I Go A-Walkin'

Dear Chicago,
I know I haven't written in a while, but I wanted you to know that I'm really digging the fog we've had the last couple days. It goes really well with the warmish cold weather and my general demeanor right now and I'm trying to find the right music to accompany it. My head's scanning for indie shit but my gut's telling me Floyd. Suggestions are always welcome.

I was reading old issues of Cerebus at work today. Each issue had a preview of another black-and-white comic. Some made it, others didn't. I think I like those ones the most. Dave Sim made a point of printing each letter that was sent to him and some issues have more letters than they do comics, sent out by sexually frustrated fanboys and adolescents, and all these other eccentric people who didn't have any other output.

I think there is a beauty in irrelevence and there are few things more irrelevent than the letters page of a sixteen year old comic.

I forgot how lonely the world was without the internet, how when you were alone, how truly alone you felt.

I still get caught up in Wikipedia the same way I got caught up with Encarta the same way I got caught up in the World Book in the middle of the night. Stalking the people that I love and the people that I'm curious about on Myspace feels like when I'd pace someone's block when I had nothing to do, because I knew that sooner or later a car would show up and drop them off, kinda harmless and kinda creepy, sweet at best and pathetic at worst.

When I was eleven, I started watching my neighbors' TV. In my parent's house, there were two twin little rooms upstairs at the end of the hall. I picked the Southwest room because of the closet. A big, walk-in square with a ledge and another smaller square behind the wall where no one could see me unless they were standing in the doorway where I could see them. When I saw it, at four, I saw it as Eternia, anyd many great action figure battles would be staged there. Dinah and I started our spy club there. Every few years I would reclaim it as my secret space.

The Southeast room was its twin, except it had no Eternia closet and the walls were far less busy, because, well, I wasn't living there. As my insomnia got worse, I preferred the drab, olive walls to mine which were covered in stickers and posters and, more and more, pictures of women. The collaged walls were too noisy for the late hour, when the rest of the world was quiet and I needed to think. Usually, I read the Encyclopedia or one of the comics from the small stash I'd hidden under the bed. They were all New Mutants, TMNT, or relics from the Secret Wars. Then there was Cracked, which I preferred to Mad, and a tiny collection of independent comix, which I couldn't (or wouldn't) convince my Mother to buy, but occasionally came across on my own. When I got bored of reading, I looked through the windows. That's when I discovered my neighbor's television.

I never met the guy whose window was most in line with mine in the building next to ours. He existed as a sihouetted bald head that ocasionally disappeared to get food or go to the bathroom. His television was always on, and always showing the same two things: basketball and porn. Perhaps these were the only two things I could've understood muted, and also in my own silent, isolation. Undoubtedly, they were the only two things I wanted to see.

The basketball was important cause it was a Bulls championship year and I didn't have ESPN but the porn was something else altogether. At the time, and for a few years afterward, the machinations of sex were completely alien to me, and that alienness was only magnified when watching the act on a TV screen forty feet away. Sometimes it was gay porn, sometimes it was straight porn, sometimes it was "Real Sex" on HBO. I loved it, all of it, and I stared awestruck for hours on end at the tangles of flesh before me.

After _______ was raped, my parents told me not to shortcut through alleys, so when I started going on walks, I took alleys exclusively. North in the morning, South in the evening, and West whenever I had enough time to make it all the way to Diversions and back. North through Touhy Park and Pottawatamee to the dollar store to buy blasting caps. South to Vibes Records, through Heartland and the No Exit, Turtle Island Books, the Shamanic Counselor's, Glenwood's murals and Loyola Beach. West through Indian Boundary and the Jewish part of Devon, Thillens, the Latin King record store and then the Arcade if I had more than a dollar in my pocket. I took the same routes because I was stupid, but I got to see a lot of the same people and their patterns. I looked for people too...Alia gets home between three and four, try to be on Touhy then, Zera gets home at five, see if she has Alana with her. If I took this shortcut I'd catch the ice cream truck, this one the paleta man, the good paleta man.

I've always felt that some people want to be watched, maybe because I always have. There was one girl I stalked for a year, for up to a minute-and-a-half a day, if I was lucky. Every afternoon, as the train picked up steam towards Morse, just before the turn, I'd see her on her roof, sunbathing in a blue bikini. She was right underneath the tracks and the train rarely stirred her, I wondered what the chances of catching her eye were, of making her notice me. I wondered if she knew I could see her. I was sure that she did.

I still go on walks, but not as often as I'd like to. I've heard talks of organized missions of urban exploration, but as of yet I've only trespassed, into homes and buildings that are halfway constructed or being torn down. If you believe in ghosts, at least the way ghosts are generally regarded in the public conscious, on those rare occasions when they're regarded at all, they'll remain at a location even once it is razed. I wonder if second floor ghosts have to wait for a new set of stairs to be built to return to the second floor, or if they're stuck there in orbit.

At ten o'clock the street is dark, and I'm wondering if I want beer, at least, whether or not to buy beer. You can tell a lot about a person by what they have in the windows that face the street, if it's a computer desk or a couch. It's rarely anything else. At ten, everyone has their televisions on. The glow creeps from garden apartments and illuminates the sidewalk. Every room is blue and I wonder if there is a particularly blue show on TV or if that's just the general color of television.

I hate that I feel the cold. I could stay outside forever if it wasn't for the cold. I hate my own thin skin. I go inside.

Sarah has been taking digs at my emotional immaturity, how I can't say the word love in the second person. When I talk about the dog I'm going to get someday, my eyes light up. When I think of huskies, they water; my lips crease at the thought of an English bull. She says that when I talk about owning a dog, I sound like a teenage girl that wants to get pregnant. I just want something that'll love me forever, that I won't be able to fuck up. Maybe if I added that I'll outlive it would put everything into perspective. Still, I'm starting to think about being a father some day. It's biological, I'm sure, but I keep thinking, 'Why should all the assholes get to have kids when I'd be such a great Dad?"

Maybe I'll adopt, maybe later on I'll forget that I don't want to pass on my genes any more, the same way I forgot my own stalwart 'I'm not having children.' Shayna will have kids. I'll be the cool uncle, it'll be great. I won't be a burden to them, they'll never find me crying and unsure. I wrote a letter, but I couldn't make me believe In it.

Dear Son (that I'm Secretly Beginning to Want, but Hope that I will never Have),

I've been driving around and looking at neighborhoods I've never spent time in before. Mostly, West. Mostly, Black. I'm trying to get an accurate handle of where I'll be living, if I'm living in the city ten years from now. It's scary that there are parts of town where I don't know anyone, that are full of people I'll probably never meet, whose houses will be gone, whose stores will be gone, whose schoolsI don't know what this city does with inadequate schools in gentrified neighborhoods. I'm looking for a path to walk on, and if it's outside of the roads I'm already digging treads into, I may not veer into it, and if all things are preordained and you're to exist anyway, if you could maybe give me a shove in the right directions. I'm having a lot of race trouble right now, in that I see the affects of systematic racism but I don't see how I can fix them, and have very little desire to anyway. I'm having a problem with work these days, in that I don't know what it is I want to do to get money while I try to make "art". I'm sure it's all just typical twenty-something postgraduate jitters, but I could use a little guidance right now from someone who doesn't have any degrees, if only just a song title.

Thanks,
Eric (I Don't Know What Last Name I Should Be Using Right Now)

P.S. Horses Can't talk, Therefore, Mr. Ed couldn' talk. Therefore, Wilbur Post was insane
P.P.S. Apparently this exists. I am amazed