Across the Great Divide

Midweek Diversions.

Two local events this week combine irreverent thought and maybe beer, or as Solutions Twin Cities says, "where happy hour meets show and tell."

Tonight, Wednesday the 24th, Solutions Twin Cities presents Give & Take, a new monthly event co-presented with Intermedia Arts. There's a 7:30 - 9pm program with a social hour to follow. They say:
the format is based on asking everybody in attendance, presenters and audience, two questions:

1) What do you know about?
2) What do you want to know about?

Some of the presenters:

Peter Rich knows about traveling the country as a costume character unbound by brand or affiliation.

Kristen Murray and Sarah Peters know how to build community around building boats by hand.

Bill Prouty knows about the monkey man of India, and how one might track him.

It's happening at:

Intermedia Arts
2822 Lyndale Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55408

*****
Drinking Liberally is at its usual 331 Club location. The guests of honor will be Ken Avidor and some of the other creators of "False Witness," the Michele Bachmann comic book previewed awhile back at City Pages.

Sipping Serendipity.

Riding to a late lunch meeting along the Midtown Greenway today, I ran through a group of kids passing out cups of water near the Kix soccer fields. There was a supervising adult and a big water jug, so it looked like an organized activity — but to what purpose?

Was it a city troop of Cub Scouts doing a good deed or young volunteers practicing how to dispense water on the fly for some upcoming event? To the kids' shouted delight, I snatched a cup as I spun by. Stopping to ask questions would've ruined the effect.

At the Birchwood Cafe, I tried to order a Diet Coke, forgetting they went natural in the soda department. The guy offered some froufy alternatives, but I confessed I was just trying not to order a Surly Furious for lunch.

I took the lack of Coke products as God's will directing me back toward my original path and the man behind the counter shouted amen.

And then it happened, the person I was meeting is a friend and neighbor of the guy who started Surly. There's good news. New tanks have arrived,  which will mean more good beer.

I wound home with the ingredients for laab gai* in my pocket and decided on a route that would take me past a Thai grocery. Working my way through the unfamiliar layout, I passed a cooler full of exotic canned beverages, including the intriguingly named Hello Boss iced coffee. Instead, I went for my first-ever coconut juice, manufactured by the equally inscrutable Thep Padung Porn Coconut Co.

Let's just say I won't be rushing out tonight to find my next can.

The detour to the grocery led me on a non-standard route across Minneapolis on 27th Street, up a closed-to-traffic Lake of the Isles Boulevard to the top of Lowry Hill, then down a smidgen to catch a sidewalk that runs along the 394 sound wall to Penn Avenue.

And there it was, except for a flattened plastic water bottle, the only piece of litter along the entire route  — a coconut juice can!

Another echo from the cosmos.

I can't imagine America's byways have always been sprinkled with coconut juice cans tossed from the cars of Asian gangsters and lying in wait for my altered consciousness to finally notice them. So I can only conclude that there is a God who is slowly letting me in on the joke.

How else to explain this SUV with its fishing boat pulling up to the entrance of a funeral home at Plymouth and Penn this afternoon?

Almost too much to drink in today. 

Almost.

* The laab was excellent, though I substituted pork and tinkered with all the proportions in the recipe.

Fair Weather Patriot.

Last December I wrote a nuanced piece about flying the flag, but the commenters had my true number.

So the essayist will only display the flag if the candidate he voted for won the election? Such fair weather patriotism, so hollow and vacuous. The canditate I voted for didn't win. But my respect for this nation and its priciples remain intact. So there!

...and...

Corporations are the difference between us and places like Somalia.

Which last I checked was severely lacking in the government department.

Today, the wind here was whipping the flag so hard it bent the metal mounting bracket straight down from the post where it was attached. Two-thirds of the pole slipped through the bracket and came apart. The flag itself was wrapped around the remaining section and tangled in the bracket.

Bombs bursting in air got nothing on the wind out here.

Leaving Traces.

And now for something fun.

Why This Just Might Take Awhile.

Three times, I've started novels, and twice before, they never got finished. These efforts have been sufficiently spaced in time that the writing was done using different technologies.

The first was composed using a typewriter and sheets of newsprint. That meant any page requiring significant revision had to be retyped from the start, which encouraged even more revision. This laborious process was not responsible for the novel's incompletion. I was freelancing and had a lot of spare time. It was a coming of age novel, and in the writing, I discovered I had not yet come of age.

Having learned my lesson, years later I started what I called my potboiler. It had no literary pretensions but it did have a pretty good premise and explored a world of intrigue that most writers never attempt because holding a corporate job long enough to learn the real twists and turns of business is harder than making up stuff about international spies or serial killers.

Anyway, this time, I came into work several hours early each morning and wrote on an early "office automation system" my company had developed. It had a word processing system that at the time was competing with the centralized typing pool. My files were stored on a central server somewhere, and I could print them out on a tractor-feed printer.

My son was born before I got even halfway, and that changed everything in my days. Eventually, the company discontinued the system, and an alert department secretary asked me if I wanted her to print out a copy before all the tapes were scrubbed.

For a long time, the draft sat in a box. I started it up again much later, but world events had moved on to make the central plot device much less original. So had technology. OCR scanning the old paper version into my computer proved to be more than I was ready to take on. And an even bigger problem was I was no longer the same writer.

Novel number three is now under way, and there are even more miraculous tools for turning words into books. Research is also considerably easier. But using an internet-connected computer also poses hazards.

For example, today I wondered if a character would refer to a Quaker Oats container as a "box." Instead of just calling it a box, since it is not a significant point, I decided to search for terms people might use and came across this video.

Then another, by the same creator.

Then, of course, I had to write about this. Meeting the video creator was a gift. I'm just not sure it was any help.

The Flight of the Unseen Twenties.

Dear Readers:

Many years ago, after shooting a few of god's creatures and deciding I liked it only slightly less than the creatures themselves, I resolved to find some new entertainments. One of the most enduring has been making up stories, or, as I like to call it, seeing the unseen.

Over the coming days, I will tell you a story that goes something like this...

Once upon a time, I arrived at the bank to discover that my intended deposit was $100 short. As best I could reconstruct, it happened because my renter pays me in cash. He is one of those first-decile poor people who can't be counted on to pay taxes, so as you can imagine, collecting rent is an adventure, too, and when I do, it arrives in small bills.

You may want to ask why a relatively prosperous individual such as myself is taking money from a poor working man, but that is not my story, and you can't stick me to it. I am actually a quite honorable and generous soul who is trying to recoup what he can of a sunken investment.

But anyway, I did not secure my jacket pocket and, as I cycled to the bank, five $20 bills apparently escaped along my route, leaving me $100 poorer than when I started. Naturally, the first thing I did upon discovering the shortage was to blame it on the bank clerk who counted my deposit. Once I confirmed the money was indeed missing, I whipped out my TI Business Analyst Calculator to determine the true extent of my loss.

Since I was planning to put the money in my retirement savings, I was able to calculate almost instantly that in 2027 when I go to buy a loaf of bread, I will have to pay for it with other funds. I was distressed by this news, of course, but somewhat mollified by the fact that I had stamped each of the bills with this message:

Reward: Please go to www.itsyourmoney.com
and report what you did with this money.

After all, I had become very concerned about my money falling into the wrong, unworthy hands and thereby causing economic decline and perhaps an irreversible calamity. I'm sure you will be enlightened by the reports I received.

Going Like Sixty.

When did my grandfather's hands attach to these wrists? And what mischief is still lurking? As the circle tightens, I cannot help but mark the speed, if not the distance, and the drain's circumference.

But the day I tumbled out was an exhortation: March forth! The first of many gifts.

Zen and the Art of Bicycle Maintenance.

There is that brief moment between the stupid thing and the consequences. Sometimes the gap is very, very long and sometimes it is short. Sometimes it is both.

My Colorado errand bike, a heavy Schwinn Imnotsurewhat, was acting strangely the other day when I hopped on for a short ride. It started dragging as I headed up the hill from my house, as if it were in too high a gear. Running it downhill, everything seemed fine, but the problem recurred when I turned back.

I had other bikes, so I parked it for the moment.

Today was clear, so I decided to check out the problem.

A digression is in order.

I find things on my rides. Some, like an elk head with the antlers chopped out, I leave behind. Other things, like the headless Barbie with body paint, I bring back.

I garland the baskets of my errand bikes with the cast-off dolls I find. This may seem eccentric, but it's actually quite practical. It's a pain to lock and unlock your bike during a grocery stop, so festooning it with stuffed animals and dismembered dolls tends to discourage the bike thieves who aren't deterred by the retro, slow-getaway nature of the bike itself.

One headless Barbie is a gift. A second is a sign from heaven. So I have a shiva Barbie bike.

Anyway, I must've been interrupted while replacing a rear tube on the bike on a previous trip, because the wheel had never been tightened down. (An odd-ball drum brake and old-style hub make rear tube fixes quite laborious.) The slowing I experienced was the drum brake cable tightening as the loose wheel was pushed further back in the dropouts as the bike went uphill.

As I righted the bike after securing the wheel, the heavy front fork swung around and my index finger was caught between the frame and the basket. The effect was that of tin snips taking a nip of knuckle skin.

So we are back to the moments. The long one, between the incomplete repair and its conclusion. The short one, between the swing and the nip.

Like when a toddler falls down and waits a moment before deciding to cry, my knuckle waited a moment to begin bleeding. Given the location and depth of the wound, I did a paperclip split and went on with life.

Things did not get better. A broken tooth, a decapitated elk and an invisible university extension office were just a few of the adventures involved, but I know how boring it can be to hear other people's weird dreams.

Even if they are real.

Don't Hit a Biker.

I was cleaning out a portion of the garage where I've collected stuff I haven't used, but it always seems too worthwhile to toss and too difficult to locate a potential user. Actually, that stuff does become worthwhile to toss about the time the stuff you really want to keep falls on the floor because the pile of semi-worthless stuff got too high.

It may be you never will use that stuff either, but it is newer and better reflects your current obsessions and opinions about what you plan to do with the rest of your life.

Anyway, I found this unopened package of door edge reflectors I must've purchased way back in the days I owned a van. For reasons I can't recall, they never got put on the vehicle.

When the package fell face down, I noticed for the first time that someone had annotated the instructions, underscoring that the strips not only protected door edges from parking lot dings, they warned approaching traffic of open doors. Below, it says: Don't hit a biker. Use the reflectors.

As far as I can tell, the note was added in the store, possibly by a cyclist conducting a personal safety campaign after being nailed by an open door. I don't recall seeing such guerrilla messages on packaging before, but it seems like a brilliant way to speak out about consumerism and stupid products, or simply pass on a political message to a semi-targeted stranger.

Am I missing out on some sort of Adbusters movement here?

P.S. If anyone wants a free teak salt shaker, or wiper blades for a 1990 Celica, let me know.

A Life.

I didn't know this woman, and now it's too late. Whoever wrote her funeral notice did a masterful job to make me feel the regret.

Danielson, Theodora M. (Teddy) Teddy passed away peacefully on Sunday the 28th of December, at her home as was her wish and plan. Sons Ethan and Damon were at her side and many of her friends and admirers had an opportunity to say their good-byes. She was pre-deceased by her parents, Johann Paul and Bertha Maria Skobel (Fisher), and son, Eckart Herter, as well as three husbands and numerous long-lived cats. She led a full life. As an awarded University of Minnesota bio-pharmacological scientist, her ground-breaking research into neuro-transmitters helped to create a new class of beta-blockers that improved the lives of millions.

She loved teaching her graduate and medical students and tormented them for over 25 years in the labs at Millard Hall. Mother was conceived in what is now Namibia, her family moved back to their native Germany prior to her birth. World War II ended mother's medical and musical studies.

She spent much of the war in bomb shelters and hiding in abandoned coal or salt mines, when she had resorted to stealing food off of Russian military trucks to feed her infant son Eckart and went thru a winter without shoes. Her family lost almost every material good they had during the war.

Theodora lost two husbands, both doctors, to the war and struggled raising her young son as a single woman in post-war east-Germany. In 1951, she escaped from East Germany by walking thru a mine field with young Eckart and was able to get a visa to come to the United States in 1953. With less than $100 in her pocket and no English language skills, she found a job as seamstress making underwear for Munsingwear and lived in a one-room apartment at a boarding house where she washed the guest's dishes to pay the rent. A friend soon introduced her to a lab technician job at the U of M. She started there by cleaning rat cages and feeding monkeys, and from there worked her way to her research position as a scientist.

In 1955, Theodora met our father Robert F. Danielson, and they soon had two sons, and while the marriage was short-lived, she was happy to be doing what she did best, which was to be a mother. She raised her three boys so that they understood how to raise their own families. She supported the family by working additional jobs thru most nights as a medical illustrator and graphic designer. She was able to purchase a beautiful home for her family and her summer gardens are a legend in the neighborhood to her last summer.

Theodora loved classical music, and trained seriously in her youth as a pianist. She was often invited to play for friends and at formal occasions. Every waking hour in her house found strains of Beethoven, Bach, and especially Chopin and Grieg issuing from her stereo. In her retirement, she became a passionate designer and creator of stained-glass, and she went on to teach many others the craft. Her windows and artifacts are found in numerous homes around the neighborhood and region.

Mom had an amazing life full of much joy, but incredible adversity. Through all of the troubled times our mother never once spoke of life as though she were a victim. Mom just prevailed and made the best of every situation she faced. This was the only way she knew how to approach life, and the way she believed in living.

Teddy is survived by sons, Ethan of Devon England and Damon of Pebble Beach, California; grandchildren, Kristina Herter of Phoenix, Erik Herter of New Hampshire, Jessic and Alice Danielson of Devon, England, Dylan and Teddy Danielson of Pebble Beach; and niece, Ika Skobel of Seeson, Germany. In lieu of flowers or donations, Mom would be pleased if you add to your savings account, or pay down any credit card debt you may be carrying. She was a German after all. She rests in peace.