Things That I Have Wrecked

It was 4 years ago this month.  Nadia and I had just came back from our honeymoon in Jamaica and we were craving something simple to eat after spending a week gorging on the lavish all-you-can eat buffets and fancy sit-down dinners at the many restaurants that the Sandals Resort had to offer.  I actually gained 10 pounds the week we were there but that was okay…the waist is a terrible thing to mind.  Our first night back home we decided on a simple frozen pizza so I put it in the oven and went upstairs.  I came back down after about 15 minutes and something was terribly wrong.  The whole place wreaked like chemicals and I assumed the oven was on fire so I ran over to take the pizza out.  I could not see any smoke or fire, but in the bottom of the oven was a dark greenish gooey plastic glob with some twisted orange streaks running through…it was kind of cool and it looked like art but I had no idea what the hell it was or how it got there.  Nadia and I stared at it for about 5 minutes but could not figure it out so we threw it away.

A few days later I realized (as is the norm) that I could not find my expensive sunglasses.  I am the poster-child for ZZ Top’s ‘Cheap Sunglasses’ song…I constantly lose my shades so I just buy cheap $5 pairs whenever I see them on sale at gas stations or wherever.  This one time however I owned a sweet pair of $100 shades that Nadia had won as part of a golf package from the United Way auction that we have at work every fall.  So normally I wouldn’t care that I had lost my shades, but these were the only nice expensive pair that I had ever owned.  We looked all over the house, cars, work, everywhere till, duh…it finally dawned on me that the cool plastic gob of goo in the oven was my cool shades.  When I am not wearing my shades I often hook them onto the front of my shirt, and when I bent over to put the pizza in they must have slid off into the oven.  Strange that I didn’t hear them fall.  Ah well…live and learn.  In particular I learned that it is not a good idea to cook your shades at 400 degrees for 15 minutes.  They don’t like that.

Over the years I have wrecked a variety of things.  I never mean to, but sometimes things just get wrecked.  If you read my 1/17/12 blog entry ‘Another Reason Why You Shouldn’t Warm Up Your Car’ you know about a couple of them…like my Dad’s 1973 Opel Kadett and his 1982 Pontiac Bonneville.  The Opel was wrecked beyond repair, but actually the Pontiac went into the shop and came out crisp and clean with a new grill, hood and front quarter-panels. 

The Pontiac’s pristine condition did not last very long however, as a few weeks after it’s revival I was driving it down I-94 from Waukesha to Milwaukee, WI.  I was behind a semi-truck when suddenly it ran over a tailpipe that was laying in the road.  The back tire ran over the end of it and kicked it up in the air.  I remember perfectly almost like it was in slow motion, the tailpipe spinning end over end and tracking right for my head as we sped towards each other at 65 mph.  There was no time to do anything but instinctively duck as the twisted hunk of metal crashed into the windshield right in front of my face.  The glass bent, cracked, spider-webbed…but it did not break and the tailpipe bounced off after doing its work, ready to wreak havoc on the next poor b*stard.  I believe it was my sister Jan who was with me in the front seat and it scared the crap out of us but we were fine.  I just remember thinking how glad I was to be in a car and not my motorcycle or it would have taken my head off.

That was not the only windshield that suffered under my care.  Before the ’82 Bonneville there was a brown 1978 Plymouth Volare stick-shift station wagon that my mom and dad hated…we called it the ‘Vo-Lemon’.  The “Volare” nameplate fell off on the way home from the dealer, which was just the first of dozens of problems with that piece of junk.  It was truly an awful car, but it was the first car I had ever driven so I have some fond memories of it.  Well…again…I am too old for my dad to ground me so I might as well come clean on how the windshield got busted on that thing.  When I was 16 my friend Aaron Vermillion and I and a couple other friends took the Vo-Lemon to the Waukesha County Fair for the night.  We had a great time, met some girls, probably had some beers…the usual.  It was a great time and Aaron was pumped.  He was a very hyper guy and when it was time to leave we got in the car and he got in the passenger side and let out a huge yell and punched the windshield in happiness.  Crack!!  The whole thing splintered.  Dammit!  He did not mean to break the windshield though so for Aaron’s sake I had to lie and tell my parents that we didn’t know how it got cracked…that we got back to the car and somebody must have broke it while we were at the fair.   My dad has a huge brain and knows just about everything, so I figured he would somehow figure out that it was broken from the inside, not the outside.  But I guess not because he got it fixed and never said anything.  Sorry Dad.

Another car that I wrecked was almost completely my fault.  For a couple of years in the mid-1990’s I owned a sweet lime-green 1974 Dodge Dart Swinger.  I got it for only $500 from my ex-wife Lona’s grandpa and it was in mint condition.  After buying it new in ’74 he basically just drove it to the grocery store and church and it only had 50,000 miles on it.  Remember the scene in ‘The Jerk’ when the crazy guy starts shooting at Steve Martin at the gas station and he says:  “He hates these cans!”?  If you look closely, you will see a yellow ’74 Dodge Dart Swinger slowly drive by in the scene.  That’s my car.  Anyways, in the late summer of 1997 on a Sunday afternoon I was heading down I-94 East from my girlfriend Mugsy’s house in Minneapolis, MN to my house in Madison, WI.  I was 20 minutes past the Wisconsin border and still had 3 hours to go, but we’d just had a great weekend and I was feeling great.  I was cruising along about 70 mph, listening to my new live ‘Doors’ cd on the stereo and plowing through a bagful of Burger King cheeseburgers on my lap while reading the cd insert. 

In other words I was paying zero attention to the road and just humming happily along when all of a sudden: ‘BLAMMO!!’  I had no idea what was happing, but the entire car was up on two wheels.  The two tires on the passenger side were still on the ground but me and the rest of the car were high in the air with the car on a 45 degree angle.  We hung there for a bit and then ‘THUMP!’ the car came back down on all 4 wheels and started fishtailing all over the road.  There were cheeseburgers and soda and cd’s and cassette tapes flying all over the inside of the car as I grabbed the steering wheel and fought to bring the poor thing under control.  I ended up on the left shoulder of the freeway and pulled over as much as I could so the cars whizzing past me would not be a factor.

However the center median of this stretch of the freeway was a deep gully that dropped off almost immediately so I couldn’t pull over too far.  Still not having the slightest idea of what had just happened I opened the driver door and attempted to step out.  I put my left foot down and tried to stand up but it was such a steep angle that my ankle gave way and I rolled all the way down the hill about 20 feet to the bottom.  As I laid in the ditch on my back with a sprained ankle and a totaled car, I stared up into the sky and the first thing to came to my head was:  “Why has my god has forsaken me?”  In other words, what the f*ck just happened?!  All of a sudden some old dude’s head comes into view and he bends over me and asks if I am alright.  I rolled over, got up, and then hopped/crawled up the hill till I get to my car and surveyed the damage.  Both tires on the driver side were flat, and the whole car was on a weird sideways angle.  The car wasn’t a rectangle anymore…it was a parallelogram.

I still had no idea what had happened, so the old man pointed first to his large mobile home parked on the right shoulder of the freeway, and then to a huge spare tire laying in the ditch behind me.  The spare had come loose from the back of his mobile home and had been laying in the middle of the freeway.  He was parked and was trying to come grab the thing out of the road when I came along and hit it flush with my front left tire which catapulted the left half of my car up in the air.  Such a shame…it was a sweet car but the whole undercarriage was completely bent beyond repair.  I somehow got the insurance company to give me $1,000 for it though.  Twice what I paid, but I still would have rather had the car.

I have wrecked a lot of other cars, boats, hotel rooms, houses and relationships since then but I will spare you any more details for now.  As I said I never mean to, but sh*t happens.  You just have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, accept the consequences and learn from your mistakes.  Have a great weekend ya’ll and try not to wreck too many brain cells.

Those Mysterious Little Creatures

I was just talking on the phone to my friend Marci Benton and for some reason the conversation steered towards her upcoming annual OB/GYN appointment.  She mentioned how sometimes complications can arise down there with an abnormal Pap test.  Not usually, but you never know.  I said:  “Yeah, they’re mysterious little creatures.”  That cracked us both up for some reason, and then it got me thinking about the very first time I encountered one of those mysterious creatures as a teenager.  It was attached to a beautiful neighbor girl named Holly Owen.

I did not lose my virginity that time, and thank god…I was completely clueless and had no idea what I was doing.  This was back in the early 80’s when stuff was a lot hairier.  I mean, a lot hairier.  Let me give you an example.  I have a friend named Glenn Kampson who fondly tells the story of the night he was with a girl who was so hairy that when he was down there, he fell asleep.  Granted they had been drinking, but he actually laid his head down and fell fast asleep on the ample pile of soft comfortable hair that was in front of him.  He woke up to her poking him in the head asking him: “WTF?!”.  It was an unfortunate situation, but very understandable if you know Glenn, who is one of the funniest men in America.

So I remember my first time down there being a lesson in terror and uncertainty as I knew I was going to have to figure out what was imbedded in all that hair.  Sure I had seen pictures, but when actually confronted with a real live one right in my face I was scared shitless.  So much hair, so little experience.  I was as happy and excited as any normal red-blooded pubescent male could be, but what was I supposed to do?  I squinted hard and tried peering through all the hair but could see nothing that afforded me any clue as to what was going on in there.  Should I go high, low, right in the middle?  I did not want Holly to know that I had never been there before so I was going to have try and fake my way through this.  I steeled my resolve and got down to business.  I figured I wouldn’t taking any chances of missing the spot or spots I was supposed to hit, so I took my index finger and started poking anywhere there was hair.  Poke…poke…poke…poke…

After a minute or so of this I felt Holly move so I looked up to see if she was by now lost in sexual rapture at my prowess.  But she was not writhing in ecstasy.  She had propped herself up on her elbows and was staring at me like I was retarded.  She had a confused, somewhat sad look on her face.  Wait…maybe that’s how girls look when they are completely overwhelmed by pleasure??  Probably not.  As I continued poking I looked at her face for a sign that I was doing something right.  C’mon, help a guy out.  Something, anything.  There?  Is that good?  I anxiously implored her face for a clue or some positive sign.  Nope, nothing.

It was clear by now from her scowl that she was not having any fun and I was probably just annoying her.  I could tell she wanted me to do it right and I so badly wanted to do it right as well, but I didn’t even know what ‘right’ was?  I needed to retreat.  Regroup.  Get a safe distance away.  Back to the classroom.  But after spending a lifetime of trying to get into this exact position, I was not ready to give up yet.  I started frantically poking anywhere and everywhere now hoping to hit pay dirt…but eventually she just slowly shook her head, grabbed my hand and asked me to please stop.

It was over.  I was done.  My career as a stud had ended almost before it began.  How do you ever recover from such a complete and utter disaster as that?  It was a stunning defeat and I hoped this would never get out to my friends.  Fortunately, her inexperience kept her from realizing how much I completely sucked at this.  We knew something was horribly wrong but we did not know how to fix it, so we got dressed and pretended like nothing happened.

Eventually that summer we got up the courage to try it again though, with more and more success each time.  Of course there were some setbacks in the coming months...most notably the time Holly's large, menacing, extremely protective father came home early from his job at the liquor store that he owned.  In the words of Bob Seger, Holly and I were ‘working on our Night Moves’ when suddenly we hear the garage door opening.  What?!  Holy sh*t!  We froze and stared at each other in horror as we listened to his car pull into the garage.  I have to get out of here! 

We were upstairs in her bedroom so Holly bolted for the bathroom and I ran naked with an armload of clothes down the hallway to the split level staircase leading to the lower levels.  Half-way down the stairs was the entrance door from the garage, then the staircase did a 180 and the 2nd half of the stairs led to the lowest level.  From the top of the stairs I could hear him just on the other side of the door about to come in.  I could turn around and go hide back in Holly's room, but if I wasn’t home in time for dinner my parents would worry and I certainly didn't want to be trapped in there all night.  I decided I had to go for it and ran down the stairs towards him.  I passed the door and made the turn just as he came in and headed up the stairs to the upper level.  We were literally on the same staircase at the same time with him going up and me going down, but I made it to the bottom safely.  

I was far from being in the clear however.  I was still standing completely nude in the house of a card-carrying NRA gun enthusiast who was calling out to his beloved daughter letting her know he was home.  I heard her yell from the bathroom that she was about to take a bath.  I couldn't tell which was louder, my heart pounding in my chest or his heavy footsteps walking around on the floor above me.  Fighting the mixture of panic and adrenaline I gently eased open the sliding glass door leading to the back yard and made a run for my bicycle which was leaning up against their above-ground pool.  Still naked I grabbed my bike and pushed it around to the back side of the pool and crouched down low, all the while hoping he didn't happen to be looking out the back window.  I got dressed, threw my bike over the 6-foot high fence, climbed over after it, and then peddled as fast as my legs would go through the neighbor’s yard and headed for home, again hoping nobody was seeing any of this.

That was 30 years ago and I still have not figured out those mysterious little creatures. Since the dawn of time when that first horny cave-man tried to get with the cute little cave-girl who lived down the street, we have been trying in vain to figure out these creatures and the people they are attached to.  Wars have been waged, battles have been fought, and lives have been lost.  Large sums of money have been spent, countless songs have been written, and sturdy hearts have been broken.  They will drive men crazy and make us do inexplicit, incredibly stupid things at great risk.  But all that matters very little to the average male and I am no exception.  I was right back at Holly's house the next day after her dad came home.  My never-ending quest for knowledge and enlightenment on the subject continues to this day and my persistence is unwavering…just ask my poor wife.

T'was Never Thus

The Radiators (Rads) from New Orleans have been my favorite band since the first time I saw them in 1984 in Minneapolis, MN.  Oh sure over the years they came up against the Grateful Dead a few times and each time I chose seeing the Dead over the Rads just because, well...they were the Grateful Dead.  The magic those guys could weave on any given night was incredible and powerful, but not promised every night so you had to see as many shows as you could to make sure you did not miss one of the great nights.  I managed to see them exactly 100 times and most but not all were great shows.

With the Radiators however, you were practically guaranteed a great show every single night they went onstage.  The epic 3-set concerts they put on in the 1980's were a test of your endurance...just how much fun can one person handle, night after night?  That was up to you.  For me the Radiators were not only the backdrop to hundreds and hundreds of great nights, including my wedding to Nadia, but they were also a conduit to a huge network of life-long friends from all over the country.  I could post blog entries about nothing other than my weekends with the Radiators and never run out of material, but I will control myself.  The story below just popped into my head because it happened exactly 15 years ago to the day.

The Krewe of DAD's had arranged a pretty good 3-day weekend for the Radiators and their devoted fans that summer in Minnesota from 6/27-6/29/97.  The ‘DADs’ are a Krewe of extremely cool Minnesota folks who have been staging concert-parties here since 1982.  Most notably the annual Halloween costume balls that always prove to be an out-of-hand great time with The Radiators acting as the house band for those parties every year.  That is until sadly the Rads folded up the tent and shut down the band one year ago in June of 2011 after 33 1/3 years together.  The Krewe lives on without the Radiators and the Halloween bashes continue, but of course it is not quite the same without the Radiators.

The Friday night concert 15 years ago was a 90-minute drive south of us at the beautiful and friendly Harmony Park in Geneva, MN with a large outdoor stage in the woods and a lake right behind it.  Saturday night was scheduled for John Mackie's farm which was a 45-minute drive west of us in Waverly, MN...a large private gathering with ‘Twas Ever Thus’ as the party-theme.  This was the site of the famous ‘Between Two Fires’ bash three years earlier, with the outdoor stage set down at the bottom of a hill and a small river running behind it.  Then the mini-Minnesota tour continued on Sunday night in Apple Valley, MN with the Rads playing at the scenic Minnesota Zoo Amphitheater, another outdoor stage with a lake behind as a backdrop.

The Friday night gig on 6/27/97 was a great gathering of friends from all over the country, including one of my all-time best friends Special Kaye who drove up from Milwaukee, WI.  We all set up camp in the woods surrounding the stage at Harmony Park, with the party promising to go on all night after the concert.  Dave Ray and Tony Glover opened the show, and both their set and the Rad's long set were awesome.  The Radiator's encore of 'Out In The Woods' was appropriate and everybody left the stage area and drifted back to their campsites inebriated from the music.  The woods were dotted with campfires, and our group of close friends headed to the area that we dubbed 'Bookerville' with Ted Booker as the Mayor.  Ted and his wife Polly had rented a camper so we circled our tents around it.  It was a cool scene and the Radiator guitarists Dave Malone and Camile Baudoin even stuck around for a bit, hanging out in Ted's camper after the show. 

The next morning we wearily packed up our tents and drove back to Minneapolis to shower and get ready for the day's activities out in Waverly, another camping show at Mackie's farm.  This was the crown jewel of the weekend and expectations were especially high for those of us who were there for that crazy good time in 1994.  That first show there was on 7/16/94 and was one of the great nights of my life...it could be a whole 'nother story if I set my mind to it.  But basically the theme of the party that night was taken from a Radiators song “Between Two Fires” and there was literally 2 big bonfires on either side of the stage.  As the first set ended with the crowd pleasing “Wild And Free”, I watched Dave Malone jump off the stage, hop up on the hood of one of the band's rented Lincoln Town Cars and light up a cig.  I looked over at him with a huge smile and he smiled back screaming "Yeah baby!" at the top of his lungs while pumping his fists in joy from within his rising cloud of smoke.  This perfectly captured the mood of the entire scene, and the acid Mitch Manson and I had taken during the first set was happily starting to kick in.  The second set was buggy but great, and the night ended with the sun coming up on Mitch and I while we kicked the soccer ball over, through, and around all the tents set up in the field.

It was an all-around perfect night...however 3 years later on 6/28/97 the weather report was not good as rain was forecast with possibly severe weather.  I drove Mugsy Millen (this was a couple of weeks before we officially started going out for three long years) and a few other folks out from the city that afternoon and headed to Waverly.  We got about 10 miles away when the sky turned an ugly, creepy, dark greenish-gray.  The air was thick and eerily quiet, but then suddenly the wind, rain and hail hit.  We pulled into a gas station and waited it out for about 20 minutes until the craziness had mostly passed.

We got back on the road and continued towards Waverly, eventually reaching the small country dirt road leading to the farm.  I was driving slow and cautiously, weaving left and right to avoid downed trees and branches and about a mile or so from the farm.  Suddenly I hear a bellowing sound and look up to see a lone cow galloping up the road towards us at top speed, eyes wide with terror and drooling ferociously.  The cow and I stared at each other as she passed our car, and it was just all too weird watching in the rearview mirror as the cow continued her mad dash down the road while we ominously crept onwards to the farm.

We got to the entrance of the place and it was suddenly sunny now, but it looked like hell with trees and damage everywhere.  A tornado had run through the farm, collapsing the stage and filling Ed Volker's piano with gallons and gallons of water.  The show was cancelled, and the theme of the party was instantly changed in everybody's mind to ‘Twas Never Thus’.  We were not going to be denied our good times however, so we headed back to Minneapolis, called up a bunch of friends including Dave, Camile, the Rad’s drummer Frank Bua and their bass player Reggie Scanlan, and had everybody come over to Mitch's house for a consolation tornado party.  We had a birthday cake there as well for Mugsy and Camile who share the same birthday.  It sucked missing the show but we whooped it up all night and had a blast.

The next day was exactly 15 years ago on 6/29/97.  We headed out to the Minnesota Zoo for night-three with our boys and of course it was a great show.  They dried out Ed's keyboard, and he peppered the set list with numerous innuendos and songs pertaining to the tornado including “Hold Back The Flood”.  Two out of three shows ain't bad, and it was a weird but fun weekend.  15 years ago...so much has changed since then and yet it seems just like yesterday.  I really miss the Radiators.  They were like a friendly but hardcore tornado that would spin their way into your town and raise hell for a little while and then move on...but always with a promise to return.  New Orleans and Minneapolis formed the two ends of tornado-alley but San Francisco and New York City took a lot of direct hits as well, along with countless cities in between.

The tornado finally spun itself out after 33 years.  I saw their final shows 12 months ago in New Orleans, and it has been a long strange year without them.  For a third of a century these same 5 incredibly talented, extremely cool, and sincerely nice guys were playing their hearts out and leaving it all on the stage of a funky venue near you.  Thinking back, in all those years since 1984 I have never gone more than a few months at most without seeing them.  Now it is over and I feel like they have broken up with me with the old "It's not you, it's me." line.  The end of the Grateful Dead was sudden and tragic, but final.  With the Radiators however they are all still alive...and not making music together.  I know the road always wins, and their reasons are understandable, but it still doesn't make sense on a larger level and I will always hope that Dave, Camile, Reggie, Ed and Frankie will get back together some day and raise a little more hell.

Justin Miller

Anything my 9 month old son Jack can get his hands on instantly goes into his mouth.  So in my ongoing effort to keep his diet limited to people food, I was just picking through my living room carpet a few minutes ago looking for the bits of bird food that my cockatiel 'Dusty' spreads all over the carpet whenever she eats.  If you run your hand around the carpet near her cage it is like popcorn with the little dry pieces of food popping up everywhere.  So I was just running my hand over the area around her bird cage carefully picking up bits of food and it suddenly reminded me of a scene with one of my old best friends Justin Miller.  I have not seen him in 7 years and I assume he is dead.  Maybe (hopefully) in jail, but probably dead.

With my colorful past I may not be the one to talk out against a certain drug...or maybe I am.  It all started with pot…I used to love weed.  My last two years in high school and my first year of college I was almost never not stoned.  That changed during my second year of college though.  Up until then school had been easy, stoned or straight, and despite my love of marijuana I was still getting mostly straight A's.  Then I ran into Calculus IV.  It was hard.  Not like Calc II hard or Calc III hard...but insane hard.  I realized that in order to pass this I was going to have to study and study well and study straight. 

I did that but the thing was that after I quit smoking weed for awhile I forgot how to be stoned.  Every time I tried it I was paranoid-high and had no fun whatsoever.  Plus the weed just kept getting stronger and stronger.  In high school we smoked brown seedy Columbian weed and we loved it because that's all we knew.  But in college it was a whole different game.  With the mid-80's came better and better weed...brown went to green and seeds became a thing of the past.  Every once in awhile I would try taking a hit and I would be so high it was ridiculous.  So I have not been a regular weed smoker for over 25 years and probably have not had even a hit in 10 years.  I have absolutely nothing against it and firmly believe it should be legalized, but I just do not choose to smoke it anymore. 

Anyways, I have dabbled in a few things and regret none of them except for Crystal Meth.  I tried it once 23 years ago in Phoenix and it was not good.  I was visiting my friend Chris Galanos in Phoenix, who had moved there a couple years earlier from Minneapolis.  We went to a party one night and it was the weirdest thing…normally when you go to a party most people have a drink in one hand, and maybe a cigarette in the other hand.  But at the Phoenix party most people had a piece of tinfoil in one hand and a straw in the other hand.  Every once in awhile they would drop a few small white crystals on the tinfoil, run a lighter underneath until the rocks turned to liquid and produced smoke, and then they would suck up the smoke with a straw.  Everyone was doing it in mid-conversation as casually as you would take a sip of a beer.  I felt like I was in bizarro-world…the people seemed like the same sort of cool people I normally hung out, but yet it was so very different from the hippie parties I normally went to in Minneapolis.

I asked Chris what the f*ck was going on and he told me what it was.  I had never even heard of Crystal Meth.  But of course being young and stupid and invincible I gave it a try.  I was up for a couple of days and felt sort of great, but it was a 'false' great.  It did not feel real.  I was aware that my grinding happiness was manufactured and just wasn’t real somehow.  The pure joy of watching Jerry Garcia singing 'Comes A Time' or 'China Doll' in concert while high on pot or something would melt me into a puddle of delirious happiness that I felt and spread to anyone I could for hours, days, years and now decades after the fact.  But with Meth, instead of the deep, lasting, life-changing happiness I felt with pot or acid, it was more like eating shards of broken glass with your body’s engine continuously red-lining.  It was horrible. 

My friend Justin owned a garage/auto shop that he built on his home property in Princeton, MN about an hour drive north of me in Minneapolis.  He was a genius.  I nicknamed him 'MacIver' because he could fix anything.  You put him in a row boat in the middle of a lake with nothing but a pen-knife, a straw, a piece of rope and a 9-volt battery, and before you know it he would have somehow built a jet engine that would be whisking him ashore in no-time.  I exaggerate, but barely.  The guy was not only a genius, but he was an ex-special forces Navy guy who was 250 lbs of solid muscle and skill.  He had a wife, 2 young daughters, a thriving business, a pole-barn full of cool cars, several horses on many acres of land, and he was one of the most loyal, cool, fun guys I ever had the pleasure of knowing.

His only vice was that he somehow got into Crystal Meth.  In the last year that I knew him, he had dropped over 100 lbs and was like a walking skeleton.  What was left of his hair had turned white, but most of it had fallen out.  He had sores all over his face and head.  His teeth were brownish-grey.  He was dirty and smelled like chemicals.  Every time I left his house that last year I was practically in tears as I watched him deteriorate before my eyes.  I would try and talk to him about his drug use, but have you ever tried talking to someone when they are high?  It doesn't work.  I kept thinking that I would try and catch him sober and talk some sense in to him, but he was never sober.  It was useless.  I watched as all of his possessions were slowly sold off to pay for his drug use.  I watched as his wife eventually packed up the 2 kids one morning and escaped for good to her mother’s place in South Dakota.  I watched as his auto shop disappeared.  I watched as he disintegrated into a babbling, broken, confused shell of a once great man, all for Meth.

On the last day that I ever saw him I went up to his house hoping to have him fix something on my car.  I knew he could use the money, and I think he still derived some joy from fixing things. Even from the depths of his seemingly inescapable whirlpool of drug use he showed glimpses of happiness whenever he would fix something.  But the only fix that was going to happen that day was him getting high if possible.  I got to his place and for over an hour I tried to coax him out of the back of his carpeted dirty old van parked between his house and his shop.  But he spent the entire time I was there on his hands and knees with a ruler and a piece of paper picking at his van carpet...much like I was just picking bird food out of my living room carpet a little while ago.  Except that he was slowly and meticulously going over every square inch of the carpet, scraping it with the ruler and catching pieces of dirt onto the piece of paper, hoping to find a meth rock while babbling nonsense to me. 

It was sad and sickening and I have never felt so helpless.  I tried in vain one last time to get him to step out of himself and look at what he had become, what he had lost and what a short and miserable future he had left if he didn't stop.  It was no use.  I left one more time in tears and never saw him again.  I tried calling about a week later but the phone had been disconnected.  I drove up there about a month later but the house was empty, the shop closed, the horses gone...no Justin.  All of his normal friends had vacated months/years ago and I did not know any of the people he had been hanging with recently so I had nobody to call.  None of his old friends knew what happened to him.  Every once in awhile today I try and Google him, but with his common name it never brings up anything of use.  He has simply vanished.

None of the people I hang out with do Crystal Meth so I am preaching to the choir there, but for anyone else…I do not like to be preachy and I usually support just about anything in moderation, but I will say with no reservation to please never try Meth.  It will take everything away from you...and I mean everything, one little rock at a time.

Not-So-Deep Thoughts, by Sneaky Sweets

I woke up this morning at 2:30am and I could not get back to sleep...I laid there for hours...thinking and thinking...I hate that.  I don't mind thinking, but not at 2:30am.  One of the things I was thinking about was bikers...Harley bikers.  If you think about it, you almost never hear of a Harley in an accident or a Harley biker getting a DWI.  I know a few bikers and none of them ever get DWI's.  And its not like they don't drink and drive.  I mean hell, if you go down to The Cabooze/Joint/Whiskey Junction bar-strip in Minneapolis on any given night or especially on the weekend you will see several hundred bikers just pounding beers like their lives depended on it.  So, the only conclusion I came up with is that they must be really, really, good drunk drivers.  I guess the old saying that ‘practice makes perfect’ is true.  But how do they get to be so good at in the first place?

So then I was picturing potential biker gang members having to attend and pass a drunk-driving class before they could get into a gang.  The Hell's Angels class would of course be the most rigorous because they are the toughest gang, but pretty much all of the gangs would have some sort of ‘Drunk-Driving 101’ class that they would have to pass. 

Students would show up for class and the huge, long-haired biker teacher wearing his denim and leather and chaps would take your breathalyzer reading when you got to class.  If it was too low you would have to go back outside and pound more beers until you were drunk enough to get back into class.  ".06?!  T-Bone!  I told you before, nobody gets into my class unless they blow at LEAST a .10 goddammit!  Now quit wasting my time and drag your sorry, sober ass out of my classroom!  I don't want to see your face back here until you're good and drunk!  Here, you'll need a hall pass." 

And if they were drunk enough to attend class, they would have to sit through filmstrips of sober nerds riding Honda's and Suzuki's, getting busted, and taking horrific falls on the pavement.  Then they would have 'simulation', where a fake cop comes over to the fake motorcycle that you're sitting on and you would have to learn how to intimidate him until he lets you go.  Then at recess all the students would rumble (skin only, no weapons) for about a half hour.  Then a couple more beers and its back to class. 

After passing 'simulation' you would go out in the parking lot where you would learn how to properly rev your engine and smoke your tires.  Then, finally, when the teacher feels the class is ready for their final exam he would take you on a field trip to a roadhouse where the assignment is to get really drunk, pick up 1 biker chick, and make it back to the classroom with you, her and the bike all in one piece without getting arrested.

Unfortunately, I have a Yamaha so I could never be in a cool gang.

Growing Up With Music

A few days ago I was listening to Gordon Lightfoot’s 1974 album ‘Sundown’ on cd, and it suddenly reminded me of my bedroom in Schenectady, NY when I was about 8 or 9 years old reading a Hardy Boy book with my parent’s stereo playing in the background.  I closed my eyes and I was there.  I could picture my bedroom near the top of the stairs that led down to the living room, my bed with the blue striped blanket, the thin green carpeting that I used to hide ‘Mad’ magazines under, the old brown tattered Hardy Boy book I was reading that was handed down from my dad when he was a kid, and the sound of ‘Sundown’ drifting up the stairs.  And actually, this Gordon Lightfoot cd I was just listening to was made from my parent’s original Gordon album that I listened to hundreds of times when I was a kid. 

I have a cd burner stereo component that allows me to burn albums to cd’s, so when my parents moved to California I took all of their albums as well as my albums and burned them onto cd.  I started with AC/DC and burned my way through to ZZ Top.  It took several years and I am still not done because I keep buying old used albums from our local record store that sells them for a buck apiece.  It’s cool listening to the cd of an album because you can still hear all the pops and hisses from the album…makes you think you are listening to an album.  I love albums and I miss the album era.  I have a few hundred of them stored in my basement, and as everyone says they sound more warm, natural and real than the cold hard compressed digital music of today’s world. 

Music was a very large part of life those early years growing up in my parent’s house.  My dad’s stereo components were housed in a big wooden cabinet that he made and had two large wooden floor speakers on either side.  It was the altar at which I worshipped for hours on end whenever I could.  In addition to the radio tuner, there was a mysterious reel-to-reel player that only my dad knew how to work.  There was also a cassette tape deck added in later years, but the key was always the cool turntable where you could stack about 10 albums or so on the post and it would play each album on one side, then you would lift the stack and flip them over and it would play all of the other sides.  I would sit on the rug in front of the stereo memorizing all of the words to all of the songs on the albums.  Mostly Beatles, but also Cat Stevens, Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Gordon Lightfoot, etc.

The Beatles were the most popular band in my parent’s house then, and in my house now.  Whenever I listen to the Beatles Anthology cd’s I always read the little accompanying booklet, and each snippet about each song as I listen to the song.  I always get sad when they get to the last song 'The End' where it says:  "No other group has delivered such an apt farewell as the Beatles."  Being born in 1966, I remember it being extremely traumatic for me in 2^nd grade when I overheard a teacher talking to another teacher about the Beatles no longer being around.  What?!  "Yeah, the Beatles broke up." I was told, not realizing that it had happened a couple years earlier.  I remember feeling incredibly sad that I was going to have to be the one to tell my parents.  So when I got home from school I solemnly took my mom aside, told her I had something to tell her, and then almost in tears said:  "Mom...the Beatles have broken up."  I expected her to start crying but instead she looked at my sympathetically and gently told me that they had been broken up for a couple of years...I was shocked and no less saddened.  It was hard to wrap my 6 year old head around the fact that they would not be making any more music together...it didn't make sense to me.

But what did make sense was vinyl in all its forms.  When I was really young I had a couple of albums, including a Beatles ‘Live At the Hollywood Bowl’ and a yellow-vinyl Elvis album that I remember in particular, but mostly I had 45’s.  I had a little blue plastic portable record player that I kept in my room to listen to them, but I could fold it up into a suitcase and drag it around and plug it in wherever I needed to listen to music.  The Beatles ‘Rocky Racoon’, and Peter, Paul & Mary’s ‘Puff The Magic Dragon’ are the two that I remember listening to the most.  Then when I was about 6 or 7 years old I got a total of $30 for my First Communion and I wanted a cassette tape recorder.  I do not know what they cost back then, but my dad told me $30 would cover it.  Then a few days later he came home from work and presented me with my new General Electric tape recorder!  It came with one purple 10-minute G.E. cassette, which I still have today pictured above.  I used to place the recorder mic in front of the stereo, record 1 or 2 of my favorite songs on each side, and then go listen to it outside in my tree-fort.  It was like magic being able to take the music out of the livingroom with me wherever I wanted. 

I moved to Wisconsin just before my 11^th birthday and the music followed.  My friends and I all collected 45’s and we had piles of them because they were only 98 cents apiece, but for my birthday and Christmas presents I would always ask for albums.  And if there was an album I really wanted I would save my allowance or paper-route money until I had the $5 or $6 needed, which was a LOT in the 1970’s.  Albums were big and exciting and I would look at the picture on the front and carefully pore over all of the details on the back reading every single word, as well as the album sleeve if it too had words or pictures.  And because each side was only about 20 minutes long, it was not like you would put it on and ignore it or walk away…you would sit there and listen to it for 20 minutes and then flip to the other side. 

It was an era when listening to music was more social…it was an actual activity that you would do with your friends.  You would sit and listen to an entire album…listening carefully to each song and talk about it and then put on another album and listen to that.  Depending on our age we may be doing something else while listening…like aged 5-10 we may be sorting our football cards while listening to the Beatles or K-Tel’s “Looney Tunes”, aged 10-15 playing ping pong while listening to Cheap Trick or Led Zeppelin, aged 15-20 smoking pot while listening to Pink Floyd or the Grateful Dead…but the main reason we were there was for the music. 

Like if my friend Gary got a new Rush album we would all go over to his house and sit in his room and listen to it several times over…or if I got a new Ozzy album my friends would come to my house and we would sit in my basement and just devour it.  My Pink Floyd ‘The Wall’ album still has all of the old ancient pot resin stains on it.  Remember sitting in your room with your friends cranking The Wall and using the fold out album to clean a bag of weed?  Watching the seeds roll down the center of the album into the mason jar FULL of seeds that you planned on planting some day.  I don’t know if music is like that these days as it seems like everyone just pops in the ear buds and listens to their IPods.  Not saying that’s good or bad, but ‘music’ was very different back then.  It was nice listening to that Gordon Lightfoot album and being transported back in time.     

Crossing Into Canada

The date was 7/1/88.  My girlfriend Lona and I had just finished the 1988 Grateful Dead summer tour, starting in our home town of Minneapolis, MN on June 17^th…through Alpine Valley, WI…Buckeye Lake, OH…Pittsburgh, PA…Saratoga, NY…and finally to Silver Stadium in Rochester, NY on June 30th.  It was an insanely hot summer with temps in the hundreds on most days, making it an extremely long and uncomfortable 2 weeks of life on the road sleeping in our tent in venue parking lots, or in the car at rest areas and hotel parking lots.  ‘Showers’ consisted of washing our hair in sinks at the rest areas, or sneaking into large hotels and using their pool/showers.  Also we were selling tee-shirts in the venue parking lots to fund the trip and make extra cash, so after partying all night in the lot we would have to get up in the blazing sun and walk around trying to hawk the 288 Doonesbury/Dead shirts I had designed and colored with fabric markers.  It was such a hot and exhausting tour that on that last night in Rochester, Lona collapsed half-way through the 2^nd set of the concert.  I had to drag her through the crush of people out to the warning track of the baseball field that the band was playing on where she could lay down, get some air and recover. 

As much as we loved touring with the Dead, we were kind of relieved it was the last night and that we were going to be starting the trip back home to Minneapolis the next day.  It was normally a 2-day drive from there, but we decided to take it easy and do it in 3 shorter days of driving.  Usually from New York we would take I-90 west and go the southern way around Lake Erie through Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana over to Chicago and then up to Minneapolis.  But we looked at the map and decided it would not be too much farther to go the northern way around Lake Erie through Canada.  We figured it would be fun to visit another country, and we would get to stop and see Niagara Falls along the way.  I had seen the Falls before but it’s relentless power and size never ceases to amaze, so that was the plan:  go home through Canada, leaving the states at Niagara Falls, NY and reenter the U.S. on the other end of Lake Erie in Detroit, MI.

So we got up the morning of July 1^st and made the short 1 ½ hour drive to beautiful Niagara Falls.  After spending a couple of hours hiking around, checking out the Falls and feeling the cool spray on our faces, we decided it was time to get on the road.  We figured we would drive a few hours and then camp somewhere along the way in Canada.  We got to the checkpoint for crossing into Canada and there was a line of cars waiting to get through.  As we sat there waiting, I started taking mental inventory of the various drugs, alcohol and paraphernalia we had brought with us and accumulated along the way.  In addition to the cooler with a few beers floating around in it, there was what was left of a chunk of black hash that had survived the trip, a couple of hits of chocolate mescaline, a metal pipe that somebody had traded me for a tee-shirt, and a small block of what looked like violin bow rosin that someone had given me.  There had been a serious weed drought that summer so people were looking for any and all alternatives, and this ‘resin’ stuff they were calling it had been floating around the parking lot at Alpine Valley.  I think it was supposed to be some sort of opium, but I do not remember it working and I have a feeling it was just that – bow rosin for a violin or cello.

I had crossed previously into Canada one other time in my life, breezing through the checkpoint in a matter of seconds with just a couple of short answers to some questions.  So I naively figured it was always that easy, that the checkpoint was just a formality and that Canada would usher me back in with open arms.  But as I sat there waiting my turn to get to the booth, I thought for the hell of it I better make a small effort to hide the drugs that were now sitting in the glove compartment…just in case.  But where?  Time was running out as there was only a couple of cars now between me and the checkpoint guards.  Suddenly I remembered the 10-12” diameter hole in the roof right above my head. 

As blistering hot as that summer had been, the previous winter had been brutally cold, with one murderous stretch of subzero temps where it did not get above zero degrees Fahrenheit for like a week straight.  One day that past winter I had reached over from the front seat and grabbed an ice scraper from the backseat but accidentally scraped the ceiling of my car with it, ripping a tear in the brittle frozen fabric that was hanging down about 3 or 4 inches.  Over the months that tear had evolved into a round circle slightly larger than the size of a human head, right above where your head would be in the driver’s seat.  It was kind of an obvious hiding spot if noticed, but it had to be better than the glove compartment.

So I reached over Lona who was sleeping soundly in the front passenger seat and grabbed the handful of drugs and the pipe out of the glove compartment.  Trying not to attract attention I casually reached up without looking and slipped the handful of stuff into the hole above me.  I pushed it a couple of inches back behind my head so it was not right on the edge of the hole, but not so far that it would slip out of reach into the back of the car ceiling.  A couple of minutes later we got to the booth and just then Lona woke up.  “Where are we?” she said sleepily.  “Crossing into Canada.” I said.  “Relax.”  Then I rolled down the window to talk to the lady.

Like I said I figured we would sail through like last time with no problem.  But last time my hair was not half-way down my back, I was not driving a rusty old 1977 Toyota Celica covered with Grateful Dead/hippie stickers, and it was not the day after a huge Grateful Dead concert that was performed a mere 85 miles away.  How stupid could I be?  Well…after answering many more questions than I remember getting the last time, the lady smiled and asked me to pull up to the guard house on the left and wait for someone to be with me shortly.  What?!!  Why??  They weren’t just going to wave me through?!  Oh my god!  My heart started racing and I thought I was going to pass out from nervousness. 

We pulled up to the stall and Lona looked over at me with panic in her eyes and I told her to be cool.  But she couldn’t be cool.  She was freaking out.  She was sleeping when I hid the drugs so she thought they were still in the glove compartment.  The guard was at my window now instructing us to get out and wait next to the car so I did not have a chance to let Lona know the drugs had been put elsewhere.  Of course the guard started his search by sitting in Lona’s seat and opening the glove compartment.  At this point she panicked and stammered that she had to go to the bathroom.  She thought we were done for and she could not bear to watch.  She had to get away from the awfulness of the scene that she was sure was about to happen, so after she croaked out the words “Need…bathroom” the man pointed to the door of the building and told her she could use the one in there.  She practically ran in.

The guard was making a clockwise sweep, so after going through the glove compartment, front right seat, and back right seat he asked me to pop the hatchback.  He opened the cooler, frowned and told us he was going to have to confiscate our beers.  Fine, I could a flying f*ck about the stupid beers…I was too busy wondering what Canadian jail was going to be like.  Would they be really polite?  I figured it had to be way better than Mexico, but still not very fun.  Were they going to confiscate my car?  What were my parents going to say?  I was 22 now, so how old would I be when I got out?  Would I be able to finish college?  Would Lona and I be in separate jails?  Would she even have to go if I said the drugs were all mine?  A million thoughts were rushing through my head.  After grabbing our beers he then looks through the back left seat.  Now there was one last place to look.  The driver’s seat.  This was it.  The moment of truth.

After looking all around under the seat, the dash, and the console in the middle I thought he was done.  I was about to breathe a huge sigh of relief when for some reason he looked up.  There was the head-sized hole in the ceiling.  What’s this?  From his sitting position in my seat he lifted himself up and stuck his head in the hole, eyes forward.  I almost threw up as I watched him turn 90 degrees to the left, back to the middle, 90 degrees to the right, then back to the middle.  He hovered for a few seconds, and then pulled his head out and said:  “Okay, you’re free to leave.”  What?!  Really??!  That was it?  We were done!  The drugs had been resting on the edge of the fabric, not more than a couple inches from the back of his head.  He had looked everywhere in the hole except directly behind his head because he had been facing forward. 

I could not believe our luck.  Lona was still hiding in the bathroom, waiting for the tap on the door from a guard to lead her to jail.  I knocked on the door and trying to contain my happiness I casually said:  “Hey, we can go…you done in there?”  She came out with eyes like saucers, not understanding why I was not in handcuffs.  I made the “Be cool!” eyes and told her to get in the car.  The guard was waiting outside and he stood in front of our car waving goodbye as I started it and prepared to back up out of the stall.  The car was a stick shift, and as I nervously put it into gear to back up I did not clutch/brake very well and the car suddenly jolted back about 1 foot and died.  The violent jolt jerked the entire pile of drugs and pipe out of the hole, right into my lap.  Are you f*cking kidding me?  I looked up and the guy was still standing there waving, but now laughing at my inability to work a clutch.  Somehow he had not seen the pile of stuff drop down into my lap! 

I quickly re-started the car and peeled out of there as fast as I could go without raising attention.  We made it!!  I explained to Lona how I had moved the stuff out of the glove compartment while she was sleeping.  Our relief at not being in jail was immeasurable, but we were still in a foreign country with a bunch of illegal drugs and moments removed from almost being caught, so we stopped at the first gas station we came to and did what I should have done an hour ago…I took every single illegal thing out of the car and threw it in a trash can.  We were now so sufficiently freaked out that we decided we did not like Canada and did not want to camp there.  We made the 4 ½ hour drive to Detroit, nervously went through that border with no problem, and camped that night in Michigan.  I have only been to Canada two times since then, and NEVER with anything illegal in my car.  After escaping that episode safely I never wanted to tempt fate again and I did not cross another foreign border with anything illegal.  Well…until we went to Greece in 1990, but that’s another story.

Dreaming

In my 3/29/12 blog entry I mentioned that one night my 2 year old daughter Autumn had cried out for the first time in many months, right at the exact moment that I was thinking about it.  So a couple of nights ago between 3am and 4am I had an extremely vivid and realistic dream that I heard crying.  I assumed it was my 8-month old son Jack as he is still not sleeping through the night.  Then it got louder and I realized in my dream that it’s not Jack crying, it’s Autumn and she was yelling out “Dada!”.   So I jumped out of bed and my wife Nadia was already at the door urging me to get in there while she took care of Jack.  Still in the dream, I comforted Autumn and told her she could sleep in my bed for the rest of the night.  That was all a dream.

Suddenly, a few minutes later at 4am in real life and while still sleeping I hear crying…through the fog of me now starting to wake up I am positive that it’s Jack and that Nadia will take care of it as I think I have Autumn with me in bed.  But the crying keeps going on and then I wake up fully and realize Autumn is not with me…that was just a dream?!  Yep.  And it’s not Jack crying, it’s Autumn yelling out “Dada!”.  So I jump out of bed and Nadia was already at the door urging me to get in there while she took care of Jack.  So now in real life I comfort Autumn and rock her for a bit and put her back to sleep.  Complete déjà-vu as it felt like I had just gone through the whole thing twice.  For some reason I seem to be super-connected to Autumn and her rare waking up occurrences…a few weeks ago through the baby monitor when I thought about it and it suddenly happened, and then a couple of nights ago when it happened exactly the way I dreamt it happening minutes beforehand.

In that 3/29/12 blog we talked about coincidence vs. psychic experience vs. quantum mechanics and parallel universes…but what about dreams?  Are they an unconscious gateway to another universe, or can our dreams give us clues about stuff that is happening in our lives, or can they predict the future, or are they just a fun way to pass the time while sleeping?  Nadia occasionally has dreams where she is talking with her father (who died 11 years ago).  He comes to her and they talk and he tells her that he is doing well, and she catches him up on stuff.  She says it is very comforting to know that he is still with her.  About a month ago she had a dream that he came to her and they talked about his grandson Jack.  He said he has been watching him grow up and he loves him very much.  Nadia told him that Jack had been extremely fussy lately overnight and her dad told her that it was because he had a sore throat.  A trip to the doctor the next day confirmed that diagnosis, and as it turns out we were all on the verge of a viral cold.  Kind of cool…thanks for the heads-up Grandpa.

I am actually a pretty good dreamer as well.  Extremely vivid, colorful, and realistic dreams to the point that sometimes later in the day when I remember something I have to pause and think about whether that memory was real or a just a dream.  Back in my younger days when I was married to Lona I have even had sex dreams that were so realistic they would sometimes turn into real sex in that we would wake up and we would be having sex in real life.  We called it sleep-f*cking.  That was cool I suppose, except to this day I still worry about when I have to sleep in the same bed with a dude…like in a hotel when we are travelling or something.  Over the last 25 years I have had to sleep with various guy friends for various space reasons in hotels or camping or whatever, including Mitch Manson, Ted Booker, Tommy The Freak, Mike Murphy, Brad Pronger, B-Dog, Dirty Dan, etc.  I was always worried that something goofy would happen and, well… 

Back in the mid-90’s me and 3 buddies decided to meet up in Stevens Point, WI for the huge annual rugby tournament/party that they have there every year.  I was living in Madison, WI and drove up with a friend of mine Derrick Goetz who was a rugby player in the tournament.  Two of my friends Gary Paulson and Jerry Meyers from Minneapolis drove over and met us there.  We got a hotel room with two double beds, so me and Derrick got one bed and my Minneapolis friends got the other.  We partied hard that night with all the crazy rugby players and got back to the room and passed out on our beds.  I was deep asleep and dreaming when suddenly I hear:  “Quit it.  Hey…quit it!” and I woke up to discover that I was spooning Derrick and stroking his shoulder-length hair!  Oh my god.  In my dream I had met this hot blonde chick, took her back to the room and I was stroking her hair.  Damn it!  So when I woke up and realized it was Derrick I was spooning and not a hot chick I quickly scooted over as far as I possibly could on the bed and tried to go back to sleep.  We all had a good laugh about it the next day…and more laughs when we got back to work the next week because he of course told EVERYone.

Anyways, I attribute my awesome dreaming to 2 things:  First of all, it has been many years since, but we partied in a variety of fun and creative ways back in the old days while in college and touring with the Grateful Dead.  I am guessing that maybe some of those incredibly vivid and extremely fun hallucinations that my brain conjured up transferred over to my dreams.  The second thing is that off and on in my life I have written down my dreams…especially when I was a kid and on into my teenage years.  I sometimes keep a journal by my bed and I write the dreams down as soon as I wake up.  After awhile I got really good at remembering the dreams…like you get in the habit of it and so your brain programs itself to remember the dreams for you when you wake up.  It’s cool…and it’s really funny to read them days/weeks/years later.  I don’t know if dreams are gateways or clues or just our brain’s way of passing the time, but they sure are fun!