offensive coaching staff and personnel slowly getting a handle on the On Vacation From Being Unemployed Already playbook recently introduced. Working about as well as one might expect. I eat more cookies recently than previously, previously being the time when the cookies were not free and over there, on the table. Also spending more time drafting text messages to people and then not sending them because they are not perfectly apropos of some emotion being conjured up by the episode of Law and Order i have been watching. There is a secret anarchism inside most late period Law & Order. I do not pay enough attention to this but I blame Lorenzo Carcaterra who seems like he would run good odds on being some kind of nihilist in his personal life. (Italian?)
Character development in approx 25 hours of Law & Order
:: The manvoiced blond assistant DA seems to have attended a fake Ivy League School. i base this on her saying she took classes taught by the fake Alan Dershowitz character who defended the pot-selling grad student who murdered a cabbie who was also an incognito KKK assassin. he murdered because he wanted to die (the grad student).
:: One time Sam Waterston said “I do what my job requires of me” and then it was suggested that he found Holocaust Denial an especially unappealing concept and maybe that meant he was Jewish. But then i noticed that he experiences moral outrage every .51 episodes.
:: Briscoe likes coffee
i think i am going to take up a collection from guys on the street to run FBI background checks on Cedric Benson and Matt Leinart. Also, I am reading John Dos Passos for unclear reasons (have no other books with me– this is actually fairly clear now that I think it through) and i’ll go ahead and say this isn’t especially good. i had a longer explanation for that (not true. it was longer but it was mostly jokes) but i remained encouraged that when i write a book, someone will like it, because a lot of people liked this book, and it isn’t as interesting, to me, as the idea of me writing a book is.
Major social changes 1910-2005
:: Less sleeping with hookers
:: Less referring to guys as “bo”
:: Labor movement destroyed
:: Slightly less racism, or at least for different reasons
Math is hard bitch. At great pain the new grill of the blog is constructed. And when we say great pain, we mean that I just borrowed it wholesome from some guy. Regardless of etiologie the banana nutriment-reading massive can now positively wallow in two-column white-space-heavy and also, briefly, in the rugged artist’s depiction of our man Billy Crudup as Prefontaine. I don’t know that the banana nutriment reading economy is what it once was or could be. In fact I’d like to take a straw poll:
Are You A Person?
Do You Read This Still?
Yes?
Should I Do Anything Differently?
Notes from moral relativist’s Christmas shopping:
Waldenbooks: Not for people who actually like literature (but not english grad students)
The shitty beard grow to hide acne: You’re treating the symptom and not the disease
There is a store that only sells calendars at the mall
So i went to my first day* of work** today. apart from being severely faded on walgreens-brand sudafed for the entire day, i feel like it went pretty well. if i haven’t given you a precise explanation of my new non-permanent career in helping minors get lost and/or kidnapped at o’hare airport, let me give you the rundown. my job is to go the airport and talk my way behind security, and then meet these kids who are either getting back or going to foreign countries, presumably for student exchange type shit. i then conduct them to their connecting flight, then i do this one or two more times, then i go home. for a laugh, let’s look at today:
1300h
show up at airport, more or less on time. spend an hour convincing united airlines counter agents that they should issue me security clearance, which they eventually do, based on the following facts:
i have a clipboard
i have a mangled sheet of paper with the names of three united passengers and their flights
i get someone outside the airport to fax something on letterhead to the united office that is (i have the fax) just a form letter saying that the sender of the fax (name of the company, which i feel no need to share until i get arrested as a result of this job) would like the reader (united airlines person) to let the bearer (me) through the security check.
1345h
get security clearance pass. to be fair, i was x-rayed and forced to take off my belt and shit, so it’s not like i could have brought US air traffic to its knees. i was going to shop at duty free just for the shit of it but at ORD they don’t even let you into to duty free without a boarding pass that says you’re bound for foreign soil, or something like foreign soil.
1430h
spent 45 minutes lurking at gate B16 looking for what appear to be unaccompanied minors. see very few people matching this description. i worked up the audicity to actually ask three women if they were (name of person i was allegedly helping). they were not. i asked the creepy german lady behind the counter to page her. creepy german complied, but mispronounced the name in such a way that if i was that person and i heard that noise, i would have no reason to think that the noise was not only intended to get my attention but that the noise consisted primarily of my own name. get frustrated. consider leaving. consider calling to berate person who hired me for this job, with the keynotes of the beratement being the brain-liquefying halfassed nature of the job (in this case, find someone who already got to this airport by themselves and ask them if they are still planning on getting on their connecting flight.) consider buying Da Vinci Code and reading it on spot, just to see, extremely belatedly, what the fucking big deal is.
Instead, I just eyeball germans (this flight is going to frankfurt) who are in turn eyeballing electronically (like with cameras) their own german babies, who are in turn running into payphones. i have a longstanding theory about babies which is that while cute, most of them are covered in food-related germs, or in some extreme situations, lethal disease-related germs, and that also (this is a corollary i guess) these babies want to put the germs on my person. so, what i’m getting around to is that i was surrounded by filthy babies and it made me uncomfortable. eventually i decided to have the much less creepy effeminate bald man at the counter page the person i was looking for, and he played it the right way, just paging “Passenger (Easy to Hear and Say English-Extraction Last Name) Come to the Counter”. at which point a middle aged bald man came to the counter. but it turned out that this was the person i was looking for’s dad, and there was no reason for me to be there at all, because one of her parents was actually flying with her. so that was a great first step. my next idea was to buy a magazine and waste time, not realizing that you can’t actually get to the international terminal of o’hare without leaving and reentering security checks.
1615h
have been waiting at the Kiss and Ride*** gate in terminal 5 for one hour waiting for a british airlines flight with two people i am supposed to find on it. i am holding a piece of paper that i wrote their names on up in the air. around me, lots of people with hilarious accents are being reunited with people with similar accents. i am not even inside the concourse actually, i’m probably 25 steps away from the parking lot. my only hope is that i can intercept both people while they walk from the customs door exit to the escalator that leads to the airport tram back to terminal one, where they are both leaving from. i have thus fucked myself because i determind, just by sort of taking the visual pulse of the International ticketing area, that i was not, not going to be able to get through with my previous clipboard-and-fake-looking-fax routine (actual qutoe from guy i work for: “usually, the t-shirt [which i refuse to wear on principle] and the clipboard are enough to convince people”.) it turns out that i should have tried to get behind security, because i couldn’t find either one of the two kids i was supposed to find. this is either because my sign wasn’t big enough, or they came through while i was reading the Atlantic Monthly in a drug fugue in the corner. so what i got for my trip to the International terminal (which meant i forfeited my security access to terminal one) was an hour of listening to these three dorks next to me talk about how excited they were to see their friend (no shit!) which was punctuated by the girl dork singing random bits of a capella arrangements. there was something mildly vindicated in having someone i made for a dork immediately be revealed as the kind of person who thinks singing in a weirdly accomplished way unprovoked in public is OK or possibly even more than OK. this builds into a larger pattern of thinking that people in a capella groups are wankers.
1700h
i have ridden the airport train back to terminal one and gotten myself security clearance again. this time it was actually weirdly easy. which is good, because i have no idea where either one of these kids is, and both of their flights are leaving in less than 15 minutes. and also i have to take an underground tunnel to concourse C to get to their gates. so i run (remember that i am on medication because my sinuses and lungs are trying to escape through my mouth) through the gates for a while, which has the end result of me not seeing either one of the kids, but finding out that they both somehow got on the plane. so i left.
*it was like six hours? if you count travel time, maybe closer to 8. i was drugged, so it doesn’t pay to take my word for it. it wasn’t that big of a deal. if i had stuck around
** i would particularly stress the non-permanent, non-me-taking-it-seriously aspect of the job. which is sort of a negative indicator, considering that at least i run a serious risk of getting kids stuck at o’hare for periods of time and at worst they will somehow wind up frozen to death in the landing gear trying to sneak back to their homeland or something.
*** i guess it’s not really the kiss and ride gate- that’s for departures. so i guess this is the kiss and continue to kiss gate?
personal to steve: do you still have the actual document that heralded the creation of the nazi
dogdirt patrol? you better
another personal to tessa: do you have that picture of the stencil of crispin glover’s head that i made you take? are you ever going to give it to me. important research needs to be done
there is some sort of person of indeterminate age engaged in i guess horseplay downstairs. this is not a big deal. the big deal is that they are also engaged in unthinkably shrill, unthinkably high-volume screeching. i am on tehv erge of collecting any and all metal garbage products i can find in this place and throwing them from the back porch in an act of aggression/protest. other than that, everything is going pretty good. i’ve been eating cactus. it’s sort of pickle-y, but no less delicious for the similarity.
Developments out my way for the past 12.5 days:
:: bought a pair of sweatpants
:: wore sweatpants in meaningful amounts
:: the bar around the corner serves tater tots and is bird- a/o Buick-themed
:: read a couple books
:: beat grand theft auto
:: went on some job interviews
::
i should probably take a shower. roger on that. something about the browns and 19 yards of offense. well, i guess we started the wrong McCown brother or something. i am going on a search for sugar cookies and possibly some diet coke now. i think i’m getting the fear
As the geese head southward (ed- this may have happened months ago. author did see what he took to be geese headed sort of SSE while travelling last week) and Mike Fratello reclaims the helm of power in the southlands: I’m in Chicago (Pilsen). As i’ve noted to several people about the current emotional weather in chicago, being here right now feels like wearing dirty underpants. i’ve tried on a couple different elaborations of the dirty underpants construct, ranging from a pair of your own that you wore two weeks ago, to a pair of mystery underpants of unclear provenance. i don’t think, or rather i know there is not, much more illumination to be mined from the dirty underpants thing.
New Frontiers in football as symbol of american cultural majority psychology
for the first time in a long time, i have to suppress the instinct to just transcribe song lyrics in lieu of actual sentence-based speech action. this is a step in the right direction.
