An Irresponsible Journalist

I wonder if Alan remembers me at all, the few times that I have seen him around town—if he remembers my face. Or if he has forgotten completely.

He had read a poem, a long time ago, at a literary event we were both participating in—he had, maybe, read more than one, but the one I remember the most was a charming, satirical ode to the pen he had just asked his wife for, that he would certainly misplace almost immediately after it had been handed to him. 

He and his wife were my neighbors for a while—maybe for a year or so. We didn’t know them, really. Not even after he and I both read pieces at the same event. Alan and his wife—her name is Heidi—before they had their children, or at least before they had more than one, lived two houses down from the home my wife and I were renting.

Maybe just a friendly wave, or a hello. Between myself and Alan, and Heidi. Nothing more. 

Alan did not remember me, I do not think, when I knocked on the door of his office in January 2015. 

He did not remember my face, from two houses down. Or from the literary event. 

I knew he was inside, but he refused to answer. I knocked. I waited. No response. I slid my business card—it said “reporter” on it, as my title, underneath, and then began to walk away. I had made it back outside into the cold air when I heard him behind me, standing in the doorway to the building where his office was. He wouldn’t come any closer. He was hesitant. There had been threats against him, and his family. I asked him if he wished to comment, or make a statement, or be interviewed.

I’d like to believe he told me he’d think about it, but I can’t, with confidence, say that was his response to me. He never reached out, regardless, and I didn’t want to press him anymore after that.

It didn’t seem worth it. 

I wonder if he remembers me at all, as the years have passed and in the times I have seen him, or his wife—always smiling with a mouth full of bright, white teeth, around town. Their children, so much older now. 

I searched his name online, and one of the first things that came up was an opinion piece that he had contributed in December 2023 to the local newspaper that, roughly ten years prior, had employed me, and pushed me into this story that he was, unfortunately, adjacent to. The local newspaper that had asked me to trudge down the street from my cubicle in the newsroom to his office and knock on his door to ask for a comment, or if he wished to be interviewed. 

The opinion piece he had written was titled, “Reflections of An American Jewish Zionist.” The paywall prevents me from reading any of it.

I don’t think I wish to know what it says, though. 

I wonder if he remembers me at all. 

*

Usually once a year, sometimes more than once a year depending on how petty I might be feeling about it, I will look to see if James Fetzer has died yet, or not. As of right now, August 2024, he is still alive—he’s 83.

On the page with the search results, Fetzer’s Wikipedia is the first thing that comes up, and at the top of the page, there is a photograph of him, credited to Rolling Stone. 

Fetzer is in a courtroom. He’s wearing a maroon button-down shirt and a gray blazer. His hair is bright white and thinning. It’s parted on the right. He looks smug, in the photo. He’s looking over his shoulder. But he also looks concerned. Concerned and maybe a little disappointed. 

The photo is from a short Rolling Stone piece written by EJ Dickson, published in 2019—“Sandy Hook Father Awarded $450,000 In Conspiracy Theorist Suit.” Among other published works, James Fetzer is responsible for writing a 450-page book entitled Nobody Died At Sandy Hook. 

He was sued for defamation over his egregious claims that the 2012 elementary school shooting never happened.

He lost.

*

I was already in way over my head with the job in January, 2015. 

Or, if not in over my head, I realized that, a mere four months in, that I was not cut out for the more unsavory aspects of the job that I was being asked to do—things that I had not given consideration to when I had applied. When I had interviewed. When I had accepted. When I showed up on my first day, eager, excited, nervous. 

Or, if I was not in over my head, I was just simply not cut out for the stress. Not at all built for the anxiety that came with the line of work. 

Not at all built for the ambulance chasing I had been, and would be, asked to do—grim invasions of privacy in somebody else’s vulnerable moments that I would just never become comfortable with.

I didn’t have the patience, or the enthusiasm, to chase after every lead, and write every story. By the end of my time as a news writer, any patience, or enthusiasm that I had for any story, regardless of what it was about, was gone completely.  

And no point, during my time employed by the newspaper, did I have the patience or the enthusiasm that was necessary to understanding all the pieces when it came to stories that were not even nuanced, really, but were merely overcomplicated by their many layers. 

Stories that were overcomplicated, like James Fetzer. 

I had no background in journalism. I was not familiar with AP Style—my first slip-up of including an Oxford comma where one should not have been in one of my earliest articles sent my editor into an absolute tizzy.

I can still hear him. Jerry. His southern Illinois drawl, shouting, somewhat in jest, but also somewhat in earnest, at me, across the rows of cubicles in the newsroom, exclaiming that from just a single instance of the Oxford comma in a news story, he was going to have a problem with me, and trying to break my habit of using it. 

I had no background in journalism. But I could write. And, at that point, I had been a resident of Northfield, Minnesota, for around eight years, and had already worked myriad different jobs, so I was connected, or at least somewhat known, within the community, which is something that others in the newsroom, who were much younger and fresh out of “J School,” as it was often called, and had relocated to Northfield, for the job, could not offer. 

I had no background in journalism, but was hired, nevertheless, as a reporter, for the Northfield News. 

I lasted two years, nearly to the day, which is about a year longer than a lot of other reporters would last in this specific newsroom, for whatever reason. Whether they, too, realize they are not cut out for it, or they move on to write for a different paper. 

I lasted two years, but I was already in way over my head, or simply not cut out for the more unsavory aspects of the job, merely four months in.

*

I’d never heard the name James Fetzer prior to January 2015, and I would like to think that if the events that occurred over the course of roughly a month, or, like, a month and a half, had not happened, or had even just unfolded a little differently—I would like to think I would have never heard his name. 

I would like to think that this wouldn’t have been an experience in which I had the utter misfortune of being involved, adjacently or otherwise. That this wouldn’t be a story that I, rarely, if ever, wish to recount to any degree, but a story that I still carry with me. 

James Fetzer, then, wouldn’t be someone that, at least once a year and sometimes more than once a year, depending on how I am feeling, I look up online to see if there is an obituary and if the tense of his Wikipedia entry has been altered from present to past. 

I'm hesitant to say this all started with a tip. But it did. At least my introduction to the overcomplicated nature of these events. I was gently pointed in the direction of something that had already quickly developed, and had immediately gotten out of control.  

I was encouraged to pursue it as a story. 

I have heard the name James Fetzer. You cannot unhear it. 

I first heard it in January of 2015. The middle of what became a long, frighteningly cold, and in the end, an unforgiving winter. A winter that would, eventually, take more and more of me. 

This started with a tip. And that is ultimately how a lot of stories at the newspaper begin. Gently pointed in a direction. Given a suggestion. Encouraged. People, in the community, would reach out. They felt compelled to do so. People, in the community, often thought their stories were worth sharing with a larger audience. A mother would contact the newspaper, and implore someone in the newsroom to write a piece about her daughter—a plucky, young Girl Scout, driven to sell the most boxes of cookies for her troop. 

People in the community would reach out. The elderly gentleman involved in an area vocal group would continue to leave information at the front desk of the newsroom about upcoming performances, with the hope that the paper would turn it into a feature story—only to become disappointed and angry when it was not deemed worthy of a story, feature, or otherwise. 

People, in the community, thought their stories were the most important. 

I had been given a tip. Or given a suggestion. Encouraged. Pointed in a direction. An acquaintance had sent a message to me, directly, informing me of what had already transpired, and was quickly escalating, between Fetzer, a handful of his supporters, and members of the community.

The truth, though, is that regardless of whether I had been given the tip or not about what was happening and what was on the cusp of happening involving James Fetzer, someone in the newsroom would have eventually had to deal with it. Whether that someone would have been me, or not, I can’t be certain. 

I often was, the longer I stayed at the job, just a warm body in the newsroom at the wrong time when someone, from the community, came in, asking to speak with a reporter.

Their stories, of course, were the most important. 

*

James Fetzer retired from his position as a professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth in 2006—I made the mistake, in the first story I had written about him, and the controversy he brought with him to our small Minnesota town, of simply referring to him as a retired professor. 

He was quick to reach out, via telephone, and chide me. He had earned the title, Distinguished McKnight University Professor Emeritus, and I was to describe him as such.

Fetzer was always quick to reach out, via telephone, and chide me about the small details of my news stories about him that he did not like. His number becoming the first of many to end up on a piece of paper, taped to my desk, by the telephone, on a “Do Not Answer” list.

Fetzer was born and raised in California before studying philosophy at Princeton, followed by a stint in the Marines, stationed in Japan, during the 1960s. He became an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky in the early 1970s, but was denied tenure—there is a part of me that is curious as to why, but there is a part of me that can take a guess as to why—and spent the next ten years in visiting professor positions throughout the country before settling into his role in Duluth, in 1987, where he remained for nearly 20 years. 

Of the information about James Fetzer, offered by his Wikipedia entry, it is not specified when, exactly, but there came a point in his life when he became interested in the promotion of conspiracy theories—the list is long, and it grows increasingly more unhinged and honestly rather sickening, the more you read up on what he believes, and the hurtful misinformation he has spent a large portion of his life spreading.

It can be difficult, honestly, to know where to begin—Fetzer believes, among other things, that John F. Kennedy’s assassination was planned by this country’s own government, and that the short, silent film clip of Kennedy in the motorcade, captured by Abraham Zapruder, is “fake.”

Fetzer believes that Minnesota United States Senator Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash in 2002, was actually killed as part of a plan orchestrated by Karl Rove, as well as other “out of control” Republicans. 

Fetzer believes that the Holocaust is “not only untrue,” he is quoted as saying, “but provably false and not remotely scientifically sustainable.”

He believes that the 9/11 attacks were, like Kennedy’s assassination, perpetrated by the United States government, and that the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings was the work of controlled demolition. 

He believes that nearly every very public and tragic event in over the last decade simply did not occur, and that they are often staged or are training exercises—events like the Boston Marathon bombing, or the shooting in Parkland, Florida, and at Pulse Nightclub. 

He believes, among other things, that “Nobody Died At Sandy Hook,” and that the elementary school shooting that took place at the end of 2012 didn’t actually take place at all—that it never happened and it was a “FEMA drill.” 

He believes, and has stated more than once, that funerals can be staged and death certificates can be forged. 

He was so emphatic about these beliefs that he was willing to defend them, in court, when he was sued for defamation, by one of the parents of a student who died in the Sandy Hook shooting.

He lost.

*

In my mind, I always think that Norman looks a little like Phil Collins. But I realize that is maybe not really the case, and maybe I only think that because they are both short, white men of a certain age. And also both British. 

I never liked Norman. I still don’t. And when I inevitably have to interview him, for the central role he played in what brought Northfield, Minnesota to the attention of James Fetzer, Norman tells me that he has always been a fan of “alternate truths.”

Conspiracy theories.

I never liked Norman. I sometimes used to try and see why people did. Maybe nobody actually did, and they only tolerated him. I am sure he thought himself charming, or charismatic enough, and that he could coast on that.

I had always been suspicious of him.

Norman, for a number of years, prior to this, saw himself as a restaurateur in the community. He had some success owning a dumpy pub—it always smelled damp, and like stale popcorn, but it was popular with certain circles of people who enjoyed what he had said to me once, in conversation, was “pub culture.” He also had some success owning an Indian restaurant—the quality of the food, often hit or miss, but it, like his pub, was inexplicably popular within certain circles of people in a small town flanked by two liberal arts colleges. 

Norman got well in over his head, financially and just in terms of sheer responsibility, when he tried to open two additional restaurants, as well as a commercial kitchen space available to rent. The other two restaurants floundered, off and on, for about two years, while he tried to revamp the menus regularly at each, before they both unceremoniously shuttered. 

I never liked Norman, and by the end of all of this, I liked him even less. 

*

I didn’t have the patience, or the enthusiasm, to chase after every lead, and write every story. I certainly did not have the patience or the enthusiasm that was necessary to understanding all the pieces when it came to stories that were not even nuanced, really, but were merely overcomplicated by their many layers.

I had been given a tip. I have told you as much, already. 

An acquaintance felt compelled to share with me, directly, information about what had already transpired. Things were already out of control—it happened quickly. And there were, of course, ways for it to be contained. Different decisions that could have been made to prevent things from getting any worse.

As a fan of what he called “alternative truths,” Norman was aware of James Fetzer, and his beliefs, and apparently was fond of them. Saw some kind of value in them. He was curating a series of “talks” as he described them, at his pub, where two people, on opposing sides of an issue, were expected to debate. The talks were supposed to be lively, but friendly, in the end. And as a fan of these alternative truths, Norman had extended an invitation to James Fetzer, and asked him to participate in one of these talks. 

Fetzer accepted. 

And in his acceptance of the invitation, if I am recalling this correctly, his name began to appear on the pub’s event calendar, as a means of promotion. The mostly liberal clientele who at the time, favored Norman’s pub, saw Fetzer’s name and knew enough about him, and his beliefs, that the backlash, and the uproar, started immediately. 

The person who had apparently been slated to debate Fetzer—Alan. Alan, who would not answer the door to his office when I knocked on it. Alan quickly removed himself from the debate and then began circulating a petition as a means of protesting Fetzer’s scheduled appearance.

Norman was besieged with angry phone calls and messages—angry, but also disappointed, presumably, and frustrated—from patrons of his pub, and the community at large.

There’s a fine line, in news writing, or “reporting,” between subjectivity and objectivity. 

It took me a long time, and I don’t think that even in the end, I was very good at it, because I often struggled to err on the side of objective writing in the stories I was responsible for. It was hard for me—it still is hard for me—to remove myself completely from the things that I write. 

It seems like I should have written more, and maybe it seems that way because they were difficult stories to write, and arduous interviews to conduct, but I wrote three stories chronicling James Fetzer’s experience in Northfield, Minnesota, and in the earliest of the three, where the stage was initially set and we are introduced to some of the players involved, it was very hard to remain objective. 

Almost impossible. 

Certainly difficult when it came to simply just reporting the opposition here—Fetzer’s beliefs, and everyone who disagreed with them, but the more I sat with this story, as it was unfolding, it was a challenge for me not to interject, or editorialize within the moment. 

I was never certain if I could interject. If it was allowed. Or discouraged. I think, if anything, specifically in a situation like this one, my hope is that during the conversation, the person I was interviewing would arrive at a realization, or a truth, that was more obvious to me than it perhaps was to them. 

Or maybe they were aware, and just unwilling to divulge it, as a means of avoiding the acceptance of being in the wrong. 

Rather than addressing the concerns of his patrons and the larger community directly or even realizing the mistake he had made, and canceling the event as a means of keeping the peace, Norman passed along every message he received—many of them emails—directly to Fetzer. 

And Norman, allegedly, at the time I interviewed him, a decade ago, did not see why this might create a much larger problem. 

He, quite literally, thought nothing of it.

*

And upon receiving the messages from concerned and upset members of the community that Norman had forwarded along, James Fetzer could have gracefully accepted that his harmful rhetoric was not welcome in Northfield, and faded away back into the extremist cesspool he crawled out of. 

But that is not what he did.

It isn’t funny, really. Maybe funny in an appropriate bleak way. But if you search the name “Veterans Today” online, the website itself is not the first result, but rather, it is a Wikipedia entry, which describes it as an “antisemitic and conspiracy theory” site, as well as a “pro-Kremlin propaganda outlet.”

Veterans Today, though, alleges it is a “military veterans and foreign affairs journal.”

In 2015, Fetzer was a regular contributor to Veterans Today, and in response to the pushback he had received about his scheduled appearance in Northfield, for a debate at Norman’s pub, he published an essay called “The Abdication of Reason and Rationality in Northfield, MN.” In it, he laments about the outcry he was on the receiving end of, and defends his right to spread his harmful, dangerous beliefs and rhetoric.

And if Norman allegedly saw nothing wrong with sending these messages directly and providing Fetzer with the contact information and full names of the individuals who were upset, angry, and frustrated, Fetzer himself allegedly saw nothing wrong with including screenshots of these messages in his piece for Veterans Today.

He saw nothing wrong with not obscuring or censoring the contact information and full names of the individuals who were upset, angry, and frustrated in those screenshots.

He told me that he, in fact, had no idea how to obscure, or censor, this information. No knowledge of how even a rudimentary program on a computer might be able to help him do this.

The threats, I think, started almost immediately. 

Hate mail. Whatever you wish to call it. 

The threats came from the readers of Veterans Today. Threats so vile and serious that a person like Alan—Alan, who had written an ode to the pen he had borrowed from his wife and would certainly misplace almost immediately. Alan, who would not answer the door to his office when I knocked on it, on a cold January afternoon.

Threats so vile and serious that, apparently, the FBI became involved.

It was after Fetzer’s piece on Veterans Today was published when I had received the tip. 

*

I never liked Norman. He was aloof and smug—he had been, with how he ran his businesses and ran two of them right into the ground. And he was in the conversation I had to have with him, after things had immediately gotten out of control. 

Norman, in the interview we had, used, I’m sure, what he thought was the most clever line he could think of at the top of the conversation. “I didn’t expect the sort of Spanish Inquisition,” he said, laughing at his own joke.

He used the same line in the conversation he had with Jon Tevlin, a writer for the Star Tribune, based out of Minneapolis, who had also picked up the story.  And adding to the stress I was under, simply trying to unpack the details of something so overcomplicated, my editor, and his boss, the publisher of the paper, were quite literally breathing down my neck for a story, because they did not want to get scooped, in our own town, by a much larger publication with more available resources. 

Tevlin was a much more capable writer than I was ever going to be. He left the Star Tribune in 2018, but he had well over a decade’s worth of experience, and he was a columnist too—less focused, in his piece about Fetzer, on objectivity. 

I had been on the job for a little over four months.

*

Things continued moving at a pace I could barely keep up with. Even until the end, I always felt like I was a few steps behind where I was expected to be. And after the first of the three stories I had written about James Fetzer was published, things only got worse for everyone involved. 

I am uncertain what writing for a newspaper is like today. But, in 2015, writing for a newspaper meant you wrote for both the publication that went to print and for the web, which is where a large portion of the readership came from. It was also, at this time in the history of the Northfield News, an absolute nightmare to moderate the comments posted from registered users of the site, regarding certain stories.

The website has been subject to a number of redesigns and relaunches in the last ten years. The first attempt, prior to my departure from the newsroom, made it so that users had to log in with their Facebook credentials in order to comment on a story. Prior to this, though, anyone could register with the site and create a somewhat anonymous account—revealing as much or as little of their identity as they wished to. 

The comments on all of the stories involving Fetzer became a shouting match for a handful of specific people from the community, trying to take one another to task over the whole ordeal—as well as Fetzer himself, and a few of his supporters from Veterans Today, chiming in, making things more insufferable and caustic. 

Things continued moving with a pace I could barely keep up with, but shortly after the first story about all of this was published, Norman finally made the decision to call his politically charged “talks” at his pub off completely—the event series was scrapped. 

“Our livelihood is threatened. Our Staff is harassed. Our regulars worried,” Norman said in the statement, announcing that he was canceling the “talks.”

And this could have been the end, honestly. It could have. After being met with the initial criticism and outcry, and after the event itself was canceled, James Fetzer could have made a sensible decision. And chose to bring his harmful and dangerous beliefs elsewhere.

Fetzer chose to do something else.

And this is a moment when, in this story, as it was unfolding, I wish I had done something differently. 

If I had perhaps been stronger emotionally, or more confident, that I would have asked different questions. If I would have had it within to interject, and point at what was obvious to me. Because there were things that bothered me, of course. And questions I felt like I should have, or could have asked, but was too afraid to open my mouth.

That is what I always come back to, truthfully, when I think about this story. I think about James Fetzer, yes. I think about the hateful things he said, and the looming sense of dread that cast a shadow over my workday for around a month. But I think about where I fell short—ethically, for myself. And the shame I still carry with me—about what I should have, or could have, done differently.

I didn’t believe Norman, when he told me that he didn’t think anything would happen when he passed along the personal contact information, and full names, of the people in the community who were angry with him, and his decision, to invite a Holocaust denier and conspiracy theorist to speak at his pub. 

I didn’t believe James Fetzer, when he told me that he didn’t think the readers of Veterans Today would go after those same people, when he shared the personal contact information and full names, of those who were upset, and disagreed with his beliefs. 

I continued to disbelieve Fetzer, after the events were canceled, and he refused to go away.

*

James Fetzer is not a reasonable man. 

It’s something I was aware of, and understood, even before I spoke with him on the phone while I was putting together the first story about him, and the violence he attracted. And because Fetzer is not a reasonable man, at all, he refused to be silenced.

It is announced, after Norman canceled all of his politically leaning events at his pub, that Fetzer will descend upon our small, Minnesota town, regardless. 

In late January, we, in the newsroom at the Northfield News, received word that James Fetzer was going to be speaking in a cramped conference room at the Northfield Public Library the following month. 

An associate of Fetzer’s, who also, at the time, contributed regularly to Veterans Today, had a very, very loose (from what I could tell) connection to a Madison, Wisconsin, non-profit, and this individual used that guise to book the space, conveniently neglecting to mention James Fetzer at all in making the reservation. 

The staff at the library, as I discovered when I reached out to them for comment, had no idea what was going on. 

They were mortified. They were furious. Rightfully so.

In speaking with Fetzer, again, for this specific story, he alleged his friend made the reservation, through the non-profit connection, so that it would be free of charge.

I didn’t believe James Fetzer. 

Why should I. Why would I. 

I didn’t believe that he had done this intentionally so that he could try to sneak his way in.

I was in no position, emotionally, to counterargue or interject. I remained quiet. 

I think about where I fell short—ethically, for myself. What I should have, or could have, done differently.

*

I remember, in the days leading up to James Fetzer’s event at the library—mid-February, Jerry, my editor, was remiss, at first, to even give it coverage, which I was grateful for. 

“We’ve given Fetzer a lot of free ink,” he said, his drawl a little weary. However, Jerry quickly changed his mind—regardless of the amount of free ink the paper had given Fetzer, and the controversy surrounding him, it was decided that someone, apparently, needed to be at this event.

“In case something happened,” Jerry said to me, when I was standing in his office. 

He didn’t ask me, directly. It was implied. That I had to. I had to be the one. Was there any other way?

So I said yes. Sure. Fuck it. I would go.

I got an “atta boy” from Jerry—one of many that I did receive, from him—his way of encouraging me, I think, during the time he was my editor. 

But, an “atta boy,” no matter how many times you are the recipient of one, or a hearty slap on the shoulder—none of that makes up for how much of myself I lost, sitting at my desk, in a cubicle, in the newsroom, for two years.

Seeing James Fetzer, in person, was revolting, and I made no effort to introduce myself to him, either before or after the event.

I hadn’t arrived late enough to have missed any of his presentation—a bland PowerPoint that he could barely get up and running with the equipment he had—but I arrived too close to the beginning of his talk, and I was not able to get a seat. 

To my surprise, all of the chairs in the room had been spoken for, with latecomers awkwardly attempting to find a place to stand. 

I hoisted myself up onto a ledge near the back of the room, balancing my computer on my lap—it was part of my job, as a news writer, to both take notes, yes, on what I was witnessing, but also, when covering an event, I was expected to share my observations in a stream of 140 characters or less, through the Twitter account I used specifically for this job.

As I sat, I wondered if any of the personalities that lurked within the comment section on the paper’s website, in stories about Fetzer, or other more controversial issues in the community, were in the audience. 

I wondered if any of those individuals would, somehow, slip, and reveal themselves, even in passing, before the night was over. If I would be able to put a face to the usernames that became the bane of existence within the newsroom. 

Fetzer’s presentation was split between what had been at this time, his two favorite subjects—the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, and the bombing at the Boston Marathon. He was unrelenting, as he spoke, nearly uninterrupted for 60 minutes, barking and yelling one absolutely unhinged, unbelievable, deplorable statement after another. 

The shooting at Sandy Hook, of course, did not happen. A hoax. Crisis actors were used. Funerals were staged. Death certificates were forged. 

The bombing at the Boston Marathon, also, of course, did not happen. It was an elaborate ploy by the government to, apparently, restrict the Second Amendment rights of American citizens. 

After his PowerPoint had concluded, he had time to take a few questions from the audience—I can recall a very frail woman standing up, her voice shaky, saying that she was willing to indulge a number of his beliefs as described that evening, but she drew the line at his statements about the Holocaust. 

To this, Fetzer began to fumble, slightly, with how he answered—refusing to actually say he was a Holocaust denier, but again reiterating that he did not consider it to be  “remotely scientifically sustainable.”

There was a notoriously cantankerous, opinionated member of the community who was amongst those in the audience—Victor. He would have been in his 80s at the time. He was visibly nonplussed by the presentation—by Fetzer, as a whole, and he spoke up, at the end, and rather than asking a question, simply said the evidence presented was “not very compelling.” 

This was, as you might imagine, upsetting to James Fetzer, who snapped back viciously, as did a member of the audience, and apparent supporter of Fetzer’s beliefs and work. 

My editor had sent me there, to cover the event, “in case something happened.” And this moment of volatility was what he was looking for. What he wanted.

Nothing did happen, though. Outside of this brief flash of tempers, and raised voices. The moment passes. And the event itself ends rather abruptly—the time for questions or comments from the audience is cut short as library staff, their patience seemingly exhausted, come into the room, announce that the time is up, and ask everyone to leave.

And there are a few places, in these events, as they continued to unfold, where I am ultimately disappointed in myself. I have regrets. And I wish I had done something differently, if I felt like I could have interjected in any way. And parked on the ledge at the back of the conference room at the library, my legs nervously dangling and my fingers furiously tapping away at my laptop, attempting to document what I was witnessing, I didn’t feel like I could truly speak up. 

What plagued me, in the end, as we were hastily asked to leave the conference room—bodies spilling out of the narrow library hallway, into the frigid night, and what I think about now when I revisit these events is simply, why are we to believe James Fetzer?

He claims that there are elements to the Holocaust that are not scientifically sustainable, and that those elements are untrue. Why should we believe him. He wasn’t there. He was not living in a Nazi-occupied part of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.

He claims that the crumbling of the World Trade Center towers in New York, on September 11th, 2001, was carried out as part of a much larger conspiracy, and was the result of controlled demolition. Why should we believe him. Was he in New York, at that time? More than likely, in September of 2001, he was teaching in Duluth, at the University of Minnesota. 

Why should we listen to him. 

He claims that the school shooting that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary was staged—part of a FEMA drill. That nobody died. Everything was fabricated. In his PowerPoint presentation, there are photos of him and one other individual, allegedly skulking around what they claim is the exterior of the school itself. 

Why should we believe what he says? That his word is accurate. That the photos he is showing us are, in fact, credible. 

During his talk, at the Northfield Public Library, and at no point, during the conversations I was unfortunate enough to have with him, did James Fetzer say why we should take his word. Why what he said was the truth. 

But if you were to disagree with the word of one man, you were complicit in the abdication of reality and reason.

*

I remember how much time I spent the morning after James Fetzer’s talk at the library, slumped down in my chair, at my cubicle, trying to comb through my notes, and the series of tweets I had fired off during the event, attempting to cobble together an accurate depiction of what I had witnessed. 

Perhaps a better journalist, or a more dedicated one, would have quickly been able to write and file a story immediately after the event. 

I was never going to be a better or more dedicated journalist.

I remember finishing the story, and filing it with my editor—it, much like the event itself, came to a very unceremonious end. I put on my winter jacket and went for a walk through Northfield’s  downtown. I was often doing this. Just getting up and leaving my desk, and walking out the door—the longer I was at the job, and the further it was pulling me down into a terrible depression, the more walks I took during the day. 

My editor, Jerry, never knew where I was going or what I was doing until he finally, one day, asked me why I was always getting up and leaving without telling anyone. 

I used to do it as a means of taking a break, and getting a small amount of exercise, but also to try, as best as I could, to clear my head a little. Or decompress. 

The piece reflecting on James Fetzer’s presentation in Northfield went live on the website, and it was immediately met with criticism from Fetzer himself. In yet another post for Veteran’s Today, he lamented about how little information about the contents of his talk I provided. In a sense, he was unhappy that I did not, word for word, transcribe in great detail, his harmful rhetoric and unhinged beliefs about both the Boston Marathon and the shooting at Sandy Hook. 

He said that the Northfield News was just as bad as the “mainstream media.”

He said that I was an irresponsible journalist.

I was never going to be better or more dedicated.

*

I left my job at the paper almost two years to the day I was hired. I had felt ill-equipped and in over my head only after a few months, and it never got any easier. What I was being asked to do, or what was expected of me—it never felt better and I just continued to muddle through the rest of the year, and well into 2016, at the expense of both my mental and physical health. 

James Fetzer eventually moved on. 

And I wonder now, a decade later, if he still thinks about Northfield, and about Norman, and the piece that he published on Veterans Today that doxxed a number of individuals in the community. 

I wonder if he ever thinks of me. The news writer whose life he made a nightmare for roughly a month in the coldest, darkest winter. 

James Fetzer eventually moved on. 

In 2019, Fetzer was sued by Leonard Pozner, the father of Noah Pozner, who was killed during the Sandy Hook shooting—Pozner also sued Fetzer’s attributed co-writer of the book, Nobody Died At Sandy Hook, Mike Palecek. 

Noah Pozner was six years old. The youngest among those killed.

Palecek and Fetzer defended themselves in the suit, and a circuit court found them guilty of defamation. A jury in Wisconsin awarded Pozner $450,000 for defamation. 

On his website, Fetzer has a link set up to take you to a separate page where you are encouraged to donate to him. 

I used to think it was funny that he called me an irresponsible journalist. 

However, it’s the one thing he’s said that I actually believe. 

Afterword (September, 2025)

On August 27th, 2025, there was a shooting at Annunciation Church and School in Minneapolis—less than 40 miles from my home. Two students were killed, and 20 people were injured. The shooter died by suicide at the scene. 

James Fetzer, currently, co-hosts a podcast called The Raw Deal, and on a recent episode, he states that this school shooting, in Minneapolis, was “staged.”

And I don’t know. If I had been sued for defamation and lost, and was ordered to pay $450,000 to a parent who had lost their child in a school shooting, over a decade prior, I would probably discontinue using this kind of rhetoric—that tragedies, involving gun violence, are all fake, or staged.

But then again, what do I know. 

I was an irresponsible journalist. 

From The Archives: We Used To Vacation

From the end of 2013 until the autumn of 2018, I regularly wrote short personal/observational pieces that were published in a monthly arts and culture paper, the SouthernMinn Scene, then online for a similarly minded site, The Next Ten Words. Save for the original documents on my laptop from this time period, and the actual physical copies of the SouthernMinn Scene I kept, little if any trace of this era of my output still exists today. Part of the appeal of having a website has been the idea of republishing select pieces—not rewriting or revising. It is humbling to go back and read your own work from a number of years ago, but it is a reminder of both how far you have come in the interim, but also where you were hoping to go, or the voice you were working towards adopting, at the time it was written.

This piece, “We Used to Vacation” was written and published in October 2017, for The Next Ten Words.

My wife Wendy and I have taken exactly one vacation during our time together—both in the early days of our domestic partnership, as well as in our legally binding marriage¹. We’ve taken trips—yes, so many trips; sometimes very far, like the middle of nowhere in Colorado or the very southern tip of Texas. But almost all of those trips involved traveling to visit family or old friends, and on a number of occasions, the trips involved traveling with family. 

I don’t consider those ‘vacations.’

The vacation we took was over a decade ago, and we drove to scenic Duluth. We had no plan for what we were going to do or where we were going. This was in the dark ages, before we had smartphones, and back then, in our early 20s, we were okay with that. This was before we lived with a companion rabbit, so we had no responsibilities at home to worry about. We had reservations at an awful hotel off of the highway, and had to commute into Duluth proper to do anything at all. The trip was a little cobbled together, but I have a vague recollection that we may have had fun. And despite how awful the hotel was, my wife found a marathon of America’s Next Top Model on television to occupy her time while I went swimming in the overchlorinated pool.

The classification of our excursion to Chicago in 2013 as a ‘trip’ or a ‘vacation’ is debatable. It had elements of a vacation, sure, but we were exhausting the goodwill of the friends we were staying with and visiting while there. 

There are a multitude of reasons why we don’t go many places, and why it becomes somewhat of a chore to even take these aforementioned trips. One of the reasons is money—some people make it look effortless, don’t they? They get on social media and brag about flights to exotic locales being at all time low prices. They have some kind of stash of money kept away for traveling; or, they are content to live their lives with debt hanging over their heads in exchange for a few days away from normal life. 

The other reason—and probably the main reason—we rarely go anywhere is because of my debilitating anxiety. Like, I can barely leave the house to run an errand in town without having some kind of emotional breakdown, so I don’t know how or why anyone expects me to get on a plane and take this show on the road. 

Along with that is the fact that it is increasingly difficult to find a trustworthy rabbit sitter—someone who isn’t going to have a bunch of people over while we are out of state, without being like ‘Hey, is it okay if I invite a bunch of strangers over while you are gone?’; someone who isn’t going to break our toilet; someone who is going to be smart enough to run the fucking fan when using the shower so that the steam doesn’t set off the fucking smoke detector in the hallway, making them think the house is on fire and calling the god damn fire department to have it checked out, all while we are in rural Wisconsin.

I don’t think I ask for much—just a trustworthy young person who will use our wireless internet, or read, or watch whatever garbage they can find on Netflix. Someone who enjoys a quiet night in with our rabbit Annabell, and will give her all of her medications at the right time and give her cilantro and top off her hay and maybe talk to her and give her pats on the noggin. 

* * *

One of the great things about living in the social media age is that it makes you instantly resentful and jealous of the fun others are having. You see status updates of your Facebook friends as they find themselves on holiday, while you sit at your desk, watching the clock, hating your life slightly more with each minute that passes. I guess I don’t really have this problem², and I also don’t have a strong desire to get out and see the world. However, my wife has both the problem and the desire, and on more than one occasion, that resentment towards others who are having fun has bubbled over and become resentment toward me because my anxiety keeps us at home.

Planning a vacation seems kind of daunting, and it is a big expense up front for plane tickets and lodging and, well, shit—you haven’t even left your house yet. There are more expenses once you finally get to where you are going. THERE GOES ALL YOUR HARD-EARNED MONEY. You also have to figure out how to get around once you’ve wound up where you are going and ensure that you can even get time away from work to do any of this. It’s just a lot, you know—or at least it seems like a lot, to someone like me.

At the end of July, we did a trial run—a short trip to St. Paul that involved getting completely out of my comfort zone to see if I could survive. We had the most capable of rabbit sitters watching Annabell. We went to a concert, but had gotten a hotel room nearby so that we didn’t have to drive back in the late evening. And I think for the most part, I made it. I may have felt that glimmer of what ‘fun’ is supposed to feel like. 

You can talk all you want about how other people are taking vacations and you’re not, and you reach a point where you say, “If we’re going to do it, let’s actually have a serious talk about it, and not just a 10:00 p.m. before-bed argument.” So you have an actual conversation about where you’d like to go, how you’d like to get there, if you can take the time away from work, and if you can find a responsible sitter willing to live in your home and watch your rabbit while you are away.

This is how I wound up on a 38-hour train ride, heading toward Seattle.

* * *

We board the train at 9:30 p.m. and our sleeping car—a ‘roomette’—has already been prepared for slumber. During the day, the size of the car is small, but bearable: it leaves a little space for personal items, and a small table folds down in between the two seats. However, when converted to a sleeping quarters, the seats pull forward and connect to form one bunk, the other bunk folds down from the ceiling; there is, quite literally, no room to move around at all—there is no room to stand and disrobe, no room for personal items, and barely any room for your stupid lumbering body.

Wendy takes the top bunk because of how often I get up during the night to use the bathroom, and because of how poorly I handle high places. To prevent falling or rolling out of the top, Amtrak provides a weird S&M-style harness that you latch from the bed onto the ceiling of the car. There is roughly two feet between her and the top of the car, and she spends both nights on the train worrying about sitting up too quickly, hitting her head. Due to my height, I barely fit into my bunk, and resign myself to sleeping curled up in the fetal position³. I am confident that I barely sleep at all either night on the train—if I do actually fall asleep, it is not for very long. Instead, I drift into the space between sleep and waking life—aware enough of my surroundings but also desperately trying to find the darkness that will overtake me. 

There is a recurring issue with the air temperature in our portion of the train—most noticeable overnight. Despite the fact that we have selected for cooler air to come from the ceiling vent, there are times when the air grows warm and our compartment becomes intolerably hot, and my wife wakes up, unable to breathe. It’s not just our compartment having this issue—others in our section of the train wake up as well, and begin to complain to Tashi, the well-meaning and easily frazzled Japanese man who manages our train car. 

Traveling by train is, at its core, a more leisurely way to get somewhere. It lacks the pressure and anxiety caused by nearly every aspect of air travel. If you have the time to get somewhere, and don’t mind being confined to small space for 38 hours—you take the train. 

Traveling by train is, at its core, an antiquated and practically dying way to get somewhere. The train to Seattle is full of passengers, sure, but overall, there are few people who do have this kind of time—or who want to make the time—to get somewhere at a slower pace. 

We arrive at the train station in St. Paul in the early evening and it’s practically empty—this part of the city, too, is nearly deserted at 7:30 p.m. on a Sunday. We walk around near the station in an attempt to find a place to have dinner; the empty streets and quiet air make me realize just how sad and lonely large cities are capable of being. The train station itself is a gigantic, gorgeous old building, renovated within the last five years—an homage to a time long since gone. Other passengers waiting for the train to Seattle situate themselves on large wooden benches that are evenly spaced out throughout the station—young men sit working on laptops or fidget nervously while watching videos on their mobile phones. 

Since we have splurged for the sleeping car, we have access to a secure lounge as we wait to board; there, we’re joined by an older man wearing overalls watching Sunday Night Football, an intense looking man in carpenter jeans who speaks with a thick North Dakota accent, a middle-age couple, possibly drunk, who are very handsy with one another in the corner of the lounge, and an eccentric older couple who sprawl across couches to sleep. 

In an act of train class elitism, passengers with sleeping cars are allowed to board first. As the lines form, a serious-looking young woman files in with our group. She carries two very full canvas tote bags, one in each hand, as well as a large backpack, bursting at the seams. Across her chest, a toddler is strapped. The woman appears to be in her early to mid-30s, and the look on her face is that of somebody who has seen some shit. As we walk down to the platform, I catch a glimpse of her train ticket and it reads ‘one way.’ 

We are all running away from something.

* * *

On the train, I become convinced that I am surviving on the free Amtrak coffee⁴. Tashi, bless his big, frazzled heart⁵, keeps a warm pot of it in the entryway to our train car and it is surprisingly delicious when mixed with the rice milk I’ve brought along, as well as a handful of sugar packets.

During our time on the train, Wendy and I snack on the provisions we’ve packed (we bring almost too much food with us); we watch old episodes of “Twin Peaks” on her iPad; we read and we try to doze if we can. We occasionally watch the landscape flash by us through our car’s window. Taking the train somewhere provides you with the opportunity to ‘see’ America, but through the desolate, bleak terrain of North Dakota and Montana, we ask ourselves if America is something you really want to see. Nearly every station we pull into for minor stops along the way is at the edge of some small, shitty town—the stations themselves barely functioning, and the buildings surrounding them are almost all dilapidated. 

For meals (provided when you pay for a sleeping car) we are forced to become acquainted with other travelers who are seated with you at large tables. We meet a painfully shy young woman from Australia, traveling alone, taking the train across the entire country. We meet two older Canadian couples—one of which were on a bicycle trip along the Danube when a motorist ran the husband off the road. He fell, and in doing so, punctured a lung, and was told he couldn’t fly back home. They took trains across Europe to get to an ocean liner to take them across the Atlantic, into New York, where they had been taking trains west, in an effort to get back to British Columbia. The tale is almost too unbelievable to fathom⁶, but all of the inconveniences they encountered taught them patience.

The other couple we dine with turns out to be who I had dubbed ‘the eccentrics’ when they boarded with us in St. Paul. The man, Frank, wears a rumpled white linen suit and has a thick bowl cut of bright white hair; his partner’s name is Elaine. We have dinner with them the last night on the train ride, and in discussion it comes up that I have experience working in a bookstore. Frank has spent a bulk of his life in the Canadian publishing industry, and regales us with anecdotes about Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. 

I never adjust to passing through different time zones during the duration we are away from home. From Central, to Mountain, than Pacific—we eventually gain two hours, but I never really know what time of day it is, and at times, what day of the week it is. I wake from whatever rest I have gotten at 4 a.m. and my days become long, nearly endless stretches of activities and occurrences, until it is time to tightly shut my eyes once again, hoping to drift off and find some kind of respite.

My first morning on the train, I crawl out of bed and feel awful—dry throat, pounding headache, sore eyes; though I have never been, I have a feeling this is what it feels like to be hungover. “You have a headache already?” my wife asks as I pour four Advil into my hand, and scowl at her, washing them down with room temperature water.

For at least 24 hours after we’ve left the train behind, I have a strange feeling embedded deep within my body. ‘Phantom train’ I call it—the feeling like I’m still rocking side to side as we make our way down the tracks; the feeling of taking every bit of rough terrain and turn in the train car. I feel it when standing still the day after our ride has come to an end; I feel it in my back at night as I try to sleep. 

* * *

Our train slides into Seattle mid-morning on Tuesday, and as we step onto the platform, it is our first breath of fresh air since Sunday evening. Then plan was to store our luggage in lockers at the station until it was time to check in to our lodging, however, there are no lockers to be found, and rather than wander around downtown Seattle for four or five hours with two huge backpacks and a grocery bag full of snacks, we more than willingly toss $80 at a rental car—we were going to rent a car for a day anyway later in the week, but the use of its trunk is worth more than the additional cost. 

We wind up at Pike Place Market, along the waterfront. We try to ignore the men tossing fish at one another; the smell of dead fish is too difficult to shut out. We get sucked into the market’s labyrinthine design of half-floors and esoteric gift shops. We watch a security guard ask a homeless man to move along; the homeless man screams at the guard, calling him a ‘fucking punk.’ The young woman at the counter of the store we are browsing in rolls her eyes and says, “Never a dull moment around here.”

I could never survive in this city.

We walk to the Dale Chihuly Museum—he is a native of the Pacific Northwest and a world-renowned blown glass artist.  He’s also a bit of a prick, as depicted in a short video we watch while there—he’s shown barking out commands and directions to a gaggle of young people, who frantically shove glass shapes into a wire frame.

At the museum we meet my friend from college, Liz, and her husband Todd, who also happen to be on vacation in the Pacific Northwest. We exit through the gift shop; I buy an over-priced floaty pen. We find two record stores—neither of which have the records I was looking for⁷. We find a Mighty O—an all-vegan donut shop, and we proceed accordingly⁸. 

I attempt to navigate the endless stretches of freeway and never-ceasing congestion of traffic in Seattle, and we make our way to our lodging accommodations at an Airbnb—a converted attic above a garage in a primarily Latino neighborhood near an airport. Not the airport, but an airport so at night, as I am unable to sleep, I hear the sound of airplanes tearing through the atmosphere. Our lodging is nice⁹—a loft style living space; the owner of the property and our ‘host’ has a gigantic dog with piercing blue eyes. I try to be his friend, but he is not receptive. By the second day, the dog grumbles at me when I say, “Hello pupper” to him. Maybe I’m trying too hard but either way the fact that this dog doesn’t immediately like me is more devastating than it should be.

The first day ends with us being too exhausted to find a restaurant or drive to a grocery store to buy things in order to make dinner. We wind up making a weird, sad meal involving things found in the kitchen, left behind by other guests.

* * *

Wednesday begins with a short tour of the offices and factory of FieldRoast, a company known for making delicious and hearty vegan meat and cheese alternatives. Jennifer, our guide, is incredibly personable and offers us samples of sunflower katsu cutlets and practically tosses us a whole FieldRoast and four boxes of vegan macaroni and cheese¹⁰.

We spend a bulk of the day at the Museum of Pop Culture—or MoPop as it calls itself. Once called the ‘Experience Music Project,’ they are currently boasting an impressive set of non-permanent exhibits, including Mick Rock’s early 1970s photographs of David Bowie, and a career-spanning retrospective on Jim Henson. 

The change from EMP to MoPop is less than a year old, and it was very apparent that the organization is still trying to sort out its ‘branding,’ or at the very least, its mission and structure. There’s a room dedicated to the history of the guitar, and an interactive music exhibit; but there are also halls dedicated to science fiction and fantasy films and television shows. 

Maybe a week or two before departing from Seattle, I learned that Elliott Smith’s 1919 upright piano, used to record “Miss Misery” as well as a few songs on XO, is part of the museum’s permanent collection, but I didn’t know where it was in the building. We hadn’t even made it up the stairs out of the main floor after paying our admission when I saw it; sitting on a ledge, blocked off by plexiglass, with a small explanation as to what it is and what it was used for. It seemed sacrilegious at first to have it out in the open this way, adjacent to the staircase. I stop to look at it and take a photograph. I wanted to—expected to, even—feel something once I found it. I wanted to be moved or to have this moment resonate.

I am not; it doesn’t.

 The air around me is filled with the cavernous echoes of people entering the museum, or eating lunch at the Wolfgang Puck-endorsed café below us. An old Death Cab for Cutie song plays loudly overhead. 

I feel nothing.

* * *

We leave Seattle on Friday morning on a train heading for Portland, and are in the city for less than 24 hours. The most ‘Portland’ thing I see in Portland is a young man, riding a unicycle down the sidewalk. He carries a large cup containing a smoothie and attached to his wrist is a vine or a plant. He wears headphones, and sings loudly as he pedals and coasts through the intersection while my wife and I wait for a bus.

He may or may not have had a ‘Macklemore’ style haircut. I see so many god damn haircuts like this in the Pacific Northwest.

We take another train to Portland and the whole reason we have even left Seattle, and are ending our vacation in another city, is because we want to visit the ‘vegan strip mall.’

Maybe the idea of a ‘vegan strip mall’ in Portland is the most ‘Portland’ thing. I don’t know. It’s a building that takes up less than a city block and it houses a vegan bakery/sandwich shop, a vegan propaganda clothing store, a vegan grocery store, and a vegan tattoo shop¹¹. When trying to explain this to people who were curious about our vacation, I said that we’d be getting “a little bit of everything” while we were there.

Somehow I convince Wendy to get a tattoo; I think it comes as a surprise to both of us, though it’s not like it was an impulsive decision and she chose a flash design, like a naked woman riding a flaming boner.

She had sketched out an idea of an elephant and a rabbit, and emailed it to Nora, the artist who did work on both of us. I get a quote from The Book of Disquiet—“How much I’ve live without having lived!” 

Later, as the sun sets, we find ourselves in a neighborhood where there’s a record store. I go in and look for the two records I was unable to find in Seattle¹², and I leave empty handed.

We find a Powell’s Bookstore. Not the Powell’s, but a smaller one, which is still way too big. I look around for a few minutes but become overwhelmed. I find myself in the ‘W’ section in fiction and see old, sunbleached paperback copies of Infinite Jest, and expensive, rare editions of The Broom of The System. 

We stay at another Airbnb in Portland. This one is a basement that was converted into a one-bedroom apartment. The ‘host’ also has a dog—her name is Rupert. She’s very small and energetic, and only responds to commands in Spanish. She seems to like us both, and humors me as I put my nose against hers, uttering “Hello, pupper” over and over again.

I wake early Saturday morning. We eat the last of our donuts, make sure we have all of our belongings, and wander into the cold morning to catch a bus to the airport¹³.

* * *

Seattle is interesting in the sense that, for the short time I was there, it struck me as a city with three sides—industrial, gentrified, and poor.

I suppose you’ll find that in almost every major city, though, won’t you? Because Seattle is on the waterfront, as you drive down the endless, sprawling freeways, you see the shipyard and the rows and stacks of shipping containers.  You walk through neighborhoods and you see newly built or renovated luxury apartment complexes, and just down the street, you see something that stops short of being a trap house.

In the landscape adjacent to highway overpasses, you see tents and tarps and shopping carts; in the industrial park where the FieldRoast factory was, on a gravel road, there were more tents and tarps set up off to the side. In the early morning, as we walked through the streets of downtown, on our way to the train station, you see the homeless lining up in front of day centers, hoping to get inside after presumably having spent the entire night out. 

Liz’s husband Todd described the homeless in Portland as ‘aggressive,’ and he wasn’t kidding. We were outside of the train station for less than 10 seconds when a young man asks us for money. He doesn’t even ask, though; he looks at and says “Dimes. Quarters. Dollars.” We say no and continue walking. 

He asks us again less than five minutes later.

Near the courthouse and visitor’s center in Portland, an older man sits on the curb, bellowing out as loud as he can about how he’s disabled and homeless. His voice sounds like Samuel L. Jackson’s as it reverberates off the buildings. 

I bring two books with me to read during this time away, and I finish one of them while we are still staying in Seattle. It’s an advance copy of Vacationland by esoteric humorist John Hodgeman—a somewhat sloppily organized memoir and reflection on Hodgeman’s time spent living in and purchasing vacation homes along the East Coast. 

Some of it is very funny, and Hodgeman’s dry, self-deprecating humor is appreciated. Some of it I take issue with—he apparently doesn’t like raccoons¹⁴. Hodgeman is also self-aware enough to realize he’s written a book about, among other things, white privilege—and it’s maybe not the best thing to be reading about, and pondering, while you are on vacation, sitting comfortably in your gentrified Airbnb, while surrounded, at times, by extreme poverty.

I could never survive in this city.

* * *

We are all running away from something.

Thursday morning I wake up and it’s raining. It’s the first real rain we’ve seen since we’ve been here. Yes, it rains regularly in Seattle, but all we’ve experienced so far are periods of overcast skies, followed by around five minutes of mist or drizzle, followed by the sun peaking through the clouds. Thursday, it rains all day—from the moment I wake up until the evening.

Thursday morning I wake up and I feel sad. Today is going to be a ‘sad day,’ I realize, and I’m disappointed but not surprised. I figured it would all catch up to me at some point, but I’m impressed that I was able to last this long before the darkness crept back in.

Wendy notices the change and asks if I am doing okay. I tell her I’m not feeling great, and that today is a ‘sad day,’ and she, too, is disappointed but not surprised; she is probably not impressed at how far we’ve gotten before this happened, however, she is probably thankful. You can take the depressed and anxious person on vacation, yes, but the depression and anxiety themselves never take time off. 

Thursday is the day we take the Twin Peaks tour, which is exactly what it sounds like. The television program Twin Peaks was filmed, in part, around Snoqualmie and North Bend—two very small, scenic towns outside of Seattle. My wife has paid a man named David to drive us around for over four hours, pointing out various locations, occasionally allowing us¹⁵ to get out of the van and look around. 

The tour is interesting, but also detrimental to the willing suspension of disbelief you have with something like a television program you hold dear. The waterfall in Snoqualmie is the same as depicted on the show; however, the hotel it is nestled behind is not the actual Great Northern Hotel. The hotel that the crew filmed in, and modeled the fictional hotel after, is located on an island, somewhere that requires a ferry ride. 

The Twin Peaks Sheriff Station is a real building, but it actually houses the ‘DirtFish Rally Racing School.’ The Double R Diner is a real diner, but it’s called Twede’s, and the staff behind the counter are probably happy for the business but are also maybe weary of tourists filtering through, continually asking for damn good cups of coffee and cherry pie. 

We’re not allowed to get out for a number of the stops—they are just things we drive past, and so many of the locations are different from how they were presented on television that the tour is kind of anticlimactic.

The tour lasts longer than it is supposed to because David, our guide, implies he wants to take the group to lunch at The Roadhouse—it’s not the real Roadhouse, or ‘Bang Bang Bar’ as depicted on the show. No. That bar doesn’t really exist. 

The Roadhouse, as it stands now, is a restaurant with shitty service on a corner in Fall City; only the exterior of the restaurant was used in the show. There’s nothing on the menu we can eat, so while the rest of the group shovels enormous burgers into their mouths, Wendy and I pick at a plate of french fries and I continually look at my watch.

We are all running away from something.

Since the train left on Sunday night, I’ve tried to manage my anxiety. I’ve tried to keep it to myself, and not dwell on thoughts like ‘what if something happens to Annabell while we are gone?¹⁶’ I’ve checked in with our rabbit sitter continually—probably to the point where she audibly sighs when she sees another text message from me come across her phone. 

But it’s in the van, on the way back from our “Twin Peaks” tour, that my anxiety begins to slowly boil over.

The second activity we have planned for Thursday, and the last for this part of our vacation, is to visit a rabbit sanctuary and rescue in Carnation, a town around 30 miles west of Seattle. Aside from visiting the vegan strip mall in Portland, this is, like, one of the few things I was absolutely adamant about doing during our time away, and I had been in contact with the woman who runs the rescue¹⁷, telling her we’d be there between 3 and 3:30 p.m.

Because of the endless, sprawling freeways and highways and the eternally congested streets filled with traffic, it takes us over an hour to get to Carnation; we leave well after 3 o’clock, and I feel absolutely terrible about how late we are going to be. At this point, my anxiety becomes something palpable—the third passenger in our rental car that I am trying and failing to drive while keeping it together at the same time, Nick Drake coming from the car’s stereo, as we listen to the robotic female voice on my wife’s GPS, instructing us what roads to use. Google, in its infinite wisdom, tries to route us off the freeway to avoid traffic—instead, it places us in downtown Seattle into even worse traffic. 

I start to silently weep while we’re at a stoplight. 

Neither of us speaks the entire way to Carnation. Five Leaves Left plays quietly. The robotic voice occasionally pipes up, tells me to keep right or to turn left.

* * *

Upon returning to work, nearly all of my co-workers, individually, inquire about my time away. Some of them ask more specific questions, like what was my favorite part, or did I like the Twin Peaks tour. Some of them are connected with me on social media, so they were subjected to my incessant sharing of photos, some of which were occasionally out of context.

To almost everybody, I respond by saying that my time away was simply ‘fine,’ and in earnest, I say that I am happy to be back. To some, I say that there were parts that were okay, and there were parts that were less okay, and I choose not to elaborate much more than that.

You can take the depressed and anxious person on vacation, but, despite all of your best efforts, the depression and anxiety never take time off, and we are all running away from something.

How much I have lived without having lived. 

1- Due to a number of circumstances, we never took a honeymoon, not even some mediocre weekend getaway. I still feel a deep sense of regret about this.

2- Mostly this is due to the fact that I really like my job right now; I’ve got a really good thing going, and I no longer wake with the sense of dread that I used to back when I worked at the newspaper.

3- If we’re being truthful, I do this at home, in my own king-sized bed.

4- The free Amtrak coffee was probably better than the coffee that I paid for at myriad coffee shops in both Seattle and Portland; the worst offender was my first cup off the train at Top Pot. It tasted like soil mixed with lukewarm water. What I am saying is fuck Top Pot and fuck their shitty coffee. It also seems worth mentioning that throughout both Seattle and Portland, there are drive-thru coffee huts where the employees (all women) have to wear bikinis. I don’t believe this at first, but after gazing too long at one of the huts while in traffic, I see a pickup window full of skin.

5- Tashi is not the only Amtrak crew member who left an impression on us during our 38 hours on the train. There was Caesar, the young and exhausted-looking waiter in the dining car, who was joined by Rose, the good-natured and jovial woman with an incredibly thick Caribbean accent. Hands down, the most memorable crew member on the train was Miss Oliver—the enigmatic, disembodied voice of a personable, cheerful, sassy black woman; she greeted us regularly over the train’s intercom to entice us to the lounge car, where she served snacks and drinks. We were never brave enough to wander down and meet her in person. We didn’t want to destroy the façade. 

6- While the story is unbelievable, yes, the couple made a point of telling us how much money all these setbacks cost them—the $6k in foreign hospital bills, plus the cost of the ocean liner and the various train tickets. I am not sure if this was because they were cheap and pissed they had to part with more money, or if they were wealthy and wanted us to know that they could afford to do something like this. 

7- I was looking for Harmony of Difference by Kamasi Washington, and Stranger in The Alps by Phoebe Bridgers; the first record store is incredibly small and primarily deals in used records, so I don’t hold it against them that they do not have what I wanted; the second store, Zion’s Gate, was small and cramped, but the racks were beyond full with new vinyl. The clerk, a young man with dreadlocks, hadn’t heard of either album I was looking for. When I explain who Phoebe Bridgers is, he tries to sell me other records by other popular female indie folk artists. As we leave, empty-handed, he slides a free sticker my way and tells me to visit the website and that they ship anywhere in the world. I throw the sticker away immediately.

8- Between Tuesday and Saturday, my wife and I ate a combined total of 18 donuts. And I never thought I’d say this, but I need a little break from them.

9- Yes, our lodging is nice, but the few granules of sugar that I accidentally spill on the kitchen counter attract a fuck ton of ants.

10- We eat nearly all of this for dinner on Wednesday night.

11- It seems worth mentioning that whenever I say the phrase, ‘vegan tattoo shop,’ it causes mild confusion. Turns out that a number of tattoo inks include bone char, among other possible animal-based ingredients. 

12- Out of frustration, while my wife wanders the Portland airport the next morning, I order both of them online (on Amazon, sorry, I know) from my phone. One of them (the Phoebe Bridgers album) arrives at my house less than two days later.

13- Our attempt at leaving Portland became a story in and of itself; we board the plane on time (it is completely full), but there is a delay—the parking brake is leaking some kind of hydraulic fluid. After almost an hour of tests and maintenance, and the captain asking everyone to ‘be patient, they told everyone to get off the plane. Nearly two hours later, everyone is wrangled onto a different plane, and we finally leave. We got in almost three hours late and missed our bus back home. Wendy’s brother has to come fetch us. It rains the entire drive back.

14- This is bullshit because raccoons are great.

15- As sketchy as this whole thing sounds, it’s not like it was just the two of us in a big white van with no windows being driven around by a stranger. We were joined by a family (also from Minnesota, coincidentally) and a guy from Switzerland (who had a Macklemore haircut).

16- I follow a fair number of internet animals (many of them rabbits) on social media. One of them, Darwin, becomes ill while his family is away in Europe. It happens, like, right before we leave for Seattle. He’s fine now; I mean, as fine as he can be. He’s prone to health issues because he is a dwarf rabbit. But this doesn’t sit well with me at all, and I stop short of taking it as a bad omen.

17- We wind up being, like, an hour late, and the woman that operates the rescue out of her property in rural carnation isn’t too put out—she’s very gracious and shows us around, introducing us to the multitude or rabbits she is housing: some she is just boarding, some are her own rabbits, some are adoptable through the organization, and some are special needs. We meet rabbits that have head tilt, rabbits that are missing an arm or hand, and rabbits that have splay legs. We spend the most time patting two black rabbits that have splay leg. They flatten their noggins down on the ground, happy for the attention. 

From The Archives: Starship 2000

From the end of 2013 until the autumn of 2018, I regularly wrote short personal/observational pieces that were published in a monthly arts and culture paper, the SouthernMinn Scene, then online for a similarly minded site, The Next Ten Words. Save for the original documents on my laptop from this time period, and the actual physical copies of the SouthernMinn Scene I kept, little if any trace of this era of my output still exists today. Part of the appeal of having a website has been the idea of republishing select pieces—not rewriting or revising. It is humbling to go back and read your own work from a number of years ago, but it is a reminder of both how far you have come in the interim, but also where you were hoping to go, or the voice you were working towards adopting, at the time it was written.

This piece, “Starship 2000,” was written and published in September 2018, for The Next Ten Words.

There was a time in my life when I was capable of having fun—I mean, more fun, or enthusiasm, or whatever, than I am capable of having now.

On an unseasonably cold Sunday afternoon in early September, 2006, my wife Wendy and I—I should note that we weren’t married or even engaged at this point; just two young people living in a very small apartment—along with a friend of hers from college, sat on uncomfortable metal bleachers, in the rain, and watched a three hour parade.

When I revisit this story now, so many years later, people ask why we sat in the rain the whole time. Like, why didn’t we get up and leave, or go inside, or something?

I don’t have a great answer—it wasn’t really raining that hard (more like a persistent drizzle) and we were dressed accordingly for the weather from what I can recall.

Also, we had no clue the parade was going to be that long. So when people ask why we sat in the rain and watched a three-hour parade, the only thing I can respond with is, “We didn’t know any better? I mean, we were young then.”

Once the parade concluded and the crowds dispersed, we realized how cold and soggy we were; Wendy’s friend, who worked in a coffee shop at the time, made us hot chocolate. Later, by the time we got back to our apartment, we were still cold—but it was too early in the year, and the boilers in the building hadn’t been turned on yet.  

We sat under a blanket, and let the rest of the afternoon drift away as the rain continued to fall softly outside, the gray late afternoon light pouring in from our window.

*

There’s no introductory course or informational session regarding the Defeat of Jesse James Days—if you’re born and raised in Northfield, Minnesota, you just know it. Year after year, from your childhood into adulthood, for a handful of days in early September, it is a part of you.

If you’re relatively new to the community—I had lived in Northfield for roughly four months before my first experience with the town’s annual fall festival—there’s nobody who is going to pull you aside and explain it to you.

It’s like, one day, the streets of downtown Northfield aren’t blocked off, and it’s relatively easy to get around; the next day, a bunch of the streets are closed, there is no place to park, there are myriad fried food stands stationed in the town square all serving some variation on the same thing, it’s literally impossible to get around, there are slow moving crowds every fucking where you turn, and there are people dressed in late 1800s garb, riding around on horseback.

The festival itself is really only two full days, with a half-day on Thursday, and then another half-day on Sunday. By Sunday evening, and into Monday morning, it’s all gone—things begin returning to normal. Streets are no longer blocked off, and the only traces of the Defeat of Jesse James Days festivities are the chemical toilets filled with human waste, the overflowing garbage cans filled with waste created by humans, and the grease stains that will never really fade away from nearly every square inch of sidewalk for, like, three city blocks. 

*

On September 7th, 1876, Jesse James and his gang—commonly referred to as the James-Younger Gang, attempted to rob the First National Bank of Northfield.

It didn’t work, however, and this botched attempted robbery¹ went so terribly wrong that it, according to lore, was the beginning of the end of the James-Younger Gang. It also, for better or worse, became what Northfield, Minnesota is ‘known’ for. Along with the two very expensive liberal arts colleges housed within the community, and the Malt-O-Meal factory² nestled next to the train tracks, filling the air with a sugary sweet aroma day after day—Northfield is known as the town that ‘defeated’ Jesse James.

But did the townspeople who happened to be present that day, who took up arms and defended themselves against the James-Younger Gang really ‘defeat’ Jesse James?

Once, a number of years ago, I made the mistake of calling this festival simply ‘Jesse James Days,’ to which I was quickly and sternly corrected—I wish I could remember by whom. “It’s The Defeat of Jesse James Days,” they hissed. “We’re celebrating his defeat—not him!”

However, at least to me, the word ‘defeat’ implies that, like, James himself died in Northfield—and that’s just not the case. Two members of his gang—Clell Miller and Bill Stiles—were killed in the ensuing shootout that occurred after the attempted robbery; other members of the gang were wounded—Jesse James himself is said to have been shot in the leg by a bullet³ as he fled the town on horseback. 

The James-Younger Gang split up after escaping Northfield—the Younger brothers, along with Charlie Pitts, were caught (and Pitts was killed) near LaSalle, Minnesota, after being cornered by one of the countless groups out searching for them. Jesse James and his brother Frank, despite the manhunt, managed to escape and continued heading south toward Tennessee. 

Jesse James would, of course, later be killed by Robert Ford, in 1882, as depicted⁴ in the film The Assassination of Jesse James by The Coward Robert Ford. 

So, yes, I get it, the multi-day festival is not in celebration of James himself, but the townspeople of Northfield also didn’t exactly defeat him, either—he went on to perform additional robberies in his later years after assembling a new gang. A town defended itself against a famous outlaw—but I suppose ‘Thwarting a Robbery Days’ doesn’t roll off the tongue or sound as appealing when compared to the alliterative and snappy ‘Defeat of Jesse James Days,’ or ‘Defeat Days,’ or simply ‘DJJD’ as some call it. 

*

There was a time in my life when I was capable of having fun—I mean, more fun, or enthusiasm, or whatever, than I am capable of having now.

By 2008, I think I had a better grasp on how to handle the Defeat of Jesse James Days—going to the parade was not one of the activities to take on, and we were best served attending the festivities on the Thursday evening—‘Townie Night,’ as it is called by the locals, representing a chance for them to enjoy the festival prior to the descent of people from out of town, pouring in on Friday morning. 

At this point, Wendy and I were no longer living in a tiny apartment on the south end of town—far removed from the bustle of the downtown part of Northfield; we were renting a charming duplex only blocks away from the heart of the town—a split level, full of character, but also a ton of flaws that we overlooked because the place came with hardwood floors and pocket doors. 

That year, 2008, we attended ‘Townie Night’ with another couple—my friend Liz, and her husband, who is also named Kevin, along with a mutual friend of ours, Jeff. Since we were living so close to the festival that year, they met at our place, and we walked down together, taking a lap through the town square where all of the food stands are clustered tightly together, then walking through the festival’s midway—set across from and along the edge of the Cannon River. 

By the time we made a full lap through, and back around to the food—it isn’t really all that big of a festival—the sun had set, the sky was growing dark, and the bright neon lights of the midway rides and food stands surrounded us. There was a slight, autumnal chill in the air—nothing like the cold air and drizzle from two years ago, but it was a comforting, crisp sensation that I still return to often. 

I wandered away from the group to get in a relatively long line for funnel cake, but I had apparently been gone for just too long—by the time I returned, our friend Jeff had departed⁵ while I was in line.

I stood awkwardly trying to hold my flimsy, hot plate of fried dough with one hand, and attempted to shovel parts of it into my mouth with the other. 

The sky continued to darken; the cool breeze touched our skin.

*

These are the, for lack of a better expression, ‘good memories’ that I go to when the Defeat of Jesse James Days comes around every year—these idealized fragments of nostalgia, friendship, and weather you sometimes long for.

By the following year, we began to look at things a little less fondly. 

Still living downtown in the charming, yet flawed, duplex, our outgoing mail was stolen—presumably by someone walking down our street to get back to their car. One of the charms of this place was that we had an actual mail flap—the letter carrier would open the flap up, and press the mail through into a basket⁶ in our living room. With our outgoing mail, we began clipping it to the flap, on the outside of the house, with a clothespin.

Naively believing, at the time, that people aren’t awful piles of garbage, we had clipped our Netflix DVD (it was 2009, after all) to the flap so it could be returned. However, the disc never made it back to the Netflix distribution center, and after about a week, we had to mark it as missing—we surmised that some upstanding individual saw a free Netflix DVD dangling from a clip, ran up, and grabbed it.

But the joke was on them—the envelope contained that 2004 biopic of Ray Charles, and you know what, despite the fact that Jamie Foxx won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Charles, that movie was not very good at all.

I have lived through 12 Defeat of Jesse James Days festivals, and with each subsequent weekend—always the weekend after Labor Day—my interest in having anything to do with the festival diminishes more and more. There are years where I have no special or nostalgic memories attached to that weekend—there were some years when we tried to leave town as much as possible if we were able to, simply to avoid the congestion, noise, and crowds. 

There were years when Wendy and I would try to cobble together a lunch from the food available in the town’s square—but when you feel like total shit a few hours later, you realize that a little cardboard rectangle of fried cheese curds and a large plastic cup of lemonade isn’t really a ‘lunch.’ And after we went from being vegetarian to vegan, our options became even more limited. 

Around four years ago, while I was at work, Wendy brought me a large cup of fries from the food stand that exclusively sells fries—I ate way too many of them, and later on, was convinced that I was dying, or that I needed to go to the emergency room. 

That is how bad my insides felt from indulging in that much grease. 

*

During the time I worked for the newspaper, providing coverage to the Defeat of Jesse James Days was, as my editor at the time called it, an ‘all hands on deck’ situation. 

In 2014, I had been on the job at the newspaper for, like, maybe two weeks, prior to the festival getting underway—since I was so new (and inexperienced) and because I had family coming into town specifically for Defeat Days, my contributions to coverage of the events were limited. On the Sunday morning, I was sent to the annual pancake breakfast at the VFW Hall—the lighting inside was atrocious, and I was barely capable of using the camera I had been handed, so none of the photos, even with tinkering in Photoshop, turned out very well—I don’t think any of them made the final cut for the ‘DJJD recap’ that was put together for the next edition of the paper.

Nobody really wanted to talk to me about pancakes, or the pancake breakfast, or the festival, or why the event was important—and a number of people, stern-faced men, mostly, presumably former service members, were nervous about me taking photos, and asked that I not photograph them.

The following year, when my editor started talking about Defeat Days preparation, half in earnest, half in jest, I threw out the audacious suggestion that we just simply not cover the festival at all. 

This was met with a small and sympathetic laugh, and followed quickly with a gentle reminder of how furious people in the community would be with the paper if it—or ‘we,’ the paper’s employees—simply did not show up to take photos during events, or write up blurbs regarding the weekend’s festivities.

Since this was an ‘all hands on deck’ situation for the newsroom, we were all assigned various areas of coverage, and that is how I found myself in the beer tent on a Friday night—attempting to take photos (I still hadn’t really gotten the hang of it, even after a year) of a band playing to what was, more or less, an empty beer tent. The band—The Key West Rejects—tackled, from what I can recall, mostly classic rock cover songs, while groups of disinterested people cluttered anywhere but near the stage.

Some sat outside of the tent at picnic tables, smoking, sipping what was presumably light beer out of flimsy plastic cups, enjoying the night air and the stale smell of the Cannon River; others huddled around the makeshift bar, their faces fixed on the televisions that were mounted above, broadcasting a baseball game. 

I was a little out of my element, and struggling to keep my anxiety in check while ‘on the clock,’ but observing this scene was among one of the saddest things I had ever witnessed.

In attempting to leave the newsroom after uploading the photos I took, a cluster of members from the Old Paths Baptist Church⁷ had set up shop in the driveway next to the newspaper’s parking lot—partially obstructing the sidewalk, making it difficult for people to walk by. Some of the members of the church were holding signs that talked about god’s judgment; one of them stood on an actual fucking soapbox, holding a bible, hurling verbal fire and brimstone at people just trying to walk back to their cars. It was a loud, and unsettling scene—coupled with the constant flickering of headlights passing by and the noise from the festival in the distance. The whole thing became a dizzying, surrealist nightmare. 

The following year, when I was really looking hard for a new job in order to leave the paper, I had set a goal—it was in 2016, and I told myself that I needed to be out before the election⁸; but I was also hoping to be out before the Defeat of Jesse James Days rolled around again. 

I left the paper with roughly two weeks to spare.

*

Somehow, I manage to avoid Defeat Days almost completely in both 2016 and 2017⁹—only driving from home to work, and back again, and never venturing in the direction of the food stands or the midway. 

I was almost on my way to avoiding it completely yet again for this year, but I began having a change of heart.

“You going down to…all that?,” my co-worker, Erik, asks me, as he motions his hand toward the food stands and low level of cacophony coming from downtown. I’m in the middle of inhaling my lunch, and he’s locking up his bike.

“Normally, I wouldn’t,” I begin. “But I don’t know—I think I’ll try to go either tonight or tomorrow. Like, as a joke.”

“A joke to who?”

“Myself.”

*

There was a time in my life when I was capable of having fun—I mean, more fun, or enthusiasm, or whatever, than I am capable of having now.

After I get finished up with work, on a Saturday afternoon, my wife and I walk down to take in the Defeat of Jesse James Days. We last all of two hours before we decide that we’ve seen enough—that we’ve had enough, and we walk back home.

The entire time we’re out in the thick of it, I keep saying that we’re ‘doing it for the culture¹⁰,’ though I am 100% confident that nobody understands what I actually mean by that. 

The first place we stop is one of the local, small breweries in town—one in particular¹¹ is playing host to what I begin referring to as the ‘bougie beer tent.’ I look at the menu of drinks offered at the outdoors portion of this event, and realize I may have made a huge mistake—there’s nothing I really want to drink being served on tap. 

“What—if it’s not a peanut butter porter, you’re too good for it?,” my wife chides me as she orders something lighter in color, taste, and texture—“No,” I respond immediately, but I also know that she’s right. 

It’s hot and I can barely hear anything or anyone over the sound of the band playing on the outdoor stage, and my wife sees an acquaintance she’s made recently—we wander over and attempt a conversation with this acquaintance and her husband; their children, both very small, keep running around them in circles, and wrap paper napkins around both their wrists, as well as the wrists of their parents.

We’re doing it for the culture, I tell myself, as I assist Wendy with finishing her beer—she’s a slow drinker, and we have much more to see. 

*

It’s a little after 5 p.m., and we encounter both a trash can that is overflowing with garbage and a drunken woman.

We’ve just finished walking through the annual art bazaar, coordinated by the community’s arts organization and held every year along the scenic riverwalk, in conjunction with the festival.

We’re about to head into the town square, where all the food stands are, when I see the garbage can—it’s one of the city’s downtown garbage cans that gets closed off for the weekend with a large piece of plywood attached over the top, discouraging people from depositing their rubbish inside, and, instead, encouraging people to go find one of the countless, large, plastic garbage cans located, oh, I don’t know, just about anywhere you turn.

I fumble to get my phone out to take a photo of the trash that’s piled up, when a voice beckons to us.

Because this woman is slurring her words, a pitch-perfect caricature of someone who has been day drinking and had entirely too much, I don’t understand her at first. As I’m taking the photo of the trash, I’m confident she asks, “Why are you doing that?”

I start to respond, “I’m doing it for the culture”—that should be obvious, and I almost want to tell her that this pile of rotting trash covered in insects is a harrowing allegory for the festival itself; however, my wife, who has much better hearing than I do, realizes this woman has asked, “Why are they doing that?”

The ‘they’ she is asking about refers to the wasps (the insects, not the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) that are swarming around the half-empty cups of beer, and partially finished containers of food that have piled up on top of the trash can. 

My wife, bless her heart, tries to make small talk with this woman about bees; the woman is practically incapable of following along and stumbles over her thoughts. She’s thin, and short, with chin-length brown hair. I can’t tell how old she is—maybe younger than us, and maybe time hasn’t been very kind; or maybe she’s older—in her 40s? She takes a long drag off of her cigarette and flicks her thumb against the filter, sending ash tumbling to the sidewalk.

We continue walking toward the food.

*

“Get your guns, boys—they’re robbing the bank!”

While we are trying to eat, there is a dramatic re-enactment of the failed bank raid taking place near the food stands—the old First National Bank of Northfield building still stands near the intersection of 4th and Division Street, only now it, conveniently, houses the Northfield Historical Society.

The re-enactments seem like they happen every hour, on the hour, but I know that there aren’t that many of them. They are way too elaborate and lengthy to happen that frequently. A well-choreographed dance, a dedicated and eclectic group of Northfield residents pulls off these re-enactments year after year; crowds of festival attendees gather around and watch with baited breath as the robbery (performed inside the Historical Society building, where nobody can actually see it or hear it) spills out into the streets. 

On cue, someone yells, “Get your guns, boys—they’re robbing the bank,” a thing that was, apparently, actually yelled during the attempted robbery. The entire scene descends into chaos and loud gunfire.

As rounds of blanks are fired off, my wife eats a piece of roasted corn, and we split a veggie burrito that literally tastes like nothing. A Northfield Police Officer wanders over and frightens two young children—a brother and sister, presumably—who are fighting. You can see the fear come over their young faces, but the officer attempts to put them at ease by handing them two police badge stickers.

On our walk back home, we see two women dressed up in western-themed garb, headed toward the festival. Both of them are carrying open cans of Coors Light—they, too, apparently are doing it for the culture, though I’m not sure which one.

Wendy later says, “Well, if they’d been stopped by the police, all that would have happened was they would have been handed stickers.”

*

The next morning, walking toward the employee entrance at work, there is an empty liquor bottle near the sidewalk—it’s for Fireball Cinnamon Whisky.

Later, as the morning nears lunch hour, I have a strange encounter with a man who, I presume, is in town for the festival. He greets me by complaining about the size of the heads of garlic we currently have at the store.

I look up from the Yukon Gold potatoes I am stuffing into a basket—he’s taller than me, maybe in his 50s, wearing jean shorts and flip flops, but also a lot of long chains around his neck, and a heavy leather jacket. As he complains about the size of the garlic heads, I’m taken aback by his accent—a thick, near-satirical New York dialect comes out of his mouth. 

Like, this is the kind of exaggerated accent you hear in movies.

I explain to him that the heads of local garlic are all very small, and he takes a few steps closer to me and tells me that he usually buys two head of garlic, and then, he brings his head down ever so slightly, brings up his palm to his mouth, like he’s about to tell me a secret, and in a lower voice, says, “But I’m, ah….going out of town.”

A few moments later, he inquires as to whether we have any arugula. I tell him that we do, showing him where the plastic five-ounce containers of salads are. He grabs a package of arugula, and while placing it in his shopping basket, tells me that his mother used to grow arugula; then, again, lowering his voice and bringing up his palm, says that she grew it, “around the side of the house.”

I don’t understand what that means, or what he’s trying to imply. And it’s at this point that the edge of his jacket lifts up slightly, and I see an empty holster attached to his waist. 

At one point, he actually says, “Fuggetaboutit.”

As I try to get back to my cart of potato boxes and other produce that needed to be stocked, so I can wheel it to the backroom and seek refuge until my new friend from New York, or wherever, leaves the store, he begins telling me about rapini.

Rapini, which I have not heard of, apparently has a lot of ‘healthy benefits’ according to this stranger, and again, as he begins winding down this third, brief monologue I have been regaled with in my short time assisting him in the store he leans in, and tells me, like it’s a secret, that rapini, “is also known as broccoli rabe.”

Much later, near the end of my day, I’m in the break room talking about the festival with two of my co-workers. I describe it as a chance for ‘trash people to come into town and leave their trash everywhere.’

Neither of my co-workers disagrees.

*

When I still worked at the newspaper, and half in earnest, half in jest suggested that we just opt not to provide any coverage to the Defeat of Jesse James Days, I said it partially because I didn’t want to work the extra hours, in the evening, at an event I had no interest in going to—but mostly, I suggested it because nothing ever changes about this event—so what’s the point?¹²

I’ve lived through 12 Defeat of Jesse James Days festivals and very little, if anything at all, changes from year to year. The same food vendors serve you the same food from the same food stand or truck that is parked in, give or take, the exact same location, year after year. 

The same artisans sell the same jewelry, woodworking, and soaps from the same tents along the riverfront bazaar.

The same transient rug salesperson sets up shop on the corner of Highway 3 and 2nd Street, displaying their large, decorative rugs on elaborate stands, with a banner flying above it all reading, ‘Buy Rugs, Not Drugs.’

The same dilapidated carnival rides are assembled, presumably by the same operators, stationed in the same location¹³, and ridden by the same people. For a number of years, the Graviton-esque ride that anchors the midway—the ‘Starship 2000,’ was either missing part of its sign, or a large portion of it refused to light up with the rest of the ride. 

This image—a partially illuminated sign reading ‘St____ip 2000,’—broken and damaged but still trying, is something that has really stuck with me. 

Maybe the festival never changes, or rarely changes, because people don’t want change. 

They want the same food served to them by the same vendors from the same truck or station, situated in the same location in the town’s square.

The same light beer served in the same flimsy plastic cups, consumed in the confines of the same tent while the same band plays the same song that isn’t being listened to.

The same re-enactments and the same artisans selling the same jewelry and carved wood knick-knacks.

The same midway rides with their partially illuminated signs—still damaged but still trying.

There’s no introductory course or informational session regarding the Defeat of Jesse James Days—if you’re born and raised in Northfield, Minnesota, you just know it. Year after year, from your childhood into adulthood, for a handful of days in early September, it is a part of you—and that’s why it stays the same. You don’t want it to change; you don’t want something to impact your nostalgia, or the way you’ve chosen to remember something. 

If the pile of trash covered in insects is an allegory for how some of us—transplants to the community, or just people who are so very tired of the crowds and noise and gunfire—view this festival, the Starship 2000 sign is how we get through it—year after year, damaged but trying. 

1- The robbery is, like, way too difficult to explain in its entirety within the context of this essay, but it is worth noting that, according to the limited amount of research I did for this piece, the James-Younger Gang selected the First Bank of Northfield because it was believed that a large deposit had recently been made at the bank, and they wanted that money. It is also worth noting that they did not get that money—the teller, Joseph Lee Heywood, refused to open the safe, and was killed. Heywood is honored every year during the town’s celebration with a graveside memorial, and an outstanding citizen in the town is given the Heywood Distinguished Service Award.

2- Malt-O-Meal was purchased by Post Holdings in 2015, but it will always be Malt-O-Meal to me.

3- I learned this in my limited amount of research for this piece—meaning I read the Wikipedia entry about the bank robbery.

4- Certainly historically accurate.

5- For a while, I took this very personally, like Jeff was mad that I was gone for too long and left because he was sick of waiting for me to come back from buying a funnel cake. It turns out he was, like, just ready to leave and it had nothing to do with me, but I used to give him shit about this regularly.

6- We never quite got the hang of this and the mail would often miss the basket completely, and just be in a heap on the living room floor. 

7- The Old Paths Baptist Church was sharing the ‘good word’ again this year as well—this time, they set up shop at the end of the crosswalk during the middle of the day, calling women who were simply trying to walk by their demonstration ‘members of the lowly gender.’ 

8- I had been on the job for three months when I found myself covering the 2014 election for the paper—staying in the newsroom until 11:30 p.m. to wait for results from across the county. It was awful, and I knew I couldn’t survive another night like that, especially with how big the 2016 election was.

9- As soon as I typed this, I realized it wasn’t the truth, but that’s part of the fun about ‘creative non-fiction.’ I had completely forgotten about how, in 2017, in a long tale of minor marital discourse, I was sent on an errand to get a growler of locally brewed beer, and angry walked through the entire festival in order to fetch it.

10- ‘Doing it for the culture’ can mean one of two things. I think most people took this as we were subjecting ourselves to the festival in order to take in the ‘culture’ of people who were at the festivities. So yes, it could mean that, but I was, perhaps foolishly, trying to use the slang or contemporary meaning of it—that refers to when a person does something they usually wouldn’t do just because, as Urban Dictionary states, ‘the thing they are doing is hyped.’

11- It seems worth noting that my benevolent editor is employed by this brewery. 

12- But what is the point in anything, really.

13- A quick point of clarification—the midway was moved in 2016 and just this year in 2018, because the ground was either flooded by the Cannon River, or just too damp from excessive rain. In 2016, the midway was moved two miles down the road to the parking lot of an abandoned K-Mart; this year, it was crammed into the employee parking lots of the Malt-O-Meal factory.