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I’ve reclaimed my balls. Reclaimed my balls and upped my C.I. by one. You know, cylinder index, the number of pistons in the internal combustion engines one owns. It’s directly proportional to ones machismo rating. This puts me at 16. Admittedly some guys hit 16 with just a their car and their pickup, but it took me three cars, a lawn mower and now a snowblower to hit that level. But it’s a new high for me.

The reason I say I’ve reclaimed my balls is because I bought the blower against my wife’s wishes. She did not see that this was a great investment. One of MM’s nieghbors is moving to California, where he won’t be needing a snowblower (at least until the state breaks away and drifts down to the Antarctic) and he had this beauty for sale. Seven horse, 24 inches of snow spitting power! He bought it last year and only used it twice, there isn’t even any paint worn off the auger blades! He was letting it go for five hundred bucks, just a little more than half price. It’s pristine.
I’ve been thinking about buying one soon. I think I’ve developed an alergy to shovels. Everytime I get near one I start to sweat, get short of breath and suffer from back, knee and shoulder pain. I used to look at shoveling as a good workout and kind of scoff at guys that needed to use machines to move their snow. But let’s face it, guys my age have heart attacks shoveling snow and real men have motorized toys.

When I conferred with Becky about the purchase she wasn’t too excited about the deal. I think most guys would just buy the thing without consulting their wives, but the truth of the matter is that at our house there’s little doubt about who’s in charge. So I decided to pass up the deal. Last weekend we got a moderate snowfall and on the way home from the basketball game Sunday, I indicated that I wanted Beck to help me shovel. She blew me off, so I was out there on our steeply inclined driveway with my knee aching and swearing under my breath when she and Q came out to get in Q’s car and go shopping. I had to finish digging out behind Q’s car, (good luck getting her to help) which meant I had to dig through the berm that the snowplow leaves when it goes by on the street. Which is the hardest shoveling there is. They stood and watched. That was the last straw. When they got back I looked my wife in the eye and said, “I’m buying the snowblower and you better not say a word.”
That felt great. Maybe I’ll just go out and buy a boat.

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Fear and Loathing.

Hunter S. Thompson shot himself. Really, could it have ended any other way. Gonzo was a folk hero in my social set, we were all trying to emulate him….vying for the reputation as the craziest. I was a contender. Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas was one of the most influential books of my youth. What does that say about me?

Thompson is forever connected in my mind with one of my very favorite artists, Ralph Steadman who gained fame with his illustrations of Thompson’s work in Rolling Stone. His crazed style captured perfectly the booze and drug driven insanity that was fear and loathing. Those ink spatters (a little graphic trick I’ve stolen for myself) just seemed to say that we were walking the edge of psychotic violence.

While some of my contemporaries read Siddartha and Casteneda, I was most influenced by Joyce Carey’s The Horses Mouth,the story of a wastrel artist, Thompson, and Dharma Bums.

The late sixties and early seventies…ok all the seventies are a blur.

Steve Gilliard writes an excellent tribute to the founder and greatest component of Gonzo Journalism which includes this eulogy of Richard Nixon.

Rolling Stone
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
‘He was a crook’
Jun 16, 1994

MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK

DATE: MAY 1, 1994

FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON

SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON:

NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER….HE WAS A LIAR ND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA. …BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.
SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON:

“And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is becoming the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.”–REVELATION 18:2

Richard Nixon is gone now and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing–a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that I know Iwill go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon.”

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, andI am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hatedNixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you.”

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he’s gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive–and he was, all theway to the end–we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instinctsof a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by thehead with all four claws.

That was Nixon’s style–and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don’t fight fair, bubba. That’s why God made dachshunds.

…………

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern–but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man–evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him–except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

………….
Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism–which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

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Qwindin, a fellow Minnesotan, asked for funny stories about the cold.

Winter Friday nights during the late sixties in Moorhead (everybody likes Moorhead) Minnesota consisted of going to “Youth Center” the weekly dance at the VFW. You could see the likes of the Unbelievable Uglies and try to grab a feel while slow dancing with your girl.

I had just gotten my driver’s license so five of my friends and I piled into the ’63 Bel Air wagon and headed for the dance. It was one of those March nights when winter is making it’s last stand before giving in to Spring. Below zero with a life threatening wind chill. We left our coats in the car and hauled ass inside and started working up a sweat on the dance floor. Later in the evening I ran into Cindy. Cindy and I had an off and on thing going, but that’s another story, one that ends with her slapping me in the face at our twenty year reunion the first time she saw me since graduation. Maybe I was looking at her teenage daughter. I told her I had gotten my license and she asked me for a ride home. Perfect timing, I thought, I could take her home and make it back in time to pick up the guys and bring them home. I thoght that I even had time for a detour to one of the time honored parking spots down by the Red River.

We’d only just begun to get the windows steamed up when I remembered I had to get back to Youth Center before it closed. But when I started to pull out I realized I was hopelessly stuck in the snow. Our desperate efforts to get unstuck, using all the tricks a North County kid learns to accomplish that only yielded deeper ruts in the icy snow packed dirt road. Fortunately there were two other couples double dating about fifty yards away and they were stuck too. So we combined our efforts with rocking and pushing and spinning of wheels got the cars out. I rushed Cindy home to the Motel her mother ran on the edge of town and then beat it back to the VFW. Deserted. Completely. A deserted parking lot at night with whisps of snow blowing across it’s icy surface illuminated by street lights may be the coldest image known to man. There was no sign of my buddies. I knew I was in deep shit.

I got home to face the all too familiar figure of my angry father, veins popping in his temples wondering out loud if I was a complete idiot. I really didn’t mind my father’s fits of temper, I was just frightened that he would get so angry he’d have a heart attack and drop dead. It terrified me. It turns out that my pals had been ejected from Youth Center at closing, sweating and coatless into the Siberian night. They made it to a gas station several blocks away and called their parents. There parents had already called my parents to express their displeasure. I spent my Saturday driving around returning the coats and apologizing to the parents. They were not very forgiving. I was treated to a lecture at each stop. They all seemed to have concluded that I was a hopelessly stupid and irresponsible kid. Adults never were very fond of me when I was young.

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Braham Minnesota is a little town of 1300, fifty miles north of the Twin Cities. They call themselves the Homemade Pie Capitol of Minnesota. Their high school basketball team has won forty some games in a row and are the reigning class 2A champs. They’ve come down and whipped the big urban schools and played a team from Compton California and beaten them too. They have three players who will play D1 basketball and three more who will play college ball at some level. Sounds like Hoosiers, only I don’t think these guys are ever going to be underdogs.

Meanwhile, it’s reported that Minnesota Girl’s high school hockey is far and away the best in the nation and that this years senior class is the best ever. South St. Paul has the metro player of the year and her linemates are all on the All Metro first team. One of them will break the all time scoring record for the state, they don’t know which one yet. They’ve played varsity together since eigth grade. They’re all seniors and they’re going to Minnesota State Mankato. Look for the Mustangs to challenge the Gophers for dominance of women’s hockey.

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I finally saw the mystery neighbor.

Yes, we have a mystery neighbor. Last summer our long time neighbors to the east, with three teenage boys found themselves expecting a fourth child. They decided to sell the house, which they had just finished remodeling. I’m pretty sure the main reason was that they couldn’t put up with my lax lawn care standards, but that’s another story.

So they sold the house in the late fall and moved out. I have not seen a human being over there since. I see an occasional light on. The driveway gets shoveled. I’ve seen cars parked on it, but rarely. Last weekend I saw a bedraggled English sheep dog in the yard. When the old neighbor told me about the sale, she described a couple with high end jobs, one was a patent attorney, I think, which surprised me because folks like that usually live on the other side of 169 in Plymouth. Which is where they were moving from. However recent local scuttlebutt says that it’s a single mom. Putting two and two together, or one and one apart, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a divorce situation.

Yesterday, I was home at noon for my usual lunch and twenty minute nap, which was interrupted when Quinn came home from school, having ditched the pep fest in favor of shopping. She was sitting at the counter eating lunch and I was in the kitchen trying to strike up a conversation before I went back to the office. She suddenly blurted, “Oh my god, there’s someone on the deck.” Call me paranoid, but I thought she meant that there was an intruder on our deck, about to crash through the sliding door and murder us. But when I looked out the glass doors I saw a woman on the deck next door, smoking a cigarette. For some reason, I thought I would be invisible to her, behind that glass on a sunny day. But our eyes met and rather than acknowledge her, I stepped back out of her line of sight. Great way to start things out with the new neighbor, if that’s what she was. I’m sure she’s already thinking of me as that nosey old bastard next door. Or maybe she’s thinking, “Wow, I moved in next to an incredibly sexy man!”

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Whoa. That was truly ugly. It was as if lisazaren went to a Dylan concert and he had laryngitis.

The Gopher Women got their asses handed to them by Michigan State. At the Barn no less. When I left with about two minutes remaining the were down by thirty and were 0 for 17 from the arc. Liz Podominek was in street clothes, but that shouldn’t have made that much difference. Weaknesses were exposed. Like outside shooting for instance. It’s real hard to beat a zone if you can’t hit from the perimeter. This pretty much blows their chances for the Big 10 title. And will hurt their seeding in both the conference tournament and the NCAAs.

I thought the woman who sits next to me was going to cry.

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My friend Charlie, a college classmate who I hadn’t seen for years has a thoughtful blog in which he writes philosophically about politics and culture today. He’s a lefty like me, but the main drift of the blog is reaching across the divide and trying to understand and bring together our country that seems like it’s never been more polarized.

The latest entry talks more about what the left can do to re-energize. He talks about tapping into the energy of the extremes, the “crazy” fringes, to stir up the passion for the hard fight ahead.

I’ve been artistically floundering lately (or maybe for 50 years) and his blog got me thinking that maybe what I need to juice me up is to go political with my art. I have some strong left wing feelings but I’ve been hesitant to voice them, mostly because I’m not politically saavy and I get my ass kicked when I try to argue a point. I’ll take a stand on aeshetics or basketball strategy, but I’m just not that well grounded on politics. Plus I’m lazy. Yup, I’m one of those wishy washy liberals.

Plus I have had a pretty pronounced lean to the right over the years. I’ve always been kind of a free-market guy, even though I went to the same college as Thorstein Veblen and where Paul Wellstone taught. I actually might have crossed over to the right if it weren’t for the fact that they seem to have this unholy alliance with homophobes, biggots, anti-intellectuals, and the holier than thou Christian Right. Not to mention the corporate robber barons.

So if I can draw farting termites, I should be able to save the world. Right?

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It’s the little things.

It’s Shannon Schoenrock slipping a pick. The biggest girl from the Iowa team came out to the free throw line to set a pick. Shoney (that’s what the fans call her, I think Rocky would be better) was gaurding lightning quick Crystal Smith on the left side of the key. Crystal took off, her mission was to beat Shannon to her team mates far hip, leaving the defender stuck like a carp at a bridge abuttment, and either going to the hoop herself or if Podominek left the picker to stop her, just dishing to the big girl, who was, as the game is played, rolling to the hoop unguarded. I didn’t think Shannon had a chance, she had no angle, she had to get around the big girl and the attacker had a straight line. She made an incredible lateral stride, leap in fact, that got her through, momentarily sandwiched between a much taller person and the bonie shoulder of another in her sternum. But letting an opponent get the ball in the paint is a sin in the eyes of High Priestess Pam.

It’s coach Borton pulling Jamie Broback from the game after she made two steals and rumbled the length of the court for layups. She’s a six-three maybe two-twenty power forward who can play guard. The first time she was alone with two defenders back and a full head of steam. by the time she hit the top of the key, you knew she decided that there was no way these girls would take a charge from her. They would have gone flying off the end of the Barn’s sadistically elevated court. They tried. She went between them, scattering them like tenpins. She hit the layup and got the spare.

The next time down the court she makes another steal another coast to coast drive that culminated in a missed shot and a foul. Borton yanks her. Later in the game she makes the same steal, picking a pass off in the backcourt. Pam sits her down immediately. Now, conventional wisdom says you ride the hot hand, keep her in the game, she’s on the verge of taking over. So, why? Doubted her conditioning? Seen her too many times loose control and pick up bad fouls when she’s on a run like that? Pam Borton does nothing without a reason.

April Calhoun gave up a scholarship to leave Iowa, Where she started every game at point guard two years ago. People speculate about why, boyfriend, the opportunity to go to the Carlson School of Business (she’s a top student) the opportunity to play in her hometown and at Williams. I think part of it was that there was talk of her losing minutes to Crystal Smith. I think there’s not a lot of love lost there. Maybe they’re best friends, but certainly there’s an on court rivalry. April has moved to the off guard position but often plays point when Shannon is resting. In the second half Borton sat Shannon for a longer period than usual and rotated the red head to the point. The game was already pretty much in hand and I think Pam just wanted to give those two the chance to go head to head. And that they did. April moved the ball down the floor against heavy pressure from Smith by taking the ball behind her back three times in six dribbles. It was a great show, you could just see how fierce they were.

There’s more of course, but I’m sure no one is reading by now. So Adios!

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Fans scramble for foul balls at baseball games, cheerleaders throw t-shirts and mini balls and what have you into the stands for fans to scramble for. I have been going to sporting events for fifty years and have never gotten that treasured souvineer. Until tonight. Our seats at the Williams are in the first row of the balcony. Very few people can throw a t-shirt or a mini-ball up there. Janel McCarville is one of them. I couldn’t tell you who threw the ball up there tonight. I didn’t even see it coming right at my face until it was about three feet away. My reactions and hand to eye are still very good. I got my hands on it but bobbled it. The woman next to me got her hands on it and bobbled it. I managed to control it enough to catch it against my body.

I’ve always told myself that if I ever got a ball I would give it to the closest kid. I handed it to the teenage girl next to me.