Bully Bait

In This Bar Things Were More My Way

2007-05-09T20:39:00.001-05:00

Drunk on Clark Street, we heard a burst of laughter like a rope ladder dropped from the third floor open window above. Nyiah said, Let's go. I said I was pretty tired.

But I followed her through the unlatched chain-link gate, past the coiled garden hose and the pots of bare soil and up the back stairs, a dozen layers of gray paint cracked and coating the hand rails, the steps, the ceiling. We'd traveled those steps before, the ubiquitous intestinal passages of Chicago apartment buildings, but there was no one above expecting the likes of us to walk through the door.

With nervous smiles we made our way through the scouts, clean-cut boys and girls smoking cigarettes and talking in that familiar metropolitan twang about their sex lives, about their habits, about themselves. Too self-absorbed to mind the strange, straight couple six pints to the wind inserting themselves where they didn't belong.

Everyone's in front, suggested a quartet of girls playing cards in the kitchen, a bright Home Depot display of bland conformity, its granite countertops littered with Miller Lite bottles. We grabbed a pair of props and ventured down the hardwood hallway toward the noise, where a roomful of sirens were immersed in an incomprehensible game of plastic cups and beer.

I'd been there before, in high school, in college, in every swollen, bacchanalian ritual of banal self-congratulation that people have forced on me throughout my life. It didn't matter that I was the only male in the room. I was raised polite, and at midnight this tame gathering was coasting on cheap beer, a boozy breath all the admittance necessary.

What was disappointing? That nobody cared? That they were all nice? That three dozen white dykes didn't root out our ruse? Send us tumbling down the stairs and Leave me battered and bloodied in the alley?

Or was it that three dozen white dykes hadn't invited the likes of us in the first place?

I Just Want To See His Face

2007-04-16T22:53:00.001-05:00

Last July while I was walking my dog I watched a man pull up to the lovely, overgrown berm around the corner in a little white pickup with green serif lettering on its doors. He pulled a mower out of his bed, revved it up to a crabby roar and razed all that was green to a flat, sick, brown, buzz-cut. Pollen and dust clouded the street, insects didn't know what to do. I gave him the finger.

Even that meager stretch of earth endured, though. Nobody came back to butcher the plot the rest of summer. Clusters of verdant greenery bloomed untouched, a few feet from parked cars, in beds of dog shit and decomposing Walgreens bags. A lovely and rare sight in a city that pays little heed to the demands of sunlight and water.

Over winter, I watched the cracked and dried stalks poking through drifts, reminding grouchy commuters steadying themselves with outstretched arms and leather-soled shoes over shiny ripples of ice that the world is not dead, just dead tired.

Spring, pissed and cranky, is slow to rouse around here. It sits bolt upright in March, as if waking from a bad dream, then crashes deeper into folds of cold rain and snowflakes for the next month and a half. We shed layers when we know better, pretend it's warmer than it is, watch for the buds on the trees and the dormant grass to grapple and bury the garbage that's settled between rooty knots over the winter.

The berm around the corner was choked with garbage. I listened to hell in my headphones this weekend as I poked it clean with my King Tongs, sidestepping turds and dragging the detritus of American happiness out from the earth that was slowly claiming it. Joyous logos, garish graphics, foil and polyethylene. Plastic straws. Kill plastic.

I filled the dumpster. It took three hours, gray clouds cracking to sunlight. I couldn't imagine a more enjoyable thing to do with my time, head down, working for no man's land, dog hitched to the fence-post, kids on bikes waiting for my back to turn before they tossed their White Castle goblets to the ground.

Roots Of Self-Loathing, Volume 98

2007-02-26T16:18:00.000-06:00

It's a tough thing to get called out in teeball time and time again for being unable to hit the ball out of the infield. Our team, the Hurons, had the worst record in the league and my being platooned in far right field meant that I was the worst player in the league.

To give myself some credit, my father had bought me a brand-new fielder's glove before my inaugural season, a nice gesture except the fact even Andre the Giant would have a hard time squeezing it shut, so saddle-stiff was its leather. Couple that with my natural propensity to daydream and an acre or two of clovers that desperately needed searching for mutant variations, and my teeball career was not off to a good start.

A month into the season, my batting average stood at a solid .000. The coaches were indifferent and my father was mostly at the golf course, so, idiot that I was, I turned for advice to my mother, a woman who not only threw like a girl, but also sewed like a girl and cooked like a girl and talked like a girl, etc.

Her advice was simple: "Once you make contact with the ball, just put your head down and run as fast as you can."

It made sense, but a cursory reexamination of the text reveals a phrase that was to be my undoing, for on that sultry summer night I did swing as hard as I could, and I did run as fast as I could and I did put my head down. And when I couldn't find first base, I lifted my head and found myself standing midway between first and second, nearly in my clover patch, both teams laughing at me.

Roots Of Self-Loathing, Volume 67

2007-02-16T11:26:00.000-06:00

One morning in gym class during 8th grade, at the pinnacle of my social ostracism in life, a time when I couldn't make eye contact with a male classmate without him asking me who my best friend was, our gym teacher made everyone in class in succession stand before the class, bend at the waist, touch their head to a wall and attempt to pick up a small chair.

Everyone had to do this, the boys and the girls, those who could perform the task retiring to a different side of the gym than those who couldn't. Soon a pattern developed: the girls were the lifters and the guys weren't, the point being that girls have a lower center of gravity - oh, and Kourlas, too. Cue laughter.

I have thick legs and calves. God bless the gym teacher for utilizing a public forum to reinforce my dad's rebuke while dressing me in ill-fitting church clothes that I had "hips like a girl."

Disaster In The Desert

2007-02-08T12:23:00.000-06:00

I remember a story that came out of Afghanistan shortly after the defeat of the Taliban in late 2001. A reporter was stricken by how quickly the Taliban forces folded under Western air power, to which the expert in the field made an assertion that it wasn’t the firepower of US weapons that did it so much as their pinpoint accuracy. What the high-tech air war did was create a psychological advantage, effectively scaring the enemy shitless. Once the enemy believes he has no safe haven, that unknown enemies are observing his every move even in the relative safety of a concrete and steel bunker, he has lost. The mind cracks. The army folds.

I imagine that’s what Rumsfeld meant by shock and awe. Or so we dream. I have my doubts. There were a lot of specialty forces and intelligence agents working on the ground in Afghanistan, a lot of imaginative westerners blending forces with a well-established opposition. Shock and awe always seemed a fantastic construct, an opportunity to assert one’s will around the world without tainting one’s culture.

We wish to fight without risk, to fight disembodied battles through well-planned schematics plotted well in advance and executed by sophisticated technology that minimizes human error. Perception is everything, and those that control the conventional wisdom control the world. And when we dominate like we did in Afghanistan the spectacle is overwhelming.

But every strategy succeeds at the expense of another. The world is not a video game. EA Sports, easy sports, dreams. From the cradle of football, the most American of sports, somewhere along the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, certain unwritten beliefs were laid out: work and toil, muscle and bone.

Our service economy forgets. Greenspan sits incredulous testifying before a row of senators. Isn’t this what you want? This wealth? This is why I am here. Why else was I born?

So we move to Florida, drain the swamps and send the gators scurrying to the safety of nuclear cooling pools. Our football flips finesse. Go over the top. Five wideouts, an empty backfield. Good protection. Nickel defense. Dime defense. Blitz the corner and drop a linebacker into coverage.

The NFL lost me years ago, back when free agency meant the heroes were nomadic, no longer familiar armies of well-embedded foot soldiers but well-paid mercenaries. Marketing transformed the game from homegrown to processed. The worker became the product.

Yet I could still find beauty in college football. Local traditions evolved over generations. Kids grew into men over a few short years. Not every player made it to the pros, in fact very few, and on any given Saturday you could find one unknown kid assert himself with a surprising play or game. The league, made up of 119 teams, was grotesquely ordered, more concerned with preserving a stable relationship with the past than an easily digestible bite of present entertainment. Championships were decided as best they could, but disputes were accepted. People moved on. It wasn’t the end of the world.

But it’s over now. Gone is the war in the trenches, the blunt clash of 2nd-generation warfare. Football has caught up to 1939: speed thrills, speed kills. And our defense industry continues to fight World War II. We’re trapped in it. We saw a defense industry blossom, a homeland population largely unthreatened, a weakened enemy that couldn’t possibly win a technological race. Our crowning achievement was the Bomb, that lovely demolition of the game itself. Shock and awe, shock and awe.

In the Arizona desert I watched a team, as physically prepared as any, unprepared to match nuke for nuke. They hadn’t played in a month and a half. Medals of honor had been bestowed, but there was one final clash, and as it turned out those who deliver shock and awe are particularly vulnerable to it.

These kids. How on earth, in this tangle of media messaging, while the hands of commerce grasp greed and jerk them about, can they possibly concentrate? A tempest of distractions. What gives a man who puts on a suit and makeup and sits in a studio the right to proclaim how things should be? Who is it that’s selling the false goods? What lasts? A trophy? A spread in a magazine? Where does the Mission Accomplished banner reside now, gathering dust in the possession of some hapless dreamer?

Celebrate Good Times

2007-01-08T08:29:00.000-06:00

This past New Year's Eve fell on a Sunday, and like any Sunday at our nondescript corner tavern the first round was free. The bartender, a thin woman in her forties dressed up like an Urban Outfitters sales girl, gave us our whiskeys with a shrug. I had called the unlisted number earlier in the evening, asking if anything special was going on that night—a hefty cover, a private party, a dress code—and was served a blunt reply. “Nothing special,” she said. Thank God.

The fluorescent-lit pool table was tucked under its vinyl tarp, balls replaced by plastic trays layered with cheese and crackers and sliced summer sausage all stabbed with little plastic swords like battlefield corpses. A dozen men with various degrees of potbellies and moustaches were watching the Bears flush away their competitive spirits in a meaningless game against the Packers, but for the most part the linoleum floor was empty and the air surprisingly clear. We were beginning to think New Year’s would pass completely unnoticed.

As soon as the game ended, however, bills were slipped in the jukebox and a buoyant young woman began disseminating plastic hats and noisemakers from a cardboard box. We took our props like union extras and watched in glee as the girl tried placing a tiara on one of the regulars playing video slots at the back of the bar, just past the pool table’s white dissecting light. The woman swatted the girl away like an old lioness and told her in not so many words to leave her alone.

Smoke hovered over the cocktail shrimp drenched in catsup sauce, twenty year-old hour d’oeuvres to match the wood-paneled walls and Fleetwood Mac coming out of the speakers. By midnight the room had filled out a bit more, friends and strangers hugging half-heartedly with the congratulatory recognition that they’d fulfilled their corny sacrifice to the calendar god again for a year. We were drunk, but no more drunk than usual. Still, it wasn’t just another night at the bar; we all had Monday off.

And I know on other streets the clubs were filled with actors in TV commercials: girls in glitter-blouses and boys in untucked shirts, Red Bull flowing faster than tonic. They’re angry, shouting at each other because the music is so loud. They mimic fun because they can’t remember how to have it anymore. The heat is unbearable.

But it’s cool in the hipster havens, where bad art hangs on the walls, action figures for nostalgia. Suburbanites slum together, white kids recreating the lunchroom cliques and categories they once upon a time fled. Their hearts beat slow, bored by the house of mirrors they’ve constructed for one another, but they’re flush with cash. They pawned the great egalitarian gift of the city a long time ago.

Fodder And Fare

2006-12-28T19:40:00.000-06:00

Watch the positions a child wriggles into to protest the dead minutes after dinner, when the adults are sipping bitter cups of coffee and twirling their wine stems on the tablecloth and talking endlessly about the things adults talk about. The cake is in the kitchen. It's been in there all day, perfect and composed in the hour of its execution, waiting to be cracked and wrecked like a piggy bank. And the adults talk on and on as their food settles. What are they talking about? Don't they know there is cake?

I take my meals over sinks, out of refrigerators, at my desk. People stop in my doorway and I answer their questions with bun spackle in my molars, mustard in the corner of my mouth. I've spent my life stealing away in dogged pursuit of quick, chip-dip-based meals: a knife and a hunk of cheese, summer sausage, a baseball game on the TV. It's too expensive to cook for one, too depressing, too.

One day a dozen years ago my brother and I took my Yiayia to a chain restaurant called Bill Knapp's. She ordered potato soup, and when the waiter returned to our table to check on us, she asked him in her thick Greek accent if he would tell the chef that he's using too much starch in the soup. "Well, actually," replied the waiter, "there is no chef. All the food, like, comes in bags. From a factory."

My Yiayia was no dullard; she snorted a good-natured laugh, both at the absurdity of the situation as well as her own naiveté. She spent her life cooking at home and in restaurants, great rich ancient dishes made from scratch. But she also liked pizza and beer and hamburgers. She told us nostalgic stories about growing up in the hills of Sparta, but she loved America and all of its first-world innovations. The generational seams are paved smooth with heavy creams and sauces.

The Jetsons ate pills for dinner but the family still ate together. It was fiction. The real future of food is shot up into space: gelatinous sauces rolled in plastic tubing, energy bars. Solitary foods. Manufactured sustenance is buried beneath shiny packaging in the supermarket aisles. A meal is a pint of ice cream, a frozen pizza, more cardboard than calories.

The condos on my street pop up like cardboard constructions in children’s books. Their front windows run the length of their living quarters, showing off the way we live: overstuffed couches and plasma television presided over by a great big marble kitchen. But there's no dining room, no table, no space to insulate oneself from the advertisements on television.

If I weren’t a coward I’d buy a dining room table and make friends over slow meals lubricated with alcohol. We would sit around the table for hours while we told stories and submit complaints. We would celebrate Thanksgiving in February, September, June. Everyone would bring a side dish and we’d all compliment each other and leave with reluctance. But we wouldn’t overeat, we wouldn’t feel greedy, because there would be no question that we’d soon come together to celebrate another Thanksgiving together.

The Late Greats

2006-11-26T21:44:00.000-06:00

It's been several years since I've seen Wilco live. Drummer Ken Coomer had just been dumped for Glenn Kotche, and I was impressed by the latter's ability to add nuance to an instrument that's usually dumbed down in pop music. He seemed to take the place of Jay Bennett as the band member whose job it was to affix odd, discordant sounds to what Jeff Tweedy had described as essentially folk music. Then utility man Leroy Bach left and was replaced by three additional music nerds and the band released A Ghost Is Born and though I tried, I just didn’t care anymore.

It wasn't just that Tweedy's vocals were buried and his lyrics unnecessarily oblique; the arrangements were surprisingly limp considering the pedigree of the musicians. So I was curious to hear what the band sounded like after these few years, now that its current lineup has been playing together for a while. Are they as bland as they sounded on the album?

The Auditorium Theater is a gorgeous venue. Designed by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan in 1886 one can only imagine the incredible musicians and performers who have played there over the past century. I'm not used to attending concerts with 4,000 other people, but I was happy to make an exception for a good band in a beautiful theater.

We were shoved midway up the balcony. The theater was mostly empty for the opening band, the unremarkable rockers Detholz—and that’s a conceit as far as I’m concerned. Why do people show up late to everything? Why do they blab during shows? But once the opener finished up people started filtering in: girls in heels, meathead guys in untucked shirts. I hate to judge but I couldn't stave off the feeling I was attending an event rather than a concert. How could Jeff Tweedy, staring up into all those white faces, think anything else?

Tweedy was his usual self-deprecating self, but it was a charmless, attention-grabbing self-deprecation, and one I couldn't really warm to. What was his comment about "Heavy Metal Drummer" being their one and only hit (from their greatest hit record) supposed to invoke other than a knowing, self-satisfied guffaw from the audience? The band and the audience seemed to be taking part in a great big circle-jerk. Tell us we’re cool and we’ll tell you how cool you are for liking such a cool band. Blech.

The band debuted several new songs that sounded like obvious descendents from the batch released on Ghost. Oblique lyrics, abrupt shifts and discordant asides resulted in one big musical non sequitur. In a way, it makes sense. There’s so much music readily available these days, so much information on the bookshelves and on the internet. So many unnecessary bloggers (I include myself). How does one react to it all? How does one command attention when everyone is being pulled in so many directions? You bust it all up. Complicate things until they don’t mean anything anymore. Just like our media-saturated world.

Wilco has carved a neat island for itself, but it’s one governed by exclusivity. My political awareness, like some cynical reporter’s, has simultaneously grown more informed and sour over the past six years of Republican rule. It’s an age of boundaries and categories, and try as Wilco may to transcend musical genres, the band has simply devolved into musical excess, no different than the kind that sunk so many great rock bands of the 1970s. I wouldn’t say it’s prog rock (though I can’t listen to “Muzzle Of Bees” without Genesis’s “Stagnation” rising from the airbrushed ether of my memory), but it is a kind of obvious, self-indulgent art rock. This is music for grad students.

Kotche’s a fine drummer and a hoot to watch, but he’s loathe to rock, thumping on his toms when the songs demand a good, strong, simple snare smack. He opened it up in the second encore, but most of the energy was sucked dry by Tweedy’s self-conscious and ironic monologue during an extended version of “Kingpin”. The solos by the supporting cast were strong but lacking in any real improvisational spirit. It seems in the band’s attempt to break out of the Americana mold they’ve gone generically international. That wouldn’t be so bad except they’ve forgotten the one thing that built their audiences in the first place: heart.

I suppose it sounds corny to use that word, but music is soul. And that’s not to say all music has to be emotional—far from it. But the heart of the performer zaps the nerves of the listener, and there were few heartfelt moments during the Wilco show. My favorite songs were the ones co-opting Woody Guthrie lyrics, especially the lovely, rich “Remember the Mountain Bed” and the soaring “Airline To Heaven”. They were full of heart. Their lyrics weren’t buried in convoluted constructions. They were clear and honest. And that’s what was so great about the Americana bands of the 90s: there was a directness in them that welcomed all listeners into the fold. I realize the genre is dead and stale by now, but those old records were fierce and friendly.

During the show my eyes kept drifting to the one holdover from Uncle Tupelo’s last incarnation, bass player John Stirratt. I’ve seen too many shows to have any delusions of how fun and cool it must be tour all over the place and perform the same songs night after night. While listening one night to Stirratt’s record Arabella, co-written with his wonderful twin sister Laurie, a good friend of mine pointed out how backup singers bring something special to a recording that full-time lead singers never could. It’s like the difference between a career minor-league baseball player swinging his heart out as compared to a wealthy major-leaguer who walks up to the plate with a stadium full of grouchy fans haunting his swing. I know a lot of people who would only want to watch the world-series best, but as for me I’d rather sit in the stands with a few dozen companions watching a guy play his tail off.

What's Happening In Ohio

2006-10-19T11:56:00.000-05:00

Here's the saddest story in the world, courtesy of the Columbus Dispatch:

Timothy Bowers handed his landlady the keys to his apartment and mailbox and the laundry room and told her he probably wouldn’t be back.
At 62, he hadn’t had steady work for almost three years. He’d been a cabdriver and worked for Encyclopedia Britannica, but he could find only odd jobs after the drug wholesaler he made deliveries for closed in 2003.

So he walked to the Speedway gas station around the corner and ate a couple of hot dogs on the "Two for $2" special.

Bowers then walked a couple of blocks to the Fifth Third Bank at 5055 W. Broad St. He handed a teller a note that said this was a robbery and to put loose cash in an envelope.

The teller put four $20 bills and a dye pack in the envelope and handed it to him. She pushed the silent-alarm button.

Bowers turned and walked to the security guard standing in the lobby. He handed the guard the envelope and told him that this day, May 1, was his day to be a hero.

What makes the story more remarkable than anything is its popularity. On the list of the Dispatch readers' top ten most-read articles, as of noon today, it lands squarely at #1, beating the usual top stories involving the Ohio State Buckeyes' football team.

Granted, OSU is playing lowly Indiana this week, but they're also undefeated, ranked number one in the country and led by Heisman Trophy frontrunner Troy Smith. Could the popularity of such an article signal the attention of Ohio citizens has finally turned from the GOP's distracting issues like gay marriage and terror panic to ones that really matter?

Who are we as a nation if we neglect the elderly, the undereducated and poor? Can we claim the right to be good Christians in a country that drives one of its citizens to commit a crime because prison is a better alternative than freedom?

Fishing

2006-09-28T22:42:00.000-05:00

I reel in my dog, cast my line—a knotted rope—back and forth across the space of my living room, slapping his chops so that he winces, until he bites and takes hold like a perch. What a gratifying feeling to be drawn together, a union, two bodies grappling in terrible embrace.

I Am The King Of All I See, My Kingdom For A Voice

2006-09-26T19:31:00.000-05:00

Joe waves when I walk past. I see him: dragging his air hose across the sidewalk, cracking jokes with customers, tending to the grill that’s sizzling sausages in the snow. He always waves.

His shop employs no lifts, only a loading zone, a stretch of LeMoyne guarded by a pair of city signs. Customers drive up in all kinds of cars—Mercedes, Caddies, old pickups crammed with scrap—and lean against the wall as Joe and his men wheel out their dented steel jacks and crank up their cars right there on the street. There is no waiting room. This is not Good Year. But Joe is fast. He has to be. There's only so much street and so many jacks.

Three floors on Western Avenue crammed with radial rubber, and when the storage-room garage grows bare they toss their replacements from the upper windows. Smack! And thud. And as my dog and I doze on our saliva-stained couch with a book on my belly and the door gaping open we dream to the zip of lug nuts unclenching their steely grip.

I wake to a hydraulic hiss and step on my deck to see the artist’s airbrush spitting black paint on a pancake stack of old, dusty Coopers and Goodriches as a makeshift potter’s wheel spins slowly around. The pink-nosed pit bull flips circles behind his bars and toots his bugle bark in protest at the spayed babes trotting past, peeing hello, too far for a snort.

Joe charges me ten bucks a leak. I kid: you’re dropping nails. He pauses, almost takes offense, then laughs.

The sun setting, he locks up the shop and crosses the alley, sits in his garage, flips on baseball or boxing. Courtiers come with tribute—a cooler of Coronas, reefer—a little empire, squatter rich, living off the land, happy to watch it turn each season richer and richer, like good soil.

Box Seats On A Picnic Table

2006-09-22T12:53:00.000-05:00

They came from the coasts—Ireland, Spain, San Francisco—to visit our unsalted shore and strike their hipster poses: a hand in one pocket, another wrapped around a plastic cup, their heads lobbing uncaught deep thoughts with the steady thunk-thump from head-to-toe speakers holding throne on the cracked asphalt parking lot.

We hide out on the picnic table near the VIP tent, happy and distant, watching the blurry crowd, the crowded blur, mix and mash. They stand beyond a chain-link fence where the garbage trucks have taken leave from their usual harbor. Everyone prepares for a Friday night. Everyone’s beautiful in the dark. We touch and we go.

The bar sits behind us, quiet, tucked in our armpit like a newspaper, like an afterthought. There’s a line to get in, so we scoop up beers and balance out the table with our weighty weeklong thoughts, letting them unravel into a net we cast out upon the occasional friends swimming through reeds of strangers like fat, aimless catfish.

But I miss this bar behind me, this rickety house with cutout snowflakes dangling from the ceiling. It's been good to me. Restless nights, alone, I’d amble up, self-conscious, impatient for the Jameson to crawl up my neck and drown the worries. And others, after work, with friends, our backs arched and calves bouncing on the brass rung and our forearms locked into the glazed wooden bar. Through words and beers and the rhythmic dance of dollar bills we'd regain ourselves from the day, remember who we were when we were kids, when we hoped out loud.

We toasted Waylon's final trip to Luckenbach. Robyn Hitchcock served us doughnuts from a Krispy Kreme pyramid. Soul and country blend indistinguishable. Siblings know no rivalries. Friends turn into family, grow young listening to three kids on a bench back seat singing popcorn on a long highway drive around the back room. Stanley licks Pabst off the linoleum floor while my friend tells me he's getting divorced. We navigate the buildup to war, melancholy settling over the room like the aftermath of a fight. Work wears us down, paychecks dissolve into cash, hangovers stagger to our desks the next day.

Then the chatter cracks and an unamplified voice conquers the room. Such a silence you've never heard. It's a Monday night and you have no business being there. It's too late, but when heaven casts its rays out of the slate-gray sky you'd best stick around.

This September party has grown too big, but we take comfort from the ash tree, the twenty-foot weed rooted under asphalt, dangling leafy tendrils from its unpruned arms. In Chicago it's not the night sky that twinkles but the glittering glassy ground. Broken bottles carpet stone. And on the other side of the fence, on the other side of the world, cop cruisers sip gasoline and roll away for another night of violence.

At The Will County Fair

2006-08-30T22:48:00.000-05:00

A cow's tongue is dry and rough, and to finally stand close to a cow after passing thousands on a drive through, say, Wisconsin or Nebraska is a humbling experience. Their girth is enormous. You wonder how long it would take to eat one.

On top of their heads is a bony knob, singing out for touch. They don't care for petting, however. They know their purpose. Hold out a handful of hay and their tongues stretch out like elephant trunks, curling around their bounty and sending them back to work. Their bodies are assembly lines.

A step forward and they could do you harm, but they don't. If they had any sense they'd save themselves from the slaughterhouse and rise up tank-tons of ribeye and flank and sparerib and trample our fattened souls into detritus. Good fertilizer for the grass.

Go visit your county fair. It's a cheap date—free parking, corn on the cob, shiny tractors you can touch. The games are easy and food trailers open a few flaps to lapse sleazy with trans-fat, refined sugar and artificial colors. Corn dogs cooked by ethanol. Machine guns spitting bb's. Goldfish counting their circles in little bowls, dreaming of death, praying for toilets instead of cats.

The goods of rural America, through some perverse algorithms of the global economy, are made in China. I bought a camouflage cap brandished with an American flag and eagle's head, gold bars and, in case you don't get it, the initials U.S.A. God bless America, it only set me back five bucks.

A man in the grandstand wore a camouflaged shirt that read, "Ha! Now you can't see me!" Self-awareness grows clumpy and mottled at the county fair. You hear it in the winking country songs, a ritual of covers. In the beer tent the band plays AC/DC and the smoke singes lazy morals.

The meager midway blinks nonsense, girls hunching their shoulders over doughy breasts, girls wearing too much eyeliner, girls punking out to look different, all looking the same, guys like dogs in panting pursuit hoping for a lick and a nuzzle and far too many getting some. Babies bloom in the night.

We came for the cars, though. Four score were tugged in on trailers, lined up in rustbucket dreams of NASCAR fame only to be penned in like cattle and pitted against one another. Old models, graffiti-tagged, the sad castaways of our fickle ad-fueled vanity dreams.

Dreams of escape, rolling through foreign landscapes trying to outrun something you can't, the skies cloudy with family and burdens, holding on to those weights of your own invention because the heavens are much too scary, only to end up in Postcard Pretty, Scared Shitless, USA. These dreams are too much to stand. Isn't there someone to ease the load for a short while?

And when it's all over, when our apocalyptic fantasies rest fulfilled with the oink-moo-bray of a lone wheezing engine, the people waddle off under an umbrella of fireworks, pinks and oranges trying hard to blot out the stars in hopes of matching the throbbing metropolis an hour to the north.

More Small Creatures

2006-08-22T11:18:00.000-05:00

She rolls through stop stop signs: a blonde, her bobblehead balanced perfectly on a crane-like neck, its tendons visible under a fabric of bronze skin. A lean phone spoons her right ear as she talks, her neck steady as she gives only the slightest glance to her left and her right.

In contrast is her vehicle: a black SUV, boxy like a hearse, shoulder pads and a football helmet on a child. Her arms and legs are narrow piping to control the dials and switches: step on the gas, change the station, answer the phone. It occurs to me the future is now, a populace of disembodied brains. In magazine ads hairless, fatless, uniformly tan figures are scaffolding for technological efficiency.

Car commercials are the loveliest: scenery and sunlight, the curve of road through Eden-like swaths of the American West. But the plastic is too thick. It obscures the view. The glass is tinted. The sky turns grim. The air is filtered. There's no scent. We drive to work, to eat, to friends. We are flies bottled up in jars.

On another street trundles a canary Hummer, fat and flashy, medallions of chrome hanging from its grill like rapper's gold. The driver is the past: thick hairy arms, thighs touching, bacteria sweltering in the folds of his skin. He is armored from the outside world, a child wrapped tight in a blanket of air-conditioning.

A BMW driver dreams a utopia of performance, Ayn-Rand order. His car is black, white, silver, a regiment in a Riefenstahl clip, precision blitzing down Western Avenue past rusted-out wrecks weighted by scrap plucked from alleyways.

Who are these men—dumpster divers, three abreast the front seat, windows rolled down, elbows hanging out? They are alchemists, touching the earth, embracing the rust and the rot, turning garbage into gold.

Not So Strange After All

2006-08-17T20:22:00.000-05:00

There's been plenty of puzzlement and laughter from bloggers and other assorted Bush-bashers at White House Press Secretary Tony Snow's mention that our fair leader was reading Albert Camus's existentialist novel The Stranger while on vacation at his Crawford Ranch.

A lot of people have cited the book's difficulty as fair reason why Bush could not have possibly read the novel. My first answer to that logic was that anyone can read a book; understanding it is the problem. I was assigned an English translation of The Stranger in high school and though I whipped through it fairly quickly, I couldn't tell you much about it at the time, and probably less today.

It wasn't until I received a forwarded email from my good friend Cris in Omaha, however, that Snow's pronouncement of Bush as a born-again literate finally made sense. Apparently the following has been making the rounds in the inboxes of the sweet God-fearing folk of the heartland:

A few years after I was born, my Dad met a stranger who was new to our small town. From the beginning, Dad was fascinated with this enchanting newcomer and soon invited him to live with our family. The stranger was quickly accepted and was around from then on.

As I grew up, I never questioned his place in my family. In my young mind, he had a special niche. My parents were complementary instructors: Mom taught me good from evil, and Dad taught me to obey. But the stranger...he was our storyteller. He would keep us spellbound for hours on end with adventures, mysteries and comedies.

If I wanted to know anything about politics, history or science, he always knew the answers about the past, understood the present and even seemed able to predict the future! He took my family to the first major league ball game. He made me laugh, and he made me cry. The stranger never stopped talking, but Dad didn't seem to mind.

Sometimes, Mom would get up quietly while the rest of us were shushing each other to listen to what he had to say, and she would go to the kitchen for peace and quiet (I wonder now if she ever prayed for the stranger to leave.)

Dad ruled our household with certain moral convictions, but the stranger never felt obligated to honor them. Profanity, for example, was not allowed in our home... not from us, our friends or any visitors. Our longtime visitor, however, got away with four-letter words that burned my ears and made my dad squirm and my mother blush.

My Dad didn't permit the liberal use of alcohol But the stranger encouraged us to try it on a regular basis. He made cigarettes look cool, cigars manly and pipes distinguished. He talked freely (much too freely!) about sex. His comments were sometimes blatant, sometimes suggestive, and generally embarrassing.

I now know that my early concepts about relationships were influenced strongly by the stranger. Time after time, he opposed the values of my parents, yet he was seldom rebuked... and NEVER asked to leave

More than fifty years have passed since the stranger moved in with our family. He has blended right in and is not nearly as fascinating as he was at first. Still, if you could walk into my parents' den today, you would still find him sitting over in his corner, waiting for someone to listen to him talk and watch him draw his pictures. His name?....

We just call him, "TV."

**Note: This should be required reading for every household in America!**

He has a younger sister now. We call her "Computer."

Indeed! Lovely computer!

You see, Tony Snow was being coy with the liberal media. It wasn't Camus's Stranger Bush was reading, it was an email Jeb sent him. And all this talk was a coded message to the few loyal followers out there huddling together like French soldiers in the trenches of the Culture War! Of course!

An Inventory Of Small Creatures

2006-08-09T21:26:00.000-05:00

It's the season of cicadas, a cacophony of chirps ringing like jingle bells from the treetops. Let's do it again goes Curtis Mayfield from the peanut-odor ash tree. Here I am, come and take me sings Al Green on the sweet maple.

Flies warm themselves on my sun-slathered pinebone porch every morning. The old bricks of my building grow hot and by eight the flies are warm enough to hit hot dog shit. It takes all day for them to devour it, rising, falling, fucking in their bounty.

Yellow jackets pick apart vomit dollops dropped like gifts from God out of the open mouths of drunks. Tequila and rice: sedentary maggots. But their cousin bumblebees still seek out flowers, driving like union men from site to site, collecting their quarry from the open mouths of morning glories saying ahhhhh to Dr. Sunshine.

I watched a flock of sparrows hunt in a hot sunny meadow near the lake. They fell like fighter jets, a horror to the insects, slicing the air up in hairpin turns, bullet beaks snapping one life after another off the face of the earth.

The crickets claim the night, one offering his applause and a thousand joining in, knocking knees and elbows, raising the dead dark from its slumber with a jigjag melody of rabid sex songs. Meanwhile, through the soil and across kitchen floors solitary, quiet beings trundle past—pillbugs, ladybugs, cockroaches, earwigs—too preoccupied to pay them any mind.

And by now most of the fireflies have found dates. Only a few lonely stragglers signal their desperate flares in the dim light of dusk.

Some never made it to the sex act. They were dashed like paint across windshields or captured by soft small hands, forced to contemplate the unfathomable conundrum of glass, a pickle jar world tapped and shaken like a quake, each desperate flare igniting a little dimmer than the last.

More On Optimism

2006-08-02T11:55:00.000-05:00

I stumbled across a terrific passage illustrating my feelings on the plague of optimism leaking from the current Republican establishment ever since the Reagan revolution. Business writer Jim Collins describes his meeting with Admiral and Vietnam War prisoner Jim Stockdale:

I didn’t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, “Who didn’t make it out?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.”

“The optimists? I don’t understand,” I said, now completely confused, given what he’d said a hundred meters earlier.

“The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say,‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

Whether those in the White House have hearts is up for debate.

Mandarin Sky

2006-07-31T13:54:00.000-05:00

The orange lights are dimmed some on these short sweaty nights of summer. Leafy branches snake their way through tangles of cables suspended on pine stiffs, their long bows stretched in lazy arcs across intersections and alleys to buildings and light poles. The light dips and waves on the asphalt with each windy stroke. But night is never dark in Chicago, not even in the summer.

There are exceptions. Sometimes a block of streetlights will go out for no apparent reason. Biking or walking along you're struck by the sudden realization of what you take for granted: the omnipresent orange glow that smothers starlight and protects us from crime. Sodium lights turn overcast skies orange, cap the city with a painted ceiling.

Still, some neighborhoods have grown dimmer. Crossing Western Avenue from Humboldt to Wicker Park, the plants and flowers are tended, fenced in, clipped crisp. The lights attached to the new constructions and turn-of-the-century renovations are dimmer, too: dramatic lighting I call it.

The houses resemble movie sets more than neighborhoods. Tall cans fan soft white cones of light vertically on the brick facades, casting into relief dark shadows that hang like long swaths like fabric. The light is spare, the light is a wink. The light says: we are rich, the neighborhood has changed, you will be safe to move here, if you can afford it.

Cynic's Dilemma

2006-07-20T16:10:00.000-05:00

Ever since Ronald Reagan charmed the American electorate in 1980 with a soft-focus snapshot of America that resembled the early pages of a Penthouse pictorial, the prevailing wisdom has made blinding, idiotic optimism a prerequisite to political vision. Aside from a four-year sabbatical during the craggy Bush I years, optimists have made living in this country and participating in its politics nearly intolerable.

Nobody has taken this plague to such an extreme as the current brat-boy president. In policies both domestic and abroad, he has bewitched the American media with his vacuous, insincere smiles. Defeated in the polls or by news from Iraq, the president smiles away as he sics his cabinet on his challengers who rip on their patriotism and brand them "defeatist." And no matter the facts, how can the pundits on the Sunday morning shows dare question such optimism? Monsanto and Citibank and Disney won't have it! It might send the stock market into a tailspin.

It seems too that they have scientists to back them up. Smile research says that not only do your smiles make other people happier, but the act of smiling actually contributes to the manufacture of endorphins. Of course, exercise will jack you up with a far greater endorphin buzz than slapping on a Steve Martin record ever could, but who wants to sweat?

I was watching The Bridge On The River Kwai when it occurred to me: there couldn't be anything more un-American and nefarious to the principals of our constitution than this compulsory optimism. The movie satirizes the contradictions of war as World War II colonel Alec Guinness challenges his Japanese captor Sessue Hayakawa in the jungles of southeast Asia. Meanwhile British major Jack Hawkins leads a team of covert ops to blow up a bridge the two have been constructing as American cynic William Holden is forced to bear witness to the absurd ends of geopolitics.

Holden is the kind of American I want to vote for: he's smart and cynical, hard to sway but open to logic and ultimately a better judge of character than most. He has character. He's cool. Goddam it, America used to be cool! Aloof! Independent! We weren't weighed down by history; we didn't have all that much compared to the next country. And we weren't a military culture; its accompanying bravado seemed phony. It's the quintessential American attitude: tough, private and realistic, with a hair-trigger bullshit detector.

Holden played this character over and over again. He honed it in Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 and in Sunset Boulevard he was so jaded he was dead. Everyone remembers Paddy Chayefsky's mad performance in Network, but it was Holden who gave the film gravity.

In the current administration, cynicism is served up sour by our authoritarian vice-president, Dick Cheney, hunkered down in his DC office paranoid and insecure while his PR-president smiles his way through one disaster after another. If Holden were president, he'd be holding out as long as possible, weighing the situation carefully and then kicking some serious ass.

The War On Fancy

2006-07-17T13:47:00.000-05:00

Sitting on a United Airlines flight to Omaha were three very little girls, clad from neck to toe in identical pink outfits. Their mother sat in the seat in front of me, on the other side of the aisle from them, issuing limp rebukes for their misbehaviors and holding an endless, inane conversation with a woman not next to her but two seats down, through a young man who somehow did not strangle them both.

The girls were blonde and pigtailed with scrunched-up faces and upturned noses. Their cheap pink clothing seemed chiefly to humiliate cherries and strawberries, which dotted the fabric in buoyant but ultimately depressing patterns. They were each a year apart, the oldest one five, but I assumed their age differences more like 9 to 10 months apiece.

All three were horrific but the one in my sight, on the aisle, was the worst. She slapped her sisters and wouldn't sit still and refused to buckle her seat belt during takeoff and landing. She sassed the flight attendant and sulked with great drama whenever her mother asked her to behave herself.

The girl's name was Fancy and she took part in beauty pageants. Her mother told this to the flight attendant, explaining away her meager efforts at discipline with the marvelous conclusion that Fancy was "strong-willed." The flight attendant replied that perhaps what Fancy needed was to be told she couldn't always get what she wanted.

The mother was unfazed by the flight attendant's wonderfully rude suggestion, oblivious as she was to the wishes of anyone over the age of five. She was a happy woman, overweight and neurotically rewrapping her shawl about her shoulders in an attempt to cover her doughy arms. Nothing could bring her down.

She reminded me of the dog owners waiting with their meticulously-groomed hounds at a dog show I attended at McCormick Place in Chicago several years ago. It was obvious these people understood the concepts of grooming and beauty, but were only capable of putting their energy into their dogs. With blond hair shiny enough for a Pantene commercial, golden retrievers sat patiently while their obese owners chain-smoked and ate fried food from the concession stand.

At what point do we let go of the reigns? Is the pressure of competition so great in this country that we need to prematurely abort our bodies and minds from this world and invest our energies solely into those we take care of? What is wrong with America? Why on earth, if I were to politely ask Fancy's mother to discipline her daughters so that everyone on the plane could enjoy a little peace, would I be the rude one? When exactly did the poles of this earth flip?

Like dogs and horses, children like Fancy need to be broken. I suggest prong collars, holding pens, convicts named Mac. I'm not like the rest. I don't blame the parents. I blame the children. And it is time we waged a war on this gross American luxury item known as The Child.

Meet Me In A Dream Of This Hard Land

2006-07-11T19:09:00.000-05:00

A bulldozer took down the remnants of the car dealership behind my apartment this morning: poles, fencing, trailer. When I moved into my apartment on the alley several years ago the red, white and blue banners glittered in the breeze under the bright floodlights, giving the sense that a perpetual carnival was going on just outside my door. But the banners fell last year and the flags are in tatters and all the cars are gone.

Would I have considered buying a car from those guys? Goodness no, but they were nice neighbors. They looked out for the girl downstairs and always greeted me warmly when I walked by. It's quieter now without the salsa music blasting all afternoon, the salesmen laughing to jokes, Coronas in hand. There are more condos than apartments on my street now. Their new owners are quiet. I never even see them.

The immediacy of a demolition never ceases to surprise me. A building I've walked by for years, a building standing for decades, disappears under the lumbering pluck of a backhoe. I pause to watch workers climbing through the rubble and spraying it down with water from a fire hydrant. Plumes of dust carry across the street like smoke. Wires are exposed, a broken chair, a kitchen like a diorama. And always the nervous-looking property owner presides over the affair, praying to himself that he gets his condos up and sold before the floor drops out of the housing market. He makes phone calls, climbs in and out of his SUV or BMW out front. The car looks garish, wrong.

This spring six houses on my street have been demolished. The debris has been cleared, foundations poured and cinderblock walls have gone up in a matter of weeks. Truckloads of bricks are carried off when the old building is disassembled, but only the fronts of the new three-flats are clad in brick. Inside, the drywall dents with a snap of the elbow and the canned lighting spotlights shiny new kitchen features that are sure to be out of style in three years.

Before I fled Ohio my friends and I used to laugh at the brand-new starter homes on the outskirts of town, their interstate backyards and treeless loneliness. I had no idea that such bland laziness would soon become the norm.

We drove through the sand hills of Nebraska, a child's landscape of blue sky, green grass and road. We drove through the Black Hills of South Dakota, where the air was crisp and the pine trees sweated their sticky sap. We drove through Badlands, where pronghorn watched us weary and tired from trying too hard to wrap our hearts and minds around far too much that can possibly be admired in a long weekend away from work.

A Damp, Drizzly November In My Soul

2006-07-07T12:25:00.000-05:00

I slogged through Moby Dick last spring, my mind alternately amused and adrift. Fascinating passages with drama and detail gave way to languid swaths of scientific explanation, its antiquated language lulling me in its obsolescence. But of course it's nuts to read such passages to gain knowledge about the natural world. Melville was writing of reason in the midst of the human social animal, the salvation it delivers in the face of madness.

The pacing was easy to discern. It was obvious the final confrontation wouldn't occur until the very end of the novel, but my movie-addled brain kept resisting this fact, hoping the white whale would make an early appearance with at least a small action sequence. It was that other leviathan, Jaws, that swam the same waters as the white whale, and not even the book version but the mechanical monster from the Spielberg flick. One of the sad ironies of growing older is the more you press yourself to employ a rational knowledge of the world in your day-to-day life, you're forever shackled by the pop culture references of your childhood dreams. Archeologists will always crack a bullwhip and Matthew Broderick and Dabney Coleman will always preside over nuclear brinksmanship.

We're adrift in a sea of distractions: work, friends, the internet and television. It wasn't until I found myself in the darkened hotel rooms of New Mexico, my girlfriend sleeping through precious daylight knifing its way through polyester curtains from outside, that I finally fell in line with the narrative. Contrasting with the miles of dry scrubland still coursing through my mind from the drives of the day before was the desert of saltwater described by Ishmael, and my pop culture flotsam soon drifted away.

Okay, enough with the nautical language. What made me revisit Moby Dick was a provocative article I stumbled across by Philip Rubio on George Mason University's History News Network. While the commentary posts following the article have rebuked him for his use of history to criticize the decisions of a current sitting president, I find his larger points fairly engaging. The article does stumble a bit in attempting to pin an Ahabesque mad quality on the current president, but at the same time even the most casual observer of recent history and current events has to marvel at the gross mismanagement of money and lives that the general population seems to be ignoring.

And it's there that the madness takes hold: not in our leaders so much as in us followers, entrenched as we are in our immediate social interactions, our national wealth tied up in economies we have little hope of understanding, let alone steering. And yet, carried along as we are how do we participate in this world, engage each other as the social beasts we are, when all our influences, all that we love, are driving us towards madness? Will there be sufficient opportunity at the end of the journey to abandon ship? And how do we recognize that moment when it comes upon us?

Cycling at Night

2006-07-05T21:06:00.000-05:00

Over a year ago, a devil bedded down for the night in my right shoe. I forgot to shake him out before lacing up the next morning, and after a week of hard cycling up and down the lakeshore, he bit. My toes turned white and with each step a stinging pain burned inside the sole of my foot. One doctor sent me to another until a radiologist ran a wire of dye down my leg and diagnosed a blood clot. He offered me shrugs and aspirin and then sent me home to throw up.

I used to bike 30 miles without giving it a thought: ride out as far as you can and you don't have a choice but to make it home. That's all over now.

I miss it whenever I think about it, so my new discipline is controlling my thoughts. The devil sticks with me. I've lived months at a stretch in a state of barely-suppressed rage. Just the sight of someone taking their bodies for granted fuels my bitterness.

But when I think back on it the devil was with me well before he laid his teeth in my foot. He cheered me on and fed my ego as I tooled about the city, smug with my own power, cussing out drivers and pedestrians in a misanthropic ecstasy.

He's still with me. I take shorter trips that are limited to warm weather. I ride frustrated by my limits. The drivers grow more selfish: iSelfish, iSwerving, I don't give a fuck. Sitting high on monster truck thrones or sunk in the hermetically-sealed interiors of BMWs, I hate them in all sorts of new ways. But this hate brings me no fleeting pleasure.

So I ride at night, when they're home watching television or making love. The only ones out are ones like me, restless rovers drawing out the day, shaking it and forcing it to live up to the promises laid out by the magazine ads guiding our lives. At night the sodium lamps light the sky all crazy and there's room to weave, to do figure eights at stoplights or long wavy S's on the wrong side of the street.

At night I ride along Cortland where the landscaping is lovely-wrong, makeup on a pig. Off the street great doors hang open and reveal a hellish scene of Chicago's past, a diorama of noise laughing at my white headphones, my recreational activities, my service economy. Ash-gray men mix molten steel in the foundry. The devils work at night.

3rd of July

2006-07-03T21:19:00.000-05:00

The city is exploding tonight. My dog lowers himself on the Persian carpet several feet from the open door leading to my porch, where pops rock through the alleys and along the boulevards. Nothing I do will soothe him. He endures the racket and so do I. Last year I drove north on Western Avenue at dusk, bright spectacles of light bursting above the roofs and treetops on either side of me. Men, teens, boys racing from parked cars, lighting bottle rockets and Roman candles over my route. I swept away debris with my windshield wipers. Not a cop was in sight.

It's impossible not to think about real pyrotechnics on a night like this. Half a world away teenagers not unlike the ones in this neighborhood ignite fuses on weapons I can't even wrap my mind around. The next day the pictures in the newspaper show the aftermath, but it's impossible to understand what was there before. How can our resistant hearts take in such destruction when despite our greed for beauty we cannot even comprehend a still photograph of the Grand Canyon? We have to be there, but only a few can be there, and God have mercy on them.

The great fireworks display commences downtown. Radio sponsors, wine and cheese. I've seen the rooftop view from this neighborhood: great plumes of smoke lit orange and red and green dance over the lake, casting the skyscrapers in a deathly silouette. It is a wonderful arsenal of bravado. It's an echo of reality, and by cold morning the cardboard wrappers have all washed up upon the beaches.