among the nerdiest things I have ever said

"How could you wake me from such a good dream? Me and Sarah had just gone inside the comic book store."

In other news, I'm off to Florida for a week. If I don't make it back alive, inquire to Sarah about who gets what stuff

this is kinda sorta what I went to school for

THE MOBILE PHOTOBOOTH is an idea I've been kicking around for a while. Its purpose is to counter the fake glossiness and pretend realism of traditional portraiture and contemporary party photography. These pictures are completely retarded. The sets and setup are completely ghetto, and rarely make it through the night. Still, I think that the pics turned out well, if flawed. I think that either flickr or my monitor are fucking up the color cast but I'll work on that.

I've got a few more of these night's planned, and hopefully it'll keep up after that.

These pictures were taken at Sleaze, a benefit for the Chicago branch of the Sex Workers Outreach Project














































all pictures by eric lab rat - ericlabrat@gmail.com
see the whole set here
come out to Solid Gold New Years for another Mobile Photobooth Courtesy of



and








[currently watching ROBOCOP]

for the fans and friends of my pet rat

It seems to be a theme for 2007: I open up a blog post with an idea for a story that didn't work out. Perhaps it will change in 2008. I'll write and complete a great number of stories, and each one will have a shelved weblog serving as epigraph.

I was writing a story about ghosts again. I was writing the story of a punk, in the mold of the anarchist train jumpers that roll in and out of my life, who wear drab clothes and colorful tattoos and so much of my envy they practically glow with it. In the story he's all growned up, matured with business and PTA meetings to go to. He goes on with his life, and all throughout, the ghost of his old pet rat rides on his shoulder. It has elements of all the cheese we enjoyed together, meaning both the junk food and the late night television we chased it with. It has tints of Hook, the eternal-child-becoming-a-sellout-grownup-finding-his-eternal-child again, the schizophrenic codependency of Drop Dead Fred, the superpowered friend angle of Jesus and the man walking together through the sand, and hopefully something good and serious and artful to temper the ridiculous shittiness of all those other sources. It might never get made, but that's how I wanted to eulogize my friend.

Bukowski died last Thursday

I'm usually pretty cavalier about death
and I am here, too

I don't know if it's a strength or a weakness
My favorite aunt died recently, and so have a couple of people I used to smoke pot with

I know I should feel more for them, but I don't
They're gone. It sucks.
People go, and it's never the right time.
And it almost always sucks.

I feel the same way about Bukowski.

Maybe a little bit more.

This was the first time I ever lost a pet I cared about
It wasn't the first pet I've had die
I had a frog get cooked, a tarantula break his feeder legs
A runaway lizard
A suicidal hermit crab
And two cats that just weren't worth the money it would've taken to keep them alive

but I really gave a shit about Bukowski
I shared experiences with him
he went to gigs
he rode my bike with me, and we went to parties and barbecues together all summer

I came home from work and he was lying on his side
one of his eyes was open
it had been open for days

I don't know what happened but one day I came home and he was bleeding from his eye
the next day, I came home and it was scabbed over, black and stuck open

the last day he was on his side
wrapped around one of the ladders in his cage

There's really nothing shittier than having a pet die, and then having to untangle his atrophied limbs from the wiring of his cage. I guess there's a lot I can think of shittier than that, but nothing I've had to deal with in a while and nothing I'd witsh on anyone else. In the end, he didn't look like my friend anymore.

His lip rolled under to show his bottom teeth, at least an inch longer than I'd ever imagined, and black from the part where they met his lip down. He looked like any other dead rat on the street, and a little bit like that first dead girl in The Ring, the one you see for a just a second right when the closet door opens.

Still, it was a relief
It was a relief because he wasn't suffering anymore
As much as death doesn't seem to faze me, I really can't handle the suffering
Or the waiting

I lit Hanukkah candles with him last Tuesday
It was his first, because I think I missed the whole eight days last year
It was his last, and that goes without saying
I held him in a towel, because he stunk
I think he had taken to shitting himself, or maybe it was the black stuff coming from his eyes
I rubbed his head as I said the bruchas

I like ceremonies but there won't be any this time.

Bukowski's in an old shoebox on the porch. My mother wrote an epitaph on it, in the hopes that I would finally toss it out, and that's what I'm going to do.





[currently watching THE CAVEMAN'S VALENTINE]

god sends gay angels to chicago to work on my self esteem

and as a reward they get to fuck each other

I'm going ninety on the Florida Turnpike, when the tire blows. Maybe I was going faster; ninety was as high as the speedometer went. Either way, I was getting tailgated. Either way, when a tire blows at that speed, the car goes into a spin. In this case, it climbed the divider into oncoming traffic first, veered back, and then spun out into an 18-wheeler.

It doesn't matter where you start the story. It doesn't go anywhere and it keeps a steady beat, so wherever you drop the needle, it's okay.

So I'm gonna start with the phrase My Dad's got some mochaccino niggas after his shit

I don't know why it's gotta start like that, or with that phrasing. Maybe it's because I'm watching The Boondocks and maybe it's because of who I work with. DJs, hipsters, and art students for seven hours a day. A bunch of cats who've been fed steady doses of hip hop, irony, and post-ironic self consciousness since they were pre-natal.

The whitest black kids I know. The blackest white kids I know. Spraycan skateboarders in hoodies and day-glo technicolor. My boss is the most homophobic person I've met in years, and I mean that literally, in that he's scared of gay people, just like my girlfriend's Dad, but then spends all day listening to the gayest club and electro tracks I've ever heard. And I mean the word 'gay' here as literally as I meant 'homophobic' two sentences back. Culture Club remixes that make the originals sound butch and a lot of shit I can't even name. Apparently my girlfriend's Dad does this too, but it doesn't have anything to do with my Pop's car.

I go to the garage and see that the whole front end has what looks like a spilled latte crusted over it. This is the second time it's happened in a month, except the first time it looked a bit more like an Oreo smoothie.

It's been a good day, but not a great one. I'm not happy with the way I conducted my radio show, the pounds I've put back on since I got a job, or the new hairs that have sprung out on the side of my eyebrows, as if I'm not just destined for a unibrow, but a handlebar one at that.

I don't trust the car. It's making noises, like the metal is eroding underneath, and flying off the car. In retrospect I think I'd drifted over to the lane divider, and it was the sound of the car hiccuping over the little reflectors planted in the ground, but immediately I think it's the wheels. I always think it's the wheels. They don't have enough air. They've got too much air. They're punctured, they're old.

I pull my bowl out of my pocket, and place it underneath the smoking heap of metal. The cop who picks me up tells me that if I hadn't hit one of the wheels, the car would've gone underneath and I probably would've been decapitated. He makes an invisible line across his neck with his finger. Everything above here, would be gone right now. My fingers smell like resin. A song plays through my head.

There aren't 18-wheelers on Lake Shore Drive, in fact there's nothing on Lake Shore Drive but myself, the Honda Civic I'm riding in, and a beautiful classic car coming up on the side quick. I don't know how to describe cars but I can kind of narrow down what you might be imagining this car to look like. It's one of those classics from the fifties that's built like a boat. It's red, it has fins, and it's not a convertible. It isn't a show car. It looks like it was restored just so it could be run into the ground again.

The car slows. The driver says something. I open a window to hear what.

It's the tire. He's going to tell me I'm driving on a flat.

"You're really [high?]"

"No, I'm just t...wait what did you say?"

"I said that you're really hot. You're really sexy."

"Oh. Thank you." What else was there to say? "You have a good night."

"I will... now." He drives off to parts unknown, and I ride home on four apparently-fine tires. I diagnose myself with hypochondria and shut the door.

In Florida, I stand across the highway from my grandmother's new pile of wreckage. As I'm talking to the cop, a frantic woman pulls over; her mother's having a stroke. We're between cities, but I'm not sure what they're called. Ambulances race across both sides of the road but a helicopter beats then over and air lifts the girl out to safety. The story is interesting, but it has a distinct beginning, middle and end.

Which is to say that it has no place here.