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.

Bad math

I lost it in the 9th grade. No, not what you're thinking, those were simpler times. I mean my ability to do math. I've always blamed my teacher, whose name I've forgotten so thoroughly that I couldn't pick it out on a multiple choice test. But I do remember that she was old, with haunted-house grey hair and huge folds and wrinkles. She was fat, and wore what I would later learn was a muumuu, with body parts flopping loosely around inside. She had warts, a lot of them. And she was crazy, yelling "I'm going right on" when any of us dared to raise a hand and ask a question.

This wasn't some hillbilly backwater. It was a class that did grades 7, 8, and 9 in two years, in one of the finest junior high schools in the New York City public school system, back when that meant the best education on the planet without paying for a New England prep school.

Yes, I've always blamed my teacher, that is, until this spring, when my older son, in the second half of 8th grade, lost it. He's not doing 7, 8, and 9 in two years, so it's exactly the same time as I lost it. And his teacher is notorious for being a bad teacher, even though the school is as close as Minneapolis comes to a New England prep school. The mothers, who pay more attention to this kind of thing than the fathers do, are up in arms. But I'm not so sure, and I'm not planning to join their lynching party. Instead, I'm spending my time thinking about the power of DNA molecules to direct our lives. And while I'm not discovering any hidden affection for my nameless math teacher, who's certainly been dead for 30 years, I'm ready to accept at least some of the responsibility.