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Saturday, April 21st, 2007
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4:11 am - Finally.
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It's about damn time I get some love on Craigslist's Missed Connections. I don't care if they are ambiguous-- I'm takin 'em for myself.
cute boys on bikes - w4m - 26
Reply to: pers-315474173@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-04-20, 11:55AM CDT
i love you.
Re: cute boys on bikes - w4m - 26 - w4m
Reply to: pers-315575473@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-04-20, 2:22PM CDT
God, me too. They drive me absolutely crazy and give me one more reason to bike. Especially the thin, bespectacled ones with facial hair. Yum.
Re: Both of you
From: Mark
Thanks. Sorry, though, I'm taken. But I appreciate the comments.
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| Friday, March 23rd, 2007
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6:32 pm - brick and mortality
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Not to get all up-in-arms about something everyone will no doubt soon get up-in-arms about, but I was mildly appalled to read in the Chicago Journal that Filter, the beloved Wicker Park coffee shop frequented by myself and a hundred idiots who look just like me, will be replaced by a Bank of America early next year.
I don't care if it is a fucking cliche to dig that place. I fucking DIG that place. Damn the man.
http://chicagojournal.com/main.asp?SectionID=25&SubSectionID=55&ArticleID=2821
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| Thursday, March 22nd, 2007
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2:56 pm - flies to swat
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Today it is nice out. Yesterday it was nice out too, but it hailed at night. The hail hung out on the ground for about a half hour and then melted. Everything about it confused me.
But today it’s 60 again, and there are no clouds, no chance of hail. I rode my bike. I took a much longer path downtown than I would have had it been cold. I ate at Chipotle. I sat in the window because I was alone.
While I ate my burrito, a kid walked by, talking on his cell phone, smoking a cigarette. He looked like he was 14 or 15. He had curly hair and wore a backpack. Baggy cargo shorts and a baseball cap.
I laughed at him and shook my head, because he was ridiculous. He saw me and gave me a “what are you looking at” glare. I laughed again and took a bite of my burrito.
When I left, he was finishing his cigarette. He saw me walk to my bike and threw his cigarette in my general direction, though it didn’t land very close. Then he said, “your bike sucks.”
If I had been having a bad day, I might have beaten him with my lock until he bled a little bit, and then kicked him in the mouth. But it’s nice out. It’s 60 degrees and the sun is shining and there are bicycles everywhere and bare arms because everyone left their jackets at home and I took the long way downtown just so that I could be outside for longer.
So I smiled at him and told him how hot he was when he was smoking and asked what he was up to later.
He called me a fag and walked the other way.
This makes me LOL, btw.
current music: Microphones
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| Sunday, February 11th, 2007
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11:14 pm - things we're too young to know
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Magnetic Fields on the living room speakers. Leftover ice cream and the last two beers. Feet resting on the ottoman, sans slippers. Slippers on the floor, wishing for feet to fill them.
Spent the weekend in various states of motion, and then today in various states of rest. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, and mine came in the form of three hours sipping coffee with the New Yorker, then an hour long nap on my couch after dinner, tuning in and out of the new Clap Your Hands…, the most magnificent album to be brushed aside by critics in years. Countless more hours in my living room chair, nodding off into the night. Bonnie Prince Billy, the Silver Jews, and now sixty nine love songs to pass the time while I write. Filling pages with words not assigned as homework. Making progress in futile directions, taking roads that lead straight into water. Enjoying the swim.
White t-shirt, wrinkled. Hair going every direction but the right ones. Still sans slippers though my feet are cold.
current mood:  happy
current music: violent crimes
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| Saturday, December 30th, 2006
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12:17 pm - going to wisconsin
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The old house is practically empty now, with furniture arranged but not sat on like an unlit corner of a department store, neglected by clerks and customers, manicured by janitors and cleaning crews.
The evidence of life is still here, but it’s missing key ingredients. The heat is off and the wireless signal is absent; the ghosts of modern comfort are dearly missed.
The bathrooms have been repainted and they seem foreign in a way. Each one stripped of the ugly flowery décor to which I had grown accustomed. They sport pastels now: One is yellow. One is bliue. One is pink. It looks nice, I think, but it always bothers me when changes are made during exodus. Only in a passing glance, on a trip home to an empty house, will I get to enjoy a little touch like that. As if it wasn’t worth it to paint the bathrooms when we actually lived here, as if such luxuries are too frivilous for our family, but necessary for someone else's.
Yesterday morning I woke up hungover, despite how sober I felt when I went to bed. When I woke up, I soaked in my tub for fifteen minutes while I thought about puking. The sweetness of blended scotch seems to lie beneath cover until the next morning, when one becomes aware of how much he really consumed, and how drastically it differs from single malts and bourbon (to which I’ve grown accustomed). Still, it has its place, and I’ll take more, please.
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| Sunday, December 24th, 2006
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1:04 am - rural justice, so to speak.
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My Uncle Tom lives on a farm outside of Kansas City. He’s a business man by profession, but—like most Byrne men—he has other hobbies. Tom farms. He grows a small lot of vegetables and brings them to a market in the city each week when they are in season. He really enjoys that, and speaks enthusiastically of his crop when he has a good season. He is extremely sensitive to environmental issues, and the only meat he eats is fish.
Tom also keeps horses with his wife Sheila, who rides them regularly. They have many acres of land on which to ride. Tom has dogs, too. His dogs sometimes come along to St. Louis for family functions. Though they were all once strays, Tom’s dogs are well-trained and obedient. He lets them run around his property, but they know who is boss.
Last year when Tom visited, his dogs stayed in a kennel. While in the kennel, one was attacked and killed by another dog. Tom was very upset, as he should have been. They don’t have children; instead, they keep dogs. When one dies, it’s like losing a child.
Tom cares so strongly about animals that he bids on as many hunting licenses as he can get for his area (only a set number of hunters are allowed, in order to keep the woods less crowded with bullets) just so that they won’t go to men who will shot animals. He recently found his neighbor’s son on the land, carrying a gun without a license, and reported the kid. He brought him home to his father, a retired policeman who fancies himself as a vigilante of rural Missouri. “I just want to make sure nobody gets hurt,” Tom told the vigilante, in sincerety typical of him. In return, the vigilante (Tom's antithesis) got angry at Tom for 'parenting' his son.
A couple days ago, just before Tom and Sheila were about to leave to come to St. Louis for Christmas, Tom took one dog for a walk. “I never let him get far ahead of me,” he said later, but on this walk, the dog had run rather far ahead. Tom heard two gun shots, and ran to the scene, where the vigilante neighbor stood, gun in hand, dead dog at his feet. The neighbor claims that Tom’s dog attacked him. So he shot it, with the gun that he just happened to have on-hand and loaded. He shot the dog twice.
“I just want to make sure nobody gets hurt,” the neighbor told my uncle.
current music: footsteps.
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| Sunday, November 19th, 2006
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1:40 pm - red and black, baby, black and red.
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| Sunday, October 29th, 2006
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12:42 pm - if she says we partied then i'm pretty sure we partied.
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| Friday, October 27th, 2006
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1:01 am - jalepeno architecture
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On Tuesday there was a fire on campus, in a vacant building across from one of ours. It started out small, with smoke drifting out of a couple of windows on the third floor. Students lined across the street and pointed, took pictures with cell phones, watched the fire trucks pull up.
I got bored and went back to my office down the street, but the sirens kept coming, more trucks lined the streets, clogged the intersections, shut down entire blocks. The smoke got thicker and made its way down Wabash Ave like a marching band and as the thick gray mass slipped through open windows, a fire marshal came up and evacuated The Chronicle. The fire, which started in the basement, had grown significantly. It was now huge, flames leaping through the collapsed ceiling, lapping at the sky. From 3-alarm straight to 5-alarm, then Extra Alarm, as reported by the Tribune. Helicopters circled and fire trucks fought for parking on the crowded smoky streets.
That afternoon, after being kicked out of our building, The Chronicle reconvened at a bar nearby. I had a midday Guinness, the foam of which ended up in my moustache on more than one occasion. When I biked home that night I was cold, and smelled like a campfire, but at least it wasn't raining again.
The next day, the building kept burning. A wrecking crew came to tear it down. They made slow progress.
Today, the building lit up once more, and the sirens made slow journeys down congested streets again. My building was evacuated, again. When we were let back in, rumors spread that our building was on fire, too. They weren’t true, and if they were, I’m convinced The Chronicle staff would have stayed. “We can’t leave, we’re busy,” said a coworker to the fire marshal. Too true.
Tonight I saw The Hold Steady at the Metro. Halfway through their set I was kicked out by a big ugly bouncer for drinking from my flask. Whiskey has never tasted better.
current mood: drunk
current music: ringing in my ears
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| Sunday, October 15th, 2006
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2:31 pm - gearhead
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A few weeks ago, I published a feature story for The Chronicle about guys who are obsessed with fixing up old bikes. The focus of my narrative for that story was a red and silver 70's model french racing bike, a fucking beautiful one at that. Today, one of the guys i interviewed gave me the frame. I'm going to start working on it and god is it going to be sexy.
Pictures to follow eventually.
( here's the story: )
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| Friday, August 18th, 2006
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7:22 pm - There are certain gardening skills that you'll never learn.
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Tonight I made myself a giant pasta dish with sautéed chicken and green and red peppers drenched in tomato sauce. I ate it in my living room, Broken Social Scene on vinyl coming through the big speakers that face east, staring at the details of the room that I might have overlooked or forgotten were there, the iridescent tile of the non-functional fireplace, the original hardware on the doors, the Christmas wreath up by the ceiling, making note of things that I ought to pay attention to more often. It was a sensory feast in terms of Sight Smell Sound and Taste and I was left wondering if Touch might be feeling left out, if grasping the steel of my fork was really an appropriate compliment to the dish to the song to the sights to the smell.
I’ve been completely engrossed in work this last week, since the newspaper is now back in swing. This is what I want to do forever.
Broken Social Scene’s self titled album makes me want to poor a big drink and sip slowly and let it run all the way through, let the needle circle towards the center like a birdofprey.
I enjoy that and I enjoy writing and I enjoy being this year’s A&E editor and being in charge or on top or however you might want to put it, I enjoy whatever psychoanalysis might be attached to a statement like that, and I liked what the senior staff and I did a couple days ago, the way we all gathered at Exchequer at 3 in the afternoon for Black and Tans and then migrated up to the L&L Tavern to finish up the job with PBR before night fell, when night was only considering its fall because it fell the night before and it seemed right to do it again, when night was checking with his boss to see if he really must fall again or if he could just stay back a little longer, just for fun, just for the fucking hell of it. He did fall, he always does, but it’s the thought that counts.
current mood: establishing routines
current music: 7/4 Shoreline
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| Monday, July 24th, 2006
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5:11 am
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The Volvo is acting like it won’t be with us for much longer. That is more depressing for me than I expect any of you to comprehend.
I’ve been working a lot lately. The morning shift, the one that cues my alarm at 4:30 a.m., the one that wakes me while it’s still dark, where I dress myself as the sky puts on the sun, where I enjoy a quick, ten minute bike ride in the day’s most virgin light.
I like the way Chicago looks on the Fullerton St. bridge over the Chicago River at 5:20 in the morning, when its completely light but the fog has yet to lift, where I can glance south east and not even see the city. I like the way Chicago looks when it’s most defining steel structures aren’t even visible, when the city is a concept instead of a skyline, when looking down the river is a faith-based pursuit.
I used to like the way my Volvo was when it was parked outside. When I wasn’t driving it but I knew I could. I liked knowing that after 18 years its still running fine, it’s still that same car that my dad picked out in southern L.A. in 1988. That there is something about it that he and i mutually respect, some kind of understanding that we’ve have come to reach together, despite distance, despite silence.
I can't think of a proper way to end this. I'm not much for endings.
current mood: tired
current music: 5am noises
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| Sunday, July 23rd, 2006
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3:49 pm - an amateur diagnosis.
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Saddam Hussein has been on a hunger strike again. He’s been doing it on and off since his trials began, in order to prove some point (the point is that the “trial” is more like a sentencing with a different name, but no one cares what points he has to make, because, well, it’s more of a sentencing than a trial). He doesn’t eat for a couple of weeks, and then he ends up in the hospital where they forcefeed him.
Anyway, he’s been receiving court-mandated psychiatric counseling to urge him to start eating again. They don’t want him to die before they can sentence him to death. Sometimes I think humanity needs court-mandated psychiatric counseling for its god-complex.
It makes one wonder what exactly the psychiatrists say to Saddam to try and cheer him up.
current mood: as always
current music: fan
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| Friday, July 14th, 2006
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6:50 pm - geneva convictions
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I almost got hit by a car today while I was biking south down State. It was in one of the residential blocks squeezed between the Gold Coast shopping area and Lincoln Park. One of those blocks lined with trees and behind them the magnificent townhouses of captain’s of industry and the Blue Blood of the Midwest. People with familiar last names.
I was passing a car, a blue Cadillac, which was stopped behind a truck. I went to his left as he was deciding to also pull left (sans blinker) to pass the truck. We did so in almost parallel; almost as in close-to, as in, if only. I rode by his car and he pulled left, into my path, stuck his hood into my leg, my gloved knuckles against his door. ‘Fuck,’ I believe I screamed. He slammed on his breaks and I squeezed on mine. I looked back and he craned his head out the window, quickly meeting eyes in the pursuit of answers, composure.
He said nothing. I said, “Are you ok?” because I’m fairly certain someone is supposed to say that. He still said nothing, just looked at me. My knuckles hurt. I left the scene.
current mood: Quite well, actually
current music: planes
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| Monday, July 10th, 2006
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12:25 am - You got a heart, and I got this big big lance.
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On less than two hours of sleep, I went to work this morning. I biked there, like usual, despite massive lack of sleep, despite lingering drunkenness and looming hangover, because at 6 am it is light out but still very cool and that time is too precious, the temperature too perfect to spend even a few moments in a car when one could be feeling the breeze on his greasy face, on his pen-marked arms, in his unwashed hair.
When I came home in the afternoon, I spent about four hours napping in various positions on various couches. It was so hot and I never made it more than 20 minutes without waking up to a soaked hairline, uncomfortable and sticky but still in need of more shut-eye. I eventually turned the air conditioning on but forget to close the surrounding windows. By the time I figured that part out, it was almost dinner time, and I no longer wanted to sleep. So I ate a burrito.
The beer we bought today was too citrusy for my liking. On days when it is this hot, we like to pick up a 12pack of something refreshing, typically a wheat ale. Our fallback plan is always Goose Island 312, but sometimes we try the summer brews. Tonight we tried Leinenkugel’s Sunset Wheat. The taste of orange is almost overwhelming, and it lingered in my mouth long after the one bottle I drank this evening, so that I could still taste it during the movie we went to see, ‘Les Pouppes Russes.’ The beer was disappointing, or at least not at all what I was expecting. The movie was spectacular, and not at all what I was expecting. I have such a hardon for European women.
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| Tuesday, July 4th, 2006
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3:45 pm - fortune 500 calories
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I’m in St. Louis right now and I have much to report, but at the moment all I’d like to comment on is that while on a walk around Portland Place, I saw a woman chauffeuring three dogs around the block in a golf cart. It was as if she was walking them—only none were actually walking. The wealthiest Americans, it seems, are not very far off from the laziest.
current mood: not yet drunk.
current music: kids
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| Sunday, June 25th, 2006
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4:54 pm
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I opened the front door today and there was a big yellow umbrella, completely open, sitting on our porch. I briefly considered this was a warning of some kind, something less messy than a dead horse head next to me in bed, something more vague than a ransom note scrawled in blood. Something not quite as direct as a beige envelope containing blackmail pictures of me doing something that I would regret the next morning.
Then Nick immerged from the front office room, where Mallory had been practicing piano, and saw it. “Oh, there’s my umbrella!” he said as he walked outside to pick it up, as if that series of events made sense, as if leaving your umbrella open on the front porch and forgetting where you put it is similar in normality to losing one’s keys between the cushions of the couch.
Anyway, that was that. I haven't shaved in three days and I feel like a shmuck, but sometimes that is an enjoyable feeling.
current music: Oceanographer's Choice
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| Sunday, June 18th, 2006
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9:40 pm - "I can hear a collective rumbling in America."
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Took Ravenswood Drive north today, following the slight bends that allow it to run parallel to the Metra Rail. The west side of the road, given that condition, is not-surprisingly monotonous: An elevated track, maybe 15 feet above street level, mostly lifted by gravelly hill and suspended above intersecting roads by big pillars and steel bridges. The east side is different. It is, at times, strictly industrial warehousing with big block-glass windows and bricks and flat front facades and large lettering that is so faded that one must wonder whether the words still accurately represent the buildings purpose, or if the building even has a purpose anymore. Is it just bricks and glass and concrete, or does something living still exist within, some machine, conveyer belt, forklift; something dangerous and loud and heavy: a heartbeat. And I am, at times, nothing if not a stethoscope.
current music: The Presets - Are you the one?
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| Thursday, June 15th, 2006
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12:55 am - I know you've supported me for a long time.
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Biked up all along the Lake Michigan coast today. Through Chicago, through about 4 towns—villages even—to the north, watching the houses grow in size and in grandeur, watching the origin of the cars centralize in Germany. Gothic mansions and Tudor estates and BMWs and Mercedes and lawns like football fields. Such is the tragedy, it seems, of the wealth in America; the higher we are in the tax bracket, the more space we seem to want between ourselves and our neighbors. Huge lawns between ourselves and our friends, huge lawns between the upper and the lower classes, huge lawns between developed and struggling nations. One is inclined to ask what exactly we need all that space for.
Ended up in [the village of] Winnetka, where I stopped due to large signs suggesting that biking was not allowed on the main coast-hugging road, which was unfortunate because the forbidding sign was at the bottom of a long hill that I had just enjoyed coasting down (wind in my hair like slender fingers). A long, steep hill that I did not enjoy turning around and [slowly] biking up. So I ended up in Winnetka, Il, one of those old towns with old, winding neighborhoods and old picturesque homes and one central stretch of shops, mainly just a bunch of antique stores, most of which would be charming if it weren’t for their close proximity to about five other shoppes of the same type. Such is the tragedy of antique shoppes, and of little towns in northern Illinois, and of the bombshell blondes that walk their sidewalks like runways. The appeal diminishes in the repetition. Things get ordinary, stale, boring even.
On that main street in that little town, the only clothing stores were directly next to eachother: a Women’s Gap and a Baby Gap. Gender programming at its finest.
current mood: forecast says 89 tomorrow.
current music: somehow i'm not impressed
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| Monday, May 22nd, 2006
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12:53 am - I only said come in alone sometimes
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Today, too cold to bike. Not too cold to leave on foot, but too cold to welcome unnecessary wind-chill into the equation. The right temperature for a suit jacket, granting that hands be burrowed in the pockets. The right temperature to go out to eat, but too cold to dine outside. Today, Sunday, the day of rest they say.
I fell asleep on the couch this afternoon, and let The Corrections fall against my chest, split open, spine spread to keep my place in the book, each page a cheek against my rib cage. Smothering the words, or perhaps absorbing them. The couch in our living room, the fuzzy tan one, is one of the few couches that is long enough for me to stretch out upon, and so I take advantage of that. Head on a pillow, shoes kicked off. One arm behind my head, the other falling to the floor. One of those naps that you don’t anticipate until just before you doze off. The best kind, or so I believe.
My Bloody Valentine coming through the headphones now. The only proper way to listen to this album, though I guess that really loud, crisp speakers might also do the trick. One needs to drown out all the world's other sounds, he must place himself in a Loveless box, I think, to fully comprehend this album, to fully appreciate this wall of noise, this cross-stitching of muffled instruments and muted vocals. Alas, if I was wearing shoes, it is at them that I would be gazing.
current mood: lifeless
current music: Loveless
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