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...
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...
posted by Pat at 12:59 AM
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