from the mixed-up files of the county courthouse

Incident A.

During this time, the suspect ran 22 stop signs.

Incident B.

While conducting a helicopter search for marijuana fields, state police observed a man and woman sitting next to a mobile home. While one can’t know if this sight inspired suspicion, the man’s response, which involved running into a nearby lake, led them to contact on-the-ground law enforcement. Police reports indicate that they found the man treading water in the middle of the lake.

The man had no identification and gave his name as Mr. K­– [not his real name]; he spoke with an apparently phony Irish accent.

The subject in question was avoiding capture after allegedly absconding on bond from a previous incident [see Incident C]. When he claimed that he had not fled his court date, prosecutors argued that:

A man who shaves his mustache, dies [sic] his hair, assumes a false identity, and affects a phony Irish brogue to avoid capture, has a good understanding that he is likely to go to jail if and when he is caught.

Incident C. 

Two men entered the defendant’s property to serve a subpoena for a murder trial [unrelated to all incidents mentioned here]. It is likely that one of the servers had a vendetta against the defendant; he and the defendant were previously acquainted and he had volunteered to serve the order. The defendant came to the door with a gun and a mouthful of cuss words. He attacked the man he knew, although he and the other server eventually managed to leave the property: 

We got into our vehicle and at gunpoint waited for traffic to clear. As soon as it did, we drove away.

Records submitted in defense of the assault. 

March 10, 1998
Now the alleged Defendant is NOT an attorney nor does the alleged Defendant wish to become an attorney, but the alleged Defendant is stuck having to undertake his defense to the charges because of several factors out of his control. One, the alleged Defendant is a public person who is clearly constrovershal, because of his defense of the United States Constitute and this Constitutional Conservatorship has made it very difficult to obtain competent Counsel, who is willing to go to bat for the alleged Defendant due to this notoriety.

April 15, 1998
Did Mr. G– not understand the Kings English or was he here for no good deed. Now lets see, I’ll take Door No. 1, NO GOOD DEED!!! I do not think it took a ROCKET SCIENTIST TO FIGURE THAT LITTLE BRAIN TEASE NOW DID IT.

April 22, 1998
This is because Mr. G–’s brain is pickled in chemical valley, and he just does not think that he is going to get caught. They will believe every little morcel I drivel to them Mr. K– and remember I have friends in high places who would clearly like to roast your butt Mr. K–and I am going to help them!!!!!! Yeah and I’m the tooth fairy Mr. G–!!!!! Do NOT count on ANYTHING UNDER YOUR PILLOW MR. G–.

April 24, 1998
WRONG DOG BREATH!!!! I will jail you says the prosecutor or make you post a big bond.

What is perhaps most astonishing about all of the above cases is that they are not unrelated accounts, but appear in the records of one individual. Who, we might recommend, should henceforth seek only licensed counsel.

my day in court

The biggest problem with looking up records at the courthouse isn’t the ban on camera phones, even if this means you have to dig up fifty cents to store yours in the line of lockers near the entrance. (This also means that the courthouse foyer rings and vibrates regularly.) Nor is the biggest problem the computer system, which is slow and furnishes records in all dialects of gibberish—everything, it seems is written in acronyms. Someone has taped a translation sheet above the computers, but the list is incomplete and I’m not sure what the terms stand for anyway.

It is a bit of a trial to fill out record requests—you must write your name, address, and phone number on every request, which means, presumably, that the people I am looking into could just as easily look into me. Fair is fair, although I don’t know about the rule that limits requests to five per person per hour. Left alone with the files, there is a moment of panic when the papers slip off the folder’s metal prongs, for the clerk has said that under no circumstances should you remove any items from the files. Furthermore, while looking at the files, you may only write with a pencil. Copies cost enough so that I’m sure they rarely have to make them. 

Spelling is worrisome. It is a testament to the severity of the file clerk’s lecture that I restrain myself from taking my pencil and correcting the errors. I think of the person who stacked the papers, of all the stamps and signatures and motions that have been plunked and flourished and filed and are now tucked onto the shelves of the Washtenaw County Courthouse.

But really, the worst part about looking up court records is that there is just too much going on. There are restraining orders and name changes and overdue fines. There are defendants coming in after court appearances, and lawyers clicking around in business shoes. There are, like yesterday, two gentlemen, baseball caps wound to 7 o’clock, entering their own names into the records system.   

“This isn’t no felony,” says the one.

His friend glances at the screen. “It is if you do it more than once,” he replies. He types in another name. “I’m gonna look at your dad’s file,” he tells his friend. Fourteen records—some of them minor traffic infractions, but he’s still astonished.

The son looks over. “He got another one in 1986?” he asks.  A 1987 charge involves possession of a short-barrel shotgun. “I wish I could bring this to my momma,” says the son. “I’d be like, ‘You remember this?’” 

“Oh, she remember it all,” says his friend. He skims his records. Of the twelve incidents on the list, three are for domestic violence.

lead, stick figures, and a bagel or two

The Fundred Dollar Bill Project hopes to clean up lead contamination in New Orleans. At the time I wrote this story, soil-based lead was the city's primary toxic waste concern. Of course, thanks to offshore drilling (and, by default, my commute to work), that is no longer the case.

Want to design your own fundred? The art advocacy project has only collected 10.6% of its goal, and could certainly benefit from a few more bills.

A few fundred ideas:

Stick figures. For those, like Brian Banks, who declared himself to be a "stick figures kind of guy." Banks is an academic advisor at the University of Michigan’s School of Art & Design. He's been working there for awhile, so he's not too concerned about the discrepancy.

Portraits. One student at the School of Art and Design drew a fundred in honor of Banks, entitled "The Fundred Man." (Banks orchestrated the Ann Arbor fundred pick up, which included both the university and area schools.) Banks showed me the drawing, confessing that he thought the ears and neck were too big. "That looks like Will Smith!" he said, proving that artistic talent does not necessarily a critic make.

Peace signs. They are still as popular as they were during my tenure in elementary school. Overall, though, the fifth grade class I visited while working on this story was ambivalent about the project's success. One ten-year-old told me he was pretty pessimistic about the whole affair--the government, the environment, collective responsbility. He also told me that "lead is a metal and comes in three different forms."

Coincidentally, it was "wacky hair day" at Thurston Elementary. One girl was wearing bagels at the base of her pigtails. When I saw her at lunchtime, one bagel was missing. "It fell on the floor," she said. "I didn't eat it."

our trespasses

On Sunday I ducked out of a Mennonite hymn sing to go stand in the rain and shoot pistols. There was a man wearing an oilcloth duster and matching Stetson and the air was thick with gun smoke and spent shell casings. The gunslinger fantasy was a bit difficult to sustain at the sight of our safety glasses and industrial-grade earphones, and dissolved completely when considering our targets, which were bowling pins donated from a local bowling alley.

The Tri-County Sportsmen’s League hosts monthly bowling pin shoots, and has been doing so every summer for over ten years. The signs order you to check in at the clubhouse, but the men at the bar wearing camouflage baseball caps tell will just tell you to head to the range—“they’ll get you sorted out down there.” They are shooting rifles on the hillside and the dogs hunched against the fog think nothing of the persistent reports. I’ve unconsciously pulled a red rain jacket from the closet, leftover reflex of a childhood measured by hunting seasons and men wandering through the back woods despite the orange and black rebuke of our neighbors’ No Trespassing signs.

I’ve just finished a book about the Haitian revolution, and guns have been much on the mind, particularly the trick of keeping gunpowder dry in tropic climates, or the logistics of moving firearms over steep mountain trails. When the French Commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax passed out muskets to former slaves, he declared, “Here is the liberty which Sonthonax gives you; whoever would take this gun from you means to make you a slave again.” The politics behind this 18^th century soundbite are ambiguous—by this point the slaves had already been freed, and while Sonthonax was a noted abolitionist, he expressed as much enthusiasm for killing those colonists who were against slavery as he did for abolishing it.

Thinking of this, of our equally ambiguous right to bear arms, of how one might shoot through the paradox at the heart of “a militia being necessary to the security of a free State” and manage, unlike Raskolnikov, not to mangle something genuinely resembling freedom, I take a .44 and shoot down five bowling pins in 7.62 seconds.

Except Edd, who works at Cabela’s in the firearms department and wishes he could buy the .44 Smith & Wesson semi-automatic with its red dot sight and retails for over $1,000, which essentially makes it the Cadillac of pistols, although you can purchase a custom engraved replica of Smith & Wesson’s 1917 Cenntential for $7,500—Edd tells me to count the pins and shoot them in a circle because that way I won’t think so much, and this does work, at least as far as time is concerned: the next set goes down in 6.34 seconds and by then I’m pretty much hooked.

They give me a .44 special and a 460 Smith & Wesson revolver and then a tiny .22 which feels, in comparison, as light and harmless as a songbird. For never having handled a handgun, it is amazing how much I know after 27 years of murder scenes, military invasions, and bank robberies. There is that moment, standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, where you grip the metal rail, listen to the stones under your feet, and contemplate tossing your body down into that stretch of vertical space. Shooting pistols, the line between imagination and homicide is horizontal; I aim for the pins, albeit poorly, never doubting that any member of the league would hesitate to shoot me down should I suddenly decide to turn towards them and pull the trigger.

articles of free speech

What happens when tongues and feet vie for space in the oral cavity:

man with the orderly mind

Despite the downward screech that is the Michigan housing market, B’s house in the Detroit suburbs closes tomorrow. It’s located off what must have once been a farm road; there’s a Steinway showroom a mile away and the predictable replication of chain restaurants and grocery stores. To get into the housing development, you carry a device, much like a garage door opener; when you press the button the gate zips into the air at such a speed that makes it a tempting catapult launch. Lacking such a gadget, you speak to the man sitting in the sentry-house. “6400 P–,” I say, but this is not enough. “Mrs. H–. The house is selling tomorrow.”

“Oh yes,” he replies. “Mrs. H–.” The gate flies up.

B and her husband lived in the condo association for over twenty years; they kept up with the couples on their semi-circle, but now B runs through the ailments and the deaths. Alzheimer’s. Stroke. Deceased. And now B, a year after her husband’s death, has officially moved away. The house has that flat, forlorn look—carpet exposed for the first time in years, walls bare but for hooks and smudges.

A man comes to haul away the residual items and refuses my repeated offer to help, even after a large metal desk crashes off his dolly, so I slip into the house to give him some privacy. (One would think that with such a peculiar name as “Kosher Garbage,” employees might have a sense of humor, but he didn’t appear in the best of spirits, even after I reassured him that I really was kidding about the “Oh, I forgot—there’s a couch” comment, which I had saved up for the moment he began pulling tie-downs over the overflowing bed of his pickup truck.)

The garbage cans are stuffed with hangers and headless broomsticks and rusting screws harvested from the toolbox. A frequent mover of homes, I am loathe to leave the garbage and cannot believe my luck when I spot the garbage truck lurching its way through the neighborhood. “You saved the day!” I exclaim, fearful that the garbage man will be annoyed with two stuffed cans and my poorly parked car. But this is indeed a day for miracles. The M– Village garbage man, who must not be unaccustomed to medical rubbish and the non-bodily remains of the deceased, looks at me, upends one of the cans into truck and replies, “You know, with the way people are leaving this earth, I’m just grateful for every day I get.”

           What do you think of us in fuzzy endeavor, you whose directions are

            sterling, whose lunge is straight?

all the news I need

To be fair, it seems to be a southeastern Michigan thing, this tendency for the weather, proportional, perhaps, to the number of drivers who cannot handle the snow. NPR reports on the snowstorm in DC, and then breaks for a local update on all the accidents around town. It is my first winter in the fleshy palm of the mitten. It snows rarely here, I have learned—so much so that we are inexperienced in the physics of brakes and ice.

Which explains our abiding interest in the weather.

I pick B– up from the senior center; she attended a program for those with memory loss. She spent part of the time worrying about the weather: if her son would make it from the Detroit suburbs, if they’d cleared the roads yet, what to do about her dog. She knew, because the roads were glistening, that the salt trucks had come through.

AAWSM, observed

I am in the habit of trawling for stories; when my friend said "salmon" and "collective" and "Ann Arbor", I knew it was a keeper.

Wild Salmon Minyan

Now what to do about that salmon fillet in my freezer...

the voice that launched a thousand ‘whys?’

Helen Thomas was in Ann Arbor this evening for a brief reading. (One man at the post-reading Q & A reported that he’d seen her at a restaurant earlier in the day, the exact location lost under Thomas’s quizzical gaze and his growing embarrassment. “Maybe it was someone else,” he mumbled, although with a profile as distinct as Thomas’s, this is hard to imagine.) Southeast Michigan, going through a bit of a Nazareth complex these days, is happy to claim her—the daughter of Lebanese immigrants, she was raised in Detroit, and proof that, although the Detroit Free Press no longer lands on stoops seven days a week, and the Ann Arbor newspaper does not come at all, yes, good journalists can come out of the Motor City.

Thomas, born shortly after the conclusion of the War to End All Wars, began reporting from the White House on Kennedy’s first day in office, and, not coincidentally, on each and every war that followed. Of today’s, she unequivocally condones withdrawal. “George W. Bush wanted to be a war president,” she said, pausing for a very trenchant silence. “And he was.” As for President Obama, she wishes him to have more courage—an improvement we might wish upon all our psyches, although certainly one most critical in a man about to send 36,000 more troops into a land war in Asia.

[title removed because it most likely involved a fish-related pun]

It takes us roughly 20 minutes to unload 80 boxes of frozen fish from the back of the refrigerated semi-truck parked in front of Kmart.  The floor of the truck is slick with condensation, and I concentrate on not falling by imagining the spectacle: two boxes worth of sockeye salmon scattering into the air, a pause, then 35 pounds of solidly frozen seafood raining down at 9.81 m/s².

The fish fills two station wagons, one S.U.V., one pickup truck.  Yes, it smells a bit fishy.  The recipes, however, are mouthwatering: dill and sour cream and coconut milk and fennel pollen, the latter of which sounds as if it belongs in a magician's incantation.

The fish is bound for residential freezers throughout Ann Arbor; local orders and delivery are coordinated by members of the informally-organized Ann Arbor Wild Salmon Minyan. We shall save the wit and why of their acronym for another day.

of a certain age

Living as I am, in a state with a fifteen percent unemployment rate, I am grateful to be partially employed, especially as I have found myself in a situation in a position that lets me zip into handicapped parking spaces in pursuit of all sorts of errands. [I am working for a family whose mother recently moved in with them. This means, on any given day, I find myself at the library, the hardware store, the doctor's office, the candy store, the laundry room, the nail salon ("an eye-opening experience for the nail care neophyte" reports yr. correspondent), the veterinarian, the Secretary of State.]

nightmares are relative, i suppose

Ask nearly any teacher about the teacher dreams. Their eyes will grow wide, and they'll nod slowly. They will recount the nightmares: Their classroom disappears. They are unprepared. They lose their lesson plans. They are possibly unclad. T–, their honorary student-from-hell, is—somehow—the principal. Their third period class pulls off a coup d'etat.

The nightmares often appear in August. Perhaps it is the moan of school buses, shuddering past the house on practice runs. Or the prodigious advertisements for mechanical pencils and Mead notebooks and My Little Pony Trapper Keepers. Something slips into the subconscious and worries the pedagogical nerves.

The nightmares lay in wait. I shouldn't have been surprised when they appeared last month, even after two years away from the classroom. Relax, I said, banishing visions of T– and gum-slathered desks. There's no school for you this year.

But that was before the brouhaha over the President's speech, which he will be delivering tomorrow to students across the country. I'll be heading to a nearby school, for one big voyeuristic round of watching-the-students-watch-the-speech. The brouhaha is a story for another day; tonight I'll dream of English class and brown bag lunches, not-so-secretly delighted that even this year, I get to go back to school.

townie

at the A2 Art Fair, you can...

sign up for the New York Times (highest home delivery rate outside the 10000s)

listen to men playing recorder/s

buy a $165 hat

or support a 5-acre rabbit sanctuary

Say yes to Michigan!

There is a surprisingly extensive list of songs about Michigan. Where, one wonders, are the songs about Connecticut? Of course, this is the only state where residents can hold up the palms of their right hands and point to where they're from. Now I can say yes to that!

A few for your listening pleasure:

see all of Greetings from Michigan by Sufjan Stevens

Half Acre, by Hem (you'll know it from the Pay it Forward-esque insurance commercial, which, mercifully, is only one minute long and thus far less painful than the movie. You may decide how you feel about a company reminding you to do what your mama and papa taught you--not to mention anthropomorphizing itself as a paragon of responsibility. You know, in the great sellout debate, what I find most disturbing is not always the artist's willingness to sell their music to the Man, but the fact that the music I love also appears to be the Man's favorite too. While Andrew Bird's whistle really shouldn't fetch any price, I am glad he can make enough to keep himself in glockenspiels. It's just unnerving to hear his melodies trickling from the television. Or maybe it's the editorial hack job meted out on his music.)

Michigan, by the Red House Painters (I keep trying this band but they never take. They're one of those bands where the first 45 seconds of a song writhes with promise but by minute two you've memorized their three power chords and pasty lyrics and the incessantly nasal drone of the lead vocalist. In fact, your time would probably be better spent waiting for the seventeen-year cicadas to emerge. They'll be here, in Michigan, in 2021.)