From Pianomomsicle – a local blog that I wish were a lot more prolific – I loved this bit:

So tonight i was looking for my old “Adoration” part, and found it and the piano part. i thought it might be fun to revisit it on violin, so i pulled my dear violin out again. And i opened it, and it wasn’t something hateful at all. It was my beloved Merrick (yes I named it) and it was looking back at me like “Why have you forsaken me?” And i played Adoration on it, and despite my very rusty technique, especially my horrible vibrato, IT still played as pure and true as it could. And i apologized to it afterwards. And will continue to play it, so i can get back up to feeling like my vibrato doesn’t sound like a beginner and my shifting doesn’t sound like sliding again. And i feel like a more complete person. The piano part is so pretty, and i was able to play it without much pausing, and that will be great. But the real victor was my relationship with my violin. i think the reason i hated it was because maybe i thought it was taking away from my piano playing, but now that i am known as a piano player, playing violin again has brought back memories and made me realize it’s wonderful. Maybe being with something 20+ hours/week makes you forget about its good qualities or something. You could probably relate that to marriage, too. Well, after coming back to it, i definitely don’t want to let it go.

I point it out partly because of the story at the top – how she became a violinist in the first place – and largely because re-discovering things you used to love had been a big theme for me lately…

…no, not quite.  I should have said “rediscovering things with which I used to have deeply-dysfunctional, codependent relationships, and trying to do it right this time” has been a big theme for me lately. 

My old cello needs a ton of work – so I don’t get to play much lately.  But a few weeks ago I went into a store, and sat down and tried a cello.  A nice one.  I started playing a few old things I’d memorized maybe 25 years ago – some little Küffner etude that I used to do as a warmup exercise – and it felt like the sound was shaking something way deep in my brain.  I kept on going, playing more old stuff, feeling deliriously comfortable, like the vibration of the instrument was a drug.

Damn.  Fun.  Gotta do that again sometime.

Anyway.  Talk radio?  Biking?  I’ve been doing that kind of thing a lot lately.

Happy Birthday, Bun!

It was Friday, August 7, 1987.  The big day: I’d been working at my freelance writing job for two weeks, and was getting paid in another week. 

And I’d gotten my final unemployment check!

And the party I’d started planning when I got the job was finally happening. 

I’d invited most of my friends in the Twin Cities; my roommates had added quite a few of their own – because, let’s face it, what’s  a party without people?

Then as now, I loved going to parties; but I’d never thrown one before.  Indeed, other than MOB parties, I’ve never thrown another (not to say I won’t – but that’s a subject for another thread).  So I went through some internal calculus, and tried to figure out what made for a great late-summer party.  I came up with:

1. Alcohol
2. A grill

It was a scorcher – probably in the mid-nineties, humid as hell.  I ran to Big Top Liquors – then as now, the booze lynchpin of the neighborhood – and figured, what the heck, I’d grab two 30-packs of Strohs.  Oh, make it three. 

Then, to Rainbow, for a couple of pounds of beef, cheese, charcoal, brats, onions, buns…

…and then, home.

People started showing up around sixish.  First came Liz’ boyfriend, and some of my late-KSTP friends.  Then my pal Rich.  Then some of Liz’ co-workers from a group home in Minnepolis.  Then the guys from my band.  Then more of Liz’ co-workers.  Then still more of them. 

The party started out so well. 

For the first four or five hours, it was wonderful; good company, good conversation given a great shove down a beer-soaked slip-n-slide, good food (I was, and remain, a great grillmeister) – just a memorably good time. 

By about tennish, people were gathered on both porches, cooling off, enjoying things.  People had nice buzzes going on; roommates’ co-workers, and I think one of my band-mates, started slipping away to the upstairs bedrooms in various combinations.  Everyone was enjoying themselves.  Even me – although I had long lost track of how many Strohs I’d sucked down in the August heat.  Still – it was a great party.

Twenty years later, I’m still not sure exactly where it went wrong. 

I think it was around ten that a couple of Liz’ co-workers’ friends showed up.  One of them, a fellow who resembled a genetic melding of Jeffrey Dahmer and Zeljko Ivanek, walked in, grabbed a beer, and came out to the porch, scowling.  Then heckling people – my friends, my band-mades, and eventually me.  And then getting really abusive; “You really shuck.  Thish izh a sh**y party.  You’re shtupid”.

I took one of Liz’ co-workers – the one who’d brought the guy – aside.  “Who izh thish moron?” I asked.  He apparently was an off-duty corrections officer from the Stillwater Penitentiary.  “Could you tell him to mellow out a little?”

Well, he tried.  It didn’t stick.

I don’t honestly remember, twenty years later, what came first – me standing in his face and saying – not yelling, I am fairly sure – “You’re standing on my porch, at my party, drinking my beer, and insulting my friends?  What am I missing here?”, him saying “I think you’re a faggot”, or me promising to strangle him with his own intestines.  His pal intervened about the time I was picking up a piece of scrap wood off the porch.  They left.

Which isn’t to say the party ended.  Just that it got kinda weird.  Almost like the evening’s gestalt got turned 90 degrees.  Which, by the way, also felt like the temperature around midnight.  Conversations that had been friendly turned…well, not “confrontational”.  Everyone was still having fun.  But the near-brawl had lent the evening an edge that it hadn’t had, and didn’t need.  And there were some other little scuffles; one of Liz’s co-workers girlfriends hooked up with a differnet co-worker; animosity ensued.  And one of my other roommate Brenda’s boyfriends ran into another of them.  (It could have been worse; she was stringing three along at the time).  An undercurrent of ugly started creeping into the evening. 

And of course, everyone kept right on drinking. Some of the co-workers had brought plenty more beer and booze.  Now, I’ve never really been a heavy drinker – except for a stretch after my college graduation, I have rarely had more than 2-3 drinks in a sitting in my life.  I’m sure I was well past a dozen beers by midnight.   Well past. 

Damn.  It felt good to be working again!

I think it was like 4:30AM when Liz’ boyfriend decided to make one last hamburger. He grabbed a chunk of the beef…

…that had been sitting on the counter since 6PM, in the sweltering evening, in the even-more-sweltering kitchen, molded a patty, and tossed it on the grill. 

I think it was about 5:30AM when he chundered phosphorescent green spew all over the kitchen.  And dining room.  And stairway to the bathroom.  And he wasn’t done.  Oh, nosireee. 

It was about then that I passed out. 

———-

Casey, my other guitar player, woke me up at about 8AM.  His car, a mid-seventies Toyota, had no starter, and needed a push-start to get him and Bill, my drummer, home.  We staggered outside – it was already scorching hot – and gave the car a shove down Fry Street (the irony wasn’t lost on me even then), a block or so, until it caught. 

I staggered back to the house, sweating toxic goo, feeling queasier by the step. 

I got in the back door.  My foot skidded on some leftover phosphorescent green chunder.  I felt my stomach jumping up, like one of those videos of a mid-fifties ejector seat firing off; I ran upstairs to the bathroom, and…

…well, you know.

My head felt like it’d been bored out with a grain auger.  Every muscle in my simultaneously ached and rioted to eject more stuff from me, from whatever end was available.  I lived in a universe of sour and ugly.

Liz staggered into the bathroom.  “Telephone!”, she yelled, before clomping back to bed. 

I crawled to the phone.  “Hullo?” I groaned, sounding very, very sick even to myself.

“Hi, Mitch!  It’s your mom!  Have a rough night?”

I stayed on the couch, sweating and praying for either rain or death, all day.  And then most of Sunday cleaning. 

It was Tuesday, July 28, 1987. 

I’d arranged with my new free-lance job – a month’s worth of technical writing – to come in late, around 11-ish, so I could catch up on my phone calling.  I was hoping to pour on the gas, and have a talk radio job lined up by the time the freelance contracting gig ended. 

As I made calls, I’d make notes on my calendar telling me to follow-up with one talk-radio program director or another, somewhere around the country.  I was getting a few nibbles, out there.  A station in New Bedford, Massachusetts liked my tape and was interested in bringing me out for an interview…sometime.  Another, in Fall River Massachusetts, thought they might need an afternoon guy…eventually.  Another in Hammond, Indiana thought they might need a news guy…someday soon.  And there was that headhunter with that gig in Raleigh that was still floating out there…more or less.

And then, at about 10:30AM, the phone rang. 

It was a program director at a big blowtorch of a station in Cleveland, Ohio.  They liked my resume and the tape of my “producer” stuff with and recommendations from Don Vogel and Geoff Charles.  I might be the perfect guy…

…to produce for a very temperamental  prima-donna who’d been hired for afternoon drive. 

Cleveland, I thought.   All the little chicks with their crimson lips know Cleveland Rocks, Cleveland Rocks.  My Town.  A job, back in my beloved talk radio.

“I’m interested”.

He described the job; not-spectacular pay (although way, way better than I’d gotten at KSTP), and a weekend show of my own to sweeten the deal. 

I fought to control my breathing.  It was sounding too good to be true.  I started sizing up whether everything I owned would still fit into my Jeep.

“Oh”, the program director added, almost as if it were an afterthought, “you would need to be here to start the job by Friday”.

I fumbled for a second as I turned it over in my head; could I duck out on my freelance job, stick my roommates with the lease, abandon the band with a few gigs lined up, and walk away from a couple of articles I’d sold? 

Hell, yeah.

Could I do it and be in Cleveland by the end of the week?

My heart bounced off my liver and kept falling.

“I don’t think I can do that.”

“Ah, that’s OK.  Sorry to hear that.  We’ll find someone local…”

And that was that. 

———-

Hard as that was, I found out I probably got the better end of the deal.  I heard through the grapevine that the prima-donna host went through three producers in nine months, when the whole show got gassed.

Still.  So close.

My dad never had all that many records when I was a kid – but the ones he did have, I remember pretty clearly.

Common weekend listening was his Clancy Brothers record, with Tommy Makem.  I can still hum/sing most of the stuff; “The Rising Of The Moon”, “Dirty Old Town”, and a bunch whose names I can’t remember but whose tunes I can’t forget.

Makem died Wednesday after a long battle with cancer.

Red?  Sure she remembers him:

Dear Tommy Makem: Your voice basically WAS my childhood. I still listen to those old Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem albums, and it’s always the oddest feeling, a mixture of present/past. Am I a child? Are these records playing on a battered turntable as I dribble a popsicle down my T-shirt? Or is it now? These songs are woven into my life, they’re just a part of who I am. I will leave it to others to talk about how the Clancy Brothers influenced an entire generation of singer/song-writers (Dylan is eloquent on this) … For now, I mourn the loss. A fragile thread of connection to my childhood, the continuum.

Very, very true.

Kevin Cullen has a wonderful obit (what, you thought it’d be by Lars Tostengaard?) at the BoGlo:

Tommy Makem was an Irish soul singer, and souls don’t die. His music is preserved, on the old vinyl LPs he made with his pals, the Clancy brothers, more recently on CDs, more intimately in memory, in the hard drive of any brain that heard his basso profundo voice.

To hear Tommy Makem sing “Four Green Fields” was to hear Enrico Caruso sing “Vesti la giubba,” or James Brown sing “I Feel Good.” He was for Irish traditional music a great ambassador, and a consummate performer.

Sigh.

Leave the tragedy aside for a moment; I never liked that bridge.

It was the product of a dismal age in bridge design, when the Interstate Highway system’s philosophy for bridges was “you shouldn’t know you’re on a bridge”; among all of downtown Minneapolis’ bridges, it never really fit in with its surroundings architecturally; it was like a delivery van in a parade of Dusenbergs.

But on the bridge?

One of the most piercing memories of my life was my first winter in Minneapolis, in 1985-6.  I was driving home down 35W from a friend’s place in Forest Lake one bitterly-cold evening, after midnight.  For the first time, I crossed that bridge late at night going south over the river.  The view was, literally, breathtaking; the lights of the city, looking sharper than normal in the cold, were gemlike in their brilliance; the light reflected off the water and dimly outlined the gorge below, by the Falls and the lock and dam, sparkled off the parts of the river that weren’t frozen.

Minneapolis looked beautiful.  And it was one of those moments when I first felt like I really belonged here.

The view has stuck with me; every time I welcome a friend or relative or newcomer to the Twin Cities, one of the stops on my night-time tour always involved driving south across the bridge, after dark (and thence to Saint Paul, driving into downtown from the south over either the Lafayette or the High Bridge, which is equally stunning). 

The loss of that view is the least of today’s tragedies.  But it’ll stick with me, too.

Please direct whatever form of prayer, imprecation or wish your worldview recognizes to the victims, their families, the survivors…

…and today, all the Fire, Police, Sheriff’s Department, hospital workers who will be untangling this mess looking for victims and (God willing) more survivors.

To everyone who called last night; I was no where near the bridge.  But thanks for thinking about me.

More on that later.

I’d started hanging around KEYJ Radio – a little 1000-watt station on First Avenue in Jamestown, tucked up above a White Drug in the same studio where it’d gone on the air in 1953 – sometime during my sophomore year of high school.  My pal, Dick Ingstad – who was a junior at the time – worked there, and he let me (and, at one point, practically every other kid in the school) hang out there.  It was a classic old radio station, with rooms full of musty old LPs and 45s, stacks of old (very old) equipment, and a control room full of equipment that had seen the announcement of the Pearl Harbor attacks.

In hanging around at least one or two days a week with Dick (who, I should point out, comes from a big radio family; his big brother is legendary über-disc-jockey, voice talent, Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson-staff-announcer and Jim Ramstad-classmate Shadoe Stevens, who’d started at KEYJ in 1957 at age 12), I’d figured out (I thought) some of the basics of doing the job – and figured I might like to give it a try.

My dad knew the station’s owner/manager, Bob Richardson – everyone in town knew both of them, frankly – and around the end of tenth grade, Dad urged me to go downtown and apply for a job.  Bob made a point of keeping a few high school kids on staff, and one of them had just graduated, so, with butterflies visibly shaking me, I gave Bob a call and applied.  He said he’d sure think about it.  That was in May.

In early July, he called back.  “I think we should give this a shot”, he said.  I spent three weeks coming in early in the morning, having John Weispfenning (a summer employee from Moorhead State, who went on to a brief career in the business) show me the basic ropes on the shift that would eventually be mine; Saturday mornings, from 5AM to 3PM.  The shift went a little like this:

1. Get in around 5AM
2. Fire up the transmitter; the station signed off at 11:55PM every night, and sat idle until sign-on, at 5:55AM.
3. Gather up the night’s backlog of AP wire copy, sort it into National, State and Local news, Weather and Sports stacks.  Pick out the stories I’d want to read.
4. At 5:55, sign on; “KEYJ Radio in Jamestown North Dakota is on the air!”. 
5. Play the national anthem.
6. Read two minutes of news headlines and weather, then go to five minutes of network news. 
7. Do a regular hour of music, while getting ready for…
8. …nearly an hour of news, weather, sports and community info at 7AM, again at 8AM, and another at noon.
9. Plus regular hours of music from 9AM-noon and 1-3, during which time I spent most of my time ripping, stacking (and, later, writing) news.

But since it was my first time soloing, I’d do a month on Saturday nights – Dick’s usual shift.  Mostly music, except for another one of those news/weather/sports hours at 5PM.

But that was all a couple of hours in the future.  I’d come in around 1PM, just because I was too excited to hang around the house anymore.  Finally, it was three.  I settled in behind the board – which had been built sometime before World War Two, and was a huge, vertical metal thing that looked like the front end of a ’52 Buick, with big metal toggle switches and large ceramic rotary pots, utterly unlike the sleek, chintzy plastic pushbuttons and slide faders on every board I’ve seen since then – and took my customary three deep breaths.

The AP News ran – all five minutes – and then it was my turn. 

I hit the “KEYJ!” jingle, and launched my first record (as in, “a vinyl 45RPM disk”), “Bright Eyes” by Art Garfunkel.  After that, I introduced myself; nothing new, really – I’d been on the mic a few times during my weeks of training, but this was different; I was solo. 

And, as I recall, I didn’t screw it up.

Well, at least that break.  There were plenty of them later in the evening. 

What do I remember?  Some of the music – “All Things Are Possible”, by Dan Peek (formerly of “America”, if you’re a real trivia geek); “A Little More Love”, Olivia Newton-John; “We Live for Love”, from a just-released Pat Benetar.  Some of the news – there’d been a fight at the State Hospital.  Mom and Dad brought me a burger from the cafe downstairs around 7PM.  Getting phone calls from high-school friends, saying I didn’t suck.

And signoff, read from a yellowed, laminated sheet in a battered old three-ring binder; “At this time, Radio Station KEYJ leaves the air.  KEYJ operates on a frequency of fourteen hundred kilocycles, and is owned and operated by KEYJ Incorporated of Jamestown, North Dakota.  KEYJ operates from studios at 220 First Avenue South in Jamestown.  We invite you to join us tomorrow morning, at 5:55AM, when we return to the air.  Good night”.

And then, as the station did every night, I played “The Lord’s Prayer” by George Beverly Shea, on a rattly old “cart” tape, took my final readings and signed off the transmitter and programming logs, flipped the three switches to shut off the transmitter, locked up, and walked the five blocks home through the muggy summer evening.

I never had much of a radio career – but what I had, started that night.

It was Friday, July 31, 1987. 

I’d called the unemployment office to tell ’em I had a job.  My last check would be coming a week from today – the same time I’d be getting my first check from the freelance writing gig. 

I hatched a plan, one that I’d never hatched before, and until the advent of the MOB, have never hatched since; I was going to throw a party.

I started calling all my friends, inviting them to the Mitch’s Final Unemployment Check Party.  The intention:  spend (at least a big part of) my final unemployment check (all $200-odd dollars of it) on a big summer blow-out. 

People started accepting. 

It was going to be fun.

It was Monday, July 27, 1987. 

The storm had overshadowed one big bit of news; I’d landed some freelance work, writing a manual for some software for a company in Edina.  It was going to be a month or so worth of work.  The best part?  It was going to be a princely $12.50 an hour!.  Other than the odd voiceover job, I’d never gotten more than $8/hour in my life, for anything.

It was a long commute, made doubly galling by the fact that I’d moved to Saint Paul just in time to get whacked at KSTP, from a place that was probably a 20-25 minute drive from this gig. 

The work was interesting – and utterly unlike anything I’d done before.  For starters, I was writing on a computer.  Not one of the DEC PDP 11/44s I’d used in college, for everything from programming (I’d completed most of a Computer Science minor, before I decided that I hated it) to writing term papers (we used the roff and nroff text-formatting programs to print “pretty” documents on an NEC Spinwriter teletype terminal, at a stately one page per minute) – but the company sat me down behind a Mac.  It was the first computer I’d touched in a long time, and the first time I’d seen a Graphical User Interface other than, say, in the movies.

The commute was gruelling.  It was blazingly hot, and with all the water soaking the region, it was one of the two most humid periods of time I can remember in my life.

But I looked forward to a paycheck that’d cover more than bare subsistence for the first time in quite a while. 

And that felt good.

It was Friday, July 24th, 1987, and I was stuck in traffic.

Everywhere.  Every road I drove on, whether a freeway or a side street.  And it’d been like that for about the previous 18 hours.

The previous night was supposed to have been a busy one.  I’d signed up for a video production class at Saint Paul Cable Access, and we were having our final shooting session at the Longfellow Community Center, before going downtown for next week’s session to learn how to edit tape. 

Before that, I’d gone over to the band’s practice house and filled up the Jeep with the guys’ gear.  We drove to Fernando’s – a crappy little dive bar at 15th and East Lake Street – and loaded in for a gig that was planned for the evening.  My plan; load in, go to class, leave class at the crack of 9PM and race over to ‘nando’s for the gig. 

As we stood outside the community center, black clouds roiled in the west.  Someone flipped on The Good Neighbor, and heard reports of tornados in Maple Grove – an impossibly distant ‘burb to me, at that time – and warnings being tossed about for the rest of the metro. 

Class let out early due to the weather.  As the first drops started dribbling down from the darkening sky, I rolled over to Cretin Avenue, intending to jump onto 94 and whip over to Minneapolis, getting to the gig a little early.

The weather had a legendary change of plan for an awful lot of us who were in the Cities that night, of course.  “The Storm”, along with the “Halloween Blizzard”, is one of those two-word icons that everyone who’s lived in the Twin Cities in the past couple of decades remembers and has in common.

Me?  Well…

As I rolled past the Highway 280 exit, the sky closed in.  Roiling cumulus clouds resembling gray grapes advanced overhead, until they were blotted out by the most intense cloudburst I’ve ever experienced, whipped by a fearsome wind.  In moments, I could barely see the car in front of me; just their tail lights.  Stopped.  Cold. 

It was then that I discovered that the rag top on my jeep had a leak.  A couple of them, in fact.  A steady stream of water poured down on my head, as I scannned for a break in the traffic that never came.  Another leak coursed water into the back seat, and I silently thanked God that I’d left my guitar with the guys. 

It’s hard to remember, 20 years later, exactly what happened.  I know that I sat, soaking, in the jeep from about 8-ish until maybe 10, wondering (in those pre-cell-phone days) if the gig was going to go ahead or not, gradually giving up on being anything like dry.  I kept the radio on WCCO, which spoke of torrential downpours (duh) and flooded roads (ibid) and calls from people talking about wind and water damage all over the metro – but no word about I-94 Westbound through Saint Paul.

Eventually – it had to be close to 10PM – I saw people walking in the downpour around up ahead.  Hours after the storm started, the rain was still a cold, drenching cataract, and the wind, while it’d died off a bit, whipped it into my face as I climbed out of the Jeep’s meager shelter – but by this point, I was more interested in information, even rumors, than the dubious comfort of my ragtop.

I walked a couple of cars ahead to a group of guys, a couple of whom had come back from farther west along the freeway.  “I heard that the road is flooded four or six feet deep at the U of M Exit” said one of the guys, soaked to the bone like all the rest of us.  “There’s cars stuck in there.  We aren’t going anywhere”. 

I walked back along the line to pass the word to the people climbing out of cars – or gingerly opening windows – farther back along the freeway.  I kept checking west along the road to see if the endless stream of red taillights were moving even the slightest.  Not a bit. 

So I kept walking.  I probably went a quarter-mile east, from car to car, spreading the “news”, watching for changes, seeing nothing.  My clothes – an army-surplus olive-drab shirt over a “Clash” T-shirt, black jeans, cheap sneakers – were soaked and soaked again. 

And still, nothing moved.

It was probably around 11, and probably 5-600 yards from my car, when I ran into a familiar face; a medium-height, husky guy with curly red hair who looked like a young Gordon Lightfoot.  I recognized him as a floor director at KSTP-TV; we’d run into each other at a few Hubbard Broadcasting events and one time when I’d gone to a taping of the loathsome Twin Cities Live With Bob Bruce.  We could see Highway 280 from the small rise where we stood, exchanging weary, sopping pleasantries. 

“Hey”, he said, a sopping light flashing above his head, “nothing’s moving on 280.  We can start people going back that way…”

We – “Gordon” and two other guys and I – jogged through the slop, back to the 280 ramp to 94, to start talking to drivers, getting them to turn around and head back, the wrong way, up the freeway to the exit to (actually the on-ramp from) University Avenue.  A cop was at the top of the onramp, keeping people from going onto the freeway, so the “plan” was falling into place.

Car by car, the four of us knocked on peoples’ windows, and got them to start turning around and, counterintuitively, driving the wrong way up the freeway.  It’s been twenty years, so I don’t know if it took me half an hour or two hours to get back to my jeep – but when I did, I climbed in, sat with an irrelevant “splorch” on the sopping seat, and got turned around. 

It was somewhere between 11 and midnight when I got off the freeway.  The rain was only letting up a bit.  University Avenue was dotted with small floods, where overtaxes storm drains gave up the ghost.  I pulled over at a gas station and ran to a pay phone to call Fernando’s; the first good news of the night was that the gig had been cancelled when the roof started leaking all over the stage and the audience. 

My guitar was the only dry thing in my life by this point.

It was after midnight when I finally picked my way home, changed into dry clothes, and flopped into bed.

The next day – Friday the 24th – I had an appointment for some freelance work in Eden Prairie at 9AM.  I got on the road at 7. 

By 9, I’d made it to the Minneapolis border, and had called and rescheduled the appointment; they told me that I494 was still flooded and impassible, and if I made it at all it’d be a miracle.

By the grace of God and Jeep and a decent memory of South Minneapolis’ back streets, I made it.  At noon.  It took me until after 5PM to get home. 

But if you were there, you probably had about the same kind of time.

———-

Apropos not much, the KSTP-TV floor director who led the evening’s amateur traffic-coppery eventually became known to the Cities as Rusty Gatenby, who got promoted off the floor and started his long career as Channel Five’s Traffic and Entertainment reporter not long after that, as I recall. 

I’ve been pretty religious about biking to work every day this past four or five weeks; I only missed a couple days when my bike was in the shop.  Not bad, all in all.

And I got some positive reinforcement; a third party with no attachment to me whatsoever commented “Looks like you’ve lost some weight” over the weekend.  So – so far, so good.  I feel much better after the ride every morning; biking to work is a natural lift to the day.  Part of it is just the blast of exercise.  Part of it is the adrenaline from the existential threat from some of the drivers out there.  Either way, it focuses the mind.

But I have to wonder about something.

I’ve noticed that there seem to be four types of bikers on the road in the morning.

1. The serious bikers; the ones in the yellow jerseys and biker shorts and streamlined helmets, with legs like tree trunks – kinda like mine were, when I was a serious biker, between about 1980 and 1990.  Most of them are visibly serious about their biking (kinda like I was); focuses, concentrated, and very, very fast.  Some of them boggle the mind; one guy sailed past me a few weeks back on an oval bike – a single speed bike with no coaster gear on it, meaning you have to pedal all the freaking time when you’re on it, and you can’t change gears on hills.  I’m in awe.
2. Guys you can pretty much tell are there because they got their third DWI.  They’re usually dressed like they dress at work – work boots, jeans, coveralls, whatever.
3. Bikers like me; guys and gals in workout duds grinding out the commute to work, or grabbing a morning jaunt before heading into the office.  I wear pretty much what I wear to the gym; whatever T-shirt I was wearing the day before, my gym shorts, my sneakers.  I put my work clothes in a backpack (my christmas present to myself will probably be a rear rack of some kind), and take a shower in my office’s locker room before going to work because I figure even my little six mile commute is gonna make me sweaty.  And who needs that?
4. Bikers like the guy I drafted for a while this morning.  Let me explain.

The guy was fiftysomething, with a neatly-trimmed gray beard, he wore a helmet, a dress shirt, khaki Dockers, black socks and loafers – in other words, dressed for work at an office job.  He carried a shoulder bag that looked like it was full of notebooks, not clothes.

Now, it was pleasant this morning, but kinda muggy.  I was sweating; I’ll chalk a lot of that up to the fact that I’m still a ways away from being in shape, but I also have a pretty solid rhythm (one of the keys to distance biking is just getting your legs in a rhythm and keeping it, not stopping for anything, even coasting as little as possible; the cooling down of your muscles actually causes more fatigue than keeping your legs moving.  And yes, I realize the absurdity of calling my six-mile commute “distance biking”, but then you try it when you’re 44 and haven’t biked seriously since 1990.  But I digress), so I don’t waste a lot of energy, either.  This guy was working up a bit of a lather, too; decent rhythm, but he was standing on his pedals up hills and out of stoplights, which tends to exert one.

I have to wonder – how do these people get through the workday without smelling like a bear that’s just come out of hibernation?

I noticed that the guy this morning – like many of the guys I see who bike to work in their work duds – pulled into a government building at the end of his ride.  Government employees, please spill the beans – do your offices reek, or what?

Someone sent me this, the other day:

The Salvation Army AAA@BBB.CCC wrote: From: “The Salvation
Army” <AAA@BBB.CCC>
To: XXX@YYY.ZZZ
Date: 18 Jul 2007 14:01:07 -0400
Subject: Summer Volunteer Opportunities

    Volunteer Opportunities     
   Salvation Army Summer Volunteer Opportunities
     ____________________________________________________
         Disaster Actor
The Minnesota National Guard needs volunteers to simulate a large
scale disaster for training purposes.  As a disaster actor, you will be
given a story to act out and some make-up to go with the part, then youll
be saved from the rubble, washed down in decontamination, and bandaged
up.  Individuals and groups are welcome as some shifts require 100
volunteers!
Dates: August 21  25
Times: Shifts are 8 a.m.  1 p.m. and Noon  5 p.m.
Location: Minneapolis National Guard Armory.  Volunteers will be bused
from this location to the training site.

That actually sounds like fun, and I might see if I can do that.

Which brings up a question:  you know the guys who play the terrorists, armed robbers and so forth for police and military simulations?

Where do they find volunteers for that?  Because that sounds like fun.

Taking a day off from work today.  Blogging will be relatively light until later.

…about Minnesota’s senior senator, he seems – so far – to find a way to come through.

Via Ed, I see Norm beat Turban Durbin like a baby seal in a debate on the “Fairness” Doctrine.

By way of blocking a Coleman amendment that would have barred the government from regulating content of political broadcasting, Durbin replied:

Mr. Durbin: …But the senator is arguing that the marketplace can provide. What is the senator’s response if the marketplace fails to provide? What is the marketplace does not provide opportunities to hear both points of view? Since the people who are seeking the licenses are using America’s airwaves, does the government, speaking for the people of this country, have any interest at that point to step in and make sure there is a despair balanced approach to the –a fair and balanced approach to the information given to the American people?

The correct answers are:

1. No
2. Do you, Senator Durbin, think the American people don’t have access to every possible point of view, right now?  In fact, do you believe that Americans have access to fewer points of view than we had 20 years ago?  Clearly, that is not the case.
3. Again, no.

 Coleman responds:

Mr. Coleman: …The government does not — does not — have the responsibility to regulate content of speech. That’s what the first amendment is about. It’s exactly what the first amendment is about. Government’s not supposed to be regulating content. And in a time in 1949 when you had three network TV stations, basically, when had you limited channels of communication, I presume there was a legitimate concern on the part of some that, in fact, government needs to step in and ensure balance. But now we’re in 2007. We’re at a time where we’ve got 20,000, you know, opportunities for stations and satellite, where you have cable, you have blogs, you have a whole range of information…John Kennedy stated, “we are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” Mr. President, I’m not afraid of of — of the people. I’m not afraid of the people having access to the in information, ideas that they want to have access to. But I am afraid of the government stepping in and regulating content…They should be able to tune into whatever they want to tune into and they shouldn’t be thinking that back home someone at the FCC is listening and monitoring and deciding what is fair and what is balanced. Let the people decide. Let the market decide. Let the first amendment flourish.

Kudos to Senator Coleman.  He made a great argument for freedom.

Of course, the Democrats’ push to re-instate the “Fairness” doctrine isn’t about freedom.  It’s not even about making sure people get “fair and balanced” information (since the market has clearly done that in spades). 

It’s about shutting down dissent from the dominant liberal media establishment.

Thanks to everyone that’s contributed so far!  It’s been a good,and gratifying, bleg!

Anyway, iif you’re so inclined, I’ll be everlastingly grateful for whatever spare electronic change you might toss in the pail…

Or, if you prefer the anonymous route, click here to go to an Amazon Honor System page.

Just looking to make this blog’s ends meet; if you have a buck or two to spare, I’d be much obliged…

So if you’re so inclined, I’ll be everlastingly grateful for whatever spare electronic change you might toss in the pail…

 

Thanks in advance!

It was a scorching hot day; the kind of humid, stinking miasma that I’ve always hated. 

It was Friday, July 10, 1987.  I’d been out of work for four months.

And by “out of work”, I mean “working, here and there.  My fixed bills – rent, phone, car insurance, groceries – came to right around $300 a month.  I’d usually tack on $50 or so more in job-hunting expenses, most of it in long-distance phone calls and postage for sending out audition tapes to radio stations.  I’d worked through the list of every talk station in the country in markets larger than about 100,000 people, called almost all of them, and by this point sent out probably 100 audition tapes. 

I supported myself – in no “style” whatsoever – by writing free-lance articles for various Saint Paul neighborhood newspapers which, while they didn’t have the stature of the Pioneer Press or the Strib, had a couple of crucial benefits:

• They paid as well as or better for freelance piece work than the daillies or either of the marquee weeklies, the City Pages and the Twin Cities Reader
• They were non-union.  I remember my first and last meeting with an editor at the Pioneer Press; “This is very good stuff.  But the Guild would put my n*ts in a vise if I bought non-union work”. 

And along the way, I pitched myself to the various “talent agents” around the cities, looking for voiceover work.  As the saying went, I’m not a model, but I played one on the radio.

Today, I got a call.  A woman at an agency in Golden Valley had an odd need.

“I see on your resume you do Commonwealth accent work.  Can you do Canadian?”

Now, growing up in North Dakota you heard the odd Canadian voice.  Indeed, I’d grown up around a lot of ’em – since we didn’t get Public Radio in Jamestown until I was into college, my mom kept the family radio pretty much welded to CBW in Winnipeg, the region’s CBC affiliate, and a station that sounded, then as now, like NPR with funny vowels. 

For a split second I thought – “In the whole Twin Cities voiceover market, you can’t find an actual Canadian?” 

But I silenced that thought.  “Sure”, I said, switching slyly into my most exaggerated Mountie brogue, “I’ll see aboot fitting the job into my shshedule”.

“OK, we need you at the studio now.  Now now now”.

So I raced out to the jeep, drove across town to a studio in Edina, and spent the next four hours doing an industrial training video for a Canadian branch of a Minnesota company.  The four hours’ work, at the non-union $75 an hour scale, paid just about a month’s worth of bills, even after my agent took her 10%.   

I think I might have worn a red flannel lumberjack shirt to get into character, but I can’t confirm that.

I’m getting some help on some long-overdue touch-ups to this blog.  The indispensable Dr. Jonz is doing a bunch of the mucking around in the site’s plumbing that I don’t know how to do myself, so that by the time he’s done the Search link will work, my archive URLs will be a lot less irrational, and I can switch adservers.

He’s doing this on top of his real job, of course – so at the moment, my comments and archive “category” links aren’t working. 

Bear with us.  It’ll be pretty cool.

It’s day two of the triennial “pledge week” bleg.  Since I don’t have any wealthy sugardaddies paying for this blog, and Blogads.com certainly isn’t paying the freight these days, I figured I’d go to the source; the best audience in the world!

Not to flatter anyone or anything.

So if you’re so inclined, I’ll be everlastingly grateful for whatever spare electronic change you might toss in the pail…

 

Thanks in advance!

It’s been three years since I’ve launched a “bleg” – blog begging.  I figure “why not?”  I have a couple of computers to fix, some site upgrades to do, and my car isn’t getting any younger. 

So if you’re so inclined, I’ll be everlastingly grateful for whatever spare electronic change you might toss in the pail…

  

Thanks in advance!

End of week two of bike commuting and, when time and energy permits, riding a bit more just for fun.

And I’ve just recovered a memory from about 20 years ago.

One of my favorite things in the whooooooole world, I’ve re-realized, is passing the Saint Paul Cathedral, and continuing down the long hill onto John Ireland Boulevard – the broad, monument-dotted avenue that connects the Cathedral and the Capitol – and just unwinding, sailing as fast as I can past the Cathedral, the First Minnesota Memorial, St. Paul College and the Historical Society, and crossing Kellogg and over the freeway…

…and then hotfooting a hard right onto the frontage road below the Capitol and in front of the Veterans Building, blasting over the overpass past Saint Joseph’s Hospital onto Saint Peter Street, a one-way with almost too little traffic to worry about (although I worry about it, have no fear).

It can get better than this, but it’s not easy.

..was born on this date in 1936, one of the first babies born in the new Jamestown Hospital.

It was the hottest summer in American history…

[…huh?  But I thought global warming meant…let me check…(ruffles through papers).  Huh.  Yep, it was over 100 for weeks on end!  Hm.  Go figger! – Ed.]

…yep, it was the hottest summer in American history, around 120 degrees when Dad was born. 

I’ve had this theory since I was a little kid; people are best acclimated to, and prefer, the weather they were first exposed to.  I observed this when I was in fifth grade, when I noticed that Dad could play five sets of tennis on a 95 degree day, then drink a cup of iced tea and go golf 18 holes and barely break a sweat – but when the temperature dropped below 40, he started like a Fiat.  I, on the other hand, came out of hospital into the -25F aftermath of a northern North Dakota blizzard; I don’t bother buttoning my jacket if it’s above 10 degrees, but if it gets over 85 I’m a sodden mess if I’m not constantly, violently physically active or curled up in front of an errant air conditioner.

At any rate – happy birthday, Dad!

I’m actually writing this on Tuesday.  I’m certainly not going to be blogging today, Wednesday. 

Anyway, get out and celebrate our nation’s independence. I strongly recommend commemorating our forefathers’ resistance to arbitrary, stupid authority by driving to Wisconsin or the Dakotas (if you’re in Minnesota) and buying a ton of bottle rockets, screamers and roman candles. 

George Washington and the patriots who founded this country would have wanted it that way. 

She’s mind-warpingly hot.

She’s got a thing for slightly older guys with unconventional good looks, some mileage, and who’ve earned the frothing insane emnity of crazed regional zealots.

She’s on the only reality show I ever watch.

And she’s available!

(And, failing that, maybe she’ll introduce me to her.  Or her.  Or her).