snow in october

Ah, the middle of October, when thoughts naturally turn to ghoulish pumpkins, crunching leaves, and drunk Germans. Unless you live in Minnesota, where we got our first snow a few days ago. Granted, it was only a couple inches, but THAT”S NOT THE POINT! I  want to have burnt sienna tinted thoughts of baseball and bountiful harvests. I should be trying to find my rake, not my windshield scraper.

I’m no meteorologist, but I think we had four days of autumn this year. We had a lovely mild summer, with none of those four-day stretches of ninety-three degrees and eighty percent humidity during which an entire city becomes cranky. But no matter how nice summer is, Midwesterners know that it’s all a tease; winter will always show up, distract us with a week of crisp, clear forty-five degree days, and then proceed to stick its frozen boot up our fat Midwestern asses for five months.

I’m not a native Minnesotan. But I’ve always preferred cold-weather cities to the other extreme. Do the math with me—no matter how cold it becomes, if you put on enough layers, you’re no longer cold. You’re unable to move because of all the layers you’ve had to put on, but you have defeated the elements. Whereas, in someplace like, say Phoenix, even when you’ve removed ALL your layers, you can still be miserable. Cold places are better than hot places—Q.E.D. (which stand for ‘quod erat demonstrandum,’ which is Latin for ‘I took some advanced math classes and for some weird reason remember the Latin phrase for ‘there—I proved my point’)

I’m not a native Minnesotan, though, and I don’t quite think like one yet. The first time I saw the temperature forecast on the front page of the newspaper (news used to printed on paper) and read “8 degrees,” I thought it was a typo. That’s missing a digit. That’s not enough degrees, I thought. But Minnesotans have this amazing, resigned calm about the whole winter thing.

Everybody here has the same attitude you see in “Chinatown” when the photographer says to Nicholson, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” Here, it’s “Stop whining, Sven. It’s Minnesota.” Everyone seems to have accepted their fate. It’s a strange, mass-delusional badge of pride, making it through a brutal winter. You get to the other side of it and people pat each other on the back saying, “Yeah, that winter in ’88—the pipes froze, Grandpa slipped on that sheet of ice, we had to drive in whiteout conditions…” You don’t hear people say “Man, remember the summer of ‘92? That was awful—it got really…hot.”

So people in Minneapolis do the rational Scandinavian thing. We cope. We trudge through snow banks, each of us wrapped up like old Ukranian women walking through  the shtetl, muttering things like “We have a great theater scene here. We have a great theater scene here. We have a great theater scene here.” And there’s no use complaining, because when you do, a local is always nice enough to point out “It could always be worse.” Thank you, Captain Perspective.

I like that people here openly taunt Nature. For example, skyways.  If you haven’t experienced one, a skyway is an elevated, enclosed climate-controlled bridge, and Minneapolis has a series of them connecting, essentially, all the buildings in downtown. It’s like a Habitrail, with hamsters in suits and Starbucks kiosks. And it’s our way of saying “Screw you, God. That winter bullshit? Bring it on.” (note: if there is a God, then what I’ve written is satire and I don’t actually mean “Screw you.”)

The best thing about winter is spring. I grew up in Southern California, and sure, they have seasons. I’ll never forget the first time I felt the subtle change as the calendar turned from the Brushfire Solstice to the Mudslide Equinox. But there is no feeling quite like that first time the mercury hits fifty after five months of ridiculous, marrow-chilling temperatures. The entire city erupts in a communal ‘woohoo!’ that can be heard as far south as Des Moines.

So I’m fine with winter. I embrace the invigorating chill, and the wind that cuts through you like a set of knives from an infomercial. It’s just too soon. Snow this early in the year is like giving someone a Nobel Peace Prize after a few months as President. It’s beautiful, but it’s too soon.

I’m just not ready to get all Currier and Ives-y. It’s too soon to start thinking about when I have to mail gifts I haven’t even bought yet. It’s too early for winter storm watches, and weather advisories, and road conditions. It’s too early to hear that “the temperature is thirty-one, but it actually feels like it’s nineteen.” I’m not ready for…ah, who am I kidding. I’m a Minnesotan now. Bring it on.

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zombie pride

It was inevitable. The backlash had to happen. First, the dominant culture is afraid of the marginalized outsiders. Then, they embrace them, intellectuals praise them, Hollywood makes movies about them. Finally, the overexposure causes the outsiders to resent all of this, criticizing a culture that has appropriated its very soul.

So it is with Zombie-Americans. Tired of being mocked and caricatured, the zombies are rising up (this time metaphorically) against the living.  At an event in Wausau, Wisconsin, over five thousand zombies attended a conference called “Things That Are Eating US.” The president of the Zombie-American Coalition Embracing Fundamental Responses to Overt Negativity (ZACEFRON) addressed the brain-eating throng:

“As a zombie, I have I have witnessed the revulsion from people as we have just tried to coexist. We never asked for a place at the table–only the freedom to stumble around your cities at night. We are not here to frighten your children–but we do want them to stop pretending to be us.

As with so many things, the media is to blame. Now that we’re trendy, you would think some filmmaker would paint a true picture of zombie culture. But “Zombieland”? Really? Woody Harrelson from ‘Cheers’ is after us now? There’s a band called ‘The Zombeatles’ and they do a song called “Hard Day’s Night of the Living Dead”? How clever. People meeting up for ‘zombie pub crawls’?

This has to stop, non-people. We deserve respect.  At least vampires are occasionally given nuanced portrayals on film. And they’re shown living in Gothic mansions, while we are always seen living in some dingy graveyard.

We are not without a sense of humor. We tolerated your Halloween costumes and were even willing to laugh at the first couple of ‘Living Dead’ movies. But these portrayals of us are based on stereotypes, and they have led to fear and hatred.

The mainstream culture needs to realize that zombies are people, too—or, more accurately, were people. To trade in caricatures is unfair. Like most hatred, zombiphobia is rooted in ignorance. The living must realize, when they put on their blotchy makeup and tattered clothes, that somewhere there is a young zombie who’s afraid to come out of the grave because he doesn’t want to be ridiculed.

We can come together with our non-zombie friends. If only they knew how many of us live in their world, as accountants, telemarketers, Starbucks employees. Some of us have even chosen to hide our true selves to reach celebrity status in the land of the living. Kim Kardashian…Brad Garrett…Willem Dafoe…all undead Americans.

We, the zombies, are like the living in so many ways, and yet we are treated as second-class citizens. How many of us have tried to buy a nice townhouse, only to have the realtor run away screaming because we look different? How many of us have been prevented from exercising that most basic right, that of voting, simply because our limbs sometimes fall off? We still deserve a voice! Even now, In most states, a zombie is not even allowed to get a driver’s license!

It is true. We eat brains. But is that any stranger than eating liver? And while it’s true that we kill some of you, you end up rising from the dead and becoming…well, a zombie. And you have no memory that we killed you, so nobody’s the wiser.

Although we have come far as creatures, we have many slow, shuffling steps to go. Why are there no roles for zombies in any prime-time network shows? You’d think we’d be perfect for “Two and a Half Men,” but they went with a kid. Even reality TV—“Survivor”? I think a zombie could do very well on that show.

In closing, let me just say that we, the undead, will not stop with our brain-eating and what-not. But we demand more than brains. We demand equality. Where is our health-care plan? Why are they shooting us in the head, instead of trying to understand us? We are not so different from them. We WERE them, at least until they died and turned into us.”

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mom, out of nowhere

Every so often, a particular word or phrase, something that would not normally bother me, becomes as irritating as a credit card robocall. This week’s winner is that old euphemism for dying, when someone says “I lost my mom this week.”

My mom died in 1984, but I most assuredly didn’t lose her. In fact, I’ve felt her presence a lot lately. It’s not the anniversary of her death, or her birthday, or some other significant time that invites her back. She just seems to show up.

So today, for no particular reason, Mom shows up. I’m at my desk ready to write my next book, and out of nowhere I hear “Turn on a light. You’re gonna ruin your eyes.”

I think it’s funny how moms can make such huge leaps from action to consequence. I can’t count the number of times my mom told me that something I was doing would, inexorably, lead to me breaking my neck. “Don’t walk out there without shoes—you’ll fall and break your neck.” “Stop running in the house—you’re gonna trip and break your neck.” “Get off that fence, you’re gonna break your neck!”

Really, mom? Do broken necks run in the family? Are our neighborhood’s lawns littered with the sprawled, misshapen bodies of kids with broken necks? I’m just saying, there have to have been a few times when a kid ran in the house and nothing bad happened. Another one I never understood was “Put on a shirt—you’re making me cold.” And I would dutifully put on a shirt. And that’s the kinda Bizarro World logic that ALWAYS worked with me! Never once did I say, “That’s impossible, Mom. What I’m wearing doesn’t change the temperature!”

With apologies to my more sensitive readers, my mom was a ‘broad,’ in the best sense of the word. You had to work past quite a few layers of gruff to get to the woman who baked sixty dozen cookies for family and friends every Christmas. I truly believe I inherited my love of New York from her: out of Astoria, Queens, working at the Bulova Watch factory at fifteen to support her family, my mom was the genuine article—a New Yorker.

And tough? Until she quit to devote her time to raising me, she was what is sometimes called a Licensed Vocational Nurse. She explained her job description this way: she did the work the doctors felt they were too important to do, and that the RNs didn’t have time to do. If someone from the psych ward broke his restraints and ran naked out of the hospital, she was the one who would tackle him. Great gig.

She wasn’t wild about the whole showbiz thing. But the only career advice I remember getting from her was “I don’t care if you want to be a ditchdigger, as long as you’re the best damn ditchdigger you can be.” Again with the no-middle-ground thing, mom. Just because I don’t want to be a doctor, doesn’t mean the only other option for me is working next to people in orange jumpsuits fulfilling their community service by the side of the freeway!

It’s not like Mom didn’t think I had talent; in fact, she was the biggest booster of my writing aspirations, starting with my first full-length story, written when I was in fourth grade, “The Adventures of Pat P. Pencil.” But performing? I remember her saying, “I just don’t want you to end up working in the chorus your whole life not making any money.” Sometimes I really hate how smart Mom was.

My mother had a bit of a temper. And we fought a lot. She loved saying ‘dammit!’ between drags of her odd-looking More cigarettes (brown paper, exotically thin and long). Yet I don’t think I ever saw her look as crestfallen as she did the first time she heard me swear back. The only other time I remember really feeling her disappointment was the first time I came home in the wee small hours. And she waited up for me.

I closed the grill at the McDonald’s and decided go with a group of kids to a party after work. Now understand, part of Mom’s reaction was due to the fact that I had never been the kind of teenager that did…anything. My only social life was the marching band, and the only time I had been drunk was at a family wedding when my uncle (her brother) kept pouring me Crown Royal and Coke so I could show I was a man at fourteen. Quick—spot the dysfunctional person in this picture!

So, I get to our house around 4AM, and discovered an important law of physics. The more quietly you attempt to turn a key in a lock, the more noise you will make. I get inside, there’s Mom in a bathrobe, and all she says is, “Good night.” But TO THIS DAY I remember the waves of disappointment hitting me, and me getting sucked into a riptide of let-down.

She wouldn’t have been upset by the fact that I’d been drinking, although she was a tee-totaller. Mom only drank on New Year’s Eve. Three vodka stingers. But in a classic example of mom-think, the first time I asked if I could go to a party, that afternoon, when I came home from school, I saw on the kitchen table three bottles of booze. Mom’s reasoning? If you’re gonna drink tonight, you can have as much as you want…here. With Mom watching. Yeah, that’ll be fun. Needless to say, I didn’t go to the party.

I think my mom missed her calling. She should have been in a position of power, because she could have solved a lot of world problems, just by being herself. The only political comment I remember from her was her take on the crisis in Northern Ireland. To which she suggested: “The Pope should just excommunicate all the Catholics who keep fighting.” And maybe the world needs some of my mom’s approach today.

When my cousin and I fought over an Etch-A-Sketch, my mom’s solution was to take it away from both of us. “Now neither of yous get to play with it.” Imagine my mom as a special envoy to the Middle East. She would say “Alright…you Israelis and Palestinians can’t work out a way to play without fighting? Now none of you get to have Gaza. How does that suit ya?”

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