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.