get your ugly baby out of my upscale wine and beer retail outlet, please. while you’re moving your baby, some shit that needs to get addressed because it is making my brain leak out my ear.
1. Andersonville: The Lincoln Park of gay? Don’t get caught up is all.
2. All of Chicago is bad. I figured this out using math. Except for Hyde Park, nee.
3. Strand Used Books tote bags. That store isn’t good, ok, and that bag doesn’t even have a phone number on it.
4. Ways we can fight back: having children at younger ages. I ate a whole box of licorice today, that wasn’t fighting back, or part of fighting back. Felt like I should make a clean breast of things.
Dear Sportscenter,
Please stop pretending to actual journalism or at least bring in a non-scott van pelt outlet to read the scary human-interest hurricane coverage.
reading synopses:
Money / Martin Amis
People seem reticent on giving this book/M. Amis due respect. Sam suggests this is because the fortune cookie version of this book is “You are a shithead”
The Razor’s Edge / W. Somerset Maugham
Just not good. This is actually, if you follow, part of my project to start a laboratory-controlled hipster backlash against Bill Murray; at any rate, this shit is dumb, Maugham is dumb, and if you like him, I will bite your hand.
Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream / Joan Didion
Holy TV this is awesome California is weird. I want to move east again. I think working at a liquor store is starting to abrade my relationship with god and scientific reality.
for the record, if anybody’s been trying to contact me, i haven’t had my phone in my possession, due to weird circumstances, for appx 47.5 of the last 48 hours. sorry, if it’s causing anyone problems; it wouldn’t be if i knew any of the phone numbers in it by heart.
C. Ahab as terrorist/homeland security guy: I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principle, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”
C. Ahab as everybody’s soul: “Is Ahab, Ahab? Is I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. … Where do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?”
I was always a mark for the secession-crisis reading of Moby-Dick; i like literary criticism that acts like each book is a magic eye puzzle that you can find the one-liner allegorical answer to if you stare at the table of contents hard enough, with the right kind of eyes. I don’t know if I buy Ahab as John C. Calhoun, as the criticial essay in my copy is pimping. What got me through a fairly unhinged narrative that starts slow, stops frequently and ends abruptly is the fact that this book contains basically everything. Ahab, as a character, as symbol, as a collection of words, is guerrero-like in swinging at pretty much anything he can reach, and connecting with it. Ahab is a contradiction, sane crazy person, cognizant maniac. I like the idea of Ahab’s mission as referring to the original intents of American colonization; as Ahab sneers at the idea of whaling for profit instead of revenge, John Winthrop tugged on his jersey to show his colony was about God and not profit. The sun is my pick to click as a thing in Moby-Dick that I would write about. I’m sure that’s been done, but just as like a chit of reading at beyond a seventh grade level, my final answer is the sun. Which represents both money and truth. Or shared human experience. What do shared human experience and the sun have in common: both are fictional. My other take-home message from Moby-Dick was to fear and distrust as many things as I can get away with.
brand names of shirts that i have in my closet:
Traditionalist
Puritan
Who knew I was a secret reactionary (raising hand)
This was going to be about Moby-Dick but it’s taken me three days to read the last 60 pages of the book for the third time. This is Christopher Walken for Skittles. I was also going to vent spleen but then I thought better of it. I’m going to pass out in a minute because all i ate today was weird soy crisps that tasted like astronaut airplane food.Think about it. i also ate all those olives. Can I have that wine glass please.
used media purchased/consumed week of 8/6/2005
Night of the Hunter: Like combining Flannery O’Connor/Sherwood Anderson with the old-new bad kind of Hollywood thriller (a crazy person is trying to do crazy things!), except with Robert Mitchum having like a 40 point 40 rebound game in the middle of it, despite not really acting so much as talking funny and screaming like a girl or a female animal anyway. and no, it was not viewed at the Grant Park outdoor thingthing, it was rented on the same night as the outdoor thingthing. Even though said outdoor showing was free. Goooooo movies.
Cakes and Ale W. Somerset Maugham
My stated position on early 20th c. English social drama/satire is that I like it, even though it’s probably corroding the wiring in my brain. I maintain icegrill for Point Counter Point, which i read so long ago I can’t remember what i liked about it other than the dissolute novelist dickhead character winning in the end, and Evelyn Waugh’s collected a-sides; everything else i previously would have tasted and then spit into a bucket. i will now look in the bucket.
Giovanni’s Room James Baldwin
What are the odds that there would be a very famous and acclaimed author and medium famous all-star starting pitcher (well, technically an all-star) in the same half-century and they would both be haunted-looking black guys? In my experience, the odds are pretty good. Anyway, I’ve been meaning to read more James Baldwin since I wrote a 10page paper about “Sonny’s Blues” five years ago, and owning the book and dusting it from time to time is a lot like reading it.
The Complete Plays of Aristophanes
500 Plays (a book of plot summaries and contextulations of um, 500 plays)
Four Great Plays by Chekhov
The Soul of a New Machine
Chimera
Farewell My Lovely
American Dreams: Lost and Found Studsworth Terkel
Why not. Dude graduated from law school in 1932 or some shit like that. Also, this book cost 25 cents, so, well, why not. U of C pride, need to get toes wet in Terkel oeuvre, etc.
Rabbit, Run
Prometheus Bound and Other Plays
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter Vargas Llosa
Only purchased it because well, i want to read it, two because i was thumbing through it and a bookmark fell out and it was a deposit slip from the checkbook of mary schmich. which i am going to sell Luis gonzalez’s gum-style on eBay.
The Razor’s Edge
Tartuffe
The Counterlife, Phillip Roth
One more chance after Zuckerman Unbound and and the shared agony of watching the bqa get through Portnoy’s Complaint. My snap take on P. Roth circa this spring’s foray with Zuckerman is that Maxim :: Playboy as Roth :: Bellow, and that Saul Bellow is also much better. I stand by this because, if these two Jewish-American writers of mostly autobiographical novels were turned into magazines, Saul Bellow would certainly have nudity (is there anything funnier than Saul Bellow having a raging libido. it makes sense, in addition to is funny, in Augie March and gets kind of tiresome when it’s Moses Herzog then comes back and is awesome again by the time Charlie Citrine is the guy) and Philip Roth would have more gadget reviews but maybe less actual nipple, which is whatever as far as you know, softcore porn goes, but the thing is, I don’t like Maxim or Playboy all that much, but I do like Saul Bellow, and I don’t like Philip Roth (before you tell me about non-philip roth based philip roth books, be advised that those are for different stuff later. But they both probably belong mostly in the bucket, on account of having diarrhea profundis of the typewriter.
The New Journalism (ugliest cover design ever; looks like a book designed by VH1)
Parliament of Whores
total price paid for all of these books: $5.00. oh word.
Normally i don’t glean much from the kind of transactions that take place over the counter at a liquor store; there are surprisingly limited genres of customers. the smallest genre is the customer who actually wants something interesting or earnestly wants advice about wine, beer or alcohol, which i try my best to avoid, just on general principle, because that would involve sales machosensitivity. then there are regular customers, who buy the same six pack or bottle of wine or pack of cigarettes, banter, possibly exchange thees and thous with the store dogs, etc.
then there are the construction dudes, who buy 40 oz or 16 oz beers, never anything smaller, never anything more expensive than Heineken, and also purchase Gatorade, Fanta or Orange Crush, or tallboy cans of Arizona Ice Tea. these are the only things construction workers consume, as far as i can tell. they also have complicated relationships to having a wallet, or at least, keeping paper money in a wallet. one guy said “this dollar’s full of sand” as he was uncrumpling a dollar bill, to which i said, “no worries, how much sand could be in it” and then he uncrumpled and a shoe’s worth of sawdust mushroomed out. and a piece of metal.
there are boozier old people, who overlap with regulars a bit, and are also wont to engage in a conversational methodology i call the “confauxsation” or “not listening” where they don’t respond to what you actually said, but what their experience and personal ideology conditions them to expect you to have said, a problem that is approaching crisis state in american discourse, alongside “not having an internal monologue.” an example, with actual speech in italics:
ogre cellphone using man (O.C-U.M.): do you have ice?
me: yes. how many bags you need? no you fat homosexual, i don’t have ice
O.C-U.M.: how can a liquor store not have ice?
me: no, we have ice, it’s in the back. i can bring it out for you in a moment i want to engage in unconventional semi-legal acts with your family then crap on your golf clubs
O.C-U.M.: I NEED ICE. and can i get a bag for this 12 pack of miller lite THAT HAS A HANDLE ALREADY.
maybe this phenomenon isn’t as easy to translate to txt as i thought it was, but everybody knows what i am talking about, that much is certain. ogre cellphone man is a composite of several people, including the prick who snipped at me for doublebagging his ice cubes because i thought he might want a bag, considering one of his sausage-finger germcovered paws was glued to the side of his face so he could talk to his phonefriend, who was probably covered in germs too.
for some reason, boozier old people have a weird tendency to be from out of town, or at least to pretend to be from out of town; i don’t know if that’s some kind of baby boom vice-masking behavior where if you are a hopeless loadie, you just switch what liquor store you go to constantly so that nobody can tell your pastor or troop leader that you’ve been downing 3 liters of effen vodka a week. there’s an offshoot of the boozy old people tribe which is the 60ish ladies in impeccable clothes/makeup/jewelry who comes in like a heatseeking booze missile, finds the most expensive mid-shelf vodka, gin and/or whiskey, grabs it and basically throws their credit card at you as they streak out the door. my theory is either they have a lot of small cocktial parties, are hopeless drunks, or preserve their weird lady dracula good looks by taking ice baths in gallons of junipero gin (by the good people at anchor brewery).
other genres:
benevolent young rich couples: polite, laidback, usually conversant in fine beverages, clearly rich based on their tendency to drop $100ish dollars on wine/booze once a week.
malevolent young rich couple: very rude, allegedly “in a hurry” despite taking fifteeen minutes to pick out a six pack of beer and bottle of wine, liable to do things like come in, put their motorcycle helmets down on the counter, where you’re trying to put shit in bags or just not have any helmets there, then run to a cooler, grab 17 cans of red bull and a handle of absolut vokda (not good or worth money) and then spend eight more minutes thinking about which fancy beer to get before aborting themselves and getting bud light.
stoned, or about to be stoned people: have different names for various paraphernalia. What people from ohio call a one-hitter is known as a bat amongst the cabaret sector of chicago’s population, or a stick, if you are the guy who came in yesterday, asking for the “small cigarette-looking stick” which we do have, as opposed to the not that small cigarette-looking stick, although i’d point out that the actual amount of drugs or special treats you can smoke with the respective devices is the same, since they have the same diameter. work-a-day potheads seem to be really into lingo (“i need a pack of one and a quarters”) and do actually really use a shitload of nag champa. usually the people who buy one-hitters are kind of seedy early-30s men and women, who also get some kind of cover up purchase, like if you were a man buying condoms, you would also get some soda just to convey an air of not actually needing the condoms right that minute, but that you were you know, running some errands. having never been on the inbound side of these orthogonally shame-driven transactions, i never realized how not awkward it is for the cashier/salesperson.
I’m just jacking this link from the end of a Slate article but i want to talk about this:
weird semicritical treatment of hipsterdom as an autonomous worldview that it’s OK to talk about
acquired today:
one pair sneakers, 20 USD
one beer-b-q chicken salad
approx 3 lb of cherry tomatoes and cauliflower (consumed in one sitting)
Certainly on the surface of things I have to agree that Wes Anderson is pretty much the only guy you can point to as a well-known commercially viable instance of hipsterdom; if it walks like a duck etc etc. But, so, is Owen Wilson a hipster then? Can we stop using the word hipster. the only thing i will give dude points for is dissecting the “racism for the jokes” angle, which definitely almost explains why i like racist jokes so much (potential answers: because they’re funny; because i’m a racist; because they’re funny and i’m a racist). before you shit your pants or harass me, know that i am of italian/ethiopian extraction and grew up poor and gay within emotional-transferral distance of brook park (support our ribbons)
I have on one of those thermal long sleeve t-shirts because I am rugged. I took a digital picture of myself wearing gun range headphones and looking pensive. But i have no idea how to get it from that “memory stick” to the computing device. this is not a huge loss, really (yes it is fuck you)
i keep forgetting, whenever i get a job interview or series of job interviews, to keep applying for more jobs in the interim so that when/if i don’t get the job i just interviewed for, i have other jobs to get/not get waiting. it’s not like having a financial soluble life situation matters anyway, i am independently wealthy and can always generate more income by selling off my old collection of tv guides. airplanes (there’s a machine in the sky) are in my future, and i mean the future in like the next three hours sense. hopefully the orange line/red line isn’t going to just fall over and burst into flames, which is more or less what i expect, at this point.
door malfunctions
the guy who appears to live in the alley behind this building (unjustified)
litterers
people who ride bikes on sidewalks
i think the free pizza from cardozos pub is catching up with me. that or the five straight days of eating lentil soup from lebanese dudes around corner.
In uncollated response to various queries from the comments box:
Yes, I work at a gourmet liquor store now. It’s nice, except when they made me clean the bathroom. and they could pay me more and it wouldn’t destabilize anything
Jake, if i could do a better job organizing my thoughts i probably would be on the supreme court, so just make the best of what god gave me
The White Sox are going to lose in the first round of the playoffs after garcia and garland shit the bed in successive starts, and mark buerhle can’t pitch more than twice in a five game series, and that’s assuming his arm is still attached to his body at that point. or maybe i should say, that’s what i want to see happen. they’ll probably get to the world series and shame america in some more grandiose way
i have 25 dollars in gift cards that i can spend on beer or bowling
