Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

The cold rain is threatening to put out the fire. Fortunately, the weather won't stop us from breathing. When the sun comes out, I'm going in the river.

The river runs through here, doncha know. I can't hear it over the sound of the space heater. This summer is a cold one. 

Cabin Day One: Ask the Turtle Walking through Yarrow and daisies in the ditch as cars fly by I  spy a dead Snapping Turtle next to an anthill And a Subway cup tossed carelessly from a passing car. The ferns are tall and verdant next to scarred popple trees,  the sky blue with scattered, wispy cirrus clouds,  and the air fragrant. Wisconsin summer, colder than some yet still beautiful.  I raise you your harsh, snowy winters  and ask for more temperance. Ask the turtle who hides under ice and hollow log what she wants.  More summer or a buttercup. Something to eat and the sun on her shell. Give me more days like this one, content in my carapace,  walking through green, even as I shield myself  from speeding cars on County Road W that never slow down.

Photo Credit:Chris Wyman One summer after I graduated high school, I worked at a resort in Northern Wisconsin wrangling bears and mowing lawns, but truth be told I spent most of my time collecting garbage. An older, German gentleman, Hans, and I drove around in a blue late 1980s F-150 truck, picking up garbage from assorted cabins around the property. He would play polka music on cassette tapes and tell me stories about his younger days. On the days that he was off work, I would drive without music and collect the beer cans that vacationers left in the cabins. If they left food or beer behind, it was fair game, so I had a seemingly endless supply of cheap beer that summer. I did not buy light beer like Keystone, Coors, Busch, Miller, and others, given that I was a Heineken and Newcastle man in my misspent youth. My friends were pleased when I always had extra beer that no one had to purchase. The bear wrangling was less dangerous than it sounds because they were leery of us...

As spring turns to summer, I often feel old as I remember all of the summers I have spent lazily reading comics and fiction or watching television when I know that I should be writing. Of course, I also spend time outside, usually bicycling, walking, or swimming. These days, however, I generally feel too warm as the humidity and temperature creep up to a shocking eighty degrees. There were many summers where I spent time fishing or running down the sidewalks of my old neighborhood, tripping over the roots of tired trees that lined the walk. One year a friend and I shamefully rode our bikes into sapling poplar trees, leaving black, oozing marks on their trunks. Last time I checked there was only one of those trees left, still battle scarred and defiant. The tree is thirty feet tall now, but its trunk is gnarled and shrunken from our youthful transgressions. Another time I rode my bicycle into a nearby water-filled ditch to avoid bees that were chasing me. They still stung me, and it...

Each summer I rack up an amazing list of wasted opportunities, unproductive mishmashes of scattered writing, files full of mindless ramblings all in search of effectual copy. I write a lot and read even more in order to continually perfect my game, but fall under the weight of the work, ineffectually stumbling back months later and wondering where to begin. As writers many of us fall into this pattern, putting work down never to return to it or never able to quite pick up where we left off. Summer is the time for me to supposedly catch up, but life always gets in the way. Even my blog posts trickle recently as dissertation chapters take all of my time. Fiction and essay writing are relegated to brief meanderings as I focus all of my attention on one never-ending project. While I just finished my dissertation introduction, so now I plan on writing more, updating old posts and returning to music, film, comics, and the essayistic scene of the crime instead of dropping in every once in...

“There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed." -Edward Abbey Starved Rock State Park in LaSalle County, Illinois.

 "Now, why do we want to go messing with the moon for? If God wanted a man on the moon he would have built a road there. I get a hundred thirty-five dollars a month from Social Secure, and I sure can't afford to live there." -- Veris Metzger in James York Glimm's Snake-Bite: Lives and Legends of Central Pennsylvania , 1991.  Maquoketa Caves State Park in Jackson County, Iowa.

"When you travel south on County Road W, the type of highway that everyone drives like they're racing, you will come around a sharp bend. A sign on the right will announce another resort, but the staunch gray, brick building on the left tells another story. There might be locals in these woods. But, alas, it’s just another hunting shack. If you turn right here and head down Flemings Rapids road, you will reach a bridge. There is good walleye and bass fishing here. Kids wander these woods in the summer looking for the perfect fishing hole. As you look upriver, you will see a roller dam that was built years ago, thick with seaweed when the river is low, barely visible if the river is high."