I cut my own grass, or else Alan does. Always have; prob­a­bly always will, at least until we’re unable, at which point our prob­lems will be more pro­found than a shaggy lawn.

Truth to tell? I kind of like it. Writ­ers live in their heads way too much, and we’re always look­ing for stu­pid phys­i­cal tasks to reorder things up there in our crowded skulls. As long as it’s not too hot and the lawn’s not too big, it’s a half-hour of back-and-forth mind­less­ness. I don’t get cre­ative. No diag­o­nal lines for me. Just cut the damn thing and have a beer — this I believe.

I grew up in an afflu­ent neigh­bor­hood; our next-door neigh­bor was a carriage-trade OB-GYN, later replaced by a der­ma­tol­o­gist. Across the street was a CEO of a thriv­ing com­pany. There was an OSU pro­fes­sor, a retired busi­ness­man, this and that from the mid­dle to upper-middle class. The doc­tor cut his own grass, and the CEO del­e­gated it to his teenage sons, but the job stayed in the fam­ily. Every­body cut their own grass, unless they couldn’t, at which point they hired a teenager to do it.

That was then; this is now. No doc­tor cuts his own grass any­more, and the CEO’s teenage sons are in ten­nis camp or SAT-prep classes. Most morn­ings I ride my bike through the lovely streets of the Pointes’ bet­ter neigh­bor­hoods, and I dodge pick­ups tow­ing flat-bed trail­ers haul­ing mow­ers, blow­ers, trim­mers and crews of Latino guys. They arrive, pull their starter cords in uni­son and, in short order and at very high vol­ume, make the place lovely.

Granted, these folks gen­er­ally have larger lawns than I do, and prob­a­bly two high-powered careers, too busy to waste a Sat­ur­day morn­ing doing yard work. They’d rather write a check than risk spilling gaso­line on the dri­ve­way fill­ing the mower’s tank.

After a while, these crews become invis­i­ble. They’re as much a part of the land­scape as the lawns them­selves. Some­day I’m going to write a mur­der mys­tery where the lawn guys hold the key to the mys­tery, because they see every­thing and no one thinks they see any­thing at all.

I’m still cut­ting my own grass.

Want a good Google? Try “cuts his own grass.”

Blog­gage: One of our best KWF sem­i­nars last year was on the brave new world of out-there repro­duc­tive tech­nol­ogy, which Slate sketches briefly in light of the photo op last week by the First Embryo-cuddler.

I have no thoughts at all on the rev­e­la­tion of Deep Throat, other than it’s amus­ing to watch Pat Buchanan and Charles Col­son get all splut­tery ‘n’ stuff.

Move to an afflu­ent neigh­bor­hood — one a few cuts above your pre­vi­ous neigh­bor­hood, any­way — and garage sales become the focus of keen inter­est. You may have a func­tion­ing brain, but you still have a greedy, greedy id, and the id is not only sorely tempted, it’s stu­pid: Look, a garage sale at a zillion-dollar house! Surely they’re sell­ing a bunch of old dia­monds and fur coats they have heaped up in the clos­ets, and at great sav­ings!

I’ve learned this les­son before, but I offer it to you if you haven’t:

1) Afflu­ent peo­ple are at least as likely as poorer ones to have atro­cious taste (see: Don­ald Trump).

2) Afflu­ent peo­ple are more likely to be really cheap. (It’s how they got afflu­ent.)

3) Their junk looks like any­one else’s junk.

The tag and estate sales have been the biggest dis­ap­point­ment in terms of bar­gains, but are almost always inter­est­ing for the entree you get to a house in tran­si­tion — I was in one last week that appeared to have been dec­o­rated by a prep­pie on acid. Every­thing was pink and green, but bright kelly green and vivid fuschia pink. All top-of-the-line fab­rics, but, well, if I’m going to drop $2,000 on a used couch, it ain’t gonna be kelly green moire silk. With a ruf­fle.

Garage sales have been bet­ter, but hit-or-miss. This week the city of GP held its World’s Great­est Garage Sale inside a park­ing garage down­town, surely a stroke of genius — we went through the thing exactly the way you look for a park­ing place, spi­ral­ing up and then down. The bad news: It didn’t live up to its name — it was more flea mar­ket than garage sale, and yes, there’s a dif­fer­ence — but there were a few moments. Like: Ear­lier this year we came this­close to buy­ing an over­size Mission-style book­case at a con­sign­ment store in Royal Oak. They were hav­ing a “half-off sale” that knocked the price from $1,800 to $900. There were two to choose from in dif­fer­ent fin­ishes, they weren’t antique, but one was big enough to fill up a big empty wall in our liv­ing room and at least par­tially solve our book-storage prob­lem. Finally, some­time in March, when John and Sammy were vis­it­ing, Alan and Sam drove out there to dicker and, with luck, pull the trig­ger on one of them, the one with the darker fin­ish. As they arrived, some guy was clos­ing a deal to buy it — for $800. Curses! Alan con­sid­ered get­ting the other one, but by then it felt like a non-antique, honey-finished oak con­so­la­tion prize, so he passed.

Well, there it was at the World’s Great­est Garage sale, at the new, Grosse Pointe price — $1,100. Oh, as if.

But we did get a fash­ion­ably rusted Mex­i­can iron win­dow­box for our kitchen, and on the way back to the car, wan­dered past a home­owner who was, in garage-sale terms, the holy grail — a guy with too much higher-quality crap on his hands who wanted to get rid of all of it.

Which is how, to take the long way around, I bought a brand-new Krups ice-cream maker for $10. (Gotta love afflu­ent sub­ur­ban­ites; when I asked, “why are you sell­ing it?,” he replied, “We have two.”)

We made French vanilla the first night. Noth­ing like mak­ing your own ice cream to appre­ci­ate just how much heavy cream and sugar you’re get­ting in every spoon­ful. But oh, how far a spoon­ful goes. I can’t wait until berry sea­son. I told Kate, “We’re going to exper­i­ment with ice cream all sum­mer long.” She said, “Yay!” How often do you get to make a kid say yay at the idea of spend­ing time in the kitchen with her mother? Not often. I’d say the money was well-spent.

So now Pre­to­ria is chang­ing its name. The seat of South African gov­ern­ment will here­after be known as Tshwane. So as soon as I read this, my brain started singing “March­ing to Pre­to­ria,” which we sang in grade school. An all-white school, of course, but I don’t think that had any­thing to do with it. It just had a catchy melody.

Whew. Can you tell my brain’s already gone on Memo­r­ial Day week­end vaca­tion? If not, that oughta give you a clue.

But hey, I never promised you any­thing but a stream-of-consciousness rose gar­den here. Some­times the roses are droopy.

For­tu­nately, Jon Car­roll is a pro­fes­sional, and works all the way through Fri­day. Today, he addresses the Wendy’s chili fin­ger:

Accord­ing to police reports, a guy named Brian Rossiter lost his fin­ger when the lift on a truck sev­ered it. He kept the fin­ger, per­haps in the hope that it could be reat­tached, per­haps merely as a sou­venir. I won­der how many freez­ers in this great nation con­tain body parts retained for merely sen­ti­men­tal rea­sons.

Rossiter: “You’ll think of some­thing.”

And you’ll have a good week­end, I hope. Me, I’ll see you Tuesday-ish.

Did you know Sen. Evan Bayh has a Flickr account? Only, huh, most of the pic­tures are of him. On the other hand, if you ever wanted to know what Ken and Bar­bie would look like at midlife, that’s the place to go.

(Which, by the way, should not be con­strued as a dig at Ken and Bar­bie. I’ve never talked to Ken, but Bar­bie her­self — Susan — is an effort­lessly charm­ing woman. I’m just sayin’: Some things are obvi­ous.)

It’s funny how even jour­nal­ists bury the lead some­times. A col­league sent me an e-mail about this and that in Colum­bus, then oh yeah, I for­get if I told you this or not, but a for­mer depart­ment head from the paper in my era gave a cock­tail party last night to answer any and all ques­tions about … his sex change.

It’s not an all-the-way deal. At his age — 73! — he won’t have the surgery, but will take hor­mones, a female name and live out his remain­ing years as a woman. Named Diana.

I can’t tell you how rocked back on my heels I was by this news. I mean: No. Clue.

But as the shock wore off, I started think­ing, once again, about the unfath­omable mys­ter­ies of the human heart. Just a few days ago I was fol­low­ing yet another blog dis­cus­sion — prob­a­bly over at Amy’s — about the dan­gers of turn­ing health ed over to the homos, who won’t stop at sex between men and women or even men and men, but want to open your child’s eyes to tran­sex­u­al­ity and bisex­u­al­ity and bes­tial­ity and S&M and B&D and prob­a­bly man-on-dog, except maybe that would be cov­ered in the bes­tial­ity chap­ter.

Obvi­ously, I’m not ready to have middle-schoolers snick­er­ing over drag queens. But I also won­der what it must have been like to spend your whole adult life feel­ing like you got the wrong set of gen­i­tals, and finally, at an age when most peo­ple have hung up the spikes once and for all, decide what the hell, life is short. I won­der if it would have been any eas­ier if the idea of tran­sex­u­al­ity had been on the menu 50 years ago. High-school stu­dents are cer­tainly old enough to hold such a con­cept in their minds. Shouldn’t we teach them about it?

Because while it’s true that most of us would be happy to order the cheese­burger or the chicken-noodle casse­role every day for the rest of our lives, there is a small but sig­nif­i­cant num­ber who want the pick­led mon­key brains, and they ought to know they’re avail­able.

Which is a lousy metaphor, but you know what I mean.

Then I con­sider how far we’ve come. I’m sure my par­ents had gay friends, but not like I have gay friends. I doubt they knew any tran­sex­u­als. I’m no longer sur­prised to hear that some­one is com­ing out at 40 or 50, or that some­one who I’d pre­vi­ously thought was gay has fallen for a mem­ber of the oppo­site sex. It hap­pens. Peo­ple are com­pli­cated and life is a river, and you never know what’s around the next bend. Maybe gen­der isn’t entirely a social con­struct, but maybe enough is to make it just a tiny bit unpre­dictable. I think we mis­trans­lated Gen­e­sis. I think the order was not “be fruit­ful and mul­ti­ply” (which is sort of redun­dant), but “be fruit­ful and really, really inter­est­ing.”

So Diana, wher­ever you are, good luck. You’re very brave. But as one of your golf part­ners says, if you think this means you can play from the ladies’ tees, you’re crazy.

What a night. Ken Jen­nings lost and so did the man who rocked that look like no one since Mark Farner. I think I’ll go to bed.

Phil Spec­tor and…

Struwwelpeter?

The above is pre­sented for an audi­ence of one; she knows who she is.

OK, it’s my sis­ter, and maybe by now, oth­ers can get the joke. Our par­ents — our mother, actu­ally — used to ter­ror­ize us with occa­sional read­ings of “Struwwelpeter,” an old Ger­man children’s book that, to bor­row a punch­line from Jim Har­ri­son, explains a lot about why we’ve had so much trou­ble from those peo­ple in the 20th cen­tury. I believe I’ve writ­ten about it before, but not since “Shock­headed Peter,” the musi­cal based on it (which closes this week­end, coin­ci­den­tally). It’s a creepy col­lec­tion of rhymes about mis­be­hav­ing chil­dren, and the hor­ri­ble fates that befall them. Really. Suck your thumb, and a giant bear­ing a huge pair of scis­sors will run into your room and CUT THEM OFF. (I guess this story laid the ground­work for the mas­tur­ba­tion talk that came later.)

Any­way, Phil Spec­tor must have seen the show recently.

Not much today, but a bit of blog­gage. I’ve taken to keep­ing my to-do list on a sticky wid­get — which is not a sticky wicket, but a com­put­er­ized sticky note. Tiger has this very cool wid­get dis­play, which I’ve become rather reliant on. My wid­gets: Dic­tio­nary, traf­fic, cal­en­dar, weather, sticky note and the Daily Tao. (And yes, James, some­times your haiku, but not always.) I love that one, the Daily Tao, because they use the Stephen Mitchell trans­la­tion, and what do you know, today is one of my favorites. I used to med­i­tate on it when I was rid­ing horses every day, because it’s pretty much the core of horse­man­ship:

Men are born soft and sup­ple;
dead, they are stiff and hard.
Plants are born ten­der and pli­ant;
dead, they are stiff and dry.

The hard and stiff will be bro­ken.
The soft and sup­ple will pre­vail.

Any­way, my sticky is full-up today, and yes­ter­day was bor­ing, although I read sev­eral chap­ters of “The Dar­ling,” and once again, Rus­sell Banks has run the bases. I love Rus­sell Banks. You just can’t go wrong with that guy.

So, blog­gage:

I don’t know how many read­ers I still have in Fort Wayne, but those who are left might enjoy a new blog there, Fort Wayne Media Notes. I’ve been say­ing for years that the town needs some com­pe­tent media crit­i­cism, some­thing it’s been lack­ing under Miss Reynolds’ reign of junior-high-school mean-girl ter­ror. The pro­pri­etor seems to be a nice guy with a better-than-average layman’s take on local media, so I’ll wish him well and hope I don’t regret it later. If noth­ing else, he must be on the right track, because Miss Reynolds imme­di­ately went out and snatched up a bunch of nearly iden­ti­cal Blog­ger domains, I’m sure to cap­i­tal­ize on peo­ple who might go look­ing and not get the address exactly right. So, then, it’s Fort Wayne Media Notes, not note­book, not news, the lat­ter of which are all the new prop­erty of the mean girls.

Lance is try­ing to drag me down Mem­ory Lane again. He has a post about Colm Feore that men­tions yours truly, and includes pic­tures. That was a good trip.

Depart­ment of Gee, Thanks, Eric: Zorn has another link to a time-waster, this one at least mar­gin­ally amus­ing: What level of Dante’s Inferno are you bound for?

Me? Oh, you knew I was headed there:

The Dante’s Inferno Test has ban­ished you to the Sec­ond Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the lev­els:

Level	Score
Pur­ga­tory (Repent­ing Believ­ers)	Very Low
Level 1 – Limbo (Vir­tu­ous Non-Believers)	Low
Level 2 (Lust­ful)	Very High
Level 3 (Glut­to­nous)	High
Level 4 (Prodi­gal and Avari­cious)	Very Low
Level 5 (Wrath­ful and Gloomy)	Very High
Level 6 – The City of Dis (Heretics)	High
Level 7 (Vio­lent)	Mod­er­ate
Level 8- the Male­bolge (Fraud­u­lent, Mali­cious, Pan­der­ers)	High
Level 9 – Cocy­tus (Treach­er­ous)	High

Take the Dante’s Inferno Hell Test

Note that I ranked high on glut­tony and lust. Sounds like a dis­ci­ple of life to me.

Lance recently con­fessed that he doesn’t watch TV news. I don’t either — for the most part. But occa­sion­ally it sneaks up on you. Last night while wait­ing up for Alan I caught the 11 p.m. news­cast on WXYZ, aka the sta­tion that employs Fat Ass. The inves­tiga­tive report was about Roy. Roy is — was — a “teacup chi­huahua,” which I assume is like a reg­u­lar chi­huahua, only smaller.

(I love writ­ing “chi­huahua.” It’s one of those words like “hors d’oeuvre,” where just learn­ing the cor­rect spelling feels like an accom­plish­ment wor­thy of your resume.)

Any­way, the story was about the dan­gers of putting your teacup chi­huahua in day­care with the wrong sort of com­pan­ions. I’m not kid­ding. Evi­dently Roy’s owner had him in day­care; why, we weren’t told. Per­haps he was ner­vous, like all chi­huahuas. Imag­ine liv­ing in a world of giants, and you’d be ner­vous too. But at some point Roy was placed in a cage with “a larger dog,” which wasn’t a help­ful descrip­tion, since vir­tu­ally every dog in cre­ation is larger than a teacup chi­huahua. And the larger dog — “a ter­rier” is the only descrip­tion we got — killed Roy.

“Of course he did,” Lance said when I told him the sad story today. “He thought Roy was a rat.”

I’m sure he did. Ter­ri­ers are famously tena­cious rat­ters. They clamp onto the back of the neck, give a few brisk shakes, and good­bye rat. Some­times they trot around in a proud cir­cle, shak­ing the dead rat. Some­times they drop it and move on to the next one. These details we weren’t given. All we heard was how sad Roy’s owner was, and how sorry she was that she put him in dog day­care with peo­ple so thought­less as to ken­nel him with a dog who thought he was a rodent.

Roy’s owner only had one photo of Roy, or at least the news crew only got one. We came back to the pic­ture of Roy, goggle-eyed and win­some, again and again. “I miss him,” the owner said, tear­ing up. “I really do.”

I’m sure she does. The ques­tion is, how­ever: Is this report wor­thy of a top-10 TV news mar­ket?

Silly ques­tion. Of course it is. That’s been the biggest shock, skip­ping the 90 or so places between Fort Wayne and Detroit. While FW TV news pitched its prod­uct to the mouth-breathing demo­graphic, they didn’t dive quite so enthu­si­as­ti­cally for the bot­tom of the bar­rel as they do here. I’m sure com­ing up with a news mix for such a sprawl­ing com­mu­nity is quite the chal­lenge. Do you pitch to the peo­ple who keep their TVs on all day long and choose their news based on which has the bet­ter lead-in? Or do you go for the wealth­ier sub­ur­ban­ites, who have the money but, frankly, no inter­est in what’s hap­pen­ing in, oh, War­ren?

Also a silly ques­tion. You go with the best video. And in Detroit, there’s never a short­age. Last week, the mayor announced his cam­paign for re-election, in the wake of yet another story about his fis­cal irre­spon­si­bil­ity. His father got up and com­pared his son’s crit­ics to Nazis. His mother got up and had a teeny freak-out; I thought we’d need smelling salts. The mayor him­self cried. “I ain’t cried since I was 10 years old,” he said.

I should watch the news more often. Where else can you get enter­tain­ment like this at these prices?

POSTSCRIPT: When Alan was a fea­ture writer, he wrote a story about God’s Tiny Ken­nel, a house we passed in Hicksville (yes, really), Ohio en route to Defi­ance. There was a sign out front that read “God’s Tiny Ken­nel — Chi­huahua Stud Ser­vice.” It turned out the lady was a devout Chris­t­ian who prayed over every lit­ter before she let them go.

“Would Spriggy kill Roy if they were ken­neled together?” I won­dered tonight.

“No, he’d just make him his bitch,” Alan replied.

Kate and I and a few zil­lion other motorists hit I-94 this week­end, and I-94 is hit­ting back. If we’re going to spend any time at our lake cot­tage this sum­mer — and I fore­see a dras­ti­cally reduced vis­i­ta­tion sched­ule, for rea­sons I’ll get to in a minute — we’re going to have to develop some alter­nate routes. Con­struc­tion and var­i­ous improve­ments have this vital thor­ough­fare a snarly mess, and a mess it will remain for months, I fear. There’s a stretch west of Ann Arbor where the east­bound lanes have been taken down to bare dirt; they’re rebuild­ing the road from the ground up, it seems, which does not por­tend smooth sail­ing by the Fourth of July.

Any­way, the road is still car­ry­ing plenty of traf­fic, some of it of the winged and insec­tile vari­ety. The carrion-eaters must have ordered veni­son this spring, because it seemed there was a dead deer every three miles between the Detroit Metro air­port and I-69, where the car­nage con­tin­ues. If there’s a dead-animal pickup crew, they’re either run­ning behind or have thrown up their hands. Since I’ve watched a lit­tle “CSI,” I found myself less grossed out than curi­ous at the full range of decom­po­si­tion on dis­play. One unfor­tu­nate doe looked untouched, but appeared to have been snacked upon, anus-first. Ewww. (“That’s where the ten­der meat is!” chirps Mr. Crow. Ewww.)

Why were we on I-94? Open­ing the cot­tage, sweep­ing away cob­webs, scrub­bing the win­ter off the place. Why just me and Kate? Because Alan was on a road trip of his own. Where to? South­ern Indi­ana. Why? To look at a sail­boat.

Yes, a hole in the water you throw money into! He’s not com­ing home with this one — he and the seller are still $1,200 apart — but I’m sure it’s only a mat­ter of time before we dock some­thing at our city marina on Lake St. Clair and start spend­ing our week­ends tear­ing up $100 bills in a cold shower, so to speak.

The boat is like this. We’ll see if he gets that one, or some­thing like it.

Much good blog­gage this week­end. Too much. I’ll leave you with but one, a delight­ful NYT piece about the still-standing drag-ball under­ground. (If you saw “Paris is Burn­ing,” you know. I dragged Alan to that movie early in our courtship. He dug it, proof that mar­ry­ing him was the right choice.)

Oh, and Lance has a use­ful expla­na­tion of a sometimes-confusing point of the­ol­ogy, vis-a-vis that San­to­rum pro­file in the NYT yes­ter­day.

I was mak­ing my way down the ever-fascinating 8 Mile Road yes­ter­day, sort of half-listening to “Fresh Air,” when I snapped to atten­tion: Some critic, review­ing some Bil­lie Hol­i­day col­lec­tion, pro­nounced “Lady Sings the Blues,” the 1972 movie about her, ahem, “howl­ingly bad.”

My lower lip pooched out. I kind of liked “Lady Sings the Blues.”

Of course, it came out when I was 14 years old. Fourteen-year-olds are effort­lessly easy to please, par­tic­u­larly 14-year-olds who fancy them­selves rebels. Take one Motown star, stick a gar­de­nia in her hair, add Billy Dee Williams, a lynch­ing and some heroin, and you’ve got a win­ner. I started think­ing about the movie. Diana Ross? As Bil­lie Hol­i­day? All they share is a one-octave range. And I remem­ber an embar­rass­ing entrance for Williams, where he steps out of the shadow, looks up at the cam­era Clark Gable-style and the cam­era holds for a long beat you know was added so that the women in the the­ater could squeal and slide off their seats, recover and not miss the next line, which was, as I recall, “What’s the mat­ter, don’t you like gar­de­nias?”

OK, so it was howl­ingly bad. I pounded the steer­ing wheel. Damn these crit­ics, ruin­ing yet another fond mem­ory.

8 Mile Road is never bor­ing. After I did my errand, I mean­dered into Detroit down Gra­tiot and stopped at the East­ern Mar­ket. Bought some roasted almonds and sour cherry balls. There’re not many after­noons that can’t be improved with salt and sugar.

And in the after­noon, at least one and maybe two more free­lance assign­ments — sput­ter­ing and wheez­ing, my career lurches into its next phase.

So, blog­gage: A nice read in the Freep today about Steve Wil­son, one of those on-your-side TV guys whose spe­cialty is chas­ing peo­ple down the street. For­tu­nately for him, some peo­ple deserve chas­ing. Detroit’s mayor, for instance:

TV inves­tiga­tive reporter Steve Wil­son and Detroit Mayor Kwame Kil­patrick had had other dus­tups — most notably an inci­dent in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., when Wil­son flew there to catch the mayor with a micro­phone, a cam­era and an atti­tude he knew would make com­pelling, and, some say, revul­sive tele­vi­sion.

Kil­patrick sup­port­ers began shout­ing for Wil­son to back off, to quit harass­ing the mayor. But the push­ing and shov­ing con­tin­ued. A child was knocked down in the scrum.

This enter­tain­ing anec­dote ends with the mayor’s walk-off line, call­ing Wil­son a “fat ass.”

Which he is, but man, have you seen the mayor? He’s got that football-player build, true, but he also looks about one Twinkie away from a dia­betes diag­no­sis.

Two halfway-decent tag sales are call­ing my name. More later, or maybe not.