Every year I wait for the moment when I can pick the first tomato from my  own vines. I plant my tomato plants ritualistically on Memorial Day weekend, rooted in a soil of my own creation through compost created bit by rotting bit through countless trips to the big black bin out behind the shed carrying plastic bags full of mushy remnants from CSA deliveries of several weeks beforehand.

Community Supported Agriculture (“CSA” to those who understand) is where guilty middle class Near West Side Madisonians pay ridiculous amounts of money to subscribe to weekly deliveries of a full box of kale and not knowing what to do with three pounds of kale we keep it in our kitchen as a conversation starter about the horrors of corporate food until one day we toss it into the compost bin, having served its liberal purpose and we feel self-satisfied, fulfilled and very sustainable all thanks and praise to Michael Pollan.

I visit these tomato plants several times a month, standing with my hands on my hips and looking with satisfaction on the progress they’ve made thanks to the fact that my wife visits the same plants every day with a watering hose and, to my knowledge and I will swear this before God and any grand jury, no such thing as Miracle Grow to the best of my knowledge at this point in time and I exercise my right to be silent regarding any further comment on the subject. Throughout June and into July I coax the reaching new arms of the plants through the ridiculously expensive heavy gauge four foot high tomato cages that I bought at a store on Monroe Street that served extra pretentiousness along with this kind of stuff and has mercifully and deservedly gone out of business since. With what I spent on the cages I could have bought tomatoes at Sentry for a decade or from a CSA for a whole month.

And then comes this day, The Day, on which the first tomato is picked. That day should have been yesterday. I visited my plants out behind the shed and, sure enough, after the monsoons of last week and the tropical days that followed one tomato (an Early Girl, appropriately enough) looked like she was ready for the trip to the kitchen. But no, I thought, not yet. I examined it closely and came to the conclusion, after some internal debate, that another day on the vine would bring it to that perfect state of vine-ripened perfection that was the destination when I started on this journey on that weekend in late May. What’s another day, I thought?

Disaster. Humiliation. Devastation. Disappointment that only a Cubs fan who remembers 1969 could know. Those 24 hours cost me my first tomato. It was the damn rabbits and liberals who did them in. Our back yard is home to a small family of rabbits who would be dead but for my liberal wife. In spring she discovered a colony of baby mice buried in a flower bed and ordered their death or deportation. I chose drowning. But when I went to do the deed I noticed that they weren’t the hated mice at all, but cute little baby bunnies. I reported my findings to the One Who Had Ordered Their Deaths and she quickly revoked the order. She didn’t want to know what I had in mind for the dreaded mice but with regard to small rabbits she went all ACLU on me. So the rabbits live to eat my tomatoes thanks to the Warren Court criminal justice system of the Cieslewicz back yard.

But all didn’t have to be lost. You might expect that my dog, trained to herd and to be generally on edge all the time would harass rabbits enough to make life so uncomfortable for them that they would find somebody else’s tomatoes to eat. But you’d be wrong about that. My Shetland Sheepdog named Calvin who will bark at the sound of a child’s voice two blocks away, is oblivious to large, healthy rabbits with red stains down their chins right under his nose. And I feed this dog and take him for walks and pay his medical bills and pop for long stays at a “camp” which is the kind of place where they offer dog massages though he’s never gotten one, but that’s the kind of dog-centric place it is, for cryin’ out loud. This dog does nothing to stop lawless rabbits who live only because of the bleeding heart attitudes of the other member of my family from jumping onto the large beautiful compost filled pot, knocking off the literally low-hanging fruit from the vines supported by sturdy and expensive cages and taking a couple of bites out of the first tomato of the season. And they don’t even finish it. No. They take only a couple of bites, ruining the tomato and taunting me with their waste.

I discovered the crime this morning. I cursed just once. Then I tossed the first beautiful and now defiled ripe tomato of the season into the compost bin where it joined all that kale.

Today I pushed a button on a computer and our application for Google’s high speed fiber network went off to Mountain View, California. Well, actually, at first it didn’t. As is a requirement in all things computer and Internet the connection was lost and we had to start over. This also happens to me when I try to buy a $19.99 polo shirt from Land’s End, so why shouldn’t it happen when I order millions of dollars of high speed fiber?

To bless the event the guys at Roman Candle Pizza made a special Google high fiber pizza, which I had to sample and which I’d say is not half bad. I may have gotten tomato sauce on the computer, which could explain the initial malfunction.

Also, Peter Leidy and I wrote a new song in honor of the event, which we debuted this morning on the Jonathan & Kitty Show. The show was actually minus Kitty, who claimed to be on vacation, but she knew I was coming to “sing” with Peter so I have my suspicions. The song was really about finding a place for a high speed rail station, but we tacked on a verse about high speed fiber as long as we were singing about fast things. Click here to listen.

So, our Google ap is off. Now, I’ll sit by the phone and wait for the call from California, when I’m sure I’ll hear something like, “The pizza was good, but your song put it over the top. When can we start?”

Google-a-palooza

Cities across America are falling all over one another trying to impress Google. They want Google to plunk down one of its first super high speed fiber optic networks in their town. It means lots of jobs to build the network and, when it’s done, it means internet speeds that are 100 times or more faster than we experience now.

Some cities are taking it a little too far. Some place in Kansas even renamed their city after Google. That’s ok, I guess. Nobody  knows the names of any cities in Kansas anyway. Another town suggested that all the first born children be named Google. That might work okay depending on the last name that goes with it. Google Cieslewicz would be a nonstarter, for example. Another city took it way too far when it’s mayor decided to jump into a lake on behalf of Googlemania. I have no idea why.

But here in Madison, a place where the plastic pink flamingo has been recently named the official city bird and where Wilco has been given honorary citizen status and where the forehead of the Statue of Liberty proudly peaks from the ice of Lake Mendota each winter, we are protective of our civic dignity.

All we’re asking our people to do is make a sign that reads I WOULD USE GOOGLE FIBER, hold it up in front of your favorite Madison spot, and send us the picture at flickr.com/groups/MadFiber.

What could possibly go wrong?