Been friends with Steve for 17 years. Could deliver you decades’ worth of photos of us two in this same pose.
He moved to Long Beach last summer, but was back in town for a show. Too many hot women at his opening [puns intended].
Darwin Deez @schubas
Haven’t seen this kid in ten years. Now he’s a big star. All the kids in the crowd knew all the words.
When he saw me at the bar, there was no hesitation. “Hey, erica,” he said. The tesseract of heart. Lossless.
Seer’s Tower with V + his visiting friend R. Chicago achievement unlocked.
The view was spectacular but no more so than from the restaurant near the top of the Hancock. Had most fun goofing off in the hour and a half line. A line to go through security. A line to get your ticket. A line to get on the elevator. Lines running through the many gift shops.
I have a real weakness for refrigerator magnets and coffee mugs, and there were some excellent ones at these gift shops but I refuse to negotiate with terrorists, and thus let the shopportunities pass by.
Also: will send the folks at the Tower my suggested changes to the trivia available in line. “All this trivia says is, ‘look at how big this fucking tower is.’ They say it over and over!” said V.
Cuttin’ up with Katya at the Drake. Achievement unlocked.
The Drake is where you take your pretty moll and commune with other gangsters. The Drake is where you wear your tight black dress and dance to live jazz. The Drake is where you shoot something up in the bathroom and leave your syringe behind in the stall (insulin? heroin?).
M saw a lookalike 30 years her senior in the corner. “Look at her: beautiful, severe white hair, shawl, grumpy face, alone, well-lit, accompanied by a gay man … that’s me in the future!” exclaimed M.
We deliberated the best course of action. “Send her a drink!”
The drink duly sent, M’s sylphan future self accepted it without remark. As expected.
Those familiar with my black thumb will find it no surprise that the garlic, found sprouted last week and planted shortly thereafter, is not doing so great.
After an initial manic growth phase, it has since folded in half. So I’ve wired it to a chopstick, much like Odysseus tied to the mast, sailing past the sirens.
See how it strains at the sounds. The Buddhists say “life is suffering” but they mean suffer like straining. And the straining can be painful, but it can also be how you know you’re alive. Thus, love unto the strange equivalences advanced by the Buddhists.
“If you walk on the beach you get sand in your shoes,” says V. “But if you walk on the ice, you have a cool experience.”
We hike on the big ice floes that abut the beach. They’re covered in delicate frozen structures, like lichens. The surface ice on Mother Michigan looks like lily pads. We watch the waves struggle to break, their forms uncanny like a computer simulation of waves. Slower, more hexagonal. It’s like watching children play with a length of chain mail.
Later on the path back to the car, V finds a laminated sheet with a picture of leaves on one side and a pod of seals on the other. It looks to me like something torn out of a magazine. On the leaf side is an address label for a Dr. Penwick Fitzwilliam* (*something like that) (something equally ridiculous) of Evanston, Illinois.
“Do you think if I put a stamp on it, the post office would send it?” V asks. Yes, definitely. “Then the good Dr. Fitzwilliam is about to get a little surprise in the mail!”
“You thought you could escape,” I say. “You thought you’d left it all behind that day like so many decaying leaves or beached seals. But some things aren’t so easy to toss aside, Doctor.”
At Pier One near Old Town. Check out this bowl of decorative fuzzy green bulbous things. You can’t quite read the sticker but it says they were “mouth blown.”
Heh heh.
:)
Christmas train spotted on the Granville red line platform.
Bah humbug, everyone. I don’t like Christmas.
I like lights. I like having a time of rest. December a big free for all, everyone killing time until the new year. Even if you don’t take a vacation, enough people you work with or rely on are on vacation, so work comes to a standstill. Parties. A request from life that you consider something besides yourself.
I don’t like Santa. I don’t like Christmas music. I don’t like involuntarily singing all the words to all the Christmas songs when I’m at the CVS buying Pedialyte for V. I don’t like elves. I don’t like crowds. I don’t like the request to SPEND qua national duty.
I don’t like the cultural presumption of Christianity. I don’t like pretending Christmas is secular. It’s the Christ mass; there are no secular parts of the word.
The Christmas train rolled up, crowded, blaring and bleating. CTA personnel dressed as elves with buckets of little candy canes. Santa riding on his own roofless rickshaw, free to the elements. Like the real Santa.
It looked nightmarish and wonderful. Half of me spitting out, “fuck!” and the other half whispering, “take me with you … !”
