Check your balls at the door

Great White Dispatch
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 49
19:30
01/25/10

As punishment for dragging Airika to an afternoon of soggy pond hockey, she drug me to an orchid show! Huzzah!

Some observations about orchids and their 'people':

- Many of these crackers smell like they've been playing in the dirt just a little too long. Of course, that may be just the actual flowers. Some do, in fact, smell like rancid horse piss. AND THIS IS A SELLING POINT.
- Orchid salesfolk seem like they had to make a decision early in their lives: Cats or flowers. I see some of these old broads sitting around the house, watching Idol in the tropical climate that is their apartment, spritzing the overheated air with chemical water, or flat Faygo, or old Sanka, or whatever it is that these plants eat, while muttering about the color of Ellen's new teeth-caps, waiting for a response from Maya the Guatemalan suneater...AND GETTING ONE.
-Some of these goddamn plants look...ominous. I'm not saying they're meat eaters, but I'd like to see how many stray rodents are hanging around the typical orchid farm. Methinks there's at least one Little Shop of Horrors lurking out there.

Luckily, orchids make for some nice photographin'. There are a ton more vaguely dirty flowers on my Flickr page.

Assimilation

Great White Dispatch
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 48
17:24
01/24/10

Becoming a true Minnesotan involves more than just moving north and bitching about the cost of propane. There are certain things you have to do to actually be from here.

-Buy a 4WD vehicle.
-Prepare a winter emergency kit for said 4WD vehicle.
-Eat and enjoy fried cheese curds.
-Use the phrase ‘Holy buckets!’ in casual conversation.
-Catch a show at First Avenue. The band doesn’t HAVE to be originally from Minny, but it certainly helps.
-Participate during the winter in what sane people from other lands consider summer activities. You know. Fishing. Hiking. Going outside.
-Wear a hat with ear flaps.
-Make a declaration with an upward lilt, so it sounds like you’re actually asking a question.
-Hockey.

In our year and a half in Damn Near Canada, I’ve managed to knock out most of the list whether I’ve wanted to or not. This weekend, I checked hockey off the list. The U.S Pond Hockey Championships take place in the Twin Cities every year. They pick one of the bigass lakes, rope off a bunch of rinks, and let 150+ teams play 4-on-4. The Gus Macker meets Mystery, Alaska. It’s kind of a big deal.

Minnesota in January is the perfect place for pond hockey. Unless Mother Nature decides to dump a week’s worth of Ohio weather on you. Seriously. We had 5 days of 40+ degree weather leading up to the tournament. And then it poured all weekend. Being out on a frozen death trap is unnerving enough when it’s 15 below zero. When it’s melting before your eyes, covered in 2 inches of standing water and you’re sharing it with a 500 yoked-up hockey yahoos and 1000 spectators? FROZEN HELL.

Still. Broke the hockey cherry and did not drown or freeze to death. I’ll consider that a success.


Want to see a near-panic attack? Airika is not a fan of the ice.


The 'warming tent' was...moist.


Players on some of the rinks had to wade through 2 inches of standing water and slush. Not the best or fastest hockey.

Soon I'll be watching Two and a Half Men

Great White Dispatch
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 47
0722
01/08/10

Sigh. I used to be such a fast reader. Once upon a time, I averaged a book+ a week, but now I'm lucky to finish one in a month. In the three years I've been tracking what I read every year (yeah...does anyone else do this? Please tell me someone else does this.), my annual number has decreased every year. 42, 33, 28 1/2.

I'd like to blame the steady decline on the fact that I had much more free time back in the day, but, jaysus, I used to go to school full-time, work full-time and drive an hour both ways to work, and I still managed to knock out at LEAST five books a month. I'd like to blame it on the fact that I'm reading more 'substance' these days, learning more and taking time to reflect on what I've learned. But shit like Men With Balls and all the random sci-fi on this list blow that argument out of the water. I'd like to blame it on the fact that I live in a natural wonderland and I spend all my time Enjoying Nature and Being Active. Yeah. That's the ticket.

I'd like to blame it on a lot positive, progressive reasons. The real answer? Comic books. I hammered back damn near 100 graphic novels this year, in an attempt to catch up on everything I missed last year. Hey, words is words, right? Right?

It's either comic books, or I'm just getting dumber. Valid arguments could be made in either direction. Anyway, here's the list of book-type-books I bagged in 2009. BECAUSE I KNOW YOU GIVE A SHIT.

A Year in the Main Woods, Bernd Henrich
Beat the Reaper, Josh Bazell
Dear American Airlines, Jonathan Miles
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
How I Became a Famous Novelist, Steve Hely
In the Lake of the Woods, Tim O'Brien
Men With Balls, Drew Magary
Minions of the Moon, Richard Bowes
Mr. Clarinet, Nick Stone
Old Man's War, John Scalzi
Population: 485, Mike Perry
Prince of Thieves, Chuck Hogan
Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
Snuff, Chuck Palahniuk
The Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons
The Book of Joe, Jonathan Tropper
The Digital Photography Book 1, Scott Kelby
The Digital Photography Book 2, Scott Kelby
The Longest Winter, Alex Kershaw
The Lost City of Z, David Grann
Understanding Exposure, Bryan Peterson
Walking Dead, Greg Rucka
Wastelands, Anthology
White Jazz (reread), James Ellroy
Whitetails, Erwin Bauer
Winterbirth, Brian Ruckley

Partial reads
Black Echo, Michael Connelly
Drama City, George Pelecanos
Dune, Frank Herbert

Warm holiday greeting

Great White Dispatch
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 46
12/31/09

I hate New Year’s. Just hate it. This crap-ass holiday depresses me more than reading The Road while watching Mystic River. After two weeks of festive good cheer, parties and presents, fireplaces and holly, you wake up January 2 and Everything. Just. Sucks.

All those Christmas decorations – glimmering symbols of fun and warmth just a week ago – now serve as reminders that you have to get back to work. Get your ass up that ladder and pull those lights down, bitch. You spend two hours sweeping up the evergreen splinters that your Christmas tree – now nothing more than a dead and brittle fire hazard – so kindly deposited all over your house when you finally evicted its rotting corpse, but your feet will still resemble that dude from Hellraiser until March. You suddenly go from having worked maybe 2 full weeks in the last 6, and now you don’t get a day off until what? Good Friday? New Year’s Day is nothing but the first of 365 Monday mornings.

And you kid yourself with these ‘resolutions.’ Let me enlighten you here: If you really need some contrived reason to do something, it ain’t gonna happen. You either want to do it or you need to do it. Making a promise to yourself just because the picture on your calendar changed isn’t the best motivation in the world. I’m the perfect example here. A few years ago, I started wearing a flab suit made of neoprene for the express purposes of hiding all my fabulous muscle definition. I really need to take it off. Problem is, I can only do that by moving my legs at a ridiculous speed for minutes at a time. Jogging. I hate jogging. HatehateHATE. Yet I live in a place seemingly custom-made for jogging. And if I haven’t been able to get off my ass and do it in the spring, summer and fall, in the middle of this land of parks and scenery, I sure as shittin’ won’t start doing it because I made a promise in the dead of winter to a baby in a golden sash. Or Dick Clark. Who do you make resolution pacts with?

Here’s an idea. Maybe we need some incentive to keep these resolutions. Say you break one. What if Dick Clark showed up in the middle of the night and showered you with stroke drool? Good god, I want to go for a subzero run just thinking about that scenario. But if the only motivation is a promise made to yourself while slurping down sauerkraut and watching Ryan ‘I am a pimp’ Seacrest, guess what? You will stay fat. You will remain at your desk. You will keep smoking. You will continue killing hobos and wearing their flesh. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with these things. I’m just saying we should all stop kidding ourselves.

Anyway. I love the holidays. Had a very nice month sequestered here in Minny. Saw some good people, got some great gifts and gave some better ones. But the holidays are over. We can hope that 2010 sucks less than 2009. But we can’t count on it. Happy New Year. Back to work.

I'm glovin' it (nyuk!)

Great White Dispatch
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 45
12/13/09
15:50

Before I moved to Minnesota, gloves were never on my list of things to worry about. Sure, if I knew I’d be spending an inordinate amount of time in the cold, like if I had to hide a body in a meat locker or keep a pair of black market kidneys iced up, I’d maybe make sure I grabbed a pair of work gloves.

But here? Holy shit. I wouldn’t be caught DEAD outside without a pair of neoprene, 750-fill power, lamb-lip-lined, water-proof, air-proof, battery-powered, one-size-fits-all babyskin gloves. Some mornings, you can’t get from your front door to the car without having to scrape the ice off your fingernails. And don’t you dare touch a doorknob out there. Not unless you plan to remodel your palms after that German guy’s in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Winter here makes you rethink a ton of things. Water pipe routes. Plow schedules. Emergency kits in your car. Ice thickness. How long its been since your car was started. Winter here is an opponent, not just some soggy bridge between fall and spring. But you deal with it. You check your propane every three days and hope to Christ that maybe the wind chill won’t drop the temps much under -15. And if it does get that cold? Screw it. You have nice gloves.

Here are some pictures, including fuzzy deer, a smartass rabbit, and some yahoos racing 'ice yachts' on ice that ain't been ice for too awful long.

So I was wrong about the blizzard...

Great White Disptach

Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 44
12/09/09
0847

It came. It saw. It kicked my deer blind's ass.

Here I sit at work, depite the blizzard that raged last night and is, in fact, still raging outside. I'm here despite the fact that I have the third longest and second most dangerous commute. Despite the fact that there is a snow emergency, and that Red Wing is largely deserted. Despite the fact that no one bothered to plow my road, meaning I had no clue where the road began and the Horrible Drifting Snow ended.

I have this asshole to thank:

Unlike his namesake, Ol' Oden here has never let me down. Does it have rust spots the size of a severed head on every flat surface? You bet it does. Does it take 45 minutes to heat up, even on a blistering summer day? Goddamn right. Does it plow through snow like a raped reindeer? Hell and yes. Keep in mind that the above photo was snapped over a year ago, and the rust has spread faster than Tiger's hepatitis.

Sigh. I could be sitting at home by the fire in my jammies, half drunk on cider left in the fridge since Halloween. I could be free to scratch me nuggers without first glancing in three directions. Sometimes, dropping $750 on this rattletrap snow molester doesn't seem like the wisest of choices.

Here are some pics of a snowed-under Red Wing. I'll likely be dropping in a ton more throughout the day, because goddammit, it's too damn snowy to work. Check me flicker page once in a while.

The calm before

Great White Dispatch
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 43
12/08/09
06:25

There’s a blizzard warning in effect for pretty much the entirety of Minnesota and western Wisconsin. We’ve known about this looming monster since Sunday night, and it’s supposed to unleash hell upon us sometime between now and Thursday. When it does, it could dump 1-8 inches of snow. That’s crack meteorology right there.

A subtle edge lingers in the air, as everyone waits, breath held and shovels at the ready, for our first real snow of the season. We made it through November warm and dry. Barely even rained, mostly settling on sunny and 45ish. But we know we’ll pay for this tropical November. You opt not to wear a coat to work the week of Thanksgiving? In Minnesota? Brother, you better believe that retribution will be paid in full.

The warnings are all over the place. The quiet little brine streaks that appeared on the roads overnight. The occasional flash of orange in the distance, snowplows laying down ash and gravel. Every third pickup in the land proudly sporting a bigass shovel. The dump trucks overflowing with sawdust. Oh yeah. Gonna be a mother.

As I sit in my kitchen window on this grey, cold (but not as cold as it goddamn will be) Tuesday morning, packs of tight little flakes – barely flakes! – ease their way down to the ground. No hurry or malice in their movements as they powder the tiny doe in the yard. These flakes are just along for the ride, going where the breeze wills them. We know they’re scouts, secret warriors sent to sweet talk us into opening our doors, into embracing the true army when it arrives. We know this. We know that snowy halo on the little deer’s brow is a portent of Very Bad Things. We know this. Winter is coming. This week. And all we can do is wait.

Until then, we chew our nails and salt our walks and hope we didn’t drive our rear-wheel Chevy Toboggan to work on the day Icy Hell descends upon us all. Winter ain’t coming. Winter is here. Chain up.