A Tale Told By an Idiot, Full of Sound and Fury...

I saw her tonight on the train, just a little heap of filthy clothing and deep brown skin, curled up into a little ball--a balled-up skeleton--on one of the seats. I didn't even notice her until she spoke. She said:

"Irma! Every day they raped a woman, every day a woman and a child were raped and tortured. Every day, Irma. Just so that your sweaty ass could have sex with Carlos. And you act like you're above it. A woman and a child were raped and murdered, Irma; that's the significance."

She spoke with an odd lucidity, as though she were reading lines from a play, or a poem that she had written. As though it were a performance for the rest of our benefit. And she stared at us with tired slits of eyes and spat at Irma, who was the seat in front of her. Or Irma might have been her, for all I know...she might have been crazy from guilt.

I'm sorry, little skeleton girl, for whatever memory--real or imagined--brought this on.

I don't know why I see things like this so often, but this sort of thing happens to me all the time: moments in life that are like little scenes, little bits of theatre. Since Saturday I've felt like I'm being led through a play, from one scene to the next.

Here's the scene where you talk with the canvasser and you make friends and get to see each other as more than money. Okay now on to the scene where the man in the bunny suit walks by and then the crowd of people following him like he's Jesus. Was that inspiring? Good...now we move forward to you getting your hair cut and meeting with a group of kids selling everything they own so that they can take a bike trip to California. See that glass head? Buy it...

I sometimes think there's a cosmic significance to it, that the Universe--or whoever governs it--has some reason for showing me these things that I just don't understand yet. But I really think the answer is more simple than that. I think I get a life that shows me these little snippets of theatre and magic and connection because I travel alone so often, as a result of which I'm always paying attention to the world around me, as opposed to paying attention to my traveling companions. But, like the weird correspondences from around the world, I like this aspect of my life.

Today I met with Steve at Ennui, which is always great. He's very warm and has a great deal to offer to people, and everytime I hang out with him I end up with a kind of warm fuzzy, because he reminds me of who I am when I'm not busy trying to be what this city wants me to be. Tonight we shared stories of how we each came to Chicago, and he introduced me to his friend, Renee (This is the scene where you meet Renee, the photographer with the blue, blue eyes and the hood, who is making a film in Roger's Park). We discussed acting, and art, and the curiously budding artistic scene in Roger's Park. And the way that, when you start working on an artistic project, artists seem to come out of the woodwork to help.

Anway, this is Renee's Page. Some good work on it. And here is a link that she provided to Inpatient Artworks, which has several other photographers on it, as well as links to a literary journal. When it isn't my bedtime, I think I'll have to go check it out.

Strange evening. My dreams will seem mundane by comparison.

Story: Plum Wine

"Plum Wine" is a story I wrote several years ago as a project for a creative writing class. I'm still fond of it, though, so I'm posting it here. When my Web site is up, I'll post my stories there, but for the time being, I think I'm going to put a few up here. Comments, criticisms, and admonishments are welcome. Oh, and if you're someone who can publish my stories somewhere, the answer is probably, "Yes I do have other stories you can look at." Right. That was mildly cocky. Enjoy.

**********************

It’s a hot day. The sun has been beating down for hours on the outside wall of my apartment. The bricks absorb the light and cleverly transform it into heat, effectively turning my three rooms into an oven. I have no air conditioner to cool me; the ceiling fan only circulates the hot air without changing its temperature at all, or providing any relief from the stuffiness. It's becoming difficult to breathe. My skin is crisping to a golden brown. I decide I need to leave my apartment, but the temperature outside is just as bad, just as all-enveloping. The entire city has been transformed into an oven.

What I need is something Japanese. My father once told me that the Japanese are always very cool-skinned, no matter what the weather is like, and I have absolutely no reason to doubt the truth of this statement. I leave my apartment and resolve to find a bottle of plum wine.

In the city people look as though they have melted. They wallow limply in the shade, toweling their heads with cloths soaked in river water. The streets are crowded with cars whose owners have abandoned them in favor of juice bars and ice cream parlors, or to congregate along the banks of the river. I can see them down by the water's edge, stripping down to their underwear and splashing each other, like children. I walk down Main Street, periodically dabbing the sweat from my forehead with my sleeve, marveling at the emptiness. This heat wave is the apocalypse, I think, the breakdown of civilization as we know it. Soon we will have to abandon the cities and make our way back to the trees. I shake my fist at the sun. The bright yellow eye stares back, nonchalant, and burns my scalp.

At the wine market, I search for my drink, but bafflingly, there is none. The man at the counter grins at me giddily and summons me over to him. He tells me they cannot keep the plum wine for long. He is a plump Frenchman whose lungs have been destroyed by a years of smoking. With each breath, he wheezes, having to force the air past layers of tar. He clutches his great belly, as though wrestling against its further expansion. He explains that the plum wine is too delicate to keep. In such hot weather, it sours if it stays in their storerooms for more than an afternoon. Every day they have to drink their stock or they'll be stuck with worthless bottles of vinegar, and they have just finished with the last of it today. It's the reason he's in such a good mood. He tells me I can take an empty bottle if I like, and that I should wait by the river for nightfall if I want to cool off.

I take my bottle and thank him, then I leave the wine market and make my way to the river. At the edge of the banks, I take off my shoes and hop like a coal walker across the burning sand toward my relief in the cool water. The mood of the people around me is one of friendliness and relaxation, or community and fun. Neighbors who haven't ever spoken to each other in years swim together and splash water. Rival shopkeepers sit on the banks, dabbling their toes in the water and talk about their childhoods and make plans for their mutual benefit. I realize that if this heat wave will bring about the end of all civilization as we know it, it will also bring about the beginning of a new community. I smile at the thought, as I strip off my clothes and wade out into one of the pools.

An elderly Asian man who I recognize from the wine market wades up to me in the pool and greets me with a courteous nod. I nod back to him, and we strike up a conversation and float on our backs in the river, staring at the sky. We talk about our days, about the apocalyptic feel of the city, about the freakish heat wave that has hit us and rendered everyone unable to work. I tell him about the wine and my thwarted plans to cool off with a bottle of plum wine and he tells that his sister makes plum wine. He apologizes immediately after, saying that the recipe is an old family secret, which he would not dare betray. Mostly all that is involved is patience, he explains.

Suddenly there is a loud hush over the crowd. The setting sun has hit the water and been extinguished. The once blazing orb has settled into a minor hue of lavender. In the water it bobs for a moment, then begins to sink. As it settles to rest in the gravely riverbed, its purple skin tears on a jagged rock, exposing the pinkish pulp within. Fluid leaks into the river from within it, and the water turns pink with the juice. I dip my bottle into the reddening water and sip the excess off the top. It is reminiscent of lemon drops and honey. I drink deep from the bottle and fall back against the bank with my head in the sand, feeling cool, ecstatic, drunk.

Cat Stevens: Public Enemy Number One

I spent Monday feeling generally very sick. I cooked a bunch of cod fritters for International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and apparently the cod wasn't very fresh. Everyone who ate the fritters came to me to tell me that they'd had weird dreams, and to ask if I had mixed a little of the wacky rosemary into the batter. I didn't suffer from weird dreams, though. My stomach just summarily rejected the fritters and refused to let me eat anything the next day. The large amounts of rum I drank probably didn't help the matter at all (what's the old rhyme: Cod fritters before liquor, never sicker; liquor before fritters, never bitter? Something like that.)

My friend Eliza sent me this as a sort of belated Talk Like a Pirate Day present: The Pirate Keyboard. It made me chuckle.

One good thing about my job is that there's plenty of down time, which means I can surf the Web. My friend Bonnie led me to the Brick Testament, which is the Bible illustrated in Leggos. It had me giggling for an hour or two today, particularly the picture of God smiting Judah's son Er. It's the hammer, I think. Anyway, there's plenty of blood, sex, and violence—just like you'd expect from the Bible.

An e-mail appeared in my inbox at work on Monday with the subject line of "Holy Shit! America's Crazy," and it contained a link to this CNN article. To summarize the article: former pop-singer, Cat Stevens, is now Muslim, and apparently as a result of this and antiwar leanings (he is opposed to ALL war, by the way, not just the war in Iraq), he is considered a threat to national security. There was a surreal moment while reading the article when I came across the line, "Federal officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, identified the individual as Islam," and I thought, "Well, of course they considered him a threat. We've considered Islam a threat to our national security for a long time." Beyond that, I have nothing clever at all to say, except "Holy shit! America's crazy."

Avast Ye!

I just finished writing a magnificent and long post full of links and other fun information, and then my computer froze and I lost it all.

"Fuck!" I hollered.

"What?" said my roommate, annoyed.

"I just lost my post."

He said nothing. He understood.

Tomorrow is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, the international holiday in which thousands of people around the world talk like pirates. If ye be one o' them land-lubbin bilge rats who have no idea how to begin to talk like a pirate, the Talk Like a Pirate homepage has a helpful glossary to keep you from gettin' run through. You can even learn how to talk like a pirate in German (Bei meinem Hacken, meine Papagei ist tot!"), and the site is structured like a haggadah, which made me wonder if there might have been a large Jewish pirate population. If my Google search is any indication, there were none. I welcome anyone who can tell me otherwise (to be fair, I don't think pirates were ever particularly religious...although voodoo).

Random Correspondence from Poland
A few months ago, a Polish artist named Paul Katon e-mailed me randomly to ask me if I knew anyone who could help promote his documentary I Am Not a Pygmy (here is a link to a press release about it). I wrote him back and explained that I was just a poor artist with no connections to anyone, but that I wished him luck. We corresponded briefly and shared stories and thoughts about our respective arts, and then the correspondence petered off and I more or less forgot about it. Yesterday I was pleasantly surprised to find another letter from him in my inbox, and this time I was able to suggest to him that I could post a link to his homepage on my blog and he could post a link to my blog on his. His site is neat; it contains links to his various photo galleries, as well as a link to a short film of his, called "Heaven in My Mind." Based on our correspondence and his Web site, I think Paul is a pretty nice guy and a really talented artist. The link to his homepage is in the "Links to Other Artists" section of my sidebar here.

When I told my roommate about randomly receiving a letter from Poland, he said, "Does this happen to you a lot?" Yes, it does. I don't know why, but for some reason I get an inordinately large quantity of e-mail from people who aren't spammers, but who just decided to contact me for one reason or another. Some of them have gone on to become good friends of mine, enriching my life, even though I have never seen them in person. Others engage my mind and my imagination with letters that contain phrases like:

I'll add some spiced insanity to this conversation. The Bedouin say that down in Oman there is a mountain with caves in it where dragons live. They say that you could play a flute which will inebriate {SP?} the lizard and he will crawl out of his den. A few men have been known to ride on the backs of the beast but this is all nonsense isn't it?

I don't know why this happens to me so much (sometimes I suspect that I'm a hub for people, a sort of conduit through which people meet each other), but I hope to God it never stops happening. It's made my life very interesting.

Finally, my roommate showed me these:
Woot! is a place that sells one thing every day (I should say one type of thing, because they actually sell many of them...I mention this because it took a very long and complicated conversation for Ian and me to figure that out). And for those people who really love coffee and really love computers, and can't bear to be away from the latter long enough to get a cup of the former, someone invented the Caffeine Machine. As Calvin (the cartoon six-year-old, not the theologian) once said , I'm sure this just goes to show something...I'm just not sure what.

This post has been fraught with peril since I started it. So I'm going to stop before I lose it again. Yarr...

Around the Coyote

My time playing uncle to a pair of small tigers has come to a close. Bonnie and Darcy got in last night, looking much relaxed and very happy. Which made me happy, and I'm almost certain made Franco and Elliot (the two kittens) very happy. Every time I told them "no" or picked them up by the scruff of the neck, they gave me this look that said, "Who are you, and why do you think you can pick me up by the scruff of my neck?" And when I sprayed them with water, I generally felt bad enough that I pet them shortly thereafter. I have a feeling that if I'm ever a dad, I'm going to be one of those pushover dads.

I spent this weekend at the Around the Coyote festival, which is a fringe theatre and arts festival in Chicago. Tantalus performed Sinister Puppetmen of the Fabrication Gallery, our outdoor summer show, on Saturday and Sunday night. The folks who ran the festival, Lynn and Cynthia, were fantastic—they were peaches. They ran the festival efficiently and cheerfully, which is a rare combination in theatre festival managers (they are, in my experience, either cheerful or efficient, but rarely both simultaneously), and they continuously thanked us, every time they saw us throughout the weekend, for helping them put their sign up. Anyway, they were lovely and I thank them heartily for helping to make the festival exist and be great fun.

I saw two shows on Sunday, one of them fabulous, the other kind of meh ("meh" being a technical term, which means, roughly, "not so very good at all, but not so awful that it made me regret having seen it/been involved with it/giving an hour of my life to it"). The fabulous piece, called From Tel Aviv to Ramallah: a Beatbox Journey, was a one-man show which told the story of two people living in Tel Aviv and Ramallah, a Jew and a Muslim, respectively, and of their lives and the tensions in Israel. Aside from the fact that it was a compelling story and script, what made it fantastic was that the performer started to beat-box (if you want a definition of beatboxing, here is one...it's just a lot easier than writing one, myself) from the moment he stepped on stage and, aside from two water breaks, he didn't stop until the show was over. Not just simple spit-and-thump sorts of beatboxing, either. No no...the man essentially created a disco on stage, before our very eyes, all the while acting every character—from a Russian immigrant, to an American Zionist Jew, to a Palestinian nationalist, and all of them extraordinarily well-defined— and setting each scene with such precision, such amazing energy that there were times that the sounds of cars on the street outside the theater were jarring, because I had forgotten I wasn't actually in Israel. In every festival there is a show like this: one which redefines what a good piece of theatre should be and makes everyone in the audience remember what they love about their art. And I was blessed to get to see it this time around.

Which might have had something to do with my disappointment with The Madman and the Nun, which was presented by Experimental Theater Chicago, and was (inexplicably) the critic's choice this year. The staging was dull and stiff, and the acting was so flat as to actually make declarations such as, "I love you," or, "I'm completely mad," seem as important as saying, "Yes, I'd like a taco." The actor playing Dr. Gruene, the psychoanalyst who knows everything about the madman's mind, chose to play him as a sort of Wallace Shawn styled good-natured idiot, which robbed his character, and subsequently any and all power-play between him and the madman, of any strength it might have had.

But what was particularly irksome to me is that Experimental Theater Chicago, whose mission statement says they stand against traditional styles of doing theater, chose a sort of Dr. Kaligari Expressionism (in the set and costumes, not in the acting, which was played very straight and true to Realism) to present this play. I generally don't like what ETC does, partially for personal reasons (my few dealings with their artistic director and principal member have consistently left me feeling as though someone just patted me on the back and said "You're cute kid, now go away."), but mostly because there isn't anything experimental at all about them. Their shows are Expressionist, Absurdist, Surrealist, nonlinear, abstract, Dadaist, and so forth, but although these styles are outside the realm of Realism, they aren't really experimental; indeed, by virtue of the fact that they are definable genres, they are actually tried and true. Experimentation requires risk. It requires stepping out of what we know to be good, what we know will work, and stepping into places where it's possible—even likely—that we will fail. ETC never does that; while they stand against American Realism, they aren't standing against it by testing any new boundaries. Instead, they're standing on the ground conquered by artistic revolutionaries decades ago and declaring the already-abandoned ground thereof new territory for the conquering. I for one, find that kind of cheap, and I find myself wondering when they are actually going to start living up to their company name and experimenting with something new.

My bewilderment and annoyance with ETC aside, though, the festival was magnificent and we plan to put a show together for their winter festival.

Tomorrow: links to an important holiday.

"What Matters Won't Change; What Changes Don't Matter"

I finished reading The Chess Garden last night, and it was just fantastic. The title of this post comes from a quote from one of the characters. I like it, because in the past week, it's helped me to realize some added peace while being back in the thick of things that worried me before, and because it is, I think, the perfect expression of how I am living my life when I'm happy. I'm not worried about what could be; nor am I worried about what was. There is only what is, and faith that the stream of life will take us where it will and that wherever that may be, it will be wonderful.

There's a moment in the movie Michael, in which the angel Michael is seen standing in a field across the street from a motel that everyone is staying at, and under his breath to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne," he sings, "We're here, because we're here, because we're here, because we're here..." and onward to himself, ad infinitum. A moment later, lots of Hollywood nonsense come and encroaches, but for just a second or two, the movie touches on something like a correct philosophy, or the philosophy of life I would have if I had to have a philosophy of life. Just the other day I read a quote by Goethe, which said (paraphrased here) that the important thing in life is to live. The Chess Garden puts it differently, that the metaphor of Christ on the cross comes in the crucifixion of the here on the now, the containment of the eternal and the divine into a single moment that stretches out forever (or the containment of infinite time into a single place that stretches out forever). That the best communication with the divine is to realize that divinity speaks to us when, instead of struggling to make things as we want them, we look at things as they are.

I'm a little sad, now. In the way that I'm always a little sad when a story that has touched me deeply comes to a close. In the way that characters can be like friends and guides, and that last page can feel like a very final farewell. I think I'll go for a cup of coffee, and maybe commune with some of my real friends for a bit.

Dangerous and Cute...Very, Very Cute

I'm writing this from the apartment of my good friends, Bonnie and Darcy, who are in New York for the week and were in need of someone to watch their apartment and the two kittens who reside therein. So far it's been a fun sort of minivacation. I get to stay in a new house, explore a whole new area of my city, and entertain two kittens (who seem generally fine entertaining themselves, so it's really been me who is entertained).

Since I've been here, I have learned that kittens are, apparently, not made out of flesh and bone at all, but pure energy, wrapped in a fuzzy skin. And it spends all day--ALL day--trying to get out. They literally haven't stopped running around the house since I came here. The other thing I've learned is that, when a kitten decides to go somewhere, they will find a way. Last night I barred the bedroom door with a steel toolbox, a towel, and my big backpack, and somehow they still managed to find a way in. And they're just so damn cute...no matter how many times I'm clawed, climbed, pouced, and bitten, I just can't seem to get mad at them.

Went to the jazz fest in Grant Park on Sunday with Bonnie, Darcy, and their downstairs neighbor. Sat out on a blanket, drinking red wine out of plastic cups and eating grapes and a pomegranate. We felt very Bohemian and fancy until a group sat down across from us and pulled out a picnic of fresh bread, a plate of fruits, and a wooden block covered in nice cheeses. They then pulled out a dry salami and started to slice it, followed by some other kind of sausage, followed by a proscuitto, which we drooled over for an hour. Finally, I got up the nerve to go ask them if we might have a slice of proscuitto, and they very happily obliged us with an entire plateful and several slices of good French bread to drink it with. We were in heaven, and I think we were all agreed that, when complete strangers can share proscuitto in a field while listening to Jazz, humanity is really redeemed.

Chapters one and two of my Johnny Theremin are up. My thanks to Laurie Sage, who is handling the Web site, for putting up with me being a moody writer. You can find the link to the site here.

and some links...
My friend, Jennifer Jamsky sent me a link to a Guardian article about a secret movie theater found in the Parisian catacombs. I had seen the article on Neil Gaiman's Journal, but I'm still very obliged to Jenn for sending me the link.

Also on Gaiman's site is Jon's Jail Journal, which is amazing. In the first few months of entries, he details the horrors that inmates in a jail (where people go before they've been sentenced) go through. It's beyond disturbing, and yet I find I can't stop reading it. Particularly interesting is the good-natured humor with which he takes all of it. I wouldn't have been able to maintain that.

And that's it for the night. The kittens have taken to telling me they like me by biting and clawing me while purring.

Bad Smells, Chessboard Dreams

Last night I went out to Cafe Ennui to see if I could find Steve, and also to get a cup of coffee. Steve wasn't around, so I settled for a scone and read The Chess Garden for a while, and then left. On my way back to the el, I noticed a group of people—youngish, attractive—standing around in the alley outside of a gallery I used to pass every day on my way to work. So I walked over to them and asked a hipster-looking guy what was going on.

"We just had a bad smells contest," he said.

"A bad smells contest?" I asked.

"Yeah. Go in, you can check it out."

Inside, a lineup of bottles and jugs and other plastic containers, labeled with names like "Gut Slurry," "Old Lady," "The Stinkinator," and the politically named "The Smell of Truth," (so named because it consisted of fast food byproducts) sat on a table, along with judging forms, visual aids describing the creation of these concoctions, and a sign which read "Perfumes of the Doomed." My favorite for ingenuity was the Gut Slurry, which featured a delivery mechanism made of an oxygen mask and a bicycle pump, but for overall awfulness, the Stinkinator won, hands down. I sniffed it for, maybe a nanosecond, and very nearly threw up. Apparently, overall foulness was only one of the judging criteria, the rest ranging from creative combination of stuffs to the overall decomposition of the materials. Big Brother (which was kept in an aluminum thermos with a biohazard sign on it) won first prize for the evening. I didn't dare find out why.

After the stench contest, I went out to the Pick Me Up to write for a bit and to clear away the lingering scent of the Stinkinator from my soft palate. I ended up getting a lot done. I'm finally done revising what I had of Chapter 5 and have begun to move forward with it. Which is exciting news for me. At around two a.m. I wandered to the bus stop and watched the circus that is Clark Street in Wrigleyville at two a.m. until the bus arrived to take me home.

I spent last night dreaming of chessboards and talking pawns, no doubt the result of some combination of the humidity, my caffeine high, and residual effects of reading The Chess Garden.

Jazz Fest, today, with Bonnie and Darcy and lots of others of my favorite people in the world. I'm very excited.

Even the Religious Right Agrees: Strippers are Cool

My father once wondered to himself (and presumably to the rest of us, too, because we were in the room) why on Earth anyone would ever join the dark side of the force, since its followers seemed to consist solely of withered and bitter old men. I agreed at the time, but based on the footage I've seen of the RNC, I suppose I have to concede that power and money are their own lures, even into the midst of a pack of withered and bitter old men (I actually have to concede that there's a surprising number of women in this picture...any women being a surprising number).

The other night, my roommate turned the channel to Bush making a speech at the Republican National Convention. I watched for just a moment, just long enough to get the taste of bile in my mouth, before I asked him to change the channel. But I saw enough to catch Bush (seen here making his signature sieg heil) say, "Given the choice between trusting a madman and defending this country, I will defend this country every time." For those who didn't catch it, what he's actually saying is, "Given the choice between upholding the UN and trampling all over international law to serve my own ends, I will violate international law every time." And people eat it up like it's chocolate sauce.

Well. I didn't intend to rant about Bush and his evil little flying monkeys (by the way, for anyone who hasn't seen it: Bush or Chimp). I actually just wanted to draw your attention to this Web site, put up by the Village Voice. It's the blog of a waitress at a strip club near Madison Square Garden. Very interesting stuff.

God, I hate them so much. Fucking hypocrites.

One last post and then I'm done for the day, I swear...

The Music Box Theater in Chicago is having a midnight showing of Forbidden Zone on September 3 and 4 (tonight and tomorrow, in other words). According to my friend Sam, who is really the expert on everything to do with strange and obscure movies, it's a little like a surrealist live-action Betty Boop cartoon with music by Oingo Boingo. If that isn't enough to make you want to see it, then I don't know who you are anymore. I know I'm going to try to be there.

Right. That's it for today. I'm off to go be productive, or at least, make the attempt to look like maybe I might try to appear productive, possibly.

Electric and Atonal Equals Beautiful

Alright, I'm officially sick of writing my Johnny Theremin entry, and it's keeping me from writing things I really ought to be doing. I realized with some horror that, just kind of fucking around, I've managed to write more in Chapters 1 and 2 in the past couple of days than I usually am able to write in a few weeks. It's always amazing to me: whenever I just let loose and play, I usually write much easier and much better than when I'm worried about making things good. Typical.

I've recently become addicted to the band TV on the Radio. I discovered them when I was sitting in the Last Drop in Philly and noticed that the music I was listening to really fit the mood of the novel perfectly. Their music is simply beautiful: a layered, atonal blend of electrically buzzing guitar and gut-wrenching vocals. It's something of a blend between Peter Gabriels and Prince, if you can imagine such a thing. You can download the video to their song "Staring at the Sun" courtesy of Touch and Go Records. Anyway, it's fantastic music to write by. Go buy their records. Now. Come on, go.

Alright. I'm going to send my first couple of chapters to the Johnny Theremin people today. Hopefully they'll be posted soon.

The vacation is coming rapidly to a close, and I find myself just wanting to get finished with all of the things that I thought I would get finished with while on vacation. Like Chapter 5 of my novel and my entry into the Johnny Theremin project and The Chess Garden and dozens of other things. Ah well.

Last night I went to the Pick Me Up Cafe and wrote until all hours of the morning. It was some good writing, I thought, but you can always tell that I've been writing late at night because I can't resist the urge to give my characters names like Mr. Fancy Pants.

I'm thinking of rearranging my room today. Suggestions are welcome.

Return from the Blue Lagoon

Actually, the Atlantic is more of a greenish silver along the New Jersey shore, and I really didn't spend any time near any lagoons, but I did return. I'm in Chicago, now, a decent summer breeze blowing in through my window. My return was not without troubles, of course. When I arrived at the airport and tried to check in, the lady at the counter informed me that I had cancelled my reservation. I told her that I hadn't and she told me I needed to take it up with Orbitz and/or buy a new ticket. Since I didn't have Orbitz's number handy, I bought a new ticket and resolved to take the issue up with Orbitz when I got home. Fortunately the new ticket wasn't too expensive, or else I would have been stuck. When I got home, I called Orbitz and told the nice customer service representative what happened. He told me the airline cancelled my reservation because I hadn't shown up to my first flight to PA...which, of course, was ridiculous and I told him so. After a half hour on the phone, in which the Orbitz CSR fought with US Airways over their snafoo, I was informed that the mistake actually belonged to US Airways, and that I would have to talk to them to get my money back. So, I'm hopeful? I guess.

It's good to be back, although it took some readjusting. And one of the things that had been looming over me, I got out of the way tonight. So it's not looming anymore. I have five more days of vacation to be here and just here and enjoy and explore my city and enjoy the good people of the world. Breathe easy, boy. Everything's just fine.

added a bit later...
Amanda just sent me a link to the Time Travel Fund. Time Travel is just great, but don't take my word for it, read from the page:

Morlocks aside, how would YOU like to visit, even live hundreds of years in the future? There may be a way, and that is the purpose of The Time Travel Fund(tm).

I love it. In reading the page, I realize that this is a somewhat less clever version of an idea my brother had. His idea was to work at a gas station his whole life, save every penny, then steal a time machine and travel back to give his younger self the money he had saved at the gas station.

In retrospect, perhaps my brother's idea wasn't so clever, after all.

Harry Steven Keeler also has a short story in a similar vein, in which a future utopia is founded on some enterprising fellow's investment of only a few dollars. I think the story goes along the lines that the interest on this investment compounds over several generations until the man's descendents own more money than the entire ownable universe is worth, at which time they die prematurely and the universe becomes owned by everyone equally. Something like that. It's a wacky plot, but no more wacky than the murder mystery in which the murderer turns out to be none other than the long-dead emperor Napoleon (read the link and it will all make sense...er...sort of.).