My mind’s been such a stew lately

:::record scratch:::

Hi there!

Well, that was weird. I’d just sat down to update the blog yesterday around 5 p.m. — starting with my customary apology for missing a day I usually don’t — when I was hit by a wave of dizziness. Whoa, I thought, this is pretty weird. But it’ll pass.

It didn’t. It got worse. My editor called, and I declined the call, because I didn’t think I could walk to the kitchen, where my phone was. Alan was right there, and I told him what was happening. I made some calls, did some Googles, and we decided to go to a local urgent care. After we’d driven half a block, I had to open the door to vomit onto the street. We upgraded to the ER, where we sat for hours more of spinning vertigo and two more emesis bags. I had what’s likely to be several thousand dollars’ worth of before-deductible tests that turned up nothing. But they medicated me for nausea and whirliness, and we left just before midnight a.m.a., because I didn’t consent to the CAT scan to rule out a stroke. I was feeling fine by then, showed no symptoms on the stroke assessment, and bottom line: I have shitty insurance to tide me over for these last few months pre-Medicare. A hospital CAT scan would likely be thousands more (although no one could tell me, because doctors aren’t privileged with that information).

My family doctor, who is likely out of network on said shitty insurance, counseled calling a private MRI facility and asking for the cash price, which I just did: $420. I’ll probably go that route, but not after a few hours of sitting on hold with BCBS Michigan to discuss my Bronze-level plan and trying to figure out a way to minimize the financial damage.

Which I’m fortunate to be able to afford. I am contractually obligated to say this. Still, it seems ridiculous that this is what’s on my mind the morning after an evening like I just had.

Personally, I think this is an inner-ear thing, but you can’t see that with an otoscope, alas. My ears have felt cloggy for a couple weeks, which I chalked up to swimming. We’ll see.

Nothing like having one of these strapped to your wrist to make you feel old:

So to back up to the beginning: My mind has been a whirl lately, but not entirely with vertigo. It’s been a crazy it’s-only-Wednesday kinda week here. Monday dawned with news that a recent victor of a special election in West Michigan, who is now a shoo-in to be in the legislature, because he won the GOP race in a safe-GOP district, went on a recent livestream and dropped a bomb. Discussing the election of November 2020, which this guy wants to “decertify” so as to install Emperor Trump back on his golden throne, he trotted out the old barroom saw, with some embellishments: “I tell my three daughters, ‘if rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it.'” Just, y’know, casual-like.

Well. You can imagine.

There’s good news and bad news in the reaction. The bad news: Various GOP groups “condemned” and “disavowed” the comment. But the state chairman stopped short of telling this human toadstool to withdraw from the race. The good news: There are many, many people who had never heard that particular zircon of wit, and I have to think that’s a good thing.

I’ve heard it, of course, because I’m old as hell and read a fair number of trashy novels. I remember when Bobby Knight said it, back in the day. It’s the sort of thing ol’ ruff-n-tuff coaches would tell their players, even though it makes very little sense as an expression of pretty much anything. But to add “I tell my three daughters…” really elevates it to another level, in my opinion.

His defense: His “words aren’t polished,” and can you guess why? Yes, because he’s “not a politician.”

Fuck every one of these guys.

Oh, and one of those three daughters made some headlines a couple years ago, when dear ol’ dad was running for the same seat, for tweeting to voters not to cast one for pops.

Ladies and gentlemen, the modern GOP.

OK, time for me to hit the shower and try to feel presentable again. Thanks for your good wishes. I feel fine. Even with an MRI in my future.

I guess the trip came full circle at some point outside Dayton. Maybe some of you remember when the states of Ohio and North Carolina were beefing over which one had the true claim to calling itself the birthplace of aviation, some version of which is emblazoned on each state’s license plates. Ohio was home to the Wright brothers, and North Carolina was where they made their first flights. I believe they settled on splitting hairs; Ohio claimed “birthplace of aviation,” while North Carolina uses “First in Flight.” Both more or less accurate. (Wilbur Wright was born in Indiana, although the family moved to Ohio in his youth.)

And I drove through both.

My N.C. friends, both longtime Ohioans relocated to the Outer Banks, believe North Carolina should get the crown. Don’t tell that to Dayton, which has slapped the Wright name on everything, including the Air Force base there. As a daughter of Columbus, I don’t have a dog in the fight, having learned that my hometown’s namesake is now considered a Bad Man and there’s a good chance the Wright Brothers will be revealed as similar Bad Men and the circus will move on to what should replace both.

Elsewhere on the trip, I found another reason to despise Donald Trump when I was looking at the Obama portraits in Atlanta. Of course I wondered who would get the Trump presidential portrait commission, or if there would even be one. From the instructional panels at the exhibit, I gathered this is a bit of business reserved for the last part of the chief executive’s final term, and Trump thinks he was illegally robbed of one. So agreeing to sit for one would mean admitting his presidency was over. Although as vain as he is, it’s hard to believe he would skip it.

A quick Google reveals the truth as of a year ago: Trump “has already begun participating in the customary process so his official portrait can eventually hang alongside his predecessors, according to an aide and others familiar with the discussions.” Who will the lucky artist be? Please let it be Jon McNaughton, she prayed fervently; let the finished canvas include an eagle, a flag, another flag, a bomb, a cross, Jesus and the Deutschbank logo. And something gold. Gotta have some gold in there.

Now here we are, on the doorstep of March, Lent and spring now less than a month away. Even Ramadan is pretty close, and it’s always moving around the calendar.) A lovely day is in progress outside my window, and I should probably get out in it, now that I’ve cleaned my bathroom and otherwise caught up with stupid housework. Ukraine remains in crisis, but is showing a great deal of pluck in their resistance. Republicans, on the other hands, are twisting in the wind. It’s like watching someone try to jerk off Tucker Carlson with one hand and the entire staff of the National Review with the other. Entertaining, in a grim kinda way.

Well, what a damn day, eh.

I woke up very early, looked at my phone and learned the day’s big news. Read for a while, went back to sleep, woke up just plain early, did some work, said goodbye to John and Sam and hit the road for the penultimate leg of this drive, to Lexington. I couldn’t do another 11-hour slog, and bad weather was promised for part of it. I thought doing the first leg, in mere rain, would be a pain in the ass. Michigan would get the snow, and I’ll finish Friday after it’s stopped and been cleared.

Well. The rain was goddamn miserable. Rather, the trucks made it so.

Has something happened to trucking that I missed? Did all the drivers become assholes? Who pilots a vehicle that size at 75 miles an hour in a driving rainstorm? And why do they come up on your ass like the wrath of god? Are they being flogged to finish runs on punishing schedules? Or am I just now 100 years old and incapable of the hardcore freeway action I used to be? Whatever. It was a miserable drive, at least for the last half of it.

But now it’s over and I’m watching CNN and Showtime, switching between Doom in Europe and Bill Cosby’s rape problem. It seems a fitting end to a long, grim kinda day. Time for a photo dump, then:

Democratic neighborhood.

Spring is coming.

Hi back.

This was a pose. “I want a ‘gazing’ one,” she said to her friend.

Michelle.

Shadows.

Camellias, past their prime.

Home tomorrow.

One of my aims on this trip was to break out of my bubbles, plural, and to that end I have:

1) Listened to a fair amount of AM radio;
2) Eaten at Chick-Fil-A.

(Hey, I’m only one person.)

The AM radio part is kinda frightening, to be honest. Although I’m impressed by how all the cogs in the right-wing propaganda sphere mesh together so seamlessly. A host refers to another show, confident that the listeners know what he’s talking about (and it’s always a he), who refers to the programming on Fox or Newsmax or one of those, who refers back to the original guy, an ouroboros of misinformation. Although, maybe instead of the snake eating its tail, the image should be of a bull consuming a pile of its own excrement.

While I was listening to this, passing through northwest Ohio, I heard an ad for this guy, Mark Pukita. I imagine he was called Pukeface as a kid, which explains his extremist views. He’s running in Ohio’s crowded U.S. Senate race, and I expect he doesn’t have a chance, but he’s willing to stake out the usual insane positions, which he laid out in fast talk toward the end of the 30-second spot. He’s for “nationwide constitutional carry,” i.e. no gun restrictions anywhere, and a “nationwide heartbeat bill,” i.e. no abortion after a detectable heartbeat, and he signed off with “Let’s go Brandon.”

(Friends, I have never been so envious as I was yesterday, when my N.C. friends were driving me to my car and we passed a let’s-go-Brandon sign, and they had to ask me what it meant.)

Anyway, turns out ol’ Pukeface is an anti-Semite, too:

A Republican Senate candidate in Ohio is doubling down on a controversial campaign ad, insisting voters need to be aware of an important fact: that the frontrunner in the primary is Jewish.

Mark Pukita, an IT entrepreneur in the crowded GOP race, during a Thursday night candidate forum defended a campaign ad that questioned the faith of opponent Josh Mandel.

Ugh. Well, he doesn’t stand a chance against the other motherfuckers in that race, who are all thoroughly terrible. Just in different ways.

Anyway, hello from Atlanta. What a long drive (hence the Chick-Fil-A), complicated by rain for the last 200 miles or so, but oh well. It can’t all be like yesterday on the Outer Banks:

You can see why the tides are an important factor to consider when planning a visit to the northernmost Outer Banks. Here’s li’l Gus, who was standing in the driveway when we left:

Gus was imported to the wild herd a while back, to freshen up the gene pool. He’s a stallion. (I verified.) He likes to hang around my friends’ road, they said. It was nice of him to see me off.

Wild horses aren’t truly wild, of course, just feral. So they’re pretty well habituated to people, which explains why you can come fairly close to them. Gus had a girlfriend with him, who was much taller. So see, short guys, there’s hope for you.

Now to drink my coffee, do Wordle, and think about the day.

It’s so warm here. Ahh.

It took a while, but I made it to the northern Outer Banks. The local wildlife say hi:

Hi, ladies.

This is wild-horse country. Feral, if you want to be technical about it. But we spotted several small groups on a drive-around this morning, most of them indistinguishable from any old horse standing in a field, except that they’re in someone’s yard. It’s an interesting place, even though it was offensively chilly (high 30s) today.

I felt like I was outrunning weather most of the way down here, and then I was outrunning traffic. I left early enough to miss the Thursday snow, but it rained, torrentially, all the way to Pennsylvania. Had dinner with Jason T. and his wife, then retired early to watch the ladies’ figure skating finals in the Olympics, which was, as we all know by now, ridiculous. On to Norfolk the following day, which meant I was skirting D.C. at lunchtime on the Friday of a holiday weekend. Which mean the traffic was insane, but not necessarily any more insane than it usually is. The plan was to spend the night in Norfolk, but when I got there, the tunnel/bridge had a 45-minute delay, so I noped all the way out of that and stayed in Newport News. But that meant I could breakfast with another NN.c-er, Kim, before pushing on to the Outer Banks, or OBX as it’s known in the local shorthand.

My friends here are great. Haven’t seen them in 25 years. But it was like yesterday, which is the real mark of great friends.

But Monday I leave for Atlanta, so we’ll see what happens along the way. Low tide is fairly early, so I should make it in one day, unless I become entranced by some place along the way and feel the need to stop.

That might happen. You never know.

In the meantime, more horses, this one a boy:

The weather is getting warmer. So am I.

Ladies and gentlemen, a project weeks in the making. My…home office:

Please, ignore the laundry basket.

Now that I look at it, I realize it’s not too different from before, but believe me, it is. We got rid of the double bed that had been there; Kate’s room is now the official guest room. An entire bookcase, outta there. Several cartons offloaded at John King Books for store credit — I believe we have $100 worth now, and I’ll probably donate it to a teacher or school or something. The desk has one-third less crap gathering dust on it, and I’m still not done.

My office cleanings rarely take place quickly, because I have to think about everything I pitch, and sometimes write about it. We hold on to so much in our lives, and so much of it is just garbage, but it makes us feel good to know it’s sitting on a shelf somewhere. In that closet I have a number of Kate’s baby toys, and Alan’s childhood teddy bear, which was given to us by his mother the last time she cleaned out a space. I just can’t bear to see them go into a garbage bag just yet, although I know that’s where they’ll end up, because everything ends up there.

I threw out so much. All my clips, all my career stuff, awards, everything. I figure if I absolutely positively have to have some clip, it exists somewhere. It would be an excuse to come down to Fort Wayne and sit among the microfilm readers, so win-win. I recall once reading a James Lileks blog where he revealed he was doing a project where he was compiling every word he’d ever written on his site, printing it out and putting it in bound volumes. I’m sure the University of Minnesota library will be pleased to get these treasures when he dies, but I have a much more Buddhist sand-painting view of my work. Do it, put it into the world, then forget it. And I must have forgotten it, because it’s in these boxes I’ve been dragging through my life without opening for years and years.

So: All of this is preface to me taking a few days out of my life for a walkabout. I realized, mid-January, that I was getting very sludgey in the head, and decided I needed a change of scenery. (Big talk for someone whose shampoo and facial moisturizer, purchased during a monthlong trip to France, haven’t run out yet.) So I’m starting out, tomorrow, on a few day’s loop of the Ol’ Souf’, as I’m calling it. First stop, North Carolina, where I have friends I haven’t seen in years living in the Outer Banks. I’ve been given a particular time to arrive, i.e., low tide on Saturday. Otherwise the unpaved road might not be passable. Well, that’s different, I thought, agreeing to every detail. Then on to Atlanta to crash with John and Sammy for a couple days, then home. I’d tried to loop in Nashville, but my friends there are going on their own brief walkabout, so no go. There will be stops along the way — Columbus, Pittsburgh, somewhere between Pennsylvania and the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere between Atlanta and Detroit. I like that much of this is unplanned, because I want to be unplanned, just for a week.

It’s a working trip, in that I’ll have my laptop and still be contributing to Deadline, but at rest stops and Waffle Houses and the like. I’ll be Chris Arnade, only probably not at McDonald’s. (I see he’s walking now. Oh.)

And also posting here, needless to say. Maybe with some more interesting pictures. John informs me the Obama portraits are at the High Museum in Atlanta, so I really want to see those.

OK, so, bloggage? Just a bit:

How do we Elmore Leonard fans feel about this? About Raylan Givens being surgically inserted into “City Primeval” and made into a miniseries? I’ll tell you how I feel: NOT GOOD. A bad idea. Let me drive for a few days and I’ll tell you how I feel about it.

Saturday mornings I’ve been going to my boxing trainer’s “gym,” i.e. his garage. He gave up the old place at the beginning of the pandemic and we’ve been doing Zoom classes for two years now. Most people have hung bags in their basements or garages, but I’m on a strict NO MORE SHIT IN THIS HOUSE pledge, so I shadowbox, and one day a week I get down there to be in the Zoom studio audience, i.e. on Saturdays, in his garage. Two Saturdays running this month I’ve taken the class is single-digit temperatures (the garage has a heater, but still: 4 degrees + a garage = call on your Midwestern fortitude, hon. Still, it’s often the best hour of the week, just banging the shit out of a heavy bag.

What does that say about life these days? You tell me.

But things are looking up. Cases are way down. The temperature, notwithstanding Saturday morning, is edging up. Snow is starting to melt. Spring is more than a rumor, more like the Chinese Democracy of seasons. It’ll be here eventually, but it’s a long way off.

If I sound like a profoundly dull person of late, well I am. This has been a hard winter. I feel fat, boring and peevish.

But now we have the Winter Olymp– Excuse me, the Games of the Roman Numerals Olympiad, to make me feel like there’s nothing more fun than sitting on one’s couch and watching a moguls skier, whose course makes my knees hurt just looking at it. Those and the skaters. And of course the biathlon, one of my faves, along with speed skating, where a parallel-universe Nance is competing in a full speed suit, one hand behind her back, the other swinging in time =. The color commentators, how can we forget them: “She is skiing for gold. I know because I asked her.” Tell me when someone says, “Who, me? I’m here for the bronze, no better.”

And because we’re watching it on Plain Old Network TV, we get to see back-to-back-to-back ads for sports betting and online casinos, NOW WITH LIVE DEALERS, all of whom are beautiful and rocking seven inches of cleavage.

Ah, it’s winter.

And a fresh thread for whatever terrors and delights the day ahead has.

A friend of mine is working on a book with a Detroit history angle, and has given me the great privilege of editing it, at least at the first-reader level. It’s great, and it reminds me of another book project I worked on, another Detroit-history volume. I spent a fair amount of time at the library, reading newspapers on microfilm, and was struck by how different history looks at ground level, as opposed to the 30,000-foot view taken in history texts.

It’s one thing, for instance, to write that “Many middle-class residents fled the city, citing fear of rising crime,” and another entirely to look at some of the crimes we’re talking about here.

One incident happened in 1976. The Average White Band and Kool and the Gang were playing a show at Cobo Arena in the heart of downtown. Gang activity was at its peak then (which tracks; my birth year was the largest of the baby boom, and I would have been 19 in ’76). As the show started, a couple hundred gang members managed to get into the arena, easily blowing past security and the few police working the show. During the break between acts, members of the Errol Flynns (they had some great names, these gangs) took the stage and started yelling “Errol Flynn! Errol Flynn!” into the live mics, while others fanned out through the crowd, robbing audience members of their watches and wallets.

Then they fled into the night, and if anything, the situation got worse, as this clipping from the time suggests:

A 16-year-old black girl said she saw 20 to 25 black youths snatch a white girl’s purse, beat her white boyfriend, and then strip her to her shoes and rape her.

Forty-seven arrests, widespread robberies, one rape, one molestation, followed by gang members smashing storefront windows and looting stores. Fun fact: One of the gang members that night? A young man named Greg Mathis, who grew up to be Judge Mathis.

Imagine if your son or daughter had gone through something like that, even if she wasn’t gang-raped in an alley afterward. You’d turn your back on that city so fast you’d spin like a top.

Something useful to remember.

I see some of you are playing Wordle. I played it for a while, deleted it, added it again. Here’s my technique:

The object of the game is to guess a five-letter word in six tries. The board starts out blank, so I’ve learned you start with a consonant blend and as many vowels as you can get up there, although I didn’t follow the rule here. Gray tiles mean the letter isn’t in the word at all, yellow means it’s there but in the wrong place, and green means the letter is in the right place.

So if the H is correct, then the first letter is probably C, T or W. The L can’t be in the third position, so try it second-from-last, then in the last spot, and then you just take guesses. Mine was lucky.

Now I’ve managed to be even more annoying than the people who tweet their results! Now there’s a winner!

There comes a time, even in a pandemic, when one simply can’t abide the restrictions for one more minute, throws caution to the wind and opts for something UTTERLY CRAZY like… indoor dining.

It was perhaps irresponsible, yes, but honestly I thought I was going to crack from boredom. Alan too, so when he said, “You want to do something?” I thought fuck yeah, I want to try this spot in Dearborn I’ve been meaning to check out for something like three years. I know we’re negative and won’t be infecting anyone. If it goes the other direction, well, I knew the risk.

This place is said to have the best hummus on the planet. (Possible headline for my obit: Unsuccessful writer ‘died for hummus;’ in last words, claims ‘it was worth it’) I can report that while my personal experience with hummus isn’t all that wide, it was in fact very good, and so was the foul, the harhoura, the falafel and the mint tea, as well as the roasted potatoes they sent to the table on the house, why I’m not sure. But I tipped 25 percent. Everyone’s having a hard time, and it was so nice to get out. Of course any carb-fest in Dearborn wouldn’t be complete without a stop at Shatila, a bakery and sweet shop where they serve Lebanese and French pastries:

Truth be told, I’m not the biggest fan of that super-fussy style of dessert — I’ll take a good slice of in-season peach or apple pie over that, any day — although they certainly are fun to look at. And my choice, the pineapple cake at the top left, was very good.

While we were at the first place, we stumbled across the restaurant’s chickpea stash and I took a picture, but I won’t post it here because I suspect it could be an OSHA violation to store a literal ton of chickpeas in 50-pound sacks in a hallway, but when they’re destined for such tastiness, I am willing to keep my mouth shut.

And now I’m so full I won’t eat until tomorrow, but a good swim in the morning will use up the calories.

It was a fine day, for January anyway, and we drove home on surface streets, Warren Avenue all the way, from the hookah shops and clothing stores for traditional Arab women through the industrial this and that of Detroit, then Wayne State, then the east side and all the way to GP.

On the drive out, Alan’s phone chirped with a news alert, which he immediately checked. “I always hope it’s news about Trump having a massive stroke,” he confessed. “Not today.”

The rest of the weekend was spent absorbing another Lansing scandal: The most recent Speaker of the House, a 33-year-old preacher’s kid who spent his six years in the lower chamber basically being a professional Christian, was revealed as anything but. His sister-in-law came forward to claim he started sexually abusing her when she was 15 (and he was 21), and didn’t stop until last summer. It’s a tawdry tale, but only surprising if you are shocked that halo-polishing Christians dig hanging at strip clubs and banging lots of chicks. I am not.

Nor am I surprised by the ex-Speaker’s high-and-tight fashy haircut. It’s like semiotics with these guys.

Bloggage? Here’s something a little light-hearted, that serves as a pretty good example of why Detroit stands alone as a news town, or at least on a par with Miami: A flashback story about the time a radical anarchist prankster threw a shaving-cream pie in the face of a so-called “child guru,” then was tracked down by the guru’s followers and beaten with a hammer. The prankster sounds like someone I would have liked a lot:

Halley was a well-known rebel character in the Wayne State University neighborhood. He drove a cab for a living but was also a writer, poet, pamphleteer, actor and self-described anarchist clown. He staged guerilla-theater events in parks, streets and the lobby of the Fisher Theatre, where he and fellow performers taunted people paying top dollar for mainstream Broadway plays.

Operating his own storefront theater, Halley once put on a satire about the 1978 massacre in Jonestown, Guyana, offering the audience Kool-Aid. That was a sardonic reference to the hundreds of Jonestown cult members who died after a drinking a fruit-flavored beverage laced with poison. On another occasion, Halley led audience members through the Cass Corridor as actors popped out from behind trees and garbage cans. One of his characters was Dirty Dog the Clown, who played a harmonica and spouted radical slogans.

In a 1978 Free Press article that recalled the pie incident, Halley, with a straight face, told a reporter the plastic plate surgeons had implanted in his head picked up radio signals.

All this entertainment for the cost of a newspaper. I ask you.

Happy week ahead, all. Let’s hope I’m still testing negative at the end of it.

Well, happy new year to all. I promised three posts this week and I guess this is the third, even though it’s Saturday.

I hope you all had a peaceful and pleasing Eve. We’re feeling fine, and it seems we may have dodged Covid. Kate’s illness flew in and out the window in about 48 hours, and so far, we’re symptom-free. I got a PCR yesterday — no results yet — and Alan got a PCR and instant, with the latter coming up negative. So you see? It’s true! Covid is just big-government mind control!

I’m still self-isolating until my results come in. It’s supposed to be warmish today with a snowstorm later tonight, then bitter cold, so I’m planning a long outdoor walk, maybe on Belle Isle. I walked three miles yesterday, to the grocery for a few supplies and back, and was amazed by how it wiped me out. Three miles! Of course, having slept four hours the night before probably didn’t help. But Dry January starts today, and I might as well make it comprehensively healthy.

I did a fancy surf ‘n’ turf dinner for my last night of wine consumption for a while. Beef tenderloin and scallops, with individual spinach soufflés and chocolate lava cake for dessert. Then we watched “The Lost Daughter” (recommended) and I folded my tent early. Even the usual midnight fusillade of gunfire couldn’t wake me. Man, I needed to sleep.

Resolutions? This year? OK, just some easy ones: Read more ink on paper, fewer pixels on screens. Listen to more new music. Don’t look back. Get to Spain (or maybe Italy). So I best get moving, eh? See you Monday.