the first step is admitting your dog has a problem

It's three-thirty in the morning and I'm fast asleep, until I feel the dog jump off the bed and slink out of the bedroom. Oh well, I think. He probably got too hot under the covers and went to sleep on the couch for a while. I try to go back to sleep, but I'm interrupted by what sounds like someone drop-kicking a bee-hive, which turns out to be a very frustrated warbling, growling noise from my dog. Huh, I think. He must need to go outside.

So I open the door to let him out, and he stands there and looks at me, dumbfounded. Which does not altogether surprise me, since it's raining. Go on, you pansy, I say, a little rain won't hurt you. He obediently walks outside, then stands in the driveway pointedly not doing his business until I offer to let him back in. Guess that wasn't it either, I think, and check food and water bowls to make sure they're well-stocked. They are.

Perhaps if I just crash out on the couch with him, I think. So I curl up on the loveseat and offer him some space under the afghan. He considers this for a moment, then jumps up and settles himself in for no more than six seconds or so before hopping back down onto the floor. I hear his toenails clicking on the kitchen tile, then comes one exasperated WOOF! and suddenly it all becomes clear to me.

My dog has awakened me in the middle of the night to play with the stuffed hedgehog that lives on top of our refrigerator.

This is not the first hedgehog Grendl has had. This is Hedgehog Version 4.0 at least. Previous hedgehogs have been carelessly left within Grendl's reach and mercilessly devoured, which is why this one lives on top of the refrigerator. Actually, Hedgehog Version 3.0 lived up there too, but one day when I could no longer stand Grendl's withdrawal symptoms I delivered 3.0 into his loving jaws and bought myself a night's worth of peaceful study time while the dog silenced the squeaky plastic bubble buried inside his toy once and for all.

The funny thing is, a good deal of time elapsed between the demise of the last hedgehog and my purchase of this one, yet Grendl cruised the fridge at least once a day in the intervening months. He was like one of those faithful believers who worships the produce section where the Virgin Mary was supposed to have appeared in someone's potato. And, sure enough, after a dry spell, Hedgehog once again materialized on top of the refrigerator to reward Grendl's loyalty.

It's great knowing that there's one surefire way I can endlessly entertain my dog. The problem with Hedgehog is he's disgusting. They say dogs' mouths are cleaner than humans' and from this standpoint, handling Hedgehog's crusty fur, matted and brown with saliva, is enough to make me want to do a Listerine keg-stand. Even more troubling, though, is the way the scant few minutes Grendl spends each day with Hedgehog eclipses all other pleasures. His poor rope toy lies abandoned. He'll tug on it for a moment, but loses interest quickly, gazing wistfully at the refrigerator instead.



It's hard to know what to do as a pet owner. I long for the days before Hedgehog ever entered our lives, when the most interesting thing to materialize in the vicinity of the refrigerator was sausages. There's a simple enough way to finish off Hedgehog 4.0, but I know the dog will faithfully wait for Hedgehog to rise again. And you know, he's probably right, because when you believe in something that hard, your mom will probably cave in the next time she goes to buy you Milk Bones.

in search of Walla Walla

There really is a Walla Walla, you know. It's in Washington. It's very pretty, at least on GoogleEarth, in the Columbia River valley. It's also home to Whitman College, one of around sixty places I'm in the process of applying for a job. But for me and the neighbs, "Walla Walla" has come to stand in for "wherever I get a real job, most likely far, far away from here". And Walla Walla seems to loom large in most of our conversations lately.

I've been schlepping out these resumés, oscillating between the terror of leaving this town after eleven years and the tedium of assembling and mailing out parts of my portfolio. And the kicker is that where I go isn't really up to me, but instead depends on where I'm needed, so every time I drop a new round of envelopes in the mailbox I have to wrap my mind around what my life would be like a year from now if I ended up in L.A. or Miami or Burlington or Eugene or Newport News.

So far I haven't had to apply anywhere I simply couldn't imagine making a life for myself, although it's hard to tell. I look at the Michigan schools on the list, and they seem perfectly innocuous in black and white. But how do I know that I haven't accidentally applied at the Pennsylvania, or Louisiana, or Utah equivalent of Alma College? Not to say anything against Alma, it's just I'm willing to bet I'd have a significant commute if I craved sushi at 12:30 a.m. (or p.m, for that matter).

In lieu of a fool-proof method of ensuring I don't end up someplace sucky, I've come up with a no-K policy. I have yet to apply to any university in a state whose name contains the letter K.

Think about it.

I'd very much like to end up somewhere a reasonable person might reflect, "I wonder if I will need my snowbrush this year". I'd prefer a blue state, and I'd be willing to use the word "y'all" but not to the exclusion of "you guys". I'd rather be a Tarheel than a Buckeye, but I'd much sooner be a Buckeye than a Hoosier. Then again, having spent a significant amount of time among adjunct and part-time university instructors lately, trying to get them to unionize, I guess I'd settle for anywhere that had health insurance and a decent salary.

Unless of course it's in Texas.

too cool for school

So it's homecoming weekend, which has historically meant to me little more than that the public drunkenness, traffic stupidity, and feral sorority girls will be in greater supply than on a normal weekend. In fact, as usual, I didn't even know it was homecoming weekend until all the bronco-shenanigans directly interfered with my ability to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it.

What I wanted to do was go to the rec center. Somehow I failed to catch on to the beauties of the student gymnasium during my first, oh, NINE years of college (unfortunate, considering I spent the first two of those surviving on baked potatoes, sweet corn and saltines with key-lime jelly to avoid gaining the dreaded Freshman Fifteen) but now that I have to pay for it, rest assured I'm taking full advantage. Alas, not on Game Day. On Game Day, I was glibly informed by a couple of girls nursing hangovers, the Rec Center is cuh-losed, hello.

You know, my mom doesn't play football. My stepdad doesn't play football. Hell, he never went to college. Yet he can antagonize her by wearing a blue T-shirt with the name of her state emblazoned on it in yellow letters. They have entire friendships that are based on bantering about the relative virtues of Peloponnesian war heroes and ill-tempered woodland creatures. Regardless of the fact that their daughter has gone to Some Other State U for nine years. Did I say nine years? Yes, I did. NINE. I guess what I'm getting at is that football is something that seems largely irrelevant to my life, and seems to play a greater role in many people’s lives than seems warranted.

I was reflecting on this while I steamed and fumed back to my car (imagine, thanks to game traffic I had to park so far away I was forced to WALK ten minutes to get to the place I was going to try to get some exercise), and while I came no closer to an affinity for football, I did stumble onto the marching band, and I have to admit, they kind of had me on that one. I was, myself, a band geek. Back in high school I shouted my share of dorky cheers and came down with my share of head colds after hours’ worth of sleet down the back of my polyester collar. The frozen fingers, the chapped lips on cracked clarinet reeds, the elation of taking off the double-breasted coat in the smothering-hot gym after a performance. Best of all, the sensation of filing down the street with a full drum corps backing you up. You could feel those drums thumping in your chest. God, I wanted to hire them to follow me everywhere, running to the grocery store, pumping gas, down the hall to class… and let me tell you, my chosen university has one helluva marching band. You know, if you’re into that kind of thing.

So the band strutted their stuff in a little pre-game, pro-bono show across the street from the stadium, right next to the locked rec center, and I stuck around. And at the end, the director climbed up and invited alumni to gather round the band and people just kept appearing out of nowhere, twenty-year-olds, sixty-year-olds, everybody, and sang the alma mater. And here’s the thing: these were people who were here for four, maybe five years, some of them forty years ago. They came to this school and puked in parking lots and lit their farts on fire and slept with each other in the dorms and occasionally went to class, and something about those years was important enough that they come back and stand in a big circle and sing the words to a song that, after forty years, they still remember – a song that in my nine years here I have failed to learn because for so much of that time I was busy quietly feeling that my cynicism made me smarter, more interesting, superior.

Something tells me that’s not all I’ve failed to learn.

why it works

For the record, I offered not to publish the following conversation, just in case the neighbs thought anyone who knows him personally would breakfast upon his testicles if they happened to stumble onto it, but he said it was okay.

Him: what are you doing right now?

Me: I thought I'd go buy some shoes.

Him: Mmmmwwuuuuuuuuhhhhhhh....

Me: No, seriously. I got rid of two pairs and I'm planning on replacing them with just one pair.

Him: Oh. I guess that's not so bad then.

Me: I'm also going to see if my favorite shoes can be repaired, and if they can't I might have to buy another pair to replace them.

Him: [with (mostly) genuine alarm] Not the ones with the kitten heel?!

Need I say more?

escape from mackitraz

So, the neighbs has a good friend (and I daresay I now have a good friend) who spends summers as a historical interpreter at Fort Mackinac, and over the weekend we went up to visit him before the weather turns heinous. It was an unusual weekend for someone like me to be on Mackinac Island, considering the G.O.P. convention was being held there, along with some sort of Boy Scout shenanigans. Between these two groups, Im gonna go out on a limb and guess that it made for more khakis per capita on the island than perhaps any other weekend this year.

In case you're curious, this is where the Republicans stay when they come to Mackinac Island:



And this is where I stay with my friends and loved ones:



In exchange for these accommodations, we were strongly encouraged (or else obligated, Don Juan Dominguez's demeanor is so delightful that who's counting, really) to volunteer, which for the neighbs and company meant donning their Prussian blue woolens and firing rifles. This provided a couple of extra hysterical interpreters up at the fort on a very busy Saturday:



I, meanwhile, obstinately persisted in having a vagina, which means no woolens or rifles. I did manage to fire off the cannon when (almost) nobody was looking though:




This created the loudest sound I have ever personally made, though when I pointed this out the neighbs seemed dubious.

After a long day of being historical, what could be better than relaxing at Sinclair's with the world-famous Pub Runners, singing some raunchy Irish tunes, and watching paunchy trout-mouth homophobes toss racial epithets at the help and try to finger one another through their chinos? Too bad I'm telling this story out of order, because we actually did it the night before. Don Juan Dominguez and I took a moment to put in a plug for our favorite bizarrely-named presidential candidate:



All in all it was a beautiful weekend. You couldn't have ordered up better weather. Fiona and M-Yob(b?) arrived on Saturday in time for a church-basement Irish concert, and the neighbs and Ray got a chance to commune with nature:



I shook hands with Rudy Giuliani down on the ferry dock, and we got to listen again and again to the Ron Paul advocates make this compelling argument: RonPaulRonPaulRonPaulRonPaul. We got scolded by this lady on a bike for walking down the street on an island that has had no horseless carriages since 1898, and watched lots of stuffed shirts ride tandem bikes through horse poop, their quietly-striped ties flapping in the breeze like John McCain's combover.

In conclusion, my loved ones and I took some much-needed time away from our busy lives fretting about who will become president over a year from now to think about the things that really matter:

unsolicited movie & music review

So, I went to see “Once” at the Little Theater tonight and drove straight out to buy the soundtrack, and now I’m trying to decide if I would love these songs as much if I hadn’t seen the movie, or if I would like the movie as much if the songs weren’t so great. I still can’t make up my mind, but I’ve listened to the CD three times now and even played parts of it for a friend, so I’m guessing that the answer to the first question, at least, is…wait, what was the first question again?

“Once”, in case you don’t know, is a story about two people at roughly the same reckoning point in far-from-perfect relationships, though they come to that moment from very different places. Both are musicians, and while their artistic collaboration sprouts wings and soars almost instantaneously, their personal relationship has a harder time getting off the ground. A sort of clumsy romance defers a storybook ending and leaves the viewer hoping for the best for both of the engaging main characters.

The film was written and directed by John Carney, former The Frames bassist, and stars Glen Hansard, the band’s lead singer, opposite Czech pianist Marketa Irglova. These two had collaborated on 2005’s “Swell Sessions” and “Once” features several revisited tracks they recorded in Prague at that time. I knew Glen Hansard seemed familiar, and after a while, to my delight it hit me he was the same ingenuous redheaded boy I remembered from “The Commitments” (a 1990 favorite of mine based on a novel by Roddy Doyle), all grown up now but just as cuddly.

The movie was a little underproduced for my tastes; I found the low lighting distracting at times, though there are some lovely continuous camera shots down Dublin streets and along country highways. I felt impatient with a couple scenes that seemed to last just slightly longer than necessary. Varying sound levels were used as a near-seamless narrative device, knitting spontaneous live songs into the storyline. It all seemed so up-close and personal that it felt almost like an invasion of the musicians’ privacy to bear witness to some of these performances. The palpable vulnerability of the characters heightened this effect and almost launched the whole thing too far into the realm of the uncomfortable. I might have -- I’m not saying I did, just that I might have -- laughed at one scene where a sad guitarist pours his heart out over his guitar, sitting on his bed in his room under his Leonard Cohen poster, reflecting that Glen Hansard may well have spent his adolescence this way. The music was too good, though, and pulled me back just in time.

I couldn’t decide if some of the relationships and themes in the movie deserved greater development, or if I liked the spareness of the storyline, which consistently insinuated and suggested rather than drove home. In some ways, it seemed that the story was more of a scaffold for the songs than anything else, giving the film a revue-like quality. Still, the acting and writing were genuine enough to be engaging in their own right, and the musician-actors are certainly talented enough to pull it off. It never feels hackneyed or clunky the way traditional musicals can. Anyone who makes music or really really loves it will identify with the scene in which the protagonists first sing and play together, and the way they reveal themselves to one another more effectively through their music than through their conversations.

Which brings us to the music. I’ve not spent much time listening to The Frames but I suspect I will now have no choice. I like the frank, Cat-Stevensy quality of Hansard’s voice. His lyrics just ache, but at times he leaves them behind altogether to cry more melodically than any human being I’ve ever heard. The harmonies on the songs he shares with Marketa Irglova are absolutely enchanting. The songs seem at once deeply personal and anchored to the film, which again makes me wonder if I’d appreciate them the same had I not seen it, but there’s no denying they’re beguiling in their own right. Something is definitely laid bare there, and wants and deserves to be heard.

So, in short, go see “Once” and listen to the soundtrack. Or listen to the “Once” soundtrack and go see the movie. And if you remember, call me up and tell me if one of the set musicians in “Once” is Joey “the Lips” Fagan from “The Commitments”.

grumpopussy galore

So the neighbs and I have been taking these tango classes, right? And we're getting to where we feel marginally competent. At least I am getting to where I feel we're getting marginally competent (or, as the neighbs expressed to me last night, we feel I am getting marginally competent). Anyway, we're taking the "advanced beginners" class for the third -- yes, the third -- time.

Lest you judge us for only being advanced beginners after all this time (we've been in class with several people much less adept than us who consider themselves intermediate by now)you should keep in mind they recommend taking this class at least twice. But as a consequence for taking our time, we have this girl in our class now who looks like what would happen if Cruella DeVille and Betty Page got mashed into the same person, gained fifteen pounds and decided to sign up for tango lessons in Ann Arbor Michigan and make everyone's life just a little more obnoxious. The neighbs inadvertently nicknamed this unlikely character "grumpopussy" and I laughed until I snorted. The name stuck, of course.

This is a girl who plucks her eyebrows out and pencils them back in, for real. Who wears f**k-me shoes so naturally that you wonder if her feet might actually be cloven. Who is vehement and even noisy about how much she still loves D&D. Who, in case you're wondering, can't dance tango for shit, but will stop at nothing to derail the entire class until she gets her imbecile questions answered.

Last night she started in undermining the point the instructor was trying to make. Excuse me, she said. You're saying not to shift weight onto your front foot, but your back foot is completely off the ground. How is that possible if you're not shifting your weight? Never mind that everyone else understood exactly what he had meant. I bet she did too, she's just, you know, one of t h o s e people.

Later, some inane thing came up where she made this public service announcement to All Leaders of Tango Dances Everywhere in which she reminded them that it is their job to publicize to her their decision to dance on the opposite foot in order that she can respond accordingly. Even though their change of footing should not in any way affect her ability to dance the same as always -- that is, provided she is on the same planet as her partner.

Which is what the instructor told her, of course. Perhaps I'm not making myself clear, she said, and said the same thing over again. For half an hour.

Finally someone pointed at her and said, can you please deal with her separately after class? I just want to dance, NOW. Which in a vacuum would have been really pretty rude but under the circumstances seemed downright diplomatic, and allowed the evening to resume the course 30 people were hoping for, instead of just Grumpopussy.

Talking it over later with the neighbs, I expressed that I thought in spite of everything, Grumpopussy is going to turn out to be a really great tango dancer, if she doesn't quit first. Either 1.)she'll get disgusted with these amateurs from whom she clearly has nothing to learn and go do something else, 2.) some bigger bully than herself will strike just the right tone while handing her ample, vintage-clad ass to her, or 3.)she'll just learn to shut the hell up and listen to what another human being on the planet has to say for a change. She's just weird and tenacious enough that I'm going out on a limb to predict outcome #2 or #3.

The neighbs of course thinks I'm insane. But here's the thing. This summer, I had the pleasure-spiked-with-pain of working with Lulurias for the 2nd year in a row. Another person you can only wish was anti-social. And my friend Angélica, who is no contest the best teacher I have ever seen in action, handed her ass to her in velvet gloves. Why do you bother, I asked her? She's never going to change, you know. And Angie said, somewhere, somehow, someone's going to get through to her. Which is why Angie is no contest the best teacher I've ever seen in action: she's never off-duty.

My point is, here's to Grumpopussy. Yesterday, my first day teaching again, I told my students they damn well better ask questions in my class. So it's hypocritical for me to want to stick an ice pick through that freaky freaky forehead of hers for doing the same thing. Even though I do very much wish to stick an ice pick in her. But if I'm going to be a teacher, I have to start believing in people's ability to change, and in my ability to change them, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

Anybody seen an ice pick lying around? I swear I just had one right here.