The Rake Magazine

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  • I Wouldn’t Care for This Health Care, No!

    Get with the program, health-care providers of America,
    and get a clue about the prices you ascribe to your services. While you’re at
    it, we wouldn’t mind if you went so far as to tell us the costs upfront. Yes,
    yes; I know the industry if rife with corruption–er, negotiated discounts–and, in fact,
    the prices are subject to much (much!) change. But here’s the thing: Very many
    of your customers are paying out of pocket nowadays.

    For example, me! At this morning’s 8:20 a.m. dental
    appointment (I’d saved enough dough in my HSA), I stumbled into a
    hundred-dollar situation: Apparently, they’ve got these five-year, full-facial
    X-rays for which they insert a progression of plastic doodads and snap a
    dozen-odd pics all around your face.

    "What’s different here?" I asked the hygienist on the fifth or sixth take. I get an
    X-Ray every year or so (I know these run me an extra thirty bucks), but I didn’t
    recall it ever being so elaborate before. It was at this point that,
    finally, I learned I was getting the Cadillac five-year, full-facial X-Ray and,
    even better yet, the hygienist assured me: "The insurance company treats them
    just like panoramic X-rays."

    "I don’t have dental insurance," I uttered icily–or as icy
    as I could be with a damned bite-guard in my mouth. I mean, who has dental
    insurance anymore? That’s, like, so-oo passé.

    I won’t bore you with the details of my temper tantrum, but I
    will say this: I’ve got decent chompers and would’ve passed on the hundred-dollar-plus
    X-Ray had I known about it upfront. This is akin to the time I took my junker Volkswagen
    for an oil change, only to learn, upon picking it up later in the day, that
    they’d replaced the $800 timing belt while they were at it, too. What gives?

  • Swallowing

    It is an established fact that we human beings want what we cannot have. When exorbitantly priced iPhones hit the market—already in limited supply—people line up at 2 a.m. And by telling a couple they are not allowed to have sex for a week, therapists say they can cause even the most uninterested spouse to churn with desire.

    So it is with absinthe, the drink preferred by Ernest Hemingway, Vincent Van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, which supposedly drove each of them crazy and was outlawed in the United States in 1912.

    It is supposedly the wormwood in absinthe that makes it so deliciously dangerous. An herb that’s poisonous in even moderate amounts, pure wormwood contains thujone, a ketone with hallucinogenic properties. It’s possible, I suppose, that absinthe provokes delusions in very rare cases—though the same can be said of sugar, sleep deprivation, over-the-counter cold medicines, and lust.

    Laws restricting the sale of absinthe have been loosening for years. In 1972, the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act lifted the ban on the liquor itself and focused instead on concentrated thujone (which also occurs naturally in sage, thyme, and rosemary). Then American distillers realized that the absinthe they’d been drinking in Spain and Portugal—and believing had mystical properties—actually contained such a negligible amount of the hallucinogen that it qualified for sale in the U.S. They were faced with a conundrum: The very argument they could use for making the case that absinthe should be legal might also lessen its appeal.

    In other words, without the naughty element, what is left of absinthe but a foul-tasting green syrup with a nearly lethal level of alcohol?

    I am both a confirmed wine drinker and someone who does not care for the taste of anise. Keep these two facts in mind. But my experience tasting absinthe for the first time left me truly puzzled as to what all the fuss is about.

    It smells herbal with a touch of sweetness, like a bakery in the middle of a stand of fir trees; this I truly enjoyed. But the first sip was like dragon effluvium: livid, scorching, and green. It burns for a long time (a looonnnggg time): on the tongue, in the throat, and later in the gut. The predominant taste is licorice and leaf and something vaguely scotch-like—if your scotch had been subject to a nuclear flash.

    Most disturbing, absinthe’s flavor lingers for hours. Neither breath mints nor vigorous tooth (and tongue) brushing can expunge it. With an alcohol content of sixty-two percent—that’s 124 proof—it’s as if the imprint is soldered onto the inside of your mouth.

    I tried drinking it straight and as an absinthe drip, a process that reminded me of every heroin-cooking scene I’ve ever seen on TV. There is dramatic ceremony to this drink—no doubt one of the things that has made it popular among writers, artists, and actors. Traditional preparation requires a sugar cube placed on a slotted spoon that is set over a glass of absinthe. You trickle ice water directly over the sugar, allowing it to melt into the liquor through the spoon’s vents. This creates a “louche,” or pale white cloud, in the drink, topped with a ring of iridescent chartreuse.

    It’s pretty. But I actually liked the absinthe even less this way, preferring the pain and boldness of a flavor I found confounding to a watered-down, sugary slurry edged in green. The only way I could imagine liking this liquor, frankly, is in coffee with a heavy dollop of whipped cream—a variation on Irish coffee that would not only soften the flavor but might thankfully burn off some of the alcohol as well.

    On December 27, Surdyk’s opened early and began selling Lucid Absinthe Supérieure, one of only two varieties currently available in the United States, for $75 a bottle. And when Jim Surdyk, who had a five-day exclusive on the introduction, opened his door at 8 a.m., twenty-five people were already lined up to buy. (The day after New Year’s, Haskell’s began selling Lucid for $69.99.)

    “It’s just interesting to people, the whole mystique of it,” Surdyk says. I agree. I also think absinthe is a perilous drink, not only for the pocketbook but for public health: a century-withheld novelty that will make you very, very, very drunk very, very, very fast.

    This—in addition to depression, schizophrenia, and syphilis (respectively)—is likely what really caused the madness of Hemingway, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec.

  • Beyond the Obvious

    Some guys—and gals—get all the ink. If you are a devoted Twin Cities foodie, you know all about Tim (and Josh), Vincent, Alex, Stewart and Heidi, Lucia, Doug, J.P., Lenny, and Brenda—and you can pair them with their restaurants. Odds are pretty good that you have also heard of Tanya Siebenaler, Don Saunders, Scott Pampuch, Mike Phillips, and J.D. Fratzke.*

    Google any of these names and you’ll get hundreds of hits. And by the time this issue is on the streets, your chances of getting a Valentine’s Day reservation at any of their establishments are slim or none.

    But plenty of other very fine restaurants don’t generate the same buzz and don’t make it into the Zagat Guide. Some of them are too new, others too old, some are a bit off the beaten path, and some are just a notch less ambitious than the places everyone’s talking about. Following are a few of these under-the-radar places that seem especially appropriate for Valentine’s Day, or any romantic occasion.


    At First Course: A chicken roulade with gorgonzola risotto, with a tres leches cake for dessert.

    Unless you happen to be his mother or one of his loyal customers, odds are pretty good that you have never heard of Travis Metzger, chef-owner of First Course. The décor at this little neighborhood bistro might be rather minimal for some tastes (varnished plywood takes the place of teak and mahogany veneers), but I find the place quite charming, fake fireplace and all.

    The first time we visited, Metzger was doubling as waiter, and listening to him describe the nightly specials made it clear that this is a guy who really knows and cares a lot about food. We started with a couple of his nightly specials: field greens and roasted beets with chopped walnuts, dressed in walnut oil with a pumpkin-infused goat cheese, and a tapas plate of polenta topped with a savory duck confit.

    I was a little skeptical about ordering the seafood stew in lobster broth, fearing a commercial soup base loaded with salt and MSG (there are no other lobster dishes on the menu); this version, however, was delicious: shrimp, mussels, clams, and calamari in a light but intensely flavorful broth, spiked with just enough chipotle pepper to command your attention. Other best bets from subsequent visits include the pappardelle with lamb ragu; braised leg of lamb with rosemary, white wine, and tomato; butternut squash ravioli with a brandy-Gorgonzola cream sauce; and the chicken roulade filled with prosciutto, spinach, and provolone, served over a Gorgonzola risotto.

  • Stop the Clock

    Perhaps no place on Minnesota’s Iron Range personifies its mythical, often misunderstood boom-calamity-boom nature better than tiny Kinney (its population flutters around two hundred), located in the middle of the Mesabi Range on Highway 169. In 1977, faced with an outdated water system and difficulty securing state or federal assistance, Kinney attempted to secede from the Union. In a letter to then-Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, town leaders announced that they were even prepared to declare war and surrender immediately, in an effort to expedite the delivery of foreign aid necessary to replace its water system. No official response was forthcoming, but the Republic of Kinney was born, and last July the town celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of its independence.

    To an outsider, the vast territory of the Range, with its gaggle of working-class towns and the unique landscapes created by its mines, does in fact have the feel of an old-world republic. The region technically encompasses the entire northeast corner of the state, including Two Harbors and Duluth, whose Lake Superior ports send Iron Range ore out into the world. But the Superior shore, and the area north and south from Ely, the Arrowhead region, has always had a distinct identity. With the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and a large swath of the Superior National Forest, this territory attracts scads of tourists and wilderness adventurers.

    The heart of the Iron Range, however, has never been high on the list of Minnesota tourist destinations. It’s not hard to find native Minnesotans who’ve never even driven through the region proper, despite its fabled place in state history and the fact that so many of the town names are ingrained in Minnesota lore: Hibbing, Virginia, Chisholm, Eveleth, Mountain Iron, Biwabik.

    Aside from a Bronx accent still evident after thirty-five years in Minnesota, photographer Mike Melman could easily pass as a native Iron Ranger at any Twin Cities social function. He’s got the laconic demeanor; the ruddy, slightly rumpled look of a man who’s just stepped in out of a cold wind; and the gift for being simultaneously deadpan and passionate. Not that Melman attends many social functions. He’s a rambler with a camera, “looking for places they haven’t messed up yet, but will,” and is generally out trolling for pictures in the dead of night.

    Melman took a circuitous route to Minneapolis, where he has lived since 1972. Born and raised in the Bronx, he attended New York’s Cooper Union and then Berkeley to complete his architecture degree. After college he served a six-year stint in the Naval Air Reserve, stationed at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. The Navy stuck a camera in his hands and sent him up in the plastic nose of a P2V prop plane to take surveillance photos over the Atlantic.

    Later, Melman went to England for several years, where he worked for architects and started taking photos in earnest. He and his wife then made the somewhat arbitrary decision to relocate to Minnesota (“a couple friends from Cooper Union ended up here, and said good things”).

    Melman worked steadily in architecture and promptly retired when he turned 65. “It wasn’t exactly a successful career,” he said. “I made a conscious choice not to do my own thing, so I was always working for firms. And the problem with that is that a lot of the time you end up working on stuff you don’t believe in.”

    Even as he was toiling at architecture, he was discovering that photography was the perfect medium for capturing the environment he found in the Midwest. “The move was a strange adjustment, initially. Growing up I was closed in all the time. I rarely left the Bronx. I’d look across the airshaft and see my neighbors at their table, and the elevated train passed right outside my bedroom window. I’d look out and see the passengers and they’d be looking right back at me. They didn’t look very happy. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I craved space.”

    Even so, Minnesota was an acquired taste, Melman acknowledges. “It didn’t take me long, though, to become quite addicted to all the space, the sky and clouds, the light and all the different kinds of weather you get here. Not to mention the sort of desertion you can encounter in the winter and the middle of the night.”

    All of those things—light, sky, space, and, particularly, desertion—have become trademarks of Melman’s photography. If anything, in fact, he has become somewhat notorious for the austerity and desolation of his pictures. He works very hard to exclude people, cars, and even trees in his shots. “People sometimes get appalled when I explain this,” Melman said. “And I like trees just fine; I just don’t want them in my pictures. I like the pure geometry of land, buildings, and sky, and the trees just confuse everything.”

    From the late ’80s through the ’90s, Melman (who does not own a car, and often travels by Greyhound bus) took photos all over the state. Most were nocturnes, or images captured at first light, for a project that eventually became his book The Quiet Hours, published in 2003. Then, at the suggestion of his editor at the University of Minnesota Press, Melman started poking around on the Iron Range. In 2006, he received a State Arts Board Initiative grant for a project there, and made twelve trips north that year.

    The culture of the Iron Range turned out to be a perfect fit for a guy who is fond of saying that he’d like to turn back the clock to the 1950s. “I see so much stuff—the strip malls, the condos, the crap along the freeways—and I’m always wondering, ‘Is this the future?’ ” he said recently. “Because if it is, I’m leaving. I don’t know what people are thinking. You have to wade through more and more trash to get to the good stuff.”

    Melman’s version of “the good stuff” is in ample evidence in his photographs from the Range. “They’ve got a different light up there,” he said. “It’s super clear. The legendary vastness of this country is all right there, and the scale of the mining operations is just stunning. The whole culture, there’s so much beauty. Towns come and go; they live and die by the mines, but the people try like hell to stay up there. You ask these old miners what they’re going to do when they retire and they want to stay right there, maybe get a cabin, and hunt and fish. They’ve had these incredible hard times, but there’s still this preserved way of doing things. I guess I’m always surprised when anything from the old days is still intact. It’s like a miracle to me.”

    Be sure to view the slideshow in the left column. 

  • “Open-Source Christianity”

    The place was mostly filled up by five o’clock, with solemn-eyed hipsters, middle-schoolers, and graying seniors seated on a motley assortment of older sofas arranged in rings. Wine bottles and plump bread loaves sat on scattered coffee tables, which, along with antique rugs and lamps, contributed to the overall feel of a living room (albeit a sizable one). A man with slicked-back salt-and-pepper hair half-shouted greetings to a gangly youngster. Chatting the boy up, he intoned, “What can I conquer next, now that I have this human interaction thing down?” The boy held out his fist as if gallantly challenging his master to a duel. “Rock, paper, scissors.”

    As stragglers trickled in, the band started. The salt-and-pepper man gave a bold vocal accompaniment to the guitarist’s heady vibrato: “The thinnest spots of you … gradually wear through. The circumstance of something true … touches both the old and new.” Others watched the words projected on screens or watched each other hesitantly following along. Afterward, one of the band members chuckled, “That’s what a new song feels like around here: a little like a train wreck.”

    The whole setup might seem awkward as church services go, but that is precisely what the congregation of Solomon’s Porch intends. Booklets handed out to newcomers affirm that the seating in-the-round is meant “to help us engage with one another during the music, prayer, and discussion … give it a chance for a while and see how it grows on you.”

    Some few hundred people are doing just that, attending this self-described “holistic, missional Christian community” and attempting to “live the dreams and love of God in the way of Jesus.”

    Standing well over six feet, Doug Pagitt is the hulking, winsome frontman of Solomon’s Porch, whose stately stone edifice and vaulted sanctuary once served Methodists, before it went up for rent on Craigslist. “We want to participate in what God’s doing in the world. We don’t have everything figured out,” Pagitt didn’t hesistate to admit, with a surprisingly elfin grin. Pagitt became a Christian at sixteen, but had no religious background before that. “I’d never been to church. I didn’t know anything—it was all new,” he said later. Pagitt and some of his teenage pals developed an experimental approach, living out a relational kind of “open-source Christianity,” as he calls it. Sixteen years later, in 1999, he and a group of friends and acquaintances fashioned a church model patterned after his experiences. “We believe in ‘life agreement,’ ” he said during an interview. “We really don’t do ‘doctrinal agreement.’”

    Pagitt uses humor, friendly ribbing, and probably even his blue jeans to fuel the casual-authentic environment of Solomon’s Porch. He believes spiritual life flourishes in community; even sermons are shaped by several volunteers every Tuesday. During a recent service, Pagitt explained the process with sweeping gestures. “We collectively create the sermon,” he told worshippers. “It’s not a one-man or one-woman operation. It’s a holistic gathering of thoughts.” On this particular Sunday, Pagitt was serving as the “chief collaborator.” He sat down on the lone stool encircled by all the sofas and asked one family to introduce their baby. The new congregant first had to be located, turning up in a friend’s arms across the room. “Wait, Amy’s not the mother!” Pagitt laughed, his voice booming easily without the use of a microphone. “And by the way, I’m not the father.”

    As he initiated the Bible discussion portion of the service, Pagitt began swiveling on his stool—slowly at first, but then quickly, as though paddling in a pitching canoe. “We always think of the word Jesus with the word Christ,” he pointed out as he crossed his legs, swiveled, and shifted in one seamless motion. “Jesus and Christ go together like peanut butter and jelly. It’s a good ‘last name’ … the quintessential swear word.” Cross, swivel, shift. A young couple in the inner ring smiled, scratching notes to each other on their booklets. “The Jews had the story of Jesus make sense to the Gentiles,” Pagitt quipped at one point. His talk was sprinkled with pop culture references: Journeyman, ZEN MP3 players, Back to the Future, LOST. (Jesus’s parables could have seemed dull in comparison.) Pagitt eventually paused and his stool came to rest. “Questions? Thoughts? Better interpretations?” The baby started crying. “There is no singular right way of thinking,” he reiterated.

    After an appropriately contemplative silence, one guy piped up. “It’s fascinating what’s different between the Jews and Gentiles, and what’s the same.” Pagitt ran with the comment like an eager college professor as a few kids scampered around the room. Later, a young man introduced Communion, proclaiming it “a political act that liberates us.” Congregants began mingling, breaking bread, and pouring wine for each other. Eventually Pagitt’s booming voice returned, asking everybody to gather for one last communal response. As people grabbed hands and circled up once more to chant verses from Jude, it seemed as though the joyous Whos of Who-ville had relocated to South Minneapolis. The only thing missing was the giant Christmas tree—and any traditionalist-minded Grinches to pooh-pooh the scene.

  • A Taste of Springs to Come

    During a recent visit to the research and development laboratory at Dairy Queen’s international headquarters, a row of soft-serve ice cream machines stood disconcertingly silent. The waffle irons and the commercial-grade mixers were unplugged, and no syrups or candies were being tested in the refractometer, the colorometer, or the texturometer. A lone bottle of coffee flavoring—and the red DQ logos embroidered on the lab coats of the men and women who moved through the premises— provided the only hints that the pristine stainless steel counters had seen the birth of such concoctions as the Brownie Earthquake Sundae and the Yule Flip Peppermint Chip Blizzard.

    While the Dairy Queens on Lake Street and Snelling Avenue may shutter their windows for the winter months, International Dairy Queen does not sleep. These days, most Dairy Queen locations operate year-round, and the company’s South Minneapolis base is home to an R&D operation that, looking well beyond the coming summer, is currently developing menu items slated for rollout in 2010.

    International Dairy Queen’s world headquarters are tucked away in a nondescript beige edifice off Highway 100. Upon my arrival, I was treated to a Dilly Bar before being escorted to the office of R&D director Bill Barrier. Amid bookshelves where The Six Sigma Way and The Leader’s Voice shared space with Modern Food Microbiology and The Handbook of Fruits and Fruit Processing, Barrier and his colleagues, Mary Joyce, director of product innovation, explained DQ’s perpetual quest for new menu items.

    A search for the new might seem a misplaced priority for a company that for decades built its brand on such traditional fare as ice cream cones and hot dogs, but Barrier and his staff emphasized the need to be mindful of consumers’ shifting tastes. “We’ll always have the basic cone on our menu,” marketing specialist Aric Nissen told me later, “but tastes change. Preferences change. We want to give our customers what they want, sometimes before they know they want it.” Barrier described a process in which market research reveals broad areas of customer interest that in turn dictate the general priorities of the R&D team. How general? Talking with Barrier, Joyce, and Nissen, I heard several references to consumer interest in the area of “health and wellness”—though Nissen was quick to clarify that “we’re not claiming to sell healthy products.” Indications that consumers might be interested in sweet snacks with vaguely healthy associations inspired, for example, the development of a pomegranate-and-berries smoothie (antioxidants!) for the DQ-owned Orange Julius chain—as well as experiments with granola-crunch Blizzards (the lab developed a delicious product, said Nissen, but franchisees have been “a little skittish” about cereal-based menu items since a misadventure with Rice Krispies). In its darker varieties, even chocolate can be considered healthy: more antioxidants! (Chocolate was featured in another Blizzard invention that didn’t fly with franchisees, since it also involved significant quantities of cayenne pepper.)

    With a chain that has spread across multiple continents, there are local tastes to consider as well: At least one product available in DQ’s several hundred East Asian locations is not yet for sale in the United States. With respect to green-tea Blizzards, said Barrier, American consumers are just “not there yet.”

    Even in cases where consumer demand is crystal-clear, DQ R&D faces formidable technical challenges. “Inclusions” (items mixed with DQ’s signature soft-serve ice cream) must last at least four months without losing color or flavor, and also must be able to survive the violent Blizzardization process without losing their identity. Barrier and Joyce have been stymied by a certain cookie whose brand name they could not reveal but which for years has been the elusive holy grail of Blizzard development. “People always say they would love to see this cookie made into a Blizzard, but it’s too delicate,” said Joyce, shaking her head. “When you break it up, it just turns into crumbs.”
    As a trusted name in frozen treats, DQ can take risks with its cold confections—Joyce offered the example of the avant-garde Treatzza Pizza, a rousing success in the 1990s (“we took our ice cream cake and turned it inside-out”)—but it needs to tread more cautiously with its entrée offerings. “We’re still establishing our food credentials” outside of ice cream, said Joyce, although she noted that DQ is currently “pushing the salad envelope.”

    Barrier, Joyce, and Nissen were mum about future developments, but they pointed me to the nearby Normandale Boulevard location for a cutting-edge DQ experience—for example, it’s one of the first to serve new panini-like grilled sandwiches. The restaurant is also used for franchisee training, and my waffle-bowl sundae was delivered by a wildly enthusiastic man. “That looks delicious!” he boomed as he set it down. It was.

  • Suffer the Children

    The holiday spirit had barely dissipated last month when close to one-hundred-fifty people took to the streets to protest budget cuts for early childhood education. One protester was apparently so distressed by the lack of resources that she wailed and threw herself on her knees. Others tried to help her up, but she let her body go limp like an obstinate child. She was, in fact, four years old.

    All told, about two-thirds of the marchers had yet to see the inside of a kindergarten classroom. Clad in orange and sporting “Early Start” and “Strong Finish” signs on their chests and backs, respectively, the preschoolers, along with numerous chaperones, paraded down Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis, the youngest riding in carts pulled by teachers, parents, and volunteers from the YWCA Children’s Center at 12th and Nicollet.

    Despite the goal that adults professed for the protest, the children seemed more concerned with peace. Many of them wore white satin headbands with that word spelled out in glitter and (except for the aforementioned activist) chanted, “We want peace. We want peace” as they skipped and jumped.

    “It’s really more about promoting civic engagement,” admitted Ellen Cleary, a YWCA development specialist, by way of explaining the confusion. When a reporter tried to get a straight answer from various marchers, they responded with the usual indignation, suspicion, and evasiveness, as if they had spied an infiltrator in their midst. One girl impudently thrust out her sign and contorted her sweet little face into a derisive “What—are you stupid?” expression. Another coyly smiled and looked down at her frosty feet, as if to suggest that she was marching for the right to winter boots. A three-year-old boy let out a shriek, buried his face in a nearby shoulder, and refused to answer. After the march, when questioned, four-year-old Nora ran and hid under a table.

    Protected by her gray laminate canopy, she was a little more forthcoming about what she was marching for. “Peace,” she said. And what is peace? Nora giggled and ran for cover again, this time into the arms of a YWCA volunteer. “Do you want to tell?” asked the volunteer. “No!” Nora insisted, and wriggled free of one more interrogator.

    The action on Nicollet Mall, organized by the YWCA of Minneapolis in honor of Early Childhood Education Awareness Month, was one of four protests (each near one of the nonprofit’s locations) to publicize five years’ worth of budget cuts for state childcare subsidies. According to the YWCA, with fewer low-income families qualifying for subsidies and facing higher co-payments, many low-income children are now deprived of early childhood education and some childcare centers have had to close.

    Becky Roloff, CEO of the YWCA of Minneapolis, attempted to kick off the downtown event with a brief statement. With several news cameras trained on her, she fought to be heard over the roar of restless children. “We are marching to tell everybody how important it is that all of you go to school and get an education like I got an education,” Roloff explained to her young audience. “We are doing this so that we can give you a good start, so that you can do well in school, and for the rest of your lives.”

    Without a microphone, however, Roloff’s message was no match for the din of a hundred youngsters ready to take it to the streets. The cameramen asked her to do another take—but not before Sarah Warren, an eager protest organizer with a drum, took a wrong cue. She began rallying the children to shout, “Early start, strong finish!”

    Though Roloff attempted to give the media what they wanted, revved-up children have a way of getting their way. There was nothing to do but lead the kiddie caravan out of the YWCA and into the cold.

    “What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!” Thus began the mixed-message march as the group set off on its three-block trek down the Mall.

    Two blocks along, one mother, clearly accustomed to more aggressive demonstrations, spotted an approaching police car; she froze on the spot, as if bracing herself for the tear gas. The nearby nippers continued, oblivious to the threat.

    “We want peace. Hands are not for hitting,” they sang. Girls twirled. Boys jumped. Energy soared. And one lonely tear welled up in a reporter’s eye, while other passersby, in classic Minnesota fashion, seemed entirely oblivious to the spectacle.

  • Xbox and Body Bags

    I opened the door to hear, “Stop! Don’t come in! I’m jacking off!” My roommate was leaving to go back to the States in thirty minutes, but apparently he felt the need to do it one last time before he left. And there he was, wearing nothing but a University of South Carolina Gamecocks hat, rolled onto his stomach in pure terror that I had caught him.

    “You’ve got five minutes!” I said.

    I shut the door and returned to the command post, where the business of war was conducted. Our priorities for running combat operations in the Middle East were as follows:

    1. “Madden 2007” on Xbox. (We had a fantasy league going.)

    2. Eating/sleeping. Basic stuff in order to survive.

    3. Combat patrols.

    My roommate came in ten minutes later with a grin on his face.

    “You’re going to be in the States with your girlfriend in twelve hours. You couldn’t wait?”

    “It doesn’t matter, I couldn’t finish.”

    “What do you mean you couldn’t finish?”

    “You ruined the aura, sir.”

    “What aura? You were watching porn and jerking off. I don’t think there was anything spiritual in your hands at that moment. By the way, I hope you don’t mind, I told everyone.” I put down the Xbox controller and headed for the door.

    “Sergeant Thomas?” said one of the soldiers. “Why were you only wearing a South Carolina hat?”

    Two months into our deployment, the days were already running together. I had yet to experience the “war” that everyone kept telling me about. I was bored. That was about to change.

    Later that day, the troops were preparing their trucks, and their platoon leader, a friend of mine, approached the commander.

    “Is there a task and purpose for tonight?”

    “You could go check to see if they opened the road again.”

    “Can I leave a team behind to hit them if they try?”

    “As long as the rest of your guys are nearby to help them if they need it.”

    “Done.”

    There was a road out there, a road that we’d tried to close many times before, but the barricades could always be moved with enough determination and the right equipment. The Iraqis had both.

    With that, the plan was set and the men loaded their trucks.
    The rest of us sat down to watch The Grudge. I like horror films (and Sarah Michelle Gellar), and was looking forward to having the shit scared out of me.

    But before the movie got going, the radio blared: “… I can’t … we got hit … I can’t get to the truck … it’s on fire, rounds are cooking off at us and I think there are two guys still inside!”

    The moments immediately after that are hard to recall. I don’t remember putting on my equipment. I don’t remember whose truck the commander and I commandeered to get us there. But I do remember hearing the words “anti-tank mine” and “pressure wire.” I remember screaming down a dirt road, wondering if we were going to be next. I remember seeing the truck in the distance, on fire, helpless. I remember the faces of some of the Iraqi police who helped me move pieces of the truck in which my friends were trapped. I remember working all night. I put two young men into body bags.

    Three earlier trucks had missed the mine by five inches. Five inches was the distance between life and death. (I’ve since learned you can shave it even closer.) That night, and that arithmetic, would forever change the way I look at what I do. No matter what I do.

  • Discounting the Value of Work

    Every month or two a Costco coupon book arrives in the mail. Unlike the usual crap in most direct mail envelopes, the Costco book contains at least twenty coupons for stuff we actually use at our house: shampoo, Kleenex, garbage bags, dishwashing liquid. I usually look forward to my semi-monthly Costco runs, and do so even more when I’ve spent the night before tearing out a fist full of coupons.

    I like to go on Sunday, especially when the Vikings are playing on TV. The lines are shorter and the navigation through the aisles is easier. I often combine the Costco trip with one to Home Depot next door. But it seems the lines are never long at Home Depot these days. The trickle-down effect of the real estate bust is my guess why.

    As I was checking out at Costco, stocking up on over $100 worth of stuff, the checker mentioned that I sure was using a lot of coupons. The young woman who was reloading my cart as the items came off the scanner said that I was buying a lot of stuff that she needed, too, but she couldn’t afford to use the coupons this week because she was “short.”

    The checker offered: “They’re good through next weekend, too.”

    “Next week, I’ve got to pay rent,” she replied.

    The guy in line behind me was buying a new vacuum cleaner. The cheerful checker kept up the banter: “This must be cleaning supply day,” she said to him as I was signing my credit card slip. “Yeah,” the guy said, “my cleaning lady told me I needed a new vacuum.”

    “That’s good,” said the checker. “I’m a cleaning lady too, and I hate it when the vacuum’s no good. My husband and I do it one day a week. He does the downstairs and I do the upstairs.”

    Pushing my cart toward the parking lot, I thought of the first George Bush and his amazement at the electronic bar-code scanners when he went through a grocery line during a campaign stop. Of course, at the time this Bush had been either vice president or president for nearly twelve years and probably neither he nor Barbara had been doing their own shopping for at least that long. (And honestly, do you really want the President of the United States standing in line at the grocery store?) Nevertheless, the story was used to great effect by his rivals to show how “out of touch” Bush was with quotidian America.

    Similar charges could more honestly be leveled at Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who recently said she was proud to be from Minnesota, “where we have more people that are working longer hours, we have people that are working two jobs.” Of course, she’s probably not as proud as George Bush fils, who two years ago told a single mother of three, “You work three jobs? … Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic that you’re doing that.”

    Never the wordsmith, Bush of course has no idea that “fantastic” doesn’t really mean “great.” It means “beyond rational belief.” What is fantastic is that Bachmann is proud that someone needs a second job in order to have the money to buy discounted shampoo by the gallon. Not as fantastic perhaps as that Bachmann expressed her pride as she was endorsing the Republican-proposed “Middle Class Job Protection Act,” which has a corporate tax cut as its central strategy to protect Americans’ rights to work two or more jobs.

    It should be pretty clear by now that Americans’ ability to keep working in order to keep shopping in order to keep the terrorists at bay is stretched as thin as our military. As the New York Times noted last week, foreign companies and governments have been behind more than half of all the announced deals to purchase American companies so far this year. Our enemies don’t need to fly planes into buildings any more. They can just buy the buildings with their strong currencies. And we can start getting used to the idea that we may all be working two jobs soon, and that the new boss will likely be Asian, European, or Middle Eastern.

    I’m working on a coupon book of my own now, which I’m planning on direct-mailing to politicians who think the issues worth worrying about include who is more religious and whether gays can marry. I’m hoping just one of them will use it to walk through a checkout line and buy a clue.

  • We Go Well with Turkey and Pancakes!

    Pine City native Jake Olson picked up The Rake while visiting Minnesota over the holidays. Back in his adopted home of Adana, the bustling city that is Turkey’s fifth largest, Olson served up our magazine (and maple syrup from Mora, MN’s Sapsucker Farms) to a Turkish friend on his balcony. Apparently, that view of the Sabanci mosque was no match for our January issue.

    Jake Olson of Adana, Turkey
    Red Handed