The recent controversy over the 14-year-old Muslim teenager who built a clock and brought it to school only to be arrested and charged with making a “hoax bomb” has brought to light a troubling aspect of our modern culture.  It is an aspect of the culture that particularly hits home for me, and it’s not Islamophobia or racial profiling.  I am a white male, and therefore not subject to negative racial profiling.  I am not religious either, and though there are people who fear and/or despise atheists, we don’t have to deal with the ignorant mobs with pitchforks mentality that people in the Islamic community face.  So, while this incident does indeed illustrate the Islamophobia and racial profiling in our culture, that’s not the part that hit home for me.

The part that hit me was…  This was a nerdy 14-year-old kid who is into electronics.  I was a nerdy 14-year-old kid who was into electronics.  I was made fun of, called a “nerd” when the word actually hurt, had my books dumped by bullies and my head kicked into my locker.  Back when I was Ahmed’s age, the vast majority of people didn’t own or use personal computers at home.  Most people had a VCR, but didn’t know how to program it.  The Internet wasn’t open to the public.  My parents had a single land-line telephone for the whole house because we didn’t have cellular phones.  Being ignorant about basic technology to the point where a bundle of wires is scary maybe would have some sense back then, but today we live in a highly technical world.  Electronics, circuits, sensors, all the stuff that makes our computerized world function, have become so ubiquitous that it seems only the most ignorant and clueless person would mistake a clock (even a home-made one with visible wires) for an explosive device.  I certainly wouldn’t expect that level of technical ignorance from a professional educator or law enforcement officer.

It seems likely that some people have feared technology for as long as there has been technology.  I’m sure that whoever chipped the first hand axe faced at least one person who lost their shit over this strange, alien artifact:

Ook: Ook make choppy cutter from stone!  Look!  Help cut things!

Thrag: Ook make bomb!  Ook make bomb!

But I keep reading allegedly intelligent people saying things like, “well, better safe than sorry, it DID look like a bomb after all” and other people arguing about the racial profiling angle, but rarely is anybody saying the painfully obvious thing, namely, NO.  It did not look like a bomb.

I’ll say it again.  It did not resemble a bomb.  Not in the least.

But, you may say, there were wires!

Might I remind you that wires do not explode.  They are inert.

But there was a numeric digital display!  Like a countdown timer!  On a bomb!

Also like the timer in your microwave, or the display on your alarm clock.  Again, numeric displays do not explode.  They are inert.

But, there was a circuit board!  It looked sinister!

Again, not explodey.  Circuit boards are everywhere.  There is one in the machine you are using to read this.

No, it didn’t look like a bomb, it looked like some sort of home-made timing device (aka: a clock), built by a nerdy 14-year-old kid who is learning electronics.  Nerdy 14-year-old kids who are learning electronics have been building similar things for decades.  They don’t look like bombs, they look like clocks.

I’ll tell you what would have made it look like a bomb…  Something attached to the timer that would be capable of exploding.  If Ahmed had painted some toilet paper tubes red to look like TNT and run some wires into them, that would have looked like a bomb.  If he had taken a grey brick of modeling clay and made it look like a clump of C4, that would have looked like a bomb.

See, in order for a device to look like a bomb, it inherently needs to appear capable of exploding.  Only a completely tech ignorant person would look at wires, circuits, and LCD screens and think “bomb”.

I’ll tell you what else looks like a bomb, because it is one.  A glass bottle filled with gasoline with a rag stuck in the end.  No wires.  No circuits.  Very explodey.

Now, I’m not saying that a kid walks in with a bundle of wires and you do nothing.  One would presume that a) his teachers were aware of him, b) they probably knew he was a science nerd type kid, c) they should have been curious enough to look at his device.  If they had seen something that appeared to be potentially dangerous, wires leading into something other than a numeric display perhaps, then they might have been justified in worrying.  But 10 seconds of examination from somebody with even the tiniest bit of common sense would have kept this story from ever making the news.

But no.  We now live in a world based almost entirely on electronics in which people feel that being entirely ignorant of the subject is perfectly defensible and persecuting teenage kids who have more intelligence and curiousity than they do is also perfectly justifiable behavior.

If you are scared of what’s inside your computer, or you see mysterious wires in the hands of a brown person and crap your pants, you are living in the wrong century, my friend.  If you think the rational and appropriate response is for the rest of us to react in fear and loathing because you can’t be bothered to learn something, well, too bad.  The genie is out of the bottle.  Maker culture exists.  Technology is in the hands of the next generation whether they are named Jimmy or Muhammed, and if you don’t want to be a paranoid ignoramus, you just might have to learn to tell the difference between a bomb and a clock.  This goes double if you work in a position of authority.  Your ignorance is your problem.  Stop making it a problem for everybody else.

Hastings is this lovely little riverside town in Minnesota, a bit south of St. Paul. It’s the kind of place that looks like an HO scale train set blown up to real size. You wouldn’t be completely startled to buy an ice cream from Jimmy Stewart at one of the antique stores. I used to live there, in an apartment above an auto parts store, under the highway 61 bridge with a Bob Dylan poster on the inside of my bedroom door.

On the weekends in the summers, local classic car motorheads would roll into town and pop the hoods on their ’57 Chevy Belairs and ’67 Mustangs and ’44 Chryslers and show off all the chrome in the world. There would inevitably be a cart vending mini donuts. This was the place, if ever there was one, for a traveling carnival to come into town and setup the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Zipper and the Octopus and the Scrambler right along the river bank.

Now me, I love carnivals. I love the smell, the sound, the rides, the games. I always have done. And also, I’ve always had a cast iron stomach. I don’t get queasy. You can spin me, flip me, drop me, twirl me, accelerate and decelerate me until my eyes are dangling from my optic nerves and I will just smile and say “please sir, may I have some more”. At least, that’s how I’ve always seen myself. I’ve never feared a death-defying experience.

All this said, one night there was a carnival and all I had to do was descend the stairs from my apartment, walk under the bridge, hang a left at the Mississippi, and there it was. Couldn’t miss it. What’s even better, I had my son with me and he was at the prime carnival age, 10 years old. Promising doesn’t even begin to cover it.

First stop at any carnival, of course, is the ticket booth. You need to buy your tickets before you choose your rides, and this we did, and began scanning the insanity on offer. There was a Tilt-A-Whirl, there was a carousel, there was a Scrambler, there were bumper cars, there was that one ride where you stand against the wall and get spun around really fast and the centripetal force pins you against the wall and your feet leave the ground. And in the middle was the King of the Beasts… The Zipper.

The Zipper is, if you’re unfamiliar, a simple concept. You and a friend are seated in a small metal car, side by side. The car is capable of freely rotating 360 degrees forward or backward. This car is one of several that are attached to a large rotating arm of sorts that itself spins. To make it all the more fun, the cars also are moving along the rotating arm on a sort of track. It’s quite lovely to behold. It is also the ride to end all carnival rides, as far as I am concerned. When I was myself a child, and my brother and I had a chance to ride The Zipper, we always took it. There was no better way to guarantee vertigo and insanity.

On this particular Hastings afternoon, seeing the chance to introduce my son to The Wondrous Zipper, I went giddy. It’s amazing, I said. You’ll love this thing, I said. Holy crap they have a Zipper!, I said. And we got on.

Seconds into the ride the self-discovery began. We started moving and my stomach lurched along with the gears and chains. I gripped the metal bar in front of me. We swung, then flipped, then spun, and for the first time I could remember on an amusement park or carnival ride, I felt nauseous. I glanced to my left. My son was laughing and screaming and seemingly having a great time. I was feeling the color drain from my face and breakfast threatening a second coming. What the hell was going on here? I’m Ryan Sutter of Cast Iron Stomach Fame. I don’t get pukey on rides. This wasn’t right.

Fortunately, I have had some training in Buddhist meditation. I often rely on what I have learned when faced with situations in which my mind and body are not responding to a situation in the way I would prefer. I slowed down time and thought about the situation.

Fact. I like Zipper rides.

Fact. I don’t like being nauseous.

Fact. I don’t get nauseous on Zipper rides.

Fact. I am nauseous on the Zipper ride.

Conclusion: I am doing something different.

I observed myself. Posture? Rigid. Muscles? Tense. I observed my son. Posture? Floppy. Muscles? Basically present. I observed myself. Attitude? Resistant. Outlook? Grim. I observed my son. Attitude? Squirrelly. Outlook? Squee.

Ah.

I see.

Oh well then.

The problem wasn’t The Zipper. The problem was that I was fighting it. I was willing my body to be still while it was being flipped and flopped and looped and flung through the air by a metal deathtrap constructed by carnies when God was a lad instead of just accepting that it was highly likely I would survive and being shaken (not stirred) could be a perfectly valid experience to go along with.

I relaxed. I let go. I gave in to The Zipper.

Immediately the nausea subsided. Immediately fun returned to the experience. Immediately.

The entire ride lasted all of a minute. My argument with the ride and subsequent spiritual epiphany lasted probably 20 seconds. However, despite the brevity of the duration, The Zipper Situation has remained lodged in my mind. I’ve replayed those seconds hundreds of times. Especially when I find myself under stress. When things are happening and I find myself resisting them despite the fact that I put myself in the situation and can no longer control the environment. I get stressed, I get tired, I find myself in a white-knuckle grip on the handlebars of life and I think… Wait a sec. Look at yourself. Breathe. Are you creating your own nausea by resisting That Which Cannot Be Resisted? Could you have fun if you just rode the fucking ride?

And usually, the answer is yes.

My last post was a photo tour of my recording studio, The Nuclear Gopher.  This is a little history and background about it.

In 1980 my family moved into a house in Apple Valley, MN and I was enrolled in the local elementary school.  Our new house had a room in the basement that was almost immediately co-opted for use as a music room.  It was in that room that we attempted to erect a stage to play on out of scrap wood (it fell down) and where we successfully constructed a drum set out of cardboard and ice cream pails and tape.  Rhett got so good on the fake drum set that my parents bought him real drums and he made his on-stage debut drumming “Swing Town” at a wedding reception in a blue tux.

Tragically, my parents never took pictures of our fake drums or the early stages of our “music room”, but by 6th grade it had become home to amps and guitars and drums and microphones and our new hobby, recording music.

The music room didn’t have a name yet but a certain character had already started to develop, as can be seen in this early blurry photo.  Car posters on the wall, a rubber hand hanging from the ceiling, and me and Rhett making our entrance into the world as The Lavone.   A few years later, in 1989, we bought our first four-track and decided the music room needed a name.  The name we chose was The Nuclear Gopher.

Shortly thereafter, I took a photography class in high school and took a few photos for that class in the Gopher.  I snapped pictures of the drums, some instruments, and a dark image of the room itself as seen through the door in addition to a picture of Rhett at the Oberheim 4-voice and one of Mike, Rhett and Reed.

I guess I was already starting to feel really connected to the Nuclear Gopher.  By 10th grade, I had ten years of memories of making music in that room.

The years went by, we grew up, and the Nuclear Gopher became more than just a room.  It became an indie record label.  We got a website, we even went digital, but we still worked in the same basement studio.

The last Lavone album recorded in 2000 was, fittingly, recorded in the Nuclear Gopher.  This time, we took a few pictures.

The original Nuclear Gopher room still exists, but it ceased to be a music room when all the kids had moved out and my dad remarried.  The new wife wanted an exercise room in the basement and repainted and cleared out the Nuclear Gopher so it could go back to white walls and house her treadmill.  I last stood in the Gopher hours after learning of the death of Rhett and stared at the empty room, the treadmill, the white walls.  I couldn’t believe how thoroughly the room had been erased of two decades of laughing, creativity, and love.

The thing is, the end of the original Nuclear Gopher, the end of The Lavone, the death of Rhett, all this just encouraged me to push on and rebuild.  When I bought my house in 2006, I started resurrecting the Nuclear Gopher, or at least the spirit.  It’s been gradual, a process of accumulation and work.  I’ve recorded a lot in the new Gopher and it’s gone through several stages.  There was the “mostly empty basement” stage.

By the time Trumpet Marine was happening (2007-08) the room had gotten more stuff hanging from the walls, more equipment, more like the original.

Of course, it’s not all bands and recording and creativity.  Having a music room is fun for a number of reasons.  Especially when kids get loose on drum sets.

I have taken lots more pics over the years of the evolution of my studio.  I am sure I will continue to do so as it evolves and matures.  One thing I think I can say without fear of contradiction is that the studio I work in today is truly The Nuclear Gopher in spirit and wherever I go in this world, I’m bringing it with me, even if the walls change.

The Lavone would have loved this place.

This morning I went out on Holland Lake in Lebanon Hills Park Reserve in Eagan in my recently completed home-built kayak.  It was the second time out in the kayak, the first time I fished from it.

I will admit that I was a tad bit nervous about fishing in a kayak.  I was concerned about losing balance and tipping in the event of a fish.  Well, I can report that this was not a problem, at least not for any of the bass I caught this morning.  In fact, at no point did I feel unstable or unsure while reeling in a fish, and I had a pretty good morning on that score, landing six largemouth bass and an apparently confused bluegill sunfish who thought he could eat a Rapala longer than he was.  Now, none of these were large fish.  Two of the bass were in the 1.5-2 lb range, the other four were a pound or less, so this doesn’t prove much about what would happen if I hooked into a fish with any size, but as a gentle entry to the world of kayak fishing, this morning was perfect.

I gotta say that fishing from a kayak is significantly different, and more fun, than fishing from a bass boat.  For one thing, you can be completely silent.  I managed to sneak up on two snapping turtles engaged in what I can only assume was coital rapture and started filming them with my iPhone (snapping turtle pornography will have a profitable market some day and I will be ready!).   I was basically on top of them before they noticed me.  Got some great footage.

Amazingly, being silent has more uses than filming snapping turtles having sex.  In general you can glide into quiet little bays without spooking the fish and I gotta believe that played some part in my successful fishing morning.  Four of my fish were caught on a first cast while gliding into a new area.  I think I was sneaking up on ’em.

I can’t describe what it feels like being almost at the level of the water while fighting a fish.  I was using light enough tackle that a 2 pound bass could put up a reasonable fight and it was really exciting in a way I have never experienced before on land or in a normal boat.  It just felt more visceral.  I could definitely see that kayak fishing could become rather addictive.  So.  Much.  Fun.