RandomCha

CLARK/BELMONT HAIKU

2 pigeons are stuck
fast in a pool of melted
glossy brown soft-serve.

11 July 2005

Grant Park Orchestra performs “The Planets” by Holst @ Millennium Park, August 5th
Nouvelle Vague @ Schuba’s, September 17th
Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings @ the Double Door, October 1st

Yesterday I finished cutting & pasting my entire livejournal thus far into a text document so that I can print out a copy for posterity. It’s 227 pages.

I’m going to buy a dozen donuts for the office on my way to work.

Another morning where instead of getting up at 6 I am suddenly, irreversably awake at 5.30. I had just had an interesting dream. I had recently been elected to the House of Representatives, where a bill had just been introduced to set up universal health care. Everyone was tired of debating it so it was decided that after two speeches, one pro and the con, a vote would be taken. I was chosen to make the “pro” speech. I was going to make the speech totally off the cuff, but there was some sort of recess so I found I had enough time to scribble down a few notes on a narrow piece of blue paper (it is sheets of this narrow blue paper that in real life separates the copies of my book before I assemble them).

The notes I wrote down basically amounted to:

–I’m a middle-class white man who doesn’t really “need” health insurance, but I still need it. We all need it.
–I respect the Senate but they’re never going to introduce this type of legislation. It’s up to us.
–We need to try it out and see how it works. There should be a built-in trial period of two years, then we can see how things are going.

There was a lot more I was going to say in my speech. Then the recess was over and everyone was assembling, and I remember I was going to ask the Speaker of the House if it was alright if we flipped a coin to see who would give their speech first.

The oddest thing in the dream was that the Chamber was actually a low-ceilinged basement room which had French doors opening onto a back yard. Like my parent’s house.

I can trace this dream to the Chicago Reader review of a coffeehouse in Old Town that I read last night. The review mentioned that the customers might include “the cop who lives across the street, a cutting-edge medical researcher, or a candidate for the U.S. Senate.”

Andy and I ambled down to HiFi Records to check out their clearance sale last night, and then we got a pizza at Renaldi’s. We were talking about one’s use of free time, wasting time versus relaxing, watching too many movies perhaps, the difficulty of getting home from work and having the necessary energy to do something interesting, etc.

I’d really like to check out the Grant Park Orchestra concert tomorrow evening in Millennium Park.

Yesterday morning my writer’s block seemed to lift somewhat and I wrote two pretty good pages before Andy got up. Writing about the good times is hard. It’s always easier to write about dysfunction. Yesterday’s stuff takes me past 40K words. I figure that by the time I come up with an ending and write my way through it I’ll be at 50K. And that’s a real novel, right?

It was a great weekend. We made hamburgers yesterday. They came out oddly shaped but delicious. Plus there was ice cream, macaroni and cheese, chips and salsa, carrots and dip. And you just can’t beat an ice-cold bottle of good beer with a hamburger.

Watched a lot of movies, and read a lot. Just read “Tomorrow Today,” by Bruce Sterling. He looks at what the next 50 years could be like, but he comes at it from an intelligent sci-fi point of view. Just fantastic. Must check out his other stuff.

In the morning yesterday we listened to “The Declaration of Independence” by Stan Freberg, and of course on NPR there was the usual 4th of July stuff. I definitely felt a very real albeit weird surge of patriotism, perhaps partly from just having read that biography of Benjamin Franklin and so on. An angry surge of patriotism, because of what people are trying to do to our country and our world. But something about Sterling’s book is rather hopeful. What the right wing has done, is doing, is trying to do–these things aren’t sustainable. This isn’t Orwell’s 1984. They can’t sustain a war and preserve tax cuts. They can’t continue to discriminate against minorities, not for very long, not when there are more minorities every day. They can’t legislate their morality, it won’t hold; there are too many of us. It’s a tide that will turn. The power of extremism collapses from its own deadly gravity. We can do what we can to help the tide turn faster.

Now I am reading Bob Dylan’s book, and it’s wonderful. Though, like David Byrne said, it’s best to read it as semi-fictional, Dylan’s persona as a kind of mask. It’s quite a story. You could enjoy it even if you didn’t know who Bob Dylan was.

YOUR JAW WILL DROP OUT OF THE CLOSET

This has to be the kinkiest, most perverse PG movie I’ve ever seen. Forget about gay “subtext”: you won’t have to do much reading between the lines when Village People break into their “Y.M.C.A.” number, complete with naked boys frolicking in the pool and snapping towels at each other in the locker room. And that’s only in the first half. Steve Guttenberg is clad in the tightest t-shirts this side of Chelsea, Judy Garland’s name pops up SEVEN TIMES during the course of the movie, and Bruce Jenner sports Daisy Dukes. And it was directed by NANCY WALKER with a reported budget of $18 million! What the hell were they thinking? Must be seen to believed; will probably offend straight and gay audience members equally. However the film DOES offer a weirdly prescient view of what the 1980’s would be like. After all, it’s the fake story of a fake band which only exists so that it can merchandise itself. As Perrine says, “The 80’s are gonna be DIFFERENT!” Have a BIG pitcher of Long Island iced tea ready for you and your friends, and enjoy.

TABLE

Bud Powell “A Tribute
to Cannonball,” adjust the volume. First

I get the
corn going in the steamer.

Real butter, salt, pepper
go on the table, set for one.

In my sautee pan I heat a
bit of olive

oil, and then carefully
place the boneless chicken breast inside

sprinkled with Tony Chachere.
When I turn

it over the leftover
green beans go

into the pan with a dash
of Modena balsamic vinegar, more

Chachere. And
everything is ready

at the same time.
I carry my plate to the table.

Finally,
my last bottle of Newcastle is poured

into a pint glass which has been
in the freezer for two weeks. It’s

so cold, an ice crust forms.
I sit down.

June-July 2005

Hellish (or at least purgatory-like) day at work today. The last day of each month means: INVENTORY. It also invariably means at least half a dozen mini-crises, some of which are related to the Inventory and others that just have really awful timing. My brain, reflexes, and other thought processes were running at full capacity pretty much every moment I was at the office. I hate that. I hate when there is no “down time” at all (and the 15 minutes scarfing down the free pizza that was provided doesn’t count as down time).

Today after work I really needed to go workout before Andy came home. It would have energized me and defused all this tension. But instead all I could do was turn on the a/c and nap. I do not feel like thinking about dinner, deciding what to eat; I don’t even feel like eating dinner.

Instead I feel like torturing whichever evil group of men designed MAS90 (our accounting/order managment/business software). I feel like endlessly bitch-slapping every generation of tow-headed businessmen who have decided that ONCE EVERY MONTH everyone ought to cram 5 days worth of work into a single day, and that this day must ALWAYS fall on the last day of the month, a more-or-less ARBITRARY SYSTEM which is the LEAST LOGICAL and MOST INCONVENIENT way to do things. Fuck you.

Oh yeah: I have to go back to work tomorrow too.

Ugh. Brandon is not in a good mood today. A very DARK mood. I wish there was something I could do.

Creatively speaking, it was one of those weekends where every piece of writing of mine that I looked at seemed shitty: lame dialogue, awkward grammar, poor construction. And I don’t use expletives often. I kept staring at the pages and thinking, “What the hell do you think you’ve been doing?” Needless to say it was terrible for me. Literally got five good sentences out all weekend. In fact the best thing I wrote all weekend was an off-the-cuff poem about the dinner I made for myself on Saturday. Will have to revise it and post it later.

Saw three great movies this weekend: “Land of the Dead,” “Once Upon A Time In The West,” and “Ordinary People.” In the latter, Timothy Hutton was so cute that at certain points I forgot I was watching an ultrasober drama about a dysfunctional drama. It was a skilled and engrossing film, but I still feel that “The Elephant Man” should have won Best Picture that year.

Yesterday I got a little sunburned. Hopefully in a few days it will fade and will leave me not quite so pale.

Summary of my feelings about Pride weekend: gay peer pressure isn’t any better than straight peer pressure.