---

More of a diary than anything else.

2009-06-30T03:03:00.000-07:00

I've been referring to the season as PUNK AS FUCK SUMMER 2K9 since before it got warm out. Maybe I'm wrong. It's still more uber-social than antisocial, and I can't remember the last time I went to a show with a guitar (but maybe guitars are more part of the structure that threatens to/already has killed the word/genre/lifestyle, as much as any of those things really can die)

It could just as well be called the summer of rugged cliches.
Bike rides, tattoos, drugs and malt liquors, late nights and train tracks, trespassing and cavorting with bums and harlots. Even a couple fights, but it's all been done before. I'm not upending the status quo or anything.

I'm still a work horse. I'm still working for the system. A couple of systems really.

But I'm in love, for what it's worth and for all the pain it causes me, and I'm pretty sure I'm enjoying life. Wow.

New pics from glitterguts.com

2008-09-03T00:45:00.000-07:00

August really kicked our asses. We somehow ended up doing four photobooths: an underground carnival, a house party, an art show and a fetish showcase. The last two were curated by Fred Burkhart and Gigi Deluxe, two larger-than-life personalities who loomed large over the events and the booths (I guess it also helps that Gigi was naked...who doesn't want to take pictures with a naked person?)

We have fifteen sets up now, and the site is really coming together. Check it out if you haven't, and get our asses out if you're doing something cool. Here are some of our favorite pictures from Out of the Box and Salon Des Independants

The next photobooth will be happening on September 12th at Spot 6 as part of SUPERLOVIN!

(you should come out)

[Currently listening to Pleasure Victim by Berlin]

last quarter 2k8 checklist

2008-08-22T00:49:00.000-07:00

cut down to 35 hours/four days a week retail, use extra time to :

IMMEDIATE
contact Peter Jones Gallery, Lucky Gator Loft, Heart of Gold Loft
re: Trancendental Fun Fest, Free Picture Day, Robot Battle

IMMEDIATE
finish setting up apartment
1. books
2. A/V
3. rip/sell old cds

incorporate mini recording studio into DJ set up so you can
1. start making solo mixes
2. start making mixes with Dan
3. pre-record radio show
4/ start doing interviews for podcast/pirate radio/vocalo

take one (1) class in
1. improv (annoyance theatre = 200/sess - birthday/hanukkah present?)
2. creative writing (???)
3. digital photogrtaphy (???)

take two (2) hours out of every day to
1. write
2. DJ
3. contact bars/book gigs
4. exercise
5. work on bigger project (glitterguts backdrops, work zine, Bump and Grindcore, figuring out tour, writing grants)
[do each one at least twice a week]

make a list of festivals, symposiums, conventions and events you would like to
(i.e. Looptopia, Burning Man, Portland Zine Fest, Comic Con)
spin or do a photobooth at in 2k9
mark them on a calendar
email them the first week of January

buy one zine a week
read one book a week
write one article a week
write one non-fiction blog a week
write one fiction blog a week
throw out an old tshirt for every new item of clothing bought

take more hallucinogens, polish third eye, become better acquainted with the Bagvad Gita and Pink Floyd

build on your relationship with Sarah so you're both in a comfortable enough place to have crazy group sex with the crazy group sex people you meet

more TBA

highlights from the full moon carnival photobooth

2008-08-20T00:50:00.000-07:00

and make sure to come visit us this Saturday when we visit the Salon Des Independants to do it all over again!

400 blogs?

2008-08-17T00:52:00.000-07:00

I can't believe this stupid website has been a part of my life for four years now, or that it was influential in the evolution of my writing, and has in fact fed all of my creative endeavors over that time. It's a bit sad that myspace is giving way to facebook, but if nothing is eternal, from art to architecture, why should an amorphous social networking website?

It's been a hard 24 hours. The party last night was full of highs and lows and I think some good people's feelings got hurt, all in the name of art and entertainment and charity and the way we're perceived in the minds of others.

I'm about to go to work.
Afterwards there's the full moon firespinning drum jam at Foster Beach,
Or the Japanese all-girl hardcore band Banjax closing out Clitfest 2008 at Juevos Ranchos
But it'll probably just be me and my sweetie, with hungover canoodling and takeout, cartoons and a hookah, maybe some opium and a lot of photos

it's been a weird four years, and I've been happy to share it with all you beautiful oddballs

400 blogs ago:

twothirtynine

It feels
i've wasted three hours now
looking for local fame and notoriety
through internet popularity contests
instead of writing and now
the tv ads are all pushing motorized wheelchairs
and the cartoons have gotten as serious as they'll get
preaching
environmental
messages
to kids who'll believe in them
until they're old enough to act for themselves and find themselves guilty
because out of the tooth fairy and St. Niklaus and Elmo and Jesus
and all the other bedtime stories
if the ninja turtles or the captain and his planeteers were real
they'd
be
judging me

for running the water the whole time i brush my teeth

maybe it's the news
maybe i'm tired
or lying
but it looks like the skin is trying to melt off john kerry's face

i'm not sure because
even though these walls are thin
I cannot see through them
to the television set
that blues
and strobes
on the other side

this picture blog may kill your computer

2008-08-12T00:53:00.000-07:00

I haven't seen "Pineapple Express" yet. I probably will, but it isn't presented by Marvel or DC or Dark Horse, so it isn't that pressing, really. For that matter, I haven't seen "The Incredible Hulk" either, but that's just me following in a lifelong tradition of ignoring the exploits of Bruce Banner, that included not giving a shit about the Ang Lee Hulk or the Lou Ferigno one. None of that's the point, really.

The point is that writer's block sucks, and I wanted to express it through a tangent.

"Pineapple Express" doesn't really look to compelling, but neither did "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" and that turned out to be one of my favorite movies this year. Lots of good character actors (see also: ugly people), surprising direction, and (a first for a Judd Apatow vehicle) female characters that were nearly as complex as their male counterparts.

There was a scene where the funny/blandish/shlub protagonist is talking to his famous actress/cuckold ex-girlfriend about her tv show being cancelled and she says:

"It's good really. I've been wanting to break into movies before I got stifled with my television persona and now I'll have a chance to do that" or something along those lines

His response is pretty much, "We used to live/love together so don't feed me that line".

I wish I had people to do that about my various lines.

An old writing teacher of mine walked into the store today and, even though I'm pretty good at having relaxed, casual conversations with people I only kinda know, or haven't seen in a while, it's always awkward when it's with a teacher, especially an art teacher.

I asked him if he was getting any good writing done, which is a shitty thing to do for any number of reasons... first, because if he's doing real well, I'll kind of hate him and then because if he isn't doing anything, he has to say so. And then either way he turns the question back on me.

Neither of us were really doing shit but he didn't qualify it, but when he asked me what I've been up to in the meantime, I fed him one of those lines that comes automatically:

"I've been spinning music a lot and taking pictures, and I pretty much figure I can only do two out of three arts at any given time."

I don't know if that's a dick thing to say, but it's a line and it comes too quick, even if it's true.

The idea I had last year for the Mobile Photo Booth has picked up steam and Sarah and I have really started to put out some really good work, that's getting better with each set (I think). I haven't put up some highlights in a while so I figured now might be a good time. As always, you can see the whole sets
at www.GlitterGuts.com

[[somnambulist]] until I can think of a better title [draft 1]

2008-08-01T10:07:00.000-07:00

The guy's got a big head, like some sort of ultracephalic retardation, or like he's got one head sewn on top of the other. I can even point out the spot where they were sewn together, there's a little scar, and a discoloration that looks like someone's smeared a Mexican flag across it. I can hear the helicopters overhead, already, like they were waiting for us. I look at her and I look at the cop and I take a step forward so it's me between them. The cops don't even make eye contact as they run around us to get to the action, the still popping sounds of fire consuming leather and bricks meeting glass and teeth, making sand out of windows and human putty out of heads.

"What've you done with your hair, Denny? You look like a fuckin' fag."

The badge says Frankel. I shouldn't be surprised that he knows me, but I have no clue. Instinctively I pat my hair, matted with sweat. I don't see the problem.

"I think I would like to speak to another officer."

"Yeah, that'd probably be better, Denny. Not just for you but for the both of us. Too bad it ain't gonna happen, so you might as well tell me just what the fuck is happening here and what you're doing in the middle of it."

"Alright. Sir. If you promise not to hurt me, I'll tell you what happened."

He doesn't want to make the promise.

"Look, I can tell you my side of the story, but I have to warn you, that I've been taking heavy doses of antipsychotics, and the story contains magic, and I'm not sure how much of it is real, so you might want to talk to somebody else."

He looked at me, skeptical.

"She's someone else."

"No, she's not."

He didn't want to make the promise and he didn't want to talk to someone else. He gestured with his gun. I tried to make a fist, but I was still clutching the pill bottle. 28 blue-and-green capsules left. Two a day. Two weeks down and two to go. Green for the manic; blue for the depression. Green is for the fields, and blue is for the sky, at least when they aren't both on fire.

"You see, Officer, it started with a tattoo."

I turn my foot over and over again. With every turn, I find another tattoo.

On the side, so tiny, quick, and indelicate, it looks like it could've been done in ballpoint. My Hebrew name, followed without breach by... my Hebrew name. In English, it would be "MichaelMichael", and it makes me think of those old Little Caesars commercials. Maybe that was the inspiration for the phrase "Chicago Pizza Buffet" written on my heel, transliterated, and written again, in Hebrew, on the other side of my heel.

Maybe I was excited to have a tattoo artist that could write Hebrew. Maybe it was what we were eating. On the bottom of my foot, there's a big, dripping crescent, like a moon made of cheese, like one of Dali's clocks. The Persistence of Memory with Extra Cheese and Everything on it but Fish, rendered in New School. In the blank space inside the crescent was a list, a handwritten list. B-Movies. Monster movies. Suspiria, Dagon, Eraserhead, Escape From Cryonic Island. It was all movies from Roan's shelf. Some nerds suggestion list. Some I've seen. Some I haven't.That was my right foot.

I don't know how I could've gone so long, two weeks with socks full of healing, itching, scabbing tattoos, without noticing. I was at my Mom's house when I did. I don't really understand my relationship with her, not yet, not totally, none of the dynamics that make us any different from any other Mother and Son but that's enough to know that her house was the worst possible places it could have happened.

She watched me when I took off my other shoe. I expected it to be blank. It wasn't. A bunch of little lightning bolts, bordered the sole. Another list on the ankle.

On the right side:

Every Food Group But These

orange
cherry
lime
grape

and on the left:

Is Missing

cranberry
orange
rasberry
blueberry

Every food group but these is missing. They're the flavors of Froot Loops and Crunch Berries. I was eating them that night, whoever I was, I mean whoever I used to be. Whoever it was must have been some kind of savant, because I only know a little about my own life, names and phone numbers for a few people, and what their business is with me, but for all that, for every time a memory gets jarred loose, my head is stuffed full of random information that flows out with little or no provocation.

Cereal for example. Cereal as we know it. Cold cereal. Breakfast cereal with all its saccharine anthropomorphs. Froot Loops and Crunch Berries. It all originated in a sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, towards the turn of the last century, to help inmates with bowel movements. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. And through. And out.

I unclench my fist to see that I've been holding my pill bottle. Blue for the tiles on the floor; green for the paint on the walls. Was I holding it because I just took my medicine, or was I just about to?

Whoever I was must have been pretty withdrawn. I've been pacing aimlessly through two weeks and nobody seems to have noticed. I've got a girlfriend, and I get deep down love feelings when we touch. It seems like I might be the girlfriend type. When she first kissed me, I was hoping I was hoping she would be the first of many, that I was some rogue Casanova that's as likely to get kissed or slapped on the street as a normal man is to just be ignored.

Maybe it's a good thing though. Maybe I'm the type of guy who deep down always feared that I was unlovable, destined to live and die alone, who happened onto this beautiful girl with white skin and glasses, who kisses me whenever we see each other even though I'm acting strange, or worse yet if I'm not acting strange, if I just stutter around all morbid and confused. I've come to the conclusion that I'm unemployed, which makes the memory loss a lot easier to deal with, but the whole ordeal a bit more depressing.

I could sense some worry in my mother, but I don't think it was anything more than a general sadness from seeing her son on the couch, marvelling at a bunch of idiotic tattoos he doesn't remember, someone who's been drugged and molested by goons, but just sits there, proud and grinning, because all he can do is be proud, and not think about it too much, or obsess over it until he can afford bath with lazers. It isn't concern for my loss of mind, or general state of being. She might not even realize.

She leaves the room with water behind her eyes. Amy walks in. She's an old friend, that comes by to watch my sisters, but I think she mightve been told to keep an eye on me.

"Tattoos?"

"Yep."

"Drunk?"

"Not sure."

"They're pretty ugly."

"Yeah, wanna see the real one?"

"Real one?"

"Yeah, there's one I meant to get, before I blacked out. Wanna see?"

I pull down the collar of my shirt, to show her the little red tricycle on my chest. By the way her eyes glitter, I can tell that she knows more about it than I do. Good. It means something.

I ride one. I know it. A grown man's tricycle. I have to, or I choose to. It's one of the clues that leads me to believe I might be a savant, some sort of savvy idiot. Savant. Savvy. Savvy. Savant. Grandchildren of the Latin sapere, separated, respectively, by France and Portugal.

God. I'm doing it again.

The girl on the couch kisses me on the cheek and whispers, "You're beautiful," into my ear. I think that's what she does, tells irredemptive motherfuckers that they're beautiful, and lightens the whole world, makes the sky seem more blue and everything else more red, saturates the whole world like taking off a pair of sunglasses.

I can go now. I kiss her cheek and leave. My feet take me to the bus stop. She's there. The girlfriend.

"You come here often?"

She takes it as a joke, smiles and kisses me. A guy says my name. If he wasn't looking at me, it would've sounded like any other. He's short and black with a big, wide grin with one dying tooth in the center.

"Waiting long?"

"Shit, the people who were here when I got here had already been here forever."

"It should be soon, then."

"Shit, not at this hour."

I was unaware of the hour. When I left, the sun was still high. Now it was the moon, hanging low in some southeast corner of the sky.

Seven people stood at the bus stop. I think I just knew the two. The bus stop was in front of the park, directly behind it was a field; close by was the playground, a tiny piece of shit, landlocked between an apartment building and a parking lot. Not that it mattered, the streetlights were out, but you could sense most of what you couldn't see. Everyone's had a hard day, or so it seems.

Nobody speaks, even my friends once we get our pleasantries out of the way.

A woman walks up, young, Hispanic, glasses, a bit of a fucked up gait to her walk. An older guy gets off his stoop to follow her. He's talking to her, and himself, about white bitches and motherfuckers and prison and money. She starts talking to me to avoid him.

"Did you see in the paper about the bunnies?"

"I saw something about them taking over this neighborhood or that neighborhood, but I didn't read it. S'at what you mean?"

"Yeah. I didn't read it either, but you know what? They are all over the fuckin' place. I bet we see two go by before the bus comes."

"Yeah, I think I remember talking to my boss about how they weren't hibernating in the winter anymore."

"Oh yeah. Weren't you saying she got all upset an went off on global warming?"

Yeah. She.

"Yeah. I think she did."

Our conversation was limited, and it got interrupted. What more was there to say about bunnies? I think I used to have a pet rabbit, but I didn't remember that until te guy found a comfortable place to insert himself in the silence. He was saying something about blood when Kika, that was the girls' name when he asked (his name was Caesar), she took the initiative.

"Holy shit, Guy. Lookit that. There's one right now!"

We looked, all of us, even the people who were just eavesdropping. There was a lump, I had to strain my eyes just to see it. It could have been a rock, or a rat, or a squirrel, or a rabbit. I was trying to focus when the lump moved and someone hit me. Not someone, but something, as big as a Buick but... Buick's don't have shoulders. It moved like a bear, with all four legs at once.
Kika chased it, slurring at it not to hurt the rabbit.

I don't think she got her wish. There was a sound, a wet crunch like the sound of a rabbit becoming something other than a rabbit, something more like food. It didn't seeem to matter though, by the time she got there, she was cooing. Ivan, that was the name of the guy who knew me and my girlfriend, grabbed me up off the ground and led me towards her, at the foot of the creature. Its legs were sturdy. Its head was down. She was petting it.

It was a slide.

A big woolly children's slide, with steps going down its back and a long neck spiralling down to a big dumb head, nuzzling Kika's hands with its tongue out.

I touched one of its legs. The fur was matted and dry, dredlocking in parts. I could feel the muscles contract. I walked underneath it and felt its belly, where the fur was softer, til it slid out from under my hand. There was a thud, then a scream, then screaming. The beast has fallen and I was looking at people. A small crowd had gathered, as if from nowhere. There were two new faces, and I recognized them both. Roan, from the house with the tattoos, and Bruno, a long-haired Latin kid from the neighborhood.

Then there was Caesar. A new friend, a new annoyance, a bus stop motherfucker who forced us into small talk.

I don't think anybody noticed it before I did. Plumes of smoke. A gun. A grin. A glint in his eyes. A brick. Bruno. Footsteps. Glass. A brick. Ivan. A sound like iron bending, and then a pickup truck on its side, Ivan behind it. I've seen him bust up cars before. I've seen him pick locks, hotwire engines. He likes cars as a tool, as a weapon, and as an emotional weapon when he can.

Sometimes things are just tense. Sometimes, when the gas valve stays open and the room gets filled up, all it takes is a spark, two stray electrons colliding in innerspace, to set the whole thing off. The Rodney King verdict. The Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. The Bulls' Three Peat. I think I remember that one.

The beast, the slide, doesn't breathe, doesn't bleed. Maybe it never did. I eat a pill, two to be sure. Blue for the color of gunsmoke, green for the color of grass in July. The reflex slows time. I breathe and taste fog. I see. Another truck is turning. I grab her and pull her back, and it crashes at her feet.

I've saved a life, I tug and we run. It's too late. The choppers are lower than I've ever seen them go before. I don't see them now, but the noise of the blades is deafaning, a nailgun at my temples.

Cops. Lots of em, except not all of them seem like cops. Some of em look like mutants and some of them look like vatos, in their big, dumb lowriders, and some of them look like cops, fat and red with anger, so which are you officer? A cop, or a goddamned mutant?

A blow to the head. The back of the head. The tightening of plastic zip cuffs being closed around my wrists.

"Don't take her."

I wake up in an alley. Hurting. Everywhere, at least all my joints and everywhere I'm bruised. Is this what the end of a bender feels like, or beginning of insanity. I don't remember before, so I check what I know. Pill bottle in my pocket. Tricycle on my chest. I fumble with my shoe and get off my sock. Dali pizza, the movie list. I check my wallet. It exists, and there's money inside.

Money. Cool.

All I've got to do is find out where I am. Then I can do something.

Twenty-six pills. Blue is for the empty cans of Pepsi in the dumpster. Green is for the mold growing on the food.

Am I That Transparent?

2008-07-29T00:54:00.000-07:00

From a yelp.com review of the store I work at:

The staff were all cool looking people with tattoos and piercings and probably fun for an evening of boozing followed by a potential one-night-stand. Not sure if anyone here actually liked their job though as the place seemed dead and hollow. So if you do pick up one of the staff, don't expect they'll be picking up any of your drinks.

That's right. I'm cool-looking and empty inside. Take me out, pick up the tab, and fuck the pain away.

Highlights from the DEMF photobooth

2008-05-27T00:55:00.000-07:00

Still not famous. Kinda full of self doubt watching my friends and peers climb further and further ahead of me while I've been having a slow couple of months. I just got back from Detroit where I was spinning at one of literally hundreds of afterparties for the Detroit Electronic Music Fest. It was the first time I've played outside of Chicago and I was so nervous, I couldn't plug my headphones into the mixer my hands were so shaky. It was a weird crowd, mostly consisting of sports fans there to watch the Red Wings win the Stanley Cup, and the Tigers trounce the Twins by something like 19-3. Almost everyone else was a DJ who's been at it a lot longer than me. At first I was trying to play to the crowd, and it was just awkward. Eventually I went back to my comfort zone, and rocked it, but it was still a bit bummy. Sarah said that parts of the set were brilliant and parts of it were terrible. I asked my friend Qbot if she'd ever had a night that felt like half of it was her best ever and half of it was her worst. She said that, no, if parts of it are terrible, then it's a terrible set, and I tend to agree.

Sarah and I brought the GlitterGuts equipment with us to Detroit just in case there was an opportunity to do a shoot somewhere. We hauled it around to every gig and every party, but nothing felt right until Sunday when we ended up at a place called City Club. I didn't realize at the time that this was a real venue and not something underground, but apparently (and despite the generic name), it's a long running nightclub and a staple of Detroit's industrial scene. The place was like a cross between Neo and every weird loft party I went to in the early aughts (Charybdis, Buddy, Transamoeba...any of them) with it's grumpy old regulars looking for tail, Burning Man hippie ravers, always-on circus performers, and nerdo tough guys who looked like they'd rather be LARPing with broadswords in a field somewhere. As we climbed the steps, my partner in crime DJ Demchuk said under his breath, "Just keep walking, no matter what they say." Our sneak worked, but Sarah (my partner in everything else) was off her game that night and got stuck behind the velvet rope, where a phalanx of security guards were trying to bleed thirty bucks out of her. She wasn't going to budge, and our predicament forced me to do what I'd been wanting to do anyways. I started grabbing official looking people and telling them I had talked to someone about doing a photobooth there. Each time I got bounced to someone higher up on the food chain, until someone just told me it was cool. By this point Sarah just said fuck it and went back to the motel, but I wasn't going to leave so I figured I might as well go through with it.

Eric doing a photobooth in Detroit? The complete opposite of Eric as a DJ in Detroit. I was smooth as shit, confident, making friends and getting hit on. It isn't our best work overall. We only had it set up for a little while before the vibe of the place started to get a little weird (in a good on the dance floor, and full of tension for a half block radius in any direction from it), and we were limited to a one-light setup because of space. Still, I think we got some tight shots of some new beautiful, weird fuckers, and my only real regret is that I didn't stick around long enough to gain the trust of the heavy duty ravers and candy kids, who were decked out like it was Party Monster and the most colorful parts of the nineties.

All know is that this

is the most beautiful couple I've ever goddamn seen

and this

is the most awesome

and I can't get enough of either of them

for the full set and more,
visit the ever-evolving
WWW.GLITTERGUTS.COM

two years ago

2008-05-19T00:57:00.000-07:00

I threw a party, had a gun pulled on me, and bought a flickr account!

I'm surprised at what pictures I took, and how unrepresentative they were of the night as a whole. Two years seems like a million years ago, and I'm more than a little bit shocked at how many of the beautiful, idiot kids from that night got fat or had kids of their own in the short amount of time since.

Matt Taibbi is no Hunter Thompson...

2008-05-07T09:28:00.000-07:00

but he's damn good sometimes:

"After all these years in public life, the only time Hillary Clinton sheds a tear is when her own political career is on the line? I didn't notice her crying when kids started coming home from Fallujah in rubber bags because of a war she voted."

I hate politics. I've got to throw my vote to Obama, even though he hasn't done shit good for Illinois and he's a huge, boring centrist, just because I hate him less than I hate everybody else, save for Dennis Kucinich (who nobody'll give a chance to) and Mike Huckabee (who I really like as a media personality, but don't jibe with politically at all). I was telling my friend Charlie, that I can at least take solace in the fact that, if elected, Obama, as a black man, would piss an awful lot of people off.

Charlie put things in perspective though, as he often does:

"Sure the racists will be pissed, but that's nothing compared to what we'd see with a President Hillary: Republicans would be disemboling themselves in the streets, there'll be a conservative hanging from every lamppoast."

I can't do it though. I can't vote for another Clinton. All I know about her is that she's pro-war, pro-censorship, and that there's a good chance that she isn't either one, but she'll vote that way to ingratiate herself with Republican moderates.

Sigh. Only eleven more months and I don't have to hear about it anymore.

[Currently reading The Savage Dragon Archives]

a new candidate for the worst dream ever

2008-05-05T01:00:00.000-07:00

I always thought that the worst dream anyone could ever have was the one where they just went to work, had an uneventful day, woke up and had to do the whole damn thing over ago. Then, about a year ago, I had a new, even more pathetic dream pop up to remind me just how mundane and routine life gets sometime. In that dream, I logged onto myspace and started denying friend requests and flagging spam. Just like the work dream, I had to wake up and do it all over again.

The other day, I had a dream top that. Sarah got up to go to work and in a semi-coherent morning haze I kissed her, said good bye, and fell back asleep. What wonders were waiting for me in this new dream world that I was entering, a place that is governed by neither time or space, nor the conventional laws of physics, where the possibilities are limitless and literally anything can happen?

In my dream I woke up, on our bed, pulled her laptop onto my chest, and searched her computer for porn to jerk off to...and didn't find any.

That shit is inexcusable.

Dream-Me put way to much thought into his search when, if our dream apartment is anything like our real apartment, I could have just gone into the other room and gotten my laptop and where I knew there would be porn, or gone onto the internet where I could easily have found porn, and worse yet, my brain could have given me anything, the goth girl in the vintage dresses who works across the street at the sex shop, grade school girls I've recently reconnected to through Facebook, Thora Birch, an nude army of Thora Birches and Diablo Codies, a world of tits and pussy the likes of which I would never experience in the waking world, and you know what my brain channeled all of it's unbridled creative energy into?

Thumbnails. A search page full of thumbnails for non-pornographic .mpeg files that do not even exist in the real world. Boo.

Highlights from the Looptopia photobooth

2008-05-05T00:59:00.000-07:00

Last Friday glitterguts was asked to set up a photobooth for the MF Chicago/Red Eye party at Looptopia. All of the elements of extreme awesome were there: a good setting, great DJs and VJs. The party was going down in the retardedly opulent Palmer House Hotel. The place was built by Holabird and Roche and at one time was the largest hotel in the world, with just about every room in the place named after one of Potter Palmer's friends, each and every one of them, someone who was instrumental in building this city after the Chicago fire. Maybe that's why the security was so obnoxious, and the whole thing a little less fun than it could have been. The place was fancy, and the organizers were all closeted old ravers who would've happily pounced on the fancy bar at Potter's Place bar if I spread out a dash of ketamine.

There was an RSVP list that was closed early, even though the fierce storms that raged on and off all day should have nullified it, in that the type of people who are responsible enough to RSVP to an event early, are the type of people who are likely to say fuck it when the weather gets hairy. And then there was something about wristbands, which I still don't understand. So they set up a velvet rope, and were real dicks about letting people through it.

It was weird to be on the other side of that rope, and we were right on the other side of it. As part of the glitterguts project, I want to get as many portraits of as many beautiful weirdos as possible, and this fancy ass hotel was full of weirdos, from what seemed like a lounge karaoke party for cast members of Wicked, to the wedding party for what looked like a Hispanic biker gang, to the Underground Art School, another Looptopia party with similarly tight-assed security, thrown by slightly less closeted raver hippies.

Still, we got a lot of good shots of a lot of beautiful weirdos. Props to MF Chicago and the Chicago Tribune for making it happen. You can check out the full set, along with all of our previous sets at the ever-evolving glitterguts.com.

Stay tuned for more in the future from glitterguts.com. If you'd like us to rock a photobooth somewhere (anywhere) or if you'd like to collaborate, drop me a line wherever you find me... because everyone loves our glitterguts

Chicago Piece 9,878,657,523

2008-04-14T09:17:00.000-07:00

[My good friend Alana is leaving. It's a loss for me, and for the city as a whole, but now's her time to go. She asked me to contribute something to her goodbye zine, answering the question of what I would miss most about Chicago if I left. I'm not sure how I feel about the piece I wrote. It feels like a rehash and rearrangement of things I've said before, but I'm happy I was able to write something, which wasn't vert easy to do these past few months]

Asking what I would miss most about Chicago is like asking an amputee what he misses most about his foot. On some days it might be the change in gait or balance, on others a lack of tactile sensation, a feeling of asymmetry or unwholeness. There is no one thing I would miss most about Chicago, because I have never been more than a couple months without it. I am more Chicago than I am any other thing. I am more Chicago than Jew, or boy, or 5'8, or 25 years old, or DJ photographer poet asshole. I am more Chicago than I am Eric lab Rat or Eric M Strom. I am more Chicago than Chicagoan.

It is the reason I am mystified by hills and stars (both the celestial kind twinkling above cities as foreign and exotic as Luxor and... Peoria, and the kind that glow on the back pages of the tabloid rags that litter the subway). It is the reason I like house music and the blues. It is the reason I don't cry over spilt milk, whitewashed grafitti, and the notion that everything is impermanent, from art meant to be appreciated through the ages to skyskraper castles built to outlast anything the centuries have to throw at them.

It is a city that never changes and is ever changing. I could namedrop the grid and the fact that it keeps me from needing to develop any real sense of direction. The fact that if I travel down any one street from end to end, I will have a story to tell, two stories even: one from the trip and some other forgotten tale, jarred free from the morass of my memory by the sight of an old locale; and then there is the fact that somewhere along the trip, I will end up in one neighborhood that is completely alien to me, and one that looks exactly the way I remember Chicago looking, growing up in the 80s. And I'll truly miss all those opportunities to talk and talk and talk telling stories about my Chicago and me.

I try to stay true to a single guiding philosophy, that I cribbed from some book I read years ago. I have no idea what the book was, and I've paraphrased it for so long that I don't even know if it makes sense the way I say it: The greatest fallacy of man, is that he assumes cause and effect, and the laws of physics, that an object at rest will remain at rest unless provoked. Just because something has always been, does not mean that it will always be.

And I think that...

There will always be one more new John Kearney animal sculpture to discover. That Sharkula will always be on the street somewhere hawking demo tapes. That Bubbleland and Dulcelandia will always be colorful respites from the cold grey city, whether or not I give them any of my money. That the Disciples run this town and the Kings just live in it. That a Daley will always have a get out of jail card and a free ride to boot. That those odd diagonal streets, Chicago's first streets built over lay lines and Iroquois trails, will always be rich with weirdness. That my parents will always have their home in East Rogers, and Indian Boundary Park will always be Chicago's most perfect place: a fountain, a lagoon, and a wooden village that will all age gracefully and not go the way of its petting zoo or its tall, iron slide.

But just blocks from my namesake Maxwell street, razed eons ago by thugs and businessmen, I can order a hot dog and have it served to me with ketchup, and if a thing like that can happen in the City by the Lake, then truly nothing is sacred, and there is no such thing as forever.

Highlights from the Art Fiend photobooth

2008-04-14T01:01:00.000-07:00

After exhausting our cameras, our memory cards and ourselves shooting a couple massive parties at the Private I loft, it was good to have a nice, mellow compact shoot for once. Our latest set was taken at Art Fiend, a group art show that for the last few months has been featured as a part of the gallery crawl Pilsen hosts the second Friday of every month. This was the show's last event at Ungallery before the lease runs out and Art Fiend becomes a travelling show.

We weren't sure if it would work. This was our first attempt at doing the mobile photobooth at an event that wasn't a party. Even though the neighborhood was pretty well-fortified with booze, we weren't sure how much stuffier (or perhaps how much less frivolous) these art patrons would be. On top of that, the sky was hammering us with freezing rain and snow flurries, and the gallery was on the fifth floor of a five-floor warehouse space whose elevator had broken that morning. This was also the first time that Sarah and I split camera duties fifty/fifty, so all things considered, our modest success was an even greater moral victory.

By the by, the mobile photobooth has a home!

Visit our new domain glitterguts.com! It's not entirely finished but you can see the rest of this set in its entirety and kinda catch a glimpse of where we're going with the site.

Stay tuned for more from glitterguts.com and the mobile photo booth!

Highlights from the Sugar-Free Kool Aid Photobooth

2008-04-06T09:18:00.000-07:00

Last week, Sam and Greg from Big Splashes and the good people from the Private I loft threw Sugar Free Kool Aid, a massive party featuring 8 bands and 5 DJs (most of whom were able to perform before the pigs shut it down). It may have been booked a little tight, but it was done so impeccably and turned out to be one of the better jams of the seasons. Fights were quelled without much incident or hubub, the beer never ran out, and, even though it never progressed into a full on dance party, a few hundred people were able to get their juke on here and there throughout the night.

Sarah and I were able to bring our GLITTERGUTS photobooth to the occasion, and come out with one of our biggest photosets ever. I think we’ve got some of our best shots, but it looks like there’s a tint I don’t really like, probably because we did all the editing on a laptop, instead of a proper screen. Live and learn, I’m probably going to re-edit them, and repost them when the site comes up later this month.

The full set can be seen here

The GLITTERGUTS photobooth will be appearing next at Art Fiend as part of the Pilsen Gallery Crawl on Friday, April 11. Art Fiend will take place at UnGallery (1932 S. Halsted, 5th fl., RM 505). Come out. Say hi. Drink beer. Take pictures.

Keep us in mind for all of your photobooth needs. Suckerts.

and don’t forget......

known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns

2008-03-25T09:20:00.000-07:00

I know that I saw a fox yesterday, a literal fox traipsing through the snow covered grounds of Loyola University. I’ve never seen one in the city before but I know I saw that one. I don’t know if I remember my crayon colors correctly, but I’m pretty sure that it’s fur could be described as burnt ochre.

I don’t know what it means that I dreamt about finding a tiny rooster in my bed, only to have it attack me, except that it probably has something to do with my penis.

I know that the stretch of Western Avenue that smelled like the weed I smoked in high school, did so because a skunk had sprayed there. It’s been a couple years since I’ve seen a skunk in the city, but I know they exist.

Further down the street, an antiwar banner hangs from a set of dead and overgrown train tracks. I don’t know who placed it there, or how they got up there, but it doesn’t matter. After just a couple of days it’s tattered and mostly illegible and soon it will be gone. I don’t know what my friend Ephran expected to happen when he doused himself with fake blood at Holy Name Cathedral’s Easter Mass to protest the war ain Iraq, but I’m glad he did it. It was an idiotic act, that was done in a way that would guarantee a backlash, but by being crude and shocking and tailor-made for soundbites and streaming video, it brought out the fact that there was an antiwar movement more than the last four years of peaceful protests.

The Catholics deserve to get a little bit of bullshit now and then. For a people renowned for their ingrained feelings of guilt, I don’t see much of a crisis of faith around election time, where abortion policies gay panic trump the issue of the thousands of American, Iraqi, and Afghani lives being lost in our wars in the middle East.

I don’t know if I have the right to write about people, at least on the scale that I do, because it’s friends and family and neighbors that get caught up in waves of cynicism. I’m hitting too close to home, too close to my home. I just wish there was someone else to write about that isn’t me. Celebrities don’t really do anything for me and when I try to get political, I come up with the same generic, uneducated talking points as the rest of the left side of the internet. It’s just easy. There are always a couple politicians I can hate on and still be kosher. There’s always George and Jeb Bush, Scalia and Scalito, and Hillary Clinton.

If you haven’t been paying attention to the news, you might have missed it.

On multiple occasions, Hillary Clinton has told a vivid story of arriving in Bosnia twelve years ago, rushing across the tarmac ducked under sniper fire. Then, when a video surfaced, of her arriving in Bosnia, calm, smiling and greeting children, she said that her entire story was a "misstatement". I do the same thing, I backpedal, I retract. The only difference is, it’s my feelings that I’m taking back or holding back on, not the facts.

There’s a list of odd factoids and notable quotables on one of the ad sheets above the urinals at Black Beetle. One of them says "If you always tell the truth, you never have to remember anything" and every day it looks like a better policy.

There are few thingsI can confidently say I won’t regret (as I regret just about everything I say, once I look back on them), so I’ll just say the ome:

What Hillary Clinton said was a bold-faced lie, a calculated one, and by no means her first. By referring to it as a "misstep" she insulted everyone left willing to listen, a list of people that I hope doesn’t include you.

[Currently listening to Jay Reatard]

Highlights from the Bash Back Photobooth

2008-03-17T09:21:00.000-07:00

the Bash Back Bash was something I wanted to happen for a while, a punk show that blended into a dance party. Maybe blend isn’t the right word, but it did start out as one with the queercore band Bromance and end as the other, with dance sets by DJ Demchuk and Marat 14k. Inbetween, the Cabaret of the Nameless provided the weirdest burlesque I’ve ever seen, starting with three robed monks rubbing ash crosses on the audience’s face to the tune of "Ave Maria", removing their robes to show off vintage 60’s cocktail dresses, which were quickly shed in a nude gogo dance number to coincide with a Thai cover of Nancy Sinatra’s "These Boots Are Made for Walking" that ended in them pulling out a coffin, opening it up to reveal a dead Jesus Christ inside, reviving him with a bottle of whiskey, filling the room with balloons, and then leading the crowd in a conga line to the tune of that song from the end of Beetlejuice. For each section of the night, which also included routines from Chicago’s own radical cheerleaders and anarchist backpacker Eric Antifa’s (whose brief hip hop set was surprisingly dancey), the dynamics of the crowd changed, and shiny hipsters filed in to take the place of crusty travellers filing out. Still there was enough crossover to make it a truly special night, and we were happy to be a part of it.

..

The whole set can be found here and our website, tentatively named GLITTER GUTS, is coming soon

[currently listening to The Best of Billy Stewart]

What's A Day Off Mean to You, Eric lab Rat?

2008-02-26T09:23:00.000-08:00

Pajamas all day, bitches!

No slush in my socks; no salt on my kicks.

I'm drinking three brands of noxious, diet soda, smoking a hookah, doing my taxes and trying to revive my music blog. I'm listening to prog rock and dark cabaret all day and I might watch the Mummy on a treadmill.

Also, I have a show later. What's a day off again?

[currently listening to Lene Lovich]

Highlights from the Lake Forest photobooth

2008-02-04T09:26:00.000-08:00

Before she joined on, Sarah thought that my photobooth idea was the dumbest thing ever, but now everyone is doing it. They all suck, except for Sean, who is a nice enough guy that I can admit he does good work. Sarah still thinks it's dumb, but also sees how happy people are doing it, which isn't just rare for art or work but any personal endeavor. We're like the opposite of the paparazzi. We're building a website, but we can't seem to figure out a name. Here are some of the rejects

-The Mobile Photo Booth - all domains taken
-EveryoneIsScummy - not original enough; parody of everyoneisfamous.com
-Last Night's Noise Show - ditto, parody of lastnightsparty.com
-Bitches Be Posin' - maybe perhaps not everyone wants to be called a bitch
-SHUTTERBUTT! - totally cute and apropos, but some douche used up shutterbutt.com
-Positive Land - according to google, Negativland- who we were trying to honor with the title- occasionally uses the moniker for secret shows... also it sounds kind of AIDS-y. I still like it though.
-The Enabler - meh
-Resident Amateur - I haven't run this one by Sarah, but, yeah, meh

Coming up with names blows. If you have any ideas drop them in the suggestion box.

Anyways, this girl Ceci saw our I Love Gold photobooth from New Years and contacted us about working at a party at Lake Forest College. We didn't realize it at the time, but it was actually at the college, like in a common area-- but it was better than any of that actually sounds like it would be. It was a bump-and-grind dance party to benefit the One campaign that made all the school cops kinda anxious and probably got a couple people laid. So guess what? We get people laid and we save lives.Stupid or not, we're fucking awesome.

The complete set can be found here

and the next photobooth is happening this Friday at Liar's Club

In other news, I'm in one of those moods where I feel really stupid. I'm trying to kickstart my brain reading Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" but b movies and retail are probably keeping me stupid. Yesterday I saw "Kinky Kong", a skinemax monster movie spoof that was maybe the best piece of softcore I've ever seen. A guy in a monkey suit and so many terribly, terribly tattooed fake tits rubbing up against one another. The Breed on the other hand was amazing. Read and heed these words: dystopian vampire buddy cop noir + Bokeem Woodbine + holocaust flashbacks.

Life is good sometimes.

[Currently watching The Breed]

I’m calling for an emergency sleepover

2008-01-14T09:32:00.000-08:00

It has to happen some time in the next week.

The Rocketeer, Hackers, and Stargate are all free on OnDemand at my parents' house

jam jmms
cuddle puddles
sundaes
and hookah smoke

lets make it happen

Highlights from the I Love GOLD Photobooth

2008-01-14T09:30:00.000-08:00

see the whole set on flickr

and stay tuned for the next couple photobooths coming soon to wherever weirdos congregate, including...

and

[CURRENTLY WATCHING THE ROCKETEER]

among the nerdiest things I have ever said

2007-12-24T09:34:00.000-08:00

"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

2007-12-17T09:36:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-10T09:37:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-03T09:39:00.000-08:00

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.

what I’m making when I’m not making words, noise, trouble or love

2007-11-26T09:41:00.000-08:00

An idea I've been bouncing around has finally come to fruition. THE MOBILE PHOTOBOOTH is meant to counter the fake glossiness and pretend realism oftraditional portraiture and contemporary party photography. These pictures are completely fake. The sets and setup are completely ghetto, and our beautiful cardboard backdrop did not make it through it's first night. Still, I think that the pics turned out well, if flawed.

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

Heavy duty thanks go out to Alanna, Noah and Sarah.

all pictures by eric lab rat - ericlabrat@gmail.com
taken at the mobile photo booth at All City Night on 11/20/07 at Reggie's

where the makeup looks particularly exceptional, it was probably applied by Marissa Christina - marissa.christina@gmail.com

check out the pics and scroll down for info on the next all city night
featuring the mobile photo booth PICTURES WITH SANTA EDITION

the whole set can be found here
and the next All City Night will take place on December 11th. RSVP!

[currently listening to Boyz Noize]

a play in no parts. less, even, than a play on words

2007-11-17T09:44:00.000-08:00

Characters:

Guy De Guy - He looks like Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips, but with a paunch that comes from years of not living the knife-hard life of a touring musician, or perhaps Billy Connoly but less puffy, healthy from not having lived the life of a Scot either. Perhaps he is one of those extremely lucky men in his fifties who can pass for a man in his forties, or even the hippest sixtysomething we have collectively encountered.

Girlie Girl: She is his trophy girl, not a bimbo trophy girl, but a trophy art-girl younger-woman, marriage material girl. The type of girl Guy De Guy can spend the rest of his life with, who's just happens to be twenty years his junior and plenty hot. Big tits wrapped in a Judas Priest t-shirt, Semetic nose and baggy eyes painted dark like a sleepy Cleopatra. The placement of her nosering tells you everything about her that she doesn't offer up voluntarily: she paints, she does yoga, she was born under a water sign while Jupiter had its back turned.

Our Hero/Narrator: A DJ, watching from the other side of the bar. Both paunchy and puffy, but decently dressed, and well groomed. In good shape for an American in general, and downright desirable for a native Chicagoan. Plays the part of a savant. Selectively deaf and mute, he is only allowed to speak when he is adressed himself, or when the conversation is justifiably loud.

Anecdote:

She requests a bevy of songs, by Radiohead, Death Cab for Cutie, Arcade Fire, Roy Buchanan, Monster Magnet, and War. Our hero is happy to oblige when possible, because it means he doesn't have to use his brain. Guy de Guy requests the same song he always requests: The Jimi Hendrix Experience. "Hey Joe".

He tries to explain to her how truly awe-some Jimi's guitar was, like he always does. She rolls her eyes, and he reiterates how beautiful she is. He lunges at her without releasing his cocktail.

He keeps his arm raised as he buries his face in her chest, a toast that this is truly the good life we're all living.

Our hero is running on auto-pilot, Dextromethorphaned and antibioticked out of his head, cotton mouthed, sober and bitter about it. The Cars' "Just What I Needed" plays.

Girlie Girl: I saw them one time, and I was totally making out with one of them after the show and then we went back to the studio to fool around. Not Ric Ocasek, but one of the other ones, the guitarist I think.

A silent poll of the room and a number of cell phones reveals that no one actually knows who was in The Cars. Not google, not Wikipedia, and not the DJ

They're surprised to see their bill come out to seventy-some dollars, but they still tip the room, the bartender, the grateful, fevered DJ. The bartender gives them a coupon for a free appetizer. "Sweet Jane", by the Velvet Underground plays.

"Lou Reed is such an asshole."

"You would know, honey."

The DJ cocks an eyebrow.

"She's Jewish."

"Oh I guess it makes sense I guess."

There is a gleam in her eyes that says that she wants to talk about fucking Lou Reed, just so she can say how bad Lou Reed is at fucking, which while entirely true, is just a device that enables her to talk about fucking Lou Reed without being some starfucker, but apparently there is an agreement between her and Guy de Guy, where she can only talk about one rock star a night. It's almost not fair. Does one of the mystery members of The Cars even count?

Lou Reed hasn't had to work for pussy since Nico, so there's no real reason he should be any good with it once he's got it. The fact that he's a lousy lay, less kinky in fact than his own songs, is overlooked. It's the fact that he doesn't have to work for it, or didn't, that sticks in Guy de Guy's craw. Outwards, he's dopey and drunk, gropey and grateful, but it shows in his eyes. He is wrapped around her as they leave, and the night begins the slow and painful process of giving birth to morning.

[currently watching KAMIKAZE GIRLS]

Norman Mailer’s dead

2007-11-12T09:45:00.000-08:00

Finally

there is enough misogyny

left

for the rest of us

(bitches)

[currently listening to Tom Waits]

chicken scratch fever

2007-11-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

So I'm trying to write a story. I guess I'm back in that mode where I wanna write fairytale stories in modern settings. The story I started writing yesterday was about a dragon setting fire to a bistro. Today's story has some sort of gun toting, frozen tundra wandering drifter hitting on a waffle waitress, but I'm totally BLOCKED.

Worse yet, I'm missing my own writing workshop this Sunday, because I have a show. This show:

I'm spamming the whole internet with it. It's gonna be awesome, but I fear it will
also be unattended.

I feel like I should write something but all I feel smart enough to talk about is Bukowski. For fairweather fans and the uninitiated, when I talk about Bukowski, I'm talking about my pet rat.

Charles Bukowski, the writer. Henry Chinanski, he'd be calling me a pussy right now for saying things like "I just haven't been able to write since I started my new job."

There's a quote somewhere, that I carry around paraphrased in my head, where he berates some wannabe who says he doesn't have the time:

"Real writers always have the time, even if they don't have the paper. They write on scraps in their pockets, napkins, check stubs, and receipts. They write in charcoal and blood. They write in ketchup, they carve the words into themselves if they have to."

Bukowski, the rat... he doesn't judge. When he doesn't want me petting him, he climbs onto the keyboard and says things like

o p;< ;

I've gotta watch out for that kind of saccharine. I've got to avoid it, before turning into some kind of despicable pet blogger. Still, the rat is comforting. The only thing softer than his fur is the skin where he's mangy. That's how I know I've got it bad, the extent that I treasure his unique ugliness.

He's no muse, but he does inspire me to write the occasional piece, even if it is just some joke movie review. The last movie we saw together was that David Duchovy flick Kalifornia. The film would have been better if it had the twist ending I was suspecting it would have, but it was pretty straight-forward. The killer was the killer, and did not get away with it in the end, even though it was Brad Pitt. Juliette Lewis played the abused country retard girl in love with him. There are a few Red Shoe Diaries shots of Mulder's butt as he goes to town on his girl and when it was over, I still had no idea why the title was spelled the way it was.

In what may have been the boringest interview I've ever listened through, Terry Gross interviewed a back specialist on Fresh Air the other day. He was talking about surprising new research that showed that spinal chord injuries, the ones that can heal will heal in most cases without medical treatment. He was talking about how he has to tell patients to get out and run after a certain point, because even though it will hurt more, it will heal quicker. In the interest of healing quicker, I'm going to keep writing through this block. Feel free to turn the page, sign out, move on, and do what you have to do if you're reading this. Because the treatment is only supposed to hurt me, so you might want to cut out if you're feeling the burn.

As I sip what very well might be my sixth soda today, a fitting story might be the time I passed a kidney stone on a road trip, but the sentiment passes alot easier than the stone did. It's a great story to hear, but on paper not so much..........

If I can put the right kinds of voices into my head, I can work through it. My brain wants Tori Amos. My brain wants Kimya Dawson. My brain wants Josephine Foster, Josephine Baker, Roger Waters, Maynard James Keenan, Meret Becker, Marnie Stern, and Diamanda Galas. I'm surprised not to skip through a Skunk Anansie song when it comes up. Paul Simon is completely wrong but the guitar makes up for it.The story starts in progress, the man sits and we don't quite know what she thinks about him, his food has not been brought to him yet.

"I dreamt about you again last night."

"Don't tell me that."

"Why not?"

"It's creepy."

"You don't even have to come over here, you know? I order the same thing every goddamn day."

"You might want something different."

"I can promise you it ain't really me if I ever do. Ways I see it, if you're coming over here after all this time, it's because you fancy my company, or at least you know what to expect from me and you don't mind."

"You're sitting on my side."

"You could still send Sadie."

"Not to my worst enemies."

"It'll be great, I'll tip her like shit."

"You tip me like shit."

"Yeah, but with you it ain't malicious."

"Coffee black?"

"Yes please."

"Danish?"

"Certainly."

"So what's your dream?"

"You were my second grade teacher. We had to keep our love secret. "

"Jesus, I would hope so."

"Not for that. My grandmother was your boss. Everyone knew though. We pretended we didn't know, but everyone was jealous."

"Whaddya think it means?"

"Outside that I'm a luckier man asleep than I am awake? Lotsa things, lotsa little brain things that make sense to me, but I'd rather not go into them. You're much prettier than my second grade teacher was."

"That's good to hear."

And with that she leaves. Pivots on her heel and takes her sweet time getting my danish from some part of the restaurant I've never seen. Normally I don't have a thing for girls in yellow aprons, but Jessamine's special. She's tall, with curly red hair and a nice thick ass, and she knows how to make coffee the way I want it. I don't know how she feels about me.

The money's on the table before I finish. The to-go bag arrives before I ask for it.

"Big spender as usual?"

"Hey, if I were to start giving you what you deserve, you might just go and retire, and its certainly in my best interests to have you nearby where I can look at you every once in a while."

"Well shit, Honey. You give me enough money where I can retire and you can look at me all the time, in the pictures... that I send you from Hawaii."

"Nah, you'll send one picture and then forget about me."

These other schmoes, maybe, but you? Never. Besides, you'll be able to see a whole helluva lot moe of me in one of those golden beach bikinis I'll be wearing than this ugly thing."

"Yeah, but it's not the same."

"I know. Well shit, lemme give you a kiss, just in case this is the time that you don't make it."

Her lips touch my cheek and shivers jolt through my body. She guides me towards the door with her hand on my back.

"Now get outta hear you dirtymotherfucker. People are trying to order food and they need me for that/"

A fresh layer of snow covers the row of trucks outside. Their inhabitants are all eating, or sleeping, washing up in the bathroom. I pass them by, and cross the empty freeway. It's amazing how quickly civilization gets lost behind the wind drifts out on the tundra. I luck out and find some tracks before they're completely covered. I pat myself down to make sue I've got what I need: rope, knives. a side arm, a shotgun. Everything I need. It's time for the hunt to begin.

[currently listening to TORI AMOS]

a morbid blast from the past

2007-09-30T09:49:00.000-07:00

I just opened a bag I haven't looked in since 2004.

Contents:

a blood caked razor blade
and a small stack of Dennis Kucinich bumper stickers

it's really the job that's getting to me. not the day job, but the fun one. I feel inadequate, and I don't get to enjoy the one gig that pays me. there's a new boss, a partner who's been away tying up loose ends, who wants to "fix" everything that isn't wrong with the bar. he wants me to play acid jazz when all anyone wants to hear is AC/DC, Peter Bjorn and John, New Order, and Kanye. Who wants to hear acid jazz at some random bar on a Saturday night? Who wants to hear Royal Crown Revue? Who wants to hear Toto? Okay, I guess a lot of people want to hear Toto but I'm still going to hold it against him that he requested two songs by those fuckers (TWO!) before telling me how anybody could play 80s music and get the crowd going, but that that's not what he wanted for his bar. This was on a night when I had to go from Conway Twitty to the Descendants to keep everyone happy. It's not as fucking easy as it looks.

this is the type of guy who wears a big, jangly watch, and when I ask him the time, reaches for a cell phone.

it's not just that though. I'm living with my parents again. they have nice things and I don't want to become accustomed to them. My Mom used to be the one who annoyed me, or who I would piss off, but it's my Dad now and that's weird. We've always had a good repoire and I feel like more of a fuck up for pissing him off than I do for moving back in. He's disappointed. He's giving up on me. I can feel it/

I've got a new job, but I don't trust that I'll be able to keep it. It was so hard getting hired everywhere else and I tried so hard, that I'm worried that these guys will fire me no matter how well I do. I like it, but I haven't had time to write or practice spinning, and I don't know if this is what I should be doing.

I'm 25 and homeless and living better than I have in years. I'm 25 and regressing. I'm 25 and full of doubt. I'm 25 and opening another box.

This one is full of toys

Current Mood: ken burns, ken wong, and ken nordine
Currently Watching: The Brak Show

lab rat and real rat at the movies: the sequel

2007-09-28T09:50:00.000-07:00

In which my pet rat Bukowski and I review the best of thrift store finds, six dollar Tuesdays, and free movies on demand. First installment can be found here

Tonight's feature: Men in Black II

ELR: I don't know if it's a guilty pleasure, a personal quirk, or just a case of me taking irony too far, but if there's one thing that I love, it's rap songs that recap a movie during the end credits. This was a staple back when executives still considered rap "the new thing" that the kids love. It wasn't in all movies and hardly ever anything serious, but every time one of those hype-machine movies, the type of movie that would come with it's own correlative Burger King cups came out, it was there. Unfortunately, this means that we were never treated to a Schindler's List edition of the Quad City DJ's "Come on Ride the Train", and Young MC never did "The Last of the Mohicans (Rap)", but we were treated to such gems as Partners in Krime's "Turtle Power" from the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Bobby Brown's "On Our Own" from Ghostbusters II, and a track from each of the Addams Family movies (MC Hammers "Addams Groove" and Tag Team's "Whoomp (The Addams Family) There it Is!", respectively). I can't say for certain, because I don't have the time to subject myself to dreck like Snow Day and Unaccompanied Minors these days, but I'm pretty sure that Will Smith put the nail in the coffin of the rap-that-recaps-the-film with "Black Suits Comin' (Nod Ya Head)" from Men in Black 2.

It makes sense that he tried, though, as his theme songs for Wild Wild West and the original Men in Black were bonafied, platinum hits, but a few years of hits like those, and tracks like "Gettin Jiggy Wit It" and "Welcome to Miami", which were embarassing to all but the whitest and drunkest of drunk white tourists only months after they'd been released, had made it so that people no longer thought of the man who penned "Parents Just Don't Understand" as a serious rapper anymore.

That's the main problem with Men in Black II. They repeated too much of what worked the first time around, almost always to ill effect, as if they market tested the ideas but not the final product.

"A talking pug? A bunch of horndog alien worms? Tony Shalhoub getting his head blown off? Put em all back in and triple their screentime, and if you can put a suit on the pug and get him to sing, do that too. Something catchy, maybe that 'Who let the dogs out?' track."

Even a throwaway joke from the end of the first film implying that Dennis Rodman was an alien got repeated, only this time they used star cameos to make the same gag with megastar pariahs Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jackson, and Martha Stewart. It's the same fucking thing that happened to Austin Powers, right down to the overt product placement. The thing is, neither one of those films were perfect to begin with, and didn't have a lot of slack to give up, quality wise, even if the alien eating the Quarter Pounder is a hot chick with her tits all pushed up in leather fetish gear.

Bukowski: It's almost embarassing to say this, and defend this movie, but you're totally wrong about Men in Black II. For goddamn sure it ain't a perfect movie, but it does have it's moments, and I'm willing to venture that it's not just some shit movie with a couple of good moments, but the perfect movie to watch on a Sunday afternoon, that just happens to be saddled with some of the worst, most groan inducing moments ever captured on celluloid. If you can get past those few glaring terrible terrible jokes, you'll see that.

Given the right role and paced out just right, Tommy Lee Jones is one of the finest and most underused, underutilized, underappreciated comedic actors we've got today, from Small Soldiers to Natural Born Killers, to probably that movie where he's a disgraced cop who has to coach a cheerleading squad or whatever. For some reason, the character he does as Agent K, a blaze country boy with a couple odd tics, plays really well off of Will Smith, who's at his best when he's playing an action hero version of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

The movie, both movies, use a great mix of slapstick, character driven comedy, and, parsed out in tiny doses here and there, some dark (or if not dark, at least off-putting) comedy. Take this quick line from David Cross :

"Hey do you guys want some mini pizzas. They're like little bagels with pizza stuff on em. My Mom makes em, and she'll put a little extra cheese on them, but she's got palsey so she really puts a lot of extra cheese on."

He says it real quick and quiet, like it might be an improv and it might be an afterthought or it might be him trying to sneak it past the editors. Of course it isn't, though. David Cross was brought back for this movie, after his bit part character got eaten by a giant bug in the first movie, and he's not the only Mr. Show alumni in the movie. I think that the makers of the film wanted to do a good matinee style movie, with sexy girls, a shit ton of special effects and as many aliens as they could cram into as many scenes as they could use them, and I think they wanted to make a dark comedy, at least a little, and they succeeded. I think you've gotta remember that you can fart a little bit more in a family comedy than what you could used to, but not much else has changed, and in fact G and PG and even PG-13 movies have gotten a lot tamer than they were in the seventies and eighties.

And all those jokes you mentioned? They look like add-ons, the result of hack script doctors brought on at the last minute, so that the producers could milk this thing for every easy laugh they could. It doesn't mean that the film can't be better than it's own jokes. Take this exchange, where Tommy Lee Jones, explains to the female lead that she's an alien, and will have to leave the planet to fulfill her destiny and blah blah blah:

Agent K: You know things before they happen.
Rosario Dawson: I'm a Libra.
Agent K: Ever notice that it rains a lot when you're sad?
Rosario: A lot of people get sad when it rains.
Agent K: Yeah, but with you, it rains, because you're sad.

I mean sure, it's not the deepest shit in the world, but we're talking genre here. Sci Fi fantasy with a PG-13 rating. Douglas Adams could've written it and, if you'd have bathed both the characters in the monochromatic blood of murdered prostitutes, so could Frank Miller. A few years back, some dude who was part super nerd and part true believer did what Hollywood, George Lucas, and a few hundred million dollars couldn't do: he edited himself a watchable version of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace If someone would just take the time to trim the fat off this movie, it would definitely be worth viewing more than once every five years.

So long as I can forget that any version of the film had an alien called Ballneck or something, whose balls were in his neck, and whom Tommy Lee dropped with a jumpkick to the neck. Then I just feel sad.

[currently listening to THE POLICE]

the dream journal of... A TWENTY FIVE YEAR OLD!

2007-09-25T09:52:00.000-07:00

My cousin lives in a high rise in Lakeview. The type of place a supervillain, a Lex Luthor-type CEO supervillain would call home. Floor to ceiling windows overlook a steel mesh dinosaur on the edge of a cliff across the street. There's a door in the side of the dinosaur and stairs going up to the top and then down into the cliff. The stairs lead to a children's museum and the big lizard is full of them marching buddy system, two-by-two down below.

I don't have time to stay at Josh's. I have to go home and practice. I scratch two forks against the strings of an acoustic guitar to the tune of a Carla Bozulich song. I have to practice in the bathroom because the acoustics are best there, but it's crowded with my friend Joe in there doing something on his computer that completely blocks access to the sink. Not that I need the sink for what I'm doing, and not that I even understand how scratching forks against an acoustic guitar is going to help me do an impression of Johnny Marr and win the big air guitar competition, but it's something I have to do!

this dream provided more questions than answers

[currently listening to WORLD/INFERNO FRIENDSHIP SOCIETY]
...happy berfday to me

news of the week

2007-09-19T09:54:00.000-07:00

God told Alan Keys to run for president again!

No matter how depressing the next year of presidential politics get, we'll at least have Alan Keys around to say all sorts of crazy gibberish. Finally, a Republican candidate with the balls to say that his gay daughter is doomed to burn eternally in Hell, compare Planned Parenthood to Auschwitz, and explain how Iraq was given to us as a gift from God.

By the way, I think that I agree with the sentiment of this animated .gif but it still cracks me up and looks crazy.

[currently listening to ED REC, VOL 2]

General Life Update

2007-09-17T09:55:00.000-07:00

In one week, I will be twenty five.

In two weeks, I will have moved back in with my parents. to save money, try to make a go of it as a DJs

My pet rat Bukowski has lived longer than any other animal I've ever cared for. I'm a kickass rat Dad, but it is almost shocking what a terrible lizard owner I am.

I'm thinking about grad school.

While both delicious and cost effective, it was in no way a good idea to get a bag of samosas on Jarvis, a bag of pho on Argyle, and drink a tallboy of Bacardi Silver Mojito in the same day.

I've gained back more than half of the weight I lost when I was on Phentermine.

I'm working two jobs, spinning music at bars and lounges, and slanging barbecue at a chicken shack, but I might be losing some hours soon at the well-paying one, and I wouldn't be surprised if I got fired from the other one, which would suck because I've gotten really used to eating, drinking, and drinking soda for free.

I just got a laptop and a bunch of DJ equipment, but some of the used stuff is already broken. The computer is awesome, and has many shiny components, but the [function] button is a jerk and Vista is an asshole. My trike is totally fucked and a part of my camera is being held on with duct tape, but it's on warranty and as soon as I get a week where I don't need a camera, and can get it to the repair store in Evanston, that's where it's going. It's good to have soulseek again.

Ten years ago today I lost my virginity. Sarah thinks it's weird that I would know that, or think about it, or bring it up, but my guess is that 9 out of 10 dudes and a majority of chicks could give you the same info at the drop of a hat.

I'm working on my fifth zine. The working title is "Two Months as a Sex Toy Reviewer and a Decade of Taking it Up the Ass for the Man." It's A Zine About Work. I capitalized those words because I think they may follow the title, after a colon.

I think that's it.

[currently listening to JAI-ALAI SAVANT]

odd. odd. odd.

2007-08-28T09:57:00.000-07:00

I spent most of my evening photographing an 66-year old friend photograph an orgy with a bunch of friends and the weirdest and most interesting thing I saw all night was a beetle having a fight to the death with a spider in my parents basement. I swear. You'd think the spider would've been more brazen, but it was in retreat mode the whole time. A classic rope-a-dope technique. There was no way it was going to be able to punch or bite through the hard exoskeleton, so it was going to have to tire the bugger out.

Life is interesting sometimes.

[currently listening to NEW YORK LATIN HUSTLE]

going for a stroll

2007-08-15T09:58:00.000-07:00

working backwards from now, naked on a futon, between two box fans and a grown woman

the chapter of the book is called "necrophiliacs anonymous". the book I'm reading, not the one I'm writing. that chapter, at this point in time, is tentatively titled "chapter two"and if I actually finish it, it'll be the artistic high point of the last two years

an ambulance sits in the alley, with its motor running. a girl with glasses sleeps in the passenger seat. the driver's seat is empty. the back window is fogged.

the girl with the fake name rides by on her bike. she must have just gotten off work at the bar. she's monochramatic except for tghe lipstick (like a Frank Miller comic), and put together well. I'm not, so I don't say anything.

I got her real name once, when I was working as a doorman and bouncer.
slight power corrupts slightly, to the point where I'll go up to a pretty girl, introduce myself, and tell her I like her art

a carful of hipsters slams into another car full of hipsters on logan boulevard, and shit stays mellow. one house is all yard, with an elegant birdfeeder, another has it's own waterfall and lagoon. these are not the people who complain about gentrification, and they are not the people who gentrified the neighborhhood

I steal a crazy man's bench by the statue when he walks away, and instead of confronting me when he returns, reasons that the invisible people he was yelling at, have moved to a different bench anyway

[currently watching EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED]

the only two poems I ever bothered to memorize

2007-08-10T10:00:00.000-07:00

I ran into Ari yesterday. She was on her bike heading for the 20khz open mic and she'd been given bad directions. When she went off in the right direction, I thought about heading out, but I didn't want to bring anything so I tried to remember if I could remember any of my old performance pieces. Amazingly, I did. Here are two old poems that at this point, I'm prouder of memorizing than I am for writing.

1. This one is dumb but it used to win teen slams when that's what I was all bout. It was never meant for the page, because a lot of it is humor derived from changing my tone, pace, and inflection. The way to make it work was to go up, talk really slow and awkwardly, play off my nerdiness so that when I got all oddball and slammy, it was a kick, and when I got to the rapid fire part at the end, it was a surprise.

I'm not Black Jesus/Chewing the Fat

I may be a bad mamma jamma
A grand master slammer
And a badmothershutyomouthI'mtalkinaboutSANTA ANNA, motherfucker
But no matter how hard I try
I will never be
BLACK JESUS

For most people, this wouldn't be much of a loss
But when you've...
Achieved
As much as I have
You just wanna reach for the stars
But it's no use

When I have a child
When the time is right
I will tell hm
Or her
Or them
Or it

"Son (or daughter or whathaveyou), THIS is AMERICA
And with a little hard work. you can be anything you want
Except BLACK JESUS
Don't even try cuz the world will pass you by, and call you a lotta things that ain't half as nice as BLACK HESUS"

So I see Flava Flav on VH1 the other day
And I don't cry
Because thugs don't
But I feel like I should shed a tear
For the world has passed him by
And I tip my bottle
And I tip my cup
And salute

It's the Flava
It's the Flava
you wifebeating cracksmoking motherfucker you
It's the Flava Boyeeee
and some girl says she don't wanna hear it, she says "My virgin ears"
My virgin ears (?!) would maje a Q-tip like a dildo
but this is too sophisticated a basis of metaphoric imagerey as situationist philosophy
so I sit back
watch Fox news
and sketch out a poem about Britney Spear's titties

a spurt in the shurt left hurt the fans with the plans to sing and to dance and romance like the idol she is til she became his a virgin to the surgeon who sees them to ease and to please like a sacrificial cow but just how did the best breasts in the west barter a martyr and how does it feel to be Generation Y

a little girl cries
but who cares
cuz pop music sucks anyway
amirite?

2. This one I wrote after one of my friends OD'd. I was really broken up about it because it happened at my house and I knew he had a problem and I was trying to get people to not give him drugs. I wanted to write something about it when I found out but I didn't have a pen or paper so I wrote something that rhymed so I would still have it in my head when I got home. The grammar in the beginning is fixable, and it would look less stupid on the page, but it sounds better when I read it this way:

[Never Titled]

He was the hostest
With the mostest
With the most voracious noses
Until an accidental overdose'd
Black him out on Sunday night
And he wouldn't see the light til Monday
Without the help of
Intravanous intervention
And how much prevention would've kept him out of the ICU
I dry my eyes because I knew
Because I knew and didn't bother
To take the time to tell his father, and
Sometimes even a junkie'll believe his own charm
When he left Sunday night on his friend Tim's arm
I told him to get home safe
Only six blocks away
From his own neighborhood
Perhaps the walk'd do him good
But
There's a demon that inhabits his alcoholic mother
That rides the double helix of the man that I call brother
And from or for this demon his whole life had given chase
And maybe he wasn't meant to make it back to his Dad's place

[currently listening to "Onward Christian Slater" by Bert Susanka]

why Sarah and I shouldn’t work together

2007-08-08T10:02:00.000-07:00

a partial list of things we make jokes about that confound our coworkers, especially the one who seems like he wants to look cool around us

Anal Cunt
Zines
Pogroms
Papa Legba and Baron Semedi
Too Much Metal for One Hand

there are more, and I'm here for one more day so there probably will be more as well.

In other news, I've been doing data entry til my eyes bleed. The highlight of my last tw working weeks was when I was filing some guy's info. His na,e was [something] Ognenoff and his email address was beef_strognenoff@[something].com.

[currently listening to JUSTICE]

someone tell me I’m a good person for not strangling the cats

2007-08-06T10:04:00.000-07:00

A couple days ago, I washed two blankets just to see if the dryer worked. It didn't. It took about twenty minutes, prodding it with a paperclip and hitting it with a shovel to get it going, but I finally got the blankets dry.

I come home today and find a bunch of cat turds on the two blankets. My bed has about six fucking blankets spread out on it right now and the cat went right for the two that were just washed.

Not that the rat is any better. I just washed his cage and changed his litter and the thing still fuckin stinks. But Bukowski is my rat and I love him. The cats are Autumn's, they have no interest in cuddling, and they have stupid, retard paws instead of hands.

So please, someone tell me I'm a good person because the cats are still breathing.

[currently listening to MANU CHAO]

national public radio wants me to do crystal

2007-08-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

seriously. it's like one of two drugs I've never tried. I mean, sure, if you overdo it you could get one of those nasty purple holes in your cheek, but my friend _____ had one of those, it healed up, and now she's ten kinds of hot, and there's not even a scar.

there have been two shows this week that have bandied about phrases like "meth is the perfect drug for artists" and "there's no such thing as writer's block on meth" and "after a couple months I was just swimming in my clothes"

I think I should do it.
Maybe it'll get me a job at Vocalo, so I have another radio outlet once WLUW gets raped, cut up and served up by the administration at Loyola.

an outlet that pays me
pays me enough money for meth.
and maybe shoes.

according to a David Sedaris anecdote on This American Life, "crystal meth makes two kinds of people: bad artists and good sex partners." I've already got a foothold in both camps, so I should probably go whole hog about it.

[currently listening to THE GOSSIP]

hot shower laundry party

2007-07-22T13:24:00.000-07:00

1. The landlord paid the water bill! Just in time for it not to get shut off, too.

2. I just found out that a phrase I've been saying for nearly a decade, because it sounded cute when one of my friends said it, came from a book I'm reading now, that one of my editor's daughters recommended to me exactly a decade ago.

3. Hottackysexycool. There was a girl on the bus reading a novel based on the television show Charmed. She had hair that started to split around the small of her back as it branched out over her back pockets and a homemade tattoo between her breasts that said simply J [heart] M .

4. It takes 20 minutes on a treadmill to work off the gatorade I drank there.

5. If I could install special faucets, I wouldn't have this problem.

The eternal shopping list:
1. Diet Pepsi
2. Lube

6. Usually I just want people to be around, and call me every now and then. Sometimes, get the hook up. Thanks to Cat for the cheap haircut and Mat for the cheap tattoo. I look 800% better. Much love to Shabby, Rachel, Basaraba, Stella, Liz, Aaron, Kate and Crazy Lombardo the Master of Pork, just for showin up.

7. Juvenile Sex Poem:

she nipped
at his cock
the way a fish
tastes the pink
at the end of the line
trying not to devour
what she knew was bad for her
but in the end
she was hooked
and though they made love
for quite some time
perhaps it would be more accurate
to say that she was gutted

8. I learned recently that when you tell a beggar that you're unemployed, they feel sorry for you

9. Outside of Margie's

Megan: If I was peanutbutter, do you think I'd be crunchy... or creamy?
ELR: Neither. You'd be jelly.
Megan: Why?
ELR: Cuz jam don't shake like that.

10. Blonde kid on the bus, young and cut. The girl with him is a couple heads taller, blonde-from-a-can, underaged and overdeveloped, so sexy that, by the way he (dis)regards her, you can tell they must be related. His shirt says CATHOLIC 4 LIFE and his iPod jacket is a collage of hand-drawn pictures of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac.

11. I can't tell if the two Polish girls on the bus are stewardesses or private schoolgirls, but I get a heavy lust feeling towards them. I press my arm down on the seat in front of my, and the flab tightens into something that looks like a muscle, the kind of thing you'd see on Popeye. I marvel at it. They don't seem to notice.

[currently reading: Still Life With Woodpecker]

Part One and Part One-and-aHalf

2007-07-14T10:09:00.000-07:00

HR didn't notice the bus increasing speed until they got to the part of the tunnel where it got narrow. We're going to die was his first thought. He looked up from his book, figuring that if he was going to die, he might as well watch. The driver was just starting to realize what he was up to. Murder. Suicide? Retirement.

HR was excited. A little. Maybe the driver would do it. All the women and children were off the bus. There was only one other person on the bus, and he looked like an asshole. HR new what he looked like, exactly what the bus driver saw when he checked the mirror. Big saggy maroon basset hound eyelids filled with

Nothing.

He was empty.

The bus driver had a heavy foot, and they were almost out of tunnel. If it didn't happen here, where they were perfectly separated from the other side of the road, it wouldn't happen there, in the neon, in the blue and purple, in the space and stars. It would have to be here, in the pigeon shit, among the broke glass, where they could be stars. Front page heroes like John Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. One wheel turns, then the rest. Maybe it was just two. All these years driving and he never figured out which wheels did the driving and which ones just dragged, not that it mattered.

A black James Dean plus fifty extra pounds of washout ugly and three or four hundred pounds of stowaway, leather and denim all traded for a company jacket. Then nothing.

Like everything the asshole had on his mind that morning. Like everything that vase-man had in his eyes. Lightning. The biggest thing they'd ever done.

You'd be surprised.
The driver was so surprised he had to rub his hand across the sharp stubble on his neck just to feel real. The nothingman was so surprised he dropped his book. The asshole wasn't very surprised. Hell was just like he'd always imagined it. He actually did the recent turn of events one better, by dishing out a surprise of his own, and introducing himself, "Hi, my name's Bill," in a very non-assholish way.

He extended a hand to HR and the driver, who in turn introduced himself as Memphis.

They were three men, with nothing in comon. Well, nothing much in common. A few big things definitely, but nothing they were quite ready to address.

Up above, and I'm being heavy with the figurative in the use of both words, the sun was rising, and it would never touch their bodies again, no matter how hard it tried. If it rose in the West and just hung out all day, it would never see them. They would still go from a tunnel, to a body bag, to a morgue, to a car, to a funeral home to a coffin to a car to the ground, and maybe if the sun tried to burrow up through China or Australia it might find them, but it wasn't very likely.

It didn't matter that HR had money and Bill didn't, or the fact that Memphis made more than either one of them, but couldn't ever keep it. They were dead. and the sun had crossed over the horizon, and would never cros their path again.

skip to the good part

2007-06-29T13:19:00.000-07:00

So I saw a crazy pile of ants on my way home, and I composed an inane storyblog in my head, but I'm too depressed./lazy to actually commit it to writing so I thought I would just boil it down to the three lines I liked.

1. I wish I was that small. Lord knows I've felt it before, in shame, in pettyness... in the one that follows the other.

2. I step over the pile, as careful as a new Buddhist.

3. I wonder what compelled them up. Perhaps some rampagine earthworm below, or dropped cupcake above, long since carried away, maybe just a celebration of the moon, which tonight peeks through the clouds, looking like some veiled gypsy bride.

Fin.

compromises

2007-06-18T13:27:00.000-07:00

I make bargains with God. I used to just ask for things. Two things, alternately.
Make me happy. Make me skinny. Make me happy. Make me skinny.
Boys wear depression better than they do body image disorders.

The problem is, I never trusted God.
I've watched too many episodes of the Twilight Zone.
I get struck by an oncoming truck. A happy idiot. A skinny paraplegic.

I bargain with God.
Happiness. Attractiveness. Productivity. Health.
I want to contribute to the greater good, but I want people to want to fuck me too. Give me three of those four things, and I will devote my life to making art, and things of beauty in your name. Maybe it's not a fair trade.

Another weekend pays the bills.

I spun music at a pub, and I didn't ask for any drinks until I was sure that people liked me. I went home drunk, but I didn't make any art.

I played the songs people requested.
Songs I thought I'd left behind with the last century.

Disturbed.
311.
Eagle Eye Cherry.
Buckcherry.

These aren't my jams, but I was able to put em all together alright.
Maybe God will answer my prayers, because it seems like the one thing I have to offer, is timing.

a draft from last night's workshop

2007-06-18T13:25:00.000-07:00

There's a town in South America, one of those unincorporated villages where the stores have no walls, the doctors are all magicians, and the people can only move north. Of course they have all the traditional moving extremities. Feet. Rollerskates. Tractors. Physically, they can move in any direction that they'd like, but there's something about the town, something to do with lay lines, the Equator, magnetic poles and the way they affect brainwaves, that keep the people from moving anywhere but North of their own volition.

The people there are rarely disappointed wqith life because everything carries a sense of inevitability. Everyone has had that experience where they see someone on the street, or at a dance or bazaar, and they get that feeling in the pit of their stomach, it could be love or lust, but sometimes it's more than that, it's that feeling that this person is the one that's going to change their life in the way that their life is supposed to change, and they can never go to them.

My life is full of that, furniture decorated elegantly with notches for the ones that got away, and then reduced to splinters by notches representing the ones that never were. Like most people in this day, age and hemisphere, one not just of feet, rollerskates, and tractors but nuclear power, personal computers, and infinite regret, my stumbling blocks are mental, a fear of the imagined inevitable, so I drink my beer, sweep the sawdust into a pile in the corner, throw a mattress on top, and go to sleep. And I connive. I strategize. I invent reasons to meet someone where I don't have to tell them why I'm talking to them, I read and learn things in order to know a little about a lot, to have an opinion, a reason to butt in and expound.

In the town where people can only move North, a man may see a woman on the street and call to her, "You are beautiful, and I would like to know your name in case I see you again," and charmed or disgusted, her only option is to turn her head and respond before walking away, in the same direction as the man but too far apart to ever touch.

In this town, whose tribal name means nothing on my tongue but translates to The Place Where The People All Are Looking Toward God Always, the people trust each other. A person can turn a person, physically with their hands, to the shoulders or waist, in any direction. Once turned, a person can walk a straight line; away from God, askew from God, but possibly towards love, or home, or personal ruin, unril theuy fall asleep. In the morning, waking up, in a room with no walls, atop one of the beds that line the streets like bars and lampoasts here, stand and go North.

If a man and a woman and another see each other on the street, and the man has that feeling about the woman, or maybe that mysterious other, he will call out to her and she will respond, and put a set of variables into place. It is up to her now, to respond to the man or the other, to send them off in the same direction as herself, for better or worse, or to respond in kind, and ask the other to send the man to her, or her to him, to go off together.

In most cases, the other will oblige, but sometimes, when he or she is as cruel as the people you and I are likely to see on the street today, he can willfully keep them apart.

There's something about rejection there, the type of soul crushing rejection that keeps two people from being able to walk together towards God, where one must choose to go askew and the other must help them, that I find truly charming in the place where people can only move North, and look always in the direction of God, where even in rudeness, even in deceit, ecen in jealousy and selfishness, with fingertips pressed into shoulders or waist, that even in rejection, two people must embrace.

There is another word they have there, that makes an inelegant slug of my tongue when I try to say it, and poached, limping beasts of my fingers as I try to type it, that has no English synonym. Bo-Ouighyow, which translates roughly to, a little tango that means good bye.

[Currently listening to Gza's Liquid Swords]

Dispatches from the End of the World

2007-06-13T10:14:00.000-07:00

Day 21. Three Weeks.

I always thought we would go out in a bang. Maybe it was probably all those lies we've been fed all these years about creation in seven days, or the fact that I never really understood the theory of the Big Bang, but I thought we would end just as fast as we'd begun. Nuclear holocaust. The explosion of the sun. The explosion of the Earth. Instead we're just fading away, little by little, like guests at some overlong party.

Life hasn't changed that much, but I guess there isn't much of a jump from unemployment to quarantine.

On quiet days we're able to run out to the garden, rip out as many plants as we can and repot them on the deck. We've got mint, for mojitos, as long as the rum lasts. The tomatos are coming in better than we'd imagined, when we first saw them sprouting out of the weeds.

We drink. We smoke the hookah. We read books. We watch movies. We go on MySpace to see who's left, and we write.

I guess you could call it a meme, but I've never felt a meme before. The first day, three bulletins: I'm here.

The second day, one hundred bulletins: I'm here.
The third and fourth days, five hundred bulletins apiece: I'm here.
The fifth day: Four hundred and ninety seven bulletins.
The sixth day: Four hundred and seventy bulletins.
The seventh day: Four hundred and thirty three.

One week. Enough time to create a whole new world. The twenty-first day, noon: Just a little over two hundred bulletins, with probably another hundred before nightfall.

xx0xx: I'm here.
Party Pauper: I'm here.
Dori, an online friend from who I've only met once in person: I'm here.
Soul~Namaste, who is now ChiIll Zombie Hunter: I'm here.
Reverend Chyna is losing her Mind Alone: Still lost. Still here.

I read each one, or at least, I look to see who's left. The game has gone from having the most friends, to having the most friends alive. I never thought I'd be blogging with the world literally crumbling around me, but there's not really much left to do.

The power grids held. The water still runs, even if we've got no gas to heat it. Phones are down.

Martial law isn't as bad as I thought it would be, mostly cause I'm not leaving the house. On the first day, when real people still outnumbered the ghouls, we rioted. We looted. Power strips, canned goods, DVDs, beer, pills, paper. I got a lot of paper. I got a lot of paper and nice pens. No one will take them from me, not yet. There's no run on paper.

Romance. There's two sides to it. There always is. I run through a roster of girls I always wanted to fuck but never did. I think about how Sarah was more and more, trying to get me to consider living with her. If I'd felt ready then, we'd been together now.

Sarah always hated zombie movies, even the joke ones. She'd see that wide shot of that street, lined with people that aren't people anymore. She'd look over at me and tell me that she wouldn't be able to do it. She'd just off herself. So far she hasn't. More than anything else I've ever seen, it leads me to believe she has hope. Maybe she's just too afraid to do it. Maybe she's just too afraid to do it alone. We tell each other we love each other. We tell each other how much food we have left. We recount the distance between our houses. Twenty minutes by car. An hour by bike. An hour and a half by train. Three or four hours walking. An eternity.

The government tried to institute a draft. No one listened. Armored trucks went door to door for a week, building an army of people too scared to stay at home, or to brave for their own good. Our neighborhood gang takes care of us. Some variant of the Latin Kings. Folks nation. They shoot their way to California twice a week for the meeting. Three hours to get out of our house and talk to other humans. It's like a cross between a neighborhood watch meeting, a swap shop, and a singles mixer. Everyone is just so scared and lonely.

It's hot. I'm sweaty, and I'm glad that I have more clothes than I'll ever need, so I don't have to wash them that much. The casual encounters on Craigslist are still desperate and hilarious. People reaching out just to find someone in their building.

Guns for Ass - M4W - Homer St at Western
LOOKING FOR COMPANIONSHIP - W4? - 1517 W SHERWIN - LETS GET 2GETHER

It's my parent's house. They're doing alright. My uncle Lee sets the computer up for Bubbe to write a letter each week, and then sends the email. She still lights candles every Shabbos, on her Christian daughter-in-law's table. She still has faith. She wants us

Turn up the faucet and you can't hear the screams.
Turn up a movie and you can't hear the screams.
Turn up your music and you can't hear the screams.
Fire up a porno and you can't hear the screams.

Autumn's listening to Duane Eddy. I'm listening to Ghostface Killah.
The woman below us is fucking her husband like there's no tomorrow. The woman below her is holding her dogs and crying.
The birds still start chirping at three in the morning.

The bubbles gather in the tub under the faucet. The smoke plumed out of my mouth and gathers at the ceiling. As it passes by the window, I realize it must be beautiful out today.

For Ida

2007-04-23T23:56:00.001-07:00

I was at a dinner party earlier, when the topic of conversation, before devolving into international politics and conspiaracy theory, was religion. There is no official Jewish concept of the afterlife. Growing up around reformed and conservative Jews in Chicago, everyone believed that they would go to Heaven or just stay dead, rejoicing in the fact that the Talmud makes no mention of Hell.

I read somewhere that the concept of resurrection comes from The Book of Daniel, when the Jews lived in what is now Iraq. When the Persian ruler known as Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon, and won the Jews, they adopted the Zoroastrian principles of a final judgment. I know that the Pharisees believed in reincarnation, but the Saducees did not (actually I don't know anything, but this is what I've read). The Book of Zohar talks of a journey one takes on the road to nirvana, where, before becoming one with God, you happen upon the masculine and feminine aspects of God intertwined in an erotic embrace. I think you'd like that.

I don't know where you are right now, or where the Mourner's Kaddish might send you. It would be nice to think that you had reached nirvana and become a part of the consciousness inherent in all things, and it would be nice to think of you reincarnated, that a whole new generation might be able to someday hear stories the way only you know how to tell them, but today is one of those rare times where I actually do want to believe in Heaven, and that you're up there, right now, calling some poor angel a shmuck, a motherfucker, and a sonuvabitch.

I'll miss you. Rest in peace.

I create whole worlds by pressing the snooze button,, fighting time to keep them real

2007-04-23T11:21:00.000-07:00

There was a significant preamble but I assure you that most of it is lost now, like when you're digging a hole in the sand and after a certain part the walls start caving in, and you're just digging to fight them from caving all the way.

Something about playing a club, with one of my friends. Cris Balls shows up while we're breaking down. Some girls show up, and there's some sort of awkward sexual intrigue, but I really don't remember.

Two small houses, almost connected by their back porches, overlooking a back yard, back gates, and the alley. The one I'm standing on is Brent's. He doesn't know me that well, and doesn't know I'm here. I see him leave out the front, he turns off the streetlights as he leaves. There is only the first hint of morning light, but the sun will not be out for another hour. The other house is full of fetish models and photographers, and I don't remember which one I'm here to see. Two women, mostly naked and painted green run in from the alley and duck behind a tool shed to hose themselves off. They must have filmed that zombie porn here I figure.I look up and there is a model smoking a cigarette a few feet away. I can almost touch her. I can touch her even though the porches are not touching. She's smoking a cigarette.Should I bum one? Yes. No? A cigarette would make me look less like a guy staring into someone else's backyard. A Hispanic guy with short hair and a long leather coat comes out smoking. I ask him for a cigarette. Copout!. Then Keight is there, smoking.

"Oh look, a dog!" The sky is two shades lighter, so that everything is hued blue. Two puppies chase each other around the front yard. "Is there any way to get a puppy? Like to get someone to lend you their puppy? Does that happen?"

"Yes, but there is a significantly higher chance of getting peed on. The good thing is that once you get puppy pee all over the place, the other puppies will know it's safe to come over. You really want to spread it around."

A few more people show up, leagues of them, until there are two or three dozen of them here on this porch. A wedding party of some sort.

"I hope you don't mind, Brent said we could use his porch for the last couple of shots because the group is so big." The Hispanic guy tells me.

The group consists of long-haired metal heads and a large contingent of people in full NASCAR jumpsuits. A girl in a pink shirt, glasses and a lip ring grabs me by the arm and pulls me into the picture, with me on the inside and her on the edge. She kisses my cheek in a way that blocks me out of the shot. It feels good. The crowd roars and throws up metal horns for the next shot. We roar. We throw up horns.

"Oh look, he's trying so hard." She points to a little baby in a wifebeater, trying to make the hand gesture. His face looks pained.

"When I was little, I had a lot of trouble holding up any finger other than the pointer, and keeping the finger next to it down. It was excruciating. I would always end up doing this." show her my hand in a Dr. Spock formation.

"How sad."

"Yeah, especially because I was metal, not Star Trek! It wasn't until years later that I found out--"

Alarm Clocl

--I could be both. Damn. I really wanted to finish that sentence. I think she would've laughed. I wake up, click the wrong part of the internet, and Kurt Vonnegut is dead. R.I.P.

staring at my hands like a goddamn stoner, waiting for them to fing

2007-04-23T11:20:00.002-07:00

People give me the dumbest looks when I tell them how much I love data entry, like I've just told a joke and they don'tt get the punchline. There's no joke though. I really love a big, juicy project that goes on forever and means nothing to me. I love the routine. It gets me away from home and all the distractions here: unmonitored internet, food, personal grooming products, an endless collection of toys and music, and the siren's call of my own dick that will surely someday lead me to ruin.

Once I'm in the zone, and doing my tasks on reptillian brain alone, my mind can wander and create. I wrote a dialog in m head, putting a mailer together and it will be the first original piece in months.

I really like msnual labor, little projects, big projects, everything but mopping and sweeping, but there have been occasions where even that didn't bother me. Today, as I stuffed envelopes downtown, my mind left me for a minute. I've been in a dreamy state lately, and I don't know where I was, but the first thing I saw when I come to is my hands stuffing an envelope. It was beautiful just watching them do their thing. My wrists seemed so... elegant, as I twirled them around to flatten a piece of paper. My arms were so... hairy, woulfd I notice that if I was someone looking at me, in my odd pink shirt with short sleeves instead of long? My hands were the stars of the show, though, and I watched them like a doting parent, as they did their tasks of their own volition, in broad waves like the arms of a magician, or a conductor, with the intricate skill of an ant or a beetle.

Sometimes I'm amazed at the simple shit this body is able to do.

if I was French, or Thin, I could call it art

2007-04-23T11:20:00.001-07:00

Or "Momchill is the best person in the world to have with you when you're on drugs"

Lyingg in the bathtub, staring up at the beads rolling down the tile, tugging at my flaccid dick.

If I was French, and thin, I could call it art, and beautiful young college students would sit in the corner with their arms folded over the seat of the toilet and their gaze fixed, trying to figure me out, hardly able to bear the moments of time that we'e not having sex once it's been made obvious that we would.

But I'm not thin, I am not French, and there are no co-eds waiting to towel me off.

It's just me
alone
after another party witrh a head full of acid

Betty: I'm gonna go home and kick all them naked bitches out of my bed and I'm going to sleep
Momchill: Well you kick a naked bitch for me too, alright

Momchill brought catharsis tonight
because he doesn't act the way everyone else acts,
at least not all the time

I'm just happy he wasn't trying to get laid tonuight and was available for [bigger] conversation

Life's all so random, such a weird series of impulses that sends you off against each other...so it all just comes down to the moment.

It's not the deepest shit ever
but he said it at just the right time for me to enjoy a particular moment where we were sitting at a table in the basement of a bar in Lakeview on a Saturday night, and I was able to watch a shadow of a friend playing a trumpet cast particularly large across a wall in the back, but I could also see that the man playing the horn was my friend Rupert, impeccably dressed, and I watched it all from behind a perfect rose that may or may not have been real.

and we had that second- at least I did- where U was able to enjoy the rose as a beautiful thing that was as likely to have grown out of the ground as it was to have been factory produced. and i got to enjoy those seconds as I reached for it to smell it to see if it had a scent and found it synthetic to the touch and completely odorless

Momchill said he was able to continue regarding it as a beautiful thing. but to me it was a bit tarnished and even the act of picking it up and putting it back put it in a position where the light didn't hit it as perfectly

and I got to have this discussion, and feel neither pretentious nor stupid while everyone else in the room was performing, or dealing with each others ego damage, or booty grinding, shockingly, to noise cabaret

I always expect to have this acid trip that I can plan out to be as crazy and adventurous and intense as the one before it, or the one I'm reading about, when really I take acid, like Momchill, on its own terms. The terms are that things will be different. Not better, or worse, or mindblowingly intense, just different.

It's nice
-especially after having to figure out my own ego dillemma
wondering if I had anyone who was there for just me, as a performer or as a friend, as opposed to anyone else in the room-
to realize that an acid trip is easily doable with my life as it is right now
to have a suit that I had never seen before and no one else could remember, unworn, untailored with price tags still on, almost in my size appear
was fantastic kismet

to have a recently bought unlimited fare card to get me home or anywhere else in the city, and enogh money in my bank account to walk to 7-11 and get a diet coke and a pack of gum and not think about it, (and enough where even though I would think about it, maybe to regret, I could get a cab if I really needed to get away)
that was me doing something right on my end

but the rest
Autumn and Davin helping me take a little extra time to pin up my pants, not just so that they looked good, but so that no matter how out of my head I got, I never had to fuss with them, or worry about not looking good or finding myself underdressed (if out of place or boring, for various settings I found myself in)

to have Jesse and Tyree pitch in money for Rupert who was paying for Betty to pay for my ride up with my equipent to help them put on a show

and for Sarah to let me have this night, even though she wasn't feeling great emotionally, before she even knew I was high

for this type of treatment
if I didn't have friends, then I must be really, really talented
and if I'm not talented, then they all must really, really be my friends

and that was kind of awesome to know

coming to a my house near you

2007-04-23T11:19:00.001-07:00

those movie days I've been talking about since I got my projector are going to happen this summer. Here are some of the tentative features

The Warrior Guitarist Series
Six String Samurai
Desperado
Wild Zero

The Jim Jarmusch is God Series
Dead Man
Mystery Train
Down by Law
(and selected shorts from Coffee and Cigarettes)

The Weird Movies My Dad Showed Me That Maybe He Shouldn't Have Series
Re-Animator
Freaks
Eraserhead

The I Have A Huge Boner For Teenage Girls Series
Empire Records
Mean Girls
Ghost World

The Maybe If You're Goth, Tim Burton is God, But Even If You Aren't, He's Still Pretty Great Series
Big Fish
Mightmare Before Christmas
Ed Wood
(plus the short film "Vincent" and selections from the series "Stainboy")

The Mash-Up Masterpiece Series
Dark Side of Oz (The Wizard of Oz synched up with Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon)
Aenimouse (Fantasia synched up with Tool's Aenima)
Giorgio Moroder presents Metropolis (In 1985 Giorgio Moroder re-released Fritz Lang's classic silent film with a disco soundtrack featuring the likes of Pat Benatar and Freddy Mercury)
--if any of these selections are unavailable, the third film will be Woody Allen's Whay's Up, Tigerlily

The Muppet Mayhem Series
Labyrinth
The Muppets Take Manhattan
(Plis selections from Storyteller, The Muppet Show, Sesame Street and/or Muppet Babies)

The Children's Fantastical Adventure Series
Flight of the Navigator
The Neverending Story
The Explorers

The Terry Gilliam is my favorite director but I really do believe that three of his movies in a row might kill me series
Time Bandits
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
??? - Probably eithe Twelve Monkeys or Tideland
(plus selections from his work with Monty Python's Flying Circus)

The Comic Books are Better than Word Books Series
The Maxx
V for Vendetta
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The slightly more realistic children's fantastical adventure movies
Goonies
Camp Nowhere
Adventures in Babysitting

The Weird Weird Weird Musicals Showcase
Forbidden Zone
Michael Jackson's Moonwalker
The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T

The Double-Plus Joyful Child of the 80s Series
Willow
Hook
Willy Wonka

The leave with a weird feeling in your stomach ultraviolence series
Natural Born Killers
Sin City
U-Turm

The Series Where I'm Not Sure If it's the Best Movies I've Ever Seen or the Worst
Death Race 2000
Ed and His Dead Mother
Frankenhooker

The OMG, Don't Hurt Him, He's Not a Monster He's My Friend Series
Mac & Me
Short Circuit
The Iron Giant

The Great Teenage Rebellion Series
Pump Up the Volume
Foxfire
Suburbia

More to come! Hopefully this will actually happen this summer.

all this is just going to obscure the memory of Hitler's birthday and stoner Christmas

2007-04-23T11:17:00.000-07:00

[which itself does nothing but detract from that which is Bicycle Day]

According to my friend the internet, this is "the face of the girl who may have sparked the worst school shooting in US history":

When will the rest of the world learn that cute Jewish girls just ain't nothin' but trouble.

For more gruesomeness, you can read some of the gunman's creative writing!

weekend recap

2007-04-23T11:16:00.000-07:00

Good things that happened:
The new issue of The Machine came out
Made a bunch of yups dance their asses off
Made money
Danced my ass off
Wrote a story
Ran another writing workshop
hung out with friends, met a couple new people
Finished watching every episode of Arrested Development
Ate both cake and Chinese food
Spent less than forty dollars
Rode my tricycle
Spent time outside

Bad things that happened:
Got beat up
Got stiffed on some money for some work I did
My Great-Aunt Ida died
Fought with _____/ broke up briefly

Things that I did with varying degrees of success and failure:
Went to some shows/crashed some parties
Made money (see above in both good and bad columns)
Kept with my diet and exercised

Total failure:
Helped _____ with her depression and self esteem
Got laid
(Uh oh! I look really shallow with those two situated next to each other! Yay for being me!)

that thing i do where I take stuff and make stuff but can't think of titles

2007-04-20T15:00:00.000-07:00

The midday sun hangs over J.D. like a vulture, and no matter which way he turns, he can't seem to keep it out of his eyes. He pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket and as he swipes at his damp neck, feels a bit of dead skin peel. Replacing the rag, he picks off the loose piece of skin. The new flesh beneath it is so simultaneously raw and cooked that the nerves don't even register the feeling as pain, just a dull throb that will eventually give way to migraine.

Something about hunting always soothes him when things get tense, but he's not sure which part, the ritual, the concentration, maybe the silence. Jed only hunts when he's nervous, and he only gets nervous about money. When Jed's hunting, he's hunting for food, and if Jed's hunting, he probably needs it. Today hasn't been too successful, though. That same overbearing sun that led to the dry crop this year started off a wave of death through the desperate, local wildlife and so far today he's seen more dead animals than live ones, none of them recent and none of them edible.

As Jed sets down for a sip of water from his horn and a gulp of bourbon from his flask, he sees a twitch in a nearby bush, followed by a stillness, a black rabbit or a squirrel. It saw him before he saw it, so he would have to plan his shot carefully. He made slits of his eyes and aimed for the weighty part of shadow between the branches, the part that wasn't moving as the wind swept through it. A loud crack tore through the afternoon as he fired into the brush, then the rustling and cracking of dry twigs and the soft th-thap of a rabbit hopping off through loose dirt, hopefully injured, hopefully injured at least, with a trail of blood leading to the spot where it finally gives up.

His mind starts to drift as he sets down again for another drink. A fantasy of tracking the rabbit. He shakes off the daydream as a confusing sound startles him, a low, muffled bass, like a bubble escaping a pool of water, like a stopped drain kicking in. A thick spurt of mud farts up out of the dirt, a steady flow becoming a small pond as it races at Jed's legs with a terrible smell.

Oil.

Oil! Probably not, but maybe. There's an old billboard near the north entrance to town. "Where natural petroleum made our dreams come true.!" This wasn't the first time someone found oil in Breckidge County. The first time was a fluke, just a small well that dried up in a year. The oil companies and the government spent another decade drilling holes all over town before giving up, but they never tried up in the hills where Jed's property stood. Maybe this was the answer to his prayers. Maybe this would get his nephew, who he'd raised like his own son, back from Iraq. Maybe this would usher in a new era of prosperity for the small town, or for his small family at least.

Maybe, but probably not. Maybe it was just a gas line or something. At this point it didn't matter if it was a dumb accident or a miracle. Either way it was unsafe, and he would have to get his family out of the house before he could do anything else. When he got to a safe enough distance where he could light up a cigarette, he could figure out a plan. Hi dug past the rag in his pocket for the emergency phone and dialed up the house.

"Ellie, I want you to gather up Duke and your grandmother, pack some bags for yourselves and go over to your Aunt Pearl's. I want you to stay there tonight. Hurry, drop what you're doing and I'll call you later to explain."

Still retreating slowly from the sludge, Jed choked up his grip on his rifle, turned around and headed for his truck. He called his daughter from a diner down the hill. Pearl didn't sound pleased to hear from him. Maybe she'd change her tune if she found out he was rich, and the both of them could see just how quickly she makes an aboutface. He wasn't listening to himself or his daughter talking, he was mostly thinking about that sweet moment where. Ellie says something about taking some money from his dresser, he saya good. He's trying to be vague, so she doesn't tip off her aunt before he gets a chance. The truckers and waitresses that occupy the counter at all hours eye him strangely, probably the dirty hunting clothes and rifle sitting next to him at his booth. He didn't think to change, not that he would've had time to.

After a few coffees, and some Drum he feels sharp. He calls the non-emergency line and the guy on the other end sounds as annoyed as he is excited. Back when oil was all the town could think of, the phonelines lit up with false alarms and each time everyone stopped what they were doing because they all thought they were going to be rich and every time they found out that it wasn't going to happen, the town got a little more unpleasant to live in for a few weeks after. He gave the man his cellular number and name told them he'd probably be staying at the Skyward.

The Skyward didn't actually have phones in their rooms, though, as the Skyward was the worst motel in town. The rooms were all filthy and there were only two shower stalls for the whole place, which were usually occupied by truckers who took whores there. Jed's room had two twin bedframes pushed together to make a queen but they weren't the same height. The room had no television and when Jed opened the door, a palmetto roach the size of a dinner plate flew out, but it was two dollars a night.
By midnight, Jed still couldn't sleep. He would keep thinking about the oil and wondering what the odds were that this might be real and then his mind would travel off on tangents. Jed was staring at the ceiling, thinking about one of his old neighbors, a girl he watched grow up into one of those trucker whores that frequented the place. Maybe if he saw her, they could get breakfast or coffee together. That would be nice.

As he starts to drift towards sleep again, a warped and computery version of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" starts playing in his pocket. It takes a second for his weary brain to acknowledge that his phone is ringing.

He was greeted robotically by an official sounding man who talked with a strange lack of any kind of accent whatsoever. Jed kind of meanders around an explanation of how exactly to get from his house to the spot where he had shot at the rabbit, and the man tells him that an inspector should check the place out by morning and to expect a call around midday.

Jed drifted off to sleep, smiling and thinking about money. The differentness of the bed brought weird dreams, that started out as a review of the important events of his life. It was like what people say about near death experiences where everything just flashes before your eyes. There were all the baseball games he'd played in school, and his time in the service. The dance where he met his wife, her death, and that of his parents. The day his Dad's old bloodhound Saint gave birth and he named one of the puppies Duke. There were all the football games and wrestling matches his big nephew Jethro had competed in, and the birth of his daughter. Then he started to see images of the events of his life that hadn't happened yet. He signs a bunch of papers at a bank, holding his daughter's hand. He smiles for cameras as the house he grew up in is torn down for oil rigs and sees his picture in the paper. He calls Pearl a bitch under his breath as he waves goodbye for the last time. He loads his dog and his family into the truck with a couple of scrapbooks and heirlooms and drives straight to California. On either side of him on the road, he sees that the other cars aren't cars at all but giant car-sized roaches with people in business suits riding on top. More banks, where they get their asses kissed as they are condescended to, like contemptible Gods. His nephew dicking around with a teller, asking that ten thousand dollars be broken down from hundreds to fifties, fifties to tens, tens to fives, and then fives to ones.

I'm sorry, Sir, but we just can't give you ten thousand one dollar bills.

Then give it to me in hundreds again! and as they replace the large pile, which spills out over the desk, with one small enough to fit in a briefcase.

I figured it out, Uncle Jed. The more money you have, the smaller the pile!

He buys tailored suits for himself and has his beard trimmed. He goes on dates where he talks gibberish to faceless women. He sees Jethro and Ellie May drunk, on television, and people are laughing. The house fills with unreputable people. Jethro gets shot and robbed, married and divorced. His smile fades into something bitter. Ellie May is crying and her makeup is smeared, her nose is bleeding and she looks older than she should. She keeps getting arrested, but never goes to jail. She's killing herself with sex and drugs and he sees himself well-dressed and powerful-looking but also looking powerless to try and help her. There are people outside of the house, looking in. They speak gibberish in phony voices that have no real accent, like they've all filed them away, and just like the people on the television and all the people his nephew and daughter have brought into the house, they are laughing.

Jed wakes up hot and damp. The sun isn't up yet but he's had enough. He takes the unoccupied shower, a stain box with no ceiling, trying to ignore the pounds and clangs and screams of what is hopefully violent sex and not just plain violence in the adjacent stall.

With the two dollars he gave to the kid at the desk, he had just enough left for coffee, so he goes back to the diner, where suddenly his money is useless. Word has gotten around about the oil and the inspector and everyone is his best friend.

A dour waitress with deep laugh lines that bely and define a face that looks like it has never once cracked a smile, forces one as she calls him, sweetly, "Sugar", which she pronounces more like Shuggah. He drinks his coffee slowly, and helps himself to a stack of pancakes and some ham on the bone.

It's about eight when his phone rings.

"Is this Jedediah Clampett? Exciting news, Sir. Is there a place where we can meet? I'll be bringing by papers to sign. If you have an attorney, you might want him present."

The phone call to Pearl was disappointing. She greeted him warmly and called him Darling. She was fine with the meeting taking place at her house. Just happy to help.

The family was mismatched when the man arrived. Jed had groomed himself but he Ellie never thought to bring a change of clothes for him so he was still dressed in his hunting gear. Ellie wore tight clothes that showed off her figure a bit too much, but they were the style. Granny wore a gown that hung off her like a tent, and Pearl came out studded in her Sunday best. Everyone had a million dollar shit-eater plasterd across their face. It was really happening.

The man looked like Jed thought he would. A white teeth and a perfect haircut, perfumed in a black suit and shined shoes. Another man, similarly dressed, accompanied him.

"You have oil on your property. You and your neighbors, actually. With a deposit this large it covers a fairly large portion of the hills. Unfortunately the hills are terrible terrain for drilling, which is why we never did it before. We're actually going to have to terraform the area, meaning chopping off as much of the hill as we can and then using the soil to fill in the gaps between it."

Everyone nodded excitedly, pretending to be interested. They were just about ready to burst waiting for the part about the money.

"Now before you get ready to go to Hollywood, I'm gonna have to let you down, no one is getting rich off of this."

It was as if someone had stuck a knife in their pancreas. It was as if they'd been spat on. It was as if the man had exhumed Rose Ellen, beloved wife and sister and mother and daughter-in-law and called her a cunt. It was God stomping on their dreams. For Jed, it was particularly bad, because there was shame in it. His poverty, that was no different than it had been the day before, was now warped into something worse. It was more of a mixed bag for Pearl, who knew that she would have had a piece of that money if it had come to Jed, there was still vindication in her brother-in-law's continued failure.

"I'm sorry now, that's not entirely true. The town will become a great deal wealthier, as will the nation, but there's good news for you as well. You see, as we change the landscape to aid us in continued drilling and pumping, everyone is going to have to move. Now here you have two options, one is that you accept a cash payment of the approximate value of your property, although I will admit that it's pretty low. The other is the one I would recommend to you though, the city has offered to raze the old property on the old Ridgeway businessdistrict, which I've been told is all vacant and dehabilitated at this point in time."

"Yeah, since the last time they found oil."

"Yes, I've been informed of that situation. Rather unfortunate for everyone involved, but hopefully this will make it up to everyone. You see, we're offering to build new houses for you and all of the other hill residents. Now these will be single family homes with all the modern amenities. Now no offense but these homes will be a lot prettier and a lot nicer then your current residences, but I also have to tell you that the lots are smaller. Now I understand that the majority of the hill residents are subsistence farmers, and while there is no suitable land available to offer, we can offer you a yearly stipend for as long as you live at the new residence. These stipends are available only to those 18-and-over who are currently living in the hills, but they are non-transferrable and they will apply for any future children born to any hill residents once their houses have been demolished. What do you think."

Jed answered the question with a smile. His mind had drifted off once again. One day he's shooting at rabbits and squirrels to feed his daughter and the next, well, he wasn't rich and he wasn't going to be everyone's best friend, but he was retired. He wouldn't have to deal with all the pitfalls of wealth, all that sin and temptation, and neither would his children. The town would be better off, and maybe the nation wouldn't need his nephew out in Iraq, getting shot at by towelheads in an oil war. The displeasure showed on Pearl's face. She probably wasn't looking at the big picture like Jed was. She probably hadn't made the connection any of this had to her getting her son back, but her mind didn't work like Jed's, and that's one of the things she didn't like about him. Now, he'd be living at least as well as her, and a lot closer, but at least neither one of them would have to deal with each other outside of family stuff. Jed's smile widened, as he thought of how Pearl treating him kindly was scarier than anything in his dream the night before. This was probably the best disappointment he would ever have.

things to do in rogers park

2007-03-31T12:12:00.001-07:00

[this is an unedited version of a piece that ran in last month's issue of The Machine Media, which can be found online at themachinemedia.com]

It's weird watching the neighborhood you grew up in change, especially when it's changing in a way that doesn't allow room for you to come back. I grew up in Rogers Park back when it was the type of shithole I could brag about. I could go to a roughneck part of the city and when I said I was from Rogers Park, it was okay that I was from the North Side. To some people Rogers Park was all Latin Kings and Blackstones and some poor baby falling out of a window every summer. To others it was hippie heaven, full of cafes full of bearded old kooks who want to tell you about orgies and Abby Hoffman. There was always some kind of détente, where the thugs would ease the hippies' collective white guilt, and the hippies would go to community meetings and fight the aldermen to keep the rents low enough for just about anyone to move in. To my old friend Mike, Rogers Park was the place where his Mom got arrested for selling crack. For Ivan, it was where his parents finally bought a house once they made their money. For my father, it was a place where I would grow up knowing blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians. I always thought it was a nice place to live, even if I wasn't allowed outside on my own until I was twelve.

Rogers Park isn't really like that now, not anymore. Joe Moore wants to turn the whole place into condos, but hopefully he won't make it past this next election. About half of the old businesses down on Sheridan have been eaten up by banks and chains like Starbux and Chipotle, but not all of the change has been bad and, thankfully, not everything has changed about Rogers Park.

Here's a list of places you can go the next time you find yourself as far North and as far East as you can be without leaving the city.

Albion House – One of the city's first punk clubs was Oz, a gay bar on Greenleaf that had constant run-ins with the police during its short life, but it's been generations since that place came and left its mark. The Adelphi Theater and the Independent Video Alliance are both gone, and the Chicago Punk Shows Collective recently dissolved their relationships with No Exit Café and The Waiting Room. Like the kids from IVA and the Adelphi, they've moved their operations down South, so right now, the Albion House is the only spot in East Rogers where you can regularly catch quality punk and hardcore shows. From the outside, it doesn't look like a punk house, and that's why it works. The cats that live there know their neighbors and pay their bills. They treat everyone who comes in with respect, and because that respect is returned, they're willing to open their basement to local and touring bands such as Fourth Rotor, Sin Orden, Caustic Christ, Bludwulf, and Ohuzaru for cheap, all-ages, BYOB shows.

Alice & Friends – Vegan deserts are yummy.

Armadillo's Pillow – Old books are often cheap because they smell funny.

Bruno's Lounge – Bruno's is a dirty bar filled with creepy old men and savvy Loyola alcoholics. Unlike other neighborhood bars like The Oasis, the creeps aren't trying to fuck the Jesuits here; it's a bar for drunks who want nothing to do with the outside. If the bartender knows you, he's kinda nice, and if he doesn't, he's still pretty funny.

Deluxe Diner – It's been years since The Deluxe changed their menu from what they served when they were called Stacks & Steaks but people still complain about the fact that they don't have waffle fries anymore. The late-night service is usually pretty terrible because the next-closest 24 hour diner is the slightly-more-disgusting Standee's Snack'n Dine in Edgewater. I suggest the mozzarella sticks, they're absolutely disgusting.

Glenwood Mural – One of the best murals in the city runs along the West Side of Glenwood just South of Morse. It's about fifteen years old and starting to fade, but still the brightest, most colorful thing in the hood. A million sets of eyes, belonging to voodoo mutants, jazzbos, and reanimated cartoon skeletons, stare out at you from the wall as you walk down the cobblestone street.

Ennui – The Atomic Café, The Cocoabean, and Honest Don's have gone the way of the dinosaur. Get coffee here. Play board games. Fall in love.

Heartland Café – A great old hippy joint. The waitstaff is all beautiful women with dreadlocks and glasseyed men who may or may not be strung out as they take your order. Buffalo burgers aren't all they're cracked up to be, but their soggy sweet potato fries taste better than they should. There are a lot of obnoxious regulars who want to impress you, but they're harmless and amusing. Also, there's vegetarian food and booze.

Indian Boundary Park – Except for the playground at Loyola Beach, the parks in East Rogers all suck. They're so overrun with gangbangers that some time in the late 80s, the city decided that they would stop fixing them up and let the kids play in the alleys. That decision motivated the community to buildup Indian Boundary Park. The park exists on what was once the boundary between the city of Chicago and Pottawatomie Indian Land, which means that a lot of people died for the fun you're having. There's a fountain and a lagoon, which are both fun-slash-beautiful, a number of tennis courts which are pretty meh, and a small zoo which is equal parts depressing and awesome. What makes the park noteworthy is its playground, a village of wooden castles and houses full of swings and tubes and tunnels made of old tractor tires. This is the only place I have ever successfully played hide-and-seek as a grown man.

In One Ear – You may not hear the city's best poetry at the In One Ear, but you will hear the most earnest. Career poets tend to shun this place, making room for people who need get something off their chest and genuinely want to move you. Founded nearly 20 years ago at No Exit, it takes place every Wednesday night at the Heartland hosted by Pete Wolf and Shahbaz Shah.

The Jackhammer – This leather bar has recently started putting on shows with acts like The Reptoids and Flesh Tones Burlesque. Also, I've heard it's a good place to meet dudes for rough, anonymous sex.

J.B. Alberto's Pizza – You're stoned. Too stoned to move. It's three in the morning. J.B. Alberto's still delivers. They have cheese fries.

Lost Eras - This costume shop keeps shitty hours but it's still a costume shop.

Loyola Beach (and better secret beaches) – People who grew up in Chicago may remember how year-after-year, halfway through summer the beaches would fill up with dead fish. Morbid, five year old Eric lab Rat would carry them home by the pail-full. I remember the feel of their dried scales and their puckered sunken eyes. I don't remember why I would take the time to collect them. Either way, when the corpses started to overwhelm the little beach a few blocks away, my parents would take me to Loyola Beach. Loyola was, and is, the neighborhood's good beach, with its modern playground, its arts wall, and its sculptures, but it's not the best. North of Loyola are a number of small beaches, many of which the cops have a hard time patrolling. Some are isolated by fenced-in private beaches which serve to isolate them more. They are a perfect place to have an intimate evening in private or down forties with friends when there's nowhere else to go.

Midnight Basketball – 24 hours a day, all summer long at the courts just north of Loyola Beach.

Megamall – Yep. There's a Megamall in Rogers Park. It's on Clark Street and is just like the Logan Square Megamall except there aren't enough building code violations for the city to shut it down.

Mess Hall – Mess Hall is an experimental gallery space on Glenwood that tends to focus on political art and interactive events. In 2006 they hosted clothing swaps, brunchlucks and sewing workshops as well as shows like Fresh Cuts (an exhibition of hand-painted signs) and Contested Chicago (an installation documenting the ongoing gentrification of Pilsen). One ongoing series is Hardcore Histories, an open discussion about punk music and politics with topics ranging from "Vegetarianism and Veganism in Punk Rock" and "Herstory of Hardcore" to histories of Swedish and Canadian hardcore music, often ending in YouTube video screenings and Bring Your Own 7" listening parties.

Morse – Morse smells like pee.

Morseland – A bar. With food. You can regularly hear hip-hop acts like Small Change and Copperpot here.

No Exit Café – Unconventional theatre, genderfuck poetry slams, and political burlesque. I'm still kicking myself for missing the John Wayne Gacy play that ran a few months back.

Oasis – The "Hoasis" is a dreadful four am bar full of desperate skanks of all genders aggressively looking for love. Also pool.

Ras Dashen – This is a great first-date restaurant. It's also a great restaurant to go and watch people stumble through first dates, and a fairly good place to take your parents who've never had Ethiopian before. You eat family style on a plate made of spongy injera bread. I've heard it argued that Ethiopian Diamond is better, or has better food with less atmosphere, but I've never been to Ethiopian Diamond, and can only recommend Ras Dashen.

West Rogers Park – West Rogers Park is like a whole different world. Where East Rogers stands as one of Chicago's most diverse neighborhoods, West Rogers is one of its most segregated, with distinct borders between Indians, Pakistanis, Russians, Jews, and Koreans, and that's just Devon. I assure you, I'm leaving some out. Personally, I'd recommend the stretch of Indian restaurants between Western and Rockwell, but I never go to the good ones. My fat ass likes buffets too much.

Waldorf School– If you have children, and you want them to grow up to be confident, sensitive, artistic people who get laid all the time and believe that there is a little bit of magic inherent in their own personal existence, send them to Waldorf. If, however, you prefer that your children grow up able to hold down a job that sustains them, avoid Waldorf like the plague. Waldorf kids dream too much, and are too smart to stop dreaming to do bullshit work. I wish my parents could have afforded to send me to Waldorf as a kid, because every grown-up Waldorf kid I've met has been delightful.

Warren Park –Warren Park houses one of Chicago's only outdoor skate parks, and has ice skating in the winter.

WLUW – Three summers ago, some cops knocked on the door of the old Adelphi movie house and told the kids who lived there that they had been tipped off to a radio signal being broadcast from the building and that if it wasn't terminated, they would have to arrest them. I'm pretty sure that the cops don't have jurisdiction over pirate radio, and that the FCC would have to have intervened themselves, but it was the end of Red Line Radio either way, leaving WLUW (88.7 fm) as Roger Park's only radio station. A common misconception is that WLUW is Loyola's student radio station. Actually, WLUW has a deal with Loyola that they can broadcast from the school's campus but must provide their own funds. Technically, Loyola is a community station, which means that with a little training, anyone in the community can have their own show on WLUW. Currently the station has two punk shows (Underground Communiqué and Reality Radio), a World music show hosted by The Chicago Reader's Peter Margasak, and a bevy of other shows including (shameless, unprofessional plug here) my show, Two Slaps Radio, which focuses on the roots and derivatives of Funk and Soul music, airing Tuesday Mornings from 2 to 4 am.

[currently listening to "Dreams Interrupted" by the Glaxo Babies]

the top 5 snowstorms of the last 7 years

2007-03-31T12:11:00.001-07:00

So a week ago, I thought that I loved the snow, that the snow was magical, that thirty degrees was as warm as I needed the world to be to stay content. A week ago, I was a fool. The snow clouds my mind like it clouds my windows. Now that it's all gone and my bike has been returned to me, I don't think I'll ever need it again. It makes me stay inside too much, and write too much bad poetry.

Here's something that was relevant one and three weeks ago today, but not now, and hopefully not again, ever:

Leaving the radio station at four in the morning, I find that the whole ground is covered in snow. The footsteps of the DJ who's come to replace me have already been disappeared and it's still coming down strong. The streets were empty, and even the birds and rabbits who'd stayed in to tough it out this winter had gone into hiding.

It was my own personal snowstorm. No one would get to see it as I was seeing it. In a few hours, the salt trucks would come and the morning rush would force people to trek across the field of and transform it into low octane sludge. The whole surface of the city will have shifted by the time I reached the car.

Under the streetlamp halogen, the snow glittered like glass when it's crushed into powder, like Lisa Frank's vision of a snowstorm, like a landscape painted on tinfoil.

I've always liked the snow, much to the bemusement of everyone I've ever said this too.Here's a list of my top five favorite snowstorms.

5. Sex. We'd been testing the waters for weeks with flirty text messages and emails, so even though the snow was piling up on the interstate and there was no good reason to be out, I was not to be deterred. I picked ________ up from a poker game. There was no slickness to it. I don't play poker and everyone knew what was going on, but tact wasn't much of an issue. We raced down the street for a fervent one night stand and twice the car spun out into the oncoming traffic lane. It was alright though. The street was empty, save for one lone cop, who looked at us, facing the wrong direction, and waved us on.

4. Love. It was back when I lived in Wicker Park. Erin and I had left a show at the A-Zone, back when they were doing a lot of vegan dinners and film festivals. We were too drunk to wait for the Blue Line, so we stumbled down Milwaulkee. Everything was quiet until we got to the six corners, of course, where it was lit up and noisy again. That intersection is quiet for a total of one hour a day The wolfman was howling and people were streaming in and out of Flash Taco, but by the time we got to the park it was all quiet. As we walked through the trees and the playground, the snow fell quietly, like a scene from a movie.

3. Childlike glee. The pressures of the world were building up and I was starting to feel detached so I went to the party with the highest concentration of friends, even though it was in Wrigleyville. It was your traditional drinking-and-dancing themed party, but someone had moved the keg into the middle of the dance floor so that no one could really do either. Brandon was on the same wavelength, and already pocketing shit from the bathroom, and was ready to leave. Jeff, Margaret and her roommate joined us as we raced back to the friendly confines of Humbolt Park, where we climbed onto Jeremy's roof and started a snowball fight. People on the street cursed us in Spanish and tried to tag us with bottles, but we just fell over laughing, with clawed, cold hands and frostbit, drunken cheeks. Maybe because we'd come from such a pathetic scene earlier, but it was here that we really felt like we were the only people in the city alive.

2. That weird part of a relationship early on where you feel pangs that may very well be the first signs of love, but since no one is willing to say it, the feeling is manifested through decadent sex. As we left the Village North we were greeted by a half foot of snow that wasn't there when we started. We still had stars in our eyes from the movie, and we were ready to whip the night into something perfect. We decided that we needed pie, so ______ and I piled into her car and skidded towards Baker's Square. There may not be anything on this Earth less sexy than the thought of two chubby people ripping each other's clothes off and incorporating a full cake of French Silk into sex on a creaky twin bed, but as one of those chubby people, I can't think of a better way to spend a snowy evening. The chocolate cakes onto the hair and skin, and hardens quicker than you'd like, leaving you looking more like a scat freak than someone who's just fucked their way through a food fight, but there was something about the grossness that made it all the better. It was stupid. We laughed about it, and it took the pressure off of the word that was dancing around in our heads.

1. Magick. It was my first year away from home, and I was spending more time at Brianna and Liz's than I was at my own house. I was supposed to be getting ready for a trip I would take in the morning, my annual trip to spend Hannukah with relatives in Florida, but there was a blizzard outside and I didn't want to leave. We had found an old VHS of Brianna's, movies taped off the television when she was a child. We watched Hook and Willy Wonka, complete with nostalgaic commercials and bumpers for WGN, knowing full well that we were the music makers and we were the dreamers, and the only reason I left was because the next movie on the tape was Willow, and if I saw a full minute, I would stay for the whole thing and I still hadn't packed. I walked to Lawrence, where the bus runs 24 hours between the Blue Line and the Red Line, shivering in front of the Blockbuster Video that Tom and I used top go to when we were stoned. The bus never came though, after ten, twenty, and thirty minutes, but a car did.

"Heyyyy. Get in! I'm going all the way to Sheridan."

The driver was old, older than you might expect to see someone driving at this hour. He was Korean, and he seemed harmless so I got in. A few blocks later he starts telling me about the car. It's borrowed; he totalled his a week ago. It was just nice to be out of the snow for a minute.

I took the train to my parents' home and borrowed their car. It was that perfect hour where I got to have the snowstorm and Lake Shore Drive all to myself. These rides are my favorite. Lake Shore Drive at night may be the most beautiful way to see the city, and when it's snowing, you can't help but to be awed. I went to the dorm and threw as much as I could into a suitcase, and rode back with the skyline in the rearview, nodding to Kid A or whatever I was listening to ad nauseum at the time, smiling and feeling happy to myself that I was alive and able to experience it. I don't get a lot of nights like those, even when it's snowing.

[some names have been omitted because I'm a gentleman. If you would like to have your name omitted, you may want to consider having sex with me]

west side anecdotes

2007-03-31T12:10:00.001-07:00

1. overheard on the way to the bike shop, at north and central, hilarious and sad

Woman1: You better come around the corner and pick up yo' goddamn baby, she standin in the doorway cryin.
Woman2: She gonna keep standin' and cryin', I'm tryin' to order some.. goddamn food.

2. as my bike broke down on the way to Sarah's, at roosevelt and menard, my hero

Big ups to the anonymous dude on the way to McDonalds who offered to help. You weren't able to fix shit, but you did help brush away the rain cloud over my head, and I thank you for it.

If you're reading this, you'll be happy to know that I ghetto rigged the chain back on long enough to replace the links, using the laws of PHYSICS!

A metaphor for life: I love my trike but I swear every time someone fixes it, two

not just for bored housewives and dramatic suicides anymore...

2007-03-31T12:09:00.000-07:00

it's the bathtub!

I just had another one of those super-luxury alone-time experiences

a shampoo bubblebath
with the jets on, and a fruit punch mint hookah
(yeah. I'm an old woman. I don't care)

it was a celebration to mark the transition from depressive to manic

it started the other day when I chopped off most of my hair
(which is something I do when I need to get rid of bad vibes)

the reflexion in the nargila, though distorted by the convex
showed someone I kinda like:

receding hairline, big gut, strong jaw, personally meaningful tattoos
I recommend it

---

HOMEMADE SANTERIA

I'm going to hold a ceremony sometime next week
to finish exorcising the demons of 2007

it will be the Jewish Passover, and the last week of Catholic lent,
the plan is to bike down to the Underpass Virgin Mary
drink mushroom tea, and burn something meaningful

I would like to have a minyan (ten people)
but any holy number will do (three, seven, nine, thirteen)

it has the potential for catharsis, but I'm shooting for maximum joy and possible enlightenment
if you'd like to participate,
please bring

a heart full of love
a small, personal item that you can burn inside a dollarstore votive
and a joke (I like jokes)

please refrain from bringing or consuming
an outward air of cynicism
synthetic drugs, alcohol, or meat

shoot me a line if you're down

[currently listening to "Hyena" by Siouxie and the Banshees]

four year olds who know that they're cute

2007-03-31T12:08:00.001-07:00

Jake: Yeah, we don't know what the theme of her fifth birthday will be.
ELR: I remember mine... the theme was we're in the backyard and we have a pinata and I'm gonna cry when I don't get what I want.
Maiya: We had a pinata at for the Superbowl.
Jake: Yeah, it was a William Refridgerator Perry pinata.
Maiya: But it broke.
Jake: Why did it break, Maiya?
Maiya: Because...we had one.

So what exactly is a 'group interview', you ask?

2007-03-31T12:07:00.000-07:00

A group interview is the little indignity you suffer, after deciding to apply at a single-digit-dollar-an-hour retail store, but before they tell you that they won't even consider you until after you've had a drug test

[Currently listening to "Rehab" by Amy Winehouse]

This week in pop music

2007-03-22T11:06:00.000-07:00

1. Saturday was the ten year anniversary of the first time I smoked pot. I don't talk to the girls anymore; when they dropped out, they dropped out hard. Mental institutions. Heroin. They've both recovered and moved back to the Northwest side, but remain unrequited crushes. I still see Dan though. He's one of the people who offered to fix my resume, and I went to a show of his on Mondays.

Sometime this weekend will be the third anniversary of the party where I met Sarah. I wonder what the last few years would've been like if either of the first two parties I'd been to that night hadn't sucked.

Yesterday was the fourth anniversary of the last time I got arrested, at the first protest against the Iraq war. That night was so amazing. I sat in the jail cell, muddy, cracking jokes, a little buzzy off the Xanax someone gave me in the paddywagon and every few minutes one of the prisoners who walked by on the way to their cell would be someone I knew: a poet, a friend from school, a dj from the Wizard. It felt like we were doing something important, chanting the same chants people were chanting during Vietnam even though we'd grown up rolling our eyes at the sound of the word like Pavlovian cynics.

We took over the expressway. Ramon lost a shoe. I got the shit kicked out of me on CNN, the whole time hamming it up and yelling I am a nonviolent protester! I am not resisting arrest!

Sure you're not, asshole. Fuck you!

Ken had his day in court today for trying to keep the CIA out of NEIU, and Tristyn gets arrested on a monthly basis. I've voted against the people that voted for the war; I've spoken out against it, on the stage, on the streets, in blogs and petitions and on the radio, but I don't feel like I've done enough, even though I don't think that what Ken and Tristyn are doing is effective.

One of the jokes I told, with my face against the bars, so the prisoners against the wall could hear, as they waited to get their zipcuffs removed:

Q: How many protestors does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. Protestors don't change a god damn thing.

2. I unbuttoned my shirt pocket to see what the piece of paper was inside. It turned out not to be a piece of paper, but a condom promoting a TBS show called My Boys (tagline: I'm not interested in your mind). Since when do I carry around condoms in buttoned shirt pockets (especially promotional ones)?

3. I think of million dollar ideas when I'm waiting for the bus on warm nights.

3a. As I watched the taxicabs drive by, each time wondering if it would be easier to just take one than wait for the bus, I noticed that about half of them had advertisements. That's when I thought of....

Taxicab Radio

I want to start a company that makes prerecorded radio shows to play in taxis.

There's a weird law that most people don't know about, that says that if you have a store, or a restaurant, or something like that, a public place of business, if it's over a certain size you can't play cds or tapes or anything from your private music collection. It has something to do with FCC licenses. One way that smaller stores get around this is by playing the radio. Commercial radio stations are exempt because they pay their own licensing fees; noncommercial stations exempt themselves from the fees by playing a required percentage of community programming. The downside to this is that sometimes your customers will be listening to commercials and public service announcements. As a HUGE chain, Starbucks gets around this by selling Starbucks-friendly music, and playing it in store. This is good for them because it streamlines the experienvce of shopping at any one of their stores. Companies that are inbetween sizes can buy restaurant tapes (that's probably not what they're called and they probably aren't tapes anymore). Restaurant tapes hold maybe six hours of music, and are played over and over, so that even though the staff knows they repeat, the customers won't. There are all sorts of tapes, designed to affect people different ways. One restaurant's tape might encourage people to stay a long time and build up a large bill, another's might play music with a quick tempo that encourages people to eat and leave quickly.

You know how some videogames have soundtracks? One of the joys of Grand Theft Auto is that there are fake radio stations you can listen to in the cars, of a number of different genres. You can listen to hip hop, country, classic rock, alternative rock, dance and talk and each station will sound like you're listening to a really good hour of a real radio station, with (over the top) fake DJs and ads.

I'm thinking of a cross between a restaurant tape, and a whole array of realistic stations with impeccable taste. The only difference would be that the ads would be real and the DJs would be bland and minimal. Most patrons wouldn't realize they aren't listening to the radio, and they wouldn't care. If they were paying attention to the songs they'd be more inclined to like them but it wouldn't matter because either way, Sbarro or Intel or whomever could be guaranteed that they' would be subliminally getting the ad.

Check it out:

Costs:
Money to pay the cab drivers to use the tapes.
Money to get people to contact both cab drivers and prospective advertisers.
Money to make the tapes.
Money to license popular music.

Returns
Money from advertisers who want in on the deal.
Payola from record labels who want their artists hyped.

Possible Problem and Solution
No way of knowing whether the driver is playing the music or whether the tapes are being heard. Use some sort of Nielsen Box device that plays proprietary tapes/disks and broadcasts a signal back to computers at the office (this would be another cost to consider). Poll drivers with a bonus if they can show receipts for the amount of time peolpe were in the cabb and, as an incentive to companies, charge less than the cost of a radio ad in a choice city, with an option of a discounted rate for placing ads in the tapes nationwide.

It's so pervasive and obnoxious it just might make someone rich.

3b. This one took less thought, on a shorter busride, but I could really use a

Waterproof Laptop

I don't know about the rest of the world but I would have a much healthier mind if I was able to do the majority of my computering from the bathtub.

An easy way to do this would be to put a regular laptop in a clear bag but leave it open always, but that's not enough to let you use everything. We would need to hsve things like the internet, cd/dvd drives, USB hubs, and possible waterproof headphones connected wirelessly to an airtight machine with a fairly long range.The keyboard and mouse would consist of a touchscreen.

The only downside is, I can't think of how to power up the machine.

There are no wateproof laptops on the market as of right now. But a quick google search tells me that Japan's CF-Y5 laptop, which is slated to hit America's shores this year, uses a special drainage system to make it more water resistant. The future is now.

4. Despite warning myself not to, I've gone back on diet pills, this time through the legit-ish counseling of a shady doctor. They seem to be working, although I feel a bit different in social situations. Have patience with me if I start acting like a jerk or a flake, but tell me as soon as you realize it.

5. Despite two layers of fake name, my boss found my myspace page after I published an article on one of my assignments, so I have to keep worky-blogs friends-only, at least until I land something new.

There's this cute Polish girl who works at the front desk of the temp agency where I work. Everyone at the last gig was calling her a bitch but she'd always been nice to me. Then I wrote an article where I made an offhand remark about cranky Poles who looked like they'd never learned to set their VCRs. Now she's real cold to me (if only she knew I was being bigoted against old people, and not her motherland).

Piwo!

6. I don't know who I can call after midnight anymore, that will actually be awake. I need to stop hanging out with lameoid mid-twentysomethings. Where is it that nineteen-to-twenty-one year olds go to, that I can meet them at, and how much is does ot cost?

7. I'm either overpunctuating this blog, or finally beating commas into submission. Take that, commas!

8. Whenever someone asks me what type of girl I'm into, I tell them that I really like nerds and I really like sluts, and if they are a nerdy slut, all the better. I hope Sarah takes no offense at either characterization. I'm not sure if she's a nerd, slut, or both, but I really like her.

9. The job application for Urban Outfitters has a lot of questions about what I'm reading and listening too. I was trying to tweak my consumer habits so that (a) it looked like I had consumer habits and (b) I was alternately lamer and cooler than I really am. Is TV on the Radio too lame? Is Spank Rock still too underground? What other bands do I know of that real people know of? The store was playing Lily Allen... wasn't that last year? I threw in the Buzzcocks, for a wild card classic pick. I figure it would go over better than Lizzy Mercier Descloux or Liliput. Is that pandering? I just want cheap jeans.

10. Currently listening to: White noise and thunder.

like many of you, i have a bathroom. lets bond over shared experience.

2007-03-04T18:40:00.000-08:00

ELR: Have either of you ever gone to the bathroom and looked down and been absolutely horrified, and then realized a few minutes earlier you poured some leftover clam chowder into the tub a few minutes earlier.

Cupcake: No. Have you ever gone to the bathroom and looked down and your shit looks just kie Alf?

xX0Xx: You guys are both fuckin gross.

[currently reading "Moonchildren" by Michael Weller]

How The City of Chicago Will Fuck Your Vote Up and it Still Won't Matter

2007-03-04T18:39:00.001-08:00

[an edited version of this piece appeared on gapersblock.com]

Congratulations on your assignment to serve as a judge of election at the February 27, 2007 Municipal General Election. This letter will serve as your notice to attend a mandatory training class. You will receive an extra $50 for attending this class...In order to familiarize new judges with the voting equipment and procedures, it is crucial that each new judge of election is trained prior to the election.

"Pardon me, Ma'am. I'm here for the off-track betting."
"That's moved to Jackson, Sir. We're doing election judge training."
"So it ain't here no more?"
"No sir. If you want, you can take the elevator back down."
"Naw. I think I'll linger."

Like one out of every five people I am likely to smell today, this man reeks of bad wine. He's probably cold, so we let him wander around for a few minutes, before leaving on his own. Working in the landmark Page Brothers building, adjacent to the iconic Chicago Theater on State Street, is surprisingly depressing. The few years the building spent as an Off Track Betting parlor really took their toll on the place. The carpet is green and stained. It is that sickly shade of green that always seems to associate itself with gambling and heartbreak. There's a matching green faux-marble trim traveling the length of the room that looks neither like the plastic it's made of or the marble it's supposed to resemble. Big windows open up to the State and Lake el station, and the constant flow of people coming and going really makes you feel like you're stuck.

This is the end of my journey learning the ins and outs of Illinois' new voting machines, in which I've traveled across the city training election judges. At Polonia Banquet Hall in Bridgeport, I dealt with cranky old Poles who looked like they never learned to set their VCRs. On a basketball court at Truman College, I worked with halfway house rejects and a surprising number of off-kilter goths who prefer not to hold down regular jobs. At Columbus Park's lovely Refectory at Jackson and Central, I worked with driven, well-dressed activist types determined to run their local elections without any outside funny business. And now Downtown, I've got an average mix of the elderly and impoverished, neither exceptionally old nor exceptionally poor. It kinda feels like a recap of everything I've seen thus far.

It's a misnomer to call just one of the voting machines electronic. In reality, one machine uses a touchscreen and another, the so-called paper ballot, uses an optical scanner. In the last election, judges generally tried to steer voters away from the touchscreen. Officially, this is because only one person at a time can use the machine. A common misperception is that thee touch screens have been added to ease the transition from paper to electronic ballots, which seems inevitable, but in reality each precinct has one touchscreen machine because that is the minimum required by the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Unofficially, however, a lot of judges in the last election refused to set up, or allow access to these machines, out of fear that they would fuck up royally. Hopefully, none of these judges were my students.

If you want to use the touchscreen, you'll have to ask your election judge for it specifically. They will then activate a card with a chip on the back that you will insert into the machine. You are given the option to vote in English, Spanish, or Chinese. If you are unable to read any of these languages, you are allowed to have a translator present with you. To vote for a candidate, touch the box next to the candidate's name. To change your vote, touch the box again. It is impossible to overvote on this machine. There are no hole-punches, no chads, and thus no fear of leaving them pregnant or dangled. There is a zoom function for the visually impaired, an audio program for the blind, a stylus for those whose fingers are too plump to touch just one box at a time, and a sip-and-puff straw setup for those who lack personal mobility. To write in a candidate, choose the bottom box and a mock-up computer keypad will pop up. If you do not spell the candidate's name as it generally appears, it is up to the judges' discretion whether or not to accept this vote. When you are finished with a page, press 'Next'. After the last page, you will arrive at the review screen. All offices left blank will show up in red. All offices voted on will appear in black. To return to any of the offices, touch the screen. To continue, press 'Next'. A printed record of your votes will cycle through the printer. This is an official ballot, and your last chance for review. It is also a verifiable paper trail. If you press 'Make Changes', it will void the ballot and take you back to the review screen. If you press 'Cast Ballot', it will do just that.

The new machines, manufactured by Sequoia, are perfect for Chicago politics. Just using them, you can tell that Sequoia was the lowest bidder. After a few weeks, the card activator starts getting weird error messages and stops reading the results from the ballot scanner, the lid stops closing on the touchscreen, the machines reset out of sync with one another, and the printers start to jam. At the same time, none of the machines have fucked up in a way where you can't tell they are fucking up, and even though they may not get the job done quickly, they'll get it done right (eventually). This is a big deal, especially when stacked up against their biggest competitor.

Last month, Ross Kincaid had some keys cut, based on a picture on Diebold's website. He then successfully used these keys to open up each of Diebold's voting machines. The results of this are available on Ross' website SploitCast. Realizing the possibility for mischief, Sequoia decided not to use the kind of keys that can be cut at the local Five and Dime. More importantly, Sequoia has announced that their computers don't use a commercially available operating system (as opposed to Diebold's machines, which use a Microsoft OS). This is not entirely true, though. While Sequoia's machines use a proprietary operating system, they still rely heavily on Microsoft-based components. A few years ago, just before the 2004 presidential election, some important pieces of code were found available on an ftp site. The theory was that this code could be exploited and a virus could be installed on one of Sequoia's touch screen machines, that could take control of the vote compiler. Sequoia's defense is that such a breach would be easily noticed, as the tabulated votes would be so out of sync with the machine's paper record. To successfully rig an election, hackers would have to attack dozens, if not hundreds of voting machines so subtly that no one would notice that they were hacked. Remember in the movie Office Space, the analogy that Ron Livingston's character made, about stealing a single penny from a billion Take-A-Penny, Leave-A-Penny trays to become a millionaire? It would be something like that, and I'm not talking about ousting a president or a mayor here, just an alderman. As it stands, electronic voting accounts for well under five per cent of the votes that will be cast in this election. Thus, there is no reason to fear that the Daley regime will corrupt the machine to steer the election in their favor. The stakes are too high, the work is too hard, and the returns, per precinct, would be too slim. Similarly, Da Mare doesn't have to lose any sleep worrying that leftist hacktivists will rig the election for a big upset.

Even though it's unlikely that the machines will be tampered with, chances are something is gonna fuck up. Just like the political structure of the Windy City, Sequoia's voting machines are deeply flawed, shoddily made, and completely susceptible to human error. At the same time, they are made with so many failsafes that even an army of idiots couldn't fuck them up enough to hurt the election, the same way that decades of City Hall corruption hasn't stopped the city from running smoothly, if slowly. The roads get salted, the garbage gets picked up and the votes get counted. Each machine has a paper record of not just the successful, but the unsuccessful ballots so nothing gets left unaccounted for. The paper ballots are backed up by digital files and the digital ballots are backed up by paper. The files are saved onto a cartridge and a memory stick, respectively. At the end of the day, these files are consolidated and the results are transmitted to election central. If consolidation fails, then the cartridge and thumbstick are manually uploaded, and if one or both of them have somehow been erased, then there's still the paper ballot to check against.

"For $52 million, I expect to have better results here than in Baghdad."

The day after the last election, Tony Peraica raised a big stink about corruption delaying the results of his contested race with Todd Stroger for Cook County Board President. The fact of the matter was that the results did come late, not because of corruption but because less than 60 per cent of the votes initially transmitted. There are a number of reasons for this. The simplest is that a lot of polling places are housed in old schools and churches, with thick walls of made of lead and concrete and that the signal just can't escape. The answer that is probably most embarassing to Sequoia is that the machines don't work well. As I've said before, it only takes a few weeks worth of use before the machines start to act as if they've got gremlins or poltergeists working inside them. The answer that's most embarrassing to the city is that the judges are incompetent.

Looking out at my class feels like looking out into the world Lou Dobbs must see every morning, just before he starts hate mongering: there are giggling groups of pregnant teens, platinum grilled gentlemen with thugged-out pictures of Gumby and The Pillsbury Doughboy on their hoodies, and every variety of wino, crackhead, geriatric, and English-as-a-not-even-close-to-second language citizen, and the people that aren't some sort of ghetto caricature are all cranky old fogies who seem to be mad at the world for changing. I'm probably being a little too hard on the judges, but it's confirmation bias. When I regularly expect to work with shitty judges, and I regularly get shitty judges, then maybe I start to overlook the rest, the ones who see their job as important and help my day go by smoother. As I said, the majority of the judges I train are very old or very poor. That doesn't make them bad judges, that's just the general demographics.

So why are the demographics what they are? And why do I have so much to complain about? Election judges are paid $100 to work on election day from five in the morning until at least seven at night, usually later. That's fourteen hours, seven-twelfths of a day. These people are only given $7.14 per hour, about 75 cents over minimum wage, per hour to deal with every single asshole in a neighborhood, if they aren't kept overtime. At that rate, it's really hard to find honest, qualified people to get the job done. So why doesn't the city raise the pay? It probably won't surprise you to learn that it's more complicated than that. The amount that judges are paid is not decided at the city or county level, but by the state, and most of the state doesn't have the same problems as Chicago. So if our election judges got paid more, so would every election judge, meaning the state would be throwing millions of dollars into Niles, Galena, and Zion to fix problems they don't have. Outside of that, there are a lot of election judges, over ten thousand in Chicago alone, accounting for well over a million dollars an election. It's not an easy buck, and even if you had every civic minded person in the city (people like the judges I worked with on the West Side, who really truly believe in making the election run smoothly), you're still going to have empty slots and all you're gonna get to fill them is people who have nothing better to do. On election morning, you're still going to be recruiting at bus stations and homeless shelters, just like the city is going to do on Tuesday.

P.S. If you can get out and vote tomorrow, and put in a vote against Daley, Colon, or Moore, please do. At least if you vote against Joe Moore, it might do some good...and you can see this blog come to life!

[currently watching "Wicked City"]

"someone stop the chickens, cuz they make too much noise" (the dream journal is back)

2007-03-04T18:38:00.000-08:00

This is a reference to a song that I'm only kind of sure exists. I think someone yells it at the end of a song about insanity that my Dad used to have on one of his mixtapes. Maybe it was Todd Rundgren or something. It was espoused in a dream of mine by a wigged-out art teacher/janitor (*I think that's symbolism, that the art teacher is also the trashman, so let's make a note of it it).

The ride back from Milwaulkee took too long in the blizzard so my parents couldn't drop me off at my house. I wasn't willing to take the train back from theirs at midnight in search of fun that may or may not exist, so I set up camp here. For the last month I've been working these hours that have kept me from reaching lucidity, and I've been increasingly more frazzled with each day, taking solace in the fact that it's only a month. Well the month's up on Monday and I've figured out what I need to do in order to sleep and think. So I have, for two days in a row. With a big empty Sunday sprawled out in front of me, I figured I could play a brain experiment. I loaded up a bunch of mutant disco (you know, that shit that we used to call no wave?), some Aorta, some Mott the Hoople, and some weirdo funk on a loop and slept in a room adjacent to it. I was going to break my brain into thinking weird when it woke up.

I'm not sure how it happened, but in my dream I ended up acting in a musical at my old high school. Arvo was in it too, and where I felt trapped, he was thriving (*is this more symbolism? Friendship jealousy?). It was a terrible production that took itself far too seriously and had me playing a conniving, Iago-type (from Aladdin-of course, not Othello) who just happened to be a lisping hair-dresser, or pretending to be, posing as some sort of handmaid to the female lead on some fiendish assignment. The voice I was doing for the play sounded like a cross between Smeagle the Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies and John Leguizamo as a sloth in Ice Age, which begs the question of how many shitty goddamn movies can one dream remind me I've seen?

As I became dissatisfied with the production, I realized that I was losing my grasp on the lines. There were no scripts anywhere in the building so I tried to hide from the production.

-There was a side-story in the dream. My cousin Ryan, who is kind of trapped in his situation in Florida, was trying to meet up with me and my sister but kept running into trouble. He finally made it there for opening night. (*This part of the dream happened because I was asking about him earlier today but I think that my brain was trying to tell me something about the duality of our situations and how I wasn't being self-reliant enough)

One day, when everyone was gone. I got up on stage and tried to get my lines out, grimacing in pain from the apparent hole in my brain. It was at this point that the art teacher/janitor walked up. He was wearing blue overalls and looked like he'd been pretty burnt-out on acid in the 60s. He had long, blonde hair in a ponytail and wore dirty, blue overalls. "Oh, I remember you. You always liked to practice, even if no one wanted you here." He rambled a bit about the play and how overwhelming work was and then, under his breath, "someone stop the chickens cuz they make too much noise."

I laughed and he was surprised I got the reference. "Oh, you like Quiet Riot?" The band name didn't seem right, but I nodded because I really did like whoever played that song.

When remembering my lines was obviously not going to work, I decided to hide and sleep. I found a dark room but they found me, the people who cared about the play and their goons. Two heavyset black men grabbed me and closed the door begind them. I think they planned to rape me, to get me into line. I bit one and jabbed another with a pen, before escaping through the wings and the actors and the costumers and Orianna as stage director, and Arvo as whatever he was doing, to the woman in charge. It would probably be helpful if I remembered what happened as I talked to this God//Director/Woman/Puppetmaster character but I don't. The two men that chased me had caught up and my eyes opened.

I had broke my brain. The packed away treadmill in the corner of the room looked like a guy in a hoodie with a gun. The nighttable with the broken tv and remote, even though I recognized it as a nighttable with a broken tv and remote control, looked like a big square-headed monster man gesturing at me with another gun. I knew I could only make them go away by turning on the light, but turning on the light would mean a dash from the covers to the lightswitch, and until I made them go away, they could still get me, right?

With the lights on, the men were gone, but I didn't trust the machines, and now sitting at the computer, listening to Baby Huey and A Perfect Ratio, I keep looking over my shoulder. It's the darkness behind me. I turn on the TV to silence it, but the sound is arresting. It opens with a scream, and then a bunch of blurred Girls Gone Wild sex, followed by a surrealistic end of our broadcasting day when I change the channel to Adult Swim, and an ad for Zoobooks. Everything makes sense, it is all consistent with what should beon cable television at 5 in the morning but its more than I can handle.

My first thought, upon waking from my dream, was I need to get my trike fixed this week! It's something I was planning already but now I know it's important, it reminds me of a dream I had five years ago, where I jumped out of bed and yelled, involuntarily, that I need to lay off the drugs for a while. I don't know what would have happened, just that I'm sure that the advice, direct from my subconscious, is what kept me alive for another half decade.

Anecdote: At one point in the dream I was looking through the book of cassettes that made of the plays soundtracks. Some of them were old Disney tapes (I am a little surprised that, a decade after I taped over the last of the Disney tapes my Mom had left from the Daycare Center, I still remember exactly what they looked like and what made them different from other cassettes). Others were operas and marches with swastikas and luftwaffes on them (because every good musical has Nazis) and a bunch of blank tape reordings of the cast, and random sounds that were needed at different points of the play. Sitting across the table from Arvo, I joked that it was surprising how similar the soundtrack to a high school musical might resemble your own musical collection. The question still remains though... cassettes?

[currently listening to Pigbag]

state of the lab rat. 1st quarter 07

2007-03-04T18:37:00.000-08:00

Shit's gone crazy for the 07. I left for Egypt in mid-December with Sarah, and nothing's been the same since. Egypt was an interesting place. You might go to Europe or Mexico or some place and see signs in English and think the whole world is like that. I always figured that I could go anywhere, at least any big city and get by alright with my native tongue but it wasn't like that in Cairo. For a country that makes most of its money from tourism, Egypt could give two shits whether you or not you get Arabic.

I always thought I had a tough constitution from living in cities my whole life but the pollution really got to me. The whole trip we were taking taxis. They were these old Japanese Daimatsu-brand cars that looked like they were held together with rubber bands and twine, but they were dirt cheap (our most expensive ride, from one city to another, cost about ten dollars American) and were easier than public transportation, which was confusing and full of dudes had no reservations about trying to get a finger up Sarah's ass through her jeans.

Sarah had a few things going against her. She was lily white, wearing a septum ring, and had long (gorgeous) hair. There's a weird thing about women's hair in Egypt. Sarah dresses pretty modestly, especially as a visitor in a sexually reressive Moslem country, but on the street men looked at her like a whore. Sometimes the men stared so hard at her that I could feel it. Sometimes it wasn't staring but lewd (-seeming) comments, catcalls, and kissy noises, and when left unchecked in a crowded enough area that they could get away with it, they'd get grabby. A group of boys stacked in threes ride up on a moped yelling at us. I tell Sarah she should flash some leg or some cleavage and see if she can give one of them the most awkward erection of his life, but we never really stirred the pot. The thing is, a lot of local girls dress like sluts. They may not be showing a lot of skin, but there'll be these curvy jawdropper women thundering down the street in skintight clothes, and no one would bat an eye because their head is covered with a hijjab. It's a clunky analogy but it's kinda like a stripper wearing a crucifix. The hijjab has become such a symbol of piety that there's no reason to look beyond it. That's actually a way shitty analogy, and maybe it's more akin to a single girl wearing a wedding ring when she doesn't want to get picked up. It cuts through whatever might be construed as a mixed message. It says, in no uncertain terms, back the fuck off.

Exchange rates worked to our advantage, but there was a complex series of prices for anything that wasn't written down. For example, cab rides. Say you're staying at a hostel on Talaat Harb (in the neighborhood of the same name) and you want to go to the American University Dorms in Zemelek (where Sarah's sister lives). If you're a tourist and you don't know what's up, you're paying 30 pounds (6 bucks) and thinking it's a steal. If you're an outsider who speaks Arabic, however, you're begrudgingly paying 8 pounds ($1.50, give or take). The driver's holding a grudge because he only picked your white ass up for the fat tourist cash. You're holding a grudge because you know the locals are getting in cheaper. Then there's the Arab price. I pulled this off once or twice when I didn't have Sarah around to blow my cover. If we kept things businesslike with no small talk or bullshittery, I knew wnough Arabic to get around. They could tell I wasn't local with my long hair and mutton chops but figured I was still friendly, maybe I was from Jordan or Morocco, maybe I was an Arab from Spain (I got that a lot for some reason) and I paid three pounds (75 cents). I was surprised at how nitpicky we got over sums of money that meant nothing back home.

There's a lot more to the trip. Eating pigeon. Fighting with Sarah. Christmas in the Libyan desert. Kosheri and mystery meat from street carts. Going inside the great pyramid and marveling at the sphinx's butt (it has a tail!). People who live on highway medians. Hand crank tricycles and cemetary flea markets. Dealing with myself when I have no reason to continue being me as I know myself. Hopefully I'll write about it someday but this isn't how, and when isn't now.

I came back with next to no money, happy to find a few checks waiting for me. New Years wasn't great, but wasn't terrible. I had one trip ahead of me and I'd be moving out soon after. The house on Homer reeked of the ammonia scent of cat piss. I was at Red Lobster with Autumn when Tania called. Our negotiations with the landlord had broken down. We pulled a cut and run and a few days later I was at utumn's, exhausted and leaving for Israel.

I left with Rachel and Kyle on a trip with fortysome other local Jews our age. It was like propaganda summercamp. We climbed mountains, rode buses, mangled prayers and ate shawerma and hommos. At night we drank and relished in sexual tension. Rachel and I suffered the conflicting pressures of staying true to our girlfriends back home, and that tendency that people have to fall for someone or grasp at someone when they're sequestered in a group away from home. We passed the time by trading sexual war stories and objectifying every woman that happened to cross our path. Dudes too, but less so.

It was weird to be back in the Middle East, in an area that was sometimes so lush and so metropolitan, and to be there with Jews, who wouldn't ask us to stop and explain ourselves when we made a reference to Hebrew School, and wouldn't ask us to stop and explain ourselves wgen we made a reference to something specific to the Windy City. Even if a lot of our comrades were Northshore transplants whose frame of reference wouldn't include much of ny Chicago, whether it be WZRD, Chic a Go-Go, or the Rat Patrol. At least I didn't have to explain my exlanations when something like that came up.

The trip was one-sided. We were secular Jews, mostly, and we experienced Jewish Israel and secular Israel. Christian Israel rarely came up and neither did Palestinean Israel, or Palestinean Palestine, depending on how you look at it.

We rode camels, one of which bit Rachel, and had a dance party in a kibbutz bomb shelter, which I feel is a uniquely Israeli experience. Fog machine smoke wafted in like gas from a Birkenau shower, I was morbid enough to mention. We told bad jokes. The Aristocrats. Jesus fucking the camel when his Mom walks in. That one that ends "Fuck you clown!" We watched the Bears win in a Danish Hotel off the Dead Sea after hiking Masada and salting our wounds, and we went home.

For me it was a home I'd yet to sleep in; I'm not sure I'd broken in my new room yet but it would come soon enough. By the time I got there, all but one of the kittens have been given away, and Bela soon after.

I secured a job for the next month, and watched the Bears lose the Superbowl. It was my second Superbowl where the women outnumbered the men, and it was slightly less engaging than the Super Mario 3 tournament that ensued after. My Dad was there, but still recovering from a reaction to the medicine he took for the aftermath of a surgery he endured for an injury he sustained playing and coaching the Strom team in the Turkey Bowl, which has been going on since he was a teenager. It was his first real injury in nearly forty years of the game. He had a penicillin drip in his arm and some blood dripping from his dick and needless to say he was in good spirits but not much of a party mood. The snow came and I tried to write about it, and as it melted it became instantly apparent just how shoddy our apartment really is. Autumn told our landlord that a sixth of her bedroom was a sheet of melted snow, frozen over, and he told her to fuck off. We're suing him through the tenants rights association and soon enough Autumn and I'll be living in my eighth apartment in six years.

I've got a cavity in my mouth and a rash on my leg. I bought some new shirts and a hoodie. My job ends next week and I'm underemployed again. I got depressed but I predicted it before hand and took measures against it so I wasn't able to wallow in it.

All in all, i'm looking forward.

[currently listening to Hold Your Colour" by Pendulum]

another piece from another comic book story

2007-03-04T18:36:00.001-08:00

[This is an excerpt from a story I'm writing that acts as a dissertation on the history of mutant pornagraphy and its effects on society. It is a good example of the type of writing I do when I've sequestered in the Holy Land]

While my research is not entirely comprehensive, it is one of the most thorough readings of the subject. The material available, much like the incidence of genetic anomaly, grows exponentially with each decade, starting with the Thirties. Some have theorized that it was our abrupt entrance into the atomic age that sparked this growth, and that the baby boom of the forties and fifties, followed by the civil rights and sexual liberation movements that cemented it so that now, mutants, which were practically unheard of a century ago, are an accepted part of society. This is just conjecture, of course, but I personally think that there may be some merit to it.

Anecdotally, I've heard some say that the fabled isle of Atlantis produced a radioactive ore, that in the end sunk the great nation but only after giving rise to the cyclopses, shapeshifters and strongmen of Olympus. There is absolutely no proof to this claim but I've always felt it an interesting concept, in a Chariots of the Gods way, that so many of our stories, stories that provided the basis of religion and history, could have been the result of a couple of freak genes.

There is one old tale that may or may not be true. It is one of the first written stories, and one of the first stories printed on movable type, and in both cases it was already a very old story, perhaps the oldest written account of a shapeshifter. There are so many versions of the story that there is no way to tell which region or culture it originated from.

In Europe, the story usually involves a powerful man from the East, a Moslem holy man, a Sumerian king, a Magi wizard, et cetera, riding four horses into town with an old satchel slung over his shoulder.

He demands an audience with the king, offering a gift to prove his allegiance. With piqued interest the King accepts him, whereupon he removes a brick of clay from his satchel, telling the king that he will breath into the clay actual life, and that the king may choose three forms for that life to inhabit, and here the details diverge like branches of an old tree, and like the wizard's gift, I will give you three versions of the story.

In one account, an early Spanish king is met by the king of the Arabs, and though incredulous of the offer, and hoping really just to kill his visitor as soon as his tricks were brought out and revealed, asked for three wives. The first was to be as delicate and exotic as the oriental women of the Far East, the second would possess the voluptuous strength of a woman from the thick heart of the African subcontinent, and the third was to be as fair and as beautiful as his own perfect daughter. To insure himself against any high trickery, he stipulated that the three women must be of vastly different heights but share the same size foot.

The Arab stroked his beard majestically and laid out the clay and with a single utterance of Unshallah, closed his eyes and snapped his fingers. From within the cube, two hands stretched out and tugged at the block's sides and corners, forming it into the body of a beautiful woman with thin eyes and long black hair, no more than four feet tall with long toes that stretched as if to escape the length of her feet. Another snap and she was a towering, dreadlocked Afrikaan, swaying to and fro on too small feet that forced her to stumble into a curtsy before another snap rendered her the new Queen of Spain: pale ivory skin, eyes the color of Spring, brown freckles that gathered around her cheeks and elbows, perfect feet and curly hair that just touched her shoulders but when pulled, showed to be the same lengths as the coifs of the other two women. The king had his three treasures and Spain had opened up trade with the Moslms.

When the Celt met with the Sumer, his requests were slightly different. Again incredulous, he grinned as he made his requests. He wanted of the block of clay, a strong-backed woman he could fuck all night, for a strong-calved horse he could ride into battle, and for a snarling dragon, a monstrous winged lizard with glowing eyes, to protect his kingdom as he slept.

Apparently, one got more use than the others, and on its few appearances, the dragon was so terrifying that the king never once had to ride his horse into battle and, not caring for the Persian sport of polo, spent most of his days fucking his strong backed woman as his wife ruled the kingdom. The story never says what the Sumer got in return.

The final version of this story happens much later and concerns the Russian Tsar Ivan IV Vasilyevich, better know as Ivan Grozny or Ivan the Terrible. To tell it, however, I must first digress, as I warn you now I will do many times from this point on.

Most scientific journals categorize shapeshifters in two specific camps. They're not the most appropriate terms to use but they are the most common; they are simply fortunate and unfortunate. A fortunate shapeshifter is fortunate because their mutation is near undetectable. Not only can they look as normal as you or me, they can choose to look much better, which for decades now has led to supermodels fending off paparazzi hoping to catch a "natural" photograph and questions of is she or isn't she. A fortunate shapeshifter can change their shape for as long as they choose, as often as they'd like. You may have learned in school that if someone were to be able to control all the muscles in their face, that they would be able to look like anyone. It's like that but on a molecular level. It's a voluntary reflex, like blinking or giving a thumbs up.

While an unfortunate shapeshifter can do all of this, it is not as easy. The whole tenure of a shift is done with complete knowledge of every atom, every molecule stretching to some unnatural length or shape. Imagine holding your arm out and bending it at a forty-five degree angle while holding a small book. While it can be easy for a few minutes, it does not take long for the act to become excruciating.

In the third version of our story, Ivan Grozny is greeted by a mysterious stranger shortly after the death of his first wife, Anastasia Romanova, and receives an unfortunate shapeshifter named Illyana who, while quite becoming as her first, second, and third incarnations as blonde, brunette, and redhead and even a handsome brick of clay, was quite homely in her natural form, with ratty hair that would change color of its own accord, dumpy breasts, and jaundiced skin that was badly pocked. Though she was nearly always suffering physically, it was preferable to the life she would lead as a peasant. Though her husband was brutal and paranoid, and had taken more than a few lives with his own hands as the country's first Tsar, he was kind to her and showed her genuine tenderness.

While history is full of stories of crooked or vengeful wives of kings cuckolding their husbands while they were away on matters of state, Illyana was faithful to her master and when he was away, she would simply lock the door, draw a bath, return her sore body to its natural state, soak, apply aloe, and enjoy a chance to cry from her own eyes. Unfortunately for this unfortunate, despite her piety Illyanna must face the same fate as these other famous women of history when Ivan returns early, agitated, and ready to jump into bed. She had neglected to lock the door and failed to hear him arrive and he surprised her there in the tub, and she, in turn, surprised him.

She quickly tugged her muscles into a familiar shape, that of the redhead whom the king liked the most, and even though she sat in the tub her makeup was exquisite and her hair a work of art. Ivan, enraged spat out, "Liar!" She tried to explain herself, nd to bribe him, promising to be a million different girls for him, all infinitely faithful. She pledged her very real love and devotion, but the knowledge that she could change at will, that she was not some enchanted hag who was truly given three forms with which to serve him, only enraged him further.

"Liar!" he shouted, more vehemently than the first time. "Whether what you say is true or not doesn't matter because if you can be anyone, then you can be a spy and I'd rather not spend my whole life looking over my shoulder wondering if the girl I'm fucking was the dignitary who's just implored me to sign a peace treaty or the bird on my windowsill or the bojar that poisoned my wife. You must be put to-" and because good soldiers don't tend to explain themselves during battle, Ivan Vasilyevich never said the word death. He just drew his blade and plunged it into her.

If you haven't studied shapeshifters before, you might not know that shapeshifting is something of a natural defense mechanism, and nearly all shapeshifters die of old age. If a shapeshifter's arm is cut off, they grow a new one like a starfish. If a shapeshifter is being eaten by a lion, then they may make sharp spines grow out of their leg or abdomen or head so as to render the part unchewable, and if a shapeshifter is stabbed, there are any number of things they may do to protect themselves. For example, they may tighten the wound around the blade so as to stop its progress and keep it from being retrieved, and at the same time shift over any endangered internal organs or encase them in thick fat or muscle.

When Illyanna let her master, Ivan Vasilyevich, the first Tsar f Russia, stab her she did none of these things. When she accepted his blade, she had resigned herself to this fate, and done it out of love.

Still, Ivan was never quite sure that he could believe that Illyanna had died really, or anything that he'd ever seen with his own eyes, and it had driven him quite mad. It's unknown exactly how many peopledied because of his paranoid rages, or who it was that finally got close enough to poison him. A few years after he murdered Illyanna, Ivan the Terrible died in the middle of a chess game with his top advisor. Ivan's first son, born to his long-dead first wife, became the second Tsar of Russia, and the Romanovs would hold their place at the top for the next two hundred years.

"Arthur Miller and Henry Miller, apparently not the same person///"

2007-03-04T18:34:00.002-08:00

or "There is a certain point in time that is neither day nor night where the horizon has not yet peaked and the Black Eyed Peas song 'Lets Get Retarded' may very well lead to catharsis"

I park the car in the same space i pulled out of, and lock the doors manually. It's like a million little perfect crimes.

A minute earlier and the streets are filled with barristas; in the rearview, my eyes are runny eggs with chestnut yolk. Christmas lights still line the street, but none of them are illuminated.

A minute earlier, I am buckling a seat belt and focusing my eyes. I rev the engine and finger the presets. David Byrne is singing "Burning Down the House".

Hold tight wait till the partys over
Hold tight we're in for nasty weather
There has got to be a way

I decide to write myself a letter...

Dear Eric,
I want you to remember this,
You're flat broke and borrowing money, you owe slightly more than you're owed and it's catching up to you. You have more shit than you have room for, and you can't even provide a decent place for your pet rat to sleep. You don't have any sort of job that makes sense, and you aren't happy with your art.

I want you to remember this now and the next time you're down. I want you to remember this next week when you're getting up at 5 to make it to work on time. I want you to remember this when you're old and pathetic and sold out and slow.

You spent the night of Wednesday, January 25, and the morning of Thursday, January 26, 2007 hanging out and doing drugs with people that you love. You played in a living room fort and ate homemade birthday cake like a child. You listened to bad techno and Nina Simone and watched a film about Anais Nin, and at the end of the night, a nude girl who (except for the tattoo) looked like the picture perfect image of what your mind sees when it thinks of faeries whispered into your ear that "you are the prettiest straight boy" before fluttering out of the room. Your crappy life is full of beautiful nights like these.

You race the sun home and win. You eat popcorn chicken and read Ginsberg in the tub. You chase toothpaste with cola, running in circles. You pull Autumn's laptop out from under Christian, sleeping on the couch, noting that both names are just regular words, and make the sentence sound so much like metaphor you almost believe it. You retitle yourself, in the way of a self-made God and until sleep, you are

Air Excess

[currently listening to "Tales of the Forgotten Melodies" by Wax Tailor]

Top Somethings of Something

2007-03-04T18:34:00.001-08:00

Some of the magazines that let me write for them asked me to submit end of the year best-of lists. I love lists!

Here's my Top 5 records of 2006, courtesy of Chicago Innerview...

Looking back over 2006, I couldn't remember anything but Gnarls Barkley and Justin Timberlake. To figure out what my favorite albums were, I have just browsed through over 2000 albums on the web and I can tell you this...2006 wasn't a good year for records. It wasn't that there wasn't good or challenging music being made, either. Outkast put out a great album, but it didn't have that usual Outkast feel of being the freshests, weirdest, best thing in the world. Bands like CSS and Art Brut proved onceagain that there is always room in this world for stupid punk you can dance to. Noise weirdos Wolf Eyes, Acid Mothers Temple, and Warhammer 48k all put out records that were as listenable as they were dense, and while mainstream hip hop started dabbling in electro, the underground embraced it full bore with new records by K-the-I???, Radioinactive, Lady Sovereign, and Spank Rock. But none of those albums made a very lasting impression, so in a double-blind test I checked my Last.fm page against this year'snew releases to see what I've been listening to.

Without a doubt, my favorite album was Pick a Bigger Weapon by The Coup, wherein Boots Riley andPam the Funkstress make Marxism sound as sexy, dangerous and necessary as hip hop was before it became big business. On A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing, Josephine Foster departs from freak-folk for an album of 19th century German compositions that's both haunting and beautiful. Carla Bozulich continues to grow with her Evangelista, which is full of morose country hymns and weird art thrash that is as hard and delicate as her voice. Kronos Quartet ended the year with a moody collaboration with Mogwai and Pop Will Eat Itself's Clint Mansell for the soundtrack to Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain. The most mileage I've gotten from vinyl this year came from the split 7" between Chicago's Carpet of Sexy and It's a Trap, where both bands serve up noise you can get crunk to.

It was a year where artists thought smaller. In the shadow of big festivals, the summer was full of pot lucks and backyard traveler jams, and in the wake of 2005, where dozens of spaces were shut down or priced out of existence, people found out how accomodating this city could be by setting up their own festivals in old man bars and ice cream shops. It was a good year to see a band, but a shitty year to buy an album.

--and these two came from Newcity's end of the year issue...

Top Five Festival Shows at Places Where You Don't Usually See Shows
1. Southkore Fest with Los Crudos, Juventud Crasa, Bastard Sons of the Apocalypse, No Slogan, Tropietzo and Condenada at The Black Hole (video arcade)
2. The Noise District 6/6/6 with the Bang Bang Circus, Black Bear Combo, Genderfuck Burlesque, blood wrestling and Satanic Marriage at the Beach House (house)
3. Mauled by Tigers Fest with Screamin Cyn-Cyn & the Pons and Totally Michael at Ronny's (bar)
4. Trans-Sexual Express with Waterbabies, He Not In, TK Raptor and Velcro Lewis at the Tastee Freez (ice cream shop)
5. Pitchfork Fest with Diplo, Aesop Rock, Spank Rock, Os Mutantes, Flosstradamus and Tarantula at Union Park (park)

Top 5 Reasons I've Heard for Coming Back to Chicago
1. "That fresh air was starting to make me soft."
2. "New York City really doesn't care as much about the live music scene as they say they do."
3. "I'm just here for the trial, then I'm gone again."
4. "So I was out there milking a goat when I started thinking, 'What the fuck happened to me?'"
5. "After a few months in Iraq, you can really appreciate a Chicago-style hotdog."

"hit it and quit it" or "the years keep getting shorter on me"

2007-03-04T18:32:00.002-08:00

It's less fun to wake up fresh when everyone around you is hung over. I spent the day deep frying things, playing with Bukowski, and watching Mean Girls. It's been a good year, even though it hasn't felt like one. I knocked a good eight things off the list I made of things I've never done to work on this summer. I still don't know what I'm trying to do with this life, and all of my goals for the future are sexual, which doesn't seem very mentally healthy, but maybe that's enough of a motivation to keep me from giving up on the rest of it.

New Years. Plural.

2007 - Commie Jam in a mismatched suit. Sunny, Rachel and Rob's house in Logan. Jerking and floating through a disconnect. Russian champagne and vegan cupcakes. Card games and banjo. A clown calls me on the suit; he's the only one. He's trying to pick up on Sarah. It's our third New Years' together, which is more than I've shared with anyone that isn't blood. We drop by the Brain, and crash a condo. Kylie Minogue Britney Spears iPod dance party is as exciting as it gets, but it's pleasant. Never had that before.

2006 - Party at Marion's house. Everyone is well dressed. Why is there a line at the Budweiser keg with Guinness on tap? White people are stupid. Red Bulls and Vodkas, Makers and diets, jello shots and I think I ended up smoking some pot. Old friends like Charles Wiley, Devon and Christian Duckworth, Tom Yates. New peeps like Eligio and Gaetano, most of the Berwyn Bordello crew. Took a cab to the wrong place and left my new camera inside. I shouldn't own things that don't fit in my pockets. Drunker than either of us realized, Sarah had to babysit.Total devastation in a cab. Near breakdown. But a beautiful day after.

2005 - Kyle is incapable of recommending good parties. Out with the yuppies and in with the bike kids. Arrive at the same time as Critical Mass. Twelve of us, twelve of them and at least as many on the way in close cell contact. Ira's pissed but we have full fridge privelages. First New Year's with Sarah. First New Year's with Erin and her boyfriend. Pete Wolf gets obnoxious when he has his own bottle of Jameson. He's in a rowdy mood but loves us all. Crash the after party, everyone is cautious of the drunk guy with the mohawk. After after at the Elks. Meet the neighbors, and sleep soundly.

2004 - Berwyn Bordello invades a smaller party. Takes it over. Roll around in the snow, hook up with Nikole and flash my dick at everyone I know.

2003 - Single on New Years. Still in love with Erin, who's at a rave with her boyfriend. Head out with the people I don't know I'm about to live with. At Natalia's I make out with everyone. Everyone. Shouldn't have left but followed the tide. Zip around the city in a stupor.

2002 - How many drugs can me and Erin do? Ecstacy, coke, adderall, vicodin, pot, whiskey, and miller lite. Dennis' loft and Dan Lieber's parents. Kevin Heath, Shahbaz, Curran, Naia and Tobz. Shahbaz is the only one I still talk to. First good new years I can remember.

2001 - Ted Hearne's place. All the girls I like are fucking each other on couches. My best friend won't talk to me and I don't know why. I'm drunk and I feel alone. Write on some drunk people, take some pictures, wish I was dead. Wander off in the cold. Hide and cry.

2000 - My parents have got me on lock. They're afraid of violence, riots in the street. Y2k. Me, Tom Yates, Kevin Heath, and Joey Mitchell chug Jaggermeister and eat pizza. I'm the only one that won't join the military in the next two years. None of them have been shot though. I'm happy about that

1999 - Babysitting in Miami. Play on a trampoline. Answer a seven year old's questions about love. Shoot off fireworks.

1998 - 1993 - New Years in Boca Raton. Watch the Mtv Top 100 video countdown. Shayna tries to keep Mom from having her one drink of the year (Kahlua). Every time I go upstairs I burst into tears.

1992 - Get home from Florida on New Years Eve at about ten. I pretend I want to stay up for the ball dropping but I really just want to play the TINY TOON ADVENTURES Nintendo game that Bubbe bought me that morning.

1991 - How the fuck should I know?

1990 - As far bak as I can remember. My first new decade. I can't believe it isn't the 80s anymore. In ten years it'll be the future. Bubbe tells me that in the thirties, when their teahers told them they would live to see the new milennium, no one believed it. I spend most of the night on Pop Pop's lap. I'm amazed to see all the adults awake, and partying at this hour and not have to sneak around to do it. The countdown was magical. Everyone in the room chanting together and smiling and looking all full of hope. Wow.

[currently watching "Basquiat"]

Stereotypes

2007-03-04T18:32:00.001-08:00

I've heard it called "Brown Town" by Indians and Pakistanis, and "Curry Town" by those what ain't. Whatever it's called. It smells fucking awful right now. Not exactly sure why but I assume it has something to do with the wetness, thawing, and weird exotic spiciness of the neighborhood.

Sarah thinks that I make up terms for things in Chicago that already have names. I don't think I do. Here's a list of things I've heard of that would look cool on some kind of hand-drawn colloquial map. Too many of them have to do with Wicker Park.

The Armpit: See also: The Crotch

The Crotch: Brian Other claims that he invented this term years ago for the North/Damen/Milwaulkee intersection, but I'd never actually heard it used until it was listed in The Vice Guide to Chicago last Summer.

Elote Island: Refers to the small park on the triangular "island" created by the intersections of Ashland, Milwaulkee, and Division, frequented year-round by foodcart vendors.

The Hipster Highway: In contrast to it's busy neighbor Western Avenue, Oakley provides a leisurely bike route from between the North and South Sides, and a very convenient route from Bucktown/Wicker/West Town to Pilsen/Bridgeport.

K-Town: There are actually three neighborhoods that layclaim to the term K-Town. Two of them use it to refer to the large cluster of streets whose names begin with the letter K (Keeler, Kostner, Kolmar, et cetera) just West of Pulaski. While this is practically the official name for a part of North Lawndale, there are a number of kids in Jefferson Park who've never heard of North Lawndale who think K-Town is theirs. For some reason there is no L-Town (that I've heard of) in Chicago, even though the streets immediately after K town all have names that start with the letter L. It also refers to Koreatown, a large strip of Lincoln Avenue populated by Korean bars, restaurants, and temples.

Liquor Park: I'm not sure if this name stems from the neighborhood's boozy bohemia that existed while I was in high school, or from the seedyglossy tourist strip it became by te time I lived there.

RoPo: An abbreviation for East Rogers Park. An abbreviation that I hate. An abbreviation that makes my brain hurt when I catch myself using it. Same thing with PostModernism

Viagra Triangle: This is another term I'd never heard before the Vice book but i must admit it's pretty perfect. There's a long triangle along Rush street that points to Division populated almost entirely by expensive restaurants and nightclubs that's very popular with tourists, particularly businessmen looking to get laid while they're in town.

That's all right now. List any you can tink of. I get a kick out of em.

someone in a dream last night asked me who I was trying to be

2007-03-04T18:30:00.000-08:00

I told her I appreciated the question but I still gave her a smartass answer. "Well, Bruce Springsteen with the hair of course."

It makes vague sense, to me at least.

I wish I'd answered it honestly, though, so that I might know now. But in the dream it probably wasn't even me, just a composite of feelings and things I've absorbed from movies and TV shows and other dreams over the last week. I was someplace different, and dressed differently then everyone there. But I was dressed differently than I do here, anyway. I was wearing shorts and an army jacket. Not really my general street attire.

This has been one of those weeks where I have to believe that everything happens for a reason because if it doesn't than most of it just sucks.

The other night I dropped dead. Asleep. Out of nowhere. I must have needed to sleep. My dreams were prophetic that night. Personally. I don't want to talk about them but I think that they saved me from some trouble, so I probably needed to drop dead asleep. I guess I should stop teasing _____ about how much faith she puts in her horoscope.

I need to have a roommate again. The house goes to shit without one. I need someone who'll get mad at me. I surveyed the situation this morning.

Tricycle in the living room. Coathanger in the bathtub. Unopened can of cat food in the bowl of dry food. Mysterious fishing lure still in my room.

I slept in my bed last night. It had been a while. I slept in my clothes with a space heater on. I woke up real hot and stinky. I was stinky because I was hot, but I also looked real fucking sexy. For me at least. Hot and stinky. Same thing every morning. Why do I always have to choose?

I've lived with stinky people before. Just one, really, but he was way stinky and I've been terrified of turning into that. Whenever there's even the remotest chance I'll get laid I'll opt for less sexy, better smell, which is probably stupid cuz Sarah would still probly fuck me if I smelled like a cow.

Last night I went to a show. I bought beer and got more change back then I spent but the girl realized it before I did. As I gave her back a five all my cards spilled out of my wallet and into the trash. It was the needle and the haystack but with bank cards and cans of Old Style. I rescued everything but my bus card, which slipped into the void. Out another five bucks. On most days it wouldn't be so devastating but last night it was. It was so much, I couldn't even enjoy the avant garde science fiction play that was happening in front of me. (that was worded pretty sarcastically but I really do enjoy that kind of stuff)

I've seen ___ a couple times this weekend. It's been awhile. The last time I saw her for any real amount of time was a couple years ago at a party at her parents' house. I left my goggles there, and then she ran away and came back and was committed for a bit. We never found my goggles though. I really need a new pair, I don't ever see them at stores, even goth stores, so where do all the goths get them? If I was to have a hanukkah list, at the top would be goggles. I'm not really that good at exchanging gifts and I don't expect them from anyone but if I hit the Lotto I would be spending like a motherfucker so if anyone reading this hits the Lotto this week, here's my Hanukkah list:

Goggles - goth
Goggles - raver
Goggles - steampunk (like someone would wear flying a biplane and shit)

Jeans - Mens 34, Womens 12 I think. Tight around everything, especially the legs. A little short in length because I'm a little short in height and a little shorter than that because I want to show off my boots.

Comics - Whole series of Frank Miller's Dark Knight, Frank Miller's Sin City, and Dave Sim's Cerebus. Actually, I'd be pretty happy to borrow these if you have them.

Earings - Guages 2 and 0.

Belts - Colorful belts with cool buckles with AK 47s and Nintendo controllers and Swastikas and shit.

Tattoos.
Scarves.
Jim Jarmusch movies.

Or maybe you could send a bunch of books to the SHAC 7 or Mumia Abu Jamal or any of the millions of other prisoners stuck in a corrupt justice system who don't get good press. Midwest Books to Prisoners.

That's it. If you win the Lotto. Except for that last one. Everyone should do that. Otherwise just be around and say nice things and tell me if I look stupid and get me into trouble every now and then.

[currently watching "Dark City"]

outline for my next real story

2007-03-04T18:29:00.000-08:00

I just had an idea for a story. It might be a book even, or a graphic novel, or a miniseries. I think it'll be too big for a blog but I'm not sure. Hopefully I didn't forget anything between the car and here. I don't usually take notes before I start writing. Here's all I can remember.

1. Boy (preadolescent? early teen?) finds lump in throat
2. Boy is diagnosed with cancer
3. Experimental radiation treatment (via injection, detail on how actual treatment differs from preconceptions of a treatment with warm, green rays being xapped at him in a cold, grey, lead room)
4. Success! As boy heals, he finds himself getting stronger than others. He is developing superpowers (strength + what?)
5. Boy starts sneaking out and fighting crimes. Finds himself impervious to knives, bullets)
6. Boy wakes up to find black and blue splotches all over his body.
7. The cancer has returned, worse than before, but the boy is too strong for surgery. Syringes buckle as they are pressed against his veins.
8. More radiation treatment. The boy finds himself weaker with each treatment.
9. Boy starts acting different, as if possessed? Cancer is controlling him?
10. They must kill the boy with radiation to kill the cancer.
11. The boy dies, but the cancer lives.
12. Not sure yet: The cancer escapes? The cancer is killed? The cancer takes over for the boy fighting crime? The cancer takes on the boys' personality? The cancer is raised as a son?

Outside reading: Stories where superheroes die. Namely the X-Men Legacy Virus stories with Jamie Madrox, Doug Ramsey, and Illyanna Rasputin; the Death of Superman series.

[Currently watching "The Oblongs - The Complete Series"]

Another story about paranoia and death that ends in sleep

2007-03-04T18:28:00.000-08:00

It's 5am when I finally pull in, tired and beaten, inbetween the Toyota and the tool wall. One more night and then it's all over.

I don't like the garage. I don't feel safe there. I saw it on the news. They wait there under the car, with knives. Car jackers. Rapists. Thieves. You walk up. You walk out. You're looking for your keys, making sure everything's locked and they make their move. The best way to incapacitate a person is by slashing their tendons. Blood poors out, and you drop to the ground.

The old garage wasn't big enough for the car, so we used it for storage. Then someone set it on fire. It didn't take, so we didn't think about it. It's not like we had any enemies in the neighborhood. It was probably just a prank. Then someone did it again. This time it took. The tools all looked fine. We could still use some of it, like the crowbar. We used that to sift through the rest of the wreckage.

Driving down Sheridan at four, the world is alive. The bar crowds are just going home. The joggers and dog walkers are waking up and starting the day, but as soon as you turn off Sheridan, you'll find my block. Still dead and still dark. The garage door is open when I pull in. I never leave the door open. That's alright.

I pull down the visor, and press the button that closes the door. Then I turn off the lights and turn up the radio. It's alright. I turn up the stereo. The Beatles are playing. "Come Together". I like the Beatles. I pull out a cigar and light it, before long the car is full of smoke. There's a full tank of gas. I hope the battery lasts long enough.

It's light outside, I'm sure of it, but it's dark in the garage. I open the window to let out the smoke. I turn down the radio. I can't let anyone know I'm in here. It's probably noisy outside, now. All of the city must be up now but it's quiet in here.

Then there's a noise, a rustle, like some leaves being picked up by the wind, but there are no leaves, and there is no wind. I turn the radio off and pump the gas pedal. He knows I'm here. He knows I know he's here and there's no reason to hide under the other car. He emerges like a snake. He's tall and white and wearing a hood. He's quick, he's already rounding the back of my car to get to the door. He pulls the crowbar off the wall and smashes my window. With shards of glass sticking to my face, I don't flinch. He looks in my eyes and changes his expression. He knows I won't let him out, he knows I won't let him live. He's going to have to kill me. He raises the crowbar, and with my finger on the handle I kick the door open into his chest. It knocks him against the wall. Tools fall. I hit him again. And again. He falls. And again. The crowbar scrapes the door. And again. And again.

I turn the radio back on. The Ronettes are playing "And Then He Kissed Me".

I tug the lever to lean my seat back. I open my door into the guy's head. I'm taking him with me. Every few minutes I hit him again. He's interrupting my oldies, but it's not so bad. It's just like the commercials.

I hit him again, and I'm too weak to close the door this time. The fumes burn through my nostrils. I turn the radio up as loud as it will go. Aretha Franklin sings like a fat angel.

I close my eyes. I go to sleep.

[Currently watching "The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D"]

Another story about sex and drugs that ends in sleep

2007-03-04T18:26:00.000-08:00

Brown. Black. Yellow. Red. The color of dried hay. The color of flowing magma just released from the ground. The color of footprints in wet clay. The color of snow after it's been salted. There are so many possible colors hair can be, so why do they both have to be bald? Why do they both have to be bald and white?

I'm too high for this threesome.

I look down and see two bald heads sucking my tits. There are so many possible hairstyles...

beehives, mohawks, crewcuts, pixes, bowl cuts, cowlicks, widow's peaks, bouffants, mullets, chelseas, curly, straight, buns, bobs, afros, dreadlocks, cornrows, pompadours...

So why do they both have to be bald? Why do they both have to be bald, and white, and doing the same thing?

They are the same. They're insects. They're clones. They're twin babies trying to suck the life out of me.

And now one of them is inside. His hand. He's going too hard, with two many fingers. If I could find a thumb I could figure out which hand it is. Or if he bent one of them maybe. I try to go inside my head. No walls, no flashing lights, no greens and pinks and swirling yellows silhouetting us on the walls. No heads, just hands. I try to focus and everything goes red, I can feel the blood welling up around my temples and...

Nothing. Black. The color of the inside of a shirt as it's pulled over your head.

My eyes open. Ceiling. There's no hand inside me, no one sucking my tits. Just two bald heads. Clones. Beige, hairless clones, running around the room like birds. Two damp insects digging through pants pockets. Two panicked infants dialing cell phones. I wipe the drool off of my chin and try to pick up my head. Too heavy, easier to just sleep.

Hello, 911? We need help--

[Currently listening to "Live It Out" by Metric]

Cat Torture

2007-03-04T18:24:00.000-08:00

I found a tone of voice that instantly repels my girlfriend's roomate's cat, Questor. Apparently a Carol Channing impression works better than a hearty boot stomp in getting rid of the beast.

Which begs the question:

Why do I know who Carol Channing is? Did she used to be sexy or funny or talented somehow or was she always some walking punchline?

[Currently listening to "Wipeout XL" by a bunch 'o techno motherfuckers from ten years ago]

Tore the Fuck Up

2007-03-04T18:23:00.000-08:00

By the time the four-day weekend is over I will have djed 5 times. My house is two parts lemon-scented Mister Clean, one part malt liquor. The cleanup effort is a continuing success. The socks I threw on this morning, however, smell like I puled them out of a dead man's ass, and a little bit like rotting crickets. Come over and I'll give you two types of strawberry pie.

Autumnal family traditions are crumbling around me, or maybe just for me.
Every year, the holiday is a little easier. At some point I became less of a joke to them, and more of an interesting person.

After thanksgiving dinner and two breakfasts at Manny's Deli, I can feel the increased heft of my tits, and the situation needs rectifying.

I had to manually raise my hairline the other day. There were a few wisps of long hair that stood alone at the crown of my head that I had to put out of their misery. I could see this coming for some time. It was about two years ago that I noticed how the front spike of my mohawk was thinner and weaker than the rest. Much like my father's height or his metabolism, which produce that wonderful Ableson lankiness, I didn't inherit his hairline either.

I'm giving up on drinks that I need to use my blender to make, at least until I become a better person.

If anybody needs me, I'll be at the Megamall, buying belt buckles that say 'cocksucker' or something.

[confidential to the Slut 69 crew: slow down on the poison intake, so you can party harder better faster longer]

[Currently reading "Exiles Volume 6: Fantastic Voyage TPB"]

I Like Art! I Hate Art! perpetual motion roadshow tour diary [part two]

2006-11-18T14:43:00.000-08:00

[disclaimer: these are my opinions, everyone sees the world through their own prejudices and experiences. I'm not omniscient, yada yada yada]

MONTREAL

By this point you may have noticed that Troy isn't the best communicator. None of us are, really, or we would have aired our grievances right off. He's just the least passive-aggressive. Anyway, the whole time I had one pair of car keys and Troy had the other, either because we were more confident in driving than China, or because of some subtle misogony that we all silently subscribed to. Troy would never ask to drive, or not to drive. He would just get to the car first, and sit where he felt like. For some reason, it was my sickass' time to drive, which was fine. China had bigger worries than I did, as she had been turned away at the border before. She'd been put on some sort of international list after being kicked out of England some years back, and there was a 40/60 chance it would happen again. Meanwhile, Troy was pissed at China over not getting some money she owed him. I wasn't pissed at anyone, just embarassed about all the sniffling.

Our trouble came to a head just before the border, with Troy and China yelling at each other and me driving, with no radio signal and fuck yous flying.

"HEY! Motherfuckers! Maybe it would be a good idea if we waited til after we're across the border to settle this?"

Do I Like Art? [Montreal]

And we made it. Montreal radio was the best of the trip. It was an even mix of French and English, with dancy synthpunk sharing a frequency with profane bootyjams like Spank Rock's "Put That Pussy On Me" and Freak Nasty's "Da Dip" (perhaps the best song ever written about rimming strippers).

Everything was perfect in Montreal. Almost too perfect. It seemed as though we were in some indie film from the 1990s where everyone wa intelligent and well dressed, witty and urbane. There were wide bike lanes insulated from traffic and nobody's clothes had any writing on them. No irony, and no designer labels, even the bums were dressed pretty well.

We performed in the Toc Toc Cafe, home of the Bibliograph/e Zine Library. Toc Toc was amazing, it seemed to be far more interested in holding community events than acting as a cafe. We drank hemp beer and pawed through zines before the show started. Montreal even had the best local acts. There was Shanghai Triad, who played Chinese pop songs from the 30s and 40s on an accordion and a Chinese violin and a fantastic writer whose name escapes me right now (I'll update this as soon as I can find it).

Our host apologizes to us in advance: I've noticed that American audiences are more willing to donate when you pass the hat than Canadian audiences. I think it's because the government funds so much art here that they forget the concept of starving artist.

I sell a few zines though, and it feels better than anything to get paid for my art in a foreign currency, even if it is just the next country up.

Later that night, Troy and I went to a noise show that would have been amazing at an underground club or a basement, but was only interesting in a cozy, well-lit bar. The one downside to having so many open-minded people is that antisocial art isn't relegated into the scumbag places where it belongs. In Chicago, I'd have been dancing my ass off and throwing myself around like a goon, but in this bar, I can't do anything but appreciate it. I climb into bed with China with my clothes on. This is the set up when there are more people then beds. It's nice to be able to lie next to someone, especially with the knowledge that I'm going to be the only one not to get laid on this trip.

We spend the next day exploring. French pastry, a record store nestled into some guy's apartment. I get a Munich Machine album, and one by Friends of Dean Martinez, and really regret buying beer and not taking out more money at the border. I'm still getting over how awesome Montreal is, and given that, why I didn't like it more. It certainly bears further inspection.

No wait, I do like art! [Montreal]

OTTAWA

So far, everyone has warned us that Ottawa will suck, and I still haven't figured out why. It was an interesting place, whose gay center was completely integrated into its downtown, with dyke hobos, liquor stores where your beer comes in on conveyor belts, and a shwarma joint on every corner. It was a place where adventures kept almost happening.

We performed at a dildo store called Venus Envy. Our opener is a funny poet who seemed far more sad than funny in his constant self-deprecation and nervous delivery, but who brought out the only audience we had in that city. China read a piece about the history of the dildo written by her daughter for the first issue her zine Dildo, and another about being clitblocked by her daughter and her daughter's girlfriend when they were both sixteen and hated her boyfriend. It was the only time she read either of these pieces, and it was her best performance of the week.

I Like Art! Also Monsters! [Ottawa]

Outside the store, there's a crew of leather daddies with hip floggers and trenchcoats smoking. The oldest one smiles at me, and asks if we want to go to a party.

"What kind of party?"

"We're having a pansexual play party. You can join us...as my guests...if I could maybe flog you?"

"Cool."

We head back to where we're staying, to drop our shit off and change. Troy is daring me to go, as if he doesn't think I will. I think he misjudged me somewhere along the line, where I wouldn't think that a pansexual play party would be the coolest thing to do. I decide to go and China comes as my escort.

At the door to the party, a nondescript and very nonthreatening hallway, an older woman sits with a clipboard, in lingerie that shows off her saggy tits and what I presume to be a pretty hard life. Past the hallway, there are bloodcurdling screams that can't be the product of anything nearly as interesting as our imaginations are conjuring. The woman looks surprised to see us, we explain our encounter in the parking lot.

"Oh, okay. Guests pay just twenty-five dollars. Oh and there's an all-black dress code so ou may need to find something else to where...."

On the way home, China tells me about another encounter with a stranger. She was trying to decipher the procedure at the beer store when an older gentleman came to her aid (and lets be clear that when I say gentleman, I mean a big, burly, tattooed and bearded biker).

"Hi, my name is Al. Captain Al Caholic."

Apparently, China met the leader of Ottawa's only bike gang and he invited us to a party at his place, The House of Pain, but China couldn't find the address and none of my calls to Chicago bike people yielded results.

It was clear on Troy's face that we had ruined his evening when we showed up back at the house. We explained what happened and he said nothing. At all.

He turned on the movie Anchorman and we all watched in silence.

C'est la vie.

I like Art! Also monsters! [Ottawa]

TORONTO

Toronto is where it all finally comes to a head. China is driving, she knows that if she gets us to our last city alright everything will be fine. I sleep in the back, even though she wants me to navigate, just so I don't have to deal with all the tension and all the crazy. I should have made the sacrifice. The argument happens over something so stupid it's ridiculous.

China nervously drills us about the last exit. At the off-ramp just before ours, Troy notices the sigm.

"HERE! Here! Here! Here!"

China slams on the brakes.

"What the fuck are you doing?"

"You said here, right?"

"The sign, the SIGN you've been asking about is here. The exit is NEXT. Drive!"

I've had enough. The least I can do is defend her, though it should've happened earlier.

"Dude. You're yelling here here here at an off ramp. I would've freaked too."

"Well I don't recall asking you what the fuck you thought, did I?"

"Well fuck you cause I'm saying it."

"What? You got something to say to me?"

"Yeah, and I said it."

"Fine, we'll see when we get out of this car."

"Fuck you."

We're all jittery and pissed when we park at a grocery store, and Troy's already waiting outside my door. I've been in this situation before and lost. At least I'm sober this time, just groggy. I open the door and step out, and Troy shoves me back in.

"You got somethin to say to me, huh?"

Our sensitive little singer songwriter has gone all aggro.

I don't do well in fights, seeing as I haven't opted to get into a one-on-one since grade school, and I'm a little shaky, but I want to hold my ground.

"No I said it already, I want to get my boots out from under this seat. What's your fuckin problem with me?"

I grab my boots and he gets up in my face.

"You wanna go?"

Go as in fight. I don't wanna go. The car is in Troy's name. If I fight and win I've got to find a new way home. If I fight and lose, I've got to find a new way home. Troy's about the same build as me, same height. Leaner but not particularly muscular. I don't know what his skill level is, and he doesn't know mine (at least if I still do have my old boxing training ingrained somewhere). The fight could go either way.

"No, I wanna know what your fuckin problem with me is."

There's a macho staredown then I walk to the curb to put my boots on. I'm guessing he's not mad enough to kick me in the face while I lace my boots but I'm prepared for it anyway so I feel comfortable enough to start bitching.

"What's your fucking deal anyway? I've treated you with nothing but respect for the past fucking week. I've been fair about money and personal space and tried not to be too annoying so what's your fuckin' problem?"

He growls and walks away. I spend the next minutes shaking and calling Chicagoans for advice. My Dad laughs, my Mom is worried. China and I agree to ditch Troy and the rental car and take a bus back to Chicago after Sarah looks up the schedules.

We all end up at the hotel where we're performing. It has three bars. An art bar, full of bad charcoal nudes, a jazz bar, and a fancy bar. There's a country band in the jazz bar, by the name of Woah Nelly playing as I set up my stuff. I've got all my bags now, and I'm drinking gin.

Despite the wack name, Woah Nelly plays some beautiful country western music on drums, guitar, steel guitar, bass and accordion. The accordion is played by their singer who is beautiful. I'm drawn into the room, almost against my will when she starts singing "We'll Meet Again" (you know, that song from the end of Dr. Strangelove).

We blast through a show with another funny poet and a performance artist. I read shit I haven't read yet, even though I'm drunk. By the time we get to the Greyhound station, I have enough leftover funny money to buy condoms, candy, soda and a tofu dog. It's time to go home.

Fuck art already! [Toronto]

EPILOGUE

One of the first things I noticed about Troy and China was that they both have scars on their arms like I do. I figured that this unites us. That we must have had some shared insight on the world that drove us to be in the same place here and now. Really, all it means is that we were three sad people.

It's my birthday, and I'm riding a Greyhound from Toronto to Chicago and I can't wait to feel my bed. Sharing this train with me and China are a bunch of podunk Canucks heading home after seeing a Tool concert. They're drunk and bolsterous but I think I could sleep through em. No point in making any connections now.

There's a stopover in Detroit, where we watch the sun rise and I take pictures that don't come out on my last disposable camera. I would think that the Detroit Greyhound Station would have to be just the saddest place on Earth but that distinction goes to the station in Gary, Indiana.

None of that matters. It doesn't matter that i'm out of books and cds to care about or that my adventure wasn't as adventurous as I'd imagined. It's my birthday and I'm going home, and for once it's where I want to be.

I Hate Artists! [Cincinnati]

[Currently watching Run Ronnie Run]

I Like Art! I Hate Art! perpetual motion roadshow tour diary [part one]

2006-11-18T14:41:00.000-08:00

[disclaimer: these are my opinions, everyone sees the world through their own prejudices and experiences. I'm not omniscient, yada yada yada]

"I guess you could say I went west. You know .. the way of Horatio Alger, Davy Crockett, the Donner Party..."

The quote comes from Grosse Point Blank. It's not a very profound movie but for some reason it had a strong effect on me. Everyone goes West. Kerouac went west. Hunter Thompson went West. Unfortunately, my references end there but as far as I can gather, West is the way you need to go if you're looking to understand this country. Further unfortunate, I went to LA earlier this year and was completely unmoved. I didn't like how the sleaze battled with the gloss like vinegar and water and the whole time I was there I felt like getting pissed on.

Back in September, I had the unique opportunity to go on the road with a couple of strangers and pimp my writing on the East Coast and Canada. Seven cities in eight days. The Perpetual Motion Roadshow.

Chicago

I've never left Chicago, not in any way to speak of. I've never been on tour before and I've never gone on any road trips, nothing that lasted longer than a week anyways. Apparently, not too far outside of Illinois, you start seeing hills and mountains. That seems like something I should have known by now. China and Troy teased me about it for three states, not my lack of knowledge but the amusement I got from driving through hills.

We started out at home, my home, and I got to feel like big shit.

It wasn't much different from any other reading I've done at Quimby's except that my family and friends were there, and my pet rat, and some puppets, and a singing saw. We went back to my place for Walgreen's dollar pizzas and beer. Troy snooped through my records and got laid. China crashed out on the couch. I said goodbye to Sarah. We rented an SUV and went off.

I Like Art! [Chicago]

CINCINNASTY

There was no reason Cincinnati would be the city I liked the best, but it was.

The city had everything I like: there was a lot of grey, a lot of blight, a lot of young people, and a lot of fat people. It was a very Midwestern place, where motherfuckers gave a shit about the Bengals and ate disgusting food like Goetta.

After a couple redneck altercations and missteps in Indiana, and a few dozen mutilated raccoons, we were at the show (an hour late). Shawn Obnoxious read short, funny poems and The Seedy Seeds played dancey electrofolk with kazoo, banjo and electronics. They would have the first of three accordions we would have the pleasure of hearing on our trip.

After the show, Faith took us to the house we'd be staying at, with somewhere between five and twenty other people. It was like a cross between a punk house and a frat, only the majority of the residents were in their late twenties and thirties with legit jobs, cool toys and open season booze. People came and went at all hours, and slept everywhere on any surface available.

Though Gemeos' art is in Cincinnati, is it of Cincinnati?

To give you an idea of the mindset of the place:

It's our first night there and we're drinking on the porch. Some crusties come up and ask, sheepishly, if this is the house where the bonfire is.

"No," Faith says, pausing for a moment to think, "Would you like to have a bonfire here?"

I talk to some girl who says that the two guys she's with wouldn't be hanging out with her if she hadn't given herself a chelsea cut earlier. China talks about anarchist child rearing with a really nice guy with a heavily tattooed face. When he pulls out pictures of his son, it's just about the cutest thing ever.

We stay there for another day. China gets laid. I steal a scarf and buy 7"es by As Mercenarias and Carpet of Sexy. We watch Drop Dead Fred, Kung Fu Zombie, and the amazingly funny Trailer Park Boys at various locales. We visit the contemporary art museum. We drink heavily and leave, but by this time the dynamics of the group have changed.

I Like Art! [Cincinnati]

CLEVELAND

I've never talked less about myself in my whole life. When I'm around more dominant personalities, I tend to yield my own. Troy has been exhibiting moody diva qualities, which is fine, because we're all artists and melodramatic. He seems to prefer conversations that give him a chance to say something impressive about himself, and when he's not in the mood to talk, he'd rather not listen (or even hear) anyone else talking either. China, on the other hand, has a habit of talking whenever she gets nervous. She told us that she went on the Roadshow because she felt like she was getting too neurotic acting out her daily routine in Baltimore. Because of this, she talks a lot, some of her stories are interesting, some aren't. She can feel the tension building betwen her and Troy, but I don't think she's figured out why. We're no longer drinking jovially as we drive, which is probably a good thing.

You can tell in the first few seconds of conversation whether or not you're going to want to fuck a city or not. We were a few minutes inside city limits wbefore we realized that Cleveland didn't turn us on at all.

The woman at the bookstore looks like Harvey Pekar's wife (from the movie, at least). Apparently she's not. Perhaps all of Cleveland's bookish women look like this. Unfortunately, she fucked up and we didn't have an opener in Cleveland. Or anyone to see us.

We decide to hit up an open mic to try and sell our wares. The closest one is in a lounge underneath a grungy rock club called the Grog Shop, where a cat by the name of Q-Nice kicks all kinds of ass as the emcee of an otherwise unremarkable show. It's perhaps the worst possible fit for me and China, in that it was nothing but hiphop. Troy changed his act from some John Mayer shit to a slam/soul sound. I made a big faux pas when I didn't realize that there was a much higher percentage of churchgoers in the crowd than in the audiences I'm used to. Halfway through a very slammy Jewish-angst piece, I realize that I'm about to blaspheme heavily, offering that...

if I have to spend one more Christmas with [blah blah blah doing Jewish-people things in Florida] I will pick up a holy hammer, build a holy time machine and spread [Jesus Christ's] palms myself.

Sigh.

We were all received alright in the end, but we didn't sell shit and had to dip into our pockets to get out. We couldn't get out soon enough.

New York

New York was New York. No one was very impressed with anything, and we weren't a huge draw even though we had an alright crowd. I could feel a cold coming on in Cinci and by the time we got to Williamsburg I was a snotty pile of gross. I read my retard piece but the timing was all off.

The only good thing I could say about NY is that we all had our own friends there. This would be the last chance we had to seperate before leaving the country. Luckily, I had my old friend Marisa to take care of me, and take me out to dinner with her theater friends for her 22nd birthday, and let me use her nice-smelling girl bathroom, which was a godsend after the weirdo Christian book guy's place in Cleveland, and the predictably icky shower in the Cincinnati party house.

With a snoot full of Cold-Eeze, Ibuprofen, and Emergen-C, we endeavored off to Canada.

I Like Art Criticism! [New York]

[Currently watching Brick]

Piece from "A Gigantic Orgasm of Anger/Depression about Work"

2006-11-18T14:40:00.000-08:00

[I have a piece in Issue 21 of Foul: A Gigantic Orgasm of Anger/Depression about Work or I Dream It, He Builds It. You should buy it. It costs one dollar and features Brandon Wetherbee, Emerson Dameron, Sarah Joyce and other people I don't know]

I'm writing this from work. I have a lot of opportunity to write here, because I'm working at a public school and all the websites I like are blocked.

After a month of depression and unemployment, where I went on tour and blew though my savings, the jobs started to filter in. Pinky got me a job at a dj company. Sarah gave me the heads up on a temp agency. My Mom hooked me up with a part-time gig at the school where she works, and that's where I am now.

This was the second of four grade schools I attended, and the one I liked the most. It wasn't that much of a surprise coming back, in the sense of finding everything so much smaller than I remembered it, but the school is so much cleaner, so much less ghetto. There are murals and mosaics and a miniature shinto temple where sad brainy kids can plot their bloody revenge during recess.The playground, which used to be a half-block of concrete with a rusty jungle jim and a batting cage is now a lush field with one of those high tech playgrounds where the only way you can hurt yourself is by eating peanuts. Apparently, there are kids who can't eat peanuts now, lots of them, and kids who are vegans, and a shit ton of kids who play soccer.

I have been made aware of this because I work in the office, right across from the wooden bench that I used to sit when I had an ear infection, or faked an ear infection, or had gotten beaten up or pissed myself. It is honestly the hardest job I've ever had, worse than retail, construction, and actual teaching. I don't know anyone's names, I don't know any of the intricacies of afterschool judo or tap that the parents are curious about, or about high school service hours. I don't know what teacher works where or where the first aid kit is. I can't understand what anyone is saying before I buzz them in. It would be the easiest thing in the world for a pedophile to sneak in under my watch (and probably anyone else's).

"Hi, my name is [any possible combination of vowels and consonants]. I'm here to pick up [anything at all that sounds more like a name than a sentence] from after school."

My job, it seems, is to briefly intercept all the electronic influx, and stall it for a second before sending it back into the system, in as pleasant a tone as possible.

A stampede of tapdancers blows past the doorway, clicking like cicadas, and as overwhelmed as I feel, an administrator asks if I want to expand my hours: A full time gig helping a boy with muscular dystrophy. It seems like something I shouldn't say no to. A month ago I vowed not to turn down any job I was offered, ever, but I don't think I can handle the morning commute, or the responsibility. Still, I remember how hard it was to be a special needs student at this school, and not to have anybody worth a damn there to help out.

I don't want to think about it. There is a surprising amount of stylish, young Dads who come to pick up their kids and flirt with the surprising amount of sexy, young professional women that work around the office. I don't rememer any hot chicks when I was a student here, god, fifteen years ago, and I was a horny little kid. Then again, maybe that's why I spent so much time faking sick in the office.

[Currently listening to Tupac]

Untitled

2006-11-18T14:39:00.000-08:00

"Two years after it happened, I come home and the house smelled like cookies, I didn't know why. I grabbed a beer and sat down in my chair and started drinking. The TV was on but I couldn't tell what the program was, I was so tired I wasn't paying attention. Dori came in, and bent over and kissed me, and when she kissed me I caught a brief glimpse of her breasts down her shirt and I pulled her on top of me. We kept kissing and I was rubbing her back under her shirt and we started heading upstairs. Just like that. She still had her oven mitt on.

And we stripped out of our clothing and got onto the bed and everything happened so gradually and so naturally we didn't even think about how long it had been, and I lifted her up onto my face and went down on her. It had been years. It was like I was seventeen and just discovering her body, just so full of lust and excitement. I flipped her over and did her from behind and then with her on top and I kept pushing the hair out of her face so I could look at her and she came and I came and we laid down next to each other in silence.

And that's when it hit us. We felt so good, but it wasn't pure. We felt right for a second, and content. And then we felt guilty, so entirely cheap and petty we could barely stand it. It was like the time we had a nice dinner and went to the movies last month, and stayed up all night talking. For me, it was like last summer when we went to the World Series and won and celebrated. It was the first time we'd had sex since that bastard murdered our son, and it hurt to think that we could go that long, just a couple of hours without thinking about him, for it to happen. It hurt to think that we were getting on with our lives."

Family Film Funnies

2006-11-18T14:38:00.000-08:00

ELR: No, but you should really see Mystery Train
Dad: I dunno, I haven't really been too impressed by Jarmusch
ELR: You liked Ghost Dog.
Dad: I dunno if I did.
Sis: I liked Ghost Dog, or maybe that was Ghost World. I always forget which is which.
ELR: Ghost World had the two girls, Ghost Dog had Forrest Whittaker.
Sis: Oh, I liked Ghost World.
Dad: Your mother liked Ghost.
Sis: I liked Ghost Dad.

[laughter]

Bonus Funny!

Betty: Oh, you should come out. Minax is having a party.
ELR: I don't know Minax, what kind of party?
Betty: It's a pansexual fetish party for sex workers.
ELR: But I'm not a sex worker.
Betty: It's okay, they'll let you in.
ELR: No they won't, they'll be all like Get a job! and I'll be like I can't I work with children. I don't think I can get paid to do both.
Eric: I think most sex workers also work with children.
ELR: You're thinking of sex abusers

[Nyuk]

[Currently listening to the Clash]

11 Dream Journal 11

2006-11-18T14:37:00.000-08:00

Is there a such thing as a boot iron? It's like a cloths iron with a rubber sole, that vibrates slowly. I used one in a dream a few minutes ago and it helped me get all the paint and blood off my new boots. The dirt came right off. It also came in handy when the zombies made their way onto the train.

I'm assuming that it's fake because in the dream, my boots were just a red rubber skin wrapped around a woven cotton nest, kinda like the inside of a baseball.

Thanks to dream-Greg for lending me the boot iron, even though I put the moves on dream-Liz after you were eaten.

There were other dreams last night:

I was back in high school, but the classroom was set up like a grade school with the chairs that were permanently attatched to desks and motivational posters all over. George W Bush was our teacher and I hated him the same way I hate the real one, but I was able to antagonize him the way I did my real teachers. He used a word that I didn't understand, "roarman" or something and I asked what it was.

Fed up, he threw a chair at me. It went over my head and into this kid Aaron Einhorn who threw it back at me.

"What the fuck? I really have never heard of that word before."

"You know what, Eric? You're a really annoying motherfucker."

I looked around, Aaron had the consensus. Some people nodded the agreement, and it just showed in the others' eyes. I put my head down, and decided to not talk so much.....

I invited a few friends to help me carry equipment to a private dj gig. A cold building downtown, a dusty old freight elevator with a rusty grey switch, a nondescript hallway decked out with minimal pictures of flowers. An attractive black woman in her mid thirties opened the door, which led to a sunlit penthouse loft. She was getting completely made over, hair cuts, acid skin peels, and all sorts of other shit I don't understand in her apartment. She hired me to play music that would add to the ambience that included catering and vials of scents strategically placed around the apartment. Things started going wrong before I set up. My friends invited friends. No one expected everyone to show up but they did. Soon the entire Rat Patrol was there. People I didn't know were showing up and getting drunk. The client laughed it off:

I'm sure all these attractive young people will make my skin fight harder.

Then she saw the guy passed out on a table by the door, resting his head in a tray of brownies. Then she fired me......

I was in a dark, crowded bar when I eyed some sort of punk rock sexual goddess. A short Mexican girl, with no hair, a Monroe piercing, and a perma smile in a spotted dress, eyeing me from across the room.

I walked up to her, or perhaps I stood there in space as the room receded. We were face to face, seperated by a thin wooden table, and then we were fucking, over the table, in front of everyone. I looked back and saw that Brandon could see us. Luckily, his girlfriend Kelsey wasn't paying attention. I was drunk but pangs of conscience were creeping in.

I spent the weekend around Brandon and Kelsey, afraid that one of them would tell Sarah, guilty, and ashamed that no one did......

It was the middle of the night, in a storefront theater off the interstate. We were sharing the space with a local youth theater group, setting up as they were shutting down. I was trying to figure out what my actual pay was, before I wa in too deep. The old lady who acted as our corporate liazon was effusive, at least if that word means what I think it does. She was trying not to tell me but when I gave her an ultimatum, she produced a chart.

$6.75/hr.

"That's less than half of what the ad said in Craigslist!"

"That's because you didn't get your Bachelor's in education."

"That's bullshit!"

"It's more than minimum wage."

"Fuck minimum wage, I can't live off that."

Hillary and I planned our escape, we were in the middle of nowhere. We would have to hitch, and we would have to wait til after the old girl had fallen asleep. Ronny had a more direct approach, more in line with his personality:

"Yo bitch, I wanna talk about some of this."

They went into a small room and I could hear him tear into her. Go Ronny! Then the yelling stopped. At least the yelling of words, and we started to get an idea of what was happening there. About a half hour later the door creaked open and Ronny comes out in just a shirt. I catch a look at his cock, which looks red and worn nd bigger than I would have expected for someone his height.

"Look guys, I'm gonna keep fuckin this bitch and then come home tomorrow. Yall should probly go."

Then he walked back into the room and I saw her. Her stern, pointy face and grim stare, like a real-life Cruella DeVille in a pink nightfrown with her legs together at the knee. It was disgusting, but I was surprised to catch a hint of jealousy from somewhere deep down.

Hillary and I walked out, into the cold clear night and stuck out our thumbs.

currently listening to 1990s hip hop: Gza, Fugees, the Pharcyde, all that good shit; currently reading "Zero Girl: Full Circle"]

AAAAHH! Teevee!!!

2006-11-18T14:35:00.000-08:00

Did anyone else see the commercial where Wal-Mart salutes our veterans?

While the announcer talks about how much our fighting men and women, past and present, deserve our respect and gratitude, there is a montage of Wal-Mart employees, labeled "sonar technician", "paratrooper", Sergeant, 1st Class" and the like.

How the fuck depressing is that? They all work at Wal-Mart!

And next week all the commercials are gonna be about Christmas...I'm glad my tv is broken. I don't care how much Tania wants to watch "Flavor of Love", I don't want a to go back to it.

Apparently this is an insecure week for me. An unsure week. A bitter week, too. I realized this after going back and reading my last few blogs.

2006-11-18T14:34:00.000-08:00

Apparently this is an insecure week for me. An unsure week. A bitter week, too. I realized this after going back and reading my last few blogs.

It's annoying being this self aware. I hate knowing that everything, every emotion and everything tangible is impermanent, and still having no control over it. It isn't excruciating but it ain't easy, waiting for the pendulum to swing back to manic from depression. It's probably cause I don't have any good books right now, that I have to embrace it.

I blame my dreams.

You know the ones. Not the one I had last night, with the dinosaur people. That one was alright, but all the rest I've had this week, full of mundane horrors where everyone is an accuser. Where I am guilted for desires I repress, but regret the the times I haven't acted on them, all in the name of being acceptable.

I blame my luck.

I have new things. New opportunities. New securities. Something is bound to go wrong. Everything is about to go wrong, and I don't know how.

I blame the weather.

It should be raining, but it's not. We've had dark skies for as long as I can remember (which isn't very long, as weather goes). I hide from the cold, because the skies are waiting for me. I go outside, and find it temperate and comfortable. The skies get thicker. When it gets me, it's gonna be bad. I should have gone out earlier, becauseI can't go out now.

I blame the attack ads...

We're all gonna die. We're all gonna lose our jobs to terrorists and Mexicans. If the war doesn't get our children, the pedophiles will, and if not the pedophiles then global warming, and if they somehow manage to wriggle free from the grasp of all these bogeymen, they'll be strangled by their own longevity when they find themselves old, broke, and without health care.

In a few hours, if I wake up in time, I'll have to grit my teeth and vote. I will vote for Greens and Libertarians wherever I can, and I will hold my nose and vote for Republicans. A lot of them. I'm sick of all the clout, the nepotism and cronyism, of the Democrats in power in this city. They expect my vote. They expect me to vote Democrat, or vote for ineffective third parties or not vote at all, but they don't expect me to vote for a racist, homophobic, Xenophobic Grand Old Party just to get rid of them, so that's what I'm going to have to do.

I keep going back to ten years ago. I think I appreciate the novelty. That I was a mostly formed adult human. Fourteen: cocky, sexualized, and opinionated. I was an anarchist then. I believed in collective farming and some sort of shared cooperative utopia, completely forgoing what people wanted. It would be so much easier to be an anarchist now, to work through defensive action and totally discount the current power structure.

At least I get to use one of the new voting machines. It'll be like using some negative ATM, that's all service charge and no payoff.

That's a terrible analogy. It'll be like donatng blood to a Klansmen.

On the brightside, as far as the machines go, there's a good chance my vote won't count. I know because I trained the people who'll be working it, and I know how hopeless they are.

I start working as a tutor today. 6th, 7th and 8th graders, all black. Old enough to call me on my bullshit, savvy enough to know how cheeseball the lesson plan is. I'm hoping they're desperate enough to work with me. I don't think I would have.

[currently watching: CNN]

Growing up is fucking weird

2006-11-18T14:33:00.000-08:00

My first girlfriend got married this year, and now she's knocked up.

Sure, he looks harmless, all curled up in his amniotic sac, floating around and developing a circulatory system all day. But to me, he's a threat.

To make matters worse, the only girl I've ever lived with (in a nonplatonic sense) had a kid this year. He looks like this:

I've got no beef with him. He's a nice enough kid. I'm just getting older.

[currently listening to Fela Kuti]

1. lame story that other djs might find amusing. 2. perceived class identity problems

2006-11-18T14:31:00.000-08:00

So I was doing a show at the Globe Pub yesterday. It's a good spot, outside of the kinda lame English sports bar motif. Friendly staff and a crowd that has absolutely no interest in Top 40 music. I set up, plug everything in, put on my headphones and... nothing.

No sound at all.

I scramble around plugging and unplugging everything and doing the same thing over and over when I realize that I didn't bring my 1/8" to 1/4" adapter, I brought my RCA to 1/4" adapter!

I call up my girlfriend (and DJ partner) Sarah, begging her to bring over an 1/8" to 1/4" adapter. I'll even pay for the cab and...she brings my other RCA to 1/4" adapter!

We're both mortified now, and thirty bucks poorer, with useless headphones, and a book of cds I'm only kinda familiar with.

Luckily, I was able to fake competence until my good friend DJ Demchuk came through and saved the day.

I can't believe people still let me do this. Thanks Dan, thanks Sarah.

----

Today's story (totally destroys the ego I built up yesterday):

I'm riding the train to a show. It's a corporate gig, so I'm dressed as nicely as I can but I still feel like a scumbag weirdo. I'm sleeping on the train, clutching my DJ bag, which is really just the messenger bag Kyle gave me when he got a new one.

I wake up when someone sits on my coat. It's a really young guy with really impeccable everything. Perfect jeans, perfect coat, perfect haircut. Perfect best friend with in similar accoutrement. It's all designer vintage so they don't look like tools. They're going through gay, college student drama.

"She wants to cheat on him and then date a woman, to get back at him."

"Jesus, I feel bad for her and all, but get over it. Dude doesn't even live in the state anymore, does he?"

"No, he's here for like four days every four months."

"Hey, Remember that party where we met?"

"With that twink kid?"

"God, what was he, like fourteen?"

"Yeah, and he was homeless and sleeping on the street and all like, 'You can't laugh at me, I'm just a kid!' "

"God."

I had two chances to feel inferior to these guys. First was when I was the bum they woke up on the train, and second when they came into the bar I was spinning at with a bunch of second-string castmembers for Wicked.

It wasn't a great night. I couldn't tell what the crowd wanted, so I did like I was told and played pop R&B all night after. It didn't feel right, the bar was playing better music before I got there. Verve shit, downtempo house, things I didn't have on me.

At the end of the night, I'm feeling like a hot mess, when fifteen theatre guys and fag hags (to be fair, they were probably just girls from the show who were outnumbered by their gay accompanyment) who only wanted to dance to show off how outlandishly the could dance. It was annoying. They wouldn't keep it up from song to song because they were just doing routines, and they kept me an hour after I was told I would be, or could probably handle.

It's alright. This is probably the best job I've ever had, and the closest to what I actually want to do in the world. Actually, it is what I want to be doing in the world. I just don't know how to deal with it sometimes. It being people, as well as my own perceptions of class, self, and expectation. I feel like a huge fraud, and it's not just there. On Sunday I went to a punk show where I felt overdressed, in practiacally the same clothes. I've always felt stuck inbetween, some sort of middle class guilt/shame.

I have no idea how to end this, because it's far from over, so I'll end it tritely, by saying that next week is another week and tomorrow is another day.

[currently listening to Anavan]

A walking tour of magickal places

2006-11-18T14:30:00.000-08:00

A walking tour of magickal places I've never had sex in but would like to***

I'm talking about the neighborhood I grew up in, and you probably don't live there, so you'll have to start on the Red Line.

I don't know how many trains the CTA keeps in circulation, or for how long. I know that the cars are made in a way that they can be removed, switched and exchanged but I don't know if they are, so perhaps the concept of individual trains is null. No matter, lets assume that the trains they're using now are the same ones they were using twelve years ago. Get in the car. Head north. Look around.

I've spent more time in that car than I have in my current apartment, and probably my last apartment and the one before that, and experienced the full range of human emotion. I've cried there, and slept. I've eaten, I've laughed, I've fought, I've gotten high. Extreme hate, extreme lust. I've been dumped on the train to Howard, but I've never screwed there.

Get off at the Jarvis stop. Ignore the pun. Embark, due East. Past the comic book store that doesn't exist anymore, the seedy gay bar that is now a shiny Irish pub, Honest Don's, the Elf Man's cobblery and the only 7-Eleven I've ever seen fail and shut down. Past the first house I ever did get naked with a girl.

Stop when you hit water.

The Jarvis beach is the neighborhood's only secret. At night it belongs to witches and gangbangers, but never at the same time. _____ taught me how to cast a circle there, a week before we fucked for the first time. ___ and I would go there to smoke Phillies and hide from our Moms. You may still find small rounds of stones there, and you may find stray bullet casings.

In the 1980s, dead fish would wash up on the shore and pile up. Hundreds of em, midway through summer. The city has since released a predator into the water that eats them before they get a chance to die on their own. The beach is clean now, and it would be a great place to fuck.

If you've never had sex on a beach before, the only bit of advice I can give you is, bring a towel to lie down on. What it lacks in spontanaeity, it makes up for in not having grains of sand grit into places they can't get out of. If you're adventurous, bring it to the rock island. Leave your drawers on the flagpole, they belong to the ages. Don't throw your condom into the water, it'll only come back, unwanted, like all those empty fish.

Head back west, to Glenwood. East Glenwood. Hook a left.You will pass a number of amazing places. Turtle Island. The Independent Video Alliance. Eagles Aerie Shamanic Counseling. Phantom Limb. Some still exist, some are just ghosts now. Swing a right on Lunt.

The Heartland Cafe may be the very soul of East Rogers. The scumbags, the artists, the yuppies, the dealers, Loyola students and dirty old men have all made their home there. The waitresses all have dreadlocks, the waiters are all on heroin, and none of the bartenders know how to mix a drink. I've been told that my number used to be scrawled across the stall in the women's room but no one ever called it. That's fine. I'm not interested in the women's room, I'm interested in the roof.

You may have noticed it from the train. An unused patio, and a replica atom bomb cracked over the Heartland sign. As an ultimate tribute to the 'make love, not war' ideals that both the restaurant and I espouse to, I wanna bend someone over that bomb. Think of it as the sheer force of lovemaking overpowering the threat of nuclear holocaust, that has made equal parts slave and rebel out of us all for the last sixty years, or something...as viewed from a train.

Head South. Glenwood West. A street that is still paved with brick, that is half street and half alley, a block of jazz, revolution and voodoo, courtesy of the artist Dzine, who has since sold out. Hop the wall that splits Glenwood and you'll find the city's thinnest forest. A surprisingly dense row of trees that seperates the street from the train. Kizer died here when he fell onto the tracks. Fuck in memorial, fuck as a testament to life.

When I was dating ______, she told me I was the second best fuck she'd ever had. It ranks among the highest compliments I've ever been paid. She didn't know who number one was, only that he was white and pinned her up against a dumpster in an alley outside of a bar. When you're done with the mural, the train, and the forest, hit the alleys. South. East. Back towards the beach (you're walking in a rhombus).

Along the shore of Loyola Beach, you'll find the art wall. Every year, local residents repaint a half-mile of bench, in three-foot by two-foot rectangular increments. You'll find mysticism here, callouts of the government, pleas for environmental action, inside jokes, and obscure gangster folk art. There's nothing sexy about the art wall, it's just something cool to look at as you head to your last stop.

The beach heads into a park, where a statue sits, a giant white loop with a big white lumpy thing off to the side. When I was little, the loop was the biggest thing in the world, and climbing it was the tallest I would ever be. My first best friend, JJ, and I spent the day there before he moved off to Hawaii in first grade. It was a sad day, and a fun one, and I've revisited the statues many times in the years since. I can climb it in a couple bounds now, but it'd still be taller than the tallest bed, and whether sunk into the concave or arched over the convex, I think it would be a good spot to get laid out.

I would be on the bottom, watching the stars, following her curves, following the curves of the statue.

That's it.
I'm done. You're spent.Or perhaps you're not, perhaps you're Spartacus, and still full of vigor. But you've exhausted the neighborhood. So go home.

***This is actually the verbatim route that I walked day in, day out when I was really depressed. Some of the memories had already been forged by then and some were still waiting for me. I'm trying to reclaim it, turn it into a a list to be checked off, a place to look forward to, a den of ill repute, a secret couples destination. I'm doing it in an attempt to combat my writer's block, which is as bad as any kind of impotence.

[currently watching: Mystery Train]

Episode One. Capital-R Rough draft.

2006-10-05T02:31:00.000-07:00

I was rolling with a crew of principled psychopaths and I think that I might've been in over my head. We called ourselves the Gang of Three, even though there were four of us, because the name was already in place when they found me. Each of us had had to prove ourselves by accomplishing some extraordinary task. Mine was the easiest and most ordinary: heroin addiction. The most ordered heroin addiction you'd ever seen.

I locked myself in a room with a bunch of old books and jazz records. I had a bucket for piss, a bucket for shit, and a bucket of fresh water brought up daily. Three times a day, one of The Three would come in and shoot me up in incremantally larger doses. I don't know where they got the junk, I never saw the dealer myself. I just stayed in my room, nodding off into the floorboards as the needle bounced along a Dizzy Gillespie track.

My problem was that I was neurotic. I needed to be in control at all times. My addiction and my participation in the Gang of Three broke me of that. For the most part, I'm in control but my body betrays that control. I'll get lost in my head on my way home, and my legs will start walking off into some sketchy neighborhood hopin to find someone to hook me up. I'll be surprised to hear myself lying to a doctor, trying to score vicodin, as if I didn't know what will happen to me, what kind of a spell I'll get caught in after just one becomes just a couple, becomes... It's invigorating to know that there's a certain part of myself I can't logic into submission.

I met the rest of the Gang of Three during the my first week in Law School. They were already well on their way to becoming what we are today, but they were still experimenting with their personal evolutions, and only occasionally taking on cases. It was all pro bono back then, they hadn't become a firm yet. Anyway, it was the first week of orientation and there were lectures being held all over school. I was in a stall in the men's room when I saw their flier.

Change the world theough legal action. Bring about classless utopian democracy. Save the world from people like yourself. Save yourself from people like the world.

Damen Hall. Thursday the 12th. 5:00 PM.

I was the only one who showed up, so we went to a bar. They were all there. Claire, back when she had long hair; Damien, looking tall and powerful; and spastic Devon, with his eyes darting around the room. Their trials were much more physical than mine, although the physical aspects were far easier to overcome than the mental.

At five years, Claire who would become my lover, was only halfway through hers. Over the course of a decade, she got pregnant nine times and had nine abortions. She wanted to understand the feeling at each stage of pregnancy, so she terminated the first pregnancy at one month, the second at two months, the third at three months, and so on. Each time she named them. Each time she went to the doctors, frequently, to check on their progress. The seventh and eighth were mine. Julien and Sean (Shawn before we found out she was a girl). With both of mine, I tried to persuade her to keep them, and she thought about it. The first time, she slept on it for a night, the second time for a week, before waking up and slapping me and calling me a temptor. Each time she cried.

Devon was her brother. His goal was to de-sex himself. He spent years taking different hormones, trying to neutralize all his sexual acids and bases. He decides when he meets someone whether he's going to be a man or a woman for them, and then sticks with it. When I met him, he was a man, which is why I use the pronoun. He says that he makes the decision within the first minute of conversation. I hear that subconsciously, that minute is when we all decide whether we want to fuck that person we've just met. Devon doesn't fuck. He's a eunuch. I showered with him once, on a trip, and I imagined he would be smooth down there like a Ken doll but he's anything but. Just a mess of scar tissue and one ugly, unfuckable piss hole. He takes whatever he can to deaden the desire, short of pharmaceuticals. Prozac would probably beat homeopathy but he won't do Pfizer. He doesn't twitch anymore, or look over his shoulder. I can honestly say that I've never met a happier miserable person in all my life.

Damien doesn't want to be a person at all, and his task won't be done with until he's dead. He's like a superhero trying to undo himself, trying to get rid of all that makes him human. Not in terms of personality or conviction or a soul, but in actual parts. He started slowly, by shaving off all of his hair. Then he donated a kidney. He cut off the ring finger and gave it to a prostitute, as an homage to Van Gogh, and they got married the next year. Eventually he'd had both his legs amputated and a partial lobotomy. He's kept his genitals out of respect for Devon's task. We've denied him the right to lose his arms, and forced him to let his eyebrows grow in, just so that he could remain a public figure. Just so that he can remain useful. If it were up to him he would just be a voicebox, but we need him. His voice, which comes out in his stern glare and the gestures of his strong arms, and his frail frame juxtapose to make him that much stronger. When I say force and I say deny, what I mean is that we make all decisions by committee. The Gang of Three has power of attorney over all its members. It controls our bank accounts and whether or not we can leave the country. Eventually, it will decide whether we live or die, until there's just one of us, left with the burden of his or her own self to take care of.

And that's it. The little guy's best friend. The man's worst enemy. The scariest and most beautiful thing I've ever seen. The Gang of Three.

gut yontif

2006-10-05T02:28:00.000-07:00

I celebrated the day (eve?) of atonement with the traditional making of the mix cd, working at a friend's wedding, eating fatty foods and drinking low-carb beer, visiting a strip club, and smoking a hookah in bed like a fat, Saudi prince watching Pinky and the Brain.

But yom kippur still holds precedent,

I would like to apologize to anyone I've wronged over the last year (and the many, many years prior wth which I've been wronging folks). To anyone who's pissed me off, and to all who have erred against me, maliciously or by accident, you are forgiven.

Happy New Years 5767, let's try not to go and fuck it up, this time!

P.S. To whomever left the squeeze-horn in the basket of my tricycle, thank you so much!!!

[currently listening to a duet between Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker]

I am Jack's Smattering of Panache

2006-10-05T02:27:00.000-07:00

This is Mister Zip. He works for theUS Postal Service. His job is to help me find zip codes, and encourage their use. It's my second day temping, and because I am the world's best temptor, I finished everything I needed to do real early. Now, my job is to go through a database, find all the five-digit area codes, and convert them to nine-digit area codes with my good pal Mister Zip.

The old guy in the cubicle next to me keeps dipping into RPGForums when he thinks nobody's looking.

This is great. Soon, I'll be able to buy food again, and beer. And new clothes so I won't be this weird, slovenly temp who comes in with uncombed hair that makes me look like Michael Landon's scumbag brother.

I love stupid office bullshit! I am a space-aged number zombie and I'm going to eat Dilbert! Hopefully I won't get fired for blogging! Exclamation points!

I hate to say it, but it's good to be making money again.

[currently listening to "The Sexual Life of Savages" compilation]