Alternative Biographies

"We were dutiful, if not particularly enthusiastic, Catholics. Mass every Sunday, Saturday catechism for me, fish sticks on Friday. Then, around my thirteenth birthday, I received the sacrament of confirmation, becoming an adult in the eyes of the church, and was thunderstruck to hear my parents say I was no longer required to go to Mass. That decision was now mine. Were they not concerned about the state of my soul? Their evasive, ambiguous answers shocked me again. They had been big fans of Pope John XXIII. But they did not, I realized, actually believe in all the doctrine and prayers -- all those Oblatios, Oratios, frightening Confiteors, and mealymouthed Acts of Contrition that I had been memorizing and struggling to understand since I was small. It was possible that they didn't even believe in God. I immediately stopped going to  Mass. God was not visibly upset."


"What could rightly have worried my dad about me and surfing was the special brand of monomania, antisocial and ill-balanced, that a serious commitment to surfing nearly always brought with it. Surfing was still something that one did -- that I did -- with friends, but the club thing, the organized-sports part, was fading fast. I no longer dreamed about winning contests, as I had dreamed about pitching for the Dodgers. The newly emerging ideal was solitude, purity, perfect waves far from civilization. Robinson Crusoe, Endless Summer. This was a track that led away from citizenship, in the ancient sense of the word, toward a stretched out frontier where we would live as latter-day barbarians.  This was not the day-dream of the happy idler. It went deeper than that. Chasing waves in a dedicated way was both profoundly egocentric and selfless, dynamic and ascetic, radical in its rejection of the values of duty and conventional achievement."

- william finnegan, barbarian days: a surfing life

2017 Year in Books

Grand Island, Presque Isle, and Points West

"Tuesday, June 16, [1840]

We are now in a region where the geologists begin to work. We have parted company with the sandstone, and got among hills as high and as rocky as those of New England. About two miles from Chocolate River we ascended a hill [possibly Mt. Mesnard], and spent all the forenoon examining it. It is composed of primary rock, not granite. At the base of the rock is found talc-slate, horn-blende and several other minerals. The top of the rock is composed almost entirely of white quartz, and is elevated near three hundred feet above the lake.

In the afternoon we traveled two miles farther and fixed our city at the mouth of "La Rivere des Morts," or dead river -- so called because its banks have long been a place of burial for the Indians. Here we had great sport catching trout.

Wednesday, June 17

We have had another rainy day. The storms here seem to be accompanied with more thunder than in any other portion of the state. The doctor says it is a thundering country. We have been confined to our tents the greater part of the day, but caught some trout and killed a duck. We have also seen some red deer, but as they were never known to be in these parts we are not provided with a rifle or ball to shoot them. Heretofore the caribou, or reindeer have been the only kind seen in so high a latitude.

Friday, June 19, 1840

Our encampment has not been changed today. In the forenoon the geological corps went onto Presque Isle and remained until 2 o'clock examining the different strata of rock. The examination is not yet completed, but they found, in what is called the lower sandstone, lead, iron, and sulphate of copper and brought off many very good specimens."

- Selections from North to Lake Superior: The Journal of Charles W. Penny, 1840

First Snow Day

St. Michael's Catholic School

ch 4 excerpt

To get to school, we had to drive north into Livonia: we always drove over the Newburgh Lake bridge at the Nankin Mill crossing, where the lake dammed and emptied into the foul-smelling Rouge, then cut through the subdivision where Jim Rund lived (later we’d carpool to school together) towards Mies Park on West Chicago. From there we made a left onto the street adjacent to the football practice field where I’d spend my chilled Autumn afternoons with tobacco-spitting men who coached JV and Varsity CYO football autocratically (St. Mike’s had won 5 straight in the CYO when I started playing), the first indication of the St. Michael’s campus. Hanging another left onto Hubbard, we soon came upon the blacktop playground and parking lot where I spent thousands of recesses playing two-hand-touch football with my playmates, where I would get my heart broken by Jenn Bechard in fifth grade; an eight-foot chain-link fence enclosed the blacktop playground like a prison yard, stretching to the smaller playground structures and to the school itself – a three story redbrick structure straight from the 1970’s in tan concrete trim, with tall windows under ugly mint-green panels. Two large stone crosses jutted up from either end of the school. The gymnasium and middle school were adjoined in the back of the main structure – the elementary school building – and a wood-fenced garden separated the convent/rectory from our curious eyes behind that. At the northernmost end of the campus, St. Michael’s Catholic Church – the church where I vomited in fourth grade from the incense fumes of Benediction, where I spent every Friday morning Mass in imaginary realms, where I confessed my sins to Father Bondi and genuinely prayed in silent kneeling introspection – pointed its steel rooftop cross towards the heavens, a stone statue of St. Michael the Archangel watching over the corner of Hubbard and Plymouth. It was a world of rigidity and linear thinking that appealed far less to me than the woods of my summers. 

“I love you!” Mom shouted from the van on the school blacktop, traitorously deserting us there to another school year at St. Michael’s, that redbrick prison of our collective youth. In our matching cross ties and loafers Patrick and I would walk thence disconsolately, in silence, towards our respective school lines and school doors, where a chaotic frenzy of activity and eager chatter awaited us. If we were lucky, and had drawn a younger, non-religiously-inclined teacher like Mrs. Chelowa or Mrs. Salley, that final march to school might be bearable, perhaps even anticipatory, but if we were among the sad lot assigned to one of St. Michael’s notorious nuns, we knew we were dead men walking.

Dark Necessities

Dark Necessities

Coming on to the light of day we got
Many moons that are deep at play so I
keep an eye on the shadow smile
To see what it has to say
You and I both know
Everything must go away
but what do you say?

Spinning knot that is on my heart is like
bit of light and a touch of dark you got
sneak attack from the zodiac
But I see your fire spark
Eat the breeze and go
Blow by blow and go away
what do you say?

You don't know my mind
You don't know my kind
Dark necessities are part of my design
Tell the world that I'm
falling from the sky
Dark necessities are part of my design

Stumble down to the parking lot you got
no time for the afterthought they're like
ice cream for an astronaut
Well that's me looking for weed
Turn the corner and
Find the world at your command
Playing the hand

You don't know my mind
You don't know my kind
Dark necessities are part of my design
Tell the world that I'm
falling from the sky
Dark necessities are part of my design

Do you want this love of mine?
The darkness helps to sort the shine

- Anthony Kiedis

Lumberjack Tavern

"I saw that I had forgotten how beautiful the drive to Thunder Bay was; the towering sighing groves of fragrant Norway pines, the broad expanses of clean white sand, the sea gulls, always the endlessly wheeling sea gulls; an occasional bald eagle seeming bent on soaring straight up to heaven; the intermittent craggy and pine-clad granite or sandstone hills, sometimes rising gauntly to the dignity of small mountains, then again, sudden stretches of sand or more majestic Norway pines -- and always, of course, the vast glittering heaving lake, the world's largest inland sea, as treacherous and deceitful as a spurned woman, either caressing or raging at the shore, more often turbulent than not, but today on its best company manners, presenting the falsely placid aspect of a mill pond. . .

We drove slowly up the main street of the town, past the tourist park on our right, nestled in among a tall grove of pines on the lake shore, past the usual clutter of gas stations, a grocery store, the post office, then two churches. . .Near the end of the long street, on our right and overlooking the lake, stood a large white and attractive three-story frame structure. A screened-in veranda ran along the entire front half and half the side nearest the lake. This was the Thunder Bay Inn, in the barroom of which the proprietor Barney Quill met his death a short time before."

- John D. Voelker (Robert Traver) (UMich Law '28)
Anatomy of a Murder

Legal Docs

Maurice Chenoweth (murder victim) outline

Big Bay