Those Blogthings quizzes are inside my head, I tell you:

You Are 99% Sexy

Your Sex Appeal Is: Almost Off The Clock You’re very sexy. You just have that certain something that takes over a room.  You warp the minds of lesser people. You know how to attract, entice, and keep whoever you want. You are truly appealing.  Even the caustic jealousy of the less-gifted doesn’t harsh your romantic mellow.

Big day today; huge meeting where I pitch what I do – as part of a new enterprise development process – to the company’s staff of Business Analysts”, followed by my annual review, followed by more work work work.

I overslept a tad this morning, so my usual frenetic 5AM burst of productivity is absent wtihout leave today. Posting will therefore likely be light-ish until I’m done at the office.

If you’re jonesing for stuff, check out Roosh, Kev, Dan-o, the Dogs, TvM – they all crank out material like it’s going out of style. You’ll be glad you stopped by.

UPDATE FOR THE WHINERS THOSE WHO’D WONDERED: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and go to KAR and Anti-Strib, too. I mean, it’s not like I never link there, right? Just trying to spread the love a little farther afield in the MOB, y’know? And it’s not like Anti-Strib is hurting for traffic; they get 20,000 hits a day from people searching for Kari Byron in a push-up or Lacy Chabert in a bikini.
Not that I would leverage any such thing.

Fine. There’s yer links. Criminy.

You’re The Anti-Hippie…

You do, indeed, have beliefs as deep as those of any hippie.It’s just that one of them is “Hippies Need To Turn Off the Phish CDs, Take Baths And Get Jobs”

Are You a Hippie?

Don’t look at me – Blogthings said it, not I:

In A Just World, You’d Be In Charge

While not everyone realizes it, you are the kind of person the world needs to have, not merely in a position of influence, but completely in charge.   While some need brutality to rise to the top, the force of your personality more than suffices. You radiate a light of your own. Some think you are love.

Zubaz – the uniform of every sleazy bar-trash jagoff in the late eighties and early nineties – is, um, gaaaah, back:

The Minnesota creation grew into such a worldwide fad that they could be found everywhere from the sidelines of NFL games and NBA arenas to the wilds of Antarctica.

So it is not surprising that a new buzz is building over the return of the wildly outrageous pants, which since November are being sold on the Internet by the same two Minnesota weightlifters who created them in their Roseville gym in 1988.

“It’s really pretty simpl

Note to pop culture: if you want to exhume “the eighties”, do it with the first half of the decade. The second half sucked.

May you and yours have a blessed Easter.

In like a lion, out…

Winter storm warning posted until 7 pm, meaning treacherous travel is imminent/happening now…most of southern MN, including Hennepin, Scott, Dakota and Carver co.

High probability of 3-6″ in the metro area by Friday evening, the most southern suburbs, where a few towns may see 5-8″ slush, less than 2″ far north metro

Second disturbance dropping southward across Minnesota may spark another inch or two of slush Saturday PM….Sunday should be the sunnier day…most of the (new) snow melts by Monday

…like a cold, wet lion.

It was Monday, March 21, 1988. It was a chilly, sloppy morning that was fixing to turn into springtime, sooner or later.

Mark and Bill, the bassist and drummer respectively in my former band, were the youngest two brothers of a big, brawling Irish-Catholic family of eight – five brothers and three sisters. All eight of them were reliably left-of-center (more accurately, socialist) on every issue; they were also blazingly smart, articulate people; although only the two oldest brothers had gone to college, all eight of them were among the best-read people I’d ever met in my life; Bill – a tenth-grade dropout – was better-read than most Masters’ candidates in literature that I’ve met; his knowledge of James Joyce is rivalled by only one person I know.

And after our various band practices, we usually adjourned to glorious hours-long discussions of politics, literature, and history, that usually ended around 2AM and left everyone wanting more. Naturally, they all knew I’d been a conservative talk show host – it was fairly safe to say I was the only conservative pundit in the Twin Cities music scene at the time. So the debates were pretty intense – but fun.

One of the issues we disagreed about the most strongly was gun control. Neil – the brother just older than Mark, who had lived in New York and was a competitive weightlifter when he wasn’t working his day job (as a mover) was the most vigorously anti-gun; “if you’re a man, you shouldn’t need a gun”, he’d say – and usually change the subject when I responded “so what if you’re a 75 year old man? Or a 90 pound woman? Or a guy in a wheelchair”.

Mark didn’t like guns because of some legal issues in his teenage years; it was a legal matter, so he abstained pretty intensely.

Bill, the drummer? Well, with him the debate was largely philosophical and intellectual.

Until today.

———-

The phone rang at 8AM. It was Bill.

“Mitch? You gotta help me buy a gun”.

He related the story; he’d been mugged the night before. Some thug had made off with about $300 in cash. That followed a breakin that’d happened a few months earlier that had netted a TV and some cheap stereo gear (and thankfully none of the musical instruments in the basement).

Bill had had enough. Although he knew Minnesota’s concealed-carry law at the time would never grant him a permit to carry in public, he wanted to secure his home – and secure it but good.

I picked him up around 10. We drove to Richfield Gun and Pawn.

He made a beeline to the store’s large, well-trafficked Assault Rifle section, and started eyeing a Norinco AK47.

I tactfully talked him away from it; for home defense, either a shotgun or a handgun were a much better idea.

I directed him toward a really nifty 12 gauge riot gun. We walked toward the counter…

…and he saw the SKS carbine. It was like a magnetic attraction.

“Bill”, I said, trying to nag him out of it. But between the firepower (semi-automatic, ten round stripper clip-fed magazine) and the price (about $100 at the time), it…well, “sent the message” he wanted sent.

I talked him into buying a box of soft-point rounds (the better for shooting indoors) along with a couple of boxes of cheap Egyptian hardball, and we drove out to Bill’s Gun Range in Robbinsdale. We set up on the line, I walked him through the safety rules (it’s always loaded), and he fired the first shots of his life, busting off five shots at a paper target.

And he came up smiling. My first convert.

Another true believer.

I had created a monster, as events turned out – but in a good way.

I mean, in this bit here?

Oddly, I think my stepson got quoted in exactly this same piece, ten years ago.

The Minnesota Monitor – the region’s Soros-funded propaganda outlet – has been doing its best, it seems, to burnish its rep as a “news” outlet; hiring Steve “Mister Furious” Perry, getting its staff to write more like reporters and less like snot-nosed polemicists, the whole thing.  Is it too little, too late?  We’ll see…

But at the end of the day, the site shows the danger of being a bought-and-paid for propaganda outlet; when its masters want propaganda distributed, truth is the first casualty.

Andy Birkey’s not a bad guy; he’s a fine writer, and he’s written some good stuff. But he covers the gay beat; while he’s no worse at Second Amendment coverage than anyone else in the local Soros/Leftymedia, this piece, frankly, starts with a basis in complete ignorance, and moves into utter fabrication.

Birkey doesn’t get far.

A National Rifle Association-backed bill is likely to be heard in the House Public Safety Committee this week, possibly Thursday. Dubbed the “Stand Your Ground” bill, HF 498 would make it easier to kill someone in self-defense.

That’s just plain wrong.

Read the bill. And then read this piece I wrote last week, in which I sum up the law-abiding citizen’s burden under current law when claiming self-defense. I spelled out the rules:

In Minnesota, if you choose and need to defend yourself or your family with lethal force, you must meet all four of the following criteria:

1. You can’t be a willing participant in the struggle: you can’t dive into a fist-fight and then shoot your way out of it.
2. You must reasonably fear death or “great bodily harm”: That means “a jury’s gotta buy it”.  And “great bodily harm” has a legal meaning; it means you gotta get hurt very, very badly. 
3. The force you use must be reasonable under the circumstances: If the police come to your house to find a body with no knife or gun, but clutching your TV, Tivo and monitor, you might have trouble with this one.
4. And finally, You must make every reasonable means to de-escalate the confrontation: That means you must back away from the altercation. In the home, that means you have to try to back away. There are limits, of course; if you are in a wheelchair, you’re not expected to develop superhuman strength and agility; if it’s -40 outside and there’s a howling wind and you have an infant, no jury and few prosecutors would fault you for shooting; if you have kids sleeping upstairs and your abusive ex-spouse has come through the door with a chainsaw, backing away is a very relative thing.

The bill changes nothing about the citizen’s obligation to prove that self-defense with lethal force was justified. It merely tightens up a few of the technicalities.

Let’s summarize what’s in SF446, starting in Subdivision 2 (Subd. 1 is definitions, although they’re worth reading as well)

• It clarifies the circumstances under which defending oneself (or someone else) with lethal force is authorized. It changes current law in that it allows self-defense when someone “Reasonably Believes” (i.e. – a jury will buy it) they could sustain “substantial” or “great” bodily harm (#2 in the criteria above). These are legal terms with real meanings; we’ll get to them below. (Subdivision 2)
• Subdivision 3 says an individual “may stand the individual’s ground in any place where the individual has a legal right to be, and may use all force and means, including deadly force, that the individual believes is required to succeed in defense. The individual may meet force with superior force, so long as the individual’s objective is defense.” In other words, as long as you have an otherwise legitimate claim of self-defense, (you meet all four of the criteria above), you are not obligated to retreat from the fight (criterion 4, above)
• Subdivision 4 states that a homeowner may legally presume that someone (unknown to thehomeowner!) who is breaking into their house or car can be presumed to be a potentially lethal threat.
• Subdivision 5 essentially states that the provisions above can be part of a legal claim of self-defense.

And that’s it. It means that a homeowner doesn’t have to figure in his head “if that’s a razor blade, does that mean I only have a fear of “substantial” rather than “great” bodily harm?” (Zealous prosecutors have put otherwise law-abiding citizens in jail over that in the past). It means that a homeowner doesn’t have to parse a burglar, rapist or robber’s intent when they find them in their homes (a friend of mine spent years and tens of thousands of dollars defending himself against a zealous prosecutor for shooting a warning shot at a burglar. In his or her home).

The bill would replace existing statutes that justifies the taking of life in cases where bodily harm or death is eminent, [let’s cut Birkey some slack and assume he means “imminent” – Ed.] and create a broader set of circumstances for which “shooting first” is immune criminal prosecution.

Point of order: In self-defense situations, “shooting second” can be a really bad idea. I’m not sure who in the media came up with the “Shoot First Bill” meme, but it’s kinda a dumb one.

Introduced by State Sen. Pat Pariseau, R-Farmington, and Rep. Tony Cornish, R-Good Thunder, and supported by a number of Republicans, the bill is opposed by members of law enforcement and isn’t likely to pass the DFL-controlled legislature.

Part of the concern over the bill is that it diminishes the duty to retreat — that the first line of defense is not to kill, but to get out of harm’s way if it is safe to do so.

This “concern” is purely potemkin theatrics. There is no “duty to retreat”; to claim self-defense, one must currently show a “reasonable” attempt to de-escalate the conflict. Of course, “reasonable” means reasonable to a jury, sitting in a nice, secure jury room, in daylight, after having a county prosecutor ask them, rhetorically, “don’t you think he could have gone to the second floor, or out the door?” in a nice, brightly-lit courtroom, with all the time they need to make the decision.

Attorneys also fear that the bill could give criminals a license to kill.

“This expansion of the right to use deadly force would apply equally to criminals as to law-abiding citizens,” wrote Dakota County attorney James C. Backstrom. “It would create viable self-defense claims in situations like bar fights. It could allow rival gangs to shoot at one another with impunity. With no duty to retreat, anyone could claim they were responding to a threat of serious harm and were therefore justified in killing a person.”

I’m going to emphasize the next bit rather intensely:

This would seem to be patent misleading bullshit. There is nothing in Cornish/Pariseau’s bills about repealing the first of the four criteria; “one can not be a willing participant.  There’s nothing in the bill that would change any of the other requirements – that the fear of harm and the force used must be “reasonable”, as in “must convince a jury”.  Indeed, the bill states specifically that the law-abiding shooter may only shoot where the individual has a legal right to be (see above!); it says nothing about revoking any of the qualifications for a shooting to be considered self-defense!

I will be seeking comment from County Attorney Backstrom’s office on this statement, which would seem at best to be misleading, and at worst to be flatly at odds with legal reality, and issued for purposes of poltiical propaganda.  (Indeed, Backstrom’s op-ed piece, from which the quote is drawn, would seem to be a good candidate for a serious fisking).   I’ll (try to) be charitable, here; Backstrom could be talking about far-fetched technical defenses (when lawyers say things like “could create viable cases”, it means they’re stretching and stretching hard…).

The Cornish bill would remove some of the county prosecutor’s discretion in prosecuting otherwise law-abiding gun owners; it’d take away some of the need to parse the intent of people breaking into homes and cars.

That is all.

To pass this bill off as anything else with no attempt to get the broader legal and factual context is to serve as a DFL propaganda tool, and to toss aside any claim to journalistic credibility.

(I’d love to have left a comment about this in Birkey’s post – but apparently George Soros isn’t so flush that he’ll buy them a comment engine that actually functions..)

If you’ve read this blog before, you’ve read this bit at least once.

In Minnesota, if you choose and need to defend yourself or your family with lethal force, you must meet all four of the following criteria:

1. You can’t be a willing participant in the struggle: you can’t dive into a fist-fight and then shoot your way out of it.
2. You must reasonably fear death or “great bodily harm”: That means “a jury’s gotta buy it”.
3. The force you use must be reasonable under the circumstances: If the police come to your house to find a body with no knife or gun, but clutching your TV, Tivo and monitor, you might have trouble with this one.
4. And finally, You must make every reasonable means to de-escalate the confrontation: That meansyou must back away from the altercation.  In the home, that means you have to try to back away.  There are limits, of course; if you are in a wheelchair, you’re not expected to develop superhuman strength and agility; if it’s -40 outside and there’s a howling wind and you have an infant, no jury and few prosecutors would fault you for shooting; if you have kids sleeping upstairs and your abusive ex-spouse has come through the door with a chainsaw, backing away is a very relative thing.

This last one is one of the most confusing.  Does it mean, assuming that you got parts 1-3 right, that you:

• can defend yourself in your house, but not in your garage?
• must retreat from the first floor to the second floor?
• must – barring any other people in the house or other circumstances – back into the far corner of your house before you shoot?
• can’t defend yourself if a rapist catches you on the patio or in the far corner of the back yard?
• are legally vulnerable to a zillion other situational permutations?

The answer – as for so many of life’s persistent questions – is “it depends”.  In this case, it depends on the zeal of your county prosecutor; if you have a zealous one who hates citizen self-defense (like Amy Klobuchar was, or Sue Gaertner is), that translates to “big legal bills” at best, prison time and a lifetime in civil court at worst.

Solving that – removing some of the vagaries of defending ones’ own home against a serious threat covered by all four of the criteria above – is the point of an eminently sensible bill introduced in the Minnesota House by Rep. Tony Cornish (R, naturally, Good Thunder) that would, as I read it, clarify that corner of Minnesota’s self-defense law.

Naturally, since it empowers real people against criminals, the Strib opposes it, for reasons that are stupid and misleading even by the Strib Editorial Board’s standards.

Oh, it starts out with the truth.

Well, at least conveniently-redacted bit of it:

It’s one of the most frightening scenarios imaginable: While enjoying the sanctity of your own home, intruders break in. When that happens, shouldn’t you have every right to defend yourself?

Under current Minnesota laws, you can.

Which is true, in the same sense that I “can” get a date with Scarlett Johannsen.  The devil – or, in this case, the “long prison term” – is in the details.

Minnesota statutes already indemnify citizens from criminal charges if they wound or kill an intruder inside their home.

I’m no lawyer (and either is Joel Rosenberg, but I’ll page him anyway, since he both wrote the book and taught my concealed carry class), but that indemnification is subject to your shooting being legally justified – and that fourth criterion, “backing away”, is so legally ambiguous and open to so much interpretation.

Hence, the Strib is being technically accurate, but literally misleading.

I may be the only person in the western world who can say this truthfully:  I was converted to conservatism while an English major in college.

My major advisor – Dr. James Blake (easily the finest among many, many fine professors I had at my obscure but talent-rich little college in the middle of nowhere) was so far to the right, he described himself as a “monarchist”, with a straight face; he also introduced me to a series of writers that helped push me along on my journey from left to right; Dostoevski, Solzhenitzyn, Tolstoii, Paul Johnson, and even P.J. O’Rourke. 

Dr. Blake and I weren’t entirely alone; the other upper-division major at the time was a guy named Scott.  We’d been friends since high school; a year older than me, we’d played guitar together in any number of abortive bands; he wrote a column under the pseudonym “Madagascar Red” in the college paper that I edited which, with the hindsight and gauzy soft focus that two decades’ remove grants all things, was as funny as anything in The Onion.  Honest.

Anyway, Scott was another conservative in the English department.  And as my own journey to the right coalesced, the three of us became something of a conservative brickbat-throwing machine at Jamestown.

The school’s library was run by quite a different specimen – a woman who was, in addition to the wife of my History minor advisor, a bit to the left of even the academic norm.  A well-meaning sort, but…well…

She had a “suggestion book” at the entrance to the stacks; if someone wanted to see a book or other resource, they could write it into the book.  There was a column for the librarian’s response. 

One chilly October morning, Scott and I walked into the library.  He looked around, grabbed a pen, and wrote down “Please get a copy of God And Man At Yale“. 

The response took a week or two; finally, the librarian wrote something snarky and dismissive.

Wrong move.

In an exchange that resembled a blog comment section, fifteen years before blogs were invented, Scott and the librarian mixed it up – he making the case for including this key, vital book in the collection, she backpedalling and trying to justify (eventually) its exclusion.

I think Scott graduated without seeing the issue resolved. 

The long and short of it being that the whole fracas was my introduction to the pure, simple joy of being a conservative underdog, duking it out with the leaden, lumpen establishment.

Just saying; without that dust-up on William F. Buckley’s behalf, this blog might never have existed.

My mom had an unexpectedly-long layover yesterday on her way from DC to Minot (“America’s Vacationland”), so Bun and I went out to the airport (Zam was out with friends) to visit for a bit.

We were sitting in the terminal lobby by the baggage check, when I saw a guy guy holding one of those signs that drivers hold up to get their incoming fares’ attention. The name on the sign was “Mr. Roarke”.

And before I could catch myself, I thought:

“Well, isn’t that nice! He finally gets a vacation! And I always wondered if he’d get so sick of his island paradise that he’d actually come to Minneapolis in February for a break?”

“And by the way – does Tattoo yell “Bozz! Da ground! Da ground!” when the plane slips through the overcast?”

I shook the thought off, and continued visiting with Mom.

When I first moved to the Twin Cities, I had a few interviews in some of Minneapolis’ older office buildings – the Sexton, the Endicott, the Grain Exchange, among others.  I was fascinated; they were like snapshots out of a Sam Spade movie, with pebbled-glass door windows and painted names and offices straight out of film noir.  I’ve often thought that if Salem Radio came calling, I’d build a studio in one of those old buidings (hello, Pioneer!).  Call it “Global Import Export”, maybe.

While I don’t agree with much I read at the Strib, it’d seem Eric Ringham has been reading some of the same stuff:

A man ought to have an office in the Grain Exchange. He ought to walk past classy architectural details on his way to work in the morning.

He ought to hear the sound of his wingtips echoing off the marble as he approaches his office.

A man ought to wear a suit and a proper hat. He ought to wear Florsheims, not Rockports. If he wants to get comfortable, he can loosen his tie and cock his hat to one side.

He ought to work for himself. Maybe as a private eye, maybe as a highly paid novelist. He shouldn’t be particular.

A man ought to have a frosted-glass door with his name etched on it. Maybe the name of his partner, too, if he has one. (When a man’s partner is killed, he’s supposed to do something about it. Not that a man should compare himself to Bogart.)

OK.  Maybe he’s reading too much of the same stuff.

But you get the idea.

On the chance that you hadn’t noticed.

I’m running around like a student loan default advisor at an Obama rally today.  Mighty busy.

Hopefully more regular in the next few days.

(more…)

That this blog kicked off.

The day had gone like this:

1. I’d been at work – at a squalid little dotcom in Minnetonka.
2. I’d gone to an appointment. There, I found a copy of Time magazine.
3. There, I read a piece about the new breed of conservative intellectuals. One of them was Andrew Sullivan. A sidebar discussed “blogger.com”, the software he used to produce the site.
4. I raced back to work and went to Andrewsullivan.com for the first time. And read. And read. And read.
5. And, as you can see by the timestamp, I went home after work, fixed dinner, got the kids situated, raced out to Blogger.com, and launched the first-ever version of Shot In The Dark.

This blog and I have been through a lot together – and although I haven’t used it as a personal diaryblog, little bits and pieces do dribble out. This blog has seen me through:

• A gruelling year of unemployment and underemployment (five and six months, respectively)
• Four serious girlfriends. Er…three and a half serious girlfriends, to get technical.
• Rediscovering a social life. When I started the blog, I was a barely-divorced guy whose perspective was shaped by years of dealing with little kids. Via blogging, I met a whole new social circle – the NARN guys, the MOB, the Salem Radio crew, and many, many more.
• I recovered some old acquaintances – I can’t tell you how many high school friends I’ve reconnected with via this blog; hey Chris, Nancy, Martha, Dan, Janice, Tom, Jack, Alayne, Pennie, both of you Dans…well, OK. I guess I can tell you how many.  Also some different acquaintances, from college (yo, MLP and Mr. P) and afterward (hiya, Bergses!).  Anyway, here’s a shout-out to Jamestown in the house.
• And of course, best of all, all the many new friends I’ve made.
• Six jobs (all but the first and the most recent of them contracting gigs)
• A near-accidental fall back into my first love, talk radio, including realizing the great dream from my twenties, hosting a national network talk show (actually, 13 times, for Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Prager).
• Astounding growth from my kids; when the blog started, Bun was 10 and Zam had just turned nine (the day before, in fact). Today, they are 16 and (yesterday) 15. My elementary-school kids are now teenagers, and perilously close to going out into the real world.

I have a lot of readers who’ve been regulars since almost day one. How can you tell if you’re one of them? If you remember when the site’s original greenish-tan background, you’ve been reading a long time! I implemented the site’s current basic design in March of 2003, and have managed to keep things more or less the same despite leaving Blogger for Moveable Type in March of ’04, and again for WordPress in November of ’06. Expect a direct-to-brain feed, at this rate, by October of 2010.

Anyway – thanks to all of you who stop by and brighten my day by paying attention to my logorrheac screedmongering.

Update: Commenter “Old Buddy” – who is among the list of high school classmates I list above, although I’m not saying which – notes that I forgot to shout out to Pennie. D’oh! How could I forget? Hey, Pennie!

…Zam will be starring in a episode of my “Twenty Years Ago Today” series.

He came along at about 12:20AM, fifteen years ago this morning at United Hospital. He was two weeks late, and was covered from head to toe with a bright crimson rash; his forehead was pushed down over his eyes, which I didn’t really get to see until he was a couple of days old.

Fifteen years later he has eyes – which, like any normal teenager, are usually screwed into a disdainful scowl – and a forehead (or so I remember – he usually has one of those wool caps on).

And he’s still Zam, and I think I’ll keep him.
Happy Birthday, not-so-little guy!

It was Monday, February 1, 1988. 

Working for the DJ service, the drill was to call in every Monday to find out where you’d be working for the coming week.  Guys who did mostly mobile shows – weddings and parties where they’d take a mobile rig out on the road – would get their locations and their rig assignments.  Guys who worked clubs – I was one of them – would get what club they were working on what night.  It made a handy way of firing people, if you were passive-aggressive; some jocks just stopped getting assignments for a few weeks; they usually took the hint.

I had the opposite problem.  After six weeks of club jocking, the service wished they had another of me.  They had me working six nights a week.  Which, being paid by the night, was a good thing.

The previous week:

• Monday: Off
• Tuesday:  Jams (the dive in Brooklyn Center)
• Wednesday: City Limits (the blah place in Rosemount)
• Thursday: Jams
• Friday: City Limits
• Saturday: George’s
• Sunday: City Limits (the snooziest night of the week; I usually ended up playing for the staff and two drunks by 11ish)

George’s was, of course, the highlight of the week.  All the more so because of Cathy.

So I called in for the week’s assignments.  I talked with Biff, the spiky-haired guy.

• Monday: Off
• Tuesday:  Jams
• Wednesday: City Limits
• Thursday: Jams
• Friday: City Limits
• Saturday: Jams
• Sunday: City Limits

“Um…”, I started, “No George’s?”

“Nah” said Biff.  “Couldn’t close the deal.  We were too expensive”. 

Crap.  I was already getting sick of Jams and “Slims”. 

After I got off the phone, my roommate Dan – the new, gay roommate – walked in. 

“Did you bring in the mail Friday??

No, I answered.

“I was supposed to get my paycheck”. 

Ow.  I’ll keep an eye peeled, I replied.  I noted that I’d gotten my paycheck…

I filed it away.  Maybe Wyatt knew something.

It was Saturday, January 31, 1988.

I worked my third straight weekend at George’s in Fridley. They totally loved me there. Which was a very cool thing.

The roommate situation had stabilized – sort of. After we kicked Chris (the crazy guy who earned a living from welfare, working at Wendy’s, and shoplifting clothes from Dayton’s, and who’d left his cat locked in his room for three days) out, we’d taken out an ad in the “Roommates” section of the paper. A young genetics major at the “U”, “Ron”, moved in. Nice kid; short, clean-cut, laid-back…

…gay. Very very gay.

That didn’t faze me.

But when Ron tried to bring a boyfriend over, Wyatt – the aggressive libertine – blew a gasket. “I don’t like fags”, he muttered in the fake arklahoma accent he affected (he was the son of a very wealthy family from downstate Connecticut, actually) whenever he wanted to make a point.

Things got very tense, very fast.  Wyatt started actively antagonizing Ron. 

Ah, but that was the home life.  And I was at George’s, again.  And I totally rocked the joint.  Which had its benefits.

A big one – I drank free, there.  I found this out when I stopped by there one day on my way home from a bar that the agency had sent me to to “learn the joint” – spend a couple of hours learning the gear, watching another DJ work the room, etc.  Tony wouldn’t take my money.

This was a very good thing.

So I’d brought a date there the previous Tuesday, my night off.

Let’s back up a bit. It was some girl I’d met at a gig with my band, the previous year – and you may read anything you want into the fact that I don’t mention her until a eight months after we met and almost a week after our date – but only if you read absolutely nothing interesting into it.  We ran into each other at the various rock ‘n roll bars around town. I figured what the heck – let’s ask her out.

Anyway. 

I took her to George’s – partly because Tony wouldn’t take my money. A nice cheap date was the best one. Plus it made me look all connected – walking into the bar, having the owner (who might have looked Italian, it’s not like my date was going to know) welcome me like I was a member of the family and refuse my attempt to pay the bill…

…yeah, that rocked.

Oh, yeah.  Saturday night.

I had the whole floor packed.  The assistant kitchen managers had learned not to come waddling up to the booth to order me to play what they wanted – by this point, knowing that I had Tony’s blessing, I was pretty much off-limits to them.  And for the first time in my six-week-old DJing career, I achieved something that only happened a few times in the next several miserable years of club-jocking; the floor was so full, so jumping, so packed, it left me buzzing.  The same sort of high I got when my band had a (rare) great night…

…and it was me, dammit!

Tony and Papa George liked me just fine.

…and have them try an infinite number of careers, and eventually you’ll get lucky.

Actually, I got lucky ten years ago, when I switched into my current career. And it seems that people are finally sitting up and noticing, as FastCompany’s list of “Ten Jobs You Didn’t Know You Wanted” does:

Interaction designer
Interaction designers work at all stages of product development to design innovative and user-friendly products. In addition to wearing the traditional hat of a designer, they work with executives to define goals for products and systems in development. They also investigate how people actually engage with new products and systems by creating “personas,” hypothetical users with constructed life stories, to predict their reactions.

Although many interaction designers have advanced degrees in design, such a background isn’t a prerequisite, says David Fore, head of consulting services at Cooper, a pioneering interaction design firm. Fore previously worked as a reporter for industry publications — valuable experience, given that interaction designers’ research requires “the skills of a reporter and an anthropologist,” according to him.

 Reporter and anthropologist?  Sure.  Add engineer, negotiator and psychologist.

In addition to the competitive salary, interaction designers enjoy the opportunity “to learn about every walk of life and industry imaginable,” says Fore. “There’s working with stock brokers, working with a golf course superintendent, an advertising creative director, working with a nurse to build infusion pumps. Everyone needs product design.”

They don’t all know it, but they do, indeed.

It was Saturday, January 16, 1988.  A bitterly cold night.

And I was on my way to Fridley.

Well, I was on my way to try to find Fridley.

I’d gotten a call from Scott at the DJ service; they had a different bar for me to try, and they figured I’d be perfect for it.  The bar was “George Is In Fridley”, usually pronounced “George’s In Fridley”. 

“The place is kinda funky”, Scott said.  “Weird crowd – kinda half brothers, half northeast-side rednecks.  It’s also kinda a weird situation; the dance floor is also restaurant space; your first two hours will be playing dinner music.  Then they clear it off, and it’s dance time!”

“And the owners…”  he said, describing the family that ran the place. 

We’ll get back to that.

It was Saturday.  And in two and a half years in the Twin Cities, I’d never once driven to Northeast Minneapolis, other than whizzing through on 35W.  Not knowing the freeway connections at all, I drove down University for miles and miles, eventually hanging a left and going over to Marshall which, just at the Fridley/Minneapolis border, turned into River Road.

And was where the bar stood, inches north of the inter-city border.  Across River Road stood the huge FMC plant; you could see brand-new naval gun turrets, bound for the Navy’s latest class of destroyers, sitting on rail cars, the haze gray paint job standing out under the yard lights against the dismal industrial background.  George’s looked like a big pole barn, with a gravel parking lot and shabby doors covered with beer ads.

I walked inside, and found “Tony”, the boss.  He was a padded, businesslike-looking Greek man.  “You are Mitch”, he said, sizing me up.  “Mitch Berg”, I answered, shaking his hand.

We walked through the bar into the main room; it looked like it’d been a ballroom in the forties, with a slick wooden dance floor surrounded by raised restaurant seating on three sides (and covered with tables about 2/3 full of diners), and, at the far end, a DJ booth towering high above a raised stage that looked like it was big enough to hold a small “big” band at one point. 

We walked to a long table, at the head of the room, set aside from the bar and across the floor from the booth.  There were chairs only on the side away from the booth.  At the center chair sat an elderly, swarthy-looking gentleman, who was talking with a couple of women in waitress uniforms and signing some piece of paperwork, looking a bit like Richard Blaine in the opening scenes of Casablanca; the diners got progressively younger, the farther from the center you went. 

“This is my father, George, the owner of the bar.  Papa, this is Mitch…Berg?” he said and asked.  I nodded, and shook his hand.

“You do good job for us?  This should be good night!” he said, smiling, in a manner that implied that it wasn’t a question.

“You bet!”

And then someone else – looked like a kitchen manager – got the floor, standing before Papa George as Tony led me to the booth.  We climbed two levels of risers and a final set of steps – the floor of the booth was a solid seven feet above the dance floor – and he showed me how to turn all the equipment on.

“Hokay, you can do this.  One thing”, he said, turning to me before climbing back down; “you will get people coming up here telling you what to play.  You are the only one who decides, hokay?”

“Gotcha”, I replied, smiling, puzzled.

———-

I started out the evening playing dinner music – quieter stuff, light jazz, doo-wop and some slower oldies.  After half an hour, a pudgy, scowling woman in a white service jacket threaded through the tables and climbed the risers with some difficulty. 

“I’m Jessica, the assistant kitchen manager.  And you have to play some danceable stuff.  You gotta start getting things going here…”

“Er, we have about half an hour of dinner left…”

“I’m not asking!  I’m telling!  Get things moving!” she said with executive finality as she turned and climbed back down the risers.

Remembering Tony’s dictum, I changed nothing.

About half an hour later, as the diners on the floor finished up and started dissipating, the bouncers and bussers started clearing and removing the tables from the floor.  Another woman – taller, thinner, younger, in a white shirt and black skirt and with long auburn hair – climbed the risers.  “You’re the DJ”, she asked.  A name-tag on her blouse said “Tanya;  Asst. Bar Manager”.

“Yes, Tanya, I am”.

“Hokay”, she slurred as I smelled booze on her breath, “I’m the assistant bar manager, and you need to slow things down so the people can eat”.

“Will do”, I said, as she turned and hopped down the risers.  I changed, again, nothing.

As the floor cleared, I started picking up the pace – more rock ‘n roll, a little accessible R’nB – and watched Papa George at the head table.  Tony had joined him, sitting at Papa’s side.  Another guy – looked like another of George’s sons – sat at the other side.  Other couples flanked them all – there were probably a dozen people, all sitting on the same side, all facing me across the floor.  It felt a little like playing to the Corleones.

Oh, I knocked it dead that night.  Tony climbed the risers around midnight.  “You good!”, he said, nodding approvingly at the packed dance floor and the crowded bar behind it.  “You real good”.

Via Cake Eater Kathy, it’s “the Privilege Meme”.

The point is to bold each of the statements that applied/applies to me.

Original source: The list is based on an exercise developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. The exercise developers ask that if you participate in this blog game, you acknowledge their copyright. So I do. Yaaaay Will Meagan, Angie, Minnette, Drew and Stacy!

Father went to college

Father finished college

Mother went to college—I think for a semester or two (Schwoops. As Keith Moon is my witness, I thought I’d heard it was a semester or two, but Mom emails to say she actually went to three years of college. My bad).

Mother finished college

Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor – UPDATED: Mom emails to note that a distant relative on her side was an attorney and governor of Iowa.

Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers – dad was a high school teacher.

Had more than 50 books in your childhood home

Had more than 500 books in your childhood home – I wouldn’t be surprised if there were 5,000.

Were read children’s books by a parent

Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18-–Not really – I learned cello in the elementary school orchestra. When I was 14, my dad paid one of his friends to show me a couple of things on the guitar. I think it was four lessons. It was useful.

Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18

The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively – it’s kind of a dumb statement. White conservative Christian males take a lump or two.

Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18 – I think I was 33. And I regretted it.

Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs – Dad helped out. And I got a decent scholarship, and a couple of grants.

Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs

Went to a private high school

Went to summer camp – In seventh and eighth grade, I won scholarships (thanks, American Legion!) to the International Music Camp on the cello. One week sessions that were spent practicing like mad for a huge honkin’ concert in the International Peace Gardens.

Had a private tutor before you turned 18

Family vacations involved staying at hotels Once, when we were going to the Tetons and the car broke down, we spent most of the vacation money getting the car fixed. We had enough to stay a night in a hotel in Livingston Montana. We went to the occasional lake cabin, though, which was a lot more fun.

Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18 – Um, mostly? But from, like, Woolworths and Penney’s?

Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them

There was original art in your house when you were a child – Yes, but Mom painted it all. She was quite talented.

Had a phone in your room before you turned 18 – I didn’t have my own phone until I was 26.

You and your family lived in a single family house

Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home-

You had your own room as a child From age twelve on – always shared with my brother.

Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course – huh?

Had your own TV in your room in High School

Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College – no, but I bought a CD when I was 16 with my radio earnings. 12.6% at the height of the Carter Stagflation!

Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16

Went on a cruise with your family

Went on more than one cruise with your family

Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up—such as were available in the middle of North Dakota? Yes.

You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family—The commandment to not waste heat was pretty clear.

UPDATE:  The Night Writer did the meme – and added:

The point is to make us feel guilty about being born with certain advantages. To which my response would be, “What is your point?” I hope this wasn’t the result of hundreds of thousands of dollars sunk into a research study of the obvious. I mean, couldn’t that money have been better spent on something like finding out why monkeys scream during sex? Perhaps a better response from me, though, would be “So what?” — as in “So what do you want me to do about it?”

Am I supposed to go around feeling meek and guilty for an accident of birth over which I had no control over? I mean, that was a decision made way above my pay-grade. Similarly, should I be upset over the injustice that Michael Jordan gets the privilege of being 6′ 9″ with mad skills, or that Sean Connery gets that voice? Or should I go to Japan and have people treat me differently, in overt or subtle ways, because I’m different? They probably would, and I’d probably be upset about it, but the only thing in my power to change about the situation is my attitude.

The subtext of the meme was fairly clear – the authors tipped their hand with the “are people like you portrayed favorably on TV” question, as if such a question weren’t meaninglessly-broad enough to be useful only to…

…pop sociologists, I guess.

It was Thursday, January 14, 1988.

It was cold out. 

Wyatt, my roommate, was – as noted before – exhibiting signs of every kind of addiction one can manifest.

• Smoking – 2-3 packs a day.
• Drinking – Low-grade, probably – somewhere between a six and a twelve of cheap beer a day. 
• Drugs – torching up daily.
• Sex – He had a steady girlfriend, as noted before – Teresa, a nurse at a local nursing home.  And when she wasn’t around, he was usually bringing home someone else, 3-5 times a week.  Envious though I was, I knew it couldn’t be healthy – especially since he bragged that condoms were for dorks. 
• Gambling – poker games, interspersed with spur-of-the-moment trips to the casinos or, occasionally, Fargo to play blackjack.

And, on top of it – odd purchases.  One day, he brought home a dog, a fuzzy black Chow he’d named “Muki”.  I didn’t know dogs, much, but I did know that Chows were kinda big, and had horrible tempers. 

And two days later, he brought home another, a huge Akita named “Jack”. 

And three days later, a Samoyed named “Rosco”. 

Three huge dogs in a three-bedroom side-by-side duplex.

Jack turned out to be dumb as a bag of hammers, and kind of nasty and with a knack of getting in the way. 

Rosco was much worse; he’d walk out to the middle of the floor in front of you, squat down and poo all over the place.  And when you got up to whack his head and take him outside, he’d flee to the corner and whiz all over the place in panic.  The boy had issues, and didn’t last long – maybe three weeks – before Wyatt sold him.  And then bought another Samoyed who, as luck would have it, was equally crazy.  The Samoyeds didn’t last long, thankfully.

But Muki turned out to be a doll; loveable, sweet-tempered (especially for a Chow), affectionate.  

Life had settled into a bit of a routine in the past few weeks.

1. Wake up.
2. Put on a record
3. Make some oatmeal.
4. Go through my notes to see if I was due to make any follow-up calls to radio stations.  Although I wasn’t doing this every single day; I was focusing on biweekly followups with program directors who’d expressed interest (at this point Fall River, New Bedford, Santa Rosa, Raleigh, and maybe a few others) and trolling for rumors of other stations that were switching to “talk” formats.
5. Take a walk.  Sometimes to the library, sometimes to noplace at all.  Often, I’d take Muki and, rarely, Jack, with.  They needed the walk, I needed the focus – and there was always the chance that I’d meet a girl, although in mid-January that was a little dicier.
6. Occasionally, go to Henri’s and have a beer and shoot some pool.
7. Make dinner – ramen, a stuffed potato, or maybe a frozen pizza.
8. Go to one of the bars I was working – Jams and City Limits.
9. Come home, read, go to bed.

Lather, rinse, repeat.  That was really pretty much it.

…to indulge in schadenfreud, may I just briefly say ha ha ha ha ha, you bastards.

Thanks.

I desperately need to remodel my bathroom…

…and who takes out a blogad on my site?

Just saying.  Eerie.