It's a Pity

Call it a Catholic upbringing or what have you, but I'm afraid I will always see something fetid, something false, in normal human conversation. The game of human beings reacting and feeding off of each others cues, living in the moment, imagining ourselves to lose ourselves. It is a lie. It is a foulness. Or simple bitterness on my part more than likely. Yet I can not help but feel slightly nauseous when I see people lost in conversation with each other. Can't help but feel ashamed of myself when a familiar face makes me feel happy. Utterly baffled when a friend shares something about himself to me with matter-of-fact ease. Several years ago I told an older woman that I lived alone and she was shocked. She said that she couldn't imagine spending an hour of her day without having someone to talk to. Her statement filled me with a white rage that terrifies me to this day.


It is often said that writers are supposed to be filled with uncontrollable passions? Well who the hell taught you that? That rapist Bryon? That drunken thug Hemingway? Is there, at any rate, nothing we can possibly feel passionate about besides the fellow shaved monkeys around us?

I write because my interior dialogue is the only one that is unshielded, and this cannot change. This is who a human being really is, the swirling yokes of feeling and thought and sensation that cannot be released to another through speech or touch or look. Our true selves can only be found by staring within ourselves and giving shapes to these half-comprehended shades. It is then and only then that we can know who we love and who we hate and who simply amuses us and why. But we can never know them. We can only know what we are to us. The world and everyone in it but you will always be objects to you. If we cannot know each other than the best we can do is to love and emphasize, to realize that the isolation we have all been damned to will ultimately hit the extroverts the hardest. Their light hearts will surely beat longer than others, and so to them goes the honor of burying lovers and friends until they see, until they know, and than there will be no one to talk to.

And so it goes.

Oh, the usual boilerplate. Futile struggle against a hostile nature and indifferent universe. etc. etc

There Was a Time When I Loved The Spark of a Warm Afternoon

And now the sun of through the window of my old apartment
Now the smell of mowed grass is a mockery
Everything I've Failed to Appreciate
The Afternoons when I was twenty four, long ago
the Fridays when I would feel the electricity
Freshly broken up, Perfectly Contented to Spend Whole Days alone
A feeling Gone forever, How Strange
The Grocery Shopping on Friday Afternoons,
The Walk Down To South Street and back, the first time
The first Halloween, Hunter S. Thompson
Still Thrilled at the Sight of the O Street Crowds
The Happiness of Weekends alone
Trips to the bars, perhaps to find a woman, perhaps not.
The love of the smell of dried grass in the air
The feel in the apartment on afternoons that is still there, still the same,
but stining now, Not embracing and alive, as it was
Under This sky and Under These Trees, so long, so long,
Watching the Games with the low-rent people in the union.
Driving to work on the last day of the spring break blizzard,
seeing the sun appear out of the clouds for the first time
The Mopac Trail on my First New Years Day here
I Could tolerate the cold than, oh how I could tolerate the quiet
Always the same calm in my apartment that unified Summer and winter but no more
Now I must Embrace them. I will embrace Chicago when the time comes,
Let me morn now.
The Starship, Hustle and Flow.
Introducing Dan to Shoemaker's, collaborating on the Laurus Story
The nights on the HOA porch
Drinking to bitter hangover and loving it
Let me mourn for what it took me too long to value.
The wisdom that I never asked to bare.
The one love I truly wanted and can't have
The same mourning we all feel
The same weaknesses we brothers all share
And so of so little help to each other
Just the same mirrors showing our own growth and Decay
The beauty that kills all who value it
We can never have this again
We have but to rue the happiness of our children.

I've Had a Vision

Not a dream but a waking vision. Naked Iron Age women circled around a primitive farm field offering their vaginae to the sky in order to summon rain. And I feel a certainty that something like this has happened, perhaps in my own ancestral line.

So My Mom Called me Last Friday

And asked if I would be available to pick up my cousin Wendy at Eppley Airport and drive her to North Platte through the night. It seems that she had run into money trouble while her husband Richard was visiting the people in Nebraska, and her ex boyfriend kindly offered to drive her from Lake Havasu City Az. to her parents in Las Vegas. He ended up sort of kidnapping her instead. Putting her and her children on a plane from Havasu to Reno and leaving her to escape at the Reno airport by telling him that she and the kids were going to the bathroom. She got a hold of her in-laws, my Aunt Sue and Uncle Tim, and managed to secure airfare from Reno to Omaha via, oddly, Tucson. My mom called at about one o'clock on Friday and asked if I would be able to pick her up at 9:55 and drive her to her husband in North Platte. Of course I would be. So there's that.

I drove to Omaha at about seven P.M. and had a dinner of boiled beef and sourkraut at the Bohemian Cafe with a meatball soup appetizer. The entree had too much dill in it and the gigantic portions left me stuffed for five hours. But overall it was nice. The waitress was great, and at any rate the presence of a Bohemian cafe in Nebraska's chief market is fraught with significance. It the only way it would be better is if the place were on Center Street, the road into Omaha from the Polish/Bohemian/whatever Alps. But on second thought nah fuck that street.

I bought coffee from a place on thirteenth and wondered along the riverfront for a short while before arriving at the airport at round 9:30. In the lounges by the gates middle-aged men were watching the Olympic opening ceremonies as if it were a funeral. I made a crack about knowing that the nation of Comoros existed now and was completely ignored.

The plane was on time from Tucson, but the jet-way was busted, so Wendy and her brood emerged from the plane half an hour behind schedule. Said brood consists of Jade, age six, and the twins Jeremiah and Jacob, eighteen months. In addition to her very small and very loud children Wendy had brought eight bags of luggage and toys, along with a crib and stroller for two. I drive a 95 Buick Grand Prix, and I had brought my own laundry with me out of pure reflex.

She made arrangements to leave the stroller in the care of an attendant on the oddball Arizona-Nebraska route. Several bags of clothes were ripped open for the sake of fitting in the trunk along with the crib, which fell out of it's cover and onto my foot in the process of figuring out how to fit everything in. While Wendy was in the airport making the deal with an attendant, a airport cop stepped out and asked us how much longer we would be. We had been parked by the terminal doors for fifteen minutes or so at that point. I told him he would have to ask the redhead inside at the Jet Express desk. This he proceeded to do after making small talk with the kids and expressing sympathy at the distance we would have to drive.

We eventually got everything into the trunk save for Wendy's suitcase, which she would sit on unbelted. The trunk closed with a small, disconcerting click and I knew that I would do well to avoid a rear-end crash of any magnitude.

The drive was pleasant enough. Wendy spoke of her ordeal and her days as a Vegas stripper and pointed out that she was worried about the cop I had directed towards her because of the high-grade marijuana she had towed across four different airport security checkpoints in a single day. This was good to know. The children fell asleep almost as soon as we started driving. She passed out in Lincoln. If Metallica's "One" hadn't come onto the radio around York I would have gone mad and/or killed everyone in the car.

A stop at Grand Island for more coffee, arrived at my parents house just after four.
My parents are having their bedroom and bathroom renovated. My old room upstairs is being taken by my cousins and their kids. I slept on an air mattress in the computer room five feet from where my father snored in his recliner.

The next day I was high on the high-grade pot and walking the dogs for relaxation when my Dad casually had Jade follow me since she wanted to walk the dogs too. And this was too much. She's a sweetheart most of the time but she's still six. The casual assumption that I would help in watching the kids after all I had done was... my God but that house was loud, and I need my twelve hours of solitude a day just like any reasonable man. So I called my mom at work and informed her that I would be coming back to Lincoln that night.

And now I feel guilty about it. My mom always cooks a big breakfast after church on Sundays for her parents and any extended family that wants to show up, and I know she was looking forward to feeding me. We were only together for a couple of hours out of the whole event. But my God, I cannot sleep five feet away from my parents while infants squeal at random points in the night. I'm just weak that way. I felt like some dipshit tourist taken in by a local peasant family while hiking Ecuador. And I'll be back on Labor Day when surely there will be some space carved out for me somewhere in the house, surely it will get back to resembling my house, our house.
Oh but Fuck it all, I suppose I'll have to tolerate my own infants someday, but damned if I'll tolerate anyone else's.

Last Night

I was in the immaculate garden where Payton Farquhar found refuge.

I Was in Omaha Some Days Back

I wondered by the riverfront for awhile until I was past the point that has recently been developed for tourists and was back to where there is just the railroad tracks, cement factories, death trap streets,gravel paths to nowhere. It is somehow a great comfort to know that Nebraska's gateway to the East is still a profoundly ugly one. Railroads and cement factories are necessary, but old hat, not superficially progressive enough.

I wondered upon the Amtrak station at 9th and Pacific. It would be closed for several more hours before they started taking tickets for the one train from Chicago to the Bay Area. I used the stations parking lot as a portal to trespass onto the track that cross the river immediately to the east and gradually loop through town to Ralston and Sarpy and eventually Lincoln to the west. Here one will find the original three-block long boarding platform for the old Burlington station. The side of the station that faces the street has been kept up and still looks impressive. The side facing the tracks consists of windows broken decades ago and unwashed graffiti. The interior consists of nothing but dust, odd junk, and one can imagine more than a few rats. There is an awning at the rear of the platform leading to a long rotted-out staircase into the building. Still the place looks better than the glass box Amtrak station, and I see it's being developed into condos. "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burlington_Station" Well, good luck with that. They're definitely going to have to do something about the railroad front.

The platform was covered with rusted metal and glass. It was humid and I was dressed in shorts and sandals. I was a bit concerned for myself. But I was looking for a quick way into downtown and was a bit curious as to what was along this track in the southern midtown area, so I continued to walk southwest. I was looking for a break in the fences to get back to the street grid and there were none. Eventually I came to the overpass over 13th street. There was something of a foot path leading down to the street, presumably made by hobos and random weirdos like myself. By grabbing the branches of a strategic tree I was able to overcome my sandals' lack of traction and make it down to the pavement without tumbling onto it. Than I had lunch at a gyro place a few blocks further south.

It seems that higher gas prices are driving many to lower themselves to the decadent European level and ride the train cross-country "http://omaha.com/index.php?u_page=2798&u_sid=10397453" Of course the problems with Amtrak are well-known. Trains are typically obscenely late, still contacted to ride along meandering Burlington/Santa Fe routes despite B/SF being bought out by Union Pacific some years ago, still forced to yield to freight trains, still carrying standard engines so that they cross the landscape at about the same speed as a modern car retracing a 1920's auto-trail.

But I am a naive and hedonistic leftest, and the truth is that I am so out of touch with my own Godly culture that I really despise driving for more than an hour at a time. Amtrak is shit. This is perfectly clear. But the fact of the matter is that there is no way to travel long-distance that isn't painful. Only Americans would believe that there's something magical or ecstatic about stuffing oneself in some manner of moving box and traveling two thousand miles in one day. Only Americans would think that we are supposed to believe such a thing. The thrill of the open road. Utter horse shit.

So I'm not willing to give up on shoveling tax money into Amtrak. I've ridden the Zephyr and could see with my own eyes that it clearly isn't that much. Let's get faster trains, like they have ion the coastal strips, nationwide. Or how about a north/south line for the Red and Missouri valleys? Fargo to Sioux Falls to Omaha to Kansas City and than on to the cities of Texas. Light rails to Lincoln and Fremont and Blair. You hate your car. Admit it. It's okay. None of your friends can see you now. You can trust the silence of your confessor.

I remember seeing a video once in which Joseph Alioto, mayor of San Francisco in the early seventies, was testifying before a Senate committee and getting berated by Roman Hruska, our own late, great, proudly ignorant, Bohunk jackass, for having the audacity to not cover his city with freeways. Those of us who have been to Frisco, who have seen how beautiful, delicate, and densely packed of a city it is, should know that a full American-style freeway system would ruin the place. Never mind. Spending half a billion tax dollars on a freeway is the American capitalist way of doing things. Spending half a billion tax dollars on public transportation is socialist.
This is the American way. We are God's children and we decide what is and is not normal. That which is normal is good because what is good is normal. The private automobile is the symbol or one's worth and value. The fact that my car is bigger than yours is proof that I am more willing to feed my children than you are. I can't count the number of times when grown men, of reasonable intelligence, and with total sincerity, equated the modern automobile with a cowboy's horse, implying a sacred bond between you and your collection of glass and metal tubes. I cannot count the number of times when I was walking and mocked by random passerby for walking. I might as well have been sitting on the corner with my cardboard sign. It's always the people and the shittiest rusted-bondo cars who mock with the most relish, just as poor whites tend to be more virulently racist than the rich and educated.

And a car-based culture does serve its uses. The core of Omaha, the part that facces the Missouri, is nearly as densely populated as the largest cities, and as beautiful in many parts as well, particularly in Little Italy. But real Americans aspire to be aristocrats, measuring our worth by the size of our steed and our amount of land, and sometimes this takes some encouragement. Build a freeway through the densest part of Omaha. Build the 480 and the North Freeway to continue the long-term work of choking off North Omaha from downtown. Do everything you can to make living in the city core as undesirable as possible. Than we can become a city for the worthy ones, the real Americans, the Red Robin's, and the Von Muir's and the streets named after John Galt. Anyone who tries to walk through the neighborhoods of the worthies is bound to get killed. So much the better.

The truth is that our society achieved hegemony too young, while we were still filled with juvenile delusions and our ideal of liberty was restricted to the right to gain the material, the physical, the easy to grasp, the easy to think about. Now we carry on like Ludwig II, using our power to legitimize the nonsense and lunacy that drowns us. I'm not fond of denigrating my own country in particular, we are not at all unusual in this. But it is damned depressing, how stupid the whole lot of us are.

Czech Days

First off. it was still eighty eight degrees and humid at ten p.m. I feel that it's real important to mention this, as a single moment of experiencing hot weather makes every millisecond of life pointless and unbearable and all attempts at social joviality evil and disgusting. But the festival, lets get back to the festival.

Well, the town of Wilber was filled to the brim. I drove in via U.S. 77 and Nebraska 41, a narrow shoulderless road that is usually adequate to serve east-west traffic to and from Wilber but on Czech Days weekend is something of a death trap, especially this long double curve out of Clatonia. Parking was a bit of a problem once I got there but not as bad as downtown Lincoln on a workday. I found a spot at first and Court just two blocks from the west end of the street fair. Mostly it was the pedestrians that made driving through town problematic. The typical big bubbas mixed with girls in old peasant-frauling costume wrapped in the arms of boys in cowboy hats and Jay-Z t-shirts.

It was disappointing, the way that the festival added only a thin layer of gloss to a perfectly generic prairie village. There were two live rock bands playing in the bars. (One thing Wilber has going for it is that it has one bar for every thirty people or so, revealing the town's Bohemian roots much more than any country schlock fest.) One band was playing Puddle of Mudd, the other was playing Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Major events, whether at the personal or community level, are really not at all transformative. They merely amplify the character that is already there. If there isn't anything interesting there than this will become more obvious than ever.

There was a street dance going on in the parking lot of a small grocery store. They were playing some current top-forty rap of the type I do my best to avoid. Girls in tank tops and high heels complimented by the occasional straw hat. Boys standing on the backs of pickup trucks and, dear God, raising the roof. It wasn't more than ten years ago when white people in even the larger Midwestern towns had a knee-jerk hostility towards rap. We should go back to that. Rap was better then. It was beyond horrible, watching these kids scream and "dance" while the stereo spouted TRL cant. Girl I like it when/you move that/sit back for me dolla/slap that/Mercedes Rims/That Bitch got a Dime/Move that Ass/ Who now?

I walked to a food stand featuring fare from the meat market owned by Russ Karpisek. Karpisek is known to the outside world as the state senator from the area, replacing deranged moon-harpy Jeanne Combs of 'I need a concealed gun to protect myself from prostitutes' fame. In the last session Karpisek managed to get a bill of his passed which upped the penalty for possession of marijuana under an ounce, reasoning that it was wrong for minors who are caught drinking to be punished more harshly than if they were smoking a substance that it illegal to all. While Karpisek is a marked improvement over Combs, it is still comforting to know that the area can still produce senators with ass-backwards solutions to state problems. I bought a polish dog with kraut. It was magnificent. All is forgiven senator.

I walked into a bar, also owned by Karpisek unless it's his brother or something. There was a Cech brass band singing a drinking song that was incomprehensible over the crowd. There was a two dollar cover charge, with another three-fifty for a Pillsner Urquell. The women were overweight and/or overly made-up. It was stuffed fill of assholes and the collective body heat negated the air conditioning, and than the band started playing the husker fight song, and the people sang along, and I always knew that this would happen. Even when I was an infant, unable to speak or reason, I knew that this moment would be. That I would be in a bar in Wilber Nebraska listening to a brass band in peasant costume playing the Husker Fight song while I was surrounded by sunburned rubes in a fire-hazard country bar. This is my moment of eternal return, this is what I will experience forever in the split-second before my death, and the thought of that fills me with a sort of bitter peace. Why does the world hurt me? Why does it hate me? Why must I be the one who reveals the smell of spilled Bud Light on the floor combined with sweat and chewing tobacco? There is no escape from this universal destiny. This is are apocalypse. While the rest of the world collapses in a great wave of blood and fire, Nebraska will be in a bar listening to an Ethnic brass band play "Good ol Nebraska U."

After this I wondered up and down the festival streets until I came to the Hotel Wilber. Which is a historic hotel which is currently being used as, a hotel, or rather a bed-and-breakfast. And in truth the place is, rather pretty. Judging by the website it seems that the maids and the waitresses all dress in old-world costume. This loses its novelty quickly. It only takes a few minutes for the sight of a woman in Czech dress smoking a cigarette, drinking a Bud Light, and cursing her child via cellphone to become nothing at all.

The Hotel Wilber is where the various state Czech Queens are being kept. I was surprised at how easily I walked in the front door. There were various hangers-on about, presumably the owners of the hotel, officials connected to the pageant, the festival, the town. The Czech Queens came and went among them, dressed down to five or six layers of underwear. Why I didn't strike up a conversation with one of them I don't know. I could of taken them away from there. We could have gone to Oakland, where the weather is never offensive and the subdivisions among white people are laughably insignificant. But here I am and there they are. Life is pain.

I went to a liquor store in search of an individual 24 of Urquell, but all they had in this vain were Budweiser products. I went back to my car and eventually navigated my way out of the village, taking the shouldered Nebraska 103 north towards Crete. Two thirds of the other cars on the highway were cops just sitting there just waiting to catch somebody swerving. When I got back to Lincoln I bought a pint of Pillsner Urquell from N street liquors and drank it in the alleys of T-Town.

McDonalds Boycotted for Supporting Gay Agenda in Ways Boycotters Seem Unsure Of.

Some knucklehead group out of Naperville called "Americans for Truth About Homosexuality" was whining about the Chicagoland media's blatantly conspiratorial lack of coverage of a press conference the group had on the boycott. This in spite of the fact that "nearly 200000" that's right, "nearly 200000" or nearly one-fifteenth of one percent of the American population, has signed onto the boycott.


"The people involved in this boycott of McDonald’s are good family people — not vegans, America-hating leftists, or some other fringe group."

Right. Boycotting a multi-billion dollar corporation for donating twenty grand to the Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce is clearly more American than boycotting McDonald's over objections to the meat industry's treatment of animals. Veganism is communism because people who don't eat meat hate their father's penis.

http://americansfortruth.com/news/chicago-media-blacks-out-mcdonalds-boycott-press-conference.html

The comments on the actual boycott site itself, http://www.boycottmcdonalds.com/ demonstrates how right-wing sloganeering is a bigger threat to the English language that VH1 can ever hope to be. The act of creating ultra-compound sentences for the sake of jamming all of the catch phrases in creates a very Beckettian sense of anti-narrative.

"America is tired of corporations and organizations twisting the free speech and actions of its citizens into 'hatred' when we simply oppose the corporation's, or organization's, involvement in areas where we don't want our money going. Opposing your involvement says nothing about the individual's point of view on homosexuality and yet you claim to know, anyway. How arrogant and childish. We are tired of the brainwashing politically correct movement. I hoped McD's was smarter than that, but obviously it's not. Don't expect anymore of my money."


"We love your fries, but we will not compromise truth. You have taken money that our family, and millions of others, have contributed to the success of the McDonald's Corp. and chosen to use it for an agenda that defies the foundation of our nation, the family, as created by a man and woman. Perhaps you should spend more time sitting at the tables in the play yards of the thousands of McD's restaurants around the country. We will only be missing the fries, but your corporation has lost something much greater, respect and truth."

"I will take me 10 great grand children to Wendys BurgerKing or some other place. YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN!"
(I will take ME ten great-grandchildren? Are London chimney-sweeps signing the petition?)

"We will not spend our money at MCD's until the Co. becomes neutral on the homosexual agenda which breaks down the natural family unit. Having two gay sisters, I know first hand how destructive this agenda becomes. I do not take it lightly labeling Christians as hateful. We just dislike the carefree lifestyles imposed on others. Lets keep our American values."

Conservative cant bingo anyone?

Politically correct
family values
American Family (capitalization theirs)
American Values (ditto)
gay agenda
Homosexual agenda
gay agenda
Homosexual Agenda
gay agenda
gay agenda

I believe I have a postage stamp.

I Swam At Blue Stem Lake Today

Tried to go to Branched Oak on the weekend but it was actually guarded by Game and Parks employees. I told one that I was lost coming out of Malcolm and he guided me back to town while his hand rested on the towel in the passenger seat.

Blue Stem was nice, the feeling of forty five minutes in pesticide-flavored water on a hot day is incomparable, something that one must do at least once in the summer. Some of the locals were there, don't know if they were from Lincoln or actually local-local. They seemed about nineteen and had no children with them.

Afterwords I went to Crete to have a drink at one of the local bars and catch something of the flavor of the town that way as is my wont. But it seems that Crete is woefully undertaverned, only three bars in a town of fifteen thousand, and only the VFW was open even though it was barely an hour before five o'clock. I take this as a sign of racial tension, or at least some sort of coldness and unwillingness of the townspeople to connect.

So I came back to Lincoln and stopped at the Ideal supermarket looking for some middle-brow tomato sauce to add to some pasta I made yesterday. All they had were the name brands offered at twice the market value, this and middle-brow wine priced at twice the market value. I still have at least a liter and a half on my box of Franzia.

After all of this disappointment the only logical thing to do was to dine at the KFC buffet at ninth and South. I waited in line for ten minutes behind an elderly woman who was having all of the combo meals explained to her point by point. I was the only one there who wasn't at least forty pounds overweight, I thought back to the lake and was horrified. Somehow I knew that, for at least those forty-five minutes, I had a full pair of breasts. I was shirtless of course, and they were there for all to see. Fat, milk gland, enlarged pores, covered in grease. If the police had shown up at that moment I would have been infamous. My breasts roast in the sun for eternity. I had the extra crispy, some buffalo fingers, buttermilk biscuit in brown gravy, and the vanilla wafer pudding.

Actual World-Herald Headline

"The 'Saddle Creek Generation' takes a cue from vintage listeners"

It seems that the (Choke) "Saddle Creek Generation" in addition to obsessing over failed relationships and awkwardly spouting liberal slogans, has the same taste for vinyl L.P's that every youngish music fan of every generation, every subculture, and every subgenre has had since the invention of the compact disc.

It is comforting, isn't it, that members of the (gargle) "Saddle Creek Generation" have shown their Midwestern essence by latching onto a (supposed) fad that could not possibly distinguish anybody from anyone.

I don't know how to say it, and yet I can't stop writing about it. I mean seriously, a vinyl collection is as universal as it gets.

"The 'Saddle Creek Generation' Enjoys Beer and Sex"

"The 'Saddle Creek Generation' will quote 'Simpsons' lines when conversation lulls."

"The 'Saddle Creek Generation' is happy at weddings and sad at funerals"

"Men of 'Saddle Creek Generation' are only pretending to enjoy Carly Simon"

"The 'Saddle Creek Generation' whispers at how mismatched you are with your girlfriend when you're not in the room"


"The tenacious comeback of classic vinyl LPs that started several years ago still is going strong."


Indeed it is John Keenen, indeed it is. Your piercing insight into the most obscure subcultural crevasses is truly exacerbating. I salute you sir. And I salute the entire staff of the World-Herald for extending showing such keen insight into youth culture.

Ya fucking dipshits.

http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_page=1208&u_sid=10384767

Thoughts on The Memorial Park Show.

The Good Life are rather overrated. The impulse to write songs about nothing but your failed relationships is born of the same navel-gazing that causes relationships to fail. Tim Kasher is an absolute dope who lacks stage presence and makes political shout-outs so ham-fisted as to make Kanye West seem smooth. But hell, it was vaguely groovable music played on a beautiful day, their signiture, "Album of the Year" is undeniably endearing, and overall it could have been worse, even with the doddering teenage twits who make up the band's most loyal base.
4.5/10

Argentine Juana Molina's folktronica sound is damned fascinating, especially with her Italian-flavored, consonants-as-vowels, Buenos Aires dialect of Spanish. Her instruments are an acoustic guitar, some synthesizers, and an echo machine that enables her to use a a single lyrical line as background noise for the next minute or so. Very cool, and perfect for sunset.
8/10

I actually liked her better than Feist, who was perfectly fine, charming and playing a good mix of up-tempo songs and torch burners. I'm afraid that I was somewhat distressed by the climax of the show as I had lost track of anyone from Lincoln and worried that my Smiley novel and cheap cigarettes were lost to the four winds. But in the end I ran into Ms. Rebecca who had dutifully saved them for me. There was a shadow show that complimented the music very well, especially on the false closer before the encore, the night was cool and the crowd became more tolerable as Leslie began to command their attention. Overall though, I felt as if something were being held back, can't really explain why.
7.5/10

No Comment Neccessary

Tales From North Platte

Jade Keith is my six-year-old second cousin, the daughter of my cousin Richard and his wife Wendy. She has asthma and allergies that she inherited from my uncle Tim and needs breathing treatments every couple of hours. She is smarter than her age and knows it, reading books aloud, pointing out logical absurdities in movies just like I enjoyed doing at her age and do still, and showing off her handful of Spanish to whoever will hear. She is the primary watchdog for her infant twin brothers while the parents are out smoking.

Wendy is my age, 27. She looks a solid eight years older thanks to powder-parties in the Arizona desert. She has vague notions of going to college for something. I told her about my plans for grad school and my vague notions of being a professor. When I told her all that was required she said "so you're some kind of genius right?" She asked me to draw up an IQ test so she could see if night classes would be worth the trouble. I quickly explained that there's some precision to it, logical riddles and spatial testing and all that, nothing one could make up on the spot.

Aside from this request, Wendy gives every indication of being perfectly bright herself, able to read shades and vocal tone and understand the mood of the room and even get my jokes. She is ignorant to the world outside of the trailer park simply because it doesn't exist to her. I wonder how much she was like her daughter at her age. When I was six years old my family recognized my wits and even though they weren't college educated and not rich they still knew well enough to "encourage" me to take up an instrument, write a poem,go out for band, geography bee, get used to showing off my mental processes in public. I never have, but I can at least tolerate the public, more or less, tolerate having something like a name in a way that would be unthinkable if I wasn't a publicly smart kid.

And what about Jade? She lords over children four years older than her with her wits and the ability to say "silly" with all the honeyed venom that makes adults fall in love with young girls. Beyond that she has nothing but some public school in North Vegas that isn't even trying to notice the superlative poor kids and a family that knows nothing of the white-collar spelling bee and recital circuit.

She'll finish high school easily enough and be thrilled to death with it. She'll take She may or may not spend a year or two in junior college before shacking up with some galoot and moving to a trailer park three towns away from the folks, using her mental power to rationalize his thuggery and drunkenness, staying up late to drink every night with him in the neighbors in the hope that some dear girlfriend will show up and maybe they might get a few minutes to talk alone, acquiring a taste for upper-middle brow films and books before finally becoming addicted to General Hospital out of boredom, waiting for her children to grow up and call her for bail, knowing that it's simply a part of life.

On The Al Gorium. (Or Why Al Gore is not an Argument you Stupid Asshole.)

Don't act like you don't want what he's got bitch.

O.K. Slim, I'll try to explain this as simply as I can. The message is wholly, completely, totally, and utterly independent of the messenger in every way. If Hitler tells you that water is wet, water is wet. The fact that Al Gore has a big house means nothing. The fact that Al Gore has a private jet means nothing. If Al Gore had a fleet of three hundred diesel tankers idling in his back yard and running continuously simply to satiate his carbon monoxide fetish, it would mean nothing. The problem with killing the messenger is so obvious that it is almost universally known by its common name instead of the official Latin one. (That's Ad Hominem Slim")
There is no excuse whatsoever for anyone of average intelligence to think that either hypocrisy or perceived hypocrisy is relevent to anything whatsoever. The Ad Hominem is the tool of the moron and the liar and no one else.

It's not fair, I know, the fact that Al Gore has infinitely more money, power, and respect than you do, even though he doesn't know how to be a real man like you do. All the same, the way that Al Gore is jammed into global warming arguments like a frat house broom rape does betray a deep level of envy towards someone who's more successful than you, and that's not very conservative of you now is it Slim? A hundred years from now, Al Gore will be remembered in history with admiration and respect. Your great-grandchildren will read about his wisdom and his foresight while throwing your polaroid out with the cat liter. Fuck you.

So Here's a Little Link from Conservapedia.

http://www.conservapedia.com/Lenski_dialog#Second_reply

Follow it and you find a conversation between Conservapedia founder Andrew Schlafly, (who we can be reasonably certain is at this moment smiling approvingly while mother Phyllis belittles his wife's chicken Marcella) and one Dr. Richard Lenski, evolutionary biologist and professor at Michigan State. The conversation consists of Schlafly's bullying attempts to get Dr. Lenski to 'explain himself' and 'show' the data gathered for a study showing that E. Coli bacteria evolve (duh-duh-duh) over time in order to better fit into their environments. Lenski replies that the data for the experiment is thoroughly documented in the paper he wrote for it, and helpfully points out that Schlafly could download the paper from most any university library if he should ever care to read the study he is criticizing.

Schlafly than makes a huffy second request for data, again making it clear that he has still not read the paper and does not seem to know exactly what "scientific data" entails. Lenski's reply to this is, magnificent.

"...It is my impression that you seem to think we have only paper and electronic records of having seen some unusual E. coli. If we made serious errors or misrepresentations, you would surely like to find them in those records. If we did not, then – as some of your acolytes have suggested – you might assert that our records are themselves untrustworthy because, well, because you said so, I guess. But perhaps because you did not bother even to read our paper, or perhaps because you aren’t very bright, you seem not to understand that we have the actual, living bacteria that exhibit the properties reported in our paper, including both the ancestral strain used to start this long-term experiment and its evolved citrate-using descendants. In other words, it’s not that we claim to have glimpsed “a unicorn in the garden” – we have a whole population of them living in my lab!..."

The thing that makes this such a beautiful moment in internet history is that Schlafly printed the dialogue, which everyone but him can immediately recognize as an absolute rhetorical drubbing, on his very own FAS baby, Conservapedia.com, under the headline, "Take a good look at the attitude our tax dollars are paying for."

I do suppose that it costs money to actually learn something instead of believing in that what we must not think about, but more to the point is the fact that it's Lenski's bad attitude that Schlafly thinks he is revealing, this man who was accused of shoddy record-keeping and outright fraud in a project he had been working on for twenty years, simply because it is proof that evolution exists, and so simply had to be untrue. The sense of entitlement Schlafly feels towards "lesser Americans", the ones who read what they criticize or even the ones who go through college without blocking out all of the information that God doesn't want them to know, is nauseatingly clear.

If you don't have the time to read the entire exchange, you'll find out everything you need to know by how the two mens signitures Schlafly his letters as "Andy Schlafly, B.S.E., J.D. www.conservapedia.com" while the man who has spent the past twenty years working on a hugely important biological study and can also claim the incredible accomplishment of knowing what the hell he's talking about signs as "Richard Lenski."

"In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation … the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not … express themselves in ideas but only … in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas" Lionel Trilling-1950

Susan Smith

I was just reading about the one who drowned her kids about fifteen years back and blamed their disappearance on a phantom black man who who officials dutifully chsed around the country for nine days before the local sheriff employed time-tested Catholic tactics to elicit the down-home Llorona's confession.

I was thinking in particular of her sexual affairs. Smith was catting about with the son of a textile mill owner who was the major employer of her hometown of Union South Carolina. The theory goes that the rich dick didn't want kids, so Smith decided to dispose of her own in order to win his heart and position herself to become the economic crown princess of her town. Like I said, Daisy Mae La Llorona. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Llorona

Smith was also still fooling around with her ex-husband, and the mill owner herself, and the step-father that had began raping her when she was fifteen. (A respected member of the community, the church, and the Republican Party by the way, I'd just thought I'd mention.) Her psychiatrists say that the abuse instilled Smith with an insatiable need for love and affection. Two guards have been fired from the prison where Smith is kept for providing vigorous love and affection.

I know I'm an evil man for thinking this, but I have a feeling that you're thinking it too. God damn but she must fuck like a beast.

Confirmation Bias is a Hell of a Drug.

“He did it by his own achievement. Nobody gave it to him.” Ward Connerly, on Barrack Obama's nomination.

That's an odd way to think of it , Mr. Connerly, since being a successful politician in a democracy necessarily requires depending on other people to give you your job.

"The entire argument for race preferences is that society is institutionally racist and institutionally sexist, and you need affirmative action to level the playing field,” The historic success of Senator Obama, as well as Senator Clinton, dismantles that argument.”

Or perhaps the fact that these campaigns were historic after two hundred and thirty years of American history is proof of that argument's validity.

Perhaps you have been trying very hard not to notice people of average intelligence latching on to the self-apparently ludicrous rumors that Obama is a secret Muslim agent, desperate to find anything to justify their ill-defined fear of the other. Perhaps you haven't noticed the common and equally absurd belief that Senator Clinton
is a stone-hearted man hating harpy, an attitude that is based solely on the fact that Clinton is a woman who is openly as proud and ambitious as any major male politician.

Have you ever seen people who have lost a house to flood or tornado or what have you on the news, Mr. Connerly? I'm sure that you and I have both seen a newly homeless housewife stare into the camera and declare,"I refuse to be a victim."

You probably approve of this, don't you Mr. Connerly? I personally find this statement very bizarre. In spite of what the Optimism Nazis in this country would have us believe, victimhood is not a choice, it is simply a physical condition that does or does not exist. I do not choose whether or not to be a victim, the tornado does.

And what is a natural disaster if not the ultimate proof that we are not the absolute masters of our own fates? That not everything that happens to us, good or bad, is what we bring upon ourselves?

Though I'm sure you would find it intolerably radical and un-American for me to say so, sir, I would suggest that a human society that is unjust and irrational at some level, as all human societies inevitably are, can leave an individual just as helpless and victimized as a natural disaster.

When African-Americans make up 13% of the general population and 40% of the prison population, what is one to say to that? Though you have been nauseatingly close to the Ku Klux Klan before, Mr. Connerly, surely you don't believe that your own people, (Yes, yes, I know, there is only one American people, and social divisions are nothing but imaginary creations of the politically correct.) are more inclined towards criminality than other people. I'm sure that you studiously ignore the fact that some groups of people are more likely to get pulled over by the police for minor offenses or no offense at all than other groups. (Or, indeed, shot dead for no offense at all every now and again.) Does it make the remotest amount of sense to you, that endemic poverty or children out of wedlock within a certain ethnic group is purely the fault of the individual and has nothing whatsoever to do with the larger society? I can assure you, sir, that your ethnic group is no more debauched than mine. Believe you me, I can assure you of that.

Mr. Connerly, I find it hard to believe that the phallus-inflating lie of the individual human as absolute master of his fate is more important to you than your own eyesight. Most people I know take pride in being able to discern the truth of what is around them and yet you willfully twist the facts and information around you to conform to your cowardly and childish delusion of a just society.

I am sure, Mr. Connerly, that you take pride in your own individual success, perhaps even see it as an example for members of other marginalized groups to follow. But have you ever reflected on how sad the manner you came to national prominence truly is? Trolling around looking for small states where the white working-class is frightened and angered by demographic changes shattering their illusions of being the center of the world, asserting your will by preying on the bitter and the ill-informed, providing a scapegoat of the weak to spare uneducated citizens who pride themselves on patriotism from the frightening idea of challenging the social order. I must say, Mr. Connerly, that it is more than a little galling to see such an inveterate bloodsucker as yourself rail against free rides and handouts.

And now you seek to suck the vitality out of my own alma-matter, a rare oasis from the mono-cultural desert that is Nebraska. I am aware sir, that you are appealing mainly to those Nebraskans who like mono-culturalism. Well fuck them. And fuck you.

There are sir, many places in the third world where an individual superman can make himself rich. A Liberian militia, after all, costs much less than a diploma from an American university. It is painfully obvious, Mr. Connerly, that you are completely ignorant to the true appeal of living in a country like this, the true pleasures of living in the modern world. I will thank you sir, to take your grinding white-bread soulessness the hell out of my state, because we already have a surplus of that.

So What's the Deal with Baseball?

I've often noticed how baseball is associated with children and "purity" more than other sports. The recent steroid scandal revealed an entire universe of commentators who are horrified by the example that the chiseled ass-juicers are setting for the children.

It's not that baseball is the only sport where ill-behaved players are berated for the lessons they are supposedly teaching the children. There are, after all, many people in this world who are rather stupid, and stupid people tend to believe stupid things, such that there is an objective, universal standard of masculinity that can be taught to boys through athletics; that a man's path to fulfillment lies in the pyramid of obedience, to dominate his wife and children as the quarterback dominates his players, and to be dominated by his employer as the quarterback is dominated by his coach.

The most galling thing about those who think that rectal vaccination against pop-fly outs is damaging to the children is the obtuseness of those who worry. These are grown adults who simply can't imagine themselves not being influenced by professional athletes, who simply can't imagine not watching sports and certainly can't imagine their children not watching sports. While it's clear that kids in general and boys in particular have some sort of natural impulse to run and play and compete, this is a different thing entirely from watching thirty-year old men do the same thing. This is something that can be indoctrinated or not. It is a choice. Watching a documentary instead of football is not a sign that you or your children are gay, watching large men work themselves into a lather by slamming themselves into each other is.

But to get back to my original point, it is strange how baseball is associated with "the children" than other sports. Baseball teams will often try to sell themselves as "family friendly." (The K.C. Royals in particular will use this line. Children can hardly hear any foul words when there isn't anyone in the stadium to speak them now can they?) "Bring the kids to the park" goes the jingle.

Baseball than, in its idealized form, is bucolic,morally pure and child-friendly; in other words Marian. The manner in which baseball is idolized, the way in which the public sensibility is SHOCKED by any suggestion of naughtiness in the game, makes it clear that some point in our history the collective American conscience came to associate the game of baseball with white women.

It is a damned strange phenomenon, and I don't have the slightest clue for when, where, and how this came to be, but it's certainly clear enough now isn't it? Perhaps it's the fact that baseball has historically been played by more clean-cut crackers than other professional sports. (Barry Bonds as devil.) but than their is also the prevalence of Latinos, the hot other of the month, in the game, and the defenders of youthful virtue are at least publicly unbothered by this, so I don't know.

I had a history professor once who offered a class called "Baseball is America." A real jackass that guy.

Watching TBN in a state of hyper-awareness

Veterans being honored in a tunnel of stars and stripes. Pray for our rulers. Pray for presidents and prime ministers, pray for those who have authority and their will be peace in your life. The storm of Yahwah lashes an arrogant land and brings darkness to the home of Back To The Bible.

Kenneth Copeland; God will perform. (Say it with me, he will perform.)
Kenneth Copeland, mocking the hypothetical orphan taken in by a wealthy Christian family. "I want to meet my biological mother" he says in a third-grade mocking tone. Why? Copeland asks. Such is the love of God for his people.

Dr. Creflo Dollar.
God will cure your debt.
God will cure your debt if you believe.
Stop trying to think your way out of debt.
"That smart head of yours got you into debt in the first place, now didn't it?"
(Nods and grumbles of agreement."
"Turn off the part of your brain that THINKS and turn on the part the BELIEVES in the UNLIMITED POWER OF GAWD."

Faith in the White House
Fields of Crucified Strawmen.
Liberal critics quoted in mocking-third grade tones.
Out of context in such a manner as to make it appear as if they were bothered only by the president's religious faith and not the way it is used to justify Iraq, Patriot act, homosexual pyramids.
Actress playing young Barbara Bush portrayed with unmistakably Marian glow.

President's drinking days presented as both story of redemption and proof of manliness. Midland Texas is an Eden where the blatantly feudalistic mingle with their barrel-chested employees.

President heroically rejects temptations of secretary-succubus-witch, despite protestations of congressman ""whose name you would immediately recognize."

Religion makes you a better person.
You must choose.
There is only fundamentalist Christian morality or Gomorrac nihilism.

Only President Bush can lead in the greatest national crisis since the Civil War. (World War II, Cuban Missile "Crisis" oh please.)
Thank God we don't have a European style relativist-socialist-atheist-witch.

I sweat profusely and stare at myself from outside with a clarity that my nation is above.

I Think I've Made My Peace With North Platte.

I've always found those who think that one is not a true patriot unlessone thinks that the U.S. is superior and entitled to exert its will rather strange. We love what is ours because it is ours, without justification.

And yet I have never been able to feel that way about my hometown. The Marilyn Manson Hoodies Nickleback on the jukebox, and pathetic alpha-male tattoos have never reminded me of anything but my wasted years, and I hated it all and them all.

But now I think that, yes, I do feel warm towards these folk. It isn't love, neccessarily. But I can emphesize with their anger, their confusion, their rage/envy towards those places that are not at the edge of the world.

I've told my family that my hair is unkempt because I hate barbers. I can tell that they think I'm just being flip; that they are unable to comprehend that I really would suffer all of the social liabilities that come with wild hair rather than suffer five seconds of barber talk. Fine.

My father stays up watching soft-core Cinemax porn after mom goes to bed, and exaggerates my grandmother's memory problems. Fine. She is in her eighties, and clearly is losing it; but it is also clear that she will go to her grave with a basic understanding of what is happening to all of her descendents and their spouses. She is aware enough, and Grandpa faces death with all of the courage and grace that Catholicism promises it will give us.

Dad liked "No Country for old Men." Mom found it unberably strange. It's kind of funny, because mom is the smart one. But she is also deferential to a fault. Always searching for concensious and normality, a mother if you will. My father, rightous defender that he is, almost certainly didn't approve of the bad guy getting away, but he is also the kind of man who would have had a gutteral understanding of Cormac McCarthy's bleakly defiant masculinist vision, that one must protect one's family from death incarnate not in spite of the fact that it is futile, but specifically because it is futile.

I've learned to love the space that a western town gives itself; the wide streets that are dead by ten o'clock, seemingly every yard big enough for two loud, raggady-ass, dogs, the new butt-rock radio station that will help ol Flatrock get over its inferiority complex towards even its peers; other outstate market towns like Grand Island or Norfolk.

So For Those That Know me, The Story of my Cat Situation

I happened to be walking to the neighborhood liquor store sometime around the turn of April. The cat that was to become Telly was sitting in one of the unmowed yards around 23rd and Q. She meowed at me and I said hello. Then she came up to me and I gave her a pat.

She proceeded to follow me, determinedly so. Whenever I would stride more than twenty feet ahead I would hear an angry meow and turn back to see her bounding towards me. I came in and out of Mums with my Sunday night pint of Beck's and saw her clawing at the wall wondering where I was, and from there she continued to follow me home. I came to notice that I was gaging oncoming traffic to see if there was time for both of us to cross.

When we came to my apartment house I figured that it was the least I could do to give her one of my tins of tuna. She was visibly malnourished, bag of bones and all that.
The next day I gave her a bath to wash off the street grime that was far too thick for her to lick off herself. She took this as well as you could guess.

I spent the next week putting out internet ads that went unanswered. I did have some hope in the Cat House, a no-kill shelter in my neighborhood, but they turned out to suffer the same fate of most no-kill shelters; overcrowding due to lack of death.

So Telly became my cat, and she came to gain a healthy amount of weight, and then she came to gain some more weight around the lower belly and nowhere else, and there were protrusions in this belly that strongly resembled legs.

And so the kittens came on Thursday-Friday. The eldest is twelve hours older than
his? siblings and is one of the two gray ones, Dad must of been a tabby. The other two resemble their calico mother. One has nearly the exact same orange/white band color pattern of mom and the other is almost completely orange. My next-door neighbor must have heard the high-pitched wail of the Prince of Wales, but so far he hasn't ratted me out to our landlord. (Hello, Mr. Anderson.)

It goes without saying that taking care of four newborn kittens in addition to their mother is completely beyond me. So I contacted the local humane society to see if we could work out some sort of loan program until my grandchildren are weened. This worked out as well as can be expected. If I were to turn the family into the pound, they would become city property. Telly would be spared or euthanasized base on her health/aesthetic beauty/temperament(!!!) after four days, and the kittens would be spared or killed based on the same pragmatic criteria. I would be lying if I said that I had a problem with this logic. Stray animals reproducing at random are a serious menace, and this is certainly the proper way to deal with everybody else's cat.

As for mine, I decided to follow the normal ghetto protocol for unwanted children and dump them off on grandma. My parents will take Telly and her brood in until the brats are weened and pass the kittens on to the lonely hearts of North Platte.

I pride myself on not being a superstitious man, but I also pride myself on seeing that which is before me for what it is; and I can't help but think that Telly was smart enough to know that she needed a human being to take care of her for the sake of her babies, and this is why she followed me home with the tenacity of a Catholic woman feeling guilty about still being single.

And yet she gives me the filthiest murder-look whenever I try to intervene in her affairs, and I must say that I like that in a woman.

Reminder

Your brain and the world outside of it are completely and hopelessly independent of each other. Every emotion you feel for the universe outside of yourself and all of the people in it is false. There are no relationships. There is no bonding. There are no friendships. There is no love. There is no family. There is no sex. There is no patriotism. There is no country. There is no tradition. There is no symbolism. There is no ceremony. There is only a desire to connect that cannot possibly be fulfilled, and is itself born of the narcissistic desire to find purpose outside of oneself born of the horror of realizing the utter pointlessness and banality of one's own internal dialogue.

There is no escape. Have a nice "weekend".

FYI

If you don't have an honorary degree, than your free-speech rights are being violated.

http://politicsandpigskins.blogspot.com/2008/05/ayn-rand-phyllis-schlafly-and-ditsy.html

Remember kids, calling a liberal a traitor for criticizing the president is free speech. Protesting Phyllis Schlafly because she assumes that every woman in the world is a leather slave like herself violates free speech.

Any questions?

So I'm Thinking of Going Home This Weekend

But I drove my van for the first time in four months today, and wouldn't you know it I'm low on oil and need to get it fixed up. I could afford it if I skimped on some vice or another, but it does raise the question, if I only made the three hour drive to North Platte say, once every three years or so, would that make me a bad son?

I'm thinking in particular of the Christmas of 06; my dad had ordered the new version of "The Longest Yard" on pay-per-view to watch with my sister and I while my mom was at work at the liquor store. I have a fair amount of respect for the old Burt Reynolds version. It certainly doesn't have the artistic quality of a "Godfather" or "French Connection", but it does have that same sort of August afternoon wariness, the sort of anti-authoritarianism and hangover-urine bitterness that made 1970's American cinema something we can be unabashedly proud of. It goes without saying that the Adam Sandler version does not fit this mold.

I remember when my mother came home Dad said with pride that "we had watched a funny movie together and had a good time." He actually believed that it had been a true bonding experience.

There was a point in the movie where I was flipping through the World-Herald and started laughing at a story about a Sudanese restaurant that was forcing baby monkeys
to fight each other for the amusement of its customers, and Dad must have thought I was laughing at one of Sandler's zany homoerotic shenanigans.

There was a point in the movie where actor/wrestler Goldberg was shirtless and triumphant about something, and my father muttered "What a man" to himself.

I've said before that there is no such thing as a man having a non-sexual appreciation for the masculinity of another man, and I stand by that statement. If you are not indifferent to another man's biceps, then you want to nibble at them, it's as simple as that.

And I suppose that I shouldn't be the least bit surprised at my father's latent gayness. He has all the attributes of a closet case; an obsession with proving his manliness at every opportunity to a point that a twelve-year-old boy would find silly, transparently insincere peons towards tolerance of gays, "I have no problems, with gays, I've just never seen a met a homo that was really happy," (I'll spare you his thoughts on lesbians.) and an obsession with the traditional masculine ideal of the father protecting his family from enemies that goes far beyond absurd. (We were visiting Lincoln when I was a boy, and while driving down a darkish section of O street he mentioned that he was driving faster to avoid the gangsters that were surely hanging out in the shadows, when I grew up I learned that this darkish section was Wyuka Cemetery.) This fantasy of his (There's no other word) with killing the intruder clearly indicates some deep hidden frustration that must be unloaded on another man with violent abandon.

But than it's all well and good to speak of the warped psyche of the rural American male in the abstract isn't it?" This is my father I write of, and I've already said far too much.

Chicago D

The sprawl isn't as bad as in the urban areas of California or Texas. By the time you reach the inner suburbs, Brookfield, Cicero, the neighborhoods very much take on the look of any midtown. Somewhere in Chicago proper is a massive junkyard, slightly to the northwest of where Jurgis Rudkis's Packingtown was. The line comes into Union Station along a large stack of tracks with chunks of industrial brickabrack lying all about the ground. Not an impressive enterence to the Loop by any means. But still, there was the Sears Tower.

It was the afternoon rush hour when I got off the train; 5:30 P.M. but damned if this place isn't well-designed, it's easy to move about quickly even when it's crowded.

The Art-Deco architectural touches are very nice, but beyond that the place has the same generic anywhere look you could find in any major metro train station, airport, or shopping mall for that matter. The corned newsstands with Cigar Aficionado and The New York Times on display, the food courts with the mix of national and somewhat less than culturally defining local chains, a little bar whose "Irishness" was denoted by green neon lighting and servers wearing green vests under their jackets.

But the cultural sterility has a strange sort of appropriateness here. Union Station is the pituitary gland of the Midwest. It is because of the railroad that Chicago was able to beat out St. Louis to become the great interior metropolis. The wars between competing lines are the reason why the California Zephyr meanders so; competing railroads drawing random lines from Chicago to Des Moines, St. Louis, Omaha, Kansas City, Twin Cities, Denver. If one line took the most direct route than simply make one up of your own, create towns out of thin air (Crete, Dorchester, Exeter, Friend) and send out flyers telling immigrants that the land is filled with milk and honey. So you end up with the ultimate all roads lead to Rome scenario; the highways follow the railroads after all. before the interstate was built there were about half a doezen driving routes from Denver to Omaha and no choice was more than half an hour shorter than any other. Drive east on O Street, down hwy 34, across the Plattesmouth bridge, and through Iowa, you'll eventually role into Chicago on Ogdon avenue.

I bought egg rolls and a soda for supper from a group of Salvadorians who spoke Spanish to each other and the customer in front of me before switching to English with me. I could tell they were Salvadorians by the baseball hats.

I stepped out onto Jackson Street knowing only that I could never dream of affording a room in the Loop, beyond that I didn't know where I was going to stay, plus it was St. Patrick's Day, and though I had arrived too late for the parades the fact is that I was a fractionally Irish man in one of America's great immigrant cities, and this would have to be celebrated. But first the library.

You do Realize

that my content warning makes me even more badass than I was before right?

Chicago C

As one comes closer to the Mississippi River the landscape changes; well, it changes noticeably if you're rolling at thirty miles an hour anyway; I don't know that you would notice it or not if you were driving on the interstate. There's occasional tall hills and even some wooded space along with the corn, and it has a lovely stark effect on a cloudy day; but like I said, you've got to be going damned slow to notice.

Burlington Iowa is a very pretty town, with the richest families living in the best houses on the ridges just above the river. The line meanders through all sections of the town in some sort of eight hundred degree loop, so you actually get to see the nice parts of town in addition to the rear-ends of lumber yards and the potholes that had combined into a single creek leading from the industrial section of town to the river; but than I'm sure you already know about the dead zone in the Mississippi delta.

The river is truly sublime, even before it takes in the Missouri and Ohio it's still wide enough to envelop your vision, and with the spitting rain falling all over the Midwest that week it was very much like being underwater.

Heavy rain and snowmelt raised the river past flood stage last week and a barge going up the elevated river ended up hitting the Santa Fe/Amtrak bridge. I must say that I wish I had taken my trip than; the extra eight hours of detour though St. Louis or wherever the trains went would have been worth it for the sake of being part of a minor disaster; and oh what a thrill it must have been for the pubescent boys of Burlington; to see a destructive event whose lack of carnage was more than made up for by the scale. It is easy to imagine the drunken teenagers drowning themselves trying to reach the wreck on some wretched home-made canoe, and it warms the heart like Christmas.

I chatted with a couple of the people whjo live in the area; a woman from Mt. Pleasant Iowa and a middle-aged grease monkey from Galesburg Illinois, and I noticed that they both had this sort of breathy, nasal accent similar to what you hear from a very old Nebraska farmer. It's certainly distinguishable from the "generic American" that is, urban Midwestern accent, which is much the same in Chicago or Omaha r Kansas City. The sample size is, technically, far too small for a mere Bachelor of English to pronounce the existence of an upper-Mississippi Valley accent, but I talked to a couple of people about it; this guy I met in the city who used to be from Moline and this very lovely girl on her way home to Iowa farm country from DePaul, and they both said, "sure, why not." So I do declare it. Perhaps someday I'll actually look it up on the internet just to make sure that no one has claimed to discover the upper-Mississippi accent before I did.

Illinois consisted of more corn; and villages that were even smaller and more ragged than those in Iowa; I was starting to see "Old Style" placards hanging from the main street pubs. Finally, at about four in the afternoon, we rolled into a place called Samonauk, and the sight of a "Kohl's" "Supertarget", and "Bennigan's" assured me that we were only seventy miles or so from getting somewhere.

Oh Gary Indiana

I didn't happen to swing your way when I was in the Chicago area, no particular reason, its just that there's so much ghetto south of thirty-fifth street, too much to explore in just a day or two.

But anyway, I was just wondering if I ever told you how beautiful you are.

"http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/primaries/results/county/#INDEMMAPPRIMARY1">

Red-Headed Stranger

My God, every time I hear this album I'm ashamed of myself for somehow forgetting, if not on a conscious level than certainly an emotional one, how unbearably glorious it is. I writing this as a personal letter to all my Neko Case-loving cats; in case you were wondering who her artistic father is, now you know.

Hearing "Hands on the Wheel" again was the most life-affirming experience I've had in several weeks.

And oh for fucks sake won't you look at me gush away? Fuck everything, there that's better.

N 27th Street Shuffle.

I walked to campus without a jacket, and got caught in the cold front.

I was a little slow to move when it was time to go home, I needed to resist the urge to take an afternoon nap, I needed to finish "Pride and Prejudice" and start my paper on it, and pick up cat litter and groceries for myself, and stay awake, and keep working, and keep working.

It was forty degrees and cloudy. I stepped on the Uni Place bus at a quarter to four knowing that it would eventually head eastish. We were caught in the normal crawl along R from Greek row to the Lied when the car in front of us stopped suddenly, forcing the bus the to do the same. We all jerked forward in our seats, the sound of every heavy-duty break in a 5-ton machine to an instant stop was similar to the crunch of a collision.

The teenagers in the back, white and black, from T-Town or Clinton judging by their dress and manner:

"Holy shit, holy shit did you see that."
"He fucking hit him dude"
"Oh fuck, I thought that was it."

50ish woman behind me; plastic sequined dress, face consisting of makeup, teeth, makeup, and something resembling eyesockets behind the makeup.

"Jesus Christ, shut the fuck up!!"

A white girl in a Walmart-tee from the back suddenly stood up and spoke to the driver

"Why don't you watch where your fucking going you piece of shit?"

Well he was watching where the fuck he was going, little.... miss, let's see you try to stop a bus on a dime, you mouthy little.... girl.

Makeup woman:
Jes--sus! Shut the fuck up!!!

The kids in the back began chattering, and they were not going to stop, they were excited at being excited, still young enough to be giddy at the fact that their words and emotions have influence over those of others. They're not going to shut the fuck up for at least five years.

"Shit dude, that was like Final Destination right there!"
"hahahahaha"
"Did you see that shit, that was like Final Destination"
"hahahahahaha"
"Dude that shit was like Final Destination!"
...........
...........
Yes, nearly hitting a vehicle not one tenth the size of ours at five miles an hour is the ultimate near-death experience.

(On a side-note, I must say that I agree with the sentiment that the mere mention of "Final Destination" is unceasingly funny. I now understand the true genius of "The Family Guy" and now intend to make my living as a stand-up comic. My act will consist of reading off a list of films released in the past twenty years for two hours.)

The centrality of the illusion of control in America. True, a large reason why *normal people (* The minority with a stable source of food, transportation, and medical care) don't ride the bus is because of "those people," I have my class biases the same as anyone else does, but as much as I do go on, the fact is that "those people" are actually quite a bit less irritating than the typical *normal person.
But never mind, those people are mainly just an excuse. The real reason we don't ride the bus is that we feel safer in little clown cars or big manly-looking SUV's with the balance of broken teter-totters that we PERSONALLY CONTROL than we do riding in buses that could survive a small bombing that are driven by someone else. This illusion of control extends even to the lower classes, to people who are supposedly used to not having control. A fourteen year old girl got to yell at an all grown up city employee, and of course she liked it.

At the 11th and N shop a woman got on who worked at McDonald's and lived with her mother, and her siblings, younger and older, and her aunts and her first and second cousins.

There are cultures in which where even the poor and uneducated have means of emphasizing the importance of some particular point besides shear volume. Ours is not one of them.

"JESUS CHRIST, IT IS NOTHING BUT DRAMA AT MY HOUSE."
"MY MOM"S SICKMY AUNT WHO USUALLY HANDLES THIS SHIT IS OUT OF TOWN. JULIE JUST BROKE UP WITH HER BOYFRIEND. MY BROTHER HAS ALL HIS WANNABE GIRLFRIENDS CALLING. AND WHO DO YOU THINK HAS TO HANDLE IT.

I'll spare you her stories about how rigorously the hand-washing policy at McDonald's is enforced. In all honesty though, if you actually eat at McDonald's than a little Salmonella or anything else that will make you lose a quick ten pounds can't help but be good for you.

I stepped off at 25th and P. I had learned nothing I hadn't known. Just some more damned noise is all.

Chicago B

Memorial Stadium, Schram, Harper, State Fair Park, Cornhusker, Havelock, 84th U-Stop, Waverly, Greenwood, Ashland Gretna, the same Lincoln-to Omaha jugular that we could drive blind. I'm sure your perfectly free to commute from Lincoln to Omaha via Amtrak, just pay fifty dollars to leave Lincoln at 4:30, and get dropped off right under the Dodge Street bridge around six or so.

The line wonders listlessly through the Omaha metro, from Gretna to the industrial area between Ralston and Millard, Ralston, South O, under the freeway bridges, the station, back south along the river, Bellevue, Offut, and than finally crossing into Iowa at Plattsmouth, a solid forty miles within the Omaha area.

The track wraps around the west edge of a new subdivision near Gretna, the residents tend to have very big back windows, we were rolling at no more then thirty miles an hour. It was about 6:30 at this time, and I could clearly see women organizing their purses, men straightening their ties, parents serving their children breakfast.

This is what you get from the ludicrously slow California Zephyr, intimacy. No generic Days Inn and Burger King tourist strips here. Instead it's backyards and dogs and professionals getting ready for the day and endless lumber yards and filthy gravel pools of water that the eye can follow to the point where whatever is leaking out of the wood and junk piles flows into the local stream, abandoned hotels, decaying wooden long buildings, junkyards from every curve and angle, like the one the one between Ralston and South O, the one that covers acres, the one I'm not sure that even the locals are fully aware of, or the one between Naperville and the inner ring of Chicago suburbs, that covers at least a dozen square miles.

It was cloudy and gloaming when we reached the Omaha station, so it was impossible to tell whether it was officially sunrise or not. 6:50: It was a ten-minute long "smoke stop" the others coming at Osceola and Galesburg. Other than that it was two minutes at some market town in Iowa or Illinois, a Casey's a Dollar Store, churches, lumber yards, and polluted runoff. The landscape consists of this and corn, five hundred miles of corn, unchanging until you reach the Chicago metro. the idea that the parched matchhead yellow of the western Nebraska hills is less interesting than the true flatness of the eastern plains is nonsense. Here is true dreariness, it was cloudy and rainy and no more than forty five degrees for the entire trip.

The line goes right down the banks of the Missouri, and the illusion of the water dancing in and out of your line of vision is fascinating. There were only two other people awake in my car, playing with their cellphones, shining white light on their faces, the darkness of the night lingered in the car for the entire trip.

I went to the dining car and got the cheapest proper meal available, seven dollars for rubbery scrambled eggs and "breakfast potatoes." (cold, unhashed hashbrowns.) I had my camera primed for the Missouri crossing, right next to the US 34 toll bridge, but then it came, and I realized that this had to be the ugliest Goddamn major river crossing in America. Western Iowa was corn and powerlines.

The Pope on Pedophile Priests

“It’s difficult for me to understand how it was possible that priests betrayed in this way their mission to give healing, to give the love of God to these children,”- Benedict XVI





Are you sure you want to phrase it that way, Your Holiness?

Family Guy Fans

It's strange, because I talk to these people. By that I mean, I'll ask a Family Guy fan a question, and he will respond in a manner that pertains to the question. So I know these folks are smart enough to have learned the language of their own mothers.

I have also seen them react to stimuli, that is, turn their heads in the direction of a screeching car nearby, or blink when a light is shone in their faces. It could be logically assumed that if I threw a bowling ball at a Family Guy fan, he would have enough intelligence to duck.

But then I realize that these "people" think that the mere mention of Qubert is funny in and of itself, and I know that I must be hallucinating about the aforementioned abilities.

I knew this Girl in High School Once

Who listed "eat, drink, and be merry" among her favorite quotes for some project in theology class and attributed it to Dave Matthews.

The disturbing thing is that this was not and is not a stupid woman, quite the opposite. And the traditional, classical education offered by a Catholic school is at least theoretically better than what you get at a Catholic school.

The theology teacher was an ex-marine who had had a testicle removed due to cancer. Lance Armstrong is his hero.

We'll still run into each other about once every two years or so, and are pretty open about our mutual scorn, it's the most honest relationship I have.

Obama Slammed by Right for Speaking Blindingly Obvious Truth

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."- Sen. Obama

Response from Steve Schmidt, McCain adviser:

“It shows an elitism and condescension towards hardworking Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking,” Schmidt said. “It is hard to imagine someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans.”

Yup, that's right. Any suggestion that there could possibly be anything wrong with the precious snowflake culture that is the AMERICAN HEARTLAND is "elitism."

The "average American" comment is especially rich. The fact that small-town Americans can possibly still imagine themselves to be America Incarnate after a century of rural flight is a testament to the power of human delusion. We are an empire of three hundred million people, hundreds of intermixed ethnic groups, dozens of finely delineated and contradictory economic castes, and innumerable shades of different religious beliefs, hobbies, tastes in art or music, understandings of the world, etc.

If there was ever any such thing as an average American, those days are long dead. Residents of south Chicago have just as much of a right to declare themselves "average Americans" as the Wahoo homecoming queen, and though
the right is rather overt in it's opinion that the inner-city poor are an aberration from the "real America" (Never mind that they outnumber the small-town snowflakes.) far be it for me to suggest that they are racist, or even "elitist"
for doing so.

Just willfully blind is all.


For a good time, read the comments at righty blog Hot Air:

http://hotair.com/archives/2008/04/11/obama-on-small-town-voters-bitter-xenophobic-religious/

Virgin Martyr Rollcall

St Lucy:

Born: Doesn't matter
Died: 304 AD

"Hereupon our saint disclosed to her mother her desire of devoting herself to God in a state of perpetual virginity, and of bestowing her fortune on the poor: and Eutychia, in gratitude, left her at full liberty to pursue her pious inclinations. The young nobleman, with whom the mother had treated about marrying her, came to understand this by the sale of her jewels and goods, and the distribution of the price among the poor, and in his rage accused her before the governor Paschasius as a Christian, the persecution of Diocletian then raging with the utmost fury. The judge commanded the holy virgin to be exposed to prostitution in a brothel" house; but God rendered her immovable, so that the guards were not able to carry her thither. He also made her an over-match for the cruelty of the persecutors, in overcoming fire and other torments. After a long and glorious combat she died in prison of the wounds she had received,—about the year 304. She was honoured at Rome in the sixth century among the most illustrious virgins and martyrs, whose triumphs the church celebrates,"


St Agatha
Born: It doesn't fucking matter
Died: About 251 AD

"According to these Acts, the Praetor of Sicily, Quintianus, conceived a passion for Agatha, who was of noble birth and great beauty. And when he could not make her consent to his wicked desires, he had her arrested as a Christian and turned her over to an evil woman, named Aphrodisia, to be corrupted. Of such methods of breaking down Christian hardihood, Tertullian wrote to pagans: Ye, by condemning the Christian maid to the lewd youth, rather than to the brute lion, do acknowledge that we more dread a stain to purity than any torment or death; but your cruel cunning availeth only to gain men over to our holy religion.

But the companionship of Aphrodisia in the brothel made Agatha only the more determined to live faithful to Christ. So the Praetor ordered her brought before him that he might try to turn her from Christian living, which he declared to be fit only for slaves. Then the Praetor gave her the choice of sacrificing to the gods or undergoing torture. And when beatings, the rack and branding with white-hot metal failed to shake her constancy to Christ, he ordered her breasts cut off. Whereat Agatha cried out and said that he who had suckled at a mother's breasts should feel shame to order such cruel indignity done to a woman. But that night, after she had been returned in irons and pain to prison, the Apostle Peter appeared to her and healed her wounds.

The following day she was subjected to new tortures. But an earthquake from Mount Etna, shook the town and terrified the people. Whereupon the Praetor, fearing a riot, ordered Agatha to be returned quietly to prison. And there, in the town of Catania, she died at peace, in prayer, on February 5th, and her body was taken and buried by Christians."
swikner.blogspot.com/2007/02/st-agatha.html

St Agnes

Died: About 303

"Agnes, whose name means “chaste” in Greek, was a beautiful young girl of wealthy family and therefore had many suitors of high rank. Details of her story are unreliable, but legend holds that the young men, slighted by Agnes' resolute devotion to religious purity, submitted her name to the authorities as a follower of Christianity.

The governor, following an edict against Christians issued in 303 by the Roman emperor Diocletian, threatened the young girl with torture. The threats did not intimidate the steadfast Agnes , however, and the enraged official sent her to a house of prostitution. Approaching her, the brothel's patrons would be seized with such awe at the holy sight of the girl that they could not touch her. One brazen young man remained undeterred, but as he neared her he was struck blind and fell to the ground; Agnes later restored his sight with prayer.

The governor, incensed by her youthful defiance, sentenced Agnes to an untimely death. It is not known whether the execution was by beheading or by the piercing of the throat, but the story tells of her ready submission to the sentence by offering herself to receive the death blow. According to St. Ambrose, one of her chroniclers, she “went to the place of execution more cheerfully than others go to their wedding.”


www.stagnes.cc/.../Main%20Links/St.%20Agnes.htm

St Marciana
Died: "End of the third Century"

Entering the city by the Tipasia door, Marciana saw a marble statue of the goddess Diana in the middle of a square. At its feet flowed clear waters in a pool also made of marble. The brave virgin could not bear the sight of that impure idol. She stepped forward and threw the idol from its base, broke its head and smashed the entire statue into pieces.

A furious mob dragged her to the Pretorium before an imperial magistrate. The Christian virgin laughed at the stone and wood gods, and glorified the true God she adored. In loud, eloquent words, she praised Him there in the Pretorium. The pagan judge handed her over to the gladiators to be infamously abused at their pleasure. Marciana remained fearless and serene. For three hours the gladiators were rendered immobile by an unknown terror, and were unable to touch the virgin. Through her prayers one of them converted and professed Jesus Christ as the true God.

Confused by this development of events, the judge remained firm in his hatred. Unable to dishonor the virgin, he condemned her to be torn to pieces by wild beasts. When the hour arrived, she entered the arena as to a joyful feast, giving praise and thanks to Jesus Christ. She was tied to a stake and a lion was set upon her. The beast, however, approached her, touched her breast with its claws, and then retired as though moved by a stronger force.

St. Marciana was not harmed by the lion in the arena
In admiration, the populace called out loudly demanding that she be set free. But a group of Jews who were part of the multitude, always thirsty for Christian blood, changed the mood of the crowd by calling for a wild bull. The beast gored the breast of Marciana opening a terrible wound. The blood poured out and St. Marciana fell to the sand in agony. Servants removed her from the arena, stopped the hemorrhaging, and nurtured what little life remained to her.

The judge, however, called for her to be tied to the stake again. She raised her eyes to Heaven, a smile illuminating her face marked by suffering, and spoke her last words:

O Christ, I adore and love Thee. Thou wert with me in the prison and kept me pure. Now Thou dost call me – O my Divine Master – and I go happily to Thee. Receive my soul.

After she spoke these words, a ferocious leopard tore her apart, opening the road of Heaven to her

www.traditioninaction.org/SOD/j209sd_Marciana...

The Miracle of Life

We watched this sex-ed documentary in my eleventh grade biology class, if I remember right the title wasn't exactly "The Miracle of Life" but something similar; complete with vaginal-wall cam and uterovision. Perfectly graphic, nothing obscured or faded out. You may be surprised to learn a Catholic school would subject its students to extreme close-up views of a thrusting penis or the army of spermatozoa battling their way through the dead ends and black holes of the lady.

But it was quite deviously brilliant, if you think about it. It is impossible to watch this film and be filled with anything but loathing for sex and reproduction. I'm thinking especially of the aforementioned vaginal-wall cam and thrusting penis. My God; the sight of that mushroomhead suddenly appearing and hurling itself towards you; until your entire line of vision is enveloped by head-of-dick, and every pore and dent of head-of-dick can be seen perfectly by your Gulliveresque microbe eyes.

And then comes the orgasm, which is actually very comforting by comparison, soothing in the matter of mixing a cup of hot tea or staring into a lava-lamp after a six-day coke party, you see the blending of these contrasting fluids and think that perhaps there really is something beautiful about this union between the sexes.

But then comes the malignant-tumor zygote, followed by the hellish superterrestrial demon fetus, and the birth.

The birth.

You speak of the miracle and beauty of life. I don't believe that you've ever had the pleasure of seeing placental matter ejected from a nine-inch-wide vagina.

Perhaps if it were my own wife birthing my own child, I would learn to find this sudden vomiting of bloody flesh to be something more than horrifying. But I really don't think so; I mean, I really don't think so.

My ancestral faith teaches me that sex is a filthy and shameful thing; and in fact this is not completely untrue. The main problem with this idea is its narrowness; its failure to follow its own logical thread to where it must go. Because the fact is that all biological processes are profoundly disgusting. We bury our dead because if we left them out to rot it would remind us that we are all pollutants. Nothing but water degraded with nitrogen and carbon and cadmium and phosphorus and arsenic and lithium and every variety of comic book supervillain shit that makes a nuclear reactor seem pristine by comparison.

Universal sterility; the extinction of the human race after my generation, why not?
You may speak of biological imperatives, but you know as well as I do that there's no such God damned thing. Life on earth is nothing but a funny quirk of chemistry; coming from nothing and leading to nothing. Reproduce, and in five generations your genetic input will be statistically irrelevant. Fathers be good to your daughters.

The extinction of the human race, why not? It is highly doubtful that we're ever going to be any smarter than we are now, and we're certainly never going to get any cleaner, do you really want to subject future generations to eighty years of wondering around and feeling so damned silly?

Kansas

With all the sincerity that my cynical, nonathletic, anti alpha-male sensibility can give, congratulations to our leaguemates.

On This Day in History

Well, never mind.


It's also my 27th birthday.