WWHP YEEHAW It's the whip!!! Best Radio EVAR!!!!!!

Every two months or so, I have been driving from Indy to my ancestral home in Wisconsin and back. Usually I drive through Chicago because the route is direct, and I love driving in the city. Occasionally, because of weather or traffic, I take the longer, boring route through Bloomington IL. My Luddite confession is that I don't have an ipod (and I only have one song on my iphone--it took me 45 minutes figure out how to download it), or satellite radio. Instead I listen to the car radio. Primitive, I know. And increasingly more generic. Same narrow list of songs, and if the station even has live DJs, the patter is all the same.

I had a vague recollection that when I drove between Leroy and Bloomington I heard some good radio--I assumed that it was a ephemeral student station.

There were no DJs, just a couple of farm market reports, and commercials for a local harley dealer, Farm Credit Bureau and a bbq joint called Porgy's. It's a throwback to a more idiosyncratic time in radio.

Their website says:

"Somewhere between Memphis and Chicago. . the Whip

Playing the best in blues, bluegrass, alternative and traditional country, rock, gospel and American Roots music"

Lots of Levon Helm, Steve Earle and a lot of stuff I wasn't familiar with but loved. Angry political screeds, plaintive wails and just for the hell of it songs. And the coolest thing is the station ID--call letters followed by the sound of whip cracking!! I wanted to stop the car, find out what I listening and get some of that music for myself. I haven't been that excited about a radio station since I was in high school listening to progressive FM stations. The playlists were huge and they rarely repeated songs. Once I got past Bloomington, the Whip started getting staticky, so I switched to WXRT-one of my favorite stations, but a big corporate player with lots repeats in the relatively narrow playlist.

Carlos and Maria: Using her butt to sell Ricola cough drops

I know that the Carlos and Maria Ricola commercial is at least a year old, but I finally hit my breaking point. Initially, I just hated his smarmy shrug and request for a cough drop and then I grew to loathe the shot of her butt on his shoulder. So the shot of her smooth butt could be considered mildly titillating, but does it really sell more cough drops? The premise of the European dance competition really has nothing to do with cough drops, but it does create a lame venue for views of Maria's butt. I can't believe some marketing team thinks this is good idea.

Calling out the marketers: another reason I love Michelle Obama

Today, I saw an excerpt of Michelle Obama's address about fighting childhood obesity to the Grocery Manufacturer's Association. The thrust of her argument was two pronged: first, healthy food needs to be easily available and affordable, and second, nutritional information must be intelligble for parents making family food decisions. I was half listenting to the television and half reading my email. Then I heard her say:

But what it doesn't mean is taking out one problematic ingredient, only to replace it with another. While decreasing fat is certainly a good thing, replacing it with sugar and salt isn't. And it doesn't mean compensating for high amounts of problematic ingredients with small amounts of beneficial ones -- for example, adding a little bit of Vitamin C to a product with lots of sugar, or a gram of fiber to a product with tons of fat doesn't suddenly make those products good for our kids.

This isn't about finding creative ways to market products as healthy. As you know, it's about producing products that actually are healthy -- products that can help shape the health habits of an entire generation.

Did I just hear her slam marketers and marketing in the solar plexus? I found this so refreshing because she was talking about something serious and substantial--she was not dancing around an issue with talking points, avoiding talking about something or letting her opponents define the discourse. And she did it in a civil, charming, "as parents, grandparents and humans we certainly all care about this issue" tone. But there was no mistake that she was advocating for a seismic shift in the grocery manufacturing industry.

And she goes on to say:

So today I want to challenge each and every one of you to go back to your companies, take a look at your marketing budgets and ask some questions. For example, when you put money into reformulating a product to make it healthier, do you then invest enough in marketing that product to kids and parents? Or is most of the marketing budget still going to the less healthy versions? In other words, which products are you really selling? And what kinds of messages are your advertisements sending?

Continuing to call out the 800 lbs gorilla in the room! Throughout the speech she talks about how children (using her own children as examples) respond to marketing the difficulty busy parents have evaluating requests for this or that type of food. She acknowledges how effective marketing campaigns are and then calls out marketers doing their jobs well with unhealthy products. By insisting that that the discussion include all aspects of the childhood obesity morass, she is attempting to circumvent a marketing campaign that forgets/limits information about nutritional value.

I used to think that marketing was fluff. It certianly wasn't anything I was interested in. At various points in my professional life I have had to deal with marketing, marketers and market research. Personally, I think it is all a house of cards, a fantasy world and, recently I have decided, an obtuse type of communication. Messaging becomes more important than discussion. Each group focuses only on their agenda, ignoring aspects of the issues that are uncomfortable, don't fit into the message and are complicated.

Also on the local news they ran a feature on the reaction of local people who are undecided about the healthcare issue to the advertising barrage. One woman complained that the issue was too complicated and she didn't understand commercials for either side--she wanted the simple version. Sometimes stuff isn't simple and people have to think about stuff. This made me sad and frustrated. I know that I could dismiss the woman as lazy and ignorant (which she probably was), but it made me realize people are now trained to expect the simple version of anything. What if there isn't a simple version? What if it is complicated, difficult and fluid?

Keep your damn pants on

I must digress for a moment. If GQ is taking pictures of you and you take your pants off, don't be surprised when those pictures are published. I know you expect the Madonna and child pictures to be highlighted, but it's GQ for god's sake!

The lasagna bed

I am slowly building a large perennial bed in my front yard. My house sits on over half an acre on a quiet corner in an older subdivision that has no through traffic. When I moved in, the house had been empty for at least two years, and I gather from the neighbors that the last occupant was a nice guy with some hoarding tendencies and no inclination to maintain the house or yard. The first time I saw the house, the floor to ceiling living room windows were obstructed by vegetation, including mats of English ivy, poison ivy, poison oak, little maple trees and other assorted volunteer trees and shrubs. Last season, the goal was to clear away all the brush surrounding the house. I accomplished a lot of slashing and removing, but I found I also needed/wanted to be planting something.

Although I have removed trees, bushes and weeds, the beds around the house are not in shape for planting. They still need removal of poison ivy (done on my hands and knees with two pairs of gloves and tyvek sleeves I special ordered from a industrial safety company), additional topsoil and soil amendments, and I need to come up with at least a general plan of what I eventually want the landscape to look like before I start putting stuff in the ground willy nilly.

So, I decided to create a bed from scratch. Using orange spray paint, I outlined a pendulous, blob shape in a sunny part of the front yard. Then sprayed the grass and weeds inside the border with Roundup and waited for atomic winter to commence. When I had a huge, brown, scabby patch, I began covering it in sections, using cardboard and thick layers of newspapers. I soak them with water and then dump whatever I have on hand that day on top of the wet barrier. The day's section size depends on the amount of cardboard I have and the amount of organic stuff I have scrounged. I have used shredded leaves, grass clippings, coffee grounds from Starbucks, shredded bushes and branches (from my shredder) dog poop, left over Halloween pumpkins, and vegetables trimmings.

This method is called a lasagna bed, because of the layers of stuff. Someone has written a book and claimed this idea of composting in place as her own. It is one of those book ideas that I kick myself and think why didn’t I think of that? The bed is at least 25 ft across and I didn’t finish it last season. I have been working my way across the blob, so the right hand side, where I started is much farther along than the far left hand side, which still has dead weeds and grass and no cardboard or compostable material. A gardening neighbor started bringing down his bagged grass clippings. I leave them in plastic and let them fester in the sun for a couple of days before I spread them on the bed. Rotting grass is really pungent, but great for compost. When it is hot and dry, I water the bed with the hose, just to keep everything decaying.

Midway through the summer I started to plant stuff--I couldn't help myself. I had splurged and ordered irises from a fancy-pants farm in Oregon and I wanted them to to be in a central, showcase location, able to bake in the sun, and have good drainage. That was the top of my bed. The grass clipping neighbor, who has an established garden, was giving me stuff as he thinned his beds and I had to put the plants somewhere. At the end of the summer, I had more plants than places to put them, so I was putting them directly into compostable material, not soil. Money and time were short, and I didn't want to waste the plants. I had a vague notion of ordering bulk topsoil and mulch, but it never happened and then it was winter.

Yesterday, another neighbor, who I haven't talked to since last fall, came over while I was pulling out two invasive bushes and said that she was anxiously waiting for the bed to bloom. She is the second person to mention waiting to see what comes up. I don't know if the neighbors are excited about the prospect of blooming perennials or if they are sick of looking at the large, multi textured patch of the slimey grass clipping, deflated rotten pumpkins and the broken, dry stems of things I planted late in the season last fall. I am also very curious to see what comes up this spring. I have no doubt the tough-as-nails day lilies will come up. I am not so sure about the spindly peonies I found growing in shade, moved at the end of the summer and planted in grass clippings and alfalfa pellets.

To Start a Fire

Yesterday I built a fire in my front yard. Although my experience was not as tragic as that of the protagonist in the Jack London story, it was frustrating. Making a bonfire anywhere on the property is something that I couldn’t do anywhere else I have lived. In most communities, it is against the law, and neighbors would have come running,complaining loudly about the smoke and potential fire danger. Since I am in Indiana, where there is no official, of unofficial for that matter, interest in taking care of the environment, I just got my sticks, newspaper, pine cones and matches and commenced to build a fire in the perennial bed. Before I lit it I pulled the hose over and made sure that it worked after a winter of sitting dormant. I had visions of a rip roaring bonfire that would require vigilant attention. What I got was a difficult-to-keep-going, smoky little fire. The logs and limbs are from tree trimming that my brother did three months ago while he was here at Christmas. The branches and small logs have not had a chance to dry out in the last three months. Initially, the leaves, crumpled newspaper and pine cones started burning, and I thought, this is a piece of cake, I will have all my unwieldy yard waste gone in no time. Then the dry twigs and paper burned up and smoldering started. None of the bigger pieces of wood burned easily, instead they smoked, hissed and popped—some pieces even had bubbles and steam coming out the end. At times there was so much smoke, I felt bad for neighbors even though we were in Indiana and many of them have their own brush fires.

It took an hour to get a good base of coals and although it wasn't rip roaring, most of the damp, green wood was burning. By then it was lightly raining and I was bored and getting wet and sick of constantly moving my lawn chair out of the smoke and every ten minutes frantically fanning the coals. After all of my efforts, I picked up the hose and doused the little fire.

The horror that is Merthiolate

I have vivid memories of the almost unbearable burning sensation of the antiseptic merthiolate on my scraped knees, stubbed toes and cut fingers. The orange, acid-like liquid stung so much, my brothers and I would avoid showing our mother small injuries. When she decided we needed the treatment, she went to the medicine cabinet, retrieved the tiny brown glass bottle with the red and white label that read Tincture of Merthiolate. At that point, we knew what was coming and we were trying to hide behind furniture or disappear into walls. She would chase us down and then she would have to hold the afflicted limb in place and daub the evil potion on the wound with the glass wand attached to the bottle cap. During the chase we would be wailing in anticipation of impending pain and after the application we were screaming because of the actual pain we were experiencing. When it was all over the wound and surrounding skin were the color of an electric orange.

When friends of my mother's would witness these dramatic spectacles, they would suggest less stressful alternatives. The first was mecurachrome, which was a cousin of merthiolate, but it did not cause excrutiating pain when applied to an open wound and it left a more reddish stain on the skin. The second was Bactine. My brothers and I thought that the paradigm shifter was Bactine; no red or orange stain and absolutely no pain; only a cold wet sensation. Bactine came out of a large white plastic bottle, not a brown glass vial. It was an antiseptic spray, not a ominous sounding tincture. Bactine was modern, space age, civilized, not old fashioned, victorian and cruel. But my mother was having none of it, she dismissed both. She was firm believer in no pain, no gain, way before the phrase had been culturally articulated. This was the same woman who raised us on Dial bar soap, bcause it was antibacterial. I was 17 before I realized that bar soap could provide a skin soothing, instead of parchment drying, experience.

Tonight I did a google search for merthiolate and found out that the FDA banned it and mercuachrome in the late 90s becaase of the mercury used to make both mixtures. Besides the fact that mercury is bad for humans in general, it also retards healing. I want to call my mother, get her out of bed and ask her, "Gee, did you know that you were slowly poisoning us?"

I was surprised at the number of people who had blog entries and comments on the pain and suffering they experienced due to parental application of merthiolate. All of the posters were in their 40s, 50s and older. You might think that after so many years have passed, we would have recovered or at least forgotten these episodes.

Five dollar foot long

This post is a rant. I watch a lot of TV, so see a lot of commercials. There are always a couple of ads that annoy me. Right now, the Subway five dollar foot long campaign makes me crazy. The insipid jingle is annoying, but what really corks me is the faux assumption that people love the song, sing it often and apply the jingle, "five dollar footlong," to their real life. No one cares. Even if people eat at Subway, they don't belt out "five dollar footlong"

Book as talisman

Yesterday, I went to Half Price Books and sold some books,including a few grad school leftovers that I had never read and most likely never will and a couple from past projects that I will not be resurrecting. I made almost $50, which really surprised me. I was expecting maybe $20. The book buyer said that I had brought in titles they don't see often on the north side of the third tier city I currently reside in.

While I waiting for my "offer" to be formulated, I found a used copy of "Words Fail Me" by Patricia O'Conner. She provides a conversational romp through common writing pitfalls and using semi-ridiculous, illustrative examples, she demonstrates what not to do. It reminds me of a book I bought while writing my dissertation. Years later, I don't remember the name, but it had something about finishing a dissertation in the title. I remember the power I derived from that little beige book. It was filled with brief motivational nuggets and strategies about just getting the damn thing done. I found that in addition to the actual advice, just having bought the book was beneficial. I was having trouble writing up and the book validated my membership in the group "dissertators." One of my many obstacles while writing up was the imposter syndrome. I knew that I shouldn't be there and it was just a matter of time until my department realized that and booted me from the program. My book was a shield against imposter syndrome. I knew that I was not the only one that felt this way and struggled with the same nagging issues.

I did finish. At some point I gave the book to a friend when she was struggling. As I gave it to her, I said this is full of hoary bromides that you see on a poster of kittens at the dentists office, but it works. My friend, one of the most cynical people I know, nodded and said "I'll try anything." She read the book and held on to it for awhile. She also finished and I am sure passed the book along to some else.

"Words fail me," is serving the same dual purpose--it has practical writing advice, and possessing it indicates to me that I am serious about improving my writing. I am hoping/assuming that a by purchasing and reading the book, I will validate my seriousness as someone who will write fascinating pieces and get paid for it. Believe me, if I hadn't used this type of crutch before, I would not be expecting it to work now.

This morning I found a carefully clipped Hints from Heloise column, dated Feb. 2000, in the pages of the book. The column is about hard boiled eggs--a reader wants to know how to peel hard boiled eggs without having the shell stick to the egg. Heloise provides a peeling method involving cold water and cracking the shells. At the end of her advice, she supplies a tidbit about the origin of the name "deviled eggs," and how it actually came from the addition of canned deviled ham. What a way to ruin one of my favorite foods.

Earth shoes pt. 1

After a gloriously sunny day of hanging out at the student union, window shopping and pretending we were university students, SW and I headed to the parking garage to get into her family’s, bulbous late model station wagon and drive home. We began to climb the concrete stairs in the parking garage to the third level where the car was parked. SW, who favored baggy, brightly colored overalls, had her pant legs rolled into cuffs at least five inches above her ankles, in order to show off her striped socks and tan earth shoes.

Earth shoes were boxy leather shoes designed by a Scandinavian person and the soles of the shoes mimicked sand on the beach—so your heel would always be lower than the rest of your foot resulting in better posture and extra calorie burning with every step. They resembled shoe boxes on the foot. Since I had large feet, I went through an abbrieviated earth shoe phase, but I was sensitive enough about the size of my large feet and accentuating their hugeness was not worth the hip factor of the shoes. SW had tiny feet and tiny earth shoes were so ugly they looked cute. She carried a huge shoulder bag that was made out of grey wool fabric with a large stripe of rainbow colors

As we headed up the stairs, SW suddenly exclaimed, "I can't move!" At that moment, I bumped into her since I was walking behind her. She kept saying, "I can't move! I can't move!" I saw that her foot was on top of her shoulder bag, which was slung over her shoulder. When she tried to stand up, she couldn't—the shoulder strap of her bag held her down. Her foot was on the bag keeping it on the step, so every time she started to stand up she increased the pressure holding the bag to the floor. When I realized this, I started laughing so hard I couldn't talk much less explain or help her stand up. I was paralyzed with laughter--all I could do was point at her foot and gulp air. When I looked at her tiny earth shoe foot on the multi colored wool bag on the dirty, chewing gum encrusted step, I could do nothing but double over again with laughter. The family coming up the stairs behind us was exasperated since we were blocking the stairs. Later, we realized they probably thought we were helplessly high. We managed to flatten ourselves against the stair railing, still laughing hysterically and they were able to get by us. After what seemed like 20 minutes, but I am sure it was less than a minute, SW picked up her foot and took it off her purse and was able to stand up and walk again. We stumbled to the car, still laughing that out of control, sustained gut laugh that makes you choke.

For months after that every time we tried to tell the story to our friends, I would see a mental picture of her little earth shoe foot on her purse and I began helpless, spasms of laughter. We could barely get the story out and when we managed to explain what happened, our usually supportive girl friends would look at us like we were freaks—it didn’t seem funny to anyone but us.

The start of a brief biography

I grew up in the 1960s and was a teenager in the 1970s. The 70s still make me shudder--a bleak, depressing, and kind of hopeless time. After I barely graduated from high school, I worked in a factory for a couple of years. There was no interest, motivation, family encouragement or financial resources for college. When I wanted a change, I moved to Alaska and stayed for 10 years. At first I continued my working, drinking, sleeping around lifestyle.

Eventually, I began to tire of that kind of aimlessness, particularly the drain of working service jobs. I applied for a job at the post office, took the test and months later was called in for orientation. The job would be sitting at a machine that envelopes moved through. The machine operator had a fraction of a second to type in the zip code so the envelope went the correct bin. In order to actually land one of these jobs, the potential operator had to reach a certian level of zip code entry proficiency. The practice sessions were unpaid and even if I passed the data entry test, shift work was sporadic--on an as needed basis.

Driving home from orientation, I had an epiphany about what I wanted to do and it wasn't work at the post office. Interestingly, I was 25 or 26 at the time, and it was the first time I made a conscious decision about the future. Up until then I had operated on the fishing bobber principle--wherever I landed a job that is where I stayed and floated along until circumstances forced me to make a change. I knew several people at the post office and it seemed to be an awful combination of relatively good money (at least, I thought so at the time), and the worst of a random rule-filled, petty, bureaucracy. In my gut I knew I shouldn't go work there. And I didn't. I kept bartending, and started college full-time. I had no idea what I wanted to do, and went through several majors ranging from travel industry management to political science finally settling on cultural geography.

No, I did not graduate promptly. I maintained a modified partying lifestyle, did not always make great grades and in a spectacular flameout after the end of a ridiculous (but at the time it seemed life shattering) affair with a married man, dropped out of school mid semester and left the state for awhile. Within a year, I returned to Alaska, went to the University and begged and groveled my way back into classes and this time I finished.

I am writing a book about people who collect stuff in some kind of organized fashion. I am interested in people who collect specific things and have imposed specific parameters on their collection. I especially interested in people who are passionate about collecting things that don't have a lot of value to the rest of us. For example, vacuum cleaners. A man has created a website about his vacuum cleaner collection. His advice to other vacuum collectors is that an object, in this case a vacuum, is only as valuable as someone else thinks it is--in other words what is someone else willing to pay for your old vacuum or iron. He points out that since there is a very small pool of vacuum collectors, he will not get rich on the proceeds of selling his collection. This is the type of collector I am interested in--not the investor or speculator--but the person who enjoys or finds comfort in the objects they accumulate.

As I write, I am reminded that I have always been interested in what people are doing and why their activities are meaningful to them. This is why I went to grad school. And then I put my interests in stories aside and started doing corporate work. I was using my skills, observing and interviewing people, and trying to translate what I saw into something the client or colleagues wanted. I am terrible at it. I am a terrible powerpoint creator. I am terrible at micro messaging at the slide and bullet point level. Telling a story in the corporate world and telling a (real) story are two different animals. It took me a long time to realize that. So, after my last couple of spectacular stumbles in the corporate world, I get it. I am done trying to do the ppt. schtick. Hopefully, the stories I will tell from now on will be interesting to others.

I have been obsessively watching Hoarders on A & E and this weekend I watched the new Discovery Health shows about Hoarders. Many of the people profiled on these shows seem to have serious emotional issues and one or two seem to have serious mental disorders. They all live in houses and apartments packed with stuff and in various levels of unsanitary conditions, including bugs, mice, cats, feces and various and sundry molds, dust and lack of water, heat and gas. The pressure to clean up is coming from relatives, landlords or child protection agencies. I can't stop watching and I have been thinking about why.

Initially, I would watch and compare myself to the hoarders and think "I'm not like that at all." Then I would remember dreams that I have been having intermittently for the last five years about not being able to do something (usually some kind of transitional activity like moving or trying to meet a deadline or catch a plane) and being almost paralyzed by trying to organize a large amount of stuff--the stuff is always random and only of marginal value. I am trying to put all the stuff in boxes or suitcases and spend so much time doing it I am in danger of missing out on some great experience. I don't usually dwell on the meaning of my dreams, but once I realized that I was having these recurring dreams, I thought they might represent feeling bogged down by too much superflous stuff--probably not even real stuff. Then I started watching the hoarding shows and felt a sort of creepy sense of recognition. That said, I do throw stuff out, donate lots to Goodwill and have a cleaning person come every two weeks and a pest guy come twice a year.

The shows have made me realize that my dad was a hoarder--we just thought he was really messy and that it was part of his alcoholism. His car and living spaces were sliding piles of crap. His last couple of vehicles it was impossible to sit in the passenger seat, much less the back seats. When we cleaned out his rental room after he died it was full of sliding piles--he had a tiny path to the bed, and a small place to sleep on the double bed. We threw out 15 bags of worthless stuff--the room was only 10x10.

A completely different aspect of hoarding is the cultural creation of the disease of hoarding. Hoarding as disease can only exist in a culture of plenty, a culture which has enough material stuff for people to collect in excess. I have no doubt that hoarding is a real serious disorder that disrupts and/or destroys people's lives. Hoarders collect their stuff from dumpsters and trash cans, thrift stores, discount stores, and shopping malls. If there wasn't an ocean of stuff for hoarders to harvest, there wouldn't be a hoarding disorder. I am fascinated by this intersection of emotional illness and material abundance. I suppose that if people didn't have stuff to fill their emotional empty spaces they would find something else to try and stuff into the spaces.