Readers and writers blog

If you start at the first entry of Rod McBride’s weblog — we sometimes read blogs that way — you might conclude that its title, Midwest Rock Lobster, aptly describes a guy with a red neck. You’d be right, of course, but oh so narrowly informed.

That initial entry, April 6, 2005, talks of a younger man’s frustration, rebellion, angry chain-smoking. You have to read on to find that McBride, like most people, has a number of different sides. And as far as we can tell, he writes about them all very well.

Let’s see . . . where to start? McBride, now 38, lives in Kansas (”flyover country,” he calls it), is a computer graphic artist, survivor of a heart attack in his early 30s, divorced, father of two, a guitarist and aficionado of music ranging from jazz to rock (the blog name may have come from an old B-52s song) to classical, is a big guy with a trimmed red beard and a matching tuft of hair atop a shaved head, goes to church but is an atheist, is offended by what pockets of liberalism may survive in Kansas, accepts homosexuality as no more a choice than a belief in God, loved his Ford F-150 gas guzzler, is an avid reader and aspiring novelist, doesn’t like government, is opposed to abortion (aren’t we all, even those who wouldn’t criminalize it?) and signs his blog posts as Chixulub, a reference to the crater off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula believed left by a large meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs. The crater is usually spelled ‘Chicxulub,’ and we can only theorize that McBride misspells it to avoid any appearance of chic.

So what word describes a guy like this? ‘Libertarian’ doesn’t even come close.

But it doesn’t make any difference. Because his occasional rants are only pockets of heat in what to us seems like a warmhearted diary of a Midwestern guy trying to hold down a job, write a novel, enjoy hobbies like rocketry and homebrewing and try to keep everything together for two daughters he shares in joint custody with his ex-wife.

It’s this latter aspect of his life that shows the hard-core individualist indeed has a soft center. The girls are 11 and 10, and when they’re at his house, he takes them everywhere — festivals, hikes, concerts, amusement parks, malls, specialty shops — and cooks imaginative foods that range from homemade pizza to veggie casseroles . . .

Not a vegan casserole, mind you. A few things out of kilter for that, like using real cheese instead of the soy imitation. Not because I prefer real cheese, but because Soysation is freakin’ expensive.

And he treats the girls in a gentle rough-and-tumble way that a bear would treat her cubs. Both of them as evenhandedly as he can, which isn’t always easy because the younger daughter is autistic and subject to epileptic seizures. With the help of his ex-wife and their older daughter, he copes with these special needs as best he can. He doesn’t write a lot about this, but when he does, it is mostly in a matter-of-fact tone of one who has coped with these needs for years, including carrying special medication for all those field trips or spending sleepless nights with a child who won’t be put back to bed.

The photos of the daughters are, in a word, adorable.

Those images instantly cut into and neutralize the irascibility of McBride’s flights into sometimes-overstated iconoclasm. And frankly, some of those will have you nodding in agreement, no matter what your political outlook.

One of our favorites is a slogan he leaves at the bottom of each page: “Ignorance is no excuse for the law.” Considering the way our current government treats the Constitution, we might amend ‘excuse’ to ’substitute.’

And we loved his Dec. 15, 2006, entry about atheism:

I told a pair of Mormon missionaries who came by my house that they were out looking for people who already believed what they did, and one of them thought for a second and said, ‘You’re right.’ Well, I’m not one of them, so keep walking. To paraphrase Tim Wilson, I don’t go for Jesus, much less Jesus The Western.

Of course, there is the occasional typo, misplaced apostrophe or unintentionally misspelled word. But one of the best writers we know couldn’t spell his own name if he hadn’t been born with it. (See how infectious overstatement can be?)

Anyway, check out Midwest Rock Lobster, the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

– Sid Leavitt