Listening to Metal

the frozen north. a sword and black armour. lightning. a moonlit night. werewolves. a winter gale. ice floes. blood. axes. steel. the wind ripping through tree branches, waves crashing in the distance. the threat of sea monsters. fire. torches. stern brows. a dusting of snow on a man's beard as he gazes northward, at a force of approaching storm giants. Fire breath. Dragons. Sorcerers. A giant hammer striking the ground. A man's sword severing a giant's hand at the wrist. blood. fire. doom. doom. doom.

The Archaeology of My Former Self

I am deep within another move, the second in six months. It has everything to do with strategic foreclosure, that inevitable game theory of the economic times we are in. I am tired of being like General Motors, even after General Motors called it quits on being like General Motors. This means an upgrade to our current apartment, because it is raining everywhere, economically, and I had the misfortune of renting a pleasant little shithole that was about to go into receivership. Seriously, the last damned day of mounting shelves, and notices ring on every apartment door, like Martin Luthers bring notice that, yes, I will have to muster my resources and move again. I just needed some rest first. This is a much smaller mass extinction than the last one, because the asteroid has already hit, and most of the items are extinction-resistant at this point. Notable exceptions are some of my old art, however, which it turns out I was saving mostly so that there would be some record of its existence-an archaeology of my former self.

This is an oil painting, about 24 by 36 inches, I painted in high school. It was probably 1986 and I was probably 17 at the time. I really should have ventilated that workspace better. I was really into linseed oil medium washes at the time, and most of it is so thick with dried medium that it looks translucent. The best part, a rare bit of luck at getting facial features to show some life and emotion, is actually not layered at all. I had a huge crush on Lilly Fu, a girl from my art class at Skyline College, and dated her once. It was a strange, transcultural affair. The next one employs similar techniques, but is smaller. It reeks of personal symbolism, the snakes representing that fundamental aspect of my soul that El Camino High School could not touch, and sentimentally invoking my long employment at H. Plath and Sons nursery.

They were never framed, but they have been displayed in many places. The House I grew up in. My dorm room. Maybe at least one apartment in Los Angeles. The Old House. This place. They came back to me after having somehow been stored in boxes at my parent's house....I think the reason they survived is because they never made the cut to be in the apartment I shared with my later-to-be-exwife in Hancock Park, which is where my contiguous stretch of years as a real adult, independent of moving back to the parents house, begins. If it seems they reek of sexual frustration it is because they do. Until recently, as in, within the last year or two, all of my art rand writing reeked of unfulfilled sexual desire.

The next one has an oil base, but it is really a mixed media collage. The underpainting, in lipstick pink, was a paint-over of something I hated. I have no idea what it was, but it probably was a work of representational art with a female nude in it because i have always done a lot of those, and when my weaknesses at figure drawing get to me I plunge into abstracts. The ammonoid is in melted crayon, the ghostrider comic was truly terrible to read, and for a while a letter to my ex-wife from out mutual friend and her lover, Elvia Lahman (who does not facebook, i would love to get back in contact with her because she has become a semifamous rockabilly mid-century retro enthusiast), was attached because it got stuck in the drying paint. I really don't know how it trotted around with me as far as it did, but I remember it blowing off the wall of our old house at every opportunity. There are so many I never photographed, and so many more to share, but it is more worthwhile to note that i seem to remember my life in episodes and thinking about one or the other falls in and out of favor. Now, I am more curious than ever about certain times and places spent with my brother and his friends, in the city and at Dennys, for which I have scarcely a photograph to mark, because my propensity to photograph comes and goes as well. It is a little like Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution throwing away icons and looking for their true history in peasant art.

Aploogies to the Ones I Left Behind

Stuffed monkey, thrown in a corner, staring upward at the ceiling. Houseplants to numerous to mention. Bas relief of the Last Supper, as served by skeletons, over-sulfured wine barrel. 11 Gallons of homemade wine in a French Oak barrel. 35 bottles of wine, some homemade, some amazing and old, vases. Monkey, the relief helecopter is on the way, and there is a seat on it for you. Fern, same thing. Some of you have to stay behind though. Painting of clowns squeezing the life out of Charlie Brown, bathtub full of old magazines, old shoes and purses. Some of you will find a new life in the punk rock haven to come. For the rest of you, your time has come in a catastrophe and I am woefully sorry. I will miss you, old house.

A Young Athiest Dreams of the Afterlife

I wrote this my freshman year at UCLA. That must have been 1987, I think. I was eighteen and living in the dorms. Dyksta hall had ten floors and a basement, but ground level was actually the second floor, because like everything in CA, it was on a hill. I had only been an athiest for three or four years, at that point, and I spent a great deal of time that year waiting for the elevator, because I lived on the ninth floor-two things which might explain the subject matter. This was a transcript of a dream that I had the night before, possibly the most intense dream of my life, certainly in the top five. I am transcribing it not having read it for twenty three years or so. I have not changed the words or corrected for my florid and inexperienced writing style, though it pains me to do so (or tendency to contradict myself), it is more interesting the way it is.

This dream basically sums up the Blood on a Space Guitar aesthetic, and belief system, and I wrote it in a dream decades ago.

I awoke to find myself lying in a hospital bed, staring straight up at the ceiling. I felt much better. I actually wanted to get up and go for a walk. Sitting up, I noticed my family staring mournfully, as if I weren't there. I got out of bed. I was about to say something really cynical like "sorry to waste your time by catching cancer, you can go as soon as I'm dead", when I realized how many tubes I must have pulled out by standing up. I turned around and realized why my family was acting so strangely.

There is no sensation exactly like looking down at your own dead body, frozen with a peaceful expression on its face. Lying on its motionless chest was a plain, white envelope with my name "Alan Molumby" typed neatly on the front. I furiously picked up the envelope-annoyed that any medical center would be callous enough to bill a person the moment they died. Upon opening it, I found a curious blue stamp, with 20cents printed on it and a note that apologized for the lack of a reception. It instructed me to keep the stamp because I needed it to get into heaven, which was on the ninth floor. It was signed simply, "God".

The shock of the situation sent me wandering blindly off in some direction-I'm not sure with because I must have walked right through a wall. I was in a crowded hall of the hospital, which was full of busy doctors and patients, who were completely oblivious to the fact that I was standing there completely naked. Ahead of me was a massive bronze elevator. It stood there as if it had been there the whole time-which was obviously not the case because it was located in just about everybody's way. Oblivious of it, everyone just walked through it as if it weren't there.

Feeling a bit awkward, I walked right up to it and pushed the UP button. It was insanely ironic that, even after dying, I still had to suffer the inconvenience of waiting for an elevator.

I ran back to my hospital room and kissed my family goodbye. I was back in time to watch the light for the fourth, the third, and finally the second floor light up as the doors slid open. The inside of the elevator was spacious and ornate. The usual board of buttons listed ten floors and a basement.

I tried to maintain a sense of adventure, reminding myself that, after being confined to a hospital bed for three months, my situation was an improvement of a sort.

I punched the button for the ninth floor wondering "If the everyday world is on the second floor, and heaven is on the ninth, what occupied the other nine floors?" I could feel no noticeable acceleration as the elevator moved, and the ride was unendurably long. I watched the numbers above the door light up until the doors finally slide open at the ninth floor. A light-haired, handsome man dressed in flowing white robes stood at the doorway.

"We're sorry about not having anyone to meet you." He said. "we don't usually make people use the elevator unless we're completely swamped." He continued apologetically. "Oh, have I introduced myself? I'm the demiangel Antigonus-St. Peter is out right now, taking care of some unfinished business. Now, let me have your stamp, and I can show you around for a few minutes." He opened a huge bound book full of hundreds of pages-some were empty, others were covered with stamps. "We have a joke here. When we run out of room in these things, we'll have to start letting people in for free."

"What's on the other floors?" I interrupted.

"Oh, nothing that concerns you" he said, "especially the first floor, that's for people who committed too many sins to be issued a 20cent stamp."

Can I visit a few of them if I get bored here?" I asked.

"Don't be ridiculous." he replied, casually. "Heaven is for eternity, and besides, why would you want to go anywhere else? Those places are not for you."

I snuck a look at the view behind him. A bright blue sky with tufts of white clouds glowed with a radiant light. The tops of Venitian and Gothic buildings broke up the horizon, brilliant orange light from stained glass windows fell on the flowers and trees that moved gently in the sweet breeze. Families laughed and chattered as they walked through the fields. The place looked unbelievably happy, and quite boring.

"These things don't expire, do they?" I asked. "Not unless you spend them by trying to get off somewhere else." He said reproachfully.

"I'll be back in a little while." I said as I examined the buttons in the elevator.

"Suit yourself." He said, patiently, as the doors slid shut.

I had pushed the button for the second floor. Perhaps I could arrange to be reincarnated back home, or at least see what some of the other floors looked like.

On the way down, the elevator stopped on the fourth floor A curly-haired woman in her late forties stepped on-she looked quite upset. I held the door open and took a good long look outside. It looked like the inside of a large old building-well lighted but cluttered with objects. A powerfully built, tall man with a lean bony face stood near the door (Note here..this man was my high school chemistry teacher), motioning with a pair of hands that wore black rubber gloves.

He wore a doctor's smock, and spoke with a deep voice.

"What's this place like-what do you do here?" I asked quizzicly.

"Not much goin' on here, just MOVIN' STUFF TO HEAVEN!" He sounded like a longshoreman. At that moment, he turned to direct a hospital stretcher as it passed down the corridor. Atop it was my own pale, dead body, still wearing the hospital smock. A succession of objects on pallets followed-bathtubs, cans of motor oil, and surreal objects I didn't recognize.

The doors slid shut, leaving me trapped in a metaphysical elevator with a hysterical middle-aged woman who wasn't wearing any clothing, either.

"Where are you from? What's wrong? Where are you going?" I asked hurriedly. "I got off at the wrong damned floor." She said in a weak voice. "The bastards charged me 3cents, so now I can't get into Heaven." I looked into her envelope, it had a single blue 15cent stamp and two blue 1cent stamps inside.

As we rode to the fifth floor, she babbled tediously about her life story. She had an air of weakness and I sensed a certain lack of imagination. The elevator stopped at the second floor. A muscular man in his early twenties stepped aboard. He stared at the two of us.

I was about to step out when he said "You an Indian." "No." I replied calmly. "Then you can't use your stamps there-they only take the green ones-I tried already.: I stared at him blankly. and then stepped back into the elevator. He glanced over his shoulder and hit the first floor button.

"You're taking us to Hell!" Shrieked the woman.

"What the fuck do you care?" He said. "You don't have to get out there, do you?". She looked away.

"Maybe there's a floor you can get into for 17cents." I said.

"I'm not interested, if I can't get into Heaven." She snapped.

The doors slid open at the first floor. A tall, incredibly attractive dark haired woman wearing a ninetenth century military uniform stepped into the elevator. She had bright, dark eyes. A magazine of machine gun bullets hung across her chest.

She took the muscular man by the arm, and said "I've been waiting for you, just hand over the 10cent stamp and I'm sure we'll be able to accommodate you here." She licked her lips seducitvely.

Outside, smoke drifted in sheets. Flames licked buildings of marble and alabaster. A lake of boiling tar could be seen in the distance, with a few legs jutting above it. The man refused to come, saying "I don't have to give it to you."

"You will." She said confidently. "Sooner or later,m everyone gets tired of this stupid elevator, of watching other people go to heaven where they can be happy..." The middle aged woman looked away. "You can't stay on Earth, either-its too frustrating not being able to do anything but watch idly as other people live out their lives. Sooner or later, everyone gives up and comes here-there's nowhere else you can go."

The woman hung about him seductively, her arms around his neck as she rubbed his leg with the inside of his knee. "I'll see you sooner or later she said, kissing him with inside lip."

"What about the other floors?[there have got to be other places to go to-there are eleven floors, including the basement, and nobody seems to be interested in anything but three of them. I felt as if I had interrupted them. The dark woman flashed me a quizzical smile. The midle aged woman and the man both looked at me as if I had just embarrassed them. "That's the unknown." said the middle aged woman "And if it was meant for me, I would have been told to go there by God." She looked angry. "Look what accidentally getting off on the wrong floor cost me-now I guess that means I should go to hell."

Jabbing her envelope at the dark-haired woman, she walked straight out of the elevator.

She looked straight at me and smiled. "Why are you here, kid? You could get into heaven/"

"How do I know that's where I want to be?" I whispered. "There are all kinds of places to go, now that I am dead." I exclaimed, bitterly.

"What's on the tenth floor?" I asked.
"Some old Greek and Norse gods-it costs a lot more than 20cents to get into there though-and you won't want to go to the fourth floor-that's more for objects than people.

"Thanks." I said, smiling at her. I kept trying to remind myself that I was flirting with an archfiend.

"I like you." She declared. "I was like you, once. A long time ago, I wanted to go from floor to floor, not too many people do, you know. For some reason, most people prefer a place like hell to the unknown. Before I came here, I saw most of them." She said. "I collected a book full of hundreds of stamps. I spent most of them getting my position here, but there are still a few pages left back at my home on the third floor."

"Aren't afraid he'll get to them?" "Are you kidding? He's too daft to tie his own shoe laces. Good luck, Kid.: She said, touching me on the lips.

She turned to the muscular man, saying "Even purgatory costs 15cents, too bad ou can't affort do go anywhere but here. See you soon." The door slid shut, and she left.

That was the end of the transcript I found in my basement the other day, going through boxes prior to a move. Though it was twenty years ago, I still remember how this dream ends. I take the elevator to the third floor, where I can get out for something like 17cents, and the man cannot. It is a beautiful, grassy place, with an early twentieth-century bandstand sporting a brass band, gentlemen picknicking with their families, and bicycles. I do not have too much trouble finding the devil's former house, as a mortal or whatever they are on the third floor, one floor removed from our reality, and there it is, that book of with pages of unused stamps.

An update

A water fountain. The word for pigeon being "duck", because there is no way to say pigeon. A sandwich. A trip to the bookstore. A long line for donuts. Iron Maiden. Lady Gaga. A stuffed monkey, relaxing on the back porch, after a crazy night of drinking. A house party next door. A jawbone played as a washboard. I did not buy mushrooms.

In other news, lonely ichtheostegalians slide off of moss-covered logs. Clouds and sand. The brown flush of diatoms. The fear of fire. Fear of the dark. Fear of the light. The lack of mushrooms worldwide, resulting in the accumulation of carbon. Dance Flies.

In still other news. Dance flies. Bee Mimics. High waters following a thunderstorm. Two tarantulas. Bass lines. Bass ale. Largemouth Bass. Black Bass. Blackness.

Kreator Recontextulized

Despite appearances, Ruby has no soft-tissue damage or repetitive stress injuries from moshing around like this. We have done it every day since she was born, and we know each other's limits. As you can imagine, she has incredible core body strength. I film this, actually, on a day she would absolutely not go to sleep...."metaling her down" is a standard daddy trick, which can backfire, of course, if she is not absolutely dead tired. She is sleeping soundly now, two minutes after the clip is finished.

The song is Kreator's 'Flag of Hate'...we had been on an Iron Maiden kick earlier, but I needed something more brutal.

This sounds incredibly pretentious, misguided, or both, but Ruby seems to need the catharsis of heavy music-electroclash, punk, metal, industrial, to deal with the everyday stresses of living in a world where she can make elaborate plans to distract her mom and dad long enough to eat the cat food, but cannot pull a shirt over her head or flush a toilet. We both live for this, which is good, because it is pretty much how we spend our days.

Cro-Magnon Parasitic Megaspore

Corrupt Neanderthal Nemesis

Life in The Petri Dish

Dear Dr. Sagan

Dr. Sagan, I feel I should tell you this, years after your death, that you were singularly one of the biggest influences in my life.  This only comes up now, inconveniently postmortem on your part, because I am reviewing Cosmos, and in some ways, it reads as an archaeology of my mind, my views on things, my understanding of the world.  I am a big-picture thinker, so much so that I frequently wonder if I have a mental illness that I cannot name, a sort of anti-aspergers syndrome.  I do not care about punctuation.  Details, such as exact dates and even exact years, matter little to me.  I love people, especially the kind of people who notice spiderwebs, and though it is true that I might rather spend a day at the library than go to a party, the reverse might be true as well, depending upon the attendees.  It is much more relevant to me that every single attendee of the party is a eutherian mammal, even the cats and dogs that occasionally line the periphery of such events, and that reptilian guests to parties are restricted to circus and fetish folk, most often, and they make difficult party guests in any event, spending most of the event tied in pillow cases.  Your picture was, evidently, very large as well, given that you were the first man to consider pointing the camera of a spacecraft, at the edge of interstellar space, back at the Earth, to look for the intelligent life we knew to be there....a sort of ultimate perspective.

    You, on the other hand, were such a careful thinker, that decades after the fact, it is difficult to find scientific innacuracies in Cosoms, for the reason that, when it was called for, you always identified your hypothetical scenarios, your speculation, and the tentative conclusions of the science of the time, for exactly what they were.

     When I first viewed those episodes, so long ago that it was another lifetime, neurologically in the sense that by now, my dendrites have rebuilt themselves countless times, and in a very real aspect, I am not the same person I was back then.  You pissed me off when you spoke of nuclear war.  You pissed me off for the same reason that, what is now arguably my favorite movie, The Day The Earth Stood Still, pissed me off as well.  From the Hollywood, Clatu taught me that interstellar war is futile, pointless, and if there was anything to conquer, it would put a stop to our machinations before they started.  As it turns out from my later discoveries, impossible.  It would take so many resources to send a single paratrooper to Alpha Centauri, that we could build and rebuild every single thing we sought to conquer, on a lonely orb like Callisto, cheaper, and faster.  Advancing technology only helps the Callisto side of the equation.  Your line of argument concerning nuclear war was equally shattering to my world view at the time.  The fact of the matter is that the threat of nuclear armageddon, every second of the day, the drain of resources to build such devices, the time and expertise wasted perfecting them, was an almost-inconceivable folly....perhaps a product of our own evolution...but folly still.  You were right, of course, and though there are still ten thousand or more nuclear weapons on the planet, the Russians are shipping plutonium here for use in our reactors...nuclear armageddon has been replaced by nuclear proliferation among the small fry, the nation states so bent on preserving their power structures that they must blackmail the rest of the world into propping them up by providing a foil, a common enemy.  Ironic that the space race was brought about by the cold war, the moon race necessitated by it, but the manned exploration of space has been crippled by the debts we ran up in the process.  You straightened me out on where I stand as a human.  I am no longer a nationalist.

  You validated my nascent athiesm.  You were right that we do  not need god to explain our place in the universe, or our own existence here as well, and that, if we are courageous, we must ask "Who Created God?", and if we cannot answer this question, we might come to question his existence as well.  You taught me that the last librarian of Alexandria was killed by a Christian mob, but strangely, I missed your message that it was the librarian's own elitism that allowed that to happen.  It was this last point that, decades later, you made to me the other night.  I could stand to contemplate it.  

  Here I am, decades later, spending my life transmitting the findings of the academic heirarchs, a choice made of my own free will, though pushed by the necessity of earning a living, and my own failures navigating the political world of research science.  I speak to the masses who will listen, like you, but without the cool TV sets, the stodgy brown suit, the carnation, and with hundreds of viewers rather than millions.

  Your often-parodied goofiness, a notion I bought into at the time as well, is now easy to recognize as passion, pure and unadulterated.  I look at my own strengths as a lecturer, and it is passion of the same ilk, thought perhaps I flatter myself by making the comparison, which stands as a counterweight to my lack of punctuation.  I suppose, I am goofy too, in my own way.  Passion and curiosity can be taken that way, I suppose.

 

  

We All Grow Up So Damned Fast

Ruby was a bumblebee for Halloween this year, or something of that ilk.  She loved the short walk we took through Wicker Park, in a hunt for demon babies and Scare a Vacs.

Here she is at home foraging for pollen.

She pretty much likes the life of a circus baby, and prefers to be upside down.

God.  Halloween.  So many great ones recently..all so different.  Here you can see I removed my disguise and became the devil.  We all grow up so damned fast.

Tips for Urban Living

I wrote this shortly after I returned to Chicago in 1999.  I think much of it still applies, but I have noted certain things that have changed since then.

Tips For Urban Living

     First and foremost, avoid being stabbed.  Being shot is usually worse than being stabbed, of course, but there is an inevitable element to a bullet wound.  They seem to be preselected for us, like phone numbers.  Stab wounds, however, are imminently avoidable.  A stabbing is an intimate dance in which both parties participate.  There two types of people, those who have a propensity to get stabbed, and those who do not.  I belong to the former category, personally, though I have avoided the fate so far.  Most people do not know their status concerning this issue, despite two useful predictors 1) if you are a stabber, sooner or later you will be a stabbee, 2) if anyone has ever threatened you with a knife for any reason, you belong among the potential stab victims as well.  Owning knives seems to have nothing to do with it, the problem seems to be the act of thinking about the act of stabbing.

     Second, don't do crack.  Crack leads to stabbing, and to various manifestations of toothlessness.

      Third, don't do meth.  As above, but faster and more inevitable in consequences.  It was not necessary to write this in 1999,  because meth was formerly restricted to hillbillies.  The club kids have brought it downtown since then.

      Don't, drink bleach either.  Not for any reason.

      When you go to the ER, because you've been shot, or stabbed, or are flipped out on crack, tell the story right.  Emergency rooms are not the place for spin doctoring.  Don't say "I wasn't drinking at all, I just stopped in a corner liquor store for a bag of chips....".  Everyone else in the ER was doing something equally stupid (these are tips for urban living, make note).  Tell your friends and loved ones to tell the story right as well.  We all know the truth.  Lying about it informs us of the inevitability that a permutation of the same event will happen again soon.

     Late summer and early fall are the killing season in Chicago, as are the first warm days of spring.  People dish out a lot of stray phone numbers those times.  These random numerals fall in a hazy cloud around certain vehicles and addresses.  Avoid Monte Carlos and Olds Cutlasses during killing season (that was 1999, in 2009, avoid men in white T shirts).  Having anything to do with people who routinely stand on the street for no apparent reason, all day long, will cause the phone numbers to follow you in a wispy stream.  Don't park near them.  Avoid knowing their names.

     It never hurts to seem a little crazy, in a halfway-house kind of way.  Develop a nervous tic.

     One other thing-rats are harmless, perhaps even allies.  I prefer to think of them as "mobile rent control technicians".  This also applies to cockroaches, although I know few people who can stomach a different rent control arthropod swimming in their coffee every five minutes.  Neither species carries any important pathogen that is not also streaming from a five-year-old's fingers.

     Speaking of that, avoid hospitals.  That is where the really scary microbes hang.  Refer to tip number one.  Make that hospitals and IV drug users, which reminds me, don't shoot up.  If you are so concerned about wasting a drug that you cannot simply smoke it, then you already have a serious drug problem.

     That said, there is ALWAYS enough money for a 40 ouncer.  It is the unstoppable calculus of urban life that any substance that falls into the food and entertainment budgets simultaneously is imminently affordable if it comes in a 40 ounce container and gets you fucked up.  Each brand is a different sensory adventure.  I strongly recommend a couple of hits of marijuana, an UP-Time, and a 40 ouncer of St Ides.  This high costs six dollars, and , when combined with the Beastie Boys "Check Your Head" is better than a hundred dollars worth of cocaine off some asshole's table.

     "Why do drugs at all?" you ask.  Read no farther, you are not living an urban adventure, you are wasting your life.

     Speaking of the above, pick a transient hotel.  Find out how much it costs to stay there, and if there is a deposit.  Even if you never spend a night there, it helps to know where to go if you become down and out, probably because you broke rule number three or four.  In Chicago, the Ascot on Belmont, the Mark Twain on Division, and the Diplomat on Sheffield are three fine choices.  You can probably do better.  (Since 1999, the SROs have perished.  The  new alternative seems to be the friend's couch.  There seem to be more couches here nowadays).

     It goes without saying that you should avoid cops.  The act of disliking them, however, seems to draw them to a person.  They can smell contempt.  If you encounter cops, make good eye contact and speak in full sentences, this will convince them you can hire a lawyer if you need to (Never say lawyer in their presence unless they are arresting you, or it will anger them.  Not wearing a shirt also attracts police.

     One other thing, you don't have any change.  Read it aloud I DON'T HAVE ANY CHANGE, SORRY MAN.  You can't break a 10 either.  In fact, you can't count and are suspicious of strangers.  Anyone who asks you to break a bill has pegged you for a fool.  People who actually need to make change walk into an Amoco station and buy a pack of gum, or better yet, a 40m ouncer.

     One other thing.  If anyone approaches you, and is stuck, their family member in the car, needing to get to the hospital, but out of gas, you only speak Czech.  Or Tongan.  Maybe Afrikaans.  This person is a con artist and there is no reasoning with them.  Do not make any attempt to help them because the help they need is to be truly in the same plight and to discover that their behavior has created a world where nobody can risk helping anyone else.  Anyone who needs train fare to get out of the city to some clinic or shelter, same thing.  They never know the actual fare, test this if you wish.  They rarely know which train they need to take to get there either.  There is some sport in fucking with these people, but that puts you inevitably into the category of people likely to get stabbed.

     The human drama of urban existence is absolutely free for the taking.  Comcast will not charge you for it.  I recommend spending time in any district where pushcart vendors routinely roam, especially if the signs are not in English (Daley has eliminated most of these, like the rats, since 1999.  Douchebag.)  Wear sunglasses, so that the woman with the infant over her shoulder band the cases of beer in her stroller does not notice you watching as she jaywalks across 4 lanes of heavy traffic.  (Note to readers, except for gender, the stroller, and the jaywalking, I am now this person.)  

   This all brings me to the subject of diners.  Diners are magical places.

7--11 Diary

I wrote this over ten years ago. I intended to write a much longer memoir, but things happen. This, I think, is worth reposting from the molumbia.com site....

Two-Fisted Consumer Commando,

Sheikh of the Liquored Night,

Zip Gun Target,

My Life as a 7-11 Clerk

I first called the 7-11 jobline the day after a job interview in Chicago. That interview had gone reasonably well, so the prospect of doing a stint as a two-fisted consumer commando seemed strangely appealing to me. A hellish future as a career convenience store clerk was only a whiff of a possibility, rather than a black dog breathing down my neck. Besides, I have always loved convenience store clerks. They are like gods, those nameless disgruntled convenience store clerks under the weird florescent light at 3 am. They are usually from exotic lands like Sri Lanka, Jordan, Kenya, and South Korea. What a strange, dark fairyland of crackheaded shoplifters, and drunk rentacops must they navigate every night? I was not to be disappointed.

I was living in Denver, CO at the time. The city had such a strong economy in the summer of 1998 that low-end employers were scrambling to hire up every able-bodied looser and addled loner who registered a pulse, no matter what else was wrong with them. 7-11 job adds decked every bus stop bench and newspaper. As the Southland Corporation lost its best underpaid working stiffs to restaurant management, air conditioner repair, and construction, they dug deeper and deeper into the weird collective of lost souls that muddled aimlessly along Colfax avenue, promising seven bucks an hour for what seemed to be easy work.

My job interview was by telephone. 1-800-711-JOBS put me right through to an automated job interview system. I felt a brief flash of futureshock as I entered my social security number, years of education, and desired salary into the machine. I was briefly put on hold as its automated decision making process considered my qualifications. Hire an eccentric, out of work PhD, evolutionary biologist, with no obvious criminal record? By all means, yes. We'll make a man out of him. I was hired.

My first training session was about 20 miles south of where I lived, in a forlorn, White-Trash neighborhood at the Denver City Limits. I remember counting a dozen different 7-11's along the way.

The Southland Corporation liked to train in certain, "model stores" which were in particularly good shape. These places would get their pick of the new employees and, of course, remain model stores. That location was indeed stocked with the cream of the 7-11 crop. Clean-cut young people with nothing in particular to do with their lives, they worked 7--11 more out of ennui then anything else. All of them lived at home, I was to discover. These were next year's air conditioner repairmen and cellular phone representatives, but for now, they kept the cups stocked and the driveway immaculate.

I was entitled to free coffee and soda, I discovered, and immediately indulged in a 7-11 French Roast with hazelnut creamers. I sat under the pay phone and stared at the used car lot across the street. It specialized in vintage classics, and sported a 57 Chevy, and Edsel, a 62 Caddy, and of course, a '72 Charger. What might it be like to work the desk here for long enough to buy one of those cars? How many biweekly 350 dollar checks would it take? 40? My classmates started showing up ten minutes later. We were exactly the weird lot you might expect of a 7-11 training crew. There was a distracted young woman with bleached blond hair, a tough looking moustached man with leathery skin, an alert looking young man who could have been a boy scout, a young mexican woman with a smattering of gang tattoos, a pimply kid who rode up on a motorcycle, and myself, in a yellow bowling shirt and stubble. The eager young man and I set up a few long tables in the storeroom. It was just barely big enough to squeeze 7 places to sit, and even then, a person had the side of their head mashed into a box of cheetos or a case of toilet paper. The eager young man proffered a hand. His name was Damien. He had a firm handshake and was entirely too happy to be in a storeroom of a 7-11 at 9am on a Thursday morning.

Forty-five minutes later, we were shifting uncomfortably in uncomfortable folding metal chairs. Our trainer was the sort of woman who should be performing a child's puppet show for right wing single moms who want their children to love Jesus. I would spend the next three days trying to visualize how she looked topless.

There was a Byzantine amount of paperwork to be dealt with. Within a half hour, I had assumed liability for any conceivable civil suit, denied that I had a drug problem, agreed to let them fire me for any reason, on a moment's notice, and signed a document that seemed to permit them to implant a microchip into my head. To this day, I am probably on a watchlist for potential drug rehab clients. Halfway into the paperwork, the leather-armed man squinted and joked "so when do we piss into a cup?" We were cautiously informed that 7-11 does not drug test. Instead, there is a phone number to call if we need help.

We were not drug tested.

This came as an enormous relief to every person sitting at the tables. The question asked and answered, our shoulders loosened, and some people began to look relaxed. As a long-term and enthusiastic dope fiend, I was as happy as everyone else, though I had been abstaining from the cannabis simply for economic reasons. Too bad, Denver was a great town for cannabis.

Five minutes later, at our first break, I was to earn just how far people will go to avoid giving up drugs long enough to pass a drug test. Several people had come to the training session with small bottles of other people's urine, which they discarded gleefully in an overfull dumpster just outside the store. Others had dipped their fingers in bleach before arriving, counting on the remaining residue to foil the chemical assay. The Native American woman was a bleach dipper. She had once eaten Draino to foil a drug test. She seemed to think the technique was effective, but also confessed to spending three days in the hospital later, an event that seemed curiously uncorrelated in her mind. Someone lit a joint, and there outside the training session, we passed it around and confessed to a few of our vices. We all smoked pot. Without potheads, 7-11 would have to close its doors worldwide-end of story. Three of the seven were regular meth smokers, two smoked crack every now and then, "but never with the kids in the car". All of us drank pretty regularly. Damien and I were the only 2 who were not basically functioning alcoholics. I was later to learn that Damien had just gone off about six types of medication, including thorazine.

The rest of the training was three straight days of exquisite, pedantic, uncontrollable boredom. Sitting on those folding metal chairs, pressed up against a long table with a peeling faux-woodgrain finish, time passed more slowly than any other syllable of recorded history. Staring at one idiotic instructional videotape after another, I was reminded of Albert Camus' advice concerning "how not to waste time"

"Stand in long lines at the bank, take the slowest bus across town, wait for water to boil.." anything to slow one's perception of time massing to a bug crawl. Convenience store clerks waste less time than any other people on earth.

The training consisted primarily of telling us not do things that might get the Southland corporation in a lawsuit, and having us sign forms that would put all responsibility on us. We went over armed robbery scenarios, learned how not to sell beer to a minor or a person with slurred speech, and that the convenience store world was one big happy interracial family. This was all fine with us, because at the first sign of trouble, most of us intended to slip out the back door with a case of Milky Way bars and never come back.

I know this because, during cigarette breaks, I was indoctrinated into the seedy underworld of the retail underclass. The fresh-faced blonde woman with two children and a Meth habit had felt compelled to let her old boss feel her up every now and then. I tried to hide my enthusiasm as I imagined myself "supervising her", unzipping her green and black frock and sliding my fingers under her lacy black undergarments, all in the name of checking for shoplifted cigarettes and gum. She left her last job at circle K after her supervisor became possessive, imagining that perhaps the customers occasionally had easy pickings to the merchandise. She just walked out-with a case of 3:2 beer, and drank it in her car on the way home.

Not once during the training did we learn anything of practical value. Never did we step behind a cash register or restock a shelf. 7-11 had paid serious money learn to implement three important policies; never keep more than $30 in the cash drawer, keep the stores enormously well lit, and spend 24 hours on each employee to cover their asses from liability suits.

Next..the time I was almost robbed.

Dear Ruby

Dear Ruby,
It will be a while before you are able to read this, but thank you for all the times you have stared into my eyes and, with all the meaningful gaze you could muster, stood on my chest and made conversation with me. I thought this would take years. No words, nonsyllbles in fact, but so much exchange of emotion. I was happy to enjoy the new Metallica album with you yesterday, and yes, those crunchy gallops were magnificent. Some of their best work, despite their age. Keep this in mind when you are playing as a teenager and I am an old man.
Love

A link to my distant past

Check out the proto-emo look I sport. I wish I could say I was on speed, the way I wave distractedly. Nope. Most of the dorks in the film are total geniuses.

lizard men

I wasted my adolescence playing Dungeons and Dragons. Seriously. I played some Traveler, some Space Opera, some Gamma World, even some Paranoia, Toon, and Call of Cthulu, but mostly it was DnD, sucking my time, giving me a reason not to hang out near the 7-11 pay phone, smoking a cigarette, trying to look cool, joining a punk band, trying to get laid. Instead, I fought orcs, impaled paladins, befriended dragons, got disintegrated, built vast space empires. Looser. At the end of all of it, what I had to show for my time was a set of amazing writing skills and an even more perverse imagination, along with the knowledge that a mummy could not hope to beat a vampire in hand to hand combat, that hell is ruled by archdevils, followed by dukes of hell, that antipaladins can turn clerics, that wraiths get their power from the negative material plane, and that geodesic is good for mapping countryside, but nothing beats good old grid graph paper for mapping underground labyrinths.

Here are some highlights from the time I wasted.

1) I first got a copy of the original DnD rules on a family vacation to Minneapolis. It wasn't the boxed set, just the rule book. I filled in the rest. I remember calling my sister an Ogre, but getting the pronunciation wrong. Still, grandma's house was boring, and now I had an excuse to draw one dungeon after another. I still use their notation for doors, cliffs, windows, and trap doors.

2) The first time I fought a skeleton, it had something like six hit points. I had a mace. I was first level. I barely won. I don't think I got too much farther in the dungeon than that. It was in Walnut Creek, CA, and a friend's friend was Dungeon Mastering. He left with the module, whatever it was. I must have been in sixth grade at the time.

3) Keep on the fucking borderlands. Hell. I dunno how many times I burned this thing down and killed everybody in it. Sometimes I had the help of the hobgoblins in the caves of chaos, sometimes not. Sometimes, we killed everything in those caves too. This keep had a way of repeating itself in every fantasy world I constructed...it was they way fantasy empires project power, by replicating this same keep and dropping it all over the map.

4) Riding through a halfling village, on a warhorse, cutting the little fuckers down with a morningstar, or burning their houses down with spells like Flame Strike. I had a predilection for evil clerics, something I can directly attribute to Thulsa Doom's character from Conan the Barbarian. The ones that lived underground, we gassed with spells like Stinking Cloud. We led the women and children away as slaves, in chains, to build a ziggaraut to my mighty power.

5) As an evil, 29th level cleric, we fought the Indian Diety, Ushas, Goddess of Dawn, and defeated her on her own turf, thus destroying her. I still feel guilty about this. She was an awesome goddess. I now realize that we cheated (she should have used her divine command power to completely destroy us...I think we made ourselves deaf or some dumb shit). I don't know how I ended up using clerical spells against another god, but it made sense at the time, even in Elysium. Seems like evil magic should not work there. We had some sort of infernal army helping us. It was like 4:00 AM when we did this, and we were cracked out on Jolt and chocolate chip cookies. Funny, dawn came anyway, in the real world. In my goofy fantasy world, of course, eternal night....EEEVILLL. Everything everywhere must have perished. Dumb cleric, no followers. I was DM and playing with a friend simultaneously, this is something like playing chess against one's self...goofy. That explains it. Seriously, I never see a sunrise nowadays without apologizing to her, or thanking her for making us think we won. Tenth grade, probably.

7) I usually DM'd. I came up with so many fantasy worlds, I could never keep them straight. I remember one scenario where I was breeding armies of undead from caged ghouls and human hostages fed to the ghouls. I would then turn the undead. Another evil cleric. Animate dead was the basis of my power for a hell of a long time. Best third level spell ever, even better than fireball is for magic users, if used properly. One need never to fight opponents again, ZOMBIES do that for you now. Fuck having a thief around to check for traps, let ZOMBIES go first....and hundreds of zombies, led by some fuckwad on a warhorse, is a good time. Hell yeah.

8) I had this campaign with ultra powerful player characters. They were at about 24th level. I translated the book of Revalations into DnD format and ended the fucking world. It was awesome. Early on, they had to keep rolling on the random disease table (yes, there is one in the Dungeon Masters Guide, first edition) for the ailments they got from god, then trying to heal themselves. Somehow, the pagan gods they worshiped still had some modicum of power. There were armies of undead led by a badass antichrist....a big lion-headed beast that breathed sulfur. The PCs knocked those things down, no problem. More monsters though, and earthquakes....I think most of them got wasted before the end. A couple ended up in the lake of fire, tormented eternally. Good job.

9) My friend Rolf was a killer DM. Tomb of Horrors was the perfect module to fuck with me. I think we all died. I was a total pussy about it when my were-rat thief crawled into that fucking sphere of annihilation and disintegrated. I still think that cover is a shitty thing to do...you can clearly see them FIGHTING a lich. Instead, you get this crappy demilitch that is indestructible, and devours your souls forever...it was a total killer dungeon. At the time I was pissed, now KNOW why Gary Gygax wrote it, from the daughter of a woman that played with him all the time. HE DID write it to kill characters, he wrote it to kill her, specifically. This was the same woman who invented the rust monster, by the way. Figures, doesn't it? You DnD fans out there, your most memorable, miserable DnD experience resulted from a personal vendetta. Wouldn't have it any other way, now. Sometimes you are just fucked.


10) THANK YOU, ex wife, for the few times I got laid BECAUSE of DnD. Great times.

left him for dead

A crazy person attacked me today. Accused me of being a Satanic Motherfucker. Beat him senseless. Left him for dead. OK...maybe I escaped his, surprisingly strong, grasp and backed away from his insults. Called cops. Got the fucker arrested. Note to self, a random crazy person is MUCH stronger than I generally assume him/her to be.

Goodbye Mathemetician

Mathemetician uncle. I am sorry I did not go fishing with you, five years ago I was tired from a road trip and you were a lot to handle one on one. A genius. A giant. A speaker of fifteen languages. A topologist. An expert in set theory. I could not work my way through the abstracts of your papers, in fact, the titles were a mystery to me. You travelled the world. You grew up on a ranch and branded cattle. You smoked menthol cigarettes, and I like to think that somehow, in another cosmos parallel to this one, an undying aspect of you is still sitting at the Satire, in Denver, with a menthol cigarette in one hand and a self-satisfied grin on its face. Your face. Jack, I will miss you.

Bray Road and the Beast

Werewolf hunting started slow traffic and no music in the car. Two couples, arranged to be optimal for horror movie scenarios, as evidenced by House of a Thousand Corpses and Kalifornia, among many others, one of the woman was pregnant, adding to the horror possibilities. Soundtrack a disappointment, took the Literature Professor's car and with a car come certain rules, a shame, it had a 6 CD disk changer and Ozzy Osbourne would have hurt nobody. Beloit came easy, only two hours into the driving, shaggy-haired man who teaches school, but under the placid exterior, a beer-drinking badass armed to the hilt and the closest we could get to the Punisher. An old house full of young cats, beer on the side porch, a small city dying of its own obsolescence, a trip to a bar called the mouse, where harsh language is forbidden. I broke the rule, immediately, with the word "Pussy", unable to get it in my head that, when referring to a glass poured half full to avoid intoxication, this is still a bad word. People who believe in bad words puzzle me. Still, at the mouse, a person can be thrown out at the slightest utterance of profanity. What I find vexing, particular, interesting, and indicating a certain degree of hubris on the part of the establishment owners, is that nowhere is there a sign posted indicating "no profanity". Their chicken and dumplings were designed and formulated to nourish the working class it was here I consumed the largest dumpling I have ever seen, in truth, half went uneaten. The badass lives in a green household his bipolar wife home schools their children they fight and stab each other and make up and are genuinely suited for each other. I once saw the badass kill a man with a number two pencil.
Onward, to Whitewater, a bed and breakfast run by old people who do not understand bohemia or goatees but were charmed that there was a wool spinner on the team and somehow forgave me my metaldom. It was so quiet there that a pin dropping to the floor would have elicited numerous comments on timbre and such, and the insect noises on a cool night were virtually deafening. Victorian houses need LSD and windows that open, neither of which we had, but it was my first bed and breakfast since CA and my sisters wedding and it was so restfull I could barely keep from falling asleep as I walked in the door of the place. At night, we pulled ourselves out of dreamspace and horror novels and books about the Amish for a long drive around a swamp looking for a particular place a werewolf may or may not bee. The iconoclast who loves werewolves had a theory that the Bray road beast inhabits swamps, so a scary drive at night was in order. Then sleep. Then wakefullness, and mystery pancakes, and a lovely moment on the front porch, the first indication of autumn coming....then driving, to a flea market and looking at oddities that give places rusticity. Rusticity, for sale everywhere, including a charming sign that featured a curvy woman in a vintage bathing suit, it read "The may look beautiful, but SOMEONE SOMEWHERE is SICK of DEALING with HER SHIT."
Elkhorn. Not as put-together as Whitewater, brimming with a university, or as beat as Beloit, brimming with a university the locals find alienating, a place of farm implements. Nearby Duvalle, a place of Mexican food and cemeteries, our lost Iconoclast, seeking the wolf, never could find her way especially in the presence of a navigator, but we loved the way she would dead end us in cemeteries. Old graves everywhere, stillness. Surrounded by ghosts so palpable they left circus traces everywhere. Note...when searching out werewolves, do not miss an opportunity to be eaten by Zombies. Bray road, finally, after many detours and another visit to a swamp that was not there. nnnnnnnnoooooooooooo.

Drywall

they make it out of gypsum now but back in the earlier part of the twentieth century at least two companies made the stuff out of paper pulp, anticipating Ikea.......it was the great depression at the time but a good idea because in upstate New York they had just cut down all the useful trees and had given up, resorting to making wall board out of compressed paper......people were drunk a great deal back then, like all the good characters in Nelson Algren's novels, such as Somebody in Boots, drunk, all the time.....only a small amount of the stuff, the most expensive, was "enhanced" with asbestos fibers, and I am hoping not do die of mesothelioma as a result of my house...but we all die of something and i have my suspicions that asbestos is not the killer we have made it out to be......not like mister cancer, he kills, in cigarette form........i could use a cigarette right now, though i do not smoke, i know if i were smoking i would feel calm and lucid and clear, not scattered in the wake of a weekend spent eating cannibinoid brownies and seeing concerts...... i do not get the impression that the Olsons used the most expensive fake wallboard, however, so i think i am save, and the stuff must have been pleasantly light....it is worth mentioning that the Olsons were Nordic heroes who occupied my house from its construction till 1979 when i was in grade school and bad things were happening everywhere, i remember seeing a Newsweek article on how our cities were dying and it seemed crazy, how could the cities be dying when it was well known that people were moving away from the country into urban areas...i knew that back then......now it is easy to see what the suburbs did to downtown, and all the junkies and boarded over shop windows that spread from the nuclei that had always lived in the centers of the metropolis....Chicago once had an impressive red light district spanning block after block....did i mention that there is something called a "queer ladder of social mobility?" and that the Irish were working their way out of criminality in my great grandfather's time, in St. Paul Minnesota, a city of rolling hills and narrow streets...... eight decades and a leaky roof, and the Beaverboard is eroded but I refuse to replace it in all but the most problem areas...drywall, the gypsum stuff, is heavy......hanging drywall is masculine....men are supposed to hand drywall, drink Coors, and fart......i cannot do it right unless metal is playing....I drank a Coors at a metal show on Sat........i do not know where they get the gypsum they mine for drywall, but it does indeed come out of the ground from somewhere.....like plastic...which comes out of the ground as petroleum......