August 7, 2003
I have been sulking for a while now over the death and mutant resurrection of my digital camera. It's a serious matter; a dozen tragedies bloom every time I step outside without it. You don't bring a knife to a gun-fight, and you don't go for a walk in Japan (or, as I have been thinking of it these days, Earth-J) with only your eyes as testimony. The camera was stone dead for a while, but when I swapped a borrowed battery into it, it came back to life. Evidently, it had killed both of the lithium-ion batteries I had been using for it. (They won't re-charge any more.) I bought a new battery (for 5000 yen, not chump change), and the camera works, but it drains the battery at a highly accelerated rate, so I have to keep popping the battery in and out while I'm in the field. That will do for now, but it will be a problem for more serious photographic research.
December 18, 1999
I have found that all of the New Year's 2000 hype is infinitely more bearable and in fact rather entertaining if, whenever you see something that mentions it, you mentally replace 'the millenium' with 'humanity's descent into cannibalism'. "the Clarion Hotel is the only place to celebrate humanity's descent into cannibalism!" it's okay, at least. well, nothing can redeem "Millenios". don't worry, it'll all be over soon.
everyone queue up: who will be the first person to do something that critics call "post-millenial"?
so, where do you plan to be when humanity descends into cannibalism? I know several people who are heading up to a house in rural Wisconsin, which seems a very sensible thing to do. personally, I'm curious to see what's going to happen. I can't imagine that much chaos will be visible from the quiet street in Urbana where I plan to be, but some trace elements should be within a quick walk. I do feel like I should be in Chicago, perhaps looting a bookstore, but there's going to be a lovely party down here. we're going to dress up nicely and have a formal dinner to make the upcoming barbarism all the more poignant. if you're reading this, you're invited. (I've found myself repeating that line several hundred times and I want to assure everyone that I'm aware of its only moderate degree of cleverness. I just haven't found a better way to phrase it.)
why am I so excited about New Year's Eve? partly because of the distant potential for total social collapse, but mostly the atmosphere. one of the best nights of my life was spent walking the streets of Chicago right after the Bulls won the NBA championship. everyone was outside, and although society wasn't overturned, there was this implication hanging in the air that certain rules didn't apply anymore. everyone knew what the laws were, but they seemed like a suggestion more than anything else. it was electric. that's what I'm hoping for here. I've considered all of the angles. I've never had much of an objection to getting maimed. I am, however, against anyone eating babies. that rule should still be respected.
you may remember that I mentioned my action movie a couple updates ago. the latest development is that the bad guy will die at the end when the good guy punches him off the roof and the bad guy gets impaled on a clown who happens to be standing on the ground below. my action movie is going to make a billion dollars at the box office.
WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING WITH YOUR LIFE?
I don't have a bible on hand at the moment, so I can't remember exactly how Jonah got out of the whale. was it through the mouth? did it poop him out with some taco bell? since I can't recall the key details, I'm going to have to abandon that metaphor and just say that I had a whole fucking lot of school work to do. two theses and several papers, something like 120 pages in two weeks. all of it was research, too. (whatever happened to good old english papers where I'd get to ramble about some guy's poem until I'd met the required page length?) to complicate the entire thing further, I developed a massive stomach disorder that had me vomiting nearly everything I ate and left me anemic from lack of ability to keep anything with iron down. the low point of the entire episode involved a man named Santiago putting his finger impossibly far into my arse with extremely tenuous justification. he claimed to be a doctor. I don't know. eventually I went to a real hospital, had some surgery, and kind of sorted things out. it was a mess. I managed to do fairly quality jobs on all of the papers aside from one. we performed one of my favorite Potted Meat shows somewhere inbetween. when it was all over, I slept for about a week.
so, in theory, as far as I know, I graduated with my three degrees and I'm done with school forever. no one has told me otherwise. the rest is a blur.
Christmas was alright. low-key, like Thanksgiving I didn't do much because I didn't have much to do. not many people are in town at the moment. a few of the ones who are did quite nice things for me and I was unprepared as usual. I'm terminally crap at the gift-giving routine. I never know when to do it and have like two ideas, both of which are a gift certificate. (in one version, I include a card.) I'm constantly tempted to buy abjectly terrible gifts for people, like a Stryper album or a book about living with herpes, just to see how far politeness of reaction will stretch. then I remember the lesson from Sesame Street about how you shouldn't perform cruel psychological experiments on your friends, and I buy some gum instead.
I did my best to foster panic in the area by playing the famous Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" broadcast on the radio. I don't know if it worked. I live in a test tube and I don't get out much.
WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH THE REST OF YOUR LIFE?
I plan to stay in Champaign through the duration of my lease, which is mid-August, and then move up to Chicago to do god knows what. I want to keep writing/performing comedy, which means that my next few years will probably be spent working crap jobs and looking for rich benefactors. a witty dental assistant said that it sounds like I'll be a waiter. she must be a Hollywood insider when she's not busy cleaning people's teeth. I'm polishing my resume for a position as a trophy-husband. I could do that for a while.
I often have dreams about bread.
for now, I plan to find a job in the decent-to-poor range, produce a ton of theater over the next several months, read some books, continue the radio show and do whatever it takes to get a milkshake. in the long term, I plan to keep on with the creative end and I don't know what else - or where, which leads me to:
WHERE WILL YOU DO THOSE THINGS?
these are the ideas I've had so far. as you read the following list, you may ask: where's Champaign? my answer is complicated, but it does involve kicking you very hard. moving forward, then, and clinging to the illusion of choice in the matter:
Chicago is where I'm headed initially. I know lots of people there, best place to do comedy in the nation, and jobs would be easy. there's always the desire to go somewhere other than where I've been for my entire life, though.
Cincinnati is a dead gorgeous city. I don't know anyone there, but it's the hometown of the Afghan Whigs and that has to mean something. nice compromise between east and midwest. "scene" may or may not exist.
Boston is out east, covers a decent amount of space, has lots of history - all of which are good. on the down side, people talk funny and the job market sucks (according to sources). don't know anything about the arts.
Philadelphia seems to have all the advantages of Boston, but a little less of each. people do not, however, talk funny and that is important. arts are good as far as I can tell. don't know about jobs.
Toronto has a Second City which is a huge plus and is supposedly a very nice city. I don't know, I just have a good feeling about the place. it's in Canada, though, and I don't know if I could ever get over that.
Tijuana for when I decide comedy is bullshit and surrender to the drunk revolutionary inside of me.
I always thought it would be a longer list. I'm always the last person to get these memos, anyway. Juneau, Alaska will probably be added when I'm 30 years old. I suspect I'll be moody and nomadic around that time. if you have inside information about any of those options, please pass it along.
Curtis Mayfield died a couple days ago. I hadn't known that he was ill. he was one of those people who genuinely made me feel better about the world by virtue of his being alive somewhere in it. he wrote and performed volumes of beautiful soul, r&b and funk music from the late 50s (including the soundtrack to 'Superfly') right through a couple years ago - even after an accident at a concert with a collapsed lighting rig left him quadripelegic. I highly recommend his two disc set 'The Essential Curtis Mayfield' if your music collection hasn't already been enlightened by the good Mr. Mayfield. to quote Kurt Vonnegut, speaking about the recent death of another great artist, Joseph Heller: "That's terrible." and it is. there are, however, many good things that he left behind. praise be.
no angry polemical ranting in this update. I'm tired, and I'm feeling all of these late nights. try this, though; perhaps the most fantastic and disturbing website I have ever encountered.
I love winter. it's my favorite season, easily. driving sucks but everything else is good. I love the way air tastes in cold weather. it's much easier to warm up than it is to cool down (e.g. you can only get so naked). winter is the one time of the year when my imaginary war with the universe really seems to make sense. and snow is wonderful. it's a kind of freedom. some of the old French anarchists felt confined by history itself, and when it snows you can imagine yourself anywhere you'd like to be - like not in Champaign, for example, and not in 1999, and not 21 years old. this photograph was taken by Alfred Stieglitz in New York in the 1890s. beautiful, isn't it? that's how it looked like when I was driving home alone the night before Christmas Eve this year. (I had a stereo playing a song about a bullfrog named Jeremiah, though, which sums up the difference between 1890 and 1990 rather nicely.)
the end, then, to "lost like this". it's kind of an artificially imposed ending because nothing major has changed in my personal life - the end has arrived cos I graduated and am losing UIUC net access. but it's an end nonetheless, and that's okay. I don't know. I guess I don't feel all that lost any more, either. I have a fairly good idea where I am. (next to a tree.) I plan to write a new webpage in a couple months. it'll be smaller, tighter, and no less charming. (I've always been in it for the charm.) when I know where the page will be, I will put a link to it here. this page will remain on UIUC's server for a long time after I've lost access to change it, so it's not going away any time soon. if I forget to post the new address, email me here or there.
lost like this, found like that.
November 28, 1999
it really can't be stressed enough how charming I am.
hello. welcome back. glad you're there. I've been swarmed with work and I am handling it fairly poorly. nevertheless it's been an interesting handful of weeks. the major things I'm concerned about - plays, cats, and free milkshakes - have all been going well. there are several people who I need to email. hello, several people. emails make me happy, especially when it's three am and I've got some massive academic thing due the next day. I plan to have a really exceptional week as soon as this semester is done when I will take care of everything. until then, here's a half-assed update before I go to sleep and dream of Trotsky. there are seven new skits and a handful of keen new links that you would do well to follow as well as a general freshening around the site.
I had saltines and noodles for Thanksgiving, because I was sick. but I honestly enjoyed it.
here is a newspaper article about Potted Meat (check out the photos, which look oddly like a superhappy paramilitary commando unit) and here is a review of the play I wrote/directed at the end of October:
RECOMMENDED
The Penny Dreadful Players continue their prolific fall season with "Monks in Trouble," an original play written and directed by Marc Heiden. In addition to the play, two members of Very Secretary will open the Friday night performance with music and Demoted to Hugs will close both performances, playing a song written for the play in their set. "Monks in Trouble" explores the lives of five monks trapped in a monastery over the winter as pieces of their secluded world begin to disappear. The characters are revealed through monologues interspliced with dramatic action. The leader, Stephen (Rory Leahy), best fits the preconceived notion of a monk: a calm, holy man with a soft voice that speaks in terms of faith and devotion. Michael (Mike Renaud) is his polar opposite: a surly rebel with a filthy mind and mouth. Lorenzo (Hank Sprague) is a disgruntled but level-headed artist searching for answers. Jackson (Tony Cosenza) does not seen to grasp the concept of monastic life but longs for enlightenment and salvation. Percy (Eric Rampson) grew up in a monastery believing he was the Second Coming of Christ. Despite the lack of a rational explanation for the disappearances, the story is told more with a postmodern sensibility than in the surrealist tradition. The disintegration of the monastery serves as an impetus for the characters to reevaluate their lives and motivation as they try to justify and survive their crumbling surroundings. The conversations of the monks, laced with comedy, defy the tradition standards of holiness, but hold a deeper meaning. Through each other, they find some sort of resolution - their journey of exploration and discovery is the journey of the play. In "Monks in Trouble", Heiden has created an environment where logic no longer functions. Stripped away of this stumbling block, the audience, like the characters, must reconsider life and the role of religion not in terms of rationality, but in terms of humanity.
Oct. 29 and 30 at 7 p.m. $3. The penny dreadful players with very secretary and demoted to hugs at gregory hall theatre.
Timothy konczyk
hot damn, that was cool. props to the exceptional cast, of course. I'll get the script online at some point.
this is an extremely interesting yet creepy website: transcripts from airplane black box recorders. for those of you not hip to the crashing metal objects scene, black boxes are the nigh-indestructible devices that record what's going on in an airplane cockpit. they operate on a thirty minute loop, so investigators listen to them to figure out what caused the plane to go down. this one is probably my favorite. if you are an airplane who has crashed or are related to one, I apologize for my insensitivity on this topic.
I was very happy to see the government's anti-trust case against Microsoft take a turn for the better when the judge ruled 'yes' on the monopoly question. it'll probably be years before anything comes of it, but that's okay. I am mobilizing an army of stealth wombats with sharp teeth and a fondness for burrowing into people's underwear to deal with everyone who takes Microsoft's side. the "free market" hardly needs to be defended. trying to protect capitalism is rather like spotting Michael Jordan twenty points in a basketball game. it's already going to whip you...
I am against the death penalty in all situations except when the execution is carried out by dropping gigantic pancakes upon the criminal in question. it's still wrong, but you have to admit that it would be an interesting sight. if people are willing to die for love, why not for fluffy goodness?
I am reprinting the following from my .plan file because it was really long and because I haven't gone into much detail about my job at the museum on this webpage. I wrote it in realtime during an awe-inspiringly slow day recently. the piece speaks for itself, I think. I would appreciate if nobody mentioned it to management.
KRANNERT ART MUSEUM JOURNAL: 11.27.99
10:30am
Back at the museum for a day. I haven't worked here for a couple months but Alan needed someone to help out and I agreed to do it for nostalgia's sake. Things haven't changed a great deal since I was last here. Joe Miller is still desperate for something to "help make the time pass". He also continues to assign bizarre, inexplicable hierarchies to guard placement and attempts to manipulate said placements for his advantage. Downstairs all day, I've got a computer to play with - rather unlike last year at this time, when all there was to do was fuck around with the motion detectors. Apparently a bunch of people showed up at 10am and asked if they could have their wedding in here. Alan, who is the supervisor, said yes. (Joe is cautiously optimistic that this will supply "a little excitement.") The wedding is now being held in the former Masters Gallery, directly above the basement where I currently sit. I suspect that this is some sort of comment upon my inability to maintain a mature emotional relationship. Shame Jerry's not here. I'm sure he'd have a few stories to tell on the subject. (I'm sure, because I've heard them all several times. You're too good for her and her crazy teenage son, Jer. Go back there and get the sweaters you left behind. You've got every right.) At least he's got a house. Fuck it, my cats could beat up his dog. He's probably out selling coffee with the Rocketman [tm] beverage backpack and making "hundreds" from football fans. I am alienated by the fact that the football team is doing well in my last year here. Fuck off, football team. Alan seems amused. Richard seems bemused. Joe seems de-mused. I seem used.
11:21am
The wedding is over. As far as I can tell, the bride and groom are still together after ten minutes which puts them streets ahead of where I'd be. Rumour has it we're getting paid double for working today. I hope so. I hope that some day, someone will describe me as the love child of Greg Dulli and Noam Chomsky. Obviously I'm being fairly morose at the moment but the thought still lingers that I'd like Mike Saul to buy "Mario Party" because we'll probably wind up renting it at least six more times. There's a beautiful woman wandering around down here in a leotard. She's been the only non-wedding visitor all day - more commentary by the universe, which I am beginning to resent.
11:31am
I wish it would snow today.
11:56am
If it snows, I won't know - I'm in the basement all day. I was thinking it'd be nice to spend the winter in a cave in Missouri. Joe's calling on the radio. Time for my break.
12:45pm
Uneventful break. I drove over to the Union and everything was closed save the gaping mouths of families down here for the high school football tournament. I am torn between my desires to write something and to take a nap. Still in the basement. Joe may have been a little irritated because I came back from break late. Paint an angry flower when you get home, Joe. I am tempted to do terrible things such as fondle the Rodins and lick million-dollar paintings, but I've done it all before. Krannert seems less of a museum for lack of a painting connecting Christ with feces. I could rectify that. There is an interesting study to be done on the strange vendettas that develop between security guards and the art they protect.
12:53pm
I participated in the big Post-Thanksgiving shopping extravaganza yesterday. The CD I bought rang up $3 cheaper than it was priced. Merry Christmas, shithead.
12:56pm
I am willing to sell the film adaptation rights to this .plan file. High-powered film producers are invited to call me.
1:44pm
Joe interrupted my nap to ramble for a while. He's walking on thin ice, that one. I'm not mad. (Happy to help make the time pass.) I was having fairly asinine dreams about air traffic controllers and usenet newsgroups, so hopefully I'll get something a bit more interesting the second time around.
2:18pm
Originally I was going to wait until Joe passed on, but I have decided to go ahead spreading the rumor that the Krannert Art Museum is haunted. The ghost haunts the basement. (I'm not sure yet if it goes anywhere else.) It's probably either a) Mr Krannert or b) Mr Trees, with Rodin as a dark horse candidate because he wants me to stop fucking around with his sculptures. Anyway, the ghost creeps around in the basement and if you're a guard who's misbehaving (i.e. sleeping), you can hear him sigh and jingle his keys - but when you turn around, no one's there! Spooky.
2:50pm
The phrase "Property is theft" is the only thing on my mind. I don't know why. I do enjoy theft.
3:13pm
I got to go into a brand new area today - Alan opened up one of the storage rooms to find spare guide pamphlets, and I followed him. Krannert is such a beautifully mismanaged museum (except for security, of course). There are literally 3,000+ catalogues from this summer's "The Rich Life and the Dance" exhibition sitting back there that are never going to be used. They will sit forever alongside the thousands of catalogues from Art of the Andes (an exhibition from the 70s!) and countless others. It occurs to me that if today was a Twilight Zone episode (or, better yet, The Outer Limits), the Rodin sculptures would come alive and beat the snot out of me. Depending on how big the budget of the show was, I might wind up as a statue myself at the end in an ironic twist. It's just another day, though, so Pope Benedict XV is going to have to keep head-butting Torso of Walking Man as long as it continues to amuse me.
3:33pm
There have only been three visitors down here so far today, which takes me back to why I loved this job in the first place I really am being paid to do nothing more than exist. I kind of miss the challenge of keeping myself entertained without the computer, which demonstrates how nostalgia can be a fairly stupid thing at times. Joe says he's gunning to close up early. Richard continues to smile wryly at all of it.
3:46pm
I heard the ghost again! Spooky. I'm thinking of working a bizarre love triangle between Mr Trees, Mr Krannert and Rodin into the ghost's backstory. Maybe a murder-suicide pact. We'll see.
3:52pm
This museum would be better if it had less paintings and more deadly games of cat and mouse. (And no wall labels to identify who is the hunter and who is the hunted, either.)
3:53pm
I feel lonesome in several idiotic ways.
end.
at that point, the computer I was using crashed. (the sheer pathos was probably too much for it.) nothing much happened during the rest of the day. a couple visitors showed up and did whatever it is that they do. since I'm reprinting things from various jobs that I've held, this is a small thing I compiled while I was working at the office of admissions and records last fall. my task was to open envelopes from incoming freshmen hopefuls and assemble the various components into a certain order that was convenient for the creepy gnomes who process the applications. by the way, people who work in admissions offices are in fact a low, low species. I can say this from firsthand experience. drop gigantic pancakes on all of them, I say. one afternoon I was left unattended near an operating computer so I wrote down my favorite excerpts from that day's batch. they're all real - I preserved the writers' original spelling and phrasing.
FALL 1998 UIUC APPLICATION ESSAYS
On ethnicity as a bargaining chip:
"I am very diverse. Because I come from small European country Bulgaria, I think I can be very useful to you."
On dreams:
"I have had many aspirations in my life, but in the top few has to be getting a good education."
(from an envelope marked "attention: football dept")
On individuality:
"You may think Courtney Lackman is just another name, but in this paper I plan to show that I am a person!"
On oppression:
"I felt alienated in my small town, where my beliefs on diversity and animal rights were not accepted."
On innovative use of language:
"I currently have a GPA of 3.09 but it is increasing...I rank in the top %5 of my class of 18 students...I am extremely interested in attending your university and hope that you can make my dream come true and except me."
On being hellbent on Polishness:
"If I attend (UIUC) then I can represent my heritage, make the campus more diverse and possibly teach others about being Polish."
On being a misunderstood visionary:
"Everyone likes to play ping-pong, so I suggested a Ping-Pong club! However, this idea was quickly debunked by mediocre minds and reality." (The essay goes on to detail two more failed attempts at starting up the Ping-pong club before ending triumphantly with the club's creation and its registration with the United States Table Tennis Association.)
at that point, I went off and took one of the two-hour bathroom breaks that made the job so much fun.
that's all for now. I'm not sure precisely when UIUC cuts off my computer access but I will find out and have one last update before then so stay tuned, and not in drop-d either.
October 18, 1999
I'm cooking some soup. that's what I'm doing. and you?
summer's gone and I'm still here, one last round with academia. I've got it on the ropes but it's throwing everything it has into this punch. all three majors coming to an end, vague sense of cognitive dissonance about the entire thing. I'm tired of being told what to read, tired of having my writing energies wasted in bland regurgitation, tired of having my desire to learn leashed and caged. but so it goes. beats having my fingers slammed in a car door while a naked Zsa Zsa Gabor points and laughs, if you consider the two outcomes to be separate ends of the same paradigm (which they are, in my world).
I am working on a pretty cool sociology thesis about silent film comedy. it's not all bad, and it's not all Zsa Zsa.
I'm also watching a boat chase in a movie right now. I feel compelled to make note of that.
I had a pretty good summer. did lots of things, worked a great many hours, and wrote volumes. there was a quite nice production of "Much Ado About Nothing" over two weekends in July, much radio broadcasting and perhaps the most memorable fourth of July I've ever had. things were busy, things were good. took a vacation or two: props to caves, especially ones that have not yet been wrecked by humans; props to the city of Cincinnati, which is a damn sight cooler than its total lack of a reputation would suggest; props to cars, which can go places fast; props to my cats, who keep it real. (it's easy to avoid selling out when you sleep as much as they do, though.)
things you should know
I spent the entire summer working on a second draft of my novel. I wound up doing more work than I had planned on: about a third is brand new and the rest was heavily rewritten. I really want to get this draft circulated. I don't know if it's worthy of publication - I won't be surprised if it's not, since it is at heart still a first novel by a young writer - but I think it's an enjoyable piece. since the web is still such a passive medium (the revolution will involve neither pointing nor clicking!), I put up excerpts for the casual to look at and evaluate. I can't afford to make paper copies yet but hopefully soon.
I might have pictures to put up soon from vacation fun (including actual photographic images of my self). check back later. in the meantime, read the novel!
although the above claims about having been busy are true, the actual reason why I never got around to updating this page should pretty well demolish any claim I have towards possessing higher order mental processes: I was stuck on this single idea that I wanted to use up top as the new lead story. it was to be called "the little bonobo that could", and it was going to be a children's story about the happy bonobo monkeys who live in the forest and wank all day long until they get tired and sad, at which point The Littlest Bonobo in whom they'd all doubted was going to rise to the task and get everyone taken care of. then it was going to transform into a bizarre 70's cop show where the chief didn't approve of Lieutenant Bonobo's methods and demand that he turn in his badge, gun and right hand. so there's my explanation. yeah, I know. I'll be staying away from computers forever.
I haven't been completely inactive online-wise. somehow I got sucked into the seedy world of .plan files. I had forgotten the things even existed, although I am old enough to remember when they had an actual functional purpose; now they're the internet's equivalent of a vestigial tail. if you don't know what they are, it's simple: get to a UNIX prompt (or the "directory services" option in Eudora) and, at the prompt, type "finger (user name)". I'm kind of torn as to whether they make sense or not. on one hand, they have no unique function. the web does everything vastly better than .plans do. on the other hand, they're kind of like passive-aggressive email and lord knows I'm all for that mode of behavior. they also have no commercial aspirations ("did you see colgate's .plan?") and that's rapidly becoming a curiosity in the online world. since you can't effectively link to other .plans, people who use them are forced to define themselves through content generation (actually writing something of their own! wow!) rather than making a list of links to popular commecial websites. some people do nothing but quote celebrities anyway, having been trained to think not in terms of truth but rather in terms of allegiance with prefab philosophies - and some people really don't have anything to say - but at least a certain mental effort is required to excerpt the quote (as opposed to the web's equivalent, wherein the simple invocation of a hyperlink serves the same purpose). so, in summary, .plans are still pretty cool.
I think I shall carve a pumpkin this year. need to get one first, of course. trip to the pumpkin patch. like a child, but I'm a ninja now. hallelujah.
I would like to make an intense crime movie that was totally loyal to formula except that for the big showdown instead of shooting guns, people threw whole watermelons at each other. they wouldn't act like it was strange, though. some of them would die. the grizzled old cop would get it. the rookie cop would learn an important lesson. the only way to survive would be if you were really hungry and could eat the watermelon. I won't spoil the double-cross at the end, but let me tell you, it's a doozy.
thanks to Time magazine, we can now derive an equation for the value of foreigners' lives: JFK Jr received two cover stories immediately upon his death, while those 13,000 people in Turkey got a story a couple weeks after the quake that killed them. commemorative issues equal 3 points, cover stories equal 2, and a story towards the middle equals 1. therefore, one rich white kid is worth sixty-five thousand faceless brown people. nice to know, and a hearty "fuck you" to the masses of Americans who sent flowers to the Kennedys and didn't make a donation thirteen thousand times the cost to Turkish relief funds.
what I find even more offensive are the pedantic essays littering the media trying to justify the obsession by rambling about how JFK Jr was part of "America's family"...the fuck he was. it's all part of the national strategy (not the work of an elite cadre - it's everyone's handiwork, wealthy and poor alike) aimed at blinding people to their own lives, keep them from feeling their own pain. understand, please, that I'm not a misanthrope. I have nothing against JFK Jr as a human being. he seemed to be a nice enough guy, and he deserves a ton of credit for not claiming the US presidency (which, given the depth of political analysis in this country, would have been handed to him on a silver platter if he asked for it). the basic point that I keep hopelessly making is that celebrity deaths are no more tragic than anyone else's. I saw some asinine editorial referring to the suffering of the Kennedys as mythic, an epic curse worthy of Greek tragedy, so on and so forth. makes me want to holler, as Mr. Gaye said. that fucking family is doing fine. they enjoy every privelege that money can buy. they operate above the law, indulge their whims, keep their asses covered...chart out the "tragedies" that they're supposed to have suffered and you'll find that damn few can't be attributed to spoiled rich kids messing up (drug addiction, drunk driving, crashing a private jet) or the risks of the lifestyle that earned them their privilege (the assassinations), the parameters of which they were fully aware. there is nothing extraordinary about their suffering. look around you. what would be truly extraordinary would be an extended family that hadn't suffered as much (if not more) over the course of several decades. feel your own pain...
see? only a few minutes and I'm raging like I was never away.
this has been an exceptional year for movies, hasn't it? I had to wait until it came out on video, but all praise to "Rushmore", whose every frame has more soul than many entire decades of cinema (ok, it's hyperbolic, but looking at that phrase cracks my shit up so I'm leaving it in). "Run Lola Run" might still be playing in a theatre near you. go see it for ninety minutes of pure adrenaline and joy. (Franka Potente is hereby instructed to email me soon. we don't talk enough, Franka. let's talk.) "Eyes Wide Shut" was phenomenal (and subject to some of the most idiotic film criticism that's ever been written - but so it went for Kubrick's entire career, I guess). other things were very good as well, but I'm wearying of this list already and would like to get back to writing angry things and making references to my fantastic ass.
this is a message for the Illuminati, so everyone else please skip to the next part. ok. hey, Illuminati, can I have a laser gun? I promise I won't use it to oppose any of your plots for world domination. I'm just sick of taking out the garbage. I always let get too full. if you want to make it an early christmas present, that'd be fine.
Paul Czarnowski's working on a new project up in Chicago: you can check it out here. take back the radio!
(afterword from the future: I wrote the following before the latest shootings. sucks to be right.) another thing that bothers me is the continuing national hangover about Columbine High School. a tragedy, to be sure, but a number of the actions following it (by the media, by so-called behavioral experts, even by the victims' families) have been truly shameful. the Onion nailed one major annoyance of mine - the gaping hole in the causal analysis behind the tragedy. (see their article.) another thing that pisses me off is the attempts (a number of which have been successful) to turn their grief into justification for censorship and the public's unquestioning compliance ("feel your own pain" ad infinitum, etc). humanity does not come to understanding through repression, and to a certain extent the families of the next set of victims (because this will happen again because no one has dealt with the real issues behind the tragedy, choosing instead the standard set of idiotic dodges) will have this set to blame. the new round of vacant yet omnipresent coverage revolving around the school re-opening is also disgusting. to invoke again the Turkish quake: can you imagine what would happen if 13,000 Americans died in one single event? history books would record it as the greatest tragedy of all time. since the quake victims were foreigners, though, we're still obsessing over the Columbine 30. (I can't remember the exact number.) ethnocentrism strikes again. ("Buy American!")
do I think the earthquake should have received similarly exploitative media treatment? no, of course not. my point is that the pretty blatant discrepancies in caring render the whole "overwhelming human compassion" justification false. be honest. JFK Jr and Columbine don't get the blanket treatment because America is truly sad over the loss of human lives. the viewing public is, as always, simply looking for an emotional opiate.
although I will be in C-U until my apartment lease expires in August 2000, I lose UIUC computing access in January so that will mark the end of this here webpage. I plan to update a little more frequently as that date approaches, so check back regularly. no massive gaps like last time. of course, after the stunning display of charm above, how could you resist coming back?
next month: Orphans, And Why They're Bullshit.
May 10, 1999
Spring. Leonard Nimoy on the Y2K bug: "We find ourselves in a time rather like the last days of Atlantis...perhaps only chaos theory could calculate the multiple ramifications of what may occur." and he knows, people. he knows. (I have written a lot of artificially inflated term papers in my time, but never have I come close to the full glory of that last sentence of his.)
yes, so there was a gap between monthly updates of this here webpage. I was busy. all of this page's subscribers should have received their refund checks from last month's issue in the mail by now (read: "I don't owe you suckas nuthin.") over the last three weeks, I literally averaged 47 pages of academic writing per week. teachers have evolved - since I rarely show up for class, they get back at me in volume. if they keep adapting at this rate, I may have to declare my professors sentient creatures. semester's almost over, one more to go. I'm really glad that I'm not graduating right now. I can't imagine I'll be any more ready when the time comes, but that's for a future me to deal with. I bought a gallon of milk that won't expire until the day before Star Wars Episode 1 comes out. in that sense, it's immortal milk...
media watch!
a non-mention, first: back in March,the Daily Illini's Buzz Magazine blew off "lost like this" in its list of the top ten UIUC student homepages. please do check them out and enlighten me as to how any of them are in any way superior to mine, cos it's a mystery to me. The Most Worthy One Who Actually Was Chosen, Jen Gerbi, pointed out that since there are several thousand pages on the students server, they probably just did a random sampling and may not have even seen mine. I like to think it was because of my political convictions. I should get some of those. spruce things up a bit...
brighter days lay ahead, though. April 15th had a story about a show I was in, "The Threepenny Opera". extremely well-written story, comes out fairly nicely, although to get an idea of what I really said you have to insert "fuck" after every other word and the part where I blow off rehearsal and hold up the liquor store was curiously omitted.
superstardom awaits: first there was a story about the independent student theatre group that I'm in, the Penny Dreadful Players. I was going through a phase at the time of speaking only in expletives as a challenge to the media establishment, so the reporter reconstructed what he could.
then, coolest of all, the newspaper sent a reporter (and photographer) to interview me and my two compatriots Matt and Eric for a story about our improv comedy radio show "What Jail Is Like", and we're also included in a story on radio theatre in general. interesting article. some very perceptive choices on the author's part and some odd ones. notes: first, my headphones actually only cost $10. second, the quote attributed to Matt (the "systematic alienation" lines) was actually me. it's really neat, though. the radio show is doing incredibly well. we're finally getting offended callers, too. at last!
the last all new Potted Meat sketch comedy show of the year has come and gone, so check out my scripts if you missed it and get an overview of what in retrospect was a astonishingly prolific and pretty darn funny year. did you check out the radio plays? all you need is realaudio and you get to spend a blissful half-hour listening to a play I wrote and directed that's quite funny and intriguing and suspenseful and all sorts of other good stuff. check it out! I want to hear what people think of it.
that's pretty much all I'm asking of you this month in the way of consuming my artistic product. onwards...
yeah, so I've got this play called "Monks in Trouble" and I suspect it may actually be pretty damn good because people have been telling me that, but I have to wait until the summer for lack of venue availability, so I'm forced to spend the remaining weeks of the semester moping instead of producing. moping is an important part of my life, of course, but I had it penciled in for the early summer and this throws the whole schedule out of wack. it's uniquely frustrating...I even locked up several hundred dollars of funding and a great cast, but fucking acapella groups and various sundry dance groups whose idea of celebrating their ethnic heritage apparently involves synchronized routines performed with chairs to shitty american house music have all the venues booked solid. is this how Radiohead feel when they look at the music charts and see Britney Spears at the top? well, we'll be able to get a great venue in the summer. it's all a matter of doing it ahead of time. I'll make some noise when something's been worked out on the topic...
I'm also playing the Keanu Part (Don John) in a production of "Much Ado About Nothing" in June. will probably be a great show, but let's face it. I'm many things, but I'm no Keanu. thankfully I don't have to carry the entire cast like he did cos the rest of this production is very talented. I do have kung fu though, if that helps.
my favorite link of the last thirty minutes: "Who Was The Ugliest President?" there's pictures, impassioned speeches, and you can vote. the only problem I have with the site is that Taft should be winning by a landslide...I mean, an informed populace is essential to a successful democracy, so do these voters have any idea how fat that guy was? yech!
during the radio show a couple weeks ago it struck me as a good idea to sniff a magic marker, and after doing to I saw a woman dressed as a giant cat walk through the door of the station. I'm fairly sure that it was real, but just in case, I'm going cold turkey on the marker fumes...during a break from writing, I read in the news that Boxcar Willie died this week at the age of 67. he was a country singer who was famous for his "mellow voice coupled with a rough-hewn hobo persona", but he was much more important in my life for being the punchline to the One Joke In "Kids In The Hall: Brain Candy" That I Just Didn't Get. now I know who Boxcar Willie is and now I can laugh at that joke too...this waitress was telling me about how a pair of old people ran up a fifty-dollar tab and then ran off without paying it. fucking old people, man. they're always doing that stuff...from Reuters: "30 percent of Republicans said a woman president would be less capable than a man of chairing the National Security Council or overseeing the Joint Chiefs of Staff." ah, you bunch of charmers, you...a few weeks ago I lost the last bite of a blueberry bagel and I was really sad because I'd geared up my mouth for that last bite and then, nothing. oh, how the world changes: I just found the missing bite on top of the fridge. somehow I'm not quite as excited about it now, though...if you've been thinking about having anything to do with the swing dance scene, remind me to send you the results of my semester-long field research study for sociology 380 on it. god, it's horrifying...I read a thing about how Fox's new animated series "The Family Guy" did well in its premiere. the article said "(The episode) featured spoofs on "Star Trek" and "Scooby Doo", among other popular culture references." the creative bankruptcy of that particular "witty" pop culture-dependent referential approach can be exposed with one question: in thirty years, who the fuck is going to be referencing "The Family Guy"? ... it appears as though I've locked up enough summer hours at the art museum to save me from round three with the temp agency (giver of such madcap fun as the twelve-hour trips to the bottle cap factory, moving boy at the mental hospital, maestro of the rollerblade crash helmet, maze jumper at the hobby factory). color me relieved...want tickets to round two of the Trial of the Millenium? May 13, it's going down. let me know...
I generally think of literally hundreds of things that I want to put here but nearly all of it becomes lost when I turn my head and the voices of the living dead filter in...tight shirt, bar pants, raising a glass and making it last...hey, hey, come out tonight...let's throw bricks through windows. anyone with me?
February 18, 1999
"romanticism is the new fascism." - Per Jambeck.
I am finding myself more interested in millenial psychology than I meant to. witness the following two news stories:
1) Elton John is recording an opera album (a "re-working" of Verdi's "Aida") featuring duets with LeAnn Rimes, the Spice Girls and "a reggae song by Sting". the man is a cultural black hole but he continues to be a valuable expose on the nature of celebrity in our world: how you can lobotomize the famous without anyone noticing, etc.
2) christian evangelist Jerry Falwell accused the amorphous Teletubby character Tinky-Winky of being an insidious plot to turn children into homosexuals, citing a lengthy list of concerns ranging from the color of the character's fur to the handbag it sometimes carries. the pink menace that has somehow gained control of the media strikes again, apparently. christians, why do you allow men like this to act in your name? I mean, if you feel so compelled to throw stones at someone, why not start in your own fold?
these and other stories are in my mind pointing out a direction for the future that hadn't previously occurred to me: as the millenium approaches, we will all become caricatures of ourselves.
aging as I write these words I have one day left before turning 21. I tend to be a very moody birthday boy: endless introspection, cakes destroyed by my mere aura. (I'm serious. there's something about me that causes birthday cakes to fall apart.) the best birthday present I received last year was a potato masher that I have not yet had the chance to use cos I am a lazy bastard and as such I am content with those bizarre "just add water" potatoes in a box. they come pre-mashed. there's nothing that I'm really looking forward to about this age: I don't drink, for one thing, and since NC-17 replaced X, is there anything else? there's something to be said for being a "major" as opposed to a "minor", I guess. whatever that means.
I have to find someone to get drunk for me by proxy tomorrow. I need a sub at the shot glass. I don't like alcohol but there are traditions that go with this sort of thing and I want to be fair about this. so, any volunteers? I want my proxy to be so drunk that, man, I won't even believe how wasted in absentia I was. I plan to be a raging absentee alcoholic.
my car insurance rates went down by half. that's one good thing, I guess. but I despise the insurance industry because I think it's all a massive pyramid scheme, one of the biggest scams in the history of industrialized society, and won't someone dance with me so I can shut up already? I don't know. every year, the question of why I do not yet have a million dollars looms louder. obviously I am not in it for the money (I'm in it for the whores, duh) but there is a story about Jim Carrey that I like - when he was poor and struggling, he wrote himself a check for a million dollars and dated it 1996. he was determined to be able to cash it when that time came, and he was able to. what does this mean? that I have a fantastic ass, of course.
so this is twenty-one. what have I done? a little bit of something, a little bit of nothing. I was playing with my kitten Orbital a moment ago and it didn't seem much of an issue.
anyway. onwards.
be advised that this spring is going to be a phenomenal one for music. receiving domestic release will be albums by Blur (!), Ian Brown (been delayed forever, may not happen) the Manic Street Preachers, Mogwai, Underworld, Orbital (the band, that is - my kitten has yet to make his recorded debut) and others which escape my mind at the moment. new James single in April, I'm told. much money to be spent. I would have no problem with the obscenely rich if they spent all their money on music. I'd understand that.
the water faucet fell out of the wall in my bathroom last week. took four days to get a new temporary one installed. the maintenance guy left a note wherein he misspelled "until" as "intell". is it evil of me to roll my eyes at this?
distance is no longer an object and the future of art is here by way of the past: every one of you is cordially invited (well, the invitation extended to the elderly is not quite so cordial cos you have to shout to get them to hear you, but that's not my fault) to sit front row and be entertained and enlightened by the world premiere of a brand new radio play written and directed by me, "Image". you can also hear me act in a play not written by me but rather good nonetheless, "The Terror At High Hill House", and if you so choose, you can stick around for a play that I have absolutely nothing to do with but which is quite good also, "Ten Pin Love Story". there is a neat website for all these happenings. you can hear it performed live, broadcast via streaming RealAudio, at 8pm CST on February 27th. the plays will then be archived on that website and you'll be able to listen to them whenever you like (catch all the hidden jokes, etc). you will also be able to hear them on the actual radio in the C-U area if you tune into 90.1 FM on the 29th at 7pm. pretty cool, huh? go to the radio play website now to hear trailers and read cast bios. don't miss this wonderful opportunity, kids. god knows life is horrible enough without these sporadic moments of joy.
(check out that last line! I don't need to take advertising classes to know how to pull off a zinger!)
also check out a fresh crop of skits, still warm from being performed and chock full of that supafun flavor that the kids just go wild for. someone should do a retrospective of my work. that would kick ass. I'd only ask for a million dollars.
so, where am I? I am older. I continue to speak all these words but I still do not even know who I am talking to. I still suspect that I am not actually talking to anyone. I still doubt that it all adds up to anything. I have words and I use them; I have learned to speak in extremes because I believe in (because I am resigned to) dialectical materialism as the working process of the world. I believe that it is the duty of the few to behave in impossible extremes and in doing so they will destroy themselves but the world will take a few steps forward by means of compromise. I believe that history moves in this way, I believe that it is a raw deal but I do what I feel that I must. do you understand me? the word on the street is that I am immature but at least I am not boring and that is something to hang on to.
did I ever mention that when I meet the love of my life it will be in a chinese restaurant? it's true.
January 28, 1999
thought process:
"it's late. I should go to sleep. I have an early class tomorrow. if I stay up, I could have that last cookie that's in the refrigerator. when will I sleep, though? I might not get to eat that cookie for some reason, though." (roll out of bed, put clothes back on, pop in a video and eat cookie)
important announcement:
"the emperor is not as forgiving as I am."
why the campus paper sucks, part one:
a questionable interpretation of what is the cutting-edge in editorial journalism. case in point: last week featured a muckraking column that made the scathing, original, and altogether shocking accusation that the Spice Girls may not necessarily be in it for the music and that "Girl Power" was perhaps not as well-developed and deep a feminist theological tract as some would believe. the utterly straight face with which these accusations were made (and the careful restraint and "now-this-isn't-for-sure" waffling throughout - was the columnist fearing mass suicides by the legions of now-disillusioned Spice Girls fans?) made for splendid although absurd reading.
life is worth living, part one:
more odd uses of quotation marks by restaurants. the Burger King on campus had this posted on their giant sign:
Come In For a "Delicious" Milkshake!
why the campus paper sucks, part two:
they just did their "top ten of 1997" lists. admittedly, they weren't publishing during winter break (which is when all the real papers did theirs), but come on, twenty-three days of 1998 have passed. life is apparently and astonishingly continuing to happen, so let's stop memorializing what happened during a now-distant grouping of periods wherein the earth revolved around the sun and move on, okay? at this point in 1998, no one is paralyzed by uncertainty about how to perceive the art created over the course of the last year any longer. yes, I know it's fun to sound erudite by quickly and concisely summing up what was good and what was bad about an entire year - making it sound like you had any real part in history by yelling your intepretation really loudly - but personal gratification is what websites are for, not major (or minor, as the case may be) media outlets.
life is worth living, part two:
cheez-wiz on celery. someone needs to borrow the cheez-wiz for an advertising project? still hungry? peanut butter on celery. yum.
important announcement, part two:
"When that the poor hath cried, Caesar hath wept.
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.
But Brutus says that he was ambitious,
and Brutus is an honorable man."
why the campus paper sucks, part three:
the comics page. I won't go into details, but on Friday one had a character named "Butt-lick Girl". who spoke with a lisp. and had bulging cheeks. because she has a huge tongue. so not funny that it's...still not funny!
late fees:
two dollars.
most of the world:
blue screens.
peace.
- out.
January 23, 1999
if anyone has any information about the styrofoam container of Chinese food that was anonymously left on my doorstep wednesday night, please email me. you can have it back if you want. I didn't eat it. I was kind of perplexed by it, actually. I'm pretty damn stupid like that.
(1.24 - if you've used the feedback form, try it again. UIUC's alias system is whacked and mail sent to it was disappearing into nothingness. it should work now.) I fixed all the major and minor bugs with the last update (if you didn't notice them, send $19.95 to the address on the bio page for a copy of that night's programme) and replaced the temp background (I liked the fishies too, but they were someone else's) on the brand new feedback page (please, feed back to me, regurgitate thought like a volcano, there has never been a better time than now), and if you didn't notice already (I think it's been made quite obvious), there was a fire sale on parenthetical statements over at the bookstore today so I bought in bulk (and passed the savings on to you).
the big news of the day for me, which is sure to generate excitement amongst speculators and stock brokers of the marc heiden financial market (if nothing else, it's got a better name than the dow jones), is that financial aid arrived today! woohoo! several days early, in fact, and just in the nick of time to prevent my rent check from bouncing and to allow me to buy milk! its timing is especially good because A&E announced last night that due to sheer lack of response they were going to cease airing the ads featuring pictures of me moping around staring blankly at dry bowls of cereal and Peter Graves imploring viewers that "for a few dollars a day, well, you probably couldn't bring a smile to this boy's face because god knows nothing can crack that cold miserable bastard but you could at least help put the Lucky Charms on top of his refrigerator to good use." I do appreciate Mr. Graves' sincere effort, but fuck the rest of you for not calling! nah, it's all good. love.
it snowed again yesterday but somehow the charm was gone. I don't know. once again, I blame el nino. I had my first meeting as a full member of the WEFT Programming Committee yesterday also and with my newfound power I took the opportunity to order several executions. the rest of the committee was not really all that receptive but I think that they may be coming around so I'll try again next time. classes are continuing to happen somewhere off in the distance, but I'm not entirely clear on what I'm supposed to be doing about that, so I've been sleeping late and listening to lots of music and things seem to be going just fine.
oh, and according to my lawyer, the opposition is "considering" settling. for my part, I'm "considering" the use of mercenaries, so hopefully the opposition will make their decision before I make mine, although I'm not planning on waiting much longer (and the services of Carlos "The Chinchilla" Borva are only available for so long).
raves:
four chords.
distastes:
the campus newspaper (subject of an upcoming feature).
January 21, 1999
classes began for me today. the rest of the campus began theirs yesterday. that's how much of a badass I am. looks like a peachy keen semester. I have a neat-looking Shakespeare class early in the morning. the professor asked the class about the relative virtues of seeing Shakespeare performed versus reading the text, whether one was inherently superior to the other. After listening to a few answers, I raised my hand and announced cheerfully that "I don't think actors can be trusted. I mean, they're always trying to pull something. You have to read the play first so that you can figure out what their agenda is." This, like every single other joke I have ever made in any class anywhere at any point in my life, was met with confused silence and finally the professor changed the subject to his lengthy background as an actor. so the class is off to a more or less typical start. should be as fun as...well, other classes have been.
all of that is irrelevant right now, though. I've known about what I'm about to announce for a few days, but I didn't want to mention it in the last update because it was already full of stuff. I wanted this to have a column to itself, the echoing sweep that it deserves.
Scott Adsit left Second City. I had the good fortune to witness one of his last performances, and it was an exceptional one - the cast was in preparations for a new revue, and though the overall presentation was as sloppy as previews would be expected to be, Scott singlehandedly carried the show. He filled the silences with more manic energy than I'd ever seen him perform with. A few days later, he was gone. I could rhapsodize for pages about the brilliant dynamo that is Scott Adsit, but instead I'd like to do it in song. It originally appeared in a play that I finished writing with Rory Leahy the very day that Scott left Second City. When I first wrote it, it was for Charlton Heston, but he doesn't matter anymore. so, with no apologies to Elton John, I present for you:
A Flower in Any Soil '98 (b)
Verse 1:
Goodbye, Willy Licious, may you rave on in our hearts
You were the old bluesman who wrought genius from the lost and found
A moment later a monk, the Weasel, young Hemingway or someone new
Now your crusade moves on to Hollywood and nationwide television too.
Chorus: (repeat after every verse)
And it seems to me that you would be
a flower in any soil.
Never fading with the house lights when the improv set comes to a close
And your voice will always echo even if you've now settled for a mere writing job
The sound died down before your manic glory ever will.
Verse 2:
Truth and innovation your art, cowardly yuppies and frat boys on spring break quaked in the dark
At the towering brilliance of our mentor and creative patriarch.
And even though boring people tried to put predictable words in your mouth
You continued to define "cutting-edge" with your every breath.
Verse 3:
Goodbye crazed Saturn salesman, bringing them into the family whether they liked it or not.
Goodbye Mr. Grissom, IQ of a raccoon and struggling with the roundy-roundy tupperware.
You were the force that mocked convetionality, shitty improv suggestions, and blandness masquerading as art.
Goodbye Scott Adsit, from an audience lost without your inspiration.
(Final line)
We will miss your rendition of the American Dream for the rest of our theatergoing days.
see, I'm all emotional now, so I'm going to leave it there. check out the updates throughout the rest of the site.
additional massive respect to Junior Wells and Carl Perkins, two very cool people who died in the last couple of days.
and a hearty "fuck you!" to el nino, who I blame for all this shit.
January 16, 1999
I am back in Champaign now, having returned a week early in order to, I don't know, sit around and watch movies. I rearranged and redecorated my apartment (despite a section in the lease which "discourages" such undertakings) and am pleased with the results. I'm going to try rearranging the entire city next. for example, wouldn't the frat houses look much nicer over by, say, that landfill?
on the topic of improvements recently made to Champaign, Eamon returns this semester. I was thinking about doing a bit where I described it like a porn movie, something like "Eamon's return to help the gang at Mr. Illiniwek's Chicken Shack raise enough money to save the school provides much spine-tingling fun!", but then I guess I came to my senses or maybe I got hungry, I've already forgotten. At my mack-daddy little brother's request, I put up a small webpage for his friends to see his picture online. what a smooth little bastard...
I haven't been walking very smoothly lately. as many of you may have heard or read in the papers, a bone spur in my left foot has been preventing me from playing with the Chicago Bulls as of late. it developed some time after I got new shoes for the first time in five years in late 1997. a podiatrist examined my feet over break and condemned them as "unsafe" or something. amongst other things, I have "hammertoes". well, well, well. Bulls management has been treating me like shit for much of my career, so I am taking this opportunity to demand a trade to Alaska. my foot is feeling a bit better as I get ready to upload this, but you know, it goes beyond the money or the injury, really it's all about respect.
speaking of words in italics, things are gradually starting to happen now in my never-ending battle over the attempted murder of the Cradle (my car) on I-57 last year. (click on the blue head and read around for the full story.) the "discovery" period is a time when the defense gets to examine the evidence and documents that I plan on presenting at the trial, do research about me, hire private detectives, hold depositions, and generally stall like crazy in the hopes that the plaintiff will drop the case out of sheer intimidation. after five long months, I remain as pissed as ever and the discovery period ended on the 31st of december. now the defense either has to pull another stall tactic from out of their sleeve or let things go forward. things going forward entails an "arbitration" date being set. notification of that date is scheduled to arrive roughly a month after the end of the discovery period, and the date itself generally occurs around two months after receipt of the notice. during arbitration, evidence is presented and witnesses are cross-examined for the benefit of an arbitrator, who then makes a judgement. both sides have the option to reject the judgement of the arbitrator for a $200 cost and send the case to trial, which for a $20 fee (which the defense in this case paid, indicating either that they thought the concept of a jury would freak me out, that they have no intention of accepting the arbitrator's judgement and want this taken to trial, or that they just had twenty dollars that they didn't know what to do with) will be held in front of an actual jury. so there's that. I am being represented by Mr. Brian C. Owen, attorney-at-law.
in other trial-related news, the film rights to this entire case have been sold to NBC in exchange for a pack of gum. it will air sometimes in late 1999 and will feature Kevin Nealon from Saturday Night Live fame making his dramatic debut as a crusading lawyer who takes on my case in order to make a statement about humanity and justice. this character does not exist in reality - I have not met him - but NBC president Warren Littlefield says that he is a "composite" of "several different people" whom the Nealon character is "true to, in a dramatic sense". I don't yet know who's playing me, although the three words "Neil" "Patrick" "Harris" are enough to strike fear into anyone's heart I think. the WB is apparently planning on doing their own, unauthorized version of the entire case featuring Tom Arnold as my lawyer and Doug E. Doug as me. hey, whatever the people want, I guess.
those same peasants have been thrown into terrible confusion now that, upon taking the test a second time (see the blue head for the link, back in november), I have been revealed to be most like Sporty Spice. so what is it, the people demand? is marc a Sporty Spice or a Scary Spice? chaos and violence reign.
so while we're talking about violently awful segues, in summary my break was really rather good overall. saw lots of good people, both by plan and by sheer coincidence, saw several good people onstage in Les Miserables, saw an absurd amount of movies, many of which were actually rather good, and finished Part Three in the Trilogy with Rory Leahy. history will thank us, I'm sure.
raves:
That's Rentertainment (the campus video store), cheez wiz, matinee prices, popcorn, the wrong door.
distastes:
fake bread for use in restaurant displays.
January 8, 1999
the main thing that I have done so far this month is be snowed upon. a record snowfall hit Champaign and the world outside became an apocalyptic vision: mountains of snow up to twenty feet tall, entire cars buried, streets barren with only tracks from the treads of what look like tanks visible. (why I associate tanks with an apocalypse, I'm not quite sure.) basic provisions ran low; proving definitively that Kevin Costner is full of shit, the postal service was nowhere to be seen. the only thing that remains yet to happen is the emergence of feudal city-states and warring tribal lords. it wasn't always like this, or so I'm told by last month's update of this page (which makes a reference to "an uninspiring sort-of-warmness" that now sounds quite nice), but it's hard to believe.
it's really sad how owning a car has kind of ruined snow for me. frosted windows create delay, icy streets paranoia, cold air sluggishness. I was out driving during the major wave of the snowstorm and didn't survive. I had planned to write something about it, but the moment has passed. death is so transitory.
the MechaCradle has lain dormant for more than two weeks now (wasting $50 of liability insurance payments). it was buried by the snowplows (the kind of idiotic paradox that only civil service can create) and when I finally managed to dig it out, it refused to start. effort is going to be put into it later today. my old car suffered damages of more than twice its own retail value and never once failed to start until it died for good. the lesson learned? "get them before they get you." it doesn't relate, but it's as good as any, really. "stay off the rock, kids." that one, too.
new year's resolution
in the past I, like others, have scorned the ritual of setting goals at the beginning of the year only to break them once laziness sets in. many resolve to lose weight, for example. others plan to read more. so on and so forth. in a change of heart, I've decided to give it a try this year. having taken a long hard look at myself, at who I am and where I am as a person, at how I relate to others and where I want to be, what my hopes and dreams are, I have made a new year's resolution to be given more stuff. it's not enough to be content with the past - one must always strive to improve as a person, and I will rest on my laurels no longer. I am determined for this year to be the year when I receive more free crap than any other. and damn it, I'm not backing down.
this is probably going to be one of those years. unless my hare-brained scheme works, I am doomed to turn 21 this year. (god, my biological clock is ticking.) although I am taking an extra semester of college in order to pick up my thirtieth bachelor's degree, I'm also pretty much stuck with graduating this year. also all the numbers on the calendars are about to change. I am just now getting used to the notion that it's 1997. the Big Number Change is going to fuck my shit up, most likely. environment in upheaval. in the face of this chaos I plan to boldly and decisively curl into a fetal ball on the floor. once again, I'm not backing down.
you should all boycott the miserable bastards at the UIUC office of admissions and records, by the way. although there were admittedly a number of good reasons for them to let me go, they chose none of them. (if I'm to be criticized, I demand that it be for the right reasons.) no, they claimed to be content with my performance but they decided to replace me with a new full-time employee because they needed someone who could work more hours than me. since they had promised me that I could work over the winter break (depriving me of the ability to earn much-needed money), that was a rotten thing to do. tell my old supervisor that she's a heartless whorecow if you get the time. cheers.
on a more positive note, I highly recommend that everyone purchase the Boards of Canada album Music Has the Right to Children for extended use on these lonesome january and february nights. it's immaculately brilliant for those purposes. trust me.
new web material!
I did a quick job on most of my Potted Meat scripts and put them up on the words page so that all of you who've seen me hype our shows relentlessly can finally get an idea of what it is that we do (and all of you who've actually seen the shows can get what it was that I was going on about in them). they're eminently readable and you should succumb to their voodoo. also there is a new page because there is...
new broadcast material!
the radioactive monsters now cruise around the world in a swank supasonic jet dispensing improvisational comedy and radio theatre every sunday night at 10pm. the show is going phenomenally well - calls flood in every week and complete strangers dig the show and talk to me about it. fantastic. incredibly talented friends Eric Rampson and Matt Trupia join me weekly to display our kung-fu which is indisputably mighty. sunday nights on WEFT 90.1 FM is Must See Radio. fame and fortune beckon, although at the moment I would settle for some cookies.
December 18, 1998
I am attempting to crawl from the audio primordial soup of overnight radio programming to a sunday 10pm timeslot. the new, untitled product will take the radioactive monsters out of london and across the world during two hours of improvisational radio theatre. the show is to be performed by myself and a collective of friends. an initial venture was given wildly enthusiastic reception, but final determination of the show's fate is two weeks away, leaving Gamera and the boys to skulk around liverpool waiting for word.
the MechaCradle (my car) broke down and required $150 worth of repairs to operate at full capacity. I find it bizarre that the original Cradle suffered over $5000 worth of damage in accidents yet ran just fine until the day it died, while the new one collapses at first hint of a blown sparkplug. what the hell? also, it cost $150 that I don't have. to quote Paul Czarnowski, "send money!"
this, the twelfth month, brings no snow as of this writing. instead it has delivered an uninspiring sort-of-warmness. clearly some supervillain has engineered a diabolical plot. when I have some free time I will do battle with him or her. in Finland they call me "He Who Battles Evil". did you know that? it's true.
my kitten orbital has grown up to be quite the ladies' man. his favorite spot is a nice perch in the most well-lit window where sorority girls who walk by see him and stop to gurgle and coo at him. this happens at least twice a day. I am fairly sure that he knows what he's doing - he seems quite pleased with himself to get the attention - and the entire arrangement is just so divinely absurd that I can't bring myself to do anything about it. somehow it makes sense to have sorority girls hovering outside my apartment gurgling and cooing. I no longer have to go looking for it; finally, the chocolate syrup of social alienation is being fed to me with a spoon. wonderful!
my job at the Krannert Art Museum is going quite well. in fact, I don't think I've ever been happier with a job. not only is there a bucketload of free food every saturday, but at last someone is paying me to do what I've been saying I should be paid for all along: essentially, I receive money to occupy a space and spend at least part of the time being somewhat aware of the world around me. fantastic.
some short, easily digestible rants:
the "political correctness" backlash
it is the cutting-edge of the brain-dead to rail against political correctness. when the term is used to refer to a situation, it says a great deal more about the person using it than it does about the situation. whenever racist or sexist acts are committed by someone who a) does not have a swastika tattooed on their forehead or b) is not wearing a KKK hood and the minority has the nerve to complain, it is called political correctness. the fact is that political correctness as an oppressive, censoring force simply does not exist and never has. magazines like Time run "humorous" columns identifying what the "PC" term for an "eskimo" is. how zany. blah, blah, blah. the reality is, however, that no one has ever been silenced by political correctness. uniquely in human history, we have a backlash against something that does not exist. (does it? name one instance where the consequence is something other than you being thought of as a jerk for insulting someone or for failing to have an articulate position on some controversial issue - e.g. "it's not politically correct to be pro/anti issue X, political correctness won't let me speak my mind", etc.)
as for the whole "I don't want to be referred to as..." aspect, you may not see why a group of people different from you don't want to be referred to by a certain term. that's fine. they don't expect you to share their feelings - you haven't had the experiences that formed those feelings - but you should at least respect them. how arrogant is it to presume that it's more of an inconvenience for you to have to use a different word than it is for them to shrug off something that has negative and/or painful connotations for them? you're not a badass. you're just a dick.
"I don't see how..." seems to be the mantra. who's asking you to see, though? the weakness of your imagination should not be imposed upon other people. which leads me to...
white suburbanites and affirmative action
what is it about them that makes them think they can extrapolate their experience to cover the entire world? yo, Ted, just because you didn't run into any opposition in the job world doesn't mean other people didn't. the way that they take their upbringing for granted - "well, if I can do it, so can anyone, and the $200,000+ parental income and private school education I got doesn't make me different from anyone else!" - is unbelievable. I find it extremely grating to read essays by whiteys who slam affirmative action as they write on top-of-the-line computers in cozy, heated rooms. they complain about racially-based admissions policies as if they are being discriminated against but the fact is that they have plenty of access to fine schools and no hard-working whiteboy has ever been kept out of college by affirmative action. (plenty of hard-working nonwhiteboys, on the other hand, have gotten into college because of it thanks to access to grants and scholarships that schools would not otherwise offer.)
I'll be interested the first time that I hear a homeless guy tell me that affirmative action kept him out of school and a job. until then, the angst of white kids who (without any factual basis) complain that "minorities should stop complaining and just work, they have all the same chances" sounds banal to me. let's hear one answer the fact that 95% of CEOs in the US are white males. is 95% of the population white and male? no? then what's keeping minorities out? either there is a preferential establishment in this country or minorities are dumb and incapable, and if you believe the latter, I'd love to see your research on it. have fun going public with your findings. otherwise, shut up already...
four thoughts about the millenium
firstly, to all the types who continue to insist that the millenium starts in 2001, not 2000: yes, you're technically right. but what everyone cares about - what all the excitement is about - is when the number chages from 19 to 20. you are correct but irrelevant so drop it already. millenium fever is a somewhat dim ritual, yes. so what? so is sex 'n booze.
secondly, buy stock in anti-depressants now. the decade of 2000-2010 is going to be very interesting as people try to cope with the fact that nothing will have really changed. no force from above will have intervened in the painfuly numbing routine of their lives. if nothing else, it will be a ripe time to be an artist.
thirdly, as the year looms on the horizon, I issue a desperate plea to everyone to not even mention the Prince song "1999". "we're gonna party like it's 1999...and it is 1999!" anyone who thinks that that is humorously ironic in any way is not a good person and will not be going to heaven. if we don't nip it in the bud now then we're going to be sick beyond belief of it come december '99. do future generations a favor and take decisive action now...
finally, I join with a handful of other people in calling for a death to irony. no more. it's done, it is false, it is not clever. throw this snarling, hideous beast away. as the arbiter of such things, I declare irony to be a spent force and the lowest form of humor. abandon the hollow aesthetes in their cafes, pretending they are above everything by making ironic comment upon it, and let us go into the new millenium free of that hateful burden and face things as they are. let's actually live in the world that we're headed towards. irony is an excuse for the incompetent and the inadequate to mask their inability to experience and to create. no more. do you hear me? no more.
happy xmas. irony is over.
December 4, 1998
somebody has started leaving behind color printouts of the satellite weather forecast in the studio, so on my radio show this week I was the first to break the alarming news that a gigantic blob of green crap is going to descend all over the region this week. you can be calm, though, because doppler forecasts reveal that an even larger glob of turquoise-ish crap is going to cover the green stuff up in a few days. still, what a terrifying world we live in! as the voice of the media, I remain calm and firm in the face of crisis.
classes are starting to wind down, only a week and a day and a paper and a review and a two-page essay left before finals. aside from the fucking mess that is sociology 231 as taught by professor Bordua, this has been a good semester and I'll actually miss the rest of my classes. I have decided to plan the rest of my academic career around trying to get as many teachers named Seamus as possible. the current Seamus under whom I am taking an english class showed a portion of Trainspotting in class on wednesday and distributed short stories by Irvine Welsh and James Kelman (another good scottish writer) to read for tomorrow. how much ass does that kick? all ass that is within reach and more.
the sky is a very different color out of the window to my right than the window straight ahead.
raves:
late-night grocery shopping, life ungoverned by half-hour segments, warmth, breakaway glass.
distastes:
colds that are bad enough to be annoying but not bad enough to do anything about, snowy weather without snow.
November 18, 1998
the weather has finally turned cold and the heat has turned on. this ia problematic in my humble apartment because, being an old-school building, we individual tenants have little or no control over the heat. windows are thrown wide open but it doesn't really help. so I am very sleepy as of late. my cats seem cool with this.
I have not accomplished much as of late. post-novel sloth hangs over me in a big way. but it's cool. don't freak out, man.
this was a good halloween in some senses. for example, the university of illinois, in a rare display of creative awareness, realized that the heavy emphasis upon getting really drunk that was such a prominent feature of years past had grown monontonous. they did something about it: an utterly brilliant rumor of a serial killing that was to occur. supposedly a psychic had appeared on oprah and announced that a mass murder would happen "at a big ten school, at a dorm next to an old cemetary shaped like an 'H'". the university of illinois fits that description. (even better was that the killer was to be dressed as little bo peep.) the simple fact that no one had said that on oprah did not deter the community, and by halloween people were so freaked out about it that they hired massive amounts of extra personnel to watch over the dorm in question. what a great world.
this was not such a good election day, on the other hand. in illinois, not many races went the right way. the openly racist, fatuous Rick Winkel won his representative seat. ultra-conservative freakshow Peter Fitzgerald bought a Senate seat. (yet another example of how little respect the political right in this country has for you: they accuse Mosely-Braun of campaign finance indiscretions and run a $40 million trust-fund baby against her, expecting that you will not notice the hypocrisy. and, unfortunately, most of the state swallowed it whole.) two racists battled it out for governership and one of them won, which I guess was bound to happen unless aliens arrived and started shooting or something. I have already forgotten the names of everyone else who ran but I was pleased with little of it.
it should be admitted, however, that I did not vote. I was trying to decide if I want to come up with a philosophical justification for it (and believe me, I could construct a good one) but honestly I was kind of confused about the registration process and I didn't sort it out in time. I've never been clear on where I should be voting, here or Chicago. here, I guess, since I now have no residence up there. on the other hand, to register here implies that I am now a citizen of this scary fucking desert known as central illinois and I enjoy my status of "extended visitor" (however illusory it may be). I don't know. I loathe the two-party system. yes, a single vote is fairly minute - you can look at it that way - or you can look at it from the perspective that this country's government is determined by less than 40% of the populace and you can be part of that elite group. you can walk around and sneer at your fellow citizens, knowing that in a sense you govern them because they're not a part of that voting elite. everybody loves a good power trip.
one thing that rocks the casbah is that former wrestler Jesse "the Body" Ventura won the governorship of Minnesota. not only is that a major-race win for a third party, but it's also just plain amusing. way to go, Minnesotans. you made a good choice. politics needs more absurdity like that. I ran for my school's presidency and very nearly won on a similar platform - every once in awhile someone needs to spray paint "poopy" in the halls of government as a shock to the system. in the legislatures of our country they are not governing, they are self-serving and it is a pretentious load of crap that can only be eliminated through exposing it for what it is. if it takes a clown to do that, so be it. pow. dada.
one thing that I did not go into during the last update is my current employment: I work two jobs. the first is at the office of admissions and records, where I have an unduly large influence over the fate of thounsands of fresh-faced applicants of every age. this strikes me as quite amusing. (I don't make admissions decisions, but were I to "lose" a key piece of paper...) I have no real intention of abusing this position, but it's good to know. the second job is a way-cool gig as a security guard at the krannert art museum. I carry a radio and I stay vigilant. I protect art. don't touch or you will feel the might of my kung-fu, sucker. the museum has the second largest collection in the state but, oddly enough, is not well-known to the general populace here. (probably has something to do with the campus being a bunch of fucking idiots.) some of it is rather cool. I've already named many of the pre-Columbian pieces.
the Trial of the Millenium is now threatening to encompass a second one: the court date was set for May 13, 1999. two years and three months after the accident.
"Pleasantville" and "Bride of Chucky" are both highly recommended. stay cool, kids.
October 18, 1998
first three people to notice that this page has been updated after more than five months win the lost like this special achiever award...don't trample each other as you rush to that mailto link, kids. erase the "home.html" and start at the beginning, because I redid the entry page too.
have you ever had a guest that stayed longer than you really wanted them to, or even just one who made a mess before they left and you don't want to have to deal with it? I find myself in a situation something like that except you have to imagine me as a disaffected teenage Dr. Frankenstein because I assembled the guest in question. I never really intended for this website to last beyond the school year in which it was created - september to may, as it were. my previous webpage had been static and I prefer that method of web presentation. my online modus operandi has always been to hide nigh-infinite bits all over the structure and let the dedicated search for them - allowing the expansion of perception to compensate for actual regenerating product. this time out people got both and they kept complaining when the web page was left alone. stinkers.
understand: this is not an extension of myself. there is no correlation between action and representation here. this is just some shit on a computer screen...with that out of the way, here you go. I don't really intend to do updates quite as frequently as I did last year, but who knows? ain't no one producing anything like it, flava from a school of fish in an ocean so deep not yet seen the light of day...it's got my name on it, so I suppose I have to do something with it. and besides, this is the new frontier, or hadn't you heard...
well, what I done? I set this summer aside for accumulating the List of Surreal Jobs that every famous person has to have in order to spice up interviews. in that regard it was a massive success - I did everything from getting buried underneath an avalanche of rollerblade helmets to rearranging and redecorating a mental hospital. no joke. financially it was somewhat less than successful, but that was a problem to be dealt with by later selves and I had a splendid time overall. I finished writing a novel and acted in an independent film that was shooting in the area: a drama about family crisis in a steakhouse. 16 millimeters of my face onscreen, the line cook on work-release who had a plan to make a break for it...an amazing experience and it kept me unavailable for "Godzilla 2", sorry guys.
the MechaCradle, my car of May origin, continues to run beautifully and without problem. with this vehicle, there has been a notable decrease in frequency of meteors that fall from the sky while I am driving, which is good. as for the ghost of the original Cradle, the Trial of the Century continues. in August I drove up to Chicago for the arbitration date, which is just like a trial but it is done before three arbitrators instead of judge and jury. I walked in there, looked that bitchmonkey straight in the eye, and kicked his sorry ass all over the circuit courts. the arbitrators took all of two minutes to award me every single cent I asked for. it was a wonderful thing to be a part of: they announced the verdict and suddenly these swarms of people appear all over the place, entire crowds holding him back from me, and he's yelling at me "you're nothing but a two-bit punk! you got nothing, you hear me? nothing!" and I calmly reply "you're going down for what you did, Hall. don't drive like an asshole. here endeth the lesson." it was a moment of immense drama and it was great - that's not to mention the bomb threat, and knocking the gun out of his hand, and impaling his silent but deadly hired Dutch henchmen, and getting a commendation from the mayor for saving the city - but it unfortunately was not final, as the opposition has the legal right to reject the arbitrators' ruling and take the case to a full trial. so he did. why he thinks that a jury of twelve average people is going to be more sympathetic, I don't know. I'd think they'd be less, if anything. but so it goes. what a dick. the meeting to determine the date of the meeting to determine the date of the trial has been held (once again, no joke), so we're awaiting the date to determine the trial date now. the Trial of the Century continues. it is at least nice to have it confirmed for me that the even the legal world finds this situation as absurd as I do...
oh, the "lost update" is in the "past" page, by the way.
I have a new apartment. the last one was chosen for its last-minute availability; this one was chosen because I actually like it. the cats seem to agree with my choice. they are each sleeping inches away from me. one thing that I can't afford is TV - although I can watch videos, I don't have an antenna and cable costs far too much unfortunately. I have been keeping busy though and can only think of two times in the last week when I actually missed it...
Potted Meat - Halloween at 8pm, Channing-Murray Foundation (Mathews and Nevada in Urbana). very good for you.
this web design thing is comfortable once you slip back into it.
hot damn, there are a lot of words on my page.
June 18, 1998
the index page got an update too. go check it out (erase the "home.html") and pretend that you're coming in for the first time.
still waiting for Oregon Trail stories, slackers. (Katy and Not Elvis exempted from that labeling.)
where to begin? I've been plenty busy despite no web activity (come on, it's summer. piss off.) writing on, learning to drive all over again, and aimlessly looking for a job. I wound up at a temp agency, Manpower. as those of you who know me best may have guessed, yes I did choose it because of its name. you can either look at it in the depressing way ("fuck, it's sunny out and I'm doing crap menial labor") or the cheery way ("I'm exerting manpower!").
what holds up the updates of this page? well, for one thing, there's only so much time I feel like spending in front of a computer writing and this is just one of many projects. it's not as though I get paid or even rewarded for this. and it's not just straight recall, either. I should write a manifesto or something. this page is founded on the rejection of the belief that to be "worthwhile" (in the "top 5%" or whatthefuckever) a website must be dedicated to some celebrity or some business. that whole crap attitude is all a reinforcement of the disgusting agenda that we should worship every move of the celebrity elite and most importantly continue to consume it while staying on our couches. whatever you do, don't get up. whatever you do, don't think that your idle activities and thoughts are as important as a celebrity's idle activities and thoughts. no. screw that. what's disgusting about the web is the way that people line up to buy into it like pathetic sucking eels. nothing on the web nauseates me more than to see some suburbanite college dropout with a web design company supported by his parents' money and his webpage about how he is in fact the one doing something worthwhile on the web because his fat ass is doing a little microsoft mime routine.
repeat after me: your life can be as interesting as anyone else's. your art can be as good as their art. your thought can be as relevant as their thought. create like mad children and the web is an available canvas so use it.
but, you know, on the other hand, you can't let yourself get lazy. you have to ask yourself why you've put something on the web. for what reason does it exist? it's tricky but there has to be a spin. you can't just recall the details of what you did that day because no one cares. it's artless. journals are all fine and good but why would you put an artless journal online? presumably, if you choose to use the web then you have considered its virtues and amongst those virtues, central is that other people can see what you put on it. strangers can see it. so why do strangers care about the base, unadorned details of your life ("I did this. And then I went there. then this person I know did this")? what's there to make them stick around?
what you have to do is make art of it. add a twist. make them think they're getting a picture of a room and then when they're not looking insert a monkey into that room and watch all hell break loose. I don't know if I always manage to hit that magic plateau myself but when I'm talking about something, like my cats or my car or my job, I try to make them social critiques or just plain amusing even if you weren't there or have never met me. be thoughtful or be funny or just be observant. I am not an anarchist but I believe in wanting to get into as many peoples' homes as possible and you do what you have to do to acc
I have been sulking for a while now over the death and mutant resurrection of my digital camera. It's a serious matter; a dozen tragedies bloom every time I step outside without it. You don't bring a knife to a gun-fight, and you don't go for a walk in Japan (or, as I have been thinking of it these days, Earth-J) with only your eyes as testimony. The camera was stone dead for a while, but when I swapped a borrowed battery into it, it came back to life. Evidently, it had killed both of the lithium-ion batteries I had been using for it. (They won't re-charge any more.) I bought a new battery (for 5000 yen, not chump change), and the camera works, but it drains the battery at a highly accelerated rate, so I have to keep popping the battery in and out while I'm in the field. That will do for now, but it will be a problem for more serious photographic research.
TALES OF THE SLIGHTLY SPOOKYBefore I came to Japan, I spent a week driving around South Dakota. One of my stops was in Deadwood, the hometown of Wild Bill Hickok. (There are several beautiful old buildings with modern slot machines inside, as gambling is legal there.) On a hill overlooking the town, there is an old cemetery with the first pioneers of the land, Civil War veterans, and Wild Bill himself. I decided to stop by - photographing old cemeteries is kind of a hobby of mine. The cemetery was fairly interesting, and I took a lot of photographs. There was another very steep hill above it, where the guidebook said just one man was buried, Seth Bullock, the big dog of old Deadwood. Feeling adventurous, I climbed up. I could tell I was the only person who'd been up there for days. The plot of land around Seth Bullock's grave was surrounded by a small black wrought-iron fence with a stone base. On the left wall of the base was a sealed white envelope under a rock. I picked it up to look at it, thought about opening it, and decided otherwise. I put it back, took a photograph, and left.
When I finally returned home to Chicago, I transferred the pictures to my computer, and was surprised to notice that some of them were at a lower resolution than others. Somehow, the camera resolution had been changed (which requires pushing at least six different buttons in sequence). I put the pictures in order of when they were taken and realized that all of the pictures I'd taken at and after Seth Bullock's grave were at the lower resolution.
Spooky! Sort of.
A crazy old codger saw me lining up the Deadwood photo and called out, in that way that only crazy old codgers can, "Make sure they smile for you, sonny!" I took the photo and replied, "Somehow, they're resisting my charms, sir." He cackled.
It feels like that was ten years ago, although I've only been here on Earth-J for two and a half months or so. The only reminders of the first 25 years of my life come through the internet (and grateful I am for it). Everything is strange and different, except for bowling, which is much the same, but louder. This place cheats you and allows you to pull scams on it in equal measure. I support economic sanctions against any country whose fast food joints double the prices of milkshakes once the hot season begins...but I bowled seven games yesterday for 700 yen (roughly $6.40), with several games of pop-a-shot and some skiing video game thrown in as well. It's bewildering. If grad school is a sequel to college, then teaching English in Japan is a three-decades-later remake, amped up with rapid jump-cuts and unnecessary special effects. Everyone's still fucking and drinking, but the townies get a more prominent role, because focus groups liked them in the original.
I get such mixed signals from this place. Some days they love you...
December 18, 1999
I have found that all of the New Year's 2000 hype is infinitely more bearable and in fact rather entertaining if, whenever you see something that mentions it, you mentally replace 'the millenium' with 'humanity's descent into cannibalism'. "the Clarion Hotel is the only place to celebrate humanity's descent into cannibalism!" it's okay, at least. well, nothing can redeem "Millenios". don't worry, it'll all be over soon.
everyone queue up: who will be the first person to do something that critics call "post-millenial"?
so, where do you plan to be when humanity descends into cannibalism? I know several people who are heading up to a house in rural Wisconsin, which seems a very sensible thing to do. personally, I'm curious to see what's going to happen. I can't imagine that much chaos will be visible from the quiet street in Urbana where I plan to be, but some trace elements should be within a quick walk. I do feel like I should be in Chicago, perhaps looting a bookstore, but there's going to be a lovely party down here. we're going to dress up nicely and have a formal dinner to make the upcoming barbarism all the more poignant. if you're reading this, you're invited. (I've found myself repeating that line several hundred times and I want to assure everyone that I'm aware of its only moderate degree of cleverness. I just haven't found a better way to phrase it.)
why am I so excited about New Year's Eve? partly because of the distant potential for total social collapse, but mostly the atmosphere. one of the best nights of my life was spent walking the streets of Chicago right after the Bulls won the NBA championship. everyone was outside, and although society wasn't overturned, there was this implication hanging in the air that certain rules didn't apply anymore. everyone knew what the laws were, but they seemed like a suggestion more than anything else. it was electric. that's what I'm hoping for here. I've considered all of the angles. I've never had much of an objection to getting maimed. I am, however, against anyone eating babies. that rule should still be respected.
you may remember that I mentioned my action movie a couple updates ago. the latest development is that the bad guy will die at the end when the good guy punches him off the roof and the bad guy gets impaled on a clown who happens to be standing on the ground below. my action movie is going to make a billion dollars at the box office.
WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING WITH YOUR LIFE?
I don't have a bible on hand at the moment, so I can't remember exactly how Jonah got out of the whale. was it through the mouth? did it poop him out with some taco bell? since I can't recall the key details, I'm going to have to abandon that metaphor and just say that I had a whole fucking lot of school work to do. two theses and several papers, something like 120 pages in two weeks. all of it was research, too. (whatever happened to good old english papers where I'd get to ramble about some guy's poem until I'd met the required page length?) to complicate the entire thing further, I developed a massive stomach disorder that had me vomiting nearly everything I ate and left me anemic from lack of ability to keep anything with iron down. the low point of the entire episode involved a man named Santiago putting his finger impossibly far into my arse with extremely tenuous justification. he claimed to be a doctor. I don't know. eventually I went to a real hospital, had some surgery, and kind of sorted things out. it was a mess. I managed to do fairly quality jobs on all of the papers aside from one. we performed one of my favorite Potted Meat shows somewhere inbetween. when it was all over, I slept for about a week.
so, in theory, as far as I know, I graduated with my three degrees and I'm done with school forever. no one has told me otherwise. the rest is a blur.
Christmas was alright. low-key, like Thanksgiving I didn't do much because I didn't have much to do. not many people are in town at the moment. a few of the ones who are did quite nice things for me and I was unprepared as usual. I'm terminally crap at the gift-giving routine. I never know when to do it and have like two ideas, both of which are a gift certificate. (in one version, I include a card.) I'm constantly tempted to buy abjectly terrible gifts for people, like a Stryper album or a book about living with herpes, just to see how far politeness of reaction will stretch. then I remember the lesson from Sesame Street about how you shouldn't perform cruel psychological experiments on your friends, and I buy some gum instead.
I did my best to foster panic in the area by playing the famous Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" broadcast on the radio. I don't know if it worked. I live in a test tube and I don't get out much.
WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH THE REST OF YOUR LIFE?
I plan to stay in Champaign through the duration of my lease, which is mid-August, and then move up to Chicago to do god knows what. I want to keep writing/performing comedy, which means that my next few years will probably be spent working crap jobs and looking for rich benefactors. a witty dental assistant said that it sounds like I'll be a waiter. she must be a Hollywood insider when she's not busy cleaning people's teeth. I'm polishing my resume for a position as a trophy-husband. I could do that for a while.I often have dreams about bread.
for now, I plan to find a job in the decent-to-poor range, produce a ton of theater over the next several months, read some books, continue the radio show and do whatever it takes to get a milkshake. in the long term, I plan to keep on with the creative end and I don't know what else - or where, which leads me to:
WHERE WILL YOU DO THOSE THINGS?
these are the ideas I've had so far. as you read the following list, you may ask: where's Champaign? my answer is complicated, but it does involve kicking you very hard. moving forward, then, and clinging to the illusion of choice in the matter:
Chicago is where I'm headed initially. I know lots of people there, best place to do comedy in the nation, and jobs would be easy. there's always the desire to go somewhere other than where I've been for my entire life, though.
Cincinnati is a dead gorgeous city. I don't know anyone there, but it's the hometown of the Afghan Whigs and that has to mean something. nice compromise between east and midwest. "scene" may or may not exist.
Boston is out east, covers a decent amount of space, has lots of history - all of which are good. on the down side, people talk funny and the job market sucks (according to sources). don't know anything about the arts.
Philadelphia seems to have all the advantages of Boston, but a little less of each. people do not, however, talk funny and that is important. arts are good as far as I can tell. don't know about jobs.
Toronto has a Second City which is a huge plus and is supposedly a very nice city. I don't know, I just have a good feeling about the place. it's in Canada, though, and I don't know if I could ever get over that.
Tijuana for when I decide comedy is bullshit and surrender to the drunk revolutionary inside of me.
I always thought it would be a longer list. I'm always the last person to get these memos, anyway. Juneau, Alaska will probably be added when I'm 30 years old. I suspect I'll be moody and nomadic around that time. if you have inside information about any of those options, please pass it along.
Curtis Mayfield died a couple days ago. I hadn't known that he was ill. he was one of those people who genuinely made me feel better about the world by virtue of his being alive somewhere in it. he wrote and performed volumes of beautiful soul, r&b and funk music from the late 50s (including the soundtrack to 'Superfly') right through a couple years ago - even after an accident at a concert with a collapsed lighting rig left him quadripelegic. I highly recommend his two disc set 'The Essential Curtis Mayfield' if your music collection hasn't already been enlightened by the good Mr. Mayfield. to quote Kurt Vonnegut, speaking about the recent death of another great artist, Joseph Heller: "That's terrible." and it is. there are, however, many good things that he left behind. praise be.
no angry polemical ranting in this update. I'm tired, and I'm feeling all of these late nights. try this, though; perhaps the most fantastic and disturbing website I have ever encountered.
I love winter. it's my favorite season, easily. driving sucks but everything else is good. I love the way air tastes in cold weather. it's much easier to warm up than it is to cool down (e.g. you can only get so naked). winter is the one time of the year when my imaginary war with the universe really seems to make sense. and snow is wonderful. it's a kind of freedom. some of the old French anarchists felt confined by history itself, and when it snows you can imagine yourself anywhere you'd like to be - like not in Champaign, for example, and not in 1999, and not 21 years old. this photograph was taken by Alfred Stieglitz in New York in the 1890s. beautiful, isn't it? that's how it looked like when I was driving home alone the night before Christmas Eve this year. (I had a stereo playing a song about a bullfrog named Jeremiah, though, which sums up the difference between 1890 and 1990 rather nicely.)
the end, then, to "lost like this". it's kind of an artificially imposed ending because nothing major has changed in my personal life - the end has arrived cos I graduated and am losing UIUC net access. but it's an end nonetheless, and that's okay. I don't know. I guess I don't feel all that lost any more, either. I have a fairly good idea where I am. (next to a tree.) I plan to write a new webpage in a couple months. it'll be smaller, tighter, and no less charming. (I've always been in it for the charm.) when I know where the page will be, I will put a link to it here. this page will remain on UIUC's server for a long time after I've lost access to change it, so it's not going away any time soon. if I forget to post the new address, email me here or there.
lost like this, found like that.
November 28, 1999
it really can't be stressed enough how charming I am.
hello. welcome back. glad you're there. I've been swarmed with work and I am handling it fairly poorly. nevertheless it's been an interesting handful of weeks. the major things I'm concerned about - plays, cats, and free milkshakes - have all been going well. there are several people who I need to email. hello, several people. emails make me happy, especially when it's three am and I've got some massive academic thing due the next day. I plan to have a really exceptional week as soon as this semester is done when I will take care of everything. until then, here's a half-assed update before I go to sleep and dream of Trotsky. there are seven new skits and a handful of keen new links that you would do well to follow as well as a general freshening around the site.
I had saltines and noodles for Thanksgiving, because I was sick. but I honestly enjoyed it.
here is a newspaper article about Potted Meat (check out the photos, which look oddly like a superhappy paramilitary commando unit) and here is a review of the play I wrote/directed at the end of October:
RECOMMENDED
The Penny Dreadful Players continue their prolific fall season with "Monks in Trouble," an original play written and directed by Marc Heiden. In addition to the play, two members of Very Secretary will open the Friday night performance with music and Demoted to Hugs will close both performances, playing a song written for the play in their set. "Monks in Trouble" explores the lives of five monks trapped in a monastery over the winter as pieces of their secluded world begin to disappear. The characters are revealed through monologues interspliced with dramatic action. The leader, Stephen (Rory Leahy), best fits the preconceived notion of a monk: a calm, holy man with a soft voice that speaks in terms of faith and devotion. Michael (Mike Renaud) is his polar opposite: a surly rebel with a filthy mind and mouth. Lorenzo (Hank Sprague) is a disgruntled but level-headed artist searching for answers. Jackson (Tony Cosenza) does not seen to grasp the concept of monastic life but longs for enlightenment and salvation. Percy (Eric Rampson) grew up in a monastery believing he was the Second Coming of Christ. Despite the lack of a rational explanation for the disappearances, the story is told more with a postmodern sensibility than in the surrealist tradition. The disintegration of the monastery serves as an impetus for the characters to reevaluate their lives and motivation as they try to justify and survive their crumbling surroundings. The conversations of the monks, laced with comedy, defy the tradition standards of holiness, but hold a deeper meaning. Through each other, they find some sort of resolution - their journey of exploration and discovery is the journey of the play. In "Monks in Trouble", Heiden has created an environment where logic no longer functions. Stripped away of this stumbling block, the audience, like the characters, must reconsider life and the role of religion not in terms of rationality, but in terms of humanity.
Oct. 29 and 30 at 7 p.m. $3. The penny dreadful players with very secretary and demoted to hugs at gregory hall theatre.
Timothy konczyk
hot damn, that was cool. props to the exceptional cast, of course. I'll get the script online at some point.
this is an extremely interesting yet creepy website: transcripts from airplane black box recorders. for those of you not hip to the crashing metal objects scene, black boxes are the nigh-indestructible devices that record what's going on in an airplane cockpit. they operate on a thirty minute loop, so investigators listen to them to figure out what caused the plane to go down. this one is probably my favorite. if you are an airplane who has crashed or are related to one, I apologize for my insensitivity on this topic.
I was very happy to see the government's anti-trust case against Microsoft take a turn for the better when the judge ruled 'yes' on the monopoly question. it'll probably be years before anything comes of it, but that's okay. I am mobilizing an army of stealth wombats with sharp teeth and a fondness for burrowing into people's underwear to deal with everyone who takes Microsoft's side. the "free market" hardly needs to be defended. trying to protect capitalism is rather like spotting Michael Jordan twenty points in a basketball game. it's already going to whip you...
I am against the death penalty in all situations except when the execution is carried out by dropping gigantic pancakes upon the criminal in question. it's still wrong, but you have to admit that it would be an interesting sight. if people are willing to die for love, why not for fluffy goodness?
I am reprinting the following from my .plan file because it was really long and because I haven't gone into much detail about my job at the museum on this webpage. I wrote it in realtime during an awe-inspiringly slow day recently. the piece speaks for itself, I think. I would appreciate if nobody mentioned it to management.
KRANNERT ART MUSEUM JOURNAL: 11.27.99
10:30am
Back at the museum for a day. I haven't worked here for a couple months but Alan needed someone to help out and I agreed to do it for nostalgia's sake. Things haven't changed a great deal since I was last here. Joe Miller is still desperate for something to "help make the time pass". He also continues to assign bizarre, inexplicable hierarchies to guard placement and attempts to manipulate said placements for his advantage. Downstairs all day, I've got a computer to play with - rather unlike last year at this time, when all there was to do was fuck around with the motion detectors. Apparently a bunch of people showed up at 10am and asked if they could have their wedding in here. Alan, who is the supervisor, said yes. (Joe is cautiously optimistic that this will supply "a little excitement.") The wedding is now being held in the former Masters Gallery, directly above the basement where I currently sit. I suspect that this is some sort of comment upon my inability to maintain a mature emotional relationship. Shame Jerry's not here. I'm sure he'd have a few stories to tell on the subject. (I'm sure, because I've heard them all several times. You're too good for her and her crazy teenage son, Jer. Go back there and get the sweaters you left behind. You've got every right.) At least he's got a house. Fuck it, my cats could beat up his dog. He's probably out selling coffee with the Rocketman [tm] beverage backpack and making "hundreds" from football fans. I am alienated by the fact that the football team is doing well in my last year here. Fuck off, football team. Alan seems amused. Richard seems bemused. Joe seems de-mused. I seem used.
11:21am
The wedding is over. As far as I can tell, the bride and groom are still together after ten minutes which puts them streets ahead of where I'd be. Rumour has it we're getting paid double for working today. I hope so. I hope that some day, someone will describe me as the love child of Greg Dulli and Noam Chomsky. Obviously I'm being fairly morose at the moment but the thought still lingers that I'd like Mike Saul to buy "Mario Party" because we'll probably wind up renting it at least six more times. There's a beautiful woman wandering around down here in a leotard. She's been the only non-wedding visitor all day - more commentary by the universe, which I am beginning to resent.
11:31am
I wish it would snow today.
11:56am
If it snows, I won't know - I'm in the basement all day. I was thinking it'd be nice to spend the winter in a cave in Missouri. Joe's calling on the radio. Time for my break.
12:45pm
Uneventful break. I drove over to the Union and everything was closed save the gaping mouths of families down here for the high school football tournament. I am torn between my desires to write something and to take a nap. Still in the basement. Joe may have been a little irritated because I came back from break late. Paint an angry flower when you get home, Joe. I am tempted to do terrible things such as fondle the Rodins and lick million-dollar paintings, but I've done it all before. Krannert seems less of a museum for lack of a painting connecting Christ with feces. I could rectify that. There is an interesting study to be done on the strange vendettas that develop between security guards and the art they protect.
12:53pm
I participated in the big Post-Thanksgiving shopping extravaganza yesterday. The CD I bought rang up $3 cheaper than it was priced. Merry Christmas, shithead.
12:56pm
I am willing to sell the film adaptation rights to this .plan file. High-powered film producers are invited to call me.
1:44pm
Joe interrupted my nap to ramble for a while. He's walking on thin ice, that one. I'm not mad. (Happy to help make the time pass.) I was having fairly asinine dreams about air traffic controllers and usenet newsgroups, so hopefully I'll get something a bit more interesting the second time around.
2:18pm
Originally I was going to wait until Joe passed on, but I have decided to go ahead spreading the rumor that the Krannert Art Museum is haunted. The ghost haunts the basement. (I'm not sure yet if it goes anywhere else.) It's probably either a) Mr Krannert or b) Mr Trees, with Rodin as a dark horse candidate because he wants me to stop fucking around with his sculptures. Anyway, the ghost creeps around in the basement and if you're a guard who's misbehaving (i.e. sleeping), you can hear him sigh and jingle his keys - but when you turn around, no one's there! Spooky.
2:50pm
The phrase "Property is theft" is the only thing on my mind. I don't know why. I do enjoy theft.
3:13pm
I got to go into a brand new area today - Alan opened up one of the storage rooms to find spare guide pamphlets, and I followed him. Krannert is such a beautifully mismanaged museum (except for security, of course). There are literally 3,000+ catalogues from this summer's "The Rich Life and the Dance" exhibition sitting back there that are never going to be used. They will sit forever alongside the thousands of catalogues from Art of the Andes (an exhibition from the 70s!) and countless others. It occurs to me that if today was a Twilight Zone episode (or, better yet, The Outer Limits), the Rodin sculptures would come alive and beat the snot out of me. Depending on how big the budget of the show was, I might wind up as a statue myself at the end in an ironic twist. It's just another day, though, so Pope Benedict XV is going to have to keep head-butting Torso of Walking Man as long as it continues to amuse me.
3:33pm
There have only been three visitors down here so far today, which takes me back to why I loved this job in the first place I really am being paid to do nothing more than exist. I kind of miss the challenge of keeping myself entertained without the computer, which demonstrates how nostalgia can be a fairly stupid thing at times. Joe says he's gunning to close up early. Richard continues to smile wryly at all of it.
3:46pm
I heard the ghost again! Spooky. I'm thinking of working a bizarre love triangle between Mr Trees, Mr Krannert and Rodin into the ghost's backstory. Maybe a murder-suicide pact. We'll see.
3:52pm
This museum would be better if it had less paintings and more deadly games of cat and mouse. (And no wall labels to identify who is the hunter and who is the hunted, either.)
3:53pm
I feel lonesome in several idiotic ways.
end.
at that point, the computer I was using crashed. (the sheer pathos was probably too much for it.) nothing much happened during the rest of the day. a couple visitors showed up and did whatever it is that they do. since I'm reprinting things from various jobs that I've held, this is a small thing I compiled while I was working at the office of admissions and records last fall. my task was to open envelopes from incoming freshmen hopefuls and assemble the various components into a certain order that was convenient for the creepy gnomes who process the applications. by the way, people who work in admissions offices are in fact a low, low species. I can say this from firsthand experience. drop gigantic pancakes on all of them, I say. one afternoon I was left unattended near an operating computer so I wrote down my favorite excerpts from that day's batch. they're all real - I preserved the writers' original spelling and phrasing.
FALL 1998 UIUC APPLICATION ESSAYS
On ethnicity as a bargaining chip:
"I am very diverse. Because I come from small European country Bulgaria, I think I can be very useful to you."
On dreams:
"I have had many aspirations in my life, but in the top few has to be getting a good education."
(from an envelope marked "attention: football dept")
On individuality:
"You may think Courtney Lackman is just another name, but in this paper I plan to show that I am a person!"
On oppression:
"I felt alienated in my small town, where my beliefs on diversity and animal rights were not accepted."
On innovative use of language:
"I currently have a GPA of 3.09 but it is increasing...I rank in the top %5 of my class of 18 students...I am extremely interested in attending your university and hope that you can make my dream come true and except me."
On being hellbent on Polishness:
"If I attend (UIUC) then I can represent my heritage, make the campus more diverse and possibly teach others about being Polish."
On being a misunderstood visionary:
"Everyone likes to play ping-pong, so I suggested a Ping-Pong club! However, this idea was quickly debunked by mediocre minds and reality." (The essay goes on to detail two more failed attempts at starting up the Ping-pong club before ending triumphantly with the club's creation and its registration with the United States Table Tennis Association.)
at that point, I went off and took one of the two-hour bathroom breaks that made the job so much fun.
that's all for now. I'm not sure precisely when UIUC cuts off my computer access but I will find out and have one last update before then so stay tuned, and not in drop-d either.
October 18, 1999
I'm cooking some soup. that's what I'm doing. and you?
summer's gone and I'm still here, one last round with academia. I've got it on the ropes but it's throwing everything it has into this punch. all three majors coming to an end, vague sense of cognitive dissonance about the entire thing. I'm tired of being told what to read, tired of having my writing energies wasted in bland regurgitation, tired of having my desire to learn leashed and caged. but so it goes. beats having my fingers slammed in a car door while a naked Zsa Zsa Gabor points and laughs, if you consider the two outcomes to be separate ends of the same paradigm (which they are, in my world).
I am working on a pretty cool sociology thesis about silent film comedy. it's not all bad, and it's not all Zsa Zsa.
I'm also watching a boat chase in a movie right now. I feel compelled to make note of that.
I had a pretty good summer. did lots of things, worked a great many hours, and wrote volumes. there was a quite nice production of "Much Ado About Nothing" over two weekends in July, much radio broadcasting and perhaps the most memorable fourth of July I've ever had. things were busy, things were good. took a vacation or two: props to caves, especially ones that have not yet been wrecked by humans; props to the city of Cincinnati, which is a damn sight cooler than its total lack of a reputation would suggest; props to cars, which can go places fast; props to my cats, who keep it real. (it's easy to avoid selling out when you sleep as much as they do, though.)
things you should know
I spent the entire summer working on a second draft of my novel. I wound up doing more work than I had planned on: about a third is brand new and the rest was heavily rewritten. I really want to get this draft circulated. I don't know if it's worthy of publication - I won't be surprised if it's not, since it is at heart still a first novel by a young writer - but I think it's an enjoyable piece. since the web is still such a passive medium (the revolution will involve neither pointing nor clicking!), I put up excerpts for the casual to look at and evaluate. I can't afford to make paper copies yet but hopefully soon.
I might have pictures to put up soon from vacation fun (including actual photographic images of my self). check back later. in the meantime, read the novel!
although the above claims about having been busy are true, the actual reason why I never got around to updating this page should pretty well demolish any claim I have towards possessing higher order mental processes: I was stuck on this single idea that I wanted to use up top as the new lead story. it was to be called "the little bonobo that could", and it was going to be a children's story about the happy bonobo monkeys who live in the forest and wank all day long until they get tired and sad, at which point The Littlest Bonobo in whom they'd all doubted was going to rise to the task and get everyone taken care of. then it was going to transform into a bizarre 70's cop show where the chief didn't approve of Lieutenant Bonobo's methods and demand that he turn in his badge, gun and right hand. so there's my explanation. yeah, I know. I'll be staying away from computers forever.
I haven't been completely inactive online-wise. somehow I got sucked into the seedy world of .plan files. I had forgotten the things even existed, although I am old enough to remember when they had an actual functional purpose; now they're the internet's equivalent of a vestigial tail. if you don't know what they are, it's simple: get to a UNIX prompt (or the "directory services" option in Eudora) and, at the prompt, type "finger (user name)". I'm kind of torn as to whether they make sense or not. on one hand, they have no unique function. the web does everything vastly better than .plans do. on the other hand, they're kind of like passive-aggressive email and lord knows I'm all for that mode of behavior. they also have no commercial aspirations ("did you see colgate's .plan?") and that's rapidly becoming a curiosity in the online world. since you can't effectively link to other .plans, people who use them are forced to define themselves through content generation (actually writing something of their own! wow!) rather than making a list of links to popular commecial websites. some people do nothing but quote celebrities anyway, having been trained to think not in terms of truth but rather in terms of allegiance with prefab philosophies - and some people really don't have anything to say - but at least a certain mental effort is required to excerpt the quote (as opposed to the web's equivalent, wherein the simple invocation of a hyperlink serves the same purpose). so, in summary, .plans are still pretty cool.
I think I shall carve a pumpkin this year. need to get one first, of course. trip to the pumpkin patch. like a child, but I'm a ninja now. hallelujah.I would like to make an intense crime movie that was totally loyal to formula except that for the big showdown instead of shooting guns, people threw whole watermelons at each other. they wouldn't act like it was strange, though. some of them would die. the grizzled old cop would get it. the rookie cop would learn an important lesson. the only way to survive would be if you were really hungry and could eat the watermelon. I won't spoil the double-cross at the end, but let me tell you, it's a doozy.
thanks to Time magazine, we can now derive an equation for the value of foreigners' lives: JFK Jr received two cover stories immediately upon his death, while those 13,000 people in Turkey got a story a couple weeks after the quake that killed them. commemorative issues equal 3 points, cover stories equal 2, and a story towards the middle equals 1. therefore, one rich white kid is worth sixty-five thousand faceless brown people. nice to know, and a hearty "fuck you" to the masses of Americans who sent flowers to the Kennedys and didn't make a donation thirteen thousand times the cost to Turkish relief funds.
what I find even more offensive are the pedantic essays littering the media trying to justify the obsession by rambling about how JFK Jr was part of "America's family"...the fuck he was. it's all part of the national strategy (not the work of an elite cadre - it's everyone's handiwork, wealthy and poor alike) aimed at blinding people to their own lives, keep them from feeling their own pain. understand, please, that I'm not a misanthrope. I have nothing against JFK Jr as a human being. he seemed to be a nice enough guy, and he deserves a ton of credit for not claiming the US presidency (which, given the depth of political analysis in this country, would have been handed to him on a silver platter if he asked for it). the basic point that I keep hopelessly making is that celebrity deaths are no more tragic than anyone else's. I saw some asinine editorial referring to the suffering of the Kennedys as mythic, an epic curse worthy of Greek tragedy, so on and so forth. makes me want to holler, as Mr. Gaye said. that fucking family is doing fine. they enjoy every privelege that money can buy. they operate above the law, indulge their whims, keep their asses covered...chart out the "tragedies" that they're supposed to have suffered and you'll find that damn few can't be attributed to spoiled rich kids messing up (drug addiction, drunk driving, crashing a private jet) or the risks of the lifestyle that earned them their privilege (the assassinations), the parameters of which they were fully aware. there is nothing extraordinary about their suffering. look around you. what would be truly extraordinary would be an extended family that hadn't suffered as much (if not more) over the course of several decades. feel your own pain...
see? only a few minutes and I'm raging like I was never away.
this has been an exceptional year for movies, hasn't it? I had to wait until it came out on video, but all praise to "Rushmore", whose every frame has more soul than many entire decades of cinema (ok, it's hyperbolic, but looking at that phrase cracks my shit up so I'm leaving it in). "Run Lola Run" might still be playing in a theatre near you. go see it for ninety minutes of pure adrenaline and joy. (Franka Potente is hereby instructed to email me soon. we don't talk enough, Franka. let's talk.) "Eyes Wide Shut" was phenomenal (and subject to some of the most idiotic film criticism that's ever been written - but so it went for Kubrick's entire career, I guess). other things were very good as well, but I'm wearying of this list already and would like to get back to writing angry things and making references to my fantastic ass.this is a message for the Illuminati, so everyone else please skip to the next part. ok. hey, Illuminati, can I have a laser gun? I promise I won't use it to oppose any of your plots for world domination. I'm just sick of taking out the garbage. I always let get too full. if you want to make it an early christmas present, that'd be fine.
Paul Czarnowski's working on a new project up in Chicago: you can check it out here. take back the radio!
(afterword from the future: I wrote the following before the latest shootings. sucks to be right.) another thing that bothers me is the continuing national hangover about Columbine High School. a tragedy, to be sure, but a number of the actions following it (by the media, by so-called behavioral experts, even by the victims' families) have been truly shameful. the Onion nailed one major annoyance of mine - the gaping hole in the causal analysis behind the tragedy. (see their article.) another thing that pisses me off is the attempts (a number of which have been successful) to turn their grief into justification for censorship and the public's unquestioning compliance ("feel your own pain" ad infinitum, etc). humanity does not come to understanding through repression, and to a certain extent the families of the next set of victims (because this will happen again because no one has dealt with the real issues behind the tragedy, choosing instead the standard set of idiotic dodges) will have this set to blame. the new round of vacant yet omnipresent coverage revolving around the school re-opening is also disgusting. to invoke again the Turkish quake: can you imagine what would happen if 13,000 Americans died in one single event? history books would record it as the greatest tragedy of all time. since the quake victims were foreigners, though, we're still obsessing over the Columbine 30. (I can't remember the exact number.) ethnocentrism strikes again. ("Buy American!")
do I think the earthquake should have received similarly exploitative media treatment? no, of course not. my point is that the pretty blatant discrepancies in caring render the whole "overwhelming human compassion" justification false. be honest. JFK Jr and Columbine don't get the blanket treatment because America is truly sad over the loss of human lives. the viewing public is, as always, simply looking for an emotional opiate.
although I will be in C-U until my apartment lease expires in August 2000, I lose UIUC computing access in January so that will mark the end of this here webpage. I plan to update a little more frequently as that date approaches, so check back regularly. no massive gaps like last time. of course, after the stunning display of charm above, how could you resist coming back?
next month: Orphans, And Why They're Bullshit.
May 10, 1999
Spring. Leonard Nimoy on the Y2K bug: "We find ourselves in a time rather like the last days of Atlantis...perhaps only chaos theory could calculate the multiple ramifications of what may occur." and he knows, people. he knows. (I have written a lot of artificially inflated term papers in my time, but never have I come close to the full glory of that last sentence of his.)
yes, so there was a gap between monthly updates of this here webpage. I was busy. all of this page's subscribers should have received their refund checks from last month's issue in the mail by now (read: "I don't owe you suckas nuthin.") over the last three weeks, I literally averaged 47 pages of academic writing per week. teachers have evolved - since I rarely show up for class, they get back at me in volume. if they keep adapting at this rate, I may have to declare my professors sentient creatures. semester's almost over, one more to go. I'm really glad that I'm not graduating right now. I can't imagine I'll be any more ready when the time comes, but that's for a future me to deal with. I bought a gallon of milk that won't expire until the day before Star Wars Episode 1 comes out. in that sense, it's immortal milk...
media watch!
a non-mention, first: back in March,the Daily Illini's Buzz Magazine blew off "lost like this" in its list of the top ten UIUC student homepages. please do check them out and enlighten me as to how any of them are in any way superior to mine, cos it's a mystery to me. The Most Worthy One Who Actually Was Chosen, Jen Gerbi, pointed out that since there are several thousand pages on the students server, they probably just did a random sampling and may not have even seen mine. I like to think it was because of my political convictions. I should get some of those. spruce things up a bit...
brighter days lay ahead, though. April 15th had a story about a show I was in, "The Threepenny Opera". extremely well-written story, comes out fairly nicely, although to get an idea of what I really said you have to insert "fuck" after every other word and the part where I blow off rehearsal and hold up the liquor store was curiously omitted.
superstardom awaits: first there was a story about the independent student theatre group that I'm in, the Penny Dreadful Players. I was going through a phase at the time of speaking only in expletives as a challenge to the media establishment, so the reporter reconstructed what he could.
then, coolest of all, the newspaper sent a reporter (and photographer) to interview me and my two compatriots Matt and Eric for a story about our improv comedy radio show "What Jail Is Like", and we're also included in a story on radio theatre in general. interesting article. some very perceptive choices on the author's part and some odd ones. notes: first, my headphones actually only cost $10. second, the quote attributed to Matt (the "systematic alienation" lines) was actually me. it's really neat, though. the radio show is doing incredibly well. we're finally getting offended callers, too. at last!
the last all new Potted Meat sketch comedy show of the year has come and gone, so check out my scripts if you missed it and get an overview of what in retrospect was a astonishingly prolific and pretty darn funny year. did you check out the radio plays? all you need is realaudio and you get to spend a blissful half-hour listening to a play I wrote and directed that's quite funny and intriguing and suspenseful and all sorts of other good stuff. check it out! I want to hear what people think of it.
that's pretty much all I'm asking of you this month in the way of consuming my artistic product. onwards...
yeah, so I've got this play called "Monks in Trouble" and I suspect it may actually be pretty damn good because people have been telling me that, but I have to wait until the summer for lack of venue availability, so I'm forced to spend the remaining weeks of the semester moping instead of producing. moping is an important part of my life, of course, but I had it penciled in for the early summer and this throws the whole schedule out of wack. it's uniquely frustrating...I even locked up several hundred dollars of funding and a great cast, but fucking acapella groups and various sundry dance groups whose idea of celebrating their ethnic heritage apparently involves synchronized routines performed with chairs to shitty american house music have all the venues booked solid. is this how Radiohead feel when they look at the music charts and see Britney Spears at the top? well, we'll be able to get a great venue in the summer. it's all a matter of doing it ahead of time. I'll make some noise when something's been worked out on the topic...
I'm also playing the Keanu Part (Don John) in a production of "Much Ado About Nothing" in June. will probably be a great show, but let's face it. I'm many things, but I'm no Keanu. thankfully I don't have to carry the entire cast like he did cos the rest of this production is very talented. I do have kung fu though, if that helps.
my favorite link of the last thirty minutes: "Who Was The Ugliest President?" there's pictures, impassioned speeches, and you can vote. the only problem I have with the site is that Taft should be winning by a landslide...I mean, an informed populace is essential to a successful democracy, so do these voters have any idea how fat that guy was? yech!
during the radio show a couple weeks ago it struck me as a good idea to sniff a magic marker, and after doing to I saw a woman dressed as a giant cat walk through the door of the station. I'm fairly sure that it was real, but just in case, I'm going cold turkey on the marker fumes...during a break from writing, I read in the news that Boxcar Willie died this week at the age of 67. he was a country singer who was famous for his "mellow voice coupled with a rough-hewn hobo persona", but he was much more important in my life for being the punchline to the One Joke In "Kids In The Hall: Brain Candy" That I Just Didn't Get. now I know who Boxcar Willie is and now I can laugh at that joke too...this waitress was telling me about how a pair of old people ran up a fifty-dollar tab and then ran off without paying it. fucking old people, man. they're always doing that stuff...from Reuters: "30 percent of Republicans said a woman president would be less capable than a man of chairing the National Security Council or overseeing the Joint Chiefs of Staff." ah, you bunch of charmers, you...a few weeks ago I lost the last bite of a blueberry bagel and I was really sad because I'd geared up my mouth for that last bite and then, nothing. oh, how the world changes: I just found the missing bite on top of the fridge. somehow I'm not quite as excited about it now, though...if you've been thinking about having anything to do with the swing dance scene, remind me to send you the results of my semester-long field research study for sociology 380 on it. god, it's horrifying...I read a thing about how Fox's new animated series "The Family Guy" did well in its premiere. the article said "(The episode) featured spoofs on "Star Trek" and "Scooby Doo", among other popular culture references." the creative bankruptcy of that particular "witty" pop culture-dependent referential approach can be exposed with one question: in thirty years, who the fuck is going to be referencing "The Family Guy"? ... it appears as though I've locked up enough summer hours at the art museum to save me from round three with the temp agency (giver of such madcap fun as the twelve-hour trips to the bottle cap factory, moving boy at the mental hospital, maestro of the rollerblade crash helmet, maze jumper at the hobby factory). color me relieved...want tickets to round two of the Trial of the Millenium? May 13, it's going down. let me know...
I generally think of literally hundreds of things that I want to put here but nearly all of it becomes lost when I turn my head and the voices of the living dead filter in...tight shirt, bar pants, raising a glass and making it last...hey, hey, come out tonight...let's throw bricks through windows. anyone with me?
February 18, 1999
"romanticism is the new fascism." - Per Jambeck.
I am finding myself more interested in millenial psychology than I meant to. witness the following two news stories:
1) Elton John is recording an opera album (a "re-working" of Verdi's "Aida") featuring duets with LeAnn Rimes, the Spice Girls and "a reggae song by Sting". the man is a cultural black hole but he continues to be a valuable expose on the nature of celebrity in our world: how you can lobotomize the famous without anyone noticing, etc.
2) christian evangelist Jerry Falwell accused the amorphous Teletubby character Tinky-Winky of being an insidious plot to turn children into homosexuals, citing a lengthy list of concerns ranging from the color of the character's fur to the handbag it sometimes carries. the pink menace that has somehow gained control of the media strikes again, apparently. christians, why do you allow men like this to act in your name? I mean, if you feel so compelled to throw stones at someone, why not start in your own fold?
these and other stories are in my mind pointing out a direction for the future that hadn't previously occurred to me: as the millenium approaches, we will all become caricatures of ourselves.
aging as I write these words I have one day left before turning 21. I tend to be a very moody birthday boy: endless introspection, cakes destroyed by my mere aura. (I'm serious. there's something about me that causes birthday cakes to fall apart.) the best birthday present I received last year was a potato masher that I have not yet had the chance to use cos I am a lazy bastard and as such I am content with those bizarre "just add water" potatoes in a box. they come pre-mashed. there's nothing that I'm really looking forward to about this age: I don't drink, for one thing, and since NC-17 replaced X, is there anything else? there's something to be said for being a "major" as opposed to a "minor", I guess. whatever that means.
I have to find someone to get drunk for me by proxy tomorrow. I need a sub at the shot glass. I don't like alcohol but there are traditions that go with this sort of thing and I want to be fair about this. so, any volunteers? I want my proxy to be so drunk that, man, I won't even believe how wasted in absentia I was. I plan to be a raging absentee alcoholic.
my car insurance rates went down by half. that's one good thing, I guess. but I despise the insurance industry because I think it's all a massive pyramid scheme, one of the biggest scams in the history of industrialized society, and won't someone dance with me so I can shut up already? I don't know. every year, the question of why I do not yet have a million dollars looms louder. obviously I am not in it for the money (I'm in it for the whores, duh) but there is a story about Jim Carrey that I like - when he was poor and struggling, he wrote himself a check for a million dollars and dated it 1996. he was determined to be able to cash it when that time came, and he was able to. what does this mean? that I have a fantastic ass, of course.
so this is twenty-one. what have I done? a little bit of something, a little bit of nothing. I was playing with my kitten Orbital a moment ago and it didn't seem much of an issue.
anyway. onwards.
be advised that this spring is going to be a phenomenal one for music. receiving domestic release will be albums by Blur (!), Ian Brown (been delayed forever, may not happen) the Manic Street Preachers, Mogwai, Underworld, Orbital (the band, that is - my kitten has yet to make his recorded debut) and others which escape my mind at the moment. new James single in April, I'm told. much money to be spent. I would have no problem with the obscenely rich if they spent all their money on music. I'd understand that.
the water faucet fell out of the wall in my bathroom last week. took four days to get a new temporary one installed. the maintenance guy left a note wherein he misspelled "until" as "intell". is it evil of me to roll my eyes at this?
distance is no longer an object and the future of art is here by way of the past: every one of you is cordially invited (well, the invitation extended to the elderly is not quite so cordial cos you have to shout to get them to hear you, but that's not my fault) to sit front row and be entertained and enlightened by the world premiere of a brand new radio play written and directed by me, "Image". you can also hear me act in a play not written by me but rather good nonetheless, "The Terror At High Hill House", and if you so choose, you can stick around for a play that I have absolutely nothing to do with but which is quite good also, "Ten Pin Love Story". there is a neat website for all these happenings. you can hear it performed live, broadcast via streaming RealAudio, at 8pm CST on February 27th. the plays will then be archived on that website and you'll be able to listen to them whenever you like (catch all the hidden jokes, etc). you will also be able to hear them on the actual radio in the C-U area if you tune into 90.1 FM on the 29th at 7pm. pretty cool, huh? go to the radio play website now to hear trailers and read cast bios. don't miss this wonderful opportunity, kids. god knows life is horrible enough without these sporadic moments of joy.
(check out that last line! I don't need to take advertising classes to know how to pull off a zinger!)
also check out a fresh crop of skits, still warm from being performed and chock full of that supafun flavor that the kids just go wild for. someone should do a retrospective of my work. that would kick ass. I'd only ask for a million dollars.
so, where am I? I am older. I continue to speak all these words but I still do not even know who I am talking to. I still suspect that I am not actually talking to anyone. I still doubt that it all adds up to anything. I have words and I use them; I have learned to speak in extremes because I believe in (because I am resigned to) dialectical materialism as the working process of the world. I believe that it is the duty of the few to behave in impossible extremes and in doing so they will destroy themselves but the world will take a few steps forward by means of compromise. I believe that history moves in this way, I believe that it is a raw deal but I do what I feel that I must. do you understand me? the word on the street is that I am immature but at least I am not boring and that is something to hang on to.
did I ever mention that when I meet the love of my life it will be in a chinese restaurant? it's true.
January 28, 1999
thought process:
"it's late. I should go to sleep. I have an early class tomorrow. if I stay up, I could have that last cookie that's in the refrigerator. when will I sleep, though? I might not get to eat that cookie for some reason, though." (roll out of bed, put clothes back on, pop in a video and eat cookie)
important announcement:
"the emperor is not as forgiving as I am."
why the campus paper sucks, part one:
a questionable interpretation of what is the cutting-edge in editorial journalism. case in point: last week featured a muckraking column that made the scathing, original, and altogether shocking accusation that the Spice Girls may not necessarily be in it for the music and that "Girl Power" was perhaps not as well-developed and deep a feminist theological tract as some would believe. the utterly straight face with which these accusations were made (and the careful restraint and "now-this-isn't-for-sure" waffling throughout - was the columnist fearing mass suicides by the legions of now-disillusioned Spice Girls fans?) made for splendid although absurd reading.
life is worth living, part one:
more odd uses of quotation marks by restaurants. the Burger King on campus had this posted on their giant sign:
Come In For a "Delicious" Milkshake!
why the campus paper sucks, part two:
they just did their "top ten of 1997" lists. admittedly, they weren't publishing during winter break (which is when all the real papers did theirs), but come on, twenty-three days of 1998 have passed. life is apparently and astonishingly continuing to happen, so let's stop memorializing what happened during a now-distant grouping of periods wherein the earth revolved around the sun and move on, okay? at this point in 1998, no one is paralyzed by uncertainty about how to perceive the art created over the course of the last year any longer. yes, I know it's fun to sound erudite by quickly and concisely summing up what was good and what was bad about an entire year - making it sound like you had any real part in history by yelling your intepretation really loudly - but personal gratification is what websites are for, not major (or minor, as the case may be) media outlets.
life is worth living, part two:
cheez-wiz on celery. someone needs to borrow the cheez-wiz for an advertising project? still hungry? peanut butter on celery. yum.
important announcement, part two:
"When that the poor hath cried, Caesar hath wept.
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.
But Brutus says that he was ambitious,
and Brutus is an honorable man."
why the campus paper sucks, part three:
the comics page. I won't go into details, but on Friday one had a character named "Butt-lick Girl". who spoke with a lisp. and had bulging cheeks. because she has a huge tongue. so not funny that it's...still not funny!
late fees:
two dollars.
most of the world:
blue screens.
peace.
- out.
January 23, 1999
if anyone has any information about the styrofoam container of Chinese food that was anonymously left on my doorstep wednesday night, please email me. you can have it back if you want. I didn't eat it. I was kind of perplexed by it, actually. I'm pretty damn stupid like that.
(1.24 - if you've used the feedback form, try it again. UIUC's alias system is whacked and mail sent to it was disappearing into nothingness. it should work now.) I fixed all the major and minor bugs with the last update (if you didn't notice them, send $19.95 to the address on the bio page for a copy of that night's programme) and replaced the temp background (I liked the fishies too, but they were someone else's) on the brand new feedback page (please, feed back to me, regurgitate thought like a volcano, there has never been a better time than now), and if you didn't notice already (I think it's been made quite obvious), there was a fire sale on parenthetical statements over at the bookstore today so I bought in bulk (and passed the savings on to you).
the big news of the day for me, which is sure to generate excitement amongst speculators and stock brokers of the marc heiden financial market (if nothing else, it's got a better name than the dow jones), is that financial aid arrived today! woohoo! several days early, in fact, and just in the nick of time to prevent my rent check from bouncing and to allow me to buy milk! its timing is especially good because A&E announced last night that due to sheer lack of response they were going to cease airing the ads featuring pictures of me moping around staring blankly at dry bowls of cereal and Peter Graves imploring viewers that "for a few dollars a day, well, you probably couldn't bring a smile to this boy's face because god knows nothing can crack that cold miserable bastard but you could at least help put the Lucky Charms on top of his refrigerator to good use." I do appreciate Mr. Graves' sincere effort, but fuck the rest of you for not calling! nah, it's all good. love.
it snowed again yesterday but somehow the charm was gone. I don't know. once again, I blame el nino. I had my first meeting as a full member of the WEFT Programming Committee yesterday also and with my newfound power I took the opportunity to order several executions. the rest of the committee was not really all that receptive but I think that they may be coming around so I'll try again next time. classes are continuing to happen somewhere off in the distance, but I'm not entirely clear on what I'm supposed to be doing about that, so I've been sleeping late and listening to lots of music and things seem to be going just fine.
oh, and according to my lawyer, the opposition is "considering" settling. for my part, I'm "considering" the use of mercenaries, so hopefully the opposition will make their decision before I make mine, although I'm not planning on waiting much longer (and the services of Carlos "The Chinchilla" Borva are only available for so long).
raves:
four chords.
distastes:
the campus newspaper (subject of an upcoming feature).
January 21, 1999
classes began for me today. the rest of the campus began theirs yesterday. that's how much of a badass I am. looks like a peachy keen semester. I have a neat-looking Shakespeare class early in the morning. the professor asked the class about the relative virtues of seeing Shakespeare performed versus reading the text, whether one was inherently superior to the other. After listening to a few answers, I raised my hand and announced cheerfully that "I don't think actors can be trusted. I mean, they're always trying to pull something. You have to read the play first so that you can figure out what their agenda is." This, like every single other joke I have ever made in any class anywhere at any point in my life, was met with confused silence and finally the professor changed the subject to his lengthy background as an actor. so the class is off to a more or less typical start. should be as fun as...well, other classes have been.
all of that is irrelevant right now, though. I've known about what I'm about to announce for a few days, but I didn't want to mention it in the last update because it was already full of stuff. I wanted this to have a column to itself, the echoing sweep that it deserves.
Scott Adsit left Second City. I had the good fortune to witness one of his last performances, and it was an exceptional one - the cast was in preparations for a new revue, and though the overall presentation was as sloppy as previews would be expected to be, Scott singlehandedly carried the show. He filled the silences with more manic energy than I'd ever seen him perform with. A few days later, he was gone. I could rhapsodize for pages about the brilliant dynamo that is Scott Adsit, but instead I'd like to do it in song. It originally appeared in a play that I finished writing with Rory Leahy the very day that Scott left Second City. When I first wrote it, it was for Charlton Heston, but he doesn't matter anymore. so, with no apologies to Elton John, I present for you:
A Flower in Any Soil '98 (b)
Verse 1:
Goodbye, Willy Licious, may you rave on in our hearts
You were the old bluesman who wrought genius from the lost and found
A moment later a monk, the Weasel, young Hemingway or someone new
Now your crusade moves on to Hollywood and nationwide television too.
Chorus: (repeat after every verse)
And it seems to me that you would be
a flower in any soil.
Never fading with the house lights when the improv set comes to a close
And your voice will always echo even if you've now settled for a mere writing job
The sound died down before your manic glory ever will.
Verse 2:
Truth and innovation your art, cowardly yuppies and frat boys on spring break quaked in the dark
At the towering brilliance of our mentor and creative patriarch.
And even though boring people tried to put predictable words in your mouth
You continued to define "cutting-edge" with your every breath.
Verse 3:
Goodbye crazed Saturn salesman, bringing them into the family whether they liked it or not.
Goodbye Mr. Grissom, IQ of a raccoon and struggling with the roundy-roundy tupperware.
You were the force that mocked convetionality, shitty improv suggestions, and blandness masquerading as art.
Goodbye Scott Adsit, from an audience lost without your inspiration.
(Final line)
We will miss your rendition of the American Dream for the rest of our theatergoing days.
see, I'm all emotional now, so I'm going to leave it there. check out the updates throughout the rest of the site.
additional massive respect to Junior Wells and Carl Perkins, two very cool people who died in the last couple of days.
and a hearty "fuck you!" to el nino, who I blame for all this shit.
January 16, 1999
I am back in Champaign now, having returned a week early in order to, I don't know, sit around and watch movies. I rearranged and redecorated my apartment (despite a section in the lease which "discourages" such undertakings) and am pleased with the results. I'm going to try rearranging the entire city next. for example, wouldn't the frat houses look much nicer over by, say, that landfill?
on the topic of improvements recently made to Champaign, Eamon returns this semester. I was thinking about doing a bit where I described it like a porn movie, something like "Eamon's return to help the gang at Mr. Illiniwek's Chicken Shack raise enough money to save the school provides much spine-tingling fun!", but then I guess I came to my senses or maybe I got hungry, I've already forgotten. At my mack-daddy little brother's request, I put up a small webpage for his friends to see his picture online. what a smooth little bastard...
I haven't been walking very smoothly lately. as many of you may have heard or read in the papers, a bone spur in my left foot has been preventing me from playing with the Chicago Bulls as of late. it developed some time after I got new shoes for the first time in five years in late 1997. a podiatrist examined my feet over break and condemned them as "unsafe" or something. amongst other things, I have "hammertoes". well, well, well. Bulls management has been treating me like shit for much of my career, so I am taking this opportunity to demand a trade to Alaska. my foot is feeling a bit better as I get ready to upload this, but you know, it goes beyond the money or the injury, really it's all about respect.
speaking of words in italics, things are gradually starting to happen now in my never-ending battle over the attempted murder of the Cradle (my car) on I-57 last year. (click on the blue head and read around for the full story.) the "discovery" period is a time when the defense gets to examine the evidence and documents that I plan on presenting at the trial, do research about me, hire private detectives, hold depositions, and generally stall like crazy in the hopes that the plaintiff will drop the case out of sheer intimidation. after five long months, I remain as pissed as ever and the discovery period ended on the 31st of december. now the defense either has to pull another stall tactic from out of their sleeve or let things go forward. things going forward entails an "arbitration" date being set. notification of that date is scheduled to arrive roughly a month after the end of the discovery period, and the date itself generally occurs around two months after receipt of the notice. during arbitration, evidence is presented and witnesses are cross-examined for the benefit of an arbitrator, who then makes a judgement. both sides have the option to reject the judgement of the arbitrator for a $200 cost and send the case to trial, which for a $20 fee (which the defense in this case paid, indicating either that they thought the concept of a jury would freak me out, that they have no intention of accepting the arbitrator's judgement and want this taken to trial, or that they just had twenty dollars that they didn't know what to do with) will be held in front of an actual jury. so there's that. I am being represented by Mr. Brian C. Owen, attorney-at-law.
in other trial-related news, the film rights to this entire case have been sold to NBC in exchange for a pack of gum. it will air sometimes in late 1999 and will feature Kevin Nealon from Saturday Night Live fame making his dramatic debut as a crusading lawyer who takes on my case in order to make a statement about humanity and justice. this character does not exist in reality - I have not met him - but NBC president Warren Littlefield says that he is a "composite" of "several different people" whom the Nealon character is "true to, in a dramatic sense". I don't yet know who's playing me, although the three words "Neil" "Patrick" "Harris" are enough to strike fear into anyone's heart I think. the WB is apparently planning on doing their own, unauthorized version of the entire case featuring Tom Arnold as my lawyer and Doug E. Doug as me. hey, whatever the people want, I guess.
those same peasants have been thrown into terrible confusion now that, upon taking the test a second time (see the blue head for the link, back in november), I have been revealed to be most like Sporty Spice. so what is it, the people demand? is marc a Sporty Spice or a Scary Spice? chaos and violence reign.
so while we're talking about violently awful segues, in summary my break was really rather good overall. saw lots of good people, both by plan and by sheer coincidence, saw several good people onstage in Les Miserables, saw an absurd amount of movies, many of which were actually rather good, and finished Part Three in the Trilogy with Rory Leahy. history will thank us, I'm sure.
raves:
That's Rentertainment (the campus video store), cheez wiz, matinee prices, popcorn, the wrong door.
distastes:
fake bread for use in restaurant displays.
January 8, 1999
the main thing that I have done so far this month is be snowed upon. a record snowfall hit Champaign and the world outside became an apocalyptic vision: mountains of snow up to twenty feet tall, entire cars buried, streets barren with only tracks from the treads of what look like tanks visible. (why I associate tanks with an apocalypse, I'm not quite sure.) basic provisions ran low; proving definitively that Kevin Costner is full of shit, the postal service was nowhere to be seen. the only thing that remains yet to happen is the emergence of feudal city-states and warring tribal lords. it wasn't always like this, or so I'm told by last month's update of this page (which makes a reference to "an uninspiring sort-of-warmness" that now sounds quite nice), but it's hard to believe.
it's really sad how owning a car has kind of ruined snow for me. frosted windows create delay, icy streets paranoia, cold air sluggishness. I was out driving during the major wave of the snowstorm and didn't survive. I had planned to write something about it, but the moment has passed. death is so transitory.
the MechaCradle has lain dormant for more than two weeks now (wasting $50 of liability insurance payments). it was buried by the snowplows (the kind of idiotic paradox that only civil service can create) and when I finally managed to dig it out, it refused to start. effort is going to be put into it later today. my old car suffered damages of more than twice its own retail value and never once failed to start until it died for good. the lesson learned? "get them before they get you." it doesn't relate, but it's as good as any, really. "stay off the rock, kids." that one, too.
new year's resolution
in the past I, like others, have scorned the ritual of setting goals at the beginning of the year only to break them once laziness sets in. many resolve to lose weight, for example. others plan to read more. so on and so forth. in a change of heart, I've decided to give it a try this year. having taken a long hard look at myself, at who I am and where I am as a person, at how I relate to others and where I want to be, what my hopes and dreams are, I have made a new year's resolution to be given more stuff. it's not enough to be content with the past - one must always strive to improve as a person, and I will rest on my laurels no longer. I am determined for this year to be the year when I receive more free crap than any other. and damn it, I'm not backing down.
this is probably going to be one of those years. unless my hare-brained scheme works, I am doomed to turn 21 this year. (god, my biological clock is ticking.) although I am taking an extra semester of college in order to pick up my thirtieth bachelor's degree, I'm also pretty much stuck with graduating this year. also all the numbers on the calendars are about to change. I am just now getting used to the notion that it's 1997. the Big Number Change is going to fuck my shit up, most likely. environment in upheaval. in the face of this chaos I plan to boldly and decisively curl into a fetal ball on the floor. once again, I'm not backing down.
you should all boycott the miserable bastards at the UIUC office of admissions and records, by the way. although there were admittedly a number of good reasons for them to let me go, they chose none of them. (if I'm to be criticized, I demand that it be for the right reasons.) no, they claimed to be content with my performance but they decided to replace me with a new full-time employee because they needed someone who could work more hours than me. since they had promised me that I could work over the winter break (depriving me of the ability to earn much-needed money), that was a rotten thing to do. tell my old supervisor that she's a heartless whorecow if you get the time. cheers.
on a more positive note, I highly recommend that everyone purchase the Boards of Canada album Music Has the Right to Children for extended use on these lonesome january and february nights. it's immaculately brilliant for those purposes. trust me.
new web material!
I did a quick job on most of my Potted Meat scripts and put them up on the words page so that all of you who've seen me hype our shows relentlessly can finally get an idea of what it is that we do (and all of you who've actually seen the shows can get what it was that I was going on about in them). they're eminently readable and you should succumb to their voodoo. also there is a new page because there is...
new broadcast material!
the radioactive monsters now cruise around the world in a swank supasonic jet dispensing improvisational comedy and radio theatre every sunday night at 10pm. the show is going phenomenally well - calls flood in every week and complete strangers dig the show and talk to me about it. fantastic. incredibly talented friends Eric Rampson and Matt Trupia join me weekly to display our kung-fu which is indisputably mighty. sunday nights on WEFT 90.1 FM is Must See Radio. fame and fortune beckon, although at the moment I would settle for some cookies.
December 18, 1998
I am attempting to crawl from the audio primordial soup of overnight radio programming to a sunday 10pm timeslot. the new, untitled product will take the radioactive monsters out of london and across the world during two hours of improvisational radio theatre. the show is to be performed by myself and a collective of friends. an initial venture was given wildly enthusiastic reception, but final determination of the show's fate is two weeks away, leaving Gamera and the boys to skulk around liverpool waiting for word.
the MechaCradle (my car) broke down and required $150 worth of repairs to operate at full capacity. I find it bizarre that the original Cradle suffered over $5000 worth of damage in accidents yet ran just fine until the day it died, while the new one collapses at first hint of a blown sparkplug. what the hell? also, it cost $150 that I don't have. to quote Paul Czarnowski, "send money!"
this, the twelfth month, brings no snow as of this writing. instead it has delivered an uninspiring sort-of-warmness. clearly some supervillain has engineered a diabolical plot. when I have some free time I will do battle with him or her. in Finland they call me "He Who Battles Evil". did you know that? it's true.
my kitten orbital has grown up to be quite the ladies' man. his favorite spot is a nice perch in the most well-lit window where sorority girls who walk by see him and stop to gurgle and coo at him. this happens at least twice a day. I am fairly sure that he knows what he's doing - he seems quite pleased with himself to get the attention - and the entire arrangement is just so divinely absurd that I can't bring myself to do anything about it. somehow it makes sense to have sorority girls hovering outside my apartment gurgling and cooing. I no longer have to go looking for it; finally, the chocolate syrup of social alienation is being fed to me with a spoon. wonderful!
my job at the Krannert Art Museum is going quite well. in fact, I don't think I've ever been happier with a job. not only is there a bucketload of free food every saturday, but at last someone is paying me to do what I've been saying I should be paid for all along: essentially, I receive money to occupy a space and spend at least part of the time being somewhat aware of the world around me. fantastic.
some short, easily digestible rants:
the "political correctness" backlash
it is the cutting-edge of the brain-dead to rail against political correctness. when the term is used to refer to a situation, it says a great deal more about the person using it than it does about the situation. whenever racist or sexist acts are committed by someone who a) does not have a swastika tattooed on their forehead or b) is not wearing a KKK hood and the minority has the nerve to complain, it is called political correctness. the fact is that political correctness as an oppressive, censoring force simply does not exist and never has. magazines like Time run "humorous" columns identifying what the "PC" term for an "eskimo" is. how zany. blah, blah, blah. the reality is, however, that no one has ever been silenced by political correctness. uniquely in human history, we have a backlash against something that does not exist. (does it? name one instance where the consequence is something other than you being thought of as a jerk for insulting someone or for failing to have an articulate position on some controversial issue - e.g. "it's not politically correct to be pro/anti issue X, political correctness won't let me speak my mind", etc.)
as for the whole "I don't want to be referred to as..." aspect, you may not see why a group of people different from you don't want to be referred to by a certain term. that's fine. they don't expect you to share their feelings - you haven't had the experiences that formed those feelings - but you should at least respect them. how arrogant is it to presume that it's more of an inconvenience for you to have to use a different word than it is for them to shrug off something that has negative and/or painful connotations for them? you're not a badass. you're just a dick.
"I don't see how..." seems to be the mantra. who's asking you to see, though? the weakness of your imagination should not be imposed upon other people. which leads me to...
white suburbanites and affirmative actionwhat is it about them that makes them think they can extrapolate their experience to cover the entire world? yo, Ted, just because you didn't run into any opposition in the job world doesn't mean other people didn't. the way that they take their upbringing for granted - "well, if I can do it, so can anyone, and the $200,000+ parental income and private school education I got doesn't make me different from anyone else!" - is unbelievable. I find it extremely grating to read essays by whiteys who slam affirmative action as they write on top-of-the-line computers in cozy, heated rooms. they complain about racially-based admissions policies as if they are being discriminated against but the fact is that they have plenty of access to fine schools and no hard-working whiteboy has ever been kept out of college by affirmative action. (plenty of hard-working nonwhiteboys, on the other hand, have gotten into college because of it thanks to access to grants and scholarships that schools would not otherwise offer.)
I'll be interested the first time that I hear a homeless guy tell me that affirmative action kept him out of school and a job. until then, the angst of white kids who (without any factual basis) complain that "minorities should stop complaining and just work, they have all the same chances" sounds banal to me. let's hear one answer the fact that 95% of CEOs in the US are white males. is 95% of the population white and male? no? then what's keeping minorities out? either there is a preferential establishment in this country or minorities are dumb and incapable, and if you believe the latter, I'd love to see your research on it. have fun going public with your findings. otherwise, shut up already...
four thoughts about the millenium
firstly, to all the types who continue to insist that the millenium starts in 2001, not 2000: yes, you're technically right. but what everyone cares about - what all the excitement is about - is when the number chages from 19 to 20. you are correct but irrelevant so drop it already. millenium fever is a somewhat dim ritual, yes. so what? so is sex 'n booze.
secondly, buy stock in anti-depressants now. the decade of 2000-2010 is going to be very interesting as people try to cope with the fact that nothing will have really changed. no force from above will have intervened in the painfuly numbing routine of their lives. if nothing else, it will be a ripe time to be an artist.
thirdly, as the year looms on the horizon, I issue a desperate plea to everyone to not even mention the Prince song "1999". "we're gonna party like it's 1999...and it is 1999!" anyone who thinks that that is humorously ironic in any way is not a good person and will not be going to heaven. if we don't nip it in the bud now then we're going to be sick beyond belief of it come december '99. do future generations a favor and take decisive action now...
finally, I join with a handful of other people in calling for a death to irony. no more. it's done, it is false, it is not clever. throw this snarling, hideous beast away. as the arbiter of such things, I declare irony to be a spent force and the lowest form of humor. abandon the hollow aesthetes in their cafes, pretending they are above everything by making ironic comment upon it, and let us go into the new millenium free of that hateful burden and face things as they are. let's actually live in the world that we're headed towards. irony is an excuse for the incompetent and the inadequate to mask their inability to experience and to create. no more. do you hear me? no more.
happy xmas. irony is over.
December 4, 1998
somebody has started leaving behind color printouts of the satellite weather forecast in the studio, so on my radio show this week I was the first to break the alarming news that a gigantic blob of green crap is going to descend all over the region this week. you can be calm, though, because doppler forecasts reveal that an even larger glob of turquoise-ish crap is going to cover the green stuff up in a few days. still, what a terrifying world we live in! as the voice of the media, I remain calm and firm in the face of crisis.
classes are starting to wind down, only a week and a day and a paper and a review and a two-page essay left before finals. aside from the fucking mess that is sociology 231 as taught by professor Bordua, this has been a good semester and I'll actually miss the rest of my classes. I have decided to plan the rest of my academic career around trying to get as many teachers named Seamus as possible. the current Seamus under whom I am taking an english class showed a portion of Trainspotting in class on wednesday and distributed short stories by Irvine Welsh and James Kelman (another good scottish writer) to read for tomorrow. how much ass does that kick? all ass that is within reach and more.
the sky is a very different color out of the window to my right than the window straight ahead.
raves:
late-night grocery shopping, life ungoverned by half-hour segments, warmth, breakaway glass.
distastes:
colds that are bad enough to be annoying but not bad enough to do anything about, snowy weather without snow.
November 18, 1998
the weather has finally turned cold and the heat has turned on. this ia problematic in my humble apartment because, being an old-school building, we individual tenants have little or no control over the heat. windows are thrown wide open but it doesn't really help. so I am very sleepy as of late. my cats seem cool with this.
I have not accomplished much as of late. post-novel sloth hangs over me in a big way. but it's cool. don't freak out, man.
this was a good halloween in some senses. for example, the university of illinois, in a rare display of creative awareness, realized that the heavy emphasis upon getting really drunk that was such a prominent feature of years past had grown monontonous. they did something about it: an utterly brilliant rumor of a serial killing that was to occur. supposedly a psychic had appeared on oprah and announced that a mass murder would happen "at a big ten school, at a dorm next to an old cemetary shaped like an 'H'". the university of illinois fits that description. (even better was that the killer was to be dressed as little bo peep.) the simple fact that no one had said that on oprah did not deter the community, and by halloween people were so freaked out about it that they hired massive amounts of extra personnel to watch over the dorm in question. what a great world.
this was not such a good election day, on the other hand. in illinois, not many races went the right way. the openly racist, fatuous Rick Winkel won his representative seat. ultra-conservative freakshow Peter Fitzgerald bought a Senate seat. (yet another example of how little respect the political right in this country has for you: they accuse Mosely-Braun of campaign finance indiscretions and run a $40 million trust-fund baby against her, expecting that you will not notice the hypocrisy. and, unfortunately, most of the state swallowed it whole.) two racists battled it out for governership and one of them won, which I guess was bound to happen unless aliens arrived and started shooting or something. I have already forgotten the names of everyone else who ran but I was pleased with little of it.
it should be admitted, however, that I did not vote. I was trying to decide if I want to come up with a philosophical justification for it (and believe me, I could construct a good one) but honestly I was kind of confused about the registration process and I didn't sort it out in time. I've never been clear on where I should be voting, here or Chicago. here, I guess, since I now have no residence up there. on the other hand, to register here implies that I am now a citizen of this scary fucking desert known as central illinois and I enjoy my status of "extended visitor" (however illusory it may be). I don't know. I loathe the two-party system. yes, a single vote is fairly minute - you can look at it that way - or you can look at it from the perspective that this country's government is determined by less than 40% of the populace and you can be part of that elite group. you can walk around and sneer at your fellow citizens, knowing that in a sense you govern them because they're not a part of that voting elite. everybody loves a good power trip.
one thing that rocks the casbah is that former wrestler Jesse "the Body" Ventura won the governorship of Minnesota. not only is that a major-race win for a third party, but it's also just plain amusing. way to go, Minnesotans. you made a good choice. politics needs more absurdity like that. I ran for my school's presidency and very nearly won on a similar platform - every once in awhile someone needs to spray paint "poopy" in the halls of government as a shock to the system. in the legislatures of our country they are not governing, they are self-serving and it is a pretentious load of crap that can only be eliminated through exposing it for what it is. if it takes a clown to do that, so be it. pow. dada.
one thing that I did not go into during the last update is my current employment: I work two jobs. the first is at the office of admissions and records, where I have an unduly large influence over the fate of thounsands of fresh-faced applicants of every age. this strikes me as quite amusing. (I don't make admissions decisions, but were I to "lose" a key piece of paper...) I have no real intention of abusing this position, but it's good to know. the second job is a way-cool gig as a security guard at the krannert art museum. I carry a radio and I stay vigilant. I protect art. don't touch or you will feel the might of my kung-fu, sucker. the museum has the second largest collection in the state but, oddly enough, is not well-known to the general populace here. (probably has something to do with the campus being a bunch of fucking idiots.) some of it is rather cool. I've already named many of the pre-Columbian pieces.
the Trial of the Millenium is now threatening to encompass a second one: the court date was set for May 13, 1999. two years and three months after the accident.
"Pleasantville" and "Bride of Chucky" are both highly recommended. stay cool, kids.
October 18, 1998
first three people to notice that this page has been updated after more than five months win the lost like this special achiever award...don't trample each other as you rush to that mailto link, kids. erase the "home.html" and start at the beginning, because I redid the entry page too.
have you ever had a guest that stayed longer than you really wanted them to, or even just one who made a mess before they left and you don't want to have to deal with it? I find myself in a situation something like that except you have to imagine me as a disaffected teenage Dr. Frankenstein because I assembled the guest in question. I never really intended for this website to last beyond the school year in which it was created - september to may, as it were. my previous webpage had been static and I prefer that method of web presentation. my online modus operandi has always been to hide nigh-infinite bits all over the structure and let the dedicated search for them - allowing the expansion of perception to compensate for actual regenerating product. this time out people got both and they kept complaining when the web page was left alone. stinkers.
understand: this is not an extension of myself. there is no correlation between action and representation here. this is just some shit on a computer screen...with that out of the way, here you go. I don't really intend to do updates quite as frequently as I did last year, but who knows? ain't no one producing anything like it, flava from a school of fish in an ocean so deep not yet seen the light of day...it's got my name on it, so I suppose I have to do something with it. and besides, this is the new frontier, or hadn't you heard...
well, what I done? I set this summer aside for accumulating the List of Surreal Jobs that every famous person has to have in order to spice up interviews. in that regard it was a massive success - I did everything from getting buried underneath an avalanche of rollerblade helmets to rearranging and redecorating a mental hospital. no joke. financially it was somewhat less than successful, but that was a problem to be dealt with by later selves and I had a splendid time overall. I finished writing a novel and acted in an independent film that was shooting in the area: a drama about family crisis in a steakhouse. 16 millimeters of my face onscreen, the line cook on work-release who had a plan to make a break for it...an amazing experience and it kept me unavailable for "Godzilla 2", sorry guys.
the MechaCradle, my car of May origin, continues to run beautifully and without problem. with this vehicle, there has been a notable decrease in frequency of meteors that fall from the sky while I am driving, which is good. as for the ghost of the original Cradle, the Trial of the Century continues. in August I drove up to Chicago for the arbitration date, which is just like a trial but it is done before three arbitrators instead of judge and jury. I walked in there, looked that bitchmonkey straight in the eye, and kicked his sorry ass all over the circuit courts. the arbitrators took all of two minutes to award me every single cent I asked for. it was a wonderful thing to be a part of: they announced the verdict and suddenly these swarms of people appear all over the place, entire crowds holding him back from me, and he's yelling at me "you're nothing but a two-bit punk! you got nothing, you hear me? nothing!" and I calmly reply "you're going down for what you did, Hall. don't drive like an asshole. here endeth the lesson." it was a moment of immense drama and it was great - that's not to mention the bomb threat, and knocking the gun out of his hand, and impaling his silent but deadly hired Dutch henchmen, and getting a commendation from the mayor for saving the city - but it unfortunately was not final, as the opposition has the legal right to reject the arbitrators' ruling and take the case to a full trial. so he did. why he thinks that a jury of twelve average people is going to be more sympathetic, I don't know. I'd think they'd be less, if anything. but so it goes. what a dick. the meeting to determine the date of the meeting to determine the date of the trial has been held (once again, no joke), so we're awaiting the date to determine the trial date now. the Trial of the Century continues. it is at least nice to have it confirmed for me that the even the legal world finds this situation as absurd as I do...
oh, the "lost update" is in the "past" page, by the way.
I have a new apartment. the last one was chosen for its last-minute availability; this one was chosen because I actually like it. the cats seem to agree with my choice. they are each sleeping inches away from me. one thing that I can't afford is TV - although I can watch videos, I don't have an antenna and cable costs far too much unfortunately. I have been keeping busy though and can only think of two times in the last week when I actually missed it...
Potted Meat - Halloween at 8pm, Channing-Murray Foundation (Mathews and Nevada in Urbana). very good for you.
this web design thing is comfortable once you slip back into it.
hot damn, there are a lot of words on my page.
June 18, 1998
the index page got an update too. go check it out (erase the "home.html") and pretend that you're coming in for the first time.
still waiting for Oregon Trail stories, slackers. (Katy and Not Elvis exempted from that labeling.)
where to begin? I've been plenty busy despite no web activity (come on, it's summer. piss off.) writing on, learning to drive all over again, and aimlessly looking for a job. I wound up at a temp agency, Manpower. as those of you who know me best may have guessed, yes I did choose it because of its name. you can either look at it in the depressing way ("fuck, it's sunny out and I'm doing crap menial labor") or the cheery way ("I'm exerting manpower!").
what holds up the updates of this page? well, for one thing, there's only so much time I feel like spending in front of a computer writing and this is just one of many projects. it's not as though I get paid or even rewarded for this. and it's not just straight recall, either. I should write a manifesto or something. this page is founded on the rejection of the belief that to be "worthwhile" (in the "top 5%" or whatthefuckever) a website must be dedicated to some celebrity or some business. that whole crap attitude is all a reinforcement of the disgusting agenda that we should worship every move of the celebrity elite and most importantly continue to consume it while staying on our couches. whatever you do, don't get up. whatever you do, don't think that your idle activities and thoughts are as important as a celebrity's idle activities and thoughts. no. screw that. what's disgusting about the web is the way that people line up to buy into it like pathetic sucking eels. nothing on the web nauseates me more than to see some suburbanite college dropout with a web design company supported by his parents' money and his webpage about how he is in fact the one doing something worthwhile on the web because his fat ass is doing a little microsoft mime routine.
repeat after me: your life can be as interesting as anyone else's. your art can be as good as their art. your thought can be as relevant as their thought. create like mad children and the web is an available canvas so use it.
but, you know, on the other hand, you can't let yourself get lazy. you have to ask yourself why you've put something on the web. for what reason does it exist? it's tricky but there has to be a spin. you can't just recall the details of what you did that day because no one cares. it's artless. journals are all fine and good but why would you put an artless journal online? presumably, if you choose to use the web then you have considered its virtues and amongst those virtues, central is that other people can see what you put on it. strangers can see it. so why do strangers care about the base, unadorned details of your life ("I did this. And then I went there. then this person I know did this")? what's there to make them stick around?
what you have to do is make art of it. add a twist. make them think they're getting a picture of a room and then when they're not looking insert a monkey into that room and watch all hell break loose. I don't know if I always manage to hit that magic plateau myself but when I'm talking about something, like my cats or my car or my job, I try to make them social critiques or just plain amusing even if you weren't there or have never met me. be thoughtful or be funny or just be observant. I am not an anarchist but I believe in wanting to get into as many peoples' homes as possible and you do what you have to do to acc