Sunday morning coffee

It's been a while since I woke up well before anyone else in the household on a weekend morning, for no particular reason. It's one thing when I'm up early because of work, and just focused on getting my go cup of coffee and getting out the door; it's another thing entirely, and far more pleasant, to be up early with nothing to do but enjoy the quiet. It's a gift to be given the job of filling the house with the first good smell of the day, coffee, and maybe an hour or so later the smell of pancakes or french toast, and then to let that be the way the people you love wake up.

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Two hopeful signs: I left work the other day well after five o'clock, and was halfway across the parking lot to my car when I realized something was different. It was still light outside! Then, this morning, looking out the back window, I saw a single red cardinal hopping along the phone line at the back of the yard. He was only there a few moments, but it was enough for me.

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The best treat, for me, was when I came home yesterday and saw this:

Donuts!

Well, power rings are always welcome at my table, but what made me happy was to see the table full of jewelry-making stuff, and my bride and our daughters all around the table working away. Turns out they spent the whole day like that, working and talking.

MizBubs is working on a necklace featuring a piece of fossilized ammonite and tiger eye beads:



Our eldest put together this necklace, using some pieces that she had:

Our youngest, who collects random antique keys and machine parts, did these:



Then she fashioned this primitive and funky-looking (but very comfortable) bracelet:



Finally she worked on a more involved necklace. The center piece was a locket that she bought from a gutter punk girl on Decatur Street last March. It consisted of a bottle cap containing a picture of a bug, sealed in some type of urethane, and fastened to a strip of lace. She added some items that have been given to her by friends and family, and made this:

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My attendance at a Superbowl Party today marks the end of a 5-day stretch during which I've gone out drinking and eating every single night. First came a training dinner Wednesday night sponsored by the local FBI National Academy alumni association. On Thursday the detective division had our annual in-service training day and spent the entire day shooting, grappling and watching training videos, followed by beer and pizza. There was another work-related cocktail session with MizBubs on Friday, and then a wonderful visit to the Grafton Pub last night.

My stomach hurts.

Along the way this week I attended the wake of an acquaintance who killed himself. It turned out it was held in the same funeral home where my friend who died that way was waked a couple of years ago. I didn't really make the connection until I pulled into the parking lot. Once I got inside I found out the wake was being held in the same chapel, and with the coffin set up in the exact same spot. Unnerving.

I just need to get through this last round of draft beer from plastic pitchers, baked mostaccioli and Italian beef, and then I'm done. The new diet and training regime starts tomorrow. Then it is onward and upward for 2009.

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"There was no point in looking back, fuck no, not today thank you kindly. My heart was filled with joy. I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger; a man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident."

--Hunter S. Thompson

Something nice to look at

Things are improving. Still no time to write or read, but it's getting better. For now I'm happy to look out the front window and see this while I'm having my coffee. By afternoon it will be full of bees and Monarch butterflies. I wish I could remember what these flowers are called, but my brain trust is at work right now.

Sunday morning coffee

I fell asleep last night earlier than planned, passing my half-finished Old Fashioned to MizBubs as I lurched up from the couch and headed for bed. Long week.

This morning I was awakened by the sound of the girls talking, loudly, and water running in the upstairs bathroom. In my fog I thought it was around 4 or 5 am and that the girls had stayed up late watching movies. Before I barked out at them I managed to focus on the clock and saw that it was 7:50 am.

They were up early, getting ready to go to the Bristol Renaissance Faire together. Once I realized that the noise was actually my two daughters, who get along famously with each other, up early and talking while they showered and got ready for their day, I couldn't bark. Instead, I had to get up and make coffee for them.



A little while later they were off down the front walk, ready to bear witness to lord only knows what kind of freakery up in Wisconsin. It was all I could do not to give them a spare handgun for the trip.

And so, if we're lucky, this is how it goes: your beautiful and competent children walking away from you, and you standing there, looking forward like crazy to their return.

I love this

It's quiet, no one's stirring yet and I have time to go over lists and just...sit. We've got some gardening and tidying to do out in the yard, and today looks like a perfect day for it. Costco and the Jewels will be getting a decent amount of my money later today; Binny's Beverage Depot already got their cut.

MizBubs got the day off work and she's sleeping in, bless her heart.

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I'm about halfway through a really good book: Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War by Joe Bageant. If you liked What's the Matter with Kansas? but wished it had been more brutally direct, or set in Appalachia, then this is the book for you.

The author, Joe Bageant, has a great home page here. You can read some of his essays, pungent little exercises with titles like "The audacity of depression" and "Pissing in the liberal punchbowl again."

The very first thing I ever read by him was this piece:

Welcome to middle class lockdown. Now shut up and buy something.

It opens with this quote:

"Take away America's Wal-Mart junk and cheap electronics and what you have left is a mindless primitive tribe and a gaggle of bullshit artists pretending to lead them."

The instant I saw the term "bullshit artist" I was hooked.

A little farther down I came to this passage, and as someone who is actively contemplating his exit to that imagined simpler, more pastoral life, this really hit me:

Now it took me one helluva long time to claw my redneck self into the middle class and it took me even longer to figure all this out about its inauthenticity. Always one to fuck up right in front of the whole damned world, I loudly declared American middle class life to be a crock of shit and vowed to kiss it off. Go someplace simpler. Run nekkid in the surf in Saint Kitts or smoke pot in Belize. Catch my own damned salmon on the Galician Coast. But whoaaa hoss! This bad news just in: Not only do you have to buy your way into the American middle class through forceful consumption of the lifestyle, but you have to buy your way out of it. I'm serious. Buy your right to live in poverty. Let's say you've managed to get your kids through college one way or another, usually via a second mortgage and loans, and you decide like I did to say: Fuck this. I've done right by my family. Now I've got high blood pressure, a bad back, and a million other stress ailments. I'm overweight and have terrible lungs. Now I want to escape the ever rising cost and stress of playing the game, the grinding chase after enough net worth to feel safe about such things as health care and a safe place to shit. Spend a few years in some warm place blinking at blue, unpolluted sky before I go tits up. To my mind, these are completely understandable sentiments for any reasonable person. But, alas dear hearts, the American middle class is a lockdown facility. One that takes a lot of cash bribes and blackmail payoffs to break out of.

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Sorry if that seemed like a little bit of a downer. I didn't mean for it to. I actually find his writing to have a galvanizing effect on me, which I need more often than not. As the holiday approaches we need a Joe Bageant to cut the grease from all the "God bless the USA" we're going to be subjected to for the next couple of days.

Good morning sleepyheads!

It's Sunday morning, the coffee is strong and tasty, and for the moment there's nothing to worry about.

Enjoy your day!

Sunday morning coffee

It's a beautiful morning. I am now officially at the halfway point in my training for the Chicago Marathon. We ran 13 miles yesterday, and other than some residual stiffness in my legs I didn't feel any negative side effects when I woke up this morning.

We've decided to forgo a trip to the farmer's market today, since the industrious MizBubs stopped and loaded up on produce and fresh deli items at Valli on Friday. I think we're having a pork-free Sunday dinner--she's planning on some kind of stuffed relleno pepper dish. So that leaves me here with my coffee, having a few minutes to not do much of anything, which is always welcome.

I had one of those days on Friday. I'm dying to talk about it, because it says a lot about what my job is like, compared to what other people may think my job is like. I'm trying to find a way to describe it without seeming horribly offensive. I learned a long time ago that stuff I find to be hilarious or fascinating frequently strikes others as just horrible and sad. This point was really illustrated for me last year when I was describing, to some in-laws, a sexual assault investigation that one of our detectives handled at a local transient hotel. I described, in what I thought was a fairly entertaining manner, how the investigation unfolded. I got to the part where I asked the detective, who was fairly new at the time, what he thought about handling his first bizarre sex case. His response (which, to me, makes the whole story) was:

"Well, sarge, if you can't get excited about retard dildo sodomy, what can you get excited about?"

I noticed a couple of sets of wide, horrified eyes and gaping mouths regarding me across our back deck, and I realized that some stories maybe don't need telling. Or maybe, I thought, they just need a better audience! So, maybe later on tonight or tomorrow I'll give it a try.

In the meantime my eldest is sitting here next to me describing her outing to Nocturna at Metro last night. She says the theme last night was pretty girls with dopey guys. I know that's been the story of my marriage so far. We have a yard party to go to this afternoon, and I'll get to meet some of the hot librarians that MizBubs works with. I rarely see book people out in the sun, so I'm looking forward to that.

Now, proving once again that if you sit on your ass long enough the whole world will come to you, my youngest daughter, recently celebrated by a big-shot Chicago literary figure, has joined me, coffee in hand. We're enjoying some Gabby La La before starting our day for real.

See you later, alligator.

Tuesday's Top Seven

What the hell. It's Tuesday.

Here's what we're listening to this morning:

Rigor Mortis—The Gravestone Four

Arabia—Siouxsie & the Banshees

Lucky Day—Judy Garland

Hellbound Train—Three Bad Jacks

Outsiders—Franz Ferdinand

Linda Lou—Curley Langley & his Western Allstars

On the Sunny Side of the Street—Keely Smith