"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]