is the demolition derby. It’s the mustachioed man loading kids into the “Kami-Kaze” ride. It’s the sitting under the big tent with a beer and a corn dog imagining how peaceful this hillside normally is, and what we degenerates have done with it. And yes, it’s for coming home with mud on every bit of my clothing and not being even the least bit sorry. Because I’m not one of the respectable elders yet, and I won’t act like one until I earn that blue ribbon.MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-7829737686170682412010-05-22T18:33:00.000-07:002010-05-23T21:57:32.867-07:00Runaway Carts and Forgotten ProduceI had my own little "Sliding Doors" moment this evening. Bear with me through the background: Lisa and I were making spicy ginger sticky wings for dinner, and we thought we'd do a cabbage salad to go with them. I, however, had forgotten to buy scallions last time I was at the store. So while the wings cooked, I headed over to Rainbow Foods to get a bunch. Rainbow in Robbinsdale is in a giant old building with an interminable surface parking lot that spans a couple thousand feet along Bottineau Blvd, where it is shared by an Outpatient Center for North Memorial.<br />So I walked in from the car through hurricane gusts (it's been windy in the Midwest today), got my fifty-nine cent bunch of green onions, and stepped up to the register. The clerk and I exchanged some banter: "Just the onions?" "Yeah," I said, "I forgot ONE ingredient when I was here earlier. Next time I'm making a list." We both chuckled. As I walked away I realized she had forgotten to give me my 41¢ change from my dollar. I paused and thought, "it's just forty-one cents," and kept walking. As I was exiting the store there was a woman in front of me pushing a cart with one bag of groceries and her (I would guess) four year old son in it. Coming out the front door I noticed out of the corner of my eye one of those big, heavy, <a href="http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6572122-0-large.jpg">child-seat equipped carts</a> rolling, propelled by this evening's heavy winds up the parking lot straight for them. There was a girl coming into the store who had seen this and was jogging over, but couldn't get there in time. I ran ahead and stopped the cart just before it hit this woman, her cart, and consequently her kid. It was actually moving at a clip with some destructive momentum. She thanked me, and I said "Where the hell did <span style="font-style:italic;">that</span> come from?" The other girl said, "Way over there! We watched it come all the way up from the hospital!"<br />I'm not saying I saved anyone's life, but it occurred to me that if I had turned around and said, "Excuse me ma'am, I think you forgot my change," I likely would have exited the store to see this woman standing over her son, skinned knees and all, surrounded by groceries in the parking lot. I'd say avoiding the band-aids and repacking was worth forty-one cents. But now I have to go raid the couch cushions so I can get a paper tomorrow morning.MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-82411123720278256472010-04-08T12:03:00.000-07:002010-04-12T16:32:33.129-07:00Of Ice and MenI was thinking about something last week while my team lost our final curling match of the season.<br />My Grandfather (maternal, I never knew my paternal) died when I was twenty years old. I remember very few moments of my early childhood, but those that I do involve his errorless hand. Not in some creepy Jim Jones way, but merely as the trusted family elder who knew a lot of things about a lot of things. All of my uncles, competent men who were experts in their fields, would defer to him and ask his opinion.<br />When Grandma moved out of their house a couple years later, I was just starting to curl at the St. Paul club, so my mother nabbed his old trophies for me as they were clearing out the house. I thought, wow, my grandfather led his team to victory! After six seasons of playing the game myself I now know that this, of course, is not even remotely true. Curling is a four-person game. From the order of names on the trophies in my den I would guess my granddad played second or third for his team. So there is a good chance he got chewed out on a semi-weekly basis. Don’t get me wrong – curling is a tactful sport, it’s not like anyone was tearing into him, but if he flashed a take-out, or hogged a guard, I’m sure his teammates let him know just how short he fell of their expectations.<br />It is a really odd thing… picturing my grandfather, the family patriarch, as a curler. Picturing someone turning to my grandfather, sacred elder of my childhood, and calling, “why weren’t you on that earlier, chucklehead?!” This is not the portrait I have of him in my mind (perhaps my mother’s may come closer to that than mine). The vision makes him instantly more relatable, not the wise distant elder, but some bumbling guy who happened to sire five children (and he was a great father who did raise them well). I have to say I think I prefer this idea of him. I never really saw too many likenesses between us until I could imagine him stepping out onto the sheet and forgetting he had his gripper off and landing ass-first on the ice. Or having to buy the first round after the game because he missed his last shot. He has attained a hallowed place in my pantheon of Stoic Old Men Who Talk Straight, but the idea of him throwing 42 pounds of granite across the ice makes him seem like a fallible human again. It is so easy to canonize the dead, and some people will always condemn you if you try to make them human. I however am happy to see the ills of my heroes so I know I can someday hope to become a shadow of what they were on this Earth. So thanks, Grandpa - you still have mighty big shoes for me to fill, but with this new perspective I at least have a fighting chance.MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-34748998194560809782010-03-07T11:21:00.000-08:002010-05-22T19:14:12.990-07:00I think we've all had enough here.Language alert: some people or employers may take issue with a couple of words in this post. Also, an apology: I know I promised a reprieve from my recent rants, but this is too important not to talk about, even in this micro format.<br />In the year 2009, Minneapolis had 19 homicides, down from 40 in 2008. We all felt good – violent crime was on the retreat. These numbers were in contrast to the <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVVukww_-huLq4amC4d7edpGZLgD9hwC-_27ZBEQgr29DBT1hRg4HMdS1j27AfF3pdLE-2KI9ZoC00QDe39L8jqemTbKbhelCo_Z0kaX_YwCfdyzQDuR6r8fn9dscQdImaNRJ9eL6n4n4/s1600-h/homstats.jpg">mid-nineties</a>, when my city was burdened with the moniker “Murderapolis” with 97 at its annual peak in 1995. Last year’s 19 is the lowest we’ve had in over 25 years.<br />It is now March 7. In 2010 so far, we’ve had 10 homicides. In the first two months of the year (the quietest crime months, historically), we’re already halfway through last year’s total. I was at the store buying some beer yesterday after driving through a mob of people on Penn and 26th. There were bullhorns, cruisers, and hand-made signs. I didn’t read the paper on Friday, so I asked at the store about the gathering. The cashier said it was a march for peace, and the guy behind me in line chimed in: “This is messed up, man! I’m not from here, but where I’m from, if someone’s on the street and they fuck up, brother gets gat, but no one else. Up here, this gang banging all over, people ain’t even involved, minding their business getting gunned down!” Last year I would have said he was wrong, and that innocents are largely safe. This year I’m no longer so sure. The crowd was a peace march to the church where the funeral was being held for the latest shooting victim, a 17 year old girl shot in the neck while standing in a group of friends outside a party. I thought, <span style="font-style: italic;">well that’s good. It’s good that people are standing up to this and being counted against this violence</span>. Then this morning I opened up the local section of the paper to read that <a href="http://www.startribune.com/local/86726962.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUUl">a gang fight broke out inside the church at the conclusion of the 17 year old girl’s funeral</a>. Do me a favor and read the underlined, linked portion of that sentence aloud. See if you aren’t just a little ashamed to be talking about a major American city. Seriously, <span style="font-style: italic;">at a fucking funeral?! </span><br />What the hell is wrong with these assholes? I’m sorry, but I’ve lived on the north side long enough to say this is my neighborhood too - as well as the woman two houses down who works for the city, the men who own and run the Quick Mart two blocks over, the teachers at the school at the end of my block, not to mention the children going to said school - and I’d like to respectfully ask these gang bangers to get the hell out of our city. We citizens of this place are trying to build a positive community up here, opening restaurants and businesses, creating community gardens, making public art, and you are cutting down our efforts. So get out. If you want to be a tough guy, cowboy, or vigilante with your guns and dope, you go do it somewhere else. We’re trying to freakin' live here. The quotation in the paper from Al Flowers, the former mayoral candidate, community activist, and sometimes political troublemaker, says it best. Outside the church yesterday, he called into a bullhorn as the police tried to diffuse the situation, “This is a baby’s funeral! Seventeen years old and she can’t rest in peace?”<br />Can I just say that in five plus years of owning a home on the north side of MPLS, this spring is the first time I’ve ever avoided certain areas of the neighborhood, even in my car, for safety reasons. That is not the neighborhood I bought into, and desperately wanted to turn into a beautiful urban area. That is not a place I would want to open a business or raise a family in. That is not a place that will attract new residents – residents who care about the place and want to live in a truly neighborly hood.<br />I’ve always been the quiet neighbor. The guy who lives here and gardens and walks places in the neighborhood, but pretty much keeps to himself. As of now I am making a resolution (if a late one). This year I am going to be more involved in the life of the greater community. I will get to know more of my neighbors, and show them that I truly care about our block, our community, and their own well-being. I will attend block parties, Take Back the Night picnics, and public festivals. I will be a visible part of this neighborhood, because I am a part of it, and I don’t like some of the violent elements that have been rearing their ugly, gun-toting heads lately. So to the north side council members, Don Samuels, Diane Hofstede, & my own Barb Johnson, police chief Tim Dolan, and Mayor R.T. Rybak, I say this: I’m going to do my part. Now it is up to you all to give us a fighting chance. Step up beat patrols, yes, but also get more familiar with this troubled community. Ask us how the municipal powers that be can facilitate growth and the culture of this part of the city. We are unique, and have unique problems here. We will need unique solutions that only we on the ground can come up with, but only you can make happen. Let’s talk.MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-73807735651227095392010-03-02T09:14:00.000-08:002010-03-02T12:10:39.554-08:00Familiar, and Familial, Arguments for Common DecencyLiberal Alert: As a heads up, I feel I must inform you that this is a leftist political rant. Feel free to skip it if you think you'll angrily disagree.<br />Two weeks ago, our MN legislature overwhelmingly passed an extension of General Assistance Medical Care. For those of you outside the state, I'll explain. In MN, the GAMC program provides for our state's poorest citizens. They make less than $8,000 per year. They do not have children, and many do not have permanent housing. They don't qualify for Medicaid, and they would face a four month waiting list for any procedure under Minnesota Care. At any given time there is an average of 35,000 of them on the rolls. The program was set to expire March 1st. The legislature rallied to the aid of these people, many of whom survive on $203/month for their housing and food, and have mental illnesses that make it difficult to locate their bootstraps, much less pull themselves up by them. A sixteen month extension of the benefits was passed with some alterations, so we would have time to create a permanent fix without throwing these people to the wolves in the meantime.<br />The senate approved the measure 47-16. The house, in an amazing show of bipartisanship for the common good, blasted the measure through 125-9 (an aside: the nine who voted against it are listed <a href="http://politicsinminnesota.com/blog/2010/02/a-rout-in-the-house-only-nine-republicans-vote-against-gamc-bill/">here</a>. I did some math at the U.S. Census website, and the approximate median income of the cities and townships in which they live [in the 2000 count] is about $60K. The median poverty level for individuals over the age of 18: 1.9 percent). They were both sturdily veto-proof majorities. We all felt good.<br />The day that it passed and was presented to our anti-governor Tim Pawlenty, he faxed a veto letter from Washington, where he was speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Okay, we all know he's a prick, but they were veto-proof majorities, remember? This should be a piece of cake! Last Thursday the senate voted to override the veto. The result: 45-21. Done. Then, yesterday the house voted. Remember the house vote numbers? 125-9. You'd think this would be easier than falling down a flight of stairs. The override vote tally: 86-47. Fail along straight party lines. So it would appear that all of these worthless empty suits on the other side of the aisle (38 of them in total) couldn't be bothered to stick to their guns as soon as our globe-trotting village idiot weighed in with his own political posturing (recall what happened when his veto of a gas tax was overridden last year in my <a href="http://moqev.blogspot.com/2009/04/waiting-for-that-midterm-election.html">previous post</a>).<br />Here's my rant. I don't understand how anyone with half a heart can look at someone making less than $8000 in a year and say, "sorry, but you don't deserve to get better." I also don't understand how anyone with half a brain can look at that same person and say, "no, I won't help with preventative care - you should wait until you need ER care. <span style="font-style: italic;">Then</span> you can bill me through higher premiums."<br />For a while now I have found the tired Anti-Tax argument of “when families have to tighten their belts, so does government,” really offensive. After all, when families are tightening their belts, whom do they rely on to pick up the slack? Why do we have GAMC or Medicaid or WIC or EBT or even Unemployment Insurance if not to take care of those that can’t take care of themselves for whatever reason? When my belt is tightened by circumstances out of my control (Full disclosure: I made $17K and change last year, so I’m not destitute, but still not quite A-OK), I expect government to step up and say, “Do not worry – we shall catch you and put you back on your feet.”<br />But that old argument I hate so much seems entrenched, so let’s explore it: If we’re running government as a family, we’re running society as a family – government, by definition, governs society. You don’t get to decide who is and isn’t part of the American Family. We all are here, and we all have needs. What do you do with a nephew who can’t quite make ends meet? If you have the means, you help him out. When your granddaughter gets sick and can’t pay the bills, you don’t let her languish in an E.R. until she can be seen by a doctor – you make the changes to your own lifestyle that you must to help her out and get her healthy. When your niece gives birth to a child with developmental problems who can’t attend regular public schools, you make whatever sacrifices you can to help that child attain the quality of life you would expect of a relative.<br />Fine. Let’s think about government in these terms (I’m looking at you, <a href="http://www.taxpayersleague.org/">Taxpayers’ League</a>). Times are tough. The family (the American populace) is in financial trouble. Not all of us cousins can keep getting by. As such, we expect the rich uncle (or grandparent) to carve a little apartment out of his or her six-bedroom suburban estate for us to have a roof over our heads. We expect the executive who drives on the same potholed roads we do to step up and make sure we don’t unduly suffer from a pre-existing medical condition that an actuarial formula has decided is too risky for the bottom line to insure. You would never want your progeny to take an hour-plus bus ride through a dangerous part of town to go to two jobs that barely pay the bills and don’t carry health insurance, so if you treat government as a household how do you forget these people?<br />I’ve always thought of government as both a security blanket and a benevolent safety net for those who hit misfortune and can’t catch themselves. Why else would we have a centralized, federal government if not to insure both military security of the country’s citizens, but also the livelihood of the nation’s people? As such, I personally don’t think government should be run like a household, but if you insist it be so, then I too am your cousin and I can’t be ignored. I too must be cared for.<br />(By the way, I will return to a de-politicized discourse with my next post, so those of you annoyed by my recent rants can come back and enjoy the historical nerdiness. I just needed to get this off my chest.)MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-39165901271340968592010-01-25T10:13:00.000-08:002010-01-25T11:05:50.870-08:00Of Losses, Big & SmallRight now I can't decide which is a bigger disappointment - being a liberal Democrat or being a Vikings fan. They are actually remarkably similar disappointments. Both teams are powerless for long stretches, unable to do anything productive for fans or constituents, and then every few years they find a star (or an all-star cast), and the hope starts to grow again. It starts small - you think, <span style="font-style: italic;">hey, maybe we'll actually get to the postseason this year</span>, or, <span style="font-style: italic;">all right, maybe we'll get the money back to get those 35,000 people back on healthcare rolls.</span> But soon enough the stars start to impress, and you start the season 9-0, and you start dreaming Superbowl dreams. Or a young upstart shows up, energizing the party and sweeping a wave of optimism into Washington.<br />This is it! This is the best chance you've ever had to get to the big game, or to insure every man, woman, and child! If you're going to do it, this is the best group of people with the best shot at it! Everything is going along swimmingly until an interception is thrown, or it comes out that someone in the party said something stupid and racist. A recovered fumble is lost again, rather than being run in for a touchdown. Fox news is allowed to dictate the discourse, and somehow manages to paint you as simultaneously weak, <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span> a fascist. The perfect kicker misses his first field goal of the year. You lose a seat in a safe state, and have to kiss your whole year of work goodbye (the <span style="font-style: italic;">Kennedy</span> seat? Really? Top notch work, guys!). You try to play it cool - it was too bad, but we'll come out just as hard next year! However, as the year plays on, it becomes apparent that the star just can't stay here if we're not going to be competitive - we lose him to a richer team out east. Remember those Fox news viewers? They vote your guys out. And suddenly you realize you're "rebuilding" again. When will the next time come when the hope starts? You don't know, but you're sure you won't fall for it again. Screw those bums, if they can't do anything! If they're always going to almost achieve, only to shoot themselves in the foot again, you're just not going to hope anymore!<br />But you can't help it, because it's in your blood. I didn't ask to be a Vikings fan. I know most of them barely have any ties to this geographical place, but somehow they still conjure in me a pride in my homeland, the North Woods. I didn't ask to be a Liberal Democrat. It's not my fault I was born with compassion and empathy. I never asked my parents to instill in me a concept of fairness and justice for every person, but now I'm stuck with it. This winter has been especially brutal, with the disparity between hopes and results much larger than usual. I'm not saying I'm giving up on either of my ineffectual teams, but we'd better get either a Superbowl win or universal health care soon, because I don't know how much more of this disappointment I can take.MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-80065054350309111712010-01-08T14:15:00.000-08:002010-01-08T19:49:40.821-08:00Like I needed another reason to loathe this guy.Rudy Giuliani. Effective Mayor? Yes. Opportunistic Partisan Douchebag? Certainly. Teller of baldfaced lies? As of now, check. This prick who demeaned all community volunteers everywhere with a simple sneer at the Xcel Energy Center in '08 is at it again, on <a href="http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/news_cut/archive/2010/01/giulianis_war_on_the_facts.shtml">Good Morning America</a> talking about the lack of terrorist attacks on Bush's watch. That's right, Mayor 9/11 is claiming there were NO terror attacks under George W. Bush. ...I will repeat that... the man who has based a political career on his reactions to a terror attack on New York City in September of 2001 says there were no terror attacks on the U.S. while one George W. Bush was President of the United States. For the record, George W. Bush was President from January 20, 2001, until January 20, 2009.<br />"We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We've had one under Obama," are Rudy's exact words. Assuming he forgot about the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks">Anthrax scare</a> of 2001, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltway_sniper_attacks">D.C. Sniper attacks</a> of 2002, and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_shoe_bomb_plot">attempted shoe bombing</a> of 2001, that still doesn't account for his blocking out September 11, 2001, a day when I personally almost shat myself watching him tell New Yorkers not to venture south of 14th St in Manhattan on account of the clouds of dust from collapsing towers<span style="font-style: italic;"> on</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">national television.</span> No terror attacks under GW Bush, sir? Perhaps you'd like to amend that statement to say something along the lines of "I'll do anything if you just <span style="font-style: italic;">pay attention to me!</span> Tell me I'm still relevant!", because that's all I hear every time you open your despicable mouth lately. Rudy, please just crawl under something damp and leave us alone since you clearly don't want to be part of the Post-Bush rebuilding process in America.MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-6113028838395597892009-12-15T12:44:00.000-08:002010-01-08T16:16:23.349-08:00What if this meal were your last?I can only assume I'm not the only person who's mind wanders this time of year to thoughts of death. Remembering those we've lost, contemplating our own mortality amid the sixteen-hour nights and dormant frozen life that surrounds us (okay, maybe it's more of a Northern, Midwestern thing than I first thought). Death, I imagine, is cold, and so is December.<br />I have a weighty collection of books of trivia in the den, and in one of them I found a list of some last meals of recently executed murderers in America. An aside: the book is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ws-Omnium-Gatherum-Moby-Dick-Theremin-Incidentals/dp/1402725701/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260922515&sr=8-1">"What?"</a> by Erin McHugh, who has a five-tome series of the five W's, and they are a wealth of unimportant knowledge for the trivia lover on your gift list.<br />But back to the last meals. What is the fascination with them? A last meal is food that you know you will never fully utilize, or even digest. It is ingested solely for the gastronomic pleasure of eating it. When you're trying to decide with a few friends if you want Thai or TexMex for dinner, there is always the assumption that the runner-up can be the crown winner next time. Imagine trying to make the case for one of the two if you knew with <span style="font-style: italic;">absolute certainty</span> that you would never swallow food again in this world. Do you try to fuse the best aspects of the whole spectrum? Do you choose one and have the absolute best of that thin range? Go simple with basic culinary staples? Wolf down some comfort food, whatever that may be for you? On McHugh's list there were two in particular that caught my eye. Executed two weeks apart, they could not be more different.<br />In May of 2002, Stanley Baker Jr. was put to death after being served the following menu: Two 16 oz. ribeyes, one lb. turkey breast (sliced thin), twelve strips of bacon, two large hamburgers with mayo, onion, and lettuce, two large baked potatoes with butter, sour cream, cheese, and chives, four slices of cheese or one-half pound of grated cheddar cheese, chef salad with blue cheese dressing, two ears of corn on the cob, one pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream, and four vanilla Cokes or Mr. Pibb. That is an autopsy I wouldn't want to sit in on. Thirteen days later, Walter Mickens was executed after having chosen to be served baked chicken, rice and carrots. It was what happened to be served in the prison cafeteria that night, and he ate only the chicken.<br />I was intrigued by the dichotomy of these two meals, and did a little more research. I found out that the internet really <span style="font-style: italic;">does</span> contain at least one of everything when I found the <a href="http://deadmaneating.blogspot.com/">Dead Man Eating</a> weblog. The cases involving the two executions in question are covered <a href="http://deadmaneating.blogspot.com/2002_06_16_archive.html">here</a>, in the third post down titled "Last Mealopolooza."<br />What strikes me the most about these two cases is that they both seem so cut-and-dried, but if you look at the last words you see two completely different men. Mr. Baker didn't have a final statement, and he even got his victim's name wrong. He was "doing what was expected of him," and never seemed to have believed he did anything evil. Mr. Mickens, on the other hand, showed nothing but remorse in his final statements, begged for forgiveness, and referred to his having been born again into the Christian faith. The man who ate a shopping cart's worth of everything before being put to death wasn't even clear on the details of the crime he was being killed for. The man who ate whatever the rest of the inmates ate was saved already by a higher power.<br />I guess if I were assured a seat at the right hand of the Father, I'd be a little more nonchalant about my last meal too. It appears Mr. Baker was less confident in his eternal lodging arrangements than Mr. Mickens.<br />Full Disclosure: If I got to choose, my last culinary adventure on this Earth would be a steak I grilled myself to a perfect medium-rare with hand-cut shoestring french fries dipped in garlic-pepper aioli, and Brussels Sprouts sautéed in a balsamic reduction. It would be served with a bottle of 1996 vintage Veuve Clicquot.<br /><b> </b>MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-64762486736848100852009-12-04T19:06:00.000-08:002009-12-05T12:21:10.296-08:00...and so this is Christmas...So we got our tree up. Merry Christmas. While we were decorating, we had KQQL 107.9 in the twin cities blaring carols on the radio. It brought some ideas forth.<br />I have always loved Christmas music. Though I tend to skew toward the secular carols, I once performed <span style="font-style: italic;">O Holy Night</span> for the assembled congregation of the Lutheran church in which I grew up, so I can hold my own with the Christchild, too. When I was small my parents had what had to be the oldest stereo system in the western hemisphere hooked up in the living room above the fireplace. The amazing thing was that it had better sound than any Bose radio on the shelves today - it just didn't have any components: just a tuner and a turntable. As such, my knowledge of Yuletide cheer was informed solely by Kenny Rogers' Christmas albums and a Time/Life collection of holiday classics on vinyl (I think the cover had some kind of Currier & Ives-ish, sleigh ride print on it). But man, when Perry Como tells you there's no place like home for the holidays, and you've got a fire going in the fireplace and you've never known a holiday away from your own family, damnit you believe him.<br />So now I'm older. I've noticed a happy trend in new recordings of old classics, and it distresses me. I do not have the gravitation toward fun carols that I once had. "Up on the Housetop" and "Here Comes Santa Claus" no longer hold the magic they once did. These days what I really want to hear is "Happy Christmas." The wholesome "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire" has given way to the realistic "I've grown a little leaner, grown a little colder, grown a little sadder, grown a little older," and I <span style="font-style: italic;">do</span> need a little Christmas now.<br />Here's an example I've been thinking about lately: In 1943 Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane wrote a song for the Judy Garland vehicle, <span style="font-style: italic;">Meet Me in St. Louis,</span> and they gave it decidedly dark lyrics. More than just dark, though, they were topical to the plot - "next year we may all be living in New York." There was no way it would ever do anything but exposit storyline for this single movie and depress the viewers of the film. Luckily, they changed it slightly to be less ominous, and in the process made <span style="font-style: italic;">Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas</span> a universal sentiment of the holiday season for anyone who's ever had an extended family.<br />The song took an unfortunate turn in 1957 when Frank Sinatra was cutting an album called <span style="font-style: italic;">A Jolly Christmas</span>. Why he felt the need to include this beautifully melancholy song in any kind of Jolly compilation is beyond me, but he approached Martin with a request to "happy up" the song. That is when it received the loathsome anti-climactic lyric it is best known for today: "Through the years we all will be together, if the fates allow. Hang a shining star upon the highest bough." This is a Hollywood ending for what was never meant (despite it's cinematic beginnings) to be a happy-ending song. The first rewrite, and the one I know from my Time/Life childhood Yule dreams is this: "Through the years we all will be together, if the fates allow. Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow." As someone who has family in three different states, and who sees the people with whom I was raised and with whom I came of age maybe once a year, this lyric speaks to me on a very deep level. In this version, there is no guaranteed reuniting "in a year" or "on Christmas Day" - we just know we're all getting by and god-willing we'll all get together soon to sit with one another and pretend it hasn't been that hard after all. It is what the Holiday season is about - hope for tomorrow's reunions, and resolve to keep a fire going in that ancient hearth beneath the old stereo, just in case someone graces my threshold bearing Yuletide cheer. I don't know if I'll be in a position to host guests in a year, but for the love of god, if you people show up at my door we will be together, and that is what matters. Until then, I'm happy to muddle through as best as I can. So Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas Now.MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-15235179164847680692009-11-21T12:45:00.000-08:002009-11-22T18:01:27.843-08:00Maybe this means I'm all growed up...I distinctly remember the early summer days in my youth when my parents (or my friend's parents, or my school, or whomever) would take me and a couple dozen of my closest friends down to <a href="http://www.valleyfair.com/">Valleyfair</a> in Shakopee, MN. I'd have trouble sleeping the night before in anticipation of the fun to be had. When we got there, and had traversed the asphalt desert of parking lot to the gates, it was like a cornucopia of options for how to spend the day. The pirate ship, the olde-timey photos, the water park, the arcade... the possibilities went on and on. By the end of the day, after the dusk laser show, I was never quite ready to leave. I was sure just one more ride on the Enterprise, the Corkscrew, or the Scrambler was all I needed. I'd spend the evening lying in bed, unable to fall asleep as I (my inner ear, perhaps?) could still recall the sensory memories of being flung in all different directions and eating the cotton candy and funnel cake.<br />I had a similar experience this morning. I had to get to the <a href="http://www.mplsfarmersmarket.com/lyndale.htm">Farmers' Market</a> before they closed at 1 P.M. I got there and parked, and the Christmas tree vendors were already setting up for this weekend. There was still, however, a single lane of produce stands lined up for the taking. I worked my way down the line - Sweet potatoes, check. Parsnips, check. The Savoy cabbage vendor also sold the cauliflower I needed, score! I got the spaghetti squash I needed and still had enough money left over for a treat: homemade soap from the lady who gives out free samples with every purchase. I was there for all of fifteen minutes, and only got half way down the aisle. As I was leaving, I felt a little guilty to be making such haste back home. I was sure there were some persimmons that I hadn't found yet - or some turnips. Maybe if I wandered further I'd find the honey guy or the meat vendor, but I had exhausted my twenty dollars, and had almost forty pounds of produce to show for it. I won't say I lay awake in anticipation, or in reminiscence, but all the same my feelings during the event were largely similar to how I felt all those years ago at the amusement park.<br />The farmers' market is a pleasure that is all too rare in my life - considering the fact that it's only available half the year in my town, I'd like to go at least once a week from May through November. All told, however, I only get down there with about half that frequency. So on this, what is likely to be my last visit before the snow melts in spring, I felt cheated that I couldn't linger longer, savoring the warm autumn afternoon and the fresh produce. Goodnight, farmers' market, and I look forward to seeing you again when the coming snow finally melts.MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7131671497667792031.post-50665069204278723992009-10-22T19:48:00.000-07:002010-05-22T19:14:12.991-07:00Coming back into neighborliness.Finally having next-door neighbors after two plus years of vacancy on my south flank should be good news, right? Then why do I strangely feel like my privacy is being invaded? I've gotten so used to no one ever being on the neighbor's deck when I go out back - now that there is occasionally someone else out there who says, "Hey, smokin' buddy!" when I go out for an evening stogie, or <span style="font-style: italic;">always</span> someone in the living room over there watching TV (and they <span style="font-style: italic;">refuse</span> to put curtains up), I'm a little taken aback.<br />I hoped for two freaking years that someone would move in over there. That the guy who flipped the foreclosed house would sell to a nice young couple. That's exactly what happened, and now I'm constantly catching myself thinking, "don't you people have to work or something? Go away!" It's not that I don't like them, by any means - in fact, from what I can tell they are the ideal neighbors. I should be ecstatic that they actually bought into my neighborhood. And yet, I feel like Grizzly Adams over here - I've been accustomed to the solitary life without neighbors around, and now society is moving back into the neighborhood after being driven out for years by foreclosures.<br />Maybe it's because they have their T.V. right in front of the back window, so whenever I'm outside and they're home it looks like they're staring out the window at me. Maybe it's because they remind me of people I used to work with. Maybe it's just because our decks are both above our privacy fences, so there's really no way I'm going to <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> see them when I'm outside. I think it's just going to take some getting used to. At least the house on the north side is still vacant for the time being, or I might start to get agoraphobic.<br />If my new neighbors happen across this blog, welcome! And I do mean it. I'm super glad to have you next door, and I'll bring some home-canned jam or salsa over soon to welcome you to the neighborhood. If you need to borrow anything for your yard, you're welcome to it. I don't mean you any offense with this post - I'm just a little weirded out interacting with people again. I'm sure it'll come back to me, just like riding a bike.MoQevhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15603966989483591927noreply@blogger.com0