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Category Archives: rambling

more stuff and stuff

so. the bears are going to the super bowl. it’s kind of a funny feeling — i imagine people in new england are dealing with a similarly displeasing and unfamiliar feeling of “the pats aren’t going to the super bowl” (and i know one particular new englander who feels that weirdness). it’s been 21 years.

i remember watching super bowl 20 in the basement of mom’s condo in columbus, taping it (where is that tape?), watching with her. hadn’t yet moved to chicago, but still got caught up in the fervor. i must not have seen any of the bears games that year…. my only experience with professional football was limited to the bengals or browns and there wasn’t much of that…. growing up in columbus meant you need look no further for quality football than the buckeyes.

anyhow — here we are, two years removed from the white sox championship, 10 years removed from the last bulls championship and 21 years from the last super bowl. i guess when national titles for major sports come so far apart, it’s tough to really know how you’re supposed to feel about it. during the two 3-peats the bulls pulled off in the 90s, we got a little used to the winning. no danger of that happening any time soon.

that said, lou pinella is taking the cubs to the world series this year.

in other news: there isn’t much of it. i haven’t managed to run much at all lately. but i’m still at my target-ish weight (170.5). i haven’t touched illinoir (the story or the .com) of course. how could i? it needs so much work. still waiting to hear back from other people who have received copies…. the recent fervor of working on this site and other public faces has diminished. i am, happily, working on a new dinner & a movie poster for morseland which should appear in the gallery section sometime soon. and then i’ll get to do a super bowl party poster which should be fun. perhaps i’ll be able to reuse that old saturday football flyer i started, or something like it….

and a morning that started with a dozen emails to send has narrowed down into an afternoon with no messages coming in at all. i guess everyone else left their computers while i stayed…alone…at my desk…

Foodyfoodyfoody

My latest idle noise:

“Foody foody foody”

but it has nothing to do with food per se…. It’s….more like…. well, I don’t know what. It’s like fooey but more sing-song-able. It’s all in good fun!

Television

….because television is manipulative. Because television is another shot of the same footage that made me ill a year ago. Because television is the cover of the Chicago Sun-Times (tabloidis en extremis.) Because television is thinking that a t-shirt that says “Let’s roll” is somehow a tribute, somehow not mocking, not cashing in. Television is making money from tragedy, making ratings from tragedy, making a fool of me. Because television is a dark box that doesn’t care what I think or what I feel just as long as I think and feel what it wants me to. Because television is a “cathode-ray nipple” that I’m sick of feeding on.

And it is not the dragonfly with its weird appendages that is flying in place, flying sideways, the wind wreaking havoc on its abilities, with me shading my eyes from the sun to see it, to try to figure out what those weird appendages are, is that dirt? a tree leaf? Spider Man’s webbing? Does not encourage me to deal with things, because once I’ve dealt with them, will no longer need it.

9/11

It seems to me that this Wednesday, September 11th, is a perfect day to go media-free. No news, no networks, no papers, no CNN.com…. This is probably the hippiest thing I’ll ever say, but I really can’t handle the way I know that the media is going to try to manipulate my feelings.

Has there been enough time that I can say, “I don’t need to see or hear another thing about this?” And that’s not to say that I want to forget it, not at all. I would like to attend a memorial service. I would like to remember and think about 9/11/01 and its impact and its victims and everything…but without the help of television, and without that sort of slant. Without commentary, without dramatic voiceover, without another fucking shot of an airplane flying into a building.

It reminds me of Maus and Art Spiegelman’s worries that too much has been said about the Holocaust and do we need another work about the Holocaust and haven’t we had enough of the Holocaust already? Of course, nearly 60 years have passed since then and there has been more time to mourn, remember. And admittedly, the Holocaust didn’t happen here, in our biggest city, to two of our biggest buildings, with television cameras filming the whole time.

If we’re going to cry about this on Wednesday, why aren’t we going to cry about the Holocaust? Why aren’t we going to cry about Hiroshima? Have you ever cried about Hiroshima? What about those two guys that were pulled from their truck and beaten to death by a mob on the south side last month?

So I’m meandering a bit here, but maybe one or two of my points are there. I recognize the importance, the impact, the devastation…. And I don’t know what to say…and I don’t think anybody else does either.

Beckett said:

“Any word spoken is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”

(As pointed out in Maus: “But then again, he said it.”)

And, he also said, “Words are all we have.”

And I said, “I’m sick of you pretentious and/or condescending and/or greedy and/or psuedo-intelligent and/or noisy bastards.”

[edit]See? This is what I’m talking about. The Onion always says what I can not.

let’s talk about beauty

let’s talk about beauty:

there i was, last night, popping off 94 and onto dempster, heading east, windows all the way down, 50+ degrees outside in chicago in march, a cigarette absolutely mashed between my front teeth and the tape starts playing beastie boys “so what’cha want” and everything was absolutely perfect. i was driving with my left wrist, my right arm hanging down, pimped out, cruising with the waning light…

…and there i was back in highschool, in dave’s brownishburgundyish four-door whatever, lunchtime, free period time, listening to the same song, drinking miller genuine draft purchased from el supermercado roman, not realizing how beautiful a thing it was. (and this is amazing to me now — thinking about how at the time, it didn’t seem like anything special…but at that age, you don’t realize how beautiful a thing can be until much much later. now i feel it too much and that’s why seeing any display of positive crowd energy [cheering fans, most of the time] can bring tears to me eyes.)

here’s to the coming summer months. no more sitting outside school drinking MGD and stress. these days it’s baseball parks and Old Style (a chicago tradition)…or whatever.

the point , if there is one, is that it takes very little for nostalgia to smack you backwards: the angle of light, or the quality of the air, or a song…

and that’s freaking cool.

three-tined approach

three-tined approach

cynicism is death. cynicism is cancer.

cynicism will kill you.

happy go lucky come lately johnny missed the mark

no longer on the spot

thinking like these circulars will kill you.