I guess the winter makes you laugh a little slower,
Makes you talk a little lower about the things you could not show

It was Thursday, December 31st, 1987. 

I was working at “Jams” in Brooklin Center again.  My boss, the spiky-haired guy at the DJ service, said they – especially Scowly, the manager – loved me out there. 

It was wet and sloppy out, and I had a miserable cold; sinus congestion, hacking my lungs out, brutal headache.   Barely functional.  But I needed the money real bad, and the DJ service was desperately short of jocks.

So off to the bar I drove, around 7:00.  I had not much better to do that night.  Wyatt was going to a New Years party with Teresa; Chris was packing up to move. 

I celebrated with one of Jams’ burger baskets – happy new year to me! – before I started turning on the gear.

The good news; one of the bartenders took pity on my state.  He brought me a shot of Jeszynowka – a brand of Polish blackberry brandy made from (this is important) blackberries (as opposed to grain alcohol with “blackberry” syrup).  “Best decongestant and cough syrup ever made”, he said.  And danged if it didn’t work.  Or at least if it didn’t feel like it’d worked.  I had another, just to be sure.

My condition aside, it was a great evening.  The bar – not a big place, mind you – was packed to the gills.  The DJ booth – a square formica “bar” with maybe twelve square feet of space – was an oasis of elbow room. 

And the dance floor was packed – the first time I’d ever had that happen in almost a whole week of being a club jock. 

Scowly really liked me.

———-

The bartender who’d sicced me on the Jeszynowkia – “Tom” was his name – was a genial, stoner kind of guy.  He invited me to a party at one of the bowling alley managers’ places after closing time.  It was just up the street, in Brooklyn Center.

I got there – a tiny post-war prefab just north of 100 and Shingle Creek – around 1:30 AM.  It was almost as crowded as the bar had been.  The air was blue-green with cigarette and pot smoke.  The first keg of the evening was starting to sputter, as someone started tapping #2.  I knew nobody – Tom the bartender never showed up.  Nobody knew me.  A couple was arguing in the corner.  I struck up a conversation about the Vikings with someone who asked me if I was working hard, or hardly working.  I left around 2:15. 

I have to get out of this racket, I thought as I picked my way through the icy streets back to I94.

———-

I got home around 2:40 or so.  The tart tang of pot smoke covered the smell of male cat spray, finally.  Wyatt was in the kitchen making some scrambled eggs, with a borderline-chubby, late-teen/early-twentysomething girl.  Not Teresa.

“Hey!  This is Ann!”

I waved “hi” as I went up to my room, locking it behind me.  I reached into the closet, under a pile of dirty laundry, and grabbed a plastic water jug with a couple of inches of cheap gin in the bottom – where I’d been hiding it from Wyatt – and poured a couple of fingers into a plastic mug on my nightstand. 

I carefully hid the jug again, and sat at my desk, pushed up against the wall by the window across from my bed, and slowly sipped the gin as I looked out on the street, the streetlamp shining with crystalline intensity in the frigid night air.  I caught the faint whiff of the slowly-dissipating funk of male cat spray over the cheap-gin aroma as I put my feet up on the desktop, and took a long drag as Wyatt’s headboard started to bang against the wall.

Happy Friggin’ New Year, I thought, hoping this’d be the last one like this.

Yep.  Last one like this.  1988’s gonna be my year.

Last year, I made the big mistake of posting my “resolutions” – which weren’t resolutions at all, since I don’t do them; they were goals – in this space.

Or was it a mistake?

Let’s look back (answers in blue):

1. I’m in vastly better shape than I was a year ago. Now is no time to backslide; joining the “Y” (for the kids and I) in about two weeks (Did it!)
2. In a similar vein, now that I’m working in downtown, I will be well able to bike to work when the weather improves, especially in the summer (when I don’t have to drive kids to school and I can get as early a start as I want). That’s the goal for the summer; bike it to work every day weather permits. (I did it, and it was very successful More below).
3. My daughter has had a blinding flash of epiphany re school in this past three months. Need to facilitate my son’s having the same thing (It’s just gotten better for my daughter – it’s been a great year for Bun. She really bloomed at school, and in her summer job. Still working on Zam, but there’s early promise.).
4. My house is the next priority. Going to improve the overall level of housekeeping quite a bit. Even if I have to pay for the help. (OK, not everything can be a raging success. Things improved incrementally, though. It’s an “opportunity” for ’08)
5. Also re the house – I’m going to build that patio I’ve been yammering about for the past two years. (Ummmm…
   
   Will work on it this summer)
6. In many ways, the job I have now is the one I’ve been hoping to find ever since I left StorageTek in 2000; I am, at least nominally, in a leadership position. I’m going to make the most of that in the coming year. (So far so good)
7. The blog – there are a number of things I’ve been dying to do with this blog as it approaches its fifth anniversary, in about a month. More later (Ditto).
8. Also – after nine months of thinking about it, I’m going to try to get my podcast site finally up and on the air in the coming weeks. There’s a technical issue I have to work out – but it’s finally doable (Life is what happens when you’re making other plans, sometimes).
9. As re the NARN – well, the status quo isn’t half bad. We’re starting to see how well the show’s actually been doing; continuing to clobber the competition in head-to-head radio combat. Next year will bring even more fun stuff (Very true!).

OK, so on to the goals for ’08:

1. The bike thing: Start earlier. Indeed, try to start biking to work this spring, before school lets out for the summer, and try to continue after school starts in the fall, to extend my biking season ideally from April through October.  (Alternate option:  gain a LOT of weight, so I can easily conceal an S&W Model 29 or an M1911A1 or something.  Health vs. Firepower…firepower vs. health…oh, screw it, I’ll take the health).
2. That’s gonna involve the Great White Whale of my personal life; getting my kids to get up and reliably get their own butts to school in the morning. It’s going to take some work.
3. Continue Bun’s great success in school. It’s been a huge, and gratifying, turnaround for her.
4. Get Zam to turn the corner.
5. Work hard on enacting True North’s goals for the year – of which much more later.
6. Find the next step for the NARN, and take it. That mostly involves listening for that banging sound, and figuring it’s opportunity rather than just kids leaving bags of burning poop.

So anyway – all the best to all of you!

It was Saturday, December 26, 1988.

I’d driven back to the Twin Cities early in the morning; I’d left Jamestown at a frigid 8AM, and arrived back in the Twins early in the afternoon.

I walked into the house; it reeked of chiba and…something else. I couldn’t quite place it, but it was hideous.

Wyatt was sitting on the living room couch, with a flamboyant-figured, devastatingly-gorgeous blonde woman. Both were wearing bathrobes.

“Dude”, Wyatt grunted. “Hey, Chris locked his cat in his room!”.

Chris – our somewhat-emotionally-challenged roommate – had a cat. The cat usually had leave to wander the house – but Chris had gone to visit his mom for Christmas, down in Burnsville, and locked the cat in his room while he was gone.

I’d never really had pets in my life, so I didn’t quite know the full import of “un-neutered male cat”.

“Oh, hey – this is Teresa”, Wyatt said, nodding to the woman on the couch. “C’mon up…”

I should take a moment to point out that Wyatt, in addition to being a smoker and a drinker and a heavy pot smoker, was an inveterate (albeit inept) gambler. He also had a thing for the ladies; he usually brought a different one home every night. This, however, was the third or fourth time I’d seen Teresa.

“Hi”, I said, following Wyatt to Chris’ room.

“I think she’s gonna be a regular thing”, Wyatt whispered conspiratorially as we walked up the hall to Chris’ door.

“Like, girlfriend?” I asked.

“Sure. She’s awesome”.

Then, a change of subject; “Smell that?”

It smelled bad, and the door was shut. I whipped out my driver’s license, stuck it into the lock, and popped it open…

…and was bowled over by the stench, as the cat ran out between us.

The landlord came over later in the day, took one whiff, and said Chris had to go. “Now”.

———-

I had a new bar to work that night, so I grabbed a quick nap, took a shower, and got ready.

The bar was “Jams”, in Brooklyn Center. It was another bowling-alley bar, smaller and smokier and more-cramped than “City Limits”, but a shorter drive. They also made a really mean burger basket.

I started at 8:30. By 10:15, I had a full floor, and I kept it that way until closing time. The manager – a portly woman in her late thirties with a face frozen in a permanent scowl – came by the booth. “You’re pretty good! Great job!”, she said, scowling.

———-

I came home around 2AM. Wyatt was on the couch with a woman. Not Teresa, in this case; short, dark-haired, very Hispanic-looking.

“Hey, Mitch”, Wyatt said, “This is Ruby”.

…will be pretty nonexistant.

Merry Christmas, all!

Christmas, for me, is a challenge.  And I mean that in a good way.

And I don’t just mean in a theological way – although Easter is the real existential throw-down, Christmas issues challenges to the believer as well.

But for me, the challenge is to both feel and exhibit the spirit of Christmas – really, the plural spirits of Christmas, sacred and social and secular.  And I’m not pollyanna enough not to know that the pressure is there; theologically, the believer wants the season to be a revelation to him/her and the whole family; socially, the pressure is on to be happy, dammit.  For many, the holidays dredge up iffy-to-terrible family memories – I’m lucky that way.  For people with families, the pressure is there to make sure the kids have a memorable time, one that they’ll remember fondly to their own kids, and grandkids, long after we’re gone.  And the idea of failing on any of those fronts – wallowing in childhood angst, feeling stressed and depressed, worrying about the memories you’re leaving your kids – is enough to shave a couple of inches off the top of any holiday joy you might be trying to feel.

It was years ago, surrounded in holiday-time angst and years before I ever heard Dennis Prager do his “Happiness Hour”, that I decided “Bullshit”.  No matter what the financial stress or personal turmoil, I was going to enjoy Christmas, first and foremost, period, end of sentence.  I would put aside whatever angst befell me, and just focus on what mattered; the two vexing-but-wonderful kids that God blessed me with, my extended family, the great blessings I have in my life, and above all the birth of Christ.

And so too this year.  The vexations are there; teenagers, mortgage sweats, the onset of a busy, busy year. 

But the blessings outweigh them logarithmically.  And there is so much to be happy about.

So from Bun, Zam, Clu, Nosemarie, Candy and I, may you have a blessed Christmas season.  If you’re one of my Christian readers, God bless.  If you believe in something else, please accept a big Care package of goodwill, care of the Savior I’m celebrating.  If you believe in nothing, well – have a good couple of days off.  You deserve it too.

If you’re one of my readers serving this country this Christmas, especially overseas, please accept my sincere thanks and the hopes that the New Year will see you home, safe, with your various missions a lot closer to accomplished. 

And thank you all for another great year on this blog.  Having an audience for my little musings, ponderings and rantings is a gift every single day.  Thank you.

It was Wednesday, December 23, 1987.  I’d negotiated a couple of days off from the various bars I’d been working to take my first Christmas at my parents’ place since 1984.

CLOSED CIRCUIT TO MY KIDS:  Skip past the next couple of paragraphs, until you get to the part where it says “KIDS MAY REJOIN THIS POST”.

My guitar player Casey – a fellow Jamestown native – and I carpooled it back to Jamestown for Christmas.

I used to carpool back to Jamestown with a couple of different friends, back then.  My pal Rich and I used to go in on a sixpack of Summit (brand new on the market back then) and drink one every 100 miles, on the road.  Kept us nice and cool for long summer trips.  (Duly noted:  It was stupid, and illegal as hell.  We were 24 and immortal.  So sue us all). 

Casey?  Well, he was a bit more of a drinker than Rich and I, at that time of his life (but then, weren’t we all?).  When I picked him up at his place in Minneapolis, at about four in the afternoon, he brought out a case of Carlings and a pint of peppermint schnapps.

We rolled up Lyndale and out onto I94, heading west, doing our best to bypass the morass of construction on US12, which – someday waaaaay off in the future – was going to be something called “I394”, but at the moment was merely a huge traffic cluster-hug.

We talked about music as we trundled west through the freezing night (below zero, if I remember correctly, although everything that winter seemed like it was below zero).  As the sun set, Casey broke out the beer.  

The rule of thumb – when I was driving back to Jamestown with Rich, and being a “responsible” drinking driver – was one beer every 100 miles.  No more, no faster.

Casey got a running start, popping a couple before I got into them. 

By the time we got to Fargo, we were down to maybe ten beers; I’d had four or five; we were both pretty impaired.

And then it started.  One of the things that had broken up the original band was that Casey and Bill  – and me, I guess, in retrospect – were two-stage drunks.  

• Stage 1:  Jolly, gregarious, happy. 
• Stage 2:  Ugly, belligerent, self-pitying.

Stage 2 kicked in just past Fargo, about eight at night. 

“Mark and Bill don’t like playing with you.  They say you’re a control freak…”, he said.  “They’d like to try a different band”. 

And on.  And on.

I sat, getting more and more numb, only partly from the cheap beer.  Casey kept on talking about how the rest of the band  just plain didn’t like playing with me.  I got quieter and quieter.  Eventually I didn’t respond; I’d take the occasional sip of beer, and sank further and further into my chair.  It would be probably fifteen years before I heard the term “shame spiral”, but I was in one.

We cracked the bottle of Schnapps around Tower City, trading swigs as we rolled across the drift prairie.  Driving across the prairie at night always felt like space travel; besides the occasional cars, the only visible light was the stars and lights from the farmhouses we were passing – and on a dark enough night, sometimes it was hard to tell which was which.

Finally – around 10PM – we pulled into Jamestown.  There were two beers left, and the schnapps was pretty low.  I drove to Casey’s parents’ place…

…and I stumbled as I got out of the car to open the trunk so he could get his stuff.  I was kinda blotto.  It had snuck up on me, but when it finally caught me, it caught me but good.

“So“, I thought as I drove away, keenly aware I shouldn’t be driving at all, “that’s it, then?  The band is toast?”  Things had been pretty awful for a while, but over?

I felt like my stomach sank into my shoes.

Depressed out of my mind, I drove over to Perkins to get some coffee and greasy onion rings and sober up a bit before I went to my parents’ place.   Of the things I’d moved to the Twin Cities to find two years before – a good job, a band, and a cool girlfriend – I’d peaked at two out of three.  And I was back down to zero. 

Square one.

I sat in the same Perkins I’d sat in a few years ago, on a dozen nearly-identical frigid nights, wondering the same things I’d wondered before I left Jamestown in the first place.  What am I going to do when I grow up?  Is there a place out there where I really belong?

I’d always thought so, before.  On this Wednesday night, I wasn’t so sure. 

I’d given it a mighty shot, and – as it seemed as I sat swirling ketchup with piece of onion ring – whiffed. 

Whiffed badly.

KIDS MAY REJOIN THIS POST.

And then I drove to my parents’ house, and had a joyous reunion.

My stepson – my ex-wife’s son from her first marriage – is getting married in New York next April.

He and his fiance were in town on Friday for a bridal shower. Bun and I drove out to Saint Louis Park to attend (Zam, being a typical 14 year old, was more interested in going to the party at the Rec Center than hanging around a condo with a bunch of grownups, even if it included his brother and future sister-in-law. Although he did call as the party was breaking up – Rec had let out early, and could I please drive back to Saint Paul through the freezing rain and come and get him and bring him out to the party? He’s so cute…)

Pardon a little reminiscence, here.

I was Will’s stepfather from age nine to about 17 or so. He graduated from high school roughly about the time of the divorce. I haven’t seen him much since then – not so much through alienation as the scrum of life for a couple of adults in fairly different worlds.

Will’s always been a fairly amazing guy. Blazingly sharp as a kid, he was also a very typical teenager; an awful lot like Zam, in fact, they look very similar when they sleep and act kinda alike when they’re awake (and are equally hard to wake up, come to think of it).

After high school, he took a part-time job with a store in a local “move it yourself” chain. The store – on University Avenue, in Frogtown – was a tumbledown wreck, a dysfunctional mess. Will started as a part-time employee, and in six months was not only managing the place, but had turned it into the region’s star performer. I talked with another store manager in the chain after Will had been there a year and a half or so; “You’re Will‘s stepdad?”, the guy exclaimed. “He’s a rock star in the region!”

He met his fiance, Eve, back in high school. The idealist in me sees the kind of story you want to see in this day and age; they met, they got together, they dated for years; even after she moved back to New York, they had a commuter relationship for several years (and it worked!), he finally moved to New York a few years ago (aided by the company, where he was considered such a key performer that they gave him a regional management job in their Metro NYC office when he said he wanted to move), they got engaged.

The cynic in me thinks…

…oh, who cares what the cynic thinks. I’m going to shut him up for a while.

Anyway. I’m proud of him. And happy for him.

Will has one thing I really envy; having lived in one place into his early twenties, he has one, big, close-knit group of friends, the same people who’ve been in his life since way back when I knew him. It was fun seeing them all again, all grown-up and…adult, in a way that I’d never expected ten-odd years ago. I talked with some of them for the first time in close to ten years; scatterbrained teenagers had turned into…

…well, all manner of adults. Noah – Will’s main pal back then, with whom Will got into all sorts of scrapes and trouble and plenty of fun as well, is a construction project manager (he does a ton of work for a former employer; we know some of the same people), married, with a one-year-old.

It kinda gave me some hope, I thought, after I got home and dealt with another day of Zam-related turmoil.

…
And the cold whack upside the head of realizing that Will is almost exactly the same age, now, as I was when I met his mother. Was I really that…young, then?

Don’t start singing “The Circle of Life” on me, capisce?

Anyway – congrats, Will and Eve. Can’t wait for the wedding.

It was Monday, December 21, 1987.

The DJ service loved me.

I picked up beat-mixing fast. All my years of music paid off in spades; as much as the other guys at the company kvetched about it, it really wasn’t that hard:

• With the first record playing, start the second record in “cue” (playing only in the headphones).
• Speed up the second record (or slow down the first one) one notch, roughly, for every beat-per-minute difference.
• Get the two records so that the snare, high-hat or bass hit, and kept, hitting, at exactly the same time; change the speed on one or both records to get them into sync or, if needed, drag the second record with your thumb (or speed it up by twirling it a little near the spindle) or crank the speed way faster or slower for an instant, to get the beats hitting precisely together.
• With the beats in sync, turn up the volume on the second record, and fade out the first.

And voila – it was a dance party.

It helped that I had a good voice for working a room, and a decent sense of how to work a crowd. The bartenders and owners liked me, since I kept a decent crowd on the floor – and a dancing house is a drinking and tipping house.

City Limits loved me; my second bar, “Jams”, in Brooklyn Center, seemed to dig me as well.

For a quick ‘n dirty, in and out temporary gig, it looked like it’d pay the bills until a radio gig came through.

———-

Liz and Brenda had moved out at the beginning of October. I’d advertised for roommates.

I got two.

“Chris” was a clean-cut, very scandinavian-looking fellow – handsome, blond, outdoorsy-looking. And he had his share of the deposit ready to go.

“Wyatt”, on the other hand, looked like one of the backup singers in “Color Me Badd”; tall, with “Zorba the Greek” good looks and a neatly-trimmed Guido beard, he confessed he’d just gotten out of Hazelden after a run-in with the law after a brief bout of using drugs. He and I hit it off, though. He peeled off his $166 for the deposit, and moved in as Liz and Brenda were moving out.

So by October 5, I had roommates. Whew. Being on the hook for $500 a month would have been a problem.

———-

Let’s back up a minute.

I never had a lot of luck with roommates. Back in college, in my three years in the dorms, I had…:

• one roommate – a bit of an alcoholic – who knocked up his girlfriend, and skipped town.
• another with serious drug and alcohol problems who tried to kill himself with one of my knives (turned out he was dialing with repressed homosexuality; once he came out of the closet, he was a pretty happy camper. This was long after he left college).
• one roommate who…well, I never saw. He had a girlfriend pretty much the whole year. In fact, all three roommates were barely in evidence; #3 was gone the whole time, #2 left school around semester time, and the rabbit died for #1 in mid-October; in every case, in effect, I got a private room for the price of a double occupancy.

After that? My first roommate wasn’t bad. In the next house, with the five women, one was addicted to pain pills. Among the next group, one was a borderline alcoholic, and the other…well, who knew?

But it was a whole new slate of people.

———-

Well, Chris turned out to have deep-seated emotional problems. He “worked” two hours a day, setting up the salad bar at the Wendy’s on University Avenue (until he got fired, around Thanksgiving). He was on total mental disability, otherwise. He earned extra money by stealing clothing from Daytons’, and using their “no questions asked” return policy to return the clothing for a refund. Some days, frozen by panic attacks, he wouldn’t leave the house (hence the firing). Most nights, he’d sit with his cat in his room, when he wasn’t going out trolling for underage skeeze (he was a handsome devil).

Wyatt? Well, it took about a month for the house to smell like pot. By Thanksgiving, bottles were piling up, and I had to stick to buying clear liquor and transferring it into water jugs to keep him from stealing it. And he missed his share of the December rent payment; he’d lost his job as a carpenter for being too drunk to come to work four days running.

———-

At least I had the band.

Well, sort of.

We finally kicked Casey out of the band; he was drinking too much, and he got belligerent when he got drunk. Which conflicted with Bill the drummer, who also got belligerent when he got drunk, and history shows there’s only room for one drunk in a band.

But Casey and I were pals, so we came up with a solomonic solution in mid-October; two bands, sharing the rhythm section. Casey, Mark and Bill were one band, while Bill and Mark and I had a different one. We had a few gigs. Life was all right…

…except that the drunken belligerence started the morph into a sort of communal hopelessness about the odds of ever getting out of the basement, and playing places better than “Fernando’s”.

Casey called, and asked if he might carpool with me back to Jamestown for Christmas. I said “sure, why not?”

I needed the break, after all.

What is…:

1. …your most unusual talent?: I have an uncanny knack for standing in front of the elevator door that will eventually be the one that opens.
2. …The Best Dunn Bros?: I love love love the one on Fifth and Wabasha.
3. …the worst holiday song?: Gotta be the very hip lounge-y version of “Sleigh Ride”. Johnny Mathis, maybe? Doesn’t matter – whomever it is, it sounds like Bill Murray doing his classic “Lounge Singer” bit.
4. …the most overrated underground singer in history?: Male: Henry Rollins. Female: Peaches (the Canadian X-rated techno “singer”, not the one of “…and Herb” fame).
5. …the best Law and Order cop lineup?: There’ve been so many. At the moment, my short list is Jerry Orbach/Chris Noth (L’nO), Vincent D’Onofrio/Kathryn Erbe (CI), Chris Noth/Annabella Sciorra (CI).
6. …the best Law and Order attorney lineup?: I will always like Sam Waterston/Jill Hennessey the best, although Courtney Vance/Diane Neal (when she was still a redhead) is moving up fast.
7. …your New Year’s Resolution short list, so far?: Same as last year; bike to work every day I can, including all summer. Get into better shape. I’m so far ahead of where I was last year, it’s not even funny; I’m hoping I can make a great year of it this time around.
8. …your greatest food weakness?: Garlic bread in any of its many permutations.
9. …the most-overrated comedian ever?: That changes very, very often, but this time of year, every year, it’s gotta be Lewis Black. Why does Comedy Central think his dyspeptic end-of-year wrapup is ever funny?
10. …your least-favorite holiday food?: Divinity.

Perhaps y’all remember me. I’m one of those guys you used to read about; I make decent money, live within my means. Work is good and steady (knock wood). My credit rating has a few dings – I’m still cleaning up from a year of near-unemployment and some dodgy contracting work, but all in all I’m not doing that badly.

I bought the house as – I’ll let you take a moment to absorb this – a place to raise kids. I’ve been here 14 years, and I fully expect to have my grandkids over for Christmas in (takes a deep breath) ten or fifteen years. It’s not like I’m going anywhere. Most of all, I’m not one of those guys who uses his house as an ATM. The balance on my mortgage is about 3/4 of what my house was appraised at.

NOTE: That’s “3/4”, as in “75%”. Not “100%”, like the loans some of you were approving like Las Vegas marriages until recently. Not 135%, which is what some of the loans you approved last year have turned into in the past few months. Nope. Just a simple, workadaddy, hugamommy 75%.

So let’s get this straight, between you, me, and your potted plant; for the last couple of years, while you were busy approving deals that render this story just barely this side of the “reality/comedy” curve, “investing” money like a crack whore “invests” with a stolen Gold Card, I was plugging away, trying to build equity, doing the best I could.

So don’t take your hangover over your years of crappy decisions on other borrowers out on me, toots.

That is all.

So I took a final walk around the house, getting ready for the appraisal.  Could be neater, but nothing drastically wrong (other than the sick kids spotted in their bedrooms, roiling with delirium from the same wretched soul-scarring crud I had last week). 

All was, within my normal tolerances, fairly well.

The appraiser came. 

20-minute walkaround.  A few questions.  No biggie.  Much pre-appraisal stress dissipates.

I bid him adieu (we pass on the handshake, given all the sick kids).

I walk upstairs.

And notice that at some time between the walkaround and 25 minutes hence, the dog had – for the first time in years – left a “present” at the foot of my bed.

The over/under on “before” or “after” the appraiser walked through is about even. 

OK.  I’m laughing about it now. 

I mean, what else am I gonna do?

Background: I’m not the handiest guy in the world.

Oh, I can do what I need to do. I worked part of my way through college as a stagehand, which involved basic carpentry and being a bit of an electrician. I learned what I needed to, practiced it constantly, and got to be fairly good at it – and then forgot most of it pretty promptly. Or at least the practical stuff; I could still do the intellectual part of it, like designing a lighting plot, pretty capably, I think. And hanging Leakos ain’t brain surgery, if you catch my drift. But still, other than my brief stint as a roofer and sider after college, I’ve never done a whole lot in the building trades.

But I have an appraisal tomorrow, with an aim toward refinancing my house.

Between being not-that-handy, and the, er, tumult of the past few years – well, there’s some “deferred maintenance” around the Berg house. And a whooooole bunch of it came off the “deferred” list; it’s stuff that’ll sidetrack an FHA appraisal. Nothing serious (that I know of, please, dear G*d), but stuff that I can fix.

In theory. Have I mentioned, I’m not much of a handyman?

Well, this weekend it was time to do what I do best; fake being things I’m not.

I shook off last week’s flu/cold/crud the best I could (although the kids are both pretty well stricken), and put together my “to do” list:

1. Repair my back porch, and put up a stair railing. FHA appraisals are pretty humorless about railings. Gotta have ’em. And my back porch was a rotting mess; it was actually missing the bottom step. So I ripped out the old steps, replaced some rotted braces, and finally put up a railing. A really, really, rinky-dink railing that qualifies as a “railing” in the same way that Bill Clinton’s grand jury testimony was “truthful”, but it should pass muster (until such time as I tear the entire back stoop down and replace it – hopefully in the next 15 months).
2. Add a railing to my basement stairs. There’s never been one. The FHA, she don’t care. So up went the railing.
3. Fix the basement toilet: It ain’t pretty – nobody’s used it in years – but it works. Done.
4. Replace the light fixture in my bedroom. I hate light fixtures. Still doesn’t work. My have to play dumb tomorrow.
5. Fix a couple of holes in some plaster walls: Done.
6. Fix the lock on my cellar-to-the-back-yard door. Done.
7. Replace two panes of glass on one of my old windows that my son broke a few years back. I had no idea how easy cutting glass was! I actually like that part of the job.
8. Replace the peeling linoleum on my bathroom floor. Almost done!
9. Prime over some, er, “art” my son left during a brief spate of grafitti-mongering. In the hallway. Words were had.

The final tally: Five trips to Menard’s, one to Home Depot.

Gotta finish the glass, and then, er, “tidy up” a bit.

Naturally, among your various prayers, karmic imprecations and other wishes for people in real, genuine need around the world – the people of Iraq, the Burmese, the Venezuelans and Cubans and Dharfuris – if you could squeeze in another word for me, I’d much appreciate it. The last bout seems to have worked, so far – I’m actually in the running for a mighty decent loan. It’d solve a lot of problems.

(And let’s hope a feel better tomorrow.  Blaaaagh)

Thanks!

Upside:  I made it to work.

Downside:  Not sure it can last. 

Posting will be zephyr-light.  I might dig out a few pieces from my “drafts” folder, but we’ll see.

Discuss.

It was Saturday, December 12, 1987. It was a cold, sloppy Saturday night. I had gotten a call from the spiky-haired guy at the DJ service – be at the bar by 7:30 to learn how to get the equipment started up, and start playing. My training would be on the job. The bar was “City Limits” (a bar I’d never heard of) in Rosemount (a town in the southeast suburbs that, in fact, I’d also never heard of in two years in the Twin Cities).

I got into my car around 6PM and started driving. It was a good thing. One of the “quirks” I’d discovered in my first couple of years in the Twin Cities was that it always took me a minimum of two tries to find anything in the suburbs. Every single time.

And City Limits was no exception. I drove to Minneapolis, then down 35W and then Cedar all the way to County Road 42, and hung a left. And drove.

And drove.

And drove.

The townhouses of Burnsville faded away into the background. I drove through farm fields, fallow for the winter, and the occasional warehouse or small business, until I got to “South Robert Trail”, a wan little intersection with “downtown” Rosemount just off to the left. I hung a right, and drove past a farm equipment dealership with a natty-looking beige outbuilding, through more fields. And more. And more.

Finally, in Farmington (I think), I stopped and asked directions at a gas station. The guy knew City Limits (he said, with an “Oy, do I know City Limits!” kind of gusto), and pointed me back to the north.

Sure enough, the natty gray outbuilding was the bar.

I walked in. The bar smelled like burned cooking oil and dry popcorn; it rumbled with the sounds of the bowling alley through the door to the back of the restaurant. A guy – early-twentysomething, blond, tall, looking a bit like a Hitler Youth but with wry smile – sat on one of the stools by the little counterette wrapped around the DJ booth, which sat at the edge of a small, tiled dance floor.

“Scott?”

“Hey!”, he said, with a voice that sounded like it’d been on the air.

———-

He showed me how to “power up”;

1. Turn the volumes down on all the mixers.
2. Power on the amps
3. Turn on the mixers
4. Turn on the lighting switchers
5. Turn on the power to the lighting rig – the various lights, flashers, and the all-important fog machine over the dance floor.

“This bar is pretty dead, so it’ll be a great place to learn how to do this stuff”, Scott said, sipping a vodka kamikaze.

———-

And so I did. The basics were nothing I hadn’t learned at my first radio job, eight years and change earlier; cue the records on the two turntables, fade between them, make announcements during the ramps and fades. I did that vastly better than most club jocks – Scott commented on it.

The harder part was “beat-mixing” – mixing the fade from one song into the ramp for the next one so their rhythms merge, making the transition seamless and giving the impression that the music never really stops. To help out, all the music in the vinyl bins was organized by speed, in beats per minute – from George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” (90BPM) through “Walking on Sunshine” (200 and change). In theory, you could start with a slower song, and – using the turntables’ variable speed controls, keep a continuous (if slowly speeding-up) beat going for the entire night.

But that was way in the future, as I fumbled at trying to get simple beats to match up in my headphones.

I needed some work, there.

———-

But at least I had the basics down pretty quickly. Scott and I talked for a couple of hours; briefly about work; mostly about radio. He remembered my character from the Vogel show. He’d worked at a bunch of small stations in Wisconsin. He was starting to think about making another try at it.

The bar had customers. Bowlers mingled with rednecks, sprinkled with a couple of Apple Valley party girls, who occasionally staggered about the floor, dancing with each other (since none of the guys felt like it). The place pretty much emptied out at 10.

Scott showed me how to shut everything off at the end of the night, and wished me luck, leaving around 11.

And so I finished out the night, taking the odd request, playing to maybe three barstool-polishing people by the end of the evening.

And I made the long drive back to Saint Paul.

I had a pleasant feeling, knowing I’d earned $50 for the evening.

Like most of the times one walks off life’s metaphorical cliffs, I had no sense that I was falling.

Yet.

One of the best hours in radio, anywhere, every week is Dennis Prager’s “Happiness Hour”, every Friday on Prager’s nationally-syndicated show.

The Hour has been a huge blessing for me in the past five years or so.  A key lesson for me has been the link between Prager’s lessons and the old Hungarian saying, “the best way to become wealthy is to appear as if you already are”.  You can change nouns almost at will, of course; it’s the best way to become healthy, in love with your partner or patient with your kids after a rough stretch, and of course happy as well.  Acting happy even if you aren’t is as good a path to becoming happy as there is. 

But that’s the easy lesson.

The harder one – and one Prager harps on heavily in The Hour – is “you have a duty to be happy”.  More directly, you have a duty not to inflict your unhappiness onto others.

So I had a really, really crappy morning, the kind that parents of teenagers should be able to recognize, if you catch my drift.  I was feeling pretty crummy when I made it to work.

I was standing in the elevator when one of my company’s mail-room girls – who happens to be “challenged” – spoke up with an ear to ear grin on my face.

“Great day, huh?”

“Sure”, I grunted, not really feeling it.

“Only two weeks until Christmas!”, she said with that glee that I remember my kids feeling years and years ago; the kind that’s contagious, that makes the holidays such a wonderful thing when you have little kids.

And I caught it.  I left the elevator feeling happy (happier, anyway), and – more importantly – realizing how much better things look now that I’m focused on not focusing on what a crappy start the day had.

Yeah.  It is two weeks until the holidays.  And the crappy stuff?  This too shall pass.

It was Monday, December 7, 1987.

I got a call from the spiky-haired guy I’d interviewed with the previous week.  They’d decided to hire me to work for their DJ service. 

“Could you start Friday?” he asked.

“How about Saturday”, I countered, remembering Friday was my birthday.

“Saturday it is”. 

He gave me the address to a bar.  In Rosemount.  I’d be meeting with one of his “assistants”, Scott, who’d “train me in” on being a nightclub DJ.

———-

I’ve reflected on that phone call and its aftermath many, many times in the past 20 years. 

It was an expedient decision – the bills needed to get paid, and the voiceover and newspaper work was slumping bad.    

But the effects on my life would be sweeping and all-consuming.  I wouldn’t know that for over half a decade, of course, but it was the first step down a path with consequences I’m still dealing with today.  Not all of them bad, of course – indeed, some of the most important, wonderful, precious things in my life  started with that phone call on that cold, snowy December afternoon, twenty years ago today. 

But on the way there, the tale wended past drugs, sex, rock and roll; it’d involve lawyers, guns and money (more the first two than the last); from clinical depression, love and self-rediscovery through fraud, gunplay and beating people with pool cues…

…but not so fast.  We have a few years to go.

It was Saturday, December 5, 1987.

I’d balanced my checkbook the previous Wednesday. Or tried. It’d earned about $75 in November. Things were getting dicey.

I needed to come up with something to help me stretch my voice-over and freelance writing income.

I looked in the Strib, and saw an ad; a company was looking for nightclub and wedding disk jockeys.

Of course, I’d always hated DJ bars; to my point of view, bars, should either have bands, jukeboxes, or nothing.

But money was money. And hadn’t I been a DJ at a bunch of radio station?

How hard could it possibly be?

I called the number in the ad; the guy told me to come out to Burnsville on Saturday afternoon for an interview.

I drove out to Burnsville, pulling into a leafy cul-de-sac.  I knocked on the door.  A pudgy guy with spiky, gelled hair answered the door.  “Hi.  I’m Biff”. [The name, obviously, is changed].  Biff invited me in.
The house – your standard Burnsville mini-mansion – was almost bare of furniture.  The living room had two armchairs, a TV on a cardboard packing box, and scattered piles of sound and light gear; amps, mixers, speakers, standards.  The kitchen, over the little bar area, looked messy and yet fairly bare.  The guy looked like he was running a DJ service out of his house.

“So”, said Biff in a Minnesota accent, “tell me about your experience as a DJ”.

I ran through my radio background, as well as my time as a musician.

“Do you know how to beat-mix?”

I sat for a split second.  “I know the basics”, I answered, thinking he was talking about cross-fading.

He looked like he thought I was completely clueless – as, as events showed, I was.

But we continued to talk, and he must have seen something he liked.  He explained his company’s operation; they had a couple of mobile rigs that worked weddings and parties, and they also supplied DJs to a bunch of area bars.

“We might start you out in one of our outlying bars”, he said, looking more or less thoughtful.  He told me to call back early next week.

We shook hands. I drove back to Saint Paul, hoping for a break that’d at least stretch my income a bit.

Just while I waited for another radio gig.  No more.

Today’s my first anniversary on the job.

It’s kinda a  big deal to me.

I’ve spent most of the last fifteen years as a contractor.  “Contracting” is sort of like “being a temp”; it pays better, but it has about the same job security.  Contractors are usually hired to work on specific projects.  And, as those of you in the business world know, a project is only as secure as its’ project is in-demand, or its’ sponsor is powerful and decisive.

And in the past few years I’ve worked for some pretty superfluous projects and/or wussy project sponsors, apparently; several of my projects wound up getting de-funded, or (almost more irritating) going into a sort of long-term funding hibernation; the work still needed to be done, but the powers that be didn’t quite want it done yet.  Hence, I wound up on the beach, for periods ranging from two days to that hellish stretch of 2003 where I did not a lick of paid work for five months, and worked at a bare subsistence level on 3-7-day long projects for six months more. 

Upshot being that in the last fifteen years, I’ve worked at a total of 24 different jobs, ranging from a week to two years, averaging 6.4 months. 

But I’m an employee now, and have been for a year.  I ride a bus (or, weather and schedule permitting, my bike) to the same office every day; I have for the past year, and – as much as part of me still likes the chase of being a “free-lancer”, “consultant”, contractor or temp – I kinda hope I keep doing it for a while longer.

So – see ya in the salt mines!

The waiting is the hardest part.

Waiting on a “conditional approval” for an FHA loan that’d lop about five points off my mortgage. 

So if any of you has a hotline to the powers that be – literal or metaphorical – on these things, I’d appreciate a good word.  I’ll eat my veggies every night. 

It was Monday, November 30, 1987. 

I was going on eight months of…unemployment?

Well, not really.  Since I’d gotten whacked at KSTP in April, I’d had one contracting job, sold a bunch of newspaper articles, done a bunch of voice-over work.

But things had been slowing down.  It was getting harder to sell newspaper articles; freelancer budgets were tightening up.

Or so I told myself.  I think they were tighter.  Who knew?

Voice-over work had slowed way down, too.  Where I used to get a couple of jobs a month – and October had seen three or four (including the best one of all), I hadn’t actually gotten a call in a couple of weeks.  There’d been one really rough job at a studio in Bloomington – my voice wasn’t in shape, it took fifteen takes to get a spot right, the director was getting audibly frustrated…

“These things happen“, I told myself.  “The next one’ll be better”. 

And it had been.  But it was the last one. And it had been a couple of weeks. 

And money was getting tight. 

Of course I was still talking with radio stations.  Some were interested; New Bedford, Fall River, Santa Rosa.  But nobody could actually hire me.

Yet.

So there was hope.  But money was getting tight.

My other diversion, besides Fridays at Phoenix Games?  I dipped my toe back into writing fiction.  Or trying to.  My efforts usually got 2-3 pages before petering out in ennui.

The band?  We were still playing.  I was still writing music.  Fairly prolifically, in fact.  But rehearsals were becoming a desultory grind through the material.  And the gigs were coming slower and slower, and at crappier and crappier bars.  We’d played our last gig at – Fernando’s, yet again.  Mark and Bill and Casey weren’t getting along all that well – Casey was chafing at the fact that nobody liked his music; Mark was getting tired of my flitting between styles; Bill was getting…hard to say.  Depressed?

For a fleeting moment, life was feeling like a sticky web of frustration.

At times, it’s hard to believe that it’s been almost five years since the most miserable year of my life started.

In late 2002, with the local software market in a drastic slowdown, I was contracting at a local manufacturing company. My project got de-funded – and when you’re a contractor, “no project” means “no job”. I went five months with no work at all, and six more months working little contracting jobs that barely paid the bills.

One of the low points, in early March – ten weeks into the ordeal – came with an interview at a local branch of a national company. Upside: it would have been a great job, and I’d have knocked it through the goalposts. Downside: it was on the far west end of Eden Prairie, highly inconvenient to Saint Paul. But I wasn’t going to kvetch about it; by this point, a job was a job was a job.

It was one of the most gruelling days of my life. The interviews started at 8:30AM, with one-hour conversations with the department head, the marketing chief and the technical communications lead. Then a lunch-time talk with the lead programmer. Then more one-hour interviews with the graphics lead, the QA lead and another marketeer. Of course, some of the interviews were a little…”off”. One woman sounded like she was trying to justify her job to me; another seemed to be sizing me up as an ally in an upcoming bit of office political intrigue.

The day capped off with a 90-minute chat with the Product Development director. During each, I tried to walk that fine line between “eager and aggressive” and “desperate” – which I most certainly was by this point. I left feeling things went quite well. And I followed up with a voice mail to the Product Development guy (who’d have been my boss) the next week.

And the next.

And the next, and the next. And the next, and the next.

Seven weeks after the interview, I finally got through. “Oh, you mean we didn’t send you a letter? I’m sorry. We took a different direction, and hired another graphic artist instead”.

I don’t like to indulge in schadenfreud – so I won’t. I don’t believe in Karma, but I do believe what goes around comes around, and I don’t need anything more coming around, thanks.

So I’ll wish the “best of luck” to my coulda-been, now coulda-been soon-to-be-former, colleagues. May your interviews be short, to the point, close enough to home, and successful.

The market’s a lot better now. Y’all will do great.

…if, given all the trouble in this world and all the people that are in genuine trouble, it’s even appropriate to wonder, much less ask this.

But those of us who believe are urged to “bring everything to God in prayer” – so this probably qualifies (and for those who don’t – well, what can it hurt you, right?). 

Soooooo…

 …if anyone could spare a prayer, karmic imprecation or best wish that my attempt at a mortgage refinance to get out of my really miserable ARM might go through, in and among all the serious prayers for people who really, really do need divine assistance, an infusion of chi, or whatever it is you believe in (or don’t), I’d much appreciate it.

(That, and/or if you’re a mortgage lender who appreciates a bit of a challenge, drop me a line.  I’d love to do business with ya).

Peruse at your leisure.

There’s hardly a “no-go” on the whole page.

I don’t know that I’ll ever write a better “Happy Thanksgiving” post than the one I did five years ago, on this blog’s first Thanksgiving:

I moved from North Dakota to Minneapolis in October of 1985. It was a spur of the moment thing – in fact, it started with a drunken statement to a bunch of classmates at a college homecoming party two weeks earlier. It was five months after graduation, and they’d all come back to Jamestown (my hometown and college) with stories of their fun careers, fun cities, fun lives……Six weeks later, it was Thanksgiving. I still had no job, I was broke and hungry and cold. I’d had a few interviews, but no bites. I had dinner at a friend’s place. And on the way home, I drove downtown, and walked out onto the Central Avenue bridge, and looked out over the city in the dark. If you’ve never seen it, looking at downtown Minneapolis in the dark, when everything’s all lit up, is stunning; for someone just in off the prairie, it was like looking at Manhattan. I was cold, and scared out of my shorts about my short-term prospects – and for the first time, I felt strangely at home in this new city.

And every since then, Thanksgiving has seemed like the turning of the new year for me – the time when I reflect on the past year’s agonies and flubs and successes, and look forward to the next year. Much more so – for me anyway – than New Years’ Eve, which is more decompression from Christmas than anything.

I remember each Thanksgiving in the last 17 years – the giddiness of feeling like I was on the edge of something big in 1986, confident in my ability to pull it all together in ’87, shell-shocked and depressed and contemplating the implosion of my radio career in ’88, crazy in love in ’89, a harried but happy but broke newlywed in ’90, a new dad digging out of deep snowdrifts in ’91, broke and on the brink of eviction with two kids and another on the way in ’92, in a new house in ’93…wondering how long my marriage would last in ’98, being able to answer the question “not long at all” in ’99…

…and today. I sat for a while by the Cathedral of St. Paul, looking down Summit over downtown Saint Paul. The giddy, heady uncertainty of the thanksgivings of my first years as an adult, the throat-clutching terror of my divorce-era holidays, and the weary relief of my first thanksgivings as a divorced dad…well, little bits of all of them are still there. But there’s the emerging sense that my life really is mine, and that I’d better get on with it.

There’ve been so many good lists of things to be thankful for, from people as diverse as Michelle Malkin and Ted Nugent and Andrew Sullivan – and my own for that matter.

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.

Since then, things have gotten worse (not six weeks after I wrote that piece, I started an epic run of unemployment) and much, much better (my career came back by Thanksgiving of ’03 much the better for wear) and – on the balance, good.  My kids are both teenagers with the full, awful gravity that term brings.  But they’re alive and doing…not so bad.

And Thanksgiving is still when the new year really begins for me.

So – I’m thankful for my kids, my family, my friends (personal and electronic), my job, my home, the blog, the show.  And above all, I’m thankful for the same things the Pilgrims were; salvation, sure, but also being in this place, with the blessings and chances and responsibilities God gave us, here and now.

God bless all of you this Thanksgiving.

More tomorrow.