I remember our first VCR: a huge, awkward, top-loading machine with a wired remote control. Like most forms of technology in our house (a Commodore VIC-20, a "cable-ready" TV, a police scanner) my brother bought it with earnings he made as a mechanic at a factory. There was no room for it on our TV stand, so we put it on a chair next to the stand, and set about the business of watching movies and taping programs.

My sister lived in Germany at the time, which was all Nena and Falco and Sprockets, completely devoid of American culture. She'd send money for blank VHS tapes and I'd fill them, six hours at a time, with what I thought every American needed to be watching in the 80s. MTV videos, Dallas, Vikings games, and sitcoms like Night Court. She'd send the tapes back after she was done with them, along with letters explaining what she did and didn't like. Then I'd try adjust my recordings to better suit my audience. It was fun, like programming my own TV station at age 12.

I've asked several people about early video stores in their neighborhood, and received mixed responses. In our neighborhood, there was a surprising number of video stores, and all of them were independently owned. It seemed like every middle-aged couple with the ability to invest a couple grand suddenly opened a video store. My favorites were All-American Video (which seemed to employ weirdos exclusively) and Late Night Video (which was open until 11pm!). In addition, however, there was a tiny shop we called "the hole in the wall" that couldn't have been much bigger than the average gas-station men's room. Another shop had a 90% Betamax collection. Stores opened and closed all the time. Every gas station in the neighborhood also had a crappy video collection -- usually bad action movies and softcore porn, the type of entertainment enjoyed by the kind of people who go to the Milk House to shop for groceries and cough syrup, and maybe a few French ticklers from the men's room vending machine.

The thing is, I can't think of a modern-day equivalent to the mom & pop video store. What trend today inspires dozens of independent businesses to crop up all over the place, with hopeful entry-level investors banking on cashing in on this newfangled craze? None. You don't exactly see iPhone accessory shops taking over the old pet store on the corner.

Ultimately, all the stores failed, except for one: Video Vision, which became a successful chain, and now features not only video, DVD and game rentals but also tanning beds and a Ticketmaster outlet. Late Night Video survived longer than all the others, but eventually became a Mr. Movies, and then closed when Hollywood Video finally moved into the neighborhood.

All video rental stores will probably tank in about five years. By then we'll all have video devices in our abdomens.

Thanks to E&T for the shelves! I don't know what we would have done without them. Well, actually I do. We would have put up with books in piles around the apartment until we got sick of it and shelled out too much money for particle-board shelves from Target. Thanks for helping us avoid that!

Just to announce to those who didn't already know: As of this month of July, my girlfriend Christa and I are officially living together. It's a good match, for many reasons, one of which is that we both really, really like words. We both majored in English. We both have blogs [link]. But best of all, we both have a lot of books, and now that we're living together, we've been able to co-mingle our personal collections, put them into all kinds of geeky order, and get far too excited about strapping on our spectacles and reading the living shit of of them.

I'm not sure why I'm doing this, other than as an excuse to re-open the comments to my fellow nerds and to put this list in writing for some undetermined future purpose, but here goes.

Below is a list of our current fiction section. (Yes! We have sections! Fiction, poetry, drama, reference, general nonfiction, art, web design, graphic novels, how-to, cookbooks, and sports, to be exact.) Please don't call me/us crazy.

What I'm asking is, if you were faced with this collection, what would you read first? Now, it's true that I've already read some of these books before, but I have no qualms about re-reading books. That's why you own books in the first place.

What would you read? What should I read?

* I was gonna re-open comments for this post, but I deleted all the comment code out of my template (to prevent lapses just like this!) and I can't put it all back in for just one post. Sorry kids! But I'd still like to hear your feedback, so email me at bchase@gmail.com. And let's face it, if you're willing to read through this huge nerdy list and then offer comments, going to your email is not much of a hurdle.

Continue reading "Das Bookshelf" »

Every time Apple announces a new product, I get excited. All of this started when I bought a 40Gb third-gen iPod back in 2004. That thing served me well and I completely wore the crap out of it. In the three or so years I used it before dropping it on the floor and wrecking the hard drive, it was my constant companion. It perfectly suited my lifestyle at that time, and I loved it.

So tonight as I think about camping out to get the new iPhone that comes out tomorrow, I have to keep imagining that device's place in my current lifestyle. And I absolutely cannot.

Most importantly, I don't have any way to carry it. My current phone fits neatly in my pants pocket. The iPhone is designed for women and for guys who carry a murse. I'm not going to carry a murse. Ever. Also I'm not going to walk around with an iPhone in my hand at all times. And I'm not going to start wearing cargo pants either.

Second, I don't spend that much time on the phone, nor do I spend that much time listening to headphones anymore. I used to have a job at a desk where I listened to headphones 8 hours a day, and the 3-G iPod's weak battery couldn't even keep up with me. Now I have a job around huge noisy machines that like to crush little electronic things into sand.

Third, I really don't want to become one of those people who checks their email in the elevator. Not that I ever ride elevators, but you get the idea. Having been internet-obsessed at various points in the past -- and still leaning in that direction in the present -- I've come to the conclusion that I'm much happier and healthier when I experience life in all three dimensions. There's no need to feed bad habits.

So the iPhone is not for me. Pardon me if this post was boring, but I didn't write it for you. I just wanted to make this point to myself.

Clockwise from upper left: 1) carrots, peas, and roasted red-pepper hummus; 2) almond & rice crackers; 3) tomatoes, avocados, black olives and mozzarella cheese with salt & pepper; 4) lentil soup.

Today I got a Mr. Bento system, which is basically a large thermos that holds four bowls which stack on top of each other. Traditionally, the bento is a Japanese lunch box with many separate compartments for a variety of foods. Some people get really cute about Japanese bento boxes and try to make them as pretty as possible, but what appeals to me about bento is the idea of bringing a variety of foods with you.

Every day, I bring pretty much the same lunch to work: Turkey sandwich, orange, banana. Don't get me wrong; I truly believe that those three foods are among the most perfect on earth. But still, even though I occasionally toss a plum in there to stir things up, it gets a little boring.

Leftovers are great when you have them, but smaller items like vegetables, chips, and crackers aren't so convenient to bring to work. Sure, you can buy them in individual packages at 35 times their worth not to mention the extra garbage they produce. And then there are things like hummus and dips, which are just too annoying to pack for travel. All in all, it's easier to eat the same thing every day, and avoid variety altogether.

Which is why I picked up this Mr. Bento system. It all packs together in one container, doesn't need refrigeration, and allows for infinite variety.

Still, I have my reservations. I'll let you know how it works out.

A few weeks ago, I gave my girlfriend the OK to let her cat move into my (well, I guess our) apartment. It was a struggle. I don't like cats. I'm allergic to cats. And among all cats, Toonces is especially challenging to admire.

I often berate Christa about her cat's name. "Toonces"? I ask. "Seriously? You are a writer. A good writer. How could you possibly name your cat Toonces?"

"I didn't want to!" she says. "It's my ex-boyfriend's fault! He's the reason I have the cat in the first place!"

"If you were going to name your cat after a third-rate SNL character, you should have named him Lothar of the Hill People. Or better yet Mr. Robinson."

"I wanted to name him Perro," she says. I have to admit this would have been a great cat name. Unfortunately we can't just start calling him Perro, because he, unlike most cats, actually understands and responds to his name. Even more unfortunately, I have to scream that name several times a day. It's humiliating - like screaming, "It's Pat!" over and over again. All day long.

My hatred of cats began at birth. Before I was even conceived, my family owned a cat called Nelson. Originally, my brilliant siblings had named it Nelly, a name which stuck for several years until one of the grown-ups flipped the cat over and discovered that Nelly had nuts. Nelson was the reason for all of my sisters' tears when every last one of their shoes suddenly reeked like cat piss, and my parents couldn't afford replacements. He was also to blame when my toddler face and torso became a mosaic of cuts and scratches. I hated that cat. There was nothing cute about him.

I distinctly remember when tumors took over his body and he had to be put to sleep. My mom took me aside and gently explained it to me. I was probably five or six. "Nelson is very sick and he's going to go away," she said. "He's not going to come back." I understood the situation a lot better than she thought I did, and I wasn't sad in the least.

"Good riddance." That was my general feeling. From then on, all of my cuts and scratches would come from things that mattered, like repeatedly attempting to ride my Big Wheel down the stairs, for instance.

Dozens of dogs crossed our door throughout the years. My siblings were always getting them, then moving into pet-free apartments and pawning them off on us. I loved it. Dogs were awesome. I couldn't get enough of them.

Then one frigid night in November of 1985, fueled by five or six bottles of Old Milwaukee and a couple of "bumps" of Phillips peppermint schnapps, my dad suggested that it might be really great to have a cat to lay on our laps and keep us warm on nights like these. With the memory of Nelson long distant, I enthusiastically supported the idea. Not even a month later, Chewie showed up on my 13th birthday. My dad came home from work and nearly had a seizure. "That's a huge commitment!" he shrieked.

"But it was your idea!" we all said. He had no recollection. Recalling this, I have to say that my father and I are practically the same person.

Chewie was the exact opposite of Toonces. While he is enormous, she was the runt of the litter. While he is needy, she shunned human contact. A tremendous mouser, she craved the outdoors, shredding screens and shins until she got her way. Every day, she'd leave the porch littered with tiny corpses. Every fall, she'd bring mice inside and let them go to escape into the walls and breed so that she'd have vermin to chase all winter. All in all, she was barely even a pet. She used the house as shelter, ignored the people in it, and completely kept to herself. Her face was covered in scars from fighting and killing other animals. Her ears were literally in tatters. You could dislike her and she was fine with that, because she didn't like anything that was alive.

Toonces, on the other hand, is huge and needy. He has literally never seen a rodent in his life. His hobbies include slamming his head into yours (his head is excessively large for a cat's and he is also excessively powerful, so, it's kind of painful), meowing incessantly because you are not awake, pulling the fur off his own arms (no medical reason - he just likes having bare arms), taking huge stinky dumps in your presence, drinking water from your glass by repeatedly dipping his paw into it and licking the water off, making sounds of protest that resemble someone squeezing a rubber duck, and petting your face whenever he wants attention, which is pretty much all the time.

So yeah, I guess I'm a cat owner now. And to tell you the truth, the big fatass is starting to grow on me. He's beginning to learn the rules of this place - and there are several non-negotiable rules.

And this fall, when the mice make their way inside looking for a place to spend the winter, he'll be able to earn his keep. I have no faith that he'll actually be able to catch a mouse, but maybe being chased by something the size and shape of a gorilla will send them scampering for a different house to invade.

Four months ago, without notice or ceremony, I disabled the commenting system on this blog. I didn't have a problem with the people who routinely commented on this blog specifically (far from it, actually -- my commenters were consistently intelligent and funny). My problem was, and remains, the idea of commenting at large. Every day, I hate it just a little bit more. And every day, I hate the human race even more than that.

Some posts truly are conversations. And don't get me wrong -- I enjoy spirited debate as much as or possibly more than the next person. Hell, I even run a site that's practically devoted to conversation. But for the most part, comments are just a useless and increasingly annoying part of the web that bloggers, corporations, and site administrators seem to find absolutely necessary in this Web 2.0 era.

I think the type of comments I loathe the most are the ones found on newspaper websites. Overall, they read like a transcript of AM talk radio, only without a host. These people come across -- almost without exception -- boorish, asinine, and flat-out stupid. They make me cringe with shame, and whenever I read them, I become more and more frightened for the world we live in because these people can vote! And if you should ever be wrongfully accused of a crime, these people will make up the jury of your peers! Right this second, most of them are at home passing their values on to their children!

My suspicion is that newspapers allow these comments on their websites because they know that it drives up their hit-count. I know I read them every day, even though I agree with absolutely none of them and they absolutely disgust me. Also, whenever someone cuts me off in traffic, I pull up next to them at the next stoplight so I can get a good look at the asshole. It's a similar behavior, and I admit that I'm part of the problem.

Another loathsome type of commenter is the uninformed helper. Try this: Next time something goes wrong with your computer, or your car, your German shepherd, or your meatloaf, go online and Google the problem. Chances are, you'll find a slew of blogs and message boards where someone has posted about having the exact same problem you're having. They've made the mistake of reaching out to the commenting community on the internet.

Usually, the first commenter will suggest something imbecilic, such as "Are you sure your computer is plugged in?" or "Maybe you put the meatloaf in the fridge instead of the oven. I DID THAT ONCE!" As if that isn't bad enough, the second comment will often post, "I don't know." I. Don't. Know. People actually take the time to read a help request they know nothing about, then log in, and post that they don't know. Well, thanks, kind sir. Because I was indeed talking directly to you.

I'd like to give a special mention to a certain person who, while he isn't by any means the worst commenter who ever could be, sticks in my mind like a gritty, sandy irritant. I think it was about two years ago, when I posted a photo on my Flick account. In between the time it took to put in the title and tags after I uploaded the photo, someone I did not know or have any connection to posted a complete critique of my apartment in the background of the photo. What he liked, what he didn't like, what I should change, etc. Like I said, I didn't know him, and he didn't know me. I just happened to have the most recent photo on Flickr, and he clicked on it. Way to make friends and influence people, buddy.

Lastly, there's lowest common denominator: the scourge of the internet, the "me-too" commenter. While these people have been around since the net began, they've taken on a new level of sophistication since blogs boomed in popularity a few years ago. Now the me-too commenter is a blog whore who skims blog posts for a general idea, which they turn into a bland, inane comment, all so that they can get their own name out there as much as possible. You can frequently spot them, because often it's obvious that they haven't read the post or the other comments very closely if at all. It's just shameful and annoying, and I want it to end. I fear, however, that it's only beginning.

In concept, comments would be a good idea if they actually did promote community and debate. And that's possible. They can, in some rare cases. But for the most part, they're a tool to drive up hits. Their relative anonymity and lack of responsibility tend to bring out the worst in people.

Not everything needs to be a conversation.

Not just an afterbar, but quite possibly the afterbar. Dancing to vinyl records while the sun is already up and your neighbors are going to work -- this is the benefit of keeping a nonstandard schedule.

Last week, my cousin asked me if I was going to attend my nephew's wedding on Saturday. "No," I said. "I have to work all weekend." Another woman who was standing nearby was incredulous.

"You're working instead of going to a wedding?" she said.

"His own nephew's wedding!" my cousin said.

The truth is, I didn't even know about my nephew's wedding that Saturday. Oh, sure, I got an invitation in the mail a month or so beforehand, which I put on an table somewhere intending to RSVP. But of course I never did. I forgot all about it, and when the day came, I hadn't taken it off or bought a present, or anything even close to that.

I felt bad. Then I remembered that I'd never attended any of my nephews' or nieces' weddings. I'm not sure whether that made me feel better or worse. But it made me understand myself a little bit better.

I can't believe that there are people so together that when they receive a wedding invitation, they actually RSVP, then go out and purchase a present, get dressed up, and attend the wedding. With a guest! Chances are, they don't even get drunk at the reception and knock over the ice sculpture either. These people are like aliens to me.

It's not that I don't care. I do care. When someone gets married, I wish them the best of luck, and would happily do so in person if only I could remember it was happening. The thing is, I'm 35 years old now, and my mind has been operating in this way for a long, long time. If you're getting married, I would like to receive an invitation, but I can't promise to attend or even to RSVP. I may attend. You never know.

Here are some other issues I'd like to get out in the open, as long as I'm on the topic.

» Unless you're on Facebook, I don't know when your birthday is.
It pains me to say this, but I have no idea when any of my siblings were born. I know the approximate season, and maybe the month, but that's as close as I can come. I know my dad's birthday, but only because it's September 11. (I honestly even forgot that every year from 2002-2005, somehow.)

» If your utility company doesn't have an online bill pay option, or better yet an auto-pay, don't expect me to pay you until you shut something off.
Seriously, though, this isn't my fault. It's two thousand goddamn eight. Do you actually expect me to write a check, put it in an envelope, go to the Post Office to buy a stamp, and mail your money to you? How cute. Yes, I realize that I work at the Post Office, and don't think the irony is lost on me. And don't think I don't have to stand in line for an hour like everyone else. Off the clock.

I don't want to be this way, necessarily. But more and more, I'm realizing that this is how I am. Please don't hate me, and also, I beg you, please don't reciprocate.

It took about 20 minutes after leaving Ely's Peak before I noticed the first tick. Luckily, it wasn't on me, but on Christa, and even more luckily, it wasn't on her skin, but on her sweatshirt. We had just pulled into the driveway and were getting out of my car when I saw the little demon. I picked it off and dispatched it, but it was then that I knew (flashing back to all the bushwhacking we'd done while leaving one trail and searching for another) that the tickiness had only just begun.

Like good, clean citizens who would rather not contract Lyme disease or walk around with something resembling a white jelly bean attached to their foreheads, we inspected ourselves as soon as we got in the door. Nope. Nothing. Not a tick on board. Still, I was skeptical.

Crawling through the ticky woods of Northern Minnesota in springtime is not always a delight. I remember one time several years ago, when a friend of mine found something like 23 ticks after we returned from an afternoon hike. I got luck again that time -- I only had six. That was probably the most I've ever had, even though I've done quite a bit of hiking, backpacking and camping in my time. The only thing I can possibly attribute it to is that I eat a lot of garlic.

Anyway, you want the horror story and that's what I'm here to write so here it is. After inspecting for ticks, I took a shower and we went out to dinner. Then we came home and watched a movie and went to bed. About two hours later I woke up, scratched my belly, and bam -- there was a tick.

I don't know if you've ever removed a tick .64 seconds after you woke up from a dead sleep, but let me tell you, it usually doesn't involve tweezers and a careful inspection of where the head meets the abdomen, like all the pamphlets tell you. I grabbed that little fucker and yanked it like I was free-falling 50,000 feet in the air and pulling the ripcord. I leaped up, stumbled into the kitchen and burned his eight-legged ass. Then I crawled back into bed and slept the sleep of the just.

But in the days since all of this happened, here's what I've come to find out. When you grab a tick and yank it out of your body, inevitably some of his body, namely his head, stays where he buried it. Also, when you grab a tick by the abdomen really hard, he, like any rational being, spits the contents of his abdomen into whatever it is he's chewing on. All of this leads to a big, itchy, red skin-volcano that oozes goo until the goddamn bug head is expelled down onto the villagers below. And when you wake up in the middle of the night and find that, you have to leap out of bed once again and look up Lyme disease on WebMD until you're satisfied by their claims that you won't get it if you remove the damn thing within 36 hours. Plus you knew it was a woodtick anyway, not a deer tick, but that doesn't matter when you're looking at Mt. Vesuvius on your own abdomen at 4:39am.

I should have just delicately removed it, flicked it onto the old lady, and went back to sleep. That would have saved me a lot of trouble and worry.

My awesome laptop is now a craptop.

For quite some time, the battery has been completely drained. It would hold maybe 15-20 minutes of charge, then would rapidly fade and shut off -- almost without warning. I put off getting a new battery and just kept it plugged in most of the time. Usually, there was an outlet within reach so I didn't mind so much.

The barrel on the power adapter was a little bent. Sometimes, I'd have to play with it a little to get it to connect. But it always did so that was no big deal either.

Then suddenly, the adapter stopped working. No adapter plus no battery equals no power. No laptop. No music. No Photoshop. No fun.

So, I bit the bullet and ordered a new battery and a new adapter. I did this at the end of last week, so I had to sweat out the weekend without a laptop. Last night I came home to find that my new goodies had arrived. I plugged it in.

Nothing. Cold. Dead.

I popped in the battery and found that it had about 30 minutes of charge. Which would be no big deal if the adapter worked -- then I could charge it up. No such luck. The little charging icon never appeared.

Just for kicks, I thought I'd try the old adapter once more. I plugged one end into the wall socket, and was bringing the other end toward the computer, when a spark jumped out of it.

Apparently, this thing's been sparking up the inside of my laptop. The computer runs fine when it can get power (like, from the battery). But it seems that either the DC board or the Logic board is shot. A new DC board costs about $100, but a new Logic board will run something like $500-800, making it a pointless purchase. Then there's the labor charges. Normally, I like to try to fix things like this myself, but after perusing the instructions online, I won't be attempting this kind of a fix myself. Nearly every component inside the laptop needs to be carefully removed before the fix can happen.

I'm completely miffed, as you might guess. If it's the DC board, and the labor charges aren't too high, well, I guess I'll have to pony up for that. But if it gets much higher than that, I feel like I should just look into a new laptop. And I simply can't afford the shiny MacBook Pro that I truly want, so I'll have to settle for something less. Something plastic and pedestrian.

At least I know what I'll be spending that "economic stimulus" check on.

When I was in college and slightly after, I wrote down a lot of hilarious lists. In fact, a friend and I used to fill entire notebooks with lists, until access to technology allowed us to start filling floppy disks instead. When that technology started to disappear, I printed out the good lists I could find and put them away with the notebooks. I've completely forgotten the majority of the lists, but one popped into my mind today.

The list was "Things in Contention for Being Our Favorite" and it was very long. It included all kinds of great things like old men with huge glasses, rodeo clowns, and gale-force winds. When we looked at the list, we could never tell you what our absolute favorite thing was (it was futile to even guess) but every item on the list was definitely in contention.

Anyway, today as I was walking down the street, not really knowing where I was going, not really having any kind of plan about what I should do for the rest of the day, I thought, "This is in contention for being my favorite." Meanwhile, people rushed by on their way home from work or to the grocery store or to pick up their kids from daycare. They all had things to do and deadlines to meet. The biggest decision I had to make was whether to turn left or right at the next block.

Don't get me wrong; This doesn't happen very often. Normally, I'm the person driving down the street frowning at all the lazy bums who are moseying along without a care. Which is I why I love being the bum. I scowl at them out of envy.

I remember seeing a 1960s movie on TV, when I was in high school in the 80s. Who knows what the movie was, but I vividly recall a scene in which a couple of guys pull their car up to a couple of girls who are sitting on the sidewalk. "Wanna go to San Francisco?" One of the guys asks. The girls look at each other and shrug. "Sure," they say, and climb in the car. Even though my teenage brain was fascinated by such casualness, I never went on to build my own life in that way, and truth be told I wouldn't want to live like entirely like that. Still, plenty of balance in that direction is essential to my happiness.

Around the time when we made the lists, another thing I enjoyed doing was getting lost on purpose. It's great in a car, but even getting lost on foot or on a bike is fun. The whole time, I'm wondering "Where the hell am I?" and "What the hell goes on in that place?" and "Who are these people?" Meanwhile, those people are looking at me wondering what I'm doing in their neighborhood and what I'm looking for. The best and worst thing that can happen in that situation is for someone to actually ask you what you're looking for.

"Salvation," is the best response, even though I don't even know what that means.

My taxes are not complicated. I have one job, no dependents, and I own practically nothing of interest to the IRS, unless some government-employed CPA wants to come over to my apartment and play Guitar Hero III or watch season two of Northern Exposure. But since I hate doing arithmetic and I hate dealing with the US Mails even moreso, I always use one of the many free eFile options available to those citizens whose lives are uncomplicated by either children or excess wealth.

This year I chose esmarttax by Liberty, because it was recommended to me by the IRS website, and because I used it last year. Let me tell you something. This service is so efficient that I just now successfully (fingers crossed) submitted my 2007 tax return. On the night of April 20th.

Quite a long time ago now -- a responsible time before the April 15th deadline -- I merrily hauled out my W2 and whatever bullshit forms I needed. I plugged in my numbers. The website added it all up for me and told me I was getting a refund. I hit submit. All was well in the world.

Several days later, I checked to see how things were coming.

REJECTED.

I looked up the error code, which consisted of four paragraphs of electronic taxspeak about left and right justification, alphanumeric entries, etc. It didn't tell me where ther error was, only that I had an error, and that that error was Error 0010. At the bottom it said "if you get error 0010, contact us." The only way to contact the service was by filling out a form, so I did.

And then I waited. For days. I was never contacted.

At this point I decided I should do something. I thought the "alphanumeric" thingy might relate to the fact that I abbreviated the word "street" in my address, and used a period after it. So I changed that and resubmitted. More days passed. I was rejected again for the same error code.

By now, it was April 15. I figured I had to do something, so I thought I might investigate the pay service, which costs $30 and allows you to talk to a real person on the phone. I clicked the link, expecting to be lead to more information and WAS IMMEDIATELY SIGNED UP FOR THE SERVICE. No request for confirmation, no warning, just a $30 charge to my freaking credit card. And the clicker -- get this -- I was then presented with the same form I'd filled out days earlier, only this time there was a field for my phone number.

I sighed and entered the exact information I'd entered before, along with my number. And then I waited. Days went by again. No call.

Around April 18, I thought it wise to call the IRS and ask them what I should do. I told them my circumstances. They were as baffled as I was. The only sympathy they could offer was that since I don't have to pay them, the April 15th deadline doesn't mean much to me. There's no late penalty if you're getting a refund. They told me to wait for Liberty to call me back, and if they didn't, to just mail in my return like a senior citizen.

Finally, today, Liberty called me back (hey, it only took 5 days, what do you expect for $30?). They basically told me that I had checked a box somewhere that shouldn't have been checked. "The IRS doesn't have an error code for that, so we just used the closest thing we could," the rep said. Nice. How about you forgo the code and use the goddamn English language? But then, you wouldn't have my $30 would you?

That was what I wanted to say, but I never talked to them. They called while I was at work and left a message on my voicemail.

esmarttax from Liberty, you smell like balls. Next year I'm going to walker myself up to the letter box and mail in my return. And it's all your fault.

So today I was reading Sarah Brown's post about her life's regrets (This sounds like a downer, but it's actually kind of fun, she writes, and I agree) and I was happily thinking about my own regrets, when suddenly I remembered one of the major problems of my youth, which made me actually laugh out loud (or LOL, for you kids out there).

When I was about 16, I seriously had the thought -- like most teenagers -- that I wanted to learn how to play guitar. Faced with this situation, some kids might get a guitar and immediately give it up as if it were a NordicTrack or a BowFlex. Other kids might incessantly talk about learning, but never gather the initiative or patience to actually do it. I, on the other hand, dismissed the thought outright, firmly believing that at 16 I was too old to begin the arduous task of learning to play the guitar. Too old. At 16. This was not the violin, and I was not interested in playing Mozart. I wanted to play Ramones songs -- three-chord songs written by drug-addicted doofuses.

In a similar vein, I remember seeing Lollapolooza II in 1992, which featured the Pearl Jam, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Soundgarden, Ice Cube, Ministry, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. As I was getting ready to go to the concert, I remember thinking that at age 19, I had better enjoy Lollapolooza, because seriously, I was already too old to attend such a thing. (Two years later I saw Lollopolooza IV in 1994 with L7, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, A Tribe Called Quest, the Breeders, George Clinton & the P-Funk All Stars, the Beastie Boys and the Smashing Pumpkins, and I felt even more awkward, being a 21-year-old at such an event, though I thoroughly enjoyed seeing what were then my favorite bands.)

I always felt a lot older than I actually was, and I always had a lot of criticism for most of the people my age. I think I missed out on a lot of fun because of that, but then again, I can't be too sure of that, because I never felt like I suffered from a lack of fun. Most of my memories are pretty fun-filled, so it's hard to tell.

I think this whole trend stopped when I was around 27. It was then that I finally felt my age, which is weird because 27 is not too old to learn guitar or to attend Lollapolooza, or anything, really. Since age 27, I've learned numerous things -- probably more than I learned in my whole four years of college, actually.

Most of all, I've learned to ascertain the things I really am too old to do.

Read and appreciate Thomas Wolfe.

Add Facebook applications.

Go camping in the winter.

Unlike when I wanted to learn guitar at age 16, I have no desire to do these things. The thought of doing them absolutely rankles me. Yes, I just used the word "rankles." I am 35.

I still have plenty of fun.

As I awoke on Easter morning, I said a little prayer.

"Please, Jesus, if I should ever have children, let them not turn out like the Satanic little fuckers visiting their grandparents next door. Amen."

And the thing is, I'm actually being serious, here. When I look out the window and see older one -- the 8-year-old boy screaming like an rabid animal, kicking the deck until the railing breaks loose and using it to "shoot" his little sister ten times before knocking her down and actually biting her on the face, then tearing off her boots and socks and shrieking "YOU'RE DEAD! I KILLED YOU THREE TIMES YOU LITTLE FAGGOT!!" -- I boil with disgust. It's the same thing every time he visits. If he can't punch it, kill it, or gouge its eyes out, he breaks it and turns it into a weapon, which he uses while screaming himself hoarse. They'll visit for four or five hours at a time, and the whole time, he screams obscenities (or, more often, just gutteral noises) and tears up the yard.

That said, at least the kids are playing outside.

I can see this kid's life and his future perfectly every time I peer out the window at him. I imagine he kills a lot of squirrels, and the occasional stray cat. He's a D-student who spends a lot of time in the office, probably for bullying weaker kids, or more likely for having "emotional outbursts." After a short life marked by unemployment, petty larceny, and date rapes, he'll probably kick off around age 26 when he either drunkenly plows his snowmobile directly into a white pine, or else burns to death in a meth-lab explosion somewhere south of the Oliver bridge.

I can't really decide which is more likely.

Every now and then, the girl will scream until their mom will come out, cigarette in one hand and cell phone in the other. The girl will whine to her mom about what the boy is doing, and the mom will reply, "STOP BEING A TATTLETALE, CAROLINA!!!!" Then she'll slam the door, and, if it's dark outside, turn off the yard lights so the kids will have to "play" in the dark.

So I guess it isn't too hard to guess how the little shits got the way they are. Still, Jesus, please. I don't ever want to have to live with people like this.

Every weekend. Seriously.

Usually, the first day of my weekend is packed with activity. There's always dinner eaten out, and fun to be had, maybe some drinks at the local drinking establishment, maybe a movie. It's festive, because it my day off! And days off are fun!

Then comes the second day off. And you know, here is where I am torn. Because there's stuff that needs to get done. There are fruits and vegetables to be purchased. I should wash the salt off that new car. Dishes. Garbage. You know, stuff that's been building up for the entire week. But on the other hand ... I know that in order to function properly, my brain needs some alone time. I have to turn off all the lights and decompress. Let my mind "run around in the yard," so to speak. If there's one thing I've learned so far in life, it's that this kind of decompression is essential to both my physical and mental health. Ideally, this will take up an entire day.

So what I usually end up doing is some kind of compromise, where I tell myself I will accomplish a small list of things after spending the bulk of the day zoning out. This doesn't work. The very essence of decompressing involves establishing a lack of obligation. When I try to combine the two, I end up feeling a certain level of guilt, while still very little gets done.

Back around 1999 or 2000, I had my hours cut at work in such a way that I was off Friday-Sunday every week. Most of my co-workers grimaced at their new schedules. I was overjoyed. One of the best days of my life happened on one of these newly free Fridays, when I had some dental work done, then wandered around downtown under the influence of Lortab. Everything was soft and beautiful. I walked out onto the pier where I helped a little kid reel in an enormous steelhead. He strapped the fish, which was almost as big as he was, to his bike and peddled off. Then I walked back to Superior Street where a tremedously drunk man tried to get me to take a swig off his plastic liter bottle of Silver Wolf vodka. When I refused, he wiped the mouth of it off in his bare armpit. When I refused again, he asked me if I thought my dad was going to find out. (I was in my late 20s at the time.) Eventually he told me all about the "little squeakies" that crawl out of the sewer sometimes. I rode the bus home and drew a comic about it. See? This is the kind of day that makes it possible for me to deal with all the mundane bullshit of life. You can't have that kind of a day when you're thinking about getting your oil changed.

I wish I could just work four 10-hour days per week. Better yet, three 12-hour days. Jesus, not so long ago I was making do with one day off per week. I must be going soft.

Or maybe finally getting back to normal.

So, last week I had the stomach flu. This week I have a bad head cold. And I hear that some people I know currently have the flu-flu. You know, the one that makes you sniffly, achey and dizzy right before it kills you.

What do you think are my odds of scoring a viral hat trick before all is said and done?

OK, so I got a new car. This winter was sheer murder on the Hedgehog, which was becoming nothing short of a death trap. When both headlights spontaneously extinguished on my ride home one night last week, I decided that I didn't enjoy driving a 13-year-old car anymore. Despite my adversity to car payments, it was time for me to trade up to something a little more fitting to my station in life. So I went to the car store and bought a 2007 Focus.

I'm not including a photo of it with this post because its covered with salt and sludge right now and besides, it's just a Focus like any other. You can Google it if you don't know what one looks like. It's the SE model. The 4-door coupe. Black. OK, it's this.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that the factory-installed CD player in the car also plays mp3 CDs, and this is going to allow me to embark on my nerdiest project yet. So far I've only made one mp3 CD -- a mix of 9 hours of songs I like, intended to be played on random. But this got me to thinking.

Nine hours of random songs that you've pre-approved is like the best radio station imaginable. You never hear anything you hate, but if you do hear a song you're not in the mood for, you can veto it. There are no commercials. No annoying DJ's voice. But unlike a standard mix tape or disc, it's completely unpredictable and you can listen to it many, many times before you get sick of it.

So what if I not only had one of these CDs, but actually filled the CD holder on my visor with these "stations" to create a visor lined with "presets" if you will. Some would have upbeat songs, some would have slow songs. Some might rock hard, some might just groove. Maybe one would be just for rainy days. There would definitely be one for driving in the dark along a lonely road and possibly getting abducted by Sasquatch.

If you need me, I'll be in one of two places: crouched over my computer making yet another "station," or halfway to Canada listening to god knows what next, while Bigfoot rides shotgun.

Yes, that's right ladies and jackholes. As of today, it's been five years since I started to subject the entire internet to the misfiring neurons, unfinished screenplays, and mewing cartoon cats fighting for attention inside my constantly dehydrated head. I figured there was a demand, since about 20 people a day back then would ask me what I was laughing at, and would look both disturbed and disappointed when I would close my eyes and mutter, "Nothing."

Since then, the site has gone through a name change, multiple upgrades, and countless identity crises. I've thought about giving it up many, many times. Each time, I just can't do it. Because of you, people! I have a very short attention span for all of the various projects and experiments I do, but that's because so few of them involve other people. I picture us all in a shoddy tent somewhere up in the mountains, pretending to herd sheep or fly-fish while we're actually falling deeper and deeper in love, me wearing a cowboy hat and little else, screaming, "I wish I knew how to quit you!"

Just take it easy on the Ambien, kids, or you'll take this blog along with you.

I don't like retrospects that much (the flashback episodes were always the worst in 80s sitcoms) so I'm not going to look back right now. And I wish I had some grand plans for the future of this blog, but I don't, other than my current experiment with keeping it commentless for awhile. I guess I'm just living in the present.

Right now, I'm blogging because it is fun. And that's about all there is to it.

Someone needs to tell the Waste Management company that, while I enjoy using their garbage cans and recycling bins for ghetto-sledding and occasionally brewing up a wopatusi, I am not one of their customers. So they should probably stop dropping off new disposal bins here.

Oh, wait. Somebody DID tell Waste Management that. Yet, the continue to line the curb with brand-new refuse containers. First, there was a new garbage can in the alley, and when, after about four weeks, they were convinced that it didn't belong here, they picked it up. The next day there was a new recycling can in front of the house. That lasted for maybe a week before it was removed, and now there's a new one again.

I'm tempted to just start using them and see what happens. But I think the whole thing is just some kind of scam. Like the moment a single banana peel lands in one of those cans, bills will start suddenly appearing as well.

The worst part is that the legitimate garbage company is getting confused about whether or not they still should pick up the trash. They call to complain about the other company's cans on the property, and I just noticed that last week they actually didn't pick up the trash at all.

Oh, well. At least it's pissing off the neighbors, who can't stand it when the recycling bin remains on the curb for a few hours after pickup, let alone for weeks. Sorry, folks, but it ain't mine.

And all those beer bottles inside must belong to some frat boy.

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When you're sitting in the dark watching a horror movie and suddenly a pair of great horned owls start their mating ritual right outside your window ... that will scare the snot out of you.

Also: owls are really loud and absolutely huge. I guess I didn't really know that.

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One day when I was about 6, the power went out just as my brother began bottling some beer he had made in a stone crock that used to belong to our grandmother. We lit candles, and someone started playing 78s from the 1920s on the old wind-up Victrola. I sat on the floor next to my brother, transfixed, watching the amber liquid rise up out of the crock through the clear tubing, curlicuing around until it reached the pressure valve he used to slowly deposit it in each bottle. The kitchen smelled like vanilla and honey, and the lights didn't come back on for the rest of the night.

That was a good day.

When I was 10, an elderly Finnish man -- some kind of relative removed two or three times by marriage -- made me a challenge after watching me chop wood at our cabin. He bet me that I would not be able to find a log that he could not split in "one shot." I rollled my eyes. How old was this guy, 90? 100? Well, probably more like 75, but still.

I found a log that I knew I probably wouldn't be able to split at all. It was too green and too long. "Bam! One shot!" he yelled as it exploded under the axe. I found a gnarley log with a lot of knots in it. "Bam! One shot!" Suddenly I knew this old codger was serious.

I ran around trying to find every butt-ugly log I could get my hands on. Some weren't even sawed flat on top. Some still had limbs attached. Some were two feet long. It didn't matter. "Bam! One shot!" I asked him how he did it, begged him to tell me the secret. He just smiled, handed me the axe, and walked away.

That was a good day.

Once when I was 13, I laid on my unmade bed looking up at the bare bulb on the ceiling and listening to my parents and their guests downstairs. I started to get really bored and bothered by my surroundings. So I made my bed, cleaned up all of my junk, and vacuumed the floor.

Then I went down into basement and found a large area-rug, dragged it up to my room, and vacuumed that. I found an old coffee table down there and a lamp, too. So I cleaned those up and brought them to my room as well. At one point my mom asked me what I was up to and I said, "Cleaning my room," but nothing more than that.

When I got my room looking how I wanted it, I got on my bike and rode to the newsstand where I bought a big stack of comic books and a bag of licorice. I went back home where I spread my bounty out on my coffee table. I sat on the floor with my back against the bed and worked my way through all of the comic books and all of the licorice. It took a long time -- maybe a couple of days -- for anyone in my family to discover what I'd done.

That was a good day.

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This afternoon, I said two things that later made me laugh. Not the smiling, roaring laugh I usually do, but more of a sneer accompanied by a choppy exhale.

The first was: "I feel like winter is over."

The second was: "I've ridden the bus a few times lately. I wish I could ride it to work every day."

An hour later it started raining. In January. In Minnesota. Shortly after that, the entire world seemed like a frozen-over hell. I tried walking out to my car where I'd forgotten my phone, and almost fell four times in the process. Letter carriers were coming in rubbing their temples and muttering profanities. I started wondering if the bad weather would let up before it was time for me to go home.

Nope. Not at all.

The thing is, the block I live on is very hard to access when the weather is the least bit inclement. Sure, you can get near it, but there's nowhere to park down there. Whenever there's a blizzard, I usually end up stowing my car in a ramp about a mile away and walking home. In the ice, however? I seriously did not want to walk up the hill when it was covered with a quarter-inch sheet of ice. For that matter, I didn't want to drive on the ice, either. And I seriously didn't want to have a knuckle-whitening ride that ended with me ditching my car somewhere a mile away and scrambling the rest of the way home, only to reverse the process in worse conditions tomorrow.

So I called a cab.

I asked them if they could pick me up at the post office, and the dispatcher said, "Well...they could try..." I asked if the gas station a block away would be better, and she said it definitely would.

"OK," I said. "I'll walk to the gas station and meet the cab there."

"You have to be very, very, careful," the dispatcher said. "Seriously. OK? The sidewalks are terribly dangerous. Be careful." I told her that I'd be careful. I was. And I had to be.

When the driver picked me up, he said that a lot of other drivers had gone home and that some of the other cab companies had pulled all of their cabs off the road. "I don't stop driving until they make me," he said. He got me within a block and a half of my house, and I tipped him well. "Why don't you live closer to where you work?" he asked. I shrugged.

Now tomorrow I have to take the bus to work, which I wouldn't mind at all under ideal conditions. Like maybe if it would get me there anywhere near my start time.

Oh, well. I'm lucky to be alive.

It's something anybody can do, but also something I've done more than anyone I know -- locking my keys in my car. My fragile and delicate mind can't handle more than two things at a time. In this case, I had to disconnect my iPod from the radio, grab my bag off the passenger seat, and take the keys out of the ignition. I got two of them right. The last, I forgot. Two out of three ain't bad, but in this case it was freaking horrible.

Especially when the temperature outside is about negative one-hundred. First I tried doing the obvious thing: using the eff word. It didn't work, even when I used it out loud. I tried in vain to get back into the car somehow. Then I tried getting into the house without a key. No luck. I called the landlord, but he apparantly conks out sometime during Eyewitness News at 10, so there was no answer.

This left one option: to walk to Burrito Union and wait for my girlfriend, who wasn't due home for another two hours.

There's something odd about going to a bar when you don't want to. I mean, I'll drink good beer whenever, and Burrito Union serves Fitger's beer which is among the best. But generally, I prefer to drink at home while playing records or watching VH1 Classic. I don't always want to hang out by myself at the corner pub listening to Tim Nelson jerk off all over his guitar while some Granola freestyles about MySpace. Not that the hippie-hop isn't good -- it is. But I planned on wearing flannel pants by now and holding a warm internet on my lap.

Instead I'm paging through the Reader Weekly wondering how they can exist by selling ads only to themselves, while alternately jotting down this post on a stray piece of junk mail.

I can't help but think about what might have happened if I hadn't had anyone to let me in. What do stupid people without girlfriends do when they lock themselves out in sub-zero temperatures? Get a hotel room? Die?

I'm glad I don't know.

Knock wood.

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I'm starting a photoblog.

It doesn't look exactly how I want it to yet, and I still have some tweaking to do, but here it is if you want to look at the two pictures that are there so far.

For the past week or so, I've been trying to explain, both in my head and out loud to friends, why I need a photoblog in addition to my regular blog and in addition to my Flickr account. It's been difficult to articulate, but it's something I understand and need. I'll try here to spell it out (for myself more than for you, actually), but don't be surprised if I fail.

WARNING: INARTICULATE GEEKY WORDINESS AHEAD

Continue reading "Photoblog" »

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On the rare occasions that I allow someone to freely roam about my house, I always try to impress upon them that anything they might decide to consume is almost certainly past its expiration date. They always make a sour face and attempt to wave me off, and that is when I sit them down, grab their shoulders, and look them straight in the eye.

"While you are in my apartment, if you put anything in your mouth without being very sure of its purchase date, chances are pretty good that you will end up in the emergency room."

My inability to keep up with expiration dates, freshness dates, purchase-before dates, and good until dates astounds me. It seems that I do everything that I can. I buy food in small quantities, even though all food seems to packaged with large families in mind. (Seriously, do you think that I personally need EIGHT bratwursts? Even if I wanted to personally eat all eight of those things before they expired, do you really think that I should?) Whenever I open something like a jar of pasta sauce, I write the date that I opened it on the jar lid. Occassionally, I've conducted small purges where I throw away the expired things I find. None of it matters. It's only a matter of time before we're right back where we started.

A few days ago Christa was making bread when she asked me if I had any baking powder. I said sure, found the baking powder in the pantry, and checked the expiration date.

February, 1998

"Well, honey, the good news is that I have baking powder. The bad news is that it expired when you were in college."

While I didn't check before throwing it away, I'm quite certain that there was exactly one tablespoon of baking powder missing from the can. That can has been with me through three moves. I could have thrown it away at any time, but instead, I packed it up, moved it to the new place, unpacked it, and reshelved it.

Suffice to say, I don't bake things.

In case you're wondering, I managed to find another can of baking powder in the pantry, and this one didn't even have a date on it. Christa tried it.

The bread turned out fantastic.

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The little girl had a staring problem to begin with. Something about me attracted her interest, so she was already gawking when I opened up the carton of eggs to make sure that none of them were broken. When she saw the eggs -- or rather the color of the eggs -- her eyes and mouth expanded to seven times their normal size.

Christa calls me a hippie, which is ridiculous in the first place, and in the second place is like Weird Al calling Milhouse from the Simpsons a nerd. Sure, my shopping basket is usually half-filled with free-range, crunchy organic nuggets, but the other half is filled with what one of my blog commenters called "negative-nutritious grocery product...like anti-matter for the body." Besides, she ran on the cross-country team in high school and constantly wears a wool cap, so there.

From what I can gather, Christa's definition of "hippie" is someone who doesn't work at Wells Fargo, doesn't wear pleated Dockers, doesn't shut down all aspects of life to watch football all Sunday, and doesn't consider Applebee's to be a great place to take a date and/or meet up with friends for drinks. Personally, I wouldn't call this kind of person a hippie; I'd simply call them "normal" or maybe a "non-douchebag." In this way, we are a good match.

When I was a kid, there were two practically synonymous words that my parents used, that each described people of a dubious nature: one was "hoods" and the other was "hippies." Hoods were dirty people with long hair who rode motorcycles. Hippies were the same people, only they rode in VWs or travelled on foot. Both "smoked dope." I didn't know what that meant.

The first time Christa accused me of being a hippie, I was appalled. She pointed out my organic eggs. The "hippies" I know don't even eat eggs, I said, real hippies don't even eat geletin...real hippies don't even eat honey. Then I called her a jock. She practically choked on her own Gatorade.

I guess that among athletic types, calling someone a 'jock' is a lot like calling a mildly healthy eater/somewhat regular recycler a 'hippie.' These are extremes that you don't want to subscribe to.

While I might choose to brush my teeth with non-fluoride toothpaste and while I might choose to wear man-sandals, she runs every day and consistently wears mesh. And yet, while we both love to drink strawberry Fanta and watch TiVo, we also sometimes munch on Clif bars as we trod down the Superior Hiking Trail.

More than all of this, we both like coffee and the internet. I guess, more than anything, we're just geeky bloggers.

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It's 3am on Christmas Eve, and this woman at Mickey's Diner in St. Paul is getting me down. She's 50ish, wearing long, gold ribbons in her hair, and she's fancily dressed in black velvet with a white faux fur coat. Also, she's alone. And also, she's three sheets to the wind.

I try to focus on the menu, but I can't. Slumped at the bar, she talks to herself. When she stands to hang up her coat, I look away, but watch her in the mirror as she fumbles with it, hanging and re-hanging it on different hooks, seven or eight times, before finally persuading it to stay put. The whole process makes me want to cry.

I see her husband dying on Christmas Eve seven years ago or maybe more. He, the one true love of her life. She just wakes up and he's gone. And everyone was terrific at first when the grief was fresh, bringing over food and making sure she was OK, but people tire of that sort of thing pretty quickly. Now, faced with a dark house and disturbing memories, she's made Christmas Eve into her own special night. She's been out on the town, carousing, though all night just like right now, no one paid much attention. Tomorrow she'll be haunted by the demons of Headache, Nausea and Emptiness. Merry Christmas indeed.

Is it the smell of hash browns on the grill that make her wrinkle her nose in disgust? Or has she caught a few words from the conversation between the two college girls on my left? Making out and hooking up, parties and other points of bragging rights among young people with low self-esteem. These two women -- the one talking loudly about her latest exploits, the other sadly swaying to the tinny Christmas music -- two women on opposite ends of the same spectrum of experience.

She was young once, too, this Christmas queen in her gold ribbons, and you can see the attractiveness in the bones of her face, her taste in clothes. The boys turned their heads when she walked into a room, and it was something she took for granted, a part of her happiness she thought would be there forever. But nothing is forever. And here she sits, alone and drunk in her party clothes, in a cheap diner on Christmas Eve.

My girlfriend, not entirely aware of all these thoughts in my head, rises and walks over to get a key for the bathroom, when the woman speaks to her, saying, "What're you, Ugly Betty? You might be actually cute if you weren't wearing that hat." At this, Christa laughs heartily.

And here is where I finally realize that all of this history, all of this sadness, is entirely in my own head. We are two-thirds of the way to Rochester and it's three in the morning. For the past hour, I've been listening to the fuzzy AM car radio fade in and out while watching the lines on the highway dash by. I don't know this woman at all.

She probably started out at a Christmas party and ended up here via three or four bars, and that isn't anything I haven't done many times over. Even this is speculation.

By the time my sandwich arrives, I'm feeling much better. There's still the rest of the drive to Rochester ahead, but I'm refueling, re-energizing, and best of all, no longer randomly saddened.

It's times like this that make me realize what a touchy thing the brain is.

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I often wonder why it is that I am so polite. I'm not bragging. It's nothing special to be polite, or at least it shouldn't be. Politeness is supposed to be one of those things you take for granted. Unfortunately, it's the exception rather than the rule.

Tonight as I walked into Subway, I politely thought about how cool the woman's jacket in front of me was -- a shiny satin jacket with the Pancho Villa logo on the back. Then I got a little closer. And that was when I started to hate humanity.

OK, OK. The sandwich was for her friend. But you'd think that all of this would have been worked out beforehand, or at least that she would have improvised. She didn't. Even when the friend didn't answer. No, she left a message. And then she said, "Can you make my sandwich while we wait for my friend to call back?"

I wanted to get her name and address, wait for her to get pregnant and give birth, and then punch her newly born child in the face.

In retrospect, however, I realize that this is my fault. It is my fault and it is your fault. Confronted with this situation, we're supposed to say, "Excuse, me, but you have no idea how rude you're being right now." It's like that scene in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home where Spock gives that kid on the bus with the boombox the Vulcan Nerve Pinch and everyone applauds. Everyone's thinking the same thing, but nobody wants to act on it.

Instead, I just sucked it up and dealt with it. The sandwich artist did the same, because that's his job. Then he was extra nice to me, recognizing me as a regular.

The friend never did call back. When it became clear that she could not hold up the line any longer without being absolutely ridiculous, she finally decided (appropriately) on the white American.

In all, I wonder if my life is better for putting up with the douchebags of the world, or if I'd get more satisfaction out of confronting them. I've done both, and yet, I'm still not sure.

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Every day, I get out of bed and put my T-shirt on backward.

Seriously. Every day. I'm not exaggerating. Most of the time, I look at the tag first, pull it over my head in such a way that I think the tag will be in the back, and then realize it's on backward. Other times, I just leave it to random chance, just pulling it over my head without looking. You'd think that would result in me putting my shirt on correctly around 50% of the time. It doesn't. I always put my shirt on backward.

Some days, I don't even notice. Some days, around 8 or 9pm, I'll realize that my neck feels a little weird. Then I'll look down and see that once again my shirt is on backward.

This has been going on a long time. I think it was on my third day of high school that someone pointed out my backward shirt to me, which was pretty embarrassing because that shirt actually had a graphic on the front of it. I guess I never noticed that the shirt that formerly said something suddenly said nothing. Someone had to tell me about it so that I could correct it.

It's pretty disheartening to realize that I'm nearly incapable of mastering something so complicated and technical as a T-shirt. I mean if I start my day with that kind of failure, what promise can the rest of the day possibly hold?

Maybe I should start wearing button-ups. Oh, god, on second thought, that could be seriously embarrassing.

Maybe I'll just stay in bed all the time. Shirtless. And happy.

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I'm always skeptical whenever I hear about someone being "ahead of their time." Usually, whenever some jagoff uses this phrase, it comes along with a sophomoric attempt to pursuade everyone that they are truly the first person to ever really understand Jack Kerouac. Or that Kurt Cobain killed himself because he didn't have any fans like the kind of fan you would have been, if only you hadn't been five years old at the time. It's one of those phrases that sticks in my craw, and so I almost never use it.

But when I talk about this one kid I went to junior high with -- Larry H. -- I have to use that phrase and many others like it.

Larry didn't have many friends. Sorry, Larry if you're reading this, but you didn't. In a school where each morning all of the girls awoke at 4am to thoroughly Aquanet themselves into perfection, and the boys slathered palmfuls of Dippity-Doo into their spiky mullets before interpreting the name of Brut Splash-on a little too liberally, Larry let his natural hair grease plaster his locks into submission. He wore out-of-style clothes, and didn't seem to like any of the cool things everyone else thought were so awesome. I doubt he owned a single Def Leppard album. It was no wonder that nobody wanted to hang out with him.

Still, none of this ever seemed to bother Larry at all.

I'm pretty sure that some of my classmates might have suspected that Larry was actually cool, because I know that I did. I noticed the first clue in social studies class, where Larry sat a few seats away from me. I kept my papers in plain, cheap folders from Kmart. Some of the other kids used folders decorated with unicorns or with the face of Janet Jackson or whatever. A lot of kids used Trapper Keepers. Larry used the empty sleeve of a Beetles album.

And really, I should have become friends with Larry right then and there. But I couldn't. In fact, it didn't even occur to me. His coolness was something I could only sense, but never actually see, like a creature from another dimension -- totally outside my realm.

The best thing that I ever witnessed Larry do was when I was in the washroom while some other kids were bullying a 7th grader. Larry walked in, carrying his harmonica, and one of the bullies grabbed him and said, "Play your harmonica!" Larry shrugged and began to play. Soon the washroom was full of boys, shouting and clapping along. Someone came in and asked what was going on, and someone else shouted, "We're having a hoedown!" Eventually the bell rang and the hoedown came to an end.

At the end of that year, Larry disappeared and I never saw him again. I guess his family must have moved, maybe across town, or maybe to Austrailia for all I know. What I do know is that one day, when I was perhaps 25, Larry H. popped into my head and I suddenly, spontaneously realized that he was cool.

It kind of blew my mind.

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Today I am 35.

Sometimes I wonder how old I will be when I stop appreciating birthdays. I think it will probably be the same age I am when I stop appreciating jokes about farts and buttholes, which is to say about 250 years old.

Despite what they insinuate on TV, being in your 30s is fantastic for many reasons, but the thing I like most is what I like to think of as the Three Principals of Bullshit Reduction.

1. More than ever before in your life, you are able to recognize bullshit for what it is.
2. Upon seeing bullshit, you are old enough to have the courage to say, "This is bullshit."
3. You then avoid said bullshit, politely if possible, but not necessarily. Bullshit does not require politeness.

There's no way of knowing for sure, of course, but I'm willing to predict that by the time you reach 70 or 80, all willingness to endure any kind of bullshit is completely erased. Or rather, the bullshit just washes over you in a brown wave, then beads up and drips off just like in those old commercials for Turtle Wax. Or at least, I can only hope that's the case.

Throughout life, the BS just keeps getting thicker and thicker. And any sane person will tell you that there's no way to avoid it.

Attitude. That's the secret of life.

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Today the Duluth News-Tribune ran a story about people who illegally raise chickens right in the city. When I was a kid, nearly everyone in our neighborhood (well, everyone except my family) raised chickens as well as ducks, geese and turkeys. We didn't live in the country by any stretch of the imagination. People just built chicken coops in their backyards, filled a couple of kiddie pools for the ducks to play in, and feasted on delicious organic eggs every morning.

Occasionally when they desired an evening meal, they'd head over to the shed and grab a hatchet.

The people who lived on my block didn't like the government much, and hated being told what to do. If they wanted to keep chickens, they'd keep chickens. Likewise, they didn't like being told where to park. Our block was a one-way street with parking allowed only on one side. At some point, someone decided that it should be a two-way street and that we should be able to park on both sides. So they did the natural thing and took down the signs.

There was a period of about three or four years where the authorities and my neighbors went back and forth. Signs would go up and immediately be taken down. Cops would show up randomly and ticket everyone who was parked illegally. But usually, you could just drive in either direction and park wherever you wanted because, well, how was anyone supposed to know what the rules were when there were no signs telling you?

Eventually, the city put up stop signs at both ends of the block and alternate-side parking signs on both sides of the street. The criminals had won. Let that be a lesson to you, kids.

These days, that block is completely different. Half the houses have been torn down and replaced with brand-new ones. All of the families who lived in the old, falling down houses have either moved on or died off. It's a nicer neighborhood now, younger and more respectable. There are still a few rotten old crackhouses left, but just by looking at them you can tell they're not long for this world. Soon they'll be bulldozed to make way for new developments, which will be purchased by young couples with little kids.

I wonder if any of them will raise chickens. I doubt it.

At least I hope they appreciate the two-way street.

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I can't tell you how excited I am about the summons I received yesterday to serve on a federal jury. I got one about a year ago informing me that I would be on call for a whole year, and now I guess I'm on call for a couple of months.

Truthfully, though, I have mixed feelings. While I do want to serve, I have always held that I personally would never want to be tried by a jury of my "peers." Not to sound snobbish or anything, but have you spoken with the average citizen lately? No? Here's a sociological experiment for you: Spend a little time hanging out in the snowblower aisle at Home Depot, and just eavesdrop for five or ten minutes. Now, would you want any of those jackholes deciding whether or not you're going to do time in prison? For that matter, would you want me making that decision? I didn't think so.

Less terrifying but more headache-inducing is the thought of deciding someone else's fate along with 11 other mouthbreathers you might see peeling back the bun and inspecting their slider at White Castle. I've seen enough Matlock to know exactly who's on those juries. The businessman who thinks the whole thing is cut-and-dry (guilty-as-charged!) and just wants to get back to work. The elderly black lady who spends the whole time knitting and slowly shaking her head. The middle-class housewife who's too timid to give her opinion. The guy in the red flannel shirt, who at the end of the trial we find out is actually the killer!

These concerns dampen but don't nullify my enthusiasm. As I said, I am excited to serve. Mainly because I'm the type of person who likes to be in on things. I like to know all the details. The story behind the story. And I enjoy being a good citizen.

The $40 per day, and $.97 milage, though, not to mention the chance to eat in the courthouse cafeteria, that's the sweet part of the deal.

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I'm not going to pretend that I was in a good mood today. After cramming two hard-boiled eggs down my gullet, and screaming at least 15 eff-words in regards to the second winter storm warning this week, I plunged out into the world in full hatred of Duluth, the people of Duluth, and the entire season of winter, not to mention you, your mother, your sister, and your filthy, dirty genitals.

After driving 15-20mph on the freeway among people who find it prudent to keep their headlights off and to constantly ride the brake while driving in zero visibility on a slippery surface, I arrived at work for the second day of what I like to call NaMaProMo, or National Mail Processing Month. It's a month that I'm participating in! There are a few simple rules to NaMaProMo, which are kind of like the rules of chess: easy to learn but hard to master.

» I will process -- by hand -- every single oversized Priority Mail™ parcel in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin during this Christmas season.

» Every day, I will work as long as it takes to do my job. I will not leave until it is finished.

» From now until Christmas, I will have only two days off. They will not adjoin.

» Nearly every clause in the contract my union negotiated for me will be suspended during this month. I will have veritably no rights.

FUN! Anyway, I made it to work unscathed (for the first time this week) where I proceeded to work my ass off and consume not only lunch, but also dinner, out of the vending machine, all the while I had no idea whether or not I was going to be able to make it home after work, because of the second raging snowstorm within three days. After weighing all of my options (one of which included walking the 4.5 miles home in the middle of the street in dark clothing), I actually started to think about the inevitable, which was renting a room at the Motel 6 across the street from the sewer plant so that I could easily get right back to work the next day.

Luckily, the storm let up and after shoveling out my Ford Escort, which was completey buried except for a small swath of fluorescent green, I was able to drive to my favorite free parking ramp, located only a mile from my home. And even luckier than that, the ramp is attached to one of my favorite bars. My old lady, who had the relative luxury of walking 2-1/2 miles to work, met me there.

I like bars pretty much on any given day of the year, but there is something about a snow day that makes a bar spectacular. It's the precise opposite of the cold and hateful world outside. Here, it's warm, friendly, and relatively safe. It reminds you that life is, for the most part, fun. Here you steel yourself for the mile-long walk home through the wind and snow. Here, no one makes you behave in any way you don't want to.

Tomorrow I'll walk back to my car, which will be safe and snowless under the ground, and it will actually be kind of fun -- way more fun than digging it out of a concrete-like snowbank. Tonight I've discovered that the secret to NaMaProMo -- one of them anyway -- is to find the positive.

Just like the rest of life.

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I've owned these boots longer than I've owned anything else in my life.

I got them for Christmas when I was 13 -- well over half my life ago. I remember putting on my wool socks, getting ready to go ice fishing with my brother, when my mom said, "Wait," and retrieved a box from her bedroom. Christmas wasn't for another week yet, but she said I could really use this present right away. And when I opened the box, I was actually really excited. When it's -10 degrees and you're sitting on a bucket on the middle of a lake, there's nothing worse than wearing Asics Tigers.

To put things in perspective, I also got a kitten that year. The kitten grew into a cat, which lived to a ripe old age and then died. But I still have, and still use, the boots.

Back then they were way too big for me of course, purchased large to accomodate my growth and so that I could wear one or two pairs of thick socks underneath them. They're still too big. I think I stopped growing when I was 14, when I reached a hair's width shy of six feet tall. I've had plenty of opportunities to get a new pair, one that fits me better, but I never have and I doubt that I ever will, unless I have to.

Cold and snow aren't so bad if you're prepared for them. If you're unprepared for them (e.g. you drive a beat-up Ford Escort and live at the top of a hill on a street the city doesn't like to plow), well, then life can get complicated. Whenever I pull on these boots, I feel like I'm at least a little bit prepared for winter. My car may end up in someone's yard, and maybe my hands will get cold and my face will get covered in snotsicles. But my feet will be more than fine, and that's a good thing to know.

*For non-Duluthians: Sam Cook is a local outdoors writer. His writing however, unlike mine, always has a point.

Of all the things I do, sleeping is my undisputed favorite. Anything else has the potential to be disappointing, but a good night's sleep will always satisfy.

There are three, perhaps four distinct ways in which I sleep. I'm not talking about the various positions and contortions I twist into while I'm drifting off. (Such as "The Grad Photo," in which I sleep with my fist underneath my chin, but perhaps I'm revealing too much...) I'm talking about the kind and quality of the sleep I'm getting, and the things I experience while I'm unconscious.

1a) Insomnia Simplex One
This is when I have lots of ideas. I have so many ideas. Ideas are more important than sleeping. I'm going to get rich by curing sickle-cell anemia, and I'm going to do it tonight! [Here's where I usually decide, two hours too late, to take a diphenhydramine tablet, which will put me into a retardedly dreamless and unsatisfying sleep until my cell phone manages to urge me awake by incessantly vibrating against the wood floor.]

1b) Insomnia Simplex Two
This occurs whenever there is any kind of upset in my sleep pattern, whatsoever. For example, if I actually have to wake up at a decent hour, which I almost never do, I will not be able to sleep. I'll drift off and then wake up ten minutes later, wondering if it's time to get up yet. Or if I'm sleeping in an unfamiliar place, I'll almost literally sleep with one eye open, just in case a hotel maid or my girlfriend's mom decides to come at me with a machete in my sleep. Don't even try it, lady! I'll be out the window within seconds!

2) Technical Knockout [TKO]
This is perhaps the most common type of sleep I experience. Here I need no drugs or persuasion to go to sleep. I crawl into bed and I literally have difficulty believing how good a bed can feel. I can't imagine why I just don't stay in bed all the time. I fall asleep completely within three minutes and wake up 10 hours later, wanting more despite the fact that it's time to go to work.

3) The Movie Marathon
Here I fall asleep normally, then wake up 20 minutes later, usually at the point of my intense dream where I'm about to shoot someone, be shot by someone, find out the identity of my long-lost cousin, or pick up a hitchhiker in Germany. I stay awake for about a minute and a half while I roll over and realize that I really want to get back into that dream. I always do manage to get back into the dream, but at a different point, like when you're at the movies and you go to the bathroom and return to find that you've missed a key point. Then 20 minutes later I wake up again and repeat the whole process, over and over, until it's time to wake up, which I do with even greater reluctance than I do in #2.

Some people think that sleeping for one-third of your life is a waste. Me, I think it's probably the most interesting thing you can do. It's all a matter of perspective.

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Throughout my life, I've had a whole list of things that I choose to believe. These are not things that I actually believe, but rather things I have made the conscious choice to believe despite knowing better, simply because it's more entertaining.

For example, while if I were pressured I'd probably admit that I really believe the opposite, openly I believe that human beings have never walked on the moon. The whole thing was done with special effects in a TV studio. Meanwhile, millions of people sat by their TV sets, enrapt, weeping tears of joy for humanity's accomplishment, and all of them were fooled.

Lots of younger people who were not around for the experience actually believe that the moon landing was a hoax created by the government. They have a point. I mean, if it really happened, why haven't we been back? Maybe it was pointless and foolhearty to begin with. Maybe it's too expensive and too risky. But really, if we went to the moon tomorrow (or next year, or the year after that) would you believe it to be true?

The real truth, for me at least, is that it's a lot more fun to believe that the whole thing was fake. I like to think of President Kennedy sweating bullets after he promised the world that we would do it. I like to imagine all the eggheads at NASA wracking their brains, fiddling with their sliderules, screaming, "WE CAN'T DO IT! WE JUST CAN'T DO IT!" Then I like to imagine some intern in the back of the room nervously raising his hand and asking everyone in charge why we can't just fake the goddamn thing. Oh, it's the greatest story never told.

Another thing it's fun to believe in is shadow people. You know how you'll be sitting there, staring at the TV or off into space, when suddenly you'll see a shadow whisk by out of the corner of your eye? That's a shadow person, running around your house. It isn't a good thing, as you can imagine. But which is better: 1) You just saw a shadow. 2) You just saw a shadow person. The choice (and it is a choice -- remember that) is clear.

It's incredibly stunning how few people these days believe in leprechauns. I mean, do you actually want to live in a world without leprechauns? Apparantly, the answer to that question for most people is "yes." Most people are stupid.

One day when I was a kid, we were all out playing in the street when someone looked up and noticed a huge rainbow in the sky. We talked it over, and agreed that finding the gold at the end of it was something that we could actually do. We scrambled onto our bikes and zipped off, pumping away at top speed, but we never found the end. Nevertheless, I ate Lucky Charms every day for a week after that. It was funner than hell.

Whenever I see a ship on Lake Superior at night, I know that it's just another ship. But I choose to believe that I'm seeing the ghost of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Lake Superior itself, of course, is full of sea monsters. But when a black cat crosses my path, it isn't bad luck. That's just another mangy alley cat. Because there's no fun in being negative.

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From a box of Savannah's Candy Kitchen sugar & spice pecans

I think I stopped being a good speller in junior high.

In elementary school, spelling was one of my only officially recognized creative outlets. Every teacher had the same routine. Every week, we'd learn a list of words, learn how to spell them, and then learn their definitions. On Friday, we'd have a test in which the teacher would say a word, then we would have to spell the word and then (here was where the magic happened) use it in a sentence. Coming up with the perfect sentence ... that in my opinion was the highest of arts.

But in junior high there were far more opportunities to screw around creatively in between the cracks of my public schooling. Spelling and grammar, to me, became -- as they should be -- an afterthought. The creative drive -- ideas -- took the forefront. All I wanted to do was think crazy thoughts, put them in writing, and say them out loud. Preferably in front of others.

Gradually, I became worse and worse at spelling and grammar, until I went to college and majored in English, where they taught me that everything they'd been trying to teach me about the English language was wrong anyway, so none of it mattered. There I learned the 10 or 12 things that were important. I also learned that I was a decent enough writer to know when and when not to shitcan the rest of what I'd been taught. It was tremendously liberating.

I've written before about how there's no better exercise for a writer than to read a lot of really, really bad writing. You can read the canon, but all that does is make you feel inferior. When you read F. Scott Fitzgerald, you can see that it is incredible, but it's hard to pinpoint exactly why it is incredible. Conversely, when you read something horrible, you know why it's bad. It's hard to escape, rather than hard to understand.

After I graduated from college, I read a lot of bad writing. Working for the Ripsaw News as a copyeditor was an education in and of itself. I used to liken it to being a hotel maid. Most days you change the sheets, empty the trash can, vacuum, clean the toilet, and leave. But some days, you open the door and say, "Ohhhhh ... shit."

I remember being given 6,000-word articles and being told to pare them down to 2,000 words. I remember rewriting entire paragraphs. Don't get me wrong: There were a lot of great writers working for the Ripsaw. But the writing staff was made up mostly of volunteers. Not all of them were great, and on a few occasions I questioned whether or not the writer could speak English at all.

On top of that, I also reviewed books by local authors, which I've often referred to as the most thankless job on the planet. I had to read many, many books, most of which were barely fit for the fireplace, let alone for reading. I'd read about three books for every one I reviewed. Sure, we'd get books by Louis Jenkins, Anthony Bukoski, Bart Sutter, Jim Johnson, and other writers who are fantastic in any arena. But we'd also get every self-published, vanity press piece of crap imaginable. I read as many as I could. And I tried to stay positive. But there was no way I couldn't rant now and then.

But here's the thing: Ever since my days at the Ripsaw when I relearned spelling and grammar, I copyedit everything I see. I once asked the people at Twice "But" Nice Furniture in West Duluth what the quotation marks were all about. They didn't understand what I meant, and later they changed the name to 2wice But Nice, which oddly made a lot more sense.

Tonight at Thai Krathong, I asked the server why the closed sign didn't have a "D" at the end.

"I never noticed that," he said.

"Maybe it's on purpose," I said. "Maybe it means, you were close, but we aren't open anymore."

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While I don't like to write about work on this site, I'm going to break the rules and mention that today I was informed that I became "regular." I won't go into the intricate definition of what that means, but suffice it to say that making regular at the post office is kind of like a promotion. It's kind of like making the varsity squad, or more accurately, like becoming a made man in the mafia. It means, more or less, you're fully fledged, matriculated, a lifer.

How do I feel about it? Well, for this, I defer to the master:

After three years I made "regular." That meant holiday pay (subs didn't get paid for holidays) and a 40-hour week with two days off. ... Each day would be easier. I could begin to cultivate that comfortable look.

Somehow, I was not too happy. I was not a man to deliberately seek pain, the job was still difficult enough, but somehow it lacked the old glamour of my sub days--the not-knowing-what-the-hell was going to happen next.

A few of the regulars came around and shook my hand.

"Congratulations," they said.

"Yeh," I said.

Congratulations for what? I hadn't done anything.

-- Charles Bukowski, "Post Office"

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Me (singing randomly): "Waaait fooor the beep!"
Christa: "You gotta leave your name, you gotta leave your number."

(Both of us look at each other, stunned.)

Me: "And that is why it's important to date within your age group."
Christa: "Exactly."
Me: "The best thing about growing old and being in a nursing home is going to be sitting in a wheelchair, staring out the window, and singing 'Nobody's hoooooome ... nobody's hoooooome' while the staff looks on, confused."

The reference, for those not in their 30s:

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It takes a week or so for a fly infestation to really gear up. At first, you simply notice that there are flies in the house. A day or so later, you notice that there are too many flies -- more than a "normal" amount for the average household. A couple of days after that, you're walking through thick, black clouds of viciously buzzing demons.

At least, that's been my experience recently.

Back when I lived at Irving School, hundreds of flies would pour in through the cracks around the windows every day at this time of year. Eventually, exterminators just hosed down the exterior of the building with bug dope every fall, because if they didn't, swarms of evil flies would invade, seeking warmth.

I figured this more recent case of fly drama had a similar cause, even though the windows here are new and totally insect-proof. I tried to keep everything locked up tight. Still, the flies kept increasing.

I went shopping in search of a solution. Everywhere I went, I found only two things -- high test chemicals for killing everything from roaches to scorpions (scorpions!), and sticky fly traps like those disgusting ribbons and whatnot. So I bought this orange pillar thing that was all sticky on the outside, and had pictures of flies all over it to trick the real flies into thinking that this was some kind of trendy fly nightclub or something.

Well, my flies apparently weren't the nightclubbing type. A few of them landed on the pillar and got stuck, but the vast majority showed no interest in that kind of gummy death. I thought about putting on some house music and twirling some glow-sticks, but decided against it.

After being pelted in the face by flying insects about 300 times this morning, I went back out into the world and found a milder, "indoor" chemical, made from orange peel extract, that carried no warnings about being toxic or deadly to humans (if I'm going to die from bug spray, I want it to be a surprise). I brought it home and sure enough, this greasy, citrusy junk will put a swarm of flies legs-up on the ground almost faster than you can squirt it on them.

As I was spraying the orange plague around my apartment, I thought about all the possible reasons for these flies being here. And that's when it dawned on me.

The potatoes.

In the corner of my pantry was a small bag of potatoes that has been there for a really, really long time. They're pushed back behind a Rubbermaid container, back in the corner I never think of.

It turns out that the nightmare growing in that corner will now be almost impossible to forget.

I summoned all of my will and headed toward the pantry. Whatever you do, don't look inside the bag, I told myself, over and over. I repeated it in my head about 10 times, and then, before I picked up the bag, I said it out loud again for good measure.

Whatever you do, don't look inside the bag.

Gingerly, I picked the bag up by its opening, taking care not to look at it too closely. As I was gathering the opening together to seal in the goodness, the contents shifted, spilling out a disgusting brown liquid, teeming with maggots.

Here's some advice: If you can live your whole life without ever having to use the word "teeming," you really should go ahead and do that.

I ran outside with the bag and threw it into the garbage. Then I came back inside to clean up the liquified potatoes and piles of maggots all over the floor.

It wasn't just the maggots, although the maggots were by far the worst part. The smell of rotten potatoes is, I truly believe, the worst smell on planet Earth. The military should bottle that smell and use it as a nonlethal weapon. Couple that with swarms of fly larvae and you've got yourself something special.

Grabbing some paper towels, I stepped back into the pantry. I took one look, then bolted to the bathroom and puked an entire Arby's Beef & Cheddar sandwich -- complete with Arby's sauce AND horsey sauce -- into the toilet.

It seemed that I was going to have to summon all of my will again, and then find some other will I might have forgotten about, to deal with this mess.

Once I do this, it's over, I told myself, feeling like a cowboy about to pull an arrow out of his chest, or a teenage prostitute about to turn her first trick. I gritted my teeth, ran into the pantry, wiped up the mess, threw the paper towels into the garbage and ran the garbage bag out to the alley. Then I came back in, poured straight Pine-Sol onto the floor and scrubbed away until I no longer felt like puking again.

And so folks, from now on I'll be keeping a closer eye on my kitchen. Additionally, it's going to be a long time before I can eat rice again. Or potatoes for that matter.

The very thought of it almost makes me lose my horsey sauce.

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So tonight I'm in my kitchen when I hear what sounds like someone knocking on my door. It's a low knock, like when someone is knocking hard with the soft part of their fist. It's a deep sound, barely audible, but strong enough to feel in the floor. But when I get to the living room, I realize that it's not someone knocking at the door, but the stereo in the car belonging to the same old douchebags across the street.

This, as always, should be good. I step out onto the deck to take it all in.

When the music shuts off, two guys and a girl get out of the car, almost too drunk to stand. The driver turns on his car alarm, then, realizing it makes a beep, begins to dance in the street while beeping it over and over.

"Heeeeeey!" the girl yells. "Do we need to pick up any beeeeeer?" Oh, she's a dainty thing.

"Nah!" the driver says. "I got two 18-packs of Milwaukee's BEAST!"

The trio then stumbles into the yard, where the girl immediately drops trow and starts urinating in the grass. I can hear the stream loud and clear. The driver sees her and sighs, exasperated. "Are you pissing AGAIN?" Disgusted, he walks inside the house, while the other guy watches the girl for a second, shrugs, and then pulls out his member and starts his own stream.

I go back in the house grinning, but a little disappointed. If it's only 11:30pm and they're already using the street as a toilet, they're far too wasted for anything really exciting to happen.

This is just another Sunday night rerun.

A few days ago, I told someone a story about one of the things that happened to me when I was at my poorest. About 12 years ago, I had no money and no job. It was summertime and very hot, and I had one pair of shorts. Every morning, I'd get out of bed, find the hole that had inevitably developed in my shorts and sew it back together. Every few days, I'd wash the shorts, always by hand because if I put them into a washing machine they would have just disintegrated.

I had about six t-shirts, all of which were the free shirts you get from volunteering at Grandma's Marathon. That and one pair of hand-me-down jeans made up my entire wardrobe.

One day I got out of bed, sewed up my shorts and put on a clean Grandma's t-shirt, and headed off to Perkin's Family Restaurant, where I was supposed to meet with this woman I went to college with and her husband. They had "just started a business" she told me on the phone, and were "looking for someone savvy." And so, dressed in my finest business attire, I trotted off to check out this potential job opportunity.

When I got there, we sat down, exchanged pleasantries, ordered some jalapeno poppers, and began to talk business. About a minute and a half later, I realized that they were perpetuating some kind of scam.

"Do you enjoy being jolted awake in the morning by an alarm clock?" the husband asked. I said that I did not. He then painted a picture for me, beginning with a morning where my body "is allowed to wake up naturally." He then described an entire day of leisure. It was like some kind of crazy Mad Lib, where I had to fill in the blanks in his story so that it would fit my ideal dream life. Together, we described the dream home I lived in right down to the last doorknob. We talked about the trips I was going to take, the car I was going to drive.

"You can have that life," he said intensely. "And to take the first step down that road, you only have to purchase these products."

That's right. Amway. Only they didn't call it that. I forget what it was actually called, but a lot of the pamphlets said Amway on them, and that's what it was.

The couple was really evasive about what exactly I would be doing and how exactly I was going to earn enough cash to jetset around Europe the way they had described. But they were very clear on how to begin: by shelling out money.

"The startup fees are nominal," the husband said. When he mentioned a figure around $200, I nearly choked on my jalapeno poppers. After joining the cult, I'd have to commit to purchasing all of my products through the cult. "These are many of the same products you already use and love," he said. When he followed up by saying, "Think of the hundreds of dollars you spend every month on food and clothing," I nearly fell on the floor trying not to laugh.

Reluctantly, I took some cassette tapes and pamphlets home with me and told them I'd "think about it." I listened to some of the tapes. The speaker on them said even less than the couple had; he just painted more pictures of my potentially incredible life (he was really big on RVs, that much I remember).

I met with them again a few days later, with a list of questions, the foremost among which was Tell me now in no unspecific terms what I would be doing to earn this money. They told me that I would be doing exactly what they were doing at that very moment:

Meeting with friends.

Chatting over lunch.

Encouraging others to join in on this fantastic opportunity.

I remember exactly what I said, and I only said this because I was in my early 20s, idealistic, and had nothing whatsoever to lose. I said, "In the past few days, you've made me think a lot about what I want to become. And I certainly don't want to become the kind of person who does this for a living."

They looked stunned. Maybe because what I said was kind of rude, but in retrospect, I think it was also because they were very naive. They truly believed that they were changing the world while heading on to great, unbridled success. I don't think they realized that some friend of theirs had conned them into conning others.

They were very nice people, after all.

Addendum: For the record, I went on to get an honest job. And while I don't exactly jetset around Europe and live in a stone mansion, I do in fact wake up naturally every day.

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I appreciate rooms. I am always in awe of and distracted by any room with any kind of character whatsoever. Currently, I rent an apartment. But someday I'd like to become a homeowner, and when I do, odd rooms will definitely be a selling point for me.

Speaking of my apartment, I've written before about the Redroom, and the many incarnations that preceded it. It's a handsome room. But many, many other rooms have caught my eye in the past, for just as many reasons.

If I were reclining on a psychiatrist's couch, I would say that my love of rooms dates back to a dream I had when I was about six years old. In it, I very realistically got out of bed and walked out into the hallway outside my bedroom. And there, low on the wall, was something I had never seen before: a little door. Suddenly I understood that behind this little door was a little hallway -- a hallway that led to a secret room all my own. I opened the door in the dream and instantly I snapped awake. I jumped out of bed and ran to the wall where to door was in my dream, but sadly, it wasn't there in real life.

The resulting disappointment lasted for weeks. I think this was the first time I realized the discrepancy between the awesome world of my imagination and the mundane world of reality.

A few years later my sister moved into a house in Superior, and her son (who was not that much younger than me) had a room that actually had a little door in the back wall, much like the one in my dream. Behind this little kid-sized door was an enormous playroom with all of his toys. The room itself was kind of gross, since there were no windows and it kind of smelled like rancid peanut butter sandwiches, but it was still the coolest thing I'd ever seen.

In high school I knew a girl whose family moved into a new house, and she also had a small room adjacent to her bedroom. She dubbed it the Voot-Voot Room, since "voot-voot" was a slang term for sex, used by teenagers in West Duluth in the late 80s. I don't think I ever actually saw her Voot-Voot Room, but she and other people, including myself, talked about it all the time. We thought it was fantastic.

In addition to the Redroom, the place where I live now has other weird rooms, or at least nooks and crannies. There's one weird closet that you have to climb three steps to get to. One of the walls is only a half-wall, peering into a normal closet immediately next to it. Right after I moved in, of course, I started referring to that closet as the Voot-Voot Room, even though it would be a pretty uncomfortable place to engage in any voot-voot. I pledged that I would use it for something interesting. Nothing's come to mind.

When you get down to it, it's the very impracticality of these rooms that appeals to me. The landing at the top of my back steps, for example, drives me insane. Sure, the smart thing to do with it is use it to store brooms, mops, the ironing board, and other tall junk that won't fit anywhere else. But that's boring. I want to put a table out there, even though I would never sit at it. I want to dream up some ingenious use for boring or/unusable space.

Potential. That's what attracts me.

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Sitting in a circle, one by one, each of my family members describes an outrageous and/or ridiculous outfit they wore as a teenager. At first, it's a civil discussion, but it's only a matter of minutes before it degenerates into a cackling hilarity of halter tops and hip huggers, neon shirts and homemade patches. Stories of "You're not going to leave the house like that!" Stories of insane combinations and social faux pas. Me, I'm silently listening. Trying to remember something comparable. And honestly, I can't.

"I think I dress the same now as I did back then," I say, ruining everyone's fun.

Don't get me wrong, there were fads and I followed them. I slipped on some acid wash in my day. I wore a Hypercolor shirt now and then. And though the cuts and fits have changed to match the times, the uniform is still basically the same: jeans, t-shirts, hoodies.

I should note here that the Chuckies in the photo above are an adult addition to my ensemble. As a kid or especially an adolescent growing up in West Duluth, wearing Converse All-Stars would have been social suicide. The only kids who wore Chuckies were the skater punks, who were even lower on the social scale than the dirtbags sucking down Marlboro 100s in back of the school. Ninety-nine percent of the student body wore name-brand athletic shoes: Nike, Adidas, Asics. Hell, even Reeboks ... even L.A. Gear was better than Converse. You could even wear Vans or Airwalks if you wanted to, which I did from time to time. Mostly, I wore Asics Tigers -- the apex of 1980s athletic footwear. But I didn't necessarily want to wear these shoes. They were a social necessity, much like the New Balance shoes or steel-toed boots I wear nowadays are a physical necessity required by my job.

Back in elementary school, however, I, like pretty much every boy I knew, wore Trax, the cheap Adidas knockoff available at your local JC Penney. I also wore the same blues jeans as almost all of my peers: the tough, indestructable Wranglers sold at Kmart before the invention of prewashed jeans. We later called these "stiffies" and joked that when our moms brought them home from the store, they leaned them up against the wall. While from the waist down I looked like everyone else, from the waist up I exclusively wore button-up (or more accurately, snap-up) cowboy shirts. I always wore an undershirt and I always wore colored socks that matched my cowboy shirt. I'd call myself a nerd, but well, this hasn't changed much either. In high school and college, the cowboy shirts changed into flannel shirts, and the undershirts became thermal undershirts, but it didn't take long to switch back shortly after Kurt Cobain died.

I remember my first hoodie, which was quaintly called a "hooded sweatshirt" back then. I remember seeing a commercial for some kind of gourmet TV dinner, where a beautiful woman in an evening gown answers the door to find some dork in a hoodie just like mine. "Aren't we eating out?!" she shrieked. "I thought we were eating in," he shrugged. "We are now," she said, rolling her eyes and dragging him inside by the hood-strings. Then the scene cut to them eating whatever TV dinner it was, savoring each delicious flash-frozen bite. "Hmm," I thought, completely misinterpreting the point, "maybe I can get hot girls, too." That sort of thing would come many, many years later, much to the dismay of my 10-year-old self.

In my late 20s, I decided to experiment for awhile with expensive, fashionable dress. I funneled 100% of my income as an "independent contractor" (quote does not indicate anything illegal) into clothes. I think I went an entire year without wearing jeans or sneakers. I wore $150 shirts. I wore $250 shoes. I traveled to large cities and returned with bags of clothes. It was a really fun experiment, but I don't think it was me.

After I told my family that I've always dressed the same way, I turned and looked at my dad, a 77-year-old man who still rides his bike every day, even in the winter. He wore jeans and a hoodie.

Shit, I thought. I'm going to dress like this forever.

I've written before on this site about how I shy away from the idea of car payments. I don't need much when it comes to an automobile. I need it to start reliably, to bring me to work and back, and to carry enough groceries for one or two people. Above that, everything else is luxury. So for me, the Hedgehog does just fine.

Recent circumstances, however, have temporarily placed me into a rental car: a 2007 Chevy Cobalt. And while the Cobalt is certainly not the sweetest of rides, several things about it have me apprehensively reconsidering my stance on making payments on a major item that rapidly declines in value.

Unlike my Teal Mobile, the rental doesn't require any tricks to drive. You simply get inside, start it up, and point it where you want it to go. If I owned this Cobalt, I would be able to lend it to someone without first giving them an entire volume of instructions about how to drive it. The Hedgehog doesn't like to be driven by anyone but me, and while all of its quirks are pretty much second nature to me, it's really nice to just hop in a car and drive it without thinking. The downside is that this, combined with the near silence of the interior, threaten to put me to sleep at the wheel. That isn't good.

Another surprising thing that the Cobalt does is easily accelerate on hills (get this!) even while the air conditioner is in use! Imagine that!

The one dangerous feature that the Cobalt has is a digital readout on the dashboard that gives you information such as your average speed, the engine temperature, and your average miles per gallon. However, it also tells you how far you can go on the current amount of gas in your tank. Sweet Jesus. Do you know how much of a temptation it is when you glance down at the dash and see that you have enough gas to go 347 miles? Do you have any idea how hard it is to refrain from actually travelling 347 miles?

I don't know what I'm going to do when I have to go back to driving that mint green glorified lawnmower.

I just don't know.

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OK, let me start out by saying I had to be three sheets to the wind in order to join Facebook in the first place. After fully discovering what a toilet MySpace is, I didn't need to experiment with any more of this "social networking" nonsense that the kids are all into these days. I was fully ready to revert back to Web 1.0, where I write funny things by myself at 3am, you laugh at them when you read them at work the next morning, and we have no other interaction at all, until six months later when you call me into your office and fire me.

Anyway, last Saturday night I spent the evening at R.T. Quinlan's discussing, among other things, the finer points of Facebook, and by the time I got home and had another beer, I was just tanked up enough to join. (Note to the Army: I know you read this site. Don't even think about it.)

Like most drunks, I joined by happily keying in any and all personal information, refusing to read any so-called "terms and conditions" and blindly ticking any box marked "yes" before clicking "submit." At one point, there was a brief milisecond (as opposed to a lengthy milisecond) where I realized, too late, that I had invited everyone in my address book to come skipping down the yellow brick road of Facebook with me.

This was not my intention.

Here are some of the people I especially did not intend to invite to Facebook:
- various co-workers
- Netflix
- people who e-mailed me only looking for someone else's address
- people whose podcasts I subscribe to
- my neighbor's insurance agent
- my mom

If you were one of the people I unintentionally invited to Facebook, I apologize. However, if you still want to be Facebook friends, well, I'm OK with that.

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So I'm digging around in the basement, looking for a lost CD to rip for my new Virtual Mixtape blog, when I open a box and find ...

... approximately 200 forgotten burned CD-Rs!

And while most of them are discs I've ripped and stored on a hard drive, a lot of them are completely forgotten. We're talking mix CDs other people have made me, random mp3s taken from p2p networks back before we all knew for certain it was illegal, or taken legally from mp3.com when it existed in its pure form. I'm in bliss.

Also, I found the photograph above, taken I believe by Lundgren in July of '04. That's the root system of a huge fallen tree I'm peering through.

Yeehaw!

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I call it the Redroom. Christa calls it the Nerd Garage. In any case, it is an essential part of my life.

I think I was about 13 when I first discovered it, and while I didn't have an actual room I could escape to necessarily, I did have a time I could escape to -- the nighttime. Everyone in the house fell asleep during the evening news. I did not. I stayed up and watched Johnny Carson and maybe David Letterman. On Fridays, I watched USA Up! All Night, on Saturdays I watched SNL, and on Sundays I listened to the Dr. Demento Show on the radio. All of this was pure bliss. I was doing exactly what I wanted to do, innocuous though it was. All other times of the day I was subject to scrutiny, and had to feel a bit ashamed of what I was doing. Only at night was I completely free to geek out.

In college, I think my "Redroom" was the woods. I walked in the woods all the time, usually the same trails in West Duluth, around Casket Quarry and up above Skyline Drive. I read in the woods, sometimes did my homework in the woods (which, being an English major, was usually reading, although sometimes it was writing).

In my 20s, I worked in the afternoon and my "Redroom" time shifted to the mornings. Here I developed a taste for black coffee. I read a lot of difficult novels. I cooked a lot of great meals. I listened to a lot of music. I explored the Internet, though it's hard for me to imagine what I did online before I discovered blogging. I think I just downloaded crap off of P2P networks. Mainly I spent a lot of time staring out the window at the freeway, which was about 100 feet away from the building. Hypnosis.

In 2003 when I moved to a duplex on 52nd Avenue West, the "Redroom" was for the first time an actual place -- a spare bedroom with a separate entrance. The landlord remodeled the apartment that way because he intended to rent the apartment as a one-bedroom and let his brother sleep in the spare bedroom while visiting. We negotiated the second bedroom for a little extra rent and it became what I liked to refer to as my "Man-Den," even though what it actually was was a storage area with my computer desk in it. Here I blogged, listened to music, and I wrote this post which refers inarticulately to the concept I am presenting here today.

In 2005, I moved downstairs of the apartment I live in now. I spent much of my time there alone, so in theory the whole place was my "Redroom," but once again the computer room was the place I retreated to to achieve the feeling I routinely need. That room was great, but it's a poor facsimile of the room I use and love today.

Unlike the photo presented above, which was taken when I first moved into this apartment, the Redroom is unbelievably messy, and is the most obviously "lived-in" room in the whole place. The floor is carpeted with CDs and cables. Spare computer parts, software disks, and beer-bottle caps are everywhere, as are stray notes and various unused electronic equipment. The only light comes from my shoddy screen and a 7-port USB hub sitting on a shelf to my right. I sit here with enormous 1970s headphones on, listening to iTunes, drinking a whiskey sour and using a Frisbee for a coaster.

I am very lucky and very happy in a lot of aspects of my life these days, knock wood. But in the Redroom I am always happy.

In the Redroom, I am home.

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Mom: He fractured his tibia and he's been eating Alleves for the past week...
Me: He's been eating LEAVES?
Mom: ALLEVES.
Me: Oh, I thought it might be some kind of herbal remedy.

Mom: Where do you vote?
Me: Temple Israel. The Jewish synogogue.
Sister: Why are you voting for him?
Me: What?
Sister: The Jewish guy.
Mom: What does it matter if he's Jewish?
Me: Not a Jewish guy ... Mom asked where I voted, and I said the Jewish temple.
Mom: I don't see what it matters if he's Jewish or whatever he is.
Sister: We're all deaf.

Me: The woman who lived there named her kid "B.J."
Christa: Oh, Jesus.
Me: I think maybe because it's what he should have been ...
Christa: [Shakes head]
Me: But no, it gets worse!
Christa: It can't get worse.
Me: Her dog was named "Bear" and she named them both after the TV show "B.J. and the Bear."
[pause]
Me: She got the dog way before she had the kid.

Sister: Is she in a gang?
Mom: A GANG? She's a grown adult!
Sister: Still ... a motorcycle gang?
Mom: [silent, appalled]

Me: I can't write about that B.J. thing.
Christa: Why not?
Me: I don't know. They're gonna find out and kill me in my sleep.
Christa: Maybe you could change it a little.
Me: Yeah. Maybe I could change it so she named the kid "Smokey" and the dog "Bandit."
[pause]
Me: No. That just won't do.

Up though last Friday night, if you were to come to my hometown of Duluth, Minnesota and tell me that you really, really wanted to get your throat cut, I would have suggested that you go to the Red Lion Lounge on Superior Street, where you could easily find someone to do it for you, most likely without even asking.

Sadly, the Red Lion closed last Friday. All the musicians, drug dealers, guttersnipes, and hipsters who called it home came out to make sure it all ended with a bang, not a whimper.

I took photos.

Click individually below, or view as a slideshow.

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In the past week:

1) I dropped my iPod on the floor, breaking it forever. It's now useless, unless I find a need for a little white box that makes an incessant clicking noise.

2) I smashed my fingers in a piece of equipment at work, blackening three fingernails, one of which oozed blood for about four hours.

3) The day after I smashed my fingers, I woke up with a fever and a head cold. I spent the next two days too sick to do anything, but just healthy enough to realize how fricken bored I was.

That said:

1) I discovered the TV series Battlestar Galactica, which is officially my New Favorite Thing. I feel like such a geek saying that, but only because people who've never seen the show probably think that it's akin to Stargate or one of those other Sunday night atrocities.

2) I'm almost finish with the 1970s in my chronological reading experiment. Which means that soon, I'll be able to start in on the 1980s. Which is kind of the whole reason to do the experiment in the first place.

3) My old lady made apple crisp. Jesus. Apple crisp.

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One of my all-time favorite features of my childhood home was the spacial relationship between the toilet and the bathtub. The tub, an ancient clawfoot affair, sat directly in front of the toilet, perpendicularly, so that while one sat on the throne, one could drape a newspaper over the lip of the bathtub and engage in hands-free reading. As far as I could tell, everyone in my family made use of this architectural marvel. It was the only way to drop a deuce.

We subscribed to two daily newspapers when I was a kid -- the morning paper and the afternoon paper. Usually, I read the morning comics at the kitchen table sometime during the day. But the late paper, that one arrived on the doorstep just in time for me to pinch off my afternoon Baby Ruth. Barely had the paper hit the doorstep before I was scrambling up the stairs, dropping trow, and seeing what old Marmaduke was up to.

While the family throne was my favorite place to go, my least favorite was easily the outhouse at the family cabin. This was a huge double-seater, built sometime in the 1930s or 40s, and I rarely deigned to enter it. Parts of the lower walls had rotted away, allowing a small amount of sunlight to peer into the hole, down where you didn't want to look. Occasionally, there were garter snakes hiding in the corners. The ceiling was hung with reams of flypaper and dozens of Christmas Tree-scented car deodorizers. The walls were covered in the graffiti of generations of nameless relatives. One long-forgotten cousin had childishly scrawled "Have a nice terd" directly at eye-level.

Generally, on weekends when we went to the cabin, I didn't even open the outhouse door, opting to pee in the woods and just hold off on the number two. By Sunday night, I really had to go, and for a 10-year-old boy who really needs to go, there is no sight finer than three days worth of funny pages (from two papers!) stacked up neatly inside the screen door.

Somehow along the way, I completely lost interest in reading on the can. It's purely a hygenic bodily function now, and I spend as little time performing it as possible. I can think of at least 15 other places in the average house where I'd rather sit and read at leisure.

What a weird thing to do.

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Somehow, I had lived over three decades in this city and never seen this breakwater at the end of Minnesota Point. I mean, I've probably been within 20 yards of it on several occasions. But I never noticed it, or if I did, I completely forgot about it.

If you think it might be fun to run out to the end of this and make the birds scatter like crazy, well, it is fun. But also, there's like a thousand birds out there at any given time. At certain points, it's like running through mayonaisse.

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Whenever a former or current president dies, the federal government shuts down. Completely. Congress quickly votes, and then unanimously takes the day off, and then, as long as they're at it, gives the rest of the federal workers the day off too.

The problem is that everyone else in the world continues as usual. While your local senator may feel fine taking eight hours off to stare out the window and sniff his index finger, the rest of us have work to do. Including mail processing clerks, federal employees may they be. Even though mail is not collected, people still mail things, and so we must process it. While we don't necessarily get Rememberance Day off, we do get *a* day off to mourn the president.

At our discretion.

Today, I chose to take the day off to mourn the passing of our 38th president, Gerald Ford. As you might expect, my day was fricken awesome.

The day started normally enough. Coffee and web-surfing. Zoning out in front of screens. A quick shower, delivering an much-overdue rent payment, and then wandering off to find breakfast at around 2pm. Yes, the life of leisure. I love this city.

(Have I mentioned that the Lake Superior Coffee House serves breakfast ALL DAY LONG, for like, four bucks? And you can totally watch Louis Jenkins talk with some ponytailed dude while you eat it? Anyway...)

After breakfast, life is all about reading and otherwise screwing around in the park. While one could choose any park, we chose Bayfront Park, because that was supposed to be the place where Wilco was going to play. Before Nels Cline came down with chickenpox. Don't even get me started on this.

I take photos, including this one, which I made into a banner for Perfect Duluth Day.

More coffee. And then sushi on my deck from Zen House, which was kind of hit-or-miss. Some of the rolls were fantastic, but some ... uh ... not so much.

Later in the evening, Superior Wisconsin and Punk Rock called. And you know what? Duluth is so much cooler than Wilco. [video]

God bless you, Gerald Ford. You were a beautiful man.

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Wilco has the goddamn chickenpox. I had the night off. I even had a ticket. Wilco, in the summertime, in the park, under the stars, next to the water ... it was going to be perfect. Crap. Megacrap.

My redesign mania took over Christa's site. So pretty, so punk rock.

I had a dream last night that I killed someone and buried them in the yard. And then I "woke up" in the dream and realized that it was for real. And then I woke up for real and I didn't know if it was real or not. I half expected the police to come breaking down the door any minute. Then I fell asleep again and when I woke up I realized that the whole thing was a dream. As a friend of mine once said about dreams: I don't need drugs. I just go to sleep.

Done and Done. Red Star here I come.

Silver Jews - New Orleans
Eleni Mandell - It's Raining
Wilco - Either Way
The Sea and Cake - Coconut
Joseph Arthur - Enough to Get Away
The Sadies - Milk & Scissors
The Raconteurs - Steady as She Goes
The Roughnecks - Goin' Home
Jeremy Messersmith - Novocaine
Ben Kweller - Penny on the Train Track
My Morning Jacket - One Big Holiday
Rolling Stones - ?
Eleni Mandell - Snakebite
Cat Power - Good Woman (request)
Nora O'Connor - Looks Like I'm Up Shit Creek Again
Charlie Parr - ? (request)
The Meat Purveyors - Sunshine
Camera Obscura - Let's Get Out of This Country
Pacha Massive - Don't Let Go
Fred Tyson - Freddy's Gonna Do What He Want to Do (Fuck You)
Massive Attack - Teardrop
Everything But the Girl - Big Deal
Spoon - Don't You Evah
The Shins - ?
Clem Snide - Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Your Grievience
Joseph Arthur & the Lonely Astronauts - Diamond Ring
Calexico w/ Iron & Wine - Burn That Broken Bed
Tom Waits - Jockey Full of Bourbon
Tortoise w/ Bonnie "Prince" Billy - Thunder Road
Mike Mertz & the Can of Worms - I Wish I Were Dead
Kiss - Beth

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Even though I could be a lot thinner, I consider myself to be in fairly good condition. The life I lead is far from sedentary. My job is very physical, and in my free time I do a lot of hiking. Lately, I've been walking everywhere -- to the movie theater, to the beach, to bars and restaurants downtown. Some stretches of the Superior Hiking Trail wear me out, but generally, I can keep up pretty well and not feel so horrible the next day.

Today, however, I woke up with every muscle in my body screaming bloody murder. I was stiff all over. It hurt to move. My hair was sore. I could barely get out of bed.

You see, it all started on Thursday afternoon at Target. Christa and I were there buying mundane things. I needed light bulbs. She needed a toothbrush. As we were walking past the electronics, something caught my eye: the little white box we'd both been lusting after for weeks but had been unable to locate anywhere.

It was a Nintendo Wii.

"They have a Wii," I said, whispering reverently. Christa's pupils visibly dialated. "Should we buy --"

"YES."

An hour later we were jumping around the living room, hurling imaginary baseballs and swinging virtual tennis rackets. We took turns beating the shit of out various cartoon characters in the boxing ring, all the time screaming, "GET YOUR GLOVES UP! GET YOUR GLOVES UP!"

It was fucking awesome.

After about two hours, we needed food and a break. We went out to dinner in Wisconsin and decided to check in on the Head of the Lakes Fair. We ate ice cream cones. But the whole time we were both silently thinking about how every moment we spent in the world was a moment we were spending away from the Wii.

We got back home at about 9:30, went immediately to the Wii, and then proceeded to play practically nonstop for the next eight hours. Birds were chirping. The sun was rising. I was mastering my hook in bowling and Christa returned my tennis serves viciously.

At one point, I think it was around 3:30am, we were out on the deck catching our breath, when I said, "Do you want to quit and go to bed? Or do you want to play a game of baseball?"

Christa looked at me like I was insane, and had just asked the stupidest question in the universe. "Oh ... we're playing baseball. Don't worry about that."

Today, I feel like shit. But still, the Wii calls ...

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I'm obsessed with the Superior Hiking Trail. Christa and I have made it our goal this summer to hike the entirety of its Duluth branch, segment by segment. The whole thing is about 39 miles long, but we've been doing it in 3- to 7-mile chunks, and so far we're about halfway through.

We tackled the first seven-miler in the drizzling rain, slogging muddily from Martin Road to pretty much my front doorstep. This, so far, was the most boring stretch. The second stretch was fun, although for the most part it couldn't really be considered "hiking" since two-thirds of it was in town, on the Lakewalk, and through Canal Park. The third stretch, though -- from Twin Ponds to Skyline at Highland, was freaking unbelievable fun.

First off, consider "Forgotten Park." It's so cool when things like this happen. Somehow there is a basketball court and a baseball field in the middle of the woods. Nature is slowly taking it back, with five-foot-tall grass covering the former diamond and with mature trees growing up through the blacktop on the hoops court.

Then the trail winds through the West End and above West Duluth going places I never knew existed. I love the sensation of trudging through the shadowy woods, having no idea where I am, and then suddenly emerging to realize that I've been right in the middle of town the whole time. Weird houses on strange residential streets, a covered reservoir that I'd never even heard about, and an old, unused bridge full of twisted graffiti were just some of the highlights.

I'll be posting photos from the walk throughout the week on Flickr, if you want to see them.

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Make no mistake: I'm a night person. I work in the afternoons and late evenings, and when I come home from work, I don't go straight to bed like many so-called "respectable" people would. I stay awake, because it seems right and natural. Going to bed at 11:30pm is for me like going to bed at 6pm would be for you.

A lot of people live like this, of course. My girlfriend Christa is an even later-shifted person than I am, and it takes convincing to persuade her to turn in before full daylight. And many other people of all walks of life stay up all night every night out of necessity or choice.

But there's one category of humans that generally doesn't end up on this type of schedule: children. As such, I rarely if ever have to deal with little kids. And therefore, I consider little kids to be perfectly insane.

Not so long ago, I had a weekend off -- an actual weekend falling on Saturday and Sunday. Everyone (well, everyone other than my fellow night-shifted friends) congratulated me, beaming with happiness for my new fortune. But let me give you a little bit of advice, buddy: On weekend afternoons, the world if full of children. And children are crazier than shithouse rats.

Here are a few of the things these people do that I consider to be sure signs of lunacy.

- Children never walk. They always run at top speed, and when they get to where they are going, they crash into a wall. Likewise, they rarely talk in normal tones, choosing instead to shriek their thoughts at full volume. If these aren't the symptoms of a raving mad psychopath, I don't know what is.

- Children roller skate indoors. I swear, one time at the supermarket, the kids without wheels on their shoes were heavily in the minority. I nearly got knocked over five times by these little demons. No one else seemed to notice. But I had six digits of the nuthouse phone number dialed, with my thumb paused on the seventh.

- When given the choice between a breakfast cereal proven to combat heart disease, and one that has a deranged chicken on the box, children will choose the deranged chicken cereal 100% of the time. Because they're batty.

- Kids actually believe that a rabbit can deliver candy to everyone in the world in one night. Some people might argue that this only proves that children are stupid, not crazy. I disagree -- they're obviously both.

Now, while all of this is true, and kids really do freak me out, I can't say the same for babies. Babies laugh, cry, shit and piss their pants, and have trouble holding up their own head let alone walking. I've spent enough time in bars to know that this is perfectly normal behavior.

Well, for night people at least.

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I took this picture at about 10pm as I was just drifting around looking for things to photograph. When I somehow found myself in Canal Park on a Sunday night on Memorial Day weekend, I realized that I was doing exactly what every tourist in town was doing. It's hard to explain why, but I felt very, very weird.

I've lived in Duluth my entire life, and I've never gone to the canal at night to watch ships come in. It just never occurred to me to do so.

Aside from the people working in the popcorn stands and restaurants, I wouldn't be surprised if I was the only local in all of Canal Park. Musicians were playing on corners, couples were strolling along holding hands, and parents were wandering around yawning while their kids ran wild with overstimulation. For a few moments, I pretended that I, too, was here only for the weekend. I took photos, looked at the city from across the water, stared at the bridge. Maybe the wife and kids were asleep back in the hotel, used to passing out during the evening news and waking up at the crack of 6. Or maybe my friends were drinking on the deck at Little Angie's Cantina, and I'd just wandered away for a few minutes, not wanting to be a third wheel. Maybe I was with my parents, who were taking a romantic carriage ride. Whatever.

A few years back I used to enjoy going to Canal Park hotels in the morning for the free breakfasts. It isn't hard to do; You just have to remember to act like you belong there. When an employee walks by, say something about the Omnimax Theater or the Great Lakes Aquarium, and you're golden. The best part was the waffle batter in paper cups that you yourself could pour into the hot waffle irons and cook to your own liking. Well, that and the mounds of fruit.

On this night, however, as soon as the ship passed beneath the Aerial Lift Bridge, the entire pier cleared out and everyone went either back to their hotel or else to one of the four or five tourist bars in the area, leaving me standing there with my camera, a native Duluthian once again. I walked back to my car and then drove about a mile [a whole world away] to my neighborhood, where a young couple stood screaming at each other in the middle of Fourth Street while 20-25 little kids looked on in a mixture of awe, glee, and terror. I drove about three miles an hour, nosing my car through the crowd.

I don't know what the argument was about, but I distinctly heard the word "crackpipe."

Any residual illusions and fantasies disappeared at that moment.

I was home.

Oh, how I remember Sunday nights. Recently finished homework. St. Elsewhere on the TV set. The promise of a brand-new school day in the morning. Ugh.

Much like I've managed to eliminate the need for an alarm clock from my life, I've managed to make Sunday nights [and Monday mornings] meaningless. Sunday? Sunday, to me, is remarkable only that it is a slightly easier workday than all the rest. Driving on the freeway is easier, not that it is ever difficult.

But at the tail end of three weeks of vacation...Sunday night is kind of horrible.

I can totally feel it ... laying on the floor ... a rerun of M.A.S.H. beginning on TV ... a soft voice telling me that it is time to go to bed ... a veiled statement that tomorrow morning the awfulness will begin again ...

I thought I'd escaped this feeling long ago. Apparently not.

Ick. Ick, ick, ick. How does one become independently wealthy? I want to know.

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Great Vacation Moments

• Walking into the Holiday Inn in St. Paul, finding the lobby half-full of people dressed for Geek Prom and half-full of wet people in bathing suits, with the fire alarm blaring, and the people behind the front desk saying, "It's a false alarm. It's a false alarm. It's a false alarm," into every line on the phone.
• Seeing two guys fist-fighting in a way that made you think they were going to start making out at any second.
• Taking the bus to the bar.
• Walking down First Street on an 84-degree day eating a chili cheese dog wrapped in a piece of deli paper and drinking Sprite from a waxed paper cup, and feeling like I'd been transported back to 1979.
• Having complete strangers come up to me on the last night of Homegrown and ask me how the pneumonia is coming along.
• Ray the Wolf at Homegrown
• Ca-chee visiting from California
• Finding out that I'm not actually going deaf and that I just need to clean the birdshit out of my ears.
• Hailstorms

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I was about 10 years old when I decided that I wanted to write comedy for TV. The whole plan was based on my obsession with the Dick Van Dyke show, and whenever I watched it I seriously wanted that dude's life. Think of it: He had a dishy wife and a swanky house with a sunken living room. And when he went to "work," all he did was lay on the couch or throw darts at the wall while coming up with funny jokes. He worked with a wacky doofus and a sassy broad, and after work the three of them went to cocktail parties and ate hors d'oevres and played charades. It seemed like bliss to me.

I wrote a lot of things as a kid and into my teenage years, but I never took my dream of comedy writing seriously, because even though I knew that people actually did that (someone had to) I had no idea that it was something that I personally could have pursued. I lacked guidance. So eventually, the idea faded, and by the time I reached high school I'd pretty much forgotten about it, or at least dismissed it as I did my previous plans to become the next Lone Ranger or my dream of acquiring a bionic arm.

Still, I liked writing and words and sentences and all of that, so I majored in English. And that's where I found out three very important truths.

1) In college, they don't teach you how to write funny, or even allow you to explore your inner dipshit. In fact, they downright frown upon it.
2) There is nothing more serious than a 20-year-old English major.
3) When those serious English majors graduate, they become serious professors of English. And the cycle continues.

I spent my college years writing about serious issues, which is utterly asinine since I'd never done anything serious in my life. But there was no way around it. The slightest mention of a potato-salad-eating contest or a three-pack of Hanes briefs would evoke sighs and eye-rolling. Clearly, I was never going to be a "major" writer, unlike the lot of my peers who would all go on to write great works of staggering importance.

I remember the feeling of liberation I felt when I graduated and started writing like myself again. It took awhile to ease back into it, but as soon as I realized I didn't have an audience other than myself, I was free to read Woody Allen books and write about drunken Shriners once again.

In short, thanks for indulging me, Internet. I know you don't pay me, but still you deserve a Ph.D. in awesome.

Now to work on that bionic arm...

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Lately, whenever I travel to Minneapolis, I think about living there. But I don't think about living there now. I think about what life would have been like if I had lived there 10 or 15 years ago.

Mostly I'm struck by how easy it would have been to temporarily move back then. These days, moving is a major event involving trucks and boxes and grudgingly willing friends, not to mention several days of packing and several weeks of unpacking. Days off from work. Painting. Cleaning. Trying and failing to pare down years of accumulated stuff. Assessing what is needed and what is not.

When I was 20, moving would have involved a large backpack and a bus ticket. With no job of any importance and no bills to speak of, I could easily have moved away for the summer, or taken a year off of school a bummed around for awhile. My standard of living was nonexistent, but I didn't realize that at the time.

In my imagination, I would have worked at a restaurant or a record store and I would have had a zine. I liked the idea of zines, which I suppose is one of the reasons why I ended up with this website, but I never actually read a zine that I liked (back then), and I didn't see Duluth as a town that was friendly to zine distribution (back then).

Today I think of moving to Minneapolis in the same way I think about having a zine in 2007 -- a lot of hassle and expense for not much payoff. A cool idea at first until you realize that Duluth and the internet are better suited to your personality.

And the reason I never moved to the Cities when it was convenient was that I did like my life back then, which was full of great things that helped to make me who I am today. It's fun to think about alternate paths your life might have taken, but if you could actually change your past, you might turn yourself into an asshole in the present.

But there's no harm in daydreaming.

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I'm one of those people who often forgets to eat. It's true. I'll be distracted by whatever it is I'm doing, then I'll head to work and halfway there I'll realize that I haven't eaten. This is one of the major hurdles standing between me and a nutritious diet.

A couple of days ago, I found myself running errands when I realized that I was stark raving hungry. It was probably about 6 or 7pm, and I had yet to eat breakfast. I don't like to eat fast food when I'm on vacation since I have enough time to eat right, but I needed to make an exception, so I pulled into Taco Bell.

Since the money I was carrying consisted of several crumpled ones distributed about my four pockets, I decided to get out of my car and eat inside the restaurant. I didn't look around when I went in, as I was focused on digging out my money. I made my order, paid, and filled my drink cup. Then I looked around and almost vomited.

I was standing in the filthiest restaurant I'd even seen.

Not one table was clean. All of them were littered with spilled food and crumbs. All of the garbage cans were full to overflowing, and all of them were surrounded with piles of garbage on the floor. In addition to the pieces of food and wrappers everywhere, everything was actually dirty with actual dirt. Four or five grimy-looking people sat around in the restaurant cramming their faces with disgusting food.

I thought seriously about walking out. Just calling it a loss. Then my food came and I located one cleanish table and sat down.

The food, if you could call it that, tasted horrible. It was kind of cold, and really artificial tasting, like something squeezed out of a tube. I imagined a gang of pimply teenagers in back, assembling tacos by shooting the ingredients out of caulking guns. I think I took about three bites before I wrapped the whole mess up and threw it away.

At least I tried to throw it away. But since the garbage was full to the top and spilling all over the floor, I just crammed my leftovers into the pile and, literally gagging, left the restaurant.

I've told this story several times and people always have the same reply: "What do you expect?" As if it is somehow my fault.

I may never eat again.

When I made previous post, I'd only just broken the seal on my vacation, and part of me felt that my premature bragging carried a bit of hubris. I had a bit of what a thought was a cold. I felt a bit crappy, but that would pass, right? I was certain that with all the rest I was getting, I'd wake up feeling spectacular. Then feeling crappy gave way to nightsweats and coughing jags that left me gagging for breath. Barely able to walk, I went to the urgent care, where they quickly determined my problem.

Pneumonia.

Now, while I do feel better after 24 hours of antibiotic therapy and about 12 hours of DVD-watching ("The Departed" is seriously good) I'm pretty miffed that I'm missing my whole reason for taking this vacation now, which is the Homegrown Music Festival. But I don't know, somehow spending hours and hours listening to deafening music under a thick woolen blanket of cigarette smoke seems like a bad idea when one's lungs are full of fluid.

Yeah. I'm missing Homegrown. But those coughing jags? I'd kinda like those to stop as soon as possible.

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For the first time in my life, I have three weeks off from work. Three weeks. I have never even had two consecutive weeks off, and now, somehow, I have three.

One of my major problems in life is that I have made goals for myself regarding work, and that my number one work goal is that I really want to stop working. I have this vision: Late rising, coffee al fresco, a walk to get ice cream, reading, a nap, then either a movie or a night on the town. That is a perfect Duluth day. That is bliss.

That is also what vacation is like. In fact, that is also what a weekend is like.

Whenever I have two days off in a row (which can be rare) I return to work the next day confused. "No, no," my subconscious says. "You set a goal for yourself and you achieved it. What are you doing back here?" Maybe it's because I am self-centered and a little bit narcissistic, but part of me truly believes that someday my life will be easy. Not that it isn't easy now: I realize that I'm a very privilaged person as far as average folks go. Still, I can't help thinking that someday I'm going to end up reading magazines all day instead of sorting them.

The three weeks isn't going to help matters at all. Already I've begun. My skin is the color of a clown's lips. I go days without wearing socks. My TiVo queue is almost completely clean.

Yesterday evening I fell asleep on the couch, looking out the window at the moon. I think if I won the lottery, my life wouldn't change at all. Except that I wouldn't sort mail.

I'm a lucky man.

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So we're sitting outside drinking coffee on the deck when one of the college boys across the street steps out to embrace the day. He's shirtless, wearing running pants and no shoes, a blue bandana covering his bed-head; and as he squints toward the sky, he spreads his arms out at either side and gradually the facts register on his face.

It is warm outside. Really, really warm.

He ducks back inside, and moments later, more college-aged boys start filing out of the house like clowns from a volkswagon. Two, three, five, seven...half of them shirtless and all of them hung over. They all look up in wonder. Sure, it's clowdy and sure it will probably rain soon. But right now it is about 75 degrees. After a few moments, they start talking.

"Dude. Dude. Remember last night when we threw all those beer cans out the window?" They all look up to the attic window, which is wide open with no screen, then burst into hysterics. One of them starts gathering up the beer cans on the lawn while another jumps up and down.

"A fucken bird flew in this morning! It came in, flew around the room a couple of times and then flew out!"

By this time, the guy picking up the beer cans has found a tennis ball, and all reminiscing and lawn care has taken a back seat to a new game: see who can pitch this ball into the open attic window. They all try. And try and try, the ball ricocheting off the house over and over again, until finally they guy who found the ball makes it through. As soon as the ball flies through the bedroom window, we all hear dozens of beer bottles crash to the floor. The college boys are unfazed.

As pasty-white girls finally start crawling out of the house lighting cigarettes, the guy who threw the ball in charges inside the house and up three flights of stairs to retrieve the ball. He tosses it out the window and the game continues.

By this time there's about 10 or 12 people on the lawn. It's 2pm on a Sunday afternoon. There are boys, girls, and presumably more beer, and suddenly it is as if last night's party has magically resumed. And meanwhile, we sit across the street, drinking coffee, watching, listening, and trying not to giggle too loudly.

This is better than TV.

4/28 UPDATE: So this morning a couple guys are out on the lawn again, and one of them says, "Dude, last night I got up and came outside to piss, and then I went back in and I was sitting on the couch watching cartoons. But I couldn't find my shoes or anything. Then this guy comes downstairs and says, 'Um, you gotta get out of my house.' I was in the house next door! They have a really nice leather couch."

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I got this picture via email, not from anyone I know, but from a stranger with the wrong address. Having been among the earlier beta-testers of Gmail, I managed to get a pretty basic email address: bchase@gmail.com. There are a lot of B. Chases in the world, and their friends and family are always emailing me with crazy messages intended for other people. I love when this happens. The above pic is from a guy who works for the humane society, and was attached to an email about the world's biggest dog. All of the information about the world's biggest dog is correct (an English Mastiff named Hercules, weighing 282 pounds and belonging to a guy named Joe Flynn) but this picture is not Hercules. It's a Photoshopped hoax. Still, I love getting stuff like this from strangers.

Once, I got an message from someone who was emailing in sick to work. Jeezus, even I saw through his too-word excuses. "I can hardly move," he said. "I don't want to expose you to this." Reading it, I wondered why he didn't use any "cough-cough" emoticons. Then I wished I could email in sick to work.

I once got an mp3 from a musician named Bethany Chase who wanted to know what I thought of her latest song. "It's great!" I replied. "Are you, like, my third cousin or something?" No, it turned out she had the wrong B. Chase; she was looking for her brother.

Some day I'm going to win $50 million, and somone is going to show up at my doorstep with a giant check and a hoarde of video cameras. After I get jump up and down for about ten minutes, one of them will frown. "Wait a minute. No, I'm sorry," they'll say. "We're looking for Bartholomew Chase."

That's when it stops being funny.

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I never really thought about it before, but I've done some fairly risky things in my time. Most of these things took place when I was about 17 or 18, and it's kind of weird for me to think of them because I'm not a risk-taker. One of my gifts/curses is the ability to visualize the worst possible scenario in any situation, right down to the color of the fingernail polish on the severed hand laying in the ditchwater. Such a talent makes for a fairly cautious person.

Back then, however, I did things that I thought were fairly safe at the time, but now I recognize them as Darwin Award potential.

For example, I once took a running leap off of the pier in Canal Park. I remember that it was nighttime, but it must not have been very late because crowds of tourists were standing around gawking, I wasn't the only one who jumped. But I remember someone saying that if you actually jumped into the canal itself, you'd probably die. The trick was to jump off the other side, into the icy waters of Lake Superior itself. There, the undertow wasn't that bad. I don't know how true this logic is. All I know is that I had to run and leap forward so as not to hit the sloped wall of the pier. And I also remember being underwater for a very long time before I made it back up to the surface.

One several (I'd say at least five) occasions, I crept along the third-storey ledge of an abadoned building in order to climb in through a broken window. Sure, the ledge was fairly wide, but it was also covered in sandstone grit and pigeon droppings. Aside from the dangers of the building itself, this was pretty stupid, especially when you consider that there was an open fire-escape door on the opposite side of the building that we didn't discover for a couple of months after first exploring the place.

Once I walked across a deep ravine while balancing on a couple of rails. I'm not sure what purpose they served, but for some reason there were two rusty railroad rails (sans ties) about a foot apart spanning a very deep ravine in the woods. I'd say the ravine was about 150 feet across. It was nighttime, and it was the middle of the winter. I put one foot on the rails, then thought, "Hm. Looks like I'm gonna cross this thing." The tops of nearby trees were about level with my thighs. When I got to the other side, I realized that I had just done something very stupid.

There are other things. Riding on a couch chained to the bumper of a car. Climging things that shouldn't be climbed.

When I was about six years old, I decided to conduct a really stupid experiment. Every time I ran down the stairs at our house, I would jump off the second step at the bottom. One day, I said to myself. "Every time I run down the stairs today, I will jump off the first step. Then tomorrow, I'll jump off the second step. The day after that, I'll jump off the third step. I'll keep doing this and see what happens."

I knew that as soon as the number got above five, I'd be risking it. I knew that eventually, I would bite it: land half-assed on the steps, fly forward and hit my head on the wall. But see, I really wanted to know what number this would occur at. I needed to quantify the danger.

I think I made it to the seventh day when I woke up, ran down the stairs and, well, you can imagine the rest.

It's amazing that anyone lives to be an adult.

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So I'm waiting at the ATM behind this woman who is older, but not that old. Maybe she's in her late 50s/early 60s. But still, this is obviously the first time she has ever used an ATM. She inserts her card, reads the screen that tells her to quickly insert and remove the card, then slowly pulls the card out. It doesn't work. She inserts the card again, reads the same screen again, with her finger slowly tracing each line, and again it doesn't work. She sighs. Tries again, this time gets the hang of it, and suddenly she's boldly using 1980s technology.

At each screen, she does the same thing, slowly reading each line with her finger moving across the screen. She sighs two or three more times, somewhat baffled. Eventually she gets her money, which is something like $140. I hope she actually wanted that much.

One thing that scares me about aging is the idea of being left behind by technology. The idea of standing confused and helpless at a device that most people could use with their eyes closed. I try to stay current. But today, the trend is that most developing technology is social technology. And if your peer groups don't stay current, you might not be able to either.

I don't know any 50-year-olds who use text messaging. They don't get it, nor do they understand the use for it. Not every piece of information requires a conversation. Sometimes, most times, "I'll be there at 10," is all you need to say. While leisurely conversations are nice, I don't need to take the afternoon off and arrange a coffee date to tell someone that I'm standing behind an albino at Walgreens. All you need to know is that I saw an albino and I thought of you. Texting is like a greeting card for absolutely every occasion. It's fun and kind, and it lets you stay in contact with people you like when you otherwise wouldn't be able to. Still, there seems to be an age-cap on its use.

Back when I was a kid, we actually rented our phone from the phone company. It was a big, black thing that was attached to the wall with screws and directly wired into the phone line. It had a dial, not buttons (touch-tone service actually required an additional monthly charge in those days). One day as I was running around like a maniac, I blindly ran into the three-foot cord as my mom was talking. The receiver flew out of her hand as the cord wrapped around my neck and slammed me into the wall. The cord tore out of the phone, and I got a scrape on my neck.

A few days later, the phone company came out and replaced our rented 1960s phone with a somewhat modern phone. It still had a dial, but it was made of light plastic and it was yellow. Also, you could detach it from the wall if you wanted to. They replaced the upstairs phone with a similar model, albeit in the classic black. My parents bought those phones outright and never rented a phone again.

The thing is, to this day you still hear about old people renting phones. If you don't call the phone company specifically and tell them you want to spend $8.99 on a new phone at Kmart, they won't suggest it. One elderly woman in the news recently was reported to have paid something like $14,000 on phone rental throughout her lifetime.

When her children found out, they discontinued the rental and bought her a new phone. And you just know that she hated that new phone. It probably had screen for caller ID and tiny little buttons. It was probably cordless. I'm sure that she misplaces it all the time and every time she uses it she feels a little bit terrified.

The above link states that AT&T still rents phones to about 750,000 people nationwide. The idea seems beyond absurd.

At what point does this happen to you? When does the world shift exponentially beyond your grasp?

Please let it not happen to me.

There have been several occasions in my life when I seriously wanted to punch somebody in the face. Not somebody in general; we all have that feeling from time to time. I'm referring to someone specific. And contrary to what they always say about how violence mainly occurs among people who know each other, the objects of my hatred are almost always strangers with whom I've never spoken.

Another common thread that runs through my violent desire is that the person I want to roundhouse usually hasn't done anything to wrong me. The stimulus to my barely controlled response isn't something they've done, but rather something they represent. The best way to put it is this: These are people who just need punching.

I vividly recall one such incident that occurred about five years ago at the Fitger's Brewhouse. Back then, we always used to try to snag the cushy chairs near the window if possible. Usually, we'd sit down somewhere nearby and wait for that table to open up. Then we'd quickly scurry in and snag the comfy seats before anyone else could even move.

This night, like most, that table was occupied. Sort of. But here's the thing: The three guys who occupied it WERE NOT EVEN SITTING IN THE COMFY CHAIRS. Instead, they chose to stand around the table, and the nice chairs only served as a resting place for their jackets. Eventually, their gigantic order of nachos arrived, and my blood began to boil as they continued to stand around the table eating chips and sour cream. They must have been brothers, because they all ate in the exact same way -- shoveling chips into their mouths, then licking off each of their five fingers in perfect sequence. It was disgusting. And the one on the end ... man ... the way he in particular looked as he stood there bug-eyed, sucking guacamole and salsa off of his thumb ... he was just begging for it.

I didn't punch him, or do anything else of course. I'm a civilized human being. But I sure did fantasize about walking up to him and decking his fat chip-crunching face. And whenever I have this fantasy, my deceased grandfather is standing there right beside me. When I punch the guy, Gramps always hollers, "Pow! Right in the kisser!"

Another time, I was standing at a urinal next to a certifiable Republican. Now, I have nothing against Republicans per se, but this dude needed a knuckle sandwich, pronto. He didn't do anything but stand there emptying his considerable bladder. Something about him, though ...

He was probably mid-50s, about 6'3" wearing a blue suit and a combover. And as he stood there peeing, he held an enormous unlit cigar in his mouth, which would have been bad enough, except that he also had his head leaned back so that the stogie stuck straight up into the air. The whole thing looked so ridiculous I could barely take it.

What I wanted to do was this: Grab the cigar out of his mouth, break it in two, and throw it on the floor. Then, as he stood there astonished (still mid-pee, mind you) sock him so hard that his jowls flapped. Oh, the image was sooooo delicious. Once again, however, I restrained myself.

Pow! Right in the kisser!

But when I really think about it, I haven't had the urge to drill somebody in the face for quite a number of years. Maybe I've mellowed with age. Or maybe, I'm just not livin' right.

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My 1995 self would be shocked and disgusted to find out that I am not and never have been a kayaker. Back then, I was on the fast track to kayakdom. I'd taken college courses in canoeing. I hiked at least once a week. I was a vegetarian. I kept a journal. I read Thoreau recreationally. I was a classic case for a kayak.

Then something happened. I don't know what it was for certain, but I'm sure it had something to do with alt-media, local music, booze, working for the government, a nighttime lifestyle, and several other things that led me to a decidedly non-outdoor, non-recreational, non-sporty, non-kayak existence.

I had fun, it's true. But at heart, I'm a kayak person. I just know it.

My idea of a great day is this: I wake up. I put on my North Face vest. I hop in my Subaru (with kayak already mounted on my roof rack) and I head down to Lake Superior to paddle away. I do this for about two hours. Then I pack up, eat a burrito at Luce or an omelet at the Chester Creek Cafe, and then go to work.

Could life in Duluth, Minnesota get any better than that? No, I think not.

Unfortunately, I don't own a kayak or a Subaru. Or a roof rack. I don't even own a North Face vest, nor do I typically wake up early enough to actually do any of these things. I wake up at 1:30, down a pot of coffee and devour a bowl of microwaved oatmeal, and then drive 70mph to work. I am a complete failure.

This year, I resolve to kayak. If not regularly, at least one or two times. Because when you live in Duluth, Minnesota, and when you are me, not kayaking is completely ridiculous. I may not own a Subaru, and I may not own a North Face vest, and I may not own a chocolate lab named Jake, but I will definitely kayak. And hopefully, I will go as far as to own a kayak and kayak regularly.

But let's not get crazy. I have a nighttime lifestyle to reluctantly maintain, afterall.

For the past several months, I've been living in a cocoon. Almost every night, I've been spending time with my girlfriend, in a girlfriendly world of girlfriendliness. It's been wonderful and fun, like effing Disneyland to tell you the truth, all TiVo and Scrabble and dualing laptops, with the occasional night of pizza-binging and/or beer-swilling and/or karaoke singing to round things out, and all of this taking place during my prime hours of 12-5am. Things have been ideal, is what I'm saying.

And yet, I'll have to admit that when said girlfriend announced that she was leaving for a short business trip, and that said business trip would correspond with my rare consecutive two days off, I kinda got excited.

It's not that I don't love my girlfriend. Jeezus, do I ever love my girlfriend. Have you seen her? Have you spoken with her? She's ... never mind, you don't want to hear all that. But it's been a long time since I've done the kind of things that I do when she's not in the neighborhood.

So after dropping her off to catch her plane this morning around the time of day we parted ways on our first date, I started thinking of all the vile things I was going to do as soon as she left Minnesota soil.

I'm totally gonna read some more of that book I just got ... then, I'm gonna make those subtle tweaks to my website I've been thinking about for awhile ... ultimately, I'd like to upgrade some of the software on that old G4 Powermac ... really trick it out ... look into a new wireless card maybe, but not necessarily ... I'll probably not get one but I'll look into them ...

And while I was sad to see my lover go away, internally, I was warmed by all of my grand plans. Not only did I accomplish all of them, but I also took a walk and photographed Lake Superior. Hello, my name is Barrett and I'm a geekoholic.

I have no idea how I acquired this many computers. Sure, I have the laptop, which is my main machine. But I also have two crappy desktops. One is a Powermac that I want to use except that it isn't (wasn't) quite good enough, and the other is a PC that I use all the time while cursing vehemently.

Back in the day, I always swore that I'd never be a Mac person. They just seemed so smarmy. And even today, those Mac ads with the jackass in the hoodie? God, I hate those ads. Still, Macs are so much better than PCs. It's like driving a really nice car when you're used to driving a shitheap. You sit behind the wheel and sure, it takes some getting used to, but suddenly you realize that driving is really, really fun. Because everything is absolutely smooth and easy, and nothing is going wrong. Even an old Mac is better than a PC.

The G4 is pretty old and crappy. I bought it secondhand simply because it was cheap. The hard drive is small, and the fan is really loud. But I think I'm ready to retire the PC and all its crappy, garbagey ways.

And then I'll officially be a Mac person. There's no going back. My girlfriend always calls me a hippy, which I have to say is so, so wrong. She looks at the soy milk in my fridge, along with the cage-free eggs and the organic spinach, and she giggles. I deny it and she points to the Amy's products. The soy yogurt. This whole Mac conversion doesn't help my case.

I prefer the term, "internet bohemian."

I'd been craving buffalo chicken wings for weeks when I found myself sitting at an overpriced airport bar at LAX, clenching the free meal vouchers the airline gave me for effing up my flight. So it wasn't difficult to choose an item from the menu. And as everyone knows whenever you eat wings, you have to drink beer, so I ordered one of those too.

Now typically whenever you eat food in a bar, people tend to leave you alone. They're busy drinking and socializing and having a good time. But airport bars are different. People drink in airport bars not out of choice, but out of boredom. They have a long time to wait, so they decide to tie one on simply because it beats sitting in the waiting area listening to announcements and staring at the fat couple in matching Indianapolis Colts sweatshirts. But even though they're in a bar and even though they're drinking, they're not having fun. Despite the disco hits pumping out of the jukebox at deafening levels.

What I'm getting at is that as soon as my appetizer arrives, I come to two terrifying realizations. 1) Buffalo wings are extremely messy and extremely difficult to eat. 2) My fumbling attempts to eat buffalo wings are now going to be the sole source of entertainment for this entire bar.

With this in mind, I dig in. And it's even worse than I expected. These are some saucy wings, and the three or four napkins the bartender provided might not be enough. With every bite, my face gets covered in buffalo juice and ranch dressing, and I have to mop it down. I don't even bother wiping the orange grease off of my hands, except when I need to take a swig of beer.

And all the time, the Asian couple across the bar stares unapologetically. The guy to my right watches in furtive, darting glances as he pretends to read a sign, but I can feel his eyes on me. All around the room, every last person stops staring into space and starts watching me eat. I realize then that quickly this will either become extremely annoying or extremely funny. Then I start giggling uncontrollably and morph into an orange, greasy madman.

It's about then when I'm saved by someone even more entertaining than I am. This guy who looks a lot like the principal in The Breakfast Club comes in, already drunk off his ass. "I want the biggest beer you got and a Jack Daniel's on the rocks!" he shouts. "And make it a double! What time do you close? How much time do I got?"

The bartender tells him they close at 12:15, but the guy's not even listening to the bartender. He's noticed the juke, which is playing "Word Up" by Cameo and now he's dancing.

I finish my wings, tag off, and let Principal Vernon run the show from here on out. I got a plane to catch.

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So I woke up this morning a little bit groggy, at least partially no doubt due the events of last night, which involved ingesting a lot of rotgut whiskey and free hotdogs at the White Horse bar in East Hollywood. I rolled over and flipped open my laptop to check the time. It was 12:15. Shit. Time to get up and catch my plane back home.

I got out of bed and tiptoed around Cathie & John, who appeared to still be fast asleep. I showered, dressed, and collected all of my stuff. Then I went back out and checked on those guys, who were just blinking awake. "Um," I said, about to mention the time. It was then that I realized that I was operating on Central time. It was two hours earlier than I thought it was.

Fucken White Horse. Fucken brain.

But this was good news. There was time for eggs and coffee. Some quality discussions about the locals (i.e. Britney Spears). A stop at In and Out Burger. And then, finally, the drive to the airport.

Cathie & John dropped me off and we said our goodbyes. I walked up to the ticket kiosk and swiped my card. "See an agent," it told me. So I saw an agent. And the agent told me that my flight had been changed to an eariler time, and that it was pretty much taking off at that very moment.

It would have been nice to know that. I might not have watched so much Britney footage on You Tube, or had that last cup of coffee, or gone to the (albeit delicious) burger joint. I probably would have gone to the airport and gotten on the fucking airplane. You think? Yeah, that's exactly what I would have done.

Travelocity. Travelocity is to blame. They are supposed to call me when something like this happens. Email. IM. Text. Tattoo it on Britney's wrist. But this whole thing was news to me.

The agent then said that I would have to take the next flight. And that the next flight was 10 hours later.

Now, as much as I enjoyed my stay in Los Angeles, I really did not want to spend another 10 hours sitting in an airport waiting area. I tried to weasel onto an earlier flight in every way I could, all the time thinking of my fantastic girlfriend back home who I hadn't seen in nearly a week, and of the whole roster of things I wanted to do to her. No dice. Finally, I agreed to the red-eye flight and asked him where I could catch a bus back to the city proper. He responded with a wince and a hiss. "Los Angeles is a very spread-out city. You could find yourself caught and unable to get back in time."

I thought about reminding him of the 10-hour wait, but then realized that I didn't have to justify anything to him; he was just doing his job. He gave me directions to the bus, plus my bording pass, a phone card, a $50 coupon off my next flight, and $10 in meal vouchers. After making some phone calls I was on my way back to Hollywood.

And so here I sit on the floor in East Hollywood. Drinking a beer and listening to water boil for artichoke ravioli. Discussing the locals. Watching Jeopardy. All of which is infinitely better than sitting in an airport waiting room, or spending my $10 voucher plus an extra three bucks of my own on microwaved nachos at TGI-Friday's.

Travelocity. I'll never use it again.

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First off, Yo Majesty of Tampa, FL was playing. And holy effing shit did they destroy the house.

Second, it was this guy's birthday. He took the stage and the ladies in the band tried really hard to find him some "nasty pussy" in the audience.

Third, not only does Yo Majesty kick major ass, they are also ka-raaaazy. These ladies clearly "don't give a fuck."

Once the bottle of Courvoisier makes it to the crowd, all hell breaks loose. Soon 1/3 of the audience is on stage. Everyone else has gone completely mental. And me, I'm just thankful that things like this happen, and that sometimes I get to be a part of them.

Amen.

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As soon as my plane landed in Los Angeles, I immediately became happy. In addition to the prospect of seeing old friends, it was the air that made me feel good. One doesn't typically think of Los Angeles air as being healthy and sweet, and I admit that seeing LA from the sky, enveloped in a shroud of yellow smog, it probably isn't. But coming from a place where the ground is frozen to a depth of three feet and where there is zero percent humidity in the air, I was glad to ignore the slight tinge of smog. More than glad, I was ecstatic.

I barely got in Cathie and John's door when they plied me with homemade tacos and instructed me to hurry up and eat, because we had to rush if we were going to get good seats at the Mexican wrestling matches. The Mexican wrestling matches. "Sexo Y Violencia" the program guaranteed. And oh, did it deliver.

The Crazy Chickens and El Disco Machine beat Dirty Sanchez and some other guys. Twin girls wrested a couple of men and won. Big guys wrestled in a 6 man tag match with "minis," and the minis got thrown into the audience. In between matches, women with big boobs took off their clothes, and a guy came out and stripped while hopping around on a pogo stick.

Listen: When you have people taking off their clothes and a guy dressed up as a chupacabra is throwing midgets into the crowd, that, my friend, is entertainment.

Today was all about walking around in Griffith Park and getting sunburned in February.

Who knows what tonight will bring.

I guess anything is possible.

When I was growing up, we had a Bearcat scanner/AM radio in the kitchen, right between the sink and the refrigerator. Every morning, the first person who got up (usually at about 5am) would turn it on, and it would stay on all day long until the last person went to bed. So all day, every day I heard adult-contemporary lite rock interrupted now and then with the cryptic chatter of police-band radio. One minute, I was grooving along to Simon & Garfunkel's "Cecelia," and the next I was listening to the cops rattle off numbers to each other. Next to the radio was a yellowed list of police codes that somebody had typed out on my sister's electric typewriter. "Hey! That's not far away!" someone in my family would shout. Then someone else would look at the list of numbers. "Domestic disturbance." My mom had all the codes memorized. She was good with numbers.

I used to sit at the kitchen table and just watch the scanner when I was bored. There were two red blinking lights that would alternately turn on and off when it was "scanning." I would stare at those lights, waiting for the police call. You never knew what it would be or where it could happen. Most of the time it was useless blabber, but now and then it was something good.

One day, the scanner announced that there was trouble on our very block, right across the street where this girl my age lived. My brother and I rushed to the front room, where we kneeled on the couch and looked out the window at all the squads right outside. When the cops drew their guns and went in the front door, my brother turned his hat backwards. I'll always remember that. The scene ended anticlimactically, with the girl's dad being walked out of the house in handcuffs. The girl moved away not too long after that -- something involving a divorce and a broken home.

Eventually, after about 30 years of service, the scanner crapped out. The radio still worked, but the police calls, which were far more important to everyone in the family than the England Dan & John Ford Coley tunes, stopped coming through. That year for Christmas, my siblings bought a new scanner for my parents. I wasn't impressed. In fact by this time in my life (my know-it-all teens) I was kind of irritated. Why do people have scanners? The whole thing seemed paranoid to me.

So last night at about 1:35am when Christa and I were sitting on my couch doing what we do best, which is yammering back and forth in a long series of one-liners, singing Lionel Richie's "Hello" and changing the lyrics to describe the video with the blind girl, and pausing now and then to watch more Veronica Mars. With all of this happening, the sound of the gunshot outside barely didn't immediately register. It took about two beats for me to say, "What the hell was that?" The answer was pretty obvious.

"Should we do something?" I asked, peering out the deck door.

Christa shrugged. "If the cops got another shots-fired report from my phone number, they'd probably laugh." Christa, I should explain, lives in the heart of the Hillside. I didn't see anything suspicious, like a dead body or a guy running down the street carrying a canvas bag with a dollar sign on it. It seemed that a call to the cops would result in a hassle that would end nowhere. We took note of the time in case there was an investigation, and went back to our cheesy existence.

But dammit, part of me wanted to reach over and turn up the knob on that scanner. To watch the red lights blink and then stop. To have the Lionel Richie interrupted by a cacophany of numbers, codes that could be looked up on a yellowed sheet of paper and translated into an answer.

I never got an answer.

Maybe I should ask my parents.

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The only thing better than having time off of work is having a place to go on vacation. And ever since Ca-chee and Paco Johnz moved to East Hollywood, I've been aching to gather up all my snakes and get on a plane.

Rapidly, that time is approaching. Soon, when you suckers are trying to pull your Carhartt snowpants over your Sorels, I'll be basking in California sun.

Like any good traveller, I've set some win-goals and loss limits for the trip.

For example, there are things I will definitely do. I will certainly eat a lot of cheap, good Mexican food. I'll see some good live music. I'll take a lot of pictures of weird things. I'll gawk at Kieffer Sutherland's bizarre warehouse mansion, which is right in the neighborhood. As I descend into LAX, I will undoubtedly blare "Welcome to the Jungle" in my headphones.

There are also many things I will not do. I will not go to Universal Studios. I will not go to the Hyde, paying a $100 cover and $25 per drink.

Then there are the things I hope to do. Such as go to the Griffith Observatory. Or photograph Lindsay Lohan's cooter as she gets out of a car and sell it for ten grand.

The best thing about visiting someone who lives in a city you've never been to is finding out what the city is really like -- not from a tourist perspective or a TV perspective, but from a citizen's perspective. And that, above all else, is what I intend to do.

If it's not my most hated question, it's certainly in my top five. In the grocery store alone, I have been asked this question literally dozens of times. I'll be buying something like say, leeks, or maybe an avocado. The clerk will pick it up, look at it oddly, and ask me what it is.

"It's a leek," I say, somewhat in disbelief that there are people who don't know what a leek is. People who work in a place where leeks are sold.

Then the clerk scrunches up her face (it's almost always a her) and says, "What are you going to do with that?"

Um...I'm going to eat it.

So. Effing. Rude.

I like to make hummus sometimes, and making hummus requires tahini. OK, tahini is kind of a strange food, and I understand that not everyone buys pureed seseme seeds. Still, where do you get off holding a jar of my food in your hand asking, very accusingly, "What is this? What are you going to do with it?"

Of course, the upside to the whole thing is that probably 50 times when I've purchased leeks, the clerk rang them up as green onions, which are, like, 1/5 the price. Booyah!

I run into a similar problem whenever I'm taking photos in public. "Why are you taking a picture of that?" some stranger will ask. I have no answer. Because I want to see what the photo will look like. Because it might be pretty, even if it's a picture of a busted TV set with a dirty rag on top of it.

"What is is for?"

I don't know. I really don't. But if you have to ask...there's no point in explaining.

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Sweet. Gentle. Lord.

I think I guest starred in an episode of Growing Pains.

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A common thing that people ask me in interviews is how I got started in cartooning, and what my first comic was. I usually answer with the same set of memories from when I was a kid: My sister lived in Germany, and I used to mail comics to her once a week or so, mainly because I didn't know what to do with them. A few days ago, however, I suddenly remembered the following repressed story, which describes the first comic I ever drew that was actually funny, as funny today as it was back then.

I must have been about 10 years old. Back then, Super One Foods had a logo on its bag involving a dorky-looking superhero in a cape with a large number "1" on his chest. Above that, the words, "Super One" were emblazoned in a cartoonish font.

One night, barely able to control the pen because I was giggling so hard, I copied the Super One superhero on a sheet of white paper. However, in my version, he was completely nude except for the cape. At the crotch area, I drew a tiny, tiny penis. And just like it was on the bag, I copied the logo's font above the drawing of the insane, grinning, naked superhero, altering the lettering slightly so that it read, "Super Small One." Putting the finishing touches on my drawing, I remember finally bursting out into gales of laughter that made me both cry and hyperventilate.

My family, of course, wanted to know why I was laughing so hard. I hesitated for a moment, and then proudly laid my drawing down on the kitchen table. Suddenly, the whole kitchen was roaring with laughter. (Admittedly, there'd been some drinking going on.) My mom, wiping tears of hilarity from her eyes, chided, "That's not nice." But even she couldn't control herself.

I kinda wish I still had that drawing. Oh, well.

So I'm sitting on Christa's couch and both of us are sick. She has a serious cold. I have a minor cold, plus some physical and mental exhaustion. And even though she is the sicker of the two of us, she seems to have more energy. I am quiet, sluggish, and apparantly defeated.

"What do you need?" she asks. I shrug. "Do you want to watch a DVD? Do you need to go on the internet?"

I don't.

"Can I get you some strawberry flavored water? Some oatmeal?"

I don't want anything like that.

"Do you want some sandwich spread?"

For some reason, this intrigues me. Sandwich spread? What in God's name is sandwich spread? Christa explains that she just bought it and that it is fantastic. The last time she had sandwich spread she was riding on the school bus plundering her own lunch, and she's been looking for this stuff for a long, long time (West Duluth Super One is where you can find it). She removes a small, familiar-looking tube of meat from the fridge.

Oscar Meyer Sandwich Spread, the label reads. Tastes Great on Crackers.

I nod my head and she procures a knife, a plate, and a row of saltines. When I dig in and go to town, I am immediately 5 years old again, sitting on my parent's couch with a metal tray on my lap, eating a plate of saltines covered in Oscar Meyer Sandwich Spread and watching Mr. Rogers, having just returned from morning kindergarten. Life was great back then.

I'm on my third cracker when another memory hits me. My mom used to make homemade sandwich spread. It's true. We had this red and white wooden chair in the kitchen and every now and then, she would clamp an old-fashioned meat grinder to the chair and put a big bowl beneath it. I was in charge of turning the crank while she fed pieces of meat and pickles into the grinder, along with whatever else goes into sandwich spread. What came out tasted a lot like the stuff in the tube, only better.

I flip the tube over and read the ingredients. "Bologna" is at the top of the list. "Imagine," I say, "we're eating a food that contains bologna as an ingredient." I keep reading and find that bologna has a parenthetical list of its own ingredients. "Pork" is the first in that list, and then "Machine-Separated Chicken." This is when I decide that ignorance is bliss and stop reading the nutrition facts.

"What kind of meat do you think my mom used when she made sandwich spread?" I wonder out loud. It's no use. I can't picture the meat she fed into the grinder, and when I try to imagine her feeding slices of bologna into it, well, that is just plain wrong. I only remember the way it looked as it came out: pink and spreadable. I make a mental note to ask her about it.

The next morning, we're staring out the window at the creepy house next door, as we are wont to do, when Christa says, "Sandwich Spread is a Food of Abuse." And despite all of my warm and loving memories, I have to admit that it is.

"The Food of Abuse" is an ongoing conversation we have in which we list and describe foods that one might be serving, preparing, or consuming just before one "falls down the stairs" or "walks into a door." We are both creative people with extremely vivid imaginations, and sometimes -- a lot of the time -- that does not lead to pretty imagery.

Generally speaking, I contend that the Food of Abuse is nearly always processed food that requires little or no effort to prepare. Both Swanson Turkey Pot Pie and Bird's Eye Fish Sticks top my list, the former suggesting spousal abuse while the latter points toward child abuse. Christa asserts that meatloaf is the quintessential example. Here is where we usually disagree.

"Meatloaf is homemade," I say. "It can't be a Food of Abuse because someone had to make it by hand. It contains love."

"Meatloaf doesn't contain love," Christa says. "Meatloaf is made out of hamburger and ketchup. You're not seeing it. She's home all day, all alone, watching her stories on TV. Finally, he's due home and she has to make something. She makes meatloaf."

"I suppose," I admit, "that IF he comes home late, drunk, and pissed off because he lost all of his money playing pull-tabs at the bar, and IF the meatloaf is therefore dry and partially burned, THEN it can be a Food of Abuse."

We quietly think about this for awhile, still looking out the window at the creepy house next door. Then suddenly, it hits me.

"Bologna!" I yell. "My mom DID use bologna to make sandwich spread, but not slices. You can totally buy it in a big log."

"That's right, you can."

"Hey, what's that soft meat that comes in a log...um...I can't remember what it's called, but..."

"Braunschweiger."

"Yes! I don't remember what that tastes like."

"It's gross."

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Someday I would like to own a house. To become a homeowner. Instead of just a ho-moaner. And while we all know what makes a good home -- a solid foundation, a wet bar, secret passageways -- what makes a good neighborhood is up for interpretation. So I often think about the neighborhoods in this part of the world and try to assess which one is right for me.

West Duluth
I lived most of my life in the 55807 ZIP code, and I would be a liar if I said that I didn't love it. Everything is cheaper there. People drive really cool cars. It's the only neighborhood in the Twin Ports that has its own beauty pageant. But yet, sometimes, West Duluth just doesn't seem quite right. I suppose this is the only neighborhood where it comes down to the actual house. If there's a great house in West Duluth that has everything I want, I will definitely take it.

East Hillside
This is my current neighborhood, and it has some greatness to it. First of all, a lot of the houses here have a great view, which would certainly be nice. Yet East Hillside is so ... expected. This is the neighborhood where semi-cool people who are not from here end up living. Because it is friendly and pedestrian and they can look at the main reason they moved here, which is Lake Superior. Ho-hum. Still, I'd live here.

Central Hillside
I kind of like this idea, because it's like West Duluth meets East Hillside. Sure, it's beautiful, but it's also noisy and full of street crime. Also I think that it's a good investment. It won't always be full of street crime. Gentrification is bound to set in, and when that happens, I can sell my house for three times what I paid for it. Plus, I can walk to the awesome bars. Thumbs up.

Lakeside
Sweet mother of god, NO. I've spent enough time in Lakeside to know one thing: Other than houses, there is NOTHING in Lakeside. And despite its name, there isn't even a view of the lake. And so you have to drive 20 minutes to get to anything. No. I like living across the street from the grocery store and two blocks from the bar. No. NO.

West End/Lincoln Park
Do you know where I'm from? I'm from West Duluth. Do you know who I hate even more than those East End cake-eaters? People from the West End, that's who. First off, I loathe when people confuse West Duluth with the West End. Second, this is the new ghetto. I don't need to live somewhere where kids get robbed on their way to school. Plus, I work in the West End, and I really don't want to spend any more time there than necessary.

Piedmont
Sweet Jesus. No we're really getting into the neighborhoods I hate. First off, "piedmont" means "foothill" in French. What the hell does that mean? While Piedmont does have wonderful views of the West End and the industrial sections of the Duluth Harbor, it feels depressing to me. I don't know much about the neighborhood, but it seems like a place for white trash people from the West End to move to when they feel that they've "made it." Sure, you have a good job with that blacktopping firm and you can afford that bungalow with the neon 80s furniture from E-Z Own, but do you have to keep the trash-stash and the glass-and-fake-mahogany case of Minnesota Vikings bobbleheads? Oh, yeah. That's right. They might be *worth something* someday.

Downtown
Holy shit. Now we're getting somewhere. If I could live on Superior Street, or better yet Michigan Street right in the heart of downtown, I'd be a happy fellow. In my ideal life, I both live and work on Superior Street. Actually, no. I live on Superior Street and work as the guy who raises and lowers the Aerial Lift Bridge. That is awesome. I have nothing bad to say about this situation at all, as long as there's off-street parking.

Canal Park
Canal Park has a lot of condos, which just might be my ideal living situation, since I can't stand yardwork or home maintenance of any kind. Oh, sure, I'm kind of good at it I think, but still, it's not something I enjoy doing. Plus, spitting on tourists from my kitchen window would be a lot of fun.

Chester Park
I can't rule this out, because I do have an affinity for listening to NPR and for reading the New York Times. I could imagine a nice quiet life for myself in Chester Park. Hell, it's probably where I'll end up.

Woodland
The only good thing about Woodland is that it has a Piggly Wiggly. And the only good thing about Piggly Wiggly is that it's fun to say.

Gary/New Duluth
Gross. The next best thing to living in Carlton.

Superior
I often think about living in Superior, and it has many appeals. The one Superior neighborhood I love is called Central Park, which I think a lot of people don't know about. Sometimes I go out there and drive around, and it's absolutely beautiful. The houses are eclectic (as they are in most of Superior, which is why I like the town) and very beautiful. They all surround this great park, which is also tremendous. But even though it's only a few block from Belknap, I think I'd still feel isolated. But yet, it's fantastic.

Park Point
I suppose it's because of my inherent naivete that this appeals to me. Everyone always says that moving to Park Point is a horrible idea. The bridge. The traffic. The teenagers burning stuff and breaking bottles in your backyard. The impossibility of ever affording a home on the 'lake' side of the point and having to live on the 'bay' side. Still. Still.

Hm.

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Next Tuesday, I turn 34. I'm not panicking. But I'm not all that excited, either. Because this will be my last year in the infamous "18-to-34-year-old" demographic. I love being in that demographic, and I suspect that for a few more years at least, much of what is said about that demographic will still apply to me. Well, at least the stuff about the tail-end of the age spectrum.

I don't give a rip about most aspects of aging. I sincerely believe that people get better with age, mentally at least, and when I hear people in movies say "Oh, to be 18 again," I literally wince. Thirty-four is WAY better than 18. Or 23. Or 29.

But there's one thing that scares the hell out of me, and that is the huge number of people who fail to middle-age gracefully.

Really: Is there anything more pathetic than a 45-year-old man? I know a lot of 45-year-old men, and some of them are really cool people. They've got a lot of great things going on -- good at balancing family and career but still have energy for creative outputs and other kinds of growth. They're healthy and vital.

But others...ugh. You look at them and the first thing you think is "perv." Unfortunately, this route seems to be the norm.

Women are no better. Plenty of them seem to go completely psychotic as soon as they hit 40. Maniacal, irrational, fearful. You don't want to take that route, because being adult should be all about being strong. You don't have to play the petty gibberish anymore. Well, not so much anyway. But then again, high school never ends, or so the song on the pop radio station tells me.

An online friend of mine once told me that we are going to end up being a generation of grandparents who are still obsessed with Boba Fett. And while that is in some ways completely annoying, maybe in that idea there is hope. We've been trying to recapture our youth ever since we hit puberty. And we're really good at it now.

All I know is that I have always felt exactly the age that I was at the time. And I still do.

Next week is birthday week, beginning on Saturday (12/9) and ending the following Sunday (12/17) with inevitable bleeding over on both ends. Wait. That didn't sound very good at all.

Stay tuned to this blog and to PDD for details regarding the annual Birthday Rally in Spirit Valley, to which you (yes, you) are invited.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to climb into my Lexus and cruise the area high schools for chicks. With my sunglasses perched up on top of my head, of course.

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IPOD UPDATE

As predicted, my iPod turned up. It turns out it was under the table beneath the shelf where I left it. It was in a box. On one hand, I'm really glad it wasn't stolen, but now, once again, I have no need to upgrade to a new iPod. Mine is a 3rd generation; the kind with the monochromatic screen that doesn't show pictures or play video. But I can't justify the upgrade, so I'll keep using it.

OVERHEARD AT THE GAS STATION

CASHIER: So, what's wrong with you?
TEENAGE KID: I'm tired. Imagine. Spending six hours a day. Five days a week. One hundred eighty days a year. In school. Oh -- I think you'd be a little tired, too.

IT'S FUN TO PARAPHRASE

For no particular reason, I took a slightly different route home today, and as I was doing so, I had the feeling I was making a mistake. Sure enough, the po-po decided to pull-pull me over.

"Good evening," the cop said. "The reason I pulled you over is because you're driving a piece of shit."

"I know," I said. "I've been meaning to get around to that..."

"Any reason in particular why you're driving such a fucking bomb?"

"I'm lazy, I guess. And also I spend my money on things like video iPods and TiVo, instead of automobile maintenance."

"This may be news to you, but people don't appreciate the fact that your car sounds like death raining down from Heaven. I'm going to issue you a warning, and you need to clean up your life."

"I sure will, officer. Now that I have to."

Ironically, my normal route home takes me past the police station. But it was a state trooper that pulled me over, so there you go. What a state trooper is doing cruising 4th Street in the freaking ghetto is beyond me, but hey, I drive a Ford that sounds like some kind of war machine, so what do I know.

On Saturday night, I was at work when the battery in my iPod died. So I wound the headphone cord around it and put it on the shelf by the LIPS machine where all the LIPS operators keep their stuff. But that night, when I left work, I forgot it there.

I actually realized my mistake in the middle of the night. But I trust my coworkers. "Meh," I thought. "I'll just go get it tomorrow."

Sunday came and went, but I forgot that I'd forgotten my iPod. Apparantly, I'm a very forgetful person.

When I got to work today, I remembered what happened as soon as I saw the shelf. However, the iPod was gone. I looked everywhere. No dice. I asked the clerk in the Registry Cage where all the valuables are kept. No one had turned it in. I asked the supervisor. No one had brought it to the office. I asked a lot of my coworkers. None of them had seen it.

The thing that really pisses me off is that someone *may* have stolen it. I still don't believe that, and I have a feeling it's going to turn up. And yet, it only takes one creep to steal an unattended iPod, even if all the rest of my coworkers are decent people. The expense of the thing isn't what pisses me off, either. I think I'd feel the same way if someone stole my coffee cup or my gloves. Don't steal my stuff. That's just so wrong.

But like I said, I still think it will turn up.

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Ever since I came up with the idea of living a Life of Leisure™, I've had a hell of a time accomplishing anything. I have made very few decisions as fantastic and life-improving as this one. The last one I made was to move into this apartment. Before that, I can't even remember.

Today I got out of bed at 3:30pm. Made French press coffee. Drank it. Around 7pm, I finally got around to taking a shower. Since then, I've been sitting around in pajamas, downloading music from eMusic.com (thanks for the tip, Pastor Matt!) and watching digital cable with the sound off and my headphones on.

Now if you'll excuse me, there's a movie on TV starring Rick Moranis and Booger. I swear I saw Mrs. Jefferson in there somewhere, too.

Holy shit. Now there's Don Knotts. I gotta turn the sound on.

So, let me tell you, the novel is coming along just fine. I'm a bit behind, but given my atrocious work schedule, I've been pretty surprised at how easy and fun the whole thing has been. If I had two days off a week, I certainly wouldn't be behind at all. I'm still confident that I'll finish by next week.

That said, it's time to start looking forward to the next big thing. And believe me, this one is very exciting. Well, at least it is for me.

I'm calling the project, "The Life of Leisure." And "leisure" is pronounced le zh ər.

The way it works is this: I go to work. I work hard, and work overtime if required. But as soon as I punch out, I begin the Life of Leisure.

What this means is that all of the side projects, independent study projects, freelance projects and the like that I've put aside while writing the novel will remain put aside. And instead of doing all of that junk, I'll be focusing on my new project: The Life of Leisure.

The Life of Leisure involves a lot of couch time. It involves a lot of cable TV. There's reading, crosswords, and coffee. There's hanging out in bars, and there's lots and lots of sleeping.

But there is no obligation toward anything at all, except doing the things that are fun.

God, I love this plan. It makes me want to shirk the novel and start immediately.

Hm. Never.

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* I know that I said I would not post again until December, but I had an especially productive day today (4,500 words!) so I thought I'd continue with the madness and do some blogging as well. So here's a post for all of you who continue to visit despite the hiatus, and/or have subscribed to the Product's RSS feed.

Back when we were teenagers, the most frequent thing we would do for fun was to "drive around." What this meant was that 2-5 of us would pile into someone's car, and then just drive. Usually, we would cruise Skyline Drive, maybe go to Canal Park, drive past the houses of people we knew, hang out at Taco John's, and other stuff like that. There were few options for kids our age at that time, and this was one of them. So this is what we did most often.

My friend Paul Lundgren and I decided one night to take the whole "driving around" experience one step further. Instead of following the usual beaten paths, we decided to turn onto the streets that had the best names. It is in this way that we wound up in the Lakeside neighborhood on the opposite end of town.

I have always remembered the following sequence of events distinctly. We had just graduated from high school and we were having a moderately serious discussion about what we wanted to do with our lives. At some point, we came to 51st Ave East, which we turned onto because I lived 100 blocks away, on 51st Ave West. Then, we turned onto Ivanhoe Street, because Ivanhoe was a classic novel, and I was just saying how I wanted to major in English. Then we drove down past 53rd Ave East, which was 100 blocks away from Paul's street. Then Ivanhoe dead-ended, so we turned around in the driveway of the last house on the block.

I distinctly remember all of this. We pulled into the driveway, which was very neat and clean. The neighborhood was so suburban in appearance, so different from the one I grew up in. I thought about how people lead all different kinds of lives, and then -- here's the important part -- I thought about the person sleeping in the window above the driveway where we were turning around. I wondered what that person was like, how they lead their life. When we drove away, I felt like something important had happened.

Several months later, I met a girl that I liked a whole hell of a lot. One night, she took me home to me the folks.

She, and her folks, lived at the end of Ivanhoe Street, just past 53rd. Her bedroom was directly above the driveway.

She was the one I had imagined, sleeping in her clean, neat bedroom. I had wondered about her life. And then, later, I experienced it firsthand.

We dated for four years. Then, we moved in together, and we lived together for eight years. While almost all of that time was blissfully happy, things didn't work out. But still, we talk pretty much every day, despite the fact that she lives in Los Angeles now.

There you have it, folks. Fate. It makes me wish that I had videotape of my entire life, just so that I could watch a couple hours of it now and then and see all the times that I was standing in line at Target right in front of someone I would later date, or work with, or end up despising.

The thought of it is enough to blow a person's mind.

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I won't be making any more posts on the Product until I've finished my novel. If you're interested, you can keep tabs on my progress through this graph.

Also, I'll probably still post photos on Flickr now and then, and I'll probably write some private stuff on Vox for my friends.

If you're starved for reading, there's always Perfect Duluth Day, but you probably know about that.

Also, I recommend the archives.

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The thing about working 12-hour days is that there is almost no time left to do anything else. Recreation goes first. Then eating properly. Then socialization. Then dealing with anything in a rational or sane way. Today, I've chosen to forgo sleep so that I don't go apeshit. The work/sleep/work/sleep cycle has to be broken, and my employers sure as hell aren't going to let up any time soon.

All of this said, I have no intention of curtailing or in any way modifying my plans to write a novel during the month of November. And I won't allow myself to fail, either. I am publicly declaring it here and now. I am going to write and finish a full novel, while working 12 hours a day on the side.

50,000 words. 1,600 words per day, providing that I write every single day in the month of November.

No problem.

Needless to say, posting will be pretty much nonexistent beginning next Tuesday.

Now I'm off to buy some coffee.

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Of all the kids in special ed, Herman was easily the scariest. He wore a hockey helmet because he would beat his own head against the wall if left unattended. The helmet also helped keep him from pulling his own hair out, which was another thing he unfortunately did. But the thing about Herman was his last name: Chase. His name was Herman Chase, but he was no relation to me.

Everyone assumed that he was my brother or maybe my cousin. And every now and then someone would ask me something about him. "I don't know him," I'd say, truthfully. If the person asking me was a girl, or if a girl or (worse yet) group of girls overheard the conversation, they'd get pissed off at this point.

"That's really mean," they'd say. "Pretending you don't know your own brother just because he's mental." That's the word everyone used: "mental."

And at that point, there was nothing I could do to convince these girls that I wasn't lying, that I was not, in fact, related to Herman Chase, and that I did not know anything about him. The more I tried, the more they looked at me with bitter disgust.

In this regard, I was the Ray Ramono of 4th grade.

Well, folks, I hope you weren't especially attached to my free time and to my sanity, because I've decided to put them both into a coma for the month of November. That's right, I've decided to crank out one of them 30-day novels.

There are two thoughts that I'm having on this.

One is that I'm very excited to finally have an excuse to write the bullshit novel that's been in my head for a few years now. The great part about this is that the book is kinda retarded, and I've always thought that if I were going to put forth the effort to write a novel, I'd want to write something much better than this junk (It's kind of a cross between Walden, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and Cheech & Chong's Up in Smoke. Though this, of course, is subject to change once I start actually writing the damn thing).

The second thought I have is that I'm going to look at this as a learning process. I'm not one of those writers who can go on with lots of words. I have always tried to be concise, so being prolific and allowing myself lots of room will be new for me.

In any case, I'm going to need a lot of caffiene.

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Tonight a friend of mine summed up my life story for me:

"You are an only child with five siblings, and you are divorced although you've never been married."

That really does say it all, doesn't it?

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Recently I was thinking about the imaginary friend I had when I was a kid, and it reminded me of another similar head game I used to play as an adult. About eight or nine years ago, I used to play this gamewith myself where I imagined people explaining their purchases to the cashier when I was in line at the store. All of the explanations and descriptions were in graphic detail and came completely unsolicited.

"I like to have sex, but I'm not ready to have a family yet," one man said. "Therefore, I'm purchasing these little bags made out of latex, which is impermeable to spermatozoa. I'm going to take these home and, just before engaging in intercourse, I'll take one out of its foil wrapper and ..."

You get the point. Try it. It's fun.

"Every 28 days, the lining of my uterus breaks down and my body expels it through my vagina. Of course, I don't want to get any of this on my clothing or linens, so I plan on taking these things and ..."

"Whenever I eat food to nourish myself, my body chemically removes all of the nutrients it needs. Whatever is left over from this process, I expel through my anus. This is a messy job, let me tell you. Therefore, I'm purchasing this soft disposable paper so that I can ..."

The best part is to imagine the look on the cashier's face. Each cashier you see offers a new level of hilarity.

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Get ready. Sit yourself down. Take a Xanax, or maybe even two. Because I don't think that in an unmedicated state you can handle what I'm about to do. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to blog about my socks.

My socks have always been somewhat of a topic of conversation among my friends, as long as I can remember. When I really think about it, it all started in kindergarten, when some little douchebag asked me, "Why are your socks ... blue?" articulating the word blue as if he were asking why my socks were ... covered in dog puke. I answered in the obvious way, "Because my shirt is blue." Duh. I looked at his socks, white athletic tube socks no doubt. Ridiculous. They didn't match anything at all. What a fucken retard.

I soon realized that no one in my entire class wore colored socks. But still, I didn't want to wear the white socks everyone else wore. So I kept wearing my colored socks all through elementary school, much to the derision of my classmates. Well, maybe not so much derision as confusion.

I think I switched to white socks when I got to junior high, because it was really weird and gauche to wear brown socks with shorts (or even sweats) in gym class. I realize now that I should have brought different socks for gym (jeezus ... even for hygenic reasons) but that didn't occur to me then.

But as soon as that gym class nonsense ended, I went right back to the various weird socks -- socks purchased in individual pairs as opposed to socks purchased in a bag.

I have so many different pairs of socks. I have socks with bands of stripes going all the way down, as opposed to just around the calf, socks with stripes around the toe and nowhere else, and socks with stripes only around the mid-foot. I have a pair of cashmere socks that I purchased at 95% off, whose original price was $149. I have socks with scorpions on them. I have a pair of argyle socks that I started wearing when I was a virgin and have outlasted every girlfriend I've ever had in my entire life.

Maybe that last one isn't something I should brag about.

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First off, let me start by saying that I have never canned, nor have I wanted to. It's not something that comes up very often in the life I choose to lead. But I'm aware that it is harvest season and that people are out there at this very minute, canning this year's crop. Well, that's good for you.

But I hate home-canned food. Here's why.

When I was a kid, we had this grungy green cabinet full of canned food in our basement. A lot of it was store-bought, and those cans were dented and rusted, with peeling, brittle labels. These didn't bother me. What bothered me was the home-canned food: dust-covered jars full of veiny tomatoes that had turned gray with age, colorless pickles drowining in what could only be dirty dishwater, and other gelatinous mystery vegetables that could not be identified at all.

One day I asked my brother about the cabinet. My brother, who was in the middle of one of his favorite hobbies -- shooting BBs into a styrofoam mannequin head -- described how the food was there for us to eat in the event of World War III.

This was, apparently, the remnants of a makeshift bomb shelter someone had set up back in the Bay of Pigs era or maybe even as far back as the 1950s. I looked dubiously at the jars, their rusty lids, their greasy exteriors, their questionable contents.

"I wouldn't eat that," I said.

My brother stated the facts bluntly. "You would if you were hungry enough."

At that moment I had an ugly vision. My family, trapped in the basement, fighting over the last swig of tomato-ish mopwater, thinking about moving on to the potato bugs and perhaps even the dogs.

I don't remember voicing my concern to my parents, but I must have, because it wasn't long before all those jars were cleaned out and thrown away, replaced by wrenches and carburetor parts. Plus, the teachers didn't hesitate to set our minds at ease and give us the real facts in school. There wouldn't be any scrounging in basements in the event of a war with the Soviets; Duluth, being an international port, would be instantly vaporized.

That was much better.

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I have said before and I will say again, that there are days when Duluth, Minnesota completely opens itself up to you and demands that you have a good time. It helps a lot if you are free that day. This past Saturday was one such day for me, and luckily I was able to accept the opportunity.

Continue reading "100% Perfect Duluth Day" »

We never had a shower when I was growing up. Or rather, we did have a shower, but it was so disgusting and so ridiculous that I refused to use it. My dad, thinking that baths wasted too much water, installed a shower in our unfinished basement. There was no stall or tile or anything like that -- just a shower head attached to the moldy, cobwebby water pipes in the ceiling. The idea was that you stood there naked on the grimy cement floor, between the wood furnace and the washing machine, and turned on the water. It was kind of like something out of a horror movie.

Or at least I imagined it was, since I never used it once in all the years I lived there. I grew up on baths and baths alone, and that was fine with me.

Sure, it was a little impractical at times. It was pretty much impossible for me to get up early enough to take a bath before school in junior high, when class started well before dawn, and I lived a half-hour bus ride from the school. But still, it beat showering in the basement.

As an adult, I always had a shower and a bath, and made ample use of both of them, up until three years ago when I moved into a place that had only a shower. Admittedly, it was the greatest shower ever invented, with lots of water pressure and as much scalding water as you could take. But there was no bath. It was fine. For awhile.

When I moved downstairs of where I live now, the place had tub -- a really nice tub to tell the truth. But the baths it gave left a lot to be expected. The water pressure was low, so that it took a long time to fill up, and then the water never really got that hot.

In short, what I'm getting at is, it's been three years since I've had a really good bath.

I had to work overtime tonight, and then there was all this social activity beckoning. But I went home because I really needed a shower. I went into the bathroom and suddenly realized: this bathtub will work perfectly.

Wow. That's all I have to say.

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My parents never gave me "the talk." In fact, I distinctly remember sitting at the kitchen table with my mother while she explained to me that I wouldn't be getting "the talk," ever, and that that was just the way it was. "You know how your father is," she said. I did know. "If you have any questions about that kind of stuff, you'll have to ask your brothers."

Hmm. If I have any questions about the most uncomfortable topic there is at my age, I should ask the two people who had been tormenting me pretty much constantly since I was born. That seems perfectly reasonable.

Luckily, however, I didn't have any questions at all, because I'd been educating myself on the topic for years. For some reason, in the upstairs bookcase, there was a college textbook about human sexuality. Off and on since about the age of nine, I'd been secretly studying up on the finer points of shaking the sheets.

My favorite section by far was a list of all the "official" terminology relating to body parts and various activities. Who knew these activities even existed?! I did, that's who. But even better ... underneath each official term was a sublist of slang terms. This was just awesome. How else was I supposed to learn that "breasts" could also be referred to as "snuggle pups"? Nothing else, not even Showtime, could grant me that kind of knowledge. This was a university education on the topic of eel-skinning.

I read that damn book over and over for probably about eight years. Most of it didn't make sense at the beginning and I hated all the boring parts about dating and intimacy. But I read them anyway, and eventually they took hold somewhat. And eventually, much much later, they came in handy.

In the meantime, I just read the book and avoided the alternatives.

"Hey, Buttplug," my brother said to me.

I smiled faintly, because I knew what that was. Literally. Then I ignored him and kept tapping away at my Commordore.

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I have this hair product called "Texture Dirt," which is supposed to make your hair look like it hasn't been washed. So what I do is, I take a shower, wash my hair, then put in the Texture Dirt to make it look like I didn't wash my hair. And every time I do it, I feel a little bit stupid. Still, I love the stuff and it does exactly what I want it to.

And, it does make sense, too. It makes it look like you've gone one day without washing your hair. Because that looks good. But if you go two days, that looks like you've been sleeping in a can of Crisco. So you have to wash your hair, but if you don't put anything in it, your head ends up looking fuzzy, like a bird's head, and so you want it to get back to how it looked when it was one day unwashed and ...

Gah! This world is going insane and I'm a part of the problem.

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Yeah, so, I no longer have a landline. I feel pretty weird about that because for all of my adult life, I've had the same phone number. I'm not particularly attached to the number itself -- it's not like it even spelled anything. But still, if you've held onto something for that long, you want to keep it.

During this move, I've found so many things that I could easily live without. My goal is to keep the new place as spare as possible. Not empty, but clean and functional.

In the meantime, however, if you need/want to get ahold of me, you'll have to call my cell number. If you don't know what that is, email me.

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1. Dread. There is so much to move and everything is such a mess. Plus I have no time. Plus I have no friends. This is going to suck.

2. Excitement. One general fact about me is that I am always hyper enthusiastic about the Next New Thing. I'm going to live in a new place? YES! Let's try all the switches and knobs and dream about what will go where.

3. Healthy, sweaty, beautiful gruntiness. Let's move this stuff quick! We'll start with everything that I love most. The other stuff, oh, we'll get that later.

4. Bliss. Wow! This place is really clean and there's nothing I hate in it yet. Plus, it is only about 50 times better than my old place, which really is saying something. There's a lot to do downstairs in the dungeon still, but for now, let's just sit here and watch whatever is on HBO-15 West and drink cheap beer from the Shanty Liquor Store. In awhile, we'll go out on the deck and watch the ore boats and people on Jet Skis. Then we'll eat dinner, not from the rotten mess in the fridge downstairs but from the fresh stuff in the clean fridge upstairs.

5. Horror. The chick downstairs is moving in TOMORROW. Oh, god. I need to figure out what should be thrown away and what should be stored. Wow, look at all those ties. It would be fun to try some of them on ... NO! NO! MUST STAY ON TASK! Fuck, look at the condition of that toilet. Clean toilet or move horrific belongings? Clean toilet. Definitely. Now, to tackle that closet...what time is it...3am...?

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Briefly, I am back online, and partially moved into my new apartment. This is my sweet living room. Soon, I'll be able to show my my sweet whole place.

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For quite a long time now, I've been obsessed with vending machines. The idea that you can buy things without even entering a store, or that you can sell things without ever having to deal with customers, is amazing to me. Hence my obsession. I love vending machines and everything they stand for.

So often, however, I'm disappointed with vending machine selections. You can sell anything out of a vending machine, so why is it only just candy and soda? A really creative vending machine selection would have me feeding quarters and singles all day long.

One of the simplest and best vending machine ideas I've ever seen was in Seattle back in the 90s. The machine was a soda machine, and it had all the usual selections. But the last selection was "Chance." Faced with that, how could you NOT choose "Chance"? I don't remember what I got, but I think it was Sunkist. Another guy in my party got Green River Soda. Putting a pittance of change into the machine and hitting "Chance" could affect your whole day.

At one time, I thought about taking matters into my own hands. You know those rotating deli vending machines that sell sandwiches and whatnot? They have a little door that you slide open so that you can remove your sandwich. I'd like to start buying sandwiches from these machines and replacing them with other objects. A green pepper. A pack of cherry bombs. An Astrud Gilberto CD.

My ultimate dream is to open a bar where all the beer is dispensed from a vending machine. The bar would be called "Vender Bender" and the machine would be called "The Drunk-o-matic." Somehow, however, I think there are probably 600 ordinances that would make that impossible.

Still, dare to dream.

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Today I woke up and thought about how great it would be if I had two days off. Then I realized, oh yeah, I have two days off starting tomorrow!

I cleaned my house a bit, made some food, and headed off to work. As I drove, I thought about how great it would be if I had TODAY off. Because I could use two days off starting RIGHT NOW. I always can use two days off starting RIGHT NOW.

When I got to work, it took about 30 seconds before one of my co-workers looked at me confused. "Isn't it your day off?"

SHIT! Shit, shit, shit! I checked the schedule. OFF. My supervisor said hi to me, and I replied. "I'm not supposed to be here." She said, "Do you want to be here?" I think you know what my answer was.

I took off immediately, and did some awesome stuff including hanging out with a friend who made a pretty smart and pretty funny joke that I laughed at it quite a bit, but then 15 minutes later it struck me why that joke was ACTUALLY funny and what it ACTUALLY meant, and holy mother of god did that make me feel dumb.

I used to be quick-witted and smart. When the hell did I become slow on the uptake?

I blame that whole night-shift experience. I still haven't recovered.

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...and I wasn't even warned. [Link here]

The Strib did a story on Minnesota bloggers and I'm in it! I had no idea.

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Recently, I sat in a bar, stone cold sober, watching as a nearby table ordered bottle after bottle of wine. I think they were up to their seventh or eighth bottle when they started playing the age-old game of Bloody Knuckles.

Their form was a variation that I had never seen before. Each of the players made a fist, and as is the norm, they touched their fists together. But then, instead of raising his fist and bringing it down on his opponent's in a "knocking" motion, the Hitter drew his fist back and punched his opponent's fist head-on. The strike made a loud smack that was audible even above the jukebox.

In case you didn't realize it, it is mid-July, the beginning of Bloody Knuckle season. Around the country, kids everywhere are getting to that point of summer vacation where the boredom is really setting in. There are only three kinds of humans who play Bloody Knuckles: the seriously bored, the seriously stupid, and the seriously drunk. Life challenges and life experience usually eliminate the first two excuses from most people's lives. But anyone can get drunk. So don't worry, your Bloody Knuckle career isn't necessarily over. You might come out of retirement for a return match tonight!

Back in my Bloody Knuckles halcyon days as a kid, my favorite variant of the game required a table. Everything is the same as the standard version, except you play with your forearms flat on a tabletop. That way, if you miss, you rap your own knuckles on the table really, really hard. This variant of Bloody Knuckles usually doesn't last very long.

I like to think about how long ago, someone actually thought up the game of Bloody Knuckles, and it became so wildly popular that everyone has at least heard of it. Its popularity is due to its simplicity. Two people willingly engage in the exchange: "I will try to hit you. You try to avoid it. If you are successful, then you can try to hit me. We'll do this until both of us are hurt so badly that we can't even sign our own names."

Those are the rules.

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I really like reading articles in men's magazines about how to behave like a gentleman. I think that all of these articles show that there is a new trend toward gentlemanliness in America, or at least I hope so, because we sure do need it. All my life, I've tried to behave like a gentleman as much as possible, and it is one of just a few things that I truly believe in. Behaving like a gentleman keeps us from acting like animals.

Personal sacrifice is the core of gentlemanly behavior. To use a common example, if you are in a hurry at the grocery store and you have 20 items, it is not gentlemanly to use the express checkout. This is rude. Your hurry is your problem, and a gentleman does not make other people suffer (no matter how trivial the suffering) for his own problems.

Likewise, if you are dining with another person at a restaurant, it is gentlemanly to allow the other person to choose their own seat. Maybe this person has a seating preference, a very strong preference which might affect the quality of their dining experience. Allowing them to choose eliminates this small problem.

One big rule that I frequently see ignored is that a gentleman respects another person's right to say "no" and also respects their unspoken reasons for saying it. Usually, disrespecting this is a misguided attempt at being nice. For example, if you ask someone what they are doing for their birthday and they say, "Nothing, actually. I've decided to stay home and get a good night's sleep," it is absolutely rude to say, "Nonesense! You have to do something! Something really, really fun!" In a single statement you have 1) made the person feel boring and stupid, and 2) dredged up all of their reasons for not wanting a big to-do, which may or may not be painful or at least awkward.

When you behave like a gentleman, however, you must realize a few things. One is that almost none of these small sacrifices will be acknowledged or even noticed. In fact, it is ungentlemanly to even want them to be acknowledged. You pay attention to detail, act with courtesy and respect, and take responsibility for your own actions and decisions. Most of the time, no one will notice or thank you. But you are making the lives of the people around you just a tiny bit easier, and that is a noble thing. If we all did this, everyone's life would be much easier.

Very few of the rules of manners are arbitrary. Some of the old, traditional ones don't apply to our modern world. But we have new rules of manners now, rules that cover things like express checkout lanes, cell phone use and the like. And somehow we've gotten into this sickening culture where it's OK (more than OK, really, but almost even respected) to take up too much space (psychologically and physically) and ignore the fact that we are living with other people whose lives are just as demanding as ours. I think that sometimes people are afraid to give a little sacrifice, because they're afraid that they'll end up giving up too much as the people around them take as much as they can grab.

Nonetheless, I've always tried to use common courtesy and good manners, and most of the time it's a really good thing. I think everyone should do it. I'm certainly not going to stop.

Now if I can just learn to behave myself in blog comments, then I'll be a gentleman.

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I never really had any sleepovers when I was a kid. But a few of my siblings had friends over once or twice, and they tell a story that I find absolutely hilarious.

Other people, nonChases, civilians, it seems, found it absolutely terrifying to sleep at our house.

The reason was my family members and their abnormal sleep behaviors. My dad snored like a lion. Seriously. When I think about my dad's snoring, and all of the other sounds I've ever heard, the closest sound I can come up with is the lion at the zoo, back before they let the big cats out in the yard to roam, back when they kept the them caged up in tiny cement cells. The lions would pace back and forth, constantly roaring and pawing at the bars. Now they just bask quietly in the sun. It's no fun at all.

But my dad snored like a lion, with big, bellowing snores that shook the very foundation of the house. Meanwhile, my mom talked, yelled, and made other weird noises is her sleep. "What are we going to do about Omaha? She kept yelling one night. "What do you mean, Omaha?" I asked. "Like Mutual of Omaha?" What did I know from Omaha? I was probably six. The only Omaha I knew was the one that sponsored the wildlife show with Marlin Perkins. The one with the lions.

"No, not that! OMAHA!" It was no use.

While all of this was going on, I also had two brothers who both walked in their sleep. I remember waking one night to a huge crash, only to find that one of my brothers had been carrying the bird cage around while sleeping. He either dropped it on the floor or threw it across the room, no one knows. But we all ran downstairs to find parakeets flying all over the place. He just curled up on the couch and finished his respite. This was just another night, as far as the Chase household was concerned.

One night, I shared a bedroom with my other brother. I awoke to him rubbing his hands together just like Mr. Miagi in The Karate Kid. He'd rub them together, and then clap, just like in the movie. He did this over and over again. Finally, I asked him what he was doing, but he just laughed, and it sounded kind of sinister.

As for my sisters, they didn't snore or talk or walk in their sleep. They saw ghosts. All the time. I swear they attracted the effing things. I have only seen one ghost in my life and it wasn't in my parents' house. But my sisters, man, they saw 'em practically once a week. You'd hear my sisters in their room, shrieking and turning on lights and everything, and it wasn't teenage kicks. It was real terror, the kind of terror that made them head straight to church. None of us gave this much creedence, however. We must have figured that if the ghosts weren't coming for us all, it wasn't really a family problem.

Anyway, my point is that except for the ghost-seeing, I think I've inherited all of these sleep disorders. I've been told that I snore quite loudly, although maybe not at the lion-level that my dad achieved (but I'm still young!) and I've also been told that I talk sometimes in my sleep. I used to walk in my sleep a lot, but that stopped when I was about 10 or 11. As far as I know, I haven't sleepwalked since that time.

Oh, and in addition to all of this, I've been told that I also get night terrors. This is when suddenly, for no reason, you begin shrieking in the middle of the night as if you are being attacked or killed. This is rare for me, but it has happened on at least two occasions. Once was when I was about 17 and my parents told me about it. And the other time was when I was about 22 and some guys I was camping with told me about it.

The best night weirdness situation, however, was not my doing at all. One night I awoke to find my bed-partner at the time kneeling next to me, plucking at my chest as if she were removing something. She'd pluck at something I couldn't see, and then fling it across the room. She did this several times before I asked her what she was doing.

"It's OK," she said, "I think they're all off you now."

I was awake immediately. The only thing I could think of was bugs. "What do you mean? What was it?"

"Nothing," she said. "It was just ... magic. It wanted to hurt you but I got rid of it all."

The next morning I asked her about it, and she thought a second, then laughed. Yes, she remembered everything. There were drops of something that looked like mercury falling onto me, and it was magic and it was harmful. She picked it all off and threw it aside. Then I was safe.

That was really, seriously, nice to know.

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Often when I go to the grocery store, I stop and read the bulletin board by the exit. It doesn't matter which grocery store I'm at, because most of the supermarkets around here have a bulletin board near the exit where people can post just about anything they want.

Most of the ads are for cars or snowmobiles. Some are for services such as yard work. Churches post a lot of invitations to meetings or to bake sales. None of these are interesting. The ads that I'm looking for are for small items. Very small, very cheap items.

It always baffles me why, if someone had something cheap and insignificant, they would take the time and effort to try to sell it. "Men's Timex Watch," one ad read, "Good condition. $5 or best offer." For a measly $5 (or best offer), someone took the time to make this ad, complete with a pencil drawing of the watch or at least a watch, and felt willing to field phone calls and invite strangers into their house to view the watch.

OK, so maybe you need that $5 and you can't scrounge up enough other crap to have a proper rummage sale. OK, I can see that. But what I can't see is the guy on the other end. The guy reading the ad and thinking, "Hmm. I don't have anything to do today. Maybe I'll call this stranger and go look at their used watch. The used watch that's priced similarly to the new watches I can buy at Walgreen's."

So you call this stranger and ask them questions about the $5 watch. How old is the watch? What kind of time does it keep? Why do you not want the watch for yourself? That kind of thing. Then, if the answers suit you, you arrange a time when you can travel to this person's house, a time when it's convenient for the both of you. You go over there and look at the watch in person.

"Hmm," you say, noticing a scratch in the watch's plastic face. "I'll give you $3 for it."

"Oh, I can't go that low," the person says. "I spent a half-hour drawing that picture and..."

"OK," you say grudgingly, "four bucks, and that's my final offer."

Is this process worth it for a $4 used watch? Is it worth it for $4?

You can see the same kind of transaction potential in the newspaper classifieds, always under the heading of "Merchandise" which is where they put the stuff that's too, well, unclassifiable. But if you're going to check the want ads for a real score of this nature, you've got to check the Lost and Found section. That's where the magic really happens.

In the Lost and Found, people report found items not for any hope of profit at all. These people have ulterior motives. Most of the Lost and Found is dominated by pets. Someone lost a Siamese cat and they're utterly heartbroken. Someone else found a black lab and they want to get it back where it belongs before it eats their entire couch. These feelings are understandable and warrant a newspaper want ad.

But sometimes the person's motives are just confusing. I recently saw a Lost and Found ad placed by someone who'd found an empty CD jewel box. "Call to identify," it said.

"Um, yeah, I'm calling about the jewel box. The album was Sports by Huey Lewis & the News, 1983. The one with 'I Want a New Drug' and 'The Heart of Rock & Roll' on it. You would have found it last Tuesday on the DTA, the Ramsey Raleigh via West 8th Street bus. Can I pick it up ASAP? I really need that back."

Listen, no jewel box I own is worth the trouble of dealing with someone who has so much time on their hands that they would go through all this to return it. This kind of thing is not done purely out of the kindness of one's heart, or because the thing that has been found is of obvious value. When I read an ad like this, I immediately think, "This is a pervert who wants to get me into his dungeon."

Great. Now I can't get "The Power of Love" out of my head. Another sleepless day for me. Maybe I'll read the want ads.

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Ladies and Gentlemen: At the end of banking hours on this very day, I, Barrett Chase, will for the first time in my adult life, be entirely free of all debts, public and private. While I never have been saddled with the voodoo curse of extreme credit-card debt, I attended a private university for four years and therefore have always had student-loan debt. Ha-ha! No more, suckas! Take that you habit-wearing, knuckle-breaking ... nuns, you! I paid my way through your school without ever using your ... education ... wait, something isn't right here ... um.

Being debt-free puts me well into the minority for people of my age. Henry David Thoreau would say that I am on my way to being ready for a walk. I'd follow up with the rest of it, but shit, I got a lifestyle to maintain.

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People around these parts are always asking the question: "Why do you live in Duluth?" And the answer, most frequently, is "because of the lake." This frustrates me, because although I am a native of Duluth, Lake Superior played absolutely no role in my life until I was pretty much an adult.

I grew up in West Duluth, which is the blue-collar part of Duluth. Unlike the Duluth they sell in the tourist brochures, West Duluth for the most part is not on a hill -- it's flat. And the only evidence of Lake Superior is the incessantly cold wind that whips through the neighborhood all summer long.

To make matters even more extreme, I belong to the fourth generation of a seven-generation West Duluth family. I clearly remember the first time I went downtown. It was not a pleasant experience. There were only two reasons to go downtown when I was a kid: 1) To go to the hospital. 2) To go to the emergency room. Other than that, there was no reason to go any farther east than 21st Avenue West. So we didn't.

Recently, I posted about visiting the old Carnegie Library downtown, which served as Duluth's Public Library from 1902 - 1980. Afterward, I thought I'd share my photos with my family. Since I am so much younger than all of them, I thought I'd bond with them about a Duluth icon and maybe hear some stories about what it was like to visit the library back then. None of them had any idea that this building existed. And it's not as if they weren't big readers -- they were. The problem was that the library (located on First Avenue West) was too far east for them to stomach.

It wasn't until the youngest of my sisters started dating that I wound up seeing Lake Superior. She and her boyfriend, for whatever reason, often took me along on their dates. It was on one of those dates that I first saw Star Wars. It was also on one of those dates that I first saw the Aerial Lift Bridge and swam in Lake Superior.

Had it not been for that time, I might have been 12 or 13 before I saw Lake Superior, the reason for which people move to Duluth, Minnesota despite all the reasons not to. Meanwhile, I was busy absorbing the real culture of the people who grew up in this place. No one lived in West Duluth purely because it was pretty, although it is very pretty indeed. When I grew up in West Duluth, there were only two reasons to live there: 1) Your family had lived there since they arrived on the boat from Sweden, Norway, or Italy, or 2) You did not have loads of money, but you were a decent person who wanted your kids to grow up somewhere respectable.

These are both admirable things. You'll notice that neither of them has anything to do with Lake Superior.

When I grew up some and became independent, I started going to Lake Superior to see what all the fuss was about. I discovered a lot of things. I learned about how and why it looks like glass in the early mornings only to kick up like a demon later on in the day. I found out what it's like to dive into the lake naked in April when the water is 35 degrees Farenheit. I discovered how when you are not feeling so well, you can spend an hour or so by the shore and for whatever reason, you'll end up feeling insane with energy. That first day with my sister and her boyfriend, I learned that the smell of Lake Superior is perhaps the greatest smell in the world.

I love Lake Superior. But Lake Superior is not Duluth. Duluth is Casket Quarry. Duluth is Hawk Ridge. Duluth is Lester River. Duluth is Mont du Lac. Duluth is Shotz Bar. Duluth is Wade Stadium.

Duluth is Superior, Wisconsin.

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About a week ago, I found myself wondering why it was so unseasonably warm outside. Then suddenly, it struck me -- oh, yeah, it's summer! It's not unseasonable at all!

Being almost wholly nocturnal, I'm often shocked when I see people with tans. Must've gone to Mexico for a week, I immediately think. Then I realize that no, there are people who are awake when the sun is out. People who go to the beach. People who grill things in the yard. People whose pasty calves are not finely marbled with blue, like English Stilton.

Here's another thing: With a schedule that floats all over the place, I have the opportunity to drive to work at every time of the day and night. Do you want to know the worst time to be on the freeway? Oh, I know, you're thinking 2am when the bars close, right? Wrong.

The worst time to drive the freeway is at 6:55am. Maniacs. Utter maniacs. Even though drunk drivers are chemically deranged, most of them make every effort to follow the rules and drive safely so that they don't get caught or killed. At 6:55am, every road-raged Ward Cleaver in town is on I-35 laying the hammer down and swerving from lane to lane in an effort to shave 12 seconds off that big 10-minute commute. Grip that wheel a little tighter, Ward. That's it -- honk that horn. You have a right to blow an artery, what with the hectic routine of driving in Duluth, Minnesota.

Let me tell you, I think I'd miss 20 summers if it means never having to become a maniacal 7am headcase. The thing is, there aren't many of these headcases in Duluth, but there's enough.

I've told the story many times, but I once had an existential moment in the Minneapolis skywalk. There I was, trying to walk from point A to point B without getting rained on, and all around me were these twentysomethings in Dockers and Gap office wear, heading to the various food courts for their lunch breaks. I stood for awhile and watched, imagining that I was one of them. It easily could have happened.

The only thing I could think of was that video for "Agenda Suicide" by The Faint, where the office worker's boss keeps yelling at him, and eventually everyone in the office becomes a mastadon or a moose-man or some such monster, and all the guys in suits jump in front of the train.

No thanks. I'll keep working a million hours a week on the night shift for the post office, where everyone is perfectly sane.

Ahem.

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So on my day off, I awoke after about two hours of sleep to my doorbell ringing. Since no one I care about would ever ring my doorbell at that hour, I ignored it and went back to sleep. Ten minutes later it rang again. And again. And again.

I put on some clothes and stormed out to my porch to find a well-dressed woman, along with two little girls. One of the little girls was holding an open Bible. Just as she opened her mouth to read, I started lettin' 'em have it.

Man, I really laid into those people. The two girls immediately turned and ran. The woman just closed her eyes and said, "Ohhhh..."

I think I'm gonna get a shotgun and a dingy wifebeater, just to make these moments even more enjoyable. There's nothing I enjoy more than bullying seven-year-olds holding Bibles.

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So yesterday, I went to the local sandwich shop, where I had the most amazing experience.

There was nobody at the counter. For a long time. There was one guy waiting in front of me and a vague voice from the back room, but no one was there to make sandwiches or to take orders.

After about five minutes, a girl came out and took our orders. When she took my order, she told me my total, which was about $5.38 or something, and I gave her a ten. She took out some bills, paused, then put the bills back into the cash register. I waited. She just stood, staring at the open drawer. Conservatively, I think I could have counted to 30.

Finally, I peered over and noticed that there was only two dollar-bills in the till. She couldn't make change, and, not knowing what to do, was just standing there frozen.

"You can't make change? You don't have enough ones?" I asked. She nodded. "Well, I think I have a five and a one," I said, pulling out some cash. I handed her the money and she slowly accepted it.

More time passed.

"What am I supposed to do?" she asked.

Wow.

"Give me back my ten and make change from the six dollars I just gave you," I said. "That won't require any ones."

She gave me back my ten, deleted the transaction from the register, and re-entered it so that it would calculate the correct change from $6. Then the phone rang, so she went back to answer it. Meanwhile, we waited for her to finish talking, so that she might return and make our sandwiches.

Luckily, she was pretty good at the sandwich-making part of the job, so eventually when she finally got around to making them, it was relatively quick. Still, the whole process took about 20 minutes.

Kids these days.

I cannot add, subtract, multiply or divide fractions. Also, I can't do simple multiplication or division in my head. I'm not saying that I'm particularly dumb about these things. I could learn them if I needed to. But I never learned how to do these things when I was a child, and there's fairly good chance that I will never learn to do them as long as I live.

See, the school wanted me to skip second grade. My parents said no. When it came to most things, my parents said no, which for the most was the wrong answer in my opinion (my childhood would have been much happier if I had been allowed to ride a minibike) but in this case they were right. Skipping grades is stupid, even if you are a genius like me.

*Cough*

The problem was, the school wasn't going to take no for an answer. Instead of having me skip a grade, they took me and three other second graders whose parents wouldn't let them skip a grade either, and stuck us in a third-grade class. We were still second graders, but we were the only second graders in a third-grade class.

This was absolutely brilliant. They asked me if I knew how to multiply, and I said that I did. I knew the concept of multiplication and the theory of what it was, so I explained it to them. But I hadn't memorized any multiplication tables or anything like that. I didn't even know you were supposed to memorize anything. I thought you were supposed to just add everything up. When I saw 11x5 on a sheet of paper, I simply made a column with five elevens and added.

Since I clearly knew how to multiply, we moved on to division. Dividing is fun when you don't know how to multiply. You actually have to invent your own style of mathetmatics under these circumstances. Let me tell you, awkward second-graders do not invent the most efficient mathematical processes. I know this from experience.

Eventually, it came out that I didn't know what the hell I was doing and that I had to learn math all over again. I half-assed my way through that, because I was already so far behind. I never really got much of a grasp on it. When it came time to manipulate fractions, I just couldn't do it. I pretty much opted not to learn that at all.

In seventh grade, when it came time to place us in our various math tracks, I was placed in the highest level. I complained to my guidance counselor that there must have been some mistake, because I can barely do long division. He said that the school system used your vocabulary skills to decide which math class to place you in. Since I had a very advanced vocabulary, I was placed in advanced math. And I thought my logic was skewed. I wanted to make use of my advanced vocabulary right there in his office, but instead I slugged off to advanced math.

Somehow, however, I managed to stay in the advanced math track all the way through school. I was awesome at understanding theory (just as I had been back in second grade) still, my answers were hit-or-miss. I could understand the most complex equations. But I'd botch some easy part along the way. Solving a problem, you had to add, subtract, multiply, and divide about twenty times. The odds were good that I'd get something wrong.

In the one math class I took in college, the professor recognized this immediately. She called me into her office about halfway through the semester. "You clearly understand everything taught in this class," she said. "But you have a problem. Here, for example," she said, pointing to a test I'd taken, "you have done everything in this equation correctly. You've done absolutely everything on this test correctly, yet almost half your answers are wrong. Look at this problem. See where you made the mistake? Nine times four is thirty-six, not thirty-two."

I told her that I'd always had this problem, and I told her the story I've just written here. Then I got a little bit pathetic. "If I don't get at least a B- in this class, I could lose my scholarship," which might have been true, depending on what major I later decided on.

When my report card came, I got a B- which I've always believed to be a bit fishy. I deserved it, though, even if I could barely do long division.

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Just as it was when I attended high school, there are three high schools in Duluth. There are also high schools in the neighboring towns of Superior, Proctor, and Hermantown. Of these six high schools, my alma mater, Robert E. Denfeld High School, is the only one that had its very own hairstyle for girls.

It's not that none of the girls at the other high schools had Denfeld Hair. (Good Lord, they certainly did up in Proctor!) I'm saying that it was at Denfeld that this hairstyle was perfected. Also, the term "Denfeld Hair" was coined not by students of Denfeld, but by all the other kids in the community. Also, at the time that I attended Denfeld, nearly 98% of girls in attendence had some version of Denfeld Hair.

My introduction to Denfeld Hair began not at Denfeld, but at Morgan Park Junior High, when certain girls were secretly apprenticed by older, much-cooler girls who taught them the art. These girls immediately became, and continued to be, the most popular girls in school. The message hit hard and it hit during the most formative years of adolescence: If you are a girl and you want to be popular, then this is the hairstyle that will be required of you.

In junior high, classes began at 7:45am and most students had at least a 30-minute bus ride. If you were a girl and you wanted to be popular, you'd have to get up at at least 5am to prepare your Denfeld Hair.

My high school yearbooks show nothing of the secret rituals, but the junior high yearbooks do. There are frequent snapshots of girls posing proudly with cans of Aquanet, much as later in life they'd pose proudly with bottles of Seagram's Golden Wine Coolers. There are also photos of girls sitting on the floor next to their lockers using curling irons which had been clandestinely plugged into the school's power supply. This was a common site back then. I'm sure that these days such behavior has been outlawed.

How to describe Denfeld Hair? It was often but not always long, and certainly curly. But the essential part was the bangs -- an enormous roto-tiller of bangs complete with cantilevers and flying buttresses, somehow defying gravity and hanging above the girl's beautiful, twinkling eyes. A few girls had straightish hair on the sides and in the back, but many went even further and spread the grandeur all about the entire head. The only other place I can think of where you might find hair like this is at a beauty pageant in the state of Texas.

Some of the worst days of my secondary education occurred on humid, rainy days. Days when Mother Nature deemed that Denfeld Hair would be difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish. On these days, girls would come to school with "flat" hair. They would scream at you for the smallest indescretion. They would cry constantly. It was horrid.

There is one memory of high school I will always carry, and that is of a certain hockey game I attended in my junior year. It was Denfeld against Central. There was this girl from Central there; I remember that she was blonde and was wearing a letter jacket. One by one, we all noticed her. We'd motion to her and say, "Wow." Then, when it was established that she was white hot, we started talking about why she was white hot, because it's not like we could make out her body and it's not like she was any prettier than most girls.

It was the hair. She didn't have Denfeld Hair at all. Her hair was straight, blonde, with very little product. She certainly didn't use hairspray or a curling iron. If you were to touch this hair, it would feel soft. You could run your fingers through it without getting them all snagged up in it. And if she liked you, you could imagine that she'd actually let you touch her hair. Unlike with a Denfeld girl, touching her hair would be an act of affection. It wouldn't be a ceremony for a fat lip.

This (our adoration of this girl) was to me, one of many indications that the world I'd grown up in was changing. I've heard that Denfeld Hair hung on for many years after I graduated, but considering my memory of the incoming freshmen girls, I don't believe that it hung on for all that long.

Very rarely, I still see West Duluth women with Denfeld Hair, just as I still see guys with mullets and people wearing acid wash. But it's rare.

If you're gonna do it, you might as well go all the way. If you're gonna make yourself look like something from Falcon Crest, well, then you better well own it. Make the whole fricken metropolitan area name it after you.

I'm so proud. DHS, muthafukka. DHS.

\m/ UH!

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I've written many times about how although we had a pretty good income while I was growing up, it was tough to make it stretch because there were so many of us in the house. Two parents, six kids, one grandparent, and a foriegn exchange student all living in a three bedroom home -- it sounds like a sitcom.

Anyway, despite a decent cash flow, we were still effectively poor, and we had to make some sacrifices. One of those sacrifices was that we had to drink "mixed" milk. In my experience, some people know what this is, but others have no clue, so I'll explain it.

In the bottom cabinet of our pantry, there sat an enormous box of generic dehydrated milk. Enormous. It was probably the size of a large box of Tide, and it looked very similar when you poured some out. About once a week, my dad would come home with a six pack of actual, delicious milk (six glass returnable half-gallon bottles of milk in a wire carrier with a red wooden handle). We were not allowed to drink this until it had been "mixed" or diluted at a 50/50 ratio with the disgusting reconstituted milk from the pantry.

When you poured the dehydrated milk into a pitcher of water and stirred it, it smelled like baby puke. It was really thin and a bit grainy. Mixing it with the fresh milk from the glass bottles made it somewhat palatable.

I've met several people whose parents also did this when they were kids. But what I wonder is, does anyone still do this these days? I really doubt it.

I think a lot of the minor methods people once used to get by have disappeared. A lot of this has to do with culture as well as the changing world. For example, it used to be a lot cheaper to make your own clothes if you knew how to do such a thing. But now, you can just go to Wal-Mart.

Although we lived right in the city, a lot of people in our neighborhood kept chickens. They also kept ducks, geese, and turkeys ... right in the backyard. There were always fresh eggs (pretty much for free) and now and then someone's dad would grab a hatchet and head out to the chopping block to get dinner. Does this still happen? I haven't seen any livestock in town for almost 20 years.

The thing is, we're one more generation removed from the farm or from the Old Country. When we get strapped for cash, these methods don't even occur to us. We just put a little more on the credit card and keep hoping the future doesn't catch up with us.

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I was in a grocery store in rural Iowa the first time I ever committed an act of pure evil. It was the summer of 1978, and I was 5 years old. My family was on a trip to visit relatives and we stopped at a local market for provisions.

I don't really know how this happened, being as that this was pre-supermarket America in the 1970s, but somehow I got lost. The average grocery store back then was no larger than a video store of today, but somehow, some way, I got separated from my family. Being only 5, this understandably freaked me out. This was my first time on the road, and I suddenly found myself alone in the strange land of Iowa, which was full of cornfields and smelled like pigs. (Which seriously was enough to make you almost vomit. Not quite, but almost.)

Probably I was lost for under one minute, but that was enough for me. I remember my parents looking around a corner and calmly saying "Here he is." No one worried about molestors or anything back then. That didn't start occurring to parents until Phil Donahue started screeching about it on daytime TV during the '80s. Still, being lost for 52 seconds was terrifying for me, and they knew it.

As we continued our shopping, I noticed another boy in the store who was probably a few years older than me. He was begging his mom incessantly for a pack of Fruit Stripe gum. "But mom, I know all about this kind of gum," he said. I knew all about it, too. The rainbow-colored alligator talked about it all the time during Saturday morning cartoons. There was some kind of a deal where you could win a toy or something. I don't remember exactly. What I do remember, however, is formulating an idea, a plan of sheer evil, and carrying that idea out.

The kid's mom kept telling him to quiet down and that he wasn't going to get any Fruit Stripe gum. He pouted, but eventually accepted it. His dreams of chewing gum and winning big had been squashed. They took their place in line and we got in line right behind them.

Now, as I said, I had been shaken up pretty badly by getting lost. And I knew that my parents knew that I'd been shaken up. Therefore, I reasoned, they would be willing to buy me something if I asked nicely for it. So as we stood there in line, I looked at the pouty kid in front of me, and very audibly said, "Can I get some Fruit Stripe gum?" My mom, oblivious to the other kid's pleas, immediately said yes. My dad, who was completely onto me, held back a laugh, but snorted.

Gleeful that I had made a sad kid even sadder, I happily shared my Fruit Stripe gum with my older siblings in the car. I had committed my first act of evil, and I couldn't have been happier. And as we sailed down the road, we all chewed merrily, the scent of rainbow fruit and pig shit dreamily swirling about us.

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Others have said, and I have to concur, that a car is a really strange thing to spend a lot of money on. I have a love/hate relationship with my '95 Escort. I bought this car because it was the best car I could find on short notice that was both reliable enough so that I wouldn't have to put any money or effort into it, and also cheap enough so that I could pay cash for it. The last thing I want is a monthly car payment, which seems like nothing but a monthly waste to me.

The guy who sold this car to me, a friend of the actual owner, chuckled as I handed over the check. "Are you a college student?" he asked. I said no, but my friend who was with me at the time mentioned that she was a college student. Immediately, he assumed that I was buying the car for her. "It's a good car for a college student, I suppose. It'll last you a long time." But his implication was clear -- while it is a good winter starter and is in good condition, it is certainly not a car that a grown man should be driving. Grown men do not drive cars that are so...green.

I've mentioned the novel Mailman by J. Robert Lennon a couple of times on this site. One of the most hilarious (to me) details about this story is that the main character, a secretly insane letter-carrier, drives my exact car, except his is blue. The car is described as "maybe the worst car ever made, this little blue hedgehog half made of plastic, with an engine that whines and pants as it climbs." I know that whine and that pant. Another reason I bought this car was that I thought it would get good gas milage. The milage is passable, but not terrific. The little lawnmower engine has to work too hard on Duluth's hills.

Another thing about this car is that when I bought it, it had nine Green Bay Packers stickers on it -- huge, atrocious helmets flanking either side, logos and more helmets on the rear bumper, decals on every window. I spent several days with a bottle of Goo-B-Gone scraping those bastards off. Everyone I talked to urged me to keep them. "They're part of the personality of the car," they said. I couldn't stand them. Eventually after too much toil, I decided that some of the window decals could stay, because you don't even notice them. I slapped a Harvey Birdman Attorney at Law sticker over one of the helmets on the rear bumper. Then I went to Menard's and purchased a letter H, which I placed over the "P" on the largest sticker, changing it from "Packers" to "Hackers." I meant to scrape the Green Bay logo off of that one and also the "S" at the end, making it say "Hacker," but I never got around to it. Now, everyone either thinks it reads "Ghackers" because of the logo, or else they take it to mean that I'm a big Vikings fan and that I'm saying Green Bay are a bunch of hacks. I only did it to align myself with the nerds instead of the jocks, but whatever. If driving a bright green hedgehog doesn't prove I'm a geek I doubt a sticker will make any difference.

Recently, my work schedule was forcibly switched from the leisurely evening shift to the grueling overnight shift. There is only one benefit to working this shift, and that is the money. This shows most readily in the parking lot, where after midnight, suddenly the ratio of hot cars to bombs tips heavily toward the sweet rides. Generally, I think most cars look the same, but some of the cars I see in the parking lot at night turn my head.

This only makes me like the Hedgehog more. The day I require heated leather seats and a DVD player on the back of the driver's seat is the day I start taking the bus. Still, there's some extra money coming in. I think the Hedgehog needs speakers.

If only they could install them at 4am.

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All of my neighbors are mowing their lawns.

You don't know how great this is. After a week of rain, high winds, and the looming threat of snow, it's balmy, sunny, and the air is filled with the scent of cut grass. That's one of the greatest smells of summer, along with beach air, gasoline, white pines, and charcoal.

So I'm sitting on the front porch drinking coffee, and noticing how the buds have turned to leaves. It's beautiful, but it's a love/hate kind of thing. Soon I'll go to work, and then while the rest of the world floats in summertime bliss, I'll be drudging away under fluorescent lights in a cloud of envelopes, paper dust, and anthrax.

Maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but cut me some slack here.

See, last night was a rare night in that I actually punched out at my scheduled end time -- 5am. This, I am told, almost never happens. Typically, it's overtime for me, which means driving home well after dawn, dodging you people as you race off to do whatever it is you diurnal people do in the godawful morning.

I was saying, though, last night was different. I got home while it was still relatively dark, actually felt tired, and actually went to bed right away. Zonk. I fell asleep and woke up 11 hours later to find that summer had arrived.

Ho hum. I missed the one nice day of the year. Of my life, actually. It'll never be nice outside again.

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On my recent tour of the old Carnegie library, the tour ended with a movie, filmed in 1971, of a typical day at the Duluth Public Library. Here we saw people going through their ordinary day: checking books in and out, cataloging new books, fixing old books, and doing the general tasks involved in running a library.

It was amazing. (I mean, it was amazing even in addition to all the hot library ladies -- and there were many.) Here are all these people doing what they do every day, and it is unfathomably different from anything anyone does today. Punch cards, mimeographs, archaic filing systems, teletype ... it's weird to imagine what life was like before there was 200 microprocessors in every home.

But I do vividly remember life before the Web. It kind of sucked. Still, the things we used in our daily lives back then were facsinating and pretty. Not nearly as fascinating and pretty as a Powerbook, but damn fine nonetheless. Plus, their scarcity these days boosts their aesthetic value.

Anyway, I have this idea to start making mundane movies about mundane things. And while they wouldn't be very interesting at all now, they might be interesting in the future. I remember getting my first library card. It was white, with my name typed on a sticker on the front of it with a typewriter. My card number was raised in the plastic, like on a credit card. When I checked out books, the library tech would place it in a machine just like the old credit-card machines (ker-chunk) that made a copy of the number by pressing the raised numbers against carbon paper. But when the lady behind the counter gave me the card, she also placed a barcode sticker on the back, explaining that soon the library would be switching to a system that used "zebra stripes."

I had that library card until I was about 20, when they took it away from me and made me get a newfangled one.

I need to make movies.

Any leads?

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Not so long ago, I wrote about bad pictures. I won't link to that post, to save you the horror of having to see my Photoshopped picture yet again.

But recently, Starfire took a picture of me that I immediately hated. I won't link to that quite yet, either. I want to talk about it first.

I hated this photo for many reasons. First of all, it's a hideous undershot, meaning it was taken looking directly up into my nostrils. You almost always get the huge faux double-chin with this angle as well, and the double-chin captured in this shot is prodigious. I'm captured mid-sentence, so my face is a bit out of whack. Also I'm wearing my cop sunglasses, which I often am in pictures such as the one in the logo at the top of this page (notice Jerree's pigtail in the reflection -- she took that shot and I immediately liked it). Anyway, when I saw this fricken shot of Starfire's, I hid my eyes. I thought I looked exactly like my uncle when he was about 50. I love my uncle, but please.

Now here's the weird part. The thing is, the more I see it, the more I kind of like it. It doesn't look like me. At least I think (and yes, hope) that it doesn't look like me. It might, and if so, well, OK whatever. I have a perfect face for radio.

Anyway, the point is, the shot is actually growing on me, despite the fact that it's hideous.

The shot.

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I took a guided tour of the Carnegie Building today, which served as Duluth's public library from 1902-1980, I believe. It's a gorgeous building, and it was fun to hear Paul Roen, a great Duluthian, decribe what it was like to work in the building when it was a functioning library. It wasn't always so pretty, it turns out. Mostly it was dim, dingy, falling apart, and cramped. But the current owners have put a lot of work into it and made it into something fantastic.

Paul's tour was funny, insightful and entertaining. It really made me want to tour more Duluth buildings. I often get the urge to go inside some of the cool buildings in Duluth and look around, but it's so much better if you get the real scoop from someone who knows some of the history behind the place.

Aside from these photos, I have some more in a Flickr set. They're worth checking out, as the building is incredible.

Unfortunately, I didn't have my video camera with me, as this would have made a great Minnesota Story.

So, I posted over here about my desire to buy a new camera. My old Canon Powershot A60 has treated me well, but it's only 2.0 megapixels. I always thought I'd never need much more than that, since I just reduce all my photos for the web anyway, but I'm becomming dissatisfied with the image quality.

My initial requirements were that the camera take great pictures, but also fit comfortably into my pocket. I've researched several different cameras. The ones I aesthetically love the most are the Canon Elph series, but reports indicate that the image quality is lacking. In fact, the image quality seems to be kind of bad in all of the subcompact cameras -- sometimes due to the camera itself, but also due to the camera's size. When the camera weighs only a few ounces, it doesn't anchor your hand enough to keep it from shaking. Which makes me think I should just stick to the camera I have.

While I have no desire to own an SLR, it seems that if I want to take better pictures, I will need a larger camera (i.e. one that doesn't fit in my wallet). But the thing is, if I don't carry it around all the time, I won't ever take any pictures.

Don't tell me I'm going to have to start carrying a man-purse.

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In your world, today is probably Wednesday. But in my world, it's Saturday. Postal clerks always refer to the days of the week as if the rest of the world has adjusted to meet their weird schedule. For example, if one of us asks another how they're doing, the other might reply, "Great! It's Friday!" even though it is actually Monday. It doesn't mean that person has gone off their rocker, though that may be the case as well. It just means they have the next two days off.

So here I am, an able-bodied adult on a Wednesday afternoon, sitting in a coffee shop screwing around on the internet, sipping dark roast, and listening to the Mumps on my headphones. In a few minutes, I'll go out and enjoy the springtime weather. Maybe I'll read a book in the park.

This is the upside of my current lifestyle. The downside occurs on Sunday, when I meet someone for brunch, and everyone is being lackadaisical and slow, and I'm all about business, needing that breakfast burrito to get here within the next ten minutes, and goddamn it if it doesn't I'll have to go hungry, because I need to leave in a half-hour. And no, I don't want a mimosa. Don't you people realize it's 8am on a Tuesday, even though it's 1:30pm on a Sunday? Don't you get postal math? Urg.

But that's not today. Today I'm the lackadaisical one. And it's awesome.

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For the better part of a decade, I've been publishing my words and drawings in various small-time periodicals, fish-wraps, and tabloids. It seems that I always have a deadline, and that I'm always working on something. When I'm not working on anything for print, I'm forcing my writing on other people via the Internet, on this site and on PDD.

It occurred to me, however, that as of right now, I'm not drawing anything for anyone. And I'm barely writing anything other than the stuff on this blog. And that inspired a wild idea.

I'm going to start drawing comics for fun.

My comics aren't going to be a "project" nor are they going to be an "exercise." Sure, I've drawn a lot of stuff that was not meant for publication in any way. But it was always with the intention of developing a new character or perfecting a technique. (Inside, I'm quietly giggling at the idea of my ever actually "perfecting a technique." If you've seen my hacky drawing style, you probably are, too.)

For an indefinite period of time, I'm going to draw for no reason other than fun. It's going to be a sort of sketch diary, and everything in it will be really casual and will have no purpose whatsoever. I'm not going to try to better myself, and I'm not going to try to make anything productive come of it. It's going to be purely for enjoyment and that's all.

Maybe the purpose of a particular page will be to tell a short story. Or maybe the purpose will be "Hey, look at this guy." Who knows.

All I know is that I'm in for a whole lot of fun.

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It's hard to explain what all we did in New York and what made it so fun. I regret never meeting up with SB, but that's the only regret.

When you hop on a plane and just fly off on a moment's notice, that is the greatest feeling in the world.

Now I have to go back to work, and a part of me is confused. Huh? I don't understand. I don't work; my life is like this now.

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I've always remembered this dream I had when I was very young, perhaps four or five. I was sitting in the backseat of the car -- a Volkwagon Beetle -- and my dad and sister were in the front seat. We had just returned from the grocery store. My dad and sister got out and started unloading the groceries (from the trunk, which was in front in those old VWs). Meanwhile, I sat there and watched as the back seat caught on fire.

When my sister noticed the fire, she screamed, "the baby!" which pissed me off because I wasn't no fricken baby. But anyway, she hauled me out and my dad somehow put out the fire.

I told this story at the kitchen table the next day with my mom and my aunt, and they nodded knowingly at each other. Barrett's had another dream. Just like last week, when T. Rex ate the dog.

Anyhow, as I said, the whole thing was so vivid that I remembered it my whole life. One day in my late 20s, I somehow got into a conversation about dreams with my parents, and I told that story. I asked my mom if she remembered me talking about that dream, and she didn't. Then my dad said, "Um. Well. Yeah. That actually happened."

Yeah, it turns out that for some reason my dad and sister determined that my mom wouldn't benefit from learning that her toddler almost burned alive in the back seat of a red Beetle while his family calmly unloaded groceries. In fact, maybe I was even younger than four, since for some reason, I wasn't capable of opening the door myself. Or, maybe I wasn't allowed. I don't know. All I remember was sitting there waiting for someone to take me out of the burning car.

I also don't know how the whole thing was covered up, what with the burned seat and all. I think the fire started underneath the seat, where maybe the battery was located on the old Bugs, and it was mainly smoldering, not actively burning.

So, yeah, since I lived long enough to move out of the house, my dad finally admitted the whole deal. Now to get him to admit that he once built a canoe in the basement, only to discover that it was too big to get out. That he still firmly denies.

I don't blame him.

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Oh, New York City. I'll tell you about it sometime. But for now, I have to do something I haven't done in days.

Sleeeeep.

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Dude, I'm totally gonna be in New York City for the next few days with my good friend Maria. And we're staying in a hotel known for its fine selection of mice and cockroaches. Hmm. At least my companion loves animals.

I'll be bringing my compact, tiny, aluminum-cased electronic communication devices, so you'll probably see some NYC posts in the coming days. Or not, if we're having too much fun.

Download: New York Theme (Hey, You Can Have That Heartattack Outside, Buddy) by Tom Waits

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In my early teenage years, after all of my siblings had left the house, I remember methodically going through all of their records looking for something to like. I was apparently bored with my tapes and thought I needed some schooling in music. There wasn't much; or rather there was quite a bit, but not much was good. The first three albums from The Cars stood out, as well as Blondie's Autoamerican, but I'd been listening to those albums fairly consistently ever since they entered our house. My eldest sister had some choice albums, but she took them with her when she moved out. I was left with the dregs.

My parents played the hell out of an album of duets by Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline, which I certainly never complained about, but couldn't really bring myself to listen to by my own volition. Mainly, there were a lot of albums by Dolly Parton, whom I wouldn't learn to appreciate until my late 20s, and a lot of give-away crap like brass bands doing the Beatles, and shit like that.

I longed for my sister's Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath albums, which as I said, she took with her, and which I believe she threw out when she became a Jehovah's Witness. This is almost, but not quite as unforgivable as when she threw out an original copy of Sing Along with Jeno. But I've written about that before and I can't think about it too long without risking an aneurism.

Anyway, I remember finding the album 2112 by Rush and thinking that it should be something that I should like. After all, it was almost like devil music. Plus, the lead singer, Geddy Lee, did vocals on "Take Off" by the MacKenzie Brothers. How bad could it be?

Bad. Really, really fucken bad.

Because I was a geek, a poor geek who couldn't afford to buy good music at the time, I listened to that album over and over trying to get it and trying to like it. I got it, but man, it sucked. A concept album about rock 'n' roll saving the world. How original. If you've read this site, you know how I feel about The Who and Pink Floyd. Fuck, Kilroy Was Here by Styx beats the hell out of 2112.

Plus, why 2112? We all know the world's going to end in 2012.

The point is, Rush sucks.

Exept in this context.

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For some dumb reason, I don't have photos of the Mongolian Chicken, or the Spring Rolls, or the Pho ... or the Vietnamese coffee -- oh, my god the Vietnamese coffee. But I do have photos of some of the things that followed. The best thing about being sick is getting well, and then realizing how much you've missed, and then enjoying everything again.

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Barrettchase.com is busy coughing up a lung. We will return tomorrow with the quality programming you've come to know and love.

In the meantime, we'd like to point out thatKamala has a website. (Be sure to crank up your speakers nice and loud, because pro-wrestling's "Ugandan Headhunter" sings MIDI-based love songs.)

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Every now and then, I make a Startling Confession™ on this site, and I'm going to make one now. Brace yourselves.

I have lived my entire life in Northern Minnesota, and I have never once eaten Tater Tot hotdish.

There, I said it. Now, don't get me wrong, I've eaten plenty of hotdishes. Like most of my peers, I was pretty much raised on them. In West Duluth, the ubiquitous Chinese hotdish was all the rage, but we also routinely had spaghetti hotdish, as well as more generic egg-noodle-based hotdishes. My favorites were the ones that contained chicken and peas.

For those non-Midwesterners out there, a hotdish is a one-pot meal which contains meat, vegetables, and starch, held together by a sauce made from Campbell's cream soup, and baked in a casserole dish or similar vessel. Often, there is also a crunchy element sprinkled on top such as potato chips or french fried onions. My mom would usually top off her hotdishes with a handful of Wheaties.

Foodie snobs are probably recoiling in horror at this point, to which I say you need to read this. Then go buy some pizza rolls.

As I've previously mentioned on this site, in my late teens I became a vegetarian and remained one for 11 years. Which means that while I was learning to cook, I never made hotdishes or meatloaf or anything of that nature. And while I still love vegetarian food, I'm often suddenly struck by the awesome realization that I could make something traditional. Something delicious. Hot Effing Dish.

Anyway, all of my sources indicate that Tater Tot hotdish is the grandaddy of all hotdishes, and I'm ashamed I've never tried it. I'm feeling under the weather today, it's gross outside and I don't want to leave the house.

Hotdish night it is.

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This is a story my mom told me on my most recent visit to her house. Let me just say, I was pretty shocked, even though she related it in the most mundane way, as if she was talking about a new recipe for egg salad. There I was half listening, paying more attention to the Dawson-era Family Feud on the Game Show Network to tell you the truth, when suddenly the point of her story hit me.

"Wha? Hey...wait, WAIT. BACK UP."

There is luridness in my genes, folks. Anyway the story goes like this.

A long time ago, I'd guess in the late 1920s, my grandpa's brother got a girl pregnant. The trouble was, he was married to someone else at the time. And while divorces may grow on trees these days, back then they were a little more difficult to arrange.

Now, getting pregnant out of wedlock was a scandalous thing back then. But it happened and people understood that. However, even more scandalous -- downright immoral and unforgivable in fact -- was giving birth out of wedlock. That could not be tolerated. If you got knocked up, you had to get married. No questions.

My grandpa's brother really wanted to get a divorce and marry the new girl, who he preferred to his wife anyway. But time kept passing. Birth was imminent. There was only one solution.

My grandpa, who was single at the time, stepped in and married the girl for him.

"Wha? Hey...wait, WAIT. BACK UP."

Think about that situation for a moment. Imagine being married to your brother's mistress, who is pregnant with his child. Meanwhile, your brother is married to someone else, but wants to be married to your wife.

Eventually, the brother got his divorce. Here's where things really get interesting. My grandpa and the girl then divorced each other so that the true lovebirds could finally be together.

My family tree is full of stuff like this. My dad's two brothers, at one time, were married to a mother and daughter. My eldest sisters married two brothers. Likewise, my other sister and my brother wound up with a brother and sister as mates.

No wonder I'm single. Sheesh.

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Well, I've officially become a Hillsider. OK, sure, I moved to the Hillside last April, but lately I've caught myself thinking in Hillsider terms -- namely, that 40th Avenue West is a really, really long way from Downtown Duluth. (It's ten minutes, people. And by "people" I mean also myself.)

Anyway, I've visited West Duluth two or three times in the past week to visit family and friends, and I've realized several things I miss about my old neighborhood. West Duluth definitely has the Hillside beat on the following points.

1. Everything is cheaper. Do you know who primarily lives in West Duluth? Old people. Do you know what old people care about? That additional $0.13 on a pound of tomatoes. Do you know what old people have? A lot of free time. You do the math.

2. People are nicer. Sure the Hillside can be friendly at times. But when you go to a restaurant or a gas station in West Duluth, the people who work there are often genuinely happy. Likewise, the people you meet on the street are genuinely happy. This is refreshing. Plus, there are very few knifings.

3. Driving and parking are easier. Most people in West Duluth have off-street parking, which means the streets actually get plowed thoroughly. When people do park on the street, they tend to park legally. The terrain is flat. It's awesome.

4. The bars are more fun. As a person who hung out at the NorShor every other night while it was in its peak, I'm surprised at myself for saying this. But let's face it: the North Pole is better than 100 Lucés. You can get any drink in the world there, and they are all cheap. Lucé doesn't even sell a 34-ounce mug of beer, and if they did, it wouldn't be $3, it would be $8. You can see Hairball at Charlie's Club if that's your thing, or charming quiet acts at Beaner's if that's your thing. Don't even get me started on the VFW. Of course, the bars aren't nearly as cool as those in Superior, but that's irrelevant.

5. The cars are better. I see four kinds of cars in my current neighborhood: shitty compacts, sissy hybrids, minivans, and SUVs. In West Duluth, I see Cadillacs, Lincoln Continentals, and kickass restored GTOs, El Caminos, and Mustangs.

The choice is clear.

(Regarding yesterday)

To my quadriceps: Oh, stop your complaining. All we did was climb a stupid cliff. You're such babies. Why can't you be more like the hamstrings?

To the US Steel company: You're going to need to put up a much bigger gate than that if you want me to stay off your land.

To the Coffee Artists: Your art opening embodied everything I love and respect about art -- free wine.

To Paul Lundgren: Not only did you say THAT, but you said it REALLY LOUD. It was awesome.

To the girl who gave me her number without my asking: Things like this make me suspicious. This means you 1) Liked me, 2) Admitted it to yourself, and 3) Admited it to me. Where's the ten levels of defensive nervousness and juvenile game-playing? Didn't we skip a step here?

To that girl's friends: You are so lame.

To my camera: C'mon, now. I know for a fact that my last public act of the evening was to drunkenly photograph my reflection in that shiny chrome thing. I was really looking forward to seeing that this morning. Where is it? Huh? Because I couldn't possibly have made a mistake in that condition.

To the pizza guy: You're gonna need to pound on Starfire's door a lot harder than that at 2am if I'm gonna hear it all the way over here.

Re-reading that last post, I was reminded of this game I made up when I was a kid. It was called "Really Really," and it went a little something like this.

I'd hold my head in my hands, and think about how I was really, really inside my body. I was really in there. Really. I could look in a mirror or at a picture of myself, but I could never really look at myself. Not really. All these other people around me were likewise really inside their bodies, too, and I could never be them.

Even more mind-blowing was that life was happening "Right Now." Think about it; and I don't mean any of this in the abstract sense, I mean think about it literally. Freaky.

The whole thing was fun and scary and dizzying. Before long, I didn't need to think out the details anymore. All I had to do was sit somewhere quiet and repeat the words "Really Really Really Really" and/or "Right Now Right Now Right Now" over and over. If I had a few minutes before Seseme Street, maybe I'd rip off a quick game of Really Really, and then sit down for some Oscar the Grouch action.

I was probably 6 years old at the time. The thing is, if I had a kid who was doing junk like this, I think I'd be seriously worried. But to me, it was just fun.

Really Really. I don't think I've ever told anyone about that.

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OK, so, I belong to this club called Mix Tape Madness. It works like this: 1) We all pick a month. 2) When our month arrives, we make a mix and mail it to all the other members. 3) The rest of the year, we kick back and get tons of free stuff in the mail.

So last month was my month to mix it up. All the previous mixes were really clever and entertaining and full of great music. But none of them were hot. I had a pretty hot MP3 playlist going for *ahem* certain reasons, so I thought I'd make that into my mix. A sex mix. Because someone has to, obviously.

But the mix isn't what I want to talk about. Not exactly. I specifically want to talk about the second song on the mix, "Giving Up the Fight" by Eleni Mandell.

"Giving Up the Fight" is, to me at least, the sexiest song of all time. The song is about putting away childish things. It's about performing the hideous, sinful, shameful act of becoming an effing adult.

One weird thing about me is that I almost never, ever get nervous around women, no matter how attractive they are. The one time I met Eleni Mandell, I fucken almost fainted. And by most standards, she's not even very good-looking at all. Still, if she asked if she could borrow my wallet, I would just give it to her. And then I would drool all over myself. And probably run away.

Anyway, back to the point. I've been thinking a lot lately about adulthood. In the past six weeks, at least two visitors to my home have commented on how "grown-up" it is. (And both are older than me.) People talk about how I have a grown-up job, but still, they ask me what I want to be when I grow up. I am 33. Do you know what I want to do? I want to make a great wage working for the government while doing a lot of cool shit on the side -- that's what I want to do.

I am an adult. And this is who I am. It's the result of what I've been working on for my whole life.

Nothing is more liberating than this realization. What you are doing right now? That is what you are. You have nothing to prove to anyone. You don't have to move to Israel or learn Portugese to make yourself admirable. You want to know what admirable is? Raising a child, that's what. Getting up in the morning and going to work. Or just doing whatever it is that you want to do, but dare not tell anyone for fear of being uncool. Despite what they teach you on TV, everything mundane is admirable.

And it's really fricken hot. I'm announcing it now -- boring is the new sexy.

In the "About" section of this site I wrote "Depth is better than breadth." Think about it. Which is harder? Living in question, constantly reinventing yourself, and saying you are a work in progress? Or saying, "This is who I am and this is what I stand for, feel free to judge me"?

Yes.

"Giving Up the Fight"

The song is sexy, it's true, but accomplishing it is the sexiest thing there is.

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I've written before about my phobia of having people standing or sitting behind me. Actually, it's not a phobia, because I don't feel any fear. I just feel a skin-crawling sense of disgust and a need to get out of the situation as quickly as possible. You call it psychosis, I call it Feng Shui.

Anyhow, since I am hyper-sensitive to my surroundings in this way, it amazes and irritates me when people are oblivious to their surroundings. I run into these people all the time -- sometimes literally, because these are the people who make an artform out of getting in the way. They take up the whole aisle in the grocery store, with their cart jutting out diagonally while they read the ingredients of a jar of Ragu. You say, "Excuse me" three times before they realize you're there, or else you just move their cart and they never even notice. This shocks me to no end. How can you live like this? You are a walking target.

I'm always reminded of that scene from Naked Lunch in the Meat Cafe, with the "reptiles," hideous beings who are addicted to a fluid that slows their metabolism down to nil: "The sailor spotted his reptile. He drifted over and ordered a green syrup. The reptile had a little round disk mouth of brown gristle. Expressionless green eyes almost covered by a thin membrane of eyelid. The sailor waited an hour before the creature picked up his presence."

And you know what? This isn't just a matter of me being psychotic. When you are in public, you need to be aware that you are sharing space. Sharing. It's a matter of common courtesy.

But mostly it's a matter of me being psychotic.

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