Year: 2006

A slightly earlier, tongue-twistier version of last night’s MPR commentary:

Probably many Minnesotans have been happy that, so far, it’s been a pretty mild winter. My family is on one of those stabilized payment plans where we pay the same amount for heat each month of the year, even in the summer months–not because I’m a speculator in energy stocks, but because I’m lazy: I don’t like to deal with sudden, surprising utility bills. Out of sight, out of mind.

Last fall, at about the time that oil and natural gas prices were spiking, I called up my friends at a farm in Western Wisconsin. I’d heard there was a run on firewood because of the panic over energy costs. Carter the farmer confirmed that he’d increased his prices by ten dollars per face cord. The price was going up not so much because of demand, but because of the cost of gas, since he had to drive into the city to deliver most of his wood. Each sale meant roughly a sixty-mile round-trip drive to town.

At this point I asked a question I ask everytime I buy firewood. What’s a face cord? And how does it compare to a regular cord of wood? This time, Carter explained it in terms that I feel confident are going to stick with me for a year or more. It’s like this: A normal cord of wood is four feet wide, four feet high, and eight feet long. A face cord is a third of a cord–a natural division that happens to a cord of wood when it’s cut up to fit into your typical stove or fireplace. Carter told me that most folks who actually depend on wood for heat will order at least a full cord, whereas folks who just enjoy a nice fire for aesthetic reasons–folks like me– will normally order a face cord.

I paid Carter $125 for a face cord of wood, mostly oak and birch, well dried and nicely split. When Carter backed into my driveway and up to my garage, I’d cleared all the kid’s bikes out of the way. I asked if he wanted help stacking the wood, and he said, “As you please.” He gave me to understand that we might enjoy each other’s company in the process, or we might not. It was all the same to him. I helped. I recall an old needlepoint on my grandmother’s wall that said something like, “When you split your own wood, you warm yourself twice.” Well, I wasn’t doing the splitting, but I’m a city slicker, so stacking counts.

I build fires just about every night. And the funny thing is, it actually makes my house cooler. The former owner had done such a great job insulating the house, sealing it up tight, that the fireplace has a draw something like an industrial wind tunnel. I’ve fallen asleep on the floor with the dog, not three feet from the blazing grate, only to wake up shivering as all the heat in the room is hoovered up the chimney.

And the other downside is that I have to go outside to smell that rich, wonderful, complex, and evocative smell. The aroma of birch and oak burning is, to me, comparable to the taste of a fine wine, or an expensive cheese–and I feel vaguely cheated to have to go outside to smell it. But then, of course, I’m rewarded by a view of the stars and the haloed moon in the cold, crisp night air.

Recently, though, I have developed a trick. After the fire is cracking nicely, I close the flue for just a few seconds. Just long enough to fumigate the liginv room with the thick, rich, aromatic smoke, but not long enough to endanger the wife, the kids, or the other smaller mammals. Sure, the fire alarms scream into life. But I breathe deep, smile, and lay my head back on the dog’s belly, and don’t give a second thought to the heating bill.

The Minnetonka police officer who gave U of M student Nick Stremer a ticket for underage drinking, it could be argued, was just doing his job. It could be argued, I said. But, arguing with a fool is always a bad idea.

Like a lot of the people quoted in today’s Strib story and on MNSpeak, I think Nick is a hero…and Minnetonka Police Chief Joy Rikala is a constipated boob. As she justifies the ticketing of Nick, she admits that the girl who actually drank herself unconscious wasn’t ticketed. According to the story, “Rikala said officers were concentrating on saving the woman’s life.” Except for the officer who was concentrating on giving Nick Stremer a criminal record, that is.

Joy Rikala is the former chief of the U of M police. Imagine the experience she has dealing with drunken minors. Too bad she doesn’t seem to have learned anything from it.

So, I’m sending a contribution of $70 to MADD in Nick Stremer’s name, and a like amount to the Minnetonka police. I encourage them to use it to buy a dictionary and look up the word “discretion.”

New issue is up. Print edition–the real thing–will hit the streets on Monday. This is what we’re doing most of the time.

With the news that our publisher and son have taken the reins of the ab fab MNSpeak, I was reminded of an ongoing monologue I’ve been developing (I know, among all the other ongoing monologues) about the variety of blogs. Just within any particular medium, there are so many varieties that creating a typology is an endless task, and probably a pointless one. Consider, for example, the world of vlogs or video podcasts. This is a nascent thing–iTunes currently lists 83 vlogs. I guarantee that number will be in the thousands, if not the tens of thousands in twelve months– and already it makes very little sense to compare, say, Chasing Windmills with Rocketboom. One is a sort of daily variety show with an astonishingly annoying host, the other is an artful and funny and professionally produced soap opera. The same is true, of course, of the text-based crowd. There’s humor, memoir, political punditry, book reviews, gossip, just some guy’s random thoughts, and so on.

But this obvious point makes me consider what the essence of a blog is, if there is an essence. If there is anything new to it (particularly in print) it is the foreshortened form– the quick hit, the editorializing link, the ribald punchline, and on to the next post. By that criteria, this here operation is no blog at all, but a frequent writing exercise with disparate, idiosyncratic subjects like magazine publishing, hockey, life in the Midwest, and so on. Anyone who writes for a living ought to write as often as they can–sort of like if you consider yourself a professional skier, you should probably ski quite a lot. Now the difference is that most professionals don’t wish to practice in public. Most writers, if they know what’s good for them, will self-edit aggressively. That’s to keep up the quality of the stuff that makes it to the point of public consumption. You could also make the argument that too much publishing, whether it’s in a blog or a newspaper, devalues the product and the producer.

On the other hand, I think you write differently if you know there is a possibility that someone other than yourself is going to read it. It’s similar to the question of whether the artist can or should think about his audience. It changes the art, generally for the better I think, when it is intended for public viewing, because it should compell the artist to make extra sure things are looking their best. So blogging, for the writer anyway, is maybe a zero-sum game. Probably the best advice is to continue to write publicly AND privately.

If I tried to guage how much I write that actually ends up in the public domain–including here on the web–I’d say roughly half of it never sees the light of day. And that’s not because it’s unfinished or unintended to have readers. I hardly ever start a project without finishing it, whether its a bloggy graf or a magazine article or a novel. (Tried once. It is the worst thing ever written in the English language. No, that would be a selling point. It’s the most useless thing ever written in the English language, and I may well go to hell just for the vanity of forcing it on the one or two people who did look at it. I used to think the thing was merely unfinished–at 100,000 words. Now I know it’s not that. It’s that it is relentlessly bad from beginning to end.)

Not sure what my point was here, other than to do my own pushups today out here in view of everyone and everything, after spending a week or so writing in a closed circuit. The upside for readers, generically speaking, is that a good writer like Woolcott or TMFTML or Diablo works differently and more loosely in this medium, and often times they really shine without the interference of an editor or a publisher or, more subtly, their own censorious professional within. I like to compare the online and print writing particularly of Woolcott, because he’s always a gas to read. But on the web, he flexes all those ripped metaphorical muscles, and he regularly beats up on the deserving weaklings who dare to darken his doorstep with their muddled thinking and their mannered contempt.