Keeping It All In Perspective

Yesterday, while going to pick my daughter and her friend up at school, I stopped by Trader Joe's to pick up a couple of things. I parked on the street to avoid their nightmarish parking lot. When I went back to the car, I couldn't get it started. I'd had problems with it before-- I knew I needed to put a new battery in it, and the battery cables were horribly cheap, shitty ones. To make matters worse, the cable to pop the hood snapped a couple of weeks ago-- I was praying that I could wing it a couple more weeks until I could bring the car to my mechanic. Alas, my luck had run out.

Fortunately, yesterday was not too terribly cold (today is), so we walked home from school. This morning, I took Kim's car and drove Mel to school and Kim took the el to work. I went by the car and tried to start it one more time. No luck. I dropped a key off with my mechanic's guys and told them what was going on. I knew the car was going to have to be towed to be worked on.

I got a call a while ago. New battery, new cables, oil was low, new $150 hood cable, and some sundry light bulbs and electrical connections. My heart sank. We are already behind on so many bills.

I was comforted a little remembering that I'd picked an extra shift up last night from a sick co-worker, and that my friend Carol had asked me to pick up several shifts over the next couple of weeks while she vacations in California.

Then I started counting my blessings. I have two terrific teenaged kids that still seem to like to spend time with me. I've got a lovely wife whom I just celebrated a fourth anniversary with. That same wife got a job in November after five months of unemployment in a field that is not doing a lot of hiring right now. The government subsidy to COBRA extension of medical benefits was about to run out. And I keep in mind that I literally won the lottery-- that the highly-regarded (and relatively inexpensive) nursing program I got accepted into last year takes fewer than 1/3 of its applicants-- there are far more applicants than slots. They have a lottery to determine who gets in. And finally, I realize I am blessed because I love the field I'm going into and am doing well academically.

It's funny how life sometimes reminds you to keep it all in perspective. While I was doing some stuff around the house, right after getting the bad news about the car, I had the History Channel on as background noise. I realized that they had a show about the December 2004 tsunami.

I've mentioned before that my old friend Dobie has made the decision to move back to Chicago. He and I had lost touch with one another after he moved to Arizona, then Asia.

When we were in college, he and another friend, Larry, and I roomed together the summer of 1984. At some point that summer, Dobie asked a favor-- he asked if I would teach him to swim. In the South Side Chicago neighborhood he'd grown up in, the local pool was inhabited by gang members, and wasn't a safe place for a kid to be. Consequently, he'd never learned to swim.

We started going to the pool at Lantz Gym, at our college. I'd never taught anyone to swim-- I had to remember back to when I'd taken swimming lessons. Over the summer, he learned to swim.

As I mentioned, in the mid-nineties, he and I lost touch, until I tracked him down in 2005 by correctly guessing his email address, after I'd read in our college alumni newsletter that he was working as a teacher in Singapore.

Not long after we continued our friendship, via email, I discovered that he'd been on vacation in Phukat, Thailand on December 26, 2004. He'd taken up scuba diving at some point. He was scuba diving when the tsunami hit the shore at Phukat.

He told me that he hadn't felt a thing-- that one member of the diving group said he'd felt a little pressure wave, but that neither he nor any other member of the group had felt anything. When they got back to shore, they came upon a horrific scene. The least of it was that the cabana they'd geared up at was gone. There were hundreds of dead and dying people in the town. He and the others spent the day helping who they could. Dobie came upon a kid who'd been separated from his parents. He was able to repatriate the boy with his parents, who had, happily, survived.

My friend survived the worst natural disaster in history-- 230,000 people were killed-- because he knew how to swim, and he'd randomly decided to go scuba diving for that particular hour or two that day. Thanks to that little miracle, he and I have been able to renew our friendship. So instead of sweating about a few hundred dollars, I'm going to count my blessings and realize that nearly everyone who reads my blog is dealing with these things and more in their lives. As my mother says, "This too shall pass."

Johnny Yen's One Hit Wonders: "Midnight At The Oasis," by Maria Muldaur

Maria Muldaur (born Maria Grazia Rosa Domenica D'Amato) was born and raised in Greenwich Village and became part of the same fertile and diverse New York folkie scene that launched Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Peter Paul and Mary, Buffy Ste. Marie, Jose Feliciano, Richie Havens, John Sebastian and many other folkies. She married fellow musician Geoff Muldaur, whom she met while performing in the 1960's with Jim Kweskin & His Jug Band, which also included John Sebastian, David Grisman and Stefan Grossman.

In 1972, Maria and Geoff Muldaur parted ways personally and professionally, and Maria, keeping her married name, embarked on a solo career, moving with her young daughter to the west coast to do so. She hit a home run at her first at-bat, with a single from her first, self-titled album. "Midnight At the Oasis" went to #6 on the Billboard charts in 1974.

Here's a performance on the popular "Midnight Special" show from around the time it was a hit.

Maria Muldaur - Midnight At The Oasis
Uploaded by newcanadian. - See the latest featured music videos.

In this video, Ms. Muldaur tells her story and the story of how the song came to be. It was a last-minute addition to her first solo album, written by her guitarist, David Nichtern. The song's lyrics tell of a desert love affair, presumably in the Middle East. It contains one of the silliest lyrics ever:

"Come on, Cactus is our friend
He'll point out the way
Come on, 'til the evenin' ends
'Til the evenin' ends"

On top of that, as many have pointed out, cacti are native to North and South America, not the Middle East.



In her interview, Ms. Muldaur recounts the many, many people who have told her that they conceived their children, lost their virginity to, or got married to the song.

Ms. Muldaur has continued to record and perform, sometimes with the Grateful Dead and their spin-offs. "Midnight At The Oasis" remains her only charting hit. In 2005, she won both a W.C. Handy Award and a Grammy in the Traditional Blues Category for her album "Sweet Lovin' Ol' Soul."

"Midnight At The Oasis" was immortalized in pop culture one more time in Sophia Coppola's "Lost In Translation," in the scene where the lounge singer who has spent the night with Bill Murray sings it as she walks around his hotel room.

Neighborhood Mysteries

I moved to the North Center neighborhood in Chicago in 1986, after rooming with a couple of guys in the far-north Roger Park neighborhood for a few months. With short breaks living in Edgewater, Lakeview, Roscoe Village, Logan Square, Avondale and Albany Park (where I'd also lived as a kid), I've lived most of the last 24 years in this neighborhood.

I've lived in the apartment I live in now for over 11 years. I moved in here with my now-ex-wife Cynthia. Like most couples, we had a lot of in-jokes. One of the big ones revolved around "neighborhood mysteries." Some examples: Why is the Sunnyside Tap, an "old man" bar near here, on Western Avenue and not Sunnyside, a block away? Why was Pilsen Auto Glass in North Center, and not in Pilsen, a neighborhood on the south side? Why was the tacqueria around the corner from our house always grilling up enormous mounds of meat, yet there were never more than a couple of people in the joint?

About ten years ago, another "neighborhood mystery" got added to the list when Cynthia and I took my son to the Illinois Rail Museum in Union, Illinois, near Elgin, Illinois. The museum is an amazing place. Not only does it have an amazing collection of rail trains, street cars, buses and trolleys, it actually operates some of them on days the museum is open, including one of the fabled "Zephyr" trains (the Nebraska Zephyr). For the price of admission, you can ride any of them all day long. It's operated by retired rail employees, including uniformed conductors on the trains.

While riding an old street car, I noticed a vintage advertising poster in the street car. The poster advertised the "Old Settler's Picnic" in Harm's Park in 1939-- at Western and Berteau. It picqued my curiousity-- there is no park at that corner, which is a block from my home.

Over the years, I would check the internet, with no luck, for Harm's Park. I began to wonder if it had been a fictional park, made up for a poster on the trolley. A few weeks ago, I hit paydirt. On a website called Forgotten Chicago, I found information on it.

Harms Park was a private park founded in 1893 by Henry Harms, who was responsible for many things, including building Lincoln Avenue (a major artery on the north side of Chicago), founded Niles Center (now Skokie) and worked as a farmer, a building contractor, postmaster, highway commissioner and other positions.

Henry Harms died in 1914, but his park continued, hosting the Old Settlers Picnic until the park closed in 1946. The Old Settlers Picnic was a celebration of Chicago's oldest citizens.




In the 1930's, a public housing project was proposed. Area residents petitioned against this, and it never came to pass. Finally, in 1946, Harms Park was razed to put up a car dealership and a subdivision with 29 houses. Ironically, I have been walking right by the subdivision every day on the way to work for ten years.

Looking back, I realize that there were clues about this mystery. One of the big ones is that the Colonial-style houses where the old park was are completely different from the rest of the buildings in the area, most of which were built between 1900 and 1920. Another is that the street was made into a cul-de-sac-- there are few cul-de-sacs in the city. Also, there are no alleys, a ubiquitous feature of most Chicago neighborhoods.









The auto dealership exchanged hands a few years ago-- it was known for decades as "Jack Hagerty Auto." It was one of many, many auto dealerships* on the entire 25+ mile length of Chicago's Western Avenue.



Besides a handful of crimes, unusual in this peaceful neighborhood-- the murder of two bar owners in the last year and a half that were apparently not motivated by robbery, and a Halloween hit and run that left a bartender dead-- there is one last mystery yet to be solved in this neighborhood: the origin of the name of Agatite Avenue.



In 1988, Don Hayner published "Streetwise Chicago: A History of Chicago Street Names." The author documented the origins of Chicago street names. Some are quite simple-- for instance, the names of Presidents that the downtown Chicago streets bear. They go from north to south from Washington to Polk in the order that the presidents served. Others, like Pulaski and Cermak, are for historical figures (Pulaski for Kasimir Pulaski, the Polish officer who was killed at the Revolutionary War battle of Savanna and Cermak is Anton Cermak, the Chicago mayor who was slain in an attempt on FDR's life in 1933).

Others are not, according to the book, what you might think; when I first read the book, I was living on Magnolia Avenue and assumed that it was named after the tree. It was not. It was named after a ship that ran up and down the Chicago River rescuing people trapped by the Great Fire in 1871.

Other streets changed names during World War I during the anti-German hysteria that was whipped up (despite the fact that Chicago had an enormous German population). Some had rather strange stories, such as the change from Robey to Damen Avenue.

The origin of the name of Agatite Avenue, which runs east-west just a couple of blocks from my home, defies explanation, remaining a mystery. Many assume it is named after a mineral, but the mineral is "agate," not "Agatite." This is one of the few street names that the author admits not being able to explain in "Streetwise." It may remain the last unsolvable mystery of the North Center neighborhood.


*Those auto dealerships have a rich cinematic history: one that was recently razed just a few blocks away on the 3900 north of Western was featured in the "Bohemian Rhapsody" scene in "Wayne's World." Also, the auto dealership James Caan's character owned in Michael Mann's terrific 1981 movie "Thief" also on Western Avenue.

And You Say You Left Your Laptop Behind?

In keeping with my threat promise to post more often, I've realized that not every post has to be about a life-changing event or my take on current events. Indeed, I've realized that sometimes my everyday life and work have enough absurdity to fill a blog.

When I made the decision to go back to school and get a degree in the health care field so that I had a fighting chance to be able to afford to pay for my kids' college and eventually retire comfortably, there was one big decision to make: what to do for a living while I was back in school. While I was a teacher, I'd kept a part-time job as a waiter. The extra money was a godsend, especially after I had to kick a thieving roommate out, and suddenly had to pay the rent and bills on a three bedroom apartment on my own. Since my ex-girlfriend kept moving with our son from one apartment to another in the bad neighborhood she lived in, it was important to me to keep this place; my son had come to think of it as home. We moved in here when he was four years old.

When Kim and I got married, it took some of the financial pressure off. I kept my toe in the waitering water, though-- I kept my Thursday night shift, and would pick up a shift here and there. When I went back to school I made the decision to work as a waiter while I was in school. A good friend of Kim's got me an interview at a high end downtown Chicago. I got the job, but immediately sensed trouble. There was a lot of nonsense going on there and hostile management. I ended up losing the job. Fortunately, something had told me to keep my old waitering job. As luck would have it, two people were leaving, and a bunch of shifts were opening up. This did not happen often-- the turnover at the restaurant was and is glacial. In general, it's a nice place to work. I like most of my co-workers and most of the people who come in there. A couple of the cooks are monuments to lassitude, obstinance and stupidity and should have been fired long ago. Were it not for the intense sense of loyalty that the managing owner has-- the offending cooks worked there at the beginning when there was little business-- they would have been drummed out a long time ago.

The vast majority of the people who come in are very nice. A while back, Steve and Margaret, a couple whom I'm very fond of, came in with their young son Richard. They were celebrating the tenth anniversary of when they brought him home-- when they adopted him. They reminded me that I had waited on them the first time they'd brought him into the restaurant. It meant a lot to me to be involved in a celebration as joyous as that. There are customers who come in with their kids whom I remember them being pregnant with-- the kids are now in grade school, and can read the menu on their own. There are couples who first came in as dating couples and who are now married. One of my regulars celebrated his 100th birthday with us a while back.

But there are the handful of people who make me question my decision to work as a full time waiter for another year and a half. Many of these people have nicknames among my co-workers and I. Some examples: "Stinkhead;" "The Fonz (who's a woman);" "The Leaning Tower;" "Christmas With the Crabs." There are people who come in who, despite clearly defined terms on the generous coupons the owners mail and email out, still try to weasel the price down. There are people who feel as if a couple of hours in a restaurant is a license to be an asshole. And then there are those who are incorrigibly and hopelessly stupid.

A couple of weeks ago, I was working a Monday with Oscar, a co-worker I hold in high regard. When he came to us seven years ago, as a teenager straight from Mexico, he spoke little English and worked as a dishwasher and busser. Since then, he has learned to speak fluent English and has worked his way up through the jobs, and now works primarily as a server and bartender. He had the early shift that night, so he had a handful of tables when I arrived.

A few hours into the shift, we got a phone call from someone who'd apparently been in earlier. He'd left his laptop behind. The host and bartender talked to him trying to ascertain where he'd been sitting and/or who his server had been, to narrow down where we'd look for it. Then both Oscar and I talked to him, trying to figure out if we'd waited on him. In the course of talking to the guy, we realized that he had no idea where he'd been sitting and had no idea if his server was a 25 year, five foot seven, 150 pound Mexican or a nearly-fifty year old white guy who weighs 200 pounds. The bartender told the guy, who was becoming increasingly angry as we failed to find his laptop, to feel free to come in and look for himself-- we'd checked everywhere he described himself as having sat.

About fifteen minutes later, a guy walked in. I recognized him immediately-- he was with the Asian woman he'd been sitting with at table 16-- a table near the back, not the front of the restaurant. Oscar had been waiting on him. There was a new couple sitting at the table, which is a "deuce"-- a two-seater. The bag was jammed so far under the table that we were only able to see it when the couple who were now seated there stood up for us too look.

The guy grabbed his laptop bag and walked out in a huff, leaving the four of us to chuckle and shake our heads. Let's see, you couldn't tell us where you were seated, couldn't describe which of the two very disparate servers you had, AND you left your expensive laptop behind. And this was our fault somehow?

I pointed out that the guy reminded me of the guys I'd met while visiting my youngest brother while he was working in his PhD in Chemistry at the University of Chicago in the late eighties-- guys who were educated to the point of not functioning any more. Oscar observed that the guy seemed to be in an agitated mood when he had originally walked in-- that it struck him that they might have been squabbling before they walked in. The John the host added that this was going to be one of the "restaurant stories" that we would tell in the future. And I realized that it's going to be a long next 18 months until I finish nursing school and can leave the business.

A New Year's Resolution

Happy New Year's to all of you. My only resolution this year is to post more often!

Book Recommendation: "Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman"

In 2002, I read Jon Krakauer's excellent book "Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster." It's a fascinating book: Krakauer originally set out to go to Everest to gather information for a magazine article about the commercialization of the mountain-- that people who had no business climbing a mountain, let alone the world's tallest mountain, were being led to the summit by profiteering mountain guides, and that this was causing the accomplishment to lose it's luster, let alone endangering people. Nature, as if to punctuate Krakauer's point, blew in an unexpected storm, resulting in the deaths of a bunch of climbers. It was one of a small handful of books I've read in the last ten years or so that I seriously could not put down until I finished.

With "Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman," he's done it again. I'd wanted to read the book since I read the first reviews. This Christmas, my lovely wife got me a Kindle, and the first book I downloaded was this one.

Most of you are probably familiar with Pat Tillman. He was a player on the Arizona Cardinals who walked away from a multimillion dollar contract to join the elite Army Rangers after 9/11. He was killed in Afghanistan in 2004. At first it was reported that he'd died at the hands of the Taliban. Within a few months it was revealed that he had been, along with an Afghan soldier helping his platoon out, killed by fire from his own squad.

I think many people, like I, thought that Tillman was a patriotic jock-- well-intentioned, but not intellectually complex. As Krakauer makes clear, this was farthest from the case. Tillman was a bright, curious, well-read man. In fact, from boot camp on, he began to have doubts about his mission-- particularly when he was diverted from Afghanistan right out of boot camp to go to Iraq.

Krakauer had, fortunately, access to Tillman's journal and many letters to his wife and friends. They reveal a guy went into the war with noble motives, but feared that the Bush administration, which he held in contempt, would use him for propaganda purposes. Tillman is revealed as a highly principled guy-- to a fault. He rejected an opportunity to leave the service and return to football, even after he'd become disenchanted with both wars.

Krakauer charts Tillman's intellectual development-- he began reading Noam Chomsky, and in fact was trying to arrange to meet Chomsky, who was friends with a college friend of his. He believed the war in Iraq to be not only unnecessary, but illegal and working counter to United States interests.

In the course of the story, Krakauer points to two incidents that occurred at the beginning of the Iraq war-- the stage-managed rescue of Private Jessica Lynch and a bad fratricide ("friendly fire") in Nasiriyah, the same town Lynch had been captured in, in which 17 US soldiers were killed. Tillman was peripherally involved in the rescue, but Krakauer points to the real significance: a Bush White House functionary named Jim Wilkinson, who'd been the brainchild behind a lot of the dirty tricks Bush' team had pulled (including their hatchet job on Republican primary opponent John McCain in 2000 and promoting the myth that Al Gore had claimed to have invented the internet). Wilkinson was, as Krakauer pointed out, Bush' primary "perception manager." He was stationed in the U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar, and was responsible for the false stories that Lynch, who had not fired a single shot (or had been shot for that matter-- her injuries were from when her vehicle ran into the vehicle in front of her in the convoy) had fought doggedly until she was captured. The story was propagated in order to hide the fact that the war was already off to a bad start-- that the US troops were not, as the Bush administration flunkies had claimed would happen, being welcomed as liberators.

In the end, it's also clear that the Lynch story was created to draw attention from the diasasterous incident at Nasiriyah.

Later, these same people would try to hide the facts behind Tillman's death, and use him as a poster boy for the two wars.

The coverup of the true circumstances began immediately upon his death, and without a doubt included Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld and other higher-ups. It also began unravelling immediately. Tillman's clothes and body armor-- and a notebook diary he'd been keeping in Iraq and Afghanistan-- were taken away and destroyed. The pathologists at the Dover forensics facility were so suspicious at the missing evidence that they refused to sign off on his autopsy.

Krakauer makes no bones about what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan-- that Afghanistan was always a sideshow for the Bush administration from the beginning-- that the invasion of Iraq was being planned even before 9/11. He also points out that the United States wasted valuable time and resources in Iraq and allowed the Taliban to regroup and gain while they got bogged down in a pointless war that had nothing to do with our national interests. He points out that Tillman questioned everything in his life, including his participation in both wars. Krakauer quotes Nazi Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring:

Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter Germany. That is understood. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether its a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country.

When I and many others questioned the war in Iraq, we got shouted down as "unpatriotic." After reading "Where Men Win Glory," my guess is that Tillman, a guy given to reading things like Plato's "Republic" in his free time, would, were he still alive, be the first to point out that it's a patriot's duty to question his government and leaders. I highly recommend this book.

Merry Christmas From the Casa De Yen!

Usually this time of year, a lot of the bloggers post one of my favorite dystopian Christmas songs, "Fairytale of New York," by the Pogues and the late Kirsty MacColl. I thought I'd post another of my favorite woeful Christmas tales, Cracker's "Merry Christmas, Emily." It's about a rocker who's reminiscing about a booze-soaked dysfunctional relationship with a "poor little rich girl." Though the song is set in Tuscon, Arizona, the video was shot in Germany. Those zany Cracker guys!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Remembering Joe

Almost exactly 30 years ago, I began hearing the Clash' "London Calling" album on WXRT, the local "prog rock" station. They rotated the title track, "Train In Vain," "Lost In the Supermarket," and a few other tracks into their mix. I was hooked for life.

Over time, different tracks would grow on me and become, for a while, my favorite-- "Hateful," their song about drug addiction, "Spanish Bombs," about the Spanish Civil War, "Death or Glory," "The Card Cheat," even their song about the ill-fated actor Montgomery Clift, "The Right Profile."

Eventually I started exploring their earlier stuff, just as they were branching out with the Sandinista! album-- the album was a crazy hodge-podge, where the group explored all kinds of genres-- I was checking out their earlier material. You could see the maturation in their political thinking. And then the impossible happened-- with Combat Rock, they had a top ten album and a couple of huge hits ("Rock The Casbah" and "Should I Stay Or Should I Go"). The fact that my favorite band had hit it big sank in to me the summer of 1983 when I took a cross country Greyhound bus trip to see my parents, who were living in San Jose, Calfornia at the time. We had a layover in San Antonio, Texas. I left the bus station to walk around downtown San Antonio and came across a group of teenagers hanging out near a car, the Combat Rock album blasting.

And then suddenly it was all over. Personality conflicts split the band up. Mick Jones had some big hits with Big Audio Dynamite, but Strummer lay low. Then, he formed the Mescaleroes and began touring. He and Jones reconciled and even did some work together.

In the 2000 documentary "The Clash: Westway To The World," Strummer expressed regrets that stupid personality conflicts wrecked the band. He realized, in retrospect, that something magical and important had gone on.

In the summer of 2002, my friend Viktor Zeitgeist was at a festival in Northern California, enjoying X, the Blasters-- and Joe Strummer and the Mescaleroes, among other bands. After the Mescaleroes' set, Viktor came across Strummer hanging out with some fans, drinking a beer and chatting with them. He bought Strummer a beer and joined him. Viktor told Strummer about this friend of his in Chicago who had "kept the faith--" that his friend taught kids in the ghetto and still fought the good fight. He bought a Mescaleroes poster and asked Strummer to sign it for him.

He was talking about me. When he gave me the poster a few weeks later and told me the circumstances, I was really moved that one of my heroes thought that what I had done was heroic.

Just a few months later, on December 22, 2002, I got the news that Strummer had died of an undiagnosed heart ailment. He was only 50 years old. I was grief-stricken, particularly since another of my heroes, Joey Ramone, had died only a year before.

I try to keep a little of Strummer alive in my heart. I try to keep fighting the good fight. I keep trying to help people. I remember a review of a Clash album in the early eighties. The review said something to the effect that while the album was not going to cause the revolution, it would be a damned good soundtrack to the revolution. I'm glad for what Strummer and the others did. When it seemed like a tide of cynicism, self-interest and apathy was sweeping the United States, it heartened me to know that others were seeing the state of things the way I was. Strummer's music gave my tribe a voice and still does. I miss Joe Strummer, and guess I always will.

My favorite Clash album is still "London Calling," but over the years my favorite Clash song has come to be one from their self-titled first album: "White Man In Hammersmith Palais." I've included a live clip of the Clash doing that song.