TWO WEEK CRUSH

New Content at Drama Mater

2006-07-19T21:28:00.000-06:00

cK's conscience has graduated to a new plain of triviality and mahem. New content is posted at the Drama Mater.

You are loved.
-cK

I’ll Surveil You!

2006-05-18T11:28:00.000-06:00

There’s nothing quite like the security of being watched, or listened to, or monitored. I mean, when I see one of these bad boys,

I feel all warm inside. It’s like getting a hug from the Man.

I’ll take my civil liberties with cream and sugar please, LOTS of cream and sugar.

(Ugh.)

--jen

cK's Hiatus Until June 12

2006-05-15T20:42:00.000-06:00

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

Put a Cork in It

2006-05-12T08:19:00.000-06:00

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

Way Behind

2006-05-09T12:34:00.000-06:00

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

Biscuits vs. the Stones

2006-05-08T09:31:00.000-06:00

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

Kansas, You've Done it Again

2006-05-05T11:30:00.000-06:00

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

A Citizen of the World (or Parts Thereof)

2006-05-04T08:28:00.000-06:00

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

External Affairs

2006-05-03T08:01:00.000-06:00

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

Careful, She's Packin'

2006-04-28T14:23:00.000-06:00

It’s done. My entire life is packed up in various sizes of boxes, waiting to be transported to the new digs. It’s all neatly sorted and labeled. Compartmentalized, if you will.

Being somewhat of a minimalist, this wasn’t all that much of an effort. I mean, after all, the heaviest thing I own is a dresser. But it’s the little things that slow you down in the packing process. Literally. For instance, scattered amongst my papers and photos, my cds and clothes, I found five years worth of ballgame tickets.

Now suddenly, my sentimentality is in direct conflict with my minimalism. Just throw them away, right? OR (we rationalize now, my ego and I) here’s a better idea: we could keep them if we organized them in some sort of scrapbook or something!

And it feels like a moment of weakness, this capitulating to sentiment.

But that’s part of it—part of our egoism, yes; part of our materialism, surely; but also part of our knowledge that life is fleeting. We are silly and self-aware both. We want to have proof—physical evidence of our lives. Look, see I did this and this and this and that, and, whew, even THAT and boy, it hurt for a week.

It’s as if we don’t trust our memories, but we do trust our own (likely inflated) sense of importance.

But maybe that’s too harsh.

All I know is that I’ve forsaken furniture (including a proper bed); I try to give away books when I’m done with them; I own no movies and have pared my wardrobe down to one large duffel bag. So why do I insist on lugging ten years of (bad) writing in a laundry tub from apartment to apartment to apartment to apartment?

Or, for that matter, those Mardi Gras beads?

--jen

Update: I'm NOT Dead (Yet)

2006-04-26T09:05:00.000-06:00

Just working in Florida this week, no time to blog. Bugger all!
-cK

Quick Like a Bunny

2006-04-18T09:08:00.000-06:00

I'm behind on typing up anecdotes, but I did try to go to Memphis. As documented at the Drama, I failed.
-cK

More Than Just Adverbs

2006-04-17T05:54:00.000-06:00

Lovely. I'm just blissed out that Lollie has launched her blog. She's the sweetest pea and one of my faves. Please go have a crush on her words at Lollie's Follies.
-cK

Kreger’s Central Food Co.

2006-04-13T10:05:00.000-06:00

I have lived in this town for a year and a half. It’s a place that some may consider idyllic, consistently getting voted the best city in which to raise children, lots of public parks and a thriving downtown.

The people here have money, and lots of it,
so the schools are good and the library is first-rate. You can often, as I did today on my afternoon walk, witness a father and son having a catch in the front yard.

Seriously.

But, since I have no kids and no money and no plans on getting either any time soon, I’ve always felt out of place here—I am not part of this community.

Instead, I am a tourist and act like one; I wander the streets and marvel at the half-million dollar homes (what on earth do they put in all those rooms?) and challenge myself to identify the exotics in the landscaping. I watch ants teem, their constant motion giving the illusion of fluidity, and eavesdrop on parents instructing their children in the park (“Sit on your bottom on the slide, Derek. On your bottom”).

Walking this way, as a tourist, I’ve covered nearly every inch of space within a three-mile radius of my house several times over. Or so I thought.

Today I took a familiar route, towards the Catholic cemetery and its statue of St. Francis, surrounded, Disney-like, by bunnies, birds and squirrels. But a few short-cuts, switchbacks, and turn-arounds later, I was surprised by strange surroundings. Suburban still, certainly, but strange. I was on a street I’d never been on before.

It was, of course, tree-lined, with sugar maples whose limbs were just starting to spot green, a couple of Douglas firs, and oaks so massive their branches stretched across the street to tickle their neighbors, and whose roots were so strong they buckled the brick paver sidewalk.

And on the corner, in a small brick building, past hand-written signs advertising “Fresh Meats” and “Famous Bratwurst,” was Kreger’s Central Food Co.

A neighborhood grocer!
An independent, family-owned, neighborhood grocer!

I walked in, met by clean, colorful rows of cookies, crackers, and cereal boxes. Here, thick deep-green cucumbers and obese acorn squash. There, shelves of soda pop. Baskets of homemade apricot bread and tins holding hot cross buns. At the meat counter, the butchers were listening to the Cubs game while cutting chops and slicing deli stuffs. There were thick steaks and whole chickens for frying and even the “famous” bratwurst, bespeckled and footlong and fat as your forearm.

How could I have missed this?
But I did, a year and a half not being enough time to know a place, really. Even if you think you do.

I’m moving in two weeks, into the city, away from here. I’d been excited up until this point. But then I felt the slightest twinge of regret, about not being able to support this business, about not discovering it earlier. Weakly, I vowed to make sure to patronize them as much as possible between now and April 27th.
--jen

Creepy

2006-04-13T07:13:00.001-06:00

Does anyone else see a young Bill and Hillary Clinton in Caravaggio's 1598 painting of Holofernes being beheaded by Judith?

I miss the Big Dawg.
-cK

A Former Life, Part 5 of 5: Roseville

2006-04-12T06:15:00.000-06:00

Roseville is the site of my former employer's office. For five years I sat inside a windowless brown-walled cubicle in a spec building with brown carpet and brown trim work. Roseville is a city loaded with octogenarians, small office buildings, gas stations, chain restaurants and a mall. It's alive during the lunch hour. The drivers are terrible, all Cadillacs and SUVs. My Altima, sans two hubcaps, looked a little ragged. It was sort of like the Steve Buschemi of the city's traffic.

Today I am driving the ten minutes into Roseville to have lunch with another former employee of this office...though we're not going to eat at the grocery store I bought lunch at on something like three days per week for much of those five years.

I'm not going to say that office work sucked out my soul. That's extreme. Everyone's job has a challenge (Violinists need not apply!), and bills must be paid. The experience did leave me pretty goddamn depressed, though. A change was needed. The lunch hours, however, offered some simple joys. I wrote the following in January 2004.
-cK

My Lunch with Roseville

I went to the Byerly's for a little to-go grub. Shepard's Pie for a sharp, cold day. All morning my eyes had blurred as I made many revisions to a manuscript sent by a jovial, brilliant engineer from Eastern Europe. Articles (of speech) are not a common part of his English, so while I'm happy to publish his contributions, I'm a little nervous that in adding articles and reorienting sentences I'm pushing the text towards unintended meanings. Is "stress increase" different than "an increase in stress"?

The girl behind the hot lunch counter was new. She had a pale, round, Russian face (tiny chin), and her hair was pulled back in an Amish bun, complete with that whole, non-threatening peasant-cloth tiara which may in fact be nothing more than a reappropriated doily. When I wandered up she was absent-mindedly spooning cranberry sauce over thick slices of pork, probably wondering what it is that brings a young woman to this station, while I went on in the dream world in which I'm eating at a grocery store, AGAIN. What is it that brings a young man to this station? It's like a short story by Chekov. One of us should have a toothache.

I snap out of it. I order.

She paused, looked around. She asked someone what to do. The woman she asked was one of five workers huddled just a few feet away at the Lee Ann Chin's side of the counter, but who, in a Kafkesque display of bureaucratic imbalance, made no move to help the new girl. (Note: The Asian workers, who are assigned to roll sushi, wear special, blue work-kimonos. The veteran white women of the lunch counter wear sous chef jackets and tall, crimped, white hats.) The woman uttered some vague remark about how "It's probably more of a beef pie than a shepherd's pie" and turned away.

The girl and I are kind of frozen by this. The girl improvises.

She gets a plastic container. (Good start.) A pie wedge. (Handy implement for this job.) And proceeds to gouge all form out of this piece of shepherd's (beef) pie. It was a massacre. Not wanting to be impolite, I stared at some herb-coated carrot balls. I wondered, How does one ball carrots as if melon? What happened to the rest of the carrot? Perhaps they were shredded and buried in this mystery meat pie?

Slowly, slowly--I'm talking, for about 90 seconds--she picked out the pieces of beef, crust, mushrooms, and giant peas--Are those really peas?--that had previously been meant for a single, unblemished slice of pie. No big deal, of course. I would have mashed the heck out of it anyway. It was just one of those plodding moments when two people are united in the drudgery of commerce. We neither knew what to do nor had the heart to feign concern, but we weren't going to laugh about it. We were both just going to say Thank you and smile knowingly in the way that says, "My alarm is set to NPR." We did.

Outside, I avoided two cars packed to their powdered gills with octogenarians--who should not be driving, by the way, if judged by their killer clown car antics. Only video game characters drive with less concern. I saw a mini-van on the side of which was stenciled MOPAR RACING TEAM.

Roseville is a dangerous place. No joke.
-cK

A Former Life: Part 4 of 5, Germany

2006-04-11T11:04:00.000-06:00

In late February 2004, I spent a week in Munich. It was my first trip to Europe, and while I've wondered often whether I might live outside of the northern Midwest states (I really don't want to. I agree with Mips: It's the seasons, and these are my people.), Munich and my subsequent trip to Copenhagen and southern Sweden made me think I now knew how one might leave a country.

Of late, it's Iceland that has my heart. I've left many links to it in the rightside bar at the Drama. The following note was sent in a letter after I returned from Munich.
-cK

***

This country nearly lost me to Germany. I want to tell you about much of it. Today I'll tell you about this:

On Thursday I visited Dachau, both the city and the concentration camp. True enough, the most annoying people at the camp were the Americans. I can't stand anyone--esp. Americans--going on about Amercians being dimwits. I mean, really: Yeah, we're easy targets for it, you know? We've done a heap of harm. But most of us are really really good. There was, however, a travel group of American teens at Dachau who spent most of their time finding places to sneak cigarettes, cuss the F word as a fish breathes water, and threaten to throw one another in either the river or the ovens. Nice. Thank you for your diplomacy.

Many of them, though, were much more polite by the end of their tour. I saw a bunch of the loudmouths in the museum, where there are photographs of bodies and such. They had quieted down by then and were reading the postings.

So. The bunkhouses at Dachau are gone now. They've left two--each of which resembles a few double-wide trailers fused end-to-end--and beyond that just the filled in foundation foots. So Dachau looks like this gigantic park. There is even a sculpted row of trees along the center path. Nature seems to have come to something of a standstill there. The wind blows hard across the open space but it doesn't make as much noise as one expects. The birds are present but ambivalent. The quietest point I found was in the firing-range execution woods, one zone of which had a drainage ditch labled in German as "blood collection pit." Horrifying.

But back to the foundation footings: As I walked along the path, I had one of those ghostie moments. I reached the end of the first row of imprints. It was cold. It was going to snow later in the day and I'd worn too thin of a jacket. (Somehow that seemed appropriate, though. It was a pretty paltry bit of suffering on my part for had transpired there in what is really not so long ago.) I'd walked past about twenty of the footings, and as I passed the final one, I felt abruptly ill. I felt my stomach turning in on itself and a fist close inside my chest.

The feeling passed, however, when I was away from that bunkhouse. I went on to see all the apology chapels (the Russian Orthodox was my favorite). I sat in the below-ground chapel with a cluster of strangers, none of us speaking. It's a crippling sort of quiet that follows you there.

I walked the gravel paths of the Carmelite nunnery on the edge of the grounds. It was impossible to know if anyone was in those houses. Stillness, clear and absolute.

Heading back towards the museum, I walked up the same row of bunkhouse footings. And as I passed the one that had pulled at me, I felt ill again.
-cK

Here and There

2006-04-07T09:21:00.000-06:00

Today I'm there, and it's all about what lies beneath.

Weekend: Duluth trip; Josh's sister is in town; J & J's birthday; taxes. One of these things just doesn't belong.
-cK

Set That Time Machine to "Backwards"

2006-04-06T11:21:00.000-06:00

Never one to get nostalgic normally (except last night, looking through old photographs, or the other day, passing the row of Mad Dog 20/20 in the liquor store), I’ve recently been pondering the last couple-three-ten years of my life. Specifically—my 21st birthday. Okay, not even mine really, since it wasn’t even that mindblowingly spectacular—a few drinks, a band at the Metro, sneaking an underage friend into the Smart Bar afterwards—the usual. But that’s what I was thinking about—the usual. The ritual of 21. A co-worker is 21 today. She is planning a bar crawl, some karaoke, having people buy her lots of shots, passing out before midnight. Undoubtedly, someone “funny” will try to buy her a cement mixer,* the initiation shot to your adulthood.

So is 21 the capper on the fun or just the beginning? It’s neither. It’s kind of arbitrarily in the middle. You’re out of high school, but still in college; you aren’t married, but you’ve probably had at least one serious relationship. You don’t have a job, but you kind of know what you’d like to do. You’re on the cusp, ready to fall over into the rest of your life. And the good news is? Now you can do that while legally drunk.
--jen

* A Cement Mixer is a shot of Bailey's with lime juice--the lime juice makes the irish cream CURDLE in your mouth. It's thouroughly disgusting in taste and texture, and it makes nearly everyone who does one hurl big time.

A Former Life, Part 3 of 5: Dropping Eaves

2006-04-06T09:04:00.000-06:00

I write in public places mostly. It's been that way for years. For the most part, I don't hear what's really being said around me, though certain words--usually sexual ones, but also "Cubs" and "sudoku"--will snap me to attention, briefly. I tune it all out soon enough, because I must. I'm no good at lying. If I'm listening, it's obvious.

Found among the detritus of all the work I've never lost in a tragic fire, this anecdote from early January 2004, back when I used to hold Museday (though never the Muse) at the Tap.
-cK

The Lawyer's Wife

Next to me is a table of three genuine (and genuinely lovable) nerds. Their conversation is spirited. They seem to be catching up on many things, though this quickly evolves into stories, most of which I lose in the din of the place and in my own little writing world. The odd cuss, though, or mention of body parts, or the sudden drop of tone into something conspiratorial brings me to attention. The lawyer is talking across the table to the other nerds (I love nerds!). They seem to be a couple. Here is the story he tells:

He and his wife had friends out at their cabin for New Year's Eve. They played a party game that his wife had learned in college at her sorority house.

The other two nerds laughed. "Uh-oh!" they said. One of them even snorted here at the story's outset.

In this game, each person had an identity pinned to her back and had to find out what it was by asking the others Yes / No questions.

The lawyer said, "You know who I assigned to Doug?"

His voice had gone quiet, the very thing that probably brought the whole story to the forefront of my attention. He was trying to hold in his laughter. (Or maybe Doug was in the bar?) "Who!?" the others whispered eagerly.

"Pigpen!" he said. "You know? from the Peanuts Gang?"

The two intended listeners laughed uncontrollably, stomping feet, slapping knees, covering their mouths, leaning into one another.

"And you know what?" said the lawyer. At this point, I’m just watching. His face is growing red as he struggles to deliver the punchline. He says, slightly wheezing, "He wasn't able to guess who he was!"

Now they laughed even harder. The laughter spilled into the bar. The woman across from him cried, "What is he, a rock!?"

Poor Doug.
-cK

A Former Life, Part 2 of 5: Interior Lights

2006-04-04T07:53:00.000-06:00

Over the weekend I noted I’d publish a series of anecdotes about why I no longer work in an office, and I tried to support that yesterday; but, really, I lied. I’m just going to reprint some things I wrote while attempting (and failing?) to keep my sanity in an office. It’s just that among the many pages of correspondence I wrote during those years very little of it had to do with working there. My thoughts were elsewhere, as they should be.

I was reminded of having written this anecdote after reading a similar (though better written) anecdote at Reykjavik Harbor Watch, a site I adore. Lovely work there.

Yes, the ice has already melted from the sidewalks this year, so it's high time to get out. I've been taking walks and feeling good.
-cK

Running in Saint Paul

It was eight o’clock. Night. I went running. Interior lights were taking effect.

After 3.5 miles, I was feeling pretty warm and wondering what had compelled me to wear running pants when my entire motive for heading out at sunset was to avoid the heat. It puzzles me, at times, whether the sun is tougher on the body or the will; in my case, I suspect the will. It would be easier to decipher if it ached like my shins.

I ran my standard loop along the bluff, a forgotten road that begins in a condominium’s parking lot and snakes down to the hospital district. I passed the lonely-looking French-style country home with its “Rue DuPont” sign, past the crumbling retaining walls and fallow yards the walking tourists are never shown. I huffed up the six hundred feet of stairs to the top of Cathedral Hill. The bells would not ring at this hour. The traffic was light. I ducked down brick-paved allies. I slowed to peer a little longer into an enormous home in which people had gathered, just then, for a meal. Steam rose from a bowl.

Closer to home now, I drifted back onto Summit for another few blocks—all that brick and wealth. (It must be my will.)

On Portland Avenue, just past the law school, I slowed for the cool down. I took in the neighborhood and the evening air. I heard a small motor.

So there I was, easy in the evening. Televisions flickered against glass. People wiped at dining room tables. My lungs felt dry. An ankle ached. My running pants made that damn swish-swish sound. On the surrounding porches, shadowed people with awkward postures hunkered in high-backed chairs. A porch swing creaked. The small motor sound continued to buzz.

Was this a remote-control airplane? a remote-control car? It had that sort of whine.

Two houses from the corner of Chatsworth and Portland, the corner at which there was always the smell of dog feces, a small, slowly rolling, open-air vehicle came into view. Dusk. Am I seeing this correctly?

A young couple trawl through the intersection. They are seated on an apparently motorized love seat, the fringe of which swishes lightly swishing over the asphalt. On the back of the seat they’ve taped a Minnesota license plate. I could pass in front of them, they’re moving so slowly, but I wait and I watch. They aren’t even laughing.
-cK

A Former Life, Part 1 of 5: Just Add “Huh?”

2006-04-03T05:28:00.000-06:00

I’m conflicted about whether this is the sort of thing I miss about office work or one of the 2000 flushable reasons I no longer work in an office. The following anecdote was found on the disc I burned on my last day of trade association work, 20 December 2005. The woman noted in this was (and remains) really quite sweet, but she was (is) a relentlessly offense-minded conversationalist, which is a serious foil for other question-ready, offense-minded conversationalists like me. Those of you who know me will probably recognize some well-deserved comeuppance herein.

In five years of working with this woman—I’ve renamed her for this posting—I never found a defense for her style. I documented a number of these exchanges, and in each you can read my helplessness. At least I didn’t wind up like Luzhin.
-cK

Accidental Conversation with Molly, 12 Feb 2004 – Lunchroom

Our trepid hero cK stands at vending machine. Molly sits at lunch table. They are the only ones in the room, and two empty tables separate them.

Molly: Careful it's not counterfeit.

cK: Uh, yeah.

cK straightens dollar bill. Eyes a Snickers.

Molly (laughs): Boy, you got a lot of faith, huh?

cK fumbles dollar once. Machine does not take it. His hands don’t seem to be cooperating nearly as much as he’d like them to.

Molly: Think it's not counterfeit, huh? Trying again, huh?

cK makes a crisp fold down the center of the dollar, longwise. Why is he so edgy? This time, the machine accepts the currency.

Molly: Boy, I tell ya. You must be charmed.

cK: Pretty much.

Molly laughs as cK punches E6. The machine whirs to life. The Snickers inches forward.

Molly: I was sure it was counterfeit—a counterfeit dollar. [Latter said with a hint of gee-whimsy.]

cK crouches. Snickers catches on edge of row. Machine goes silent. Horror enters cK's heart. He hops a bit, goblin-like. Machine whirs again, and Snickers falls.

Molly: Scared ya, huh? Thought it wasn't going to fall, huh?

She laughs. The change falls.

cK: Just some high drama for the day.

He drops a dime, bends to pick it up. She continues laughing. As cK leaves the room, he hears:

Molly: First a counterfeit dollar, and then nothing. Boy, I tell ya.

New Reads

2006-04-02T11:46:00.000-06:00

I'll repost this reminder, I think, during the next week, but for the moment please know, dear friends, that the cK (i.e., me) has a second blog: Drama Mater. It's like your alma mater, only more dramatic and even less applicable to career-track work.

Also, Mips has moved her blog out of MySpace. Check out the Skyylark, please.

So. I finally found the disc that I burned on my last day of office work (December 20, 2005) and it contains more than 80, single-spaced pages of e-mail correspondance from the past five years. (Actually, most of that is from the last two, as the previous three years correspondance are on a disc burned during the e-mail system upgrade, late 2003, but that disc is, I fear, lost for good.) I'm going to post some of the office stuff this week: Why I No Longer Work in an Office. Woo! I've a crush on working at home.

More soon.
-cK

Flag Envy

2006-03-30T16:43:00.000-06:00

I claim very little patriotism, but then, this isn't about patriotism. It’s about aesthetics. And aesthetically, our flag is ugly.

Yeah, yeah. I know what you're gonna say. Symbolism, right? You're gonne tell me there's a REASON for those stripes, those stars. There’s fifty states. There were originally 13 colonies. Hey, I don’t need a history lesson here. This is what I’M saying:
It’s clash of textures, the colors are jarring, there’s very little design sensibility exercised.

Basically, it’s a jumbled mess.

Look at it (above) compared to some of the simple, lovely flags of other countries:

Micronesia:

Turkey:

Canada, for chrissakes:

These flags are understated, and calm. They are not barking out their name and allegiance; their pride is not overbearing; these flags speak those things with sort of an upright dignity.

Or, if we are determined to throw all good taste out the window, we could at least go all oddball and cryptic, like my favorite flag from The Isle of Man:

Again, to be clear, this is NOT about politics. It’s about art. I mean, can’t we get whoever designed the new ten-dollar bill to work on this? Can’t we?

Naw, those are pretty hideous, too.
--jen

New Crush

2006-03-30T12:29:00.000-06:00

Jill Carroll, the recently freed journalist in Iraq.

I got creeped out there for a spell when her death deadline passed and no word emerged. I'm really happy she's been released (and not just because she's a cutie!). It's a thing to feel good about.
-cK

Word "Op"

2006-03-30T09:22:00.000-06:00

For all the shows I’ve gone to over the past 15 years, less than 10 shows during which, I’m sure, I wore earplugs, I can’t believe I never learned sign language. I can’t believe all club kids didn’t learn sign language. But if we weren’t smart enough to wear earplugs (still not, though the underagers often do), we weren’t smart enough to figure out how to easily communicate in those environments.

A tale of another tribe:

I was part of a knot of mid-level nerds in high school. One year the girls took to speaking what they called Op. Op was a variant of English with pretty dependable rules, much in the spirit of Pig Latin. The rules, as I remember them:

1. Place “op” after every syllable in a word, save for the last syllable (in most words). Examples: Hopellopo = Hello. Schopool = School. Stopop = Stop.

2. In the case of a single syllable word, place “op” at the end of a word beginning with a vowel and after the opening consonant(s) of other words. Examples: Opand = And. Opit = It. Thope (pronounced Thop-ee) = The. Whopat = What.

3. The “op” insert is always to be pronounced with the short ‘o’, the nasally one. (This may have been significantly different had I grown up in Minnesota rather than around Chicago.)

Now, the mental dexterity required to do this is significant, I think. It blows sudoku away, I’m sure of it. The rest of us teen pundits publicly frowned on the linguistic fireworks, but privately attempted and failed to figure out how they were able to hold normal, if not faster, conversations in this manner. Their brains just hopped onto the ropails and topook offop. It was bizarre.

We were reluctant to believe they were actually interested in anything that didn’t involve 90210, the Bodeans, or that 6 ft. 5 inch bag sticks from another high school nicknamed Tree (the guy, not the school). Who was that dude!? I just remember him appearing in shadowy parking lots. “Oh look! There’s Tree!”

Ever read Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where are you going? Where have you been?”

To my knowledge, these gopirls rarely wrote in Op. It was apparently far easier to spopeak.

I’m not a terribly nostalgic person, have skipped class reunions, and have never wished for those days again. I prefer life as it hopappopens and what it may bope. But I’m fond of those friends today.

Chopeers.
-cK

Gangi pér vel!!

2006-03-28T21:05:00.000-06:00

Best of luck and happy days to you--Lisa, John, and Lily--on your move to Champaign. We'll miss you dearly!

-cK

Would YOU hire France?

2006-03-28T20:14:00.000-06:00

A friend interviewed intern candidates at her publishing office recently. She told me that a dose of the potential interns didn’t bother to change their voicemail messages even though they expected an interview call. (We assume they expected a call.)

For example: “Like, I’m not even home?, so…you can leave a message, maybe, if you like? And, you know, I might return it. Buh-BYE!! Don’t cry!”

This is not surprising.

Sometimes, such as now, I feel quite a bit older, and I think every graduating student should pass in her last semester either (a) a kidney stone or (b) a basic course in survival. Checkbook balancing. How to read a credit card statement/offer. Tracking how much you spend per month just on liquids (beer, soda, coffee, bottled water). Why a Napoleon Dynamite t-shirt is probably not what your employer means by casual Friday. Basic résumé-writing. How to eat something that isn’t deep-fried. How to sit alone and not feel like crap for it. And how to sound job-ready on an answering machine.

God knows I could have used some of that coaching, but God would, that Busybody.

All this is higher in my mind today because of the riots in France. I’m a little conflicted about it all. They’re demonstrating against government programs that will decrease job security under the pretense of opening more jobs.

Huh? Firing someone and calling that job creation for another seems an awful lot like a null scenario.

Sidebar: I’m reminded abruptly of a radio interview about advances in transplant technology and tissue generation. The radio host was really geeked about it, as was the scientist, but the host really didn’t get it. To end the interview, fully juiced by talk of hearts and spinal repair and hand transplants, etc., he asked, excitedly, “And what about brain transplants!?” He queried about a future scenario in which the brain is injured but the body remains healthy. “Do you think we’ll be able to get a brain transplant?” The scientist said, “Um, you wouldn’t be you anymore.” Awkward silence. The scientist added, “You’d be gone.”

Back to France: Yes, the availability of jobs and job security. That’s the issue. The young people there have a really awful unemployment rate, something like 25%. It’s a dire situation. The bright spot in all this may be the conservative agenda is so untenable that it will, one hopes, yield a more liberal culture down the line.

But while I support the labor movement, and I’m glad to see that the labor core came out to support the demonstrators, I can’t help but note that rioting looks terrible on a résumé.
-cK

Imminent Extinction

2006-03-28T09:32:00.000-06:00

What, with the bird flu,

and the Zombies,

I don't think we'll last through summer.

--jen

Giving the Gas Face

2006-03-27T10:29:00.000-06:00

I’m in a good mood, I swear, but perhaps it’s one of those days when one is keenly observant.

So. Yes. I’m in the coffeeshop and the guy working on a computer at the table next to me just farted. Don't deny it, dude. We're sitting on the same bench. (It's an old church pew.) Your gas vibrates along the length of the seat.

According to this speaker maker’s Web site, wood provides excellent sound propagation, “for clear, crisp sound.” I concur. Literally, I feel your gastro-intestinal pain.

The speaker-maker’s Web site even juxtaposes an image of the speaker with an image of a beautiful forest—perhaps the one they cut down to make the speakers. Reminds me of what I've written here before, of restaurants that use the animal they serve as a happy icon, as if these pigs can’t wait for the carving to begin. No, no, no! Start with my ribs, please!

Oy. Now he's shifting in his seat. He sighs, or maybe that's a huff. Just go crap, buddy! Or is living what makes you sigh? Friends, if I ever become someone who just sighs because, say, the Web site I'm looking for takes 1.5 seconds to load rather than 0.5 seconds, please kill me. If I grunt just because I've stood up, kill me. (The exception: I've been sitting cross-legged for hours or, say, I've a spine injury.)

I expect you all to arm yourselves with knives. I'll get up, world weary, and sigh. You'll appear with the knives and say, “We really wish you hadn't done that."

ARRRRGGGHHHH!!! He just sighed AGAIN!!!

[Time passes.]

That’s it. I'm leaving. Two more farts and about 17 sighs later, I'm out. He’s now sitting with legs extended, and he’s leaning back, his ass pressed firmly against the edge of the pew. It’s basically a full-body buttplug, I’m sure of it. Are you going to shit your pants, man!? ARRRRRGGGGHHHHH!!! Now he’s starting to read/mutter aloud!!!

Fate’s really been mischievous on this one. When I walked in, the place was packed. I took the one open seat—the one next to this gas bomb. Soon enough, the place seemed to empty out. I could let the first fart go, that’s fine, whatever, but repeated offerings, all that sighing, all that muttering. Come on, dude!

Also, the elfish-looking old woman who calls everyone "Ma'am" is here. EVERYONE. I can understand it with me, I'm a little pretty boy (especially since I’ve let my hair grow), but 6' 5" dudes with Grizzly Adams beards and Andre the Giant bellies? And the guy to my left is incapable of doing anything without great noise: coughing, sneezing, setting books down, setting his coffee down, stretching. Jesus Christ. And there's only so much androgynous jazz singing one can take.

Another fart! GAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!
-cK

10 Days...

2006-03-24T11:41:00.000-06:00

…’til Opening Day. My favorite day of the year. Opening Day signals summer and all those tired-yet-beautiful clichés that go along with it: hot, sticky days in the ballpark, hearing the thock thock thock of bats-on-balls during BP, cold beer sweating on your hand. Frat boy Cubs fans yelling at me that I’m a Redbird Slut.

Yeah, that’s right. I’m a Cardinals fan in Cub territory.
I know, I know. It’s dangerous. I put myself at risk every time I step into Wrigley. But it’s a sacrifice I make willingly. Even though I get pelted with peanut shells every time I slip my windbreaker off my shoulders to reveal my true colors. I can handle that. I can handle the braggadocio. I can stand the barrage of insults—many of them I can even consider clever (for example, after a particularly nasty Cardinal loss in Wrigley, having the entire park chant “I-55, I-55,” which is the road home to St. Louis).

I can deal with getting booed at on the street. Having drunk men leer, then jeer: “Man you looked cute ‘til I saw that shirt!!”

I can take it. In fact, I love it. And this year they are kicking the rivalry off right—the Cubs home opener is against the Cardinals. I’ll be on a rooftop, an “accidental” five-story fall in my future should we happen to win.

But as I said: I do it willingly.

Because, secretly, the masochist in me revels in being in enemy camp, in feeling like an underdog, even when your not.

So I’ll give them the season series over us last year. Afterall, it doesn’t matter if they beat us, if that’s all they can do. We went to the playoffs and they didn’t even crack .500. But this is not the place for trash talk. We’ll leave that to the “friendly” confines.
--jen

Setting Sweet Valley High to Boil

2006-03-22T20:38:00.000-06:00

Francine Pascal is the series creator for Sweet Valley High, a series for which she, perhaps, wrote very little. Perhaps. Number 1 in the series is Double Love. The writing credit is given to Kate William, and some sources credit William with all 143 in the original series, but many online booksellers credit Pascal with the writing. Wikipedia’s stub entry about Pascal gives authorial credit for many of the books to the menacingly prolific Jamie Suzzane, but it’s unclear if this pertains to the original Sweet Valley series or the many subsequent incarnations.

According to an “interview” posted at Random House’s Web site, this New York-born and –raised series creator lives in New York and the south of France. (And according to this review of Francine’s edgier Fearless series, Book 13, her knowledge of New York is sketchy.) If one is to judge by the sun-worn quality of the photograph appended to the Random House page, Ms. Pascal—Why do I feel compelled to call her “Ms.”?—is about as easy to find as Sasquatch.

I’m no Sherlock, but I’m guessing she uses a pseudonym. If it is a real name, she must have grown up as Frannie Pascal (pronounced similar to Eddie Haskell). And maybe that’s the sort of dreamer whose mind becomes Sweet Valley.

So. Much in the way that water hurled onto a mogwai produces more mogwai, Francine’s Sweet Valley books still seem to produce new permutations. In addition to the original series following the blonde-headed, aquamarine-eyed Wakefield twins (Elizabeth and Jessica), what with their “all-American good looks” and Fiat, there has been the Sweet Valley Twins series, Sweet Valley Kids, Junior High, Senior Year, Elizabeth, and the uncomfortably named SVU series. (One must hope that is a university drama, unconnected with the Law & Order series.)

The reason for Francine’s success is probably an amalgamation of timing, tenacious marketing, and the salability of crap. But that has its value. (As a dedicated Days and Passions viewer, though, I suppose I'm biased. And, yes, I read Faulkner and Joyce too!) I haven’t the attention span to follow any series of books, but they are an absolute gas of a read; particularly their unrelenting advance and redirection of motive and plot. All of it occurs in the teen characters’ interior landscape (way out beyond Thunderdome). The point-of-view sits upon the character’s shoulder, the narrator (red spandex-clad?) seeming to stir the pot. Consider this passage:

So why didn’t Todd know it? Tears of angry frustration filled her eyes. She decided she would walk home from school. Whenever she was out walking, she never failed to attract a good deal of attention from passing cars. The more, the better, she thought, swinging her hips a little as she set off.

And this:

Enid couldn’t believe her ears and told them so. “I know there’s another explanation. I can’t accept these rumors, especially after Liz has denied them.”

Todd, a sad, faraway look in his brown eyes, said, “Maybe there’s just so much a person can take. I mean, how long can you go on trusting someone, believing in someone?”

Or this:

“How terrific are we going to be, Liz?” asked Jessica, happy once again.

“Get out of here, you idiot,” said Elizabeth, grabbing a small pillow and aiming it at Jessica.

As soon as Jessica left the room, the smile left Elizabeth’s face. Will it be such a terrific night? she asked herself, tears filling her eyes.

-cK

Hallucination Nation

2006-03-21T13:45:00.000-06:00

While the cK has been off gallivanting in sunny, rejuvenating WPB, I’ve been here, right here in the dim, cold suburbs, rolling and reveling in my most nasty of illnesses. Did I cough? Oh yeah. Did I puke? You betcha. Did I go to the doctor? That low-rent quack? Perhaps something herbal then? The last thing I need is to overdose on Echinacea and then have to go to that quack doctor. No, I chose the route that all barely sane people choose—I decided that I’d just Ride It Out. Translation? I spent the majority of my weekend huddled on my mattress on the floor, sweating and cursing and sleeping and seeing things.

When you sleep for anywhere between 12 and 20 hours at a clip, bundled in blankets and a high fever, sweating an icy sheen on your goosepimpled skin, thinking about nothing, but also everything, in some wacky pastiche of a dream, that’s when you realize what you most want in this world.

And what you most want is to spread this hideous disease to your loved ones so they know exactly how hard you’ve had it.

Okay, so that’s not nice. But there’s nothing nice, either, about yellow and brown phlegm dripping into the back of your throat, or your stomach’s rebellion, or a high libido coupled with quarantine.

But more than revenge, it seems, that my two days of fever have knitted together a nice image of my future for me to stare at. In my hallucinatory state, I saw myself in various situations with various people (those loved ones I was so ready to condemn with this horrid flu-ishness). It all seemed in the realm of possibility, or, like dreams sometimes fool you into thinking, even that I had done it before.

There I was at ballgames—in parks I’ve been to and not. There I was making fresh tomato soup in a kitchen I’ve never seen, playing Frisbee in the Lake with a dog I don’t know, rocking out at shows of bands I’ve never heard of. There I was: jumping into his arms over and over and over again.

Was this my future or was this my now? I’d gotten confused. I thrashed a bit—the covers too hot but the air too cold. At some point, I slipped off the bed and pressed my face into the cold, and embarrassingly, dirty floor. I could feel the cat’s whiskers graze my ear as she sniffed the delirious white girl writhing on the hardwood, but all I could see was the early spring daffodils popping their greens up over the brown leaf detritus on the ground in the park. A hundred more simple images came at me in these hours and I stopped trying to grasp at them for meaning. In my state, who would have found it any way? Instead, for a while, I took them as experience itself. And now I can say that I have toasted red wine with a friend before a concert in the park. I have served sun tea spiked with vodka at a barbecue in my back yard. I’ve published. I’ve grown a healthy crop of pumpkins that my whole family carved at Halloween. It’s what the dreams said, what I took as true. I do wake up in his arms everyday, my ear up against his chest. And we have a big mutt with bad breath named Spots the Dog.

When I woke up, for real and finally, reeking of myself and my sickness, there was still a haze where I didn’t remember which parts were real and which weren’t. And I didn’t care. I’d felt I’d had the whole of it. And that made me feel healthier than anything

-jen

Focus, please

2006-03-21T11:16:00.001-06:00

I'm having trouble focusing on much of anything at the moment, having eradicated the more valued functions of my brain through days of evaluating data. News of Nepal's Buddha Boy, though, sticks out.

Reportedly, Buddha Boy lived beneath a tree for something like 10 months without food or water. He left his meditation site, though, in search of better (meditation) energy, but prophesied returning to the site in six years. WTF?

It's probably racist that I find stories like this fascinating. If it was a white kid meditating for 10 months beneath a maple tree in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, I'd say the kid had issues. But Buddha Boy is in Nepal, which is exotic (to me). I'm more willing to grant this kid the benefit of the doubt.

More than anything, I guess, the starved soul in me wants things like this to be real.

A friend of mine who grew up Mormon recently recounted inviting Mormon doorknockers onto her porch for a little debate. Oddly enough, they tried to persuade her that the Church welcomed lesbians now. She's not buying it.

I didn't know much about the foundation of the Mormon Church, save for its presence in Utah. So she told us of the 14 year old (Joseph Smith) who'd heard the Lord and was visited by the angel Moroni (Italian?) and that there were special gold plates hidden in the hill. The rest is history.

She concluded, "Man, I don't trust anything a 14 year old says."

Indeed. Ah, but if we did ...

Maybe the Japanese are right. Maybe pre-teens really are quite scary.

-cK

Delta Delta Delta Kind of, Sort of Helps Ya (i.e., Me)

2006-03-18T23:57:00.000-06:00

The flight out of West Palm was easy-peasy, as usual, but things got oogey descending upon Atlanta. The southern woman next to me, who’d already assured me that it was going to be no problem for her to get to her rental car, not tonight, and that she’d be at Mary’s house by 9—I didn’t ask who Mary is—began an intense “That’s a strange sound, Have you heard that sound before?” campaign as we taxied in. We taxied for a great distance. For all I could tell, we’d actually landed in Savannah and were now driving to Atlanta in a 757. The idle motor whined away, aping, I think, a remote-control airplane. It freaked people out.

All along the tarmac, the chaos continued. Luggage cart drivers raced one another and pumped fists at the cats with the glow sticks who waved the plane in. The carts snaked in crazed patterns very much like those I saw plain-clothed Shriners in mini-carts practicing one afternoon in a parking lot near Mears Park in St. Paul.

“What IS that SOUND?” the woman next to me asked.

The connecting flight home to MSP was a 50-seater we were going to board outside, an unsettling moment that recalls to me the deaths of Richie Valens and the Big Bopper. (More precisely, the film version of their deaths.) It was still a jet, sure, we’re not talking prop plane here, but it was a little thing they’d badly oversold. A gigantic man with a very soft, effeminate voice waved his hands and apologized. They weren't going to give me a seat. I began writing a complaint letter in my head. I thought about saying something stupid like “I paid $550 for this!?” But it wasn’t his fault, and complaining makes me very uncomfortable. I was ready just to be put on a cot, maybe shuttled to the Red Cross, perhaps interviewed on CNN.

Then they offered $200 and a flight an hour later to anyone who ... before they finished, a college girl shoved me aside and slapped her ticket on the counter. “That's a lot of money, man,” she said. The clerk laughed and punched a furious sequence of buttons. The printer whirred to life, and I had myself a ticket. She looked at me and smiled. She smelled like someone who’d been traveling all day, and who perhaps had woke up too late to begin with. “Take it while you can,” she said. “I’ll sit on my ass for $200, thanks.” She held up a well-dog-eared copy of Memoirs of a Geisha. I liked her smile.

So I made it onto the flight. Not long after I'd settled in, the same girl appeared on the plane. Apparently, someone had canceled at the last minute, so she got a seat after all. We smiled at one another in that vague “You” kind of smile, only hers seemed 200 “Delta bucks” richer. I think she'd already been given the credit. Nice one to her, eh?

Ah, but fate came back at us, and fate won. (Gaaaaaahhhhh!!!) This Geisha girl and I both got zapped at MSP. Our luggage (and the luggage of like eight others) was not sent forth. The poor girl behind the luggage counter had to deal with quivering voices, exhausted travelers. Our flight had landed 30 minutes late. (We’d been delayed because of too much luggage. It had, apparently, caused quite a bit of headscratchin’.) Tempers, you know? So I handed over my luggage receipt and played all cool-like. She asked me to describe the bag. I said, calmly, “Well, it’s kind of rolly, you know,” and motioned its height with my hands. “Two wheels. Not too big. Kind of blue, kind of dark blue.” She narrowed her eyes, nodded subtly, and said, “Yeah.”

Getting home from the MSP airport was worse, I think. Not only were the roads mined with staggering drunks and staggeringly drunk drivers—this had been St. Patrick’s—but the cabbie displayed a flagrant lack of understanding of the basic vehicular control one hopes to find in a driver, at least for the duration of one’s ride. Of course, there was no seatbelt for me. Sigh.

We were driving without lights as we merged onto Highway 5. I said, cautiously, "Are our lights on?" and he said, "Huh?" and I said, "The headlights." This is good: He turned on the interior light. It was right above my head. "Bright as they get," he said. I said, "The FRONT lights." "Huh?" "The lights in front of the car," I said. Meanwhile, there we were swerving our way towards Fort Snelling, the Mississippi River, bridge abutments. He had his hands at 3 and 9 and was white-knucklin’ it. "I don't drive at night," he said. (Thank god! I thought.) Finally, he reached down and pulled a switch. POOF! The road lit up!! Practically magic.

“Thank you, buddy,” he said. “Thank you, thank you. Better, okay?”

Better. Yes. Home for two Guinness and a dream-rich sleep.

At 6:15 this evening, a kooky driver with a heavily dented car showed with my rolly, kind-of-blue suitcase. The A-squad underwear’s there. The engineering handbook is there. My black, seven-year-old, low-top Chucks are there. My new toothbrush is there too, but I feel a little strange about ever using it again. I just don’t know what it was my luggage went through. Looks like the toothbrush is a casualty.

The luggage driver said to me, “I just hope I can make it to Andover.” “Where the hell’s Andover?” I asked. He told me. I promptly forgot. He wore wrap-around shades and kept shifting his weight. He was a rumpled character but full of life. He seemed on the verge of shouting Woooooooooo!!! I was out there, barefoot on the icy walk, just kind of taking in the day and how much I like the winter here. Florida was, by most measurements, a long ways off (though all ye Peggses and Costas remain high in my thoughts, please know).

It became apparent the driver wouldn’t leave until I picked up the suitcase. He looked between me and it, shifted weight, shifted weight, and finally asked, “Well ain’t you gonna take it, man?” I did.
-cK

Escapists! Dream of Tulipan!

2006-03-17T15:59:00.001-06:00

I am in the West Palm Beach International Airport (PBI), and I am thinking of two things: snow in Minnesota and Tulipan. Ah, my heart is torn.

It's Saint Patrick's Day and I'll be in the safest place in the country: the air. But I am thinking of Tulipan.

On the corner of Georgia and Belvedere here in West Palm, there’s a little Latin bakery called Tulipan in which many dialects of Spanish and English are spoken. This is my second work trip to this low-rise, sun-soaked neighborhood (my employer’s office is a block away) and I am in love with the bakery, its employees, and its patrons.

Less than a week ago I was sitting outside the pub (Lake Street Garage) in Minneapolis with a couple smokers. We were happy it was 40 degrees. We were so happy, we sat outside for a spell, not just because smokers must go outside but because we were really happy to be able to sit outdoors. It’s winter, after all. Now I’m back for another week in south Florida, breathing the air of the Atlantic Coast and marveling at its flattened landscape and melted fauna—the dropsy-headed palms, the twisted banyans. Everything looks exhausted from centuries of relentless heat.

(Note: In the 24 hours following my flight from Minnesota, Mother Nature uncorked a ten-inch snowturd on the Twin Cities. I got out. Jonah was a hack!)

I’ve been asked if I want to move here, and really I don’t. I won’t. But I feel a definite pull. I feel the dream of a move. Tulipan, with its multiple tongues, cases of fresh pastries, gigantic ham and pork sandwiches, regular working patrons and out-the-door line is partially to blame.

Yes, Florida is a land in which one can always find a verdant green leaf (outdoors), but early in the year the true dream of Florida blooms. The winds are cool and the humidity is low (for here). The sun is plentiful but carries only a fraction of the heat it wields in, say, July. I pretend I live here. I sit out on Lara and Ray’s porch and listen to night insects. I watch the waver of light in the pool. In the morning, I walk to Tulipan for two gifts from the gods: con leche and guava-cheese pastries.

Con leche is a Latin coffee. Basically, it’s a latte with sugar and/or sugar cane juice mixed into the espresso. Too many of these would undoubtedly risk the onset of diabetes. They are addicting. The women at Tulipan make so many of these in the morning that they never stop pouring espresso. Steamed milk jets into the silver-bottomed pots one might find holding coffee in a diner.

Oh, guava-cheese pastries. (My heart!) The cream cheese and guava blossom inside the browned, flaky empanada shell to create a selfishly intoxicating moment. I eat these things without a hint of self-respect. I hide to eat them.

Apt: Lara and Ray, those great souls, have at times used the word “Tulipan” as a code word for escape. “What time is it?” one might ask the other at a party. “Quarter to Tulipan,” the other might say, meaning, “I need to go.” Once, while subjected to the gesticulating fury of an ebullient conversationalist, Ray was asked “What college did you go to?” to which he answered with flat but unmistakable urgency, “The University of Tulipan.”

It is an escape, indeed. I miss the snow up north (seriously). I’ve received a number of really beautiful anecdotes from friends describing how they took advantage of it, how their streets look, how being snowed in felt good just this week. I long for home, true. I long for my neighborhood.

But the guava is a sorceress. She’s got great powers. She’s doing something to my brain. When I wander in from the warm, white light and bite into the pastry, I start thinking crazy things like, “Well maybe I could rent a house here…just for a month.” I look for wedding rings on the fingers of the Tulipan women who, each day, work behind the counter in their white shirts with the pink stripes. I swear this is the year I will learn Spanish, yes, of course.

And I think that when I walk in for the fourth day in a row, all the people I recognize also recognize me; that their knowing glances harbor the same message the wind whispers through palm fronds each night: You belong here.
-cK

Ghana, 1957

2006-03-15T09:00:00.000-06:00

While bellied at the bar in Carbondale, Illinois, one late afternoon that rapidly became a full evening, Vaughn and I played the video trivia and shot the bull. A drink and think, you know? It was early enough that the whole zoo of regulars was still crowing: Beagle, Tuna, Squirrel (that’s me), et al. Someone told a story of the night Pedro left the bar and returned promptly with a broken jaw after falling on his bike. Everyone had an outrageous description of how literally unhinged his face had looked. No fun to live through it, I bet, but good times to talk of these things.

We were feeling good.

McCready (noted in Jen’s 10 March 2006 entry “McCready”) sat next to me. I’d never really talked to him. On this night, he wore a green blanket on his shoulders, and as the place became more crowded he seemed to hunch a little more. He’d transitioned into the point of the night during which a personal sort of darkness descends. He mumbled things to himself. Out of fear of a lengthy conversation, I did not ask what.

So Vaughn and I are talking and the trivia’s flying past. On the screen comes the question, “What was the first West African nation liberated from Great Britain?” We looked at the multiple-choice answers and Vaughn said, “Oh, it’s got to be Ghana.”

We punched in our answer. McCready shifted in his seat. I could see it in my peripheral. He was agitated. The answer popped up: Ghana. The factoid: 1957.

“What the fuck do you know,” McCready snapped. “You fucking punks. You weren’t there. You don’t know, you fucking punks.”

We continued the game. He kept mumbling.

Though we drank and thank [sic] much more, my buzz was checked by the not-so-subtle attention I gave to McCready. I tried to keep watch on him without looking at him. My neck began to cramp. I wouldn’t turn my head for anyone to my right, not even Dawn, the angel who ranged the bar and kept the conversation light as she refilled our drafts and spirits.
-cK

The Accidental Spring-Break Tourist

2006-03-14T08:29:00.000-06:00

Never fly during spring break unless you are going on spring break. Security is grumpier. It’s a refugee situation: Snoring college students sleep in terminal hallways, against garbage cans, outside of bathrooms (because they just couldn’t wait for their friend to finish). The airport fills with youth who narrate their every move and thought to one another. A young couple so sensitive that, apparently, they cannot read at the same time takes a seat near me, and the girl turns to the boy and sighs and says in their couple’s voice “Can you tell me what they have?” (Literally blinded by love?) He proceeds to read the giant sandwich board, items and prices. It’s a breakfast hour. She crinkles her nose. “I’m more lunchy,” she says.

A clean-faced girl in cigarette jeans, push-up bra and a stretched thin, form-hugging, military brown t-shirt bops past on some mission: a magazine, a 24-ounce coffee, a right fine piss. The socially worrisome declaration I ♥ FRAT BOYS jubbers upon her chest. Her 50s' ponytail snaps with each step.

So there I am, writing at the bar of a terminal restaurant. They’re serving pre-packaged egg and meat panini sandwiches that the immigrant clerk (Ethiopian? Turkish?) tosses in the microwave, then a toaster oven. She’s wearing a wet lipstick so wet her mouth looks like something made of porcelain. Something about her hair and thin, silver-hoop earrings reminds me of the ‘80s. We talk a bit and it’s pleasant, though I’m sipping coffee that is perhaps as flavorful as graywater. Perhaps.

A young man in what seems to be his first straw cowboy hat—the airport is in Minnesota—sits awkwardly at the bar, slouching in a way that emphasizes his crotch. He orders a beer. It’s Sunday, 8:30 a.m.

The clerk informs him that the bartender isn’t there yet. “Can’t do it,” she says.

“I know,” the cowboy says plaintively. He adds, quite irritated, “Fuck. The bartender was here just a few days ago.”

“Bartender not here,” she says. She shrugs. “Maybe he lazy.”

“I don’t know, man,” the cowboy says.

I turn my head towards him but keep my pen on the paper. “Have an egg,” I tell him without much enthusiasm.

Now the cowboy walks off. As he passes, he says to me, “Fuck you, buddy.”

I break up laughing and the clerk, who’s overheard this, looks at me with a scandal’s amusement.

“Think he’s cute?” I ask her. She blushes and goes about cleaning a counter surface. The cowboy has moseyed off towards the gate and has slumped into a chair, defeated. The clerk returns to me with that smooth stone grin. She says, “I think he thinks he’s cute.”
-cK

The People We Listen to in Bars

2006-03-10T15:58:00.000-06:00

(inspired by the cK)

McCready.
Southside Irish—you know the type. Grew up rough and tumble, a hint of bare-knuckled racism, White Sox fan.

Ended up down south for college, and, as the story goes, fell in love, got his heart broken, became an alcoholic. And there it is.

Oh, but there’s so much more. Would you like more from the surface? He's fiftyish, but looks 38. He’s had DUIs—enough so that he can’t drive. He rides his bike everywhere and is in phenomenal shape. He works, he lives by himself, he manages his affairs.

Still more from the surface.
He’s handsome—sandy hair, blue eyes. He’s also brilliant. He has what could only be termed a photographic memory—he knows sports, politics, film. He’s a regular at the bar I used to work at.

He’s also schizophrenic.

He would sometimes be waiting for me to open the bar at 1 pm—sitting in the sun on the cement walkway. I was always grateful for the company. We would talk sports and watch TV–him drinking Molson and Irish Mist, me cutting foodstuffs for garnishing drinks with, until the regular crowd came in at 4.

He would talk to me, see, just like anything, the way everyone feels comfortable talking to their bartender. And he’d talk to the other patrons as well—they all knew him, had for years. But right around beer number six, with that premium buzz going, you felt an odd wave of relief coming off him. Like an elastic stretched too tight that has suddenly been allowed to relax. And he would look at the empty chair to his right, nod his head a couple of times and start talking. To the chair. And for the next couple of hours would keep up a lively, vibrant discussion with a friend only he could hear.

And these conversations were one-sided, like listening to someone talk on the phone. They were mostly banal, sometimes heated. Once, McCready called his friend a “chorizo mutherfucker.” Which was a fascinating curse made more fascinating by the fact that I couldn’t hear, and will never know, what prompted it.

But he was always coherent. You could interrupt him, ask him a question like, “Hey, wannanother beer?” And he’d look at you sober as sunrise: “Oh yes, Jenny dear. Keep ’em comin'!” Then he would turn back to continue his conversation.

One of the other girls that worked there would call him on it—“McCready,” she’d say, but in a nice way. “You’re talking to yourself again.”

And he’d say to her, “Oh, I know it.” Or, “Yeah, I guess I am.”

Newcomers to our bar always stared, always questioned: “Dude,” they’d say. “You know that guy’s talking to himself!?” And I’d say, “Oh yeah, he always does that.”

And the thing about it is, I think it’s good for him. I think it’s good for McCready, just like it’s good for all the rest of our crazy old souls, to have a place where he can be himself. After holding it in and being “normal” all day, finally, when he gets to the bar and gets a couple pints down, he can be himself, let go, chat it up, and for the most part, no one blinks.

They just listen.
--Jen

Hands

2006-03-09T17:11:00.000-06:00

Late out of the blocks from the previous night's rollick, I found myself among a different crowd at the coffeeshop in which I almost always put in the first hour's work. This was another piece of the neighborhood's face, and it proved to contain a lonely young man who holds conversations with himself, polite-like, even waiting his turn.

It seems he tries to fight it. His fingers begin to twitch not long after he's seated and has looked around and perhaps taken in the noise. His head snaps a touch, as if trying to shake off whatever it is he's thinking about. He gives in. He shifts in his seat to face his invisible speaker or speakers, and he begins to talk.

To listen is to hear just one side of it.

I'm so small and innocuous-looking that strangers tell me their tales. Why not impose? Really, they must sense I'll listen. I'll be annoyed at first, but then I'll listen. A man once told me he'd had sex just once in his life and had a daughter for it. She was 13 at the time of the telling, and he was trying to be a good father, he said. Another man gave me and Jen (the Crush's other writer) what he called "felony feathers"--eagle feathers he'd found on the road. He was an unemployed coal miner. He had a teenage son he hoped very much to send to college, but he thought the boy was starting to go bad in the ways he had. The catalog of these encounters is long.

So when I met eyes with this young man as he sat, I looked away too quickly. I was afraid he wanted to talk. Others I would have nodded to, then looked away. It's just polite. But I'd seen him there once before, it had been a similar hour, and he was deep in conversation. Now, I thought it was him in my peripheral, so I looked. He was looking. I felt, as I sat there staring at my computer screen, trying to force myself to do the research I'd intended to do, that he was really watching, wanting me to look again; and if I did he would begin speaking to me.

I've always been kinder to the wild card in a bar, perhaps because I can chalk it up to alcohol. In a coffeeshop, I tend to think it's extreme loneliness or mental illness, two things I wish so dearly to cure that I'm afraid to confront them, even hesitant to be basically kind, because I know I haven't a fucking chance.

I need to be better about this.

Annoyance, fear, guilt, yeah yeah. Soon, that gives way to fascination. It's the predatory instinct in writing, I think. So this young man sits, and I wait, and I realize that we aren't going to talk. So I begin to watch as discreetly as I can.

Around us, the coffeeshop's conversations are loud, the laughter plenty. It's a full house, overly full. Art students have yanked themselves [out of bed] and are sitting against walls. A thin girl from behind the counter struggles with a bustub of dirty dishes. Her arms shake. The tendons on her neck stand out.

The young man goes through his routine: the twitching fingers, the head snaps, setting himself for conversation. And then he speaks. Ever polite, he waits his turn.
-cK

Are you kidding!?

2006-03-06T13:05:00.000-06:00

While reading up on root barrier fabrics (pursuant to an article, I swear), I watched Days of Our Lives, per usual.

I am now officially a Salem agnositc! I cannot believe that Austin and Sami are about to do the horizontal bop! I cannot believe that Carrie and Lucas are swallowing one another's faces!

Unfortunately, I can believe I'm being subjected to another John and Marlena tryst. What Salem needs is a good housecleaning, Twin Peaks style.

-cK

Paramours! Wear Mittens!

2006-03-06T10:44:00.000-06:00

With all the pre-winter hype about how heating costs were going to cornhole those of us in the Midwest and Northeast, it was easy to see how apartment managers here in Minnesota were bound to be a little conservative with providing heat. After all, for us renters, at least here in the lovely little hamlet known as St. Paul, the provision of heat is required by law (Agreed: Great law) and almost always built into the rent. It’s up to the apartment managers to reserve the cash to cover the heating costs. In an old building like mine, that can’t be easy. The aged window frames fit loosely, the interior window locks are too old and warped to be effective, and the floorboards (badly in need of refinishing or out-right replacement) are slowly and not-amicably divorcing the wall.

I get fresh air whether I want it or not. Most of the time, I appreciate it.

The winter’s been mild, a touch colder at times than the last few winters, but overall quite manageable, only rarely requiring the deep-winter coats. It’s been, in fact, a total pisser for snowboarders, skiers, and the rest of the winter-industry ilk. The city’s winter carnival, which had been haunted a year or two ago by prohibitively sub-zero temperatures, had trouble hosting wintry events--It was too warm.

But this winter has not been without incident. We had a true snap recently, and during that series of sub-zero days, I discovered my heat sort of wasn’t working. Only 2 of the living room’s 19 radiator coils warmed. Same in the bedroom. The bathroom and dining room radiators were cold. No amount of monkeying helped.

So I piled on the woolies and blankets, got comfortable in my sniffles, and took frequent trips to warmer joints, such as the Liffey bar (which is often like imbibing in a boiler room, only better looking).

Also, I took to fogging up the bathroom with steam and hiding in those sauna-like showers. They were tremendously helpful in elevating the body’s thermostat, the effects of which lasted long after the steamings. I can see why the Scandinavians have sworn by them for so long.

So after a few frigid days, the radiators started to work. They spat and huffed like histrionic children. They went about their business with a rage. Abruptly, my little ice palace became a desiccated zone. If you put a piece of white bread in a tin with hard cookies, the cookies will absorb the bread’s moisture and soften a bit. My apartment became like that. Suddenly, I was the only object in the place with a bit of water in me, and the overly heated apartment wanted it.

I couldn’t get the radiators to stop. I closed them but they raged on. I slept without covers. My skin hurt. My back, which I’d already made a touch sensitive through that sauna-like bathing heat, felt flayed.

But all the suffering passed. Or so I thought.

A week or so later, just a couple days since, I’d stepped from a normal-heat shower and toweled off. I was listening to a mix, and it was concluding with Belle & Sebastian’s “Lazy Line Painter Jane,” and they were crooning about who I’d have tonight on the last bus out of town, and it was such a spirited tune. Hell, perhaps I was ready to up and run away.

I must have danced as I listened. I know I did! A little booty shakin’, you know?, in the privacy of one’s own home. Yoko Ono was right about naked men: We keep life funny.

I finished by toweling my back, which I think is always how I finish. One has one’s habits. I did sort of a “chow-chow-chow” kind of thing, for those of you who might recall the old Purina Cat Chow commercials. I brought the towel forward. It was streaked, terribly, with blood.

Gross.

I reached back again: Blood. So now I’m freaked out. The mirror’s too fogged to see anything, so I head in search of a full-length mirror (even funnier, of course). I’d just set one in the kitchen, intending to take the mirror to the storage room. Here I am, nude, water-beaded, my hair standing in shocks, in my kitchen and holding a bloody towel, turning over each shoulder, repeatedly, in search of the source.

(Note to self: Get back to running SOON and work on the buns.)

There, low between my shoulder blades, is a dark streaky blot of blood. I dab at it best I can. It doesn’t hurt. I feel no sign of a cut or even a zit. Nothing. Blood forms again. I dab. This is repeated a few times. When it finally stops, I don’t even find a coagulated cut. No scab, no nothing.

For the life of me, I don’t know where that blood came from. It was plentiful. It ruined the towel (a white towel, no less). I recall Jerry Seinfeld talking about detergents that boast of getting blood out, and how stupid that is since if your laundry’s bloodied up you’ve undoubtedly got other things to worry about. I did.

True, I’d given myself a bit of stigmata on the palm the other day trying out some Segal-like knife moves while gourd-bored on a Saturday (Seriously), but this seemingly immaculate and bloody mess between my shoulder blades, I don’t know what it was. Was it just a providential reminder to exercise? I’ll take a wake-up call next time, thanks.

If I begin to walk on water, I’ll let you know. I’d feel awful if I was actually the Second Comin’, and me not having known all these. I’d hate to fuck up everyone’s day like that. I’m just not into destruction.

Dear paramours: Please wear mittens.
-cK

Gypsy Punks! (aka: Not Your Local Music Scene)

2006-03-03T13:32:00.000-06:00

Do yourselves a favor, friends. Whether you live in the Twin Cities with cK, or the Windy City with jen, check out Gogol Bordello on their midwest tour.

They are worldy, loud, and as fun as a carnival. You can give a listen at their MySpace site:
http://www.myspace.com/gogolbordello

Or catch 'em LIVE:

Friday 4/7--Fine Line Music Cafe, Minneapolis

Saturday 4/8--Metro, Chicago

--jen rocker

Back Atcha!

2006-03-03T10:21:00.000-06:00

Who could resist this smile? The Crush's co-author cK is certainly a villain, as the shirt proclaims, but more in the Robin Hood vein. He's mischievous and kind, open-hearted and generous and consistently putting others above himself. Ladies, look out! He IS a stealer of hearts. Mine included.
--j

Stating the obvious

2006-03-02T17:57:00.000-06:00

It's almost farcical the degree to which the Crush's co-writer Jen will go to feel poorly about herself, to castigate herself, to question her self-worth. I've got a tough road to hoe, I think, in persuading her to recognize the intangibles, but, Christ, really: She can't in good conscience speak ill of the tangibles. Set your phasers to STUN.

Look! Even the banana boy in the background is giving a thumbs up.
-cK

Do I not LOOK like a daffodil man?

2006-03-02T15:30:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, being March 1, was St. David's Day: the Patron Saint of Wales. So a cache of us met at the Garage to say our hey-heys to John Dingley, a real Welshman, tenor voice and all.

At lunch, I'd hoofed on down to Fleur De Lis, the neighborhood florist, to acquire some daffodils--the Welsh national flower. The owner came up from the backroom and greeted me. I said, jovially, "We're celebrating Wales. Do you have any daffodils?"

I'm not sure what "Wales" sounded like in his ears. Did he hear "whales"? He seemed to fight back a laugh. He said, "No. No. But we've some tulips today."

Do I not look like a daffodil man? I'm not the ass here!

When I got to the Garage, sans flora, Dingley was passing out leeks and a Welsh potato-leek recipe. So there we were, a cluster of us, armed with leeks. For a spell, Carolyn taped mine to my wrist like a corsage. Some cat wore his on his head. Another had it fanning from his back pocket.

All this reminded us of a time Keith had leeked up the old Molly's. Bill did the telling. Like Dingley, Keith had come in armed with vegetables and handed them about. One of the waitresses was a bit slow getting to work, and as she approached the building, two people walked out laughing and holding a leek. They said to the waitress, "You don't want to go in there, dear. Some nutter's talkin' loud and handing out produce."

"That's okay," the waitress said. "They're my friends!"
-cK

ps: Yo, Dingley! Which is the horse and which is the ass!? CYMRU!!!

Well, I would have read this.That's all.

2006-03-01T10:09:00.000-06:00

Much is made of Minnesotan rhetoric in films and magazine articles, on newscasts, at county fairs, etc., many of which originate in and are primarily for Minnesota. (Note to Coen brothers disciples: Yes, they are from Minnesota, and yes most of Fargo takes place in Minnesota, but Fargo is, I swear, a city in North Dakota.) Point being: We're not doing anything to disspell public opinion because, not so secretly, we love our little language of rolled "O" sounds, hot dish, out-state living. We love that to borrow also means to lend, as in, "Maybe he'll borrow me his snowblower." (He won't.) Perhaps most important to our social fabric and reputation, though, is our passive-aggressive admonishments.

I grew up in Illinois, so this is something I came here expecting, and my language antenna was finely tuned to it. For most of the last five years I've found it grating, even depressing for it seemed speaking directly even on very simple points cost me friendships or caused me hardships at work. In my previous employer's office, I was routinely admonished for being too brusque.

Example: I was nearly fired for telling a meeting group "We shouldn't be meeting if you haven't done any of the prep work." (Not one of them had.) Serious offense taken, especially by the highest-ranking manager in the room. The meeting actually ended right there, the group was so upset. The manager came by my cube. She said, "Do you think we need to talk about this?" and I said, "No." She said, "I was just thinking that maybe you had something you thought we should talk about," and I said, "No." She repeated herself. I added, "I just didn't think we could have a productive meeting with so many people unprepared." And she said, "'Cause if you think there's something to talk about, I mean you just kind of lashed out at everyone, then maybe we should go talk in my office." Sigh.

Had I said it like, "I just don't know why you'd want to have a meeting if you weren't going to prepare for it," well, I probably would have gotten away with the comment.

Confession time (Shhh!): I'm starting to like the passive-aggressive thing, though I don't think I can ever internalize this sort of rhetoric (let's hope I don't). Maybe I've been here long enough to find it humorous. I don't know.

Here's the thing: We've no filter criteria for chastisement. There is no DEFCON system. Cheat on your girlfriend? Spill a soda at the game? Fart in an elevator? You voted for that lickspittle NORM COLEMAN? The admonishment comes in the same tone, the same sense of disappointment. For example, "I just don't know why you cheated on her. It seems like she's the best thing for you." Or, "I'm just saying, maybe you'd want to use the restroom before you get on the elevator. I would."

It's odd, and often frustrating, but I do find it endearing. Especially now, probably because I really know that this is where I want to be.

No matter how severe or innane the offence, no matter if it's a stranger or friend, they'll still tell you they're sort of disappointed in what you did. (Fair play.) But they don't seem too disappointed. Ever. They're just annoyed.

It's as if everyone in the state is married to everyone else.
-cK

Allow me to demonstrate my powers ...

2006-02-26T21:58:00.000-06:00

So at the Scottish Ramble the other week we stomped about in our kilts, bought knives, imbibed in the hall, imbibed at the Liffey, and all in all made what one might call merry. I ate haggis. I survived. Still, the week that followed, I was even more ramshackle in my memory than normal. I'd hurt my brain (but done nothing to repair it!).

Billy Watkins, whose memory is for all the world sharp enough he can fake it, drank so much he'd neglected to remember the whole Liffey episode that served as the Guinness-rich middleground between the Scottish fest and whatever it was the others got themselves into at the Garage that night. He seemed confused he'd been so groggy the next day. I didn't know what to tell him. I'd gone home.

So for a week I'd been haunted by forgetfulness. Thoughts came to me only long enough to let me know I'd had them but not of what. They were phantoms: creaking floorboards, the itch of an insect's step. Things you think you sense when you're holding still trying to sense them.

I watched a film about an exorcism. I started to think that 3:00 a.m. was a pretty shitty time to be awake.

Then I began to feel more deft in my motor skills and mind. Days had passed after all. I took out the kilt knife. I tossed it between my hands (Under Siege was on Fox, again) and wound up giving my left palm a bit of stigmata.

I went back to the pub. I declared myself the Mayor of Lake Street during our "Fat Saturday" celebration, the photographic evidence of which I await, for it will guarantee, I think, that the best official political seat I can hope for in life is becoming a Congressman in the United States House of Representatives: the B-teamers.

But it was a grand night, so grand I left my computer there. All my fiction. All my freelance writing. Everything I'd due on Monday. Financial information (Ha!). Photographs (not the incriminating ones). My 92% success rate in Freecell.

Yet all this led to good, as it made me take it easy Sunday morning (Do NOT sing that song!) instead of working. I couldn't pick up my computer for many hours, not 'til 6 pm. So I went to a breakfast at the Local and ate more meat than I normally do in a week. "Irish Breakfast" might as well come with an apple in its mouth. It's good, especially the Local's, but it's a huge amount of food, and it's got to be horrifying to true vegetarians. I just lack the dedication.

So I met John and Tony there, and Kieran, the golden dawg who owns the joint, joined us for a bite and some yabber. Outstanding, all three of 'em. I feel blessed to know these folks. We watched Ireland runover Wales (Sorry, Dingley) with a fairly cruel certainty in a 6 Nations match from Dublin. Good fun, though. (Ireland to take the Triple Crown this year? Unbelievable.) Kieran told a story of taking his wife to Galway, and as they entered a pub she saw a sign promoting the Irish hurling championship, and the language barrier at that point was steep. He explained the sport, but later fate had its fun. They wandered back onto the street, only to find a man just outside the pub leaning against a lightpost, holding the earth in orbit for all we knew, as he vomited copious amounts of what had been a very good day.

And Kieran's wife said, "Oh, he'd be a good one for the team."

Indeed.
-cK

Staring at the Arctic Universe

2006-02-25T12:39:00.000-06:00

Wednesday night at the Turf Club, I saw a one-man band by the name of Arctic Universe. Awesome. He opened for Ear Candy (Dear god, they were also eye candy for the night), and he was pure spectacle. The stage was empty but the room filled with the sound of waves and bass that evened into a soothing but thunderous ambient sound. No one on stage. Then some singing emerged, soaring, slightly plaintive, sort of Latiny, sort of Cher-ish. Definitely house.

When was the last time I heard house outside of a drag show? I know, you're like, "Dude, where have you been for the last 15 years?"

So there we were, listening to these short lines about love or darkness. More bass. People started looking at the sound guy like, "Why are you playing the club tunes at the volume of a band?" The volume of everything had brought some people closer to the stage. But no one was there. No instruments were there.

It was like a John Cage performance.

And then we realized the singing was coming from the guy just wandering in front of the bar. He used a remote mic but so deftly that you might think he was simply raising a pint or cigarette to his lips. He seemed so out of sorts it was stylish. One shoe looked to be three inches larger in the sole than the other. He wore black-rimmed glasses and a curly, black wig (perhaps hoping to look that extra bit rumpled). It was grand.

He even took breaks in songs to smoke, order beer, compliment the staff ("You're doing a great job"), dance in controlled bursts (behind the bar, no less), play a jaunty air violin (to match the jaunty violin sounds that abruptly burst from the sound system), hold his wrist over a candle in some sort of determined "I'll do it!" dare, etc.

He wandered the room, found feedback, went into the photo booth, paused at the Golden Tee game as if he might golf a few holes during this.

Had his set been longer than 30 minutes, it probably would have gone stale fast, but for what it was it was really entertaining. It made people so happy. He had a charming sort of flamboyance and a strong degree of self-awareness. It seemed he'd reached a point of parody in which he was so comfortable he'd actually just fallen in love with the material. He was probably in love with it to begin with.

Afterwards, a girl chatted him up near me. He said something to the effect of being a little tired of Minneapolis, and then it seemed he added something complimentary about St Paul (home of the Turf Club). It didn't seem they knew one another, but those words sealed some sort of deal. (If I heard him correctly, yes, we're suckers for that pick up on this side of the River. Our esteem is so terribly low, but we love our city.) There was a pause. They wandered off together--god, that voyeur, knows where.

Passing, the girl gave me an even look but her eyes said, "You saw me do this, didn't you." The Arctic Universe looked at me too, only his eyes seemed to say, "Hey, you saw this, didn't you." I nodded. So did he.
-cK

Pinched Pincher in the Pokey

2006-02-24T09:40:00.000-06:00

A little something for your morning coffee: A man in Colombia has been sentenced to FOUR YEARS in the pokey for grabbing a woman's butt. Ha!! He cycled off following the incident (He was a courier), but some passers-by stopped him. The woman was given the option to slap him. She pressed charges.

Just glorious.

I know. I know. Four years is harsh. Something will probably change with that. But, really. Hey, butt-dude: Knock it off! You were supposed to be delivering the packages you were paid to deliver.

By the way, what the hell is this?

That, friends, is my submission for the next million-selling relationship troubles book--the sort that too many people like us who don't need it will buy; while, people who really might learn some rudimentary communication skills (such as our cheeky Colombian) will not.
-cK

Tales from the Crypt

2006-02-23T17:33:00.000-06:00

Partial remains of longtime BBC correspondant Alistaire Cooke were among those raided and sold into medical experiments. Four men have been charged with the thefts and illegal sales. More than 1,000 corpses are thought to have been robbed.

Cooke's Letter from America series ran for 58 years. He was a gem, as was his work. Back on 1 April 2004, the Two Week Crush even posted a note about his passing.

Rivals

2006-02-23T12:09:00.000-06:00

Just gorged myself on a truly spectacular vegetarian wrap from Nina's and must crack back into work in a bit (while watching Days, thanks), so I've no time yet to post my write up from last night's Turf Club show, but I wanted to ask:

What is up in Japan?

Crush rivals? And they've brought jam.
-cK

Ear Candy

2006-02-22T12:10:00.000-06:00

While I railed about Minnesota's flagging music scene earlier today (see previous blog entry), I'm not all piss and/or vinegar. I love lots of people! For example, Ear Candy. They put on a righteous show.

Those in the Twin Cities, please think of going to the Turf Club in St Paul tonight rather than sitting home to watch Conan and complain about having to get up for work in the morning. You know you're still awake! Come to the show!!

But if you don't, don't grouse to me about "not doing anything." I take your silence to mean we have a deal.

Amina and Minnesota's Drought

2006-02-21T22:48:00.000-06:00

Why are we ignoring bands like Amina in Minnesota?
Some half-assed investigative journalism gives over to a plea

The metro populations of Grand Rapids, Michigan and Minneapolis-St Paul, Minnesota are about 650,00 and 725,000 respectively. The latter becomes 3,000,000 when one includes the wooly suburban ring.

Grand Rapids boasts on its Web site that it was the first US city to add fluoride to the drinking water. Minneapolis-St Paul promotes is Scandinavian heritage, even including “Skol!” in the anthem of its (our) football team: the Vikings.

(No, I’m not positing that having a sports team with a name like the Vikings makes one truly Scandi.)

What really nags at me right now is the totally uninspired scheduling of music in the Twin Cities. While both Minneapolis and St. Paul do a respectable job of supporting classical music, and that’s rare and thrilling, the Cities are terrible about supporting new music. They’re terrible about supporting current music. They’re terrible about supporting local music. It’s a dead zone.

Why do so many touring artists play here only mid-week? Is it the clubs not putting up the money or the people not supporting the weekend venues? One will always say it is the other.

This could be a very lengthy screed, and already is given our easy reading exhaust now that scrolling is the information equivalent of a mile marker. It could be a thesis. I don’t want that. I want to talk about Amina, because they’re quite good, and, if I might be allowed to be shallow (but honest) too, they’re quite hot. This is the Two Week Crush, after all. In this venue, we’re all allowed our loins. Let Amina be CRUSHED! (You’re crushed!)

Amina is one of the featured bands in the music documentary Screaming Masterpiece (about the Icelandic music scene), itself an overlooked item in the United States though finally being given some legs. Amina has toured here, though. Recently. And with Sigur Ros (no small act, you know). And while they’ve been ignored by many of the country’s venues, or their label's ignored most venues, they have played, among many places, Grand Rapids, Michigan. ON A SATURDAY.

In Minneapolis-St Paul, we’re lucky to get Motley Crue for a weekend date. And they’ll date anybody. We can’t get a Billy Joel cover band for a weekend date. We can’t get the children of the Pointer Sisters for a weekend date. It doesn’t matter. You name the genre, you name the artist, we can’t get ‘em. Not the unknowns, not the mid-knowns. Screw it. We can’t even get those who can command enough capital to sell out arenas here on the weekend. Jesus. Even Prince (Hello, Chanhassan!!) made me catch him on a fucking Tuesday—one of three mid-week performances he’d sold out here in St. Paul.

Scandinavian music is really good right now. I’m not kidding. Denmark and Sweden have some lovely bands coming along. And it all goes well with our white-sky winters, and gorgeous summers, and our “Are we liberal? Are we not as liberal? We care about one another but let’s not make it too much” culture. We’ve got a much larger population than Grand Rapids and a hell of an advantage with the college culture and the overall Scandinavian culture. Yet we’re getting our asses handed to us. And we’re holding the knife.

We’re like the barbecue pig on the restaurant sign, the one who’s overjoyed to carve himself up for your dinner.

Get off your asses, and I’m talking to the music venues. And I’m talking to the people who support such flaccid efforts. We have too many business owners and not enough business sense in Minnesota. (Oo! Isn’t that clever!) Too much cultural pride but not enough culture. If you want to be just a bar, then just be a bar.

At some point, we need to refresh things, kids. We need to tend our cultural energy. We need something more than freshly poured pints and conversation about what’s on tv. I can't support the statement, but I feel very much that it is true: such complacency contributes to a city's decline. Culture and effort are meaningful.

Everyone must give in at some point. We need to do more here. Please. I swear to you that it will be worth it.

ABBA agrees with me.
-cK

The Human Eye

2006-02-21T13:31:00.000-06:00

I can't believe Fancy got runover by a car (that had crashed through the diner window) and all that's wrong with her is glass in her friggin' eye. Everyone keeps saying, "Oh my god. Fancy. She might lose her eye." A car!!! I'm talking about Passions.

-cK

Things NOT To Do When You’re On the Rebound (though they seem like a good idea at the time):

2006-02-21T12:41:00.000-06:00

1. Drop a monster load of cash at your local Off-Track Betting parlor.

2. See a Pearl Jam cover band. And dance to them. With one of your ex’s friends.

3. Go to an after-hours bar. Flirt with a guy named “Crazy Dave.”

4. Make out with a different ex. Especially after discussing how THAT relationship failed. Double especially after he says “I didn’t know that you love me; I just didn’t know.”

5. Go on a week-long bender in which you say the words “Jager Bomb” more often than you say hello.

(trust me on this.)
-jen.

Forget-Me-Nots

2006-02-21T10:32:00.000-06:00

While four or five article sources are currently taking my messages but failing to return the calls, Jens Lekman hasn't abandoned me!! Please visit his site and download the gorgeous tune "I don't know if she's worth 900 kr."

1. The 900 kroner applies to the price of a train ticket to Barcelona in the song. I'm not directing you to a red light district! (900 Swedish kroner is worth maybe $120 US.)

2. You've got to like presents, and Jens deals them out freely.

Thanks for picking up the pieces, Jens. I'm not even going to make a man-crush quip.
-cK

Shut Up and Make Out!!!

2006-02-20T10:30:00.000-06:00

The Hazzards are definitely crushworthy. Lord.

Hey: spring is coming. It's nigh, even, in some parts of the country. (We've got a second helping of winter ordered here first, but we've heard about spring.) It's never too early to think spring planting, including, but not limited to, in whose mouth you'll be planting your tongue.

Roll the clip!

-cK

Gangsta gots to a take a rest

2006-02-20T00:05:00.000-06:00

I've been working double-time these days, both in my freelance life and with blogging. I'm writing here and at my page at MySpace.com, the latter community about which I must vent. Briefly. Of note, the myriad pages of kids from Crystal Lake, Illinois. I'm sure you know, right off by the town's name, that it is a pleasant suburb. It is NOT the gangsta hub its MySpacers want you to think it is. I too rolled CL back in the day, but, let's be honest: Access to a Gadzooks store (now known as Forever 21, though it sells to teens) does not make one gangsta! Nor does a photograph of your fucking underwear line or you making a gesture like

Looks much more like the aftermath of a combine accident.
-cK

The Haggis Experiment

2006-02-19T11:01:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, a knot of us from the pub kilted up, despite the below zero temperature (such heroism!), and attended a Scottish ramble at St Paul's lovely Landmark Center: a handful of booths, plenty of dancing, copious amounts of McEwan's, and men's knees so winter pale that they were apt to erase the viewer's memory. You could read at night to some of these legs. Acquired a new sgian dubh, new wool socks for the late-winter get-up, a Celtic pin, and canned haggis.

Holy crow: Canned haggis. Of course, the folks I was with sung its praises, though none purchased it. I rolled the dice.

After the fest, we wandered a few frigid blocks to the Liffey and caroused for a few hours before most of them shuttled off to the pub quiz in Minneapolis and I retreated to my apartment for a more spectacular end to the day: haggis.

At some point real substance needed to be consumed. Why not try the haggis? It looks something like condensed dog food out of the can. There are these globules in it that I suppose are fat pellets, or maybe bits of inner bits. I eat very little meat anymore, but this haggis seemed to be a salt-rich, meaty assault. (Can we call guts meat?) It was an assault, in some degrees.

Admittedly, I'd had plenty to drink and over many hours, so the body was bound to suffer some discomfort if fed anything other than pizza. (A fundamental law of gastronomical physics, I think.) But this haggis, whoa. While I ate it, yes, and with some buttered asparagus (What a fop!), it haunted me throughout the eve, announcing itself internally as it passed to each successive layer of digestion. It announced itself at each step the way television shows use the slamming of a cell block door to hit home the loneliness and finalty of prison.

I sat up. I waited. I'm going to be okay. I think.

The night progresses. I lie in bed wondering if I'm going to be woken up by the sudden flight of my internal organs. But morning, or heaven, or hell, has come.

So far as I can tell, I've suffered no loss of vision or memory. There's no soil on my shoes to indicate haggis-induced somnabulism, and the reports on the radio seem to indicate that this city had a pretty tame night. The coffee tastes perfect, as does the chocolate croissant. I've survived. It's to be hoped that I'm now wiser.

It's Not Enough

2006-02-15T12:44:00.000-06:00

You are looking at him and loving him and you want to tell him everything.

And you find that you can trace your entire history by running your finger slowly over the crease in his freckled eyelid. Every summer day spent swimming in the Lake with your Dad is there, the first time you ever cussed, every time you decided that Taco Bell sounded like a lot more fun than Spanish class.

The crease turns into a laugh line trailing over his pale cheek. Your first job is there, reeking of grease and mop water, so is your Firebird with the 8-track player, so are all of your friends, and the first time you clumsily tried to give head.

Over the hollow, moving towards his lips, full and formless, without the cupid’s bow on top, melting softly into his chin. That’s where your marriage is, and your divorce, and working at the college radio station, and making love on a sofa bed in the basement, and road trips, and afterhours, and waitressing, and learning how to write.

Inside his mouth, touching his teeth, counting them off like hard shiny pebbles. Graduate school, your BEST friends, falling in love for real, baseball games, your favorite books, sitting by a campfire listening to old rockabilly and staring at the moonlight on the water, summer tomatoes from your garden, breaking up, and getting your first real job.

His tongue, wet and warm. You are HERE, in this place, doing this now, for better or worse. And you think for the first time, just for a minute, it might be better.

But then he speaks, and lets you know for certain that it’s not. And all of that history comes falling into your lap, and you sit there covered in your life, trying to pick up the shreds to show him, to say “See? THIS is who I am and what I’ve done. See? If you only knew me...”

But he turns around and walks away, leaving you and the pieces of you, and every bit that leaps into your hand is rimmed with remorse and regret. Including that last one, the one that was being created by touching his face,

So here’s the thing about love, friends: It’s not enough to simply know your partner, to have their face and freckles memorized and the taste of them in your mouth. It could be. But it’s not. It’s not enough to be faithful, to care, to fuck, to listen to their day, to clean their dirty clothes. It should be, but it’s not. You have to WANT to love. And you have to want to give it. You have to be fully conscious at all times WHY you are cooking or fucking or bandaging or at that corporate Christmas party. It’s because they are your best friend. It’s because they have always been there and always will. It’s because you love them and that takes precedence over everything else.

Sadly, THAT is generally too much for us to handle. We hold our own history and do not have room for another’s. We are all chickenshits.
-j

One for the Home Team

2006-02-14T15:31:00.000-06:00

So, in a college apartment many years ago, a few friends were gathered, two of whom were roommates, all of whom lacked girlfriends (proof, most likely, of providential justice): Matt, Brent, cK. Matt says to Brent, “But it’s Valentine’s Day,” and Brent says, “I’m not going to a movie with you,” undoubtedly peppering his speech with the f-word, not for any genuine conveyance of anger but simply for the cadence, sound, and comical emphasis. Place the word where you will.
Matt tries again. Brent refuses, returns to his bong.

A moment passes in the sound of the bong water’s rustle.

“C’mon,” Matt says, which causes Brent to spit smoke and sputter a laugh, or cough, seems to be equal parts both. “Get a girlfriend!” Brent says.

“I had one,” Matt says, shrugging. “I lost her.”

Now, cK: That kid (i.e., me) has been listening from the kitchen. I enter the living room holding something innocuous: a beer, a plate of rice, a microwave burrito. Whatever. Matt says to me, “You’ll go to a Valentine’s Day movie with me.”

I look at Brent. His face is contorted with disbelief.

“Yeah all right,” I say. “What are we seeing?”

“Sense and Sensibility,” he says. “I’ll pick you up at 7.” He leaves.

Brent: Horrified.

Seven arrives, Matt arrives. One toot of the horn.

“Enjoy your date,” Brent says.

“I’d invite you,” I say, “but it might be kind of awkward, you know.” Something, perhaps a shoe, strikes the door behind me.

So we buy our tickets, and we give the ticket-taker a grin to fight back. This is southern Illinos. Two men seeing a movie on Valentine’s Day is an unusual, if not wholly unprecedented, vision.

“You want to share a popcorn?” Matt asks. I’m not much of a popcorn guy, I tell him. He adds, “But we can share.”

We take our seats, not even putting one between us. It’s one of the smaller theaters, but still too big for this film in this part of the country on this day. There are six of us in the theater: three couples, two mixed, one for the talk.

The lights go down. The lights come up. A pleasant film.

We didn’t talk much on the way home, just sort of sat there, bemused. The car may have driven itself. It's just that the whole town had settled into some sort of reflective timidity. Even the street lights seemed muted. The city was darker and much quieter, as if the day was to have been something to hide from.
-cK

In defense of boldness, of brash and brazen action

2005-06-21T16:07:00.000-06:00

It’s not as easy to stalk someone as the police blotter makes it out to be.

Oh sure, you can be the random creep on the street, just following folks home with that vacant look in your eye, those flecks of spittle in the corners of your mouth, your hands stuffed deep into your trench coat pockets.

You could be that guy.

But chances are, if you are that kind of stalker, you’ll get picked up by the po-po within twenty yards.

What I’m talking about is stalking with finesse, with style, with the art and awkwardness, but yes, the tenacity, of your average 8th grader.

And, again, it’s not as easy as it sounds. I mean, first, you gotta find out where they live and what their phone number and e-mail address is. Which you’d think in this day and age, you know, with the internet and all, would be a snap.

Google search! Anywho.com!

Piece of cake.

Right?

Wrong!

As you all know from Googling your own names to pass the time at work, if you have even a moderately common name, it is easy to get upwards of seventeen thousand hits. Now, as great as your potential amour is, they can’t all belong to him/her, and even the “advanced” search is a deflating exercise.

By typing in your general geograpic area, you may have whittled your hits down to a modest 343, manageable for sure. But still there is the problem: does the information presented in those 343 snippets, clippings, and posts pertain to your particular stalkee?

“Aha,” you discover. “He graduated cum laude from Ohio State in… 1947? No, that can’t be right. Hmmm…”

Scroll down, scroll down, page forward.

“He was the lead astronaut in the last space shuttle mission. And he own his own tapas bar in Monterey and he rescues abused pit bulls and blows glass figurines and disdains Texas Hold ’Em for the classic five card stud and was all-state on the Jefferson High men’s track team this year and blogs regularly about ‘Guns and Stuff.’”

Nooooo, for real? Where does he find the time?

Tiring quickly of sifting through useless informational detritus (and thinking that you’d rather learn his background from him anyway), you give up that route and go straight for the e-phonebook. At least if you knew his address you could drive by, check out his hood, see if there are any watering holes within stumbling distance you may be able to “bump” into him at.

But again, as with the Google search, if you don’t know his full name and zip code, you are going to get an embarrassingly long list of M Browns, Mike Browns, and Michael Browns, all within a fifty-yard radius of your current home.

And you can’t drive by all of their houses, waiting to catch a glimpse. Not with these gas prices. Not on your paycheck.

So you ask, what’s a would-be stalker to do? I have love in my heart to foist upon someone and I’d like to foist it upon this particular someone. And then I’d like him to foist his love upon me. And then we’ll foist and foist and keep foisting until we fall out of bed and onto the floor.

And then we’ll really be able to get something going.

But that’s neither here nor there.

In my case, I have failed as a stalker. After countless hours spent searching, and without even phone-numeral one, I’ve given up.

Do I still want to feel that thick black hair between my fingers? Yes. Do I still want to hear him whisper my name, and then scream it, in our ultimate moment of passion? You betcha! Do I still want to feel drops of sweat from his thin but well-defined chest…

You get where I’m going with this.

Yes, yes, and yes. And Ms. Bold, Lady Brash, and Madam Brazen, the three wild sisters that live within me, often getting me in trouble, start to whisper in my ear.

They say that a real woman, a woman confident in herself and her, ahem, abilities, would just march right up to that little boy, grab him by the cajones and say, “You’re coming with me.”

Or, barring that, at least ask him out for coffee.

Which not only is advice I can live with, but action that is legal in all fifty states, and hardly creepy at all.

There ought to be a law

2005-06-02T10:13:00.000-06:00

To the dude three or four buildings east from Fairview on the north side of Marshall Ave, Saint Paul: Your building's lawn space is scarcely larger than two ping pong tables (separated by a paved walkway). What the fuck are you doing with a leaf blower?
-cK

The Linesman

2005-06-01T06:09:00.000-06:00

So there we were, Ryan and I, embroiled in a tense 1-6, 0-3 match on a public tennis court. I'd lost nine straight, true, but I was serving and determined to claw my way back into this donnybrook. Across my previous three service games, despite my being on the losing end of them, I'd managed to ace the self-titled "Springfield Express" not once not twice but thrice with a serve so airless that the ball bounced twice before reaching him. I'd had trouble locating the second serve, but I felt a comeback hounding the horizon.

Then a stranger entered the courts.

At the far end of the pavement, two gentlemen, one of whom was quite portly, took a rest. The larger of the two extolled the virtues of tennis for keeping in shape. "You look at me and I got these fat rolls," he said, "but you see me move at that ball." Indeed. He was quite spry and ultra-competitive during the points. I envied his headband.

Now, the third stranger was a loner. Perhaps he'd wandered up from the nearby craft fair that had set up shop along the road. He wore a short sleeve, intensely striped shirt (horizontal stripes) and Dockers-esque pants into which he'd tucked this shirt with the pristine intensity of military corners on a bed sheet. His hair was hard-parted across the top of his forehead, reminiscent of Christopher Reeve from Superman. He wore black rimmed glasses. So this man enters the courts, and with a robotic precision steps up onto the bench, puts his fists on his hips, rears back his shoulders (fine posture), and stands with legs akimbo. He stares at us.

Fair enough.

Warily, Ryan and I play on. The third serve I attempt under this supervision is greeted with a grunt from our courtside friend. I couldn't tell whether he said "long," "fault," or just "no"; but he said something.

Christ.

So now I'm trying not to laugh (Not that my game was going to get worse), and adopt an even softer serve. I'm playing defense from before the point begins, determined to land things in play because I don't want to compel any sort of response or conversation from him. At the same time, I become aware that a spectacularly long point might engross him, however timid that point might be: yawning lobs, false grunts, the infrequent squeak of a sneaker. I was in need of a diplomatic coup.

Seconds stretched. Light from a star so distant scientists have yet to discover it landed upon us.

Wait! Wait! Relief. He leaves of his own accord. Confrontation, friendly or otherwise, averted.

Loser's Trophy: 1-6, 1-6. Two fence posts of pride.
-cK

Wants and Needs

2005-05-13T16:58:00.000-06:00

I don’t read self-help books. I don’t watch Dr. Phil. I don’t believe in quick-fix pop-psychology. Nor do I particularly believe in long, involved soul-searching for answers. Frankly, it’s just too much effort.

And to be perfectly honest, I am much more of a “Hierarchy of Needs” kind of girl. That bottom layer of the pyramid, the one that satisfies the physiological needs like food, sleep, water and sex, I figure, if I’m there, I’m doing pretty good in this world. Everything else is just, as they say in New Orleans, lagniappe.

But even Maslow recognized that we want that lagniappe, that we want just a little more, and the top layers of that pyramid include safety and acceptance and love. None of these things satisfies the basic requirements of existence, but they add to the quality of our lives. These are the things that make it all worthwhile.

And we’re so easy. We are willing to find love in any nook and cranny we look. All it takes is one small gesture, a smile, the right word, and all the ills of the world and the past week dissolve like cotton candy on the tongue.

All it takes is a pair of warm eyes smiling at me from under a mop of black hair, and a sweet, semi-southern accent drawling at me slow and sure:

“You know, I’ve always liked the name Jennifer.”

And sure enough, I swoon. I smile too, rock back and forth slightly, cock a hip and bat an eyelash, giddy and flushed and a little light-headed.

And I realize: I needed that. I, who for months had been surviving on the emotional equivalent of Aldi-brand macaroni and cheese, who slept and woke and ate and shat and worked and slept again, suddenly felt something. Something good.

I haven’t had a crush in a while, but I do now.
jen.

A new crush

2005-05-12T12:50:00.000-06:00

Lake Street, May 9 - The Two Week Crush clock starts back in motion

I stopped to talk to Bill Watkins at the Lake Street Garage. The bar was crowded, so I took a seat on the very end. The bartender, a tiny thing with a gentle but not timid voice, and who's just as sweet as pie, asked what I'd like, so I said (as one might predict) a Guinness. She poured that while pouring another, which I noticed was for Scotty, who was seated on the other end of the bar, right beside the tap. (Smart man.) Scotty had recently bought me a beer, so I thought I'd return the favor. The waitress set Scotty's down, then brought mine.

I said, "Can I get the beer you just gave Scotty?"

Taking it all at face value, she reached tentatively for the beer she'd just placed in front of me. She said, "Oh. Is something wrong with this one?"

Just lovely. My heart soars.
-cK

The prodigal son returns

2005-05-12T12:46:00.000-06:00

Apologies, all, on the vanishing act, but my head and heart were stolen one day. Or perhaps I simply left them at the bottom of a pint glass. Or maybe it was the day in February I paused in aisle 3 to read the label on a can of kidney beans? The dinner was good, but I was haunted by the sense that something was missing.

Maybe I've quoted this before, but I like it bunches, so will (again?). It is from Denis Johnson's JESUS'S SON:

>> All these weirdoes and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, not even for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us. <<

I adore that.
-cK

Snowboarders: Tips For a Broken Wrist

2005-02-10T15:35:00.000-06:00

Popularity, it’s finally been determined, has its drawbacks. There’s not having any time to yourself; the inability to think critically and form your own opinions; there’s peer pressure.

And then there’s the potentially fatal blows to the head. And the less fatal, but just as inconvenient, broken wrists.

Snowboarding (according to many legitimate websites that I won’t be crediting here) is fast becoming the most popular winter sport in the country. And thus, its injuries are fast becoming the most popular ones in emergency waiting rooms.

So hey, jump on the bandwagon, get “in with the in crowd,” step into those bindings and have some fun in all that snow! And when you break your wrist (and you will), know that you have the #1 injury in the #1 winter sport in the Western Hemisphere, and wear that cast with pride!

Here’s a couple of pointers for the newly casted to help them while they recoup:

1. When talking to people you want to impress, but not necessarily sleep with, throw in a lot of snowboarder jargon (sensical or not) to make yourself seem cool: “Yeah, I hit that powder carving goofy foot into a toe-side J turn and then bam—that’s when it happened!”

2. When talking to people you want to impress AND sleep with, exaggerate the drama surrounding the injury, play the sympathy card. “I saw this kid wipe out in front of me—the next thing I know I’m doing a double backwards somersault down the mountain. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to go back out there. And playing the guitar is out of the question. And I just don’t know who’ll feed Grandma now.”

3. Picking out your cast:
· If you are female and under 18: get purple and have all of your friends sign it in pink. Cute!!
· If you are female age 18-22: get black to show your toughness.
· If you are female age 23-25: get black and paint a big silver star/jolly roger/anarchy symbol to show your disaffected irony.
· If you are female and over 25: stick with the basics, black or white and wear long sleeves. (Sorry, ladies, society is tough on us).
· If you are a male of any age: black with the star/jolly roger/anarchy symbol, but ignore the ironic intent of the ladies. You are serious dude!! Live it!!

4. When the cute server at the Mongolian BBQ joint wants to carry your bowl, LET HIM. And for god’s sake, would it kill ya to strike up a little conversation? For instance, ask if HE’s ever broken anything.

5. This line will also work on hot bartenders, bike messengers, folks on the el, and co-workers you’d like to bang.

6. Keep lotion nearby at all times and rub on casted hand frequently to prevent scaley grossness on exposed skin, and also to mask odor. Just trust me on this one.

7. Finally, when the question comes up (which it will approximately 7400 times in the five weeks you are immobilized), never, EVER admit that you were, in fact, on bunny hill when the incident occurred.

And that’s it!! Follow these tips and you’ll be able to pull off your injury with complete aplomb.

Just like the cool, popular kid you are.

--Shaun White I Ain't,
Jen

Therapy

2005-01-13T14:01:00.000-06:00

Round the age of 23, I had a dream in which my parents told me that for many years they’d suspected I was schizophrenic. For about six months, I was convinced I’d had this conversation. Then I realized that some things were wrong with the memory. For one, I can’t believe my parents would tell me something so personal, even if it was about me. (We aren’t a confessional family.) Two, the kitchen towels in the memory were all wrong.

(I confirmed this with them later.)

This was actually the second time kitchen towels helped me puzzle real from unreal. I’d had a lucid dream when I was fifteen. I was floating naked, just as I’d read would happen in an out of body experience (OBE). I floated through the railing, down the stairs, through the front room (in which a kitchen towel flapped atop the drapery rod over the atrium door), and, finally, through my closed bedroom door. I looked down at my sleeping self, then crashed into myself. I woke with a start, and my body ached. Much later, desperate to have a lucid trek again, I realized the kitchen towel thing. Total let down.

Now, maybe I need to sit down and think more about the problem of confessionalism in my life. For the past year, as Jen and I have updated this site in fits, interrupted by long silences (lets call them whole notes and say they are essential to the composition), I have dreamt increasingly of people I know and in familiar settings with very familiar plot points. This is a noted departure from 30 years of dreaming of strangers, particularly faceless ones. Facelessness has been an ongoing element in my dreams, a creepy, upsetting, thrilling element—one that common interpretation boils down to a fear of revelation, sharing of self, distrust of self, etc. In short, a possibly unfortunate need for distance. A basketcase.

Something about spilling tales on this site has led to me spilling more personal tales to friends in conversation, and, ultimately to more, well, facey dreams.

Sigh.

Yes, I like your faces, friends. I like them dearly, even though they seem to be watering down the inner fits--even with you dressed in that creepy all-white outfit, John, as if you were a painter with a bloody hatchet to hide; even though you, Jennifer, wanted me to pick you up at the Uptown Motel on a snowy backroad of northern Wisconsin. (What were you doing out there?) Dear Julia, why were you in that field when it seemed to be going nowhere good?

I dream of water, often. I dream of things I cannot see.

Birthday Boy

2004-12-28T15:34:00.000-06:00

Like a young Tom Wolfe—except less dandified. And more talented. Crazy Chutes and Ladders hair the color of your office carpeting. Nearly transparent skin. And these eyes, these blue eyes shaped like nuclear warheads. But not cold, as blues eyes are so often described. They hold, instead, an abstract warmth—full of mirth, mischief, and merriment.

He appreciates alliteration.

He also likes necks (ladies: take notes).

And oxymoronic duality: girls who exude a timid boldness.

He wants to know your story—and he’ll feed you homemade pizza while you tell it. Or, if you’d prefer, some smoked Edam and red wine. He notices things we assume people won’t—scars or birthmarks, new pants/hair/habits. And he will think on these things until he has constructed a suitable, beautiful explanation for their existence. You’ve scraped you leg on a scraggly, outstretched oak root while hiking in Appalachia? Nope, just a disappointing and unfortunate mishap with a magazine rack while running for the john.

But, and this is the thing, he creates lives—sad and optimistic, generous and practical, angry and sexual, and infinitely more human than we may actually be. Because, in the end, he believes in us. And loves us. And he knows that our stories, that everyone’s stories, have power.

And lucky us, for his observance, his skills, his care for his craft. He’s makes us better.

He is known by many names—Chris, Squirrel, cK, cK1, SQ, Boodles—but he is one man.

A great friggin’ one, at that.

Happy Happy, SQ.

Jen.

Conspiracy theory #902

2004-12-14T13:38:00.000-06:00

Somewhere a team of Budweiser, Miller and, in our less important states, Coors, reps are breaking pencil tips as they create new, ridiculous corporate and institution structural rubes, the frustratingly obvious limitations of which guarantee a steady flow of relief-seekers and rant-wielders to pubs and swill stores.

Case in point: The Carver style of government, currently the modus operandi of choice in my employer's arsenal.

Yes, let's take an already cumbersome top-down structure and "simplify" it by making it so vertical, so without a base that decisions cannot get to the top (where they require clearance) or back to the bottom without threatening to topple the operation. Think pyramid, now transfer same weight to a single, thin, unbending thread on which we all cling and cannot let tip. Everyone moves more slowly, for the structure feels shaking. We're all looking down and hoping to land on the idiot below us. We do less. We credit more. Then, we drink.
-cK

Letter to the NHL

2004-11-29T10:36:00.000-06:00

Cancel the season, yes, but give us a single-elimination tournament, you toothless geeks. Add one independent team to your fractured 31 for a smooth 32 field. (32 teams? 32 teeth?) If you're feeling game, make the final a 7-game series; but, really, I like the drama of all 32 teams having a game-by-game, do-or-die crawl for the cup. No laser highlight needed on the televised puck.
-cK (nee PucK)

Bookworms

2004-11-29T06:20:00.000-06:00

The OCLC has released its list of the top 1000 volumes held by its member libraries. (The caveat is on "purchase votes" or something like that. Perhaps that disqualifies acquisitions such as new potboilers, which a library might not keep on the shelf beyond the book's limited public life.) The list of intellectual works is culturally intriguing. Following the initial run of the Bible, Dante's Divine Comedy, Mother Goose, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and other heavyweights, number 18 registers like a wet fart: Garfield. Following America's favorite lasagna-eating cat, we promptly revert to more Shakespeare, Jonathon Swift, Chaucer, etc.

http://www.oclc.org/research/top1000/complete.htm

Allan Bloom--who produced an excellent translation of Plato's Republic--eked out number 1000 with his critical look at American universities and students: The Closing of the American Mind.

I don't find Garfield's presence among literary luminaries to be troubling; just funny. Much funnier, in fact, than Garfield, which I think I realized wasn't funny around the age of 11. With hormones goes humor. Read as you will.
-cK

Note to Peter King, sportswriter

2004-11-22T13:05:00.000-06:00

Dear Pete,

Enough with your hysterics on the Terrell Owens / Nicolette Sheridan towel-drop incident. Does it escape you that you work for SI? Which markets its swimsuit issue to kids? I had my first SI subscription at age 11. The swimsuit issue was a big part of that, pal. And you know that.

Today, in fact, there are two banner ads supporting your column, fucker: they feature SI model Melissa Keller. SI--or is it Ms. Keller?--ask, "Don't you miss summer?" I'm sure she's referring to baseball.

Dude: Shelve your Nipplegate rage. You've been shitting your pants about this for two weeks. Jesus. The towel drop promo was in bad taste--the same bad taste that Pete Coors markets at all hours on the tube--but worth two weeks of loin-fearing invective? Stick with your sports writing, but avoid the half-baked social commentary...esp. when (a) your name is PETER KING (Hello! Vivid Video?), and (b) your work is propped up by the aforementioned banner ads. (Don't you have ad reps to sell that space?) You might also stop picking games. Am I remembering correctly? Did you pick Chicago over Indy? Are you addicted to pain killers?
-cK

Compulsory Service: Orff

2004-11-18T08:20:00.000-06:00

Whether this is at all responsible for my life as a nerd, I’m not sure, but “now, more than ever” I think it played a role:

For a month or two in fifth grade, students were compelled to serve in a musical regiment known as Orff. The name was not an acronym; rather, it was a nod to the composer Karl Orff. Those with a far better classical composition background can tell you about Orff. I know he composed Carmina Burana, the “Fortuna” portions of which are often used in film trailers to splice together dramatic, zooming images of actors in awe, demon heads emerging from the darkness, white gowns in wind and exhausted heads lolling to muscular shoulders. That’s pretty much where my knowledge of his work ends. Now, about my own private Orff and the echoes thereafter:

We were let out of class about ten minutes early to attend Orff practice, two or three times a week. The session held us five minutes into the lunch hour.

Orff practice involved each student—roughly 20 of us—learning scores on glockenspiel. I don’t believe Karl Orff geeked out on the glockenspiel, but we had something like 30 of them and one triangle in the music room. I don’t think we even played any Orff. I recall “Rock Candy Mountain” as one of the pieces. (I also recall the instructor, Barbara Wardwell, asking if we understood the meaning of the song. Crickets. A dog barks in the distance. Horrified that no one, NO ONE – You rejects! – seemed to get it, I raised my hand. I said, barely able to contain my incredulity with the ignorance of my friends, “It’s about CANDY.” We then were held to a lecture about something called The Great Depression.) By the end of one’s Orff tour, even a prideful, hasty-lipped idiot would have learned a few parts to a longer piece than we were normally taught in music classes, and perhaps even a full individual piece that the Orffers then played in a maniacal round.

The upside of Orff was getting out of class early and the idle, unmonitored walk to the music room. (Simple pleasures.) The downside was arriving at lunch five minutes late.

The lunchroom was located just below the music room. A long straight stairway emptied out on the far side of the cafeteria, and as we descended those stairs, our voices and footfalls echoed on the painted concrete blocks. The orange-framed doors (with chicken-wire-patterned safety glass) at the bottom were open, and we could hear the din of our 400 peers at their tables. And they could hear us.

Maybe it was pizza day, maybe it was the coveted hot ham and cheese day. Or maybe it was just the need to catch up with the rest of the school, to get our lunches and wolf them down—very much like boot camp—so we could get outside with everyone on time. Regardless, we were in a rush. The sound of the Orff students thundering down the stairwell swelled in the lunchroom with the chaotic clip of a gym of dribbled basketballs. The din of the lunchroom picked up, as we all anticipated the inevitable.

As the first student crested into view, our fate was sealed. We had to take the long walk to the lunch line, while around us 400 students paused with fork and knife, or drinkbox and a sandwich with a thumb-squish. They chanted “Orff! Orff! Orff! Orff!” until the last of us had made it across the room.
-cK

Hooligans

2004-10-21T14:49:00.000-06:00

(True Story):
I am a cocktail waitress. I routinely get twenty-three-year-old boys drunk and hope that they have fun. I feel no pang of guilt about this, because I know that right around the corner is a lifetime of mind- and ass-numbing work, responsibilty, heartbreak, debt, failure, and worse. Because, however, they are only twenty-three, they often don't know how to treat a lady (me), and I am often grabbed, tickled, whispered crudely to, or whacked in the shoulder. I feel very little about this anymore, either. It is just part of the job.

Saturday, I am at work. A twenty-three-year-old whacks me in the shoulder. He is trying to get my attention.

"Hey," he says. I get another good whack. "Hey." He is staring at me with his arms outstreched, challenging me.

"What can I get ya, hon?" I smile. I always smile. He points down to about my groin.

"Don't you think I could out-drink a midget?" he says. "Don't you?" I am, apparently, the final verdict in this argument. I look down.

The midget next to me just stares back up at him, stonefaced.

The Catch

2004-08-03T10:30:00.000-06:00

It's amazing how people one does not know will launch into tales of heartbreak and all-around weirdness. But I guess there's no real risk of rejection or judgment when it's someone we don't believe we'll ever know. (It's that familiarity-contempt thing. Do you hate me?) And if we're lying, the chances of it getting back to people who can call our biggity bluff are greatly diminished. So:

The other night a woman told me a story while she ate steak. This was at the bar at Molly Quinn's. I was on my second lemonade--no joke, I been a good boy of late--and my bladder was ready to burst, but she started telling this story, and when the good vibe is there, I can't resist. I put my pen and paper away. I listened. Her story: She's 59. She's a teacher at a local school. Recently the storyteller found a cache of nearly 100 letters that her boyfriend from when she was 17 had sent. He was 23 at the time. He'd asked her to marry him. She'd said yes. "But then, who knows?" she said. "It just didn't happen. I don't even remember why." So she reread all those old letters, and suddenly she felt as giddy as a teen. Love, sweet love! She used the internet. She found the guy. He's 65 now. She contacted him.

So 42 years later they get in touch. On the phone he says he still loves her, that he's always thought of her. He asks her to marry him. She says yes. He comes to see her, and it is right. But they begin getting angry phone calls. It's the man's ex-wife.

After nine days together he vanishes.

[About this point in the story I'm hoping she eats her steak more slowly. I don't want the story to end, and I get the impression it is only to last as long as the meal.]

Days go by. She's angry. Then he calls. He tells her about his ex-wife--"Some Korean," she says, "I don't know. She's got this problem with her legs. She's in a wheelchair. That's why she still lives with him, because he feels he's supposed to take care of her. Or so he says. They're probably still married. Who knows."

She chomps away. She spears a hard piece of lettuce.

"Now he comes back," she says. He drives into town with eight boxes packed in his old Nissan. This is it: they've got a real chance. He's opening up. He confesses to a brief stint in prison (twenty years since at least) for a financial scheme. "Ha!" she says. "Did you know I loaned him the money for him to visit? A f-cking con." She drops back into the tale, though. They are together. They are happy. All is forgiven. But more phone calls come. And now the ex-wife is calling the school, trying to get this woman fired. "That crazy Korean b-tch was trying to get me fired!" she says. She pauses with one of those can-you-believe-this-sh-t? expressions. "Christ," I say. "Christ!" she agrees, pointing with a piece of meat on her knife.

After three days of this high-stakes emotional exchange, he says he's going up north. He says something silly about calling his ex from up there so she'll think that's where he is now. The storyteller shakes her head. "Oh, yeah. That would throw her off the trail," she says. "What a f-cker."

She's almost done now. She's on her last bites. She says to me, "And you know what he said at the end? Keep in mind I haven't seen or heard from him since. He's going fishing while he's up north. He tells me, 'I'll bring you back some walleye.'"

"Oh my god!" I say.

"F-cking walleye!" she says.

--cK

Crazy In All the Right Places

2004-07-22T11:46:00.000-06:00

He just looks like he’s off his nut. Cheekbones jutting out underneath sharp hazel eyes that both wander all over and stare down too hard. Lanky, unclean. Sucks his teeth when he is angry. Think: Manson Family. Think: Aryan Nation. Think: jailtime and probation and drug use and violence and heartbreak. Think: bad news.

And then know: he is soooooooooo hot.

He’s just a little rough around the edges. Which is the way we like it, right? Better that—better this tattooed, motorcycle riding, heavy drinking, heavy fucking, high school drop out, stripper-dating, cowboy stud ruled by his pride and appetites than the alternative.

Better that than the yuppified pretty boys we so often throw ourselves at—those educated at the expensive private liberal arts schools, those that golf at a club of which they are a member, those that own their homes, those that take one look at us and see nothing.

Especially when he is soft around us where those boys are hard. He appreciates our generosity, he appreciates our lust, he appreciates our intellect, and he will do anything we need. He is affectionate and jealous and fun and honest. He doesn’t think he is better than us and isn’t overly or unduly complex. He can be a gentleman—which is more than we can say for most.

Just slightly insane.

Which maybe we can live with.

Humbert would have died

2004-06-25T13:21:00.000-06:00

For six years, during periods I wasn’t in school, I held a shit job bussing tables at the Crystal Lake Country Club. I can point to years of hideously unsafe living, but when it comes down to it, I was always quite stable. I am probably the most stable person I know. I didn't even mind bussing tables, not even for six years. It had its own. Downtime like that is probably just as (if not more so) formative in a life than the things we popularly speak of: our college days, “teachers who believed in” us, the downright ugliness we see between our undeveloped shoulders as we book- and butt-clutch it in the halls of a nameless junior high. (Dear God, pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death, and let me never never fart in this place.) Furthermore, wait jobs put a person in contact with a great many strangers who we’d likely never encounter otherwise.

A family asks what the special is tonight. I’m pouring water. I tell them the waitress will be by in a moment. They ask, “But don’t you know?” I say, “I think it’s a halibut, but I’m not exactly sure.” The woman pauses. She smiles wide. She says, “Are you from Sweden?”

Ms. Sateris, who I’ve heard is the widow of a mafia man killed by a car bomb, comes into the bar. It’s late. She’s the only one, and is often the only one. As is our custom, we stay open until the members have all gone home, and they have all gone home but her. So she begins drinking. Her lips are full and painted. Her golfer's shorts bloom from a tiny waist. Her limbs, I think, remember the life of a younger woman. After she smiles, she looks away. She looks away as she smiles. She goes to the juke box while I begin recleaning the dining room. The lights are low. It’s us and the bartender. Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” plays while I wipe the tables a second time. She reads the ice in her glass as one would tea leaves. Uninterrupted, “Crazy” plays twelve more times.

So, good lord, the days of our lives. …Every Mother’s Day was a 13-hour, breakless shift. I once worked a 19-hour day for a Motorola golf outing. By the end of it, I saw atoms quiver before me, I was a knife in the universe, and had to be careful where I stepped. I wondered how it is two atoms don’t just fuck us royal one day and, without human provocation, eradicate the Izods at the ninth hole.

I was 19. The Halperins came for dinner. The daughter, an accelerated twelve, wore a short skirt with black stockings strained thin at mid-thigh. She turned sideways in her seat and propped her legs, knees high, on the seat beside her whenever I poured water, so I was always reaching across her body, and the metal pitcher threatened to drip its cold condensation, and what would I say then? Her father drank something like a seabreeze and joked uncomfortably with me, while his daughter drank her water, and much of it, along with strawberry virgin daiquiris. I had ponied my grunger's hair to look the part: the suddenly refined student, a serious young man. Cummerbund included. There I was in my jacketless tux. Yes, Mr. Halperin. I'll check on that. The grandmother at the table stopped me. My pitcher of water sloshed still. She said, “You look like Jeff Spicoli.” No joke: THAT Spicoli. FastTimes at Ridgemont High Spicoli. (True enough: My hair was decently curly until I moved to Minnesota, a place that seems to have given me hair trauma.) My cummerbunded co-worker, Alvaro, shook his head. “Oh my god,” he said in his thick accent, which gave them all a laugh.

It was the only place I've heard the word "decadent" used in conversation. I was clearing dinner plates from table 9 (generally a four-top round) while the guests debated the spiritual-gastronomical merits of having dessert. The host was an odd odd man with a rather affected way of speaking, jut-jawed like he was trying to sound like a Harvard graduate. The waitress--Wendy, a total sweet pea for whom I made Absolut white Russians when the shifts were over and the members had gone home--recommended the Snicker Doodle Pie. The host loosed a rabid grunt. He said, "Ohhhh. Decadent."
-cK

First crush

2004-06-22T07:31:00.000-06:00

Funny how the phoenix of one's thoughts can skulk about with a trailer name like Tami.

Tami was the foster kid who came to stay with my family when I was seven or eight, but she wasn’t our foster kid. She lived with the family of my neighbor's friend. Her real mother was an alcoholic who drank during pregnancy, which left Tami with a bit of fetal alcohol syndrome. She had trouble making connections sometimes, and she certainly had an addictive personality. But those conditions were as much a result of her birth circumstance as it was of her life's instability and general teenage wildness. Her foster parents couldn't quite handle her and asked my neighbor to take care of her, but since my neighbors didn't have children and never planned to, and since they drank quite a bit—the woman who lived there has been treated (unsuccessfully) for alcohol dependency in the years since—and threw parties, the request then came to my parents. The foster parents paid my parents a bit of rent, I think, and Tami stayed in our downstairs bedroom, which five years later became my own.

It was a nice room to have. It was the only bedroom on the lower level, and there was a tv, a bathroom, a kitchen. It was like a little apartment after hours when the family had gone to bed.

There were certain ground rules, which I hadn't known about—or at least there was one: If she came home drunk or stoned around my siblings and I she would be kicked out. Otherwise, they let her be. No curfew, no chores. She could eat with us if she wanted to. She seemed to like the arrangement, and I think she genuinely liked being around kids because she could relax. There was no teenage pressure, you know? She was polite and patient, she told me stories. I was fascinated by her. She was a sleep-deprived waif, a bag of bones with cherry red lipstick and little banana boobs beneath tight tops. Each morning a cab driver named Felix came to pick her up—did she go to the Annex? The high school for the flunkos and discipline cases?—but she was never ready. I'd sit downstairs watching cartoons and eating cereal, and waiting. Tami would peek out from the bathroom where she was adding some curl to her otherwise dry, early 80s hair, and ask me to run out and tell Felix five more minutes. And I would, even in the winter. Even in my thin, Star Wars pajamas.

At some point I discovered more of her routine, and it became mine to get up just before six and wait on the stairs. From there I could see into the living room, to the door through which she walked each morning in her underwear on her way to the shower.

After school, if she came back to the house, she’d sit in the rocking chair and stare out at the willow tree and blow smoke rings because I asked her too. Sometimes I tried to shape the smoke before it broke up, or I’d just hold out my finger and let the smoke drift around it, which I suppose is its own Freudian mess.

Other memories get lost in here: a week during which she lived at a hotel with some boy; a night she came home drunk, or maybe just without a key, and rather than wake my parents and risk getting kicked out for good she slept on the front porch.

Five or ten years later, I'm really not sure when, she stopped by to talk to my parents and thank them for their help. She was living in Texas, and probably not doing too well, but she seemed very happy to see them and all in all comfortable with where she was at in life. She was thin as a rail and still seemed to suffer from a bit of sleep deprivation, but she was at peace with life, I think, whether it placed her in a trailer park in Texas or as a live-in with a family in the satellite suburbs northwest of Chicago.

The first 45 I ever bought was the Human League's "Don't You Want Me Baby."
-cK

Note to self

2004-06-21T08:45:00.000-06:00

Found myself eating tirimasu ice cream straight from the container. Of course, I was spooning around the softened edges. One doesn't need to be a forensic expert to spot this straight-from-the-carton excavation pattern.

Be civilized, use a bowl.
-cK

Release

2004-06-18T09:51:00.000-06:00

Some people like to walk where the gods of history walked. Some people.

En route to Chanhassan, Minnesota, for a visit to Prince's studio, Paisley Park, I decided that my afternoon would be a waste if I did not urinate somewhere in that studio--preferably in a bathroom.

First, though, let me tell you this much: If the doors of Paisley are opened for public visits again, and if you happen to go, when someone in Studio A asks you if you play drums, say YES. You might even add, "I am a drummer." When our tour group was asked, no one responded, save for this unimaginative girl who no doubt did once play drums, only she played a snare or something in a high school band, or maybe just middle school. So the sound guy takes her into the granite-walled drum room while our tour guide, one annoying man named "Chad," who I'm quite sure would prefer to give a "Nothing to see here" tour, says, "With a granite wall, sound just explodes." (Look, Chad, you were annoying; but I have to agree: sound did explode.) The guy in the drum room disclaims he is not a professional drummer, but then belts out a basic funky beat. He's got a decent sense of time. (Dare I say Morris Day and the Time?) And then he turns the sticks and the kit over to the girl, who says, no shit, "A cowbell!" She played the cowbell for us. A fucking cowbell.

But the real question is, Did she expose herself in Paisley Park? if only in the privacy of the lavatory?

I pissed at the end of the tour. I pissed the piss of kings (er, princes). Prior to this moment of release, my friend Heather cued me in: lavender soap.

I am here to tell you, mortals, that amid the souped up digital equipment, the basketball half-court, the Prince for Prince iconography, the Oscar for his Purple Rain soundtrack, the caged doves, the swank kitchen, the kickass lounge furniture, the gold records, and the aromatherapy candles from Pier 1--that's right, Pier 1--there is lavender soap with a hint of musk. Even in the men's room.

I went home. I urinated. I washed my hand's with some nameless Aloe soap. I felt like a total puss.
-cK

At the State Fair and After.

2004-06-14T16:03:00.000-06:00

You go down the midway and scope the games and prizes. All of the games involve arm strength and hand eye coordination. For the willing, talented, and naive, balloons may explode at the prick of pointed darts, china plates might shatter under powerfully pitched softballs, paper stars could be shredded by pellets from faux rifles, etc.

And most people do succumb to these amusements and do so in order to win the Big Prize. The enormous, flashy plush animals created in the likeness of well-known characters—a three foot tall Scooby Doo perhaps, or a giant Care Bear knock-off. They play for this, for the Big Prize, but are content to settle for the lesser ones and everyone goes home happy.

You, yourself, have always eschewed the Big Prize, always preferred the smaller, less obnoxious trinkets to the gaudy, loud, there-to-be-seen souvenirs. You prefer the dirty, white, no-name dog whose spots are half-fallen off to the Scooby; the bile-yellow frog with only one eye to Tenderheart Bear.

So when you step up to that carny and buy your three baseballs for two bucks and stand in front of those old-timey milk bottles (the ones you are almost positive are glued to each other and super-glued, epoxied, shellacked to the table they rest without sway on), stand there right in front of them and stare them down and take aim, you don’t do it with any grand ambition. Just knock one down, you think. Just knock one down and see what happens. That’s sort of your life philosophy.

So in your best imitation of Bob Gibson you wind up and pitch.

Low and away. Damn. Those milk bottles look as if they’re protected by a force field. You look up and see that sweet, sad kitty cat–the unnatural purple calico with the crooked eyes and try Sandy Koufax.

Way outside.

Nolan Ryan.

Focus.

Hurl.

You will the ball to reach a hundred miles per hour (or at least break ten), will the ball to hit its target.

And it happens.

The ball connects with the milk bottles and they all topple to the ground.

“A winner here!” The carny announces and reaches up to un-affix your prize—what you feel you’ve earned. Come to Mama, you sweet kitty.

But lo and behold. You’ve won the Big Prize.

This takes you by surprise. You’re not quite sure how to feel about this. The Big Prize is not really your style.

You juggle it and your funnel cake and lemon shake-up and ride tickets and wonder if it’s really worth it. But then you get to the car and prop it up next to you in the passenger seat and you are alone with your prize for the first time and you start to see it for what it really is.

And you start to appreciate its thick nylon fur and its sparkling plastic eyes. And you begin to appreciate other things too, things that no one else sees because they haven’t taken the time, they don’t know this prize as well as you do—its steadfastness, its whimsy, its honor, its level of commitment. They don’t see it for what it’s worth—they don’t see it’s true value. But you do and you start to really, really love it.

Then one day it’s gone. Perhaps your parents give it to your younger sister, or your sophmore year college roommate steals it when she moves home for the summer.

And you’re devastated more than you thought possible by its loss.

And you curse the Big Prize and big prizes in general—for leaving, for making you care.

(…but really you’re more offended by the situation, by the circumstances surrounding the loss, by the fickleness and pettiness of people, by the surface-deep-ness of them…)

And you wonder if it had the capacity for thought, would the Big Prize miss you, too? Would it want you back?

And you swear that if it does, this time, the Big Prize will have to win you.

Heartless on State Street

2004-06-14T08:26:00.000-06:00

Saturday, early evening. I was nearly late for a friend’s reading, having lingered too long with my parents at a gorgeous little trattoria on State Street in Madison. The restaurant is in the revamped corner building once occupied by The Ovens of Brittany, a vegetarian restaurant at which I had had a black bean burrito so wondrous that I still recall how good I felt on that day some twelve years ago. The name of the trattoria escapes me, but I suspect it was called Tutto Pasta, which is also a bow-tie dish that my father ordered.

My mother does not eat much olive oil, so my initial excitement at spotting "trattoria" written on the sign was tempered by the knowledge it was probably not a match for that good woman's fickle gastronomy. Yet, she glanced at the menu and found some excellent low- or no-olive oil foods--including a remarkable mushroom, butter and oregano soup--so we ventured in. The tipping point may have been our mutual remembrance of The Ovens of Brittany. It had been a favorite lunch spot back in the day when the family might venture northward. It was a city in which my parents could look at books and let us venture a bit on our own. My siblings and I could marvel at the size of the city, all the young people, the streets that allowed only pedestrians and buses, etc. It was this golden place for us.

So there we were, eating a fantastic dinner. Trattoria cooking is quite simple. I suppose it's like Italy's soul food. Lots of olive oil, pepper flakes, and pasta. Three to six ingredient meals (including spices). Good food for sharing. It's my favorite to cook.

And then it happened: I fell hopelessly in love with a waitress who must have been part of the restaurant owning family. She still had an accent, and there was a careful pace to her speech that suggested she thought of everything first in Italian. Initially she wandered towards our corner, though there were no other customers in this area. It was early in the night, just 5:30. Across the street a woman was in her fourth hour of fiddle playing, collecting loose change from passers-by. The waitress looked over our table, and then seemed to disappear behind me, though I was sitting at the window. She was, as it turns out, looking over the tables set along the walk, but I was so confused by this little moment that I stopped talking looked around me, wondering just what it might be that she was looking for. When our eyes crossed then I blushed terribly. Olive-skinned with a summer’s gloss beneath. Black hair pulled lightly back. There seemed to be a faint black line that circled the irises of her eyes, and shards of light within their depths. She wore a white button-up shirt with a very slight ruffle to it and the top two buttons undone, a black skirt to just below the knees. She was not like the Wisconsony college women who worked there--long limp hair, jeans and Italian football jerseys.

Later, when she asked if she should take the plate away, careful, always careful, making eye contact (How could one refuse?), I'd like to think she was asking, "May I rip your thundering heart from your chest, for you will never have need of it beyond this moment?" I said Yes, please, that would be nice. She smiled. She took what she'd come for. I fell apart.
-cK

The Bachelorette

2004-06-07T07:38:00.000-06:00

Once again, I was caught off-guard by the abrupt conclusion of a dinner reception--which should conclude, properly, with the end of the meal, and this reception did, but as I’m someone who warms to an environment and then becomes quite sociable, well, I didn’t get around to meet all the table guests and now feel a bit foolish. I do not want to be a wasted guest. Still:

After the reception, Jen, John Wallace, the Newburn and I went to a nearby martini bar. This is Decatur, Illinois, a city of about 80,000, according to the bartender, which is about 60,000 more than I would have guessed. She was amused when we ordered Old Style, a beer they did not carry. She said, “You must be from Chicago.” Fair enough.

A group of young, flush-faced women were having a grand time, laughing themselves to snorts and near asphyxiation. A short, shy woman in the center of things kept covering her mouth when she laughed as if she was burping. She wore a sash that read BACHELORETTE. Jen had just gone to the bar in search of strangers and cigarette lighters. The woman in the sash was brought to our table. Her escort kept her in check with a hand on her elbow and asked, “Would one of you fine gentlemen buy this woman a shot?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes I will.”

A man in a flatcap is always a gentleman. She’s pleased. She instructs me to bring a blowjob to the corner table and gives me a post-it note. Erratic scrawl: “Have one guy buy you a blow job w/ extra whipped cream.”

So the bartender and I shoot the shit as she prepares this. We talk about Decatur, the drives from Minnesota and Chicago. The man two seats over asks “What the hell is that?” when the conical whipped cream tower is placed in front of me.

“A blowjob,” I say. And perhaps feeling a little pressured add, “For that bachelorette party over there.”

“A blowjob?” he says.

“They just don’t make classy-named drinks anymore,” I say. He agrees. The age of rob roys and manhattans is over.

The bartender adds some extra chocolate sprinkles and tops this tower of whipped cream with a full-stemmed cherry. She grins, undoubtedly knowing what I’m walking into, but I, unaware of the ways of bachelorette parties, smile naively and sally forth to a shared fate.

The flush-faced women rock in their seats as I approach. Something is about to happen. The bachelorette blushes terribly and covers her mouth. “Congratulations,” I tell her. Her friends tell me I need to stay a bit. They insist I sit down.

The martini bar is full of lounge chairs, small sofas and love seats. Small square end tables are scattered about. In this corner section, all the seats are taken and they’ve pushed many end tables together to create something of a coffee table to accommodate their mess of empty shots, umbrella drinks, and martini glasses undoubtedly reserved for later thefts. All the chairs are taken, so I, ever literal, say, “All right,” and proceed to sit on the fucking floor. This sends them into hysterics.

One of them, scarcely containing her embarrassment for me, says through her fingers, “Oh, no no no. You have to sit on the table.” I comply like a puppy. Now they hand me the shot. A bit of induction strikes me: It’s a blowjob, it’s a bachelorette party, they want me to … drink this? No. That can’t be it. It’s a blowjob, it’s a bachelorette party, they want HER to drink it, yes, that seems right, but I’m holding it now so they must want me to … OH. The eyebrows raise.

The obvious is finally spelled out: “Place this between your knees.” I do. And amid flashbulbs and cackles, the bride-to-be, with hands behind her back and down on one knee, sucks clean the whipped center with a fierce, Hooverific sluck. She stands wobbly as her friends shriek and point and celebrate. A lone member of the party even raises the roof. The bachelorette holds her mouth, holds the other hand out, and lowers her eyes, red-faced, as the cherry stem tickles her throat.
-cK

The Fall Of the Computer of Jen

2004-05-26T15:00:00.000-06:00

I am the only thing Crushed this week, dear friends. My laptop finally and for all time shut her eyes—or as I said last night to the Gateway man: the fucking piece of shit just crapped out on me.

Cunt whore bitch.

Okay, I added that colorful last part just now. But c’mon.

I have lugged that thing around for four years, five apartments, and nine lovers. It was with me through graduate school, the post graduate-school years of bartending and bar-sitting, and the transition into the “real” world. It helped me write my thesis, countless stories, poems, screenplays, posts, two failed novels and one that hasn’t yet failed.

For the past year and a half I have sat down with her religiously everyday for at least two hours. I’ve spent more time with her than my mom, my best friend, or my cat.

I’ve been with her more than with any of the aforementioned lovers.

We had a relationship.

And then she dumped me.

As she struggled to open a file (any file) last night, as she whirred and wheezed, I could almost hear her saying “I just can do this anymore!”

I almost saw her throw up her little virtual hands in disgust.

As if I didn’t appreciate her. As if I took her for granted.

That slut.

Really, I shouldn’t be bitter, disappointed or upset. Everything is backed up. And I have hard copies. (Brian Coley losing his thesis taught us all a valuable lesson).

It is sad though.

And since no one in the free world will extend me a line of credit, she is, in fact, irreplaceable.

So I mourned her loss as I would any other; I drank a fifth of gin and poured a little out on the curb, gangsta-style.

Rest in peace, dear laptop.

You cocksucking rag.

Swing Night (aka: Partner swapping with all your clothes on)

2004-05-18T13:50:00.000-06:00

Yes, the fad has passed. The Zoot Suit Riot of a few years back has quelled to a grumbling, a muttering-under-breath. But in the quaint ’burb of Naperville--recently voted to be both a) the best place to raise children (in a formal poll), and b) the whitest place on earth (in a informal poll, conducted by me, given to my buddy Brian--Swing music and dancing are still all the rage.

The bar I work at in Naperville hosts Swing Night on Wednesdays. We offer both lessons for the beginners and an authentic swing band to play all night long for those who’ve got the knack, or at least haven’t yet collapsed from fatigue, embarrassment or pain.

At 7 pm sharp scads of men and women show up to take advantage of the free lessons. And they are dressed to the nines. The men are fond of fedoras and fancy, Italian leather, snake-skin-patterned, International Male-catalogue-bought, saddle-shoes. They carry these in their arms, cradling them against their chest like children. Like suckling babes. They switch these for their old moth-eaten, broken-laced, college-aged tennies only when they’ve hit the dance floor.

The ladies take it even a step further. They wear all of their finery, including the requisite flounce skirts--some equipped with petticoats (yes, petticoats)--many with their hair done in up-dos reminiscent of the pre-WWII era, or hats with netted veils.
There is a line to get in, but they all do. They get in and the girls get their look on and the guys get their shoes on and they all drink water (for $2 a bottle) so they can stay hydrated and dance all night. And some order food, but most are here for the lessons.

And that’s when Carl gets to do his thing.

And his thing is to dance.

Yes, the fad has passed, but as it was washing over us a few years back, it drenched Carl in a spray of dance sweat—and he hasn’t stopped since. He has found his niche in this world—something we all long for—and he can take pride in this, because he makes a lot of people happy. He can revel in his instruction of both young and old in the wild and wacky grace of swing dancing.

And off they go.

All of a sudden they all are swirling and twirling in a flurry of flounce and fancy shoes, of frenzied feet and ecstatic elbows, all to the microphoned suggestions of Carl, who is dark and slight and easily lost in the melee.

I walk through the chaos, my tray held high above my head, ducking flails and trying to hustle drinks. And trying to watch Carl.

He is Prince Charming. Careful in instruction, and then later, while the band plays, he is gracious and kind. He flirts and flatters, and dances with every woman in the room.
He even sets my tray down and spins me for an impromptu dance, complimenting my agility and calling me a natural (please refer to the post entitled La Comedienne to see just how untrue this is.); he kisses my hand and my cheek and moves on. He is having a great time.

And he is making sure that every one else is too. And I appreciate that because that is also why I am here, to serve them, to bring them whatever they want, to make them happy. And so we are united in this campaign, Carl and I: to make the people full and drunk and happy, and to take them away from their lives and transport them through time to a place they think is better, more romantic, more exciting, and more fun. It’s not going to feed the hungry or educate the ignorant or save the world, but there is something humbly noble about giving people an excuse to have fun, a reason to dance.

So to Carl I say keep up the good work,daddy-o, and to them all I say: Swing away.

Waiting patiently,
Jen.

Disembodied

2004-05-17T11:27:00.000-06:00

After a week of hauling boxes, book cases, chairs and a bed up three and a half floors to my apartment, and a weekend spent hefting furniture, boxes, dressers, book cases, chairs, etc. into my siblings' places, I discovered I now have someone else's legs. It was startling at first, the washcloth moving across my calves in the shower. I pause. I stand. I look around. I think, "Those aren't my legs." I try again: foreign gams.

It was like waking after sleeping atop an arm. You turn and the arm--your arm, your bloodless, lifeless arm--flops heavily onto your chest.
-cK

What a One-Eyed Horse Doesn't See

2004-05-07T14:34:00.000-06:00

I have a tendency to make foolish bets. On horses. On men.

Saturday was the 130th running of the Kentucky Derby, and this year, an undefeated colt by the name of Smarty Jones walked off the muddy track wearing the coveted wreath of roses.

I placed a modest wager on two one-eyed horses.

Smarty Jones has full working function of both of his eyes.

Guess who’s still poor?

But who could resist the lure of such underdogs? Who doesn’t want to believe that a one-eyed horse has just as much of a chance as any other to win?

I spent the afternoon watching simulcast races at Fairmount Park just outside of St. Louis.

Derby Day at Fairmount is slightly different than at Churchill Downs. Put away your mint juleps and grab a paper cup of beer. Gone are the debutantes in flowered hats, replaced by sweatshirted middled-aged men in ballcaps. There is no singing of “My Old Kentucky Home,” but you can’t escape the hopeful chants of bettors during a race (“c’mon five, go five, go five, c’mon horse, go five”) or the chorus of curses afterwards. Instead of the expansive and lush green fields of Kentucky bluegrass, there’s a gravel parking lot with potholes scattered randomly, like it was pelted with birdshot from God’s rifle.

Ha ha, God. You missed.

Fairmount still stands. Although it’s been visibly shaken by the blow.

It’s nearly impossible to get a seat at any of the hundred long cafeteria tables, unless one is willing to scope out the elderly and alone—who will likely have weak bladders and have to abandon their posts for the potty. One would be wise to prepare for cane and conscience batterings if stooping to this level. Otherwise, stand. Or get there early. When they open.

Which is why I assume YOU got there before they even unlocked the gates. To take your seat in the front row, to set up camp with the other hardcore gamblers.

You look out of place, with your rockabilly sideburns and alt-country hair, sitting there next to two grizzled old black men—all gums, these guys—track vets for sure.

But you fit in, too. The slight doughiness, the pallor, the nicotine-yellowed fingers, the fidgeting.

Off to make my wager, thinking about one-eyed horses and longshots in general, about how the most unlikely things are often so beautiful. You watch me walk by. Our eyes meet briefly. I smile, concerned more with your hair than habits. You look back up at the TV, compelled more by the action on it than in front of you.

An hour later, I walk by again. You are fast asleep, with your head down on the table. Losing tickets from lesser races torn in half and scattered about; an empty water bottle rests neat your hand; an anthill of cigarette butts has sprung up under your seat.

It’s still a good half-hour before post time. I still have hope for my one-eyed horses.

But I look at you, and I can’t stop wondering how things got this bad.

Creaking floorboards

2004-05-04T12:28:00.000-06:00

Memory is not to be trusted. As I walked through the new apartment today, I noticed that the rooms were not nearly as big, the woodwork had changed, and there's a slight divide between the kitchen and "dining area." This divide, I'm sure of it, was not there two months ago. The floors are sorely scratched too, and actually gouged at a couple points near the radiators--something the manager hadn't realized either. (The previous tenants had carpets.)

Also, the property manager put the wrong apartment number on my lease, so now I have the right apartment but I've been changing my credit cards and setting up utilities for a different place. Yikes! She's from Wisconsin, though, and those people--many of whom are my people--are really poor liars (Jeffrey Dahmer excluded). Think of Squiggy, the Big Ragu, Laverne. You can shake your head, but you really can't be mad.

So that was exhausting in and of itself, as was hauling up a few boxes of cleaning supplies and the first wave of books. (Third floor unit, three and a half from the street-level entrance.) It's easy to regret, you know, and I did. I regretted not taking the apartment on Cleveland, the one owned by the woman who owns my current building. That had a layout more conducive to gatherings since the living room and kitchen/dining space were pretty much one large room. It wasn't as interesting of a neighborhood, though, and it was a few miles from my current neighborhood, which I was intent on staying in. I like where I am. I think it's the right place.

Now, the stress of moving is going to cause this sort of dissonance. To counter, I stayed around a bit and propped open the windows to vent some of the paint fumes. I put a few supplies on shelves, mentally mapped what bookcases would fit in the closets. (There's a gigantic closet in the living room. It's probably bigger than the can.) What sort of storage case could fit behind the bathroom door? How feasible it is to fit the work table I want into this kitchen space?

Walking then from room to room, sometimes walking into the wrong one--a fairly stupid act in a four room apartment--a bit of space was gained. Betsy suggests that one night I or a neighbor will be sick and require assistance up the stairs. We'll both be embarrassed by the episode but will grow closer because of it.

A life can happen here.

Yes, the excitement has returned ... so long as I hold off thinking about the condo they are about to break ground on next door, the lot that is currently a greenspace. It was a major selling point when I signed the lease for this corner unit: light, trees, greenery. Damn it all, now. Angel and devil, angel and devil. I am a man of thin shoulders. But my fiction can flourish in this new place.

(Ooo: Is there a greater fiction than the self? I should be French.)

Let it come.

Soon to wake to the sound of hammers,
-cK

Point of Pride

2004-05-04T06:43:00.000-06:00

My powers of perception, long flagging under the weight of familiarity, have heightened as I gear up for a move. I pause to reflect: the toilet plunger is awfully dusty.

Well done, boy.
-cK

Waterloo

2004-05-03T07:49:00.000-06:00

10:30 pm, Saturday, Minneapolis. It’s Jakki’s birthday. I’ve just met Jakki, am visiting her and Andy’s house for the first time. Andy, Mahti, Misty, and I are talking at the base of the stairs. I’m waiting for the dude in the can to finish. He's really taking his time--no haunting linger, though, which I soon discovered, that's a plus. When he finally wanders downstairs I venture up. I set the beer on the toilet tank, wait a bit. The tank is sloped but the beer seems steady. Nice.

The gates are opened. There’s a pounding at the door. I respond. She responds. Neither one of us can really hear the other. It's a moment of bliss. (Does the bladder trigger endorphins?) A little buzzed. The party’s been going since 4:30. The voice outside the door scrapes the air, just a few faint notes. It's Misty, I'm sure of it.

I finish. I flush. I’m washing my hands. It’s at this point that fate begins to snicker. There's not even a warning, a sound of glass slipping across porcelain. Nothing. It's as if the bottle, which was quite full, evolved legs and a suicidal urge. The beer falls onto the toilet seat, there’s a nice little clack and crash, and abruptly urine-colored brew—damn you Samuel Adams!—sprays about.

The pounding at the door intensifies.

Horrified, I pick up the bottle and stare at it a moment. It continues its foamy release around my feet. I drop the bottle in the sink. The pounding at the door continues. I say something unhelpful like, “Uh … Uh …” and do a little Tom Arnold shuffle. That's it! I grab a line of toilet paper. My hands are still quite wet, so now I’ve pretty much saturated the role of paper while unwinding enough to wipe off the seat, a real rush job of it, though I haven’t enough time to wipe up the floor. Misty’s knocking is just too urgent.

Armed with a handful of beer soaked toilet paper, I open the door as she's just coming in, ready or not.

I’m just a pathetic, pleading mess. I say, “I swear to you all of this is beer! It isn’t urine. Really, really, it isn’t.”

She doesn’t care. Writhing like a child, she cries, "I don't care!" Her hands are in position to drop and douse. She says in her unplaceable accent, “I just need to sit down!”

Fair enough. I leave her to it.

Downstairs, my incredulity leads me to a point of confession. It was bound to happen, Andy. Misty returns. As another guest heads up to the jon, Misty says, “I can’t believe you just pissed all over the place.”

This line of commentary repeats itself for fifteen minutes of pissers.

Well, it was probably a good thing she shared the organic chocolate with me early in the night. She certainly would not have been so keen on the idea after my hosing of the loo.

Dear Andy and Jakki, thank you for a good night. You are marvelous hosts. Jakki, I truly hope you made Andy clean up the mess. And, I promise, if I ever make the cut again, I'll just wear a catheter.
-cK

Manage Ability (aka: One for the Haters)

2004-04-27T14:50:00.000-06:00

Not really a big consumer myself, but needing some sexy panties really cheap and really fast (don’t ask)—I cruised to the mall on my lunch hour and found myself, by reason of its proximity to the entrance, in Deb.

For those of you who’ve never had the occasion to visit a Deb store, be you male, or adult female, or the bearer of good taste and sanity, let me describe it to you. Inside this store, it’s as if a not-particularly-sharp eight-year-old girl’s brain exploded. There is the perennial section devoted to prom dresses and “princess wear.” Included here are elbow-length gloves, tiaras and scepters, everything a girl needs to lose her virginity in the most romantic way possible—on prom night, with your glass slippers on and your prince by your side (until you both get wasted and he sticks his dumb ol’ penis in you for a three-grind-grand-total of thirty seconds and it still hurts and you still bleed all over and you feel more like a scullery maid than a princess and when do you get to orgasm anyway? Or maybe that’s just how it was for me).

Across the aisle is the teen sportswear collection, which is dominated by racks of blue jeans and t-shirts with “catchy” phrases on them like “Dump Him,” “Glamour Girl,” etc. In the back is the sleepwear—including masks for the princesses’ faces and pillows with pictures of moons, clouds, and Care Bears on them.

This is also (inexplicably to me, in the midst of all this cutesy) the home of some rather racy underpants.

Which is, if you recall, what my mission entailed in the first place.
So I buy three pairs for ten bucks—all black, lacy, boyshort-style.
Variety is for the non-time-constrained.

I stroll to the counter and make small talk with the countergirl (“This is a great deal,” I tell her. “This cut is great, too, for hiding flaws,” she says. “Great,” I say). Everything is, well, great. There’s no line. The purchase is running smoothly. Until HE storms up.

At first, I'm intrigued. He’s good looking in that affected, Rivers Cuomo kind of way—a very studied sloppiness, shirt untucked just so, hair slightly mussed, horn-rimmed glassed perfectly square. He strikes me as the kind of person who would say “…but really I’m an actor/writer/in a band.” He’s harried, rushing around, clipboard in hand, looking irritated, which I presume, at first, to be an inevitable by-product of inventorying teen girls' bedroom accessories and prom dresses all day.

But then he opens his mouth.

“You put the wrong price on the clearance hooded tees.”

The girl behind the counter, who is in the middle of waiting on me, apologizes to him, gives me a wry-but-embarrassed smile, and runs my card through the reader.

He laughs, but not in a nice way. “Don’t be sorry, just do it right next time.”

She gives me that smile again. We both assume he is done. Admonishment over. But he’s behind the counter now. Hovering a short distance away. Studying the clipboard. He says, still looking at it. “I mean, you’ve got to be retarded to mess that up as much as you do.”

Retarded? For real? I turn to stare at him. The girl hands me the credit cad slip to sign. I accept it blindly—staring at him, at his naked rudeness, at the unprofessionalism.

She says, “I know; I’m dumb; I just can’t get.” She gives me a look now like “it’s just easier to agree…”

“You are, you’re, like, the stupidest girl here; seriously, it’s been three months.” Another snide laugh.

I hand her my ticket and pick my jaw up off the counter. I want to say something to him, something indignant, something about how uncool it is to berate your employees in front of customers, how uncool it is to call anyone retarded, or stupid. But I don’t.

Instead, lamely, I tell the girl that I think she’s doing a great job. Like what I think matters, especially because jerkass is out of earshot by that point. She apologizes. She says that’s just his personality—that it’s better if, like most of the girls, you can give that attitude right back to him, but she’s just not like that. She guesses she is just too nice.

I leave and spend the afternoon fantasizing about him.

I imagine him in leather wrist and ankle shackles, on his hands and knees.

My pet.

No.

My bitch.

What can I say? Jackoff managers bring out the sadist in me. Partly because managers in general are directly compliant in, and complacent regarding, the subjugation of the working class. Partly because they’re, you know, jackoffs.

So it’s not a crush per se, but I would like him to beg me for the honor of apologizing to that sweet little counter girl—dim though she may have been.

And also for the honor of tossing my salad.

And with one size-nine, knee-high, black vinyl boot poised above his windpipe or groin, I'm fairly certain he would beg.

And I’d say, Who are you trying to impress?

Dude, you work at DEB.

And then, hopefully, he’d remember what it’s like to work at some crappy mall job for $5.50 and hour punching up PLUs and asking people if they’re going to use their store credit today and seeing people your age spend more in an afternoon than you make in a week at both your jobs and dealing with shithead, douchebag managers who are condescending only because they were stupid enough or apathetic enough to stick it out the eight months it must take to become a manager at Deb.

This is why I don’t shop more often,
Jen

Pop quiz, hotshot

2004-04-26T06:03:00.000-06:00

Pub Quiz, Molly Quinn's, Minneapolis. Being that I wrote last night's questions (and answers), it was only fitting I was on hand to be lynched when the crowd found the questions too difficult. Listen, grumblers, if you don't know the Crests ("Sixteen Candles"), Long Duck Dong (of the film Sixteen Candles), Orff (Carmina Burana), Stephen King's book Four Past Midnight, or the old Fritos commercial theme ("Luncha-buncha"), well, then I don't know how to author a quiz for you. My old roommate Jake once wrote on my frosted windshield. He wrote, "Shitballs 4 U." Throughout the winter--which in southern Illinois is, arguably, winter only in name--this phrase would reappear on chilly evenings and after rains.

Sorry, quizhounds. A readier go next time. (You've got to admit, though: Condoleeza Rice-a-Roni was funny.) It's just that gauging who is at Molly's and who's at the Dub--that ain't easy. Different skill sets, you know?

The real question of the night was this: Who was the pudwhack who dropped a glass at 9:45? as he was being introduced to a Pioneer Press business editor?

Yup: ME.
-cK

Another round with the Muse

2004-04-22T10:38:00.000-06:00

Apologies, friends, for April's delinquency. Buried in work and spending freetime orchestrating a move and keeping busy with some fiction. (Can't let my days become all about being on the clock.) And, as requested by the readers, it's ime for a reality check: the Muse.

I am a dink. I'd totally set out to recommend a couple grand souls each month, as I have for many years, but lately I'm so in my comfort zone for writing--habitual times and locations--that I'm not encountering new blood to race my own. I'm still, however, appreciative of, and quite ga-ga over, the Muse, as one should be. (If you aren't, something's wrong with you.) So while I work to make good on promises of praising others, here's an update on my time at the Tap:

Yes, I love my little quiet encounters with the Muse. It keeps the heart beating.

Yesterday following work I had intended to run. The sun had pressed through the clouds, and when it's this early in spring--this is early in Minnesota--one must capitalize on the rare break in this wet newsprint we often call a sky. But I chose not to run. I ate some chips. I ate some cheese. I went to write at the Tap.

I went early because I wanted to avoid the manic Timberwolves crowd. (Hard to write there during a T-Wolves game.) It was a fine choice: the place was empty. The bored waitstaff had shelved themselves beneath the red light of a Leinenkugel's neon sign. They talked about their methods of counting tabs when working behind the bar, how it differed from the bookkeepping for waiting tables. There were a few customers in the back room shooting pool, and from time to time the break sounded. But that was it. It was just me, my notepad ... and my Muse! Waaaaaaa!

Oh, she's a charmer. At some point I was just zoned out. My glass was empty, but I didn't notice. I was barreling along some paragraph's shore. Then it struck me that someone was nearby. I stopped abruptly, sat up, looked at her as if I'd just emerged from a nap and was a bit confused about where we were. My face was as wrinkled as a shar-pei's.

The Muse had a little grin, a raised brow.

When she left, I tapped my forehead until the flush subsided, as one will tap a pop can while waiting for the fizz to settle.
-cK

Bad Seed

2004-04-20T14:51:00.000-06:00

It was only a matter of time. Running flagrantly afoul of the law would catch up with me sooner or later. I knew this, but I just didn’t have the $78 bucks to renew my license plate sticker. Well, I had it. But that money was earmarked for beer and CDs. And a lot has come up the six months since my last sticker expired. A lot of beer and some really killer CDs.

Of course, cruising through the suburbs in my outlaw vehicle was bound to get me noticed by the wrong type of guys. Namely, cops.

And sure enough, on my first trip to the quaint village of Elmhurst, I get stopped by a Ditka-esque patrolman, whom, due to his thick accent, I’ve nicknamed Officer Southside.

Officer Southside asks if I know why he’s stopped me.
“Yes sir. I have an expired license plate sticker, sir.”

Choosing to be honest. Everyone appreciates honesty, right?

Officer Southside asks to see my driver’s license and insurance card.
“You see, Officer, here’s the thing…”

Insurance is mandatory in Illinois. It’s the law. In addition to foregoing the purchase of a new sticker, I’ve also let my insurance lapse. To save money. For beer. And CDs. A couple of years worth, anyway.

And, to top it all off, I’ve forgotten my driver’s license at home in my other pants.

Officer Southside tells me flat out, but affably enough:
“Da only thing you done right, young lady, is wear your seat belt.”

“Always, Officer.”

Well, sometimes. And it was my good fortune that he saw me on a side-street, because on the highway I’d been speeding. As usual.

I won’t lie; I have a reckless history of traffic violation—starting with my very first ticket at age seventeen, also due to an expired sticker.

It appears I have come full circle.

But in that 14 year loop of law flaunting, I’ve accrued countless parking tickets, no less than twelve speeding tickets, three trips to traffic school, numerous months on court supervision, and dozens of weary warnings from cops too nice or too tired to actually write out the ticket.

Officer Southside was not too tired; he issued me three citations for my three violations—expired sticker, no insurance and no DL. Now, I know I made his night—and his quota—but the thing about this guy was that he was too impatient. If he hadn’t have been in such a damn hurry, if he would’ve waited say, about four hours, for me to come out of the bar he pulled me over in front of, he could’ve probably nailed me for a DUI as well.

Ha ha, copper, joke’s on you.

Holding the three tickets, I realized I now had more proof than ever of my fourteen years of road rebelliousness and evil driving ways right there, in my hand, on paper—three delicate pieces of goldenrod with my crimes in bold black.

Oh, to run back to high school and show all the bad boys that I’m not so “nice,” all the slutty girls I admired so desperately that I’m not such a “goody-goody.” I am a criminal.

Kind of.

I honestly think three traffic tickets must equal a felony in some advanced form of judicial algebra. It just has to. Am I now able to start checking that box on job applications? (Exactly why Hooters cares if I’ve been convicted of a felony is a question whose answer has always eluded me—but that’s a subject for another day).

I was given two weeks to get into compliance and offer proof of this to the circuit clerk of DuPage County.

Which I do, because as tough as I think I am, or pretend to be, as much as desire to be civilly and uncivilly disobedient, as much as I aspire to be revolutionary and however much I want to break down the system of government, I am, at heart, a big wuss.

Needless to say, within the week, I molded myself into a legal driver—obtained the sticker, purchased some cheap insurance from Fly-by-Night Insurers of America, began carrying my driver’s license on my person at all times.

The day I was expected to be in traffic court, I was nervous. There, in the courtroom, were a hundred and fifty others, who, like me, had done some damage to the system of regulations that govern our streets. But none of them could’ve been as bad as me.

None of them could be a triple offender.

I approached the judge, documentation in hand, ready to plead/cry/beg; I didn’t want him to throw the book, or 500 dollars in fines, at me.

“All righty,” he said. “It looks like you’ve taken care of everything. 100 dollars in court costs and you’re free to go.”

I was stunned. A hundred bucks is a lot of money, to be sure, but really just a slap on the wrist for what (in my mind anyway) amounted to a culmination of my lifetime of crimes of a vehicular nature.

Maybe, I thought, I should start robbing banks.

But then I realized a couple of things.

I am a menace.
A scofflaw.
A bad seed.

I got away with something far less grievous than I should have. I got lucky. And I have no business being on the road.

So Saturday, to protect myself and others, the sweet and hapless suburbanites that are blissfully unaware of my driving record, I polished off the credit card and bought a bike.

Riding high,
Jen.

A Dry Crisis

2004-04-12T08:39:00.000-06:00

Wading through my annual spiritual crisis, I attended Easter service at the Cathedral. This year I made sure to sit near the center isle. The priests walk past aspersing the crowd with holy water. I was three people from the center, the priest waved the water soaked brush in our direction, but not one drop, not one stinking drop!, hit me.

I guess you can't fool the unknown.
-cK

ps: The theatre near my office has a good ten screens or so. On their front entrance, they usually bill just one or two of the movies. This weekend, they billed it as follows:

HELLBOY
PASSION OF
THE CHRIST

Somewhere, a teenager with the title "Manager" is snickering.

Mouse-town Travelogue

2004-04-09T12:51:00.000-06:00

So, cK, how was your trip to Orlando? Got any stories to tell?

Jen the Cat

The Eye Doctor

2004-04-07T16:03:00.000-06:00

She looks like a transplanted farm girl, like she loves horses, like she should have been a vet and was maybe leaning that way, but found she didn’t have the heart for all that destruction.

She has straight, no-nonsense hair, middle-parted and blunt cut an inch below her earlobe. Hair the color of brown that most resembles dry, non-viable, earth; the color of brown most women dye/tint/bleach/streak/highlight or shave completely off; the color most women would do anything to deny.

Her pale skin is the canvas for Pollackesque droplets of freckles, and she has a slight overbite in her chap-sticked mouth.

She gets really close and asks you to look up. And you can smell her. Not perfumey or flowery; a clean smell: Dove soap and Suave 2-in-1 shampoo. And you feel her breaths of concentration on your cheek; can taste the coolness of mint on this breath-breeze as she raises her arms and drips something wet onto your cornea.

Eye-ball tightener, you decide.
Or at least that’s what it feels like—a swelling, a bloat, like you had a little give in those lids before, but now they fit nice and snug.

Actually, they’re dilation drops. Just like women used to use back in the day to make themselves look more beautiful. You ask if these, too, are made out of belladonna. She assures you they are not.

And then they kick in. And your pupils grow and grow until they nearly eclipse your iris, leaving only the thinnest corona of brown around the black.

The results: You look like you’re in love.
Or on PCP.

And then she looks into your eyes.

Because this is what she does.

She looks really deep into your eyes; all the way to the back, to the bottom, to the depths.

For this, she uses a microscope.

And staring into the dilated pupil, into that widened black space, what does she see? Is it like night in there? Filled with stars? Lightning? Fireworks? Is there a magic show playing on that stage in there?

What is the eye composed of?

Is it anti-matter? Is it fluid, solid, or air?
Is it nothing?

Are you just woefully ignorant of anatomy?
Do you really want to know?

Whatever it is, she proclaims it healthy and normal and is laughing, maybe because you seem nervous, maybe at your lame joke about being glad to have passed the eye test.

But she is certainly laughing and, oh, can she laugh. Gracious, open-mouthed and friendly-loud. A laugh without a trace of falsity or pretension; a laugh perfectly pitched—not too high, not too throaty, not too deep or too squeaky. Not a “heh-heh” laugh, but big, the kind that starts in the belly, warms the cheeks, forces the mouth open, and produces those sounds, those hiccups and noises, that are given voice but no enunciation or form but somehow combine into a laugh.

It was the kind of laugh that makes you laugh in return. Your eyes begin to water, which is why you’re there in the first place, but by this point you’re wrapped in the warmth of her mirth and don’t even care.

It occurs you that maybe she saw something important in there. Maybe she was looking in there and saw further than most, saw deep down, saw that for all of the things you’ve screwed up—for all the people you’ve hurt and all the poor choices and all the selfishness, that you really want to be a good person and that you try and have good intentions and a good heart. Deep down. Maybe she could see that and maybe that touched her in some way; maybe she is empathetic and wants you to know that she knows you are good. So she laughs with you to let you know she appreciates your efforts.

Or maybe, and this is even better, maybe it has nothing to do with you. Maybe she’s in love, or just got a new dog, or a raise, or found out that her brother has beaten his cancer, or woke up in a good mood because the sun came out for the first time in three weeks.

Or maybe she is always this happy.

Seeing things clearly,
Jen