Wife from next room: “Aaaaackkk!”
I ran in to see what the problem is.
“Don’t ever put my picture up without asking!”

Earlier in the day:
Wife: “Don’t forget the garbage.”
Meaning roll the bin out to the curb, Tuesday’s pickup day.
Me: “Yes dear.”
I forgot.

I guess that I am in pretty good shape for an old fart, my digestive problems keep me skinny and I don’t have that bad a gut. But one of the things that comes with aging is sagging pectorals. I suppose if I really hit the wieghts i could get a chiseled upper body, but that sounds like work to me. Of course it may not be an age thing. Once when L was about three she said, “Someday I’m going to have big boobs just like Daddy.”

It seems some strange disease has infected my garden!

Mother Pucker

The first flowers in my garden. They’re called Star of Holland and are supposed to naturalize and spread for ground cover. Well at least the first ones that I planted. I’m getting pretty charged up about the garden, I’m completely disorganized about it, and I’ve got that 50 something memory going for me, so whatever comes up is big surprise. I did find my crumpled coffee stained map of what I put in last year, so I kind of have an idea. No clue about colors though I tried planting some crocuses right under the lawn last fall, it looks like the ones in front are going to come up, but a bushy tailed tree rat got the ones in the backyard. I’m thinking air rifle. It will give me good practice for when the revolution comes. But you don’t have to worry about me, I won’t eat any squirrel brains, I’ve read the articles about them spreading something like mad cow. My wife grew up poor, most of the meat they ate came from what her brothers shot. Squirrels, rabbits, gamebirds….I wonder if they ate the squirrel brains. That could explain a lot. Anyway, I hate squirrels and rabbits and I like flowers.

These crocuses come up every year under my gas meter. I’ve lived in this house for twelve years and I didn’t plant them. They’re on the southeast corner of the house and the sun reflecting off the block foundation must warm the soil up early. They’ve already come and gone. My house faces south so the backyard doesn’t get much good sun, everything is about two or three weeks behind back there.

We had our first spring thunderstorm last night. It was a good one! It almost got to 90° this afternoon. Humid and very windy. “She’s blowin’ up a storm maties.” I picture Jack Aubrey checking the glass to see the barometric pressure dropping. “Reef the mains boys, it’s going to blow!”
Anyway I digress. At about five o’clock the front came in from the west, it got dark, rained a few drops and then cut loose. The rain was coming down in horizontal sheets and it sounded like there was a war going on. I can still hear the thunder, but the worst is past us now. Those kids next door I photographed in the tree a couple of weekends ago? They were up in the same tree in a lightning storm. I was afraid God and Darwin were going to get together to cull the stupid from the species. I’m not sure I could have handled boy children. They’re such kamakazis. I never did dumb stuff like that. No siree, I didn’t. Well maybe a few times. Maybe in cars. And a couple times in boats. But I think I can handle screaming matches and extreme sarcasm and PMS better than frequent trips to the orthopedic surgeon. (I’ve just totally jinxed Quinn’s upcoming soccer season….I see a compound fracture in the future) Yeah great now I have an albatross around my neck. It’s hell to be a reincarnate sea dog in the absolute middle of the country. At least I’m close to the Mississippi and I can slap down a weeks pay and buy a used 14 foot aluminum fishing boat with a 15 horse Evinrude and cruise all the way to the Gulf if I wanted to. I could.

Here’s a good one. I tended bar at Black Forest Inn from 1974 through 1978. The Black, as we called it, was situated on 26th and Nicollet in South Minneapolis. That corner was kind of the “downtown” of the nieghborhood and we drew an amazingly divers clientel. It was near the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, The Chidren’s Theater, Honeywell’s corporate headquarters were near by and on the other side some fifteen blocks away was Kenwood. Plus there was a row of run down mansions close by, some of which were halfway houses. It was a neighborhood that was full of apartment buildings, some low rent and subsidized. I think by Minneapolis standards you’d call it a rough neighborhood, but by say, Brooklyn standards, not so much. So we had fat cats from Kenwood and Honeywell office workers, mumbling coffee drinkers from the halfway houses, art student, artists, theater people and a thriving criminal element. It also drew people from all over the state because at that time there were very few authentic German restaurants in the Twin Cities, and in spite of it’s reputation for Scandanavians, there’s probably more Germans in Minnesota. It was the place to be in South Minneapolis in those days.
When I started working there they only served beer, but then they upgraded their license to beer and wine and then soon after they obtained a full liquor license, each of these milestones was accompanied by an expansion of the bar and restaurant. I have the “honor” of having served the first hard liquor at the Black.
In 1970 Richard Avedon the photographer had a show of his work at the Art Institute, which was near by. At that time, Erich (pronounced Airish in the Bavarian way) the owner of the Black would hang out after closing and drink with some of his buddies, artists and kenwood fat cats. Somehow Avedon ended up in this after hours crowd while he was preparing the show and had such a good time that he gave Erich a huge autographed print of one of his famous pictures. It was about 5′ X 5′ and was a candid shot he’d taken while preparing a formal sitting of some elderly DAR members in evening gowns. It’s a fabulous photo and with the autograph and it’s size must be worth thousands of dollars. I currently hangs to the right of the bar if your on the drinking side, right between the two rest rooms in the little corridor that leads out to the beer garden. Since the early eighties it’s had three bullet holes in it. From a .357 magnum.
The morning after the gun play, Beck and I were reading the article about it in the paper. The shooter was only identified as a “forty year old regular.” I looked at Beck and said, “Has to be Ellis.” Later in the day we ran into Bear, who was bartending at the time. He confirmed that it had indeed been Ellis. Ellis was what I considered a harmless but annoying wierdo, the kind you often find in bars. He would sit at the bar and ramble on and on about his military experience, his duty in Nam (turns out he was never there) and other crap. He bothered the customers, and occasionally got into fights in which he invariably got his ass kicked. It turns out that the night before he had been in fine form and had been thrown out by Erich himself, told to never come back. He’d been told this countless times before, a couple of times by me. So he walks in during the lunch rush, when the place is full of business people, sits down at the bar, pulls out the cannon and blast three shots into the Daughters of the American Revolution. The area by the bar is very enclosed, by a wall on one side and a massive wooden canopy above the bar. I can’t imagine how loud it must have been. I’m sure everyone present had major hearing damage. Thank god no one in the bathroom was hit. Can you imagine sitting there squeezing out a fat one and seeing three slugs rip through the wall and lodge in the plaster on the far side? He did shoot at an upward trajectory, he was harmless, but really craved attention. Needless to say he got it. So, to this day, you can see the Avedon print with the three bullet holes on 26th and Nicollet in South Minneapolis. Don’t miss it if you’re ever in town. The Wienerschnitzel’s pretty damn good too.

More later, but for now, check out frensix’s vacation in Ireland.

Glorious spring weather. The hammock swing is up. I sat on the deck and drank coffee this morning. Did a little yard work. But now I’m beat and I’m going kick back. I’m whipped. I finally got my ass down to the club for a workout on Saturday morning. I fits in so well. I’m up two hours before the rest of the slugs and with tennis on Wednesday and Thursday, it fits into the cycle of pain pretty well. I’ve noticed that since I started playing twice a week instead of just once, my knees hurt a lot less. Duh.
All my life I’ve gone through an up and down fitness cycle. I was in much better shape at thirty than I was when I was eighteen. I wasn’t very physical when I was a kid. The forest fire thing changed all that. And basketball. I have trouble exercising when there isn’t a ball involved. After I had my ACL removed back in eighty when they weren’t rebuilding them like they are now, I gave up hoops and got really fat. Since then I’ve at least done some walking and played a little tennis, but nothing too serious. My weight stays pretty much the same no matter what I do. Now I’m beginning to think that I can get a couple of those lost steps back and I actually can, at 55 put my tennis game on an uphill curve.
Damn…I wish I could have the strokes I have today with the legs I had at 23. I love that wirey hard ass feeling you get when you’re playing a lot of tennis. In my experience there’s no game that builds cardiovascular fitness like basketball, but for muscle tone I think tennis is better. Don’t know why.

Corporate America is by it’s nature insane.
Can’t really say much other than I survived. This time.

My father was the Michael Jordon of cattle buyers.
He was a city kid who grew up on the West Side of St. Paul. Which is on the west side of the Mississippi, but actually is south of Downtown. East of that is South St. Paul and to the south is West St. Paul. True. He got his training in the huge South St. Paul Stockyards, starting out as a drover, moving cattle around the yard on foot and on horseback, at sixteen. At one time he had a side business with Mike Farrel’s dad, speculating on buying and selling cattle in the yards. They called it the Emaciated Cattle Company.
When I was about five, he was offered a job buying cattle for Liebman Packing Company, which was in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Hence the Packers. The job was in the West Fargo Stockyards, just over the border in North Dakota. He worked for them until the early sixties when Siouxland decided to build their big plant. They realized that they couldn’t buy enough cattle to keep the place busy unless they hired my dad. Even with the advantage of no trucking costs, they couldn’t compete.
Here’s how it worked. The feeders brought their market ready cattle to the Stockyards and consigned them to a commission company. The commission company would act as bargaining agents for them. The buyers would go out into the yards and bid on the cattle hoping to cut an advantageous deal. The trick was to be able to look at the cattle and determine the ratio (yield) of their “on the hoof” weight to their dressed weight, hanging in the meat cooler. Then if you knew the going price of dressed beef and the profit margin you needed then you could calculate what a fair price per pound would be. Remember there were no calculators then; he had a series of laminated cheat cards, but I also think he did a lot of the math in his head. He was not a high school graduate. Dad could walk into a pen of 25 cattle, spend five minutes and estimate their yield percentage. If he missed by more than a half of one percent, he figured he’d blown it. So when Dad offered a price, you knew it was fair, so it was kind of a no haggle proposition. And if he gave you a price and you turned him down and you found out you couldn’t do better…well you’d better not come looking for him to give the original price. When he worked for Siouxland, he was the head cattle buyer and had five or six or some number of buyers working for him. He bought more cattle than all of them combined and bought them cheaper.
Mostly the job consisted of sitting around in the shacks out in the yards, playing cards, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes until some cattle would come in. Then out they’d go take a look, cut a deal and get back to the card game. There was some bullshitting done in the bargaining process. Once he took me aside and said, “You go over there and sit on the fence and when they bring the cattle in say, ‘Kinda skaggy aren’t they?’” I could say the men were rolling in the alley, but that would be really nasty.
So the owner of Siouxland came to town and personally offered Dad double his salary and he couldn’t refuse. He died when I was twenty. The business was going to auction selling and he had trouble hearing so he figured he would be obsolete before long. The West Fargo Stockyards is a ghost town now.
That’s him in the middle with the groovy glasses.

Warning If you’re a vegan or a PETA member or simply don’t want to think about where your filet mignon comes from, you might not want to read the following.

The highest point in the Fargo-Moorhead area is the manure pile outside the Union Stockyards in West Fargo. It was huge, they drove big dump trucks on it. It had roads up it’s sides. It’s still there. Settled a bit and overgrown with vegetation, probably the most fertile soil in an area known for it’s fertile soil. The soil in the Red River Valley is amazing. The silt from the bottom of prehistoric Lake Agassiz. Black as oil, perfect growing anything, especially sugar beets.
In the early sixties, Siouxland Dressed Beef built a new state of the art packing plant across the road from the stockyards. Designed to kill cattle, sheep and hogs it was at that time one of the highest volume livestock packing operations in the world. That wouldn’t last long because that was a time when the size and efficiency of such operations was growing at an amazing pace. But at that time it was a showcase. The offices were on one side of the building, next to the kill floor. They were lined with windows so the office workers and plant managers could look out and admire the operation. Unfortunately the architects or engineers made a slight miscalculation. The conveyor for the sheep kill brought the freshly slaughtered sheep carcasses right past the window. They were swinging as they came around a corner on the line. They hit the window. So these windows that were put in so the white collar folks could admire the efficiency of their high tech plant were constantly covered by a disgusting film of sheep blood and gore. My dad was extremely amused by this.

ASAP
As Soon As Possible.
I hate that term. What does ASAP mean to you. Here’s what I think when someone tells me they want something ASAP. I think they don’t give enough of a fuck about it to care about when it gets done and what it’s priority is so why the fuck should I. I put it on the bottom of my priority list behind all the things from people who have taken the time to figure out where the work fits in their schedules. I can usually accomodate that. When you really never have any downtime, ASAP is pretty much NEVER.
This has nothing to do with my current shitty mood, though.