Wed 13 August 2008
Make the Pie Higher! Make the Pie Higher!
thirty-six
Saturday it was fun to be a reporter again. I'd had the feeling that I'd been falling on my face failing to come up with those easy, intro stories. Here I am, "experienced reporter", thinking I'm going to flunk out of school before I even begin my magazine classes, because I'm not turning in enough stories of the kind I learned to do in 2003. Oy vey. But I relaxed, realized that unlike Sedna, my former boss, my instructors don't want to impale me on my sharp rocks or feed me to sea beasts, and Saturday I got up out of bed and went to the farmer's market. I came up with two stories: I took a bunch of neat pictures (maybe I'll post them on Facebook or something), so I'll have a photo essay, and I got down and dirty talking with housewives buying organic potatoes and a woman and her daughter (on break from Yale) selling organic peaches. Delicious. I mean the fruit. And, um, well, the vegetables. The ma and daught pair got up at 1:30 from someplace downstate to make it to the Evanston market, where the rich, naive and conspicuously liberal Evanstonians will pay a lot more for their produce.
And then later in the day, I was paid a visit by one Robbie Cusser. We hadn't seen each other in nearly three years. Hard to believe. It was a really great time hanging together in my studio as he strummed my guitar and we caught back up. We crawled through Uptown and Lincoln Park, riding the Red Line and looking for dives; met up with a young professional friend of his; We ran into a Lincoln Park (alleged) coke bar as The Smiths played; Robbie and I didn't roll back into Rogers Park till 5 a.m. Woke up at noon and all day I was in this happy-happy daze. Happy that the people dear to me, near and far, are alive in the world, happy that Chicago has beautiful girls, happy to see my friend, but of course mostly happy that God invented beer. The lake looked like a painting — choppy green water with clouds rimming the horizon. The view somehow made me think of The Moon and Antarctica (so long to this bone-bleached part of the world).
As if I needed anything to remind me of Modest Mouse.
I took him to Union Station so Robbie'd know how to leave (his mother had dropped him off at my place when he arrived); out of nowhere we were asked, "Are you from Miami?" And I was like, what the hell, how did you know that? Oh, yeah, I guess Robbie's shirt. We met this girl who still goes to Miami, talked with her for forty minutes as she waited to board a megabus to Cleveland. She was an English major (like me) loves the Beatles (in fact just got back from Liverpool) and really sweet. I thought she was beautiful.
Oh, she was just nineteen, if you know what I mean, and the way she looked was way beyond compare...
I'll never see her again, but it was a fun little encounter; R&I capped the night off in Lincoln Square watching the Cubbies and then spent last night getting ripped apart on margaritas in the DePaul area (after downing Pabst)...oh, how I should no longer drink like this at 25...
I head to the Northeast next month. Tickets to Yankee Stadium on Sept. 12 for the final season. I'll spend the bulk of my time in New York and Philly. I'm still working on the details of the trip...hoping to hitch a ride, Cameron Crowe style, with an indie-rock band. (www.takkatakkamusic.com — they're cool).
Three weeks left in the quarter, than another adventure. And I was thinking the other day that I have no idea where I'll be a year from now, which is kind of cool. I'd just as soon stay in Chicago and really get comfortable, but I may have an opportunity in Constantinople (or that may just be ridiculous). And my dream magazines are in San Francisco and, of course, New York, which when it comes down to it, is the only city anyway.
Book to recommend: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I loved this. Tale of moral isolation in a sleepy Southern town during the Great Depression. Four oddball characters isolated because they're of high intelligence and everyone around them is a philistine and they can't communicate. An adolescent girl, a black physician, a Marxist vagabond, a diner owner. And the central friend that they have in common is a deaf-mute, upon whom everyone projects their own highest values. Brilliant, a joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. And Carson McCullers was only 23 when she wrote it!! I'm already 25-1/2, and what do I have to show for myself? tsk, tsk...
Chris
"Make the Pie Higher"
a poem from the words of George W. Bush:
I think we all agree, the past is over. This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen And uncertainty And potential mental losses.
Rarely is the question asked Is our children learning? Will the highways of the internet Become more few? How many hands have I shaked?
They misunderestimate me. I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity. I know that the human being and the fish Can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope Where our wings take dream. Put food on your family! Knock down the tollbooth! Vulcanize society! Make the pie higher! Make the pie higher!
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