Sunday, February 19, 2006

An arctic blast, a shot and a beer - the way the Lord intended it OR Way past midnight at the Oasis

So it’s 10:30 on a Sunday morning, and I am sitting here in my red union suit, like a beardless, slacker Santa, writing this down before my long winter’s nap.

I am just home about a half hour and have about 3 hours of sleep in me. I crashed on some friends’ couch, with the Weather Channel on as a night light. I find weather reports reassuring while resting in unfamiliar places during (or in this case after) arctic blasts.

A guy I talked to last night in a very smoky bar said that he believes everything happens for a divine reason. Hitler? the Taliban? Bush? American Idol? Come on!

But, last night at least, I’m willing to give him benefit of the doubt Why? Because it was just one of those days made for a writer.

First, in late afternoon, there was the sunset. A guy who actually reads the paper I work for sent an e-mail about how two times a year, from his huge ass home in the boonies at least 40 miles from downtown Chicago, the Sears Tower and other buildings blaze in the distant horizon like the brass bottom of a new frying pan.

So I call him about this on Saturday, and he invites me over (Not before apparently inadvertently outing his brother, who is a TV news producer in Los Angeles. This all just by asking how his brother is doing: he’s considering retiring but he’s helping support the family of some guy he used to date. I kid you not.)

The poor guy’s wife has Alzheimer’s, which is another story. Anyway, I look out his back window through his binoculars and you can indeed see the buildings.
Once the sunset comes, just like he said, all of a sudden there are these gleaming objects, flacks on the horizon, shining like souvenir shop trinkets.

It is beautiful.

Blissed out by mother nature (or maybe one of those Listerine breath strips), I make my way to the city.

Once through the place in hell known as the Illinois Tollway System and in on the North Side, things start innocuous enough. My buddy and his girlfriend and I head out for dinner at a mostly empty Thai and sushi, BYOB place, that for some reason has a motorcycle parked inside.

Oh, there were some Mexican guys sitting in their car on the coldest night of the year, in a garage off an alley, listening to norteno music, there on our way to and from the place. And someone left a frozen cake on a back porch. (Wasn’t that a song?)

Anyway, my buddy’s girlfriend tuckers out and stays behind while we go to meet my buddy’s brother, who is a professor of social work in town from Detroit for a conference.

Hailing a cab on the “don’t French kiss a light pole” cold night, a black man carrying a radio and preaching about the end of days to anyone who will listen bustles by the corner of Foster and Kedzie. He busts into a near rhyme of Jesus and penis. something to the effect he’d rather get down with Jesus than Janet Jackson.

Well, whatever your persuasion, I gotta go with Jackson on this one. Plus I’m thinking she’d pay me off big time to keep out of the press that her career has sunk so low that she’s doing some bald, husky guy from the suburbs.

Jesus, he’d be a nag, and would probably want to cuddle and save my soul. Too much work.

So we head to the promised land - I mean bar - a place near Loyola called the Oasis, which I vaguely remember for some reason. Maybe its the package goods store in the front. Or that its like any other no-heirs bar near a big city college.

All is regular dive bar drinking until this chubby bald guy sits down at the corner of the bar. I notice that he had the bartender drop a tall glass of ice water into his pitcher of beer to keep it cold and point this out to my friends.


Eventually, maybe because of all the beer he drank, while my pals are video bowling, he comes up and introduces himself to me. He’s one of those people who stands really close, like he knows you. Or wants to dance with you.

And he loves to talk.

During the course of the next hour or so I learn the following: he worked for a time on a barge in St. Louis; worked as a TV cameraman in Arkansas, a job at which he had a life-changing experience; decided to study theology, first at St. Louis University, now at Loyola, pretty much dedicating his life to being a perpetual student; is going for a masters and his research involves translations, unpublished books of the Bible, and a thesis on the Samaritans role in the text; claims to have a redheaded girlfriend who might have been with someone else last night while he was drinking; is Romanian and Eastern Orthodox, but is angry at the church, especially for how they treated a brilliant but apparently fragile friend; fears the end of days is near; and loves Hank Williams songs to the point of knowing all the lyrics.

No tears in his beers that I notice, but maybe long gone lonesome blue.

I don’t know this much about Playboy centerfolds, my representatives in government, or most of the people I’ve worked with for the last eight years. Of course it very well could all be bullshit.

I get the guy’s e-mail address before he leaves, because if it is bunk, my what a fantasy world he’s created. If it’s true, either way, he’s my ticket to Oprah.

Once he leaves, a buddy of his starts up a discussion about religion, which is not a good beer goggles topic for most. However, since I am part Golden Retriever and part Bill Clinton when I drink I try to build a bridge between Mr. Debate Club and my increasingly drunk and defensive buddy.

Scrawny built, scrawny hair, scrawny beard, dressed in black, the master debater is and always will be a grad student at heart, even if he now works fixing computers and not in the biology lab of his dreams.

Grad man can’t help himself from goading the drunkest of my two buds into more God talk. (The other bud had the good sense to go play pool). He goes so far to call my friend an idiot and tells him to Google “STFU” when he gets home.

Well, that’s not very nice, even for an admitted atheist bordering on nihilist (who later claims to be a humanist). And who likes human label guns, anyway?

So, a little late, to mess with him I start asking him about his big lug friend who left earlier. They did hug, so I thought they might have been more than just drinking buddies.

I tell him I thought his friend was cute and would go out with him if he were gay. He said he couldn’t remember his buddy ever talking about a girlfriend or women and, of course, only knows the other guy from the bar. Of course.

Grad man, of course. is progressively straight, but asks why men don’t hit on him and told me about a dream he had about a less-than-lipstick lesbian.

Hey, I had about four pints of Guinness in me. Plus some beer before dinner, plus a couple glasses of wine after, and maybe a shot, and...OK, stop judging me. I’m a big boy and can handle my liquor.

Thus, my walk on the wild side of the secular humanist seemed funny at the time. My friends thought so when I told them. And it beat talking about religion.

Well, I go take a pee, and Grad Man disappears into the frigid night, assured of his superiority, if not his sexuality (since I am so damn hot myself) I am a sure.

By 4:30 the placed closed. We cabbed back to my friend’s house in a taxi driven by a guy from Nigeria who has family in Ireland, who blared a King Sunny Ade afro-beat tape (and seemed impressed I knew the music).

Who needs church, when you can frolic with faith on the town?

Saturday, February 04, 2006

Deacon Blue: I'm in a lite rock funk

Feeling old and tired lately (hey, it's winter), I've was listening to way too much Steely Dan.

What a weird band that was. Even back in the 70s their songs were often about getting old, dating women way too young and taking on the persona of a suburban creep. Now they actually are what they were singing about.

And their music really was rock and really wasn't jazz and sounded middle of the road but was more subversive than those type of bands.

Well, one thing led to another, and I got myself into a real MOR funk. I actually bought discounted CDs by the likes of Seals and Crofts, Michael McDonald, and Lionel Richie. I’d throw the Go-Gos in there, too, but for the fact I had a crush on Belinda Carlisle until she got fat, then lost weight, then married a Republican and started singing songs far worse than Lionel Richie.

Suddenly I felt like a 55 year old housewife from some lily-white suburb, with my W sticker on the minivan and a megachurch multimedia service to attend.

Seals and Crofts! OK, I like Hummingbird and Summerbreeze. Dumb-ass hippie lyrics but good bad 70s stuff.

Michael McDonald: Weird voice, a white guy trying to sound black. Minute by Minute is his best song, What a Fool Believes is docked a notch because Kenny Loggins wrote it and he is evil.

Lionel Richie wrote great music for 8th graders to make out with each other to. All Night Long isn’t half bad for the whitest black guy ever to record for Motown.

Sometimes you just need to listen to stupid music partially for the laughs and partially because stupid times call for stupid measures.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

The Death of Journalism: Episode VI, Attack of the Drones

If newspapers are dying you need look no further than the one left in my driveway this morning to find out why.

I’m not even going to give you the Web link, because doing so would only be another number for this paper to count as it’s very own. In fact, I’m not going to mention the paper’s name either, for the same reason.

Suffice to say, it was not the Tribune or the Sun-Times but as amusing as when
the big boy papers went ape shit over Queen of All Media Oprah Winfrey
castigating her author buddy for fibbing in his memoirs. (Honey, like that
hasn't been going on since Truman Capote fell in love with a cold-blooded killer.).

The Trib covered it the way the Sun-Times usually covers a Bears game.

Anyway, back to my story.

This paper has been turning up in my driveway for well over a month, though I do not subscribe to it. That’s because papers are allowed to do something called a sampling where they deliver free copies for up to two months which they can count as circulation. How just putting the paper in my driveway is supposed to make me want it is beyond me. There’s not even anything with it telling me how to subscribe or offering any incentives to do so.

Today’s issue was especially innocuous and hard to tell apart from The Onion. Actually, that would be a fun game: look at a headline and tell if it’s from a “real” paper or one made up for the comic one.

Above the fold in today’s issue were three stories, one told mostly through pictures.

On the left was “Buzzer rats on kids in myspace,” about a school district where alarms go off on computers if students access friendship Web sites such as My Space. Not only is this not related to studying, officials said, it also is potentially dangerous because Internet predators lurk among posts about bands and other teenage stuff just waiting to lure kids to sex and death.

Not one student was interviewed for the story, essentially one I like to call a “when bad things (might) happen to white people” tale.

The middle story is about a rock, scissors, paper tournament coming up at a suburban Chicago college this weekend. “A cutthroat battle” cries the headline. See Page 5 for the story.

The other above the fold story is about a nightclub in Elgin that has been hosting so-called reality TV show “stars” over the next few weeks. Heavy-hitters from the likes of Real World Austin and Laguna Beach.

What makes the story even funnier is the straightforward tone in which what is basically a free ad for this club is told, playing on the club owners claim that Elgin is the Las Vegas of the Midwest.

Yeah, and I’m the Bruce Willis of the Northwest suburbs.

This paper loves stories about locals who go on reality TV shows, treating them with admiration and respect as if they actually had talent. Never do they ask if such drizzle brains feel used and embarrassed afterward or if (especially in the case of young women) they felt exploited or used as sex objects.

Nah, the market research wouldn’t allow that. And papers like this are all about the market research, what some focus group said readers want.

Never mind if you are a real journalist you should grill reality TV knuckleheads (if you pay any attention to them at all) about the one of the basic question from j-school :Why?

Actually, you should beg your editors to write editorials demanding such people be spied upon by the Bush Administration and sent to Guantanamo or be conscripted into military service.

To be fair, the paper had two other stories started on the front page: “Can United fly on its own?” (this paper is big on using question marks in headlines). It fails to mention the despicable aspect of the story, that United screwed its workers, getting them to take big pay and benefits cuts, while bosses are walking away with a $15 million package for their role in the turnaround.

The other tale: someone wants to build a working farm yuppies can go to for vacations out in the far northwest suburbs.

Like I said, it’s just like The Onion. It’s funnier, because some boss thinks this is the news people want. The research says so.

I need to get into a new line of work.