What I saw at the fair

The Russian emigre who works at the dry cleaner has an accent like Natasha, as in Boris and Natasha. "You are going to the fair?" she asked on Saturday. "Yes, indeed," I said, "I've gone every year since I moved here in 1992.

"I live here eight years and I have never been. What is there to see?"

"Fat people," I said, "lots and lots of fat people."

True of course, but true like mild cheese, nourishing yet boring. Here's what I saw that wasn't boring:

1. Goats, one of which was eating a steel-link dog chain.

2. Dogs running an obstacle course. My corgi Luther would rip my throat out if I asked him to do even one of those jumps, tunnels, see-saws, or ramps.

3. Young men with muscles.

4. An old man who sat next to me on a bench and, between bites of pepperoni pizza, told me that it isn't the heat that bothers him, it's the humidity.

5. The entire cast of extras from Winter's Bone.

6. A display on how and why bees swarm, useful knowledge because my neighbor Mel has become an amateur apiarist, and just last week his bees swarmed.

7. Some cupolas, after which I won an argument over how to pronounce cupola.

I didn't get a scotch egg or a turkey leg, so maybe I'll go back. Or maybe not.

Day two at Lollapalooza

On day two of Lollapalooza I set out to find the tattoo that stands out, the one that says, "yeah, you old fart, you think everyone regrets this decision eventually but here is artwork for a lifetime." Lollapalooza is certainly the place for that quest; I saw at least a billion. But not one went beyond the expected and ordinary. Maybe it's hidden so that only lovers will ever enjoy it. I hope so.

I did see a Chicago flag belt buckle; I'd never seen one before. Here it is without the human. The first star is for Fort Dearborn, founded in 1803, the second for the Chicago Fire of 1871, the third for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, the fourth for the Century of Progress Exposition of 1933.

I saw one good t-shirt, a category more depressingly obvious and ordinary than tattoos: "Because, without beer, things do not seem to go as well." I like its polished sense of dramatic understatement.

And I was stretched out in the sun on the wall of a stairway, listening to Gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello, when a young hipster with muscles and a grin looked at my socks and said, "best socks in the place." Then he was gone up the stairs. It was one of those odd fillips that makes one feel at home in a strange place, and I'm grateful to him.

As for Gogol Bordello, it was the best live musical performance I've ever sat through, so that even if I don't find that tattoo, the adventure will have been worthwhile.

Day one at Lollapalooza

About a year ago I made the radical decision to follow along with my son William's alternative rock avocation. This meant simply that instead of saying, "turn that down," I said, "what is that?" I'm not reporting this to prove what a good parent I am, but instead to explain why I'm spending three days at Lollapalooza in Chicago.

Here's what's worth noting after one day.

1. The city I lived in for 27 years is unrecognizable. This is probably true of anyplace when you don't come back for 18 years, but it's not just the way it looks. The zeitgeist has changed; it doesn't feel, smell, taste, or sound like Chicago. It's a nice hipster rich city, but it's not Chicago.

2. Pork belly is in. At Lollapalooza at least four stands of four different ethnicities are selling something made of pork belly. This means it will be in Minneapolis in two years.

3. When accosted by Rock the Vote about the November election, a teenager behind me in line said, "What election?" This is not remarkable, but when told the election is for the House of Representatives and the Senate, the look on his face said he had no idea what those are.

4. Emailing clients while standing in a crowd being blasted by sound improves both business and the concert experience.

5. It was Hiroshima Day and no one mentioned it.

6. You can sometimes believe The Wall Street Journal. They recommended seven bands and the first one I saw, Wavves, was terrific.

7. Short shorts with low boots is in. This means it will be in Minneapolis in two years.

And now I'm going to get ready for day two.

Things you may not know about prothonotaries

Every year we visit my wife's parents in Naples (Florida, not Campania), and every year we spend half a day going to Corkscrew Swamp, an Audubon preserve 45 minutes inland. Corkscrew after days of beach and sun is like salad after the main course or cheese with apple pie, a contrast that refreshes the senses, revives desire, and satisfies the craving for complexity in the universe.

This year we saw Painted Buntings, a baby raccoon, a Ghost Orchid so high up in a faraway tree that it had to be viewed through a high-powered monocular on a tripod, bear shit, a baby alligator, and a giant alligator that surfaced silently from the algae on the pond in front of us. But the best thing we saw was a Prothonotary Warbler.

Prothonotary Warblers aren’t rare, but they are difficult to see because they forage in dense foliage low to the ground. Even bird-watchers and ornithologists get excited when they see one, and Alger Hiss’s boast of having sighted a Prothonotary Warbler became, for HUAC, one of the facts that linked him to Whittaker Chambers.

Now, unless you’re tragically incurious, drugged, or dead, you of course want to know what a prothonotary is. I’m glad you asked.

Prothonotaries were high-ranking civil administrators in the Byzantine Empire, 7th through 12th centuries. Prothonotaries still are high officials of the Roman Catholic Church, but they no longer wear the golden robes that give the warbler its name. In the Canadian federal courts, a prothonotary is a judicial officer with many of the powers of a judge. In Pennsylvania, Delaware, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, the prothonotary is the chief court clerk, as he is in the Supreme Courts of the Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria.

Don’t worry if you’ve forgotten all of this by tomorrow. It is, after all, a random collection of facts held together by a 12.5-gram bird. And cravings for complexity are quickly sated. My 12- and 14-year old boys forgot the Prothonotary Warbler even faster than tomorrow, first decrying the depressing ugliness of inland Florida strip malls as we drove back from Corkscrew Swamp, then demanding that we stop at one for Dunkin’ Donuts.

I had a Chocolate Glazed Cake Donut and a Chocolate Kreme Filled Donut, and, many days later, I'm still wondering where the salad course is.

Pantywaist goes to hockey game

Once a year my brother-in-law gives the family tickets to a Wild game. We all look forward to it. Hockey is beautiful and exciting. Xcel is a great place to see a game. And the whole experience is other-worldly, not just being surrounded by space aliens, but actually visiting their planet.

This year, as usual, the four of us were the only people in the arena not wearing Wild paraphernalia. And this year, as usual, the greatest pleasure for the 12- and 14-year olds was eating the kind of food they don't get at home. Both boys were done with their Philly cheese steaks before the Star Spangled Banner began, and no, they didn't care that their sandwiches bore no relation to what's served in Philadelphia, or that the cheese glopped over it was mostly vegetable oil with artificial coloring.

A few minutes into the first period, there was a fight. Not a little fight, but the kind where the referees stand aside and let the two guys go at it. The St. Louis Blues player lost his helmet, so his head served as a punching bag for the Wild player. It was probably 60 seconds; it seemed like ten minutes. It was unpleasant.

Not so much because I expected the punchee to start bleeding from his ears and be carted off to die in some green-tiled, fluorescent-lit St. Paul emergency room. But because the crowd cheered every punch, standing and screaming with pleasure, so excited that they might even have spilled some of their beer.

"Watch out," you're thinking, "he's going to make a last-days-of-Rome reference." No I'm not. The cheering needed no tired similes; it was horrible enough on its own. The 12-year old, who spends every waking minute splattering the brains of opposing Call of Duty soldiers against the concrete block walls of nameless Eastern European cities, all the while chortling "head shot" into his headset, was visibly upset. He'd never seen real grownups really fighting, he didn't like it, and he particularly didn't like that thousands of people loved it. The 14-year old asked why they allowed it. "Because everyone loves it," I said, "look around you."

Oh well. The rest of the game was filled with dazzling skating and shot-making. The boys recovered sufficiently to each eat a pizza at the beginning of the second period. The Wild won. We all went home feeling we'd had a cultural adventure. We were exhausted in a good way and, at the same time, excited, so excited that we had huge fight in the car over how to pronounce Guayaquil.

Now there's something worth fighting over. I think if we'd been on skates, there might have been a death or two.

The rabbit in the back yard

I don't care how cute and furry they are, I hate rabbits.

They eat the garden. They're stupid, prone to dying needlessly under the wheels of cars because they freeze in terror, spreading guts and brains and blood and fur all over the road for the crows to clean up. They shit everywhere at will, leaving perfect and delicious Rabbit Trix for my Corgi (a big, manly Cardigan Corgi, by the way, not a small, overweight, sissy Pembroke Corgi) to hoover up endlessly, which is even more disgusting than rabbit bodies in the road. And rabbits breed like rabbits, producing adorable bunny treats for Alice the cat. Alice eats the whole baby, leaving only the skull for me to clean up and the scream of the dying innocent echoing in my ears.

So it was with dismay that I discovered we've acquired a resident rabbit who lives under our front porch. He was in our back yard every night this winter, eating like a king from our compost heap, where he can choose from the leavings of pears, apples, bananas, pineapples, kiwis, carrots, turnips, rutabagas, parsnips, cabbages both green and red, brussels sprouts, lettuces of all nations, cucumbers, tulips, lilies, and whatever else, all of it flash-frozen to preserve the flavor and nutrition, and decorated with a tasteful dusting of ridiculously expensive coffee grounds from Dunn Bros. With the exception of the root vegetables, it's a small lesson in the evils of the carbon-based economy: burn fossil fuels to transport food, instead of eating locally, and your rabbits will come home to roost.

Even worse, I've come to like him. I'm proud that he's bigger than any other rabbits I see in the alley. The whole family cuts those weird little black berries from the chokeberry bush for him to eat, then applauds when they're gone in the morning. And now that he spends a lot of time in our neighbors' yard, I worry that he's ok.

It can't end well. Spring is here, and he'll start to eat the garden, starting with the alpine strawberry plants that just yesterday appeared from under the ice. Or he'll cross the road looking for a mate and die and I'll have to watch his body decay while the crows carry away the juiciest pieces. Or he will turn out to have been she all along, and she'll have babies, and Alice will eat them, and I'll have to worry that she's sad.

Yeah, I know rabbits don't get sad. But this is my rabbit.

Christmas trees and pigs

I once knew a woman who, when I mentioned my Christmas tree, said, "oh, it's like having a dead body in your house." I understood right away, pondered why I'd never seen it her way before, and haven't been able to stop thinking about it her way ever since.

It hasn't, of course, stopped me from having Christmas trees. But every year at Thanksgiving I wonder what it would be like to have a house with an atrium where our live Christmas tree grew, decorated in late November and undecorated in early January, a member of the family, growing tall with our kids.

This year, for the second or third year in a row, our discarded Christmas tree is propped perfectly vertical in a backyard snow bank. It adds architecture to the yard, relieves the monotony of white, and, as whatever broadside that gave us the idea promised, it gives shelter to the birds. It looks perfectly alive, green and healthy, and it will until the snow melts. Then it will fall over, and all the needles will come off at once, and it will be a skeleton instead of a body, lying on its side in the middle of the spring rebirth.

In perfect non sequitur it will remind me of another friend, a man I knew when I was a vegetarian. "You know," I told him one day, "pigs are really smart animals, you shouldn't eat them." To which he replied, "that's exactly the animals I want to be eating, the really smart ones."

Alfredo, Caesar, and God

Two years ago, when he was 10, #2 son looked up from his banana bread one morning during a discussion of chapel attendance at his Episcopal private school and said, with a directness no one else in the family seems able to muster, "This god stuff is just stupid, there is no god." I didn't argue, since that's my opinion too, but neither did I rush out to buy him a Richard Dawkins book. If he joined his older brother in the kind of atheism that just wants to sleep in on Sunday morning, that was fine with me.

But then his older brother brought up Alfredo and Caesar.

He wanted to know why we didn't have Alfredo sauce in jars so that at a moment's notice he could have Alfredo chicken just the way they serve it in the school cafeteria. He wanted to know why we didn't have Caesar dressing in bottles so that at the drop of a hat he could have a chicken caesar just like the ones he eats in the school cafeteria.

"Because there is no such thing as Alfredo sauce," I said. "There's a famous dish called Fettuccine Alfredo, which is cream and butter and parmesan with a hint of freshly ground nutmeg tossed with fresh pasta. There's no such thing as Caesar dressing either. The famous dish called caesar salad is made with salt, garlic, Tabasco, dry mustard, oil, vinegar, a one-minute egg, anchovies, pepper, and parmesan tossed with romaine."

"If they don't exist, how come everyone else gets to have them?" he asked.

Buying a hat

Fedex has it now. It's on a truck somewhere north of Houston. There's no turning back. I've gone and bought a hat.

Not like my beloved Peruvian wool knit hat from the Linden Hills Coop that's incredibly warm and silly looking. Or like the real French beret made in the Pyrenees (not some hideous Australian knockoff) that I bought for my wife at Saks. She never wears it so she gave it to me, and I never wear it because I look exactly right in it, which makes me feel as if I've stepped out of central casting and I'm waiting for my baguette and bicycle from the prop girl.

Not even a New York Times logo baseball cap, bought at The New York Times itself, bought twice even so each son would get one and then inherited twice when neither wore it more than once.

No, I'm talking about the kind of hat that friends and strangers alike will see, and think, "another silly fart trying to look like Don Draper." Hah, a lot they know.

The hat adventure is an inevitable consequence of the winter coat adventure. I have a terrible electric blue down coat good for walking the dog in fifty below but I didn't have anything else. Brooks Brothers sells a double-breasted camel hair I wanted for $1300. They sell a wonderful cashmere chesterfield for $1200. (Last year their super-fancy label had a dark blue double-breasted number that was right out of a Gilbert and Sullivan production for twice those prices. I wanted it desperately, it became the beautiful girl I couldn't talk to, I gave up.)

So I went to eBay and bought a dark, dark grey, double-breasted, way-below-the-knee overcoat from Hart Schaffner & Marx, that famous Chicago brand. It was $106 plus shipping, it's in perfect condition, and even if the lapels say it's from the 1970s, I look great in it. What's more, Barack wears Hart Schaffner & Marx. But if winter in Minnesota isn't enough reason, the coat cries out for a hat.

A real hat, a fedora, the kind my father put on his head before he walked out the door with The New York Times tucked under his arm, smelling of coffee and Yardley's lavender, heading for the A train that took him to Wall Street. Fedoras are in right now, they're sprinkled liberally all over the web. You can buy one with silly little brims that makes you look like a 1950s hoodlum for $50; you can buy one with felt made of beaver fur that makes you look like a 1950s capitalist for $500.

I was paralyzed. I spent days not working, poring over the alternatives, learning the different shapes and creases and brims. I agonized over linings, sweat bands, silly little feathers, price, and, when I'd decided everything else, brand. Then I made myself buy a hat so I could return to living.

Anyway, Fedex has it, and they should be bringing it to me in a day or two. It's a real Borsalino, and if you laugh at it, I'm going to have Guido beat the crap out of you.

Stone dust

The workmen began the new patio for the house next door about a month ago. The first day or two they used the machine that makes the ground perfectly flat and very hard. It's the kind of machine you'd want to have if you were a little kid, a thumper, and so, even though it's noisy, it's hard to get mad at it. And it doesn't make a mess.

Then the men began sawing stone. No little kid would want the stone-sawing machine. It's like having a dozen giant, evil dentists drilling in your front yard, minus the screams of pain from the dozen victims. It also produces a cloud of white stone dust that floats merrily in whatever direction the wind wants. Most of the time, that's toward our house. The men did take a break for a day or two to saw brick, and that changed the dust cloud to a dried blood pinkish red. They've long since gone back to stone, but I know that, if they ever finish, there are 25 or 30 steps up from the street still to be covered in brick.

A month into the work, every window and every windowsill is coated with stone dust. We've long ago given up any thought of having a drink or eating on our front deck. The dog and cat leave stone dust footprints as they walk through the house. And when we close a screen door, the bang produces a little mushroom cloud of stone dust.

The most alarming part is that we've gotten used to it. We're like the people who live in the one-industry town who know that the exuviae from the giant factory is poisonous and ugly but who also know that complaining about it is futile. Would our lovely, polite, friendly neighbors understand if we told them how we feel? And would that stop the work? No and no.

I'm just glad I can't see our lungs.

Forget it, Jake

Jeez, will everyone stop talking to me if I defend Roman Polanski? Not that he needs defending by an obscure Minneapolis copywriter, what with legal talent I couldn't afford five minutes of, and a bunch of famous directors speaking up for him. And no, I don't have daughters, nor am I a victim of sexual abuse, so I can't possibly understand.

But really. Do those people in the L.A. District Attorney's office have any criminals more dangerous to chase? If they've got some spare time, they might go to the movies. Or is this one of those vote-getting adventures that's class-related, where the D.A. is picking up a lot of prole votes for prosecuting the small foreign pervert who makes films where things don't blow up.

And the Swiss. Since they have little interest in culture, but lots of interest in money, and they've done nothing about it for 30 years, someone must have paid them. Why now?

I don't think it's ok to have sex with 13 year olds, even if the Roman Catholic church does condone it. Nor am I saying Polanski should escape punishment because he's one of the greatest artists who worked in the 20th century's most important medium. I don't have a good answer, but I do know that the 13 year old in question, now in her forties, has asked that Polanski be left alone. Maybe she's seen Chinatown.

You lie and the Big Lie

Sometimes I think I'm the last old commie who really believes in free speech. So I was relieved, even excited, to see that Dennis Kucinich had voted "no" and Barney Frank "present" on the vote to censure Joe Wilson. Wilson's yelling "you lie" was inappropriate and rude. It was also part of a calculated Republican Party disinformation campaign, a campaign of lies itself, meant to derail healthcare reform, bought and paid for by the insurance industry.

And that's all irrelevant.

What is relevant is that we live in a country, and profess a political ideology, that believes in free speech. Not polite free speech or appropriate free speech, but just plain free speech, even for people like Joe Wilson who would take it away in a second from people whose politics he didn't like.

Never forget that we've just been through eight years of Orwellian rule based on the Big Lie. We all have the right to ask why every congressperson and senator who sat and listened to George Bush lie to joint sessions of Congress didn't stand up and call him on it. We all have the right to ask why every news organization that reported Dick Cheney's lies didn't follow with a sidebar reporting the truth.

Maybe the representatives who voted to censure Joe Wilson should instead have spent their energies documenting the money trail behind the real lies about death panels. Muzzling one sad stooge hurts freedom. And does nothing to pass legislation that millions of people desperately need.

What I saw at the fair

It's not as if anything changes from year to year at the Minnesota State Fair. It's just that, inevitably, I'm at different places at different times, and therefore see new things. This year I saw five.

Young women wearing evening gowns and lots of jewelry driving low-to-the-ground, two-wheeled carts pulled by ponies. Uh-oh, I have to admit I'm not sure they really were ponies. I was too amazed by the drivers to pay much attention to the animals. But they don't race goats, do they?

The sow, from the annual sow-and-new-piglets display in the swine barn, urinating so copiously that I wondered if they'd bred her with an extra bladder. I know they're not beyond that kind of thing.

My niece carrying a blue balloon with a GOP elephant logo on it. I don't know which adult of the four present allowed it, but I know who it wasn't.

An 89.3 baseball cap that I coveted, but did not buy.

A huge stuffed Stewie lying on a roof underneath the gondola ride where some adult, ashamed of himself for carrying a doll, had dropped it. No child would ever carry a Stewie.

Three oinks for the fair

The Minnesota State Fair is almost here, and what's more, it's as late as it can mathematically be, which means there's the least possible time between the fair and Christmas, the two most fun events on the planet, and well-deserving of a run-on sentence. I don't need to defend Christmas, but really, the Minnesota State Fair? You bet.

It's filled with fat people eating unashamedly, the only place in the wild this happens.

It's the only place in Minnesota, which lacks real public transportation, where all social classes and ethnicities and geographies mix freely.

There are lots of pigs and goats. There are also lots of cows and horses and sheep, but I find those dumb, and two of them are so big they're scary. Pigs and goats, however, are smart and you can tell they have a sense of humor, so it's nice to mingle with them.

If you want to see it, you have to walk.

It's the only mass event left that isn't openly orchestrated and exploitative. Baseball games used to be like that, back around the time the Dodgers left Brooklyn.

It allows everyone to be a low-life, to wallow unashamedly in tastelessness and ugliness, and then to find joy in the wallowing.

It's way too hot and there's no way to air-condition it, so that for a few hours we have to give up our insane desire to master the planet.

New York, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Boston, and all the other hip places don't have anything like it, which provides a rare opportunity to count your blessings.

Everyone can eat like a fat person and do so unashamedly.

Tactical rudeness

LaGuardia, roughly ten o'clock on a not particularly hot, but definitely muggy, Friday night. The cab line is 300 people long but it's moving; it will take only about a half hour to get to the front. There are young and old and middle-aged, men and women, professional and working class, Indian-, Pakistani-, Chinese-, Japanese-, Korean-, African-, Dominican-, Jamaican-, and Puerto Rican-Americans, and quite a few white folks of the originally-European variety.

As I move closer and closer to the head of the line, where it folds into an S before feeding people into cabs, I notice two men, jaw to jaw, arguing angrily. One is a movie-star handsome mid-30s Hispanic businessman in a beautiful suit; the other is a burly, hugely tall, late middle-aged white guy. I can't hear what they're saying, but they're pretty damned interesting if only because they're the only two out of 300 who are doing something other than looking at their smartphones for salvation from cosmic boredom.

They argue, and they argue, and they argue, and suddenly, up from the line jumps a short, fat, young woman in hip-hop clothes who screams to all 300 of us, "hey everybody, this fat white motherfucker jumped in the line what are we going to do about it are we going to let this cocksucker just do it c'mon everybody speak up let's do something you're not going to just allow this prick to break into the line . . . " And before she can put it on a loop, the burly, hugely tall, late middle-aged white guy shrugs, walks away, goes to the back of the line.

Everybody cheers.

Which makes me wonder how my children, growing up in Minneapolis, will learn the essential skill of tactical rudeness.

Denny Hecker and Goldman Sachs

I'm grieving for Denny Hecker. No fooling, I really am. In a world of weasels, he wasn't.

If you've been reading the Strib, you know a lot about Denny. They've made him out to be a knave or a fool, depending on how much schadenfreude you're inclined to enjoy with your morning pop-tart. But that's not the most important story the Strib could be telling, and you reading, about good and evil in the business world.

Try the recent Rolling Stone article on Goldman Sachs and the financial gangster takeover of world capitalism. Go ahead, click the link. It's a long article, but you'll be rewarded with an analysis of the plundering of the world economy that might even make you angry.

So are news organizations like the Strib that aren't telling the Goldman Sachs story, that are instead diverting people with fluff about a local car dealer, guilty of collusion in the looting of the republic? Yeah, probably.

As for Denny, I'm not his friend, and barely his acquaintance, but I knew him one step closer than his omnipresent face on the sides and backs of buses. He's a fellow parent at Breck and has a son in the same grade as my oldest. He gave money to the school. He helped raise more by offering great lease deals on Escalades at the annual auction. And every year he threw the best Halloween party on the planet, filling his enormous house with every child and every parent in the same grades as his kids, with fabulous decorations everywhere, and lots of delicious food. It was joyfully excessive, the children loved it, and even parents like me who hate parties had a great time.

I doubt there'll be a Halloween party at the Hecker house this year. But I bet there'll be some great ones out in the Hamptons when those record Goldman Sachs bonuses get paid. As for you, sucker, you won't be invited.

Brand, price, and theft

Late last week one of us (nobody's stepping up to take responsibility here; certainly I'm not) left the garage door unlocked. Not the big door that the cars use, the little door that the humans use. When we woke up in the morning, here's what was gone.

The quarters that we use for parking meters. The thieves were thorough. But not the ridiculously expensive tennis rackets. The thieves were from a different culture.

The iPhone of #2 son, which, no matter how many times we'd asked him not to, he left in the car. At least it was a two-year old, first generation model. He'd inherited it from his brother, and he'd had it for a week.

Two bicycles, one good but old, one not-so-good but old, both necessary.

Enter the Minneapolis police department bicycle auction.

If you've ever wondered what's east of Bachman's in that wasteland that looks kind of like the less pretty parts of New Jersey, some of it is a huge shed where the police keep bicycles they recover but that no one claims. About once a month they auction them off.

You can show up two hours early, at 4 pm, and look at each of the roughly 150 bicycles seven or eight times, trying to decide which ones are worth bidding on, and for how much. Here's how to do it when you're not a bicycle mechanic.

Like all marketing victims, choose by brand. Trek, Cannondale, Specialized, Giant, and Gary Fisher are acceptable. Schwinn, Murray, Huffy, and anything you haven't heard of are not. Like all peasants, pay no more than the fair price. The French still regulate the price of a baguette because there's a fair price for bread that has nothing to do with the market. It's why your grandfather, when you tell him you paid $200 for that Hermes tie, says, "I never paid more than $9 for a tie in my life." The fair price for a ten year old bike that may have spent a Minnesota winter outside is a hundred dollars because it's the symbolic, magical limit for a pig in a poke.

Once you're that smart, everything falls into place. We bought one bike for $90, which allowed us to spend $110 on the second one. They're both a brand called Next that I've never heard of and that I doubt still exists, but they look cool and the kids like them. So nuts to brand.

The next step is to send #2 son out on his new used Next to stand on random street corners and see if anyone wants to trade a bicycle for an iPhone.

The difference between tragic and stupid

A few weeks ago a Minneapolis woman driving westbound on Lake Street after midnight hit and killed a man standing at a bus stop.

Sad yet boring.

The few of us who relish those kinds of small events assumed that public death after midnight meant lowlife, and moved on to the next item of accident and mayhem in the online Strib.

But then it turned out to be interesting.

The man was 48, jobless, and lived alone with his widowed mother in the lower middle-class neighborhood where he died. He'd gone out on foot to buy a pack of cigarettes; he didn't drive because of previous drunk-driving problems.

The woman was 49, and lived with her husband and children in fashionable and wealthy East Isles. She'd been returning home from St. Paul where she'd gone to a party to celebrate her daughter's graduation from St. Paul Academy. The car was an Audi. She was so drunk she'd fallen asleep at the wheel. She'd been in treatment before for substance abuse.

And everyone either knew her, or knew someone who did.

By everyone I mean the social class that sends its kids to St Paul Academy, or Blake, or, as I do, Breck. I'm not rich, but most of the parents I know are, and they were abuzz about poor Kirsten Driscoll, what a tragedy it was for her, how she'd ruined her life.

I have to admit that, even though I didn't know Kirsten Driscoll, those were my thoughts also. It took a few hours before people realized their reaction was inappropriate. Uh-oh, a man is dead, and maybe that's worse than doing something pathetically stupid that will be embarrassing at parties for the rest of time.

And then, maybe because the Strib writes about the bad behavior of new money but not old money, the story disappeared. I've been waiting for weeks now for the "Parallel Lives" feature to appear, the one where we track the 48-year old victim and his 49-year old killer in order to dramatize the ironies of their different paths through life, culminating in their fateful final meeting.

I'd like that because it would give me a good chuckle, and release me from that scared feeling I now have every time I get behind the wheel of my BMW. Am I about to ruin my life?

Rock the Garden

After spending seven and a half hours at Rock the Garden two days ago, I have some unsurprising observations.

1. I owe my 14-year old son, William, a huge debt for diving headfirst into alternative rock, thus staving off for maybe a few years my inevitable descent into old-fartitude.

2. Rock is a whole lot more comfortable lying down on a grassy hill in the sun than it is standing in an auditorium or a basketball arena.

3. Tattoos are like other consumer goods. Almost all of them are ugly, cheap, tritely conceived, badly designed, and ill made.

4. Even the best rock is less interesting than Bach or Mozart, and you don't leave the concert feeling you've had an intellectual workout. Am I missing something here?

5. Calexico is way cooler than the audience thought it was.

But mostly, where are the old people? It's not as if the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra is selling every available seat.

Jumbo shrimp

The other day my wife asked me, “have you ever read an intelligent tweet?” I didn’t answer. So the next day I tweeted, “my wife asked me last night, had I ever read an intelligent tweet?” Nobody answered, although not a lot of people follow me. And nobody reads this blog either, so again, nobody will answer.

That’s just fine. On matters of life and death like Twitter, it’s best to remain anonymous. After all, 100% of the people who tweet had “The Emperor’s New Clothes” read to them when they were little, and here they all are, me included, terrified to speak out. Who can blame us? The Emperor could turn out to be wearing a magnificent suit, and then we’d have to spend eternity with all the Academy members who didn’t give best picture to North by Northwest or The Wild Bunch.

It’s probably best to ask questions instead of supplying answers. Here are some that may or may not be good. 

• If you set millions of people to writing Emily Dickinson couplets, how would they do?
• What percentage of people who tweet know who Jenny Holzer is?
• And what percentage of those people are embarrassed that they’re not as good?
• If Twitter turns out to be no different from the Sunday coupon inserts, will you mourn?
• What could you be doing instead?
• If your writing is stupid, does that mean your thinking is stupid?

Or, back off a little, and consider that many things that aren’t any good turn out, 100 years later, to be important artifacts of cultural history. That’s a pretty good weasel.