Funny or Sad

So on my way to school every day I pass this seedy night club and for about two weeks now, it has had a simple message on its tiny marquee: "Midget Dancers August 23-25." Every day I would drive by the sign, look up, and be just a little bit sadder for having read it, and look forward to the 25th of August when they would take it down.

Then August 23rd came and the sign had been changed. Now it read "Little Sisters August 23-25." And I thought for a second about how that change must have happened and I imagined the scene that must have taken place when the "Little Sisters" drove into town and looked at the sign that had been billing them as "Midget Dancers" for two weeks and they were probably upset, I figure, and had a few words with the management. It's still a sad story, but at least it's a story, and a sad story is always better than a sad nightclub sign.

Dream band

I can't believe I've never seen Animal Collective live yet. It hurts to know that. Some days I have trouble getting out of bed just because I know that I have missed that experience in my life so far. Seeing video like this convinces me that, given a choice, it's the one band I'd like to be a part of. It's just sublime. B, my two year old, goes crazy when their song "Purple Bottle" comes on and he starts egging me on to yell along to the "Whoa! Get that!" part toward the end. You have to be born with great taste like that, I think.

Last of the Summer Wine

I think that's the name of an awful BBC comedy that they run on PBS here, but it fits. Here's a snap of one of my favorite summer rituals: eatin' outside. We finally dragged the picnic table out of this low kind of holler in the back yard and put it somewheres where we could actually use it, so we did. I made lots of fish tacos this summer, for example, to varying degrees of success. It always hurts the flavor of the fish for me when, right before I take my first bite, C always says "are you sure this fish is still good? I thought it smelled funny." Oh, but I exaggerate.

Anyway, if I am picking ultimate summer moments, this has got to be one of them. That's J yakking to Papaw about going to the dentist or something. I think we're eating some homemade spaghetti that he brought over. It's the simple things, right?

The Wire

When you're out of town for three weeks in a summer and you are in places that don't have television, you get out of the habit of watching television. Then, when you come back home, you try not to watch television to see how long you can hold out. You don't have cable, so that helps. You don't work at a job where you need to watch television so that you have something to talk about with your co-workers. So you are doing okay and you don't miss television. You see your teevee-free future spread out in front of you and you can see that it is going to be okay. You will eat better. You will sit down at a table and write a letter to an old friend. You will learn the names of trees.

And then they release the third season of The Wire on DVD.

Oh, I was so close to living life of value. But it's worth it really. I mean, c'mon. The Wire is the best thing on television and if it isn't please don't tell me because I don't need to know about it. And, if you know, please don't tell me what happens in this season because I have no idea. The first two episodes are just so good, though.

A funny thing happened to me while watching the first episode, though. One scene takes place at a Baltimore Orioles baseball game and I'm sitting there watching it and I think to myself "it would be nice to go to a baseball game." Where did that come from? Sure, I used to go to Detroit Tigers games all the time when I was a kid, but I kind of fell out of baseball when I stopped being any good at it and I haven't followed it for years. And now this? We'll have to see where the urge takes me. The last baseball game I attended was in Evansville at the minor league stadium where they filmed the Madonna movie A League of Their Own. It was such bad baseball that we left after three hours and it was only the fifth inning. Maybe I need to try a real baseball game. We'll see.

Yeah More of the Garden

Can't help it. It's these high summer flowers I like best, the ones that are happiest when the sun is beating the rest of the world back into the cool air conditioning of their homes and offices. These flowers are even from the same part of the garden as the last picture below, but the light is better, so I had to put them up.

It was one of those rare mornings when I was awake before both kids. I put some of the blueberries we picked last weekend on my Grape Nuts and went outside to the picnic table and, for once, ate my breakfast without hearing Clifford or Dragon Tales in the background. It was a lot of nice for a mere ten minutes of time.

While I was out

The above picture is what happens when you leave the moles in charge of your lawn when you go on vacation. I think you can see four or five traps sitting there, poised and useless. I have not caught a mole in a long time, though I've had some very exciting close calls. Is this any way to spend a summer? Well, it's one way. It's not bad. The secret is to learn how to look beyond the scarred tatters of your lawn to see the colors of your high summer perennials (which were lovingly looked after by Michelle--thanks!!). It's about perspective.

You can't see it in the top picture, but there is a bird bath in this corner of the garden that gives me all kinds of perspective. It's just this simple concrete design, very Japanese or something, and I rarely even see birds in it, but I find myself thinking about it. Some nights right after I brush my teeth I will turn off the bathroom light and then look out the window at my bird bath in the moon (well, and street) light and I know that nothing bad is going to happen while I'm sleeping. Just one of the lies we tell ourselves so that we can stop thinking and fall asleep, of course.

In other news, I can't stop listening to the Fiery Furnaces latest, Bitter Tea.

Sturgeon Bay, Michigan

J on the beach, this stretch of beach I'd been wanting to get back to for a few summers now but never took the time. We remembered this hidden part of the beach that you could only find if you followed a hidden two-track and we drove slowly along seven miles of the loneliest road in Michigan trying to find it, but gave up and drove to the public part. This part of the state is so hard to get to, though, that we had it to ourselves almost. Really, one of the prettiest stretches of sand and water and dune I've ever seen.

The next time you are on a sandy beach, make sure you take the time to take a small plastic shovel and dig as deep a hole as you can. Dig to the wet sand and keep digging until you make a small underground lake. I felt five years old when I did this. I took the wet sand and built tiny castles and my children immediately stomped them back into the sand every time. How did they know that's what you're supposed to do? It's something we're born with, I suppose.

Live Strong

Here's kind of a funny snap I took during the Indian River, Michigan 4th of July parade last week. I wish the punch line showed up better. I just like the irony of a guy with a LiveStrong bracelet combined with a skull tattoo and cigarette with a long ash hanging sticking out from his knuckles. Cracks me up. It's the ash that I should have caught against a darker background, I think. At the time, I was just trying not to get caught by him.

Small town parades are the best. You forget that 1/2 of every parade is taken up by local merchants driving cars with the names of their businesses on them--it's just a rolling commercial where you have to sit in the sun and listen to the firetrucks blast their horns in your ears for 30 minutes. But still, they're the best.

The Best Festival is Today's

Oh, look at that little kid there on me shoulders. Fresh from bopping his head to the live Greek Fest band. My new favorite festival, Greek Fest. It's more ethnic, you know. More people that don't look like me, compared to German Fest at least. Dances that I only see once a year and make me wonder when the kids dancing them learn them, and even more why my family doesn't have any dances. I don't know what we'd do with it if we had a dance, my family, but it might be nice to know that there is one that we could do if we ever saw an ad in the paper that there was going to be a Hill Fest that weekend. Maybe it would be to dance in whatever way you do when you are playing a great song at home and think no one is watching. Everyone would hit the floor and just let it go, just let it go like they should every day but we'd do that once a year and maybe that would be enough, or a start at least.

Festival season

German Fest might be my favorite summer festival here. Greek Fest has slightly better food, but it's dang expensive, I think, and something about it feels exclusive for some reason. Like it's for Greeks only almost. That's probably in my head, though. German Fest is pretty laid back in comparison. If you're from the midwest, you're already half German just from being raised to eat all that meat and boiled vegetables. So, it's comfortable.

This is from last night. The always fun Melissa saying hi to me as I surreptitiously snap her photo and Brian's great, really great, girlfriend Leslee smiles on. She always smiles, Leslie. It's almost her natural state--it makes you smile too and wonder why you don't smile more and so you resolve to try, and then the next time you see her you remember your pledge and realize that you haven't been working on it enough.

For the birds

This here is a birch tree that has grown near the beach at our family lake place for the past forever and now I need to accept that it is probably pretty much dead. It's the flocks of wood peckers perching on what looks like its bullet-ridden hide that clued me in. The birds are pretty, and funny to watch as they bash their heads into the bark over and over, but still, this is a special tree to me. It frames the lake view in every cheesey sunset picture ever taken by our family. At least we'll have pictures.

Summer Blogging Season is Here!

A few more days of school and my summer will start and I plan to be doing a lot of this here: sitting down to read but instead having J. walk up and ask me to watch a Gene Kelley movie with her. It's a life.

I think Monkeysquirrel will be taking a summer vacation, too. Maybe it'll be more of a summer photo blog if anything. Either way, there will be a little more space between posts. I slow down in the heat, you know. Anyway, as we say in our yearbooks, have a great summer. Don't spend it all in front of a computer monitor. Oh, and wear sunscreen.

I never used to care about this stuff

I forget how great it is when spring rolls on and our garden just keeps blooming, one perennial after another, on into and through the summer. I spend a lot of the winter thinking about all the things I'd like to change about our flower beds, but once things fill out and start blooming, I forget all the problems and just dig watching things grow. I never used to care about this stuff, and never would have guessed it's something I'd be into, but I guess it's okay to like different things as you grow up.

This here is the first bloom on our small stand of siberian iris. It's smaller than most irises, but sits on top of this long, graceful, grassy foliage that's always tipping in whatever breeze you have. Might be one of my favorite plants--this fall I really need to bury a bunch more bulbs of this so that I can have a large blur of them next year. 

I'm the man.

Here is a picture of me after I sank a putt during my first round of 2006 last weekend. I look so happy because I hadn't made anything longer than three feet all day and this one was like four feet at least. Incredible.

Actually, for my first outing of the year, it wasn't half bad. I shot 41 on the front at Deer Track, parring 4 of 9, and then fell apart a little on the back and shot 50. That's a tough 9 back there. Had a few penalty strokes and got tired enough that I missed some easy putts. Overall, I hit my irons pretty cleanly and, well, who cares how well you play when it's as beautiful as it was Saturday. I think 65 is my favorite outside temperature, for sure.

YouTube strategizing

I think the secret for using YouTube is that you go there only once every six weeks or so. That gives the place time to replenish the wells, so to speak, and you can go right to the "most viewed" or whatever and see a few really funny things and then leave. That's what works for me, anyway.

This is my favorite from yesterday's visit.

Downsize

I have too many loved ones and stuff in my life to ever do this, but I've always had this dream of living in a really small place. Room for a bed for sleeping and a chair for reading and a maybe a window for staring at birds and stuff.

So tonight on NPR they had this nice story about the "Tiny House Movement"--people who share, and are living, my tiny, impossible dream. Ideally, one would build his own tiny house from lumber he salvaged from decaying barns or milled from funky timber. There are enough people in this "movement," however, that businesses are building houses for you now. And they're really cool. Check out a few of them here. I think my favorite is the "S-House." As the web site explains, the S-House is "everything the 10x16 Front Gable is and less."

I can see my tiny life from here, and it's nice, but worshiping living spaces like this, I know, is a form of pornography--an objectification of space rather than of women. Real estate dreams always look at homes as if they're just cool, homey spaces, and I let myself forget that really living in them would be rather similar to the (already great) life I live the too-large home we have now.

But still, it would be so cool.

American X, a list

On a good recommendation, I watched the 1998 movie American X the other day. Lots of yelling. Some violence. I know this is a popular movie, and I can't deny that that Edward Norton is a swell actor, but I have some problems with its verisimilitude in a few places.

1. Skinheads. They cannot play basketball. How could they not know this? Everyone knows that skinheads cannot play basketball. It's just absurd.

2. The "gang bangers" that the skinheads are in conflict with in this movie are too pretty. They should look like they do in the perfect HBO show The Wire: scrawny and shifty and paranoid and tough. The guys in this movie, on the other hand, all look like dates Lisa Bonet could have brought home to meet Clifford Huxtable on The Cosby Show.

3. Again with the basketball scene, no game that was being played to decide which side would get to "own" the court would ever make it to completion if this neighborhood was as tough as it was supposed to be. As soon as it got to game point, the losing team would have sabotaged it by starting a fight and then they would have always been able to argue that they didn't lose the bet. That's what I would do, anyway.

4. The jail was too clean looking. Nobody died there, either. I think more people die in jail, usually, like in the too-long-and-flawed-but-fun Blood in, Blood out.

There was some nice dramatic tension in the movie. I'm not sure why they killed the kid at the end--it was kind of a cheap shot, a "warning" to us that we may all too late to save our kidz unless we start practicing one love right away.

I got a small laugh out of Norton's style of argument when he was still a skinhead: his response to any expression of sympathy for other races was "bullshit." Then, after this deeply hateful man is changed by the experience by making a single black friend in prison, he returns to the outside and counsels his brother that now it is the racist way that is "bullshit." Pretty convincing argument, that.

It probably sounds like I enjoyed this movie less than I actually did, I guess. For much of it, I had trouble getting over the fact that the one fat skinhead is now Earl's brother in My Name is Earl, except he has lost about 200 pounds now. Crazy. A regular DeNiro he is.

About syrup

Hey, I'm happy to say that I have a short piece published in the newest issue of the Acres Quarterly, the wonderful newsletter put out by the Acres Land Trust. My contribution may approach the sentimental at times, and there is one ambiguous modifier in there I'm not happy with, but overall it's a cute little thing about family trip to the syrup festival up north of here about six weeks ago or so. If you're interested, you can read it here, and hey, think about joining Acres while you're at it. They're the ones trying to maintain the simple natural charms of this corner of the state.

If you click the link, open the latest newsletter's pdf.

My Bodyguard

Have you seen that movie, My Bodyguard? You totally should. Early 80's, Matt Dillon as a high school bully, kid hires a motorcycle tough to be his "bodyguard." The bullies do this cool thing where they took huge wads of toilet paper and got it wet and then whipped it at their victims. I'm glad no one does that at my school, but it looks fun.

But Mr. Row here is totally right out of that film. He even made his bike out of, well, bike parts that he ebayed and and scrounged and that also included a round trip drive to New York and back that he did in, like, six hours or something insane like that. Six hours, I swear. I can't imagine. I can make a decent spring risotto, savory crepes, the occasional compound-complex sentence, but that's the extent of my assembly skills. What Tracey managed with grandpa's shop and a dream just knocks me out.

And the ladies glasses he's wearing. They're just too much, and I can't believe he's thinking of leaving town--Indiana should start giving cool-people grants to keep folks like Tracey and Joseph in the towns where they're needed.

Anyway. Thanks for stopping by tonight, T.

It's a kind of life, I guess.

So this little wildflower is what I'm obsessed with these past ten days or so. If the sun didn't go down, I'd be outside digging them up all night long. See, they're flowers, sure, but they're not where I want them to be, and that makes them weeds. The only way to keep them from coming back, though, is to get the bulb dug up. It's an art, really, digging them out without popping the stalk off and losing the bulb somewhere down there, where they are waiting, waiting for next year, when they will be back.

Oh, but when you get them whole . . how can I describe it? It's like catching a fish, a dirt fish, and one that means you harm. I'm almost a little sad at the thought of my perennial beds being wiped out of them. No, that's not true. Now that I think about it, they're like little moles that I don't have to feel bad about killing when I catch them.

And on Texas Ranch house . . man, that ranch owner and his family are abominable.