I double-dog dare you to post this!

   

     Maybe we don't need the law to rein in Facebook. Maybe eventually people will just get bored with it.
     I certainly am.
     Every morning I dump my column, or blog post, in the little "What's on your mind?" oblong, to afflict others with it ... whoops, so eager readers can find it there. For the clicks. And I at least try to look at what Facebook friends are posting, to see what folks are talking about. 

     But it's a fairly empty experience. People I don't know celebrating their anniversaries. Posting motivational poems. Sharing their vacations. Ads for stuff I don't want. And odd, out-of-left-field challenges. Like this:

     "Someone once said, “When you love someone with dementia you lose them more and more everyday. When they are diagnosed, when they go through different stages, when they go into care and when they die. ‘Rapidly shrinking brain’ is how doctors describe it. As the person’s brain slowly dies, they change physically and eventually forget who their loved ones are. They can eventually become bedridden, unable to move and unable to eat or drink.”

     A former college classmate, my age. Not sharing grim news of her own, but a canned chain letter. It ended:

     "There will be people who will scroll by this message because dementia has not touched them. They may not know what it's like to have a loved one who has fought or is fighting a battle against dementia. To raise awareness of this cruel disease, a special thank you to all willing to post to their timeline."

     Or ..... there may be people whose lives have been abso-fucking-lutely touched by dementia, and are all for "sharing awareness," but just aren't into tiny symbolic gestures, those happy pink ribbons that insulting suggest you can beat back bad old Mr. Cancer if only you keep a really positive attitude, and chafe against the I-double-dog-dare-you-to-post-this ethos that so infects Facebook. Like we're all in sixth grade. I thought of commenting. But that sparks all this Punch-and-Judy bickering that ends nowhere, and I just don't have the energy for that. I unfollowed her instead.
     Yes, it's good for people to be aware. And given how many people don't understand medicine, science, vaccines, who can't differentiate between an example and proof (Colin Powell dying of COVID despite being vaccinated is no more an indictment of vaccines than someone dying in a car crash despite wearing a seatbelt undercuts the advisability of seat belts) they need all the awareness they can get.
     But the flip side of awareness is over-stimulation. Everything, from everyone, all the time. The demonstrably untrue assertion that we can combat something just by lavishing our precious attention over it. That's sometimes true. But you can also combat something by focusing less attention on it. The less time on social media, particularly Facebook, the better. You don't need the government to tell you that.

Goodbye Chicago, hello Tokyo!

     Being a contrarian, I do not share the general consensus that Lori Lightfoot has accomplished nothing as mayor beyond grimly presiding over one disaster after another. In my view, that just isn’t true. For instance, she managed the neat trick of making Rahm Emanuel look good by comparison.
      Think about it. The Riverwalk was Mayor Rahm’s baby. A glittering new facet to the city. Like Rich Daley with Millennium Park, Rahm reminds us that a single landmark bauble can almost outshine a garish jacket woven of blunders.
     And at least you could talk with the man. Yes, that isn’t a quality that resonates with most Chicagoans. But it meant something to us inky wretches. Rahm was trying to accomplish stuff, and it gave the media a warm glow to be let in on the plan. The reason I can confidently credit Rahm with the Riverwalk is because, when he showed up and I asked him what he wanted to do in office, the first words out of his mouth were about improving the riverfront.
     I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve gone over to Team Rahm. Yes, I am rooting for his nomination as U.S. ambassador to Japan to be advanced Wednesday by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — and not just because that would plant him about as far from Chicago as he can get without leaving the earth’s magnetic field. A certain generational sympathy is also at work. It’s hard to be a man in your early 60s trying to carve out a new career.
     Or so I imagine; I’ve managed to cling to my own job with singular, barnacle-like tenacity for a third of a century. But I take a morbid interest in noting where those whose fingers are pried from their professional ledges manage to land. Usually, it isn’t pretty. Usually, there’s a splat.

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Flashback 2012: 'Prairie Home Companion' on its way

     Garrison Keillor is one of those figures like Al Franken, whose careers sank after running headfirst into the Me Too movement. I'll leave it to others to decide if that was fair, or if they were swept up in a furor, like Antoine Lavoisier, the scientist beheaded in the French Revolution. Once the guillotine is set up, it demands new necks to feed upon.

       I've been thinking about seeking Keillor out, maybe trying to interview him. But Keillor was a tough interview before this trouble happened. He hated the press before, and I doubt being publicly cashiered made him any fonder. I remember, after this conversation, telling someone that talking to him was like trying to interview an oak. 

     He's going to be performing "A Prairie Home Holiday" at the Rialto Square Theatre Dec. 11. I don't think I'll go—I've seen him several times, and it's in Joliet. But if you never have, you might consider it. He's the greatest American humorist since Mark Twain, and he won't be coming around forever.

     Mark Twain made a lot of money. Both from his own best-sellers, like "Huckleberry Finn," and from the work of others - he owned a publishing house - particularly the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.
     But he also lost a lot of money. Trying to repeat the Grant success, Twain published the autobiographies of lesser Civil War generals who, it turned out, the American public no longer cared much about.
     And Twain had a genius for bad investment. He bought many worthless patents. Several times in his life he was forced to hit the road to earn money, particularly after the economic panic of 1893, which left Twain bankrupt at 60, forced to travel the world giving speeches to pay off his creditors.
     I think of Twain pulling into Chicago or Berlin and imagine a local gazing at the paper, musing whether to go see the great man, whenever his lone rival over the past century, Garrison Keillor, comes to town, as he will in a couple weeks, and I have to decide if I should go see him again. Usually I do.
     Not that Keillor is financially ruined, I hasten to add. He tours the country with his radio show, "A Prairie Home Companion," because ... well, I had no idea why, so I asked him, before we fell to talking poetry, which you might have read about in my last column. Why not always broadcast from St. Paul?
     "Well, you get to see a better cross-section of people who listen to the show," Keillor said. "That's something a person needs. The longer you're in this business, the more you have to press yourself to get out and be out around people. I like to hang out after the show and talk to people; I want to check out who they are."
     His audiences turn out to be younger than you might expect.
     "A lot of people in their 20s now, and 30s, who more or less were forced against their will to listen as small children - they've made this transition, they come to enjoy something that as young people they thought they loathed," he said. "I'm interested both in the loathing and what they like about it now. So they offer a lot of information, and I want to keep in touch."
     I imagine they like the variety of the show—the songs and humorous sketches, and the highlight, Keillor's snapshot of his fictional hometown, Lake Wobegon, a short story he says is shaped in part by those listening to it.
      "When I sit down to write the show, I'm not writing it for myself. I don't want to," he said. "I'm writing for an audience. It just helps a lot to have some faces in your mind."
     Keillor doesn't read the story, nor does he entirely make it up on the air, but rather a blend, part recalling what he wrote earlier, part extemporizing as he goes along.
     "I'm a writer. The way I think is by putting words down," he said. "I like to have some outline, some story. That's how I do my thinking, looking at a long legal pad, with a pen, making marks. Then I toss it out. Once you write it down, then you don't need it anymore. You extemporize from what you remember of it. You don't make any attempt to memorize. Sometimes you turn it all around in the act of performing."
     What happens then?
     "When you tell a story, the audience will tell you where to go," he said. "They give powerful directions, and that's what you want to rely on. It just looks odd, I think for a man to stand up in front of an audience and read off a script."
     Does he ever forget what comes next? On live radio? What then?
     "It happens often," he said. "And you just have to talk in circles until you find a trail. You're in the woods and sort of crashing around through the underbrush. Eventually you find your way out of it."
     Keillor, 70, has in the past publicly speculated about retiring, but no longer.
     "It's always up in the air," he said. "We have this season pretty much all blocked out," and 2014 "is starting to get sketched in."
     With the election so close, we talked about politics—while the show isn't overtly partisan, it often contains a strong message.
     "I would always rather confuse people than have a label stuck to me," he said. "But I'm an old Minnesota Democrat, no secret about that. I've been involved in Democratic politics up in Minnesota, especially this fall, though my view has broadened with time. The party line doesn't interest me so much as politics is the best way there is to meet people and get to know who they are. Deep down, politics is about civility and about friendship, about the bonds between people. I think that I'm aligned with people who have acquired in their youth a powerful sense of empathy for the outcast, the stranger, the victim, the abused and the unlucky, and so we believe that we allied against the protectors of privilege. To me there's only one side to be on."
           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, October 26, 2012

Why are cops afraid of vaccines?

     Boy, is it beautiful up in Door County. The wife and I had a great time there last week, hiking the parks, going to fish boils. I tried not to think about being right back here Monday morning, poking Chicago’s ball-of-snakes politics with a stick.
     Oh look. The city and the police department are suing each other. That’s normal.
     So let’s talk about the police. Puff aside the fog of BS swirling around them and get down to basics. What is the most important activity performed by the police? The reason for the roll calls and the paperwork. What does everyone, including the police themselves, agree that police are supposed to do?
     Fight crime, right? Any objections? Is the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 7 on board with the whole police-are-supposed-to-arrest-criminals idea? Assuming so — a leap of trust nowadays with anything requiring an ounce of sense — let’s continue.
     This crime-fighting business involves danger, does it not? Puts police in perilous situations. Running into a dark alley where there might be a bad guy with a gun. Charging up the dark stairs of a six-flat. Going into the foul, overheated apartment of some crazy person who might come at you with a razor.
     A dangerous job. If I say, “Chicago cops put their lives on the line every day,” I don’t expect John Catanzara to jump onto YouTube to insist, “No we don’t!”
     So what’s with the vaccine hesitancy? You’ll run into a burning building but won’t get the shots that soon every 5-year-old will need in order to go to school? You let the city tell you what kind of hat to wear, but helping fight the plague that has killed 700,000 Americans is a bridge too far. Why?

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Dogs of Wisconsin

Lazlo

     Our dog Kitty travels well, and has ranged across the country from the Rockies to the Atlantic.
     Alas, the one inn we could find in Door County with a vacancy at short notice does not accept dogs. So we had to leave her with neighbors—who are, to Kitty's credit and theirs, somewhere between happy and overjoyed to savor her company for a few days. She really is a most easygoing dog.
     Because of her absence, I was perhaps more attentive to those travelers on our trip who managed to take their dogs with them, particularly this dog, spied on the Eagle Trail at Peninsula State Park. His name is Lazlo, his owner told me, and he is a Puli, or Hungarian sheepdog. At first I thought his long, dreadlock-like coat had to be some kind of singular neglect, but that is how the breed grows it, in these tight coils, which actually take quite a bit of attention to keep clean and in the pristine condition that Lazlo presented.
     I choked back the obvious question, "Can he see?" because there seemed to be a whiff of criticism about it, and there are enough people ignorantly challenging others over baseless concerns for me to add to the scrum. If you Google "How can a Puli see?" you find this question has been well-masticated. The answer is "yes of course," and there is even a supposed "old Hungarian saying," which goes " “The Puli, through his hair, sees better than you.”
     The other dog sat next to me at the Old Post Office fish boil; or, rather his owner did. We struck up a conversation (the owner and I, that is, not the dog). He had recently gotten the dog, named Wilson, a Silver Labrador that he trained for duck and pheasant hunting. I had heard of golden labs and black labs and chocolate labs, but a silver lab is something new, and he said it is indeed new. 
     The breed dates to the 1950s, which is yesterday when it comes to dog breeds. Though some think it actually is just a chocolate lab in a new light, sort of the canine version of the blue dress. Turns out, there is all this controversy over the silver lab, at least in circles who care about such things. Part has to do with their breeding: are they pure labs, or mixed with Weimaraner?  (which is what I suspected he was, at least partly, before I asked, though it seemed thick for a Weimaraner).
     "Dogs are an inexhaustible subject," as George Orwell writes in Burmese Days, and I probably should wrap this up. In closing, I have to mention that I've noticed people don't sneer at Kitty, being half-Bichon, half-Shitsu, the way they used to, nor insinuatingly demand to know what rescue shelter she was gotten at. I used to tell them she was rescued from a breeder, and point out that she was already born when we found her, and someone had to give her a home. I've either managed to better avoid such people, perhaps through good luck, or otherwise our national problems are such that grilling people over the provenance of their dogs just isn't as important as it used to be.

Wilson

     

     

     

Ravenswood Notes: Chills

 

   Credit to Caren Jeskey, she gets around. If I pulled on a random door, I don't believe I would find ... well, better let her tell it:

     Pre-pandemic you would have walked right past The Violet Hour, perhaps admiring the facade— an oft-changing mural the length of several storefronts. You would not have noticed the door hidden away within the strokes of the art. This posh cocktail and small-plates bar boasts “pre-prohibition style libations” and rules including “No Jager-Bombs. No bombs of any kind.”
      The Violet Hour sits on Damen, just south of North Avenue. My Grandpa Carl is rolling around in his grave at Rosehill knowing he missed out on all of this swanky fun, and remembering his days at the Busy Bee diner a few doors down where he sat at the counter sipping five cent coffee, black.
     COVID robbed The Violet Hour of their secretive allure when they realized they needed to set up outdoor seating on their limited parcel of concrete real estate. I called to fact-check and spoke with bartender-turned-manager Abe, who shared that the patio (along with a cocktail delivery program) helped them stay afloat. He stressed that the patio “is on a busy street in Chicago” to reduce expectations. He told me that he uses the mantra “make it work,”— words that have rung in his ears ever since he heard them spoken by Tim Gunn of Project Runway— to keep moving forward in solution mode at all times. This, he found, was particularly important during this past long year and a half for those in the now precarious business of service.
     I’ve not been to The Violet Hour for years, and was reminded of it recently when I found myself accidentally entering another mysterious joint. While on an Andersonville walkabout, I happened upon a black metal door, framed by an exposed brick wall that was peppered with Houdini, Thurston, and Alexander posters. I pictured a young boy with shorts and saddle shoes slapping them up there with a bucket of glue and a long-handled brush.
     I’m not 100% sure why, but I pulled the handle of the door marked with the address 5050, and was very surprised that it flew open. I was greeted by a suit-wearing chap with salt and pepper hair warmly saying “Welcome! Do you have your vaccination card?” (This snapped me out living in the land of timeless make-believe, but I still went with it). “Yes, I do.” I popped on my ubiquitous bracelet, aka mask, and followed him.
     The foyer was filled with laundry machines with big round glass doors, packed with clothes in various stages of wash cycles. He pulled at one of the machines, which opened up into yet another door. This time we were standing in an elegant, dimly lit, high ceilinged bar with black walls and vinyl booths. Salt and pepper turned out to be The Amazing Bibik. He showed me around the place and I was tickled to be led into a full sized theatre and stage hidden behind yet another door. I stuck around for some witty banter and card tricks, made a mental note to get back there for a show soon, and headed back out to meander some more.
     The other night a friend and I were on a walk and I thought to show him the magic place. He loved it. The show was already sold out, and we were looking for something to do. I checked the Music Box schedule and saw that The Rescue was starting. (As a member there I know that they require vaccination cards and masks, and if not too crowded the theatre is big enough that one can usually find a seat tucked far enough away from others).
      We high-tailed it to the theatre (on foot) as I bought the tickets online, and made it just in time for the film to start. It was a documentary about the 12 boys and their soccer coach who were rescued from the cave in northern Thailand in 2018, and it was made by E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin of Free Solo fame. Steve James, the creator of Hoop Dreams, introduced the film, and invited us to stay for a talk back afterwards. The movie was as enthralling as you’d think it would be, with unlikely heroes of shy, brilliant, socially awkward cave divers who feel more comfortable squeezing through muddy little passages than they might feel while sitting at a dinner party.
     After the movie Mr. James introduced the guests. First was John Volanthen, the British cave diver who first found the boys alive and was a crucial part of their rescue. We all stood, clapping. I am getting the chills again just thinking of that feel-good moment that we all need so badly. The other guest was Captain Mitch Torrel of the US Air Force, who had a big hand in helping plan and facilitate the successful mission. After the talk back we went up to the small circle that had gathered around these men, and though I wanted to hug Mr. Volanthen with all of my heart, it didn’t seem appropriate so we shared a hearty handshake instead.

Wisconsin mystery

     We hit four state parks and two county parks during our five days in Wisconsin, the last being Whitefish Dunes State Park. It seemed fitting to end our trip walking along the sand, watching the waves roll in.
     Just before we left that park and headed home, we tucked into a small lakeside area, the dimness under the trees contrasting with the bright beach just beyond. We sat for a while, watching the water through the trees, then turned to walk back to the car.  
     "Look, a doghouse," my wife said. It seemed incongruous, this small canine dwelling, just set there.. We walked around it. No door. No window. No entrance of any kind.  It had obviously been there for a while. A theory immediately came to me, ludicrous in its wrongness.  

     "Maybe they are testing roofing materials," I said. "For park structures and such. They built this little model here to see how it stands up to the elements."
     I hesitate to share this here, lest I establish myself as a stupid man. But that is what, confronted with the object, I thought and said aloud, sharing my wildly improbable theory. It shows imagination, if nothing else.

     My wife, far brighter, pointed to the concrete base.
     "It's probably covering up some unsightly thing," she said. Of course. An electrical meter or gas valve or some such device. That has to be it.
     "Some unsightly thing." I want to pause, and savor that phrase. Heck, I could use that as the title of my autobiography. One of the really enjoyable aspects of the trip was our conversations, and my wife, as always, would say things I just had to admire, with the surprise and appreciation of a philatelist discovering a rare issue. There was one during our first hike.
     "It's so friggin' quiet," she said, with feeling. I did marry a city girl—well, Bellwood, close enough. A simultaneous praise and dismissal of the Wisconsin natural idyll. I wish she had used the actual obscene present participle, and not a euphemism. But nothing is perfect. Close enough though.