Category Archives: Home Life

Just Checking In

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OK, so I know it’s been a while. But again, no one is reading this, so no big deal.

As for today, I am feeling restless, so thought I would submit an entry, blog-like, rather than the usual planned essay.

Today is September 12, one day after September 11. Last week, we had a great excitement as one Terry Jones (not the Monty Python Terry Jones), leader of a Christian church of sorts down in Gainesville, FL, finally hit a hot button that got him the media attention he so desperately craves.

Apparently this guy, whose church’s basic Christian tenet is that Islam is evil, has been trying to get the attention of the media for several years, announcing this or that plan for his church designed to foment ire and street violence among the worlds Muslims. Problem was, nobody was paying any attention to him and his crackpot pronouncements.

But this time, he got it right. He announced “International Burn a Koran Day” and sent out a release saying his church was going to burn Korans on September 11 as a way of “getting their message out” about Islam.

Cue media frenzy. Admittedly, it was a slow news week. So slow, apparently, that all anyone talked about – apart from someone named Snookie – was this guy and his whacko church.

In the end, and under pressure from Barack Obama and General Petraeus and the whole gang, Jones announced that, on second thought, they would not burn Korans on September 11.

Whew! Close one.

Now, you may or may not consider it ironic that at least two people were killed in street protests in Afghanistan which anticipated the non-event. But I for one would hate to be the guy who died while demonstrating my opposition to an outrage that never actually occurred.

But anyway, speaking of religious nuts, we had our own little weird celebration here on the plains a couple of weeks ago, right down the street from my house.

We were heading out on Saturday morning to the farmer’s market to get some good tomatoes. That time of year, you know. But we got over on the main street, and were surprised to encounter a huge throng of folks lining the sidewalks near the Lutheran church, holding signs, chanting and all the rest. Turns out the main group – hundreds of them – were actually counter-protestors who were there to face down the crazies from the Westboro Baptist Church of Kansas. These folks like to protest at the funerals of soldiers who’ve died in our of our imperial wars. Their reasoning is that the soldiers are dying because God is visiting retribution on our country for – are you ready? – its tolerance of homosexuality, apparently the vilest of sins. So they show up at the funerals with big signs that say “God Hates Fags” or “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” .

That’s their thing.

On this day, in fact just after we passed through on our way to the farmer’s market (my wife gave them a thumbs down, and I gave the Westboro folks a version of a “thumbs up”, which involved a different finger) another event occurred. A veteran drove down the same street and unleashed a barrage of bear repellant – basically mace – from the window of his pickup truck, aimed at the Westboro protestors.

The gay-hating protestors, though, are not rookies at being broadly despised. They had their signs at the ready. They maneuvered them in front of their faces and avoided getting maced. The counter-protestors, probably less experienced at this sort of thing, got the brunt of it. Several ended up in the hospital.

It is surely so that God works in mysterious ways.

It’s 2010 – Now Shovel!

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Another new year, fresh like a just-opened jar of peanut butter with that pristine swirl it feels so good to dig your knife into.

Oh I could talk about how this marks the first year out of the “0” years and what we might call them now that they’re gone – the “aughts,” or the “naughts”,  or the suckiest decade since the 1930s if we’re being honest.

Or I could, blogger-like, conjure up some best-of-the-decade lists, for movies or records or porn stars or something.

Or I could lament, in full middle-aged fashion, the sheer lack of originality and freshness in all things media-rich, the repetition of styles and endless remakes of vintage culture  – the sequels and prequels and boxed sets – a sure sign that the one so lamenting is himself not so fresh anymore. (“If you are tired of London you are tired of life.” )

Or I could remark, as a side note, on the failed Christmas underwear bomber. But perhaps what’s more interesting is that this attempted terror attack is, according to the media, merely a side note. This may be the year we warm up to terror as the English and the Israelis have – relegating it to the ordinary risks of life, as it should be, rather than the sole focus of the government’s efforts (hello – jobs?). Me – I’m much more convinced I will die not in a conflagration of Islamist vengeance but at the hands of a sober, inexperienced and wholly disinterested teenage driver staring at a cell phone.

Mark those words – I’ve seen it in a vision.

Instead, though, I’ll just talk about the weather. Because it’s the most remarkable thing about this year so far. At least around here.

It began in mid-December. We were all feeling fine about the news from the meteorologists that it would be a mild winter. But before winter had a chance to get here and be mild, we had about 11 inches of snow dumped on us.

Mild snow, I guess. And mild zero-degree temperatures. And mild fatal car wrecks.

Then, a couple of weeks later on Christmas eve, an old-fashioned, Laura Ingalls Wilder type blizzard rolled in. Whiteout conditions, and another twelve inches of snow. We had to eat the horses.

OK, we didn’t eat the horses. I wanted to, but there was plenty of peanut butter.

Nobody moved – Christmas was effectively cancelled (a small bright spot) – the city froze solid for a few days while everyone either looked out the window and marveled or – we the unlucky ones – were marveled at as we lifted endless shovels full, tried to find a place to put the four-foot snow drifts that had collected in the driveway. Turned our faces from the biting crystals as we blew them aside and the North wind blew them back at us.

As the gutters filled with pounds and pounds of ice, a solid wall of it gushing a freeze-frame cascade of watery stalactites.

I had to buy a roof rake and actually shovel the snow off the roof. It’s just not natural.

But hey, we’re plains folk. We’re hardy, or so I’m told. So we got the job done, got the walks shoveled and the roofs raked, and the cars unstuck and the snow blower gassed up again.

Because here it is next week, and the forecast is for snow, snow, and snow.

Here on the plains.

I Have Nothing to Say

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You know, sometimes there’s just nothing to say. I have been, for the last couple of years, as they say, largely “silent” as a writer. Some claim writer’s block. I, on the other hand, claim it not. It’s different. It’s more as if, with the great cacophony of opinions swirling around the – I can’t say it – blogosphere, the prospect of adding one’s lonely voice to that tiresome, bloated chorus is just a little bit demoralizing.

Or a lot. I don’t know. But this is what I do.

Suffice to say, I am crawling back to the surface like some college boy tossed into the pool at the 3 a.m. mark of the frat party. Why? Because, oddly, I must. I have no excuse for it. I have been working on some fiction, which I believe I’ll start stapling out on this board for anyone who may be interested. And I’ve got matches – matches for sale.

Seriously – I have felt like some primordial mud pit long crusted over but with an insistent bubbling magma beneath – some of which must surface, and form some strange new organism, while other channels must stay submerged, flowing forever beneath the surface. So it is.

I won’t say my mood is good, but it’s not too bad. There is, again, a kind of pacific stability to my life – it is the peace I crave in order to hear myself in the quiet, and also the peace I abhor because, let’s face it, life is not a study hall.

I mean, dude.

There’s so much to say, I have no excuse for not saying it. So here we go. I was reading over the old entries here today, one day after I pulled the switch and registered supergiantsquid.com as my own personal domain*. So here’s my pledge to you, dear possibly non-existent public: I will take up the mantle of explaining life inside this mortal coil once again, and try to make public sense of this world – the one we drop into, like a baby set adrift in the rushes.

But we can leave all that behind.

October

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I awoke to the first cold Monday morning today. The bed, with its pillow-top mattress and down comforter, seemed mighty preferable to the cold floor, dark hallways and…work. How many personal days do I have left…?

The day brightened up as I got some hot coffee in me and made it to the car–I mean it literally did. The slanty sun himself came up over the city as I crested the highway North, the first time I’ve seen it do that in months. And it did not disappoint. A hazy red gumball, a Japanese flag. Later on, a small V of geese, black in silhouette, passed overhead, heading down the Missouri to wherever they are going. A fog monster glided up over the stubble field they crossed, trying to act threatening as the sun burned its edges into feathery wisps of cold smoke.

I do love October. Yesterday I spent all morning cleaning windows, to let that strong October sun in the house, perhaps also an unconscious attempt to head off that snowbound feeling before it starts. In the afternoon I walked a golf course alone, cheating and cursing myself into a pretty good score. My calves are sore now, remembering all those uphill par fours.

The day before we took our annual pilgrimage to Nebraska City, home of Arbor Day and Arbor Lodge, which is now a state park. The Lodge, on 160 acres (bought from Uncle Sam at ten cents per), was originally a four-room frame house built in the 19th century–the first one, they say, West of Nebraska City and East of the Rockies. Through several generations and additions it ended up as the impressive mansion home of J. Sterling Morton, secretary of agriculture and founder of the Morton salt company as well as Arbor Day itself. There’s a fantastic carriage house with various period carriages from the 1880s to about 1910, bought on a whim when Morton could snatch them up for a song (cars, you know). There’s also a working apple orchard and many varieties of trees planted throughout the estate. There’s also some new commercial crap they’ve built to increase the tourist factor–I think they call it “Tree Adventure”–but we always avoid that area of of the park.

We had lunch at Johnny’s Corner Cafe in downtown Nebraska City, where I had the massive hot beef sandwich, famous in three states. We bought some nice Fujis and come cherry cider at an old orchard outside of town.

As I walked the grounds of Arbor Lodge with my little family that afternoon, full of roast beef and mashed potatoes, I was able to capture for a little while a bit of that unattached contentment that is so rare, and so valuable. As my daughter swung on my arm and we walked up the rutted carriage path to the house, she scattering squirrels and us laughing at her, the sun friendly on us and not too warm, the clouds like big scoops of mashed potatoes themselves and the sky that curious October blue, the moment lapsed into one of perfect ease. For those few minutes, absolutely nothing else was on my mind, nothing nagged at my attention. I was, the day was, we were–it all was, and always will be nothing more nor less. Time unconstrained, simply lived.

That night the crescent moon lulled low among silvery clouds, the clouds being their unique October selves. Friends came by for dinner, I built a little fire outside and drank a couple of beers with my friend, feeling the chill of the air and the warmth of the flames and the conversation. He told me about his garage sale, and of course we talked about music and life.

It was continuing to be a good day.

Memory Speaks

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Black Elk said: “Certain things among the shadows of a man’s life do not have to be remembered – they remember themselves.” He was right. If we’re lucky, we have both memories of good times and memories of important milestones at our command. But whether we’re lucky or not, certain memories come back of their own accord, whether beckoned or not. Many of mine in that category were first lived in a dream place, a middle place, and they come calling with some frequency.

I don’t really know why.

When I was in college, my now-wife and I lived in a nice apartment that happened to be located in the g-h-e-t-t-o with a capital “G”.

One of those sentinels of bygone days, a stalwart stone inner-city middle-class apartment House with solid brick balconies and spacious rooms, French doors, built-in bookshelves, etc. In fact, my own mother had lived in the same building with her parents as a teenager. (I didn’t know this when we looked at the place, but I maintain some strange feeling made me want to live there–call it a feeling of home. I had had no interest in moving, but when we saw this place, I immediately wanted it.)

We had the top floor, and the entry door locked, and it was cheap and our old Greek landlord was a saint, so we were good with it.

One day a couple of girls with…interesting wardrobes…moved in to the apartment below us. I learned later they were sisters, and both worked as strippers at a local club. They were both very nice looking in a surgically enhanced, tacky, over-reaching sort of way.

They moved in with a lot of expensive, brand-new furniture, then completely re-carpeted the place at their own expense. They both drove brand-new cars.

After a few weeks, I noticed they were having “parties” very regularly, lasting to about 3 a.m. It seemed only men attended these parties.

Yep, they were ho’s. And I’m pretty sure they didn’t actually live there. It was just their “business” address.

Anyway, while wondering what to do about it, I noticed one winter evening, coming home around 1:00 a.m. or so, that one of the girl’s new Mitsubishi convertible was parked outside with the engine running. I could tell because it was winter, and the exhaust was visible in the cold.

I went to bed and forgot about it.

When I got up the next day, I looked out my dining room window and noticed the car was still running. What’s more, just then some cops pulled up and started rummaging through it, opening the trunk and such.

I decided to be neighborly and go down there and tell them about it.

I had never spoken to them–we kept different schedules, to say the least. I went down the flight to their place and knocked on the door. I heard considerable shuffling and nervous voices, then a strained “Just a minute” from one of them.

She opened the door a bit, a sheet wrapped around her naked body, her blond shaggy hair all over the place, visibly wired or whacked out on something.

“Hey. I just wanted to tell you your car is out there in the alley, and…”

She interrupted–“My CAR!? Is it RUNNING?”

A bit surprised, I said, “Well, yeah, it is running, and–”

–“Are the COPS IN IT?” Sort of screaming, like we’re arguing even though we’re not.

“Well, yeah, the cops are going through it.”

“Ahhhaaaaayyyy!!!” She screamed in a sort of primal angst-ridding, rolled her eyes back and slammed the door.

Well, I thought, I guess she already knows.

They were gone a few weeks later. I heard the dark haired one had died, or was she murdered?

This was just one of the tamer episodes we had at that place. I would never want to go back, but I do miss the color and unpredictability of the old neighborhood sometimes.