That damn reuben sandwich!

The great emotional breakdown of 2012 started with a latke reuben from Rye Deli.

It had been months since wife and I had gone out to enjoy this city that we moved to six months ago with a job for her and dreams of continuing a career for me. Months of having to scrimp and save. Months of saying "Well, we can't go to this musician or comedian that we are hard core fans of, but once I get a job, things'll change."

Then on a tip from Andria, I started checking out the local library for free tickets to local places. The hope was to score tickets to the Minnesota Zoo and go there Thursday. Wife was taking her first paid vacation ever. I was working a temp job for three weeks and now had extra cash for gas money, and we had a plastic bin and bankers box full of books to sell to fund this excursion.

Unfortunately, the zoo tickets are a hot item at the library, only put out randomly, and they go fast. I've checked 4 times since last week, and never got lucky. We tried on Thursday and got nothing. I was determined to give wife a good day out though. We didn't know what we would do, but after selling the books, we had some money to do it.

Wife had read about Rye in pretty much every Twin Cities magazine, and ever since the New York honeymoon, she's wanted to visit. So we pulled in on Thursday afternoon, an empty time at Rye, and our eyes boggled at the menu, the fish on display, and promises of hand carved meats.

I ordered a brisket sandwich and poutine to share. Poutine at Rye is fries and cheese curds smothered in an onion-heavy gravy, and it makes you want to sell your unborn for the promise that you will have it again, soon.

Wife ordered a latke reuben, which is a reuben, but with latke instead of rye.

Her sandwich came out first. A pile of corned beef between two burned looking pieces of latke. She took a bite, and was instantly transported back to our honeymoon, wolfing down a pie tin full of corned beef from Carnegie Deli with a plastic fork in our hotel room across the street. She piled a fork full, carefully balancing the ingredients to give me the perfect bite. A bit scared, I put the fork in my mouth, and my eyes misted. The meat must have been soaking in angel blood and puppy dreams for a week. The latke was blackened, but tasted unburned, just perfectly crisp.

My sandwich was not as good. I'm not a fan of mustard, but it happens so seldom that a sandwich has mustard that I don't make sure to hold it every time.

But that reuben.

Damn.

Shit.

We sat there, I scraped mustard off my sandwich. Wife occasionally gave me more bites, which I took without hesitation.  I usually pick better than her, but this time it was her turn to share.

We then took in the Life Like exhibit at the Walker, which was fantastic. We could have gotten free tickets for this, but it was just one of those things where we didn't know we would be going until we were driving by it. The Life Like exhibit was one of those rare times where my background in modern lit and themes helped me to decode and understand the pieces on display, while still having a gut emotional reaction to them.

(not my picture)

We coasted through Friday, but I got a rejection from a job I sorely wanted and hadn't heard from for weeks. She was nice about it, but it still stung. With the temp job coming to a close, it started to feel like we were once again approaching that dark precipice of not knowing how to make it through another month.

On Saturday, I woke to check my email, and before I was gone 10 minutes, wife was calling for me. I was annoyed.

The off feeling didn't stop. I went to Cub to grab some groceries. Came home and cooked bacon and egg sandwiches. I rented two movies from a redbox. I know wife's tastes are different than mine, but I figured I had scored a good medium by getting two kids movies. Hugo and Tintin. I had to talk her into Hugo, which annoyed me, since I got it specifically for her. She had wanted to go out for St. Patties day, but we couldn't afford it. Instead, I made corned beef. But nothing seemed to be good enough. I was looking down the hole of joblessness once again, and I didn't know what was going to happen. The reuben had cracked the emotional wall on Thursday, and the art gallery had stuck a crowbar in that wall, but Saturday's fights with the wife took a bazooka to it.

We were lying in bed together at about 3, because we had had enough snipping, and nothing was going right between us, and the weight of everything just. Snapped.

And I started crying. Deep sobs. Like the kind a 13 year old girl would have if she came to the deep realization that Robert Pattinson was way too old for her and would never, ever, ever be interested and the best she could hope for was the scabby acne guy named Stan from fourth period. Holy shit did I break. And wife just jumped on, wrapping her arms around me, calling me back from the abyss. Telling me it would be all right. I cried like I couldn't breathe. I wore my way through eight Kleenix. I felt like I was doing sit ups, the deep stomach shit that was going on.

One hour later.

Me: What the hell was that?

Wife: It was you letting go for once. You haven't done that since we moved.

Me: Holy shit.

Wife: It's nice to know you are still human. I was worried. No one should be able to do what you've done for six months without that happening.

Me: Thank you for being here.

Wife: Hey, it's my turn. Howabout we watch Tintin?

Me: OK.

Epilogue: Tintin is frackin awesome.  

Dead Horse for UND logo!

I don’t have much to say that hasn’t already been said about the UND logo debate, and let’s face it, most people are pretty vocal to the point of not being able to hear the other side anyway. If there are any commonplaces in this mess, they include:

1.     That this whole situation is ridiculous

2.     That the other side is ridiculous

3.     That one’s own side is the only logical thing in the world to believe in and Oh My God how stupid are you to keep bringing up this issue during the time of existence where things were going well for my side and we should have let it rest.

It looks like the powers that be are retiring the Fighting Sioux logo, leaving a Native American sized hole in the hearts of many North Dakotans and UND graduates.

For this reason, I am starting a campaign to submit Dead Horse as the new logo.

There are many great reasons for this:

1.     The name is vaguely Native American enough to vaguely offend some people without being specific enough to cause problems.

2.     Dead Horse loves a good beating, and any UND logo needs to be able to take a good beating.

3.     Zombies are "in" right now.

4.     Dead Horse will love you no matter how hard you pound him and no matter what sorts of implements you use to clobber his bones.

5.     If you have been on a college campus lately, you know that they are great places to go to kill time while you wait to grow up. They are also great for debates that have been talked to death over the course of existence. College campuses are full of students that like to discuss our bullshit bourgeois society and the death of capitalism. What better symbol of this Ouroboros of intellectualism than Dead Horse? Except maybe an Ouroboros, I guess. 

6.     Because how cool would it be to have a dead horse as your mascot?

It has also been suggested that "Dead Horse" by Guns N' Roses would make a great school song. How rocking would that be? Extremely. The answer is extremely rocking.

So vote today, vote often. Long live the UND Dead Horses!

Comment boards are black holes of suck

My reporting days took place in the early days of the news/internet convergence, when papers put some of their news online. We had a part time guy who would come in and post the day’s stories and leave. The site was pretty simple.

I got out just in time.

The comment boards are now an expected feature of the online news experience. When the Forum shut them down for a brief time a few years ago, people went ballistic. They felt their rights to free speech were being taken away, rights that they didn’t have 5 years ago in this form. Rights that aren’t actually tied to any law, but try to tell them that this is just a service the Forum provides and they want you to die slowly with at least three crows working on your eyes.

The comment boards are where reason, community, and argument go to die. Continually. Every story, and every comment.

Every person who comments on these boards has a similar desire – to get someone to change their mind and see the world from his point of view. It’s like having the ability to speak to all the drivers around you while in your car and telling them how they are doing it wrong. At the same time, they are trying to do the same.

I have enjoyed reading the comment sections despite all this – in much the same way one enjoys watching reality television. It’s a verbal party with no accountability. The only reason to post to a comment board that will fulfill your need is if you are posting just to poke fun. Try to bring any logic or reason to the party and you will be going home with no one. I enjoy posting as dead horse, a character I bring out whenever the story topic or argument has been ground into dust, pissed on, and sun bleached – yet still somehow people are still trying to convince others to see things from their point of view.

The Fargo Forum comment section is populated by about two dozen regular posters. Each has been posting for years, but never have I seen any of them change their point of view based on someone else’s comments. Read long enough and each will be guilty of the same logical gymnastics they accuse others of. It can be disheartening to see such public verbal belief masturbation with nary an internet cop in sight. There are moderators for the site, but they’ve rarely laid down the law since the early days of the new area voices system. At a conference once, I heard the presenter talk about how the commenters on her site began to self-police, and after a while, they understood the community of commenters and were civil. I don’t see that happening on the Forum, but I can dream.

I try to remember that it’s always the same 24 people posting, which helps keep the despair over the Fargo/Moorhead area to a minimum. The other 175,000 people here really don’t give that much of a shit about these events. Comment boards are largely for the extremists. You can’t reason with an extremist. You don’t commune with an extremist. And you can’t argue with an extremist. It doesn’t work.

Another comment board area I frequently read is on avclub.com. Their commenters also have their faults – most commonly a sense of self-importance and judgmentalism that comes as part of the hipster douchebag package. But they are also pretty funny if you can look past the cynicism.

I have a lot of conflicting thoughts about comment boards, and I hoped that this blog would help to organize them. However, I feel rambling today. 

Since I began checking out twitter, I’ve strayed away from my heavier days of trolling the Forum comment boards. I think twitter is the next generation of comment boards. You can follow people as you see fit, don’t have to read crazy people that make you angry and aren't open to new ideas, you can follow the local news reporters, and can get a nice one-liner joke from any of your favorite comedians. Twitter has become the comment board of choice for any news topic of the day – and it never pulls you into a pit of depression over the future of mankind the way that the Forum comment boards can, unless you follow Justin Beiber fans, I suppose.