Spring Break!

Some things I’ve been thinking about in the last 48 hours.

My friend Ramona was in town about a year ago. We met up for coffee at Alliance Bakery, then split. She was going to go dancing at Rainbo Club, Brianna and I were going to head south. Later, I asked Ramona how dancing went.

            “If by dancing you mean drinking 40s in an alley in the rain, very well.”

On a phone call waiting for some FAFSA info, the machine voice got tricky with verb tenses. “Your call was very important to us,” it said, and I waited for something bad to happen.

The manager at White Palace Grill was talking to a regular. “It's too, too expensive to fly into San Francisco. What you should do is fly into Oakland, save a hundred bucks, and take a fifteen-dollar train to San Francisco.” 

              I actually wrote this down in the book I was reading. When I got home and checked some prices, Oakland was somehow at least seventy-five dollars more. But that doesn’t make sense. So I still believe him.

I’ve watched two Werner Herzog documentaries in the past two weeks. Which isn’t a lot of anything by anyone’s standards, but I don’t watch many movies. After seeing Happy People and Cave of Forgotten Dreams, I slummed onto YouTube to hear him talk more. I love his voice. During one interview, someone in the distance shoots him in the stomach with either a powerful pellet gun or a weak rifle. He taps his stomach and mumbles, then the camera cuts. Afterward, at the interviewer’s request, he reflects on the shot. “It was an insignificant bullet.”

I reread Conrad’s short story, “Youth”, because Heart of Darkness is too long to finish in a sitting, I think. Here is the setup for a quotation I enjoyed. After the coal they are trying to ship to Bangkok sets alight in the cargo, the ship explodes. When they meet another ship, it is described like this – “One of the boats dropped in the water, and walked towards us upon the sea with her long oars.”

 

Over break, I’ve been trying to write about this time I rode an elephant and felt icky afterward. In one cheesy paragraph I’ll probably have to cut, I think about big eyeballs on animals. Which animal has the biggest eyeball proportionate to body? The vampire squid. Which overall? The colossal squid, I think. I looked up elephant eyes, too. Really, they aren’t that big. When I went to sleep I had a nightmare wherein I asked Brianna about eyes, some weird eye question, and then rows upon rows of eyes appeared and she chased me, a departure from my usual nightmares that are about forgetting to lesson plan, etc. 

I try not to write about dreams, but it always happens.

And now I have to go to bed.   

Or Maybe an Improved Version of How Songs Are Easy

How I Pass the Time, Or Maybe an Improved Version of How Songs Are Easy

At 28, I'm only starting to learn the things I needed to know at 17. How to sort of make a zine, how to silkscreen, how to write songs, how to not take any of it personally. I'm still not great at any of those callings, and I've never identified as an artist in any sense, though I do like the mythlore of being receptive to ideas and inspiration.

If I go for a stroll or a bike ride on Ashland, a miserable street for cycling and exhaust choked for walking, there's a passable opportunity to receive a song idea.


It starts by my whistling. I pair whistles with bits of phrasing I see, almost exclusively store slogans and grocery prices that have been painted on white butcher paper. A melody arrives and I record it onto my phone. I rush home and jangle it out onto guitar. I break into a sweat, play it over a few times. 

Outside people are dropping candy wrappers to the cement and waiting at red lights. They have no idea what's happening in my apartment. Incredible.

Four out of five instances my song's will have such a bad melody that I can actually hear my high school friends ridiculing it, "What're you gonna send these off to Walt Disney?" 

Etc. Then the occasional song will make it to Krayola practice. My accomplices, according to no grading system I can determine, will give it the pass or rejection slip. The rate of acceptability must parallel some sort of barometer. I can only knit my hands over my eyes and invoke the Lord's name many times until it's over and a new song comes.  

Dee Dee Ramone Figures Into Things (3)

Dee Dee Ramone Figures Into Things

How I Think of Dee Dee Ramone in Particular and Songery in General

Over the next few days and in the year since, I knew I didn't care about who wrote what, "Chinese Rock" or whatever song. Really, I just think -- wouldn't it be exciting to be walking around your neighborhood, to get onto the subway, to do anything with a hit song in your head? The type that other bands wanted to rip from you and set to record across town? Does it feel heavy until you record it? Do you whistle it for months before anyone else knows? All I want is this light drama in my life.

And I don't mean popular songs like Train's "Hey, Soul Sister" which I had to learn the name and performer of so I could hate it clearly, but maybe famous songs like Cannonball or Great Big Kiss, Heatwave or Civilization's Dying.

Learning of the plagiarism legend around "Chinese Rock" established in Poison Heart and 70s NYC cult rock biography Please Kill Me feels a bit like watching tennis. Bass player Richard Hell -- who referred to any time he spent with Thunders as babysitting -- told Dee Dee that he would write a song better than Lou Reed's "Heroin," and Dee Dee decided he would outdo both Hell and Reed by writing an even greater drug-themed song. To his testament he gave proof in shaking out the chorus and verse to "Chinese Rocks."

Oddly, The Ramones were leery of taking a song about hard drugs. This delayed prudery caused an odd shift. Without any documented slap to the face of his pride, Dee Dee tossed the song as a hey whatever/you take it to Richard Hell, who renounced his Anti-Reed vow and wrote two lines for a new verse to "Chinese Rocks." Hell then gave it to The Heartbreakers, quit The Heartbreakers, and frowned later on when Johnny Thunders and company took writer's credit for it in their next album's liner notes.

To settle things, Dee Dee writes in his autobiography that Johnny Thunders was a lowlife, a wonderful insult. Apparently, no sooner does he lose that song then Stiv Bators of The Damned stoleThe Ramones piece "Poison Heart." Bators rushed it to demo in a London studio only to die promptly afterward.

Sure, all you ingest is potato chips and methadone, you can wax a car with all the grease in your hair, and receding gum lines make you look like a sad Dracula, but a dozen creeps around the city want your choruses.

I can't distinguish the pulp from the history. But still, to have such professionally unreliable people grating out this music. It gives me pause. 

The Last 7 Days

• In the last seven days, I could've zip-lined, but I was terrified. The zip-line tower was two or three stories high. Some kids said, "Do it! Zipline! What're you scared?" I told them I was very, very scared. 

• Rode my bike by an SUV limo on Clark St. that smelled like absolute dog shit. Powerful!

• Went out on Lake Michigan on a boat (a tiny yacht?) called the Free Spirit. A guy named Capt. Joe owns it. Lots of alpha-males and liquor, but delicious catered food from Greektown, too. When I jumped in the water with everyone else, to show I was not scared, Capt. Joe threw an inner tube at me. "Jesus Christ," he said, "you look like you're drowning." 

• I went to the library to get a comic book called Old Man Logan. It's a Wolverine comic where Wolverine is an angry old man and there are Hulk babies everywhere. In the comic, Wolverine cannot be killed but usually wants to die. He drinks whiskey and stabs people all the time. I see a Catholic saint in there somewhere. At the Lozano Library, my local branch, I saw that my Wolverine comic was not on hold as the CPL website told me. When I asked a librarian for help, she buzzed around the room checking spots, then asked, "Wait, Wolverine? Oh, I bet a kid has it. That movie just came out. All the neighborhood boys have been snatchin up those comics." "Oh they certainly have," said her co-worker. So that's why I couldn't read Wolverine.  

Art! and Culture!

Four years ago, maybe less, I was at an after party for a self-publishing event. I had just come back from the 7-11 with another person. Walking in the door, I was recognized by a stranger for the first and probably only time in my life. 
He came in from out of town to attend the readings and things. "Do you write Let It Sink?" he said. Yes, I told him, bewildered. "I really like your zine," he told me, even touching my shoulder, "but that zine writer over there changed my life!" And in saying this, he pointed across the room  toward a person who had been sexually harassing me for months and months. "Changed your life like in a good way," I asked, "Yeah!" he said. Then I reached into my bag for a 7-11 beer, and I drank it.

Last summer I took a pile of money I'd saved and turned it into plane tickets. Soon I was in Barcelona. Mostly I remember that there were Australians everywhere and none of them listened to Royal Headache. I saw palm trees and signs in Catalan, English, then Spanish, in that order. I went for walks and listened to London Calling and read Homage to Catalonia. 
At the hostel where I stayed, the two night staff workers, young people from Mexico City, were the only ones awake while I was trying to adjust to the new timezone. Talking, It came out that we all liked rock music and that I was in a band.
The next night, one of the staff, a guitarist who was about my age said that he searched online and heard my music. He liked my band, but had I heard of his favorite group of all time, also from Chicago, the great punk rock group, the best of them all, Mest?

End of Summer

          If I stay at home so often, reading and that kind of thing, that I get the idea that I'm smart and in control of my life, that's when I know it's time to leave the apartment and engage the world. 
  This week, a grown man called me an asshole. This happened after I asked him if he was fucking kidding, which I only asked because he first asked me why I was biking so slowly. Traffic was heavy and I was scared was why I was moving so slowly. But what I actually said was, "Are you fucking kidding me?" and pointed at all the dangerous cars on our right squeezing us against the parked vehicles to our left. I didn't realize until I turned around to curse at him that he was 100lbs of muscle heavier than me. 

Later, I sat outside this coffee place while on the phone, leaning on a bike rack. A severe biker guy says I'm blocking the rack. I apologize and feel stupid but he still looks angry. He has black hair and veiny temples.
An hour later, I was drinking coffee and working with a friend on some writing. A guy announces, "Someone has locked their bike to a customer's bike. Does anyone in here have a single-speed white frame bike outside." Quite. "Someone's single-speed white frame bike is locked to another customer's bike and he needs it unlocked." All of the patrons look around, seeking the chump who has locked their bike to a bike. I join in, thinking, where is this poor idiot? 
I realize within moments that I am the culprit. I excuse myself from the table and unlock my bike from the customer's old spoiler, which I've attached to. 
Back inside, my friend asks if it was my bike. I tell him, no, it was not. Now what were we talking about. 

Booked - The Way We Sleep

Hey faithful readers, an essay I wrote on sleep, Catholicism, and death appears here with pieces by fellow Chicagoans Billy Lombardo and Jeffrey Brown plus fun others who you can discover on your own. 

As of now, they're shucking these glossy bad boys for $10 with free shipping. I might  rewrite/remix the heck out of this essay later and release 20 copies as a choose your own adventure zine, but hey, this is a cool book and Curbside Splendor is a grand supporter of Chicago writing. My friends Billy and Frank gave me some heavy editing advice and I'm finally starting to figure out this essay form.

Anyway, I ordered a copy few weeks ago. If you don't need to add another book to your life, I'll show you mine over coffee and you can humor me since this is my first book-thing I've been in.  

As to  the cover, if it were of me, the picture would display --  

• a frail man child spooning a pillow 
• drool all over the place 
• and since I moved, no bed frame, floor mattress 
• no facial hair and babe less.    
• but isn't it a pleasing blue? Appearing below, a message from the publishers: 

The Way We Sleep is on Black Friday sale for TEN FREAKIN’ BUCKS (FREE SHIPPING!!!) from Curbside Splendor Publishing this weekend.Jessa Marsh and I are honestly just insanely proud of this thing we’ve been able to put together over the last 2 years with so many creative, talented people, working with friends and making new ones along the way. I know I’m biased on this, but if you’re literary friends or friends who are just into cool stuff, you really can’t go wrong buying this anthology for $10. And you didn’t even have to sleep outside Best Buy all week to get it! Get it today at http://curbsidesplendor.bigcartel.com/product/way-we-sleep

The Uppers, The Downers

I was hungry and confused and it was raining. At the cafe I used to work at the tables crammed full with study dates. I was drinking decaf coffee and getting upset about it, it was bothering me how I couldn't sit in my red brick apartment and do anything. It's so dark and cold, and I uncaffeinated.

I got some beer and hamburger at the bar place across from the coffee place, and then the server smiled at me a bunch, but I thought, Come on, Jim, servers always smile, it's their job, and she kept dropping by, this lady, maybe she was a student at UIC or something, maybe from nearby, a Mexican woman in her 20s, I'm not obsessed I'm just saying.

But really because I'm Irish I am obsessed because over all those mornings on the Western bus, all those cool Mexican kids we never hung out with who had better taste in music and cooler haircuts, I was only ever friends with the guys, but almost could've been with their sisters, because we were all Catholic and had that hard crucifix connection.

I thought about all this while I was eating alone, sifting through a pile of papers, feeling older than my age like I was looking into this dusty future of me in this blandness drifting off the map, just getting withery and working this bell curve forever, then the Depeche Mode song started playing, "Everything Counts," everything counts in large amounts they kept saying, which is when my bill arrived, there was a smiley face on it, Everything counts in large amounts, I said, signed it and left, I wanted to stay and see, but I live with my aunt and I'm in shambles this week.