i frequently jabber about why i want to check out living out west. summed up in yesterday’s post “why i want to live out west” (i thought it seemed like an appropriate title). all perfectly valid, but i’ll say that i don’t go through every day sullen and depressed at the prospect of having spent another 24 hours in this state. it’s an important and beautiful place.
when jim walsh started writing a weekly column for the city pages last year, it was the beginning of a great thing. the thoughts expressed in his inaugural column, “home and away,” have been shuffling around in my head for the past year, and when i happened across it the other day, it rang very true again as the short days and cloudy skies of winter have blanketed our souls and i’ve found myself daydreaming about what it would be like to wear a t-shirt in december or for it to be light out when i leave work at 5:00.
anyway, here’s some of the goodies from that column written last december:
Like any good battle-weary Minnesotan, she knew what I was talking about. “I’ve had the gun in my mouth,” she said with only the faintest trace of humor, “for about three weeks now.” I didn’t laugh. I said I could relate or something, we talked for a few more minutes, then went our separate ways…
My head’s slightly woozy from the whiskey I drank last night at Grumpy’s, where quite a few others, including manager Pat Duffy and bartender Tim Kennedy, armed with the City Pages winter issue and stark, sure knowledge of the collective war against the elements that lay before us, hunkered down in the coziness that only a Christmas-lit corner bar can afford on a frigid winter night.
As I type this, smoke stacks spew billowing white steam clouds across the downtown Minneapolis horizon. The domes of St. Paul look like Fritz Lang’s in Metropolis. The lakes are finally starting to freeze over, and all that condensation hitting the frigid morning air conjures a mist that gives off the look of English moors, or the San Francisco Bay. Mummies and Michelin people walk their dogs and waddle their errands, steam whooshing from their mouths and noses like they’re connected to the same big bong…
[Y]ou head out to a high school basketball game between your hippie Catholic alma mater and their crosstown military academy rival. As you cross the mighty, steaming Mississippi by way of the translucent Hennepin Avenue Bridge to Nicollet Island, you and your old baseball coach, who called you out of the blue to go to the game, bitch about the Grain Belt Beer sign not being lit up, while Holidazzle is allowed to glow on and on in all its corporate-sponsored kid-friendliness…
You sit down and watch the game, and are immediately and once again bowled over by the awesome vitality of youth. You borrow a pen from someone and make a couple of notes to yourself on the program: Keep listening. Roots. At halftime, some very sharp and smart-looking 60- and 70-something men are introduced, captains of their high school championship teams, men who probably did the Lindy or Frug in this gym. They’re joined by some 20-something hip-hop guys, captains of their own championship teams.
The game is a thriller. The military kids have a 6′9″ sophomore who dominates, but our guys are city and scrappy and come back at the end. The 6′9″ kid scores with two seconds left to give the military kids a one-point lead, and, it looks like, the game. After a timeout, our hippy-hop guys inbound the ball perfectly past half-court and a kid named Gio Gideo rises up right in front of you and lets go a perfect jump shot from outside the three-point line. The ball rotates and arches in slow motion, up past the championship banners that hang on the wall, up past the black and white and brown and yellow faces in the stands, up past the balcony where guys in your day used to get stoned and make out with their girlfriends. At the buzzer, it hits nothing but nylon.
Everybody jumps up. The students spill out of the stands and smother the shooter, and the coaches try to get the kids to kneel down for a prayer but as far as you can see the kids are already praying by pogoing up and down in a spring break-worthy circle of hormones and euphoria. You slap five goodbye with the old black man with the toothpick in his mouth and the booze on his breath who’s been sitting behind you with his nieces. You pat the back of the older white guy in front of you, who came to the game alone and who knows his basketball much better than you. On your way out, you say to your buddy that every one of those kids fell in love with basketball tonight.
You run out into the parking lot and ask people if they saw that last shot but what you really mean is did you see that look on everybody’s faces, that look of wonder, of connectedness, and you get in the freezing car and you use this phrase to describe us, and everyone else who stays, and the kid’s winning shot: cold-blooded.
after a bit of a lull — i reckon he was stunned about the election — he came back this week with a doozy about the goose bumps. yep, the goose bumps. he does it with his signature honesty and insight and gives his readers something to think about as we descend into the chaos of christmas and shopping and gifts. he starts out by telling about how he and a songwriter friend went over the friend’s new lyric and jim told him it said too much and they were getting ready to play a game of b-ball so they just worked it out, figured out how to rewrite the lyric aloud, and when they finished it, they both shivered with the goosebumps…
…
I’m talking about sitting down at a dinner party this past Saturday with old friends, new acquaintances, survivors, strivers, and strangers, and asking them about the last time they got goose bumps. I’m talking about people offering up stories about it happening with their kids, jobs, songs they heard, plays and pieces of art they saw. I’m talking about this damaged and delighted chosen family brought together for one night only and letting down its guard.
I’m talking about a question that left many inarticulate and resorting to sighs and grunts. I’m talking about answers that led to invocations of Joseph Campbell, the Mayans, The Motorcycle Diaries, Nietzsche, Malcolm X, Jay-Z, Neutral Milk Hotel, music, football, poetry, channeling, and the warm rush of creation. I’m talking about the musician who confessed to being in a constant state of goose-bumpery, the woman who works with troubled teens, one of whom recently gave her his business card, and the new parents who goosed up at a recent episode of–don’t laugh–Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.
I’m talking about the woman at one end of the table who confessed that she gets goose bumps every time she pees. I’m talking about the woman at the other end who couldn’t remember the last time she got goose bumps, but who, upon leaving the party, wondered if it would be “all right” with me if she posed my question to her family at Christmas dinner.
And of course it would be all right with me. I mean, how do you corner the market on discussions about horripilation? How do you put borders around the astral plane? How do you argue with the image of a once goose-bumpless woman sitting around with her loved ones on Christmas Eve, swapping cosmic kisses that got their start with a couple of dead-or-alive geezers in a hothouse gym?
jim walsh and the home state he describes on an almost weekly basis are a powerful argument for minnesota as the greatest place on earth.
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