Go Bears

I haven't really made much of it, since the teams I follow have yet to make much of it for me, but football season has begun. My wife and I did our annual tearful farewell at the door to the living room, where I will be found on Saturdays, Sundays, Monday evenings, and sporadic Thursday nights for the next five months. It's not as tragic as it sounds, since we've both managed to become more forgiving and understanding of each other's peculiarities. I like to pace and curse as I watch strangers play games in distant cities, and my wife - well she likes the stories.
Like this one: The backup punter at Northern Colorado has been accused of stabbing his rival in the leg — his kicking leg. I confess that, even when I lived in Colorado, I didn't follow the progress of any particular UNC Bear football campaign. That would have meant worrying about something that happened in Greeley. Since I know that my wife has a certain fondness for that corner of the front range, I suppose this will provide her more connection to this piece. The stabbing took place Monday in Evans, a small town adjacent to Greeley and about 50 miles north of Denver. Mendoza was attacked from behind after parking his car outside his apartment at about 9:30 p.m. About ten minutes after the attack, a liquor store clerk told police that a car matching the description of the assailant’s getaway car stopped outside the store, where two men stripped tape off the license plate and drove away. The clerk gave police the license number and the car was traced to Cozad, who was arrested Tuesday.
Last Saturday, the Bears fumbled their way to a 45-3 loss to perennial Big Sky Conference power Portland State. The week before that, they rolled over for UC Davis to the tune of 38-7. This Saturday, when the Bears tee off against the Texas State Bobcats, you might expect that no one will care. But perhaps all is not yet lost. I wasn't a huge fan of figure skating, but Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan got me watching. I'm guessing they'll be handing out a few more press credentials up in Greeley this weekend. Welcome to the spotlight, University of Northern Colorado.

Ticketmasters

My buddy is heading out to the Garden tonight to see Roger Waters. That would be Madison Square Garden, and Mister Waters is the brain/misanthrope behind the heyday of Pink Floyd. I'm not going, primarily because I'm on the opposite side of the country. He e-mailed me to chastise me for this oversight, and I took his criticism with the grain of salt with which it was intended.
The truth is, we used to go to concerts together all the time. Over a ten year period, we probably saw thirty-some shows with each other. Some of these involved camping out overnight for tickets in the weeks before the actual event, so we had plenty of time invested before we ever heard a note. This was back in the days when lining up to buy tickets meant you got the seats - before having a speed dial or a high-speed Internet connection meant front row. Somewhere in the basement is a box containing a wad of ticket stubs from a dozen different venues and dozens of different bands.
My favorite thing about our concert-going experience was never the actual concert. What I always truly reveled in was the post-concert debrief. We generally headed for a nearby Denny's and pored over the set list, our expectations, our disappointments, and what we would have wanted to see and hear if we had been running the show.
This ritual probably had its roots in the way that my brothers and I would line up to take turns regurgitating the plot and details of the movie we had just seen to my mother. She was endlessly patient to listen to three different versions of "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes" and even often even lesser fare. Those late night discussions at Denny's provided endless recapitulation of what we saw and heard. We snickered at those neophytes around us who were foolish enough to buy a souvenir shirt and wear it at the show where they had purchased it. We created spectacular bills with headliners that only we wanted to see. And most of all, we picked the nits out of the list of songs that were chosen for the night's performance. What was missing? What was unnecessary? Most of all, why wasn't it the list that we had imagined when we sat out on the cold concrete in front of the ticket window for thirty-six hours?
I'm forty-four now. I'm not going to as many shows because it generally involves getting someone to watch our son while we go out into the night. I haven't seen my buddy from New York for more than a year now - even though we stay in touch. And we're tossing around a rendezvous somewhere in the midwest - maybe seeing Cheap Trick in Illinois. I sure hope they play "High Priest of Rhythmic Noise." That would be awesome.

It's Not Easy Being Green

Thousands of plant species are being pushed to the brink of extinction by global warming, and those already at the extremes are in the greatest danger. This comes to us courtesy of Paul Smith, head of Britain's Millennium Seed Bank, who really should know about such things. This comes as especially scary news in my house, where the plants are plentiful, but not always thriving.
For historical perspective it is important to note that most, if not all, plants that have come into my charge have lived long and fulfilling lives both indoors and out. Way back in college, a female acquaintance of mine marveled at the lack of green things in my very spartan bachelor digs. I suggested if she was keen on growing things that she ought to check out the shower curtain. Feeble jest aside, she took it upon herself to remedy the situation and showed up the next week with the tiniest cutting from her spider plant. We rooted around the cupboards in the kitchen and came up with the only suitable container for a living thing I had to offer: a big plastic tumbler. This is how Peter Parker, the Amazing Spider Plant, came into my life.
Peter moved around Boulder county with me, from one bedroom apartment to another, and all that time I managed to find a sliver of sunlight for him and kept his soil moist. It wasn't until I moved across the country to live with another plant lover that I began to feel the weight of plant ownership. Dogs will bark at you if they don't get fed. Plants just die. I had become somewhat accustomed to the relative ease of caring for one spider plant, but the demands of a house full of growing things. Too much water, not enough water, indirect sunlight, fertilizer, and if you do that well, you'll get to repot the ever-expanding sprout into ever-expanding buckets or pots or pans. It prepared me, in some small way, for the rigors of child-rearing.
Emboldened by my relative success - nobody ever died on my watch - we decided that the ecologically responsible thing to do would be to buy a live Christmas tree. For the second time in my life, I named a plant. We called our blue spruce Fahrvegnuven. Each holiday season, we would dig up the pot from our back yard and drag the beast into our living room where we kept it alive with daily feedings of ice cubes and lavished it with just the right number of lights and silly ornaments.
Until last year. We realized that Fahrvegnuven was not at all well. He looked a little like the victim of a very selective forest fire. All that carting about and shuffling had taken its toll. Drastic times called for drastic measures. My wife called a woman who specialized in tree rescue, and after a quick examination it was determined that Fahrvegnuven would be better off if he was set free. We were told we could visit him anytime, but as yet we haven't had the heart. It's still too soon.
Back at home, Peter Parker continues to fill the big tumbler he started life in, and we try not to speak of the blue spruce in front of the other plants, but they know that sometimes bad things happen to good seedlings. This whole global warming thing, however, is not my fault.

Time Zones

Three hours. That's the time difference between here and New York City. Five years. That's the time difference between here and 2001. Four years is the difference between now and the last time I was in New York City.
When I asked my friend how he felt about going down to visit Ground Zero (ironically it shares the name with a dance club we used to go to in Boulder together), I already knew the answer. He was just blocks from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Like so many people who worked in the financial district, he lost several friends and associates that day. Even better, he knows an even larger group who walked, ran, or were carried away. It's easier to meet survivors.
Back on that summer day, when he asked me what I wanted to do with my family on our one day in Manhattan, I told him I wanted to go down and look at the hole. He shrugged, understanding that my morbid curiosity was a part of that three hour time difference. As I watched the tape delay out on the west coast, hell had opened up back east. I had the vicarious experience, but not the sheer pain of having one's world ripped apart. It was only in the third hour of coverage that it occurred to me that my friend might be somewhere in the midst of all that chaos. That's when everything changed for me. I knew it made no sense to try and call. I knew that he didn't work in the towers. But sometimes he had meetings that took him there. Hopefully not that morning.
He wasn't there. He saw it. He heard it. And it wasn't on tape delay. When I asked him to go back a year later and look with me, into that great big hole. He suggested we take the ferry instead. It turns out he was exactly right. The view from the water was much more dramatic, like a smile missing its two front teeth. In the middle of the world's mightiest skyline there was this great big hole.
As the ferry turned around, we floated back past the Statue of Liberty. I was amazed again at how close everything seemed: the bridges, the buildings, and all those people. We didn't talk about it then. Our kids were up and down the stairs of the ferry, looking at everything and nothing, enjoying one another's company. New York is full of things you've seen in movies and TV, at least that's how I tend to see it. I've seen Ground Zero before and after on big and small screens, and it's still nothing without the context.
Now it's been five years. And three hours.

The Last Song

It occurred to me today just how many dead guys I have on my iPod. All those Ramones, bless 'em, and Warren Zevon. John Denver's on the list, as is Johnny Cash. Steve Goodman keeps the company of Freddie Mercury, and Buddy Holly reminds me of the day that music died. I've even got Robert Palmer telling me how he's addicted to love, since now he's not so addicted to breathing. The Who count for just a half, but it was their whole rhythm section that went to the great gig in the sky.
This opens the discussion I was having in my head as I mowed the lawn: I wondered what it must feel like for those folks left hanging around here on earth while the lead singer decided to take a dirt nap. Kurt Cobain was where this musing began, as I listened to Dave Grohl sing, "This is the last song
That I will dedicate to you
Made my peace, now I'm through
This is the last song
that I will dedicate to you."
Bitter? Confused? Hurt? All of the above? Probably not because he feels any lack of artistic or monetary fulfillment. Foo Fighters continue to bash it out with five major label releases and have earned the distinction of being one of David Letterman's favorite bands. Still, the specter of Kurt Cobain looms large, especially as Courtney Love continues to milk her extra fifteen minutes of fame from the ghost of Nancy Spungen.
Then there are the remaining Beatles. What will Paul's legacy be in another ten or twenty years? Ringo's place in pop culture will be safe simply for providing the blueprint for "goofy marries beauty (Barbara Bach)" that has been followed so carefully by Lyle Lovett and Chris Robinson. For the record, Ringo and Barbara are still married - sorry Lyle and Chris. Paul could have been dead, but now it's George and John who are heralded on high.
Which brought me back to Kurt Cobain, the Grunge James Dean. Imagining a world with a fifty-something Kurt Cobain is just a little unnerving. James Dean was too fast to live, too young to die - almost. In the meantime, Eddie Vedder continues to brood about the Pacific Northwest like a rock and roll Sasquatch, waiting for the revival of the Seattle sound.
"This is a sound
The here and the now
You've got to talk to talk to talk to get it all out
I listen, I listen, I listen."
- The Last Song by Foo Fighters

The Only Thing We Have To Fear...

Coming around the bend on my way home Friday evening, I encountered a fire truck, an ambulance, a police car and a motorcycle cop. They were part of the crowd that had assembled at the top of the hill near my house to watch as a mini bike, or most of a mini bike, was wheeled out of the intersection. The lights on the ambulance came on, and I stopped to let it pull away. Whoever was on the mini bike was probably in about as good a shape, so off they rolled to the nearest emergency room. Still, the crowd waited, boys from down the street ran to join the curious. Once they got to the edge of the first group of bystanders, they were quiet. No one talked. It was all too plain.
Later that night, when it got dark, the commotion from the apartments next door heated up again. There had been a few days of uneasy truce, but somebody's stereo got turned up too loud, or somebody disrespected someone in a way that set all the bad blood back on boil. And I sat there in my living room, feeling the anger like a wave. There was no crossover between the crowd on the hill and the screaming tenants across the fence from me, but I the fear was a shy cousin to the hate that filled the late night air.
As of September 9, there have been ninety-nine homicides in Oakland during 2006. A vast majority of the victims and the suspects in these killings were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. And there's my connection: Living in Oakland, especially for those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, is dangerous. Francis Bacon once wrote, "Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark." I get that - and so do the kids on the hill, and the ones next door.

If You Wanna Know The Players, You Gotta Have A Program

Saddam Hussein saw al-Qaida as a threat. It doesn't take a rocket or political scientist to make sense of that. Al-Qaida is a pretty nasty group with some rather distinct and severe philosophies. Their stated objective is the elimination of foreign influence in Muslim countries. They're not always polite about how they go about this, however. Osama bin Laden first took interest in Iraq when the country invaded Kuwait in 1990 (giving rise to concerns the secular, socialist Baathist government of Iraq might next set its sights on Saudi Arabia, homeland of bin Laden and of Islam itself). In a letter sent to King Fahd, he offered to send an army of Mujahideen to defend Saudi Arabia.
Osama bin Laden viewed Iraq as an enemy - in 1990. But since "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," one might argue or suspect (there's lots of that going on) that the moods and allegiances would change like the desert wind. Okay, how about this: An October 2005 CIA assessment that before the war, Saddam's government "did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward" al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his associates. As recently as an August 21 news conference, President Pinhead said people should "imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein" with the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction and "who had relations with Zarqawi." You'll have to imagine it, since it never really happened.
So, maybe an oppressive regime is an oppressive regime. It's not hard to imagine the lunch meetings that al-Zarqawi could have had with Saddam as they discussed the infidels. But eventually they'd have to get down to specifics, and I'm guessing that their common ground turned out to be more limited than one might have suspected. So they went their separate ways, promising to keep in touch - "Death to America," they shouted as they pulled out of the driveway.
But we went ahead and invaded Iraq anyway. It's like we can all agree that having a big, feral cat in your house would be a bad thing, but once you chased it out the rats with rabies showed up because there was no feral cat to keep them away. Oh, and it's not our house, by the way.