Mom update. First things first. So, I woke up this evening and headed straight to the hospital, because it has been a full week since I had seen my mom. I walked into her room and was utterly shocked. She wasn't in her bed ... she was sitting in a chair. "Hey, it's Barrett!" she said. It was the first time I'd heard her voice in a month and a half. She is beginning to walk, she is eating actual food (well, hospital food at least), and is getting stronger every day. There is a good chance that tomorrow she will leave the ICU and go to the rehab floor. She said she's excited about talking to a variety of people and being able to look out a window. I know that things like
walking and
eating probably don't seem like much, but after six weeks of being mostly unconscious, they are outstanding strides. Just to be see her sitting up and watching the ball game was incredible.
"People need to be as self-sufficient as possible," she said. "I'm not bragging, but I am the backbone of this family. But everyone has to take care of themselves now because I can't do it. I can't even take care of myself. Hopefully now that I'm getting better, the family can get back to normal, only more self-sufficient."
I told her that this is something we've been discussing for almost two months now. It's weird to have to look out for/worry about my mom. She always was the one to on top of everything, which is probably why she won the chess game with the reaper, this time at least. The doctors say it's a miracle.
I didn't do a whole lot. On my two days off I mean. I meant to go out Saturday night, because plenty was going on. Mike Nicolai played the Brewhouse and I wanted to see that. Sloe Loris played at Beaner's, a mere three blocks from my apartment. The freaking Dames played Luce, which I have sworn to avoid, but I would have liked to see the Dames. For certain undescribable reasons, I did none of these things. But -- I did get to hang out with
Space Waitress who made an impromptu visit to Duluth for a little while on Saturday afternoon. We ate dinner and she shivered in my freezing apartment. Meanwhile, I ran around closing windows. Duluth is a cool city, SW. just like the T-shirt says.
FYI. When you're working the graveyard shift for the USPS, which is awesome by the way, the greatest song in the universe is "Sleeping In" by the
Postal Service. Not that the whole album isn't fantastic.
Heads-up for next weekend. If you're looking for something to do Friday, and you consider yourself a friend of mine, I'm inviting you join me and mine for CORN TO THE CORE, baby. That's right, a pre-Halloween fiasco beginning at my apartment and extending out into the further reaches of greater Wrenshall.
Things start out in the early evening at my place with a screening of the horrible horror flick
Children of the Corn
. Then, all hopped up on corn and whatever, we head out for "Flashlight Friday" at the
Silver Brook Corn Maze.
Now, however. I got home from the hospital, realized I had no booze in the house, and then realized I had a rare opportunity to steal some (don't ask). My plan is to drink it and watch both volumes of
Kill Bill, back to back. Wakey, wakey ... eggs and bakey.
And yes. That is me in the picture. Notice the small eye-holes. I'm a year old or so, a blogger in the making already with pencil in hand. I look at this photo and think, god I want those chairs, those curtains. Those
pants. I want everything 1974, except the computers. Well, not everything ... if you think the corn party is going to be a key party, you can just stay home. It's going to be good clean fun. Well, relatively clean. But please check your suburban desperation at the door.
Who: Friends, snobbits, countrymen.
What: A pre-Halloween, pre-Election Day spookfest featuring (hopefully) a screening of the horrific horror classic, Children of the Corn, followed by a trip to "Flashlight Friday" at the Silver Brook Corn Maze.
Where: My house, then to Wrenshall, Minnesota.
When: Tonight (Friday). We'll begin in the very early evening, so as to cram all this in before the maze closes at 10pm.
Cost: $5/person at the maze, unless we have more than 10 people, in which case it'll be $4. (Cash only)
Other: Dress warm. Bring a flashlight. Bring whatever else you need. I have a Race Case of Molson Canadian.
With the chilly months coming and all, I thought I'd share with you the greatest socks in the world. They're a bit ragged, and a bit irregular, but I've had them since I was about 13 and they've never done me wrong.
Don't mess with me when I'm wearing these babies, or you will feel the sting, sting, STING! Plus, the "tread" effect done with black yarn on the bottom makes me too fast to comprehend.
Hall of Justice, here I come.
Halloween is coming up soon, and that's the second-best reason to run out and rent Motel Hell immediately. The best reason, of course, is that this movie is so awesome I can hardly contain myself. I came home from work at 5am and threw this DVD in for some pre-dawn relaxation. Little did I know I would be in hysterics for the next hour and a half.
The first of the big belly laughs comes about 5 seconds into the movie. Even the credits are funny.
But none of this even matters. What matters is they way this stupid scenario is delivered. This movie is a study in how to make a B-movie, and everything is executed perfectly.
The unhidden, unforgiving backbends that the movie takes purely for the inclusion of nudity is a prime example. Why the hell does the sheriff take this girl to lover's lane so they can watch a drive-in movie with binoculars? Well, so that when the squad car pulls up to the make-out spot, the naked people in the cars will panic and do the natural thing, which is jump out of their vehicles and run around frantically jiggling. Of course. Who wouldn't do that?
Other scenes are just shockingly lurid. For instance, there's a scene with a kinky couple who show up at the motel with a tacky little pamphlet, wanting to know if the place is "cool." I can't and wouldn't even describe what happens next. It's too outrageous and too funny. You need to see it for yourself.
Also, there is the sympathetic attitude toward Farmer Vincent. He's not a bad guy. He prays to Jesus every day. He refuses to have premarital sex. Even the canniabalism, he does out of social concern: "There's too many people in the world and not enough food," he says. "Now this takes care of both problems at the same time."
Really, Farmer Vincent has only committed one sin in his entire life, which he reveals at the end. It's the punchline of the movie, really. Don't miss it.
Man. No sooner do I 
That's what I've been makin'. If anyone wants to trade, drop me an email.
There's a lot of people on the street at 5am. Well, more that you would think, anyway. I must have seen ten or twelve of them on my 4-block stroll home from work this morning. The slackers smoking in front of the gas station. The stockers filing out of the supermarket. The errant troublemakers roaring down Grand Avenue at 60 mph.
It kind of reminded me of when I was an errant troublemaker, during the summer in between high school and college. I had no job. I had no girlfriend. What I did have was an addiction to Jolt cola and a handful of similarly disinclined friends.
"I don't have a life," I'd complain, chuckling for some reason.
"Yeah, but you don't have any responsibilities either," was the inevitable reply. This was true. The most pressing decision of any day that summer was whether to swim in the lake or in Lester River.
The clock, like just about everything else, meant nothing. Hanging out could easily begin at midnight and end at noon the next day. Far too often, these hours were eaten up by endless games of Risk, interspersed with caffeine-induced arguments. Other nights we'd drive back and forth down Skyline, "surfing" on the outside of the car, stopping occasionally to shoot at stuff with BB guns. Youth, as they say, is wasted on the young.
For so many people, the day follows a regular schedule. Wake in the morning. Eat breakfast. Get to work at 9. Work. Get home at 6. Eat dinner. Watch TV. Sleep. Repeat. The TV news caters to people with this schedule, especially the weather report. They're always talking about "On your drive to work tomorrow morning," and "your weekend weather." I'm offended because sometimes my weekend occurs in the middle of the week. And as of today, morning is when I can either choose to go to sleep or choose to get drunk.
There is a whole segment of society that lives at night, some by choice and some not by choice. But by and large, we don't think about that. And we still equate rising early with virtue, and sleeping in the day as vice. It's silly, really.
In 9th grade, I got in an argument with my English teacher because she said, "Nothing good ever happens after midnight." Well, I lost the argument because I was only 14 years old and my defense was that her statement was too absolute. Yadda yadda yadda. But I'm 31 now, Mrs. Klun, and I can guarantee you that in my lifetime I've been ridden to the point of near insanity many, many times in the wee hours, and that is a very, very good thing. Case closed.
When you live life according to the schedule of the majority, life is a lot easier. When you tell people you're working the graveyard shift, they wince and feel sorry for you. But I'm not feeling sorry for myself right now. I'm feeling pretty good. And so many of the people I work with at night are happy with their schedule. They earn more money. They get shift differential, and they get more hours. And as my new supervisor said several times tonight, they have more fun. It's hard to describe, and I don't quite understand it yet, but the "vibe" is a lot more relaxed at night. It is more fun. Somehow.
I'm going to take these good things and run with them. I'm going to take these lemons and make lemonade. And being as that it's 6am, I'll dump a little Bacardi in that lemonade and think of you as your alarm is jolting you awake. Have fun at work, friends. I'm gonna watch some cartoons.
You figure it out. I'm gonna go watch 
So far, my preparations for my new night schedule are going as well as can be expected. I stayed up until almost 4 last night, and slept all day. Tonight, I am attempting to make my bedroom as comfortable as I can. I've removed most of the clutter, washed the sheets, and, most importantly, dismantled the bed frame and put the mattress and box spring on the floor.
As any of the 
This movie is grouped with The Hollywood Knights in my mind, because both came out in 1979, both take place in the early 1960s, and both involve groups of high school kids who wear matching jackets. But whereas The Hollywood Knights is about a "car club" on the West Coast, The Wanderers is about a street gang in the Bronx.
I watched this movie over and over during the summer between second and third grade. Back then, I thought it was tough, but there was something definitely "off" about it. I didn't know what it was back then, but boy oh boy do I ever know what it is now.
The Wanderers is totally fricken HOMO.
The movie opens with Richie, a blue-eyed Italian who looks like he just stepped out of Teen Beat, deflowering his girlfriend. At the very moment of climax, he hears a whistle outside signaling trouble for his fellow Wanderers. Since he has his priorities straight, he leaps up and runs out to join the boys.
The Wanderers are being chased by the Baldies, a rival gang led by a huge 400-pound behemoth named Terror (you might remember this actor, Erland van Lidth de Jeude, from such memorable roles as Dynamo in The Running Man). Terror has a girlfriend named Pew Wee, who is probably 4'5" and 60 pounds. Pee Wee looks and dresses like a 10-year-old boy, so it's quite something to see Terror pick her up, cradle her in his arms, and make out with her. This oddity is compounded by the fact that Terror speaks in a very smooth and effeminate manner.
Anyway, back to the plot. Richie and his Wanderers are rescued by the new kid in town, Perry (played by Tony Ganios, whom you might remember from such memorable roles as Meat in Porky's). They want Perry to join the Wanderers, since he is Italian, too, and all the gangs are segregated by race, creed, and color. Perry is noncommittal.
For some reason, there are no girls at this school in the Bronx, even though this is obviously a public school. (All the kids are just too poor for private school.) This adds to the utterly homo feel of the movie, too. And it makes it easier for the kids to harmonize as the randomly break out into spontaneous doo-wop. (Gay, gay, gay!)
Trouble starts when the boys go out for an afternoon of "elbow-tittin'" (bumping into women as a ruse for copping a feel) and meet Nina (played by Karen Allen, whom you might remember from such memorable roles as Marion, the gal who can drink anyone under the table in Raiders of the Lost Ark). Despite the fumbled and obvious attempt at elbow-tittin', Nina obviously has the hots for Richie, and vice-versa. This is bad news, since the girl he just deflowered is the daughter of a local Mafioso.
There's a bunch of other boloney about an upcoming rumble with the black gangs which somehow turns into a football game, and then there's some weird Irish gang that lurks in the fog and makes everything turn surreal when they come out swinging their shillelaghs. Plus Richie knocks up the Mafioso's daughter, we find out that Meat's mom is an alkie, and Dynamo leads his Baldies to get drunk and accidentally join the Marines. The movie ends when Meat and John Ruvelson drive off to California, Teen Beat Richie chases Marion to the folkie coffeehouse and realizes he's no match for Bob Dylan, and Pee Wee parties down at the mafia shotgun wedding.
I think there's some deleted scenes on the DVD that feature a gay orgy, but I'm not sure.
All right, enough of my woe. Do yourself a favor. Navigate through and watch the "sexy vids" from 
This is the second in a series of reviews of movies I liked as a kid, and have not watched since.
Truthfully, I was a little scared about revisiting The Hollywood Knights for two reasons. The first was that I suspected that the movie just wouldn't be any good. The second was that when I 
Sometimes, when I am just walking leisurely down the street or laying in bed or hanging out in my yard, I stop for a second and realize that everything is going well.
It's a good thing to do, because you often don't realize that everything is going well. You only realize the extremes.
When I was working 60 hours a week, I'd be traveling between jobs and see people -- sometimes people I knew, sometimes not -- just taking a few moments out to talk to each other on Superior Street or to eat a sandwich while sitting on a fountain. I'd be so envious. I barely had enough time to eat lunch at all, and I had no time to enjoy the outdoors or to take it easy during the day.
The same thing happened to me while I was walking down First Street last week to see my mom in the hospital. It was a gorgeous morning, and people were out walking their dogs or just walking down to the bakery for scones. I wished that I was doing something like that, instead of visiting my mom in the ICU.
This morning reminds me a lot of a day like this almost a year ago. It was another beautiful autumn morning, and I woke up and blogged and drank strong coffee. I had a blast just taking it easy and doing nothing. I had that incredible feeling of being free, with nothing weighing on my mind. That night, I went to a going-away party and then to a bar, and had a lot of fun. At 4am, I received a call; Starfire had been attacked in downtown Minneapolis and was in the hospital with a broken jaw.
The point is this. These bad things that happen in life are often sudden and terrible. But the good things, more often than not, are quiet. And you have to be alert to tune into them and enjoy them while they're occurring. But we rarely do that unless it's obvious. We take all the good things for granted, because they are so quiet. There's no dramatic crescendo and creative camera angles to show us that it's an important moment. It just happens like the rest of life.
Stand By Me is not one of my favorite movies, but there is one scene that is just brilliant. The boys are in the junkyard, talking about Annette's tits on The Mickey Mouse Club, and Vern suddenly says, "This is a really good time."
The narrator explains, "Vern didn't just mean being off-limits inside the junkyard, or fudging on our folks, or going on a hike up the railroad tracks to Harlow. He meant those things, but it seems to me now it was more, and we all knew it. Everything was there and around us. We knew exactly who we were, and exactly where we were going. It was grand."
Then they flip to see who has to go to the store, they come up with a "goocher" and everything goes to hell from that moment on.
That is life. That's exactly it. 