FIRST DRAFT

Bernie Kosar and the Long Road Back

The first time I really remember seeing him, Bernie Kosar was about to be on the wrong side of history. As a kid, I had watched the 1984 Orange Bowl, but I didn’t really know who the QB was. It seemed to be more team on team than man on man.

When I saw the lithe 6-foot-5 man taking on the 5-foot-9 elf from Boston College on the day after Thanksgiving, the midget in me pulled for Doug Flutie.

I watched practically weeping as they showed Kosar on the sideline smiling and accepting congratulations from guys with bad mustaches and Jheri Curls.

“I want the short guy to win,” I wailed to my father. “Not this Bernie guy.”

My father tried to explain reality to me and how six seconds wasn’t enough time to do anything and so forth and so on…

You know how that one played out.

For the next 30 years of my life, I pulled for that short guy but also for the tall one. Kosar found a way to finagle his passage to his hometown Cleveland Browns. I had loved the team for years, for reasons that still escape my family, and I watched him grow the team from weak roots to playoff promise.

I remember that cold-as-shit weekend in 1987 where he whipped the ball through an icy wind on the banks of Lake Erie for 489 yards, bringing his team back against the Jets for a 23-20 double OT win. He was down 10 with less than three minutes to go and he managed to make it happen for the Browns.

I also remember suffering with him as John Elway made the Browns his personal bitch. The Drive. The Drive II. The Fumble. Every year, Kosar would pull them to within an inch of the Super Bowl. Every year Elway would keep them an inch away.

It also seemed like every year, Kosar arrived in the playoffs made of nothing but duct tape and glue. He would be beaten, battered and nearly crippled.

He had the mobility of your average Greek statue and the escape ability of the passengers on the Titanic. In the days of Mark Gastineau, Lawrence Taylor, Mike Singletary and other rabid defenders, Kosar essentially wore a “Sack Me” sign every Sunday. Over 16 weeks, they would crush him repeatedly and mercilessly.

During one playoff game, I remember seeing a sideline report on Kosar’s hand. Turns out he had torn a tendon or something in the index finger of his throwing hand. To make sure he could play, the trainer built this thing out of a rubber band and epoxy.

They lost anyway.

Finally, I remember that one horrible fall in 1993 when Bill Belichick (before he was “Miracle Bill” of the Patriots), called a press conference and cut Kosar in mid-season without a viable backup to injured Vinny Testaverde. Belichick muttered the line “diminishing skills” and with that, he was gone.

The only good thing about that was seeing Kosar getting scooped up by the Cowboys, who were en route to a Super Bowl. When Troy Aikman got one of his patented concussions, Kosar stepped in and helped push the team into the Big Show.

(Over the years, I seemed to have remembered Bernie throwing a ridiculously good pass to Alvin Harper for a touchdown. Found it in that link. It's like finding a memory of your first kiss.)

The last snap of that Super Bowl win? All Kosar, who knelt to the ground to run out the clock.

I only got to see him play live once. It was in 1994 or 1995 when the Dolphins (his last stop) played the Packers in the pre-season Shrine Game at County Stadium. He led the Dolphins’ second unit down the field with ridiculous precision. Of course, he wasn’t going to supplant Hall of Famer to be Dan Marino, but I could dream.

Eventually he retired and became one of the few success stories in post-game life. He had a business degree and a good mind for running things. He invested in real estate, restaurants and greeting card businesses. He was doing exceptionally well.

Then, everything broke again.

The market turned, his wife left, his health began deteriorating. His fortune turned to dust and his fans started to wonder about him.

The Browns brought him back to do color on their broadcasts, only to find that fans believed him to be drunk or drugged up on TV. The slurred speech and the lapses in thought had them thinking the worst of the man who gave them his very best.

As it turns out, Kosar was dealing with serious post-concussion syndrome, much like many of his other mid-1980s NFL brethren. No one knew to ask for a while and when they did, Kosar wasn’t willing to share.

As of this writing, Kosar has finally come to grips with some of these issues. He’s still trying to rebuild his life. He’s speaking out on issues of finance, as witnessed in Billy Corben’s classic “30 for 30” film “Broke.” He also appears to be getting healthier.

Kosar recently spoke out in favor of an experimental treatment he’s been receiving for concussions. He said the pain has subsided, the ringing in his head has stopped and he feels healthier than he has since his 20s.

My only concern is in the minor details of the story (shown here) that refer to his doctor as a “pioneer”  and the treatment as “groundbreaking.” In both cases, the quotes are directly from the source material, leaving me curious as to why the writer chose that path. My hope is that this isn’t some sort of snake oil salesman, glomming onto a downtrodden player in hopes of a fast buck. My cynicism leads me to think this to be the case, in spite of hoping against it.

Still, I’ll be keeping an eye on ol’ Number 19, watching him get back off the turf one more time.

If anyone deserves a winning outcome, it’s Kosar.

A really funny gang rape

Here’s a great joke:

How do you know a 16-year-old girl is likely dead?

“You don’t sleep through a wang in the butthole!”

Wait, here’s a better one!

How dead is a 16-year-old girl who was kidnapped by a group of high school classmates and repeatedly raped?

“She’s deader than O.J.’s wife!”

Have you stopped laughing yet? Then you'll love this one:

How hard did a group of high school football players, one by one, rape a girl after they had to physically carry her unconscious body from one party into their “rape crew” party?

“They raped her harder than that cop raped Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction. And they raped her quicker than Mike Tyson raped that one girl…”

Do you need to catch your breath? Laughing so hard? Yeah, here’s another one that will have you just crying:

How pointless is it to try to help a 16-year-old girl who, after being raped while unconscious (possibly because some asshole roofied her), was peed on and still didn’t wake up?

“That’s like trying to help wood turn into stone. That’s like trying to help the Padres to a .500 season. That’s like trying to help Tim Tebow be a good quarterback. That’s like trying to help Natty Light become a refreshing beer.”

Wait… You’re not laughing?

I guess you’re not from Steubenville, Ohio’s proud high school. If you were, you’d probably think this stuff was hysterical. At least, that’s what the video evidence that was leaked earlier this week reveals.

An anonymous hacker posted a 12-minute clip of a young man, identified as former Steubenville High School baseball player Michael Nodianos, detailing how “raped” a young woman was at the party. Those one-line zingers above? Nothing but his comedic genius at work.

Not satisfied to simply take his one-idiot improv act to video, Nodianos is said to have also tweeted about the incident, so his brilliance could be enjoyed by those without the inclination to sit through a fifth of an hour of pure dickheadery.

The rape was said to have occurred in August, but the prosecution of the football players who were said to be responsible for these acts failed to gain traction until the blogosphere took hold of the story. Allegations that police had brushed the incident under the rug in this 18,000-person football-crazed town were refuted by prosecutors, who said almost no one came forward to offer any information about this vile act.

Now, it seems that everyone’s eyes are on this hamlet best known for its dying industrial base and as the birthplace of famed gambler Jimmy the Greek.

Prior to this national shaming, it seemed as if nothing could bring down the “Big Red” spirit. To wit, here’s the opening line from the “investigative” piece from the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

It’s Monday, and ominous-looking clouds are pushing over Harding Stadium as dozens of football players in practice jerseys prepare to take on Cleveland’s Benedictine Bengals.

But this day two key players are missing from the field.

Right. Because that’s the news. We’re missing two key players from this “Championship-Bound” group of extraordinary young gentlemen. Never mind that the story also notes that several players linked to this shameful act were still PLAYING ON THE TEAM at the time this was written.

Talk about a joke…

If you want to spend 12 of the creepiest minutes of your life, watch the video. Usually, when someone tells me something is “extremely disturbing” they’re trying to warn me off about a blood-soaked scene, an obscenity laced tirade or a speech Mitt Romney is giving. In any of those cases, I can eat a ham sandwich and watch it no problem.

This one? No way. I saw it twice and that was three times too many.

The worst part was that this kid and most of his friends were in no way empathetic. They laughed. They cracked jokes. They sipped beverages out of Styrofoam cups while musing about how little this girl's life mattered.

When a friend asked, “What if it was your daughter?” Nodianos replied, “It’s not.”

Well, I have a daughter.

She’s seven.

I worry every day about what’s going to happen to her.

When I see assholes like these strutting around like roosters, proclaiming the awesomeness of someone else’s daughter being brutalized, every ounce of fear and rage I have heightens in my desperation to protect her.

The kid recording all this said he planned to watch this video every day.

I hope he does. I hope it eventually sinks in what actually happened to this girl.

I don’t know if that kid or Nodianos or any of the other vidiots can be charged with a crime. At the very least, I wish they would be forced to stand in front of their peers, the school administrators, the parents and the loved ones of everyone in their school at some giant assembly.

Then, I want someone to play this whole video on a projection screen as they stand there and watch how people stare at them in horror and disgust.

I want every college recruiter and every employer who Googles these pecker-heads to have that video pop up front and center so they can see exactly what they had to say about how “raped” this poor child was.

I hope they do have families and then have to explain to their kids why Daddy was laughing in that video about the hurt girl. I also want them to simply have to worry about people like them being out there, all too ready to take advantage of an incapacitated child.

I’ll bet all of that would just be downright hilarious.

Brave

Five years ago, a former student of mine teetered on the edge of ending her own life.

I never knew it at the time, as she had slipped through the cracks of life like so many other kids who sit in my classes and stare back at me as I pontificate about something or other. She was a great student, a funny kid and an amazing journalist. She had that weird “quirk” about her that predisposed her to a life spent with coffee and cigarettes and off-color jokes. She oscillated between self-deprecating humor and claims of being a Golden God of design. She just had that odd newsroom sense of being annoyed with herself and being proud of herself all at the same time.

Turns out, some of that was the doing of a mental illness.

In a column she wrote a few years back, she did the scariest and bravest thing I could imagine: She told people she was broken.

(The DM didn't keep the full version on its site. She added this note to her Facebook page that was the "uncut" edition. Read it if you get a chance.)

She explained the nature of her bipolar disorder and how the pills weren’t helping and how she had neatly arranged the bottles and pondered how best to end her own life. She explained that this wasn’t a mental snap, a one-shot deal where she “had a bad day” but rather a slow build that had taken half of her life from her. She provided details of life as a kid, a young woman and an adult who was forced to live a silent struggle against a societal shaming.

You break a leg? Ouch! There’s a doctor for that.

You contract an illness? Oh, you poor thing! There’s a cure for that.

You have a mental “issue?” Snap out of it. Jesus… Quit being such a crybaby.

I hadn’t thought about her for a while until I read the story of Officer Jen Sebena and her husband, Ben, who is now charged with her murder.

We were watching TV on Christmas Eve when the news of her death came across the screen. She was found dead while on duty, having been shot multiple times outside a Wauwatosa fire station. Two days later, her husband sat in a courtroom, while the details of his disturbing behavior had been revealed.

Ben Sebena was a highly decorated Marine, who was part of the invasion force at the start of the 2003 Iraq War. He received a Purple Heart after surviving a mortar attack that left him with scars all over his body.

In a YouTube video, he talks of seeing friends killed all around him, of having to kill a child, of learning that “death is OK.”

Over the past month, Jen Sebena had told fellow officers her husband had become more erratic.

He abused her, held a gun to her head and threatened to kill her.

He claimed to be jealous of “other men” although no evidence has come to light suggesting any other men in his wife’s life.

He punched holes in the walls of their home.

In the days leading up to the murder, Ben stalked his wife, following her in the couple’s 2012 Prius. He then emerged from the shadows on Christmas Eve around 4:30 a.m.

He shot her twice in the back of the head before removing her service weapon from its holster and pumping three more bullets into her face. He later told police he wanted to make sure she was dead and that she didn’t suffer.

Ben Sebena has been charged with first-degree intentional homicide and although no one has made mention of it yet, I would be willing to bet every dollar I have that his “mental condition” will come into play at some point.

Chances are, those events he spoke of during that video and many more he couldn’t bring himself to discuss hurt him in a way far deeper than that mortar attack ever could. He told people that he had been “into the dark places,” and it’s unclear if he ever truly recovered from that. Even more, he might have had issues before he entered Iraq or before he entered the Corps or before he entered high school.

In the end, this hulking man who had been trained to kill couldn’t or wouldn’t come to grips with the idea that he probably needed mental help.

In reflecting on her decision to publish her story, Nicole talked about how mental illness is one of the last giant stigmas in our country. In fact, it was the death of a police officer prior to her column that inspired her to come out about this issue:

Last year, a man with bipolar disorder shot and killed a state trooper. In the interviews with his family afterward, they said they had been trying to get him help, but the public response seemed to be “crazy people shoot cops.” I’m not saying I’m crazy, but I do believe if the man had gotten the help he needed, he could have managed the disease.

In the five years since she was able to crawl back off that ledge, Nicole has been climbing the ladder at a prestigious newspaper, spending time with her boyfriend and advocating for the mentally ill. This year, she also donated a kidney to her father.

She touched many lives and made so many people so much better because she figured out she needed help and she got it.

Ben Sebena probably needed help and he had access to it. The VA in Milwaukee is renowned for being one of the best in the Midwest in terms of providing services to veterans. Those who have served have access to counseling, medicine and health care professionals.

In many cases, though, the vets don’t take advantage of these opportunities due to a distain for bureaucracy. In other cases, I would imagine, the societal equation of mental issues with weakness would be another reason.

I’ve spent more than enough time with “guy’s guys” to know what gets said over beer when the subject of someone seeing “a shrink” comes up:

“Does his husband go with him to see the shrink?”

“Hey, did the doctor give him a box of tampons too?”

“I just figured he was tougher than that…”

In other words “mental illness equals pussy.”

And yet it was this diminutive kid with a pixie haircut who was stronger than all of them, a woman who laid bare her fears and shared a story that most of those manly men can’t tell. She was tougher than people who earned a chest full of medals by being willing to stand up in the face of death but are unwilling to sit down with “a shrink.”

It was probably the bravest thing I ever saw.

Reading, 'Riting and Rifles

When I was about 7 or 8 years old, a good friend of the family had her home robbed in the middle of the night. While she and her husband lay in bed, feigning sleep, two or more men rifled through their closets, drawers and jewelry.

Unbeknownst to these thieves, they had entered a home with multiple guns. The husband was an avid hunter and fisherman and had several rifles throughout the home and a shotgun placed right under the bed.

The only problem? For some reason, the gun was on the wrong side of the bed, resting under her side, not his. Neither of them decided that a daring attempt to protect their home was worth it. In the end, the thieves left with clothing, jewelry, electronics and cash. They were never caught.

The husband died a number of years ago, and I was too young to ask any questions about that night before he did. Still, I found myself wondering what would have happened if the gun had been in the right spot that night.

Would he have reached for it?

Would he have confronted the men?

Would he have been forced to kill them?

Perhaps even more importantly, had all of those things happened, how would that have impacted him?

I thought about this today as memorials to the victims of Sandy Hook took place throughout the country and gun nuts started worming out of their STFU bunkers.

The NRA folks managed to hold their tongues for almost a whole week before Wayne LaPierre took to the stage today and told the world he wanted armed police in every school. It is a miracle, but LaPierre’s take on this wasn’t the stupidest thing I heard this week.

That honor goes to the brain trust suggesting that TEACHERS be armed at the schools.

Exhibit A:

If the people supporting this position could say anything more idiotic, it would have to be in “Nell” style grunts, because this is the dumbest thing the English language will allow.

In each of the last several major public shootings, the shooters involved were carrying assault weapons. Adam Lanza had a Bushmaster .223, a civilian model of a military-grade assault weapon. James Holmes used a similar weapon (a .223 Smith and Wesson M&P 15) while also carrying a shotgun and two semi-automatic handguns. Klebold and Harris multiple shotguns and assault rifles in Columbine and the two kids who enacted the Jonesboro massacre had 10 guns, three of which were automatic weapons.

In addition, Lanza and Holmes were wearing full body armor.

What, exactly, are we going to be arming our teachers with? A cannon? The Iron Man suit?

Even more, possessing a gun is far more likely to get you killed than NOT possessing a gun. A study at the University of Pennsylvania found that on average, guns did not protect people who possessed them from being shot in an assault. Even more, the study found people WITH guns were 4.5 times MORE LIKELY to be shot than those NOT possessing guns.

(The cynic in me believes that maybe the “arm our teachers” folks know this and figure if the shooter is trying to take out the teacher with the gun, the kids can run for cover.)

This doesn’t even account for people who own guns and have them turned against them. The idea of someone without a gun overpowering someone with a gun and then using that gun against them is not that farfetched.

My mother and many of the women she teaches with are about 5-foot-3 and weigh about a buck 20. Some of the eighth grade GIRLS are almost a foot taller and outweigh those teachers by 70 pounds, to say nothing of the boys. A teacher’s gun being taken away and used for less-protective means isn’t a pipe dream.  I’m interested to see what happens when a student absconds with a teacher’s gun and does something horrible.

And then there is the most counterintuitive portion of this: The idea of parents being OK with armed teachers in the school. These are the same parents who piss and moan about teachers who a) overstep their boundaries in pushing an “agenda” with their kids, b) don’t see how brilliant their kids are and fail to give them all A’s for simply breathing, c) should be brought up on charges for “assault” for breathing near their kids in an aggressive manner and d) are completely worthy of scrutiny for EVERY, SINGLE DECISION they make.

Talk to an elementary school teacher or a high school teacher and that educator can regale you with tale after tale after tale of how parents were on them for any perceived slight levied upon their kid. The teachers I know can tell me hours of stories in which parents questioned pretty much every aspect of their competence.

I can’t imagine that these would be the same parents who would say, “Y’know, I’m fine Mrs. Smith locking and loading in the classroom. I’m sure NOTHING bad will happen and she has my complete faith and confidence!”

(And of course, there’s the fear that one of the kids in the classroom decides to pull a gun or a knife and force a teacher to make a lethal decision. Let’s see how much support we get for the “Tech-9’s for Teachers” program.)

Finally and perhaps most importantly, there’s this: If a teacher was presented with a gun, trained in its use, given the green light to “castle doctrine” anyone with a weapon and then presented with a rampaging Lenza-style asshole, then what?

When the time came and the chips were down, could that teacher pull the trigger on a person and take the life of another human being?

This part of the equation is never discussed. It really should be.

So should the concept of “OK, then what?”

Police officers go to work each day, knowing it is likely that a “kill or be killed” scenario will take place. They train for it. They ready themselves for it. They fear it.

When the time comes and they do fire that fatal shot, it often takes months or years for an officer involved in a “righteous shoot” to pull it back together.

Some never do.

What happens when a teacher has to do it? Do they ever recover?

When it happens for a teacher, how will the kids react? Will they ever look at that teacher the same way?

It may be true that we never see a school shooting like Sandy Hook coming until it’s too late. In many cases, it’s a one-in-a-million event.

But if we start placing guns in the schools like this, we will be living under the constant specter of death and mayhem.

At that point, we risk everything .

Dead Children. Again.

A few days ago, a letter came home from The Midget’s school, noting that  we had to fully list all of the people who would be allowed to pick her up from school. In addition, the school was implementing additional security measures in which children had to walk with their classes and teachers had to make contact the adult prior to releasing the kid.

Last night, after the Christmas concert, the choral director announced that the parents had to come up and get the kids and make sure to check out with the teachers.

To me, it all seemed frivolous. Nothing bad ever happened to my kid by running out of the door of the school, barreling toward me while screaming  “DADDY!”

OK, maybe a skinned knee or a bruised shin when the tripped ass over teakettle, but other than that?

I wonder how many parents at Sandy Hook Elementary School thought the same thing before today. The wooded area the police spent the morning searching had that tranquil, peaceful feel to it. The word “hamlet” springs to mind.

A gunman's rage brought to fruition brought this tiny Connecticut town to our attention today.

26 dead. At least.

I wonder how many parents at schools all across the nation are watching the newscasts and asking, “Is my kid safe?”

In less than two hours, I have to go pick up my kid from school. When she is released from her teacher’s watchful gaze and plunges into my arms, I know I’ll hug her tighter than ever.

What should I tell her about what happened out there?

 ---

During the last election, I found myself at more than a few stoplights behind trucks, cars and vans with “I’m the NRA and I VOTE!” bumper stickers. They weren’t the only stickers like that I’ve seen.

The punchy slogans ranged from “Gun control means hitting your target” to “They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead hands!”

Bumper stickers like that serve as a chip on the shoulder of the car’s owner. It says, “Yeah? I said it. What are you going to do about it?” They’re like every other one-way conduit of information: they state a position and invite no dissention.

They do not change.

I wonder how many of those “pro-gun” bumper stickers graced the Hondas and Chevys and Toyotas and Fords and Volvos and BMWs on the cars in that parking lot that WABC keeps showing from its “helicopter cam.”

How many parents who lost children in this senseless act of violent social desecration will go home to a home with a gun?

When they look at their own gun from this moment on, what will they see?

How will they reconcile the two images?

How many of the students who survived will go home and ask a parent about the gun rack, the gun safe, the hunting gear in their own home?

What will they want to know? How will the parents respond?

Children of this age have a simple understanding of the world and yet, they just experienced something even the best minds in the world cannot comprehend.

It is a pretty safe bet that one of the 600 children in this school will ask, “Why did the bad man have a gun?”

What bumper sticker can answer that question?

---

A week or so ago, Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association, noted that had Kasandra Perkins owned a gun, she might still be alive.  

I wonder what LaPierre’s answer will be this time. Should we arm the teachers? Should we arm the administrators? Should we arm the kids?

In one way, LaPierre had a point: A gun is an equalizer.

It gives power to the weak.

It gives one man dominion over others.

It empowers people who feel aggrieved, disgruntled, upset, angered or in some other way injured to make tangible the internal hurt, rage, despair, pain and fear they feel.

Shootings like this one are imbrued with a sense of  “that’ll show ‘em.”

Later in his interview with USA Today Sports, LaPierre noted:

"Owning guns is a mainstream part of American culture and it's growing every day. My God, there's nothing more mainstream in this country than 100 million Americans who own firearms.”

With all due respect, Mr. LaPierre, yes there is.

“Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

If the framers believed in anything, it wasn’t a gun but the right to live. This is the right that one can’t take from another, lest he forfeit his own cause to claim a right to live, to live free or to live happily.

I do not want to force Wayne LaPierre to explain the actions of this individual, as such a demand would be as disingenuous as, for example, asking one woman to represent all women.

However, I do not think it would be unfair to demand of this one man to explain the thinking of the group he represents.

To understand why guns can’t be better regulated.

To figure out why his group doesn’t want to limit the weapons available or at least keep stronger controls on them.

To ask the question we all want to know the answer to.

How many have to die?

#BiebsMeetAly

 

The week that was included another debate over gun control after a Kansas City Chiefs player killed his girlfriend and then himself after attempts by his coach and GM to stop him failed. Of course, the thing that could have solved the problem of gun violence is if another gun had been available.

We’re debating the merits of the “fiscal cliff” and there are problems relating to whether the really super rich will be taxed or if just the super, super rich will be taxed.

My home state of Wisconsin and its higher-ed system are battling over the idea of if it should raise the cap on out of state students, thus theoretically making it harder for some in-state kids to get in. Some state politicians don’t want this and argue that it’s a money grab. Of course, this is the group of idiots who have constantly cut UW System funding at the state level, thus necessitating the money grab.

Students are hitting the wall around here, with finals leading to cheating, leading to crying, leading to paperwork. Faculty members around here are grumbling about “kids these days” and how they somehow expect to turn an F into an A by begging for extra credit two days before the final.

I also have a faculty meeting that is likely to be so bad that my stock in Rolaids will go up by two points by the end of the day.

If all of these things represent the worst of us, #BiebsMeetAly represents the best.

According to the Facebook page started for this concept:

 

Aly is a 19 year-old from McFarland, WI who is battling cancer. She was scheduled to have a liver transplant but when she went in for the final check up, doctors found that the cancer had spread and the liver transplant would no longer be effective. We have put together a YouTube Video and started the Twitter campaign #BiebsMeetAly to raise awareness for Aly to meet Justin Bieber.

 

You can make all the cracks you want about the value of wanting to meet Justin Bieber, but the fact is, this is a kid who is clinging to hope. If you know anything about recovery from violent acts, deadly illness or anything else in which the odds are not good, mental strength is 90 percent of the game. This kid is suffering from neuroendocrine cancer that is spreading. She was taken off the transplant list. She’s on a clinical trial drug and God alone knows if it will be effective. Clinging to hope, regardless of what that hope is, is likely to be the difference between a successful recovery or an untimely demise.

You can make all the cracks you want to about how “kids these days” can’t be bothered to vote for state races or stay informed or galvanize support for the “important things” out there if you want. However, in a relatively short time, a group of students from this campus built a social media campaign that has #biebsmeetaly trending all over the place. Famous athletes, local mascots and other important people have jumped on the bandwagon, as have people like me who have never met this kid and couldn’t pick her out of a line-up if she mugged me. They didn’t say, “It’s finals week and I’m busy” or “Maybe later.” They hopped on this and kept pressing the issue because they found something important that was worthy of their support.

Instead, think about what her hope represents: a hope within us all that some small thing can be the driving force behind a larger goal.

It’s like a small blade of grass that forces its way through a crack in a concrete sidewalk.

It’s so damned courageous.

If you agree, tweet for #BiebsMeetAly.

Race to the Bottom: College Edition

I have somewhere between three and six degrees, depending on how the universities I attended are attempting to count them.

And, no matter how you slice it, none of those degrees make me smarter, better, more intelligent or anything else when compared to people who don’t have them.

If I am better or smarter or anything else, it comes from what I actually LEARNED in doing the degrees.

This is why the recent moves by governors Larry, Moe and Curly to create “McYugo” degrees has me wondering if I’ll eventually just wear a paper hat to class and ask, “Welcome to the university! How may I help you today?”

Florida’s Rick Scott announced earlier this week his plan to create four-year degrees at institutions of higher learning that could be had for $10,000. By the end of his call to action, seven institutions, including educational powerhouses like Valencia College, Daytona State College and Broward College all said they were up for the challenge.

If this attempt to create a cheap alternative to actual learning sounds familiar, it’s because Texas braintrust Rick Perry thought of it first. During a statewide address, Perry called for colleges and universities to keep the costs down, even pitching the idea of a $10,000 degree. Other awesome ideas these two Ricks agree on include collecting data on faculty to see how many students they are teaching and how much grant money they are raising, limiting state appropriation increases and providing funding-based incentives based on how many kids a college can graduate.

Nothing says quality education quite like the “charge ‘em cheap, stack ‘em like cordwood and shove ‘em out the door quick” model.

If it’s a bad idea about higher education that is being poorly executed by Republican idiots, it’s a safe bet that my governor, “Scotty Doesn’t Know” Walker, will be quickly following suit in a more disconcerting and less compelling fashion.

Instead of pitching a “We’ll paint your car for $99” degree, Walker helped push out the “Flexible Option” degree this week. This will allow people who think they already have a pretty good handle on book learnin’ to show those skills to other people who will be incentivized to make this program work so they can get a jumpstart toward an “almost bachelor’s” degree at various institutions.

The bonus? Although the people involved don’t know how much this will cost, it will be cheaper than going to school for a traditional four-year degree.

At some point, we, as a society, must start to figure out what it is we are valuing here: Is it the degree or is it the knowledge?

It used to be theorized that one begat the other and the other reflected positively upon the one. Now, it’s a “Git Er Dun!” approach that makes educators become “providers” and students become “customers.” People want degrees faster, cheaper and easier.

As the proud holder of more degrees than most, I can tell you with absolute certainty that degrees don’t matter worth a crap.

The doctorate was cool for about five minutes. I passed my defense, called a restaurant and ordered reservations for “Doctor” me. After that, it really didn’t do much. However, that stats class I killed myself in to learn how the hell to do research mattered. The assistantship I took that forced me to teach really smart kids how to be smarter and encourage really weak kids to apply themselves and learn something mattered.

If you want to dial it back even more to my master’s and bachelor’s degrees, I can’t say I learned a whole hell of a lot from the tests and quizzes, but rather the experiences.

Being “forced” at the time to take courses in ethnic studies, sociology and other areas helped me figure out who I was and how I fit into a puzzle of many other pieces.

Taking speech, even though I’d been speaking competitively for four or five years, helped me see what other bad speakers did that I needed to avoid and what other good speakers did to help me want to better myself.

Being on campus didn’t hurt either, as I got to meet people from other races, ethnicities and sexual orientations and realize they ran the gamut of “full of shit” to “really fucking awesome” just like everyone else. I got to ask questions and give answers regarding who we all were and why people could or couldn’t get along.

(Speaking of questions and college, here’s my best one ever:

I’m in a room at age 19 with my journalism TA and four other guys who were also gay and we were all drunk as shit on margaritas.

One guy asks, “So you’re straight?”

Me: “Yeah.”

Him: “I gotta know. What’s a woman’s … y’know… like?”

Before I can answer, Stereotype Gay Guy chimes in with “Honey, I’ve been there. It’s like a wet, loose handshake.”)

Not one of those things (not even the “handshake” discussion) led to a degree. As the years went on, I realized that the degree was pretty much a by-product of the learning.

My father would probably lose his damned mind if he heard me talking about this, and not just because he’d figure out that his 19-year-old son was shithammered on tequila in some guy’s apartment watching “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” on VHS.

Dad was a big believer in the power of the degree. He spent his whole life in one factory and he was often passed over for improved positions due to his lack of a sheepskin. He was a foot smarter than anyone around, but that four-year degree held an almost mythical power over those who doled out promotions.

If he said it once, he said it a million times: “Your mother and I have done pretty well for ourselves, but let me tell you…” he’d pause and a wistful look would creep across his face. “If I only had that damned degree, we would be a lot better off.”

On more than one occasion, he referred to my degree as “your generation’s union card.” When he found out that I kept the actual diploma in a box of crap under my bed, he looked at me like I’d used it for toilet paper.

The sheepskin didn’t matter. The stuff in my head did.

I try my best to pass that along to my students each day I teach. If you’re here for a grade, I explain, you’re cheating yourself. Some nod, others don’t, but I think a lot of them figure it out. It’s my hope that they figure this out a lot faster than I did and that they vote for people who understand it as well.

Still, every semester, including this one, I have a painful email conversation with at least one kid that usually starts like this:

“I’m supposed to graduate next week and I just noticed I’m failing your class. Can I get some extra credit or something? My mom and dad are coming out for graduation and we’ve got a party planned, so I need those points.”

Giving thanks for Mrs. Kaim

Her name was Ellen Shoshany Kaim and she taught me the secret to life while we were waiting for a park board meeting to commence.

A blizzard was pounding Madison, as wind swept across the isthmus from what seemed to be every direction. It was the kind of day where you wanted to sit home and do nothing. In my case, I had to work at the newspaper and I was praying for a quiet night of making cop calls and writing briefs out of the briefs bin.

For reasons past my understanding, the dayside editor had received pressure from the upper management to get more work out of the nightside reporters. In an attempt to appease someone or other, he had me slated to cover a park board meeting.

Nothing of importance ever comes out of a park board meeting and nothing of importance was expected to come out of this one either. My boss had circled three minor agenda items and told me I could patch together a byline story out of them. As I listened to him tell me what he wanted, I stole glances out the newsroom windows, which were being buffeted by angry snowflakes.

The drive was about six or seven miles, but I was driving a 1991 Pontiac Firebird. This car took to snow like oil took to water. It had no back end weight and often fishtailed out of control, despite the fact I’d dumped my dad’s entire collection of weightlifting equipment into the trunk in an attempt to improve the traction.

The snow had been falling for about two hours at a rapid pace and the streets department wasn’t clearing the roads. The theory was that the folks with the plows would wait until most of the snow had fallen and do one good clearing because what kind of idiot would be on the road in this crap?

I got to the meeting with about ten minutes to spare, only to find that no one from the board was there yet. The only thing in the empty room was a microphone and a small, rumpled woman who looked to be about 900 years old. She sat quietly among the chairs in about the fourth row.

When I entered the room, she looked back at me with a smile spreading across her wrinkled face. “Why are you here?” she asked me in a very thick European accent that I couldn’t quite place.

I told her the newspaper sent me out here to cover the park board meeting and I wasn’t sure if the meeting was still on. She explained that the board members had an event or something downstairs that was still ongoing and it had been delayed because of a ridiculous amount of snow. She said she had taken the bus here much earlier in the day and had been waiting for the board.

“I came to talk about my rock,” she said.

Given the accent, I wasn’t sure I heard her right, so I repeated what she told me. She greeted the response with a perfunctory nod of pride and agreement.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I told her. “Your rock?”

Her eyes lit up as she realized I was a trapped audience of one. She explained that she had saved about $30,000 and was donating it to the parks department to create a memorial to the Holocaust. She was having a giant boulder put into one of the area parks with a plaque on it to remind people of what had happened all those years ago. Two benches would face the boulder and would be dedicated to two men I had never heard of who, like Oskar Schindler, had aided Jews in their survival.

She didn’t look like she had a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of. She also had taken the bus here, lived in an apartment in a less-than-stellar part of town and seemed a bit off. The idea of her having $30,000 and just giving it to the city for a giant rock didn’t seem plausible. As a reporter, I’d heard all sorts of stories over the years and I had learned to be wary of stuff like this.

As I was pondering all of this, she seemed to see a look of quizzical doubt creeping across my face.

“I do this because there is guilt in surviving,” she said. “You have to help people remember. We aren’t many left.”

She then told me the tale of how she came from a family of well-to-do German Jews in 1930s Berlin. As Hitler rose to power, her father was warned to find a way out of the country. A week before the military started closing down the borders, she was ferried out of Germany along with the rest of her immediate family.

They made their way to America, where she grew up and eventually met a nice Jewish boy she wanted to marry. His trip to this country had been sidetracked by a stay at the Bergen-Belsen Death Camp.

The camp took on many stages of use, ranging from a POW camp to a “shoe” work camp. Eventually, the former leaders of Auschwitz took over and converted it to a death camp. Although the camp lacked the traditional tools of death associated with these facilities, such as gas chambers, approximately 50,000 people died there, mainly due to typhus. The camp gained notoriety in 1945 after images of the liberated camp become public and it remained in the collective conscience when it became known that Anne Frank had died there.

She spared me the details I’m sure her husband shared with her over the years. The one thing she did tell me was that she married him in the late 1960s and until the day he died, he slept with his arms folded and his hands placed on his shoulders. He never moved an inch during sleep. She explained that was how he was forced to sleep in the camps and despite his best efforts, he could never shake the habit.

The Nazis cost her aunts, uncles, cousins and more. As the years went by, she found that more people showed more doubt about the stories she shared and information that emerged. She kept saying to me that it was important for people to remember and for the people who saw and experienced these things to keep finding ways to remind people so it never happened again.

I found myself taking notes, forgetting all about why I was there in the first place. I then asked her name and asked if I could tell her story. After three attempts to have her spell her name for me and me screwing it up, I handed over my reporter’s pad and she printed out “Ellen Shoshany Kaim.”

The park board had found its way into the meeting room at this point and its members were shuffling through their paperwork. Mrs. Kaim and I settled into our seat and got ready for the meeting to start. I was looking toward the front of the room when I felt a tug on my arm. I looked down and saw her gnarled hand.

She had a small twinkle in her eye and asked, “Would you like to know what I have found to be the secret to life?”

“Yes, please.”

She beckoned me in with a bony finger and I leaned in close, as to not have her voice disrupt the meeting as it was called to order.

“Spend all your money on education and travel.”

I gave her kind of a strange look.

She answered my stare.

“Those are the two things no one can ever take away from you.”

The meeting began and Mrs. Kaim took to the front of the room, explaining the rock and her plans for it. The board passed it with no trouble at all. I had to duck out of the meeting early to make my deadline. When I got back, I explained to my boss what I had found and that, yeah, sure I could do the three boring briefs or I could tell this story. She not only agreed to let me do Mrs. Kaim’s story, but she managed to carve out a premier spot for it. The story drew praise from the dayside crew as well.

About a year or so later, I got an invitation from the park board to come to the unveiling of the boulder. I was about two weeks from leaving the state for what would be a decade, so I skipped the ceremony without much of a thought.

Still, I often found myself replaying that moment in my head and her secret to life: education and travel.

I hated travel, but I did get about as much education as possible. When my formal degrees had reached their end, I tried learning about other things. I learned how to work on cars, small engines and other mechanical items. I taught myself how to refinish furniture and how to cane chairs. I learned how to use different computers and various programs. I also dedicated myself to teaching people so that I could share what I had learned and maybe find a way to help other help themselves.

Over the years, I’d bump into a copy of the story I had written on her and the note my boss had scrawled across it, complimenting me on a job well done. I could still recount, practically word for word how she explained why she was giving the city a “rock.”

About two weeks ago, during a break in one of my classes, a couple kids were yammering on about a chance to take an interim class on travel photography and how cool it would be and how great it would be to go to all these places and photograph them and…

“So go,” I piped up, drawing the attention of everyone in the room. It was as if E.F. Hutton had shown up or something. “What’s the problem?”

The young lady shot back, “Uh… It’s called MONEY! I can’t spend all that money on a trip for something like this.”

“Spend all your money on education and travel,” I told her. “Those are the two things no one can ever take away from you.”

She paused. “What?”

I told her the story of Mrs. Kaim and the rock and the secret to life. The kid paused and pondered and then said, “I wonder if I can use some of my student aid for this.”

She then looked at me. “Whatever happened to that lady?”

“I really don’t know,” I said. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

The rest of the day, I Googled the terms “Shoshany Kaim” and “obituary,” figuring on her being dead. Nothing came up, so I started going through various guides and online phone books. No luck there either.

I saw that her rock was listed on the website of a Jewish community center near the park, so I emailed the office and asked for any information on her. I received a perfunctory email about an hour later:

“Mrs. Kaim passed away a number of years ago.

If I can be of further assistance please feel free to contact me.”

A follow-up inquiry directed me to an obituary in the paper I used to work for. She died about four or five years ago. I hadn’t really thought about her in years other than when that moment comes up to talk about education or travel. Or when I want to tell kids about how sometimes a great story can just fall right into your lap. Or when I have to explain how some things just stick with you, like the image of a man sleeping with his hands on his shoulders…

Or on this Thanksgiving, where I realized that a park board meeting and a chance encounter gave me the gift of perspective and a sense of understanding.

Good night, Mrs. Kaim. And thanks for everything.

A deeper look at Herald-free Fridays

I spent the better part of the week digesting this item: One of the student newspapers at my alma mater is dropping its Friday edition for a “digital-first” approach. I obviously have some bias toward the dead-tree edition of publications but I also obviously have a bias toward the Internet. Both have been good to me for different reasons: I love advising the kids in our newsroom as they gather on deadline to pump out the paper. Conversely, without the Web, I’d just be a crank writing missives in a “Avengers” notebook.

The Badger Herald isn’t the first to do this and it won’t be the last. The Minnesota Daily dropped its Friday edition a few years back and hasn’t looked back since. The Shorthorn at Texas-Arlington has moved to a digital platform and TCU has launched TCU360 in place of a daily pile of pulp.

Perhaps the biggest gambler was the Daily Emerald in Oregon, which took a profitable print publication and blew it up. The Emerald now publishes as a primarily Web-based medium, despite making money in the print world (a rare feat these days to say the least). In that case, the publishers saw changing shifts in their readership and despite remaining relatively healthy, they took a chance that if they wanted to survive long term, they would need to get while the getting was good. At the time, it seemed akin to a healthy woman in her early 30s getting a double mastectomy because she had the breast cancer gene: a radical choice but one that was theirs to make. As is the case with most of these things, the jury is still out.

However, in the case of the Herald, deconstructing their approach and their argumentation gave me the sense that this was more about triage than it was about trailblazing. Consider the following:

 

• In an interview with College Media Matters, Herald EIC Ryan Rainey noted that the paper was going to create a “voluntary sandbox” where digital first ideas would come about and potentially be implemented as a substitute for the print edition. When considering how to move to a digital-first model, whether you’re doing it one day or every day, you need to have some semblance of a structure. If this move were for the purpose of doing SOMETHING, Rainey would have likely been more specific as to what that something would be. Instead, it felt very free-form. Don’t get me wrong: Good things can come of that free-form approach, but more often than not, it’s like having a task to do that lacks a concrete deadline. It rarely gets done.
  
  
• Rainey noted a lack of revenue and concerns with the drop in advertising over the past few years at multiple points in his interview with CMM’s Dan Reimold. He explained that the move isn’t indicative of any major problems at the paper from a financial standpoint. That said, the Herald’s most recent 990 form shows the paper lost about $33,000 over the previous year (Download it here). For the past several years, the paper has shown a downward trend in its financial health. That said, the “voluntary sandbox” wasn’t in any way linked to a revenue-making process, which is a concern. In other words, it’s not enough to cut spending. You have to increase revenue. It’s unclear how this move does both.
  
  
• When the other papers moved to a digital model, the proposals had been in the works for months. This included heavy revamping of the workflow to better accommodate the 24/7 aspect of digital-first, the reconfiguring (or redesign) of the website to show new and exciting things and an overall set of financial and editorial projections to outline some good markers to assess the success or failure of the venture. Although I am in no way privy to the inner workings of the Herald, the nebulous nature of this project would concern me. The interview was one thing: Reimold appeared to catch Rainey before he was ready to do a full roll out of this idea. However, Rainey’s own words, published three days later in the Herald, do nothing to disabuse me of this concern. He relies on some serious buzzword bingo and that’s about it.
  
  
• When you say you value something and you want others to believe you value it, you actually have to value it. In most cases, what you are willing to pay for will demonstrate that value. I’m not say it’s always that way (I love FD the most and I do it for free), but when you set up a paid/unpaid tier system, you run the risk of telling people, “Put more time here and less time there.”
  To wit:
  
  He said salary levels for the paper’s roughly 55 paid staffers are being adjusted, simply due to the fact that “there’s going to be one less print edition, which means one less day of revenue.”
  
  Essentially, the staffers are taking a pay cut, the new enterprise is going to be revenue-free and no one is being forced/paid to work in the “voluntary sandbox.” What that indicates at a basic level is a) the paper remains the most important enterprise, b) we value the “sandbox” less both in terms of resources we are putting into it and the revenue we expect to receive from it and c) we have no cudgel to hold over you in order to get work out of you to help make this enterprise a success.
• Why now? Today is the first “Herald-free Friday,” which means that with Thanksgiving break and upcoming finals, the Herald is essentially killing (at most) five issues. The financial savings isn’t enough to make that a rational choice. In addition, this is the most stressful part of any college semester. The Thanksgiving break usually means a boatload of stress, travel and catching up on the homework students have been blowing off all term. Then, it’s upcoming final projects, final exams and packing up for the holiday break. It’s not exactly a time period most conducive to thoughtful discourse, innovation and radical change. Students are lucky if they can get laundry done. One of the best advantages student news outlets have over their professional counterparts is the presence of extended school-year breaks. Summer, Christmas, Spring Break and more give student media operations a chance to stop the daily grind and regroup. Why not push this off to the middle of December and use that dedicated group of staffers that will be responsible for launching this thing to figure out what exactly will be happening.

Other problems are always around the corner, but these appear to be the biggest question marks in an industry filled with them. The one thing that remains the elephant in the room is that for the most part student newspapers (the dead-tree editions) are still popular with students. Reimold did some earlier analysis on this topic and found that, yes, people still pick these up, they still read them and they still like them as a free, quick way to catch up on the news of the campus. By being ever-present on the campus, the papers lack competition in many ways (although the Herald does have a competing daily on its campus, it is the only paper in the country with this concern). However, when you flip the switch to digital, you find yourself fighting for air against millions of other sites, ranging from daily newspapers to Facebook and Twitter. If I’m online, I’m not going to look for my student paper, unless I have REALLY developed an online reading habit associated with that site. The days of “If you build it, they will come” are over and have been for many years.  

What will happen next to the Herald and their Friday experiment? That’s just one more question in a long line of them.

Is there hope?

(Or... If a terminator can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too...)

 

As much as I didn’t want to write about the election, I found this question scratching at the corner of my mind. In two of the previous states where I made my home, Republicans rejected the candidates of their own party in favor of Democrats. Missouri put Claire McCaskill back in the senate while Indiana elected Joe Donnelly instead of Tea Party candidate (and owner of serial killer eyes) Richard Mourdock.

In both cases, these guys said something horrifically stupid involving rape during the campaign and in both cases, women turned out in droves against these guys.

However, that can’t be the only reason we don’t have Dumb and Dumber in the U.S. Senate this morning.

Despite it’s status as a “swing state,” Missouri’s history has it swinging mostly right in recent years. In the 10 presidential elections prior to this one, Missouri has backed only two Democrats: Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Indiana on the other hand is pretty much a Dead Red stronghold. Prior to Obama’s first term, the state backed only one Democrat since FDR: LBJ in 1964.

In both cases, party politics have been a main culprit.

When I lived in Indiana, I got a lot of “We ALWAYS vote GOP” comments from people around the state. It felt like the place where you would get a “good talkin’ to” if you had a bumper sticker on your car for a liberal candidate. They voted straight ticket, or bust. It was like that scene from “Band of Brothers” where David Schwimmer’s character is told, “We salute the rank, not the man.”

That led to a virtually life-long term for Dick Lugar. He wasn’t the most anti-abortion or most pro-gun guy out there, but he was a Red guy. People punched tickets based on that.

A lot of that could be said about Missouri as well. If you ever wanted to see a city mouse/country mouse divide, look at the way in which most controversial statewide ballot initiatives fall there. In the 1990s, attempts to pass concealed carry laws tended to fail, despite overwhelming support throughout the state. The main “metro” areas of St. Louis, Kansas City and Columbia had the bodies to carry the vote and with colleges and cities, they tended to vote more Leftist. The outlying farm areas tended to go the other way.

In either case, if the stereotype of Republicans voting in a gelatinous block of pickup trucks and belt buckles were true, we’d be talking about how to better define a “legitimate” rape today. Instead, the Moron Twins are headed back to their caves and sanity has prevailed.

Voters in Indiana noted in exit polls that if Dick Lugar had been on the ballot, the election would have turned out differently. In short, they voted for the Democrat because they knew Mourdock was a whack job. They liked Lugar and despite what you might think about him or Mourdock, it’s at least a ray of hope that simply strapping a GOP sign to the ass of an ass isn’t enough to get someone elected in a traditionally Red state.  

For months, people have been telling news reporters around here that the divide in Washington isn’t really representative of the rest of the country.

Yes, we don’t always agree, but not everyone who punched a ballot for Romney got up on Wednesday and bought all the guns they could carry as they awaited Armageddon.

No, I’m not happy that Wisconsin is now once again completely run by the Republican Party and I hope that GOPers learned something from the last time they were able to exercise carte blanche in this state. Watching guys like Dale Schultz think before voting gives me hope that maybe we have people who think beyond the colors on a map.

It will be a wait-and-see game, for sure, but I’d like to think it’s worth the wait.  

A cure for electile dysfunction

The end of election season is mercifully arriving this week. Politicians can stop showing up at college campuses and pretending they know where the hell they are. Special interest groups can stop running ads that tell you everything from how Mitt Romney once ate a small child that was birthed from one of his sister-wives to the way Barack Obama is preparing to launch a “Brown Dawn” attack on us with his Negro Army.

And, most thankfully, the pollsters can stop calling the house to make absolutely, positively sure that we haven’t changed our mind on Romney, Obama or a federal proposition to allow for Jerry Sandusky to write a children’s book from prison.

For those of you who have made it this far without pulling an “Elvis” on your TV set or pulling an “Axl” on your phone, congratulations. However, if you feel a little of either creeping in on you, here are a few survival tips as we wait for the glorious end to this inglorious process:

Tell everyone who calls that you're not supporting a candidate who isn't making a full and total commitment to bringing back disco and velour shirts.

When you see a guy sporting a “I support the Second Amendment and I VOTE!” T-shirt or with that bumper sticker on his car, engage him thoroughly by explaining how you are a Third Amendment voter and you take it very seriously. Argue loudly that we are only one returning vet moving into his mom’s basement away from a full slippery slope toward forced-soldier-quartering Armageddon. Also explain that you are fully committing to passing the “Titles of Nobility Amendment,” that has languished for far too long.

When the live pollster calls asking for “Debbie,” Ask “What Would Danny DeVito Do?”

If you have a toddler or a cat, relinquish the phone when the robo-caller calls for data. I have enjoyed seeing how my junk mail changes after the Midget dealt with the last four or five of these things. I’m sure it confounds my mail lady to see that I’m getting offers for AARP, Weight Watchers and mail order sex toys services.  (If you lack children or pets, just try playing “Carol of the Bells” or something with the phone button tones. It works just as well.)

Make up yard signs that attack a fictional candidate for something. Offer to provide them to your neighbors in an attempt to “defeat this extreme, radical extremist, who is way too extreme for even the extreme people we already have.” See how many takers you have.

Set out on a last-minute, vociferous push to re-elect your local coroner. If the race is uncontested, push even harder because, “You never know!” (Or just watch this ad and shudder.)

If you get to talk to a representative of a candidate for the U.S. House or Senate, ask how seriously committed that person is to getting the Corwin Amendment passed. Better yet, ask that of the candidate him or herself. It’s about 100-1 odds that they won’t know what it is, but won’t ask what it is. If you make it seem important to you, they’ll let you know it’s really important to them. Because that’s what we really want in politicians, you know. That and the sense that you could have a beer with them…

If a candidate knocks on your door, open it slowly and then breathe a sigh of relief. Yell back into the house, “HONEY! Stop burning all the kiddie porn and meth! It’s just some politician…”

When dealing with pollsters or advocates or candidates who want to form a bond by using your name, make up a name that is horribly uncomfortable for them: “Hi I’m Fahquin Diqfase.”

Buy a bull horn and an inflatable princess castle. Place the castle on your lawn and wait inside of it for the campaign volunteers to approach your door. The minute their foot hits your property, jump out of your princess castle start screaming through the bull horn, “CASTLE DOCTRINE! CASTLE DOCTRINE!”

Ask if the candidate is "in full effect” or not. Tell everyone that is the most important voting issue. Also request that the candidate rap his or her next speech and offer all future bills in the form of haikus.

When a pollster calls you and asks if you know for whom you are voting in the presidential election, ask “So who’s running?” After he or she tells you, pause and say, “Hang on. I gotta find a quarter to flip.”

Remember, my friends, as Daniel Day Lewis said, “Stay alive. No matter what occurs, I will find you.”

See you next week.

Doc

Civic Pride (Part III)

Here's the final piece of the Civic Trilogy. If you missed part I and part II, feel free to catch up. Thanks for reading. -- Doc

----

There’s something to be said for a fresh perspective on a problem that only a decent night’s sleep and a general sense that you’ve turned the corner can provide. The day after I basically alienated my family, took a Sawzall to my car and was about two seconds away from calling Charlie Sheen for some mental health advice, I managed to put the car back together.

I added coolant, turned her on and watched the core heat up. The venting on the car wasn’t as good as it used to be, but it was no longer pouring a chemical that clearly noted “DANGER: DO NOT INHALE” into the footwell of the passenger’s seat. The majority of the pieces were back in place and the car had heat, albeit undirectable heat.

It was good enough.

Somewhere along the way, the phone rang. It was Mom, wondering how my week of hell was concluding. I gave her the breakdown as I put some tools away and mopped up the giant puddles of various crap from the garage floor.

“Well,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re going to be done with that car soon. It’ll be nice to be in a much better car.”

“It’s not a better car,” I said with an unexpected flash of anger. “It’s a different car. There’s nothing wrong with the one I have.”

“Well…” she began. “There was that thing in Madison when it broke down on your wife. And this heat thing…”

“Cars have problems, Mom,” I said, gritting my teeth. “I seem to remember the blue Cadillac was no great shakes.”

My parents bought a 2-year-old Caddy one year from a reputable dealer. Dad loved it as it had every button imaginable. One day when he was on the freeway, it just shut itself off. He slammed it into park and push-button started the hell out of it. It started again and he got home in a panic.

The garage guys couldn’t find anything wrong with it. They rebooted all the systems and told him it was a one in a million glitch.

About a week later, Dad hit the “Whoa Shit” lottery again, as it died on him in the middle of town. He immediately went back to the dealer and got his money back.

“Yes, but, you’ve had—“ 

I cut her off. “It’s a good car. It served me well and I’m doing something different now.”

The conversation ended and I went back to doing whatever it was I was doing before it started. I kept thinking back on it though. I was defending a car that was not anything special. I was not happy about selling it, even though it was the right move. I was getting away from something that was clearly about to be on the decline.

Yet, it was mine. It was comfortable. It was just not easy talking about it.

--

Fifteen years ago, I made the mistake of going to my high school reunion. It was the dumbest of reunions: the 5-year one.

At that point, the “best” among us were just out of college or barely married. It was really a collection of half-formed post-collegians who were trying to figure things out in life. Add some booze, a few ex-girlfriend/ex-boyfriend wounds to open and you had all the makings of a massive disaster.

The 10-year reunion was about two weeks before our wedding. We were living three states away and frazzled from all of the “Are you sure this is taken care of?” questions we were getting, so I passed.

My uncle died right about that time. I couldn’t get back for his funeral, which was the same day as that reunion. If had cared enough to make the reunion, I would have been there for the family. My aunt said she understood. I still felt like crap.

The 15-year either didn’t happen or I missed it.

The info for the 20-year reunion showed up a few months back. I pondered the idea of going to this thing. I was old enough to have some stories to tell, interested in how people turned out and there were probably a couple teachers I wouldn’t mind seeing again.

As the day got closer, I started to realize that the people I wanted to see were among the least likely to go to the reunion. They had found jobs on the coast or were living abroad. They were busy and involved. And, to be fair, out of the 422 people who walked across that stage all those years ago, I could think of about three I really wanted to run into. Not exactly the best odds.

The people who were going to show up were the people for whom high school was the crowning achievement.

Just like A mentioned a week or two ago, it might have been fun to roll up there in my 1968 Mustang. I could wear a suit that costs more than their rent check, flash the doctoral ring and regale them with tales of the books I’ve published and such before saying, “So, I heard you work for a fast food restaurant. How’s that going?”

And yet it all seemed so exhausting and pointless.

I also found it weird that I had no real memories of value from that time, but instead I was spending the weekend a few miles from the reunion thinking about how I’d likely be parting company with the Civic this weekend.

 

--

 

I went home to Milwaukee for the weekend to help Dad with a card show and to help Mom figure out how to finish cleaning out my uncle’s apartment. There wasn’t much left but it was something that had to be done.

A bedroom set, a desk and a dining room table were all that remained when we got there. The items were all brought with him to the apartment after he sold my great-grandmother’s house decades earlier.

Years of age and dirt had grown on them and little was salvageable.

The one really nice dresser we left behind for the guy who was being given the apartment. He was an elderly man with almost no possessions and was so grateful to be getting this low-cost home. He ran into my father as Dad was moving out some of my uncle’s personal effects and asked him that if there was anything at all that he planned to throw away, could he just leave it behind in the apartment?

Anything, he said, was better than the nothing he had.

Dad left him a couple old velour chairs that Mom noted she didn’t want. Mom later decided the guy should have a place to put his clothes and that she didn’t have a place for the larger dresser anyway.

We pulled the small dresser out so that I could refinish it next summer and The Midget would have something to use when she stayed at my folks’ place.

The dining room set was kind of a wreck and we debated its value for a bit.

“Was that great-grandma’s?” I asked.

“Yes,” Mom said before pausing. “We used to have every family dinner, every holiday meal… That table was the holidays. I just don’t know now…”

I looked at what had to be 25 to 30 years of paint splotches, watermarks, food stains and scorches on it. It wasn’t even a question.

“Take it. I’ll figure out how to refinish it.”

We moved all this stuff down to the truck and packed it up. We had one last task for the day: find a TV for Uncle Ron.

The one he had died or was dying and he didn’t have anything to watch in the new place. All the money he had would be slowly drained away by the healthcare system, so Mom decided that before it was all gone, she should spend his money on anything that would give him some comfort.

We bought a 27-inch flat screen and headed over to the assisted living place. When we got inside the room, he was in bed, under the covers, staring at the ceiling.

Dad and I are usually horribly awkward in hospitals and with illness, so we set about trying to put the TV together. Mom went inside and tried talking to my uncle to pretty much no avail.

After about 10 minutes, I realized we needed a screwdriver to put the base onto the TV. Mom and Dad left to go and find one, leaving me alone with my great uncle.

“Hi Uncle Ron. How are you doing?”

Silence.

“It’s a nice day out. Glad we could swing by and see you. Did you get outside?”

Silence.

I paused. I realized this was bullshit. He wasn’t going to talk. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to live. Still, I needed to tell him something.

“I wanted to thank you for selling me your car. I loved my Civic and you really took great care of that car. I’m sorry you can’t drive it any more, but I’ll do my best to keep her on the road.”

I turned away.

“I always did what the car people told me,” he said, breaking the silence. “I kept up with the oil changes, the tires, everything. It was a really great car and it was really good to me. It was a good car. A good, good car.”

 

--

 

The weekend blew by in a blink. A card show was interrupted by about four or five dozen phone calls, texts and emails. I went between having five people wanting to see the car to no one wanted to see the car. By the time I was heading home, I had two people coming to see the car.

The first guy showed up from in town. He was clearly a mechanic.

Before he did anything else, he examined the underside of the car for rust and leaks. He rubbed the body in spots to make sure there was no rust anywhere. He opened the hood and looked for anything that was not in the right spot.

He noticed immediately that the seals were wearing in spots with some minor leaking. He also noticed a crap-ton of the new parts I had put into this thing.

He took it for a ride up and down the outlying farm roads before coming back with a simple assessment:

“I like it, but the heat doesn’t work the way I want it to.”

I explained that the core was good, the vents needed work and that overall, it was a keeper.

“It’s either a core blockage or it’s a vent thing or whatever. I can fix it, but I really don’t want to.”

“Look,” I told him. “I know this sounds like bullshit, but I’ve got another guy who’s interested and he’s coming later today. You’re here first, so if you want it, you get the first shot at it.”

“Uh-huh,” he said with a “yeah right” smirk. At that point, a car pulled up. A kid who looked like he was about 19 and his girlfriend got out.

 “I’ll be right there,” I called out to the kid as the guy’s demeanor changed a bit.

He left me an offer about $500 less than what I really set as the bottom for what I would take for the car before he got in his car and drove off.

 

--

My dad’s brother was 18 years younger than my Dad. Grandma used to love to tell the story about how she was about 40 and she didn’t feel well, so she went to the doctor.

“I think I’m going through ‘The Change,’” she said, referring to menopause as they did in those days.

The doctor smiled. “You’re going to get a change, all right. You’re pregnant.”

Uncle Fred lived through his young adulthood without a father, since Grandpa died when he was about 16. A few years after Grandpa passed, his sister, Agnes, died as well.

Aunt Aggie had no children of her own. She lived with my great-grandparents, worked hard and saved money her whole life.

In her will, she left Uncle Fred a chunk of money, the size of which I was never really told. It wasn’t enough to make him rich, but it was in the four or five-figure range, enough to buy something fairly price.

He decided he wanted a car and a lot of car lots wouldn’t take him seriously. He was about 20 years old, loved fast cars and came onto the property alone. He appeared to be the “anti-sale,” to use a salesman-friend’s term: A guy who sucked up a lot of time and played with the toys but never had the money to buy one.

A Ford dealership operated a mile or so from Grandma’s house and Uncle Fred just happened to be looking on the lot that day when a trailer pulled up full of new 1982 cars. One of them was a black Boss 302 Mustang.

My uncle had found his muse and he made an inquiry as the car was gliding off the truck.

“Here,” the salesman said, tossing him the keys. “Go sell yourself a car.”

My uncle said that made all the difference to him. He drove it, loved it and bought it.

“The guy wanted me to own it and thought I should,” he once said to me.

30 years later, he still owns it.

 

--

 

The first thing I noticed about the kid was that he seemed to be looking for a reason to buy the car as opposed to a reason not to buy it. He looked at all the same things the other guy did, but he got in the car faster. He checked simple things like if the backup lights worked, if the horn beeped and if the radio came on. He pushed buttons and moved the seat around.

It appeared as if he was trying to imagine himself in the driver’s seat.

The car was running as we talked about price and condition and everything else. Finally, I asked him, “Do you guys want to take it for a ride?”

The guy said he did and the girl started to move away from the passenger’s side door.

“Do you want to go with him?” I asked.

“Well, sure, but …” she started.

“But what?”

“Aren’t you going to want to come with us?” the guy asked.

“Nah. I trust you. Take her for a run. Sell yourself a car.”

While he was out driving it, the first guy texted me.

“I think we can make a deal on the price you wanted. LMK.”

Bird in the hand, I suppose…

When they got back from the ride, the mentioned the heat issue. I repeated what I told the first guy. The kid said he understood.

He then started just kind of looking at the car.

It’s a hard thing to describe, but it wasn’t like he was looking for damage or for leaks or anything else. It was like he was looking at someone he just met, maybe a nice girl he wanted to ask on a date. Maybe a person on the bus he wanted to befriend. It was just a look, but so much more.

“I need to tell you something,” I began. “The guy who was here before you left me an offer. It’s not bullshit. I can show you the text. I told him that you drove out here from two hours away and that since you were still here, you could have first shot at it.”

He asked what the offer was and I told him. He seemed a bit deflated. He then countered.

“I have cash in the car.”

I smiled. I totally would have said the same thing. Maybe I wasn’t looking for the right amount of money but the right guy to sell it to.

Maybe I found him.

“Look, you don’t have to match or beat the offer. Tell me what you want to pay and if it’s close, you should have her.”

He came close after we finagled a bit. We shook on it. I had sold the Civic.

While we waited for The Missus to come home and co-sign the title, I pulled the plates off the car, gave him a “License Applied For” sign and just generally shot the shit.

“You know I didn’t want to sell her, right? My goal was to put a quarter million miles on her and then drive her in the parade with classic plates.”

The kid looked at me.

“Do you think she has another 100,000 miles in her?”

“I’d love to know for sure. Call me when you get to that point.”

Five minutes later, my wife was home and she signed the title. The kid put the sign in the rear window and he drove off into the darkness.

He turned left as he left the cul de sac and that was the last I ever saw of the Civic.

 

EPILOGUE

 

A buddy of mine used to say that a mechanic can’t call a car truly his (or her) own until he fixes one thing on her and breaks one thing on her.

I did both in the same day.

The Green Civic had power locks that didn’t work when we bought it. I looked around and talked to my guys at the parts place about this, only to find out that the lock actuators on this model were notorious for dying off.

I picked up two actuators and set about trying to replace them.

To reach the locking mechanism, you have to remove the door panels and then reach around inside the door. It’s like a wide metal bowl with a narrow metal mouth. A lot of possibility for cuts and bleeding.

Before I could even get to the passenger’s side actuator, I practically snapped the inside door panel in half. A small crack in the plastic door lining was hidden from sight. When I tugged on the panel, the crack caught a bit on the door and a giant gash formed all along the top of the inside of the door.

No amount of epoxy was fixing that.

Still, I pressed on and got the actuators in. I put everything back together and had that “There! Fixed!” feeling going on when my wife called.

“Are the locks fixed?” she asked.

“Yep. And I broke the door.” I could hear her sigh.

She told me that the Midget was a bit confused with the name of the car, since I kept calling it “The Civic.”

“I thought Daddy sold the Civic,” my child told my wife.

She asked if the car had a name yet. I told her no. You can’t just name a car. It has to come from somewhere. I doubt my uncle named it, but at the very least, I couldn’t just say, “Hi, car, you are now named X.”

We hung up and I looked to the left of the phone in the garage. I had a piece of the door I had failed to reinstall on the driver’s side.

I pulled the panel off again, hoping to avoid a matching crack on this side. The panel started to groan like disaster was just one erg away.

“Come on, Sparky, dammit, don’t do this to me.”

The panel popped free. I put it down and looked the car over. It was the same look the kid had when he bought the car from me.

“Sparky. That’ll play.”

Civic Pride (Part II)

(Ed. Note: Get me talking about politics, it's over in about four paragraphs. Get me onto a car as a metaphor for life, and you get this. I promise it will be three installments (four max) and next week's will be posted earlier. If you missed the first part, here's the link. Thanks for reading. -Doc)

I remember hearing once that every breakthrough happens about six seconds before a breakdown. If you miss that moment, you really lose your shit.

The car was in pieces, the time was running short and I realized that despite the sheer volume of bloodletting I was performing, I was never going to get this thing out without cutting a few corners.

Or a few pieces.

Honda requires that you remove the entire plastic housing to best access the heater core. I said “OK, that’s fucking impossible” and instead removed all the screws and clips I could before standing on the housing and bending it down and out of the way.

Honda notes that in removing several parts of the steering column, the screws on the inlet and outlet tubes can be slid out of the holes in which they rest. I knew that was borrowing trouble unless I had an alignment machine and about three more days with Mr. Goodwrench. Thus, I slid under the dash, pulled out all the additional rubber insulation and pressed the tubes down and away from the firewall with a prybar.

The thing was moving, but then something occurred to me: Honda had done a shitload of plastic tapering with the casing for this heater core to make things fit a certain way. Do it their way or don’t do it at all, this plastic seemed to be telling me.

This wasn’t going to work. I had done everything I could. She was going to Wally’s.

I flung a wrench across the room and screamed, “GODDAMMIT!” at the top of my lungs. I started kicking tools, cords, portable lights and everything else I could get a foot on.

Who the fuck designs a car this way? I screeched in my head. Who the fuck… If that fucking plastic shroud, which serves no goddamned purpose wasn’t fucking there I could…

I found my six seconds with about a second to spare.

 

--

 

When the Missus and I lived in Indiana, we had a toilet that would leak from the tank into the bowl. After about a good couple hours of not being flushed, the tank would dip low enough to trigger the float to engage and thus force the water to start refilling the tank. This usually happened in the middle of the night, waking us both up and pissing us off to no end.

I had no plumbing skill at that point, but I had a “Good Housekeeping” repair manual that was bought with a gift certificate to a local bookstore. I looked at how to go about disassembling and reassembling a toilet. It seemed easy, provided you had another crapper in the house in case you needed it  and that the plumbing was new enough to have a local shut-off valve next to the bowl.

We had both, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

About half way through this, I found that apparently another amateur plumber was responsible for assembling this porcelain gem. My book clearly stated, “On the plastic nut between the bowl and the tank, do NOT use plumber’s compound or any other sealant.

Apparently what this guy’s book said was, “Load the hell out of the nut’s threads with epoxy or some other shit that will never come off. Hell, you don’t plan to own the house forever, do you?”

I tried to remove this 3-inch plastic nut in about four or five “approved” or “suggested” ways, only to find that I had cracked the nut and yet was no closer to removing it. Thus, it was broken and yet not broken enough.

With sweat dripping from every pore of my body and feeling like there was no hope, I had a violent epiphany: If I couldn’t turn the nut, I could break it somehow.

The “somehow” became an old tree saw I had inherited from my great-grandfather’s house. It had a jagged blade and a reversed handle, making it the only weapon in my arsenal capable of sliding between the bowl and the tank to shred the plastic and separate these entities.

I was hunched over the bathtub, cradling the bowl in my lap, hacking at the nut and screaming, “Get off there you fucking cocksucker!” when my lovely wife came home from work for a brief lunch.

“What the hell are you doing?” she asked. A concise question not without merit.

With the calm and stillness of your average serial killer, I turned slowly to the door.

“Please leave now,” I said. “You don’t want to see me do this.”

She left.

I managed to break through without cracking either piece of porcelain and a few hours later, you would have never known what it took to get us a functioning toilet.

Thus, we established the rule in the house: If you want me to fix something, you can’t be around to look at me while I’m fixing it. That will only make both of us crazy.

 --

The car’s epiphany was a simple one: If the plastic is impeding you, get rid of the plastic.

The harder part? Answering the “how” portion of this problem-solving moment.

I looked around the garage for about ten minutes, weighing the pros and cons of every tool I had. Even the old tree saw came out for a looksee.

The problem with the problem was that there was no room to move under the dash of the car. Even twisting a screwdriver or turning a wrench took special effort.

So what I needed was something to remove plastic that moved on its own and that would be able to handle the rough stuff. In other words, a fucking Sawzall…

It was at that moment that I wasn’t sure if I was crazy or brilliant, but I figured in for a penny, in for a pound.

I grabbed the rotary tool I kept in the garage for special projects. Usually, I used it with a hook and loop pad and did detail sanding with it. Today, I was going to use it break some shit.

I swapped out the pad for a long thin metal blade with a set of jagged ends on the top. It had the look of a set of barber’s clippers, only slightly more deadly.

I plugged it in, slid under the dash and held on for dear life.

The first cut slid through the plastic and grazed the piping of the heater core. The sparks kicked back and flew at my eyes.

For some reason, I didn’t notice.

The following cuts took out nothing but plastic, wads of ruined black crud flailing about. I cut and I cut and I cut.

Then, a literal breakthrough.

The tubes were exposed and could move up and down. The heater core was sliding around in its sheath. Still, it wasn’t free. The bends in the tubes prohibited me from just popping the core out. If the tubes were there, the core wasn’t going anywhere.

In for a penny, in for a pound.

I cringed a bit and averted my eyes and gritted my teeth. I’m quite certain I looked like a porn actress who was waiting for the money shot she had loudly demanded a few seconds earlier.

I pressed the vibrating blade into the metal tubing.

The car and the tool both screamed their disapproval. Smoke began to snake out of the point of friction as the tool cut through the metal. The tubes began to vibrate and let loose with what little coolant was left in the core. Green liquid splashed everywhere as I notched through the first tube and entered the second.

The second tube snapped free from its soldered connection to the core. It bounced around harmlessly while attached to the end of the blade before it fell harmlessly to the floorboards.

I shut off the tool and ran around to the other side of the car. I tugged on the core, once, twice… A pop rang out as part of the plastic sheath broke off and more green slime oozed out of the open holes at the core’s base.

I had it out.

 --

The next two days were a whirlwind of calls to parts places, junkyards and people I knew who knew people. Eventually, we located a new heater core for about $80 and I had about a day or two to figure out how to get it in there.

After basically disassembling my car with a chainsaw, it dawned on me that I couldn’t reassemble it in quite the same way. Even worse, some of the damage I had done under there might be detrimental to the installation itself.

The problems kept adding up. The core didn’t fit right. The lines wouldn’t line up with the holes through the fire wall. The jagged plastic was threatening to poke through the core, which would negate the point of all of this.

After about four hours, I managed to have the core in its proper place, but the core lines wouldn’t go through the firewall. I had to take The Midget to karate and then I had a ton of work to do. The Missus had been sick most of the day. Everything seemed to be devolving.

If you ever spent any time in kids-based karate class, you know you need a few things to survive: headphones and Advil. Of course, I had neither and the spawn of other people had pushed me to the point of wanting to castrate myself in the parking lot with a beer can tab.

My head pounding, my child chattering and my stomach empty, I drove us home. Daylight was waning and nothing had been accomplished that day.

When we arrived, all I wanted was something to go right. My wife, feeling better and able to talk for the first time in about two days, decided to take advantage of her newfound health to ask me 6 million questions about everything and anything.

It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t a smart move on my part. It wasn’t normal.

But I completely lost it on her.

She sat there stunned.

“Are you off your meds or something?” she asked.

“Look,” I told her. “The Stang is broken. My computer is broken and won’t be repaired for a month if that. The Civic is shot. Your mother needs stuff. The kid won’t stop yammering and NOTHING HAS FUCKING WORKED RIGHT TODAY. The only thing that is holding me together by the tiniest fucking thread is the idea that I will somehow, some way pull two metal tubes through a fucking firewall and make that fucking core fit.”

She looked at me like I was demented. Truth be told, I was. I was waiting for her to call me Captain Ahab.

“Go,” she said, dismissing me with a wave of her hand. “Just… Go.”

Time goes by a lot more slowly when my wife is pissed at me. In this case, that was helpful because I managed to do a lot of work in a short period of time.

Don’t ask me how, but I managed to get the lines back through the firewall of the car and hook up the hoses. I put the plastic pieces back together as best I could and got most of the car assembled. Normally, I couldn’t sleep until I had tested the system, but very little of what was happening to me these days could be classified as normal.

I left the car and went inside. The Missus was still reading.

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

“Don’t tell me,” she said not bothering to look up. “Tell your daughter. She’s not sleeping because she thinks Daddy is mad at her.”

I opened the door to The Midget’s room. Her bed was lofted, but I could see a flashlight beam weaving through the darkness as she read aloud to herself.

“Peanut?”

“Hi Daddy. I’m sorry I was bad…”

Christ, that hurt. I climbed up the ladder to her bed, clearly exceeding the weight limit Walmart had placed on this fine item. I nestled in next to her and cradled her in the nook of my shoulder.

“You weren’t bad, honey. Daddy was. I shouldn’t have yelled. I’m sorry. This is all my fault.”

“Oh… It’s OK. You were just having a bad day.” She looked at my hands. “Did the car hurt you again?”

“No, honey. That’s from before.”

“Oh. Can I have a bednight snack?”

“Sure. Go pick something out from the pantry.”

“THANK YOU!” she squealed as she hugged me quickly and then scurried down her ladder.

I know there will be a time in life where some snuggles in a loft and a bednight snack won’t cure all her problems.

I’m really not looking forward to that.

Civic Pride (Part I)

(Ed. Note: In writing about Betsy a few years back, I was accused of creating the "haigiography of a gas guzzling testament to why we don't have widespread public transportation." Thus, I understand that another “car” story opens me up to that again. Point taken. Also, please excuse the “colorful metaphors” others have used to describe foreign cars. As I tell my kids, violate AP’s rule regarding derogatory terms only if you have good reason. I think I met the burden, but either way, consider this a pre-strike apology. Part 2 is next week, as this just kept growing beyond what was sane to do in one shot. Thanks. – Doc.)

A Mustang discussion board I frequent for repair hints and automotive advice had an interesting question pop up a few years ago:

“What’s your favorite rice burner?”

The poster noted that obviously Mustangs were God’s gift to the automotive world, but if you had to choose a Japanese import (a.k.a. a rice burner) to own, what would it be?

The answers tended to be what you’d expect: high-speed, low-drag “Fast-and-Furious” mobiles that ate nitrous and crapped flames.

I thought about responding to the post for a while, as my answer was clearly going to be different. I finally figured I’d add to the mix.

“My dream rice burner is a 1998 Honda Civic EX,” I wrote. “It has no street mods, offers no high-end speed options and it doesn’t even have a spoiler. The reason I love it is because I own it. It gets 36 mpg, I have put about $37 in repair parts into it over the past ten years and it starts every time I ask it to, regardless of weather. Thanks to that car, I can afford to dump a ridiculous amount of money into my Stang.”

No one really said anything about it, but I felt my point had to be made: You can call them whatever you want, but the Accords, Civics, Tercels and other imports had a lot to like.

Growing up as I did, I never expected to drive a foreign car, let alone defend one. Dad was an America First-er and I was expected to follow suit. I still remember a conversation I had with my dad when I was about 16.

“When are you going to get a haircut?” he asked.

“I’m not,” I told him, running my fingers through my nearly shoulder-length mane.

“Hmm. Why don’t you get an earring then?” (Keep in mind, this was when a guy with an earring was either a rebel or a gay. In fact, the issue of “Which ear means you’re gay?” was hotly debated among the pierced and unpierced alike.)

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Then you can get a foreign car and a new place to live.”

The next day, I had my head shaved.

I learned to distrust and dislike foreign cars even more when I worked at the garage. The master mechanic, Tom, had an aversion to working on these “Jap pieces of shit.”

In many ways, he had a point about them. The econo-box cars that rolled out of Japan in the 1980s were impossibly difficult to work on when compared to the traditional American vehicles of that era. Front-wheel drive flipped the engine sideways, thrusting three sparkplugs on a V-6 up against the firewall. The smaller engine bay and additional electronic options led to less open area and more busted knuckles. Even more, the cars were designed by engineers, not mechanics. The sense that you should put an oil filter somewhere near an open space since you change it every three months never seemed to dawn on these people.

The one I remember working on most was a mid 1980s Toyota mini-van. The battery was under one of the seats of the car. The oil pan was hiding in some ridiculous spot that required you to practically create a Tennessee Valley Authority irrigation project to drain it. The radiator was… well… you get the idea.

Foreign cars were strange. Foreign cars were crappy. Foreign cars were, well, foreign.

--- 

The first time I went car shopping with The Missus was not a fun event. The Firebird I’d owned since college was suddenly car-non-grata.

I was sitting at a bar when my cell phone rang. It was my lovely fiancée calling from her job at the police station.

“Did you park in the ramp today?” she asked.

“Yeah, why?”

“Get over there. I just ran your plates for Jenna. Seems that someone slashed a shitload of tires and a couple of them are on the Firebird.”

I paid my bill and hustled over to the parking structure. Sure enough, I had two flats with giant ugly gashes in the sidewalls. Jenna, the police officer investigating the situation, had me hop in the car and she took me back to the station.

The next day, I had the guys at the garage put four new tires on her. I also asked them to put an alignment on the car, since she seemed to be pulling to the left. About 30 minutes later, I got a less-than-encouraging phone call.

“We can’t align the car,” the guy told me. “The steering knuckle is shot, the rack and pinion is pretty much worthless as well. You’ll need to put about another couple grand into this thing to make it right.”

I hung up the phone and went down to the garage to get the car. Tires were fine, steering sucked. I parked her outside the apartment and went upstairs to discuss the situation with the Missus. We agreed we might need to trade her in, but that we’d give it a couple days.

I went back downstairs and planned to drive to the grocery store. The car refused to shift into gear at first before finally lurching into drive.

I shut the car off, walked upstairs and told her, “We’re buying a new car tomorrow.”

--- 

It was the Missus who broke me out of the “rice burner” mode by suggesting a Nissan Xterra. It was big, it had 4-wheel drive and it would be a good car for a family when that time came. Truth be told, she actually wanted it because it had a first-aid kit built into the back of the trunk and that just seemed cool.

Our foray into the world of automotive purchasing wasn’t a good one. The cars were iffy and the salesmen were pushy. Worse yet, they committed the mortal sin of treating my wife like a handbag.

She’d ask a question that was important and completely on point. The guy would ignore her.

I’d reiterate the question and he would perk up with, “Excellent point, sir! Let me explain that to you!”

By the time we had arrived at our fourth lot, I think she wanted to geld me for the sins of the other penis bearers.

Buying the car at this place wasn’t that hard. The kid selling us the car looked like he could shave with a Kleenex and he had been on the job for about two weeks. He was still working out of the “Official Salesman’s Handbook” when it came to his pitch. At one point, he’d gone through Stages 1 and 2 of the program and he stopped and stared at us. After about a minute of awkward silence, he leaned forward and whispered, “You haven’t asked me for any money off yet…”

I said, “OK, I’d like some money off of the price.”

He then launched into the Stage 3 of the sales guy thing, explaining how we could work on price.

Eventually, we agreed on stuff and this kid had his first sale. Got the plates transferred, the car insured and everything else ironed out. Things seemed fine until later that night when I had to call home. Here I was, a faculty member who was pushing 30, living three states away, worrying that I had to call home and tell Dad I bought a “Jap piece of shit.”

He handled it better than I thought he would, although he handled it worse than when I told him the Missus ran away from home and was now living in sin with me in Missouri.

Kind of strange where some priorities lie.

---

After we got married, we realized we needed another car. The one we had been borrowing from our folks to hold us over as we saved for the wedding needed to be returned. What we were looking for was a Dodge Neon or something like a “grocery getter.” Gas was about $1.20 a gallon so “mpg” wasn’t a huge buzzword for us. Still, we were trying to find something small, smart and that would get us around town.

The search was spectacularly unsuccessful. The Neons we drove had huge braking and steering problems. The Saturns were beat to hell and had engine problems. Everything else either had a million miles on it or had some other massive flaw.

We decided to consider a new foreign car. The Hyundais were horrible to steer at that point and it felt like you needed a jet-assisted take off rocket to get onto I-70.

The Kias weren’t any better. I remember being on the lot with a sales guy, when I pointed out that the gas hatch looked like it was bent out. That seemed strange to me for a new car.

“Oh,” the guy said, reaching over and bending it back into place with his hand. “There we go.”

It reminded me of the “Adobe: The cute car made of clay” sketch from SNL.

We expanded our search to the outlying areas of the county. Then, we expanded it to the surrounding counties. Still, nothing looked right, worked right or felt right.

Finally, one Saturday morning, I took a drive to a city called Boonville to check out a used car lot off the freeway. When I got there, they had not only no cars of value, but no salespeople. I walked the lot for 10 minutes and couldn’t find another living soul. The thought of hotwiring something occurred to me, only to be overcome by the sense that nothing out here would be worth hotwiring. I got in the car and headed back to the freeway.

As I was approaching the on ramp, I spotted a dealership on the other side of the road. Decision time: pass up the ramp and waste more time, or go home. Hell with it… Let’s stop.

The first thing I realized about this place is that it was different. It was a Chrysler dealership. This was farm country and everything here appeared to be a diesel.

When I pulled in, there were about four old guys in bib overalls huddled around the engine bay of some gas-guzzling monstrosity. One guy in a corn-feed cap looked up and pointed at me.

“Foreign truck,” he muttered.

“Yup,” the guy next to him said, shaking his head.

There were exactly two “foreign” vehicles on the lot: The one I drove there in and the one I bought.

--- 

I still remember introducing my wife to the salesman at this lot in Boonville. His name was Jim Ray Cluck. He was a rotund man who had the distinction of being on the same high school offensive line as either the police chief or county sheriff in the area.

His business card included the slogan, “The Round Man with the Square Deal.”

I’d driven the car earlier in the week and was now getting the final approval from my wife.

The car was a 1998 Honda Civic EX model. It was four years old, had 40,000 miles on it and contained every option you could possibly imagine. It had been on the lot for almost a year without a single taker.

Jim Ray (you said the whole thing, much like “A Pimp Named Slickback”) had explained to me that the dealer bought three of these Civics from an auction house in Kansas. The first two sold in a week, because they were stick shifts and the kids in the area were tricking them out. The automatic remained untouched.

I wasn’t entirely sold on this car, but it was one of those “this is better than nothing” moments. If I could get him to move on price, I’d take it. If not, to hell with it.

Jim Ray’s boss wouldn’t move on price at all. It was a take it or leave it kind of thing. My wife had become so frustrated by the process that she finally got up and left. When I followed her to the car, she told me, “You’re really pissing me off. Either buy it or don’t but I’m not coming back in there.”

I returned to Jim Ray and told him, “She’s not happy with you.”

He sighed and took a sip out of a Styrofoam coffee cup. He then leaned in and in a conspiratorial tone, told me something that changed the dynamic.

“Look,” he said, furtively turning his head left and right on its non-existent neck. “My boss doesn’t want me to sell this car to you. We have a thing here where if you sell three used cars in a month, you get a good-sized bonus and the profit he’ll make on the car won’t be big enough to cover the bonus. What if I gave you some money back out of my own pocket to close this?”

“You mean cash?” I asked.

“If you bring cash,” he retorted.

“OK. Deal.”

We drove back home to clean out our bank account and return with the most money I’d ever had in my hands at once. When we sat down with him, I tossed the thick envelope containing $100 bills on the counter.

“What the hell is that?” he asked.

“Your money. Cash.”

“Jesus Christ!,” he yelped. “I meant just that we didn’t have to finance you. You coulda brought a cashier’s check!”

“Hey. You said cash.”

He had an envelope with about 200 bucks waiting for us as well. Ten minutes later, we were on our way.

As I drove home, I thought, “Well, two or three years and we’ll trade it in and get something good.”

--- 

When we moved to Muncie, the goal was to see if I could get 100,000 miles on the car before it went to shit. When we moved back to Wisconsin, the goal was to get 120,000 before the problems outweighed the benefits.

Somewhere last year, the car hit 150,000 miles. I had to do the routine repairs (exhaust, brakes etc.), but I’d only put about $37 worth of replacement parts in her, thanks in large part to a place called “Wally’s U-Pull-It.”

It was a graveyard of dead, smashed or otherwise damaged vehicles. They would gladly pull pieces off of these wrecks for you, but if you were willing to sign a “go out there at your own risk” form and wander the yard, you could pull your own part and save a bundle.

My first experience with Wally’s came when the Civic’s power steering started to squeak. Turns out, the reservoir had a giant crack in it somehow and the fluid was leaking all over the place.

I’d called a few shops and part houses to see about getting it replaced. $120 for a new part, $50 for installation, both of which seemed a bit excessive to me.

Wally’s price? Ten bucks if I could find one myself.

Found it, replaced it and fell in love with my car. There always seemed to be an ample supply of dead Civics on the lot thanks to kids who drove them like maniacs and people with Grateful Dead bumper stickers who didn’t know red means stop and green means go. The mechanical features of the car were more simple than I remembered and more intuitive than I gave them credit for.

When the AC died, I figured out it was the fan, not the compressor. The cost for diagnostics would have been $50 just to hear that from a guy in a greasy shirt. It was half that for a replacement fan from Wally’s.

When the radiator blew, I managed to swap it out for a new one (never use a used radiator; consider that “one to grow on”) along with hoses, a thermostat and several wiring harnesses I pulled from Wally’s

With the exception of tires, brakes and exhaust, which all required special tools, I did all the work myself. The car was more than holding its own and I had come to bond with it in a very weird way.

It wasn’t like the Mustang, a dream car.

It wasn’t like my Thunderbird, my first car.

It wasn’t like anything else I could put my finger on. It was just a really good used car that ran like a top and survived like a tank.

My new goal was to put a quarter million miles on her and drive her until 2018. Then, I would get “Collector” plates on her and demand that I be allowed to drive her in the Fourth of July parade, as she would be a classic.

--- 

Fate has a funny way of screwing with you.

It wasn’t a transmission or an engine or an axle that was on its way to dying that forced me to think about selling my car.

It was my great uncle.

Uncle Ronnie was my mom’s mother’s brother and he was not doing well. He had survived a bout with colon cancer somewhere along the way, but remained on borrowed time. He lived alone, having never married and often was the after-thought by some folks in the family. After Grandma died, Mom made sure Uncle Ron was always invited to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, which were often the only good meals he had. When the Illinois branch of the family invited Mom down for birthday parties, she made sure Uncle Ronnie had a seat in the car and was able to attend.

Two months ago, he was hospitalized with a MRSA infection. A week or so later, they sent him home, only to have him hospitalized again the next day. Mom knew he couldn’t live on his own any more and together they began the process of getting him into “a home.”

Things must have been terrible for that to happen. When Mom’s grandma was dying and riddled with dementia, great-grandma found a moment of lucidity and with terrified eyes begged Mom, “Please… Don’t let them put me in a home.”

My grandmother was crippled with cancer to the point where she couldn’t get out of bed. Still, she was adamant: I’m dying at home.

Three weeks after our wedding, she did just that.

For him to say he didn’t want to live and that he couldn’t be on his own, well, that just wasn’t our way.

As the power of attorney, Mom had to make some moves. She had to clean out his apartment, settle his banking and take care of anything else that he wouldn’t or couldn’t use. The car he had became one of those things.

The 2001 Civic he owned was unlike anything else in his life. While he ate Spaghetti-Os cold out of the can and abhorred changing his clothes, the car was in perfect working order. Oil changes every 3,000 miles, tires every 40,000 and anything the guy said was broken got fixed. He pretty much was the stereotype salesmen talk about: the little old person who only drove it to the senior center. After 11 years, it had 46,000 miles on it.

Mom and Dad had long since gotten out of the life of selling their old cars by putting a “FOR SALE” sign in the window. They also lacked the space to keep it at their place.

For all Dad’s proclamations that he’d love a little “get around” car, he had no interest in this thing. It wasn’t a Cadillac and it was still a foreign car (never mind that it was probably built in Kentucky).

I told them it wasn’t a problem. They could store the car on our land until they figured out what they wanted to do with it and I’d drive it occasionally to keep the seals lubed and the battery charged.

Two days later, Mom had a different idea.

“We’d like to sell you the car.”

--- 

The Missus had been dropping hints that it might be time to trade in our Civic. It’s getting a bit old, she’d note. Hey, there’s a sale at (fill in the name of the car lot) this weekend. Maybe we should look, she’d mention.

It wasn’t going to happen. The Civic was like an old pair of shoes: it fit just right.

I knew what was right and wrong. I knew how it acted on the road. I could practically set the cruise and drift off to sleep and let the car drive me to work.

Thanks, but no thanks, I’d tell my wife. We’re fine for now.

When this deal came up, though, I felt I had to do this. My wife was right: our car was getting older. I found myself doing more work on her. I found the problems I knew were going to be coming up and I knew we weren’t far from seeing them in full flower.

She needed new brakes in about six months.

The timing belt was about 20,000 miles past the “you should really change this” line.

The alignment was drifting a bit. The tranny was getting old. I wasn’t sure how much longer the engine had. It had gone from a worry-free tank to a “how long do you want to let it ride?” roll of the dice.

My uncle’s Civic was fine. It was a good car. It was well maintained.

But it wasn’t mine. 

Still, we agreed on the price, which was more than reasonable and I set about trying to sell my Civic.

At first, I did the things that most people do when they don’t want to do something: I sabotaged myself.

I set the asking price at about $400 above what AutoTrader told me to. I explained in the ad that I didn’t want to sell it. I failed to list a few attributes that would draw people to the car. I took the cheapest ad possible, thus making it a bit harder to find.

The thought of selling my uncle’s car instead entered and left my mind quickly. It would piss off pretty much everyone involved for a variety of reasons. Plus, logically, I knew I needed to do this. Still…

After about a week of no real interest and a couple calls, I decided to get serious: bigger add, more features, lower price.

As it turns out, I probably didn’t need to submarine myself. The car was doing just fine on its own in that regard.

As I was cleaning the carpet on the passenger’s side floorboards, I noticed the carpet felt tacky. I figured it was either a coffee spill or some Midget-related beverage debacle.

I rubbed the carpet and put my fingers to my nose. The sickly sweet chemical smell chilled me.

Fuck.

The heater core blew.

 ---

A heater core is a simple thing: it’s a mini radiator that sits in your car. Hot coolant from the engine runs through it and a fan blows air across it to heat the cabin. It’s also a stupid thing, in that engineers tend to hide them in some of the dumbest places around. Of all the things that were intuitive on this car, the heater core was not among them.

To get at this thing, you had to disassemble the entire dash. You then had to remove several parts of the heating system. You then had to take out part of the steering system, the radio, the dash panel and more.

If you wanted to do it right, you also had to have your AC system professionally drained of Freon and have the condenser in the car removed. You also had to be inverted during the entire process so you could see under the dash. You had to force the seat to recline all the way, hang your feet over the headrest and descend into the foot well.

In other words, this was not an easy job.

The cost for a pro to do this was well over $1,000. The part alone cost upwards of $250 and that’s on a good special. Of all the things that could break that mattered but didn’t kill the car, this was the worst.

I talked to a couple guys at the parts store, who told me, no, you could actually do this without draining the AC. They also said you could get into it without any special tools.

The choice was simple: fix it yourself or the car is dead. The cost to get it fixed wouldn’t be recouped and I could get more money from Wally’s by turning it in for parts than I could if I paid to have the core redone and then sold it for what it was worth.

After two days of bleeding hands, scarred arms and a coolant headache, I got to the point where I could see the heater core. I still couldn’t touch it, but I could see it.

After two more days, I could touch it but not move it.

Of course, as is Murphy’s Law, now I had a ton of people calling with great interest in the car. They wanted to come out on the weekend and drive it.

It was Tuesday. I had five days to figure this out.

By the time Thursday rolled around, I had to make a choice: Was I going to replace this the “Honda approved” way or was I going to actually make this happen? This heater core was the full fruition of every racist stereotype Tom spat forth while working on Hondas and Toyotas in the garage: Stuff was too tight to fit, they built it so you couldn’t work on it, the thing wasn’t engineered for repairs…

I went back into the house and grabbed soda. The Missus looked at me and said, “Oh my God, your head is bleeding!”

I wiped the blood off of my head, once, twice and then stopped. Turns out, my head was fine. I was just bleeding profusely from both of my hands and I had touched my head. I wiped my hands on my pants and sat on the steps.

She chose her next words slowly and cautiously.

“You know,” she began. “We got a great deal on the green Civic. If you can’t fix this, it’s OK. We can just call Wally’s and take whatever they’ll give us for it.”

No.

Not Wally’s.

It was this car that took us through the ice storms of Muncie. It got us home when her beloved Xterra failed on some shitty road near Lebanon, Indiana. It took me to Minnesota every summer. It never quit on me. I couldn’t quit on it. I couldn’t see her out there when I went through the yard to pick the bones of some other car.

I couldn’t.

I stood up on wobbly legs.

“I’ll be in the garage.”

Love of My Life

I had this post worked out in my head for weeks. I had it built until about four hours ago when someone decided that "Hey, when we say something is due on X day, that means whenever, right?"

The concept was simple: This summer, The Missus, The Midget and I went to the Wisconsin Dells for a summer get away. One of the things we did was the rather campy tourist trap thing known as "The Dells Mining Company." They sell you a giant bucket of sludge with raw gems in it and then try to get you to up the ante by getting a few of those things turned into polished gems and jewelry.

The Midget pulled a lump out of her sifting bin and stared at it with a scrunched up face. "It looks like a meatball!" she said as she rolled the round rock in her hand. She was happy to have it and planned to keep it.

The lady at the counter told us it was a garnet, which sent my wife's eyes a'sparkling. She has always loved garnets, so much so, she has forsaken her actual birthstone and adopted the red gems as her own. After a bit of back and forth, we agreed to have a couple stones cut from the raw rock. It would take 6-8 weeks and they'd be mailed to us.

I hatched a plan in my head to ferry away the stones from the mail, have them put into some nice earrings and have them for her on our anniversary, which is today.The lady at the jewelry store swore that it would be no problem to have these by the 28th, or even a day earlier. She told me to come back on the 27th and everything would be fine. We chatted a bit about how these stones came to be and what it took to get them there. How it was that something so big and lumpy and non-descript could be polished and shaped into something so worthwhile.

Then, I started thinking about my post. I wanted to do the perfect metaphor post. It was a lead-pipe cinch.

If you knew me back when I met her, you'd know that I was probably the least likely person on Earth to land my wife. I was rough, crude and off-putting. In other words, pretty much like now, but imagine it magnified. It took about a dozen stops and starts, a "OK Fuck It" move to Missouri, about $600,000 in long-distance charges, a midnight run away from Wisconsin with nothing but 10 sweaters and a broken coffee pot, a shaming moment from our parents, a series of epic misfortunes and 18 months of eating Ramen so we could save enough money to do our wedding the way we wanted to, but we got here.

However, my wife isn't great for these reasons. She's great because she saw something in me that I didn't see in myself. She rubbed away the dirt, cut away the crap and tried to polish me up so that I could see what she saw, and maybe other people could, too.

Over the past 10 years, we have worked the problems we faced, we have found our way and we have done it because of her. She took the initiative to give me one more phone call after I was in the "I'm not talking about her anymore" phase. She realized that we fit together, even if neither of us really saw how at that point. She cut the gem, whatever it was, from the heart of the mess and shined it.

So, here I was today with this post that had info about gem cutting and jewelry making and this wonderful metaphor of life. It was done and waiting for the earrings to arrive. The closing was going to be tonight when I gave them to her at dinner.

I stopped by to pick them up, only to get a blank stare from the woman at the counter. Turns out, that instead of putting "Due Date 9/27" on the package, she needed to put "Due Date 9/27 RUSH" on the package. Apparently that's the difference between having earrings for my wife and not.

The woman who sold them to me was apologetic. The owner was apoplectic.

I offered to drive to the goldsmith's and pick them up. They balked. I guess telling a random guy where a shit ton of gold has been sent isn't a good business plan.

I then offered to meet the goldsmith at a coffee house or a freeway exit ramp or something. No dice.

I told them if they didn't want to have me drive to the goldsmith, I'd pay for the gas for them to drive out there. That apparently didn't work either.

They told me they'd call me in an hour but they'd work it out. Turns out, that meant that the earrings weren't done, but they would be done and they'd be happy to give me a pair of earrings to "present" to my wife as a symbol of what was coming.

Right. Because nothing says, "Happy Anniversary" like saying, "Here are some great earrings, but they're not actually yours."

Like so much of everything else that happened to us leading up to that wedding, this wasn't going to be easy.

In July of that year, her grandfather died.

In August of that year, my dad's mom died. I still have the invitation response card she sent back to us in June. "If the good Lord is willing," she wrote on the back of the card. "I'll be there!"

Two weeks before my wedding, my uncle died

My grandmother (mom's mom) was the reason we were ever able to make that leap of faith and run away from everything and cling to each other. She was so goddamned stubborn that she swore cancer wouldn't take her before she saw us wed.

After we opened gifts that following morning, I drove her home and hugged her goodbye. When we left her house, a sadness came over me.

"What's wrong?" my bride asked.

"I can't say for sure," I began. "But I have this horrible feeling I just said goodbye to my grandmother for the last time."

I was right. Three weeks later, she was gone.

I was pondering this when the phone rang. It was the jewelry store. No hope of getting them until Monday. The goldsmith sent a picture for me and the jewelry store sent along a gift card as an apology.

I stopped for a minute, thinking I should be really pissed off. I smiled instead and said, "Thanks for trying. I'll pick the stuff up this afternoon."

Maybe it wasn't the gem that typified who we were. Maybe it was the process.

We improvise, we adapt, we overcome. We try, we fail, we forgive. We love and we cherish.

And we also love to tell stories.

We can add this one to the pile of them we built together over the past 10 years.

Check out my lizard...

 

This is what I get for assuming you all are broke like me. :)

I had planned a tasteful "Sticky Fingers" cover shot, but since it was hard... Uh... difficult to get my lizard to cooperate, we had to go with the handful shot.

In any case, this is Archer, a baby leopard gecko that I fell in love with. Always wanted a gecko for a pet and The Missus finally convinced me to give this a shot. He's usually decent about "hand time" and he's a hell of a lot of fun to watch run around. He'll climb all over you if you let him. I have yet to get salmonella.

Seriously, thank you all for donating to this fun little place we all call home. If I could think of something to do with him next year for this that wouldn't get me bitten, I'd probably agree to it for the fundraising trick.

Archer don't do hipster glasses.

Doc.

The New Bullies

Sometimes it takes a stupid argument over a stupid thing to reveal a greater truth. After a week of “Oh, hey, you still live here?” chaos that meant seeing my wife for about three minutes a day, we finally had an evening to catch up on some together time. We decided to watch a few episodes of “Project Runway” we had gathered on the DVR, which isn’t as tortuous as I thought it would be when she asked for a season pass to this thing.

If you haven’t see this over the ten seasons it’s been on, the concept should at least be familiar: Gather about 12-14 people from all over the place with an interest in being famous at X job. Put them together in a living space and force them to do all sorts of impossible work-related challenges. Have three or four assholes on a panel judge them in some of the meanest ways possible.

They shit-can one of them each week and we all listen to the person who got shit-canned say, “I learned a lot and I know you haven’t heard the last of me.”

We then officially never hear from that person again and move on to the next week to start the process all over again.

This week’s fashion challenge was to move away from designing clothes for people that anorexics call thin and try to design something for a “real woman.”

(I hate that phrase, despite its constant use in the program. It’s like models turn in their vaginas when they take to the catwalk. Or like we’re trying to come up with a nice way to say “size four is too fucking heavy.”)

These were all women whose friends had sponsored them. They were too short, too heavy, too “fuck fashion” to be fashionable and the challenge was to create a look for them that took who they were and translated it to fashion.

One of the designers is named Ven. Ven is a talented guy and doesn’t fit the stereotype of “male fashion designer.” Most of the guys on the show seem like they’re picked based on number of tattoos, tightest Daisy Duke shorts and how catty they can be. It’s like they went to Fire Island and hired life coach Jerry Springer to conduct a “Gay Off.”

(I talked to one of my good friends who watches the show and who also happens to be gay. He said, “I finally understand how my friend (Name of an Italian lady he know) feels when she watches the Sopranos and Real Housewives.”)

In any case, Ven has the body shape of a potato with a half-sucked Milk Dud stuck on the top for a head. He’s the kind of guy who the mean joke “Have you see his new shoes? No. Neither has he” applies.

His model for this challenge was a woman who was about a size 12-14. She didn’t like the way she looked so she wore things that were comfortable. And speaking comfortable, she clearly wasn’t comfortable in the world of high fashion.

I get it. When I had to buy a suit for the Cardinal Reunion, I felt like I was walking into “Jimmy’s House of Get Ready for a Random Anal Rape.”

I was tense. I needed help but I didn’t want help. I felt like something at the Westminster Dog Show. I was afraid to touch something to have the sales guy say, “That? Are you kidding?” 

So, of course, the first thing Ven does is complain about his plus-sized model, right in front of her. He then starts talking about how they’re going to do certain things because she’s a plus-sized woman. Again, right in front of her. He then proceeds to fuck up his design (a common theme on the show: Try something, fuck it up, bitch about it.) and complain both on camera and to her that if she weren’t such a plus-sized model, this would be better.

The woman breaks down, Ven almost gets kicked off the show and the show ends with this guy still saying, “I’m not designing for people like her.”

Thus, the argument.

My wife, someone who loves fashion but hates clothes because of designers like Ven, is arguing that he wasn’t being that big of an asshole. I, someone who could probably be a lot more fashion-forward because everything for dudes is somehow in my size, am losing my mind about this guy being a complete bag of dick. We argued about this for an hour, went to bed and woke up arguing about it again. The Missus said she was DREAMING about this and wanted to continue the argument because of it.

That’s when it really hit me why this bothered me: This guy was the new bully.

Bullies have been around for forever. They usually were big and strong and demanded lunch money if they were guys. The girls bullied in more subtle ways through power gained by beauty, money and status. However, bullies were bullies. They were the top of the evolutionary food chain and they used their power and your fear to make you something less than you were.

I find it highly likely that people on “Project Runway” including Ven were victims of bullies. The word “fag” keeps coming to mind as the insult de jour. For some of these guys, I’m sure it was even worse that they were coming to grips with being gay and doing so at a time when even the most well-adjusted kids teetered on the edge of insanity. Ven probably was the fat kid in the class as well. He liked fashion. He was quiet: The perfect target for the loud, boisterous assholes among us.

He probably found solace in being good at something and eventually realizing that being able to throw a ball for a high school team wasn’t the end all and be all of life. He left high school, left college and began to find himself in a world where different was embraced. He was chosen for a show that celebrates that in its own way and allowed him to create his own power.

The first chance he got to take his skill and his power and give some hope to someone else, he turned into a bully.

Earlier this month, I got a phone call from home. Mom was having a week that feels like you fell off the top of a giant pine tree and the branches are smashing into you constantly. You hope to hit the ground and die, if only because you want this shit to be over.

Problems with sick family, bad kids, weird administrators and general bullshit were beating her up. She had the grace and strength to handle all of that.

Except for one thing.

The district had decided to install new computer programs to chart and track kids. Even more, it mandated that the faculty members all have their own personal websites that could be used to contact parents and provide homework information and such. The district hired a guy to help oversee the training of the faculty and this guy was supposed to be an expert on the topic.

The in-service day of training turned into what you would expect: Faculty fumbling around, computers that were older than my car not being fast enough to do things right and general mayhem. Of course, the expert was an expert, not a teacher, so this became a lot of “Well, that SHOULD work.” When it worked for a few people, thanks to their previous knowledge and the fact they had faster computers, his sense that failure was based on human error appeared justified.

Of course, when you coupled my tech-phobic mother with the slowest machine out there (a PC, no less for a Mac person), you have the makings of trouble. She couldn’t get things to pull up, she couldn’t get things to link and she had trouble making her stuff work.  

She became the perfect target for a bully.

The man kept saying, “Well just do what I told you to!” When it didn’t work, he mocked her in front of the class. When someone asked for help, he nodded in my mother’s direction and noted “Why don’t you ask her?” as others laughed.

I could feel her pain. I could feel her embarrassment. It just seeped through the phone in that broken, crippled way.

“I just… I SWEAR to you…” she said as she broke down in tears. “I am NOT stupid! I WILL learn this and I WON’T retire until I do…”

The computer guy should have known better than to be like this. From every account, he was probably the guy other kids picked on. He probably liked modems instead of models, SCSI instead of sports and programming instead of playing. Of all people, he should have been the one to say, “I know how it feels when it seems like everyone else is laughing at you. Let me help you.”

Instead, the instant he had the upper hand, he played it in the most merciless and mean-spirited way possible.

I could feel it building. I wanted to grab my Louisville Slugger and drive two hours and fuck this guy up. I wanted to just rage against him and scream, “See if you can .html code your way out of this you FUCKING FUCK!” It was the same way I wanted to stick Ven on a treadmill and say, “Let this lady watch you run until you’re the size of the models you think are worth designing for, asshole.”

Then, I realized why that wouldn’t work. To beat a bully, you have to beat him at his own game. The reason kicking the unholy shit out of the bully I faced in sixth grade worked was because he was using violence to perpetuate superiority. I out-violenced him and thus was left alone.

I couldn’t out-design that turd in a striped shirt, but I sure as hell could do something to help my mother. I told her everything was going to be all right and that we would fix this somehow.

The next weekend, I headed to Milwaukee for a card show and basically locked myself in The Computer Room with Mom for about four hours. We slowly went through each program and we got her website to work. I helped her add images, links, email references and more. We used her scanner to grab photos and homework. We found references online to her previous awards. We built it together, slowly and scholarly. We also managed to get her classes updated, her kids added and her parents emailed.

“You’re really a great teacher,” she said with a smile. “If he had been able to explain things this way, I know I could have gotten it.”

Later that week, I called Mom to tell her my book had finally published. Before I could get excited and share my news, she interrupted me and said, “I’ve gotta tell you something first! I updated all my classes homework by myself! I got all the kids over there and everything!”

She sounded elated, a mix of triumph and giggles.

She then told me that they had another session and she was one of the few people to have a website done.

“I wasn’t going to show my site,” she said. “I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, but then that asshole said, ‘Well, maybe we should look at HER site!’ and it got a big laugh. So I told him to open it up and the room fell silent. He mumbled, ‘Nice job on adding those photos. How did you do that?’ I told him it was because he was such a great teacher.

“People laughed.”

"...You could be another Lincoln..."

 

I remember the first run of the “Why do you hate America?” censorship that poured out in the weeks and months after 9/11. It was Bill O’Reilly and the other “STFU” freedom fighters who labeled anyone who wanted to stop and think about things for more than three seconds as being someone willing to offer aid and comfort to terrorists. It was a stupid bit of illogical patriotism that belied a larger concern that for all the freedom we were fighting for, we had to pretty much give up our freedom to get it.

Facts? Fuck ‘em

Discussion? Only for pussies.

Logic? Queer shit.

Fast forward to Friday in which Paul Ryan decided everything old was new again. He spent the better part of a campaign speech in D.C. deriding the president for engaging in similar behavior in terms of the economy and social issues.

Ryan noted:

“…if anyone dares to point out the facts” of the president’s “record” then “they’re just being negative and pessimistic about the country.”

Aside from heaping on the “America: Fuck Yeah!” approach, he upped his game by pointing out how Obama kept rolling out classic “strawman” arguments that he would then beat into the ground:

“Nobody is better at rebuking nonexistent opinions,” Ryan said. “Barack Obama does this all the time, and in this campaign we are calling him on it.”

Looking at this argument is like staring into a moebius strip: Every time you think you reached the end of it, you double back on top of yourself and you feel upside down.

Start with the fact that it was the Republicans who spent the entirety of the 2000s giving us the “agree or die” philosophy when it came to actual life and death decisions. If Democrats are anything, it’s overly sensitive dipshits who a) talk things to death or b) shut up if they can’t get everyone to agree on something. The whole idea that Obama is doing this “Yeah? You think so? Fuckin’ hater!” thing is laughable at best.

Then, move to the more amusing part of the program: the strawman. I’m not a great fan of Bill Maher, but he has been right as rain on this aspect of how the Republicans are running against Obama. There’s Real Obama and there’s Imaginary Obama. The Republicans have spent the last several years building an Imaginary Obama to run against, a guy who has a Negro Army just waiting to fuck up white people, a man who is plotting to seize all the guns and who will be walking through Bedford Stuy with milk crates full of C-notes to make it rain on his peeps any day now. (He’s also a silver-spooned, cultural elitist who never really worked a day in his life, but don’t let anything that might seem counterintuitive slow you down here…).

I had a two-day fight with a friend over a fucking Internet meme about how Obama said he didn’t think people should have guns. The fact he never said it, has never said it and there was no evidence to support he would even suggest it didn’t matter. It was online.

It was a picture and had quote marks around words and EVERYTHING!

(Click here to see the source of this. When you're done laughing, c'mon back.)

If that purple-pimp-hat-having, freedom-suppressing, gun-stealing, black-junta-leading Obama were any more of a strawman, he’d be wearing flannel and having a crow shitting on him.

So if you want to try to pare this down into an elevator statement, Paul Ryan is essentially rolling out the ugliest parts of what the Republicans have done or are attempting to do and saying Obama is doing them, even with evidence or specificity to the contrary.

Obama isn’t perfect and I honestly don’t know how I’d vote if this time around a “McCain/Somebody Awesome With a Brain” ticket came along. That said, when a guy whose convention speech had fact checkers leaping off the couch screaming, “Lordy, Lordy, we’re having BISCUITS TONIGHT! Chedda comin’!!!!” calls you out, you have to kind of wonder where rock bottom is on this campaign.

But if we need a meme to capture this, enjoy:

“Death isn’t always sad…”

 

That line from Bill Maher’s “tribute” to Jerry Falwell came to mind today as I heard that former NFL team owner Art Modell had passed on (pun intended).

Sorry, Art. I can’t say “goodnight” to you here, but I can say “good riddance.”

Modell owned the Cleveland Browns for more than 30 years before taking the team to Baltimore and renaming it the Ravens. He did this despite the overwhelming protestation of Browns fans, the city of Cleveland and the NFL itself.

For this reason, Modell was essentially exiled from his adopted hometown and despite his decades of service to the NFL and his work in advancing it through the AFL/NFL merger remains a Hall of Fame reject.

However, Modell was an asshole long before he decided to treat Cleveland like a roll of Charmin.

He bought the Browns in 1961 and fired the team’s iconic coach and namesake, Paul Brown, just two years later. According to Cleveland legend, the timing of Brown’s firing was set to coincide with a citywide newspaper strike, as to avoid any backlash.

Brown had won seven titles. Modell won the 1964 title with long-time Browns assistant Blanton Collier at the helm. It would be the city’s last major championship.

And yet, he would do the city one better in 1993 when coach Bill Belichick clashed with quarterback Bernie Kosar.

Kosar was a local kid from Boardman, Ohio, who led the Miami Hurricanes to a national championship. Through a series of maneuvers to qualify for the 1986 supplemental draft, Kosar might have been the only athlete ever to game the system in an attempt to play IN Cleveland. He often called it his dream job.

Kosar was the guy who took the Browns to the AFC championship game multiple times and appeared poised to make a run in 1993 as well, when Belichick benched him in favor of Heisman washout Vinny Testaverde. To sooth the wound and attempt to smooth the waters, Modell referred to Kosar as “my son” and gave him a 5-year, $27-million contract extension.

Kosar was cut a week or two later. In a sweet twist of irony, Kosar was signed as a back up QB for the Dallas Cowboys, who won the Super Bowl that year.

Of course, at the time Modell allowed this to occur, the Browns were 5-3 and in the hunt in the AFC Central. Testaverde was hurt and the team had no legitimate starter.

And, hey, when you can take the field with the immortal Todd Philcox leading the charge, you have to take that chance, right?

In the early 1970s, Modell took over as the landlord of Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Modell saw this as a venue to quick cash, as he would take over the stadium from the city for $1 per year while assuming all operating costs and revenue. The trick was that while the Browns played 14 to 16 games per season, the other tenant, the Cleveland Indians, would play 81 home games each year. Thus, Modell was able to charge both his own team and the Indians rent, thus doubly feathering his own pockets. Despite this, he consistently lost money on the deal and the stadium continued crumble. When the city worked with new Indians owner Dick Jacobs to build a baseball-only park, Modell refused to find a way to become part of the Gateway Project and attempted to block the construction. In the end, the Indians got the stadium and Modell lost out. He then began looking for a way out.

Like it or hate it, the NFL is a license to print money. The league has salary caps, non-guaranteed contracts and revenue sharing. Stadiums routinely sell out for exorbitant prices, concessions are overpriced to the point of avarice and this shows no sign of stopping any time soon. You almost have to TRY to lose money if you own a team in the post-merger world of the NFL.

And yet, lose Modell did.

He consistently reported losing money throughout the 1970s and 1980s. He once noted that he had to “go to four or five banks” to find someone who would lend him the necessary money to finance wide receiver Andre Rison’s $5 million bonus.

(And, hey, when you have a chance to sign a guy who’s nickname is “Bad Moon” and who had his rap star girlfriend burn his house down, you really should take that chance, right?)

Think about this for a second: Imagine an NFL majority owner showing up at a BANK  and having him BEG for a loan. And then imagine that the guy had to do that four or five times until he found someone who would pony up.

Even in the wild post-Reagan deregulation, consumption-based economy, FOUR OR FIVE BANKERS decided that an NFL OWNER was a BAD INVESTMENT.

Modell never figured this out.

In 1995, Modell did figure something out: Other cities want teams too. He cut a backroom deal to move the team to Baltimore, ignoring pleas from civic leaders to simply sell the team to his friend, billionaire Al Lerner. Modell repeatedly said he wanted to keep the team for his family.

Part of me always wanted to blame Baltimore for this. I found it offensive that the city that watched Robert Irsay steal the Colts out of town under the cover of night would do the same thing to someone else’s city. It always felt as incongruent as a rape victim going out and becoming a rapist.

Despite a free, modern stadium and tax breaks that would make Scott Walker blush, he kept losing money. Each year, he had to sell a little more of the team.

When he died, he owned 1 percent of the team, which some people viewed as a thinly veiled way to get around a multi-million dollar finder’s fee he would owe if he ever sold the team.

So much for “the family.”

So much for “the Browns” who remain a laughing stock expansion team that was reborn in 1999 in attempt to shut the city of Cleveland up.

So much for death being the ultimate equalizer, in which we all look for something nice to say about someone who has gone.

Sorry. I can’t.

I can’t look at photos of his fat, toady face or listen to clips of his self-serving bullshit or even watch a Ravens game without getting upset.

Modell had his vision blurred by his own arrogance, frittered away money through his own stupidity and damaged a glorious franchise through his own greed.

If I looked hard into his past and tried really hard to find something great about him, I’m sure I could, but doing so would only make me as hypocritical as he was.

It’s like having to compliment a chef on his choice of ketchup.

In his final years, people talked about him with a slightly softer tone (outside of Cleveland, that is). It reminded me of a book I once read called “Nixon Reconsidered,” which was written near his death in 1994. The idea was that perhaps now that time had passed, it was worth giving Tricky Dick a pass. He did some good things and had some bad breaks and some regrets and… Gee… shouldn’t we let bygones be bygones?

Each time Modell comes up for the Hall of Fame, this issue reemerges. Each time, a good many journalists and fans recall how Modell took a shit in the punch bowl and bolted from the party without saying so much as a goodbye.

Perhaps the only thing about Art Modell that made me happy was going to ESPN.com and finding his obituary and noticing two things:

1) It wasn’t worth putting out front. I actually had to dig for it on the site.

2) It couldn’t refer to him as “Hall of Famer” Art Modell.

$20 from a safety net

Her name was Rachael and she would have been 14 this year.

I usually think about her as school gears up each fall, as kids shop for school supplies and new gym shoes.

I think about her parents, both of whom are now well on their way to middle age. When Rachael was born, they were two scared 20-something kids with a daughter in danger. He was an agricultural laborer, and she was a stay-at-home mom.

I thought about all of this today in the wake of Mitt Romney’s speech at the RNC last night. He spoke out against the failure of Obama to do much of anything good. Jobs lost, costs hiked, people screwed.

(Side Note: I have to give the RNC a lot of credit for one thing: Clint Eastwood. Instead of the media going after Paul Ryan’s horseshit or Mitt’s bullshit, everyone is enamored by rambling oratory that was likely taken from the “Book of Speeches, Salutes and Wedding Toasts delivered by Drunken Brothers-in-Law and Other Morons Who Grabbed the Mic.” Nice inadvertent idiotic brilliance.)

When Mitt was yammering, I was flipping back and forth between two channels filled with lies: The RNC on one station and the Green Bay Packer announcers who were trying to convince me that the Packers wouldn’t miss a beat if Aaron Rodgers went down and Graham Harrell had to take over on the other. I was also uploading news articles I needed my students to read this term for my feature-writing class, which is where I came across a piece on Rachael.

And then it all came back.

 

When I worked as an editor in Missouri, one of the things we didn’t lack for was reporters. The students would fill the newsroom each year and look for stories that hadn’t been done before. The joke around town was that if you hadn’t been interviewed at least three times each year by someone on our staff, chances are you were dead.

Most of the stories were what you would expect out of a newspaper brimming with cub reporters: fires and floods, meetings and speeches, pomp and circumstance.

I was helping to oversee coverage of outlying areas, which usually led to some meeting stories and an occasional county fair story. If it was happening out in Boonville (an actual city, not a slight) or beyond, chances are no one really cared.

One day, a kid came to me with a scrap of paper he’d pulled from a weekly paper that covered an outlying farm community. It was a tiny ad, alerting the community at large that someone was hosting a chili supper with proceeds to benefit a girl named Rachael.

“Can I go?” he asked, understanding that space and mileage money were tightly rationed.

“Sure,” I told him, figuring not much would come of this. “Let me know what happens when you get back.”

The next time I saw him, he was chattering away like an agitated monkey. He told me the story of Rachael, a baby with Down Syndrome and a hole in her heart. The family had no insurance, the dad was the sole source of income and they had already been drained by all the complications associated with Rachael’s birth.

Her grandfather had gotten some people together to make and serve chili to help defray the cost of the upcoming open-heart surgery.

The family wasn’t thrilled about this nosy kid who was writing down everything thing they had to say. They were guarded and concerned.

But, the next time they had a supper, back the kid went for another update about the fundraising and the girl.

The more he went, the more he wrote. The more he wrote, the more people heard. The more they heard, the more they gave.

Eventually, the family adopted this goofy college student who had taken up their cause in print and started opening up about all of this. They told him they never regretted the decision to have a child they knew would have these problems. They felt both saddened and overwhelmed with gratitude when people started to donate to their cause.

“We’re afraid to ask how much it’s going to be,” the mom said at one point. She had been trying to find a job to help out, but between caring for Rachael and the general state of the economy, she couldn’t manage it.

Her husband did everything he could to be the breadwinner. He worked upwards of 80 hours a week during planting season in an attempt to help the family cobble a life together.

He might have been better off if he hadn’t.

In one of the last interviews leading up to the surgery, the mom revealed her husband made too much money in the previous fiscal year to qualify for Medicaid and WIC benefits that would have taken care of much, if not all of the bills.

“How much is too much?” the kid asked.

“We missed the cut off by about $20.”

 

Rachael kept getting worse and then a bit better and then a bit worse.

Something had to be done.

The surgery happened in November of that year. She was less than two months old when her family gathered in a private waiting room. Her grandfather was in a hospital bed on one floor, recovering from his heart attack while she was being tended to on another floor.

My kid was there as well, at the behest of the family, watching all of this come together.

Were the chili suppers enough to pay for the bills? No one knew.

Would she make it out alive? It was a 50/50 bet.

He was rolling through these thoughts as a nurse came in and told the family that things weren’t great.

“Please, God, let us keep her,” Rachael’s grandmother said in a quivering voice. “… We need her more than she needs us.”

She survived the surgery and continued to struggle forward. Each day, one small step in a positive direction. The family spent weeks holed up in the waiting room, each day, praying for a small miracle.

“She still has a chance,” her mom told the reporter. “But everything has to go perfect.”

Everything didn’t.

 

Years after that story ran, two things remain fresh in my mind.

First, that story wrecked my reporter kid in a way that I never would have imagined. He was about 20 years old at the time he wrote that story and he was never the same after it.

He had grown up in an America that preached the idea of hard work, sacrifice and prayer. If you wanted something badly enough and you worked hard enough, then you would always triumph, the story went.

He gave everything he had to telling that story.

The community gave everything they had to raise the funds.

The family sacrificed and prayed.

The girl died.

This wasn’t the script he was used to.

The parents were close to his age. He sympathized and became part of a story that consumed him. He couldn’t let it go.

Years later, I got in touch with him and found out it still haunted him in some ways. He was a serviceable reporter doing a good job and managing post-collegiate life.

“It’s funny,” he once wrote to me. “After all I’ve done in the years that have passed, I still remember that story. It’s always with me.”

The second and more depressing thing was the quotes from the family. They prayed and hoped and loved and more, but so many of the quotes came back to the issue of money.

They were trying to earn money.

They were trying to raise money.

They didn’t want to know how much this would cost.

They feared the costs associated with the life of their child.

At a time in which they clung to hope, the niggling fear of funding scratched loudly at the corners of their mind.

I can’t say for sure that they didn’t get the best possible care for their child. I have no idea if there was a “broke people” wing for folks without bulletproof insurance or if they had insurance it would have been better or faster or stronger care. I have no idea if that $20 kept their kid from landing in a safety net of government assistance and medical assurance instead of crashing into an early grave.

I can say, however, that isn’t a concern anyone should face while their infant’s life hangs in the balance.

 

Healthcare is a rather abstract concept to people who have it or don’t need it. If you are healthy or insured, chances are when Romney says, “We must rein in the skyrocketing cost of healthcare by repealing and replacing Obamacare,” it doesn’t mean much. It’s just a word like socialism, communism or whatever ism is on the outs at the time the writer is using it.

Obamacare. Like he’s the guy giving me my prostate check each year.

Obamacare. A Franken-word that smacks of too much government and not enough freedom.

Obamacare. A term inviting the icy scorn of those who believe they just hit a triple, when in actuality, they were born standing on third base.

And that’s exactly who Mitt Romney is and why it’s hard for me to take him seriously when it comes to problems that impact people who earn in a year what he took home in a day.

When he talks about working hard as a businessman, I’m sure it was never in a Missouri farm field, planting seeds for 10, 12 or 15 hours a day.

Sweating for life. Praying for hope. Losing both.

Thursday, Mitt Romney told us, “If I am elected President of these United States, I will work with all my energy and soul to restore that America, to lift our eyes to a better future. That future is our destiny. That future is out there. It is waiting for us. Our children deserve it…”

Today, Rachael rests in a small grave in a small town in Missouri with a marker noting she lived for 63 days.

Each one of those days, her parents had to worry about how much money it would take to keep her alive.

That can’t be our future.

It can’t be our destiny.

No one deserves that.

Strip Tease

It was hot and crowded and the woman in front of me kept pushing us away from her by grinding her very wide ass into my groin. My wife suggested that the woman grab a pole and make some money while we all were waiting.

It was an odd bit of serendipity that landed The Missus and I and me in Paris that July. We had gotten married the previous September, but with both of us working and me still having a dissertation to write, we postponed our honeymoon. To make up for time lost, we joined a tour group that was heading to France that summer and decided to make that our belated post-wedding trip.

After the requisite stops at the Eiffel Tower, the Cathedral at Notre Dame and every mall within the city limits, we chose to spend our last full day overseas waiting to see a Texas cancer survivor do the impossible.

After a series of floats, odd motorized vehicles and police escorts, a flurry of steel carbon fiber and rubber came down that long stretch home. Men of sinew and spandex, flying along on two wheels faster than I could on four.

The riders with nothing to gain or lose sped past with reckless abandon, figuring on winning that final stage simply to say they did it. The overall victory had been salted away days earlier with a series of grueling rides in which the likely winner had separated his wheat from the others chaff.

And then he came in the blink of an eye, too fast to be captured by my pedestrian camera.

Lance Armstrong, clad in the yellow jersey, surrounded by a protective ring of teammates, heading down the Champs-Elysees. We were strangers in a strange land, but the sense of history filled us with pride.

He was not only going to win the Tour, but he would tie the record for most Tour wins. As the riders made their laps around the final circle of the Tour, we ran down to see them finish the race. Armstrong, knowing he had it in the bag, enjoyed champagne with his teammates as they rode into history.

The next day, we were on an early flight out. I stopped at the airport news kiosk and bought one of every newspaper, even though I had no idea what any of them said.

The photos told the story for me: Lance Armstrong, looking like a giant banana, hoisting an ugly cup of some sort.

Today, I was told all of that probably never happened.

Lance Armstrong dropped his fight against doping allegations and so the USADA or the UIC or WADA or some other spoonful of alphabet soup will be working hard to take away his titles. He might lose a bronze medal from the 2000 games and he might also be required to turn in his other testicle.

This recent trend of historical revision has become one of the dumbest things I’ve seen in sports. In an attempt to punish people who have already left their sports behind (or in some cases died), athletic oversight committees have taken to stripping them of things.

When the Gerry Sandusky molestation allegations came to light, the NCAA bypassed its traditional investigative protocol and just dropped the shit hammer on Penn State. It banned the team from bowl games, levied heavy fines and killed off scholarships for years to come. All of that made sense to me, even though it seemed like the punishment was being doled out on people who weren’t there when the crimes were committed.

However, the NCAA also stripped the team of all of its wins from 1998 to 2011, which made no sense. What did that do, exactly?

Sure, Joe Paterno would no longer be the coach with the most wins in major college football, but the guy was dead.

Nobody really wanted those “wins” once they got them either. Bobby Bowden, the former Florida State coach, ascended via default to the position of “winningest college coach.” He wasn’t thrilled and it wasn’t like he was immediately retyping his resume.

And the schools that lost to Penn State over those years didn’t really embrace the moment either. Were the creampuff schools that had signed on to get murdered by Penn State for a paycheck rewriting their record books? Were they boasting, “Hey, we didn’t really LOSE to Penn State by 912 points in 2001!” and using that as a recruiting tool?

The players who won games and titles were gone as well. Were they required to turn in their rings and awards and such?

That idea isn’t too far afield. When allegations came to light that Reggie Bush of USC had received illegal benefits, the school was required to cut all ties with Bush and erase him from the record books. In addition, he essentially had his Heisman Trophy revoked. According to the records, no one won the 2005 award, which must really be a kick in the balls to Vince Young, who finished second that year. Even when the Heisman committee noted that it probably wouldn’t award Young with the trophy when they got it back, Young stepped out and said he probably wouldn’t want it anyway.

Punishment is meant to do two things: penalize a guilty party and offer solace or closure or restitution to those who have been wronged. When athletic board, groups and organizations decide to rewrite history, none of this happens.

Armstrong’s legacy and Paterno’s legacy and Bush’s legacy get “tarnished” and talking sports heads dither about what this means in the grand scheme of things. Bush is still getting paid to play, Paterno is dead and Armstrong isn’t going to be on the side of a road with a “will cycle for food” sign.

None of them really hurts.

Even more, the restitution factor never comes into play. It wasn’t like the Bowden family was breaking out the bubbly and saying, “Whoo-eee! Thank God for that kid-diddler!” Also, it’s not exactly clear how this impacts the kids who were molested. Is there a bit of solace that their attacker was on a losing team? Probably not.

Vince Young wasn’t campaigning for sloppy seconds or demanding a revote as he tried to hang on to a job in the NFL.

And the cycling guys… Well, actually, given what I’ve seen of the sport, there probably is a ton of cheering and some guys casting lots for seven yellow shirts.

Look, I get it. You have to do SOMETHING to these people and you can’t actually punish them in real time. Until Jean-Claude Van Damme shows up with his ride from Time Cop, you can’t go back and actually stop stuff from happening. However, rewriting the past isn’t the way to improve the future.

You can take Armstrong out of the books, but guess what? I was there.

I saw him ride. I saw him win. I still have those hunks of dead tree in my office that proclaim in a language I don’t understand that he kicked the shit out of the field.

You can’t make me un-cheer him. You can’t make me un-remember watching that moment. You can’t make me undo what I got the chance to experience.

If you can do that, start by getting that woman’s ass off of me.

Seven

I crept out of my bedroom early this morning and poked my head into my child’s room. She was snoring and muttering in her sleep, same as always. The floor of her room was devoid of most of the toys that usually made walking through a minefield a safer proposition than putting her to bed.

The room was relatively clean because family and friends will be descending upon our home this weekend for her birthday parties (Yes, plural. Yes, we are nuts.).

Today, she turns seven.

I wonder how that is possible.

Three days after my wife walked out of the bathroom, slapped a pee-laden plastic stick in my hand and announced, “Here we go again,” an ice storm hit our part of the state. Of the 50,000 homes in our area, about 49,000 of them were without power, including ours.

We lived next to a nature preserve and spent the first night hearing giant trees forcefully shedding their limbs under the weight of the ice. Every time a chunk crashed to the ground, it sounded like the wood had landed in our dining room.

We spent the first day playing board games and bundling up for what we thought would be like a snow day. The only radio station in town with a gas-powered generator was broadcasting updates as to damage and power issues in between bouts of mid 2000s pop music.

I still can’t hear Lenny Kravitz’s version of “American Woman” without feeling my teeth chatter.

Once we realized this wasn’t going to be a short-term problem, we hunkered down in the family room: Me, The Missus and The Rabbit (who was none too pleased that we chased her into the room and captured her into a makeshift cage). We wore every layer of clothing possible. It wasn’t helping.

Shortly before 9 p.m. on Day Two, the DJ told us something life-changing: The Lowe’s in Muncie had received a shipment of 300 kerosene heaters and was opening immediately to sell them.

The store was about a mile from our house, but the four-wheel-drive truck we owned wasn’t at home. On Christmas morning, we had slammed head on into a deer and the truck was crushed to shit. It was at the shop, being repaired. All we had was our grocery getter, a 1998 Honda Civic. Making things worse, it was trapped in the garage.

“Look,” I said, “I can try to break the garage door and go out there and get one if you think it’s worth the risk.”

She turned to me in the dark and through foggy breath said, “Do whatever you have to.”

I managed to shatter the ice that sealed the garage door and forced it up and out of the way. The Civic started and I wove through the desolate streets of the city.

When I arrived, the Lowe’s was insane. The line was growing out the door and cars were swarming to the parking lot like angry bees, weaving in and out of each other’s way. I threw the car into a spot that might or might not have been marked for handicapped use, as the ice made it impossible to tell.

Fuck it, I thought, they can tow me.

I raced to the line across a slick parking lot and slid into line, quite literally. I counted the people in front of me: 21. The line behind me grew exponentially.

After what seemed like hours, but I’m sure was only 20 minutes, they started selling these things. The first guy walked out with his and commented to no one in particular, “They’re screwed. They thought they had 300 on the truck, but they only have 150.”

Thanks, asshole. Feel free to touch off a riot for no good reason.

The line remained calm as we wove into the store. For about $150 plus tax, I had a heater and a giant jug to hold our kerosene. As I walked out, people who were deep within the line and had no chance of getting one were offering wads of cash to me for mine.

One gas station remained open in the vicinity and all the people with heaters were making a beeline for it. The kerosene pump had never seen use like this before. I got four gallons to be on the safe side, and headed home, where I would build this damned thing in the dark as my wife watched over me with hopeful eyes.

One hour and two clicks of the igniter later, we had heat. It smelled like raw petroleum in our house, but we didn’t give a shit. We were warm.

It took six days to restore power and on each of those days, we had the same argument: I would tell her to take the car and drive to Indianapolis or wherever had power and get a hotel room to stay warm. She would refuse and tell me she wasn’t leaving me alone.

I was afraid she’d lose the baby.

She was afraid of what would happen to me.

And around and around it went.

As the city slowly crept back to life, we were able to find bits of salvation here and there. Our water heater was gas powered, so we could take hot showers when we wanted. Of course, when the shower was over, it was still 43 degrees in the house, so we needed to be ready for that. We would place our clothing around the heater, get it warm, bundle it up and race it into the bathroom. After the shower, we would dry off as fast as possible and get dressed. The bathroom was dark, obviously, except for a small neon light I used when I worked under the car. Between the neon and the steam, the bathroom took on the feel of the movie “Aliens.”

We violated every rule pertaining to the heater, I’m sure, short of running it while we slept. We warmed soup on it. We warmed coffee on it. We ran it inside without the 900 feet of ventilation or whatever it was supposed to have.

About the fourth day, we heard a nearby city had power fully restored, so we drove there for food. McDonald’s never tasted quite so good and hasn’t ever since.

Thousands of workers from all over the country poured into our city to shake the ice off the lines and rebuild our power grid. We treated them like the Poles treated the U.S. Military during World War II.

We bought them lunch when we saw them. We cheered for them as they drove by.

When one of the guys came by to check the power transformer in our backyard, we ran outside and jumped up and down, offering him a choice of beverages: some lukewarm coffee or a semi-frozen beer.

Eventually, the power came back and live moved on. I spent the next month panicking about what that deepfreeze had done to my child.

When we met with the OBGYN to get an ultrasound, all of that panic came to a head.

I couldn’t sleep the night before. I couldn’t eat. I beat the shit out of myself.

Why didn’t I force her to leave?

Why didn’t I do more to keep her warm?

Why… Why… Why…

The doctor was a woman who had the personality of a wet fart. She told us about six months earlier with clinical precision that the child we had been expecting was not meeting growth expectations and had failed to be viable and needed to be removed from my wife. She then printed off some ultrasound photos, handed to them to us and said, “I’ll give you a minute” before walking out the door.

So here we were again. With this woman. Again. An ultrasound. Again.

Why… Why… Why…

She pressed her tool against my wife with the delicacy of someone crushing a cockroach under foot before she located what she was looking for.

It was the size of a peanut.

The heartbeat looked like butterfly wings flapping against the wind.

The next seven or eight months were a blur. We learned about random phenomena associated with this process, including the concept of “nesting,” where men go nuts and build or break shit. I thought it was ridiculous until the day my wife came home from work and found me with a chainsaw cutting up an old split-rail fence because it was dangerous and there was no way in hell I was bringing a child into this world without getting rid of this fucking fence.

On the July 4 weekend, our AC blew and I spent half the day screaming at people who had come out, said it was fixed and then left, only to have it break again.

“Look, you asshole,” I screamed in a clearly counterproductive fashion, “I have a wife who is eight months pregnant, asthmatic and not doing well. You said you fixed it. It’s still broken. Get the fuck out here and fix this!”

Eventually, they sent a different guy who was decent, human and knew what he was doing. He also had something like nine kids, so he fully understood what I was dealing with.

Around Aug. 15, we had “the big appointment” and the doctor said the phrase every woman apparently longs to hear at this stage in the game:

“I think we’re going to induce you.”

Two days later, we were in a suite at the local hospital, awaiting our child. The doctor said it was going to be a girl. My father, whose medical training started and stopped with Quincy reruns, was sure the woman was wrong.

Apparently, we come from a small-dicked people and the male genitals were just hiding somehow, he figured.

The folks had come down from Wisconsin while my wife’s family stayed back home. The day we were having our child, my wife’s grandmother was being buried.

Nothing, it appears, was going to be easy about this.

Truth be told, it apparently was easy. The nurses were amazed at how quickly my wife pushed this little person out of her body. The doctor, months later, would marvel at her cervix and how well it had snapped back into place.

My wife, who had declined the nurse’s offer to have a mirror set up so she could watch this miracle of life, was amazed that I watched the kid come sliding out of her.

The child’s head popped out like it was a whack-a-mole game. It was screaming and it hasn’t stopped making noise since.

They quickly placed the child on my wife. I took a quick peek at the bundle of joy.

No wiener. Dad was wrong. Go figure.

The doctors and nurses swept her away, cleaned her up and used KY Jelly to attach a little bow to her head. They swaddled her and handed her to me and I nestled her into my wife as we posed for pictures.

I know people do this every day, but it was still one of those, “I can’t believe this” moments.

If those nine months were a blur of firsts, the subsequent seven years have gone by even faster. From sleeping through the night to solid food to teething to crawling to walking and more, it’s been a very weird and amazing ride.

Tonight, we have another first: First sleepover birthday party.

Seven little girls will invade the basement and sleep all of about six minutes.

(I know we all have divergent views on faith, but please, if you can, pray for us.)

As I was writing this, a disheveled child with a princess crown atop her head and a blanket wrapped around her staggered into the room.

“Good morning, Daddy…” she said in that slow, “I need coffee” kind of way.

“Good morning, Peanut. Happy Birthday.”

Pry my turtle from my cold, dead hands, Tennessee!

I understood that Tennessee and I would never see eye-to-eye after a few visits to the place. I made it to one meeting on time because it was on one side of a time zone while I missed a meeting the next time I went down there because it was on the other side of a time zone.

One state, two time zones. Pick a fucking side. You did it in the Civil War. You can do it now.

In the midst of a visit about three years ago, I found myself ambling down some street in Nashville and nothing but country music was pouring out of every window.

I also had a bouncer ask me to come in for a “Hollar and Swallar” event.

However, an article that popped up on my radar the other day bugged the shit out of me. The state of Tennessee is outlawing the sale of turtles because they are dangerous carriers of salmonella.

The rationale behind the ban of turtles is that they are moist, can pull their skin back into their shells and thus create a breeding ground for the bacteria.

“It’s just common sense,” according to Walter Cook, the captive wildlife coordinator of the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency.

As A’s husband was always fond of noting, if it were common sense, everyone would have it.

First, almost ALL reptiles have some form of salmonella associated with them, but it’s in their digestive tract and it usually becomes introduced into the environment via their feces. According to animal studies, while 85 percent of turtles carry the bacteria, 92 percent of snakes carry it. To date, I can find no statewide Tennessee ban on our slithering friends.

Second, the way these bacteria are transferred from reptiles to humans is through ingestion. In other words, you have to put something with the bacteria in your mouth after coming in contact with it. No eat, no treat. This is true of all salmonella contact, including the consumption of raw chicken and other meats or the bags of spinach that somehow manage to be unclean in the fine food processing plants throughout the world. Unless you plan to lick your lizard, you should be fine.

Third, beyond licking a turtle, you can handle the thing and transfer the bacteria through handling and transference to food, food-preparation surfaces or other similar things. According to experts on the topic, this means we are all doomed because once salmonella enters the atmosphere, it’s like the Zombie Virus and no one is safe. Or…

Fortunately, by following some good common hygiene practices and avoiding contact with the feces of these animals as much as possible, we can easily prevent the spread of Salmonella. These basic preventive recommendations include:

·  Wear disposable gloves or wash your hands thoroughly with hot, soapy water after handling reptiles, reptile cages and equipment, and the stool of reptiles.

·  Do not allow reptiles to have access to the kitchen, dining room, or any other area in which food is prepared.

·  Do not use the kitchen sink, kitchen counters, bathroom sinks or bathtubs to bathe reptiles or to wash reptile cages, dishes, or aquariums. Also, do not allow reptiles to have access to bathroom sinks and tubs or to any area where infants are bathed. Reptile owners may wish to purchase a plastic basin or tub in which to bathe or swim their reptiles. Waste water and fecal material should be disposed of in the toilet instead of the bathtub or household sink.

·  Wash all food and water bowls and equipment with hot soapy water and disinfect with a chlorhexidine or household bleach solution (remember to rinse all disinfected utensils with clean water before using).

·  Do not eat, drink, or smoke while handling reptiles, reptile cages, or reptile equipment. Do not kiss reptiles or share food or drink with them.

 

So wait, all we have to do is wash our hands, not French kiss the things, keep the poop out of our food areas and exercise common sense and we won’t die? Nah. Too hard. We’re banning the bastards…

Fourth, the majority of the cases of salmonella that get ugly in a hurry are those involving infants, the elderly and people with compromised immune systems. In other words, people for whom germs of ANY KIND are more likely to fuck over.

Look, I get the idea of protecting people from things that are dangerous, even in spite of themselves.

It’s why we ban fireworks in certain places or at least restrict them to the point that 5-year-olds can’t buy the Megatron Bomb that promises that the Mars Rover can see it from space.

It’s why we keep kids out of porn stores. When the question, “Mommy, where did I come from?” comes up, it may be an awkward question, but the answer shouldn’t be “Here’s $50. Go to Pleasures and get a copy of “Gentlemen Prefer Bridget” and learn something.

It’s why we keep playing “chicken” with the tobacco industry by raising prices and placing photos of cancerous lungs on their product.

In this fine state of Tennessee, various cities and areas have engaged in a number of laws to save us all from danger, including the banning of “It Ain’t Goin’ to Rain No Mo,” forbidding people under the age of 18 from playing pinball and prohibiting men from having an erection in public.

However, in a state that is listed among the top 20 for most gun deaths per 100,000 citizens, you would think that state officials might be thinking a bit more broadly about how they are protecting citizens.

You need no licensing to purchase a gun or own a gun and the state has no “assault weapon” law. Concealed or open carry is acceptable for handguns, provided you have a permit. The law does not require you to retreat before using deadly force, provided you are in a place that you have a right to be in and you fear death or harm.

I can’t imagine what kind of shit storm would occur if any state agency just up and decided one day, “Y’know, this gun shit is dangerous. Fuck it. You can’t have it.”

I can point to a newspaper, a website or a TV broadcast in any decent sized city on any given day and say, “A gun killed this person.”

I want the gun folks in Tennessee to show me the last guy or gal who was killed with a turtle. The minute some asshole storms a showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” or begins an assault on a Sikh Temple with a bag of African Side-necks and sheath of Red-eared sliders, I’m totally anti-turtle.

The words that come forth first when it comes to gun control opponents are “rights” and “personal freedom” and “personal responsibility” and as much as I think that’s horseshit, I also think it should be something that goes beyond weaponry.

If I have the right to a hand cannon in Nashville, I should also have the right to a turtle.

Race to the bottom of Colorado Shooting coverage

At this point of the media frenzy surrounding the Aurora shootings, the victims have become known to us, the nature of this crime has been known to us and the overall breakdown of what happened before, during and after the crime has become known to us. Vigils have been held, family members continue to grieve and we continue to ponder what will come next.

Unfortunately, if you have ever seen one of these things unfold before, you know what comes next from a media perspective.

Scraping the barrel for a new angle, a new insight, a new scrap of information of any kind. We know all about the living and those who died at the hands of this guy, so now we need to know all about him.

So who is James Holmes?

Was this guy a Tea Party member? Was he a Democrat? No on both accounts, but media outlets had no problem putting that out there, as if how he voted reflected on anything. (Hey, he was a hell of a shot for a Democrat! = FAIL)

Did this guy have a conversation with guards regarding the movie’s outcome? According to the NY Daily News, he did, leading people to breathlessly speculate as to his Batman fetish.

Did Holmes frequent prostitutes and then rate them on a message board? TMZ says so, which a) means it’s probably true and b) means you shouldn’t give a shit.

Did Batman teach him to kill? It didn’t take some people long to hang onto that angle, despite the one comic historian who kept saying, “Look, this is so far out there that even Holmes probably thinks you’re nuts.” I wonder if he saw the one “My Little Pony” where Fluttershy gets all mean in the labyrinth, leading to some pony-on-pony violence.

I also found out that several people have had to rethink Twitter after making the oh-so-smart move of tweeting that they thought Carrot Top’s Evil Twin was “hot.”

Even that felonious lust wasn’t enough to reach the top of the “are you fucking kidding me?” list I was forming as I flipped through the articles on Holmes.

Here’s your weekly winner: The media is humanizing James Holmes because he’s white.

I think I read this column about six times, each time looking for “the smoking gun” that showed how the media was treating this guy with a gentle touch because of his general honky-ness.

(Side note: I know this is a student newspaper. I also do my best to avoid ripping student journalists. However, sometimes, it’s impossible to ignore something, much like when a stripper decides to park her ass in your face.)

Here are some of the “humanizing” moments the media has put forth, according to this column:

Many articles described him as a shy and hard-working student.

They elaborated on the Ph.D. research project he was involved in and had quotes from peers who were shocked by his behavior.

The LA Times had a tagline that read, “Was James E. Holmes a brilliant loner? A nice guy with circles of friends? A stubborn near-dropout? ...”

Look back at the coverage of pretty much anyone who has done this kind of action and you’ll find that most of this is standard fare stuff. Who was this guy? What did people who know him think about him? Did they see this coming?

The author makes a lame attempt to figure out how the media treats people of color who do things like this, only to find that, strangely, an unprovoked mass shooting seems to be one of those things that tends to shade toward the more pale among us. To try to parallel this, then, the writer provides this:

 In a recent article, it was reported that Rudy Eugene was not high on bath salts, and the only drug found in his system was marijuana.

However, that hasn’t stopped the media from calling him the Highway Cannibal, despite only having chewed off a man’s face and not having ingested it.

Even after the new evidence in the case, Eugene has not had the privilege of being called “mentally unstable.”

What’s the main difference between Holmes and Eugene?

Bluntly put, Holmes is a white man while Eugene is a black man.

 

Or one is shooting up a theater which is tragic, but has some historical parallels while the other is EATING A GUY'S FUCKING FACE IN PUBLIC FOR NO REAL REASON.

Oddly enough, this was the first “cannibal” reference I’d heard about this guy. I’d look it up, but there is no citation of any kind as to where this came from. In addition, I’ve heard him called the start of the zombie apocalypse and believe me, zombies will bite your face off. Eating it might or might not be involved, but either way, it’s fucking insane.

If you want a better look at race and mass murder, take a peek at Carl Robert Brown and James Edward Pough. Two guys, one white, one black, who were consecutively responsible for the worst random shooting spree in Florida several decades ago.

The media reported on both of these guys fairly extensively, which is how we learned that Brown taught junior high until he had a mental breakdown.

He was often known as someone angry about racial issues and someone who saw America sliding into the Bell Jar.

On Aug. 19, 1982, after complaining to a worker at a metal welding shop that the work they did on his bicycle’s new motor was shoddy, Brown declared that he was leaving, but would come back to kill everyone there. He returned the next day with two newly purchased guns and killed eight people while injuring three others.

Extensive writing by the Miami Herald shortly after his rampage revealed that he had been going slowly mad for months. His racism and his anger toward others was reported on as well. His principal had him seek psychiatric help and noted after the fact, he sort of saw this coming.

His neighbors saw him shooting a pellet gun at stuff and picking grapefruits in his underwear prior to the shooting.

Pough, known as “Pop” to his friends, was described in media stories as being a reliable worker, who was never late and was one of the best at whatever labor he was doing.

Neighbors described him as being a quiet and nice man who kept to himself. He was known to fits anger when dealing with money. Relatives called him a recluse and said he kept mostly to himself.

He had an affinity for his car, which had been repossessed by the GMAC finance division when he couldn’t make payments on it any more. On the morning of June 18, 1990, Pough went to GMAC with an M1 Carbine and a .38 pistol and began killing people. He killed nine and injured four others. The day before, he had apparently killed a pimp and a prostitute, shooting both of them to death.

Go through the coverage of these people and you’ll find two things: 1) the only mention of race is that it was weird that Pough did this, as most of these multiple shooting whack jobs are white and unemployed and 2) the coverage is almost a perfect overlay of what’s being done with James Holmes.

Were there any indications that he was going to crack?

What was he like before the shooting?

What did people think of him?

None of this stuff is “humanizing” but instead informative. I don’t think, “Aww… Holmes was a Ph.D. candidate! As a doc, I totally feel for him.” or “Hey, this guy liked hookers! Big ups!” He is who he is and he was who he was.

Taking this issue and making it about race makes no sense.

The victims weren’t targeted for their race.

The assailant hasn’t made any statement involving race.

Let’s chalk this guy up to nuts and save our discussions of racism for a time and place where they might actually apply.

It’s too serious of a topic to apply to this Joker.

Colorado Shooting Evokes Memories of "Never Again..."

The last time Colorado experienced something like this, I was in a newsroom in Missouri with a kid who would later become a good friend and the best man at my wedding. It was 1999 and he was a junior in college. I, all of 24, was in my first real job as staff editor and adviser.

Adam was from Colorado and he knew the area surrounding Littleton. He still had friends in that area. He had connections to that zone based on football rivalries, overlapping proms and other such things that happen to bring high schools from across the state together.

We weren’t covering it locally, as my boss had a (correct) view that having a shit ton of people three states away reacting with “It’s just a terrible tragedy” quotes doesn’t make for decent journalism. Thus, all we could do was watch the AP wire as it came in and stare agape at the TV that hung from a ceiling-mounted swivel near the copy desk.

It turned out that he didn’t intimately know anyone involved. Family members, friends and vague acquaintances appeared to have been spared. He never really spoke of it, though I could see something in his eyes that showed his world had changed a little. The wounding was over, but the scar would remain.

His home state would ever be known as “that Columbine place.”

In the wake of this shooting, everyone agreed on two things: 1) this was a terrible tragedy and 2) something must be done so it would never happen again.

This morning, as I was working in the garage, the radio’s 103-second news update (No shit. 103 seconds. No wonder we’re fucked as a country.) led with the shooting in Colorado. It was a quick hit on the way to other things like Winneconne’s Sovereign State Days and the weather. The announcer didn’t seem to change tone or break stride.

I went inside to read about this and found out that we don’t know anything about this guy.

He was 24.

He was about 6 feet tall.

He apparently owned a rifle, a handgun and some body armor.

He went after people in the midnight showing of “The Dark Knight.”

Why did he do this? We don’t know. However, rest assured, we will quickly be told all the answers by the pundits, the talking heads and Wayne LaPierre.

The Today Show is already yammering on about the movie’s “dark culture.”

I’m quite certain if he had started shooting up “Ice Age 3,” we’d be having a serious morning-show discussion on the impacts of climate change.

Reactions from government officials will be swift. There will be discussions about our gun laws and how easily a whack job can obtain a gun. There will be legislation to ban guns or concealed-carry. It won’t pass because a) the NRA owns everything and b) the slogan “Guns don’t kill people. People do.” will rise up and Jedi mind-trick everyone into thinking this guy could have done this with a Louisville Slugger if he really put his mind to it.

Banning guns isn’t the answer any more than electrifying the fence at the Mexican border is the answer to our immigration issues. If you don’t believe that, watch “Bowling for Columbine” again and get back to me.

Reactions from movie people will be swift as well. People will dither about how costumes need to be banned, as this guy just appeared to be a costumed weirdo, who was in no way a threat to anyone until he started shooting. Eventually, you will be asked to put on a “Marcus Approved Robe” made by the company that produces those fine paper gowns you wear at the doctor’s office when getting a physical.

People will argue that we are a violent culture and we must find a way to fight back, never once seeing the irony in that statement. Colorado is a death penalty state, so rest assured, this guy will be up for the chair or the needle or whatever it is that makes us feel humane in ending a life. They will kill this guy slowly and deliberately to show how much gravity the situation has. They will also silently take perverse pleasure in it, much like someone who manages to ground the fly that has pissed him off for an hour, but not kill it. Finality will now come on his terms.

The death of the insect will be vengeful, as will this man’s inevitable demise.

Why the man did this is unknown. Why we react this way is easy to understand.

When faced with something incomprehensible and tragic, we look for ways to rationalize it. We try to figure out if the guy’s little league coach yelled at him too much or if a priest touched him. We then stop giving a shit about him and start becoming actively self-interested.

We don’t want to be that next group of people watching a movie wondering if the guy next to us in the Darth Maul mask actually has a working light saber he’s going to kill us with. We are like the three idiots in Spaceballs who start screaming “Do Something!” when Mega Maid goes from suck to blow.

We panic. We demand. We say, “Never again!”

In an attempt to keep their seats in congress, their positions running corporations and their sense of control, those we turn to fire off a salvo of actions that have the same logic and accuracy as the shooter’s bullets. They figure if they tighten gun restrictions or make us remove our shoes or scan us for gun powder before we can order a latte, everything will be fine. They delude themselves into believing that they can control everything that could possibly hurt us.

They tell us, “There! We fixed it! It won’t happen again.”

And we go back to thinking everything is fine.

Until the next time.

Kitchen Tables

If you wanted to find my family on a Friday night, you need not look any further than my grandmother’s kitchen. No one could pinpoint exactly how we started this tradition, but every Friday, rain or shine, snow or sun, we’d find our way to my dad’s mom’s house and gather in the kitchen.

It was usually Grandma, Dad, my aunt, me, my cousin and maybe Dad’s little brother, who was still living at home at the time. Some of my uncle’s friends would drop by from time to time and occasionally Mom would poke her head in for an hour or so.

Dad would drink beer, the women would drink cheap champagne and my cousin and I were constantly dispatched to the basement fridge for beverage reinforcements.

We could have spent the night on the comfortable couches in the living room, where the TV and record player resided. Instead, we gathered around the kitchen table, where we told and retold stories of people who were long gone and events that still made us laugh. Grandma would ask if we were hungry and we always said no. Still, somehow she would quietly place a tin of nuts, a bowl of popcorn, a bag of chips and a pan of brownies in front of us and eventually we would be eating without thinking about it.

Food and family. Liquor and laughter.

The time has long passed since then. Grandma is gone and buried almost 10 years. The house was sold and the children have scattered as have the grandchildren.

And the strangest thing still sits in my head: the kitchen table.

It wasn’t anything particularly fancy. It was a bluish-woodgrain Formica top that was shaped like a pill caplet. The legs were stainless steel pipes that curled out of the top and planted firmly onto the ground. The chairs were the same ugly blue, but in a paisley. We always seemed to fight over who got to sit in “the good chair” as opposed to the ones that wobbled like hell.

We played cards on that table.

We ate Easter dinner on that table.

We laughed and we cried and we shared on that table.

After Grandma died, it was sold for less than $50. I never knew where it went.

At my mom’s mom’s house, the table was also Formica, but it was wood-grained simple. The table was simple and direct with one post in the middle supporting the oblong slab. The piece was rectangular with the corners cut off and rounded. It was like a misshapen stop sign.

My Grandma and Harry, her second husband, would sit there and drink coffee and smoke cigarette after cigarette and watch the birds through the back door. When I came to visit, I’d come around the back of the house and enter through that door and take the chair opposite my grandmother and talk about anything.

Hours would become minutes as she would share things with me, some of which I wish I never learned. It was there I found out how her marriage to my grandfather ended, why she didn’t have more children and how she found her way out of the bottle.

It was also there where my life changed drastically. When The Missus and I were dating, she wanted to run away with me back to Missouri. My folks were gone, I had to leave and she was a mess.

I went to Grandma’s, slipped in the back door and told her and Harry the story.

“Call her,” Grandma said, gesturing to a plastic shell phone that was yellowed with age and smoke. “Tell her you’re coming for her. Take her with you.”

I worried about the blowback from her parents and mine. I worried about what would happen if she suddenly changed her mind on Missouri or me.

As I nervously picked at the crud that had lodged itself in the center crevice of the table, Grandma said something that stuck with me:

“Trust yourself. You’re in love and you’ll regret it for the rest of your life if you don’t take her with you.”

She was right. We were married two years later. She died a month after that.

The parents weren’t thrilled at our Thelma and Louise act, but eventually they came around.

For our wedding gift, The Missus’s mom gave us a kitchen table.

Somewhere around Year Three of our marriage, one of us (not me, but she swears it wasn’t her) put a wok with a wet bottom on the table. A nasty green ring grew from the metal and water combination.

By the time we moved back to Wisconsin, the ring had gotten uglier with age and we contemplated a new table. The Missus was adamant about keeping what we had, but we both agreed something needed to be done.

I was fully in furniture refinishing mode at that point and told her, “Look, I’ll give it a shot, but it’s a risk. If I screw up the table or it can’t be saved, you can’t hold it against me.”

She agreed and I managed to make it look respectable. Today, you can’t tell that the ring was there before. I also layered on about six coats of a sealant that is supposed to be impenetrable. Between the Fourth of July drinking, the birthday parties and the kids in the neighborhood, the table has hosted dozens of people with no sign of it being worse for wear.

To me, the kitchen table has been where the business of family comes to bear. It’s where we share and laugh and cry and more. Whenever my parents needed to dole out a punishment or explain something important, they did it at the kitchen table. Whenever we wanted to play a game or share a story at grandma’s, we did it at the kitchen table. Whenever the Midget has homework or we want to share some family time, we do it at the kitchen table.

I don’t think I’m alone in this, although the trend seems to be away from gathering and toward individualism. I found an amazing hardwood kitchen table at a rummage sale, an item as out of place as a turd in the holy water fountain. When I asked about it, the people told me they never used it. The kids eat on the run, the parents didn’t have time to sit down and whenever they did get together, it was in front of the big screen.

If it’s true, it’s sad. If it’s a trend, it’s worse.

Still, I have an affection for old tables like the one I refinished for my mother-in-law that was a wedding gift for her parents or the one I found a few weeks back at an estate sale.

The table was oak with a thin veneer finish. The table top was rough from years of use and probably a few incidents where the husband used it as a cutting board or a workbench. The legs were marred with pockmarks, which were nothing compared to the rungs of the chairs. They were all mangled and several looked like something had chewed through them.

“My parents had a dog,” the woman explained. “He would bite and yank on the chairs when they were playing cards at the table and didn’t pay enough attention to him.”

The price for this set of dog toys? $8

I took it home and began the restoration process. Why? Who knows. It just felt like the right thing to do.

When I told Mom about my find, she mentioned it to a young family who lived next door to them. They offered to buy it if I was willing to sell. Apparently, the giant glass table they had was great when they didn’t have kids. Now, with three of them, none older than six, it was impossible to keep clean. The kids loved climbing under it and making monkey faces on the glass.

I brought it with me and sold it to them for what it cost to refinish it.

The way I see it, the world is better with one more kitchen table in it.

The Greatest Country in the World...

The Fourth of July here was hotter than hell. Last year, I sweated my ass off while I drove the mayor in the Mustang for the city parade. This year, I couldn’t even think about getting inside the car.

We went to the parade, which was well attended, although it seemed shorter than usual. Fewer classic cars and one of those that did make it had to give up half way when it overheated and blew its radiator.

The Midget was too hot to want to get candy, although many shirtless little boys kept giving her stuff. This was my first official warning that I need to put her in a convent before she turns 12.

It was a more subdued political scene as well. This was the first summer in a while where the candidates weren’t really stumping or fighting recalls. There were a few GOP candidates vying for a chance to take over for retiring Sen. Herb Kohl and one small Dem float consisting of a pedestrian-looking sedan with Jessica King signs all over it.

As the King vehicle passed, an elderly guy, who must have been about 300 pounds of wobble and was wearing a giant flag shirt, cupped his hands around his mouth and started booing. He didn’t stop until the float had long gone passed and the parade of drag queens… er… overly made up twirler girls came into view.

Later in the parade, the flag guy and a large contingent around him joined in singing this “It's Amerr’ka” country song as the country station’s float rolled past. People were singing along to that as well as participating in the various pro-USA rumblings that were moving through the crowd, despite the heat.

We are ‘Murr’ka, dammit. We rule.

Throughout this event, I kept hearing Will McAvoy’s monologue in the back of my head.

Later that day, as the temperatures climbed higher into the triple digits, A, Mr. A, my brother-in-law and I climbed into a couple cars and drove out to a small neighboring community. Earlier that week, I’d bought a giant wooden play set from a family out there. The lady’s grandkids were getting too old for it and The Midget had been begging for one of these things. It was a heck of a good bargain, but the downside was we had to disassemble and haul it ourselves. That day was the day the thing had to be gone.

The house was in the older part of town and looked like the kind of place the booing guy from the parade would own. Solidly built and decorated woodland style.

A camouflage-painted boat with an outboard motor rested in the driveway and it was obvious the paint was done by the owner and the trailer was rusty as hell. A giant RV camper hulked next to it, with paint peeling from it and one of the tires looking sadly low.

The owners had that small-town look to them as well: her hair was sensibly short cut with a 10-year-old style to it, his was a bald pate with closely shaven white stubble on the outer rim with a brushy white mustache to match. He wore a sleeveless shirt that tightly hugged his barrel-shaped torso and revealed an ancient, home-done tattoo of her name scrawled on his upper arm.

They greeted us as we pondered the best way to attack this thing before grabbing some plastic outdoor chairs and sitting in the shade to watch was sure to become, as A put it repeatedly, “a hell of a YouTube moment.”

Having never done construction disassembly onsite, we suddenly realized that we weren’t overmatched, but that we had left key things behind. The heat began to kick our asses and we realized we didn’t bring water. As we attempted to dispatch one of our crew to get the water, the lady who owned the play set emerged with four bottles of ice-cold joy. They were the last four she had in the house.

As her husband watched us struggle to break the rusted nuts free, he went into the garage and returned with an 18-volt DeWalt drill with a socket attachment.

Each time we realized we’d lost something or left something behind, they went into the house and got it for us, never needing us to ask.

“I’m sorry,” I said to the lady, as a gratefully guzzled my water. “We must be the most disorganized people you’ve ever met.”

She smiled and said, “Well, how many of these have you built or disassembled? How were you supposed to know?”

We got the majority of the pieces into the truck and A’s Prius. We only had one bungee cord. The man emerged with one we could borrow.

“Thank you so much,” I told the lady as we finished packing the first load. “I can’t tell you how grateful we are.”

“You know,” she said. “When I told my daughter what I sold this for, she was kind of upset, but I told her that it was the right thing to do. Everyone else wanted us to break it down or to deliver it. You were the only one to say you’d do the work. I also told her that I saw your daughter jumping up and down when she saw it and how she said ‘thank you.’ I knew this was going to the right house.”

We drove the 10 miles home and dropped off the pieces in the backyard. After a brief cool-down break, some of us headed back to strap the last couple pieces to the top of the truck.

The last couple pieces went on like a breeze. In five minutes, we were ready to be gone for good. The couple was nowhere to be seen, probably either going somewhere for dinner or retreating to an air-conditioned home.

I took the bungee cord we’d borrowed and tied it around a 12 pack of beer I’d bought, which was festooned in red, white and blue decorations. I placed it on their doorstep and headed home.

America to me was in that moment. Two sets of strangers, brought together from different worlds who saw and appreciated each other’s generosity and good will. We didn’t have to agree on everything, but we could agree on something. We could share a moment without suspicion and be grateful for the decency of people from whom we didn’t have any right to demand it.

Kindness provided without prescribed recompense and graciousness repaid in kind.

We might not be the greatest country in the world, but if you look really close, you can sometimes see some of the greatest people.

Rummage Day

On the road, conducting a rummage sale. We hope, as always, that we "make table."

Next week, I'm back.

Until then, curse about something for me.

Doc

45 years of marriage and counting

“Marriage, is what brings us together today… that blessed arrangement, that dream within a dream…”
- The Impressive Clergyman, The Princess Bride

 The main aisle at St. Fred’s church in Cudahy is a long one, paved with glossy stone that echoes with footsteps in the quiet of day. Row after row of pews, adorned with clips for men’s hats and wood rails worn by the clasped hands of prayer, separate the narthex from the altar.

The few narrow windows begin almost a story in the air, with little in the way of natural light seeping in at the ground level.

A giant slab of pink and white marble, which vaguely resembles a large piece of uncooked bacon, hovers over the front of the church. It hosts a magnificent cross, adorned with a white stone carving of Christ. Atop the crucifix sits a small symbolic scene of two stags drinking blood from the bottom of a smaller cross, a referent to a long-forgotten passage of the Bible.

In this cavernous testament to God and faith, less than five years after the Second Vatican Council allowed for the use of an English-based mass, a pair of young 20-somethings joined hands and exchanged simple silver rings.

A four or five second utterance of “I do” that led to a 45-year expression of love.

June 17, 1967 was the day China successfully tested an atomic bomb, the Tigers and A’s played the longest double header in baseball history and my parents decided it was worthwhile to spend the rest of their lives together.

Cancer, Earrings and The Fight that Must be Won

Fuck it.

It’s still Friday.

I still have the floor.

Maybe that’s the only thing I can control right now, which is why this is what I’m doing at 11:24 p.m., when I should be nestled in bed, wrapped around my wife and snuggling in for some much needed rest.

My friend Amy is battling cancer.

It’s a simple noun-verb statement that I can’t get past.

She fights it.

Noun-verb-object.

If you want to find the people who run universities, don’t look for the presidents and provosts and chancellors.

Don’t seek out the deans and the chairs and the academic elite.

Get past the people with giant offices who sit behind giant mahogany badges of self-importance and who layer their walls with plaques and certificates and photos of them shaking hands with other important wankers

Look for cubicles. Look for the small, cramped offices off the “main office.” Look for desks piled with papers that pulse and wobble. Look for the places with “Same Shit, Different Day” bumper stickers on the filing cabinets and the odd trinkets glued to the tops of ancient computer monitors.

Look for the administrative assistants or the program assistants or whatever title we’ve decided to bestow upon once we learned that secretary didn’t quite cut the muster.

Look for people like Amy.

Had I never met her, I would never be where I am today.

It sounds cliché. It sounds trite. It sounds hollow.

It’s what we say about people when they retire and when they die.

She has already done the first and I would step in front of a bus to stop her from doing the second.

She was the assistant to the director of the journalism grad school where I went for my Ph.D. She had a kind, round face and a body to match. She had glasses that were thick and large and were at least 10 years out of fashion. She sat in a cramped office behind an overflowing desk near a filing cabinet that had a single calendar page taped to it with one date circled: the day she could retire.

She could have been the stereotype of the school marm in any 1950s sitcom, but she was so much more. She had that uncanny ability to coddle and nurse and yet kick your ass at the same time. She had a biting sense of humor and she knew exactly how to needle everyone from the first-year master’s student on through to the dean.

She was like a maestro, waving the wand perfectly to get the very best out of each member of the orchestra, all the while never once picking up an instrument to join the cacophony that was all around her.

She stayed out of the politics. She stayed above the fray. She had her finger on the pulse, but never attempted to alter it.

For me, she was like a modulating device. She knew when I needed to be brought up out of the depression and the doldrums. She knew when I needed to be taken down a peg.

This was true, even when I didn’t know which of those things I needed myself.

The honest reason I can say she was the sole reason I’m Doc and not “Hey, you, car guy” is a cold, miserable Friday in February about a decade ago.

If you have ever finished a doctoral program, you know what comps are. If you never have, you probably have heard about them. If you have done neither, let me explain.

Our program was simple: You have five members on your doctoral committee. Each of them chooses a “section” of your program to quiz you on. You agree to a readings list. You read those readings for about a month or two. You read them over and over and over until your eyes bleed.

Then for five days, four hours per day, you show up at Amy’s office.

She hands you a single question and a floppy disk (yes, they still had those). You have never seen the question. You don’t know what is on that piece of paper. You have no notes, no materials (save for a dictionary in those pre-spellcheck-is-installed-already days) and no help. You enter a room that has a computer, a desk, a chair and any food/beverage you want to bring with you. From that moment until the moment Amy comes to get you, you write.

You analyze the question. You write.

You think about the readings. You write.

You type and you type and you type, not knowing how much is from your head and how much is regurgitation of someone else’s shit. You then type some more.

Five days. Five questions. Thousands of words. Each more mind-numbing than the last.

The first day, the question threw me. The member “zigged” while I had planned to “zag.” Rough start.

The second day, my committee chair and resident hard-ass had the floor. It felt like this scene from “Back to School.” I got to part 27 at about the 3:59 mark.

I was fucked.

I saved what I had. I took it to Amy. I lost my shit.

“I can’t do this,” I practically pleaded. “This isn’t something for me. I’m not supposed to be an academic. I’m the kid of a factory worker. I’m… fuck.”

She looked at me, broken, tattered and eroding me, and said something extraordinarily calming.

“You have Stephanie’s question on Monday, right? Try that one. If you really fall apart on that one, maybe you’re right. But I don’t think that will happen. If you can’t do it, we’ll talk.”

I had a restless weekend, followed by a series of “I’m buried alive” dreams.

Monday came.

I opened the question.

Total cake.

The final three questions were a blur of ease and jargon. A perfect blend of ease and academic obfuscation.

I passed written comps and the oral defense. I was ABD, or as we say in cribbage, in the shit hole. Almost there, but so far away.

Amy leveraged my last shred of sanity into salvation.

She did it again when my chair submarined my dissertation proposal at my proposal committee.

She did it again when I fucked up, playing two jobs against each other before losing them both.

She did it again and again and again.

It dawned on me that, as I walked across the stage in that “Henry the VII meets Detroit pimp” doctoral regalia, she probably did it for hundreds of other doctoral students, having never actually walked the doctoral path herself. She was like the Louis Gossett Jr. character in “An Officer and a Gentleman.”

She made us officers. She made us what we are.

Thanks to her, universities saw us as “better than her station.” If we were honest, we never did.

I wonder if she saw us that way.

I wonder how many people see her that way.

 ---

Tonight, an odd confluence of events brought me to the breaking point.

The Novocain wore off at about the same time that The Midget came home from a pool party. Shortly after arriving home, I heard some rumbling upstairs and the garage door open. She and The Missus left abruptly.

Upon returning, my wife came downstairs with her “Remain calm. The kid feels bad enough already” face on.

“She lost an earring.”

“Which one?” I asked kind of already knowing the answer.

“Grandma’s”

My grandmother died of cancer about six weeks after our wedding. She was at least a couple pack-a-day smoker and had been for most of her life. She suffered like I’ve never seen anyone suffer before and yet she was so goddamned stubborn that she wouldn’t quit on us. She was going to see us married and it didn’t matter how hard it was to survive.

She was also a recovering alcoholic. She had few possessions at the end of her life, as what little she had went to the cancer treatment.

One of the last “pleasures” she allowed herself was on her 75^th birthday, when she went out and got her ears pierced. After decades of clip-on earrings (do they even make those any more?), she had two holes punched in her head and adorned her ears with whatever she could afford.

The earrings were single stones, probably some level of cheap cubic zirconium. Mom had saved them from the estate and when The Midget lost an earring while staying over at her house, she put the earrings delicately in my child’s lobes and explained where they came from.

“Don’t let her lose them,” Mom cautioned as I took her home.

And I did. And then I found out about Amy.

Despite my best effort to be a calm and explanatory parent, I failed.

I somehow gave my child the impression that my grandmother, who is now in Heaven, hates her because she lost an earring. I spent 20 minutes holding her as she sobbed herself to sleep, feeling like the worst parent ever, knowing my grandmother was looking down at me and cursing, “Dammit, they’re just earrings!”

The folks at the party said they’ll check the pool filter and the bathroom where the girls changed tomorrow.

We might find it. We might not.

Dammit. They’re just earrings.

 ---

Cancer is a scary and evil thing.

I honestly don’t think it means to be, any more than a roach means to be spread infection or mold means to ruin food.

Each is born, somehow, and does what it is predestined to do.

Roaches scurry. Mold grows. Cancer attacks.

Intent? No such thing. It is what it is. It does what it does.

We can destroy roaches. We can inhibit mold. We can fight cancer.

Cancer is to the body what weeds are to the garden. Somewhere along the line, someone determined that certain plants are good and pretty and should be saved while other plants are bad and ugly and must be removed.

The plants don’t know why. They just grow how they grow.

We look at certain cells of the body and say, “Grow! Multiply!”

We look at other cells of the body and say, “Stop! Die!”

The cells don’t know why. They just do what they do.

Somewhere in all of this is a scared person, sitting in a paper robe as a doctor holds up an X-ray to the light and explains in the simplest possible terms that the garden is growing too many weeds and something needs to be done, lest the garden be lost.

So the ingest poison, they endure radiation and they hope against all hope that normalcy will somehow be restored.

And we all hope for them.

 ---

Talk to an old boxer who has been to the brink of death. A fighter like Joe Frazier or Meldrick Taylor. A fighter who has been pushed to the point in which the mortal coil has seemed to unravel.

Ask that fighter about the last nerve. The last moment. The last flurry.

Doctors and scientists will explain it in scientific terms, in “fight-or-flight” language.

A fighter will explain it differently.

When faced with that moment in which death has come to collect its due, that very rawest of human nerves will be tapped.

The fighter, pushed beyond what should be tolerated, will be systemically spurred to fight back. To flurry. To punch. To prevent what might be.

It is my hope that somehow tonight, amid her early cancer treatments, that Amy knows how many people are digging down to find that nerve for her.

I hope that my grandmother pokes St. Anthony in the ribs and says, “C’mon. Just put it in the pool filter and get it over with.”

I hope.

Because sometimes, that’s all you can do.

Uncomfortably Numb

The week that was started with The Missus and The Midget spending about 24 hours between two airports and never actually getting to their Texas destination. It ended this morning with a very nice lady I just met taking pity on me and drilling a hole in my head to clean out some infection that had crept under an old filling.

Novocaine has a way of making not just my jaw numb but my brain numb as well. Tried to write. Wasn't happening.

With that in mind, I'll take the advice that an old priest told a young priest, the latter of which filled in for a church service I attended long ago:

"When it's hot and there is no air conditioning, if you don't have anything to say, don't say anything. Faking it will only make it worse."

With that, he ended his homily and led us in the creed.

I'll be back next week with what I hope will be a fun post for those of you in love or marriage or both.

Doc

Scott Walker, Precipitating Factor

As I battled a hangover and tried to make sense of what happened Tuesday night, I started to worry less about Governor Deadeyes and more about what really might be happening here. I argued about this time last year that if the Dems were going to come for the king, they’d best not miss.

And boy, did we miss…

The numbers revealed that even with massive turnout and massive outrage about Walker’s tactics, the election was no different than it was in 2010. In fact, Tom Barrett lost by a wider percentage this time than he did last time.

The people “in the know” saw this coming. About three months ago, I found myself talking to a pretty sharp political reporter who told me that, unless Russ Feingold or Herb Kohl decided to run, Walker would win this thing pretty easily. On the plus side, he noted that Walker would probably lose in 2014.

The scary thought that wandered into my mind last night was this: What if Walker was just the precipitating factor for the anger and hatred Wisconsinites always had toward each other?

In chemistry, a precipitate is a solid that’s suspended in a liquid and can’t be seen until another variable is introduced. At that point, this precipitating factor interacts with the mixture and the solid becomes visible. The idea is that the solid was always there, but it took this new variable to get it to show itself.

Scott Walker is just one person, but he’s one of the more than 1.3 million people who decided that state workers were overpaid, unions shouldn’t get to bargain and that “the spoiled few” needed a spanking.

Those 1.3 million people interact with public employees every day. They see them painting lines on the streets, putting out fires, running state offices and teaching their children. They saw the John Doe investigation building steam. They saw number crunching of jobs that would make a three-card monte dealer blush.

Those 1.3 million said, “Fuck ‘em… Don’t care… And We’re standing with Walker.”

I’m not ascribing this sentiment to money (I still favor spending limits), the individuals running (although Tom Barrett’s next gubernatorial campaign should be run by the Washington Generals) or the general lying (anyone who can be persuaded by a political ad these days is probably too dumb to find a voting booth).

Unless you’re the Jewish son of a carpenter who can change water to wine, there’s no way you’re getting that many people on board for an idea they didn’t already have percolating in their heads.

It frightens me that the people back in my old neighborhood might have always resented my mom for her benefits and state salary.

It worries me that the parents who attended our city school’s carnival and open house with me might have been bitter toward the people who taught their kids.

It hurts me to think that friends and family who have shared barbecues, birthday parties and baptisms might have looked at me and seen a “have” when I was struggling with the same things they were.

Wisconsin has always prided itself as being a purple state, but I don’t think that’s a fair assessment any more. In my view, purple would indicate that we could think some Republican ideas on finances are fine, but some Democratic ideas on social protections are good too. Purple would mean that we could fluctuate between good arguments that make sense, regardless of who was making them.

In this election, polls indicated that 91 percent of the people voting made up their mind on this issue months ago (or longer). The contrasts between who was voting which way created sharp divides.

We weren’t a blended purple. We were oil and water. Shake us up as hard as you want, but we will eventually separate out along a clearly demarcated line.

Barrett and others have now made the mealy-mouthed call for healing, but can we really “unlearn” something like this about our fellow citizens? It’s like finding out your grandfather is a raging racist only after you bring a black friend home from college at Thanksgiving. Can you ever really look at him as the guy who took you fishing and used to find a quarter behind your ear after that?

Healing from a major wound almost always leaves a scar. That scar serves as a reminder of what happened to you.

When you see that scar, you remember who inflicted it upon you as well.

And then a different kind of hurt prevails. 

"No good thing ever dies..."

For A and all the folks who give us this place. Today, more than ever, we hope.

Non-offensive headline goes here...

There’s a pretty good reason that when a university hosts a “blogging ethics panel,” it rarely invites bloggers to participate. It’s the same reason why journalists enjoy the ability to write to a niche audience that is likely to share their opinions.

It’s a lot easier to shape the debate if you’re only showing your side and you’re preaching to the converted.

Bloggers rant, professors chastise and on and on it goes.

These fights tend to devolve into what a friend once described as “Polish oral sex: You stand across the room from each other and scream, “Fuck you!” “No, fuck YOU!” until at least one of you is finished.”

The ongoing battle between professor Dan Reimold and Business Insider’s Henry Blodget has me wondering who will end up with the egg cream by the time we’re done.

The men have been shouting past each other regarding Reimold’s post on Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal. Reimold opined that, despite the heavy accolades Weisenthal had received from his reporting peers, he wouldn’t recommend Weisenthal as a role model for his students. Among the reasons he lists: Weisenthal is plugged in to the point where his quality of life could suffer, he is often posting tons of information but not much with depth to it and his work is “wrong and sensational a lot.”

Blodget responded with a “your professor doesn’t get it” post, casting Reimold as some sort of simple curmudgeon before getting to some logic-driven points: digital storytelling is different than print, the skills are different and doing what Weisenthal does isn’t easy. Then, right on cue, he does the “hipster, cooler-than-you blogger closing line” that just always wins arguments:

So, if any of the professors' students have any of the attributes described above and are eager to work in the medium of the future instead of the media of the past, we'd love to hear from you.

This shit fight went back and forth for several days with Blodget saying Reimold couldn’t cut it doing what Weisenthal does, Reimold responding, “Oh, yeah, count me in!” and finally Blodget saying, “We’ll get you a desk next to Joe” thing. Apparently, we will see the fruits of this effort, as BI will document the whole thing.

Before we get too far into this, first let me say, gentlemen, I have no doubt you both have giant penises.

I would put money on the fact that you are each so large and girthy that you have likely had many complaints from your sexual partners and have had difficulty buying pants that do not have wheelbarrows in the front of them.

In fact, the sheer volume of air moved by your current dick-waving contest has likely generated enough wind power to solve the energy crisis.

I’m quite certain that your penises can be seen from space with the naked eye.

With that penile recognition and genuflection out of the way…

This kind of fight between “academics” and “professionals” happens way too often when each side decides it knows exactly what the other side is all about. In this case, however, the stereotypes don’t fit.

Reimold is a good and respected blogger on a number of topics, including student media. I frequently read his work and whether I agree with him or not, I believe him to be an honest broker of information. He is in no way the elderly crank who is sitting in his ivory tower, waving a cane at all these damned kids and their hippity hoppity music. He’s not pining for the days of lead type and line tape when he suggests that accuracy should remain the stalwart of media coverage.

Blodget isn’t the twerp that crusty academics associate with this interwebbing thing that the kids like. His site is informative and extremely rapid. When mistakes are made, they get corrected. The site showcases exactly what good professors have been harping about for years: relevant, useful and interesting information put forth using the best tool to accomplish the job, (text, hyperlinking, graphics, video etc.).

Blodget is a good leader as well. When someone comes after one of my newsroom kids in the way Reimold hammered at Weisenthal, you’d damned well better believe I’m reacting like Blodget did. When you call someone out by name, get ready for the shitstorm that will follow, especially if that person buys pixels by the barrel.

In reading back through his sarcasm-sluiced posts, I wish like hell Blodget had taken a higher road in his defense. It’s too easy to take the easy way out and paint the picture the way he did. To be fair, his approach didn’t make him wrong, just harder for the folks in the middle of the road to stand behind.

What both of these guys tend to miss, however, is that this “game recognize game” gambit won’t come close to providing closure on the topic.

Reimold won’t be able to come close to Weisenthal’s productivity or approach during this experiment. That’s not a rip on Dan, but rather a central point in his favor. What makes journalists like Weisenthal good at what they do isn’t the ability to mainline Red Bull until the last post is posted. It’s the interconnectivity that comes with covering a beat, becoming a known entity to sources and having good instincts on how best to punch out copy. Weisenthal has a hell of a head start in all of these areas.

What Reimold does is teach students HOW to become entrenched in a field like this so that they CAN be the go-to reporter on a topic. His work in student media shows that he’s growing the seedlings so they can bear fruit while keeping an eye on the entire farm. Criticizing him if he fails at this is like a chef criticizing a farmer for failing to prepare a good Soufflé. 

Even if he could go to-to-toe with Weisenthal, so what? He shouldn’t WANT to do this for the very reasons he stipulates to in his original post: speed can kill accuracy, trying to punch out too much leads to some vapid crap, being constantly plugged in can numb you to the big picture and finally you burn out from all this.

Doing this is like trying to tell kids that boxing can cause brain damage and then immediately accepting a challenge to train for a heavyweight title fight.

And what happens if Reimold blows the doors off the place? He doesn’t represent all academics, for sure, and his efforts can be viewed as that of one man, not a class of people.

(If you want to read more about this concept and the various ways intergroup relations works in regard to stereotyping groups and excusing individual cases that run counter to those stereotypes, take a look here. Sorry. Didn’t mean to get my academe in your blogosphere.)

If Blodget gets a grudging sense of admiration for Reimold, great. It doesn’t solve the problem that we need more people doing good work that is fair, accurate, timely and valuable. He should consider returning the favor and offering to teach one of Reimold's classes for a term. If this happens, let me know early enough so I can buy stock in Advil...

If Reimold gets a taste of the 24-7 life that is Weisenthal’s bailiwick, that’s fine too. It doesn’t solve the problem of how best to balance journalistic speed against other pressing issues. My great hope is that he finds a way to pair accuracy with speed and we can all start teaching it and calling it the Reimold Model.

Maybe the best we can hope for is that they’ll each look at the other when this is done, light up a couple cigarettes and ask, “Was it good for you?”

Tits on a bull

Summer for me usually meant about three days of vacation, followed by 14 weeks of crazed servitude. I attended college prior to the days when the state government looked at higher education and said, “What? Why should we subsidize that? I ain’t never gone there and I done just fine!” (Thank you, Gov. Walker. You can sit down now…). As ridiculous as it seems now to my students, a decent summer job combined with an unyielding work ethic could almost pay off the next year’s tuition and even bankroll a little spending money. Now, the only way you can pay off your tuition via a summer enterprise is a) drug dealing or b) selling an organ on the black market.

My traditional summer job was one I really hated. I worked behind the register at a gas station with a small mini-market area. It was attached to a two-bay garage where we had one really good mechanic with anger management issues and one mediocre guy who was nice enough and smoked cigars that smelled like fertilizer.

The place was owned and operated by a guy named Ray, who used to womanize older ladies who came in for service and drink like a fish on weekends. When he would come back from “camping” on a Sunday, you’d look at his nose for a telltale sign of if life would be good or bad. Pale was good, red was bad. He’d curse and accuse you of stealing and various other acts of bad manners. The first couple times, he freaked me out. However, when he’d forgotten all about it the next day, I learned to worry less and just get through it.

To be fair, the job was great for a number of reasons. First, it was always there. Between the types of people he’d hired throughout the year (usually single women with “boyfriend problems,” who had a penchant for quitting after two months) and the desire for everyone on staff to use vacation in the summer, he always had an opening of some kind for me. Second, I didn’t go home smelling like a McNugget, which I considered a plus. Third, and most importantly, although the job paid like shit, the sheer volume of hours gave me a good amount of money and a limited summer window to foolishly waste it. I was almost always guaranteed to go back to college bone tired and with a solid bank account.

One year, Ray told me that he didn’t have much work for me behind the register, so he was going to put me in the garage for part of the time “just like last year.” In my desperation to keep the job, I didn’t bother to tell him that he never put me in the garage at any time. I also failed to mention that I was so inept at mechanical stuff that I was likely to light the place on fire, if put in the proximity of anything flammable.

I worked every day from about 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. in the station. After that, Ray’s wife would come in and relieve me. I’d go in the back, change from the button down shirt and tie into the mechanic’s blues and set about being abused by Tom, the master mechanic.

After two oil changes went south on me, Tom opined to anyone who would listen that I was “as useless as tits on a bull.” His opinion of me didn’t improve when I relaxed my grip on the tire machine one day and had the iron pry bar come whipping off the machine and nearly take my head off.  Still, I had to be there, so my job essentially became answering the phone, because Tom hated to do that, ordering parts that we didn’t need because Tom was pissed at the part he was installing and picking up wrenches and hammers after Tom would throw them across the room. He once kicked a lit torch across the garage, which led me to believe that despite my novice status, if arson hit the garage, Tom would be a much better suspect than I would.

After six hours of Tom, I’d go home and eat dinner. On several days, I’d come back at 6 p.m. in the tie and work the register until 10. This was my schedule for 5 or 6 days a week and it provided about a dime more per hour than minimum wage.

And so it went: May, June, July and August. Each day brought new weirdness, odd challenges and a general sense that my life was becoming a Kafka story. To wit:

- One day, I came to work and was told to go home and put on a tie. Seems that working behind the register required some decorum and a tie was going to be the way to go. This lasted for about three weeks, until I had to check the transmission fluid in someone’s car while performing a full-service gas fill up and I nearly got strangled when the tie found the cooling fan. The tie rule was rescinded. A week later, we got company issued clip on ties.

- To avoid paying a landscaper, when business was slow in the garage, I was sent out to pick weeds from the shrub areas surrounding the property. Half of them were out of sight, so my boss demanded that I check in every 20 minutes to make sure I wasn’t needed. In other words, do something, but don’t do it for a long enough stretch to actually do it well.

- On a weekend one year, a kid and his mom stopped in and the kid asked to use the bathroom. About five minutes later, he came back and told me he locked the key inside. I had a spare, so I went to retrieve the key only to find that the kid had shit and puked all over the bathroom floor, garbage can and sink. When I told his mother that her son was ill, she demanded that I take it back and how DARE I accuse her son of doing such a thing. She later returned and apologized when she found the child wearing no underwear, as they were in the garbage can full of shit. I got a $20 tip that day. It wasn’t worth it.

- Tom listened to Laser 103 out of Milwaukee, which played hard rock of the day. Guns ‘n’ Roses was popular and whenever “Paradise City” would come on, Tom would sing, “Take me out to Atlantic City, where the girls are hot and they got big titties.” He also had a version of Soundgarden’s “Blackhole Sun” that had a refrain about a “Butthole Son.”

- One day, I was told to go clean the restroom. As I tried to refill the paper towel dispenser, I found a porn mag stuffed in the slot. I reported it to my boss, who took the magazine and made a huge deal about it being important that we not give the restroom key out to lowlife people who use it for such horrible purposes. I later found the magazine stuffed between a couple parts catalogs on his desk in the back of the shop.

The list of oddities could go on and on, but eventually, I learned that it came with the territory. I managed to keep the gas pumps on, the squeegee buckets full and the bank deposits balanced. I also figured out how to do a satisfactory oil change, tire rotation and tune up. I even got the tire machine to work after a fashion. One day out of the clear blue sky, Tom looked up from what he was doing and said, “Y’know. You’re not as fucking useless as you used to be. You’re not like tits on a bull any more. Tits on a boar, maybe, but still…” He then dropped something and started cursing.

The summer of The Shutdown at the Daily Cardinal, I didn’t go home for the summer. Mr. A got me a job in Madison so I could stay close and work on the paper. I never went home again for a summer.

The gas station eventually changed hands a few years back. I saw a note in some local paper that Ray had retired. I heard from my aunt that he had also divorced his second wife, who was a nice lady and probably deserved better. The garage was knocked down and a carwash took its place. Ray did it before he sold the place. Turns out, we had about 9,002 code violations in there or something, but it was cheaper and easier to just put in an auto wash.

On occasion, I’ll still see Tom in Milwaukee driving around in his classic El Camino. Usually, by the time I realize it’s him, he’s a stoplight or two away. I haven’t talked to him in years.

Today, I’m late with this post because we were having a rummage sale. One of the many items dotting our lawn and driveway was a Murray 6HP lawn mower my father had tried to throw away.

“Fucking thing doesn’t work at all,” he explained while showing off the mower he’d bought to replace it. “I’m just going to leave it on the curb for the junk guys.”

I looked at it a while and figured, what the hell…

“Can I have it?” I asked.

“The hell for?” he shot back. “It’s broken.”

“Mmm Hmm…”

The mower came home with me and a day later, it was running like a top. A new blade and a new plug came from Farm and Fleet. I disassembled the carb and rebuilt it in about 20 minutes. Adjusted choke lever, new gas and some restoration work on the battery helped out as well.

When I first tried to start it after putting it back together, it cranked, but wouldn’t run. I only felt slightly more grateful than stupid when I realized the main issue was that I hadn’t installed the new spark plug, so the plug wire was hanging out there and the port was just a gaping hole to the engine block.

A quick bit of muttering later and it ran. I sold it today for $80.

“Amazing,” Dad said when he saw it. “It runs great. I just don’t know how to do that stuff to the carb like you were talking about. That really is something…”

Tits on a bull, indeed.

Confounding Variables

I always find it amusing when politicians use newspaper articles in their ads to support their claims, especially when those claims are tied to numbers. Speaking as a journalism sinner, a good number of us went into journalism because we had a phobia regarding math. I’ve known great, award-winning journalists who couldn’t balance their checkbooks, so when I see ads like this one from Scott Walker, I must pause and ponder.

Truth be told, I got over some of my math phobia when a stats prof pulled a Jedi Mind Trick on me during my doctoral program. “Don’t worry about being afraid of math,” he told us. “Stats aren’t math.” It worked just enough to get me by and fall in love with data crunching.

Sadly, I think the phrase “stats aren’t math” has been taken to a whole other level in this gubernatorial campaign.

After getting his ass kicked by job-loss numbers for several months, Walker released unvetted federal data that showed the state not only didn’t lose jobs, but instead gained about 30,000 of them since he took office. Democrat Tom Barrett rightly pointed out that this appears to be a case of data shopping, in which you have an idea as to what you want people to hear and you find information that supports that idea. Walker has argued that the monthly numbers are based on a small sample of the state (3.5 percent of employers), that the numbers are volatile and that the margin of error is so large, it almost isn’t worth looking at the data’s outcomes. Experts in the field support and refute various aspects of those things to some degree, but what concerns me most is the lack of full analysis done with these numbers.

Journalists can tend to parrot sources when they feel a lack of confidence in their ability to understand what something is actually revealing. In addition, the concept of “fair and balanced” has degraded to the point of throwing a new fact into the arena and letting both sides attack it with soundbites. Don’t worry that the readers won’t understand this stuff. They probably aren’t reading your paper anyway.

Here are several key components of what go untouched:

- The City Mouse Effect: Milwaukee is both the largest city in the state and the home base for both of these idiots. Job losses are more likely to be concentrated in that area than in other places, especially in an economic downturn. Sure, a paper plant in Niagra closing will devastate the community and put about 50-60 percent of the town out of work. However, it’s a small town and the losses, when measured in pure numbers, won’t be as great as if a paper plant closes in the Fox Valley or if Ladish or Caterpillar closes in Milwaukee. In addition, when a downturn kills or severely harms an industry, that impact will be more likely to be felt in a city like Milwaukee because it will host multiple places that service that industry. For example, if an economic downturn leads to unemployment for foundry workers, a small town is likely to have a single foundry. This will lead to cuts at that one factory. If the downturn impacts a city like Milwaukee, they have multiple foundries in which the impact will be felt. And that says nothing about the collateral damage associated with a single job loss.

- Covariance: In assessing any set of data, the first question you should ask is if any other variable might be impacting the variable you are trying to measure. For example, let’s say you have the idea that college students who watch TV news will have a greater fear of being sexually assaulted on their campus.

Of course, you need to measure fear of sexual assault on campus and television viewing habits, but that’s not enough. Things like the gender of the participant, the size of the campus, the location of the campus (urban/suburban) and a half dozen other factors should be examined. Once you parse out these covariates, you can see what’s left and whether a direct line can be drawn between these two variables.

One of the big “other” factors that has me scratching my head is the Milwaukee job numbers. Walker’s ads paint Milwaukee as a shithole where jobs go to die while simultaneously touting huge job increases throughout the state.

What hasn’t happened (on either side of this campaign) is a decent analysis of the state as a whole not counting Milwaukee. In other words, extract the covariate that is Milwaukee (call it a draw between Barrett and Walker, as neither could really make a compelling argument that it was he who brought a specific job to Milwaukee) and then analyze the data.

Just for the sake of argument, here are the unemployment numbers and percentages (you need to rerun the search if you want to see the numbers) for Milwaukee in 2012:

January: 60,909 (7.7)
February: 63,738 (8.0)
March: 61,276 (7.7)

And here are the state’s:
January: 229,403 (7.6)
February: 240,995 (7.9)
March: 229,801 (7.5)

 

If you redact Milwaukee, here’s what you get:
January: 168,494 (7.5)
February: 177,257 (7.9)
March: 168,525 (7.5)

In other words, the alleged shithole Tom Barrett has been running for a decade is in no way different than the remainder of the state in terms of percentages. In fact, this could actually be a win for Barrett if he simply said, “Look, we’re responsible for more than a quarter of this state’s workforce, which means when the economy takes a shit, we are most vulnerable to data spikes. Instead, we’re right with the rest of the state. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

- Attribution: When data are reported like those in the set Walker released, each job is counted as a data point. However, what is missing here is where those jobs are placed and to what can we attribute their placement. In other words, if a Democratic mayor in a small town convinced a friend to start a small business and hire five people, those are six data points that Walker can count that really have nothing to do with him or his policies. The same is true if someone moves their fireworks business from one side of the Wisconsin/Illinois border to the other in order to take advantage of a sales tax disparity.
What the surveys done at the monthly and quarterly level do is simply measure quantitative movement, not why that movement occurred. In addition, any job that Barrett might have created will automatically count as a new state job as well, leading to the “rising tide” outcome of improved job conditions in the state. Where these jobs were created and WHY they were created becomes critically important in analyzing this data. However, this hasn’t stopped Walker from telling everyone in every possible ad that “Our reforms are working!”

By not really looking at this data in any kind of meaningful way, the Democrats are allowing the Republicans to play this issue to a draw. The Democrats appear to be receding from the issue as we speak, hammering more now on the ongoing John Doe probe instead of taking the time to really crunch the numbers. With the numbers continuing to change and Barrett’s failure to attack the “Milwaukee is a job killer” ads, the narrative is allowed to emerge that the state’s largest city is a millstone around the neck of Wisconsin.

The truth is a lot more nuanced. The city is in no way different from a statistical point of view than the state when you look at the data. In addition, no data has emerged that indicates any job gains have been the result of a specific trigger, such as Walker’s policies or actions.

The saddest thing is that it’s unclear if making this known would be worth the trouble. Recent polling data seem to indicate that most people have made up their minds already about this election.

And that’s scary as hell.

"Will this question be on the course evaluation?"

One of the more interesting aspects of my job as a professor is the student survey and course evaluation process. A couple colleagues told me when I got here that thanks to a really ridiculous ruling out here that evals are to be treated as public documents. Thus, the U put the clamps down on what can and can’t be asked.

The most problematic change was the decision to remove the “open comment” portion of the evaluation. As far as I was concerned, the most useful part of the evaluations has been cut and instead, I’m staring at random data points.

Still, one boss I had tried to put a happy face on the evaluation process.

“It’s their chance to give you a grade,” he said with hopeful optimism brimming in his voice. “Isn’t that refreshing?”

Not really, but if the grader becomes the gradee, I think it’s also fair to give them the full experience of being the one giving the grades. To wit:

 

- I plan to show up 10 minutes late for the evaluations, wearing my earbuds and a “disaffected professor” look on my face. I will then ignore their stares and just start talking.

 

- I want to tell them that I had planned to get the evaluations ready on time, but my best friend was having kind of a crisis, so I was over there all night and then we had some wine and then I totally forgot to set my alarm, so I didn’t have time to get the pencils so they could do the evals. That’s not a huge problem, right?

 

- Before I hand out the evaluations, I should tell the students, “You know, I’ve never received anything less than a five out of five on an evaluation before. Just so you know.”

 

- “Hi… I know it’s the last day and I’ve had some issues throughout the semester, but, if I were to, like, do really well at handing out the final evaluations, I mean like really REALLY well, is there any chance I could still do well in here?”

 

- As I open the door to leave, I want to stop quickly and ask, “Do you know when you’ll be done, you know, with the grading of me? Like when I can I expect to get this back?”

 

- During the evaluations, I will be ignoring my students’ requests for pencils or guidance and instead play on Facebook, which I’m sure they don’t even notice me doing because I’m doing it on the down low.

 

- When I get the evals back, I need to go to “ratemystudents.com” and anonymously post that you should NEVER have Billy Jones or Samantha Smith as students because they totally don’t understand how to grade a professor.

 

- I plan to tell all of my students that I once taught a group of first graders how a newspaper works and they really liked it and clapped a lot for me, so obviously the people who gave me poor evaluations in here know nothing about how to evaluate stuff. I always get good evaluations except for here…

 

- I should also go around telling my colleagues to avoid certain students because they give such low ratings.

 

- I want to call the students into my office one by one and nit-pick the evaluations. “How could you give me a four on the ‘Is always prepared’ item? I mean, sure I missed a couple classes and occasionally repeated a lecture but, I mean, come on…”

 

- I will ask loudly why my students don’t understand that I tried really, really hard to teach them stuff and it’s so not my fault that I got these evaluation scores. Doesn’t effort count?

 

- I will get revenge on them by posting mean things on Facebook before finally developing a website called “mystupidstudentsareassholes.com” which I will update forever until I get bored in three days.

 

- I will look at only the “Overall, this professor did a good job” grade and ignore the rest of the feedback. I will then throw them out.

OK, back to grading finals. Thanks for the breather...

Doc

Dissing the Disses

In one of the more entertaining shit-fights I’ve seen in a while in academia, Naomi Schaefer Riley took it upon herself to read the titles of several black studies dissertations and then declare the field a complete waste of time. Her blog post on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s website takes three particular grad students to task for their topic selection and then mocks them mercilessly.

In Episode V: The Interwebs Strike Back, folks almost wore out their keyboards beating the shit out of her or defending her for having the courage to take this position. As you would expect, the criticisms, which she aptly summarized in her follow-up post, fell into four distinct categories:

I am picking on people because they are black (and I am a racist).
I am picking on people even though I don’t have a Ph.D.
I am picking on people who are too young and inexperienced to defend themselves.
I am picking on people even though I haven’t read their entire dissertations.

I’m not going to touch on number one (other people have done so far more eloquently than I), but I will say that if she didn’t expect people to be pissed about this post and call her a racist, I’ve got some magic beans I can sell her on the cheap.

With number three, she’s right in her defense of her thoughts. If you make it through grad school in the shortest time possible, you’re probably between 27 and 29 when you get the Ph.D. If all that life experience and scholarship hasn’t got you ready to game up against a snide asshole, you’ve got bigger problems than dealing with the snide asshole. Like tying your shoes.

Her defense in point four is kind of bullshit. No, you don’t need to read the whole dissertation to be able to comment on the scholarship. In fact, in reviewing scholarship, I find myself focusing more on certain parts than others. I don’t sit there and challenge every citation, argue with every bit of the method section or parse the full magnitude of the conclusions. However, when you read the title and mock it, you’re just asking for an ass-kicking. Imagine if we did that with other literary works:

“The Color Purple.” (Do we need a novel explaining purple is a color? Or, if you’re Jerry Falwell’s folks, GAYS! EVERYWHERE! HIDE YOUR CHILDREN!)

“Les Miserables” (Whiny fucking French bastards)

“Paradise Lost” (Get off your dead ass and find it.)

"Paradise Found" (About fucking time...)

“Candide” (I’m not reading this shit. They spelled it wrong.)

“The Count of Monte Cristo” (A guy who likes sandwiches doesn’t need his own book. Of course, it’s written by a guy named Dum ass…)

 

Which brings us back to point number two: picking on people without the requisite degree to do so.

A and I spent a lot of time talking about the issue of power of position and power of person over our time at the Cardinal. We both agreed that when you had to whip out the “Well, I’M the EDITOR IN CHIEF!” stick, you basically lost the argument. Saying someone can’t pick on a Ph.D. because that person doesn’t have a Ph.D. works along that same line of bullshit. I have no problem whatsoever with intelligent conversation on any topic involving anyone of any educational level. There is not a sign outside my office door that reads: “If your degree isn’t THIS TALL, you can’t ride this intellectual rollercoaster.”

That said, she’s missing the point.

It’s not the lack of a degree that’s bugging people, but rather a lack of knowledge that is creating a problem.

For starters, not reading beyond the title of the dissertations you are criticizing is like reviewing a movie after looking at its poster. If you want to go out on a limb about a topic, fine, but let’s at least watch the movie trailer, or in this case, read the damned abstract.

A professor in my doctoral program let us all in on a little secret: The dissertation isn’t going to be, nor is it supposed to be, the best scholarship you ever do. It’s the first major bit of research you do, on your own and you learn a ton by doing it. It’s a launching point for your career and a chance to stretch into a completely foreign field.

Criticizing a dissertation like Riley has done is a lot like criticizing the Army for implementing calisthenics because who the hell gets up and starts doing jumping jacks in the middle of a firefight in Afghanistan?

It’s also not a secret that the dissertation is like a frat hazing: The academics at your institution want to see what you can withstand. That is why these take so long, run so long and are so horribly painful to write. They want to test your mettle and your desire to be good at this so that you CAN move forward from this point and add to the sum of human knowledge. Maybe it won’t be in a field that Riley thinks is worthwhile, but others might. In any case, it’s a starting point, not a complete body of work.

If Riley wants to take shots at some shitty scholarship, there are plenty of targets out there. Some studies I read have scholars comparing two variables that have nothing to do with one another and then offering the “significant differences exist” argument that they found something important. Of course, they see nothing wrong with acting like the guy from Spinal Tap as they arrogantly defend the premise that “these go to 11,” which makes their failure all the more spectacular.

And, no, I’m not going to say, “Go get a Ph.D. and then we’ll talk” because that would be fighting her weak bullshit with equally weak bullshit.

Instead, I’ll simply ask that if she’s going to write for a publication that combines my two passions (education and journalism) that she ascribe to the basic tenets of both of those fields.

Research, report, analyze and then write.

Are there any questions? Why not?

Spent the past two days talking to a wide array of school-aged kids as part of various festivals, conferences and fairs. Once this post is over, I’ll pack a bag and head off to the Daily Cardinal’s 120^th anniversary celebration, for what is likely to be even more of the same.

I spend a lot of time with college students who are forced to take my classes. This is one of the downsides of teaching a class that is a prerequisite for pretty much everything else in the major. Some students come through and actually care about the material while most try to find a seat that is as close to the back wall as possible and the only question they ask is, “So, is this going to be on the test?” I tend to expect this, and when you add those factors into an 8 a.m. class, I understand that I’m unlikely to get a lot of enthusiastic engagement.

However, this week, I got the chance to work with student journalists at various high schools who were heading to our campus. They paid good money to hear me help them improve their papers and sit in a one-on-one environment. Since they came to me and actually paid to do so, I offered to answer any questions, deal with any issues or address any concerns they had or wanted to talk about first. In other words, let’s make this about you and what you want.

Silence.

They all looked like they were about to get “the rat treatment” from Game of Thrones if they were noticed. Their advisers, meanwhile, were prodding and poking them to say something/do something/breathe.

No dice.

I figured it was because I was and old guy and talking to old guys is uncool for high school students. However, when I checked with my newspaper staff, I found out they had a similar experience in leading the newsroom session. In fact, it was worse, as the visitors sat around and kept checking their watches/phones/personal digital devices.

“One interesting thing happened,” a kid told me in my class that next day, as she pointed at the girl next to her. “There was some 15-year-old kid who was totally hot for her. It was cute.”

Pondering that for a moment… 22-year-old college woman + 15-year-old high school boy = cute. 22-year-old college man + 15-year-old high school girl = criminal charges. Ah… to be young again.

Speaking of young, the last event of the week was Career Day at The Midget’s school. I’d kind of kept trying to blow this off so I didn’t have to go. The reasons were valid, at least in my mind:

1) I teach. They see that every day. That’s like telling people I’m a professional shoelace tie guy.

2) This would be the end of a week from hell, as the Missus was out of town at a knitting camp (don’t laugh… OK, laugh) and I had a list of stuff to do before I could head to Mad-Town for some fun.

3) I’m always afraid I’m going to not notice and say “fuck” or something in front of the kids. If you know me, you know that fear is logical.

Still, the Midget begged me, so I acquiesced. However, I decided to try a different strategy: I’d talk about the newspaper and the newsroom.

I got copies of the paper for them, after furiously reading them over for anything that might merit a call from the principal. What’s acceptable for college students isn’t necessarily acceptable for first-graders. Fortunately, they decided against running the story about the woman who assaulted the cop with a pink dildo, so I was set.

I got some reporter’s notebooks and pens for them and I even printed up “official” press passes that I put into clear plastic holders so they could wear them and be honorary members of our staff.

I packed all this crap into a box and headed over to the school for my 10-minute chat. In, out, on with life.

However, what I found made me smile all day.

As I was waiting for the kids to come back in from lunch recess, a boy about 7 years old, walked to the bubbler, took a drink and then noticed me.

“What’s in the box?” he asked with absolutely no pretense.

“Some stuff for my Career Day talk.”

“Hmm. Like what?”

“Some newspapers and… Do I know you?” I asked.

“Nope.” He walked away.

As the kids started coming in from recess, a good number of them passed me, with at least half of them stopping and asking, “What’s in the box?”

It got to the point that I half expected Brad Pitt to pop up with a handgun and start screaming, “What’s in the box? WHAT’S IN THE BOX?”

Once I got started telling them about life in the newsroom (the sanitized version), things went well. They found out what was in the box and appeared to be thrilled at getting paper, pens and something to wear around the neck.

I did my 10 minutes and left the requisite two minutes for the “Does anyone have any questions?” precursor to silence that would allow me to leave and go get lunch.

Instead, the kids were raising their hands and yelling out questions:

“Can we write stories?”

“What happens if the machine that makes the newspaper breaks?”

“How do you make the pictures get into the paper?”

“Why do you have to write about sad things?”

“Why doesn’t the newspaper paper feel like paper paper?”

On and on it went. About 15 minutes later, the teacher had to cut them off. They all kept their hands up, just in case she relented.

It was a stunning turn of events for me. I found myself wondering where was that unperceivable pivot in life in which we went from asking all the questions to questioning nothing? When did that unbridled joy of finding stuff out stop for us? What age was it that we stopped being forthright and nosy and started being shy or reticent? If my unscientific analysis is anything to go by, it’s somewhere between first and ninth grade and in my book, that’s way too soon.

We got this far as a country, a people and a planet by asking questions. Who says the world is flat? Why can’t we build a flying machine? What if we made people wear too much hair gel and call themselves disparaging pseudo-Italian names on the air? Some answers came quickly, others took time, but they all found a way to the surface because someone decided it was worth it to ask about something.

In social situations, too often we hear people say something that makes no sense and rather than challenge the assumption, ask the question or in some other way make it known that we’re not “with you” on that, we do the “Yeah, I know, right?” thing. I honestly think this is how Scott Walker is able to run ads about how shitty Milwaukee has been without ever being called on the fact he was the COUNTY EXECUTIVE for that area as well as the GOVERNOR for the state in which Milwaukee exists. Instead of saying, “Wait a minute, if Tom Barrett lost all those “Milwaukee jobs,” what were you doing for the county at that point to stop him/restore lost work? Was the county not losing anything?” we mutter and move on or do the “Yeah, I know, right?” thing.

Little kids aren’t afraid of telling you where the bear shit in the buckwheat. If they don’t get it, they don’t get it and they’ll tell you as much. If they don’t eating something, they’re not eating it politely with a “Mmm… Wow… What IS this?” smile. They’re shuddering and coughing like a shitty lawnmower and saying, “I no like this!”

And they’ll remind you of that each time you make it.

And they’ll tell their grandparents what kind of shitbag cook you are as well.

Most of all, they question things because they know they don’t know everything. Somewhere along the way, we figure we’d better know everything or at least not let on that we don’t.

At that point, we allow others who know less to talk more and do horrible things.

Why is that?

Does this guy get a set of steak knives or something?

Wisconsin just issued its 100,000th concealed/carry permit. The quote of the day comes from J.B. Van Hollen:

"There were doomsday people out there, before concealed carry was passed, who were predicting, of course, the doom and gloom that when we put more guns on the street, that when more people are able to carry concealed weapons, that we're going to have more problems," he said. "Nothing could have been further from the truth."

OK, maybe a fair point. I can't find statistical data out there yet that shows changes in gun-related deaths. I'm figuring this is something that might take a while to fully sort out. My only great hope is that the Journal-Sentinel decides to send the watchdog team after this and see if the bear shit in the woods. It seems like of all the officials, groups and organizations out there, only the JS's Dan Bice/Raquel Routledge all-stars manage to shine light on crap like this in any kind of effective way.

 

In more fun news, I've been obsessing about this for at least a week now. Watch and witness the rise of Jeff Daniels:

 

 

The Job

“Stop looking at me,” The Missus mockingly complained. “I can’t help it.”

We were at a local café eating lunch Thursday and I was soaking in the moment. Every forkful of salad she put into her mouth was preceded and followed by an irrepressible grin. The smile ran from ear to ear and revealed that my wife has far more teeth than I ever knew could fit into a human mouth.

The reason she was, to use her words, “grinning like an idiot” was because today she starts a new job. It’s closer to home. It’s more responsibility. It involves doing things with her degree. It carries with it managerial capacity.

And she’s at the U.

For the past six months, every day she’d come home from her job bone tired and maudlin. She broke down twice in that time period, begging me to let her quit. Each time, the reality of her situation eventually sunk in and she pressed on, knowing she needed an Option B before Option A could be told to go screw itself.

Today, she starts.

Today, as she noted repeatedly during our lunch, “Everything around me just feels fresh and new and amazing.”

The food tasted better.

The clothes she wore felt nicer.

The plants she was growing seemed healthier.

Heck, I probably seemed like less of a dink.

It wasn’t the money or the change in scenery or the ability to be closer to home. It was the sense that she now mattered to people. Her current job has people who are asking, “So when can you come talk to us? How can we help you? Do you need anything?”

It was a sense that she was alive.

--

About a week or so ago, the phone rang and Mom was on the other end. She was calling to chat before she left for Easter Break on a much-needed vacation.

In February, she had been told she’d be getting her contract for the 2012-13 school year in about a week. She had a choice: Sign it and face the unknown of what Governor Deadeyes might do to educators’ rights or decline and retire.

She went back and forth as the contract kept getting delayed. For her, it wasn’t a question of money. She and my father aren’t rich, but they were amazingly smart with their money. Dad rode the last wave of American Prosperity to a full pension and a good 401K. Mom was part of the State Teachers Retirement Fund.

It wasn’t a “work or don’t eat” kind of situation. In fact, the one thing that their financial adviser ever said that my mother just railed against him for was the time he noted, “Well, based on how set up you are, all I’m doing is basically managing your kid’s inheritance.”

And that’s what was really bugging her about this contract.

Over the years, she and her fellow teachers made sacrifices for the sake of a promise of what was to come. They often agreed to terms in which they took little or no raise in a year, instead agreeing to have the district cover part of their pension or sweeten the retirement pot.

She told me on several occasions, “I HAVE to retire this year. I worked too hard to get my retirement set up just to have them take it away from me.”

For most people, it would be a no-brainer.

Fuck ‘em. Quit. Live out the sweet life.

She had told me on several occasions I had to help her write a letter that would tell her boss she was resigning at the end of the year and taking retirement. She told me she didn’t know what goes into a letter like that.

It then dawned on me that she had never written a letter of resignation in her life.

She never had to. She’d been in the same place for more than 40 years.

I had gone through several drafts in my head and began pondering them again when she called.

We began with the small talk: How was the packing going? What did she think of the trip she’d be taking? How was Dad?

Near the end, she paused.

“I got my contract.”

I could feel every nerve in my body tense.

“I signed it. I’m in for another year.”

“Wait. What?” I asked as my heart stopped slamming against my breastbone.

“I talked to my boss. He said he wanted me to stay as long as I wanted to stay and that I didn’t have to do a few extracurricular things I didn’t want to do. He also said I was “redlined” this year, which has something to do with what they can and can’t do with my pension. I guess we’ll see.”

“How do you feel about that?” I asked, knowing that every journalism teacher I ever had in my life would slap the crap out of me for asking that question.

“Lighter,” she said with a smile I could hear. “I feel a lot lighter.”

--

I don’t know Khristopher Brooks, but I know a lot of kids like him. They sit in my classroom every day and learn how to turn hyperbole and spin into news that doesn’t suck. They crowd into my office and flood the newsroom, seeking that slice of experience and that little bit of information that will help them get a leg up as they careen toward graduation.

They hopefully pack together a set of clips, a cover letter and a resume and send it off to every third-rate newspaper, every half-assed magazine and every website that needs a blogger, knowing full well that 1,000 other people are doing the same thing.

They are operating under a crush of student loans, the expectations of being the first generation to attend college and the sense that the applicants are many while the jobs are few.

And yet when they get that offer at the Beaver County Tidbit, they come storming into my office like they just won the lottery. They have a look of unbridled joy on their faces as they explain how they’ll be covering the school board, county government, weekend cops and the occasional hog roast at the Piggly Wiggly Parade of Pork all for about $8.50 an hour.

They bounce up and down and if I knew for sure I wouldn’t get fired for it, I’d give each of them a hug. Instead, I smile back and just get this great contact high from their passion.

That’s why what happened to Brooks should be viewed as a criminal act and someone should kick the unnamed “publisher, HR and corporate” assholes in their collective balls. They should be named, called out and shamed into giving this kid anything and everything on Earth.

If you missed it, read the story. I’ll wait. When you’re done throwing up, let me know.

In that moment of unbridled joy that rarely befalls anyone, let alone a guy who is going to work for a newspaper in Wilmington, Delaware, Brooks wrote a nice tongue-in-cheek press release on his blog, stating that he had been “signed” by the paper. It was a perfect “wink” of a press release that you’d see whenever a team signed a free agent. It was cute, it was funny and it in no way cast any disrespect or aspersions on the paper.

About 20 minutes after the Gannett Posse discovered the post, Brooks got a call. His offer of employment had been rescinded.

In short, he was fired before he even started. The crime? “Using the company’s logo on my personal blog and quoting the executive editor from my job offer letter.”

Fortunately for Brooks, Seal Team 6 was otherwise occupied when he committed his heinous crime.

He begged the paper to reconsider, telling the editor he’d take the post down, he’d have Romenesko take his post down and that would be it. No harm, no foul.

The editor said no dice. This was coming from people far above his pay grade.

Romenesko wanted Brooks to write something for the site. Here was Brooks’ reaction:

Romenesko apologized for what happened and asked if I wanted to write a few lines as reaction. I couldn't. I was feeling numb. A few minutes earlier, I was hungry, but suddenly I had lost my appetite. All I could think was: maybe the News Journal wasn't the right fit.

But I couldn't fully bring myself to believe that. I thought the News Journal would be the perfect step for me. When I met David Ledford, the executive editor, we got along very well. And I'll still go on the record as saying I really like that guy. I was starting to interact with my fellow reporters on Twitter and I was lining up apartments to view this Friday. Everything was looking thumbs-up, so why did this happen?

 

The kid noted he already received dozens of job offers from all over the country. His Twitter feed picked up some serious steam. He isn’t bitter and he’s just trying to get a grip on all of this.

Fine. I’ll be bitter for him.

How dare you miserable cocksuckers take away this kid’s moment of joy?

Who the hell do you think you are, giving him that “first job” golden moment and then snatching it away and leaving him with a mouthful of ashes for his trouble?

I hope you bastards are always known as “that paper full of assholes that fired that kid for being happy.”

Whatever evil befalls you, it won’t be enough.

You took a sliver of his soul away that day.

--

I remember the first time I got “the job offer.”

Gainful employment outside of school.

A first step on a career path.

I had applied for the job as a joke and figured I’d never make it. The interview went so poorly, I asked the grad student who was responsible for shuttling me around to take me some place to buy a school T-shirt. The reason? I knew I was never coming back here.

During an interview with my would-be boss, a man who was well known in the field and who was the object of my undying respect, he turned to me and said, “I have four applicants for this job and everybody is more qualified than you.”

I don’t know what the hell happened between that moment and the day I got the offer, but when I called in to check my answering machine messages, I had a call from him, telling me to give him a ring when I got a chance.

I ran down the hall from the lab I was supervising to the student paper to borrow a phone. When I got a hold of him, he laid out the terms of employment in this matter-of-fact way, including health care, dental, vacation and so forth.

I still have no idea what he said after, “I’d like to offer you the job…” He might have told me I’d need to lick his car clean every day. If he had, I would not have hesitated.

I staggered out into the main part of the newsroom, unable to feel my legs. My head was fuzzy and I swear I was going to pass out.

I finally fell into a chair. When a concerned editor asked me if I needed help, I just smiled.

“I got the job…”

--

Jobs are funny. We love them. We hate them. We want them. We want to leave them.

Not all jobs are created equal in terms of money, societal value or esteem. We vary on how we feel about certain people in certain jobs. For example, we’re not all that fond of police officers when they pull us over, but in a crisis when we’re fearful, they become our best friends for a fleeting moment.

When an ice storm knocked out power to about 95 percent of Northwest Indiana one year, The Missus and I huddled in our house, sustained by the warmth of a kerosene heater and the hope that power would come back soon. When we saw the electric worker walking through our yard to the power pole, we put on boots and coats and ran out to thank him and offer him a beer. I’m sure we would have hugged him, had we not already freaked him out. His job was our salvation.

I’ve often said that money isn’t everything but it beats the shit out of whatever comes in second. It’s more pithy than true, as I could more than double my salary if I left the friendly confines of Fitzwalkerstan and headed to Texas or Oklahoma or some other place where you can fit a tea service on your belt buckle. I could also go into data analysis and research and probably triple what I make.

Instead, I’m here and I’m happy. I matter.

That’s all the Missus wanted as well. When the lady doing the hiring started talking about pay, she kind of tuned out. The job, she said, was what drew her here.

It’s the same with Mom. She could be a sub or go do something else. She could follow my father as he sought out the daily bargains at Walgreens or he went on the quest for the cheapest Diet Coke in Milwaukee County. Instead, she’s going back because she can’t imagine doing anything else.

It’s why I just hurt for Khristopher Brooks, even though I’ve never met him. He mattered for a moment only to be told later, “Sorry, but we decided to be dickheads about this. Maybe we’ll see you at a job fair this year.” He even loved the job after he had been told he couldn’t have it anymore.

If there’s one thing that ever captured my sense of a job, it was this clip from the movie, “Dave.” Kevin Kline’s character makes a pretty astute observation about how people react when they get to work and they get to matter.

He’s also right that you never know what you can do until you try.

--

I went upstairs around 10:30 last night to see how the Missus was doing. I figured I’d need to get her to relax, to wind down and to understand that she needed to sleep. Instead, I found her curled up in bed, passed out with her Nook in her hand and the light still on. The puddle of drool on her pillow indicated she’d been in this position for some time.

I took away the Nook, shut off the light and climbed into bed. My sleep was less restful than hers, for sure. I kept having dreams that she overslept or that something had happened to the car. I set my alarm on my day off so that I could back-stop hers just in case the power went out.

When she woke up, I’d been awake for hours. She still had her “idiot” grin on and a new dress to match. When she left, the Midget and I called after her.

“Have a great day at your new job!”

She paused.

“I will.”

Well... Just... Ow...

This has not been a great week for student media. In case you missed it, the Daily Texan found itself in hot water when one of its cartoonists decided to put forth a fresh take on the Trayvon Martin shooting and the subsequent flurry of outrage and media coverage and outrage at the media coverage and the media’s coverage of the outrage at the media and so on. In doing so, artist Stephanie Eisner managed to mangle the issues of race, media coverage and spelling all in one fell swoop. The paper pulled the cartoon and then put it back up on its site with a brief “don’t hate the player, hate the game” kind of response to the outrage.

And this was only the second-weirdest moment of the week…

Not to be out done in the “Head Up Your Ass Olympics,” the editor in chief at the Daily Free Press at Boston University was fired after the paper produced an April Fool’s issue that leveled allegations that Cinderella was in a prostitution ring and a group of BU frat guys slipped Alice in Wonderland some LSD. The paper’s lead story? A piece on seven dwarves from a BU frat “gangbanging” a female student as part of a roofie and rape party.

Don’t think for a moment I’m climbing on a “holier than thou” soap box. No way I’m doing the “tsk, tsk, tsk” thing here.

I think in my life I’ve had three true, gasping, heart-palpitation-inducing, freakishly real dreams that made me wake up in the middle of the night and walk the floors of the house.

1) I was being buried alive in a glass coffin and I could see it all happening as shovel after shovel of dirt hit the casket and I was all “Bill Pullman in The Serpent and the Rainbow” and couldn’t do anything to stop it.

2) I was somewhere with girl who wasn’t my wife and she was all over me. I succumbed to this and as I’m in mid-sex, I was screaming in my head, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” as I realized I had done something from which I could never recover.

3) I get a call at about 6 a.m. from the president of the university, who has informed me I’m being fired for something the kids did at the paper. When I see the paper, it’s something so horribly stupid and infantile, there is no way in hell I can say anything other than, “Ah… Well… Fuck.”

I’ve read several studies and seen several “Law and Order” episodes where experts outline how the brains of young people aren’t fully ready for high-order thought and it’s stuff like this that has me believing it. I keep turning over in my head the Trayvon cartoon, looking for answers to questions like “What the hell did you think was going to happen when you published this?” and “Did anyone stop and THINK about how this was doing nothing to address the issue you think you’re trying to address?” and “Should we really let a cartoonist who can’t even spell “Trayvon” right take a potshot at such an amazingly delicate issue through a one-panel cartoon?” And “Who the fuck still uses the word ‘colored’ to describe people? We’re not talking about fucking Easter Eggs…”

I can’t find any, other than to say that this is what tends to happen when people reach beyond their own level of competence and inject themselves into an issue they can’t fully understand. We all do it to some extent in our discussions with colleagues, our bar arguments over baseball teams and our understanding of the human psyche. Most of us don’t fall on our keys as publicly or spectacularly as this, but it’s not a rare frailty.

The same thing can be said about the BU kids: Many of us think we’re funny. The problem is that we probably are in the right situation with the right people. However, while my father’s fart jokes are likely hilarious to The Guys at Work, they aren’t going over with the Moliere crowd. The wider the audience, the more likely your humor will be offensive.

You’re not getting away with joking about frat guys being rapists or dealing drugs any more than you’re getting away with putting on black face and walking around with a watermelon. Frat guys, friends of frat guys and people who know they could be your next target all read the paper. It’s not like the frat guys are looking at this saying, “Hey, look! They got us again! Those clever scribes!”

Even beyond that, there are certain things that are just never funny, no matter who you are.

The late, great George Carlin once tried to prove otherwise in his album segment titled, “Rape can be funny.” Despite his best efforts (“Picture Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd.”), I can honestly say it as the most awkwardly painful thing I’ve ever listened to.

And this was being done by a guy who made a fortune being funny.

If Carlin couldn’t pull it off, the BU Daily Free Press didn’t have a shot in hell at making this work.

Every couple years, a staff asks me if I think they could do an “April Fool’s edition” of the paper. I grit my teeth and tell them the truth: You can do whatever you want, that’s part of the joy of operating under the First Amendment. However, keep two things in mind:

1) Just because you can do something, it doesn’t follow that you should. If you publish this, remember that you need to be ready to deal with the fallout when people are pissed about something you wrote.

2) People already look at what we do, find every minor error and say, “What a bunch of shit. Who takes this garbage seriously?” Why would you want to give them an even better reason to think we’re stupid and pointless?

And every time they say, “Oh. Got it. Thanks.” and walk away, I hope I’ve made my point.

And then I usually have the third dream.

File this under “They still don’t get it.”

The election board has determined that enough signatures exist to start the official recall of Gov. Scott Walker and Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch. Despite the claims that had it not been for Adolf Hitler and Mickey Mouse, only about 10 people would have signed these things, more than 900,000 signatures were verified against Walker and about 800,000 against Kleefisch.

With that “breaking news” hitting the airwaves last night, both sides took their turns to react to the recall. Both Kathleen Falk and Kathleen Vinehout noted they’ve been looking forward to this, which comes as no surprise to anyone. However, here’s the thing that really bugged me.

Republican spokesturd Ben Sparks called in and noted that it was the “liberal unions” who foisted this recall upon the “families of Wisconsin.”

The divide in this state is already big enough, thank you. Being more divisive isn’t really what most of us are shooting for here. Falk’s ads are trying to tap into this, by noting that she’ll work across the aisle to get people to work together etc. etc. If the previous 12 years are any indication, that’s unlikely to happen at any political level short of the Mayville Queen of Corn Sponsorship Committee. However, even if we’re all just paying lip service to the idea of “Knock it the fuck off,” it would be nice to see the governor’s party try to embrace that.

The bigger problem is that the divide is being drawn in a way that none of us should tolerate. “Liberals vs. Families” might be the next great iPhone app, but it sure as hell shouldn’t be the way we view our state.

Where do the majority of us sit? Probably in neither area. Watch the “Scott Walker fucked my state” commercials the local and national PACs are running and you can see tons of families. They showcase people concerned about their schools, their towns, their lack of 250,000 new jobs to choose from. All of those are concerns for families, liberals and anyone in between.

Watch the “Hi, I’m Scott Walker and I’m going to look like a normal guy” ads and you’ll see something else amazing. He talks about keeping the budget balanced, taxes under control and people chipping in to pay their share of things like health care and pensions. It sounds a lot like things most of us would approve of. No one out there is saying, “Let’s tax the fuck out of everyone and burn the money in the backyard.” If I’m in what Scott Walker views as the “liberals” camp, I’m an oddity that thinks debt and shitty financial acumen are bad ideas.

This is not a case of one group of people that wants one thing and another group that wants another, despite the best efforts of the Walker folk. Look at the damned signs and bumper stickers: “I Stand With Gov. Walker.” It’s like a giant game of red rover or the news team fight scene from “Anchorman.”

Instead, this is a case of HOW things are being accomplished. The “hack and slash” method employed by a man with no checks against him is what people really hate here if they’re trying to get him recalled. The “welcome to my reality” kick in the balls he delivered to state workers resonates with people who have less and want more. They can’t get it, so you shouldn’t have it.

Had this been a negotiation or even a fair fight, I think the backlash would have been far less severe. It has been a long time since we’ve seen someone willing and able to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war like this. That’s why it was such a stunning sucker punch. However, Walker’s approach was “build populism and then do what you want” and now people are suffering major buyer’s remorse.

The whole reason for this recall is actually based on a kid’s joke:

“Would you like to lose 10 pounds instantly?”

“Sure.”

“Cut your head off.”

Only it’s not funny and people aren’t laughing.

Least of all this family man. Or liberal. Or both. Or neither.

My sign penis is bigger than your sign penis

Signs involving the recall of Scott Walker are nothing new out here in Cheeseland. Some conservatives would argue these signs were being printed as election results rolled in that night in November 2010. However, with the recall finally in full swing, I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon regarding the signs and their placement.

The “Recall Walker” signs have been in full bloom for months and range in color from green and white to blue and red. The bumper stickers are everywhere and are orange, white, blue and more. However, these are all about the size you’d expect: 11 x 17-ish yard signs and regular sized bumper stickers.

Pro-Walker supporters appeared to have fewer signs and fewer stickers, but for the most part, they were retreads of the signs he issued when he was running. The standard “Walker: Governor” signs dotted a few lawns out here, but they seemed to be outnumbered by the “Get rid of this asshole” plaintives.

About three weeks ago, I saw my first “mega-sign.” A farm on a main county road out here had this billboard-sized monstrosity strapped to a couple metal poles in his front yard. Later that week, a guy in town had another one that almost dwarfed his home, proclaiming “I STAND WITH SCOTT WALKER.”

These John Holmes-ian pieces of cardboard have started showing up with much more frequency in the past week. The number of pro-recall signs is still much, much higher, but the pro-Walker crowd appears to be playing the “bigger is better” angle.

Each side has the right to make its own show of strength. I’ve taken to watching Netflix and 30 for 30 reruns to avoid the Walker TV ads. Radio out here is particularly dicey, as his annoying voice just pops up on the air before you can switch it off. The only good thing about this election hell is that you get to watch random PACs go after Rick Santorum with the voracity of a starved pit bull. In any case, you want big signs, fine. You want tons of TV ads, go for it. The networks are happy to take your money.

However, when you go to the polls, your giant sign penis doesn’t give you any special privileges.

It will be one person, one vote.

Professor XXX

I spent 12 years in Catholic school and my entire life as the son of a teacher. Perhaps that’s why I never had the “Teacher wants to see me after school” porn fantasies that appear to populate the dreams of many other men.

As a professor who values the fact I get to work about half a year and earn more than my father did in his last year of work after 38 years in a factory, I never had the “Maybe you’d like to get me to rethink that F” fantasy either.

Still, if you’ve got “Hot for Teacher” on a constant loop in your head and you immediately search for “Teacher sex” on all those free porn sites, perhaps you should relocate to the Oxnard School District in California. Allegations levied against 31-year-old Stacie Halas, a science teacher at Richard B Haydock Intermediate School have led to her being placed on administrative leave while the district sorts things out.

According to several published reports, Halas had worked in pornography under the name Tiffany Six. Aside from several “masturbation style” videos, she performed in hardcore porn films, including one titled “Big Sausage Pizza.” While the district has yet to confirm all of this, the person responsible for filming many of her performances has outed her, shortly before he put her videos online behind a pay wall.

We are nothing if not an opportunistic culture…

As you might expect, this has created some serious handwringing among the good people in the district and has led to people wondering what this world is coming to. Their “mmm… mmm… mmph” approach and the media frenzy surrounding the allegations do little more than allow individuals to engage in moral superiority and faux outrage while quietly searching for her on Google.

Here are the main problems I have with how this has all shaken out:

- Stop saying the teacher was “moonlighting” as a porn star. It’s disingenuous at best and a flat out lie at worst. According to the guy responsible for filming her (if it’s even really her, which we haven’t fully established yet), most of this stuff was shot between 2005 and 2006 when Halas was working as an EMT. Moonlighting suggests that a) she was a teacher while she was also a porn star and b) this porn career is ongoing. Neither of which is true. Calling this activity “moonlighting” is like saying I am a professor who is moonlighting as a gas station attendant because I happened to work as one once.

- This great “moral turpitude” clause that everyone is yammering about needs to be applied universally to the “colleagues” who just “happened” to find her videos on the Web and then alerted administrators. We also need to apply it to the parents who found the videos and the parents of the kids who were able to locate the videos. In this strange little world we’ve created, finding porn online, viewing porn online and doing God knows what else to porn online doesn’t violate moral turpitude, but performing in porn does. Really? Also, have you looked around out there at all the porn? I mean, you could spend an entire week on a single free porn site and not watch half of the shit that’s up there. How is it, exactly, that these “colleagues” just “happened upon” the right site with her video? Hmm…

- We clearly need to invest in improved education and technology in our schools. No, not for the kids, but for the administrators. After being alerted by students (seventh and eighth graders, mind you) that they found the porn film with Halas, administrators did their own searches and were unable to find one scrap of evidence that this film or this actress existed. They were so convinced in their searches that they sent out official notice that the Halas-is-Six rumor was unfounded. Shortly after, several faculty members pulled the video up on their smartphones and showed the administrators, who were shocked. The reason the admin couldn’t find the video? The school district computers had blockers on them, thus restricting their access to porn sites. And these are the people in charge?

- Speaking of stupid things administrators are saying, here’s an amazingly naïve passage from the official post- “OK, we figured out how to find porn on our computers” letter:

“We are asking teachers to discourage the children from searching for and/or visiting these inappropriate sites. We ask that you be particularly vigilant over the next few days with respect to the Internet content being accessed by your child on his or her telephone or other Internet-ready devices.”

The three people in the district who haven’t found the movies yet will likely respect this request for all of about 2.3 seconds before Googling “Tracy Six” and “Big Sausage Pizza.” The quickest way to get people to do something is to tell them not to do it.

 

Quick: Don’t think of a pink elephant.

 

(Disclosure tangent: It dawned on me about half way through this that I was about to start defending someone I’d never met and actions I’d never seen. Thus, I scanned the Web for some deeper insight (stop laughing). I’m doing this for you at First Draft. It’s a dirty job but I’m committed to being an informed blogger… Anyway, I didn’t have access to the whole Tiffany Six back catalog, but what I saw in a couple small clips was enough to give me pause. Let’s be clear about one thing: This wasn’t “nude art pictures.” It wasn’t a “masturbation” thing, either. This was a movie in which the phrase “I want that big black cock in my fucking ass” was being bandied about at the frequency in which you’d hear “More coffee, please” at a diner. I’m not going to pretend for a minute that it would be easy to sit through a parent-teacher conference with her after what I saw. However, I’ve had awkward situations in which a student told me she was pregnant before breaking down in tears in my office, I’ve tried to have a casual conversation with a nun and I’ve had my parents once tell a date of mine that although I’m an only child “it wasn’t due to lack of trying.” If discomfort was my only measuring stick for what should and shouldn’t be allowed, I’d have gone insane years ago.)

Like it or not, pornography is not criminal. It’s not illegal for adults to buy it, own it or even perform in it. I don’t want to see Paris Hilton blowing some guy in what appears to be a room lit by night-vision goggles. I don’t know which Kardashian is in which fuck film, but I know I couldn’t care less about seeing them. However, I can if I want to and that’s what makes this country great: My decisions about what I do, see or enjoy don’t have to be the same things you do, see or enjoy.

I’ve viewed porn and I know plenty of other people who have as well. It’s hypocritical to suggest that consuming it is somehow OK, but being part of it isn’t OK. One of the main reasons I’ve never frequented a strip club (other than I hear the lunch buffets are subpar) is that I heard over the years from a number of former female students that instructors and students alike had frequented these places and often danced at them. The “I’m stripping to pay my way through college” myth? Yeah, it’s less mythological than one might think.

Even more, it’s stupid to think that only degenerates or the depraved ever flip to that X-rated channel or stop by that “book store” that has paper on all its windows. According to Forbes magazine’s most conservative estimate in 2001, porn generates several billion dollars a year. That’s a lot of money for something that no one ever buys or looks at.

What Halas might have done (again, probably it’s her, but let’s stick with the whole “innocent until proven guilty” thing), might offend some people, but it’s not illegal. How many teachers have a DUI, unpaid child support or outstanding speeding tickets? How many of them have engaged in a wild night, had promiscuous sex or done something else that would be “morally questionable” in the eyes of group of parents? We don’t know. The only reason we know about Halas is because her lapse in judgment (or however you want to view this) showed up online. Had she done this 10 or 20 years ago, the only way she’d gotten caught is if someone happened upon her film at a porn store.

If anything, I’d be interested to hear what Halas has to say about this. If you’re looking for a “teachable moment” (stop snickering), maybe she’s got it. If she is ashamed of her past, she could tell kids, “Look, here’s what happens when you do something you should think twice about. There are consequences and they will follow you. Think about that when you’re on Facebook.”

If she’s not ashamed, she could say, “Look, does this make me a worse teacher? I’m teaching science and no, I’m not hot for your kid or your husband. And no, I don’t really like big black cock up my ass, but it paid the rent.”

Either way, pretending that this is a first, a last or an only type of situation is naïve and stupid.

An open letter to Russ Feingold

Dear Russ,

I know I’m not the first to take on this quixotic task and I’m quite certain I won’t be the last. However, if your time as my senator has taught me anything, it’s that there is nothing wrong with trying something if you truly believe in it.

I spent part of last week perusing your book “While America Sleeps,” and for the first time in a long time, I actually didn’t mind thinking about politics. From the snippets I read online and in Barnes and Noble, the book was well-reasoned, logical and well thought out. It gave me just enough gossip to be light-hearted but focused more on the issues. It also talked about a topic that most people have stopped paying attention to, but probably need to take a second look at.

I then caught your interview with GQ. (Any man willing to do an interview while slurping a brandy old-fashioned is my kind of guy, by the way.) I was really amazed at some of your answers. You still maintain that Republicans and Democrats can be friends. You stand behind your choices, whether they were the bedrock of Democratic politics or veered into more Republican territory. You don’t apologize for voting against the Patriot Act while simultaneously being in favor of dropping a big honkin’ bomb on bin Laden. Your name remains on the McCain-Feingold Act, which was meant to try to do something about people who use big money to create a political imbalance in their favor.

You are smart. You are willing to listen. You are balanced in your approach to action. You actually listen.

In other words, you are everything our current governor is not.

It broke my heart to see the last line of that GQ interview regarding the likelihood that you’ll run for office sometime soon:

I won’t run for office again until I feel like it. And right now I don't feel like it. I've always been grateful for the enormous outpouring of support and affection that I've received here in the state, but I've never kidded myself that anybody is irreplaceable.

You’re right that no one is irreplaceable. You’re right that people love you. You’re right that a job is hard to do when you don’t feel like doing it. However, you have always done what is right, even if it means you have to hurt a little bit to do it. You’ve been true to yourself, but also true to the needs of this state.

You’re a far better man than I am, and I freely admit this. You knew going into the 2010 election that you were going to lose. The mood of the state, and the country, had changed. The Teawads had stormed the castle with the superhero costumes they made in special ed and their cans of spray cheese. A “vote the bastards out” vibe had hit, thanks to a crappy economy and the sense that liberals had just elected Dolemite to the presidency. When you lost (and MAN did you lose), you took it in stride and you kind of just walked away.

I can’t imagine doing that. I probably would have gone the “you’re not going to have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore” route. I probably would have gone on the talk-show circuit and criticized every move Ron Johnson made, from his stupid haircut to his inability to stay on message in a speech of more than three minutes.

I would have been hurt. I would have been pissed. I would have said “fuck y’all” a lot. I have a hard time believing that you don’t have just a little bit of this going on deep within the recesses of your soul. You’re human and this had to hurt. It’s probably why you don’t want to take another pass at politics right now.

You did a good job of not letting the pain show and not letting a flash of anger undermine your decades of service. I couldn’t do that.

In a much smaller and much less significant way, I found myself on the outs like that once. I was running to lead an organization that I believed in quite a bit. As the sitting VP of the group, I had what had traditionally been considered an inside track if I wanted it. I really didn’t want the job, but felt the obligation and thought I could do a good job of it. Instead, problems from administrations long gone came back to haunt the our board that year. Instead of pulling together, a few self-centered political opportunists took the chance to use those things our group had nothing to do with to attack the board and essentially attack me. They propped up a cardboard cutout, screamed about how I was a horribly bad candidate and beat me. About a year later, the cardboard cutout wilted in the rain, the problems persisted and I got a knock on the door, asking if I’d be interested in running for president again.

“Not if you tied my tongue to your muffler and drove me naked over a field of broken glass at 70 mph,” I told a stunned colleague. “I will NEVER take a leadership position in this shithole again.”

This is precisely why I would be a lousy politician and why you are a great one.

The state you love is in trouble. In that giant wash of “sticking it to the man” that took you out of office and gave us Senator Salad Bar, Wisconsin elected a greedy, selfish, idiotic fool. They elected the yin to your yang. The backlash, the party politics and their ability to drink the sand led normally sane Wisconsinites to put Scott Walker in office. This has finally gotten so bad that more than 1 million of these people, many of whom voted for him in the first place, have said, “We can’t tolerate four years of this.”

They got the signatures. They got a recall election going. They need a candidate.

With no disrespect to Kathy Falk or the other folks running, this state can’t get rid of Governor Deadeyes without you.

If I were you, I wouldn’t do it either. I’d be fine with a simpler life of teaching law at Marquette, hanging out with my family and quietly watching politicians run around like terriers with their fur on fire. It’s got to be a great gig to sit back and enjoy that brandy old-fashioned while quietly saying to yourself, “See? Not a lot of fun out there, is it?”

However, you need to keep one thing in mind: This idiot is your governor, too. As a citizen of this state, a taxpaying member of society as his party likes to say, you are represented by this pathetic food tube.

Most of us can only do so much. We signed the petition for change.

You, on the other hand, can be the petition.

Please run. Give us back our state.

Sincerely,

 

Doc

Brain droppings

On the road for another media convention. Here are the random bits and bites that have given me pause over the past couple days:

- With my brain clearly on autopilot, I managed to forget to pull my laptop out of my bag, thus setting off the “you are clearly a terrorist” red light on the scanner. Totally my fault, but  then the guy did the special “wipe” thing on my laptop, which somehow came back positive for something dangerous. Given the current condition of my computer, it sure as heck wasn’t a cleaning supply chemical that set it off. In any case, this meant the Full Monty: every piece of my stuff came out, every page of my book was flipped through, every one of my candy bars was scrutinized. And then, I got the “pat down.” I think this is clearly a misnomer. I was expecting the “cop show” pat down and instead got the “altar boy” treatment. Lot of rubbing, pressing and a few utterances of “now I’ll be moving to your buttocks.” It wasn’t unprofessional, but it was not exactly how I wanted to start my day.

- Flying in to Seattle, I had a layover in Minnesota. Of course, I had 10 minute to change planes, so I did the “lunge and press” approach to getting off the plane, grabbing everything I owned and racing as far as I could up the aisle  before other people got out of their seats. It’s a total dick move, and I understand this. I only try it when I’m desperate to make a connection. Otherwise, I let everyone one else off the plane first. In any case, I get off the plane, run to a monitor and scan the list, desperate to find my connection. Turns out, it’s not only at the same gate I just got out of, but it’s the SAME PLANE I JUST LEFT. When I asked the lady at the desk why I had to get off the plane if all I’m doing is turning around and getting back on the same plane, her answer was, “Well, it’s a different flight.” Uh… It’s the same plane, the same gate and I’m in the same seat. “Well, it’s a different crew and a different number,” she sniffed. “It’s different.”

- I got called to the podium for a “seating issue.” Turns out, I got moved from the window in the back to the exit row. When I got there, I was seated next to a woman who was clinically morbidly obese. She had to move the arm rest and was at least half into my seat. About five minutes before take off, a flight attendant came to her and told her that the law forbade anyone who required a belt extender from sitting in an exit row. They moved her out, which was kind of a spectacle and everyone was watching. I think it was the first time on a plane that I ever felt bad for someone other than me or a stewardess.

- I did not realize Seattle was built on the side of a mountain. The hotel is up a “steep” hill from the light rail stop. It was only three blocks and I’m in pretty good shape, but after one block, I seriously considered calling a cab and telling the driver, “Take me up to the top of the hill. Here’s $50.”

Drinking way too much for my own good. Would tell you more but it would be pointless. Sufficient to say that former students who now have expense accounts and the desire to either get back at you or honor you in some way lead to way too much liver damage for my own good.

More next week. Or when I sober up. Which ever comes first.

Doc

A reminder of what we can be

I spent my morning and afternoon dealing with the annual Wisconsin Newspaper Association convention in Madison. It was, of course, the only day it snowed in the past three weeks or so, which made for a hellish drive. I was meeting a group of newspaper kids there, who were apparently so concerned about my safety and my driving that they kept texting me every five minutes and demanding a response.

By the time I got there, I’d missed the keynote, which apparently was to say I saved an hour of sleep and prevented a brain aneurism. The guy noted that newspapers could be saved if they just acted more like Fox News.

Still, it was worth it. The kids got to meet folks from all around the state, rub elbows with some nice vendors and learn about various aspects of the business that go beyond our hinterland confines. They got a critique from one of the dudes associated with the state’s investigative journalism project and he was impressed with their work. They also picked up a couple awards, including one for being best overall in the state in the non-daily division.

(Side note: If you are at all interested in saving my soul, donate $7.50 to The Daily Cardinal Alumni Association, earmarking it for an entry into next year’s WNA Better Collegiate Newspaper Contest. The Badger Herald won everything, essentially by default, as the Cardinal is one of the only other dailies in the state. If I had to watch one more Hairball kid get an award simply for showing up, I might have regurgitated my lovely Lenten Friday veggie meal. Thanks.)

While picking through our lunch, a couple of the kids started talking about various things we’d done and the conversation wandered back to a national convention a few years back. It was the first one I’d done with this paper and for at least one kid, it was the first time she’d ever been on a plane or left the state.

They had a blast, got a good critique and really learned a ton. However, what they remember most is the Best of Show competition.

Prior to the convention, a few editors asked how people win the Best of Show at these things. I told them that they’d have to do an awesome job on a big issue. They’d have to pour in a ton of content, great visuals and really give people something amazing. They told me they wanted to give it a shot, so I broke the bank to add pages, pour color all over this thing and then produce a mega-issue. It took a ton of time, had a ton of problems and ended up being amazing, despite a few flaws. As Johnny Sain used to say, “No one wants to hear about the labor pains. They only want to see the baby.”

We entered the issue in the contest and found out that there were more than 300 entries overall, with a great many of them being in our sub-category. I also found out from the guy who was running the place that they would do the Top 10 in order to give people a fighting chance at some glory.

Eighth, I told myself. If we finish eighth, that would be amazing. It’s good enough to say we won something and yet not perfect, so we’ve got something to aim for next time. Eighth would work. Eighth would be awesome.

On the day of the award ceremony, the kids gathered for the event. One girl was so sick, she was bundled up in her winter wear, despite the sweltering temperatures in the ballroom. When I told her to go back to the room and get some rest, she refused: “I need to know if we won,” she rasped in between shudders and coughs.

I’m sure it was only about 20 minutes, but it seemed to take forever for them to get to our category. The awards were handed out from 10 to 1. When it hit eight and we weren’t announced, I was concerned. When I heard who did win eighth, I figured we were dead. Good paper, great adviser, long track record of winning stuff.

As they kept ticking off the winners and we kept not being announced, I started trying to figure out how to explain the outcome to the kids. Judging is random, your effort was good, the competition was tough… The statements I planned to use to soften the blow kept pouring into my brain.

After they announced the second-place paper, they looked at me with these terrified and yet hopeful eyes. It was like they wanted to believe it was their award and yet they knew it probably wasn’t.

I broke the tension as best I could.

“Well,” I told them, “this is going to go one of two ways for us…”

After more build up than is present in your average porn film, the MC announced the winner.

It was our paper.

The girls screamed and one of them just broke down sobbing. The sick kid was jumping up and down. They hugged each other and then poured on top of me with hugs. The editor, the only guy in the bunch, just sat there stunned. I told him to go get the award. He stayed put. I poked him. He wouldn’t move.

I finally said to him, “Get up there and get the goddamned thing before they think better of it and take it back!”

He ran up and grabbed the trophy. Everyone else got certificates. We got a golden cup. Oddly enough, I was thinking how great it would be to win a certificate because we could mount it on the wall. Where the hell would we put a cup?

We all ran out of the ballroom and started texting everyone back home. I’m sure we trended on Twitter for about three minutes.

We decided to get some lunch. The trophy came with us.

During lunch at a local Panera, the kids were arguing about whose suitcase would carry home the trophy. After a long debate, they gave it to one girl who had a hard plastic suitcase and usually dressed in sweat shirts. The clothing, they argued, would provide padding while the suitcase itself offered protection from the elements.

I built a shelf in the newsroom and the cup sits there, coming down for an occasional dusting and a fairly frequent “cuddle session” with one of the editors.

As the editors retold this story to the newer staffers today, they were still smiling. And then, the girl who got to carry the trophy home offered this:

“I think that will be the most memorable moment of my life, up until my wedding day.”

The girl who was sick on that trip responded, “Nah. It’ll be even better than my wedding.”

I can’t say that it will or won’t be better than their weddings, nor can I state that it was better than mine. (I think the Missus might kill me…) I don’t know if we’ll ever win something that will be better than that. Sure, best in state is great and I’m sure a best in the country would be amazing too.

However, this was the first one. It was that moment where they put themselves out there for the first time. They had no right to expect to win. The odds were so much against them.

They’d been told they attended a branch school, a weaker sister of a bigger campus. They were told they lacked the education, the experience, the talent of bigger papers throughout the country. They didn’t have the pedigree for this kind of thing.

Yet, they stood up and said, “This is who we are. This is what we do. Take it for what it’s worth.”

For that, they were rewarded with something that went far beyond a golden cup.

The Golden Ticket (and what it took to get it)

“You are out of your goddamned mind!”

Not exactly the support I had hoped for when explaining my plan for this Friday to The Missus.

About six weeks ago, a company that does massive estate sales posted early pictures as to what was going to be present at a sale that kicks off at 9 a.m. Friday. I had made it a policy to avoid estate sales after my last few escapades had yielded a ton of shit that costs a decent amount of money and was slow in turning around. Still, I’m always on the look out for a good bit of luck and some nice dishware for The Missus. It turns out she grew a fetish for a Depression-Era glassware known as jadeite. Turns out, Martha Stewart had just done a big spread on it and she loved it.

“If you see any of that out on your shopping trips, could you pick it up?” she asked in that sweet and hopeful way that says “I love you” and “If you want to keep doing this, here’s an excuse that won’t make me want to kill you.”

Of course, I knew nothing about it, but as an intellectual, I attacked the problem with the idea that knowledge gain would be best. I bought about six guidebooks on this stuff, dug around on the Internet and kept looking for it at estate sales and flea markets.

The shit was ridiculously expensive. When Martha likes something, so do collectors.

Thirty-five bucks for a fucking plate? With a crack in it? Oh well…

Some savvy shopping, good digging and some luck later, she had a cabinet full of light green bliss. Still, you can’t wave off a hunting instinct just because the hunt is over and people are full. There are worlds to conquer, dammit.

Thus, I found myself sorting through the pictures this company posted online.

What I came to realize early in this set of photos is that they were clearing out a hoarder’s home. The place was piled with shit. The thoughts of what might be crawling under those mounds of crap had me thinking, “No fucking way.”

Still, I thumbed through the thumbnails until I noticed a copy of an old Green Bay Packer program. Then another. Then another. Good stuff, but I could probably live without it.

Then, I found a picture that had my heart in my throat and my stomach in knots for about six weeks.

To the untrained eye, they were scraps of paper. To me, it was like unlocking the Ark of the Covenant.

---

The Bible talks about the man who finds a treasure in a field, so he goes and sells all he had and buys that field. When he returns, he rejoices over the treasure and what it has brought him.

This parable was swimming through my head as I quickly Googled some information that I intuitively knew. The image was as clear as a bell and right as rain. The four scraps of paper scattered in the middle of this image were ticket stubs from 1959. They had info about the Packers on them.

They were the first four games Vince Lombardi ever coached in Green Bay, all four wins.

I did a quick search to see how rare they were and what they were worth.

Only one had been found. The first game. Certified. At auction: more than $500.

A unique item in the purest sense of the word.

It was then became determined: I had to have them.

And thus, I revealed to my wife how I planned to get them: I’d camp out in my car overnight and be the first person in this house.

And this is how I find myself in the driveway of a stranger in Kaukauna, Wisconsin at 11:30 p.m., waiting eight hours for a chance at a piece of history.

Here’s the running diary. As I write this thing, I don’t even know how it will end as I'm writing it in mostly real time. Typos will be likely. Verbiage will be wild. Click on at your own risk.

A Mini-sota Post

 

To Mr. A, as I'm missing a trip to the Chicagoland area to spend a weekend teaching kids how to report, write and annoy the administrators at their schools. It's convention season, which means I'm running my ass off all over the Twin Cities, dodging people wearing some of the ugliest team colors ever conceived. (Seriously, who the hell looked at maroon and gold and said, "Sweet! Wait until we make polyester uniforms out of this for our MARCHING BAND!")

I wish I could be there, buddy. You are the older brother I never had, desperately wanted and always needed. Miss you more than you know and you are on my mind now more than ever.

I hope you have a great time with The Missus and The Midget. Make sure she gets all the cat-cat time she can handle. Don't let her eat too many ferret treats.

If I don't see you, have a happy birthday and treat your wife to all the love she deserves.

Doc.