Saturday Essay Posts

What About Today?

Apr 12, 2025 1 Comment

Today is the day. The day to do something. To do anything. Because there is no better day than today.

This is the day you think about more than yourself. You think about your family, neighbors, friends, others around the city, and the vulnerable populations who are struggling with such challenges as poverty and being homeless.

And no matter what time it is when you read this, it’s the right moment to respond and get physical. To stand up. To step up. To speak up. If you wait for another time or day, it will be too late.

Too many of us have never felt a greater sense of angst and urgency. With all the disturbing news, it would be very easy and understandable to distance ourselves, to distract ourselves, to even disconnect ourselves from the harsh reality which surrounds us. But we can’t keep closing the door behind us and walking away from what’s happening out there.

This is not just a bad dream or nightmare. It’s definitely more than that. It’s real. It’s painful. It’s inevitable.

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Random

The FBI Paid for My Co-op Membership: Minnesota Food War 1975

Mar 22, 2025 No Comments

Transcript of interview with former co-op volunteer / FBI confidential informant

Interviewer: How did you become an FBI informant during the Minnesota food co-op wars of 1975?

Name redacted: Well, when co-ops started forming in the late ‘60s, the FBI thought it was a communist plot. That theory got a lot of traction because many early co-op’ers were actual, literal Communists, mimeographing typewritten Leninist newsletters. You would’ve thought downtown Minneapolis was the Red Square. So it was a case of “let’s just keep an eye on these people.” But since there was a cooperative warehouse in Wisconsin serving as a distribution hub, when co-op-related violence broke out, it crossed state lines. So the FBI went from passive surveillance to active infiltration. When the Minneapolis co-op wars spread to the North Shore in ’75, I was on the short list to infiltrate the Duluth one. A native Duluthian, I had worked undercover before, and I was already a Co-op shopper. I was not a member, but knew some of the early Co-op’ers from church. I wasn’t on the anarcho-communist continuum, and I wasn’t a hippie — I just wanted better food. This made my handlers a little nervous. They started thinking I was a pinko. But I told them, “You couldn’t find a loaf of whole wheat bread in Duluth until the Co-op opened in 1970.” They were eating Wonder Bread baloney sandwiches with mayonnaise, but that convinced them. So the FBI paid for my Co-op membership. Then I signed up for member volunteer work shifts to get on the inside. I stirred buckets of nut butter with a drill attachment, but I heard stuff. I wasn’t the only one, the Feds had an informant in Grand Marais too, and some as far south as Iowa. Minneapolis was the hub, of course; the co-ops down there were popping off like popcorn.

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Christian Boarding School Texas Football

Mar 08, 2025 No Comments

I still have bitter high school football recriminations. My 1980s Episcopal boarding school in Texas glorified football above other sports. I attended on a scholarship from family connections, not through any academic or athletic merit. And I learned the wrong lesson about authority from the sports program.

A recent obituary in the alumni newsletter helped spur me to write this, although I’ve been kicking it around for 40 years. Nothing personal against Coach P who I don’t have to name. For the purposes of this story he is the universal coach. This is not to disrespect his essential personhood or whatever. But I learned things I did not want to learn about society and all the rest of it — universal things I never forgot.

Coach P’s obituary said he was the decades-long athletics director, had coached thousands of games and taught thousands of history classes, too. He is fondly remembered by nearly everyone, including myself. He was a real Texas character. His knees were busted up and it crabbed his walk. I assumed it had happened on a football field in his younger days, a brutal hit or series of hits marking him, claiming him for the sport. You knew he was committed. He was gray and had the hairy ears of an old man if he let it go, something I noticed sitting behind him in chapel once or twice, and it made me swear to never get old or sentiments to that effect. He wasn’t really that old but he was weathered. He was not without warmth or humor, and he bonded with his players particularly. Like in the Lou Reed song, they “wanted to play football for the coach.” They liked how, when he was consternated at you, he would exclaim “Hellfire, son!”

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Sports

Last Call at the Pilot House

Feb 22, 2025 No Comments

Duluth Herald late-edition special report
Thursday, Jan. 28, 1915
By Joe Crisp, Senior Shipping Reporter

A famed local maritime drinking establishment has shut its doors. This is the ship’s pilot house on the tip of Timber Point in the harbor. For 16 years it has operated as the Pilot House bar. Initially serving a clientele made up exclusively of members of the Great Lakes Life Saving Service, soon it caught on with sailors and dock workers. Older Duluthians recall its origin, as the pilot house of the doomed Marchande which stuck out of the water in the shipping lanes for weeks in 1899. She had sunk by the stern as her cargo shifted, but her nose bobbed up. Using a floating crane, the Life Savers salvaged the pilot house and installed it on Timber Point. There they collectively owned and operated it as a business, until last night.

Because today, as the war in Europe heats up, the 45-year-old Life Saving Service has been officially subsumed into the Revenue Cutter Service. The resulting compound organization forms the newest branch of the armed forces, the United States Coast Guard. The Pilot House is a casualty of new regulations and a wave of retirements. Some old-timer Life Savers don’t wish to adapt, nor to compete against much younger men in basic training, to re-qualify for what will be different jobs. Many jobs are being eliminated. All three of Duluth’s Life Saving stations — at Park Point, Lester River, and Stony Point — have been officially replaced by the single new Coast Guard station in the harbor. The oars and battered wooden surfboats of the Life-Savers have given way to a steel steam-powered Coast Guard cutter, and a modern Life-Saving station complete with radio equipment and a machine shop. Among the sweeping changes are rules prohibiting Coast Guard personnel profiting from salvage. And since all the booze served at the Pilot House was salvaged from local shipwrecks, this effectively puts the bar out of business. Last night was last call.

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Minnesota Land Surveyor’s Deathbed Confession, 1907

Feb 01, 2025 2 Comments

The text below is reproduced from a handwritten document that slipped out of a book of maps at the Minnesota Historical Society. Its authentication remains in progress.

I die happy seeing the completion of the Minnesota land survey, and the dissolution of the Office of the Surveyor General. He surveyed himself out of a job. We all did, the great work of our lives. It took five decades. But holes were chopped through the state that cannot be filled. I discovered a flaw in the measurements in the summer of 1855 when we were still just a territory. And I have knowledge of the disappearance of my hated competitor as he fell between the parallels, in the woods of what is now northeast Duluth.

Many surveying companies were employed by the Surveyor General. Mine was one and I was sworn in as a deputy surveyor. Rough work. We camped away from home for months, in 10-man teams: axe-men, chainmen, cooks, and muleskinners. Our families didn’t know if we were alive or dead until we returned (or failed to) for the winter break.

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History ,

Gang of Thieves

Jan 25, 2025 No Comments

Every time he comes into the public library, Marv is mumbling to himself, engaged in an angry conversation with the assholes who live inside his head. Six feet tall, hard faced, his vibe is intimidating, but when he speaks to library staff, Marv’s hissed swearing ceases; unfailingly, he is respectful. Mostly, he’s there to use the computers, and once he’s settled inside the massive downtown building, Marv stays, sometimes spending more than half a day in the climate-controlled, well-lit shelter that is the main library in Duluth, Minnesota. At closing time, he’ll bid workers “Good night!” before he and His Mumbles head outside to unlock whatever bike he’s riding that week.

When Marv leaves the building, he’s accompanied by a library technician, someone who will unfasten and remove the eight-pound chain and small u-lock that protect his bike from theft during his long hours of poking around the internet. Marv doesn’t own a lock. Likely, he doesn’t own the bike. But it’s his for as long as he’s got it, and checking out a library lock assures he’ll have a means of getting to whatever passes as “home” at day’s end.

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The Grateful Dead vs. The Velvet Underground

Jan 18, 2025 No Comments

The 2024 death of Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh reminded me: I discovered the Grateful Dead and the Velvet Underground at the same time. The bands still exist as a unity in my mind, even after I figured out they were polar opposites.

My 1980s high school girlfriend was from the Northeast around Connecticut and New York City. She fused goth, punk, and hippie vibes. When we were 18, we took acid in her Austin, Texas shack. That’s where she DJ’d for me, on vinyl, the Grateful Dead and the Velvet Underground.

I’d heard the bands but never listened. She played the 1970 Dead tune “Box of Rain,” written by Lesh about the death of his father. Then we listened to “Rock & Roll,” the 1970 VU tune by Lou Reed about music as refuge, with Sterling Morrison on lead guitar. It all sounded like sheer Americana to me.

In the 1990s I became more of a Velvet Underground guy, from the band’s proto-punk stuff. But then I dated a Deadhead in Berkeley, and she took me to some Dead shows. That’s when I really got what the Dead fuss was about. I enjoyed my first show plenty, just for the carnival atmosphere, not having a deep knowledge of their discography. But then they covered “Johnny B. Goode” and the top of my skull lifted off. The secret of Dead shows is they piled crescendo on crescendo until you hit peak bliss, then they kept climbing. Yes I was on mescaline.

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Music

The Most Read Saturday Essays of 2024

Dec 28, 2024 No Comments

Saturday Essay logo generic

For the fourth year in a row, Jim Richardson has dominated the top of the charts. He has authored four of the five most read Saturday Essays of 2024.

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Ripped at Lost in the ’50s in 2004

Dec 21, 2024 No Comments

[Editor’s note: For this week’s essay we’ve once again pulled out a relic from the archive of Slim Goodbuzz, who served as Duluth’s “booze connoisseur” from 1999 to 2009. Twenty years ago the Sultan of Sot paid a visit to Lost in the ’50s, 1809 N. Third St. in Superior, and composed this article for the December 2004 edition of the Ripsaw, which was the last issue of the publication in its monthly magazine format.]

Of the five bars located at the receptacle end of Tower Avenue, Lost in the ’50s is the shyest and most understated. Other bars in the neighborhood are known for their horseshoes or their burgers or for being a place to quietly drink yourself to death. Lost in the ’50s offers cheap drinks, a decent juke, bad karaoke and, as the name would suggest, a smattering of velvet Elvis art. For some reason, few people bother to take them up on the offer.

Location has as much to do with it as anything else. The layout of the Tower Avenue/North Third Street intersection tends to lead the drunken eye to the east, away from Lost in the ’50s and toward more dubious places, like Jo D’s Corner Oasis, JT’s or the deathly Tom’s Cedar Lounge. Besides, most people, once they get as far as the Anchor or maybe Molly’s, don’t even think of venturing any farther, because they assume they have all they need. They’re wrong, and I’m going to tell you why.

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Ripped at O’Gilby’s in 2004

Nov 16, 2024 No Comments

[Editor’s note: For this week’s essay we’ve once again pulled out a relic from the archive of Slim Goodbuzz, who served as Duluth’s “booze connoisseur” from 1999 to 2009. Twenty years ago the Sultan of Sot paid a visit to the O’Gilby’s, 511 E. Fourth St. in Duluth’s Central Hillside, and composed this article for the November 2004 issue of the Ripsaw magazine. O’Gilby’s closed in May 2008; the location is now a parking lot.]

The great thing about being an alcoholic in a region with so many bars is that there is one to fit each of my moods. No matter what I feel like doing, there is an establishment that caters to that specific type of fun. O’Gilby’s isn’t the kind of place you go to see live music. It isn’t the kind of place where you go to try to pick someone up. It isn’t a place where you go to dance or to participate in illegal gambling. No, O’Gilby’s is the kind of place you go to when you just want to get plastered and sit around like an Ethiopian with flies on your face. And tonight I’m having the time of my life.

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History ,

These Extraordinary Days

Nov 09, 2024 No Comments

In the introduction to their book The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis, the authors wrote, “The world is on fire, from the Amazon to California, from Australia to the Siberian Arctic. The hour is late, and the moment of consequence, so long delayed, is now upon us. Do we watch the world burn, or do we choose to do what is necessary to achieve a different future? Who we understand ourselves to be determines the choice we will make. That choice determines what will become of us. The choice is both simple and complex, but above all it is urgent.”

Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac talk about the various climate events that have contributed to a more fragile planet over the past fifty years. The populations of mammals, fish, reptiles and birds have declined by 60%. Half of the world’s coral reefs have disappeared. Also, the Arctic summer sea ice is rapidly shrinking.

Over the past several months, we’ve been reading about the extensive wildfires in California and Canada as well as the ever rising temperatures in Phoenix and other parts of the Southwest. And now, we’re watching wildfires in Oklahoma, historic heat records in the central region of the United States, new hottest night records in Indonesia and Thailand, and a year’s worth of rain fell in 8 hours in Valencia, Spain.

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Two-headed Calf and the Power of Stories

Nov 02, 2024 1 Comment

I own thousands of books and comic books. I own fewer books than comics — I have grown disenchanted with the novel, as a form of storytelling, because it sucks me away from the world that I want to be part of, to find meaning in. So my shelves are filled with nonfiction books that I can reference, instead of read cover to cover. They are filled with poetry books and prose poems, writings by mystics and cranks. And they are filled with comics.

Comics read quickly but reward reflection — I can zoom through 20 pages while waiting for a teenager who takes forever to kiss their girlfriend goodbye, or I can slowly reflect on a page or two that tugs at my heart and makes me think.

The Laura Gilpin poem, “Two Headed Calf,” has become the source for a lot of internet comics.

For example, the two-page comic below by Little Tunny (their name on Twitter and on Patreon).

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Ripped at the Duluth Athletic Club in 2004

Oct 26, 2024 No Comments

[Editor’s note: For this week’s essay we’ve once again pulled out a relic from the archive of Slim Goodbuzz, who served as Duluth’s “booze connoisseur” from 1999 to 2009. Twenty years ago the Sultan of Sot paid a visit to the Duluth Athletic Club Bar & Grill, 402 W. First St., and composed this article for the October 2004 issue of the Ripsaw magazine. The Duluth Athletic Club closed in 2008 after it was flooded by a toilet overflow.]

Tonight, in an effort to mentally prepare you for the upcoming presidential election, I ask this question: Where in the Twin Ports would George W. Bush go to get drunk? The answer, of course, is nowhere. Bush doesn’t drink. He used to drink, but then he flip-flopped and turned into an evangelical traitor to the cause.

John Kerry, on the other hand, might go to the Duluth Athletic Club Bar & Grill. After all, the DAC is a nice, clean, all-American place where any political figure could spend a quiet night without any controversy whatsoever. And a rich sonuvabitch like Kerry could certainly afford the overpriced drinks.

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History ,

Football

Oct 19, 2024 No Comments

Since early September I’ve been really wanting to throw a football around with someone. It makes sense given the season, but until a few weeks ago I bet it had been 25 years since I’d even thought about it. After the last throw or catch on some early-’90s day I’ll never remember, after throwing and catching footballs every autumn day and a lot of others from elementary school until college, I just didn’t do it anymore. I don’t even know the last time I picked up a football before recently. And now, for no reason I can discern, I’m lost in thoughts of throwing a soft, arcing spiral to someone, watching the ball into my hands after they throw it back to me, and repeating that process over and over and over.

I played organized football from elementary school until college. Fourth grade until sophomore year. Age nine to age 20. Eleven years. I’m 53 and the 11 years from here back to 42 feel like a blip. Nothing. Pretty sure I turn 64 next month. I’ll be 75 a week or two after that. But when I was 20 those 11 years were half of forever and Football Player was most of what I had known myself to be. Elementary school, junior high, high school, and the first two years of college. Each an eon that feels more heavy and definitive the older I get. The past won’t stop being present. Those 11 years have lasted so much longer than their actual length.

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Sports ,

Synchronicity in Action: How I Met the Late Ralph Abraham

Oct 12, 2024 No Comments

Among the mind-blowing coincidences of my life is how I met the countercultural chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham, who died on September 19. He was a huge influence on me and the moment we met was extraordinary.

Coincidence is not technically the same thing as synchronicity. To believe in synchronicity, you must believe in meaning. And I did.

It was the 1990s and I was a young hippie newlywed in Bonny Doon, the backwoods of Santa Cruz, California. Like a lot of folks, my wife and I lived at the end of a long winding dirt road at the end of another long winding road. It was like a miles-long driveway. People with land out there had sprinkled the place with trailers and shacks, and they let people rent them cheap on the down low. One of those shacks was home sweet home. You could hear the ocean in the distance. The outhouse had no walls or roof, it was just … out.

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R.I.P., Random ,