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.