Livin' in the future

I smiled as the Bruce Springsteen song wailed when Barack Obama made his exit from today's town hall meeting at Coe College.

"Don't worry Darlin', now baby don't you fret
We're livin' in the future and none of this has happened yet"

Indeed.

The local and regional flood recovery.
A reasonable energy policy that fully embraces environmental responsibility.
Affordable health care.
Investment in education and overhauling No Child Left Behind.
Rescinding Bush's irresponsible tax cuts for the rich.
Diplomacy before death.
Electing a Democrat.

"None of this has happened yet
None of this has happened yet
None of this has happened yet
None of this has happened yet"

Who's retarded now?

"Shouldn't that duck have moved by now?" I'm calling to my daughter while looking out the kitchen window and thinking, "Great. A dead retarded duck."

The retarded ducks are an oddity we've become accustomed to since moving in across the street from this lake. And they are too retarded, thanks for objecting. Since they're mallards, I know it is a gang of boy ducks who sometimes wander from front yard to front yard to front yard on the non-water side of the street looking for what, girls? No girl ducks out on the county highway where they always end up, looking disoriented, but then again, there is a beer distributor back across the way. I need a better example. How about the original retarded duck pair, a girl and a boy, who always insist on sitting cozily together smack in the middle of the street? Could that ever be comfortable even without the exhaust fumes and constant near-misses? Retarded. At least the backyard is shady, so even though it makes me shake my head and smile when they end up there--it's just not where ducks go--at least it seems slightly less retarded. Or maybe they just feel at home here.

Which brings me to this morning, and the duck which had not moved. I haven't walked all the way out there, to the resting spot under that tree, but I did go out on the deck, and peer hard over the rail. I came back with the news.

"Madison, that is not a duck." She went outside and looked for herself.

"Well, don't I feel silly." (It appears to be some kind of a box, with I don't know what green thing sticking out of it. A further mystery for later in the day.)

"The ducks aren't all that's retarded around here," I think. That and, "tomorrow, I definitely get new glasses."

A year off

These are the words that stick in my head. Sure I cried while watching the retirement press conference live in my office. I so wished it wasn't so. But it was clearly over, this Brett Favre magic carpet ride.

Somehow, though, after all hell broke loose, the only comment I can remember is Deanna's. Clearly uncomfortable about sharing the stage with her husband, she said the annual celebrity softball fundraiser was off. They were going to do nothing for a year.

Some nothing it turned out to be.

My Packers, on the verge of a Super Bowl, are in turmoil or will soon be once Brett reports for camp. My allegiance is conflicted and I can't even decide who to hate. On the plus side, my son talks to me more than ever now.

He remains optimistic that this will end the right way. I, conversely, am starting to come to grips with the notion that Brett Favre will wear a different uniform. After he takes a year off, of course.

20/650

So now I've gone and done it. The bane of my existence has long been that I cannot find my glasses without my glasses. Save a lucky grope or an unlucky footfall, if I forget where I put them, I am stranded until someone decides to give me some help. My eyes may have other endearing qualities, such as the ability to change color to match my outfit, but they pretty much don't work. Pity then that I really haven't been able to find my glasses for coming up on a month. Oh, of course I have my contacts; the other choice would be one of those really great dogs. I'm just being perverse in my delay to replace a necessity--sticking a lens in my eye first thing is not my first choice. I just can't believe that after--oh, let's just say MANY years, since sixth grade--I lost a pair of glasses. How ridiculous! Good grief. When they didn't turn up in my luggage, I kept hoping that Denver hotel would respond to my pleas and cough them up; I know that's where they are. Or were. I'm sure they've been donated to some good cause. But on the off chance you see a really nearsighted housekeeper with some fairly cute frames, tell her not to forget where she puts them down.

thinking and rethinking

"I thought he retired." On the surface, a straightforward question, but I'm not explaining now. I brush the on-looker aside and gesture for my mother to continue.

"You say now he's reporting for camp?"

"That's what I read on the internet this morning." And I'm halfway through my follow-up question when I laugh at how pointless it is. As if even any of the main stupid people--and I'm counting quarterback, coach, agent, GM--whoever--has any idea how these shenanigans will end. Bad or worse, salvaged or not. It's all just some shade of ruined compared to what it should have been.

And yet I read the headlines and columns, watch the videos, and page through far too many comments on ESPN and PackersNews. As if there are any opinions that actually matter, anything to know before it happens, as if I really want anything but to be able to enjoy some football. I haven't wasted this much time on bad soap opera since Bo and Hope got married the summer I turned sixteen.

Knowing that, trying to save my sanity, I head to the main website, save the schedule to my desktop, look forward to the coming days of, I hope, sit down, shut up and play. And then I wander through the Pro Shop, look at the stuff I already have and what I might want to buy. I see this shirt that I never got because I couldn't decide if it was too girlie--though at least it isn't cancer pink--and I ponder it again. Thanks 4 the memories? Up through March, absolutely and always. Here lately, not so much.

lunch

She's told me this story before, the math teacher. How she had immigration all figured out--she makes a cut and dried gesture--until she met one of our favorite students, one of my favorite young people, all time. Faces and names, I guess that's the difference, how it works. Having a black friend, modern era.

"It's all screwed up," we conclude, again and more profanely, my converted friend and I. And she asks what news I have about the other students we shared, and I tell her some sad stories because while they might call, while they might e-mail, good news waits until Fall.

But we have more to talk about than school. Vacations, the merits of various big league ballparks and whether Andy Van Slyke is on drugs, to start. And then we drink some more beer. Right there's an advantage of no longer being co-workers, no longer only sharing a twenty minute school lunch break. (Alcohol is generally verboten.) One of us is going on to new and different, one of us going back to the supposedly familiar, though it's never really all the same. For one thing, I'll have one less person to help me stay sane between 8 and 3, and clearly, it's a team effort. But at least this isn't goodbye. We've got August pl*ns, two summer dates down; school's now just how we met. Minus a colleague, plus a friend; that's not an equation, but to me it more than balances.

News?

Considering I have checked the story 14 times today--it played out on a former coworker friend's short street, and I was trying to make sure she was okay, or, frankly, that her husband had not lost it--I'm a little fuzzy on the facts. But some typically bizarre suburban tragedy unfolded today that involved a car fire, and a shooting, then a standoff, then the gunman's house burning to the ground and maybe an explosion. I think that covers it. The still unnamed bad and/or crazy guy seems unaccounted for, but two cops are wounded and a 22 year-old firefighter is dead-- killed by a bullet as he got out of the fire truck to do something about the car fire--and in response the local paper has posted a direct link to the kid's Facebook page in a virtual front page headline. His profile was public, not restricted to his "friends", so apparently he didn't mind, you know, yesterday, when he was alive and maybe hoping to meet some girls. Today posting that link--which I didn't click--feels a little sick, or at the very, very best a lot lazy. What do they want people to do, write their own human interest stories?

So close and yet so far

Once upon a time, for a very long time, there was a bean field. And the bean field was good, and more often than not it yielded beans of a soy-type nature, or so I assume. But, being located between a highway and clusters of subdivided houses, the field was as ripe for development as it was for harvest, and thus the farmer cashed in. And therefore over the past year or two, nothing has grown in this former bean field except a strip mall, and another strip mall (still empty), and an Arby's, and a Walgreens (unfinished in May, perhaps now open), and, of course, a Starbucks. In a former bean field, out by the side of a highway.

"Apparently they ran out of places to put them." That's all I could think up, between the bean field Starbucks and the one in the steel mill town down the road, the most un-Starbucks-y place around. But whatever, they're everwhere, doesn't matter much to me, not being a coffee drinker, except upon rare occasions such as three or four o'clock in the morning in the middle of a Relay. But yesterday, a few months belatedly, I discovered that Starbucks is now selling Top Pot doughnuts--a doughnut worth the flight to Seattle, if you ask me. Now, of course, way out here, it wouldn't really be the same, but it might be nearly good enough, and it's loads more convenient--the bean field is at the end of my school year commute. Except now the Starbucks people, once known for their real estate savvy, have realized to their chargrin that they opened stores in steel mill towns and bean fields, and mere months later, are going to close them. Heavy, heavy sigh. They can keep their coffee, but a Top Pot doughnut was nearly motivating me to go to work. Perhaps instead I'll take a trip.

July

It's the middle of July, sunny, 90 degrees. So clearly summer's over. The first school supplies have been purchased--the weekly ritual of whatever's on sale--but mostly it's the ringing of the phone that signals the changing of the seasons.

"What are you doing about freshman orientation?"

"What dialect do your Chinese students speak?"

"Who was monitored last year?"

"I need help filling out this form for the state."

"The bus company wants addresses. Where do the ninth graders live? Did anybody move?" That's my favorite. I suppose there's almost a compliment in there somewhere, that I should automatically know whatever there is to know about my students, but hello, surely there's a database with such information regarding these children whom I've yet to meet. I have no idea where they live. Honest. And I hear I'm on vacation, technically, at least.

color commentary from nowhere

I live in an imaginary place. This according to my friend who has been displaced out of New York twice as long as she ever lived there. At my urging, she scribbled out a U.S. map that doesn't even include anywhere to fly over between Jersey and Denver, save, as I recall, for Chicago. Whatever. Given that even the air here is solid--humidity, don't you know--I'm confident that I'm somewhere that exists. And, you know, we're supposed to be all hale and hearty. How real.

This morning I'm amused by these Greenwich, CT teenagers who built themselves a wiffleball field in the shape of Fenway. Of course, they built it on a $1.25 million city lot and, being the sons of privilege that I presume they are--Greenwich, CT--they went straight to the media and the government all the way up to the lieutenant governor when the neighbors started screaming. But, teenagers who still play wiffleball and made the effort to build a field-- I have to kinda love them a little.

The Times drags out the Field of Dreams references and implies that they'd have been better off building their ballpark in Iowa. I don't disagree--since the Midwest does not exist apparently neither do property values or irritable neighbors--but I think they forget the story. Even his fellow Iowans thought Ray Kinsella was nuts until they saw the games . Those boys shouldn't be fighting the neighbors, to follow the plot of that book, they should be inviting them to play.

Talk about your mixed messages

Brett Lohan, nee Favre, finally spoke today through Faux News' Gretta Van Susteren, an Appleton native and Packer shareholder. The situation seems only to continue to deteriorate beyond repair. I found one quote most telling.

"You're telling me playing there is not an option, but playing elsewhere, we just can't - we're trying to protect your legacy," Favre said. "Well, thank you. I appreciate that. But apparently now, they're trying to protect my legacy by bringing me back and having me be a backup. Boy, that is really good."

Instead of whining about being put in a bad position, Ted Thompson better get his head out of ass and fix this pronto. I've been a Packer fan for twice as long as Favre has been in the NFL. I don't know what I'll do if I have to choose between the two.

And if you think I'm pissed off, check out Favre's friendly reporter at the Sun Herald.

Sold Out

As was inevitable, A-B agreed to become A-BInBev tonight. So, to mark the occasion, here's something from Chuck, whoever Chuck may be. Back in June, he wrote this pitch-perfect parody, if that's the word, of one of the Real Men of Genius Bud Light ads in the comments section of one of the million and twelve articles about the take over that have been posted on Stltoday.com. So, watch an original and get the tune in your head, and then read his:





Bud Light presents: Real American Heroes
(Real American Heroes)

Today we salute you, Mister Big Company Corporate Board Member
(Mister Big Company Corporate Board Member)

You started a glorious career with only one thing in mind. To reach the top. And clawed your way up the corporate ladder, stepping on, I don't know how many people to get there.
(Get out of my way)

It takes a lot of really hard work to turn a five foot cubicle into a fifty foot long table. And while your coworkers were being thrown out onto the street, you didn't falter one bit. Not you.
(I made it)

It must be comforting to know that when the employees merely sell the goods, you can buy and sell the company.
(The whole enchilada)

Anyone can learn how to read spreadsheets and count profits. But it takes real talent to light up a big cigar and make those really tough decisions.
(Whatever, Dude)

So polish up that parachute and crack open a cold one 'o surrogate of the shareholder.
(Wax on…)
Because when it comes to No. 2; well, that's really for everyone else.
(Number two)
Bud Light Beer, Anheuser-Busch, St. Louis Missouri
— Chuck 4:24 pm June 12th, 2008

In her own words

She's a woman heartbroken, a woman betrayed, or at least that's how she sees it. To her table of regulars, she drops all pretense: "Oh, these shenanigans just piss me off!" She sighs, and she shakes her head, and she'd throw her hands up if she wouldn't drop her tray and order pad, the one with the Green Bay Packers sticker displayed on the back. We tell her we like it.

"I'm from Fond du Lac," she tells us, in Manitou Springs, Colorado, in an accent as strong as her allegiance to the gold and the green. "They've got two religions," she says, though the pronoun might as well be"I": "Catholic and Brett Favre."

"And he sat there in March," she picks up in the middle of the rant that she's been perfecting,"all that boo-hoo-hooing. . .said he didn't know. . .liar!" in a tone so harsh it surprises. And then back over her shoulder, "I cried too!" I nod and try to remember the stages of grief.

"Do you know how many magazines with him on the cover I saved?" she offers with refills and a description of her spare bedroom shrine to her man. "I was gonna have an affair with him," she jokes, kinda, about the man as young as her son, and then follows, "We wanted him to run for president!" She lowers her voice: "Better than that Obama."

"I'll never forgive him. Do you believe that?" I'm not sure that I do, considering she's worried he's going to get booed, if he ever comes to Lambeau--God forbid--in some sick and wrong colors. We've already established the obvious, that he cannot. be. a. Bear.

When she casts about for reasons, and says, "It can't be the money!" we blurt out, "He just wants to play," before she rolls on. She concedes, but sees her Packers in a corner and no way for that to happen in the only acceptable way. Some religion with little faith.

And again I hear about the shenanigans, though she's talking across the room. And then the ridiculous opinion that number 4 should have retired two years ago, from some man (who may or may not be a jackass, but) 30 years removed from the Badger state. In a pancake place. In Colorado. In July. Meanwhile, my daughter contemplates eating watermelon rind in an effort to clean her plate "like we do in Wisconsin" since anyone who could be mad at Brett Favre is just a little scary.

"Clearly I have no life," she says, with a wry smile that pretends to try for chagrined. "E-mail me the latest," she kids, "since I'm all the way out here." We leave a note with the tip and happen to see her read it as we get in the Pathfinder to drive away. She's on the patio having a smoke and talking to her fellow waitress, her twin sister (how I wish we could go back for lunch) when her boss brings it out. She pockets the scrap with a roll of her eyes and is off on a tear again. "Go Pack Go," indeed.

Off my chest

I've long subscribed to the philosophy that whatever doesn't kill me, makes me stronger. I don't think it applies to the current Packer drama, unless it does in fact kill me, making everything moot.

I mean, come on already.

Yes, Brett Favre is behaving like a diva, again.

But, also yes, he's the greatest Packer of all time.

As far as I'm concerned, he can dictate game times. The suggestion that he returns as Aaron Rodgers' backup is laughable. Mr. Rodgers would look good in purple. It's not like he'd be the first Favre backup to move on -- see Matt Hasselbeck, Mark Brunell, Aaron Brooks, etc.

What's the big deal?

Maybe, just maybe, the quarterback of the future isn't Rodgers but Brian Brohm. The quarterback of the present is Brett Favre damnit!

Leavin' on a jet plane

Only appropriate to wedge a John Denver song right into your head as I get ready--well, pretty soon I'll get ready--to fly out of Colorado. Last big trip we took was Florida, during a which a recovery week at Siesta Key was preceded by a planned-to-the-minute week at Disney (but did we stand in any lines during the jammed-packed height of the season? NO!), so this time it feels as if we've done nothing much, which is what vacation should be. On the other hand, we've seen a Rockies game, the state capitol and history museum, albeit accidentally, some friends, Casa Bonita, the Museum of Nature and Science (also with friends, which made it better), a movie or dim sum, Elitch Gardens amusement park, Mile High stadium (or whatever the corporate sponsor calls it), most of the shops in Manitou Springs and some in Old Colorado City, the motel pool, the penny arcade, the penny arcade, the penny arcade, Pikes Peak on the cog railway, the Olympic Training Center, the Garden of the Gods, the Flying W Ranch (nostalgia trip, part II. see Casa Bonita), Royal Gorge from the bridge and the train to the bottom and the aerial tram, an awesomely scenic drive on the way back from the gorge through the gambling wasteland of Cripple Creek because gas is free here, though we never found anywhere to pan for gold that was not basically in a strip mall, and something else but I forget. Ah yes, the lithium water. Oh, to take some home.

When asked to name her favorite part, my daughter ran through that whole list, starting with meeting a new friend, and declared it all equally awesome. I'm glad. I'm also glad to have vacation stories to torture her with for the rest of her life, that being part of my job. There's a ton we didn't do, but considering our pace this morning, I'm assured we'll leave the Bataan Death March of Vacation to the tour groups that we kept running into in between our naps and our trips to the penny arcade.

Baseball

I've lost count, but it's nearly 80. No where near 163, but plenty for an amateur or anyone named Nomar.

And, suddenly, it's over.

The season-ending "metro" tournament was canceled prematurely today after a few too many raindrops fell on the "metro's" worst field. No explanation was given as to why games could not be played Friday or even Saturday.

The boy is at a movie with teammates. His dad is trying to come to grips.

Thank goodness for RAGBRAI.

Hometown Zero

Kurt Warner came home to Cedar Rapids today and took a tour of my city of ruins. He brought a pen, but forgot his checkbook. He signed autographs, posed for photos, handed out Cardinals t-shirts (no, not those Cardinals), and shook hands.

Whatta guy!

My favorite local sports writer -- and one of the smartest people I know -- let him off the hook, I thought, describing the visit as "an attempt to keep the effects of the flood in the public's consciousness."

Baloney! We're not even a month out.

“I think there’s always the initial push by people to help out, whether it be corporations or individuals,” Warner said. “But it becomes out of sight, out of mind.

You forget about how long it’s going to take these families or this community to rebuild. Once it’s not a headline or a breaking story it gets pushed in the background.”

Does Warner come from the future or something? Perhaps he returned sooner than planned. I'm baffled.

Some Numbers

Number of hours that I have been in Denver: 23
Number of minutes our flight was early: 35 (on a 1:45 flight, that's almost disturbing)
Number of lost pairs of shoes, 11 year-old girl division: 1
Number of professional sports stadiums visited: 2
Number of yellow-fever-ridden ditches adjacent to sports stadiums here: 0
Number of promised fireworks displays that materialized: 0
Number of home runs witnessed at Coors Field: 6
Number of days by which we missed witnessing a 43-hit ballgame: 1
Number of Blue Moons consumed at the ballgame: 2. Was I having an issue with Belgian-ish beer and ballparks or something? Disregard.
Number of feet above sea level: 5280! Now, where's my oxygen?

Fireworks

Extravagant to wasteful. Breathtaking. Huge. Dangerous when improperly supervised. Made in China. What more appropriate way to celebrate this country could there possibly be?

naturally

No, I wasn't at that Cardinal game. I can't remember if the minor league ballgame we fondly refer to as the Tornado Game was that night or just a similarly dreadful July evening, but I don't have to look at the calendar to know that it's time to try it again. The weeks of freakishly beautiful weather--so perfect for baseball--have vanished, the thunder and lightning just crashed hard enough to rattle a lightbulb out of its socket and the weather boxes say there's no let-up in sight until Independence has been duly--but please, not dully--celebrated. Meanwhile, tonight we have tickets with the same friends who expected to Duck and Cover for real and intentions for Fireworks at the Ballpark--the best of both worlds--and then tomorrow Fireworks On The Golf Course in town--reclining on the fairway is the only decent use of any such grass. Except it's gonna rain out the holiday, as it usually does when it's not hellishly hot. I don't mean to complain, given the meteorological destruction of the Spring, but it does almost make me wonder what God might say about the current state of America.

babies having babies

Now and then it's kinda fun to play at being old. To say things, as I did to a teenager this spring, like "And you were at my wedding, but you don't remember because you were one year old. But I have the photos and I could show ya." Just to watch the eyes get wide. But now that former infant's sister has gone and had a baby, and while she's a bit of a child bride, she's not any such thing as a teen mother, no member of any demographic that would cause the old ladies to gossip, and certainly not the second grader that my memory insists that she is.

Oh, my goodness gracious. (I am practicing being ancient.)

Hearing of all the bonnets and blankets and gowns, and yes even booties that this baby's great grandmother had already made before she passed away this Spring, I had a nonsensical thought: "Oh, great. Now mom will want a grandbaby." But I wasn't thinking another. For a split-second I'd forgotten I'd already given her one. In my defense--I've always got one--I think it's that I just can't reconcile the wild-haired child who insists blue and purple tie-dye and green camouflage are a pleasing combo with anything that simple and delicate. But maybe I'm just getting old.