a work in progress...

There was once a place on the erstwhile internet called "Seen Reading" (which seems now to have become a book, because, sure, I guess, let's print off the whole internet!).  The premise was a brief observation of a person, usually on public transit, who was reading a book, noticing what page they were on in that book, and then quoting on that page.

This premise of seeing where a person was - both in their reading journey of a particular book and in transit - I suppose it's a bit fanciful, but it feels like we might gain some insight (imperfect and incomplete to be sure into a person who we see where they are in their journey.

When Tim asked me (a bunch of us really) a month or so ago what we were currently reading, I answered him a list of 7 books - a sort of typical number that I'm usually in the middle of.  So I thought a current reckoning - not only of books, but of shows (and perhaps any movies too) that I'm in the midst of completing.

I've been on goodreads quite a bit more in 2025 than ever before, because I'm planning on writing a short review of each book I finish this year, not just cataloging them.  They have a feature of the "currently reading" list called 'tabled', so I'll go through my active reads and watches, and then see if I can complete a catalog of tabled texts as well:

Books 

[This feels like a fairly low number of active books for me, but in part, I don't have any of my typical encyclopedic works that I am working through, of which there is usually one or two]

1. Light in August, by William Faulkner
2. Frank Talk: The Inside Stories of Zappa's Other People, by Andrew Greenaway
3. I Cheerfully Refuse, by Leif Enger
4. The Hunting Party, by Lucy Foley
5. Plagues Upon the Earth: Diseases and the Course of Human History, by Kyle Harper

Shows 

[of course there are many shows that I am between seasons for - I've watched 3 seasons of Barry, but not the 4th again.  I watched The Bear, Season 1, but not the rest,,, yet]

1. Dune: Prophecy, Season 1
2. Laid, Season 1
3. Fast Friends, hosted by Whitney Cummings
4. Star Trek: Prodigy, Season 2
5. The Decameron, created by Kathleen Jordan
6. No Good Deed, starring Ray Romano & Lisa Kudrow
7. mr. & mrs. smith, Season 1
8. The New Yorker Presents, Season 1

Movies 

[I may actually adjust this list before I hit "Publish", as I'm working my way through one of them now]

1. The Raven, starring John Cusack
2. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, starring the BeeGees!

tabled 

[I'm not sure if I intend to finish some of these, or most of these or what, but l started them all with that in mind, I'm sure.]

Wallace & Gromit: Murder Most Fowl

Time Bandits

Franklin

What If, Season 3

Northern Exposure

Dark Matter

The Sticky

Castle Rock, Season 2

Pop Culture Jeopardy

The Magic Island, by William Seabrook

How I Met Your Mother

An Island Away, by Daniel Putkowski

The Journey of Natty Gann

Our Trip to New England!

 Directions: Begin by filling in the form on this page with one of each word for the type of word requested.  Then, enter the word into the paragraphs below according to the number requested.  Read the paragraph aloud and ENJOY!!!

1. [a first name] __________________________________________________
2. [proper noun] ________________________________________________
3. [city] ________________________________________________________
4. [person of significance] _______________________________________
5. [past participle] _____________________________________________
6. [body of water] ______________________________________________
7. [family surname] ____________________________________________
8. [U.S. State] _________________________________________________
9. [type of baked good] ___________________________________________
10. [geographic feature] ____________________________________________
11. [city feature] ___________________________________________________
12. [landmark] _____________________________________________________
13. [a number] ___________________________
14. [weather phenomenon] _________________________________________
15. [famous author] ________________________________________________
16. [noun] _________________________________________________________
17. [sinful substance] ______________________________________________
18. [Title of an Important Person] _____________________________________
19. [Home Ec Term] _________________________________________________
20. [adjective] _______________________________________________________
21. [type of water body] _______________________________________________
22. [verb] ____________________________________________________________
23. [popular acronym] _________________________________________________
24. [wet foodstuff] _____________________________________________________

Our Trip to New England!

 

Ah, I remember it like it was 23 or so years ago...  

We three (Mom, Papa, and (1)__________) headed off on (2)_______________ Airlines to fly from Chicago to (3)_________________.  (This would eventually become my first of four trips {so far!} through Boston's Logan Airport - once in 2013 for a Haitian Studies conference at Harvard and later in 2015 and 2019 on Peter Mahler's dime to meet with Carmella Kletijian and (4)______________________________).

We collected our rental car (possibly my first time ever driving a (5)_______________ car!), and were off to drive north up the coast of the (6)______________________.  Our first landmark was passing Kennebunkport, Mass. where the (7)______________________ Family famously had their summer compound.

Further up the coast we stopped in Portland, (8)___________________ and tried their world famous lobster (9)__________________s.  I don't remember quite where we stayed that first night, but I think we continued up and around the Atlantic (10)__________________________.

Our first full day (or one of the days, I don't really remember the timeline), we visited Acadia National Park in Bar (11)______________________, Maine.  Driving into the park (I think), Don & Hope, having recently reached retirement age, bought lifetime passes to any (12)_____________________________ in the entire country, which they have gone on to use (13) ____________ times since that trip in 2001.  

Before leaving Acadia, we saw the famous (14)________________ Hole, and stopped at Bar Harbor Brewing Company before heading north to Bangor, home of famous author. (15)__________________________________.  I recall we stopped at a (16)____________________ shop in Bangor, asking about the whereabouts of Mr. King, but it was before we all had the internet in our pocket, and the book store owner said he liked to be left alone, so I think that's about all we did in Bangor.

We drove west, through New Hampshire (where we learned that the only place you can buy (17)_____________________ in New Hampshire is at designated State (**17**)__________________ stores!  Arriving in Vermont, we stopped at one of (18)________________ Jim Jefford's campaign offices, who in 2001 was the only Independent Senator serving in the US Senate, after he had left the Republican Party earlier that spring!  (Jeffords retired in 2007, and was replaced by Bernie Sanders, who has continued serving as an Independent from Vermont).

One of our nights (or our one night?!?!) in Montpelier, Vermont, we had dinner at NECI, The New England (19)_______________ Institute, and had what has to have been the (20)______________meal I had ever had up to that point!  Fine dining / haute cuisine - what a meal!

We drove west from there to Burlington, on the shores of (21)________________ Champlain, which at the time was (22)_____________-ing to become an additional Great Lake, so that school kids across the country would have to remember C.H.O.M.E.S. as a mnemonic for the Great Lakes, instead of the much easier (23)_____________________. (I'm pretty sure there's VHS footage somewhere in the Seeger House of Joel throwing some serious shade at Lake Champlain, where he's shooting footage of a big puddle, and calling it Lake Champlain... classic!).

We also drove into Canada, and to Montreal (which was not so many kilometers farther), where we ate the great Canadian cuisine, Poutine (french fries with (24)__________________ on it), and Joel drove the wrong way down a one way street.  Whooopsy-Daisy!

Sorry, this is all I really remember about our trip all those years ago... Half of my life ago just now.  I do remember that it was a lot more fun than I was expecting - seeing all the things we saw, and being with you both right when you'd retired and had such freedom to travel and see all the things you hadn't gotten around to yet!

 

 

merry christmas 2000 in a mercury grand marquis 2004 (a review)

 merry christmas season y'all!

40 days and 40 nights ago (or so), we came into possession of a brand (new to us) 2004 Mercury Grand Marquis LS, all in tan.  At first, Brooke was mortified, but has now come to a place where she will just never be seen with it ever... ever.

How we landed on this particular car isn't terribly important, but knowing that it was Andy and me who did the choosing - and the fact that it was a vehicle that had both a CD player, and a tape deck - shit, we didn't even look under the hood (what would we have pretended to be looking at!?). [tbh I still have not looked under the hood]

We did, being good old fuckin' car buyers, bring a CD to test any potential CD players in old cars... We brought Blackhawk, by the band Blackhawk from my nearly original CD collection, and (sadly) the CD did not play [No Disc].  This was disappointing, but (we felt, brilliantly) a good negotiating point to bring down the price.  We had no tape, to similarly test that device, but when we got back to the "dealership" John brought out a second CD from their collection to verify the test.  It also failed.

We dickered down the price a bit, and brought it home (I'm thinking I'm going to call it the MERC, but am open to suggestions).  Andy and I immediately took it on an errand to Beloit, bringing 2 Christmas tapes of his, and (on a last minute hunch) a "burned" CD from the Clinton House collection.  (I vaguely remembered an era of CD players - both in cars and out - where it could stop playing CDs {or sometimes stop playing burned CDs} and you could "trick it" by playing a burned CD, and then try a pre-recorded one again and it would work {or all in vice versa}.

AND IT WORKED!!! - 

   Merry Christmas CD 2000 (and a happy new year, too)

1. Jamie - Weezer
2. Mrs. Potter's Lullaby - Counting Crows
3. Handle With Care - Traveling Wilburys
4. California - Mason Jennings
5. Baby One More Time - Travis
6. The Great Beyond - R.E.M.
7. Rowboat - Johnny Cash
8. The Thunder Rolls (Long Version) - Garth Brooks
9. Between the Bars - Elliot Smith
10. Blue Moon - Chris Isaak
11. The Ground Beneath Her Feet - U2
12. I'm Gonna Keep on Loving You - Lisa Loeb & Dweezil Zappa
13. Into The Sun - Sean Lennon
14. Shakespeare's Tragedy - Danny Wilde & The Rembrandts
15. If You Want To - Cat Stevens
16. Don't Let it Bring You Down - Annie Lennox
17. Thank You - Dido
18. Accidently Kelly Street - Frente!
19. Emaline - Ben Folds Five

Here is the review:

After 24 years, I feel like this mix still holds up pretty well!  Not every single track - I would have some notes, but it fairly rocks - starting off with "Jamie", which is my favorite song from the Blue album, which evidently isn't on the Blue album.  

"Mrs. Potter's Lullaby" remains probably my favorite Counting Crows song of all time (I remember when someone who was Omaha cool from that era told me that they loved that song except for the lyrics, but 'they weren't really lyrics' people, and I confirmed that it is a great song).

As a young person to Traveling Wilburys, I am delighted that I knew how cool they were even back when I was just graduating college.

While Mason Jennings feels increasingly 'of a time', I absolutely think "California" is one of his best ever songs - and it starts a darker turn for the mix, falling into a bit of the ever-present 'depressed bastard' portion of my mix CDs of the era.

Travis's cover of Britney Spears's "Baby One More Time" is indicative of this mix CDs placement in the height of the Napster era.  While this one is available now via a rarities collection, at the time it was quite the find.

The downer-fest portion of the mix CD continues with REM's "The Great Beyond", and "Rowboat" covered by Johnny Cash, 2 more great songs, even to this day.

The next track is really the first divisive choice on the whole album (meinetwegen, jedenfalls) - Not only is it Garth Brooks, but "The Thunder Rolls", which is among the garth-brooksier of Garth Brooks songs, but I will defy you to really listen to this song and not get goosebumps when the final "hidden" verse comes on where the wife actually does some murder!

Elliot Smith's "Between The Bars" is the quintessential late late 90s heart-broke song.  :(

The next song is where this mix gets a bit... much.  "Blue Moon" is a classic song with a nice long tradition... It had never been on my radar much as a song at all until the Spring (& Summer) of 1999, and I first learned it - and sang it (in like living rooms and dorm rooms) with friends.  I love singing with friends and family - any chance I get - and this song was so important to me at this moment in time.

So too, "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" by U2, which was a real mood piece, and deep, because the lyrics are (purportedly) by Salman Rushdie, from a big fat doorstop of a book that I have not read.

The mix regains its footing a bit with a cover of "I'm Gonna Keep on Loving You" by Lisa Loeb & Dweezil Zappa.  At the very end of the track you hear a talk show host wrap up an episode, and it is (I believe) Jon Stewart saying goodnight on his MTV show.  Dweezil and Lisa (which I think was also a short-lived Food Network show!) was a celebrity power couple that I wanted for the world to last.  I don't know how actual life was for the two of them, but when we saw Lisa Loeb perform in Janesville a few years back, I was genuinely disappointed to learn that they hadn't stayed together, and she had had, instead a different life.  It's hard when people don't choose the people that we have chosen for them... sometimes.

Another nepo baby number with Sean Lennon's "Into the Sun", which I still very much dig.

The Rembrandts were just about my favorite band of the 90s, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find a mix tape or mix CD by me that doesn't have one of there songs... almost never The One With The Famous Show Attached To It...

Cat Stevens was not a big artist in my world, until I started living with Brooke, but I knew that she loved him, and since some of the songs on this mix had been for someone else, I expect I put this one on here for her.

I apologize for the Annie Lenox and Dido portion of this disc... I don't know what I was doing here... at all.

But then Frente!  You're welcome!  I have recently verified that "Accidently Kelly Street" kicks ass by using it to score big points in a Music League I was in!

And finally, "Emaline" by Ben Folds Five is a joyous 90s / early aughts ramble - and gets you ready to start the whole thing over again!

The Lingering: Skulldiggery Book 3, by DM Gritzmacher (book review)

Probably your favorite bartender / real estate magnate returns (The Quarry, 2023) in an interweaving blend of eras and narratives.

Almost 44 years ago, Russell Stander found something.  Spending summers of his adolescence away from home and friends in Michigan, and instead a season-long visit to his idiosyncratic, elderly aunt in Western Illinois, Rusty is understandably in search of adventure.  As it turns out, he and his cadre of summer friends find more than they bargain for, discovering a mysterious, abandoned graveyard full of dark secrets. 

Stephen King and Peter Straub described the “dreamlike and slightly unnatural… characteristic of borderlands” in their novel Black House, and DM Gritzmacher’s third installment of the Skulldiggery series takes place just a short way down that most awesome (and awful!) of all American borders – The Mississippi River.  The story hops between the present day, the early 1980s, and the turn of the 19^th into the early 20^th Century, with each of the three eras meandering toward each other as the narrative unfolds.  In our modern moment, we find middle-aged bar owner Rusty returning to the small community of Almore, Illinois with his friend and employee, Tom Secrist, a retired police officer.  In the early 80s, we find the same Rusty, 10 years old (give or take), and a group of four friends wandering through the countryside in search of some fun and some adventure.  And eighty years prior to that, a mysterious figure on either side of the border that is The Mississippi (and the turn of that century on either side of 1900) also wandering that same countryside where the boys find themselves we are witness to a sequence of grisly murders told from the perspective of the perpetrator.

It's part Stand By Me and part In Cold Blood, with a dash of co
smic horror, and a world of related stories swirling all around the edges.

Engaging, leaving you hungry for more.

Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023

ISBN: 9798986638751

Page Count: 259

Publisher: Piqued

well this is embarrassing...

 So, I've just learned that a previous Roman Numeral J contest has yet to be resolved, and, as I am currently in the midst of a membership drive...

The question is: What is the most recent alcoholic beverage purchased by joel? For the purposes of this quiz, "purchase can be purchased for me by someone else, but the most recent beverage, whether it be at a bar, liquor store, or guy in a parking lot. The answer will change and will be checked based on time i check answers. As a bonus, if you can also name the brand you will gain an extra Mii (you can choose anyone you like, as long as i know what they look like or you can provide a picture). Ok, good luck, and good luck. Enjoy the coming week, and get your Men's Clubs planned now.

Please be assured that this Contest from 2007 still stands (tho it seems like it has become quite a bit easier since then!), but also that Roman Numeral J continues to provide the best up to the date information...

And so, it is my sorry news to deliver that Men's Club is no longer the institution that it was.  But instead, on each first Friday afternoon of each month we've been hosting a Commune Meet-up at 6pm CT since about 2012...

You (whomever you are) are welcome to join... Just let me know, and I'll set up a link.  It's weird times, I think for all of us just now, but we can all come together to acknowledge it, and figure it, and move on...

The Last Piece with Peanut Butter

 For almost all of my workaday life, I have been, nearly without exception, almost gonna be late. 

Almost gonna be late is a state of mild, yet steadily increasing panic that permeates every single morning before work for a person with my condition whereby you wake up feeling like it might be just a little later than you had intended to awaken and therefore may have to hurry a bit this morning, and then steadily, at each stage where you check the time you’re somehow a little bit later until you leave the house (first having to move your wife’s {who is btw blissfully still fast asleep upstairs} car into the street making you oh just that tad later) and start driving and realize that even if the streets are entirely empty due to some unrealized apocalypse and every light turns in your favor, you will only be 7 minutes late, and 7 is less than half of 15, so you can still count it as starting at 8, rather than 8:15. This all occurs only to realize upon arrival that nobody cares or pays attention at all to your comings and goings. 

For a prodigious sleepy-head, I have had some obscenely early staring times at my jobs over the years. I had to get to the library at MCC by 7am (I think my start time was actually 6:30, but the library itself opened at 7, so if I wasn’t there by then I was officially failing the public), and I think the Deli at Lake Lawn opened as well at 7am (again, I think I was supposed to get there earlier, but as long as I was there a few minutes prior would give the coffee time to brew I never got found out). Paint crew started at 6am (but had the advantage of literally waking 5 minutes before you started, blundering there, and then finding a room far from where Bob Sheets was working where you could sit on the floor and sleep for a couple hours, pretending like you were working on “the bottom of the wall”). 

Even after my rise into middle management (prior to my precipitous and predictable fall), when I was by no means punching a clock or needing to be anywhere by an absolute time*, I not infrequently grabbed the 6am Southwest flight to La Guardia or the 6am Hiawatha train to Chicago (both of which had me walking into the relative hearts of each of those cities at right around 9:30am local time). 

All of this is to say, that once in a great while (and today was one of those rare onces), I find my self awake and refreshed before my alarm is set to go off, and going through my morning steps discovering that today I might be running just a little bit ahead for a change, and might just have a bit of extra time for something (maybe a little reading, a toss with my dog, or in today’s case a {very slightly} leisurely breakfast). Today I had the time to make myself some toast and use up most of the last of the peanut butter jar thereon. (I’m delighted to discover that I’m not the first person to consider this issue

source: huffPo.com

!)

Scraping out (most of) the last of the peanut butter jar is an art and a skill that I have mastered over the years. It takes time and patience, and starts with assessing correctly that you have the appropriate amount of PB remaining in the jar: too much, and you may need to have another piece of toast (plus, you’ll have scraped for nothing!); too little and the last piece of toast (AHH!!…) with peanut butter will likely be quite disappointing or needing something else to cover over some of the gaps. 

Once you decide to take on this rewarding task, I like to start at the center bottom of the jar, and scrape out to the edges.  Don’t worry so much about getting volume on your knife at this stage, your more just trying to get enough together around the bottom circumference of the jar to get one or two small glomps^ of PB on your toast before you begin the orbital scraping process that should satisfy to fill in most of the gaps on your toast between glomps. For orbital scraping, begin at the top, and with your knife mostly vertical, scrape around the inside, where the grooves for the lid are. This should yield you a fairly good crop of filler creamy PB. Next, repeat but just below that first lip of the inside of the jar. This will likely be your most productive line of filler, so be sure to go all the way around. Continue thusly on down the jar until you have a satisfying piece of PB toast in front of you, and congrats!, you’ve (mostly) used up the peanut butter jar. 

Enjoy!!

* I am talking here start time or departure time from home in the morning, not for any other meetings or appointments throughout the day. For those, for me, time is sacrosanct and I am on time (or 3-5 minutes early for a meeting off site), every time. 

^ Glomp is the standard unit of measurement of peanut butter as recognized by the Seeger Science Ministry (SSM) with one standard issue piece if toast taking 3 to 4 glomps for full coverage. 

Not quite sure what to call it…

 

As I was finishing with the last of Walter Benjamin’s 1933 writings (the last was “Experience and Poverty”, which is about, among other things, the poverty of experience that we are/were enduring in our/his modern times), a buttered piece of raisin wheat bread from Mary’s Market and an as yet untitled Irish Coffee variation (unfortunately some bar in the Pacific Northwest has already coined another of their cocktails as Spanish Coffee, which was my first thought).  This one was made with the wonderfully sharp Empress 1908 Elderflower Rose Gin, but I imagine that any gin would sharp up your morning coffee to make for an enjoyable day of leisure.

Next week I start full-time work for the first time in some time, but today I’ll enjoy a bit of the life Ibiza… Afternoons, and coffee spoons. Maybe some T.S. Elliott...