Falling temperatures and frequent gales of Rauner

     This column starts out at A and meanders to Q. That was the intention. My only overall goal was to write something funny, to mention snow, and to jab a sharp stick at Bruce Rauner. I accomplished all three, to my satisfaction. And no, I don't dislike the rich, only the contemptuous rich.

     I came to work Thursday. Yes, yes, I know, it’s the nostalgic newsman in me. I figured, you’ve got a job, you go, physically go to work, transporting your body to your place of employment. Old school. That I was making some kind of error in judgment only occurred to me at the Northbrook train station, which looked like a crowd scene from some unwritten Kafka short story: “The Train Station at Murmansk” or some such thing. Dark figures wrapped in thick coats and scarves, leaning into a blinding storm.

      The train was a half hour late. I got a seat, which wasn’t true for everybody. I tried to catch the eye of the lady standing next to me, ready to gallantly ask, “Madam, would you like a seat?” Then I realized that she was a decade younger than me, and, anyway, she never tore her eyes away from her cellphone, certainly not to glance in the direction of someone literally and figuratively below her. So I focused on my Sun-Times, occasionally gazing with mixed emotions at the diamond ring and assorted sub rings on her finger wrapped around the chrome handhold. The rings cost $25,000 if they cost a dime. Standing might be good for her.

     The less said about the trudge to the office the better. Soon I was thawing out on the 10th floor, getting my morning coffee, finding myself standing in front of a window with a co-worker. Both of us lost in thought until I spoke what was clearly on our minds.

     “Does snow ‘hurtle’?” I wondered aloud. “I’m trying to find the right verb to describe what I’m looking at. ‘Race?’ ‘Plummet?’ It looks like one of those bad 1940s Christmas movies where the stagehands are shaking big boxes of laundry detergent just above the view of the camera."
     He nodded. Snow snow snow snow . . .
     OK, enough of that.
     Do you have any New Year's resolutions? I do. I'm going to write about politics more. Looking back at the past year, I realized I stopped talking about Barack Obama, or commenting on the mayor, or the governor, and generally avoided everything involved with the vast creaking, clanking artifice of government. Why? I think it was simple revulsion. You've got the continual Punch & Judy show of party politics, with Punch Republican and Judy Democrat holding their little bats between their splayed, immobile hands and having at each other - "bap bap bap bap, bop bop bop bop." You've got career politicians, monsters of mendacity, who only say an honest word accidentally. Not looking is too easy. Must . . . force . . . myself.
     What changed? Honestly, it was Natasha Korecki and Rosalind Rossi's article a few days ago on Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner, he of the deep pockets, and the latest of what will be a blizzard of campaign advertising that makes our New Year's snowfall look like a slight dusting.
     "There's no excuse for failing schools. Zero. None. Period." Rauner says. Stop right there; "excuse" is the key word, one of those freighted buzzwords, like "agenda," that Republicans love to trot out to pretend the matter they're discussing is settled. If you substitute "reason" - "there's no reason for failing schools" - you start to grasp the lack of empathy that Rauner is bringing to the table. Of course there are reasons, plenty of 'em - from shattered families, poverty, crime, you name it. Schools feed all our social problems - and reflect them.
     But the sentence that got me rising to my feet with a late middle-age groan was when Rauner, asked about his pulling strings to grease his daughter into Walter Payton College Prep after she failed to get in on her own: "It's just minor stuff. It doesn't matter."
     Well . . . yessir, Mr. Rauner sir. I guess that sets it straight. I should probably say here that I have a personal bias against Bruce Rauner, having met him on two occasions last year. Both times I tried to talk to him. Both times I found myself tossed into the same bin with his pressuring principals to give his daughter a spot earned by someone else: I was just minor stuff; I didn't matter.
     You can't buy a personality, I thought ("You mean being an . . . " insert a seldom-seen body location here "doesn't count as a personality?" a colleague asked. Point taken).
     Reading that story gave me a glimmer of hope, that Gov. Pat Quinn, with his sensible, off-the-rack suits and his weary look of dolor, is not necessarily doomed when he goes up against Rauner's money machine. The thinly disguised contempt of rich people is like spit: it only takes a little to spoil the soup. As god-awful stupid as people are, in Illinois as everywhere, they might not be quite so stupid as to lap up the blizzard of paid BS Rauner is about to unleash upon us all. Which is an epiphany worth schlepping into work in a snowstorm to experience.

Snowfall

    Snow is not actually white. It's clear, like glass; look at an individual snowflake and you will see that. But being complicated, clear surfaces, snowflakes scatter light in all directions, and as anyone who has ever spun a multicolored wheel knows, the result looks white—or under some conditions blueish, since the snow tends to absorb red light more than blue.
    It's certainly lovely to behold. "I doubt if any object can be found more perfectly beautiful than a fresh, deep snowdrift," wrote Victorian art critic John Ruskin. "Its curves are inconceivable perfection."
    Optics and aesthetics aside, there is something freeing about snow. Snow blankets our world, disguises it, interrupts our usual routines. The important appointments are scrapped, the airplanes stay on the ground. By interrupting society, snow liberates us. Snow almost begs you to go play in it. No less of a thinker than Ralph Waldo Emerson noted a connection between snow and our democracy, "wherever snow falls there is usually civil freedom," he wrote in 1870. 
     More or less correct. He probably wasn't thinking of Russia.
     Like freedom, snow is rarer than we think. Most places on earth don't get snow. It's something of a privilege really -- about 75 percent of the globe is almost always snowless, and Emerson has a point that the worst dictatorships—North Korean notwithstanding—tend to be sunny. Cairo had its first snowfall in over a century last month; it lasted about as long as the reforms that seemed possible in 2011 during the rebellion on Tahir Square. (Not only is snow rare, but so is atmospheric moisture. We live on a watery planet, true, but all the water in the air, condensed, would cover the surface of the earth to the thickness of an inch). 
     A little can seem like a lot, though. It didn't really snow that much over New Year's -- some eight inches, beginning Tuesday afternoon, as we were hurrying home to get ready for our New Year's Eve festivities, then steadily Wednesday, with an inch or two  to come Thursday. Not much compared to the epic snows of yesteryear -- 1967's 18.1 inches in one day. Because much of the city was shut down anyway, there was no need to worry much about getting around in the snow. So the snow could be simply enjoyed, even by us suburbanites who had to shovel it. I have a long driveway, but don't own a snowblower, since it seems stupid to belong to a gym and do aerobic exercise there, to lift weights and run, only to shuck actual productive effort when nature serves up a manageable physical task to be performed now and again. 
    The snow was pretty fluffy, the weather not too cold, and while I wouldn't describe shoveling as "fun," it wasn't so bad either. The dog was certainly delighted, crashing through drifts as tall as herself, bounding like a porpoise. It seemed for a while she wouldn't come in at all, but rocketed around the yard, chasing squirrels that weren't there, cutting a furrow through the perfect whiteness, raising clouds of fresh snow. I like to let her run, and worry less when there's snow, because I can always track her through neighbors' backyards, though toward the end we looked like a silent movie comedy act, Kitty threading the snow between the trees, me puffing through the frosty landscape after her, calling her name with decreasing good humor, scattering snowflakes uncounted.
     Looking at a flake of snow, by the way, is like looking at a giant molecule. The basic shape of a snowflake is six-sided because when oxygen bonds with hydrogen to create a water molecule, the molecule is a hexagon which, growing on all sides and crystallizing into a snowflake, maintains its shape. 
     I don't expect an argument over this. It is worth noting that religious sorts do not insist God creates each individual snowflake, despite their complexity, perfection. beauty and abundance, . Because the science behind snowflakes is so simple and clear, they don't waste their time challenging them, saving their energy for what they perceive as the shadows of science, where they expect more results, and indeed get them. A recent poll showed that about a 1/3 of Americans believe that evolution, a science as certain as the crystallography behind snowflakes, is a fiction, and instead that God Almighty created man fully-formed, and about 10,000 years ago yet. 
     Their religion teaches them this and they feel strongly enough to tell it to pollsters and insist it be taught in supposedly public schools, to children whose parents might not believe it at all. As to why they would not add, "God creates snowflakes too, designing each one with a No. 2 pencil" and oppose teaching of crystallography and chemistry, well, that is just one of those mysteries -- actually, it isn't. 
     The disappearance of human origins into time immemorial creates an opportunity, to the faithful, to impose their fanciful tale of divine will, and dismiss the careful proof plain in the fossil records. Dragging in snowflakes -- which they should do, if they sincerely believed God designed this world; in for a dime, in for a dollar -- would just be dumb. What they don't realize is that limiting your fantasizing to the creation of animal life and the Earth is also dumb -- well, "dumb" is a harsh word to apply to faiths not one's own. How about "presumptuous"? You may of course entertain yourself by playing with whatever ball of nonsense looks pretty to you. It's when you push your fairy tale upon the unwilling that it becomes dumb, since it insults others and distracts society from things that matter. So maybe "dumb" is apt — when you insult people, they get to insult you back.
    But we've drifted, blown a long way from snowflakes. The snow was very soft and quiet and wonderful Wednesday, and I hope you got out and enjoyed it. 

New Year's Day receptions at the White House

     "All is quiet on New Year's Day," to quote U2. But that wasn't always the case —  Jan. 1 was once a day of boisterous, ritual party-making across the country, as anyone with a home worth showing off set out refreshments and welcomed literally everyone who wanted to stop by, starting, for the first 142 years of this country's history, with the White House. That seems something worth remembering.

     One hundred and forty-two years is a long time, and you’d think that a cherished American tradition of that length, one that involved some 30 presidents, starting with George Washington and ending still within living human memory, would be at least faintly recalled on New Year’s Day, when it took place. But it isn’t.

      On every New Year’s Day from our first as a nation with a president, in 1790, to the last observed in the White House by Herbert Hoover, in 1932, the doors would be thrown open and any American could walk in and shake the president’s hand. Thousands did.

     Washington’s first New Year’s reception was in New York, where the nation's capital first was located, then Philadelphia. Several hundred people attended, some grudgingly.
     “Made the President the compliments of the season, had a hearty shake of the hand,” Pennsylvania’s first senator, William Maclay, noted in his diary on Jan. 1, 1791. “I was asked to partake of the punch and cakes, but declined. I sat down and we had some chat. But the diplomatic gentry and foreigners coming in, I embraced the first vacancy to make my bow and wish him a good morning.”
     That’s why you’ve got to love history, not the whitewashed, grade-school history, but history as lived by a senator keen to escape the clutches of the father of our country.
     John Adams began receptions in the current White House in 1801, and his successor, Thomas Jefferson, started the tradition of shaking everybody’s hand — a practice his successors would loathe. Martin Van Buren refused to serve refreshments, to keep the crowds down. William Howard Taft’s hand was so swollen the day after shaking 6,000 hands in 1910, it had to be bandaged.
     If you wonder why the president would even bother receiving people on New Year’s Day, the answer is easy: that’s what people did. In the days before telephones, nevermind the Internet, you visited. There was an elaborate ritual of leaving visiting cards, of etiquette, which of course was not always observed, particularly on New Year’s, when the tradition was to serve punch to guests.
    “It frequently happened that young men, after having made six or eight calls and stopping at six or eight punch bowls, became intoxicated, causing distress in the houses which they next visited,” wrote historian George William Douglas. “Bibulous young men, attracted by the prospect of free punch, would force their way into houses where they were not known.”
     As ugly as that must have been, the scene wasn’t much better at the White House. If you think it would be nice to have gone there for a New Year’s reception, think again.
     “The guests are often compelled to stand for hours in a line outside, exposed to the elements, whatever they may be, whether clear or stormy, warm or cold, windy or calm, the waiting line moving forward towards its goal a step at a time, with long intervals between each step,” Helen Hakcourt wrote in 1911. “Many reach the receiving party worn out with fatigue, and with their elaborate costumes all awry, if not actually torn to ribbons, and are shot through the door as though from a mortar by the relentless pressure behind, and in such a dazed and confused condition that they pass by the President to reach whom they have endured hours of almost danger without so much as seeing him.”
     The practice was ended by Herbert Hoover who, bitter at losing to Franklin D. Roosevelt, skipped out to Florida for New Year’s 1933. FDR never revived it “as his lameness made it difficult for him to stand in the receiving line for any length of time,” as one commentator wrote in 1937.
     Our current president, Barack Obama, has vanished to Hawaii, and as his sagging popularity is dissected, I can’t help but think of Pennsylvania Sen. Maclay. Not only was he hot to escape George Washington, but he hadn’t planned on going to the reception.
     “Just as a I pass’d the president’s house,” he wrote in his diary, an acquaintance bid him go in to the reception but, being in his “worst clothes,” he begged off. A few steps later, Maclay “had, however, passed him but a little way, when [Samuel] Osgood, Postmaster-general, attacked me warmly to go with him. I was pushed forward by him, bolted into his presence.” Of course, Maclay had served in the Continental Army under Washington, so maybe he already had his fill. He also belonged to the Anti-Administration faction that had opposed ratifying the Constitution — does that sound familiar?
     That could be our resolution for 2014: to see history, not as we wish it were, but as it actually was, and do the same for life today.
     Or heck, why expect anyone to start now?

You do something for 30 years, you should ask yourself why

 

     On Jan. 7, 1985, I visited Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, five years before the quirky palazzo was looted of a dozen paintings, one of the great unsolved art thefts of modern history. Even intact, I found the place a "weird, debilitating collection of dark, gilt baroque pieces, artlessly assembled in dim corridors and mocked by bright flowers assembled in hideous inner courtyard like Sears Garden Center."
     A hard assessment, but I was 24. The young are often unkind.
     Later that year, on May 11, 1985, I picked up my first computer, a Kaypro 2X, serial number 273997. At 29 pounds, it was considered portable.
    That fall I lost my job at the Wheaton Daily Journal, fired for something I wrote about the Rev. Billy Graham, and on Nov. 26, I visited the unemployment office at 35 S. 19th Avenue in Maywood. There were 55 people in line in front of me when I arrived at 8:25 a.m., affording me plenty of time to look around. "Plastic chairs are burnt orange, olive green, mud brown and blue. Dark brown carpeting the color of yesterday's oatmeal, walls a whitish yellow beige, as if they had never been washed."
    Never went back, never collected a dime of unemployment.
    I know this because I wrote it down, in the 1985 Waterstone's Literary Diary that my parents brought back for me as a present on a trip to London. It was a lovely gift, a rich red cover, filled with diversions -- essays, a crossword puzzle, a quiz. Every day had a noteworthy literary event (June 13, "W.B. Yeats born County Dublin 1865.") Each week had its own two-page spread, with an illustration and a notable quote or work or author highlighted.
    So began a tradition that tomorrow enters its 30th year, and, perhaps after yesterday's post on this blog's six-month anniversary, in the mood to confess what may be an alarming habitualness on my part, I am unwrapping my 30th journal. I suppose, if a person has been doing something for nearly 30 years, he should pause once and reflect upon why he is doing it.
     Why fill these books? At the time, for convenience. Appointments, interviews, birthdays, due dates. If you don't write them down, you can forget your obligations, and leave people sitting in restaurants, gazing at the door. In the back is room for phone numbers and addresses, and looking over them is a reminder of just how long relationships last. Of the dozen names on the first page of that 1985 address page, five I'm still in touch with. One I married. Otherwise, you see people come and go -- in 2006, I put Barack Obama's cell phone number down, though I can't recall ever dialing it, and it's too late now.
     But scheduling and contact information is only a fraction of what's in them. Most of the writing is from the end of the day, the basic outlines of what happened. Again, why? That's easy. Because you forget everything. All the details of your life are not only lost after you die, but before, while you're still here. I knew this even as a child, growing up, and it bothered me. I remember sitting next to someone on a plane, having a conversation, then realizing I was never going to see that person again. So I jotted down my fellow passenger's name on a piece of paper — I might have the slip still, tucked in a box somewhere. Remembering seemed important, on its own merits. I think I became a writer because I didn't want to forget stuff. Keeping a journal is a kind of control over the passing of time, a way of dipping your hand into the racing torrent of your life, scooping out a dripping meager handful of details, and saving them in a jar.
    A journal is perfect for that. You put in what was important, what is interesting, what meant something, and you tuck it away where you know you can find it. In 1985, I worked for the newspaper in Wheaton, but I had already started writing for the Sun-Times, and Chicago magazine, and other publications. The book is filled with notes to call this or that person, and lists of story ideas.
     That fall, I wrote to the Waterstone's company in London and ordered the upcoming year's literary diary, and in the years to come doing so became a Christmas treat for me. Subsequent diaries varied, they were different, having been placed into the hands of various artists and design teams, and I loved tearing open the package to see what it looked like this year.  Some I liked better than others.  At first I would write to Waterstone's, and it was always a worry, whether the diary would arrive in time for the new year. But then, one year, running late, I phoned, and after that I always phoned. It was a thrill to dial their flagship store in London and place my order, very carefully, imagining myself eccentric and wealthy, indulging this extravagance, explaining my order to the somewhat surprised clerk, who found herself shipping a diary to America. For a few years, Waterstone's had a store, just off Michigan Avenue, and I remember it was somewhat of a let-down to just clomp over there and buy it. What fun is that?  Scarcity and difficulty create value.
     Beginning with that 1986 diary, I filled in the events of the day in a tiny hand that I could never manage today. But that year, the tiny notions petered out on July 2, with a single sentence that explains why, "Hectic day trying to finish work & get ready for trip." A glance at the day before gives a sense of the freelancer scramble: "Busy workday worked at finishing up Sun-Times stories, Nostalgia stories, N.S. story, got call from WLS D.J. Larry Lujack for N.S. story. Talked to Newsweek first thing in morning about last 2 profiles. Dictated over phone, took three hours out at middle of the day and wasted it -- walked to library to mail N.S. article and book to Didi--$5 to mail a paperback to Haiti. Ate a slice of pizza, looked through bookstores, didn't get home until 2, missed surprise air express delivery of photos. Mad about that."
    "N.S." was "Northshore," a now-defunct magazine. I have no memory of ever talking to radio great Larry Lujack, who coincidentally died earlier this month, nor even what the story might have been about. That seems odd—you'd think a person would remember, but that's my point. The journals are rarely literary, in themselves, rarely structured prose designed to be read by others. They're bare facts, descriptions, impressions, salted away against forgetting and, I suppose, under the notion I might need them again. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I'm writing something and need to go back to a time; occasionally I find something useful, other times, just a blank. Sometimes I just pull one down idly to see what was going on.
     In 1987, I joined the staff of the Sun-Times, having freelanced for two years, and would make notes on stories, such as Friday, April 15, 1988. "Sent to the South Side, 48th St. and Wabash, for Ald. Dorothy Tillman's birthday celebration. After I got over my initial unease it was interesting to walk around the large hall & take everybody in. Many sharp sorts in small fedoras & 3 piece suits like cast members of 'Guys & Dolls.' Lot of commerce -- people selling Harold buttons, clocks, posters, records, a very thin poet was hawking his poem about Harold for $1-- the opening line was something like, 'He was the first & he was very very far from the worst.' ... Ald. Tim Evans spoke, not saying very much. He was a long way to go if he plans on filling Harold Washington's shoes."
    Prescient.
    In 2001, Waterstone's shrank their diary to 2/3 the size it had been, and the next year it vanished altogether. It hurt, but I shifted to Brownline Daily Diaries. They're spare, they don't have the literary trappings that Waterstone's did, but do have a pleasing utilitarian office supply vibe. They're smaller, but give each day a full page, and I've been pretty good about writing the events of the day, some years more than others. I've noticed that this year, with the blog, the entries are more telegraphic.
       The books are lined up, 29 of them now, a better record than anything technological. The coincidence of my old Kaypro's purchase being recorded in that first 1985 diary would look cheesy in fiction, but it is true. The Kaypro is in the basement, wrapped in plastic, a future antique, and if I wanted to read anything on the big floppy disks it used, I'd have to haul it out, fire it up, find the disks, assuming I still have them, and maybe I could read them  more likely I couldn't. Thirty years from now, who knows what kind of electronic devices we'll be using, or if these new systems will be compatible. We may be able to dip into the Cloud, or the Cloud could drift away. Who knows?

     But the journals will be as accessible as they are now, on a top shelf of my bookshelf, easily searchable, and if I want to wander off into the past, all I need to is pull one down. So what was New Year's Eve, 1993 like?  Memory tells me a bit: no kids, newly married, living on Pine Grove Avenue and ... that's about it. The journal however, for Dec. 31: "Up at 5:11—began reading intro. Read & printed it & first two chapters. Slow going," that must have been Complete and Utter Failure, published in 1994. Then I moved away from work. "Edie up singing, getting ready for party." That should have been parties, plural. It was quite an evening -- going with old friends downtown to see Steve Martin's first play, then back to our place for Mexican food and drinks, then to a party Richard Roeper was throwing at Mother Hubbard's, smoking Cuban cigars and drinking whiskey with radio and TV personality Roe Conn.
      Sounds fun, and it is oddly comforting, looking at my sedentary, sober life now to remember that fun was had, and reading other entries is a reminder of how much fun wasn't had, the experiences as inevitable as stepping stones, leading to right now. Tonight, as usual, we'll be watching movies at home with the boys, drinking sherbert and ginger ale punch, eating little hot dogs wrapped in dough and shrimp. I can't honestly say that I'd rather celebrate New Year's Eve 1993 than New Year's 2013.
      A journal doesn't take that much time, and it is a statement that your life might be worth recalling. I can't pretend that anybody else would be interested in them -- heck, I'm hardly interested, and it's my life, and half the time, when I do look at them, I'm rewarded with some stark barb that's painful to recall. But that's useful too — it's wrong to laud the joys of your past and ignore the woes. Both are necessary in the forging of your spirit. Tonight is a time for introspection, balanced on a peak between two years, 2013 gasping out its last minutes, 2014 taking its first gulp of air and letting out a newborn cry. Life is a very long time, or can be, and most people will use their time well and use it poorly, switching off, in fits and starts. It's good to keep track of life, if you can, so that when it's past, you'll know what happened, sort of. Happy New Year. See you in 2014.


   

The story so far...

    The year is off-balance, out-of-whack. Not just this year. Every year. And I'm not referring to the crazy stuff that happens, the shoves and kicks and twists to reality that send us muttering along our way. 
    I mean off balance as in number of days. The second half of the year, the six months of July, August, September, October, November and December, has 184 days, while the first half -- January, February, March, April, May and June--contains only 181.
    You'd think people would know that generally. I didn't; I just assumed a rough balance, maybe 182 in the first half, 183 in the second, with the leap year day added to February balancing it every four years. But no.
   And if you're wondering why I was counting the days, tomorrow marks the end of the first six months of the blog, and I was wondering how I am doing. The Blogger platform tosses you a bunch of statistics, but not a daily average. So I had to take the total page views —168,000 -- and divide by the number of days in six months -- 184 (well, 183, since Dec. 31 hasn't happened yet) -- to get my daily average of 918.
     That isn't good from a mass media perspective. Not good from a Drudge Report, straddle-the-earth-like-a-colossus point of view. But it seems pretty good to me, and given the complete obscurity of most blogs, can be considered adequate. Others seem impressed. My pal Vanessa Grail, who writes the Messy Nessy Chic blog in Paris, told me it took her a year to get 30,000 page views a month, and I had that going out of the gate in July.
     Though it pretty much stayed there, after a big dip, to about 22,000 a month in August and September, then back up to 31,000, 32,000 a month. Lower in December, to 28,000, still around a thousand a day. Not a lot of improvement. But a little. The biggest change I noticed is the average bottom has raised. It used to be, if things got quiet, I could have a day when only 400 people looked at the blog -- the high is around 2,000, which I've hit on a few busy days. Now the worst it ever gets is around 700. If the thing tops 1,000, as it usually does now, I feel I've done my job for the day.
     Of course those are numbers, and the fact that I'm pondering them at all shows a shift in attitude. Numbers are essentially meaningless when it comes to judging writing, or should be. Though I suppose it isn't any different than brooding over book sales. The number of views seems more a function of how vigorously I tweet each post, and who re-tweets it, than the content itself. The question I am more concerned with is: does writing every day lower the quality of my work? Am I burning out, running out of steam? I don't feel like I'm shoveling ill-considered garbage online just to have something to post, and nobody has yet complained about that -- perhaps I shouldn't give them the idea. But someone would. The online world is not known for its kindness, and I figure, were the blog some tossed-off, shoddy thing, trolls would be lining up to gleefully tell me. Maybe that's coming.
     Although, the big advantage of blogging, as a form of writing, is that it can be easily improved. While I try to let the posts be—there are other tasks to do—only fixing typos, sometimes I go back once or twice or six times, reread the thing and fiddle with it, or add an additional thought, such as this one, which came to me Monday over a breakfast of Earl Grey and homemade banana bread fresh from the oven. Sometimes, in lifting out a sentence to fling out on Twitter, I'll improve the sentence, then sharpen it here as well. Posts at the end of the day tend to be better, more polished, less buggy, than they were at midnight, when Blogger automatically posts them.
     Blogger lists your top posts, and it's an interesting motley of themes. The most popular post, chiding Chicago's most famous chef, "Time to Stick a Fork in Charlie Trotter," didn't create a stir when it was written at the end of August. Then he died Nov. 5 and search engines grabbed it, getting 2,000 hits that day, and now it has more than 4,500. Yet close behind, the second most popular post, "Some companies you can't forgive," is about the Caribou Coffee shop in Northbrook washing away a gay pride window painting, and the whole idea of boycotting companies. Why that one? No idea. Maybe because Dan Savage retweeted it to his 160,000 followers. That must be it. In close third there is a long post on visiting colleges -- I assume, since it touches on eight schools, that creates a large built-in audience.
    Some of the posts have surprisingly long tails. I wrote something in the middle of September, based on a single exclamation of my older son, "That's not tellable, mother." It seemed a small family vignette, something written more for my benefit than anybody else's. But it can get 20, 30 hits a day (it's had 33 today), months after it went up, and is one of my top 10 all time popular posts. People seem to like family vignettes -- "Burning down Nevada," a chapter in my unpublished family vacation book, is another favorite, in seventh place. I'm considering putting the whole book up this August, but can't decide if doing so will help it get printed eventually, or make that an even more distant possibility.
      A lot of this is mysterious to me. I don't know why 4 percent of my audience is in China -- I have to assume it's a random effect of hundreds of millions of Chinese searching stuff, and doesn't involve any actual readers. I wrote a post trying to flush them out. Nothing. In third place is Ukraine, with 3,700 or so hits -- again why? I assume Russian mobsters, looking for sites to hack. But maybe it's just some odd online echo.
      What else? The Sun-Times seems to have accepted the existence of the blog, the way a lion will allow a tiny bird to alight on its shoulder. The two still aren't officially connected, though of course on days when I have a column in the paper, I link to it here, and that both reduces the burden of generating content, and I assume drives readers toward the paper's web site, which might explain why it's tolerated by them. While a rare reader will occasionally object to the name, what notice it has gotten has been positive. There was a lively debate over "The Connoisseur Trap," my take on the Lyric Opera's production of "La Traviata," and I was flattered when Alex Ross, the music critic of the New Yorker, left a comment. It's nice when that happens, when someone significant, like the great Gene Weingarten, of the Washington Post, retweets something, or the blog gets mentioned on the Economist's Midwest bureau chief's web site. Another plus: I had an advertiser for the past two months, Eli's Cheesecake -- thank you Marc Schulman -- and plowed the bulk of what he paid back into promoting the blog, in the form of a Hatch Show Print poster, which is being produced in Nashville as we speak, and will be on the streets in Chicago, and on display here, in a few weeks.

Garfield Park Conservatory, Chicago

      Writing this hasn't been a particular strain, more a quotidian obligation, like flossing. Although, unlike flossing, I manage to actually do it when I'm supposed to. That could be a new use for something like Facebook -- provide social pressure for small but necessary tasks. "Hey Bill, I see on Facebook that you haven't cleaned your gutters yet..." But I have never missed a day, so chalk one up for mulish consistency, if nothing else (and yes, the echo of Emerson's "foolish consistency" is intentional. We be lit'rary round these parts).
      The jumbo first half of Everygoddamnday.com's first year ends tomorrow. I plan to continue this for another six months, an easier task, since they second half is short three days, and then re-assess again. My goal for the next six months is to somehow double my daily average, from almost 1,000 to nearly 2,000. It's seems doable. I don't think a poster will do that, but maybe just mere persistence will count for something. It often does in life.
     The first half of the year, by the way, is three days shorter because it contains February, of course, with only 28 days, this year at least, as opposed to, oh, August in the second half, with its 31 days. We don't divide the year into halves, usually -- why would we? -- so one half being larger is not the sort of thing you'd notice. I think that's why I like writing this -- I  often learn new stuff, and I hope you do too. But even though you stop by for your own purposes, or because you're a random passerby from China, I still appreciate it. Thank you for reading.

Waiting on weed

    News has a way of following a reporter.  I scheduled my trip to Colorado to coincide with my younger son's Christmas vacation, never realizing that a historic shift is taking place here — this Wednesday, Jan. 1, Colorado will become the first state in the nation (well, a neck-and-neck tie for first with Washington State, which also legalizes pot on New Year's Day) and one of the rare places in the world where adults can freely purchase marijuana, no strings attached. You don't have to be sick. You don't need a prescription. You only need to be older than 21 and not spark up in public.
    We should have visited next week.
    Kidding.  I'm not running out to get pot, because either I'd like it too much or too little and either way would be bad. But it is an interesting cultural moment to witness, even second hand (insert your pun here) in the local press. 
     The newspapers, always champions of the status quo, are eagerly ballyhooing the aborning era of Colorado Rocky Mountain high. Saturday's Denver Post contained an extensive story on how to grow pot -- in the "Home" section, of course. Another showed up in the "Fit" section. Each adult can grow up to six plants, though the law requires that your stash be cultivated in an enclosed, locked space, which is just as well, as house pets carry parasites that can make your pot plants sick. Who knew? 
     Sunday's Boulder Daily Camera was headlined "Waiting on Weed" and included the 14 stores expected to open for business New Year's Day -- none in Boulder or the surrounding Boulder County, whose licensing hoops will keep legal pot from being sold until February. 

Denver Post

     "I have a feeling we'll be visiting a lot more often in the future," I deadpanned to my mother.  Legalizing pot is a topic that encourages humor, both accidental and intentional. We went to see "Monty Python's Spamalot" at the Boulder Dinner Theatre Friday night—first rate singing, dancing and serving, by the way (the actors are the waiters)—and the obligatory insert-a-topical-local-reference-in-the-show segment of course referred to Colorado legalizing pot. "Not that anyone will notice a difference," quipped King Arthur, or words to that effect. No doubt. They legalized it here first for a reason.
     I suppose there are all sorts of somber, valid, good-public-policy reasons to be concerned, but at this point it just seems funny, to see society open its arms to what is basically a low-level, self-indulgent method to disengage your brain from the world for a while. Compared to the huge swath of death and destruction, illness and heartbreak carved by alcohol, I just can't see getting worked up at this point about sweet old Mary Jane demurely slipping her legal chains. Like gay marriage, the surprising thing will someday be that it was ever illegal.
    Another Post story on Saturday, by reporter John Ingold, was about the distribution of the first three dozen pot licenses Friday (about 100 stores are licensed in the state, so far) to vendors who already sell medical marijuana. When the first license was given out, "The handful of people in the licensing office -- some of whom had lined up as early as 7:15 a.m. to await the office's 8 a.m. opening -- applauded." 
     I haven't been smoking anything, but that "some of whom had lined up as early as 7:15 a.m." struck me as incredibly funny, again in a dry sort of way. Wow man, a whole 45 minutes early! Righteous vigor! I assumed the detail had to be intentional, but then wondered. It wasn't as if confirmation weren't possible. I wrote to the reporter, identifying myself and telling him what I struck me about the sentence: 

When I read that, I smiled, considering it delightfully wry. As anyone knows who has ever covered stories involving people waiting in line — holiday shopping, or hot concert tickets, or those lining up to get the first picnic license — people show up hours, even days early for stuff they consider important. Showing up 45 minutes early is practically late, and struck me as a sly wink at the stoner culture to come, assuming it's not already here.

     I was wondering if he had written it intentionally. Ingold didn't answer* -- maybe because it's the weekend, maybe because most reporters don't leap to respond. Maybe he smelled a trap, and was worried about being accused of tucking double meanings into his staid news stories. He shouldn't worry; double meanings are inevitable. Another article — or his, they all blend together at this point — explained that distribution might be a problem, as the only legal chain of supply right now is for medical marijuana, and it'll take a while for them to ramp up the purely recreational supply chain. Shortages are possible.
    "Nobody knows how great the demand will be," I told my mother, as we sat in the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse, waiting for our breakfast.
     "I'm sure it will be high," she said, her face placid with sincerity. I paused, looked at her for a lingering moment. I smiled. She smiled back. A beat. I couldn't say it.
     "No doubt," I replied.
   

* The day after this was posted, I heard from John Ingold. He wrote:            

Sorry to take so long to respond. Regrettably, I wasn't trying to be wry with that sentence. Considering that there was no need to line up -- since store owners could pick up their licenses anytime during business hours on Friday (or Monday or Tuesday) -- I thought it was a sign of the store owners' enthusiasm surrounding the start of recreational sales that they would line up just to achieve some type of first.

But if you found humor in it, all the better. I certainly don't take any offense to it. Whatever someone might think of our experiment with marijuana legalization, I think everyone can agree that it has been filled with plenty of little moments of absurdity.

Stranger coming

    Near my parents' place in Boulder is an expanse of open space where I like to take walks when I can. The area is silly with prairie dogs, which are somehow less noxious than other rodents they are related to. Or maybe they're just less familiar, and in time I'd find them as odious as squirrels, if that is possible. Maybe more so — they're certainly louder. They hang out by their burrow entrances, like gang members on street corners.  Whenever somebody approaches, they start squeaking out a warning, then zip into their burrows to safety.
    Researchers say that prairie dog warnings are one of the more complex communications in the animal kingdom, not only shouting "danger" but conveying details of what the danger is, such a hawk or a coyote or a person, down to specifics as to whether the person is thin or fat, even what color clothes the intruder is wearing.
    The constant prairie dog chatter got me thinking about warnings.  I had to admire that each alarmed prairie dog, in turn, raised the alarm of my approach before seeking its own safety. Quite altruistic. It must be because they're from a community, the pack or clan or whatever you call a mob of prairie dogs.  Humans would reverse the order: duck first and think about others later, if then. Human prairie dogs chirps would be muffled from within the safety of their burrows. Assuming they didn't dispense with the warnings altogether. Every man for himself....
     I was in the middle of the above reverie when I heard a bell. "On your left," a bicyclist said and I took a step rightward while he flew by, such a usual occurrence that it took me a second to make the connection between the prairie dog shrieks and the bicyclist's bell. Maybe I was selling my own species short — only a few days in Boulder and already I was glorifying any passing rodent while running down my own kind. Really, neither species' warnings are entirely altruistic -- the bicyclist doesn't want to hit me, it would wreck both his day and mine. And there is probably some Darwinian reason the dogs worry about each other -- safety in numbers, pack dynamics, they want the other prairie dogs to live and be around so the next hawk will get them instead. Or heck, maybe they love each other; heck you can't really ask them, though those researchers seem fairly confident about the specifics of what they're saying.
     And rather than skimp on warnings, when you think about it, human conversation, our media, is a chorus of cautions and clicks and whistles, clatter over new studies, debates over dangers. We don't consider it that way—it's usually either worrisome or annoying — but we show concern for the other members of our species by warning them about stuff, and we show concern for ourselves by paying attention to the latest news of possible threats.
    Probably too much. I don't speak prairie dog, but I'm fairly certain those alarms aren't warning about intruders who might be arriving in 2020. That can't be said for people. It is a gift from our enormous brains, the ability to fret over threats to come. But there's a limit, or should be, since at some point our worry risks becoming a greater peril than the peril we're worrying about. The prairie dogs only focus on the danger coming down the trail right now, and that is something we could learn from them. Otherwise, we ending up spending all our time ducking into our burrows, jabbering our hearts out, pointlessly, again and again and again.