talk about just finding out!!!

The latest early morning (like, REALLY early) fast food-fueled flights of fancy/fantasy out of Mar-a- Lago (aka White House South) are full of shocked, righteous indignation that the Obamma administration wiretapped the Trump Tower.  TERRIBLE!!!  Where does this so-called President Obamma get off threatening the integrity of the very sacred election process.  Gee whiz.

Well, DUH!!!  Of course Obamma wiretapped lyin', little donald trump.  My first question would be: how was little donald able to tell the difference between an Obamma wiretap and all the other wiretaps that were and are in place?  You know; all those from other evil entities intent on dragging the donald further down into the mud that he's already slopping around in.  I'd be surprised to learn that there are anything less than a dozen American law enforcement agencies who are listening in on Trump Central a/o other Trump Tower tenants.  And that's just the American agencies.  Who can even hazard a guess as to how heavily wired for sound the Russians have managed to make the Tower's infrastructure?

You might wonder at the laxity of security standards which Team Trump had employed if it's taken this long to figure out that someone had been listening in.  But that can be a topic of conversation for another day.


My second question would be: why hasn't lyin', little donald found out that Obamma is guilty of far worse that the wiretapping nonsense?  Whyinhell hasn't l.l.d. outed Obamma on the egregious abuse of Presidential power when he took his family off on a super-expensive weekend junket on the taxpayer dime?  This is the REAL SCANDAL!!!

I have it on very good authority that, back in early December, Obamma packed Michelle and Sasha and Melia into the super secret Stealth version of  Air Force 1 (aka Air Force X to those with sufficient security clearance).  After a quick trip to Kenya to pick up some family photo albums, he flew the whole crew to Mars and back over the weekend.  They even shopped at the biggest Martian souvenir superstore and bought tshirts and postcards.  They couldn't actually mail the postcards from Mars because the USPS hadn't finalized its service to and from the Red Planet quite yet.  This sort of a jaunt really dwarfs the tens of millions of dollars the taxpayers are shelling out every weekend to shuttle the Trumps and his crowd of fawning toadies and sycophants back and forth between the Beltway and Florida.

But don't think for a second that it's pure coincidence that it was the RED Planet that the Obammas jetted off to.  Here's some proof positive that it's Obamma who's been in bed with the Russkies.  Not lyin' little donald.  I'm pretty sure that Breitbart will be picking up on this one very soon.  And, from there, the sky's the limit.

We have fallen into the unhappy position of being at the mercy of  a madman with a smartphone, a madman who's apparently awakened routinely and early by a complaining prostrate.  Instead of going back to bed after his little tinkle (like anyone with an ounce of common sense would do) he seems to think it's a good idea to transcribe his latest fantasies for public Twitter consumption.  We're talking about a guy who'd rather tell you a lie than steal your tax return or your girlfriend.  And that's saying something when you consider lyin' little donald's penchant for getting his little hands on other people's money and women he's never or barely met.  I think that we can expect ever more and more lies coming out of Palm Beach or DC or wherever he's having his little early-AM tinkle.  Buckle your seatbelts; it ain't gonna be pretty.  Entertaining?  Oh yeah.  Infuriating?  Almost certainly.  But pretty?  Not by a far sight.

thank you kellyanne. and to you, too, sean spicer.

I wrote a couple of days ago that I couldn't wait for Kellyanne "Con Artist" Conway to show her perpetually smiling face on the TV feed.  I was really hoping that I'd see more of her patented deliveries of assorted praises for crooked, lyin', little Donald.  I realize that picking on her for sporting that heinous RW&B overcoat on Inauguration was almost as lame as her wearing the damn thing. Thank the Lord that she didn't disappoint me for too long.

She showed up on Sunday's Meet the Press where she sparred with Chuck Todd over the difference between facts and "alternative facts".  If you don't know already, you can probably guess which of those she was touting.  I'll hand it to her, though.  She almost managed to keep that phony pasted-on smile in place after Chuck Todd suggested that she was full of it.  She's like that inflatable clown which keeps popping back up after taking one square to the jaw.  And the smiles are damn similar.

I saw her again today, back in the national spotlight even if she was relegated to a spot on the sidelines for Sean (of the Brain Dead) Spicer's second attempt to conduct an orderly meeting with the press corps.  His first shot came on Saturday and, even if Kellyanne gave him high marks for his "alternative facts" on MTP, most reviews were less than positive.  Loaded to the gills with direct orders from the throne, Sean blasted the media for doing its job.  I'll be interested to see how often this nonsense is going to show up.

Mr. Spicer did better today in his first official press briefing.  Saturday must have been his first official tongue lashing.  But he sank to the depths of the truly pathetic when he tried to justify CLL Donald's psychotic preoccupation with his bloated sense of self worth.  Spicer took the press to task again, if more gently, for depressing little Donald with its reporting.  How can that constant barrage of negativity help but make The Boss a wee bit defensive?  Can't you people try to say something nice once in awhile?

This poor Donald BS is advanced in deference to the feelings of the most obnoxious, arrogant, rude, crude, overblown, dismissive, bullying blowhard in American public life.  Why can't you just be nicer to him?  This is very close in it's pathetic quotient to Kellyanne's wondering aloud why people can't just ignore little Donald's boorish behavior and trashy mouth and propensity for putting people down and instead detect the goodness of his heart.  Jeez.  Wonder why?

As I write, we're on the eve of Day 5 of the Trump regime.  I hope that the next 1,400+ won't be any more toxic than than the first 4.  Somehow, though, I'll be surprised if that's how it all plays out.  I sense that the worst is yet to come.

Lies, damned lies and statistics. Or attendance estimates.

I haven't seen Rachel Maddow on MSNBC since earlier in the week.  I hope that crooked, lyin', little Donald's thought police haven't snatched her off a network sound stage and clapped her in jail for her outspoken questioning of most of the gibberish coming out of the Trump fantasy camp.  I also hope that I'll see her again soon in her usual weeknight time slot but, if not, the last words I saw her broadcast have already proved prophetic.

Her comment went something along the line of, "No matter what the actual inauguration attendance figure turns out to be, Trump will lie about it."  I guess you can't go too far wrong if you predict that little Donald will lie about something (anything) so I don't know if Rachel really deserves all that much credit.  But it's been entertaining to see the way her prediction has come to life.

I'll admit that I don't know if little Donald has actually lied himself or if he sent one of his lackeys out, fully laden with lies, to lie for him by proxy.  The lackey in the spotlight is Sean (of the Brain Dead) Spicer who, as the Trump Press Secretary, is going to get lots of opportunities for lying by proxy.  But this one was pretty good.  He blasted the assembled White House press corps for deliberate lies about the size of the Friday Inaugural crowd.  He spouted a hodge-podge of garbled District of Columbia mass transit ridership data and a sketchy story (since debunked) about a light-colored ground cover which, according to him, proved that the Trump Coronation attendance was the largest ever.  Period.

I feel a little sorry for Sean Spicer.  It looks pretty clear that he was provided with marching orders that would set him up to look almost as petty and mean-spirited as his boss.  Ouch.  Day Two of the Trump reign and gas has been liberally applied to the already smoldering feud between the big cheese and the press.  I don't want to accuse Trump of being too chickenshit to confront the pressroom crowd himself.  After all, he had a full day to race through and he got his digs in against the media in his address to a crowd of CIA operatives at the Agency's Langley headquarters.  Something about the press including some of the most dishonest people around.  Coming from little Donald, words of high praise indeed.  Spicer did cast Trump as a victim of the Democratic Senators' delaying tactics, thereby cheating Trump of the presence of his CIA Director nominee at Langley.  Waaah, waaah, waaah.

Press briefings during the Viet Nam and Iraq wars earned the nicknames of The Four O'Clock Follies and The Five O'Clock Follies, respectively.  Beleaguered military mouthpieces were subjected to open scorn and ridicule from reporters over the briefings' exaggerated and inflated claims of just how well those two wars were going.  Hmmmm.  Exaggeration and inflation.  Sound like anyone we know?  I'm going to urge Spicer and the rest of his flacks to avoid regularly scheduling their future press briefings at either four or five in the afternoon.  And certainly not on Fridays either.  No need to make it easy for the enemy press to harness the power of alliteration.  The briefings' contents alone will make them plenty easy enough targets.

Away we go.  I think that even an untrained hack like me should be able to find plenty of juicy material from the Trump Gang to fill up a daily report.  I can't wait to try my hand on the comings and goings of Kellyanne Conway.  Such as, wasn't that coat she wore to the inauguration just about the most ridiculous thing you've ever seen?  The only place I can see that as appropriate would be the Philadelphia Phillies' bullpen in April.  God help us all.

The Emperor's got himself some new clothes. And don't you dare say otherwise.

I'd committed myself to paying zero attention to any and all media coverage of today's Coronation...oops...Inauguration.  And I told Ms Susan as much: no TV watching while that cockroach was on camera.  I did pretty well but Susan buckled with the line, "I wanna see what he has to say."  She watched and I caught only the opening lines of his monologue in which he thanked the assembled formers and the 28.5 % of eligible American voters (give or take) who voted for him and the citizens of the world (even, presumably, Mexicans and radical Islamic terrorists) for their roles in his ascension to his Imperial Throne.  I was a little disappointed that he didn't single out the Russian electorate.  After all, those comrades hadn't gotten to vote for him even though they had to bear some amount of deprivation while Putin was pouring state resources into the Trump campaign.  Oh well, the Russians have always been long-suffering.

I couldn't help but see some clips from the body of his address during the evening newscasts.  It was vintage Trump stump rhetoric: one and two syllable words delivered in that strident slo-mo whine of his.  So much for getting presidential and unifying.  I'm sure that his supporters lapped it up even as it's becoming more and more obvious that he has no intention or even the wherewithal to implement the sweeping measures he's been promising up to the eve of the election and beyond.  My question (well, one of my many questions) is: How long is it going to take for those supporters to realize that they've been gulled yet again?  And not by a politician this time but by a reality TV game show host and serial bankruptcy filer.  Go effin' figure.

This is a guy who'd rather tell lie after lie than a simple truth.  This is the guy whose tax returns we're never gonna see.  This is the guy who's never gonna lock Hillary up.  This is the guy who's never gonna sue each and every one of those women who came forward to put some meat on the bones of his self-admitted sexual assault exploits.  This is the guy who's never gonna build that wall though that will relieve him of trying to track down the President of Mexico to collect a check for construction costs.  Heaven alone knows what he's gonna try and do about deporting undocumented aliens and banning Muslims from entry to the country.  This is the guy who's promised to cut taxes while beefing up our military and strengthening law enforcement and balancing the budget.  I'll give him credit for following up on one of his promises.  He's nominated a passel of unqualified and uninformed lackeys to head various branches of the federal government.

My other question (among those many) is: when do we get to start talking openly and publicly about the mental state and stability of this walking, talking doofus with bad hair and an extra long tie?  OK, OK.  Make that really bad hair.  Do we have to wait until this phony starts rolling around on the floors of the White House and chewing on the carpets?  How soon does the shrink on retainer get a crack at the new inhabitant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?  Even with the specter of Mike Spence hovering in the shadows, I'd love to know that something is being done to reel crooked, lyin', little Donald down from the clouds of his megalomania.  Don't we all deserve that?

cutting and running...

Miz Susan wondered aloud on Friday morning how long it would take me to stop waking up so damn early.  To be fair, I don't sleep thru to the alarm on my crummy little cell phone (now set for 5:10 in the AM) more than twice a month.  But it hadn't been much earlier than 4:30 on Friday.  And it's not like I'd been sneaking out of bed and leaving the phone upstairs to go off an hour and a half before her usual wake up call.  So what right did she have to get all bent out of shape with me?  She was still getting her coffee delivered bedside, as usual.

OK, so it had been at 4:00 on both Wednesday and Thursday.  And at least once at 3:30 the week before.  But still, just because I was slipping into a sleep-deprived psychosis, I hadn't taken to going outside and baying at the moon when almost everyone west of the Atlantic coastline was still sound asleep.  Or threatened Susan with one of the tennis balls we keep on the back deck to chuck at the rabbits which Olive and Grey haven't slaughtered.

I'd had a lot on my mind.  I'd finally turned in a letter of resignation from my prestigious and highly paid position (ha!) as the textbook manager at North Hennepin Community College up in Brooklyn Park.  It had gotten to the point that the 40-mile round trip slog up and down I-94 was one of the bright spots of the job.  The pace and the pressure felt like they were both on the uptick since last fall.  And at some kind of exponentially accelerated rate.  It was getting close to either killing me or moving me to kill someone else.  I tempered that threat by telling people that if I felt like I had to kill someone, I'd go after one of the publishers' sales reps before I focused on the campus community at large.  Jeez, sales reps are a dime a dozen.

This past Friday was my last day and the previous two weeks had been a frenzied whirlwind.  Is that redundant?  I'd add more adjectives for effect, if necessary.  How about fevered, panicked, disjointed, stretched-thin?  I felt as if I needed to get 2 months' worth of work done in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, etc days.  I had plenty to do and it was coming home with me both in the forms of overtime from my laptop's keyboard and injections into what should have been hours of restorative REM snoozing.

Now I feel as if I've had a huge weight lifted from my back.  Maybe that's because quitting a job that had become overwhelming lifted that weight but was also a step into a free-fall void.  We'll see if the gravity of the free-fall is easier to bear than the weight that had been on my back.  I dashed home at 2:15 on Friday afternoon to meet with a real estate agent about getting a for sale sign in front of our now unaffordable house.  Maybe I've traded one painful pressure for another.

But that said, both Miz Susan and I are almost giddy with the prospect of spending a chunk of our summer together without job pressures hanging over us.  Hopefully, we'll avoid our tendencies to niggling micromanagement and voicing opinions about each others' questionable behaviors.  Questionable to the voicer but, of course, perfectly rational to the behaver.  But if those are gonna be the worst of our problems, sign me up.

I slept in until 5:30 yesterday which ain't bad for me.  Today, though, I woke up at 3:00 in the middle of some incomprehensible bookstore-flavored near-nightmare.  But I shook that off, crawled back into bed and didn't wake up again until 6:30.  I think it's gonna get better.

cruel disappointments

OK, I've had some disappointments in my life.  I'm not complaining; that's just how it is.  Losing my gig at Hamline may have been one of the worst of those.  That was when a crowd of hapless administrators swapped me out for a crowd of comparably hapless Nebraska turd farmers posing as booksellers.  It's a good thing that I've left that bitterness behind.  In retrospect, none of those disappointment events, as dark as their days may have been, killed me and I'm left pretty happy with life as it plays itself out.

I remind Miz Susan over and over again that, yes, our lives suck to a certain degree but that we've got it easy compared to way too many people.  Those wise reminders don't hold us for long, of course, and we fall back into pissing and moaning mode.  Oh well, p+m'g is one of our few rights and it beats the hell out of kicking the cats or trying to smuggle stink-bombs into work to stuff up into the ventilation ducts.

My latest disappointment has to do with, of all things, the Goodwill.  That's right, the Goodwill.  That which has brought so much fun and meaning into my monotone (but not unhappy) existence.  It might all work out for the best but I have to wait for the late returns on that one.

The Goodwill disenchantment came at me like a two-pronged attack and started maybe a month or a month and a half ago.  I'd been noticing that my home Goodwill store on Charles off of Fairview and University wasn't providing me the wow-factor finds that I'd gotten used to over the last couple of years.  It used to be a given, much to Miz Susan's displeasure, that I could practically count on a grab bag full of keen stuff as a result of my weekly (OK, maybe biweekly) visit(s).  Not that I actually needed any of it.  What on God's green earth made me buy those two MacGregor baseball gloves?  I'm as likely to ever play softball again as I am to play centerfield for the Twins.  Or even rightfield.  And all the shirts and jackets and sweaters and pants which I already had in more than abundance in several closets and dressers at home?  Plates, bowls, cups, nickel beer glasses, coffee mugs.  Like I wasn't able to have a cup of coffee without the Cleveland Indians or Pioneer Press mug I found?  I was doing my best to spread the stuff around to friends and family but that wasn't doing much to clear the clutter.  Not to mention the strange looks I got when I gave people stuff which still had the 99¢ Goodwill price tags stuck to them.

But it was the thrill of the chase and the occasional pot of gold at the end of the Goodwill rainbow that kept me coming back for more.  And more and more.  I guess that dragging all of that junk into the house motivated me to clear some space in the closets and dressers and cupboards and to box and bag up all the displaced stuff to haul off to the Goodwill donation dock.  But that was, at best, a zero-sum game even with minimal disposal of stuff scoring me a few points with Miz Susan.  At least I think that I've never bought anything after I'd donated it.  I've bought a few things which were pretty close matches to what I'd just gotten rid of but nothing that's come home was making a round trip.  I'm pretty sure.

But the Charles Avenue store was definitely getting depressingly more bare and barren by the visit and it sure as hell wasn't because I was buying anything.  There  just wasn't anything appealing enough to buy.

Just as I was starting to despair that I'd outgrown the Goodwill and that I'd have to take on some new hipster affectation, like maybe heroin addiction, a possible solution presented itself.  It looked like the Goodwill was coming to me and opening a new store in Brooklyn Park!!  I was excited, to put it mildly.

I'd been passing by a building site in BPark twice a day for the past several months on my daily drives to and from work.  It was a monstrous cinder block building, maybe three stories tall by three football fields long.  I'd casually wondered who in their right mind was choosing to invest in a  warehouse building in the northern suburbs when it came clear.  Signage got tacked onto the outside of the building in the form of the familiar white lettering on a dark blue field.  Goodwill was coming to town and right on my way home.  I was in heaven as this was all revealed to me.

The reason that my home Goodwill was looking so desolate must have been because the GW merchandising geniuses were pulling stock from it, and probably all of the 42 other metro area stores, to fill the racks and shelves of the Brooklyn Park store with wow factor.  I had visions of stopping at the new store every day on the way home.  Miz Susan would never notice and my only problem would be how to smuggle the new booty into the house so that she wouldn't notice it piling up.  Life was good.

In a fever, I called the Goodwill home office where the merchandising geniuses were housed.  This happened to be in the complex of retail and office space at the Charles Avenue location.  My breathless email (is that possible?) asked when the new store would open and the response told me that it was going to be on the coming Saturday.  Well, I wasn't going to make a 40-mile round-trip on the weekend even if it was for a new Goodwill store.  I might be crazy but I'm not totally stupid.  I could wait until the following week.

I played a little passive/aggressive on Miz Susan on Monday afternoon.  I called her from the car as I was exiting the NoHenn parking lot and told her that I was going to try to hold off on stopping at the new Goodwill until later in the week.  I heard her long sigh (and if I'd had a picture phone I'd have seen her rolling her eyes) and she told me to go ahead and stop.  I might have heard her whisper through gritted teeth that she didn't really care if I ever came home but maybe that was just the hum of the tires and the wind whistling past the Camry.

But, oh boy, had I been played.  I wish that I had a copy of the store's security camera footage as I walked through the door and looked around.  My jaw must have dropped a good 8 inches.  I'd stumbled into a Goodwill Outlet store.  The place was fixtured with a bunch of low-lying...somethings...which could have been feed troughs for cattle or horses.  Someone has told me since that that's exactly what they are.  There was junk poured onto these troughs in no discernible order with no apparent discernible pricing system.  Far from skimming the cream of their other 42 metro area stores' inventories, the Goodwill merchandising geniuses seemed to have chosen to stock this store with whatever they'd been able to fish out of trash cans as they cruised up and down the alleys of the metro area.  I left as quickly as possible so that I could get home and take a shower.  I felt dirty and betrayed.  I think that I broke into tears as I walked in the door and blubbered out my story to Miz Susan.  She sent me straight to bed.  I think she slept in one of the spare bedrooms that night.  Or maybe on the couch.

The one-two punch of two crummy Goodwill stores was like a couple of body blows.  I stayed away from any and all Goodwill stores for better than a week.  I snuck in a trip to the St. Vincent de Paul store down on 7th Street.  I should have known better; no wow factor there either.

This past Wednesday, I stopped in at the Charles Avenue store.  And was greeted with signs announcing a clearance sale at 50% off everything in the store.  None of that everything was worth buying even at 50% off but the real news, the heart-gladdening news, the news that's fired up my will and desire to go thrift shopping again was in the lower half of the signs.  The Goodwill was going to close down their Charles Avenue Store to pave the way for a brand new, two-storied, Taj Mahal and Mecca of a Goodwill store at 1239 University Avenue.  Which would be doing a Grand Opening on Saturday the 28th, now less than a week away.  Talk about being pulled from the very depths of desolate depression to the heights of glorious new thrift shop possibilities.  I think that Miz Susan was happy for me when I blurted out the great news after I got home on Wednesday.

It turns out that what was news to me was ho-hum for others.  Big surprise there.  When I saw Sue's sister Jill at the gala opening of this year's version of the Monroe 4th Grade Opera (named Electric Catastrophe: Save the Energy; there's probably YouTube video out there), her first question for me was, "Are you ready for the Grand Opening of the new Goodwill store?"  She'd known for weeks.  Or maybe just days.  But ages longer than I'd known.  She suggested that we get a big group together to make the scene.  Which would be fine by me.  I doubt that we'll be able to strong-arm Miz Susan into that excursion.  She puts up with my thrift shop shenanigans, if barely, but I don't think that she's ready to surrender to the idea that her life is as silly as mine.  She's undoubtedly right.  I'm doing my best to drag her down but she's remaining above it all.  Class will win out, in the end.  She's got it.  Me?  Not quite so much.

breaking news

Just this morning, which started for me at 3:30 when I couldn't get back to sleep, I learned of developments involving two Minnesota luminaries.  Oh, what the heck, make that icons.

The early AM newscast had Paul Molitor being called back in for a second interview with Minnesota Twins brass in the search for a new manager for the team.  I've loved Paul Molitor even before the day  I bought a "Paul Molitor for Rookie of the Year" t-shirt at the liquor store up on Snelling at Hague.  The one which was a long-time inhabitant of the corner which is now a Play-It-Again-Sports outlet.  I also remember playing IM touch football against him at the U (as a ringer, of course) back when I could be counted on to do something else with a football other than drop it.  We kicked their asses.  Just sayin'.

How do I get off on these tangents?  Back to Paul Molitor and his future with the Twins.  Molitor was a great player with the Brewers and the Blue Jays and even the Twins as he wrapped up his playing career.  He was an All Star multiple times and a deserving inductee into the Hall of Fame.  Those credentials are beyond question.

Lately, he's been a coach for the Twins.  This probably earned him an inside track at a first interview in the wake of Ron Gardenhire's departure.  Still all well and good even if the Twins have stunk during much of Paul's coaching days.

However, it was reported this morning that he'd earned the second interview based, in part, on his familiarity with the Twins' system.  Ouch.  Hopefully that's only a very small part cuz the Twins' system has been pretty dysfunctional lately.

And Michele Bachmann's back in the news.  Thank God; I've missed her re-election commercials this cycle.  But now it sounds as if the Congresswoman has earned some extra security protection.  Based on threats from, get this, ISIL.  ISIL, I was told by Kim Insley or Carla Hult, has made threats of some sort against Michele.  Apparently those maniacs are pissed off at her because of her outspoken public criticism of their organization's operations and methodology.  Hmmmmm.  I wonder who else ISIL is targeting based on the targets' public criticisms.  That would pretty much be all of us, right?

I've been pissed off at Michele Bachmann for years because of her outspoken public criticism of any number of things.  But I've never been pissed off enough to broadcast any threats against her.  And I've given her grudging credit for the inventiveness and entertainment value of her public criticisms.  Fortunately, this country has enough checks and balances in place to have kept Michele and her like from rising any further than she has.  Unfortunately, the checks and balances in Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan are in need of some fine tuning.

I have no idea how much further ISIL will advance its agenda.  I hope that they're approaching a high water mark and that that agenda of hate and ignorance will start to wither away.  For now, I'll take some comfort in the fact that Michele Bachmann and her agenda of hate and ignorance have reached a high water mark.  Even if that's not without some fresh lunacy making the headlines.

cleaning up the community. 43 cubic feet (and them some) at a time.

Miz Susan and I were excited to find the Citywide Community Cleanup flyer laying in the entryway of the house a few weeks back.  We're too cheap to buy a mailbox so we rely on a mail slot in the front door.  This allows the carrier to jam our bills and junk mail through the slot and onto the floor of the entry way.  I wonder occasionally if we're in violation of U.S. statute by not having a mailbox even though we're pretty sure that our cheapness defense is airtight.  I remember reading years ago  that a residential mailbox is actually the property of the feds.  Which leads me to further wonder if our house, mailboxless as it is, is transformed by the slot in the door into one gigantic mailbox.  And is therefore the property of the federal government.  The whole damn thing.  But...I digress.  There's a surprise, right?

I've done a few of the neighborhood/community cleanup events in the past.  Though, as anyone who's had a peek into our garage or basement already suspects, not in the recent past.  The last one I remember took place down at the Ford Plant when that place was still on the tax rolls.  I'd clearly forgotten that this event constitutes real work and is far more effective at gobbling up half of a weekend than at cleaning up the community.  But we were psyched up at the thought of getting some of the accumulated junk out of the house and even started a mental checklist or two of things we could get rid.  But what we mostly did was to let the flyer lay on the library table inside the front door and forget about it.

Until I found the damn thing again, probably while looking for something else that I'd left laying on the library table and forgotten about.  And found it just a day or two before the big event rather than, sensibly, a day or two afterwards.  "Aw, that's too bad.  But we'll get on that next year."  Nope, found it in plenty of time to do some housecleaning last Saturday.  Hmph.

On Friday night, Susan was busy firming up her mental checklist of stuff that we (meaning me) should wrangle into the back of or onto the top of the truck and then deliver it all to the collection site at the north end of the State Fairground.  She told me that I'd be getting rid of a defunct dehumidifier which had shorted out during the beastly hot and sticky summer of 2013 and flipped off a bunch of circuit breakers for the wiring in the basement.  We also agreed that I could scrounge thru the garage for computer components and haul the queen-sized box spring out for disposal.  That box spring had defied all of our efforts to coax it up the steep and narrow staircase to our 3rd floor, former-attic bedroom.

The real prize in the cleanup was the horrible, god-awful heavy Kenmore air conditioner.  This beast had been blocking out any hope of natural light penetrating the window at the landing of the staircase between our first and second floors.  My brother-in-law Dan and I had double-teamed it into that window shortly after we'd moved in during the summer of '06, another beastly hot and sticky one.  I've known all along that it was probably inefficient as hell, cost an arm and a leg to run and was most likely shaking the interior framing of the west side of the house to pieces with it's sad old banging and clattering motor.  But that machine had served us well over the years.  I don't think we had it on more than two or three times this past summer but, in hotter seasons, it kept the main floor of the house almost comfortable.  I won't miss the darn thing but I'll tip my hat to it.

Oh yeah, one more item.  A toaster oven rendered hors de combat by a few too may English muffins and bagels.  This former fixture of our Saturday and Sunday mornings had been pitched out onto the little annex of our back deck where it had been getting dirtier and more disreputable looking by the week.

Everything was a breeze to load into and onto the Tahoe.  Except for the Kenmore air conditioner.  This example of Sears finest workmanship could have been used as a auxiliary anchor for about 3/4 of the ships in the Navy's fleet.  Heavy as hell?  Yes.  Clumsy as hell?  Yes.  Almost totally lacking in any convenient handholds that didn't have sharp protruding chunks of metal as integral parts of the purported handholds?  Yes.  Yep, it pretty much had it all.

It took me the better part of an hour and a half to get that thing out of the window and onto the floor of the landing.  What with its size and all of the precautions we'd taken to keep it from falling out of the window and crushing one of the next door neighbors' kids, it was a struggle to carefully undo all of those precautions without letting it fall out of the window and crush one of the next door neighbors' kids.  What also ended up on the floor of the landing at the end of the hour and a half were piles of dirt and at least half the pine needles that had fallen off of the Martinson's towering evergreen tree over the past eight years.  How could that have possibly have happened?  Shouldn't more than half of those ended up on the ground somewhere else?  Some days, it seems as if those all fall onto our front porch.  Annoying as that might be, it makes shopping for Miz Susan's major Christmas presents pretty easy since she wears out a broom every year keeping the front porch pine-needle-free.  I am running out of inventive ways to disguise what her present is with just wrapping paper and ribbon.

I moved the air conditioner down the steps, carefully and one at a time.  But not so carefully that it didn't land on each step with a resounding thump while leaving a new pile of even more pine needles with each thump.  It was as if the stupid thing had an infinite supply of pine needles, perhaps being piped in via a wormhole from some parallel universe.  From the foot of the stairs, I picked it up and staggered out onto the front porch with it.  How in hell was I going to get it down the stairs without dropping it on one or both of my feet or somehow stumbling with it in such a way as to rip the living daylights out of my left knee again?  I had my doubts but I picked it up again and tottered down the steps.

It was touch and go and there were times when it felt as if all of the weight (considerable between me and the AC) was on my quavering left leg.  I know!  Let's not do anything quite that stupid again anytime soon.  OK?

From that point, it was easy enough to manhandle the brute onto my trusty aluminum Hamline Bookstore two-wheeler and roll it out to the back of the Tahoe.  Susan said that I looked like a coal miner coming out of the hole after a shift.  I insisted that she take a picture but it was so disreputable looking that she refused to put it on Facebook.

I got cleaned up and headed for the drop-off site.  The entrance was off of Larpenteur up at the far end of the Fairgrounds and there were cars and trucks backed up practically out to street.  The traffic moved along fairly quickly though and before too long I was being grilled by a couple of women about just what the hell I had in the truck besides the box spring lashed onto the top of the truck which they could see for themselves.  I ran over the contents: the big-ass air conditioner, the shorted out dehumidifier, the three printers from the garage (yes, I'd salvaged the copy paper from the guts of the printers before I surrendered them) and the toaster oven.  The two women snorted in contempt at the toaster oven and I cautioned them not to laugh at what had once been a beloved member of the household.  They didn't seem impressed.  I drove the itemized bill they created for me up the line to the next station where another attendant took my check for $60 ($20 for the AC, $5 each for the printers, $10 for the dehumidifier and $15 for the box spring.  They threw in disposal of the toaster oven gratis).  From there, I moved to the head of the line where the geography of the place was explained to me.  I complained to that guy about the ridicule my toaster oven had been subjected to.  He seemed sympathetic but he may have just been humoring me.

When I was done with all the dropping off of junk at the various stations, I headed south thru the Fairgrounds for the main entrance (or in my case, exit).  I reveled in clipping along at 10-15 mph over the same ground I'd covered just three weeks earlier at a tenth that speed while being shoved and jostled and assaulted by a quarter of a million insane State Fairgoers. I'll guarantee that I didn't look for some defenseless pedestrian to run over from behind.

All in all, I figure that I moved 40+ cubic feet of junk off of our premises and into the capable care of the City of St. Paul.  Not that you'd notice the difference.  I've got a couple of boxes of my mom's books in the back of my car that I'll drop off at the Goodwill today.  If I remember; I've already forgotten twice.  Each of those two boxes probably take up a good two cubic feet.  I'll count it all as progress.

On the way back home from the Fairgrounds, I stopped in at Micawber's bookstore for an hour and swapped lies with my friend Tom.  Any attentive reader of my previous posts will remember that I recommended last spring that everyone go there and buy a book or two.  Or three.  That advice still holds.  I left with an armful of books which I hope to read and/or give away.  All in all, I figure that that armful may have been about a cubic foot's worth of books.  Even dragging all of those home left me well to the plus side of the ledger in  the community cleanup category.  I'm kinda proud of myself.

i hope i'm not being stalked by vampires

I don't get the tracking widget on blogger and the stats that it displays.  I started writing this stuff about four and a half years ago and the tracker says that there have been close to 3,000 views.  Or something like that.  Not likely.  I'll admit that I'm a fool but I'm not falling for that one.

I understand that most of those aren't real views but are generated when some automated trolling robot takes a peek to see if I've inadvertently included my credit card and bank account numbers within one of my posts.

But seriously?  21 hits from Romania over the past day or so?  Is it really spelled that way now?  I like Roumania so much more; it looks more exotic.

I'd be interested in hearing other people's theories on this.  Especially if any of you think that I should take this Romania thing seriously and stock up on garlic.

and we paid to do this.

This year, Miz Susan and I put plenty of thought into picking the best possible day to go to the State Fair.  I can't remember for sure what the exact thought processes were.  But I'm sure that they were rational, well-considered and took into account all of the various factors important to us to ensure an optimal State Fair Experience.

The one thing we didn't give adequate enough consideration to was who'd be going to the fair with us and just how goddam many of them there would be.  This turned out to be a fundamental miscalculation on our part.  The place was jam-packed, ass-to-elbow with crazy Minnesota Fairgoers and they did their darnedest to kill us.  It turns out that the second Saturday of the Fair, the one on the Labor Day weekend, attracted somewhere in excess of a quarter of a million people, us among them.  All of whom paid real money for the privilege of paying too much more real money for food and drink and entertainments.  And none of those were probably all that good for any of us.  This amounted to a new all-time single day attendance record.  And, I'm guessing, an all-time single day spending record   I don't know whether I should be proud of myself or disgusted with myself for being a part of it all.  Maybe a little of both.


Gee whiz...who'd'a thought?       August 30, 2014

It didn't start out too badly.  We managed to get out of the house by 10 in the morning.  This amounts to pretty quick-stepping for us on a weekend.  But we had our agenda and we were motivated.  Maybe we should have started to suspect that we were getting sucked into something close to an epic disaster movie scenario when we had to wait up on Snelling for 30+ minutes for a bus to come along.  But we had visions of corn dogs and the art work of hundreds of K-12 students in the Education Building dancing in our wee little heads.

It didn't seem that bad when we went in thru the main entrance opposite Midway Parkway.  Maybe my dad's benevolent spirit was looking down on us and was deflecting some of the horrors to come.  Doug was a huge fan of the Fair; back in the day when he was playing politics he'd go several times during each year's run.  Even further back in the day, he'd parked cars at the Fair as a Boy Scout and it seems like he never really got it out of his blood.  It hadn't occurred to me before I was writing this but maybe there was a certain justice in his having passed away at the Lyngblomsten Home just two and a half blocks east down Midway.  He was definitely on familiar ground.

O'Gara's newish building is right inside the Fair's entrance and I'd decided in advance that I needed to try their pretzel cheese curds.  These would definitely not have been good for me but they'd been touted in the media as one of the Fair's hot new foods to try.  Surprisingly, Miz Susan agreed that I should try them but, even at 10:30 in the morning, O'Gara's was a mob scene in miniature (clue #2 as to what we were in for).  So we deferred on that idea.  And headed south and west around the Agriculture Horticulture palace for the Dairy Building and breakfast malts.

Malts in the Dairy Building are one of our must-haves at the Fair.  The lines (more like anxious mobs frantic to board the last ship out of Dunkirk) have tended to feeding-frenzy long in previous years.  On our chosen Saturday, not too bad.  Chocolate for me and stawberry rhubarb for Miz Susan.  She proclaimed that hers was better.  Hers of almost anything is almost always better so I'm gonna give her that one.  We got separated as we spilled out the exit chutes from the milk shake franchise when Susan stopped to gawk at the glass-windowed butter carving cooler.  I'd have stopped, too, but the carver was just doing rough preliminary work without a suffering Princess Kay candidate shivering with goose-bumps and chattering teeth.  What fun would that have been?.

She came out of the butter carving spectator section looking around a little frantically.  This would be the first of many separations that day.  I never did get a chance to ask her what she was worried about.  We couldn't have possibly been more than 30' apart, we each had cell phones, I was wearing a bright red Twins cap (chosen for easy spotability) and we were at most like 3 miles away from home.  Maybe the excitement of the butter carving had gotten the best of her.  But it wouldn't be the last time I saw the look of fleeting panic in her eyes after we'd chosen different routes around an obstacle in our path (and God knows there were plenty of those) or when she squeezed thru a little opening in the crowd that I couldn't exploit.  She tends to forget that I'm about twice her size.  Which may have served me well on the broomball rink but isn't really an advantage I can parlay in polite society.

Leaving the Dairy Building, we joined the crowd pressing west down Judson.  The pedestrian traffic seemed to have grown considerably during the 20 minutes we were off the street.  This took us past the MPR Empire display (which Susan enjoys and which I don't give a hoot about) and up to the Minnesota lottery booth.  I've always said that the Lottery has scratch-offs at the fair with higher odds of winning than the ones that get sold out of the SAs and Holidays.  Makes sense to me; kinda like the dope pushers of urban myth handing out free joints thru the chain link fences of elementary school playgrounds as a business expense write-off against the big paydays with the hard stuff in high school parking lots.  My theory fell flat as not a single one of Miz Susan's three bucks worth of tickets paid off.  I'm not dissuaded; it was a pretty small sample.

We bounced back and forth across Judson to take in the sights at the KARE 11 and Miracle of Birth Barns.  All of the on-air talent had fled the KARE building and about the only excitement in the Miracle of Birth building was the anticipation that one of the visitors would pass out and maybe die.  Jam-packed, hot and humid, people moving around the place like marbles in the bottom of a shoebox.  It was pretty random.

We decided to cut across the swelling east-west traffic and head north toward the Grandstand.  Once we bumped into that dead end of a towering brick wall, we veered left for the newly rehabbed West End Market.  This spot is home to the Schell's Beer Bandstand and, more importantly, the Schell's Beer Garden.   Besides the Schell's Beer attractions, the former West End Market had been made up of a cluster of low-lying ramshackle wood-framed buildings which resembled nothing so much as stables on a low-rent horse farm.  The rehab transformed the Market into a cluster of low-lying steel-girdered and mesh buildings which did away with most of the dimly-lit, poorly-ventilated (think being inside a pizza oven) and claustrophobic stalls of Fairs past.  Balance the improved amenities with a loss of familiarity, though: we had to circle the individual buildings, all five or six of 'em, before we found what had drawn us there in the first place, the I Like You shop.  Miz Susan was greeted with adoring open arms by her former student whose mom runs the place.  I Like You is a regular stop for us during the holiday shopping season at its full-time location on the fringe of the usually-too-hip-for-us Northeast Minneapolis neighborhood.  It specializes in local artists' hand crafts.  It was nice to see a couple of friendly faces.

I don't think we bought anything at I Like You.  We'd seen all that stuff before.  I'd have certainly bought something at the Schell's Beer Garden if the lines hadn't been so damn long.  But we needed to push on; there were corndogs in our futures.  As we came out of the West End Market between the big-ass Sweet Martha's and Fresh French Fries concession stands, the picture above captures what greeted us.  The West End Market had been a relatively calm backwater compared to the Amazon of humanity which clogged Dan Patch in raging full flood.  Where had all these people come from?

From that point on, it's pretty hazy and my memories are dreamlike (or nightmarish).  There are some pictures in our cell phones which seem to suggest that we waited in line for 30-45 minutes to try Giggles's walleye mac and cheese and that we saw a chunk of the daily Fair parade (did they really have that many different gigantic cow sculptures collected in one place at one time?) and that we finally got corndogs at about 3:30.  When we got home, I found that I'd managed to buy a fistful of Fair-themed postcards.  Did I really think that we had that many friends who'd want to get one of those?  My most vivid recollection is of the insane driver of a motorized wheelchair.  She must have decided to test her chair's off-road capabilities by running the damn thing up the back of my left leg.  I don't think she got very far though she did manage to scuff up my ankle and hamstring. This memory is so far-fetched that I'd write it off as pure nightmare except for the picture Miz Susan took of the tread marks on my ankle.  It could have been worse.  When all was said and done, our bankroll was only $70 or so lighter than when we we'd left the house.

I started to come to as we stumbled off the MTC bus at Snelling and Laurel.  Our front porch had never looked so good.  Miz Susan managed to drag herself upstairs and collapsed onto the bed for a long nap.  I had other ideas.  Still smarting from the indignity of getting shut out at the Schell's Beer Garden, I hopped in the car and headed for Big Top Liquors in the Midway Shopping Center.  Yep, just as I suspected.  They'd gotten their first shipment of Schell's Oktoberfest into the store.  Of which I hauled two twelve-packs home.  Sometimes, good things do come to those who wait.

It was a pretty crazy day at the Fair.  I don't remember a crazier one.  Do we really have to wait a whole year to go back again?

...and a glimpse into the past

All sorts of experiences and influences from my formative years (which I'm undoubtedly still slogging thru) probably made me, for better or--more likely--worse, what I am today.  Slackering my way thru high school and college on not much more than native wit and charm, getting drubbed in Strat-O-Matic baseball season after season, putting off doing whatever was necessary until that whatever became urgently necessary, hearing the Basie band's recording of Li'l Darlin' for the first time from far-off WLS radio in Chicago, picking up charcoal grilling tips at my Dad's elbow, rummaging thru dusty old antique stores and countless refinishing projects at my mother's elbow.  Maybe I shouldn't be saying it, but I'm pretty sure that, amidst all of those, broomball was pretty benign.  It wasn't completely innocent but it mostly kept me and a crowd of other guys off the streets during our late teens and early 20's.

I stumbled across broomball one winter night in my sophomore or junior year of high school.  I was plagued by teenaged angst and unrequited love(s) and, rather than plotting to blow up my school or axe-murder my family in the middle of the night, I'd go out for long solitary walks and feel sorry for myself.  Even in the dead of winter.  It was on one of those walks that I noticed bright lights and loud voices coming from the backyard of 145 Amherst.  This was Kurt Wiessner's house and he was one of my friends from Highland Park High School and, before that, Ramsey Junior.  Drawn by the lights and the voices, I walked up the driveway to the backyard and discovered broomball.  I was allowed to play, became a regular and found meaning for my otherwise sad and doubt-wracked life.  Turns out that there were plenty of others from my high school crowd who were happy to find meanings in broomball for their similarly pathetic lives.

145 Amherst is a big white-stuccoed slab of a house smack dab in the heart of St. Paul's Tangletown, south of the Macalester campus. It was the home of  Kurt, his three older brothers and their parents.  Tangletown is full of charmingly winding streets and alleys, streets with collegiate sounding names like Princeton and Amherst and Cambridge.  I suppose that whoever platted that quarter of a square mile, apart from being drunk, named the streets with an ear to charm and prestige to match the grid.  I leave it to others to argue if those names come off as more pretentious than prestigious.  I've lived within a half a mile of this little neighborhood since 1964 and know it for what it is: a secure little enclave of the upper middle class with housing stock to match.  Mostly.  My swim coach at Macalester lived a block down the street from 145 and his placed looked liked it had been lived in hard by a family with four kids.  Which it had.  When Coach retired and moved to Lake Tahoe, the new buyers quickly gussied up the place to the point of making it unrecognizable to me from the curb.

The Wiessner place was similar.  It was in a constant state of remuddle and visions of the next project.  Just as soon as the current one got finished.  It was a great house.  We played more than our share of broomball in its sprawling backyard but we also did our share of beer drinking there since the senior Wiessners were frequently absent on the weekends.

Oh, but that sprawling backyard.  The twists and curves of Tangletown's faux-medieval street map made for building lots of various shapes and sizes.  The backyard of 145 benefited from this; it went rambling away from the back door's little concrete stoop toward the alley for easily 150 feet.  The yard wasn't wide in the same way but its shape was perfect for flooding a broomball rink enclosed with banked piles of snow.  The rink didn't take up anywhere near the whole back yard but it was at least 60' by 40', plenty of room to handle a dozen or more players at one time.  And there were lots of times when a dozen or more players would descend on the Wiessner backyard on a Friday or Saturday night during broomball season.  The season ran from about Thanksgiving thru Valentine's Day with allowances made for minor weather fluctuations.

Broomball mostly kept us off the streets and sober during those winters though there was some bad behavior that went along with the game.  Broomball "brooms" are now high-tech items with high-impact plastic heads rather than our brooms' bristled ends; today's broom looks more like half of a kayak paddle than the ones we played with.  Our brooms broke constantly in the heat of the game and needed replacing.  Some nights, play couldn't start until we'd fanned out into the Mac-Groveland and Highland Park neighborhoods for an hour's worth of snatching brooms off of people's front steps and porches.  Kurt was especially brazen.  He'd work the apartment buildings up and down Grand Avenue for the brooms he knew he'd invariably find in their furnace rooms.  This was long before landlords started installing locks on the outside doors of their buildings but the petty broom larceny might have pushed those security steps along.  Jim Theirs kept a machete in his truck, not for dealing with rival gangs from Central or Monroe but for shortening the bristles of newly acquired brooms for better ball handling.

Kurt's mom and dad were remarkably tolerant of the hordes which took over their house every weekend for 3 1/2 months every year.  Maybe his mom more so; she would make huge batches of Kool Aid punch for the players.  As the last of the players headed for home every Sunday at midnight, they both probably breathed huge sighs of relief  that their homeowner's insurance had survived to cover them for another weekend and that sleep-deprived neighbors hadn't called the cops.

Broomball at the Wiessner's didn't last much past our high school graduation in 1970.  The core group of players scattered to college and jobs and, if we still got together to play occasionally, it was never in that backyard again.  Kurt's was diagnosed with Alzheimer's shortly after broomball gave way to other entertainments and lived out the rest of her life in a residential care facility a couple of blocks away.  I went to her funeral service in the mid-90's.  Kurt's dad stayed on at 145, probably manning the place at all hours like a ship at sea.

I wasn't ever even close to being a good broomball player (the best was Kurt's brother Todd, an amazing natural athlete who reveled in making me look stupid) but I parlayed what skills I picked up into a successful intramural carer at Macalester and as a ringer at the U of M.  After I graduated from Mac, I somehow managed to scam a key to the old gym and permission to flood the broomball rink in the dead of night while most everyone else in the zip code was fast asleep.  I remember a great sense of peace and purpose at 2 in the morning on those freezing cold January nights.  Much like playing the game.

My sister called me a few weeks ago to tell me that there was an estate sale at 145 Amherst that weekend and hadn't I known the family that lived there.  Well, yes, I had.  I got over there on Saturday about midday and the place was pretty picked over.  Not that I went looking to add to the already unmanageable piles of stuff I've got cluttering our house. But I found a few things that cost me four bucks: an LED flashlight (I'm always a sucker for a working flashlight), a 19-tools-1 Leatherman knockoff still in its plastic clamshell, an 18" drafting ruler minus its cork backing.  That wasn't why I'd gone, of course.  I went, mainly, looking to poke around in my childhood and pay my respects to something that had once been an important part of my life.  And. judging from my continuing fondness for the people I played and committed petty larceny with and what I've written here, still is.

40+ plus years ago...

The real score came from a closet at the top of the staircase to the second floor.  Propped up against the wall just inside the door was the beauty pictured here.  There's no way to know and no reason to believe that the broom I found and paid for with the other stuff actually saw game action in the late-60's.  I'm not making any such claims.  I shouldn't even be thinking about ever playing broomball again; not in this lifetime, anyway.  And not touch football and not softball either (though I'd be interested in a diagnosis of what led me to buy that nice MacGregor outfielder's glove at the Goodwill several weeks ago; even at $3.99, that purchase makes no sense whatsoever.).  The sketchy condition of my battered left knee has me convinced to stay away from games like those. But. if I'm ever actually stupid enough to get back out on an ice rink again, the broom from 145 Amherst will be the first thing that I'll have grabbed.  And I have great faith in my stupidity.  Now, what did I do with those damned knee pads?