Non-Art

Don't get me wrong: I like art. I appreciate the time, talent, and vision it takes to create a great work of art. But what is art?

Tribune Plaza has these...things (pictured at right). I hesitate to call them art. I guess certain people refer to them as works of art, but do they in fact constitute works of art? Maybe I'm an uncultured moron, but I'd say no. They're definitely something, but they're not really art. Are they some objects that someone took the time to arrange? Yeah. Are they fairly interesting colors? Sure. Do those two factors make it art? Hell no.

The yellow one is meant to represent an Indian headdress. The gray one is meant to represent prairie grass. I mean...I guess. If you were on a ridiculous amount of drugs, maybe they would look like feathers and grass. I would probably appreciate them more if they were the creations of an actual Indian who grew up on a sweeping reservation somewhere. Not that that would change the fact that they're not really art, but it would make the story about the headdress and the grass somewhat more plausible. Instead, they're by some guy here in Chicago. He probably grew up in Oak Park or Bridgeport, or some other neighborhood completely lacking in both prairies and Indians.

The grey one in the foreground (remember, the one that's supposed to be prairie grass) was given by a donor to some small school in the western suburbs for millions of dollars. Do you think the guy has a good excuse for not giving the money for scholarships or computers? I'm sure the school's board of directors thought, "Now we have to figure out what to do with this massive gray thing that's not art, or this guy might not give us any more money. Man, we sure could use a new chemistry wing."

The litmus test for art should be: Something someone created that makes a significant impact on the beholder. You should tingle a little bit, either physically or mentally. It should make you think, draw some emotion from you, or prompt a deeper understanding of existence. Yet, all I think about when I pass by things like those is: Who the hell was ever moved by ten-tons of steel and some paint? Maybe if they were a little more something, they might provide shelter for pedestrians when it rains, thereby lending some useful purpose to their being. As it is, they're just a bunch of painted steel beams, taking up a whole lot of space and masquerading as art.

If I can do it, it's not art. This is particularly true when it comes to the visual arts. Namely, I cannot draw for crap. My doodles in school notebooks usually consisted of lines from songs, famous quotes, things like that. I'd occasionally draw one of those eight-point cube doodles, but I'd usually botch them in one way or another.

When I was little, and my dad went to the office every Saturday morning, he'd drop me off at the School of the Art Institute. He still has the little sculptures I made for him in his office, and they are pretty bad. One is a bunny, but it's a retarded bunny. The other is a little cup for paper clips that has a lid, but the lid doesn't even come close to covering the top of the cup. The only reason he keeps them handy is because he loves me, and not because I showed any sort of redeeming artistic talent.

My abilities in that regard have not improved at all in the twenty-odd years since I made those little ceramic objects. That being said, I know that tomorrow I could take a bunch of steel beams, weld them together, cover them in paint, and name them. I could easily finish both in roughly two days. I'm not sure I could convince someone to give me millions of dollars for them, but money shouldn't make something art.

Interestingly, they (I'm not sure who "they" are--the City arts council or someone at the Tribune, I guess) have replaced the grey one with a very different piece of "art." It consists of eight or ten metal rings, about three feet tall, of an awful rust color, arranged like a faulty Slinky. I can't find a picture of it, but it's completely unimpressive. It strikes me as the world's least-appealing bike rack, for the exclusive use of aliens who are twice as tall as us, blind, and goofy.

There's another statue in the plaza that definitely is a work of art: the Jack Brickhouse sculpture. Now, I certainly couldn't do a sculpture. Look at all the detail in his face, his hands, his clothes, his microphone. That's really hard to do. You could never do it in a week. It must have taken months and months of preparation and execution. Is it a stretch to say that the guy who came up with the grass and the Indian thing couldn't re-create the Brickhouse sculpture? If he could, then why didn't he do an actual representation of them, instead of some half-assed interpretation veiled under the cloak of "art"?

I know people might say, "There are different kinds of art, you myopic twit." And you'd be right, especially the myopic twit part, but not about the definition of art. There are different kinds of things that are referred to under the general umbrella of art. I know I'm taking a narrow view of the art genre, but it seems that defining things would require some sort of narrowing process. I'm sure there are some who might say that art needn't be subjected to semantics. Well, why should that be the only thing that gets a reprieve?

When I look at various decorative objects, I have to ask myself: Is that art, or is it Art? As I see it, within the major category of Art, there are works of art (things that took vision and skill, and have an enduring importance), and then there are works of non-art (things that marginally fit the broader description, but are easily reproduced by anyone with a pulse and ample time on their hands). If I didn't look at Art in this way, I'd go batty every time I walked past the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The MCA, which is a few blocks down my street, is full of things like droplets of black on a white cloth surface, containers full of old tennis shoes, and shapeless globs of indistinguishable materials. That stuff is not art. That's stuff you might find in someone's apartment. It's non-art.

What Is It About Tuesday?

Everybody laughs when I say that my life is a sitcom. But I'm not kidding about this—I completely understand where Seinfeld was coming from. Today, for example, was a typically normal yet odd day. I think it has something to do with Tuesdays. I just scanned through old posts, looking for potential writing samples (I picked "Eulogy for the Post That Never Was," because Dahlgren gave it high praise), when I realized that most of my zanier posts are the result of strange things happening on Tuesday. This Tuesday was packed with the ordinary and the extraordinary, keeping with the trend.

I woke up and applied to a bunch of jobs, none of which I expect to hear back about. It's a miserable feeling, knowing that you don’t have any choice but to put time into a letter that will probably be instantly deleted. My cover letters have become more and more desperate as the months past. At this point I feel like writing, "I am offering the rights to my future children if you let me come and toil away for free." What more can I do, honestly? It’s not a matter of trying; it’s a matter of timing. I can’t do much about it.

My brother came over at about 11 to eat lunch and nap before going to work. He and I started discussing my sister and her boyfriend. Why this was the chosen topic of conversation for the day? He brought it up out of the blue. I should have sensed the set up and found something else to do, but I walked right into it.

He asked if I thought they were going to get married, and I said I hoped so. He asked me why. I told him that they seemed to share a real respect and affection for one another; that he had gone to great schools and done extremely well; that his family members to whom I've been introduced seem extraordinarily nice; that he was very easy going and very respectful to my grandparents and other family members; on and on like that, listing about fifty good reasons why I hoped she would wind up with him. At the end of it, I expressed an opinion that that the two of us have shared at least a million times, "I have long been terrified that she'd marry someone we didn’t like, and we'd be stuck hanging out with him for the rest of our lives. But this guy is really awesome."

Then he lashed out at me and yelled, "You're so self-centered. What's your problem? Why does everything have to be about you? Jesus, Pat, grow up!"I was stunned. Fifty-one points, one of which was a personal opinion, and that makes me some self-centered egomaniac. I was missing something.

"Well," I quickly retorted, "you asked me my opinion. Sorry I don't know your opinion, or anyone else’s. Sorry all I have the right to say is what I think about the situation. Sorry I couldn't give you the results of some 'perfect relationship formula' that doesn't exist. You know we don’t have the kind of relationship where she’d sit me down and say, ‘I really love this guy; I hope we get married.’ If you ask me an opinion about something, of course I'm going to include how it might affect me, because all I really know for 100% certain is how I think something might affect me. So, blow me, dude."

At that biting retort, he pounced back with a diatribe about how ignorant I am in the proper use of language, and how I typically construct sentences poorly because I don't put enough effort into putting forth my ideas. Would you, my dedicated readers, say that I have communication issues? I hear compliments like, “You make me laugh my ass off,” or, “Your take on the world is pretty unique.” Never once have I heard, “There’s a much better way to get that idea across,” or “That was a really great story until you completely dropped the ball at the end.” Give me a break. I'm a damn good communicator. Communicating is what I do best, for crap’s sake, or at least I think it is. Maybe I’m wrong. The conversation continued.

After levying this totally incorrect assessment on me, he finished with a comment along the lines of, "Dad has always liked me more than you." Okay, so what? Big deal. Pat takes a lot of crap. Thanks for the newsflash—from 1990. Given the random assortment of senseless arguments being hurled about, I knew he was getting at something. What was it?

In between stabs at me, he repeatedly went back to the topic of my sister's boyfriend, and how he thought it was bogus that my dad was helping him to find a great job for after his graduation this spring. He expressed concern that my father would use up all of his networking capital trying to hook up a non-family member, when my brother would need the same help in two years' time. Now, I know this to be ridiculous. There is, to the best of my knowledge, no set quota for the permissible letters of introduction one might write, or a limit to the number of favors one might seek, especially when it comes to my father helping us in a time of need. But, my brother is no idiot; he knows he was wrong, but he was just in a sour mood. When he lashes out at those closest to him, it is never because they did something to wrong him. Without exception, he lashes out because he did something wrong, and he needs to get angry at somebody else in order to make himself feel better about what he did wrong. It’s confusing, but that’s how it is.

"Ah," I thought to myself as it all dawned on me, "you got a so-so grade on a legal writing project that could have been much better, so you came over here to ruin my day." Situations like this are exactly why I read Sherlock Holmes—sometimes you have to read clues backwards to forwards to know what’s going on, especially with this guy. I try to take it in stride, and I never hold it against him. I love him too much to lash back, so I just let it go.

Just then the phone rang, and it was a headhunter. We had a conversation that was great in two ways. First, and most importantly, I think she's going to get me in somewhere. She seems pretty well connected in Chicago, and she has former colleagues at an awesome company that happens to be actively hiring. Second, the call was of a length such that my brother had to leave before we finished the conversation. I've been in too good a mood lately to offer myself as a punching bag for an emotional infant. So, thank God on both counts.

When I wrapped up the headhunter conversation, I fired off several more emails. My dad wanted me to stop by his office, but not until tomorrow afternoon. I read The Economist. I watched “Around the Horn” and “PTI.” I read a long article about some minute detail about analyzing a baseball player’s range factor. I set up a few equity valuation spreadsheets, just for fun. Let me tell you: Time flies by when you have nothing to do.

At about 3, I got a call from the doorman. Usually this means that someone is on their way up—a friend, the cleaning ladies, a delivery guy, etc. This was not the case this time. The conversation went as follows:

Him: "Hi, Patrick?"

Me: "Yeah, hey, what's up?"

Him: "Hey, it's Mohammed, downstairs."

Me: "Hey, Mohammed, how goes it?"

Him: "Good, good. Did you have a nice Thanksgiving?"

Me: "Yeah, yeah, it was good. You know, a lot of eating, a lot of shouting, never long enough, all of that. How about you?"

Him: "Great. I had a very nice time, thanks for asking. (Pause.) Okay, see you later."

Me: "Take care, Mohammed."

I stared out of my window, as confused as I’d ever been. What the hell was that? Have you ever heard of anything like this before? I mean, the doorman just tossed out a random “what’s up” chat call. He thought, “I want to see how someone’s Thanksgiving was. I think I’ll call Pat.” He’s my sixty-year old doorman from a small island in the Indian Ocean, and he is named Mohammed. I’m nice to him and all, but it’s not like I’m particularly friendly with the guy. Why does weird crap like that always happen to me?

Am I just being self-centered? Whatever, I know I’m self-centered, but I’m not really sure of any other way to be. Everybody is, when you get down to it. Isn’t that the natural (as in, according to the laws of nature) way to be? Have you ever read Ayn Rand? Ah, let’s just drop it.

Confused by the chat with the doorman, I took a shower and got dressed. It was really nice here over the last two days, but the wind and cold ploughed back with full force today. I bundled up sufficiently.

Just then Seamus came up and said he would kill for a ride home. He forgot to grab his U-Pass (a card that gives free rides on the CTA, costs included in his tuition bill). He didn’t feel like taking a cab or walking. Having nothing better to do, I was happy to oblige.

We got into the car, and immediately the gas warning binged.

Gas, of all things, has set the table for a brutal struggle between my siblings and me for quite some time now. No matter how often or loudly or publicly I complain about the problem, they never take action to do anything about it, and I’m past the boiling point.

I live across the street from my sister, and my brother is a mere five-minute walk away, so we share a car to cut down on parking costs. Living in the heart of the city, I take a hundred walks, cabs, or trains for every one time I need to use the car. It’s insane to drive around downtown to accomplish daily tasks, because you could most likely walk there in half the time it takes to find parking.

This conflict does not pertain to usage, but rather to an utter lack of courtesy on their part. My sister took the car to go out to the suburbs a couple of times this weekend. Not a problem; didn’t put me out any; with the exception of Thursday, I stayed downtown all weekend. But, do you think she could have put twenty bucks worth of gas in the car? Follow along, because I think this is how she (and, also, my brother) rationalize the gas situation: “The car is only one-third my responsibility, which means it’s mostly not my problem. Since someone else will probably need it before I do, they’re going to be the ones needing the gas, so they can go buy it themselves.” And I’m self-centered. They never seem to notice that I’m the dope who puts the gas in the tank in the first place. I know what I’m going to get them for Christmas: Directly from a secret world of fantastic wonders, a magical gas tank that miraculously fills itself up, but only when you yourself need the car. I’m apparently the only one who doesn’t feel right about leaving the car 4 miles from empty, and that’s just nonsense. Here’s to them for calling in sick on the day in kindergarten when the teacher talked about sharing.

Actually, the car shows no signs of being two-thirds their responsibility. As I feared, the real rent on my apartment has increased by $190 a month once we moved the car to my building. We only share the car in the true sense of the word 29 days out of the month, because when I call them to collect on their share of the costs at the end of the month, all I hear is, “I bought you dinner last week,” or “Remember those shots Friday night?” or “I gave you Cubs tickets back in May.” I’m glad that they think bullshit is a currency, but my landlord expects a check for actual U.S. dollars. Maybe if I wrote up this point in the proper brief form, the two wise-ass attorneys might finally get this tremendously difficult concept through their legalistic skulls.

So, back to the drive, we made our way up toward Lincoln Park, and I pointed out the building that serves as the exterior of Pruitt’s old employer. Seamus looked confused when I tried to explain the significance of it, so I eventually gave up and told him he’d get it once I let him read it. Getting back to the gas issue, he said he thought I was in a crap situation, so he offered me some money to pay for the many rides I’ve given him since he moved downtown. It was a nice gesture that I would normally turn away, but this time I accepted. Why? For one, I’m broke. And for another, well, I’m broke, that’s all.

I dropped him off and drove to the BP at LaSalle and Clark. I put exactly $5 in the tank, in case of an emergency. I’m not filling up the goddamn gas tank remainder of the winter, period. I’m angry to the point that I would rather attempt walking to Florida than drive away from an apocalyptic blizzard. I’m not kidding. It really pisses me off.

Thoughts of the perfect storm roiling around my mind, I ditched the car and went downstairs. Though it was cold and windy, I hit up Starbucks and went out on my daily walk.

As you know, I usually like to head up to the Lincoln Park Zoo, but every once in a while I like to meander east and south. I go along in that general direction because Streeterville, as the area east of the Magnificent Mile is known, seems to be in desperate need of warm bodies. It's very nice over there, with new buildings and cool stores and restaurants and such, but there never seems to be enough foot traffic. So I occasionally like to wander through there, in the hopes that the random occurrences following me like ghosts might rub off on this neighborhood almost utterly lacking in human vitality.

On my way to Streeterville, at the corner of Chestnut and Michigan, a tall black guy asked me for a smoke. I reached into my pocket and extracted one.

"Here," I said, offering him a cigarette.

He stopped and said, "Really? You'd just give it to me? Just like that?"

"Yeah, I said, "What's the big deal?"

And he said, "Ah, man, I don't even smoke. I just ask people that to see if they're nice."

"That's kind of weird," I said, barely slowing down.

"Yeah. Hey," he said, pointing to my earphones, "what are you listening to?"

"Zeppelin," came my reply.

"Really? 'Oh let the sun beat down upon my face!’ Yeah, that's cool, man!" he intoned with great exuberance.

"Yeah," I said. What the hell was this? Was he going to ask me for money or try to sell me something?

"Hey, you seem like a pretty cool dude."

"Sure," I said, hoping he’d go away. He clearly wasn’t homeless or explicitly crazy, so maybe he was just hitting on me, or has an odd way of making friends.

"What do you do?" he asked.

My mind went through the extensive range of false occupations I sometimes tell complete strangers. “I’m the bullpen catcher for the Seattle Mariners.” “I’m an archaeologist with the Oriental Institute.” “I’m a plastic surgeon from Columbus, in town for a conference.” “I’m a brew master for Miller up in Milwaukee.” And, the big bomb that I occasionally pull off, “I’m an aspiring porn star, but I’d rather not get into it.” This time, however, I decided to tell him the truth.

"Nothing," I said. "Honestly, I don't really do much."

He laughed. "No way! Nothing? That’s some funny shit. Hey, we should hang out some time."

I stopped walking and paused for a second.

"Oh, I thought you were going to ask me for money,” I said.

“No,” he replied, “I’m just out walking around, new here and all.”

"Let me ask you something,” I said, “have you got a girl?"

"Yeah," he said, "but she lives in St. Louis."

"Well,” I said, “what if you called her and said, 'Hey, baby, I randomly met this guy on Michigan Avenue, and now we’ve become great friends'? That'd be a really fucking weird conversation, right?"

He nodded and said, "Yeah."

"Well," I said, starting across Michigan, "good to meet you, then."

My walk continued.

It was a good walk, I suppose. Actually, it was a bit boring. Nothing very cool ever happens in Streeterville. How's this: I saw a bunch of nurses and med students leaving Northwestern Hospital. Three city workers stumbled out of Timothy O'Toole's, as drunk as can be. Two tourists asked me how to get to Saks. A Chinese girl hustled into the U. of C.'s Gleacher Center, probably late for class. It’s just never very exciting over there.

By contrast, on the Gold Coast, there’s always wild things happening. A building fell over at Dearborn and Burton the other day. I’m not kidding. Granted, it was just the shell of an extensive rehab job, but still, the wind blew the damn walls over. Now, that’s something. In Streeterville, however, there’s not even much dog crap to step around. I reminded myself that it was, after all, something of a charity visit to begin with.

I came home via Rush Street and grabbed a gyros and fries from Johnny's. It was really good. They use this awesome seasoning on the fries. It's terrific. When you get a good batch, they might be the best fries in the city. Of course, they won’t tell me what the seasoning is, and I find this completely ridiculous. It’s not like I’ve got a deep fryer in my apartment, and I’m not some chintzy jerk who would use the powder at McDonald’s or some other restaurant just to save a few cents. I’ll always buy fries from the fast-food place downstairs, because I’m just that lazy. They should know this by now. Maybe they will someday.

So that brings me to right now, and I’m not really sure of what to make of things, as per the usual. The headhunter was supposed to call me back this evening, but she must have gotten tied up with her kids or something. That’s all right. I’ll call her first thing in the morning. It’s not like she could make any calls on my behalf in the middle of the night anyway. I'm thinking about calling this girl I've been hooking up with, but I don't really feel like it. She can call me.

One more thing: Who’s ready for ‘Nova’s 2005 national broadcast debut? In case you hadn’t heard, it’s the ESPN game of the week, Saturday night, at Oklahoma. This club is going to be wicked, even without Sumpter. Foye, Ray, Fraser, Nardi—any of the four could be All-American. Preliminary reports on the freshmen are very positive. The bench proved itself last year in the Tournament after Sumpter went down, and most of those role guys are back. And, f UConn! We’ll definitely beat them for the Big East title, and we’ll completely wipe the floor with them if they have the misfortune of crossing us in March. This is the best team we’ve had since the 1985 championship, much better than the Kittles/Williams/Lawson teams of the mid-1990s. I’m desperate for one of my teams to win a championship, damn it! Bring it on!

Also, Dick Vitale can kiss my ass! It’s funny how that guy is named Dick, doesn’t know dick, and is a dick. Think about that the next time you hear him say great things about some overrated media-darling program like ScrewConn or Puke. Let’s Go Nova!

Random Thought of the Day

Isn't it ironic that the "point guard" doesn't necessarily have to be a big scorer?

Quote of This Past Weekend

Me: "I can't really use the words I'd like to, because your girlfriend is present."

Man, I'm finally making progress!

Living Urban Legend

Something exceptionally odd happened yesterday, and I must admit that I'm freaking out a little. On so many levels, it's easily one of the most unusual things that's happened to me this year. Actually, it might be the strangest thing that I've EVER been a party to, and that's saying something.

Some of you will undoubtedly hear about it at some point in the future. However, in a rare exercise of discretion, I have decided to withhold all details from this medium, because it is considerably more personal than typical What I See fare. But, let's put it this way: If I ever write a sitcom, this incident will definitely warrant a full episode--but only if the show runs on HBO or Showtime.

The thing is, it's not like I go out of my way to cause weird shit to happen. 99% of the time I make it a point to try to be as nice as possible; the other 1% of the time usually presents a situation so hysterical or the set up so welcoming that I cannot resist a wise-crack or inappropriate comment. In this case, I did nothing absolutely wrong, from start to end. In fact, this situation arose because I went out of my way to be a great guy along each step of the process, if you can believe it. Because my intentions were chivalrous yet still blew up in my face, I feel like an earthquake has shaken the foundations of my faith in well intentioned actions. It's simultaneously funny and scary and, if I know anything about anything, the story will undoubtedly be propelled to the status of living urban legend.

Pat the Brat

I haven't posted much lately because I don't really have anything to say. I mean, I always have something to say; I just don't feel like sharing at the moment. So there.

It's a weird thing. I just didn't have it this week. The words aren't there. The hose is turned off. I stared at a blank Word document for a good half hour last night, and it freaked me out. So, it's time for a break, because the only way to get around writer's block is to put it down for a while.

I promise to come back with plenty of great tales from my writing vacation, but I couldn't even guess when that will be or what I have to say. Could be next Thursday; could be something totally different. Who knows? I'm just not thinking about anything for a while.

Pruitt Day 25

Thinking about things about nothing.

And...

Words that go unsaid aren't necessarily forgotten.

Those are the most pertinent points that ran through my head while trying to figure out how I can round out this story. Sorry if I've utterly confused you, but that's what I thought about all day.

Also, in a point completely unrelated to the writing of this book, it seems like every economist is talking about copper, which means: avoid it like the plague.

Pruitt Day 22

As I mentioned in the previous post, I went to the new Harry Potter movie tonight after all, going by myself to the latest showing at the AMC by the river.

I rather enjoy going to movies alone. You are in the dark, and you cannot speak. That being the case, movies never struck me as much of a social occasion. As far as appearances go, other people might find it odd for a person to be sitting alone in a theater, but I’ve never given much thought to what other people think of me, and I feel terrible for people who are unable to cope with solitude in a public setting.

Before the movie began, the screen alighted with the following message, “Silence Is Golden.” Though utterly necessary in a movie theater, I find that statement to be ludicrous in everyday life. As I see it, silence is less than ideal. It is emptiness. It is cold, dark, and haunting. It is terrifying. It is the absence of life. Silence is sleep, possibly even death.

Noise—now, there is something that’s golden. It is a sign of life. It is proof of things happening, of activities of a wide variety. It is the cradle of creativity, and of thought. It is the comfort of knowing that, if you can hear something, then you cannot be alone.

Our great legends tend to be extremely simple allegories of good’s struggle against evil. It has long been hypothesized that the main reason why they appeal to us so much is that stories, regardless of their form, are experiments in escapism. Life is never as simple as it appears to be in Harry Potter’s universe, the tales of the Old West, or Arthurian legend. Seldom are things or people very, very good or very, very bad. Yet, in our most cherished tales, we are allowed the opportunity to make them so, and that makes them glorious things.

I seem to have developed, in an extremely roundabout way, something of a Buddhist worldview. There are no bad experiences, but rather simply experiences—in each case offering aspects of both good and bad. There is always at least one positive thing to be drawn from every horrific occurrence. Perhaps the victim hadn’t realized how strong he or she was before being forced to survive. Or, in the course of pursuing and achieving love, harm comes to those on the periphery. There is give and take, and there is always compromise. We do the best we can when making decisions, and we attempt to abide by our own set of principles for guidance and perspective. A person’s actions might be perceived as being ill intentioned, but that is a description typically levied by the victim. It is the rare sociopath who revels in the intentional infliction of misery upon others, and were they not such uncommon specimens, I daresay that society would cease functioning or, more likely, probably never would have formed in the first place.

I cannot pinpoint the exact moment when I began to disagree with the existentialists. While it is true that we are beings possessed of free will, in no way are our lives absolutely determined by the choices we make. The necessity for making decisions is often foisted upon us, and in those instances we tend to be more reactive beings than we might otherwise be if given the choice.

The tale of Richard Pruitt will take these factors into account, and though I am sure that in thirty years I will look back and scoff at how foolish I was to think this way, I have not found any alternative for going forward than to advocate through this story the above-stated opinion, that our actions are predominantly reactive. It seems to me that pure self-determination is akin to silence. From the point of view that when making decisions from the sort of vacuum implied in a completely self-interested environment, actions are undertaken from a base that is utterly tranquil and conducive to clearly defined visions. Who could ever make that assertion, except for the dead? More often than not, real life more closely resembles noise, in that we must find our way through a muddled cacophony of the lights, sounds, and movements of the things happening around us, and we hope to pick out the best course given our environment.

I apologize if I have steered you to overly philosophical grounds. And yet, there you are, reading along, trying to make sense of it, this little piece of writing that you cannot control. You might agree or disagree with me, but that’s my point. Your reaction counts in some way, but not in every way you might like. Were you able to control every single factor introduced to your life, you might opt to have me downgrading an eastern-style attitude, but you are utterly incapable of doing that, and so you are left with nothing but your reaction to this thing. You are, in an existential sense, capable of dismissing what I have written, or of directing your browser away from this bit of composition. But, in so doing, you would be merely reacting, not entirely acting in the course of your own free will, because an outside factor prompted your action. To put it in simpler terms, there are many things in life that touch us, and most times those things are beyond our control.

And therein lies the great responsibility of being a storyteller. The beauty of the art lies in the fact that, if he is skilled, he is capable of crafting robust portraits using all tools imaginable. But beyond that, there is an overriding obligation to present something of value to the audience.

I have spent the last 22 days dreaming up all sorts of things about the world of Richard Pruitt. I have dutifully sketched outlines, characters, sentences, conversations, scenarios, and a considerable quantity of rules and explanations for what Dead Rich can and cannot see or explain. I am still quite short of finalizing several characters’ names but, as I have mentioned previously, this matter will resolve itself in due time. Some of the pieces I have written are short, sometimes only a couple of lines. Other pieces, such as my work from three days ago, are much longer, to the tune of five single-spaced pages or more. In fact, I have several pages of notes that I have not yet typed up, and upon each of these I will compose vastly longer tracts of polished detail.

The following analogy is appropriate for my work to this point:

Imagine that you are standing on the bank of a wide, smooth river. Next to you is a pile of rocks, varying in size, shape and color. Some of the rocks are already present, but some appear unexpectedly. Occasionally, and in an unpredictable manner, you throw these rocks into the river. Eventually, after more and more stones are thrown, something resembling a bridge will appear. With a little time and effort, you will have enough of a foundation to gain a solid footing, and you will eventually begin walking across the bridge, filling in the spaces as you pass them, on your way to the other side of the river.

Currently, I am in the process of throwing rocks, and the outline of the bridge has formed. This river is quite wide, however, and only the portion of the bridge nearest to me is clear as of this moment. I am unsure of how long it will take before I will be certain of my ability to cross, but I know that I will get there given time.

In a somewhat unrelated note, and in closing, I will divulge a few clues behind one particular sentence that will in all certainty make it into the final draft. This sentence came to me this evening when I was walking up Michigan, on my way home from the movie theater. I would go so far as to say that it is the single most beautiful sentence I have ever composed. It contains a snippet from the Bible, a phrase from Hamlet, a line from a poem by Robert Hunter, and, a long sequence of words of my own invention. I would be highly amused and most thrilled if, at some point in the future, one of you were to come to me and say, “I was reading Pruitt, and I found the sentence you alluded to on What I See.” I am excited to have created it, because I seem to have captured and refined a certain style of composition that prevailed in my younger days when, though I had much less to say and my style was considerably cruder, I could write with a sense of genuine poetry, nuance, and urgency. I am hoping that the resurrection of this style is a harbinger of great things to come, because, although I cannot attempt to cross the hypothetical river just yet, I am anxious to begin throwing in the tinier, considerably more philosophical rocks that will eventually serve as the mortar of the bridge.

Another Day that Just Happened to Be a Tuesday

I couldn't sleep last night. I don't know why. Maybe I'm just nuts. I remember looking at the clock at 3:25 and falling asleep shortly thereafter. At 7:45, I heard rumblings in my apartment. I tried to ignore it. I thought to myself, 'Ignoring it will drive it away.' Wrong. I pushed my head deeper into the pillows. It did not go away. I smelled my brother’s cologne. I wondered why he was in my apartment so early, and I remembered that the law library doesn’t open until 8:30. He’s begun prepping for finals, so all the power to him. He closed the door to my bedroom. It’s a nice gesture, but a completely ridiculous one, because there’s a huge space in the exterior wall separating my bedroom area from the den area. It’s nearly as silly as rebuilding New Orleans, because the shit will eventually come flooding right in regardless.

This he turned on the television, and flipped over to ESPN. There was a story about the Bears’ defense, and Alex Brown and Nathan Vasher made an appearance. They were talking about (what else?) respect. Football players love to talk about respect, as though anyone in their right mind would intentionally disrespect a 6’6, 320 killing machine. Jeremy Schaap was feeding them easy questions about members of the team, and they blew nearly all of them. I mean, what Chicagoan doesn’t know that Brian Urlacher went to Lovington High School in New Mexico? There’s a gigantic Nike ad of him in his high school jersey on the building, right before you get on the highway at Ohio. Each of these guys must have seen it at least fifty times. Come the fuck on. Good team chemistry, like good defense in baseball, is just something people say when your team is winning. Anyway, I didn’t care much about what they had to say, because my new favorite player on the Bears is Tank Johnson. Because Todd Johnson and Bryan Johnson are also on the roster, “TANK JOHNSON” is written across his nameplate. How awesome is that? In my opinion, that makes it the coolest jersey in sports.

Through the wall in my bedroom, I could hear the neighbors playing with their newborn baby. These people form the height of irritation. They bitch and moan to the building office that about loud noises late in the evening, but I don’t call downstairs to complain when they blast the Teletubbies at the ass crack of dawn. Before having getting pregnant, maybe they should have looked into moving out to the 'burbs like every other normal, young family. It’s not my problem they’re shitty planners, or were too dumb to realize the win-some-lose-some nature of living in a high-rise. In retaliation, I make it a point to turn up the subwoofer on my computer while conducting late-night research into the sexual inclinations of the average American male on any variety of free porn sites. Growing up in a small two-bedroom apartment, the kid is bound to learn about sex pretty early anyway. F them.

It was about 8:15 when my brother answered a call from his office. My dad was out of the office all day, and the secretaries were apparently all in a tizzy over the fact that they didn’t have definite word as to whether they could wear jeans to work tomorrow, it being the last day of the work week. My brother made some wise crack about how they should be thankful that my dad already gave them Friday off and would probably let them go early tomorrow as well, but nonetheless promised to call my dad and find out. He did, and it was a strinkingly odd conversation. After about five minutes of talking with the volume turned on, he suddenly switched the television off and said, “I’m at the library already,” thereby establishing the world's all-time worst attempt at recovery.

By that point I was fully awake but groggy, but I really didn’t feel like getting out of bed just yet. So I rolled over and started reading Sherlock Holmes. As soon as my brother left, at about 8:30, I jumped out of bed to check my email and make a couple phone calls. I was back in bed by 10.

At 12, I heard the phone ring and saw it was my brother, but chose to ignore it for no good reason. I went into the bathroom and started the sink and the shower, when the phone rang again. It was the doorman. The phone hadn’t even stopped ringing when I heard the door unlock. The cleaning ladies entered my apartment just as the phone dumped into voicemail. Thanks for the heads-up, you bastard doorman. I know why he did it—to bust my balls. The morning guy is an East Indian who doesn’t get on too well with my brother, so he sometimes pulls small dick moves like that to piss me off. I’d like the record to show that I take a lot of crap from people with whom I would otherwise have normal relations, if only my brother didn’t piss them off or vice versa. Why we can’t be treated as two separate entities, I’ll never know.

I hoped to get the cleaning people to leave so I could clean up, but they don’t speak a word of English. In fact, two weeks ago I left them a note that I’d hoped they would bring to their boss to translate, explaining that I was broke and would inform them in the near future when to resume their services. I honestly think they mistook it for garbage and threw it away. Also, in true Meat fashion, I lost the damn number for the cleaning service, so I guess I'm not cancelling the service.

My brother tried calling once more just as I was lathering up to shave. I think I mentioned in an earlier post that my old phone broke, but Murton was nice enough to give me one of his old phones until Verizon starts to offer the Razr. His ring tone was “Nuthin’ But a G Thang” by Snoop Dogg, and because he forgot the combination to unlock the phone features, I haven’t been able to change it—nor do I really want to, come to think of it. During the digital rendition of this hip-hop classic, I heard one of the ladies utter something to the other that ended with the word “murzyn,” which is Polish for the really bad name for African-Americans. I burst out laughing and nearly butchered myself, because I was in the midst of going over my chin with my razor.

I stood in the shower for a long, long time, hoping to hide in there until the cleaning ladies left. Uh, wrong. I came out of the shower and they were waiting to clean the bathroom. Hey, at least they’re thorough! I hastily dressed, threw some money on my desk, and left the apartment, with my hair still dripping wet.

I wandered down to Seamus’ restaurant, and had lunch with Day, Seamus’ roommate. He was down in Champaign this weekend, to see the Northwestern-Illinois football game as well as to visit his brother, who’s enrolled in law school down there. We filled each other in on the details of the weekend, and it was a quality lunch. Day left, and I shot the shit with Seamus for a while. Most of the conversation was dominated by the displeasures caused by my brother telling Proehl that all these people think Proehl has an eating disorder, and about how the sell-out makes it nearly impossible to approach Proel about the problem in a serious manner. I told Seamus that this should be expected, because my brother is renowned for playing both sides against the middle. Everyone is a free agent in his eyes. That’s just how it is. I deal with it.

I walked back up to my place and stopped at the barber shop next to the Chicago Red Line stop. I used to go to Truefitt and Hill in the Bloomingdale’s Building, but a regular haircut there is $65 with tip and, like I said, I’m broke. This woman charges only $25 with a tip, which is more agreeable with the current state of my budget. Seamus had been going there since it opened, and he had pretty good things to say for the most part. Plus, it’s in a space formerly occupied by a shady pawn shop, so I figure: support a clean business might clean up the strip of shit a little. Because the city made the immensely unwise decision to extend the long-term lease on the Lawson YMCA several years ago, that corner is dominated by a collection of human shitbags like you would not believe. It’s not unsafe per se, but it’s still bad enough that the barber woman feels the need to keep the door locked at all times. I can't tell you how many ugly looks I got from crackheads and drunks while I was sitting there getting my haircut, or how many of them would have jumped right in and raped the woman given the chance. The only people who say gentrification is a bad thing are the people who live far, far away from the idiots getting kicked out.

The barber woman was a very nice lady, but she went way too short with my hair. My mom is going to cry when she sees it. One downside of getting my hair cut really close, and the reason why I keep it relatively long, is that short hair makes my head look fucking gigantic. I never considered my jaw to be overly large until I looked in the mirror this afternoon. Seriously, I was like, “Woah, Jay Leno!” I am aware of the fact that I have a huge nose—remember, Italian + Irish = Jewish nose—but this haircut adds fuel to the fire. At least if she hadn’t shaved off my sideburns I’d have some cover, but they’re merely a shade of what they once were. It’s not like it matters, though. As the lady remarked, “I feel like your hair is growing even as I cut it.” I tipped her well and told her to remember me, because I’d probably be back once a month.

I went home. My place was clean and empty. I shot down a job in Philadelphia, and sent out a few more resumes. Seamus came over on his way to class, and as we were leaving my apartment, we heard some shouts from the guy across the hall. I mentioned this to the doorman, and he said the guy across the hall is a Greek, and he’s got a fire-y personality. No shit. Apparently he's the one the baby couple has been complaining about, so I felt bad for chastising them...for all of three seconds.

Seamus ducked into class, and I took a long walk down Michigan, back up to North, and home. It was a pretty typical dark, winter early evening. I talked to my G-Man buddy for a bit; he’s driving home Friday. I bought a Gatorade and cigs, and went back upstairs.

That brings me to right now, and I’m pretty bored. I’m thinking about going to see the new Harry Potter movie, but I’m not sure how great of an idea this is. After all, I blew a chunk of my scarce funds today, and we’ll probably go to a movie with the family at some point this weekend. Then again, screw it. If they go out to the theater, I’ll watch Rome and Curb, because those a-holes watched it while I was talking to the G-Man’s parents at dinner Sunday night.

It's supposed to snow tonight. That’s just great. Life couldn’t be better, but it could definitely be more interesting. I need a job.

Oprah

Don't even get me started.

Where Have You Gone, PVC Nova?

I haven't posted anything since Thursday, and even that was just a mini-rant. I apologize to those of you looking to me for entertainment over the weekend. A breakdown of the weekend, then:

Friday, I made a half-assed attempt at gathering signatures for a guy who's decided to try to get on the gubernatorial ballot at the very last second. I got a whopping total of four signatures all afternoon. My friends were completely non-committal when I asked them to sign, as they are pretty much all Republicans to the core. To be honest, I didn't even know this guy was a Democrat until I saw a news story about him after I signed on to help, and now I feel like a jerk for not looking into it before agreeing. But, hey, this is Chicago, and there's not really such a thing as a Chicago Republican, excluding my family and close friends.

My sister also signed up to help. Her efforts were limited to walking around Lincoln Park for a couple hours Saturday afternoon. After gathering barely a handful of signatures, she gave up and retired to Kincaid's. Really, who can blame her? The response she got was less than lukewarm. Even admitted Democrats told her, "He doesn't have a chance." No kidding. When I told her that I was not too geared up to help this guy because he's a Democrat, she said, "Well, I'm not a Republican anyway." Then I remembered: when she went to law school, she finally made a non-white, non-Christian friend for the first time in her 25th year, and suddenly became a head-fake communist, $800 Burberry coat and $300 Brooks Brothers suit and all.

So, back to me, I gave up seeking signatures after about an hour, and focused my attention on setting up my brother's birthday party. One of his friends--the Wej--and I drove up to Seamus's house, where we set up the keg, then hurried back downtown for dinner. Seamus and Bill were already at my place drinking beers and waiting for dinner. This was all done without my brother's knowledge; since we were trying to pull off a surprise party, we figured it'd be best to be as shady as possible until the very last minute. I left them and headed up to my brother's at quarter to eight.

On the walk up Dearborn, I ran into Sheehan and Johnny the Red. It was an extremely awkward meeting. They were going to see "Walk the Line," and seeing as they know how much I love Johnny Cash, I was pretty pissed that they didn't even call me. Who knows? Johnny the Red was like, "That's so weird, Pat. I was just saying, 'What's up with Pat?'" I wanted to say, "And what reason did Sheehan give for blowing me off? I invited him to this party I'm putting together, but he didn't respond." But I held my tongue. Sheehan can be a really weird guy, and I feel like he's tried to make a group of friends without me. So I reminded them about the party, but I knew they wouldn't show up, because apparently I wasn't on the cool guy list that night. Hold on a second while I recover from the disappointment.

I met Proehl in front of my brother's and we went upstairs. Murton had a buddy in from Boston, and my brother finally came downstairs after making us wait for a half hour. Then the five of us walked over to Orso's, and the other three guys who were in my apartment showed up a few minutes after us--those three being Seamus, Bill and the Wej. Not surprisingly, we got really trashed and insulted most of the people in the small restaurant. I kept waving my arms around my head, shouting, "Hey! We're in public, not at my house!" No one seemed to care, though, and midway through dinner I gave up trying to impose an edit-button function. My brother forgot to get a smoking table, so we had to get up to go outside to smoke. They have an outdoor bar out back that's enclosed with a tent-like covering in the winter. It sure beat going outside, or standing in the small bar area.

After dinner, Bill and I ran out to a cab and unlocked Seamus' house. When the rest of them arrived, we were like, "Surprise!" And my brother was like, "Surprise what?" And I was like, "Surprise, we got you a keg!" It wasn't much of a surprise, to be honest, but that's okay. At least we tried.

A few more people showed up, but I don't even remember who was at the party. Proehl started doing kegstands the second he got there. Then someone began floating rumors that he had an eating disorder, something I refused to take part in. Maybe he just stopped eating like crap, or got off the couch more than once a month. For example, old Proehl would have never walked the six blocks from my brother's to the restaurant, but new Proehl laughed when I asked if we should hail cabs. Who knows? He has disappeared over the last few months, because he got a girl. Well, whatever. It's bound to happen. Who, I ask, who has ever gotten a girlfriend without pissing off his buddies? It's just not possible to invent extra time. It's funny how you don't realize how much your friends need you around until you're not around anymore.

At one point, most of the party disappeared, off to some bar. I missed that train, however, because I was deeply engaged with someone I don't know about the war in Iraq. I wasn't sure why they needed to go to the bar, but I know my brother was behind the push. He's always behind the "let's go anywhere but here" push, and it never really goes anywhere. I'm sure he goes into the bar intending to hit on girls, but he mostly just ends up getting really piss-drunk and screaming instead. Ah, genes.

At quarter to six, the keg finally kicked. Seamus, House, and Katie Belfour were still conscious, and said they were going to House's to drink more. I got in a cab with them, but stayed on after we dropped them off at House's. I had the cabbie drop me off at McDonald's on Chicago and got me some grease. When I was walking past my Starbucks, I looked up at them and saw that they were laughing at what a mess I was. I was completely stumbling, but whatever. It was my brother's birthday party, so screw them. Make me an espresso, and shut up.

I got home, ate, and typed up a blog post. I thankfully passed out before I could publish it, because it turned out to be an incomprehensible rant about nothing in particular, riddled with drunken cursing and illogical trains of thought.

I woke up at one the next afternoon with a screaming headache, and rolled over again until five. I was in bad shape. At six, I rallied, showered, and went out for a walk. That's when I called my sister and got the report on her attempted signature-gathering endeavor. She wanted me to go out with her and her friends, but I was in no condition to go bar hopping. Also, Seamus called and said he wanted to get dinner and see the new Harry Potter movie, but he ended up blowing me off. It was just as well, because I was in the mood to spend the night alone.

Michigan Avenue was jammed with people, because of the Christmas season kick off parade. I'm not kidding--there must have been a million people out there. The stores were open late, and the restaurants were totally jammed. I was happy that south Michigan was mostly empty. I wandered around the area of the Loop near the Art Institute, to do some location spotting for Pruitt. I made a bunch of notes about details I'd gotten wrong when writing from memory, came up with a few character names, and had a couple cigs on the steps of the A.I. Then I walked through Millenium Park, back up Michigan, and over toward my house.

I stopped by McDonald's for the second time that day, because I decided that my arteries aren't quite clogged enough. I also ran over to the grocery store and loaded up for the week. I love going into stores just before they close. I can't deal with lines. After unolading my groceries, I reclined on my couch and flipped around the t.v. for the rest of the night. I read some Sherlock Holmes before passing out.

This morning, I woke up at 10 and thought about going out for some signatures at the churches near my house, but thought better of it. I watched the Bears pre-game shows and the game. I can't believe they beat Carolina! Holy cow! Maybe they're actually better than everybody thought. At what point will people consider them a legitimate threat, and not the beneficiaries of a weak schedule? Maybe if they win a playoff game, but probably never. All I know is, the Bears defense is ridiculously scary.

Mom called at halftime and said she was coming down to pick up my sister, because my brother took the car up to the 'burbs yesterday and stayed overnight. She got back from Florida yesterday afternoon and brought my grandpa home with her. This is the first time in years he's been in Chicago during the winter. He's developed some mysterious liver problem, which is amazing on several levels. On one hand, though he was in the liquor business for forty years, he never, ever drinks. On the other, he's 87 years old, and it's remarkable that this is the first medical crisis of his life. I can't remember him ever staying overnight in a hospital before last week, so it must be pretty serious. He'll be okay, but if not, he's lead a good, long life. That seems to be his take on it, which is much better than my paternal grandma's situation, as she is depressed and praying to die, but will probably live to be 120.

So that's that. I'm going to shower, walk for a little bit, and take the El the rest of the way home once I get sick of walking. Not too exciting, but not exactly nothing either.

Meeting of Two Deplorable Characters

How did Jesse Jackson get himself involved in the Terrell Owens controversy? I mean, I look good in a suit, have a big mouth, and am completely unaffiliated with pro football. Can I run to T.O.'s aid? The answer is: No, of course not, because television cameras wouldn't show up if I called a press conference. Also, I'm not capable of threatening the league with a ridiculous, contrived shake-down.

Is T.O. being discriminated against because of his race? Hardly. The Eagles suspended him because he's a selfish, unprofessional baby. So will someone explain to me: At what point did Jesse go from using the banner of civil rights to line his own pockets, to unqualified advocate for assholes?

Pruitt Day 15

Well, well! Surprise, surprise! I realized that there's no way in hell I can finish writing and editing a 50,000-word version of Pruitt before the end of the month. It's not that I can't keep up with the pace, mind you; I could just blurt out all sorts of nonsense. Look at this blog, for example. I bet I post 50,000 words or so per month, but there's no cohesion, no intention, no point. It takes a long time to formulate strong characters, settings, dialogue, etc. I could have come up with the 50,000 words easily enough. However, I refuse to let an idea this good turn into some sort of piece of crap; I will not let it die an early death because I felt rushed.

I've got about 10,000 words so far, and those are definitely in rough draft form--some dialogue, certain paragraphs, short-hand descriptions, names, set ideas, floorplan sketches. In other words, it is merely a skeleton, but what a skeleton it is. Over this past weekend, the plot sprouted into being in a serious way. Names continue to be a bit of a problem, but I figure I can take my time with those, or put them off until the final draft. Until then, the text is sprinkled with code names, such as BUDDY2, SISTER, and BOSS. That will do for now.

The format will be as follows: I. Prelude; II. Morning; III. Afternoon; IV. Evening; V. Epilogue. I originally intended to create the story in four sections (or acts, I suppose)--intro, day, night, outro. Then I realized the possibilities for having three main sections comprising the body of the story. The prelude, as well as the epilogue, will be Rich in heaven, looking back on the day, and serve as the story's cornerstones. The morning will start with Rich in a low mood, rising ever so slightly. The climax will likely be more like a plateau, spreading out across the course of the third section, serving as a keystone to the preceding and following sections. The fourth section will be critical in that it will present Rich's reaction to the story's climax, and his anticipation for its effect on his life, with a gradual turn downward, as the story slowly accelerates toward his demise.

The morning and afternoon are nearly completely plotted out. Ideas as far as the other three sections are slight but hearty for the moment; I have no doubt that these will firm up once I set my mind to doing it. At any rate, those portions can remain incomplete for the moment, as the daytime plot points are more important and immediately necessary to understanding the purpose of the remainder of the tale.

The problem with meeting the volume requirement is strictly a question of quality. Everything in this story has to be completely authentic and believable. It is a fiction, but it will be a fair reflection of things as I see them. That means capturing vague societal commentaries, the feeling of the experience of being, and myriad other details about the relationships, pleasures, and the state of the world around us. This story will be approachable yet comprehensive. I want you to get sucked into this world. For example, when Alive Rich leans against a bar, I want it to feel like you're standing right there with Dead Rich, soaking up everything that's going on in that room. I want to direct a movie in your mind's eye--in my opinion, that's the mark of the great author. I will not presume that the audience knows anything about what I'm describing before I start describing it. I will leave nothing to chance and so, that being the case, I cannot afford to rush it.

The biggest problem I ran into with regard to the word count is that you simply cannot plan or force creativity. You see, sometimes I'll come up with an concept that I know is fantastic and workable, but before I can formulate an approach that captures the depths possible within the idea, I have to hide under the covers and listen to Coltrane, or get a coffee and take a really long walk, or stand at my window and think of nothing whatsoever. I wish I knew how to meditate, though I don't know how effective it would be compared to my other methods, which seem to be working pretty well.

At any rate, I am sorry to say that this book will not be done by the end of the month. It's supposed to be about 150 pages; I have roughly 22 right now. If I bear down and really do my best to flesh it out, I could have between 80 and 100 completed by December 1. I must say that I'm a little disappointed by this realization, but at the same time I am very excited by the prospect of Pruitt. I think it has more promise and a greater likelihood of completion than any other writing project I've undertaken. I'm starting to love this story, and I think you will too.

Access Retardation

Why are so many people addicted to celebrity 'news' magazines? Who the hell cares if Jude Law is fucking his nanny or getting back together with his girlfriend? I know the answer is "women care," but why do women care? The last thing I think of when Maria Sharapova comes to mind is who she's fucking, aside from the fact that I wish it were me. My sisters argue that celebrity watching is the female equivalent of sports, but that's completely ridiculous. I don't know what Michael Barrett does with his free time and, frankly, I could give a shit, so long as it doesn't negatively effect his ability to throw, catch, hit, and run. Athletes hone special skills at which other people marvel; the same could be said of actors, but only if you're watching him or her in the act of performing.

Yet these ridiculous magazines and television shows almost exclusively showcase stars away from work. Well, who the fuck cares?! "Lindsay Lohan went to Starbucks, then bought a bunch of shit she doesn't need at Prada." Big fucking deal! How is that any different than my typical day? "Pat's brother came over to his apartment, then they met Murton at Third Coast Cafe for dinner." Substituting Carson Daly's name for mine shouldn't justify transforming common events into three minutes of network programming.

How do the producers expect us to respond to these idiotic non-stories anyway? Surprise? Incredulity? Or are they some sort of motivational tool for the serverely retarded? "If Sarah Jessica Parker can do mundane bullshit, you can too!" If Marx regarded religion as a drug, imagine the fine things he'd have to say about "Access Hollywood."

Celebrity is beyond fucking stupid.

A Downside of Winter

The wind is howling here like you would not believe. It must be at least 30 miles an hour. Every fifteen seconds, a gust crashes into my building, making a horrendous noise. Tthe streets are almost completely empty. This has much to do with the wind, and also the Bears game. Granted, they are playing a second-division schedule, but I never thought they’d be 6-3. I don’t know how the kickers were able to work in this kind of wind.

I live in a high-rise, so what my neighbors decide to cook, I get to smell. This is especially true in the winter. Because the apartments in my building were arranged so that all of the apartments are situated far from the windows, cooking odors abound.

Today my apartment is full of the distinct reek of burnt toast. Because of the wind, the moron who failed at cooking toast refuses to open his windows. Unfortunately, I am also unable to open my windows, so I’m stuck wallowing in the reek. This odor is so terribly persistent that I’ve decided to brave the gales raging outside, knowing full well that they will likely blow me to the ground at least twice per block. It is, I suppose, a downside of winter.



I'm back from the walk.

It's getting really freakin' cold out! Luckily, I stole a knit Bears cap from my parents' house a coulpe of weeks ago. I admit it: I never really shop, but reather take things here and there from my family members. My brother and dad are bigger shoppers than most guys I know, and they don't mind if I grab things they don't or that look really good on me. All of my white undershirts, for example, are stolen from my dad's closet. My brother has a massive collection of shirts in his closet at home, more than could possibly fit into a rotation. From time to time he'll say, "That's a nice shirt. Where you get that?" And I'll say, "Your closet, about two months ago." Neither of them mind this thievery. They know how little patience I have for shopping, and they tend to enjoy it, so we all win.

To give you an idea of how strong the wind was this afternoon, a 40-foot maple tree was uprooted, lying across the walking path near North & Dearborn in southern Lincoln Park. I remember thinking yesterday that tree must be pretty strong, because it was one of the few in that part of the park with leaves still on it.

Yesterday, the park was covered in a three-inch deep layer of dead leaves. I love walking through leaves. I get a similar satisfaction from walking along the beach, but leaves are so much more colorful and diverse than boring sand, and you don't have to rinse off after kicking around in the leaves. Today, though, the strong wind blew pretty much all of the leaves into the lake, and most of what was left on the trees were stripped off the trees. It felt very cold and lifeless.

Seamus reminds me almost daily, "Winter pays for summer." Frankly, I think summer comes up a little short in that deal.

GD-Related Random Thoughts

I was just listening to B.C.T. 08/21/72, and I finally understood lyrics from "My & My Uncle" that sounded like mubles the other thousand-odd times I listened to that song. "Picked up a bottle / rapped him in the jaw." Now I can't remember what I used to think Bob was singing. How weird is that? If you're a big fan of teases and jams, those shows are full of them. What a great run.


Do you think Pigpen would have stayed in the band for all 30 years? Do you think he could have convinced Garcia to stop using heroin?


This afternoon I was listening to the longest "Dark Star" on record, Rotterdam 05/11/72. It's downright hysterical how badly Phil wants to do "Bird Song." Did you know they dropped it for almost a year, from summer '71 to summer '72? It's really too bad, because their style of play during that period would have made for some beautiful versions. Then again, right when they they introduced it back into the repertoire, they launched into super-jazzy mode, so maybe "Bird Song" acted as the catalyst for the shift.

Setlists can be misleading, and revisiting a theme does not necessarily indicate the strength of the show. Sometimes the return to a theme is purposeful and driven, resulting from the band's collective thought, like Paris 05/03/72. Other times they go back to it by default, because they've gotten lost in the jam, and the version is not too inspired, such as San Diego 11/14/73. I only bring this up because, over the last several days, I've been furiously flipping back and forth between Furthurnet and Archive.org, attempting to gather all the multiple "Other One" shows.


Early '70s Dead is the best. I would give anything to go back in time and see the Wall of Sound in all its glory.



I love the Dead as much as I did ten years ago, and the reason is simple: They made freely available such a massive amount of great material, that it's practically impossible to run out of new things to discover. Who says the Dead are dead?

Random Thought of the Day

Would you consider Oakland general manager Billy Beane to be the Athletics' director?

Pruitt Day 10

It's gotten very cold here over the last couple days, but I still need to take long walks to gather Pruitt ideas. Today I came up with several terrific story twists, conversation set-ups, and a slew of environmental details. Because I always seem to come up with my best ideas when I'm away from the computer, I've started carrying around a little notepad and pen everywhere I go. After winding my way through the Gold Coast, I eventually settled onto a bench at a softball dugout in the southern reaches of Lincoln Park. It was a very good spot for writing in the approaching dusk, because the field's lights were on for no good reason.

The problem was, because of the rapid temperature over the last two days, my hands started shaking after about twenty minutes, to the point that I could hardly make out what I was writing. I went from writing prose to jotting down notes. Some of these include: "New: security. Old: Chilean director. Old: creative cheapness. New: institutional frugality." Stuff like that. I know that doesn't make any sense, but you'll just have to read the book.

I realized this afternoon that I know next to nothing about the industry in which Rich works. This is not a problem, as I will propose reasonable assumptions and conjecture based on the little I do know. Nothing's ever really that complicated if you think about it long enough. It’s rumored that Lefevre never worked in the securities industry, but “Reminiscences of a Stock Operator” couldn’t be more dead-on. I can pull it off if he did, and I’m not even going into nearly as much detail about Rich’s work.

Also, I realized that my new tactic is to create the story that Rich is telling, and overlay the looking back from heaven portions once the story is complete. It sounds strange, but I'm actually trying to get organized for once. I have a very scatter-brained thought process, and I know from past attempts at creative writing that the quality improves when I jump around when writing the story. The final product will not feel like a composite piece, but my writing technique is very much like laying a mosaic--I guess that's the best way to explain it.

Totally off the subject, but what else is new?: My family went to dinner tonight at Kevin, a foofy French-Japanese fusion place on Hubbard. The dinner was in celebration of my sister's Bar Association swearing-in ceremony. Another 1,400 lawyers to make everything much more complicated—let’s have a party. It's funny: Before she went to law school, she was really smug, argumentative, and always ready to screw people. Now, she can do it for a living. Isn't that just wonderful? [I would like to interject somehting here: I'm sure that she would say that I am lazy, dramatic and unpredictable, which are all true. Characteristics are really neither good nor bad; they just are what they are, let's be honest. Nobody's perfect, me least of all.]

Most importantly, this means that now I can get arrested without having to tell my parents. That's a pretty huge perk. Never again will I have to work off my father's legal representation with awful, menial labor. My dad once made me weather-proof the wooden deck at his building. Big deal, right? Well, the building is four-stories tall, the porch space on each floor is quite considerable, and it was about 95 degrees on the day he demanded payment. Between the fumes and the heat, I was a complete mess when I finally made it home about eight hours later. Was he thankful? Hell no! He actually had the balls to ask me if I'd done two coats. I told him to go fuck himself.

Back to dinner, I really thought it was going to be painful. I told my sister, "Club Lucky, Chop House, Rosebud--those are good family dinner choices. Why don't you save places like Kevin for your 'Sex in the City' fan club meetings?" She gave me a dirty look, but there's no denying it's one of those places. They have a different menu every day, which definitely makes me suspicious. Today's menu, for example, was chock-full of asparagus. I had asparagus salad (practically no dressing, with loads of greens that were definitely not lettuce--two cornerstones of the chic restaurant salad), asparagus soup (really amazingly good), and my beef tenderloin (which was the size of a pack of cigarettes) sat on a small pile of asparagus. We talked about foie gras, how Da Mayor wants to ban it, and how he and super-chef Charlie Trotter are battling over the "issue" in the City Council next week. He's got a city of three million people to govern, but his big priority of the moment is ending animal cruelty. If that's not a sign of the coming apocalypse, I don't know what is.

I wound up enjoying dinner much, much more than I thought I would. I'm sort of full, but in anticipation of hating it, I had what I like to call "the poor man's cheese sandwich:" a few handfuls of oyster crackers and a couple slices of cheese. I'm glad I did, though, because the portions at Kevin are comically small. They brought out these really awesome pumpkin wontons that tasted amazing but were roughly the size of a Hershey's Kiss. I'm not kidding--they weren't even big enough to cut open and see what's in them. I'm assuming it was squash, corn, and pumpkin, but I'll never know, because it will be forgotten tomorrow in new-menu-every-day zone. My various asparagus dishes were very good, and the cheese plate made for an excellent (if tiny) dessert. However, the whole time I couldn’t help but think, "I'm spending more on this meal than I will on food for the rest of the week, and I'm only getting a half portion--what a waste.” When it comes to places like Kevin, one of my dad's favorite phrases is certainly applicable: "This is why the terrorists hate us."

As dinner wrapped up and we walked home, my sister's boyfriend started hinting that he wanted to go out drinking. Tonight was the final fall-term SBA meeting, which is short for "Student Bar Association." SBA is an obligation that sounds important when you mention it to your family or colleagues at work, but it's actually a series of all-you-can-drink parties at various different bars near school. (It used to be held strictly at the bar across the street from school, but they knocked the building down to build a new dorm building. I used to hang out with the SBA from time-to-time when I was in b-school, when I was ditching endlessly boring presentations.) These meetings are rumored to be a great time, as everybody almost always hooks up. In fact, my sister met her boyfriend at one of these events. Between my sister and my brother, I have had a family member at their law school for nearly four years, yet I have somehow never been invited to come along, in spite of the fact that non-student friends are more than welcome. What bullshit is that? I’m aware I have become something of a social pariah due to my raging black outs, but above and beyond that, my family absolutely lives to cock-block me.

At any rate, my sister decided she wasn't up for it, so that probably means her boyfriend wasn't going either. How messed up is it that they had the swearing-in on a Thursday afternoon? Her graduation was on a Saturday, and it was totally awesome. I got completely wasted at dinner with the rest of my family; was ejected from a party for making fun of the host (how was I supposed to know the guy’s dad was gay?); and walked all the way from Wrigley to my house in a suit in the pissing rain. That's celebration at its finest.Tonight was more of a formality, and I hate formal. But I had a really good time tonight, and I wasn't going to ruin it by getting drunk and making everybody uncomfortable. So they went their merry way, and I went up to my apartment, turned on the computer, and continued jamming on these scrawled notes.

Carl, the radio show, an old townhouse, and an intentionally abandoned set of keys await...

Evaluation

What I See seems to have evolved over the months. Early posts were dominated by an air of partying and general irresponsibility, but now it's all about my thoughts, reactions, and things of a slightly more adult nature. I fear this is a sign that I might be growing up a little.

Well, fuck all of that. Balls. Shit. Cock. Motherfucker.

There. That's more like it.

Random Thought of the Day

I've given some thought lately to shaving in a really ridiculous facial hair set-up. If bullpen pitchers can get away with it, why can't unemployed apiring authors as well? After all, I can shave if I have an interview, and in the meantime it'll be funny to look like a complete hillbilly.

Sergio Mitre of the Cubs had a great nonsensical beard-goatee thing going for a while. When he showed up at the park with that odd arrangement on his face, and someone announced it was publicity photo day, I bet he soiled his drawers. I mean, look at him! He looks like a devil! Too bad he can't throw like one...

Great Book

Sports fans who have not yet done so: go read "Summer of '49" by David Halberstam, and then you can stop being ashamed of yourself. It's one of those books that you wish was 100,000 pages long. I flew threw it for about the tenth time this past weekend, and I’m thinking about reading it again; it’s that good. “Teammates,” which is a similar yet different story, is also awesome winter reading. I lost my copy of it somewhere—damn it!

When I was studying for my history degree, I often found myself a lonely defender of Halberstam’s type of history. Academic purists loved to belittle that style of writing in favor of primary sources and weighty academic tomes. I argued that they were completely missing the point. Before digging through primary material, I always found it valuable to turn to a Halberstam-style history first, to gain an immediate sense of the vibrancy and human perspective surrounding an historical event. Halberstam's works were not crafted as textbooks. Rather, they are songs about the experience of people’s lives. Popular histories (by Halberstam, Mailer, Royko, Ambrose, etc.) are akin to Francis Scott Key’s National Anthem. They are not to be taken as strict histories, but rather as stories about history, and there’s significant value in that.

So what if the public actually derives pleasure from reading these slightly more literary works? If they've gained widespread popularity, then they must be more meaningful for ordinary people than dry, academic accounts of names, dates, and numbers. Americans know shockingly little about history, because schooling typically does a terrible job of making the material sparkle. Kids become turned off by history very early on in the educational cycle, because they disregard it as some painful call-and-answer exercise. This is a terrible shame. If academia took a less effete, elitist view of the popular historians, typical Americans would be more inclined to enrich themselves with some great stories about themselves.

That’s just my two cents.

I guess the point is, click over to Amazon and order up some Halberstam. I could hyperlink to it, but they’re not paying me, so f them!

Random Thought of the Day

Today was the first time in a really, really long time I didn't walk up to the South Pond at the Lincoln Park Zoo. For no good reason, I instead walked with my brother down Michigan Avenue, over to Daley Plaza, and back up Michigan Avenue. It was a supremely beautiful Indian Summer day.

I guess this isn't really a thought, but it is pretty random.

Pruitt Day 8

This post would likely make me look really out of my mind, if it weren't for this caveat at the top.

Most of the writing battle lies in just getting started. Sometimes I sit down at the computer without a clue as to what I'm about to write, but I always come up with something. My emails to friends are legendary and often uninentionally lengthy. What I See is the answer to this problem. It spares your guys' email inboxes, and presents my typically drawn-out thoughts in a somewhat organized fashion, so that you can come by and enjoy it at your leisure. I wish I had saved some of my more infamous email messages, because I'd love to do a regular "What I See Classics" series. If anybody has some of these in your inbox or elsewhere, please forward them to me so I can post them. In particular, I really wish I had "Dear Paul Bako."

One of the most valuable lessons I learned at Villanova is: If it doesn't sound right when you read it out loud, then you didn't write it correctly. So I just type away furiously, about whatever is on my mind, and most of the time I talk to myself as I write. Even if it turns out to be unusable garbage, it gets the juices flowing and overcomes mental barriers that are in place for no good reason. This part of the process is like untying knots, and since untying knots can be a haphazard, trial-by-error process, I usually wind up deleting most of these pieces.

Since I set up What I See as a kind of clearinghouse for compositions of all sorts, I've decided to post a snippet of one of these knot untying sessions from yesterday. This is, after all, What I See, and this part of the story is what I've been focused on in my spare time--which is admittedly quite immense--for the last several days.

By the way, Sheehan came up with a great new name for the main character. In a signature Sheehan moment--that being, his ability to make you think to yourself, "Why the hell didn't I think of that?"--he blurted out, "Don't start over; just change his name to Pruitt." It works better--it flows off the tongue a little easier, and it has more prospects as far as creating nicknames goes. So be it: The Death of Richard Pruitt.

Now, on to untying knots....



The fulcrum of this story is that Rich decides to quit pleasing everybody else all of the time. Maybe it's a shedding of naiveté or immaturity or who knows what. Bad guys never consider themselves to be pieces of crap. I don't think bad people go around with the thought in their minds, "Man, I can't wait to be a cancer and cause bad things to happen." Evil often ensues when selfishness effects of all decisions, and outcomes for other people get ignored. Also, it's easier to screw people over when you appear to have the right to do so, or when you can put the chaos you've wroght on others out of your mind.

This bad person's motives might be deeper than even they are aware. Is it ridiculous to assume that, after a while, bad people start to get off on being bad? I think they begin to reconcile the rightness of any superficial benefit to himself. He begins to judge things based soley on whatever positive outcome he gained, even after he becomes aware of the overall negative effects of his actions. For dumb people cannot be considered bad; they might be myopic, maybe, but not bad. Real bad guys are usually intelligent in the most extreme sense imaginable; he knows of the evil which he might cause, but he’s beyond moralistic examinations. Bad Guy learned how to ignore the negative results of his actions, because the direct positive benefits he gained have clouded his perspective; selfishness became a virtue. At that point, Bad Guy embodies terribly bad qualities, especially as perceived by others—i.e. the accumulated marginal negativity of his actions, ignorance of the reactions by those around him. Bad Guy doesn’t take satisfaction in overcoming; a desire to annihilate excites him; he reasons that competition will always yield to sinister. The bad streak will be like caramel ice cream: fundamentally boring vanilla ice cream, but with a strain of caramel running through; after eating it for a while, the caramel overwhelms the vanilla. His badness will not evolve from a principal level, but in a way that will show marginal overshadowing the bulk of good. He will not ultimately be liked, but the all the different sides of him will be understood.

Good and evil manifest themselves in subtle ways, and often masquerade as one another. Pruitt will make decisions in a gradual way, reacting while contributing. The final round will be the brief culmination of small activities. Think cooking ingredients--a little of this, a little of that. Pruitt is looking back onto the events of the last day of his life, so he has the benefit of objectivity. He sees how Bad Guy was intending, and he sees the outcomes of his actions. You can't make the Bad Guy too good, because after all Richard does screw him in the end. Likewise, Rich can't bee too good, because the audience needs to feel like they can relate to this guy, so it would be unwise to create a character who's some sort of ideal.

To add to the human experience element of the story, find ways to touch upon language and reactions as clumsy communicators. The focus should largely be on the last day of this guy's life. How to condense yet maintain the depth of the story? Avoid flashbacks and back-story narratives if possible.

The Most Important Post Ever

Made you look!

Insanity Disguised as Creativity

Blah blah blah. That's about what I'm coming up with right now.

I'm on this every other day cycle of creativity. Sometimes there's this wild stream of ideas that come at me, and my fingers act like a nozzle, forcing the stream into something effective and directed. Other days there's no nozzle, and I'm just all over the place. Today is definitely a nozzle-free day. The ideas are there, but I'm not in control of them, and the writing feels like some sort of excercise in free-form composition.

This post, for example, is an example of nozzle-free writing. I don't have any good stories at hand, no insights I feel like sharing. Regardless, I could just go on and on and on about absolutely nothing for an indeterminate length of time. I can throw my writing into jamming mode: just give me the theme, and I can go off for hours. My grade school gym teacher used to threaten us with writing 1,000 word essays about life inside a ping-pong ball. I warned him once that I could do it without problem, that I would in fact do it in my spare time. He must have believed me because he started to threaten me instead with having to do the "wall sit." I was able to do that for hours as well, but it was definitely a considerably less enjoyable experience.

Today's writer's block is caused by the fact that Richard Pratt turns out to be the Fascist of the Frontier. (See comments of "Pratt Day 3.") Every approach I take is blocked by this terrible realization, because that name has been attached to the story idea for so long. But, in all honesty, I don't even love it that much. It works insofar as it's a play on my own name, and Pratt is a main street in Lincolnwood, the town where I was born and spent my early childhood. But it sort of rolls off the tongue a little awkwardly--the way you have to return to that "r" sound in quick succession kills the flow of it. I intend on Googling the new name to ensure that it's not associated with some nefarious chapter of history.

So I'm going to get really bombed tonight and bandy about stupid name ideas. This will surely confuse people--a shitfaced guy sitting at the bar, randmonly blurting out invented names. And when they ask me what the hell I'm doing, I'll be quick to respond, "Don't be alarmed; it's only insanity disguised as creativity."

Pratt Day 3

The World of Books
by Clarence Day

The world of books
Is the most remarkable creation of man
Nothing else that he builds ever lasts
Monuments fall
Nations perish
Civilizations grow old and die out
And after an era of darkness
New races build others
But in the world of books are volumes
That have seen this happen again and again
And yet live on
Still young
Still as fresh as the day they were written
Still telling men's hearts
Of the hearts of men centuries dead



The Writing of Richard Pruitt
by pvcnova

I'm creating Richard Pruitt
Because I want to be wealthy
And to do something on my own
And to make people happy
And to marry a gorgeous woman
And to walk my kids to school every day
And not to sit in some fucking office
And not to dread life

Rejoice!

Good news: I just installed the Blogger plug-in for Word, so the days of posts without capitalization, riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, are over. I'm sure you're as thrilled with this development as I am.

Carry on.

Home Entertainment(?)

Here's a run-down of what's on t.v. today, for those of you stuck in an office and/or out of the country:

News: Something about the guy who planned the London and Madrid bombings. It's on every channel, to the point that I've become totally disinterested. Also, the new Supreme Court nominee. Democrats are suspicious; Republicans adore him. Go figure. All I know is, his daughter looked mighty fine at the press conference.

Financial: Vioxx doesn't cause heart attacks. My ass. I took one once, and my heart started thundering as though I had just run a marathon--or, 50 yards, all things being relative. So, Merck's stock shed 40% because they killed people, but it's up 7% because they won't get in trouble for it. We should be ashamed.

Sports: Football. Occasionally a basketball or hockey story, but mostly just football.

Broadcast: Soap operas, soon to be followed by court shows or talk shows.

Music: Reality shows starring teenagers or celebrities, all the freakin' time.

Public: Kids shows. Why doesn't Rick Steves launch a hostile attack on WTTW and program nothing but his own shows all the time? You gotta love a commercial-free show about the quintessential nerdy uncle eating exotic foods.

If, in the future, you find yourself gazing out the office window, and start to wonder what's on television at that moment, don't even waste your time. There is absolutely nothing on daytime t.v. Honestly, there's better programming at 3 a.m. than 11. You'd think that 100 years of television and film history would produce enough good material, such that there would always be something worth watching on t.v. Fat chance.

Before I write for the rest of the day, I need to turn my brain off for a bit so I can approach the story from a fresh point of view. I sketched out a few good characters last night, and I figured out this morning why he was where he was when he gets killed. The plot thickens...

Pratt Day 1

I finally entered a writing contest. I have to come up with about 50,000 words over the course of November and mold them into something resembling a novel.

I took a long, long walk this afternoon to clear my head and iron out some details of some ideas that came to me overnight. I decided over the weekend that I would go with the Pratt story, because I've given it the most thought over the last few months.

I turned off all the lights in my apartment--except for a lava lamp--lit some incense, threw on my big-ass headphones, and started typing whatever came to mind within the Pratt idea. I decided to start the beginning, because I have parts of other sections of the book done, but not much for a while between the intro and the middle. I wrote 3,853 words in about 3 hours, which is a satisfactory pace by any measure. I could have easily done more, but I felt like I laid a good foundation for going forward. I like what I have so far, even though most of it will be scrapped or extensively reworked before all is said and done. Basically, I got halfway through describing his early morning routine. I know certain details will have to be added later, but I'm sure they'll come during future edits.

I've decided that my approach will go something like the following. I'll write like crazy all day and night during the week. On Saturday I'll do some editing, consolidating, composing transition portions, and possibly some real writing. Sundays I will do half-days, maybe 2,000 words to lay the foundation for the rest of the week.

Out of my blackout/hangover of this past Halloween weekend arose some seriously fantastic thoughts regarding the plot. This point has troubled me for some time now--the fact that I had a great beginning, a great ending, but not much in between. Where's the direction of the story going to come from? What's the point? There have to be highs and lows, or I'll risk losing the audience 50 pages in. The plot idea I came up with is a pretty great one, I think. I won't divulge it just yet because it could very well change, and I want you to buy my book. But, as I am a trickster at heart, I've decided to make the death portion of title applicable to the plot itself--not just Rich the man dying, but the self-imposed death of an important portion of his life. Double-entendres kick ass, even when they're not of a sexual nature.

I promise I'll keep blogging about whatever comes to mind, including thoughts about where I am in the writing process. I might even post snippets of the novel as I go along, to see if you guys like it. So keep checking back often.

And that is that: Day one of my first sincere attempt at being an author. Wish me luck...

Confusion

This article really irritates me. Lee came to the plate with nobody on 75% of the time, while Barrett was buried in the seventh or eighth hole until about mid-July. Wouldn't it have made sense to have two of the top hitters in the game batting within one or two spots of each other? Why doesn't Hendry write out the line-ups, leaving Dusty with the "bro-man-buddy" clubhouse details? It just doesn't make any sense. Barrett-Lee-Ramirez 2-3-4 damn it!!

The Picture of Patrick [Blank]

My brother has taken to calling me Dorian, a practice adopted by the rest of my family. I finally asked him why this was, and he said, "You're Dorian Gray, dude. You're the image of Wilde's imagination." He explained that while examining pictures of me from roughly college forward, he noticed that my appearance has not changed one bit. He's right.

I've looked more or less exactly the same since my last growth spurt, roughly 12 years ago. My weight has fluctuated somewhat, swinging maybe 30 pounds or so. My double-chin never goes away, though, regardless of whether I'm a beefy 210 or a slim 180. The uncontrollable mass of hair on top of my head has stayed more or less the same because, well, I can't control it. If I grow it short, it looks long again within two weeks, and there's no discernible difference between long and really long, either. A couple grey hairs have popped in occasionally over the last year or so, but you'd be hard-pressed to notice them because they are rather easily mistaken for one of my occasional blond streaks. The lines of my face have deepened, but very slightly--certainly not as much as one would expect considering that I enjoy drinking, eat nothing but junk food, and smoke a pack of cigarettes a day. My family used to call me Peter Pan, because I'm the boy who never grew up. But, to my knowledge, Peter Pan wasn't much of a partier. The Dorian Gray label is spooky.

I think the unchanging nature of my appearance does nothing but add to my problems, because I really don't look like a grown up, no matter how hard I try. My brother who's five years younger looks older than I do, for God's sake. As my friends begin to bald and/or grey, I simply do not in the least. It's like I'm frozen in time, and I'm starting to think that it has something to do with my inability to get on with life. If I looked forty, I bet I'd have a sweet job. As it is, I still look like I'm somewhere between 21 and 24, so people are inclined to deal with me as though I am a kid. One interviewer said to me last week, "You're too young to be finished with grad school." Really? Since when 28 is too young to be done with grad school? When do people typically wrap up graduate school--after their 50th birthday?!

There's not much I can really do about it, except (I guess) embrace it, continue to abuse myself with blatant disregard for consequence, and smile politely when fielding inquiries as to what I plan on doing with my life after I finish college.