You Say You're Changing: Madison

I am in the only spot in Madison where my computer steadfastly refuses to connect with the WiFi. This place is ur-Wisconsin. I don’t dislike it.

Everybody’s changing and I don’t feel the same.

Outside, the weather dismal. Light rain, dark and grey and cold. No amount of smiling co-eds can overcome the gloom, can warm me.

It was 90 and humid when I arrived three weeks ago. So, a seasonal shift.

I’ve worked a week landscaping an intractable plot of land around a cursed wooden ranch house in Middleton, which is apparently a place of its own, Madison also being a place of its own that is not Milwaukee or Green Bay.

I am, today, a waiter in a pub that has not a healthy thing on the menu. But cheese curds and a thousand kinds of aioli.

It is pretty here. The lakes and the architecture, and despite the insane amount of University wear, the kids. They are as gorgeous as in Ohio and Michigan, and mostly well behaved.

I have no idea, beyond landscaping and waiting tables, what the adults are up to. I hear they are fucking up politics?

The pretty and kitschy Capitol looms over us all. Not my first time at this kind of merry-go-round, rodeo, other accepted metaphor.

The music is great, I’m always Shazam-ing, and the beer is decent.

Try to understand that I’m

Trying to make a move

Just to stay in the game

I try to stay awake

And remember my name

There is an element of tabula rasa that I appreciate.

Bars have gaming machines and electronic dart boards. The former not something I’d ever do; I have been to Vegas five times and never played so much as a slot machine. (There are empirically more enjoyable ways to lose money.) The latter profoundly unsatisfying, for the boards aren’t cork. You don’t even know how much darts were part of my life in Jakarta, swatting away potential Indonesian wives to beat Baba at cricket.

It's a couple-mile hike to Trader Joe’s, but I take it. It’s a drab drive to Middleton in Roger’s truck, all strip malls and lousy roadmates. But I take it.

Am rendered absolutely filthy. Recover surprisingly well from muscle ache.

Madison IS a place, which is all I ask. There are lakes on either side, M one lake and M the other. There are old theaters that get all the good bands and comedians.

Not everybody says, “I’ve never been to New York,” as they do in San Francisco (still) and Portland.

Friday night I am going to man the door at a “club” with “dueling pianos.” Your guess as good as mine.

This is the kind of shit I did at 24, and I am doing it again at 54, and I’m game. It’s exhilarating in a low-key kind of way.