We're Back From Oklahoma!

Here you go, Sly:

Oklahoma! Oklahoma! Oklahoma!

We just got back from Oklahoma, and I'm tired. I'll post more tomorrow (or something), but here are some highlights:

1. That is a loooooooong drive (12 hours).

2. Staying with my aunt was fun.

3. Iowa has disturbingly-named gas stations:

3.b. But it could be worse:

4. Everything in Oklahoma is red.

5. the OU campus is amazing:

I'll post more when I'm sane.

I'm Also a MySpace Monitor

I hate the radio. Even stations that play the music I like piss me off. I want to hear new music--stuff I haven't heard before. The more original the better.

But sometimes I just like to hear a form well executed. Here's a link to The Past Alive , who play traditional heavy metal music as well as I've heard in a while. The first song, "These Solutions," is kind of lame, but the rest is great. I'll probably post links like this pretty often, as I wander the net looking for different music.

This Is Why I'm Not a Poet

I love to play with language and ideas, but normally the language and the ideas take over for me, and I can't back away to make an artistic piece out of it. This also gets in the way of my fiction, but I have ways of dealing with it there.

So here's a poem that occurred to me while I worked yesterday. Keep in mind that I haven't followed the actual ode form--there's neither strophe, antistrophe, nor epode. I haven't chosen the Pindaric, Homerian, or Irregular form. These are just thoughts so far, with some wordplay involved. And it's probably too polemic to be a poem in any case, but I thought that loathing would be a fun, ironic twist to an ode. So here it is:

Ode to George W. Bush

The dimmest of bulbs, the dullest of knives,
I must admire his brass balls
            (or is it brainless conviction?)
as he and the knaves on his staff
send wave after wave of braver men
and women to needless, deadly tasks. Only the dumbest
dullards would praise the knob who wastes
the lives of noble soldiers to prove he’s a man. A lost cause,
but he can’t think his way
from here to there, from A to B,
from C to shining C-.
In the best of all ends
we hope to see that he’s
            at least as well
hung as Saddam was.

Yeah, and it's probably a bit too juvenile, too. But it makes me laugh. Plus, I just had to write it down, because it was distracting me. Now I can move on to my satiric short story about the invasion of Iowa.

Happy Birthday to Me.

Today's my birthday. And here ends a weekend of constant partying. Some of the parties were more raucous than others, but they were all celebrations of a sort. I've already mentioned Thursday and Friday. Saturday we went to Mankato for Cinco . . . er, Doce de Mayo. Diana knows how to lay out some food and beverages. It's too bad it's such a drive and I'm so old. I feel like I have to leave waaaaay too early, and I hate not opening and closing the party.

Then we did Mother's Day brunch at my brother's place and had huge omelets with my Mom, Jam, and Brigadoon. And their menagerie, which I like, because animals are fun. Last night we went to the In-laws' and Michele made a Greek chicken-and-pasta combination, with fudge-and caramel-sauce-covered chocolate cake for dessert. Mmmm. We played "basketball" with the Demon Nephew. He's a funny kid.

So we've gotten to my birthday. 37. That's an ugly number. It occurred to me that when I was still 36 that was kind of like 35 and I could convince myself I was in my mid-thirties still. Now I'm definitely hitting the end of the 30s and on to 40. Ugly. I still feel like I'm 25. Probably because I act like I'm 12. Michele and Mom visited me at work for lunch today and they brought me egg salad sandwiches, malts from Dairy Queen, and brownies with a candle I blew out. It was a nice surprise.

As for it being my birthday--I guess I'm pretty ambivalent. I don't like getting gifts, and I don't like getting attention (especially for merely not having died in the last year). And my birthday has been marked by negativity in the past. When I was nine I had chicken pox on my birthday. Happy birthday--don't scratch that.

The worst birthday I've ever had, though, was ten years ago today. That was the day I served as pallbearer at my grandfather's funeral. He was survived by my grandmother, the matriarch of the Beneshes. My grandmother--Gram--was an awesome woman. Tiny and always smiling, she had this charming Norwegian lilt to her speech, and still rolled her "r"s from a childhood (ninety years in the past) of speaking Norwegian almost exclusively. She was like Yoda--wise and hunched over. Except her syntax never twisted like the Jedi Master's, and she was much less green.

I emphasize Gram for a few reasons. Like I said, she was the unquestioned authority in the family, the matriarch. And her husband of sixty-nine years just died on Mother's Day. When she saw me she said, "Happy birthday!" and for a moment I'm positive that's all she was thinking of. One of my favorite people ever, and this is my last concrete memory of her. She died on Halloween, 2000. She was done. When Gramps died, she considered her work done. Her children were grown (and two of five had been buried). The grandchildren were all grown, and the great-grandkids were reaching adulthood.

I don't remember the rest of Gramps's funeral too clearly. We carried Gramps out of the little church where Gram had been baptized eight decades earlier and we put his coffin on the stand at the grave forty feet from the building. The wind blew the shelter and the coffin skirts, whipped them like it wanted them gone. We went to the church basement and smiled weakly over thin coffee and nineteen different Norwegian church-lady hotdishes.

Happy birthday to me. This year is much better.

On Being Social

I've been more social in the last month than I have in the last couple years. Last night we attended a going-away party for a Book Store co-worker, and that was fun. Tonight we met the guys at "The Bone," and it was a lot of fun, too.

When Michele and I walked in, Sly and his new woman, who I'll call "Indy" on this blog, were just finishing dinner. This was our first time meeting Indy, and it was predictably easy to get into a comfortable conversation with her. I've known Sly for 28 years, and we've been friends for 25 of those, so if he gets along with someone, I can be pretty sure I will, too. She's nice. We didn't get the chance to talk too much (just because there were a lot of us there, and a bunch of conversations happening), but I'm sure we'll get more chances.

The next person to show was a woman I'll call "Cameo." There are a few reasons to call her that, but one is that, though I've known her since fourth grade, I've only seen her two or three times since we graduated high school. The last time I saw her was at a bonfire at Sly's house about four or five years ago, and we caught up. It was fun. She caused me to remember things that I haven't thought of in years.

Then Sly's brother showed up with a co-worker. In the past I've suggested there's some reason to call him "Cat Puke," but I've also mentioned that this would be mean, and I won't do that. So instead, I'll call him "Hot Fuzz." Because I think it's funny, and he's a police officer. Ha. I didn't get to talk too much to Mr. Fuzz, but he did harrass me about not blogging enough. Then he left without saying "goodbye" or anything. So now I call him "Hot Fuzz."

Then Jam and his wife arrived. Jam is my brother, and, by extension, his wife is my sister-in-law. I haven't figured out what to call her yet. Actually, I have. I'll call her "Brigadoon." She knows why. I didn't get to talk to them much, either. What the hell was happening here?

There were a couple of no-shows. Hammer didn't make it, and didn't answer his phone. Of course, knowing his life he may have been in New Mexico or Walla Walla. Or he could have been ankle-deep in infant-feces. You never can tell with him. The Big Polack didn't make it either. I call him that because he recently mentioned to Sly that his pregnant wife is carrying around the Little Polack, and so Sly then called him the Big Polack. I think it's funny, so now I have a nickname for him. And one for his wife, who is now Mrs. Big Polack (unless someone can suggest something funnier, and I don't see how that's possible).

Michele spent the night loopy from her finals yesterday--my guess is that after a few days' rest she'll be alright. The smoke contributed to our need to leave when we did. You could practically chew on the air. Hooray for the Minnesota legislature passing a statewide smoking ban. I hope it sticks. It would be nice to go out for the evening and not come home smelling like ass.

It's nice to have the time to hang out with friends again. Now I need the schedule to settle down a bit so I can write more. I have two short stories doing really well. One of them is an old piece and another is brand new, and composed under the influence of George Saunders's CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. So it's weird.

One of Those Weird Thoughts That Enter My Head

Here's the funky thought that went through my head today, prompted by nothing that I can recall:

I'm a manly man from planet Mars. My body is incapable of producing tears, so I have to go to the shop twice a week to have my eyeballs oiled.

And here's the picture I found to illustrate this thought.

Me? I blame too much Monty Python in my adolescence.

A Busy Week

I had a lot going on this week. I worked nine- and ten-hour days at Book Distributor and my last few shifts at Book Store. Then we had a concert to attend, Michele's graduation on Friday night, and some landscaping at my mom's house yesterday morning.

I worked Book Store on Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday nights. On Wednesday my co-workers gave me a going-away gift:

Yep. My very own copy of The Cat in the Hat. There's a reason for this choice, though. The day I started working there was also Kurt's first day. Kurt's a couple inches taller than me, but he slouches, so we're about the same size. He wears glasses, and we really don't look much alike other than being caucasian males with some shade of brown hair. Nevertheless, Di couldn't keep our names straight, so she resorted to calling us "Thing 1" and "Thing 2." That stuck, so when it was time for me to go they got me this book and everyone signed it and lied and said nice things about me and it was kind of touching.

Thursday night we attended a concert at the Historic State Theater, which is a really cool place to see a show. We saw Loreena McKennitt there:

She and her band played Celtic-inspired pop-folk. Michele's a big fan and I don't mind the music, so we went. It turns out that the music's a lot more dynamic and compelling when played live. The musicians were all excellent, and even if there were too many ballads mixed in for my taste, especially toward the end, it was a good time. Didn't get home until midnight, so Friday morning was a bit of hell.


Then Friday night Michele graduated. She still has to take her finals next week, but never mind. She walked. Here she is with a couple of friends before the ceremony:

And then on her way into the auditorium:

And, finally, on her way out, empty diploma-folder in hand:

The pictures showcase my naturally-developed talent for putting the subject of a photo in locations other than the center, and my special red-eye-enhancement technique.

Then yesterday before the rain I went to my mom's house and cut down a couple little trees and chopped them up for disposal. Then I carried five or six rocks across the lawn, and then I scattered some grass seed.

Good thing I ditched the second job. The next couple months will be full of weekends like that.