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.

Kansas farm children respond to a nuclear missile being launched from a silo on their property.

Back in 1983, ABC aired a TV movie called The Day After, which detailed the lead-up to and the aftermath of a nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union. The school I attended (as well as many others across the country) sent a note home to parents warning them that they might not want to allow their children to watch the movie. My family didn't watch The Day After, not because it might be upsetting to my tender sensibilities, but probably because there was something better on another channel -- most likely The Exorcist was on Showtime that night.

So I never watched The Day After. The next day at school, it seemed that most of the kids who watched it were pretty freaked out. Some put on a brave face, shrugging and saying, "It was nothin'." I imagine that these kids got bored during the first hour, which consists entirely of character development, and either fell asleep or snuck off to poke through their parents' closets. Because The Day After is kinda disturbing.

The movie takes place in and around Lawrence, Kansas. All kinds of people -- Jason Robards playing a surgeon, Holling from Northern Exposure, Steve Guttenberg portraying a college kid, some black guy in the Air Force, John Lithgow -- are concerned about the fact that the USSR has stopped allowing people in and out of West Berlin (remember West Berlin?). For the next hour, this concern is played against the backdrop of typical life in Kansas. Holling's daughter is screwing some boy, and Holling hates that, but they're getting married so how can he really complain. Jason Robards' daughter, meanwhile, is moving off to Boston and he's gonna miss her. Robards' wife is reminiscing about the time they did it with the Cuban Missle Crisis on the TV in the background. You get the idea: You come to like a bunch of people, and then they get nuked.

That's where it gets crazy, because there's all this 28 Days Later-style chaos, with heavy decisions such as: Do you let Steve Guttenberg into your basement even though he has his own food or do you just blast him with your shotgun because this is World War III? That kind of thing. Meanwhile, cows and pigs and dogs and daughter's boyfriends are dead all over the place and people are dropping teeth and hair behind them everywhere they go. Yeah, it's like a zombie movie, except that back in 1983, we as kids had our teachers and principals and parents and the TV itself telling us every day that this was all real and would probably happen in our lifetime.

Sooner rather than later.

Some facts about The Day After [via IMDB and Wikipedia]

- After the movie's broadcast, ABC aired a debate between William F. Buckley and Carl Sagan about nuclear proliferation. Sagan compared the arms race to "two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline; one with three matches, the other with five."

- Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary that the film "left me greatly depressed." After Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Mikhail Gorbachev, he sent the director, Nicholas Meyer, a telegram that said, "Don't think your movie didn't have any part of this, because it did."

- My favorite quote from the movie is actually a quote from Albert Einstein: "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

(to P.A.L.)

Something has been weighing on my conscience lately. I'm not one to confess things online, but, well, this is something that I just can't bring myself to confess to you in person. I suppose that I could e-mail you a confession or even confess to you on the phone, but actually, I want witnesses for this. This is an untruth that I have been bearing for far too long.

I want you to think back to the winter of 1996. We went to some concert at the Amazing Grace together. I don't recall who was playing. Maybe it was an open-mic night or maybe some folk act. It doesn't matter. What matters is that we were sitting at a table near the wall when unbeknownst to you, I let the most horrendous fart ever known to humankind.

I say "unbeknownst" because you didn't know that it was me who did it. Now I'm thinking that it wasn't a folk act, because no acoustic guitar could have ever drowned out that sound. What I remember clearly is this: the valve of my colon opening as far as it would go, and then just staying that way for what seemed like a full minute as rancid air rushed from my body and curled through the cafe. At first, no one ... not even you ... had any idea what was going on. But I was in shock. Please remember that. I was surprised and mortified by just the feeling of it. And now when I look back, I think that was why I pretended that it wasn't me who let it.

I remember your face wrinkling as my intestinal gas reached your nostrils. You looked at me as if to say, "Eww." And then suddenly, when the full force of it hit you, your face exploded in horror. I pulled my shirt over my nose and mouth and buried my face in my hands. You tried to use your jacket as a filter. As I looked around, pretending to try and figure out who did it (as if I didn't know!) I noticed that everyone in the vicinity was doing the same.

Wisely, we got up and moved away from the epicenter, and headed to the other side of the room. It wasn't much better over there. We stood and watched the show for awhile until we got bored and decided to leave. Once outside, we didn't speak about it. I suppose I never knew whether or not you suspected me, but I truly believed that you thought it was someone else. I let you keep believing that, as I said, because I was awestruck by the power and intensity of my own stench, the likes of which I have never smelled since.

You know me very well. Well enough to know that I am not the kind of person who either brags about, or refuses to own up to, a colossal fart. And yet here I am, with my thumb firmly pressed against my forehead, half ashamed, half proud, undeniably asserting: "It was me, baby."

P.S. I had eggplant parmesan for dinner that night. That's probably what did it.

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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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.

A few weeks later in another class, Larry offhandedly mentioned that his brother played in a country & western band, and that sometimes he would sit in and play with them during gigs. Gigs in bars. You'd think this would have immediately given him some damn fine street cred, but I suspect that those words "country & western" spoiled everything. Among that crowd, liking country & western was like eating broccoli ice cream or biting the bubbles in the bathtub. Clearly something that only mental defectives could enjoy.

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 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'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.

In sixth grade, they herded us all into the auditorium so that we could hear a band concert performed by our future junior high-school band, the Morgan Park Wildcats. The whole purpose of the concert was so that we could see what band was all about, and start thinking about what instrument we might want to play.

Like everyone else, of course, I wanted to play drums or percussion, but those instruments were limited to kids who already knew how to play the piano. Barring percussion, the only instrument I could possibly tolerate was the saxophone. All the saxophone positions, however, were already taken by eighth graders.

Since I couldn't bring myself to play any of the stupid instruments in band, and I had no desire to join choir, and I didn't have the foresight to join orchestra in sixth grade when you were supposed to, I had only one choice left.

Music Appreciation.

The class, in its description, was actually quite cool. Our task was to appreciate music. We would listen to all forms of music, and that was pretty much all we had to do. Listening to music: I could handle that.

The problem was, however, that I was one of three, maybe four kids in the class who did not have some sort of behavioral problem. My first day in class made it clear that this was a class for kids who either could not handle "normal" music classes to begin with, or had been kicked out of "normal" classes on the first day. The experience was, in a word, awesome.

I sat in the front row, along with everyone else who wouldn't end up in prison before their 25th birthday. Meanwhile, the teacher vascillated between offering us rewards and meting out stiff punishments. It was easy to be a star pupil when you're surrounded by people who are struggling to pass a class where the average assignment is to listen to Bruce Springsteen.

"Springsteen is GAAAAAAAY." That was the consensus among the class. I remember the teacher trying to deal with that statement.

"What kind of gay do you mean? Because gay can mean several different things..." she said.

"He SUCKS! He's LAAAAME," the class said.

"OK," the teacher said. "That's your opinion. But he's not homosexual."

"If you say so," someone murmured.

Meanwhile, those of us so-called "A" students in the front row who actually did not belong in the class but were just slumming it, we were allowed to try and teach each other how to play the guitar. Sometimes we did this in the actual classroom, but usually we did this in an adjacent practice room. On these occasions, the classroom outside melted into complete chaos.

I think that in Music Appreciation was the only time I ever saw a teacher cry while I was in junior high school. It certainly was the only time I ever saw a teacher smash an acoustic guitar, Pete Townsend-style, in sheer rage.

But when I think about it, I probably learned more in Music Appreciation than I learned in any other class in junior high.

Somebody had to do the learning.

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See, if you're in the bathtub, and if you're really careful, you can get your washcloth to float on the surface of the water. All you have to do is take it by its edges and sort of drag it slowly on the surface. Then, let go and it will stay there, floating.

That's what I figured out when I was about five. And so I used to sit in the bathtub, floating my washcloth, and thinking my weird little thoughts: I wonder how they tame the raccoons on Grizzly Adams? They probably dress up in raccoon costumes, so that the racoons are fooled into thinking they aren't humans. You know, that sort of thing.

One day I was in the bathtub when my sister knocked on the door, saying she needed her hairbrush or something lame like that. This ticked me off. Coming from a large family, it was almost never possible to have any privacy, even in the bathroom. Rolling my eyes, I found the obvious solution.

I floated the washcloth so that it perfectly obscured my weiner. Then I leaned back in the tub with my hands behind my head and said, "Come in."

My sister opened the door, looked at me, grabbed her hairbrush and left. Outside the door, I heard the following conversation:

Sister: "So I go in there and ..."
Female Cousin: "I saw!"

It served them right.

When I was about 11, some distant relatives were visiting and the house was even more overrun than usual. At one point, I was in the bathroom doing my business, when some woman opened the door (without knocking) shrieked and slammed it closed again. She apologized and went back downstairs.

For some reason, I developed a crystal clear image in my mind of what would happen when she went back down and told everyone what happened. Someone would grab her and frantically ask, "Did you see his butt? Did you see his weiner?"

Obviously, that's what happened. Because distant relatives in their 50s want to know -- desperately, according to my 11-year-old mind -- all about my butt and weiner.

A few years ago when I moved into the apartment downstairs of where I live now, my landlords gave me a tour of the house, showing me all the features. "This is cool," Nick said, pointing to a sort-of half-blind on the bathroom window. "It lets in a lot of light at the top, but no one can see your weiner."

And really, that's all I ask for. A roof over my head, three squares a day, and complete control over who can and cannot see my butt and weiner.

Life is simple, after all.

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I almost have a theatre minor. I never really planned on pursuing it in college, but just before I was about to graduate, the chair of the theatre department informed me that I was probably eligable. So we counted up my credits and I was one credit short of a minor. If I wanted to, I could have paid the college $250 for an additional credit* so that I could officially say that I had a minor. I chose to keep my money and use it to go to the Grand Canyon instead.

In plays, I got a lot of positive reviews and a lot of negative reviews. When the local paper reviewed the first college play I was in, A Doll's House, I got the best review out of anyone in the cast -- "barely worth listening to." I think the best review I ever received from the newspaper in my entire college career was "able." Yes, he is technically capable of acting. But that's about it.

The best critique of my work I ever receieved from anyone, however, came from another student. He was very intelligent, and very sincere. And here is what he said to me:

"You're a really, really good actor. You could be the next John Ritter."

I laughed, of course. But then I realized that he was completely serious. "John Ritter is incredibly talented," he said, and he meant it.

Ever since he said that, I've kind of kept it in my head, and whenever I see reruns of Three's Company on TV Land, I try to imagine myself falling over that living room couch. Sometimes I see it, sometimes I don't.

When I told Christa the story about the John Ritter statement, she didn't even laugh. "You could be the next John Ritter," she said. "You're a great physical comedian."

I suppose that if this is my unrealized potential, that I'm at peace with it. Most people spend their lives thinking about what they could have been, what might have happened if they'd gone for the gold and struck it big. If what I could have been was Jack Freaking Tripper, then I'm perfectly OK with living the normal-life alternative.

* I realize I'm dating myself when I admit that a credit cost only $250 when I went to college.

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Most of the time, I'm all for the advancement of technology. The majority of the time, each new invention is a tremendous improvement over its predecessor. The computer beats out the typewriter, which in turn beats out the pen. The DVD is arguably better than the VHS tape, but TiVo trounces both of them. The digital camera overshadows the film camera, hands down.

Still, I can't help but feel nostalgic for one rapidly disappearing piece of technology: the pay phone.

The pay phone is one of those things that, in this day and age, is hard to wrap your head around. Before the cell phone, you had to be "home" to receive a call. And as soon as you left your property, you'd become unreachable to anyone who couldn't actually see you. But here and there around town were oases where for a coin or two, you could jack back into the telecommunications grid.

This idea, to me, is kind of romantic. In a way, the pay phone is a lot like the vinyl record in that its accidental aesthetics counterbalance its old-fashioned clunkiness.

One of my all-time favorite pay phones was located in the lobby of my junior high school. There are few places that are more oppressive than a junior high, and that phone was the one link to the outside world where things were free and normal. Usually, people would use it to call kids who were home sick (a la Ferris Beuller's Day Off) and since I was sick more often than anyone else, I'd get calls from school all the time. I always wanted to be able to call in to that phone, and I even wrote down the number so that I could try it, but it didn't work. That didn't keep me from trying it every time I was absent.

Another great phone was in the campground at Jay Cooke State Park. That one was fun to use because it was on a short little pole and felt like it was in the middle of the woods. Calling people from the woods! What a crazy idea! We used this one a lot as teens when we were "driving around." We'd say, "Let's stop at the Best Phone Ever and call Bob." It was something to do.

In college, there were two public phones in the building where most of my classes were: a pay phone and a free phone. Even though it cost 25 cents, I often chose to use the pay phone because it was more private and because it was inside of a really cool wooden phone booth. You could talk for hours there and no one would interrupt you. The free phone was kind of awesome, too because it was inside a cylindrical phone booth that had a sliding door. Once, a woman who annoyed the hell out of me used that phone, but forgot how the door worked once she was inside. The panicked look on her face as she pounded on the door is still etched in my brain, and still makes me smile. Eventually, someone let her out. Not me.

When I got my first job with the USPS, I worked in a newly built facility that had nine pay phones all along one wall of the break room. It wasn't unusual for all the phones to be in use, and there were signs saying to limit your calls to 5 minutes if there were people waiting. Often the phones were out of order because the coin boxes were full. A few short years later, no one ever used the phones. A few years after that, the facility closed due to technological advances.

For a while, I had a working pay phone inside my apartment. But alas, I no longer have a land line. I still have the phone, though, and I use it for a bank.

I've never used the pay phone outside of Last Chance Liquor on Fourth Street, but I drive by it all the time and it's still frequently in use. There's a certain attitude you have to have when you use that phone. First off, you need to have a scowl on your face. Second, you need to constantly scan the traffic on Fourth Street, presumably to make sure no one is watching you. Pacing and smoking cigarettes is key. Look paranoid, jittery, and guilty, and you'll do fine.

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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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Sometime in the weeks leading up to the 1980 presidential election, I overheard a conversation in which someone asked my dad who he was voting for. My dad shrugged his shoulders. "The Asshole," he said. The other guy agreed that, yeah, you didn't have much choice in this election. The Asshole was the only way to go.

When election day rolled around, my teacher decided to illustrate the democratic process by letting us vote in class. When I received my ballot, I thought about the conversation I'd overheard. Of the candidates on the ballot, which one was "The Asshole"? There were always political discussions going on in our house. I wanted to go home and proudly report that not only did I get to vote in class, but I also voted for the Asshole, as any good American undoubtedly would.

Jimmy Carter, the incumbent, didn't seem like much of an Asshole to me. He had a nice smile, and a soft voice, a lot like Mister Rogers. He seemed like a kind and benevolent man. There was no way that he could be the Asshole I was looking for.

I didn't know much about Ronald Reagan. I knew he was an actor, but I'd never seen any of his movies. He did have somewhat of an assholic look about him. The thing was, I hadn't heard his name much around the house. It seemed that if he truly was the Asshole that my dad wanted to run the free world, that there would have been more talk about him in the Chase residence. Still, he could be the Asshole. I wasn't sure.

John Anderson was running as an Independent. I thought this was funny, because there was a guy named John Anderson who lived across the alley from us. When he and his wife went on vacation, I'd get a dollar for letting out their dog and filling his food dish. But I understood that that was just a name, and despite its similarity to the name of someone I liked, that didn't mean he wasn't an Asshole. I also understood however -- even at that young age -- that a third-party candidate has no chance of winning. I concluded that even though John Anderson might be an asshole, he wasn't the Asshole.

I voted for Ronald Reagan.

That night when the results were rolling in, and Reagan was winning every state in the union except for Minnesota, my dad's pure, raging disgust made it obvious that Ronald Reagan was not the correct choice. It turned out that Jimmy Carter was the Asshole I should have voted for. Politics was a lot more difficult to understand than I'd imagined.I felt like I'd let both my family and my country down.

A few years later, the stupidity of my choice became real to me. Ronald Reagan and his cronies loved to deregulate things, and one of the things they deregulated was children's television. Suddenly, all my favorite cartoons like Superfriends were replaced by cartoons that were literally just ads for toys. There was one cartoon called Rubik, the Amazing Cube. I stopped watching cartoons, not because I was too old to enjoy them, but because none of them were good anymore. Like I'm going to watch a fricken Rubik's Cube with a face on it run around and doing magic.

Carter might have been an Asshole. But at least he never messed with cartoons. That's just evil.

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My brother loved Halloween. Not for the usual reasons, though. The thing he loved most was handing out candy to trick-or-treaters and scaring the bejeezus out of them. He was pretty good at it.

I remember one costume in particular, and to this day it stands out as one of the most terrifying costumes I've ever seen. Of course I was about six when I saw it, so take that into consideration.

What my brother did was this: For months before October 31, he saved up all the dryer lint he could. He had whole grocery bags full of the stuff. And when the magic day rolled around, he proceeded to glue it to an old raincoat. He also glued it to gloves and to a rain hat as well. Lastly, he glued it to a ski mask.

For eyes, he cut out two cups from a styrofoam egg carton. He drew pupils on them, I believe with red marker. These he glued to the rain hat, above the slits where his own eyes would be.

I'm not sure what he did with his legs, but on his feet he wore black snowmobile boots with all kinds of straps and buckles on him. When he put the whole thing on, he looked like Grover's evil twin. A giant, grotesque mascot animal ready to pull your soul out right through your face. Everything Jim Henson did to stop kids from being afraid of monsters, my brother erased every time he opened the door to hand out a furry fistful of candy.

I remember him stepping out of the basement wearing his completed ensemble, proudly showing it off. I remember everyone in the family laughing. And I remember walking out of the yard to go trick-or-treating, almost being bowled over by terrified kids bolting from my house, screaming as if they were being butchered.

I almost would like to recreate that costume some year, just to see what it looks like again. But, unlike my brother, I know how flammable dryer lint is. That stuff is like cottonballs soaked in napalm.

Luckily, he didn't find that out the hard way.

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In the early 1980s I somehow fooled everyone.

In elementary school at the end of every school year, they'd pool us all together and talk to us about citizenship: what the word "citizen" means, what a citizen does, and what a citizen believes. They'd give us a week to think about it, and at the end of the week, we were all supposed to vote for who we thought was most deserving citizen in our grade.

The first year that I won, I thought it was pretty cool. At the end-of-year assembly in the auditorium, with the whole school and people's parents watching, they called me up on the stage (which, years later, would become my apartment) and presented me with the certificate above.

I was pretty stoked.

The next year, when the time came around to vote for Good Citizen again, I knew deep down that I was going to win again. Cockiness really isn't a mark of a good citizen. But I kept my hubris inside my own head.

A few days later, the school closed forever, and the next year I went to a new school where citizenship wasn't rewarded, which was good for me and my hubris because I kind of stopped being a good citizen.

But I wonder. If good citizenship had been rewarded at MacArthur/West Elementary, would my life be different today?

I guess I'll never know.

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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 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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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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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 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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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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I spent the summer of my 18th year driving around in circles, staying up all night, and drinking buttloads of Jolt Cola. I think I saw the sunrise more that summer than any other in my life, including last summer, when I got off of work at 6am every day. I played a lot of games of Risk (to completion) and spent a lot of time on the beach and on Skyline Drive.

One night up on Skyline, a couple guys and I came across this dude named Brad, a 30ish grimy little fucker who was sitting on the hood of his car getting totally shitfaced. Somehow we struck up a conversation, and when he asked us our names, we all spontaneously decided to alter our identities for the funny.

My name was Keith Spade, and I and my companions were not from silly old Duluth, oh no. We were from California. And we were professional skateboarders.

Brad, it turned out, was drunk enough and/or stupid enough not to doubt this story at all. In fact, he was downright excited about it. And the more excited he got, the more elaborate the story became. It was kind of a vicious circle that way. We were staying at the Radisson. We had a manager named Ian, who was probably pissed off at us for staying out so late. Either that, or he was knee-deep in babes and blow (the story oscillated as we speculated which version of Ian was funnier, but Brad never caught on).

For awhile, we told Brad all about the cool things we'd seen during our stay in Duluth. I told him I though that the Angled Tower was pretty rad, and he literally slapped his hand against his forehead. "No, no, NO! Not the Angled Tower...it's called the Enger Tower!" I asked him if he was sure, because I could have sworn it was the Angled Tower. He was sure.

"Hey, hey, hey...have I got something for you guys!" Brad screeched. "You're gonna love it!" He scrambled around inside his car for awhile, then came out wielding one of those keychains that says "Fuck you" and "Eat shit" when you press a button. We didn't love it.

"What do you do for fun here in Duluth?" I asked Brad.

"Mainly, I come up here and party all the time," he said. I got mock-excited about this, and asked him where the parties were tonight. He just waved me off, rather than explain that "party" was just his term for "sitting alone in the car in a secluded area drinking an entire bottle of SoCo."

There's a cement wall on Skyline to keep your car from rolling off the cliff when you park there, and toward the end of the night, we huddled in conference. Then we went back to Brad and explained to him that since he was such an awesome dude, we were going to perform one of our skateboarding tricks for him. The thing was, we didn't have our boards with us, so we'd have to do the best we could. He thought this was pretty awesome, so we counted to three and then simultaneously ran at the knee-high wall, jumped up on top of it and then quickly jumped down. That sealed the deal as far as Brad was concerned. We fucking ruled.

By this time the sun was up, and Ian was really pissed off back at the Radisson. Brad was wrecked. "Hey," somebody said, "Why don't you come with us to our next stop? There's room on the tour bus."

Brad thought he'd died and gone to heaven. Of course he'd come with us. (I can't remember where we were headed next. I want to say Fargo, but I'm not sure.) All he had to do first was go home, grab some clothes, borrow some money from his mom, and he'd be good to go. We said we'd meet him at the Radisson.

He never showed.

To this day I like to imagine a slightly grimy 30ish man, drunkenly shaking his mother awake in an attempt to borrow some money so that he could go on tour with some professional skateboarders from California.

She must've been so proud.

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