Facts & Figures: An English Major's Case for Math and Science

Michelle Bachmann has been in the news a lot recently, mostly for her notorious lack of command over the facts -- any facts.   In her hands, facts seem like slippery electric eels that shouldn't be gripped too tightly or handled any longer than necessary lest they mesmerize you with those lidless eyes and bite off your hand.  From Paul Revere to Elvis to some switch she claims is on the wall inside the EPA just waiting to be turned off, Bachmann has clearly staked her claim as the candidate whose knowledge is not bogged down with, well, knowledge.  She "knows" what this country needs and it is $2 gasoline, though she hasn't explained exactly how she will make that happen.

I find her and her purported policies abhorrent for all of the well chronicled reasons that one who cares about reason and justice and the welfare of others and the environment we share would.  Yet, there is part of me that has some sympathy for her clumsiness with historical detail.  Retention of dates and statistics has never been in my wheelhouse either.  Don't ask me when the War of 1812 happened or how long the 100 Years War lasted.  I'm just not going to know.  As for math, the first cousin of factual trivia, I'm not scared of it in the least, but I just don't find playing with numbers all that interesting in and of itself.  I use math when I need too, but I don't seek it out.  It's sort of like a hammer.  I like hammers and have hammered any number of things in my life -- nails, thumbs, mosquitoes.  Heck, I've even gotten hammered, but I don't walk around with a hammer in my hand all day long looking for something that needs to be pounded down.

Like the hammer, mathematics is a highly useful tool.  From financial systems to jet propulsion to Sabermetrics that can tell us which Twin has the best BABIP (Batting Average on Balls In Play), math has kicked some serious ass over the centuries.  (Note: The Twins/Sabermetrics reference is a trick question.  The Twins don't yet use Sabermetrics, which may explain why their record as of this posting is 57 - 79.)  Still, I just don't get that lovin' feeling from math or compendia of factual data, though I admit that the Harper's Index is pretty cool.  This is probably why I was an English major.  I prefer the interstitial bits of life.  The things that can be observed but not measured; sensed, but not recorded.  The invisible structures of experience and narrative and ideas.

Take a baseball game, for example.  If I knew how many baseball games I've attended, that number would not reflect anything about my experience at those games.  It wouldn't reveal whether I enjoyed a particular game, rose to sing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" during the seventh inning stretch, or perpetually harbored a deeply rooted and unrelenting hatred of the New York Yankees.  There is no statistic or measurement that can capture the energy of the crowd, the sounds of the game or the grin that reflexively overtakes my face each time I notice the elderly lesbian season ticket holders who sit in the row in front of us, one of them meticulously completing the box score and the other one yelling, "ring 'em up, Joe!" every time Mauer comes to bat.  And it wouldn't document the pride I feel every time my older daughter sits down, refuses to leave her seat for fear of missing a big play and asks questions about the nuances of the game, like what the pitch count is used for or what a balk is.  Even Ron Gardenhire seems to favor the intangibles of baseball over the bloodless stats that are all around it.  Here's what he said about why the Twins don't use Sabermetrics:

"Numbers are good bases to go off things and try to figure things out, but for every number you throw out there that's not supposed to work, the human element's always coming. Bad pitch, guy gets a hit. But he's not supposed to, still rips a pitch in the gap. Those are all great things and, over the course of time probably prove out pretty good. But I like the human element and I like the heart way better than I like their numbers. And that's what I'll always stay with.''  (From ESPN's Sweet Spot Blog, which I should note, goes on to make a truly sweet, but horribly wrong, prediction about the Twins' season this year.)

Now maybe Ron and I can get carried away a bit and romanticize baseball and the human experience.  But there is no doubt that experiential knowledge is real knowledge, too.  It tells us something about ourselves and our world that can't be captured by numbers or data.  It is why we watch sports, climb mountains and go see bands live at First Avenue.

And yet, I think Gardy needs to get with the program.  Just because there are things that numbers can't tell us doesn't mean that numbers can't tell us anything or even most of what we need to know.  While as a fan I might enjoy the subjective experience of baseball without feeling compelled to read the sports page every morning to update some mental catalog of batting averages, standings and ERAs, as the manager Gardy needs to avail himself of all possible sources of information that might more precisely indicate where the Twins are succeeding and where they are falling short.  If his job is to win the AL Central and then demolish the Yankees on the way to a World Series Championship (and it is), then he needs to field a team of .300+ hitters and 2.00 ERA pitchers (or better).  Yes, heart matters and it can make all the difference when teams of equal skill are battling for a win, but skill is what gets you to that game.  What the Yankees buy with their bloated and obscene $196 million payroll is not intangibles, but numbers. They buy strikeouts and base hits and win games. 

This shouldn't be a revelation.  Data driven decision making is behind most of what makes modern society go.  But we have come to take it for granted to such an extent that we fail to appreciate its presence even while we insist on it.  When we board an airplane, we assume and expect that the mechanics who maintain that plane know the status of every bolt and rivet.  They know the air pressure in the tires and the collective loading the hull can withstand before the catastrophic consequences of metal fatigue occur.  We don't want a plane that the mechanic feels is good for a few more flights.  We want a plane that has been scrupulously measured, chronicled and analyzed. 

In the midst of cell phones, the internet, the space shuttle program, satellite television, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), pasteurization, retinal scans, nuclear submarines and Google Maps with Street View, however, it seems we have lost track of how we know what we know.  We have forgotten about or deliberately disregarded the best tool in the toolbox: the scientific method.

Contrary to what you might hear from Fox News, the scientific method is not some radical, leftist, subversive methodology that will lead us inevitably to lawless squalor, or worse, universal health care.  It is just a fancy way of saying "human smarts."  When my then 10 year-old daughter was learning about the scientific method in school last year, I concocted the following illustrative story:

*****

Imagine back in caveman times a few hairy and hungry cave people are standing around a raspberry bush.  The berries look red and juicy and really yummy.  The first caveman, Glurg, wants to eat some raspberries, but he is cautious by nature and isn't sure whether they are safe to eat.  Up comes Slurg, the Ari Gold of the cave world, who pushes Glurg out of the way as he grabs a handful of berries, tosses them down his gullet and then dips his hand in the pond for a cool chaser.  Startled and now a little pissed-off, Glurg glares at Slurg, struggling for the perfect comeback grunt when Slurg suddenly lurches and falls dead to the ground.  After a brief flicker of joy at Slurg's demise (which will be the subject of years of psychotherapy for Glurg later on), Glurg is overcome with horror at the realization that he almost ate poison berries.  He sits down next to the raspberry bush and slaps his hand to his forehead.  Then, out of the corner of his eye, he catches a glint of some blondish fur that he has had his eye on for a while, peeking out from the other side of the raspberry bush.  He peers around the bush and sees Flurg, in all of her golden-furred, curvaceous splendor, calmly feasting on raspberries.  He watches, waiting for her to keel over.  Then, Glurg cocks his head, runs a few mental calculations and reaches out and pops one delicious raspberry after another into his mouth.

So what caused Glurg to conclude that it was o.k. to eat the raspberries?  The answer is data and the scientific method.  Glurg compared the data from Slurg to the data from Flurg and noticed that while both of them ate the raspberries, only one of them drank from the pond.  This being the only variable between a dead Slurg and a happily full Flurg, Glurg concluded that the raspberries were fine, but the pond was bad news.

*****

Granted, the caveman scenario is simplistic, but then times were simpler back then, except for the lack of language and bathroom facilities and the high likelihood that you would be something else's meal before you could find a meal of your own.  The point, of course, is that the scientific method is nothing new.  If Glurg had wanted to further test and verify his hypothesis that the raspberries were fine and it was the pond that was trouble, he could have conducted a controlled experiment in which he convinced 10 of his cave friends to eat the raspberries and nothing else.  When all 10 lived to thank Glurg for the delicious snack, Glurg's hypothesis would have been validated.  Or, he could have persuaded 10 cave politicians to take a sip from the pond and perhaps left us all better off today.

So now fast forward 20,000 years.  Glurg's logic is still all around us.  The only thing that has changed is the complexity of the puzzles we are trying to solve.  Instead of trying to sort out two variables -- raspberries and pond -- we are tackling problems like what are the long-term effects of cigarette smoking or deforestation or the burning of fossil fuels?  Or what will happen to the ecosystems in the Gulf of Mexico after nearly 5 million barrels of oil spew from BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and seemingly disappear into the ocean?  Both the number of variables and the time frame during which we might expect to see the effects, if any, of those variables are vastly increased in these scenarios.  Had Slurg not keeled over until two weeks later after a terrible stomach illness, Glurg might never have correlated the pond to Slurg's death and could have starved before realizing that perfectly edible raspberries were right in front of him.

Although the questions today are bigger and hairier than ever before, that doesn't mean that we have no methodology or tools for finding out what's underneath all that fur.  The way to get to the answers is the same way we always have: to sort through the variables and track the data.  Just like Glurg.  Sometimes the initial data will be misleading.  Like Glurg, we may need more data and visibility to all of the variables before we can reach the correct conclusion.  But over time, the data will be right.  Over time, the facts will win out, because they are, after all, the facts.  Science is really nothing more, or less, than testing hypotheses by gathering and following the facts, but it is the essential process behind most of our modern achievements.  It is how we got from the Wright Brothers to The Right Stuff.

Now enter the political arena and the lazy reality of the modern life that science has made possible.  We don't know how to grow our food or fix our machines or make our clothing.  We just go to the store and buy them as if they magically appeared there, nicely packaged in all the latest colors.  We have climbed the ladder of invention and technology so high that we can no longer see the ground we started from.  And from this perch in the clouds, disciplined scientific geniuses like Rick Perry feel qualified to comment on evolution and Michelle Bachmann can threaten to "turn out the lights and lock the doors" at the EPA without any idea of what the fuck she is talking about.

As an English major, I agree that some of the most powerful knowledge we acquire in our lives isn't the kind you learn from textbooks or through memorization of the periodic table of the elements.  Sometimes things happen against the odds or despite what the numbers might predict.  Further, I whole-heartedly endorse the power of storytelling and inspiration and personal human experience.  But you have to be bat-shit crazy if you think that is the only kind of knowledge you need to operate a machine as complex as the United States of America.  I have no desire to have my airplane mechanic, my dentist or my President operating from a place of intangibles and gut feelings.  I want to know that the airplane will fly, that the right tooth will get drilled and that my nation's fiscal, military and environmental policies are based on the rigorous collection and analysis of data.

Apparently, however, the American electorate is bat-shit crazy.  Like Gardy, we want to believe that believing is enough.  That heart will get us through and that we don't really have to do the boring calculations and the lengthy proofs necessary to make sense of increasingly complex streams of information.  We want a shortcut.  What's worse, we continue to mistakenly believe that our "guts" are as good a means for decision making as studied analysis of the facts.  Ironically, the evidence overwhelmingly points the other way; that where hard data is available, the use of it to guide decision making leads to better and more accurate outcomes (and often counter-intuitive outcomes) than non-data driven decision making.  (See, e.g., Freakonomics and The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives for much better articulation of this evidence and point of view.) 

The crowning blow, from my perspective, is that the use of and reliance on math and science has been politicized by the right wing extremists and thereby rendered "suspicious" or somehow biased and non-neutral.  To my mind, this is like claiming that hammers are Democratic instruments and shouldn't be trusted.  Nevermind that they pound nails into wood really well and have been used by Republicans and Democrats alike for centuries, if the Democrats seem to really like hammers, then all self-respecting conservatives should now be suspicious of the hammer as the tool of choice for pounding.  After all, what makes the hammer so special when any of us can just grab a rock and pound a nail almost as effectively? Big deal your fancy, ergonomic handle and solid steel head and weighted design. 

It makes no sense.  Which brings us back to Mrs. Bachmann.  I don't mind that she confused Elvis' death with his birthday or even that she didn't appreciate the difference between Concord, New Hampshire and Concord, Massachusetts (though frankly, I would be thoroughly embarrassed if it were me).  Those particular facts are of no real consequence in and of themselves.  But what I do mind, is an approach to governance that seems to deliberately steer away from data driven analysis.  That you can't remember the facts is no big deal.  That you don't care to ever learn and develop the facts and study the conclusions that flow from them -- that's a whole different ballgame.  And as Gardy will tell you, ignoring the data makes it awfully hard to beat the Yankees.

In the Beginning, There Was Creation

This post started out as a nebulous concept involving the idea of creation; not the biblical story of creation, but the many human acts of creation and the fundamental drive to create that compels many of us to do at least some of what we do in our lives every day.  As distinguished from the bare necessities of breathing, eating and sleeping, creative acts, by my definition, are the multitude of things we do to enhance the experience of survival and to fill-in some of the available, non survival-focused hours.   Of course, the more secure and certain is your survival, the more hours you can spend on such enhancements and the more creative you can be.  (Here I refer you to cultural Exhibits A-C, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, MTV Cribs and Pimp My Ride.)

Now I'm no scientist, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and assert that in addition to a facility for language and a cranium that can contain a relatively large brain, the ability to conceive of an idea, plan its execution and then carry it out is at the core of what it is to be human.  Because we can create, we sleep in comfortable beds and not on the ground, we eat Big Macs instead of big Mammoths, and we entertain ourselves by watching Jersey Shore instead of staring at the shores of New Jersey.  Everything from cooking to knitting, farming to Facebook-ing, and painting to poorly executed blogging is a kind of creative act.  Whether you think of yourself as a creative person or not, chances are you engage in multiple kinds of creation and creativity every day.

As unlikely as it may seem, the spark for this topic came from my family's recent annual visit to the CSA farm that we are a member of.  For those who are not familiar with the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) phenonmenon, it is the process by which city dwellers can procure a weekly box or bag of vegetables from a local farm.  There are many ways such operations are structured.  Sometimes your box is delivered to you and you get what you get, other CSAs might allow you to "shop" at a farmer's market with membership points and you can get as much Russian kale and broccoli as your squeaky-clean, vegetarian heart desires and skip the cabbage.  With our CSA, Spring Hill Community Farm, we get a cloth bag full of vegetables as determined by the farm.  The bag contains what the farm was growing and harvesting just days or hours before, whether I recognize it as an edible plant or not.  Thus, on many occasions I have unpacked my bag and been confronted with strange and previously unknown vegetable forces, such as kohlrabi, parsnip and Medusa-like tangles of garlic scapes.  While these expeditions into the deepest, darkest corners of Vegetable World are thrilling and exciting in and of themselves, what I like best about Spring Hill is not Close Encounters of the Vegetable Kind, but the required work day at the farm. 

Every member or member family is required to sign-up for at least one work day at the farm over the summer.  As Spring Hill's web site explains, "Spring Hill deliveries are done by members.  Each household commits to working one delivery day on the farm. Twin Cities members then pack their cars and deliver vegetables to pick-up sites in Minneapolis or St. Paul."  But the work day is more than just a distribution system.  It allows the member to see the farm, help with some of the many chores that need doing, share a pot-luck lunch together and then pack-up the bags of vegetable surprise.

So how, you might ask, does stuffing vegetables into a bag with strangers one day a year spark an idea for a blog post about creation?  On one level the answer is, "I have no idea," but on another level I do have an idea.  Every time I go to the farm I get all hopped-up on good vibrations and positivity.  The idealist in me that is never too far below the surface even under less idyllic and objectively more hostile urban circumstances, gets giddy with delight after a few hours at the farm.  Without smoking or snorting a thing, I get high on the experience of reconnecting myself to the land and playing farmer for a day.  After our most recent visit, my reaction was no different, but this time on the drive home I started wondering what, exactly, it was about going to the farm that caused this reaction.

Without subjecting you to the tortuous thought process that ensued for the next 45 minutes of our return trip, I ultimately concluded that the giddiness was the result of participating in one of the original and most fundamental of human creative endeavors: the growing and cultivating of food.  Through manipulation of earth and water we can curate and organize mother nature's wild bounty.  We can game the system into producing a field of corn, or a patch of strawberries, or vines heavy with melons.  At some point in the distant mists of history and evolution, we observed what grew in the cool dampness of spring and what needed the hot summer sun for ripening.  Then, we put our minds and bodies to work and invented farming.  No longer would we need to find the strawberries where they had manged to grow while hoping there would be strawberries and wondering where they would be.  Instead, we would make a place for them, help them along and then stick around for the delicious, face staining results.  Creating, I concluded, is deeply satisfying to us homo sapiens.  We are hard-wired to create because that is how we survived.

From there, I thought about how much creating we do on a daily basis.  Indeed, my brain almost escaped my skull when I contemplated the notion that society as we know it is really just a massive, ongoing act of collective creation.  Each day we get up and the world we put down the day before is still there.  But this is only because we tacitly agree to continue our collective bargain that if you continue to create your part, I will continue to create my part.  We agree to build and support an elaborate and complex abstract structure in which some of us will grow food and others of us will buy it; some of us will build buildings and specialized machinery and others of us will care for the sick, plow the snow and issue fishing licenses; some of us will be named Kardashian and be famous for no reason and the rest of us will follow them on Twitter.

That society is an elaborate, continuing act of collective creation is underscored with bloody emphasis when the invisible pact becomes dysfunctional or is rejected, as recently occurred in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.  Should enough of us decide to stop playing our parts all at once, the show can't go on.  In a very literal sense, society is what it is -- good, bad or syndicated -- for no reason other than because we have made it so.

So now we get to the part where the happy, eat-your-vegetables-and-get-your-hands-in-the-dirt blog post I thought I was going to write, gets hijacked by recent international news and political events, causing the farm-induced, up-to-the-rafters high to come crashing down straight through normal and into the basement of depression and despair.  Here's how it went down:

I kept on with the thinking about creation well after we returned from the farm, delivered all of our bags of vegetables to our assigned drop-off/pick-up locations, and I had stowed-away my metaphorical overalls for another year.  I kept thinking about how we need to remember that we are all creators.  That we have the power of a creator.  But we are forgetful.  We forget that the world was not always this way and that it could be different; that the color for "go" on the traffic lights could be purple and "stop" could be orange, or that, if we tried hard enough and brought all of our energy to bear, the American League might get it's ass in gear and abandon the blasphemous, ill-conceived and strategy killing designated hitter once and for all.  

The way I see it, about 82% of what happens to or otherwise affects human beings on Earth is within our control.  By this I mean that it is the direct result of human practices, policies or procedures.  This includes war, revolution, vaccines, pollution, rescues at sea, the invention of peanut butter and chocolate together and the massive biker rally in Sturgis, South Dakota.

Then, there's about another 15% that I'd put in the category of "shit happens."  This accounts for untameable forces of nature, such as earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, mosquitoes and Lady Gaga.

That gets us up to 97%, leaving 3% unaccounted for.  That last little slice is what I call "no one really knows."  It's meant to allow for the fact that, devoutly religious or haphazardly atheist, no one really has the 4-1-1 on the whole of the universe.  True, I fall-in with the crowd that is deeply skeptical that there are organized higher powers out there who have nothing better to do than pick the Packers to win the Super Bowl, imprint their likeness on toast, counsel Michelle Bachmann on her career path and direct ancient scribes to write confusing, contradictory and internally inconsistent sets of divinely issued instructions that will be used for millenia to incite religious sects to kill each other and to support and justify every variety of hatred and discrimination humans have come up with to date.  Still, I am willing to acknowledge the possibility that I don't know it all either.  Hence, the 3%.  (To the math and science geeks reading this, I admit that this data has not been independently validated or peer reviewed. Mostly, I'm just trying to illustrate a point.)

If you are still reading after that monster of an incendiary sentence in the previous paragraph, my point is this: if you agree that most of what we complain about is within our own control, then we are both the problem and the solution.  We must try to remember and understand the extent to which we are the creators of our world.  At some level, we all know and believe this or else the democratic process that has made this country so successful for so long would collapse. Why argue policy and propose legislation and have elections if it is all just an ineffective charade?  (I'm not going to take my own bait on that one for the moment.)  

The idealist in me surges at this insight.  Yes! We can be farmers and plant, cultivate and harvest the kind of world we want to live in.  We have nothing but ourselves in the way.  Think of what we could do if we really believed in our ability to make our own Earth right here on Earth.  Just think of it.

But then, the other side of the coin.  I pick-up the New York Times on my breakfast table and gasp at the horrific picture of an emaciated child dying of starvation in Somalia.  I look at this child, naked and probably now dead and I think, "we are failing."  Trying to squeeze the tears back into my eyes, I drive to work and wonder how it is possible that such a thing can happen.  And why is it happening?  Because of forces of nature such as years-long drought and famine that is beyond our control?  Sure, but only in the smallest way.  It is happening because human beings in Somalia are blocking the aid.  Because human beings are sacrificing other human beings like plastic pawns in a political game of chess.  Because instead of understanding that they can create something, they only know how to destroy the creations of others.

In the black depths of my come down, I think about our failures.  Because, if you see the potential, as I do, and if you see that we are the creators, then we are responsible for what we have created.  It's a very unpleasant and uncomfortable thought.  And then to watch the lunacy of the debt-ceiling debate and the astounding ignorance of many of our so-called representatives, I felt hopeless.  We are here in the 21st Century, with all of the wonders of the internet and iPhones and Brazilian waxes because we got here together.  Because we all agreed to play our parts so that collectively we could build something bigger and taller than any of us could have done on our own.  And yet, it seems that underneath the stage make-up, we hate each other.

So what's my solution?  Form a band!  Well, not really, but maybe in a way.  All I can think is to hope that we reconnect with our inner creators and recognize them in each other.  That we remember that this is our world and if we don't like the show we're seeing, we need to put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboards, and begin the hard work of creating a new one.  Certainly one blog post won't change the world, but then again, there's always that 3% and you never know.  If we can get Zuckerberg in on the ground floor, squeeze out the Winklevoss twins and get set-up in a sweet shack in Silicon Valley, maybe we could have something.

Lawyers, Soccer Moms and Rock Stars: Thoughts from the Road

Recently my oldest daughter had a weekend soccer tournament in Rochester, Minnesota, a pleasant city with a population just over 100,000 located about an hour and a half south of the Twin Cities by car.  It is the lesser known of the Rochesters, known by name only to Minnesotans and nearby Midwesterners, but known indirectly the world over as the home of  Mayo Clinic.

Years ago, before I took my law practice in-house, I used to do legal work for Mayo Clinic.  The law firm I worked for represented Mayo in the occasional medical malpractice lawsuit brought by an unhappy or unlucky patient.  Although I never thought medical malpractice defense was an area I would practice in, the cases were interesting and even better, the client insisted that we take the strong cases (which was most of them) all the way through trial.  For a budding litigator, this meant I had several opportunities early in my career to participate in real, live trials before real, live judges and juries.  We worked long days, up early, full-day in the courtroom and then back to the hotel for a long night of reviewing that day's events and preparing for the next.  (I would later understand that the sleeplessness that accompanies trials is rivaled only by the early days of motherhood.)

The doctors we worked with and represented were some of the best in the world.  Spending time with them so that we could learn their field of medicine and understand the methodology of diagnosis and treatment was challenging and stimulating.  Imagine finding some of the best tutors in the country on a subject, but instead of you paying them, they pay you and are even more motivated than you are to get you ready for the test.  It was a heady time full of excitement but also the pain and fatigue that come with rapid growth.  One of the things I remember most from that time is not a particular doctor or specific piece of acquired medical knowledge, but rather the physical and geographic journey that bracketed and facilitated everything else:  the numerous road trips down to Rochester to develop and prepare each case well before any trial date was even dimly rising on the horizon.

Being a world-class medical facility (or collection of medical facilities, really) there are no slacker night-owls at Mayo (or, if there are, they have absolutely no ability to influence the schedule of operations whatsoever).  Business opens, surgeons start scalpeling and doctors start doctoring at 7 a.m. sharp.  While meetings with lawyers are never preferred, if they must occur the preferred time to schedule them is also 7 a.m.  Says the obliging law firm, "sure, no problem.  We can meet you at 7.  It's no trouble at all."  But to drive 81 miles, park, navigate the Mayo tunnel system and find your seat in the inevitably obscurely located conference room by 7 a.m. translates into a Twin City departure time of 4:45 or 5:00 a.m.  In my lexicon this is also known as "the middle of the night."  It is not morning or even early morning.  It is not time for exercising or reading the paper or really any activity whatsoever that requires vertical movement and consciousness.  It is nighttime.  It is a sacred time meant only for sleeping and to be left alone, quiet and undisturbed.  This truth is further corroborated by the fact that in Minnesota for a good chunk of the year it is pitch black at 5:00 a.m. and visibly indistinguishable from its predecessors, 2, 3 and 4 a.m.   (Indeed, for part of the year it is nearly pitch-black at 8:00 a.m. in Minnesota, but the sadness of that Northern story is to be deferred for now.) 

Despite the realities of divergent biological hard wiring, the time for meeting with clients is whenever the clients say it is.  Furthermore, associate attorneys' concerns in these matters aren't even accidentally considered by the senior partners.  In sum, not even a humanitarian mission designed to better the lives of abused, neglected and malnourished infant lawyers would take on the cause of accommodating the circadian rhythms of oppressed associate populations over the declared meeting-time preferences of a paying client.

And so, I found myself impossibly setting my alarm for a time not very much in front of 4:45 or 5:00 a.m. and struggling to remember what I was sure I knew only hours before about the properties of gravity and caffeine and getting dressed, then standing just inside my front door listening for a honking sound from the street.  Upon hearing this unnatural interruption of the stillness, I would open the door, move through the darkness, exchange brief greetings with a shadowy figure and take my place behind the wheel of the car, which was, to be very clear on this point, not my car.  For, you see, the only way that getting-up in the middle of the night could be made to be any worse (aside from having to immediately exercise, which I tried once but then stopped when I found myself at risk of vomiting) would be to add driving a senior partner's car while trying to stay awake to the mix.  So, of course, that is exactly what I got.  In retrospect, I can now appreciate that the nerve-wracking anxiety associated with driving your boss's car through the early black hours that were sometimes salted with blinding snow had the positive benefit of minimizing the likelihood that I would dose-off and veer into the ditch.  No matter what Starbuck's has told you, adrenaline beats caffeine every time.

The reason that I would drive the senior partner's car while the senior partner relinquished control and enjoyed the calmer, more serene "ease your way into the day" perspective of the passenger seat was so said partner could review documents during the drive in preparation for the meeting.  And, if you must know, I never crashed the car or got fired, though for several years I was convinced that I was just one head-bob away from both.

What I remember from those drives, aside from the repeated torture described above, was that once we cleared the Twin Cities and passed the ominous and alien looking Koch Refinery on Highway 52,

The internet tells me this is now called the Pine Bend Refinery, though we always called it the Koch refinery.   It is owned by Koch Industries and the same Koch brothers whose influence with the governor of Wisconsin was recently in the news.

the landscape opened up and the rolling farmland that lured adventurous Scandinavian settlers all those years ago laid itself out before you:

I thought about all of this recently as I passed the Koch Refinery once again, though thankfully at the much more reasonable and amply-illuminated hour of 9 a.m.  I was relieved to find that the farmland persists and still enchants with its pastoral simplicity and incredible greenness.

Because my daughter was watching a movie in the back seat, I couldn't listen to or sing-along with my playlist as I usually do in the car.  This unexpectedly forced me out of my routine.  I found myself alone with my own thoughts in the mostly silent car except for the muffled action of Toy Story that occasionally spilled out of the headphones behind me.  I was immediately aware of the strangeness of having a long stretch of time in front of me with nothing to do but think. 

The first thing I thought about was how many ruts we let ourselves get into without realizing it.  We all have certain habits and routines that we are fully conscious of; everything from eating Wheaties for breakfast, to driving the same roads to and from work, to work itself.  Many of these habits are inescapable or maybe even comforting.  I came to realize that because my commute is short, because I nearly always use the time for singing, I had developed and fallen into the rut of "what I do in my car" without even knowing it.   But now here I was, quite unexpectedly, in a little mobile thinking pod that looked just like the car in which I often engage in musical practice, but this time without any ability to leverage the radio or my iPod and with no one to talk to.  Without the distractions and soothing comforts of routine my internal restlessness loomed and gathered.  But, since no one was looking, I resolved to let my brain go streaking for a bit across the countryside just to experience the exhilaration of feeling the wind on usually cooped-up, wind-free parts.

Band Names

So, maybe this is just me, but my newly loosed brain did not immediately leap at the chance to recite memorized poetry or attempt to develop a unifying economic policy that would solve the budget crisis while also extending health care to all Americans and ending world hunger.   Instead, it started with what it already knew and liked.   As a result, thanks to the mileage between Minneapolis and Rochester, I'm now working on a theory that driving around on roads you're unfamiliar with is a good way to generate possible band names.  This activity is akin to travel bingo or tracking what states' license plates you've seen: it's not important whether you have a band or that it needs a name, it's just a form of entertainment.  When you're driving a road that you don't know well, you pay much more attention to the signs and roadside attractions.  You notice the names of towns, like Zumbrota, and rivers, like Vermillion.  You notice the "House of Coates" establishment in Coates, Minnesota and think, "House of Coates -- that could be a band name."  And then you think about how many bands have already used this formula.  Of course, there are the likes of Boston, Chicago, Kansas, America, Asia, Europe, Alabama, The Bay City Rollers, The Oak Ridge Boys and Berlin, to name just a few, but some of my favorites are the more creative applications like The Rural Alberta Advantage, Pert Near Sandstone and Fountains of Wayne.  You can play this game for quite a while, actually, trying out each new location or roadside attraction and imagining it as announced by your favorite DJ: "And now, the new single from Pine Island."

Life on the Road

From band names your mind may eventually wander and consider what life would be like if it were in this situation all the time; that is, if you spent most of your time covering miles and miles of American pavement.  Of course, many people have already mapped-out this subject in great detail and to much acclaim.  One thinks of Kerouac and other explorers like Hunter S. Thompson, Ian Frazier and Anderson Cooper.  But my brain being what it is, it took the topic on a more mundane and literal level and wondered what it would be like to earn a paycheck driving for a living.  Not out of choice or some grandiose notion of manly "because it is there" adventure, but because that's the job you could get.  So you drive a big-rig or a UPS truck or do whatever it is that has to be done to be a cab driver (despite personal experience to the contrary, I'm led to believe that there is some sort of qualifying requirement before one can become a cab driver, yes?) and then you spend the majority of your time thereafter enjoying all 10 cubic feet of your work space.  Every morning, (and most likely during the "middle of the night" part of the morning) you rise, swill some sort of caffeinated beverage or ingest a bennie or two and take your seat -- for the next 8 to 12 hours, or more.  Ugh.  My unexpected hour of rut-awareness-via-forced-solitude suddenly seemed practically playful.

But there are other kinds of life on the road.  It's not just literary types, 60's radicals and blue-collar workers out there.  There's also a good chunk of the "Who's Who of Rock 'n' Roll" logging miles over the endless ribbons of highway.

I happen to be reading Bob Mould's newly published autobiography, See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody.  I'm not finished yet, but I'm more than half-way through and well past the early Husker Du years with staggering stories of life on the road as part of the exploding punk rock scene in the late 1970's and early 1980's.  Sleeping in vans, electrocution by improperly wired microphones and a lack of sufficient funds to afford anything we would recognize as food and lodging.   The apprentice years of rock, it seems, are far from the make-believe world of an MTV video.   Even today the one and only Henry Rollins recently wrote a column for L.A. Weekly about the grind and odd social dynamics of an artistic life lived in transit.

I don't know how many burgeoning rock stars I passed or trailed on Highway 52 that day, but odds are that some band or another was making its way to Rochester for a gig that Saturday night.  Then I wondered if the rockers ever thought about who else was on the road; if they ever realized that probably a startling majority of the vehicles heading south that weekend were under the steady hands of soccer moms and dads, logging miles so that their progeny could extend their season, test and sharpen their skills and experience the anxiety and thrill of deliberately expanded boundaries.

The Bucket List

Thinking about who else is on the road and what their personal stories and situations are might lead one in a myriad of directions.  My thoughts flitted briefly from wondering how many rockers were behind the wheel to wondering how many different social, political and religious perspectives I was sharing the road with to then wondering when my next chance would be to travel a new route with unhindered contemplation as my companion.  Maybe the next soccer tournament, except that no more were on the calendar.  

This led me to one of the forbidden fantasies I harbor: the solo road trip.  This fantasy is forbidden not because of any intended lewd or illegal conduct that is implied by the mythology and Hollywood portrayal of such things, but because of my current station and responsibilities in life.  I am a wife and mother.  I have a healthy career.  I am not supposed to want to take-off and let whim and some good tips from the American Automobile Association be my guides.  I am not to supposed to imagine and wonder what it would be like to take a few months and just wander around, by myself, across the lesser-known parts of America, finding all of the rock venues and baseball stadiums and national parks I've always wanted to see along with whatever else is in between.  

In my fantasy, the car is not important, though it is not a van or large, cumbersome vehicle.  It's just a nondescript, regular car or sometimes, if the whether is hot and sunny in my imagination, a vintage convertible.  I invariably imagine more southern and western climates and Photo-shopped landscapes rolling by.   (No Koch refineries, thank you very much.)  It's not that I want to get away from anything, but rather that I want the chance to really see facets of life in the modern world that I wouldn't otherwise be likely to encounter and at a pace that certainly only comes without an itinerary.  To go to the next place that seems interesting and spend the amount of time there that my interest dictates.   Perhaps its just my mental antidote to a harried world that seems busy, but not often engaged.

This always leads me to the Bucket List: the list of things I'd like to do in my life that aren't likely to happen unless I point myself at them and apply focused effort.  I have an actual list in written form on my computer, but I mostly did that just for the discipline of the exercise.   To see what I would really write down.  I hardly ever look at the list and can't recall for certain everything on it, but I like knowing that it is there for me to find in the future if I should otherwise forget about it.  The key items are in my head.  And while it's easy to come-up with a long list of things that seem like they would be fun or interesting to do if time, money and physical dexterity were no obstacle, I think the best approach is to limit the list to just a few items at a time and to items that you actually intend to make an effort to address.  If the list is really meant to embody aspirational yet achievable objectives, then the weight of too many lessens the likelihood that you will knock-off even one.  

Perhaps not surprisingly, one of mine was to "sing with a band."  Now, depending on how you judge such things, I either have or have not accomplished that one.  But I maintain that the details and outcome are far less important than the process.  I will never be a rock star, but I don't see why that means I shouldn't dabble in music if I want to.

I watched the road and the now increasing suburbanization of the landscape out my window and thought of some of the other items on the list and how they might be accomplished.  The paths to some are clear and to others much less so.  

And then, just like that, the real world caught me by the tail and stuffed me back into its bag.  Rochester was before me and the time to review the directions regarding which exit to take was now.  Master-control brain once again took over and the pondering mists receded again to wherever they came from.  

Hmmm.  "And now, here's the new single from Pondering Mists."  Nah.  No good.  Guess I'll just have to keep looking.

Everyone Needs Band Practice

I've been thinking about what my next post should be about for a while and not coming up with much.  (Believe it or not, a blog this incisive and profound requires more time and effort than the superficial appearance of hastiness and poor judgment would lead one to believe.)

The band has been at it a year now and the novelty of each new threshold crossed has gradually given way to increasing comfort and familiarity.  Where once I trembled nervously in anticipation of singing into a startlingly serpent-like microphone for the very first time, now I regularly volunteer any number of sounds, some of which might not be altogether unpleasant. This is not to say that all nervousness and apprehension has dissipated.  Far from it.  But it is to acknowledge that at least the habit of showing-up and taking a whack at it has taken root.  Why should it be my concern if Jim and Andy have an unusual tolerance for bad singing and beginning tambourine?  If they can handle it, I can too. 

Admittedly, I am still struggling on the guitar and tambourine fronts, but these things are known to take time.  Still, the novelty of attempting to learn guitar or write a song or endure listening to one's own voice as part of the recording process has already been mined for blogging ore.  (Here we shall carefully avoid analogies to the yield from said mine and whether the investors got taken.)  And while I'm sure it's just a matter of time and a smidgen more practice until I can reveal what it is like to be on the cover of Rolling Stone and traveling the world in support of a new, critically acclaimed album rapidly rocketing to platinum status, until that moment actually arrives the band simply continues on from one week to the next, practicing, refining and steadily adding new covers and original songs.

So what's a blogger to do? 

One option, of course, is to really comb through my memory and ensure that I am telling you absolutely everything that goes on . . .  Like, did I mention the time that Craig Finn and Bob Mould happened to be walking down the street outside Jim's house in Edina (I know, right?!  Those two guys?  Together?!  In Edina?!) and were so struck by what they heard coming from the basement that they knocked on the door and insisted that they be allowed in and then we all jammed together for, like, ten hours, until they called their respective labels and insisted that they sign us on the spot, at which point a bidding war broke out and we had offers going back and forth and then Bob and Craig got in a fight and we had to break it up?  No?  I didn't tell you about that time?  Huh.  It must have slipped my mind as a result of the trauma of seeing those two guys brawling in Jim's basement.  Plus, they each wanted to do a duet with me on our original song, "Sun" and they were being so petulant about the whole thing that I told them both they had to go home and think about how they behaved and couldn't come back until they were ready to say they were sorry.  I must have been more stern than I realized because I haven't heard back from them yet.  I guess they're still thinking about their behavior.

Or another option for future blog posts would be to go the reality/confessional route blazed by such revered journalistic pioneers as "Intervention" and VH1's "Behind the Music" and pull back the veil on the sordid personal lives of the band.  There's Jim's generosity and type-A achievement issues that need to be addressed and Andy's all-around agreeableness that just has to be a front for something much more disturbed and sinister.  Clearly I could get, like, a year's worth of posts out of all that raw material.  Thankfully, I'm pretty much all good and able to hold the band together and serve as your impartial observer.

Any of those routes would be likely to increase readership and maybe get me a book deal or a byline in The National Enquirer.  But, as it turns out, I kinda like the routine of band practice, in all of its plain, non-newsworthy ordinariness.   And although the event of band practice no longer stands out as new or unusual, what happens at band practice is far from mundane.

Band practice is a black box built from the rare wood of spare hours joined together with latent and implausible fantasies.  Inside this box, magic happens.  Lawyers and account managers and finance guys transform into singers, songwriters and rock musicians and the universe of unseen possibility stretches out infinitely, paradoxically all within the confines of an otherwise unremarkable suburban basement.  There are no bosses to impress, no clients whose needs must be paramount, and no financial returns of any kind whatsoever to even begin to contemplate.  (Indeed, the cost of beer alone has the band in the red and I'm afraid the trend shows no signs of abating anytime soon.)

We own all of our own stock.  We are both management and labor and we have only ourselves to answer to and negotiate with.  Indeed, it is the sheer freedom of band practice that constricts most tightly.  With no external limits, you have only yourself to look to for shape and form.  It is one thing to perfect the art of pouring oneself into various professional molds, ensuring that each curve and crease is filled and the content evenly distributed within, but it is another thing altogether to be mold-less.  (At the moment, we also happen to be Bob Mould-less, but I expect that to be resolved very soon.  Bob's always been a very sensitive, contemplative guy who just needs time to work through things.)

If you could do anything and no one would know, what would you do?  If you could sing a song, bang on the drums or, for the more daring out there, attempt to sing while also shaking a tambourine -- would you do it?  Of course you would.  You do it already in the privacy of your head and in those rare moments when you are alone in your own home and no one knows if you drink the milk out of the carton, scoop the jelly out of the jar with your finger or decide to watch the last 45 minutes of Beaches that you stumbled upon on Lifetime while changing channels.  (I'm just passing along the reports I've heard on the internet that some people do these things, not that I would know anything about that kind of clearly deviant behavior.)

This is the beauty of regular, ordinary band practice: the protective shield of the black box.  No matter what has happened in the outer world, band practice exists in a different dimension.  At least for me it does.  Somehow the simple physics involved in driving 10 minutes to Jim's house and walking down a flight of stairs really messes with time and space in a way that even Stephen Hawking can't explain.  I might have had a bad day or a sad day or an alarmingly boring and unremarkable day, but band practice allows me to step sideways, slip out of my skin and take on another form.

Most importantly of all, I think, if I have the courage to really try, band practice provides that rarest of all opportunities: the chance to try and fail without serious consequence, save a few bumps and bruises to the ever delicate ego.  How often any more in this stage of life does one really have the luxury of experimentation and failure?  Certainly it has not been recommended as a path to success in the legal field or most others for that matter.  You gave catastrophically bad legal advice to your last client?  Excellent.  You're hired.  Likewise on the home front.  Parenting in particular is fraught with the stress of trying to "get it right," whatever that means. 

So along comes band practice, offering the opportunity to ditch the real world for a few hours and see if I still know what it means to step off the ledge, push myself past my comfort zone and allow myself to do and try -- and fail.   And yet it is so much harder than you think it will be, even in the black box.  I don't want to sing badly.  I don't want to write a lousy song.  I don't want to fail.  But I have done all of those things and I have felt the heat in my cheeks when confronted with these small, uncomfortable realities.  But each time, I also feel a bit more sure that despite how it feels, it is actually forward progress.  That each time I fail, I also succeed.

So now that I've gotten that off my chest, managed to punch out one more blog post and give Oprah a run for her money (I hear there's going to be an opening in that area pretty soon that I might want to apply for), here's the Reader's Digest version for those of you who don't have the time, like Craig and Bob, to really contemplate your behavior: go out there and find a way to try something new and really fuck it up.  You'll be glad you did.

Confessions From The Living Room Floor

As has been clearly established without meaningful rebuttal in numerous episodes of  CHIPS, Hill Street Blues and Law and Order, when attempting to solve a crime it is useful to understand the origins and motivations of the criminal you are seeking.  This frequently involves talking to the former high school teacher, the neighbor across the hall who never really saw the suspect because he mostly kept to himself, the cheerleader's best friend who insists that "she was just a normal girl, like everybody else" or the junkie on the street corner who reflexively tells all to anyone with a formidable squint.

But just what causes an otherwise unremarkable and mostly-law-abiding middle-aged woman's sudden and unforeseen crime spree against all that is good and holy in the world of rock 'n' roll may never truly be understood or explained.  Still, perhaps if we retrace her steps, canvas the neighbors and menace the junkie, maybe we will find the hidden clues that were there all along.  Maybe if we can deduce the faint trajectory of deviancy early enough, if we can spare other friends and families the embarrassment and despair -- if we can save just one life -- perhaps, just perhaps, the bits and bytes of the grizzly MP3 carcasses that have been tossed so callously onto the shoulders of the Internet superhighway where any unsuspecting tender soul might inadvertently come upon them, perhaps they won't have died in vain. 

 *****

I remember the stereo cabinet my parents had when I was a kid in the '70s.  It was a big, long piece of furniture that must have been all in vogue at the time with it's burnt umber finish, California meets Baroque styling and deftly concealed hinged opening in the center of the top that revealed the secret compartment for the record player.  The speakers were cleverly ensconced behind the mysterious mesh that peaked through the flourished, doily-like wood carvings that comprised the doors on either end of the cabinet.  To my mind, the secret stereo cabinet was on par with Maxwell's sneaky shoe phone on Get Smart, except the cabinet won out because it was actually a real thing in my very own house.  Plus, you could tell it was fancy just by looking at all the swirly carving involved.  While the console pictured below isn't the way I remember ours, it gives you the general idea of the kind of craftsmanship we're talking about.

In no way aware of or deterred by the abundant design sins committed by a single piece of living room furniture, my favorite thing to do was to get a pillow from my room and lie on the ochre-hued shag carpeting in front of one of the speakers so that I could hear the music as loud as was possible in the days before Walkmans and iPods.  I felt the vibrations in my head and belly and it was easy to get consumed by the sound.  And, before I got older and developed that relentless self-consciousness that unfortunately seems to be part and parcel of getting taller (not that "tall" is any place that I've ever been),  I used to sing along.  Judy Collins, Peter, Paul & Mary, The Lettermen, the Kingston Trio and The New Christy Minstrels were in regular rotation and I loved them all.

But my all-time favorite, bar none, was John Denver.  I knew all the songs, even the sad ones that made me cry, like the one about the young lady who somehow got killed when the horse she was riding tripped.  ("Darcy Farrow" is the song, in case you can't immediately bring it to mind.)  I sang that song holding back the tears like a stoic Bette Midler sending Johnny Carson off forever with "One More for the Road."  (Sometimes, in my more emotionally unguarded moments, I let the tears out a bit; sort of like John Boehner giving a speech about anything to anyone.)  I loved "Grandma's Feather Bed", "Rocky Mountain High", "Calypso" and, of course, "Take Me Home, Country Roads":

Almost heaven, West Virginia
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, blowing like a breeze


Country roads, take me home
To the place, I belong
West Virginia, Mountain Mama
Take me home, country roads

Wikipedia: Take_Me_Home,_Country_Roads

As it happens, I had a case at work a few years back that required me to go to West Virginia on four separate occasions.  Each time I went, I contemplated the sentiment lodged in my brain by Mr. Denver decades earlier that somewhere out there it must surely be "almost heaven" - - just not where I happened to be.  I was prepared to trust John about the heavenliness and leave it at that when I discovered, ahead of my last excursion in the spring of 2010, that The Hold Steady would be playing in Morgantown during my stay.  Conveniently, Morgantown happened to be just 2 hours away from where I was camped out in Charleston -- nothing a rental car, caffeine and Mapquest can't get sorted out in short order.  So, I bought tickets online, hit the road and made the show.  Morgantown, being the home of the University of West Virginia Mountaineers, had the expected energy and character of a college town, which must be why THS chose it as one of the first stops on the tour for their then new album,  Heaven is Whenever.  There were maybe 125 people in the tiny bar and, frankly, it was pretty darn close to heaven if you ask me.  See, John Denver knows his shit.  I'm just sayin'.

From singing Denver on the living room floor, I eventually stood up and moved on to my own room with my own record player proudly purchased at Sears with my very own money.  My first records were the ones I saw on t.v. advertised by K-Tel.  One of the early purchases I still remember was called Expressions. It was a collection of love songs and break-up songs and I played it constantly.  It had a swirly, misty cover of pink and blue with "Expressions" in a curlicue font across the front.  What's a fifth grade girl not to love?



Then there was the teen idol phase of Shawn Cassidy and Andy Gibb that ran simultaneously with The Captain & Tennille phase that overlapped a bit on the Bee Gees Saturday Night Fever soundtrack stage that gave way to the Breakfast in America period.  Grease and Olivia Newton John were, of course, paid their due as well.

I also remember making lists in 6th grade of my top-five favorite songs and passing them to my friends in class with the understanding that I would get their top five in return.  Ring My Bell  made the list as did Eddie Money's Two Tickets To Paradise.  That was all well and good until the subject turned to boys (not at my suggestion, I might add).  Having successfully passed notes on numerous prior occasions, I dutifully penned my "Top 5 Cutest Boys" as requested and deftly passed it to my neighbor.  Or so I thought.  In what I have come to refer to as the "Horrifying Boy Incident of 1978," my list of the five cutest boys got intercepted by the teacher and read aloud to the class.  The reverberating and profound mortification from that experience still registers on my mental seismograph even today.   Jeff Simpson, Mark Sayer, Matthew Brown, Jamie Gilmore and a mysterious fifth boy that I have never been able to recall, I hereby, though quite belatedly, apologize for any objectification you felt as a result of my careless and insensitive note-passing.  I fully respect the unique qualities and complexities of each of you as individuals and never intended, in any way, to demean you or your gender by ranking you in order of physical attractiveness.  Really.  I think it was Stephanie Engler's idea anyway.

Being the first-born, I had no older sibling to show me the ways of hip or cool or "in" and "out" in terms of music or anything else, really.  My clothes were from Sears, my bruised shins from my younger brother and my haircut and wheatgerm-infused lunch from my mother.  Musically, I just took what I could find and was happy to have it.

By junior-high I graduated to the Columbia Record Club, as many of us did, which involved moving into the slightly harder drug of cassette tapes.   (Small, portable, playable in automobiles, the cassette-tape opened-up whole new vistas for music consumption and surreptitious, parental-free listening)  Of course, the 10 records (or cassettes) for a penny part was pretty easy, but that $17.99 price tag that followed immediately upon the failure to return the record of the month card  -- which, without any irony whatsoever, was how you were meant to tell them you did not want the record of the month -- was really hard to take.  ("If you want the selection of the month, do nothing and we'll send it to you in 14 days!")  Especially for a 13 year-old in 1980 dollars.  (This practice, by the way, is fondly referred to by the Federal Trade Commission as "negative option billing."  FTC: Negative Option Plans)

Needless to say, this "club" was the subject of many disputes with my mother, though to be fair, just about everything was the subject of many disputes with my mother.  Still, in this one instance I can see that she had a point.

I hit a heavy metal phase briefly in 7th and 8th grade.  I flirted with Molly Hatchet, ZZ Top, Van Halen, Pink Floyd and ACDC.  Back then, there were dueling metal stations in L.A.  Metalheads could choose between 94.7 K-M-E-T or 95 1/2, K-L-O-S.  KLOS had these cool bumper stickers with an oblong shape and bands of color around the edge and they could be seen all over town: 

KMET's stickers weren't quite as cool, though it was the more hard-core of the two stations:

But all of that changed toward the end of 8th grade when I was introduced to the up-and-comer from Pa-sa-de-na: K-R-O-Q:

 

KROQ (pronounced K-ROCK) was a phenomenon that shaped a generation of Angelinos.  It was L.A.'s very own Sputnik that shot into the stratosphere and dared others to follow.  Dr. Drew got his start there as did Adam Carolla, and Jimmy Kimmel.  Heck, even Elvira had a gig on KROQ.  But aside from the line-up of future late-night TV personalities, revolutionary format, and ground-breaking willingness to find and play music on the edge, what this station really offered was a chance to be part of something as it was happening.  It was a busted fire hydrant of music and energy that gushed into our heads unabated.  To me, it confirmed that I was not alone in my belief that music really was a door to another world.  Without a steady income or even a reliable allowance and with a mother who frequently displayed the same willingness to accommodate burgeoning individualism as, say, Stalinist Russia, KROQ was revolution delivered to your door -- free of charge.  I learned about bands like The Clash, Dramarama, Black Flag, The Alarm, The Dead Kennedys, The Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies and X when they were just breaking out.  And I was a nice girl from Pasadena who did her homework. 

In addition to the up-to-the-minute music that KROQ provided, I also embarked on a home study course in The Classics throughout high school.  Together with my best friend, Melissa, (though I called her "Mel" and she called me "Bob") we spent innumerable afternoons in my room, with the same record player purchased at Sears years before, exploring The Beatles, The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Don McLean, and Neil Young to name just a few.  Somehow, we felt obligated to fill in our ignorance of the original revolutionaries as best we could.  I remember literally listening to music for hours, pulling records out of their sleeves and trying to get the needle down on the favored song of the moment without any skipping or scratching.

The records themselves were acquired slowly and steadily in many pilgrimages to perhaps the greatest record store there ever was.  Poo-Bah's Records occupied every square inch of an old Pasadena bungalow on Walnut Street.  It was Mecca for music lovers, except without all the kneeling and praying and facing East part.  It was open late, had every kind of music ever recorded, encyclopedic staffers, and intriguing and obscure music playing in the background, all in an atmosphere of your uncle's attic -- creaky floors, posters on every surface, and the sense that if music really was a portal to another realm, then Poo-Bah's was the mother ship that would get you there at warp speed.  A genuinely independent record store, it essentially did no marketing, other than selling t-shirts like the one pictured below, and relied on the exuberant proselytizing of its extremely loyal patrons.  Some days you had to wait in line to get at certain album stacks.  Plus, they sold new and used, which was particularly helpful to those of us with six bucks to spend on a Friday night. 


 





[Note: this is a photo of the old Poo-Bah's from the Internet.  I don't have any idea who this guy is.]

Transportation to Poo-Bah's was most often provided by my friend Tom, without whom our egregious ignorance of rock's forebears likely would have gone unchecked until college.  (This may be the time to note that both Mel and I were young for our grade, meaning that we were literally the last two people in our class to get our driver's licenses.  Tom, you're the best!)  Once inside, the evening's entertainment was at hand -- a maze of albums through which to wander, posters to peruse, conversations to overhear and people to watch.  Cap it off with a midnight run to In-N-Out or Tommy Burgers and it was Pasadena perfection.

*****

There's not much more to the story after that really, officer.

College happened which took me to Minnesota and right into the sweet spot of the Minneapolis sound.  So much has been written about the bands coming out of the Twin Cities at that time that its pointless to try and say anything more.  Bands like The Replacements, Husker Du, Soul Asylum and The Wallets were just lying around all over the place like snow in the Minnesota winter.  (Not to mention that purple dude who was pretty big at the time too.)

I don't really know why we all like music so much, or at least most of us do.  Music loving varies, of course, not only by preferred genre but also by frequency of listening and depth of response.  Still, you don't come across many people who say, "I don't like music."  Whatever it is, it seems at its base to be a secondary communication system.  A way of evoking passion and contemplation that unaccompanied words struggle to equal.  Now, truth be told, I am not illiterate and I love books and reading.  I have been brought to tears reading a book and I have laughed out loud reading a book, but it's not quite the same.  Music, when done right, reaches its invisible hand right into the middle of you and grabs your guts -- usually in three minutes or less.  (It should be noted, however, that with some bands this can result in nausea and vomiting.  Once you have identified the bands that have this effect, however, they can usually be avoided without much difficulty, except, maybe, when one of their songs becomes the popular anthem for, say, the San Francisco Giants in their bid for the World Series championship.  I'm just sayin'.)

Now, I know after all of this you're wondering what the thing is, so here's the thing: it seems to me that our ability to access and respond to music or [insert the passion from your youth here] too often gets pushed aside as we grow older.  Our sources of optimism and inspiration get boxed-up and put away with the other tokens of childhood and adolescence in the name of even-keeled maturity.  Goodbye Kool-Aid, no more Nancy Drew and see ya later air guitar.  And while I like red wine, The New York Times, and a nice salad of beets and blue cheese over organic micro-greens just as much as the next liberal, urban professional, I think it is a mistake to discard so much of what made us who we are in the belief that things loved in childhood must be childish.

Like most of us, I have worked hard to hike to the top of Mt. Middle-Age, but I've found that while the view is very nice and certainly shouldn't be missed, the air is a bit chilly and there's mostly just a lot of standing around and looking at things.  I, for one, think it ought to be o.k. to hike back down every now and then and splash around in the stream where its warm and sunny and there are picnic tables with jugs of Kool-Aid and an iPod blasting someone's idea of good music.  Because, frankly . . .

I can't fight this feeling anymore
I've forgotten what I started fighting for
It's time to bring this ship into the shore
And throw away the oars, forever

Gotcha.

Salt, Sugar and Plastic Bags (And Other Reasons You Don't Want Me To Drive You Anywhere)

When you lose your shit, as I have, there is a wide swath of collateral damage.   In addition to the front and center risk of making a fool of yourself for attempting to start a rock band after 40, there are various and sundry other items that get folded into the insanity batter inadvertently while the baker's attention is fully devoted to finding the right kind of chocolate chips.  One little moment of inattention and you've switched baking powder for baking soda or added a cup of salt and a teaspoon of sugar, and well, you have a real fucking mess on your hands.  (Still, if you get the chocolate chips right you never know.  Maybe it could be good.)  In any event, the point is other stuff can sneak-up on you and escape your notice while you're busy focusing on finding the chocolate chips in your life that you're pretty sure are stuck somewhere in the back of the cabinet if you just look hard enough and move the whole-wheat flour and molasses out of the way.  In my own search for the misplaced chocolate chips, I confess some weird shit went down with the batter.  Normally, I would care about these kinds of things, but given that I can feel the chocolate chips just at the edge of my grasp, the mix-up with the salt and the sugar really doesn't concern me at the moment.  In other circumstances I would be a bit sheepish about revealing the additional evidence that shit has, in fact, been lost, but given what's already come before this, what's a little bit more?  

(1) I sometimes sing along to songs I don't know and try to guess the lyrics. 

By this I mean I literally attempt to anticipate the rhythm, tempo and next line of a song that I have never heard before or only partially heard before, but that has caught my interest.  I am terrible at this.  Happily, I have decided not to let this bother me.   My success rate has no deterrent effect on my behavior at all.  (Which also shows that the death penalty makes no sense, though you may nevertheless wish that it be extended to cover musical crimes before this is over.)  So, for example, I will keep trying to figure out both what Tapes 'n Tapes is saying in the first place and then what they are going to say next.   I am never right.  Ever.  It has occurred to me that this is the same phenomenon that goes on in front of slot machines and blackjack tables across Las Vegas and in Indian casinos everywhere, though I will quietly distinguish myself from my gambling-addicted, AARP cousins by noting that I'm not usually wearing polyester pants and holding a plastic cup full of coins when I'm playing this game.  Also, this is why it is so universally joyful when you finally get to the chorus of a song, because most of the time the chorus is the part that repeats, so your odds of getting it right increase the second and third time it comes around, making you feel like you might just have a few psychic powers up your sleeve after all.

The only time I ever have any success outside of the chorus is when my kids have taken over control of the dial and, although I am driving the car and sitting just inches away from the stereo and all of its operational parts, I am in fact hostage to Top 40 radio.  In these circumstances, I bat about .300.  And while Joe Mauer may not be satisfied with that, it's nothing to sneeze at.  The hazard, of course, is that the predictability of these songs is what makes them terrible and is the primary reason why you don't want them stuck in your head, which, unfortunately, they will be after you have correctly guessed that Enrique Iglesias is going to rhyme "situation" with "nation" in his chart-topping song "Tonight."  Also, because I have actually listened to the lyrics of these songs while trying to guess what will come next, I have noticed in great detail how much I dislike them.  This caused me on one occasion to engage in the following exchange with my children:

Scene: suburban mom driving two young daughters somewhere while Katy Perry's "Firework" is heard coming from the radio.

Radio and children together:  "Do you ever feel, like a plastic bag? . . ."

Me: Hey, guys?  

Children and radio:  ". . . through the wind, wanting to start again."  Yeah?

Me:  Um, if you ever actually feel like you're a plastic bag . . . I mean, you know, you wake-up one day and think, "I don't feel good.  I feel kind of like a plastic bag."  I want you to come tell me immediately.  Because that's going to involve a trip to the doctor.  It's not normal and just doesn't make any sense.

Radio and me together:  "You just gotta ignite the light, And let it shine, Just own the night, Like the Fourth of July . . ."

Children (with great pain and irritation audible in their voices):  M-om!  (Much sighing and rolling of the eyes occurs.) Can we listen to the song now?  And can you please STOP singing?!

Me:  O.k.  Just wanted to be sure we were clear on that.


(2) I keep a camping headlamp in my nightstand and regularly strap it around my head it in the middle of the night.

For those of you who do not already own a camping headlamp, I implore you to immediately go to REI or REI.com and order one.  If you're not familiar with headlamps, they are the functional equivalent of a flashlight taped to your forehead, but they are more ergonomically designed and easier to put on and take off.  They generally look like this:





For those of you who already own one but, for some odd reason that I will never understand, keep it stored away with all of the camping gear you never use, you are going to want to seriously consider relocating your headlamp to your nightstand.  Here's why:  when you have what at least initially appears to be a brilliant idea in the middle of the night, you are going to need to write it down.  Unless you are gifted with night vision or are willing to chance that in the morning you will be able to read the long-awaited follow-up to Coleridge's Kubla Khan that was scribbled furiously in the dark (and trust me, that never works out), this will require some light.  Instead of flipping on the bedside lamp and waking the cats and irritating your spouse, however, you can just reach for your handy headlamp and strap that sucker right on.  Then, with the simple push of a button right in the middle of your forehead you have perfectly focused, hands-free light.  Of course, one thing I have learned over the years is that the headlamp does not improve, in any way, the quality of what you are writing down.  Still, if you're like me and you're playing the odds that one of these days you are going to guess the lyrics right (as referenced above) and one of these other days you are actually going to have a brilliant idea or capture the greatest rock 'n' roll lyrics of all time before they are lost forever on the edge of a rapidly receding dream, well then, of course, it's all worth it, right?  This is what nightstands were made for -- to hold your headlamp, notebook and pencil in the event a worthy thought or idea unexpectedly comes your way.

(3) I sing in my car.  Loudly.  Even when waiting in traffic while others are looking.

Because my daughters will not tolerate any amount of this in their presence, I can only do this when I am alone in my car.  Thankfully, that happens at least twice a day on my way to and from work.  Unthankfully, my commute time is about 8 minutes, unless there is weather, in which case it bumps up to about 12.  Every morning as I am backing out of my driveway, I go through a little ritual.  First, I turn on the stereo and surf the local radio stations for something singable.  This can range from indie rock to classic rock to soft rock depending on my mood and the nostalgia meter reading on that particular day.  Some days its Boston, other days its The Black Keys.  If the radio strikes out, as it often does, I turn the dial to the iPod that is connected in the glove compartment.  I have equipped this iPod with numerous playlists full of songs that I enjoy singing.  The advantage of this option is that I will get 8-12 minutes of singing time without any time sacrificed to DJs, commercials, or an atrocity of a song rotating in.

As I have mentioned, I have recently gotten a lot more comfortable with singing in front of others (others, of course, being two people in a basement).  This has carried over and emboldened my automobile singing as well.  While I have been singing in my car for decades, I would only do so while traveling at sufficient speed that no one could really see or hear me.  Thus, when a stoplight would be reached, I would inevitably taper off, attempt to sing quietly and without moving my lips, and wait for the light to change.  As the good folks along Glenwood Avenue in Minneapolis are now viscerally aware, however, this is no longer the case.  I will now continue to sing, loudly, while stopped at a traffic light or stop sign and sometimes even in front of the people waiting for the bus just yards away.  I no longer care.  (What was I supposed to be adding next?  Salt?  Sugar?  Whatever.)  And while no one has ever clapped, neither has anyone ever thrown their bag lunch or pounded on the window and asked me to stop, for the love of God.  So, I haven't.  Turns out most of them have iPods in their pockets and earbuds in their ears anyway, or are secretly masking their own singing in the car next to me while waiting for the light.

As for the batter, who knows what will come of it.  I'm not even close to being finished with it yet.  But, just to be safe, you may not want to eat any cookies I bring around for a while, you know, in case they are a bit salty and hard as rocks.

Clearwater Rock City

As it turns out, there are times when music and mid-life crises must take a back seat to the mechanical obligations of the hard-earned real life that makes my fantasy world possible; the job that pays the mortgage, buys groceries, equips my oldest daughter with a bass guitar and puts gas in my car (provided I remember to stop by the gas station in time), with some dollars leftover for guitar lessons, Mac laptops and copious purchases from iTunes.  On occasion, this job requires that I travel to some spot or another for some reason or another, though it usually involves paper fights, also known as litigation.  As a result, I've had the good fortune to see the jaw-dropping wonders of a two-week trial in the Bronx, to compare and contrast the differences between mediations in San Francisco and San Diego, to ask the upright people of College Station, Texas to fairly compensate my employer for the consequences of a taking by eminent domain and to go toe-to-toe with elected officials in Topeka, Kansas.  And, on occasion, I get a boondoggle to some resort destination that lures winter-abused Northerners down for conferences so they can swap temperatures in the 30s (or worse) for temperatures in the 70s (or better) in the name of continuing education and networking. 

So, I found myself attending a retail law conference at a Marriott in Clearwater, Florida last November that conveniently came equipped with a sparkling ocean out front, less sparkly development for miles on either side, and some pretty awesome bridges across which a Minnesota runner could run and take it all in without need of Thinsulate.  One afternoon after dutifully attending both general and break-out sessions in Conference Rooms That Could Be In Any Hotel Anywhere and before the scheduled dinner event, I laced-up my running shoes and headed south towards one of the high-arcing bridges I had spotted on the way into town.  Having successfully located the bridge and hauled myself up and over it, I was pleasantly rewarded with a small park and public-access beach area waiting for me on the other side.  It had preserved native wetlands, indigenous vegetation and included, I soon discovered, a small but peaceful bird sanctuary.  The boardwalk trails beckoned, so I headed in to see what I could see.  Before long, I encountered an observation area with a few benches, a view of the remaining wetlands and a lone old woman.  I slowed to do some of the recommended observing and noticed the cranes, herons and other water fowl scattered about like motionless plastic lawn ornaments, (though in this case it would be a lawn that had been badly over watered and turned into a pond.)  As I slowly passed the old woman it became evident that she was no tourist or retiree come to spend a few minutes with the birds.  Rather, the over stuffed plastic bags nestled on either side of her and incongruous layers of tattered clothing betrayed the fact that, in all likelihood, the bench or some nearby make-shift shelter was what she called home.  She and I were the only human visitors in the park from what I could see.  I sat for a few minutes a couple benches down from her and took-in the refreshing island idyll that was managing to keep its metaphorical foot firmly planted between the rapidly closing double-doors of neighboring condos and hotels.  I watched the birds, then the old woman, who, I found, was also watching the birds.

After a few moments, I was up again and on my way, but now with a shiny new marble of a song idea rolling around in my head.  It struck me as a worthy parable of sorts that the homeless woman with so many wants and needs was the one with the time and interest in taking-in what little natural beauty was still left to be found while the tourists and retirees hurried by barely noticing the scruffy-signed park with few modern amenities.

Back in Minnesota a few days later, I cursed the declining weather to no effect.  Winter and band practice, apparently, must go on.  At the end of our next practice,  Jim and Andy were energetically working on one of Andy's latest guitar bits that had set Jim in motion on the keyboards like a whirling dervish but with maybe slightly less whirling, though I'm pretty sure there was still some amount of whirling that did occur.  As they discussed the structure of the music and how the keyboard piece and guitar would work together, I sat on the floor with my notebook, listening to the progressive iterations of the melody being born.  I thought back to the homeless woman in Florida and my pencil suddenly got moving, words pouring out on the page like stale beer spilling from a bottle kicked across the floor at First Ave. after a show.  When I could get a word in edge wise, I informed Jim and Andy that I might have just come-up with the lyrics to the song.  Not too long after that, we recorded the following, again as insurance against the probability that our aging and overly-taxed brains would not remember what we had done from one practice to the next:



I won't repeat the disclaimer referenced in an earlier post because if you are still hanging around reading this blog you either have no common sense and therefore warnings are of no avail or you are of hardy enough stock that really you can take just about anything, no matter how egregious.  So, we shall proceed then and get straight to the final version of the song which, if you like it, is to be credited to Jim and Andy and if you dislike it, well, then you're computer isn't working right and you should probably take it in for a tune-up and while you're there pick-up a nice set of headphones so that you can really appreciate the art involved here:



As for Clearwater, I'm thinking if our band ever makes it big, we might have to include a stop in Clearwater on our first tour.  I know some conference rooms in a hotel there that really need something interesting to happen to them before they die.