Seasonal Music: Christmas

Since there was such a universal positive response to my choice in winter solstice music, I thought I would post a little holiday tune. It is another power trio, shot in all black-and-white, in a winter-themed video. These guys are from even farther north than Celtic Frost. It is less than three minutes of your life.



Merry Christmas to all, and to all a pumpkin pie and Alka Seltzer smoothie.

Nexty: ...maybe orphans Part The Last, maybe my Hotternheck electric stove, maybe Chloe's Christmas double entendre.

How to be a Good Little Orphan III, Part the First: Bears, Wrestling, Looming Untimely Death

I am forever bound to a tall male nurse with a honeyed voice -- not because of our time together in speech and theater, or because I care even one whit for his beloved Cubs (I do not), or even because he was with me for my mother's death, but because he understands me without interrogation and conjecture; I am an open book to my friend Mark in part because Mark is also adopted. At the time I met Mark in a gym-class softball game, I was only fifteen; I had no idea he too was adopted, and that he would ease me through my mother's death -- and who else out there in the wide world lived under continual interrogation and conjecture.

In 1997 -- while I was moving and Chloe was beginning and Tracey was returning and Beck was marrying -- Mark was living in an apartment at Irving Park Road and Halsted. Mark was not long out of the Army, and tended bar at the Dave and Buster's near the Newberry Library. I lived on his couch for a few days when I relocated north from Carbondale. Before winter set in, our lives just got too busy. We talked not enough. We drank Red Stripe at Exedeus II not enough. Soon I was getting remarried, buying a house, moving my re-wife and my re-life back to Lansing, preparing for Chloe's arrival. Soon, Mark moved to an apartment at Sheffield and Waveland; although his apartment was in the basement, he was still entitled to his spot on the rooftop and the view into Wrigley Field across Waveland.

My mother's name was Waveland -- as far as anybody ever knew. My mother's name was actually Wavelene, although no one ever called her that. She was most often called Waveland, Waverly, or Maybelline. My mother hated bastardizations of her name -- with the exception that she used the truncation Wave, going so far in her last years as to sketch (rather than write) her name as a series of pointed squiggles such as a child might draw to indicate the surface of a body of water.

Chloe was drawing near. or Edmund. Tracey and I really thought that Chloe would be Edmund. Edmund if it were a boy and Bellatrix if it were a girl -- later, Chloe Bellatrix if it were a girl. It were a girl. It was EdBell while it was still gender-neutral to us. While Tracey was ready to drop EdBell, Michael Jordan and the fellas were wrapping up the double three-peat. This big straight bear -- sports hater and all-around anti-athlete -- had to wrestle with the pandemic of Bulls Fever, but eventually I succumbed to my inevitable infection. It had happened with pro-basketball before -- with Dr. J and the ABA.

I was just a little feller when the ABA was around. The Harlem Globetrotters were popular with us kiddies in the 1970s, and the ABA looked like a whole league of Globetrotters. Dr. J made the finger roll and the slam dunk look like astronaut moves on a spacewalk. These were the Apollo program days at NASA: everything -- even professional basketball -- was better with a touch of outer space. The end of the ABA brought an end to my interest in pro basketball until Jordan and Pippen. I never had any interest in the college basketball that was and is such heroin to my Dad. I was always more interested in outer space.

I would escape monotonous winter evenings of UK Wildcats basketball by literally staring off in to space with my favorite volume of the Childcraft Encyclopedia to guide me around the circumpolar sky. On the top floor of my childhood home on Locust St. was a north-facing window; it stood unshaded next to the top of the upper stairs, like a giant's peephole onto I-80 and Chicago beyond, like an eye on the Great Bear chasing the Little Bear around the the top of night.

Night after night I would stare up at Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Cassiopeia, and Cepheus. My mythology was a little fuzzy when I was young, but I knew that Cassiopeia and/or Cepheus pissed off the powers that be and were pressured to give away their kid, Andromeda, to the Kraken (Cetus). I suppose that means Children's Home and Aid Society is the Kraken. The natural extensions of metaphor seem obvious, except that there was a consonant in the ointment.

W.

No, not Dubya. W.

The constellation Cassiopeia looks like a big W. W for Wavelene. So, Mom was Cassiopeia which meant Dad was Cepheus. I was indeed Andromeda. That rock in Jaffa Harbor (to which Andromeda was chained) was my upbringing as an adoptee. Cetus/the Kraken is the wide world and its attitudes about and toward adoptees. So, who are those two bears right in the middle of this Ray Harrihausen movie? The Big Dipper or Ursa Major was my birthfather. My birthmother was Ursa Minor, the Little Dipper -- stuck in one place, anchored to the north celestial pole by Polaris, the Guiding Light.

Somewhere out there beneath the pale moonlight

The level of sticky-sweet sentimentality is so staggering here even Don Bluth would go into insulin shock. If he were here, my friend Mark would make some non-verbal "Mah" grunt of not-havin'-any-of-it. Mark's voice is very smooth and low, with just a tad of the Charlie in a Box from the Island of Misfit Toys - easy to listen to, hard to dismiss. Mark turned some GI Bill funding into school and more school and finally into nursing. Meanwhile, I was wage slaving for this young family I had made. Over the next decade, Mark and I, our world's diverged and our infrequent contact became less frequent still.

Simultaneously, my birthfamily and I stopped speaking so much. After we all survived Y2K unscathed, contact dwindled. God knows what meanings were ascribed to those silences. If the members of my birthfamily are something like me -- and some of them are more than something like me -- those silences were seldom interpreted favorably.

My Mom, my adoptive mother, Wave, was interpreting nothing favorably thanks to her prescription-induced personality disorder. I will never be certain how much of the problem was due to the side-effects of the drugs, but I am going to blame the meds anyway. We had relocated back to Lansing, in part, to give my ailing mother aid and comfort; Mom now made it difficult to be around her for longer any amount of time.

By the summer of 2007 and inordinate amount of time had passed since I has spoken to anyone in my birthfamily. Every relationship there had been dependent on the relationship between me and my birthmother. Naturally. I thought I should contact her first. I remembered when her birthday is in late July. A simple birthday card would be a nice re-entry. A card would parallel how the original reunion process through Children's Home and Aid Society was conducted mostly through the mail.

Next time: watch the orphan wrestle the bear.

Seasonal Music: Winter Solstice!

Today is the first day of winter and I am overjoyed. Sure, the wind is blowing at thirty-five miles an hour and your tears freeze in your eyes, but it is winter. Yay! Please spend the next six minutes of your life with the greatest musical comeback of 2006-2007, Celtic Frost -- who are not Celtic, but Swiss. This song couldn't be more wintry, and always makes me happy.




My ten-year-old daughter Chloe calls these "the mud guys."

Not exactly the northern European chillout music I have been into for the past couple of years, eh?

Comments? Raves? Threats? If you don't post a comment, how will I know to go fuck myself?



Nexty: the Irvingesque thingy I thought I would have posted already -- replete with orphans, bears, wrestling, and untimely death.

How to be a Good Little Orphan II: Filling in Some Gaps

When I was a kid, I had braces. I also had an addiction to Cool Ranch Doritos, so I popped lots of braces off, which means that the process took extra long. I had braces for a long damn time.

When I met my birthsister Beck, she had braces. I can't remember if she had braces at her wedding. I wish there weren't so many gaps in my memories from back then; September of 1997 was the tipping point of my life. I remember that in Beck's photo on her wedding invitation, her lips were very consciously together. I remember Beck being self-conscious about her diastema -- the gap between her two front teeth. I suppose she saw how much a diastema hurt the careers of Lauren Hutton, Kate Moss, and Madonna.

If a gapped-toothed smile is a common trait within my birthfamily, then I am an exception. I have a small gap between my two front teeth from a childhood injury to my gums (I can spit a thin jet of water Super Soaker style). Apparently my orthodontist thought my mouth was too full, as he had four of my permanent teeth pulled. I had one more pulled because of a cracked root. Oh...and all four of my wisdom teeth were cut out -- which may explain the gaps in my memories. I am down nine teeth already. I feel like such a stereotypical hillbilly.

I was raised by hillbillies (hillbillies with teeth, though). My Dad is from western Kentucky near Ft. Campbell. My Mom was from eastern Kentucky in the mountains. Growing up in Lansing, most of our neighbors were third and fourth generation Dutch. I think some of those neighbors were puzzled that we weren't obliged to live in Black Oak or Lake Station -- but I have never been a Hoosier. Lansing is my hometown. As the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt. So, I left Lansing for Carbondale -- southern Illinois, hillbilly country.

While living downstate, I began to worry about my birthmother whom I did not know. It seemed like every Lifetime movie in the 1990s starred Melissa Gilbert (a fellow adoptee) as a young mother who gave a child up and then spent her life trying to fill that gap -- with booze, with men, with pine cones and hot glue. If there were I gap left in my birthmother's life, I thought I should at least preheat the hot-glue gun. I searched for my birthmother through Children's Home and Aid Society...and quickly found her. Surprise, my birthparents raised five girls an hour north of Lansing.

I originally sought my birthmother to let her know that I was okay, to tell her that I did not begrudge her anything. I let her know. I told her. Then what? I had sought and found and filled in what gaps I could, but had scant idea how to proceed. I didn't just have a birthmother, I had five birthsisters. Six women, familiar strangers, came slowly toward me like a horde of loving zombies.

I let my Mom and Dad, my adoptive parents, know that I was doing a search for my birthfamily. Growing up, they had asked me numerous times if I was interested it finding my birthmother. It seems they expected me to do it sooner or later.

Mom said she was glad for it, glad for me.

Lie.

Dad said that once the newness wore off of the situation that he wanted to get everybody together for a barbecue -- my birthfamily and my adoptive family.

Complete insanity.

Extended analogy? Don't mind if I do. Let's say I had a girlfriend who left me (although she loved me) because, for one legitimate reason or another, she did not think she could stay with me. She even went so far as to leave me in the hands of a matchmaker. In short order, the matchmaker set me up with someone else and I married this someone else. Years later, I reconnect with the ex-girlfriend and it is obvious in hindsight that she could have indeed stayed with me and that she never stopped loving me. Am I going to invite that ex-girlfriend to a barbecue thrown by my wife? Nuh-ho Wuh-hay. After that, I tried to avoid talking with Mom and Dad about my birthfamily.

I was in Carbondale then. The 340 miles between Six Corners and SIU hindered relationship-building somewhat -- but slow and steady as she goes.

Then, in the fall of 1996, Mom got sick -- my adoptive mother, the mother I grew up with. She had a heart condition called cardiomyopathy, a weakening of part of the heart caused (in her case) by a viral infection. I didn't come see her when she was first hospitalized. She told me not to. She told me she was fine, just a little wake-up call.

Lie.

Mom got sicker. She had to take IV treatments of dobutamine for several hours at a time several times a week. Angioplasty didn't help. A stent didn't help. A permanent port for the IV that was put under the skin of her arm didn't help.

Multiple drugs used in combination helped -- but those cocktails had side effects. The drugs made her loopy-headed and paranoid.

At this same time, my marriage was on the skids. I withdrew socially from just about anyone I couldn't go have a drink with -- even my new-found birthfamily somewhat, even my adoptive family somewhat. When I called my Mom to tell her that my marriage was on the skids, she absolutely shredded me. She was sure that I had violated my marriage somehow. I had not. She was sure that I had stepped outside the marriage to fill some petty imagined gap in my sex life. I had not. Mom set fire to a heap emotional trash and dumped it in my lap. She pushed every one of my buttons that she could. I froze -- too shocked to hang up, too shocked to cry, too shocked to even breathe.

Eventually, my wife Tracey and I fixed our relationship -- but right then, at that moment, during that phone call when my Mom was shredding me, my wife who was packing her shit to move out took the phone from me and explained to my Mom that I was a faithful husband. What was Mom thinking? Why was Mom so angry with me? Why couldn't Mom see the gap in her reasoning? Why could Tracey (who was only in my Mom's life because of me) convince Mom, when I (her own son) could not?

I met Tracey about a month after her mother died. Tracey took to Mom right away, and Mom took to her. I understood this. Still, I was family, goddamn it. This was a matter of family, of real family -- not an add-on who was soon to be a used-to-be. I couldn't figure Mom out.

I didn't speak to Mom for a long time after that. I barely spoke to anyone for a long time after that. Dad -- with the look of Norman Schwarzkopf, the diplomacy skills of Bobby Knight, and the voice of Strother Martin -- made a sincere effort to patch things up between Mom and me. It never really took.

Within a year, my wife and I had reconciled. My Mom was still sick, but was acting as if she had never shredded me. I was still gun-shy. Mom had blown a big hole in our relationship, and done nothing to mend the gap.

By September of 1997, my wife Tracey and I wanted a fresh start together, but the culture gap between our student lifestyle and and our professional lives was a problem -- as was having professional lives in Bumfuck Little Egypt. We decided to move back to Chicagoland. Every week of September of 1997, something momentous happened. Week one: I accepted a transfer from the Kinko's in Carbondale to the Kinko's at Ashland and Clybourn via teleconference from St. Louis. Week two: Tracey's amazing grandfather Walter died, so we went up to Chicagoland and back. Week three: I headed for Chicago alone while Tracey continued at SIU Press until she found a publishing gig up north (our goodbyes conceived our daughter Chloe). Week four: Tracey came up from Carbondale to go with me to my birthsister Beck's wedding to a bass player -- where I met my birthfather. After Beck's wedding, there were only a couple of days left in September, yet Tracey and I managed to squeeze in dinners at two of out favorite local restaurants -- Cafe Borgia and Mario's Tacos.

Last month, my birthsister Beck and I met up at Mario's Tacos. I think we had only seen each other a couple of times since her wedding. I wish there weren't so many gaps in my memories from back then; September of 1997 was the tipping point of my life. I had been going through some old pics before I saw her, so mentioned that I had recently been looking through pictures from her wedding.

Beck made a very still face. "You were at my wedding?"

Hurray! Her reaction made me incredibly happy. Here I was, trying to remember whether or not she still had braces for her wedding -- trying to remember details of all the important events of that month. September of 1997 had obviously been a huge month for Beck as well, yet there were some gaps in her memories from back then. I wonder if she's had her wisdom teeth cut out? I'll bet it's genetic.

Next time: more hi-jinx, and I will try to wrap up this orphan business John Irving style.

How to be a Good Little Orphan I: Like I've got any freakin' idea

We'll drag the streets with the baggage of longing.
-- Beck, "Orphans," Modern Guilt

Why was the bench still warm? Who had been there?

-- They Might Be Giants. "Ana Ng," Lincoln

I am adopted, and so is my sister, Sheree. If you know either of us, you probably already knew that we are adopted, or guessed it.

I resemble the world's largest leprechaun;

Sheree looks like a bit player on The Sopranos.

Growing up, our adoptions were never a secret from us or anyone else. I don't know when I first knew. I always knew. In the I'm OK, You're OK 1970s, adoptees were told to take cheer, because "you weren't expected, you were selected!" More on that in future installments. In 1968, Children's Home and Aid Society couldn't keep white orphan babies on the shelves, especially boys. Even though demand outstripped supply so much that most prospective adoptive parents would have gladly said,"White male hegemony be damned, give us any ol' newborn," I was a spot-on match for my family -- my adoptive family. My mother's red hair and my father's straight-across front teeth garnered them a lot of he-looks-just-like-yous.

I am adopted, and so is my sister, Sheree. Notice the use of the present tense. I am adopted, and so is my sister, Sheree. For me, adoption is perpetually in the present tense -- less like face-painting, more like a tattoo.

In my mid-20s, I went through the typical life events: I graduated from college, I got married, I planned out my life's paths. The older generation of my family began dying off. For a while, I was losing grandparents, great uncles, and aunts at a pretty brisk clip. I suppose that all this death sparked something in my back-brain. It burned at the base of my skull for years before it found language: I'm OK. Somewhere, the woman who gave birth to me needed to know I'm OK -- while there's still time left, if there's still time left. I never gave this much thought while I was growing up, but suddenly I felt that she needed to know that I'm OK.

That's not to say that I didn't think about who my birthparents were. I thought about that often. In bad movies-of-the-week, adopted kids are ever running away from their street-urchin existences to seek out their "real" parents who are always successful and rich. This is ridiculous -- not as ridiculous as that piece-of-shit movie August Rush -- but ridiculous nonetheless.

I often felt presque vu. If you were one of those stuck-up bitches who took French in high school, you may remember that presque vu is French for "almost seen." Presque vu can refer to any one of several of related phenomena:

• feeling that a word is on the tip of your tongue.
• feeling that you are about to come to some grand realization or epiphany.
• feeling that you just missed something or someone important by mere seconds.

This last sense of presque vu pervaded my youth. If I were in a movie theater, sometimes I would get the overwhelming feeling that my birthmother had been in that same theater (or, even, that same seat) for the previous screening. If I walked up to the counter of a fast-food restaurant, I might get the feeling that my birthfather had just gone through the drive through. Hollywood does it all the time - the departing elevator closes just as the arriving elevator opens. The connection is just barely missed. In the mid-1990s, I made the connection.

This is not the story of the process of my reunion with my birthfamily. Suffice it to say that I reunited with my birthfamily about 13 years ago. Reunion. Sometimes people say reuniting with the birthfamily, sometimes people say reunion. There is no good word for it, because it is not a re- anything for me. I was adopted in infancy; I have no old memories of my birthfamily at all.

I was able to find my birthfamily rather quickly and easily through Children's Home and Aid Society -- the agency through which I was adopted:

From L to R: Beck, Cindy, Wendy, Sally, moron choking on estrogen, Barb, and Abbey.

This was taken at Beck's wedding, back before the turn of the century. The twenty-first century, you meanie. Barb is my birthmother (and look, she put me at her right hand...no symbolism there). Beck, Sally, and Abbey are all younger that I am and are technically my full birthsisters. Cindy and Wendy are both older than I am and are technically my half-birthsisters. They all grew up together with my birthparents. I grew up as the older of two; in my birthfamily, I am the third of six. I am my birthmother's only boy. Do I act like an oldest child with the family I grew up with, but act like a middle child with the family I share DNA with?

Not enough data. Don't bother doing the math, it will only make your head hurt. Besides, there's a lot of unusual math around most adoption stories -- and around this adoption most of that math isn't really my story, that's Barb's story. I exist -- the bathroom scale is the only math I need for that, and that math indicates that I am conjoined twins. Beck and Sally are twins, but not conjoined -- which is lucky since their lives are hundreds of miles apart from each other now. My life is only about an hour from my birthmother's life, and the lives of three of my five birthsisters. Still, I had been almost completely out of contact with them over the last five years , and barely in contact with them for five years before that. About six months ago, I re-initiated contact. So far, there have been lots of warm emails exchanged, a couple of letters, a couple of phone calls, birthday cards, and one face-to-face meeting with Beck (who has outed me to the entire InterWeb as her brother by blogging about it).

Before our recent afternoon together, I think that the last time I saw Beck was at her wedding. I had been going through some old pics before I saw her, so mentioned that I had recently been looking through pictures from her wedding.

Beck made a very still face. "You were at my wedding?"

Hurray! Her reaction made me incredibly happy. Why? Well, that is a long story...

Next time: more hi-jinx and I will try to fill in some gaps.

How to be a Good Little Orphan: A Primer and Preface

The Coen Brothers made this great movie, Miller's Crossing. For those of you who don't know it, Miller's Crossing is (on the surface) a hard-boiled story about the Irish mob being usurped by the Italian mob in the early days of prohibition. It is full of snappy dialogue like a Dashiell Hammett mystery. As the story-behind-the-story goes, writing the screenplay for Miller's Crossing was kicking Joel and Ethan's butts. The language of Miller's Crossing was a very specific argot, a very specific jargon; it was laborious writing and they were suffering writers' block. They decided to take a break and vent. They vented by writing more, writing something else. They wrote their way through their "issues" by penning a screenplay about a playwright who writes about "the common man," yet is incapable of empathy. This became their their next film, Barton Fink -- unanimous winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1991.

If you have ever seen the Coen Brothers, you may have noticed how much they resemble. They are three years separated in age, but seem as wrapped up in each other as twins in an art-house film. I don't have a twin brother. I don't even have a brother. I have a sister, but we don't resemble and we aren't wrapped up in each other. If you wanted to be shitty, you could say that we aren't even related because she's adopted. Well, she is adopted.

I am adopted.

I have spent the last several days composing my first blog entry about being an adoptee. As I exercised my failing touch-typing skills, everything was going well...until it wasn't. See, the adoption community has some very specific jargon. What's worse, this jargon is hotly contested. I, like the Coen Brothers, need to take a break from my laborious writing to vent -- by writing about what I'm writing about. Confused? Me too.

Unlike Barton Fink, I am capable of empathy. I will try to be fair.

First off, when I say adoption, I am only talking about old-fashioned closed adoption -- where the parents-who-raise-the-kid never know the parents-who-make-the-kid, and all of the records are sealed. My adoption was a closed adoption. Many contemporary adoptions are open adoptions -- there is some level of interplay between both sets of parents. Open adoptions can be much more slippery, but don't really apply to me, so I won't attempt to address them here.

There are three parties to any adoption: the parents-who-make-the-kid, the kid, and he parents-who-raise-the-kid (these are my terms, not terms the adoption community readily uses). These three parties are what's known as the adoption triad. At least we can all agree on that.

The Internet is a great place for people in similar situations to find each other. There are lots of Internet resources for the members of the adoption triad (and their extended families and concerned acquaintances and imaginary friends and pets). Most of these forums are, well, forums -- forums that accept input from anyone involved in adoption in any way. There's not much by way of "Parents-Who-Make-The-Kids United" or "The Adopted Kids Club" or "The Fraternal Order of Parents-Who-Raise-The-Kids." The downside of this inclusiveness is that it creates an environment for bitter philosophical Mexican standoffs among people who could all really use some TLC. We cannot even agree upon what to call each other.

About the time I was born, social workers started using a jargon that is now called Positive Adoption Language, or PAL. I think this was an earnest attempt to be more kid-centered. The parents-who-raise-the-kid (and only the parents-who-raise-the-kid) are called the parents, the mother and father -- the informing logic being that they are the only parents that the adopted kid will know while growing up. The parents-who-make-the-kid are referred to as the birthparents, the birthmother and the birthfather. The changing of custody from the parents-who-make-the-kid to the parents-who-raise-the-kid is called placement.

Those who are offended by Positive Adoption Language are usually mothers-who-make-the-kids, or strongly aligned with mothers-who-make-the-kids. These folks may be proponents of the jargon called Honest Adoption Language, or HAL. Much of the terminology used in HAL has been brought back from the era before social workers began using PAL. In HAL, the mother-who-makes-the-kid is referred to as the first mother or the natural mother. The term adoptive parents is used for the parents-who-raise-the-kid. Surrender or loss is used to describe the changing of custody.

I tend to use PAL in everyday life, such as:

My birthparents went through Children's Home and Aid Society to place me with my Mom and Dad.

When I am writing about adoption issues or when I am talking with other members of the adoption triad, I may say adoptive parents for the sake of clarity. When it comes to which words are appropriate and why, do I have strong opinions and hot rhetoric to back those opinions up? Sure do. I'm going to keep my spittle from flying and my fist from shaking, though. I am not willing to have a Mexican standoff -- that is the stuff of Quentin Tarantino movies, and I have been using a Coen Brothers metaphor. I'll only say that I prefer the PAL jargon because it is, "you know, for kids!"

All this double terminology for double genealogy is taxing. For a more detailed comparison of PAL and HAL, Wikipedia is actually pretty good -- today anyway. Follow this link at your own risk. Now take your flunky and dangle.

Next time: more hi-jinx and the post that was supposed to be this post.

The Fall Eating Season III: Fifteen Years! Fifteen Years! She had one of my kids, got me for fifteen years

November sixth was my fiftieth wedding anniversary. Fifteenth. Fifteenth anniversary. Why would I say fiftieth? It doesn't feel like....time isn't dragging...don't feel like we're seventy-five...um....

backspace, backspace, backspace.

November sixth was my fifteenth wedding anniversary. Fifteen years...well, not in a row. That is another story for another time. Shit, my wife reads this blog. She is going to be pissed off that I even alluded to our marriage having its rough patch.

backspace, backspace, backspace.

November sixth was my fifteenth wedding anniversary. We celebrated. Twice.


backspace, backspace, backspace.

November sixth was my fifteenth wedding anniversary. For years now, we have given each other token gifts -- fragrance, or a book, or movie (or two). Our wants are small. We do like to have a nice meal together somewhere. This year, it was at Cafe Borgia, the Chicago southland's famous northern Italian trattoria.

Recently, Cafe Borgia moved from it's digs in the old Lansing House of Pizza location to an airy new building in neighboring Munster, IN. I would love for House of Pizza to go back into the Lansing location, as that was the kick-ass thin crust of my youth. House of Pizza in Hammond, IN, is pretty similar to the old Lansing HoP; but, by the time I bring a pie home from Indianapolis Boulevard, it's cold. There are various Zuni's HoP and Dante's HoP locations around the area, supposedly (I have my doubts) owned by the same family as the old HoP, but the pie is different.

Wedding anniversary? Cafe Borgia? House of Pizza? Sentence fragments? WTF?


I do not know Karen and Mike Jesso, the mom-and-pop of Cafe Borgia. There is a story that goes around town about how they met. The story holds that in their youth, they first met while they were waiting in line at Lansing House of Pizza to pick up their carry-outs. After their marriage, after culinary school, they found that Lansing House of Pizza had closed and that the very place they met was available for lease just as they were about to open their own restaurant. Serendipity! Kismet! Fate! Karma! Interjections meaning luck!

Now the old Lansing House of Pizza is the old Cafe Borgia, and the old Cafe Borgia is empty. The new Cafe Borgia is built across from the Munster dump. Like every dump in America, this is called Mt. Trashmore by the locals. Munster has been developing the area around Mt. Trashmore: exhibit-style veterans memorial, shiny new park, pricey subdivision downwind of the dump, and Cafe Borgia.

We went for lunch. This was our first time at Cafe Borgia since it moved.

There is a fine line between ambiance and pretense. Cafe Borgia treads upon that fine line like Karl Wallenda (Google it, kiddies).

Just inside the front door, appearing at first to be a narrow corridor, the bar juts off at a right angle. The quick peek I gave the bar told me it was fashioned after a club-car in Rat-Pack chic (remember the bar in Phil Smidt's?). We were seated immediately in the main dining room. This new building fosters the impression that it is a converted warehouse -- high clattery ceiling, duct-work to nowhere. The large open kitchen is on the same side as the bar, with a yards-long order-up window that had me worried that Mel Sharples was going to ash his cigarette on my food before passing it to Flo or Alice. Our waitstaff could not have been more attentive if they had chewed our food for us and fed us like nestlings.

The menu was short but varied. The usual Italian suspects were present: pizzas and pastas, chicken vesuvio, risotto, calamari, veal, lamb this, eggplant that. Not-so-usual fare includes: cubanella peppers with four cheeses and marinara, duck ragout and polenta, and a salad of apple and mixed greens with gorgonzola and pine nuts in a raspberry vinaigrette. The daily-specials menu was nearly as long as the regular menu.

We started off with the marinated olives and the baked goat cheese.

• Marinated olives were a great appetizer: starting off a meal in a classy joint by spittin' out pits, ptooey. The lightness of Cafe Borgia's favored olive oil cannot be overemphasized. Other places, an appetizer of marinated olives looks and tastes like an unchopped version of the olive salad in a nice muffuletta; Cafe Borgia's olive marinade did not overwhelm, so that the different flavors of the different olives (kalamata, cerignola, galega, and castelvetrano) were distinct.
• Goat cheese was served as something of an Italian version of brie en brioche. Baked to gooey bliss in a thin pastry crust and surrounded by marinara, the goat cheese was the kind of good that makes me roll my eyes and smile as I chew. On rounds of the warm house bread, or by the forkful, we couldn't leave it alone until it was gone.

The herb and raspberry tea was strangely appealing. Even though a small carafe of tea was left on our table for self-service, not a sip was taken that was not immediately refilled by the staff. If the service at Phil Smidt's ever really was the way Dad bragged that it was, it would not have beaten this.

Our main courses came just as we were finishing the last bites of out appetizers. I ordered the pork scallopine limone. My wife, a pecso vegetarian, had an ultra-thin (Roman-style) pizza off of the daily-specials menu.

• My pork scallopine limone consisted of thin triangles of pork tenderloin that had been sauteed in olive oil with garlic, artichokes, mushrooms, and lemon. A lot of lemon. A lot a lot a lot of lemon. I love intensely sharp acidic flavors, so I was pretty okay with this, but this is not for everyone. This extreme acidity, however, was only evident in the pork, so I think it must have been marinated in a strongly acidic solution. As much lemon as I like, this was a little much even for me. I would have liked to cut the sour a bit with a little salt. Here is where the pretentiousness of this wonderful trattoria comes in. There are no salt-and-pepper shakers on the tables. Of course, ask and ye shall receive -- as the service is beyond reproach. The pretense is that the chef knows just the right balance of seasonings, all seasonings -- even salt and black pepper -- so no possible correction should be necessary. There's the tiniest of social stigmas attached to asking for the salt and the pepper you pissy little cretin...No soup for you! I have already given more space to this than it deserves. The only other thing I'll say on the subject is that the alleged Italian Christopher Columbus braved the uncharted Atlantic to bring back black pepper from India but found America instead, so maybe an Italian restaurant in America should consider having some black pepper -- and its longtime companion, salt -- on every table, like every other restaurant (see my blog entry The Fall Eating Season I: ...and since Columbus discovered India in the Dominican Republic, we use precious cinnamon to make elephant ears. for more on the spice trade). I digress. I do not think I was ever told what my side dishes were, but they appeared to be a large-grained couscous in a tomato sauce and some grilled green beans of the spindliest variety in the world. Both were unexpected, unusual, and excellent.
• The daily pizza was a Roman-style ultra-thin crust with eggplant, arugula, and cherry tomatoes. This was large enough to feed two and somehow tasted alive...almost like is sparked when eaten. I assume that this was because of the exceptional freshness of the produce used. This was the greatest pleasure in a dinner of many pleasures.

With no empty space in our stomachs and half of a pizza to take home, we still managed to share a desert and have coffee. The coffee came with real cream and real sugar. I might be tempted to burst into a tirade here about the waitstaff not supplying artificial sweeteners with the coffee, like my earlier tirade about salt, but this is different: anyone who is willing to eat even half of a high-calorie dessert and then worry about the 16 calories in one teaspoon of sugar, well, that person is a nut. Great coffee. If you aren't hungry, just stop by for coffee. Great coffee. Thick and strong, not even the slightest bit bitter. I usually drink my coffee straight black, but when it is really excellent coffee, I like to add just a drop of cream and about half a spoonful of sugar to really bring out the complex flavor. Who's being pretentious now? It's me, bitches.

If you take a ball of white chocolate mousse with pistachios, wrap it with chocolate cake, slice off one half, and serve it -- apparently, that is called zucotto. The zucotto was plated with a pool of chocolate sauce and a pool of raspberry sauce. This was a lot of wonderful competing textures and flavors. This was the fireworks after the home run.

If it sounds like I had a foodgasm at Cafe Borgia...well, a gentleman does not kiss and tell. Outside of a brief lemony leg-cramp, this was the consummate anniversary dinner -- food I loved at a restaurant I loved with the woman I loved...love...the woman I love.

Yeah, yeah. Awwww, right back at you.

Next time: more hi-jinx, and how to be a good little orphan.

The Fall Eating Season II: Candy, Candy, Candy -- I can't let you go.

I love Halloween. I love my wife. My wife loves Halloween more than I love Halloween. I love my wife more than I love Halloween.

What does all of this mean?

My wife is a Halloweenie. It is her thing, her thang. All-year round -- every day is Halloween. Mostly, I find it uber-cool to be married to an old-school goth (albeit a closet-goth for her roles as homemaker, librarian, and room parent). Occasionally, I feel the bats and cats and rats and skulls are all staring at me, trying to psych me out.

What does all of this mean?

In 1992, Halloween was my holiday. I was a graduate student at Southern Illinois University -- where Halloween was celebrated with much drinking and burning of cars.

In 1993, Halloween was our holiday. We were still in Carbondale. We were finalizing our wedding arrangements -- the Interfaith Center, the cake from Cristaudo's, the reception at Fiddler's (gone, but not forgotten), the honeymoon on Miami Beach. A week later, we were married on a snowy Saturday afternoon. A week after that, I was in the hospital for three days with Legionnaire's disease. A week after that, we were on Miami Beach for only fifteen minutes on only one day of our week-long honeymoon while the Legionnaire's disease kept me in bed (in the wrong sense for OUR HONEYMOON).

In 2008, Halloween was her holiday, and has been for years. Not that her version of Halloween is substantially different from my version of Halloween -- but, as far as I am concerned, the day is all hers. I love Halloween, but it's her thang.

I'm contented just to be a patron of the art she creates with Beistle cutouts, plastic skeletons, and monster fur. I still have an important role in the festivities:

I am the candyman.

(If you think that means I want to do something unspeakable to Virginia Madsen...um, well....)

It is my job to pass out candy to the kiddies every year. It is not as simple as it may seem:

• Who? Without even factoring in the weather, some years we get fewer than thirty kids, other years we have had over 150. My first thought is to just say no to the high-school kids with no costume and a used Wal-Mart bag; then, I think of starting November with a busted-out picture window. There are people who drive vans up to our house, let a dozen kids out on the side-street, have those kids trick-or-treat our front door, try to trick-or-treat our side door, then leave the neighborhood.
• What? Chocolate, that's what...and not motherfucking Tootsie Rolls either, you cheap bastard. If you are only giving out a piece or two per trick-or-treater, please please PLEASE make it all name-brand chocolate. If you give more candy than that, mix it up with non-chocolate. I know Skittles are just as expensive as Snickers, but to a nine-year-old Skittles are as much a filler-candy as Double Bubble...or Tootsie Rolls, you cheap bastard. Given the unpredictable number of trick-or-treaters we may have, we make sure there is enough chocolate for 200 really hungry kids.
• When? In broad daylight...nowadays. Check out my blog entry, "I think Barack Obama is avoiding me..." for more on daytime trick-or-treating.
• Where? My front door. I live on a corner. Every year, kids go to my front door, then go to my side door. For some reason, some kids only go to my side door. My house is a slab house of less than 1,100 square feet. My side door is in the breezeway connecting the house to the garage, but it is obvious to anyone close enough to the side door to ring the bell that this breezeway doubles as an ersatz junk-filled basement.Also, I would have thought that the large obvious sign on the side door saying "Please use front door" might help. It gets a little harried trying to answer both doorbells at the same time -- my fat candy-snitching ass huffing and puffing back-and-forth through the kitchen.
• Why? Just before my Druidic ancestor were ransacked by my Viking ancestors, they did something with an oak tree and Stonehenge I think, so now we give kids candy on Halloween. Hey, it's all I've got. That is at least as convincing as the story about the stepson of a Jewish carpenter who was horribly tortured to death in public, so now every year a rabbit hides hard-boiled eggs.

I estimate that I saw about 125 trick-or-treaters this year. We had enough candy for 200 kids. We had (yes, HAD) a lot of leftover candy. The largest hole in my face is just the right size for Fun Size candy bars. Additionally, we always shop the after-Halloween markdowns. Here's a tip: every year one of the big discounters completely screws up and buys way too much of something good. This year, that was Target. So, here are my two favorites -- my 2008 Favorite Halloween Candy, and my 2008 Favorite Post-Halloween Markdown Candy. Drum-roll, please (no Tootsie Rolls, you cheap bastard):

2008 Favorite Halloween Candy:Nestlé Crunch Caramel

This is a newish variation on an old favorite. It's like a Nestlé Crunch Bar with a Cadbury Caramello on top of it. This is a great texture pairing that work against logic. Like thin-crust pizza with extra cheese, Nestlé Crunch Caramel pairs the crispiest of the crispy with the gooiest of the gooey. The Fun Size bars are not exact miniatures of the full-size bars: the Crunch Bar to Caramello proportions are different, better (I think) in the Fun Size.

2008 Favorite Post-Halloween Markdown Candy3 Musketeers Mint

This is another newish variation on an old favorite. The whipped mint nougat dipped in dark chocolate is even better frozen and cracked like you might do to a Charleston Chew. Target was selling bags of 18 in their Halloween clearance for $1.14, while they were selling the same size bars with earlier expiration dates in the 8-bar packs for $1.29. Mint and dark chocolate sound pretty Christmas-y to me. WARNING: if you ever get heartburn at all, mint and dark chocolate together might just be your kryptonite.

Next Time: More hi-jinks, fifteen years of wedded bliss (not in a row), and more of the Fall Eating Season.

I think Barack Obama is avoiding me...

I voted today. If you know me, it will not surprise you that I voted for this guy:

Barack Obama.

He was "my guy" from the start. I voted for him for US Senate, and I voted for him for President of the US of A. Over the last few years, that is...not both today. I realize that the motto in Chicagoland is "Vote early and vote often," but I only voted for this guy once today.

On May 2, 2008, Barack Obama came to my neighborhood. In the heat of the primary season, he held a town-hall meeting and gave a speech in Munster, IN at Munster Steel -- 3 miles from my house. I could not attend. I was not on the approved list. Although I was a high school friend of Lansing Mayor Dan Podgorski, I have no clout. Lansing takes "municipal home rule" so seriously that local officials do not run as Democrats or Republicans but instead have their own fake made-up parties. I cannot keep straight if Mayor Pod's Community Action Party more closely aligns with Democrats or Republicans, so he may not have any real clout for me to exploit with my non-existent clout. I have heard it said that a local politician is someone whose deepest darkest secrets keep them from seeking higher office -- so maybe I do have some clout after all, Dan. Still, I live close enough to have walked to Barack, but I was not invited to attend.

On Halloween 2008, Barack Obama came to my neighborhood again:

I got five pieces of candy!

I got a chocolate bar!

I got a quarter!

I got Barack!

Wicker Memorial Park in Highland, IN is also 3 miles from my home. My daughter plays in this park regularly. Mid-week last week, the Obama-Biden campaign announced that they would be holding an event in Wicker Memorial Park on Halloween night starting at 6:00 PM. No costumes allowed.

Local Trick-or-Treat hours were from 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM. The retired busybodies who set such rules have ruined Trick-or-Treat by scheduling it to start just after they finish their Early Bird Specials -- you know, so they can be in bed by 7:45 on Halloween...on the first, they've got to be at the bank by six in the morning to cash that Social Security check. The extension of Daylight Savings Time has double-ruined Trick-or-Treat by putting this already-too-early event into what any reasonable person would think of as the noonday sun.

Now, 3 miles from my front door is an historic event -- Obama's "closing argument" for the presidency. I should go. My wife should go. My daughter should go. By some estimates, 40,000 people did go. Even if I didn't support Obama, even if my O-baby's Obama O-Mama didn't support Obama, we should attend this historic event in our neighborhood -- an historic event starting just before it gets dark enough to make Trick-or-Treating the least bit fun (or even tolerable for those poor kiddies under twenty pounds of monster fur on a seventy-something degree Halloween).

Not only would we all have to de-costume and de-makeup before we could possibly go, but given the parking options, we would have to walk half of the distance to the rally. To make it there by 6:00, we would have to start getting ready by about 4:00 PM -- so, no Trick-or-Treat at all. Not only would my daughter not get to Trick-or-Treat in her non-Charlie-Brown ghost costume, but we would not be able to pass out the twelve hundred dollars worth of candy we have to buy every year because some years we get twenty kids and other years we get fifteen thousand. Plus, I wouldn't be able to tell if my house was being egged by the candy-less neighbor kids, or by the guy down the block with the McCain-Palin sign in his lawn.

So I ignored the call of history-in-the-making.

At the last moment, the Obama-Biden campaign moved the rally forward to 7:30 PM.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Fuckers.

And now, some shameless grandstanding in pun form:

• GObama! Yes we can! For More Years of the Bush Agenda? No we McCain't.
• Biden's opponent is Palin comparison.

Next time: More hi-jinx, and the next event of the Fall Eating Season.

The Credible Shrinking Man

If you know me, you know that for a while now I have been fat. In my skin-tight, 2XL navy blue work uniform, I have been mistaken for Violet Beauregard, and the Oompa-Loompas have tried to roll me to the juicing room more than once (I really do chew gum constantly).

This was me the week before Halloween 2007:

It would be convenient for me to say that emotional eating took over my life when Mom died last July; by that point, however, I was already superfat. At Mom's funeral, I was wearing this monster of a shiny grey suit with about 27 buttons down the front. I bought it at a thrift store and I think it had been previously owned by Bruce Bruce (the host of BET's Comic View). It was very urban churchy. On any normal-sized man, this would have looked like David Byrne's giant Stop Making Sense suit. For me, it was tight through the middle.

By Christmas, I was nearly 300 pounds. 5' 8" and 300. Almost 300 -- 298 and change.

I needed a change. I don't really make New Year's resolutions, but January First was a convenient date for me to make some lifestyle changes. Then, on January 31, I turned forty. Four-oh. I have not been to the doctor for the big four-oh physical. When you are forty and you go in for your checkup, they send you to the proctologist. The proctologist essentially takes a plumber's snake with a webcam on the tip and jams it straight up your ass. All the way up your ass. Slowly probing and twisting. Is this making you horny? WTF is wrong with you. Yeesh. So that isn't kinda hot, in a way? WTF is wrong with you. Yeesh. As I say, I have not been. I am not ready to pay a millionaire to tell me that I am way too fat, and then send me to pay some other millionaire to also tell me that I am way too fat and while feeding a roto-rooter up my rectum. Rectum? It nearly killed 'um. Bah-dum, ching. About his own probative event, comedian Robert Schimmel said, "I taste metal." I couldn't possibly suffer the indignity of it all with Greenpeace simultaneously trying to push me back into the sea.

I was already getting smaller in March of 2008, when The Learning Channel aired British DJ/hypnotist Paul McKenna's I Can Make You Thin. This provided me with a couple of strategies: step counting and distracting myself from cravings.

• Step counting. I hate exercise for the sake of exercise. I love physical exertion in the name of something practical, but athletics and the gym are not my bag. I have maintained for years that I have a very active job which should completely make up for my hate of sports and workouts. It turns out that I was right. Paul McKenna reccommends 10,000 steps per day. My workday averages 12,000 to 15,000 steps. If I am a few steps short one day, a walk up to the grocery or the drugstore usually makes up the difference. My wife Tracey easily doubles my average daily steps, that showoffy skinny bitch. My Dad scoffs at all this walking...as he drives his Cadillac the few blocks to the drugstore to pick up his meds for type-2 diabetes and high blood-pressure.
• Distracting myself from cravings. Paul McKenna uses this rapid succession of hand movements, tappings, and vocalizations to scramble the brain a little bit and disrupt the craving. It helps. So does green tea. So does a frothy Metamucil smoothie. So does MGD 64 (I blame my b-sis Beck's mention of this redo of MGD Light for getting my alcoholic beverage average over 1 per month -- yay booze).

This is where I am now, the week before Halloween 2008:
This year, so far, I have lost 75 pounds. An XL is now a pretty loose fit, and much of the time I wear L. If the additional notches I've drilled in my belt are to be believed, I have lost 8 inches off my waist. Still, I am around 225. I am at a plateau. I have hit diminishing returns. Poopie. Nothing is ever good enough.


I would like to make it an even 100 for the year -- but Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are realistically going to knock me off my pace.


Next time: more hi-jinx, and a look at the start of the New Fall (eating) Season.

The Fall Eating Season I: ...and since Columbus discovered India in the Dominican Republic, we use precious cinnamon to make elephant ears.

Columbus Day. My sister's birthday is October tenth; so, growing up, every year for her birthday she got the gift of a three-day weekend from the school district. In fourteen-hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, wished for a westward passage to India, blew out the candles, and had a piece of atomic cake with the Arawak shamans, so my sister got a three-day birthday. I'm not bitter.



Fenugreek is bitter. Fenugreek is not an important seasoning to "Western" cooking: you can't just pop into the Kroger and get a bottle of McCormick fenugreek. Half an eon ago, Columbus sailed the wrong way around the world to "India" in search of fenugreek and cinnamon and coriander and especially black pepper -- to make rotten European pork taste less, um, European. Today, black pepper sits on every "Western" table (it's the stuff that makes us say,"Oh shit," when we see the grey flakes and realize we didn't grab the salt shaker as intended). Coriander has been relegated to pickles and Mexican food. Cinnamon. Cinnamon is the spice of Columbus Day, the spice of every day when the darkness is longer than the light. The Fall Eating Season commences for me each year when I first smell the cinnamon goodness of fresh elephant ears at the Covered Bridge Festival, which begins Columbus Day weekend.

For the Covered Bridge Festival when I was a kid, The Rockville locals would set up two parallel cinder block walls knee high and a foot apart along one entire block of the courthouse square. The space between the low walls was filed with blazing firewood -- a block long barbecue grill. In recent years, the crowds have shifted to other parts of Parke county, so the grilling setup is a lot smaller. Still, not much has changed on courthouse square in the 30 or so years since my first Covered Bridge Festival. Nowadays, instead of our family searching as far as Terre Haute or Indianapolis for lodging, we make it a day-trip.

• SAVORY HIGHLIGHT: Pork chop sandwich with complimentary hot tea or (perfect) coffee.



• SWEET HIGHLIGHT: Warm persimmon pudding with gingersnap "sideboards" and whipped cream.

For the displaced hillbillies or fans of Andrew Zimmern, there's always a big bowl of fried chicken gizzards. Mmmm...the more you chew them, the bigger they get!

Next time: More hi-jinks, and a pre-post-election rant that I should really post pre-election.

Premiere Entry: Let's get the compulsory bitching out of the way up front

"Don't sweat the small stuff," calls the novelty mug in a brushy 1980s font. A chorus of schwag chants this platitude from dump tables and thrift stores in every English speaking community on this planet we call Earth. I would venture to guess that somewhere there is a picture of LOLcats mewing "Don't sweat the small stuff," to each other from ground level, peering up along the legs of a new frilly bassinet.

I smash that coffee cup in the fireplace with a hearty Opa! I dress those LOLcats in layettes and bonnets and leave Sweet Pea on the floor to crawl through the steel girders and cement mixers just beyond the open door.
I reject your reality and substitute my own: "If you cannot trust that someone will do the right thing when it is easy to do, you cannot expect that they will do the right thing when it is more difficult to do."

Here's an easy example: school zone speed limits.

My hometown has one main drag through downtown. Three schools and the library are clustered along this main drag well away from the downtown area. The speed limit is 35, 20 in the school zones. Twenty. In the school zones. On school days. When the orange hazard light is flashing. When children are present. Our children. I am the only one who even approaches 20. Ever. Not the parents, not the school buses, not the police on their way to and from their speed trap set up to catch speeders in the school zone.

To be sure, I am a fairly law-and-order fuddy-duddy for an extreme lefty -- but I am no prude. Still, if I can't trust my neighbors to slow down and follow the rules long enough to be certain they are not plowing over their own children and their children's classmates, then I can't trust my neighbors when the sleeper cell of foreign operatives in Lake Station, IN accidentally gets switched on by a David Blaine trick gone wrong on TV. Sure, I wouldn't mind a series of payday-loan shops meeting with a few pounds of C-4, but not if the debris field is directly over the jungle gym at the park.

I think back to being fifteen years old and failing the driving portion of Driver's Ed. because my spinning alcoholic of a driver's-ed. teacher couldn't regain his equilibrium enough to tell that I came to a complete stop at the red octagon. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. When I learned how to drive, we were required to come to a complete stop at a red octagon no matter what. No matter what. No matter what. Then, once we had come to a complete stop at the red octagon, we had to count out-loud "one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi" before we were even to look and see if it was clear to lurch forward into the intersection. In nineteen eighty duhba-duhba-duhba I aced the classroom portion of Driver's Ed., but failed the practicum because I said Mississippi faster than the stammering drunk with the additional brake pedal. I had to retake the driving portion in summer school, and had no problems with the extra-sober elderly Dutch-Christian-Reformed spinster who instructed me then.

I resent the stranglehold of frivolous regulation as much as Rush Limbaugh and his Pez dispenser full of oxycontin. The old punk in me says, "Rules are for fools." Indeed, the old Puck of punk himself, Johnny Rotten, said it:

Rules are for fools...but common sense is for everyone.

If we are going to replace all of the red tape with clear tape -- or with no tape at all -- we have to make sure we don't run over our kids on the way to the candy store. Mix metaphors until stiff peaks form. Pour into a 9-by-13 cake pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

Sweat the small stuff. The small stuff is everyday life. The small stuff is your friendships, your family relationships, your sense of belonging. The small stuff is the Social Contract.

Here endeth the bitching.

Next time, hi-jinx and poop jokes.