The Geiger Counter

One night I saw the glint of light on broken glass, and I knew the moon was shining.

A burnt sienna-haired woman was draped in black. She stormed back and forth across a little room, sneering and yelling and rolling her eyes - raging and beautiful in the way only a furious woman can be. A man towered and lumbered around her, menacing and massive one moment, comical and infantile the next, powerful and afraid.

I sat a few feet away, sipping room temperature coffee from a white polystyrene cup, watching, nodding and laughing.  

“We all have so much in common. You wouldn’t think it from the endless cavalcade of animosity and discord on the Internet, but we do,” observes author Matt Geiger as he prepares for the release of his debut book. “We all live, we all die, and we are all far more confused by the world around us than we like to admit.”

I used to have a Darwinian view on parenting. Like all uninformed opinions, it was elegant in its simplicity.

“Kids have survived for thousands of generations without car seats, helmets, vaccines or organic, lavender-scented diaper cream,” I said. “I’m pretty sure the survival of our species proves we don’t need to go out of our way to keep them alive.”

What I immediately realized the first time I looked at my daughter was the fundamental difference between the species as a whole - which includes billions of people, many of whom are murdering, stealing and singing karaoke at this very moment – and my little girl, who is currently gnawing on my leg and saying “meow” while pointing at a picture of a pig.

It’s not that I don’t care about the whole of humanity. It’s that I care about it far less than I care about the little girl whose health, safety and ultimate happiness are my responsibility.

It was the early 1950s when a young farm girl named Bonnie Bakken stood in the doorway of her parents’ home in Black Earth. Her hands on her hips, the fiercely independent young woman told her mother she was leaving the farm, the church, and Wisconsin.

She was going, she said, to see her name in lights. 

“And I did,” she reflects today with a nod, cradling a small cup of coffee and flexing her hands to counteract the arthritis that often binds them. “I saw my name in lights many times.”

At a corner table at Hazelnut Café in downtown Blue Mounds, the woman, who went by myriad names but who most know as Bonnie Logan, carefully opens a thick, red, ribbon-festooned book containing dozens of magazine covers and newspaper clippings that chronicle the life of a pin-up and burlesque legend.

Editor's note: The following column first appeared in News Publishing's Spring 2012 Home and Garden Supplement.

In our partisan culture, half the populace always believes we’re on the brink of the apocalypse.

I’m an Independent, which means I’m always convinced everything is on the verge of collapse. As a result, I’m cultivating a lifestyle that will make the inevitable apocalypse manageable. I don’t just want to survive the End Times – I want to enjoy them.

“Be careful everyone! The gypsies might throw their babies at you.”

We stood in a swarming French train station - surrounded by gothic clocks, smoke and a mist of people making throaty noises I had to assume were words.

I departed for France with the impression even babies there smoked cigarettes and drank wine. Colorfully dressed nomads hurling small children hadn’t been mentioned during pre-trip preparations.

Was it like the beach ball at baseball games? Or perhaps the dropped babies were sent to a special school and groomed to someday become American politicians.

“It’s an old trick,” our tour guide continued. “A woman will throw her baby at you. When you grab it with both hands, someone else will pick your pocket. She’ll snatch her baby back and they’ll be gone before you know what happened.”

Tim Roehl, a Middleton Town Board supervisor, recently referred to backyard chickens as a “fad.” (See “Town Cries Fowl,” our page 3 story in the August 9 edition.)

I have news for Mr. Roehl. The domesticated chicken has a genealogy stretching back between 7,000 and 10,000 years, according to Smithsonian magazine. Throughout 99.8 percent of that time, families, on a relatively small scale, have kept chickens in the backyard.

The actual fad is raising poultry on putrid, cramped, filthy factory farms, injecting them with drugs so copious they’d make even the good Dr. Hunter S. Thompson cringe.

If keeping chickens on your property is a fad, then so too are things like the wheel, clothing, math and written language.