South 12th

Raynor’s stupendous (and stupendously unhelpful) unhelpful phonetic alphabet reminded of a particular instance in my own life where the more traditional NATO phonetic alphabet, the one that Raynor’s will shortly replace, proved extremely helpful in the pursuit of some dubious sociology.

There was once, several years ago, a new-ish band made up of some guys Nate and I knew. This band had ten or eleven original songs, and they had a distinctive sound (a bland mishmash of Fugazi and the Rapture, which was a very popular sonic cocktail in those days). They had great outfits to wear (tight pants, Wayfarers, ironic t-shirts), and they even had a show lined up.

What they did not have was a name.

So they were asking around for suggestions, and Nate and I privately agreed that these pleasant, blandly attractive, generic rockers ought to go ahead and call themselves the Fun Guys Who Probably Mean Well. It seemed to suit their essence — they were fun guys to have a drink with, and blandness aside, they certainly had their hearts in the right place. 
 
So while they ended up calling themselves something else, our name stuck. It seemed vaguely rude, though, so we just started using an acronym — F.G.W.P.M.W.’s. That’s a mouthful, of course, so drawing on my training as a secretary, I devised a better name. When I need to spell things out over the phone, I use the NATO phonetic alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot…). So the abbreviation could be spelled out as Foxtrot Golf Whiskey Papa Mike Whiskey. That’s also too long, so, for short: Mike Whiskey.
 
So you have the Mike Whiskey: a fun guy who probably means well.
 
It turns out that there is an entire subgroup of urban-dwelling men in their 20s and 30s that, although they collectively constitute a very clearly identifiable demographic, had previously gone unclassified.

A Mike Whiskey is the sort of guy you often run into at rock shows or art openings, who is sort of handsome with shaggy hair, wears nice jeans, always has a funny thing to say (but not that funny), likes to drink beer, and has given his heart over to OK-but-frankly-not-that-great aesthetic pursuits. You like seeing him, but don’t go out of your way to do so.

A Mike Whiskey is the sort of guy whose band you see on the bill of a show you were going to anyway, and you don’t say “oh, awesome!”. You say “oh, I know him.”

He’s a Mike Whiskey. You’ve known a lot of them. You’ve probably dated one. You might even be one.

It becomes such handy shorthand that you don’t know how you got along without it. For example:

“So, what’s he like?”

“Uh, he played guitar in that one band we saw last year at the Nomad — you know, I think he works at the Wedge? He used to date what’s-her-name? Got kind of a scruffy beard sometimes, but he had a mustache last year for a few weeks? Come on, you know him, super nice guy — remember, we ran into him last weekend at the Mountain Goats show? And he said he liked your shirt? And he was going on and on about the new Grizzly Bear album? Come on, you know who I mean…”

Or:

“So, what’s he like?”

“Eh, he’s kind of a Mike Whiskey.”

“Oh, I see.”

He’s a Mike Whiskey!

I am very likely in an embattled and sleepy-eyed minority here, but I really love the end of daylights savings in the fall. You can spend the entire summer enjoying long, lazy, well-lit evenings that dip off imperceptibly into twilight sometime long after supper, where you bike around without lights in white pants rolled up to mid-calf until at least 9:30 pm, at which point you realize the day is very nearly over and you haven’t accomplished shit except drinking a lot of summer cocktails with lime garnish and exploring a dozen city blocks worth of south Minneapolis commercial architecture. Yes!

So it feels right that as bike-and-white-pants season comes to an end, you trade all of that in for darkness, enforced solitute and a re-committment to the sort of unwavering Nordic work ethic that gave America everything from The Boat of Longing to “The Toolmaster of Brainerd.” Time to hit the studio! Time to up your Netflix queue to four-at-a-time!

Here in Minneapolis, the sun will set at 4:55pm today, and then continue to set two-and-a-half minutes earlier with every passing day until Hippie Holiday Winter Solstice. By the end of November, the sun will have set completely at 4:30 in the afternoon. The entire state will be plunged into darkness by the time I leave work, in other words. 

I still find that tremendously exciting for some reason. It makes you feel as if you are privy to the secrets of the North, as if you have a shared kinship with Canadians and Swedes and Russians and Alaskans and Finns that everyone in the rest of the hemisphere doesn’t get as they go on with their subtropical sweating and stinking well into November.

I will be sick of of all of it by late March, of course, but I’ll have gotten a tremendous amount of work done, and will be ready to jump back into warmth and light with a sweaty, white-pantsed fury.

Here is an excerpt from a reader’s (presumably negative) two-star customer review of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America in Arabic Farsi (thanks, Age of Dhool!). If anyone speaks Arabic Farsi, I would love to know what specifically is being singled out for criticism.

صید قزل آلا در آمریکا نوشته ریچارد براتیگان یک رمان پست مدرن است. براتیگان در این اثر که شاهکار او محسوب می شود نگارش داستان را تکه تکه پیش برده است که هر تکه را می توان به عنوان بخشی جدا در نظرگرفت و به این دلیل ظاهر این رمان شبیه مجموعه داستان کوتاه است و داستان ها را می توان مس.. صید قزل آلا در آمریکا نوشته ریچارد براتیگان یک رمان پست مدرن است. براتیگان در این اثر که شاهکار او محسوب می شود نگارش داستان را تکه تکه پیش برده است که هر تکه را می توان به عنوان بخشی جدا در نظرگرفت و به این دلیل ظاهر این رمان شبیه مجموعه داستان کوتاه است و داستان ها را می توان مستقل از همدیگر و بدون در نظر گرفتن ترتیب آنها خواند. نشانه هایی از قبیل داشتن یک فرزند خردسال و مسافرت با شریک زندگی که در بخش های مختلف کتاب آمده سبب می شود به راحتی نتیجه گرفت که راوی در بخش های مختلف داستان یک نفر است. ضمنا نقل تکرار شده داستان درباره فردی با نام کوتوله صید قزل آلا در آمریکا که به گفته راوی یک الکلی آس و پاس است را می توان به عنوان رد پای راوی یکسان در همه داستان ها در نظر گرفت. با هم در نظر گرفتن کل رمان از راوی داستان که صید قزل آلا را در مکان ها و زمان های مختلف نقل می کند و حوادث مختلفی برایش پیش می آید داستان را بهتر در ذهن خواننده جا می اندازد.

A few years ago I was sitting at the bar at Nye’s Polonaise with a friend, making the bartender mix me obscure, fruity cocktails from the ’60s that I’d never heard of (the bartenders at Nye’s are almost all ancient Northeast natives that have a sense memory of every cocktail ever created, even the really farty ones, like a “Blood and Sand”). It was still pretty early in the evening, before the 8pm rush, so there weren’t many people around. Just me and my friend, some lone diners, the bartender, Gina the hostess, and two identical twins in their 50s, sitting a few seats down.

The identical twins were bickering about something or other, and the conversation began to spill over to our end of the bar. I forget what the dispute was about, but it came down basically to them politely accusing each other of being assholes, and then asking me and my friend for some arbitration on the matter. I don’t like to call people assholes because I’m a wuss (who else drinks a “Blood and Sand”?), but the twins were adamant. Cheerful, even.

“The thing is,” said one of them, “that we have studied this issue for a long time. We are both assholes. You are, too, probably.” These two brothers had a very elaborate personal taxonomy of assholes, identifying themselves as Number One Type assholes, and me as a Number Two Type, or possibly a Four. They began to describe their system in some detail.

“We’ve written a book on the subject,” said the other. “If you give us your address, we’ll send you a copy.”

They seemed like OK guys, so I gave them the address of the house in Phillips I was living in. They thanked me and both left the bar, and I went back to my Blood and Sand and forgot all about it.

Six months passed.

One day, I received a mysterious package in the mail. It was a copy of The Ordering of Assholes: A Useful Study by Craig Wiese and the Brothers Oberpriller.

The Ordering of Assholes is less a book than a pamphlet, but a fascinating one. It’s copyrighted 1989, though the “eleventh printing” I own seems to date from 2003. “We’ve thought about this very hard and our findings are important because the world is full of assholes,” it begins.

They then go on to identify four types of assholes:

1. Perfect Assholes: Guys who are totally conscious of being an asshole and enjoy being one.
2. Real Assholes: Guys who are assholes but don’t think they are.
3. Can Be an Asshole: Guys who the skills to be PERFECT ASSHOLES.
4. No Assholes: Guys who aren’t assholes, and don’t try to be, as in “he’s no asshole.”

“You’ll note we said ‘guys,” they clarify. “Females don’t count in the world of assholes. Most of them would be TWOs or FOURs anyway.” The distinctions being drawn here are rather delicate, of course, but I am fairly certain I’ve known at least a few female Number One types. Still, they wrote the book, not me.

Regardless, the brothers go on to identify the four types in some detail. “Perfect assholes” will often “do the exact opposite of what you tell them to do” and “make people very nervous at social gatherings where certain behavior patterns are expected.” “Real assholes” are “not a good thing to be”; they have “a self-perception that is wildly out of sync with reality.” Number Threes “are very successful drinkers because they can often become ONES for an entire evening.” Number Fours are “just nice,” and “very relaxed.”

The pamphlet concludes with this enigmatic statetment: “There are certain Hall of Fame assholes who have achieved the rare distinction of 5-STAR ASSHOLE status. There is no honor higher known to mortal man. Pay homage to this rare breed of asshole.” Who are they? We aren’t told. Presumably, once we’ve absorbed the lessons in the pamphlet, we’ll be able to identify them in the wild.

There is no contact information in the text, though the Brothers Oberpriller are written about here; turns out they were part of a twins study at the University in the 1950s.