Moving this week. Also, surgery due to a genetic flaw in my abdominal wall. Codeine sucks, makes me crazy. When a u-haul outlet said that they had no trucks available to rent, I took it very personally and almost bawled before I realized that yes, indeed, I'm on drugs. Remind me never to do heroin.

I spent the weekend in Nebraska with my good friends Kim and Jeff. It was a much-needed relief from the ol' hustle and bustle. All that life and growth, all around, and the fresh air... a much needed respite from the concrete jungle.

On the train on the way to O'Snare, we stopped on the tracks and were informed by recording that "This train is experiencing technical difficulties. The operator has left the train to address the problems". I guess they didn't want people panicking when they used the intercom and got no response. Then, after about five minutes, we started rolling again... and the recording said, "This train is experiencing technical difficulties. The operator has left the train to address the problems." Zoiks! A runaway train!

Got to Omaha airport/cattle auction okay with the help of a Bloody Mary. Intellectually I enjoy flying very much but it still scares my gut. Jeff drove me to their place, which involves leaving the paved road and driving for an hour and a half into the deep Nebraskan cornfields. I never knew there were really houses like this: Their house, a church, another house, and a 2-classroom schoolhouse... and then corn to the horizon. Beautiful countryside, huge sky, fresh air. Ah, just what I was looking for.

Kim greets me on the porch in bare feet, pigtails, overalls, and a cowboy hat. Tryin' to look like a hick! I'm sorry, but the computer lab with seven stations kinda destroys that image. Their kids were quite computer literate. It was amazing. LeAnn and Bob were there too, I was pleased to discover. What great folks. We stayed up late into the night drinkin' beer and talkin' and playin' games.

Saturday, more chillin' and relaxin' was to be had. Jeff took me on a short trip around the Omaha reservation. So much tragedy. We stood on the bank of the Missouri and Jeff sang an Omaha spiritual and I looked at the river the Omaha had crossed 500 years ago, 200 years before any white people set foot there. Now they're living in poverty and have had their culture almost completely destroyed. It was unbearably painful to see, who knows how Jeff does it every day?

Kim and Jeff are Lutherans, and I am an atheist. To sum up our philosophical differences, I say, "There ain't no hell" and they say, "The hell there ain't!" ;) Our friendship has been very good for me, really opened my eyes to the good aspects of a faith that I had always seen as fully persecutors. They focus their lives on living it right as they see it, while many atheists fall into the trap of assuming because there is no god, there also are no morals or ethics. We need something to replace the church for secular humanists. Unitarianism does it for a lot of people, but that still assumes a belief in the supernatural. At any rate, I've learned a lot about Lutheranism from them. Every gripe I have about Christianity as an organized religion, they have too. We tend to agree on most (but not all) philosophies except the final caveat. Best of all, they've been very accepting of me and my ways and they've taught me to be accepting of theirs. We talked late into the night on Saturday, the highlight being Jeff's translation of a bit of Genesis from the Hebrew text. I also saw him read Greek. Astounding. I wish I'd used my college education to develop, like, skills and stuff.

Got the scope out for a bit of a glimpse at Mars and Andromeda. The night sky was beautiful, lots of shooting stars. I could have stayed for months, sitting in the lawn chairs, drinkin' beer. It was a nice little reset, and I returned to Chicago full of vim and vigor.

Singular Girl and I went on a date to see "The Maltese Falcon" showing in Grant Park. What a great movie! Y'see, I used to think that old movies were all fuddy-duddy and dry. But Singular Girl got me to watch some of the the old classics, and I discovered they were just as bawdy as today's movies! They just had a little class about it back in the day. Of course, her parents only watched old movies because new movies are all filthy and sexual, so I think they must have been blind to the innuendo.

The movie was showing under the stars, and there were thousands of people there. The park is surrounded by the skyline on three sides and the lake on the fourth. It's nice, you show up early with a picnic and eat it while you watch the sun set- though in the city, you don't watch the sun set so much as you watch the skyline come out.

Half of The Maltese Falcon is funny because it's supposed to be, and the other half is funny because of the way things have changed. Sam Spade learns of his partner's death, calls his secretary, and says, "Now listen, Precious. Miles has been shot...Yeah, dead. Now don't get excited..." He's just so deadpan, so emotionally cold. He sees his partner's dead body, and when a cop asks him, "It's tough, him getting it like that, ain't it? Miles had his faults just like any of the rest of us, but I guess he must have had some good points too, huh?" Sam says, "I guess so." What an emotional outpouring!

Everybody's smoking in every scene. When Sam's not smoking, he's rolling a cigarette. In between tokes, they're all downing scotch. Two cops come over to grill Sam about his partner's death and he has a drink with 'em! I mean, these people are drinkin' like it's a Red Quill gathering!

Every woman in the movie is all over Sam, and he's thoroughly uninterested. He says, "I don't know a damn thing about women!" However, Cairo (the guy with gardenia-smelling calling cards) complains after Sam knocks his pistol out of his hands, "That's the second time you've laid hands on me," and Sam slaps him three times and says, "When you're slapped, you'll take it and like it!"

When he goes to talk to the Fat Man (Who "likes a man who likes talking to a man") he pulls the Fat Man's thug's jacket around his arms and relieves him of his weapons. He then hands the Fat Man the guns, and says, '"Here. You shouldn't let him go around with these. I know he might get himself hurt...A crippled newsie took 'em away from him, but I made him give them back!" LOL!

Overall, a riot of a movie, intentional or not. I heartily recommend it. My favorite character was the Fat Man, who was always laughing and had a great speech pattern. It was the actor's first talkie. Next week is "A Patch Of Blue", which I haven't heard of. But I'm definitely going to go out and rent more Bogey films. And the guy who played Cairo, if I can find him. Classic stuff.

Sometimes I can see the dead. Have you ever experienced this? I don't believe that the dead have any sort of message or task to carry out, they're just there. I only see them at night, generally, and only when I seek them out. They look kinda like you would expect the nonliving to look. However, I find most popular fantasies or myths about them to be untrue. They can't move objects, they can't talk, they can't possess. They usually just lie there in their coffin until I bury them again.

There's a new issue of The Roommate out today. However, I'd skip it if you're a cat lover. If you have any comments, reply to this post.

I got an invitation to go drinking after work with Billy Corgan today. The Hooterhumper's girlfriend is an agent for a recording studio where Billy is recording an album. She called and invited the Hooterhumper to lunch, but he had already left for the local greasy spoon, causing much cussing on his part when he got the message. However, by now they've headed over to the bar and The Hooterhumper invited us all to come along.

I don't know, though. What would I say to Billy Corgan? I'm a fan of his music but not enough to have a meaningful conversation with him about the direction it's going in. Plus, I'll betcha dollars to dot.com stock options that they ain't exactly drinking at a dollar-beer type of place. I'm too poor to drink with rockstars. Overall, though, I declined the offer because I would only be going because he's famous.

The Hooterhumper has an excuse to be there- it's his girlfriend. We'd just be hangers-on, seeking to bask briefly in the glow of some star (or Corgan's shiny head). Not that HH isn't going for just this reason, but he's got an in. I'd just be another nobody star-gazing, and everyone there would know it.

Now, certain artists I'd give anything to talk to. I have plenty of questions for the ones that I worship, and it would be the weight of their genius that wowed me and not how well-known they are. Laurie Anderson. Noam Chomsky. Michael Moore (though he answers his email, so he's pretty accessible). Steve Irwin. The author of the Twin Jim Physiology Wunderbook. The fiddler for the Raisin Pickers. The guy from the band Garden Variety who was found through a newspaper ad. I'm sure there are more famous artists I admire, but the list would go on and on.

Being famous is my worst nightmare. I'll do anything to avoid it, and I've been successful so far. To have losers, psychos, sickos, and wannabes coming up to you everywhere you go, determined to get your autograph, marry you, or kill you is no kind of life to live. The guy who plays Dr. Green on ER says that the question he's most commonly asked by fans is "Can you take a look at this and maybe give me a diagnosis?" People are nuts. People are stupid, pitiful, crazy, lunatics around somebody who's gotten their picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone. I don't want to be one of those people tonight.

The old guy in front of us at the sub shop had his wife on a cell phone. He would read a bit of the menu, and then stop talking for a bit, and then ask if they had this or that, and in this fashion he eventually ordered two sandwiches, one for him, one for his wife.

He turned around and explained that she was laid up in bed because she was cut from here to here. Some kind of common procedure old folks get, I can't remember.

Then he pulls two Subway tickets out of his wallet. "Y'see this?" he says, "They changed the color of the tickets at Subway. Said they wouldn't accept the old kind anymore for the free six-inch. I told 'em I wouldn't ever go back. That's why I'm here."

We nodded sympathetically.

"I don't know if you know any Germans, but they're very stubborn. Have you ever met a German? If you haven't, well, you have now."

I chuckled. I love old guys.

"If you ask me, we shoulda hit the beach on D-Day and not stopped until we'd killed every last one of 'em."

Y'know, I should just disable the discussion feature today, because there's not much more to say about this.

So there was a big protest outside "MTV's The Real World" the other day. After ten years, MTV decided to host the show in Chicago, and I think they got more than they bargained for.

They wanted the house to be in the hippest neighborhood in town. However, due to the 14-24 target demographic, they chose that age group's idea of "hip". This means they moved all those fools into Wicker Park, the punk rock neighborhood du decade.

Wicker Park's an odd neighborhood. Well, not so odd if you understand the residents. It's not the place where all the tattoo parlors and head shops are- that's Belmont. Each city has an established alterna-neighborhood like that. Instead, Wicker Park is a place to live if you're the young, white child of a rich suburban family and you attempt to unburden yourself of white guilt by being activist, socialist, and wholly idealist. One of the things that makes the neighborhood odd is that it's a really shitty part of town. All these punks and earthtones wanna live near some ethnic types so they can convince themselves of their down-with-the-peopleness, but the more white coffee-slurpin', poetry-readin', record-store-clerks-who-think-they-themselves-are-rockstars types move there, the fewer ethnic types there are for them to be near.

It's a "transitional" neighborhood, but not in the traditional sense. Traditionally, some big developer will buy up a bunch of cheap property in the ghetto, build condos, and the resulting high rents will drive all the undesirables out. With Wicker Park, you got a bunch of honkeys moving in to chill with the poor, and then they immediately start protesting all the other whiteys who move there for the same reason. It's similiar to the saying: "What's the difference between a developer and an environmentalist? A developer wants to build a house in the woods, an environmentalist already has a house in the woods." Wicker Park whiteys complain about the problem they are a part of. Not that the developers aren't building there. Tons of yupsters want to be just like John Cusak in "High Fidelity" and live there, regardless of how many decades ago the movie took place.

Adding to the fun, it's a pretty crime-ridden neighborhood. It's not gang controlled but the areas to the west and south are. So it's probably the only neighborhood in town (with perhaps the exception of the Gold Coast) where you pay really high rents because of the trendiness of the neighborhood, yet still get all of the murders and muggings of the ghetto. Sounds like a steal!

On move-in day, MTV's The Real World hired off-duty cops to work security, though at that time the location was secret. But this wasn't no damn New York City townhouse, it wasn't a fancy antebellum home in the French Quarter, and it sure as hell wasn't no happy-go-hippy San Francisco dwelling. At a nearby Taco Bell, a drug deal went bad and two men were shot in the head. The surviving woman in the car drove it around frantically looking for help, and saw the MTV's The Real World cops. So, as the residents/wannabe stars are trying to subtly move in without giving away the location of the house, a woman pulls into the driveway with a dead body and another one dying from a gunshot wound to the head. Welcome to Chicago!

One of the press agents for the show tried to threaten the Sun-Times reporter who covered the crime scene. "If you reveal the location of the house, we'll ban you from all press contact with the show." "Oh, really, ban me from giving you free press?" the reporter wrote in his column, "The house is at 1934 W. North Avenue." Welcome to Chicago.

Ever since then the neighborhood won't leave the house alone. The local used-bookstore has banned all camera crews. The local coffeeshop is advertising that if you go there you might get on the show. People are putting up signs everywhere pointing to the place, and one person scrawled eMpTV on the door. Then some "pranksters", as they called themselves, decided to stage a "protest".

Now, I'm all for causing trouble for the megacorps. I heartily endorse it. I'm just telling this story because I myself was once an angsty malcontent who believed in ideals with disregard for the way the real world operates.

The perpetrators distributed flyers in bars that said, "Be on The Real World, need extras for a party scene, free beer!" Then, when hundreds of folks showed up at the noted time, they started yelling through megaphones at the house and throwing paint bombs and such. However, their recruitment tactic for the protest ensured that only pro-real-world types would show up! So, of course, when the cops showed up the crowd dispersed and the pranksters got arrested. Anybody who yelled anything was arrested, even though they were on the sidewalk. Welcome to Chicago!

Now, we all agree that The Real World sucks. It's a shameful exploitation of human beings, who are humiliating themselves for fame. It's a disgusting show, especially now that they've got some innnocent 18-year-old on with the nation waiting for her to lose her virginity. I hope she keeps it. The show sucks donkey shlong, nobody's arguing that point. Is it worth getting arrested over? Wellll....

The protesters' main gripe seemed to be against Viacom and corporate media in general. I am just as frightened as everyone else should be about the consolidation of control over most forms of media. But is The Real World the aspect of Viacom that we should be protesting? What about the fact that they bought the Telecomunications Act of 1996 and proceeded to buy as many radio stations as they could get their hands on? Compared to the Orwellian possibilites resulting from media hegemony, some shitty show about losers bitching seems pretty minor.

The protesters also didn't like the fact that other trendy whiteys had followed them into the neighborhood. "The Real World is an advertisement for gentrification, and it's an insult to all those people they kicked out to put in those trendy restaurants." said one. The organizers demanded that the house be converted to affordable housing. One of the local coffeeshop owners compared it to Reality Bites: "This neighborhood is Ethan Hawke. It's the poetry writing, trying to get his band off the ground. MTV is Ben Stiller."

Good analogy. In that movie, Ben Stiller's character was trying to be cool but just couldn't get it. He was too sucked up in the corporate world. However, he was a nice guy, and he attempted several times to make friends with Ethan Hawke's character. Hawke, however, played an asshole. He was certainly cooler-than-thou. He was a complete and utter jerk, mistreating anyone who ever tried to be nice to him. He lived in a world of ideals that had no relation to the real world, thus the title of the movie. And he was only nice to Winona Ryder's character when he was trying to get laid.

So here's the punchline: These protesters, these pouty, angsty protesters, are angry because they found out Wicker Park was cool a couple of years before MTV did. They're the environmentalist in the woods angry that someone else is building a cabin there. They're out there pitching beer bottles at the Real World house, a bitter and haughty Ethan Hawke who you couldn't possibly understand because you don't have the ennui. They got asked by Rolling Stone Magazine for some pictures of their protest.

Their response: "We have the pictures you desire but it has been of considerable concern to us that your magazine is quite implicated in the corporate tragedy we aim to destroy. That being the case, we have come to the inevitable conclusion that we are willing to cast our values aside to drain some money from your villanous corporate coffers. As you probably suspect, we are starving cultural producers that cannot compete with the parasites that you are. Ummmm... listen... we want $500 per image. It will help us in our campaign to run you out of business."

Rolling Stone's reply: "Integrity's running pretty cheap these days, huh? Only $500 bucks. If you had said $1000, I would have bought them."

Well, it's been a little too long since I've posted about grave robbery. It's hard to find good stories now that digging someone up and dragging them about town isn't an acceptable way to mock their memory. It still happens, though, as longtime readers of this blog will recall.

I don't want you to take advice from me, an amateur, about how to pull this stuff off. So here's a link with instructions from the pros.

Here's a story I heard long ago, possibly even true:

My friend Berber went to Jungle Jim's in Fairfield, Ohio. This is one of those mega-ethnic supermarkets that has an aisle for each part of the world and stocks food for foreigners who can't get their ingredients anywhere else, or for wacky college students who want to try new things/make fun of bizarre products. But Jungle Jim is a nut, he roller-skates around the store, ships palm trees to Ohio every spring to have them die each fall, and was once busted for shipping more than coffee from Columbia, if you catch my drift.

He has the store done up in a jungle theme. When Showbiz Pizza was bought by Chuck-E-Cheez, a coupla restaurants went out of business and Jim bought up all the animatronics. So there's a big lion in there that's dressed like Elvis, and in the seafood section he actually moved a 40-foot yaht in there and stuck an animatronic band on deck dressed like crabs and fish. Weird stuff. They have a gigantic remaindered alcohol section- a good place to get Peanut-Butter-N-Jelly Schnapps or "Pink Passion Everclear" which is sugared wine that comes in a 2-liter for 59 cents- great for the kiddies! Also local home-brewers come and give samples for their beers, but due to some weird law you have to pay a dime for every shot glass of beer. Ooh, and they always feature a cheese scuplture in the dairy section- like a 6-foot cheddar gorilla or a Gorgonzola Canoe. It's worth going there even if you don't shop. I've always wanted to sneak in wearing an ape outfit and just start throwing fruit, making a ruckus... everybody'd think I worked there.

So Berber, like many visitors, decides to pick one item from an ethnic aisle just for kicks. He chooses the Chinese aisle, and picks a candy bar. While he's waiting in line at the register (Jungle Jim doesn't sell tabloids after what they did to Lady Di) he decides to start munching on the candy bar. It's nasty, of course, most snacks from other cultures are entirely unappealing. But he notices a little old chinese guy staring at him from the next checkout lane, jaw agape. Berber gives him a "what?" look and the guy says:

"You crazy! You eat incense!"!

As the more domestic member of my relationship, I tend to take care of the household chores. However, I think there are some situations for which my parents and Home Ec have not prepared me. Perhaps some of the Household Professional Domestic Technicians out there can advise me:

My swimsuit says "press with cool iron". Do people really iron their swimsuits? I would feel like such a dork (er, more of a dork) strutting down to the beach with a pressed swimsuit with creases down the front. So if you do this, how do you keep it wrinkle-free in the water? Is starch the answer?

I notice that She's sister irons her socks and underwear. Where is the proper place for the crease on a pair of men's white cotton grape-smugglers?

When you're cooking, and a recipe calls for 1 1/3 cups of water, and you measure it out, what do you do with the measuring cup? (I realize that the master chef merely does everything by intuition and feel, but keep in mind I'm only in my second year of homemaking). Do you put it back in the cabinet, or do you wash it? And once you wash it, and rinse it, how do you clean THAT water off?