So there once was this guy named King Minos who was gifted a white bull from Poseidon, the god of the ocean, and man, this white bull was awesome. Like really, really fucking great. So great that instead of sacrificing this white bull to Poseidon like he was supposed to, King Minos thought, “why would I want a perfectly good white bull to be slaughtered, let’s use one of my shitty bulls instead, Poseidon probably doesn’t even know what a good bull looks like. He’ll never know.” So that’s what he did.

But guess what, Poseidon noticed. And he was really fucking pissed.

Whereas the Judeo-Christian God would just make you wallow in your guilt and shame, or send plagues of locusts and murder your first born child—Poseidon was a bit more cunning. He knew he had to get King Minos back for thinking he was too stupid to notice that the dead bull thrown into the ocean wasn’t the kickass white one he really wanted. I mean, he was really counting on that thing being slaughtered for his pleasure. But Poseidon was a crafty son-of-a-bitch. He had a plan. King Minos was about to get soooo fucked.

That white bull was still chilling in whatever pen King Minos kept his best bulls, and every so often the queen would go down and admire this really, really awesome white bull. So Poseidon did what any pissed off god-of-the-ocean would do: he made the queen—the wife of King Minos—fall in love with that white bull.

And we’re not just saying she admired the bull. We’re talking insatiable physical lust for this beast. Like the sight of this bull would make her swoon. She stayed up late at night having nasty thoughts about all the things she wanted this white bull to do to her.

But the problem was, this bull just wasn’t feeling the same way about her. He was a bull after all, not some weird pervert.

But the queen was determined, and just as crafty as the angry god-of-the-ocean who put an interspecies love-spell on her.

If you remember the Trojan horse, the Greeks have one foolproof way of getting what they want: they build a wooden animal and sneak inside it. It’s the top play in their playbook.

The queen went to a guy named Daedalus who was awesome at building stuff—and imprisoned on Crete for being kind of a dick— and asked him to make her a really, really life-like cow. But not just any cow, this one had to be hollow inside so she could sneak inside it while—you guessed it—the white bull fucked her.

And this dude built it.

Now artists and historians differ on the exact design of this wooden cow sex-doll, but at a minimum it had a butt-flap or something. I also don’t know how long it took to build, but suffice to say to do the job properly it probably takes at least enough time for the average person to think, “welllll… maybe not. Maybe I don’t want to have sex with a white bull.”

But nope, no second thoughts here. No cold feet. By the time Daedalus was done with the heifer sex-suit, the Queen was still in heat.

And the cow suit worked great.

Worked so well in fact, that the Queen became pregnant.

Pregnant with a half-man, half-bull that you may affectionately know as: The Minotaur.

And Poseidon just laughed his ass off.

King Minos, on the other hand, was understandably a bit embarrassed by the whole thing. I’m not sure if his wife ever came clean, but I’m pretty sure that once the kid was born he knew he probably wasn’t the father.

To hide his shame, he made Daedalus build a crazy-ass maze and forced his mutant stepson to live in it. It was the most obvious option he had. And luckily, Minos had another, top-half and bottom-half, human son. But then the Athenians killed him. Holy shit King Minos was pissed about this. He waged war on the Athenians, kicked their asses, and made the losers participate in a fucked-up, Hunger Games-style human sacrifice game. Each year seven boys and seven girls were forced into the labyrinth so his weird-ass stepson could chase them and eat them.

And things were finally going great for the King. At least until a dude named Theseus pulled a Katniss Everdeen and volunteered for tribute to ruin his weird game.

The problem this time was that King Minos’s daughter had the hots for Theseus, which is pretty inconvenient but way less weird than the time her mom made a wooden cow-suit to get banged by a white bull. I’m also getting the feeling that King Minos wasn’t much of a family man. The Princess gave Theseus a ball of thread, which she got from our homeboy Daedalus, which was the least weird thing he ever did for the royal family, and Theseus tied one end of the string to a doorpost. He hid his sword (I guess Minos’s henchman never thought of checking for swords), got some clues from the Princess on navigating the labyrinth, and found a sleeping minotaur. He cut off the poor monster’s head, found the other kids stuck in the maze, and followed the thread out the exit. He took the Princess and sailed away from the island of Crete—only to promptly dump the Princess once he got back home.

But don’t worry about her, she rebounded by hooking up with half-man, half-god Dionysus.

●●●

As captivating as this love story is, this tale wasn’t the reason I wanted to go to Crete for our honeymoon. It was because Crete was in a Bible verse. I was really into Bible verses when I got married. Granted, it wasn’t like, a famous Bible verse—not like the ones we used to justify our trip to the Areopagus or the ancient city of Corinth—but it was still in there and we had a week’s itinerary to fill while in Greece.

OK, not super exciting, but not all Bible verses can be winners.

There’s also one in Titus that said:

Which seems a little harsh. Sure, they make cow-suits to get fucked by cattle and sacrifice children to mutant bull-monsters, but no one ever said they were “lazy.”

Thoroughly intrigued, my new bride and I hired a Greek travel agent named Dora and decided to find out for ourselves.

●●●

Crete is an island off the southern tip of Greece, and though it’s been featured in a Bible verse, it’s typically not the Greek island you go to on your honeymoon. My wife wanted to go to those islands, but once I started throwing out Bible verses she knew she was going to have a tough time winning the argument. We compromised and agreed to do nothing that she wanted to do, and in exchange, maybe we’d go back for our ten-year anniversary. Luckily, our actual wedding had enough drama to distract her from caring too much about our honeymoon itinerary.

After eating a gyro with a hamburger patty at the airport McDonald’s, we picked up a diesel-powered, manual transmission, Peugeot from the Chania rental-car stand. We weren’t sure why Dora had booked a hotel in the city of Chania since the main attraction in Crete was a several hour drive, but she insisted and told us we would need need this rental car. We didn’t ask a lot of questions, she seemed to know the riddle of Cretan vacations. We checked into our shockingly swanky honeymoon suite and got dinner at a restaurant inside a decommissioned Turkish bathhouse. They just served food now instead of sweaty, naked men, but we had a functional Turkish steam run in our honeymoon suite to make up for any inconvenience this presented. Upon return, we thanked the concierge for the excellent dinner recommendation and asked for advice for when to leave for the city of Heraklion the next morning.

Heraklion is the capital of Crete and the only reason we went there other than Bible verses. Around the year 1900 AD, an archaeologist named Arthur Evans got super into the labyrinth myth and started looking for it. Like most Greek mythology, the weird stuff blended with the historical record like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, and this Arthur Evans dude was convinced the labyrinth was real. And after digging around in a hill in northern Crete, I guess he was right. Sort of.

He didn’t find a maze that housed a half-man, half-bull monstrosity who feasted on the prepubescent bodies his dad fed him for fun, but Evans did find an insanely elaborate palace that had a bunch of confusing hallways and a big ass mural of kids jumping over a bull. But it was like a full-bull, without any half-man parts.

History said, “close enough” and now the bulk of Crete’s tourism dollars come from tours of this “Palace of Knossos” and the purchase of replica pottery with pictures of kids jumping over a bull. We had already bought a pot at a gift shop, now we just needed to see this temple. But we needed some help navigating there from the concierge.

“Don’t go tomorrow, it’s too crowded. Go the next day.”

Well, I guess he knows more than we do. Instead we made plans to visit a beach resort so my wife could do something other than just the things I wanted to do.

●●●

We had declined the €17.00 per day insurance on the diesel-powered Peugeot, and after learning the state of the Cretan highway system, we second guessed the decision. You still drove on the same side of the road and all that, but the concept of highway medians or two-lane traffic could not have been more foreign to the Cretans. There were no lanes, just a long patch of unmarked asphalt. But despite this lack of painted road markers, they managed to cram as many rows of cars, side-by-side, heading in both directions of traffic, as the width of whatever patch of asphalt you were on could manage. And then a couple more for good measure. If you needed to pass the car in front of you, there was no point in waiting for oncoming traffic to be clear. It would never be clear. Instead, you held your breath and punched the gas—counting on any potential collisions to be avoided by a last minute swing into the gravel shoulder by either you or the bat-out-of-hell screaming toward you. You got really good at eyeballing just how wide a diesel-powered Peugeot is. It turns out you don’t need as much room as you think. And all that was before factoring in the wind, road debris, and winding mountain pathways with blind corners.

But after a while, I got comfortable enough to turn on the radio. The seat mate on the domestic flight from Athens to Chania insisted that we listen to the local Cretan music. He said it was unique from any other region of the country and we were in for a treat. He couldn’t give much for explanation, but the station we found with the clearest reception between mountain ranges was playing acoustic cover of Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean. The rendition had very deliberate enunciations and a spoken word, thick-Greek-accent style of singing. They played the song multiple times during our ride. I’m not sure if this was the particular song our single-serving travel companion had in mind, but it’s the only sampling I needed.

He was right, I had never heard anything like it.

●●●

The wind and the beach of Elafonisi was biblical. And since this exact wind was mentioned in one of the Bible verses I read while planning this trip, I’m using that phrase correctly for the first time in my life. It was also the offseason for this allegedly bustling beach property. There was no one else on the beach to block the wind from pelting exposed cheeks with grains of sand. Whatever beach chairs available for rent had been chained together and vacated, any public outhouses sealed and put into hibernation. It was dangerous to remove your sunglasses for fear of sand grains tearing a pinhole gash in your cornea, but the beach itself looked pretty through the UV-tinting.

We brought a couple of beach towels. We weren’t planning on swimming, but my bride was hoping to do some reading while I paraded the beachside looking for something to do. We decided to give it a go, but as we unfolded the beach towel the wind caught it and blew it as horizontal as Donald Trump’s comb over. Paige tried to make the best of it while I scanned the sand at my feet for sea glass, but as the Apostle Paul himself had learned during his time on Crete, the weather just wasn’t willing to cooperate. The Lord had other plans. And I really had to take a shit.

●●●

We already knew the status of the sealed off porta-potties, but we spotted a sprawling beachside restaurant near where we parked. We yanked on the door. Closed for the season. There wasn’t a single available toilet on the entire beach. I guess people weren’t supposed to come here when it’s terrible out.

We mounted our diesel-powered Peugeot and headed back into town. We didn’t find anything that resembling a public restaurant or public toilet, but there was a house with some tables in the front yard and a vinyl sign advertising beer specials. It felt promising. And there were a bunch of feral cats hanging around. The feral cats probably knew the best spots to eat in Elafonisi.

As we parked and greeted the woman who seemed to be in charge using the only Greek we knew, I immediately inquired about a toilet while Paige pet a stray cat. I was told the riddle to the bathroom, going around the house and through a back alleyway, before discovering the most disgusting place I had pooped thus far in Europe. Having slain my foe, I followed the stray cats to where my wife was seated and ordered a beer and something made of pork. The pork arrived lightly seared and pink in the middle. We left the raw meat for the cats, settled our tab, and braced for another journey through the Cretan highway system before rewarding ourselves with the steam bath in our honeymoon suite.

Our assault on the labyrinth would have to wait until tomorrow.

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It’s not that I have strong reservations about feeling stupid, I’m a bit used to it, but I’d rather not if I had the option. Which means that in an attempt to sell a book, and thus not feel stupid, you start looking for opportunities. You look at your friends and think, “maybe him?” And you realize that not only does your friend not want to buy your book, he doesn’t want to read your book, because he doesn’t want to read any books, because your friend doesn’t even like books. And you start doubting who your friends really are because in this moment you see how little you have in common with any of them. And they don’t even want to give you a sympathy book purchase.

But they will, if you insist. Which makes you feel really stupid.

And you’re back to where you began and you still have boxes of books in your basement.

Most of my friends and family were enthusiastically supportive of my book, but a handful acted as though I recruited them to join a multi-level marketing scheme. When a prominent “bookstagrammer” I knew didn’t reply to my message about using some free copies for one of her bookstagrammer giveaways, I felt like I had just been turned down as her homecoming date. And then there was the podcaster I knew who was happy to give me advice, but fell just short of actually offering any sort of public endorsement to all of his podcaster friends.

It’s just a really weird thing to try to sell a book.

Since the internet had yet to do all the work for me, I decided to start buying lottery tickets. I bought a VIP package to meet the emo band Emery prior to their Omaha show. When the date came, I gave the lead singer five copies of my book for their six band members. I had miscounted, but one of the guys barely does shit in the band anyways, so he doesn’t need one. My angle was to take advantage of their $500 “LET EMERY WRITE YOU A SONG” promotion, and the lead singer guy was really nice about: taking the stack of five books, saying he would take my $500, saying he would indeed write me a song, and would definitely be looking for my e-mail later on the subject matter. I sent them that e-mail, and the $500, and an excited message with lots of exclamation points. In return, I received a reply from one of the girlfriends saying the members of the band—a band I idolized, listened to fervently, loved interacting in person with—got together and decided they didn’t want to write a song about my book. The guy in the band who doesn’t really play an instrument must have been pissed I didn’t bring a copy for him.

I got my $500 refunded, along with the knowledge that the members of one of my favorite bands talked about me behind my back.

They later re-did their website and clarified that the whole “LET EMERY WRITE YOU A SONG” thing was really meant for dudes with jobs to buy as a gift for their emo girlfriend. I guess that makes sense. But it doesn’t help me sell any books.

Despite the fact that Emery now had five copies of Loser*: A Survival Guide to High School Popularity in their possession, I had no proof of it. And now that I couldn’t even pay them to write a song to promote my book like their website said I could, I decided I needed to buy a different lottery ticket.

When “Weird Al” Yankovic and Penn & Teller had meet and greets of their own, I brought copies to give them, and posed for a selfie with the book before forcing them into their hands. They were confused, but nice about it. I repeated the process with Todd Packer and Ryan Howard from The Office, but Chevy Chase never lifted a single appendage the entire time fans of Christmas
Vacation posed for photos with him after a festive movie screening. I was convinced they had replaced the real Chevy Chase with a wax figure glued to a bar stool until my wife said, “thanks for coming to Omaha,” and the animatronic replica of the former SNL Weekend Update host replied with, “of course.”

https://www.csbeaty.com/loser

So Chevy didn’t get a copy of my book and he certainly didn’t tell his agent about me. But I did get a selfie with him. And a Chevy Chase trading card handed out by a member of his entourage.

●●●

It’s not that I expected any of these celebrities to make me famous, but I mean, they could if they wanted to, right? And how would they know if they wanted to unless they had a copy of my book? David Sedaris mentioned on his Masterclass that whenever someone tells him they want to be a writer, he invites them to open for him on tour before one of his readings. So I mean, it could happen, right?

Right?

I decided to find out. I gave David Sedaris a copy of my book when he did a pre-show signing in Des Moines, Iowa and I made it very clear that I was the person who wrote it.

Wrong.

Sedaris was super nice though. We talked about a plastic fetus he received the night before from a pro-life advocate, and I wrote an entire essay about the fun I had that evening at his show. And maybe, you know, he just didn’t think about it? Maybe he regretted not inviting me onto the stage once he realized he didn’t have an opener for his Des Moines tour date? Maybe he was kicking himself for the lost opportunity?

So once the show was over, I went through the book signing line again.

And Sedaris recognized me.

And he was super nice, again, even apologetic that I had to go through the long wait a second time.

And he gave me a very nice signature and inscription to my children.

And sent me on my way back to Omaha, Nebraska.

Well shit.

But it’s hard to blame the guy. His bedside manner with each autograph seeker was truly commendable but he was also eating a steak and potato dinner during the post-show signing and likely not auditioning fans to be his opening act. There was probably some protocol or process for that, but hell if I knew what that was. I didn’t even know the process for getting a woman I had known for sixteen years to give away free copies of my book on her Instagram page.

I started looking for clues.

●●●

Having lived my entire life in a State that is rarely talked about, any mention of where I’m from, no matter how frivolous, jumps out from the page and latches onto my face like those things from the movie Alien. Having recently met Sedaris, I started reading his book Calypso, and once I made it a page-and-a-half into the title essay, I had an alien latched onto my face—pumping alien eggs into my stomach cavity that resembled civic pride and ideas about this mysterious world of becoming an author who sells books and doesn’t feel stupid.

Omaha. There it was. I live in Omaha. My dreams felt closer to home as I discovered this loose thread to tug on.

The essay naturally goes on to describe Sedaris getting a fatty tumor cut out of him by an autograph seeker who then mailed the biological waste to his beach home so he could use it to feed a snapping turtle. The essay’s title “Calypso” is taken from a passing reference to someone giving your cat a secret name behind your back. But Sedaris wasn’t quite through with Janet.

I googled “janet wood interpretation society” and came up with what appeared to be a reputable e-mail address. So I used it. I asked her if we could meet up somewhere in Omaha so she could sign my copy of Sedaris’s Calypso. It felt particularly appropriate since the book cover for this volume of essays was a plank of wood with a smiley face.

Now this request may seem a little bold, but honestly, I send emails like this weekly and anticipate most of them never to receive a reply. I’ve sent celebrity ethics professor Michael Sandel a copy of a college paper I wrote about one of his books and an essay about locker room nudity to stand-up comedian Demetri Martin. I’ve asked Paul Scheer how to locate a DVD copy of season 2 of his sketch comedy troupe with Aziz Ansari Human Giant and asked ex-Christian singer Derek Webb to play at a concert in my basement. Basically if someone I vaguely admire has an accessible e-mail posted somewhere on the Internet, I look for an excuse to send them a message. The majority never reply, and honestly they probably shouldn’t, but as a result of this low hit-rate, you can imagine my thrill when I received the following message fourteen hours later in my inbox:

And that, my friend, was the most exciting thing to happen since the time Jason “Wee Man” Acuña from Jackass mailed me an autographed hockey puck, baseball card, thank-you note, and an assortment of skateboard stickers.

Sensing an opening, I tried to keep the communication going. I really didn’t have an angle. Now that I wouldn’t be getting her signature next to the doodle of a naked woman Sedaris had hand drawn for Devon on the inside cover of one of my three copies of Calypso, all I wanted was to learn as much as I could about this fascinating woman. I asked about her son mentioned in the essay and she said that he was a writer. She sent me a link to a humorous essay he wrote about Papal election procedures. As it turns out, Janet’s son was Sedaris’s opening act the last time he did a reading in Omaha and Jimmy also joined him on a couple of recent tour stops.

So I guess the trick to getting invited to open for Sedaris is to have a mother who has been featured in one of his essays and has also supplied him with a framed sheet of plywood for his beach house.

This might be tricky.

Particularly since my mother has no idea who David Sedaris is and tends to avoid reading anything with curse words in it unless it’s something I wrote. She feels obligated to read those.

She also has a slightly different background than Janet:

But even with the advantage of going to dinner parties with the world’s-greatest living humorist, Janet was empathetic to the struggle of finding your creative voice in a crowded room.

●●●

I had my Omaha book release and celebrated Christmas Day from an urgent care waiting room with other carriers of the influenza-A virus. Once the New Year had arrived, I convinced my family to discard the $50 ping-pong table we had bought from Facebook marketplace so I could turn that cavernous waste of basement floor space into a library and writing study. I paid a buddy to install a fake copper ceiling and stretched the rest of my construction budget by building bookshelves out of hastily stained 2 x 4s. It really did look nice in the end, and the natural wood grain of my new library added a neat character and aesthetic. I hung a few pictures of my favorite authors, but my shelf of Sedaris books felt a bit empty.

I sent my new friend a message to help solve that:

One day later, she replied to my text:

Three weeks later, a package arrived.

If I look closely, I can see the Chihuahua. Or the raccoon. Or whatever I want it to be.

Or, if you look at it just right and for long enough—it could be a snapping turtle who just finished eating the tumor of a best-selling author, looking around for more before disappearing, like the ingrate that he is, back into his foul and riled depths.

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And if you could read an account of what they were thinking, would you?

There’s likely a part of you that would jump at the opportunity to read something like that, and then another—perhaps bigger—part of you would be terrified of it. This tension between longing to be known, yet scared to actually know someone, defined so many people’s experiences in high school. And none of us ever talk about it. Even as adults. At least not about all of it. Not the weird parts. Not the embarrassing parts. Not the absolutely, gut-wrenchingly, terrible parts. And because we never talk about it, when the next generation of high schoolers start feeling those same awful, awkward, and agonizing growing pains—they think they’re the first people to have ever felt this way.

And even as adults, it’s still weird to think about. So we pretend like none of it happened, at least not the way that it really happened.

●●●

I spent my high school years convinced I was a loser, and it wasn’t until recently when I started realizing that my “cool” classmates also felt like losers a lot of the time. They may have responded to it differently than me. Used different coping methods. Chosen different masks to wear. But we were all suffering from the same chronic case of “insecure (and most of the time, horny) high schooler.”

I was the kind of guy who would have driven all you women insane in high school. I don’t mean that in a good way either. I was nice. Funny. And completely clueless. I’d go out of my way to be kind and funny around women, and then—once we started to get to know each other—panic. Shut off all communication in complete terror. And go home sad and lonely and wonder why no one loved me. You can probably guess I also listened to a lot of emo music when I was in high school. I couldn’t read any of those “signals” that the 80s teenage romcoms tell me that women send out.

Seriously ladies, you would have loved me. And then hated me.

Moms, you would have just loved me. You had absolutely nothing to worry about if you saw me hanging out with your daughter.

So, if you want to know what went on inside the mind of a teenage boy who was kind of like that, you’ll find this book fascinating.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t much.

●●●

Trying to fit in as one of the most universal human experiences there is—but the irony of an environment like high school is that, while we’re trying to find our place in it, we fail to realize that everyone else is doing the exact same thing. We assume that everyone else has this thing figured out. We think that they are content, established, and thriving. And we assume we are the only person who feels out of place. And those people we compare ourselves to are simultaneously comparing themselves to us. They think we’re the ones who have it figured out. They think we are the ones who have found their place. And we want them to think this, so we act along—projecting some false reality that slowly wears down the confidence of our peers as they likewise wear down ours.

We all assume the other person has the secret and we all end up travelling alone.

So it’s no wonder why this dynamic makes high school a breeding ground for the most fucking awkward time of our lives.

But thankfully. As an adult, a lot of these stories are also really, really, funny.

●●●

I didn’t set out to write a book about high school at first. A few years back I bought a manual typewriter and started writing essays. It was therapeutic in a way, and years later I still write the first draft of everything—including this particular essay—on a typewriter so I don’t get overwhelmed by the need to make everything perfect the first time. Many of these essays are left unpolished and I put little thought into connecting one with another. At a certain point, I started writing about high school. I wrote about my favorite English teacher. I wrote about a short-term mission trip I took during the summer. I wrote about joining the high school’s trap shooting team. And then I had the idea to write about all the girls I had a crush on.

Like everything I’ve written, the spark came unexpectedly. Something would happen in my normal routine, and it would remind me of something I hadn’t thought about in years. This time, I was eating at McDonald’s with my six-year-old daughter and observed what appeared to be two young adults on a date. My initial thought was, “who would ever go on a date in McDonald’s? What a trashy thing to do.” And then some synapse fired that had been dormant for years and I was reminded, “ohh yeah. I did that once.”

I took my first homecoming date to McDonald’s.

And I thought. Wow. I was such a loser. That could be a funny essay.

I sat down to write about that experience, but as I was outlining the story, it made more sense to talk about a summer romance I had in order to put the homecoming date in context. And then I thought it would make more sense to talk about the first girl I asked out in order to put that summer romance into context. And I just kept backing up until I started with the first girl I kissed. As a preschooler. On her driveway. By the time I felt I had sufficiently covered my awkward stories about girls, I had typed 105 pages on my typewriter.

I realized I had more than just an essay. This was a book.

●●●

I think there are two reasons why people read memoirs:

1. They read memoirs to learn about someone who is completely unlike them.

2. Or they read memoirs to hear about someone they can relate to.

During this process I read as many memoirs as I had recommended to me. If you’ve read Solito by Javier Zamora, Educated by Tara Westover, or We Will be Jaguars by Nemonte Nenquimo and Mitch Anderson, you probably know what I mean by that first category. These books floored me. I had never heard first-hand accounts of what it was like to illegally cross the border, be raised in an ultra-fundamentalist Mormon home, or be grow up in a rainforest.

But the types of memoirs that guided me were more like: The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson, The World’s Largest Man by Harrison Scott Key, or even Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. These were people who had very normal experiences—normal to me at least—and when I read them, I felt as if I was talking to a friend. A friend who understood me. These books made me feel less alone. These books made me feel known. This was the type of memoir I wanted to write.

Other than the tone of the book, the first thing I wanted to establish was the setting. Setting is anchored by two things: time and location. The book was intended to be a coming-of-age story about finding your place in life. This type of story is as common as disappointing football seasons in Nebraska, but it is the setting that dictates what makes my story either novel or familiar. This question of “who are my people?” is universal, but the way you find the answer is entirely dependent on the setting.

To illustrate this idea, I opened the book with a story about the island of Taquile in Lake Titicaca and the unique dating rituals that evolved in this setting.

“In addition to the floating islands, Lake Titicaca has forty-two “natural islands.” After leaving the floating island of Isla Pato Corazón, we boarded a ferry for a two-hour trip to see how island life differed on one of these permanent sites. Our tour guide grew up on one of these natural islands and told us how things worked where he was from. His native language was Aymara, an indigenous language spoken by the first water settlers. Not all the islands speak Aymara, and our tour guide’s Spanish was rudimentary enough that he and I could converse without confusing one another. He told us about mermaids and fishing, but his best story was how he asked his wife out on a date.

When his grandfather was a lad, it was tradition to take a flute to a particular beach and play a beautiful melody. If a young lady was impressed­ (or turned on) by the flute playing, she approached the flautist. They started chatting, and if things clicked, they got married. Over generations the art of flute playing was lost. Technology changed and kids no longer had an interest in learning skills where a digital alternative was available. Just as email and MSN Messenger replaced sonnets and letter writing, listening to woodwind music couldn’t compete with the sensual beats available through radio signals. But despite the progress of the industrial age, a dude still needs to figure out how to get a date. And conveniently, instead of learning the flute, now you can just buy a boom box.

When our tour guide came of age, he left his island and voyaged to the far-off shores of the mainland. Fighting back the demons of congested traffic and avoiding the sirens of knockoff Nike apparel sold on a street corner, our hero exchanged his life savings of disposable income to purchase a portable CD player from a home electronics store. Like John Cusack in Say Anything, the eligible bachelor picked the most stirring serenade from his music collection and returned to the beach of his grandfather to blast the love song in the vicinity of the island’s young hotties.

I asked our guide what he played to meet his wife. It was an easy question.

“Enrique Iglesias. Claro.”

…

But different rules have evolved on different islands. To an outsider, a culture’s customs can sound arbitrary and absurd—but to those within, the rituals seem completely natural. Habitual. Instinctual. The place you live defines what you consider normal, and it isn’t until you look from a distance that you can see how strange those “normal” practices might be.

And on the island of Taquile, everything centers around knitting a hat.”

This introduction serves as an allegory, illustrating that the only reason we find these customs weird is because we are not from that setting. People from Lake Titicaca may find the practices a bit odd, but they’re normal. It’s just the way things are done. And in Grand Island, Nebraska circa 2005 to 2008, the customs were just as odd. But they were normal. Familiar. And I wanted to point out how our customs were just as ridiculous as knitting a hat to determine your love life.

“Peace Lutheran Church came up with a brilliant money maker. Ostensibly to give kids a safe place to congregate on the weekends—but mostly to raise a shit ton of money on sales of cans of pop—this church opened their gym on Friday nights so middle schoolers could listen to radio versions of rap songs and grind on each other. I never learned what a middle school courtship was supposed to look like, other than it involved grinding on flat-chested girls at a Peace Dance.

Peace Dances intimidated me, but one couldn’t participate in the middle school social scene and ignore them. I never went alone, but I never went with a girl. Louis, Mike, or Austin would promise to meet me at the entrance, and we’d go in as a pack. At least until they spotted someone in their Top Five and left me on my own.

To prepare for each dance, I carefully selected my best Hawaiian shirt from Old Navy and accessorized with a shark tooth necklace I purchased from the Science Museum of Minnesota. Every fiber of my clothing was saturated with Axe body spray. My favorite scent was the crushed mint and rosemary of “Phoenix”—the blue can. I also had a discounted Walmart variety pack that was meant to be given as a Christmas gift set. The sampler came with two cans of “Essence”—the one with a red and blue dragon, scented with black pepper and cedarwood. I sprayed a line of Phoenix straight down the chest and a blast in each armpit, always over the top of the shirt. Not satisfied with the result, I repeated the process with Essence and completed the bouquet of fragrance with a short blast from the mandarin and sandalwood of “Kilo.” The green can. I also bought a jar of hair gel from the dollar store, but with no discernible hairstyle to keep in place, I simply ran a greasy comb dipped in goop straight through my bangs so my scalp could harden into a bike helmet. By the time I was ready to leave, my chemical smell radiated like a freshly opened pine tree air freshener.

The first Friday of each month, a line of pre-pubescent middle schoolers formed outside the locked entry of Peace Lutheran Church, wrapping itself around the nursery’s plastic playground equipment. All of us horny sixth graders paraded ourselves out of our parents’ cars like a movie premiere before segregating into cliques. As our sausage fests did annoying middle school kid stuff, we sneaked looks at our female classmates with caked-on makeup and crop tops in violation of the school’s dress code.

The fronts of our pants a little tighter, us losers watched as the boys with girlfriends entered the dark gym, bobbing their heads to Nelly. The rest of us hid in the line to buy cans of pop. We needed something to hold in our hands as we hugged the wall for the evening. Gum was strictly prohibited since it ruined the carpet, so chaperones canvased the sweaty mob with flashlights and paper cups. If you were spotted moving your jaw up and down, they darted across the floor, shined the flashlight in your face, and put the cup to your mouth to spit out the gum without saying a word. Repeat offenders were bounced out by whichever dad was guilted by his church small group into volunteering.

I never had any romantic moments at a Peace Dance. I don’t recall ever dancing with a girl, and certainly never rubbed my crotch on one. I mostly remember studying the felt banners displaying Lutheran symbolism and trying to convince someone on my football team to stop saying he was going to kill himself because his girlfriend dumped him.

I had no idea what the fuck we were supposed to be doing. So I did nothing.”

As I weaved together the narrative, I tried to find a few themes to unite the various stories. My editor said that the controlling idea was, “we gain wisdom and confidence when we think beyond ourselves and realize our peers are just as insecure as we are, despite appearances.” Yeah, that was a pretty good summary, better than anything I had come up with. This is why you hire an editor.

In my more amoebic mind while writing the book, I had a couple of things I kept coming back to. One was a line I thought of while walking my dog.

“That’s the thing about high school. We are all just shitty to each other.”

I didn’t know where that line would go exactly in the book, but it captured some of the insights I had gained throughout this journey. I shared the line with a writer friend of mine, and he added the rejoinder, “we’re all just shitty to each other because we lack the tools to know how to be any other way.”

That was a helpful addition.

The other story that I knew I didn’t want to write was a romantic comedy. I have always been frustrated with the John Hughes Sixteen Candles, and even Adam Sandler, movie endings where everything leads to some big catharsis when the awkward loser makes out with their dream date who is clearly out of their league but charmed nonetheless by the protagonist’s dorky naivete. As someone who was a complete dork in high school, I knew this was bullshit. The dorks didn’t get the hot girl. They just sat around and felt bad about themselves until they grew up later in life and figured out who they really were. I wanted to write a story about that kind of person, with all the tension of an 80s teenage romcom without the cliché happily ever after ending. Because I thought this resembled real life more accurately. It certainly resembled mine more accurately.

The only book I can think of that accurately reflected this was The Count of Monte Cristo. In the movie, the main character gets the girl, but not in the book. He goes after the girl, that’s kind of all he does, really. But he doesn’t get the girl. And this ending was so disturbing to our romantic sensibilities that they changed it in the 2002 movie version. In my first draft, I quoted two entire pages from this brilliant ending, but it was removed after some early readers told me they thought it was lazy to just rip off Alexandre Dumas for a couple of pages. But the idea still penetrated through to the soul of the book.

I still think this is the greatest passage ever written. And I knew I couldn’t write something that beautiful. So I decided to make this book funny and add some stories about accidentally peeing my pants while pheasant hunting.

●●●

One reader described the book as a time capsule for millennials, and I think the description is fitting. I was heavily influenced by cultural moments at the time like: emo music, purity culture, and the transition to digital technology. I vividly remember the days when both the iPod and the iPhone were released while I was in high school, and I saw the before and after. My freshman year no one had a cell phone, then a few people got a Motorola Razr and a limited texting plan. By graduation, no one spoke to each other verbally anymore. I was also late to receive my own cell phone, so I felt the loss of not having a portal to this digital world where everyone else seemed to live. Those moments were heavily influenced by the time I came of age.

But then there were things like: Boy Scouts, competitive trap shooting, marching band, and garage bands where I looked for an identity of my own. These stories may be different than your own, but I think you can substitute any of those groups with the activities you were associated with during your own high school years and feel some empathy toward me while reading. This quest to find your place may be the thing we all have most in common.

Because that’s the thing about high school, no matter how alone we thought we were at the time, we all went through our own version of pretty much the exact same thing.

And now, I want to give you all permission to laugh about it at my own expense.

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The North Pole, Inc. had enormous success in their rebrand from St. Nicholas to Santa Claus. Coca-Cola aside, royalties were flowing from partnership deals with shopping centers who wanted to increase holiday traffic by encouraging children to come visit Santa and tell him what they wanted. Macy's department store in New York City latched onto the concept early on—incorporating the Santa Claus likeness into their annual Thanksgiving Day Parade and providing the setting for a feature length film called Miracle on 34th Street about a senile man that believed he was Santa.

"We thought the project would shine a light on mental health along with generating a lot of excitement around the new brand. We were right about one of those."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

Through Cauliflower's efforts, Santa became ubiquitous. And lucrative. Interested parties were lining up to use the Santa image in their seasonal marketing. However, The North Pole, Inc. did permit The Salvation Army to use the likeness of Santa without royalties for their annual kettle drives.

"It's Christmas after all."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

In 1823, Cauliflower hired a poet named Clement Clark Moore to write a document encapsulating the essence of the new Santa Claus. It was an idea inspired by Nicholas's work on the Nicene Creed. He had seen first hand how a comprehensive text could effectively unite the public's perception of some supernatural being, otherwise the character's essence is left up to individual interpretation. But to make it more fun, Cauliflower decided the Santa creed should rhyme. And have pictures. The poem was a great success.

Cauliflower's team steadily grew and decided it needed to expand the Santa mythology— sparking a century long effort to craft an entire north pole universe in the public eye. Market focus groups were conducted extensively, yielding many important insights. Regional biases were uncovered in various global markets, leading to a slew of subtle modifications to the Santa iconography. Father Christmas, Papa Noel, and Kris Kringle monikers were coined. In some instances the Santa Claus image was reworked entirely, such as the case of the Yule Lads in Iceland. In the Germanic countries an antagonist tested well, so Cauliflower introduced Krampus and Belsnickel. But eventually the focus groups kept coming back to the same conclusion: "Santa needs some friends."

"None of the focus groups responded to Mrs. Claus, so we decided not to spend much time on creating her image beyond the cursory, but the reindeer and the toymakers both seemed promising."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

Cauliflower created two marketing teams to focus on the reindeer and the toymakers respectively. The reindeer team was led by the former zoologist Chestnut, and the toymakers was led by Crumpit's nephew—a bright up and comer that had been born at the north pole named Steven, but Nicholas called Capybara. Chestnut's team had trouble coming up with a marketing plan for eight identical beasts of burden, they needed a star to focus on. A reindeer had just been born that had an odd nose pigmentation that Chestnut had been attempting to bottle-feed with little success. The reindeer herd had rejected the calf, forcing Chestnut to raise it into maturity. Nicholas found the calf unsettling and had even suggested euthanizing the infant since it was clear that the other reindeer wanted nothing to do with it, but Chestnut was adamant that the calf be spared. Chestnut named it Rudolph, and since Nicholas didn't want to get too attached to the reindeer, he never came up with a nickname. Inspired by Rudolph, Chestnut suggested that his team create the reindeer's marketing plan centered around the most physically distinct animal in the herd.

"The legend of Rudolph is all made up, which is why looking back the whole thing is so superficial. As someone that lives with genetic dwarfism, I regret how we singled out a single physical characteristic and focused exclusively on it. We felt the nose had to have some sort of utility in order to be accepted, which hasn't really aged well. The whole 'Rudolph got made fun of a lot’ bit, that part was true. We thought that if we made the nose glow, it would serve a purpose, but it just reinforced stereotypes that someone's worth is dependent solely on how useful they are. Even Santa comes across as an ass and reinforces this superficiality through the Rudolph storyline. I wish we had gone a different direction, but the concept tested incredibly well in focus groups."

- Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

Despite what the marketing plan suggested, not all the reindeer loved Rudolph's new-found fame. Rather, they resented him for it. Lacking the nutrients that could only be provided from reindeer milk, the bottle feeding proved unsuccessful. Rudolph didn’t survive to adulthood. Despite the TV shows and song lyrics suggesting otherwise, Rudolph was never physically fit enough to accompany Nicholas on a sleigh ride and certainly would have never been permitted by the rest of the reindeer herd to lead them. But Rudolph's likeness became the second most valuable intellectual property owned by The North Pole, Inc. other than Santa Claus himself.

"The public loved him, which is ironic since everyone in the north pole hated him. I suppose maybe there's some cosmic justice in that in a way, but I don't know. Sometimes marketing plans just don't feel right even if they're successful. That's kind of how I feel about the whole Rudolph initiative."

- Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

•••

From Toymakers to ‘Elves’

Capybara's toymaker team came up with a marketing plan in parallel with the reindeer team, but since the Rudolph concept tested better, their plan was rolled out more gradually. ‘Toymaker’ didn't resonate with focus groups, and the odd deformities of The North Pole, Inc.’s employees were hard to explain in a manner that children understood. So Capybara looked for a clean storyline that wouldn't rely on pity to get the public to respond.

"The Lord of the Rings was really big at the time and it kind of clouded our thinking. We came up with the concept of assigning a mythical creature to represent the toymakers— and the elves were the most noble in the Tolkien books. We were frankly a group of outcasts that had been shamed by society, so it was our attempt at rewriting that script and instilling a little pride amongst our employees. But that's not really how it worked out once the elf narrative left the north pole. The toymakers gradually resembled dwarves or hobbits, which was the complete opposite of what we were going for."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

With the efforts paid toward crafting the Rudolph narrative, there wasn't much budget left to do a proper roll-out of the elf image. After Cauliflower hired songwriter Johnny Marks to come up with a Rudolph jingle and Gene Autry to sing it, the marketing budget was tapped. The idea of ‘elves’ was introduced, but in a muted manner compared to the gargantuan efforts paid toward both Santa and Rudolph. As a result, the general public crafted the archetype of the ‘elf’ largely on its own. Eventually The North Pole, Inc. had to embrace the idea of small, childlike cherubs rather than the regal, warriors they had intended—or risk losing a potential revenue stream in licensing to the public domain.

"We had Tolkien all lined up to do an entire north pole mythology surrounding the elves. He had a bunch of 'Father Christmas' letters worked up as prototypes, but we couldn't afford both him and Gene Autry. And frankly, Tolkien was much more amiable. We always intended on revisiting the elf brand and kept Tolkien on retainer, but after the public image of what an elf was took hold, there was just little we could do other than roll with it. But we resisted for a long time, I mean, it was personal to us. This was who we were."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

The setback on the elf image was hard on the marketing team, but they decided to pivot and play the cards they had been dealt. Eventually Cauliflower greenlit an elf-themed film project by New Line Cinema starring Will Ferrell and Capybara pushed out a concept called 'Elf on the Shelf' in order to tidy up the whole naughty/nice list plot holes in the overarching north pole mythology.

"There's no such thing as a naughty and nice list, there never has been. Everyone always gets presents. I'm not even sure how that rumor got started, but I think it was by parents to encourage good behavior. I don't blame them, but it took us a while to spin that concept in a way we could monetize it. We were also upset with the failed elf launch, but Capybara's team found an innovative solution to solve both problems with the 'Elf on the Shelf' idea. It wasn’t the elf image we wanted, but nevertheless, it was a success. It just took a little longer than we were used to and had more stumbles along the way."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

•••

Licensing and Trademark Protection

With so many properties and trademarks providing the primary source of revenue to fund The North Pole, Inc.'s toy manufacturing and delivery services, protecting those brands required a vast team of lawyers and legal experts. Crumpit tasked a crotchety ‘elf’ known as Cratchety to be The North Pole, Inc.'s General Counsel. Like most of the elves that had relocated from Turkey, Cratchety had a life before he came to the north pole. Cratchety had previously been employed as an attorney but was disbarred and disgraced for drunken misconduct in the courtroom. But he was a whiz on copyright enforcement, aggressively protecting The North Pole, Inc.'s growing stable of properties. Cratchety sent out cease and desist letters to corporations using unsanctioned Santa likenesses in their advertisements, and an idea for the Tim Alan movie ‘The Santa Clause’ was conceived based off a legal review by Cratchety of punitive measures for theft of Santa’s belongings. Cratchety’s expertise became invaluable to Nicholas and Cauliflower, though not every issue was resolved to his satisfaction.

"That whole 'Grinch' thing really pissed me off. I mean it's a cut and dry case. This Seuss character flat out says, 'with this hat and this coat I'll look just like Saint Nick.' What more evidence do you need that they were infringing upon one of our assets? It's trademark violation, plain and simple. But since the Grinch was green and he was mean, we had a hard time getting a judge to see the case our way."

-Cratchety, General Counsel, The North Pole, Inc.

The North Pole, Inc. and Theodore Seuss Geisel eventually settled outside of court for an undisclosed sum. Cratchety advised on a growing list of other concerns beyond copyright issues. There had long been allegations of Nicholas performing illegal surveillance of children and unlawful breaking and entering. When the elves unionized in response to The North Pole, Inc. placing a growing emphasis on supply chain management and third party distribution rather than direct toy manufacturing, Cratchety became involved in negotiating The North Pole, Inc.’s first collective bargaining agreement.

"The employees really hated it when we announced we would no longer be making our own toys and instead relying on outsourcing to China— and the partnership agreement with Walmart to allow for parents to purchase toys directly and bypass delivery by Santa drove the wedge even further. But a company has to adapt. You don't survive nearly 2000 years in operation without making some tough choices."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

•••

Succession Planning

Nicholas was growing tired, but his plans for retirement took an unexpected turn when Crumpit surprisingly died of pneumonia.

"I always knew Crumpit would be the next Santa, we were just waiting for the right time. Frankly we knew the two of us worked better as a team, but I didn't want to be CEO forever and Crumpit deserved to be allowed to move out of my shadow. But his death shocked everyone. I suppose the average lifespan for a person with the medical conditions Crumpit had is about 60 years and he made it to age 1,721— but still none of us saw it coming. It was an awful time."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

With Crumpit deceased, Nicholas doubled down on his own efforts and shelved any talks of retirement. He promoted Capybara to COO to replace his uncle, and the youngster brought a new view to The North Pole, Inc. Under Capybara's leadership, The North Pole, Inc. started to invest heavily in artificial intelligence and analytics, allowing Nicholas to compensate for his aging workforce. The complete supply chain was reworked using Lean Six Sigma, and testing began on using autonomous electric vehicles in place of magic reindeer.

With Capybara in place, Nicholas once again started putting an eye toward retirement. But he had his doubts that an analytical and antisocial figure like Capybara could ever embody the jovial cherub that the entire Santa brand had become. But did that still matter? Did the homely image of Santa mean as much as it used to to the financial success of The North Pole, Inc. in this digital age?

Cauliflower was another potential successor, and someone that fully understand the importance of the Santa branding— but he lacked some of the financial and operations acumen necessary to keep a business financially solvent that gave all of its products away for free.

Or was it time to consider an outside hire? Nicholas had toyed with the idea of forming a board of directors and even performing an initial public offering to shore up some of their cashflow troubles. But would an outsider keep the magic alive, especially since investment bankers don’t believe in magic?

•••

Discussion Questions

1. How did The North Pole, Inc. become successful?

2. How did The North Pole, Inc. differentiate and insulate itself from competitors?

3. Is The North Pole, Inc. financially volatile? Describe the threats that they face from the various market conditions and their financial exposure.

4. If you were Nicholas, what would you do regarding succession planning?

5. What would be the pros and cons of taking The North Pole, Inc. public?

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It's December 26th, 2024 and Nicholas is exhausted. He has been at the helm of The North Pole, Inc. for 1699 years and the world is changing. What had started out as a small hobby of whittling wooden trains and gifting them to the neighborhood children in his hometown of Patara in modern-day Turkey, has since become the world's largest and logistically complicated charitable gifting and expedited package delivery service. The 2025 Christmas would mark the company's 1700th year in operation, and Nicholas was beginning to wonder if the time had come to put forth a serious succession plan. Frankly, the old ways of doing things didn't seem to be working anymore, which for a nostalgic man like Nicholas, created some serious questions about whether or not he was still the right man to lead his l,872 employees and herd of 8 (sometimes 9) reindeer. Did a business model based entirely on gift giving in lieu of profits even make sense anymore?

•••

Becoming Saint Nick

Nicholas of Myra was born on March 15th, 270 AD to a very religious family. His parents, Theophanes and Nonna, were active in the local church of Patara and encouraged Nicholas to get involved in the community at a young age. Nicholas's uncle was the Bishop of Myra —a city nearby. His parents were very wealthy, and the family would join Nicholas’s uncle annually in distributing gifts to the less fortunate throughout the region of Lycia. This act of delivering gifts— particularly to children— made a huge impression on young Nicholas.

"At the time, the whole concept of 'Christmas' was a relatively new one. The church hadn't been around for that many generations, and a lot of the holidays and traditions were still being figured out. It was my uncle that first had the idea of going around and giving gifts to children as a simple way of celebrating the birth of Jesus, the idea being that if they got a present it would help them see the birth of Jesus as a gift as well. I'm not sure how many kids really understood that association, but they sure liked getting presents. And it made me thrilled to see their smiles. It became my favorite thing to do each year."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

Nicholas began planning ahead. He would study which gifts the kids responded to most favorably and began crafting a surplus as soon as one Christmas ended to prepare for the next one. Before long, making toys was a year-round hobby, though it was still just a hobby. But making and distributing toys wasn't the only activity of Nicholas's that soon grew into a passion, he became fascinated with magic. His uncle gave Nicholas his first magic set during one of the annual toy distributions, and Nicholas became infatuated with it. He would put pieces of straw through drachma coins and fascinate his family with simple mentalism tricks that made it appear he knew what they had been doing when no one was watching. His magic tricks grew more and more elaborate as he practiced, and soon rumors spread that Nicholas possessed clairvoyance and supernatural abilities.

"Ho, ho, ho. It was great fun. People will believe anything if they really want to. Deep down, we all want to believe that magic is real. If you can tap into that, you can get away with just about anything. That is, as long as people think the magic isn't harmful. Once you start losing trust, and people don't want to believe anymore, then the whole thing unravels."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

With this principle of using magic for the common good, Nicholas's reputation went from jovial to transcendent. Rumors started to spread. Residents of Lycia claimed that he could calm a storm at sea and had chopped down a demon-possessed tree.

Artists depicted Nicholas raising three children from the dead after they had been murdered by a butcher. Allegedly the butcher had pickled the children in brine with the intention of selling them as pork. Pork was hard to come by.

On another occasion, townspeople claimed that Nicholas had rescued three girls from a future as prostitutes. The story went that for three consecutive nights, Nicholas deposited a sack of gold down their chimney. The idea was for their father to use the gold as a dowry and marry the girls off instead. No one ever saw Nicholas in the act, but his reputation for stealth and generosity made him the prime suspect. Nicholas never admitted to anything.

The rumors troubled Nicholas and made it harder and harder for him to efficiently get through town without being bombarded with requests for gifts and magic tricks. As a result, he became a recluse. Nicholas moved outside of the community to a remote area of Mesopotamia, which quelled some of the town gossip and gave him ample time to refine his toymaking craft.1

•••

Forming The North Pole, Inc.

Nicholas expanded his toy distribution service to the areas surrounding his new home. Around 300 AD, at the age of 30, Nicholas hired his first employee— a small, paunchy outcast that Nicholas nicknamed 'Crumpit.' His real name was Larry.

"I had frankly bitten off more than I could chew. Each year more children would hear about the gift giving and would send me a letter asking to be included. I've always had a problem telling anyone 'no’ to anything, so I looked for help. I found Crumpit begging on a street corner. He had an odd look to him, some sort of disability that had stunted his growth and made him unemployable at any of the markets throughout Lycia. I took pity on him, and taught him how to whittle in exchange for room and board. After a while, it seemed as though Crumpit was running the whole toy making process himself and all I was doing was giving the gifts away once each year."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

Without Crumpit, Nicholas likely would have remained simply a jolly old man giving away toys to boys and girls in ancient Turkey— not the international celebrity and pop culture icon that he is today. However it was a brush with church politics that ultimately led Nicholas to pursing this charitable career path full-time.

“I was working as the Bishop of Turkey at the time after my uncle put in a good word with the church leaders. I was excited about the gig, but I was really doing it out of an obligation to my uncle. He never married since priests spent so much time doing other things, though he could have since the clerical celibacy didn't get established until the 12th century. But still, I was the closest thing he had to a son. So I took the job and I hated it."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

In 325 AD, a church council was called at the city of Nicea by Emperor Constantine. Constantine had used the Christian religion as a political tactic to unite his empire. Disputes had arisen throughout the church regarding the nature of Jesus, which threatened Constantine’s unification strategy. He sought to who put an end to the divisions and shore up his approval ratings. And like any good politician, Constantine used the most effective means available: long, tedious debates. As the Bishop of Turkey, Nicholas was required to attend, but found the proceedings cumbersome and frustrating, at one point slapping a fellow participant.2

“There were over 1000 people there, and everyone seemed to have an opinion. There was grandstanding, hair-splitting, and hell-raising. We were stuck in this stuffy palace for over a month and a half, and all I could do was think about how none of the kids I gave toys to really gave a shit about any of this. Don't get me wrong, I think the Council had a lot of good things come out of it, but by the end of it, I had had it with church politics."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

The main outcome of the Council of Nicea was the Nicene Creed which formalized the canonical beliefs of the Christian Church for the first time. Nicholas signed the creed, but shortly after left his post of Bishop. He had different plans.

"The Council was crucial for the Church, but I had seen how the sausage was made, and frankly, it had spoiled my appetite for sausage. When I got back from Nicea, Crumpit presented me with an elaborate business prospectus he had worked up regarding how to take the toy manufacturing to the next level. I was at a crossroads, and sensed that if I didn't take Crumpit's ideas seriously, he may leave and start out on his own. So I told him, 'Fuck it. Let's do this.’”

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

•••

Headquarters Relocation

When Nicholas's parents passed away, he was the sole heir to their vast fortune. As a bishop, he had little need for the inheritance and instead invested the entirety of it in various speculative enterprises. He was an early investor in wheel technology— though he always preferred the simple elegance of the sleigh, "fewer moving parts" he'd always say­— and purchased numerous tracts of land, particularly in Western Europe and Scandinavia. He began to vacation frequently in Spain, and would spend much of his time in the country when away from Turkey. But it was a failed investment in an uninhabitable wasteland that proved to be the one that would change his fortune forever.

"When I first purchased the north pole, I thought that the return on investment would occur from the exportation of ice. At the time, no one had thought of mechanical refrigeration, so I had this crazy idea that we could harvest ice from the glaciers, and then ship it all throughout warm climates like India or Africa so wealthy aristocrats could chill their beverages. The idea was ahead of its time. The transportation of glacier ice proved to be too costly. The concept caught hold later on after I had already divested of all my infrastructure and I was just left with a useless chunk of frozen tundra."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

Nicholas had tried to sell off this north pole property numerous times unsuccessfully, but the location became a centerpiece of Crumpit's expansion plans. By moving to the north pole, Nicholas and Crumpit would have enough real estate to expand their operation indefinitely and be logistically located to be equidistant to nearly every location above the equator. At the time, colonialization had yet to move much further south, so the Christmas celebrating nations were largely concentrated in Europe. The plan was too large for two people, but Crumpit had considered that as well. From his time on the streets, Crumpit had befriended innumerable deformed beggars in need of stable wages. Given their living situations, these vagabonds were more than willing to relocate for the promise of room and board. Nicholas loved these odd employees. He found them cheerful and hardworking, more than willing to labor around the clock in appreciation for their jobs. Nicholas could never remember any of their names so, like ‘Crumpit,’ he came up with festive nicknames. These monikers became so widely adopted throughout the north pole that hardly anyone used their Christian names. Many of these workers had been addicted to opium or alcohol prior to their employment, which could make their behavior erratic and childlike— though this characteristic proved to be helpful in the development of several new product lines.

With the workforce riddle solved, Nicholas and Crumpit turned their attention to distribution. From the failed ice harvesting exploit, Nicholas knew that moving large quantities of material from the north pole was expensive and difficult. Ships had trouble navigating the glaciers and industrial airplanes had yet to be invented. The harsh climate severely limited their options.

"We considered your traditional cattle and pack animals, but none could survive in the temperatures of the north pole. We tried, it’s best not to talk about what happened.”

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

The relocation began without any plans for toy transportation in place. Nicholas considered that he might have to take a Christmas or two off in order to find a solution, but providence provided an answer when a pack of wild reindeer were spotted roaming through their construction sites. An environmental impact study took place and halted construction for three months while Crumpit and Chestnut— a former zoologist that had found himself homeless after getting mauled by an orangutan and addicted to painkillers during his recovery­— studied the movements of the reindeer herd. The factory site map was redrawn to accommodate the reindeer habitats, but as construction resumed on Mechanical Toy Warehouse #3, the reindeer only encroached further.

Chestnut had an idea.

"Everyone wants to know how we domesticated wild reindeer and taught them to fly, but frankly I get tired of the question. If you explain magic, it ceases to be magical, and I'd rather not have that. Penn and Teller don't stand up after their performance at the Rio Casino and explain how they perform each of their tricks, and if they did, they wouldn’t have a paying audience for very long."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

Nicholas would give a similar answer whenever pressed about any of the magical elements of his craft— “trade secrets” he'd say. This included explanations regarding how he visits every house in a single night, how to enter homes without chimneys, and how he has avoided being diagnosed with Type II diabetes after a thousand year diet of nothing but milk and sugar cookies.

•••

Financial Woes

Like any start-up, Nicholas anticipated running at a financial deficit in the company's early years, but after several centuries, The North Pole, Inc. had still yet to turn a profit. And the fortune Nicholas had inherited from his parents was dwindling.

"It turns out that a business model based on giving away your product for free isn’t sustainable in the long run."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

It was this realization that truly transformed The North Pole, Inc.

"People have no idea how we stay financially solvent, and I like it that way. It's part of the mystery. But truth be told, it's simple really. All we do is sell licensing."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

It really is that simple, yet The North Pole, Inc. has became one of the largest corporations in the world through simple, yet incredibly effective, marketing and branding. The genius came from a ball­ bearing assembly line supervisor whom Nicholas called Cauliflower.

"Nicholas would often come into our plants to inspect the process. He was always in a good mood and had the weirdest laugh. We started making fun of him for it. It was in the break room over lunch where one of the workers was giving an impression of his now famous ‘ho, ho, ho,' that it dawned on me. This should be a catchphrase."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

Cauliflower pitched the idea to Crumpit, who had since been promoted to the company’s very first Chief Operations Officer. But Crumpit was skeptical. A catch phrase would only do so much, what Nicholas really needed was a complete rebranding. Crumpit promoted Cauliflower to Chief Marketing Officer and tasked him with overhauling the image of Nicholas. It was through this effort that Saint Nicholas was transformed into Santa Claus.

"The exact process of how Nicholas reached sainthood isn't clear, but it seemed that it mostly stemmed from his work during the Council of Nicea, even though Nicholas himself always loathed that time. But as a result, some started to refer to him as 'Sinterklaas.' We wanted to retain the honorific title, but make it a little more palatable to the non Roman-Catholic audience. So we worked with a few different advertising agencies and landed on 'Santa Claus.'"

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

With a new name and catchphrase, Cauliflower also thought Nicholas needed a makeover. The signature look of a red suit with fluffy white trim was based off an old jacket Nicholas had been given by a girlfriend he met while in Spain during the offseason. The coat was meant to resemble the jacket of a matador, but Cauliflower removed the sequence and elongated the waistline, combined the outfit with the work boots Nicholas wore while tending the reindeer stables, and came up with the idea for the hat after one of the elves got drunk at an after-Christmas party and put a stocking on his head. Santa later married that young Spaniard, but few know that Mrs. Claus's biggest contribution was the simple purchase of a red coat for her boyfriend. Cauliflower began pitching the new ‘Santa Claus’ to established corporations and found a willing partner in the Coca-Cola Beverage Company to use the image in their winter advertisements. The ads proved enormously successful. To date, the licensing deal with Coca-Cola remains one of the largest annual sources of revenue for The North Pole, Inc. and is the second most lucrative licensing deal of all-time, trailing only the Air Jordan brand partnership between Michael Jordan and Nike.

"Look, 'believing in Santa' and 'Christmas cheer' are all fine and good, but those don't pay the bills. Cash does. People don't like how commercial Christmas has become, but what they don't realize is that Santa could never have stayed afloat any other way. Unless you want to start paying for elf wages, reindeer food, and toy manufacturing costs, Christmas is going to have to be commercial. There just isn't any other way."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

But Cauliflower and his team weren’t done working Christmas marketing miracles. Shortly after the success of the complete Santa re-brand, they hit another marketing home run in the form of a beast of burden with a genetic mutation.

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It did not leave the same smell on his breath though, fortunate since when he woke up he was already late for work. It was hard for Stanley to find a job. He was unkempt, overweight, and old. He had stopped shaving a long time ago, and his white whiskers hid what remained of his face. And ever since his Eugenie died three years ago—almost exactly 3 years ago—he had little reason to search for something new. She was always the planner. Decades ago, when Carol was born, Eugenie had insisted on life insurance policies. Stanley thought it was all a little silly—going to a Doctor who would take your blood pressure and then feed the data to some actuary who determined how long he would stay alive as to not bankrupt the insurance company underwriting the policy. Luckily for Stanley, they didn’t do a very good job. Eugenie had proven their math wrong. So Stanley could afford booze.

“God dammit Stanley. You know most places just get volunteers to do this right? You’re fucking lucky. I don’t pay you to be a pain-in-my-ass.”

“Sorry Charles. I know. I know. I’ll try to do better.”

“Try? You can’t even commit to anything?”

“I’ll do better period it won’t happen again.”

Stanley hated lying, but he did need the job. He needed a reason to go somewhere.

By the time he reached his post, his uniform being buttoned as he walked through the back corridor past the rows of vending machines and turning at the food court, the line was sad. When he started this gig two years ago, the lack of demand for his services surprised him, but he could never have predicted that it would decline further in just a few more seasons. The magic wasn’t there, at least not like it was when he used to wait in line. With Carol. And Eugenie.

These days, most of the storefronts were empty bays—the Gap Kids turned into a model train association office, the “Made in Nebraska” now a “For Lease.” The seasonal calendar store that was once relegated to a series of kiosks dotted through the center of the main fairway now had their pick of real estate and permanent displays to set up shop for the two months of the year that they needed them. Once the Spirit Halloween moved out, they moved in. And the rest of the year the space sat empty. Hopeful. The lights still worked, the furniture was in good shape. A single security lamp shone next to the EXIT to ward off any burglars. But empty.

It wasn’t what Stanley remembered.

He felt bad, but only because he knew Charles had enough stress without having to wonder what time Stanley would clock in. But, he also knew being a little—or more than a little—late wouldn’t have any real impact on his productivity for the day. It was even harder to be alone, when you’re pretending to be someone everyone wants to see. And when you had to pretend you weren’t hungover. Pretending you didn’t have to drink. Pretending the lack of customers didn’t bother you.

But despite what he told Charles. It did. He knew Charles couldn’t hear the truth. Charles already knew things weren’t the way they used to be, but Charles was pretending too.

Larry was walking by with his wife Janice. They were always there, walking the corridors each morning since the winter air made it too cold for the duck pond by their retirement village. Stanley didn’t meet them until last year. He didn’t notice them at all his first season, he was too busy—well, busy enough—but gradually with each lap and polite wave, it became too uncomfortable for Janice not to say something instead of half-wave with a half-smile. Larry with a half-nod and no smile at all.

“Well, where are all your customers?”

Janice thought she was being funny the first time she said it. As if Stanley hadn’t noticed. As if he hadn’t heard the exact same thing—or some form of it—from every parent when they were surprised to find out there wasn’t a wait for Stanley’s attention. Stanley always acted like it was the first time he had heard it. As if that parent—or more likely as the years went by, a grandparent—was the first to observe this shift in demand. Stanley usually pretended he didn’t hear them. He never knew how to respond and stay in character.

“Didn’t there used to be some people taking photos?”

That was Janice’s next ice breaker when her and Larry made their way back around the circumference of their indoor walking track. There used to be. But those helpers went away. People had smartphones now. No one wanted to pay $25 for a photo package. All they needed was a quick shot for an Instagram reel and the appropriate hashtag. Not that Stanley knew those were the names for those things. He never had someone to explain it to him.

“Hey Stanley, Merry Christmas.”

This time it was Larry. Gradually, he started taking over the small talk. They moved slower now. Larry had a cane. His back pain had reached a point where Janice talked him into getting an MRI and a cyst was found near the base of his spine. Nothing life threatening, but required surgery. And a cane. The doctors told them to stay active, so Stanley still saw them in the winter. And the slower pace increased the time it took for the couple to loop around Stanley’s roped off Christmas village. And Larry liked taking a break at the bench next to the recycling bin, each time complaining how no one knew what to throw into it.

But then Larry would respond to Janice’s gentle teasing, plant his cane firmly against the linoleum, push himself upward, and start the next lap.

And Stanley would get back to work.

•••

Stanley had shown up to work on time, but it didn’t make much of a difference. He was out of limoncello, that was a treat, and he was out of money. And didn’t have anything to celebrate.

Larry and Janice hadn’t been around for a while. Janice told him they were taking the next few weeks to fly to Georgia to visit their son and his wife. They had just had a baby a few months back, but because of Larry’s back they couldn’t travel to see their new grandchild. It was hard on them—seemingly harder on Larry than Janice—to be told to wait, but eventually the doctor gave him permission to travel. They made arrangements that same day. They had a direct flight in the evening of the following day, and gave Stanley their news on their morning walk. He was happy for them, but he knew that meant he wouldn’t have a friend for the rest of the season.

And he had yet to decide if he would sign up again next year.

He didn’t think so.

He wasn’t sure if there would even be a job available.

He didn’t know why there would be.

He had a few customers that day, but not many. The interactions were always over more quickly than he would have liked. And the gap between visitors grew longer and longer.

A woman wearing an apron started walking in his wing of the mall. She wasn’t a mall walker, Stanley recognized her uniform from when he used to get lunch at the food court before starting his shift. She carried a platter of samples, chunks of chicken that had been speared with a toothpick and handed out liberally to draw customers to the Asian Express Chinese restaurant. Stanley would always get a sample, when he ate lunch at the food court, before grabbing a Sbarro slice of pepperoni. He liked the chicken, but he didn’t like all that extra stuff they put in the food. And Sbarro was cheaper.

He didn’t recognize the woman, though she looked familiar in the way that everyone who worked at the Chinese restaurant looked familiar. Her platter was still covered in samples. She made her way toward the bench near Stanley and dumped all of the remaining chicken in the recycling bin.

With a blank expression and the platter dangling from her side, the woman walked back toward the food court.

The next day Stanley saw her again. She held out a toothpick clutched between her thumb and index finger, tempting the few customers leaving the calendar store with an appetizer to lure them her way to the food court. They politely refused. The next couple, not so politely.

The woman would drop her smile as they walked away, painting it back on when a man holding a JCPenney bag rounded the corner and crossed her path. He didn’t look at her. The woman kept looking at him. There was no one else to look at.

She walked toward the recycling bin with a defeated gaze. She lowered the tray and began tilting it.

“Hey! That’s the recycling! Hey! Hey! The garbage is on the other side!”

The samples were half gone when the woman realized Stanley was yelling at her. She acted like she hadn’t noticed him until just then.

“Ohh, sorry. I didn’t think it mattered.”

With what remained on the platter, she walked towards Stanley.

“Well, to most people it doesn’t I guess. But the blue tops are supposed to be recycling.”

“Yeah I know, I just figured it was more for show than anything. Like to pretend we cared about the environment, but really all the trash just gets dumped in the same place as the rest of it.”

“I don’t know I guess. Honestly, I don’t really care. I just thought you should know what it was supposed to be for. In case you didn’t know.”

The woman smiled. It wasn’t the same smile she gave when handing out samples. It wasn’t as prominent as that one. This smile was softer. Slight. Natural.

“Why are you handing out samples all the way out here anyways?”

“I go where the people are. I figured they wanted to come see you.”

“Ha ha ha ha ha, well you’re wrong there.”

“I thought you had a different type of laugh.”

“Ohh Jesus. OK fine... ho ho ho. Happy?”

“Yeah. That’s better.”

“Want to know a secret? I’m not actually the real Santa.”

“No shit? No wonder no one comes to see you then.”

“Maybe that’s it.”

“Wanna sample? They’re cold. I always make too many. Way too many.”

The woman extended the platter towards Stanley, what remained of the teriyaki chicken bits glistened where the grease had started to harden into a rind.

“No thanks. I don’t really want one.”

The woman’s soft smile grew, just a bit. Only a bit. But Stanley noticed.

“Where’s the garbage?”

“Over on that side.”

•••

Stanley had the next day off, but when he got to work the following day—late, again—he had just enough time to grab a granola bar and some Advil before getting scolded by Charles. It wasn’t as bad as all the other times. Charles seemed to be a little less concerned than before. A little less, hopeful.

Stanley flipped the sign from “Santa is currently feeding his reindeer,” to “Santa is brought to you by the Oak View Mall, please visit our website for inquiries about leasing.” He checked the boxes stashed inside the cardboard gingerbread house to see if there were any candy canes left to give out to kids. There weren’t. They had bought fewer this year, and Charles had warned that once these were gone they weren’t buying more. They were sick of having extras at the end of the year and trying to figure out what to do with them. Stanley broke down the empty boxes and started walking toward the recycling when he heard a shout echo through the empty corridor.

“Hey Santa, I brought you a present!”

It was the woman with a platter. Stanley could see small curls of steam coming off the quarter sized bits of chicken breast.

“These ones are fresh, I tried bringing you some yesterday but you weren’t around.”

“Yesterday was my day off. I am kind of hungry, those smell pretty good.”

“That’s the whole idea. Back when we were busier we only gave out hot samples, but now we don’t go through them as fast. And they don’t stay fresh very long when you have to walk around to find people to give them to.”

Stanley grabbed a sample. It tasted like he remembered, the generic salty chicken flavor identical to all food court mall Chinese restaurants.

“Thanks. I think this is actually going to make me hungrier.”

“Well, take another then. I’ll end up throwing half of them away anyways.”

She placed the platter down on the bench and sat Stanley joined her on the other side of the chicken.

“So how’s this all work anyways?”

“How does what work?”

“The whole Santa thing.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know about Santa?”

“Well I get the basic idea, the whole goes down the chimney and gives you presents thing. But what’s the point of having one in a mall?”

“Well. Kids go up and tell Santa what they want for Christmas.”

“But don’t they know it’s not actually Santa? I mean at least you have a real beard, most of these fake Santas working here just look like they’re wearing a wig. One of you is even black.”

“I think kids know it’s not the real Santa, most of them anyways. Did you think it was the real Santa?”

“What do you mean?”

“When you were a kid, did you think it was the real Santa?”

“We didn’t do Santa. We didn’t do Christmas. I didn’t think anything about it at all, other than all my white friends seemed really excited about it.”

“You didn’t celebrate Christmas?”

“No my family isn’t from here.”

“They don’t celebrate Christmas in China?”

“We’re not Chinese, we’re Vietnamese.”

“Well. close enough.”

“What do you mean close enough? It’s a completely different country.”

“Yeah but, it’s like close to China.”

“The United States is like close to Mexico. Does that make you Mexican?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah... Unfortunately, I think I do...”

The woman’s face looked like someone had just refused her sample. She started getting up.

“These are getting cold, I better keep moving.”

Before Stanley had a chance to respond the woman was on her way.

•••

Stanley finished shoving the cardboard boxes into the recycling, noticing there was an old candy cane stuck to the packaging tape on the bottom. He ripped the candy cane off and put it in the pocket of his red coat.

The rest of the day went by slowly. He only saw four families, one of the kids smelled terrible and another was way too fat to comfortably sit on his lap—but insisted nonetheless. The whole sitting on the lap thing was a lot more uncomfortable than it once was anyways, both because Stanley was getting older, but also from the stern gazes he seemed to get from each parent. Charles came by and told him he could go home early.

Stanley flipped the sign back to “Santa is off feeding his reindeer,” and started walking back toward the changing room where he stored his street clothes. As he took off his red coat, he felt the broken candy cane he had rescued from the recycling. He hung up the coat, and started heading toward the garbage can in the food court, so he could dispose of it properly. He could smell chicken.

He turned and saw the woman with the platter a few yards behind him. He started back her way.

“Here, take this. In appreciation of the samples earlier.”

“Ohh, it’s Santa. You look different without your whole get-up. What is it?”

“It’s a candy cane. We used to give them out to kids, but we ran out. This was our last one.”

“It’s broken.”

“It still tastes the same.”

“I don’t like peppermint.”

“Ohh, well. OK. I don’t really either.”

“Let’s split it.”

The woman sat the platter down in front of the cash register. As Stanley ripped open the cellophane packaging, he started talking.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

“About how Mexicans are the same as Americans?”

“No, not that. I mean, I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to offend you. But about why kids keep coming to the mall Santa even if they know he’s not real.”

“OK, why is that?”

“Well. When my daughter started getting older I knew that she knew Santa wasn’t real, but she always wanted to go see him each year. To the point where it became kind of weird. Like how she seemed too old. All the other kids in line were way older than her, and it was kind of uncomfortable waiting in line with her.”

“Did you still take her?”

“I didn’t want to. But my wife still would. I would just wait on the bench for them while they waited in line. I was kind of embarrassed really. But Carol really loved it.”

“Is Carol your wife?”

“No Carol is my daughter. Eugenie is my wife. Was my wife.”

“So why did your daughter still want to go then?”

“I think it was because she still wanted to believe in something, even if she knew it wasn’t real. Like there was still a part of the magic. Even if she knew she wasn’t supposed to believe in it anymore. And to move on from that would kind of ruin the whole thing. Make it less special, you know?”

The woman was sucking on her half of the candy cane, and Stanley put his to his mouth. No one said anything for a little while.

“Does anyone ever ask Santa what he wants for Christmas?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like all those kids coming with all those demands and lists of things they want, but does anyone ever ask Santa what he wants?”

“Some kids bring me pictures they drew.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“I guess not. I don’t think so. I guess I’ve never noticed. I can’t think of a time.”

“Well, what does Santa want for Christmas?”

Stanley sucked on his candy cane as he thought. He thought of Eugenie. He thought of Larry and Janet with their new granddaughter. He thought of Carol.

The woman took off her apron.

“Are you hungry? I know how to make something other than chicken teriyaki.”

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Share By C.S. Beaty

Classmate Chris Beaty reflects on high school—the good, the bad, the ugly—in his new memoir2

High school is a strange in-between—the place where you start to figure out who you are, but also where you never quite feel like you fit in. It’s full of firsts: friendships, crushes, heartbreaks, big dreams, and awkward stumbles. It’s messy yet transformative, the bridge between childhood and whoever you’re becoming.

Chris Beaty knows these contradictions all too well. Today, he’s a successful young professional in Omaha, building a life with his wife and three children. But roughly two decades ago, he was just another wide-eyed freshman finding his way through the crowded halls of Grand Island Senior High.

For Beaty, high school was a maze of confusing encounters, quiet insecurities and a few painfully embarrassing moments that still make him cringe all these years later. But, looking back now, he’s come to appreciate his high school experience—in part because it helped shape him into the person he is today, but also because he’s realized high school is just … awkward for everyone.

Loser*: A Survival Guide to High School Popularity

Book cover courtesy of Chris Beaty

Beaty (GISH class of 2008) reflects on his formative years in his first book, “Loser*: A Survival Guide to High School Popularity,” out later this month.

Beaty and I were high school classmates and friends, so reading his book was a fun trip down memory lane. I chatted with him to learn more about his burgeoning career as a writer, as well as what it was like to reflect on his time at GISH. Here’s what he had to say.

The following interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Kuta: What inspired and motivated you to write this book?
Chris Beaty: I’ve always wanted to write, but I never knew what I was going to write about. I’ve always enjoyed writing and I had in the back of my mind, ‘OK, yeah, one day I’ll write a book,’ but I didn’t know what it would be about, necessarily. Around 2022, I bought a typewriter. It was just a fun thing to mess around with, and I started writing essays. I started writing as a means of processing life, and it was almost therapeutic in a way. At that point, everything was in essay form so, a lot of the stuff that made it into the book initially existed as just different essays.

I was writing a lot about high school and I don’t really necessarily know why, but I think I was just reflecting on that time of life. But what prompted the book was, I was with my daughter, I think she was around six or seven at the time, and we went to McDonald’s for lunch. We saw these two people who looked like they were on a date and I thought, ‘Who in the world would go on a date in McDonald’s? What a trashy thing to do.’ And then I remembered, ‘Oh, I took my homecoming date to McDonald’s. I did that once.’ And so I decided that’d be kind of a funny essay—you know, this loser kid who takes his homecoming date to McDonald’s. And so I sat down to write that and then I went, ‘Well, in order to tell that story, I should probably back up,’ because that happened my sophomore or junior year [of high school]. So I backed up. And I just kept on backing up until I thought of the first girl I kissed on her driveway, before I even entered kindergarten. I just kept writing and, eventually, the pages started to stack up. So, I decided this might not be an essay, this might be a book.

SK: Aside from your own memories, what did you use for source materials?
CB: Often, I would write something and then let it sit for a while. And then I’d remember later, ‘Oh yeah, that happened too,’ and I would add to it. It was almost like this iterative process. Once you put yourself back in that frame of mind, then all these memories start coming back.

I also read through as much Grand Island stuff as I could. I read “The Night of the Twisters” by Ivy Ruckman. I watched the movie. I went back to Grand Island a couple of times. I went through every yearbook I had. I did not interview anyone for it, so it’s definitely just my perspective.

SK: What’s the reception been like so far?
CB: I reached out to a lot of people after I wrote the book, just to let them know about it. Nothing’s been bad. Everyone I’ve talked to has been very excited about it. But I’m still kind of not sure, right? I’m not sure what to make of [the feedback] because it’s such a personal book. It’s all about awkward high school stuff. And some people just don’t like to go there, so I don’t know.

SK: What was it like to think back and revisit all these memories? What emotions did writing this book bring up for you?
CB: Some of it was super fun. Just thinking about the dumb stuff we did and just remembering those stories and giggling as I was writing. It was as if you’re meeting up with an old friend again. And some of it was just brutal, honestly. Each of the chapters is kind of anchored around a relationship I had, for better or worse, during that time frame. None of them worked out in the end, at least not in a romantic sense. So, every one of those interactions had an element of regret with it. You try to put yourself back in that situation and experience it the way you experienced it at the time. But, at the same time, now you have a little bit of knowledge, right? So you’re thinking of stuff you could have done [differently] that would have made it go better. All these times you thought you were being smart or smooth… when, really, you were just being an idiot. It’s like, ‘Just tell her how you feel, man, and if she doesn’t feel that way, that’s OK.’ There were a few of those that were just really hard.

I can think of a couple of times where I was writing and I just had to stop and collect myself again. A few of those moments got captured on the page, too. There’s a little transition paragraph I wrote just reflecting on those moments in life … those turning points where you made a decision one way or another. The girl I took to McDonald’s… at the end of that homecoming date, it was very clear she had a level of interest in me and I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. And to this day, I regret the way I responded. And it’s not that I regret the way my life turned out, but I regret the way I responded because I had no reason to treat her the way I did and just kind brush her off and whatever. But I just freaked out. And I can see that now. But at the time, I was just immature.

SK: Did this whole process shape the way you’re thinking about parenting your own kids at all?
CB: Maybe in some ways. When I was growing up, I felt like I was doing something wrong by having feelings for girls. I was depressed and insecure and anxious and all these things. I felt like there was something wrong with me for feeling that way, and so I think a lot of it is just remembering what it was like to be in that place. That’s really helpful for me as a parent.

I teach college kids now and I really think my biggest strength as a teacher is just that I’m not that far removed, I still remember what it was like to be a college kid. I don’t give assignments that I think are stupid because, if I think they’re stupid, then the college kids definitely aren’t going to get anything out of them. So, I think just that level of empathy is important, whether you’re parenting or teaching or whatever.

Reliving those moments and placing yourself back in high school, it certainly helps you be empathetic, even though my kids’ lives are going to be different than mine. But there’s also this universal human experience that I think everyone goes through, regardless of the generation, of feeling awkward and trying to figure out romantic interests and all that.

SK: Has writing the book changed how you think about high school?
CB: Yeah, I think it has. It has given me a sense of closure on this chapter of my life, as opposed to, before, I just wanted to ignore it. I moved away from Grand Island and I just wanted to pretend that whole chapter of my life didn’t happen. I wanted to become a new person, to reinvent myself when I left Grand Island and moved to Omaha for college. I didn’t really keep up with my friends from Grand Island, we just slowly went our separate ways and, honestly, that was a conscious decision for me at times. I just wanted to move on.

But, now, I still feel like it is in the past, but I have a sense of closure. It was still OK, it was still good. It was weird, but I’m still thankful for that period of time. I’m still thankful for where I grew up. I’m super thankful for the people.

And this goes back to your earlier question, but it has been so fun to reconnect with people from that period of time. And just the support and interest I’ve gotten from people [after I posted about the book on Facebook]. It’s all these people that I thought I would never see again. And it’s just a reminder that these are still good people. We went through a really weird time together and we’ve moved on. Hearing what some of my friends are up to now as adults, it gives me a sense of pride. We could laugh about things that we couldn’t laugh about then, and just realize we all went through something together. And that was really cool, even though it worked out differently for each one of us. Everyone I’ve reconnected with, we have shared that same sense of, ‘Yeah, [high school] was really weird, but man, it’s great to hear from you now.’ So, I think it did give me a sense of belonging again, and a sense of being OK with where I’m from. Not that I was ever ashamed of it, but just more so being proud and claiming it.

SK: Who is this book for? Who’s your ideal reader?
CB: I think there is a general appeal in the same way that people love “Sixteen Candles” and all those teenage rom coms. There’s hopefully a lot of nostalgic references from that time period, even for people outside of Grand Island. Anyone who has ever tried to hook up with a girl over instant messenger, I think they would like at least a part of this book. We’re never going to have that experience again. We can all look back at that and be like, ‘Wow, what were we thinking?’ I thought the stakes were huge, getting those stupid emoticons just right and picking the right song lyric. We all need to get together and make fun of that.

But, also, anybody from a small town, even if their town didn’t have a fiberglass cow that seemed to move from steak restaurant to steak restaurant. They probably have something like that and they can laugh at that.

I would also love for a high school kid to read this book and think, ‘Oh, wow, people have always felt the way that I feel right now. Even if it’s not OK now, it’s going to be OK in the future.’ That’s really the heart behind it. Life keeps going on, even if it sucks at the time. That’s just part of growing up.

SK: I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but the book really is a time-capsule for millennials.
CB: Yeah, for sure. That stuff was really fun to write about … the Axe body spray and things like that.

SK: What are some of your other goals for the book?
CB: I hope it finds an audience. I hope it finds some eyes. I hope it’s successful, in some sense that just allows me to keep writing. I hope people from Grand Island feel like it gives us permission to laugh at ourselves a little bit. I just want people to have a sense of pride in having a book about Grand Island. I hope the city rallies around it in a way that makes them laugh at themselves in a good, healthy way, because frankly, we have a lot to laugh at ourselves about.

Chris Beaty

Photo courtesy of Chris Beaty

SK: What tips and advice would you share for someone who is in high school right now?
CB: I just felt so much pressure on myself. And, in some sense, I just needed somebody to tell me, ‘Chris, none of this really matters right now.’ I think we put so much pressure on kids to make good choices and work hard and, you know, don’t stay up too late. And there are probably kids who really need to hear that. But at the same time, for me, I just need somebody to tell me to just chill out. And I had a few mentors who were like that… When you hit those moments where people are like, ‘Dude, just chill out, none of this is that big of a deal,’ it could be life-giving because it gives you freedom to make mistakes and not beat yourself up and everything.

And I wish I would have taken more risks. I wish I would have asked more girls out. I wish I would have gone to more things. I wish I wouldn’t have been so concerned with saving everyone’s souls and getting them to youth group and converting them to Christianity and [more focused on] just being a kid and having fun and making mistakes. I thought I had to get everything perfect and get everything right, and I think that really stunted my development and maturity in a lot of ways. I always had a little of a class-clown vibe at times. And I think that was probably me acting out from just the insane pressure I’d put on myself to be the best at everything.

I just wish someone had said to me, ‘If you’re not the section leader for the drumline, it doesn’t matter. If not every single one of your friends becomes a Christian, it’s not your fault that they go to hell, even if that’s your theology. Just chill out, you don’t need to put the weight of the world on your shoulders.’

SK: What’s next for you?
CB: I’ve got two other books that I’m working on right now. One of them is kind of a sequel of sorts, about getting married and adopting three kids from Colombia. And then I have an aunt who was in the movie “Nomadland.” She played herself in the movie, she goes by the name of Swankie. I’ve been working with her to write a biography of her life, so that’s been a really fun process. Other than that, I’ve been trying to do podcast stuff and writing essays and everything. We’ll see where it goes. I have a full-time job and a part-time job on top of that, but writing is what I really love to do, and I do it by choice.

SK: Where can people find “Loser*” if they want to read it?
CB: You can buy it on www.csbeaty.com. There’s a bunch of other fun stuff on there too.

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Rivalries between border states are not unique to just our two competing corn-producing economies. Kansas and Missouri literally fought a war against one another. When my brother moved to Wisconsin, he taught me the acronym FIB, which Wisconsinites define as Fucking Illinois Bastards. Us Nebraskans created our own acronym for our hated neighbors by declaring that they were all a bunch of “Idiots Out Wandering Around.” They like to retaliate by claiming that the “N” on the side of Nebraska football helmets stands for “knowledge.” It doesn’t. It stands for Nebraska. Fucking dumbasses.

It was a tough pill to swallow when my literary hero went on a book tour and the closest stop to my Omaha home was in Des Moines, Iowa. The drive was only two-hours and twelve-minutes, but... through... Iowa. And once I got to Des Moines I would have to watch David Sedaris in a room full of... people from... Iowa. Ingesting this dilemma would require the technique reserved for my dog’s Giardia parasite medication to get down. I opened the jar of peanut butter and purchased my ticket.

•••

I rediscovered Sedaris later in life when I started to take my own writing seriously. I first heard of him when my high school English teacher would read him out loud during my senior year. Around that time, I took a trip to the Lincoln, Nebraska Barnes and Noble to visit my brother. I convinced my mom to buy me a copy of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and a hip The Message translation of the Bible. Knowing I was on a roll, I snuck a copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day on the bottom of the book stack. Of those purchases, I started the Sedaris essay collection first, but once I realized he was gay I abruptly ceased in fear of its corrupting influence on my Midwestern youth-group-boy values. I couldn’t admit the joy I received from his honest and occasionally vulgar writing. I was ashamed by my pleasure from the words of someone so utterly unashamed of who he was. So, I stuffed the copy away—along with most of my feelings about morality and theology—until I was old enough to be honest about what I thought. And once I returned to Sedaris’s body of work, I learned that despite the stark contrast in upbringing, Sedaris and I thought a lot of the same things were funny. I thought I was the only one.

I am embarrassed to admit that I have not read all Sedaris’s books, but I do own them all. Many more than one copy. There’s this character in the TV show Lost whose favorite author is Charles Dickens. He carries around the only Dickens novel he has yet to finish, but because he loves Dickens so much, he can’t bear the thought of having read all that ol’ Charlie has written. He wants this book to be the last thing he reads before he dies. Sort of impractical really—especially during the scene where he thinks his secret fort is about to explode and he desperately opens the novel and tries to cram in several hundred pages of Dickensensian prose before a time bomb hit zero. But I kind of get it. I suppose Sedaris is sort of like that for me. I bought all of Sedaris’s books on eBay, searching for autographed doodles and clever inscriptions he made during public signings that apparently mean more to me than they do to Rich, Debbie, Kit, or whoever else was gifted a book from some relative. One would think I would have worked through each volume promptly, but instead I prefer to savor them. I love the idea that when my reading gets stale or I’m in a particularly depressed state, I can simply grab one of my copies of Calypso and start a fresh experience with the author who seems to get me.

After I started reading Sedaris again, I wrote an essay about the copy of Theft by Finding I acquired from a little free library. I liked the essay, but it wasn’t anything terribly impressive. It was the kind of fun writing that you just sort of fart out. But I was desperate for attention nonetheless, so I found the address of Sedaris’s publisher and mailed a photocopy of my typewritten draft to him. I was hopeful I may hear something back, but not optimistic. A few months later, I received a postcard in the mail. On the front was a sketch of a Russian prison tattoo depicting a man-goat playing an acoustic guitar sitting atop a hammer and sickle. The lyrics, once translated from Cyrillic, read “but in the graveyard everything is peaceful, everything is proper, absolute bliss.”

On the opposite side was a handwritten note.

•••

I am easily starstruck and often disappointed by my nervous awkwardness after meeting someone I admire. I stopped trying to be funny in front of famous funny people, but I still have this hope of coming off as not-a-total-weirdo. I’m usually disappointed with my performance. I had a typewritten letter and an advance copy of my own memoir in my backpack as I anxiously inched closer to a folding table. Sedaris was holding court signing the title pages of his own books. He had a pile of Sharpies next to him—not whatever size pile of markers you are imagining, take that mental image and quadruple it—and a silicone fetus. It wasn’t the first time I had seen a fetus of that sort. Sedaris was clearly enamored by it. He practiced drawing it on the back of a paper leaflet that was intended for you to write down who you want him to inscribe your book to. He transferred the image onto the book of a fan in front of me before selecting a flesh-colored Sharpie to fill in the outline. He seemed pleased with the result and handed the book back to its owner. She seemed pleased as well.

There was only one more person before my turn. Her name was Kenna. I knew her name was Kenna, because Sedaris cheerfully declared, “fuck you Kenna, fuck you,” after she handed him four worn volumes to be inscribed. It wasn’t the first time I had waited behind Kenna that evening. She was the same woman who frustratingly told a gate attendant “I was the first one here, I’ve been here since 6:00 PM,” when the other security line was moving faster than ours to gain entrance to the pre-show book signing.

“Seriously, fuck you Kenna.”

Kenna walked away laughing. It was my turn.

My anxiety was high, somehow even more so since it seemed inevitable that my idol would actually be interacting with me and not just silently signing my book with a half-smile until I said, “thank you,” and walked away. It was as if he had been waiting for me.

“Who are you?”

Usually this is an easy question, but I was struggling with the answer. He asked my kids’ ages. No idea. He asked me where they went to school, so I gave them the name of their future high school, even though my oldest child has yet to enter middle school. I seriously couldn’t remember the name of their elementary, even though Sedaris would have never known if I was telling the truth. I couldn’t come up with it. Sensing my struggle, he bailed me out.

“It wasn’t long since they used to be this size.”

He picked up the life-size replica fetus from its resting place atop a nylon drawstring bag and cradled it in his palm.

“Someone gave me this last night. I think it’s a right-to-life thing, but I’m fascinated by it. I looked up buying more, but they go for like two for $35.”

Finally, a topic I knew how to engage with.

“Ohh I know all about those fetuses. They used to hand them out for free at the Nebraska State Fair. My high school friends and I would try to collect a bunch because one of my buddies wanted to make a necklace out of them.”

Sedaris laughed. He wasn’t exactly sure what to make of the comment but seemed to be amused. He drew a picture of a praying mantis on the inside title page of my copy of his first collection of diary entries. It was the same book I had found in a little free library that kick started my rediscovered fandom.

“Can I give you this?”

“What is it?”

“It’s a copy of the book I wrote. And a letter I wrote to you.”

Sedaris graciously accepted the gifts and slid the contents into some container underneath the table. The fetus he left in plain sight.

•••

My heart rate was elevated, but I felt triumphant as I found my seat in the auditorium. I was in the third seat from the aisle, a single buffer between myself and the next closest occupant. It was a half-hour before the scheduled start time, and the residents of central Iowa were gradually making their way into the concert hall. This mundane task of entering and sitting down seemed a way bigger deal here than it was in the great state of Nebraska.

“I am SO SORRY. But I’m going to have to ask you to get up. You see, my seat is down the row from where you are seated and I need to get by in order to reach my own seat. I am so sorry. If I could just scoot by and step around...”

I had already pulled in tighter since the moment she approached, but this old woman insisted on delivering her entire monologue justifying her actions before setting off on her journey. Once she had successfully transitioned from my right-hand side to my left-hand side, she started the speech all over again to my closest neighbor. But this time she had an engaged audience.

“No problem at all, that’s alright. I completely understand. You know these rows are really narrow…”

“They are, aren’t they?”

“They sure are.”

“I think these old theaters just tried to cram as many seats in as they could. People were a lot smaller back in those days too.”

“They sure were, not like today.”

“Ohh no, not like today.

It was a good thing she had arrived early. This was going to take her a while.

•••

I was aware that David Sedaris is 33 years older than me, but it didn’t occur to me that this meant the rest of the audience would be as well. I thought he was like this hip, underground thing us left-leaning moderate kids liked. I knew he wrote for The New Yorker, but I guess I never pictured the kind of person who actually read The New Yorker attending his public readings. I was easily in the 99th percentile of audience members when it came to years left prior to retirement. With the woman properly seated in her velvet cushion in the center of the row, I turned my eavesdropping to the conversations behind me.

“Do you have your furnace inspected?”

“Ohh yes. Every year. My air conditioner too.”

“Hmm. I should probably do that.”

“Yes, I do my furnace in the fall and my AC in the spring. It’s amazing what can go wrong with them. They always find something.”

We were inching closer to start time but the seats at either side of me were still vacant. A wrinkly woman and her wooden-cane-supported husband took the two empty cushions to my right. Thank God they showed up after the last woman, otherwise we’d still be listening to her profuse apologies. I saw how laborious standing up to allow someone to enter the row was for this geriatric couple when my left-handed seatmate made her triumphal entry. She had short silver hair and a hooded sweatshirt resembling a quilt. A Christian cross pattern fashioned out of four nails was embroidered where the left breast pocket would normally be located. She said goodbye to her daughter, a young brunette with a cleavage tattoo, and traveled across the elderly couple on the end and past my lap. Her offspring found her seat next to a man in a jean jacket three rows in front of where we were seated.

“We really should have bought our tickets at the same time so we could all sit together,” the quilt sweatshirt lady said to no one in particular. While I was wondering if she understood how ticket purchases worked, she yelled at her daughter, who ignored her. So she yelled again, a bit louder this time. Still nothing. After the third attempt, the young lady with the cleavage tattoo froze for a moment—the kind of pause you make while slowly inhaling through your nose in order to calm your nerves—and turned around to address her mother.

“Yes mom?”

“Photo! Photo!”

Cleavage Tattoo hit Jean Jacket on the shoulder. He tried to ignore it. So she hit him again. He visibly sighed, turned his head past his shoulder, and gave a forced half-smile while his mother-in-law snapped a cell phone photo using both hands. The young couple turned back around as quickly as they could to avoid further requests. My neighbor fumbled with the photo a bit more on her phone. She typed “David” into a search engine, presumably in an attempt to send the photo to a man named David, but instead the results yielded a variety of Star of David icons she could select from to superimpose on top of the photo. Frustrated, she closed the window, put the phone on her lap, and started asking personal questions to the man she had never met seated to her left. She had a lot she wanted to ask him.

The event was scheduled to begin at 7:30 PM, but Sedaris had agreed to sign books for a full hour ahead of time, and then again afterward indefinitely into the evening until all requests were filled. It was amazing to see his lack of hurry earlier in the line. He had little need for efficiency, rather he wanted to ensure every person he interacted with felt like they were being seen and cared for. But when 7:33 PM rolled around, Quilt Hoodie had about had it.

“Come on let’s gooooooooooooooooo... this was supposed to start 3 minutes ago.........”

Sedaris walked onto the stage four minutes later, wearing a muu muu and clown shoe combat boots. One would think that his arrival would satisfy my seatmates impatience, but she was mostly distracted by her cell phone going off at the exact moment Sedaris began to address the crowd. I’m always amazed at the number of clicks and the amount of confusion that accompanies an old person whose cell phone rings unexpectedly. A swift, single push of the side button would cure the awkwardness, but when the bullets start flying it’s hard to know how someone will react. Quilt Hoodie was about to be shot. When she finally managed to silence her ringtone, I settled in for a full evening of uninterrupted frivolity courtesy of my favorite humorist. But at the first punch line, I learned we had a much bigger problem than an unexpected phone call.

This woman had a really fucking annoying laugh.

And David Sedaris is really funny.

•••

We often have no idea how annoying we are to others. I had no clue that I bounced up and down from walking on the balls of my feet until I watched a video of myself in an eighth-grade multimedia class. It made more sense why classmates would trot next to me in the hallway and start skipping up and down to match my gait. As the woman next to me reacted to every Sedaris joke, I had a feeling she had no idea either. It wasn’t so much that she sounded weird, it was more so the way that every chuckle seemed to be calculated and forced based off what she felt the appropriate noise should be for the given humor. For the first half of Sedaris’s opening essay, I fumed, but eventually I decided to diagram her laughter in my pocket notebook.

The dimmed house lights made taking notes difficult, so I initially developed a laughter morse code. Each dot represented a punchy “ha!” and for the first few readings she alternated between:

. . . . . ………

and

………………… .

As she warmed up, her lung capacity increased and the staccato breaths of laughter became elongated. Such as:

____________________________

or

_ _ _ _ ____________ _ _ _ _

But then she started alternating her pitch, necessitating the addition of a y-axis to my diagram. The prolonged single breath laughs remained, but the octaves fluctuated.

Eventually my code started to fail me. I didn’t know how to transcribe “yah! ha! hee ha ha” into a system of dots and dashes. And my methodology completely missed the contextual usage of each form of forced laughter. Like when she agreed with some observation made by Sedaris and delivered a knowing “ah! ha ha” in affirmation of his assessment of human behavior.

And then she just started talking back to him while she laughed.

Sedaris: “I learned that a woman after the age of 25 is known as a thornback.”

Quilt Hoodie: “Ha! The heck?”

Sedaris: “Could a person make a living jerking off into a gym sock?”

Quilt Hoodie: “Ah ha ha… gee…”

Sedaris: “Go back to whore island.”

Quilt Hoodie: “Ha AAAAA. Oh my God.”

Sedaris: “... a dog named Becky.”

Quilt Hoodie: “Ha, yeah. Becky.”

Sedaris: “Which is anal sex.”

Quilt Hoodie: “Ah!”

Sedaris “And in Mormon culture that’s called the poop hole loophole.”

Quilt Hoodie: “ooooooooo”

When Sedaris mentioned putting “the fucked-up genie back in its bottle,” she made sure to finish his sentence by proclaiming “bottle!” in unison with him. She knew where this joke was going. And she was proud of herself for it. When he rhetorically asked, “if you would suck another man’s cock if it would cure cancer?” she just started coughing. She reacted to Sedaris’s lament of the going-ons in urban Oregon with a hearty “Portland is just a mess,” but was mysteriously silent after a joke about a MAGA hat wearing truck owner who named his disobedient dog “Trumper.” The only natural laugh that felt unforced occurred after Sedaris compared the fact checking process at The New Yorker to “being fucked up the access by a hot Thermos.”

•••

The night was coming to an end, and judging from the number of times the woman’s Apple Watch lit up between fake laughs, she wasn’t planning on being out this late. As Sedaris started taking Q&A at 9:22 PM, she turned to me.

“Excuse me I need to go.”

Even without my partner next to me, I was now so self-conscious about the sounds of my own laughter that it was hard to fully participate. When Sedaris mentioned a fondness for Iowa-based grocery chain Hy-Vee, the Des Moines crowd erupted. They yelled at him about trying the “Hy-Chi” Chinese food, and then demanded he go to Casey’s for pizza. He had never heard of Casey’s, and when they told him it was a gas station, he was appropriately confused. But at this point the crowd was in a frenzy with regional pride.

Fuck. Chill out Iowa. It’s not like he said he ate a Runza.

With no longer needing to collect laughter data, I could now go back to paying attention to the ladies behind me who had earlier compared notes on furnace inspections. They had begun their own one-way conversation with Sedaris as he described the premise of the Amazon Prime documentary titled A Very British Brothel. They insisted they would not be watching it despite his hearty endorsement.

•••

After the show, I purchased a copy of Sedaris’s children’s book Pretty Ugly and went back into the autograph line to get it signed for my kids. Even after meeting him and successfully delivering a copy of my own book to him, I was still nervous. The line was moving slower than before. With no start time to hit, Sedaris’s pace was even less urgent. He ate a steak and baked potato between asking autograph seekers about their jobs at Hy-Vee’s rival grocery stores. When a high schooler agreed to his offer of eating a bread roll, Sedaris took his time slathering the secondhand appetizer with ample whipped butter. Eventually it was my turn.

“Didn’t I meet you once already?”

“Yeah, but I picked up another book for my kids.”

“Ohh, well I feel bad for you having to wait in line twice.”

“It’s ok, I didn’t think about it until just now.”

“Who are your kids?”

“Their names are Manuela, Karol, and Kener. They were adopted from Colombia.”

“Wow. I once thought about adopting a kid with Down syndrome. I even looked into it. It was strange seeing how many kids are out there waiting to be adopted.”

“Yeah, they call those waiting child lists. We looked at some of those also at different points. It’s heartbreaking.”

“But you adopted a family of three siblings?”

“Yeah, we did. It was kind of stupid.”

“Wow. That’s an amazing story.”

It was a thrill to talk to someone who seemed to understand me.

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Once again, our vacation began with an early morning wake-up. We had a train to Madrid to catch later that afternoon, but there was one final to-do item before our time in Pamplona came to an end. The tickets we purchased two days ago to watch the end of the running of the bulls inside the bullring only cost six euros. We still didn’t know what we were in for, but we had low expectation since it was less than the price of a jamon iberico sandwich and a bottle of sangria. We entered the Plaza de los Toros for the third day in a row. The previous two nights there were digital ribbon boards that displayed the most basic of information electronically in text form, but in their place now hung large LED video displays. In place of drunken tuba music, a professionally dressed band was arranged at the center of the ring in a semi-circle. The lyrics to their sing-alongs were prominently imposed over a live video feed, though the only people that seemed to not know the words already were Paige and me. I tried to keep up with my high school Spanish vocabulary, but mostly just sang, “lo, lo, lo, lo, lo” during the chorus. When the song ended, the band packed up and marched out and pump-up music started playing through the public address system. A picture of each bull with its stats flashed on the video boards like a starting lineup at an NBA game. Each bull got as many cheers as Jordan and Pippen during the mid-nineties.

In the distance, we heard the pop of a firework, and then a few seconds later, the pop of a second one. The bulls were headed our way. The progress down Calle Mercaderes and Calle Estefeta was simulcast on the video boards. Our previous day's encierro viewing was limited to 13 seconds, but this time we got to watch the entire parade route. The bulls introduced moments earlier were off the bench and in the game, navigating through downtown Pamplona and toward the arena. A few men were stationed in the center of the ring with pink and yellow capes in case they were needed, but otherwise all we could see inside the plaza was dirt ground down from the bullfights leading up to today. The far entrance was open to street level. A few joggers trotted in, found a wall to hug, and celebrated their triumph and lack of goring. Then a few more joggers. Then a few more joggers entered. Then a lot more joggers spewed in, causing a stampede that knocked several people over. They laid in the fetal position to avoid getting trampled as the last of the runners desperately tried to make their way to safety.

We knew our favorite team was about to make their dramatic entrance. Except it wasn't that dramatic. Exciting, yes, but uneventful. The lead steer knew exactly where to go, and the six bulls being exposed to the route for the first time took solace in this steer’s knowledge. They slowed as he slowed, pulling up from the dead sprint and almost appearing relieved they had made it to the end of the road.

The last five steers galloped into their own stables, and the last of the runners congregated to the center of the ring. The encierro was over. That felt like about six euros worth of entertainment, but as Paige and I prepared to exit the stadium we noticed no one else was moving, particularly not the runners on the bullring floor. The doors that had just shut as the last steer crossed through the ring swung open again and out popped what looked like a miniature bull. The little guy was confused by the mobs of people, and proceeded to charge, thrash, and flip any day drinker that got in his way. I couldn’t believe what I was watching. The event planners of San Fermin were giving the people exactly what they craved, a chance to get injured by wildlife. We eventually gathered that the “he” was actually a “she” and I also learned how little I knew about cattle. This was a heifer, a female that still had its horns, which I didn’t realize could happen. The only time I had heard the word “heifer” was the name of Rocko’s best friend in the classic Nickelodeon cartoon Rocko’s Modern Life.

I was texting my boss live updates of the day's events and told him how confused I was by this cow's anatomy. Or heifer’s. Or whatever it was down there flipping a tourist on its horns while the guy's buddy laughed at him. My boss texted a co-worker of ours that lived off the fat of the land in rural Wyoming. He was the kind of guy that used his own pocketknife to cut steak at a restaurant and had a stuffed musk ox in his living room that he shot himself. Heifer facts were transmitted to my cell phone from across the Atlantic Ocean, but I forgot the lesson. I was too distracted by one of the tiny bulls jumping over the side of the ring and getting stuck in the concourse.

My boy Ernie Hemingway told me they use heifers to train the next generation of bullfighters, but the current scene resembled less of a training session and more of a mosh pit at an Insane Clown Posse concert. I don't think they have liability insurance for events in Pamplona. When the festival organizers grew tired of the shenanigans, they let out a steer to track down his lady friend and escort her home safely. After the heifers were safely tucked in, our final event at the Festival of San Fermin had concluded.

We had a train to catch.

•••

We spent a few days in Iceland before landing back home in Omaha. As with any long trip, the recovery process was gradual and the pile of leaflets I collected across Europe were stuffed in a folder for a later date. I kept on thinking about bull 33. Every recap of the trip focused on his heroics and he became the icon of our time in Europe. I wondered what his name was, I figured it would be something badass. Something that I might call my dog or first child since we had now completed our first annual last big trip before kids. I remembered I had saved the program from our bullfight in our stack of scraps.

When I found the leaflet, I was somber. The name wasn’t tough at all, it was a girl’s name. The same name as an old friend of mine. A friend that I cared about. A friend that during my final year of college, had died.

•••

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“So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after and judged by these moral standards, which I do not defend, the bullfight is very moral to me because I feel very fine while it is going on and have a feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality, and after it is over I feel very sad but very fine.”1

- Ernest Hemingway

Before we left our lodging, we grabbed a corkscrew. We had gotten a tip that there are no food or beverage restrictions at the Plaza de Toros and it is expected that the spectators pack a meal. And a meal in Pamplona needs a corkscrew. We found a food stand that accepted cards and ordered two jamon iberico sandwiches and a bottle of wine to go. The meal for two cost us 13 euros.

We arrived well in advance of the start time stamped on our flimsy paper stubs, but the drunken pep bands had beat us to the ring. They had already started doing what drunken pep bands do: play drunken pep band music. Drunken pep band music that would not cease until they later stormed the arena floor and paraded out the stadium to bless all rural Spain with their beautiful drunken pep band serenades. But the night was still young. There were still too many things alive. Over the singing, whistling, and tubas, we heard a vendor crying out to potential customers from the aisle. He was holding a basketful of Marcona almonds with a metal scoop speared into the center of his pile of legumes. Paige wanted some, so we flagged down the almond man and used our meager pocketful of coins to purchase a single serving of almonds for 3 euros. The nut peddler fashioned a tube out of a piece of paper, expertly manipulated his scoop to slide in the perfect portion of almonds, and passed them down our row to my anxious wife.

Despite the rambunctious atmosphere, our seat mates were nothing but hospitable. As a Nebraskan, being kind to newcomers at sporting events is a source of pride for our people. On the walls of Memorial Stadium reads the inscription “Through these halls walk the greatest fans in college football” above each entryway. We make it a point to be nice to road teams, unless that road team is the Colorado Buffaloes, in which case they can go fuck themselves. Otherwise, sporting event hospitality is a matter we take seriously. The same can be said of our bench mates at the Plaza de Toros. Presumably, the person Yvette called to peddle their bullfight tickets was a family. Families don't sit next to the beer buckets and pep bands. In a bull ring, your ticket price is dependent on the amount of sun your seat is expected to endure. The spirit section is in direct glare from the first bull to the sixth, but we were seated “en la sombra,” along with all the other civilized patrons. No one was throwing beer bottles or slurring their words next to us, they were there to appreciate the artform. And they appreciated it deeply. Respectfully. As the parade of matadors and their entourage signaled the beginning of the evening, they were sure to pay their respects.

•••

The matadors for the evening were Miguel Angel Perera, Cayetano Rivera, and Roca Rey. The six bulls came from the Jandilla ranch in Merida of the Badajoz province in Spain.

A bullfight has four parts:

1.

A matador isn't a one-man show, but rather a grand finale. A bull­fight is a choreographed process of gradually wearing down a bull so that the matador can do some fancy tricks at the end before killing the beast once and for all. To accomplish this goal, he employs a stable of partners paid a meager salary, and each helps wear the bull out so that the matador can look fancy and in control at the end. A lot of these role players are wannabe matadors, up and comers given an entry level in the bullfighting career path. They have either failed to rise in the ranks or are waiting their opportunity to branch out on their own, recruit their own posse, and seek fame and glory as a bull killer.

The first step in tiring a bull is to get him to run around a whole bunch. When a fresh bull is released into the ring, he is understandably confused and royally pissed off. This has been a really fucking weird day so far, and he's had enough. As such, the behemoth is full of energy and in a mood that can only be remedied by running into something and letting everyone know just how unsatisfied he has been with his experience thus far.

A bullfighting bull is chosen at a young age. Ranches breed cattle for the purpose of providing toros for the fights, and like a Kentucky thoroughbred, their lineage has been refined over generations to breed and train the ideal creature for this esoteric purpose. To preserve their vigor and shitty disposition toward the world, a bull calf is tested early in life for his physical and emotional attributes. They are briefly shown a cape and their reactions are studied. If a rancher is satisfied with the bull’s response, he declares “Toro,” and the bull is separated from the herd. From there he is groomed for the rest of his life toward his ultimate demise in the ring. If the bull isn't enough of an asshole, he is castrated and lives out his life as a steer. I'm not sure which one has it better.

The bull is never shown a cape again until he enters the bull ring for the final time. Bulls are constantly pissed off, but they are smart. After a while, they start to figure out that all their sprinting and charging isn't yielding the desired results and will learn to aim straight for the human and not a floating piece of fabric. When the toro makes his big debut, enough time has passed to where he has forgotten what a cape is entirely.

The matador’s posse starts to work the bull with pink and yellow capes. When the animal first bursts out of the gate and into the open space of the ring, he is at full steam. The matador’s crew positions three or four men around the circumference of the ring and they fan out their capes with both hands to attract the animal's charge. When it's close, the men jump behind a wooden barricade before the bull gores him with his horns and another man tries to get the bull's attention. It's kind of like playing frisbee back and forth with your buddy while the dog chases the disc, except the dog is trying to kill you.

2.

While the bull is still getting worked by all the capes, two guys on horses slowly creep into the ring. The horses look like they're wearing Pac-man costumes. Horses, understandably, don't like bulls—so their eyes are covered in blinders and their bodies are cloaked in thickly woven yellow protectors. Riding on top are the picadors. Their yellow, flamboyant outfits match the color scheme of the horse jackets, but they stand out from all the others in the ring by carrying an enormous spear and wearing a cool cowboy hat. They stand and wait, allowing their homies to keep tiring the bull, until the bull gets just…close…enough…and…

BAAAMMM!!!!!

The picador jabs his pike square into the back shoulder of the bull. The bull really fucking hates this part.

Each bull gets speared twice over the course of the bull fight. The horses appear unharmed, but traditionally this was the most gruesome part of the bullfight and the one that upset the most visitors. Since my entire bullfighting fandom has been limited to a single evening, I’m hardly an authority on the subject. But Ernest Hemingway was. According to old Ernie, back when he watched bullfights it was common to see the bull kill the horse there on the spot. More than common, pretty much expected. The protective covers weren't added until later, but Ernest thought they were actually worse for the horse because the damage is done internally when a bull rams the steed, thus making it easier to ignore. The same horse can be trotted out time and time again for more and more abuse while their insides were being scrambled. The goal of a horse doctor was to simply keep the horses going, so sometime they would even fill up wounds with sawdust, stitch them back up, and send them back out to get maimed again. When a bull’s horn would pierce a surgically repaired spot, sawdust could be seen leaking out from the animal like a sandbag with a hole in the bottom.

I think horse protection technology has improved since Hemingway's day.

3.

After he has been freshly speared in the back— twice— the bull starts showing signs of weary. He has been unsuccessfully sprinting up to this point but has started in at a trot. No less furious, likely even more so, but the dude is worn out. He needs to be more calculated with his movements as his energy wanes. And now his back is bright red with blood that has begun to seep out of each of his wounds. Unfortunately, he isn't done with abuse for the evening.

The horses retreat to their stables, hopefully with all their internal organs intact. The picadors job is over, next in line are the banderillos. The banderillos use banderillas. There are no female banderillos, so the feminine “a” at the end of the word doesn't denote a girl banderillo, but rather a long pointy stick with hooks on the end. Once the bull has been poked twice and is tired of chasing flapping pieces of fabric, a banderillo comes out of the ring in a skipping, sort of hopping, trot with one pointy stick in each hand. He holds the pointy sticks at the tail, the non-pointy side, and extends both arms above his head in the Karate Kid crane position. He gets the bull’s attention… runs straight at the dwindling animal… and…

BAAAMMM!!!!!

The shitty banderillo sticks both banderillas in the back shoulders of the bull where the fishhook barbs trap it under the bull's flesh, leaving the banderillas dangling from his flaps of skin. The bull fucking hates this part too. The banderillos go another round, placing four banderillas in total. According to Hemingway, sometimes they go six. By the time this round is over, the bull is a bloody, crimson, pin cushion.

4.

Now that the bull has been made a shell of its former self by the matador’s poorly paid employees, the hero can trot out to receive all the glory. By trot, I mean walk dramatically. Hemingway makes it very clear that a matador should never run, he is the slow-motion superhero that can’t undignify himself by pretending like he’s scared or in a hurry to get out of a confined space with a bloodthirsty animal. It helps that the bull is already half dead, but still. His posse doesn't just do all the hard work tiring out the bull for him, earlier in the day a few people from each matador team go down to the bullring to inspect each of the six bulls and negotiate which two their boss will fight. There are certain temperaments that play better for a matador, put on a good show, and keep him out of as much danger as possible. Usually, each matador gets one good bull and one not-so-good bull, and after the determination is made, the picador or banderillo will report back to their matador and help strategize on the plan of attack for their particular bulls like a caddie would help the golfer read the greens.

The matador has three tools: a cape, a muleta, and a sword. The cape is of the same style used earlier, it's an actual cape worn on the shoulders that is handled with both hands with long, swoopy, strokes.

But what most people picture when they think of a matador is not the cape, it’s the red piece of fabric that he manipulates with a single hand called a muleta. There's less fabric, which allows for more aggressive movements and quicker tricks. And it's real handy to hide a sword in.

After some passes where the matador gets close to the bull as it charges, it becomes clear that the constant sprinting and dramatic loss of blood has put the bull near death's door. His stomach fills and drops with each deep breath and the blood has turned a tapestry of colors as some has dried on its back and more has leaked from the six holes yet to clot. When the matador feels the bull is ready to be finished off, he slowly walks to the side of the ring, takes the sword from a member of his staff, the whole crowd shushes one another, and for the first time the tuba players shut the fuck up. The bull goes in for on last charge as the matador has the sword drawn, pulled back above his head with the blade pointed straight at its target. The bull charges… the matador strikes… and…

BAAAMMM!!!!!

For a moment the bull and the matador become one.

After a long fight, the bull drops dead. The crowd yells “Ole!” and tubas proceed in fortissimo.

The matador walks over to the dead bull, cuts off its ear as a trophy (occasionally gifting it to a young woman he has plans of piercing in a different way after the bullfight) and then slowly circles the rings as the crowd cheers, throws him flowers if he is good, and throws shit at him if he was bad. Meanwhile stadium workers hitch the carcass behind a team of mules and drag the conquered foe out through the Zamboni door of the bullring. While the matador receives his praise, the only sign of the bull is the streak of blood left in the sand.

•••

After a bull is killed, the crowd yelled, “OTRA, OTRA!” presumably because they enjoyed the experience and wanted another one. Or maybe we just didn't understand what they were saying. There were a lot of moments like that. Luckily, the affluent families who could afford seats “en la sombra” were good neighbors. After the third bull was dead and the crowd’s cheers had subsided, EVERYONE stopped what they were doing and took out the food they brought. Paige and I still had our bottle of wine and jamon iberico sandwiches at our feet, so we took our cue. With every hor d'eourve pulled out from the Mary Poppins picnic bag of the family seated to our right, we were offered to partake. Skewers of olives, slices of cheese, and chocolates were all passed out to family members— and then the couple in front of us handed us a tin of cookies. We had nothing to share, but they knew we had no idea what we were doing. We were guests.

The seats were concrete benches, and everyone was handed a foam pad to cushion your butt cheeks for the three hours of entertainment. Printed on each pad was the name of the Plaza de Toros that I never saw used anywhere else: Casa Misericordia. Mercy House. These were the same red pads that I had seen tossed into the bullring the night before when we stumbled into the end of the last bullfight. After a while, the thin cushion’s effectiveness wears off, and frankly the first five bullfights were almost identical. I was still appreciative of the experience, but after watching the same thing five times in a row, even grisly animal slaughter can grow tiresome.

But all that changed with the sixth and final bull of the night.

This bull was familiar. As my butt had started to fall asleep on one side from sitting for so long on a concrete bunch, it woke up when I saw a brown bull run into the ring with a number 33 branded on his torso. He was ready to Fuck. Shit. Up. This bull was different. The way he moved. The way he used his horns. The speed that he ran. It was clear that he had been identified earlier in the day as the “best bull” and saved for last.

He took his abuse from the picadors and banderillos, but he seemed less effected by the torture than the previous five bulls. By the time the matador slowly walked to the center of the ring, 33 was still full of piss and vinegar. And wanted to show it. We had seen this matador work once already, but with 33 he had the bull mannerisms he needed to really put on a show. The muleta passes were closer and swifter, and the flurry of cape movements were theatrical. As 33 tired, the matador got to work. He stared down the bull, dramatically turned on the balls of his feet, and with his back to the bull he held up his hands for the crowd to cheer. When he turned back around, the bull hadn’t moved.

The matador walked straight to the bull's horns, placed his muleta behind his back, thrust out his hips, and inched toward the bull—matador crotch first— until his pelvis was well within range of being gored by the horns. Even though 33 had been the most aggressive bull both at the encierro and throughout the bullfight— the matador appeared in complete command. He knew what the bull was thinking. How he would react. How he would charge. How he would tire. How he would die.

The matador decided the bull was ready. He was handed the sword and the crowd hushed. Sword behind his head… 33 charged… and…

TWAANNNGGG!!!!!

For the first time all evening, a new sound entered the stadium. It was sharp. Piercing. Metallic. When the matador went in for the kill and his sword was stuck behind the bull's shoulder, 33 flung his head back and snapped the sword in half. The matador, holding the stump of his former blade, was tossed into the air as the bull charged him. The matador's team quickly ran in with their pink and yellow capes and distracted 33 to get him away from their fallen boss. The matador stood up, walked a few paces back toward the bull, and collapsed.

Two men ran to the matador, slung an arm across each of their shoulders, and dragged their injured boss through the tunnel where a team of mules had already carted off five bodies throughout the night. One of the other matadors came out to finish the job. There was little showmanship, just focus. When a second sword was thrust through his back shoulder, 33 fell.

I knew it was inevitable for the bull to be defeated, but I have to admit, I was rooting for him.

And then Paige and I went to watch fireworks.

To Be Continued.

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We got up around 6:30AM. My body ached from the 7.7 miles we walked the day prior. And the 13 miles the day before that. And the 86.9 miles we had walked the 10 days before that. The frantic pace we had been vacationing at wasn’t conducive to 6:30 AM wake-up calls, but if there's one thing to get you out of bed it's the knowledge that today is the day you're going to witness the Running of the Bulls. Our balcony check-in time was 7:30 AM and only a few blocks from where we were staying. The sky was dark and the streets were calm when we shut the large wooden door behind us and locked it with a primitive key. For the first time since arriving in Pamplona, the streets were not alive with licentiousness. In its place, was a team of street cleaners— spraying down the streets with hoses from a water truck. The hose man worked his device like a leaf blower, spraying all the beer bottles, food wrappers, and vomit into the sides of alleyways while another worker in a yellow vest swept the wreckage into the path of a compact streetsweeper van. They were doing a good job. Despite wet shoes, we followed the clean streets to the doorway along Calle Mercaderes that we discovered the previous afternoon. The next steps were unclear, but a white American woman with curly blonde hair introduced herself in perfect Midwestern English and asked for our names. Yvette found our names on a list. When you’re vacationing in a foreign country, it's always reassuring to see your name on a list.

We followed Yvette up the stairs to a second floor apartment where we would be watching the morning’s festivities. We weren't alone. Yvette seemed to be running the show and would break into perfect Spanish from side-conversation to side-conversation. She pointed to an elderly man seated silently in a recliner with a brood of Spaniards watching the local news coverage of the encierro.

“This is his apartment.”

He gave us a little wave and a slight nod. He was happy we were there, I’m sure this was a profitable morning for him.

A family member greeted us warmly and directed us to a collection of pastries and carafes on the kitchen table. We helped ourselves while Yvette introduced us to her other charges for the morning. A family from upstate New York with three young boys would be sharing the balcony with us, and another couple with a baby would be one window bay down with the apartment owner’s family. We chatted with our balcony mates, realizing they were the kind of people that had the financial resources to take three kids between the ages of 6 and 11 to the Pamplona for a family vacation. My parents took us to the Mall of America and Uncle Jim's house growing up.

Calle Mercaders was filling with runners, mostly young men, all wearing the same white shirts and red bandanas that we ourselves had on. Each runner seemed to have their own pre-game routine. Stretching. Jumping. Standing petrified in place. Dead Man's Corner was in full view, Paige heard a rumor they used to grease the intersection to make the collisions more dramatic but had stopped since 6 bulls and 6 steers chasing pedestrians at full speed and attempting a 90-degree turn was good enough. Ambulances parked in alleyways and paramedics were loading out stretchers in advance—preparing for the inevitable.

Yvette came to check on us and asked about our plans for the rest of our time in Pamplona. We casually mentioned we had talked about going to a bullfight, but understood it was impossible to get tickets.

“Do you want tickets? I can get you tickets.”

Paige and I made eye contact. We had raised eyebrows and shrugged shoulders.

“Yes.”

Yvette said she would look into it, but right now there wasn't time. The Running of the Bulls was about to begin.

Our view down the street was obstructed by a bicycle shop— we had to use context clues to get a sense of where the bulls were. Two fireworks fired, the first indicates that a bull left the corral on the other side of town, and the second signals that the last has followed the stampede. We heard both from the balcony. Runners stood erect, hands on hips, staring down Calle Mercaderes for their Minotaur. Then we saw movement. The most cautious started in a casual jog, joined by a few more, and then a few more, and then a torrent of men— bursting from a spigot like a water balloon breaking in the process of filling it. Three black bulls led the way followed by a single brown with the number “33” branded into his torso.

Runners were ducking to the sides, but real estate was scarce. Dead Man's Corner was approaching sooner than they had realized. Three men made the foolish decision to get caught, two avoiding the it horns of the lead bulls by jumping over the wooden barricade, but the last's split second of indecision proved his demise.

He avoided the lead bull by hugging the wooden fence.

But as he attempted to turn toward the other side, the second bull, running on the outside of the 90-degree turn, rammed his body straight into the barricade he was in the process of climbing.

He slipped.

The loss of footing delayed his salvation, allowing the last of the black bulls and brown number 33 to have their turns at abusing this curious target on the oddest day of their bull lives. He had both legs swept out from under him as his arms desperately clutched at the middle beam of the barricade. The black bull and number 33 lost their own footing as they attempted to make the turn into Estafeta, collapsing on top of one another with the runner landing on 33's horns. The brown bull didn't much appreciate this new barnacle. He thrust back his horns as he pulled his hooves splayed on the cobblestones back underneath his body. His legs now underneath him and his center of mass re-established, 33 used his full momentum to toss the runner upward as he clutched to the bull's horns. The runner rolled off the bull's back and laid motionless on the cobblestones as the trailing steers prompted 33 to move along and complete the turn. The runner’s static body disappeared as he was desperately pulled underneath a gap in the bottom of the barricade and out of the path of any additional wildlife.

A few steers trotted casually behind, the bells on their necks jangling to notify everyone that the caboose had arrived.

We heard a third firework, signaling that the first bull entered the corral at the end of the bull ring. And then a fourth.

All the bulls were where they were supposed to be. For now. The encierro was over in less than 3 minutes.

•••

We looked at our balcony mates. From now on we could all tell our friends, family, acquaintances, and annoying coworkers that insist on how interesting they are that we had seen the Running of the Bulls.

And so had their three young kids that were now making hooting noises as if they were playing Mario Kart while watching the replays of the race on the apartment TV. I hope they appreciated the moment as much as I appreciated the Paul Bunyan's Log Chute ride at the Mall of America.

Yvette was eager to make a good impression. When Paige made an off-hand comment on how efficient the whole experience was, Yvette doe-eyed Paige and asked if she would please repeat that exact compliment so she could record it on her iPhone. The two of them trotted off to a corner of the apartment with better lighting while I polished off another pastry and joined the boys watching slow motion replays of the dude that got his shit rocked by #33. When the girls returned, Yvette had an update for us. She had tracked down two bullfight tickets for that night through her elaborate network of Pamplonans eager to make money off tourists. And we were eager to give them our money.

Yvette led us out of the apartment and down Calle Mercaderes for several blocks—the barricades had been slid back to allow for pedestrian traffic— and we met another nondescript male with two flimsy pieces of parchment with a photo of a bull and a timestamp for that evening. Yvette had negotiated a price of 40 Euros per ticket, roughly double the face value, which decimated the remaining Euros we had on hand but was the most obvious purchase of our entire time in Europe. We thanked Yvette and the shady character, went our separate ways, and then Paige and I reworked the entire day's itinerary with this new knowledge.

We were going to a bullfight.

Despite the paramedics treating the less fortunate on stretchers, the party was picking back up. It wasn't quite mid-morning, but the first shift of partiers had just clocked in for a full day's work. It wasn't the free-for-all that the late afternoons and evenings were, meaning the bars were open but you could still walk through the streets without colliding into someone. We found sanctuary in a few different shops and souvenir stands, buying San Fermin wine, craft beer, and discovering that the official names of the San Fermin mascots were Mister Testis and Miss Tetis. As far as cartoon cattle go, they were very formal.

Lunch options were tricky. We had used all our petty cash on bullfight tickets and to order food you had to yell in Spanish over the backs of a mob surrounding a counter with beers in hand. But despite their challenges, the Pamplona restaurants made up for it with amazing names, names that probably came across a little differently to a predominantly Spanish speaking populace but certainly captured the attention of the English tourists.

Every morning of the festival, right after the adults get chased by violent farm animals, the kids get chased by ugly paper mâché people with foam maces. Over 150 years ago, artists created four enormous paper mâché costumes representing a king and queen from Europe, Asia, America, and Africa. They are each around 13 feet tall, and they do a little dance and twirl around as people life them up and down with the gigantic dowels running down their paper mâché spinal columns. But at some point, Pamplona decided to do what Pamplona does best, and inject a little fear and danger into the tradition.

Travelling to the world’s most famous Spanish festival with a high school Spanish teacher that teaches in depth Spanish culture lessons means that I had my personal tour guide throughout the trip, This came in handy when on our way back to the hotel a man with a horse outfit ran me down and whacked the shit out of the back of my neck with a foam weapon. They call it “La comparsa de gigantes y cabezudos,” which translates to, “the parade of giants and big heads.” It's a good name, but they forgot to mention the beating the shit out of you with a foam club part. They keep that a fun surprise.

With a full stomach and a back full of fresh welts, Paige and I retreated to our Air BnB for a 3-hour nap. We had— again— seen some of the most amazing things in our lifetime, but we needed some rest before we topped it all later that evening.

To Be Continued.

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•••

We had been married for a year when Paige and I decided to take one last big trip before kids. We didn't know at the time that getting pregnant was more complicated than just having unsafe sex, which meant the following year we took our “second annual last big trip before kids,” and then when we went to Hawaii the year after that we stopped the joke since it wasn't funny anymore. But in 2017, we were full of hormones and ambition— deciding to cram five European countries into a two-week window since we were convinced that without birth control, we would never get the opportunity to do anything ever again. Iceland had been getting a lot of buzz lately. Icelandic Air had some stopover policy where you could stay up to two weeks on a layover in Iceland without paying extra. I'm not sure if it was really a deal or not, but Iceland sounded cool. While we were in Iceland, we might as well go to England, and while we were in England we might as well go to Ireland, and while we were in Ireland we might as well go to France. Once you start listing off European bucket list items, the itinerary gets full quickly— but the entire schedule centered around one date that was inflexible. We needed to be in Pamplona, Spain in the second week of July to witness the Running of the Bulls.

•••

By the time we arrived in Pamplona, we had been to: Chicago, Dublin, Cork, London, Oxford, Stonehenge, Paris, and Barcelona. Each night we fell asleep with the knowledge we had seen one of the most amazing destinations on earth earlier that day, and each morning we woke up knowing we would be seeing another one later that afternoon. Even after we were through with Pamplona, we still had Madrid and Reykjavik to look forward to. But we weren't looking that far forward. There was too much immediately in front of us.

All our destinations up to this point had been static. We had seen amazing things, but those sites were frozen in place. During the Festival of San Fermin, Pamplona is a powder keg that has been lit in series next to six more powder kegs. And each morning of the festival a new one blows.

We were staying in an Air Bnb— an apartment that promised to be in the heart of the festival. Our Air Bnb host met us at the end of the street where cars were still permitted. A taxi could never make it to the apartment’s doorway through the throngs of college students, tourists, Spaniards, farmers, families, and other humanity—all dressed in white shirt and red scarf, most fully intoxicated or taking a break from the previous day of drinking in preparation for a subsequent day of drinking. Signaled by frantic waving and aided by Google Translate, Miguel guided. He knew these streets— he had traveled them many times before. We felt safe with him, convinced that wherever he led us, it would be ok. These roads were foreign to us, unfamiliar, scary—and the mass of humanity in front of us set us on edge. We followed Miguel down the worn cobblestone streets, dodging one clueless partier and running straight into others in spectacular collision. We would lose sight of Miguel and grow anxious, but when the crowd parted and he was in our line of sight, everything went back to calm. The chaos was unceasing until Miguel led us through a wooden door to our lodging, corralling us safely until we were led back into the frenzy later that evening.

It was Day 3 of the Festival of San Fermin, and we were told it had been “quieter.” Pamplona grades levels of tranquility on a sliding scale. The festival takes place over 9 days, starting on July 6^th. On the morning of July 7^th, six bulls and six steers are released from their stables on one end of old Pamplona until the herd reaches the bullfighting ring a half mile— 826 meters— away. And then they do the same thing each of the next seven mornings. And each morning, drunken and hungover idiots get in their path.

After that they have the rest of the day to party.

By the time we arrived, it had been hours since that morning’s encierro, which meant it had been hours since the street mobs had started to party. There had already been five gorings of runners in the three races, including one in the scrotum. A goring is counted any time the horn of an animal pierces human flesh, which means that if you just get knocked down, trampled by a 1,500-pound animal, tossed by another, and then left in the street while other runners step over the top of your unconscious body— well, that doesn't count on the score sheet. Most of the festival goers know the running total of gorings and are eager to update it each morning.

Another tradition occurred the day before when PETA held their annual topless protest in the public square. This year’s protesters wore horns and wrote “STOP BULL FIGHTS” across their bare chests. Bodies were covered in fake blood and female nipples were covered with pasties (nice of them to keep it family friendly).2

We had no plans of getting intoxicated or naked and covered with fake blood, but we did want to fit in. We located one of many make-shift souvenir tents and bought two white undershirts and matching red bandanas. My Spanish was rusty, but Pamplona is far enough from a major city that the English of the locals wasn't any better than my Español. I used the word for “grandma” instead of “wife” when telling the shopkeeper that I was also purchasing a scarf for Paige, but my gesturing and aggressive finger pointing helped clear up the confusion. Paige and I now looked the part, it was time to get our bearings.

And maybe something to drink.

In Spain, animals have intent.

The six bulls participating in the encierro that still have their testicles were bred and raised their entire lives to serve a single purpose: die at a bullfight. The bull runs begin at 8:00am and last approximately 2 - 3 minutes. At 6:30pm, those six bulls would be tricked, taunted, tortured, and killed inside the Plaza de Toros. And then six more the next day, and six more the next day, and six more the next day, and six more the next day, and six more the next day, and six more the next day, and then six more on the final day. Between 8:03am and 6:29pm though, the time is yours. It was a little after lunch and I was starving. We had no destination in mind as we wandered onto the streets, and neither did anyone else. At least not for a few more hours.

My favorite food in all of Europe was discovered a few days prior at a tapas restaurant in Barcelona. Anywhere that serves food in Spain has their ceilings covered with dangling pig legs—suspended by a cord tied to the pig ankle just below the hoof. The single leg is severed from the rest of the pig down the ass crack, and the rows and rows of hind quarters are lined along rafters in preparation for the next one to be hoisted down, screwed into a vice specifically designed to hold pig asses, and sliced into thinly shaved trimmings of perfectly cured pork only available in Spain. It’s called “jamon iberico” and it’s kind of like prosciutto, only it’s not really like prosciutto. It's fucking amazing. Paige told me that the pigs are only fed acorns and raised their entire lives to serve a single purpose: to be killed, have their asses split in half, dry cured, hung from a ceiling, and eaten. And today, one of them was going to be eaten by me.

Jamon iberico is not hard to find, you just walk down the street and look for the pig asses dangling in the doorways. Specifically designed plastic cups with a skewer are shoved into the bottom to act as drip trays, catching any remaining oils that slowly bleed out of the preserved carcass. We got jamon iberico sandwiches, which consist of jamon iberico and olive oil on a hoagie roll, and a side dish of padron peppers. Padron peppers are small and kind of like shishito peppers, only they're not really like shishito peppers.

As many, many, many had already discovered— the whole meal goes great with lots and lots and lots of sangria.

•••

We made our way to the bull route. Different ranches provide bulls for each day of the festival, and the night before the rancher brings the animals into a pen on the outskirts of Pamplona. We glanced into the corrals, but there wasn’t much to see yet. Paige recorded several videos for her Spanish class’s weekly “Mundo Miercoles” culture lesson, and then we hopped down to Calle Santo Domingo to follow the world's most famous cattle trail.

The streets in the old section of Pamplona are cobblestone and don’t follow a discernible grid. Wooden barricades line the sides of the route and are pushed to the side after the race has ended. As I inspected the frayed planks, it became clear how little separated San Fermin from disaster. But that was understood. That was part of the deal. Down Calle Santo Domingo, the path curves to the left between City Hall and Plaza Consistorial— the location of most of the parties and seminude protesting. The bulls are guided by six steers that run the route year over year and are familiar with the path. Bulls scare easily, and nothing freaks them out more than being isolated and encountering new things. The steers are meant to be a calming influence, docile guides that unwittingly convince their new friends to trample tourists before getting murdered. In Pamplona, there is a lot for a bull to be afraid of.

The herd picks up steam at Calle Mercaderes, which was also the location of our balcony for the next morning. The balconies are on upper-level apartments, and tour companies partner with residents to lease out viewing spaces throughout the festival. We found where we needed to report at 7:00am the next morning and carefully reviewed the instructions sent to us for tomorrow. Paige did an incredible amount of research for the entire European vacation, but her preparation for our time in Pamplona was a doctoral dissertation. The bull path was so windy, and the views so limited, and the options so expensive, that the choice of where to watch the running could make or break the entire outing. I jokingly (half-jokingly) told Paige I wanted to start out in the street and then hop out as soon as I saw a bull— but she wisely forbade me. Instead, she read blog after blog to find the best elevated view out of the path of potential gorings.

Calle Mercederes is known as “La Curva” for its, well, curva— but it meets a hard turn at Calle Estefeta, known as “Dead Man's Corner,” for its, well, dead men at that corner. It is there that 12 animals, each weighing between 1,500 and 2,000 pounds, must pull up from a dead sprint and make a 90-degree turn. Newton's first law states that an object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an equal and opposite reaction, and his second law states that force equals mass multiplied by acceleration. If you do the math, that means that a bunch of bulls are going to have a really fucking hard time making that turn. Which means these minotaurs slam against the wooden barricades, get trapped, freak out, and ruin anyone's day stupid enough to get stuck in that corner with him. Paige made sure she got us balcony seats in perfect view of the corner.

•••

We followed the cobblestones down Calle Estefeta, the final stretch before the bulls enter the stadium and are corralled until the bullfights later that evening. As we hiked down this final run, there was a new noise— just barely noticeable at first—and then unavoidable. To this point, all we had heard was uncoordinated chaos, but coordinated chaos was picking up steam behind us. We were pummeled by the unmistakable noise of poorly played tubas. It was nearly 6:00pm, and the partygoers were more organized than I had realized. As the masses approached from behind, fiberglass tuba bells peaked above the white shirts, red scarfs, bedsheet banners, and poorly tuned drums. They were playing instruments that had clearly been in the family for decades for this sole purpose— and were singing, screaming, chanting, and drinking.

We let them overtake us, stepping to the side of the wooden barricades while the stampede proceeded past our small bodies and into the bull ring. The scene was odd and amusing. Bullfighting seemed to be something noble, involving pageantry and tradition, but these drunken adolescents descended into the stadium with less uniformity and reverence than a fraternity during a college football homecoming game. But they sure were excited about it. We were later told that Pamplona carries a stigma with it amongst bullfighting. It's the Waste Management Phoenix Open of bullfighting tournaments. Some matadors feed off the frenzy of the debauchery, but most of the serious ones feel it’s disgraceful to the artform and refuse to participate. But with bullfighting having been outlawed in Mexico, the venues for this pastime have dwindled and the festival of San Fermin has a lot of bulls to slaughter. Someone has to do it.

Tickets to bullfights are sold out years in advance with families purchasing season passes to all the fights throughout the festival. At no point did the topic of attending a bull fight come up in our trip planning. Until now. We found a kiosk outside the stadium to see how much a seat cost, learning of their sellout streak in the process. We noticed another ticket available for purchase, and after some translating, learned you could sit in the stands to watch the conclusion of the morning's encierro from stadium bleachers. We had only purchased the balcony view for one morning, and we were scheduled to be in Pamplona for two more days, so we bought passes with little idea what it was. Like the rest of the trip to Pamplona, I just let the day's plans unfold ahead of us and tried to stay out of the way.

There were plenty of ways to kill time, all that was needed was a place to people watch and a bottle of sangria—both of which we had plenty. We didn't venture far from the bull ring. There was a bust of Ernest Hemingway and a stand that sold keychains we later converted into a Christmas ornament. Cheers and tuba music could be heard from the grandstands inside as we watched breakdancing outside in blocked off streets. As time passed, crowds started to form outside the gates of the arena with an undisclosed purpose. They were waiting for something as patiently as a group of twenty-somethings could, who had run out of beer in the ice buckets they had been carrying around everywhere they went. There was one last cheer from inside, this one louder than all the rest, and the attendants swung open the gates to the stadium and a mob rushed inside. Paige and I made eye contact. We both raised our eyebrows and shrugged our shoulders— and without a word we cautiously followed the masses trespassing inside the bullfighting arena.

We tentatively walked around the overturned beer buckets and avoided the puddles of melting ice. The concourse wasn't vast, but it felt iconic. It had that authentic feel that old baseball parks do. The kind of aura that the walls had seen things that predated corporate sponsorships and tax increment financing. If the stadium had been in the United States, some planning board or ownership group would have pressured the City Council for renovations decades ago.

But this was Pamplona. Things were done differently here. We followed the roar and passed through an entryway to the grandstands unabated by any ushers or security. Inside was pandemonium. Screams, cheers, and tubas made it pointless to attempt speaking— not that Paige or I had any words for the scene we were taking in. A dead bull laid at the center of the ring and was in the process of being dragged out by a team of mules, harnessed to the toro carcass like reindeer pulling a Christmas sleigh. The exterior gates had opened when the final bull of the night was slain. It was as close as Pamplona comes to an attempt at crowd control— opening the vessel as wide as possible to allow the patrons to exit, making no attempt at obstructing the stampede of patrons without the funds or the hookups for bullfight tickets trying to get inside. We stood in the aisle as the crowd grew restless.

Each of the three evening’s matadors slowly walked to the center of the ring, saluted the crowd, and followed the path left in the sand by the dragging of bull carcasses. A beer bottle shattered on the floor inches from where I was standing. The blast of glass shards and the piercing noise indicated that it must have been tossed from the stadium deck above. I grew nervous. The mob of bullfight enthusiasts— fueled by booze and the hot Spanish sun— started hopping over the backs of bleachers, past families collecting their things, and stormed the center of the bullring. The fiberglass tubas were lowered across the wooden barriers meant to prevent a one-ton animal from goring the crowd. The motley crew of makeshift pep bands started the after party where six animals had been slain over the last two hours. No efforts were made to stop the pulse of drunkards, but with their absence in the stands my anxiety was sated.

“Should I go?”

“Yes. But I'm not. Take pictures.”

I joined the mob.

The side of the bullring had wooden panels periodically placed to allow for people to hide behind as the bull chased them. I closely inspected one of these barricades, freshly splintered wood could be seen from where the bull's horn pierced the plank and dug a cavity through the paint. There were standing pools of blood throughout the ring, puddling up from earlier and yet to be ground into the terrain by the hordes of tuba players. I walked to the center and took a panoramic photo of the scene around me. All 360 degrees of raucous festival goers, descending on the bullring like a student section storming the court after beating the Kansas Jayhawks.

I climbed back over the sides of the bullring, found my wife, and then found a slice of pizza, jamon iberico sandwich, and a 2-liter bottle of sangria for 8,80 euros.

To Be Continued.

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I live in Omaha, Nebraska along with a whole lot of white people. I grew up in Grand Island, Nebraska along with a whole lot of other white people. In high school, my friend Mike Beckton and I had this running joke when watching varsity boy’s basketball where we counted how many black kids were on each team and used that as the basis for deciding the game’s outcome. We called it the “black guy count” and the Grand Island Islanders were always at a significant deficit. Especially when we played a team from Omaha. In an era before analytics and Moneyball had taken over athletics, Mike and I were pioneers in using predictive statistics and applying them toward sports outcomes. It was pretty accurate too— Grand Island lost a lot of basketball games.

When I moved to Omaha for college, my life and environment changed drastically. In many ways the culture of Grand Island and Omaha could not be more different. People took pride in being from Omaha rather than lamenting how they got stuck in GI and wished they had moved a long time ago. People rallied around the College World Series and restaurants that appeared on Food Network shows rather than bitching about how rival-city Kearney got an Applebee's before we did. And I met kids my age that grew up in Omaha, decided to go to college in Omaha, and planned on living in Omaha afterward. By choice. This was unfathomable in Grand Island. But with all the excitement of the big city, there was still enough of home that was familiar and comforting. Husker football still united the town, even though it was miserable to watch. I could still buy sweet corn from the back of someone's pickup parked at the corner of a major intersection. I still ate a Runza on a monthly basis. And, well, the people around me felt familiar too. They were all white. This wasn’t on purpose—my freshman year I even joined a church group where my three closest friends were Chinese, Mexican, and black— but once I realized how sketchy that church was and moved on, so did those friendships. I started hanging out with white people again.

My perception of Omaha is limited to my experiences, and it takes a little while to realize your experiences aren't the same as everyone else's. To a local, all you need to say is “I live in West O” or “I live in North O” to drive this point home. West O is suburbia. West O is wealth. West O is where people pay for yard care and outsource hanging up Christmas lights. West O is white. I live in West O.

To someone who lives in West O, North O only comes up when someone tells you to “just avoid that area, especially at night.” North O is crime. North O is gangs. North O is drugs. North O is black.

How much this perception is true depends on who you ask and what kind of stories they have. But since most white people stay out of that part of town, the only stories they have are the bad ones that didn't happen to them—but rather happened to a guy they knew who heard it from a buddy of his cousin. If you get turned around trying to drive downtown and (God forbid) end up on Ames Street or Lake Street, you mutter “oh fuck,” lock the doors, and take the quickest side street you can find to head South.

How many people do I know that have actually had something bad happen to them in North O? Zero. But North O is still scary.

No one from West O really has any idea what North O is like.

•••

On May 25th, 2020 in Minneapolis an event happened that changed a lot of minds. I remember the hooded sweatshirts when Trayvon Martin was killed in Florida. I remember LeBron James wearing “I CAN'T BREATHE” clothing during warmups at some NBA game. I even wrote an essay defending Colin Kaepernick. But I barely remember these events. None of them upset my status quo. None made my life any different. All of these injustices were easy to fade into the background, because what it’s like to be black is completely lost on me. Because I’m not black.

George Floyd's death was different— it couldn’t be ignored. It was a rallying cry. A scream. When I visited my sister in 2021, I stopped by the site of Floyd’s murder outside of Cup Foods. The streets were blocked off by homemade barricades and 24-hour martial law prevented anyone from entering that didn’t treat the site with reverence. There was a sign at the entry reading “this is a sacred place.”

And it was.

This disruption revealed something. A reality that was too easily ignored because it was not the reality that I was confronted by day in and day out. But that didn't make it any less real. Like Neo in The Matrix, I was given the red pill and my eyes were opened. Just slightly. And they hurt because I had never used them before.

Omaha, like every major city, was in uproar. Protests necessitated citywide curfews and riot gear. One downtown bar owner killed a protester after a questionable confrontation— leading to a month-long controversy ultimately ending in the suicide of the bar owner pending his inevitable trial.1 Windows were smashed. Pepper spray was effused. Tear gas clouded the streets. One protestor suffered cornea damage when a pepper ball hit him in the eye.2

I stayed home.

•••

Enter Terence “Bud” Crawford.

I’ve never watched a boxing match. I don't even know if it’s called a “match.” Maybe it's a boxing “fight,” but I don't really know. I've seen all the Rocky movies, so I know the sport is ripe for a good against-­all-odds-underdog story. The closest I’ve been to being an underdog is being a Nebraskan. I love being from Nebraska. I have no desire to live anywhere else, but people that aren’t from Nebraska are surprised to hear you admit that. They assume you’re a bit embarrassed. They feel safe making fun of your state. After all, “what’s there even to do in Nebraska?” But I’m proud of where I’m from, and when others show that same pride, I am proud they are from Nebraska too.

What happens when these two worlds collide? One that I know nothing about, and another I know everything about? It looks a little like a kid that grew up in North O becoming the greatest athlete alive. It looks like a shredded black man on ESPN highlights, wearing trunks that say “OMAHA” and a flat bill hat with the Husker “N” on it. I have no idea what makes a great boxer, but I know a great ambassador when I see it. And as more and more people told me how great Bud Crawford was, the more I saw him. And cheered for him. And was proud of him. He became unavoidable, and I started to care a little about boxing. Not so much the sport, but the boxer.

About every 6 months I heard about Bud's next fight against a guy that was supposedly really good. I would forget when the fight was, and then I would hear Bud won. Again. By knockout. It just kept happening. When he beat a guy named Errol Spence, Omaha got real excited because he had “unified” four belts. I still don't know how boxing works. I thought he was already the undisputed champion of the world, and I wasn't really sure how you could become even more undisputed. But people were pumped. Bud had united something people thought couldn’t be brought together. Something that seemed impossible— until Bud did it.

Omaha wanted to thank him, so the mayor threw him a parade. Since there are no professional sports teams in Omaha, we’ve never had a championship to celebrate. I had to go— I couldn’t stay home.

As I parked my car half a mile away from the end of the parade route, I heard the steady pulse of rap periodically interrupted by a guy on a mic yelling things in a cool way that got people riled up. I found a shady spot next to a man carrying a dog in a backpack and started sending text updates to my wife. With the exception of the guy with his head half-shaved exposing the tattoo of a marijuana leaf, I let my wife know that there were “not a lot of white people here.”

I didn't put any thought into who would show up to a Bud Crawford parade— and this wasn't your typical Creighton basketball crowd. I pieced together later that the parade organizers reached out to North Omaha and African American organizations to participate. They represented the community that supported Crawford throughout his career and they take ownership of where he came from. These are the kids that want to grow up to be just like him. The families that went to watch him before he was seen by a pay-per-view audience. And then there was me— the white guy from West O that just wanted to go to a parade. But I was still excited.

The parade planners wanted this event to represent a group of people that doesn't get a lot of representation. I had no idea how many step dancing groups were active in my city and hadn't heard of any of the black-owned food trucks parked on the curb. When Bud Crawford came out on a motorboat pulled by a pickup— I just smiled and shrugged. I wanted to ask the lady next to me carrying a fishing net to explain it to me, but I wasn't quite ready to out myself as completely clueless.

The parade route ended at an outdoor pavilion where a rally was supposed to follow. Everything was running behind schedule, but that didn't damper spirits. I bought a chocolate chip cookie. The man in front of me told the story of his nephew placing a considerable wager on Bud’s fight, and now he was buying a home in Seattle. There were a lot of ways to profit off of Crawford.

When the rally finally got underway, a woman belted out the Star-Spangled Banner followed by another who sang a gospel hymn. The event was MC'ed by the hosts of a sports radio show I had never heard of— but I recognized one of the personalities from his previous gig discussing Husker football in the morning drive timeslot on 1620AM. No one was in much of a hurry. One of the guys made the DJ play a pump-up rap song repeatedly so the crowd could sing the next line a cappella. It took several tries. I didn’t know the song, but everyone else did.

Mayor Jean Stothert had a history of supporting Bud Crawford, giving him a key to the city and sponsoring the day's festivities. I've consistently voted for her. She was introduced first and got a nice response, but from there the politics of the crowd became a bit more apparent. A chorus of boos ensued when Mayor Stothert handed the mic off to U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts— the former Governor, silver spooned, Trump-backed, heir to the TD Ameritrade trust fund (at least until his family sold the locally owned business for a fat payday while he was still in charge of the state's economy). Governor Jim Pillen didn't fare any better, and when Congressman Don Bacon was introduced, the first thing I heard was a loud “ahhh hell nah” shouted from the man behind me.

It wasn’t exactly their political base.

Only Congressman Bacon tried to use the moment for campaign purposes.

“I see Bud out there in the community because I'm out there with him!”

The comment didn't turn the volume down on his detractors and felt a bit desperate.

The next two speakers went smoother. One was a City Council member I didn't know, the other was a bureaucrat working in some public office that I didn't know. Both did a nice job. Both got a nice response from the crowd. Both were black.

The event had a noticeable lack of structure, but not a lack of hype. There were cool montage videos of fights I didn’t tune in for and congratulatory video messages from rappers I didn’t listen to. I knew who Shaguille O’Neal was though, his video was pretty cool. I started getting text messages from my wife about how all hell was breaking loose at home. I left and watched Bud's speech later on YouTube.

•••

Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation centered around the question: how much does man control his own fate? Aristotle also chewed on this one quite a bit. Both seemed to conclude: not a whole lot. Assert this notion today and it can come across as not only counterintuitive, but cruel. Who are you to tell me what I can and cannot do? Who are you to tell me my limits? Who are you to determine my destiny without my input? I don't think this is a black or a white thing, I actually think it's a uniquely American thing.

How does that resonate to a community that has been given little to affirm their worth and voice? What does it feel like to be from North O? I still don't know. But from what I heard on that hot afternoon as a microphone was passed from one excited person to another, growing up in North O seems to look a bit different than growing up in Grand Island, Nebraska.

People talked about Bud coming from a hard place— the same place much of that crowd came from— yet through hard work he was able to overcome and become something great. It's easy to understand why this hero got the parade and Pete Ricketts got the boos.

So what's the lesson? Work hard? That's at least what the banner leading one of the many step-dance troops advised me to do.

“No excuses. Do the Work.”

This theme was unavoidable. But there was another slogan on a different step-dance banner that struck me.

“With God on our side, we can't be beat.”

The road to success starts by submitting to a power greater than yourself. You can’t do it on your own.

Both slogans felt odd to me. I came from the world of competitive marching band where sloganeering was absent from our parade banners. I wasn't sure what the context of being “beat” was in reference to. Are there step-dance competitions decided by the hands of the Almighty? Probably not.

“No excuses. Do the work.” and “With God on our side, we can't be beat!” aren't truisms for a parade, they’re truisms for life. These slogans had little to do with inspiring kids to be good at booty-shaking and pounding on out of tune drums. They were meant to inspire youth to rise to something greater. But aren't the maxims at odds with one another? We were at a parade to celebrate someone who overcame unimaginable odds by growing up in the rough part of a rather unremarkable city in a rather unremarkable state. His surroundings dictated Terence Crawford couldn’t do what he did. But he did.

Then again, lots of people work hard. And there’s only one Bud Crawford. You need something more than just doing the work. You need something else on your side.

So which is it? Does it matter where you came from or not? Do you have to do the work, or just get God on your side? This is a bit of a stupid question. Of course both things can be true, but which truth do you embody? Which truth propels you? Which truth do you use to inspire? Which truth do you tell a bunch of kids growing up in a poor neighborhood that are daily confronted with racism and a lack of self-worth to make them feel their lives matter? Does the idea you are in charge of your destiny provide comfort when you see so many people around you, people you love and admire, in a setting that lacks so much? Or does the surrounding hardship illustrate that God isn't really on your side after all? Is it your fault? Or God’s? Or your fault for not getting on the side of God?

I think we all struggle with these questions at a certain level, but it's easier to ignore the implications when your life is easy. When it's always been easy. When no one has ever subtly or overtly made you feel like you were less valued because of something you can’t control.

I don't know which slogan I would put on my banner.

•••

“It’s not just me winning. We all win.3”

This was the headline on the Omaha World Herald newspaper the next day. This was Bud’s message. Bud represents all of us standing in that crowd.

I felt like an imposter most of that afternoon, but nobody tried to make me feel that way. The unfamiliar can be easily mistaken for the unwelcoming. When one of Bud's posse asked everyone in the crowd to hold up a number 1 index finger so he could take a selfie, I looked around to gauge if it was appropriate for me to take part. I wanted to be part of the moment, but I felt it wasn't meant for me.

Yet I was still there.

There is something unifying about sports. In Nebraska the same conversation about Husker football can be heard from my daughter's YMCA volleyball game, a comic bookstore, a dive bar in a farm town, and a boxing gym in North O. Our teams represent something greater than just the players on it. A boxer can become a symbol for more than just a guy good at punching people. Why do we sing “We are the Champions” when most of us did nothing to earn it? Is it because in a way—from the environment, to the people, to the community, to the cheer, to the fervor— We actually were a part of something?

It wasn’t lost on me that the last time a group of this size gathered in downtown Omaha, it was to protest the blind eye that society gives to a particular group of people. Now many of those same people were there in celebration of one of their own.

One of our own.

I don't know if that's progress or not, but it felt nice to see. And I have a feeling the guy standing next to me in the crowd smoking a roach would have agreed.

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“Dylan wanted to be here tonight, but not that badly.”

-Conan O'Brien, while hosting the 2025 Academy Awards

“I saw, ah what was her name, that lady, she had a beautiful voice. Shoot. Who was that?… JUDY COLLINS. I saw Judy Collins here.”

“My family took me to Riverdance here. It was amazing. Have you ever seen Riverdance?”

“Yeah, I mean no, I haven't seen it.”

“It was amazing.”

“I saw that show they do every Christmas.”

“The Christmas one?”

“Yeah…ummm… who was it... they do it every Christmas.”

“Oh I know who you're talking about I think.”

“Yeah, like each Christmas they come.”

“Skip Davis.”

“YEAH. Skip Davis.”

I needed an usher to help me find Row S Seat 50. The Orpheum Theater in downtown Omaha uses section names I'm not familiar with. Like cup sizes at Starbucks, each name means nothing in it of itself, but is chosen to mislead you into thinking that every seat is as important as the one in the section next to it. They aren’t. I was seated in “Gallery,” which translates to “Shit.”

Per Bob Dylan's request, my cell phone and the cell phones of all the other patrons had been locked in fabric pouches— eliminating them from distracting from the experience, or maybe it was to avoid unwanted recordings ruining whatever surprises Bob had up his 83-year-old sleeves. Either way, for better or worse, people were forced to talk to one another. In seats 26 and 28— the seats next to mine that for some reason only functioned in even numbers— sat two men that had spent many more years listening to Bob Dylan than I had. This was a special moment for them, a treat, someone truly great would have to be playing for these blue collar retirees to scrounge together $64.50 before fees and taxes to collect two Gallery seats in the very last row of The Orpheum. They reminded me of Statler and Waldorf, the grumpy old Muppets that sat in the balcony during Muppet Show performances and criticized how ridiculous and amateur all the acts were. But instead of unimpressed cynics, these two men could not have been more enamored.

“We came here in high school for one of my classes… my Spanish class, to see a play. It was that one famous one.”

“The Spanish one?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah I think I know that one.”

“Don Quixote.”

“Yeah.”

•••

I was there by myself. Tickets weren't cheap or readily available, and neither my wife nor I were really Bob Dylan fans. About a year ago, she found an old ticket stub her mom kept from when she saw Elvis play at the “Omaha Auditorium Arena” on “1976 THURSDAY Evg. Apl. 22.” The ticket was $12.50, which adjusted for inflation is about what my Gallery seat for Dylan was, only she was in the second row. I didn't grow up listening to Dylan, my only knowledge of his catalog were those songs you organically heard but never sought out. The kind where you ask, “who sings that again? ah, that's right.” But I knew Bob Dylan was a big deal. I knew it would be cool to be able to say I saw him.

I did my homework ahead of time. It wasn't hard, Timothée Chalamet had made Bob Dylan cool again. Shortly after buying my ticket, Paige and I watched the epic tale of Bob telling the folk music world that made him famous to go fuck itself. He wanted to use an electric guitar and play music that everyone at the big folk concert he was headlining hated. The drama makes you feel for Bob— the misunderstood creative that is fighting the establishment in the name of artistic freedom. A Man vs. the State type of story device, except the State is a bunch of humble, banjo playing, “aww shucks Bob wouldn't you like to just play the folk music, after all it is a folk music festival” kind of people. This system of oppression must be destroyed. And Bob Dylan is exactly the aloof don’t-give-a-fuck-I-do-what-I-want kind of man for the job.

In the movie, the hero prevails. Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan shoved his electric guitar so far up Pete Seeger’s suspender wearing ass that the hillbilly sang his pussy folksy twang with distortion.

•••

I found a record of Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits and for weeks leading up to the show I played it on loop while drying dishes. I watched a Netflix documentary about some dope-filled tour Bob and his vagabond minstrel friends did. They played a bunch of music no one had ever heard and filled arenas so the world could get a glimpse of Bob. Martin Scorsese directed it— he just thought the whole thing was fucking great.

I liked the greatest hits album, at least a lot of it.

•••

I got to The Orpheum early. I brought a book and journal in my trendy shoulder bag, but my 21st century brain had been too hardwired for immediate gratification and short attention spans. With my phone locked in a fabric pouch under my seat, I was restless. I asked the usher if she knew where I could get a paper ticket stub, and she told me to ask the box office to print me one. I gathered three days of rations, wrote a quick last will and testament in case I was lost during the voyage, and threw down a rappel line from my Gallery seat to scale to base camp. The ladies at the ticket desk were real sweethearts. They were grateful and pleased to give me exactly what I wanted. I left them with a note for my loved ones in case I didn't return and started the trek back to the summit of Gallery Row S Seat 50.

I passed back through the phone line, but was expedited since my mobile device was still locked away. One middle aged woman spoke loudly to no one in particular. She adopted the kind of tone self-proclaimed expert travelers reserve for TSA officers after they’ve been politely asked to follow proper airport safety protocols.

“Oh, I’ve been to a Bob show before, I know how this works. I've been to Bob alright. This isn't my first time. Yup. I sure know.”

•••

The curtain was drawn and the sparse stage setup seemed in keeping with Dylan's sparse demeanor. A monstrous overhead tripod lamp was tucked in a corner, a steampunk industrial looking contraption that could have been a prop for a spotlight in a 60s era prison break film. A drum set was elevated on a platform and guitars were scattered across the stage, resting in racks and clumped together in several stations. In the center, was a monstrous grand piano. I wasn't sure what that was for.

I had ample time to study the instruments through the Bushnell binoculars I smuggled in next to the jailed cellphone in my shoulder bag. My seatmates were deep in thought— trying to come up with the other six times either of them had been at The Orpheum—when the spotlight clicked on, the house lights dimmed, and out walked a decrepit old-man, hunched over with a mop of graying hair. As he shuffled across the stage, his eyes never lifted from a spot on the floor three feet in front of him.

He sat down at the piano. Three men in stylish sportscoats and non-corresponding cool hats took their places at their stations. They moved a lot quicker than their bandmate. The no-names started in on a little ditty, but not one I recognized. I wasn’t alarmed. It's a common concert parlor trick to play your middle of the road songs early because the audience is just excited for the show to start. You save the big hits for later to give the crowd a jolt right about when the novelty wears off. The “I wonder when he is going to play…” anticipation builds suspense until the audience feels a cathartic release when the artist nonchalantly starts in on those oh-so-familiar opening chords. There's an exhale, a relief, a sense of I-thought-you-forgot-about-me-but-of-course-you-wouldn't-forget-to­-play-the-song-that-made-me-fall-in-love-with-your-music. After all, how could he possibly forget? We hadn't hit that moment yet, the band was just warming up.

Bob started to play his grand piano.

“BLAM, BONG, BANG, BANGBANG-BANG—BANG, BLON, BLIM… BLAM—BLAM-BING”

Bob's piano was very hot in the mix.

“mmmb mmmbbbmmm and then we bought a truck mmmbbbmmbbmmm it cost more than a buck mmmmbbbbmmm”

And his vocals were not.

Ok, well an old man like Bob probably didn’t bother with a sound check and pianos are tricky to mic. It'll be better once he inevitably switches to guitar. That can't be long.

“BLAN BONG BONG BLAN-BING—BONG—BING-BING mmmbbb mmnnnmmm and then we got in the truck...mbbmmmnnmm BLAM BOB-BLAM mmbbbmmmm and the truck was on the road BLAM-BIM-BLAN”

The Julliard caliber backing musicians were locked into one another. The beret wearing drummer was a little high in the mix, but they were professionals. They got it dialed in.

“and then the truck kept driving BLAM-BING-BING-BLLLAN mmbbum we drove all day long mmbbb BING—BINGBING-BLOM mmbmmmm”

The only problem getting in the way was Bob's mumbling, wandering, mop of a head and his gorilla hands pounding on the keys.

APPLAUSE.

The opening song was over. A man four rows ahead of me stood in ovation, another from the adjacent section joined him. They were fucking loving it.

I waited for Bob to get up, pick up his guitar (acoustic or electric, I didn't care which) and keep the momentum going with one of his hits. The second song is usually a good time for one or those. There is so much excitement at the beginning that you can send the crowd into a frenzy with an immediate reward for sitting through the opening number. And come on, Bob has so many hits, it will take him a while to get through them all. He might as well get a couple done early.

“and then we got back in the truck mmbbbmrmm BLAN BING BONG the truck had a long way to go mmbbbmmmmn”

The two men sat back down.

This pattern repeated itself uninterrupted by any sort of commentary from Mr. Dylan. As soon as the truck ran out of gas, he found a fill station and got right back on the same interstate. Every fifth song the same man four rows in front of me stood up in a standing ovation, followed by his lackey the section over, and then they sat back down once the truck got back on the road. I was starting to get carsick, but not my seatmates.

“Did you recognize that one?”

“Huh?”

“Did you know that song?”

“Uh, I think so.”

“Yeah I think it was that ‘You and Me Babe’ one.”

"Yeah."

I wasn't sure either.

•••

The pattern was broken. Bob stood up.

Fuck yeah, here we go. Bust out that harmonica and let’s get this shit moving.

I hadn’t noticed before, but there was a reading light propped on the top of his piano. Similar reading lights were at the foot of each musician's station, presumably illuminating the night's setlist. But Bob took longer to study his than the cursory glance his bass player gave between truck stops. I grabbed my binoculars.

Bob was on his feet in front of his piano bench, flipping through a three-ring binder. He played the next song standing up, eyes reading from the pages.

“...the truck was a little old mmmbbbmmm BLAM BING BONG... the inside was yellow with upholstery and smelled a little like mold... mmmbbmm BLIM BANG- BING—BING-BING BLOM”

Guy four rows up stood and clapped, followed by his sidekick.

•••

When Bob addressed the crowd for the first time, I checked my wristwatch. He had played for an hour and 43 minutes before he said a word to the audience. He introduced each member of the band and then started the grand finale.

“I always loved that old truck mbbbmmm BLIM-BING I felt it had a lot of luck mmmbbmmm BING-BONG-BLAM- BING—BONG—BONG— BONG— BOO0OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGG”

Bob stood up, backed away from his piano, and the crowd erupted. He hobbled like a movie monster, his gaze still fixed on a spot three feet in front of him. He walked to the back of the stage, made eye contact with the crowd for the first time, and allowed the audience to soak him in applause and admiration. He didn't speak. No “good night.” No “thank you.” He never once said the word “Omaha,” I doubted he even knew what city he was in.

He looked back down three feet in front of him and crept offstage. His band followed behind, leaving their instruments at their stations. The stage lights beamed as the applause crescendoed in anticipation.

And the house lights flicked on. My seatmates were confused.

"What? Is that it? They're not doing an encore?”

“Yeah, I guess not.”

“Huh.”

“Hmm.”

“Huh.”

•••

It took a while to get out of The Orpheum, the sold-out crowd bottlenecked to one of two stations where their phones could be unlocked. Since we couldn't yet retreat to our mobile devices, the concertgoers were forced to talk to one another.

“I didn’t realize he was such a piano player.”

I didn’t have that realization.

•••

As soon as the phones were freed, they were put to immediate use.

“Yeah I just got out… it was good... well it was a little weird, he didn't play a single hit... it was fun though.”

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that someone who didn't attend his own Nobel Prize ceremony didn't really care about giving the crowd what they wanted.
Maybe it was that kind of attitude that made Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan. If he cared, he would cease to be Bob Dylan. But then again, how hard would it be to just play a song the crowd paid an obscene amount of money to hear?

As I was walking to my car, I saw Bob's tour bus pull away. He was onto his next show before I even had time to text my wife I was on my way home.

Whatever I thought about the concert, one thing was clear: Bob Dylan didn't give a shit.

After all, he's Bob Dylan.

It was cool that I got to see him.

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“I don’t want the spirit, I want the kick drum

I don't want the spirit, I want the kick drum

I know how it works, oh I'm not dumb

I don't want the spirit, I want the kick drum”1

-Derek Webb

They say your music taste doesn't change after high school, but the ways I thought about music certainly did.

I went to college on a really good scholarship. The kind of scholarship where all financial concerns were removed and all I had to do was focus on my studies— just focus on my studies and save the souls of all my classmates. It was nice not having to worry about money.

I knew two others from my hometown that had the same scholarship. One was an odd kid from my church that drank spoonfuls of colloidal silver each night to protect him from the flu, the other was a football player that moved from California whose dad was my freshman year English teacher. I loved my freshman year English class. Mr. Zach would lead wholesome class discussions, and then show movies to get caught up on grading. When we were working through The Odyssey, he found a 70s era film adaptation and replayed a scene where someone was eaten by a water monster roughly nine times.

“Wait for it… Wait for it… BOOM! That guy just got munched, let's watch that again… Ok, here it comes… And…GOT HIM! One more time…”

The peanut gallery groaned in annoyance with each additional viewing, but I thought it got funnier each time.

Before he started the Romeo and Juliet movie, Mr. Zach made a disclaimer.

“Ok, here's the deal. There's a point in this movie where I'm going to tell everyone to look away. Just please, let’s all be mature, and do me a favor and just look away.”

When Juliet's perky nipples flashed across the scene after a romantic evening with Romeo, Mr. Zach looked up from his grading.

“Whoops.”

And he went back to work.

Mr. Zach had a son a year older than me, a daughter my age, another son two years younger, and a gaggle of other children yet to reach high school. I got to know Sharon from class and Phil from drumline, but I didn’t cross paths with Tim the oldest. Tim’s status as an athlete isolated him from just about every social circle I swam in, particularly because when Mr. Zach encouraged me to join the Fellowship of Christian Athletes each year, I'd avoid the topic by simply saying, “I’m not an athlete.” Mr. Zach was insistent that it didn't matter, and I believed him, but I still didn't think I would fit in. I was more of a Christian musician. Those were my people.

I knew I liked Mr. Zach. I knew I liked Phil. I knew I liked Sharon. I even liked Sharon’s boyfriend that was recently given Mr. Zach’s permission to date his daughter. I figured if I wanted to make my first college friend, Tim would be an obvious place to start. I sent Tim a Facebook message before moving to Omaha to ask how the textbook reimbursements worked for our scholarship. He offered to sell me his old books at a discount, and on dorm room move-in day, I found his room on the second floor of the Scott Hall dormitory to collect my bounty. Tim gave me the textbooks, handwrote me a receipt on notebook paper to turn in for reimbursement (which was later denied), and asked me a simple question that changed our friendship forever.

“Hey, do you have a car?”

●●●

Tim had four cousins in a Christian rock band called Remedy Drive, and they were playing a show later that week 45 minutes away in their hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska. Tim really wanted to go, but he needed transportation. I was eager to make an impression and accepted the invitation to be his personal chauffeur on the spot. A couple days later, during my first-ever week of college, in the middle of my first-ever month of living on my own, Tim and I drove for a week-night show that a year ago I would have never been permitted to go to on a school night. But my parents were no longer in charge of my concert schedule.

Tim's family had just moved from Grand Island to Lincoln after his dad got a job as the Principal of Lincoln Christian Elementary School. It was a dream job of sorts, and as Tim knocked on their door to greet his family ahead of the concert, I wasn't greeted by my old English teacher Mr. Zach.

But by Rod. My friend’s dad.

And he was just as happy to see me as I was happy to see anyone familiar after a week of homesickness.

I met the rest of Tim's family. It was great to see Phil again and Sharon was there with her boyfriend Seth, but Tim’s mom and the nest of Von Trapp siblings were just as welcoming. The youngest of the family was Joel, a little tough guy that Phil and Seth loved to tease and who had a wall of Remedy Drive posters— each one autographed by his four cousins and inscribed to “Cool dude Joel.” Joel had been a fan since day one and had the posters to prove it.

Remedy Drive was performing their first concert in Lincoln after being signed by Warner Brothers music and releasing a studio album. It was their big break and their big homecoming, and the Zach family couldn't wait to see their freshly famous first-cousins. The show took place in the cavernous gym of a Lutheran church. Tim met up with his cousin Paul, the guitarist, ahead of time and asked him about the acoustics. He said he thought it would be ok, but it would be hard to tell until the gym was filled with people. It wasn't ok. The sound bounced off the walls, like, well, a rock band in a church gymnasium. But it was of little consequence. I had never heard of Remedy Drive, and I certainly was hopping on a bandwagon by ignoring their music careers until the Warner Brothers release of the album “Daylight is Coming,” but I liked what I heard. Liked it. Didn't love it. But I liked it. The songs were catchy, and the show was entertaining. They let us know they had been nominated for a Dove Award— which is like the Grammys, if the Grammys were just for Christians, and has nothing to do with soap. It seemed like I should have been impressed by this, the room certainly was, but I needed to have the award explained to me a bit more first. But either way, I hoped they’d win. They were good dudes. This seemed important to them.

Tim stuck around at the merch table after to say hi to each of his cousins and asked if I wanted to see the inside of their tour bus. Without an escort, Tim walked me straight into the mobile home and pointed to a note they had taped to the fridge:

“How good and pleasant it is when brothers live in unity.”

-Psalm 133:1

●●●

Tim invited me to attend his church, and since I didn't have any other leads on churches in Omaha, I accepted. Tim seemed to have a slew of friends, and they all were Christians. They took being a Christian seriously. Real seriously. More seriously than anyone I had ever met back in my hometown. And I found it refreshing. They took the Bible seriously, they took going to church seriously, they took evangelism seriously. Real seriously. And they took the consequences of failure in any of those areas seriously as well. I felt a growing cloud of conviction hang over me throughout the day. I started culling the songs in my iPod, deleting the gangsta rap I had been given on a burned CD as a graduation gift from my middle school band director. I went to the Omaha-based Parable Christian Bookstore for new song choices. I bought a Newsboys Greatest Hits album.

Christian music celebrity Chris Tomlin was playing a concert in the nearby Mid-America Center across the Missouri River in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Tomlin’s tour promotion claimed the show was in Omaha, but the rent in Iowa must have been cheaper for mid-sized arenas and you’re more likely to attract a crowd by saying you’re playing in Omaha rather than the town locals refer to as “Council-tucky.” My new college church was going as a group and announced the event from the pulpit. Tim and I rode together.

I was high at the end of the show. All of God's love and choreographed laser lights made me really full of Holy Spirit, and full of desire to buy a band t-shirt. The line for Chris Tomlin merch was insane afterward, and his $35 tour shirts with a stylized heart on the front were flying off the wire racks that they were clothes-pinned to. I had to get Tim to talk me into buying it given the stiff price and my lack of income as a college student, but I asked for a medium and was handed it over the top of the tip jar stuffed full of $5 bills from convicted teenagers.

I was going home for the weekend, and the highlight of the short trip back was playing a round of roller hockey at my old church. Church roller hockey was something my old youth pastor Mark had started. Mark had grown up playing ice hockey in Colorado and wanted to bring an equivalent to the barren plains of Grand Island, Nebraska. Lacking any proper ice rinks in town, Mark made boards out of plywood that could be placed in the corners and gaps of our carpeted church gymnasium, and spent a considerable amount of his lucrative mega-church youth group budget on purchasing roller blades, hockey goals, sticks, and helmets. Every Tuesday night, kids that were usually absent from the normal Free Life Youth Group meetings would carpool to the Grand Island Evangelical Free Church gym to play a couple of rounds of pick-up roller hockey. During my high school years it was my favorite night of the week, and Mark was organizing a game in conjunction with my short college homecoming.

Mark was the first person to teach me to think critically about music. When I joined the youth group worship bard, Mark had just returned to Grand Island after a multi-year hiatus. He was re-hired as a young adult pastor, but when the high school youth pastor quit at the end of my junior year, Mark agreed to fill in with the youth group on an interim basis. The two of us grew close. Mark once told me, "there's no such thing as Christian music, only music by Christians." He made fun of the weird grunting noises contemporary worship singers would make as if they were constipated or having an orgasm. During a road trip to Chicago to visit Christian colleges, he told me about his favorite example of the weird Jesus sex grunts. It was a live recording where the lead singer tried to capture the feelings inside of him during an extended interlude that was most likely followed by an altar call.

“mmmmhhhuuuhhhh… Jesus… mmmmuuuhnhhhhuuu… Come all over me…”

Mark would challenge us with guidelines for the songs we chose for our worship band sets. Guidelines like, “none of the songs should have the word ‘I’ in them. If the point is to worship God, you shouldn't be talking about yourself.” I learned a ton during these years, and my worship of God grew as a result.

I wore my new Chris Tomlin t-shirt to roller hockey that night. On purpose. I felt like Mark needed to see it. I felt like God would want me to wear it in front of Mark.

To be bold.

To witness.

To not be ashamed.

I knew Mark had once protested a Chris Tomlin concert. He stationed his car in the arena parking lot where Tomlin was playing and made a sign that read, “you can worship with me for free.” He brought his acoustic guitar and handed out printed-off lyric sheets to anyone that cared to join him. A few did. They sang worship songs from the back of his car while Chris Tomlin had his laser light show inside the arena.

I don't know if Mark noticed my t-shirt. He never said anything about it. But he said he was happy to see me. I really enjoyed playing roller hockey with my friends that night.

●●●

Cornerstone Music Festival's practice of overspending on top-line acts and losing money in the name of fun finally caught up with the Jesus People, and in 2012 they shut the festival down after an impressive 28-year run. I didn't go to the final festival. They still charged full admission prices but the lineup was terrible since they were trying to recoup some of their substantial losses and asked most bands to play for free. Most bands didn't.

Tim and I left our college church within a week of one another and worked together to find a suitable replacement that didn’t give us cultish vibes or forbade dating. After our previous experience, we set the bar fairly low. In the process, I spent more time with his family since Tim still didn’t have a car. I never minded. In fact, I loved it. Despite living 45 minutes away, I spent so much time at the Zach household that Rod insisted that I help clean up the table and dishes after dinner like the rest of the family. When Phil protested that I was a guest, Rod gave his son a steely glare and said, "I think we're past that point with Beaty."

I sat in on a family meeting where Rod challenged his family to “be friends with the Whitney family.” The Whitney family was Dan Whitney aka Larry the Cable Guy. Dan had relocated from Florida to Lincoln and sent his kids to Lincoln Christian Elementary. In conjunction with enrolling, the Whitneys made a sizeable donation to the school, enough to earn themselves their own reserved parking spot. Dan's celebrity status was hard to normalize when he hung around the school or toured the gym that he paid for by telling jokes about biscuits and gravy flavored edible underwear. Rod was troubled by the attention Dan was getting from the teachers fawning over him. Rod thought the Whitneys could use a family that treated them normally. The Zachs got plenty of opportunities, Tim let me know about watching Husker games in Larry the Cable Guy's suite and going to his Super Bowl Party. I never got invited to come along, but then again, I would have been pretty star struck. That's not really what Rod was going for.

I bought a Christianity Today magazine subscription from “Cool dude” Joel when he was doing a school fundraiser—pining over the “Is MuteMath a Christian band?” article and sharing it with Tim. I was on a first name basis with Philip Zach, the Remedy Drive bass player. Well, I suppose more of a last-name basis since the whole Zach family just called me “Beaty.” Philip loved teasing his younger cousin Phil who shared his name. When Phil subbed in on the piano for the Lincoln Berean mega-church worship band, he commented how “it felt so amazing play in front of such a big crowd.” Philip went in for the kill.

“How amazing it felt? Because that's the point of playing worship music, right? To make you feel good? To make everyone appreciate how good you are and see you play?”

Phil told Philip that he knew what he meant. And I think Philip did know what he meant. And I think that’s why he was pointing out the dangers of thinking about worship in the manner his little cousin was describing. At least that’s what it seemed like.

I really liked Philip. He never went anywhere without a cool scarf, cut-off finger gloves, or any other number of accessories— but man— he was a good dude. I could see why Tim and Phil looked up to him so much. I saw less of the other Remedy Drive brothers, but I still saw them. I saw them parent. I saw them say grace before meals. I saw them set a good example for their younger cousins that adored them. Guitar player Paul's wife had a face that had been horribly disfigured. I never learned if it was genetic or from an accident, because no one ever felt the need to talk about it. This rock star treated her like the beautiful woman she was. I was always amazed at drummer Daniel’s hair style that stood perfectly on end and— as a drummer myself— was jealous of his Porkpie Percussion snare drum. Daniel’s wife was frequently at the Zach household. Their son was named Noah, which I remembered because they used a German word for “no” because they didn’t want the child to mix up his own name with the negative command. Lead singer David became infatuated with the fight to stop child sex trafficking. After years of trying to raise awareness of the issue, he traveled himself to Asia, posing as a potential buyer of child sex slaves to set up a sting operation and get the perpetrators arrested and the children rescued.2

None of these observations were really talked about in the Zach household. It certainly wasn't bragged about. Members of the Zach family just did stuff like that. It didn’t need to be pointed out.

●●●

Tim invited me back to the Council Bluffs Mid-America Center for another Christian music concert, but this one was a shared billing. I had learned the acronym CCM for “Contemporary Christian Music,” and the biggest showcase in CCM was an annual tour called Winter Jam. Acts like MercyMe and David Crowder Band headlined the tour and smaller bands rotated in. To pack the arena, all tickets were only $10. Remedy Drive was playing.

They didn't win their Dove Award and the trajectory they were on seemed to have plateaued since when I saw them a few years back. They were getting creative to attract new fans, doing a promotion where one lucky person that signed up for this-or-that Remedy Drive mailing-list-something-or-other would win a new fancy contraption called an iPad. I had never heard of the device, but it looked nice from the photos on the Mid-America Center jumbo board. I got a free ticket to the event in exchange for volunteering to encourage people to give money to Compassion International. During the second intermission, the Winter Jam tour Chaplain (because they had one of those, of course they had one of those) gave a “message” with all the familiar build-up to an inevitable altar call. I thought to myself, “oh boy here it comes, the few pagans in attendance will have the opportunity to give their life to Christ.” Except the high-stakes, high-pressure, high-awkwardness didn’t culminate the way I thought it would. Instead of telling everyone to give their life to Jesus, five-gallon buckets were passed so all the church kids could give their spare change to Winter Jam.

After all, your ticket was only $10. Don’t you want to make sure others can enjoy God’s love for the affordable price of only $10?

●●●

I got a summer job in Lincoln where Tim and I shared a studio apartment across the street from the Nebraska State Capitol. I needed a place to crash for a few days before our apartment was ready. The Zach family was all out of town, but they gave me their house keys and let me stay in Joel's room. I was surprised by their hospitality and mortified when I had a wet dream in Joel’s bed sheets. I helped myself to their washer and dryer, and did my best at cleaning up before I moved out to become Tim's roommate.

The studio apartment was difficult. It's hard to be anyone's roommate, and Tim and I were in close quarters at stressful times in each of our lives. Tim had just graduated college and returned from a year abroad working for an engineering missions organization in India. He didn't have a job when the summer started and was trying to navigate what was next for him in life. I was a few months into my first serious relationship and dating a girl several years younger that now lived in a different city and suspiciously seemed less interested in me than I was with her. The cracks in the friendship between Tim and I started to show.

At the end of summer, I moved back to Omaha— getting dumped by my girlfriend in the first week and having a falling out with a few other friends the day after. Tim and I would get together occasionally when he was in town, but those meetings became fewer and fewer as he started dating the woman he married. I was in the wedding party, but as I gave him a hug before I left the reception, I sensed our friendship had changed.

The Christian music scene seemed to be changing as well. Remedy Drive broke up, and then reformed with lead singer David and several replacements who didn’t have the last name of Zach. Bands like Gungor and Underoath no longer considered themselves "Christian bands" and people like Michael Gungor and Spencer Chamberlain no longer considered themselves Christians. As I Lay Dying's lead singer Tim Lambesis went to jail after pleading guilty to hiring a hitman to murder his wife.3 But Kanye West made a “Christian” album. And then Kanye West ran for President, called himself a Nazi, praised Hitler, said the Holocaust never happened, got kicked off of Twitter for using a profile picture with a swastika in it,4 paid a dentist $50,000 a month to move in with him to feed his nitrous oxide addiction,5 got divorced, and then got re-married to an Australian model that routinely went into public topless— or without pants on— or both.6 Christians were really excited about his “Jesus is King” album when it came out though.

The term “deconstruction” became unavoidable in Christian circles. The celebrity pastors that I used to download sermons of were exposed as despicable. Instead of deleting gangsta rap from my iPod, I was now deleting sermons from Mark Driscoll and Ravi Zacharias. And even the pastors that didn't get in trouble no longer held the same appeal. In college I listened to John Piper's message of “don't waste your life collecting (sea)shells” and was utterly ruinous with guilt.7 Now when I heard it I thought, “wow, he’s kind of a dickhead.”

I returned to Winter Jam after an awkward guy from my church small group asked for someone to go with him. I had reached the age where I wore ear plugs to concerts. The Newsboys were headlining. They were terrible.

But I still listen to Underoath on my iPod.

●●●

Tim and his cousin Philip were coming into Omaha to see Paper Route open for Switchfoot at the Slowdown. I liked Switchfoot just fine, but I loved Paper Route. I had seen both at Cornerstone. Paper Route played through their new album and blew me away.

As the bands were switching, Philip Zach and I were standing side-by-side. Jon Foreman walked out to mess with his microphone stand and made eye contact with Philip. Foreman smiled and pointed right at him, Philip returned the recognition with a smile of his own and a knowing wave.

I had something on my mind, and going to a Switchfoot show brought it back up.

I needed to better understand something.

I needed to run something by Philip.

“Hey, honestly what's your opinion of the Christian music industry? Don’t you feel like the whole idea of ‘Christian’ music is a little weird?”

I had asked a similar question while crashing on a couch overnight in the Nashville apartment of a woman who worked for a CCM label. She had moved to Tennessee to get a job in the music industry and built a career around ‘Christian’ music.

She was confused by my question.

But Philip understood what I was asking.

He answered quickly. In passing. The kind of answer that you just give instinctively without doctoring it up first. Without pretense. Without disclaimers. Without nuance. The kind of answer you would want to elaborate on if it was brought back up again. Expand. Clarify. But we didn’t have the time to do any of that. He just had to tell me what he thought without trying to represent something other than his own thoughts. The kind of answer that says what we really think even if it’s not what we really meant.

“We just wanted to make music, but we knew we would make more money if we called ourselves a ‘Christian’ band.”

We stopped talking. Switchfoot was starting their first song.

I wanted to get my money’s worth.

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“People knock religion because it's responsible for all these wars and stuff, but they forget it's also responsible for a lot of terrible music.”

- Demetri Martin

In the mid-nineteen-hundred-nineties, the mark of God's chosen people wasn't circumcision or a love for one another, but rather cleverly worded t-shirts. These articles of clothing appeared to be made by Calvin Klein, but upon closer inspection read "Christ is King." Being "in the world, but not of the world" meant that everything in Christian culture should look identical to the secular all around us— but a more positive, encouraging, family-friendly version. There were no problems with the latest fashions, movies, or literature— it just needed a little Jesus flavored seasoning sprinkled on top. If we snuck in a wholesome message like a mom hiding blended vegetables in a soup, the world will get that nutrition naturally without even realizing that they were eating something healthy for them. Something that they would normally find repulsive.

But these vegetables couldn't be found in just any grocery store. They needed their own specialty marketplace, where shoppers could browse without having to worry they would accidentally buy a spoiled fruit. A place where the selection had been carefully curated already by experts in the field, experts that lived in Colorado Springs and had their own radio programs. Experts that had already done all the thinking for us so we didn't have to do it ourselves. Places like Chapel Christian Bookstore in my hometown of Grand Island, Nebraska. As a guilt-stricken teenager wanting to buy CDs, I spent a lot of time in Chapel Christian Bookstore.

For as long as people have believed in God, they have sung songs about it. The Old and New Testaments are full of examples. Much of the books resemble a Broadway musical set in Mesopotamia, where the characters break into song mid-action to describe getting pregnant, winning a battle, falling in love, and killing people with the jawbone of a donkey. But despite the variety of subject-matter, most of these Biblical songs would fall under the broad category of “worship.” Songs that show admiration, gratefulness, reverence, and awe to a supernatural deity. A transcendent figure that can't be responded to with words alone, but rather songs. Because whereas words describe, songs emote. And believing in a god is a very emotional thing.

These weren't the kind of CDs I was looking for in Chapel Christian Bookstore. I was trying to find the Newsboys albums.

●●●

I had discovered the Newsboys from a free Christian music sampler. I don’t know where the CD came from, but it somehow made its way into my three-disc collection along with “Weird” Al Yankovic in 3D and a compilation of cartoon theme songs called Cartoon Medley. It may have been passed out at church, or I might have taken it from my older brother that had been similarly guilt tripped about his music taste, but whose conscience rebounded a lot quicker than mine. The sampler was filled with other Christian bands with names that sounded tough in the 90s. Tough band names like Sonicflood but with not-so-tough song names like “I Could Sing of Your Love Forever.” Even as a pre-teen with anxiety, I could tell most of this music was garbage, but I loved the melodic string intro that built into a funky groove in the Newsboys track “Entertaining Angels.” It was like the sweet violin beginning of “Bittersweet Symphony” by The Verve, but about Jesus.

I think.

More or less.

Maybe less.

I didn’t pay much attention to the lyrics, my main takeaway was I could feel like I was doing a good deed by listening to this song instead of polluting my soul with whatever was playing on MTV.

I found the track “Entertaining Angels” on the “Step Up to the Microphone” album and bought it with my paper route money. The collection eventually expanded to include albums “Not Ashamed,” “Thrive,” and “Love Liberty Disco.” I don't remember any conversations with my parents limiting my music purchases to just Chapel Bookstore, but those were the aisles where I felt the most at home.

The safest.

And the store’s music section came with handy posters that showed flowcharts for other safe music options.

• Do you like Linkin Park? Then you should probably listen to Evanescence, Pillar, or P.O.D. instead.

• Eminem? Try KJ-52.

• If Dr. Dre, Then Lecrae. Definitely Lecrae.

• Twisted Sister : Stryper

• Third Eye Blind would be better if it was more like Jars of Clay

• And everyone would probably like DC Talk. Who wouldn't love DC Talk?

But only so much information could fit on a poster, and some cases weren't so cleanly handled. For the more complicated questions regarding what I should be listening to, I turned to my free subscription of the Focus on the Family teen magazine Breakaway. At least I think it was free. As mysteriously as the music sampler's arrival into my life, one day I noticed that my brother's magazine subscription no longer had his name stamped above our home address on the lower right hand corner, but rather my own. I guess this was my magazine now. I suspect my mom had something to do with it, but like letters to Santa, I didn't know what kind of communication she had with Dr. James Dobson in determining what I needed.

I never read any of the articles in the magazine. When it would arrive in the mail, I would flip it over and work my way to the back three pages. Opposite of the back cover was always a cartoon that had been created by one of Breakaway's teenage readers. Artistic adolescents could submit hand-drawn comic strips that had some positive message fit for a Christian audience, and I would fill myself with envy each bi-weekly issue by studying how much more talented my Christian teenage peers were than I was. Freshly filled with jealousy, I would flip back one more page, right-to-left manga style, to read the review of the latest popular music by Breakaway's cultural columnist. In the piece, concerned parents and guilt-stricken teens could mail in questions about the wholesomeness of certain new songs, albums, and bands. Not possessing the ability to discern their music's integrity with their own limited skillsets, Breakaway provided an expert you could outsource the discerning to. I audibly exhaled after the review of Coldplay’s X&Y album when I learned it was safe for consumption, and I read my first full article when the editor decided to expand the commentary section to feature length in order to cover the hotly contested topic of "Is Creed Christian?" I had all three of Creed's albums, and really wanted—needed—the band to pass the test. I knew it would be hard since they sang "don't have to settle no Goddamn score," in the song “What’s This Life For.” I was worried. The article’s author was also troubled by this blatant taking of the Lord’s name in vain. But the rest of the songs felt about right for a Christian.

He advised we proceed with caution.

●●●

I discovered Napster and blank CDs, and soon my collection of mixtapes outnumbered my collection of Newsboys studio albums. I found some Newsboys tracks that weren't available at Chapel Bookstore, like “The Breakfast Song”— which features appearances by Captain Crunch and “Fruit Loop Lovers,” and helpfully reminded me in a poppy, upbeat tone that “they don't serve breakfast in Hell.” That track in my mixtape was followed by “Hash Pipe” by Weezer. The illegal downloading of music never bothered me, despite how much I was told it was supposed to. I was more bothered by the Christian parody band ApologetiX that would sing over karaoke versions of radio hits with their own Christian lyrics a la “Weird” Al Yankovic. “Bohemian Rhapsody” became “Bethlehemian Rhapsody.” “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” became “The Devil Went Down to Jordan.” And “In the End” by Linkin Park— a song I had used to win my sixth-grade talent contest by playing the drums behind it— was reworked to “Cor-in-thi-ans.”

My music taste started to change as I entered high school, but not my angst. High school has a lot of angst. My hair grew longer. My clothes grew darker. And my belt now had studs on it. I was trying to make a statement by not making a statement. My I-don't-care-the-world-doesn't-understand-me vibe fit in well with my peers, but not as well with my Christian music tastes. At least not until I discovered Tooth and Nail Records. Here were mid-twenty somethings in rock bands, raised on Nirvana and Hillsong, that finally had a record label of their own. Suddenly, being a Christian was cool again. And tough again. Instead of listening to bands with pussy names like Newsboys and Jars of Clay, I could now listen to As I Lay Dying and As Cities Burn, and still feel good about having Jesus's seal of approval.

The bands I discovered fell under one of the synonymous genres of: metal, screamo, hardcore, or post-rock—but when I ripped the CD into my iTunes catalog the tracks would get categorized as “Gospel” or “Religious.” I sold my stack of Newsboys albums to Hasting’s Bookstore and used the $25 of in-store credit to replace their vacancies on my CD rack with “When Everything Falls” by Haste the Day and “Bless the Martyr, Kiss the Child” by Norma Jean.

For my 16th birthday, I convinced my parents to drive me two-and-a-half hours to Omaha to watch Underoath play at the Sokol Underground. My folks were skeptical— my dad referred to my favorite bands as “dope smokin music”— but I was able to convince them by playing the song “Some Will Seek Forgiveness, Others Escape,” and pointing out the lyric “Jesus, I'm ready to come home.” Conveniently, this song was the only one on the album where most the words were sung instead of screamed, and I turned off the Bose CD player in our living room before it got to the break down.

My parents relented, but only if my college-age older brother went with. I agreed to the terms, but I have no idea why Jason did. I knew he hated this music. Though we had grown closer since he moved out of the house, I was still his kid brother separated by five years and just about every interest other than a mutual fondness for Batman: The Animated Series.

On the Saturday of the concert, we picked up my garage bandmate Emmett, drove to Omaha, and met Jason before heading to the venue. I didn’t see Jason again until the show ended. I felt terrible that he was being forced to do something I knew he hated, but at the same time, I felt completely loved by him.

Another high school buddy was there with his older brother. They smoked pot ahead of time.

●●●

The Mecca of Christian music was Cornerstone Music Festival. Each summer over the week that contained the Fourth of July, all Christian music listeners were required to make an annual pilgrimage to the holy site of Bushnell, Illinois to listen to Christian music and sleep in nylon tents during the sweltering July heat.

Cornerstone was run by Jesus People USA—JPUSA— or “Jah-poo-sah.” They were a bunch of hippies from the 70's that found God, gave up psychedelic drugs (probably), and lived communally in downtown Chicago. To make money, they fixed roofs and ran gigantic Christian music festivals—although the gigantic Christian music festivals never made any money. But they were fun. Hippies know how to have fun, even Christian ones.

Since they shared just about everything, the Jesus People pulled together all their roofing money, and bought a huge plot of land in a town of 2,673 people. The fairgrounds were a 3-hour 35-minute drive from their Chicago commune, and for one week a year, 8,000 to 20,000 festival goers would overload Bushnell’s single lane highways to pay homage to their favorite feel-good artistic expressions. It was kind of like Christian Woodstock, though as the young kids with their screaming music and gauged ears took over, the comparison grew closer to Christian Burning Man.

I set up the single man hiking tent I used to avoid having to bunk with anyone else in my youth group, and walked through the Cornerstone fairgrounds. At any given point, there were nine tents with music, five tents with seminars, organized sports tournaments, canoe competitions, art installations, food trucks, and countless campsites that created their own stages by roping off a couple of tent sites and hooking a sound board and amps to a diesel generator. The festival’s opening night was tame. Apart from the coffee shop and 24-hour prayer tent, the only acts were unsigned bands trying to catch the ears of the Christian music record label reps wandering throughout Bushnell. I found myself in the middle of a red and white circus tent watching a late-night show for a hardcore band I had never heard of. The band wasn't good, which was why they were playing on the night campers were still arriving and the army of soundboard technicians were still dialing in their levels. But until "Tooth and Nail Day" started the next morning, there wasn't anywhere else to be. When we walked through the open tent flaps, the band was still mid-song, and a couple of screams and microphone cord twirls later, the music died out into a soft, melodic guitar riff behind long keyboard scales. The lead singer got real serious— a sobering mid-song message is a staple of the Christian music genre— and with a steely gaze he told us about how important the content of their next song was.

How much their words mattered.

How much you should listen to them.

How much you should let them change your life.

And their marketing strategy for how they were planning on making money off those words.

“This next song… this next song we submitted to be included in the Twilight movie soundtrack. We just wanted to shine a light in a dark place.”

And like a werewolf in search of a girlfriend, he proceeded to scream out the opening line.

●●●

Cornerstone Music Festival became a youth group tradition and was the week I most looked forward to each year. Some people dream about beach vacations to get them through a hard day, I dreamt about sweaty mosh pits and getting punched by someone with a mullet in girl jeans, while listening to screams about Jesus's love and how hard it is to be a teenager. It was my Shangri-La. My first journey to Bushnell was all about watching bands and buying their t-shirts, but with each new trip I started caring less about the music and more about the experience. There was nowhere else that had so many expressions of Christian subcultures on earth. Go ahead and fact check that.

My friends and I would attend “Goth Prom,” vegan potlucks, youth group sermons, and hippy drum circles. Walking down the dirt roads you would see punks with mohawks and safety pins in their clothes on one side, and homeless people that lived in a black school bus on the other. (Though as my friend expertly pointed out, "the first sign that they're not actually homeless is their $110 festival ticket.") A Red Cross Bloodmobile was parked next to a mobile tattoo studio, just behind the communal shower houses fed by an artesian well. The sulfur smell of the water would lead you to question the efficacy of your shower, but—unlike the bus dwellers— at least you were trying. Others would bathe in the canoe lake, leading the festival organizers to post rules that the only soaps and shampoos permitted for lake bathing had to be chemical free. Between fart smelling water, bathing in a lake with cleaning products lacking any product actually capable of cleaning, and not bathing at all— the hot July sun made the inside of each of the festival tents smell like the fish section of an Asian market. And that was before Irish punk band Flatfoot 56 threw actual raw fish on the crowd during their nautical themed midnight concert.

My buddy and I fell in love with a beautiful hippy with thin, blonde dreadlocks (we named her Moonbeam), and slept outside on a broken down youth group couch. I got guilt tripped into sponsoring a Compassion International kid on my first trip, and continued making my monthly $36 payments into adulthood until I got a mysterious email that Compassion International didn't know where Wilbert Perez Alfonso Lopez was anymore. I bought t-shirts that said “To Write Love on Her Arms,” and heard someone speak in tongues for the only time in my life.

On stage.

During a song.

A hardcore song.

I guess it wasn’t that different from the rest of their set since you also couldn’t understand any of the other lyrics.

There were so many unique traditions that I made 7 by 7 Bingo cards to hand out to the youth group kids. We named it “Bloater” after googling “seven letter words.” When I graduated high school, I came back as a college aged youth group sponsor. The next generation of youth group kids loved the festival. They embraced the culture the way I had and added their own elements by dressing up in a platypus costume and going to concerts. Christian music superstar David Crowder even tweeted about “seeing a platypus with a lightsaber.”

But in my six years of going to Bushnell, the sight that surprised me the most wasn’t the 7-foot tall bicycles, banana costumes, or organic free-trade merch—it was when three guys I knew from my high school drumline carpooled together to attend the festival on their own. These weren't youth group kids. These weren't church-going kids. These weren't kids that would ever claim to like “Christian” music.

But there they were.

I was happy to see them.

And maybe if they went to any shows without a bandmember whose job was “throats,” they might hear a message that could be meaningful to them.

But I don't think they did.

(To Be Continued.)

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The North Pole, Inc. had enormous success in their rebrand from St. Nicholas to Santa Claus. Coca-Cola aside, royalties were flowing from partnership deals with shopping centers who wanted to increase holiday traffic by encouraging children to come visit Santa and tell him what they wanted. Macy's department store in New York City latched onto the concept early on—incorporating the Santa Claus likeness into their annual Thanksgiving Day Parade and providing the setting for a feature length film called Miracle on 34th Street about a senile man that believed he was Santa.

"We thought the project would shine a light on mental health along with generating a lot of excitement around the new brand. We were right about one of those."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

Through Cauliflower's efforts, Santa became ubiquitous. And lucrative. Interested parties were lining up to use the Santa image in their seasonal marketing. However, The North Pole, Inc. did permit The Salvation Army to use the likeness of Santa without royalties for their annual kettle drives.

"It's Christmas after all."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

In 1823, Cauliflower hired a poet named Clement Clark Moore to write a document encapsulating the essence of the new Santa Claus. It was an idea inspired by Nicholas's work on the Nicene Creed. He had seen first hand how a comprehensive text could effectively unite the public's perception of some supernatural being, otherwise the character's essence is left up to individual interpretation. But to make it more fun, Cauliflower decided the Santa creed should rhyme. And have pictures. The poem was a great success.

Cauliflower's team steadily grew and decided it needed to expand the Santa mythology— sparking a century long effort to craft an entire north pole universe in the public eye. Market focus groups were conducted extensively, yielding many important insights. Regional biases were uncovered in various global markets, leading to a slew of subtle modifications to the Santa iconography. Father Christmas, Papa Noel, and Kris Kringle monikers were coined. In some instances the Santa Claus image was reworked entirely, such as the case of the Yule Lads in Iceland. In the Germanic countries an antagonist tested well, so Cauliflower introduced Krampus and Belsnickel. But eventually the focus groups kept coming back to the same conclusion: "Santa needs some friends."

"None of the focus groups responded to Mrs. Claus, so we decided not to spend much time on creating her image beyond the cursory, but the reindeer and the toymakers both seemed promising."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

Cauliflower created two marketing teams to focus on the reindeer and the toymakers respectively. The reindeer team was led by the former zoologist Chestnut, and the toymakers was led by Crumpit's nephew—a bright up and comer that had been born at the north pole named Steven, but Nicholas called Capybara. Chestnut's team had trouble coming up with a marketing plan for eight identical beasts of burden, they needed a star to focus on. A reindeer had just been born that had an odd nose pigmentation that Chestnut had been attempting to bottle-feed with little success. The reindeer herd had rejected the calf, forcing Chestnut to raise it into maturity. Nicholas found the calf unsettling and had even suggested euthanizing the infant since it was clear that the other reindeer wanted nothing to do with it, but Chestnut was adamant that the calf be spared. Chestnut named it Rudolph, and since Nicholas didn't want to get too attached to the reindeer, he never came up with a nickname. Inspired by Rudolph, Chestnut suggested that his team create the reindeer's marketing plan centered around the most physically distinct animal in the herd.

"The legend of Rudolph is all made up, which is why looking back the whole thing is so superficial. As someone that lives with genetic dwarfism, I regret how we singled out a single physical characteristic and focused exclusively on it. We felt the nose had to have some sort of utility in order to be accepted, which hasn't really aged well. The whole 'Rudolph got made fun of a lot’ bit, that part was true. We thought that if we made the nose glow, it would serve a purpose, but it just reinforced stereotypes that someone's worth is dependent solely on how useful they are. Even Santa comes across as an ass and reinforces this superficiality through the Rudolph storyline. I wish we had gone a different direction, but the concept tested incredibly well in focus groups."

- Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

Despite what the marketing plan suggested, not all the reindeer loved Rudolph's new-found fame. Rather, they resented him for it. Lacking the nutrients that could only be provided from reindeer milk, the bottle feeding proved unsuccessful. Rudolph didn’t survive to adulthood. Despite the TV shows and song lyrics suggesting otherwise, Rudolph was never physically fit enough to accompany Nicholas on a sleigh ride and certainly would have never been permitted by the rest of the reindeer herd to lead them. But Rudolph's likeness became the second most valuable intellectual property owned by The North Pole, Inc. other than Santa Claus himself.

"The public loved him, which is ironic since everyone in the north pole hated him. I suppose maybe there's some cosmic justice in that in a way, but I don't know. Sometimes marketing plans just don't feel right even if they're successful. That's kind of how I feel about the whole Rudolph initiative."

- Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

•••

From Toymakers to ‘Elves’

Capybara's toymaker team came up with a marketing plan in parallel with the reindeer team, but since the Rudolph concept tested better, their plan was rolled out more gradually. ‘Toymaker’ didn't resonate with focus groups, and the odd deformities of The North Pole, Inc.’s employees were hard to explain in a manner that children understood. So Capybara looked for a clean storyline that wouldn't rely on pity to get the public to respond.

"The Lord of the Rings was really big at the time and it kind of clouded our thinking. We came up with the concept of assigning a mythical creature to represent the toymakers— and the elves were the most noble in the Tolkien books. We were frankly a group of outcasts that had been shamed by society, so it was our attempt at rewriting that script and instilling a little pride amongst our employees. But that's not really how it worked out once the elf narrative left the north pole. The toymakers gradually resembled dwarves or hobbits, which was the complete opposite of what we were going for."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

With the efforts paid toward crafting the Rudolph narrative, there wasn't much budget left to do a proper roll-out of the elf image. After Cauliflower hired songwriter Johnny Marks to come up with a Rudolph jingle and Gene Autry to sing it, the marketing budget was tapped. The idea of ‘elves’ was introduced, but in a muted manner compared to the gargantuan efforts paid toward both Santa and Rudolph. As a result, the general public crafted the archetype of the ‘elf’ largely on its own. Eventually The North Pole, Inc. had to embrace the idea of small, childlike cherubs rather than the regal, warriors they had intended—or risk losing a potential revenue stream in licensing to the public domain.

"We had Tolkien all lined up to do an entire north pole mythology surrounding the elves. He had a bunch of 'Father Christmas' letters worked up as prototypes, but we couldn't afford both him and Gene Autry. And frankly, Tolkien was much more amiable. We always intended on revisiting the elf brand and kept Tolkien on retainer, but after the public image of what an elf was took hold, there was just little we could do other than roll with it. But we resisted for a long time, I mean, it was personal to us. This was who we were."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

The setback on the elf image was hard on the marketing team, but they decided to pivot and play the cards they had been dealt. Eventually Cauliflower greenlit an elf-themed film project by New Line Cinema starring Will Ferrell and Capybara pushed out a concept called 'Elf on the Shelf' in order to tidy up the whole naughty/nice list plot holes in the overarching north pole mythology.

"There's no such thing as a naughty and nice list, there never has been. Everyone always gets presents. I'm not even sure how that rumor got started, but I think it was by parents to encourage good behavior. I don't blame them, but it took us a while to spin that concept in a way we could monetize it. We were also upset with the failed elf launch, but Capybara's team found an innovative solution to solve both problems with the 'Elf on the Shelf' idea. It wasn’t the elf image we wanted, but nevertheless, it was a success. It just took a little longer than we were used to and had more stumbles along the way."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

•••

Licensing and Trademark Protection

With so many properties and trademarks providing the primary source of revenue to fund The North Pole, Inc.'s toy manufacturing and delivery services, protecting those brands required a vast team of lawyers and legal experts. Crumpit tasked a crotchety ‘elf’ known as Cratchety to be The North Pole, Inc.'s General Counsel. Like most of the elves that had relocated from Turkey, Cratchety had a life before he came to the north pole. Cratchety had previously been employed as an attorney but was disbarred and disgraced for drunken misconduct in the courtroom. But he was a whiz on copyright enforcement, aggressively protecting The North Pole, Inc.'s growing stable of properties. Cratchety sent out cease and desist letters to corporations using unsanctioned Santa likenesses in their advertisements, and an idea for the Tim Alan movie ‘The Santa Clause’ was conceived based off a legal review by Cratchety of punitive measures for theft of Santa’s belongings. Cratchety’s expertise became invaluable to Nicholas and Cauliflower, though not every issue was resolved to his satisfaction.

"That whole 'Grinch' thing really pissed me off. I mean it's a cut and dry case. This Seuss character flat out says, 'with this hat and this coat I'll look just like Saint Nick.' What more evidence do you need that they were infringing upon one of our assets? It's trademark violation, plain and simple. But since the Grinch was green and he was mean, we had a hard time getting a judge to see the case our way."

-Cratchety, General Counsel, The North Pole, Inc.

The North Pole, Inc. and Theodore Seuss Geisel eventually settled outside of court for an undisclosed sum. Cratchety advised on a growing list of other concerns beyond copyright issues. There had long been allegations of Nicholas performing illegal surveillance of children and unlawful breaking and entering. When the elves unionized in response to The North Pole, Inc. placing a growing emphasis on supply chain management and third party distribution rather than direct toy manufacturing, Cratchety became involved in negotiating The North Pole, Inc.’s first collective bargaining agreement.

"The employees really hated it when we announced we would no longer be making our own toys and instead relying on outsourcing to China— and the partnership agreement with Walmart to allow for parents to purchase toys directly and bypass delivery by Santa drove the wedge even further. But a company has to adapt. You don't survive nearly 2000 years in operation without making some tough choices."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

•••

Succession Planning

Nicholas was growing tired, but his plans for retirement took an unexpected turn when Crumpit surprisingly died of pneumonia.

"I always knew Crumpit would be the next Santa, we were just waiting for the right time. Frankly we knew the two of us worked better as a team, but I didn't want to be CEO forever and Crumpit deserved to be allowed to move out of my shadow. But his death shocked everyone. I suppose the average lifespan for a person with the medical conditions Crumpit had is about 60 years and he made it to age 1,721— but still none of us saw it coming. It was an awful time."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

With Crumpit deceased, Nicholas doubled down on his own efforts and shelved any talks of retirement. He promoted Capybara to COO to replace his uncle, and the youngster brought a new view to The North Pole, Inc. Under Capybara's leadership, The North Pole, Inc. started to invest heavily in artificial intelligence and analytics, allowing Nicholas to compensate for his aging workforce. The complete supply chain was reworked using Lean Six Sigma, and testing began on using autonomous electric vehicles in place of magic reindeer.

With Capybara in place, Nicholas once again started putting an eye toward retirement. But he had his doubts that an analytical and antisocial figure like Capybara could ever embody the jovial cherub that the entire Santa brand had become. But did that still matter? Did the homely image of Santa mean as much as it used to to the financial success of The North Pole, Inc. in this digital age?

Cauliflower was another potential successor, and someone that fully understand the importance of the Santa branding— but he lacked some of the financial and operations acumen necessary to keep a business financially solvent that gave all of its products away for free.

Or was it time to consider an outside hire? Nicholas had toyed with the idea of forming a board of directors and even performing an initial public offering to shore up some of their cashflow troubles. But would an outsider keep the magic alive, especially since investment bankers don’t believe in magic?

•••

Discussion Questions

1. How did The North Pole, Inc. become successful?

2. How did The North Pole, Inc. differentiate and insulate itself from competitors?

3. Is The North Pole, Inc. financially volatile? Describe the threats that they face from the various market conditions and their financial exposure.

4. If you were Nicholas, what would you do regarding succession planning?

5. What would be the pros and cons of taking The North Pole, Inc. public?

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It's December 26th, 2024 and Nicholas is exhausted. He has been at the helm of The North Pole, Inc. for 1699 years and the world is changing. What had started out as a small hobby of whittling wooden trains and gifting them to the neighborhood children in his hometown of Patara in modern-day Turkey, has since become the world's largest and logistically complicated charitable gifting and expedited package delivery service. The 2025 Christmas would mark the company's 1700th year in operation, and Nicholas was beginning to wonder if the time had come to put forth a serious succession plan. Frankly, the old ways of doing things didn't seem to be working anymore, which for a nostalgic man like Nicholas, created some serious questions about whether or not he was still the right man to lead his l,872 employees and herd of 8 (sometimes 9) reindeer. Did a business model based entirely on gift giving in lieu of profits even make sense anymore?

•••

Becoming Saint Nick

Nicholas of Myra was born on March 15th, 270 AD to a very religious family. His parents, Theophanes and Nonna, were active in the local church of Patara and encouraged Nicholas to get involved in the community at a young age. Nicholas's uncle was the Bishop of Myra —a city nearby. His parents were very wealthy, and the family would join Nicholas’s uncle annually in distributing gifts to the less fortunate throughout the region of Lycia. This act of delivering gifts— particularly to children— made a huge impression on young Nicholas.

"At the time, the whole concept of 'Christmas' was a relatively new one. The church hadn't been around for that many generations, and a lot of the holidays and traditions were still being figured out. It was my uncle that first had the idea of going around and giving gifts to children as a simple way of celebrating the birth of Jesus, the idea being that if they got a present it would help them see the birth of Jesus as a gift as well. I'm not sure how many kids really understood that association, but they sure liked getting presents. And it made me thrilled to see their smiles. It became my favorite thing to do each year."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

Nicholas began planning ahead. He would study which gifts the kids responded to most favorably and began crafting a surplus as soon as one Christmas ended to prepare for the next one. Before long, making toys was a year-round hobby, though it was still just a hobby. But making and distributing toys wasn't the only activity of Nicholas's that soon grew into a passion, he became fascinated with magic. His uncle gave Nicholas his first magic set during one of the annual toy distributions, and Nicholas became infatuated with it. He would put pieces of straw through drachma coins and fascinate his family with simple mentalism tricks that made it appear he knew what they had been doing when no one was watching. His magic tricks grew more and more elaborate as he practiced, and soon rumors spread that Nicholas possessed clairvoyance and supernatural abilities.

"Ho, ho, ho. It was great fun. People will believe anything if they really want to. Deep down, we all want to believe that magic is real. If you can tap into that, you can get away with just about anything. That is, as long as people think the magic isn't harmful. Once you start losing trust, and people don't want to believe anymore, then the whole thing unravels."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

With this principle of using magic for the common good, Nicholas's reputation went from jovial to transcendent. Rumors started to spread. Residents of Lycia claimed that he could calm a storm at sea and had chopped down a demon-possessed tree.

Artists depicted Nicholas raising three children from the dead after they had been murdered by a butcher. Allegedly the butcher had pickled the children in brine with the intention of selling them as pork. Pork was hard to come by.

On another occasion, townspeople claimed that Nicholas had rescued three girls from a future as prostitutes. The story went that for three consecutive nights, Nicholas deposited a sack of gold down their chimney. The idea was for their father to use the gold as a dowry and marry the girls off instead. No one ever saw Nicholas in the act, but his reputation for stealth and generosity made him the prime suspect. Nicholas never admitted to anything.

The rumors troubled Nicholas and made it harder and harder for him to efficiently get through town without being bombarded with requests for gifts and magic tricks. As a result, he became a recluse. Nicholas moved outside of the community to a remote area of Mesopotamia, which quelled some of the town gossip and gave him ample time to refine his toymaking craft.1

•••

Forming The North Pole, Inc.

Nicholas expanded his toy distribution service to the areas surrounding his new home. Around 300 AD, at the age of 30, Nicholas hired his first employee— a small, paunchy outcast that Nicholas nicknamed 'Crumpit.' His real name was Larry.

"I had frankly bitten off more than I could chew. Each year more children would hear about the gift giving and would send me a letter asking to be included. I've always had a problem telling anyone 'no’ to anything, so I looked for help. I found Crumpit begging on a street corner. He had an odd look to him, some sort of disability that had stunted his growth and made him unemployable at any of the markets throughout Lycia. I took pity on him, and taught him how to whittle in exchange for room and board. After a while, it seemed as though Crumpit was running the whole toy making process himself and all I was doing was giving the gifts away once each year."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

Without Crumpit, Nicholas likely would have remained simply a jolly old man giving away toys to boys and girls in ancient Turkey— not the international celebrity and pop culture icon that he is today. However it was a brush with church politics that ultimately led Nicholas to pursing this charitable career path full-time.

“I was working as the Bishop of Turkey at the time after my uncle put in a good word with the church leaders. I was excited about the gig, but I was really doing it out of an obligation to my uncle. He never married since priests spent so much time doing other things, though he could have since the clerical celibacy didn't get established until the 12th century. But still, I was the closest thing he had to a son. So I took the job and I hated it."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

In 325 AD, a church council was called at the city of Nicea by Emperor Constantine. Constantine had used the Christian religion as a political tactic to unite his empire. Disputes had arisen throughout the church regarding the nature of Jesus, which threatened Constantine’s unification strategy. He sought to who put an end to the divisions and shore up his approval ratings. And like any good politician, Constantine used the most effective means available: long, tedious debates. As the Bishop of Turkey, Nicholas was required to attend, but found the proceedings cumbersome and frustrating, at one point slapping a fellow participant.2

“There were over 1000 people there, and everyone seemed to have an opinion. There was grandstanding, hair-splitting, and hell-raising. We were stuck in this stuffy palace for over a month and a half, and all I could do was think about how none of the kids I gave toys to really gave a shit about any of this. Don't get me wrong, I think the Council had a lot of good things come out of it, but by the end of it, I had had it with church politics."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

The main outcome of the Council of Nicea was the Nicene Creed which formalized the canonical beliefs of the Christian Church for the first time. Nicholas signed the creed, but shortly after left his post of Bishop. He had different plans.

"The Council was crucial for the Church, but I had seen how the sausage was made, and frankly, it had spoiled my appetite for sausage. When I got back from Nicea, Crumpit presented me with an elaborate business prospectus he had worked up regarding how to take the toy manufacturing to the next level. I was at a crossroads, and sensed that if I didn't take Crumpit's ideas seriously, he may leave and start out on his own. So I told him, 'Fuck it. Let's do this.’”

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

•••

Headquarters Relocation

When Nicholas's parents passed away, he was the sole heir to their vast fortune. As a bishop, he had little need for the inheritance and instead invested the entirety of it in various speculative enterprises. He was an early investor in wheel technology— though he always preferred the simple elegance of the sleigh, "fewer moving parts" he'd always say­— and purchased numerous tracts of land, particularly in Western Europe and Scandinavia. He began to vacation frequently in Spain, and would spend much of his time in the country when away from Turkey. But it was a failed investment in an uninhabitable wasteland that proved to be the one that would change his fortune forever.

"When I first purchased the north pole, I thought that the return on investment would occur from the exportation of ice. At the time, no one had thought of mechanical refrigeration, so I had this crazy idea that we could harvest ice from the glaciers, and then ship it all throughout warm climates like India or Africa so wealthy aristocrats could chill their beverages. The idea was ahead of its time. The transportation of glacier ice proved to be too costly. The concept caught hold later on after I had already divested of all my infrastructure and I was just left with a useless chunk of frozen tundra."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

Nicholas had tried to sell off this north pole property numerous times unsuccessfully, but the location became a centerpiece of Crumpit's expansion plans. By moving to the north pole, Nicholas and Crumpit would have enough real estate to expand their operation indefinitely and be logistically located to be equidistant to nearly every location above the equator. At the time, colonialization had yet to move much further south, so the Christmas celebrating nations were largely concentrated in Europe. The plan was too large for two people, but Crumpit had considered that as well. From his time on the streets, Crumpit had befriended innumerable deformed beggars in need of stable wages. Given their living situations, these vagabonds were more than willing to relocate for the promise of room and board. Nicholas loved these odd employees. He found them cheerful and hardworking, more than willing to labor around the clock in appreciation for their jobs. Nicholas could never remember any of their names so, like ‘Crumpit,’ he came up with festive nicknames. These monikers became so widely adopted throughout the north pole that hardly anyone used their Christian names. Many of these workers had been addicted to opium or alcohol prior to their employment, which could make their behavior erratic and childlike— though this characteristic proved to be helpful in the development of several new product lines.

With the workforce riddle solved, Nicholas and Crumpit turned their attention to distribution. From the failed ice harvesting exploit, Nicholas knew that moving large quantities of material from the north pole was expensive and difficult. Ships had trouble navigating the glaciers and industrial airplanes had yet to be invented. The harsh climate severely limited their options.

"We considered your traditional cattle and pack animals, but none could survive in the temperatures of the north pole. We tried, it’s best not to talk about what happened.”

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

The relocation began without any plans for toy transportation in place. Nicholas considered that he might have to take a Christmas or two off in order to find a solution, but providence provided an answer when a pack of wild reindeer were spotted roaming through their construction sites. An environmental impact study took place and halted construction for three months while Crumpit and Chestnut— a former zoologist that had found himself homeless after getting mauled by an orangutan and addicted to painkillers during his recovery­— studied the movements of the reindeer herd. The factory site map was redrawn to accommodate the reindeer habitats, but as construction resumed on Mechanical Toy Warehouse #3, the reindeer only encroached further.

Chestnut had an idea.

"Everyone wants to know how we domesticated wild reindeer and taught them to fly, but frankly I get tired of the question. If you explain magic, it ceases to be magical, and I'd rather not have that. Penn and Teller don't stand up after their performance at the Rio Casino and explain how they perform each of their tricks, and if they did, they wouldn’t have a paying audience for very long."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

Nicholas would give a similar answer whenever pressed about any of the magical elements of his craft— “trade secrets” he'd say. This included explanations regarding how he visits every house in a single night, how to enter homes without chimneys, and how he has avoided being diagnosed with Type II diabetes after a thousand year diet of nothing but milk and sugar cookies.

•••

Financial Woes

Like any start-up, Nicholas anticipated running at a financial deficit in the company's early years, but after several centuries, The North Pole, Inc. had still yet to turn a profit. And the fortune Nicholas had inherited from his parents was dwindling.

"It turns out that a business model based on giving away your product for free isn’t sustainable in the long run."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

It was this realization that truly transformed The North Pole, Inc.

"People have no idea how we stay financially solvent, and I like it that way. It's part of the mystery. But truth be told, it's simple really. All we do is sell licensing."

-Nicholas, CEO, The North Pole, Inc.

It really is that simple, yet The North Pole, Inc. has became one of the largest corporations in the world through simple, yet incredibly effective, marketing and branding. The genius came from a ball­ bearing assembly line supervisor whom Nicholas called Cauliflower.

"Nicholas would often come into our plants to inspect the process. He was always in a good mood and had the weirdest laugh. We started making fun of him for it. It was in the break room over lunch where one of the workers was giving an impression of his now famous ‘ho, ho, ho,' that it dawned on me. This should be a catchphrase."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

Cauliflower pitched the idea to Crumpit, who had since been promoted to the company’s very first Chief Operations Officer. But Crumpit was skeptical. A catch phrase would only do so much, what Nicholas really needed was a complete rebranding. Crumpit promoted Cauliflower to Chief Marketing Officer and tasked him with overhauling the image of Nicholas. It was through this effort that Saint Nicholas was transformed into Santa Claus.

"The exact process of how Nicholas reached sainthood isn't clear, but it seemed that it mostly stemmed from his work during the Council of Nicea, even though Nicholas himself always loathed that time. But as a result, some started to refer to him as 'Sinterklaas.' We wanted to retain the honorific title, but make it a little more palatable to the non Roman-Catholic audience. So we worked with a few different advertising agencies and landed on 'Santa Claus.'"

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

With a new name and catchphrase, Cauliflower also thought Nicholas needed a makeover. The signature look of a red suit with fluffy white trim was based off an old jacket Nicholas had been given by a girlfriend he met while in Spain during the offseason. The coat was meant to resemble the jacket of a matador, but Cauliflower removed the sequence and elongated the waistline, combined the outfit with the work boots Nicholas wore while tending the reindeer stables, and came up with the idea for the hat after one of the elves got drunk at an after-Christmas party and put a stocking on his head. Santa later married that young Spaniard, but few know that Mrs. Claus's biggest contribution was the simple purchase of a red coat for her boyfriend. Cauliflower began pitching the new ‘Santa Claus’ to established corporations and found a willing partner in the Coca-Cola Beverage Company to use the image in their winter advertisements. The ads proved enormously successful. To date, the licensing deal with Coca-Cola remains one of the largest annual sources of revenue for The North Pole, Inc. and is the second most lucrative licensing deal of all-time, trailing only the Air Jordan brand partnership between Michael Jordan and Nike.

"Look, 'believing in Santa' and 'Christmas cheer' are all fine and good, but those don't pay the bills. Cash does. People don't like how commercial Christmas has become, but what they don't realize is that Santa could never have stayed afloat any other way. Unless you want to start paying for elf wages, reindeer food, and toy manufacturing costs, Christmas is going to have to be commercial. There just isn't any other way."

-Cauliflower, CMO, The North Pole, Inc.

But Cauliflower and his team weren’t done working Christmas marketing miracles. Shortly after the success of the complete Santa re-brand, they hit another marketing home run in the form of a beast of burden with a genetic mutation.

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Share By C.S. Beaty

"Dad, why do we celebrate October?"

"Do you mean Halloween?"

"Yeah.”

"There's something to do with it being the day before some holiday for Catholics, but I don't really know that part. Mostly we just do it because it's fun."

"Why do we celebrate Fall?"

“Do you mean Thanksgiving?"

"Yeah."

"Well, that one is a little weird."

●●●

I spent a lot of my childhood playing with my friend Perry. Perry's favorite movie was the film adaptation of Huckleberry Finn, and he embodied the character. The two of us would create elaborate adventure scenarios down back alleyways, Perry’s grandparents’ cabin, Perry’s other grandparents' farm, and each of our backyards. We were seldom inside, but when we were we could be found in Perry’s basement junk room— digging through his dad’s old baseball cards and discarded collectibles the family had been meaning to throw out. The first time I was invited over to Perry’s house, the playdate ended with when his dad called the police to come unlock the handcuffs that Perry's little brother had fastened around his wrist. The cuffs were law enforcement grade, acquired during his dad’s time as a parole officer— but no one could remember where the handcuff key was.

Perry's little brother often tagged along, and he drove me nuts.  I would sigh whenever his mom would insist that we include him, but we found a loophole to fulfill his participation requirements without having to play nice—we'd just make him the bad guy in whatever game we were playing.

Perry and I loved the classic role play of Cowboys and Indians. Perry always wanted to be the Indian, so I’d join his tribe, and we’d proceed to pummel the Cowboy played by his adolescent sibling. It wasn't clear why Perry loved the role so much, and his interest went beyond our improvised combat scenarios. He had collected an impressive display of replica Indian paraphernalia, mostly acquired from various gas stations or National Park souvenir shops during family vacations. Perry claimed he had some Cherokee blood and would give you the percentage of said blood upon request. I always had my doubts, but despite Perry’s pasty white complexion, his mom substantiated the claim.

But I really think Perry just liked rooting for the underdog.

●●●

At our classroom Thanksgiving party, we were encouraged to dress up as either a Pilgrim or an Indian. I'm sure there was a goal of an even distribution among the Kindergartners, but the choice of attire was left to us and the Indians vastly outnumbered the white settlers. Predictably, Perry was one of them— but since his little brother wasn't around, I decided to align myself with the Pilgrims.

After all, we weren't meant to be adversaries—this was Thanksgiving. We were friends.

After all, isn't that what Thanksgiving is all about?

I wasn't sure exactly. I guess I'm still not.

The only other mention of pilgrims I’m familiar with is in John Bunyan’s complicated allegory Pilgrim’s Progress. I didn’t like that book, but I lied to a Pastor once and said I did. I had experience pretending to be something I wasn’t, even if that was the fan of an old book Christians are supposed to like.

I didn’t like the book Prevailing Prayer by D.L. Moody either, despite it being gifted to me by another Pastor as a present for helping with a youth group. I slogged through it though. I found Moody’s theology weird and troublesome, but he did have an interesting anecdote about everyone’s favorite seasonal gorging.  

That’s what Thanksgiving is all about Charlie Brown.

At least that's what D.L. Moody thought it was about I guess, but Moody didn’t cite his sources. And what about the Indians? Weren’t there supposed to be Indians?

To go along with the Pilgrim hat we made in class out of construction paper, my mom made me a Pilgrim shirt out of felt. I was proud of my outfit, no one else had cardboard shoe buckles.

I looked just like a Pilgrim.

●●●

The Boy Scouts knew that boys getting bored with camping was a real threat to business, so some Boy Scout intrapreneurs came up with a novel solution. Capitalizing on the popularity of secret societies and fraternal orders at the time, the Boy Scouts of America created their own Freemasons. They threw in some Indian stuff and The Order of the Arrow was born.

OA didn’t hide being serious and secretive, that was the whole point.

There were secret handshakes (your bottom pinky interweaved with the other guy’s bottom pinky if you were the lowest rank, and then you added another finger for each rank you moved up).

 There was a secret code word that was only whispered directly into an ear and wasn’t supposed to be written down anywhere (“Ahoalton.” I think. I don't know how to spell it on account of the whole not being able to write it down thing.)

You even got a cool new Indian name when you reached the highest rank. The names were decided by a committee of other Vigil Honor Members after scrolling through a glossary of Lenni Lenape Indian language words. I always loved picking people's names. I’d look for the most ridiculous words and create uncomfortably long phrases that no one could ever remember. It reminded me of the movie Jungle 2 Jungle when Tim Alan learns that his son’s name “Mimi-Siku” means “Cat Piss.”

My name was “Malechinsin”, or it might have been “Machelensin”. I'm not sure which, it was written down different ways on the certificates I was given.

OA ceremonies were a big deal. We had initiation ceremonies and ceremonies for each level of membership. The ceremony’s content was also secretive, only those with the proper level of membership were allowed to watch them. There were four main characters in each, played by pudgy white farm kids wearing headdresses and regalia that cost hundreds of dollars and made up the entirety of an OA “Lodge's” annual budget. You could always tell which cities had the best OA Lodges based on how nice their headdresses were.

During Boy Scout summer camp, each Wednesday the OA would hold a “Call-out Ceremony.” All the campers for that week were lined up at the entrance to their campsite, and then a usually shirtless preteen dressed in Indian regalia would stand stoically at the front or the line— not flinching or saying a word regardless of how bad the mosquitoes were or how much you fucked with him. All campers, whether they were initiated into the Order of the Arrow or not, had to stand with arms crossed in complete silence. Eventually the four "chiefs" would walk in front of their campsite, and the guide would fall in at the back of the line with their campsite in tow.

More reverence was paid during this ceremony than the morning flag raising.

The Four chiefs— Meteu, Nutikiet, Kitchkinet, and Allowat Sakima— would read from a script (a couple of times my buddy Drew tried to memorize his lines for Meteu, but he was the only one). A list of names was "called out" to indicate which Boy Scouts had been elected by their Troops to join the Order of The Arrow. There was an initiation and some hazing to go, but otherwise the boys were now a member of our tribe.

The chiefs wouldn’t drop character until the costumes were off and neatly placed in their garment bags and back under the care of the Ceremonies Chief. Only then were we permitted to go back to our ordinary lives of white Boy Scouts camping for the weekend.

Well, most of the time.

There wasn't much to do in Grand Island, Nebraska. It became a tradition for Meteu, Kitchkinet, Nutiket, and Allowat Sakima to make an annual pilgrimage to the three holy sites of: Walmart, Bosselman's Truck Stop, and Tommy's 24-hour Diner.  The chieftains were still solemn and serious while eating their late-night half stack of pancakes, but nevertheless these four warriors stood out amongst the late-night Grand Island crowd. We once saw the same man at both Tommy's Diner and later at Bosselman’s Truck Stop. I bet he gave his meth dealer a big tip after he started seeing teenage Caucasian Indians following him around.

I wore black and white face paint a few times, I even created a pattern that I wanted to be my signature Indian look. A middle-aged Scout leader who was heavily involved in OA back when he was a young lad saw my face paint and gave me an odd look.

"Didn't OA decide not to do face paint anymore out of respect for the Native Americans?"

It was a question.

I didn’t know the answer, I was as unsure as he was. He had thought he had heard something along those lines once, but he couldn’t quite place the comment.  

I kept wearing the face paint. I thought it looked cool.

I’m not sure how prevalent Indian regalia is at the Order of the Arrow ceremonies nowadays— the Boy Scouts seem to have been making a lot of changes lately.2 But it does seem a little odd for a bunch of kids from farming communities dressing up like Indians, even if we did do it respectfully. Most of the time.  Even if we were trying to honor their culture. Most of the time. A culture that wasn't ours.

●●●

I don’t know when exactly I realized that the term "Indian" was —at best— misleading and —at worst— offensive. It seemed to depend on the person you asked. And most of the people I asked were white.

I went to a presentation by an Indian—or Native American—or American Indian author who midstream launched into a George Carlin style rant about the names his race gets called. The limitations and inaccuracies of the term "Indian" are obvious, but he had his own issues with the term "Native American.”

“I'm not from America. That's not the name of the place where my ancestors came from. Then how can I be a native of a place that didn’t exist until white men came and called it that?"

Ok, I felt like he had a point, so then he was a Sioux, right?

"The name Sioux was actually a name assigned to us after white settlers asked a rival tribe what our people were called. The word they used meant “enemy” or more specifically “little snakes.” So, the French heard that word, but didn’t know how to spell it, so they gave it a French ending of “oux” and now we're known as the “little snake people.”

Well shit, that name was apparently worse.

I was waiting for the punch line of the speech where he blessed us sensitive white people with the official, politically correct name we could call “his people” and not be an asshole. But it never came.

To him, that didn’t seem to be the point. He didn’t seem to have much of a problem with someone who used the word “Indian” in a charitable spirit, even though it might be inaccurate.  He was more annoyed with using a term like "Native American" or "Sioux" by people that were convinced they were being respectful.

At least that was his opinion. Which matters. But different people have different opinions. And those matter too.

●●●

It's not that we shouldn't change the names of our baseball teams, it's just that we shouldn't think that changing the names of our baseball teams makes us more understanding.

Maybe less ignorant, but not more empathetic.

●●●

Occasionally, I’ll arbitrarily pick a point in U.S. history and read a bunch of books about it. This past year I came across a copy of American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham.

I was perusing the shelves of a local bookstore, the kind of local bookstore where you feel obligated to buy something to help the underdog. I love biographies and have read some Jon Meacham in the past. I kind of liked those books, and this one had won the Pulitzer Prize—so I guess that’s good. I overpaid for the used paperback, and the volume sat on my bookshelf for several months until I reached the antebellum period of my historical curiosity. The book was great. I told my wife about it.

"Other than the whole “Trail of Tears,” Andrew Jackson was a badass. I can see why we put him on the $20 bill, even though everybody hates him now."

My wife offered, her response.

“Yeah, other than that “WHOLE TRAIL OF TEARS.”

I could see her point. But I elaborated.  

"It's not that I don't think it was terrible, it just seems like it was inevitable. That's the pattern of history, people conquer other people. The idea that we were just going to share the land like we’re all friends just wasn't realistic. Jackson was just the guy that decided to rip the Band-Aid off."

She wasn't convinced.

"I suppose…"

I followed up American Lion with Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab by Steve Inskeep. I felt a little differently after reading that book. Maybe Jackson wasn't such a badass. Maybe he was just an ass.

Maybe the Trail of Tears is enough to determine your legacy.

Inskeep ended the book with his own interaction with an Indian— or Native American—or American Indian.

●●●

My wife and I like different kinds of books. It's rare to see me with a novel, it's rare to see her with anything non-fiction. But when she listened to the audiobook of Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann she acted as if Ingrid Michaelson had written a murder mystery about baking. She begged me to leave her alone so she could shove in her ear buds and listen to the systematic murder of Osage Indians for their oil money.

It seemed like the kind of thing I would read. It was. I plowed through the book version of the book with a similar fervor. When we heard Martin Scorsese had cast Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro for a film adaptation, Paige made me watch the trailer on our basement flatscreen.

This story of “mineral rights,” exploitation, and land deals is fascinating and at times poetic. Sick of people forcing them off their land, the Osage Indians made the shrewd decision to purchase property that was shit for farming so everyone would just leave them the fuck alone. But in a cosmic sort of justice, the land they got off the discount rack happened to have some of the richest oil reserves in the country. Knowing their white neighbor’s propensity to take their stuff, the Osage leaders executed a brilliant maneuver— they allowed others to buy and sell the land above, but the Osage retained the “mineral rights” for anything found below. It turns out what was below was worth a hell of a lot more than what was above.

The Osage established a complicated system of “headrights,” which were basically shares of the oil business. Each Osage alive at the time received one “headright,” and when they died, the headright passed to their next of kin. An oil headright was absurdly ludicrous, and the white ranchers resented the red Osages for their wealth. They got out maneuvered. The white settlers weren’t used to this— it was the white people that were supposed to be the ones that knew how to trick people into shitty deals.

So, they decided to trick the Osage into some shitty deals, and when that didn’t work, they just killed them. Killers of the Flower Moon is about how a few swindlers married into Osage families, killed their spouses, and then inherited their headrights which granted them access to their oil money into perpetuity. It's mysterious, tragic, and disgusting. Many of these families live today still under the mystery of what happened to their relatives.

The book was so fucking good.

●●●

My family needed an affordable road trip, and we had done just about everything there is to do in Kansas City. After drawing a radius around Omaha in Google Maps, we decided on Tulsa, Oklahoma. I didn’t know anything about Tulsa, but the more we planned the trip, the more excited I became. I wasn't let down.

But despite how incredible the Catoosa Whale and the Tulsa Oil Man statues looked, we didn't quite have enough activity to fill our vacation itinerary. We looked for options in the surrounding Oklahoman metropolises.

"Where did all that ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ stuff happen"?

"Pawhuska"

"How far is that?”

"Not too far, we could do it on the way back.”

"Sweet, what about that Pioneer Lady that makes food out of sour cream, doesn't she have something in Oklahoma? Where is that?"

“Pawhuska”

"Looks like we’re going to Pawhuska.”

There isn't a lot in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, but the things that are there are owned by the Drummond Family. As in Ree Drummond. The dilapidated ranch town of fewer than 3,000 people has been turned into Pioneer Woman Disney Land. And the prices and lines to get to the attractions are just as exorbitant.

I felt odd about how overly commercial the small-town charm had become. Odd and above it all. I took cynical photos and sent them to my brother. Refusing to wait two hours to eat at the official Pioneer Woman restaurant, my wife and I found a small BBQ joint tucked away next to an abandoned railroad track grown over by weeds. This was exactly the kind of place I wanted to eat at in a city of 2,926.

We were enthusiastically greeted by the lady behind the BBQ counter, peering at us through stacks of Styrofoam cups that I would later fill with sweet tea. We were the only people in the restaurant other than this pleasant woman and a large man sitting in the corner watching a TV replaying a classic movie. It took us a while to settle on the appropriate amount of meat stuffs to feed our family of five— it was clear we had never been there before, and the restaurant's inhabitant was eager to help with suggestions. Eventually, the large man in the corner broke his silence and lifted his gaze from Clark Gable's overtures.

“Where you guys from?"

"Omaha.”

"Ahhh. Cornhuskers. I've been up there. You here to see the Pioneer Woman?"

"Actually, we're far more interested in the ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Osage Indian murders," I said matter-or-factly.

I wanted to make it clear that I was a man of substance, not a man of frivolity. I wanted this large man in the comer to understand I wasn't in the middle of a pilgrimage to see the woman that taught the world how to make a quick and easy casserole with only four simple ingredients and 25 minutes. I was the kind of man that cared about culture. About history. The kind that read books.

The large man’s smile faded. His head dropped at the neck to peer at the floor. I hadn't expected this reaction, I thought I would have been appreciated. Respected. But I seemed to have offended him. When his head lifted again and his eyes met mine, I noticed his complexion for the first time. He wasn’t white. Which in Pawhuska meant he was Indian. Which in Pawhuska meant he was Osage. Which in Pawhuska meant the Osage murders weren’t some interesting unsolved mysteries. In Pawhuska, that meant the people murdered were his people. His family.

And I was taking my family to see the attraction.

He was kind. He told me there was actually a better book out there than David Grann's. I forget the name. But I remember the look on his face.

●●●

Pawhuska, Oklahoma has got to be the only town of 2,926 that has its own bus tour. Our family was the only one on the outing, but I found it fascinating. The driver was really excited about how they just got someone to make a DVD she could play to explain the stained-glass windows at the old cathedral, but otherwise the nice old woman drove us around and narrated the contents outside our vehicle. The Osage Nation is still deeply embedded and influential within the community—actively buying up land and other property. Property that was likely stolen from them a generation ago through one corrupt act or another.

The tour went a little like this:

"On the left you will see the Drummond Ranch, the largest cattle operation in all of Pawhuska. Ree Drummond married into the Drummond family in…"

"On the right you will see the tree where they would auction off Osage properties, the Osage people would get taken advantage of by…"

"Just ahead you, will see the old Walmart buildings that Ree Drummond purchased to warehouse all of the Pioneer Woman items to be shipped..."

"This site is where one Osage family was said to be murdered, so that his headright could be passed on to a wife…"

"Drummond…"  

"Osage murdered so someone could steal their land and money...”

"Drummond…"  

"Osage murdered so someone could steal their land and money...”

"Drummond…"  

"Osage murdered so someone could steal their land and money...”

"Drummond…"  

And then the inevitable —yet never suggested by our tour guide— connection crashed into my head as if our full-size van had hit a Drummond owned bison. I turned to my wife.

"Wait. Did the Pioneer Woman marry into a family that got wealthy from murdering Osage Indians?"

My wife offered, her response.

“Holy shit.”

●●●

While I ate my official Pioneer Woman pepperoni pizza at the official Pioneer Woman's pizza restaurant, the internet proved inconclusive. But suspicious.

There were a few facts that were consistent. The Drummond family were the wealthiest landowners in Pawhuska— completely independent of Pioneer Woman fame. The family went back generations, accumulated wealth over generations, and always lived in Pawhuska. There were numerous speculative articles written4 that pointed out dealings that weren't above reproach, but there was much more that was secretive. Though it was the most popular method of accumulating wealth in Pawhuska, the people that murdered and swindled Osage and stole their money didn't come out and talk about it. And the Drummonds had the most wealth. And had for a long time.  There were enough questions for Bloomberg Media to create an entire podcast called "In Trust" investigating the Drummond family and their suspect dealings, which I listened to in its entirety once I returned to Nebraska.5 Despite the lack of evidence that may stand up in a court of law, it all just felt so painfully obvious to me.

I asked our Pawhuska Air Bnb host about how the community viewed the Drummonds. And the Osage.

She was a kindly cattle rancher, she spent her entire evening showing my children various horses, goats, and chickens while answering endless questions and acting impressed at my 4-year old's ability to mumble some sounds that were supposed to be the lyrics to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle theme song. She told one of her sons to go inside to find an old cowboy hat to give my boy. She encouraged her daughter to becomes pen pals with my daughter. By the end of our evening, I adored this woman.

 Surely everyone in the community had already considered whether the Drummonds got their money from shady dealings and racist corruption? I figured she could put my mind at ease. There was probably an easy explanation, otherwise there would be more than just a speculative podcast out there.

She didn't put my mind at ease. She acted like she didn’t know much about it at all. Her understanding of the dynamic was just as flimsy as the flower patterned paper plates sold at the Pioneer Woman Mercantile. She didn’t try to sound authoritative, but her own explanations for how the Drummonds got their money were easily proven false by the simplest of googling. It's not that she was lying or trying to cover for Ree—she just hadn't put that much thought into it.

 I guess not many had.

She did have a strong opinion on Osage politics though. She had thought about it a lot.

●●●

Despite the plausible deniability, I was convinced the Drummond family were racist crooks. Ree married into the family, so maybe she deserves some leniency, but it's hard to listen to the entire Bloomberg podcast and at least not feel a little reluctant to buy a festive cowboy themed crock pot from the official Pioneer Woman product line only available at Walmart.  

“Paige. Once this movie comes out, the world is going to cancel the Pioneer Woman. There's just no way she could survive this. It's so obvious."

My wife wasn’t convinced.

“I'm not so sure. Her fans aren't the types that would care about something like that."

I could see her point. But I elaborated.  

"Care about systematic corruption designed to destroy a race of people, steal their land, steal their money, and treat them as less than human? How could you not react with disgust?"

It turns out my wife was right. The movie came out. Unfortunately, it kind of sucked. And then everyone went back to not caring.

I saw that Ree Drummond recently released a memoir though. I haven't read it, but the cheerful cover didn’t suggest to me it was written by a sorrowful woman reckoning with her family's place in profiting from a genocidal cover-up.

I bet it has some fun recipes though.

●●●

No, I can't prove anything about the Drummonds other than to say, "listen to the podcast."

But I don't feel like it is wrong of me to at least care about what appears to be a complete injustice. What looks like a white family living in fame and fortune under the shadow of one of the darkest and most disgusting periods in our Nation’s history. Because appearances matter, especially when the rest of the culture refuses to look at them.

There are some character traits more important than being good at cooking a big fancy dinner for your family. Maybe we should care more about those values.

●●●

A pilgrim is "a person who journeys to a sacred place for religious reasons"— at least that’s my favorite of the six google results. If the Pilgrims came to the United States, and if that became their sacred place, then it makes sense that they would get together with a bunch of Indians who clearly felt the same about where they lived. It would make sense that they would both be thankful.

And it would make sense that they would both be at odds about it later. People aren’t good at sharing the sacred. Covetousness is part of the human condition. We are easily reminded of that.

But it’s hard to remember to be thankful. It takes effort to remember that. A holiday. A Holy Day. To remind ourselves to be thankful.

To be thankful for people that look different than us. To be thankful for the place that we live despite its hardships and inequalities. To be thankful for the things we have, and not the things we want to take from others.

Though I have to admit, it seems you have more to be thankful for when you look like a Pilgrim than an Indian.

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Our TV was my best friend. My dad worked from a home office and my mom didn't return for about two hours after I arrived back from school, so my idle hours revolved around a steady stream of Animaniacs, Rugrats, Doug, Johnny Bravo, Garfield, and my favorite, Batman: The Animated Series.

I had memorized the network schedules long ago, at any given half hour I knew exactly where I needed to be. Genera1ly, my older brothers were either working at Skagway Grocery or doing cool older kid stuff, leaving the remote entirely under my control, but on one afternoon I was pissed to find that Jason had claimed the television when the caped crusader (voiced by Kevin Conroy) was scheduled to be pummeling the clown prince (voiced by Mark Hamill). I was about to utter my disgust, when I took a moment to see what he was watching.

"Do you like Batman?”

"Yeah, I like it"

“Me too.”

Anyone with siblings can attest, there aren't a lot of moments growing up when you feel a familial bond. That tends to come later in life, as maturity grants you perspective and you realize just how much you can relate to the people that had the exact same upbringing as yourself. Somehow, inexplicably, it dawns on you that you actually kind of like them. It turns out, you have quite a bit in common. But during adolescence, they present an obstacle. Competition. Rivals. Someone that got to the remote before you and ruined your after-school plans.

On that afternoon, Jason and I were brothers. I had never felt so close.

●●●

The Batman Animated Series wasn't the only 1990s vintage superhero cartoon out there, but it was the best. There was a dark tone that made me feel more grown up. The fact that my older brother didn't tease me the way he did about Pokémon made me feel accepted. Validated. I wasn't a little kid, I watched Batman.

Most kids in my generation attribute their love of a particular superhero to cartoons. We didn't grow up reading comic books like the Vietnam era that preceded us, we were latch-key kids with a remote in hand. There was a Superman cartoon. But it sucked. His villains were just dumb and unbelievable. Bizarro? A guy that sees a cat stuck in a tree and thinks he needs to save the tree because in his universe everything is opposite? Come-on, this is nonsense. Comic books can contain simple plots and dull storylines since the experience is also dependent on factors like the quality of the artwork, but in the world of TV animation, your story and characters better be good. And Superman's were dumb as hell. After watching a starfish monster that brainwashed people by getting stuck to their faces, I changed the channel.

Spiderman was my second favorite, and like Batman, it was because of the gripping narrative and fascinating villains. I heard the X-Men cartoon was good too, but I wasn't allowed to watch it because it talked about evolution and some people had psychic powers. This was clearly the devil's handiwork.

The current generation will undoubtedly have their favorite heroes influenced by the onslaught of Marvel movies, which wasn’t such a bad thing until they decided that each new film had to represent thirteen different social causes and feature a transgender Swahili character with only one nostril and a hideous deformity, all in the name of representation. The first Marvel movies were just about being fucking sweet, the artform seems to work better that way.

As I age, the imprint of Batman and Spiderman cartoons helped those two heroes earn the gold and silver positions in my favorite heroes list, but they were aided by the brilliant movie storytelling at the hands of Christopher Nolan and Tobey Maguire. As an adult, you need something you can identify with to sustain your passions. You need a mythology.

The binary battle between the good guys and bad guys is a timeless epic, and if the hero has a kick ass outfit, that'll be good enough for a while. But at a certain point you need to know why this guy cares. What are his motives? What is his drive? And perhaps even more importantly, why would any bad guy ever get in the way of that? My five-year-old son is content with slamming two action figures together until one is arbitrarily defeated, but the superhero industry needs something more durable than injection molded plastic to capture the minds and hearts of the target audience with disposable income. They need a legend.

Heroes were around before Stan Lee. The pagan legends of Hercules and Dionysus are practically household names still. Texts like Beowulf are timeless, the only way you can screw them up is by making a poorly animated Angelina Jolie lizard lady.

It's not hard to understand why Marvel decided to just say 'fuck it' and made Thor the Norse god of Thunder into an Avenger. As the saying goes, if it’s not broken, then turn it into a movie franchise and call it your own. There is something in the human condition that needs a figure, a savior, to latch onto. We see a struggle, an evil, in the world we live in. We feel how futile our own attempts are at trying to fix things. We've tried. We've failed. We need something—someone— greater than ourselves to make the world right. We need a symbol.

●●●

We have no choice but to view the world through lenses. Our experiences drive our beliefs—as my first boss was fond of saying— so the heroes we resonate with the most are the ones that seem to understand the world we live in. The same world that we have experienced. The heroes that see the problems we see but have the power to do something about it. The heroes that we can’t be. The heroes that we feel the world needs.

Maybe that's why I've always thought that Superman was kind of a penis. There's absolutely nothing I can relate to about the perfect man who can do absolutely anything he wants as long as no one shows up with some glowing, green jewelry. He's so unrelatable that Friedrich Nietzsche used the term ubermensch —i.e. 'superman'— to describe the next stage in human evolution. That is, he described someone that was completely unlike who we are today by borrowing the term from comics. Nietzsche is known as the father of nihilism, the school of thought where everything is meaningless. As it would seem, without a superman, our world is pointless. But I don’t know, I’ve kind of always thought that maybe there’s a point to it all.  

When William Moulton Marston couldn't find a market for the lie detector test he invented— and got kicked out of most university professor gigs for being kind of a weirdo— he decided to invent Wonder Woman. He took deliberate attempts to write stories that were feminist allegories, going so far as mandating and providing sketches for how Wonder Woman had to be bound in kinky chains, so she could then liberate herself.

Marston was successful in creating a feminist icon, one that my seven-year-old daughter has dressed up as for the past two Halloweens. But it's hard for me to look at Diana the Amazon and all she stood for in the same light after I learned that Marston was a masochist in a polyamorous relationship. He told his wife that if she didn't want a divorce, she had to let his female lab assistant move in with them so she could be his mistress. Marston fathered multiple children by this mistress, and never told them what the fuck was going on.2

Doesn't really feel like feminism to me, kind of sounds like a creepy dude that likes kinky sex.

Which brings us to why Batman is the best superhero.

●●●

Bruce Wayne has everything the average person would think might make him content in life: money, charming looks, a butler, a kickass house with a cave underneath it. But because of the death of his parents, he can never escape the reality that things are not as they should be. And because of the death of his parents, he can never escape how that no matter how hard he tries, his efforts will never be enough to set things right. But he has to try.

He doesn't have superpowers. He doesn't come from another planet or a mysterious island where all of the athletic ladies that live there are born with superhuman strength and the genetic desire to kick the asses of men in charge. He has money, but he feels weird about that. He's a kid in pain. He decides that unless he uses all of his physical and fiscal resources to do something good, he will be betraying the identity he was born into. Unlike Superman, Bruce Wayne doesn't have an alter ego. He is Bruce Wayne. He is Batman. He needs Bruce Wayne to remember who he was. He needs Batman to make things the way they should be.

And yet he is unmistakably a tragic hero. We can relate to the humanity of Bruce Wayne, but also relate to the fruitlessness of his life's work. As he becomes a symbol for justice, others become a symbol of fear, chaos, and pain. He now has enemies, foes that would have never risen if Wayne hadn't challenged them. As long as Batman is trying to save it, Gotham City can never be saved. But if the Batman isn't there to save Gotham, no one will be. Batman shows us the tension we feel living in a fallen world, yet encourages us to do something about it even though we cannot fix it all on our own. It reminds us that we need a savior, and that there is more to life than trying to be one. Because no one should want Bruce Wayne’s life. Or Batman’s.

What a legend.

●●●

Because I grew up in the golden age of cartoons and not the golden age of comic books, my introduction to the artform was through happenstance. The first comic I purchased was a four-issue run of Plastic Man from a garage sale. My childhood friend Perry and I searched through the rows of long boxes for a superhero we recognized, but Plastic Man is what we ended up with. It was a good deal and there were two matching sets of all four books, so Perry and I both walked away with the foundation of our comic book collections. The construction didn't proceed much further past the foundation for a very long time.

Despite the perfection of the Batman cartoons, the Batman movies left something to be desired. At least until Christopher Nolan came around. I knew from the opening shot of a man with a clown mask firing a zipline that The Dark Knight was my favorite movie. During the midnight premiere at the Dickinson 7, my buddy Broc and I made eye contact at that exact moment.  No words were said, but we both understood. This movie was going to be fucking sweet. When the trilogy was set to be completed with The Dark Knight Rises, Jason made an off-hand comment that he thought he should read some Bane comics ahead of time to better appreciate the storyline. At the time I was lonely, living in a studio apartment without internet in a strange city while working a summer internship. I spent a lot of time wandering the aisles of a nearby bookstore and found a specially compiled collection of Bane storylines in the graphic novel section. Undoubtedly marketed for the release of the summer blockbuster, I gave them my money and read the whole collection in a single setting. When I was done, I regifted the book to Jason.

Knowing Bane’s genesis immensely enhanced my movie viewing experience. The whole Talia al Ghul twist made so much more sense. I wondered what else I missed out on by not knowing the Batman comics, so I decided to find out. I started buying classic Batman tales for Jason's birthday each October, getting them well enough in advance to read each before wrapping. I didn’t learn much about the hero that I didn't already know, but the nuance of the villains was greatly enhanced. The motives, the back stories, the distorted worldviews that justified their actions—it turns out all of it had been thought through. It was as if I just discovered color television. The speech bubble sound bites of comic dialogue don't read like literature prose, and there were still some real turds in the canon, but I was left with the impression that these stories are going to be our generation's contributions to the written word. Batman will be our century's Beowulf.

●●●

There seemed to be boundaries to what you could do with the comic book form, and then I bought a copy of Maus. The comic format of panels and lettering tends to limit what can be expressed, but Art Spiegelman discovered a use of the medium that elevated his story, or rather his father's story.

Art’s dad was a difficult man. As a Holocaust survivor, he was understandably bitter and frustrating to be around. But Art felt the need to record what Vladek had been through. He started meeting with Vladek and taping the discussions. He assembled the sessions into a nearly 300-page, two-volume graphic novel. On the surface, a comic about the Holocaust may seem insensitive, but that’s not the treatment Art gave the story. I tend to avoid the topic of genocide and concentration camps— not that it comes up a lot since so does everyone else. Because of how gruesome and disgusting that period of history was, I don't want it to be unpacked. Even though I wasn't impacted by it directly, I cannot fathom the reality and gravity of what took place at places like Auschwitz. It sickens me, so I ignore it.

By storyboarding Vladek's experiences, there is enough distance created from reality to allow you to consume it. The distance forms comprehension, because the real thing is so overwhelming that at a certain point you have to desensitize yourself from it. Remove yourself from it. Spiegelman takes this separation a step further by drawing every Jewish character, including himself, as a mouse. A vermin. And the Nazis as cats. Predators. As you read the work, the metaphor is captivating. You get lost in it but keep moving forward. And then you have to remind yourself that the cats and the mice were actual human beings. And it gives you pause. Like, you have to stop what you're doing and soak that in.

It's nothing short of brilliant, and the Pulitzer Prize Committee agreed when they gave Maus their fancy award. And it would have never worked if it wasn't a comic book.

But not every comic book is Maus.

●●●

I didn't branch any further into classic superheroes, but I bought copies of the comics written by the lead singers of bands I liked. I thought the Coheed and Cambria comic books kind of sucked,3 but Coldplay did slightly better.4 When the prodigal son Scott Frost came back to save the Nebraska football team as its much-hyped new head coach, the local newspaper the Omaha World Herald made a comic book accounting the epic of how our hero came home to save our state. Frost went on to become the statistically worst head coach in school history. When his replacement Matt Rhule was announced, the paper elected to skip the comic book production.

In 2011, the National Hockey League undertook their most ambitious marketing campaign to date in a desperate attempt to attract younger fans to their esoteric sport. The first Iron Man movie had come out three years prior, setting off a chain reaction of Marvel Studios titles that would culminate in the cinematic craze of The Avengers. Stan Lee went from nerd hero to cultural icon. Superheroes had gone from stapled pages to Saturday morning televisions, to now, the big screen. The NHL could sense the momentum and wanted a piece, why not arenas next? They called it The Guardian Project, and the the hockey world was introduced to it during a month straight of video clips posted on the NHL.com website.

Hyping the project, was Stan Lee himself:

When the big reveals came, I was pumped. I couldn't wait to see what The Colorado Avalanche was going to be. A badass Yeti? A bloodthirsty snow monster? A dude with Rocky Mountain Ram horns? There were so many directions they could take that would be unique to the region and new to the Superhero pantheon. On the day that the fan vote deemed it was Colorado's turn, I clicked the link with anticipation to see… Mr. Freeze.

It didn’t LOOK like Mr. Freeze. It WAS Mr. Freeze.

The idea was to create a new superhero for each NHL franchise, something that local fans could rally around and buy shit tons of merchandising. There was a loose storyline—they said a novel had been written explaining how the whole thing was supposed to work. But for now, all we were given was each team's hero. From the looks of things, it seemed like making original characters inspired by a Canadian game and regional identities isn't easy.

So, they took a shortcut.

The Colorado Avalanche was a Mr. Freeze rip-off, but he wasn't even the most obvious one.

The Calgary Flame was The Human Torch.

The Pittsburgh Penguin was Cyclops.

Since Guardians of the Galaxy was still a deep cut at the time, they thought no one would notice that The Toronto Maple Leaf was Groot.

The Phoenix Coyote as Wolverine was like they were trying to fuck with us on purpose.

Running out of comic book inspirations, Stan Lee and company turned to cartoons. The Minnesota Wild was Taz from the Looney Tunes.

The Montreal Canadien was Cobra Commander from G.I. Joe.

South of the border, The Columbus Blue Jacket was a patriotic Optimus Prime.

And from there, the Guardians just started ripping off each other. The Los Angeles King was the same as The Ottawa Senator but with a different hat.

And The Detroit Red Wing, The Chicago Blackhawk, and The Atlanta Thrasher were all just guys in the same robot suits. I guess no one really knew what a Red Wing, a Blackhawk, or a Thrasher was supposed to look like.

There were a few original ideas though, like The St. Louis Blue who was a smoke monster that played the saxophone.

The heroes were officially introduced during the NHL All Star Game as promised, and then no one heard of them again. The NHL just stopped talking about it. After months of incessant buildup, the league pretended like it had never happened. The promised novel was never released. I never bought The Colorado Avalanche plush during my annual trips to the Pepsi Center. Whatever metric the hockey bosses were using to measure the effectiveness of the Stan Lee promotional videos came back and said to cut bait.  

It's not clear how much money was dumped into the entire initiative, but lawsuits were filed claiming damages in the hundreds of thousands to millions.5 The internet is pretty quiet about the whole thing, other than agreeing that the real issue was that the Guardians all sucked.

But surely it couldn’t have been that bad, right? Sure, the reveal was a bit botched, but they had a whole exhaustive backstory and everything, shouldn’t that have been given a chance?

●●●

I scoured eBay for anything Guardian Project related and was able to locate a water damaged special edition book containing the introduction to all 30 heroes. I read the excerpts from the novel introducing the teenage protagonist Mike Mason and the notorious baddie Devan Dark. I mean it wasn't Bruce Wayne watching his parents get shot after leaving a showing of Zorro, but what is?

I pressed on.

It was that bad.

Each hero had a 5-page storyline where their city is under attack from an arch nemesis, and the respective Guardian swoops in, or runs in, or surfs in, or scuba dives in, or electrocutes in, and saves the day. And if the heroes were unoriginal, the villains could have benefited from being a little more derivative. The Boston Bruin took down a scientist with his brain sticking out named Dr. Mayhem.

The New York Ranger took on an electricity guy with sunglasses who called himself Time Squared.

Cyclops, I mean The Pittsburgh Penguin, had to stop Rivet—the junkyard mutant with a metal lower jaw and no hands.

There were other amazing names like Jellifish and The Threatener. I hope someone picks up The Threatener in a future comic book series or Marvel movie franchise. The potential dialogue is too good.

Spiderman: “Is that a threat?”

The Threatener: “No, that’s a promise. Shit. I mean, yes, it’s a threat.”

The writers of The Edmonton Oiler and The Washington Capital storylines forgot to compare notes when they created identical sludge monster super villains Bitumen and Refuse.

But the real winners were in a league all their own.

The Buffalo Sabre thwarted The Scarf’s evil plans to commandeer the radio of the Maid of the Mist boat taking tourists to see Niagara Falls. The Scarf's big power? He has a scarf.

A similar unfortunate event took place outside the Gateway Arch, but thank God for The St. Louis Blue who knew just how to stop the evil desires of Mr. Fingers, who has really big fingers.

But the worst was when you get on the wrong side of history.

A mob of Benjamin Franklin impersonators would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for that pesky Philadelphia Flyer.

And my favorite: Hitchcock. The diabolical bad guy who hates awards shows, rides a giant robot bird, and looks like Alfred Hitchcock. But in the end, he was no match for The Los Angeles King.

As it turns out, it’s possible to take, two things I love—superheroes and hockey—and make them both suck.

●●●

We were a week-and-a-half into our stay in Colombia and losing our minds. The three kids that were now “our three kids” had banded together to cause the most misery possible to two people that had never been parents. Travelling to foreign countries had always been a cherished activity for both my wife and I, but this trip couldn’t end fast enough.

The only relief was in the evenings after the kids went to sleep, Club Colombia beer in a hand still trembling from frayed nerves. Paige and I would split the peanut and chocolate Combo bars that we told our kids were just for mom and dad.

Due to a global pandemic and her foster mother's neglect of her education, our oldest daughter only knew how to spell four words and had been held back in school twice. A vocabulary consisting of: Mama, Papa, oso, and perro wasn’t going to get her very far in the American Public School system— we had some work to do.

Our kids hadn't been raised by adults, but by a television. In our initial video calls, they would hold up DVD case after DVD case the way other children may have shown off their favorite stuffed animals. They were 8, 5, and 3 years old, but had already seen the R-rated Venom, and our oldest would later tell stories of Chucky the serial killer doll.

We cut TV time way back, and they revolted. We started reading bedtime stories from the suitcases of books we had hauled from the United States, and they were uninterested. As time went on, the days grew worse but the routines more predictable. They would have much rather spent the entire evening in front of the television, and some nights we caved and did exactly that, but the books were no longer an enemy.

Colombian stores would put books in the checkout aisles and it became a habit to grab a Spanish language children’s story to try to appeal to their interests in their native language. But there were comics there as well, amazing looking ones. Like the saga of Puberman. I regret not purchasing that volume, but I’m sure Marvel will eventually make him an Avenger since they’re running out of options. I can’t wait to hear how a mild mannered pre-teen with spiky hair and a leather jacket was granted the power of pubes.

Our driver agreed to stop by a grocery store on the way back from an appointment. Paige went in to grab some supplies while I kept all three of the psychopaths fastened to their seats. Not their car seats— Colombia doesn't use those. Paige tried to move efficiently, but I knew she savored the moments away from the circus, even if it was just grocery shopping.

When she finally returned, she had a smile— a rare sight during this phase of our lives— and a surprise for me. I figured it was beer and Combo bars, but then again that wouldn’t have been a surprise. I was very clear that those were the only two groceries I cared about.  She handed me a shrink-wrapped, hard cover, Batman graphic novel in Spanish.

"I saw it when I was checking out and knew I had to get it for you."

My Spanish wasn't any good but had improved drastically after parenting exclusively in that language for two weeks. Each time I attempted to crack open the book, the kids would flock like moths to a bug zapper. I’d shoo them away, and they would scurry, only to return right back. I’d shut the book in frustration, declare out loud in English, "I'll just read when I'm dead," wondering how soon that moment would come.

But I had to admit, I had some of my first moments of fatherly pride when my children of two weeks started to ask me about Batman.

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