The salads and sandwiches and Suzi’s have always been huge and tasty, allowing one to select from a list of ingredients as varied as their jukebox and as long as the wait for a deep dish pizza on a Friday night. Choice is great, and we’ve often gone there just for the salads when craving something fresh and green, made exactly as we like it. Just the other night, in fact, the urge hit and we found ourselves admiring the tiki statuary before we knew it.

I was pleased to discover, however, that the menu now has four salads with pre-determined ingredients. I ordered the Blackened Chicken Caesar, a steal at only 7.25. It had a classic Caesar dressing - anchovies and all (mixed in, not on top). The only complaint: no fresh parmesan. Why go for the gold with the anchovies and then use cheese powder, Suzi’s? Even so, it definitely hit the “fresh and green” spot, a spot that can be hard to satisfy at a bar in meat-and-fried-itemscentric Northeast.

Anyway, there are three others, all of which look good, and some new sandwiches on the menu as well. You can read about them on their highly entertaining website, www.psychosuzis.com. Pretty standard fare, but I think perfect for those times when choosing your own salad toppings is way less interesting than the choice between Rum and Tequila and whether to keep the tiki mug or not.

Or

Yep Duluth, I Live Here Now – A brief history and explanation.

At some point last winter a friend of mine asked me to move with him to his mom’s lake home about 15 miles outside of Duluth. She uses it herself June – August and rents it out September – May, he explained. No f-ing way, I said. But then my other plans for Leaving Minneapolis Come Hell or High Water fell through and he asked again. This time lacking other options, I conceded. Another friend of ours had agreed to come along, and I dragged a friend from Madison with as well. And then there were four.

Thus, after spending two post-college years back in Minneapolis, after working full-time for an Edina-based corporation committed to spreading both urban sprawl and terrible haircuts, after losing my creative ambition and acquiring a drinking problem, after too much drug use and boy chasing, I attempted what I hoped would be a spiritual cleanse of sorts, a reawakening in the Great North Woods. I would retreat in September, become a recluse and a hermit, pursue the various artistic endeavors I had daydreamt about while slaving away at the office, and emerge in May, reborn as inspiration incarnate.

Unfortunately, some pretty scenery and a lot of free time do not an overnight visionary make. After all, a person’s gotta work, which means a person’s gotta drink, which, at least in my case, can lead to most evenings spent rabble rousing and ballyhooing, not pontificating on Alan Watts while practicing guitar chords by the fire.

Regardless, Duluth (and surrounding areas) has not been such a bad place to call home. And what it lacks in shopping and eateries, it makes up for in scenery and a lot of nice folks who can drink their weight in $2 tall boy PBR’s. And just about anything else alcoholic that the Pizza Luce bartender de jour puts in front of them.

So, I hope the following entries about our lives and the friends we have made in this new place will, at the very least, be a record of our adventures, and at the very most, assist in the salvation of modern civilization.

Stay tuned for Duluth: Some Astute Observations.

Do the rock, do the woodland rock
let it all hang out ev’rybody shout
do the rock, do the woodland rock.
- Marc Bolen