After a mile and a half ride, I would lug my bike across a fallow corn field to get to the gun shop, a windowless pole-barn set on a hill overlooking the nearest blue highway, a road my parents specifically identified as too dangerous for cycling. The gun store had been around for more than half a century and had some legitimate business name, but it was always known simply as GUNS, because the word GUNS stood on its exterior in giant 10-foot letters that glowed red for miles across the county. The journey across that corn field and back usually discouraged any follow-up visits for a few months: the ground was uneven and it was often easier just to carry the Huffy than roll it through the waist-high switchgrass and forbs.

I grew up in what then seemed like "the country." But that fallow field was never replanted, as far as I know. Now it is a parking lot for a big box hardware/lumber store, with a McDonalds, a Subway, and a tire store out there islanded by asphalt. It was all built after I went to college. But at thirteen, it felt so liberating just to leave home on my own two wheels and go to a store, even if all it sold was weaponry I couldn't buy. Once every summer, the farmer who owned all that land would have an all-day sheep auction and he would hire a lady to sit in a trailer and ladle sloppy joe meat from a crock pot onto wonder buns for a dollar each. She also sold candy and pop. I looked forward to riding my bike down to that trailer every year. There was something so satisfying about being able to engage in such commerce on my own accord. That's partly why I loved going to GUNS. They had a pop machine and charity candy for sale at the counter. I remember strolling through the aisles of the gun shop, staring at semi-automatics and revolvers, assault rifles and shotguns. I admired the sophisticated lines of vintage Walthers and Lugers, the slick, gimicky plastic of the Glocks, the harsh beauty of a Sig Sauer .45 caliber handgun. I would spend hours there, wandering with the distant staccato of small-arms fire from the basement shooting range, dreaming of turning eighteen, examining everything from boxes of bullets to the armpit holsters to the compound bows and their vicious broadhead arrows. I would hover over the case of Rambo knives, listening to the clerks describe to their customers what kind of damage the various pistols would do to an intruder's skull. When you're a 13-year-old boy, you are not just grateful that the only business within bike-riding distance is a gun shop and not, say, a place that sells dollhouse miniatures or scrapbooking supplies. You are in heaven.

One night, a few years later, GUNS caught fire. My dad and I drove over there in his truck, while the disco lights of the local constabulary and the firetrucks and the red ten-foot letters of GUNS itself were outmatched by the flames illuminating the night. There is a strange sense of community when some local building catches fire: neighbors come out from behind their televisions and have conversations when they might not have spoken in years; hands are shaken, news exchanged. Someone is a grandfather now. Somebody else had a good old dog die and now they got a new one. Word quickly spread throughout the township that GUNS was on fire, and soon more rubberneckers in pickup trucks and station wagons were lining up along a road that now spans five lanes between a Wal-Mart Supercenter and a Meijer's Thrifty Acres, all assessing the heroism of the township fire department, the performance of the brave volunteers, the possibility of a malicious cause of the blaze, and the speculated damage to our township's lonely island of commerce. I remember some men were drinking beer, the flames reflected in their glasses. Before the fire could be contained, the building was rocked by a series of explosions: enormous hollow, echoing booms, probably from the cannisters of gunpowder. "It's nearly muzzleloading season," a nearby man said. "They sell a lot of black powder there."

Then the ammunition boxes caught fire. I remembered where they were kept along the eastern wall of the store, 25-round boxes of Remington buck shot piled 50 high and ten deep, hundreds of boxes of .45 caliber bullets and countless 5,000 round boxes of Winchester rifle ammunition. Now you could hear them whistling into the darkness. The volunteer firefighters tore away from the scene in their Broncos, cops barreled towards us screaming through their loudspeakers to get the hell away from there, bullets, they said, were flying in every direction. I've never seen my dad drive so fast, my teenage body tucked snug under his right elbow, my shoulder practically against the wheel and his big battered hand around my head.

Every year on a September Saturday my high school German teacher would borrow one of the athletic department's 15-passenger vans and take eighteen of his German students to Chicago. This teacher was a wise and fabulously lazy man who grew up in the very small town of Watervliet, Michigan before attending college and settling down in the slightly bigger town of Kalamazoo. Looking back, I believe he saw his role in our lives as more than a mere martinet of Teutonic grammar; he considered himself a mentor whose mission was to expose young provincials to the possibilities of the wide world beyond their petty secondary-school social upheavals. Not to get all Mr. Holland's Opus on you, but if men and women like him weren't out there sacrificing the exciting lives they could have led in Berlin or New York to inspire the pubescent petite bourgeoisie to get liberal arts degrees and move away to bigger cities, there would be no embittered penniless hipsters living out their thirties in cramped Brooklyn apartments writing short stories about embittered penniless hipsters living out their thirties in cramped Brooklyn apartments. And without them and all the other urban paralegals, copy editors, consultants, lawyers, editorial assistants, government employees and research associates bored out of their fucking minds at work, who would be left to read and write blogs? If no one had inspired us to break up with our high school sweethearts and seek something more from life than throwing empty cans of Milwaukee's Best into the rock quarry every Saturday night, there probably wouldn't be any blogger conferences to go to in Chicago. Danke Herr Holland!

Back in Chicago all those years ago, wir deutsche Kursteilnehmer were supposed to spend the morning on a brief architectural tour, followed by a few hours in the Art Institute, and later dinner at the Berghoff. But between Nighthawks and the Schnitzel, we were allowed to roam the city as we pleased. Most everyone headed up Michigan Avenue, straight for Niketown. I remember Niketown being a very big deal to people. If you told someone that you went to Chicago, you were always asked if you went to Niketown, and if not it meant you had a lousy trip where it was assumed your parents made you do all kinds of boring crap. I don't think Niketown is such a big deal anymore, now that downtown Chicago has ESPNworld, OldNavyburgh, Hollisterworld and HighSchoolMusical2Land.

Skipping the not-so-magnificent mile, a few of us hopped on the elevated train and headed up to see Cabrini Green before it got knocked down. We did not consider this to be dangerous; all our knowledge of Cabrini Green came from the movie Candyman, so we figured if Virginia Madsen could almost survive it, three high school guys from Kalamazoo should have no problem. People there just glared and made us feel like the assholes we were, so we left to try to find Al Capone's hotel, which was also scheduled for demolition. After we stared up at that crumbling old building ("that's probably where he killed that dude with the baseball bat!") we rode the train down to Chinatown and laughed at the crazy and smelly goods in the stores and wandered around the surrounding area filled with abandoned buildings until we found a paper bag stuffed with about twenty little plastic baggies of a resiny drug none of us recognized, along with a wad of about seventy dollars in cash and a .38 caliber revolver. We tossed the drugs and split the cash, and I saw the guy who picked up the bag put the gun into his jacket's inside pocket. "The best place to find shit is where people are always running from the cops," he said. The whole afternoon was just like that "going to town" scene in Wet Hot American Summer. Only real as fuck. By six we were back in the Loop with our classmates and their Niketown bags, eating spaetzle.

I wonder sometimes how horrified I will be when Future Juniper does stuff like hop on a train into an unfamiliar city and walk around places where she could very easily get sold into white slavery or get forced into running guns for the Yakuza. This is a curse of parenthood, I suppose, desiring nothing more than for your kids than for them not to be as fucking stupid as you were. I read an article a few weeks ago about how over the course of four generations, an eight-year-old British boy's freedom to move had been restricted to 300 yards from his front door, while his great-grandfather had enjoyed the freedom to walk six miles every day to go fishing. I thought of my own youthful wanderlust, spending all day hiking through endless forests (that are now endless subdivisions). I think of days like that one in Chicago, formative in a way of what I still find fascinating and interesting about the cities of the world. And then I wonder if I am committing Juniper to a life of virtual house arrest, even though my fearful colleagues in the suburbs are largely doing the same thing.

* * * *

"Psychogeography" is the study of the specific effects of a geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. In 1958, Guy Debord wrote the seminal psychogeographical text Théorie de la Dérive, or "Theory of Drifting," what he called, "a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences." In a dérive you (or you and a friend) drop your existing relationships for a few hours, you drop your work and usual leisure activities, ignoring all your other usual motives for movement and action, and let yourselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters you find there. Sights and attractions intended as touristic are to be avoided along with itineraries, your journey instead becomes "dependent on chance and the spontaneous subjective impulses and reactions of the wanderer."

Debord had been inspired by the situationalists, particularly the study Paris et l'agglomération parisienne, in which Chombart de Lauwe noted the narrowness of the real Paris in which most individuals actual lived, in comparison to the grand, touristic idea of Paris. Most Parisians, he suggested, dwell exclusively within an extremely small geographical radius. Lauwe diagramed all the movements made in the space of a single year by a female student living in the 16th Arrondissement. Her itinerary formed a small triangle with no significant deviations, the three apexes of which were the School of Political Science, her residence and that of her piano teacher. Why live in Paris at all? One naturally wonders.

We spent the past weekend in Chicago. On Friday we followed our itinerary, visiting friends and beautiful old buildings, finally ending the day on Navy Pier---a tourist destination with a character seemingly defined by the absence of reality---to visit with people we only knew through the internet. On Saturday we took the train to uptown and walked back towards the tall buildings. I love Chicago. Beyond the city's obvious charms, there are still so many wonderful thoroughly unspectacular things to see there. It is never the grandeur that impresses me most, though I can certainly see the appeal of gothic skyscrapers and miesian monoliths as well as the bustle of a vibrant city center. I love the dirty Italian beef stands in Chicago, the old movie palaces turned into Mexican dance clubs, the Indian funeral homes, and the bars with glass-brick windows and faded Old Style signs hanging above the door. Tourists are almost always in a better position to partake in the dérive: seeing the familiar as new, bisecting the small triangular ambulations of the locals as we walk down streets with no idea where they'll take us.

We are back in Detroit now: house, market, playground, our own comfortable triangulated rut. But beyond the joys of seeing old and new friends, getting over to Chicago for a couple of days reminded me of the pleasure of wandering that so consumed me when we first moved to Detroit. Tomorrow I'm going to turn left where I usually walk right.

You never know when you're going to come across a paper bag filled with drugs, cash, and a gun.

Moderator: Well, here we are on what Dutch and Wood consider their real anniversary, more important even than their wedding anniversary. Ten years ago today they . . . Well, I guess we'd like to get some details of why you two consider this an anniversary. Wood, how did you and Dutch meet?

Wood: Let's see. The first time I remember seeing Dutch was early in the fall of our freshman year of college. I was in our dorm's cafeteria, and one of my friends was talking to a couple of people I didn't know, one of whom was a guy wearing a very ill-fitting tuxedo. She called me over and introduced me to the guy in the gigantic tuxedo. It was Dutch, who stood there jerking his head around and twitching. He had on a nametag that identified him as one of the very few kids at our university who had a full scholarship. The jerking and twitching made me think that he was mentally impaired and some sort of a "special friend" among the scholarship winners, but I now realize that it was all an elaborate dance to avoid making eye contact with anyone. He still struggles to look people in the eye. So yes, when I first met Dutch, I wondered if he was mentally retarded. I also thought he might just be brilliant.

Dutch: I'd seen Wood about two dozen times before that. Any honest guy will tell you that when he moves into a new scene he figures out who all the hot girls are within five minutes of being there. Wood was the hottest thing I had ever seen. First time I saw her she was wearing a green shirt that made her red hair look amazing. She had an eyebrow ring and tattoos. Yum. We ended up getting married just a few yards from the spot where I first saw her.

But, when we started to really get to know each other in February, I had a girlfriend.

Wood: That's right, he did. I remember that. A few months after meeting Dutch, I noticed him again. I was walking up the hill from our dorm to the main campus, and he was in front of me, holding hands with a girl. And I remember thinking, "Awww, how sweet. That guy has a girlfriend." I could also see about 4 inches of his underwear, because he sagged his jeans so low that at least half his butt was hanging out.

Dutch: I was totally one of those white guys.

Wood: It was complicated for him to walk up the hill. He had a heavy backpack, he was holding this girl's hand, and he had to keep pulling his pants up every couple of steps. He didn't want to let go of her hand or slow down, but his pants were just barely staying on his body.

Moderator: What happened to this girl?

Dutch: Oh, she was a sweet girl. But she had an ex-boyfriend with a prosthetic hand who threatened to kill me. Things didn't work out.

Wood: It was more of a claw, wasn't it?

Dutch: I guess it was kind of a gnarled fist.

Wood: Eventually Dutch and I started hanging in an awkward trio with one of my best friends who lived down the hall. Her hair was redder than mine. We both had crushes on Dutch, but we didn't admit it to each other.

Dutch: It was awesome.

Wood: One weekend in March I went home for my cousin's baptism. From my parent's house, I called this redheaded friend, and to my absolute horror, found that Dutch was in her dorm room. I was sick to my stomach and sure that she was putting the moves on him. I knew right then how badly I wanted him.

Dutch: I found out that night that the other girl was a hardcore Republican.

Wood: Yes, her politics saved me. I'd already farted several times in front of Dutch, which I'm sure repulsed him, but at least I didn't lecture him about the free market.

Dutch: I think the other girl's version of putting the moves on me was reading from a paper she'd recently written about how the decline of American morals mirrored that of ancient Rome.

Wood: We haven't mentioned a big part of the story yet: his entire first year of college, Dutch was a teetotaler. During the year that I was doing kegstands in a frat house called the Legion of Doom, Dutch didn't drink a drop of alcohol. He was like a Mormon without the Utah voodoo.

Dutch: I made it through high school without drinking, not because I was strong-willed or anything, but because I wasn't cool enough to hang out with anyone who could get alcohol. I never had the opportunity to just say No. One time when I was 17 I did have a sip of boxed wine that was leftover from a party my parents threw. And I did go to Lollapalooza 1994 with a whole bottle of codeine from having my wisdom teeth yanked out the day before. That was pretty great.


Wood: It was obvious that we both had crushes on each other, and in the last two weeks before the end of the school year, Dutch had multiple opportunities to try to kiss me. We rode bikes at night across town to a rock show, we stood outside of a party talking awkwardly while people smoked cigarettes around us, and we stayed up all night studying for finals in my dorm room, and each time, I put on my best squinty-eyed, kiss-me-now face, but nothing happened. Here was a boy I had seen argue passionately with a room full of drunk hippies at a house party, but he was too scared to give me a kiss.

Dutch: I did do other things to try to impress her. Remember when I threw my bike off the roof of the dorm?

Wood: Yeah. And I remember the time you got all tough and swore at the guy who prank called my room.

Dutch: And the night before the last night of school, it was pouring rain and Wood and I went out and ran in the downpour and got all muddy and we had a moment in the stairwell on the way back in that should have been a kiss. I went back to my dorm room with all that intensity of our inevitability sparking in my mind. I couldn't sleep, and I plotted how I knew it would have to go down. For years we have struggled with this part of the story, the illicitness of it. Ten years later it seems so innocent.

Wood: Dutch told me that he wanted to drink alcohol for his first time on the night before we had to move out of the dorms, and I happily accepted his plea to get him some beer. Finally! I thought. We sent our "source", a fratboy from the Legion of Doom house who was dating one of my friends, to the liquor store with requests: some vodka and a sixer of Jack Daniels coolers for me, and two 22 oz bottles of Molson Ice for Dutch.

Dutch: I believe I asked for a deuce-deuce. Or a 40oz of St. Ides. I was totally one of those white guys. Whatever it was, I know I drank it out of a paper bag.

Wood: That's right. You did.

Dutch: I will add that Wood drank her Lynchberg Lemonades through a fucking beer bong.

Wood: That's right. I did.


Dutch: It was the last night of the schoolyear, so all the guys on my floor were throwing a huge party.
It's funny how ten years later, I can still remember the giddiness of those moments. How even though I've been kissing the same girl for ten years, I've kept inside me somewhere exactly how it felt to rush towards the first one, to get past the tipping point of doubt and walk through one of those en suite bathrooms that connected the dormrooms and to have us both reach out for each other's hands and then suddenly find ourselves pressed up against each other, pressed up against the wall and then sitting on one of those dorm chairs making up for weeks of not kissing, making out like there wasn't enough time to make up for what what we'd missed.

Wood: There wasn't. The next day we were moving out of the dorm and returning to our hometowns. And the next year you weren't coming back to school, but going to Ireland.

Dutch: That part sucked, but made it pretty intense.

Wood: And the whole time there was a party going on around us, but we didn't even care. Occasionally someone would come in and say, "Holy shit, Dutch and Wood are making out in Keith's room," and we'd smile at each other. People took pictures of us in each other's arms, and gave them to us later. I woke up the next morning with Dutch in my bed. Eventually he had to leave to get started with moving out, and I wondered for a second if anything would come of it. If he'd have the balls to make it work.

Dutch: I came back up. I actually met her in the stairwell where we'd had our failed moment before. I didn't fail her this time.

Wood: Then we moved out. Dutch's mom came to pick him up. I packed my car and drove with friends back home.

Juniper: Mama.

Dutch: I cried like a fucking baby the whole ride home. I felt so cheated by my own hesitation. It felt like I'd had one of those dreams where all kinds of amazing, wonderful things happen and then you wake up and none of it's true.

Wood: But before leaving town, I stopped with friends at Pizza Hut. And then I called you from the pay phone.

Dutch: You did.

Wood: And then you came and met us.

Dutch: I did. And we sat next to each other and held hands under the table.

Wood: And that's how all this began, ten years ago.

Moderator: What are you going to do to celebrate?

Dutch: What we do every April 19. We're going to get drunk and totally make out all night.