Changing States

John Winkelman

For the second day in a row Scott and I were in the right place at the right time. Today as we were walking along the river all of the ice between the 6th Street Bridge and the Leonard Street bridge (about a quarter-mile of river) let go and thundered over the dam.

river_melt_3

It was quite impressive. Some of the pieces were more than twenty feet across and about a foot thick, and must have weighed well over a ton.

river_melt_4

The entire ice pack took half an hour or so to clear the dam. The turbulence at the foot was filled with huge ice chunks and tree trunks and old shoes and pop bottles and a single soccer ball. The local ducks like to camp out at the top of the fish ladder and some of them were doing small-scale reinterpretations of the Titanic, getting bumped around and generally pushed toward the dam. A heart-stopping moment occurred when a duck hopped up on one of the ice floes just before it want over, but the duck took to the air in plenty of time to escape.

Sooner or later one of them will be a little slow on the uptake and Grand Rapids will find itself a duck short.

Different Seasons

John Winkelman

The upper river has been frozen since mid-December. Sometimes the ice creeps back from the edge of the dam. Sometimes the ice hangs over the edge of the dam. Scott and I contemplated walking across the river, but couldn’t quite work up the nerve. Something about river ice seems inherently less trustworthy than, say, lake ice.

This is what the river has looked like for most of the past three months:

river_melt_0

Yup. That was pretty much it, up until this past Friday. The warm weather has been melting the ice at an extraordinary rate. This is what the dam looked like yesterday at around 6:00 pm:

river_melt_1

About eight inches of water going over the dam. The ice was still touching the shore up by the 6th Street Bridge. Fishermen were braving the still frigid water and dodging the occasional chunks of ice.

At about 1:00 pm today the weight of the backed-up ice pushed a couple of trees over the dam, which had been hung up at the top for a couple of years. Scott and I had been saying for a long time “Wouldn’t it be cool…” and we finally got to see it. As he said, we deserved to see it.

At 5:30 pm today, this is what the dam looked like:

river_melt_2

When the ice and the trees gave way there was a mad scramble as the fishermen sought shelter in the rocks and shallows.

By tomorrow morning the rest of the ice will probably have let go for the year and the river will be running high, and the fishermen will be pulling salmon out by the barrel-full.

Happy birthday, Virginia.

Happy St. Patrick’s day.

Lamb

John Winkelman

This afternoon Virginia and I went to Sami’s for gyros. After the initial feeding frenzy, in which I lost the tip of my pinky finger, we traded gyro stories. Actually, it was less a trade and more of her listening to me while she ate.

I had my first gyro in Gorky Park in Moscow, in June of 1994. This was at the tail end of a six week class excursion to Russia, and the bunch of us were dirty, sleep-deprived, suffering from mild alcohol poisoning, and loving every minute of it.

The day was overcast and spitting rain, and the park was mostly empty, except for the carnies. Boy, if you think American carnies are scary, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. We didn’t dare go on any of the rides; by Cedar Point standards they didn’t look like that much fun and we had a healthy distrust of Russian safety measures. The latrines were the most frightening experience of my life. They made my eyes water from a hundred yards UPWIND.

Just off of a smaller path a ways away from the river two Azerbaijani gentlemen had a small kiosk set up with a home-made rotisserie grill thing and a small strongbox. On the rotisserie was a big hunk of sheep meat. After days of sparse sack lunches and shoe-leather stew, the site of so much fresh meat sent us into a slavering frenzy of waiting in line for the sheep to finish cooking. The twenty minutes felt like an eternity. Every movement of an Azerbaijani arm left a vapor trail and the glint of sunlight from gold teeth was blinding.

Finally they were preparing my gyro. Several thin slices of lamb on pita bread, with a cucumber sause and fresh crushed parsley. To this day, I remember it as one of the best meals of my life.

Debriefing

John Winkelman

Where have I been? I’m glad you asked! I… have been working so much that the thought of looking at my computer after-hours fills me with fear and loathing.

And if that weren’t bad enough, I just downloaded Nethack . If you have never played Nethack, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It hearkens back to the days of Rogue, Telengard, Bard’s Tale, the early MUDs; it is The Original Adventure Game, and it has been constantly updated and upgraded for the past twenty or so years.

And it is free.

I expect I will be using it a lot as a distraction in the coming days as we gear up for war. Personally, I think Saddam needs to be ousted. His methods are on par with Stalin and his continued rule will be worse for the Iraqi people than any U.S. led war that doesn’t go nuclear.

Having said that, I will now say that I think the Administration should just come out and admit that the one and only reason we are even acknowledging Saddam’s existence is The Oil. Seriously. If the Middle East wasn’t chock-full of oil we wouldn’t pay any more attention to it than we do to the AIDS-decimated countries in southern Africa.

Think about this: If it was Catholic terrorists flew the planes into the towers, would we have declared war on Rome? Nope. After the Oklahoma City bombing did we declare war on Michigan rednecks? Nope. You know why? Not profitable.

Every president since World War II has been a sociopath to some degree or another. The kind of ego that would want to be president believes nothing other than itself truly exists. I don’t think Bush gives a damn about, or even notices the existence of, other human lives. They simply don’t factor into his reality. Those hundreds of millions of social security numbers are nothing more than assets in his giant game of Sim Presidency. I absolutely believe this about him.

And if he has this level of respect for the people of his own country, imagine how expendable he considers the rest of the world to be…

Neighborly Courtesy

John Winkelman

At the bookstore there is, in the back room, a fire alarm-type-siren which is so loud that to be in the room with it when it is wailing causes disorientation and nausea.

This morning at 4:00 I discovered that there is an identical siren on the roof of the local jewelry repair shop, less than a hundred feet from my bed. Apparently a glitch in the wiring set it off. It screamed for a good half-hour before one of the dozen or so police responding to irate phone calls managed to disconnect it.

No sign of the owner.

I can appreciate that the siren is there to make the building more safe and secure, but I feel that it should be mandatory that he have a duplicate siren in his bedroom, which can only be shut off from inside his store. Fair is fair.

In other news, I am considering, in my extravagant free time, performing a scholarly comparison between Dostoevsky and Mishima. If you don’t know what I am talking about, then click on the BOOKS link to the right and spend a little time browsing. I will perform the comparison on my trombone. I bet no-one has done THAT yet.

Irony

John Winkelman

Charles T. Sell was a dentist for a number of years before he was arrested on over 60 charges of insurance and other kinds of fraud. He has spend the last five years in jail because he is suffering from serious mental illness and has been deemed not competent to stand trial.

Unless he is medicated.

Given his current state of mind, which includes the fear that the government is trying to kill him, this medication would have to be forced upon him. So he is appealing the decision.

Did you catch that? The government, in order to make him sane enough to stand trial, is trying to force medication upon a man who is suffering paranoid delusions that the government is trying to kill him.

The legal community is rather nonplussed. Adding to the confusion is the fact that he hasn’t actually been convicted of anything yet.

I don’t feel much of anything about this case, one way or the other, but wow! what an odd situation to be in. In order to cure his paranoia they need to feed it.

I have updated the Books page to include only those books which I am reading/have read during this year. Also, I have started on a new collaboration, this one a site about sloths.

My Whacky Neighborhood

John Winkelman

This morning my daily ritual of repeatedly hitting the snooze button was interrupted by loud noises from outside, where several police officers were breaking down the front door of the neighbor’s house and hauling some of them away in handcuffs. An angry man stood on the street out front shouting “I told you he was a punk!!!” and something about a dog. Several young women with babies in carriers evacuated the premises at about the same time, and one woman, wither holding her stomach or cradling her arm, went away in an ambulance.

This is, I think, the third time that Grand Rapids’ Finest have come and cleaned that place out. The most recent was over this past summer, when one of the residents at that time had walked up the block and shot one of the employees of the local scummy convenience store in the legs.

Two weekends ago I noticed that that scummy convenience store, on the corner of Fulton and Diamond, has lost its liquor licence. “Until Relocation or Closure”, it says on the notice. The Powers That Be finally got fed up with them selling liquor to minors and looking the other way when drug deals and muggings happen out front and in their back parking lot.

This past fall someone tried to mug Master Lee at that store. As he was getting out of his car someone hit him in the back of the head with something and yelled “Gimme yo fuckin’ wallet!” and other such niceties. Master Lee turned and advanced on the guy, saying “You want my money? Come take my money!!!” The guy turned and ran. Probably the wisest decision he has made in his life.

Unless he has since decided to commit suicide, which would be a truly neighborly thing to do.

mmmmmmyep….

I recently finished reading The Red Hourglass, a nifty book about all sorts of predators like Black Widows and Praying Mantids and Pigs and Rattlesnakes. The chapter on pigs had some interesting things to say about humans, both physiologically and psychologically. The chapter on black widows had this neat description of how doctors determine if that ungodly pain you are feeling is, in fact, a black widow bite: They ask you if this is “the worst pain you have ever been in?” If the answer is Yes, then it is likely that you have about a year of painful recovery ahead of you.

If you survive the next 24 hours.

So for the rest of the evening, I will read Richard Dawkins, watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and eat Ethiopian food from Little Africa (the best food in the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan).

Oh! Before I forget: Fundamentalists are really necrophiliacs .

A Dream

John Winkelman

I am sitting in a concert hall, waiting for the performance to begin, I am not sure who or what it is, but the audience is well-dressed and well behaved. Directly in front of me is a mother and her two small sons, both in the five-to-eight age range. They are restless and she suggests they sing a song – softly – to keep them occupied until the curtain goes up. They choose “Down To the River To Pray”.

It starts with just the two of them, hesitantly, in the pure, crystalline, self- conscious- yet- completely- open manner of young children:

“As I went down to the river to pray…”

The people around them turn and look for a moment, then join in. Quietly, not at all professional, but with the same purity and clarity of voice. With each word, each line, more join in.

“O brothers lets go down
Let’s go down, Come on down
O brothers lets go down
Down in the river to pray”

By the end of the second verse the entire audience, hundred of people, are singing this simple, beautiful song. The performers come to the edge of the stage and join in

At the last lines of the song this moment has become one of perfect beauty; these two young children are the seeds, the nexus of something extraordinary, which never happened and will never be repeated.