harvest of sorrow for white sox will arrive at the station shortly, i hope. also, please stop trading larry bigbie. phil nevin for chan ho park, this needs to be unpacked. when i get a minute on sunday afternoon or monday, I’m going to explain, sort of in reference to Lt. B.Q. Manwaring’s fear of being left behind by the careening shitwagon of modern culture, why, for me, it’s convenient and healthy to have cobbled together a moral code that privileges a non-ironic appreciation of seminal country music, baseball and a larger understanding of sports as automatic cultural handwriting drama, and I can’t remember the other thing, which I think was emotional restraint (not suppression, restraint) all of which, when arranged in the appropriate sequence, generate a loud buzzing noise and explain some shit.
i’ve never actually paid that much attention to the movie Bull Durham, nor do i think that this is a problem that I need to tackle at anypoint in the next 47 years, but i would like to point out that strikeouts are clearly not fascist. i don’t know why this bothers me, but if anything is fascist (in a sort of site-specific definition of fascism) it’s home runs.
books acquired at the Newberry Library Book Sale
Civil War in Pictures
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of Justified Sinner
Common Ground *
Eminent Victorians *
F. Scott Fitzgerald In His Own Time
The Crack-Up *
The Last Tycoon
Henderson the Rain King
The Dean’s December
Augie March, Adventures of *
The Alienist *
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance *
Studs Lonigan
American Tabloid
The Hunting Sketches
The Man With the Golden Arm
Walk on the Wild Side
Money
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Tristam Shandy
The Thief’s Journal
Bastard Out of Carolina
The Goodbye Look
Blue Angel
Lead Time (Garry Willzsz)
price $24.00. $6 of that was Common Ground and Lead Time.
* = have already read, just wanted a copy for owning/reference
Partial list
Black Paul Giamatti
White Doc Rivers (x3) (so i saw three distinct different white guys who looked like doc rivers who is not a white guy)
Hispanic Jason Varitek
Hispanic version of guy who worked for my college newspaper
I went to the secondhand store down the street, which i do about three times a week actually, pretty much anytime when i feel an impulse to waste $3 and take a short walk, and i bought two books, five t-shirts (to be described directly), four pairs of pants (one was turned into shorts) and a complimentary feeling like I needed to take a shower added into all that (that feeling was not entirely the fault of village discount LLC but yes it was entirely their fault). i keep buying thrift store clothes because i don’t have the money for real clothes, and they don’t sell t-shirts that say “KOREAN AMERICAN” at the Gap, and they do sell them at village discount. or t-shirts with watercolor paintings of basset hounds on them.
in the vein of the History of Wolves on Shirts: is there an internatonal aesthetics of crap accord I am not privy to that stipulates in any t-shirt-driven rendition of an animal, there must be one large profile depiction of that animal with a smaller full-body rendition below, with either a second full-body smaller rendition of more than one of the animal filling the rest of the shirt, which can be subsituted liberally for a painting of the moon, a canyon and solitary desert pines. the answer is yes do not fight me on that. Unfortunately my new basset hound t-shirt does not have a solitary desert pine.
i think i am going to die if i keep eating this mexican food.
I would linger with you all for a while but I have to go home, take off the black suit, and go work at a liquor store. There will be more later on the new best face of America, which is some kind of combination of the guy from the Hold Steady, Jhonny Peralta (not American in literal sense) and Tom Berenger. Is Platoon good? Why did I watch ten minutes of Platoon this morning? Why did I watch almost all of The Great Escape last night. Because The Great Escape is awesome. I wish I could go into greater detail on a lot of topics, but I’m done recovering from the chicken salad and I should really get going. Who eats chicken salad (don’t answer that)
Before I forget: Where people at the U of C always so fucked up looking? I don’t mean unattractive, I mean incapable of dressing like adults? I should stop swearing so much. There is a guy with hair down to his shoulders. Also, I figured out specifically how dreadlocks are immoral, again you have to wait to find out about that. Lord knows the reason for giving us summer in the city, you better move, you better dance all night long.
Despite have laid my head, for one length of time or another, in at least five neighborhoods in this city (i am counting east hyde park as a separate neighborhood from hyde park, incidentally), I’ve never actually understood the appeal of living east of Michigan Avenue, in what the street signage refers to as Streeterville. From what I’ve pieced together about Streeterville, there was a guy, sort of a rascal, named Captain Streeter, who didn’t really respect the property-rights dong and built a weird shanty town on the sandbars north of one of the original mouth(es) of the river, and said shanty town had a population of weirdos who refused to join up with the rest of the city, until it became a sort of moot point when the rest of the city swallowed their shanty town whole (not clear how shanty-ish it was by that juncture), but the area maintained a kind of raffish air for a while but then downtown grew up the branch of N. Michigan Ave and the whole thing got liquified into a bunch of boring glass towers with not very much street-level commerce or even like human activity, except for rich people leaning out their car window periodically. Yet people insist on living there? I don’t get it. The Gold Coast, par example, is also pretty much exclusively for rich people; I don’t mean that there aren’t a good many middle-class people packing the bars on and south of Rush and State on any given weekend night; it’s more that they identify with the rich people who do live on the Gold Coast and approve of how they present themselves as rich: expensive bars, flashy boutiques, big restaurants where you can see that at least $.05 of your food dollar went to bleaching napkins or acquiring a second 45-foot solid maple bar fixture or something. Streeterville, on the other hand, seems to cater to a different brand of rich person, who doesn’t actually give a shit whether or not you can do anything other than walk around the corner to get a cup of coffee. I’m not that sure why I’m worried about it. All I know is that I wound up wandering through an area that gave me a headache from thinking about it this afternoon.
I was only down there to get fitted for an activity-monitoring bracelet for a sleep-cycle study at the hospital. Now I have to write down whenever I go to sleep and if I nap, and I have to take the bracelet off if I engage in anything so strenuous as a game of pick-up basketball, on account of the bracelet being semi-valuable, at least to sleep researchers. I’m starting to worry about whether or not wearing this for a month is going to get old. Too late for that, shithead.
Some other notes:
1. What, if someone can help me out here, is meant by the slogan “America’s Most European Supermarket”?
Are there, in an american sense, that many supermarkets in Europe to establish a European style of of supermarket?
Why are you compelled to say this about your supermarket, since it doesn’t remind me of anything other than a dirty Publix? Also, why do all your stores smell like something in between wood glue, urine and elderly pets? Maybe this is a subtle commentary on how Europeans do shit. I got to freak out a cashier today by walking up to the counter nonchalantly twirling a box of tampons on my finger Globetrotters-style and then remembering to ask “do you sell pet food, like for cats specifically?” Also it helps if you know I am a beefy, prematurely balding man with glasses and sunburn. Yes, beefy.
2. another one in the same vein, what is meant by the following, as the catch-phrase for a big-band-themed cocktail lounge: Chicago’s Valentine to the New York of the ’40s
Why do people think this is appropriate. I will allow that New York in the ’40s was probably a special moment in time and space (our energy would prevail) but I bet Chicago in the ’40s was very similar, except with maybe fewer Italians, which isn’t a value judgment either way. Maybe this makes me a provincial or just a wang (too late to save me), but you can put that saying on a bar in kansas city, or even a big city with a less identifiable culture, but it seems weird and retarded to put it here. this is why we can’t have nice things here.
also, some proposed theme bars along the same lines:
Chicago’s Get-Well Card to ’40s Stalingrad
Schaumburg’s Love Letter to 1917 Paris
’30s Algiers’ tribute to future Toronto
Not to delve into the personal hell of observational humor BUT WHY THE FUCK DOES EVERYONE HAVE ROLLING LUGGAGE NOW. i need a ruling on this. PICK UP YOUR FUCKING BACKPACK. while i’m hating, the #($&#ing people across the street need a new child-care approach, or at least an alternate one, because “put the crying screaming children out on the porch where they can annoy anyone within a half-mile with an open window” seems to be their bread-and-butter move. also, i rode my new old bike (pictured below) from foster to hyde park and back to foster (except i had to stop like three times on the last 1/4 of the ride to drink water and just not crash into a tree because my asslegs hurt so much). also I went to the store and purchased tan jeans and a pair of canvas-sided shoes. i am still awaiting explanation for how the east side of uptown has like 51% of all the visible insane residents of chicago in it. this is like .01% of the total land area and it is has more than half of the crazy people. more on this when I get some field work done.
that’s me on the bike. these last few years have been hard on me.
1. i am writing a fake elmore leonard novel. i have trace amounts of good intentions on this, just so everyone can sleep easier/without a knife under their mattress
2. i need something to eat besides toast
3. can i have some of that orange juice
4. why did sam rockwell just impersonate kevin millar in hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy: also, the main guy from The Office: get a new thing. it’s not that exasperating, whatever is happening to you. also, The Office: you’re not actually entertainment.
My goal here was to provide some kind of content other than just the picture of a NASCAR-themed goat below; I think I can comfortably say I’m about to fail in that pursuit.
Reader survey
Which of the following topics are most interesting to you?
1. Surveillance photos of hipster haircuts and accompanying diagrams, and some unrelated diagrams
2. Surveillance photos of Bruce (cat) sleeping, or more surveillance photos of young people at the bunch where you have to try and figure out whether or not the target is a hipster but you can’t because they’re not wearing enough clothing to make superficial judgments
3. Guerilla real estate journalism (just getting a credit check everyday from a different landlord and seeing how quickly they say no)
4. Lists of things I ate or drank
5. MP3s of me singing along to grateful dead songs
I was supposed to do dishes today, i was also planning on writing more of my fake elmore leonard novel, or any of my fake elmore leonard novel (i have a beginning, where the person who is going to get murdered has a hard day at work, and then like another three pages of the police guy complaining about his wife)
also, tomorrow, 8 juillet AD 2005, 5pm to end of time, 1443 w. winona, the backyard, come and display your fealty to the PTB-Whet matrix of univeral truth. there will be high-ABV russian beer, emo foodstuffs, and my dramatic interpretation of the rayhad jackson scene from boogie nights.
Scene: craphole dry goods merchant of 5200 block of N. Clark
Me: (walk in. weird old dickhead guy stops his conversation with another old guy like he was about to mention his days in the IRA or something. glares at me for coming in) Hi.
Me: (unshaken) I would like this thing, this thing and a third thing (all things are present and accounted for behind counter; i have chosen three things because i want to get over any $5 credit card minimum preemptively; also i have pre-checked that there is a We Accept Mastercard sticker on the door, window, counter and cash register)
Guy: (eyeballs my brandished credit card, but maintains total poker face about it, if he has strong feelings about me trying to use plastic, he is masking them)
Me: (holding credit card as guy rings up arbitrary prices for stuff, such as $3.00 for soda, which works out to like $10, or at least $5 more than all the shit was worth)
Guy: $10.37 please
Me: (sort of say with a hand and facial expression, here is this card, for paying, take it)
Guy: (sighs like i have shit on the floor or something) It’s cash only.
Me: (affronted) You have stickers on the door and counter that say mastercard.
Guy: Oh, we only take it for (clearly making something up) tobacco (He doesn’t want to get fucked out of the measly $0.25 transaction fee; also, i had the fucking card out the whole fucking time so he could have gone ahead and had his weird old-man-dickhead-autism like two minutes ago and saved everybody some time
Me: (Empowered) I’m going to the ATM, i’ll definitely be right back.
Clearly I won this engagement, in that i kept my $10.37, and that weird old asshole will never sell anything to me or my family again. Maybe I’m being vindictive but he definitely tried to scumbag me because he didn’t like my personal appearance. He probably thought i was gay or something. Why have a store if you don’t actually want to sell anything, and also why have a store if I don’t like you for weird inscrutable reasons. Now there is a different weird old man fucking screaming at the guy in the Enterprise moving van outside trying to get straightened out so traffic can go by. Just not my day for dealing with non-asshole men in their mid-60s.
Songs that I would prefer to not have you know that I like via Tom via W
1. “Don’t Speak” by No Doubt
I don’t feel the need to defend this; i think Gwen Stefani wearing a weird mom dress that revealed that she’s secretly reverse-reverse regular pretty in the video would get me acquitted on all charges. Also, this song is “All My Life” but for and by white people. not that i’m for the separation of the races, which is what that last bit sort of implied. i’m not!! yay!
2. “The Anthem” by Good Charlotte. I think is just because there was this little kid who ran around singing it all the time, whenever it was popular (2002)? but it’s en peu interesante to have mall-punk referencing weird postmoderen irony (the entire lyrical content of the chorus is just the dude claiming that the anthem is the anthem; its anthemic nature is created by the fact that he says its anthemic. maybe i’m just dumb)
3. Mr. Perfect’s Theme music from the WWF.
4. “Mozambique” by Bob Dylan
5. The theme from Law and Order.
Songs I am embarrassed that Whet likes:
1. “Type Slowly” by Pavement
Just for the record, that is a picture of the Ultimate Warrior (no longer Ultimate) being interview on C-Span. I just wanted to repeat that in a way that cannot be misconstrued or twisted around by conservative media outlets.
