apparently they've hired a man to work in our bar at long last. this is a little detail brought to you by a mildly curious lisa.

Today, a friend of mine said something very funny while somewhat drunk.

My friend, a black man, said this: "There are two reasons you cannot trust whitey! Number one, Republicans. Number two, Insane Clown Posse.

The end of a long day. I took a stroll to the off-licence around the corner for a single cold beer. At the top of my road there was an inexplicable spillage - forty, maybe fifty pvc squares gleaming under a streetlight. How on earth had they come to be there? 'Bin day' was yesterday, were they cast from a window of a car?

On further inspection, many had been run-over but I managed to salvage two pretty much free from dents, scratches and the impressions of stone chippings.



It is without question some of the worst music of all time, mind-bendingly awful - cod-Irish hillbilly hardly does it justice.

A friend has a birthday coming up.

Yesterday I was on my lunch, walking down busy Michigan Ave., near the river at Wacker. All of a sudden I saw a (probably schizophrenic) woman wearing old jeans, a gray hoodie and a yellow t-shirt. She was looking blankly at all the 9-5ers and tourists who were gathering at the stop light. She then walked towards a section of the group and said: "So what exactly is her pussy like?"

Funny to see all the stunned faces.

John W. wrote:Yesterday I was on my lunch, walking down busy Michigan Ave., near the river at Wacker. All of a sudden I saw a (probably schizophrenic) woman wearing old jeans, a gray hoodie and a yellow t-shirt. She was looking blankly at all the 9-5ers and tourists who were gathering at the stop light. She then walked towards a section of the group and said: "So what exactly is her pussy like?"

Funny to see all the stunned faces.

Was it a Slint hoodie? If so, their faces were probably stunned because they knew she spent $40 on it.

John W. wrote:Yesterday I was on my lunch, walking down busy Michigan Ave., near the river at Wacker. All of a sudden I saw a (probably schizophrenic) woman wearing old jeans, a gray hoodie and a yellow t-shirt. She was looking blankly at all the 9-5ers and tourists who were gathering at the stop light. She then walked towards a section of the group and said: "So what exactly is her pussy like?"

Funny to see all the stunned faces.

I can top this...yesterday waiting for a bus at 16th and Mission at about 12:15 a female crackhead, about 40 years of age, was walking down the sidewalk, right in front of about 15 people waiting for the bus. She is wafer thin and was walking quickly, holding her pants up (sold her belt to buy crack I guess). As she passed us, she forgot she needed to hold her pants up. Her pants fell to her ankles. She wasn't wearing any underwear. Stunned, horrified faces. She looks around, shrugs her shoulders, picks her pants up and keeps on walking.

This same lady last week asked me for a quarter at 8:30 in the morning, begging and begging almost in tears. I was tempted, but said no, as I always do. Someone caved in and gave her a quarter. I watched her as she immediately bolted for the liquor store on the corner, and came out seconds later with one can of Tecate and a huge smile on her face, yelling "ALL RIGHT...ALL FUCKIN' RIGHT!" between sips.

Yesterday, I got a call from a my friend Inigo asking if I wanted to go swimming up in Harrow at his parent's house, a beautiful old coach-house with a clock-tower and bell. So naturally I fucked off all the work I was meant do and got the train up there.

I was expecting to go swimming in this giant inflatable rubber pool that they used to have, but when I got there I was delighted to find that they'd had a 'pond-pool' dug out where the old pool used to be. Essentially, it's a freshwater pool that isn't chlorinated and filtered by reeds planted round the edges. The bottom of pond is a layer of clay, that moulds itself to your feet as you walk. There's a multitude of animals in the water, including newts, tadpoles, water boatmen and dragon-fly larvae and the walls of the pool are covered in hair-like pond weed.

Later Inigo, showed me his dad's bee-hives. Inigo was explaining how we trick the bees into making surplus honey for us. Our other friend John was wearing the the bee-keepers mask and standing right up close to the hives. Inigo said that they won't attack you as long as you remain calm. It was at this point a bee flew into my hair and got stuck. Initially I started trying to run away, in an attempt to loosen the bee from my barnet, but then remembered what Inigo had been saying and calmly walked over to him and asked him flick it off.

After that, whilst we were sunbathing, John mentioned a story in the newspaper about Britain wanting to replace it's ageing nuclear arsenal. Inigo's girlfriend Ria is from Nagasaki and she started telling us about how her uncle was blinded by the flash from the nuclear explosion and how her grandmother saw the mushroom cloud (apparently, her uncle didn't go blind instantaneously, but gradually over twenty years).

It was strange sitting in such an idyllic english setting talking about such things.

Later Inigo showed me a giant mandala painting in his bedroom, given to him by his godfather Nick Mason.

[EDIT: to add some definite and indefinite articles]

Cranius wrote:Later Inigo showed me a giant mandala painting in his bedroom, given to him by his godfather Nick Mason.

"Nick Mason" as in the Pink Floyd drummer?

Yes, the one and the same.

I have another friend whose uncle was Keith Moon.

I will start by writing that I am relatively drunk. Ok.


My father called me yesterday and asked if I could help him with a computer problem at his office. Being an elementary school "technology coordinator", I figured I could at least look into it. Basically, when I got there (chicago burbs), I found out that the Zip drive that he backs up all his daily data with had a jammed up USB cord and bent pins in the connection. But, to be safe, I called around to find a local computer store and brought it in.

There was a 40 year old dude and a 19 year old kid who worked there, the 19 year old helped me. He screwed around with a pair of plyers and tried to pull the pins back in place and repeatedly plugged the device into one of the many PCs in the store, trying to see if it recognized it. Literally every time he was about to plug it in he would pause and give me a look and say something like, "keep your fingers crossed" of "I really hope this works" as if he were a orthopedic surgeon or a demolition expert under severe pressure. It was so sincere it made me completely uncomfortable, cause I was ready to just buy a new Zip drive and move on with my life, but he eventually convinced me to "really want it to work" as well.

Anyway, after about 10 minutes of fiddling with it, he did get it to work. 40 yr old boss guy was asked how much it would cost for such labor and a new USB cable. Yaddah yaddah yaddah, he asks for 10 bucks. I explain that I have to pay with a card cause I had no cash, unless he could wait till I went to the bank first. He responds with: "There is a Starbucks next to the bank. Get us each a coffee and we'll call it a day." I agree.

Now, I don't really drink coffee, and I've been to Starbucks probably 4 times in my life, so I have him write the order because I don't understand him.

Venti Black Guy (I swear to God that is what he wrote and was correct)
Caramel Moccaciato

I go to the bank, get to Starbucks...there is a 50 something dude behind the register, and 2 young women from Ireland that are baristas. I hand him the paper and decide to get myself an Iced Decaf. He looks at me. "Iced decaf what?" I am stunned. "Coffee," I explain. He is completely perplexed. "We don't have just iced decaf coffee." At this point I realize that I am so far out of my element that I should just fucking retreat and give the computer guy 10 bucks and run and hide. But I muster: "Latte?" He scoffs, plinks at the register, and orders the Irish girls to make a decaf latte, and "should probably add some whiskey" in a tone that doesn't sit with me well at all. I promply put $.08 in his tip jar, grab my foreign beverages, and go to collect my Zip drive.

I return to my dad's office, grab the device, cables, and (whiskey?) latte, fumbling to remotely lock my car, and clumsily drop the Zip drive to the pavement. Fucking of course. I snap what I can back together, bring it in, get it to sort of work, and explain to my dad that within a week or two, he should invest in an external hard drive. I go to Johnny's Beef on Arlington Heights Rd and have the best fucking Italian Beef I have ever had in my entire life. It nearly brought me to tears.

I drove home with a homemade Italian Lemon Ice and the realization that I am 31 years old, that life is ever-changing, and that I am okay with the fact that it changes without me.