"No more than remembered light..."

Mark Strand died today.

I would not even have known of his passing had a small item failed to catch my eye at the bottom of a compost pile of much more important news links...

Well, not really all that important. Not important at all, actually, not in the great cosmic all. Just a slag heap example of the world spinning on annoyingly - Black Friday brawlers, Bill Cosby, "Snooki's 'Gatsby Themed' wedding...

I can't claim to be especially familiar with Mark Strand and his work, with the exception of one poem, "The End", which I read when I was seventeen and was moved to long thoughts. I read it now, in these times when the world sometimes seems to spin more monstrously than annoyingly - Black Friday, Cosby and Snooki traded in for Ferguson, ISIS and Ebola - when death is less of an abstraction, and no longer the least bit intriguing, and I am moved to tears.

------------------

Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he's held by the sea's roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he'll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he'll discover instead,
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.

- Mark Strand

Accountability for player behavior needs to start long before they reach the NFL

The other night I was driving two hours and I stopped at a convenience store in a little community along the way, one of those wispy towns whose outer edges bleed indistinctly into the surrounding farmland, where silos lord over residential neighborhoods, and parking lots are shared by both school staffers and workers at the grain mill. As I was waiting in line, contemplating whether I should get a doughnut to go with my coffee, I overheard a conversation between the guy in front of me and two teenage boys working behind the counter.

The man was a typical area man, mid-40s, prominent mid-section, baseball cap yanked down over thinning hair, his personality suggesting he was used to - and comfortable - interacting with kids and may have held some kind of position around town, probably as a teacher. The kids behind the counter were typical local stock; their clean-cut handsomeness obscured by the pock-marked gangliness so unavoidable at their age.

They were discussing the local high school football team's performance the night before, a 'Monday morning analysis' (though it was Saturday night) of the team's strengths and weaknesses, what ways they needed to improve and how best to go about it before playing a conference powerhouse (and rival) from the next town over, next Friday night. The offense was strong, quick and unpredictable, it was agreed; defense needed the work.

It was an oddly reassuring tableau: nice normal guys in a nice, normal town, having a nice normal conversation about something that was important to them, something that reaffirmed their place in the world, rather than their location on the periphery of everything. This was their town, their team, in their world, and they were speaking - in that moment - the way pro teams are spoken of on SportsCenter - same enthusiastic attention given to hashing out the details. I like to think at that moment the same conversation was going on in convenience stores in little towns all across the country.

I'm a Pittsburgh Steelers fan and a Green Bay Packers fan, in that order. The Super Bowl a few years back really had me in a quandary. I grew up in Wisconsin, so could hardly have avoided an appreciation (at least) for the Green and Gold. But in the late 1970s, something about the Steel Curtain era must have caught my attention one Sunday afternoon, because ever since, my primary allegiance has been with the Steelers. Driving through that region, and I have a few times, is not only a drive through some of the most beautiful country in the country, but a dreamland for any member of Steelers Nation. In no other place that I've been to (even in Wisconsin, where the Packers enjoy a fan appreciation beyond legend), have I ever seen the local or regional team more visible. Put simply, you can't swing a dead cat, and a dead cat is not swung, in western Pennsylvania without some mention of the Steelers, and I love it. Kind of makes me wish I lived there. Too cold (I will eventually be heading south), but seeing a game at Heinz Field one day is definitely a bucket list item. I wouldn't mind seeing a game at Lambeau either, for that matter. But if I had to choose...

That being said, I never align myself with, or expect anything from, the players themselves. I appreciate the extent to which they each contribute to a winning (or losing) season, but make no mistake, it is a rare instance that any one player feels a particular devotion to any one team, or the city that team calls home, or the fans living there. Pardon my French, and sorry if this bursts someone's bubble, but for the most part players go - or would if they could (and often do, when free agency come into play) - where the money and the blow jobs are, plain and simple. That's the machine that the NFL has become, and anybody who holds onto the belief that there's much direct connection between the pros and what I witnessed the other night in the convenience store is naïve at best, delusional in the worst of scenarios.

I'm sure even in the old days it was about 'money and blow jobs'; that is, more about the payoff...'what's in it for me'...and less about the game. But it does seem like the attitudes (and subsequent behavior) of NFL players gets a little crappier with each new season, and more than a few notable players have in the last decade hand-delivered gift wrapped 'worst scenarios' right to the doorstep of fans: notably Michael Vick, Ben Roethlisberger, Richie Incognito, Greg Hardy, Aaron Hernandez, Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson...even Brett Favre reportedly got a little creepy a few years back.

Granted (and in fairness to Favre), some of these situations were worse than others, but they all revealed the same singular truth that until very recently, nobody who follows football seemed to want to acknowledge: that pro players are not always the high-stepping, take charge, rock solid role models we believe - or expect - them to be. And whenever a new indictment or new TMZ alert reminds us of this, the reaction is always the same: shock from the fans, as though how could any of this be true (and this often coupled with a disgusting, though thankfully microcosmic, show of support from certain fans, like those fucking idiotic women who showed up at the Pittsburgh/Baltimore game a few weeks back wearing Ray Rice jerseys), and an unnerving code of silence from the NFL, a kid glove policy which has been put on the hot seat - and rightfully so - in light of recent events.

The explanation should not be a mystery to anyone. First of all, there's no denying American football is a culture of male aggression and violence that can have long-term physical and psychological effects on its participants. We all like to see a good hit, we all expect these guys to torque up and play their hearts out, and it should come as no surprise that some players are going to have trouble shutting off that gridiron grit when the game is over. Some of that aggression is bound to leak onto the playing field of their personal lives. That aggression is, after all, at least in part, what makes them good players in the first place.

But I think the influx of incalculable levels of money and celebrity makes things much worse. The National Football League has become a multi-billion dollar industry, growing by leaps and bounds every season, with so much monopolized power and influence over its players, the media, and the times we live in (think: football, not baseball, is now our national pastime), it could easily be considered its own government. There truly is enough money at play on any given day to qualify as a gross national product, and scouting for new talent to keep the money moving and growing starts early, back to high school, to those little towns awash in their Friday night lights.

I'd venture that might be where behavioral problems witnessed later begin, back in those small towns, where nice clean cut kids (or sometimes perhaps not so clean cut) talk with their elders about how the team did that Friday. Football teams are revered, to say the least, and there is routinely a buzz created about exceptional players, even without the presence or possibility of scouts, even if only to fill a little space on the sports page of the local paper. An undeniable and potent star power is lent kids who have just learned how to drive a car, because football is a big fucking deal in towns that have little else to hang the end of their day on. The standouts become bona fide stars, and if they end up attracting the attention of scouts, that can lead to being given a free ride through institutions of higher learning they otherwise might never be allowed to attend, solely for their skills on the gridiron.

The NFL of course is always hungry for fresh meat - fresh meat equals dollar signs - and each high school and college would love to be the slaughter house from which the meat comes. That's the 'machine' in action, and to that end, I would be willing to bet, at least in some cases, great lengths are traveled to safeguard and fast track certain players' paths to the pros. Reputations are protected, records fudged, bad behavior glossed over or erased entirely, legal infractions that would get ordinary students in hot water 'handled'. Really, how could this not be the case? They may be great athletes, but they're still teenagers, and all teenagers make mistakes.

No teenager is 'clean cut' the way we believe - or expect - them to be.

This Petri dish of duplicity can foster a feeling of entitlement in the kids that obscures any appreciation for their good fortune (and talent), and obliterates (as in leaves not so much as a faint smudge) anything they felt in their first pee wee league game, where talk of the fundamentals, of teamwork, of sportsmanship, were probably still part of the narrative, and to which, more to the point, they were still listening.

In other words, by 20, 21, 22, when doors really start to open for the legitimately talented, these guys are already feeling entitled. And if they become standouts in the NFL, it's all over. That fortune and fame creates a sense of unbridled arrogance and invincibility that, when mixed with the aggression they make their living with, can - and often does, we have seen - create monsters.

The responsibility of the NFL shouldn't be merely to respond when a player does something horrible, it should also be to vet all potential players early on, enact a true zero tolerance policy that scrutinizes their behavior long before they sign that contract. At least back to their freshman year in college, and perhaps even further. If they do something wrong it should be over for them. No exceptions, no second chances whatsoever. A drunk driving arrest, a drug conviction, anything of a violent nature, even a barroom fight, it should be over. Over and done.

When I read that back aloud, I admit it seems harsh. But when you consider the money and fame that might be lavished on these individuals, the opportunity many of them will be given to become household names and perhaps national heroes, it's not really harsh at all, or too unreasonable an expectation. They should never stop considering it a privilege to play professional football - not a right, or a certainty, but a privilege. And they should walk the line. A very taut and thin line.

If they can't, or won't, they should be over and done. 

Interestingly enough, partial responsibility for the explosion of obscene amounts of money in pro sports lies within my own family. Bob Woolf, a pioneering sports lawyer active throughout the 1980s, was a cousin of my dad's. He was known as a consummate wheeler and dealer, and helped 'invent' the six-figure contract for such clients as Larry Byrd, Doug Flutie, Dr. J, Carl Yastrzemski, and even (sigh) the New Kids on the Block.

Please don't hold it against me; we're from the country mouse side of the family. ;-)

In any case, many more lawyers and agents followed Bob Woolf, took his 'friendly persuasion' tactic to a whole new level, creating an environment of eight and nine-figure contracts and celebrity endorsement deals that would make Jerry Maguire blush. I have never begrudged anyone the right to make as much money as possible, but I think if there were less money involved, less promise of fame, and a tighter leash placed on individuals who want to get there one day, indeed, if there were less need (or opportunity) for me to quip snidely about 'money and blow jobs' when speaking of the NFL, players might come up through the ranks with anticipation that is fueled by gratitude, rather than entitlement.

Robin Williams

1986. Robin Williams' A Night at the Met. My dad had taped it off HBO, and it did not take long for me to have every word committed to memory, every expression, every gesture and gesticulation down pat. A Night at the Met was iconic to my childhood. There was Eddie Murphy back then, too. You couldn't grow up in the 1980s and not know Delirious. But Eddie Murphy was an 'other', came across, to me at least, like an emissary from another world. Maybe because he was black, I don't know...maybe my enthusiasm was quelled by a buddy who quickly commandeered that album, got really good at throwing down impromptu performances of 'Ralph and Ed' or 'Elvis Lemonade' at the drop of a hat, making it his shtick and leaving me only the malnourished hope of impersonating the impersonator. The sloppy thirds of comedy. No thanks.

Or maybe it was the difference in the humor itself. Eddie Murphy was funny, but leaned in a different direction, toward the puerile. Robin Williams was smart, at times trenchant, and yet never at the expense of being funny. A Night at the Met was the first comedy routine I could wrap my head around, first one where I felt confident that I got all the jokes, knew what he was talking about, and more to the point, a little bit how he talked about it. I had a sense that Williams' worried about stuff and used humor to mask it, and I could relate to that. It was my passport to the much-talked about larger world most people first step into around the age of 13 or 14. There would be others in the comedy realm, each seemingly assigned to just the right time in my life to be appreciated fully - Sam Kinison, George Carlin, Chris Rock, more recently Louis CK, and over time Williams obviously revealed himself to be a performer of extraordinary range and talent, that is, much more than just a comedian - but for years after, I would quote the material from ...Met - my timing and delivery still (clumsily) honed from countless nights performing right alongside Robin in the living room while my parents were at work or out shopping - to garner favor with friends, to impress girls. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it backfired. One time when I was nineteen I thought I was killing it with a girl at a party until I made the mistake of doing an impression of Stallone doing Hamlet - 'To be, or what...?'

The smile actually drained from her face a little, as she muttered, 'Thank you, Robin...'

Embarrassing, but she was totally right. Thank you, Robin.  I am shocked, and also very heartbroken.

Ode to Casey Kasem...and radio's silver age...and Shaggy...

Casey Kasem passed away today, at the age of 82. 

It was neither a shock, nor a moment too soon, it would seem, for the gravely ill radio personality, but it was definitely the passing of an era. Like many Boomers and Gen X'ers, Kasem's was the voice most likely to be heard dropping tinnily out of my dual cassette, AM/FM boom box when I was a kid, counting down the 'biggest hits in the land' on American Top 40. His delivery was just a little smarmy, his vocal quality just this side of nasal, but he nevertheless, I thought, came across upbeat and sincere; he breathed life into pop music, made the countdown seem like an important thing with his earnestness and enthusiasm, made you want to wait until the end to see which song claimed the #1 slot, and led you to believe that it somehow mattered. Before I became aware of how lame it all was, before I was too jaded to give a shit, there was something invigorating about the Top 40 countdown. Something invigorating about the long distance dedications and his sage advice at sign-off: 'Keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars...'

I listened to Casey Kasem in the early 1980s, 1981 - 1984, from Donna Summer / Hall and Oates / 38 Special, to We Are the World / Prince / Cyndi Lauper. In those first few years of MTV, at the very first light of the digital age, Kasem might already have been considered among the last of the 'old school' radio jocks, having started out when radio deejays were still gods...when on Friday and Saturday (or any) nights, they delivered listeners from isolation by providing music they would otherwise not hear or know about. Oh, to have been on the air (anywhere, but especially in a major market), in the 60s and 70s, radio's silver age, after the advent of rock and roll, but before huge corporate conglomerates were allowed to buy up as many stations as they wanted and standardize them, the days before clever but entirely bloodless automation techniques reduced stations to veritable graveyards with a skeleton staff  comprised mostly of account execs. To be spitting copy and spinning stacks 'o wax in that time when radio deejays did nothing less than bridge the gap for many between here and 'there', when they were the Dick Clarks of their market....even (or especially) if it was a small market.

And all of the above addresses only the change in the radio industry; it does not speak to the rise of the digital age, and the changing music industry. These days, radio doesn't really mean much, would seem to be going the way of newspapers in some places, but  'countdown' shows on radio, as a way of hearing new songs and discovering new artists, mean even less. Every playlist on someone's iPod is a 'countdown', and nothing needs to be delivered anymore. A full body of music, spanning all eras and all genres all at once, is readily available on-line, legally or otherwise, and can be brought along anywhere - literally anywhere - one chooses to go. In short, we are all our own deejay, living our lives with the soundtrack of our lives playing in the background continuously. We choose what is '#1' at any given moment. We no longer need Casey Kasem to tell us. Ryan Seacrest does his best to carry the torch, and Kasem himself was doing his countdown thing right up until his retirement in 2009. But nah...I don't know of any kids among the Millennials who listen to American Top 40 (or 'AT40', as it's known today) the way we did twenty or thirty years ago, not with the same sense of anticipation and purpose.

And as for long distance dedications, they were nice back then, weren't they? I thought so, anyway. Finely misted droplets of romance Kasem sweetened with a lilt of his voice and a pregnant pause before announcing, so-and-so, in someplace or other, 'here's your long distance dedication...'  I tried this once when I was working in radio, did a 'dedication' on the air...mine was complete bullshit. I just made it up, and used Smoky Mountain Rain by Ronnie Milsap. I got chewed out by the GM for this; he might not have believed it was real, but he mostly complained that Smoky Mountain Rain was way too old for a 'hot country' station to be playing. I thought it was a good choice, and I still do. Somewhere I have tapes of some of the shows from my radio days. If I could find a tape of that (and I think it might actually exist...), I'd post it here, let readers decide how convincing I sound.

But in any case, there is no 'long distance' between us anymore, really, none that bears, or warrants, the pageantry of over-the-air dedications. Text, e-mail and Skype, Facebook, Reddit, Snapchat, Twitter and Tumblr, and so forth and so on, have bridged the gap of space and time. If anything, we're all up in each other's face now in a way we never were in the past. We are never given a chance to drift apart, start getting sentimental, to start longing. Too often, the past really does remain present.

Casey Kasem's perfect radio voice was also well suited for cartoon voice-overs. He provided the voice for Shaggy, from the Scooby Doo cartoons, and ironically enough, given the astonishing longevity of that cartoon's popularity with each new generation, it might be said that this will be his most lasting accomplishment, his legacy.

Honest thoughts on the passing of Ashland’s Soo Line Ore Dock...(and advice on what to do when shift happens...)

Danny’s facial features were clipped and pinched toward a point in the center, his thinly-traced countenance suggesting the Scandinavian heritage his last name confirmed. His beady eyes bore the same blankly menacing expression they had fifteen years earlier, on our very first day of kindergarten, when he told me he would beat me up if I tried to sit by him.

We were fishing off Ashland, Wisconsin’s Soo Line ore dock, hunting the monstrous northerns storied to lurk underneath the massive structure. We’d been there most of a Wednesday morning, hadn't caught anything, when Danny decided to start a fire between two huge concrete pillars by introducing a collection of twigs, branches and whatever detritus he could find to the lighter in his pocket. We were two-thirds out the total length, which placed us approximately 1,200 feet offshore, and I was painfully conscious of the thick smoke his weak, green fire was creating and the attention it might attract. But Danny hadn’t mellowed much since kindergarten; he was brutish, a young man not to be trifled with, and I was not all together comfortable telling him I thought the fire was a bad idea.

Besides, it was providing him his lunch. Impelled by the frustration of not catching anything as much by hunger, he had taken to cooking the fish we were supposed to be using for bait, and did not appear to think what he was doing was unusual, neither the fire, nor the half-thawed smelt he impatiently placed in his mouth after just a few turns over the flame on a makeshift stick skewer.

“You think you should keep the fire going?”

“Yah,” he shrugged, reaching into the Styrofoam bucket for two more fish. “You ain’t hungry?”

I threw a nervous gaze toward shore. “Naw, I’m good.”

It was a cool, gray day in June 1992. Across the canal into which 50,000-ton ore carriers once nestled on a daily basis, my hometown appeared as a dichotomy not likely to get captured in any local artist’s watercolor: a naturally beautiful stretch of Lake Superior thoughtlessly blighted by 'progress', both past and present: a public beach strewn with garbage, driftwood and taconite pellets. Just beyond, a tired mini-golf course on the verge of disappearing forever (having lasted barely two years...). Beside that, the city sewage plant, smelling exactly as you'd imagine one would. More than a mile down shore, past the splendorous hotel constructed within the last four years in the style of a splendorous hotel that had stood nearby 100 years before, the coal plant that provided electricity for a large portion of northern Wisconsin. There was no wind; the water was calm. The only movement, outside of Danny’s conspicuous billows of smoke, was the odd seagull gliding crossways through the gray, lighting on a wooden piling and huddling against the lake-effect chill with a surly flutter of plumage.

More than twenty years later, that ore dock has finally been demolished. A series of inspections in 2007 concluded the deteriorating superstructure (the portion rising some 80 feet above the base) was not only a safety hazard but too structurally unsound to try preserving, dashing the hopes of nearly everyone. The largest of its kind in the world, it was one of several similar structures lending pin stripes to Chequamegon Bay in the early part of the 20th century, over time had become a last-remaining totem to a proud history, and news that its demolition was imminent swung in with the force of a wrecking ball.

HISTORIC, OR JUST A RELIC? - Ashland, Wisconsin's 1800-foot long Soo Line ore dock, on Lake Superior's Chequamegon Bay, ceased operation in 1965, and stood until 2013.

My hometown has long reveled in the memory of its glory days shipping iron ore from Michigan’s Gogebic Range to the steel mills of the east, its role as a worthy cog in the mighty tradition of Great Lakes shipping. The end of each shipping season back in the day was heralded in the local paper with a final tally of total tonnage, which ballooned, and dramatically, in war years. The region’s contribution to both the good fight and the building of a nation in the first half of the 20th century became nothing less than its legacy, lauded in story and song.

But legacies can get interrupted, knocked off their feet, by shifting sands before reaching their destination, and that's what happened in Ashland. Like many communities that pin their very livelihood to an extraction industry, the good times didn’t last. Foreign ore and ever-changing mining techniques provided insurmountable competition, and once all the Gogebic mines were tapped, ‘industry’ simply snuck away, leaving its mess behind. The last shipment was loaded off that ore dock in 1965, just a few years before I was born into a post-mortem reality, where all that was left of the good times were the school teams called the Oredockers and the white elephant they were named for, jutting a third of a mile into the bay and already deep into Frost’s 'slow smokeless burn.'

Danny and I grew up together in this reality...or at least in the same town in the same era, not really together. He was a tough kid, and I avoided him when I could, always had to be on the lookout for him and his (bicycle) gang of 12-year-old giants. But we both carried out our youth amidst the skeletal remains of Ashland’s proud history: a bone yard of abandoned railroad tracks, trestles and cars, vacant buildings, lots and storefronts, concrete refuse lining the shoreline and wooden pilings jutting from the otherwise gorgeous waters of Lake Superior.

OMNIPRESENT - The ore dock was visible from just about any vantage point along Ashland, Wisconsin's beautiful but blighted shoreline.

Paramount among this post-industrial playground was the ore dock. It was left open to the public after ceasing operation (in a far less litigious world), and kids of our generation were given free rein to explore through every stage of our development. At ten, we raced our bikes along the length, fished the ‘diamonds’ (pools located in the interior) for perch; at fourteen we smoked purloined cigarettes and made our first contributions to the graffiti with purloined cans of Krylon; at seventeen and eighteen we crept there at night to drink and do other things grownups told us we weren’t supposed to be doing. There was never any hiding the fact that we’d been on the ore dock. The orange-colored dust left over from hundreds of millions of tons of ore shipped out over sixty years went home with us, caked into the treads of our shoes and bike tires.

But outside of the tell-tale trail we left swiveling up and down the driveway, or across the kitchen floor, adults never cared that we went there; they went there too. Everyone in town spent at least a little time on the ore dock, fishing or walking. As a young adult, I started doing a lot of both. With an interest in history and a new appreciation for what that dock represented, I would walk through the gargantuan center, stare up to the dizzying heights where seabirds nested, trembling a bit (seriously…) at the dock’s overwhelming physical presence, and listen to a narrative without words - a profound silence broken only by the hollow whisper of wind through those 80-foot pillars, as unnerving as it was intriguing.

And so on that gloomy day in June ‘92, it wasn’t being there fishing that was making me nervous. It was the fire.

“This sucks,” Danny muttered, lighting a cigarette and proceeding to collect more trees and twigs to feed the flames. He said it mostly to himself, and I wasn’t sure what he was referring to – the fishing, the fish, the company, or just the Wednesday - but the look in his eyes brought me back to our first day of kindergarten, the same childish hostility that got me uneasily picking a seat clear on the other side of the room. He was done eating, and I knew him well enough to know he was now keeping the fire going, adding to it, building it up, simply because he wasn’t supposed to.

He may or may not have realized it, but Danny likely would have been working on that dock in a different era, and been doing well for himself. Had he graduated from high school in 1941 or ’51, rather than ’91, he wouldn’t have worried much about his future; he would have concerned himself only with getting through high school…or not…and doing one of two things: joining what was at the time a far less discerning military, or simply going down to the waterfront and getting a job on the boats in an economy that required no specialization finessed by a world view, only physical ability fed by a work ethic.

For that reason it was Danny, more than me, who was screwed over when the dock closed, robbed of a promised (or assumed) livelihood, cheated out of a legacy. I was born and raised in Ashland, and it will always be ‘home’ in some measure, but all else being equal, Class of ’41, ’51 or ’61, I would never have been a candidate for life on the boats or docks. My parents were transplants from New Jersey, found their way to northern Wisconsin to open a bookstore. They helped start the local theater group, gravitated toward the college crowd, my dad thought Benny Hill was the funniest man ever to live (and was right, of course…). I could not have asked for better parents, but the sensibilities they handed down set my brother and me apart from other kids growing up. I was not shy and studious exactly, just culturally alienated. I didn’t know things that Danny knew. I had never hunted, never ridden a snowmobile or a mini-bike, was not nearly as hardscrabble, and at some point, I realized, as my brother had a few years before, that when I came of age, my future would play out somewhere else.

But again, legacies sometimes get interrupted. Sands shift. Shift happens. As it turned out I didn’t go anywhere after high school. I stuck around, took my turn standing in line, waiting - always waiting - and overnight the differences between Danny and me so divisive as boys hardly seemed to register as men. We’d grown up in the same post-industrial town, and in our post-high school lives were getting a taste of the struggle our parents knew: difficulty making a go of just about anything, bouncing between the few dead-end jobs that existed, living with a relative lack of amenities, in a scarred environment, and having plenty of time to fish off that ore dock on a weekday morning. The reasons were different, perhaps; I was there because I hadn’t lived up to my potential, Danny because industry hadn’t lived up to its promises, but we both knew the slow-roiling frustration of disenfranchisement, and to any outside observer, any traveler stopping in town just long enough to fill up on gas, the only thing distinguishing the two of us in June 1992 might have been the fish scales clinging to the tips of his saliva-stained fingers.

JULY 2004 - Nearly forty years after it last loaded a Great Lakes freighter with iron ore from the Gogebic Range of Michigan, Ashland's Soo Line ore dock was in a state of deterioration, and had become a totem not to a proud history, but something else. Note the fence put in place by the dock's owner, CN Railroad, to prevent trespassing. This happened in the early 2000s after it was clear the dock's 80 foot high superstructure had become a crumbling hazard.

Demolition of the Soo Line ore dock started in 2011, really got rolling in 2012, and finished up last summer, with the last of the dock’s superstructure being brought down. The end of an era has been bemoaned six ways from Sunday. As soon as news arrived that the dock's days were numbered, Facebook exploded with campaigns hoping to somehow save it. Those failed of course, and now, everywhere I look when I come to Ashland, the ore dock is being immortalized. Murals have been painted. Commemorative calendars printed. Photographs blown up and framed, hung in public places.

I understand people's love of it, and desire to commemorate it, but all in all, the loss of the Soo Line ore dock doesn't move me to sentimentality so much as relief. In the last ten years it had become a totem not of a ‘proud history’, which, let's be honest, ended when Lyndon Johnson was president, but the 45-year hangover that followed. It had come to represent the post-mortem reality I knew growing up in a town blighted by brownfield and economically hobbled by its dependency on an industry that pulled off a vanishing act worthy of David Copperfield once it got what it came for.

Happily, much of that brownfield has been removed from the landscape. The ore dock's demolition coincides with other great improvements to the look and feel of my hometown. Cleaner, prettier, more spacious, Ashland, Wisconsin has recently undergone a massive overhaul; it's definitely not the town I grew up in.

But once again, barely 20 miles to the south, winds of war have been blowing over a proposed open-pit mine in the Penokee Hills. Residents of the even smaller, more isolated (and thus more susceptible to the allure of any opportunity for prosperity, no matter how dubious) Mellen, Wisconsin potentially face the difficult task of trying to find an appropriate balance between that promise of jobs, of livelihood (which are very important, make no mistake...) and responsibility to the environment they and their children, and their children's children, will live in.

It would seem, for better or worse, the decision there might already have been made, but the story of Ashland's oredock, and that morning in June 1992 when Danny and I were fishing on it, should serve as a cautionary tale to Mellen and other communities and regions like it, to, at the very least, steadfastly observe a few basic tenets:

1) Be wary - always wary - when industry comes sniffing around looking to extract something from the ground; always be listening for the sound of shifting sands

2) Be able and willing to move on quickly when shift happens.

3) Before industry even gets a foot in the door, demand to see an exit strategy.

Wake Up Call

Death made direct contact with me for the first time ever last week.

Until I got the call, I'd been...not oblivious exactly, but insulated. My parents, still alive, were significantly older than normal when they had me, and while I was self-conscious of this growing up, aware of their mortality to a greater depth than, say, children whose parents were barely through their twenties, it also meant I never knew their parents, thus, had no grandpas and grandmas to have to say goodbye to. Three of them were gone before I was born; the last, my mom's mother, I have only sketchy memories of: an old lady, sitting in a chair like a portrait of an old lady hanging on the wall, watching and listening, but never (rarely) speaking.

Until recently, death kept its distance. It was no match for me or my family, and it knew it. My parents enjoyed good health, as did my brother and me...nothing chronic, nothing ongoing. No hospital visits or surgeries or medication regimens for any of us, no reason, much less inclination, to become one of those people who can tear down even the most auspicious gathering by talking endlessly about what ails them. But early last year, my dad, at the age of 80, suddenly found himself being rushed through winter snows to a hospital an hour away for a heart condition that came out of nowhere. Late last year, unexpectedly, his best friend lost a battle with cancer that he was hardly given a chance to try fighting. This hit my dad hard, particularly on the heels of his own 'cardiac event'. and to top it off, my parents have - in general - really started to look, and feel and act their age in a way they never used to. They were always just Mom and Dad...now it's clear in no uncertain terms that they've joined the ranks of the elderly.

They've lived a good long life, and no one - including them - is feeling robbed of anything, necessarily. It seems a certain resignation burgeons the longer the twilight lasts. But being resigned to death in old age doesn't make it any less unnerving or heart-breaking to deal with, this slow and steady - and now more apparent than ever - march into that good night. Lately, it seems, death is getting cocky, closing in, looking for a opportunity, smelling something on each of us that's whetting its appetite.

Nothing could have prepared me, however, for the news I received last week, that a friend I'd known for two decades had taken his life at the age of 37. In recent years, he and I had lost touch, but there was a time when we were close, when I shared a bond with him I've never shared with anyone else and probably will not again. I had just seen him a month before, for the first time in quite a while; he didn't seem well (that's not 20/20 hindsight talking...), and it was shortly afterward, but before his death, that I found out he was suffering from severe mental illness.

It's amazing how reliable the 5 stages of grief are. I was given the news while I was at work and got down to the business of 'denial' right away, keeping myself busy, avoiding what I had just been told as though believing if I ignored it, it would tire and go away. After that, I went through an 'anger' phase...anger at him for what he did, anger at myself for not being there, for letting us drift apart, for all the times I thought about giving him a call and didn't (though I know there would have been nothing I could have done to help him). And of course, there came short but powerful moments of 'depression' that took my breath away in an instant. The only stage I escaped was 'bargaining'...maybe because at the end he and I weren't as close as we'd once been, maybe because the last time I saw him I knew right away he was not the guy I'd once known, or maybe simply because I knew there was no point.

His funeral was only the second I'd ever been to, the first for someone I actually knew well. I delivered his eulogy, and this prompted other people to come up and say a few words, and there was definitely a consensus about this guy, a consistency to what people remembered of him. No doubt, he will be missed.

And now, all that's left is that hollow, orphaned feeling that comes in the aftermath, that settles in my gut like water flooding a basement. This, accompanied by thoughts of my own mortality, and an impulse to cling to those I've shared my life with more than ever. No question, depression is hanging on.

Here, as I wait for 'acceptance' to finally make an appearance, I present his eulogy, both as an ode to a friend, and a cautionary tale:

---------------

"I first met Adam 20 years ago, spring of 1994. I was the manager of a restaurant in town, and there were two things I noticed almost immediately about the guy who came in for food every single Friday night:

1) His metal-studded leather jacket and long pony-tailed hair; a look that - even before I knew him - didn't seem to match his glasses and quiet demeanor.

2) The fact that he always ordered the same thing, every time. His exact special order escapes me, but his methodical manner doesn't. Like clockwork, he would call it in ahead of time, and pick it up ten minutes later, like clock work.

Several Friday nights' worth of this came and went, until eventually I was nodding and smiling when he came in, and he back at me, knowing that I knew that he was 'that guy' with 'that order.'

Eventually, he turned in an application, and I hired him, and it did not take long for a close friendship to grow out of our working relationship. Adam and I just clicked, effortlessly; we shared the same way of thinking about things, had the same sense of humor, same way of expressing it. We were both creative people, and it was through this kindred spirit that we ended up creating a cartoon character of all things, called Pickle Boy. Pickle Boy was a 7-foot-tall dill pickle who just happened to be the real defender of the American way of life, and went out of his way to make sure everyone knew it.

Early in our friendship, we spent a lot of nights sitting at a local diner smoking cigarettes. Well, I smoked, and more or less blew it in his face, but he tolerated it, and together we sat late night after late night, penning those single panel cartoons. Sometimes he wrote up the idea and I would illustrate it; sometime I wrote up the idea and he would illustrate it. But we were so much alike, neither of us strayed from our original vision, and Pickle Boy became, like all great ideas in the minds of their creators, larger than life, an extension of ourselves, a third person in the act. The cartoons were dry, they were witty, they were at times a scathing review of the very American priorities and values Pickle Boy was sworn to defend. And they would only deepen the bond between Adam and me.

Over time, we drew up about a hundred of these cartoons, and in the earliest days of the Internet, like '97 or '98, he built an elaborate website from which to promote our cartoon and sell Pickle Boy tee shirts. Website building was a big deal then; there was no dragging and dropping with ease, like today. No Facebook, no MySpace...it was done pretty much by hand, one HTML brick at a time, but Adam taught himself how to do it, even created a bunch of animated GIFS of Pickle Boy in action, which blew my mind. He was like Bill Melendez to Charles Schultz back in the day - animating our cartoon character, yet managing to preserve the look and feel. It was amazing.

The website was as much a money-making scheme as a creative endeavor, I guess, but we didn't care. Pickle Boy was real in our minds, and we were confident he was going to be the next Dilbert, the next South Park, the next something...

We sold just one shirt - to a girl in Georgia - a few more if you count the friends we guilted into buying one...we got some fan mail here and there, from people who discovered the website. We even got some hate mail from somebody in Australia, who actually called us, 'talentless American wankers.' And we shared those moments - of excitement, triumph and embarrassment - in a way only creative collaborators can.

I miss those days with Adam. Moreover, I miss the days when my dreams were driven largely by an energy fueled by fearlessness fueled by a certain naiveté that's found only in youth. I could collaborate with someone right now and go on to fame and fortune, and it would never feel like it did at age 24, at the very moment the Pickle Boy website went live, or when we received our first order on-line, or when we proudly posted our hate letter on the website, folding it into the Pickle Boy narrative, as though the character had received it.

Adam was quiet; he tended to lurk on the periphery of any social situation, watching and listening. This was too bad, I think, because it prevented people from knowing not only that he was uproariously funny, but a hell of an improviser, and not afraid to play the spazz. We drove to New York City once, to visit my brother, 1500 miles there and 1500 miles back, and on the way out we road dogged it, went 17 hours before stopping. By the 14th hour, somewhere in Ohio, we were spent physically and psychologically. I was at the wheel, slapping myself to stay awake, or maybe just for something to do, Adam was slouched down in shotgun staring out at the road as it whizzed by, and I don't know if it was exhaustion making him loopy or what, but out of nowhere he started doing a voice, a woman's voice, a woman with a severe speech impediment; at least that's what it sounded like to me. I had no choice but to respond in kind, with my own verbally challenged character, and so on and so forth, and pretty soon we were acting these two women out, lending them lives and stories to tell in a style and at a pace that would have blown the doors off any improv class, and I was laughing so fucking hard at what he was coming up with, I couldn't breathe.

There were other similar moments after that, and from these other characters arose, always one for each of us to play off the other: Edith and Fran, Larry and Dennis, Ed and Barnabus.

These names, these 'characters', don't mean anything to anyone anymore, but to me, they are as alive, and animated, and memorable - as 'classic' - as anything that's ever appeared on Saturday Night Live, anything Chris Farley ever came up with. They truly enriched my life.

As time went on, things beyond our control caused Adam and me to drift apart, but he was never not there. He was always around. We saw each other at parties, or out at the bars once in a while. He taught me how to ride a motorcycle one of those summers...actually trusted me with his little Honda (his Harley, hell no...), with only the slimmest assurance that I wouldn't lose control and rocket that thing down into a gully. He let me borrow an old helmet too. It was full of road rash, and bright white; he called it 'the egg.' I seem to recall him and his brother getting a good chuckle at the thought of me wearing it. But wear it, I did. I haven't ridden since, never ended up getting my motorcycle license, but I know how to ride. I could get my license if I wanted to. And that's because of Adam.

He was an intelligent, multi-faceted guy. If you had a problem, you called Adam. He was a kind of jack of all trades. He just knew stuff, or if he didn't, he could almost always figure it out. Beyond being a cartoonist and a killer improviser, he was a musician, a handyman, a computer technician, a mechanic...definitely a mechanic. He was the one who bought my gutless 1981 Camaro that I wrote about on this page last year, with its factory 8 track player and rainbow striping, and turned it into something that chewed up pavement.

He also networked all the computers at my office once, seven of them in total, running between two floors, spinning CAT 5 cable like gold, getting them all communicating with each other, correctly, efficiently. It seemed he was always repairing or installing something for me or someone in our group of friends. This, in spite of the fact that we'd let Pickle Boy and other great ideas fade away over time, and had drifted apart. Adam was always around, always willing.

Several more years passed before I saw him again. He was painting by this time. Painting had become a kind of calling, a siren song, a natural evolution from cartooning, I'd say. I was writing newspaper articles by then, and this time, he got a hold of me. He asked if I would be willing to write up a story about an art exhibit he was having at a local coffeehouse. I said sure. Admittedly, I was hesitant at first. More than once in my life I've had friends and family read my writing and been told only how neat the typing was.

But I was impressed, legitimately impressed, by his work. And fairly amazed, not just by his technical ability, which all things considered was not too surprising, and not by what I still consider to be the ingenuity of his artistic vision, but by the sheer complexity. I was - and I am - amazed by the thought of the hours he must have spent creating those intricately woven images. They are testament to the complexity of his personality and his thoughts.

That was 2006. After that, we drifted apart again, this time more permanently. I moved out of the area where I'd grown up and lived most of my adult life in 2008, and haven't been back much. I've let more than a few friendships slide. I didn't see Adam again for six years - until just a month ago - when I had the opportunity to have dinner with him, and two other people, two buddies who were part of the crew back in the day and knew Adam as I knew him.

He and I said hello, shook hands. He looked older, a little tired. So did I. I said let's keep in touch, and he said, yeah, it's been too long.

And he was right. It's been too long.

There's nothing I won't miss about Adam, and there's a lot to look back on. I have an unlimited supply of memories in the form of photos and video and cartoons to smile and weep for, and I do. And I will. But I think what I will take with me from this point forward will not be just the memories of what he and I were once, or what we did together, but what we let ourselves become: deeply in-tune creative collaborators who over time dissolved into distant acquaintances. I want to go out of my way to make sure that doesn't happen with anyone else I've shared my life with, and I like to think that will be how he'll continue to enrich my life.

Goodbye Adam. Wherever you are now, wherever you got to, I have no doubt you've already made it a funnier, more intelligent, more interesting place."

-----------------   

From my own personal Darwin Diaries: how a school safety campaign actually proved a useful tool in the face of my boundless stupidity

My first obsession, first rebellion, and hell, maybe even a little my first dalliance with an impulse control disorder, came on strong when I was thirteen years old. My best friend and I were on that precipice between childhood and young adulthood, dangling perilously between our fears and our impulses, our common sense and our restlessness, and for three months in the summer between my 7th and 8th grade years, we became pyromaniacs of the highest order.

It started when Ron found a lighter between the sofa cushions in his living room, either his older sister's - she smoked cigarettes (and looked pretty hot doing so) - or one of her many friends, always milling around when I came over. They were awkward, brace face teenage girls of the Clearasil set, but they were women in my young eyes, older women no less, women of the world, painting their nails, smelling like cigarettes and gum, simultaneously watching MTV and looking like they could be on it, tweaking both my desire and self-consciousness.

The big deal was not so much that Ron had the lighter, but that it was not missed by someone. It became our lighter, a possession as thrillingly illegal as it was permanent, and before long we were wielding it with the same sense of discovery and newly hatched empowerment early Man must have felt the first time he kept a torch going long enough to cook his food and illuminate his night.

We burned paper - notebook, construction, toilet...paper plates, paper towels, paper napkins...any kind or brand we could get our hands on. We burned leaves. We burned the ends of sticks, the caps of pens until they melted, any cardboard box unlucky enough to be caught sitting around with nothing to do. We burned a baseball cap we found in the alley, a tee shirt that didn't fit Ron anymore. We even torched one of his sister's Barbie dolls with as ceremonious a flair as we could muster. I suggested leaving its charred remains on her pillow as a joke (yeah, I guess I was that kid, a little...), but Ron wasn't comfortable going there, and looking back, that was probably a good thing. He was already pretty nervous about the lighter, certain we'd be discovered at any moment, and quickly regretted what we'd done to the doll, not so much for how torching any kind of human representation might read to others, but for monkeying around in Kate's room. He wound up guiltily stuffing Immolation Style Barbie in a box of books we found in the old barn behind his house, hoping Kate wouldn't notice one of her collection missing. As far as I know, she never did, and the doll and box might still be there.

That lighter became not just a source of unlimited power in our minds, but brainless amusement, wholly befitting two brainless thirteen-year-old boys. In the dark of his bedroom during sleepovers, we would spark it up and hold the flame under our chins in an effort to look as 'freaky' as possible. On a dare, we'd run the flame across the new hairs on our arms, or swipe the tip of our finger straight through it, to see - and prove - what we could take. Inspired by the fantastically hilarious stories that had made the rounds of our classrooms, locker rooms and campfires as far back as we could remember, we tried to light our own farts.

We failed (I guess that too was a good thing...), but Ron had something that was almost as cool. He'd learned from someone how to fill his cupped hand with fumes from the lighter, then ignite it in a fiery display without doing any damage to his hand or fingers. He spent fifteen minutes showing me this parlor trick, another fifteen passed before I summoned up the nerve to try it myself, but once I'd mastered it, it became as reliable a method for whiling away a boring summer afternoon as whittling or bouncing a ball against a wall. I did it so much, I used up all the fluid in that lighter. When Ron informed me that disposable lighters are not refillable, and with no reliable way of refilling it anyway, and having dug my way into their sofa cushions up to my elbows to no avail, I demanded he sneak into his sister's room one more time. There was surely a lighter to be found, probably in plain sight. Quick in, quick out. Come on, Ron, don't be a pussy.

Bold words from someone who would not have dared set foot in his older brother's bedroom, but Ron obliged reluctantly. Not to appease me, but to appease the gods of fire. That summer, we were subservient minions to the gods of fire. It was our first real - as in structured and ongoing - rebellion, our first taste of doing something we knew we weren't supposed to be doing, right on the doorstep of adulthood. He wanted it just as badly as I did.

In June, we almost burned his fricking barn down, stupidly setting fire to a bin filled with hay and firewood, just to see what would happen, and only barely - barely - managing to put the flames out after they started to lick their way up the wall as if consciously trying to get away from us. No joke, we were seconds from disaster that time. That whole two-story barn, which had probably stood for a hundred years (built when his residential neighborhood was still farm land, his residential street a county road), might have gone up had the garden hose not reached.

On the occasion he and I discuss that incident, some thirty years later, we still cringe at what might have transpired.

It was sobering, but unfortunately not enough to get us to stop playing with fire. By July, in keeping with the quantum universe theory that everything that can possibly happen does (or maybe the Murphy's law version...), we had started seeking out new applications for our pyromania. And that was when the red gas can in that barn, used by Ron's older brother to fill the lawn mower, became of keen interest.

We were duly cautious with the fire water at first, indulging only in small sprinkles on the sidewalk that produced small flames undulating hypnotically off the concrete. But that soon felt inadequate. We evolved, just like early Man, started to write out words.

At first, 'SOS' or 'HELP', for astronauts in orbit we told ourselves (I think I was inspired by an old episode of Gilligan's Island).

Then we got sassy: 'EAT ME', 'BITE ME', or other typically witless 13-year-old expressions were flashed into the twilight heavens.

Then we got artistic (if still witless): smiley faces, a middle finger, a pair of breasts, a penis...hey, we were thirteen years old, and it was great comedy, and dare I say an invaluable experience - never to come again quite the same way - to see a burning penis about four feet in length light the gathering darkness of a July evening in northern Wisconsin at that age, and laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

But we didn't stop there. In an eventuality that proved Darwin's theory, the words 'Molotov cocktail' floated between us, and by mid-July we were feeling a strong desire for something more epic to appease the gods.

By then we were entirely cocky about our abilities marshaling fire. We'd gone almost the entire summer without being caught, causing a catastrophe or hurting ourselves (oh yes, we were fully aware of the danger of our behavior; that was a big part of the allure...), and felt we had earned a certain lack of discretion. At least, that's what I tell myself to try to explain what happened one late morning in early August, in front of Ron's house, in broad daylight, with traffic going by and someone mowing their lawn across the street.

Unwilling or unable to walk away from the Molotov cocktail idea, seriously believing that bigger fire made for bigger men, Ron and I placed a plastic fast food cup on the ground beside a tree, and filled it three-quarters full of gasoline. He knelt down and carefully lighted a paper wick sticking out of the cup like a straw. He scrambled away hastily, and we both stood there, one of us on each side of the cup, watching, waiting.

I'm not sure what we were waiting for...some kind of fireworks-style explosion to delight and amaze, maybe? It was pretty disappointing, actually. No explosion, no fireball, just flames starting to climb their way up the side of the tree with quickening determination as the cup collapsed in on itself and gas started to leak out.

When the fire started to wrap itself around the trunk of the tree, we gave each other a nervous glance, then Ron, gripped by the same second thoughts as I, stomped down on the cup with his shoe in an effort to snuff the fire out. That's when I got my fireball - a wall of bright orange coming straight at me with a roar.

Suddenly, the entire front of my shirt was on fire.

Suddenly, I was screaming.

Suddenly, I was running.

Suddenly, the gods of fire had become vengeful.

In that moment, I remembered a safety cadence I was taught in second grade, and had barely listened to at the time. Stop, Drop, and Roll. If I ever found myself (in so outrageously unlikely a scenario as to be...) on fire, I should stop, drop to the ground, and roll.

Actually, I can't say I consciously remembered it. It was more of an auto-response, which perhaps is testament to the effectiveness of that particular safety campaign. Though I took off running at first - a fight-or-flight response if ever there were one - I had the presence of mind to stop on a dime, drop, and roll like a barrel through the grass in Ron's front yard...made it a little way into the neighbor's yard, in fact, just enough to put out the flames. It's only in hindsight that I remember being on fire at all. At the time, there seemed to be no time between the moment right before Ron brought his shoe down, and hoisting myself up from the grass fifteen yards away.

I walked back to the tree and stood before Ronny in what was now a tattered Yankees tee shirt, a hand-me-down from my older brother I would never wear again (which was fine; I'm a Braves fan). I will never forget the surprised look in his eyes. Not horror, but surprise. I'm sure it was the same incongruous expression I had on my face. Neither one of us could really wrap his brain around what the hell had just happened, much less be upset by it. A car went by. The neighbor was still mowing his lawn.

It seemed the world had not heard my screaming.

"Are you okay?" Ron asked finally, and in his voice, if not on his face, there was a supreme disquiet.

"Yeah, I'm...I'm..." I wanted to say I was fine, but that would have been laughable. I reeked of gasoline, there were grass clippings and dirt in my hair, on my face, and though the flames had been extinguished, my chest felt as though it were still on fire. "I'll probably just go home."

All I remember of the bike ride home was being afraid to look at my chest and afraid to face my parents, and having a sense that the two things were going to be connected soon enough. I arrived at my house and was greatly relieved to discover nobody home. I made a hasty bee-line for the bathroom, locked the door, removed the Yankees shirt with the stiffness of an 80-year-old man, and gasped at what I saw in the mirror.

There were three burns. Two smaller ones didn't look that bad, but the third was twice the size of the others combined, an ugly charred sore shaped like an arrow head, as though the devil himself had smeared the flames across my chest with his hands. It was about two inches wide, four inches long, untouchably tender and oozing continuously. My heart sank. This was not something I'd be able to take care of myself with first aid cream and a bandage. I was going to need medical attention.

But by then shock had set in, and the fact that nobody was home prompted me to withdraw even further. I went upstairs with the Yankees shirt in my hand. I threw it in the waste basket in my room, laid down on my bed, above the covers, and found sleep blessedly easy to come by.

When I awoke, the sunlight had shifted in my bedroom. My parents were home now, I could hear them rummaging about downstairs, putting away groceries, maybe cobbling together lunch, like a thousand days before and a thousand days after. (They too had not heard my screaming.) The big burn was the color of grape jelly on my white fish belly, as tender, bubbled and sticky as ever, and now it was announcing its presence with a resonant, blowtorch pain, as though someone were trying to iron me. The two smaller burns seemed worse than they had been before...darker, blotchy, painful to the touch and oozing that awful fluid that stains bandages in amber colored rings. The entire room was saturated with the smell of gasoline.

Taking a nap hadn't made anything better. I still needed medical attention. I still had to tell to my parents.

I shouldered into as light a tee shirt as I could find, hunched my shoulders forward so the fabric would stay off my chest, and went to my dad, rather than my mom. My dad could be strict, but he was the more level-headed of the two, the one I could trust to not freak out (this would prove to be the case time and time again in my teenage years...).

He was upset though, visibly so, no question about it, leaning down for a closer examination of the big burn with a look of horror and revulsion I rarely saw from him. As he drove me to the emergency room, he asked repeatedly what happened, probing for the truth, and sighed with just a little more frustration for every evasive answer I gave.

The doctor in the ER, too, had plenty of questions as he treated my second and third degree burns. I fed him the same bullshit story I did my dad, and though it seemed the doctor's questions reached the level of interrogation at one point (augmented by my dad standing behind him, looking a little like a cop who could go rogue at any moment), I stuck to that story:

Ron had been mowing the lawn, I said, and I was filling the gas tank for him, and as I carefully poured it through the can's long red nozzle, the gasoline had just spontaneously erupted into flames and engulfed me, ignited, I theorized, by the hot metal surface of the engine, or maybe the bright sunlight.

Ridiculous, but intended to safeguard what little of my dignity had not been burned off that morning. This was an accident, my story claimed, as if straight from the cover of a tabloid, it was not the result of vulgar recklessness and stupidity (and a little hubris), for which I had been violently smitten.

Neither my dad nor the doctor believed a word of it; I think the doctor even smirked once or twice (or exchanged a look with my dad...). Like a horse fallen through the ice and unable to clamber out, the more I squirmed and thrashed, the worse it got, but I stuck to my story, too proud to admit anything out loud, especially with my dad standing there. The 'rogue cop' look I saw on his face wasn't really hostility, or even disappointment, it was shame, outright embarrassment, for what a jack ass he knew his son had been that day.

My dad knew. He'd never get the truth, but he knew. And it was mortifying.

The rest of that summer played out as a slow recovery. I remained bandaged, and mostly indoors, through the dog days of August and into September...into the new school year. Each changing of the dressing came with jolts of pain and discomfort. The burns - especially the big one - took forever to heal. Once they started healing, I endured weeks of agonizing itchiness, and whenever I succumbed to the temptation to rake myself, which was frequently, the healing was forced to start all over.

Eventually, I recovered physically. Psychologically was a different matter. The incident could not have happened at a worse time. Like all newly hatched teenagers, I'd been full of all sorts of plans for removing myself from childhood once and for all. Many were embarrassingly calculated poses, but some were accurate glimpses at the adult I would become. I started to really discover girls that summer, or care enough to understand them. I discovered new music, new movies, books...that was the summer I read my second Spenser novel and officially became a fan, watched Monty Python's Flying Circus and 'got it', felt for the first time capable of chiming in on the kind of conversations that went on between my dad and brother, where before I had only listened (or lost interest). It was the summer I renounced cartoons. It was the summer I got a new bike, a ten-speed, put the old banana seater, which I'd been pedaling away on since 4th grade, out to pasture. It was the year I awakened to the notion that I'd lived long enough to have memories to look back on, that 3rd and 4th and 5th grades, and my middle school years, were part of my 'past.'

Looking back, the 'fire gods' bullshit was not actually a new rebellion on my journey toward becoming an adult, it was a last vestige of being just another dumb ass kid, and I paid for it. Everything was put on hold while I recovered, set back to zero. Not permanently, but enough so to feel like a jarring throw down nevertheless.

I know it could have been much worse. I was beyond lucky that the Napalm spray Ron created when he unthinkingly brought his foot down on that Hardee's cup hadn't gone right into my face. And I am convinced that stop, drop and roll is the reason the fire didn't spread.

I could have wound up permanently disfigured.

But those psychological effects are still there. Not in obvious ways. I'm not afraid of fire; it ranks fairly low on my list of scariest ways to die. The smell of gasoline - thick and sickening as it was in my bedroom that afternoon - does not bother me, nor does the sight of a red gas can, or a fast food cup. In other words there are no blatant triggers to remembering that wall of fire or its unpleasant aftermath.

The triggers are far more insidious. An otherwise late summer day can still haunt me, if conditions are just right, if temperature and light and wind and ambient sounds conspire, I can at a moment's notice be given pause, flung back to those last few seconds of my childhood watching as Ron lit that makeshift wick, and left, with fairly abated breath, wishing we'd burnt his barn to the ground.

Hawaii stowaway story is serious business, but also downright astonishing

When I was sixteen years old I was full of piss and vinegar - about what I knew, what I was capable of, what I was willing to do - but like most middle class, Midwestern teenagers, it was just that: piss and vinegar. Truth was, I never strayed much - if at all - outside my safe zone, and my rebellions, my surrenders to impulse, were for the most part garden variety and PG-rated. One time I drove my new car (a '77 Chrysler Newport that didn't always start) three hours to Minneapolis, though I'd only been driving for a few months and didn't know Minneapolis (or city driving) at all. This event was on a short list of things I did in outright defiance of my parents back then, and though it was kind of thrilling, when I returned home safely with nothing terrible having happened, as my parents worried might, I couldn't help feeling as relieved as I did vindicated.

News last month that a 16-year-old California kid snuck onto an airport tarmac, climbed into a wheel well of a Boeing 767, and survived a five-hour flight at 35,000 feet to Hawaii deserves some serious inquiry, but also, quite frankly, some serious applause.

The obvious questions, born of grave concern, arose immediately: How was the boy not spotted by someone?  Airport security? Baggage handlers?  And if this kid could do what he did, what's to stop someone with ill-intent from doing the same thing? And of course, the most obvious: how the hell did he survive subzero temperatures and virtually no oxygen for such a period of time?

The questions about airport security might never be answered. The only proper (and possible) response would seem to be to tighten up the game at all of them (every facet of the airline travel industry should forever be in a state of 'tightening'...) And I'd be willing to bet the boy will have no answers as to how he survived the journey. So far, doctors seem to have done little more than shrug and talk about the possibility (however unlikely) that he went into a state of 'hibernation' during the flight, which saved his life.

If I had a chance to sit down and talk to this kid, I'd have just one question, and it would not have anything to do with surviving it physically. I would want to know how he pulled it off emotionally, and psychologically? Where in his psyche did he have to dig, and how deep, to not only figure out how to do it, but then actually do it?

Sitting there waiting for something to happen would be the worst. It's one thing to imagine him getting there, climbing over the airport fence in the dark, approaching the massive aircraft, grabbing hold of an enormous tire and climbing up into the wheel well. But what mysterious force enabled him to stay there, crouched in that cramped, uncomfortable space, heart and mind racing, breaking out in wave after wave of cold sweat, trying to control his breathing, counting the seconds and minutes until take off?

What went through his mind when he heard rummaging and thumping going on in the cabin directly above his head, as the plane was boarded and prepped?

How did he not panic into fleeing - in a jackrabbit sprint back across the tarmac - when he heard the engines fire up for the first time, or when the plane first lurched into motion...?

And what in the name of all that is holy went through his mind in the moment - poised motionless at the head of the runway - when the aircraft first rushed toward take-off speed? Take-offs freak me the hell out when I'm safely buckled into seat 27A!

'One question' can't help but lead to another, and another, and another.

Reportedly, he was homesick and wanted to see his mother in Somalia. Okay, that's powerful stuff, especially when you're a kid, so I guess the impetus is not hard to figure out.  But what kept him motivated on the follow through? He's sixteen years old!

At sixteen, no matter how much I missed my mother, I would not have had the wherewithal to even know how to go about plane hopping, much less the stones to actually do it. I'd have tired and given up, or pussied out (to use age-appropriate lingo) really quick.

And what of the prep time required? That alone would be a major undertaking. There clearly needed to be a lot of studying, a lot of careful calculation and plotting, a familiarity with the airport layout, with flight plans and schedules and so forth, to bridge the gap between reading about it and doing it.

At sixteen, I struggled paying attention in gym class and wasn't too keen on concentrating long enough to wrap my head around directions for hooking up a VCR.

Make no mistake, I am not saying what this reportedly 'quiet teen' from San Jose, California did was right. I am neither condoning it, nor dismissing the seriousness of it just because it didn't cause a catastrophe (which it easily could have). But man, there's no denying it's impressive. People train for things like this: they train for marshaling their fears of speed, height and distance. They go out of their way to prepare themselves psychologically for the pushing of boundaries through extreme behaviors, extreme sports, and they're usually not sixteen years old when they do.

At sixteen, my sixteen, all the 'piss and vinegar' in the world could not have hidden the fact that I didn't think there were too many reasons to get out of bed in the morning, or that I fully expected there to be cereal (Fruity Pebbles) and cold milk waiting for me downstairs in the kitchen when I did, or that I would get a little bitchy and bratty if there wasn't, and likely use it as an excuse to go back to bed.

Coming in 2015...uhhh...Peanuts? Really? *sigh...*

So not 45 seconds ago, I came across a 'teaser/trailer' on YouTube for Peanuts, the first feature length movie to come out for the comic strip franchise, unless you include (and you should...) 1980's 'Bon Voyage Charlie Brown (And Don't Come Back)'...and surely the first to render the beloved characters with computer animation.

Slated for release in 2015, the movie is (at least so far) being billed as, "Peanuts: by Schulz"...a worthy sign that some semblance of the original comic strip will be preserved. I can only hope 'Schulz' will not feel compelled to roll over in his grave when it is released.

The minute-long trailer seems inoffensive enough, lending Charlie Brown and Snoopy familiar mannerisms that hold true to the old days. It even sports that Vince Guaraldi piano jam that has pretty much become the Peanuts theme - further evidence that something will remain of the original, that all that made Peanuts great in the past will not be snuffed out in one bloated, belch-like endeavor to make it palatable to a new audience.

Hey, it happens. In the past 15 years, I've twice bore witness to a grievous bastardization of another childhood favorite. Jim Carrey and Mike Myers were each, in turn, unleashed on Dr. Seuss in the early 2000s, with, in my opinion, disastrous results.

I have nothing against Jim Carrey or Mike Myers, in their element. But to try creating a mash-up of their comedic shticks and the sweet, dreamy trip of Dr. Seuss -  whose books allowed the imaginations of readers to do the walking for three generations - in other words, to turn the heady unraveling of a rainy day when the Cat in the Hat pays a visit into a particle stream of Austin Powers-caliber fart jokes and 'peeing in the fountain' sight gags, was the most horrible fucking thing I have ever seen on the big screen.

This, from someone who endured Bulworth and Dr. T and the Women...

I'd give anything for that not to happen with this incarnation of Peanuts. And I am especially defensive of Peanuts, because I'm especially fond of Peanuts.

There are two ways this new movie can go, as I see it  It will either corrupt the franchise entirely, desperate to keep viewers' attention by updating the characters, turning them too savvy, or too snarky, or just needlessly too modern (imagine Charlie Brown an uber depressive emo...Schroeder an arrogant hipster...Linus, a David Spade-type know-it-all, with an asshole comment about everything...)

Or...

It will go the saccharine, river-of-sugar route, which would be equally as untrue to Schulz's vision. The Peanuts comic strip conceived and churned out dutifully for 50 years by Charles Schulz, almost until his death in early 2000, was not saccharine. Too often, it gets dismissed / remembered as such, by people who are not digging deep enough, or are distracted by some of the more prominent totems of the Peanuts world: sayings like Happiness is a Warm Puppy, for instance, or what's always been perceived as an overstated Christian message (although that itself would seem to be misunderstood...)

Instead, Peanuts was intended to humanize kids, to put intelligent, and yes, sometimes pensive thoughts in the mouths of children. It was first and foremost a comic strip, so its main charge was providing the requisite daily dose of gag relief, but it was philosophical too, even a little dark once in a while. Not the overwrought and ridiculous 'dark' populated by vampires (and mascara-streaked emos...) that makes for flashy Saturday night programming on the WB; rather, the plainly dressed sort of dark, sporting a clean haircut and sensible shoes, that visits ordinary people at odd moments in this life, usually vulnerable moments. Peanuts was, at times, tuned into the kind of thoughts that can draw shadows out from the corners of any room and turn any day pensive, without there really being a reason.

POTENT - Throughout its 50 year run, Peanuts sought to humanize kids, to portray them as thoughtful individuals, and did so without coddling them or pandering to them. This particular panel, which I clipped from a newspaper page in the mid 1990s, is perhaps the best print evidence that Peanuts does not deserve to remembered as saccharine. 

The very best example of Peanuts' complexity might be Charlie Brown's opening line in the now classic 1965 Christmas special: "I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. Christmas is coming, but I'm not happy. I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel ... I just don't understand Christmas I guess. I like getting presents, and sending Christmas cards, and decorating trees and all that, but I'm still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed."

Numerous animated specials followed that one, throughout the 1970s and 80s. Some were better than others; and some, admittedly, went out of their way to capture what was popular in the day, in the very manner I'm hoping will not be the case here. (1983's It's FlashBeagle, Charlie Brown leaps to mind...) But most were drawn from storylines in the comic strip, and nearly all bore a sampling, at least, of the intimate brand of intelligence and melancholy that sets the strip, which at its peak ran in over 2,500 newspapers, apart. I remember watching She's a Good Skate, Charlie Brown when I was nine, and really being moved by the end scene, where, after a tape malfunctions, Woodstock saves the day by whistling music so that Peppermint Patty can complete her skating routine. The tune he whistles? O Mio Babbino Caro.

An odd yet fitting choice for a children's program. There was (is) something lovely about the scene, which I just cannot see working now. Kids today either have to be shouted at, or completely inoculated from reality, from themselves, from their 'pensive thoughts'.

Maybe I'm wrong...about what kids respond to these days and what lengths this new movie will go to get and keep their attention.  Seriously, I hope I am. But either way, it's been proven time and time again that when someone great passes, that which made them great should probably be left to pass with them.

Greetings from the Polar Vortex (...Am I dead yet?)

And so, here in west central Wisconsin, following six surprise inches of fine, fresh powder overnight Saturday, we find ourselves in the midst of yet another Arctic blast; Polar Vortex II, The Reckoning, you might be inclined to call it, smack dab in the midst of what's almost surely to be remembered as the 'Winter of  '14.' (Which sounds kind of weird, actually, leads me - erroneously - to thoughts of Model T's, horse-drawn carriages and chickens kept in people's yards...)

Happily, the media coverage is far less hysterical than two weeks ago, when, to hear your average TV anchor tell it, the Four Snowmen of the Apocalypse were bearing down on us all. But precautions are still being taken this time around: schools are closing, events are being postponed or cancelled outright, and there's a buzz going on about it, on-line and in public places, a uniformity of response centered around a looming danger, which has led to a certain indignation over any class or organization that isn't closing up shop as the Snowmen reach the outskirts of town...

Which, in turn, has led me to wonder if we really are becoming softer as a species.

Surely nobody alive in America today is (or can be expected to be) as hardy as pioneers or American Indians of 150 years ago, but I wonder sometimes, set adrift as we are in the sunny doldrums of comfort and ease, living lives in which every impulse and aversion alike is indulged a hundred times over in real time, if we're as hardy a people as we were fifty years ago, or even thirty.

I grew up in the 70s and 80s in Wisconsin, a state that's always thrown a hell of a winter (a short description of which helped keep Kate Winslet from throwing herself off the stern of the Titanic), and I don't remember a single day off from school back then merely because it was cold. There were plenty of snow days...a bomb scare once, too, and some kind of spill in the Chemistry lab that was so malodorous, classes were let out...but not once was I ever allowed to stay in bed on a Wednesday morning merely because it was cold outside. I could be wrong about this, but given how high in esteem days off were held, I would think I'd remember any that happened for an unusual reason.

I can see, perhaps, closing public schools when the temperature plunges, making sure our young children are not outside in this type of weather, waiting for the bus or, worse, walking to school. But colleges and vo-techs? Other public (but indoor) events? Really? Is the cold weather that unmanageable? That threatening? It sucks, to be sure...but as we ply our day, 99.9 % of us are only actually outside for 5 to 20 seconds at a pass, usually between the front door and our car. Is brutal cold a reason to cease living, to hole up and power down until it passes?  I just don't know...

I might be unusual, that is, not the right person to ask, because the last thing I want to do when the weather's like this is stay in and get cozy. I get restless, start climbing the living room curtains, need to get up and get out.  But if it's at all true that we've become weak in the face of winter, as usual, I think the news media's to blame. When you consider its hysterical response to the polar vortex (which, as I understand it, is an archaic meteorological term from the 1940s that is neither an uncommon phenomenon in winter, nor all that threatening), perhaps it's no surprise that it's come down to whole days being ground to a halt, in a winter that isn't even as cold as some in the past.

The news media (and by this, I mean primarily television...) operates under the premise of dispensing vital information, giving us the story, keeping us informed, but Humanity survived just fine from 10,000 BC to 1980 AD, prior to the advent of the 24-hour news cycle. We handled cold, and fire and water and earth in a very worthy way. There was tragedy surely, because there is tragedy from time to time in this life. But at no time was our survival as a species threatened in the days before we gave winter storms their own names and stuck reporters under street lamps in Anyplace, Anywhere to broadcast live for the duration. At no time was a cold snap, or a winter storm, treated or thought of as an Apocalyptic event just to sell more cell phones, SUVs and bags of potato chips (because make no mistake, that's what 'news' - particularly the 24-hour kind - has become: never about broadcasting live so much as generating hype for Madison Avenue).

I think the news media's zeal, the unending search for something to spin into a story (or turn into a scoop) in a world where something isn't always happening, not only succeeds in little more than fostering a culture of fear and paranoia, but erodes our ability to think for ourselves, to rely on wits and common sense and observation, and communication with one another (ironically enough) to arrive at the proper response.

A wicked cold snap is not a good situation; it can be dangerous; certainly it presents the potential for hardship (among our most vulnerable citizens in particular), but it is not the fricking snow apocalypse either, and shouldn't be treated that way.

And though I hate this time of year with a white hot passion I keep hoping will one day melt all the snow, I say again, at least it feels like winter, a winter of old. It's kind of reassuring to be trudging through half a foot of snow that came without warning overnight, to have to 'bundle up' and go out to start my car ahead of time, to have a reason to bitch and complain and declare my allegiance to the Conch Republic. Even if these wintry days are an illusion (and nobody with a brain is claiming our current cold snap is proof that climate change isn't real), it's comforting nevertheless to see - and feel - a winter like those I remember from childhood. Brown Thanksgivings and 50 degree days in December - in Wisconsin - are unnatural; a 'January thaw' is supposed to be a minor hiccup in an otherwise impenetrable winter.