things that make less and less sense when I think about it

Fucking Gateway just erased my blog as it was nearing its end. If it happens again, I'm taking it out back behind the shed.

What exists here now is summary. An artless shell.

Yesterday was the most beautiful day I can remember, full of sex and John Waters and cheeseburgers made of meat. There was no sun, the city was a perfect greyscale. It would have been a picture perfect Labor Day, if only I was working enough to deserve the day off. I refuse to fall asleep, but the day drags me along into tomorrow, a day which I am wholly unsure of. And now, here I am...

Full of pancake, spending entirely too much time debating whether to shower and groom myself now or wait until I've slept and awaken. Every second that I'm awake, I'm burning calories. Every second, a little less pancake.

The summer started with a list, some of which has been checked off, but not enough. All in all, I've done pretty well for myself.

I like lists.
Anything that shows me exerting some level of organization is a good thing.
When it rains it pours, though...

Obsessive Compulsions
here is a list of things that must be removed

labels
labels from bottles of sodapop, labels from beer
labels from society
the bendable parts of pen caps
the dead skin from my fingertips and feet
the American oppressor, in all his forms
Barack Obama, Mayor Daley, Rod Blagojevich, The President
whatever compunction keeps me from taking a job at Jimmy John's
pop can tops
the concept of monagamy, from the concept of love
this mouse and keyboard, from my cold, dead hands
the two-day muzzle, on my face and neck

I sit in my corner typing, stalking people friends, and friends-of-friends, and people I might someday want to have sex with, and people who don't even exist, on the internet. The television sits in its corner, yelling at whoever will listen like some deviant street preacher. I almost doesn't understand.

Transformers is on, some Fifth Generation, computer generated "Go, Go America!" version that seems to be lacking in dinosaur lambourghinis.

One of the robots calls another "a poseur." Did I really hear that, or am I just projecting?

An ad announces Study Buddy Koby, who tells a booger joke. Apparently Study Buddy Koby is an educational toy that converses with latchkey kids, an educational toy that tells booger jokes.

Children's television is too abrasive for me right now, or maybe I'm too sensitive. The announcer adresses me as "sucka." A crooked cafeteria worker has a machine that scrapes crust from students' pinkeye, to add to the top of her casserole. The television goes off.

I need to go to sleep, if only because I'm starting to hallucinate. I lay my jeans on the floor, and they start to slink away. When I look at them, bashful and caught in the act, they stop. In the corner of my eye, my boots do the same thing.

I can't see outside, from my little cave in the basement. I'm hoping for another sunless day. I'm hoping for a day as beautiful as yesterday.

"Fun With Identity" or "More Reasons to Hate on a Motherfucker"

The game is called survival...

I'm still trying to become famous, just like everybody else in America, but at the same time I'm trying to figure out how to make money and how to do either without selling out cheap. I'm trying to keep total control over my image. I hate the fact that I think of myself as having one.

The answer seems, as it has always seemed to me, to be in fake identities, or splintered personalities, in living a life full of aliases, stage names, noms de guerre and de plume. Whichever personality writes blogs, must be the one that doesn't know how to spell words in French.

I've touched on this before, but here's a little more insight on who I am.

Eric Strom has a bank account and family. He votes and pays rent. He falls in love and thinks about suicide fairly often. His perceptions of each are fairly selfish and unrealistic. He is a college graduate and a job applicant; occasionally he finds himself subject to the slightly demeaning whims of his bosses. He has bad credit and may or may not have a couple collection agencies after him. He has trouble talking to people.

Eric lab Rat performs. Perhaps he is always performing. In real life and on the internet. He got his name as an afterthought, but was carefully built up as everything Eric Strom wanted peope to think he was. He makes art. He takes his pet rat to parties and dances like a horny epileptic. He rides a tricycle and spins music which nobody wants to hear. He thinks that he is really clever when he's drunk. Occasionally he is photogenic. He claims no family. He is untouchable.

ELR is somewhere in between. He writes and djs. He takes pride in what he does, but he does it for money and it is not art.

A year ago, Strom slipped up. I --whoever I is-- let myself be filmed with an improv group I was trying out for. I wasn't in charge of the filming and it was totally amateurish and embarassing. The people I was working with had no absolutely no aesthetic taste, and thought me nitpicky. I thought that was the last of it. A month back, Misha told me that her brother saw the tape on their short-lived public access show. I can't tell you how much this worries me, the fact that I've been broadcast against my will, using the name that most people know me by, and at least one person has seen it. I can say without hyperbole that I've lost sleep over it.

I fucked up again this week. Allow me to explain.

Wherever I go, day or night, in my head I'm secretly writing an article about it, or a blog. I'm filing away all the funny images, weird juxtapositions of people and things, jarring and ironic phrases for later use. I try to stem these urges to turn everything into a piece, because life loses a bit of spontanaeity and my writing loses a bit of integrity when I get wired that way. I try not to write about things that I'm a part of, but by the end of the night the article is always there. A couple weeks ago, I was having a lovely afternoon with some friends, some of whom pride themselves on their anonymity, and I thought, well this would be just perfect and the next day, as the sun was coming up, I whipped up an article. My girlfriend read it before I woke up and told me it was lame, or at least that I've done better. Someone I emailed it to, to check the facts on, told me it was cute.

No one wants to be lame and no one wants to be cute. I spent the whole morning rewriting it.

I thought, if this is going to be something my friends could take offense at, I need to make it as good as anything I've ever written. At the end of the day, I sent it to [a place], got word that it was gonna be published and didn't think about it again. Well I picked up [a thing] today and, sure enough, there it was, the original, unedited copy that no one was supposed to see. I sent in the wrong file, and while I'm a little proud that someone thinks that my unpolished, latenight ramblings are publishable, I'm petrified that someone is actually going to read it. This is what it looks like. This is what it should look like...

"I dont lock this bike up when I go into stores. Its been stolen twice and its never made it more than a block."

Adrian is aiming to win the award for the rattiest bike in the Rat Patrol. His homemade bike lies limp on a patch of grass, with the handlebars stuck through one of the wheels. The contests' only rule is that you need to prove that the bike can be ridden, and Adrian is facing stiff competition. The Rat Patrol has been described as everything from a trash and chopper club (via Wikipedia) to a bike gang. Today is Ratification, one of two celebrations held annually by the Chicago chapter of the group (the other is St. Ratrick's Day). The main purpose of Ratification is to hand out awards to deserving members of the Rat Patrol for achievements such as Best Colors and Most Patches on a Single Tire ("Each patch on your tube represents another five dollars that you didnt feel like spending!").

The scene is like some bastard, DIY version of a motorcycle rally. At six in the afternoon, there are over thirty tallbikes, shortbikes, and choppers lined up against Pot'N'Rocks, the Humbolt Park apartment building that serves as unofficial Rat Patrol headquarters. Bags of dumpstered baked goods sit on the ground in front of a rusty grill where elotes are cooking. A girl has just realized she can play The Animals Dont Let Me Be Misunderstood on a mandolin. The cops have shown up twice now, but are at a loss as for what to do about the funny looking kids with the funny looking bikes having a picnic. Ominous clouds overhead threaten to call off the much-anticipated steeplechase and tallbike joust.

A couple of boys from down the street borrow bikes one by one. They take turns circling the block until theyve exhausted the whole collection of mutant bicycles. The crowd swells with curious people from the neighborhood as the Rats scream and clap for their favorites.

Adrian's bike doesnt win. There is an apparent tie for Rattiest Bike between a tandem whose back seat is a bundle of bed stuffing and a chopper who nobody seems willing to ride twice.

"The only way to break the tie is with a dance off!"

A dozen people break out in an impromptu (and terribly arrhythmic) beatbox session. Another handful chant lines from DJ Assault's Ass and Titties. The loose itinerary is forgotten for the time being as the group dances on the sidewalk. A squad car rolls up, warns everybody to keep it down, and rolls off again. In the midst of the revelry, the mixing- and discussion of- noxious cocktails, and the frustration with the police, it almost goes unnoticed that the sky has cleared up, and the evening can go on as planned.

My apologies to the Rat Patrol for putting out a sub-par article about you. I'm going to email the publisher and see if he can replace the old one with the good one. I feel like I think about things too much. That's an Eric Strom thing, by the way.

Holy Shit, there's video!


[currently listening to "Bande a Part" by Nouvelle Vague]

Randomness. I'm sick of randomness. Or randomnity.

there is absolutely no logical explanation for the fishing lure I found on the floor when I was looking for a lost earring this morning

in other news

sometimes when I'm bored, I make up the names of bars I'll never own

The Doom Room
The Gloom Room
The Status Bar
The Space Bar
The Roar Shack

two-part dream journal: black magic and white guilt

The re-tellings of the events that took place in my dreams are painfully inaccurate. I find myself incapable of recreating the feelings that pulled me along through the nonsense. This probably goes without saying, but I can barely remember them and that's a shame.

The streetlights still shone at nine in the morning, The sky was dark and the rain was getting thick. Every part of my tricycle squeaked and squealed. I cursed my friends for our late night revelry and for our choice of location. I locked my bike to a tree on a seedy corner last night and wished it well. Whoever tried to steal it from me failed, and opted instead to attack the tires and kick in all of the pliable pieces of metal. It was in a sorry state when I found it, still shackled to the tree, and so was I. Now I cursed Sarah, Brian, and Jesse for individually not making things any easier for me in the middle of night. I cursed my boss for not having the courtesy to show up to her own house for work in the morning, and making me ride home like this. I cursed Zeus, Yahweh and Doppler for the torrentsof water soaking through my skin.

Just before Western Ave, I realized that my wet brakes weren't working. I flung myself on to the sidewalk to avoid getting crushed in the onslaught of cars and flung the bike on top of me to keep it from getting smashed any further. When I remounted the trike I wasn't thinking about the turn I had to make so I just kept riding. A few blocks out of the way, the street was crowded with stores but none of them were open save for one, tiny little resale shop on the corner. I locked my trike up in front, wrung out my shirt, and went in.

"You can bring your bike in. I don't think anybody else will be coming in today. Ooh. Nice tricycle."

We exchanged pleasantries but I wasn't listening to what we were saying. I was entranced. I'd been here before. This was it, this was a store I'd been trying to find for years, but I couldn't remember where or why. I couldn't figure it out, it was mostly furniture and clothes that wouldn't fit me. There were no comics or records. The books looked nice on shelves but they were too old to be readable at this point.

I had been here twice before. Once two years ago and once as a child. I couldn't remember what happened at either time but there was this feeling attached to the childhood trip. It was with a daycamp and it was inexplicable. We came into the store so that someone could make a phonecall because the bus broke down or something, but there was something magical that happened that day.

I sat in a rocking chair, eyes darting around the room. The proprietor was charming. He was tall and lean, prematurely bald and had a soft voice that seemed Californian in nature. Even though nothing in the store looked at all special, he said he traveled the world to get it.

"You've been here a long time, haven't you?"

"That's true. Most people don't come down here more than once and notice. Have you been here before?"

I thought he might have remembered, but apparently not.

"C'mon, why don't you join me in the kitchen."

I stood at the stove while he hovered around the fridge, "You like quesadillas?"

I nodded. "Catch."

He threw a bag of tortillas at me, and then a bag of shredded cheese, "Open these up for me, willya?"
After I opened them, he took over the cooking and preparing duties. He told jokes but none of them stuck. I wanted to ask him if he was hiring, I wanted to ask about the feeling I'd gotten so many years ago. Something told me to go to the window. It wasn't as dark in his yard as it had been elsewhere. The rain had let up, and there they were. Two of them, about twice the size of a dog, playing in a mud puddle, with skin like cracked, unfinished clay and proud horns laid out on their foreheads.

"You have dinosaurs!"
"There's no such thing as dinosaurs."
"But you do. Those are triceratops."
"Adjust your eyes son."

As I looked on, the crouched beasts stood up and they weren't triceratops and they weren't twice the size of a dog. They were covered in long fur that looked like hay, and they were at least ten feet tall. They stood upright, and held themselves like bears.

"What are they?"
"Those are German Spiked Psychopaths. They live in the woods in a couple parts of Western Europe and most people have never seen them."

We watched them as we ate our quesadillas. I guess this was his real trade. Animals. A friend of his sat outside, soaking wet, with a horse that looked tiny and fragile next to the Psychopaths. We laughed as his friend loaded two horses into a car, where they would have to crane their necks and fold their legs on the long ride back to Indiana. It seemed more playful than cruel, at the time at least.

When we were done eating I decided I was ready to go and thanked him. On my way to the door I noticed my tricycle, the back was folded, so it was the width of a two weeler, with the basket folded over either side. I was impressed. I didn't know the trike could do that. It looked as if he'd tamed it. Outside, it was still dark but the only rain was coming off buildings and branches.

I woke up, paced around. My boss called. I really didn't have to work today. I felt sick and unproductive. If I wasn't going to make any money today, I wasn't going to spend it either. I tried to type up my dream while it was still fresh in my head but Kate's laptop erased it. Too many keys, too close together. I went into Sarah's room and turn out the lights, and forgot that it was morning outside.

The museum was right by the train. I followed the tracks on my trike. It was a zine show at the Chicago MoMa, all writers I've seen or booked a million times. All the second-tier writers who don't get invited out to these kinds of events, that think they can evolve out of their caste by being around enough. Am I one of those? Best not to think about it. When this was over, everyone would drink, shower, primp, and go to the Paper Rad show in Chinatown. I didn't feel white enough for this shit. Did anybody ever? Best not to think about it. Best not to judge. Best to assume that I'm being honest, that I legitimately want to see everything that I'm going to see today and so do all my peers.

So why am I walking away from the museum?

It's a sunny day on a block I've never been on before. Across the street there are brand new townhouses, one and a half stories tall and red as firetrucks. On this side, however, all of the houses are made of wood, and crumbling. Only one of them feels alive. Towards the end of the block, there's a house with easily a dozen people sitting out, talking, laughing, drinking lemonade and passing a blunt. One of them is fat, and white, with a thin mustache. The rest are thin and black and range in age from zero to a hundred. Most of them sit on the steps. Next to the steps a homemade ramp zigzags right and left away from the house before meeting the porch. A man in a POW MIA hat, with a long beard sits in a wheelchair in front of the steps smoking a cigar.

"So Reggie," the white man addresses him, "I've got a friend comin in to town on vacation. He's only one leg, he's from the military and I gotta get him around, what do you think is the best..."

An old man lays down on the sidewalk in front of me.

"Excuse me, Sir."
"Oh pardon me, Sir."
I bumped him with the toe of my boot, "Ooh, it looks like I got you with my foot a little there."
"Oh, that's okay."
"You have a good day, Sir."
"You too, Sir."

"Excuse me?"
It came from a woman in a station wagon parked on the next driveway.
"Yes?"
"What the fuck is your problem steppin over old people? And what did you call him? Psh, and Jerry, you had the nerve to call him 'Sir'."
"We called each other 'Sir', Ma'am. Just a sign of respect."
"And what do you respect, and why should he respect you?"

There was a dog sitting on her arm, one of those weird, fancy Lady and the Tramp dogs that didn't have much hair, except around the crown, whiskers and tail. Five puppies sat on the ground beneath her pawing and nursing. When they were done, they scattered, revealing another dog behind them. A gray ball of fur with four little balls of fur for legs that seemed to short to support its body, feet and a face. It almost looked like a sheep, except that it was so dark, and had straight fur. I couldn't look at it without wanting to laugh.

"I don't know, I was just showing the common courtesy I was taught to treat my elders with as a child."
"And you were taught to kick your elders?"
"No Ma'am, it was an accident and I apologized."
"Lemme ask you one thing. You're going to a show at that new museum, right?"
"Yeah."
"And then you're gonna go back North or South or wherever you kids come from and forget about us, right?"

I didn't know. Probably. They were just people I was walking past on the street.

One of the puppies had found its way over to me, and was wrestling with my arm as we talked. A pair of old legs stretched out from underneath the station wagon. They were wrinkled and gnarled, as if tree trunks rupturing from the inside.

"Hey Maybeth, why don't you shut up and let the kid go."

We looked at each other for a minute. We were done. I tried to pull my arm from under a sleeping puppy, which in turn wrapped its paws around my wrist. I caught the woman watching me struggle with her dog. She smiled. She didn't hate me. She plucked the pup off me and patted my hand.

I could see through one of the windows a group of kids in black. They were kids I used to know through places I don't go to anymore. One of them was playing a show tonight at the Elbo Room, sponsored by a tequila company. They were all drunk. In the middle of them was one of the writers from the show, running late. He was easily recognized in the group. He was short and well dressed with mutton chops and Buddy Holly glasses. I didn't want to leave yet. I didn't want to get caught up in that group. I didn't want to claim them. I waited til they turned the corner and left.

I glided from this dream into another one, and ended up back in my high school. All of my coworkers from Columbia were student teachers here now. I was there because I wanted to see some old professors. I was here because of a girl that I used to teach. I was here because Brendan had died, and this is where we were meeting up for our own personal memorial. I was worried about seeing the girl. I was worried that she wanted to have sex with me. I was worried that I wanted to have sex with her. I was worried that someone would catch the vibes coming off one of us and I'd be carted off as a pedophile. I was worried that Skylar and Obie and the Marks could all see my fear. This dream was too complex to have a good hold on me anymore. It was the type of dream, where every time I opened a door I was in a different building, where hallways turned to forests. The last door I opened lead to a moonlit lake, possibly inside the gymnasium, and a matchstick boat made by my friend Viktor. We set it on fire and pushed it off towards the horizon. I woke up confused, hot, and unprepared for the outside.

[currently watching episodes of "The Ren & Stimpy Show" and "The Adventures of Pete & Pete"]

OMG, there are black people in a free Chicago magazine!

Lots of em. And a couple Asians. All in this month's UR Chicago. It's almost as if UR is a magazine that wants to represent the city of Chicago in all of its beautiful diversity despite its tragic history of self-segregation.

Sure, it's the Hip Hop Issue, but I'm nearly certain we'll see the trend continued in whatever it is they cover next month.

[currently listening to "Amerika Perdida" by Mano Negra]

flick you off

Last night I got kinda sad. How sad? I was eating bacon bits and gummi bears. I wouldn't wait til I was done with the salty before I'd reach for the sweet. It was kinda funny that the gummi bears had actual fruit juice but the bacon bits contained absolutely no bacon, but not funny enough not to be kinda sad (and fairly gross). I decided to do something productive-ish, so now I'm a movie reviewer. Here's a month's worth of thrift store finds, mellow time on friend's couches, outdoor screenings, and Five Dollar Tuesdays.

Bamboozled - When I was seeing Nikole, she was still engaged, so I could never come over to her house. Unfortunately, this meant that I never got to meet her snake. Fortunately, it also meant that she left a lot of shit over at my place. The stuff she never got back was Frankenhooker, Bamboozled, and a Disrobe cd. Nikole recommended Bamboozled as an outrageous comedy and I really can't tell why. Maybe she had a different experience than I did because she's black and maybe because she'd never seen the ending sober. Once again, Spike Lee wants nothing more than to stir the pot of collective guilt and bum everyone out. This movie put some serious rain clouds over my head on a day when I really didn't need em.

Nikole: I lost your copy a couple apartments ago. You can have this one. Basaraba has Frankenhooker. He won't give it up without a fight.

Corpse Bride - The dead are more alive than the living, especially moreso than Dickensian England's social grabbing upper crusts.Tim Burton makes a good movie. Visually stunning, et cetera. Worse than Big Fish, better than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It feels kinda phoned in though, for something that took a decade to create.

By the by, the musical number at the doorway to the underground is amazing, and as good as anything from A Nightmare Before ChristmasWith Danny Elfman as Mister Bonejangles!

Death Race 2000 - Post apocalyptic future. All the way in the future year of 2000 AD.David Carradine (as Mr. Frankenstein) versus Sylvester Stallone (as Joe Faturbo)versus a sexy, good-natured Nazi versus a freedom fighting grandma named Thomasina Paine. You know that game that you play when you're driving where an old person is walking in front of your car and someone yells "200 points!" and then you murder them and get 200 points? Someone built a movie around it. It's even better than it sounds, if such a thing were possible.

Featuring The Real Don Steele as the news reporter!

Eating Raoul- When I was ten, I suffered from insomnia. Maybe suffer is a bad term. I rather enjoyed insomnia. The movies and cartoons I watched in the middle of the night laid the foundation for a lot of the weirdness to follow, and this was one of em. When I remarked to my father, some thirteen years ago, that I saw Eating Raoul the night before, he was shocked. After seeing it now, so am I. How were they ever able to censor this enough for TV? The whole thing is sex, murder and eventually, canibalism. In1982, California was overrun by swingers, who are pretty much drug addled rape zombies. After a series of mishaps that lead to a murder,a prudish couple from Redondo Beach puts out an ad as dominatrices to raise enough money to start a restaurant. Their plan is to murderthe swingers who answer their ad- and who will miss them?- without ever getting kinky.

Featuring The Real Don Steele as the swinger party host!

Fire and Ice - Ralph Bakshi makes a movie for the Heavy Metal Magazine/Dungeons andDragons set. It's actually a lot like one of the shorts from the Heavy Metalmovie: "Den" starring John Candy, only there's less sex and it's about forty times longer.

Forbidden Zone - This is the best movie ever. Everything is animated or made of cardboard and it stars The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo and Tattoo, the midget from Fantasy Island. Everybody humps in this movie, and nearly everyone is Jewish. The devil sings Cab Calloway, the princess never puts a top on, men of sixty play twelve-year olds and less than half of the cast are actual actors.

Foxfire - When Jenny Lewis came out with Rabbit Fur Coat, I demanded to see her tits. In Foxfire, she's the only one that keeps her top on. Apparently, because she's suppsed to be the "fat" one. If she continues to be a public figure/indie darling I'm going to get totally creepy about her. Meg White creepy. Isaw this one when I was fourteen, and all the best films were about teenage lesbians or white gangbangers. Angelina Jolie as James Dean, heroin, homemade tattoos, and a soundtrack by Babes in Toyland and Kristine Hersch make me feel 1995 wonderful.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 - It's aNightmare on Elm Street movie, I must be at Breanna's house! Freddie Krueger is the bastard son of a hundred criminal mental patients and a raped nun. You want backstory? Eat that shit up!

Pirates of the Caribbean 2: The Something of the Something's Something - Why do I like this? Why doesn't anyone else? Who's wrong here? Johnny Depp made the unique decision to flesh out the character of Jack Sparrow by going really flaming gay. No one expected it. No one in the studio liked it. It worked like gangbusters. I figured thathis affectations would be less efficacious because, this time, the writers knew what he would be doing and would overdo it. It felt natural though, and there were squid monsters, and barnacle monsters, and a hot Voodoo priestess with a platinum grill! I totally like this against my better judgment.

Rebel Without a Cause - James Dean is much less James Dean than I always thought. In this movie he's a whiny, rich kid who wants nothing more than his parents to be forthright with him. His best friend is the kind of loner that shoots dogs, and I'm not sure if they mean it to be as funny as it turns out. When Cybil Shephard does talk radio interviews, she tells a story about how Natalie Woods' rank pussy turned Elvis off of cunnilingus for years. In this movie she's a mature sixteen year old who doesn't have much trouble getting over her boyfriend's death. In retrospect, take all of your classics off their pedestals, because they're pretty meh today. Except of course Forbidden Zone, which is the best movie ever.

Yellow Submarine - I like the Beatles, but don't need to hear any of these songs for a while. This movie would be better as a mashup. I think I'm going to try it with Os Mutantes, or maybe Tupac. I miss smoking pot. See also: Pink Floyd's the Wall.

The Young Ones - This BBC sitcom has magic powers. When I watch it alone, it feels like brilliant, subversive, sillytelevision, but when I try to show it to people it turns into a cheesy, dated sitcom filled with broad archetypes where everybody's always yelling. Then they lose respect for me. I need someone who likes this show already to watch it with me, so I stop looking foolish.

[currently listening to "Rabbit Fur Coat" by Jenny Lewis with The Watson Twins]

Take that, Tania's cat!

When I came home this morning, I played with my beautiful, new rat Bukowski and ate sardines without sharing.

That'll teach you for scratching me, jerk!

The best revenge is living well.

Imus is Zen

My Lord, the Don Imus show on MSNBC is perfect.Three or four of television's ugliest men trade awkward silences and even awkwarder sexual barbs:

"That weathergirl.....Maria......from MSNBC................her baby.....................looks a lot like Richard..............Huh Rick?"

The whole show is like one long Andy Milonakis sketch (but much better than that example sounds).

For his own part, Imus sounds kind of like Johnny Cash might have had hedeveloped such a bad case of Parkinsons Disease that the only thing he could do is drink, or maybe Larry the Cable Guy's wise old grandfather. Better yet it all takes place in a home-y countrified corner of MSNBC, as if Roy Rogers had taken on the task of redecorating the White House's secret underground War Room (you know, the one from the movies with all the computers), but was fired before he could finish.

It easily rivals the set Gary Panter created for "Pee-Wee's Playhouse", a show that would pair up well alongside Imus.

Perhaps the best part is when they finally figure out what they're talkiung about, and all of a sudden, Imus, his cohosts and their guests are going off on these racist, Xenophobic rants. It's really funny when they spend a whole minute trying to figure out the correct pronunciation of Hezbollah, before they agree to just pronounce it as Jew Killing Thugs,which is pretty funny until you realize that they are referring to all of the Lebanese people as Hezbollah (or Jew Killing Thugs ). It's also a little less funny when I realize that all of this is real to a lot of people. It's not real because they hear it on the radio or see it on TV, it's just real. To a lot of people. And there will never be peace in the Middle East, because the only people that want it are too poor to do anything about it.

Now I'm sad. Let's watch more Pee-Wee.

Scene Report: 2006

I kissed Sarah tonight like I would have in high school, had I known her then. At the end of the movie, as the lights and soundtrack faded and there were no sounds left in the world but the bubbling of a water pipe, the humming of a million little motors all over the house, and the quick and tired gasps of our own breath.

Yesterday was high school, or so I called it. I stuck some safety pins through my ears, put on as many pieces of punk rock flair as I could, and drank King Cobra from a paper bag at the bus stop. I broke bottles on the ground and bled all over the floor. But it was't high school so much as a minstrel show. It lacked sincerity, in the way that most things lack sincerity.

In all the ways I've learned to sell myself over the last few years I've lost a lot of that sincerity.

On the porch, Krissy laments that she doesn't know any interesting people like I do. To be honest, I'm sick to death of interesting people, or at least right now, this moment, I feel like writing that I'm sick to death of interesting people. Everyone in this city is so damned talented and busy, people to name-drop, and tell stories of, and brag about knowing, and Krissy, in all of her stoned suburban-ness, doesn't realize that she's one of the most beautiful people in my life right now.

She has secrets. Little ones. She plays the mandolin, but no one but her mandolin teacher has ever heard her play it. She will never read this, and I admire that about her.

It was about ten years ago that I went to high school and started meeting people with enough freedom to be interesting. Mike was a fifteen year old runaway, who slept in the basement of a building he'd once lived in. When the basement flooded, everything he owned was ruined. For a whole summer, he wore the one shirt he had left. It was a Marilyn Manson shirt and he had to wear it inside out because the back said "I Am the God of Fuck."

The difference between Mike and Cris, who was a skinhead, and Jacob who was a hippie, and Tom who had been a Latin King and Michelle Luellen, who chastised me for jokingly using the term "feminazi" and Jill DiGiacomo who was one of my many, many shoulders to cry on and me then, versus me now, is that they weren't living their lives as some sort of a performance. Cris was a skinhead because it made sense to him, because he hated the cops and the class system as much as he loved his father and Chicago. Mike was a squatter because his mother was addicted to crack. We were full of passion,and big ideas and the direction of where we needed to be heading, if myopic, was clear.

On the street, getting off the bus, I see more familiar, beautiful people. They've surrounded themselves with ugly people who only look good when I'm jerking off. My first thought is that they have dead eyes and shallow personalities. My second thought is that I'm projecting.

I wonder what it was like in Seattle and Olympia in the late eighties and early nineties. If it was just like it is here, right now, and then everybody started getting famous, and it all changed.

I wonder about five years ago, when this city seemed open to so much. There was a resurgence in poetry, in puppetry, in noise, in peace and in play. I wonder if 2001 really was all those things or if I was just 18, and I was the one who's shut out the world of possibilities since.

I saw Miles today, and Freddie and Ida. They were the youngest people to see the high school version of me. The one I've worked to kill, for better and worse. They're that age now, drinking on the street and rambling mad in a blur of sexual confusion. Again, I may be projecting but it seems like that's how the scenes all implode: everyone gets high, gets famous, or is done in by incest. More eloquently than me, Kristiana Colon wrote once on how the poetry movement of 2001 fucked itself to death.

I'm taking my first month off soon. My first whole month away from Chicago. I'm a little scared, not so much of leaving, so much as that I won't. Life will intervene and my thirty days will be a week, a vacation, a bygone, a dream. I've got my couches lined up, and I'm looking for work. It feels like I'm commiting some act of treason by willfully interrupting a five year tradition, but, to be honest, it's just a party that I throw every year and, for better or worse, there will be parties to take its place.

[Currently watching "Foxfire"]

Missing Persons. Units of Time.

The neighborhood is gentrifying, which isn't saying much when gentrification is a Payless Shoes and a Wallgreens Pharmacy. His apartment is too cold for the season, and his bed seems too lonely for having the woman he loves at his side, which is to say nothing about his love for her and only about the situation.

Merely, it is insomnia. He puts his pants back on and relaces his boots. He turns off the lights that are on, turns on the lights that are off, and steps out into July, in all its oppressive mugginess, for a bike ride.

His bike is novelty, but he rides it out of necessity. He's not ready to try a real one and besides, it's paid for.

He hates and loves the hood, for its 24-hour taquerias, it's thrift and dollar stores, and the galleries that perpetually fail, only to be replaced by more of the same. Nobody's willing to spend money here, the landlords don't even want it, but it's still changes with the ebb and flow of white flight. A little bit at a time, than a lot, then a little, and then more.

The night is quiet, unusually so for a Friday, but it seems as though he knows everyone of the street. The bums are all gone, but where have they gone? Has the hood changed that much since dinner? ___ drinks from a paper bag and pesters a tour bus in front of the theatre. The pair of feet on the dash signal that the band has gone to bed and lends credence to the notion that you can't get drugs from this city if you're not from here. ___ and _______ drive around in a Mini Cooper, looking unfulfilled, but willing to give one more place a chance. ______ drives South on a Vespa, determined. Anyone he doesn't know compliments his bike. He exhausts his adress book. The phone wilts. He wipes his brow, thinking about how much he hates hipsters.

He turns around. All he wants are candy and soda, and maybe a new day.

He has surrounded himself with things he doesn't like, because he is just that, the same as that which he derides.

He wakes up to a Saturday in July, typical in its laziness and revelry, it's fanfare and brotherhood. There is sexual tension and even sex. There is play violence and politics. Everything that he consumes is bad for him. He purges in an alley to ease the ride home. The sunrise is as beautiful as any sunrise, despite his weary eyes and rotten smell.


In a dream he rejoins his closest and most long-lost friends. He finds them at a street fair, after searching a different street fair to find them. They are in a booth, playing middle eastern instruments as people mock belly dance outside. ___ waves from behind a set of turntables. She has no time to talk.

He watches aghast as a middle aged guy with green tattoos curling around the corners of his mouth tries to pick up on two new friends, both underaged. When the man's wife arrives, she seems less open than he has advertised, and warns, "You'll kill them, just like you've killed her," and she hands him a dead baby. She has a whole bag more. "Just like you've killed them all." There are at least a dozen.

He surprises himself, waking up early, and attempting to scrub away the hardness of his hangover. He has a new mind, but it has learned nothing from the last two days, and works exactly the same as the old mind. He sheds his face ad grooms the pink one beneath. He is the king of the space age hangover, he tells himself, and he almost looks human.

Post-Card

Dear Mom,

I had the most unusual day. It seems like every new day tops the last for most unusual, but maybe it's finally peaked. I can now say that I can outrun a tank on my bicycle. Isn't that wild, that I can say that? That I'm in a position where I would find that out?

They brought out tanks, Mom. Rows and rows of tanks rolling down Commercial, going back for miles. Jeannie and I had a picnic today. It was the first picnic in a long time. We ate hummus and crackers and drank cheap wine on a blanket in the park. Mortars were going off and we pretended they were fireworks. We waved sparklers in the air and blew kisses at the planes overhead. Then we got on our bikes and rode through tanks like parade stowaways.

I hope this letter finds you well. The fact of the matter is, I hope it finds you at all, but let's not dwell on unpleasantries and uncertanties. I'm doing well, Mom, despite the bullshit. Jeannie is doing well. Her parents are doing well. We were all kicking ourselves for not leaving when you and Dad did, but we're over it. Jeannie and I are, at least. It's amazing how quickl;y things can seem normal, how quickly we can adapt.

The funny thing is, I feel freer now than I ever did before. I feel much less like a victim. Much less like a target. The army is much better than the police ever were. There's no profiling. No scare tactics. They don't need em. They've got tanks in the street, they control the power grid. No mastter what's happened. it's summer, just like any other, and it's too hot to fuck around with petty bullshit.

Remember 1987, when we drove to New York? And you woke me up to look at a freight train passing in front of us. It was covered with graffiti, end to end. I was five years old and that's all I remember of our trip to see Nana and Ed. That's how the tanks look. They've been tagged high and low, these day-glo monsters like something out of Ken Kesey's nightmares. I wonder how long it'll be before we run out of paint.

Did you like the polaroids? The first two don't need any explanation. The dog is Terry, she followed us home one day. We're not sure if she's ours or not. The other one, the FUCK to PROVE you CAN stencil. Those are popping up everywhere. The theory is that they're burning saltpeter. Everywhere. They're ashing it in the lake. They're burning it with coal. The air is thick with it. At least that's what they say. It's supposed to deaden desire. I don't know if it's working, but the placebo effect of the rumors has turned everyone in to animals. A Wobbly group staged an orgy in the fountain. I went out to take pictures and people kept trying to drag me in, big burly men, dead eyed waifs with painted nails and pointy eyebrows, runaways, bums, fucking like it's going out of style.

Jeannie doesn't believe a lick of it, she thinks it's just some Miltown kids conspiring against the situation to get laid. It's as plausible as anything else, but we're fond of the attention nevertheless. I wonder how good the stockpiles are. How long before the condoms run out, the birth control, the viagra, the penicillin, in a sexual frenzy? After every war there's a baby boom, and I don't want no war babies. This is a little awkward, but if you think you can get a letter back here, send one. Then send another, a decoy or a copy, and package it with rubbers. I promise you'll be a grandma some day but now s not the time.

That about sums up life behind the lines. People who aren't dressed any different than me run through the streets with AK-47s but there are long lines at the supermarket where I always seem to be caught behind some old bitty who doesn't know how to use her own checkbook, and that's what bugs me when the day is through. Say hi to dad. I love you.

Goodbye.

Another Summer of Bad Ideas exclusive?

Apparently, the people who attach themes to seasons have dubbed this the Summer of Bad Ideas, which makes it sound eerily similar to the last ten summers.

A phone call. Midafternoon.

Ken: Hello?
ELR: Yo.
Ken: [hangover gurgles]
ELR: How're you doing?
Ken: Better. What's up?
ELR: Well I woke up with a bump on my head, and I know it was from headbutting. I was wondering if you knew who I headbutt, and why.
Ken: We headbutted each other. We were talking about soccer.
ELR: Oh.

It's weird. Two weekends in a row devolve into soccer talk. Perhaps it's not a hangover I'm suffering from, but World Cup fever!

[currently reading "Despite Everything" by Aaron Cometbus]

I think about unimportant shit when I could be dreaming beautiful dreams

which is fine because my dreams are just like everyone else's

no matter, I created a term today. someone may have created it before, but I created it TODAY, and I refuse to go to google and risk diminishing my accomplishmant.

As you know, in the world of metal you could be the hardest, coke-eating, soul burning, puppy sacrificing motherfucker, revered worldwide for your dual loves of sodomy and sacrilege, and you can still, every once in a while, pull out the acoustic guitar and ham it up for the ladies

they call it a MONSTER BALLAD
and some people are alright with that

There are a few reasons why it doesn't happen too often in punk rock, or at least not in the punk rock you're likely to hear recorded. For starters, a lot of metalheads started off with classical training, whereas a lot of punks can't compose outside of three chords. Punk also has trouble being as cartoonish as metal, as it's often bogged down with the rage, the political messages, the hair glue, and the politics of slam dancing, which is not to say that glued hair and moshing is uncartoonish, just a different kind.

It does happen occasionally, though, and the results are always surprising and sometimes, very beautiful. Here are a few examples....

The Stranglers - "Golden Brown"
Naked Raygun - "Holding you"
and just about everything Social Distortion have put out since "Mommy's Little Monster"

I have decided that these songs need a name, a derivative, familiar name:

DUMPSTER BALLADS

Now I just need to release a podcast or a 2-disc/2-cassette set before Time/Life beats me to it at $17.99 a piece.

-----

Speaking of which, I'm reviving my high school dream of having my own record label/distro. The first release will be

"Ain't Nothin' Wrong With A Little Bump and Grindcore: The Music of R. Kelly"

to be honest, I came up with the name first and the idea second, a few months ago, but I think it's a fitting project. Here are just a few things I dislike about R. Kelly:

He is, ostensibly, Chicago's biggest and most untouchable celebrity (at least after Oprah and Daley). We let him get away with banging younguns for over a decade before he took it too far and let a tape get out. He married Aaliyah when she was sixteen, and it took the investigative team of fucking B96 to out him. He is the only multiplatinum R&B star to have a golden shower tape circulating on the internet. He pussed out of a fight with Jay-Z. Nobody seems to mind that he switches back and forth between gospel albums and sex jams...

and he wrote motherfucking "I Believe I can Fly"

Still, he can craft a good radio jam and he makes a great undercover weirdo.

However, I think the time has come for the everyday weirdos to have a chance deconstructing the radio jams.

If you're interested at all in contributing, in terms of art, music, space or equipment to record, hit me up, It should be a good time.

[currently reading "Drugs are Nice" by Lisa Crystal Carver

Math for Survival: Crossing the River With Thugs

I don't think there's a such thing as a neighborhood I shouldn't travel through. Statistically, however, there are places where I'm more likely to get beaten to death for looking white than others. I am writing to you today, not as a blogger or an activist, a provacateur or whatever it is you think I am, but as a mathematician, and it is as a mathematician that I say this...

I hate the fuckin police.

My reasons are threefold:
1. Overwhelmingly, they know next to nothing about mathematics and art, and when you remove mathematics and art from the world, then what is left?
2.They're only out to fuck up a good time (as I've stated earlier)
3. They ask a lot of rhetorical questions, questioms they don't expect me to have an answer for.

It was on 4th of July, the freest day of the year, that I had my last run in with Chicago's finest. We were in a neighborhood that, arguably, we shouldn't have been in, en route from a far scarier neighborhood, when we stopped to catch some fireworks. It was me on my tricycle, Sarah on her bicycle, and Jesse on his chopper. When the cops came to confiscate fireworks (thus fucking up a good time), we were a bonus. With our hands on the hood of the car, they started asking their questions.

"How would you like it if some thugs beat the shit out of you, dragged your girlfriend into an abandoned building, and there are seven of em on this block, and had 15 or so of em gang bang her day and night for three days?"

Hmm. 15 thugs gang raping my girlfriend for three days in one of seven abandoned buildings, after beating me unconscious or worse. How would I like it?

Now, of course, I'd feel terrible but I knew that this wasn't the type of question I was supposed to answer. Meanwhile, the math tutor part of my brain clicked on and, suddenly, I saw the problem.

If 15 thugs were to rape my girlfriend in each of the seven abandoned buildings on Homan and Chicago, day and night for three days. For what amount of time would each thug individually be raping her?

The first thing you do is convert the days to minutes. We all know that three days is the same as saying 72 hours and that each hour has 60 minutes, so you multiply 72 by 60 and you find out that three days is equal to 4,320 minutes. Keep that number in the back of your head, you're going to need it again in a minute.

Now you're going to multiply the number of thugs by the number of abandoned buildings, that's fifteen times seven, which is 105. We're going to take that number and divide it into 4,320 (the number of minutes in threer days). You wind up withy each thug raping my girlfriend Sarah for 31.6 minutes, per building, per day, if each thug used an equal amount of time to rape her.

If any of you got the same number, give yourself a pat on the back. If you got something else, remember to stay in school. Remember, learning can be fun when you apply it to real life!

*I swear that this is funny on stage, but I've got a feeling that it just looks cruel in print. C'est la vie.

[Currently listening: Crucial Conflict]