Yes. Well...Ah...Inauguration Cake, Anyone?

AOL News has been reporting on the Congressional hearings for Condoleeza Rice's nomination for Secretary of State, which has kept me thoroughly amused as every time I log into my AOL account, I see Condi's face, alternately scowling (presumably when some meany Democrat Congressman asks her a question she doesn't like) or smiling (when general approval shines down on her from the majority). It's been amusing watching what has seemed like an up-to-date report on Condoleeza's mood.

This article was interesting/disturbing:

Looking at the personnel of eight federal agencies chosen at random, the GAO found that 463 employees showed up on the enrollment records of just three unaccredited schools. (It actually looked at four colleges, but only three responded to its request for information and only two fully cooperated.) This was merely a sampling of the dozens of mills operating nationwide, not an exhaustive audit; given the limited nature of the GAO's investigation, the true number of federal employees who are academically unqualified to fill the positions they hold could be in the thousands.

Agencies tasked with defending America from terrorism were among the top employers of workers with phony diplomas identified by the GAO. The Department of Defense employs 257 of them. Transportation has 17. Justice has 13; Homeland Security, 12; Treasury, eight.

Also interesting is that whoever edited this piece let this gorgeous bit of irony slip into the final sentence:

The American people need to know that the best-qualified workers are running the war on terrorism, not a bunch of hacks and cheats.

Yes. Yes we do.

Strindberg and Helium

Last night, we had our first rehearsal on our feet, and today my butt has informed me that it is very displeased with me. I woke up this morning sore and in need of a good stretch and a run of calisthenics to get my muscles working again. Instead, I sat on a train for an hour. Which didn't help. I'm thinking that six nights a week of jumping around in rhythm like a monkey and weilding a sword like a Viking is just what I need to get into shape. I should be significantly less doughy by the time this show goes up.

My friend Jamsky (whose name is Jen, but has been Jamsky ever since I forgot whether her name is spelled with an "i" or an "e") sent me Strindberg and Helium, which is...well...exactly what one would expect from a cartoon pairing the Expressionist playwright, August Strindberg, with an ebullient pink helium balloon. I can't recommend it enough. It is only possibly surpassed in its weirdness by the home of its animator, Eun-Ha at Milky Elephant, which has all sorts of fun flash animation to play with (but is a little hard to sort through).

Tres strange. Enjoy.

Fun Facts, Links, and Updates

A few fun and interesting links...

My friend, Sam, sent me this article, which proposes a plausible explanation for the weird lump on Bush's back during the elections. I don't know if it's true, or not, but as my neighbor, Jim, pointed out, the fact that the Administration denied that Bush even had a bulge, when he clearly did, is a good sign that something is amiss.

Personally, I wonder how Bush feels being one of the few presidents whose inauguration is met with protests and jeers.

Jeff Vandermeer's blog has a couple of interesting entries on it, including an entry about automatons with lots of informative links, a neat essay on shortwave radio, and the most recent, an article about a collaboration between Mexico's most famous crime novelist and Subcomandante Marcos. If only more revolutionaries had such artistic leanings as Marcos, the world would certainly be a better place.

And from Neil Gaiman's site, dated January 11, Theresa Nielsen Hayden provides links to nigh every article she's written to date on the subject of writing. My favorite being Namarie Sue.

I finally decided that, since I reference the Wikipedia every time a term comes up that I want to explain, I really ought to just post the Wikipedia in my sidebar. So I did that. Makes life easier for everyone. Not to let the Wikipedia stand on its own as my sole reference book, I've also added the Urban Dictionary, which can be equally useful. Amanda (the friend who was in town last week) led me to the Urban Dictionary, explaining that her mother uses it to sort out the slang in her students' papers. Which I think is a much smarter approach than just failing her students, outright, which is what many teachers would do.

I've added a link to my friend, Adam Verner. He's a voiceover talent, and just a talent, in general. He's the single most Aryan-looking human being I've met outside of Denmark. And since I've never been to Denmark, that means he's at the top of the list.

Back to life...
I dropped Amanda off at the airport, last Sunday, and then went to watch the season premiere of Carnivale (the best show on television) with my friends. Was overjoyed to hear from her after the show. Then I went home, and my bed felt terribly empty, and there was the impulse to reach out and hold someone who wasn't there. So life is back to something like it usually is, with the exception of the fact that I'm still fairly glowing from our visit. And the miracle of cellphones makes it so much easier to keep in touch with her.

But life back to normal means I've been sitting in coffee shops, writing--fighting desperately to finish a few short stories before rehearsal starts tonight. Because, once rehearsal starts, I'm enslaved to my other art for a little while and I don't get much time to write. So.

And life back to normal also means appreciating the strange and beautiful things I find. The other day, a few of us from my office went to Chinatown for lunch. Across the street from the restaurant was an herbalist/Chinese grocery store and after lunch, I dodged away from my coworkers to see if they had any star anise on hand (star anise being a key component in my next absinthe recipe). A pomegranate tree sat in their window, its fruit literally bursting with the little ruby-gem seeds.

As I stepped in, the girl behind the counter looked at me with a slightly confused glance, as though I was the only white guy who had set foot in the place in weeks.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

"Yes," I said, "Do you have any star anise?"

"Star anise?" she said, shaking her head. "It is a fruit?"

"No, no," I said, "it's a spice. I don't know what else it's called."

Again, she shook her head.

"It's star-shaped," I continued, "and it tastes like licorice."

She thought for a moment, and then produced an enormous bag of brown, woody shuriken, smelling sweetly of licorice. The bag was labeled, clearly, "Star Anise." I asked for two ounces of it, which cost me a dollar (when she said "one dollar" I was so convinced that couldn't be the price that I thought she was saying something in her language to one of the men who worked language. It was just too cheap to be true), and then left to rejoin the people from work. All day long, the little envelope of grey paper that she had wrapped the anise in filled my office with a sweet potpourri of licorice candy.

So life back to normal is not life back to boredom.
But I still miss my friend.

Off to write for a bit, and maybe a haircut today, in preparation for Ragnarok.
Happy MLK day.

In the Company of a Dear Friend

I'm in The Grind with Amanda, who is reading Sleeping in Flames and periodically looking up to catch me watching her as I write this, and frankly it feels like she was never anywhere else. She just belongs here or just always is here somehow. Or something. We've done little more this week but sit in my apartment and talk, go grocery shopping when we realize the woeful lack of food in my apartment (I have parts of recipes, but no real whole recipes), and just be in each other's presence, which I think is really the point of it all. Just to be with each other.

We had an interesting New Year's, in which we spent the first couple of hours of the night walking around looking for the party we were supposed to show up at, and then spent the second half at a different party, drunk off of the French absinthe Amanda brought. Then we walked home and went to bed at dawn.

Every time Amanda visits, it's a new visit, which seems like an odd thing to think but really isn't. Some people visit after a few years and you come at each other from the same place as the last time you saw them, and even if you've kept in touch, you still act like the person you once were or you expect them to be the same person they once were. Amanda's never been that way with me. We just take each other as we are. We've seen each other's worst and our best and we can just be around one another whoever we are. It's a friendship that I'm always amazed by and grateful for.

And now I'm going to go back to being with her. Because that's better than blogging.

(as a final aside, our absinthe came out of steeping yesterday; it's painful to drink and has a flavor like an herbal medicine and even mixed with cranberry juice isn't particularly palatable...but it sure makes the world all shimmery for a while)

All's Well

I'm back in Chicago after one of the best Christmases in recent memory. My mother decided to stay home this Christmas and invite the rest of the family to see us (which raised some unexplainable anger from the rest of the family), which meant that, instead of rushing off to New Jersey on Christmas morning, I got to sleep late and then help my mother cook dinner all day long, then sit down for a meal with my brother, my sister-in-law, my mother and her husband, my step brothers, and my grandparents. More or less everyone I wanted to sit and have a meal with. Which was great. We had squash ravioli for an appetizer, followed by pork loin that my mother and I stuffed with apricots, using our combined medical knowledge to realize that using a process of peristalsis would be the most effective way to work the stuffing into the center cavity of the loin. Imagine my mother and I standing around and chatting, while we feed apricots to a giant esophagus, and you have a pretty good image of what we were doing.

Yeah.

The rest of the vacation was uneventful but fun. I made it up to NYC with my brother. We saw The Life Aquatic, which was profoundly disappointing (a fantastic title, fantastic concept, tacked on to a long, winding, and incidental film that wasn't terribly funny; except for Bill Murray dancing in a wet suit...that made me giggle out loud) and wandered around for a bit. Received some bad news from a friend (her grandmother died) and then spent a great evening wandering around the Village and SoHo with her while New York gave us a night full of snow, moonlight, and an irrate cabby.

All in all, it was the best Christmas in recent memory and I can't wait to do it again.

Now I'm back. In the brilliant cold. In my city, having experienced my other cities. They're like friends, cities are. I spend a great deal of time with Chicago, and I love its character and I hate some of its quirks, but I miss my other cities and long to be back with them. So. Joy.

The absinthe is steeping with the flavoring herbs now, and is a beautiful forest green. Which it is supposed to be. In a few days, we'll see how it tastes.

Rejections

Heading for home, today, which has me in high spirits (although I'm a little afraid that I'm going to experience delays on the way home. Never good).

Received a rejection letter from Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine, which I posted on my wall next to the others, though the curtness of the reply and the swiftness of the rejection left me feeling more--well--rejected than the others. So I'm a bit low.

There's a few things that I find cheer me up when I read rejection letters. The first is posting them on my wall as a reminder that this is part of my body of work. Rejections mean someone has looked at my work, even if they didn't see fit to pay me for that. They mean I've been looked at by an editor. In some cases, the editors have been very helpful and kind, too, which I appreciate. So there's that. The other thing is everything contained within this article. To explain--no, that would take too long--to sum up: no matter how bad it feels when you receive a rejection letter, it isn't personal. Never ever ever is it personal. This is what I keep in mind, and it really does help me. Just last week, I sent a letter to the brother of a friend of mine, saying pretty much "Rejections suck, but they're a part of the life of a writer, and all you can do is buck up and move forward." And they do. And they are. And you must.

So the adolescent boy in me is saying "Screw you, buddy!" and the determined business manchild in me is saying "Alright, so I'll send it to someone else" and the editor in me is saying, "It's nothing personal. Just a matter of tastes. How can we make this story better?" but the writer in me is saying "Ah well. Keep writing."

Which is what I did last night. And I'm happy with the way my new short story opens. So here it is:



1. Morning

He woke beside his beloved.

The sun rose sideways into the room, neatly drawn and quartered into rhombuses by the sash and grill of the window. Light trickled across the books in the library, casting long faint shadows from the ziggurats of literature piled around his love’s bed. The books in the shelves grinned out at him like great sets of teeth, smiling because they knew they were a part of history. The whole room in which he lay beside his beloved smelled of it. Decades of bohemianism, revolution, art for the sake of art for the sake of beauty for the sake of decadence hung in the air, as palpable as the dust in the sunlight, carried on the scent of mushrooms. He rose amid this—twisting his head until, much to his delight and with an audible pop from his vertebrae, the tightness that had taken residence in his neck through the night freed itself—and wagged his nose at the ceiling. Stories written in mildew across time-moistened pages, told in a voice as sweet and tender on the taste buds as truffles, traveled their old vaporous paths into his nostrils. In one breath, a book of poetry bought for a lover on the day the bookstore opened, later bought back, dog-eared and worn by a lifetime held close to the woman’s heart. In another, oil from the fingers of a great playwright, days before he would begin writing two plays—one a brilliant parlor drama, the other a play that would redefine the art of theatre—grazed across the pages of a philosophical essay, turned to for inspiration. In another, long dried, set into the margin of a history book, these words scratched in India ink in terse loops belonging to a traveler who passed through the city, like so many others, looking for the poetry locked in its walls and cobblestones:

Love is pure, and poison, too
Liquors of bliss and blindness both
Distilled from the heart and the water hemlock
Mixed in phials of morning dew
For the taking of spirits
When other faiths fail us

Other stories in other sips of breath. His nose cluttered with each of them, all of them competing for his attention. His attention turned toward his beloved.

Sylvia. Ah, Sylvia. Beautiful porcelain Sylvia, bound under sheets of white linen. How his heart leapt at the mere sight of her face, at the thought of her body hidden under the blanket, her nightgown just covering her, revealing just the slightest curve of her buttocks, the barest shadow of her sex. He inhaled again and drowned in the scent of her. Lilac bath oils, sandalwood incense, fine jasmine perfume, and musk—inescapable and pungent—musk, blended together in an effluvium called Sylvia. He watched her roll over in the bed and turn her face toward him, making slits of her eyes.

“It’s morning isn’t it, Jamon?”

“Past morning, dearest. Into midmorning by now or, dare I say it, late morning,” he said, turning to her.

“But not noon? Not yet?”

“No, no. There have been no bells to indicate noon.”

“Good. Then I needn’t be awake,” she said with a small smile. And she turned over in the bed, taking the blanket with her to cover her eyes from the invasion of light.

He returned to watching her, listening to her, inhaling her, and smiled because he could do so. Because he was close to her. His beloved.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And that's what I have so far. The title is something like "Parisian Decadence," or "Parisian Delight" (because it's written as a Decadence story and the Decadents hated that term for themselves...so would they use it in the title of a story?)

Happy Christmas, all. Pleasant New Year. The next two weeks are going to be fun. Going to NYC sometime over my time home, getting to see lots of old friends, and then a week of Amanda, drenched in rum rolls and absinthe.

Fuck you and all that you have done to this country

History will remember this as a time when villains no longer fought heros, but fought other villains for control of the theiving.

Taxation, Representation, Etc.

I keep trying to wrap my brain around exactly what my problem with the whole "let's make a Constitutional ammendment forbidding them homos to marry" thing. Aside from the fact that its properly "those homos" and the fact that making a Constitutional ammendment barring a group of people from expressing love seems just fundamentally wrong, I've been probing myself (so to speak) for exactly what is wrong with it. Barring freedoms isn't fundamentally wrong, of course. Most laws bar freedoms. Such as the freedom to kill, the freedom to drive at 500 mph on open highways, the freedom to forcibly remove someone from their home and declare that home yours. These are all freedoms that the law has reasonably barred. So why not this one?

It comes down to this: one of the fundamental principles of this nation, the principle that, arguably, launched the American Revolution is "No taxation without representation." Roughly speaking, that means that nobody can enact a law that affects you and only you unless someone in the government represents you. Which is why it was wrong for the English to make laws affecting the colonies, and why it's wrong for a bunch of White people to make laws restricting the rights of a bunch of Black people. If, for example, a law were enacted allowing White people to walk around wherever they want, sit where they want on buses, attend whatever schools they wanted, and eat at whatever restaurants they wanted, while Blacks had to go to specific schools, eat at specific restaurants, and sit at the backs of the bus--well everyone would say that was madness...eventually.

There are freedoms that belong to everyone and there are freedoms that belong to only a select group of people, and whenever we try to restrict the freedoms of a select group of people without restricting the freedoms of everyone else, we are not just on a slippery slope, we are already sliding away from everything that makes us the land of the free. We cannot reasonably enact laws affecting one group of people without representing the will of those people within our legislature. Gay marriage: where are the homosexuals in the House of Representatives? Who represents queer issues in the Senate? Where are there gay people in the Oval Office? In the Supreme Court? In the lives of the people trying to fuck up the lives of people not like them? We can't allow it. We can't. It's this, then the removal of the right not be fired from a job for being gay. Then the ghettos. It's a backwards step away from enlightenment and it goes against the principles of our Revolution. America isn't just founded on the Will of the People. It's founded on the Will of the People and the rights of people who stand reasonably against that will to live their lives in peace.

The Absinthe Drinkers

Ah shit. I've been seriously remiss in my blogging duties over the past week. Mostly because I've been spending evenings at home, getting actual work done on short stories and on that novel that's been sitting around on my hard drive, twiddling its thumbs for the past--oh--six months. It sits there, taunting me. Actually, it sits there, telling me to get off my literary ass and write the fucking thing. Because I know how it ends! At least, I think I do. As I've been writing, I wonder if it actually ends the way I think it ends. Anyway. Point is, I haven't been going out and pretending to work while actually perusing the Internet quite as much as I used to do.

But I sat down and blocked out where the novel has been these past couple of chapters and where chapter five might be going. Which is good. Chapter five has felt a bit aimless to me, which is generally what frustrates me and makes me stop writing it.

Finished the medical story. Have started another.

Oh, and I bought an absinthe kit from this guy (I find it disconcerting that the first part of his URL is "deadflesh.fear"), which arrived in a timely five days. I began to macerate it on Sunday, and so I now have a decanter full of 151 rum and wormwood macerating in my linen closet, slowly turning into a familiar forest green. A few people have wondered, "Why are you making absinthe? Doesn't that make people go mad?" And the answer is no. Absinthe doesn't contain enough of its active ingredients to make people go mad. Wikipedia has a good article on absinthe, which describes some of the conditions that caused absithe to eventually become illegal and some of the reasons why some brands were so dangerous (competitors of Pernod absinthe added industrial-grade alcohol and other horrible things to their blends to cut corners and add color).

In my experience with the drink, absinthe has little of the effect that people ascribe to it. It's just a nice warm sort of drunk. With some synaesthesia to top it all off. Very nice.

So that's all. I started a new story in a sort of Decadence style. About a pig.
Oh...and as nearly as I can tell from this post in Jeff Vandermeer's blog, there is further evidence that I'm a medium for the zeitgeist. A story about a stripper stripping her epidermis? This sounds almost exactly like my story "Pornography," in which a boy can't get off with his woman unless she strips her skin off (because his first experiences masturbating was to Gray's Anatomy).

Happy Holidays, if I don't blog before then.

Korpervelt

Had a good writing night, last night. I've been working on a story that takes the form of a scientific/medical paper, and have been wrestling with how to bring elements of dialogue and characters other than the person writing the paper into the story, and last night solved it by adding footnotes to it. I'm not sure why that didn't occur to me sooner. Footnotes can be kind of gimmicky--and it's a done gimmick, too--but in this case, it really frees the body of the text from the choppiness of switching back and forth between the scientific voice and the narrative voice, and it also opens up room for a lot of explanation and parenthetical commentary that was tanking the story. So I went to bed feeling happy and productive last night.

This morning, I was very excited to see this article in the Sun Times:

A controversial new exhibit of human body parts, which has fascinated millions in Europe and Asia but appalled and infuriated others, is coming to the Museum of Science and Industry..."Body Worlds'' features some 200 body parts, including 25 whole figures, that have been preserved through a process called "plastination." Created by a German scientist and artist, the procedure replaces body fluids with resins and polymers.

The article goes on to describe a little of the controversy surrounding the exhibit, which, frankly, surprised me to read about. I got to see "Body Worlds" when I was in Berlin a few years ago. I found it weird and wonderful and right up my alley. At the end of the booklet that accompanied the exhibit were quotes from some of the dozens of people who donate themselves to the doctor/artist who makes the sculptures. Some said it was in the interest of science, but many--and this is what interests me--were doing it for religious reasons.

Anyway, the last time I saw the exhibit, it sparked a great flood of creativity in me, which included the story I was working on last night, so this is clearly an omen. Rest assured, I will be at the museum. Possibly many times.

Feb. 4-March 20
$21 for adults,
$11 for kids 3-11 and
$17 for seniors.

Pie Interruptus

How I Met My Neighbors

Last night I was in the middle of making two dozen or so hand-held chicken pot pies for consumption over the next weeks (I'm not sure why, but winter always makes me want to make pie...any pie, really; just pie), when I heard a knock at my door. Which was odd, because I never hear anything from my neighbors. The last time I received a knock on my door, I opened it to a pair of Baptists from Indiana who wanted me to come to their church. So I asked who it was, and the response was, "It's your neighbor, Dan. My apartment's on fire. Which, naturally, made me open to door. Smoke billowed in from the hallway, and I stood in the doorway for a moment, trying to figure out what to do. After a second, I grabbed my coat and ran to knock on doors to get people out of their apartments, before the fire department called up the stairwell and ordered both Dan and I to leave.

As I walked outside, barefoot, into the cold air, I glanced up at the window of Dan's apartment. Fire belched out in big swirls. Fire engine lights flashed everywhere. The small crowd of interested neighbors that always appears at these sorts of events had already begun to gather on the sidewalk. Some out of sheer curiosity, some to see if there's anything they can do to help, some to be nosy and poo-poo the poor soul who accidentally started the fire.

I stood outside in my socks and winter coat for an hour, watching the fire department work, chopping away at my neighbor's windows, raining glass and water down to the street, until there was nothing left but the shell of an apartment. A square space where an apartment once lived, it's eyes hollow and black and unframed. When they were ready to let us back in, I made sure Dan and his wife had somewhere to go, and then went back in to see what had become of my apartment. Everything was fine, but it reeked of smoke. So I opened up all of my windows and placed fans in them, called my friends Bonnie and Darcy, and went back to making pies, while my neighbors evacuated their houses and their pets.

A while later, Bonnie and Darcy showed up and sat with my while I made pie in my winter coat, and we drank moscata and lit scented candles and nag champa and just generally enjoyed the best of a bad situation. Every so often, someone would knock at the door--first the curious friends of a downstairs neighbor who wanted to make sure he was okay (everyone got out okay, as far as I know) and then my upstairs neighbor, who was away during all of this and came home to her apartment wide open and her dog locked in her bedroom. I explained everything to her, lent her a fan, and then spent the night at Bonnie and Darcy's house, just in case the carbon monoxide levels were dangerous.

Today, the apartment next to mine is all boarded up, making it look even more like a ruined shell. My front hallway is cold and dark and smells of the most horrible, acrid, chemical mixture of smoke and fire-killers that I could ever imagine. The hall outside my door is dingy, grey, as though it won't even let light brighten it. Black, mildew-like tendrils run up and down the walls where the smoke and water infiltrated the paint, the wood, the carpet, the air. Everything has a current of smoke and burning running through it now. Even my apartment, which was relatively untouched, reeks of smoke still. But it's getting better and it will be better.

People are generally good natured, I've decided from this. Most people, anyway.
And I'm okay and so is everything I own. And I'm thankful that I can sit here and write this over a cup of hot cocoa and everything's really pretty cool.

A Warm Winter's Day

It's another grey, damp day in December, with temperatures not much lower than the forties or fifties and a veil of moisture in the air, dulling the line of the sky. Last year around this time, I remember walking out into the cold air, feeling it hit my skin and solidify my mind into these neat little crystals of thought. Last year, I remember walking around a cemetery in snow drifts, struggling just to breathe against the wind, and skies a permanent blue because the air wasn't warm enough to hold clouds. That's proper winter.

This year, it's just grey and moist. Good weather for a sinus infection. Yay, global warming.

Despite that, I've been very content over the past week, due in no small part to the fact that a friend I love very much is coming to stay with me soon. And because we've actually both taken a proper amount of time off to enjoy each other's company, so we're not rushing to cram a proper visit into a short period of time. Makes me smile every time I think about it.

Also, the benefit went well. We raised about a thousand dollars for Tantalus, and more just keeps coming in. If you haven't been able to donate or whatnot, please do. So we can do brilliant theatre.

Wandering Books
While tooling around on the Web today, I visited Jonathan Carroll's site and was happy to see that he has been updating it and even has a blog, which is, like most of what he writes, really good. On it, I found a link to bookcrossing.com, whose goal is, "to make the whole world a library. Book Crossing is a book exchange of infinite proportion, the first and only of its kind." The idea is to leave a book that's moved you in a public place for someone else to pick up. That person does likewise and so on and so forth. You can track your book's progress via a sticker that the site provides. It's a brilliant idea; I think I'll start doing that, at once.

For those of you who don't know him, Jonathan Carroll is an author. His books are largely slipstream fantasies--dreamscapes glazed upon ordinary life. They're about the magic of true love and imagination, philosophy, talking dogs, and heroes/heroines who eat far more Sachertorte than is probably healthy for any human being to consume. I can't recommend him enough. Especially his book White Apples.

Luck O' the Irish

I locked myself out of my apartment this morning. Almost the instant the door shut behind me, I realized I hadn't brought my keys with me. My apartment door doesn't lock automatically, but its handle doesn't turn from the outside unless you have a key in it, so for all intents and purposes, I was locked out. I swore at myself and then marched myself outside to see if the back door was open, propping the door to my foyer on the way, so that I could get back in if I needed to. The back door wasn't unlocked and my back window, though unlocked, was so covered in years of paint and swollen from rain and other weather, that it would take a three-foot pry bar to open it. I swore again and wandered back over to the front door to see if I could jimmy it with a credit card, only to find that some diligent soul had unpropped it. Thricely, I swore. I was about ready to give up, when I noticed that there was a group of workers across the road from me and that their truck contained none other than a three-foot pry bar (actually, it contained many other things, as well...but the three foot pry bar is what caught my eye).

I walked across the street, explained my situation, and asked them if they would mind lending me their pry bar, to which one man replied, "Nobody's ever come up to us and asked us to use our crow bar before," in a heavy Irish accent. Which made me nervous, because--I suspect like many people--whenever I'm around someone with an accent, I tend to pick the accent up, myself. Rather, I tend to pick up a hideous bastardization of the accent that invariably makes me sound like I'm making fun of the person with the accent. Fortunately, I managed to avoid calling anyone "mate" or slipping accidentally into a jig long enough for them to provide me with the crow bar.

It worked. I managed to pry the window loose from the geological layers of paint that were holding it in place, slip through it, nab my keys, return the pry bar and thank the kind workers, and then head off for work, keys in pocket. Oh, and I closed the window, too. And that was my morning.

Tantalus Benefit

If you've already received this, feel free to ignore it.
But if you're one of the few people in my life who read my blog, but who I don't talk to regularly and who I don't e-mail, read on.

It is Tantalus Theatre Group's distinct pleasure to invite you to our annual Winter Gala. Come support theatre, enjoy live music and cheap wine, and most excitingly, be privy to an exclusive sneak peak of our upcoming world premier production,
RAGNAROK!

Ragnarok is a company-created piece, rooted in the stories of Norse mythology. You are invited to a party thrown by the gods on the cusp of Armageddon. We tell the stories and sing the songs of the world as all that is hurtles towards its
fated destruction. We invite you to join with us as we make merry and laugh in the face of death!

Winter Gala
Saturday, December 4th
From 8 p.m. until we can't move nor party no more (performance is at 9 p.m. when we will still be able to move)
The Munki Haus
1278 N Milwaukee Ave, Loft 4W
Chicago, IL 60622

$25 Regular Admission
$10 Student / Senior / Industry with headshot or resume
Feel free to forward this email and bring friends!

To reserve your ticket, simply call Artistic Director Glen Cullen at 773-960-2066. Walk-ups will be taken as well, but
it is best to reserve your ticket.

I recommend coming. It's going to be a blast. Munki Haus parties always are.

I'm getting sick and should probably go home and drink a cup of tea, take a nice bath, and go to bed early. But I have rehearsal to go to, and lines to memorize, and exhaustion to endure. What a life. How could I have it any other way?

Late News on Budding Mythologies

When I was in college, my first directing teacher (I should say "our first directing teacher" because he really was the department's first directing teacher--I only personally had one directing teacher--but to avoid people thinking I'm using the royal we, I say "my first directing teacher. But enough digression...) once commented that someone really ought to tell our paper that the operative syllable in "newspaper" is "news". After two or so weeks, which is when the paper generally opted to review our plays, it no longer qualifies as news. It is, in fact, olds.

That said, I probably should have posted this a week ago, when I first found it on Neil Gaiman's blog, but I procrastinated. So it isn't news anymore, and it doesn't qualify as ephemera anymore, either. Still, how cool is this? To summarize: an entire mythology has sprung up among homeless children in Miami, which merges Catholicism, Santeria, and basic childhood boogiemen like Bloody Mary with the ills and dangers of street life. The basis of the mythology is that God has fled Heaven after an attack from demons. In his absence, the angels are fighting a war and it is up to humanity to fight with them by finding the moral path. What amazes me about the article, more than anything else, really, is the weight that it places on the children, and the strength they seem to find despite or because of that weight. Also, the fact that it doesn't promise a good afterlife if you live a good life. The most the children hope for is to get to join the angels in their fight. It's a gorgeous article and a gorgeous mythology, genuinely frightening and real.

Thanksgiving was a blast. I spent it at the shore with my father and that side of the family. And my grandmother, who, though she is getting older and older, looks genuinely pretty good and was fairly engaging once you made eye-contact with her and spoke at the requisite volume for her to hear you. The hardest part about going home is always getting family to understand just how real and good what I've been doing out here is. None of them have ever seen a Tantalus show, and our shows don't really translate well into short descriptions (Well, you see, it's about the final battle in Norse mythology, in which Loki and Odin fight to the death, and Odin knows he's going to die but does nothing to stop it. But it's also a game, and the game is the battle, and the audience is going to be part of the game. But no...seriously...it's going to be really cool), so whenever I go home and start talking about what I'm doing with Tantalus, my parents kind of fade off. It's frustrating.

The same is true of my writing. Whenever I start to tell my mother about anything that has happened with my writing, I get, "You know, your old friend Lee David published an article in Such and Such magazine." And I realize she means well by saying, essentially, "Why don't you write something the complete opposite of your writing style?" but I find myself just wishing for some vindication. Which, I suspect, won't come for a while. Not because I don't think I'll be published. Just because I think I won't be published anywhere she's heard of.

Moral of this story is, I think, no matter how supportive your parents are, they're still people and have failings, just like you do. I think that's the moral, anyway. The other moral could be buck up, write, act, and create theatre for yourself and nobody else; and quit your whining. It could be a lot worse. That's probably closer to the moral.

Anyway, I'm off. Going to drink some water and talk to my friend Bonnie about the cruise she and her girlfriend are going on.

Web Slingers

My Web site is finally up, and it looks fantastic. Just sheer gorgeousness on a plate--er--screen. Thanks to Ian Knox for doing all of the programming and to my brother for desiging the site. With this development, I might finally pull ahead of the other Matthew Rossi in Google searches.

Victory is in sight!

Greetings from Marrakech!

I'm currently sitting in the new Morroccan internet cafe that just recently opened in my neighborhood. So far, I love the place. Their Morroccan coffee is delicious; bitter without being painful. Very smooth on the tongue. And their Internet is really and truly free, which always makes me happy. If they had hookahs to smoke here, I think I would be in heaven.

Ever since I disconnected my apartment from the Web, I've enjoyed the experience of communal Internet. It isn't fundamentally different going to a cafe and checking my e-mail on a computer than it was when I could check it at home, but there are subtle differences. It gets me out of the house more, for starters, which is the largest part of what I like about it.

The other day I met Bonnie for lunch and she handed me a copy of Fuck the South. I have to say, I found it very apt, but as someone who lived in the South for five years, I also feel a need to defend the people there. The South is a strange place; they never entirely have gotten over what happened after the Civil War (as evidenced by the fact that it's called the War of Northern Agression down there), and I can't honestly say I blame them. A thriving economy was destroyed by the war, and the North did near nothing afterward to help repair it and bring them into an economy that worked for them. And the Northern attitude that the South is just populated by a bunch of hicks doesn't really help to make them feel as though what we say is good for them. We are, in a lot of ways, a very divided country. Yeah, the North is arrogant. Yeah, we have a right to be, but that doesn't really mean that our arrogance is going to do anything other than further divide our country.

In the week and a half after the election, I was party to a series of e-mail conversations between a group of my former professors. One of them made the point that the Liberal attitude that everyone who isn't Liberal is an idiot and that we're morally and intellectually superior to them is just going to force the nation further to the right. No matter the fact that this attitude is correct--I will happily and loudly call anyone who believes that they have the right to make laws that will take away the freedom of everyone but themselves my moral inferior, and I will be right to do so--it does nothing to root out the problem of why they have a worldview that focuses on bigotted things. Instead, we condemn them, and in doing so we further divide the country.

I have no idea what the answer to this problem is. More listening on both sides would be my suggestion. More willingness to accept that bigots aren't created in a vacuum and that it is just as ignorant when one of us refuses to listen to them as it is when one of them refuses to listen to us. More humanism, less other isms. Man, I'm a hippy.


My continually failed efforts with the laptop hunt have finally come to a close with the purchase of a new IBM T20. It's a very nice computer, faster and smarter than my desktop, with a DVD drive that I can watch movies on. Well...I will be able to, anyway. I'm currently downloading a DVD codec for this very purpose. Hopefully, if all goes well, I'll be able to watch Eternal Sunshine... by the end of the night.

That's it. And happy Thanksgiving, one and all. In a few days, I'll fly home and celebrate the yearly ritual slaying of man's only natural predator: the turkey.

Pranking Steve

I received this in my mailbox today:

Hey, I'd like to enlist your help for a project I'm working on. Okay, it's more of a prank than a project, but with the best of intentions. Here goes: I am currently working at a company called Wextrust. Everyday, for the past two months, Steve has called and asked for Patty to sign his 401K form. And everyday, Patty blew him off. Till today, when his persistence paid off. He showed up here at office, she signed it, he did a little dance. So here is my plan: I'd like to get as many people as possible to send him a congratulatory email. The more people the better. Just let him know that he's a good man and your thoughts and prayers have been with him. And if you want to pass this on to anyone, feel free. But, I'm guessing it's only going to be funny for the next day or two.

CONTACT STEPHEN AT saffarewich@yahoo.com

I'm generally a fan of a good joke, and I'm always a fan of anything that makes someone's life just a little strange for a few days, so I sent Steve a letter as Rev. Matthew Rossi, explaining that my church's congregation has been praying for him and that he's inspired my next sermon.

I recommend you send him e-mails, too. It's great fun and will make his life delightfully weird. Also, he's an improver, so he's trained to handle these situations.

Thing One and Thing Two...Or...My Poor Ignored Produce

Not two days after I blogged about the joys of organic farming and how wonderful it is that I can now get huge amounts of produce, I opened my fridge to make some yummy stir-fry to the sight of such wilt, such squishiness and rot as would make even the sternest heart weep. Poor green beans. Poor red peppers. Poor lettuce. I really did mean to eat you, back a month ago when I saw you in the produce section, so multicolored and inviting. I had such plans to roast those peppers. Such great plans for steamed broccoli with rice and chicken. I'm sorry produce. I failed you. If it's any consolation, the tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich that I cooked, after I threw away the completely inedible stir-fry I made with you, made me feel like a horribly cliched bachelor and a waste of culinary talent.

It's a problem I think I'm going to have with these coop people--a half bushel of produce is a lot of produce, especially for someone who is almost never home and rarely has time to cook. I'm anticipating making lots of soups and fruit juice punches in the coming weeks. If anyone knows what to do with a pepper squash, please let me know. Seriously. I've got one on my shelf and it keeps staring at me, challenging me to make some new and wonderful recipe with him, and I keep having to back away from him, afraid. Snide little punk-ass squash.

I've been trying to buy a laptop again, having realized that my current laptop can't display this blog screen correctly, and it's not going well. I've e-mailed two people on Craig's List, practically begging them to let me buy their computers from them. "Please," I say, "I'll pay double--triple for it. Just let me buy a computer!" And they haven't e-mailed me back, except to taunt me with the knowledge that the computer is still for sale, without telling me how I might buy it. It seems fate has willed that I not have another laptop. At all. Ever.


Life has been fairly well absorbed in workshop lately. We're writing a lot, which is fun, but a very different process than I usually work in. I usually work alone, and working by committee can be tiring and frustrating. And the play has diverted my from a story I really need to finish about asexual reproduction and memetics. I'm rereading the stories about mitosis and meiosis in Calvino's T Zero, in the hopes that they'll inspire me and get me back on track.


Thing One and Thing Two
Ian (my former roommate for those of you not in the know) walked up to me a moment ago and said, "Two things."

"Thing one?" I asked, looking up from my desk with my usual nonplussed expression.

Thing one was that he thought I might like to make a graphic for my Web site. An icon to appear in the address bar when you sign into me. Um...my site, that is. Nevermind the fact that I have the artistic talent of a clam wearing shoes. I can make a sixteen by sixteen pixel graphic.

Thing two was that I haven't posted his blog anywhere on my blog. And this is true. The reason for this is that I'm desperately insecure and worried that if anyone saw there was another blog they might read, that would divert their attentions away from my blog and I would lose all my friends and wind up alone in the gutter somewhere with nothing but a bottle of Jack Daniels and my old teddy bear from childhood to keep me company.

Yes, my mind really can come up with these scenarios. No, I honestly don't see any need to seek help. Honestly. Yes. Honestly.

Consider yourself posted, Ian.

Also, a thing two of my own. Theresa Nielsen Hayden has some very good suggestions for a way to buy traditional Indian garments directly from thier makers in India, without having to go through a wholesaler or any other middleman. Alas, if only I was a woman or lived in a climate where I could get away with wearing such lightweight fabrics. I may have to buy something, anyway.

update on my peace of mind...

whew! I heard from my friend today. She's alright. Made it home safe and sound after a cabbie with far more sense than I had picked her up. Thank God.

I'm an idiot.

Mud's Queens and King's Hill

A week after the election, and I have to admit I do feel better. Mostly because, as it turns out, the whole thing was just a horrible mistake and Bush isn't really our President. Thank God for small miracles and Howard Dean!

The other day my friend, Jessa, suggested the thought that the Democrats really need to start bowing more on the moral issues. At first my mouth gaped and I stared at her like she had gone completely mad with postelection grief. But she made a pretty good point. Her logic goes as follows:

The Democrats can't be left enough to support a truly progressive agenda, but because they won't bow on the moral issues--issues that they don't really support wholeheartedly anyway--they keep losing the votes of mid-liners who are opposed to Bush on social issues but with him on moral issues. If the Democrats would let go of the moral issues that keep holding them back, they would gain immeasurable support from groups like the Black and Latino communities, which they often lose in moral issues because those communities are largely Christian. The end result of this, continues the logic, is that the truly leftist Democrats would have to stand against their party because of the moral issues, eventually creating a third party that would have some strength; the Republicans would have to start shaping up their stance on social policies to avoid losing power altogether; and the Democrats would be able to maintain better control over the government, but with the pull both left and right from the other two parties, would have to keep a stance that was both morally moderate and socially responsible. To me, this seems like a reasonable prediction.

But then, it was about two in the morning when I was listening to all of this, after a good night of partying. So my perceptions might have been skewed.

Life has gone on, though, and that's at least half of what's important. Friday night, I went and saw a friend play at Cosmicafe, which was fantastic. The space was wonderfully warm and cozy, and the music was just right; it reminded me of evenings in high school and college spent in the company of good friends, feeling safe in the world and valued among people, evenings when everything is just right and nothing upset at all.

After the show, a few of us went off to catch a mud-wrestling match by the Mud Queens of Chicago. The Mud Queens of Chicago get together every couple of months as a fund raiser for the Young Women's Empowerment Movement, which is a brilliant marketing strategy. I watched scantily clad women writhe around in mud, and was actually helping to empower women by doing so. It's fantastic. The match was held in a warehouse out in the western parts of the city, and was great fun to watch.

Unfortunately, I ended up missing most of the matches to help a friend get a cab. We walked to the closest main street we could find and called a cab. Then she insisted I leave her, which I did, stupidly. So I'm worried now, because the last time I saw my friend, she was sitting on a bench in a not-great area of town, late at night, waiting for a cab, and she hasn't returned my phone calls since. Which means that, if anything happened to her, it would at least be half my fault. Luckily, my friend is a big girl--in the empowered emotional sense, not the size sense--and she can probably take care of herself. Yeah. I think I'll keep telling myself that.

In lighter news, my friend Bonnie turned me on to King's Hill Farm, which is an organic produce cooperative out in Illinois. They have a delivery program for people in the city. Last week, Bonnie ordered thirty dollars worth of produce and had pounds and pounds of good apples, squash, potatoes, and--most surprisingly--pomegranates. Where the hell do pomegranates grow in Illinois? I have no idea how they did it. I signed on today and can't wait to see what I get in my first shipment.

This eliminates about half my grocery problems, too, since really produce is mostly what I like to get (because it's cheaper than meat and goes a longer way). I'm very excited.

That's that. If you happen to be an attractive young Jewish girl who I stupidly and drunkenly left sitting alone, please contact me, if for no other reason than to let me know you're okay.