Musings

20 posts

On the Passing of North Dakota’s Nicest Man

The greatest friendships in life are often the unexpected ones—the ones you didn’t know you could or should look for. The other kid on the playground you didn’t notice at first; the random post from a kindred spirit on the internet; each one the unique support you didn’t even know you need.

When you make a major move as Jessica and I did four years ago, you of course hope you’ll find new friendships in your new location. But there’s always the lurking fear that you won’t make any new connections—especially strong friendships. Having made major moves before in adulthood, we both knew how hard this could be. Most adults our age are already balancing their life around established friends and family, and oftentimes their kids. Adding a new friendship to that equation rarely happens: the “Yes, we should do something sometime” statements are all too often not followed up on.

So it was wonderful to hear that Jessica’s new job included a lunchtime group of the people who worked near her in the library: amusing lines and anecdotes were repeated for me when she came home at night, and she told me that much of the lunchtime chatter passed over jigsaw puzzles that were painstakingly sorted and assembled on the break room table. Jigsaw puzzles have driven me nutty since I was a child, but they took on a new light for me here—if they were part of what was making my wife happy in this new place we had found ourselves in, they couldn’t be all that bad.

One co-worker’s name came up repeatedly: Randy Rasmussen. He was older than us—old enough to be in our parents’ generation—though he came across as anything but a stuffy relative. A genial, kind, witty man whose leukemia had recently gone into remission, it seemed like he had watched every TV show and film ever made (he had even published four books about movies!). Need to know something about Orson Welles or a Hammer horror film? Randy was your man. Want to talk about an episode of Bewitched? Randy was most definitely your man: Elizabeth Montgomery was the most beautiful, elegant woman who ever lived, if you asked him.

While maybe not yet a friendship, this workplace acquaintanceship seemed the start of one—for Jessica and me. I had begun to know Randy better as well, since I frequently came in to eat lunch with Jessica and the rest of her lunchtime crew. And so the weeks and months passed, with us getting to know Randy better and better.

He talked about about his vast movie collection and how he organized it, noting that he was going through the bookcase devoted to his favorites—watching one movie a night—determining if they still deserved a place on those hallowed shelves. He recommended movies to me and Jessica, describing Before Sunrise as “the best movie of the 90s” (we watched it and rather had to agree). And he mentioned valuing his days more, since the leukemia went into remission—that he found them all the more precious now. One time, walking back from the dining center, he noted one of his favorite spots on the University of North Dakota campus, where the English Coulee ripple-roared over a small ledge of rocks. Though Jessica and I had paused over that bridge many times before, we did so again, savoring the sight and sound anew.

Why is it so many of the best experiences are shared? A thing you find and love alone seems a softly singing solo, while sharing that same thing with another seems to transform it into a glistening harmony.

I find myself sitting and remembering so many things like this about Randy. Having him over in the fall of 2019 to listen to an old radio drama, “Sorry, Wrong Number,” a gem I had never heard of before. Eating a Thanksgiving meal with him just a few weeks later. And going to watch Knives Out last January. The theater was empty except for our group and it felt like we were watching it on a big screen in our living room, joking and talking during the movie like we never would with a larger audience around us.

Hanging around those happy moments from a little over a year ago was the news that the doctors were not happy about Randy’s numbers, that the leukemia might be relapsing. It was knowledge we did our best to ignore around the times we shared, though it grew impossible to do so as the covid pandemic took hold and he asked us to drive him back from the leukemia treatments that seemed to make no difference—Randy was not improving. We offered to drive him in as well, wanting to do more for him, but he didn’t like to be a bother.

If that were one thing you could fault Randy for, it was that independence and desire not to be a bother. At the same time, how dare I push in on his desire for independence and privacy, things I very much value myself? But helping him with his appointments and keeping up with him periodically was all Jessica and I had to give to Randy, and it never seemed enough. It wasn’t enough, or he’d still be here.

Which makes me even more angry—in a world where there isn’t enough kindness, in a year that was all too short on kindness, why did 2020 have to add leukemia claiming the nicest man man in North Dakota to its list of horrors? Randy may never have accepted the title of “nicest man in North Dakota” for himself—he was too nice to claim it for himself—but a friend of ours bestowed it upon him and I have yet to hear a person dispute that moniker who even passingly knew Randy.

Now, even though Randy passed away over a month ago, the anger still returns. The distancing required of the current covid pandemic makes it seem he still has to be out there, like everyone else I’m not seeing in person at the moment. He’s just a phone call or email away, right? My mind prefers to think like that, despite knowing better. When I accept it, though, when I remind myself fully that he is gone and that we will never eat lunch together again, I find myself grateful that I even got to know him. In the small space of time granted by his leukemia’s remission, there was an opening for the glimmers of a new friendship, and I will never forget that.

And I will always remember you, Randy, when I start a movie… when I walk across the English Coulee… and when I think about the all too few days and minutes that life gives us.

On the Hopeful Darkness of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Book Reviews Musings Recommended Reads

In a year already marred by insurrectionists storming the U.S. capitol building to dispute the results of an election in which hardly any instances of voter fraud occurred, I find myself comforted by Haruki Murakami’s best novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle—and disturbed by its all too accurate portrayal of the dark side of humanity.

Why is it that evil so easily seems to grow? How do the seeds of dissension so easily spread? Murakami’s novel rightly identifies media as one cause, with those who earn its seemingly random favor gaining a strange power to manipulate those around them. At one point the book’s main character, Toru Okada, is warned to be careful: “Those people are always glued to the television set. That is why you are so disliked here. They are very fond of your wife’s elder brother” (pg. 572).

Nor is it just being in media that confers power—it’s also how the media is used. Toru’s brother-in-law is so dangerous because he does not seem to hold any consistent values (other than the increasing of his own power). Rather than being problematic to his supporters and viewers, this lack of consistency actually works in the brother-in-law’s favor, which Murakami notes in a passage that will echo alarmingly to anyone who has paid any amount of attention to modern media (and politics), let alone the past week: “Consistency and an established worldview were excess baggage in the intellectual mobile warfare that flared up in the mass media’s tiny time segments, and it was his great advantage to be free of such things (pg. 75-76).”

It’s not all down to the media of course—hatred and evil find other ways to spread… sometimes in ways that are hard to understand and can almost seem like a tidal wave. In a passage that is by turns hilarious, disgusting, and soberingly accurate, Toru captures this phenomenon by telling the story of the monkeys of the shitty island.

‘Somewhere, far, far away, there’s a shitty island. An island without a name. An island not worth giving a name. A shitty island with a shitty shape. On this shitty island grow palm trees that also have shitty shapes. And the palm trees produce coconuts that give off a shitty smell. Shitty monkeys live in the trees, and they love to eat these shitty-smelling coconuts, after which they shit the world’s foulest shit. The shit falls on the ground and builds up shitty mounds, making the shitty palm trees that grow on them even shittier. It’s an endless cycle […] What I’m trying to say is this: A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propagating itself with its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it—even if the person himself wants to stop it. (202)

If one can’t tell from the humor of that ingenious passage, Murakami is incredibly apt at making heady moral and philosophical ideas accessible. But he is especially able to do this because of the ordinariness of his main character. Not unlike Bilbo in The Hobbit, Toru Okada is the best possible protagonist for this kind of narrative. He is so utterly normal, so utterly grounded, it’s hard for a reader not to appreciate his stability, even as bizarre, otherworldly things begin to happen. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a Haruki Murakami novel, after all, and that means you’re in for strange, psychic dreams and dark netherworlds that wouldn’t feel out of place on the X-Files or Twin Peaks (as I noted in my review of Murakami’s Wind/Pinball).

Just in the first chapter alone, a strange woman keeps calling Toru on the phone, insisting that he knows her very well, even though he doesn’t recognize her voice or manner at all… before she takes the conversation in a in a racier direction (“Oh, great. Telephone sex,” Toru thinks to himself before hanging up on her). And then the teenaged girl Toru meets while searching for the his lost cat seems to be rather morbidly obsessed with death. Everyone he encounters is a little strange, a little off, and Toru’s equanimity in encountering them all keeps drawing the reader in.

The balance Toru brings only continues as the aforementioned psychics and strange dreams start to arrive in the novel’s narrative. “What does it all mean?” any reader is bound to ask, but Toru’s even-keeled nature and the connections that are revealed between smaller strange events lead a reader to trust that all the bigger ideas and mysteries Murakami is juggling will come together somehow. And they do—thanks much in part to why this oftentimes somber novel is able to comfort me. Even as Toru uncovers a human darkness that grew out of some of the darkest events of World War II—itself one of the darkest times in human history—he finds a group of like-minded souls, individuals that have learned (or come to learn) how to feel for their fellow humans and to help them.

Still, it all seems so fragile, so impossible. Toru Okada is out of work and his cat has disappeared, shortly before his wife disappears as well. And his primary antagonist is his wife’s elder brother, a rising media star and politician that has all the power and all the cards. It begins to feel like there’s no way that Toru can win and unravel the mystery of those missing in his life, no matter what friends he finds on the way.

But if a small group of humans can continue on, healing the world around them—no matter how high the cost—maybe it’s okay to feel some hope as my own life has been hit by a real-life media (kind of) star and politician that is wreaking his own brand of havoc on this world that I love so much. Like Toru, I choose to descend into the darkness again, for those who seem to be lost to it… unless I can help them find their way out.

On ‘Opinions, Everybody Got One,” As Opposed to “Us Versus Them”

Musings

(Important, pre-blog post note, as this was drafted three weeks ago: opinions are opinions and not to be confused with facts)

One of my favorite movie lines comes from Platoon and John C. McGinley’s war-weary Sergeant O’Neill: “Excuses are like assholes, Taylor, everybody got one.” A recent article I read in The Atlantic reminded me that you could say much the same for opinions.

In her piece, titled “Singles and Couples Are More Divided Than Ever,” Ginny Hogan describes an added relationship dystopia to the bleakness of our current Covid-19 situation. If one were to believe what she describes, people in relationships are a bunch of arrogant a-holes, flouting social distancing recommendations, pausing their 24/7 lovemaking sessions to proudly tweet that there is no one else they’d rather quarantine with, and rubbing this romantic bliss in their single friend’s faces when they check in to see how they are doing. In a truly baffling passage, Hogan bristles at “coupled” acquaintances and family members asking how she’s doing all alone. “The idea that I need the company or validation of a man so badly[…] is genuinely offensive.”

Hogan walks back some of this straw man hyperbole near the article’s end, yet she still closes her piece with the hope that the rupture between those who are single and those who are in relationships will not persist when the pandemic ends.

The problem with that? Opinions are like butts: everybody got one. Once we’re Covid free, singles aren’t going to stop liking their singlehood for the time being (or for some, wishing and longing they were not single). Relationship holders are not going to stop loving (or pretending to love) their relationship. And meddlesome relatives and friends aren’t going to stop suggesting to the single person they know that the right man/woman/person for them might be just around the corner.

Because why? Let’s check the list, shall we? People have butts. Check. Oh, and yes, they have opinions. Check.

Perhaps I’m taking the article too seriously. Articles gotta articulate, publications gotta publish, and writers gotta write and pay the bills (and have opinions), after all. Just ignore it and move on.

I wish I could, but this is a tribalism–a dichotomy–that I have run into time and again. When I and my then fiancee told people that we did not have an engagement ring, there were choruses of voices, defending the choice to have an engagement ring, and even arguments that Jessica really did want a ring and was just pretending (“Neal,” she said, “I would never play games with you like that”).

And when we decided we were not going to have children? It’s difficult to find a more contentious debate. Opinions among the childfree can range from “we like kids, but don’t want our own,” (an opinion Jessica and I share), to being among the most vociferously hateful I have ever heard, calling those with children “breeders,” (like we’re all stuck in some Mad Max film, lorded over by some neo-gothic warlord in leather pants named Killer McKillerface). On the other side of this divide are those who tell friends and family members considering not having children that “you’ll change your mind some day,” a line of reasoning that builds up to doctors refusing to provide sterilization procedures to adult men and women when they ask for one. And that’s before you even get into the usual grass-is-always-greener argument about who has a happier life with or without kids.

If everybody got opinions, are we condemned then to stand in our wrongness and be wrong and get used to it (no matter how amusing it was when President Bartlett said it on The West Wing)? We could, I guess. We’re kind of trending there more and more, it seems like.

But that’s only if we assume that because we have opinions (and butts), those opinions are also absolutes. Just because Jessica and I didn’t have an engagement ring, and just because we don’t have kids, doesn’t mean we begrudge other people those things. There are elements that are out of control when it comes to engagement rings and weddings, but the ideas at their core are of luminous beauty and nothing to begrudge. Even if I did not find them luminous, it’s a far better world where I allow them to be for others who do find them so.

There are certainly people who would begrudge and not allow, of course, those who would build a wall around those of their own opinion to keep those against them far and away from their vision of how things ought to be, believing that the separation they have created means they will no longer be affected by those they have put on the other side of their fortifications.

What if, instead of focusing on how everybody wants to not be affected by the opinions of other people, we instead realized that we are always affected by other people’s opinions? If we were not already affected by those we call “other,” walls would not be argued for or created. What would the world look like, if we just accepted the reality of everybody around us having opinions–and the requisite differing of those billions of points of view?

There are limits, I know, to humanity’s understanding and capability. But my friends, my friends, we have set up our walls so far short of those limitations.

On “City of Lakes” Versus “Minneapolis is Burning”

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Musings Slice of BFS's Life (memoir)

I lie down this past week and can’t sleep. Not from visions of little coronaviruses dancing, (well, mostly not, anyway): Minneapolis is burning. As the protests over George Floyd’s murder spread across the country, as politicians and society argue over what it all means, as people from outside of the Twin Cities may or may not be trying to co-opt true calls for justice, I can’t stop thinking about the Minneapolis I grew up in–the Minneapolis that I love.

My childhood home stands a mere five miles from the 3rd Precinct building that was burned last week. A year ago during a return visit, I drove through the same neighborhood: the drive filled with the warm ache of memory at the very street signs that seemed to scream Minneapolis to me. And the central location for much of the last week’s activity–Lake Street–is one I know well: I frequently drove down Lake Street while commuting to a substitute teacher job at Minnehaha Academy, the shop-lined urban streets slowly giving way to rows of houses and spreading trees and then a bluff, overlooking the blue and brown swaths of the Missisissippi.

There are a lot of Lake Streets across the country, but it’s particularly appropriate in a metropolis nicknamed The City of Lakes (there are 22 within the city limits). In the hot, humid days of summer, we would bike west to Lake Harriet or Bde Maka Ska (recently renamed from Lake Calhoun, its former moniker inexplicably taken from a notorious States Rights and pro-slavery senator from South Carolina in the early 1800s). I didn’t know then how lucky I was to be within biking distance of a lake with a public beach. I live near nothing like that now, and it’s not lying to say I miss it with the sharp pang of loss. And nothing against rivers, but there’s something about the expanse of a lake that holds the mind more peacefully.

Of course, there are incongruities to memory. Things excised, things brought forward–the mind and desire altering things in ways you don’t realize until reality presents the contrast to you with crystal clarity. During that return visit to south Minneapolis, the Washburn Park Water Tower was just as awe-inspiring as I remembered it to be (how many stone water towers have you seen whose curved bases are flanked by warrior statues?), but the hillside on my old block just wasn’t as steep as I remember it being. A long and gentle decline in actuality, my grade-school memories have equated walking or biking up that thing to Everest.

And then comes this past week, which has me remembering again how my family would generally bike west or southeast for family outings. We’d go north to visit my dad’s work in the downtown area, but there were areas we skipped between there and where we lived, taking Interstate 35W more often than not. I remember always having the feeling that the farther north we went on the residential streets, the more dangerous things got.

Where did I even get this feeling? It was more than the normal fear of leaving familiar surroundings. Was it family? The chatter of kids on the playground and on the bus? It’s one of those social and cultural things we just absorb without realizing it. I’m quite certain I did absorb it, too. A few years back, when my wife and I revealed we had driven down Lake Street on the way to the Mississippi, words were said to the effect of “Oh, isn’t that a little rough?”–an attitude and meaning coded to say it maybe should have been avoided, coding I had seen and heard before for lower income or more diverse areas.

Against the backdrop of my Minneapolis memories are a record needle scratch of hard realities and statistics. Whites are generally happy and healthy in Minnesota, but minorities are much less likely to be in the same boat (education rates follow similar trends). And in Minneapolis, police fatalities flip its racial demographics: in the past 20 years, Blacks make up about 20 percent of the population, yet they account for roughly 60 percent of police fatalities (whites are 60 percent of the population but only account for about 20 percent of fatalities).

So which is Minneapolis? The beautiful memory of my childhood? The burning city raging at its differences and inequities? (The dream or the nightmare, as Ibram X. Kendi stated in a similarly tracked article I was surprised to discover as I wrote this particular paragraph in this particular essay?)

For me–and I may be wrong–both exist. The beauty of Minneapolis is still there this week, in its places and in its people: from the shores of Lake Harriet and Bde Maka Ska to its residents coming together to help their community. And the darkness is still there, from its police terrifying residents off of their porches to “maintain order” to a semi loaded with flammable materials almost plowing down dozens of protestors on Interstate 35W (on the same site of a tragic bridge collapse nearly twelve years ago). Acknowledging the blissful side and not the other leads to a dysmorphic view, as unhealthy as one of those photoshop disasters where people try to make themselves look more attractive and end up with something completely alien. But is it foolish to hope we can change? That we can lessen the nightmare Kendi describes in his article?

We’re too far from any utopia to think it’s closely in reach… and part of our problem has been pretending we do live in a kind of near utopia. The fault lines this belief has created have kept far too many of us up late at night this past week–while lulling some others to sleep with judgmental thoughts for those protesting.

I cannot and should not go back to the security blanket of nostalgia and privilege, to the gentle hum of hammocks in tree-lined backyards and neighborhood games of kick-the-can: yet I can use those images to motivate me, to help me continue to notice the unevenness of the country I live in… and to act in ways that help bring the nightmare closer to the end. For everyone.

On Slowing Down Time…

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Creative Nonfiction Musings Slice of BFS's Life (memoir)

Photo by sinkdd on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

A shot from The Descendants has really stuck with me. The movie was filmed in Hawaii and is filled with gorgeous images, yet the particular shot that stood out to me is in no way one of the most spectacular or important: it’s not a rise of green mountains or a sweep of verdant countryside falling gently towards a far-off beach. It’s just a small, roadside creek, with occasional drops of rain hitting its gray surface. The water’s surroundings are rough and non-descript enough that you could almost wonder why the director, Alex Payne, kept it in.

But of course, it’s there for a reason. The short segment, inserted between more hefty moments of character interaction, is the kind of pause a movie needs to create its mood, to get its viewer to think what they need to. It’s also what the characters of the movie need to do, in order to cope. If a story is going to center around a family dealing with a loved one (a wife, a mother, a daughter) being taken off life support, you can’t rush it around like some frenzied action picture. You need space.

That idea kept coming back to me. Sure, we all know the “stop and smell the roses” line, but I keep returning to that phrase from new angles. Seeing it as the concept of giving yourself space, I am more strongly confronted by the idea behind the cliché. Or maybe even more so when I consider it as an image: of sitting and watching rain drops ripple outward in a small creek. Not running to the next thing like we always do or staring at some screen (only half present), but just sitting. Witnessing.

Those times on the beach at camp, when I looked overhead and saw the Milky Way spilling its way across the heavens. That time I was driving by a lake on my way from high school, a lake I had seen many times before and that was so repetitiously calm and blue that I hardly glanced at it most days, but on that fall day it was somehow transformed into large waves and a surprising, pewter gray—we never think of gray as being beautiful, but it was alive under a glowing, cloudy sky, somehow its own source of light—and I found somewhere to park nearby so I could stand by its edge and just take it in.

I’m twice the age I was at those moments and they still feed me now.

They’re not my only moments I come back to—I have many of those—but I’m never going to have so many of them that I could never use more. It’s making me wonder why I don’t sit and witness more often, even as I struggle through the end of a busy semester, which has made it increasingly hard to stop, cope, and give myself space.

Maybe the most annoying thing about clichéd wisdom like “stop and smell the roses” is how hard it often is to follow.

On Knowing Yourself and How Men Can Be

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Creative Nonfiction Musings

It was a hard line to swallow back in my college years. ‘This isn’t true,’ I thought. I was reading The World According to Garp for a Contemporary Literature course and reacting to this line: “Rape, Garp thought, made men feel guilt by association” (p. 209).

‘Why would I feel guilt about that?’ I said to myself. Rape was anathema, an abomination. Some men out there might do it, but they were not me, and I would most certainly condemn anyone for doing such a thing. To my mind, it was like feeling guilt about someone murdering someone else.

In the eighteen years since that reading, I’m agreeing less and less with my initial reaction. On the one hand, I still agree with my earlier feeling on personal responsibility. You are responsible for the things you choose to do, and the buck stops there. This is a good and important way to think about how the world works: what are you personally doing about an issue, within your ability to do something about it?

As the years passed, it was increasingly impossible not to acknowledge another troubling part of the equation—how men, as a group, can be. Of course I knew about the stereotypes and had even witnessed it, but I tended to avoid situations where such talk happened, and the type of men (or boys) that engaged in such talk. I didn’t care for their behavior. Still, though, I had encountered this attitude when I was with other men—the actions or words that were seen as okay because I was a fellow man. And I had to think about what that meant.

Like the time on the bus in late junior high, when a guy was talking loudly about how he would ask a well-endowed female student what her shirt said, so he could get an easy look. He was technically talking to the guys circled close to him (I was a few rows up and not a part of the conversation), but we were all on a sports team and there were no girls on the bus. I heard more than a few knowing laughs in response. For my part, I felt ill. I understood why the guy would want to look, but also felt terrible for the girl. It was like we were all leering at her collectively.

Or the time in high school when I was walking next to another guy I hardly even knew. We were part of a group headed to a concert, and directly in front of us were two of the girls in our group, one of which he was kind of sort of starting a dating relationship with (one of those hard to follow high school relationships). For reasons still unfathomable to me, he gave a nod at the girl he was dating, waggled his eyebrows at me, and mimed grabbing her rear end.

I was horrified and startled, and this clearly showed in my raised eyebrows and facial expression, since he quickly started talking about something else. Much of my time at the concert that night was spent wondering how to tell the girl what this guy was really like. I kind of knew her, since we were in the church youth group together, but I didn’t know her that well. I settled on telling a friend of hers that I was much closer to so she could pass it on, but I’m still not sure if that was the best thing to do or if it even did any good (I didn’t see much of this guy or the girl he was kind of sort of dating after that point).

I’ve heard far too many stories that are similar, and many that are much, much worse. About eight years ago, I was reduced to a pulse-pounding rage when I read a blog talking about the things often suggested by male college students to women in their classes (either verbally or via text). It would have ticked me off regardless, but I’m a college teacher: no student should have to put up with sexually harassing comments from anyone. I often think of my students as my kids, my family, and if there is one thing you do not want to do around me, it’s mess with my family.

Given these, the stories we’ve all been hearing since the Harvey Weinstein revelations confirm what I already knew—we’ve all been sitting on this iceberg. Men in groups and men alone can feel entitled to say and do things that reduce women to objects, making it easier to harass or rape them.

I think men can be better than this and I know so many men that are better, but it doesn’t change that I am part of a group that has this tendency. When I’m walking alone in a parking lot at night, any woman I meet doesn’t know my background or feelings about all this, they can just tell I’m male, and therefore, a part of that group with that inclination. I hope I don’t cause fear like that, but I am forced to accept that it is a possibility. That guy I hardly knew in high school only needed to know that I was male to think I would agree with his actions.

That’s really what that John Irving quote (which is a similar realization for Garp) is all about—that if you are a man, you are a part of this group that has demonstrated this leaning, time and again. It’s a call to self-awareness and knowing what you are, warts and all. This kind of thinking is not a comfortable one for anyone, as is made far too clear by the many men pushing back wholesale against the #metoo movement, or tweeting utterly baffling things like “Can I even smile at a woman anymore?”

Of course you can smile at women if you’re a man. The issue is when you start expecting more than that—when the woman crossing your path in the dark parking lot should have reason to fear. When the woman sitting next to you in class has to wonder if you’re going to talk to her about the homework assignment or make a suggestion about how she can sexually gratify you. When your co-worker has to wonder if you appreciate what she brings as an employee to the workplace, or if you’re wondering if you could get a little something more from her, be that a date or just someone to take care of the office party because “that’s what women are good at.”

The crux of all this is knowing what expectations you are putting on yourself and others. If you’ve never examined those and their repercussions, you’re probably in for some discomfort (you probably are even if you have put some time examining those… I know I can still feel it). The danger of not asking these questions is losing out on your potential, at being mastered by the expectations you never stopped to consider.

Mastery. It’s the focus of a book I just finished, and very much relevant here. In Ursula K, Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, the main character is a man as powerful as many men want to be. Magic comes to him easily, and he learns far more quickly than his fellows. Yet the central thing this mighty protagonist must face is not some external power (a dragon, another wizard, etc.), but his own shadow, his own darkness. A thing of his own creation that threatens to subsume him.

The wizard perseveres not by winning, but by naming the shadow and acknowledging it as himself. It takes him some time to recover from the encounter, but once he does, he laughs, because at last he is free and healed. As the book notes, he has become, “A man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life is therefore lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark” (p. 143).

Now that is something worth being. That is something worth striving for. It’s not a path easy to begin or continue, but it’s the one worth pursuing—for all of us.

On School Shootings and Stories That Never End

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Musings Slice of BFS's Life (memoir)

Columbine happened not long after I graduated from high school, and it disturbed me to the core. While it wasn’t the first such mass shooting, it was the one that slapped me awake. Nor did it seem outside the realm of possibility for it to have happened in the school I had just graduated from. After all, there weren’t (and aren’t) all that many dissimilarities between a suburb in Minneapolis and a suburb in Denver.

The following year, I began working through my confusion in the way I knew best, by writing. I didn’t really know what I was going to say, just that something needed to be said. What can lead someone to go to a school full of people they know and try to kill them? What does this say about us, the society where this is possible? I was horrified by these questions and not particularly sure if (or what) my answers would be, but I was determined to try.

It took a long time to write my book. A long time. Part of this was needing to figure out my writer self, but part of it was finding what needed to be said. Community was a part of it, some wise part of me seemed to know (I knew it before I even realized how true it was). These things don’t just affect one or two people, but everyone: the school and its local area, the state, the country, even the world.

So I had to discover my fictional community and write stories about it. From one character and his relationships, I found another and another, until I found I was slowly uncovering an entire tapestry of stories, one that I could never completely reveal (or could be written about in just one book). But I had, at last, a book that suggested at that larger collection of untold tales.

In all these years since I began writing, things have only gotten worse. As the New York Times noted, the shooting in Benton, Kentucky, on January 23rd was the eleventh of this year. The eleventh, just twenty-three days in.

And we’re past that count now in February, aren’t we?

For all that regularity, however, we’re no better at dealing with these things. We may make our schools—those who work there and study there—undergo active shooter drills, but as far as actual prevention, or coping goes? If anything, we’re regressing. We are so inured to the fact of these things that we almost have our responses down pat. The battle lines are drawn, and it’s World War I trench warfare at its worst.

In all the tumult of one side denouncing the other, however, I don’t see as much discussion of the most important aspect of the problem. Gun control certainly is a part of it (and there is a possible bridge between responsible gun ownership and better regulation of these potentially lethal weapons), and mental health may be as well, though the connection between that and mass shootings is debated.

The thing we so often miss is what I uncovered in trying to write about these tragedies: community. And while I do see people tweeting and writing about the heroics of those trying to save others, and about the lives of those involved, those narratives tend to be buried (or used for further ends). Particularly the day-to-day lives of those affected, before and after the event everyone is so focused on. Because those stories never end.

Are these stories ever connected, too. We all live in communities, surrounded by other people, and each of us has a propensity for good or bad, love or hate. And try as we might, we cannot legislate love. We cannot dictate how people interact with each other, lest we become dictators ourselves. Boundaries or guidelines may be suggested by laws or constitutional amendments (or under some other organizational name), but how each of us relates to those others in our community is what really decides the outcomes of our stories.

I know, I’m tired too. I’m weary of the sudden spike in my chest whenever I hear of another shooting, knowing that we’re undergoing yet another trauma so common that it has become difficult to register.

Even as we hear about them, though, think on how you relate to those in your community, be it locally, nationally, or internationally. As you argue your point of view (goodness knows we all have them), think long on how you are arguing for it, and the implications of arguing for it. Because the root, the very root of these tragedies is anger and lack of empathy, no matter how one arrives there.

If you’re going to pull the trigger and kill another human, let alone many other humans, you must see them not like you, but as a problem worthy of hating and eradicating. That the only solution is their removal, as quickly and dramatically as possible.

The first step in response for all of us then, no matter how foolish, no matter how rose-tinted glasses it might seem, is to love. To reach out. Anything else is a step back into the abyss.

Random BFS Thoughts

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Humor Musings Random BFS Thoughts

What with the school year starting and the requisite getting the brain in teaching gear (amongst other things), I just haven’t felt up to a blog post. But as a recent tweet showed, I am capable of random thoughts or quips, and since I am beginning to work again on a novel with a rather random main main character (who likes to make random notes about life), how about I provide nine random BFS thoughts for your delectation and delight? You can thank me later.

1. Why must every new endeavor be fraught with self-doubt and fear?

2. Why can I never do teaching prep during the summer, when I have plenty of time, but need the no-time frenzy of the school year to prepare?

3. Why don’t people like to wash pillow cases and towels with other types of clothes? They’re seriously all rubbing against you at some point.

4. To go back a bit to #2, no seriously brain, why do you need the panic of a deadline to get things done?

5. Why do students so often do what you tell them not to do?

Me: “Explain your thinking! Don’t just tell me what you think this document’s purpose is, tell me what clues in the text are making you think that.

Students: “We think this document’s purpose is to be informative.”

Me: *facepalm*

6. Why did the federal government stop providing federal aid to post-secondary students who are taking a junior-high level class at the post-secondary level? I mean yeah, you would hope they would have learned what they needed to in junior high, but if they’re testing at that level after they graduate high school (or after they move to our country), how else are they going to learn this stuff? They can’t go back to junior high, can they?

7. Why is my brain waking me up an hour before I need to get up this week, then making me feel tired the rest of the day? Is it possible for parts of your body to want to mess with other parts of your body? Or is this generally just a brain thing?

8. To go back a bit to #6, does this mean the federal government has a secretly funded time machine program that they’re going to use to help students in need of some remedial education?

9. To continue thinking about #6, who would be watching the watchmen in this scenario, making sure Timmy didn’t use this opportunity to actually get the girl of his high school dreams to go to prom with him?

On Unlooked-for Humor

Creative Nonfiction Musings

Is unlooked-for humor the best humor? I said it was the other night on Twitter when I was surprised by Revanche’s random quote from Galaxy Quest: “By Grabthar’s hammer, what a savings” (seriously, I can just see the annoyance and disdain on Alan Rickman’s face as his character is forced to say his catchphrase). I was amid a sea of depressing news and thoughts, and this hilarious line from out of left field made me laugh out loud (not that “LOL” thing, which often only means you found something amusing).

While things are almost always funny because they surprise us,* that’s not quite the way I meant it when responding to Revanche. We often experience humor when we’re looking for it: comedic movies, sitcoms, late night shows, you name it. But to my mind, the best humor is unlooked for humor, the type that arrives when you are otherwise preoccupied, sitting on the couch with serious thoughts, perhaps with darkness on the horizon.

This conviction has been quite settled in my mind for some time, made particularly concrete by the large amount of time I spent in hospital waiting and recovery rooms about thirteen years ago, when my father’s cancer was being treated. Aside from the memory I’m about to share, the thing I remember most from that time is the smell: the hospital stink. More than the remembrances of my dad in his hospital bed or the people from our church that were wonderful enough to visit is that god-awful smell of the hospital. I can summon it to mind even now, that antiseptic, artificial, non-living stench.

I suppose some could attach it to cleanliness or something at least a bit more positive, but I cannot. While the doctors were quite hopeful for being able to deal with my dad’s cancer and his recovery, lingering in the back of my mind was the knowledge that this was cancer, those damn rebellious, screwed up, abnormally growing parts of your own body that can kill you. The thoughts were there, just like the smell, refusing to be ignored or to go away.

They were worst the evening of the operation, when we sat in the waiting room with them just hanging about. I eventually had to get up and take a walk—I couldn’t sit there for one more minute—and I inevitably found the cafeteria, which was completely deserted, all the places to buy food closed up. Some kindly or lazy person (I prefer the former) had left a copy of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune lying on a table, and I riffled through for the comics section.

I’ve been a funnies man my whole life and will continue to be, but I wasn’t particularly expecting or wanting to laugh—I just wanted to think about something else, anything else. To forget that hospital stink in my nose, even in the cafeteria. I perused my usual favorites and didn’t crack a smile. Then I found the Boondocks strip for the day, and I broke into laughter. It was just so incongruous to my situation, so illogical, so everything I needed at that moment and didn’t even know it. I was immediately fond of that strip and tore it out, keeping it in my wallet for years until it started to disintegrate (as you can see above).

And that is why unlooked for humor is the best humor.

*The only exception I can think of is when a loved one tells that one story you’ve heard a million times but you still get a kick out of hearing it. And there’s maybe equal parts fondness and love to this as much as humor.

On What Absence Makes

Creative Nonfiction Musings Slice of BFS's Life (memoir)

Lake Superior from Grand Marais, photo by the author

While they do have a frustrating amount of truth to them, the main reason platitudes and clichés are so annoying is that they are downright obvious. More, they’re generally said when that obviousness is staring you directly in the face. So when I tell you what I’m missing in the following paragraph, know that the phrase “absence makes the heart grow fonder,” is making its presence known, and that I am wanting to punch that presence in its clichéd white teeth.

I miss water—open water. Water you can sit and stare at and feel small next to, something in the expanse speaking all the words ever written in literature right inside you, without the words ever needing to be said.

I had an embarrassment of riches in open water when I lived in Duluth. The city sprawls along a hillside overlooking southwestern Lake Superior, so pretty much anywhere you go you’ll see at least a smidgen of one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world (so large it’s often called an inland sea).

That’s not to say I’m in an area without water: this year is the 20th anniversary of a major flood here in Grand Forks (I’ve driven across the bridge shown in the Wikipedia entry!). I like the Red River of the North where it is in its greenbelt and don’t need it to become an expanse again. But even though the Red River is a presence in the region that should not be ignored, it’s not a presence in the same way as Lake Superior is in Duluth. You can’t avoid noticing the lake in Duluth, but unless you’re right on the river here in Grand Forks, you’d be hard pressed to notice it.

Driving pretty much anywhere in northern Minnesota or down in the Twin Cities, you’re going to trip over a lake without much effort. Despite its slogan of having 10,000 lakes, Minnesota actually has almost 12,000 that are 10 acres or more, and if you count ones smaller than that, the number just goes up and up. If some of the info I’m finding is correct, North Dakota has… 35? And some of those are reservoirs or larger portions of rivers!

Some of this, I know, is the stir craziness of winter. I’ve been inside too much, I haven’t even been able to walk by the Red River much… and that’s enough to make me miss water right there. There’s a little English Coulee on the University of North Dakota’s campus, and it is a simple joy to stop and watch it tumble over a little rock dam with Jessica during her lunch break. Some of the underwater rocks have beards of algae, and one in particular sports a fu manchu look: not common among rock algae formations, in my experience.

Still, it’s not the same as being able to drive over any number of hillsides in Duluth and have the sudden and overwhelming vision of Superior fill your eyes. Nor is it the same as crouching at the edge of the water at Kitchi Gammi Park, feeling yourself as small as can be while waves wash against the shoreline.

Lester River enters Lake Superior on the edge of Kitchi Gammi Park, and it becomes a raging torrent in the springmelt. I can see its rapids in my mind even now, and I can see the surfing fanatics in their cold water gear, riding the crests caused by the river’s entrance. The lake has so many shades of blue: I can’t describe them all, but I can see them.

I’ve sometimes wished I didn’t have such a strong connection to Duluth, as it would make this move easier and less full of longing. But if one needs to move, maybe it is a good thing to have such deep roots to your old home, if it means being able to find its waters when you need them. Albeit with mind’s imperfect memory.