Blog

To any readers who may still peek in the windows here to see if anyone is alive under all those towers of old newspapers, I have to apologize. While up in Michigan this summer, my computer has apparently come down with a nervous disorder that I won’t be able to fix until I get back to town and have my DSL and reboot disks handy. So I’ll just have to use my vacation time away from the internet, like our forefathers did.

It has been an eventful summer so far, so this hiatus is frustrating, but not as frustrating as trying to download simple emails. Like I just tried to do for the past 45 minutes in the public library. From which I can’t SEND emails. But whatever.

Most recently, my family and I all piled up to Grand Rapids this past Saturday to check out my nephew’s Irish rebel band, The Waxies, and had a stupendous time. I urge you to check out their MySpace page and support Irish music in the heart of the West Michigan Dutch duchy.

The news of George Carlin’s death was a blow this past month. While his latest HBO’s specials were too screedy for my taste, his body of work was phenomenal. Whenever I correct Number 1 Son about his language lately, I need to remind myself that at his age, I was playing the album “Class Clown” over and over and learning all about the Seven Words, plus a few more that got me in trouble in Catholic junior high. A thought struck me a week ago that seemed like something Carlin would come up with, and for all I know, probably did. If I stole this from him, consider it flattery:

How can you have a circular driveway? If it were truly circular, you’d never be able to get off your property. Don’t you mean Semi-circular Drive? That would allow you to escape an endless loop of asphalt.

Of course, Carlin would have made it funny. RIP, George.

Be well, and I’ll return in three weeks.

That’s what I’ll be doing to my marriage for the next three weeks. My ever-lovin’ wife and kids and I will be taking a camping road trip to the East Coast until July 4. Cooperstown, Plymouth, Boston, Maine, Lake Champlain, and points in between. Pray for good weather, small crowds, a sudden dip in gas prices, and a surfeit of exotic license plates for Highway Bingo. See you in a few.

PS: Please go and check out the Field Tested Books collection of essays, and buy a copy if you feel like it. Disrupt the dominant publishing paradigm!!

Thanks to our friends at Ampolo.

My friend Steve Fiffer started a blogsite last year called Ampolo. It’s meant to be a place to share those ideas that come to you in a flash, ideas that could be worth millions or change the world or liven up your next family barbecue but you haven’t the expertise or time to make them a reality. I like to read it because it makes me feel less isolated in the world when I see someone else actually thinks that weather reporters should have to post their “batting averages” at the bottom of their screens during the TV news.

For a year, I’ve tried to come up with an innovative notion that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to send Steve for possible inclusion on Ampolo. And I’ve finally done it. I think. The embarrassment might come later. But it’s just possible that my idea could become the “gull wing doors” of the new century. Call me Clyde Crashcup. You can check out the idea here. And return to Ampolo often. It’s slick, informative and fun.

Science fiction has never been a big genre with me. I read it here and there, but I don’t gobble them down like so many devotees do. However, last year I did enjoy very much reading Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles for the first time. The early stories in that book (about the first colonization of the planet and the corruption of the native culture) came to mind this morning when I spotted this picture of a Martian sunset on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, who got it from NASA’s Image of the Day,

Can’t you just picture enjoying a nice cool Epeftian Manganese Fizz on your veranda, before you have to go indoors and batten down the house against the carnivorous sand weasels and spleen bugs that are just beginning to stir in their holes?

My jaw dropped this morning when I read about the following news item. The event happened last Wednesday, and you may have heard about it already. The news has been flying around the internet, and CBS’ The Early Show had an interview this morning.

Mom says special needs child ‘voted’ out of classroom

PORT ST. LUCIE, FL — A Port St. Lucie mother says her five-year-old son with special needs was voted out of his classroom by his peers at the behest of the teacher, who has since been reassigned.

….

“(She) took him and stood him in front of his classmates this week, asked every single child to tell Alex why we don’t like him… in his words, tell Alex why we hate him,” she explains.

After having each child ridicule the boy, she says the teacher continued belittling him.

“Then they had a vote on if he deserved to stay in the class or not,” says Barton.

Like a twisted reality show, Barton says in a 14-2 vote, his classmates voted the five-year-old out of the classroom.

The boy, Alex, has recently been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. His classmates objected to Alex’s spinning, his eating crayons, and hiding under desks. And so the teacher’s solution to a handicapped child disrupting her classroom was to hold a public pillorying, then a vote. There’s plenty more to read online, including how the boy’s one and only friend in class was pressured by the teacher and the rest of the kids to change his initial vote and turn against Alex.

Words fail me. If this “teacher” has indeed been reassigned, I hope it’s to guard the supply closet, or any other job that keeps her away from children PERMANENTLY. I can’t fathom what could have gone on in her head, that she would think this would be a good idea. It’s beyond understanding. In the wake of her insanity, one little boy is crushed and is afraid of going back to school, his peers get some sick lesson in groupthink and revenge instead of tolerance, the boy’s friend is probably feeling awful (and to avoid that feeling, might not try to be friends with Alex again). What this teacher did was abhorrent, she ought to be beaten with a plank and neutered….

I could write 5,000 words right now and not scratch the surface of my anger and loathing at this action. I take this very personally. Our son has Asperger’s, and if I remember, in Kindergarten, he hid under the desk a lot because the chaos and energy of a social environment like a classroom confused and scared him. I’m thankful he had a teacher and principal who looked at the whole child and helped him along. What would a decent person’s reaction be to a scared, confused 5-year-old?

Since that year, he’s never had a classroom aide (he probably didn’t even need one that year), is now in 7th grade pulling straight A’s, and is a happy, confident teenager, worried about girls and obsessed with music. The other kids in class may find him annoying at times, but other times his strengths come through. He’s accepted for who he is. Which is every person’s right. (Even as I type those words, they seem to clink like Canadian nickels, failing to express the importance of the notion. They seem cliche in the face of what happened in that classroom. I get angry over the fact that I have to type them at all.)

You can read more about Alex’s situation at this site, which also contains a link to his principal and the school board. Please write them and lend support to Alex, who has the right laid out by federal law to have a proper education. Of course, a law can’t mandate that a teacher would act like a HUMAN BEING and see the consequences of her actions, but it shouldn’t have to. It’s up to the school board to see this woman is shitcanned so far that she won’t be able to get a job as a prison guard.

I have to stop typing now, before I hurt my fingers or damage the keyboard from pounding.

Got back last night from a weekend of getting the cottage ready for the summer. Got the dock in without anyone drowning, which is always a good sign. The weather was too cold to go swimming or to eat outside, unless the sun was pounding directly on you. Nevertheless, I’m so very ready to chuck everything around here and relocate for a summer of reading, napping, fishing, and martini-drinking. We won’t really be up there until July 4, due to other commitments and a road trip we’re trying to take to the east coast. I won’t be able to take the wait. I need to catch me some fat bluegill NOW!

Our cottage is near the town of Fennville, which has two gas stations, one grocery store, a video store and a pharmacy. It also has a Mexican restaurant that’s hands-down the best in three counties. But the newest restaurants there have brought with them a strange phenomenon: Fennville is becoming a destination spot for foodies.

A few years ago, this started happening in my Chicago neighborhood, when a few eateries got written up in the New York Times (I think all of them have closed in the meantime except one). The foodies were conspicuous by the expensive casual clothes they wore, and the sweaters tied around their shoulders (60-somethings trying to look like they just stepped off the green). The wives always walked in front, wearing eager expressions for their urban adventure, with the husbands four paces back, bemused and patient and thinking life is supremely good as long as the Viagra holds out. They’re not so much around anymore, maybe they’ve moved on to Logan Square or West Town or Joliet. Which is good. Sated with food and too much South African shiraz, they were clogging up the sidewalks with their meanderings.

But now the town near my cottage is getting them. Their destination is the Journeyman Cafe, which opened on Main Street two years ago. The restaurant features only locally grown food, part of that whole locavore idea, which I think is a fine and dandy one as long as I don’t have to eat too much squash or give up coffee and bananas. The foodies arrive there, clutching their purses and peering into the place like a cave–“So THIS is the place everyone’s talking about?”

I’m not knocking the food, which is good to excellent, nor the idea of eating local. The angle of it I find most interesting, from a global socioeconomic viewpoint, is that the locals can’t afford to eat local. Few if any of the year-round residents can afford a $17 plate of lamb chops, however well intentioned the food is. Will this always be the case, or will the practice of locavorism make the area economically viable to the point that the former factory hands and farmers around there will be able to afford it? What’s more than likely is that the spread between the haves and the havenots will continue to grow until we begin to resemble Mexican resort towns, where the locals get only a glimpse of the good life.

Of course, I’m a fine one to talk, being a summer resident visiting my second home in my Illinois license plates conspicuous on the Volvo wagon. And I like a good meal as much as anyone. But any trip to Michigan will give you a quick view of the economic disparities in the country, and I’ve only seen it get worse in my time up there. Let’s hope those $17 lamb chops will do some good in the long run, and not just be a tasty curio of an era of decline.