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! Thursday, February 24, 2005 When you stop tromping along to stand quietly in the woods, first you’ll only hear the wind rattling leaves and tree branches knocking together. If you stand there long enough you’ll start hearing jays and crows. If you’re patient and keep standing quietly, nuthatches will come back into the area, hopping around the winter-bare branches of the upper canopy, looking for bugs or lichens or whatever they eat. And if you keep standing there after the nuthatches come back you’ll begin to see squirrels poke their inquisitive, whiskered noses out of their leaf ball huts in the trees and hop along the forest floor. I don’t know what happens if you wait quietly after the squirrels come out. Maybe a Pegasus or something appears. I don’t know because when the squirrels come out, that’s when I start shooting. On my nightly constitutional last evening I sat down at the corner of Broadway and Sheridan to lament that the city contains no such delicately emerging mysteries as the woods. I was to learn, however, that the city does seem to operate on similar principles. I found a pleasant seat on that wooden box on the corner that contains the winter-dry sunflower garden. At first, there were just cars and buses and a few people pedaling by on bikes. The people walking by were coming home from work and might as well have been trees, they seemed furiously occupied with their inner lives like most hardwoods are. But after I sat there long enough, the city’s curious creatures started to emerge. At first, it was this guy with a deep lavender parka with a fur-lined collar draped over his arm. “Fur coat for sale!” he stopped and told me. “No thanks.” He took the fact that I didn’t want to buy his fur coat personally. “But it’s only 18 bucks!” he shouted. “Yes, but I rarely have the occasion to wear fine furs.” My comment failed to console him. “I’m just trying to make a living!” He shouted at me. “Asshole!” Then he walked off to sell his fur coat to somebody else. After a while, another, even better denizen of the city emerged from the throng of people walking past. This guy had walked past me earlier, wearing his long, unbuttoned overcoat, sneakers, and a t-shirt with its neck elastic v’d down by a dangling pair of aviator style sunglasses. I remembered him because it was cold and I thought he should have a scarf with his neck and upper chest exposed like that. “Hey!” He shouted at me. “HEY!” He was standing sort of behind me. I turned around to look up at him and he screwed up his face in an effort to enunciate a very carefully scripted joke. This was the joke: “When they told Bush that they discovered water on Mars, Bush asked, ‘regular or unleaded?’” I guess the guy felt I needed a laugh or something and was determined to do a good deed. We both chuckled a bit about the joke and then he, with a very satisfied air about him for a job well done, walked across the street and over to the Hotel Chateau – best transient hotel ever! I’m not sure I get the joke exactly. Does it imply that Bush can only think in terms of petroleum availability, or, my favorite interpretation, does the joke imply that he is some sort of creature that needs gasoline to live like we normal humans require water – the Pres. is some sort of horrible, unworldly creature that hungers to devour petroleum like those bacteria they use to clean up oil spills sometimes and that if one or two ever get loose and mutate to be airborne and multiply rapidly will consume all oil everywhere and mean the end of our way of live forever! Don’t worry, we can trust the same industry that spilled all that oil in the first place to keep a million billion tiny oil-hungry bacteria in check. But whatever, the dude’s joke was really funny. So after all these good tidings the only possible thing I could do was head over to Wrigleyville North for $1.50 drafts. All the best regulars were there, including this old guy named Norman who seems unable to speak in what his mother at one point probably referred to as his “indoor voice.” Norman’s glasses are HUGE! We all watched the Wheel of Fortune. Norman’s guess to the partially lettered “a song by Madonna” puzzle was “Majority Girl.” The answer was “Material Girl,” of course, but still I thought Norman’s guess deserved accolades - Norman's lyrics changing the pro-consumerism ditty into a controversial anthem for democracy. Norman was bitter when the correct answer was revealed. “They had no right to press that button!” Norman shouted of the Wheel of Fortune contestant who correctly guessed the answer. “They had no right! No right to press that button!” Brian 1:33 PM (0) comments Friday, February 18, 2005 I've been trying out a hip new hairstyle lately. Unless you're ultra cool, you probably haven't heard about it yet. It's called a pompadour. Today I was walking down the street and there was a tree branch hanging across the sidewalk. I didn't duck it soon enough and part of the branch stuck in my hair. I wrestled with it for a while, but I couldn't get the branch out. You know how when you're fighting in an epic old tyme battle and you get hit with a barbed arrow that you can't pull out the best thing to do is break the arrow off where it protrudes from your body, leaving the arrowhead in your body, and keep fighting? That's what I ended up doing. I had to reach up and snap off the branch where it stuck out of my hair. Then I finished walking down to the Osco to buy a new pair of flip-flops. Brian 1:59 AM (0) comments Monday, February 14, 2005 I need an answer to this question VERY QUICKLY: Is it okay to use dryer sheets as toilet paper? Brian 7:02 AM (0) comments Friday, February 11, 2005 In the 50’s or 60’s or whenever it was, I understand the urge to not recognize the health hazards of smoking cigarettes. I just don’t like the thought that stuff, like smoke or whatever, goes in your lungs and stays there forever. Alas, I guess it does. That knowledge has taken a lot of the joy out of life for me. For every smell that registers against my olfactory bulb, I bet there’s way more smell particles heading straight down to my lungs. Even for really good smelling things, nowadays it seems like the healthy thing to do is to smell in moderation. It doesn’t matter if it’s a fresh pine scent or somebody else’s stinky fart (everybody likes their own brand), when I think about it I’m always like, “that’s going to be in my lungs FOREVER” - I’m going to get smeller’s cough in the morning just because some jerk in the elevator (discourteously!) insisted on clogging up my alveoli with his stinky farts. Brian 1:39 AM (0) comments Tuesday, February 08, 2005 I’m not really one to follow how much people weigh or anything. Jared is an exception. He’s the one who made it an issue - waving his huge old pants around, talking big about how he eats a Subway sandwich for every meal and how he lost all that weight. But have you noticed… recently?…like in his commercials?… Jared’s not so skinny anymore. And if Jared’s weight gain is apparent just by watching Subway commercials, you know that he must be packing on the pounds in real life because I’m sure that before each commercial and public appearance Subway PR people fly in high-priced cosmetologists from Los Angeles with slimming clothes and ultra-tight full-body neo-whalebone man-corsets that take half an hour to cinch Jared into. Nobody understands - Jared’s closest friends, family, his lawyer and agent. They’re all probably like, “we just don’t get it Jared, you’ve got it made - a lucrative endorsement contract, fame, all the free subs you can eat! All you have to do is stay under 193 pounds! That can’t be so hard, can it? For what Subway is offering you?” This whole situation must make for tense meetings between Jared, Subway top brass and Subway’s retained counsel. “Look, Jared!” Subway lawyers threaten, “Subway has been more than patient with you. If your body mass continues to exceed 193 pounds, then Subway is well within its contractual rights to terminate your endorsement contract and recover from you everything you’ve been paid.” Jared probably used to give the lawyers and Subway Corporate false assurances that he’d lose the extra pounds and he probably used to shave off his pubes to read lighter on the Subway scales, but now I bet he’s just like, “go fuck yourself! I can’t live like this!” And I don’t think Subway Corporate is very optimistic about the situation, either; I noticed that Subway’s most recent television commercial lays the groundwork for portraying Jared as a compulsive snacker. That’s right! Get ready for a Subway-backed smear Jared campaign! They’re gonna throw Jared to the dogs! Thing went bad years ago. It’s obvious what’s been happening at the gas station / fast food restaurant where Jared procures his steady diet of Subway sandwiches : Sandwich artist: “Look Jared, you know the rules.” Jared: “Put cheese and condiments on my twelve inch chicken teriyaki sub!” Sandwich artist: “But Jared, what about your lucrative endorsement contract with Subway Corporate? What about Subway legal? What about all the dieters who purchase subway sandwiches in homage to your diet success? These things [Subway sandwiches] are lard bombs with cheese and condiments!” Jared: “Are you a sandwich artist or not!?” Sandwich artist: “I’m a sandwich artist! Dammit! I’m a sandwich artist!” Jared: “Then do as I command!” Sandwich artist (applying cheese and condiments) “May god have mercy on your soul!” But really, I’m just like “whatever,” when it comes to Jared. But you want to know what’s fucked up about Subway? For FOREVER I’ve been collecting those little sub club tickets they give you when you buy a sandwich. They’re tiny (and probably intentionally) easy to lose, so I’m always so careful to tuck them into a special place in my wallet. You’re going to be mad if, like me, you’ve been collecting sub club points and you didn’t know this all along: It turns out that the only thing you can get for your sub club points - no matter how many you have - is more submarine sandwiches! That’s seriously fucked up. Brian 4:27 PM (0) comments Saturday, February 05, 2005 I’ve been watching this PBS series about psychology. A particular episode I saw about a week ago dealt with theories on how childhood mental state affects physical condition - even the physical shape, growth, and build of people. Part of the documentary featured the life of J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan. J.M. had a brother who died at a young age in some really tragic way. As it turns out, J.M.’s brother was his mom’s favorite, and she never really recovered from the loss. She spent the rest of her years in bed giving J.M. shit and whenever J.M. tried to visit her room she’d be like, “Oh, it’s you, I was hoping it’d be your brother because I never really loved you, you un-wanted, decrepit, rotten, vinegar-smelling sour fruit of my loins. According to the PBS series, this kind of treatment hurt J.M.’s feelings so bad his hippocampus got all fucked up or his pituitary got plugged or something, and that’s why he never grew up (in real life!). The PBS series showed an old daguerreotype or something of J.M. at his writing desk when he was fifty-something years old, and it’s true - he looked kind a like a really old kid, like those kids you sometimes see on Maury Povich (I’m just mentioning the Maury kids for comparison purposes, I’m not saying that the Maury kids’ parents are jerks.) J.M. Barrie went on to live a lonely, tortured life, albeit never growing up, but he really like writing. I guess he was a really prolific but his stories’ protagonist was always a child who had never grown up - Peter Pan was just the one that went all Hollywood. To further illustrate what the PBS series claimed was the result of J.M. Barrie’s childhood emotional trauma, the series mentioned that it was discovered, after J.M. passed away, that he had never grown pubic hair and that his testicles had never descended (you know, like down out of his body and into his beanbag). Only after J.M. Barrie’s burial were his written last wishes discovered. He had made only one post-mortem request. It was this: “I’ve got an idea, assholes, how about after I’m dead you leave me some dignity and stay the fuck out of my pants!” Brian 3:54 PM (0) comments

E-mail: Brian7Morris "at" hotmail.com

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House of Noh!

Thursday, February 24, 2005

When you stop tromping along to stand quietly in the woods, first you’ll only hear the wind rattling leaves and tree branches knocking together. If you stand there long enough you’ll start hearing jays and crows. If you’re patient and keep standing quietly, nuthatches will come back into the area, hopping around the winter-bare branches of the upper canopy, looking for bugs or lichens or whatever they eat. And if you keep standing there after the nuthatches come back you’ll begin to see squirrels poke their inquisitive, whiskered noses out of their leaf ball huts in the trees and hop along the forest floor. I don’t know what happens if you wait quietly after the squirrels come out. Maybe a Pegasus or something appears. I don’t know because when the squirrels come out, that’s when I start shooting. On my nightly constitutional last evening I sat down at the corner of Broadway and Sheridan to lament that the city contains no such delicately emerging mysteries as the woods. I was to learn, however, that the city does seem to operate on similar principles. I found a pleasant seat on that wooden box on the corner that contains the winter-dry sunflower garden. At first, there were just cars and buses and a few people pedaling by on bikes. The people walking by were coming home from work and might as well have been trees, they seemed furiously occupied with their inner lives like most hardwoods are. But after I sat there long enough, the city’s curious creatures started to emerge. At first, it was this guy with a deep lavender parka with a fur-lined collar draped over his arm. “Fur coat for sale!” he stopped and told me. “No thanks.” He took the fact that I didn’t want to buy his fur coat personally. “But it’s only 18 bucks!” he shouted. “Yes, but I rarely have the occasion to wear fine furs.” My comment failed to console him. “I’m just trying to make a living!” He shouted at me. “Asshole!” Then he walked off to sell his fur coat to somebody else. After a while, another, even better denizen of the city emerged from the throng of people walking past. This guy had walked past me earlier, wearing his long, unbuttoned overcoat, sneakers, and a t-shirt with its neck elastic v’d down by a dangling pair of aviator style sunglasses. I remembered him because it was cold and I thought he should have a scarf with his neck and upper chest exposed like that. “Hey!” He shouted at me. “HEY!” He was standing sort of behind me. I turned around to look up at him and he screwed up his face in an effort to enunciate a very carefully scripted joke. This was the joke: “When they told Bush that they discovered water on Mars, Bush asked, ‘regular or unleaded?’” I guess the guy felt I needed a laugh or something and was determined to do a good deed. We both chuckled a bit about the joke and then he, with a very satisfied air about him for a job well done, walked across the street and over to the Hotel Chateau – best transient hotel ever! I’m not sure I get the joke exactly. Does it imply that Bush can only think in terms of petroleum availability, or, my favorite interpretation, does the joke imply that he is some sort of creature that needs gasoline to live like we normal humans require water – the Pres. is some sort of horrible, unworldly creature that hungers to devour petroleum like those bacteria they use to clean up oil spills sometimes and that if one or two ever get loose and mutate to be airborne and multiply rapidly will consume all oil everywhere and mean the end of our way of live forever! Don’t worry, we can trust the same industry that spilled all that oil in the first place to keep a million billion tiny oil-hungry bacteria in check. But whatever, the dude’s joke was really funny. So after all these good tidings the only possible thing I could do was head over to Wrigleyville North for $1.50 drafts. All the best regulars were there, including this old guy named Norman who seems unable to speak in what his mother at one point probably referred to as his “indoor voice.” Norman’s glasses are HUGE! We all watched the Wheel of Fortune. Norman’s guess to the partially lettered “a song by Madonna” puzzle was “Majority Girl.” The answer was “Material Girl,” of course, but still I thought Norman’s guess deserved accolades - Norman's lyrics changing the pro-consumerism ditty into a controversial anthem for democracy. Norman was bitter when the correct answer was revealed. “They had no right to press that button!” Norman shouted of the Wheel of Fortune contestant who correctly guessed the answer. “They had no right! No right to press that button!”

Brian 1:33 PM (0) comments

Friday, February 18, 2005

I've been trying out a hip new hairstyle lately. Unless you're ultra cool, you probably haven't heard about it yet. It's called a pompadour. Today I was walking down the street and there was a tree branch hanging across the sidewalk. I didn't duck it soon enough and part of the branch stuck in my hair. I wrestled with it for a while, but I couldn't get the branch out. You know how when you're fighting in an epic old tyme battle and you get hit with a barbed arrow that you can't pull out the best thing to do is break the arrow off where it protrudes from your body, leaving the arrowhead in your body, and keep fighting? That's what I ended up doing. I had to reach up and snap off the branch where it stuck out of my hair. Then I finished walking down to the Osco to buy a new pair of flip-flops.

Brian 1:59 AM (0) comments

Monday, February 14, 2005

I need an answer to this question VERY QUICKLY: Is it okay to use dryer sheets as toilet paper?

Brian 7:02 AM (0) comments

Friday, February 11, 2005

In the 50’s or 60’s or whenever it was, I understand the urge to not recognize the health hazards of smoking cigarettes. I just don’t like the thought that stuff, like smoke or whatever, goes in your lungs and stays there forever. Alas, I guess it does. That knowledge has taken a lot of the joy out of life for me. For every smell that registers against my olfactory bulb, I bet there’s way more smell particles heading straight down to my lungs. Even for really good smelling things, nowadays it seems like the healthy thing to do is to smell in moderation. It doesn’t matter if it’s a fresh pine scent or somebody else’s stinky fart (everybody likes their own brand), when I think about it I’m always like, “that’s going to be in my lungs FOREVER” - I’m going to get smeller’s cough in the morning just because some jerk in the elevator (discourteously!) insisted on clogging up my alveoli with his stinky farts.

Brian 1:39 AM (0) comments

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

I’m not really one to follow how much people weigh or anything. Jared is an exception. He’s the one who made it an issue - waving his huge old pants around, talking big about how he eats a Subway sandwich for every meal and how he lost all that weight. But have you noticed… recently?…like in his commercials?… Jared’s not so skinny anymore. And if Jared’s weight gain is apparent just by watching Subway commercials, you know that he must be packing on the pounds in real life because I’m sure that before each commercial and public appearance Subway PR people fly in high-priced cosmetologists from Los Angeles with slimming clothes and ultra-tight full-body neo-whalebone man-corsets that take half an hour to cinch Jared into. Nobody understands - Jared’s closest friends, family, his lawyer and agent. They’re all probably like, “we just don’t get it Jared, you’ve got it made - a lucrative endorsement contract, fame, all the free subs you can eat! All you have to do is stay under 193 pounds! That can’t be so hard, can it? For what Subway is offering you?” This whole situation must make for tense meetings between Jared, Subway top brass and Subway’s retained counsel. “Look, Jared!” Subway lawyers threaten, “Subway has been more than patient with you. If your body mass continues to exceed 193 pounds, then Subway is well within its contractual rights to terminate your endorsement contract and recover from you everything you’ve been paid.” Jared probably used to give the lawyers and Subway Corporate false assurances that he’d lose the extra pounds and he probably used to shave off his pubes to read lighter on the Subway scales, but now I bet he’s just like, “go fuck yourself! I can’t live like this!” And I don’t think Subway Corporate is very optimistic about the situation, either; I noticed that Subway’s most recent television commercial lays the groundwork for portraying Jared as a compulsive snacker. That’s right! Get ready for a Subway-backed smear Jared campaign! They’re gonna throw Jared to the dogs! Thing went bad years ago. It’s obvious what’s been happening at the gas station / fast food restaurant where Jared procures his steady diet of Subway sandwiches : Sandwich artist: “Look Jared, you know the rules.” Jared: “Put cheese and condiments on my twelve inch chicken teriyaki sub!” Sandwich artist: “But Jared, what about your lucrative endorsement contract with Subway Corporate? What about Subway legal? What about all the dieters who purchase subway sandwiches in homage to your diet success? These things [Subway sandwiches] are lard bombs with cheese and condiments!” Jared: “Are you a sandwich artist or not!?” Sandwich artist: “I’m a sandwich artist! Dammit! I’m a sandwich artist!” Jared: “Then do as I command!” Sandwich artist (applying cheese and condiments) “May god have mercy on your soul!” But really, I’m just like “whatever,” when it comes to Jared. But you want to know what’s fucked up about Subway? For FOREVER I’ve been collecting those little sub club tickets they give you when you buy a sandwich. They’re tiny (and probably intentionally) easy to lose, so I’m always so careful to tuck them into a special place in my wallet. You’re going to be mad if, like me, you’ve been collecting sub club points and you didn’t know this all along: It turns out that the only thing you can get for your sub club points - no matter how many you have - is more submarine sandwiches! That’s seriously fucked up.

Brian 4:27 PM (0) comments

Saturday, February 05, 2005

I’ve been watching this PBS series about psychology. A particular episode I saw about a week ago dealt with theories on how childhood mental state affects physical condition - even the physical shape, growth, and build of people. Part of the documentary featured the life of J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan. J.M. had a brother who died at a young age in some really tragic way. As it turns out, J.M.’s brother was his mom’s favorite, and she never really recovered from the loss. She spent the rest of her years in bed giving J.M. shit and whenever J.M. tried to visit her room she’d be like, “Oh, it’s you, I was hoping it’d be your brother because I never really loved you, you un-wanted, decrepit, rotten, vinegar-smelling sour fruit of my loins. According to the PBS series, this kind of treatment hurt J.M.’s feelings so bad his hippocampus got all fucked up or his pituitary got plugged or something, and that’s why he never grew up (in real life!). The PBS series showed an old daguerreotype or something of J.M. at his writing desk when he was fifty-something years old, and it’s true - he looked kind a like a really old kid, like those kids you sometimes see on Maury Povich (I’m just mentioning the Maury kids for comparison purposes, I’m not saying that the Maury kids’ parents are jerks.) J.M. Barrie went on to live a lonely, tortured life, albeit never growing up, but he really like writing. I guess he was a really prolific but his stories’ protagonist was always a child who had never grown up - Peter Pan was just the one that went all Hollywood. To further illustrate what the PBS series claimed was the result of J.M. Barrie’s childhood emotional trauma, the series mentioned that it was discovered, after J.M. passed away, that he had never grown pubic hair and that his testicles had never descended (you know, like down out of his body and into his beanbag). Only after J.M. Barrie’s burial were his written last wishes discovered. He had made only one post-mortem request. It was this: “I’ve got an idea, assholes, how about after I’m dead you leave me some dignity and stay the fuck out of my pants!”

Brian 3:54 PM (0) comments

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