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! Tuesday, November 30, 2004 I don’t know if I’m being fair or not, but I’m really mad about it. Madder even than my old friend from school, Monica R, was the time after we’d been hanging together for like a year and after she‘d been over to my house a bunch of times and we‘d split a bunch of cheap bottles of wine together, that I told her I believed very strongly in “conditioning” all my drinking vessels before I put them into use. Conditioning consists of filling them with my urine and letting them sit for twenty-four hours or so. It’s like when you oil down a cast iron pan and bake it to “season“ it, I told her. It turned out not to be a funny joke. After I told her about “conditioning,” she freaked out and at that point wouldn’t have believed me if I told her for real that I did, or didn’t, really do it. She was mad. It’s those salvation army bell ringers. They’re back, clogging up pedestrian thoroughfares and bottlenecking foot traffic at the entrances of local grocery stores with their garishly painted red kettles full of butt-pennies, urethra dimes and vagina nickels. I don’t even want to hint at where people commonly put their quarters when nobody is looking. For a while I worked as a banquet hall bartender at a hotel where there was a crack in the concrete in the bottom of the pool so the maintenance people just ran a garden house across the cabana and left it on 24/7 to keep the water level up. One of my co-workers was an attractive freckly red-headed woman who had a touch of a tragic streak to her. One night she was complaining about one of the hotel staff people, who alerted the bar manager that she was drinking on the job. We ALL drank on the job, foxes in the henhouse and all that. I asked how the hotel staff person found her out. The freckly bartender told me that she thought the hotel staff person saw her running into the bathroom to puke. The freckly bartender went on to tell me, in her defense, that it turned out that she puked a little, just in her mouth, and that she was able to swallow it, and so that shouldn’t really be counted against her. That’s how much you would puke if I told you where people put quarters. I know - those kettles are gross! What also makes me mad is how long I always have to wait in the craft store check-out line. At first, I stand in line and tell myself that the tortoise speed of the checker is just part of the craft store experience. But then, after like half an hour, when I’m still the second person in line, I start to get these terrible urges. I can barely restrain myself from cupping my hands around the checker’s timid mouse-ear and shout “hurry the fuck up!” into the side of her head. But I don’t. That's because I’m on thin ice at that craft store as soon as I walk in the door. They’re always throwing me jive and shit on account of how I don’t got no cooter. Brian 3:50 PM (0) comments Wednesday, November 24, 2004 Guess how many waffles I just ate? Just kidding. You don’t want to know. If you knew how many waffles I just ate, it would make you SICK. But seriously, guess when the last time I took a shower was. I’m just kidding again. You don’t want to know. It would make you SICK. Brian 3:30 PM (0) comments Friday, November 19, 2004 Talking about all this bicycling lately… Do you remember my 9-20-04 journal entry where I very enthusiastically typed out for you the definition of “Hot Carl?” Well, during a visit to my parent’s house I elucidated the term at the dinner table with the same zeal. Andrea, Dusty, Hadley and I all laughed. My mom, however, was not amused. “Thanks a lot!” she said. “I hadn’t ever even thought about” (and then she shuddered) “people pooping in each other’s mouths before. Now I’ll never be able to get that out of my head for the rest of my life!” “I’m sure, with time, it will fade,” I tried to reassure her. “No, it won’t,” she said stubbornly. “You mean, you think that decades from now you’ll be like eighty years old, sitting on a porch swing somewhere enjoying some lemonade in your golden years, and that image will be playing somewhere in the back of your mind?” “YES!!” At the time, that made Andrea, Dusty, Hadley and I laugh even harder. However, now I suppose apologies are in order. But what does all this have to do with bicycling? It’s because the more I think about it, I’ve begun to realize that little images like that can stick with you for life. Specifically, there’s a certain memory I have that makes me shudder, just a little, every time I remember it, and it pops up into my head whenever I ride a bicycle, think about bicycling, or even see somebody riding down the street on a bicycle. I probably wasn’t even fourteen years old yet when it happened - so this is like a full fifteen years ago at least. I had just gotten my ten speed, and my Dad and I had gone out for a twenty mile or so ride (perhaps to encourage me to engage in a hobby that would help alleviate my requiring “husky” sized jeans, which I deplored). The next day I asked my Dad if he wanted to go out for another ride. When I asked, he got this pained look in his eyes, and then, in the voice he reserved for unpleasant but necessary conversations, explained to me that he would have to get some bicycle shorts or something before we went bicycling again. That would have been a good enough explanation for me. But he continued, perhaps needing to unburden himself, I don’t know. “Because, yesterday, when I got back from our bike ride, I went in the bathroom and my SCROTUM was ALL CHAFED,” he told me. And then he kind of squatted with his legs apart and indicated with a sweeping hand gesture the plane at which his scrotum had been chafed. “Like, from here to here!” he said. That’s the image that I will be stuck with for the rest of my life perhaps. Incidentally, and this isn’t related to bicycling, but I have some friends who complain of chafing problems from just walking around on hot sticky summer days. They use talcum powder, they say, and that leaves them gliding free and easy for however many miles they have to walk that day. They swear by it. If you suffer from this problem, why not give it a try? I’ve never tried it or anything. I’m just putting the word on the street. Brian 6:07 PM (0) comments Wednesday, November 17, 2004 Contrary to what I’ve been led to believe by popular movies such as Fight Club, making soap doesn’t require a crazy old abandoned house in a brown-field. Neither does it require that uniquely delightful special brand of homicidal malice aforethought. Making your own soap is really quite easy. I found a recipe on the internet for making soap that just uses a brand of drain cleaner (pure lye) and two 3 lb. tubs of Crisco, both of which are quite readily, and inexpensively, found at your local grocery store! And if you want to make a fancy soap, you can use this recipe and add herbs like chamomile or bergamot or essential oils or ground up oatmeal or whatever after “trace” occurs - (soap making term). The only hitch is that for this soap you’ve got to let it sit around and “cure” for around 2 to 4 weeks before you use it, which is sort of a drag. So if you’re into DIY kind of things and want to make special soaps for people as Christmas presents, you’d better start now. I’m going to make a bunch of batches and crumble up dried poison ivy into the soap instead of chamomile or bergamot and give it as Christmas presents to people I can’t fucking stand!! Brian 3:47 AM (0) comments Saturday, November 13, 2004 I’ve been riding on trains again. Trains I think are the perfect transportation for me. To be sure, there is a very important downside in that the seats (in fact, chairs in general) on trains hurt my coccyx (which can‘t be good, kundalini-wise). I have a friend who said he took some acid once and rode on a train. He says he sat there in his seat and as he peaked all he could hear, and even sense actually, was that rhythmic thumping, clunking type of noise that you hear inside the train as it goes down the track. Somewhere en route he fell asleep. A conductor woke him up at his stop and he got off the train, but then half an hour later my friend realized that the clunking noise never stopped! I guess it never went away. He just got used to it. Even years later I’d ask him sometimes if it was still there. He’d get really quiet and look like he was thinking hard about something, and then he’d be like, “Yeah, it’s still there all right!” Last time I was on a train there was this really drunk guy going all the way to Texas. When he first got on the train, even though there were lots of seats left, he walked down the aisle and wherever there was a dude sitting alone, the drunk guy would ask that dude, “can I sit with you, sexy?” Almost everybody grudgingly said yes, I mean, that’s train etiquette and all. But the drunk guy didn’t really want to sit down with any of those dudes, he’d just go on to the next dude. And if he was lying about wanting to sit down next to them, I suppose the question remains: did he really think all those dudes were sexy or not? The drunk guy didn’t call me sexy or ask to sit with me. Perhaps he just found me unattractive. That’s okay, I mean, everybody’s got their own tastes and all. It’s perfectly natural. OR! And this is my preferred theory, my huge bushy beard, (alas, it’s been cruelly pruned as of late), protected me from those sorts of harassments. It once protected me from being the victim of an act of violent crime in Dublin, you know. After the drunk guy finally found his seat, he amused himself by trying to bully the conductor into letting him step off the train for smoke breaks at non-smoke-break stops. After he got bored with that, the drunk dude pulled out a suspect half-full bottle of perfume and started wandering the train, boasting of the perfume’s expense and high quality and offering (and in some cases, demanding) to squirt it on people. He didn’t bother me with it (again, the beard). I didn’t realize the full extent of the fragrant terror the drunk guy had wrought until I reached my stop and lined up in the narrow stairwell down to the lower level of the train with the other people getting off at my stop. The stairwell smelled like ambergris and Lysol and window cleaner all mixed together. As I stood there in line behind a middle-to-older-aged woman wearing those kind of glasses where the earpieces connect to the lens frames at the bottom and a helmet-shaped perm we could hear the drunk guy below us, shouting around an unlit cigarette in his mouth about how he was going to get off the train to smoke at the stop and the conductor HAD BETTER let him back on the train. “I don’t know if that guy’s just drunk or what!” the woman remarked to me. Then she indicated the middle-to-older-aged man standing patiently in line in front of her. “He sprayed that perfume he had all over my husband!” Brian 4:38 PM (0) comments Wednesday, November 10, 2004 I’ve been writing a lot of poems lately. One thing I like about poems is that they don’t necessarily have to rhyme. I have this on good authority from a friend who has an MFA in poetry. But don't spread it around. She doesn't like to talk about how poems don't necessarily have to rhyme. I think it might be an industry secret. I might be getting better at poems. I don’t know. I guess it just takes a lot of practice. This poem is to somebody, but I'm not sure specifically who - it's to the person who’s riding the small framed red steel-lugged schwinn traveller with hacksaw bullhorn bars, back brake and gear shifters and second chain ring removed, 700 aluminum front wheel, toe straps, and a 27 steel rear wheel with the old ten-speed cassette freewheel ratchet mechanism locked with J&B weld that I left chained to a bike rack downtown yesterday. That bike is stolen and you know it. You’re going to feel silly if you try to sell it or the parts because it’s a junk collage, Besides, there were lots of bikes around there better than mine. And, ahem, shouldn’t you perhaps have checked the chain line before picking a bike to steal? Good luck trying to find anything that’ll fit that crazy old bottom bracket, Asshole! You should feel bad, Because I have lots of fond memories of that bike Like that time I was riding on the lakeshore and a cold wintry wave shot up over the cement walkway and totally swallowed me in its curling foam like I was in an Ocean Spray commercial or something and I got water pushed in my lake-side ear all the way to my freaking cochlea and the gang of petty footpads sitting on rocks nearby drinking forties and planning minor burglaries watched it happen and shouted encouraging remarks amongst each other like, “Shit! Did you see that asshole get wiped by that wave?!” Need I even mention again that time I almost got clawed by the creepy guy on spooky street? And so I’m keeping one eye peeled, like that dude in I had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew watching for Quilligan Quails, and if I see you riding my bike I’m going to grab you by the jacket and crash you and take back my bike. And if you twist your ankle in the toe-straps, or chip your tooth on the pavement when you go down… well, I just don’t care, because using that amount of force is legally justified in Illinois to recover stolen property. Or at least I think it is. But it’s not your physical safety that I’m worried about the most. It’s mine. Because you also stole that block of foam that I wore strapped to my head. Now when I ride my even crappier bike I have to wear a thick stocking cap. I just don’t think that’s as safe. And sometimes it’s itchy. And this doesn’t have anything to do with my bike, But it’s something important that I think you should be made aware of: Lately, when my bathroom light goes on, I think my neighbor walks out on the landing and puts her ear to the window, Because she wants to listen to me taking a dump, Is that weird or what?! Oh and also, I’m going to go around and check used bike shops, and if I find my bike in one, or even any pieces of it, purporting to be for sale and legitimately acquired and whatnot, then I’m gonna freak out and go all tonight only! pay-per-view Jesus vs. MoneyChangers at the Trump Temple Gardens. To be sure, there’ll be lots of double handed, over the head, angry chimp-style property smashing and spittle-fly-shouting. On this rainy day. Brian 1:22 AM (0) comments Saturday, November 06, 2004 Just last night, riding my bike down spooky street late at night started to pay dividends. FINALLY! And I’m not just talking about rat spottings or finding cool trash in the many dumpsters there, either. I’m talking about a really scary dude chasing me! Years ago (I’m so old now!) when I was living up in the corn and soy fields in lower peninsula mid-Michigan I had a job that took me every morning past this house where a dog lived. I was riding a motorcycle then and the dog liked to chase me. It was always very Marty Stouffer-esque - the struggle of life, predator-prey and all that. The dog was like a wolf of sorts, and I was like a deer, a deer riding an old, beat up Superbike of the 70’s! motorcycle the deer bought from a trucker in Saginaw for $300 and then replaced the head gasket in, breaking off some nuts in the engine in the process. It took the deer like a week and a half to put it all back together too, but when it was finally reassembled it roared into life when the deer tried to start it! The deer found this to be very relieving, because $300 is a shitload of money to a deer going to college. So anyway, I was like this deer, and the dog was a wolf, and together we enacted a sacred, timeless dance of life, older than dogs or deers, or even people or Superbikes of the 70’s. The first couple of times the dog heard me coming; he was waiting for me there in the road. He tried to bite my legs and shit and I had to swerve past him with my legs all lifted up and I almost wiped out, which I think was the dog’s ultimate goal. Ok, deer can’t lift up their legs like that. I know that, okay. But after a few times of being ambushed by the dog I started being all quiet before I got to the house, going slow in a high gear. Then the dog couldn’t hear me so far off and didn’t have the advance warning that I was coming. I’d creep down the road, watching the dog in his spot under the tree, chewing on a human arm or a Kalishnakov rifle or whatever he had over there, until the dog saw me. Then the race was on! The dog would jump up and start running alongside me on an intercept course at an angle to the street, and I’d immediately downshift and throttle up the bike. At first, it wouldn’t seem like either of us were really moving that fast, but as we reached the apex of our intercept course it was always a desperate struggle, the dog bounding, lungs bursting, tongue lolling, running as fast as he could go, and me tucked down to avoid wind resistant with the throttle back all the way, watching the dog just miss my back wheel and slip into the distance behind me. The dog never caught me. But sometimes it was really close. That’s what it was like last night. I was riding my bike down spooky street under the tracks when I spotted a bunch of people hunched down by the wheel well of a van off to the side. I was kind of wondering what they were up to, and I believe I (inadvertently) gave them a look as if to say, “I’m excessively curious about your activities as well as the legality of same!” Then this guy sprang up and started sprinting toward me on that same type of intercept course that dogs and creepy dudes seem to know instinctively. He shouted something, too, like, “Bah Bah Goobely Goobely Bah!” I couldn’t understand him. In retrospect, I believe that he was either saying, “I am going to take your wallet and dip your penis in carmel and bite it off, then kill you!” or, he was saying, “my van just broke down and my wife is in labor, I would hate to be an imposition but would you be so kind as to loan me your cell phone so that I may call for an ambulance, I would, of course, gladly reimburse you any phone tolls.” I’ll never know what he was trying to say, because he didn’t catch me. I though he was going to, at first, because he was really fast, but then I stood up on the pedals and kicked in the afterburners. He still almost got me. In the desperate seconds near the apex of our intersecting courses I think he realized that he was going to miss me by a small, small margin - he stretched out a claw at me, fingernails all sharp and jagged and lined with fecal matter like bird-poison cat claws, but I limberly ducked his vicious swipe at the last second and pedaled on out of there! It was very exciting and I hope it was as much fun for that guy as it was for me. Brian 3:59 PM (0) comments

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House of Noh!

Tuesday, November 30, 2004

I don’t know if I’m being fair or not, but I’m really mad about it. Madder even than my old friend from school, Monica R, was the time after we’d been hanging together for like a year and after she‘d been over to my house a bunch of times and we‘d split a bunch of cheap bottles of wine together, that I told her I believed very strongly in “conditioning” all my drinking vessels before I put them into use. Conditioning consists of filling them with my urine and letting them sit for twenty-four hours or so. It’s like when you oil down a cast iron pan and bake it to “season“ it, I told her. It turned out not to be a funny joke. After I told her about “conditioning,” she freaked out and at that point wouldn’t have believed me if I told her for real that I did, or didn’t, really do it. She was mad. It’s those salvation army bell ringers. They’re back, clogging up pedestrian thoroughfares and bottlenecking foot traffic at the entrances of local grocery stores with their garishly painted red kettles full of butt-pennies, urethra dimes and vagina nickels. I don’t even want to hint at where people commonly put their quarters when nobody is looking. For a while I worked as a banquet hall bartender at a hotel where there was a crack in the concrete in the bottom of the pool so the maintenance people just ran a garden house across the cabana and left it on 24/7 to keep the water level up. One of my co-workers was an attractive freckly red-headed woman who had a touch of a tragic streak to her. One night she was complaining about one of the hotel staff people, who alerted the bar manager that she was drinking on the job. We ALL drank on the job, foxes in the henhouse and all that. I asked how the hotel staff person found her out. The freckly bartender told me that she thought the hotel staff person saw her running into the bathroom to puke. The freckly bartender went on to tell me, in her defense, that it turned out that she puked a little, just in her mouth, and that she was able to swallow it, and so that shouldn’t really be counted against her. That’s how much you would puke if I told you where people put quarters. I know - those kettles are gross! What also makes me mad is how long I always have to wait in the craft store check-out line. At first, I stand in line and tell myself that the tortoise speed of the checker is just part of the craft store experience. But then, after like half an hour, when I’m still the second person in line, I start to get these terrible urges. I can barely restrain myself from cupping my hands around the checker’s timid mouse-ear and shout “hurry the fuck up!” into the side of her head. But I don’t. That's because I’m on thin ice at that craft store as soon as I walk in the door. They’re always throwing me jive and shit on account of how I don’t got no cooter.

Brian 3:50 PM (0) comments

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Guess how many waffles I just ate? Just kidding. You don’t want to know. If you knew how many waffles I just ate, it would make you SICK. But seriously, guess when the last time I took a shower was. I’m just kidding again. You don’t want to know. It would make you SICK.

Brian 3:30 PM (0) comments

Friday, November 19, 2004

Talking about all this bicycling lately… Do you remember my 9-20-04 journal entry where I very enthusiastically typed out for you the definition of “Hot Carl?” Well, during a visit to my parent’s house I elucidated the term at the dinner table with the same zeal. Andrea, Dusty, Hadley and I all laughed. My mom, however, was not amused. “Thanks a lot!” she said. “I hadn’t ever even thought about” (and then she shuddered) “people pooping in each other’s mouths before. Now I’ll never be able to get that out of my head for the rest of my life!” “I’m sure, with time, it will fade,” I tried to reassure her. “No, it won’t,” she said stubbornly. “You mean, you think that decades from now you’ll be like eighty years old, sitting on a porch swing somewhere enjoying some lemonade in your golden years, and that image will be playing somewhere in the back of your mind?” “YES!!” At the time, that made Andrea, Dusty, Hadley and I laugh even harder. However, now I suppose apologies are in order. But what does all this have to do with bicycling? It’s because the more I think about it, I’ve begun to realize that little images like that can stick with you for life. Specifically, there’s a certain memory I have that makes me shudder, just a little, every time I remember it, and it pops up into my head whenever I ride a bicycle, think about bicycling, or even see somebody riding down the street on a bicycle. I probably wasn’t even fourteen years old yet when it happened - so this is like a full fifteen years ago at least. I had just gotten my ten speed, and my Dad and I had gone out for a twenty mile or so ride (perhaps to encourage me to engage in a hobby that would help alleviate my requiring “husky” sized jeans, which I deplored). The next day I asked my Dad if he wanted to go out for another ride. When I asked, he got this pained look in his eyes, and then, in the voice he reserved for unpleasant but necessary conversations, explained to me that he would have to get some bicycle shorts or something before we went bicycling again. That would have been a good enough explanation for me. But he continued, perhaps needing to unburden himself, I don’t know. “Because, yesterday, when I got back from our bike ride, I went in the bathroom and my SCROTUM was ALL CHAFED,” he told me. And then he kind of squatted with his legs apart and indicated with a sweeping hand gesture the plane at which his scrotum had been chafed. “Like, from here to here!” he said. That’s the image that I will be stuck with for the rest of my life perhaps. Incidentally, and this isn’t related to bicycling, but I have some friends who complain of chafing problems from just walking around on hot sticky summer days. They use talcum powder, they say, and that leaves them gliding free and easy for however many miles they have to walk that day. They swear by it. If you suffer from this problem, why not give it a try? I’ve never tried it or anything. I’m just putting the word on the street.

Brian 6:07 PM (0) comments

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Contrary to what I’ve been led to believe by popular movies such as Fight Club, making soap doesn’t require a crazy old abandoned house in a brown-field. Neither does it require that uniquely delightful special brand of homicidal malice aforethought. Making your own soap is really quite easy. I found a recipe on the internet for making soap that just uses a brand of drain cleaner (pure lye) and two 3 lb. tubs of Crisco, both of which are quite readily, and inexpensively, found at your local grocery store! And if you want to make a fancy soap, you can use this recipe and add herbs like chamomile or bergamot or essential oils or ground up oatmeal or whatever after “trace” occurs - (soap making term). The only hitch is that for this soap you’ve got to let it sit around and “cure” for around 2 to 4 weeks before you use it, which is sort of a drag. So if you’re into DIY kind of things and want to make special soaps for people as Christmas presents, you’d better start now. I’m going to make a bunch of batches and crumble up dried poison ivy into the soap instead of chamomile or bergamot and give it as Christmas presents to people I can’t fucking stand!!

Brian 3:47 AM (0) comments

Saturday, November 13, 2004

I’ve been riding on trains again. Trains I think are the perfect transportation for me. To be sure, there is a very important downside in that the seats (in fact, chairs in general) on trains hurt my coccyx (which can‘t be good, kundalini-wise). I have a friend who said he took some acid once and rode on a train. He says he sat there in his seat and as he peaked all he could hear, and even sense actually, was that rhythmic thumping, clunking type of noise that you hear inside the train as it goes down the track. Somewhere en route he fell asleep. A conductor woke him up at his stop and he got off the train, but then half an hour later my friend realized that the clunking noise never stopped! I guess it never went away. He just got used to it. Even years later I’d ask him sometimes if it was still there. He’d get really quiet and look like he was thinking hard about something, and then he’d be like, “Yeah, it’s still there all right!” Last time I was on a train there was this really drunk guy going all the way to Texas. When he first got on the train, even though there were lots of seats left, he walked down the aisle and wherever there was a dude sitting alone, the drunk guy would ask that dude, “can I sit with you, sexy?” Almost everybody grudgingly said yes, I mean, that’s train etiquette and all. But the drunk guy didn’t really want to sit down with any of those dudes, he’d just go on to the next dude. And if he was lying about wanting to sit down next to them, I suppose the question remains: did he really think all those dudes were sexy or not? The drunk guy didn’t call me sexy or ask to sit with me. Perhaps he just found me unattractive. That’s okay, I mean, everybody’s got their own tastes and all. It’s perfectly natural. OR! And this is my preferred theory, my huge bushy beard, (alas, it’s been cruelly pruned as of late), protected me from those sorts of harassments. It once protected me from being the victim of an act of violent crime in Dublin, you know. After the drunk guy finally found his seat, he amused himself by trying to bully the conductor into letting him step off the train for smoke breaks at non-smoke-break stops. After he got bored with that, the drunk dude pulled out a suspect half-full bottle of perfume and started wandering the train, boasting of the perfume’s expense and high quality and offering (and in some cases, demanding) to squirt it on people. He didn’t bother me with it (again, the beard). I didn’t realize the full extent of the fragrant terror the drunk guy had wrought until I reached my stop and lined up in the narrow stairwell down to the lower level of the train with the other people getting off at my stop. The stairwell smelled like ambergris and Lysol and window cleaner all mixed together. As I stood there in line behind a middle-to-older-aged woman wearing those kind of glasses where the earpieces connect to the lens frames at the bottom and a helmet-shaped perm we could hear the drunk guy below us, shouting around an unlit cigarette in his mouth about how he was going to get off the train to smoke at the stop and the conductor HAD BETTER let him back on the train. “I don’t know if that guy’s just drunk or what!” the woman remarked to me. Then she indicated the middle-to-older-aged man standing patiently in line in front of her. “He sprayed that perfume he had all over my husband!”

Brian 4:38 PM (0) comments

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

I’ve been writing a lot of poems lately. One thing I like about poems is that they don’t necessarily have to rhyme. I have this on good authority from a friend who has an MFA in poetry. But don't spread it around. She doesn't like to talk about how poems don't necessarily have to rhyme. I think it might be an industry secret. I might be getting better at poems. I don’t know. I guess it just takes a lot of practice. This poem is to somebody, but I'm not sure specifically who - it's to the person who’s riding the small framed red steel-lugged schwinn traveller with hacksaw bullhorn bars, back brake and gear shifters and second chain ring removed, 700 aluminum front wheel, toe straps, and a 27 steel rear wheel with the old ten-speed cassette freewheel ratchet mechanism locked with J&B weld that I left chained to a bike rack downtown yesterday. That bike is stolen and you know it. You’re going to feel silly if you try to sell it or the parts because it’s a junk collage, Besides, there were lots of bikes around there better than mine. And, ahem, shouldn’t you perhaps have checked the chain line before picking a bike to steal? Good luck trying to find anything that’ll fit that crazy old bottom bracket, Asshole! You should feel bad, Because I have lots of fond memories of that bike Like that time I was riding on the lakeshore and a cold wintry wave shot up over the cement walkway and totally swallowed me in its curling foam like I was in an Ocean Spray commercial or something and I got water pushed in my lake-side ear all the way to my freaking cochlea and the gang of petty footpads sitting on rocks nearby drinking forties and planning minor burglaries watched it happen and shouted encouraging remarks amongst each other like, “Shit! Did you see that asshole get wiped by that wave?!” Need I even mention again that time I almost got clawed by the creepy guy on spooky street? And so I’m keeping one eye peeled, like that dude in I had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew watching for Quilligan Quails, and if I see you riding my bike I’m going to grab you by the jacket and crash you and take back my bike. And if you twist your ankle in the toe-straps, or chip your tooth on the pavement when you go down… well, I just don’t care, because using that amount of force is legally justified in Illinois to recover stolen property. Or at least I think it is. But it’s not your physical safety that I’m worried about the most. It’s mine. Because you also stole that block of foam that I wore strapped to my head. Now when I ride my even crappier bike I have to wear a thick stocking cap. I just don’t think that’s as safe. And sometimes it’s itchy. And this doesn’t have anything to do with my bike, But it’s something important that I think you should be made aware of: Lately, when my bathroom light goes on, I think my neighbor walks out on the landing and puts her ear to the window, Because she wants to listen to me taking a dump, Is that weird or what?! Oh and also, I’m going to go around and check used bike shops, and if I find my bike in one, or even any pieces of it, purporting to be for sale and legitimately acquired and whatnot, then I’m gonna freak out and go all tonight only! pay-per-view Jesus vs. MoneyChangers at the Trump Temple Gardens. To be sure, there’ll be lots of double handed, over the head, angry chimp-style property smashing and spittle-fly-shouting. On this rainy day.

Brian 1:22 AM (0) comments

Saturday, November 06, 2004

Just last night, riding my bike down spooky street late at night started to pay dividends. FINALLY! And I’m not just talking about rat spottings or finding cool trash in the many dumpsters there, either. I’m talking about a really scary dude chasing me! Years ago (I’m so old now!) when I was living up in the corn and soy fields in lower peninsula mid-Michigan I had a job that took me every morning past this house where a dog lived. I was riding a motorcycle then and the dog liked to chase me. It was always very Marty Stouffer-esque - the struggle of life, predator-prey and all that. The dog was like a wolf of sorts, and I was like a deer, a deer riding an old, beat up Superbike of the 70’s! motorcycle the deer bought from a trucker in Saginaw for $300 and then replaced the head gasket in, breaking off some nuts in the engine in the process. It took the deer like a week and a half to put it all back together too, but when it was finally reassembled it roared into life when the deer tried to start it! The deer found this to be very relieving, because $300 is a shitload of money to a deer going to college. So anyway, I was like this deer, and the dog was a wolf, and together we enacted a sacred, timeless dance of life, older than dogs or deers, or even people or Superbikes of the 70’s. The first couple of times the dog heard me coming; he was waiting for me there in the road. He tried to bite my legs and shit and I had to swerve past him with my legs all lifted up and I almost wiped out, which I think was the dog’s ultimate goal. Ok, deer can’t lift up their legs like that. I know that, okay. But after a few times of being ambushed by the dog I started being all quiet before I got to the house, going slow in a high gear. Then the dog couldn’t hear me so far off and didn’t have the advance warning that I was coming. I’d creep down the road, watching the dog in his spot under the tree, chewing on a human arm or a Kalishnakov rifle or whatever he had over there, until the dog saw me. Then the race was on! The dog would jump up and start running alongside me on an intercept course at an angle to the street, and I’d immediately downshift and throttle up the bike. At first, it wouldn’t seem like either of us were really moving that fast, but as we reached the apex of our intercept course it was always a desperate struggle, the dog bounding, lungs bursting, tongue lolling, running as fast as he could go, and me tucked down to avoid wind resistant with the throttle back all the way, watching the dog just miss my back wheel and slip into the distance behind me. The dog never caught me. But sometimes it was really close. That’s what it was like last night. I was riding my bike down spooky street under the tracks when I spotted a bunch of people hunched down by the wheel well of a van off to the side. I was kind of wondering what they were up to, and I believe I (inadvertently) gave them a look as if to say, “I’m excessively curious about your activities as well as the legality of same!” Then this guy sprang up and started sprinting toward me on that same type of intercept course that dogs and creepy dudes seem to know instinctively. He shouted something, too, like, “Bah Bah Goobely Goobely Bah!” I couldn’t understand him. In retrospect, I believe that he was either saying, “I am going to take your wallet and dip your penis in carmel and bite it off, then kill you!” or, he was saying, “my van just broke down and my wife is in labor, I would hate to be an imposition but would you be so kind as to loan me your cell phone so that I may call for an ambulance, I would, of course, gladly reimburse you any phone tolls.” I’ll never know what he was trying to say, because he didn’t catch me. I though he was going to, at first, because he was really fast, but then I stood up on the pedals and kicked in the afterburners. He still almost got me. In the desperate seconds near the apex of our intersecting courses I think he realized that he was going to miss me by a small, small margin - he stretched out a claw at me, fingernails all sharp and jagged and lined with fecal matter like bird-poison cat claws, but I limberly ducked his vicious swipe at the last second and pedaled on out of there! It was very exciting and I hope it was as much fun for that guy as it was for me.

Brian 3:59 PM (0) comments

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