cK's Hiatus Until June 12 NOTE: I'll update every couple days until May 28 at the Drama. I don't anticipate posting from Asia. So: June 12.

Just returned from Illinois and have family coming into town ahead of next weekend's annual family reunion, which also doubles as the annual fracturing of the family. I look forward to this. I do not look forward to this.

So, yes. Not to brag, but I'm totally incapable of wrapping my brain around all things required of me right now. With each task I take up, I feel the others are falling apart. I turn to one of them, the one I originally started falters. Must hunker down, you know? Much is to be done for work, and half the world in travel, twice over, awaits. I'll update every couple days until May 28 at the Drama, then it's off to Asia for a spell. Sorry: No opium dens or mail-order brides on this trek. On THIS trek.
-cK  ¶ 8:42 PM

  Put a Cork in It Good times last night as I squeezed in an hour of writing prior to a three-hour publishing dinner down at the Buca's on West 7th. And since I've already submitted my article for the next newsletter, I was off the hook when it came to responsibilities: just pasta-filled scenery.

On the way home, I stopped at the Garage where the kids were in high form. Everyone ordered "one for the ditch," as we say (grim, I guess, but a fine phrase), and the tales were told.

My dream was a rerun: a ghost story from a Japanese island. Third time I've had this dream.

Culinary thought for the moment: I'm done with even trying "meat sauce" on spaghetti. There's no reason to mess up good spaghetti with ground beef...not even in the midwest. I eat meat, but it doesn't go with everything, people. More about this Monday, perhaps. The whole add-meat-to-everything scene needs to be stopped.

Words I will not use even in satire: "This represents a paradigm shift." Shut up, you.

Thing I Most Want to Know RIGHT NOW: Where do you put all those wine corks, Lollie? With each bottle you open, you write on the cork the names of everyone sampling the wine. Seems you've done this for years...but where are all those corks? In the Atlantic with all those notes Ray used to put in bottles and cast out? In a storage space in Baltimore with the head of Miss Moffett?

Whose Boots Would I Kiss: The girl with the shaved head at the coffeeshop. I'm not infatuated, I don't wonder if she thinks of me, hummingbirds do not take flight in my chest when I see her, but damn if it doesn't enter my thoughts that she's got some superpowers. She crushworthy. Go get coffee, friends. Get crushed!

-cK  ¶ 8:19 AM

  Way Behind I'm behind on updating this blog, save for in my head. Apologies. I will tell you this: Today's favorite work song is Duran Duran's "New Moon on Monday."

You now know who I am: a dork.

Special thanks to Jess for clueing me to Gotan Project. I love those kids.
-cK  ¶ 12:34 PM

  Biscuits vs. the Stones Empirical analysis performed by the Fuckin Shit Biscuits reveals that they trump the Rolling Stones, mathematically speaking. They've even filled their site with charts breaking down instrument by instrument numerical superiority.

Big thanks to the KP uncovering this objective report. (Great to see you at the Dub on Thursday, by the way. Good laughs.)

So, hey: Check out the FSB. And for more randoms, see the Drama.
-cK  ¶ 9:31 AM

  Kansas, You've Done it Again To: Kansas
From: cK
Re: WTF!?

CNN reports that a bill in Kansas will severely limit the chances of "women" under 18 marrying. A crux of this is the state putting its foot down on the sub-15 marriage class.

Why is this news in 2006? Kansas: They shouldn't have been getting married!!! This just now occurs to you? Have you not seen Maury Povich? (Lord. That show is a form of birth control, I think.)

Needless to say, our particular inventiveness in this country for unintentional self-parody and social quagmires shines once again, this time from the state most often in the news for its raging homophobia, twisters, and expanding beltlines.

Marx: You were an idiot. Religion is not an opiate of the people; it's a narcotic, and Kansas is high as a fucking kite, man. It's a speedball o' god. And that makes me so sad, 'cause religion fascinates me. It's often in my thoughts.

Finally got my paperwork sorted out, I hope, for my China trip. The bureaucratic shuffle is maddening, especially if one intends to go as a writer. Extra suspicion. Extra forms. It's nuts. One can probably draw a pretty good parallel between the higher submissiveness in a population and thicker bureaucracy. The pen is truly as mighty as the sword.
-cK  ¶ 11:30 AM

  A Citizen of the World (or Parts Thereof) When I was in Duluth recently a man adamantly refused to believe that I was not from England. My friend Katie laughed and said, “He doesn’t sound a bit English,” but the man, more than a few sheets to the wind, pressed on. “There’s something there,” he said. “I can hear it. And the clothes too. Look at him!”

Pan up: black shoes with thick soles, dark blue jeans, black belt with silver buckle, and some sort of gray…pullover. Pretty standard garb for me.

(Crud. Now I have that “London look” mascara commercial in my head. I know I don’t have that look.)

More than a few times I've been asked if I was from New York.

Two years ago in Munich people spoke to me in German even though they pegged by sight other Americans (and Brits) and spoke to them in English. They spoke slowly, though, so clearly they didn’t think I was a native German speaker but probably some sort of European, possibly Swedish. Or maybe they thought I was retarded and/or on drugs?

In a thrift shop in Roseville, Minnesota, a woman asked me, before I spoke, if I was Scottish.

As a busboy in a country club, age 17, something about the way I pronounced “halibut” when I was asked about the special prompted the woman at the table to ask me if I was from Finland.

A guy at a pub I go to has a peculiar habit, when he’s drunk, of insisting I’m an Icelander, and he’ll proceed to talk about it not as if it was my genealogical background but nation of birth and childhood. In his defense, I did wear an Iceland stocking cap in the winter.

The other night at this same pub we were subjected to an immigration services agent who would not allow anyone to talk about anything other than Irishness, Scottishness, Welshness, Englishness, etc. Seriously—an immigration agent. He came in with one the heads of Minneapolis-Saint Paul’s airport security, who is a really good guy, by the way. So this immigration official kept threatening to deport everyone, and then he’d throw his head back and laugh. He turned to my Welsh friend (who is from Wales) and said, “You sheepfucking bastard you!” He turned to my Irish friend (who is from Ireland) and said “You damn Irish bastard, you!” He’d say things like “Fuck the English, right!?” Then he turned his eyes on me and said, “I want to hear you talk. I’ve never seen a more English face in my life! Look at him! You Anglo-Irish bastard. I just know it.” And he threw back his head and laughed.

Bill confused the man by saying, "Leave him be, he's Cornish."

Why am I thinking of this?

Just now in the coffeeshop, the girl at the counter asked me where I was from. She said, “You’re not from Minnesota, are you,” and I said no, so she asked and I told her about 40 miles northwest of Chicago. “I was going to guess the west coast,” she said.

Indeed. I walk between the raindrops.
-cK  ¶ 8:28 AM

  External Affairs The running season has returned, at least until I injure myself again and have to stop. Yesterday's first miles proved to be challenging not just for weak lungs (documented by way of a ghost / hallucination tale at the Drama) but leg strength, back, stomach, etc. Oy! The will was there, so that was odd.

Running/Walking always leads me to odd encounters. Teenagers ask for cigarettes. (What? Where would I put them in this runner's get-up? And would you still want to smoke them?) People with curious dogs say odd things like, "You don't want to bite him. No. No you don't want to bite him." (I'm thinking YOU want the dog to bite, pal.) A man on the James J Hill stairs once stopped me to tell me about the picnic he was going to. He was sitting in the sun eating pickles from a jar.

So life gets a bit more fractured...and soon enough I'm sure my foot will too.

As a celebratory prequel to running, I took a rainy day this weekend, or maybe it was Monday?, and had a pint of Guinness down at the Dub while writing. I sat near the front windows with the thick traffic of University and Cretin passing. I wondered when the day would come when a semi from or to the industrial park was going to barrel through the pub window and wipe us regulars out.

Two figures outside gave me pause:

1. A young woman walks along University in a green fleece sweatshirt and black stretch pants. She carries no bag, but she's armed with a hairbrush. She’s walking and brushing her hair and her mouth moves a bit as if she's counting.

2. A young man peddles wobbly along in the eastbound right lane on University. He rides with only one hand on the handlebars and seems ungifted on the bike. He keeps looking back into traffic, veering into the left lane. When he gets to the corner, he turns into the southbound lane on Cretin and makes a wide swoop back on the sidewalk, now heading west. He rides wobbly toward the street again. When another young man walks past, the man on the bike says something. The other man keeps walking. Soon, the man on the bike drops his bike and walks after him, slowly, arms out. The walking man never looks back. He crosses against a light, turns on a right angle, and passes the pub windows. He's walking back towards the industrial park, the most characteristic feature of which is the hulking stacks of to-be-recycled goods at the processing plant. Whatever we're recycling back there not even gulls will touch.

So the man with the bike watches this cat leave, then goes back, picks up the bike, and rides quickly away east on University.

Thirty minutes later, he emerges from behind a building across the street. He's without the bike or his hat. It's raining lightly. He's holding something in his coat. He runs back towards the industrial park.
-cK  ¶ 8:01 AM