2014 Fall / blog theory

The Giant Cleanup

November 5, 2014

My little archive dusting project took longer than I expected.

Turns out I’ve amassed a little over 2,100 entries over the past 10 years.

This coincidentally works out to about a year of full-time work.

Slogging through the entries was an interesting, yet depressing undertaking – a parade of old aspirations, failures, exes – it was also a testament to the power of journaling.
Memories are fallible, so I’m grateful for my little digital scrapbook, even if it is not always flattering.
These types of cleaning projects are necessary every few years because links break and upgrading a WordPress theme tends to badly malformat old posts.

I won’t get into geeky things like landing page quality scores, but that’s a factor too.

I am also aware that soon-to-be law students navigate this site very differently than most readers.

Many of law students start from my senior year of college and work their way forward. Now that’s a little easier to do because I’ve fixed most of the egregious formatting problems.

Cleaning up the archives also means that I’m ready to ramp up the new posts – and I have a lot to share!

Thanks for sticking around.

2014 Fall / Minneapolis-St. Paul

Violence

October 20, 2014

A brawl broke out at bingo.

Mitchell and I are at Aliveness Project Bingo when a woman stumbles across the Townhouse Bar and demands a chair from our table. She drops the chair once and then picks it up only to trip and faceplant in front of the bingo caller.

Gay bars are pretty tolerant of over-served patrons, but falling in such a loud manner is guaranteed to get you kicked out of any place.

The bingo coverall game starts and I see fists flying out of the corner of my eye.
The barback and several patrons attempt to push the drunk woman out of the door. She starts kicking people in the face, and a second woman (who we later find out is her mom) starts wailing on people too.

Bingo eventually stops and we whip out our cellphones are record the fight.

Shooting season

There have been a lot of brawls and shootings at Minneapolis bars recently, but not every place gets stigmatized by random acts of violence.

Places like Augies and the Gay 90’s get characterized as dangerous, whereas no one says that about the 19 Bar, Saloon, or the Eagle.

Shootings at the mostly white bars are viewed as random acts of violence, whereas the same types of incidents can confirm people’s suspicions that minorities are inherently violent.
There are some bars that are truly dangerous, but they eventually lose their liquor license or otherwise shut down.
Statistically, downtown Minneapolis is by far the most dangerous part of the city (PDF) and it’s unfair to characterize a business based on one-off acts of violence or what happens on the sidewalk outside.

Going out at night always involves some level of risk, whether it’s a nutcase with a gun, the sketchy guy you take home, or a mother and daughter Kung fu fighting at bingo.