We all float on...

I’m writing this stream-of-consciousness style, plowing through writer’s block. Well, more like babbling over it like a rock in a riverbed.

I really want to go tubing again. Let me clarify: while I was spending a wonderful Sunday morning with Belle and we walked my puppy Juno, she mistook my term “tubing” for being pulled behind a boat on an inner tube (a fun activity, for sure, though once I get knocked off I often cannot pull my bulk back on) when I meant floating lazily down a river on a raft or tube, shoulders, knees, and massive belly sticking out of the water, never out of arm’s reach of the cooler tube and a fresh alcoholic beverage.

A few years ago a group of us floated down the St. Louis River. It was handy that my long-time friend Chance lived on property that was brushed by the river on both the Northwest and Southeast corners. Between these two points, the river looped north and back south again, leading us on a ride that lasted nearly 4 hours with a walk of mere minutes to return home.

The ride was fast, apparently, but not as fast as Chance has seen the river. The water level was high, and the 6 of us climbed in and onto our tubes. We fastened the cooler tube to someone’s tube, I don’t remember whose, and we all floated on. I didn't drink beer back then, and trying to manage mixed drinks would be comical, so I picked up a 4-pack of Sparks and choked them down until they tasted good (coincidentally, I've since learned to like beer using the same methods). It was a sunny June day, warm as all hell, and we had taken proper precautions; I was wearing a t-shirt over my pasty white fat rolls and we had sunscreen slathered all over our upper bodies.

What I didn’t realize was that with my sizable ass sunk in the middle of a tube, my knees are high above the waterline. They cooked like lobsters and I was crippled for a few days with the pain of leathered skin.

We rode the river for these hours, sometimes all in one group, sometimes a few of us moving to the middle of the river and riding the faster current ahead for some private conversation. The sunlight twinkled through a canopy of green leaves and branches, and a cacophony of insects serenaded us from the shaded shoreline. Once we saw the overpass signifying the end of our ride, we moved to the shore to disembark. I lost a sandal that started floating alarmingly fast downriver, but thankfully Thor did his best Michael Phelps and dove for it, coming up victorious against the stream and rescuing my errant footwear.

Only once we were on dry land did I realize how inebriated 4 cans of Sparks made me. Combine stumble-drunk with leg muscles that ached from standing against the rushing waters moments earlier, and that short walk home proved more difficult than it should have.

We carried our tubes back to Chance’s house, deflated them and bagged up our wet clothes. The 6 of us piled into a car and drove out to Bimbo’s for what would become the worst service I've had in a restaurant, and so far, my last visit there. It was on this dinner trip that my legs started protesting their over-exposure to UV-B rays all morning. They remained painful for about 5 days, and I maintained a tan-line on my thunder thighs for a whole year after that.

We didn't get to go tubing this past summer. Chance lives in California now, and though she returned for a summer visit, the river was nearly dry and nobody wants to scrape their butt cheeks against the riverbed for hours on end. Maybe this summer will prove different, or maybe I’ll find another group of people to go on another river. I really want to go again, one way or the other.

I definitely want to spend a lot of time out-of-doors this summer. This record-breaking snowfall in April was enough to put the most stalwart Eskimo deep into cabin (igloo?) fever. We were teased with a few warm days before it dropped to freezing again, and after a glorious weekend, we’re going to see highs in the 40s again. Ugh.

Soon enough it will get so warm that staying inside with air conditioning will prove an irresistible desire. I don’t welcome that kind of heat, even though a few weeks ago I joined the state-wide chorus of whining about how cold it was. See, I just despise being sweaty. I’ll shower multiple times a day and change clothes often, rather than rot in my sticky filth.

I don’t mind sweating, though. Well, I’ll continue saying that until I believe it. I figure it this way: large mammals that live in the Arctic Circle have thick insulating blubber to shield their organs from the cold. At 315lbs, I too have large reserves of insulation which serve me warm in Minnesota’s worst, but were you to transplant a sea lion to a summer’s heat wave; you bet he’ll bake inside his Crisco skin! To try to eliminate that happening to my most beloved body, I figured I need to shed at least 100lbs of sub-cutaneous lipids. So I ran, I ran so far away. Ok, ok, so I jogged and walked for a mile. But hey, it’s a start!

I hope I can keep this up and start shaping my body to how I want it. Other people have started noticing the effects of my changed diet, which makes me feel good. I can certainly see some difference in the mirror; my face is much thinner now, though Zach R. from 6^th grade would still jiggle my chin and call me “turkey neck”. I’ve lost a few inches in my waist and chest, have outlived one belt so far (I swear I bought it at a comfy 3-hole fit, but weeks later it was loose on the last hole!), and have dropped from size XXL to XL in both t-shirts and boxers. I’ve stayed below 320 lbs for nearly a year now with minimal effort.

Humble-bragging aside, I’ve got a long way to go. I keep my priorities in mind and try to push myself to beat my horrible habit of procrastination and giving up. Of course I want a sexy body. I’m comfortable enough in my own skin right now that if you ask me to take off my shirt, I’ll dazzle you with the sight of my hairy shoulders and squeezable man-boobs! But I know I’m not fit. I’m a tall guy with a broad chest, though instead of a barrel of muscle above a 6-pack of abs, it’s more of a couple of 40s above a keg. I want to be able to lift heavier things and not strain. I want to be able to hit home runs at softball (mostly because, jeez I’m not a fast runner and I think I’ve been thrown out at 2^nd more times than not)! I want to be able to end a fight if someone wants to start it, and I want that fight to end quickly and decisively.

Aside from fitness, I also want to be normal in proportions. Buying clothes right now is so hard: I’m either wearing button-straining, curve-hugging shirts that would not come close to buttoning around my 19.5” neck, or I’m swimming in tarps of a shirt that fits my neck but are inches long in the shoulder and would fit a belly thrice the size of mine in the midsection. And pants? I order Levi’s that fit my waist, hips, and thighs, and they look like JNCO jeans around my skinny ankles.

So I decided I’m going to get some more exercise, try to get into shape. I’ll be that guy who posts obnoxious things on Facebook about how I trimmed a minute off my mile (which, shit, would still be like a 19 minute mile). I’m looking through clothing company websites and their look books to find clothes that I wish I could buy, and reviewing their size charts so I know where I need to be. I’m setting off Richter scales when I jog. I’ve made my puppy happier than ever with the increase of walks/runs/general outside time.

And maybe come Summer 2014, we’ll be back on that river, floating lazily along, and I’ll be half the man I was that first time.

Don’t worry; I’ll remember to put sunblock on my legs this time.

Getting There

This post is a little... rougher... than I'm used to. Maybe I'll polish it up some day. Probably not.

The most important thing you have to remember about anything I write below is that it’s all a lie.

Well, ok, not exactly. I’m not about to spew off a litany of untruths. What I mean is that though what I say may be true, and I certainly believe it to be, my preaching has not yet been fully actualized in personal practice.

What follows is like the inside of a Hallmark card – a lot of text in flowery language that hopefully conveys enough romantic sentiment that it rescues from the dog house the man who chose it only because it’s the cheapest card and it doesn’t have glitter dandruff cascading from its cover. I mean, I’m sure there are some men out there who spend ages finding the perfect card for their woman or man. But there’s that sort of man who needs something quickly from Walgreen’s on his way home because his wife has been texting him about the garbage not going out and the dishes not being washed and Mary Sue across the street just received flowers from her husband and why don’t you ever buy me flowers?

Holy shit, maybe my idea of what life should be has been more heavily influenced by television sitcoms than I realize…

Tangential bit of advice for men that hopefully none of my future girlfriends will ever read: find the card that really expresses how you feel about your special lady, then take a blank card with a pretty picture and hand copy the message of the first card into it. She will think more of you for putting in effort to compose the perfect personalized lovely note just for her.

Every ex-girlfriend of mine reading this is now thinking back on every card I’ve given her to see if it was hand-written. Of course, if you’re already a talented writer, you don’t have to do this. In fact, I’ve never done this myself. I could prose the pants off the ladies, wink wink nudge nudge. I’m sure there’s a joke about my love life in there involving abbreviation or certain punctuation marks; I’ll leave that to your imagination.

So I’ve been struggling with thirty. I’m within 5 months of the milestone number now. Macklemore says “They say thirty is the new twenty, and twenty is the new thirty. Shit I guess makes sense, cause fifteen year olds seem twenty and twenty five year olds seem ten.” I can’t seem to agree with him on that first part, though. I’ve spent the past eight years clinging to 21, as reflected in my booze budget, sleeping habits, and the girls I’ve dated. But lately I’ve said the terms “401(k)” and “personal responsibility” more than ever before.

(And if you think Macklemore is just a thrift-shopping hipster, you really ought to check out his back catalogue. He’s earned his fame, if for nothing more than working with the best producers (shoutout to Budo and Ryan Lewis!))

I’ve let my quest for fullness of life be dictated by externalities for my entire adult life. I’ve emulated the “cool kid” in a bid to earn some of his successes, only to realize that the person I’m looking up to is nothing more special than another guy stumbling through his own problems. The moral of this story, however, would be just around the corner, out of sight, ready to be discovered, and I’d instead cling on to the next attractive-yet-fundamentally-flawed role model, only to become as disenfranchised in him as I did the first. I’ve found my identity in others’ mirrors. I’ve tried on many different hats out of others’ closets.  I’ve searched for self in the validation of those around me, a lost dog begging for scraps. If a numerical value could be placed on my self-worth, it is directly proportional to the number of notifications I see when I log on to Facebook.  I had no idea who I really am.

I’ve been with my company for 5 years now, longer than any other single job I’ve held. This isn’t just a job, this is a career, too, a label that demands more reverence.  My billing rate hasn’t increased very much, and compared to others’ rates, I’m a little low on the pay scale. I know there’s many reasons for that (they have higher cost of living in the Cities, or more experience) but the one that I have to accept responsibility for is that I didn’t earn any raises. I slacked off at work for the better part of two years, doing just enough to not get fired. Wow, for somebody who seeks his self-worth in the approval of others, you’d think I’d be eager to please everyone at work, no?

The bitterest pill to swallow is realizing that the sum of these misguided parts has been my love life of the last 3 years.  Now I’m not going to bad-talk anybody here ( a habit I’m eager to break, mind you), I’ll just say that I clung desperately to broken relationships for far longer than was sane, let alone healthy. I’d sacrifice and make promises that ultimately I couldn’t keep, I’d fight both literally and figuratively, all because I was afraid of being alone.  Facebook status: single. By myself.

Because really, I hated myself when I was alone. I hated aspects of my life I let get out of control, be it late bills, credit card debts piling up, messy house and piles of laundry built up. I hated myself because I lacked the discipline that would have prevented these issues, lacked the discipline to fix these issues, lacked an external outlet (in the form of a girlfriend) for my anger, and lacked the awareness to even realize just how much I was shifting the blame for all of the above to anyone but me.

Basically: I had no personal responsibility for myself. I needed to learn how to be an accountable and reliable adult. I knew that that was the path to the happiness I’d missed.

Sure, most people who have known me will argue that I was never that bad, that I’ve been a pretty happy and jovial dude. Fact of the matter is, everyone has their internal demons, and I got good at hiding mine. On the other hand, let me take a moment to acknowledge that I’m not diminishing the struggles of people with diagnosed depression, or those whose life stresses tower over mine. This isn’t a woe-is-me tale.

The trick to happiness is to take control of the things you can control, and for the other things, you fake it ‘til you make it.

I’ve started concentrating on my work, doing better and getting back on everyone’s good side, but the most major thing I did was take responsibility for my personal happiness. I knew I was poison to my relationships, so I made it a point to stay single for a while. I wasn’t going to replace my latest ex, nor would I allow myself to pursue another lover without first being happy with myself. “You can’t expect other people to be happy with you if you’re not happy with yourself” became my new mantra. I had a few opportunities for dating, but I was still apprehensive and, well, scared of myself. I learned that a relationship is not required to complete my life; rather it should be a way for me to share my complete life with another person, who ideally would do the same with me.

As I've written before, I lost a bit of weight during this period. At my heaviest, I tipped the scale at 355 lbs. That’s two of a normal man! But suddenly I was seeing 330, then 325 on my digital scale, and while I did actively to earn it, I embraced it and vowed never to pass those numbers again. A year later, with minimal work (and I do mean nearly non-existent) I’m currently at 310, but feeling better than ever. My cholesterol and blood sugar levels fell to acceptable levels. My face thinned and I lost one of my chins. Clothes fit me much better and I look and feel better in them.

I bought a house. My credit card balance is currently zero, and while I’ve hit that milestone a few times in the past year, this time I’m maintaining a zero balance for a lot longer, and don’t feel in danger of needing to, barring of course any emergencies. My bills are all caught up. I haven’t gotten any savings yet, and don’t yet contribute to my 401(k) as I should, but I’ll get there. My other debts aren’t all repaid, but I’ll get there.

I’ve even started dating again, with minimal results. But a certain special girl helped coax me out of my shell and I found myself unafraid of myself, content with myself. Happy with myself. Not all the time, but I’ll get there.

And here’s the aforementioned lie: I still search for approval in others. Why else would I be writing a blog? Why else would I try to post music, quotes, or jokes on Facebook? When my friends attribute their boring morning shits to the lack of my status updates for them to read on their smartphones, I feel like I’m something of worth. When blogger extraordinaire F-Dot tells me to increase my readership, I should post something on the regular, I scoff at the idea that my artistic value be corralled by publishing deadlines, but I also want to see increased readership, and more importantly, feedback or discussion. Sorry, Mom, but your thumbs up, while much appreciated, is rarely sufficient. I’m not completely independent of approval of others for my self-worth, but I’ll get there.

I see old habits creeping up on me when I’m seeing a girl, too. I suppose I should be extremely happy that I’m recognizing them as they occur, rather than stumbling through oblivious, but even with a chance to nip them in the bud, I still find myself doing the wrong things a few times before making the choice that’s most right for me. If my life were a choose-your-own-adventure book, I’d definitely be guilty of flipping back to my last page before choosing the story-ending option. For a book, that’s alright. In a relationship? Not so much. But I’ll get there.

I’ve read many self-help forums on Reddit, The Art of Manliness, No More Mr. Nice Guy. I’ve even internalized some of the platitudes presented therein and can regurgitate them to help anybody who might listen. But I don’t always live by them myself. I’m a work in progress, and I discover more of myself day by day. Sometimes these words of advice are tried and true advice given with the weight and reverence of experience. Sometimes they are the words inside a hastily-chosen greeting card, and sometimes I have to read them after I give them to make sure I choose correctly or to see if I should go back and get a proper “I’m sorry” card.

But should I have to do that, I’m prepared to take responsibility for my mistakes and fix them. No more blaming anything else but me. I hope that those of you who know me can say that he doesn’t always practice what he preaches… but he’ll get there.

Pee Ess Three, Arr Eye Pee

November 2006 saw the much-awaited release of the Playstation 3, Sony’s next-gen system that boasted a brand new 8-cell processor and all these specs that I as a computer person should really know by heart. Not too long after launch, I’m sure, a particular PS3 was born. It was clothed in whatever plastic wrapping and boxed and shipped to… Shit, was it Best Buy? Target? Some store in Minnesota, and soon would come home with me.

For 6 years, despite harsh environments full of dust, dog hair, and smoke, and throughout hundreds or thousands of hours of use, she worked beautifully and diligently. She put up with shitty blu-ray movies like Spider-Man 3 (which she ashamedly came packaged with like your friend who arrived to go cruising with his newly-acquired driver’s license, only to have been told by his mom that he had to take his 13 year old brother with him) to Indiana Jones 4 ($100 for whoever can tell me why I thought I must own that trash at all, let alone in hi-def blu-ray…). She put up with hundreds of hours of Netflix streaming as I watched Doctor Who or Freaks and Geeks or Arrested Development (OHMYGODSOEXCITEFORTHENEWSERIES!!!!!!). She also was finally invited to the neighbor’s house party when I set up PS3 Media Server on my PC so she could browse and stream any video file I had on my other media device.

If she could talk, I’m sure she’d have a helluva lot to say about my choice of video games. Primarily, she’d probably express the kind of gratitude a guy gets from his girl through the cloud of a particularly-excellent post-coital cigarette, all because I installed and played through the pinnacle of Metal Gear Solid games on her. She’d probably nag at me for not cleaning her out and blowing off the dust from her fans, then she’d bring up long-forgotten grievances from their shallow graves, like how after the first Black Ops game, I felt the need to buy and play Black Ops 2… or Modern Warfare 3. She’d probably tell me she’s happy with where she lives now, as that tiny house in International Falls was just as bad as that tiny apartment across town. But she’d probably miss playing with all my friends when she was the only PS3 in the house and there’d always be multiple folks passing her controller back and forth.

All of my friends play PS3. A few play X-Box 360, yes, but that’s in addition to Playstation. So out of all my immediate friends with PS3s, for mine to have lasted the longest is a proud accomplishment. Others have had to replace their original systems, some of them getting the new slim model that lacks the sexy shiny curves of my old “fat” model system. But mine kept on, giving me no troubles… until this fateful Sunday.

I woke up in the late morning, having enjoyed my chance to sleep in, and I went to the bathroom for that majestic first morning piss. As I lay back down under my covers, I grabbed the controller from my nightstand and pressed the central PS button. I was greeted with the familiar power-on beep, but something soon was wrong. I immediately heard three short beeps, and saw nothing but a blank TV screen. I shot out of bed, seeing a blinking red light on my console. Quickly I performed triage: I held my finger on the capacitive power button to force it off, no response; I reached in the back and clicked the power switch off, then on, and pressed the power button again: beep… beepbeepbeep. Quickly I grabbed my phone and searched the net to decipher this message. The prognosis was not good. My poor girl had a bad power supply unit. Her PSU cancer was terminal.

Panicked, I did the computer tech equivalent of CPR: I quickly unscrewed her cover and slid it off like an EMT might rip off a victim’s torn and bloodied shirt. I grabbed the vacuum hose and sucked away dust and debris, much like a first responder would hastily rub the paddles of a defibrillator together in preparation of the heart-resetting shock. I removed each individual component: the hard drive disk, the blu-ray drive, the PSU, the wifi card. I cleaned and wiped as much as I could, and put it back together. I plugged in the power cable and the HDMI cable, held my breath, closed my eyes, and flipped the switch.

Nothing. Not even a three beep death rattles. Flatline. I hung my head in defeat.

Time of death: 11:22 AM Sunday, April 14, 2013. Six years old.

RIP

Black T-Shirts and Ties

The evening dress flatters her body in ways everyone else might appreciate visually, but with my following the patterns in the fabric stretched over her hips as I hold her in my lap, softly brushing my fingertip round to her back and down her spine to meet her ass, my appreciation comes from a more visceral level, reaching from the furnace of my heart and out through candid moments of eye contact with her hidden among the alternating belly laughs and respectful silences found within our small congregation as we wind down the night. She wears my tie loosely draped around her bare shoulders as if it were a nation's flag planted into new country soil, a territorial claim, worn with the carefree abandon that comes with knowing her skin as more silky-smooth than the tie could ever be. Her arm wraps around my shoulder and plays with my suspender, casually tracing with her fingers the line of the brace as it fits snug over my chest. Her free hand holds my cigar smoldering as my left hand grasps the neck of the last bottle of champagne. The unfortunate cleaning crew is already starting to scurry throughout the hall, clearing tables and sweeping up the afterglow that we so desperately cling to.

I could see a few of my friends sitting around me, the loves of their lives - or maybe for a few, the loves of the moment - legs stretched out from hard steel folding chairs, shined shoes on their feet and shirts striving to maintain their pressed glory after a night of dancing and rowdiness at this wedding. I don't know whose wedding it is. Maybe it's a holiday party.

Whatever it is, this kind of circumstance cannot easily be found on the Iron Range.

I’ve lived the twilight of my 20s, and now it is dusk and midnight quickly approaches. I’ve never been one to concern myself with my own age; “You’re only as old as you act!” (or, heh, lately, “you’re only as old as the girl you’re fucking”). But I’ve also reached another milestone: my current is the first career I’ve had, the first job I’ve spent 5 full years at. During those years I’ve nearly lost my job as I let the bullshit of life leech my attention and energy and strength and I had distracted what remained of my emergency reserves of the above with frivolous internet inanities. I’ve had to learn what discipline means, I’ve had to set goals for myself and to do that I needed to answer to myself those easy-to-dismiss interview questions: where do you see yourself in 5 years’ time? 10 years’?

I spent years of my mid 20s in and out of a horrible relationship, learning lessons that should’ve been quick and apparent, like a student having to take their 10th grade classes thrice over and graduating years behind his age group. It then took years after that to put those lessons into practice, to take what demons I identified in the mirror and slowly start to excise them from my life. It wasn’t easy, but even a dumbass like me can learn that you can’t drown them in alcohol, you can’t smoke them away, you can’t paint over them with a smile and drown out their voices with distortion and polyrhythms.

So I’ve been making the most painstakingly slow incisions, extracting each abscess with a personal surgery stretched across the last years, slower than playing a game of chess by mail. My weight dropped after months of depression where I probably had a food-to-alcohol budget comparable to the US’s Education-to-Defense dollars. But shit, 25 pounds is nothing to sneeze at, is it? One eighth of the weight I had 6 months prior. Try as I might I could not develop the willpower to work at losing more, but dammit I could at least keep what I’ve already lost off.

I judiciously reviewed my closet’s contents. Folded upon my bed, the tower of silly, childish graphic t-shirts sagged in resignation to their fate upon the highest of shelves, probably happy they weren’t yet donated to charity. Same, too, for the myriad of black metal band t-shirts I’ve collected, hardly any of them fitting me anymore, and barely any of them from bands that are relevant, or that I’d admit to having listened. Instead, I pulled out clothes that hadn’t seen sunlight in years, giving long-awaited second chances to garments so dismissively hung to the back, some still with attached tags bearing the rough edge where some aunt or grandmother tore the price sticker off before wrapping it as a gift. Maybe those grievously unstylish shirts were hidden gems all along.

I bought some real footwear. It had started with the Chuck Taylors I needed for a wedding, and continued on to experimentation of the various styles found on fashion forums: Sperry Topsider boat shoes, Clark’s Desert Boots. I half-assedly polished up my grandfather’s wingtips, bringing a shine to their brogueing. I purchased socks so I could properly wear browns, blacks, blues, or whites on my feet.

I tried on a pair of Levi’s I had long given up on, and lo! and behold! they fit wonderfully. I’ve worn a hole in the knee since and have replaced them with an identical pair, and I also supplemented my wardrobe with a pair of shrink-to-fit 501s, the sort of jeans that come stiff as cardboard but will eventually tell the tale of their life through the fades and creases and stains of wear and tear, like your grandfather would have worn in the mines in his youth.

I drove throughout Woodbury with my accomplice in search of decent casualwear, finally settling on a buy one, get one sale at Men’s Warehouse for some sports coats and dress shirts.

I could put together a dashing figure in the mirror and get compliments and likes on my Facebook pictures and from the ladies at the office alike. This was much needed, though, as my hair was getting longer and I needed to balance it out: half Kurt Cobain, half Adam Levine. But I wanted to grow it out, partially in a personal rebellion to the multitude of styles I had tried previously in vain attempts to grasp at some new definition of self, which one time left me with super super short hair, and mostly because after spending the recent year listening to hip hop, I found again my taste for metal music and the subculture surrounding it.

Because, see, there’s one long lesson I’ve learned that I can attribute solely to Deuce: it doesn’t matter what other people think of who you are so long as you’re happy being yourself. This man wears the ugliest ICP shirts, still maintains a closet of tripp pants, and alternates between long hair and mohawks. This man also effortlessly gets the attention of a room, and of the ladies, and he never even acknowledges it, pleased to continue his one-man show and brushing off criticism like so many pieces of lint. The man epitomizes old-school cool in a Generation Juggalo shell.

So it might sound antithetical to say that I cut my long hair, lost more weight, took out my earrings, put away (most) of my metal shirts and so help me Ronnie James Dio will never wear my camo cargo shorts again. Yes, be who you want to be and be happy with it, and I’m a huge metalhead with a growing arsenal of guitars and the developing callouses to prove I play them. But I find myself happier when I’m less Slayer and more Rat Pack.

See, the wedding I needed Chucks for, and my brother in arm sleeves for my search of Woodbury’s clothing shops, is the Sinatra to my Sammy Davis, Jr. He’s the man who grew into his man-ness faster than I could. He’s gotten fit, developed a better sense of style, married a lovely woman, and has taught me lessons he couldn’t fathom. F-Dot, though he lives 200 miles away, is very much one of my closest bros and biggest influences. And even though I met him through the mentor I previously looked up to, he certainly surpassed our Dean Martin and proved to me there’s more to life than hustling a pool table. The three of us were our Rack Pack, playing pool and bombing jukeboxes, but to this day it is F-Dot that I feel I owe a large part of my life to.

It’s not just that we as stupid 20-somethings appropriated the name of a particularly well-known group of rascals (the horrors if we were younger and started calling ourselves “The Wolf Pack” and planning trips to Vegas to steal Tyson’s tiger…). No, it’s the sense of camaraderie, the brotherhood, and the social styling we share that I don’t quite find with my other brothers. These are the guys I could most easily lounge with in a jazz club or in a casino run by gangsters in 1950’s Americana.

So while everything prior to this suggests that I should be at home and comfortable and successful with shit-kicker boots, ripped and torn jeans, a bullet belt, and the hair to windmill headbang with, I’m realizing that I’m getting older, and that I can and ought to embrace a more refined version of myself.

It’s not like the punk-styled homie friends of mine, nor the nerdy people I play Magic with, nor the (successful or unsuccessful) ladies’ men I go out drinking with, nor my business casual coworkers, nor anybody else really, nor myself, wouldn't accept me for who I am, whoever I am.

The trouble is, I feel as if my life in Hibbing is as far away from the Rack Pack as can be. The love of my life will come eventually, that I’m not worried about. However, nowhere up here are throwback clubs with leather padded lounge chairs and black and white photos of famous blues trumpeters on the wall. Sure, there are some bars with a few pool tables and Guinness on tap in Duluth, but those belong to those post-college years when we clung to a frat life we never really lived. The lights and obscenely loud music of dance clubs up here are the playthings of the young; let the newly-21 year olds (or the kids with newly-acquired fake IDs) posture and pose and shuffle and shake and enjoy their youth. No, at this point I want to spend time in the sort of place where “live band” doesn’t mean cover charge to hear someone slaughter AC/DC songs, but rather a piano and a voluptuous singer in a slinky red dress and a sultry voice. The sort of place with carpets and drinks served in glass tumblers, not plastic cups. A place where “coat check” means a ticket given to you by a man in a walk-in closet, not checking to see if someone stole your Fox jacket from the back of the barstool you draped it over.

Maybe those places don’t exist at all outside of Justin Timberlake’s latest music video anymore.

Maybe someday, members of the Rack Pack, the FYF clan, the Gamer’s Haven crew, and I could all find ourselves gathered at the end of a classy wedding, the last group of people walking out of a closed dining hall, the bride and groom long gone to consummate their nuptials. Those of us with women of our own would drape our suit jackets over their shoulders and brush their hair over the collar, while others of us would hang our jackets over our shoulders with one hand, sliding on sunglasses against the dawning sun, slightly stumbling after a full night of drinking, dancing, wine and champagne.

Maybe some night we’ll find ourselves in a quiet and dark hotel bar, chatting with a bartender named Frank who wears a vest and visor and cleans the inside of a glass with a white rag while he tells us of that time he stood at a urinal next to Hugh Hefner.

I’m only (nearly) 30. There’ll be plenty of life left to learn to drink scotch or whiskey and to cavort with lawyers and doctors and investment bankers. Some of my friends are already there, some are farther behind me. I certainly don’t want to rush to become Patrick Bateman admiring the tasteful thickness of a business card, but I think I’ve taken the correct fork in the road, and I’ll make reservations for anyone who will join me in a booth on the wall at whatever fancy restaurant I come across when I get there.