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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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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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.

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Minnesota just implemented its state-wide smoking ban last week. I drew this comic back in 2000, a much different era.

Click it to see it big.

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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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Brian, it seems, had discovered the joy of matches. While the rest of us were discussing the finer intricacies of Smokey & the Bandit or trying to scrape up enough pocket change to buy a bag of Funyuns, Brian sat on his front porch transfixed, staring into space and plotting out how to accomplish his foremost goal.

You see, Brian wanted to burn a house to the ground. More than anything else in the world.

"You pick the house," he told me one day. "You pick the house and I'll burn it down."

I told him that I didn't want him to burn any house down. "Let's just play catch," I suggested. "I'll go get my mitt." Then when I saw that that wasn't going to take, I started to think of riskier things to do, maybe to satisfy his urges for a while. "We could put stuff on the tracks and wait for trains to smash it? We could play ding-dong-ditch? I think we might be able to get that Scott kid to eat another rock?"

"What about that house?" he asked, pointing to a run-down house with the siding falling off of it. When I shook my head he said, "Oh...you LIKE that house?"

I tried to change the subject. I don't remember how I got out of it, but somehow, I did.

A few days later we were hanging out in my yard when Brian announced, "Go on up to the corner and wait for me. I have some things I want to do." I knew that this was stupid, because we were like 8 years old, and besides, this was my yard. But for some reason I walked up to the corner and sat on the curb to wait. A few minutes later, Brian joined me. We sat on the curb for awhile, silent, until he shouted, "I SMELL SMOKE! IT'S COMING FROM YOUR HOUSE!"

We ran back to my house, which was thankfully not on fire. However, there was a bail of hay in our yard which my brother used to shoot arrows into. The hay was completely engulfed in flames. My mom stood in the yard, angrily spraying the hay bail with the garden hose.

Later she said to me, "You don't need to say anything. I know Brian lit the hay on fire." I don't know if she called Brian's mom or not, but I imagine she did.

While walking down the street a few weeks after that, I noticed the house next door to Brian's. Although the house was still structurally sound, the entire front was charred and black. This didn't surprise me, because Brian had been eyeing up this place more than any other in the neighborhood. The house belonged to a married retarded couple that all the kids affectionately refered to as "The Ding-a-Lings."

I didn't see Brian again for quite some time, but when I finally did, I asked him, "Did you try to burn down the Ding-a-Lings' house?" He just stared ahead, silently. I knew I would never get an answer out of him, but I didn't need one. I knew exactly what happened.

To all of my knowledge, Brian adjusted to life just fine and still lives a peaceful life in West Duluth. I saw him a couple years back at a bar in Gary. We did some shots. Talked about the old neighborhood. I think I got 86'ed for breaking glasses on the floor, but I'm not sure.

I never mentioned the arson to him. I probably never will.

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