Mike Croswell’s Proust Questionnaire

What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Sitting outside on a beautiful day spending time with family and friends while enjoying coffee or a cold beverage. Creating music with friends or solo is also perfect happiness. Slow dining with my sweetheart and our friends is also pretty hard to beat.


What is your greatest fear?
His second term.


What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Negativity, pride, bias, hard headedness, stubbornness, stupidity, laziness, apathy, farting, and more.


What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Secret gas passers in elevators.


Which living person do you most admire?
My mom.


What is your greatest extravagance?
Stomp boxes


What is your current state of mind?
Not good


What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Righteousness


On what occasion do you lie?
When filling out the Proust questionnaire


What is your favorite journey?
The journey to the ice cream store


Which living person do you most despise?
#45


Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
“Oh sh-t” and “Oh f-ck”


Which talent would you most like to have?
I would like to be a really great singer. They don’t have to schlepp gear or instruments to rehearsals or in cars, trucks, and airplanes


What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Are you asking about a personal achievement like being married to the love of my life for 25 years or professional achievements like receiving a McKnight Fellowship or Ivey Award?


What is your most treasured possession?
In 1986 Kitty (love of my life) gave me a piece of pottery as a birthday present. Three months later our house burned down and the only intact object that I found in the smoldering ashes was that piece of pottery


What is your favorite occupation?
My favorite occupation would probably be making ice cream, candy, or baking pastries. My favorite personal occupations have been being a dairy farmer and creating music. I had to get old and then look back at my farm family past in order to truly appreciate it.


What is your most marked characteristic?
y bald head and the little scar on my cheek from the time I crashed face first into a sled at full speed.


Who are your favorite writers?
Shakespeare (or whoever he was?), Danai Gurira, Susan Lori Parks, Brecht, Bukowski, Tolkien, Coleridge, Ginsberg, Sendak, and Lavie Tidhar (Central Station) are some of my favs.


Who are your favorite musicians?
Randall Davidson, Timothy Ritter, Chris Strouth, Drew Miller, Mykl Westbrooks, David Russ, Natalie Nowytski, Kitty, Jim McGuire (guitar teacher), David Means, Robert Fripp, Eno, Bowie, John Cage, and a whole host of composers and musicians too numerous to list here


Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
Captain Picard


Who are your heroes in real life?
My dad, my grandfather, my brother, Jimmy Carter, Sister Teresa, Geronimo, Chief Pontiac, Crazy Horse, Frederick Douglas, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Gandi, Budda, President Barack Obama, John Lenin, Paul Wellstone


What is your favorite motto?
Damn the torpedoes


If not yourself, who would you be?
Myself as that guy in the movies who dresses really nice and drives those cars that do all kinds of magical things. He gets to travel to exotic places and experience all kinds of amazing things that I will never have the resources to do.