One of the best-known, and certainly longest-running, series in the history of this blog was my 130 part series of 20th anniversaries of events between deciding to move to the Twin CIties in 1985, and my oldest child’s birth in 1991. The series took (doy) six years to write.

One of the characters that popped up was a roommate I had at the time. I gave him a pseudonym (as I did with a couple of the people that were, er, on the “colorful” side) – “Wyatt“. He had a thing for the ladies, was addicted to pretty much everything to which one could be addicted (and dealt in some of it vocationally), He gave off certain signs of mental illness, although I was pretty bad at noticing that kind of thing back then. Our roomate situation ended one night in 1988, when he shot up the house we rented in what I had ascribed to a cocaine-fueled frenzy.

I’ve neither talked with nor heard from “Wyatt” for over 30 years. I will confess, I googled him about ten years ago, and found from a few news stories – a break-in at a liquor store, a trial and sentence – that showed that his habits were keeping him in just as much trouble as they did when I knew him.

I also knew he had a father – a fairly wealthy man, a former Navy frogman who had done well in, I believe, real estate or insurance or something like that – and a mother. And I knew his family loved him, and spent a lot of money and, I suspect, a lot more effort and emotional energy, trying to get him on the right track – including sending him to treatment in Minnesota, which of course led him across my path in 1987.

And when I became a parent, his story – the whole family’s story, really – terrified me; it was possible, no matter how you loved your children, for the unreasoning, cackling spectre of mental illness and its sidekick, addiction, to take that kid from you no matter what you did and how hard you clung to the hope you could do something about it.

A bit of curious googling over the weekend brought it all back.

“Wyatt” had a real name. And he died in 2010 – ironically, not long after his departure from the series. Tragically, but not in the least bit surprisingly, he died of mixing drugs and booze.

And I’m going to admit – while my “Wyatt” tales in “Twenty Years Ago Today” were true down to the last comma and semicolon, they painted as one-dimensional a picture of him as one might expect someone who, twenty years later, was still kicking himself for letting that kind of dysfunction into his life, and the consequences it brought.

The article – featuring his parents, who have stayed involved in trying to help the mentally ill over the years – brings a human aspect to “Wyatt” – Wyeth – that I wasn’t ready to acknowledge when I wrote the series, over a decade ago.

My very belated condolences to everyone involved.

It’s been a little crazy lately, and in the rush I neglected two birthdays.

The first, of course, is today.

Reagan

Note:  This is an “encore” of a post I wrote in 2013

Today would be the 108th birthday of the greatest president of my lifetime.

People say “there’s no Ronald Reagan in American politics today”.  And they’re right – but as his son Michael told me in an interview a few years ago, it’s not that there couldn’t be.

Because Reagan had three great talents:   he was a great, natural communicator (who, unlike a lot of “natural communicators”, honed his craft with relentless discipline);  he developed a vision and he stuck to it with determination and focus; and most importantly for today’s  conservatives, he knew how to build coalitions, rather than exclude people from them.

We have plenty of people who can communicate well, although the conservative movement has had its share of duds in that department too.  And we have not a few who can visioneer with the best of them  – in fact, with the rise of the Tea Party, our movement’s best years may be to come, provided they keep the faith.

But as to building coalitions?

Today, we’re better at building silos.

Reagan did something that conservatives are terrible at today; he got social conservatives (at the peak of their notoriety and political cachet), blue-collar Democrats who the economy had turned into instant fiscalcons, Jack Kemp-style economic hawks and paleocons together…

…by focusing remorselessly on what they agreed on;  fixing the economy, and ending Communism.

And once in office, that’s what he focused on.  Oh, he paid lip service to issues that were to him tangents – and lip service from the world’s greatest bully pulpit ain’t chicken feed. But he didn’t fritter his political capital away with excessive natterings about issues that were tangential to his vision, and the vision his coalition all agreed on in electing him.  He spoke eloquently on issues – many of them – and that speaking had its effect.

Some call that an abdication; it was in fact a matter of leaving that work to the members of his coalition (example:  he exerted very little executive effort on abortion and gun control – but the efforts to roll both back at the state and local level started to coalesce during his time in office anyway – in part because of his leadership from the bully pulpit.  But for all that, always, the focus was on “dancing with the one what brung him” to DC at the head of an impossibly-diverse coalition; his rock-solid, bone-simple two point agenda, fixing the economy and toppling the Commies.

As I moderated the “Where Do We Go From Here” event last week at the Blue Fox, and listened to some of the friction and cat-calling across the party’s various factions, I thought there was a lot of focus on what divided us.  And so my final question to the panel was “what do we all – all of us, from socialcons like Andy Parrish to libertarians like Marianne Stebbins, actually agree on?”  Because that is the only real way forward for any of the factions – since if any faction takes Parrish’s (tongue in cheek?) advice and forms a separate party, it’s the road to mutual palookaville, with multiple parties that are less than the sum of the parts they once were.

So for my annual Gipper Day celebration, it’ll be the usual; jelly beans at my desk, taking the kids out to dinner to talk about what Reagan’s legacy has meant in their lives (other than the uninformed, out-of-context crap the DFLers in their lives’ll say)…

…and asking my fellow conservatives “what do we agree on?”

The second? Well, that’ was yesterday.

Shot In The Dark

Yesterday was the 17th anniversary of my starting this blog.

Hardly seems possible, sometimes.

I’ve got the worst flu I’ve had in a long, long time. Taking the day off.

As you can probably tell.

Back blogging for real tomorrow.

Happy New Year to you and yours!

It’s gonna be a light posting day, as this whole holiday season has been.

But to tide you and the world over until tomorrow, here’s a good New Years resolution from Amy Alkon:

Now, go out and smack the world and the year upside the head with some kindness.

So – if you’re out and about and need to warm up and work up a sweat tonight or tomorrow, stop on by the Eagle in Stillwater. My band Elephant in the Room will be playing from 8 ’til Midnight, Friday and Saturday.

It’s in the old Famous Dave’s, on Highway 36 at Greeley.

We’ve got some music for the holidays, too! [1]

Good food, not-too-expensive drinks, great location, pool tables just around the corner, fast service – and EITR. What a perfect way to decompress from the holidays?

(And don’t forget – we’ll be at the Outpost in Ramsey on Friday, January 11. Two weeks from tonight!)

[1] OK – to be accurate, it’s two songs. But hey, you’re not gonna get that from a dance club DJ, are you?

Hope you all have a happy and blessed one.

My present to all of you:

But not just any Friday.

It’s the Friday after Thanksgiving – which may be the single slowest traffic day in the year of a halfway-serious blogger.

So I’m just going to remind you  my band is playing tonight and tomorrow out at the Eagles in Stillwater (all kinds of details right here), and leave you with this:

My band, “Elephant in the Room”, is playing Friday and Saturday nights at the Eagles in Stillwater.

We’ll be playing from 8 ’til midnight.   We’re a classic rock band that does stuff from the ’50s through the ’90s.   And it features our “new” lead singer, former NARN producer Tommy, who can do Led Zeppelin ,Guns and Roses and the Offspring with style.   Seriously – this isn’t your grandpa’s Elephant in the Room.

It’s a fun room, excellent food, drinks aren’t too expensive, and we have a lot of fun playing the joint!

My band, “Elephant in the Room”, will be playing at the Outpost in Ramsey Saturday night at 9PM.

It came up pretty suddenly – so our leather-lunged lead singer Tommy “The H Bomb” Huynh won’t be interrupting his family vacation for it.     It’ll be the old, four-piece version of EITR.

Anyway – come on out to the Outpost Saturday night.  You never know what’ll happen!

I started this blog 16.5 years ago – and one of the things I learned early on was that the key to making it work, day in, day out, through writers block and manic creative bursts, was to write to a schedule; whether it was a couple times a day or twice a week, just write, even – maybe especailly – if it was krep.

This past few months my cycle has been more “block” than “maniacially creative”.  It’s been a busy, exhausting couple of months for a variety of personal reasons – most of them very good, but pretty taxing.

I’ve been though the cycle often enough to know it’ll pass; I doubt I’ll ever feel the creative doldrums like i did in 2011, after throwing myself neck-deep into writing about the 2010 gubernatorial race and coming out completely exhausted.

But you know what they say – the first step is admitting you’re overstretched and exhausted!

Much more to come.

My band “Elephant In The Room” will playing Friday and Saturday at the Eagles in Stillwater

It’s the former Famous Dave’s.

We’ll be on from 8 to Midnight both nights.

Stop on out!

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Story 1:

Some guy riding a bicycle in downtown Minneapolis at 11:30 at night.  Blows a red light, collided with a motorcycle and was struck by a car.

Plainly, the drivers of the motorcycle and car, being wanton spewers of carbon dioxide poisoning our Mother the Earth, were at fault for failing to recognize the moral superiority of the bicycle rider and to acknowledge his right to disregard the traffic laws governing lesser mortals

Story 2:

Some gal riding a bicycle in Stillwater weaves around the barrier and falls into the river when the lift bridge began to rise.

Plainly, the bridge operator and the pilot of the boat for whom the bridge was opening, being wanton spewers of carbon dioxide poisoning our Mother the Earth, were at fault for failing to recognize the moral superiority of the bicycle rider and to acknowledge her right to disregard traffic laws governing lesser mortals.

Plainly, there is a crisis in Minnesota.  When will Governor Dayton act??  When??

As biking has become more popular (especially in places like the Twin Cities, were perverse incentives drive a lot of people to bikes), it’s axiomatic that a lot of those new people will not know what they’re doing.

Posting is going to be a little light today.

What is it about Thursdays, lately?

In 1998, I’d had a pretty busy couple of decades.

I’d started in radio (koff koff) 19 years earlier, in 1979.  That lasted until about 1992, when – tired of trying to raise two kids with another one on the way on $7 an hour, I got into technical writing – mostly writing user manuals, online help, reports and fdjdjweim asklssssssssssssss….

…sorry  I fell asleep just remembering that phase of my career.  Technical writing didn’t agree with me much.   It was good for me – it got me into the software business – but a good technical writer is a stickler for details in a way that I really just don’t much care to be.

I’d been a technical writer for about a year, working at the old Cray Research facility in Eagan, when I ran into a fellow tech writer who was in charge of building a “usability lab” – a room where users could be observed doing the jobs they were supposed to be doing on Cray software, noting the problems they had, developing trends, and eventually making recommendations on how to design the software to be easier to learn, less obtuse – better.

And I thought – instead of explaining how to work with badly designed software, why not just design the software to be more self-explanatory, and make more money and get more respect in the bargain?

It wasn’t quite that easy; at the time, user interface / human factors / Human Computer Interaction design was seen rarely outside of highly regulated industries like medical devices or defense contractors.

And most of them had masters degrees in industrial, cognitive or experimental psychology.   I had a BA in English.

But I spent four years of spare time reading, practicing designing things, and learning about the trade from the few people I could find as mentors.  And twenty years ago today, I walked into my first User Experience job at StorageTek in Brooklyn Park.

And, to my amazement, succeeded.  For twenty years.

UPPER MIDDLE CLASS NPR-LISTENING WHOLE FOODS SHOPPING DEMOCRATS FROM GOOD NEIGHBORHOODS WITH “GOOD SCHOOLS”:  “The problem with Republicans is that they’re just so racist”.

EVENTS:  “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Upper Middle Class Democrat from a Nice Neighborhood:  We’re going to fulfill a liberal goal and start busing your kids and seriously integrating your school district”.

UPPER MIDDLE CLASS NPR-LISTENING WHOLE FOODS SHOPPING DEMOCRATS FROM GOOD NEIGHBORHOODS WITH “GOOD SCHOOLS”:  “No – we’re the good kind of racist!”

Due to a perfect storm of nagging events, posting will be on the light side today.

And for its sixteenth birthday vehicle, it chooses a 1968 Lotus 49.

Shot In The Dark started sixteen years ago today.  I was in my isolated basement cube at a doomed startup just about the time the dotcom bubble started popping.  I read an article on Time.com about this new phenomenon, blogging, bringing unprecedented number of people to the marketplace of ideas.

Having been a frustrated pundit in my twenties, it called out to me; I started reading Andrew Sullivan, and that night I went out to Blogger.com and started “Shot in the Dark”.

The neighborhood’s changed since then.  Other blogs have come and gone.  Others – Ed Morrissey, Powerline – made it big, and turned into self-sustaining ventures.

Me?  I just kept on writing.  And here I am today.

Anyway – thanks to all of you for joining me on this ride.  It’s never gotten old.

Kind of like the Lotus 49.

Blogging is dead.

It has been for a while.  Andrew Sullivan – my blogfather – wrote about it not all that long ago (in re the death of The Awl, a blog I don’t lament in the least)

William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection attempts an autopsy of blogging – at least, of blogging as a cultural phenomenon and business model.  Both were killed by the loathsome Twitter:

Social media really is a sewer, and I attribute much of the evaporation of the blogosphere to Twitter. It’s much easier to find an instant audience on Twitter than to build the relationship with readers to get them to come to your website. Twitter pundits are the worst pundits, counting their worth based on “followers” (many of whom are fake and purchased). The NY Times had an amazing expose on the purchasing of Twitter followers in order to create a fake reality of popularity that then can be monetized as an “influencer.”

The financial pressures also are real, as ever-increasing demand for clicks to drive dwindling advertising payout creates so much noise it’s hard to be heard. And yes, the financial pressures are real in this superheated media environment.

Monday will be my sixteenth anniversary as a blogger.  I’ve never been especially sensitive to the ups and downs of the field; I never became a superstar like John Hinderaker or Ed Morrissey or Rachel Lucas.    I didn’t go down in a wave of shame and humiliation, either, like Duncan Black or Oliver Willis or pretty much a anyone who ever blogged for “Minnesota Progressive Project”.  It’s always pretty much just been me, with the odd contribution from First Ringer (and, back in the day, Johnny Roosh and Bogus Doug).

And it was about the time Twitter and its hordes of droogs took over the job of facile instant political analysis that people stared hitting the gates.

And, like the other highs and lows, I didn’t care.  Twitter bores me stiff.  I use it mosty to promote the show, and to gauge the cowardice of liberal politicians (the ones that routinely block conservatives are, in fact, gutless cravens).

But the “death” of blogging interests me not in the least.   I got into it because I enjoyed writing.  And while I’ve gotten the odd paycheck out of the deal – back in 2007, I think I was gettting $200/months in ad revenue, which has plunged to maybe $100/year lately) and my annual pledge drive always adds a nice bump to the vacation budget, I do it for the pure unadulterated love of writing stuff for people to read.

Dead, schmead.  As far as I”m concerned, it’s just beginning.

Things sort of caught up with me this week:  it’s been crushingly busy.

Posting will be light to nonexistent today, and maybe tomorrow.

But I’ll be back.  Oh, yes, I will.

After about 32 years of trying to write music, a year of recording stuff, and a few months of frantic planning, it’s here:  the debut (and who knows, likely final) album by my band, The Supreme Soviet of Love.

See Red goes onsale today at your favorite music online music retailer:

The album includes a few songs that date back to the eighties – “Fourth of July”, “Chicago” and “Great Northern Avenue” are songs I used to play with bands back at the Seventh Street Entry way back when.

Others – “The Wonders Each New Day Brings”, “Almost Monday” and “Snake”, among others – are things I wrote in the past year, largely to prove to myself that the whole thing wasn’t just a nostalgia exercise.

And a couple others – “Shotgun”, “The Ugly LIghts” – split the difference; they’re lyrical reboots of ideas that’ve been knocking around my head for years, sometimes decades.

Anyway – the album is on sales as of today:

• iTunes
• Amazon Music  
• CDBaby (for CDs or downloads)

Coming soon (like, probably today) on:

• iHeart Radio
• YouTube Music
• Spotify
• Pandora

And hey – it’s priced to move!

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind y’all one last time:

Tomorrow (Saturday) Night:  Elephant in the Room (rock and roll covers, ’50s-’90s) at the Sundance in Maple Grove

8-12PM.  No cover.

Sunday Night:  Album Release Party; The Supreme Soviet of Love at O‘Gara’s in Saint Paul

5-9PM:  $5 cover.

Hope to see you there!

Waaaay back last summer, when I  planned to release a Supreme Soviet of Love album, I picked a date:  November 12.  A Sunday night.  Few conflicts, start and finish times early enough to get everyone home for the evenings news – perfect!

My other band, “Elephant in the Room”, after taking taking a few months off to learn new material and change lineup, on the other hand, spent most of the year looking for a gig.

Any gig.

So between scheduleing a Supreme Soviet of Love gig for November 12 way back in July, and today, what happened?

Of course Elephant in the Room landed a gig for November 11.

So talk about this weekend!.

Saturday, November 11 – the Sundance in Maple Grove

Elephant in the Room will be playing at the Sundance in Maple Grove from 8 to midnight.  

EITR does classic rock covers from the 1950s through the 1990s – a grab bag of Elvis, the Kinks, Ian Hunter, the Cars, Bad Company, the Stones, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, the Eagles, Steve Miller, Tom Petty, John Mellencamp, Johnny Cash…

…well, pretty much anything that grabs you from that entire forty year period.

And the Sundance – which I just visited for the first time last weekend – is a nice place; bowling, golf (probably not much of that ’til spring), good pizza, decent beer selection, “Steak Night” on Saturdays ’til 8PM (just $10!), and, of course, live entertainment.  That’d be us, of course.  No cover that I”m aware of, which makes it even nicer.

It feels like it’s way out there – but it’s actually super easy to get to:

It should be a fun night and a fun gig.

Hope you can make it!

Sunday, November 12 – O’Gara’s in Saint Paul

This gets complicated, so stick with me, here:

“The Supreme Soviet of Love” will be having the album release party for its first (and wjho knows, maybe only) album, See Red this coming Sunday at O’Gara’s.

See Red includes a bunch of songs – a couple of them going back to the 1980s (we’ve encountered some of them here), and a whole lot more that I wrote in the past year just to prove to myself that the whole thing wasn’t a nostalgia exercise.

Who knows – it may have been both.  I don’t know.  And I don’t care!

The Supreme Soviet of Love will go onstage at 8PM, and come hell or high water we’ll be out of there by 9PM;  you’ll be home in plenty of time for the 10PM evening news, or the 10PM rerun of Walking Dead if that’s what you prefer.

There’s a $5 cover – 100% of which goes to pay the rest of the band.  Me?  I’m hoping to sell CDs (and they’ll be on sale there, as well as available for download on iTunes, Amazon or wherever you like to get your music from.

And by the way, the opening act, going on stage at 6:30ish, will be…

…Elephant in the Room.  Yep.  I’ll be opening for myself.    That’s one way to save money!

I’ll be hanging out after loadout until they kick me out of there, for anyone who wants to talk politics, music, beer, food, or whatever you got.

So I hope, in an ideal world, you can make both shows; the Sundance could become a regular gig if we draw a lot of people, and of course the album release party has been on my bucket list since Ronald Reagan was president.

Either one would be great, though!

As I noted last March, I’ve been playing guitar for 40 years.

I moved to the Twin Cities 32 years ago, largely to try to be a musician.

And since either or both of those events, I’ve been dreaming about making this announcement:

My first single [1], “The Wonders Each New Day Brings”, is out today.  It’s on most of your major music vendors:

Amazon.

iTunes

(It’s also on Pandora, Spotify and any number of other music services)

The album See Red is also available for pre-order; it will be released 11/10.

[1] OK, it’s technically a “Teaser Track”, not a single.  I don’t care.

So the Supreme Soviet of Love’s first album, See Red, is off to the printers.   My son Zam – who’s in school for graphic design – did the front cover art:

So I’m committed now.  The album goes on sale on November 10 (I hope), on both CD and digital  download; with a little luck the “teaser” (they used to be called “Singles”), currently a song called “The Wonders Each New Day Brings”, should come out a week from today, if all goes well.

So – hope you can make it to the Release Party for “See Red”, November 12 at O’Gara’s in Saint Paul!

Boy, is the weekend of November 10-12 going to be busy.

First – one of my bands, “Elephant in the Room”, is going to be playing at the Sundance in Maple Grove:

If you’re in the Northwest Suburbs that night, I hope you can stop by!

And then the next night, November 12, my other band, the Supreme Soviet of Love is having the release party for our first album, “See Red”, at O’Gara’s:

Doors open at 5PM, and the Supreme Soviet of Love goes on at 8PM.  Come on down, have a beer, enjoy a few tunes, hang out after for the closest thing to a MOB party I’ve been able to put together in a while!

Maybe I’ll print tour t-shirts…

Lots of external sturm und drang today – so I’m going to be having a Joe Doakes marathon.  Back to regular posting Monday.