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! Wednesday, December 31, 2003 I wasn’t sure what to think about my new downstairs neighbors until today. All I knew about them was that they drove SUVs and that their arrival closely correlated to the timing of the message I came home to find on my machine from the apartment management company that said that there had been reports of somebody peeing off a balcony late at night and, although the management company wasn’t exactly sure who was peeing off a balcony, the issue would be taken care of by the police if the balcony peeing didn’t stop immediately. So I’m pretty sure my downstairs neighbors ratted me out, but I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt until today. Today, in fact this evening, my former ambivalence toward my new downstairs neighbors was replaced with complete and unchecked rabid loathing. Right now, even as I type this, my downstairs neighbors and their party guests are right below me listening to loud music, and talking, and laughing, and having a good time. It makes me SICK! The first thing I did in response to this outrage when it first began was to return hostilities by uncapping my dry erase marker and discourteously pushing back “open / hackey sack” hours in the dining room schedule to 1:00 AM. Then I, vigorously and without regard to the noise I was making, practiced my break-dancing moves on the wood floor until I pulled my latisimus dorsi doing a six step. This is what burns me up the most about my new downstairs neighbors. Get this. They have, not one, but two PARTY CHEESE TRAYS in their kitchen right now. I mean, come on, cheese trays? Cheese trays would be the nectar of the Olympus Gods if the Greek pantheon was full of bourgeois yuppy jerks (“poopsicles” would be their ambrosia). One of the cheese platters in the apartment below is slices and the other platter is cubes. Each platter has its own doily on which the cheese is tastefully arranged. I suspect that the cubes are for eating with festive party toothpicks. The slices... I don’t know, they might be for putting on sandwiches or something. I didn’t see any sandwich meat or bread, or anything else that would suggest sandwiches, but my field of vision into their kitchen was really narrow. There’s probably more snacks and whore dervs and crap on the counter that I wasn’t able to see. Shit, there could even be ANOTHER cheese tray. But back to the two cheese trays that I did see, they seem to each have both a white and a yellow cheese on them. The white probably isn’t Swiss because I didn’t see any holes in it. So I’m thinking that it’s probably Monterey Jack, although I acknowledge that there is a chance, albeit a lesser one, that it could be Mozzarella. I say a lesser chance of Mozzarella because I’ve very rarely seen it in cube form. The yellow cheese is probably Cheddar or American. I’m not sure it even matters which type the yellow cheese is because I’ve noticed that the line between those two types of cheeses seems to be becoming a little bit blurry in the last decade or so. If you’re wondering how I know about the cheese trays, it’s because I saw them accidentally though my neighbor’s kitchen window when I innocently looked down after I stepped outside onto my back porch landing to walk down to the ground floor to get my downstairs neighbors’ names off of their mailbox to put on my list of people I hate. Clearly, my downstairs neighbors were ashamed of their cheese trays and assorted party snacks, for they had pulled their Venetian shades tightly shut. But from my vantage point the Venetian blinds, even tightly drawn, did nothing to obstruct my view of their cheese trays. In fact, by blocking the glare from the street lamps the blinds probably even helped me to see the cheese trays more clearly. You didn’t think about upstairs neighbors when you invented your blinds, did you Venitians? Yet you Venitians are always so smug!! What with your “Renaissance” and your “canal system” and your “perverted marble amputee pornography statutes” and your “tiny little canned sausages with the convenient pull tab lid.” Venetians! You didn’t even THINK about the possibility of an upstairs neighbor, did you!? Brian 10:51 PM Thursday, December 25, 2003 I never saw the movie Free Willy. Or the sequel, Free Willy II (presumably, the whale was captured by rogue marine biologists in the interim). Quite frankly, the only thing that I knew about the two films up until a few days ago was that the movie title was fertile soil for B material dirty jokes re: penises. Based on the recent press surrounding the whale, however, I gather that the movie was about a killer whale named “Willy” who was captured by Crocodile Dundee and forced to give up a life of crushing seals to bloody death between his nubby-toothed, vise-like jaws in the surf off some rocky Northern coast somewhere and forcibly transported to California where he was forced to debase himself by doing tail stands and begging for old stinky fish from a pail held by some disingenuously perky, blond wetsuit-clad woman in front of audiences of tourists. But then an idealistic little boy shows up, and he convinces the whale to jump over the wall of its enclosure to sweet, sweet freedom!! How this was enough material to make an entire movie, let alone two, eludes me. I assume lots of filler was inserted into the plot, like car chases and rousing Sea-Biscuit-style speeches about the twin venerable virtues of the United States, consumerism and militarism. Have you seen these news stories of late about Keiko the REAL captive killer whale? She was the whale actor who played “Willy” in the movie. I guess that the Free Willy movies were so inspiring that some really rich person or foundation decided to free Keiko in real life. Various top-notch marine life specialists were formed into a “reintroduction task force” that tranquilized the whale by slipping a mickey into one of its stinky fish, and then they airlifted the whale’s unconscious body to a secluded bay in Greenland somewhere. (And, as an aside, this method of freeing Keiko makes me wonder if that really rich person or foundation who wanted to free the whale perhaps skipped a critical part of the “Free Willy” movies) This is why I think this story is remarkable: merely liberating Keiko from her enclosure was not enough to actually “Free Keiko.” During all those years of captivity, Keiko the whale had grown to love her human captors and her interactions with them. Although she was free to, she never left the secluded bay in Greenland, and she spent her days doing the acrobatic tricks that made her a star back in the day at some Seaworld-type institution and begging for stinky fish from pails. In an attempt to get Keiko the whale to return to her life in the wild, the reintroduction task force launched a de-socialization project, for which the task force hired local Greenlanders to loiter by the bay and act unimpressed by Keiko’s water acrobatics. But that didn’t work and the reintroduction task force was forced to bring in professional actors to stand on the docks. Whenever Keiko sidled up to the docks, hungry for human attention, the actors, acting as if they were unaware of the whale’s presence, engaged in loud conversation littered with carefully scripted and intentionally hurtful remarks about Keiko. Things like: “Keiko the Whale really fucking stuck up the screen in “Free Willy II!” “I fucking hate killer whales!!” “Did you see what Keiko the whale was wearing the other day?!” “Gads, yes! What a stupid whale!” “Could that fat-ass Keiko the whale’s butt BE any bigger?” Eventually Keiko swam off. Keiko’s been in the news lately because her body, just a few days ago, was discovered in some Norwegian fjord somewhere. The reintroduction task force was helicoptered to the site mere hours after the discovery, and began to quickly and quietly dig the shore-side grave that Keiko is now buried in. The reintroduction task force says that Keiko died of “pneumonia.” But I think she died of a broken heart. Oh, and also, one time when I was at the aquarium in Chicago, looking in the Beluga whale tanks from the windows below water level, I saw one of the beluga whales start to swim around in a circle, faster and faster, and then when the whale was going really fast it took a huge billowing watery dump and it was like the whale was a James Bond car equipped with a really gross brown smokescreen! Brian 11:30 PM Sunday, December 21, 2003 Sometimes when I'm alone in my apartment like late at night, I, all of a sudden, realize that I am doing something that would be really embarrassing, say, if somebody was videotaping me with a hidden video camera. Whenever that thought occurs to me lately, I've been making mental notes of increasing priority to myself that I really need to FINALLY getting around to checking my apartment for hidden video cameras. I've been living in this apartment for around five months now, and there's probably all sorts of footage of me by now doing really embarrassing things. Normally, within the first week after moving to a new place I would have performed a sweep and would be reasonably sure that I'm not the subject of illicit surveillance. I should explain however that my "sweep" isn't really anything elaborate. I just look in the all heating ducts with a flashlight. Oh, and I also disassemble all the light fixtures.... and I run a super-powerful magnet I bought from American Science Surplus' mail order catalog along the walls while listening with a stethoscope. And I usually knock a few (just a few!!) small holes in the drywall where I think there might be secret passages (or a hidden treasure trove!).....I also, on a periodic basis, check to make sure that the band-aids I stuck over the eyes of the paint-by-number portrait of Jesus hanging in my hallway are still tightly in place and none of his eyeball is showing so he can't peek at, nor judge, me. See, nothing elaborate. But with this new job, I just haven't had time to check for hidden cameras. However, I think that maybe some good has come out of all this because I've had to come to terms with all that embarrassing video footage of me potentially being out there somewhere. After some deep introspection, I've finally come to the conclusion that it's not me who should be embarrassed. It's the illicit videographers - THEY should be embarrassed for videotaping ME! In fact, I might not even look for hidden video cameras in my apartment ever again (well, except for obvious places, of course. And this does NOT constitute permission, express or implied, to conduct any sort of surveillance on me). I think that this is the best and most psychologically healthy way to approach this situation. Brian 1:22 AM

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House of Noh!

Wednesday, December 31, 2003

I wasn’t sure what to think about my new downstairs neighbors until today. All I knew about them was that they drove SUVs and that their arrival closely correlated to the timing of the message I came home to find on my machine from the apartment management company that said that there had been reports of somebody peeing off a balcony late at night and, although the management company wasn’t exactly sure who was peeing off a balcony, the issue would be taken care of by the police if the balcony peeing didn’t stop immediately. So I’m pretty sure my downstairs neighbors ratted me out, but I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt until today. Today, in fact this evening, my former ambivalence toward my new downstairs neighbors was replaced with complete and unchecked rabid loathing. Right now, even as I type this, my downstairs neighbors and their party guests are right below me listening to loud music, and talking, and laughing, and having a good time. It makes me SICK! The first thing I did in response to this outrage when it first began was to return hostilities by uncapping my dry erase marker and discourteously pushing back “open / hackey sack” hours in the dining room schedule to 1:00 AM. Then I, vigorously and without regard to the noise I was making, practiced my break-dancing moves on the wood floor until I pulled my latisimus dorsi doing a six step. This is what burns me up the most about my new downstairs neighbors. Get this. They have, not one, but two PARTY CHEESE TRAYS in their kitchen right now. I mean, come on, cheese trays? Cheese trays would be the nectar of the Olympus Gods if the Greek pantheon was full of bourgeois yuppy jerks (“poopsicles” would be their ambrosia). One of the cheese platters in the apartment below is slices and the other platter is cubes. Each platter has its own doily on which the cheese is tastefully arranged. I suspect that the cubes are for eating with festive party toothpicks. The slices... I don’t know, they might be for putting on sandwiches or something. I didn’t see any sandwich meat or bread, or anything else that would suggest sandwiches, but my field of vision into their kitchen was really narrow. There’s probably more snacks and whore dervs and crap on the counter that I wasn’t able to see. Shit, there could even be ANOTHER cheese tray. But back to the two cheese trays that I did see, they seem to each have both a white and a yellow cheese on them. The white probably isn’t Swiss because I didn’t see any holes in it. So I’m thinking that it’s probably Monterey Jack, although I acknowledge that there is a chance, albeit a lesser one, that it could be Mozzarella. I say a lesser chance of Mozzarella because I’ve very rarely seen it in cube form. The yellow cheese is probably Cheddar or American. I’m not sure it even matters which type the yellow cheese is because I’ve noticed that the line between those two types of cheeses seems to be becoming a little bit blurry in the last decade or so. If you’re wondering how I know about the cheese trays, it’s because I saw them accidentally though my neighbor’s kitchen window when I innocently looked down after I stepped outside onto my back porch landing to walk down to the ground floor to get my downstairs neighbors’ names off of their mailbox to put on my list of people I hate. Clearly, my downstairs neighbors were ashamed of their cheese trays and assorted party snacks, for they had pulled their Venetian shades tightly shut. But from my vantage point the Venetian blinds, even tightly drawn, did nothing to obstruct my view of their cheese trays. In fact, by blocking the glare from the street lamps the blinds probably even helped me to see the cheese trays more clearly. You didn’t think about upstairs neighbors when you invented your blinds, did you Venitians? Yet you Venitians are always so smug!! What with your “Renaissance” and your “canal system” and your “perverted marble amputee pornography statutes” and your “tiny little canned sausages with the convenient pull tab lid.” Venetians! You didn’t even THINK about the possibility of an upstairs neighbor, did you!?

Brian 10:51 PM

Thursday, December 25, 2003

I never saw the movie Free Willy. Or the sequel, Free Willy II (presumably, the whale was captured by rogue marine biologists in the interim). Quite frankly, the only thing that I knew about the two films up until a few days ago was that the movie title was fertile soil for B material dirty jokes re: penises. Based on the recent press surrounding the whale, however, I gather that the movie was about a killer whale named “Willy” who was captured by Crocodile Dundee and forced to give up a life of crushing seals to bloody death between his nubby-toothed, vise-like jaws in the surf off some rocky Northern coast somewhere and forcibly transported to California where he was forced to debase himself by doing tail stands and begging for old stinky fish from a pail held by some disingenuously perky, blond wetsuit-clad woman in front of audiences of tourists. But then an idealistic little boy shows up, and he convinces the whale to jump over the wall of its enclosure to sweet, sweet freedom!! How this was enough material to make an entire movie, let alone two, eludes me. I assume lots of filler was inserted into the plot, like car chases and rousing Sea-Biscuit-style speeches about the twin venerable virtues of the United States, consumerism and militarism. Have you seen these news stories of late about Keiko the REAL captive killer whale? She was the whale actor who played “Willy” in the movie. I guess that the Free Willy movies were so inspiring that some really rich person or foundation decided to free Keiko in real life. Various top-notch marine life specialists were formed into a “reintroduction task force” that tranquilized the whale by slipping a mickey into one of its stinky fish, and then they airlifted the whale’s unconscious body to a secluded bay in Greenland somewhere. (And, as an aside, this method of freeing Keiko makes me wonder if that really rich person or foundation who wanted to free the whale perhaps skipped a critical part of the “Free Willy” movies) This is why I think this story is remarkable: merely liberating Keiko from her enclosure was not enough to actually “Free Keiko.” During all those years of captivity, Keiko the whale had grown to love her human captors and her interactions with them. Although she was free to, she never left the secluded bay in Greenland, and she spent her days doing the acrobatic tricks that made her a star back in the day at some Seaworld-type institution and begging for stinky fish from pails. In an attempt to get Keiko the whale to return to her life in the wild, the reintroduction task force launched a de-socialization project, for which the task force hired local Greenlanders to loiter by the bay and act unimpressed by Keiko’s water acrobatics. But that didn’t work and the reintroduction task force was forced to bring in professional actors to stand on the docks. Whenever Keiko sidled up to the docks, hungry for human attention, the actors, acting as if they were unaware of the whale’s presence, engaged in loud conversation littered with carefully scripted and intentionally hurtful remarks about Keiko. Things like: “Keiko the Whale really fucking stuck up the screen in “Free Willy II!” “I fucking hate killer whales!!” “Did you see what Keiko the whale was wearing the other day?!” “Gads, yes! What a stupid whale!” “Could that fat-ass Keiko the whale’s butt BE any bigger?” Eventually Keiko swam off. Keiko’s been in the news lately because her body, just a few days ago, was discovered in some Norwegian fjord somewhere. The reintroduction task force was helicoptered to the site mere hours after the discovery, and began to quickly and quietly dig the shore-side grave that Keiko is now buried in. The reintroduction task force says that Keiko died of “pneumonia.” But I think she died of a broken heart. Oh, and also, one time when I was at the aquarium in Chicago, looking in the Beluga whale tanks from the windows below water level, I saw one of the beluga whales start to swim around in a circle, faster and faster, and then when the whale was going really fast it took a huge billowing watery dump and it was like the whale was a James Bond car equipped with a really gross brown smokescreen!

Brian 11:30 PM

Sunday, December 21, 2003

Sometimes when I'm alone in my apartment like late at night, I, all of a sudden, realize that I am doing something that would be really embarrassing, say, if somebody was videotaping me with a hidden video camera. Whenever that thought occurs to me lately, I've been making mental notes of increasing priority to myself that I really need to FINALLY getting around to checking my apartment for hidden video cameras. I've been living in this apartment for around five months now, and there's probably all sorts of footage of me by now doing really embarrassing things. Normally, within the first week after moving to a new place I would have performed a sweep and would be reasonably sure that I'm not the subject of illicit surveillance. I should explain however that my "sweep" isn't really anything elaborate. I just look in the all heating ducts with a flashlight. Oh, and I also disassemble all the light fixtures.... and I run a super-powerful magnet I bought from American Science Surplus' mail order catalog along the walls while listening with a stethoscope. And I usually knock a few (just a few!!) small holes in the drywall where I think there might be secret passages (or a hidden treasure trove!).....I also, on a periodic basis, check to make sure that the band-aids I stuck over the eyes of the paint-by-number portrait of Jesus hanging in my hallway are still tightly in place and none of his eyeball is showing so he can't peek at, nor judge, me. See, nothing elaborate. But with this new job, I just haven't had time to check for hidden cameras. However, I think that maybe some good has come out of all this because I've had to come to terms with all that embarrassing video footage of me potentially being out there somewhere. After some deep introspection, I've finally come to the conclusion that it's not me who should be embarrassed. It's the illicit videographers - THEY should be embarrassed for videotaping ME! In fact, I might not even look for hidden video cameras in my apartment ever again (well, except for obvious places, of course. And this does NOT constitute permission, express or implied, to conduct any sort of surveillance on me). I think that this is the best and most psychologically healthy way to approach this situation.

Brian 1:22 AM

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