Flight Music

So I recently flew back to Minneapolis from Tucson by myself, and I have to say it was an incredible experience to see the Sonoran desert drop away into the sunset against the backdrop of Jim Croce's I Got A Name.  Later in the flight we were out over the nighttime lights of Denver and the other front range cities while I enjoyed some Sturgill Simpson and some Old Crow Medicine Show.

I've been lucky enough to fly a decent amount in recent years, which has been great.  It's really allowed me to expand on my flight soundtracking.  For instance, I've learned that if you start Lamb's Gorecki once you taxi away from the gate, just after they've gone through the safety card, it will take you on an almost choreographed journey through takeoff and up to about ten thousand feet before it's over.  The song was made for air travel.  Going to Boston for work, I've enjoyed starting The Pogues' The Body of an American as we get into our final approach to Logan.  It wails along through the decscent and landing, and then it has that long slow coda while we taxi to the gate. 

This might be the single most privileged thing I've ever admitted to, but I love accidentally curating playlists for flights.  I mean, we've all seen the Mad Men episode where Don sits in the ascending plane while The Tornadoes' Telstar plays over the end credits.  But truly, what a spectacular thing it is to take off just after sunset and watch the sky darken outside over orange cloud tops as you climb into the inky black and hear Paul Simon's Born at the Right Time while the Earth curves away below you.  Or to follow the Mississippi down to New Orleans with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band blaring I'll Fly Away through your auditory complex.  When you're a kid they don't tell you this is part of your reward for growing up.  There are so many wonderful experiences that you just never hear about until you have them, and air travel with noise-cancelling headphones is one of the more magical.

My wife downloads shows and movies on Netflix to watch in flight.  I cannot do this.  I am a nervous flyer and have always needed to sit, staring out the window, with a couple gins and tonic to stay sane, so I can't watch anything on a screen.  I don't know if it's the visual connection to the Earth, but I prefer to watch the ground and listen to music while in the air.

Of course, over most of the country you can look out from thirty-five plus thousand feet and hear any music in a whole new light, but certain catalogs lend themselves really well to air travel.  Pretty much everything New Order ever recorded counts in this category, as does the entire discography of Booker T and the MGs.  However, timing is relevant, too.  Nothing beats looking out of a redeye flight onto a moon that's close to full over the snow-covered Great Plains with Blind Faith's Can't Find My Way Home playing in the background.

My soundtracking seems also to usually involve unlikely cover versions of songs - maybe it's because you're literally looking at the world from a new perspective, but it is a great time to hear someone else give their version of an old favorite.  I love California Dreaming, but for some reason on the landing approach I prefer hearing the version from Jose Feliciano.  One of my favorite covers of all time, Yo La Tengo's version of The Cure's Friday I'm in Love, sounds excellent no matter what you're looking down over.

The advanced lesson here though is that certain flightpaths and landmarks are also truly enhanced by specific tracks.

I love flying from Mpls to Chicago's Midway airport, mainly because it's like a 90 minute flight, but also because the approach to MDW is great.  It's an urban airport, but there are so many suburban culs-de-sac on the initial descent that, from above, remind me of Keith Harring figures.  It also takes really well to whatever John Hughes era cinematic 80s jams I have going on.

Flying into Seattle is a trip - you start out in this sunlit utopia with Ranier to your front left, and then you descend through the top layer of floof clouds to reveal there's a writhing layer of harder, meaner clouds several thousand feet below.  Only after you get through that lower layer do you see how far below you the city and its life and vibrance still are.  If you really want a mindfuck, listen to Such Great Heights by the Postal Service (or better yet The New Standards' cover of it ) on full blast while this all takes place.

DC for me is a strange call because from above you really see how close it is to both the hills and the low country.  Of course the obvious (and correct) choice is CCR's Fortunate Son, but if you don't want to get overly political any old Appalachian country music will do - or better yet, find yourself Will the Circle Be Unbroken from the Nitty Gritty Dirtband's 1972 effort to bring the generations of Americana together.  Though I did also once land at Reagan with the full dueling banjoes track from Deliverance wailing in my ears and it just felt somehow right.

Some of course are obvious - I shouldn't even have to say that flying into Las Vegas you should always be listening to someone who either currently or has in the past had a residential gig on the strip, and when landing at JFK, one needs to have a mixture of old Rat Pack nostalgia and A Tribe Called Quest churning in the earbuds.

Alternately though, part of the magic of flight music is opportunistic.  We flew into San Diego a few winters ago, and while passing over the grand canyon with the sun rising I happened to find Way Out There by the Sons of the Pioneers, and it was a transformative experience.  Flying back from Boston last Fall, while careening over southern Ontario, I had Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 come up in my earbuds unexpectedly, and with the wispy high clouds moving in the opposite direction over the autumnal brown patchwork of pastoral farmland, I truly felt a connection with the Kappelmeister.  Coming into Memphis, I enjoyed hearing Hold On by the James Hunter Six in our small (2X2 seater) plane downriver.  And the Atlanta skyline was beautiful on the horizon as we approached with Tom Petty's American Girl ringing in my ears.  

All of which is to say, sometimes the music I hear above a place informs my memories of it.  Even if I never land there.  So at sundown, when you can see a plane in the sky only by virtue of its reflection, and then suddenly the sun drops far enough below the horizon to stop reflecting off it, but it's too far away to actually see so it just looks like it disappeared...  ..remember..  ...someone on that plane is listening to Tears for Fears and looking down at your city.

Walt Disney Lied To Me!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 at all!  And so prolifically - this has been a LOT of mouse shit.  According to Don Bluth 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 - Rankin & Bass just never zoomed in on their asses when they were dropping pellets all over the clock tower.

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.

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.

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 big.  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.

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.

Don't shit under my fridge though.

Cherry Crumble

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 thousand beautiful tiny white blossoms, 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.
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 State Fair Blue Ribbon.  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.
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.
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.
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?

Spring Feverish

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 Graupel.  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.
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.

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 Windigo 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.
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 fight against some invasive insects, saving some berries in the garden and some boulevard trees.

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.

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…

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.

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.
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 this 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.
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.
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 Halloween Blizzard, we all have a story), and I've seen it snow as late as May 5.  And it's not like it snows and goes away either - between those calendar extremes you can sometimes have to navigate through this.  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.

Infinite Potential

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^th 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.

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.  When I look at the clouds and think of the enormity of things, I am sometimes over-awed.  I have to look away because it is just too vast to comprehend.  I look down at the skyline of the city I love, and the small scale makes sense.  I can see the building where I work from the bus, and this is a comfort.  I am headed toward a warm tower where I have created my own world.  The clouds above are not gigantic quivering pools in the infinite sky, but just a backdrop.  They are decoration behind the tangible play that is my life.  The building where I work is 792 feet tall.  I work in the basement (or concourse), about 16 feet below street level.  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.  When I walk through the dock from the tower to my office, I see these giant concrete columns, and they enclose steel beams.  Beams that are around nine-hundred feet long.  That’s .17 miles.  That’s a long piece of steel.  But I can make sense of it.  I’ve been to both ends of it.  I work at the bottom, and I’ve eaten (and served) holiday brunches at the top.  It’s a long elevator ride, but I can fit it in my head.  When I see a jet contrail against an orange sky, that’s sometimes 36,000 feet in the air.  That’s almost seven miles.  Think of something seven miles away from you on the surface of the earth, and try to imagine seeing it from where you are.  Imagine everything that exists between you and it isn’t there – that’s just space.  Seven miles is a longer distance than you think it is.  To put it differently, it takes roughly 45 seconds to get from the basement to the 50^th floor, but imagine that times forty-five to get to 36K ft.  That’s a really long elevator ride.  Thirty-three and a half minutes of express elevator.  On top of this mindfuck, there are clouds that you can see up to eight times further away than that.  Not to mention the satellites blinking cheerfully as they traverse the night sky.  They are barely clinging to Earth’s gravity.  I sometimes think I’ll understand the scale of the universe better once I die.  Once I’m not trying to fathom eternity, but rather am a part of it, it may all be clearer to me.

Neil Armstrong recently died.  He is the fourth moon-walker to leave us, of twelve.  His peers were all born in the 1930’s, and soon there will be no one left alive who went to the moon.  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.

It made me think about our collective lore a little.  What is lore?  It’s wisdom passed down generationally, or the fundamental narrative of a people, no?  A people, of course, is the collective description of a person.  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.  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.

Name a common exclamation of frustration when someone can’t accomplish something because of a technological shortfall.  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.  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 – can we put a man on the moon?”  A man on the moon is the concrete model of an abstract American Ingenuity that still exists, and still drives us to strive.  It’s the original MTV logo, for Christ’s sake.

So we went to the moon.  So what?  Well, for one thing, it is one of the oldest recurring characters in our discourse.  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.  The very concept of flying through space to reach it is kind of absurd.  Can you blame the ancients for anthropomorphizing it as a god?

The peak of Everest is one thing.  You’re still standing on the planet where you originated.  The bottom of the ocean is one thing.  You couldn’t live there, and there are a lot of hostile conditions between you and home, but you’re still standing (submarining) on the planet where you originated.  When you stand on the moon the hostile conditions between you and home are literally nothing.  There is an actual lifeless void between you and the place that made you.  And you’re outside of its gravitational pull.

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.  There is a road between Vermont and me, and if I wanted to go there, all I’d need is a long weekend.  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.  That road closes, and the moon passes into our history.  But I’ve seen enough 1960’s TV to know that the moon has always been our future, not our past.  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.  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. 

Speaking of enormous distances, remember the Pale Blue Dot?  Dr. Carl Sagan’s single pixel of light is an actual photograph of our entire 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 zoom out on that photo, 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.

Ode à la Grand Marais

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.  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.  I was flattered, and didn’t have anything else going on that weekend, so I said I’d be there, on a lark.  I haven’t missed the Fisherman’s Picnic since.  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.  Near-death experiences in the formative years nourish life-long bonds; this I know as someone who was once seventeen.  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.
But by the time I showed up, we were older, if not necessarily wiser.  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.  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.  To be a hedonist among puritans, just once a year, is an experience I highly recommend.  It will discombobulate you, but luckily that word sounds a little dirty, so you’re already on the right track.We went on for several years, kayaking in the harbor, Bingo-ing at the legion hall, and climbing on the rocks overlooking the bay.  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.  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.  And it's an adorable little cottage a block from the main drag, with an extra bedroom.  Then something different happened.  Jill, who had long since broken amicably from my best man, married the guy she was destined for.  And they had twins.  Twins!
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.  We all have mellowed, though we’ve done so at different paces.  Some of us have children, others don’t.  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.
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).  My initial priority was getting my tent up and checking out the rainbow over the bay to the East.  When my campmate arrived, he & I enjoyed a couple beers and some homemade brittle and waited for the familied friends to get in touch.  After they did, we were anchored in the town with them and in the festival for the weekend.  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 predate her.  She did not exist when most of your life took place.  She is a Descendant.
When you have so many years of history in a place it is tempting to claim it as your own.  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.  Yet while it’s tempting to claim it as your festival, it is so much bigger than you.  It is the one who shaped you, not the other way around.  It went on for decades before you arrived, and it will go on just as merrily if you never come back.  But you are that little girl.  You are a product, a Descendant, of it, and you owe a little piece of who you are to it.  Here’s to you, Grand Marais… may you shape and mold many good friends to come.

Thanks, Pop.

I recently saw this post on the Newscut Blog by Bob Collins.  It got me to thinking.  I have 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.

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 they hadn’t spent their every day in relation to me.  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.

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 (although this has proven helpful too).  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.

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.

Call me a Beverage Enhancement Technician

I 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.”
I am not making that up. It actually says “Journey Ambassador.”
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.
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.
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 really heavy on the individuality. Coffee is not only brewed, but also grown, roasted, and ground specifically for you. 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 to order?! 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 there.” It’s laid out on a template.
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. Yes, I realize all this is goddamned absurd.
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. Fast. 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.
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.
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.

Abraham, 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.
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.
Here’s why I think that’s unfortunate: It should 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. Here’s its park board website. 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.
As someone who lives in an area of the city where people of all ethnicities try to kill each other every day (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?
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.
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 and 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.

Blessing Count 2010

Lisa 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.
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.
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.
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.

Do Not Disturb

There’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.
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.
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).
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.
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.

My God Can Beat Up Your God

I 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.
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.
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?
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?
I give up. I really can’t make a better case than Mayor Michael Bloomberg did 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.
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.
So the Dove World Outreach Center 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.

Independence Dayz

We 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.
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:

A Summer Weekend in the Country

Three-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, Hennepin County 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.
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.
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.
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 4a in the Merriam-Webster definition). 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.
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.
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.

What 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.
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 "What?" 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.
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 absolute certainty 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.
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.
I was intrigued by the dichotomy of these two meals, and did a little more research. I found out that the internet really does contain at least one of everything when I found the Dead Man Eating weblog. The cases involving the two executions in question are covered here, in the third post down titled "Last Mealopolooza."
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.
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.
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.

...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.
I have always loved Christmas music. Though I tend to skew toward the secular carols, I once performed O Holy Night 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.
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 do need a little Christmas now.
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, Meet Me in St. Louis, 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 Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas a universal sentiment of the holiday season for anyone who's ever had an extended family.
The song took an unfortunate turn in 1957 when Frank Sinatra was cutting an album called A Jolly Christmas. 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.

Maybe 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 Valleyfair 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.
I had a similar experience this morning. I had to get to the Farmers' Market 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.
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.