Geek heaven: Last night while the girls were busy watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks in honor of Halloween (Kiki’s Delivery Service was already checked out), I assembled a pair of speakers I built back pre-parenthood but had never gotten around to wiring, and hooked them up to an ancient, cranky vacuum-tube amplifier I had in the closet. Nothing makes music sound better than a brand-new pair of homemade speakers and the smell of burning dust.
After three hours the amplifier developed a short and blew its fuse (which made an awesome melting-wire noise in the middle of a Mos Def song). But what a great three hours!
My old friend Joe Weismann fronts the band The Smarts, which is the house band for the Minnesota Public Radio show In the Loop.
“In the Loop” did one of their occasional open-mic Story Slam tapings last night, and Joe encouraged me to show up and perform. Theme of the show was “Disguise,” so I told a story (perhaps not mine to tell) my high-school guitar teacher once told me, about the time she attended a costume party dressed as God.
She bound her breasts, wore baggy clothes, pulled a paper bag over her head, and refused to speak. This was met by universal hostility, as each guest demanded to know, “Are you a man or a woman under there?” and “Who are YOU supposed to be?” Eventually one of the guests became so upset by the ambiguity that he squared off and tried to fight her.
I’m ambivalent about appropriating her story, and I’m not sure I rendered it particularly well. The best I can say is that I fought down stage fright and spoke slowly and clearly. Beginner’s mind, beginner’s mind…
I spent half an hour today cleaning the last of the poisons and explosives out of the woodshed where I write, in preparation for firing up the Ashley Automatic wood stove that is sure to be my best friend over the winter. The collection was impressive: gasoline, two-stroke oil, lighter fluid, lacquer thinner, Japan Drier, Naphtha VM&P, Naval Jelly… I spent the rest of the morning striking matches, drinking kerosene and sucking on a leadsicle…
We had some friends over Sunday afternoon, and we all went out and bought ice-cream cones and sat around the fountain on Bridge Square and watched some junior high school boys laughing and throwing bicycles at each other. This went on for a long time.
October gets a ghost story:
It is the hottest night of the summer. Nick is parked at Porky’s Drive-In on University Avenue, pretending to tune his 1928 Model A Roadster Pickup (which doesn’t need tuning). Suddenly a rangy, weather-beaten woman rides up on an impossibly-cherry 1914 Michaelson Big Twin, grabs him by the penis, and drags him across the Mississippi to the Underworld.