Oh, That Explains It...

I'll bet all you out there in the blogosphere have been wondering how this administration has been able to afford both tax cuts for the rich and to fund a massively expensive unecessary war. These two recent articles from the New York Times:


Governors Oppose New Medicaid Rules


Sheriffs Protest Fed Drug - War Fund Cuts

(To read the articles, you have to register with the New York Times. It's free.)

So they're cutting funds for Medicaid and for local law enforcement officers to deal with the growing problem of meth. And to make matters worse, we're losing the war in Afghanistan because the resources to fight people who actually helped the terrorists who killed thousands of Americans are tied up in Iraq, a country that didn't do anything to us.

This last weekend, there was heartbreaking article in the New York Times Magazine about the struggle of an American Army unit in Afghanistan, Battle Company Is Out There.

Good god, I hate this administration..

Exhausted Friday Random Ten

This would have been a busy week to begin with-- we're getting ready for midterms at school. But add to that picking up an extra shift at Jury's Tueday and Kim's car troubles and things got even busier.

Kim is going to trade in her '99 Jetta Lemon for something that doesn't require repairs every couple of months. We're celebrating Adam's 14th birthday, which is actually next Saturday. I've got on online Biology quiz to take, which means reading three chapters. I've also got to write a paper. And of course I'm working two shifts this weekend. I foresee lots of caffeine in my weekend.


1. Lost In the Flood- Bruce Springsteen
2. Sugar Mountain- Buffalo Springfield
3. Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Parts VI-IX- Pink Floyd
4. Free Man In Paris- Joni Mitchell
5. My Back Pages- The Byrds
6. Plaster Caster- Kiss
7. Centerfold- J. Geils Band
8. Harden My Heart- Quarterflash
9. Kiss and Say Goodbye- The Manhattans
10. Little Wild One- Marshall Crenshaw

Notes:
1. A great song from Bruce Springsteen's first album about a robbery gone awry.
2. Neil Young wrote and sang this song about getting older.
3. The last song on Wish You Were Here.
4. Joni Mitchell's song about her friend music mogul David Geffen.
5. The Byrds' cover of a Bob Dylan song that has one of my favorite-ever lines in a song: "I was so much older then/I'm younger than that now."
6. Kiss' tribute to the Plastercasters of Chicago, who, ironically, never "did" any of the members of Kiss.
7. In Dave Marsh' Rock Book of Lists, published in 1981, J. Geils Band was listed as one of the greatest bands never to have a number 1 hit. Of course, they later had one that year with "Centerfold." And then they broke up.
8. Okay, it's a big hunk of eighties cheese-- but I like it.
9. I love this little seventies R and B gem. As I listened to it today, I realized that it's almost the same song as Billy Paul's "Me and Mrs. Jones," but with a different ending.
10. One of the great underappreciated artists of our time.

Wild, Wild Life

Yesterday morning, I parked my car on Montrose Avenue and Racine as I always do and walked down Racine Avenue to class at Truman College. About halfway down the block, I saw a large bird out of the corner of my eye landing on a railing. By the large size, I assumed it was a crow, which are plentiful around here. As I turned to look closer, I realized that it was not a crow, but some kind of hawk. For once, I didn't have my camera with me, but I remembered, for a change, that my phone has a camera in it. I fished it out of my pocket, and as I was trying to get the zoom adjusted, the hawk flew away. I was struck by how big the hawk was; the wingspan had to be about five feet.

As luck would have it, I happened to be on my way to my Biology class, so I told Roberto, one of my classmates what the bird looked like. He told me that I was describing a Red-tail Hawk, but that it was unlikely I'd seen one; they rarely go into cities. Still, there are two large cemetaries with lots of trees just a few yards from where I saw the bird, and Illinois is well within the area the hawks range, so I thought it might have been possible.

I got called in to work last night for someone who was sick, and I told my boss Dan about what I'd seen. He told me that one of his neighbors who is an avid birdwatcher told him that a Red-tail Hawk took residence in the area about six months ago.

Back last fall, I spotted a coyote sitting in Lincoln Park as Kim and I drove down Lake Shore Drive. I spotted another one in the city a couple of weeks ago, after I picked up Adam at my ex's house. I was driving down Lawrence Avenue, between Cicero and Pulaski, when I saw a coyote ambling across a railroad bridge that spanned Lawrence Avenue.

I haven't seen a deer in the city in a while-- years ago, I saw one crossing a railroad bridge on Foster Avenue, near a forest preserve-- but deer are regularly spotted in the city, sometimes taking up residence on people's lawns. We used to have a bit fat possum that used to waddle down our block, and racoons and skunks are occasionally spotted-- we live about a block from the north branch of the Chicago River.

I've been intrigued by Alan Weisman's best-selling book After We Are Gone, a book about an imaginary abrupt departure of human beings from the earth. Weisman pictures a world in which our infrastructure quickly falls to entropy without our maintenance, and plants and animals quickly retake the land we clawed away from them. Lately, it seems like the animals are coming in ahead of our departure. Maybe they know something we don't.

My Neighborhood's On The News And I'm On Sirius Radio

I got home from the library a little while ago with my stepdaughter, and discovered there were three news helicopters flying over my neighborhood. I got her into the house and walked around the corner to discover a half dozen fire trucks around the corner from my home, but no fire.

I walked back home, turned the news on and discovered what the hullabaloo was about; some workers in a building being renovated, put some kind of stripping chemical on a floor without venilating and were overcome by fumes. They're okay. When they showed the helicopter shot of our neighborhood, I called my stepdaughter in to see it. She commented that it looks different from above.

Must have been a slow news day.

Last night, on the way home from work, I was playing Little Steven's Underground Garage. The deejay, Handsome Dick Manitoba, played "Bend Me, Shape Me," 1970 hit by the American Breed, who hailed from Cicero, Illinois, where I was a teacher from 2002-2006. He mentioned that he thought Cicero had something to do with Al Capone, and asked for someone to email him if they knew any details. I did, and when I got home, I emailed him a short history of Al's stay in Cicero after he was run out of Chicago. The school I taught at was a block from where Capone's headquarters, the Hawthorne Hotel, once stood. Manitoba emailed me back, thanking me for the information and saying that he was going to talk about it on the air the next night (tonight). If you happen to be listening to Sirius Radio Channel 25 tonight, I may get a shoutout. You can listen to it online as a visitor for a few hours at www.sirius.com.

Dreams and Creativity

Last Wednesday, Sarah, a woman I work with, told me that she and her husband Matt were closing their cheese shop, "The Cheese Stands Alone," in Chicago's Lincoln Square neighborhood.

It made sense for a lot of reasons for she and Matt to close the place, but it still made me-- and my kids-- sad. It was unique, interesting and the result of someone's dream, vision and sweat.

I currently work for two small businesses, and have worked for a number of them over the years. They've varied in success and other regards, but one of the things they all shared was that they were someone's vision and passion.

I'm fortunate to be and have been surrounded by a number of small businesses. A couple of blocks from my home is the home and studios of Delmark Records, the oldest independent record label in the United States. My last post was about my friend Joe Judd, who owns Myopic Books. My friend Mark came back from a 1990 trip to Europe to form his own graphic design company, The Art Mafia, and later formed Automedia, Inc., one of the first web design companies in Chicago. At the end of my block, a family is opening a Thai restaurant. My barber, who is from Serbia, owns her own place. The list is long.

Mark once made the comment that one of the reasons he opened his own business was because he wanted to be his own boss. He ruefully said that ironically, when you own your own business, you have dozens of bosses-- your clients. Still, people keep opening their own businesses.

A couple of weeks ago, I was working at the Evanston restaurant with my friend Christine. Some of you may remember how bloggers Lulu and TenS had sent me there when they found I needed another job. An old friend of theirs is a co-owner. The day I walked in to apply for the job, to my surprise, my friend Christine, whom I'd lost touch with, was working there.

I had become friends with Christine a few years back when I'd picked up an arts/politics magazine in a bookstore and had been impressed with it. I had published my own 'zine, and thought, rightfully, that I'd like to be friends with someone who would be creative and motivated enough to publish a magazine like that and tracked her down.

That day at work, Christine and I were sipping coffee, chatting, when she confided to me that she was having big doubts about her life. She felt like she should be doing more, she said. I was astonished at the statement and told her that I felt completely opposite; that she was one of the most creative, self-actualized people I've ever known. I think she appreciated hearing that.

In addition to publishing the magazine for a while, she writes poetry and short stories. She is also an excellent musician, writing and performing her own music. She's also a talented artist. I pointed all of these things out to her, and told her my belief that she and people like her brought beauty, grace and creativity into the world and made it worth inhabiting. As someone who has little to no skill in the arts or music, I appreciate people like her who bring those things to us.

For every Picasso, whose name will always be famous, there are thousands of other artists who labor in obscurity and often poverty. For every Joyce Carole Oates, there are a legion of other writers whose excellence goes unnoticed. For every Miles Davis, recognized and lionized for his accomplishments, there's an army of musicians who play for the love of the art form and never get to quit their day jobs.

I am in awe of these people, along with the people who have the faith, audacity and courage to open their little restaurants, boutiques, businesses and shops. The restaurant business, which has allowed me, and continues to allow me to feed my kids and pursue my own little dreams, has a staggering 98% failure rate. Yet people continue to open them.

A couple of Saturdays ago, I brought my kids to Sarah and Matt's store. I knew that they were thinking of closing the place, and wanted Adam and Mel to have one more memory of going there. They both love cheese, and it was fun to watch them as they excitedly tried the different cheeses and chose which ones they wanted me to buy them.

Truth be told, they are models of creativity themselves. A few years back, I told Adam about my old friend Dana's theory about the "Million Dollar Idea--" that every person, somewhere in their brain, has an idea that would make them rich, and that they just have to discover that idea. Adam's come up with some ideas, including a pillow with a speaker for playing your Ipod through. About a year later, he saw this product in a store, much to his chagrin. I'm certain that he'll come up with another idea. My stepdaughter started a company making coasters (the kind that you set your drink on) with a couple of her friends. She also wrote me a wonderful song as a Valentine's Day present.

As I'm easing into middle age, I think a lot about the future, the future that my kids and their kids will eventually inhabit. As a society, we've got a lot of problems to solve. Political problems. Economic problems. Cultural, religious, educational, energy, technology and a hundred other types of problems. We've got a boatload of problems to solve before we reach a sustainable future.

But I have faith that we've got that creativity and the energy to solve those problems. From a latino immigrant with his lunch truck and a dream, to Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes, to some software wonk writing code that allows a spaceship to explore planets, and everything in between, people with a handful of dreams and a pocketful of creativity make this world a place worth living and, I'm convinced, will someday not only come up with the solutions to our problems, but make this place an interesting and enriching place to live. Sarah and Matt may not have come up with the cure to AIDS or a solution to our energy problems, but they did contribute to making this a rich, interesting and wonderful world. Thanks guys.

Got Time For Friends?

One night, in early September of 2001, I got into a huge fight with my now-ex-wife Cynthia. I left the house that night and slept in my car. After that, for the next few days I stayed at my friend Mark's home, in a spare apartment he had next to his studio in the attic of the building he owned. I was one of a number of his friends with marital troubles who availed themselves over the years of this space, which he had dubbed "Mark's Home For Wayward Boys."

I've alluded in earlier posts to the reasons that marriage went down in flames. Cynthia is six years younger than I, and wanted kids and a house-- not unreasonable things for a woman in her early thirties to desire. My finances were in ruins over a custody fight with my ex-girlfriend a few years before over my son, and buying a house or having more kids was out of the question.

As i sat in my friend's home, pondering over what was going on in my life, I picked up a couple of magazines from one of the many stacks of magazines Mark had in his attic. One that jumped out at me was the most recent issue of the Utne Reader, pictured at the top of this post. The article that grabbed me was about the importance of friends in our lives.

In reading the article, I realized that I'd been neglecting friendships in trying to make my failing marriage work. After a couple of long phone conversations with Cynthia, in which we decided to try marriage counseling, I went home. I took the issue of the Utne Reader with me. I didn't think Mark would miss it among the enormous stacks of magazines in the attic.

I thought back to 1987, when I'd renewed my friendship with my friend Andreas. He and I had become great, great friends toward the end of college, in 1985. By 1987, we'd lost touch. Fortunately, during a trip to see some college friends that year, he also happened to have visited that weekend (his parents lived in the town), and we ran into one another in the Uptowner/Cellar, the bar we'd hung out at in college. In the course of the evening, I discovered that he'd survived cancer in the time we'd lost touch. I was stunned and a little angry at myself. I could have lost him, and would never had known what happened. I vowed never to let something like that happen again-- to make sure to work at and maintain my friendships.

Right after I got out of college, in 1985, I'd become friends with a guy named Joe Judd. He, like Andreas, Mark and I, had gone to Eastern Illinois University in the early and mid eighties. He'd hung with the same crowd I had. We knew, we discovered, all of the same people there. Yet, somehow, we'd never met in college. When we did meet, though, after college, we immediately hit it off. We'd end up with groups of college friends going out, or just run into one another all the time.

In the early nineties, I was in Myopic Books, a bookstore in the Earwax cafe in the Wicker Park neighborhood in Chicago, when I saw Joe behind the counter. I stopped to talk to him, assuming he worked there. Not only did he work there, he owned the place.

Over the next few years, Joe moved the store. He always maintained a little cafe in his stores. When Adam was little, we'd go to Myopic and hang out. Not surprisingly, Adam loves books to this day.

Over the years, I saw less of Joe. I started working two jobs, so I didn't get to his store often, though it was down the street from Adam's school for a while. When I did get to the store, Joe wasn't there.

When my friend Mark was murdered in June of 2006, we helped his family clear his home out. In addition to the huge trove of magazines and newspapers were thousands of books. It occurred to us that Joe might take some of the books, or at least give us an idea of where we could sell them, where we could use the money for a reward fund and a scholarship fund.

Joe remained mysteriously elusive. He'd was spending most of his time, we'd heard, on a farm in Arkansas.

We talked to Cat, the manager of Myopic Books, which had since moved back into its original location in Earwax. She told us that Joe had okayed us to bring in a lot of the books.

On Saturday morning, I was cleaning out the wicker basket in our dining room that I keep newspapers and magazines that I haven't had a chance to read in. I came to a Chicago Reader from last month that I hadn't had a chance to read. I looked at the cover to decide if I wanted to read the cover story. As I read the headline, I realized I most certainly did want to read it; it was about my friend Joe Judd.

http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/joejudd/

Over lunch, I read the story; it explained why Joe was incommunicado for so long. It turned out that around the time my marriage to Cynthia was unraveling, Joe had been diagnosed with a disease called Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber syndrome, a congenital disease that affected the veins in one of his legs. The doctors initially told him that he was probably going to lose the leg.

After a couple of years of grueling treatment-- lots of operations-- Joe left the hospital, leg intact. In deciding how he was going to spend the rest of his life, Joe decided that he wanted to live on a farm. In 2003, he bought a farm in Arkansas. He's found happiness-- and love-- down there. Reading the article, I was very, very happy for my friend. He only comes up to Chicago a couple of times a year, so I may or may not run into him again, but it made my heart happy to know that he's doing well.

I thought of my chance meeting with Andreas that weekend in 1987. I thought of last year, when I read about my policeman friend Hector Alfaro in the newspaper. I thought about how, when I started this blog, the fourth or fifth person to post on it was Lulu, a friend I'd long lost touch with.

I also thought about my friend Yomi Martin, who I'm still looking for. In the end, I seem always to connect back with, or at least hear about, old friends. I'm hoping my luck in that vein holds out with him.

In the meantime, I still have the issue of the Utne Reader that set me on the path of making sure that I maintain and nurture my friendships. Once in a while, I take it out and re-read the article on friendships, just to remind myself of the value and importance of friendships.

One day, last year, I happened to set the magazine out to reread the article. Kim was walking by, when she stopped, picked the magazine up, looked at amazement at the cover and asked me why I happened to have this old issue of the Utne Reader. I told her about what had happened, and how I kept the issue for the great article on friendship, and as a little talisman of my friendship with my late friend Mark. Why did she want to know, I asked?

The guy on the cover, she told me, was her good friend Keith Anderson, from her hometown, Minneapolis, where the Utne Reader is published.

Friday Random Ten

One of my professors mentioned yesterday that midterms are approaching, in two weeks. This semester is flying by!

My main concern this week was my mother; she had a hip replacement surgery yesterday. I got a call from my father yesterday evening to tell me that everything went perfectly. She'll be in the hospital a few more days, where she'll start rehab.


1. Married Man Blues- 10CC
2. Motherless Child- The Blind Boys of Alabama
3. Can't Say Nothin'- Curtis Mayfield
4. Me and Bobby McGee- Janis Joplin
5. Almost Saturday Night- Dave Edmunds
6. Johnny And Mary- Robert Palmer
7. Hitch Hike- Marvin Gaye
8. The Bitterest Pill- The Jam
9. Penthouse and Pavement- Heaven 17
10. Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Grows)- The Edison Lighthouse


Notes:
1. From 10CC's Deceptive Bends, one of my favorite albums of the seventes.
2. I always think of Richie Havens' great rendition of this at Woodstock whenever I hear someone's version of this. I heard it on the album, by the way. I was only eight when Woodstock took place. My parents wouldn't let me go.
3. From People Get Ready, the fantabulous Curtis Mayfield box set.
4. Janis Joplin continuing the great rock and roll tradition of having your greatest hit after you die (e.g.: Otis Redding's Dock of the Bay, ) Janis played the acoustic guitar that's at the beginning of the song.
5. Dave Edmunds covering John Fogerty.
6. From Robert Palmer's mercifully short New Wave phase.
7. My copy of Marvin Gaye's Super Hits was one of the most-borrowed records in my collection when I was in college.
8. Paul Weller and the boys at their finest.
9. This group got their name from a ficticious music group in Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange. My favorite song of theirs was Let Me Go.
10. Everybody loves this bit of pop tripe. Try not singing along. I dare you. Here-- I'll throw the 45 on the turntable.

Go ahead-- dance around your cubicle a little bit.

Mystery Solved

Yesterday morning, I looked at my sitemeter and discovered that by late morning, I already had more hits on my blog than I normally get in a day. I wondered what was going on. I looked on Sitemeter and discovered that all the hits were coming from http://www.greendayauthority.com/, a Green Day fan site. The Foxboro Hot Tubs are a side project by a couple of Green Day members. They recorded the song "Ruby Room," about a great punk bar in East Oakland that I've been known to frequent with my good friend Viktor Zeitgeist.

They had a link to a post about me and my friend Viktor Zeitgeist almost getting thrown out of the Ruby Room. Apparently they liked my description of the Ruby Room as "a great establishment, full of punk rockers, bikers and other assorted riff-raff."

We include ourselves, of course, in the "riff-raff" category.