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I am a Minnesotan, I speak the language, it's my home so dear and its name is a beacon bright and clear. I attended the University of Minnesota and majored in English, which prepared me for a career in valet parking. I wanted to be a writer so I drank heavily and tried out all the illicit drugs offered to me but the good stuff went to the coasts, and the Midwest got hashish that was less potent than used coffee grounds. I never got high until I had two wisdom teeth extracted and was anesthetized.
I went into treatment for naivete and it helped. Minnesota is a national headquarters for the recovery industry, where you'll find enormous camps for drunks where they listen to lectures and break into small groups to talk about their emotionally unavailable parents who failed to vindicate their personhood. There are programs for people in grief at the loss of a pet, people who want to stop being Scandinavian, people suffering from traumatic taciturnity. I suffer from a fear of leaving food on my plate and scraping it into the garbage and I'm sure there is a group for me.
I'm a writer and I could live in a lighthouse in the Orkneys but I moved to New York because I fell in love with a New Yorker. She thought I was cool because I had copies of The New Yorker around my apartment but they were delivered by mistake. Wrong address. I discovered that I could cure my Minnesota accent by sticking a piece of adhesive tape on the underside of my tongue, which makes me sound like a Harvard graduate.
We live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Unitarians live over on the East Side, people who don't recognize badness but see it as a misunderstanding, the result of not having been read to as a child. The Upper West Side is the domain of Jewish mothers who know right from wrong and tell wrong to take a hike, which gives us Episcopalians permission to do likewise. Being from Minnesota, however, I hesitate to stick my nose out. I am modest to a fault.
I only raise my voice at athletic events. I decline compliments. I'm not good with profanity. The difference between a Minnesotan and a New Yorker is this: ask a Minnesotan what kind of salad dressing he'd like, ranch, balsamic vinaigrette, Italian, Russian, honey mustard, Caesar, or blue cheese, he says, "Whatever is easier for you, whichever you have more of, whatever nobody else wants." Ask a New Yorker, he says, "How about tahini muscatel?"
Minnesota could've been French, you know. Louis XIV sent explorers here to scout the place, Marquette and La Salle, but changed his mind. It's not a good climate for wine. A Minnesota Bordeaux has the bouquet of crabgrass and the texture of potatoes; our Pinot Noir tastes like peanut oil.
Minnesota was a techno hot spot years ago but the brightest minds went West and now we're the No. 1 producer of turkeys, high-strung birds with a teeny brain and enormous torso and fragile ankles who are prone to panic and in a thunderstorm. Google may be developing a robo-app called Gobble that can manage turkey breeding, and then the state will become a vast turkey concentration camp run from an underground control center, a hundred million birds auto-fed round-the-clock, a sedative added to prevent panic, which could result in a million birds with broken ankles. The turkeys'd be herded by bird dogs to the butchering mills to be gutted, defeathered, flavoring injected to make the meat taste turkeyish, and shrink-wrapped for market.
One of these days, you'll read that Minnesota has been bought by Amazon, twenty thousand square miles of turkeys, run by a couple hundred truck drivers and four mathematicians. During busy times, truckloads of undocumented Canadians will come over the border to do the butchering and hatch the eggs. Minneapolis, St. Paul, Duluth, and Rochester will survive, the small towns will disappear, and Jeff Bezos will have two seats in the U.S. Senate.
I'm not one of those old people who lament the loss of the old days. I prefer pastrami to turkey. My sweetie and I are both wired into ConjugalGPT, which reads brainwaves with generative preference transformers to create artificial infatuation and we exist in a state of bliss, no questions asked. Yes, I am a robot. Proud to say it.
Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality. His latest book is "Cheerfulness". Buy it at a 38% discount! by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.