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 January 2006 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 Thieves Jargon	No one must know my terrible secret... House of Noh! Sunday, March 26, 2006 I made it the farthest up the Chicago River ever in my kayak on this Sunday evening's expedition. I don't know if it was the Team Chicago! river cleanup, or just the spring thaws, but the huge tree blocking the river was gone from its spot, and I recognized pieces of it along the banks downstream. I made it all the way up past the National Bohemian Cemetery and to Gompers Park, to where CRISIS left his tag under a bridge in four foot high letters spray-painted on the concrete public works next to a mossy trickle of water coming from an old shattered drain tile. It was a nice day in Chicago today, and the whole way up the river my paddling was marked by the numbers of parents who, after spotting me working my way up through a series of rapids or around shopping carts in the stream, pushed their children's strollers up to the fences lining the banks of the river. So many parents did this today that I got tired of waving to them, then I got tired of nodding at them, and so toward the end I was just sort of trying to ignore them: paddling stoicly past their babies pushed up against the chain link, presumably to watch me paddle past. It makes me wonder why they pushed their babies up to the fence, like, what did they think seeing me paddle past would mean to their children? It better mean something bad, and bitter, and regretful. I'm just saying. Because tomorrow I have to go into work where my favorite part of the day is when I go into the bathroom and pick my nose. I do it for like ten minutes, and I sometimes put it off, like, I'll make a deal where I'll wait until the little clock in the bottom right of my computer screen says 9:30, anything to help the day pass a little easier. One time, when I was in fifth grade (and I may have blogged about this before) I raised one hand in class to answer a question while with the other hand I was vigorously picking my nose, and my teacher made fun of me, and everybody laughed, and I'll never forgive that teacher, because teachers get paid NOT to make fun of students, and because I'm an excessively bitter man. I'll never forgive that teacher. NEVER!! Here is a list of the sweet birds I saw this weekend: a woodcock flying across the highway from a car just as the sun went down (this is the season where woodcocks fly from their swampy strongholds to open fields to do aerial mating displays that look like how people say UFOs fly), a fox sparrow (monster truck of the sparrow family), a sharpshin hawk, and a sandhill crane flying desperate confused circles all by him or herself high over Chicago. Brian 6:03 PM (1) comments Thursday, March 23, 2006 Everybody loves The Onion, right? Well let me tell you something about The Onion: its office staffers don't wash their hands after using the bathroom. I know because the place where I work shares a bathroom with the Chicago office of The Onion. They are intolererable. All day long I hear their dogs barking and their techno music through the walls. I see them in the bathroom, each of them dressed like their personal favorite member of Blink 182. Of everybody in the building on our floor, it's The Onion staffers who make it a habit to drop anchor at work - SAVAGES! And they never wash their hands, even after dropping their kids off at the pool; at best just a little quick finger twiddling under the faucet with no soap to make sure that the bacteria on their hands has a nice moist evironment in which to grow. Brian 10:20 PM (0) comments Friday, March 17, 2006 This is the kind of neighborhood I work in: A few days ago I got off my El stop in the morning and turned the corner on to the street I work on and there was a guy holding a few half-filled plastic amber prescription pill bottles in his hands. There was this rough looking street woman grabbing at him and he was fending her off. She was trying to grab at the pills, but he was insistent on rebuffing her, so she started trying to wheedle and deal with him. I had to walk around them and as I passed I saw him hold up the bottle of pills she wanted and I heard him say, "for these you got to pay money." This is the kind of neighborhood I live in: I came home tonight and there was a guy (bum) standing in the alley by the gate to the back stairs up to my place, he was standing facing the back wall of the laudromat, pissing on the wall and the side of the dumpster. I saw him when I first stepped into the alley and he was peeing the whole time it took me to approach the gate to my stairs. I was putting my key in the lock and he was shaking off, and zipping up, then he started walking toward me as two streams of his urine ran out from under the dumpster to the middle of the street. He said something to me that I didn't understand. He was filthy, and was missing most of his bottom teeth. I had to ask him what he was saying. "Sorry," he repeated. But he wasn't GENUINELY sorry, because when I laughed he explained further, and there was absolutely no remorse about him. It was something gleeful about how you got to go when you got to go. Brian 6:31 PM (0) comments Wednesday, March 15, 2006 I'm back to riding the El again. The filthy warehouse I work in now (for the time being) is located out of reach of my beloved (but entirely skanky) millenium park bicycle station, and I can't suck it up to sit in sweaty underwear, sans skank shower, all day behind a computer screen. So now I'm back to riding the El: Brownline. Two mornings ago this elderly asian guy brushed past me, angling for the sweet spot (if you're going to have to stand anyway) in the wide aisles near the middle of the car. He had on a tan trenchcoat, square gold-rimmed glasses, and an impeccably blocked kangol hat, brim oriented at exactly zero degrees in a very conservative fashion. His shoulder bag was hanging to his side, it caught on mine, and as he passed his bag pulled mine across my body and held him up. He was confused at first at what was holding him, so he kept tugging. Then he looked at me all aggressively, like I was holding the dude's bag, but I was just holding onto my bar, wondering why he was tugging on my bag behind me, so I was just like, "Whu Happend?" The guy then bent down, disengaged his bag from mine, and took one step forward and held onto the bar he had been trying to reach. Then during the ride downtown the old guy kept giving me this look, sort of out of the side of his face, like how a dog looks at you without pointing its face at you and showing a lot of whites when the dog is angry at you but doesn't want to start a fight. The old guy kept fiddling with his bag, like, closing it up and then opening it up again and looking inside and making sure everything was in there. I think the point he was trying to make was that if I was a pick-pocket, then he was going to find me out. That started me thinking, what if he was a pickpocket? And the more I thought about it, the more I came to the conclusion that a kangol hat was a very suspicious hat for him to be wearing. And when I analyzed him closely, I discovered that he had razor burns in front of his ears showing he had recently shaven his eyebrows shorter (obviously an attempt to disguise himself as someone sportier). So then I started looking in my bag too, giving him an angry look back while I conducted the inspection of my bag's contents for theft. Fortunately, my banana, notebook with pizza recipes scribbled on it, and some glitter pens, weren't missing. As far as good people to mess with, I think that the elderly asian man couldn't have picked a better person to mess with than me. Case in point: this evening in the grocery store a man (to the extreme embarrassment of his wife) brushed past me taking his shirt off and challenging another guy to a fight while shouting, "I'll show you how to accidentally bump into people in the grocery store!" (I'm paraphrasing) All I said was, "that's entirely unnecessary," and I said it quietly. Counterpoint: if you've ever seen the mail I get, military surplus catalog shopper that I am, you would probably be under the impression that I'm NOT a good guy to mess with (although I am). The other day I received a thick envelope in the mail, and above the address window in large font the envelope read, "DOES IT MATTER WHICH GUN YOU BUY? (Springfield Factory Comp 1911-A1 OR Brolin Arms Pro-Comp; Colt's .38 SF-VI OR EA Windicator (each pictured in thumbnails on the cover)) YOU BET YOUR LIFE!" (get it?) And that's just my junk mail. BTW, if you're wondering what kind of gun I'd buy in each class, the answer is neither, in either gun class. For a .45, I'd pick a Para-Ordinance semi-auto for the unique double column magazine (this model of gun is the sweetheart of famous pistol-fighting writer Massad Ayoob because it combines the stopping power of the larger .45 cartgridge with the firepower of a 9mm pistol). And for my holdout pistol (which I would carry in an ankle holster), I'd buy a stainless steel Smith & Wesson .38 hammerless with a three inch barrel. Brian 7:54 PM (0) comments Thursday, March 09, 2006 One thing that I should have remembered before I waved the bologna (trader joes extra stinky balogna shrink-wrapped special) in Sharon P.'s face was how much that kind of lunch meat disgusts her. I did it only because I was really proud of the snowflake patterns I made out of the circles of extruded meat by folding the slices all up into small triangles and biting the corners off. So Sharon P. tried to play it cool but dry heaved in just the same way she did that time she was messing around with some dirty dishes (even after I warned her) in my sink and found some puffy, hairy, fully developed mold, that, when uncovered, saw its moldy chance and puffed its spores like a thousand late autumn dandelions into her lungs. We (Sharon P. and I) also found a cat. He was screaming - just screaming - in kitten meows with his eyes tightly shut when we walked passed him on Irving Park. This is where there's a cemetery on both sides of the street, just West of where that one Robinson Crusoe homeless guy (and I know that I've typed of this man before, he's a personal hero of mine) built a house amongst the steel supports of the Redline El tracks that attracted a whole kingdom of homeless people with him over one summer. And then one day, when the leaves had begun falling off the trees, I rode a bus past him and the spunky kingdom he had fashioned and they had assembled a Marco Polo caravan of shopping carts piled high with the garbage scavengings, ready for their pre-winter migration and I have never seen any of them again. Sharon and I kept the kitten in a cardboard box in my kitchen with food, and water, and litter in a shoebox with the sides cut down. We guessed he was between four and six weeks old - he was that small. But the vet said he was ten months. He was stunted, he had been on the street for so long. And he had feline leukemia, and such a bad upper respiratory infection that his eyes would seal shut with dried puss and he'd look up out of his box at us the best he could, with blind love in our general direction. We had to have him put down, but both Sharon P. and I miss the little guy, he was such a little sweetheart, and he was so brave too that I wish we had had more choice in the matter. Brian 9:52 PM (3) comments

E-mail: Brian7Morris "at" hotmail.com

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

House of Noh!

Sunday, March 26, 2006

I made it the farthest up the Chicago River ever in my kayak on this Sunday evening's expedition. I don't know if it was the Team Chicago! river cleanup, or just the spring thaws, but the huge tree blocking the river was gone from its spot, and I recognized pieces of it along the banks downstream. I made it all the way up past the National Bohemian Cemetery and to Gompers Park, to where CRISIS left his tag under a bridge in four foot high letters spray-painted on the concrete public works next to a mossy trickle of water coming from an old shattered drain tile. It was a nice day in Chicago today, and the whole way up the river my paddling was marked by the numbers of parents who, after spotting me working my way up through a series of rapids or around shopping carts in the stream, pushed their children's strollers up to the fences lining the banks of the river. So many parents did this today that I got tired of waving to them, then I got tired of nodding at them, and so toward the end I was just sort of trying to ignore them: paddling stoicly past their babies pushed up against the chain link, presumably to watch me paddle past. It makes me wonder why they pushed their babies up to the fence, like, what did they think seeing me paddle past would mean to their children? It better mean something bad, and bitter, and regretful. I'm just saying. Because tomorrow I have to go into work where my favorite part of the day is when I go into the bathroom and pick my nose. I do it for like ten minutes, and I sometimes put it off, like, I'll make a deal where I'll wait until the little clock in the bottom right of my computer screen says 9:30, anything to help the day pass a little easier. One time, when I was in fifth grade (and I may have blogged about this before) I raised one hand in class to answer a question while with the other hand I was vigorously picking my nose, and my teacher made fun of me, and everybody laughed, and I'll never forgive that teacher, because teachers get paid NOT to make fun of students, and because I'm an excessively bitter man. I'll never forgive that teacher. NEVER!!

Here is a list of the sweet birds I saw this weekend: a woodcock flying across the highway from a car just as the sun went down (this is the season where woodcocks fly from their swampy strongholds to open fields to do aerial mating displays that look like how people say UFOs fly), a fox sparrow (monster truck of the sparrow family), a sharpshin hawk, and a sandhill crane flying desperate confused circles all by him or herself high over Chicago.

Brian 6:03 PM (1) comments

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Everybody loves The Onion, right? Well let me tell you something about The Onion: its office staffers don't wash their hands after using the bathroom. I know because the place where I work shares a bathroom with the Chicago office of The Onion. They are intolererable. All day long I hear their dogs barking and their techno music through the walls. I see them in the bathroom, each of them dressed like their personal favorite member of Blink 182. Of everybody in the building on our floor, it's The Onion staffers who make it a habit to drop anchor at work - SAVAGES! And they never wash their hands, even after dropping their kids off at the pool; at best just a little quick finger twiddling under the faucet with no soap to make sure that the bacteria on their hands has a nice moist evironment in which to grow.

Brian 10:20 PM (0) comments

Friday, March 17, 2006

This is the kind of neighborhood I work in: A few days ago I got off my El stop in the morning and turned the corner on to the street I work on and there was a guy holding a few half-filled plastic amber prescription pill bottles in his hands. There was this rough looking street woman grabbing at him and he was fending her off. She was trying to grab at the pills, but he was insistent on rebuffing her, so she started trying to wheedle and deal with him. I had to walk around them and as I passed I saw him hold up the bottle of pills she wanted and I heard him say, "for these you got to pay money."

This is the kind of neighborhood I live in: I came home tonight and there was a guy (bum) standing in the alley by the gate to the back stairs up to my place, he was standing facing the back wall of the laudromat, pissing on the wall and the side of the dumpster. I saw him when I first stepped into the alley and he was peeing the whole time it took me to approach the gate to my stairs. I was putting my key in the lock and he was shaking off, and zipping up, then he started walking toward me as two streams of his urine ran out from under the dumpster to the middle of the street. He said something to me that I didn't understand. He was filthy, and was missing most of his bottom teeth. I had to ask him what he was saying. "Sorry," he repeated. But he wasn't GENUINELY sorry, because when I laughed he explained further, and there was absolutely no remorse about him. It was something gleeful about how you got to go when you got to go.

Brian 6:31 PM (0) comments

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

I'm back to riding the El again. The filthy warehouse I work in now (for the time being) is located out of reach of my beloved (but entirely skanky) millenium park bicycle station, and I can't suck it up to sit in sweaty underwear, sans skank shower, all day behind a computer screen. So now I'm back to riding the El: Brownline.

Two mornings ago this elderly asian guy brushed past me, angling for the sweet spot (if you're going to have to stand anyway) in the wide aisles near the middle of the car. He had on a tan trenchcoat, square gold-rimmed glasses, and an impeccably blocked kangol hat, brim oriented at exactly zero degrees in a very conservative fashion. His shoulder bag was hanging to his side, it caught on mine, and as he passed his bag pulled mine across my body and held him up. He was confused at first at what was holding him, so he kept tugging. Then he looked at me all aggressively, like I was holding the dude's bag, but I was just holding onto my bar, wondering why he was tugging on my bag behind me, so I was just like, "Whu Happend?" The guy then bent down, disengaged his bag from mine, and took one step forward and held onto the bar he had been trying to reach.

Then during the ride downtown the old guy kept giving me this look, sort of out of the side of his face, like how a dog looks at you without pointing its face at you and showing a lot of whites when the dog is angry at you but doesn't want to start a fight. The old guy kept fiddling with his bag, like, closing it up and then opening it up again and looking inside and making sure everything was in there. I think the point he was trying to make was that if I was a pick-pocket, then he was going to find me out. That started me thinking, what if he was a pickpocket? And the more I thought about it, the more I came to the conclusion that a kangol hat was a very suspicious hat for him to be wearing. And when I analyzed him closely, I discovered that he had razor burns in front of his ears showing he had recently shaven his eyebrows shorter (obviously an attempt to disguise himself as someone sportier). So then I started looking in my bag too, giving him an angry look back while I conducted the inspection of my bag's contents for theft. Fortunately, my banana, notebook with pizza recipes scribbled on it, and some glitter pens, weren't missing.

As far as good people to mess with, I think that the elderly asian man couldn't have picked a better person to mess with than me. Case in point: this evening in the grocery store a man (to the extreme embarrassment of his wife) brushed past me taking his shirt off and challenging another guy to a fight while shouting, "I'll show you how to accidentally bump into people in the grocery store!" (I'm paraphrasing)

All I said was, "that's entirely unnecessary," and I said it quietly.

Counterpoint: if you've ever seen the mail I get, military surplus catalog shopper that I am, you would probably be under the impression that I'm NOT a good guy to mess with (although I am). The other day I received a thick envelope in the mail, and above the address window in large font the envelope read, "DOES IT MATTER WHICH GUN YOU BUY? (Springfield Factory Comp 1911-A1 OR Brolin Arms Pro-Comp; Colt's .38 SF-VI OR EA Windicator (each pictured in thumbnails on the cover)) YOU BET YOUR LIFE!" (get it?) And that's just my junk mail.

BTW, if you're wondering what kind of gun I'd buy in each class, the answer is neither, in either gun class. For a .45, I'd pick a Para-Ordinance semi-auto for the unique double column magazine (this model of gun is the sweetheart of famous pistol-fighting writer Massad Ayoob because it combines the stopping power of the larger .45 cartgridge with the firepower of a 9mm pistol). And for my holdout pistol (which I would carry in an ankle holster), I'd buy a stainless steel Smith & Wesson .38 hammerless with a three inch barrel.

Brian 7:54 PM (0) comments

Thursday, March 09, 2006

One thing that I should have remembered before I waved the bologna (trader joes extra stinky balogna shrink-wrapped special) in Sharon P.'s face was how much that kind of lunch meat disgusts her. I did it only because I was really proud of the snowflake patterns I made out of the circles of extruded meat by folding the slices all up into small triangles and biting the corners off. So Sharon P. tried to play it cool but dry heaved in just the same way she did that time she was messing around with some dirty dishes (even after I warned her) in my sink and found some puffy, hairy, fully developed mold, that, when uncovered, saw its moldy chance and puffed its spores like a thousand late autumn dandelions into her lungs.

We (Sharon P. and I) also found a cat. He was screaming - just screaming - in kitten meows with his eyes tightly shut when we walked passed him on Irving Park. This is where there's a cemetery on both sides of the street, just West of where that one Robinson Crusoe homeless guy (and I know that I've typed of this man before, he's a personal hero of mine) built a house amongst the steel supports of the Redline El tracks that attracted a whole kingdom of homeless people with him over one summer. And then one day, when the leaves had begun falling off the trees, I rode a bus past him and the spunky kingdom he had fashioned and they had assembled a Marco Polo caravan of shopping carts piled high with the garbage scavengings, ready for their pre-winter migration and I have never seen any of them again.

Sharon and I kept the kitten in a cardboard box in my kitchen with food, and water, and litter in a shoebox with the sides cut down. We guessed he was between four and six weeks old - he was that small. But the vet said he was ten months. He was stunted, he had been on the street for so long. And he had feline leukemia, and such a bad upper respiratory infection that his eyes would seal shut with dried puss and he'd look up out of his box at us the best he could, with blind love in our general direction. We had to have him put down, but both Sharon P. and I miss the little guy, he was such a little sweetheart, and he was so brave too that I wish we had had more choice in the matter.

Brian 9:52 PM (3) comments

<< chicago blogs >>

Archives