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Just received a glowing review from The White Tops, the official publication of the Circus Fans of America:

“The style of the book is breezy and clever, much like any Sam Spade mystery dialog. Mr. Garner is a master of puns and satire. This is not a book to skim….HHMD is a fun read. It’s a great gift for your circus- and mystery-minded friends.”

Maxine House emailed me about the review, and we had a short interview in which I admitted where I found most of my circus lingo (ironically enough, “Circus Lingo” by Joe McKennon), and the situations when I had to invent my own. It’s in the September/October edition of the magazine.

While I’m sure I’ll get some mail from purists who will tell me that clowns and midgets aren’t natural antagonists, or will ask me what type of diesel train took Boots Carlozo away, it’s very gratifying to hear from someone who knows the circus and understands that I’m going for a rollicking, bigger-than-life story here.

I drove up to the cottage Wednesday, in order to get up to Grand Rapids Thursday and meet a couple of Thai tailors who’d flown to town to get everyone fitted with nice cheap suits. (Yay!) For dinner, I drove to a sports bar nearby Saugatuck, hoping to catch a little of the early action of the Tigers-Indians game. From my barstool, I could look at 11 different TV screens at once.

Little did I know, the whole country was counting down the minutes to something monumentally important.

No, not the Democratic convention, but the start of the NFL season!

The countdown to the kickoff! The clock running down in the corner of the screen! The clash between the Dallas Cowboys (America’s Team to some – shudder) and the NY Giants! In the middle of the media capital of the country! More forced amusement and community than in 10 Rockin’ New Year’s Eves! How could such monumentalosity escape my attention?

With the sound off, it was surreal to watch the interviews, and the other interviews, and the retrospectives of the interviews. However, sound-free was definitely the way to enjoy the music and dance-a-ganza taking place midtown in Rockefeller Center (30 Rock, for the more macho announcers). Mariah Carey sang and danced, looking like she had just enough time on the subway to do her hair. Some fat bald rapper recited from a big gold throne, while everyone who wanted to be part of such scripted joy shoved and pushed to wave to their fans at home. Meanwhile, the dancers around Mariah wriggled and shimmied wearing modified shoulder pads. Too bad they were male dancers.

Oh football. Why can’t I quit you?

You embody so much that is crass and overblown in American culture. Every Sunday, we’re urged to get down, pig up, chest bump, drink up (though with shitty beer that only gets you drunk in the manner that Mariah Carey gets you dancing) and roll back evolutionary progress a couple of centuries.

You make us cheer for brutality, long for overstuffed blonde barmaids, treat a 3-hour relaxing TV respite like it were a matter of life and death. You force us to identify with still-adolescent meatheads whose goal in life is not enlightenment or service or ecstasy, but merely to own a mancave decorated entirely with promotional items, an Ali Baba’s cave for the soulless and rudderless.

Still, I can’t quit you.

To enjoy a game, you force us to ignore millions of dollars wasted in glitz and advertising, not to mention millions of tax dollars siphoned off to build high-tech stadiums for the rich and connected. You force us to forget how many former players are hobbling around their houses on shattered knees, or trying to keep from shaking from the concussions they’ve suffered. You require us to forget about the thousands of young men who never make it, but are sold a bill of goods by sadistic, power-mad coaches that they must sacrifice themselves to the game to get ahead when they could be getting an education or learning a trade.

Still, I can’t quit you.

Football, you force me to admire jocks who not only were assholes in high school (the last time we ever existed on the same plane) but now are rich and even more entitled. You force me to make excuses for the players who get arrested for beating up their girlfriends, or even casual passersby. You encourage me to lard stories about heroism and sacrifice and honor upon a bunch of arrogant steroidal gorillas who would only pull over to help a stranded motorist if there were a film crew nearby, who sometimes play with less enthusiasm than a 40-year-old stripper on a pole. And some day, I am completely certain, I will watch a player die on the field from blunt trauma.

Still, I can’t quit you. How can that be? What in God’s name is wrong with me?

The Chicago Bears connect with me more thoroughly than ever did the Detroit Lions (godawful for my entire life in the Motor City) or the Michigan Wolverines (just not that exciting to me). Plugging into the enthusiasm of Bear fans makes me feel like I grew up here, which is a feeling I like to cultivate from time to time. I like to think of my late father and me watching a game on TV sometime, with his long-gone Aunt Helen smoking cigarettes in her kitchen in Homewood and yelling at Butkus. And the time I spend watching the game (even better when my daughter joins me) gives me a chance to suspend responsibility for just a little while, and enjoy watching someone else’s well-laid plans either go well or ill. But these are only partial reasons, dressed in play clothes of nostalgia.

So what is it about you, football, that keeps me coming back? I never played the game. While short-tempered, I’m not a violent person. We have an artistic household, not an athletic one. My wife and son give me grief for watching a game every weekend.

Still, I can’t quit you.

Must be the logos.

Enjoy the season, fans!!

I sat down today, fully intending to write up a blog post that people could read over this long holiday weekend. This post would be clever and erudite, but also ground-breaking. It would cement in the reader’s mind that, despite the comical trappings around here, I was someone to take seriously, that my musings were something to tap into on a regular basis, that any sliver of spare time spent here would be rewarding. And from a crass commercial angle, it would get me a little web traffic and remind readers I was still alive and still flogging all my e-books, especially Honk Honk, My Darling.

Sorry, gang. It didn’t happen. Whatever thoughts might have been pacing around up there in the waiting room, ready for their debut, have somehow vanished. Maybe they were in a pique because I’d ignored them for most of the month, and they were loath to be trotted out hurriedly like a kid reciting “Twinkle Twinkle.” Maybe thoughts of baking, cooking, hosting and running around locked the door on them and pretended the key’s been lost. Maybe the thoughts are stuck in the security line at O’Hare. Maybe I ain’t got a cogent thought to present in any interesting way, and never did.

I started a list of things I was thankful for, but that started getting a little mawkish. Besides, everyone else’s lists have been on Twitter and blogs all week. While it was nice to read them all, it pushed me closer to the idea in Matthew 6, about praying by yourself in a closet.

Is that in the spirit of the holiday? Who knows? One of the best things about Thanksgiving is that it’s a little amorphous in how you approach it. There are traditions a-plenty, but the idea of celebrating the day “properly” rarely comes up. There’s no blowback if you choose to spend it by yourself or with friends, whether you eat turkey or lasagna, whether you go shopping or watch slasher movies at home. It feels like a real Do-It-Yourself holiday, and since it’s the first one of the season, everyone is a little less anxious.

At least, that’s how I feel about it. Family tensions certainly arise, as crowds gather for the celebration (or as people tell their families that they won’t be coming). The Black Friday stuff makes me want to join a monastery, in the Marianas Trench. The Christmas commercials during the parades and football games are nauseating (I feel so inadequate that I won’t be able to give my sweetie a Lexus this year, with a big bow on the top!). Seriously, it takes A LOT to turn me off from watching a parade, but CBS and Macy’s have perfected a formula for it. So, opportunities certainly arise for tension, disappointment, regret, but I’ve somehow blocked them out. Perhaps I’ve learned a few lessons in life by the half-century point.

At least we’re not the ones traveling this year.

And double at least, The Detroit Lions aren’t an abomination now, so both football games might be worth watching.

And I get to watch my darling daughter singing in “Boris Godunov” again tonight at the Chicago Lyric Opera.

So I’ve got lots to be thankful for. And I thank you for reading this far. Have a happy holiday weekend, y’all.

Well. there goes another Monday morning. Any productivity shot down by a night of sleeplessness.

I just don’t get it. This year has actually seen fewer problems than last year, yet since my 50th birthday, I can count on a good bout of insomnia about every month or so. Usually hitting on Sunday night, because of the upcoming workweek, I suppose. This weekend I got it twice, even on Saturday night, after a day with two hours of driving and about 5 hours of hiking around state parks. Despite all that exertion, at midnight my body felt like it was poised to walk into a slam-dunk meeting or defend the house from raccoons or something.

So last night, it should’ve been easy to fall asleep, right? I took it easy, did some stretching before bed, read for 40 mins — and didn’t fall asleep for another 2.5 hours, even after warm milk and a couple of Tylenol PMs.

How ironic is it that the only thing weighing on my mind lately is that I’m not being that productive? That I’m still waiting to get answers from other people before I release my projects for public consumption? That I’m the person in the household with the least amount of pressure in their lives, and still sleep simply avoids me?

And how stupid is it that I feel like a failure for not being able to sleep? That’s the dominant feeling in those empty hours, that I am failing at something that the entire city has somehow been able to do. Grrrr. This is one aspect of getting older that I’m really detesting.

An Irishman moves into a tiny hamlet in County Kerry, walks into the pub and promptly orders three beers. The bartender raises his eyebrows, but serves the man three beers, which he drinks quietly at a table, alone.

An hour later, the man has finished the three beers and orders three more.

This happens yet again.

The next evening the man again orders and drinks three beers at a time, several times. Soon the entire town is whispering about the Man Who Orders Three Beers.

Finally, a week later, the bartender broaches the subject on behalf of the town. “I don’t mean to pry, but folks around here are wondering why you always order three beers?”

‘Tis odd, isn’t it?” the man replies, “You see, I have two brothers, one went to America, and the other to Australia. We promised each other that we would always order an extra two beers whenever we drank as a way of keeping up the family bond.”

The bartender and the whole town was pleased with this answer, and soon the Man Who Orders Three Beers became a local celebrity and source of pride to the hamlet, even to the extent that out-of-towners would come to watch him drink.

Then, one day, the man comes in and orders only two beers. The bartender pours them with a heavy heart. This continues for the rest of the evening – he orders only two beers. The word flies around town. Prayers are offered for the soul of one of the brothers.

The next day, the bartender says to the man, “Folks around here, me first of all, want to offer condolences to you for the death of your brother. You know-the two beers and all . . .”

The man ponders this for a moment, then replies, “You’ll be happy to hear that my two brothers are alive and well. It’s just that I, myself, have decided to give up drinking for Lent.”

From Dickie, Stymie, Spanky, Petey, Skanky, Tommy aka Butch, and the Waif.

Hai! Sumo! Hai!

It’s a beautiful fall day here in Chicago, though it’s hard to consider 65 degrees as very autumnal. But the harvests are all in, and that has meant it’s time for apple cider.

And while apple cider is nice — one of God’s true gifts to humankind — hard cider can be even better. Or at least it appeals to the part of me that likes gadget and likes to play mad scientist once in a while.

(It’s not that my daughter in the background was scared of my fermenting experiments or the skull candle. She’d just woken up from a well-earned nap.)

Last year I fermented some ciders using a lager yeast, which came out pretty tasty. However, the drafts tasted a lot like those that I made years ago with champagne yeast. They weren’t quite as dry as the champagne batches (which were too dry to even enjoy), but they were very very crisp.

So this year, I made the trip over to “Brew and Grow” to see if they had any yeasts that were specific to making cider. (Cider of course will ferment on its own, if left to its own devices, but it can be a bit of a gamble to end up with a flavor that you like.) And sure enough, amidst all the hydroponic and home gardening equipment for closet-grown “tomatoes”, they sold some yeast specifically made for ciders. The pack was for five gallons of cider, which is about three gallons more than I will drink this winter, so I just estimated the proper amounts. No big deal to put too much in.

I made different batches by using cider from two different farms: Seedlings Orchard, which is run by a friend of mine, and Crane’s Orchard, which is the big chimichanga up by our cottage. The bottles from Seedlings had been pasteurized by ultra-violet light, while Crane’s was just au naturel. (Seedlings is also marketing their own hard cider at liquor stores in the Chicago area, though I haven’t tried it.)

After 10 or so days in the jugs, the bubbling subsided, and I took a measure of specific gravity. Surprisingly, it read that there was NO potential alcohol in either batch. I still haven’t figured that one out — did this yeast not produce any alcohol when it digested the sugars? That seems impossible. Will have to talk with other brewers about this when I think of it. So I siphoned off the liquid into beer bottles and capped them, as shown above, after priming each half-gallon with about a teaspoon of corn sugar. After a week, I brought some to a friend’s house for his birthday.

The results? The cider from Crane’s was clear and crisp, with just the right amount of carbonation. Good adequate drink. But the batch from Seedlings had a lot more complexity, a little peppery bite to the flavor, a touch more carbonation. If forced to choose between the two, I think I’d take Seedlings.

Now I need to find a bottle or two of the commercially made stuff and see if mine is at all similar to it. Seedlings has some “varietal” ciders, with mutsu and jonagold and the like, which they were selling at the farmers markets this fall. To me, those flavors are so delicate that I think fermenting them would almost remove the flavor. For now, I’m going to stick with the generic apple cider, though I do like Seedlings’ combo of cider and cherry juice.

Better living through chemistry.

Well, I was going to write a post about how summer was over and it was back to the old grindstone in the City on the Make. Full of little tidbits about what the family had done during the hot months, designed to bring smiles to those who know me well and envious grimaces to my enemies, since as they say, “Living well is the best revenge.”

Then I looked up and, whaddyaknow, it’s already the beginning of October. The time for winding down, clearing out the garden, making sure last year’s boots are still waterproof. The first tenuous weeks of school are finished, and now the kids have to actually get some work done. Big Ten teams need to stop beating up on Eastern Michigan and Bowling Green and Illinois, and start playing against actual football programs. The demands of Halloween loom, when us creative people have to step up and deliver with the house decorations and costumes (no leftover medical scrubs or softball uniforms for our lot). Then, it’s the greased chute to Christmas, and the whole “what the hell just happened?” feeling that accompanies it.

But poor, poor September. Aside from Labor Day, no one gives it any love. No big special events, no big sales (except back-to-school), no big debuts since no one cares about network TV anymore.

September is starting to feel like a segue month, a time to bide until other, bigger, flashier months come up. The church calendar talks about “ordinary time,” which consists of the weeks that don’t fall under Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter. This can maybe apply to the secular calendar too, the weeks when we catch our breath and maybe ponder what our lives are all about. If so, September leads the pack, followed by January, March and maybe June (although graduations bisect that month nicely, and weddings can give it an extra urgency).

So, as it begins to feel like “The years just flow by, like a broken down dam” (John Prine), maybe we should savor the ordinary times like September. At least until we can figure out a way to commercially exploit it.