The summer I turned sixteen the swelter at camp was relentless. Each afternoon the temperature peaked — 101, 102, even rising past 103 degrees — and campers dropped like flies from the heat. Or like grasshoppers, really. Have you ever seen a grasshopper before it keels over under a body-blistering sun? It jumps erratically, its center of balance overridden by an instinct of perpetual motion, and then it just stops, still and stiffening as its body bakes. The kids were like that — frantic in the sports field with Frisbees and soccer balls, fueled by mediocre mess hall food — and then they crumpled to the ground, unmoving until the nurse came to time their pulses and brace them for the walk to the infirmary.

The heatstroke hit the girls almost exclusively, until the nurse’s station was out of cots and they had to clear space in the back of the gym for a makeshift second infirmary. The rest of us were told to drink water and to sit in the shade as often as possible. We rolled up the legs of our pants and tucked the arms of our shirts up over our shoulders. Camp rules for girls: No tank tops, no two-piece bathing suits, no shorts shorter than an inch above the knee. Modesty always.

I used to think I could be a writer. It was adorable.

I’m 45. From 20 until almost 40, I harbored delusional aspirations of someday publishing in prominent venues such as Spin, Sports Illustrated, Outside, and the New Yorker. In my 20s I neither enjoyed nor did well in a few full-time print and online journalism jobs. Throughout my 30s I taught writing (which I still do); I also spent a lot of time pitching Minnesota magazine and website pieces and a little time actually getting to write them; I took a short break from teaching in Duluth to see if I could hang with music journalists in Minneapolis (spoiler: nope); I made some stupid decisions I still cringe-blush about (I think I’ve now sent Alan Sparhawk five or six apology emails about a 2005 Minnesota Monthly piece about him I wrote and the magazine’s editors kind of ruined); I got fired from a few freelance jobs and submitted some work that sucked; I did some OK stuff and some pretty good stuff; I realized being able to arrange words well does not make me a writer and even if I ever become what I believe a writer is I’ll never refer to myself as one.

I grew up in a word incubator. Mom reads constantly, Dad taught English then worked as a library director, and they have big, agile vocabularies. They started reading to and conversing with me when I was in the womb. Before I was out of kindergarten, the words and images in The Magic Carousel, Cranberry Christmas and Cranberry Thanksgiving, I Wonder if Herbie’s Home Yet, Diggy Takes his Pick, Never Tease a Weasel, Old Witch and the Polka Dot Ribbon, I Wonder What’s Under, The Ice-Cream Cone Coot and other Rare Birds, and a bunch other Parents’ Magazine Press books, Arch books, Little Golden books, and Dr. Seuss books (especially I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Solew) were forming my lifetime perspective at least as powerfully (and for just as much bad and good) as Sesame Street, Zoom, Captain Kangaroo, and the Electric Company were.

I have no memories of my father or the life my mother, sister, father and I lived until age four. Our home was in the middle of the city, but it was so old, it used to be the center of a farm. The garage had lived a former life as a barn, with hay lofts refitted for storing unused garden tools.

I don’t remember my parents’ divorce. In kindergarten, I understood that my mother filed, and that my grandparents moved in with us, because my mother was afraid that he would hurt her. By middle school, I understood the kind of hurt she feared.

My father is my paradigm case of what it means for a man to use force.

I’ve been thinking about the use of force. And every June, I think hard about fatherhood. The thinking is coming together this year.

Christian thinker and philosopher Simone Weil describes force as something that “turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.” She is writing about Homer’s Iliad, a poem about war, the force that turns men into corpses.  But she goes beyond war to talk about the threat of force as well.

“I’m from New Jersey, I don’t expect too much
If the world ended today I would adjust.”
–John Gorka

New York, New Jersey. San Francisco, Oakland. Duluth and Soup Town. The Deep North, top of the map, and shallow end of the gene pool. Ugly sister-city. Can you feel the gravitational pull of the swamp it was built on? This force that bends us, slouching like the lowland willows. That drives water, beer and whiskey to seek the lower ground. Rains and fortunes falling, down and down. The banker’s son becomes a biker. The executive’s boy delivers pizza and sells dope well into adulthood. Sociologists call this “regression toward the mean.” Or maybe the swamp is pulling them. Down.

Of course the place tosses off an astronaut or Nobel winner once in a while. But folks mostly seem to understand they were born in second-place, and second place, as we know, is first loser. You get used to it. It helps to have negative role-models. Don’t do what he did. Look out for that. Rest in peace.

For one long moment after I unintentionally swooned over a young man’s testicles, all 70 students in the UMD class I was teaching stayed mostly silent.

The incident happened in 2003, during an otherwise average session of Introduction to Cultural Studies. UMD’s course guide says the class, “Examines how cultural practices relate to everyday life by introducing students to each of the four core areas of the Cultural Studies minor: Identity Politics, Media Cultures, Cultures of Space & Place, and Cultures of Science, Technology, & Medicine.” My teaching contract was in Writing Studies, but the Sociology/Anthropology department faculty member in charge of Cultural Studies heard I might be into teaching something different, and my department head was cool with the idea. It’s been one of my favorite experiences in 20 years of trying to help people learn things.

I seek opportunities to participate in conversations with students and anyone else about how belief, intent, socialization, and other forces intersect to influence our actions. I approached Intro to Cultural Studies as an extended problem-posing conversation. I’d start most days by naming an example of something most of us in the room take for granted or don’t notice, then I’d ask a bunch of questions like, “Why do we do it that way? What happens if we try to do or see it differently. What if we did it for reasons different from the generally accepted ones? Who gets to decide?”

When I was 11, my best friend was Eddie Griffenbacher.* He lived with his grandma, for reasons he never detailed. (*No, it wasn’t. But even I don’t want to talk shit about someone. It’s not because I have class. Eddie would kick my ass.)

He was very, very, impressively naughty.

He came by this honestly: his grandmother was like a David Lynch character. She was short, round, and, I think, chronically intoxicated. She curmdugeoned around her house in a beige sweater-vest over a plaid shirt, khakis and fluffy white sneakers that resembled King’s Hawaiian rolls. Her hair was old-lady-did into fully-formed curl banks, but the back left corner of her head was all matted down and disarranged, like gray-hair crop circles amidst the otherwise puffy rows. She smoked endless Benson and Hedges cigarettes; they dangled eternally from her yellow fingers, the nails of which she kept painted the same bronzey-brown color for as long as I knew her. She was always drinking some ice-cubey alcohol cocktail from an amber-glass tumbler: between the yellow of her fingers, her nail polish, and the yellow tint of her glass, it seemed like everything around her was saturated completely with tar. Somehow, her entire microcosm had become the color of an old fly strip.