SmokeSound

What on God's green earth is a person to think? Earlier this month, I delayed taking the Røyksund Fleet out of storage from a farm barn in Rosemount, and here we are--yesterday and today--at 95 degrees! I have two sprinklers going--well, actually, one is going: the other is stationary--and they are doing no good at all! The water comes out, but just as it touches down, it turns to steam, sterilizing and killing the plants. I drag-ass two hundred feet of hose, and when I sit down I generate a little steam, myself.  I assume sterility. It does not matter; not any more.  Here in Minnesota, we have climate change every few weeks.  After months of snow, the astroturf greens again, and the mosquitoes return, hitchhiking in the laundry of showbirds coming home. I used to daydream that it might be fun, someday, to take our boat to the Gulf of Mexico, but the boat is white.  I would go north, but trying to time when winter ice goes out and subsequent win...

The long-term cause of what is happening in our society is that we are losing our old industrial society.  It is doing what it did once for us, that is to say, moving to those places where old hunting and gathering and agricultural societies are ready for the next step, to those places where the raw materials are to be found (or accessed), and where agricultural wages make factory jobs look really good, even when those wages are far below ours, here. What we need to do is to look for the scientists.  They are exploring what it is that comes after the age of coal and steel.  It is they who are finding new energy sources, new ways to produce food, new avenues of communication, new understandings of what it is to be alive, and how life can prosper.  We need to go there!  We need to provide encouragement and funds to train more scientists, and more engineers and craftsmen (sic, sorry, shorthand) to turn their findings into jobs and a better life. ...

We are caught between a landslide and a landmine. The landslide is our economy, the crumbling decay of an industrial system, tumbling to be rebuilt into something new.  The landmine, exploding beneath our feet, was something we built ourselves, while our sight was failing:  a belief that we could become rich by selling each other silly putty. In all of human experience, until very recently, we have lived in three great "economies".  First, we were hunters and gatherers.  We killed other animals, and ate plant seeds, and fruits, and roots, and shoots. Such societies still exist, here and there, in overlooked corners of the world.  It was a wandering, nomadic world. About ten thousand years ago, or so, people figured out how to domesticate both plants and animals, making it unnecessary to tramp about to look for food, and making it possible to store surplus food.  That is agriculture.  Once, in our own nation, about 95% of our economic activity had...

Tea Party!  Sister Sarah!  Ayn Rand!  Raggedy And!  Rand Paul!  It is all so confusing!  Nothing makes sense!  The Republicans took a huge budget surplus and turned it into a monstrous deficit.  They did that, partly by cutting taxes on people who made a lot of money, and partly by refusing to include the cost of a war we did not need in the budget.  They hated big government and made it bigger.  They hated government regulation of private enterprise more than they hated Bill Clinton, so Wall Street invented ways to divide NYSE initials by 37.5, divide it by a formula for cough medicine, submit the remainder to an acrostic program, and sell whatever came out to people as a way to get rich without every knowing what it was they just bought.  When the roof caved in, they gave three trainloads of money to whoever could argue they were too big to fail.  Then, when the roof caved in, we elected Democrats, who said, "What happe...

Personally--very personally--I have only one reason to believe in God, and even that reason is not outside the bounds of the test of reason.  Beliefs cannot be allowed to run unchallenged by reason!  Else people would believe in the most outlandish things; things like eternal hellfire, an infallible Pope, men as the head of the household.  Things like that.  Well, anyone can understand that!  Otherwise one could just go up on the mountain during a thunderstorm, and come back with a backpack stuffed with wild assertions.  Here is my reason for believing in God!  It is a story of doubt and despair and overwhelming jubilation! Last autumn, I could not find my trusty old cordless Milwaukee 18Volt Hammer Drill Driver.  I have had it for years and had, in fact, just bought two new batteries for it.  Finally, I did a reasonable and logical thing:  I sat myself down upon my hindparts and thought carefully about where I had used it last....

The gems of Minneapolis are lakes.  Minnesotans do not know what to do with rivers, but they love lakes.  It is a bit less than three miles, to go around Lake Nokomis, but cumulatively, I have walked, there, several thousand miles.  Lovely miles. No one has a house on the lake.  All the houses are set back, behind a park.  You can own a house there, but all of us own the park, and the lake.  Park and Rec must be short of funds. No one wants to raise taxes to pay for what all of us want.  Perhaps, in all, we want too much.  We do not pay too much. Our taxes are at a sixty-year low.  The dandelions dominating the grass look like a mineature forest of frizzy palm trees, our of place, seeding their runaway domination of the common green.  Money is short. There is good time to blossom yellow, seed, and blow.  The commons is a pillow fight.  Had we been our own forebears, planning the City of Minneapolis, ther...

"If you, or a loved one, suffered serious side effects, or died, after taking Avantia, call. . . ." Now, where did I last use my phone, before I died? That reminded me of what I recall was a telephone company ad, that had to do with something you could wear to bed, "so that if you woke up dead in the morning, there would be a record."

We think we first visited "The Hubbel House" in Mantorville, Minnesota about twenty-nine years ago.  On our way back from Decorah, Iowa, yesterday, we drove west from Rochester to have dinner there, again. The Hubbel House remains as dark inside as it was then.  The restaurant was first opened in 1854, and has reluctantly conceded to electric lights or, perhaps more accurately, has conceded to reluctant electric lights.  Unable to read the fine print on the menu, which is a very good one, I read the place mat, instead.  It features replicas of some of the guests of the restaurant and inn.  The list began with "W. W. Mayo", father of the doctors who founded Mayo Clinic in Rochester.  A third-generation Mayo is there, too:  Charles W.  The name that caught my attention was "Ole Bull".  "My god," I said to Mari, "Ole Bull had dinner here!"  Well, as you all know, since all of you are keenly interested in Norwegian violinists, Ole B...

Once upon a time, in a land far away from everything that is evident now, a young lad--a fine young lad!--with adequate intelligence and a bad attitude toward authority, a combination which resulted in a crippling inability to memorize anything that did not have a kind of logic to it--things like dates, and names, catechisms--was herded by custom and community and a contentious religion toward a theological seminary. There you are!  The story of my life!  But now, for the rest of the story: (Think of that deliberately wandering first sentence as you might think of a speaker telling a couple of lame jokes before getting on to his lame speech!) I suppose I should say, in the interest of disclosure, that the fine lad in question had a fine experience in a parish in California before he went back to graduate school to clear his sinuses, resulting in an easy landing in the (then) 20th century.  It is not to late to get to the point:  in the seventy-plus years of m...

We must decide who owns marriage! If we don't assign marriage to the Baptists, or the Catholics, or the Mormons, or Somebody, we will never escape the mess we are in. Maybe it is because I have lived in Arizona, which shares a State border with Utah, where a good number of those (now) unofficial sects that affirm polygamy have settled, that causes something in me to wonder if having several wives might not be a good way to keep up with the laundry.  Or it might be something a bit hornier than that. It might, in fact, be evidence that stupid is stupid. On the other hand, maybe we should give marriage to the Southern Baptists.  Polls show that divorce is more common among religious groups in the South than anywhere else in the Country.  There appears to be some connection between damning divorce and getting one.  It might have to do with baptism by immersion. Personally, I rather like the way Catholics do it. They don't approve of divorce....

The musical, "South Pacific", earned a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1950, in the same year in which Eatonville High School awarded me a graduation certificate that I had not earned.  Yesterday, Mari and I went to the Ordway Theater in St. Paul to see the new Lincoln Theater Production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's gorgeous and powerful story of racial prejudice set in World War II.  Nellie, a military nurse from Alabama, fell in love with Emile, but turned away from him when she learned that he had two children from his marriage to a native woman. She could not overcome what she had learned, all her life, about racial intermarriage.  At the same time, Lieutenant Joe Cable, turned his back on a Tonkinese girl, for essentially the same reasons.  In a meeting between the two men, Joe said that racism is not born in people.  It happens, he said, after you are born.  It is something you learn. Then he sang, "You've got to be carefully taught". ...

"Who is Harley Refsal?", several of you asked, after reading the poem I posted in April.    I will tell you! Harley Refsal is a native Minnesotan, who was kidnapped by the fraudulent Vikings who carved the Kensington Runestone, and left in Hoffman, Minnesota, to be discovered by naive historians, who pronounced him to be a genuine Norwegian, probably descended from mountain stock somewhere in the middle of Norway. When he entered public school--the first time Harley had met anyone not in the family--his teacher said:  "I see by your utfit dat yew vas a Skvarehead!".  She hid him from the authorities who wanted to deport him because he could not speak English, and taught him English and Palestinian myths of creation.  Young Harley went to college somewhere, presumably-- there is no actual record from that era--and on to Luther Seminary in St. Paul, where Harley meditated on creation myths and the war in Vietnam, after which he did some othe...

I feel rather left out of the political process. No one has asked to see my papers.  I think it is because I am wrinkled and pink.  I don't like to say, "pink", but I held a gym sock up next to my face, and I definitely was not white. In the same kind of discouraging way, I used to say that my hair was gray, but everybody else said, "bald". I cannot bring myself to say my hair is pink. Barack Obama doesn't have that problem.  People want to see  his papers, and say that he has taken our country away from us, mostly because we elected him President, and he isn't white, or pink.  He is kind of brown, and that means he probably isn't one of us pinks. There is some doubt about that, I guess: some people call him a pinko; you know, a socialist, or maybe a fascist, or un-Alaskan. Most Mexicans aren't pink, either, nor are most Native Americans.  Or Asians.  Or Afro-Americans. In fact, most human beings aren't pink, which exp...