Fargo Rock City, Here I Come!

Tomorrow morning I head out for Fargo, which is sort of the Scranton of the northern Midwest. Some people live there, for some reason, and somehow they get by. I'm going to Fargo to visit my friend Brady and attend The Hold Steady concert at their local music hall, which I imagine to be a small chapel of some kind where dowdy parishioners take off their cowboy hats and scrape the mud from their boots before entering the mind-blowing world of crushed red velvet and central air conditioning. They blink as their eyes adjust to the dim lighting, jaws slackening in amazement, and the long blade of fuzzy grass falls from their mouth and onto the floor, which has been swept immaculately clean by old widows with straw brooms and mild arthritis. Someone asks the awestruck parishioners for a ticket, and, for just a moment, they mistake the theater employee for St. Peter himself.

My friend Brady is a funny guy. He's quiet, always observing things, and just when your defenses relax then begins asking you a series of questions which are remnants of his days of newspaper work. We attended Hamline together in the MFA program and I dubbed him The Inspector after he caught me in an elaborate lie that involved me owning a Fry Daddy and cooking numerous things with it. He's also the sort of guy who one day sends you an e-mail to a public reading of his new play, when all this time you didn't even know he was working on a play, or even had any interest in play writing. Yet, at the same time, it seems inevitable that he has been working on a play, underground, as inevitable as night following day.

Oh, Fargo, you dusty siren, you Ford flatbed temptress!

Soon, I will be on my way.