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. Sienko Foundation Storyteller Musings Solotarian Views Lynne Wiora Tek Poker News Blog Some Biscuits Evil Eye Emporium Niggling Doubts Pressure Release Sara as Mommy runswithscissors Defective Yeti Afternoon Delight trancejen The Terrarium Bird Nird Slipperily Tofu Hut Stereo Gum Links Fixed Gear Gallery Get Crafty This is Grand Featherproof Books Gapers Block Chicago Bird Watching	No one must know my terrible secret... House of Noh! Sunday, November 24, 2002 I can see only a very specific slice of the sky out of the East windows of my apartment. It’s a rather small slice, but I enjoy my little sky-scape framed as it is by sights I’ve grown accustomed to, such as the loneliest roof vent in Chicago and a broken fire escape piece that crows like to sit on. I must be under an air-lane or something too because seven times out of ten when I look out the window I see a plane hanging there in that slice of sky. But a few days ago I looked out my windows and I saw a rainbow curving across the sky. And it wasn’t a faint, dreary little rainbow either. This was a plump and ripe rainbow, vibrant and rainbowtastic. The rainbow stayed there for a while too. I haven’t seen it for a few days now but I think the rainbow’s still in the area because just yesterday I saw a leprechaun outside a transient hotel in my neighborhood. And, as a side note, this transient hotel, it’s like, the PERFECT transient hotel. There’s a blinking neon sign mounted to the side of the building that’s supposed to read “Chateau Hotel” but the letters are never all working so it usually flashes something like “ ate Hot l” or “Cha e H e.” There aren’t any screens in the windows and even in the winter some of the windows are open. Whenever the wind gusts, scraps and bits of trash like old stained Styrofoam cups get blown off windowsills and down onto the sidewalk. I’d hang out there more, pretending to be a transient and collecting cool points but there’s a big sign in the lobby that says “No Loitering!” and the lobby clerk in the cage is a mean, crusty old son of a bitch who doesn’t take kindly to non-transients pretending to be transient. Me: “But sir! Honest! I’m a transient!” Lobby Clerk: (Grunts) Me: “Do you have any mail for me?” Lobby Clerk: “Do you live here?” Me: “Ha! Nice try. I don’t live ANYWHERE! I’m fucking transient! I just thought somebody might have forwarded my mail here.” Lobby Clerk: (exasperated) “Listen. I was up drinking till 4am this morning. Now I’ve got to take a shit as big as a squirrel. My shift last for two more hours and I can’t leave this cage. Please leave me alone.” Me: “Geesh! Touchy!” So anyway, about this Leprechaun. He was about five feet tall, stocky, and was dressed in an old hounds-tooth coat and crumpled pants. He ran past me giggling loudly and holding in front of him a spaghetti-like mess of golden watches and watch bands in front of him. I stood there for a while looking for the person he had robbed. Why else would he be running and laughing with a big double-fistful of watches? I didn’t see anybody chasing him, however. I guess the Leprechaun was just happy, you know, to be a Leprechaun. Brian 12:10 AM Saturday, November 16, 2002 It smells like poop in the hallway outside my apartment. It smelled that way when I came home but I just got back from throwing a bag of garbage down the refuse chute on my floor and now I can say for sure that the hallway smells decidedly poopy. When I walk out into the hallway in the evenings Mr. Kitty likes to sneak out the door when it’s open and run around the halls meowling. That’s how I met my new neighbor. Remember that neighbor I told you about that rarely wore a shirt but who always wore a red sweat band on his head? Well, he moved out. Red Sweat Band guy would have never tolerated a poopy smell in the hallway outside his apartment, he had a six billion dollar mountain bike and was very particular in his appearance. I tried to buy some new clothes tonight after I finished work but I was walking around the streets downtown and there were all these ruddy cheeked Christmas shoppers holding hands and crap and the store windows were all dressed up and playing music and some guys in cherry pickers were hanging lights up on trees. It always bothers me how people in this city are always hanging shit off of trees. It’s like they think nobody can enjoy a tree unless it’s burning fossil fuels, and I hate to see them stringing the lights because they bend the branches at pretty harsh angles instead of wrapping the wires around the branches. I know what the trees are thinking while they do it. “Get your fucking hands off me! You’re bruising my fucking cambium!!” I couldn’t take the Saturday night city anymore and was forced to retreat like a millipede exposed to sunlight down into the subway to sit on a train next to this guy with three coats on who kept talking about the microchip implanted in his penis and who snuffed down an entire bottle of some sort of nasal spray in three stops’ time. I always got this vibe off of Red Sweat Band guy like he felt sorry for me, like, he’d look at how poorly my pants fit and see me coming home all tired with a bunch of pens stuffed into the front breast pocket of my business casual just as he’d be getting home from an invigorating mountain bike ride and I always imagined him thinking “I could never live like that!” I’d always think to myself that Red Sweat Band guy was probably right when he thought that – he couldn’t live like me. But so anyway, I always feel like I’m wasting a bag of trash by just throwing it heedlessly down the chute. Sometimes I hear trash plummeting down the chute while I’m in the trash chute room so I know that other people are always using the trash chute. My dream is to someday throw a full bag of trash down the chute onto somebody below me while they are leaning out into the chute. The problem is that the only way I’d know the right time to drop my trash is by leaning out into the chute and that’s probably just what somebody on a floor above me would be waiting for so that they could drop their trash on my head. But hey, I forgot to tell you about my new neighbor. I came out of the trash room and Mr. Kitty was sitting on his haunches looking up at this guy standing there confronting him. “what’s that?” He asked me, pointing to Mr. Kitty, who was looking at this guy with disdain. “That’s a cat.” I told him. “I have TWO cats!” The guy told me. “Yeah?” “Yeah! I’ve got two cats. One weighs FIFTEEN POUNDS!!” “Wow, that’s a big cat.” “AND HE’S GAY!!” “Are you sure?” “HE’S A FULL FIFTEEN POUNDS OF GAY CAT!” “Yeah, but you don’t really know that he’s gay, right, I mean people always say that about dogs too, and usually it’s just because the dog likes to hump stuff. That doesn’t mean that the animal’s gay, just because they like to hump stuff.” “Trust me! He’s a GAY CAT!!” “Yeah, okay..” Brian 10:10 PM Thursday, November 14, 2002 I got an e-mail from a careful reader concerning my last entry. “How,” they asked, “is it possible that you, a guy who can’t even bring himself to use the public pens at banks and shopping centers, are able to type on a used keyboard with some stranger’s pubic hairs and toe nail clippings wedged between the keys?” I suppose the reader was right, it is an apparent inconsistency. The reader went on to type, “Inconsistencies such as this are beginning to make me doubt whether anything you type in your journal is true, or, at best, it’s just some brand of extreme hyperbole.” I believe that if the writer of that e-mail watched me type this entry they would be much assured. There’s a layer of plastic wrap over the top of my keyboard. Brian 7:06 AM Sunday, November 10, 2002 This weekend my computer developed a typing impediment. It can’t type its T’s or Y’s anymore. I should probably get a new computer but I had a speech impediment in elementary school and so I feel for the computer and I think I’ll limp along with this one for a while. However, much like how my fear of riding escalators makes it impossible for me to get around sometimes in the city, my computer’s typing impediment made it impossible for me to get around in the internet. Some of my passwords have T’s and Y’s in them so I was unable to access my e-mail or this blog and I was unable to type out a journal entry about how I became “pooping buddies” last Friday with a tech guy at work (as I kept telling the tech guy, I prefer the term “defecating compatriots” to “pooping buddies,” but tech guys are so stubborn that eventually I had to give in). It was frustrating because I really wanted to type that journal entry. Back in the day, the school system tried to cure me of my speech impediment by making me sit in a musty abandoned room with a desiccated old speech therapist from some ancient epoch. “RRRRRRRRR” she’d say. “Now you try.” “WWWWWWW” “NO! You don’t want to sound like a retard do you? It’s RRRRRRRRR!” She’d tell me. “WWWWWWW” “You sound like a retard! Go like this! “RRRRRRRRR.” “Okay, I think I understand now.” I’d tell her. “Good, let’s hear it!” She’d respond, pleased. “WWWWWWW” Speech therapy was less than pleasant, and I think I may have already related in this journal about how hearing people talk baby talk reminds me of the experience and makes me freak out and indiscriminately punch anybody I see wearing parachute pants in the face. Speech therapy wasn’t so bad for making me miss lunch with my classmates because most of my interaction with them consisted of my being made fun of for picking my nose. My fifth grade teacher encouraged them to laugh at me for the nose picking, you know. (That’s right, Mr. DeGouffal (spelled phonetically), I don’t remember how to spell your name but I remember you inciting the class to humiliate me! You, Mr. DeGouffal (spelled phonetically), are a jackass, and go ahead and try to bring a libel suit against me for typing that. I will prevail in court because “truth” is a defense to libel.) But sitting in that room with that lady telling me what a retard I was wasn’t so great on the old self-esteem and self-confidence, and after only a few years in elementary school, nose-pickers don’t exactly have a lot of self-esteem and confidence to spare. I blame the experience for whatever mental condition I have that prohibits me from ever buying pants that fit, and if you’ve ever seen me wearing pants you know what I’m talking about. So there I was this last Friday evening, wanting to type into the void about my new “pooping buddy” but I couldn’t, I was just stuck in my little squalid apartment alone. I used to believe that the soul lived on consciously after death because it would be just too cruel to snuff out a consciousness after so many years of developing and pain and growing. But as I sat here wanting to express myself to the world about my new pooping buddy but finding myself unable, the experience was so frustrating that it occurred to me that making the soul forget at death might be an act of mercy. Leaving the soul conscious without a body for it express itself through might be the cruel thing. Oh, but here’s how I fixed my computer. I went down to the local used merchandise thrift store and sifted through a Tupperware tub of keyboards until I found one that had coffee-stains on it and pubic hair and fingernail clippings wedged between the keys but that I could plug into my laptop. I also bought a pair of used jeans and a used electric wok. I don’t know if you’ve ever carried an electric wok box any distance, but it’s kind of a bulky item. The only way to carry it was to clutch it to the front of my body. There was a big picture of an electric wok on the front of the box with the words “Electric Wok” in three inch letters and I kept seeing people give me looks like I was carrying some sort of placard advertising electric woks. About halfway home a homeless man stepped out of a doorway, pointed at my box and showed his enthusiasm for my purchase. “Ah! Microwave!” He said. “That’s right!” I told him. That was the best part of my weekend. Brian 9:37 PM Wednesday, November 06, 2002 I’ve been taking a lot of shit lately at work for refusing to get a flu shot. People that are normally very pleasant get all mean and wish specific ill upon me when I tell them that I don’t want a flu shot. Example: Normally pleasant receptionist: “What time are you going down for your flu shot?” Me: “Oh, I’m not getting a flu shot.” Normally pleasant receptionist: “But you’ll get the flu!” Me: “Whatever, I’m not getting that shot.” Normally pleasant receptionist: “I hope you get the fucking flu and die!” They’ve been advertising the damn shots for like a month, like with posters in the coffee room explaining how the flu is made from growing viruses in chicken eggs and how it’s “perfectly safe.” Whatever. I don’t believe that crap for a second. They protesteth too much, if you ask me. And that’s what first made me suspicious. The reason that I don’t want a “flu shot” is that I’ve become quite convinced that the content of those syringes has nothing at all to do with the flu. Rather, the “flu shot” consists of nothing more than saline and tiny government microchips that both eat away the part of the human brain that believes in conspiracies and send out a radio signal so that the injectee can be tracked by satellites. And that’s what I tell people when they start getting angry about me refusing to get the shot. People say stuff like, “there’s no way flu shots are part of some sort of conspiracy to ensure compliance with a government that monitors our location through satellite tracking!” Whenever somebody says something like that I turn my back and cock my thumb at them and say derisively “Guess who got a flu shot last year!” Today I was doing that a lot. And then it struck me. Everybody else has submitted to the flu shot. I’m the last one left. Staying flu shot free under such adversity requires constant vigilance. I write an assumed name with a sharpie pen on my lunch in the refrigerator so that people don’t sneak flu shots into my sandwich, “Rev. Steel Erektion, Esq.” And I always check the seat of my chair before I sit down to make sure that nobody left a flu shot there to impale me. The worst part is that the quality of my afternoon rest has deteriorated. I nap in fits and starts in my chair and my dreams are haunted. Brian 10:58 PM I got an e-mail from building services at work yesterday that said people aren’t supposed to park on the street today and that there will be more security guards in the lobby of my building. I guess the reason is that the WTO is meeting in the Sheraton Hotel and protests are planned. The WTO isn’t meeting under their old acronym – they seem to have selected a newer, longer acronym in an attempt to throw WTO protestors off their trail. The new acronym stands for something like “Trans-Atlantic Evil Directors and Malevolent Executives Perpetrating Impious Business Turpitude” (I’m paraphrasing). But the name change didn’t work and protestors have a parade planned out and everything. I hope the protestors are going to try to shut down the city like they did in Seattle and like they tried to do in D.C.. It’ll be cool for me if they do because “city shut down” is a pretty good excuse for a guy not showing up to work who relies on public transportation. But just in case the city’s not shut down I’m going to get on a bus and try to get to work today. I have to make a good faith effort. I hope all the Protestors will be wearing business casual and carrying soft-sided promotional Lexis-Nexis briefcases on shoulder straps stuffed with legal work. That way I’ll be able to blend in with the protestors on my walk from the bus to my building. If I’m confronted by protestors I’m just going to explain that I don’t work for a corporation. I work for a LLC, which, I’ll point my finger in the air and explain, is a business organization with the limited liability of a corporation but that allows members to opt for taxation as a partnership. About then I figure a protestor in the crowd will throw an old size C battery at my head. And I completely understand. I really do support the protestor’s cause. Some of those corporations really are evil. I’ve read personal accounts of people. All kidding aside, some of these corporations poison whole tribes of people living in oil-rich areas, and when people complain about being poisoned the corporations literally has them killed like so many bothersome squirrels in a chimney. It’s really sick and I admire the courage of the protestors. I’d be there protesting with them, but I make my contribution in my own special way (read: writing stories about pooping and peeing and posting them on the internet). I hope that the person who throws that size C battery at my head doesn’t throw the battery so hard that it makes me permanently lose my hearing in one ear. But I hope that they throw the battery hard enough so that I get a bleeding head wound. Then I can wrap my head all up with gauze that will get all blood soaked and carry around one of those rag-padded stick crutches and look like a wounded Civil War soldier. Then I plan on working all day at my desk and making a big to-do about it so that everybody says stuff like, “Wow! That guy looks like a wounded Civil War soldier but he’s still billing hours!” All my co-workers are going to be totally jealous. Brian 8:04 AM

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House of Noh!

Sunday, November 24, 2002

I can see only a very specific slice of the sky out of the East windows of my apartment. It’s a rather small slice, but I enjoy my little sky-scape framed as it is by sights I’ve grown accustomed to, such as the loneliest roof vent in Chicago and a broken fire escape piece that crows like to sit on. I must be under an air-lane or something too because seven times out of ten when I look out the window I see a plane hanging there in that slice of sky. But a few days ago I looked out my windows and I saw a rainbow curving across the sky. And it wasn’t a faint, dreary little rainbow either. This was a plump and ripe rainbow, vibrant and rainbowtastic. The rainbow stayed there for a while too. I haven’t seen it for a few days now but I think the rainbow’s still in the area because just yesterday I saw a leprechaun outside a transient hotel in my neighborhood. And, as a side note, this transient hotel, it’s like, the PERFECT transient hotel. There’s a blinking neon sign mounted to the side of the building that’s supposed to read “Chateau Hotel” but the letters are never all working so it usually flashes something like “ ate Hot l” or “Cha e H e.” There aren’t any screens in the windows and even in the winter some of the windows are open. Whenever the wind gusts, scraps and bits of trash like old stained Styrofoam cups get blown off windowsills and down onto the sidewalk. I’d hang out there more, pretending to be a transient and collecting cool points but there’s a big sign in the lobby that says “No Loitering!” and the lobby clerk in the cage is a mean, crusty old son of a bitch who doesn’t take kindly to non-transients pretending to be transient. Me: “But sir! Honest! I’m a transient!” Lobby Clerk: (Grunts) Me: “Do you have any mail for me?” Lobby Clerk: “Do you live here?” Me: “Ha! Nice try. I don’t live ANYWHERE! I’m fucking transient! I just thought somebody might have forwarded my mail here.” Lobby Clerk: (exasperated) “Listen. I was up drinking till 4am this morning. Now I’ve got to take a shit as big as a squirrel. My shift last for two more hours and I can’t leave this cage. Please leave me alone.” Me: “Geesh! Touchy!” So anyway, about this Leprechaun. He was about five feet tall, stocky, and was dressed in an old hounds-tooth coat and crumpled pants. He ran past me giggling loudly and holding in front of him a spaghetti-like mess of golden watches and watch bands in front of him. I stood there for a while looking for the person he had robbed. Why else would he be running and laughing with a big double-fistful of watches? I didn’t see anybody chasing him, however. I guess the Leprechaun was just happy, you know, to be a Leprechaun.

Brian 12:10 AM

Saturday, November 16, 2002

It smells like poop in the hallway outside my apartment. It smelled that way when I came home but I just got back from throwing a bag of garbage down the refuse chute on my floor and now I can say for sure that the hallway smells decidedly poopy. When I walk out into the hallway in the evenings Mr. Kitty likes to sneak out the door when it’s open and run around the halls meowling. That’s how I met my new neighbor. Remember that neighbor I told you about that rarely wore a shirt but who always wore a red sweat band on his head? Well, he moved out. Red Sweat Band guy would have never tolerated a poopy smell in the hallway outside his apartment, he had a six billion dollar mountain bike and was very particular in his appearance. I tried to buy some new clothes tonight after I finished work but I was walking around the streets downtown and there were all these ruddy cheeked Christmas shoppers holding hands and crap and the store windows were all dressed up and playing music and some guys in cherry pickers were hanging lights up on trees. It always bothers me how people in this city are always hanging shit off of trees. It’s like they think nobody can enjoy a tree unless it’s burning fossil fuels, and I hate to see them stringing the lights because they bend the branches at pretty harsh angles instead of wrapping the wires around the branches. I know what the trees are thinking while they do it. “Get your fucking hands off me! You’re bruising my fucking cambium!!” I couldn’t take the Saturday night city anymore and was forced to retreat like a millipede exposed to sunlight down into the subway to sit on a train next to this guy with three coats on who kept talking about the microchip implanted in his penis and who snuffed down an entire bottle of some sort of nasal spray in three stops’ time. I always got this vibe off of Red Sweat Band guy like he felt sorry for me, like, he’d look at how poorly my pants fit and see me coming home all tired with a bunch of pens stuffed into the front breast pocket of my business casual just as he’d be getting home from an invigorating mountain bike ride and I always imagined him thinking “I could never live like that!” I’d always think to myself that Red Sweat Band guy was probably right when he thought that – he couldn’t live like me. But so anyway, I always feel like I’m wasting a bag of trash by just throwing it heedlessly down the chute. Sometimes I hear trash plummeting down the chute while I’m in the trash chute room so I know that other people are always using the trash chute. My dream is to someday throw a full bag of trash down the chute onto somebody below me while they are leaning out into the chute. The problem is that the only way I’d know the right time to drop my trash is by leaning out into the chute and that’s probably just what somebody on a floor above me would be waiting for so that they could drop their trash on my head. But hey, I forgot to tell you about my new neighbor. I came out of the trash room and Mr. Kitty was sitting on his haunches looking up at this guy standing there confronting him. “what’s that?” He asked me, pointing to Mr. Kitty, who was looking at this guy with disdain. “That’s a cat.” I told him. “I have TWO cats!” The guy told me. “Yeah?” “Yeah! I’ve got two cats. One weighs FIFTEEN POUNDS!!” “Wow, that’s a big cat.” “AND HE’S GAY!!” “Are you sure?” “HE’S A FULL FIFTEEN POUNDS OF GAY CAT!” “Yeah, but you don’t really know that he’s gay, right, I mean people always say that about dogs too, and usually it’s just because the dog likes to hump stuff. That doesn’t mean that the animal’s gay, just because they like to hump stuff.” “Trust me! He’s a GAY CAT!!” “Yeah, okay..”

Brian 10:10 PM

Thursday, November 14, 2002

I got an e-mail from a careful reader concerning my last entry. “How,” they asked, “is it possible that you, a guy who can’t even bring himself to use the public pens at banks and shopping centers, are able to type on a used keyboard with some stranger’s pubic hairs and toe nail clippings wedged between the keys?” I suppose the reader was right, it is an apparent inconsistency. The reader went on to type, “Inconsistencies such as this are beginning to make me doubt whether anything you type in your journal is true, or, at best, it’s just some brand of extreme hyperbole.” I believe that if the writer of that e-mail watched me type this entry they would be much assured. There’s a layer of plastic wrap over the top of my keyboard.

Brian 7:06 AM

Sunday, November 10, 2002

This weekend my computer developed a typing impediment. It can’t type its T’s or Y’s anymore. I should probably get a new computer but I had a speech impediment in elementary school and so I feel for the computer and I think I’ll limp along with this one for a while. However, much like how my fear of riding escalators makes it impossible for me to get around sometimes in the city, my computer’s typing impediment made it impossible for me to get around in the internet. Some of my passwords have T’s and Y’s in them so I was unable to access my e-mail or this blog and I was unable to type out a journal entry about how I became “pooping buddies” last Friday with a tech guy at work (as I kept telling the tech guy, I prefer the term “defecating compatriots” to “pooping buddies,” but tech guys are so stubborn that eventually I had to give in). It was frustrating because I really wanted to type that journal entry. Back in the day, the school system tried to cure me of my speech impediment by making me sit in a musty abandoned room with a desiccated old speech therapist from some ancient epoch. “RRRRRRRRR” she’d say. “Now you try.” “WWWWWWW” “NO! You don’t want to sound like a retard do you? It’s RRRRRRRRR!” She’d tell me. “WWWWWWW” “You sound like a retard! Go like this! “RRRRRRRRR.” “Okay, I think I understand now.” I’d tell her. “Good, let’s hear it!” She’d respond, pleased. “WWWWWWW” Speech therapy was less than pleasant, and I think I may have already related in this journal about how hearing people talk baby talk reminds me of the experience and makes me freak out and indiscriminately punch anybody I see wearing parachute pants in the face. Speech therapy wasn’t so bad for making me miss lunch with my classmates because most of my interaction with them consisted of my being made fun of for picking my nose. My fifth grade teacher encouraged them to laugh at me for the nose picking, you know. (That’s right, Mr. DeGouffal (spelled phonetically), I don’t remember how to spell your name but I remember you inciting the class to humiliate me! You, Mr. DeGouffal (spelled phonetically), are a jackass, and go ahead and try to bring a libel suit against me for typing that. I will prevail in court because “truth” is a defense to libel.) But sitting in that room with that lady telling me what a retard I was wasn’t so great on the old self-esteem and self-confidence, and after only a few years in elementary school, nose-pickers don’t exactly have a lot of self-esteem and confidence to spare. I blame the experience for whatever mental condition I have that prohibits me from ever buying pants that fit, and if you’ve ever seen me wearing pants you know what I’m talking about. So there I was this last Friday evening, wanting to type into the void about my new “pooping buddy” but I couldn’t, I was just stuck in my little squalid apartment alone. I used to believe that the soul lived on consciously after death because it would be just too cruel to snuff out a consciousness after so many years of developing and pain and growing. But as I sat here wanting to express myself to the world about my new pooping buddy but finding myself unable, the experience was so frustrating that it occurred to me that making the soul forget at death might be an act of mercy. Leaving the soul conscious without a body for it express itself through might be the cruel thing. Oh, but here’s how I fixed my computer. I went down to the local used merchandise thrift store and sifted through a Tupperware tub of keyboards until I found one that had coffee-stains on it and pubic hair and fingernail clippings wedged between the keys but that I could plug into my laptop. I also bought a pair of used jeans and a used electric wok. I don’t know if you’ve ever carried an electric wok box any distance, but it’s kind of a bulky item. The only way to carry it was to clutch it to the front of my body. There was a big picture of an electric wok on the front of the box with the words “Electric Wok” in three inch letters and I kept seeing people give me looks like I was carrying some sort of placard advertising electric woks. About halfway home a homeless man stepped out of a doorway, pointed at my box and showed his enthusiasm for my purchase. “Ah! Microwave!” He said. “That’s right!” I told him. That was the best part of my weekend.

Brian 9:37 PM

Wednesday, November 06, 2002

I’ve been taking a lot of shit lately at work for refusing to get a flu shot. People that are normally very pleasant get all mean and wish specific ill upon me when I tell them that I don’t want a flu shot. Example: Normally pleasant receptionist: “What time are you going down for your flu shot?” Me: “Oh, I’m not getting a flu shot.” Normally pleasant receptionist: “But you’ll get the flu!” Me: “Whatever, I’m not getting that shot.” Normally pleasant receptionist: “I hope you get the fucking flu and die!” They’ve been advertising the damn shots for like a month, like with posters in the coffee room explaining how the flu is made from growing viruses in chicken eggs and how it’s “perfectly safe.” Whatever. I don’t believe that crap for a second. They protesteth too much, if you ask me. And that’s what first made me suspicious. The reason that I don’t want a “flu shot” is that I’ve become quite convinced that the content of those syringes has nothing at all to do with the flu. Rather, the “flu shot” consists of nothing more than saline and tiny government microchips that both eat away the part of the human brain that believes in conspiracies and send out a radio signal so that the injectee can be tracked by satellites. And that’s what I tell people when they start getting angry about me refusing to get the shot. People say stuff like, “there’s no way flu shots are part of some sort of conspiracy to ensure compliance with a government that monitors our location through satellite tracking!” Whenever somebody says something like that I turn my back and cock my thumb at them and say derisively “Guess who got a flu shot last year!” Today I was doing that a lot. And then it struck me. Everybody else has submitted to the flu shot. I’m the last one left. Staying flu shot free under such adversity requires constant vigilance. I write an assumed name with a sharpie pen on my lunch in the refrigerator so that people don’t sneak flu shots into my sandwich, “Rev. Steel Erektion, Esq.” And I always check the seat of my chair before I sit down to make sure that nobody left a flu shot there to impale me. The worst part is that the quality of my afternoon rest has deteriorated. I nap in fits and starts in my chair and my dreams are haunted.

Brian 10:58 PM

I got an e-mail from building services at work yesterday that said people aren’t supposed to park on the street today and that there will be more security guards in the lobby of my building. I guess the reason is that the WTO is meeting in the Sheraton Hotel and protests are planned. The WTO isn’t meeting under their old acronym – they seem to have selected a newer, longer acronym in an attempt to throw WTO protestors off their trail. The new acronym stands for something like “Trans-Atlantic Evil Directors and Malevolent Executives Perpetrating Impious Business Turpitude” (I’m paraphrasing). But the name change didn’t work and protestors have a parade planned out and everything. I hope the protestors are going to try to shut down the city like they did in Seattle and like they tried to do in D.C.. It’ll be cool for me if they do because “city shut down” is a pretty good excuse for a guy not showing up to work who relies on public transportation. But just in case the city’s not shut down I’m going to get on a bus and try to get to work today. I have to make a good faith effort. I hope all the Protestors will be wearing business casual and carrying soft-sided promotional Lexis-Nexis briefcases on shoulder straps stuffed with legal work. That way I’ll be able to blend in with the protestors on my walk from the bus to my building. If I’m confronted by protestors I’m just going to explain that I don’t work for a corporation. I work for a LLC, which, I’ll point my finger in the air and explain, is a business organization with the limited liability of a corporation but that allows members to opt for taxation as a partnership. About then I figure a protestor in the crowd will throw an old size C battery at my head. And I completely understand. I really do support the protestor’s cause. Some of those corporations really are evil. I’ve read personal accounts of people. All kidding aside, some of these corporations poison whole tribes of people living in oil-rich areas, and when people complain about being poisoned the corporations literally has them killed like so many bothersome squirrels in a chimney. It’s really sick and I admire the courage of the protestors. I’d be there protesting with them, but I make my contribution in my own special way (read: writing stories about pooping and peeing and posting them on the internet). I hope that the person who throws that size C battery at my head doesn’t throw the battery so hard that it makes me permanently lose my hearing in one ear. But I hope that they throw the battery hard enough so that I get a bleeding head wound. Then I can wrap my head all up with gauze that will get all blood soaked and carry around one of those rag-padded stick crutches and look like a wounded Civil War soldier. Then I plan on working all day at my desk and making a big to-do about it so that everybody says stuff like, “Wow! That guy looks like a wounded Civil War soldier but he’s still billing hours!” All my co-workers are going to be totally jealous.

Brian 8:04 AM

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