I hate blogging

OK blog, I'm only doing this because I haven't in a long time. We are like some long-married couple that no longer sleeps in the same room at night. But this one is for us baby. So get comfortable: we may be here a while.

This winter has been a dismal time divided by occasional highlights thus far. I've been drinking more and more lately. About two weeks ago I blacked out around 9ish at quarter beer night at The Horseshoe. When I woke up I had lost my phone and my wallet (the wallet later turned up stuffed into an old school bag that I rarely use) with pictures of felines drawn on my chest in black ink. Details are sketchy and still emerging. There is a very real chance that I disrobed at the bar as well. The phone was replaced after visiting a T-Mobile store, waiting for hours while some insane bitch kicked her helpless dog that she had confined to a carrier, demanding better reception and more anytime minuets. The world is a loss. So it goes.

I recently purchased a Polaroid camera and took photos of the inside of my medicine cabinet. I then hung the photos inside my medicine cabinet. I figured that this would invariably confuse the authorities when they come to repossess my belongings. Confuse them or enlighten them in a 6th century Zen sort of way. A modern day Basho I am.

If Basho were a
photographer, he'd use a
Polaroid camera.

They are the haiku of the photographic world.

The rest of the season has been consumed by writing or otherwise working on 'the book' and buying presents for friends and/or attending their dinner parties in a wife-beater. That is how I roll.

I have been listening -non-stop- to the Libertines first album "Up the Bracket" and BRMC's "Howl."

Making vague plans to: Hit France for a driving tour with D sometime in the next 3 months. Purchase a car. Join the Peace Corps and learn to speak Arabic. It is good to have ambitions.


As for today, I feel touched by the icy finger of death. I've contracted some kind of horrible upper-respiratory disease that is currently branching out on it's path of destruction like General Sherman marching to the sea. There is no doubt in my mind that this disease wants me dead. My body is putting up no resistance as retribution for quitting smoking. My body loved to smoke. Anyway, the thing is falling at a pretty bitching time as far as retributive bio-terrorism goes - we have a really short deadline at work this week due to the holidays and I'm about due to peak into a mass of congesting phlegm and swollen diaphragms right about when we go to press. Hurray! Can't wait proof a 12 page issue while being so high on NyQuil that everything I hear echoes and my fingers appear to elongate, making typing and holding pens impossible. Fast times, as always. And this, my friends, is why I do not blog more often.

Autum Leaves

Today is the most Autumnal day I can remember, save for a one or two I vaguely recall from childhood. There’s a strong wind ripping most of the newly turned leaves off of their branches and scattering them about. Kids on campus are wearing scarves with light jackets and the cool air through the window carries sounds a little better than it does in the heat and humidity of summer. People are starting to walk around with their hands in their pockets. The weather reports say yesterday and the day before may be out last fair-weather days until next year. Soon I’ll have to get the motorcycle back to its winter storage location south of the city. Then the cold will really come, the pipes and radiators will rattle, and winter will roll down from the north with a certain metallic sort of ambivalence.

The phrase “Summer is almost over” has stuck in my mind ever since I saw it printed in a news paper ad and ripped it out, gluing it to my typewriter with red paint. I guess I’ve always enjoyed the easy metaphor present in the change of one season into another. And anyone can examine their existence and find a few things that mirror that change, for better or worse, and use them as a way to personify the seasons. To make something inanimate and inarticulate personal; it’s a weird characteristic of humanity. Anyway, as it appears that summer is now defiantly over, I feel like tipping my hat to the coming winter like a burglar, who knows he’s busted, might nod to the police who have come to take him away.

"Eyes on the road ahead, and bent to it again. Gone."

So it's been a while...

I'm a horrible blogger. If this blog was a child or some kind of dependant it would have been taken from me by the appropriate government agency due to neglect. But, as any good abusive parent/husband/bestial pornographer has said, "I can change baby...really. How bout you take me back and we get some bar-b-q and get busy?"

So, that said, I intend to stick with this wretched little thing - posting more often and being less concise and clear.

For instance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_A._Norton


I read this today and found it to be utterly fascinating. Anyone who has read (the cliff notes version of) Don Quixote MUST be a little touched by the story of Joshua Norton. I would argue that he is the essential American - right up there with Jefferson, Roosevelt and Abby Hoffman. Currently, the national mint is turning out coins with pictures of cows and ubiquitous, pastoral scenes that represent each state and, subsequently, our national identity. This is a load of crap. There is no reason for Iowa to have its own coinage before Joshua Norton's likeness is carved into the front or back of some legal tender. Iowa and Florida should be given back to the Natives.... they've done nothing for us anyway.

Just a thought.

Cherrio for now!

Notes from the underground

This is a part of my notes from one of a few shows by The Ponys that I went to while researching an article I was writing about them that eventually got published in Love, Chicago. I didn't end up using this, but it was a fun drunken evening and so I faithfully submit it.

K



Subterranean has all the charm of a frat house that has been converted into a two-story darkroom. A place where outlaw pornographers develop still images of snuff films and huff gasoline fumes. Where it isn't dark, it glows with a queer red light. Rough, plywood edges feel like they jut out from just about everywhere. And the couches upstairs have probably come from the estate sale of some long-dead Hispanic pimp that lived in the neighborhood before the housing boom bathed it in fair-trade coffee and upscale boutiques.
But when the tickets are free, you don't ask questions about the atmosphere. Especially when the destination promises loud music on a Saturday night -- the kind of thing you bite your lip and pray for during Wednesday morning meetings when the office is too cold, and you're ready to fill the coffee maker with urine and smear your letter of resignation onto the worn carpeting in yellow mustard. Yes, The Ponys are a welcome diversion from this sort of feeling. Loud and frayed at the edges, their sound is developing into a very tight and cohesive force.
Like a jet-propelled phallus, rocketing off across the night sky and leaving everyone who stands watching it secretly wishing they could climb aboard - these people are about to go for a ride. What's strange is that I've met the band, and they are all very nice - almost shy in some respects. They can still walk through the din of bad light and drunken revelry of the Subterranean unrecognized, though this probably wont last for long. When their blades are sharp enough, they will need to cut down the tall trees, like other seminal bands that have come before them, letting new light in to the virgin forest. For now, we can only congregate in whatever backwater red-light hole they show up at and hope that if we keep arriving, we might be there when the big trees fall, and that light comes shining in.

But she breaks just like a little girl....

But she breaks just like a little girl....

Meghan called me in a panic. "I've been having nightmares...can't sleep, I'm coming over." It was 3 o'clock on a Wednesday morning and I was in no mood for whatever this was about. "Don't you come here!" I shouted into the phone, "you have a husband, that's what He's for!" She had already hung up the phone before I finished the sentence though.

Meghan and her husband live two floors above me in a ubiquitous apartment building on the near-north side. I've known them for about three years now, and have come to rely on them for all kinds of domestic advice. Her husband, Russell, is a banker by trade and she works in some anonymous secretarial office job. They were married about two and a-half years ago and are constantly making plans to move to the suburbs, start a family of soccer players. I have no doubt they will see these plans through. It is probably within their means to do so right now, if they could only surrender their youthful love of living in the city, going out on the weekends, and maybe, strictly maybe- the fantasy of trading up to a better, more exciting life. The kind they always pictured themselves living.

I was reluctant to answer the door when I heard the knock. I could tell by the desperate phone call that she would probably continue knocking all night, so in spite of better instincts I opened the door and let her in. "Ever since that party last week I haven't been able to sleep." She was referring to the party Russell threw her for her 30th birthday. "I just lie there thinking about college and where I thought I'd end up and where I am now...God! I'm such a mess." She was on the verge of a breakdown and I couldn't really think of anything to say. "Well, why not just stop thinking about it," I said. "Just go home and drink yourself to sleep...or whatever Donna Reid would do in this situation. I have no time for this weirdness." She ignored my suggestions and started telling me about the time in college when she and the guy she was dating climbed up onto the roof of a building somewhere in Middle America and made love beneath the night sky. I'd heard the story before, and even then it struck me as the kind of thing old wives think about late at night as their husbands sleep and cars hiss by outside their windows.

Meghan spread out on my couch and continued talking but I couldn't focus on what she was saying. She had this pathetic air about her suddenly, something you see on the face of the defeated. And it made me think. Her story isn't all that different from what you see on a prime-time special about the life of a serial-killer before they get caught: A nice, clean house, a decent job, respected by all the neighbors and an occasional participant in charitable functions. There is no reason to believe there is anything sinister beneath the surface, no dark secrets looming in a shallow grave just beneath the dirt in the crawl space under the house. But then, one day, it all turns black.

She had talked herself out within an hour, and then fell asleep there on the couch. Another exhausted mark that bought into the great junk-bond that is the American Ideal. In another era, Meghan's type would have been a saloon girl in an old western whistle stop town on the edge of nowhere. Splitting her time at night between drinks at the bar and earning them on her back. Sucked into the notion that there was simply no other way, and that the desperate need for something else that welled up in their chest every now and again was better left unspoken.

The sad truth is that her story is a common one in our time. With nothing left to do and nothing left to be discovered, going for broke is a hard sell to anyone with a chance of making it into a suburban cemetery one day. Fifty years ago, her life was thought of as the dream to which one should aspire, but after half a century of dreaming more and more people like her are waking up with nightmares. Maybe it's the dated expectation that a college education, a clean arrest record, and good credit will lead to some kind of real happiness. Who knows? Maybe it's just that whatever kind of brass it takes to throw off the easy comforts that this kind of life provides is lacking in our generation. Like some evolutionary weirdness, bred out after years of misuse and neglect. There aren't many left on this planet with the balls to move the big stones these days, to build the pyramid for the sake of proving it can be built. With any luck, the next generation will get bored with the antiseptic tranquility of the suburbs and shake the earth with the force of their character. But it's too late tonight to make any sort of predictions about that sort of thing.

...There he goes, one of god's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant; too weird to live, too rare to die....

**Note - This little ditty was published in a few online zines and blogs on or around the 15th of March, 2005. **

...There he goes, one of god's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant; too weird to live, too rare to die....

I went to bed early last night because I knew today was going to be long and bloated with long-hours of waiting around for things to get over with. I've got to wait through work, take the train home, wait until 9:30, and then sit through a band practice so that I can interview the band for an article I'm supposed to write about them for a music magazine. I hate my job and I hate this band and I'm beginning to hate writing because they all require a sort of charming cleverness that is about as appetizing as licking a full ashtray after a night of heavy drinking. So anyway I went to bed early, maybe 10:15, and so missed the news when it broke.

I woke up at about 4am to the radio announcer saying "...Thompson, a legendary journalist and icon of the 1960's and 70's "New Journalism", died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. He was 63." I sat up in bed and waited for a gut reaction. Was I glad? What sort of news was this? Bad news? Was I dreaming again? I got no answers and turned on CNN. Nothing. MSNBC, Nothing. No news channels were covering this. I was convinced it was a farce. I checked the New York Times webpage as a last resort and found the headline there, right above "Secret Bush Tapes Imply President Tried Pot" and right below "Sandra Dee, 'Gidget' Star and Teenage Idol, Dies at 62". Could this really be happening? What kind of cruel and sick minded fascist had taken control of the New York Times webpage? But the news was true and, at best, fit to print.

I honestly don't have much to say. 'Shocking' is a word that comes to mind, but is it really? Perhaps 'Ominous' is a better word. Right now I look at this news like someone who just witnessed a stampede of animals running out of a forest; bracing myself and staring at the trees, looking for the beast that drove them out. Maybe that thing won't come. Or maybe it has been coming for a long time, and we were all too giddy and drunk on the fumes of everyday life to notice the pounding of hoofs as they approached. All I know now is that if the Doctor decided to get out of the way then I'm pretty sure I don't want to see whatever the hell is coming out of that wood.

I have questions that I want answered, for now I am guessing they'll not be. But I imagine that, just before that bullet passed through the man's brain, he was thinking about that great rubber sack he talked about in The Rum Diary - and how he'd run from, struggled with, and fought against it his whole life; and how you can't win a foot race against the tics of a stopwatch. Maybe this was his last chance to get out. Either way, wherever he is now, I'm sure he'll wish he had that extra bullet in the chamber.

The end is Neigh…

The end is Neigh…

"I'll kill you!" he screamed, "You want my vote? I vote for you to die you bastard!" Somewhere on the other side of the fence a beer bottle shattered on the concrete of their patio. A scuffle ensued but was quickly ended when Nancy came out back and threatened to castrate the two men if any of the broken glass ended up deflating her new swimming pool.

Bill and Marty are good people. Fine Americans. Bill, who retired from the Chicago Police Department last year, likes to spend these early days of his golden years on the back porch of his two-story brownstone house on Chicago's north side. Marty, who is Bill's younger brother, is a mildly retarded but coherent alcoholic who does not have a job and collects stray animals. When the weather is good, as it has been in Chicago this summer, Bill and Marty get blindingly drunk and discuss politics. This invariably ends in death threats and broken glass, and Nancy, Bill's wife, cursing the two of them and breaking it up.

This highly partisan and misinformed punditry carries on well into the evening most nights, much to the chagrin of the neighbors in the buildings next-door. I am one of these neighbors, but unlike my colleagues I admire these men for the strength of their convictions. It takes a lot to kill a man. Much less a man who is your own flesh and blood. To do so, or even threaten to do so over a political difference requires the sort of brass that is lacking in our society. Or at least lacking until recently.

In many ways, Bill and Marty mirror the general mood of the American voting public in this election season: highly polarized, feverishly supportive of their candidate, and lacking in what can only be called common sense. The nation has been drinking on the back porch in the heat all day, and it is only a matter of time before things get ugly, brothers kill brothers, and the air goes out of the inflatable pool again. But I am getting ahead of myself here.

Bill seems to have the Democratic ticket summarized in one word. To him, John Kerry and John Edwards are "Haircuts." He has spoken for hours to this effect, and not without a certain touch of eloquence. It is his contention that Kerry and Edwards are nothing but a fashionable comb-over that does nothing for the bald spot on the American Soul. He claims that the Democrats lack substance and decisiveness, and even points to photographs of Kerry in the 1960's as proof that hair is the real issue on their platform.

Marty, who is rarely seen without his tasseled leather vest and long, dirty hair, done up in a ponytail, takes offence to this characterization. To him the world is surprisingly less black and white. He will often speak of the plight of the workingman whose factories have closed under the Bush administration's economic policies. When Marty is reminded that he has not personally held, nor sought gainful employment in over 3 years things usually digress into a war of personal attacks and empty threats.

The simple truth that both of these men often fail to see is that they are far more alike than different. There is a certain vein of patriotism and conviction that runs through the two of them like it ran through Teddy Roosevelt. In fact, it's not hard to imagine them as two Rough Riders, enjoying a few too many after a hard day of charging hills and vanquishing enemies for the advancement of US imperialistic efforts. Perhaps in another life these two were brothers on opposite sides of the Civil War. Insulting one another and heaving beer bottles at each other across the fields of Gettysburg.

Luckily for them, Nancy has them both by the balls. No matter how ridiculous they get in the heat of early August, fueled by hours of light beer and confused talk, Nancy will always bring the hammer down and prevent what would otherwise be nothing short of a disaster. Be it reality television or Internet pornography, whatever holds us, as a nation, back from this brink is a very special and uniquely American thing. Where else in the world is it more acceptable to hate your next-door neighbor, your brother, and your coworkers on the basis of philosophical and political differences? Election season in America makes heroes of a few of us, and jackasses of the rest. And with the convention season upon us it is only bound to get worse. It is in these times that I am reminded of the words of Illinois favorite son, Abraham Lincoln, when he said, "A house divided against it self cannot stand." Curiously, it stands anyway.

KK