1000+ words about jonathan toews, the mountain goats, and a cat

on twitter, i made an offer -- one which still stands. for every $10 you donate to a civil rights/immigrant rights/general anti-fascist/etc. organization, i will write you 100 words on a topic of your choosing.

caitlin came through with an awesomely generous $100 donation to the international rescue committee and gave me a few prompts to pick from. me being me, i decided to write slightly over 1000 words on all of them.

my offer still stands. make a donation, show me some receipts (blur out your personal info!) and i'll write you some stuff.

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Things That Jonathan Toews Has Probably Said Out Loud At Least Once

• Where do you source your quinoa from? I mean, it’s a great food but its sudden rise in popularity is creating a real hardship for the people who grow and live on this. Is this sustainable?
• Please, leave your shoes by the door. I’ve got house slippers for visitors right over here in this basket.
• I’ve actually been giving a lot of thought to creating my own seed bank. Monsanto shouldn’t have all the power, you know?
• No, that’s made out of recycled hemp.
• I’ve got a three-year plan to make sure this whole place is carbon neutral.
• I try not to eat a ton of meat. When I can, I really like to make sure it’s free range, ethically sourced.
• Check out these planters. They’re all made from upcycled wood I got from Rebuilding Exchange.
• What do you mean, you don’t do visualization exercises? Let’s talk about your strategy.
• Oh, no, we feed our dog a raw food diet.

Three Stories About John Darnielle

i. 

As you might know, I’ve got a radio show that I host weekly. As some of you, but maybe not all of you, know, I’m also divorced. (This will be relevant in a few sentences.) I play the Mountain Goats frequently on my show; they’re a good transition band that will fit in pretty much any set, no matter what genre I’ve been playing. I like going for deep cuts, just because our whole station philosophy is to play stuff that you don’t hear elsewhere.  But I’ll indulge and play the hits (for a given definition of hits, for a band like TMG) from time to time. I usually play “This Year” if I have a show on NYE -- or if I’m just having a real shitty week in general, sometimes. But I’ve played “No Children” exactly once in … five? Six? Years of DJing, and it was on the day my now-ex and I went to court to get divorced.

ii.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting JD a few times after shows. I know they say never meet your heroes, and I’m generally on board with that, but -- John Darnielle, right?

Anyhow, the first time I met him was after a show at the Vic in Chicago a few years back. It was Halloween adjacent -- there were lots of costumes in the audience, and I had a Halloween party to go to afterwards (my costume was Twenty-Something Who Went To A Mountain Goats Concert). I waited in line for a really long time, contemplating what I was going to say to him.

Mountain Goats shows are one of the few things I can go to where I know, no matter what else I have going on for me, I will get to spend a couple of hours just being pleased and worry free and hopeful for the state of the world. Doesn’t matter how stressed I am, how fascist-bullshit-dystopian the world’s getting. JD and company manage to make everything so much better.

So when I finally got up to JD, I said all I could think of, and that’s thank you. Thank you for making music, thank you for being a voice for weirdness and melancholy and despair and also hope and wonder and goodness. We talked for a few moments about his outspoken support for reproductive justice and the pro-choice movement, etc., and he was like, listen, don’t give me a cookie for doing what any decent human should do, I don’t deserve any praise for doing what’s right, I’m just a straight white cis dude.

Anyway, sure, straight white cis dudes trying to be allies are everywhere. But JD gets it. That’s always going to be important to me.

iii.

I met him after a few other shows, just pausing to say ‘great show’ and get my CD signed or whatnot. Once (it was at Lincoln Hall, I think it might have actually been after his book talk for Wolf in White Van), though, as I was taking my book back and leaving the merch table, he reached out, grabbed my sleeve. “Hey,” JD said, and I stopped, because what else do you do when one of your musical heroes stops you? “I really love your glasses,” he said. “Bold choice,” or something like that, he added. The glasses I had at the time were a two-toned blue/brown thing, where the brown part kind of looked like wood grain, and the blue part was just your standard plastic. And like -- I’m pretty sure I kept wearing those glasses long past the time I needed a new prescription for them partly just because John Darnielle said they were cool. (Also because I’m hella lazy.)

It’s the little things, I guess.

iv.

We held on to hope of better days coming / And when we did we were right / I hope the people who did you wrong / Have trouble sleeping at night. (I cried, y’all. I cried. Can count on one hand the number of gigs I’ve cried at.)  

One Story About A Cat

When I adopted Spats -- he’s the black and white one, also known as Cat #1 on Twitter -- I wasn’t entirely expecting to actually adopt a cat that day. I was newly single, finally settled into my new apartment and my new life and everything, and I decided I wanted a cat.

I had never had a cat before. I grew up with a dog. My only exposure to cats was my neighbor’s fluffy white monstrosity, who would swipe at you if you got too close, and my aunt’s poorly behaved cats who peed everywhere. But I knew a dog was too much work and too much money, so cat it was.

I went to the shelter, which was one of those cageless ones where the cats are just free to roam around an old converted house. I told the people at the shelter that I just wanted a chill, already grown up cat. Nothing too excitable, nothing that would take too much energy from me or be too destructive.

I spent a little time with the younger cats, just because they’re adorable, and the shelter volunteer introduced me to a ton of cats, all of whom were nice but not … mine, you know?

We get upstairs, and the volunteer goes up to a big black and white cat curled up in a cat tower. “Here,” she says, lifting him off the tower. “Just hold this one.”

Now, I didn’t know a lot about cats, like I said. But I was pretty darn sure that most of them don’t want to be held by complete strangers, especially after being woken up from a nap.

But I’m super good at taking directions, so I hold out my arms for the cat. He proceeds to drape his little kitty paws around my neck, and nestle his face into my neck. It’s a big cat hug.

I am, predictably, smitten. I walk around the shelter, still holding this cat. I put him down. I try playing with some other cats.

None of them hold my attention like the sleepy wannabe puma who snuggled me as soon as he met me.

“I guess this is my cat now,” I said, then went to go do some paperwork.

I didn’t have a car. I’d taken the bus to the shelter. I wasn’t prepared to take the cat home that day. The shelter said they’d hold him for me; I texted my ex, who I was still friendly with, asked if he could do me a huge solid the next day and come pick me and a cat up. No, this isn’t an April Fool’s joke, I said.

The cat -- Spats, Cat #1 -- was too big to fit inside one of the cardboard box carriers they traditionally give you with your new cat. They let me have an enormous hard plastic carrier, the kind you’d probably put an average sized lap dog in. He’s very comfortable in it.

(They didn’t tell me that Spats has some, ah, anger management issues. He still gives great hugs, though.)