E-mail: Brian7Morris "at" hotmail.com Archives March 2002 April 2002 May 2002 June 2002 July 2002 August 2002 September 2002 October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 December 2003 January 2004 February 2004 March 2004 April 2004 May 2004 June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 current Blogs Mandapants farkleberries Uranium City Records The C.M. 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I ask partly because I’ve been walking around all hunched over like an old man lately. I think my gait is caused by the chair I have to sit in at work. I call my chair, affectionately, “The Scolioliator.” Oh, and also, I can’t say that I wasn’t warned about the egg throwing. I think I’ve finally learned my lesson about listening carefully to the mentally ill. On the way home today I gave a dollar to a street performer because he asked the crowd, “Hey! Who likes the Backstreet Boys!?” After which he proceeded to infringe on the Backstreet Boys’ copyright with an unauthorized performance, resulting in much eye rolling and ho-humming in the crowd. Pure Genius. So I flipped a dollar into the guy’s shaving bag or whatever it was and he raised his hand to give me a high five and he said “Hey! Don’t get hit by any eggs on the way home!” I gave him a cheery thumbs up so I wouldn’t have to return his high five and totally disregarded his warning. I was like, “Don’t get hit by Eggs? Whatever, mentally ill homeless dude!” I only wished I had listened. And I only wished I had listened a week ago when another mentally ill homeless person gave me a dire warning. It was that old woman who begs down by the Pacific acupuncture school on Broadway, the one who wails sonorously like some eerie kind of witch in Macbeth or something, “Help the homeless, every every every every every every every every day.” She’s been saying nothing else and sitting in that same spot for at least a year now, wailing away. Between you and me, I never give her any money (1) because she doesn’t need it – she’s a beggar all-star and makes plenty of coin, and (2) she really bothers me with all those “every’s.” Last weekend I passed by her and in between wails she shouted, “Don’t forget to set your clocks back.” Like her wailing was regulated by the FCC and she had a certain public service announcement time requirement to fill or something. Of course I forgot about the clock thing, and Monday morning found me all wild eyed at work, the only one on my floor, wondering where everybody was and thinking that I was missing some sort of super important meeting. I bet the old beggar Macbeth witch would have liked to have been there to see me. “Who’s the mentally ill one now?” She could have asked me. “That’s what you fucking get for not helping the homeless every every every every every every day!” Brian 11:07 PM Monday, October 28, 2002 Despite what I’ve been told by amazed and awestruck bystanders in my bathroom, it’s not really a superpower. It’s just more of an incredibly powerful skill that I’ve been gifted with by some omnipotent god or universal spiritual force. I can flush ANYTHING down a toilet. Regardless of buoyancy or volume, I don’t even get toilet water on my hands – that is, as long as I have my chopsticks. Brian 11:26 PM Tuesday, October 22, 2002 Lately I’ve been kind of afraid when people see me on the bus or walking around that they might think I’m a member of some sort of goony cult. I’ve been worrying about that and so I thought I’d just get it out in the open and clear the air. The kind of cult whose members wear tennis shoes during ritualistic functions. Or Sigourney Weaver. I might look a little bit like Sigourney Weaver in Aliens right now. It’s my haircut. I’m a little self conscious about it. I did it myself. If I had had access to a flo-bie, or hadn’t been drunk, I think I could have really worked some woo-magic on my follicles, but all I had was my crappy K-mart home haircutting kit. The kit came with an instructional videotape that showed how to do different styles of haircuts. The tape said haircut # 3 “Flat Top” is the most popular haircut today, so that tells you how old the tape is. I didn’t give myself the Flat Top though – too difficult. Instead I improvised. Some people at work told me that they liked my new haircut, but I think they are lying. Whenever somebody mentions my haircut I say two things, (1) “I did it myself!” and (2) (while pointing to a part just above the occipital region) “I missed some parts and now I’ve got some clumps.” If you see me riding the bus or walking around and think that there is even a small chance that I’m in a goony cult you should let me know. Let’s say 5%. If you think that there is a greater than 5% chance that I’m in a goony cult then just be HONEST and tell me. Then give me a chance to either re-appear before you or send you a picture or something before you make up your determination whether I’m in a goony cult or not. And this time I get to wear a hat. Brian 11:27 PM I woke up Sunday morning and there were broken corn chips and hummus globules scattered all around my kitchen like a bunch of raccoons had ravaged the . . . oh wait, that was me that made the mess. I may also have sent out some drunken e-mails late Saturday night. There was some evidence of that having taken place. So I apologize if you got one. I believe that you will be able to recognize one of my drunken e-mails because it will contains phrases like “emotionally fragile,” “fuck the stockmarket!” and the concept that the space age is all about realizing that you are stuck on Earth. On Sunday I treated myself to a new chair. I walked down to the local thrift shop and bought one I’d had my eye on for a while. On the way back I had to stop and rest the chair on fire hydrants, trash cans, and things. “Let’s see you carry a chair seven blocks without taking a rest once in a while!” I wanted to shout at people who passed me but I didn’t. Okay. It’s not a new chair. And okay, it may, or may not, have flea eggs on it. And I may, or may not, have fleas now. But it’s the very first actual sittin’ chair I’ve ever brought into a place where I lived that didn’t have a bunch of rusty screws poking out of the seat cushion. A dude with no chairs can’t be very healthy, human relationship-wise. Like I was telling a friend, I’m pretty sure this new chair is going to open up a whole new chapter of my life. Brian 12:10 AM Sunday, October 20, 2002 I think I was probably only, like, eight years old when my Father showed me how to pick up fallen leaves along a deer path to find the indentations of hooves in the earth. For years afterwards whenever I’d see a deer I’d stand quietly and watch it walk past and then I’d run over to check the hoof prints. I can tell the age and gender of the deer, as well as make a pretty good guess what kind of mood the deer was in from the prints now. There’s all sorts of stories in the woods – like little mice tunneling across mossy hills under trees and stories of battles between great horned owls and rabbits brushed in the early morning snow. But here in the city with all the concrete my tracking skills are rather lacking. I guess it will just take a while to get used to my new environment. However, one of the things that I have learned how to tell is when somebody puked. I’ll go down on one knee, touch a finger to a pile of vomit, rub it between my thumb and forefinger with a far-off look on my face and be able to tell you: “Somebody puked here. . . recently.” I also can tell you when I find a deformed and smeared dog feces combined with poop streaks across the sidewalk - after some thought, I can tell you exactly what the story is behind that: “Somebody stepped in that pile of poop, and then they tried to scrape it off by dragging their shoe.” I found lots of puke Saturday night on the El going to the Stiff Legged Film Festival sponsored by the CM Sienko foundation. Attending the Stiff Legged Film Festival was the most fun I’ve had yet in Chicago, despite disturbing irregularities in the raffle that I’ll get to later in this entry. So anyway, the Film Festival was totally rad. I mean, the CM Sienko foundation is really, just, like, this guy. But he puts on a mean film festival. It was the kind of film festival where we drank martinis after we finished off the cheap wine and nobody made fun of me for using the phrase “warms my cockles.” Kudos to the CM Sienko foundation. So onto the disturbing irregularities in the raffle – they were the kind of thing that Jimmy Carter would have totally made a to-do over – that is, before he got all soft after that whole Nobel Peace Prize thing. And why do they give a cash prize with the Noble Peace prize? That’s the thing that gets my goat about it. Why don’t they, like, buy some medicine for dying people or food for some people who are starving? You know, spend the dough on some peace instead of just give it to some international meddler. Besides, Jimmy Carter needs to be lean and mean to go make an ass of himself condescending to other nation’s elections – he’s probably just going to use all that money to buy cable television and a bunch of frozen pizzas and he’ll never leave his apartment again. But to tell the truth, the raffle at the film festival seemed pretty fair, I just wanted to say some mean things about Jimmy Carter and the Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe I’m just kind of disappointed because, despite shouting in the ear of the CM Sienko Foundation during the raffle, my name wasn’t picked. Cruel Fate! Brian 11:31 PM Sunday, October 13, 2002 Last week was pretty rough for me. I had all sorts of stuff to do and I wasn’t getting enough sleep. Then on Wednesday I packed a delicious sandwich to eat like a filthy animal at my desk that day but when I got to work I realized that I had accidentally left it at home. All I could think about all day was Mr. Kitty maxing and relaxing back at the apartment by the koi pond and eating my sandwich. And what’s worse, the good peanut butter granola bars in the vending machine were imprisoned behind a single crappy Maple syrup flavored granola bar that had to be purchased before I could buy the good granola bars. Despite my canvassing for a purchaser for the maple syrup granola bar, I couldn’t I convince anybody to buy it. Then on Thursday morning I went to a seminar. The seminar was okay. And when I got back to work for the whole afternoon people kept coming up and shaking my hand and introducing themselves. “What curious behavior!” I thought. Especially at the dinner buffet at work, it was like I was a celebrity! It wasn’t until I got ready to go home around seven that night that I realized I had forgotten to take my “Hello, my name is. . .” nametag off from the morning seminar. So on Friday I was pretty glad the week was over, I gave a dollar to my favorite, “Sunshiney day” singing street performer in the El station, packed myself into an El train car and grabbed on to a bar.. . And I should digress here. You may remember that I’ve taken a hard stand against touching those filthy greasy bars on buses and the El in the past (see journal entry July 30, 2002). Well, I’ve decided that in certain situations I should hold onto the bar. Not so much for myself, you see, but for the other passengers on the El. When I wasn’t holding onto the bars, three times out of ten when the El would stop it would throw me forward. About one time in twenty I’d get thrown to the floor. I figured those were the breaks. Sometimes I’d crash into a group of people but I figured that anybody who gets on the El has got to expect to (a) be puked on, (b) have their wallet stolen, (c) be puked on by a drunk, or (d) have some goon dressed in business casual crash into them when the El stops because he has some hang-up about touching public things. So everything was going along fine with my no-touching-bars policy until about a week ago – last Friday to be exact. I crashed into a screamer. She wasn’t that hurt. When I plummeted forward through the car I accidentally stepped on her ankle. But it wasn’t like her ankle was broken or anything. The courteous thing for her to have done in that situation would have been to clear her throat to get my attention and then politely inform me that I was standing on her ankle. Instead she screamed super loudly like I had just poked a puppy’s eye out with a toothpick or something. It was pretty embarrassing. And nobody on the El car bought my argument about how her breach of etiquette made ME the victim in that situation. So anyway, here I was on Friday riding the El. A woman about my age wearing a tank-top over a huge orange carp tattooed across her shoulder blades kept laughing about something. I tried to figure out what she was laughing at and followed her gaze to my hand gripping the bar. Earlier that day I had written “Cat Food!” across the back of my left hand in big blue letters. I hadn’t had time to go shopping and I had left Mr. Kitty with a bowl full of crumbs that morning. At that moment I realized that there is probably nothing more pathetic than a tired looking dude dressed in business casual riding the El with the word “cat food” scrawled across his hand. “So your cat needs some food?” the woman asked me. But I could tell from her voice that she didn’t pity me. It sounded like she was almost kind of amused. “yeah” I told her. That was the best part of my week. Brian 12:34 AM Tuesday, October 08, 2002 It got cold here in Chicago yesterday. I mean, it’s been getting colder for a while now but yesterday was the first day that it was too cold to get by with occasionally squatting in front of the open oven turned on to “broil” (I’m full of clever/ desperately pathetic little tricks like that!). I had to figure out how the heaters in my apartment worked. The heaters weren’t that hard to figure out, actually. I should have done it a while ago instead of spending all those mornings squatting in front of the open oven until I was warm enough to move around. Sometimes I’d have moments of lucidity, squatting there in front of the oven. I’d see myself hunched over on the floor of the kitchen wrapped in a smelly old blanket and eating creamed corn out of Mr. Kitty’s old cat bowl (I bought Mr. Kitty a new bowl) with two mismatched old chopsticks and think “Woe! I’ve lost my way.” But I kind of liked the oven routine too. It was like camping . Also, my position by the oven gave me a view of the east through a window and I could watch the sun come up. But now I’ve got my heat turned on so any oven squatting will be strictly recreational. The one thing I’ve learned and that I’m going to take into this impending winter with me is this: life can be a lot of things but it can’t be all that bad as long as I have friends that tell me stories about passing their very first kidney stone by beginning, “I felt like I needed to poop but I couldn’t. . .” Brian 6:57 AM Saturday, October 05, 2002 Lots of people tell me that it’s impossible, but I believe otherwise. And I’m not alone in my belief. Check out this webpage and scroll down. Not only does this woman claim to have trained her cat to use the toilet, she’s got photographic evidence. Mr. Kitty’s progressing pretty well. He’s at the stage where I’ve got a salad bowl filled with kitty-litter in the toilet bowl and Mr. Kitty poops and pees in it. Mr. Kitty’s pretty smart. And, you should know, we’re not just doing this toilet-training thing for me, we’re doing it for both of us. Mr. Kitty doesn’t like using his pan because the litter gets in between his toes and it really bothers him. So anyway, I’ve got this whole contraption set up in my toilet, and I have to reach down in the toilet bowl to get it out whenever I need to use the toilet and it’s a big pain. So I don’t bother when I only have to urinate. I like peeing in the sink better anyway. It’s the bowel movements that get me. Each time I fumble around with the toilet training contraption (and sometimes I really have to go!) I see Mr. Kitty’s empty cat box over in the corner. It’s almost like it’s beckoning me to it, me and my butt. I mean, if it’s good enough for cats. . . . I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that there’s something terribly wrong with a human pooping in a cat box. I know that. I do. However, I also know myself pretty well and it’s only a matter of time…. Brian 10:09 PM Thursday, October 03, 2002 Sometimes I come home to my squalid apartment late at night after work and I wonder if maybe somewhere through the years I lost my way. Lately, I’ve been wondering if my life right now is based on undercurrents resulting from the things my life was about so many years ago, the things that pulled me away from society’s embrace during my formative years. Of course, perhaps I was already pushed away from society’s embrace and that’s why I chose to do the things I did, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m talking about the kinds of things that my parents and teachers made me feeling dirty and ashamed about. You probably know what I’m talking about by now. Yeah, trying on old used hats at the Goodwill charity store. I remember my very first experience. I had accompanied my mother to the Goodwill store on an errands excursion when I was fourteen years old. I surprised my mom in the women’s apparel aisle with a 1960 style straw bowler hat on my hat. “Hey! Check me out Mom!” I shouted at her with a bright youthful smile on my face as I pantomimed a clumsy soft-shoe. “Ha Cha Cha Cha! Check out this rad old hat!” “You get that filthy thing off your head this very instant!” Her tone and anger struck me like a ton of bricks and my face fell. I didn’t say much on the way home. I felt too dirty and ashamed. But still, underneath it all, I couldn’t stop thinking about trying on used hats. After that first hat incident, my relationship with my family became strained. My parents knew what time I usually got off of work and if I came home late they’d hit me with the “Mrs. O’Reilly saw you outside the Goodwill! Were you trying on used hats again? Were you trying on used hats?!” I’d always deny it but lots of time Mrs. O’Reilly had been right. Then there were the “family meetings”. “I don’t care what you do when you leave but as long as you live under this roof you’re not to going to try on used hats!” My Father would shout. “Don’t you know how hard it is to get lice out of a house once it takes hold?!” My Mother would wail. “We’ll have to fumigate the house and take all our pillows to a dry-cleaner!” “Look what you are doing to our family!” My brother would tell me. “Why can’t you just stop trying on old used hats at the Goodwill?” It was a good question but I didn’t know the answer. And I didn’t really think about things like that when I was that age. All I knew was that trying on used hats was important to me. I fell in with a group of like-minded youths and even after the Goodwill closed down we still had access to used hats. Society didn’t endorse our used-hat practices, of course. We were ostracized. But we built our own society in back alleys, scrub lots, and vacant fields behind department stores. On Saturday nights we’d all crawl under the chain-link fence behind a local closed-down warehouse with a big cardboard box full of used hats and hang out in the warehouse all night long. Those were good times. I think that I’ll probably always identify with those old times but now that I’m older, I find myself sometimes walking down dark and cold streets between windows lit with couples and families sitting down to dinner together and laughing and eating and talking. At times like these the 1972 derby hat with a vintage dyed turkey feather in the orange and brown vinyl hatband and a three-quarter filled bottle of RID lice shampoo in a plastic shopping bag provide me with little solace. Brian 7:35 AM Tuesday, October 01, 2002 My dad wears a pocket protector. He has ever since I can remember. His typical work garb is a short-sleeved plaid-patterned dress shirt with a pocket protector in the shirt pocket full of pens and his security badge. But, come on! Who wears pocket protectors anymore? Even as a child I knew there was something dreadfully wrong with it. When I was younger I used to encourage people to make fun of his pocket protector. For instance, a friend would come over and be like, “what do you want to do?” and I’d be like, “I don’t know. Why don’t we go make fun of my Dad for wearing a pocket protector.” And then I’d go find my Dad’s pocket protector all full of pens and markers and show it to my friend and then my friend and I would go find my dad sleeping in a chair in front of television all tired out from work and we’d point and laugh (quietly) at him. But I suppose my Dad must find that the advantages to wearing a pocket protector outweigh the disadvantages by a serious margin. He must, to persevere with wearing a pocket protector in the face of such mockery from a cruel society that really doesn’t accept pocket protectors. And I have to admit, pocket protectors look pretty convenient. When he got home from work instead of taking each individual pen out of his pocket, Dad would just take out his pocket protector, full of, like, fifteen pens, in one quick move and set it on the table. And when it was time to go to work in the morning instead of looking around for all his stuff, Dad would just slip his already-loaded pocket protector into his pocket and he’d instantly have access to ten different pens in three different colors, his security badge, and a pencil. The down-side to wearing a pocket protector was that because he never had to unpack his pocket protector he would accumulate all sorts of things in it that would just build up and he’d end up lugging around in his shirt pocket. Things like ketchup packets and dried out pens and little vials of white-out and fast-food napkins until his pocket protector became so ripe and full it was like a nerdish prosthetic teat. I’m not exaggerating at all when I say that about every six months his pocket protector would get so full that it would burst at the seams, and Dad’d have to sadly sit down at the kitchen table with the contents of his recently deceased pocket protector spread out before him and take careful stock of what he really needed to carry around in his shirt pocket. Where can you even buy pocket protectors anymore? I never figured out where he was getting them. As I mentioned, I never missed a chance to poke fun of my dad for his pocket protector while I was growing up. But genetics can be a funny thing. I looked down at myself a few days ago and I saw three pens (two different colors), a half piece of paper towel, two scribbled on post-it notes and my security badge all stuffed into my shirt pocket. What’s worse, my blue pen had begun leaking in my pocket and I had a big blue ink stain on the front of my shirt. Brian 6:22 AM

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House of Noh!

Thursday, October 31, 2002

I guess that it’s really funny and amusing and a lot of fun to throw eggs at some tired dude dressed in business casual walking home from the El stop after working all day on Halloween. Guess who is not going to defend those egg-throwing miscreants pro-bono five years from now when they are charged with felony murder after their 2nd cousin kills an elderly shut-in woman with a garlic press while they burgle her house? Answer: me. Do I sound like a bitter old man? I ask partly because I’ve been walking around all hunched over like an old man lately. I think my gait is caused by the chair I have to sit in at work. I call my chair, affectionately, “The Scolioliator.” Oh, and also, I can’t say that I wasn’t warned about the egg throwing. I think I’ve finally learned my lesson about listening carefully to the mentally ill. On the way home today I gave a dollar to a street performer because he asked the crowd, “Hey! Who likes the Backstreet Boys!?” After which he proceeded to infringe on the Backstreet Boys’ copyright with an unauthorized performance, resulting in much eye rolling and ho-humming in the crowd. Pure Genius. So I flipped a dollar into the guy’s shaving bag or whatever it was and he raised his hand to give me a high five and he said “Hey! Don’t get hit by any eggs on the way home!” I gave him a cheery thumbs up so I wouldn’t have to return his high five and totally disregarded his warning. I was like, “Don’t get hit by Eggs? Whatever, mentally ill homeless dude!” I only wished I had listened. And I only wished I had listened a week ago when another mentally ill homeless person gave me a dire warning. It was that old woman who begs down by the Pacific acupuncture school on Broadway, the one who wails sonorously like some eerie kind of witch in Macbeth or something, “Help the homeless, every every every every every every every every day.” She’s been saying nothing else and sitting in that same spot for at least a year now, wailing away. Between you and me, I never give her any money (1) because she doesn’t need it – she’s a beggar all-star and makes plenty of coin, and (2) she really bothers me with all those “every’s.” Last weekend I passed by her and in between wails she shouted, “Don’t forget to set your clocks back.” Like her wailing was regulated by the FCC and she had a certain public service announcement time requirement to fill or something. Of course I forgot about the clock thing, and Monday morning found me all wild eyed at work, the only one on my floor, wondering where everybody was and thinking that I was missing some sort of super important meeting. I bet the old beggar Macbeth witch would have liked to have been there to see me. “Who’s the mentally ill one now?” She could have asked me. “That’s what you fucking get for not helping the homeless every every every every every every day!”

Brian 11:07 PM

Monday, October 28, 2002

Despite what I’ve been told by amazed and awestruck bystanders in my bathroom, it’s not really a superpower. It’s just more of an incredibly powerful skill that I’ve been gifted with by some omnipotent god or universal spiritual force. I can flush ANYTHING down a toilet. Regardless of buoyancy or volume, I don’t even get toilet water on my hands – that is, as long as I have my chopsticks.

Brian 11:26 PM

Tuesday, October 22, 2002

Lately I’ve been kind of afraid when people see me on the bus or walking around that they might think I’m a member of some sort of goony cult. I’ve been worrying about that and so I thought I’d just get it out in the open and clear the air. The kind of cult whose members wear tennis shoes during ritualistic functions. Or Sigourney Weaver. I might look a little bit like Sigourney Weaver in Aliens right now. It’s my haircut. I’m a little self conscious about it. I did it myself. If I had had access to a flo-bie, or hadn’t been drunk, I think I could have really worked some woo-magic on my follicles, but all I had was my crappy K-mart home haircutting kit. The kit came with an instructional videotape that showed how to do different styles of haircuts. The tape said haircut # 3 “Flat Top” is the most popular haircut today, so that tells you how old the tape is. I didn’t give myself the Flat Top though – too difficult. Instead I improvised. Some people at work told me that they liked my new haircut, but I think they are lying. Whenever somebody mentions my haircut I say two things, (1) “I did it myself!” and (2) (while pointing to a part just above the occipital region) “I missed some parts and now I’ve got some clumps.” If you see me riding the bus or walking around and think that there is even a small chance that I’m in a goony cult you should let me know. Let’s say 5%. If you think that there is a greater than 5% chance that I’m in a goony cult then just be HONEST and tell me. Then give me a chance to either re-appear before you or send you a picture or something before you make up your determination whether I’m in a goony cult or not. And this time I get to wear a hat.

Brian 11:27 PM

I woke up Sunday morning and there were broken corn chips and hummus globules scattered all around my kitchen like a bunch of raccoons had ravaged the . . . oh wait, that was me that made the mess. I may also have sent out some drunken e-mails late Saturday night. There was some evidence of that having taken place. So I apologize if you got one. I believe that you will be able to recognize one of my drunken e-mails because it will contains phrases like “emotionally fragile,” “fuck the stockmarket!” and the concept that the space age is all about realizing that you are stuck on Earth. On Sunday I treated myself to a new chair. I walked down to the local thrift shop and bought one I’d had my eye on for a while. On the way back I had to stop and rest the chair on fire hydrants, trash cans, and things. “Let’s see you carry a chair seven blocks without taking a rest once in a while!” I wanted to shout at people who passed me but I didn’t. Okay. It’s not a new chair. And okay, it may, or may not, have flea eggs on it. And I may, or may not, have fleas now. But it’s the very first actual sittin’ chair I’ve ever brought into a place where I lived that didn’t have a bunch of rusty screws poking out of the seat cushion. A dude with no chairs can’t be very healthy, human relationship-wise. Like I was telling a friend, I’m pretty sure this new chair is going to open up a whole new chapter of my life.

Brian 12:10 AM

Sunday, October 20, 2002

I think I was probably only, like, eight years old when my Father showed me how to pick up fallen leaves along a deer path to find the indentations of hooves in the earth. For years afterwards whenever I’d see a deer I’d stand quietly and watch it walk past and then I’d run over to check the hoof prints. I can tell the age and gender of the deer, as well as make a pretty good guess what kind of mood the deer was in from the prints now. There’s all sorts of stories in the woods – like little mice tunneling across mossy hills under trees and stories of battles between great horned owls and rabbits brushed in the early morning snow. But here in the city with all the concrete my tracking skills are rather lacking. I guess it will just take a while to get used to my new environment. However, one of the things that I have learned how to tell is when somebody puked. I’ll go down on one knee, touch a finger to a pile of vomit, rub it between my thumb and forefinger with a far-off look on my face and be able to tell you: “Somebody puked here. . . recently.” I also can tell you when I find a deformed and smeared dog feces combined with poop streaks across the sidewalk - after some thought, I can tell you exactly what the story is behind that: “Somebody stepped in that pile of poop, and then they tried to scrape it off by dragging their shoe.” I found lots of puke Saturday night on the El going to the Stiff Legged Film Festival sponsored by the CM Sienko foundation. Attending the Stiff Legged Film Festival was the most fun I’ve had yet in Chicago, despite disturbing irregularities in the raffle that I’ll get to later in this entry. So anyway, the Film Festival was totally rad. I mean, the CM Sienko foundation is really, just, like, this guy. But he puts on a mean film festival. It was the kind of film festival where we drank martinis after we finished off the cheap wine and nobody made fun of me for using the phrase “warms my cockles.” Kudos to the CM Sienko foundation. So onto the disturbing irregularities in the raffle – they were the kind of thing that Jimmy Carter would have totally made a to-do over – that is, before he got all soft after that whole Nobel Peace Prize thing. And why do they give a cash prize with the Noble Peace prize? That’s the thing that gets my goat about it. Why don’t they, like, buy some medicine for dying people or food for some people who are starving? You know, spend the dough on some peace instead of just give it to some international meddler. Besides, Jimmy Carter needs to be lean and mean to go make an ass of himself condescending to other nation’s elections – he’s probably just going to use all that money to buy cable television and a bunch of frozen pizzas and he’ll never leave his apartment again. But to tell the truth, the raffle at the film festival seemed pretty fair, I just wanted to say some mean things about Jimmy Carter and the Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe I’m just kind of disappointed because, despite shouting in the ear of the CM Sienko Foundation during the raffle, my name wasn’t picked. Cruel Fate!

Brian 11:31 PM

Sunday, October 13, 2002

Last week was pretty rough for me. I had all sorts of stuff to do and I wasn’t getting enough sleep. Then on Wednesday I packed a delicious sandwich to eat like a filthy animal at my desk that day but when I got to work I realized that I had accidentally left it at home. All I could think about all day was Mr. Kitty maxing and relaxing back at the apartment by the koi pond and eating my sandwich. And what’s worse, the good peanut butter granola bars in the vending machine were imprisoned behind a single crappy Maple syrup flavored granola bar that had to be purchased before I could buy the good granola bars. Despite my canvassing for a purchaser for the maple syrup granola bar, I couldn’t I convince anybody to buy it. Then on Thursday morning I went to a seminar. The seminar was okay. And when I got back to work for the whole afternoon people kept coming up and shaking my hand and introducing themselves. “What curious behavior!” I thought. Especially at the dinner buffet at work, it was like I was a celebrity! It wasn’t until I got ready to go home around seven that night that I realized I had forgotten to take my “Hello, my name is. . .” nametag off from the morning seminar. So on Friday I was pretty glad the week was over, I gave a dollar to my favorite, “Sunshiney day” singing street performer in the El station, packed myself into an El train car and grabbed on to a bar.. . And I should digress here. You may remember that I’ve taken a hard stand against touching those filthy greasy bars on buses and the El in the past (see journal entry July 30, 2002). Well, I’ve decided that in certain situations I should hold onto the bar. Not so much for myself, you see, but for the other passengers on the El. When I wasn’t holding onto the bars, three times out of ten when the El would stop it would throw me forward. About one time in twenty I’d get thrown to the floor. I figured those were the breaks. Sometimes I’d crash into a group of people but I figured that anybody who gets on the El has got to expect to (a) be puked on, (b) have their wallet stolen, (c) be puked on by a drunk, or (d) have some goon dressed in business casual crash into them when the El stops because he has some hang-up about touching public things. So everything was going along fine with my no-touching-bars policy until about a week ago – last Friday to be exact. I crashed into a screamer. She wasn’t that hurt. When I plummeted forward through the car I accidentally stepped on her ankle. But it wasn’t like her ankle was broken or anything. The courteous thing for her to have done in that situation would have been to clear her throat to get my attention and then politely inform me that I was standing on her ankle. Instead she screamed super loudly like I had just poked a puppy’s eye out with a toothpick or something. It was pretty embarrassing. And nobody on the El car bought my argument about how her breach of etiquette made ME the victim in that situation. So anyway, here I was on Friday riding the El. A woman about my age wearing a tank-top over a huge orange carp tattooed across her shoulder blades kept laughing about something. I tried to figure out what she was laughing at and followed her gaze to my hand gripping the bar. Earlier that day I had written “Cat Food!” across the back of my left hand in big blue letters. I hadn’t had time to go shopping and I had left Mr. Kitty with a bowl full of crumbs that morning. At that moment I realized that there is probably nothing more pathetic than a tired looking dude dressed in business casual riding the El with the word “cat food” scrawled across his hand. “So your cat needs some food?” the woman asked me. But I could tell from her voice that she didn’t pity me. It sounded like she was almost kind of amused. “yeah” I told her. That was the best part of my week.

Brian 12:34 AM

Tuesday, October 08, 2002

It got cold here in Chicago yesterday. I mean, it’s been getting colder for a while now but yesterday was the first day that it was too cold to get by with occasionally squatting in front of the open oven turned on to “broil” (I’m full of clever/ desperately pathetic little tricks like that!). I had to figure out how the heaters in my apartment worked. The heaters weren’t that hard to figure out, actually. I should have done it a while ago instead of spending all those mornings squatting in front of the open oven until I was warm enough to move around. Sometimes I’d have moments of lucidity, squatting there in front of the oven. I’d see myself hunched over on the floor of the kitchen wrapped in a smelly old blanket and eating creamed corn out of Mr. Kitty’s old cat bowl (I bought Mr. Kitty a new bowl) with two mismatched old chopsticks and think “Woe! I’ve lost my way.” But I kind of liked the oven routine too. It was like camping . Also, my position by the oven gave me a view of the east through a window and I could watch the sun come up. But now I’ve got my heat turned on so any oven squatting will be strictly recreational. The one thing I’ve learned and that I’m going to take into this impending winter with me is this: life can be a lot of things but it can’t be all that bad as long as I have friends that tell me stories about passing their very first kidney stone by beginning, “I felt like I needed to poop but I couldn’t. . .”

Brian 6:57 AM

Saturday, October 05, 2002

Lots of people tell me that it’s impossible, but I believe otherwise. And I’m not alone in my belief. Check out this webpage and scroll down. Not only does this woman claim to have trained her cat to use the toilet, she’s got photographic evidence. Mr. Kitty’s progressing pretty well. He’s at the stage where I’ve got a salad bowl filled with kitty-litter in the toilet bowl and Mr. Kitty poops and pees in it. Mr. Kitty’s pretty smart. And, you should know, we’re not just doing this toilet-training thing for me, we’re doing it for both of us. Mr. Kitty doesn’t like using his pan because the litter gets in between his toes and it really bothers him. So anyway, I’ve got this whole contraption set up in my toilet, and I have to reach down in the toilet bowl to get it out whenever I need to use the toilet and it’s a big pain. So I don’t bother when I only have to urinate. I like peeing in the sink better anyway. It’s the bowel movements that get me. Each time I fumble around with the toilet training contraption (and sometimes I really have to go!) I see Mr. Kitty’s empty cat box over in the corner. It’s almost like it’s beckoning me to it, me and my butt. I mean, if it’s good enough for cats. . . . I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that there’s something terribly wrong with a human pooping in a cat box. I know that. I do. However, I also know myself pretty well and it’s only a matter of time….

Brian 10:09 PM

Thursday, October 03, 2002

Sometimes I come home to my squalid apartment late at night after work and I wonder if maybe somewhere through the years I lost my way. Lately, I’ve been wondering if my life right now is based on undercurrents resulting from the things my life was about so many years ago, the things that pulled me away from society’s embrace during my formative years. Of course, perhaps I was already pushed away from society’s embrace and that’s why I chose to do the things I did, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m talking about the kinds of things that my parents and teachers made me feeling dirty and ashamed about. You probably know what I’m talking about by now. Yeah, trying on old used hats at the Goodwill charity store. I remember my very first experience. I had accompanied my mother to the Goodwill store on an errands excursion when I was fourteen years old. I surprised my mom in the women’s apparel aisle with a 1960 style straw bowler hat on my hat. “Hey! Check me out Mom!” I shouted at her with a bright youthful smile on my face as I pantomimed a clumsy soft-shoe. “Ha Cha Cha Cha! Check out this rad old hat!” “You get that filthy thing off your head this very instant!” Her tone and anger struck me like a ton of bricks and my face fell. I didn’t say much on the way home. I felt too dirty and ashamed. But still, underneath it all, I couldn’t stop thinking about trying on used hats. After that first hat incident, my relationship with my family became strained. My parents knew what time I usually got off of work and if I came home late they’d hit me with the “Mrs. O’Reilly saw you outside the Goodwill! Were you trying on used hats again? Were you trying on used hats?!” I’d always deny it but lots of time Mrs. O’Reilly had been right. Then there were the “family meetings”. “I don’t care what you do when you leave but as long as you live under this roof you’re not to going to try on used hats!” My Father would shout. “Don’t you know how hard it is to get lice out of a house once it takes hold?!” My Mother would wail. “We’ll have to fumigate the house and take all our pillows to a dry-cleaner!” “Look what you are doing to our family!” My brother would tell me. “Why can’t you just stop trying on old used hats at the Goodwill?” It was a good question but I didn’t know the answer. And I didn’t really think about things like that when I was that age. All I knew was that trying on used hats was important to me. I fell in with a group of like-minded youths and even after the Goodwill closed down we still had access to used hats. Society didn’t endorse our used-hat practices, of course. We were ostracized. But we built our own society in back alleys, scrub lots, and vacant fields behind department stores. On Saturday nights we’d all crawl under the chain-link fence behind a local closed-down warehouse with a big cardboard box full of used hats and hang out in the warehouse all night long. Those were good times. I think that I’ll probably always identify with those old times but now that I’m older, I find myself sometimes walking down dark and cold streets between windows lit with couples and families sitting down to dinner together and laughing and eating and talking. At times like these the 1972 derby hat with a vintage dyed turkey feather in the orange and brown vinyl hatband and a three-quarter filled bottle of RID lice shampoo in a plastic shopping bag provide me with little solace.

Brian 7:35 AM

Tuesday, October 01, 2002

My dad wears a pocket protector. He has ever since I can remember. His typical work garb is a short-sleeved plaid-patterned dress shirt with a pocket protector in the shirt pocket full of pens and his security badge. But, come on! Who wears pocket protectors anymore? Even as a child I knew there was something dreadfully wrong with it. When I was younger I used to encourage people to make fun of his pocket protector. For instance, a friend would come over and be like, “what do you want to do?” and I’d be like, “I don’t know. Why don’t we go make fun of my Dad for wearing a pocket protector.” And then I’d go find my Dad’s pocket protector all full of pens and markers and show it to my friend and then my friend and I would go find my dad sleeping in a chair in front of television all tired out from work and we’d point and laugh (quietly) at him. But I suppose my Dad must find that the advantages to wearing a pocket protector outweigh the disadvantages by a serious margin. He must, to persevere with wearing a pocket protector in the face of such mockery from a cruel society that really doesn’t accept pocket protectors. And I have to admit, pocket protectors look pretty convenient. When he got home from work instead of taking each individual pen out of his pocket, Dad would just take out his pocket protector, full of, like, fifteen pens, in one quick move and set it on the table. And when it was time to go to work in the morning instead of looking around for all his stuff, Dad would just slip his already-loaded pocket protector into his pocket and he’d instantly have access to ten different pens in three different colors, his security badge, and a pencil. The down-side to wearing a pocket protector was that because he never had to unpack his pocket protector he would accumulate all sorts of things in it that would just build up and he’d end up lugging around in his shirt pocket. Things like ketchup packets and dried out pens and little vials of white-out and fast-food napkins until his pocket protector became so ripe and full it was like a nerdish prosthetic teat. I’m not exaggerating at all when I say that about every six months his pocket protector would get so full that it would burst at the seams, and Dad’d have to sadly sit down at the kitchen table with the contents of his recently deceased pocket protector spread out before him and take careful stock of what he really needed to carry around in his shirt pocket. Where can you even buy pocket protectors anymore? I never figured out where he was getting them. As I mentioned, I never missed a chance to poke fun of my dad for his pocket protector while I was growing up. But genetics can be a funny thing. I looked down at myself a few days ago and I saw three pens (two different colors), a half piece of paper towel, two scribbled on post-it notes and my security badge all stuffed into my shirt pocket. What’s worse, my blue pen had begun leaking in my pocket and I had a big blue ink stain on the front of my shirt.

Brian 6:22 AM

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