Notes From Michigan

Soooo... missives from vacation tend to be... lethargic, laconic and lots of other things meaning to express to a general lack of....doing-ness. I have been parked up in beautiful Arcadia Michigan at the Becker summer compound. Two kids, one wife, two dogs and a variety of house guests throughout the week. There is always the illusion that there will be some contemplative time and the fact is that it is just an illusion... and that it might be an out and out lie.

The first two days were filled once again with Arcadia Daze. Fior those of you unfamiliar it is a two day event in Arcadia Michigan including a craft show, a parade and two nights of drinking in the city park which is fenced off with snow fence. "Drink in a pen with your friends". It does not get any better. $2.50 for a can of beer. A DJ playing in the pavilion and every manor of poor, fat, northern Michigan white trash. It cannot be under estimated the poor quality of people who generally attend. Many of them are my friends. Because there is Camp Arcadia up here the Daze tends to be a reunion event and there will be 50 or more camp people wandering around the pen. It is not as fun as it was formerly because now we have a house and most of the people come and drink there before, and sometimes after, the Daze. Mixed blessings.

On Saturday night we cooked out with Pastor and Mrs. Tiemann. They drove in from Rochester New York just for the weekend to cut their lawn and putz around in their garden and check on their house. There are some medical issues at home which are keeping them away this summer but they are parents of one of my best friends and are just some really fine people. We cooked bratwurst. t\They were happy. Me too. There is something about an old Lutheran Pastor. A certain obstinance and crustiness if they have been allowed longevity. And this one married above his station in life. Good company and I like having my kids get to know them. Truly a different era.

It is great seeing all these people and it is also great when.... they leave. The camp runs family weeks all summer long which means people arrive on Saturday and stay to the next Saturday. We sit in our little house three blocks away in town and watch the people come and go and some are nice enough to stop by. there is always a St. Louis contingent and this year we had the Buemers, the Bergmans and their extended families in camp and also the Rozkem clan from Chicago. They came over and we drank while we watched my son and his friends move the beer they are brewing in our kitchen to "secondary fermentation". It tasted good.

The rest of the week has been spent swimming, laying around, touching base with work, walking around, driving around and generally, chilling. Chilling is good. The Dean at Camp this week is Scott Bruzek and he is talking about Justice and Mercy as a Christian. being a lawyer they are interesting discussions as it seems like all anyone ever tells me is about how they want "justice". It is interesting as a Christian to contemplate whether they are the same thing, or two sides of the same coin, or whether they run counter to one another. I am thinking that you cannot have one without the other. Anyway, that is what we do in the morning...talk about stuff like that. It makes me think outside myself though and that has to be good.

Wednesday we went to morning program and then with the Kuklas drove up to Glen Arbor and ate outside at Art's Tavern http://www.artsglenarbor.com/. Good burgers, great tater tots. Then we drove over to Traverse City and bought brian Kukla a "slack line" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacklining. then we saw "Inception". Then we had dinner with John at "The Blue Tractor"http://www.bluetractor.net/. Then we came home and went to bed sober. "Inception" was an interesting (albeit long) experience and I am still processing it. There were some really meaningful themes in it. The whole dream within a dream, world within a world thing is interesting... bit not intellectually interesting. It is interesting in a way like unicorns would be interesting (this from a man who believes someone died for his sins). I have never been a huge Di Caprio fan (at least after "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?") and this did nothing to dispel that. He can act but... so can a lot of people.

Thursday.... Thursday was a good day. Got good nights sleep Wednesday and then made the decision not to play golf. Arcadia has one of the best golf courses in the country in Arcadia Bluffs. http://www.arcadiabluffs.com/. It is an awesome course carved out of the dunes and it is way too much course for me. Soooo...I walked on the beach, took a nap, read another book, went swimming in the lake and then went and met the golfers as they were coming off the course and had a few drinks. Brilliant. I came back, we ate, we drank on the porch until late. Good day.

Friday. I cannot really remember Friday. We had a shrimp boil for dinner.

Saturday it rained. We walked the dogs. Had breakfast at The Bayside in Frankfort. A friend from DC was in and I had lunch with him at Riggers. I finished another book while the rest of the gang played gin. Don and I went and gambled at the Little River casino. I downloaded the new Joe Pug EP. We cooked some steaks. The people who were coming in the next week at camp started to come by. Matt Carlson, Kyle Dewees and his betrothed Leah Meier. The Gallos. It made me sad i was leaving. We drank a little more. I went to bed early.

I got up early Sunday morning and headed south at 6:00 A.M. planning on taking a long way home through Indy to Shapiros Deli. You just get on 31 outside of Arcadia and point your car south. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_31. Somehow while looking for directions to Shapiro's northern Indy location in carmel I didn't make the right merge and ended up on highway 20 for about 20 minutes before I even noticed it. I of course am an idiot. To get an idea why this place is worth the long detour: http://www.shapiros.com/locations.htm. I ate a huge corned beef sandwich and a potato pancake. I noshed on the road home from Indy. I was happy.

I got home to a house being repainted. 95 degree heat and listening to the Cardinals pounding the Pirates. it was a good holiday. Too busy. I did not get done any of the important things I intended like discussing my future vocation with my wife or even spending any time with my wife. We have got to be smarter about this stuff. Anyway...vacation 2010 in Michigan. BOOM! that just hap[pened.

Social Engineering, Taxation and What We Need To Try

OK....or as I like to say...sooooooo.... our country is a little bit of a mess right now. we are totally polarized between the tea party people on one side and the lefties. commies socialists or I guess Glen beck calls them "progressives" who are even to the left of our President. There are people to his left. Just like their are people to Romney's right. And everyone is angry. Our economy is in shambles with a jobless recovery that cannot drive any true growth. It is like we have forgotten how to grow an economy without another bubble like the tech bubble and the real estate bubble which drove our recent spate of high life style and over borrowing.

When I say over borrowing I mean you. Even if you were one of the careful, smart, responsible ones who did not borrow more then you could afford and who are continuing to mke payments on your houses and cars... you borrowed too much. You borrowed too much through the government who borrowed on your behalf and you benefitted from it because the economy boomed while everyone built and built and built and bought and bought and bought with all that cheap money. Now we have massive debt, a stagnant economy and even I cannot really tell you with a straight face that Barrack's policies can be doing anything but making it worse. In the best possible light the policies are preserving a stagnant status quo.

So what do we do? One answer is to let the beast die. Stop government spending. Stop consumption altogether and let the economy crash. And it will crash. All those businesses hoarding cash because they are afraid are going to really be afraid when the government stops buying. 21 million employed by the government, wait until those people get unemployed. It seems like a bad answer but that is what the tea party people are demanding. Smaller government, less services, especially for those who are not paying for them. i still do not understand where that falls in with their Christian majority but that is neither here nor there. And when your talking about creating jobs... you are going to throw a couple hundred thousand government workers into the mix when you start to cut all those budgets. be careful what you wish for.

I have another way to shock the economy. Throw the tax code in the trash. 17,036 pages. Longer then a Harry Potter book. What is in all those pages? Well I am certain there is some good stuff but mainly what is in there are tax breaks, and tax incentives encouraging certain types of behavior that Congress at one point or another found advisable. When did our country of rugged individualists and Federalists decide that Washington should incentivize businesses and individuals, through the tax code? When did they decide it was their job to incentivize us at all. I have no problem with paying taxes. I pay a lot of them. I hear a lot of small business owners bitching about their taxes but most of them I know do not pay all that much and sometimes none at all. In this economy they might not pay any because of no profits yet still they bitch. Well, lets fix that.

It does not have to be a flat tax but there is a lot to recommend the egalitarian nature of it. I know they regressive but low wage earners should pay taxes too. They enjoy the benefits and shared suffering is a unifying thing but it does not have to be that answer. It could be anything. It could be a soak the rich plan. It could be a national sales tax plan. It could be a tax the hell out of the middle class plan. Tax businesses until they break plan. the main thing and my only requirement is that it is a simple plan. Why isn't all income taxed equally? Why is capital gains income different then earned income. I earn my capital gains income by risking my money. Why should Warren Buffet not pay millions or perhaps even billions in taxes. Why should I be able to preserve wealth for my children? Dead people should be the easiest people to tax and their heirs have rarely done anything to "earn" or "deserve" the money anyway. And DO NOT tell me about how this damages and forces the break up of family farms. I know it has happened. I have never seen any evidence that it could not have been avoided with some better estate planning.

Bottom line. Abandon the tax code. Burn it. No more incentives. No more breaks. no more loop holes. No more social engineering from Washington. Tea Party People...are you with me on this?

Irish Pubs: What IS the Point?

So it seems like in almost every neighborhood in this city there is an Irish Bar, pub or Restaurant and every time I see one open up I always have this overwhelming feeling of annoyance and exhaustion. Why? Why do we need another Irish bar or pub? There have got to be at least 100 of them, probably a lot more. Now every city should have Irish bars but why are there so many of them in our town? St. Louis is not a particularly Irish city like Boston. It is a Catholic City but the German's and the Italians represent in the Catholic church at least as strong as the Irish.

I know the Irish lay a certain claim to loutish alcoholism and stupid drinking. I respect that. Although i hate St. Patrick's Day (another amateur drunk fest) I do not begrudge my Irish friends their legacy of drunkenness, bar fighting and spousal abuse. WHO would try and deny a legacy like that. But once again, why so many Irish bars. Think about it. Downtown and near downtown we have:
Tigin
Flannery's
The Dubliner
Mc Gurks
Llewelyns
O'Connells
Pats
Seamus Mc Daniels
Nicks
Maggie O"Briens
Hannegans
O'Malleys
And I am sure I have totally missed 30, piece of shit dumps with Irish names, Shamrocks and a big Guinness sign. And that is just in the city. Is there any beer more over rated then Guinness? EVER? Sure it is the color of motor oil and you feel like a man when you drink it warm but that does not make it enjoyable. It has a thick creamy head when poured from the special taps that serve it. Why? Not because of the beer but because the special tappers mix it with nitrogen. Left to itself when you pour it it looks like flat Coca Cola. But I digress.

Whenever these bars open up like Tigin recently or Molly Darcy's in the old Seven Gables Inn in Clayton, some asshole is always telling me how great their food is. Really? REALLY? Your going to tell me how great Irish cuisine is? I will never defend my German heritage's cooking but on the other hand there are only a hand full of places in town that apologetically serve German food. They know it is crap. they know they need to cover it with bad, heavy sauces so it it can even be gagged down, but no one every tries to tell you it is good. These Irish bars "have the best fish and chips". Has there ever been a bigger lie? Who knows what kind of fish most of them serve and inevitably they have the "authentic" fat fries which unless they are fresh from the deep friar taste like card board cancer. the fish and chips suck because inevitably, other then in lent, they never serve enough of it to put out consistent product. And then they want you to pay 12 bucks for it at lunch. Not that I am cheap... or bitter.... or petty.

God forbid if you order meat. Other then the afor mentioned Germans no one boils and over cooks worse cuts of meat then the Irish. They were a poor, down trodden, stupid, dirty people. they let themselves (and are still letting themselves) be oppressed by the British. The British! How embarrassing is that? Anyway, the British are crappy cooks too and they clearly did nothing to improve Irish cuisine though they probably never left enough meat on the island for it to make any difference. The fact that Seamus' miserable, yet huge hamburger appears every year on the list of best burgers in town is a testimony to the sympathy and drunkenness of St. Louis patrons.

Llewelyns has done a nice job creating a pretty stable menu of above average food but they are an exception and have become... a chain. That is testimony to their having found a decent mix of food. The others... crap. Unmitigated crap, across the board. So, I put it to you St. Louis Diner Review readers... why do we have so many of these places? What purpose do they serve? Shouldn't the drunken Irish be drinking at home where they do not have to drive and cannot fight with the decent, bar going public? Couldn't we, as a city do more with all of those kitchens that are being used and abused across the city?

I think so. I know so and I look forward to your thoughts. Think about, have a Guinness... and maybe a pickled egg.

Athletes, Film Stars, Politicians, Celebrities and Priests

"You gotta serve somebody".-Bob Dylan.

It might not be Jimmy Johnson's fault but we can... blame the hair.










What do athletes, politicians, film stars, celebrities and priests all have in common? There are a lot of people who put them up on a pedestal. They are unlike rock stars who people expect the worst from. Recently in a bar I was working with the conundrum presented by all of these groups with my genius partner. We sit, we drink and we contemplate the great issues. Occasionally we bring in outsiders. We bring them in for their outside influence. We bring them in because they sometimes pay for drinks. We bring them in because often they will tolerate out bloviating for over an hour and we are running out of people that can do that. As we run through people to assist us in our deliberations the level of the discourse has...declined.

Occasionally we convene the bar with just the two of us and we really are able to drill down on the big issues and the issue recently was WTF is wrong with our country when we are constantly disappointed in these people who we put on a pedestal? Our conclusion is that people are retarded. He and I have two different views on WHY people are retarded. My opinion relates back to a healthy interest and belief in original sin. It is a guiding principal in my life. I believe that people are fundamentally flawed and that only through God's Grace (capital G on both) are we ever righted. My drinking companion on the other hand believes that once any of us rise to a level or power and prestige that we cannot stand the temptation of using it to... enjoy life to it's fullest.

Sadly both theories have merit. If you knew me, you would know how painful it is for me to say that because I have no confidence and in most cases no time for the opinion of others, especially, my drinking companions. I view them as simple, oafish and likely brain damaged. Especially this one. But in this one, particular case his thoughts apparently have some merit. More importantly we (I) have decided that it really is of no import why our heroes have feet of clay. Feet of clay is course a reference to the book of Daniel (2:32-33) but why are we so weak as people to expect that these people are somehow not human and not frail, just like us? My theory on this point is that we yearn for people to be better then we know that we ourselves are. So we embrace Tiger Woods as perfect golfer and person, forgetting that his personae is nothing more then a creation by his publicist and NIKE to sell us something. The same is true for our politicians (all over the place), our TV stars (John and Kate+8) and of course our priests.

We have been being told this last week about the weakness of John Edwards. What a turd. I wanted to like him even though he had pretty hair. To a bald man like myself pretty hair is always a "tell" of weak moral character. He really is the kind of person only God can forgive. I remember when Gary Hart torpedoed himself through his comparatively private liaisons on "The Monkey Business". That is nothing like Edwards knocking up and old groupie, pinning it on his most loyal aid, lying to everyone about it and being so stupid as to think he might not be caught. We also got hear Blago spew obscenities as he showed contempt for anything that did not generate cash. Of course there is the guy who really lowered the bar for everyone....Bill Clinton. So in regard to politicians perhaps there is a third theory... big hair equals trouble. the evidence speaks for itself. They also are all Democrats (other then Sanford). Couldn't FOX news do something with this... in a fair and balanced way.

So at least in regard to politicians we can say that all of the bad ones have one thing in common....bad hair.

Movie stars humiliating themselves....hmmmm....hard to think of any examples....I don't know.... how about MEL GIBSON? Nuff said.

The priests are tough. They are held out by their church to be better then us. To be intercessors for us with God and if you believe that, their fall is the greatest. I am not saddled with the baggage of elevating men of the cloth. I view the Priests and Ministers and Rabbis in the same light as I view Ozzy Osbourne. A When we have pedophile priests or Lutheran Ministers with child porn on their computer I just sadly nod my head. It is a human tragedy when anyone falls and an open ended question whether of what is gained by bringing their broken humanity to the surface.

Another sinful man on another sinful day.

BOOM! That just happened.

By the way...GO ORANJE!

The World Cup/ The Tour De France/ Irritable Bowel Syndrome

Sooooo.... they are related. I do not not know how as of yet but I will try and pull this together before we finish. The U.S. is out of the World Cup and we are on to the semi finals. My prediction of The Netherlands going all the way looks pretty good. (Go oranje). the Dutch are of course a deeply troubled country always laboring under the misapprehension that are part of Germany (a misapprehension maintained primarily by Germans) and the fact that a lot of people (me) get confused when we talk about Denmark, Holland, Belgium etcetera and wonder why they are all not part of Germany. If The Netherlands wins their semifinal then Germany will have a chance to possibly annex them in the finals. Breathing room. With three European teams in we must assume that the boys from Montevideo might not make the finals but it would be a sweet little lark to have the boys from Uruguay steal it all.

The Tour de France has started. Floyd Landis has reprised the role of a low rent Jose Conseco (can there be such a thing) and given about 2,000 interviews laying out in detail how dirty the sport is. The only thing we have learned about doping allegations thus far in all sports is that they are true. Every time. No matter who denies what. Mc Guire, Nolan Ryan, everyone who ever ran in the Olympics, Tiger Woods... all dopers. Probably the entire NHL: does too but i do not even think it is against the rules for them. But Landis filleted Lance and his team mates directly before the Tour and now the Tour has started and, well, frankly based on the number of crashes.... it appears they are all on drugs. So we assume Lance dopes and we assume he will get away with it. I know that I do not care about professional athletes doping. I am not sure why anyone does. People who hold view athletes as role models and encourage or even allow their children to do the same are very misguided and if little Johnny's world is going to fall in because a ball player (or bike rider) is juicing then Johnny has a lot more serious issues then we have tome to deal with today. By the way, despite all the Lance hoopla and his great team, I am predicting Contador does a back to back if he remains uninjured. No one can climb with him right now. If his team protects him, he wins.

That leaves us with irritable bowel and other gastro-intestinal maladies. i know of what I speak having been suffering now, post Wagenfeld Levine and never really recovering and now with my occurrence "presenting" again. They say that stress does not cause my problems but it does cause it to..."present". What a great word. i have lost 30 LBS. I would like to think I look better but I just look week and sick, which sucks. But my pants are falling off me which is kind of cool I guess. Do to my "condition" I am not absorbing vitamins B and D. Evidently I need them to hold weight. They have me one some drugs and so maybe that will help. Perhaps it will have the same effect as doping... or a Uruguayan hand-ball...or doping....or a bad crash in the Peloton.... and a little IRB will deliver me to full health. But probably not. perhaps it will help me "win".... but probably not. Perhaps it will just let me have a solid stool. I bet there are a lot of people who might consider that win.

By the way Netherlands advanced to the finals and that means....irritable bowel or no....I am a GENIUS!

On Arranged Marriages And My Daughter

Soooo having a 17 year old daughter is an interesting experience. Not a bad experience, just... interesting. In almost every case it has been excellent but there are some issues related to it. Oddly enough she seems somewhat interested in boys and some of them somewhat interested in her. Everyone says this is a natural occurrence but by the time I was her age I was already dating my wife by the time I was her age so I am a little... nervous. That might be the right would.... or perhaps apprehensive. That sounds nicer and more professional. Apprehensive. That is it.

Those of you with younger daughters need to pay attention here. I have two older sons and the fact is... you really do not care about boys. You give them good advice like "marry up" and "improve the gene pool" and you let them go. My oldest appears to have figured it out and my number 2 son Pat is gay so all bets are off there anyway. That is interesting all by itself but that would need to be the subject of another entry.

Two weeks ago I was up in Michigan with 190 Lutheran teen agers. About 80 of them were boys. This teen camp is for sophomores, juniors and seniors and gathers kids from all over the Midwest. 90 percent of them are one variety of Lutheran or another, from two parent families and probably 70 percent go church every weekend. They are nice kids from nice families. Decent breeding, good German Lutheran work ethic. Probably in church every Sunday as God intended.












In light of my apprehensiveness I made a decision that an arranged marriage might be best for my daughter (me). I did not discuss it at length with my wife but made a conscious decision that I care to much about my daughter to leave it up to chance (and hormones) so it would make a great deal of sense for me to "help" her make the correct decision. Teen Week seemed like an ideal time to find the correct boy, from the correct family with the correct prospects. Simple problem, simple solution.

When I am at teen week I get a group of 11 kids with boys and girls but at night I get to stay on the first floor of the camp's Inn with about 30 of the older boys. This would be a logical group to cull a potential husband from. I also get to see how the boys act when they tired, wired, and otherwise and have a chance to view their personal grooming habits and their neatness. The things I will do for my daughter are pretty unbelievable. I give too much. The boys are generally...boys. They are pigs. They do not bathe regularly. They leave clothes and sundries everywhere. They speak faux knowingly and with general contempt for girls and treat authority figures (like me) with even more contempt. Generally through a withering verbal assault on their self image from the second I come into contact with them I keep them under control with the help of a few other old people. Sometimes we do use a taser but that story can be told another day.

There were not a lot of prospects in this group. Several of them were from St. Louis and as such were kind of "old news". I looked them over very carefully for height, weight, intelligence and then had them fill out a 150 question "test" regarding their general attitudes and knowledge of politics, sociology, quantum physics and 9 different questions regarding the various defenses of 7 day creation as a "fact". Along with this I had the nurse examine them for deformities, congenital diseases (ta sacs and sickle cell run rampant in inbred environments like Lutheran Camp).

Then came the one on one interviews. These are primarily taken sometime after 1 A.M. when there is noise coming from their room. I will tend to go in with a large flashlight and two other counselors. We grab the child, put a sack over his head and drag him out to the beach where we lay him with his head to the tide and "question" him. This is a good early test and this year when doing this I was looking forward to tests of fire, water and air (that one involved potentially me needing to make a catapult) but after we drowned the second kid I decided this form of questioning was counterproductive. After all, my daughter is not getting any younger and if I kill all the prospects we are not going to get anywhere.

There is a nice young man in the room next to mind. I have spent several days giving him a lot of shit and he reacted well. Confused at first by this old man whipping on him but bemused. Bemused is a good way to treat me. He has a nice smile. he is earnest. he is going to college to be some kind of engineer or something. I realize that I know and like his sister a great deal and decide this is the guy. I inform my daughter and my wife. Surprisingly they too are interested in the young man as a prospect so I left it to my daughter to close the deal but with all the drama of teen agers she could not get it done. She had another week with the boy after teen week and still could not get it done without her fathers wisdom and encouragement.

At this point I guess it falls on me. I will track down his parents and make the call. I think my opening bid is going to be two camels, three pigs and a couple big sacks of milled flour. That is not a bad dowry my friend. I will keep you posted.