plots i have laid

the bridge from the first shot of major league:


a guy with a baby on his shoulder walking past a building, in front of a sign across the street that says drug items


a bank sign in tremont. i suspect the drugaddled hipsters across the street who were taking pictures of us taking pictures of the sign are responsible


the american food mart. if you can’t tell, it’s in a great neighborhood


a car with a florida marlins bumper sticker (and most of a french flag). also please note that it is a lebaron. and it is parked next to the fuckass sign.


a colt 45 ad that has been hanging in that window (the one with the plaid sheet for a curtain) since at least 1998


the rocky river at berea falls


me, looking dashing as ever


nice driveway

where can i put my money?

statements of intermittently obvious facts:
this is a skeleton dressed up like some kind of foreigner. he/she represents cholera. i feel like people are trying to bring me cholera, in the form of boredom and confusion. that’s me in the boat with the barbolic acid. i will return with a photoessay on the many splendors of cleveland in the coming days. please stop reading over my shoulder.

i don’t want to talk about the detroit tigers right now, despite being principally in favor of the idea of the detroit tigers.

monkish excesses

somehow i inadvertently read/re-read a series of books that principally involved weird and emotionally insolent 24-year-old guys. which is weird, as i principally have been concerned with my own personal weird insolence whenever possible. then i had an encounter with the class enemy in a garden on saturday, and now i am considering the potential for some kind of passive declaration of war on the world. not that it will come to anything like violence, as much as i tend to root for that kind of resolution. this is the year that i find the keys, to quote k. harrelson about joe crede every single year since 2002. am still gnawing on The Magic Mountain. having, but understanding more clearly, the same problems i had with it when i read in the first time under the instruction of a bearded pathologist slash svengali of essential modernist tract novels. that problem is that i like the parts that are just toss-off jokes / ramping up to the part where it’s just thomas mann shrieking about humanism vs religion and their supposed counterindications. oh well. shrieking will do, it will do, when i have little else to enjoy right now. even so, the settembrini monologues in Magic Mountain aren’t the nakedest allegory i’ve read this week. Cf. the moment in English, August wherein in a forest ministry bureaucrat named Mohandas Gandhi gets his arms cut off by leftist rebels (off-stage at least) for taking liberties with local women. More fun than it sounds like, at least to read about in a novelized setting, but still, if i wrote a vignette about a wal-mart manager named abe lincoln getting baked into a giant hamburger for destroying local economies, would it get translated into bengali? if so, let me know, i will write it at lunch tomorrow.

we have a book coming out called Economics for Humans. somehow the humor and on-kilter prioritzation implied in the title seems like a weird concession to the fact that everything is wrong. OK, no more half-baked disquietude. I promise to return shortly with either fully-formed disquietude or an outlook on life more fit for polite society. until then you can find me on Chicago public transportation abstractly racebaiting. my best to everyone.

into a guest’s wine goblet

project re-readThe Magic Mountain was tabled for a day or two while I recover from recent encounters with special treats. i will post with updates.

recent and recommended:
english, august by u. chatterjee. i would post a bit that made me laugh a lot but it’s somewhat blue, in like the connecticut blue law sense of the word. and i don;t like to work blue anymore.