Blogging, I just sort of hate the word, it’s just not pretty. Blog it rhymes with bog- where you don’t want to be, it rhymes with cog who you don’t want to be… well where I don’t want to be for all I know you might enjoy it. In which case I’ll try not to judge…much. I don’t consider myself a blogger in part because what I write tends to fall out of the popular definitions of what a blog is. I don’t write tech news or reviews, I am not waxing rhapsodic on politics or celebrity gossip; lets be honest here celebrity gossip is to Politics what porn is to erotica.

I write stories and not short ones, at least not by Internet standards where 300 words are thoughtful and detailed, my stories tend to log in at the 1000 word mark. You can’t read one in a commercial break, ideally after you read it takes a minute or two to digest, which is not the diversion needed by your average cube farmer. Hence why icanhascheezburger.com is popular, though I have to admit, it feels like America’s Funniest Home Videos for the tech minded. Now I do get time wasters, I did co-author the much-lauded Alliedchemical.com site, considered by experts as a fine way to waste time.

This is a different sort of entertainment, not better or worse mind you-just different. Very different for the net too, the thing about the blogsphere is that it’s lacking atmosphere. It’s not always about creating things as reacting to them. Book reviews, record reviews, Tech reviews, Political commentary and armchair spin. Which is awesome, it’s all these little glimpses into peoples lives, or their perceived lives; by day a average temp but at night he become a diabolical flamer, and protector of the American right, or left, or a Swedish exchange student with a thing for Garter belts. The point is a lot of the wonder of the blog age is a chorus of me too’s, yet another person giving their 2 degrees of difference spin on the most tread territory on the Huffington Post.

All the various and sundry social bookmarking sites aren’t aimed for anything outside of tech, politics, or celebrities, which given the vastness of the Internet is kinda small. Think about it: the ‘net is essentially a great library of all known human accomplishment, fact and fiction. And it’s all supposed to fit into: World & Business, Technology, Science, Entertainment, Gaming, Sports, Offbeat News, Comedy Videos, where is: Zen Insight, clever musings, sardonic prose, historical essay, hell what about lifestyle? Or religion though truth be told they have sort have merged as of late.

Not to get all Mcluhan on your ass, but the medium does definitely have an effect on the message, take for example T-9 text messaging. Which for the Luddites in the audience is a format that picks words for you when you text from your phone, based on the likeliness of it being the proper word. So you don’t have to continually hit the same key to get the appropriate letter. In T-9 if you want to say “Cool” the word that comes up is “Book” do they change the word, no. Instead book becomes a synonym for cool. Likewise in T-9 there is no question mark, nor is there a direct and easy access to it, in fact on my phone to type a question mark in text I have to go 3 sub levels down. People are lazy –so what do they do stop asking questions instead it all becomes statements. Yeah like that won’t have any negative repercussions down the road.

Another strange concept is the same one that politically minded tend to fall into; the idea that talking about something is the same as doing something. It’s not, you can spread awareness all you like but until someone takes action based on that awareness you have accomplished nothing. It’s the liberal trap that I see happen all the time, friends who are CNN addicts, read the NY Times every day (even if they live in Indiana), They destroy parties playing armchair politico, and see themselves as insider. The problem is if it stops there they might as well be discussing Star Wars, substitute Darth Vader for Bush and the Palpatine for Cheney and the story still holds, of course that does make Condoleezza Rice- Jar Jar Binks. At the end of the day it’s the actions that matter, words are great but what’s preached needs to be practiced too.

I labor under the notion that an atmosphere that can support everyone will appear, so I sit in my far too cold basement, listening to records, typing on keyboards, staring into screens, writing words to fill the vacuum. Dancing the dances all the cool social networking kids do. I practice my preaching, and give generously to causes that tow my personal line. Even in a vacuum there is work to be done.

Editor’s note: Hello oh dear and gentle reader, presented for your consideration:”It’s Raining in Warroad”, a break from our more traditional pithy fare. This is a Prose piece written for the Future Perfect Series we did at the Bryant Lake Bowl. This might be my favorite from that whole run of stuff, sadly the documentation for it sucks so its lost to the ages.

As to why to run it today, that has to do with Thanksgiving, several years after 9-11, and nowhere near its anniversary’s it seemed worth looking at. I am thankful not to have to live that day again, I will be more thankful when my countries government gets out of a war against people who had nothing to do with it.
PS: the Mick Fleetwood thing is a true story
………………………………………………………….

It’s Raining in Warroad
I think the thing that I haven’t gotten used to yet is the plane flying overhead. Even as we speak somewhere up above f-16 with their stinger missiles armed and at the ready are there protecting us… or watching us depending on whose column you read. Me I don’t subscribe to either side… it just spooks me

The whole plane thing was different but the plane stopping was the weirdest. Not because I fly a lot. But I live not far from the airport not close enough to be soundproofed but close enough that the takeoffs can rattle the windows at 5:00 AM, their noise is the back ground soundtrack of my day. I hear it often and always, and then it wasn’t there. Hours upon hours of relative silence, the kind of thing referred to in bad mystery novels as eerie silence. Broken only by the occasional thunder like whoosh of a jet, a jet that you wish was carrying smiling grandparents back from Florida, the sound of military jets, and life becomes a lot like an after-school special about the apocalypse the kind they made you watch during the 70’s.

And there I sat…shaking at the sound of silence… in a constant din of CNN. There’s this idea that we seem to have as a society, like having a lot of facts about something will sometimes help you cope, but it’s a lie, just another one of the list, the idea of being informed as a positive action in a situation that your ignorance would provide the same results. And all you can do is…

The Morning of Sept 11 my phone rang …now I know we all have a “where were you when the towers got hit story” it’s our generations” where were you when Kennedy was shot”. But this is my story, so I’ll tell it like I know it. Because that’s the only way you can tell a story. The phone rang at 8:10 am and as far as I can tell a phone call before 9 AM is almost never good news. No one ever rings you up in the early morning to tell you they are bringing donuts to your front door. I answered in horror to hear the least serious person I know tell me with a graven voice usually reserved to tell little children that there Puppy had went to the sky to live with Grandma.

At first I thought it was a joke. Of course one view of the TV screen that just a few hours earlier had comforted me with the Happy images of James Garner as a wacky Texas Oil man was now changing how my life, everyone’s life would change. But no one got that yet.

When I was kid I was home, sick on January 28 1986, the Day the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up. I wish that I had felt emotionally destroyed… I wasn’t, it really didn’t effect me, I saw it happen Live in front of me but I didn’t get it. I mean I felt bad that people had died but that’s about where it stopped. I just wanted cartoons to come back on.

Sept 11, 2001 at 8:15 AM Central Standard Time I got it,

The giant sense of loss hit me not just this horrifying act but all the horrifying acts ever, the challenger explosion the idea of battles in world war one, where 4000 people would die and the realization that the last 1000 to die in that battle had to walk over the bodies of the previous 3000…they had to know… and I had to think that must have gone into battle knowing , and I think, no I know that would have driven me insane. How could it not 1000 insane soldiers marching over their brothers to die.

I thought about a castle in England that I had been to where they let you into this pit or dungeon I guess they put prisoners in but they wouldn’t give you any light because the proprietors said it was too gruesome you could see the marks the inmates made in the wall to mark there time. Me I had my own flash light …bad idea they weren’t lying …I really wish they had been.

The Spanish inquisition became very real. Indian massacres, I remembered the Alamo. .. It all made me sick. Not the nausea of Sartre, I know that one well enough, no this was a whole other kind of sick. I got the cruelty of nicknaming the buck-toothed guy named Jim: bucky beaver in the second grade. I got it all

I stare in disbelief clutching my wife, as I watch the second plane, wondering if anyone saw the first plane hit in that building and thought, not that much of it and kept working, I sat sad eyed and slack-jawed calling everyone I knew in New York, to receive nothing but busy signals… sure they live in Brooklyn and never find themselves near the twin towers, but best to be safe. I guess when the plane hit the pentagon it was a little different, although I remember My High School social studies teacher had said that it was really impossible for that to happen, so many missiles, and soldiers watching the skies, and I …well I believed him. It’s that thing we all have that belief. Someone tells us it’s ok so we take them at there word. Even though common sense tells us otherwise. It’s what allows people to smoke, they know it will shorten their life but they do it anyway. It the little lies we tell to make ourselves feel comfortable in our skin.

Meanwhile people are dying and there soot everywhere. Peter Jennings is theorizing that the heat must have been so intense as just to evaporate people. All this tragedy, Manhattan a sea of soot and ash, and that everyone there is breathing dead people, and I start to imagine that smell…

I read once, that in every breath we take that there is at least one molecule that’s been breathed in ad out by every person and thing that’s ever lived. Jesus, Hitler, Buddha, J Edgar Hoover and Sammy Davis jr. and now add to that the ashes of a couple thousand people who died because they went to work.

And I look at my wife, Now if you don’t have that certain someone, who really is that certain someone, and it’s ok if you don’t cause most people seem to miss that train. In favor of more convenient ones, you won’t know what I am talking about; I thought about losing her I held her so tight it hurt and we sat there a collapsing building flickering on our TV half a continent away from where it happened.

I was shocked about how selfish it made me feel. Not that this would happen here in America, that was just time, rather how different everything would be… I was right within a month thousands of layoffs and a new sense of patriotism and paranoia.

That’s sort of the funny thing isn’t it everything is different …kind of as much as exactly it is the same … it’s always amazing what you can adjust to in time, I think that explains people who live in abusive relationships, they just get used to it and once your used to it you can deal with just about anything…

When I was 16, I was in my first bomb threat, I was 16 and in London on a high school trip, I was the only guy, me and 13 girls, not the bliss that my adolescent brain thought that it would be. I spent a lot of time just on my own, and being 16 I had to hit all the cultural highlights like the worlds largest department store ” Harrods” Terribly unhip in retrospect but what are you going to do, and as I was walking through the men’s gloves and umbrellas when I heard a loud alarm bell, followed by lots of swat looking police officers with dogs and shields and guns storming in, as I stared wondering if was going to die amongst a sea of Burberry.

I locked eyes with a late 50’s bushy bearded giant , that looked not unlike some sort of Tolkien creature, in that moment I saw on his face what I have to imagine was the same look on mine: panic, fear, and a strange sort of acceptance. This was just a new reality to be dealt with just like the introduction of a new umbrella into an otherwise rainy English landscape. It was only as I joined the throng heading towards the exit that I realized my bearded man was Mick Fleetwood, you know the guy from Fleetwood Mac. The funny thing is I hated Fleetwood Mac.

4000 people dead maybe, man that sucks… I know I should have something more profound, something that underlies the senseless brutality of it all, but what the hell can I say that 10,000 guys who write for the New York Times have said before. It sucks and not because it was Americans.

Mass death anywhere sucks, hell one death sucks, even if you didn’t like them very much. That’s why I would make a rotten god, because I hate loss, anyone anywhere.

I become obsessive about trying to stay in touch with old friends, because I don’t want to lose them …that part of myself… its those selfish motivations again. I go back to my old neighborhoods ones that I haven’t lived in for ages just to visit the convince store clerks… for some reason they always remember me. And it’s the little things they remember not my name, or what I do. It’s that I drink Coke and not Pepsi, that I prefer the cheap novelty candy to the more standard chocolate bars. They say the genius is in the details; the say the devil is in the details too…. Just who are they anyway, cause that’s pretty damn confusing. But I do think they matter because it really is the little things that we sort of…look foreword to at the end of the day, your more likely to reflect on dinner then on the profundity of your paper work.

See nothing is permanent, nothing it all changes eventually. In school they tell us the world will eventually lose it’s life in like 30 billion years. It still makes me sad, that in 30 billion years no one will be around to know what coke tasted like in green glass bottles. What cherry blossom trees look like in full bloom, they won’t know how beautiful my wife’s face looks in the morning before the make up and hair. And that kills me inside. It doesn’t matter that by that time the Moorlocks, or apes will overrun mankind or what have you.

The great pyramids, the redwoods of California, Chicago they are all just temporary. All our monuments and memorials will be lost in time like whether or not the guy who cleaned the floors of the 53 floor of the east tower of the world trade center preferred danish or donuts in the morning

I wish that I had something great to leave you with some parting shot of hope and light, but I have to return to that day… The day, after hours of Peter Jennings telling me that he just didn’t know, and the squawking voice of the radio offering only the familiarity of weather reports of distant but close places as a source of comfort. I had to leave and go outside, I am by nature not a nature boy. Nothing against the great outdoors I just prefer concrete to dirt… I just needed to walk, and I noticed that the trees didn’t know what was going on, and the squirrels were just doing what they do… gathering nuts for winter … life just did what it does, and I walked to a dairy queen and eat an Ice cream cone, because sometimes that’s all you really can do.

There is a new book out called “The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting: An Oral History” by Minneapolis super writer Jim Walsh, Its been making a lot of head lines here in my hometown, well because it’s the Replacements and it’s their hometown too. Here they are the stuff of legend, but I guess like all legends they didn’t start out that way.

What makes the Replacements difficult for me is that in the 90’s I worked for the label that launched them Twin/Tone or as it was know the TRG (Twin/Tone Records Group), during the Non-famous years post Suburbs, post Soul Asylum, post Babes in Toyland, and of course post Replacements. We did however have Lifter Puller, Brother Sun Sister Moon, Savage Aural Hotbed and some other bands that 90’s survivors might remember fondly I was the Director of Artist and Product so my task was to discover and develop bands. The Replacements were like this big drunken God that all of our bands would get measured against, and they would all suffer in the comparison.

Imagine Guns and Roses, biggest band in the world, Slash at the time worlds most famous guitar player quits and starts his own band “Slash’s Snake Pit” and you’re the Bass player. That is to some extent the definition of career suckatuide. Because it doesn’t matter if you’re a great bass player it will never be Guns and Roses. Now you don’t know this right away so you try, and then you try harder and you may get to be really good but it all gets lost not because of what you are, but because of what you are not.

The Replacements became sort of the gold standard that Mpls Indie Rock was Judged by well them and Hüsker Dü, and Soul Asylum and the Jayhawks …Ok there are a lot of bands that fall into that category but the Mats stand out a bit more today if for no other reason there are a number of books about them currently in the market.

I first heard about the Replacements from my friend Greg Holmka, he was the cool punk rock guy in Coon Rapids complete with fin Mohawk and Agnostic Front shirt, while I was token wanabe punk guy in carefully distressed clothes from Fridley. He started dating a girl I went to school with at Totino-Grace; she was very preppie and dated him mostly to annoy her parents. Greg had seen the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag (before Rollins ruined it.) and turned me on to the wonders and joys that were the Circle Jerks (ok that sounds really wrong), even the guy at Sun’s head shop knew him by name.

Greg became my Guru, I thought he could help leave my little private school life and discover the true punk rock me; he was the guy who showed me how to draw the perfect anarchy symbol on the left leg of my self ripped jeans, he showed me where to buy the DK button that would go on the right sight of my sharpie laden jean jacket, he showed me how to be a non conformist. Which in 1984 meant looking like every other angry at their parents fourteen year old. If only teenagers in youth movements could understand Irony, but then I suppose we never would have gotten EMO.

The entirety of my “Hardcore phase” was six months, it was a short tenure mostly because I got bored with a three chord vocabulary, and looking like part of a ragamuffin army, soon enough I was to leap on the much more embarrassing train of Goth, but for now I was still searching and destroying.<

One day while watching Repo Man for the sixtietrillionth time, Greg put on a cassette of a local punk band that he thought I would like and stop playing REM incessantly (which apparently could mess with my punk credibility), the tape was Let it Be, and the band the Replacements.

On first impression, I hated them. Not just dislike mind you, but truly hated them. The record seemed sloppy, and downright silly (Gary’s got a Boner?!). Perhaps had been recorded while being drunk- It was just so amateurish. The big question is were they Punk? This is the sort of things we debated for hours, like some sort of hipster student council, at the Zantigo’s downtown. I was confused, everyone called them Punk; they weren’t hardcore, these were songs and they weren’t political, Regan wasn’t mentioned once. They weren’t new wave; there was none of that polish and sheen. And they sounded nothing like the Clash, Siousxe or the Damned. That first listening experience left me with the very solid impression that they were the crappiest band in the world, and would never have the importance of a Jody Foster’s Army. I pushed the stop button on the tape, and put on a Die Kreuzen record.

Greg forgot the Replacements tape at my house; it sat in the stereo cabinet of our suburban Fridley home for about two months. By this point I had discovered the Velvet Underground, and would literally listen to nothing else. It was during this period of time that I had a very bad reaction to far too many caffeine pills, which in turn convinced me that I had been dosed with speed. Which lead to me doing many stupid things, not the least of which was running around the block in my boxer shorts singing “Run Run Run Jig a Jag a Jew-Scared to death of you, Say what you do”. My friend John who had convinced me to do this in the first place coaxed me inside thinking the best way to get me to stop running and jumping about was to put on some music –that wasn’t the Velvets. Of course he put in the Replacements cassette, this time however, I didn’t hear it as the mess it originally seemed to be. This time “I Will Dare” made sense. This time I too would dare. It was a golden moment, where the album was perfection. It was an epiffany that lasted until the pizza came, and was quietly forgotten in a post speed haze.

Greg took the tape back later that week, but wanting to try and recapture that moment I went to the Wax Museum at the Northtown Mall and bought the new Replacements record “Hootenanny”. I hated it. I didn’t play it again till 1989.

Eventually I did come to understand their genius; it took a long road trip to Chicago during which the driver played the entire catalog. It was the right context and I was now in possession of a much wider musical vocabulary; I was walking in the Skyway, after being colored impressed. Hell I even liked Gary’s got a Boner.

Sometimes my favorite music takes the longest to like. Maybe because it’s not about when it comes out rather when we are ready to hear it. In 1984 I just wasn’t ready, in 1994, well that was a different story.

During the interviews for the job at Twin/Tone the owner asked me what my favorite Twin/Tone golden age release had been, I responded with the Wallets. I never brought up the Replacements once during any of our conversations, when he asked me what I thought of them; I said they were my least favorite band, possibly of all time. Surprisingly they hired me.

Sacrificing bands to the shadow of long gone gods: pretty much how I spent the 90’s.
Not that we knew it at the time, we were just making records and playing shows and hoping to get some fans and make some scratch. It’s only after the game that we know why the play didn’t work, at the time you are far busy to see the game for what it is.

I am not suggesting that this is a conscious effort on the groups part, rather it’s an influence woven into the subconscious culture of the city. The bands today and even those of recent yesterdays don’t necessarily consider those bands of yore; but the press does. As does the rest of the machinery that makes up a scene: the stores, the clerks, the clubs, the bookers, the elder statesmen scenesters (read those who are over 30 and still go out); this is how the new talent gets measured and judged – will they add up? Sadly, the answer is almost always no. No band starts out ass a legend, but that is how they will always be compared. We will never have another Beatles, another Rolling Stones, a Hüsker, or Replacements, for the same reason we will never get another Einstein or Edison.

They got to the field first, and have the benefit of history washing away their sins, and reinforcing there deeds true or not.

Today is Veteran’s Day*, not that you would know it. Sure the banks are closed as is the post office, and I believe if you present your veterans card at the Sizzler you get half price off your entrée with the purchase of another entrée at full price, and of course the thanks of the nation.

America has a weird relationship with its veterans, well let me clarify it with veterans of wars other than World Wars one and two, or as they seem to be thought of “the good wars”. These are the wars that they make glowing documentaries about, the ones glamorized in a million movies, TV shows and every other kind of fiction imaginable. We fought the Nazis, liberated Europe, kicked Japans ass, and got the girl. With a minor obligatory nod to the people we fought along side, which of course was most of the world minus the Axis powers. Since there aren’t a lot of WWI vets roaming about, World War 2 is the clear cut noble war to talk about, at least as it’s presented in our history books, and the veterans of that are considered are greatest generation. They have become the basis of our modern mythology.

Not to take anything away from them, because lets face it they were pretty great. They were the shoulders that built the latter half of the 20th century. But lets look at the war itself. One of the reasons we can feel good about WW2, is that from the 21st century perspective it seems pretty clear-cut; we were attacked by Japan, who were at the time Hitler’s evil little buddy. Hitler was a bad man who killed a lot of people because of race and religion. Which is a pretty good reason to dislike someone. From today’s perspective it seems pretty black and white: Hitler was bad so we had to fight him.

Thing is, it really wasn’t that black and white at the time. Hitler had been working the genocide machine for close to ten years in Germany prior to the US involvement. Ten years of going yeah maybe we should do something, (Darfur anybody?) When we did get involved was when we were surprise attacked at Pearl Harbor, except now we know that the government was aware that Pearl Harbor was a very likely place of attack. Then the rumors abound that this was used by FDR as a setup to go to war. Before I get too far down conspiracy lane the point of the matter is that war is never a clear-cut simple thing. It has a multitude of purpose, civilized nations don’t go to war over just principles, and they go for principles and gain.

We talk a lot about freedom in Iraq, but freedom doesn’t seem to be a big motivator for action in Darfur, or Burma, or anywhere else that doesn’t have a lot of resources to offer.

When it comes to veterans of the not so easy wars, like Korea, Vietnam, the myriad of South American scuffles that made up the 80’s, and Gulf wars I& II, we tend to confuse the singer and the song. Some Vietnam vets found themselves booed when they got off the plane, we have progressed a long way since then, now we just ignore it. Your average US citizen is really unencumbered by the war, sure gas prices are higher but most folks see no relation between the two events. Citizens aren’t saving grease droppings like WW2, there is no rationing, in fact it’s the opposite, like it’s our patriotic duty to shop. What is the price of freedom? $12.99 at Wal-Mart (regularly 15.99, a $3.00 savings!).

Our current vets come home to lost jobs and indifference, and fighting in abstract war I suppose that it’s fitting, but it is hardly fair. We do have a tendency to confuse the soldier with the war, lets face it the Iraq war isn’t exactly popular amongst the masses. It’s a war, much like Vietnam, that we don’t want people to go to. Honestly, what war would we want to go to? No one outside of the members of the military and politicians really want war, and even a good chunk of them don’t like war but they understand it as a necessary evil.

Our vets are like a friend who we owe money to and don’t want to pay back; sure we owe them but for whatever reason can’t give it back. So we avoid them, don’t acknowledge them because we don’t know what to say. We return their bravery with cowardice.

Just the act of being of being a solider is brave, whether you’re on the front lines or in an accounting division, because you have to give up free will. Joining the army is like signing a contact to do as you’re told. They say jump into the abyss, and you jump regardless of the consequence. It’s a trait that I truly admire to have such faith in an entity that it will see you through. To have faith in your country without question, to follow an ideal even if you disagree with the administration or their execution of duty.

It’s a different job ethic from those of us who live in cubes, and feel gypped if there is not a cake for our birthday in the conference room. So for our current soldiers we put magnetic ribbon on our cars and every once in a while there is a news story about a plucky third grade teacher who gets a letter writer drive where anonymous citizens write letters to anonymous soldiers thanking them. What do we do to show for the troops that are back? Well they do that half off thing at the Sizzler.

*Well to be specific it’s only Veterans Day in America, and Canada, everywhere else it’s just a standard issue Monday.