Impeach for Peace

I attended an Impeach for Peace rally at the state capitol on Monday. It wasn't well-advertised -- in fact the only way I knew about it was from the impeachforpeace.org website -- and the turnout reflected that. We were a rag-tag bunch of 20 or so. To some appearances, a bunch of weirdos and outcasts, I'm sure. But there we were, bundled against the cold wind jetting up the capitol steps, holding our signs and trying to kick up a ruckus that would be worthy of our outrage at the abuses and crimes against the constitution by the Bush administration and the lack of accountability with which they are being held.

The event was part of the effort to escalate impeachment pressure, this time on state and city representatives.

Impeach for Peace researched a method for impeaching the President or Vice President using a little known and rarely used part of the Rules of the U.S. House of Representatives ("Jefferson's Manual"). This document actually empowers individual states to initiate the impeachment process. All that's required is that the MN House and Senate pass an impeachment resolution.

I wasn't able to speak to my rep that day -- she was introducing a bill of her own at the time we got to her office -- but I made an appointment. Meanwhile, I'm getting my presentation in order. Keith Ellison submitted one several years ago, I'm told, when he was in the Minnesota congress. They may have gotten this resolution from that:

Resolution to Impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard B. Cheney

WHEREAS, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney conspired with others to defraud the United States of America by intentionally misleading Congress and the public regarding the threat from Iraq in order to justify a war in violation of Title 18 United States Code, Section 371; and

WHEREAS, George W. Bush has admitted to ordering the National Security Agency to conduct electronic surveillance of American civilians without seeking warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, duly constituted by Congress in 1978, in violation of Title 50 United States Code, Section 1805; and

WHEREAS, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney conspired to commit the torture of prisoners in violation of the "Federal Torture Act" Title 18 United States Code, Section 113C, the UN Torture Convention and the Geneva Convention, which under Article VI of the Constitution are part of the "supreme Law of the Land"; and

WHEREAS, George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney acted to strip American citizens of their constitutional rights by ordering indefinite detention without access to legal counsel, without charge and without the opportunity to appear before a civil judicial officer to challenge the detention, based solely on the discretionary designation by the President of a U.S. citizen as an "enemy combatant", all in subversion of law; and

WHEREAS, In all of this George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney have acted in a manner contrary to their trust as President and Vice President, subversive of constitutional government to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice, and to the manifest injury of the people of _____insert_your_City/Town/State______ and of the United States of America; and

WHEREAS, Petitions from the country at large may be presented by the Speaker of the House according to Clause 3 of House Rule XII; and

WHEREAS, Jefferson's Manual section LIII, 603, states that impeachment may be set in motion by charges transmitted from the legislature of a State;

Be it resolved that George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney, by such conduct, warrant impeachment and trial, and removal from office and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States;

Be it resolved further by the legislature of the State of _________, That our senators and representatives in the United States Congress be, and they are hereby, requested to cause to be instituted in the Congress of the United States proper proceedings for the investigation of the activities of the George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney, to the end that they may be impeached and removed from such office.

Be it resolved further, That the Secretary of State of the State of ________ be, and is hereby, instructed to certify to each Senator and Representative in the Congress of the United States, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, under the great seal of the State of _____________, a copy of this resolution and its adoption by the legislature of the State of _____________. The copies shall be marked with the word "Petition" at the top of the document and contain the original authorizing signature of the Secretary of State.

Ironies

Did you hear about how Iraqi insurgents are selling their looted antiquities -- the treasure US soldiers failed to secure and protect five years ago when they went into Baghdad -- to buy weapons of mass destruction to kill US soldiers?

Marine Reserve Col. Matthew Bogdanos, who led the military probe into the looting at Baghdad's National Museum after the fall of Saddam Hussein, claimed both Sunni insurgents such as al-Qaida in Iraq and Shiite militias are taking funding from the trafficking in antiquities.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, captains of industry have joined the welfare class this society claims to hold in contempt. The feds have begun a bail-out of the financial industry after their deregulated markets neglected to protect them (or us) from their perversely avaricious assault on the middle class. They fought for government deregulation of their transactions but now require rescue from that same government, ala S&L debacle of the '80s. That from cherished conservative icon Ronald Reagan. E.J. Dione, writing in yesterday's Washington Post, echoes my sentiments:

Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy.

And from The Nation editor, Robert Scheer, "Idiot's Grin:"

They will take care of their own, which is why Bush was smiling, happily posed in that photo op between Henry Paulson Jr. and Ben Bernanke announcing the Bear Stearns bailout, made possible only by the federal government using your tax dollars to pick up the bad debt of the banks. Tape that picture to your wall to remind you, when you open a credit card bill with a 30 percent interest rate--not the 2 percent the Fed will charge banks--or see the increase in your adjustable rate mortgage, of just what your government will do for the really big guys that it will never do for regular folks.

None of these greedy tycoons can claim to love their country while raping and pillaging it and leaving it bruised and bloodied. How does that feel, by the way?

It should make your blood boil to know that BushCo has hindered states' efforts to protect consumers against the subprime meltdown. According to investigative reporter Greg Palast, Eliot Spitzer, on the fateful night in Washington when he got caught making an appointment with a call girl, was on the verge of blowing that story wide open:

Here’s what happened. Since the Bush regime came to power, a new species of loan became the norm, the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage and it’s variants including loans with teeny “introductory” interest rates. From out of nowhere, a company called ‘Countrywide’ became America’s top mortgage lender, accounting for one in five home loans, a large chuck of these ‘sub-prime.’

Here’s how it worked: The Grinning Family, with US average household income, gets a $200,000 mortgage at 4% for two years. Their $955 a month payment is 25% of their income. No problem. Their banker promises them a new mortgage, again at the cheap rate, in two years. But in two years, the promise ain’t worth a can of spam and the Grinnings are told to scram - because their house is now worth less than the mortgage. Now, the mortgage hits 9% or $1,609 plus fees to recover the “discount” they had for two years. Suddenly, payments equal 42% to 50% of pre-tax income. Grinnings move into their Toyota.

Now, what kind of American is ‘sub-prime.’ Guess. No peeking. Here’s a hint: 73% of HIGH INCOME Black and Hispanic borrowers were given sub-prime loans versus 17% of similar-income Whites. Dark-skinned borrowers aren’t stupid – they had no choice. They were ‘steered’ as it’s called in the mortgage sharking business.

‘Steering,’ sub-prime loans with usurious kickers, fake inducements to over-borrow, called ‘fraudulent conveyance’ or ‘predatory lending’ under US law, were almost completely forbidden in the olden days (Clinton Administration and earlier) by federal regulators and state laws as nothing more than fancy loan-sharking.

But when the Bush regime took over, Countrywide and its banking brethren were told to party hardy – it was OK now to steer’m, fake’m, charge’m and take’m.

But there was this annoying party-pooper. The Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer, who sued these guys to a fare-thee-well. Or tried to.

Instead of regulating the banks that had run amok, Bush’s regulators went on the warpath against Spitzer and states attempting to stop predatory practices. Making an unprecedented use of the legal power of “federal pre-emption,” Bush-bots ordered the states to NOT enforce their consumer protection laws. Indeed, the feds actually filed a lawsuit to block Spitzer’s investigation of ugly racial mortgage steering. Bush’s banking buddies were especially steamed that Spitzer hammered bank practices across the nation using New York State laws.

Spitzer not only took on Countrywide, he took on their predatory enablers in the investment banking community. Behind Countrywide was the Mother Shark, its funder and now owner, Bank of America. Others joined the sharkfest: Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup’s Citibank made mortgage usury their major profit centers. They did this through a bit of financial legerdemain called “securitization.”

What that means is that they took a bunch of junk mortgages, like the Grinnings, loans about to go down the toilet and re-packaged them into “tranches” of bonds which were stamped “AAA” - top grade - by bond rating agencies. These gold-painted turds were sold as sparkling safe investments to US school district pension funds and town governments in Finland (really).When the housing bubble burst and the paint flaked off, investors were left with the poop and the bankers were left with bonuses. Countrywide’s top man, Angelo Mozilo, will ‘earn’ a $77 million buy-out bonus this year on top of the $656 million - over half a billion dollars – he pulled in from 1998 through 2007.

But there were rumblings that the party would soon be over. Angry regulators, burned investors and the weight of millions of homes about to be boarded up were causing the sharks to sink. Countrywide’s stock was down 50%, and Citigroup was off 38%, not pleasing to the Gulf sheiks who now control its biggest share blocks.

Then, on Wednesday of this week, the unthinkable happened. Carlyle Capital went bankrupt. Who? That’s Carlyle as in Carlyle Group. James Baker, Senior Counsel. Notable partners, former and past: George Bush, the Bin Laden family and more dictators, potentates, pirates and presidents than you can count.

The Fed had to act. Bernanke opened the vault and dumped $200 billion on the poor little suffering bankers. They got the public treasure – and got to keep the Grinning’s house. There was no ‘quid’ of a foreclosure moratorium for the ‘pro quo’ of public bail-out. Not one family was saved – but not one banker was left behind.



Every mortgage sharking operation shot up in value. Mozilo’s Countrywide stock rose 17% in one day. The Citi sheiks saw their company’s stock rise $10 billion in an afternoon. And that very same day the bail-out was decided – what a coinkydink! – the man called, ‘The Sheriff of Wall Street’ was cuffed. Spitzer was silenced.

Do I believe the banks called Justice and said, “Take him down today!” Naw, that’s not how the system works. But the big players knew that unless Spitzer was taken out, he would create enough ruckus to spoil the party. Headlines in the financial press – one was “Wall Street Declares War on Spitzer” - made clear to Bush’s enforcers at Justice who their number one target should be. And it wasn’t Bin Laden.

It was the night of February 13 when Spitzer made the bone-headed choice to order take-out in his Washington Hotel room. He had just finished signing these words for the Washington Post about predatory loans:

“Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.”

Bush, said Spitzer right in the headline, was the “Predator Lenders’ Partner in Crime.” The President, said Spitzer, was a fugitive from justice. And Spitzer was in Washington to launch a campaign to take on the Bush regime and the biggest financial powers on the planet.

Spitzer wrote, “When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners the Bush administration will not be judged favorably.”

But now, the Administration can rest assured that this love story – of Bush and his bankers - will not be told by history at all – now that the Sheriff of Wall Street has fallen on his own gun.

And don't be so sure the incoming regime will be so quick to correct these injustices. Clinton played his own part in market deregulation. My advice is to get rid of your debt as soon as possible, because this type of bailout will not be offered to you when your personal fortune is at risk, proven by the treatment of millions of families losing their mortgages in this subprime fiasco.

Save your money under your mattress and forget about retiring.

Or move to Canada.

Or better yet, get busy and join the revolution.

Why do gay guys love Hillary?

No, I'm asking. I've noticed this trend among my gay (mostly male) friends: they are crazy for Hillary. I wondered what the deal might be with that, but since so many of the gay men I know are feminists, I chalked it up to that. Don't they remember the mockery of "don't ask, don't tell" or the Defense of Marriage Act? Not that Hillary is Bill, but she is running partially on his record and popularity.

Even many feminists are shying from Hillary. It's an issue that has feminists riled up, the chance to vote a woman into the presidency and why so many of us are ambivalent about that. My favorite is Jessica Parenti, who writes the Feministing blog. She said in a recent The Nation article, "Let's use this moment, when our politics and emotions are raw, to push for a better, more forward-looking feminism." I don't get the impression from reading her many postings that she will be voting for Clinton.

Anyway, this weekend I was in Des Moines visiting my "other brother" and he had me watch this episode of Bill Maher's show Real Time, in which sex columnist Dan Savage explains that it's the Diva thing. I hadn't thought of that. Nor wanted to be so sexist as to characterize it that way.

After going to an Obama rally, Savage says he's now a little gay for Obama.



On Sunday night we saw John Doe and Wilco at this very groovey venue in Des Moines called the Val Air Ballroom, which reminded me of a Texas honkey tonk. It's an old concert hall with a huge wooden dancefloor and raised seating and bar area adjacent to that. Free parking. Tickets were thirty bucks a piece. I spent more than that on drinks. The cool kids were in attendance, 30-somethings with thick, tousled hair, some even with small children in tow. They were there for Wilco, of course, and they knew all the lyrics. It was a great night.

The Buddha, the Dharma and the Media

It's Friday and I'm clock-watching and poking around some of my book-marked sites. One I've been keeping tabs on lately is The McGill Report, maintained by veteran journalist Douglas McGill. A recent entry, The Buddha, the Dharma and the Media, yielded this gem, so simple yet so solid:

A journalism grounded in Buddhist morals would display two salient traits derived from its moral purpose and methods. Such a journalism would be:

1. A journalism of healing. Buddhism is often not classified as a religion because it teaches no theology, declares no divinity, and requires no faith. Instead, its doctrines revolve entirely around the achievement of a practical goal: “the end of suffering.” Nor is the definition of suffering complex or esoteric. It is ordinary everyday suffering, aches and pains, mental moods and afflictions, sickness and death. On a social level, suffering in Buddhism is defined as any harshness, violence, and division of the community. A Buddhist journalism would therefore be aimed at helping individuals overcome their personal sufferings, and helping society heal the wounds caused by injustice, hatred, ostracism, and physical violence. Such a defined professional purpose would give the Buddhist journalist a measuring stick for each word and story produced: does it help overcome individual and social suffering?

2. A journalism of timely, truthful, helpful speech. A Buddhist journalism would need tools and materials adequate to its healing purpose. The Buddhist “Right Speech” doctrine provides many of them. Right Speech sits midway along the “Noble Eightfold Path,” the Buddha’s prescribed method to reach the end of suffering. The midway place of Right Speech along the Noble Eightfold Path is interesting, because speech is the first action to follow the gaining of wisdom and positive intention, as developed in mediation. By this view, speech is a person's very first chance to act morally in the world. It is followed then in the Noble Eightfold Path by “Right Action” and “Right Livelihood.” Also, very helpfully for journalists, the identifying traits of Right Speech are specifically defined as “timely, truthful, helpful, and spoken with a mind of good will.” Likewise, the five main types of speech to avoid are lies, divisive speech, harsh and abusive speech, and idle and distracting speech.

Polar Vortex

The MPR meteorologist said this morning that we are in the middle of a polar vortex. That's why we're still in the deep freeze. It's bloody March, a couple weeks shy of the spring equinox, and temps are in the single digits again. Because the temperature has remained cold, despite low snow fall this season, we have kept a constant snow cover for the three months of winter, the first time in 11 years. And it looks like that trend will continue for the next several days.

While we've been cooped up inside (and, mind you, I am what Garrison Keillor calls an "indoorsman." I don't mind hanging at home most of the time), there's been a writers strike, so nothing but reruns on tv. So if you're a tv watcher, you end up watching shows you never used to watch (mostly because they didn't interest you in the first place) to see something besides reruns. That, or you watch really OLD reruns.

Last night I watched three shows I formerly eschewed. The first was American Idol. I've been watching that a little more than I ever have this season, partially because there's nothing else on. But another reason might be that there some pretty cute boys on this season, and a couple are even openly gay (or should be). I doubt I'll keep it up past spring. The second show I watched was one of those crime-profiler dramas, the one starring Mandy Pantinkin and, last night, featuring Alyssa Milano. That show is probably part of the Law & Order franchise, which I loathe, mostly for its glib one-liners. Both those shows I watched with tepid interest, dipping back into my book throughout.

The third show, the one I watched with enthusiasm and delight -- which when it originally aired I didn't watch and never would have admitted to it even if I had -- was an early episode of Baywatch. This episode starred Kelly Slater as local surfing hero Jimmy Slade, who has since become the world surfing champion several times over (8!!) -- along with many other accomplishments. Turns out Kelly has quite the lengthy filmography, but that's another story. This is from a 1999 interview in Outside Magazine:

"All the stories were pretty stupid," Slater says, popping grapes into his mouth. "They showed me waking up in the morning in my van, and the sun is setting over the water, with an onshore breeze, when in the morning it's always glassy—ridiculous. Though watching myself and trying not to think of it as me, I thought I wasn't that bad." He glances over shyly, and then hurries on."But overall it inspired me not to act. Don't tell Bryan that."

Still, Slater says, "I begged to get off the show. The motivation was 30 percent me just wanting to be a serious athlete and 70 percent surfers saying, 'Slater made a mockery of surfing, there's no forgiveness, fuck him.' That hurt. In fact, that was probably 95 percent of my decision," he adds ruefully. His face firms up. "But I used that grudge against those guys to drive myself harder, and I won my first world title that year."



The episode I watched last night was one made in the early 90s, but the fashions are pure 80s: tanned, not-too-skinny girls wearing nothing but a bikini and thick white socks and sneakers, small waists and big hips, frizzy, over-teased hair, and glitzy, gaudy earrings. And men in short-shorts. The kid in the story, Mitch's son, Hobie, was stomping (rather, skating) the same grounds at about the same age as me when I lived there, way back in the early 70s: the pedestrian strand that separates the beach from the south bay towns of Manhattan, Hermosa and Redondo beaches. Those storefronts couldn't still be the same as when I was hanging around there, but they sure looked familiar.

What's a better tonic for a weather report that promises a bone-chilling weekend than an escape to the beach? Here's Kelly in action.

Sound Construction 2.0

If you called Wain’s cell, you might get this voicemail message: “Hello, you’ve reached Sound Construction Company and Wain Anthony McFarlane . . . Create a great day.” Wain is a working musician – and by that I mean that music is his day job. Wain is Sound Construction Company and as such he writes and records music; manages up-and-coming artists, including having mentored one blond, dreadlocked teenager who now has his own presence in the cities’ music scene; rents sound equipment; operates a recording studio; and coordinates musical events. Mostly he sings and plays guitar, but he has been known to fill in on keyboards or drums when needed. Wain has many hobbies. He keeps Japanese koi in the water garden he built one summer in the yard of his girlfriend’s house. He spent a couple weeks (and all the money that should have been going toward living expenses) sanding the floors and white-washing the walls of his warehouse so he could provide art space as part of the Northeast Art-a-Whirl last spring. He recently was given 35 old red pay phones that he wants to weld together into a working phone booth and hopes to get a commission from the city for an installation of the phone booth as an art piece downtown.

I picked Wain up at his Northeast Minneapolis home one cool morning in November to drive him to the hospital for outpatient surgery. His girlfriend, Catherine, with whom he lives, asked me to be his driver that day since she couldn’t get off work. As he collected his keys and cell phone, I noticed a painting on the wall I hadn’t seen before. It was a portrait of Wain flanked by Ziggy and Stephen Marley from when Wain’s reggae band, Ipso Facto, opened for the Melody Makers at the Quest in the early 90s. In the painting, Wain is smiling broadly, wearing his signature black top hat. Wain is a robust guy, five feet nine with the shape and temperament of Santa Claus. As I followed him out the door I noticed how scrawny his dreadlocks had become. When I met him over a decade ago, they were plump and long and doubled the sized of his head. Now they were sparse and barely hanging on.

Wain was diagnosed with hypertension in 1997, but it wasn’t until he went in for a hip replacement (years of jumping on and off stages, combined with prescribed steroids and Jack Daniels, destroyed his hips) in February 2006 that he was sitting still long enough for tests to be taken, which diagnosed kidney failure. Hypertension, along with diabetes and glomerulonephritis, is the leading cause of kidney failure. Until a compatible kidney donor could be indentified from among the many family members who volunteered to be tested, his dialysis treatments could continue indefinitely. He needed a permanent dialysis access site (called an “arterio venous fistula”). The fistula, a device implanted under the skin, joining a vein and an artery, offers efficient access for removing the patient’s blood for filtration. It is also less likely to get infected than a temporary access site that has to be opened anew each time.

In the car, he made several calls to “take care of some business before I go to sleep.” One almost never has his full attention. It is rare for Wain to go more than a few minutes without an incoming or outgoing call. If you are ever out in public with him, there will always be someone – fan, friend, someone who saw Wain play at a wedding or prom – who stops to say hello and chat. That day he made calls to solicit help for the move of his studio equipment from his warehouse, which he could no longer afford, to a smaller office space, and to coordinate an up-coming gig at Famous Dave’s.

I dropped him at the hospital and went back to pick him up several hours later. He would not be released until he had feeling in his arm (where the fistula was implanted) which would take another hour, so they let me wait with Wain in his cubicle. The nurses were in and out, monitoring his progress. One of them told Wain some other nurses had been talking about him. He grinned from ear to ear and said “gossiping about me, how fun is that?!” Eventually a nurse told him he could leave, but he still didn’t have control of his right hand so I had to help him get dressed. He laughed as I helped him get his jeans on and started singing the Dionne Warwick song, “That’s What Friends Are For.” We were singing it together as we walked out to the administrative station, where six nurses were bustling but stopped when Wain approached. They asked him to sing them a song and he crooned the first couple verses of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” One nurse asked what band he was in. He said, “My band is called Wain McFarlane. My big band was called Ipso Facto.” I saw the recognition in their faces as they nodded and looked at him with renewed interest. “I was the guy in the top hat. My brother, Greg, played drums and that was my brother JuJu in the leather chaps and nut cup. I got you through the 80s!” he chuckled. “You were drunk, but I got you through it!”

It had been a manic journey to this moment. Soon after the diagnosis of kidney failure, many of his family members offered to be tested for compatibility as donors. But because he didn’t have the proper health coverage, navigating the kidney transplant program was like slogging through molasses; nobody could be tested for donor compatibility until the seemingly limitless paperwork was complete. For instance, they would fill out a form and submit it. The next week they’d check back to see how the process was going and would be told it was never received. Or they weren’t informed of all the parties that needed to receive a copy. They eventually learned to keep copies of everything and follow up, ideally in person, to make sure the information was logged where it should. There were two or three different forms a week for roughly six to eight months. As Catherine described it, they had to stand on one foot facing east while the moon was rising to get the accurate and complete information and she was afraid Wain might not live that long.

That fall Wain went to Walker, on Leech Lake in northern Minnesota, for a couple of weeks. He has a good friend who runs a resort on Leech and visits several times a year. One night he was sitting at a bar and struck up a conversation with a couple sitting next to him. It came out in conversation the hassles he was having trying to get a kidney. The woman had connections through her work with the Mayo Clinic and could get him in contact with a kidney surgeon there. What’s more, the couple had a big house in Rochester and would welcome him as their guest, giving him his own suite and run of the place for as long as would be needed. Within two weeks Wain and Catherine were sitting in the kidney surgeon’s office. Soon after that, the first family member was tested for compatibility.

A week after the fistula implantation I went with Wain to one of his thrice weekly dialysis treatments. We stopped at the convenience store to buy coffee and sweet rolls for some of the other patients. He told me, “I’m the pacifier. You can tell how the day’s going to go by those first few minutes.” He was referring to his neighbors who sit in the “Tahiti” section of the clinic (the other two being “Jamaica” and “Maui”). He explained that some mornings the patients were grumpier and needier than others.

There are 28 “chairs,” or dialysis stations, in the privately run clinic he goes to in downtown Minneapolis. Nearly all the patients are black. African-Americans have disproportionately higher rates of kidney disease and are also less likely to be placed or even referred to kidney waiting lists. African-Americans are more likely to find a compatible kidney from another African-American, but they have a low instance of donorship compared to white Americans. When we arrived at the clinic he was glad to see who his technician would be that day and greeted her as “my Nubian princess.” He passed out the coffee and made sure everyone had some munchies. “Everyone is happy this morning,” he grinned. “It’s a good day.”

It takes four and a half hours for the dialysis machine to clean Wain’s blood of impurities and excess water, the work his kidneys are no longer doing He tries to get started by 7:00 a.m. so that he can be home by noon to start his day. The guy to his left let out a belly laugh, and Wain said, “He’s watching Sanford and Son. She’s usually watching it too,” he continued, gesturing toward the woman to his right (each chair had its own television). “They laugh in stereo and that makes me laugh.” He giggled. He told me about his plans to take them fishing to Leech Lake. They would all “dialysize” at the small clinic in Walker.

“Oh look, it’s that country guy, Keith Urban, he’s gonna be here this weekend.” Wain’s channel was tuned in to a morning news and entertainment program. “He’s that country dude. Catherine says you don’t like him,” he said to me, not quite approving of my music snobbery.

“I never said I didn’t like him, I said it’s not country. It’s pop,” I contested.

“I like him. And what’s that other guy’s name? Kenny Chesney. I saw him once in Jamaica. Do you like him?”

“Kenny Chesney is a virulent homophobe.”

“Yeah, they’re all homophobes down there,” Wain said, referring to Jamaica, where he visits about once a year.

Wain’s father grew up in Jamaica; his mother is from Mississippi. Wain was born in Kansas City, MO, and the family (ten children at the time; two more were yet to be born) moved to Worthington, Minnesota, in 1964 when Wain was 11. They were the first black family in that small town. He recalls his childhood in Kansas City, watching movies from the balcony of the theatre, feeling like a king. He didn’t realize he wouldn’t have been allowed in the other section of the theatre. On one of the first days in Worthington he was checking out his new neighborhood and ran into a white kid on the street. He hadn’t yet seen a white person up close and the sight scared him. He screamed, which startled the white kid, and they both ran off screaming in opposite directions. Wain always laughs when he tells that story. The kid, Phil, remains a good friend.

Wain was looking forward to the Famous Dave’s gig coming up the following night. He doesn’t have many these days. Dialysis exhausts him and makes his hands too sore to play the guitar. Furthermore, to qualify for Medicaid, he has to limit his earnings, keeping them under about $1000 a month. That means itemizing every dollar that comes in and accounting for that to Hennepin County Health, Housing & Social Services, which distributes his disability and EBT (food stamps) benefits. He exceeded the upper limit once last year and hasn’t been getting EBT since. By the time he pays all the musicians after the Famous Dave’s gig, he won’t even clear $100. As Wain has said many times, you don’t play music for the money. The preparations, the assembling of musicians, the audience, the music – every aspect of the show energizes him, gives him purpose. He rarely frets about money, usually spending all that is available to him, a quality that is not always endearing to Catherine.

* * *

The night of the gig, about half an hour before the band would begin, Wain and I were grabbing a drink at the bar. A blonde, college-aged woman tapped him on the shoulder and asked “Are you Wain McFarlane?” He nodded expectantly. She said she was from Walker where she had seen him play. She said her mother was sitting at a table on the other side of the bar and wanted to talk to him. It turned out her mother is one of the owners of the Moondance Jam, a festival that takes place every summer, Walker’s Woodstock, and Wain has wanted to play there for years. They agreed to meet in a few weeks when Wain would be up at the lake.

Catherine brought some colleagues to see the show and one of them brought her seven-year-old daughter, Olivia, specifically to meet Wain. Wain asked Olivia if she wanted to come up on stage and sing. She shook her head, pinching her brow. As he was about to turn away to talk to another member of the party, Olivia found her courage and told him she plays the guitar. Wain asked, “What’s your favorite song to play?’ “Back in Black” she said with a straight face.

Even though Wain hadn’t decided the playlist until he was standing in front of the audience, the band followed his direction without faltering. As it turned out, he started with a bluesy rock instrumental then lead the band into “St. Thomas,” the pop-calypso version from the jazz-fusion wave of the 80s. These are followed by an R&B number Wain wrote, “That Was Then, This Is Now,” which was used several years ago as background music in a scene on the soap opera “The Young and the Restless.” I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve heard him play this song. I asked Catherine if she ever gets tired of hearing it. She shook her head and smiled dreamily, “No, it feeds me every time.” Many people forget that Wain isn’t the only one going through his health crisis. Catherine is also bearing a heavy weight. It was good to see her enjoying herself. She told me once that he is too big for the world, that this earth can’t contain him.

It was past Olivia’s bedtime and Catherine walked her to the stage so Olivia could wave goodbye to Wain. He took Olivia by the hand and brought her up on stage, handing her his white Stratocaster, which was about the same size as she was. She leaned the guitar against her small body, concentration etched into her small features, then plunked out the opening chords of AC/DC’s “Back in Black” while the band quietly backed her up.

* * *

That was Wain’s life for the past two years, undergoing dialysis three days a week and working the few gigs his health and energy level would allow. On Tuesday, February 26, Wain was gifted a kidney from his niece Yai, the 26-year-old daughter (and angel of mercy) of his sister Patricia. The day of the surgery dozens of anxiously waiting friends and family were kept updated on a website set up specifically for that purpose by one of Catherine’s sisters. In the waiting lounge, at least 20 family members, including siblings and their children, were lead in murmured praises to Jesus by Queen Mother McFarlane for Wain and Yai’s successful operations and recovery, and for other patients whose family members brought good news.

When Wain was wheeled out of surgery, the first thing he asked for was his guitar. Catherine said that he writes a new song for every occurrence, such as “my IV monitor is beeping, my IV is done,” and “she’s putting in my Heprin, la la la.”

In addition to being grateful to Yai for the kidney and the chance to continue following his life’s purpose, Wain feels that he is getting some feminine insight from the new body part in his abdomen. He gloated, “I’m part Nubian princess now.”

He makes me laugh

From an interview between GW and Today Show's Ann Curry:

ANN CURRY: Some Americans believe that they feel they’re carrying the burden because of this economy.


PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Yeah, well—


ANN CURRY: The economy, they say, is suffering because of this war.


PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I don’t agree with that.


ANN CURRY: You don’t agree with that? It has nothing to do with the economy, the war, the spending on the war?


PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I don’t think so. I think, actually, the spending on the war might help with jobs.


ANN CURRY: Oh, yeah?


PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Yeah, because we’re buying equipment, and people are working. I think this economy is down because we built too many houses.

That is how the story began on today's Democracy Now! about the "Three Trillion Dollar War," in which two entities are raking in these riches shelled out (no pun intended) by we, the tax payers: Oil companies -- and their investors -- and defense contractors.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We’re going to get into quite a few of those, but I’d like to ask you about the oil, in particular, because obviously many critics initially, when the war began, criticized it as a war to dominate Iraq’s oil. But as you point out, the price of oil has skyrocketed from about $25 a barrel to $100 a barrel since the war began. And what portion of that rise—you also try to attribute to the actual Iraq war, right?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Well, we were very conservative in our book. When we say $3 trillion, that’s really an underestimate. We attributed, in our book, only $5 to $10 to the war itself. But if you look back, in 2003, futures markets, which take into account increases in demand, increases in supply—they knew that China was going to have increased demand, but they thought there would be increases in supply from the Middle East—they thought the price would remain at $25 for the next ten years or more. What changed that equation was the Iraq war. They couldn’t elicit the increase of supply in the Middle East because of the turmoil that we brought there. So we think, actually, the true numbers, not the $5 or $10 that we used, because we didn’t want to get in a quibble, but really a much larger fraction of the difference between $25 that it was at the time in 2003 and the $100 we face today.



And there's this from yesterday's press conference:

"Wait, what did you just say? You're predicting $4-a-gallon gasoline?" Bush responded to a reporter who said some analysts expect prices to soon climb that high. "That's interesting. I hadn't heard that. . . . I know it's high now."

Spoken like a very happy investor . . . You can just about hear the glee in voice.

In the same conference, talking about immunity for telecom companies participation in illegal wiretapping of American's phone calls, he insisted that protecting American's civil rights are foremost in the minds of people listening to our phone conversations:

I wouldn't put it that way, if I were you, in public. Well, you've been long been long enough to -- anyway, yes, I -- look, there's -- people who analyze the program fully understand that America's civil liberties are well protected. There is a constant check to make sure that our civil liberties of our citizens aren't -- you know, are treated with respect. And that's what I want, and that's what most -- all Americans want.

He went on explain why telecoms need protection and American people don't:

Now let me talk about the phone companies. You cannot expect phone companies to participate if they feel like they're going to be sued. I mean, it is -- these people are responsible for shareholders; they're private companies. The government said to those who have alleged to have helped us that it is in our national interests and it's legal. It's in our national interests because we want to know who's calling who from overseas into America. We need to know in order to protect the people.

But you really should watch it for yourself.

And finally, he and his posse continue to kick sand over their tracks of their politically-motivated conspiracy to influence the justice department by seating right-leaning US Attorneys, a position that is supposed to be nonpartisan. Pelosi finally got some grit and "asked the Justice Department on Thursday to open a grand jury investigation into whether President Bush's chief of staff and former counsel should be prosecuted for contempt of Congress," only to have the White House call the request "truly contemptible."

The Justice Department said it had received Pelosi's request and anticipated providing further guidance after Mukasey's review. It noted "long-standing department precedent" in such cases against letting a U.S. attorney refer a congressional contempt citation to a grand jury or prosecute an executive branch. The top House Republican called it "a partisan political stunt" and "a complete waste of time," according to a spokesman.

"There is no authority by which persons may wholly ignore a subpoena and fail to appear as directed because a president unilaterally instructs them to do so," Pelosi wrote Mukasey. She noted that Congress subpoenaed Miers to appear before the House Judiciary Committee, which is investigating the firings.

Leap Day 2008

Mark Seeley had this to say about this year's February weather:

February mean temperatures ranged from 5 to 8 degrees F colder than normal around the state. Extremes for the month were -40 degrees F at International Falls and Embarrass on the 11th and a high of 52 degrees F at Canby on the 24th. Minnesota reported the coldest temperature in the 48 contiguous states 9 times during the month, more than any other state. It was the coldest February since that of 2001. Most observers also reported a drier than normal month, with little snow. There were some exceptions as Worthington, La Crescent, Winona, and Caledonia reported above normal precipitation. Caledonia was also slightly above normal on monthly snowfall with 9.4 inches (normal is 9.3"), while Isle reported 7.9 inches of snowfall which corresponds to their average value for February. Though precipitation was lacking most places some strong low pressure systems crossed the state during the month, bringing wind gusts of 40 mph or greater to western Minnesota counties on four different dates. These all produced dangerous wind chill conditions. Thanks to a colder than normal December and February, the winter season (Dec '07 through Feb '08) will also be noted as the coldest statewide since that of 2000-2001.

So there you have it, from the weather guy.

I couldn't find any good or interesting Leap Year fun facts or trivia, so that's all you get.

S-s-s-s-o-o-o-o c-c-cold!

It's been another day of sub-zero weather - I think I heard them say the fifth day so far this month. And since we had handfuls in each of December and January also, I'm thinking it's some kind of record for the coldest winter in while.

When I moved here, 22 years ago, it snowed on Thanksgiving weekend. I was enchanted with the way the big Victorians in my neighborhood looked surrounded with their quiet, snowy quilt, golden light glowing beyond frosted windows. The squeak under foot, the cleanliness of the landscape. I got ice skates and drew wiggly lines on a frozen lake, holding hands with friends or beaux. I painted water colors of the black silhouettes of oaks against a twilit horizon. I learned to knit.

The snow berms got so tall, cars put ribbons on their antennae so they would be seen by other cars from around a corner. We got snowed in on a couple nights, and people didn't drive, they stayed on my floor until the roads got plowed.

I loved the snow but hated the cold. I whined and shivered like a cowering dog. I hadn't learned to dress for the weather. I was stubborn and vain and dressed more for attraction than for health maintenance. The first time I saw the Ice Palace I cried - not for its beauty, but because my feet were frozen.

It doesn't snow like those first winters anymore. But we have had good snow this season, and bone-penetrating cold. But now I just try to ignore it all, try not to take it personally. I dress in sensible down that covers my butt, with the hood securely snapped around my chin, and boots that keep my feet warm to some sub-zero temperature that I hope never to have to endure for longer than 10 minutes. I am not as enchanted with the scenery, but I still appreciate a cleansing snow to spruce up the landscape. I haven't been ice skating in years.

His work is done

Obstacles and catalysts

I started reading "Uncle Tom's Cabin" last night for my current English Honors class (bragging, just a little). I don't remember ever having read it before, but the story is very familiar. Maybe because I've read so many stories of slavery and suffering. About the time I got through the second chapter, where Eliza's husband, George, gets taken out of a factory where he was respected and treated with some compassion and put back to drudgery and misery, I started watching the second series in Henry Louis Gates, Jr's "African-American Lives 2." The first series aired last year about this time, and traced certain prominent black American's DNA back to Africa. In the current series he traces the family trees of some other prominent black American's back as far into our country's history.

Chris Rock's great-great-grandfather was born into slavery, fought in the civil war, became a state Senator during the reconstruction, was tossed out and left with nothing the Republicans sold the blacks out in favor of control of the White House, but eventually became landed and bequeathed considerable acreage to his offspring. Don Cheadle's great-great-grandparents were owned by Indians in Oklahoma, before it became a state. After emancipation, and after another decade and a half of having neither a country nor a livelihood, they were each given 40 acres and formed an all black town.

As each of the featured personalities are given these pieces of history, they visibly go through a range of emotions, from disbelief to pride to resentment to grief. Chris Rock said something like, "If I had known that my great-great-grandfather had achieved so much, I wouldn't have just assumed I wouldn't ever achieve anything." As they are learning these details of their family history, how they not only survived but were greatly successful, I, too am choked up and wiping away tears. My tears come from compassion, self-loathing and self-pity. I'm sorry for the prejudiced attitudes I sometimes have to chase out of my head; I'm at a loss for the lack of empathy between people. How can a person claim to believe in god -- because American was founded on Christian ideals -- and justify such treatment of another being, human or animal?

What is it that makes some people excel and accomplish great things despite unfathomable adversity? Black Americans today don't have nearly the obstacles that their forefathers did, and yet disparity exists at levels and across so many areas of life that people who study such things are at a loss to explain. And why, then, is someone like me not more successful, if I have nothing like that excuse? No one can argue that racism isn't alive and well, but that only explains part of the problem.

The level of a person's ambition varies so much from person to person. Some people have it, and adversity feeds it. Others, myself included, suffer a dearth. One of the reasons I continue to take classes and pursue degrees is to keep goals and deadlines for accomplishment in front of me,
to keep me from being a total bum, to divert my otherwise lazy instincts away from sloth, to keep the self-loathing at bay.

I don't have the type of success I expected I would, back when I was learning to express my self-awareness and forming my world view in my early-mid 20s. And it is a matter of definition, I know. A friend of mine has been living in a Buddhist monastery in Burma for the last 5 years or so, following a path of love and asceticism. I will ask him what his motivation is. Does he believe his life is serving a purpose, is he helping the world? Or is that a matter of interpretation? Am I too attached to the worldly idea of good works? And what will it matter anyway when I go off to the next dimension?

Is this my mid-life crises?

First Edwards, now Santana. Oh, the humanity!

At the end of the day today Johan's trade to the Mets may be sealed. My heart is breaking.

I was an unapologetic spectator sports reviler for most of my life, eschewing parties (although I'm a devout partygirl) that centered on sports events, drawing the mistrust (and pity) of many of my friends. I didn't appreciate the athleticism and skill involved, but mostly I was appalled at the salaries and oppose any public money for teams via stadiums and the like. It wasn't until the summer of 2003, with nothing much on the tube on Sundays but baseball, that I discovered the joys of the great American pastime. It was the summer we moved to the Sugar Shack and I had a variety of house projects in progress. Our friend Dennis would come over on Friday eve to help and stay until Sunday, and we would drink and paint (or wallpaper, or patch walls, or break ground for a garden, you know the drill) and stay up late talking politics (arguing, to most people's ears, although we agree on everything but the fine points), and on Sunday he and Pat would want to watch the game . At first I acquiesced but with the sound turned down so I could listen to the Latin music show, Brisas Latinas, and dance while I continued whatever project was in the works that day. As the summer wore on, I got less able to resist the magnetism of the tube, and I started watching a little here and there with the sound on, while Dennis explained the pitching game. The more I watched, the more I wanted to watch.

Baseball fans will remember that was the year the Marlins, lead by young phenom Josh Beckett on the mound, pitched a nine-inning shut-out game to beat the Yankees in the World Series. I was jumping on the couch, the three of us were cheering, the exhilaration lasting the rest of the week (I thought - and still do - that Beckett was too doughy, but hey, maybe that extra weight provides leverage). I couldn't wait for the next season, which happened to be the year Boston beat the Yankees in their division championship (remember those extra inning nail-biters, especially that one that went, like, 14 innings or something?!), then went on to win the World Series for the first time in nearly100 years, breaking the curse of the Bambino. The season before last, my hometown team took the American League Central Division title , another occasion of elation that is burned into my cranial and emotional memory.

All those joyous events have made a die-hard fan of me, and my friends who know the game are impressed with my knowledge. I can talk baseball.

But this is the first year I've experienced the darker side, the heartbreak of baseball.

First to go was Torii Hunter, the prettiest smile in baseball. A couple of other less pivotal players were traded, but they were on my team so my heart clenched up a little. But now the Johan Santana Show is being traded to the Mets! Oh the humanity! If the talking heads are to be believed, at the least one of the heads we have talking here in the TC, Johan wanted to go. But I don't think I'm the Lone Ranger when I lament the lousy trade they made for the best pitcher in baseball. There's all kinds of talk from baseball watchers around the country.



Here's how Ken Davidoff, New York Newsday writer, started his blog earlier this week:

In this crazy world of New York baseball, it just might turn out that, when the Mets complete their miraculous acquisition of Johan Santana, they should thank the Steinbrenner boys most of all.

and here's how he ended:

Great work by the Mets, yet they couldn't have done it without some help from the Yankees, and some incompetence by the Twins.

From another perspective, Chop Chick in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes:

Here are the facts regarding my personal position on Santana:

• I think Santana is great.

• Nobody can play like Santana.

• Santana is a great addition to any lineup.

• If you play with Santana, you’re going to bring in fans by the turnip truckload.

• Santana deserves as much $$$ as he wants to play in a big city like New York.

• Atlanta is just jealous because WE didn’t get Santana to come here.

• In 2003, Santana’s album “Abraxas” was ranked number 205 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time and I wholeheartedly agree with that assessment because it’s one of my favorites.

So you see, there’s no reason whatsoever to go off on a “CHOP CHICK HATES SANTANA” write-in crusade. Because I’ve personally blown out a number of speakers cranking up many of his fine guitar solos and…

Oh… Wait.

JOHAN Santana? A possible blockbuster Twins-Mets deal? THAT’S what she meant?

How depressing. I’ll never listen to “Abraxas” quite the same way again now.

I'm just glad I got to see him pitch that one game with a National League team (maybe it was even the Mets!) when he had to take at bats and whacked a double and eventually scored a run, all with a big smile on his face. Or when he pitched 17 strike-outs in a row, to the frenzied glee of the crowd. I'm just glad I bought a t-shirt with his name and number on it, while he was still a Minnesota Twin.

And then there were two

I was one of many who was put off by John Edwards' ambition to continue with his presidential bid after learning of his wife's untreatable cancer. I was appalled when I found out how much he spends on haircuts while claiming to speak for and champion the causes of the poor and working class. But I stuck with him because he articulated what I think is the basic issue of our time, the need to pry apart the stranglehold corporations have on our government and our democracy.

John Dickerson from Slate had this to say:

But Edwards' pitch was too limited. He often sounded like he was preaching to the converted in his party. Did this sink him? The question will be thoroughly adjudicated as the Democratic Party launches into another of its stirring debates over the limits of the populist message. But watching Edwards, it always felt like he was touching a passionate minority of voters who already believed that corporations were at the root of all of America's problems, as if all that was needed was the right candidate to beat them back. Edwards rarely summoned the bridging language that might have resonated with people who weren't already predisposed to corporation hate.

Even as I doubted his viability I planned to caucus for him next Tuesday, when he promised he'd still be in the race. I tried to keep faith. After all, I voted for Nader - twice. My facility for both optimism and cynicism keeps me on my toes. But he must have gotten brain freeze when he was here earlier in the week, because about twelve hours later Renee Montaigne informed me he had dropped out.

So now I'm ambivalent. How great is it to be choosing between a black man and a woman for the highest office in the land? But who has the best chance of winning the Independents and middle-ground Democrats? I think there's plenty of moderates who would vote for anybody but Clinton. Not to mention, the crooked, ends-justify-the-means neocons who have already stolen two elections aren't going to quietly sidle away on the departing heels of George W. Bush. They aren't going to cede power that easily.

I detest that the mainstream media has been competing with Fox News with their sexist rhetoric against Clinton, and by extension, all women. But she and her husband are not innocents; they have been using Rovian tactics in their campaign against Obama, tainting the conversation with just enough to remind white Americans of their distrust and fear of black men. It makes my stomach turn.

So, Obama moves up as my number one choice. But will he be effective? I agree with the argument that he won't be able to hit the ground running, that he will need time to orient himself to the playing field. There really isn't time to loose; we have already gone backwards socially, economically, morally, several decades. And I don't mean to insinuate that he's naive -- he is a member of the largest oppressed community in our country, after all, he knows what "the man" is all about -- but does he really know the depth and extent of the wickedness of our government? Does he have the stomach? Will he regret his decision once he finds out? Still, he is more in touch with the masses, unlike his opponent as well as his mega-endorser, Oprah, and I believe he will best speak for us.

It's all relative

This I overheard yesterday:

"We're going to New York this weekend, when it will be a lot warmer, in the 30s." Sounds balmy.
When I got in my car to go home yesterday evening it had warmed up 10 degrees since the morning commute, when the thermometer read -14 (yes, that's a minus), not factoring for wind chill, which was about twice that.

It is "warming up." This morning the thermometer read a comfy 1 degree. You'd be surprised what a difference that makes. The weather forecasters have suspended their cold advisories, when they warn people not to leave skin exposed or go out alone and broadcast threats of hypothermia and frostbite. It's 6 right now, and sunny, but the wind chill makes it feel like -6, but at least we're headed in the right direction. It's days like these I'm thankful for hot flashes. Strange days, indeed.

Email to Harry Reid

I just sent this to Senator Reid:

I am perpetually disheartened and angry at the "Democratic" leadership for continuing to cave to the Bush administration, allowing them to get away with their crimes against the American public and the constitution. The FISA bill and the effort to grant telecoms immunity for their participation in illegal surveillance of Americans is just another in a slew of attacks on our democracy.

You are not giving them "hell", Harry, you are giving them head. Please remember why you are in Washington and who you are working for.

Dream a little dream

I had a dream about a month ago that I should have written about at the time, of course, but I'm going to try to remember it now.

It began (do dreams really have a beginning?) in some cityscape, in something like an elevator or turnstile. There was a group of us being asked to follow the path down to ....? We did this, and it became increasingly difficult going as the path kept getting narrower and crookeder. The pathway included stairs and hobbit holes and all manner of passages that kept getting smaller to the point that I was physically sure I couldn't fit through but then found myself in another passageway.

(This is not an uncommon theme, closed spaces, entrapment and claustrophobia).

Finally I was in something like a stadium, but one that was suspended in space, but I knew it to be underground. There were many levels, some of them having grassy areas. There were lots of people there, and I understood we were all trapped, while another population of people lived up on the surface.

I slowly realized those of us who were trapped were imperfect in some way. Some were not terribly good-looking, or somewhat fat or somewhat old. To my eyes, nobody was ugly, but I got the impression that we or someone else thought us to be less than "ideal."

I overheard someone tell a youngster that they would eventually be allowed to go up to the surface, once they became an adult. I intuited that comment to mean that the young person had not yet matured into what the surface population considered ideal. I then figured out that I could have an effect on whether I thought I was good enough or not to live on the surface.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Pretty deep, huh?

Sound Construction

If you called Wain’s cell, you might get this voicemail message: “Hello, you’ve reached Sound Construction Company and Wain Anthony McFarlane . . . Create a great day.” Wain is a working musician – and by that I mean that music is his day job. Wain is Sound Construction Company and as such he writes and records music; manages up-and-coming artists, including having mentored one blond, dreadlocked teenager who now has his own presence in the cities’ music scene; rents sound equipment; operates a recording studio; and coordinates musical events. As a musician he mostly sings and plays guitar, but he has been known to fill in on keyboards or drums when needed. Wain also has hobbies. He keeps Japanese koi in the water garden he built one summer in the yard of his girlfriend’s house. He spent a couple weeks (and all the money that should have been going toward living expenses) sanding the floors and white-washing the walls of his warehouse so he could provide art space as part of the Northeast Art-a-Whirl last spring. He recently was given 35 old red pay phones that he wants to weld together into a working phone booth and hopes to get a commission from the city for an installation of the phone booth as an art piece downtown.

I picked Wain up at his Northeast Minneapolis home one cool morning in November to drive him to the hospital for outpatient surgery. His girlfriend, Catherine, with whom he lives, asked me to be his driver that day since she couldn’t get off work. As he collected his keys and cell phone, I noticed a painting on the wall I hadn’t seen before. It was a portrait of Wain flanked by Ziggy and Stephen Marley from when Wain’s reggae band, Ipso Facto, opened for the Melody Makers at the Quest in the early 90s. In the painting, Wain is smiling broadly, wearing his signature black top hat. Wain is a big black man, five feet nine and shaped like Santa Claus. As I followed him out the door I noticed how scrawny his dreadlocks had become. When I met him 11 years ago, they were plump and long and doubled the sized of his head. Now they were sparse and barely hanging on.

Wain was diagnosed with hypertension in 1997, but it wasn’t until he went in for a hip replacement (years of jumping on and off stages, combined with prescribed steroids and Jack Daniels, destroyed his hips) in February 2006 that he was sitting still long enough for tests to be taken, which diagnosed kidney failure. Hypertension, along with diabetes and glomerulonephritis, is the leading cause of kidney failure. Until a compatible kidney donor could be indentified from among the many family members who volunteered to be tested, his dialysis treatments could continue indefinitely. He needed a permanent dialysis access site (called an “arterio venous fistula”). The fistula, a device implanted under the skin, joining a vein and an artery, offers efficient access for removing the patient’s blood for filtration. It is also less likely to get infected than a temporary access site that had to be opened anew each time.

In the car, he made several calls to “take care of some business before I go to sleep.” One almost never has his full attention. It was rare for Wain to go more than a few minutes without an incoming or outgoing call. If you are ever out at a restaurant or bar with him, there will always be someone – fan, friend, someone who saw Wain play at a wedding or prom – who stops to say hello and chat. That day he made calls to solicit help for the move of his studio equipment from his warehouse, which he could no longer afford, to a smaller office space, and to coordinate an up-coming gig at Famous Dave’s.

I dropped him at the hospital and went back to pick him up several hours later. He would not be released until he had feeling in his arm (where the fistula was implanted) which would take another hour, so they let me wait with Wain in his room. The nurses were in and out, monitoring his progress. One of them told Wain some other nurses had been talking about him. He grinned from ear to ear and said “gossiping about me, how fun is that?!” Eventually a nurse told him he could leave, but he still didn’t have control of his right hand so I had to help him get dressed. He laughed as I helped him get his jeans on and started singing the Dionne Warwick song, “That’s What Friends Are For.” We were singing it together as we walked out to the administrative station, where six nurses were bustling but stopped when Wain approached. They asked him to sing them a song and he crooned the first couple verses of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” One nurse asked what band he was in. He said, “My band is called Wain McFarlane. My big band was called Ipso Facto.” I saw the recognition in their faces as they nodded and looked at him with renewed interest. “I was the guy in the top hat. My brother, Greg, played drums and that was my brother JuJu in the leather chaps and nut cup. I got you through the 80s!” He chuckled, “You were drunk, but I got you through it!”

It had been a manic journey to this moment. Soon after the diagnosis of kidney failure, many of his family members offered to be tested for compatibility as donors. But because he didn’t have the proper health coverage, navigating the kidney transplant program was like slogging through molasses; nobody could be tested for donor compatibility until the seemingly limitless paperwork was complete. For instance, they would fill out a form and submit it. The next week they’d check back to see how the process was going and would be told it was never received. Or they weren’t informed of all the parties that needed to receive a copy. They eventually learned to keep copies of everything and follow up, ideally in person, to make sure the information was logged where it should. There were two or three different forms a week for roughly six to eight months. As Catherine described it, they had to stand on one foot facing east while the moon was rising to get the accurate and complete information and she was afraid Wain might not live that long.

That fall Wain went to Walker, on Leech Lake in northern Minnesota, for a couple of weeks. He has a good friend who runs a resort on Leech and visits several times a year. One night he was sitting at a bar and struck up a conversation with a couple sitting next to him. It came out in conversation the hassles he was having trying to get a kidney. The woman had connections through her work with the Mayo Clinic and could get him in contact with a kidney surgeon there. What’s more, the couple had a big house in Rochester and would welcome him as their guest, giving him his own wing and run of the place for as long as would be needed. Within two weeks they were sitting in the surgeon’s office. Soon after that, the first family member was tested for compatibility (to date, several family members have been tested but a kidney donor has yet to be confirmed).

A week after the fistula implantation I went with Wain to one of his thrice weekly dialysis treatments. We stopped at the convenience store to buy coffee and sweet rolls for some of the other patients. He told me, “I’m the pacifier. You can tell how the day’s going to go by those first few minutes.” He was referring to his neighbors who sit in the “Tahiti” section of the clinic (the other two being “Jamaica” and “Maui”). He explained that some mornings the patients were grumpier and needier than others.

There are 28 “chairs,” or dialysis stations in the privately run clinic he goes to in downtown Minneapolis. Nearly all the patients are black. African-Americans have disproportionately higher rates of kidney disease and, due to issues of poverty and access, are also less likely to be placed or even referred to kidney waiting lists. African-Americans are more likely to find a compatible kidney from another African-American, but they have a low instance of donorship compared to white Americans. When we arrived at the clinic he was glad to see who his technician would be that day and greeted her as “my Nubian princess.” He passed out the coffee and made sure everyone had some munchies. “Everyone is happy this morning,” he grinned. “It’s a good day.”

It takes four and a half hours for the dialysis machine to clean Wain’s blood of impurities and excess water, the work his kidneys are no longer doing He tries to get started by 7:00 a.m. so that he can be home by noon to start his day. The guy to his left let out a belly laugh, and Wain said, “He’s watching Sanford and Son. She’s usually watching it too,” he continued, gesturing toward the woman to his right (each chair had its own television). “They laugh in stereo and that makes me laugh.” He giggled. He told me about his plans to take them fishing to Leech Lake. They would all “dialysize” at the small clinic in Walker.

“Oh look, it’s that country guy, Keith Urban, he’s gonna be here this weekend.” Wain’s channel was tuned in to a morning news and entertainment program. “He’s that country dude. Catherine says you don’t like him,” he said to me, not quite approving of my music snobbery.

“I never said I didn’t like him, I said it’s not country. It’s pop,” I contested.

“I like him. And what’s that other guy’s name? Kenny Chesney. I saw him once in Jamaica. Do you like him?”

“Kenny Chesney is a virulent homophobe.”

“Yeah, they’re all homophobes down there,” Wain said, referring to Jamaica, where he visits about once a year.

Wain’s father is originally from Jamaica; his mother is from Mississippi. Wain was born in Kansas City, MO, and the family (ten children at the time; two more were yet to be born) moved to Worthington, Minnesota, in 1964 when Wain was 11. He recalls his childhood in Kansas City, watching movies from the balcony of the theatre, feeling like a king. He didn’t realize he wouldn’t have been allowed in the other section of the theatre. On one of the first days in Worthington he was checking out his new neighborhood and ran into a white kid on the street. He hadn’t yet seen a white person up close and the sight scared him. He screamed, which startled the white kid, and they both ran off screaming in opposite directions. Wain always laughs when he tells that story. The kid, Phil, remains a good friend.

Wain was really looking forward to the Famous Dave’s gig coming up the following night. He doesn’t have many these days. Dialysis makes him tired and sore, including making it painful to play the guitar. Furthermore, to qualify for Medicaid, he has to limit his earnings, keeping them under about $1000 a month. That means itemizing every dollar that comes in and accounting for that to Hennepin County Health, Housing & Social Services, which distributes his disability and EBT (food stamps) benefits. He exceeded the upper limit a couple months ago and hasn’t been getting EBT since. By the time he pays all the musicians after the Famous Dave’s gig, he won’t even clear $100. As Wain has said many times, you’re not a musician for the money. The preparations, the assembling of musicians, the audience, the music – every aspect of the show energizes him, gives him purpose. He rarely frets about money, a quality that is not always endearing to Catherine.

Wain assembled a variety of musicians to make up the band for the Famous Dave’s show and, in addition, would have two musical guests up for a couple songs each. Wain is brilliant at assembling musicians who have never played together before and orchestrating magic. That night there would be a second lead guitar (Wain is one), bass, drums, keyboard and a conga/saxophone player. The guests that night would be a 15-year-old slide guitar player and a jazz singer from Denmark.

* * *

It’s the night of the gig. The stage is ready, the musicians are assembled and Wain and I are getting a drink at the bar. A blonde, college-aged woman taps him on the shoulder and asks “Are you Wain McFarlane?” He nods. She’s from Walker where she has seen him play. She says her mother is sitting at a table on the other side of the bar and wants to talk to him. It turns out her mother is one of the owners of the Moondance Jam, a festival that takes place every summer, Walker’s Woodstock, and Wain has wanted to play there for years. They agree to meet in a few weeks when Wain will be up at the lake.

Catherine has brought some colleagues to see the show and one of them has brought her seven-year-old daughter, Olivia, specifically to meet Wain. Wain asks Olivia if she wants to come up on stage and sing. She shakes her head. He is about to turn away to talk to another member of the party when Olivia finds her courage and tells him she plays the guitar. Wain asks, “What’s your favorite song to play?’ “Back in Black” she says with a straight face.

Even though Wain hasn’t decided the playlist until he is standing in front of the audience, the band follows his direction without faltering. As it turns out, he starts with a bluesy rock instrumental then leads the band into “St. Thomas,” the pop-calypso version from the jazz-fusion wave of the 80s. These are followed by an R&B number Wain wrote, “That Was Then, This Is Now,” which was used several years ago as background music in a scene on the soap opera “The Young and the Restless.” I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve heard him play this song. I ask Catherine if she ever gets tired of hearing it. She shakes her head and smiles dreamily, “No, it feeds me every time.” Many people forget that Wain isn’t the only one going through his health crisis. Catherine is also bearing a heavy weight. It’s good to see her enjoying herself. She told me once, when she feared Wain might die before he got a transplant, that he is too big for the world, that this earth can’t contain him.

It’s past Olivia’s bedtime and Catherine walks her to the stage so Olivia can wave goodbye to Wain. He brings Olivia up on stage and hands her his white Stratocaster, which is about the same size as she is. She sits on the drum stage so she can lean the guitar against her small body then plunks out the opening chords of AC/DC’s “Back in Black” while the band quietly backs her up.

During the second set, those ubiquitous clusters of middle-aged women gather to dance together in front of the stage. One of them is me. There’s Wain center stage, in a sleeveless plaid shirt and straw cowboy hat, eyes closed, feeling his way through a guitar riff. Another family member has been identified as a possible donor. Whenever he gets a new kidney, it’s clear he is not finished with this rock ‘n roll life just yet.