It feels strange to say this, but something not-terrible finally happened in my broader political scene. My state, good ol’ Once-A-Bastion-Of-Progressive-Policies Wisconsin, has managed to vote done a pair of proposed constitutional amendments that would have radically altered the way the state government works in what is a naked grab for power by the Wisconsin Republican party (which holds about two-thirds of the state senate and state assembly despite routinely losing popular votes) now that their horribly gerrymandered maps have been deemed unconstitutional and rewritten. They’re going to lose power over the next few elections and the massive voting power that Wisconsin has managed to mobilize in recent years despite the largely pessimistic outlook of its citizens can go from desperately denying them a supermajority to actually feeling represented by the political powers of the state. It sure would be nice to have a functional state government again, since almost nothing happens any more because the Republicans who control the senate and assembly just show up and immediately adjourn rather than actually do anything. They’re slowly losing their grip on the state’s governance and, thankfully, the voters of this state have seen through their transparent attempt to once again deny power to the governor (they tried to do something similar as the previous Republican governor, Scott Walker–may he suffer the same indignities he visited upon others–was on his way out) and voted against it. It is a relief and I’m glad it has been avoided, but even this moment of relaxation is overshadowed by just how precarious the future still looks. I wish I could just enjoy this win, but I can’t even think about it without being aware of just how we got to this point in the first place.
Continue readingWisconsin
So Much For A Proper Wisconsin Winter
A doom of ice descends upon us all. Probably, anyway. Once it rains next week and melts all of this almost two feet of snow, it will eventually get cold and freeze all of that slush and water. Normally, I’d say something about being terrified of road conditions in weather lik that, but we’ve already got roads of solid ice thanks to the city doing such a shit job at plowing everything but the arterial roadways and the fact that they’re cutting back on salt a huge amount this year. I didn’t expect them to cut back on sanding or gritting the roads as well, too, but here I am slipping and sliding around everywhere because all the salted places didn’t get salted enough to deal with the ice before the sun sets and it all refreezes, so there’s at least a little bit too much ice everywhere and an unsafe amount of it everywhere I drive on a daily basis except the highway. I honestly don’t know what the hell anyone is thinking because this seems incredibly dangerous. I mean, I’m used to seeing cars in ditches during and for a couple days after snow storms. What I don’t expect is to see new cars in ditches every single day for (as of writing this) seven days after the blizzard.
Continue readingThe First Heavy Snowfall Of This Wisconsin Winter
We finally got our first blizzard. It isn’t the first snow that will probably stick around for a month or more (that fell a few days prior) [and all of this turned out to be speaking way too soon since we have rain and temperatures in the high 30s and 40s forecast for a week from now so it probably won’t actually last a month], but we got a decent amount of snow dumped on us and even more whipped around. The winds were so strong that they were picking snow up off the ground to add to the stuff already in the air because it hadn’t hit the ground yet. It was quite a day and I spent it working from home since it started in the early hours of the morning and carried on until an hour or two before midnight. It was quite a pleasant bit of weather to enjoy from the cozy confines of my apartment. I’m luckly enough, at present, to avoid most of the unpleasant bits of winter weather since I don’t have to shovel any sidewalks or driveways, I didn’t have to drive anywhere, and all that took me outside was my own desire to go out in the snow as it fell. A desire I sated mostly by opening my door to my balcony rather than by going downstairs since my landlord has done a pretty poor job of maintaining the sidewalks between the apartment buildings and I didn’t want to mess with slush and ice on top of all that wind. I even discovered the the tree right outside my balcony is the perfect kind of pine tree to hold snow on its branches and gets transformed into a beautiful white statue. As far as wintery days go, this one was aesthetically pleasing to me and went a long way towards redeeming my experience with winter over the last few years.
Continue readingA Warm Start To Winter
Aside from a two-day period of low temperatures, high winds, and biting cold (it was so windy on one of those days that I was almost knocked over by a particularly vicious gust and I’m difficult to even stagger, let alone topple), it has been a fairly mild December so far. Most days, the temperature spends a decent chunk of the day above freezing, there’s some sunlight, and my wall AC/Heater unit is enough to keep my apartment comfortable against the chill. Sure, we’ve had an oddly rainy and grey parcel of days lately, with occasional periods of snow sprinkled in for flavor, but it’s been kind of nice, especially compared to last year. Last year, it was so windy and cold that it permanently damaged the aircraft transportation network in the US (and almost made me miss my trip to Spain due to the cascading ripples of the week that so many flights were cancelled rather than rescheduled). This chilly, wet, and sunless weather might not be welcome, but it sure beats the pants off how awful last it was this time last year. I actually had to buy firewood and go through my plans for what to do if I lost power because I’m pretty sure my apartment would have frozen if I’d lost my ability to heat it against that drafty cold. So I can put up with this, even if I’d probably be better insulated against the cold and wind in my current apartment than I ever could have been in my previous one.
Continue readingSensible Precautions In A Wisconsin Winter
It is snowing as I write this. It is not the first snow of the season–that came after Thanksgiving, falling after midnight in a powdery coating that lingered for days, even through warmth and sunlight that should have sent it away. It is the first snowfall that happened during what could generously be called daylight hours, though. A light, gentle dusting that will stick mostly to the snow left over from a week ago as the brined, salted, sanded, or grit-covered roads force whatever lands there to vanish swiftly. There will be more snow, soon, at least according to the forecast, and we have reached the time of year where it will likely stick until we get another mid-winter heatwave of temperatures in the fifties [which has already happened]. Snow in a brown winter can be a deceptive thing, lingering longer than you would think as the regional draughts isolate it so long that it has no choice for survival but to hide in unseen corners and mix with dirt until the muddy slush it becomes is finally melted down by the weight of its disguise. It can last weeks, maybe even months if its cold enough, but people who desire some semblance of the frosted winters they recall from years past will often seek it out and, like a flower plucked for a vase, bring a swift end to something that might have lived longer on its own.
Continue readingThe First Taste of Wisconsin Winter
[Another casual reminder that I write these a week before they go up, since it’s currently summer in Wisconsin again]
It is snowing again today. Over night, the temperatures bottomed out in the high twenties and even hours after dawn, with temerpatures flirting with freezing for hours already, there was still the pale remnants of the morning’s frost on the deep green grass outside my apartment. Flurries of small, damp snowflakes fill the air like mist and dampen the world as the trees drip what remains of the snow that landed on them from their brightly colored leaves. I am bundled up against the wind and chill, my layers quickly dug out of the closet when it became clear that my usual fall garb would be insufficient for the day, and still I briefly consider turning around for a heavier coat. I walk along the sidewalk, tracing the same old path from my front door to my car, but far more attentively than in past months for fear of slipping on the ice that stretches across the sidewalk. Today, I miss the comfort of holding a warm mug in my hand as my new coffee cup prevents any heat from escaping it but I am grateful that my coffee will still be warm throughout my entire drive to work on this blustery, snowy morning.
Continue readingWisconsin’s Woes and Weather
For the second summer in a row, the weather where I live has been fairly dry and relatively mild. Eighties during the day, sixties overnight, and mostly small strips of storms and rain that rush past, or clouds that seem to split around us before reforming once they’re past so they can drop their moisture elsewhere. Mild, compared to the heavier storms, flooding, and record-adjacent seasons of the first six summers I spent in the area. I mean, my first summer was marked by a massive storm system that dropped a few tornados southwest of Madison that, among other things, tore up a bunch of trees and some of the buildings of my then employer (my memory of the storm was being the only one in my apartment that woke from the tornado sirens at one or two in the morning to take shelter in the basement).
Continue readingI Think I Managed To Visit House On The Rock Incorrectly
I recently went to House on the Rock for the first time in my life. As someone who has lived in Wisconsin for almost thirteen years now, I have to admit that a trip to one of Wisconsin’s most famous tourist attractions was long overdue. To be honest, I’m not sure why it took me this long. It’s not like it would be difficult to convince people to go with me or that I was uncertain about whether or not I’d enjoy the trip. I just sort of never went. Like how I never went to a local branch of a coffeeshop chain I’ve long enjoyed since settling in one place after college. I don’t have a good reason, I just never went. I never felt like going during a time when I had the opportunity to go and I never felt the inclination so strongly that I made an opportunity to go, despite visiting a state park near House on the Rock many times.
Having now gone, I can say that it was pretty much like I expected. The descriptions in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods always made me think the space had more of a “warehouse” feel to it than the sort of carefully arranged collection of oddities that actually occupies the space. It was exactly as much of a trip as the book made it seem, though. Sure, there wasn’t a conflict of gods happening throughout it, but it definitely felt like the place a bunch of modern gods would show up in. What made up for that loss was actually the context the foundation tried to provide at the visitor center near the start of the walk-through.
I don’t remember many of the specifics from the various informational placards, but a few things leapt out at me and the general sense I got from said placards informed the way I saw the rest of the collection. Despite the clear eccentricity of the collection being a selling point, the descriptions of the collector, Alex Jordan, seem to have been sanitized in order to avoid offense to the more conservative leaning folks of the world. Even though Jordan clearly lived a non-traditional life, so much of the truth seems to have been scrubbed away in order to make the origin of this collection “more palatable.” Given that it has been decades since Jordan passed away and so much of his life was clearly sanitized, I can only wonder what else inside the displays has been changed so as to be “suitable” for all audiences. Which feels ridiculous given the number of artistic presentations that include topless or nude women. Somehow all that was fine, but admitting that Jordan had a romantic partner who he never married but still lived with was unacceptable. They had to call her his “companion and friend.” Hogwash.
Because I had already seen so much clear sanitization of the history of the man who built the collection, I couldn’t help but wander through the aging, slowly decaying collections and wonder what else has been altered to be more palatable. Every open space that seemed like it should have held something was a place for my imagination to fill in a blank and the strangeness of the collection that remains set a very high bar for how weird or strange something must have been to warrant removal. Sure, it’s possible that parts of the collection have merely broken and been removed rather than left to collect dust like so many of the music machines, but it’s difficult to trust that nothing beyond the history of the man was sanitized.
I’m not saying it wasn’t a nearly incomprehensible experience. It was, and still is, difficult to determine if I enjoyed it or merely survived it, but I had this thought in the back of my mind that maybe there was something missing. That maybe things had been pushed in a “safer” direction, despite the clear disregard for safety in the collections at large. I mean, I was pretty much blinded by a bunch of lights and mirrors in one section of the walk-through, forced to rely on the voices of my friends to guide me through it as I shut my eyes against the vertigo-inducing sight of all that lights stretched out by the mixture of astigmatism and faint blurriness in my dominant eye (a result of my on-going eye problems that only comes up when looking at specific types of lights that aren’t terribly common and every single LED anything ever) and none of the music machines had any sort of notice about how loud or quiet they’d be.
I don’t have much to say about the collections. I feel like I’m not yet in a place to share my thoughts in that regard (I need to go through there another time or two to figure those out), but it definitely left an impression that maybe this sort of thing was way more unique before the internet. Half the sites I used to visit before social media turned the internet into like five websites had a similar feeling to walking through House on the Rock, and most of them didn’t sanitize the history of the person who created/curated the odd collections. I guess I left there with a lot to think about, but mostly in regards to the way even the eccentric are sanitized for general consumption rather than about how strange the experience was.
Weird Weather And Warming Walks In Wisconsin
Lately, the weather has been changing more than usual. Setting aside all the potential problems this might indicate (for sanity, not because they aren’t necessary), I’ve been enjoying the variability. There are very few places in the world where the weather can go from “potential frostbite if the wind blows long enough” to “you’ll want a sweatshirt, but you’ll need to roll the sleeves up before long” in less than twenty-four hours without drawing remark. I happen to live in one of them (the midwest of the US). As a result, I got to enjoy a pleasant walk in the sunny fifties one day and then had to bundle up tight against a frigid wind that sought to claim my exposed skin the next day.
Continue readingWisconsin Winter Preparations
I have lived many winters without ever needing to put plastic insulation over my windows. If this sentence makes no sense to you, well, congratulations on not living in shitty or old apartment or house in a frigid midwestern or generally northern US state. Or, you know, anywhere else in the world where the outside doesn’t get so cold in the winter that it can leech through every exterior surface of your dwelling to steal every drop of warmth you posses but also so warm in the summer that an unattended egg can cook in thirty minutes of sunlight or less.
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