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Chapter One

A silent ceremonial parade of white and red clad

Latino clergymen, religious patrons, kids and grandmothers came shuffling down my busy street to the sound of a lone door violently closing shut, the fake plastic glass halfway up the door shuttering. I abrasively stopped and became illustriously attached to the scene happening on my street. I was late for something and as always jumped from the foot of my door over three tiny stone steps to the uneven

sidewalk and turned space shuttle-like to the direction of my old black car. But today my boosters didn‟t ignite. I could hear mission control in my earpiece demanding I explain my failure for take off. Those frauds.

The only sound now was a single hand bell played

perfectly out of time by the eldest altar boy at the front of the procession. I had never heard this part of the city so quiet. I could vaguely hear the drone of the Kennedy down the block and I never heard one cab honk at

pedestrians down at the Armitage corner. It was a

beautifully breezy day. Chicagoans love these unalarming breezes, for they are usually brought with the piercing stabs of winter or the solar wind fumes of humid summers. The breeze set the ancient Catholic garments of the altar boys awry like how I remember the American flag flew when I obtained flag duty in the fifth grade. I‟d unfold it like I was taught, unraveling and respecting the perfectly tri-tipped corners. After it locked at the top of the pole I‟d cover my eyes towards the tepid May suns during my flag pole duty week and watch it fly for a few minutes, like I had seen Neil Armstrong do in projector films we watched in the grade prior. Luckily, my classroom was right outside the flag pole patch of grass in the front of the middle school so in between bells I‟d sneak behind Ms. Tasker‟s desk and watch the flag I raised silently ripple to the sound of eleven year olds snarling and attempting to tell sex jokes behind me before Ms. Tasker would come in from hall duty and force us back into our seats. I felt like I had built that flag and its majestic pole. It was my

responsibility to see that it flew proudly all day through. The altar boys passed me, as I watched the procession between a car and the alleyway, utterly the lone witness. Behind them came what had to be a three-year-old girl in a tiny white wedding dress dropping crimson flowers onto the

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oily, pothole crater street. Behind her walked the priest that was to say mass that Sunday. He was underneath an altar cloth with fringed edges draped across four glossy, wooden poles held up by four men in tan suits. It reminded me of when I was obsessed with epic, Saturday evening

religious movies like “Ben Hur” and “The Ten Commandments” (it‟s quite possible my fascination was with Charlton

Heston; a fascination I hold no longer), and the high priests, pharaohs, or golden calves were held up by four muscly men with poles on their shoulders while passing through the noisy merchant masses in the city centers from Jerusalem to Cairo.

Bringing up the rear of this apparently ritualistic procession was the congregation. There must have been seventy-three of them in their literal Sunday bests, the solo hand bell still perfectly out of rhythm. They filed in through the side of the church and the cars waiting behind the parade roared past the steps of the bell tower building. They were angry they had to wait while whole families and rippling garments hoarded their street space. The hand bell faded, echoed hungrily and triumphantly by the big brass church bell atop the tower, fan-faring in noon mass at St. Mary of the Angels.

St. Mary of the Angels is an old Polish church across the street from where I live right now. I‟m told it is the largest Polish church in the Midwest and is designed in the Neoclassical form, and I believe it because I believe

things people tell me. It has Corinthian columns which I learned from a “Les Cinq Ordres D‟Architecture” poster I have in my living room and I believe that because I believe anything that is hung upon a wall. I‟m inventing a proverb that all artists should live across the way from a Polish Catholic church.

In Chicago there are mounds of them: Polish, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Costa Rican, Italian, Vietnamese, Native

American, Filipino, Saturanian, Scandinavian. Their bells ring at noon and six for artists and artists only (the former for you to rise, the latter for you to rise also). The latter works better, most creators begin at dusk. I think Henry Miller said something about Parisian writers needing to live by a cinema “so the bells will wake you up in time for the matinee”. That fraud.

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I have a Paris. I think I have a Paris. Does every artist need a Paris? I‟m no writer. I‟m no musician. Some people still think I‟m a folksinger, some call me a

guitarist, some people still think I‟m a drummer, some

people only remember me as prom king and a guy who once had a love affair with the city of New Orleans. What I really am is a ball of observance; a sponge whose holes are not holes but impact craters from stupid emotional meteors orbiting the filmy layer of heliosphere around my heart. These meteors aren‟t conscious but like sperm, appear to be completely aware of where they are going and why. They

shoot down towards my heart, catching fire one quarter of the way down, crashing purposelessly but randomly. They all do this. Not all at once. Each of them have a God-like

predetermined moment when they choose to become rogue, and make me deal with it. I guess I deal with them through being a folksinger, a prom king, and a drummer. But that old identity can go to hell. I‟m a writer now.

Danny Aberdeen, an old friend of mine, who used to live with me across the street from the gargantuan Polish church, lives with a girl in Lincoln Park now. I haven‟t called him „Danny Aberdeen‟ in many years. I‟ve known him since high school and everyone has always called him Berdie since he doesn‟t look at all like a Danny.

He still pays rent here. His bed, diplomas, rags, and stacked drum set he bought during a fit of male quarter life crisis are all strewn about the larger room of the two-room apartment like a no-legged woman no longer begging for your soul.

(The other week in a hangover-ridden car ride home to the suburbs- I was about as low as I could go- I saw a one-legged teenager get off a small bus. He had crutches which seemed like they were so part of his human fiber that they no longer clinked and crunched under the fumy, humid black tar driveway. They no longer had hollow sound. They were no longer hollow, just as his bones aren‟t hollow. He looked determined and outright maniacal. I could tell he was frustrated at the cards he had been dealt, but the

frustration he turned into sheer courage and daily life. Everyday he has an Everest, maybe even multiple Everests. Getting to his doorway from the bus was one. Inside that barbarian face of his I saw purpose. He has his life‟s purpose constantly in front of him and it is chrome clear. He has meaning. He has something to live for. It was the saddest and happiest thing I had ever seen and I wanted

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nothing and everything to do with having a single leg. I saw him struggle up the steps to his door in my passenger side mirror and realized I am the loneliest man with four limbs.)

Berdie and I moved to the city from the horrid suburbs triumphantly a year ago. We parted ways with Roselle, IL and in an opus feat bid farewell to the strip mall bars and the plump faces of ourselves and our high school friends scurrying through parent‟s pantries bloated with voluptuous diets. We partied as free men do when life gifts you a

fridge to fill with your own Krankshafts and trophy cheap Bourbon atop its sticky and dusty head. We whooped in the face of the West and hollered down to Harlan and Annie Fincher who share a courtyard with us and broke into the abandoned convent of former St. Mary nuns next to the

courtyard with us the night we moved in. The convent was my new favorite building in Chicago. It had a dead elm tree in its tiny front yard, the same skeleton as the decaying

trees that lined the innards of the home street I had just abandoned. The only way we found into the convent was

through a half broken window at the summit of four flights of wooden stairs in the back where graffiti tagged

swingsets and four-square outlines took graves. We whooped and hollered to the all the other folks breaking into

haunted convents all across this wide street city. We could see the neon Wrigley sign over the passing cars on the

Kennedy and we screamed to Lincoln Park and all its people we wanted nothing to do with because we knew they weren‟t breaking into convents. We bobbled our heads around the south side of the convent and screamed toward Logan Square and we listened for the recall of irresponsible boys from across our generation breaking windows of dilapidated buildings to find the mildewing honesty of a failing machine.

As soon as we stopped hollering we heard the soft voice of Annie rise from the budding spring courtyard asking us if maybe we should keep our hollering down because if was a Sunday night and we had moved to a

professional familial part of the city where people took the Metra out to suburbs where they worked and cut their teeth in the new reverse commute because people took jobs wherever they could find them and most people I know work in the towns hugging this wide street city.

We stopped hollering because there is only so much irresponsibility I will succumb to and I have an awfully

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painful fear of getting in people‟s way or letting people down. We silently crept into the convent where we found blood and syringes on the floors in rooms with skeletons of twin beds, the fat from their bellies were in clumps in closets. We walked down the hallway perpendicular to the window we smashed passing rooms where squatters had clearly been squatting and arrived at a small balcony with a wooden railing.

The balcony overlooked ten pews and an altar with a nailed down table and Jesus on a cross slid into what looked like a large nailed down candle holder. The Krankshafts we brought in were drunk on the balcony in total silence, as you would in any functioning church. My days as an altar boy and one hundred thousand Sunday masses had taught me well.

We found some stairs around the side of the balcony behind a wall and a door and went down into the stomach of the convent where within the pews we found a copy of St. Andrew‟s Daily Missal like a deflated heart in the greasy rib cage of a failing machine.

We took a walk around the basement and left through a door in the side of the convent and went back to the new apartment through the courtyard and grabbed a handful of clanking Krankshafts and careened down to Jeremy Tiles place on the first floor because we heard that America had found and murdered Osama Bin Laden and the President was about to take off his shirt and show us the abs he‟d been working on for the past few years and Jeremy Tiles had a brand new flat-screen television and the 1993 Sony my dad bought the family to watch the Chicago Bulls win the

Championship of the same year hadn‟t yet been plugged in.

You have to come see the way the sunset sets across the street from me, by the gargantuan church. It‟s such a lonely turning, but patient. The maroon brick of the church against the autumn-toned sunset clouds pasteurize into a clear, lonely moon lit sky. I sometimes find it funny-

watching the sunset or moonrise or when the moon is hanging in the air like a baby‟s chew toy- that we can see these magnificent orbs. We can make out the definition of the sun and even more the definition of the moon. We can see

craters of a cosmic meteor shower cracking up the surface of the moon. We can clearly equate our role in the process

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of the universe by just witnessing with our eyes the moon and the sun. But still they feel like props in some creaky old theater of reality- one of those dark, small community theaters where you know one or two of the actors but don‟t find anything they‟re doing enthralling but give them a huge hug and offer to buy them a drink and a burrito after they take their makeup off and while waiting for your

actors with your hands in your pockets on the empty stage you‟re able to get up close to see the props: the sun is made of candy wrapers and the moon is an oriental crackling lamp, hanging there, them moving, not us. But they aren‟t props. They are ridiculous, psychedelic orbs that exist to create and destroy life. Look at the moon. You are floating on a planet. You are not a cab driver, coffee drinker, gang banger, street rascal, free lover, priest, poet, archivist, masturbator, cell phone salesgirl, civil engineer, Enron employee, senate gopher, rummager, paleontologist,

masochist, mirror, runner, Medusa, Theresa, budding bomber, or a modern man. You are the universe conscious of itself; you are the everything of and in the universe. For all we know this is first time the universe is getting lost in herself and breaking her own heart and turning tables in markets or throwing her records against walls because of how frustrating the bloody sirens of a gaunt Saturday night can be. For all we know this is the first time the universe can feel her sweat clog the pores of her paved skin and the first time she can see her hands turn and wrinkle right before her wandering eyes. For all we know this is the first time the universe is counting on herself and through her breath and through me I want you to know that you

believe in everything already. You are the universe conscious of itself.

A moon is a name for those things that float around planets. I‟m sure we have names for all of Jupiter‟s sixty-three orbiting moons. We have no name for our moon. It is responsible almost as much as the Sun for life on Earth. Why not give it a name? Ancient Westerners called it Luna, I think. Then they turned it into a day of the week; a sad pit of a day. Then they turned it into a carpet company as well as a Mexican taco stand. We should rename it Luna. Or maybe Luna Portuna, the port at the moon. No, just Luna.

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But alas, the moon will most likely remain nameless for all eternity. It will lock in orbit until it is too far gone because every year the moon inches farther away from us. One day our seas will cease to slush around and woman will cease to embody her womb. YOUR SINISTER SECRET IS OUT, LUNA. All alone, Luna, having to watch all that life flourish day in and day out on Earth knowing full well you‟re leaving us behind. I‟m sure she knows how important she is. But why is such a lonely yet savagely important being leaving us for dead?

Chapter Two

Our apartment is small, a slender slit on the third floor of a late nineteenth century building. There are rats in the basement that will eat and shit on anything. They scurry and race back and forth across the stone walkway that leads to wet darkness at the far end of the basement. It‟s almost as if they‟re packing their little belongings hurriedly into tiny attaches, going from room to room, bathroom to bedroom obnoxiously grabbing for toothbrushes and skin cream, swim trunks and old pictures. Their doom reaper has come to take them away in the shape of a

frighteningly sweaty, depressed twenty-something in ripped red jean shorts desperately looking for a window AC unit.

This summer is hot. I knew it was going to be. The winter was mild and groggy. It was balmy at times and the air was always wet. Things always have to balance out. This summer is sweltering. It constantly feels like you‟re a beam of sweat on an overly tan, vile, muscly Wrigleyvillian and however hard you try cannot shake that fate. I sit in front of a large industrial fan. I sleep in front of a

large industrial fan. I sometimes trek to my parent‟s house in the suburbs where the AC is blasting. Or I just brave the constant humidity and sun in this putrid hell of a summer.

I started a band and Berdie met a girl. He rarely

comes back to this rat-infested apartment building. Good on him.

“I feel awful, spending all my time at Molly‟s”, says the dark red-headed Berdie.

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He is a good friend. I‟ve never had any one person more supportive of me in my entire life, other than my

parents. He can spend as much time with the person he loves as he wants, that‟s what you do. I am so happy for him. Molly is a darling girl. She takes care of him. He needs that. I can only do so much. Plus, I really enjoy the time alone and the apartment to myself. I get things done, and I drink less. But I‟m at that point where people are starting to take pity on me. People are inviting me to dinners. Oh, the dinners! They‟re these things one goes to where people ask questions like “so, Andrew, how ARE you?” and “Andrew, you must be so excited about the band! I‟m really happy for you!” or “What about at the pub? Aren‟t there any girls at the pub you‟re into? Andrew, you‟re a good-looking man! Any girl would be lucky to be with you!”

I have a weird shaped head and there is too much skin on my neck. It doesn‟t go well with my hair, all that neck space.

I‟m not looking for pity nor am I looking for a girl. I‟m actually rarely attracted to girls. The intervallic time between when I find a girl attractive is gaping. It‟s usually when I‟m driving past Big Star Tacos. I don‟t know why but the women there are so right. There are always girls outside Big Star Tacos. I never talk to them because I‟m driving. Big Star Tacos has the shape of a place that would spring up in L.A. I‟ve never been to California. I should move to L.A. for a year and then write a book about it. California MUST have an outside bar where you can order incredible tacos with high fashion women wearing white

sunglasses, licking sweat from bottles of Lone Star with their dirty blond hair and seared bangs, flat shoes and short canvas shorts with a masculine button up shirt

buttoned down and tucked into their short canvas shorts. I sometimes pretend I‟m in one of those gangs of Los Angeles, with a bandana and a Hanes white shirt, driving slow past Big Star Tacos with my eyebrows down, searching through all of these fad women. In reality, though, I‟m just Squints walking around some wiry fence trying to catch the eyes of Wendy Peffercorn. But I haven‟t the courage that Squints has because I‟m Smalls, some lost white kid from the suburbs.

I never talk to these women when I‟m walking either. Or standing. Or drinking. Or wiping the sweat off my

forehead. This loneliness goes beyond the love of a good woman. Any relation with women just makes me sadder for

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some reason. Nothing is ever real. I‟d rather be real and myself than have a bowl full of leftover hair clips

needlessly kept with the dust beneath the nightstand.

The stupidest thing I‟ve ever done is re-engage a digital friendship with an ex-girlfriend on a social fucking media site.

I harbor no ill will towards this person whatsoever. But everyday is a thread of disgusting photographs of her and her boyfriend of two years. How do I know it‟s been two years? Because their anniversary was June 10th and how do I know it was June 10th? Because I‟m friends with my

ex-girlfriend on a social fucking media site.

Her boyfriend is crazy handsome, too. I think he‟s Vietnamese and Spanish. Most human beings that are a mixed race of European and Asian have a dynasty on the fairness of attractive looks. It isn‟t fair for the rest of us full bred European and Asiatic descendants, with our rigidly plain features and normal everything.

It was almost four years ago we were like two stars in a cosmic, dusty nursery. What swirled around us were

pigments of love and hate and function and dysfunction, sane and insane, sex and no sex, a hot breath dissolving and evolving into a slimy serpent tongue between stars and behind clouds of electricity, a matter inside matter. These slithering orbs of fire magnificently collide only to

destroy and destruct and in the constant process of

destroying and destructing create separate life-making suns, which then spiral and cool and go their separate ways and look for the balance and imbalance of the universe and use it for purpose. They move forward and try their luck at unconsciously making conscious life. They move on to nudge the universe awake; to wash the crust off the infant eyes of wailing Earths.

I wonder what a nursery of stars sounds like. I wonder if it rumbles deep and low. I wonder what kind of eternal rhythms I‟d hear. Music is the organization of sound and the sound of stars being born is the sound of the

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audience of that galactic orchestra. You‟d burst. Your

consciousness would pop. My seats would probably suck, too. I‟d pay for balcony seating, but not floor. But what if it‟s standing room only? I‟d probably get stuck behind some awkwardly tall white guy in a stupid polo shirt and I

wouldn‟t want to watch and hear millions of years of interstellar music making and star-sex bobbling my head

around some awkwardly tall white guy in a stupid polo shirt.

The whole country is drunk right now. Berdie and I drink a lot and Molly tags along but doesn‟t drink. I‟m not an everyday drinker. I could be. I know many people who are. My friends and I like to go out or have gatherings at our

apartment complex, which we call “1841”. Calling it an apartment complex makes it sound like we live in some

stainless steel and glass futureplex with mazes and phases of escalators and clear flat touch-televisions. We don‟t. We live at 1841, which might as well have been built in 1841. We sleep in front of fans and window AC units in kitchens and tiny bedrooms with black dirt on windowsills from the rain that spills in during summertime and mixes with dust. Our knees are sweaty and our moods are swung by the stable instability of some semblance of an adult life. We have felt real glory in our giving up the pursuit of money; real glory in handling our own business our own way; real glory in owning patchwork in the American quilt. Real glory. We aren‟t irresponsible, just having a good time at times. The time has come, though, to take a look at things, to question things like drinking, to find new harmless

glories and put our flesh flag on the summit of the bosom on a new and emerging sexual America. It is a time to move.

These times at 1841- where our goal each weekend was to not get drunk enough to order Chicago‟s Pizza but as soon as we got a little drunk we wanted Chicago‟s Pizza and then our goal was to get drunk enough to order Chicago‟s Pizza and then two large cheese pizzas would show up and Berdie would always foot the bill and Harlan Fincher would dance around him in a three piece suit championing a

tumbler half full of Buffalo Trace and we‟d all cheer and embrace the fantastic work we had done all night- were joyous times and I had just moved from the horrid suburbs and I wanted everything to do with evenings like that.

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After these parties at 1841- when the stragglers go home and the neighborhood drunk sings his last left-handed song on my right handed guitar, and a dear friend from childhood who is visiting me over the weekend in the city (as the sun rises over the blinking billboard across the highway from the back porch) begs and commands me to be his friend again. I say “WE WILL” and “WE WILL grab coffee in the morning.” But I am a fraud and a new American and we don‟t do that sort of thing. “But I‟ll follow you on social media and I‟ll „like‟ things that pertain to me and me only while dying in bed from self inflicted shots and PBR wounds while scrolling without end through designs and designated stopping points for friends like you.” There on my phone under a green comforter in a closet room that fits only a bed I scroll endlessly on my phone, a fate that awaits me the next muggy afternoon- we‟ll go down to Marie‟s on the corner of Armitage and Hermitage. This is never a good idea. “NOTHING GOOD EVER HAPPENS AT MARIE‟S” is their actual

motto. Marie‟s is musky red and full-up with failures and black angels. The jukebox plays about twenty songs and when those twenty songs are through, Marie somewhere somehow hits replay and the cycle of late 1950s singles breathes in again. Marie died two years ago from throat cancer.

Marie‟s is a last-ditch-effort-to-get-laid of a place and is open until 5am and doesn‟t open again until 11pm. None of us go there for sex. We go there for something but we don‟t know what. You can feel it the next day, though. We probably go there to feel something.

It sits on a corner that bums find particularly welcoming during the day. I see them crumbling into

themselves and then their arms outstretched as people walk past them in bike shorts and sunglasses. They crumble into themselves again from people‟s disregard like some

erroneous heartbeat and continue this Christ-like hanging all day through. They un-crumble to me as I sit sweltering in my car with the AC full on waiting at the longest

stoplight in the entire fucking world.

“I want nothing and everything to do with you, friends. You should have been at Marie‟s last night”, I say to

myself under the hum and rush of AC splashing in my face. It sounds like deep space.

This musky-red, cheap-Italian-cologne-cesspool of a place has a red door with triangular slit windows at its peak. It reminds me of an old neighborhood woman‟s door

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from my childhood, Henrietta. We used to have to go and visit her as kids, my little blonde sister and I. She lived down the block and on the same side of our suburban Chicago street our house was, next to the homes whose roofs

overhung their driveways. There weren‟t many trees on our side of the block because when they built that part of town in the early 1950s there wasn‟t enough money to plant trees. Plus, most of the land outside of Chicago proper was

cornfield, which was uprooted to pave roads and put up houses whose roofs overhang their driveways. There were no trees to begin with.

Henrietta was a farmer‟s daughter. She was in her

eighties when we‟d go and visit her. There were a few farms left in the town, not when I was born, but in the early 20th century, and many families chose to stay despite the urban progress. They usually became politicians or worked for politicians because they still owned massive amounts of land, which they eventually sold to Italian developers and the land was turned into ugly granite subdivisions. This happened in most suburbs during the later part of the 1990s and 2000s but stopped as soon as the recession hit.

My mother grew up across the street from Henrietta, and then chose to raise us on the other side of the block. Henrietta knew my mother when she was a kid. So we would go with my mom down across Marion Ave., where I would peer down the street to see if my friends were playing baseball in Marion Park. They used to ride their bikes to 7-11 and get Milky-Ways and Mountain Dews and sit on the ump box behind home plate and wait for me while I spent a lot of my childhood doing adult things like visiting old ladies who I never really liked and who I actually found kind of mean to my mother but never said anything because my mom had a duty to take care of the old lady who lived across the street from her when she was my age.

Henrietta used to work at that 7-11 on Roselle Road, even in her old age. She was an angry old lady and would flash us the face of Medusa under rosy glasses with a beaded metal chain around her head every time we went in there and every time we went in there we quite nearly turned to stone. I didn‟t go in today, and she wasn‟t

working because I was visiting her. My friends were waiting for me on the ump box as I crossed Marion Ave., kicking their bike pedals backwards and pretending to run the baseless infield. Also, I couldn‟t stand Mountain Dew

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and I knew that sperm lived in your nuts and it hurt like hell when my older cousins would slap me in the nuts so I figured sperm was very important and stayed the hell away from Mountain Dew. Bitch of a hot day. Brandon, you fraud.

Henrietta had that same red door with triangular

windows at its peak, the same as at Marie‟s. After we rang the doorbell her messy old lady hair would fill all the triangles. I cannot remember the insides of her house. It is completely lost on me as I walk into Marie‟s angrily carded by a bouncer. NOTHING GOOD EVER HAPPENS AT MARIE‟S. Sam Cooke is on the box and the long skinny bar is filled with a musky red odor. The regulars are there as well as a bunch of obnoxious people who care nothing about solitude or the quest for comfort of self and I wanted nothing and everything to do with each and every one of these people. But they are all just an arsenal of misdirected souls in a last ditch effort to get laid in Bucktown and I wasn‟t one of them. I pretended to be, but in the end I truly enjoy going home alone because Marie‟s is a hell of a classy place and they let you buy a six-pack of PBR to go.

“It‟s so God-damn fucking hot in this fucking

apartment I literally can‟t believe it! There is nothing about this fucking reality that I believe”, I scream out loud as I punch the side of the entrance way to my kitchen. I have a slight temper indiscretion in my personality that comes out every so often. I‟m a frustrated person.

“Frustrated” is such an impeccable adjective. I adore it like I adore a good, dark television drama. It‟s easy to adore as I write about this dark passenger of mine. Being “frustrated” implies complexity. I can‟t just be angry because anger is a surface emotion. I need layers upon layers of things to think about and be frustrated with. I know that my raw anger to the heat in my apartment is just my frustration with the fact that I cannot afford AC which is then a frustration with the fact that I am sacrificing money and a steady job to pursue a career in art and not have AC, so why am I pursuing art if I‟m constantly

frustrated? and why am I the only one sacrificing things? and what am I really sacrificing for because I‟m so

frustrated with the fact that I can‟t see any success with art in my life that everyone tells me about and if there is success then where is the money to buy AC? The worst part

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is I‟m frustrated because I‟m frustrated that I can‟t be happy with how perfect things actually are in my life.

It really is hot in my apartment. I have to sleep in the living room where the overhead fan and industrial floor fan invisibly meet and fornicate above my coffee table

(which is really an old bedroom chest) and their windy offspring reach my bare, white, misty body in luke-warm puffs of dusty air. I walk to the back porch. It‟s actually cooler outside at three in the morning than it is inside. I can see the white fangs of the Sears Tower above some tree. It is flashing information to all the other Sears Towers in the Milky Way Galaxy.

I think about the past weekend and all the guilt it brought. I did everything right except take care of myself. I didn‟t read or write. I didn‟t listen to music or play music. I didn‟t go for a walk or call my parents who left for vacation for a week. I didn‟t spend time my sister like I said I would. I didn‟t go and meet my good friend at that shitty bar in Wrigleyville. I didn‟t talk to a girl the bartender I work with wants to set me up with because I found her to be imperfect and if I‟m with someone imperfect that must mean I‟m imperfect so I said nothing to her. I‟m selfish and shitty and I want to move to Europe. Doing all those things would have made me happy, too- except moving to Europe. I‟d get homesick and cry like a baby.

Maybe I‟ll have a baby sometime soon. That‟s something I could do. At least then there‟ll be born some part of me I could love. At least then there‟ll exist some part of me someone else could love.

I would just have to get through the first twenty-three or twenty-five years of their life and then I could talk to them like adults and have beers with them at city bars where they live and are struggling like I was at their age. I‟d have a girl and a boy. I‟d have so much to tell them, so much to help them with. I‟d be a hero. They‟d

thank the universe and Luna for having been born to such an imperfect person so that they knew what imperfection was and wanted nothing to do with it. They‟d thank the universe for giving them such a loyal parent, one that would spend hours and hours in line to see them sing a song. They would lovingly laugh at me for introducing my eldest son to the cute bartender who I talked with before my son arrived

about them being a great pair. He‟d blush and thank his old man for honoring his apparent loneliness and I‟d pay for

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his beers because of how proud of him I am for fearlessly pursuing his dreams. He shouldn‟t be like me and I‟d make that clear. There‟s a much better version of me that he could be and if there‟s anyone to do it, it‟s him. That‟s why I wanted him.

But I don‟t like being on Earth a lot of the time and I don‟t know if I want anyone else who is half-me to be here. It‟s an unfortunate thing- having to be here and wake up to myself everyday. I didn‟t ask to be here. I don‟t even know if I wanted to be here. I had no choice, no say in the matter, just like my babies will have no say in the matter. There is little I can do though, because killing myself would bring immense pain to a few people and I never want to do anything to hurt anyone. I would never abandon those people. But people will abandon me because I‟m loyal. People will abandon ferociously loyal people because

they‟re loyal. They can get away with it. It‟s an atrocious existence and I have everything to do with it. I‟m trapped. I was duped into being here and duped to get out. I was born with all the imperfections of mankind within me. I was born to shove myself into sticky apartment doors and call myself inhumane names for having inhumane thoughts. I was born with a heart for everyone but myself. I was born into a soft curved corner of a lonely orb and it is time to scream and scream until someone hears that I am here.

I met Berdie at Big Star Tacos tonight. He desperately needed to explain his disillusionment with the state of music in today‟s society as he arrived out of breath on his bike. He slowly took his earbuds out and I could faintly hear the sounds of fashion and coolness. These bands have the ears of an entire generation and they are choosing to say nothing. He said words like “franchised” and “sold to you”. I agreed. The one core problem with the state of

music so far this decade is that anything can be popular if it is made popular. There can be quality in cheap sounding music BECAUSE it‟s cheap sounding music, as long as it‟s sold to you and, well, irony is selling.

Berdie came on his bicycle with a silly black helmet on that he clipped off after seeing me at the table and headed my way. We ordered tacos from the window-stand next to the bar. The night air was hot but there was kind of a tropical breeze gushing through the tables and tables of hipsters with mustaches and parted hair. It‟s incredible to me how much they all look alike but still look different. It‟s like they vet the people they choose to be in public

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with, so that they appear to be in uniform- a fortress of giant eye-wear and vintage button ups wallowing in their combined hatred towards organized sports- it‟s cookie

cutter shit for those that think they aren‟t cookie cutter shit.

I pick my friends based on the inconsistency of their moods. Berdie is one of these, as goofy and childish as he can be one time and as seriously confused and worried about the direction of his life at other times. He helps me sort through things better than anyone because he‟s honest and caring and doesn‟t know what he‟s talking about but seems to always know what he‟s talking about. I actually love that he wears a silly bike helmet with rolled up socks and running shoes in shorts.

The reason why dear Berdie rides his bike everywhere now is because his car caught on fire in the winter. Berdie is a guy who has everything go wrong all at once. Our

senior year of high school he went to Hawaii for spring break and stayed at this quaint little bed and breakfast with his family. Some older woman owned and lived at the inn. Berdie was sure she was a grandmother because of her love of photos of people who stayed with her. She was

internet savvy for the time and took a photograph of Berdie and his family and put it on the inn‟s website. His entire family was sitting on a king size bed. Berdie and his

younger sister had their hands in a fist under their chins smiling and sitting between his parents. Then there at the of the bed was his little brother strewn about horizontally, his arm holding his head up and smiling like a little girl. How do I know this photo? Because some kid in high school found this picture of Berdie and his family on the website during spring break and then blew up copies of it and put it all over school the Monday we came back to school from break. I couldn‟t walk anywhere without seeing this

photograph. There above the water fountains was Berdie‟s family on their honeymoon. There, next to the epic wall montage of Lancers riding horses into some kosher of a battle and their lances catching lightning from overhead clouds was Berdie‟s little brother posing embarrassingly for all the world to see. At that age, your school is the world. This prank was fun to some kids, but horrifying to Berdie and his siblings. He lost contact with a lot of his friends, rightfully so, but kept solid with those that

stood by him. And so, Berdie and I are together now in this leathery, hairy city like spots on a bull‟s hide separately denouncing our position nearest to the bullshit.

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The way I found out about the car fire was through a call from Berdie one evening as I was in my car in a

hurried drive to play guitar for a friend‟s show. Berdie was also on his way to that same show. However, his trip back into the city from work was much more historical than mine.

“Hello?”

“Dude, my car is ON fire. Right now. It is ON fire”, he was laughing festively as if the car was somehow a

surprise birthday cake and he was 4 years old. I could hear him jumping up and down as he laughed.

“It‟s on fire? Your car? How is it on fire? Why is your car on fire? Where are you? Are you okay?”, I ask.

“I was sitting at a light on North Avenue in Melrose Park and the hood of my car just started on fire. Here…”

Her took this moment to send a picture of his sandy colored 1998 Toyota Camry with flames rising from the sides of the hood. In the back of the picture- just out of focus- wer fire trucks with their lights caught in whites and

blues and firemen caught in mid-stride towards the searing hunk of Japanese ingenuity and the roaring end to its

thirteen-year lifespan.

He had JUST met Molly at work that week and she came back west on North Avenue to pick him up at the fire. They were sort of on a date that night and were driving

separately to the show I was playing guitar at. That was the first night I met Molly. Ever since then Berdie has had no car. Molly and Berdie now carpool together, sleep

together, live together, eat together, gossip together, cringe together, fight together, wilt together, squash together, lunge together, count calories together, doggy day care together, love together, read different e-books together, find Groupons together, be together, and whatever else modern couples do. I wouldn‟t know, which is why I called Berdie to meet up with me at Big Star.

Berdie and I met up to talk about a girl I met the other night after he and I had walked around some filthy, low brow street fest drinking beers. There are moments when both of us are silent and the transparency of our

generation engulfs us like a fever sickness, where your skin aches and is sensitive to the touch. These uncaring, get-ahead, greasy people can just go away. This dirty old

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frat culture can just go away. I feel isolated,

miscommunicated. I don‟t belong in this culture, in any culture in North America. Maybe somewhere in South America I do. Is there art on the street there? I feel like there would be exotic dancing and exotic taxis taking you to some red candle-lit first floor apartment that bursts with color and violins and castanets. The triplets and soft snare

bracing you until a big bass drum and the fury of hundreds of years of a rich and important human subculture snap the wires of the fear and anxiety-based subculture you‟ve only known. Buenos Aires must be like that. Berdie and I needn‟t speak words at this juncture at the street fest. A simple shaking of heads will suffice.

We both despise cover bands with the passion and solar flares of a million red giants oozing and bleeding out

after the War of a Million Red Suns, so we left the street fest and laughed at the musical misfortune of an „80s cover band not far enough away from our ears. We passed under the tracks that nestle the alleys of Sheffield Avenue and

praised Zeus for the beauty of the train‟s monstrous boom when you stand directly beneath its sparky interim between stops. Our ears rang so piercingly after the train overhead gurgled through the distant electric poles and telephone wires towards Diversey that we were barely able to hear Bon Jovi anymore.

We landed at a decent bar for craft beer and each had chicken tortilla soup and two beers apiece. We talked about the struggles of life and how to meaningfully manage the trials and difficulties of our individual everyday lives. We were both down about our weekends. It was a Sunday night. Molly lives right around the way from this craft brew bar so I walked Berdie there and we shook hands and dispersed.

I walked home through west Lincoln Park down Webster and decided to walk into and around the Finkel and Sons steel plant where sometimes the sliding doors will be open and you can look in and see hell. Sparks the size and shape of lighting bolts shoot out of towering greasy machines with giant spider legs and silo shaped heads and an open stomach full of bright yellow molten lava. There are piles and piles of black rubber or dirt- I‟m not sure which one- with men covered in soot shoveling black into other black and stopping to adjust yellow helmets and baggy Lee

Dungarees. These were real men, the men of folk music everywhere around the world.

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The doors were closed this particular evening and I cursed walked over the river and stopped to look at the skyline. It looked magnificent through the dark red iron bridge beams. Iron city! Glass city! White city! Stone

city! Even at night you can point out the different eras of architecture. All along this patch of riverfront were

cranes and semi trailers and oversized dumpsters with Lindahl on their sides (I went to elementary school with one of the Lindahls in the suburbs. I vividly remember swimming in their in-ground pool and eating macaroni and cheese in the afternoon one day in third grade. They lived on the other side of Granville east of Roselle Rd, the

other side of where Henrietta and I lived. I remember being brought home in a GMC SUV by Mrs. Lindahl to our little cape cod home three blocks away with the Indian arrowheads I found buried deep on the side of the house, which I think Brandon Jacobson actually hid there one day while I wasn‟t looking.)

The night was warm. There was little humidity, but still fairly summer smelling. I stopped into the pub after walking past the livery in Bucktown. The summer is the worst time for the odor that permeates out of the livery and pervades the breathing space of neighboring apartments, mine exclusively included. Some days I‟m at my computer by the window facing east and a breeze arrives off the river delivering with it the musk of cattle innards and molten lava.

At the pub I was a little full from the soup and thick, dark craft beer so I just ordered PBR‟s. I saw that Sketch was working. Sketch is another bar-back at the place. He‟s black and from Bronzeville, a place I‟ve never been. I haven‟t even been anywhere south of Pilsen. The world he comes from is a world I‟ll never know; a world just under five miles away. He‟s a kind and gentle man with one of the most positive outlooks on life and music I can only dream of getting to. He‟s a twenty-seven year old, handsomely talented hip-hop artist and he was telling me about his upcoming trip to California.

“Yo! What‟s the word, Andy?”

“Hey, man!” I said that with a laughing smile. His

enthusiasm in seeing me was so genuine and excited that I couldn‟t contain my affection at his offering friendship. Part of it is that I am an extremely white, moderately privileged, suburban, Seinfeld-loving boy. I know every

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word to “Big Willy Style” because I thought Will Smith was a gangster and because it was the only “rap” CD my parents would buy me because of how funny he was on TV and the fact that there wasn‟t a parental advisory sticker on the cover. Will Smith, my unhealthy obsession with “Space Jam” and basketball players of the 1990s is about as entrenched as I got within black culture growing up.

“What‟s new, man? How was your weekend?” I ask.

“It was busy”, he says. “Worked at Haymarket last night. Got up early, did some writing, hung with my girl, then came here. I‟m starting to write the next album and I‟m gonna call it „Sell Coke to White Folk‟, haha. Heard you had a fantastic show the other night. Getting ready to head to Cali next week. You think you could work for me Friday?” He always packed so much information into a paragraph of verbal speech, much like his art. He can hand you so much to think about and question in just one normal social interaction.

“Yeah, man. I‟m free Friday. I‟d be happy to”, I respond. “Word. I want to spend a night with my girl before I head to Los Angeles.”

“Great! What are you doing in L.A.?

“Uhhhh, I‟m going to be giving a lecture at a small college outside the city about politically charged hip-hop.”

“That‟s incredible!” I scream and shake his hand congratulatory.

“Thanks, thanks! I‟m excited and a little nervous, though.” I was a little buzzed at this point and I always

praise people too much when I‟m buzzed. It‟s somehow uncool to come off like you genuinely care and want to connect with someone and what they‟re doing in this age. It‟s much cooler to act unsurprised and a bit uninterested. It‟s that post-modern crap gone mad. But when I‟ve had a few beers, the gloves come off. I once told Jeff Tweedy that he was “my hero” right to his face and in front of his two little boys. This was when he was just out of rehab for

painkillers and right when he quit drinking. No modestly successful, emotionally struggling artist wants to hear the “hero” line. Bob Dylan didn‟t even want to hear the hero line. “Hero” is reserved for people like Neil Armstrong and

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George W. Bush. You‟re a hero if they name a library after you and a fraud if they name a coffee after you at Ipsento Café. I consider people like Jeff Tweedy my saviors. It was he who saved me from listening to shitty music when I was 18. Jeff Mangum is my newest savior. If I ever meet Jeff Mangum I‟ll tell him he‟s my savior.

Then one time I met the „Gasman‟ from “Dumb and Dumber” at a dive bar in Boystown we used to play songs at in

college. His real name is Michael Starr. He was in

“Goodfellas” too. A bunch of us would sing at the open mic at Uncommon Ground early and then trek to Town Hall Pub for late night open mic, a much drunker form of open mic.

Depending on who was bartending, if you were underage, it was possible to get in. I had just turned 21 so I was able to frequent this open mic every Monday. At this time,

Lakeview/Boystown was a fairly hip and artsy place to be. It is no longer the case.

I was sitting at the end of the bar with my girlfriend of that time, and the „Gasman‟ walked past to go to the bathroom. I thought about it long and tough. Was that the „Gasman‟ from “Dumb and Dumber”? I asked my girlfriend if she saw him and if she even knew who the „Gasman‟ was. She hadn‟t a clue. This was before our phones had the internet and Motorola Razrs buzzed and danced next to half drunk pint glasses of Pointe down the bar. So I asked the bartender, Julia.

“Julia, is that the „Gasman‟ from „Dumb and Dumber‟?” “You mean, Mike? Tall, big guy?”, she answers looking towards the bathroom doors with a white towel in her left hand and intertwining tattoos of birds and beasts careening into the bottle neck of her cleavage.

“Yes.”

“That would be him. He‟s a friend of the owner. He comes in whenever he‟s in town. He lives in New York, but is a huge Cubs fan. So he comes in for games. He‟s been coming here since the early 70s.”

The owner was apparently an old hippie who opened the bar in the early nineteen seventies in the aftershock of the end of what some deem a sexual, musical, and cultural revolution. He has pictures of himself with Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh, which for me, at the time, was a huge deal.

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“WHOA!!! What‟s his name?” I ask. “Mike Starr.”

“Mike Starr”, I repeat.

I turn back to my girlfriend.

“Ummmm, that‟s the fucking „Gasman‟ from “Dumb and Dumber”. Another unhealthy obsession from my childhood was Jim Carey films. I must‟ve seen “Dumb and Dumber” a thousand times, so running into a character from those moving images singed into my pre-pubescent brain at a local bar was mind-blowing to me.

“What? Oh, cool.”, she said entirely unenthused. She was much more interested in listening to and playing songs than freaking out about C-grade celebrity sightings. “I don‟t need her. I‟m talking to him”, I thought. I was JUST drunk enough to think that.

We talked about the Cubs and the owner of the bar and he told me about his favorite memories of Chicago and Town Hall Pub, this Mike Starr. Soon all my friends were

gathered around him asking questions about his movies and being a celebrity, all of us twenty-one year olds. He

bought us each a few shots within a span of ten or fifteen minutes. He was a very kind human. I asked him what it was like working with Jim Carey and Jeff Daniels and he said it was the most fun he‟s ever had in his whole life. Then I was JUST drunk enough to ask him who is favorite band was and he said Bob Dylan and then JUST drunk enough to go up and play a God awful rendition of “It‟s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and then JUST drunk enough to dedicate it to “MY NEW FRIEND MIKE STARR”.

I sat down after the song and ordered another beer with my girlfriend of that time. Then I noticed Mike get up and start to leave out the back door. I raced off the stool, used the bar as momentum like a push-up, and shouted down the bar:

“MIKE! YOU WERE MY CHILDHOOD!”

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“You were my childhood” is what I said.

He gave me a very quick puzzled look, nodded his head, and left out the back.

“YOU WERE MY CHILDHOOD!” I‟ll never forget those words. I‟m not even sure what they mean exactly (I grew up with you?). I could have saved those words for my ailing and dying grandfather. Or told them to my aunt who watched my sister and I everyday for years and years while our mother and father went to work and grad school. Or told my parents who worked and went to grad school so we could have a

privileged life and buy us rap CD‟s and take us to see the Bulls play. I could have saved those words for people who had a profound impact on my childhood. I could have saved “YOU WERE MY CHILDHOOD!” to the people who actually were my childhood and are very much still alive. I saved “YOU WERE MY CHILDHOOD!” for the „Gasman‟ from “Dumb and Dumber”.

After telling Sketch that I‟d work for him on Friday we took a few shots and he walked up to the microphone to do some freestyle poetry. I moved towards the end of the bar amidst the n-words and vocal anger furrowing up into a cartoon cloud of black smoke and white noise above his head. Live art is sometimes like watching someone in a sauna.

Toxins are boiled until the flame diminishes and evaporates over your head. Oddly, your skin feels cool while your

insides are tepid warm, like riding the warm 147 bus up Michigan Ave. and through Lake Shore Drive after being caught in a torrential, warm summer rain.

After Sketch came off the mic, he was all smiles and high fives as if he had just clobbered a triple after being in a hitting slump. What a difference a stage presence can be; anger and animosity one poetic minute, and pure cross-cultural, race-less human elation the next.

I moved towards the end of the bar where I could be alone and pass judgment while also putting on a long face and looking like I need someone to talk to. It worked. A “vixen in a red dress” came to speak with me. This vixen in the red dress- she was referred to me through this sentence by a regular at the pub trying to solicit her possible

affection for me- was a waitress across the street from the pub and frequented my corner. I‟m very much not into

meeting women in general, particularly in bars. I refuse to meet the love of my life in a bar. My friends laugh because

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why would I meet the love of my life in a bar anyway? Wouldn‟t it, instead, be more apt to meet a fine, young woman in a bar and casually date and engage in a dangerous liaison with? Wouldn‟t it, instead, be more apt to meet a fine, young woman in a bar to engage in short textual cell phone conversations with late at night with full intention of not dangerously liaising with but sometimes engage in a dangerous liaison with on Sunday nights after open mic and six PBR tall boys and a few shots on the house? Wouldn‟t it, instead, be more apt to meet a cute, young vixen to talk

about cats with and go to piano themed shows downtown where theater carpets remind her of Vegas, and then sit in cars and watch her smoke cigarettes and listen to tired radio songs from the nineteen eighties and take note of where she was when her father had originally showed her these then contemporary hits?

Looking lonely, she appeared and we talked about our hometowns. There was a butchered version of a Neil Young song we had to speak over. She was a quiet talker and so the entire night at the bar was spent with my ear in her mouth. Then my mouth in her mouth a little later, but by no progression of my own and by no continuation of my own. She was an assumingly silent solider on the hunt for human

flesh- like the Viet Kong or African snipers. She was actually a very sweet girl, I‟m just always prepared for battle. She fought hard. I just wanted to talk, get to know her. The way to a man‟s heart is through his brain.

Entertain me. Tell me about something you‟re obsessed with. Tell me about something hard you‟re trying to overcome. I don‟t want to talk about drugs. What is aching you? You must be aching! This generation makes me ache. Does it make you ache? Why are we not discussing our shared neuroticism towards feeling artistically inept? Why haven‟t we pointed out how manic we feel some months and how overwhelmingly filled we are in others? I don‟t want to talk about the corner. I don‟t want my mouth on your mouth because I want to hear things that I need come out of that mouth. Why don‟t we list all the places we‟ve been and why we want to be there right now, in this moment? I don‟t want to go to Marie‟s.

We go to Marie‟s. Maybe if I give this some time she‟ll say something so fantastic I‟ll leap across the table and violently kiss her and take her home with me. We get to the red door. In the triangle windows at the top of the door I see backwards baseball hats and glittered hair. I had to wait for the vixen to smoke a cigarette. I kicked

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at the side of Marie‟s, its chunky cream paint I tried

chipping off with my thin, summer shoe. I looked up and saw the hand-made “Riptide” sign in some sort of musical note excerpt from God knows what piece, and chuckled at the situation in which I had found myself- some say-

voluntarily in. I wanted nothing and everything to do with this girl.

We went into the bar. I saw the normal people that I know patron there. I saw the normal people I don‟t know patron there. I saw the people that belong there forever It‟s purgatory for everyone there, including me: between the over welcomed stay of the bar before to the staccato thud of my couch after leaving Marie‟s.

The rest of this story is just silliness and ends in misfortune and a bit of fun, as you can imagine. She

stopped me in front of St. Mary of the Angels. The crimson bell towers made a developing story develop longer into the morning. The rising stone Corinthian columns hailed at my reluctance towards the beckoning balcony beneath the

pinwheel stained glass where the faceless angels creep over Hermitage and over a cardboard man and rubber vixen and their shameless display of disaffection. I saw the façade of the church in a sharply clear globe with sleepy Luna wrapped in her cirrus blanket- she existed only for this Hermitage globe, and the corner, a planet itself, with too little people to feel free and too much four in the morning nausea to begin to populate the thunderstorm feast of

rotten purity gooped around the rungs of the closest and most malevolent storm drain.

I‟m telling this all to Berdie over tacos at Big Star. There isn‟t even space for comment because of the

implication of immaturity in the story. He picks up his helmet and we walk to his bike just around the fence and he rolls the bike along with me and we cascade back to

Hermitage through the deadness of a hot Monday night. Berdie takes off from Hermitage and back through Lincoln Park, past the Lindahls and Finkels, not quite to the tracks, and with the overarching humid stench of next

morning‟s rise, Molly lets him in the back because he lost his key to the front.

I got up to my apartment and turned on the industrial fans and poured a glass of filtered lake water because I am

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a new American and that‟s what I do. I sat on my cornered couch and thought about what it means to be this age in America- what it means to be ANY age in America. The seagulls squawked annoyingly just above the street lamp near the alley. Just two months ago I thought their squawks were glorious because I heard them early one Saturday

morning through a sunless air and my toes were still cold and my heart was still frozen but just thawed enough like a slab of salmon taken from a freezer and left on a white plate on a porcelain kitchen counter. I thought a lot about Berdie and his constant dilemma. I thought about my

constant dilemma. Berdie has it bad in the new-American sense, which means he‟s getting close to the truth. He‟s getting close to righteousness. The actual American dream is now attached to his heels and pulling at his heart with an Ethernet cable up through his khaki slacks. All his life he‟s done things right. He got fantastic grades in high school, went to a top Midwestern university where he studied international business. He now works for a very

private but influential company that sells cell phone cases, printers, sponges for cleaning electronic equipment, robots that type text messages for you and computer screens that self-clean. I think about him a lot and how he‟s doing because he was duped. I told him we‟re all duped, but he wasn‟t listening. This entire generation isn‟t listening. Nobody does what they want to do because nobody does what they want to do. People that don‟t do are then jealous of people that do and the people that do are all liars and fully constipated with digital shit. The only ones telling the truth are the ones lost and questioning and unafraid to be lost and questioned. They are the ones who need a beer and a conversation. They are done masquerading as a good American and want to extinguish the policy of what is a good American in a discerning bright America. We haven‟t heard the President‟s voice in ages because it seems he may think this generation is a shot in the dark.

This generation is deathly sad and no one wants to admit it. It‟s okay, though. This generation is sad because we‟ve been given everything and our parents don‟t

understand us. They‟ve given us too much. They had to work for what they wanted and had to work for what they got. Our grandparents had to learn how to be the youth of the Great Depression and prepare and come back from world war and they weren‟t able to give their offspring much. So their offspring conspired to do great things like fix economies and teach in public schools so their offspring could have

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everything and now we have everything and it‟s the saddest thing in the whole wide world. We‟ve had the best

Christmases in American history because we got what we asked for except for me because all I wanted was to be Santa Claus and bring joy to the billions of other kids of the very ripe 1990s. But it turns out it was all a fraud.

There are also so many people of my generation who weren‟t given anything. Who come from nothing and fight for themselves and come to bat for others. They come from

broken homes across central Illinois and despite odds are helping others light torches. People like me, who have everything, are being lifted up for air towards the crest of the oceanic spirit of those who were given less. There are people in my generation who come from less than me and do more than me. They are the ones that have. They are the ones that become Presidents and are the faces of the

twenty-first century Congress or start blogs about

independent coffee roasters or take classes in woodworking or open their doors for traveling bands coming through their large town in need of a floor for one air mattress after moving to these larger towns because there is more in a big town than all of the less that they came from. They come from lineages of immigration and bleed in the color of a new mingled America on the palette of justice and

fortitude they learned in our public schools whose agendas haven‟t changed since our grandparents learned how to be children of the Great Depression. They are the ones to fight for and keep fighting for. Don‟t apologize, America. I‟ll apologize for you. You have nothing to apologize for, America. You unknowingly picked your first men to be men of the pen and the brain for the future. Whether they like it or not we are now bursting apart in color at the seams of the Constitution and we are moving across the feathered cursive empirically.

They also come in forms like me. I actually don‟t have everything. I come from middle-income middle-America along with all my friends and relatives. All my friends and most of my relatives are alive and are well fed and have jobs as teachers or mechanics of heating and air-conditioning and host parties where we make quilts out of the flannel shirts of a deceased grandfather. We have nothing and everything that we need. We need no more and no less. We are the

middle. Except I want more and I want it all. I want glory and I want the gutter. I want it all to be real and I want it when I‟m ready. I don‟t know if I‟m ready. I am starting over. I‟m going to start over with nothing. I am going to

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be so honest that you‟ll have nothing against me and

nothing to hold me to. I am going to engulf with flames all the lies and reservations I hold and I am going to inject with venom my secrets until they secrete willingly out of my fingernails. I am going to be honest with you- I just want to be honest with you- LET ME BE HONEST WITH YOU. I don‟t want anyone‟s help. I‟m going to take everything that I deserve. I am going to stand on the right side of

righteousness. Berdie needs to join me on this side. He should quit his job and demolish his comfort. He should annihilate his simple life for the promise of a simpler life designed by he and he alone. But with my faux nobility comes real struggle. I do pine for a life with money and a computer and time off and weekends with snowmobiles and deviant dogs to take heed of. There‟s something righteous about Berdie‟s life. It‟s wholesome and true. It‟s an

honest day of work and an honest night of camaraderie with Molly. He has the elasticity of opening himself to someone in the confines of a home in the evening and in the morning is greeted with a clean car ride to the sun burnt northwest suburbs. He may already be standing on the right side of righteousness. What does it look like?

I sometimes wonder that when my heart explodes if out will pop carcasses of dead moths, impaled by yarn, like stale popcorn strung around a Christmas tree.

Before this happens, though, I want to grow old and sad with someone. I‟m already sad and I‟ll always be sad but I want to learn how to grow in sadness with someone. I want to grow weird with someone. I don‟t know if it‟s

sadness or weirdness I‟m after. I like both. I want to watch sad films and read sad books with a person. We‟ll have normally sad children who love spending all their time with us and are interested in things made by other sad

humans and then make things themselves and by doing so help the even sadder people of the world feel better. We‟ll bear weight together and live in a small European village

together. We‟ll take on things bigger than ourselves and in that find the insurmountable summit of sadness that comes then so we‟ll compress that sadness into something we can

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use to fight with and throw it at things we make with our hands. We‟ll keep it at bay and use it when we need it, like super heroes. We‟ll be super heroes together and by doing all of this we will have abolished the debilitating effects of sadness. We‟ll keep it at bay. My mother would love to know that I‟m keeping it at bay. I am.

I don‟t know if I would be able to die in a European village. Part of me wants to die in my home state. I wish I were ready to die. I wish I were Justin Vernon who could die anytime he wants because he made something for the world. He made something for us and can die with grace. I am the loneliest man with four limbs but I want my funeral to be the happiest place on Earth and for floozy Luna to make her way closer to us to wear a party hat and whatever family and friends I have at that moment to be joyous and rip pages out of books foreign and gothic and tossed up with shards of smashed instruments and people hollering on chairs and swaying with locked arms and arched backs and belly‟s full of brown Bourbon transported by plastic red cups. But first I need to make something and be the leader of something huge and then retire with it. I might want to retire on the Mississippi. I should retire on the

Mississippi. I‟ll retire in a loving brothel made of mud and Indian skin near a skinny forest on a skinny shore. I‟ll retire on the Mississippi with a tender molar fixed numbingly at some local shop by some local dry hand because I failed to get my teeth fixed in my 20s among things and other things failing like sore knuckles and a machine with a dirty, greasy hand shoved up my intestines pulling out auxiliary meals and the sparkling split ends of electrical chords made unruly and all tangled by me and me alone.

(I meant for the dead to hear the rumble of my car over the mumble of my laugh through the un-humble contents of my acidic breath.)

I am fixated on retiring on the Mississippi. I am fixated on being away from home with someone from home.

This reminds of something that happened while I played a music festival in Austin, Texas this past spring and I

went with Berdie to the pub to tell him about what happened. It was a Sunday night and I told Jimmy Conlon I‟d play some new songs at his Sunday Open Mic. It was a warm March, and but spring still hadn‟t come. I remember thinking that it felt like the weather in Chicago had a wet fever with gusts of chills cresting on the sweaty forehead of a nauseous and

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unaware infant. Berdie and I never meet at our eventual destination. We go together to places. We‟ll pick each

other up or we‟ll meet on a corner and then walk a block to the place where we want to be. I don‟t know why we do this but if I had to bet it‟s because we grew up in the same small suburban town and were never too far to pick each other up even if it was a little out of our way. It has always been our etiquette.

Sketch was working behind the bar and we ordered

Krankshafts and shoved popcorn into our faces. Chicago is a beautiful place to get nothing done in. Sometimes it feels like no one is getting anything done. In the summertime I don‟t think anyone does anything because they‟re out

looking through boutique windows or running towards the lake and along its front. In the wintertime I don‟t think anyone does things. The pub is always empty and I walk out of there with thirty dollars at most Saturday winter and spring nights and I spend fifteen of it on pour-over coffee at Star Lounge every Sunday morning before rehearsal and fifteen of it on Krankshafts after playing songs at Jimmy Conlon‟s Sunday Open Mic.

Harlan Fincher came and met Berdie and I once he found out we were around the corner. Harlan is my brother in arms from the band and my back neighbor at 1841. Harlan has a sleeve of tattoos of which I‟ll never remember when, why, or where he got them, though I lie because one of them is a heart with an arrow through it and when I consistently ask him why he tattooed it on his body he exclaims: “‟Cuz it‟s a human heart with a fucking arrow through it!” with much empathy and vibrato laughter. He does things because those things make him happy and he never looks back.

Harlan is a tame, but wild bird and the only one of my friends who is married. His wife Annie and I come from the same area; cut from the same suburban teeth. We are white and Catholic and carry our whiteness and Catholic guilt like the sleeve of tattoos subdued by the light blonde hair of Harlan‟s arm.

I grew up playing in bands with Harlan‟s brother-in-law in church basements and community centers in the very young part of this century in suburbia America. We often reminisce at Gold Star Bar on Division where Harlan

bartends after thirty-two free PBRs and arguments on which suburban Rec. Center threw the best Friday Live & Local shows twelve years ago while Annie smirks behind her vodka

References

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