Author Archives: The Night Writer

Tra-la, it’s spring!

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What a pleasure to step outside this morning to get the newspaper and instead of getting a nose full of frozen hair I had it filled with the smell of warm, moist earth and impending rain. It won’t be long now before I can take down the Christmas lights, pull up the orange driveway stakes, or find a place in the back yard to bury the cat (wrapped and boxed in our deep-freeze). I don’t think it’s going to take me four hours to finish that task.

The snow is almost gone, revealing all the goodies the city plows deposited in my front yard and the tire tracks of the yahoos who drove across my lawn over the winter. It’s good to see the snow go, but I’m a little disappointed. Our sump-pump started acting up last year and I had gone most of the winter without replacing it because there wasn’t a pressing need. When the 16″ of snow fell a few weeks ago, followed by the 40+ degree temperatures, I knew procrastination was no longer an option. I pulled up the old pump and went to Menard’s for a new one and other necessary parts (only two trips!) and got it hooked up, then sat back waiting for the deluge. Nothing! The ground has absorbed everything and nothing has made it into the drain tiles. Oh well, at least the job is done.

Without that to worry about (for the time being, anyway) I can focus on the Twins’ preparations for the upcoming season. The team looks a lot more promising this year than last year at this time, what with the League MVP, Cy Young Winner and Batting Champ all on the roster. Now the biggest concerns are who will be the back-up infielder and whether desperate veteran pitching acquisitions Ramon Ortiz and/or Sidney Ponson can fill spots in the rotation allowing our host of promising but young pitchers an opportunity to season a little longer.

It strikes me as a dubious proposition; Ortiz reportedly has the ability to focus like a shotgun when the going gets tough and the portly Ponson has a reputation for bizarre and aggressive off-field behavior. This has been attributed to excessive drinking, but supposedly that’s no longer a concern because Sid is limiting himself to just a little wine with dinner. Uh-huh. I expect to see a report any day now that Ponson has eaten a bat-boy with some fava beans and a nice chianti. Twins management is hopeful that he’ll work out, of course, saying they expect that Carlos Silva’s work ethic would be a positive influence on him. This is like saying Paris Hilton could be a good influence on Britney Spears.

Oh well, it may be spring, but it’s early in the spring when things still look a little gritty and messy. Soon the grass will be green, the flowers will be out, the sump pump will be humming along and Opening Day will be here.

Funnies…

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The reason we continue to get the Strib at home is because we all read the comics. I read every strip, even the ones I don’t like because it’s easier to read them than skip over them. A strip that I do like is “Get Fuzzy,” and one that I like sometimes is “Stone Soup.” The other day after reading these I said outloud, “If I lived in a house with Bucky Kat from ‘Get Fuzzy’ and Holly from ‘Stone Soup,’ at least one of them would be in a bag down by the river.”

One of the three women of the house said she kind of liked “Stone Soup.”

I said, “If I lived with all those women it would drive me nuts for sure!”

Wa-a-i-i-it a minute…

The good retire young

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Another of my “Night Lights” blogs has pulled the plug as Port McClellan has gone dark after two years and two months. I never realized that the Port was senior to my own blog by only a month, but I enjoyed the excellent commentary, clarity and insights. Given these gifts, my presumption and hope is that the blogger, Michael Brandon McClellan, has merely found bigger fish to fry and has turned his considerable talents toward something more remunerative or life-advancing.

Michael and I were “introduced” by another blog on my roll, Portia Rediscovered, that has also been dormant but has promised to return from hiatus in the near future. Also on hiatus now is LaShawn Barber’s Corner, and Suburban Blight is as good as gone (new babies are hard on blogging), while The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns are still crazy, but a lot less frequent.

And so it goes, old friends move on, new friends arrive. There has been some darn fine writing and/or analyses lately over at Scottish Right and Uncorrelated and I’ve linked Away With Words so much lately that if I do it again I’ll probably be accused of stalking (you can feel free to sneak over there). The Llama Butchers are as prolific as ever, even if exclamation marks sometimes outnumber the words in a few posts. I’ve also become enchanted with the adventures of the ex-pat Kelleys, marvelously chronicled over at Half a World Away. There’s a book in there, trying to come out.

The way things go in the blogosphere you should get over and enjoy these blogs while you can.

Rehearsing

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My wife, the Reverend Mother, preached a sermon yesterday. In it she described how there is a book being written about our lives, every day, and that one day that book will be opened. But there is also, she said, a script for our lives that has already been written and that we can follow. I know both are true.

The first book is scary. Many things are in there that I wish I could rewrite, or delete entirely. Unfortunately, all my rough drafts are there, unalterable:

my missteps…

half-finished thoughts…

idle words…

careless plots and sketchy character development —

all of it, just waiting for a real Author and Finisher.

The script, however, is comforting. It means that I, like an actor at rehearsal struggling to learn a new part, have a guide to fall back on; someone who knows what the plot twists are for and how the story ends. It means that in any scene, if I lose my way or forget my part, I can stop and say,

“Line, please.”

St. Pat’s regurgitation

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I know that the title for this post doesn’t sound appealing, but I’m swamped with work, travel (travel for work) and with getting through this thing we call Life. Rather than let this significant excuse for public drunkeness holiday pass by unremarked I’d thought I’d re-run a previous post that described some of the college St. Pat’s hi-jinks I enjoyed back in the day. If you read this last year at this time, well, I hope the re-run isn’t as noxious to you as that morning-after taste in the mouth. If you didn’t see this last year, then just forget this entire paragraph and sit back and enjoy some refreshing adult entertainment.

I don’t think there will ever be a St. Patrick’s Day when I don’t think about my first semester of college when I enrolled in the Spring term at the University of Missouri-Rolla campus. UMR is mainly an engineering college but it was close to where I lived at the time and a convenient way for me to knock out some general liberal arts credits before transferring to the main Mizzou campus in Columbia.

St. Patrick’s “Day” was actually a 10-day party at UMR. The campus was about 90% male then, almost all in grueling engineering classes that seemed to require binge drinking in order to cope. The reason St. Pat is such a big deal at UMR is because he is deemed to be the patron saint of engineers for having driven the snakes from Ireland and thereby creating the first worm drive (engineering humor). The rites and festivities of the season were under the auspices of the St. Pat’s Board: upper classmen (some I think were in their 30s) elected by their fraternities, eating clubs and campus organizations. For most of the year their duties seemed to be based around regular “meetings” marked by drinking and carousing. Come March, however, they were especially prominent in their filthy green coats (part of their semi-secret initiation rites) as they enforced the rules and protocols of the holiday (for those familiar with the St. Paul Winter Carnival – especially in the older days – think green Vulcans).

Part of the tradition was that all freshmen males were to have beards in the week or so leading up to St. Pat’s, and were to carry shillelaghs (an Irish cudgel). Most people think of shillelaghs as being a bit like walking sticks, but at UMR there were specific requirements: the shillelagh had to be at least two-thirds the height of the student and at least one-third his weight, and it had to be cut from a whole tree with at least some of the roots showing. The punishment for being caught beardless by a Board Member (and they usually traveled in packs of two or more) was to have your face painted green. The penalty for being without your shillelagh was to be thrown into Frisco Pond. Frisco Pond was actually the town’s sewage lagoon, but was called Frisco Pond because the St. Pat’s Board of 1927 rerouted the Frisco railroad into the pond after one of their meetings. I’m sure it seemed like a good idea to them at the time.

Fortunately I was able to cultivate my first beard, red and wispy as it was, and I cut myself a suitable cudgel. Carrying books and a shillelagh of the stated dimensions was a challenge, and even more so when certain professors wouldn’t allow them into class, meaning they had to be stacked in the hallways and guarded because Board members liked nothing better than to snatch unattended shillelaghs and then wait for their rightful owners to appear — followed by a honking procession to Frisco Pond. (I did mention the campus was 90% male and fueled by alcohol, right? During St. Pat’s week the campus looked like No Name City from “Paint Your Wagon.”)

The reason we carried cudgels was in case a Board member approached you with a rubber snake and demanded that you “kill” it. This generally meant pounding on the snake with your cudgel until the Board member (not you) got tired. I weighed about 170 then; you do the math as to what my shillelagh weighed, minimum. I was fortunate to go largely unnoticed (as unnoticed as a guy carrying a tree can be) through most of this period. This was especially remarkable given that one of my friends from my hometown was on the Board. Toward the end of the week, however, he came up to me in the dining hall. “Red,” (for my beard) he said, “I think I see a snake.” With chants of “snake! snake! snake!” I was led outside and my “friend” tossed said snake on the ground. It landed, however, in a flower bed. “Freshman! Kill!” was the command. Hoisting my club over my head (and somehow not tipping over backwards) I brought it crashing down onto the hapless rubber creature — and even more hapless plants in the soft earth.

“Hit it again, it’s not dead,” was the order. I looked down once, then again. “Oh, it’s dead, alright,” I said. Actually, it would be more accurate to say, “Missing, presumed dead” because the rubber snake was nowhere to be found in the newly-created crater. Rather than wait around for CSI, or the gardener, the small group repaired to the dining hall to toast the success of the mission and I survived the week, the highlight of which was the St. Pat’s Parade.

In those days the St. Pat’s Board would be out early in the morning with mops and barrels of green paint, painting Pine Street in advance of the parade. High school bands from around the area would march, car dealers would drive demo models with pretty girls in them and various and sundry other parade standards would be present. In particular, however, I remember the Precision Pony Team: a group of students scooting along on empty pony kegs strapped to skateboards with rudimentary heads and yarn tails attached to the kegs. They wove patterns and formations down the street, stopping periodically to lift the tails of their “mounts” and drop handfuls of malted milk balls.

Much like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, the event culminated in St. Pat (not St. Nick) appearing on the route, riding a manure spreader and attended by his Guard. The duties of the Guard were largely to keep St. Pat vertical (he’d probably been drinking for four days straight) and to bring any fetching lasses from the crowd to St. Pat for a good luck kiss. (I did say the campus was 90% male and fueled by alcohol, didn’t I?).

After this particular St. Patrick’s Day all the other ones I’ve experienced have just kind of faded from my memory.

Note: the annual UMR St. Pat’s parade and related festivities still go on, but in a much more muted manner. A couple of alchohol-poisoning deaths were a factor (sad and true) to be sure, but I also think it was because some of those Board members finally graduated.

Short on sleep in the city that never bothers to

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I’ve always loved coming into Manhattan from the outlying boroughs. Approaching and crossing the bridges or coming through the tunnels always has a certain feel of anticipation as if traveling to a fantasyland. In the past I’ve always come to the island via the Newark or LaGuardia airports, but this trip I landed at JFK. In one of those oddities of air fare arcania, I had a choice between two Northwest flights, each leaving Minneapolis at the same time on the same day, one arriving at LaGuardia and the other at JFK, one minute apart. The LaGuardia flight was some $650 more than the one that landed at JFK. That’s math that even I can do. (Heck, I can even do it in story-problem form: if two planes leave at the same time for the same destination, arriving at almost the same time, and if the Night Writer selects the one that costs $650 more, how long before Corporate Accounting comes down on him like a herd of flesh-eating frogs?

Approaching Manhattan from Queens especially enhances the sensation of being backstage at a big show. Nearing the Queensboro Bridge I noticed a cemetery resolutely holding its ground while the highway, roads, brick warehouses and homes pressed round its perimeter like a river coursing past a boulder. It occured to me that cemeteries tend to be a reflection of their environs. When I drive through rural areas, for example, cemeteries have lots of empty space around them and seem to jut up from the empty fields suddenly, without transition, much like the communities they serve. Squat stones and tall stones break up the lines of the earth in the same way the houses, barns and silos do. In Queens the headstones – squat and tall – are compacted together, their straight, tidy rows and random heights and shapes looking like a modeler’s panorama of Manhattan’s grid. I thought of these headstones again this morning as I had a bagel and coffee while looking out the window from the 44th floor of the Hilton in mid-town (yes, Corporate Accounting knows about this, too); the stone rectangles of differing heights and colors running row after row below in straight lines below my feet.

That’s about all of Manhattan that I saw on this short trip. Yesterday I went directly from the airport shuttle to a 13th floor conference room overlooking an inner courtyard off of Park Avenue. From up there, though, I could hear the filtered sirens and honkings from the streets below and the miscellaneous crashings and bangings that are a constant part of the background noise of the city, much like bird song on a country morning. Six and a half hours later I followed our little group out of the conference room and across the street to a restaurant; three hours after that I walked the half-dozen blocks to my hotel.

Though that was still “early” – especially by New York standards – it was still 18 hours after I had woken up that morning, a sleep that itself had only lasted about 3 ½ hours. By the time I got up to my room last night the 20 oz. Caribou coffee in the Minneapolis airport, two cans of pop and one cup of Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee (now that’s what I call a conference room!) in the afternoon that had provided life-preserving stimulation earlier were exacting their payback in the form of palpitations and twitchy muscles in my forearms and fingers. When I was younger I might have thought, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Last night I was more interested in sleeping like the dead. The neon lights may be bright on Broadway, but they were nothing compared to the ones going off inside my head — and it was definitely time for lights out. I might as well have been in Des Moines or Owatonna except that way down below, the New York City serenade was a soothing backdrop.

You really can find anything you want in New York, including a good night’s sleep.

What kind of bracket are you in?

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Away With Words has a nice March Madness diversion, looking at the new book, The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything. The book posits that many of the great debates of our times can be resolved by methodically breaking these down into a series of one-on-one matchups culminating in a categorical “Final Four.” She links to Slate.com’s article about the book, which features four sample brackets: the greatest “Where Were You Moments”, “Ad Slogans”, “Marital Arguments” and “Film Deaths.”

In these samples, 32 candidates in each category are listed in Round 1 and you proceed to “face-off” each match-up into the next bracket. For example, in the “Film Deaths” bracket I found a lot of bona fide contenders that were hard to choose from, but when it was close I went with the death that was most central to the story. Thus the “Psycho” shower scene made it to my final four despite a strong first round challenge from the opening shark attack in “Jaws”. The rest of my final four ultimately included King Kong falling from the Empire State Building, Tom Hanks’ death in “Saving Private Ryan” and the Wicket Witch melting in “The Wizard of Oz.” (King Kong won.)

Deaths also figure prominently in the “Where Were You When” (Boomer Division) bracket with JFK, RFK, Martin Luther, Princess Diana, John Lennon, Dale Earnhardt among those featured, though these also compete against the fall of the Berlin Wall, Woodstock and the Miracle on Ice. In the Ad Slogans bracket you’ve got “Where’s the beef?” going up against “It’s finger-lickin’ good” in the first round, while “Does she or doesn’t she?” could conceivably fight it out with “Just do it” in one of the later rounds.

You can check out these sample brackets for yourself from the Salon link. While I don’t see that we could resolve many disputes by having a world-wide “Greatest Religions” bracket, this is a fun way to hash out your favorites — and all without having to listen to Dick Vitale (I didn’t notice if there was a “Most Obnoxious” bracket covered in the book).

When you’re finished you can check with your friends and acquaintences who also completed the brackets and then make a bracket to determine which of you is most compulsive.

Go tell the Spartans Rams

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There were two brave, defiant and ultimately glorious campaigns on display this past weekend featuring determined underdogs rising up to give their much larger foes all they could handle and more. One was in the new movie, “300” (see previous post) — the story of 300 Spartans standing against the massive Persian army and the elite Immortals at Thermopylae to defend their way of life. The second was tiny Roseau High School demonstrating its way of life by rising up against greater numbers and big school hockey powers with their monstrous enrollments to win the 2A (highest) state hockey title.

For the Roseau Rams, “The 300” might refer to the school’s enrollment (342 in 2006, to be exact), but like the Spartans they proved that when you get your opponent in a confined space you can triumph through heart, spirit, discipline and skill. What makes it all the more inspiring is that it’s not just a Cinderella story of a small school winning out against long odds, it’s a story of Cinderella saying “Forget about the ball, I want to be on ‘Dancing With the Stars.'” Roseau had the option of playing in Class 1A, created back in 1992 to make things “fair” for schools with smaller enrollments from which to draw their teams. Like the Spartans, they sneered at any such accomodation by themselves or their opponents, especially since in the days of the one-class, all-sizes tournament they had made 29 trips to the state tournament and won five titles.

In “300” Leonidas forcibly rejected the Persian ambassador’s request for a token sign of obedience and submission to King Xerxes. “This is madness!” the ambassador said, seeing the hostile intent. “This is Sparta!” shouted Leonidas as he kicked the man into a pit. Similarly back in ’92 the State High School league came to northern Minnesota with a similar, reasonable proposal to bow to the forces of reason and warm, fuzzy feelings. “This is Roseau!” was the response, with the authority of a slapshot from the blue line, and the small school with the proud tradition insisted on competing against the biggest schools at the highest levels, going on to win the 2A title in 1999 and again this year, persevering over teams in the field with as much as eight times their enrollment.

In ancient Sparta, young boys were taken from their families at age six and sent to the agoge, to learn fighting and endurance, to develop a love for freedom, self-government and responsibility, and to never retreat or surrender. In Roseau the children start skating even earlier, learning to forecheck, backcheck and keep their egos in check and to never, ever stop skating.

There were two brave, defiant and ultimately glorious campaigns on display this past weekend — I hope you enjoyed and appreciated them both.

300 reasons

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I was among the 90 percent male audience at a 9:00 p.m. showing of 300 over the weekend. Some of the guys there were younger men and a few looked a little geeky and there were one or two older ones I might have pegged for still being in residence at their mom’s house, but most appeared middle-aged and normal — a category I hope the others thought that I fell into. Having read Steven Pressfield’s “Gates of Fire” and Frank Miller’s graphic novel that the movie was based on I’d been eagerly awaiting the release of the latest movie version of the Battle of Thermopylae (I even rented 1961’s The 300 Spartans, made when Hollywood thought “epic” also had to mean “plodding”). Here’s my brief review of the movie and some thoughts that have occurred to me since it ended.

Overall the movie was very good. The look of the film was definitely unique and strongly resembled Miller’s book, which was the intention. The “graphic novel” artistic treatment (and it is artistic) mitigated the gruesomeness of the ultra-violence to some extent, and while it was bloody (and came close to over-using the slow-motion) I felt it was a believable rendition of what hand-to-hand combat in close confines with sharp-edged weapons would be like. It’s definitely not a date movie unless your girlfriend also happens to like field-dressing roadkill, but there is a discernible plot and some inspiring and intense performances that makes this a good story. Additionally, it is a thought-provoking examination of duty, honor and patriotism that’s short on speeches and long on demonstration.

I was disappointed with the gratuitous scenes with naked women; the scenes fit within the story but appeared to be driven more by a marketing formula for the target audience than from story-telling license. The scenes between King Leonidas and his wife, and in the seductive blandishments offered by King Xerxes to the traitor Ephialtes, easily could have been shot with a bit more discretion. Not that this is a movie for younger teen males anyway, but the nudity definitely would be a distraction from the more laudable themes in the film. Otherwise “300” is an inspiring and entertaining movie for action film fans and those who will draw some conservative political allegories from the story.

While much is made of the battle being between a small group of free men and an invading slave army of a couple hundred thousand, I thought there was little effort to frame the historical significance of the effects on Western Civilization if the fledgling Greek city-state democracies had been absorbed the Persian empire. Ironically, Spartan society was probably less “free” than the Persians; while it is portrayed as an egalitarian meritocracy, it was also rigid in its laws and cruel — some might say eminently practical — in its single-minded warrior ethos. At the same time it made a religion out of exalting honor, duty and courage and “300” makes that point with all the subtlety of a Spartan xiphos.

King Leonidas is the standard-bearer and champion of this creed, even to the point where he breaks the rigid letter of the law in order to ultimately defend its spirit, standing firm against the alternating threats and flattering of his foreign enemy and standing in disgust at the treacherous collaboration of his own Council of Elders that sought accommodation and surrender to the apparently overwhelming enemy (based on the portrayal of Council, duty and honor weren’t universally revered in Spartan culture as the politicians manipulated events for their personal gain and grudges regardless of the cost to their country). For Leonidas, while freedom may be ripped from a Spartan’s dead fingers, it must never be willingly released due to fear, complacency or indolence.

The movie also helped me see another important point. The Spartan warriors are all very fit and well-muscled, conditioned to their “Spartan” existence of war and striving. While my own body bears little resemblance to theirs, I know that I was born with the same number of muscles in my body as they had; the difference is in how they developed what they were given. Similarly, I think we all start with the same capacity for faith, duty and honor within us and these, too, can be trained, exercised and built up to astonishing and awe-inspiring levels. When we do, even just a handful can change history.