FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE RECESSION

This recession must be far worse than anyone in the media has led on- just this morning, I spotted the Frankenstein Monster's trademark sports jacket hanging abandoned at the Chicago/Damen bus stop.

Apparently, he's been laid off, left to roam the streets just trying to keep body and soul together

Once financial distress begins affecting classic monsters, who's next?

It's only a matter of time before carelessly shed gnome hats and tree-nymph leggings litter Chicago sidewalks, as fictional creatures left looking for work discard layers of clothing to cool off in the summer sun.

But without new jobs haunting oak trees and frolicking in sun-dappled fields, who's to say how things could go?

Hobgoblins begging for a dime to buy a pint of Jack... werewolves shooting up in the alley... tooth fairies turning tricks under the el stop just to get a couple of molars to hit that fix.

This recession affects us all, friends.

DEAF AND DRUNK

According to the street signs near Lawrence and Western, there are a notable amount of deaf alcoholics wandering the neighborhood.

Some signs that you may have encountered a wandering deaf lush include elaborate, quick hand gestures, a strong smell of gin, and the inability to speak or hear what you are saying.

Drive with caution: It's not their fault.

A FIELD GUIDE TO IRONIC MUSTACHES

You may have noticed on your last jaunt around town that there are an alarming amount of people roaming the streets sporting facial hair that serves no purpose other than to illustrate how stupid facial hair can be, with not a hair of sober seriousness or mustache-related respect.

To help you discern just what someone might be growing from their face for the sake of an occasional mild chuckle from a stranger, I present a rough field guide to some of the types of upper-lip irony you might encounter on your travels...

HIP-HOME-LESS

It seems the unemployment situation has now infiltrated that once-thought un-infiltratable bastion of society: the hipsters.

Yes- hard those working, diligent hipsters are now having to pound the pavement, searching desperately for any kind of work they can find to provide themselves with much needed studded white belts, ironic neon sunglasses and metrosexual hair ungents.

Wait...

What's that you say?
Most hipsters never had jobs in the first place?

Oh. That explains why I frequently see them out riding bikes enjoying the sunshine, being ironic, or getting a lazy afternoon coffee at 1PM on a Wednesday while I'm running across the street to get a ream of printing paper, a banana, or a pen from the local stop n' shop so I can get back to my desk and work more.

Ah well- back at it, you merry life-lovers. Job-shmob... Live that life as carefully ironic as you can; you only get one, man.

A CLOWN A DAY...

Every day at 3:45 PM, a clown goes past my office.

I am 100% certain it's a clown. No one else would have the same impeccable timing to be by at exactly the same time everyday, nor could anyone else muster the same bubbly bike-horn honking frenzy as this particular clown.

Perhaps he only speaks in horn-honks. Perhaps it's to alert the neighborhood to his hijinx.

Maybe it's not a tangible, flesh and blood clown like most other clowns (actually- I believe most clowns to be hewn from rotted beef and filled with custard.) This could be a poor, free-floating ghost clown, forever wandering the Irving Park corridor, frantically honking his horn in the hopes of finding eternal, clown-y peace.

Whatever the reason- I've yet to see him in person, which is why most of my co-workers are of the belief that the frenetic bike-horning is actually an ice cream man.

But I refuse to believe it... one of these days, I'll see that clown.

And based on how I feel about clowns, depending on how things go, I just might push him off his unicycle into traffic.

Hard to say, really...

FLUTE SALAD

There are way more annoying instruments than the flute. When one thinks about the flute, one is bound to imagine delicately flowing waterfalls, or infomercials for the Time Life Zamphir: Master of the Pan Flute collection.

But imagine my surprise when a flute player moves in under my girlfriend's apartment, and it's thoroughly irritating. Imagine my further shock to discover that said flutist, when not enjoying a good flute riff, prefers hardcore gangster rap and terrible, shitty dance music to salve her shredded flute-playing nerves. Imagine my further surprise to discover that yet another flute virtuoso has moved in above MY apartment, resulting in a weird "just can't get away from that flute" scenario whether at my house or the lady's.

It's almost too much to bear. Sure, they could be practicing "Sunshine of Your Love" on the tuba, cracking some wicked zither rhythms, or playing off a fallen comrade on with a stirring Scottish bag pipe solo. But somehow, when renting walls from a financially higher power, it seems like instrument practicing should be kept to a minimum. And by minimum, of course I mean sequestered off-site in a government holding facility where bag pipers, flutists, and opera singers can practice to their hearts content and become the world's greatest bag piper/futist/opera singer in a motivational "Fame"-type situation where only the strong survive.

All's I know is... I've had not one, but TWO accordions sitting here, just begging to play "Roll Out the Barrel" for the last two years, and now that I have flute-related competition in two separate dwellings, I finally have the appropriate intestinal gusto to let those damned barrels roll.

Once I fix my "A" button, you flutes are toast.

INTERNAL DAMNATION

I know when I walk into a room full of near-strangers and face a table full of clear alcohol that I'm in for a night of severely punishing my internal organs to a level of near-masochistic splendor.

My best friend's bachelor party was at his older brother's house. He has two brothers, and I knew both of them in the capacity one can know someone ten years older than themselves when they're 8. So- I remember them mostly as guys who would trudge through the house, "hey" their parents and leave again.

Fast forward, oh, 20 years, and now we're all playing ball on the same field. But a very sizeable part of my better judgment wondered what it would be like seeing and carousing with my friend's relatives who remember me as a nerdy, chunky eight year old. What will happen now that I'm a nerdy, chunky almost-30 year old?

It's good to know time has a tendency to iron out the wrinkles and put everybody at roughly the same level. What's UNfortunate, is being a career steady drinker who can comfortably put away most of a fifth of whiskey throughout the course of a day without so much as a hiccup stuck drinking with folks who mostly socially lubricate themselves in a binge-manner, with shots and beers and tequila and schnapps and open lack of judgment.

I wanna say I've been drunker. I don't honestly remember.

What I do remember is being more hung over than I've been in 5+ years.

But it was a proper send off, so the projectile vomiting and 9+ hours of daytime sleep were theoretically worth it.

JUST LIKE OLD TIMES

The beautiful and wonderous thing about getting older is that all the trivial bullshit that kept you from enjoying yourself as an awkward, self-conscious high school teenager doesn't seem to matter at all.

For most of us, high school was not at all like High School The Musical, or Rock & Roll High School, or even High School the Musical II. No, for most of us it was an arduous test of your fortitude to force yourself out of bed every morning all chock full o'terrible bitchy moodiness and general unpleasantness to go sit quietly learning about things that don't interest you in the least when you'd much rather be shooting zombies in a video game, watching a zombie movie, or drawing pictures of zombies.

I didn't have any particular issues in high school (other than being a mostly terrible person for adults to be around at all times.) Honestly, it went about as well as it could have. But I would never do it again. In fact, I might rather serve out a four year prison sentence, trading smokes for favors and minding what's near my hinder than go back to Algebra or gym class. Gym class can bite every last inch of my ass.

But I met good people, and with high school politics and bull shit, probably could've met more if I'd let it happen. Regardless, I've been away for ten years now, and have done a piss poor job of keeping in touch with people. So you can imagine my inherent trepidation when my best friend since the age of seven invited me out to his bachelor party.

Admittedly, neither one of us has kept in touch with many people from the "old days," but I knew through the bachelor party and the wedding two weeks later, I'd be laying eyes on a lot of people I haven't laid 'em on in a good decade or so.

Which brings me back to my original point. I go and have a great time because within five minutes, we're all caught up. All the "my life is like this now" fluff is flowing squarely under the bridge, and we're free to talk about movies, swap stories, and drink beer.

Because the funny thing about catching up with people you haven't seen since high school-- nobody really cares. When it gets down to it, your business is your business, you've made a few decisions, been to a few places, and so long as you're keeping things together, all is well. None of it is terribly impressive to anyone unless you're an astronaut or the president or cured AIDS or something.

Life is life- your life is your life, mine is mine, and their life is theirs, and everybody's still waking up every day to shit, shower, shave, and go to work, whatever that might be.

It's good to know it's that easy to knock back a few with friends you haven't seen in ten years. After five minutes it's like you never left.

Y'ALL COME BACK NOW, Y'HEAR?

I had to take the Amtrak back to Iowa for a friend's bachelor party.

Having not so terribly long ago been dealing with flights and airports and such, train travel suddenly stands in sharp relief as a kind of rolling tenement full of screaming babies, rubber neckers and recently released ex-convicts. And the Amish... yes, the Amish love themselves some trains.

For years now I've been taking the train back and forth to Iowa to visit the folks, and every time I think, "I should take a cross-country train ride," y'know- leisurely soak in the local sights and color, take a lot of grainy snapshots, buy a magazine in Needles...you get the idea.

But it seems as soon as I hit Union Station, with it's even mix of suburban teens heading home from finals week, a mess of carnies, hillbillies, law-flee-ers, and psychopaths, with just the lightest sprinkling of normal folks, I have an abrupt change of heart. The romance of the train doesn't exist anymore. Certainly not on Amtrak.

Everybody settles into their seat after strict security screenings. Actually, they've been warning of increased security on Amtrak since 9/11, but that mostly consisted of making you put tags on your carry on bags (which was only enforced a year or so)and requiring an ID to buy a ticket.

The people behind me are having an intense conversation about D-I-V-O-R-C-E (Tammy Wynette would be proud) as well as domestic disputes, child custody, and NASCAR. Turns out one of the guys is taking the train to go get his truck out of an impound lot in Kansas, because his brother in law stole it...and left it in Kansas. The guy was from Missouri, but just went to Chicago because "Hell, my truck was stolen so why the hell not?"

An announcement comes over the P.A.:

"Attention Amtrak Passengers: Please keep your shoes on at all times on this train."

Um...what? Is this an ongoing problem where people get MORE athlete's foot on the train, combining with the athlete's foot and fungus they were already working on, forming a super-fungus?

A crackle and deafening buzz from the 35 year old speakers...there must be more!

"In addition to hygenic reasons, the plates in between cars are constantly shifting, and can pinch bare feet causing a nasty wound. It's happened before- we'd like to keep it from happening again."

Ah. gotcha.

I throw on my I-Pod and drown out talk of jail stays and bass fishing off the bridge.

Surely things will be more cosmopolitan in Iowa.

CALL O' THE WILD DOUCHE BAG

It must be spring!

All across Chicagoland, the native Douche Bag have begun to crawl out of their knot holes, dorm rooms, sports bar wingeries, and poorly-lit studio apartments with just a "Bob Marley Smoking Weed" poster on the wall and nothing but a half a case of Corona and moldy lime wedge in the fridge to spread their douche-baggery far and wide. The smell of Patchouli and Axe Body Spray wafts on the cool breezes that ruffle their un-ruffleable gelled-permanently-into-bedhead hair.

I know this for two reasons:

A.) Every four seconds at work today, I could hear their native calls of "DUDE!" and "BRO!" as they migrated past the window

and

B.)It's baseball season.

So get the hose ready, Chicago- there's bound to be some pee and vomit on your porch in the morning! The Wild Douche Bags are on the prowl, shouting their mating calls to and fro (or, date raping calls as it were.)

I, for one, will once again be choosing my time outdoors carefully. Unlike sparrows, the common hummingbird, and tuft-eared North American squirrels, I do not like being around Douche Bags. They are the worst thing nature has to offer. Volcanos? Nope. Pestilence? Nope. High-register Earthquakes? Famine? Poisonous black mamba snakes? Madagascar hissing cockroaches? AIDS? Mexican Bird Eating Tarantulas? Dancing With the Stars? Matthew McConaughay?

No, friends. I'm afraid Douche Bags trump them all. Though- you could call technicality on Matthew McConaughay, because (technically) he IS a Douche Bag.

So make sure to lock up your trash cans and set plenty of traps baited with 3D Dorritos, MAXIM magazine, and the latest Dave Matthews Band CD.

I'm afraid we're in for a long Douche Bag season this year.

PRIVATE DANCER

I recently went to go see the incomparable Kel Tamashek (also called the Tuareg) band Tinariwen at the Old Town School of Folk Music.

For the uninitiated, Tinariwen sounds like not a whole lot else. Imagine traditional African and Middle Eastern music mixed with American surf guitar and you begin to get the idea. The members of Tinariwen were exiled from Mali for political reasons(my details get fuzzy here)and now play incredible music, along with a handful of other bands from the region- Group Bombino and Group Doueh among them.

Their most recent record, "Aman Iman," is absolutely phenomenal. It had been well over a year since they'd been stateside, so as you can imagine, I was pretty damn well psyched to have a shot at seeing them again. I can only imagine the logistics involved in getting such a band into the states and playing shows has got to be one monstrous pain in the ass (though admittedly, this most recent trip consisted of just four dates in the US.)

Now, the Old Town School of Folk Music is a wonderful place with a rich and fascinating history. John Prine was an early student, as was Steve Goodman (he whose music I was raised on, and who wrote "City of New Orleans" amongst about a billion other chestnuts) and it's about the only place in the world you can take traditional Celtic dance lessons and then learn how to play a zither or traditional Parisian accordion under the same roof.

The show room is fantastic- the acoustics rival any place I've been, and there truly isn't a bad seat in the house.

My only issue, which seems to rear its head nearly every time I visit, is the white people.

There are white people all over the place, which wouldn't be a problem, except that these particular white people always seem to be of either the arts endowment variety, or the trust fund hippie/professional student variety. It never seems to matter what show I visit- the seating is perfect, the sight line to the stage is perfect, the sound is impeccable, and I would be having a life-changing experience...if it weren't for the old dollar bill duffs and hackey sackers clustering about me.

I am the first to admit that I am not a people person. On every other visit, I can mostly ignore my fellow show-goers and become absorbed into the music. But at Tinariwen, what with it being bouncy, danceable music (and with the band more or less insisting they allow people to move as the sounds will them), OTS opted to clear a space for dancing.

It was nice to see people getting into it- for a time. But by the time I spotted a businessman in a three-piece suit and power tie cutting loose with some kind of hippie flag racing around the dance floor, I felt that it should be stopped. Why allow these people to shame themselves so?

Just then I noticed a woman jerking around frenetically to my left. Her motions were not wholly unlike that of the notorious "Elaine dancing" episode of Seinfeld. She had not a care in the world, nor a even the faintest half-note of rhythm. Her perfectly white violent thrusting and convulsing about was jarring and utterly terrifying. But its at these moments, when someone is making a perfect ass of themselves, that pure irony tends to show itself in its most natural state.

The foot-kickin', thumb-jabbing, hair tossing motions were taking place in front of an emergency exit, with a stop sign instructing people to use the next door. From my point of view, in the dimly lit room, all I saw was the picture above. And I laughed. I laughed a whole god damn lot.

Because I concur, irony. White people dancing SHOULD stop.

NEEW YORK CITTEE??

If absolutely every last decision you have to make as a couple is a drawn out exchange of pro's and cons that isn't exactly an argument, but isn't exactly isn't an argument, perhaps it's time to enter into a NEW relationship with someone altogether different.

If you should enter into said new relationship and still find yourself constantly in heated debates about meaningless, trivial bullshit for upwards of 45 minutes at a go, perhaps you were not meant to BE in a relationship with someone else. Maybe you would be better serving the world as a monk in a devoted live of celibacy, a eunich in a devoted life of asexual ball-lessness, or maybe you have been devoting time to the completely wrong sexual orientation, and you need someone of the same sex to keep you in line. Maybe your constant mind numbing bickering over inconsequential drivel stems from a lack of sexual chemistry.

Whatever the case, hearing a couple bicker back and forth over what kind of salsa to buy at the grocery store for upwards of 25 minutes (I left the aisle and returned no less than 4 times, ultimately leaving salsa-less) is precisely the kind of thing I'm talking about, and it yet again reinforces one of the many reasons why I hate the grocery store.

In this case, I hate it because it drags you into a weirdly personal layer of other people's home lives, and people seem to forget they're in public more often at the grocery store than just about anywhere else. Nowhere else can you hear as many discussions over which shape of sandwich bags a person finds to be the most efficient for sack lunches, or which kind of toilet paper a body finds the most soothing and absorbent.

You wouldn't look through someone's medicine cabinet unless you wanted a sudden potentially scary jolt of what this person needs to maintain themselves. The grocery (and drug) store is pre-medicine cabinet, pre-nightstand drawer, pre-shower shelf. It's the only place a person can openly ruminate in public on which kind of ham gives them less gas, pick up a disposable enema to do a little house cleaning, and decide what kind of condoms they should take home, because they and the missus just aren't ready for another mouth to feed, but still need to get down from time to time. Travel pack or jumbo?

It's really quite gross when you get right down to it. But then, so is the human body. I suppose it only makes sense that the fuel station where a body gets all the crap it needs to keep it going along doing all the gross things it does would have to be a little disconcerting in and of itself.

But above all else, wouldn't our world be much better if people could keep their familial squabbles at home, whether they're at the grocery store, Wal Mart, Fudrucker's, or the Golden Corral? 'Cause I don't really give a shit what kind of salsa they want, or what kind of ham gives them less gas. And if I were wearing headphones, they'd scowl at me.

Damn. Looks like I'm low on milk.

HIGH-GOD-DAMNED-FALUTIN' SHIT!

Some of the most expensive coffee in the world is made of coffee beans harvested out of wild cat shit.

Kopi Luwak coffee is about $200 a pound.

Now... I've had a lot of coffee that TASTES like cat shit, but I'm pretty sure it was actually made from coffee beans that HAVEN'T been run through a wild animal. Maybe animal shit is what's needed to improve the unequivocal diarrhea known as Folgers.

So how much longer until rich people are actually eating shit? Settling in at high-falutin' cocktail parties, sipping on a tea cup of Llama diarrhea while discussing their yachts and investments?

"Gourmet" may actually be French for "suckers." I'm talking about things like caviar and moldy cheese- an excitement of flavors, to be sure. And please don't assume I haven't experienced these things- and if someone offered me a cup of wild cat shit coffee, I would probably try it (after all- that cup is probably $15.) But the cost, sheer ridiculousness and overt lack of common sense involved in pausing one day, seeing something blast out of a fish's hind end and saying, "Hey- a whole bunch of fish embryos... I think I'll put that on a water wafer and serve it at my high society party!" cannot be overlooked.

Really, high-class food in other countries is even more insane- bugs, snakes, brains... actually, watch Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to get an idea, just mind the questionable ethnic hokum.

Today I was walking down the sidewalk and saw a bunch of little dog poo nugglets surrounded by an assortment of frilly toothpicks.

Either someone saw a bunch of poo chunks while carrying frilly toothpicks, was alarmed and flung them all about, or, as I believe, this was actually exotic monkey shit that had been set up on a swanky silver serving platter to be taken to a high society party, when someone stumbled and spilled it all over Montrose Ave.

Somewhere out there, I'm certain there's a bunch of rich people eating animal shit right this second.

In fact, after learning about cat poop coffee, I couldn't be MORE certain.

BUYING PENS WITH THE STARS!

College is all about delusion. Delusion that you're actually an adult, delusion that you're actually learning something useful, and delusion that you'll be using that something to solid ends when you graduate, and not just taking on extra shifts stocking small pants at the Baby Gap down by the mall.

Art school, in particular, is an elaborately delusional experience. Not only is it the teacher's job to lead you to believe that you are learning a useful skill that isn't entirely beholden to your predetermined natural ability for a particular medium (not to mention being able to come up with concepts and ideas worth sharing), but also to delude themselves into believing they are doing the world a service by helping fill it with important, challenging artwork, thereby making you (the student) believe that painting bowls of fruit and sculpting phallices will somehow earn you a steady paycheck when you graduate.

And for every would-be Jackson Pollock out there just waiting for the alcoholism to set in, there's that first, fruitful art store visit- a rite of passage for any would-be art school kid. Sure, buy the $45 "ArtBIN"... it's not exactly the same as a $10 tackle box or anything! And those packages of pencils you buy 10 for $2 at Walgreen's aren't good enough- instead, pick up pencils that cost $3 each and break easily!

It's one big racket, and at least around here- an area where there seem to be very few working artists- nine times out of ten I find during a quick visit to grab more ink or a pen tip, I will undoubtedly be shopping exclusively with sullen teens who aren't good at math, and their hopeful parents- hoping that somehow, some way, they've managed to raise the next Gauguin in their humble Fort Wayne, IN track home.

On this most recent visit, the kids seemed especially disinterested in being anywhere near the shop, shuffling around with pained expressions alongside their beaming parents under a big sign sporting the store's slogan: "You Might be Shopping Next To the Next Van Gogh!"

I have to say... I don't think I was. The next Steve-O, maybe. Possibly the next Fall Out Boy roadie-turned-meth addict-turned-religious zealot, and more likely than not, the next Waukesha, WI Applebee's shift leader.

One thing I do know, however, is that even if one of those kids shows up my jaded ass and turns the art world topsy turvy with their genre-defying, edgy paintings- the people shopping around me were most DEFINITELY not shopping next to the next Van Gogh.

I like having two ears too much.

ALL IN A DAY'S WORK...

The shop front next to my place of business is undoubtedly home to some kind of shady shenannigans.

First of all, it doesn't have a name. Nowhere on the front or side of the store is anything even closely resembling a title for the "business." Or an address, for that matter. On casual inspection, it is a mostly empty store that manages to pay its bills by selling weird tuberous vegetables out of baskets, and some kind of foreign alcohol. Oh, and "crunch apels," as the sign says (note: they've been marked down from $.50 each to a mere $.25!)

No cigarettes, no soda, no little cans of tuna fish and pinto beans. Just weird fruit and foreign-y alcohol of some kind.

This might seem sad under normal circumstances- in my quest to avoid turning more cash over to the CVS' and 7-11's of the world, I've stopped in many a heart breakingly pathetic "convenience store" staffed by an overly attentive, well meaning clerk that stocks nothing but grape Nehi, generic batteries and one, sad, mostly deflated mylar birthday balloon.

But this particular shop is filled with surly looking old men who seem to be of some kind of non-descript, thickly Eastern European descent. And they stare you down whenever you walk buy.

Any time day or night- whether it's 7AM or 11:30 PM- there they are, sitting near their baskets of rutabegas and "crunch apels," surrounding a table covered in empty vodka bottles, staring at you with death-wish eyes, hoping to God you don't want to stop in for a nice refreshing room temperature bottle of Zomerzitas beer and a crunch apel.

The other day, I must've caught them at trash time, as I turned the corner to find myself face-to-face with a hair-oiled 60-something, overtly scowly European man in a Cabana wear shirt hauling a garbage can overflowing with nothing but generic vodka bottles, weird foreign beer cans and Little Caesar's pizza boxes. It was their entire existence boiled down into one garbage can (though suspiciously free of crunch apel cores and root-based legumes.)

Somehow- I can't believe this is enough to maintain a business. At some point during the day, somebody's coming in there to get instructions on who to whack, or where to take the bundles of unmarked bills, I'm sure of it.

I'm also sure there was probably a a filed down handgun and human arm or two at the bottom of that garbage can.

UNNECCESSARY RUFFAGE

Touristy parts of town crack my shit up.

Mostly because I never have to go to them.

Back when I was working in one, it was an openly maligned hell hole I couldn't wait to be out of. If you work in one of the Hard Rock Cafe's, Planet Hollywood's, or Rain Forest Cafe's of this world, my hat's off to you. Those places are magnets for all kinds of inanely irritating people from lands far and wide who have chosen to plop themselves at one of your tables and make themselves your problem.

But the difference between, say, a place like Chicago, LA, or New York and, say, Orlando, FL or Pigeon Forge, TN, is that these are big fucking cities: the biggest fucking cities, in fact, that this fine country has to offer. So when people come here to Chicago, which was the murder capital of the country multiple years over, and act like they're ordering themselves up a churro at Busch Gardens, I couldn't be more pleased when something goes amiss and reminds them they're in an actual city and not Frontierland.

I hadn't been down to north Michigan Ave for awhile. But I was within 2 mi walking distance, it was a nice night, and I wanted a laugh.

Not only was I treated to such wonderous delights as advertisements for "Legally Blonde: The Musical," which may be the most despicable thing I can fathom, and a sign that said "Bored with your ice cream? HERSHEY-IZE it!" at a store that ONLY sells Hersheys chocolate-relayed products (while apparently offering Hersheyizing services), but I spotted a mommy-daughter duo out having a nice night on the town watching a carriage horse eat out of the garbage. They probably drove in from Indiana, hoping for some good wholesome fun, getting all dressed up for a nice dinner and carriage ride, and end up watching a horse eat old burrito wrappers while his handler looks on smoking, ignoring the situation almost entirely.

They couldn't have been more disgusted.

Thank god they didn't see the hobo peeing on Borders.

A PACK A DAY KEEPS THE DOCTOR IN PAY

I'm not some uptight pain in the ass about smoking. I think smoking is wonderful, actually, health hazzards and all.

I don't smoke often, but when I do- it is thoroughly enjoyed. Every smoky, faintly chemically intake is a wonderful little break from life while simultaneously trimming a bit off the end.

I am, however, in thorough awe of people who smoke like there's no tomorrow as though their favorite daily indulgence were running 10 miles and eating a bunch of kale. It is pretty well established at this point that cigarettes aren't GOOD for you, but neither is refined sugar, alcohol, caffine, or fried cheese. And yet all those things are magically delicious in small doses. Or large doses, if that's the way you choose to kill yourself slowly over time.

Reacting as though smoking is something you're entitled to and just gotta do in the ol' day-to-day is as weird as when I watched a special about the fattest man in the world- coming in at OVER a ton- who's filling up most of a hospital room complaining about being deprived of cheeseburgers and fries, even though it takes a team of six able bodied men to roll him off his bed pan long enough to change it before the next massive evacuation.

If you are an enormous fat pile of flesh and don't give a shit, awesome. It you are an enormous tub and don't give a shit AND are fully open and admitting of the fact that you will probably die young due to years of abusing yourself and yet you continue to do the same? Even better. You get a thumbs up from me, friend.

Same goes for smoking. If you want to smoke a carton a day- please have at it. It's your life: do whatever the hell you want so long as it isn't fucking up somebody else's life. If you can admit it's not a harmless little habit, you're up there even higher- keep on climbing!

Fact is, I'm an overweight occasional smoker who drinks a lot and loves red meat. I know I'm not exactly living the health nut life. And I'm fine with that- because I know I'm not going to be here forever, and what few pleasures this modern world has to offer me I will happily take part in.

But to think I'm ENTITLED to my vices?

I think not.

HOME, CRAP, HOME

Returning to Chicago from vacation is generally a losing venture.

A body tends to take their vacations when Chicago's weather is absolutely abysmal- late winter/early spring seems to be the sweet spot. But the trouble with that is that you have no idea what it's going to be like when you land back home. Let's say you've spent 7 days in beautiful, sunny Florida weather- you begin to forget (or care) where you came from, and landing in 2 ft of snow on the return home can be enough to reduce a grown man to tears.

This go-round, it was a quick thrust from 70-80 degree clear blue skies to 40 degree spitty shitty snow/rain and bleak, crushing gray as far as the eye can see.

Of course, Chicago is not without its charms, and after coming off of five days of bizarre shit, it was nice to see some bizarre shit here at home- a land with it's own, very specific kind of bizarre shit.

Take for example, a homeless man passed out drunk in a pile of garbage bags being roused into consciousness by his CELL PHONE.

Now my question is not so much where he gets the money to pay the bills- I've seen this guy out asking for cash before. And it's fairly obvious he has a number of things, other than panhandling, generating revenue for him- hence the reason why he might need a cell phone to take care of all those important business calls.

My question is- where do they send the bill? Does he have online bill-pay?

The logistics of not having a house are beyond my comprehension. Guess I better stay employed and sheltered- I don't want to have to figure all that crap out.

BON VOYAGE-

What better way to bid a fond farewell to Las Vegas than with a cabbie telling us about dead babies being used to smuggle drugs into the country on our way to the airport?

Somehow, it seemed like a fitting hat for the trip..

HAMMER AND BANG, or...

FREE YOUR PANTS AND THE REST WILL FOLLOW.

Our last full day in Vegas, and I've realized that we have done absolutely nothing close to what most people come here for.

We've spent maybe $60 at the slots. Neither myself, nor my girlfriend knows the first thing about cards (except a couple of cornball card tricks good for entertaining drunk uncles at Christmas) and we've seen nary a strip club nor a brothel. Our trip has been entirely public-vulva free as a matter of fact. We did see an amazing burlesque show (have I mentioned that?) but that was all very tasteful- er, as tasteful as off color jokes and nipple tassels can be.

So, after heading out on the "new" strip for the first real measurable amount of time in five days, we've come to find the true Vegas- the one people fly out to to fritter away their life savings. After three hours or so shuffling around with the fanny pack and camera herds, we decided we needed a breather. So we headed back to the confines of our slightly less austentatious hotel(though- still incredibly austentatious by normal hotel standards. We weren't at the Travelodge or anything, though I'm sure if we were it would be ritzier than, say, the Travelodge in Peoria.)

As we entered the front doors, there on a bench just inside, before entering the droves of people milling about with light beers and miserable expressions, and adjacent to the $10.99 buffet sits a fratty man-boy man shouting into his cell phone to his loved ones back home, recounting the exploits of the night prior.

And what did he do that was worth the public phone call?

Oh, he just "banged the shit out of some prostitutes, bro."

And with that- I realize we've really just been pecking around at the side dishes here in this town, with not a single bite of the steak they accompany.

Yes, a town where you don't just "bang the shit out of" A prostitute. No, you "bang the shit out of" SOME prostitutes, with an "s" on the end. With your friends. And you can recount just "how hard" your best pal "gave it to this one prostitute."

When we get home, our bank accounts will only be short the cost of food, lodging, and airfare. No second mortgage- in fact, no house to take a second mortgage out on. And our naughty bits will be in the same shape they were when we took off from O'Hare.

And y'know? I'm pretty God damn alright with that.

We got back to the hotel probably 5 hours later and the guy was gone.

But that doesn't mean somebody didn't just come clean up his body.

What happened to that guy in Vegas stayed in Vegas.

SATURDAY



Sad ol' Las Vegas regulars provide easily as much entertainment as any other inane flashing nonsense going on.

Sure, there are mornings I wake up, look at myself in the mirror and think, "so this is what you've laid out for yourself, huh? Way to go, jagoff." But never, ever, even at the lowest depths of despair can I imagine being one of these sad, prematurely old bastards who roll themselves out of bed in the morning, sidle into the nearest flashing wasteland and set up shop at their favorite slot machine for nine or ten hours at a go. But not just any slot machine... the "lucky one"- the one that's going to pay off big one of these days.

And there are a lot of these little nomads wandering about, drawn to "the lucky one" where they sit, hour upon hour waiting for emblems to line up on a machine designed specifically to NOT have those emblems line up.

Two things immediately cross my mind:

Firstly, they can't ALL possibly be the lucky one. And "luck" is very different than "chance." "Chance" is a real, provable thing. "Luck" is part of the same chapter in the "Life Lessons" book as leprechauns, dragons, and Santa Claus: it's bullshit.

Secondly: What the hell would these people do differently with their lives if they WERE to suddenly hit it rich?

To aid them in their quest to redeem a big payoff ticket, they march out all sorts of "lucky" accouterments- rabbits feet, plush toys, troll dolls, pictures of deceased loved ones, flowers- all to be adjusted in such a way as to make that particular machine pay off big. "If I dance my troll doll with colorful hair two steps to the left, one to the right, a half turn around and blow on his hair, cherries come up on the screen!"

But with all the weird shit being paraded on top of the slot machines lining our hotel, easily the weirdest and most unpleasant luck-finder was the gentleman pictured above, absent-mindedly going about his business playing a slot machine in a lumberjack shirt and no pants. From what I could tell, not even underpants. Just a pantsless old guy at 11:30 AM on a Saturday playing "Gold Mine!" hoping, that having his balls exposed in public will somehow cause the machine to pay off in a major way.

Aghast, we walked to the liquor store, and on the way back passed a group of younger guys coming towards us, one of whom was saying to the others, "Geeze, that dude's gotta wear some underwear or something, bro!"

And sure enough, multiple hours later after hitting a major car show at the Orleans, old Pantsless Jim was still there, rockin' the hot slots.

From then on, every place I sat (and- possibly every place I will EVER sit) I had to wonder if the seat had been kissed with a liberal dose of bare old man ass sweat.

As such, all of the pants from my trip have entirely bleached backsides.

Vegas is a pretty unreal place. One day in and I've been pretty well buzzed since landing yesterday. This is the tackiest, most hideous thing I've ever seen in daylight, but at night, it's inhumanly beautiful... well, that is if you can look past the drunken frat boys and fanny-packers stumbling around. It's the cubic zirconia of architecture- you can build whatever the hell you want as big as you want and as flashy as you want; reservations be damned! Because in the daylight, fake is fake, and it all looks pretty awful.

But... we're experiencing Vegas slightly differently. We actually came out for the massive Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekender festival, which takes over the Orleans Hotel & Casino every spring (actually- it used to take over the Gold Coast. But whatever.)

I love rockabilly music, and I love old stuff- specifically mid-century stuff. I always have. I was obsessed with early Charlie Feathers and Jerry Lee Lewis sides in my early music development period, and have been far too into classic Universal horror flicks, Polynesian restaurants, gangster movies, and 1940's comic strips since I was about 11 years old. It's a fascinating time period to me, most probably because I never lived in it.

But "Rockabilly" now takes a lot of questionable turns. It incorporates punk dudes (which is cool- I used to be one), brawlers, swing kids, tiki philes, motor heads, and everything in between. The "scene" is less about music than ever, and all about the culture- Head to toes in tattoos, decked in vintage clothing, carefully coiffed, and may not know Carl Perkins from Carl Weathers.

But I find it entertaining as hell. I have no interest in meeting much of anyone- most of the folks I've met who are way into "the scene" are wholly self absorbed with very little to say. Of course, maybe my closed mind towards the whole shtick of the thing could stem from the fact that I was pluck bald by the age of 21... And there are nice people into this stuff, for sure. We've just barely started to get out and stretch our legs. That coupled with the fact that midwest+this stuff is a rare equation to come across.

But stereotypes is stereotypes, and it's a gas walking around, crowd watching in between bands and burlesque shows. For example- seeing the above image when entering the bathroom- one old fella who's been around since Elvis first threw on a black leather jumpsuit, surrounded by a bunch of interchangeable so-cal car dudes taking a whiz.

Then there was the fully-loaded cart that went past us, stocked with close to 30 cases of PBR, only to return like this a few minutes later:



Viva, Las Vegas indeed... It looks pretty good from here.