Unseasonably warm temps this weekend, especially for the first week in November. Sunny and perfect Saturday, around 65. After running around all morning and day, was finally able to knock out some leaf moving and take the evening to burn some woody debris. It was a relaxing way to end another solid weekend.
Don't get it twisted. I'm liberal minded and even I can't stand my fellow leftists. I certainly have no patience for socially-conscious anybody or anything. And I realize that the White Panther Party of the 1960s had holes in some of their theories, including trying to blow up federal buildings. I'm a fat suburban blogger who can't figure out if he's more down for the hip-hop sound or too wrapped up in classic hardcore to know that either calling card, at 40, with a Labradoodle, a brand-new skateboard, and a baby on the way, is nearly farcical in its absurdity.
I work in an office. I wear sweater vests and oxfords. Mine is the model that revolutionaries, be they of the '60s or '10-and-beyond, seem to rail against. So, why do I love every syllable of this?
White Panther Party Statement
1969
We are the mother country madmen in charge of our own lives and we are taking this freedom to the people of America, in streets, in the ballrooms and teenclubs, in their front rooms watching TV, in their bedrooms reading underground newspapers, or masturbating or smoking secret dope, in their schools where we come and talk to them or make our music.. For the first time in America there is a generation of visionary maniac white motherfucker country dope fiend rock and roll freaks who are ready to get down and kick out the jams — ALL THE JAMS — break everything loose and free everybody from their very real and imaginary prisons — even the chumps and punks and honkies who are always fucking with us. We demand total freedom for everybody! And we will not be stopped until we get it.
We are bad.
There’s only two kinds of people on the planet: those who make up the problem and those make up the solution. WE ARE THE SOLUTION. We have no problems. Everything is free for everybody. Money sucks. Leaders suck. School sucks. The white honkie culture that has been handed to us on a silver platter is meaningless to us! We don’t want it!
Our program of rock and roll, dope and fucking in the streets is a program of total freedom for everyone. We are totally committed to carrying out our program.. We will do anything we can to drive people crazy out of their heads and into their bodies. We have developed organic high-energy guerilla bands who are infiltrating the popular culture and destroying millions of minds in the process.
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As a student, I had a habit of hanging around some sketchy people, who kept friends that generated even more suspect. We were in a bar in Detroit, Alvin's on Cass, drinking in the middle of the day -- getting really drunk, actually -- when one member of our party heard a break from the local public radio/college station announcing a ticket giveaway. Caller 10 gets 2 free tickets to that evening's lecture by reknowned expert on death and dying, Elizabeth Kubler Ross. Ross, an eloquent intellectual, was the mastermind behind the Kubler Ross Model, known to the rest of us as the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance).
One of the guys at our alcohol pool, Gino, politely excused himself from the table and when he returned, he announced that he was the lucky caller. He walked over to the station as we continued to drink and returned with not only the winning pair, but an extra pair he wrangled from the station, giving us four total. "This is going to be great," he said, as we kept drinking for another few hours.
We stumbled in the rain to the hall, arriving late and not at all subtley, with bluster and ruckus, we grabbed four seats and settled. I was trying to jam my closed umbrella under my seat when it hit the back of the chair in front of me. A man much older than my 22-year-old self turned around and scowled. We all kind of laughed a little. Kubler Ross, at this point, is about 10 minutes into her lecture. I shimmy around again, trying to get my coat off, and I accidentally hit the chair again -- and I feel really bad about this because I'm really trying not to be an asshole. The man in the row ahead of me turns again and says "Do you mind?"
"Sorry," I whisper, which probably sounded more like "Slorrwwee," as I was embracing, in my intoxication, my native tongue of Slurrvic.
Minutes later, a couple of the guys, Gino and Ben, are carrying on a conversation in somewhat hushed tones, but clearly audible by those in our immediate radius. The guy in front of me turns around and hisses like a cat. Those two stop, look at each other, and revisit their laughter and conversation. At this point, the people next to, behind, and in front of us, are all glaring in our direction. We're half-wet, fully smashed, reeking of smoke, and not at all respecting their ability to enjoy this lecture. The man in front, tired of all of this, very slowly and deliberately, so for dramatic effect we can very much see it coming, shifts his shoulders as he is about to turn around again and, this time, to probably tell us to zip it. He is not even fully turned around before we all fall completely silent as Gino says "This motherfucker turns around one more time, I'm jamming this umbrella of yours in his fucking ear canal." We all heard it clearly. The man in front of us heard it clearly, too. And he slowly returned to his looking-forward position, before standing up and leaving his seat. Problem solved.
One minute later, we are being canopied by two university security personnel. "Pack it up, boys. Time to go," we are told. As we are escorted out, we continue to make a scene, gesturing to people in their seats as we make our way up the aisle. "Enjoy the show," we say, giggling, staggering, and looking like complete assholes.
Not sure why we thought attending an Elizabeth Kubler Ross lecture, after drinking for about 4 hours, was a good idea. Nor am I sure how I felt justified in behaving like such a shit, ruining what was arguably a heady presentation by an internationally-recognized authority on the very delicate matter. What I do know is that I'm glad -- as I'm sure others might be -- that stage of my life has passed.
So, what does that say about people who talk on cell phones or to their companions while in the middle of a movie theater experience. If they're my age now, ignoring all social courtesies once the feature presentation begins, what is their excuse? I mean, I was young, drunk, and stupid. Maybe that makes them just stupid?
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This, for about a year and a half, was the door to my apartment on Detroit's far West Side.
It wasn't a bad place to live, until some shitheads came and shot up the side of the building, looking for the idiot in the apartment behind ours. I moved out 2 days later.
Loved the accordian gate, though. Very handy.
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It's like this, every day when I get home from work. Lamont is just not himself without his evening constitutional.
You know what it smells like outside in Michigan today? It smells like fall circa 1985 and I'm walking home from school at 15.
We lived within walking distance of my elementary school when I was growing up. I would later attend junior high in the same building that housed the high school. The school board at that time must've been higher than Willie Nelson because this curriculum scheduling plan made no sense.
It started in sixth-grade. The school's administration staggered the high school and junior high school class schedules. The high schoolers began their day at 7 a.m. and ended at 1 p.m. We began our school day at 11 a.m. and ended at 5 p.m. Evidently, they were comfortable with that two-hour crossover. It was weird, at age 11, to be in same hallways as 16- and 17-year-olds. That experiment lasted for a year.
When I entered the seventh-grade, the school's administration lopped off the sixth-grade classes and sent them, appropriately, to their own junior high buildings as those structures became available. That year, both seventh- and eighth-graders, and the high schoolers, had the same hours, from 8 a.m.-2 p.m., but they divided the school itself in half. My classes were on the east side of the building, my brother and his friends on the west. As eighth-grade year commenced, they lopped off the seventh-graders and put them with last year's sixth-graders, leaving a weird arrangement of grades 8 through 12 in one building. By the time I entered my freshman year, the junior high component in the high school building was fully eliminated and the building itself was strictly ninth-, 10th-, 11th-, and 12th-graders, as it should be. So, by the time I graduated, I had attended junior high and high school classes in the same building for 7 years.
And through all of those years, I was always walking home, either in the rain or through the snow, or in the dark, until I received my driver's license as I headed into my senior year. But before that, I was always walking, sometimes with friends; for an entire year with a girlfriend; and other times picking up a group a block ahead of me, or simply walking alone.
But I remember fall the most, with a recall so vivid it forces my soul to grin. Those in fields psychological call them imprints, an indelible memory that, for whatever reason, you just can't shake. It can be the color of a shirt someone wore to a picnic 30 years ago, the sound a car made when you were a kid, or the way that eggroll tasted a decade ago. The clarity of these memories is uncanny and generally not easy to explain. I have several, but arguably the most pleasant, the most striking, is simply walking home from school when I was 15.
Shuffling through leaf-strewn sidewalks on Johnson Street, ambulating home at 2:30 on a Friday, not at all regretful in knowing that I would be making the return trip 4 hours later for that night's football game, it's as clear right now, at age 40, than it was when it went down. It smelled like soil, like crisp, frozen ground despite the reality that winter, at this point, was only in a pending stage. It was a parade of adolescents, because at 2:30 in the afternoon, most adults are at work.
It wasn't like winter, where the trek required so much more effort, or you could occupy your non-thoughts by making and heaving snowballs. I remember one day with my long-time, I grew-up-with-that-guy friend of mine, Bear, jawing at a rival set of friends across the street about 2 houses ahead of us. "Fucking pussies!" we'd yell at them, and they would return fire with some vitriol that was every part dramatic but toothless in any practical application. Back in eighth-grade, I would sometimes be carrying home my band instrument, a device on which I never practiced but always managed to hold second chair. And this would be the story of my adult life for a great stretch, sacrificing effort in exchange for second-rate status. Shit, most kids I knew, if they didn't even try, ended up in the band room's last chair or with D's and E's on their report cards. I barely put forth an effort and managed with B's on the academic front, and in the shadow of Janet Barrett and her kickass trumpet-playing skills in the performing arts realm. My teachers at conference would tell my mother the same thing: He could be a top student if he just applied himself a little, and stopped dicking around in class all day trying to get a laugh out of everyone within earshot. But I never changed. It always stayed that way, even when I tried to be diligent and focused. I would take the B's and the second-chair every time. Are you fucking kidding me? If that's my score for barely trying? I could spend the rest of the time most would devote to attaining excellence by fine-tuning this fucked-up imagination of mine.
And I see Halloween like I did last weekend and I think of my first pull off a joint, one wrapped in leopard-print rolling paper; or the BB-gunfight Bear and I had between cars on a dark street after running around all Halloween night at age 14 -- one-pump rule, otherwise you could get hurt.
It was sweaters and boots, and swinging an ax in the backyard to cut the massive wood pile my father and brother had accumulated all summer. It reeked of five-on-five football in the street with button-hooks and slant patterns -- mapping out the play in the palm of your hand in the huddle, breathy and red-cheeked. Or when we played in a nearby field, blueprinting the complexities of the play in the dirt with a stick or fingertip, and then quickly erasing the diagram with a swift swipe of a dirty high-top Nike, a requisite subterfuge in the event your opponent tried to cross the line of scrimmage to eavesdrop on the play. It was that rare feat of punting the ball way past the corner in front of Sutter's house.
I draped myself like a couch in heavy flannel and hoodies, years before anyone had heard of Seattle-based music genres. You didn't need a calendar. When the nets came down at the tennis courts, you knew the throes of Fall had you, and had you very tight enough to nearly immobilize you. Breezy rides on BMX bikes; jammed fingers from basketballs too cold and hard to dribble; the aromatic goodness of leaf fires a block away.
I see leaves and I see 15 again, and I catch continued whiffs of that soil air, and I ache because I just want to cram it all into the kind of tank you see affixed to the emphysemic, strap on one of those rubber masks, crank it to high, break off the lever, and just suck it all in. I see this every October and November, and was stunned by it as it was happening then, and now continue to rile myself up with glee every season afterward because of it.
This will repeat every fall, until I die and blissfully, honorably become part of the same earthen glory that generates it in the first place.
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Each year, I split a partial Detroit Tigers season-ticket package with a friend of mine. As anyone who has read this blog may understand, I embrace many of the professional and college sports teams, especially the ones calling Michigan, or metro Detroit, home. I like my baseball and my football (both college and pro), and I like my hockey and basketball as well.
Attending a professional baseball game, if you're like me, is not always a cost-efficient occasion. Granted, I'm not like many fans who show up, pay $20 for premium parking, have countless premium drinks before the game, blow $30 on food in the park (if you have some kids with you, this is the least of what you'll spend on concessions), buy about $60 worth of merchandise and then call it a night (all the while not being able to name the guys playing infield and their correct positions). No, I direct my monies where I prefer them most. And don't even get me started on the social scene.
Tailgating has never been a big priority for me. I have been invited to some high-end, pregame affairs and, I will admit, they are nice -- a ton of food, shitload of booze and a general sense of mirth. But when you go to games by yourself, or meet friends down there on your own, as is my custom, you find your own way to make your fun. And my fun before a game sure as hell does not look like this:
I don't park in the stadium lot, and I certainly do not bring a goddamn grill with me, either. The baseball glove stays at home, too. And while this doesn't happen with every game I attend, I may frequently grab a tall can of beer to wolf down before entering the game, sometimes just sitting in the car on the street, with the door open, listening to the pregame on the radio, absorbing my city in this unreal sense of Me Time. This was my *tailgate* view on the second-to-the-last game of 2009.
My aforementioned friend and I attended a game several weeks ago on a Saturday. He was sore because his college football team lost that day. And when I pulled up here at 6:30 to park, about 3/4-mile from the ballpark, he asked me what in the fuck I was doing parking so far away, that he would gladly pony up an additional 10 bucks to park closer and not in such a shady area. I complied.
But when it's just me, I don't mind the walk. I like the walk, especially among these blocks, where I've been carousing for decades. I actually like shit like this. Do I wish that eyesore was instead a couple of condensed blocks of active businesses, a couple of restaurants, maybe a historical center committed to the city's glorious baseball past? Something in a brick-and-slate-meets-greenspace? Of course. But this is, well, you know where I am. That is not the reality yet, if at all. So, in the meantime, as I look about me, I appreciate what I see.
Still, other times, I'll drop in at one of the gin mills in the shadow of the ballpark. This is not to be confused, mind you, with the bars that are mainstays for the uninitiated. You won't catch me in Hockeytown, much less Proof, Cheli's or even the State. No knock on the people who like to hang out there; I just crave something a little more well-worn, a venue where you can sit at the bar and read the sports section with relative ease, where you can have a can of beer and a shot of something brown and warm and you won't have to drop a 10 to do it. If there are a hundred people who like hitting a particular bar before a game -- unless I am in the company of a majority who prefer to visit that place -- chances are I will go in the other direction, generally to places like this:
Yeah, right. Does this look like the type of room that's even remotely ready to house a baby?
I think with some tweaking, the career of Charlie Daniels could have taken a different path. I like how that, when the devil was looking for a soul to steal, he went to Georgia. What does that say about the Peach State? What, the devil couldn't check first in Tennessee? Buffalo? Medicine Hat?
If anyone does a remake, I offer alternatives to the opening line of his most famous song.
1. The devil went down to Hilton Head/looking for a challenging par-5.
2. The devil went down to Pep Boys/looking for a fuel filter.
3. The devil went down to Fort Wayne/looking for a Komets jersey.
4. The devil went down to Sao Paulo/looking for a zip line instructor.
5. The devil went down to the city clerk's office/looking for building permit guidelines.
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