The Wrath of Kon

Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

  • Rocktober

    It’s been a strange summer for baseball for me, and I thought that it was over back on the 19th when we saw the Dodgers. Colorado won, and the Rockies were doing well coming out of that, but my schedule got too weird to get in on any of the other games, and I figured that victory would be a nice high note to end on, and then the team would get blocked by the end of the year by the Padres or something.

    And it has been strange being a baseball fan here. First of all, I was not really that much of a baseball fan prior to moving here – I saw a couple of games, it was neat, but I didn’t know the difference between a foul tip and a strike. And when we moved to Colorado, most people asked me if Denver even had a major league team, and I found that among many locals, the Rockies were somewhat of an inside joke, something that took off with a flash about fifteen years ago, and then slowly took its place behind football, hockey, soccer, and basketball. Hell, the rodeo is bigger than football was back in Indiana.

    But I had an apartment a block from the stadium, I had a work-at-home/part-time gig that let me skip out for day games, and tickets were usually cheaper than going to a movie in New York. So I went whenever I could. And two things happened. First, I learned to really love baseball. I love the mathematical aspect of it, the statistics and numbers and team records and batting averages. I also love the subtleties behind the game. Football (as far as I see it) is this brute force game of conquest, of pushing and shoving and blocking. (The passing game is another story, though.) Basketball: endurance, and running back and forth; it’s basically a track and field event with a ball added. Hockey: I don’t even understand hockey. But everything in baseball is knowing how to gradually change your stance or your angle or your position in order to exploit a known issue with the other team. The difference between a strikeout and a home run is a millimeter’s difference in how you hold the bat. A split-second decision in fielding is the difference between the other team scoring two or three times in one hit versus turning a triple play. You have to be strong to belt one 500 feet, but a little dude (like Kaz Matsui) can easily dominate the offense based on his ability to read the other team and react. And if a guy like Prince Fielder, who makes me look like a damn anorexic, can dominate the game, it makes me feel closer to the game, even if I could never play at the company softball skill level.

    The other thing that happened is that the Rockies got good. They didn’t at first, but right around the time I started going, they started winning more games, and doing more impressive things on the field. They swept the Giants; they won two of three against the Red Sox at Boston. Then after a ton of losses, they swept the Mets. They swept the Yankees. They went into a slump, but swept the Brewers in one of the most lopsided set of games of the year. And as this picked up, I followed more games on the computer. I bought an AM radio to listen when I wasn’t there. I spent a lot of time reading up on players and opponents and history and the game itself. And I loved it even more.

    And then it got weird. The Rockies simply could not lose. They lost three pitchers and had to replace them with triple-A transplants or kids right off the boat from the Dominican Republic. Matt Holliday messed up his oblique muscle. Matsui strained a ligament. They brought up a catcher, a replacement for a replacement, that dorked up his leg early in his very first MLB start. But they kept winning. A four-game sweep against the Dodgers. A road trip where they swept the Padres, then swept the Dodgers again. Then two of three against the Diamondbacks. And that meant the Rockies were tied with San Diego for the wildcard. In a 13-inning game at Coors Field, the Rockies just barely squeaked by and got the spot. People were going absolutely apeshit here – some people were actually more interested in the Rockies than the Broncos. And then the Rockies beat Philly twice on the road, (which included a phenomenal grand slam by non-power-hitter Matsui) setting up a huge huge huge Saturday night game, which could advance the Rockies to the next level, where they’ve never been before.

    Anyway, I managed to get two tickets to the Saturday game by sheer luck. I bought them online before the wild card was decided, meaning I basically made a $150 bet that they’d finish. But they did, and I went to the box office and picked up my tickets on Friday. They’re different than the regular season tickets, printed on a golden-looking ticket blank. I even managed to get club seats, which meant we got to hang out in the fancy concourse and we had padded seats that were wider than the regular ones. Nice.

    The game started at 7:30, so we left at 6:00, and there were already masses of people everywhere. Notably absent were ticket scalpers, since it was a sold out game and nobody was parting with their seats. Everyone got a free Rockies towel to wave around. By the time we got to our seats, it was almost an hour before the game started, and over half of the seats were already full. That’s about how many people show up for the average ho-hum game during the season, and I knew the crowd would double. It was at least as crowded as when we saw the Yankees, an event that brought out droves of no-neck shitheads to boo the home team because their $200 million dollar roster was getting slaughtered by a $50 million dollar team. This time, it was a sea of purple and spinning towels.

    There were many changes this evening over all of the regular season games I saw. First, the NLDS logos were everywhere: on the grass, on the signs, on the souvenir cups you get with a Coke, and on many t-shirts, official and bootleg, in and on the audience. The advertisements were different; probably because of some MLB-brokered postseason deal. Some of the ads contradicted other ads in the stadium: a Budweiser next to a Coors; a Pepsi next to a Coke. Some were ads completely new to Coors Field: XM, Nike, TBS. They also showed some between-inning PSAs that we don’t usually get, like one about steroids. Ironically, another was for some “best season ever” thing that spotlighted Barry “will work for HGH” Bonds, which got many boos. The biggest change was the national anthem; a million Marines brought out this football field-sized flag and opened it up. Then there were a few shots of fireworks, and a million purple balloons were released into the sky. There was also a long, protracted introduction of all of the players and staff of each team. There were six umpires instead of four. Also, there was a video of John Elway saying “go Rockies” or some shit, and if Jesus would have showed up and told everyone there were keys under their seats for a free Hummer H1, it would have gotten less applause.

    One of the more moving things in the game (as if there was a shortage) was the first pitch. Mike Coolbaugh was a player turned batting coach for one of Colorado’s minor league teams. Last July, he was coaching at first base and was hit in the head with a line drive, which killed him. He left behind a pregnant wife and two young boys, three and five years old. The Rockies have gone the extra mile in helping out the Coolbaugh family, holding charity events, and opening up their own checkbooks. When Matt Holliday won the Clemente award, he basically signed the back of the check and gave it to Amanda Coolbaugh. The team also unanimously voted to give the family a full share of their playoff earnings (not the *team’s* earnings, but the *player’s* earnings, right out of their pockets), and guessing at how the stadium sold out, that should be a decent chunk of change. Anyway, young Josh and Jacob were cute, and got a standing ovation from 51,000 people without a dry eye among them. As I read on a constant basis about what total shitheads most professional athletes are these days, it always amazes me when the Rockies do something like this.

    We joked a lot about the plague of locusts or whatever that fucked with the pitchers in the Yankees-Indians game the night before. And a second later, these huge gale-force winds started blowing in, right into home plate. They whipped around a ton of garbage, and pitchers were able to put major heat on the ball, while the offense couldn’t hit anything out. And with the wind, the temp dropped fast. I was wearing a light jacket and thin t-shirt, and suddenly wanted a winter coat and gloves. Sarah went to the gift shop and bought a ton of stuff, and I guess everyone else did too, because the store looked like a grocery store the day before a blizzard. I put on a second shirt and a hooded sweatshirt, and that mostly kept me warm. I felt sorry for all of those Latin American ball players who never saw temps below the mid-80s in their lives.

    Then, in the middle of the second inning, all of the lights in all of the light clusters went out, one by one, and in about three seconds, the entire field was dark. I seem to remember this happening at a Cubs game recently, and of course Lou threw a fit, because that is a game-calling event. A minute later, a small subset of the field lights went on, like those emergency lights that go on when the power goes out. All of the other lights were on, though. A quick-thinking PA dude put on the Springsteen song “Dancing in the Dark”. Within 15 minutes, the lights were back on, and the game continued.

    And what a weird game. It was one of those pitching battles, where there were no hits or walks, and it just went back and forth, except every time Jimanez threw a pitch, there was a huge cheer. If it was two outs and a 1-1 count, everyone was on their feet like it was the final out of the final game of the World Series. Same goes for balls thrown against Rockies players. But nobody was making any progress, until the 5th inning, when the Rockies got in one. I was pretty sure the entire stadium was going to get rocked off of its foundation after what normally would be a pretty mediocre run. Then the Phillies got a single-shot homer via Victorino in the 7th to tie it up, and I anticipated the game going back and forth for another 19 innings.

    In the 8th, Holliday and Helton both flied out, and things started looking very dicey. Then Atkins got a single; Hawpe got a single, and Atkins got to third. The next up was pinch hitter Jeff Baker. Baker hadn’t played much this year, and then in a Cubs series, he got hit in the face by a fast pitch, which gave him a concussion and kept him out for a while. But for whatever reason, Hurdle sent him in, and the crowd went absolutely apeshit. And on the second pitch, Baker singled a grounder to right field, driving in Atkins, and riled up everyone like throwing bloody meat into a shark tank.

    At the end of the 8th, at least a hundred security people came out to the field, standing at each side three feet apart. In the 9th, Manny Corpas came to the mound, and people were yelling and screaming at each pitch, more than ever. Ryan Howard – strikeout. Aaron Rowand – a dribbled ground ball right at Helton on first base. Victorino, who had the only home run of the game, came to the plate It seems like four hours between each pitch. Strike. Foul. Ball. Then a grounder to Matsui at 2nd, throw to Todd at first – and that’s that.

    Everyone was going totally absolutely apeshit. Towels were everywhere. Brooms were all over. A huge barrage of fireworks were shooting out of the scoreboard. All of the Rockies charged the field. At least a dozen police motorcycles drove up onto the warning track, and there was a SWAT team truck below our section. The screen went to the cameras in the clubhouse, and there was an entire boatload of champagne being shot all over. LaTroy Hawkins was dancing like he was auditioning for a part in Breakin’ 3. We went downstairs and I took a lot of video with my camera. I looked out onto Blake street, and there were tens of thousands of people running around, yelling, with purple hair, purple face paint, brooms, signs, and spinning towels. We fought our way back downstairs, and Glen Hurdle was trying to give a speech on the monitors, but he looked like he just jumped into a swimming pool of bubbly. Outside, every car horn in a two mile radius was glued down. Every person we walked past wanted a high-five. Luckily, we were only a block away, and got inside with no worries.

    Now that would be a great end to my season, right? Almost – I got us tickets to see the second home game of the NLCS, against the Diamondbacks. Should be fun! (Especially if it snows first.)

    Anyway, pix here.

  • New car

    I bought a new car last night. And I don’t mean I bought a replacement for the Subaru – this is a second car. And I don’t mean I bought a new-to-me car off of craigslist with 100K on the odometer. I mean I bought a brand new car off the dealer lot with ten miles on the odometer. It’s both scary and neat.

    I got a 2008 Toyota Yaris liftback. It is black sand pearl, 4-speed automatic, AC, power locks/windows/mirrors, the cold-weather package (heavy duty heater, starter, daytime running lights), ABS, side curtain airbags, and the stock AM/FM/CD/MP3 stereo. The Yaris doesn’t have much latitude as far as options on vehicles sitting on lots, and pretty much all of the ones we found in Denver were either this build, or this build minus the power package. The reason for this car is that when I’m commuting in the Subaru, Sarah will be walking to work, but sometimes needs the car for an appointment or a meeting across town, or to get to the airport at 6AM, so a second car makes that much easier. And we don’t need a huge car with every luxury that we could drive across the country every other month and haul 500 miles of lumber and a fridge in the back. We just need an around-the-town deal, and the Yaris is that.

    The Yaris is tiny. It is very narrow, very short wheelbase, and very low to the ground. Despite this, the interior is very roomy. I have tons of headroom, even when I am in the rear seat, which is surprising. The car is also set up so the metal is very low around you, and there’s a lot of glass at eye level. The visibility is much better than the Subaru all around. The oddest thing is that the instruments are in a tiny pod in the middle of the dash, so there’s nothing in the dash in front of you. It actually opens up as a glove compartment, and the passenger has two gloveboxes. There are also flip-open drink holders in the dash, plus a center console and holders in the doors. Lots of places to put junk. The bad this is, when you’re driving at night, you instinctively look for the lit dash above the steering wheel, and it isn’t there. Very weird.

    There’s a 1.5L engine with 16 valves and some weird proprietary electronic valve breathing monitoring whatchamacallit that promises better performance. It’s not a bad car as far as pep goes, but it gets 44 MPG highway, which is the real benefit. The engine is really crammed into the front, and the hood is like a foot long, so they really shoehorned into there. There are a lot of other engineering feats, like all-electronic steering, and the throttle control is electronic. Looking in the engine bay, which is the size of a glovebox in an SUV, it’s a work of art to see what they crammed in there.

    Downsides – well, there’s no trunk. There is a hatch, but seriously, the Fiero has as much cargo space. The Subaru has a lot of power and convenience things that this car doesn’t (keyless entry, trip computer, tachometer, etc.) but you can’t expect that for the price point. The car drives well, but it’s small – it’s a lot ‘quicker’ as far as steering response and handling, so it’s different. It’s not as quiet on the highway, either. But for the around-the-town puttering, it’s excellent.

    The paperwork and finance side of things really had/has me nervous. We seriously talked about going to buy a car at noon yesterday, and I had the keys and was pulling off the dealer lot at 9:00. Part of that is that we just wanted something simple and cheap, and didn’t feel a need to test drive 400 cars and search the country for the exact trim level we wanted. Part is it was that you can very easily research this crap online. And part of it was that the Toyota internet sales people were very helpful and to the point, and it was a very no-bullshit experience. We narrowed it down to one dealer with two cars, identical except in color, we drove it around the block, and the paperwork started.

    Because Sarah financed the Subaru, the decision was that I’d finance this one. As a point of reference, the last car I owned was a 1978 VW Rabbit with a dented in side, covered in rust, and I dumped it for $100 when I moved in 1999. I did lease a two-year-old car (no thanks to Evergreen Ford in Issaquah), but I’ve never bought a new car. But the guy plugged in my numbers, and my credit score stunned me. I went through college dealing with creditors and going into credit card debt, and then spent years after trying to pull together my debt. Prior to the car purchase, I had $12 in total debt on my report, and a credit score in the highest tier, which meant I could have picked any car off the lot if I wanted to. But I took the cheapest one, and after saying no a thousand times to the finance person, I got out of there for about $15,000 damage.

    The Toyota guys were very nice though, and it was almost an in-and-out deal, with no real hitch. But seriously, buying something that big and then taking out a brand new car with almost nothing on the odometer was very daunting. I still can’t believe I did. The rub though is that I’m not the one driving it – I will be putting the miles on the Outback starting Monday. But the Subaru gets 30 MPG highway, so that isn’t a huge punch to the nuts.

    As an aside, with this Yaris, why would anyone buy a hybrid? This seriously has as much space as a Prius, but costs half as much. It gets about 5 MPG less, but is also classified as an ultra-low emission vehicle. It doesn’t have a hybrid badge on the side, so you can’t brag to people about how you’re saving the universe. But it also doesn’t have eleventy-million parts and pieces and components and batteries and everything else that will break, and that cost both money and environmental erosion to produce. I should make some “My car was cheaper than your Prius (and gets close to the same mileage)” stickers, and start selling them on the Yaris message boards.

    OK, gotta add a car to the insurance, get a spot in the parking garage, then go for a nice drive. Did I mention this has an Aux jack for your MP3 player? That’s basically the only feature I really need.

  • On the ranch

    The zine is out, and available at lulu. You probably already know the details and are sick of hearing about it, but here’s more: This issue’s theme is “Weird, Paranoid, Insane”, and features 23 stories by 15 writers. I am very excited, because #12 has more published authors than ever; I also have a lot of solid work from some newcomers. And don’t worry, there’s plenty of writing from the usual gang of slobs that have contributed in previous issues. Authors include Grant Bailie, Keith Buckley, Tony Byrer, Joshua Citrak, Kurt Eisenlohr, Rebel Star Hobson, Stephen Huffman, Jon Konrath, R. Lee, Erin O’Brien, John Sheppard, Joseph Suglia, Todd Taylor, and Richard K. Weems. The stories range from tales of deranged relatives to secret coalitions to battle-maddened ‘Nam vets who can’t shop in Kroger without seeing VC behind every freezer cabinet, to a still-alive Richard Nixon snorting coke and listening to Dokken. Something for everyone. We created two video trailers for the book. (Yes, apparently books can now have trailers.) The first is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w83ZgawVDF4 and the second one is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWEoSBZVBHUb – The second trailer was done by Matthew Pazzol, who also did the cover and interior art for the book. The book is now available at lulu.com (http://www.lulu.com/content/1151437) and will be available in about six weeks at Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, and other fine online booksellers. It’s $14.95 + s/h. The book is 236 pages, and is 6×9″ with a very cool color glossy cover. The isbn is 978-0-6151-6314-7. Lulu has a free preview containing the first 20 or so pages that you can read online. Also check out http://ParagraphLine.com, where you can download e-books of all previous issues for free, get information on submitting your work, and read news on Paragraph Line Books, the publishing company that I started with fellow author John Sheppard to put out AITPL and other books. As always, any links or mentions to the new issue out on the internets would be greatly appreciated. Since we’re not affiliated with any academic or corporate system, word of mouth is a godsend.

    —

    It’s been a busy week. On Tuesday morning, I woke up early, packed the car, and drove south on I-25, to my land. I hit the morning rush hour, but found it wasn’t terrible – it was possible to keep a good 50 or 60 going without touching the brakes. This will be my new morning commute, so it was good to time things. It was also nice to try out this whole podcast thing, by listening to Talking Metal, probably my favorite podcast as of late. I’ve got a fantasy baseball podcast on the iPod that’s okay, considering I just want news and not fantasy baseball stuff. Anyway, it passes the time, and within a half hour, I hit the big open mesa south of town, and got it up past 75 and on cruise.

    This trip was more than just a look-see – I had in the back of the Subaru a set of three Colorado Blue Pine trees, each about a foot tall, in plastic pots. I also had a 50-pound bag of peat/manure mixture, some organic pesticide stuff, a shovel, and every large plastic container I could find, filled with about five gallons of water. i know three trees is not some huge undertaking, but the journey was more about timing the drive, and timing how long it would take me to haul out all of this shit and dig the holes in the ground. I also needed to do something to cap the end of my summer, before I got back to driving a desk for a living. And seeing something other than the parking lot across the street would be good for the soul.

    I drove past the Air Force academy and saw a pair of Schweizer 2-33 gliders, one making his approach, and the other under tow, trying to get as much altitude as possible. (I have no idea how they fly at this altitude, with the thin air.) Then I cruised past Colorado City and its religious freakies, and Pueblo, and it’s beaten old factories. By 10:00, I got to Walsenberg, a tiny little town that sat at the intersection of 160. The biggest thing around was a gas station/truck stop, which happens to be the first place we ever filled up the Subaru. I took on a full tank of gas, then bought three gallons of water, and got a cheeseburger combo at the built-in micro-A&W. It was only ten and I wasn’t in the mood for burgers, but this would be the last stop before my land, and I’m a dozen miles from San Luis; their biggest eatery is a Checker station with a candybar shelf. Burgers it is.

    The 160 drive is the roughest part of the trip, because the roads wind around tight mountain curves, and also raise and then drop about a half-mile above the mile-high altitudes. It’s all dual-lane stuff, and you’re always battling to pass a big rig hauling something that looks like a John Deere farm implement invented to mine the surface of Mars. Most of the terrain is reddish-brown, and you can occasionally see a bit of barbed wire surrounding a hundred acres and a hundred cattle, but a lot of it is overgrown scrub. The western haul is 47 miles according to the map, and you’re actually covering half that, because of the curves. Add in a transmission that keeps trying to jump down a gear because of the hills, and it took me about an hour until the speed limit dropped, and I hit the next town.

    Fort Garland isn’t much, maybe the size of a couple of city blocks, and a diner or two, along with a museum and some gas stations. But it was also the intersection of 159 and 160, and 159 south was the home stretch. I drove south of town, and into the strange area where half of the land was scrub brush and desert, the place where the Air Force would drop bombs in mock combat drills. The other half was irrigated, green and glistening with huge agrarian machinery that pumped water through crops. Actually, a lot of the green had been mowed down by huge International Harvesters and baled into stacks of bright yellow hay. But it always strikes me as odd to look to the left and see nothing but loamy dirt, but to the right is this bright chlorophyll paradise. And don’t forget that the Sangre De Christo mountains are on either side of the valley.

    After a dozen miles, I hit San Luis, the oldest city in Colorado. San Luis is pretty beat – most shopping malls are bigger, and even during the day, have larger populations. There are a few token attempts at being pretty for the tourists, the “come again” signs, the signs of the cross display and the old mission-style church high on a hill. By the time you slow down to 25 to match the speed limit, it’s time to get back to speed again, and the town’s done.

    159 dumps out of San Luis going west, and then curves back south again, making its final run into New Mexico. My land is three miles south of there, and I always forget that they put in this recreation center since I bought the place, this pond about a quarter-mile square, where people fly fish. It’s so odd to see a body of water there, but nice. I start scanning for the county roads, and fall back to my training as a bicyclist in the Indiana cornfields, counting a mile per road on the grid. A big farm’s on the right, all green, maybe parsley. Then some busted-up house and barn buildings that are vacant, that look like they burned down. A mile south, I recognize the turn-off, County Road K. (For Konrath.) I hang a left, stop the car, and get out for pictures.

    There are two roads from the highway to get to my property. First is CR. K, which is two dirt strips through a bunch of weeds, heading west. I get in the Subaru and drive west on that. It’s not a hard drive, but little weeds ping and snap on the undercarriage. Then, a quarter mile up, is the access road that goes in another quarter mile to a cul-de-sac. First, I drive west a mile, to the next big road on the grid. There’s an unnamed dirt road, but just past it is an eroded river bank, or maybe a farmer’s irrigation ditch. There’s only a tenth as much water as the banks would suggest, but it’s water! It’s like hiking Mt. Everest and finding a Ramada Inn halfway up, very unbelievable to me.

    I back up, go down to the access road, and it is almost completely covered in flowers and weeds, so much that I could barely see it until I spied the ditches on either side. They dug out that road in late 2001 maybe, and I don’t think it’s been touched since. So I drove to the cul-de-sac and did a few donuts in the Subaru, to etch out some of the dirt underneath all of the tumbleweed.

    Everything was the same as it was in March. I started this pile of stones then, anything bigger than a pack of matches I found while walking around the place. And the surveyor’s plastic stakes were still in. Most importantly, there wasn’t a ton of dumped trash. And no rabbits, deer, or horses. I started unloading the car, and looked for a place to start. There’s a 30-foot easement on each side, for the power company and whatnot. And I will eventually have my own little driveway coming out 45 degrees or whatever from the circle. And the best place to block with a treeline is north. So a pace is three feet, and I started making my marks.

    Planting trees is a pain in the ass, but it’s also cathartic. I had to dig holes, water, put in peat, water, put in trees, put in driwater, put in peat, water, cover with dirt, water, spray with the pesticide. The ground was very clay-y, heavy with a recent rain, and I had trouble hiking around, because I’ve got this busted knee, and every surface is uneven from the ground and plants. But I finished in no time, and once the plants were in, I realized I had about an hour invested in the project.

    (For those of you unfamiliar with DriWater, it’s like 99% water and 1% some inert ingredient that makes it a consistency of thick jello. When exposed to soil and the soil gets dry, the DriWater starts to melt and waters the soil. When the soil is wet or when the DriWater freezes, it stops melting. It comes in a biodegradable carton, like a carton of milk. You cut off the bottom, bury the carton against the root, and it melts and keeps things watered for up to three months. Very handy for when you’re planting trees in the middle of nowhere.)

    I collected more stones – I have this dream that by the time I get the property cleared up, I will have a pile of stones big enough to make a driveway, although I realize that may take 500 years. I also watered the trees and sprayed on more of the bug stuff. And then I noticed a pain in my wrists, and realized that the bug stuff, or maybe some weed I touched, had caused my inner arms to burst out in red welts. My scalp and neck were also itchy, like I was being attacked by tiny bugs. So I packed up, doused the affected areas with water and then with purell, and decided that maybe it was time to get the fuck out of there.

    The arm thing went away, and I have no idea what it was. Maybe heat rash. The pesticide only contained egg whites, cayenne pepper, and some other minor stuff. The neck/scalp thing – sunburn. I was very, very red by the time I got home. Much solarcaine was applied.

    I’m back. Got the car washed in and out yesterday, then went to my last baseball game of the year – the Dodgers. It was a real nail-biter, too – went back and forth many times, then Brad Hawpe got a 2-run homer at the last minute to put over the Rockies. I forgot my radio, didn’t bring my binocs, and only took a few pictures. But it was awesome. I also like that pitcher Josh Fogg has a Foghat song for his walkup song. As we speak, the day game is 6-0 rockies in the 4th, so I expect good things to happen there. I will miss going to games. Maybe I could catch one more, and there’s a small chance that they will make playoffs, but then the tickets will be too expensive.

    OK, gotta go get shit done.

  • Screams and whispers

    First of all, I’ll get all of the zine stuff out of the way:

    I am waiting for a proof to arrive (early next week?) and then it will be live and you will be seeing much more spamification here telling you why you’re an idiot if you don’t buy a copy. I have the first proof (no ISBN) sitting on my desk and it is easily the best issue yet. It looks incredible, and has more good stuff from more new people and more published writers. Anyway, go here for more info.

    —

    The weather’s shifting fast, and it’s doing weird things to my head. First, it’s literally doing weird things, because I have some allergy or allergy-like headaches and congestion. I took an Allegra today, which means I trade the headaches for this feverish, mindless jittery feeling all day. But the weather’s been odd; it was cracking the 90s one day, and the next is was barely at 50. It’s been hot for a while, so the sudden warp in the weather is pretty weird. And I swear there is some correlation in these pressure changes or temp snaps that force my brain to dial up memories from some point in the past when the same thing happened. And it’s not memories, like I’m reminiscing about a long-lost restaurant or a girlfriend that never was. It’s like I just feel the essence of that time, and then in order to somehow quantify that, a few brief memories slip in.

    Case in point: on Friday, it was lunchtime, and Sarah had the car, and all of the lunchmeat in the house was green. I hit F12 to see the weather on my Mac Dashboard, and it was 59, so I grabbed a light jacket, an iPod, and started walking south. For whatever reason, the temperature or change in barometic pressure or something reminded me of the band Anacrusis, so I dialed up their album Screams and Whispers on my little white music box.

    Anacrusis is either a minor historical footnote or an inside joke to most of the metal community. And I don’t even consider myself a member of the metal community anymore. But back in the early 90s, as thrash metal gave way to Death Metal and then the industry or the bands or the fans (or all three, since usually the same people had bands, zines, and basement record labels) suddenly realized that every band out there continuing to release the same exact Sepultura record was not a sustainable plan, so labels tried to branch out with all of these fusion ideas: death/industrial, death/hardcore, rap/metal, thrash/gothic, whatever. And Anacrusis fell into that slot on the Metal Blade lineup for two albums. The St. Louis-based four-piece took a thrash approach and tried to mix in some prog-rock influence, like Fate’s Warning or Queensryche or whatever. The good news is that all of the fans into this album thought it was completely over-the-top. The bad news was that there were about eight fans of the album, and after their 1993 album, they fell off the face of the earth.

    Now back when I was doing Xenocide, I was getting a lot of record label demos and advance copies. (I was also getting record reviews from a future Al-Quaeda member, but that’s another story.) Marco at Metal Blade fed me a lot of tapes, and for whatever reason, this tape ended up in the walkman quite a bit. In the spring of ’93, I was carless, and walked everywhere. And for whatever reason, I have this really distinct fragment of a memory of walking to the grocery store or mall or laundromat, and I was listening to this tape. Every day, I walked at least a mile to work, to shop, to get out of my tiny cell and clear my head. And that album, that music brings me right back there. The album itself is not that memorable; I couldn’t name a single song on it, and there were no big breakthrough hits or whatever. It’s not the kind of album that you buy because it’s got that “Hm Hm Hiiim” song on it. It’s very ambient in that aspect, very background to me. Maybe that’s why it stuck with me.

    And what’s weird is that when this happens, I don’t think about the girl I was dating then, or my job that I was working day-and-night, or the classes I skipped, or anything else. It’s just that walk, just south of 3rd Street, cutting through the yards and church parking lot to get to the Eastgate Plaza.

    Anyway. My typing ability is rapidly declining. I was going to mention that I took a tour of Coors field last Wednesday. I was the only one there, so my $7 got me a personal tour. Photos are here. It was interesting, especially when I actually got to walk across the field on the warning track, a dozen feet from home plate, and then into the dugout. It’s a lot less glamorous than I’d thought; I mean, every single one of these guys make at least five times as much as I do, a few of them a hundred times as much, and they’ve got a wooden bench to sit on that’s about as nice as one a bum sleeps on in a public park. I don’t know why, but I thought they’d at least get some kind of Herman Miller shit in there, or air-conditioned ass pads. Still, very interesting.

    OK, time for lunch.

  • The Plot Against the High Castle

    I just finished reading Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America yesterday. When I saw a ton of hipster types reading it on the subways a few years ago, I assumed it was some kind of anti-Bush screed. (And by some of the reviews on Amazon, a lot of people who read it did the same.) But it’s not, and it’s a nice little alternate history novel that involves a big twist or two going into WW2.

    I’m a big fan of these sorts of alternate history plots, especially when it’s World War 2. I just re-read Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle a few weeks ago, and after a dozen or two google searches, found Roth’s book and decided I should check it out. Other similarly themed books would include Fatherland by Robert Harris, and maybe Ira Levin’s The Boys From Brazil, both of which I enjoyed. And there’s the PS3 game Resistance: Fall of Man, which takes the jagged alt-future and mixes it with a healthy dose of zombie-like beasts set out to infect and destroy the earth. Each of these books makes what we know as historic timeline turn into a different history by the change of a small event in the past, like someone not winning an election, or a war’s winner and loser flip-flopping. It’s always interesting to play the “what if” and read a story that starts with a stock set of characters and then switch it all up until you’ve got Josef Mengele running the research division of Procter and Gamble in the 1950s.

    TPAA takes a softer touch with the changes, compared to other books anyway. The US doesn’t get involved in WW2, and a land that is becoming more isolationist and worried about fixing domestic issues before international voting in Charles Lindberg as the next American President, defeating FDR in 1940. He then signs peace accords with Hitler, and on the surface, shrugging off the thought of going to war. But many social programs are started that seem to target Jews, relocating them to remote rural areas to break up the strongly Jewish enclaves in large cities, and (voluntarily) sending off young Jewish kids to live in the countryside with farmers for the summer, and maybe teaching them to stray from their family beliefs. This quickly escalates into massive anti-Semitism riots and general chaos, with families fleeing to Canada, young men enlisting in the British army via Montreal to fight in France, and crews of Jewish vigilante police groups erupting in violence with the national guard and other non-Jewish vigilante groups.

    Roth chose to write the book from the viewpoint of a young Jewish boy (also named Philip Roth) living in New Jersey, and he details the conflict in terms of this boy’s family, neighborhood, and apartment building. It’s interesting, because the cheap way to go would be to have these two-dimensional stormtroopers come in and lay waste to the high and mighty Jewish people that did nothing wrong and were entirely noble. But he spends time blurring the lines a bit, showing people within the family as not being entirely perfect. His dad is completely enamored by every word put across the airwaves by blowhard gossiper Walter Winchel (sort of the Jewish Perez Hilton of the 1940s.) The dad goes on these huge tirades and believes every word of Winchel’s reports; just saying the word “Lindberg” around him makes him blow a gasket. Philip’s brother Sandy enters the program to work on a farm in Kentucky, while his cousin Alvin joins the Canadian army, gets his leg blown off in France, and later ends up a low-level mafia henchman. His aunt marries a Rabbi that is a confidant of the Lindberg political machine; the downstairs neighbors get sent off to the deep south in the relocation program.

    It was a real page-turner, although I thought he didn’t dive too deep in the alt history, and the ending slapped together far too quickly. Pretty much every loose thread is pulled back together at the end of WW2 to the actual history, with few explanations as to how that would happen. Much more of the book had to do with domestic policies and the slight changes among the population. For example, the war in Europe is mentioned, but hardly detailed. The Japanese conflict is only mentioned once or twice. If you’re looking for detailed specifications of what kind of jet bombers the Luftwaffe built with no allied bombers mucking up their factories, that kind of thing isn’t there. There are also strange “factual” errors, like that if Hitler and pals went unchecked for an extra few years and the US had no great military buildup, it’s unlikely the Third Reich would have still fallen in 1945. This book’s much more focused on how the already existing anti-semitism in the 1940s could have exploded if the political situation went south, and it does do a good job of twisting together existing political figures into the fabric of the story. That said, I found Roth’s writing itself to be somewhat clunky and tangled in places. There were more than a few times where I read something and had to say “wait, they’re in Kentucky now?” and had to backtrack and read forward and search to find the tiny reference he made to some huge plot device.

    What’s weird to me is that if you research Lindberg or the anti-war far right movement (which has been forgotten by history), you see that a lot of the reasons they had for staying out of WW2 were the same reasons people now state for staying/getting out of Iraq. Read this speech he gave in 1941, and it’s just odd to think that he’s on the completely opposite side of the political spectrum from people giving the same speech today. And with that in mind, back up to the thing I said about people who reviewed the book saying “OMG BUSH PWNED!” – did they even read the book?

    Anyway, worth checking out, but go with the PKD for a better-written book, or Fatherland for a more technical one.

  • Summer is over

    Well, summer’s over. I just accepted an offer on a full-time job, which puts the kibosh on sitting around in my underwear writing unpublishable fiction and walking across the street for every baseball game I can afford. For the sake of not getting fired, I won’t mention where I’ll be working, but drop a line if it’s really bugging you. It’s a techwriter position, and everyone seems nice and the money’s good, so I’m excited to get started. (My first day is 9/24).

    It’s weird going into this. My first instinct would be to stay home and do nothing, and giving up that freedom isn’t as easy as I’d thought. But I still have this bug in the back of my head that’s used to checking my Bank of America account a couple of times a day, and when there’s not money going into it on a regular basis, that makes me worry. Ditto that for the 401K and IRA. I interviewed at a few other places and I think this is a perfect offer and salary, but I still felt a little hesitant to accept the offer. I never felt like this before, but I think every time in the past I was given a job offer, I was living hand-to-mouth and needed to keep the paychecks coming to keep a roof over my head. Now I need to weigh the options a little more, and that nagged at me. But in the end, I took the job.

    I am not really looking forward to a half-hour commute. And that’s odd, because I have a new car with no problems and good gas mileage, and I have the built-in iPod adapter and an iPod that currently holds 19.1 continuous days of audio. I also have the jitters about what my schedule will be, how I will need to dress (not in my underwear, probably), how I will read my email now that I have all of it coming straight to my Mac, and a bunch of other odd minor things that will probably sort themselves out in the first week with no effort. The big one is that I am not sure what this does to my writing schedule. I currently have my whole day free, and I’m getting zero done, so what happens when you add 8 or 10 hours of work plus an hour of commute? Sarah did point out, however, that the most productive period of the last year was when I started waking up two hours early, using my full spectrum light, and writing before work. So maybe some structure will kick me in the ass a bit.

    Unrelated #1: Go to ParagraphLine.com – I touched up the design, colors, logo, and have been nipping away at the text. The next issue is very very close – I just need the ISBN and it will be ready. In the past when I bought an ISBN, it was from Lulu’s block of numbers, which means it was instant. This time, I registered as owner, which means a bunch of paperwork and a delay. Anyway, soon.

    Unrelated #2: I got my new camera (Canon PowerShot A570IS) and it is pretty awesome. It’s very small and fits in my pocket, but it has a 4x optical zoom, and the digital zoom (x16) is actually pretty damn smooth. The camera has some image stabilization junk, like camcorders, so it’s easier to take steady shots at long distances. It also has built-in stitching support for panoramas, and the stitch software on the Mac can even make QuickTime VR movies very easily. There are a million focus and light adjustments on the camera that I will never understand, and a display that shows far too much information. It also runs on 2xAA batteries, so no worries when I run out on vacation. And it has so many small touches that make it nice, like how a shutter door closes over the lens when you turn it off, so it doesn’t get smudged or need a lens cap (like my last camera.) And it fits in my pocket!

    And the perfect test of the camera – tonight the Rockies play the Padres, and I will be there, new camera in hand (or in pocket). But first, a million things to do here on the home front…

  • Broken cameras and small towns

    I went to the Rockies-Giants game yesterday, but there’s not much to mention. Barry Bonds did not play, but I did see a number of people with homemade asterisk shirts, which was cool. It was hotter than hell on earth, and I was sitting in the second row of section 106, which is on the ground, right behind the right fielder. There was no shade whatsoever, and although the view was different than usual and very close to Brad Hawpe, you can’t really see pitches or what the hitter’s doing. I did, however, have this crazy fan next to me who was yelling at the top of his lungs at each play. He was heckling the pitcher right as he slipped in the third and allowed Jeff Francis to hit a double and start off a seven-run bitch-slapping from which the Giants never recovered.

    The worst part of it is that my fucking camera broke. It may have happened on the way back from Indiana, I’m not sure. It let me sporadically take a picture or two, but when you shake it, you can hear a part rattling around. I’ve hated this camera ever since I got it in 2005, but it’s taken some decent pictures. It has also been all over the place with me: Hawaii, Vegas, Berlin, Amsterdam, Alaska, and a bunch of states in between. But it’s also one of those mini-pseudo-SLR sized cameras, which doesn’t fit in a bag or a pocket well. And it is horrible as far as low-light situations. The internal battery is also dead, so if I take out the AAs for more than a minute, it forgets the date and all of my settings. So I jumped online last night and bought a Canon PowerShot A570IS. It’s a lot smaller, more pixels, also uses AAs, but uses SD, so I had to get another card. (Anyone in the market for a 1G xD card?) It also has image stabilization, which might be cool or might just be a gimmick. Anyway, I hope to have it for Friday’s game against the Padres.

    If you’re wondering about the zine, it’s getting there. The cover and the interior are done; I just bought the ISBN and I have to wait 3 or 4 business days for them to get back to me with the actual number, then I order a proof. The art is all in and looks awesome – each story has a title page that has fucked up art on it, and the cover is awesome, too. Anyway, stay tuned on that.

    I just finished reading Population: 485 by Michael Perry. It’s the tale of a writer who lives in a tiny farm town in Wisconsin, so it’s fitting that I bought it in Milwaukee at this weird planned community slash mall that’s designed like a tiny town, except in the EPCOT center. Anyway, Perry’s story is interlaced with his duty as a volunteer fireman for the town’s emergency services. There are two things going on here: one is the macho ER adrenaline junkie stories of fire and death, which is interesting. The other is an attempt to take the small-town mix of deer-hunting, Packers, and pickup trucks and validate it somehow.

    I thought about this a lot, since I read this book right after spending some time in my old childhood home town of Edwardsburg, Michigan. Edwardsburg was maybe pushing a thousand people when I lived there in the 70s, maybe less than that. There was a lot more fishing than hunting, due to all of the lakes. And the main strip of downtown was probably bigger, although they didn’t get their first fast-food restaurant until maybe the late 90s. Edwardsburg was also close enough to Elkhart and South Bend that people could survive without a Kroger or a mall or a movie theater, since they could jump in a car and drive a few minutes south. But the village always had a certain feel to me, a place where the tallest building was an abandoned feed mill, and even if there were only a few hundred people in the high school, they still had three strings of football teams.

    Perry spent a lot of time trying to justify the life of his small town to the folks on the coasts that think that the great red plain is cultureless and lifeless. I appreciate that he went this way with it, because so many books in this space tend to be demeaning, or look down at rural culture from an ivory tower and frame it in such a way that the NPR crowd can look at it and moan about how horrible red states are. Perry did an honest job of describing the small-towners, and it made for a good read. The ending got a little weird, and the death and injury angle also got a little overwhelming, but I still liked it overall.

    I have a million zine-related tasks to pull together, and I just can’t get rolling. Maybe I need more caffeine.

  • College smell

    If I had to pick a smell to describe my first week of college, it would probably be bleach. Not straight-up chlorine though – that crystallized blue powder stuff that’s in a blue box and you pour into the machine, regardless of color. The cheap cardboard box split apart when I pushed my thumb into the spout thingee, and I had to pour the remaining powder into a bag. For weeks, the only thing I could smell was the pleasant chemical odor of a laundry room, and that’s the smell that always transports me back.

    18 years ago, I loaded my crap into my dad’s truck and we drove south to my new home. The whole back-to-school thing always held a certain allure to me: brand new bluer than blue Wrangler jeans, the new Trapper Keeper, a collection of pens, pencils, erasers, and whatever else I could con my mom into getting me at G.L. Perry. Later, after years of the same classroom, the same teacher, and the same 30 like-aged kids, I got to pick classes, and see new people as the periods progressed in the day. Later, I looked forward to the new crop of freshmen, and more specifically the new crop of freshwomen, hoping maybe one of them wouldn’t think I was a doofus. (No dice. And this was before being a doofus was cool. Dressing like Beck back then would certainly get your ass kicked.)

    But college was an entirely different beast. First, my parents generally didn’t give a shit about what I did or didn’t have for school after about the fifth or sixth grade. But suddenly, it was like they were sending me off to war. They read checklists and compared notes with other parents, and actually studied those stupid lists that dorms sent containing what you might or might not need. I got a microwave and a little fridge. All types of foodstuffs and laundry supplies and showering equipment and personal care products got socked away, like I was planning a voyage to the New World in a leaky boat.

    So I had all of these gadgets and supplies. And don’t get me wrong, these were not all-out kits designed to last me forever. When I say personal care products, I mean a three-pack of Dial, a bottle of Prell, and a tube of Crest, not the complete Bliss for Men catalog. And a lot of it was cool, but I also found that I didn’t need a lot of it, and could have used other stuff more. For example, I didn’t need food, because I lived in the dorms, and we had a meal plan. I probably should have brought a TV. I guess a computer cost more than a semester of tuition back then, so that would be too much. Also asking mom to pack the 100-count thing of Trojans would not have been a great idea. (Actually, buying the 100-pack would have guaranteed that I never got laid, ever, and that everyone else on my floor would scamper over when the third base coach was waving them in so they could “borrow” one. Not that you’d want the borrowed condom back. I mean, unless you’re into that sort of thing, and there’s nothing wrong with that I guess.)

    The big thing that made those first few weeks magic was that everything was completely new. Not only had I always lived under the reins of a parent, but that also sets a precedent for the general paradigm of your life. You wake up in your parents’ house; you go to school; you come home for a minute; you go to a part-time job; you sleep at your parents house; repeat for four years. When I got to college, there was no structure, no predefined pattern. You stayed up all night, you got up super early, you had cereal for dinner, you went to a girl’s place to “study”, whatever. It seems trivial to think about it, but it was like throwing a bunch of Amish into a battle in Vietnam.

    It’s no secret that I completely fucked up on this structure shift. (Probably the only thing beneficial that came out of this was that I hunted down a copy of _Slaughterhouse 5_ from the main library, because someone told me I would dig it, and I read the whole thing in a night and planted a little seed in my brain to come back later and write.) But the first few weeks of it were pure magic: going for walks at midnight after studying, hanging out in other peoples’ dorms, sitting in the grass outside of the union reading. And everyone was new, different. It was commonplace to get in an elevator and ask someone else their major or their hometown. I can’t imagine doing that in real life, but in the first month I met people from hundreds of cities. There were lots of people from Indianapolis, but I’d meet freshmen from North Manchester and South Bend and New Albany and Shelbyville and Paioli and Terre Haute. I eventually learned enough geography that I could usually figure out where a town was without thinking. (“Munster? That’s next to Hammond, right? A guy in my Spanish class is from there.”)

    Back to gear: when we moved into the dorm, there was a “welcome pack” for each person in your room. It consisted of a bunch of trial sizes, like shampoo, razors, and Advil. It also contained both a NyQuil and a Scope, and allegedly if you drank both real fast, you’d cop a mighty buzz. But this was the beginning of the era when companies found it really profitable to prey on college students, and this collection of stuff was the first step in that direction. We also got a lot of desks in the union with people from Bank One and the credit union and of course all of the credit card people, and they lured in freshmen for that first dip into the world of plastic. I know that know this sector is huge, and every possible company is out there ready to tattoo their logo on your forehead when you come in as a freshman. But in my four years of high school, the most we ever got were DARE book covers and maybe pencils from the National Guard, so that freshman blitz was like a goldmine to me.

    I forget where I was going with this, other than to think a little about 1989. Oh shit, I remember! The bleach was actually detergent – Cheer. Blue box, I think they only sell the boxes in laundromats these days, and the liquid in the store. But if you find a box in the store, rip it open and take a deep whiff, and that’s September, 1989 for me.

  • Back from the Midwest

    After two weeks on the road, my bed feels like magic. I wanted to spend all day in my shower, using non-trial size shampoo and non-hotel bars of soap. It’s good to have my stereo, my keyboard, my view of the parking lot (which looks like it’s finished, construction-wise), and mostly, it’s good to be back in today, after spending so much time talking about yesterday.

    My big SUV got a slow flat while I was in Indiana, and I talked to 17 different people at Alamo, who gave me 17 different answers, ranging from “bring it back to O’Hare” to “drive on the baby spare for 10 days” to “buy a $650 tire and spend $100 and a day getting it mounted, and save the receipt and fill out a TPS report and send it in and wait 4-62 weeks and we might or might not pay you back some or all or none of it”. I drove to the South Bend Municipal cow pasture and barnstormer air strip and the Alamo there had like three cars and they were allegedly all gone, and there was some inter-location transfer bullshit that made them really iffy about giving me a car anyway.

    So I topped up the tire, added just enough fuel to make it west, and hit the toll road. When I got to O’Hare, I expected a huge clusterfuck of trouble, and the inside of the rental building looked like Saigon 1975. A woman in front of me was trying to rent a car with no ID and no credit card other than a Target card, and went round and round with the clerk, to the point where I wanted to grab her and start shaking her while yelling “WHAT BIZARRO UNIVERSE LETS YOU RENT A CAR WITH NO DRIVER’S LICENSE OR CREDIT CARD?” Finally, after being asked “picking up or returning?” and answering “well both, and neither”, a guy told me to go pick any car off the lot, re-printed my contract, and gave me a free tank of fuel out of the deal. I got a new Rav-4 and hit the road.

    I had something like 5 hours to kill until Sarah’s flight arrived that night, so I gave John Sheppard a surprise call and drove up to see his new place. 294 was a parking lot, so I took surface roads, and got a nice little tour of the northern Chicagoland burbs. It’s always good to see John and Helen, even in such a hurried visit, and I got to see the new homestead and four-legged members of the household. We went out for pizza at a place with plenty of dead animal on the wall and a tradition of eating peanuts and throwing shells on the floor. There were many talks of gloom and the remainder of the Cubs season, and then I had a freakout when I thought I had 20 minutes to get back to O’Hare, when really I had an hour and twenty, and a watch that was on Indiana time.

    It’s almost impossible to pick someone up at O’Hare, even if you know their airline. Maybe if I was there more than once every 20 years, I would remember, but there are hordes of identical-looking parking lots sprouting from each terminal, and even with two cell phones and lots of “I’m looking at a sign that says Elevator bank 4 and has a picture of a wolverine on it” conversation, it took us a while to figure that out. Then, another trip back to Indiana.

    Driving with Illinois plates at 7 MPH over the limit, you can guess what happened next. I got pulled over by an Indiana cop for the first time since, what, 1994? 1995? I handed over the Colorado license and the Illinois registration, and they came back with a warning. I’m guessing it’s too hard for them to write a ticket for out-of-staters. Or maybe they were just looking for drunks, suspended licenses, or whatever else. And get this, a night or two later, I got pulled over AGAIN, on old US-33, just before it gets to 19. This was a little more suspect, because it was a Goshen city cop, patrolling out on the area between Elkhart and Osceola. After he gave me the warning, I almost asked him “what the fuck are you doing out here?” He probably thought I’d never set foot in the Midwest before, when truthfully, I got my Indiana license around the time this dipshit was born. Anyway, don’t drive in Indiana with out-of-town plates and no Jesus sticker on the back window.

    The rest of the Indiana stay was meeting after meeting. Different relatives, the same questions, reciting the same answers. It’s good to see people, it’s just tiring to answer the same questions over and over, until your conversations turn into morphing tape loops, and you can’t remember who you told what. It was refreshing to spend time with my nephews and diverge into Guitar Hero or Spongebob conversations, just for a change of pace. Two parents, two sisters, three uncles, two aunts, a bunch of spouses and step-kids and whatever else, and we managed to pull together about three free minutes to drive to my old house and see that the new people have a very fucked-up yard. There was also supposed to be a minor-league baseball game in there, but it rained so much, it didn’t happen.

    Another drive, to Wisconsin this time. We spent a lot of time with Sarah’s family, and it poured rain most of the time. I got a couple of good home-cooked meals (no more chain food) and an excellent meal at Pandl’s Whitefish Bay Inn, which is this little restaurant that time forgot. And we got some not-so-fast food from Culver’s, which is an amazing little chain of hamburger joints gone wild.

    We also made the pilgrimage to Lambeau Field in Green Bay to see the Packers play a pre-season game against the Jacksonville Jaguars, my first NFL game ever. Me and Sarah went with her dad and Dan, her sister’s boyfriend. I spent the trip up talking MLB and all things Brewers with Dan, who is a walking encyclopedia about that stuff. When we got there, we parked in the back of some restaurant strip mall for $20 and hiked in. This gave us a good survey of the tailgate situation, huge dudes with big mullets cooking brats and downing MGD and Jager while blasting unrecognizable Pantera-like metal from the backs of their trucks. Whory bleach-blond chicks in shorter than short cutoffs yelling WHOOOOO at every passing car. There was green and gold everywhere. EVERYWHERE. There were more Favre #4 jerseys than there are jerseys period at any Rockies game. And I loved it. The NPR totebag, Free Tibet bumpersticker crowd would denounce this as a lack of culture, but it IS culture. It’s the most perfectly cut slice of Wisconsin you could find. And that’s why I dug it.

    Okay, so you go into this huge, newly-remodeled stadium, with a giant atrium, and more Miller Beer signs than a Miller brewery. When we went into the tunnel and out to our seats, it was weird. The field looked small to me, compared to TV games. 100 yards on a high school field or a college stadium is the same 100 yards in the NFL, although everything surrounding that rectangle of green was bigger and better and brighter. But when I looked down at that, I thought “shit, I could throw a 30 yard pass down there!” I had the same reaction at my first MLB game, where you’re so close, and the view of the whole thing makes it look small. On TV, it’s a giant video game, but when you’re yards from the dudes on the field, you see they are people.

    We got the national anthem, and two F-18s flew over. It was some Catholic charity game, and there was a bishop on the field blessing the Packers or something. Dan wanted to know why he wasn’t damning the other team, too. As the game started, I saw the overwhelming number of commercials versus baseball; they show video and audio commercials on the big board whenever possible between plays. They played “Hell’s Bells” and I wondered if the bishop enjoyed that.

    I followed the game, but I didn’t. I guess baseball is much easier to watch in that respect – less people out there, more contained game action, whatever. The one thing I noticed was that we had good seats – 50 yard line, 21st row – but they had metal bleachers, and had like 12″ of ass-space per seat, and you know the average ass width in rural Wisconsin is nowhere near 12″. Sitting shoulder-to-shoulder and trying to eat was a challenge. They did have excellent bratwurst, though.

    A huge storm front rolled in, and it started to rain. We bought ponchos and jackets just for this weather, so I put on the poncho, and the rain stopped. I took it off, it started. I put it on, it stopped. This cycle repeated, and then it didn’t rain again for the rest of the evening.

    The Packers lost, although the newspaper the next day praised only the good stuff that happened, and you’d think they had won. We drove back and Sarah hit an owl, which sounded like Randy Johnson throwing a fastball into the windshield, but amazingly, the glass did not break.

    We finally got out on Saturday morning, me with a giant suitcase filled with 48 pounds of dirty laundry. On the way down to the airport, in Kenosha, we stopped at a real A&W with the drive-in and everything. The girl was trying to put the tray on my oddly-shaped, not-rectangular window, and as I messed with the controls (which are backwards from our Subaru) I managed to auto-quickie-open the window and dump the whole fucking tray onto the pavement. But the food was good. We got to O’Hare, ditched the car, flew back home, got the Subaru, and here I am.

    I managed to not go to a mall the whole time I was in Indiana, and I managed to not eat any cheese curds the whole time I was in Wisconsin. (But we have a whole big box of stuff on the way from Mar’s Cheese castle that gets shippped out today.)

    [I had a link to my pictures here, but the photo sharing service died years ago, so use your imagination.]

    OK, now I need to start some work on this damn book.

  • In Elkhart

    I’m in a Perkins in Elkhart, and I’ve barely seen anything here, but it’s all very weird. Let me see how much I can explain before my food arrives.

    I left Elkhart, or at least stopped calling it my home, when? 1989, when I graduated and went to college? 1991-ish, when I returned the second time and vowed to never come back? 1995, when I moved to Seattle? I don’t know. But I guess the 1991 date is when I stopped spending any regular amount of time here. And I haven’t set foot in Indiana since 2004, partly by coincidence, and partly by design. So it’s been long enough to make it seem like an alien experience when I return.

    I got into O’Hare and got my rental car by about midnight last night, then pointed it east and headed toward the toll road, hoping I could still figure out my way around Chicago and to Indiana with no major incident. The toll road was eerie, driving with nobody around, counting the exits and wishing I could go to bed.

    Right after the University Park Mall zipped past, I exited on 331, and took the route home I’d normally take from the UP mall, on Cleveland road. The second I pulled up to a railroad crossing, the gates went down and a 200-car train inched by. I joked about this in Summer Rain, but it really happens to me every time I get here.

    I drove down this stretch of road with only farmland on either side, and remarkably it was still farm. I used to max out my car here late at night, because there are no intersections for miles. Then my friend Peter got killed there in 1991, so I stopped. The old drive-in movie theater – a gas station, and what looks like a Super Target or a Wal-Mart going in. The Pleasureland Museum – still there, but I couldn’t tell if it was closed or not.

    Nothing really changes in Elkhart. A lot of the same businesses had the same signs that they did in 1985, the same displays, the same paintjobs. They build new subdivisions of prefab houses in the outlying areas: Goshen, Napanee, Granger, Simoton Lake. But they’re the same subdivisions they built in Dunlap in the 70s, just different trim and formica and sunroom options. And when they build a newer and more expensive and further out subdivision, it means the old ones won’t get updated and won’t get redone and essentially get trapped in time, to wear their 1970s aluminum siding forever.

    Some stores go under. The old Templin’s music, where I bought many a pair of guitar strings in the day, is now a Mexican furniture store. The Taco Bell where I worked is now a crack Chinese place. I used to spend a lot of time at this Perkins, but back in 1989, it was a few blocks south, and the last-gen design of Perkins buildings. The new one is nice, but it isn’t the old one. (This one is currently filled with a gaggle of high school girls basketball players, which might be enticing to jailbait enthusiasts. As for myself, it sort of freaks me out that they were born after the last time I was in a Perkins.)

    I thought Denver was a bit conservative, but this place makes it look like a hippy ashram chanting in a drum circle. Two out of three cars have this Jesus license plate that you can tell was designed in spite when the JFreaks here lost that ACLU case about the ten commandments. There are are churches everywhere. The Concord Mall now has a sign that says “Great Deals, Family Values.” (Does that mean you can’t sodomize the workers at Pretzel Time anymore?) This is the one place in the country where I feel Nicole Ritchie thin. When I walked out of the hotel, there were about two dozen people chain-smoking like you’d suck on a bottle of oxygen if your spacesuit exploded and you hadn’t breathed in five minutes. Lots of magnetic ribbons, and I haven’t seen a single Kerry/Edwards or anti-Bush sticker yet.

    I saw both “de-malled” malls, Pierre Moran and Scottsdale. Back in the old days, they turned strip malls into malls by enclosing them. For whatever random reason (*cough*Wal-Mart) malls have gone into the toilet, so someone got the wise idea to break apart the interior spaces, and turn them into a huge parking lot with a bunch of freestanding big-box stores. This makes it much easier to shop, because you have to either move your car six times, or carry a lot of stuff in the rain and snow. Both malls look even more deserted, but it’s obviously some liberal conspiracy and we all need to pray to Jesus to make sure the local Panera and Dress Barn keep in the black. (Wait, I mean they are making money, not that we want african-americans shopping there.)

    The biggest change I see is that all of the trees have doubled and tripled in size. When I drive by an old dentist or insurance agent and see a giant oak stretching way into the sky, I remember when it used to be as tall as me. Driving past houses and streets, it seems like I have the angles and distances and setbacks burned into my brain. When I cross Prarie on Mishawaka, I know in my head exactly how far it is to the u-pick strawberry place, even if it was plowed under and turned into a medical clinic. The occasional bodega where a video store used to be throws me off but it’s usually in the same building, just a different sign.

    I spent the day with my sister, nephew, and niece. It was the first time I’ve ever seen Belle, and she is already mobile and stealing her brother’s toys at any possible chance. I always think the kids are cute, until a few hours later when Wesley runs down a row of toy trucks in Target and presses the sound button on every single one two dozen times, producing this cacophony of sirens and explosions and jackhammers, and I realize there’s no way I could do it for five days, let alone 18 years.

    Not making much progress on this food – I better shut down and go back to my little Holiday Inn Express and see if the TV channels are just as bad as they were 30 years ago.

    P.S. The waitress handed me my check and it said, in giant, curvy, girly cursive, “God Bless!” at the bottom. I still gave her a tip.

    P.P.S. Re my previous entry about thunderstorms – I am back at my hotel, and just saw the most monumental t-storm I’ve seen in a while. Very close strikes, loud as hell booms, and the kind of bolts that arc from sky to ground (okay, vice-versa) in such a way that make them look like scratches etched into a tinted window. There was even a five-second power outage that really reminded me I was in Indiana.