I've Been On Fire Three Times...

The first time I caught on fire was in December of 1985.  I was over at my new girlfriend Lona’s house for Christmas with her whole huge family (mother, dad, brother, sister, grandparents, and a bunch of aunts, uncles and cousins).  This was back during the beginning of my Grateful Dead/hippie days so I had long hair half-way down my back and I think the relatives were a tad suspicious of me.  I was pretty nervous but I successfully made it through the entire dinner without spilling my milk or saying anything too stupid.  But then it was time for the big family picture in the living room, and since I was not in the family I graciously offered to take the picture. 

So everybody gathers in the living room.  They are all sitting/standing/centered around the couch and I am looking through the view-finder trying to fit them all in.  I am trying to be cool…directing, telling them where to go, scrunch together, smile, etc.  All the while I am backing farther and farther up in order to try and fit them all in the picture…finally it’s all starting to come together.  Just as I get them all in the frame and I am about to snap the picture, suddenly two things happen simultaneously while I’m looking through the view-finder:

1)      They all start waving their arms and yelling and several of them rush me.

2)      I smell the nasty, acrid odor of burning hair.

In my effort to fit the whole family in the picture, I had backed up so far that I was up against the mantle above the fireplace where several small candles were burning and I had set my long hair ablaze.  Like I said several of them had rushed me and I put down the camera as they took turns beating me about the head to put out the flames.  So damn embarrassing, but they all had a good laugh once they got the flames out and for some reason I think that won them over as I eventually married into the family.

The next time I set myself on fire was on April 13^th, 1988 in the parking lot of the Rosemont Horizon in Chicago, IL.  I was there with friends for the first night of a 3-night run of Grateful Dead shows, closing out their 1988 spring tour.  It was a cold, gray, blustery day out in the lot and I was taking a break from selling tie-dyed tee-shirts to have a beer and hang with some friends.  I had long since quit smoking pot by then, but I had no trouble being in a circle while bowls were being passed.  I would just say no thanks, and pass it on.

So I was in the circle, wearing a big, warm, Guatemalan poncho with large, loose sleeves.  Someone on my left passed me a pipe and I took it and offered it to the guy on my right, but he declined and said just to hold it for a bit.  So I held on to the pipe and we all chatted for a couple of minutes till the guy on my right was ready and I handed it to him.  He tried to take a hit but there was nothing left in the bowl.  Just then he pointed to my right arm and said:  “Dude, you’re on fire.”

The burning ember from the pipe had blown out of the bowl into the bottom of my poncho sleeve.  The ember had smoldered for awhile and eventually caught the fabric on fire.  As I looked down I saw the thick white smoke billowing out of my right sleeve and felt the flames burning my arm hairs.  Then I saw that the flames had made their way through the sleeve and were licking up the outside of my poncho arm.  I had seen enough, so I whipped the poncho up over my head, threw it on the ground and stomped out the flames while patting out the last of the little fires on my arm hairs.  Again, slightly embarrassing but we all had a good laugh once I got the flames out.

Slightly interesting sidenote:  After being on fire that day, I thought it would be a cool coincidence if the Dead played ‘Fire On The Mountain’ in concert that night (in it’s usual place in the 2^nd set).  Well they did not play it that night, but on the final night there in Chicago on 4/15/88 they opened the 1^st set with the ‘Scarlet Begonias/Fire On The Mountain’ medley, which was extremely rare and cool for it to be in the 1^st set.  Another slightly interesting sidenote now that we’re on the subject of April 15th:  As it was the final day of the tour, I was done selling my tee-shirts and just wanted to relax and take in the parking lot scene full of traveling hippies selling their wares.  We found a dude selling $1 beers and settled in for a long afternoon of hanging out and having fun with my friends.  After a few hours I suddenly I remembered the tax forms that I had hurriedly shoved into the glove compartment before I left Minneapolis for the tour.  Dammit!  I stumbled over to my car, pulled out all the paperwork, squinted hard, and set about the task of doing my taxes while inebriated in the front seat of a car in a parking lot in Chicago on April 15^th.  I got ‘em done…but then had to find a place to mail them.  Nothing for miles around except warehouses, 10-lane freeways and O’Hare airport.  I couldn’t drive, so I set out walking and after about an hour of wandering around I found a dude at some building who said he would mail them for me.  I ended up getting a $43,000 refund that year so I must have done something right!  Just kidding.

Okay, I digress.  My third brush with flame was a couple of months later in the summer of 1988 on my front porch in Minneapolis.  Me and about 10 other people lived in the old Pillsbury mansion just off 4^th street a few blocks west of Dinkytown.  A cool friend of mine from California named Pete Rhoads was in town living in his VW bus and needed a place to park it for the summer, so I said he could park out in front of the mansion.  He could ‘live/sleep’ in the bus, but come inside when he wanted to eat, shower or hang out.  Pete happened to have access to large tanks of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) so for ‘rent’ he would make sure that there was always a tank set up for us on our front porch for the summer. 

So one afternoon we were sitting around the tank giggling like crazy when I came up with a brilliant idea.  People like marijuana smoke, and people like nitrous oxide gas…so why not combine the two?  Like I said I had quit smoking pot a few years earlier, but I decided for the sake of science it would be okay for me to go with it just this once to see if my ingenious idea would work.  So one of my friends got a metal pot pipe going, screwed a metal cap with a screened hole on it, and then I quickly attached the rubber hose from the nitrous tank to the cap of the bowl.  Do you see where I am going with this?  Then I put the mouthpiece of the bowl to my lips and instructed somebody to turn on the gas.  My theory was that the gas would push the pot smoke through the bowl, into my mouth, and I would get a nice combination of pot smoke and nitrous…two great tastes that taste great together!

Sadly, my 4 years in college had failed me miserably as I stupidly forgot how highly combustible gases are.  So when my friend released the friendly gas it hit the burning marijuana embers in the bowl, ignited, and instantly caused a not-so-friendly explosion in the pipe.  The exhaust from the blast had nowhere to go but up into my mouth, causing my cheeks to expand to Dizzy Gillespie-like proportions before rocking my head back.  I spent the next few anxious moments spitting out chunks of red-hot pot embers and a white-hot screen that were burning my tongue, throat and roof of my mouth.  Again, slightly embarrassing and quite shocking but we all had a good laugh once I got all the fire out of my mouth. 

Lessons learned?  None really on the first two incidents.  My hair grew back, both on my head and my arm.  With the third incident my cheeks hurt for a few days but shrunk back to normal size fairly quickly and I have never since tried to combine fire and gas except in the grill on my back porch.  So I guess, basically…I learned that when it comes to catching on fire, it’s better not to.  Oh yeah, and don’t put off doing your taxes till the last day.

Another Reason Why You Shouldn't Warm Up Your Car...

Well it is currently 6 degrees Fahrenheit here tonight in beautiful Minneapolis, MN.  I am looking at the 5-day forecast and I see that it is supposed to get down to -6 degrees tomorrow and then a high of 7 degrees on Thursday.  It sucks when Mother Nature is actually trying to kill you.  This reminds me of last winter when my friend Farah Manning and I were at work debating the merits of warming up your car in the winter.

I was adamant that you should do it for at least a few minutes before driving off because back in my high school days I had destroyed my dad’s 1973 Opel Kadett hatchback by not warming it up.  It was a sweet little lime-green German car that was destined to be mine someday until I ruined it.  It was 1982 and I was 16 years old working the closing shift at McDonald’s.  It was a brutally cold night in Waukesha, WI with the temperature way below zero degrees Fahrenheit.  My dad had always stressed the importance of warming up the car so I knew better, but when I got out to the car late that night after work and started her up I was freezing cold and just wanted to go home.  I only waited maybe 30 seconds and then took off.  The car was groaning and protesting and hitching and acting funny until maybe a mile down the road it had enough and died.  I'd killed the poor thing.  I had to find a phone, call my dad up and ask him crawl out of his nice warm bed into the mercilessly cold outdoors to come pick up me up.  The first thing he said was:  “Did you warm up the car first?!”  “Yes, of course I warmed it up!  I don’t know why it died!”  It was dumb and I’m pretty sure he knew I was lying, but he was fairly cool about it and I felt bad...sorry Dad.

(Hmm, since you’re probably reading this Dad and I am too old for you to ground me, I might as well come clean about another driving ‘incident’.  Remember that time that my friend Mark Smith and I were driving your 1982 blue Pontiac Bonneville station wagon and I t-boned that other car that had pulled out in front of me at an intersection and it was raining out and you asked me if I had pumped the brakes to try and stop the car because everybody knows that if you don’t have anti-lock brakes and you want to stop a high speed car it’s better to pump the brakes rather than just slamming on the brakes, and I said “Of course I pumped the brakes but there wasn’t enough to time to stop before hitting the other car.”?  Well…I don’t know if there was enough time to stop the car or not, but I definitely did not pump the brakes.  I was 17 years old, inexperienced, and when faced with that car suddenly in my path I just slammed on the brakes as hard as I could and slid in to the guy…pumping the brakes never even entered my mind.  Sorry Dad.)

So anyways, I relayed my Opel-ruining story to Farah, but she told me that she checked with her mechanic and was told that with these modern fuel-injected engines and better high viscosity engine oils and such that it really is not necessary to warm up your car more than 30 seconds or so.  I was dubious, but I checked online and by god she was right.  According to the experts, if it’s above zero degrees Fahrenheit then you should only let it run for 30 to 60 seconds to get all the fluids moving, and then drive off gently.  If it’s below zero, maybe 3 or 4 minutes.  Anything more than that and you're really just wasting gas and polluting the air.

But about a week after our talk it became really cold…like there were several days in a row when the high was maybe zero or 3 degrees or something miserable like that.  When it’s that cold I still like to warm the car up for at least a couple of minutes, if anything just for my own comfort when I get in and so I won’t fog up the windows.  So about 5 minutes before it was time to leave work I went out and started my car and came back in.  I was parked facing the building, about 5 or 6 cars down to the right of the door.  When I went back out a couple minutes later to leave, I opened the building door and looked to my right and all I could see was nothing but empty space between the two cars where I used be parked.  Huh?  Suddenly I see the back of my car slowly emerging out between the two cars!  What the hell??  Somebody is f*cking stealing my car?!  I simply could not fathom that this was actually happening.  Why anybody would want to steal a rusty old 1997 Honda Accord with billions of miles on it was beyond me, but all I knew was that I had left it running and now some b*stard was stealing it!  So I broke into a run down the sidewalk and got to the space where my car was all ready to rip this guy out of the driver seat and…yep…there was nobody driving.

When I had started my stick-shift car I had neglected to put the emergency brake on.  Our parking lot is on a very slight gradual slope that you can barely even notice.  So…although it took 5 minutes, it had eventually started rolling by itself and was now impatiently leaving work without me.  It was picking up speed but I ran to the driver door, jumped in and slammed (not pumped) on the brakes just before it was about to hit one of the cars parked 15 feet behind it in the next row.  Luckily I had come out just in time before the damn thing hit anybody else in an embarrassing low-speed collision.  Lesson learned?  Fathers (and Farah’s mechanic) know best:  If your car is from the 70’s, warm it up for a good long while…if not, don’t.

Getting Crunched

Well the abbreviated 2011/12 NBA basketball season recently got underway over the Christmas weekend.  After being a season ticket holder for 12 years I did not renew my season tickets this year for my local team the Minnesota Timberwolves, however I am finally a bit excited about our team and have some hope of success for them.  We have acquired some new young players with huge potential, a new coach with a plan, and have a renewed sense that we could be good again.  While watching the game on TV a few nights ago it got me thinking about the last time I was actually at a Timberwolves game two full years ago.

As usual I had season tickets last year, but with a 1-year old daughter at home and a son due last August I ended up selling every single one of my tickets.  So I have not been to see a game in person for two years, with the last one being a game against the Boston Celtics.  The Timberwolves have been a horrible team for the last 6 years or so, especially after they traded away Kevin Garnett to the Celtics in the summer of 2007.  Their hopelessness as a team however is actually both bad and good for people going to see the games in person.  On the one hand it is sad to have to pay to see a team suck so bad, but on the other hand they suck so bad that hardly anyone ever goes to the games so you can sit wherever you want to in the arena.  It's fun!  My motto the last few years has been:  "If a team sucks but nobody is there to see them, do they really suck?"

Okay I hope my Timberwolves rep is not reading this but my season tickets have always been the cheap $5 nosebleed upper deck seats...and since nobody ever attends the games I would usually just waltz right down to the lower deck and sit in the $100 seats, and occasionally when it’s really empty sit near the court in the $200 seats.  In fact at one game my friend Mike Spicoli and I were 1st row off the court, dead center behind the scoreboard table.  I knew the game was televised so I called my wife Nadia and told her to tune in so that I could wave to her on TV.  Unfortunately though she tuned in to the game just in time to see us being kicked out of our seats as the real owners of the seats decided to show up a half hour into the game.

So anyways, the Wolves were so bad two years ago that even with Garnett and the Celtics in town I still found a great aisle seat in the lower deck about 15 rows up from the court.  I could not find anybody who wanted to go to the game with me however, so I gave my extra ticket to a bum and settled in to my great seat by myself to watch what I though would be the Celtics beating up the Timberwolves.  It actually turned out to be a great game though and surprisingly close.  The Timberwolves lost of course but they fought the Celtics right down to the end and made it interesting.  The only problem that night really was the douchebag Celtic fan sitting in the seat directly behind me.

He was your typical visiting-team fan doing his best to be a douchebag.  A loud obnoxious male in his 20’s, fully decked out in Celtics jersey, Celtics hat and drunk.  As I said I had an aisle seat and he had the aisle seat directly behind me.  Every time the Celtics would score he would stand up, yell, spill his beer, point to his jersey, and take his hat off and wave it around showing it to everyone around him.  I would have been embarrassed for him if I didn't loathe him so much.  I am a peaceful guy, but he was so damn annoying that I just wanted to turn around and donkey-punch him right in the throat.  His friend sitting next to him was relatively quiet and obviously embarrassed by his friend's antics, but he made no attempt to quiet him so I consider him a 'douchebag-by-acquaintance'.

So after putting up with this jerk for the entire the first half, we get into the 3^rd quarter and things get a little hairy.  If any of you have been to a Timberwolves game you know that their mascot is a guy in a big furry wolf outfit named ‘Crunch’.  He runs around entertaining the crowd and does all the typical mascot things like messing with the referees and goofing around with the kids and doing massive trampoline slam dunks at half-time.  One of the bits that he does once a game during a time out is they roll out a long carpet in an aisle on the lower level from the top of the stairs all the way down to the court below.  Then Crunch gets on a plastic slide at the top and slides all the way down to the arena floor.  It’s fun and a big crowd-pleaser. 

I have seen it many times but never in my aisle, and sure enough midway through the 3^rd quarter the security guys roll the long black carpet down the stairs past me to the floor below.  I look back and Crunch is behind me at the top of the stairs holding on to his sled and urging the crowd to cheer him on.  Everyone in the arena is looking at him and clapping and cheering and he’s about to jump on the sled and slide down the stairs when suddenly the jerk behind me jumps into the middle of the aisle and blocks Crunch from going down while waving his stupid hat around and yelling and pointing to his Celtics jersey!

Well one of the angry security guys with his walkie-talkie (they're always angry about something, I think they were born that way) comes running up the stairs and forces the guy back in his seat.  So then Crunch gets the crowd going again and is just about to slide down when the jerk jumps back up into the aisle and blocks his way again!  The security guy comes flying back up the aisle, screaming into his walkie-talkie and freaking out now he’s so pissed off and he forces the guy back into his seat.  You can tell Crunch is getting pissed now too, but he waits patiently while they sit the jerk back down.  He’s finally about to slide down and...yep...the guy jumps back into the aisle and blocks his way for the third time.

By now I’d had enough so I jump out of my seat into the aisle and grab the guy around the waist and start wrestling with him.  He had been jumping up and down waving his hat around, but now he’s got me wrapped around his waist and I’m trying to haul him back into his seat.  While wrestling with him I happened to look up and realize that we are on the arena's big jumbo-tron screen, which is weird because it's one thing to wrestle with a dude but it's another thing entirely to see yourself wrestling with a dude on the jumbo-tron.  In addition, the entire arena crowd is watching and they are all clapping and cheering me on.  The guy was young, big and strong though and I was struggling mightily with him when the insanely pissed of security guard comes running up the stairs for the 3rd time and helps me put this f*cker back in his seat.

A time-out is only a minute or two at most, so now this guy had taken up so much time blocking the stairway that the time-out was over.  They were about to re-start the game so they had to roll up the carpet and Crunch never got to slide down the stairs.  The bit was ruined.  The entire arena booed and booed while this guy just sat in his chair laughing and nodding his head like he was the sh*t.  I looked up and we were still on the big screen and he was just eating it up, laughing and gloating for the cameras that were trained on him.  It was so annoying and I kept wishing they had just kicked this guy out.  About 15 minutes later though I happened to look back and there was Crunch coming down the stairs towards us holding a huge bunch of helium balloons tied to a string with a black clip on the end.  He had his finger to his lips up shushing me and the crowd so as not to give him way, and he sneaks up, grabs the jerk's precious hat, clips it to the balloons and throws it up into the sky. 

The stunned guy jumps out of his chair and while Crunch is waving bye-bye to the hat floating up towards the arena rafters, the guy runs up the stairs after it frantically jumping up and down trying to grab it.  But it is too late now as the hat is out of reach nearing the upper deck and gone for good.  He comes back to his seat behind me and plops down, swearing under his breath.  He just sat there pouting for the rest of the game.  We are on the big screen again and the entire crowd is now clapping and jeering.  The cameras go back to him several times during the game when the Wolves would score and he just sat there stewing in his seat.  It was perfect...almost too perfect.  Sometimes I wonder if the entire thing was staged but I don't think so...at least I hope it wasn't because it was awesome.  The only way the night could have been better would be if the Wolves had won.  Ah well, it was a fun night anyways.