Oy vey, what a morning. My plans for this weekend began thusly: "meet in front of the liquor store at ten in the morning." You know you're a midwesterner when you hear that in normal conversation. Actually, the liquor store was only a convenient landmark because it was across from the "go-stuff-yourself" self-storage place. The objective was to clean out one of the plywood lined storage sections rented by some friends of the family. Out of the shed and into a large truck with the help of a half-dozen-odd people. It was all organized kind of like one of those flash mobs that are popular in larger, cooler cities. We gathered, we lugged boxes, we departed. I think that some of the guys were workers at the local General Motors plant, hence the efficiency.

Moving the stuff into the new house was equally easy. The couple whose stuff we were porting had a preternatural sense of where each box should go. The same anonymous cardboard boxes that everybody moves with, with loosely scrawled black felt tip marker directions to rooms that possibly didn't exist when they were christened "storage" or "ornaments." These people knew from memory where everything went. Just like Thom Yorke said, "everything in it's right place."

This lead to the post-move sit down, a custom which leads back to the nomadic tribes of the North American plains. After you move, you sit and eat and talk. Just me and six other carbon copies of Joe Sixpack American watching Purdue and Wake Forrest. I have no particular allegiance to either team, but the alpha-male of the house is a Purdue grad, so that became my adopt-a-team today. Whatever. They all sat around with their light beer, athletic team shirts and $150 Nike running shoes and beer bellies to "shoot the shit" as it were. It's the kind of thing that I feel obligated to sit in on every once in awhile in order to keep my Midwestern heritage. It's one of the last vestiges of tribal culture in our society, similar in this way to wedding presents and church potlucks.

These sort of gatherings are great social equalizers. If you'll carry boxes, you're welcome. It doesn't matter if you're the archetype of the American blue collar working man who always becomes so important in major election years, or the largely marginalized unemployed artist type with more computer smarts than labor-intensive work ethic. It doesn't matter. Anyone can sit and talk about trivialities like sports and movies as if they held real importance. You can wear $95 deck shoes from Saks or $2.50 flip-flops from Walmart. You sit, talk, and absently stare at the brand new wooden deck and ponder what color wood stain would match the house, furniture, and gas grille. Yup, good times.

Perhaps this could be the answer to peace in the middle east. Seriously. Every time Al-Jazeera spins the latest video from bin-Laden we see the crotchety old bastard sitting on a pile of sharp rocks. Of course they're mad at us, they're mad at everybody. They don't have a place to just sit at the end of the day and kibitz (okay, maybe not a Yiddish term for them). They all have guns, but they don't seem to have a hunting lodge to convene at after a long day of flipping off the CIA satellites and dodging missiles. What they need are carpenters to build them manly things like decks and lodges so that they can gather to shoot the shit, not shoot the shit out of each other. The last time a carpenter was a major social force in that general area, we got Christianity. Just don't mention that to the guy at the Ace bin-Hardware in Kabul.