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! 

Barf

Earlier today I was taking a full frontal shot of puke from my 7 month old son Jack.  This has been a common scene in my house the last couple of years first with my 2 year old daughter Autumn and now Jack, but it got me thinking.  As the ample supply of thick, warm, pungent, mucousy liquid was running down my neck into my shirt I thought about the long, gross journey of this particular pile of barf.  This was human milk that was originally manufactured inside of my wife Nadia, then sucked out of her breasts by my son Jack and down into his little stomach, where it fermented and curdled at a steady 98.6 degrees for about 20 minutes until it was then ready to be expelled back up on to his father.  Mother Nature works in mysterious ways.

For some reason this got me thinking further about vomit and it brought back so many memories from the past…especially memories of the large metal mixing bowl with the little round metal clasp on one side that our mom had me, Jan, Cindy and Nate use when we were sick as kids.  I hate puking.  I can still smell the metal bowl as I layed on the couch all those times retching into it while my my mom held my head and hair.  My earliest puke memory was from when I was about 3 years old.  We had just moved from Minneapolis, MN to Schenectady, NY in 1969 and me, my newborn sister Jan and my parents were living in an apartment until we could find a house to live in.  Normally my mom was always in charge of taking care of us when we were sick but this particular night she was out.  I remember telling my dad that I didn't feel well, and as he picked me up with my head buried in his neck I suddenly leaned forward and barfed all down the back of his brown shirt.

Another early puking story that still has lasting consequences was a few years later on Mothers Day when I was probably 8 or 9 years old.  We took Mom out to a nice restaurant and I ordered the all-you-can-eat BBQ ribs.  Well I ate all I could eat, and more.  I ate and I ate and I ate, priding myself on getting my parent's money's worth by ordering numerous rounds of ribs and stuffing myself to maximum capacity.  Well that night I happened to get the flu and I spent the next 24 hours puking all those ribs back up.  I puked and I puked and it tasted exactly the same coming up as it had going down, but with the bile added for flavor.  That was almost 40 years ago and I still to this day do not eat BBQ flavored anything.  (I have the same problem with Jack Daniels, but that is a whole 'nother story that might get told at a later date.)

Several high school puking episodes immediately jump to mind…like the time I was at a large house keg party in high school and I took over the one available bathroom with a vomiting episode that just wouldn't quit.  I remember all of the extremely angry partiers banging on the door demanding to be let in, but I laid sprawled across the bathroom floor blocking the entrance and refused to let anybody come in.  Or the time I got introduced to the wonders of beer bongs at an outdoor house kegger, and then spent the rest of that July 4^th night laying behind the wood pile out back trying to recover while watching the fireworks from the nearby town park exploding overhead.  Or the time I was riding shotgun in my friend’s car going down the freeway and I knew it was coming up so I reached in the back for an old plastic shopping bag, but in the dark I could not find the opening in time so I just splashed onto the bag and it sprayed up and completely coated my friend, his windshield, all his cd’s…the entire inside of his car.

Those were all embarrassing rookie mistakes, but in my defense I was not much of a drinker in high school.  Another episode that comes to mind during my senior year of high school was the time I spent 2^nd hour with my friend Roman driving around in his car delivering newspapers on his paper route.  He had a 12 pack of Mickey’s Big Mouths malt liquor in the back seat.  In a valiant effort to further the notion that teenage boys have an infinite capacity for stupidity, I decided it would be a good idea to drink 7 of them that hour.  I felt absolutely fantastic the whole next 3^rd hour, but then not so great 4^th hour as I ran to the bathroom and then spent the rest of the school day laying on the floor in a stall puking.  Friends came in to check on me from time to time until finally it was time to get on the bus for home. 

That was a bad day, but not out of the ordinary for us high school kids bent on having fun at any cost.  One summer night this girl and I and another couple were skinny dipping in Fruits Pond near my high school in Waukesha, WI.  The girl I was with was a year or two younger than me and had been drinking way too much.  After swimming and making out in the warm, dark water we dried off and ended up in the front seat of my (parent's) car.  We had gotten somewhat dressed again and just as she leaned over to kiss me she started puking up into her mouth.  I could tell she was trying to play it cool, not ruin the mood and acting like nothing was wrong because she was puking into her mouth and then swallowing it again while still trying to kiss me.  Needless to say we were done making out and I quickly took her home.

That sucked, but it was nothing compared to the night of 3/17/84.  It was my senior year of high school and I had borrowed my parent's blue Pontiac Bonneville station wagon to pick up a bunch of friends to go to a St. Patrick’s Day party at some dude's house.  We got there and they were serving green beer.  I was the designated driver that night so I just had one beer to see what a green beer tasted like.  My friend Aaron Vermillion however was drinking the stuff up like it was the greatest thing since sliced bread and he was getting hammered.  After many hours we finally got everybody back into the car and I started the long process of taking them all back to their respective houses.  It was a cold, snowy night and as I was heading down a dark country road with 6 people crammed into the car I suddenly see the cherries go off behind me and I was being pulled over.

I do not remember what I was pulled over for, but the cop came to my window, smelled the one beer on my breathe, took me out of the car and threw me into the back of his car while he ran a check on my record and my car.  After what seemed like forever everything came up clean.  I explained to him that I was the designated driver who had only one beer and was driving all my drunk friends home, so he decided to let us go.  I got back in the car and slowly took off down the road, but with the cop following right behind me.  Just then Aaron started freaking out in the backseat directly behind me and demanded I pull over immediately because he had to hurl.  I told him there was a cop right behind me and I couldn't possibly pull over and to just hold it.  Suddenly I hear the unmistakable wretching sounds of Aaron trying to puke out of the 4 inch gap at the top of the window.  This particular car had 'child-safety' windows that only rolled down a few inches, so Aaron was trying to projectile the vomit out the small opening and was only half succeeding.  Large quantities of the green beer-puke was hitting the window and splashing back onto him, while an equally large quantity of the stuff was making it out the window-gap and spraying the side of my parent's Pontiac and instantly freezing onto it.

Aaron was the last stop and when I got the b*stard to his house he crawled out and said he was way too sick to deal with anything and he quickly went into the house leaving me alone to clean up.  This was a Saturday night.  Early the next morning my entire family would be piling into this rolling puke-palace to go to church.  F*ck.  I pulled into my driveway and tackled the outside first, using an ice-scraper to chip off the long frozen green streaks of puke running the length of the station wagon while soundly cursing my friend.  Then I pulled into the garage and tackled the insides with towels, soap and water.  I knew it wasn't going to go well in my parent’s cold dark garage with church looming a scant few hours away, but I did my best.  It wasn't even close.  The next morning we got into the car and my dad, mom and siblings all looked around in disgust while sniffing the aroma of Aaron's puke.  For the rest of the years that we owned the car, we never got rid of that smell.  It was always there faintly reminding us of that night, but it would get especially strong in the summertime when the sun would bake the car and the puke smell would rise up strong and proud and slap you in the face as soon as you opened the car door.

I suppose I could go on forever with all the high school and college puke stories but I will spare you.  I will close with my most recent puke episode that occured just last December.  Autumn and I simulataneously got struck by the flu one night, so I allowed her to sleep with me in my bed while my wife vacated the area to sleep in 4-month old Jack's room.  Poor Autumn and I spent the entire night taking turns puking.  She would wimper "Daddy" and then sit up and hurl all over me with the smell permeating everything, at which point I would then run into the bathroom and fill the toilet with my own puke.  Then I would come back to bed, clean us up, sleep for 20 minutes, and then we’d repeat the whole process well into the next morning.

Anyways, I absolutely hate puking and I always have, almost to the point of it being a phobia.  The barf-o-rama scene where everybody pukes on each other in the movie ‘Stand By Me’ always makes me cringe, and after reading the recent Rolling Stone article about Dartmouth College hazing I sure am glad I never went to that disgusting place.  I do not drink until I puke anymore, but I still fear the flu.  Maybe me puking up this whole vomit-blog will be cathartic in some way.  I am extremely sorry for subjecting you poor unsuspecting readers to any of this, and if any of you are still reading I promise to try and come back next time with some interesting non-gross story that has nothing to do with bodily fluids.  Thank you, and good night.

Coincidence or Psychic or...?

A couple of nights ago I was sitting on the couch, eating my Orville Redenbacher lime popcorn and watching the TV show ‘Fringe’ recorded on DVR.  A commercial break came on and instead of fast forwarding right through it like usual, I looked over at my 2 year old daughter Autumn’s baby monitor and marveled at how she has slept through the night every single night since last July, never making a sound…and at EXACTLY that moment Autumn cried out and the monitor lights flashed red and I was like “Holy sh*t!”  Did that just happen or am I dreaming?!  Complete silence for a couple of seconds, but then in answer to my question she cried out again so I ran upstairs and picked her up and she immediately fell back asleep in my arms. 

Was that an extreme ‘coincidence’?  I suppose it is entirely possible for something to happen for the first time in 7 months at the exact moment that I was thinking about it.  We have all had that experience where you are at a baseball game or some place talking about an old friend and then suddenly you see them in the row in front of you.  Or was it some kind of ‘psychic’ thing?  I’m sure it happens to everyone now and again where you see or predict something happening and then it happens.  Like when you are rolling the dice for a board game and you suddenly see the number 7 in your head and then you roll a 7.  Or was it somehow ‘intuitive’?  Where you know something is going to happen before it happens due to some barely noticeable clues in your surroundings that you subconsciously pick up on.  Like maybe Autumn was abnormally fussy when going to bed that night and giving little clues that she was going to have a bad night. 

About 5 years ago me and my then-girlfriend/now-wife Nadia were at a Minnesota Timberwolves basketball game.  The game was kind of boring and we were only half watching it while talking about stuff.  For some reason we started talking about Saturday Night Live and the funny skits that we had seen on that show over the years.  One of us mentioned the classic skit with Patrick Swayze and Chris Farley where the two of them were auditioning for the last spot to be one of the Chippendale dancers.  As we were laughing about that one suddenly Nadia happens to look up at the huge 4-sided scoreboard hanging over the basketball court (the same scoreboard where I watched myself wrestling with the Celtics fan in my 1/9/12 blog).  Her eyes were huge as she jabs me in the arm while pointing up, and that same SNL Chippendale skit was just starting to play on the scoreboard!  We both stared and watched it with our mouths hanging open.  “No way that just happened.”  I said to Nadia.  There had been a time-out on the court and for some reason they were playing the Chippendale skit!  I had never seen them play that there before and had no clue it was going to be played, much less right at the exact moment that we were talking about it.  What a weird, random, incredible coincidence…or something.

Another time, exactly 5 years ago today on 3/29/07, I was on a flight to Las Vegas to meet up with a bunch of friends and see my favorite band ‘The Radiators’ who were playing 3 nights of shows there at a hotel called The Aruba.  As my plane landed and was taxiing up to the gate, I suddenly remembered that my oldest friend Cire Wonhsak’s birthday was the next day.  My birthday is 2 days after that so for as long I can remember we have a tradition where I call him on his birthday and we wish each other a happy birthday.  So I was making a mental note that no matter how hung over and spacey I was the next day after my first night in Vegas, that I needed to remember to call Cire.  Then for no reason at all the thought popped into my head of how cool it would be if Cire was here in Las Vegas.  Maybe celebrating his birthday or something?  I had not talked to him in a year and had no idea where he was or what he was doing, but for some reason the mental image of him being here in Vegas was strong in my head.  I of course dismissed the thought as I was getting off the plane and then headed through the terminal to meet up with another friend who was arriving at the same time at a different gate from a different city.

As I was walking through the crowds of people I suddenly hear my name and get a tap on the shoulder.  I turn around and it’s Cire’s wife Shauntee.  No…f*cking…way.  Seriously?  Shauntee and Cire’s mom Marshelle (who was like my 2^nd mom when I was growing up) are suddenly standing there in front of me.  I could not believe it.  I managed to sputter:  “Is Cire here too?”  Yep.  Turns out he was in Vegas celebrating his birthday along with his brother Jerry, Shauntee and Marshelle.  They had been there for a few days and were now at the airport heading back home to San Francisco.  Cire was back at the gate getting ready to board his plane and I did not have much time, so after finding my other friend I ran back to Cire’s gate hoping to say hi.  After getting word I was in the airport and despite the protests of the flight attendants, he de-boarded the plane to come out and say hi.  We chatted for a couple minutes until they dragged him back on the plane and then it was over.  Did that really happen?  Did I just happen to think about Cire being in Vegas and then moments later I run into him at the airport? 

Again, what a weird, random, incredible coincidence.  Or can it be explained by quantum mechanics?  Einstein did not approve or subscribe to quantum mechanics theory, but it appears to be the only way to explain some of the things that happen on a microscopic level.  If you really get into it quantum mechanics is weird, crazy stuff.  For example, based on the laws of quantum mechanics it is possible to walk through a wall.  You may have to try it several trillions of times, but there is a slight probability that it could happen if all your electron particles are primed for ‘tunneling’ and everything is lined up perfectly, then the object of your body could theoretically pass or jump through the object of another body like a wall.

I just watched a show on PBS’s ‘Nova’ about quantum mechanics, and the ‘Fringe’ TV show that I watch every week is about parallel universes which ties into quantum theory…the theory being that everything that happens is based on probability.  Like if you roll one dice, there are 6 possible outcomes…and when you do it, there are 6 parallel universes where each of the 6 possibilities happens.  I love my life and my universe, but I also love the idea that based on different probable outcomes there could be other universes with me in them living different lives.  Like maybe in one universe I am an airline pilot, and in another universe I am a wide-receiver for the Minnesota Vikings, or a movie star who occasionally gets invited to the Playboy mansion, or a guitar god, or the guy who invented the cure for pancreatic cancer.

So maybe when you think of something and then BAMM it suddenly happens, maybe you could think that thought a million times and only once will it then actually happen, but there is a slight probability that it could happen and when it does is when we happen to be in the right universe for it to happen.  So maybe I just happened to be in the universe where I thought about Autumn crying out for the first time in 7 months and then it happened at exactly that moment, but in all the other parallel universes that did not happen. 

Is it possible to skew the odds in your universe by your actions or even your thoughts?  Like positive thinking?  Or possibly the ‘Law of Attraction’…that is, what we think about we bring about?  Maybe we can make the universe work for us by thinking positively instead of negatively, and just let the good stuff happen.  Good things seems to happen more often than not when you visualize them happening and believe it is going to happen…like maybe if you believe it then the universe does too and then it happens.  And conversely bad stuff seems to happen if you are negative and expect it or visualize it.  I don’t know, okay, I’ll just close with the wise words of Bill and Ted:  “Be excellent to each other.”

Taking Myself Out Of The Game

As I mentioned in my 12/15/11 blog entry, I have been playing soccer since about the 3^rd grade, both outdoor and indoor.  I have been injured and had to leave the game many times with sprained ankles, a broken nose, tweaked knees, pulled hamstrings, etc, but only once have I had to pull myself out of a game for a non-injury related reason.  It was in the mid-1990’s while living in Madison, WI when I was on a cool indoor coed team called the Sharpshooters. 

We were all close friends who got along great both on and off the field, plus we were pretty good.  We were short on players one week though and needed a body so I invited my friend Mitch Manson (who had never played soccer in his entire life) to sit in and play with our team that night.  Since Mitch had no idea how to play the game we decided to make it doubly interesting by cooking up a strong batch of mushroom tea over at our friends Bonnie and Clyde’s apartment about an hour before game time.  Mitch and I, along with a few friends who wanted to come watch us play, slurped down the gloppy mess and then we headed over to the indoor soccer arena.

When we got there I gave Mitch a quick crash-course lesson on how to play soccer, but by game-time things were starting to get weird and the hallucinations were setting in.  Mitch and I out on the field (as well as our shrooming friends watching from the sidelines) were all giggling in anticipation to see how this was going to go down.  As a forward I was the guy whose job was to do a lot of the scoring, but before long reality had deteriorated to the point where the soccer ball had become a living, breathing mass of energy with a mind of its own.  It always seemed to be traveling at high speeds, just over the ground, and always out of my reach.  My confused teammates who were not aware of the ‘situation’ would pass it to me and as it would go whizzing by I could not seem to stop it…much less control it, dribble, pass it, or take a shot on goal.

I was just running around out there on this huge, beautiful sea of fake green grass laughing helplessly and watching everyone else running around kicking this living laser.  I would poke my leg out and take a stab at the ball as it would come careening towards me but I could never seem to make contact with the actual ball, just the visible trail of balls it left behind which was fun too.  The one time I did manage to get a foot on the ball, I kicked it so hard that it rocketed straight up into the ceiling and hit one of the huge sodium pressure light-bulbs 50 feet above us, causing it to explode in a loud shower of sparks.  “Did you SEE that?!” I yelled out to nobody in particular while I stood there and watched the electrical shower in awe.  I could tell my now extremely puzzled teammates were staring at me while I ran around melting with laughter, but it didn’t matter.  We were all close friends, we were winning, and I was having a blast.

The final straw though was towards the end of the game when we were awarded a penalty shot.  “Let Mitch take it!  Let Mitch take it!” I screamed.  Mitch smiled and nodded in agreement, not having the slightest idea of what a penalty shot was.  Through my tears of laughter, he listened intently as I explained to him that the ball is placed in front of the opposing goalie at the penalty shot mark, and then he gets to run up and try to kick it past the goalie into the net.  He thinks about it for a second, surveys the field, and then leans in close and whispers:  “Watch me juke him.”  Um, okay. 

So the referee places the ball on the penalty mark and Mitch walks up to it and stops.  He is concentrating intensely now as he eyes the ball…eyes the goalie…eyes the ball…and then he backs up 10 yards.  He pauses in thought for a second, and then backs up another 10 yards…pauses and backs up another 10 yards…then 10 more…then 10 more until after awhile he is all the way back on our end of the field by our mystified goalie.  Everybody in the building is watching now and thinking he has completely lost his mind.  Finally he stops his retreat, looks over at me, smiles, winks, and then starts a loooong slow weaving path back up the field towards the ball.  Left, right, left, right in a huge snaking S-curve while their goalie is just standing there with his hands on his hips in bewilderment.  Also, and this is important, Mitch’s body kind of resembles the Grinch…skinny arms and legs with a big round buddha-belly, and when he runs his arms and legs pump up and down but his head remains perfectly stationary with his eyes on the prize.  By now everybody is pointing and laughing and I’m crying and when Mitch finally reaches the ball he actually gets a really good smack on it, but alas it misses just wide left.

At this point I was done for the night.  I could deal with the fact that everything was melting around me, but my stomach and face hurt so bad from laughing that I could not have possibly attempted any more soccer and I took myself out of the game with an ‘ankle injury’.  I joined my friends on the sidelines and had a beer and enjoyed the rest of the game.  As per usual the team went out to the bar for post-game drinks where we came clean and revealed the reason for our condition.  Our coach wasn’t mad and actually just wanted to know if we had some more shrooms.  Lesson learned:  psychedelic drugs and competitive sports do not mix (if you want to actually be competitive).  Unless of course you are Doc Ellis, who pitched a no-hitter for the Pittsburgh Pirates on 6/12/70…while on LSD.

Another Confession

Okay I have another confession to make.  I actually wake up each and every morning ecstatic with anticipation of what the day will bring.  Before I get out of bed I think about all the cool things that happened the day before, and I think about all the cool things that might happen this coming day.  I imagine what new things I am going to learn, and what new things I will be able to teach.  My state of exhaustion is nothing compared with my state of excitement, and I would not change my life for anything in the world.  Contrary to what my last blog entry may have led you to believe, I do not have sleep apnea, I am not depressed, and I am not a drug addict.  Hi.  My name is Sneaky Sweets, and I have...a 6 month old son and a 2 year old daughter.

My buddy Mitch Manson inadvertently introduced me to the pure joy of parenthood long before I had a clue as to what it was about or was even close to understanding.  About 5 years ago we were standing in his kitchen talking about our local basketball team or something like that.  I was probably making some important point about how we needed to draft a power forward when I realized with some annoyance that Mitch was completely ignoring me.  He was looking down at his 2 year old daughter Savannah laying on the floor.  She was doing absolutely nothing as far as I could tell but laying there staring up at us.  Mitch said quietly to himself:  "Oh my God you are so cute."  I looked over at him and he had this look on his face that I had never seen from him before.  I did not understand it, but I filed it away in my memory banks as one of those 'moments' that you never forget. 

I am not going to gush on about how awesome my kids are, but I will give you one of my own examples of what a kid can do to you.  A couple of days ago my 2 year old daughter Autumn and I were driving to the store and listening to the Grateful Dead on Pandora radio.  The song ‘Crazy Fingers’ comes on and as per usual Autumn asks me who is singing this particular song.  (She does the same thing with the Beatles…not only does she make me explain to her what each song is about, but she also wants to know which Beatle is singing each song.  Ringo is her favorite Beatle, and the Beatles are her favorite band.  We have some goldfish named Paul, George and Ringo, and the porcelain turtle in the tank is named John.)  So anyways, I tell her that for this song it is Jerry Garcia singing.  The guy who’s picture we have hanging in our front hall.

“Is he a nice guy Dada?”

“Yes, very nice.”

She listens and thinks for awhile and then says:  “I really like this guy Dada.  I think that when we see him we should tell him that we love him.  That would make him feel so happy.”

Through my glistening eyes due to my mixture of extreme happiness and sadness, I tell her that that is exactly what we will do the next time we see Jerry, and that yes that will make him very happy.

Yes Mitch, I get it now.