Recall Musings

I’m going to miss all the fun. 

On Tuesday morning, while I’m wedged in a middle seat near the back of Delta flight 4359 to Detroit, thousands of feet below me Wisconsinites will be picking their new boss (who will likely be the same as the old boss). 

Gov. Scott Walker has been leading in recent polls, but I’m not ready to call it for Scottie just yet. Turnout is expected to be huge and it’s just as likely the Badger-state wakes up on Wednesday to realize it’s swapped a former Milwaukee county executive for a current Milwaukee mayor. 

Say what you will about this (public) union busting, women’s equal wage disdaining, chubby kid from “Up” impersonator - Scott Walker knows how to make things interesting. 

For the last few weeks, I’ve felt like the new kid in school, the one everybody is trying to size up. The knee jerk amiability that I’ve grown accustomed to from my small town’s residents now has a quizzical undercurrent. I could list several examples but I'll just let these pictures speak for themselves. 

I’ll admit it. I do it too. 

While to each other’s faces we may spout platitudes about weather (“been beautiful lately”) or the Brewers (“so many injuries this year”), it’s all Walker underneath. Most folks seem to want to know which team you’re on, but is most cases, they’re too polite to ask. 

And that’s okay. 

Because while I might not personally like, agree with, or even vote for Walker, I do love a good political fight, and the last few weeks have shown me I’m not alone in this.  

To add another platitude to the mix, disagreement is at the heart of a vibrant democracy. It snaps us awake like a ruler to the knuckles. It shakes us out of complacency and it demands of us to take stock of the things we cherish. And hopefully we remember the way we felt when the next election rolls around. Wisconsin is awake this summer and that’s the way it should be. 

See you when I land. 

Standing on and in a frozen lake

A few hours prior to going ice fishing Friday, I Googled how to survive if the ice should give way beneath my feet. I watched as a professor who studies hypothermia submerged himself in an icy lake for minutes then, calmly but with chattering teeth, proceeded to tell the cameraman how one should act if one ever finds himself minutes away from a cold, wet death.

The first step was to calm down, he said. You will naturally overreact to the freezing temperatures and rush to extricate yourself from piercing liquid around you. Don't. If you flail about you'll tire quickly. Your muscles will stop working. You'll become exhausted. You will die.

You have a short, maybe five minute, window before your core temperature dips into the danger zone. To get out, you simply begin to kick your feet so they rise to the top of the water (this looks hilariously like the first lesson of a swim class for 5-year-olds but without the bubble blowing). Use the energy from your kick to push your body on top of the ice and viola, you're in the clear. Well, maybe not in the clear but at least you're out of the water.

So this was running through my mind as I sat on the ice Friday. I figured I could handle a quick dip in Lake Nepco, if it came to that. Fortunately it didn't.

No, my dip came roughly 19 hours later in a nearby pond. That's me second from the left.

After fishing on Friday, I visited a nearby bar for some post-fishing beers. In my sauced state I agreed to jump into the water at a Polar Plunge for the Special Olympics the following morning. 

It was a chance to test out the professor’s survival technique. Dressed scrubs (it was the hospital’s team) I Karate-kicked by way into the icy water. 

Then the air rushed from my lungs in one swift gasp. I’m still not sure whether I drank any of the pond water. I wasn’t calm. In fact, I was the first one to run from the frigid water. Fortunately, I could run out and wasn’t forced to pull my body onto the ice itself. 

I don’t know how I’ll do should I ever fall into a frozen lake. But after jumping into one, I’m pretty sure I’ll take every precaution to make sure that never happens. 

Digging in the dirt

On a soggy London day last September, a professional pastry chef and amateur archeologist named Regis Cursan uncovered a nearly 2,000-year-old Roman brothel token from the banks of the Thames. 

Cursan later told a reporter for London’s The Daily Mail that he found the token while walking the banks of the river with his metal detector during very low tide. 

Cursin said, “When I rubbed the sand off the artefact (sic) the first thing I saw was the number on one side and what I thought was a goddess on the other. Little did I know at the time it was actually a rare Roman brothel token.”

It was the first of its kind to be found in England. Tokens such as these often depicted specific sexual acts, which historians think was necessary to convey to the sex worker what the client wanted, since many did not speak Latin, according to The Daily Times story. Check out the story and pictures of the token here. 

I mention this story because back in 2001, there was a skinny American kid who had a similar experience.

Pella is hot in June. Like nearly everywhere our stuffy buses took us in Greece that summer, the sun over Pella (Helios?) seemed to have made a pact long ago with Erebus, a primordial deity of darkness, to keep the shadows to a minimum. 

I was taking a class in archeology as part of a study abroad program with my university. Roughly three weeks into the course, I decided archeology was not for me. Just the thought of spending one more minute discerning Ionic from Corinthian columns, triglyphs from metopes, and I could feel the glaze descend over my open eyeballs. 

But then Pella happened. 

We stepped off the bus and into the dusty, dry heat of the Greek summer to find a group of graduate students digging into an embankment. Each section was marked with red rope, and the ground had been dug into a kind of precise step-like pattern. Behind the diggers were a line of wood and chicken wire sifters. The diggers would dump the dirt from the embankment onto the sifters, and using small spades and brushes, the others would attempt to cull gold, jewels, statues or any other piece of living history from the antediluvian soil. 

At first I was a digger, loading soil onto the chicken wire baskets for my classmates to sift. We found human bones and lots of pottery shards. One person found a small pot, nearly intact. 

After digging for a while, it was my turn to sift. I sat on an overturned plastic crate and began to separate soil and rock from pottery, nature from ancient man. Then, just minutes into my career as a true archeologist, a glimmer of purple caught my eye. Amongst the dirty brown and dusty grey of the Grecian soil was a sight no one had seen in thousands of years. 

A token. A trinket. A woman, squatting with her hands on her vulva. 

Part of me thought it was a joke. Another part was ecstatic. 

At the suggestion of one of the grad students, I took a quick photo of the token before someone from the museum snatched it from my grasp. 

There were handshakes, “attaboys,” and a few scowls and Greek curses from jealous grad students. I had found something that would go in the museum, I was told. 

Later, my professor said the woman on my token was Baubo, an old crone made famous for a revealing encounter she supposedly had with the Goddess Demeter. 

From Wikipedia (emphasis mine): 

"Baubo, having received Demeter as a guest, offers her a draught of wine and meal. She declines to take it, being unwilling to drink on account of her mourning. Baubo is deeply hurt, thinking she has been slighted, and thereupon uncovers her secret parts and exhibits them to the goddess. Demeter is pleased at the sight, and now at least receives the draught, – delighted by the spectacle! These are the secret mysteries of the Athenians! These are also the subjects of Orpheus’ poems. I will quote you the very lines of Orpheus, in order that you may have the originator of the mysteries as witness of their shamelessness:"

"This said, she drew aside her robes, and showed a sight of shame; child Iacchus was there, and laughing, plunged his hand below her breasts. Then smiled the goddess, in her heart she smiled, and drank the draught from out the glancing cup."

I never became an archeologist. Ironically, it was a paper I wrote for this class about the city of Vergina that convinced me to seriously consider writing as a career. Lacking a computer, I wrote it by hand at the last minute. I was forced to miss my classmates’ trip to climb Mt. Olympus, but managed to rescue my grade from a low C and convert it into a mid-range B. 

I don’t know what became of Baubo. I hope she is in the museum. Upon reading about Cursan’s find this week, I emailed a professor at the newly constructed Archeological Museum of Pella in the hopes of tracking down my find. 

Even if I never hear back, it’s okay. I have a blurry picture and a memory that is irreplaceable. 

West coast, snowfall, dead seals, etc.

I’m back baby. 

Like Lord Dark-Helmet’s Mega-Maid huffing the the planet Druidia’s air, a new writing project has recently sucked my blogging endeavor dry. 

I checked today to find my blog lying damp and crinkled in the bin, like a brown paper bag with a sweaty tuna sandwich still inside. Well friends, I’ve reached down into the bin, unfurled the bag, and thrown the leftovers to the dog. 

It’s time to show the blog a little love again. 

A few weeks before Christmas, I started writing a novel. It’s writing on a scale I’ve never attempted before. It’s terribly challenging but also rewarding in a way I never experienced while churning out daily paragraphs about copper thieves and gun-toting miscreants. 

I won’t go into the plot here (partly because I’m still working out the details) but I will list a few adjectives (and nouns) that will hopefully describe the world my characters inhabit: future, past, mistake, betrayal, struggle, confusion, wet, gristle, teeth, The Garrison, palisade, mud, Finley, brackish. 

Pretty cryptic, huh? 

When I get it more polished, I may throw a few chapters up on the blog. 

Meanwhile, here is what I’ve been doing since we last talked: shovel, ski, bundle-up, shop, wrap, repeat, drive, iPass, hugs, Christmas, Michigan, snowfall, speakers, speaker wire, new shoes, lots to read, drive some more, write, write, drive again, say goodbye, airplane, west coast, wander, vegan sweet and sour, climb hills, cable car, The Rock, sunset, Golden Gate, Hwy. 101, stand in awe, google “tips for valet,” Pacific, the Ritz, bagpipes, lemon-lime water, heaven’s waffles, hot-tub, sauna, steam room, shower, dead seal, redwood, banana slug, baby bear growl, “In the air tonight,” fight, make-up, pina colada, Tonga Room, indoor rainstorm, Green Bay in the lobby, Sonoma, wine, Napa, champagne, Fairmont, room service, my what-a-view, sleep, get sick, airplane, yellow dog, drive some more, -8 degrees, welcome home. 

Nine Degrees and Dropping.

At some point, it can’t look any colder outside.  My guess is that this registers somewhere on the thermometer between 20 and zero. Take this morning, for instance. An azure sky, the kind only a cold winter seems to create. A week-old dusting of snow which, while lightly covering the grass in our backyard, resembles nature’s best attempt at a Jackson Pollock painting (if the artist had stuck to just white and green). And a pair of grey and black sentinels, whose shining fall leaves are now a ruddy drab that lie underneath the piles of white ice. 

It’s basically the same image I’ve been seeing from my window for the last week, but with one key difference. 

It’s really cold. 

Right now - which is about 8:24 a.m. Central time on December 9 - the Indian food in my freezer is enjoying about the same level of thermal comfort as I am standing on my back stoop. 

I know this because, in a poorly conducted attempt at a third-grade science experiment, I recorded both the temperature outside and the temperature in my freezer with my extra delicate thermometer/whistle/compass/keychain. 

Here is what I got: 

Freezer (yes, those are crinkle cut fries). 

And outside. 

It's not easy to see, but it's about 9 degrees outside. It's just a bit more than that in the freezer. Did I mention the winter solstice is still two weeks away?

Ten Thousand Lakes and I Didn't See One of Them

In honor of Black Friday, here are a few things that make the Mall of America better (weirder?) than your mall.

Morgan and I visited this monument to American consumerism last weekend.

 Beer store.

Bubble tea.

Buddhist monks.

Violent Lego saber-toothed cat death fights.

A Dora ferris wheel.

Fighting stuff.

Horrible looking slipper/clown shoe things.

A history.


One area where the mall didn't differ from any other shopping experience was this . . .

Until they somehow make it entertaining for men to wait on their wives while they try on clothes, I'm not impressed.



So we tried to leave the mall after one day but a snowstorm blocked our way.

No worries. Some folks brought out an old standby for transportation.

Smashing Pavement With 311 Cranberries in Marcy Playground

Out on tour with the Smashing Pumpkins/Nature kids, they don’t have no function/I don’t understand what they mean/ and I could really give a fuck. 

- “Range Life” by Pavement

Who says big name bands don't come to central Wisconsin? I've been seeing their names all over the place . . . 

Smashing Pumpkins

The Cranberries

311

Marcy Playground. Do they count as a big name band? Probably not. 

Just as I was spotting this stuff last week, Side Line Music Magazine reported last week that major record labels might (and I’d wager it’s a BIG might) stop making CD’s as early as next year. 

Whether or not you’ve made the transition to downloads, most of us still use CD’s. We may not buy them at a brick and mortar store anymore, but that doesn’t mean they don’t slide out of our Mac’s disc drive with a ding - hot to the touch like homemade bread.

Blank CD’s, I assume, will still be around. But the story suggests that only special releases will be pressed and packed into those iconic CD jewel cases. I can’t blame them for wanting to save the money, but that doesn’t mean I won’t miss the diminutive discs. Having worked at a now-defunct Sam Goody store in high school, the act of unpacking and blocking (Goody-slang for alphabetizing and organizing the separate CD sections by genre) brings back some good memories. 

I made friends because of the compact disc. On slow days, we’d sit and talk about our favorite tracks. On busy one’s, we’d try to hold back the tide of capitalism by playing the one song we each thought would be the most effective at getting people to leave. Typically this meant either Johnny Cash, some form of death metal, the rap song of-the-moment with the highest rate of profanities per second, or a South Park Christmas song called “Swiss Colony Beef Log.”

And in truth, CD's won’t really go away. In ten or twenty years, hipsters will be collecting CD’s like they do with vinyl today. 

And by hipsters, I mean me.

I'd also like to tag a couple of interesting stories about some other dead or dying formats making a comeback. 

Check out this one on cassette tapes  and this one about the return of VHS. 

Note: 

If you happen to spot band names like those above, send them to my email at afolk81@gmail.com. I’ll throw them up on the blog. They don’t have to be 90’s bands, any era will do.