Soundtrack, Part 2

The two weeks before I moved to Minneapolis, I wrapped up on my roofing and siding job.

I had a boom box to help while away the lonely hours of hammering and sawing. To save battery power (four D batteries ain’t cheap), I usually tuned it to KFYR in Bismark – the only non-country music station in range.

This being the eighties, program directors were casting some very broad nets to try to figure out what’d latch on.

And this song peered out onto the radio a few times during those few weeks. It’s by Jane Wiedlin, erstwhile rhythm guitarist for the Go Gos.

There is no rational reason why this song, of all the hours of music I listened to on that job site that month, this one stuck with me. You never hear it on the radio – ever. I doubt most of you ever have heard it, or retained it if you did.

And yet this song, for me, feels like a hot day, smelling the hay coming in, watching the sun edging down toward the hjorizon.

I didn’t say all of these songs made sense.

Where Credit Is Due: Berndt Oleson Græsli

I sometimes wonder what it must have been like to be Berndt Oleson Græsli.

He was born in 1863, named Berndt Oleson – “Berndt, son of Ole”, in a tiny farm hamlet named “Græsli”. a place small enough that being known as your father’s son was plenty specific enough. Græsli was in the hills of east-central Norway, close to the Swedish border, in a municipality (think “township”) called Tydal, which was a tiny isolated backwater then, and still is today [1]. The oldest sons of each generation swapped between “Berndt Oleson” and “Ole Berndtson”, going back as far as I can tell to the early 1700s.

But times were tough in Tydal. My grandmother – Berndt’s youngest child, who grew up speakiung Norwegian until she was 8 – passed on stories she’d heard of people eating tree bark soup the winter after a crop failure. Sometimes the problems were external – the Swedes invaded in 1812 – but it just wasn’t a hospitable place.

The chronology isn’t clear, but at some point in the late 1800s, one of the many periodic depressions that afflicted Tydal, Ole Berndson’s father went bankrupt, and the farm got foreclosed on. Bernd, by this time in his twenties and with nothing to inherit, emigrated to the US, and moved to greater Thief River Falls, which today reflects the fact that it was a favorite destination for Norwegian emigrés. He took as his last name the anglicization of his home town, and became Berndt Gresley.

He got a job as a drayman, which was the trade he listed in the 1900 and 1910 censuses. By this time he’d moved to Middle River, MN, and built a house that was just torn down fairly recently

Being a drayman was a hard life – but it apparently not as hard as the alternatives. He sent word to Norway, and 5-7 years after he left Norway, his two younger sisters followed suit; Kari Olesdatter moved to a little town along the Canadian border in North Dakota, married, and became Carrie Dennett. Ingeborg married a farmer near Binford, North Dakota, and became, ironically, Ingeborg Olson.

I don’t know much about Berndt. He died 15 years before I was born, in 1948. I try to imagine sometimes what the world must have seemed like to him, starting out in a world not a whole lot different than it’d been 500 years ago, and seeing two world wars, rural electrification, trains and cars, aircraft of any kind much less jets, and a world where his children didn’t consider it preposterous to move more than 10 miles from where they were born.

Berndt is in the bottom three photos, along with his wife Mary (button center), son Ralph (bottom left). Top left, clockwise from top: daughter Minnie, son Ralph, my grandma Beatrice, daughter Alice.

And as someone who rolled the dice and moved to a place that was socially different than the world I grew up in, but economically and technologically utterly recognizable, I wonder what must have gone threw Berndt’s mind as he pondered spinning life’s roulette wheel and moving 3,000 miles to a place that existed in his mind only in the stories sent back in letters from people who’d emigrated before.

[1] Although during the war, the town was a stop on the underground railroad smuggling refugees, guerrillas, downed airmen and Jews to Sweden.

Soundtrack, Part 1

John Hughes wrote movies for eveyrone – but they focused through the lens of angsty upper-middle-class kids from the north burbs of Chicago. Risky Business, Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink. even Home Alone (angsty tween!). And their soundtracks reflected those kids; Psychedelic Furs, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Simple Minds – just sing the big singles from each of those movies, and you’ll get a pretty decent digest of new wave pop from the early to mid eighties.

If Hughes had written movies about rangy, restless kids with huge chips on their shoulder in the middle of nowhere, he’d have had a bunch of John Mellencamp’s Scarecrow on the soundtrack.

As I knocked around Jamestown during the weeks before I moved, it felt like my social circle was constricting around me. My haunts and stomping grounds were on short time. . My friends who hadn’t graduated and moved on were all busy with their lives – there, in Jamestown. My focus was moving.

And outside the occasional night knocking back beers at “The Club”, I felt isolated. Above and beyond the isolation of living in a place far, far from the center of action I craved being in.

So as this song plied its way up the charts in early October, it couldn’t have been timed much better:

And I hear it today, and I can still feel that hollow ache of ,as Paul Westerberg put it, “waiting to be”.

Where Credit Is Due, Part I

I’m not a big “podcast” person.

But since I got a car that reads my phone’s bluetooth without a lot of muss and fuss, I wind up listening to some of them anyway.

It’s probably not a huge leap that I found my way to Mike Rowe’s The Way I Heard It podcast. It started years ago as a riff on Paul Harvey’s old “The Rest Of The Story” blurbcast, and has evolved into something more like Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson’s podcasts, for people who like their great interviews in one hour chunks.

Like Rowe’s Dirty Jobs, it focuses on people who are just a tad off the beaten path who nonetheless have fascinating stories to tell.

Johnny Joey Johnson – a Marine EOD tech who lost both legs in Afghanistan – iis one of them. If you haven’t heard it, I’ll. commend it to your attention:

In it, Jones plugs his new book, in which he talks about ten people who shaped him, sometimes without knowing it until long after the fact, and for whose influence he’s grateful.

The idea grabbed me – especially since gratitude has become such an important theme for me lately (more on that in November).

So over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to do the same…

…well, not the same thing. Something similar.

More on Monday.

Soundtrack

Growing up working in radio, I learned an interesting bit of applied psychology from my various program directors: people tend to become emotionally attached to music they hear from puberty until their brain stops growing, around age 25.

It’s not so much that music attaches itself to important events in your life, as the music and the events happen at a time when your brain is filling in a lot of important space with events that matter to you – and, given its evocative intensity, the music that’s going on at the time.

If I ever got to be a phenomenally wealthy mad scientist, ,one of my experiments would be to pay a family to raise their children around nothing but some absurd, archaic genre of music – say, John Philip Sousa marches – through their twenties, and measure to see how many events, first dances and first crushes and first kisses, they associated with marching music.

Anyway, about this time in 1985, my brain was getting stuffed with the consequences of my following up on my drunken promise to move to the Twin Cities that I’d made about a week earlier at a college homecoming dance. And for the next two weeks as I tried to fill in the many blanks of my half-baked “plan”, my still-growing brain drank in the music that was going on around me, on the radio, on my boom box, and (when I got to the Cities) on MTV, which I finally got to watch.

And to this day, I hear one of those songs, it brings it all back. I hear one of the songs burned into my cortext from that era on an overhead or the radio or at a bar, and I still smell the must of autumn building, of the harvest coming in as I worked my roofing and siding job, the feel of the wind as I drove my barely-roadworthy car to MInneapolis, the “exhilaration” of my first rush hour on my way to an interview.

The smell of fear, the feel of the tingle of hope, and the shiver of taking a huge leap.

I’ve had a theory that the period from 1977 to about 1986 was one of the best periods of all time for popular music.

It might be because it was a fact. Or it might be because it’s associated with that most searingly immediate period in life, adolescence through leaping out into the world.

Why choose?

At the risk of indulging in nostalgia, I’m going to indulge in some of the rewards of nostalgia.

While Making Your Weekend Plans

My band, “Elephant in the Room“, is playing at the “Backing the Blues“ Street dance this coming Saturday.

The event – which was an annual thing for over 40 years until the pandemic, and is restarting this year – is a benefit for the Hennepin County Sheriff Association

The event is free. Donation proceeds go to supporting scholarships for people going into law enforcement. The band is playing for free, so anyone who wants to throw a few bucks in the bucket is much appreciated.

I mean, they had me at barbecue.

To The Hardest Working Man In Science…

….the late, highly esteemed Dr. Bill Gleason, mornings like this gave him an almost childish degree of glee.

He’d frequently tweet, or post on the blog wrote about me, how his pleas had been listened to, and some divine technological retribution had finally been served on me, and I’d been smitten from the Internet.

I had, of course, forgotten to pay my domain renewal. Nothing more. Within a few hours, the blog was back in action. HIs tweets for the rest of the day felt…cheated? Crestfallen?

But he’d go on about his day,, creating deathles science or something.

Anyway, it was another one of those mornings. Most likely the last such – because after 16.5 years of procrastination, I finally added an annual reminder on March 25 to make sure it gets paid.

I’m sure that the great Doctor is bellowing into the void up in the great beyond even as we speak.

I’lll pour out a forty for him now. [1]

Continue reading

When Making Weekend Plans

I don’t normally put much music stuff on the blog – I’d rather not dilute the gravitas of this publicatio with rock and roll

…but my band, Elephant in the Room, is playing Shamrock’s on West 7th in Saint Paul, Friday night at

We go on at 930PM.

It’s one of those rooms I’ve been dying to play for like fifteen years, now.

Anyway – if you stop by, say hi!

19

Today is the 19th anniversary of the Northern Alliance Radio Network.

I’ll probably save the whole “waxing philosophical about it” thing for (God willing) next year – and for those of you who like that sort of thing, I have a hunch it’ll be a doozy.

But like this blog, that two hours a week has been a steady, constant thing over the course of a couple of mind-warpingly turbulent decades, personally and for the nation.

Back in October of 2003, asking Chad the Elder, John Hinderaker, Brian “Saint Paul” Ward, Ed Morrissey, Scott Johnson, Atomizer, King Banaian and JB Doubtless (and eventually Michael Brodkorb) if they wanted to do a radio show was a little like making a burger with four patties; you realize it’s probably going nowhere, and the world will not change if it fails completely, but that’s no reason not to try.

And the fact that it worked – of which more below – is further evidence of what may be the biggest axiom of my life: the things that start as jokes, whimsical experiments or drunken pranks on myself, tend to be the things that are the most rewarding. I’m going to have to do a post on that phenomenon sometime in the next year.

Of course, for that little flight of fancy to become what it did has taken the connivance of a lot of people. Three generations of general managers (John Hunt, who originally OKed the idea along with Ron Stone and current GM Nik Anderson), and four of operations managers (Patrick Campion, the first person I talked, along with his successors, Nick Novak, Lee Michaels and John “Consigliere” Berg, no relation) had to agree to put us on the air, schedule staff to keep us on, and take the risk of having a bunch of noobs on their air.

How many generations of producers did it take to make us sound passable? The late, unforgotten, great Joe “The Jackal” Hanson, Tommy “The HBomb” Huynh, Matt Reynolds, Irina Malanina, The Consigliere, Terminator N, Megan Fatale, G-Money, and a whole bunch of Brad and King’s producers I can’t even begin to remember…

…and of course Brad Carlson ,King Banaian and Jack “The New Guy” Tomczak.

Not to mention the audience.

Not sure who or what I’d be today without the result of the – not sure what to call it, joke or prank or unhinged scheme – that got hatched 20 years ago this coming fall. But I do know I doubt I could navigate the insanity of today’s world without it – not to mention the blog that started it.

Anyway – thanks!

In The Abstract

“It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses.”
– Elwood Blues

I don’t know that I laughed any harder than anyone else at that classic line from “The Blues Brothers“ when I first saw it, back in high school.

But if I had known how important the idea of “Taking absurd, improbable chances that, in retrospect, seem completely crazy“ would be in my life, I might’ve laughed even harder.

I had no plan for my life when I got out of college – so I moved to the Twin Cities on a drunken whim.

Once I got here? Nobody gets a job in major market radio by just walking up and asking for one. I ‘d been in radio for six years by the time I was 22 – even I knew it was delusional. I hadn’t even moved to the Twin Cities with getting back into radio in the back of my mind. But I did it anyway.

And it worked.

No 23 year old gets a talk show on a 50,000 watt station by nagging his boss into putting them on the air. But I did it – and he did.

Nobody builds a career by teaching themself something that (at least at the time) most people had a masters degree in psychology to get into. But I didn’t know any better – so I did, and it worked out.

Nobody gets a major market talk show by gathering a bunch of bloggers together, walking into a radio station and saying “ mind if we do a show on your station?“. But here we are.

It doesn’t always work – that’s kind of what my marriage was, too; “what the heck, who says it couldn’t work out ok?“. But that’s where my kids came from, so I can’t say it didn’t work, either.

No question about it – I’ve been blessed, and lucky, to turn a pattern of scatterbrained opportunism into a career and a life I enjoy.

And every once in a while, I hit one of those restless moments when I think “what’s my next opportunity to grab half a pack of cigarettes, put on my sunglasses, and drive off into the darkness looking for my next questionable decision?”

I’m kind of having one of those moments now.

Ritual

Yesterday, I…:

  • Changed the oil in my snowblower.
  • Put in the first fresh gas of the season.
  • Got my boots, choppers, coat and wool cap out and ready to go.
  • Got a pot of Korean beef stew ready to go in the pressure cooker.

If we wind up getting half an inch of snow, you have me to thank.

Gratitude

It’s Thanksgiving.

I’ve written before about what Thanksgiving means to me, personally – on this blog’s first Thanksgiving (checks notes) twenty years ago. It’s still true in every respect.

I was on the road, driving somewhere the other day when the notion of listing the things for which I’m grateful popped up. I started trying to list them all – and the list only really came to an end when the car stopped, far too soon, at my destination.

So what the heck – I’m just going to start a stream of consciousness list of things for which I’m grateful on this, our country’s festival of thanksgiving.


I’m thankful for my family, and my family in law. Looking back over the past twenty years since I’ve been writing about all of us, there are so many ways things could have turned out differently, and much worse – but yet here we all are, and things are all right.


And I’m thankful for the family I grew up in – my sister and my brother, of course, and my father, who is blessedly still with us. And for my mother, who we’re spending our first Thanksgiving without, this year. And as I noted back last spring, I’m profoundly grateful for one of the greatest gifts my mother and father gave us all – boring, non-remarkable childhoods, free of the sort of pointless, mindless drama that has always afflicted less fortunate families, and that a certain segment of society has taken to celebrating these days.

The more families I get to know, the luckier I know we all were, and are.

So for Bun, Zam, Syd, Watermelon, and of course Barb, Jim and Dad, I’m happily thankful.


Oh yeah – and Pickle, the cat. Best cat ever.


‘m thankful for the career I have. I blundered into it 24. years ago, more out of boredom with my short career writing instruction manuals – and yet after all this time, I still look forward to going into the office every day, literally or virtually.

I’m grateful in particular for the job I have with the company I’m at. Not naming names – but it’s a place I genuinely enjoy being, with people I genuinely enjoy working with. There aren’t many places where a UX designer with a BA in English could land on two engineering patents. For that story alone, I’m exceedingly thankful.


I’m grateful for the path I took to get there – all its myriad chicanes and hairpin turns. Starting in radio at 15, burning out on it when I was 21, getting back at 22, out again at 25, nightclub DJing, technical writing, and the various twists and turns that got me here.

At the very least, there are a lot of stories to bore my kids stiff with.

On the other hand, every once in a while I can offer someone a perspective they don’t have. And that is a great feeling.


Oh, yeah – I’m immensely grateful that my first run at “Mentoring” in my career field has been successful; my first mentee – actually the child of a long-time friend of the blog – got their first job in the field after an amazingly and satisfyingly short time (by my standards, not theirs) learning the trade. That was such a blast.


I’ve become keenly aware in recent years that there are people who’ve been very important at one time or another, that I will likely never see again. The time for chance serendipity random encounters gets shorter every year. So one thing I didn’t expect, but for which I’m intensely grateful – my show and blog and, to an extent, social media have led me back into contact with a lot of people I likely wouldn’t have via the normal course of random encounters – high school and college classmates who tune in, and occasionally shout out on my show’s various social media feeds. In three particular cases – my college friend Ray Zentz, and my high school and colleg4e classmates Eric DeMar and Pennie Werth – they passed away, very unexpectedly, and (gulp) way too young. And in this past couple of course, I’ve been blessed to have had at least some contact with each of them, while I still could.


And for my many friends who are still with us, and who I do get to see and hang out with? Yes, I’m even more thankful for each and every one of you!


It’s easy enough to say “I’m thankful to be healthy”, and it’s true. But in the four years since my crash weight loss (most of which is still gone), I’ve become humbly aware that most guys who spend as many years sedentary and overweight as I did, aren’t nearly as lucky as I am, to be as relatively healthy, after all that, as I am. I’m very aware I’m as lucky as can be. “I’m healthy” is, in this case, delivered with a bit of “whew – close call” as a happy nod. And for that, I’m thankful.


Back to a bit of nostalgia – I’m thankful for my entire high school class. I can’t say I’m friends with everyone in the Jamestown High School Class of 1981 – but this past couple of reunions have blessed me with a deeper appreciation of quite a few people who, between cliques and crowds and circumstances I barely knew in the day, with whom I’ve spent more time over a few drinks at reunions than we ever did in high school, and intensely glad for the opportunity.


I’m glad I got the education I did. It’s become the fashion these days among a certain crowd of conservatives to dunk on the modern college education – and from what I see among 20-and-30-somethings today, there’s something to it – but my BA in English has served me far better than I’d ever thought it could when I graduated from college. It taught me how to think, reason, look for the question behind the question, for the additional questions that every answer launches.

And of course, “education” is more than just curriculum and schooling. I’m thankful the many unintentional lessons I learned from some of the amazing people I met, and the collateral effects of the things I learned, in class and out.


I’m grateful that this version of the RIchard Thompson Band released this version of this day-appropriate song:


Perhaps a bit less ethereally? I’m so happy to have a band again. Oh, it’s just a classic rock cover band – it’s not the flaming-hot passionate “mission in life” vibe the twenty-some me wore back in the 1980s, when I took my swing at being a rock star, or at least a songwriter, producer and whatever else came my way. But I get to play guitar in front of rooms full of people who seem to enjoy it. And even if it’s a slow night at an out of the way bar, my Fitbit says I burn 6-7000 calories and rack up a zillion steps, so even then it’s a win-win.

Anyway – for that, I’m thankful.


Given the sturm und drang of this state and nation’s political scene, I’m deliriously grateful for the voice this blog, and the NARN, have given me over the years. On the one hand, social media have given everyone a voice, of sorts – and what people have done with that voice is another entire subject. But being able to do this on my own terms (within FCC and Salem Communications rules, natch) for all this time? To the extent I’m still sane, that’s probably why.

Of course, I’m grateful for the friends I’ve made during all these years of writing – Professor Reynolds, Gary Gross, Joshua Sharf, Sheila O’Malley, and the group of local bloggers that, about this time 19 years ago, started coalescing into that radio show: Scott Johnson, John Hinderaker, Brian Ward, Chad the Elder, Atomizer, Michael Brodkorb, and of course Ed Morrissey, King Banaian, Brad Carlson and Jack Tomczak. And of course, for the many friends I made in the “Minnesota Organization of Bloggers” days – including the three whose contributions still bless this blog, Mr. D, Jeff Kouba and First Ringer.


Why, yes – even Paddyboy! I’m thankful that Pad – someone I’ve considered a friend for over three decades, and to whom I owe an odd little debt of gratitude from back before the word “blog” meant anything but something that happened about an hour after you ate a gas station burrito – drops by, pique and all. I owe you a drink or two. Have your people call my people.


And I’m thankful for this little ephemeral bit of internet I’ve been wrangling this past 20.75 years.

As I noted elsewhere around the time of the 20th anniversary, writing this every weekday morning has been sort of a Zen-like lesson – come rain or shine, feast or famine, writer’s block or fit of logorrhea, the exercise of sitting down and writing, five mornings a week, has been a way of centering myself for this past two decades. For better or worse – I have to think it’s better – one of the great takeaways from doing this has been, I think, one of the great lessons of life; keep plugging away, and things eventually explain themselves.

Of course, I’m profoundly and humbly thankful that people still choose to read it, after all this time. Thank you all!


I could keep at this for hours more. And perhaps one day I should. But cooking calls.

And so to borrow a line from that first Thanksgiving post on this blog, way back when:

But I forgot one. I’m thankful to be here. Now. Doing what I’m doing, and with the chance to be doing the same thing – or better – next year.

Thanks to all of you. I hope you all have a happy Thanksgiving and a blessed holiday season.

Twenty Years Ago Today

Democrats like to bleat that Ronald Reagan couldn’t be elected in today’s GOP.

It’s rubbish – watch “A Time For Choosing” and ask what he’d have to change today – but I’d answer in response that Paul Wellstone would either have trouble getting endorsed in today’s DFL, or would have to displace hard to the left to stay viable.

It’s exceptionally hard to believe that it was 20 years ago today Wellstone died:

The crash – which DFLers of my acquaintance spent years was a hit job carried out by an RNC sniper – handed the election to Norm Coleman.

The Coleman/Wellstone race was, in fact, what put this blog on the map (checks notes) twenty freaking years ago: covering the DFL’s bizarre, often antisemitic attacks on Coleman, and another prominent Minnesotan’s clod-footed assault on Coleman, got me the Instalanches that launched this blog from 5 hits a day into the 3-4 digit range.

Mom

For those of you who know my family; my mother passed away over the weekend after a long battle with Alzheimer’s.

Mom was Janice Brooks.

Mom, probably 20-30 years ago. As much a fun contrarian with hats as with anything.

Before that, Janice Berg.

And before that, Janice Hall.

Like me, Mom was the oldest of three kids. I never knew much about her childhood – that’s a conversation I need to have with my aunt and uncle, sooner than later.. I wasn’t the only one to get the impression she got a little restless being a young mother of three in a small town in North Dakota. She had been an art major, loved painting, craved travel, and probably had had many other plans before she wound up as Mom.

She was born in Devils Lake North Dakota, grew up in Bismarck, lived in Jamestown throughout my childhood and young adulthood , spent several years in Ankara, Turkey, and then most of the past 25 years in Minot.

Mom is front and center, between my aunt Jerri and uncle Roger. My grandma Pat and grandpa Don are in the back. This was probably about 1950 or so.

Kids – at least, the ones who are lucky enough to have two functional parents – grow up as little melting pots of different combinations of their parents traits. Things I got from my dad should be fairly obvious; dad was a speech teacher, I speak a lot.

From my mom?

It’s funny. I just got off the phone with one of my mom’s old friends, someone I’ve known since I was, well, old enough to remember humans outside my family.. One of her memories of mom is her running into groups of people and getting into long, involved discussions with them, just for the fun of it.. When I was in college, she ran for the North Dakota State House of Representatives, as a Democrat – in one of the most Republican places in the world. She didn’t win – but I think she enjoyed the battle just fine.

Where did I get my contrarian streak from, you ask?

And to the extent that I don’t sweat the small stuff in life, to the extent of sometimes very studiously ignoring the small things?.

That’s mom as well.

But I do know that, along with my dad, she gave me one of the great gifts a child could ever have; a completely unremarkable childhood, where the three of us – my little sister and brother and I – pretty much just got to be kids, without having to deal with a whole lot of a crap that parents inflict on their offspring if they are not lucky. Tolstoy wrote “Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is different in their own way.” I used to complain that I had a “Beaver Cleaver“ childhood, especially when I was an angsty teenager; now I realize it was one of the greatest things a parent can give a child.

Years later, after my parents split up (10 days after my own wedding), she remarried, spent several years living in Turkey and indulging her latent travel bug, and finally moved to Minot when her second husband (who like my father was conveniently named Bruce), retired from the NSA.

(Side note: My extended family has two Bruces, two Jans, and a total of four Nicks – more than any non-Greek family in the world).

They built their dream house, which was like a little Turkish cultural center on the edge of town. One of my favorite enduring memories of both of them; meeting them on a visit to the Twin Cities, in the little Turkish restaurant down the street from our house; waiting with my kids, for them to come in, and watching the staff’s jaws drop as a couple of middle-aged Anglos would respond in fluent Turkish.

And while she sometimes may have bristled at the limitations of being mom, she loved being grandma. Some of my kids greatest memories, I suspect, involved trips to grandmas house, up over the creek on the southeast side of Minot. Watching those visits certainly stuck with me.

I’m not sure if it was a “pre-social media” thing, but she loved entertaining. She groused about it, of course, but she loved having people over; crowds of teachers, the book club she and her friends ran from probably 1970 to sometime in the mid-90s or early 2002s, and – during the epic Minot flood of 1997, when the city was flooded 15 feet deep, she and her house on the hill hosted probably a dozen people, on mattresses all over the place. It was her ultimate house party.

The picture below? She is sitting with her brother and sister and their spouses, at my fathers place in Jamestown, in September 2017. It was a mini “family reunion“ my brother and sister and I put together.

It was a wonderful couple of days, that brought together all of the branches of our (fairly small) family for the first time in decades. In retrospect, it was also bittersweet; it was the first time most of us noticed Mom‘s memory was misfiring a little too often, and too alarmingly, to be normal.

Her second husband passed away two years ago last month, right as the lockdown started. This left Mom alone in a memory care in Minot, for several miserable months during the lockdown. We have no idea how much damage being stuck, alone (despite the best efforts of an overstretched staff) was for her before the charnel house that was Minnesota’s long term care system settled down enough to move her here, but the ball of rage still burns.

But among the many things I’m thankful for are that we were, eventually, able to get her moved to the Twin Cities, to be back around family, my brother and I, after several difficult months.

Memory problems proceeded to dementia, which eventually turned officially into Alzheimer’s. And yet after 4 1/2 years, things resolved so quickly over this past week or so that I am still very much in shock.

Still, my mother was lucky; she never got to the stage of Alzheimer’s where the disease ate the part of her brain that contained her personality. She remembered me and my brother, and even as her mental loop dropped from 5 minutes to 3 to two down to simple responses to questions, she still remembered who we, her family, and the people around her were, up till the very end. For that, again, I am thankful.

So quit reading, and go hug your parents. Or your kids. Either, or both.

It Was Twenty Years Ago…Saturday.

It was a passive-aggressive MInnesota winter day; a storm threatened to make the afternoon commute miserable, but all it was doing was making traffic between Saint Paul and Minnetonka miserable.

I was working at a little startup that, five months after 9/11, was already exhibiting the stench of death that would soon stalk the high-tech market. I was being managed by two of the stupidest people I’ve ever met in the world of business – a titanic accomplishment, in my various careers.

And I was smack dab in the middle of trying to rebuild my life. Not in the sense that a refugee from Rwanda tries to get back to subsistence – no, nothing that eternal and existential. I was just a guy who’d been divorced a little over a year, busy raising a couple of kids – 10 and 9, at the time – and trying to figure out where I fit into the world.

I didn’t have much of a social circle – for a variety of reasons, the one I had hadn’t survived my ten years of marriage. I certainly hadn’t had the time or, perhaps, the wisdom to rebuild one the conventional way.

And the pall of gathering rot about the company punctuated the sense that had crept over me; a chapter of my life had ended, and I had no idea what the new chapter was. It was more a sense than an idea – but it was real, and it wasn’t a whole lot different than the restlessness I’d been wrestling with 16 years earlier.

Lunchtime came. I pulled out a sandwich – that stench of imminent corporate collapse had turned the social, lunching-three-times-a week crowd I worked with into hermits – and started grazing about the internet.

I got to Time.com, and opened up an article about “The New Generation of Conservative Intellectuals”. That grabbed me. I hadn’t been especially active in thinking about politics, much less actual politics – but I fondly remembered my time as a political talk show host at KSTP in the late ’80s. It was a time I’d felt…

…well, not like I did that day.

I read onward. It introduced a number of writers – most notably, Andrew Sullivan, a gay British writer who was making waves with his blog, a new invention that was sweeping the internet.

I thought “Blog? Good lord, what a stupid word”.

But there was a sidebar piece on “What is a blog”. Which I read. And took notes, to take home.

And that night, after the kids were in bed and the dishes done, I went out to blogger.com, and started writing. After briefly considering calling it “Reel News” – after a “‘zine” I’d fantasized about putting out, back when ‘zines – small, do-it-yourself print magazines – were the bleeding edge of DIY media – I settled on “Shot in the Dark”. It seemed to fit; that’s what it was; that’s what most everything in my life had been. It seemed to fit.

And twenty years later, it still does.

It’s hard to count up all the things that this blog has brought to my life over the past, ahem, two decades. But I’ll try.

It brought me a social life. The “Minnesota Organization of Bloggers” hasn’t really been active in a decade – but the connections that were made haven’t gone anywhere. Some of the best friends I have, I have from doing this.

It brought me a voice. While I started this blog thinking that I might reach 5-10 people a day, I thought that’d be just fine. It was mostly about the writing. While blog traffic isn’t’ what it was 15 years ago, I still reach a lot more than 10 people a day. And even if there were still five people a day clicking into the site, it’d still be an outlet for all the things that have been let out, here, over the past 20 years.

It got me back on the air. This blog led me into contact with John HInderaker and Scott Johnson from Power Line, and Chad, Brian, Atomizer and JB from Fraters LIbertas, King Banaian from SCSU Scholars and Ed Morrissey from Captain’s Quarters, which got noticed by Hugh Hewitt, who dubbed us the Northern Alliance of Blogs, which in turn led us – after another one of those bouts of restlessness of mine – into pitching the idea of doing an all-blogger talk show to AM1280, which incredibly got green-lit by some of the least risk-averse radio management I’ve ever met. And that – for almost 18 years now – has been an unalloyed blessing in my life.

It got, and kept, me independent. Along about 2013, when Facebook promised to take away the content management headaches, and Twitter forcibly limited the length of one’s thoughts, I thought about following a lot of bloggers over to social media. I didn’t think about it long, though. Part of it was suspicion of Big Tech’s motives, even then – which were utterly justified in retrospect. This blog owes nothing to Jeff Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey. Neil Young can bitch about me until he turns blue(er) in the face. I’m here, and I’m not going away until I’m good and ready.

And perhaps most importantly, it’s given me a…what’s the right word? A rhythm.

I’m not a fundamentally orderly person. I thrive on chaos; I’m one of those fish who swims toward the turbulent water. I was increcibly bad at things like “follow-through” (outside work, anyway) and “focus”. I started my adult life in a career – radio – that is chaos incarnate, where changing jobs. yearly is (or was) the norm, and went into another career where a (largely) contractor’s life ion’t a whole lot more stable. It’s been a career that would take a chaotic and spin him into a complete basket case, as indeed I kind of was on the morning of February 5, 2002.

But for the past twenty years, sitting down five mornings a week to write something, has been the beat behind my days. Through cataracts of creativity, and bouts of writer’s block so serious I could taste it, I made it my goal to write something at 6AM, 7AM and 11AM, every weekday, with very few breaks. It might be crap, it might be perfunctory, it might be something I’m enduringly proud of, or something in the great in-between – but hitting those deadlines has lent my life a discipline and focus I didn’t have before.

I finish thoughts. I follow through on actions (more than I did, anyway). I think about “what comes next”.

Obsession? Habit? Therapy? Blessing? Zen exercise?

I can cop to any or all of them.

Happy New Year!

2022 will mark this blog‘s 20th anniversary.

I’m kind of excited!

But first let’s talk about the weekend.

Tonight – New Year’s Eve – my band “Elephant in the Room” is playing at the American Legion in Fridley. We will be starting at 8:30 PM, and ringing in the new year. The Legion has those cool edge of the metro food and drink prices, without actually being outside the metro, which is kind of cool. Hope you can make it out there.

Tomorrow on the show? I will be talking with Rebecca Brannon about her run in with the Hennepin county machine over her reporting on Sheriff Hutchinson‘s DUI.

And tomorrow night, we will be playing at Neisen‘s Sports Bar and Grill, in Savage. I love our bars, but Nissans has a stage that makes you feel kind of like a rockstar, and a sound system that makes us sound like one. No cover.

I hope we run into each other, literally or figuratively, during any or all of the above!

A Change Will Do You Good

In almost two decades of running this blog, I have tried to keep a hands-off approach to the comment section. I do this because I believe the answer to bad speech is more better speech. This blog has one of the smartest comment sections anywhere, so I feel little need to intervene with stupid comments – you all are more than capable of handling that.

I can count the number of people I’ve actually banned from the comment section on one hand. The last was six years ago, and it was in large part due to constant threadjacking [1].

Anyway – we’re gonna try something new.

Threadjack Policy

If you look up on the top menu, there’s a “Contact me / Report Threadjacking” item. It’s actually been there for years, but didn’t really work very well.

I fixed it over the weekend.

Anyway – if you want to complain about a threadjack, leave a note there. Please include the link or title for the post, and explain what you think the threadjack was.

My decisions will be, of course, final. I’ll do my best to explain my rationale in the related comment section, but that’s not a promise.

People who continue to jack threads? There’ll be consequences.

People who abuse the reporting process? Well, you’re all adults. I don’t think I need to get redundant, here.

[1]. Although in the case of Dog Gone, it was even more due to the fact that she took an unconscionable liberty with the fact that she knew my family, socially, decades ago, and decided to go full bore stupid.

Never go full bore stupid.

Take Five

It’s been a busy month, and I am fried to a fine sheen.So I believe I am going to take the rest of this week, and weekend, off from riding.

(UPDATE: And, of course, from writing).

I hope you all have a happy, blessed Christmas season, and I will see you all again on Monday!

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlefolk

“Fake it ’til you make it”.

It’s a glib little saying – and it’s governed so much of my life, it’s hard to even express it. So much of what I am, I am because I basically decided I wanted to *be* that thing, and acted like it until it worked. (See also: this blog, the NARN, my career).

And that’s a good thing.

And it’s never a bigger deal than this time of year.

I make no bones about the fact that I had a childhood Beaver Cleaver would have envied. I had a pretty intact family, no major dysfunctions – I have no complaints. The Christmas holiday was always a joyful memory; family, food, tradition…love. I wish everyone were as lucky.

Then came adult life.

Without going into a whole lot of details, when my kids were little, there were certain stressors in life that made the holidays…complex. Anxious, stressful, parlous, sometimes outright tests of emotional and physical endurance.

And I resolved to push the happiness, the *cheer*, almost to an absurd extent – because I was hanging on to that shred of joy, happiness and family by my fingernails. And in its own way, it – “Faking” ample joy for Christmas – worked.

I can’t speak for my kids – they’re adults, with their own lives and tradtions of their own, now – but the holidays as a general rule *aren’t* white-knuckle anxiety rides. They are good, not just because I *will them* to not be bad, but because the attitude seems to help give me the mental headspace to focus on the holiday rather than all the angst – and to actually enjoy this time of year.

This flies in the face of the modern obsession with “being authentic” to how one feels – a trait with some upsides, but a solipsistic overtone that boils down to “it’s better to be ‘real’ than to be happy”. Thing is, while one can not create one’s own reality, one can change one’s perception of and reaction to that reality; sometimes, the best way to do that is to just do it.

And modern society goes cynical about the holidays on the drop of a pin. I’ve related in the past my disgust for media (principally NPR) pounding a drumbeat of cynical, post-modern, anxious misery about the holidays – the stress, the anxiety, having to put up with all those *relatives* who act, and see the world, differently than you…

Modern society and its obsessions can get stuffed.

I hope you all have a joyful, meaningful holiday – whatever that means to you.

The Why We War

I write a blog, and do a talk show, that covers a fair amount of politics.

People jump from that to assuming I looooove politics.

It’s not true. Truth be told, I hate ’em.

But just because you’re not interested in politics doesn’t mean they’re not interested in you.

Charles Cook lays it out as well as anyone in this bit here.

Pullquote:

If, like me, you believe without irony, exaggeration, or caveat, that the United States of America remains the last, great hope of mankind, then you have no choice but to fight those who would “transform” it. If, like me, you believe that America was exceptional before its Founding, was exceptional at the time of its Founding, has been exceptional throughout its 250-year history, and remains exceptional to this day, then you have no choice but to resist the entreaties of those who consider its run thus far to have been a pernicious lie. If, like me, you believe that the world benefits enormously from American leadership — and that, if and when we reach the point at which another nation is in the driving seat, we will regret it enormously — then you have no choice but to try to keep it on top. And if, like me, you believe that the American system of government — which represents the only remaining ossification of core Anglo-American ideals in the world — is a work of astonishing genius that must not be tinkered with for temporary political gain, then you have no choice but to defend it to the hilt. I cannot prove this, but I suspect somewhere in my bones that we will get just one shot at America — one — and that if it goes, then so does the classically liberal order that has done wonders for the world.

And in my little, D-lister way, I feel the same. .

A Taste Of Ozone

In recent years, as the print news business has been slowly unraveling, I’ve read quite a number of nostalgia pieces from “ink stained wretches” lamenting the demises of the papers where they, in effect, grew up. We’ve seen this most recently with the spiralling-in of the City Pages, a vapid lifestyle tabloid in its later years that in its early days spawned some great writers (James Lileks), some journalists (David Brauer, Brian Lambert), one very goodeditor (Steve “Not The Journey Guy” Perry), a generation of “music critics” that further debased an already fairly useless genre of writing, and a lot of laughable, insipid drivel (I won’t name names; if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you don’t need me to).

I get it. When you get to a certain age, you start to realize that you haven’t had just one life; you’ve had quite a few of them, really. And you try to make sense of them, order them, set them up so that anyone who might be interested in the future knows the story – even if that “anyone” is just you.

I got to thinking about that the other day. This week is the 22nd anniversary of my first day on the radio, back in 1979 [1].

It was at KEYJ, a little 1,000 watt (250 at night) station in Jamestown, North Dakota. It was the #2 station in a two-station market – the competition, the mighty KSJB, with a broadcast radius that covered six states and two provinces, was more a regional thing. But KEYJ was not only absent any delusions of grandeur, but the station intimately knew its niche. While “KS” covered the upper Midwest, with a steady diet of country music in and among a stream of crop reports, regional news and agriculture reporting, KEYJ covered Jamestown and Stutsman County – the news, high school and college sports, city and rural fire calls, reports from the nursing homes, a “swap and shop” show, and a half-hour local talk show. We carried the Twins in the summer, the Jamestown Blue Jays and Jamestown College Jimmies during the school year, and on Saturday afternoons we’d do a “Class B Basketball Game of the Week”, recorded the night before, where the merchants of Ellendale and Kensal and Medina and Ypsilanti would pony up a few bucks in sponsorships to hear their towns kids on the radio.

And some music. Although that was more or less an afterthought – we played middle-of-the-road top forty pop and a lot of “recurrents” from the previous couple decades.

The boss – Bob Richardson, one of the guys who’d put the station on the air in 1953, and who’s still going strong at 90 years old – considered it part of his mission to train local kids who were interested in the craft and technique of doing radio. He always had a couple of high school or college kids on the staff [2]. Not only was it one of the best broadcasting “schools” around, but it was one of the stations new grads from broadcast schools wanted to get into, if they were smart; they, like I, quickly wound up learning how to do literally everything at that station.

No, that’s not me. That’s Dave Howey, who took all the photos in this story when he was the same age I was when I started – the photos are all from 1977-ish, a few years before my time. Dave went on in the business – he’s been dominating morning radio in the Brainerd/Detroit Lakes/Fergus Falls area for the past thirty years or so.

And in August of 1979, it was my turn.

I spent a couple of weeks, starting in late July, shadowing a few of the other guys – Dick Ingstad [3] and John Weisphenning [4], including a day or two spinning records and reading the news and weather. Now it was time for my first solo – on the air, on my own, no training wheels.

It was a pleasant late summer evening in Jamestown when I did my first “solo” couple of hours. I’d be lying if I said I remembered that next six hours especially well – but I remember the first song I ever played on the air. And the second. And actually the third.

It went well enough – I actually got to switch to my regular shift – Saturdays, 5AM to 3PM – the next weekend.

Which led to my ritual, every Saturday morning for the next year and a half or so. Get up at 4:30AM. Hike the four blocks to the station, unlock the doors, start turning on the equipment so it – all ancient tube-driven electronics – could warm up. Most important was the “Remote” – a big, tube-driven stack of amplifiers, rectifiers, and controls that operated the transmitters, two miles away on the south side of town. It’s the sort of stuff you could do on your phone today. Back then – or, really, back in the 1950s, since KEYJ was in effect a museum of the early days of radio – it was a seven foot tall rack of electronics that looked like something from the fire-control plot room from a World War 2 battleship.

This isn’t the remote stack – that’s to the left. This is the pair of ancient reel to reel recorders. That little speaker grill at the top is for a piece of equipment associated with the Emergency Broadcast System, back when it was still called “Conelrad”. That’s how old the gear was/

On a hot day, that studio got downright torpid – there was no air conditioning (other than in the engineering shack, where it was needed); the control room relied on a fan and an open window. On a cold morning, you could hear the tubes struggling harder than I was.

The whole place gave off a scent of ozone. They say smells are among the most powerful memory triggers; ozone does it for me. There was something about the crackle and excitement of being in a radio station, being on the air, that for me is intimately associated with the smell of ozone. If I smell ozone, I get a spring in my step.

Dave Howey’s picture of one of the tubes. From the remote control, or the board, or something else? No idea. But that place was full of ’em.

Spent the next 45 minutes sorting through the 50-odd feet of AP wire copy that had printed on the teletype since signoff, about six hours earlier. Sort out the news, weather, sports and other stuff you’d use for the newscasts – five minutes every hour, plus half-hour blocks of news, weather, sports, and local public affairs stuff at 7AM, 8AM and over the noon hour.

That kept me busy for a good half hour or so.

5:50 AM? The transmitter should be warmed up. Time for standby.

And at 5:55 AM? Hit the sign-on music, read the sign-on script, and it was off to the races.

Dave sent a photo of the control board.

Why, yes, I still know what the controls all do. Those three boxes on the top? “Cart” machines – they played those little rectangular cartridges you see stacked on the right that looked a lot like eight-track tapes (kids, ask your grandparents) because that’s what they were. I have no idea what happened with this board – I think some local collector grabbed saved it from the junkyard. At least, I hope they did. Photo courtesy Dave Howey.

I’ve described it as “looking like the front end of a 1952 Buick”, and compared to modern boards, it kind of does. There is literally not a single piece of digital equipment anywhere in this photo, or anywhere in the room. Or station, anywhere, other than maybe a calculator in the sales office.

How old was it? It was in the studio – above the White Drug on main street in Jamestown – and had been since the station went on the air in ’53. I saw a similar one in a documentary about “black” radio stations in the south from the late ’30s, so “from before the war”, in a year starting with “193…” something, is more likely than not. It felt like old-world craftsmanship; the Bakelite pots had a heft that nothing in a radio station today duplicates; the VU meter, perfectly balanced and looking like something off the Titanic, didn’t herk and jerk up and down like modern meters; perfectly balanced, it swayed majestically, like the much slower time it was built in.

(The “production” board, in the little studio room next door where we produced commercials, the occasional pre-recorded show, and where Bob did the daily half hour talk/interview show, had a “1928” date stamped on the manufacturer’s plate on the side – and it looked and felt like it; it was “Steampunk” twenty years before anyone had heard the term).

This may have been the newest piece of equpment at that station. I think it was from the early ’70s.

I went on to work at much more-modern stations – my next, KDAK in Carrington, had a board from the sixties. When I came “back” to KEYJ (which had become KQDJ), everything was remodeled, with brand new (for the early ’80s) gear, although everything was in the same cramped little space above the drug store.

My career moved on – to KSTP, six years later, with KDWB-AM/FM, WDGY and KFAI to follow in succession. And then it ended.

And when it started again, at AM1280 in 2004, I felt a little bit like Rip van Winkle; there was not a single turntable, reel-to-reel deck, or ever cartridge machine. Even the CD player was largely un-used.

And most jarring, although it took me a while to figure it out?

No smell of ozone. Solid state equipment, much less digital gear, gives off no ozone. Radio stations today smell like…offices.

Don’t get me wrong; the excitement I get from turning on a mike is still there. And I can’t imagine all that ozone was good for the health; radio people seemed to die way too young, from old mens’ diseases, back then.

But I miss that smell, sometimes.

———-

[1] Don’t bother checking my math. I said 22 years, and I meant it.

[2] Many of whom went on to big things. Terry Ingstad – you know him as “Shadoe Stevens”, one of the great LA disc jockeys – started there at 12, and earned a spot in Life Magazine in the process. His youngest brother, Dick, is a morning guy in Louisville today, and was one of my best friends in High School; hanging around with Dick while he did his shifts whetted my appetite enough to want to apply for the job in the first place. Mick Wagner, the great Oregon jazz DJ, Mark Swartzell, Dewey Heggen and many more all started in this old studio.

[3] As noted above, a morning guy in Louisville, who’s had an amazing career.

[4] At the time, John was a student at Moorhead State, majoring in Communications. Last I checked – probably 10 years ago – he’s a communications professor in California.

Independence Day

Hope you all have a happy and blessed weekend – and that you can help tell someone what the day really means, if you’re so inclined.

Mr D, First Ringer and I will be off today and Monday [1] enjoying a long weekend.

But we’ll get back in the saddle bright and early next week.

[1] Actually, I have no idea what the guys will or won’t write over the next couple days – for all I know, Ringer will actually finish that tome about Italians in Abyssynia – but I for one am taking a long weekend, and I hope you all can as well.

Frequently Asked Questions XV

It’s been a few years since I’ve done one of these. It’s probably high time.

Why don’t you manage your comment section more thoroughly?
I work a day job, a couple side hustles, I try to have some semblance of a life outside of all of them…

…and, call me pollyannaish, but I wonder why I should have to? And I know, I know – we’re all grownups, but we’re really not all grownups, either. Such is the nature of online forums – they bring out the worst in some people.

What’s your comment policy?
I still have one of those. I always tried to keep things simple. I summed it up in one of these FAQ pieces a while back. All I ask is:

  1. Don’t write something that’ll get me in legal trouble
  2. If your entire reason for being on the blog is to personally bash me – not an article, or my reasoning, but me, personally, over and over and over – then it’s not me, it’s you, and you and this blog will be parting company.

Perhaps I’ve gotten spoiled – I haven’t had a lot of problems since about 2010. But there you go.

Hey, you removed a comment of mine, even though (fill in name) regularly says things that are far worse. What gives?
Posting a comment doesn’t connote agreement. What do you think I am, Sally Jo Sorenson? But I give a lot more leeway to people I know, and have met personally. I know where they live, at least, figuratively. I know that they aren’t going to “Swat” me, start blogs to publicize “dirt” on me (well, try to.. There really isn’t a whole lot), or start poking at my kids.

With anonymous commenters – people I’ve never met, and likely never will – it’s a little different. I allow anonymous and pseudonymous commenters, and nd pointedly respect their pseudonymity – until the behavior swerves to the wrong side of the risk/reward line.

But what about threadjacking?
Yeah, I’ll whack the occasional threadjack, if it’s obnoxious enough.

But hey – you knew “Dog Gone”. You allowed her increasingly dissociative ranting for about a decade. And then, poof , she was gone. Doesn’t that contradict what you wrote above?
Hardly. I tolerated DG because it was fun watching her narrative – that conservative commenters were a bunch of idiots – get pummeled like the New York Generals. For about a decade, it was a perfect metaphor for modern society – a “progressive” with no particular visible expertise in anything, getting factually rumbled by a comment section that includes lawyers, MDs, a literal rocket scientist, engineers and generally well-read polymaths mirrors the modern social debate pretty perfectly.

Then she started using the fact that she had met me, and did know my kids (when they were 1 and 3, anyway), and took a creepy turn…

…and she got flushed like a gas station burrito and tequila, the morning after.

Does a commenter violate the “Hands Off” principle? Dog Gone did. Other commenters who are the subject of occasional complaints never have, and I suspect never will.

That’s pretty much it.

So that’s it? It’s all about you?
Well, in a sense, duh. The whole blog is about me, if you think about it. I’m the only (regular) writer.

I loathe echo chambers – as a personal matter, and a practical one. Intellectually, I’m still pollyanna enough to think in terms of political and social engagement as a “debate”, rather than mobilizing support to “own” or destroy “the enemy”.

Glad we could chat.

While Making Your Weekend Plans – And Voting Plans

It’s been a while – but my band, “Elephant in the Room”, is back in business.

After a year where we had precisely two, somewhat surreptitious gigs, we’re back in an actual bar, for the first time since February 29, 2020.

After a couple years of playing in the far northwest and far eastern suburbs, onSaturday night, we will be going north, playing at the Back To The SRO Bar and Grill in Oak Grove. It’s about 10 miles north of Anoka:

I’m not sure what the Covid rules are, other than the fact that we are playing from six until 10 rather than our usual nine until one – which isn’t entirely unwelcome.

Anyway – I’ve been there before, the food is pretty good, and the food and beverage prices have that “edge of the metro“ not-so-priciness about them.

By the way – enjoy live music while you can. Because while on the one hand states are slowly reopening, the Biden administration is doing its best to destroy the “gig“ economy. And there is literally nothing giggier than playing in a bar band.