Having spent the last few days working from home, some of it through a lovely cold-medicine-induced haze, I was feeling positively benevolent toward the world in general. I mean, hey, I may be chock full of phlegmy goodness, but at least I’m sitting in natural light, with trees and plants and a nice warm cat. But somehow I can’t stop thinking about these links that came to me the other day. First off, I like the Village Voice and all, but why are they the only media outlet covering this story? I’m no expert, but the sources seem legitimate enough, if a bit pissed off. Why has nobody else picked this up? Is this common knowledge and I’ve just been in the dark all this time? Do people realize that Bush is snuggling under the proverbial duvet with organizations who break Israeli law (and every ethical code I can think of) by actually bribing poor citizens to convert to Christianity? In case you’re too lazy to click the link, here’s the quote:

The staffer, Kim Hadassah Johnson, wrote in a report obtained by the Voice, “We are establishing the Meet the Need Fund in Israel—’MNFI.’ . . . The fund will be an Interest Free Loan Fund that will enable us to loan funds to new believers (others upon application) who need assistance. They will have the opportunity to repay the loan (although it will not be mandatory).” When that language was read to Moshe Fox, minister for public and interreligious affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, he responded, “It sounds against the law which prohibits any kind of money or material [inducement] to make people convert to another religion. That’s what it sounds like.” (Fox’s judgment was e-mailed to Johnson, who did not return a request for comment.)

And that’s just a teensy-tiny part of it. The article starts off scary and just keeps getting worse and worse. I would have thought this would merit at least another look, but perhaps it’s just me.

As for the other story, to be honest I could almost get behind this idea – I mean, at least we’d know where to avoid, right? But I fear Kos is right and they don’t really have the wherewithal to make it happen. It’s an interesting idea from an electoral perspective, though: is there a possibility that the bible thumping, snake-handling Christian Right, were they to concentrate themselves geographically, could make their votes count more? Wouldn’t their departure from their current states weaken the GOP vote there, at least to some extent balancing out the gain? This is where I show my achilles heel – the finer points of politics are awfully foggy to me. It’s the big picture I tend to look at. And the big picture at this point is pretty damned scary. I’ve said in the past that the war on Terror/Iraq has a goodly dose of religious fervor behind it – inasmuch as we condemn the idea that the western world has been attacked in the name of Islamic beliefs, by our ongoing ignorance of and/or disrespect for those beliefs we perpetuate the same conflict. Only of course it’s OK when we do it, because we’re Christians, and Christians = good guys. Right?

Right?

Last night, in an unheard-of coup following several bouteilles du vin, dear Sam and Lindsay almost convinced me to post the upshot of yesterday’s poetry break (which was of course a piece of my own). Well, in point of fact they did convince me to post it, around 1 am or so. And then this morning I promptly took it down again. I can’t compete with dear old Pablo and Philip, so count your blessings that I came to my senses.

Anyway.

The morning commute is an interesting thing. I can’t quite work out whether it’s so interesting to me because the things I notice are actually as odd as they seem, or if it’s just my half-awake state combined with the first jolts of caffeine hitting my system. You be the judge.

Last Friday, I got on the train and was immediately overwhelmed by the fabulous scent of Eau de Chien Mouille, more commonly known as Wet Puppy Surprise. I spent several stops trying to determine (a) whether it was making me nauseated enough to change seats, and (b) which of my neighboring passengers it was coming from, so that if I did change seats I wouldn’t actually be making a change for the worse. The woman in front of me was wearing a leather jacket. Leather, I happen to know, requires extensive steeping to acquire any sort of scent (aside from cigarette smoke, which it seems to absorb quite readily), so I tentatively discounted her, although her hair was sufficiently, um, neglected that I couldn’t rule her out completely. The guy behind me (back to back) was wearing a wool peacoat, which seemed to be a more likely culprit. What’s more, he had a baseball cap, and we all know that boys in baseball caps are 2.6 times more likely to own dogs. Or did I just make that up? Anyway, I tried to surreptitiously sniff said coat, but the odor was really too pervasive for me to get any sense of direction on it. Eventually, around Jefferson Park, I just got up and moved to the other end of the car.

And the scent wafted on, undiminished. I considered moving to another car, but with only two stops to go, it seemed more effort than it was worth in my undercaffeinated state. Then I started to wonder: is it me? How I could possibly smell like Wet Dog is beyond me, since I neither have a dog in the house (yet), nor have spent any time in the recent past rolling around in wet grass with one, but when the smell seemed to follow me off the train at Cumberland I got seriously worried. On my way up the escalator, sniffing at various parts of my sweater, I suddenly became aware of the people around me watching me compulsively smell myself. I guess that morning I was the odd one.

So this morning I got off the train at Cumberland as usual, hiked up the stairs and exited the turnstile, neatly sidestepping the a/x clad blonde with apparently no sense of other people’s existence, let alone personal space, and looked up to see a large-ish (15, maybe?) group of boy-children, ranging in age from, at a guess, 8 to 14 or so, all clad in identical dark blue tracksuits and jackets emblazoned with “UZBEKISTAN,” buying Chicago Visitor passes from the vend-o-mat and chatting with the CTA guard. Wrestling team? Gymnastics? What do you reckon?

Then, while walking across the concrete expanse toward the office building, my eye was caught by one of those obnoxious “I have an Honor Roll Student at

High School” bumper stickers. Only then I noticed something else about it: the mascot reproduced on the left hand side. I recognized that mascot. It was a Norseman. My high school teams were the Norsemen. When I was 16, I was a Norseman, and that was my logo! My colors, too! It was identical. I found this inexplicably distressing, so when I got in I asked one of my coworkers if he knew what the deal was. “Yeah,” he said. “All the Bulldogs are the same, too.” I wondered about the business model – did someone own all the art to all of these and just market them to schools all across the country? “No,” he said, “I think the printers just have, like, clip art.” So my high school mascot, for whom we cheered and screamed and fought and – ok, well I really didn’t do much of that stuff outside of football and hockey games, but still. Clip art? How depressing.

Coming soon: Home Improvement Tips, brought to you by the Den of Iniquity.

Poetry breaks are good for the soul. Let’s hear it for inspiration…

– L.H.

If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

– Pablo Neruda

And also…

Why did I dream of you last night?
Now morning is pushing back hair with grey light
Memories strike home, like slaps in the face;
Raised on elbow, I stare at the pale fog
beyond the window.

So many things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
– Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.

– Philip Larkin

Must be the weather again.

Despite the annoyances inherent in working on a contract at a major corporation(not being able to get a security card and therefore being forced to wait in the eighth floor lobby like a dog out in the rain until some more legitimate employee happens along to let me in; sitting in a half-height admin’s cube in the middle of a high-traffic area between two conference rooms, where there’s never ever any hope of privacy or quiet and everyone in the office gets every possible chance to examine your personal belongings, leading them to ask ridiculous questions like, “how come your iPod is so fat?” (it’s got a lot of glam rock on it. it got into the cat food last night. i dunno, i’ve been thinking about putting it on Atkins); being forced to wear real actual clothing every single day – and shoes, too! no flip-flops!), I wouldn’t want to give the impression that it’s no fun around here. Nosiree. We’ve got plenty to keep us amazed, amused and entertained. These are a few of my favorite things:

Office Signage
I’ve grown accustomed, not to say totally immune, to the usual doofy signage one finds around these kinds of places. You know the ones: “Hot water is hot!”, “Your mother doesn’t work here” and so forth. Surprisingly, they don’t have those here. Instead, we have a fine collection of marginally comprehensible and consistently amusing instructions. In the kitchen, we are urged to “clean up behind yourself.” We are advised that there is no smoking “in the stairwell or in the building,” because once you’re on the stairs it can be so hard to work out whether you’re still indoors. My personal favorite, however, is this:

Office characters
None of your standard-issue Dilbert types here. We do, however, have these fine fellows:

Late Night Guy. The only reason I noticed LNG is that one morning when I was running fairly late I spotted him on the almost-empty el platform. Since then, I’ve noticed that while he’s pretty much always out of there before i am (his cube’s directly in my field of vision, so I can’t help but notice these things), and i don’t leave later than 5 or 6, he’s never in before 9:30, and generally closer to 10. This guy’s got the system down. He’s always got the sports section in his hand, and he generally looks pretty dazed for the first couple of hours. I suspect some mornings he actually just comes in and takes a nap in his nice cozy private cubicle. Either way, at this point the only question is which place he’s at until 4 in the morning: Nick’s Beer Garden or Bar Louie? You’ve gotta respect the LNG.

The Saturday Night Fever Hippie. This one let me in on my second day, and the image was so irretrievably burned into my not-yet-fully-awake brain that it’s all I can do not to flinch when I pass him in the hallways. He’s skinny with straight blond hair, cut all one length and well below his shoulders, which at first might make one categorize him more as ‘hippy’ than ‘disco’, but don’t be misled. Beneath the long luxurious Grateful-Dead hair and scruffy goatee and wire-rimmed spectacles lies a heart that beats to pure 120 BPM Gloria Gaynor, as evidenced by the shirt unbuttoned a good two buttons too far, framing a collection of gold medallions that even Snoop Dogg might covet. No shit.

Cell Phone Guy. This is another one who’s been nice enough to let me in the door a few times. He’s the reason I don’t worry so much about showing up late or grabbing lunch at odd hours anymore, because he’s pretty much always out there in the hallway, well within view of the windows to the lobby but out of earshot of the warren of cubes, talking on his cell phone. Seriously, he’s out there almost every time I walk by. Who’s he talking to, and about what? He wears 80s tasseled loafers and pleated khakis and pink polo shirts, and has a suspiciously orangey tan. I don’t know what to make of him, but I’m considering reporting him to the Department of Homeland Security.

In marginally related news, it has just (read:yesterday) come to my attention that despite my best efforts, the photo gallery on this site looks like utter shite on any Windows machine. This is because for some ungodly reason the proper stylesheet is not read when the site is accessed by IE/Win. I have not yet been able to work out why, and I don’t know that I’ll have the time to try particularly hard in the immediate future, but I’m always open to suggestion from you code wizards out there.

And now, it’s off to the hardware store to buy hanging hardware and roller covers. Someday this place will be finished. Someday, I promise.

Things I really enjoy about my new neighborhood:

– The Little Nut Hut behind the bar at the ITP
– Egregious hipster-watching at Rainbo & Rodan
– Cheerful, punk-listening, blue-haired baristas at Jinx to make my on-my-way-to-work coffee (“if we make it iced, i can fit another shot in!”)
– Indyvoter.com grafitti on Milwaukee Avenue
– Saturday evening softball games at the Section 8 apartment complex next door
– A 2-minute stagger to the local
– The corner that redefines convenience, with a 7-11 (complete with booze!), a Walgreen’s, a pizza/fast food joint, *and* a bar
– The patio at the Pontiac on a Sunday afternoon
– The American College of Office Technology, a positively seedy-looking institution where you can take courses in Networking (learn to go to bars and talk to people!) and Accounting (and get them to buy your drinks!), among other things

It’s been a long weekend of work and play, and I’ve been enjoying the hell out of the neighborhood.

Oh yeah, and the title of today’s post comes from a story told to me over our quasi-traditional brunch yesterday by a friend, who was talking for some reason about a party several years back where he and his friends drank a lot of everything they could get their hands on, got naked and “a little carried away” and cut up the couch with chainsaws (yes, plural), and then set fire to a cardboard cutout of Bill Clinton with his saxophone and danced around it, all Lord of the Flies-style (speaking of which, did you know that someone’s adapted the novel for the stage? yikes). Made me feel slightly better about my weekend shenanigans, which, while still leaving me baffled at the fact that I am able to walk and talk today, don’t even begin to measure up.

While it may be true that I can be a bit of a cultural/intellectual snob (what do you mean, you’ve never read any Algren? How can anyone not have seen Dead Man?), but i’m not ashamed to admit that i am completely psyched to see Troy. And it’s not about Homer. Sure, I own a copy of the Iliad. Sure, I think it’s a damned good read. But I’m not going to pretend that’s the draw here. I just can’t think of a better way to spend a couple of hours than staring at hot, half-naked boys in skirts with good cinematography. Well, ok, I can think of a few better ways. But not many. I’ve got to say I’m happy, though, that the infamously difficult-to-please David Denby had (mostly) only good things to say about it, and the Times didn’t come up with anything particularly bad, either.

On the other hand, I don’t know if I can bring myself to shell out $9 to see Van Helsing. Despite my deep and abiding love for vampire flicks of virtually all conceivable kinds, I have in recent years realized that there are such things as vamp flicks so bad they’re not even funny. And this really looks like one of them. Maybe that’s because it’s strayed outside the vampire genre proper and expanded to werewolves and frankensteins and suchlike things. Lord knows Underworld was awful, and that was the last vamp/werewolf one-two punch I can think of. But Buffy did the crossover/multi-monster thing too, and at least for a while there it was still really, really good. No, I think my problem with a lot of the newer stuff is that it’s just got no sense of humor. I mean, the best line in Near Dark is still and will always be the best line in a vamp movie, ever: “Hey, remember when we set that fire in Chicago? [uproarious laughter]”

They just don’t make ’em like they used to, I guess. Maybe I’ll have to have a good old fashioned vamp film festival to console myself.

As told to me by my friend Helen:

When I was 7 I was in the Brownies. There was a big talent evening coming up, and my friend Bonnie and I were planning a dance routine to wow the crowd. We wanted to keep it a surprise for our parents, so we’d take turns – one day we’d shut ourselves in her bedroom and practice, the next day in mine. When the big night finally came, we were sure we had the best act. Mostly it was kids playing the recorder badly or doing crap magic tricks, and then we were on. Dressed in our best pyjamas, we put the tape in the cassette player, pressed play and laid down on the stage. Our dance routine was all about getting up in the morning, and the choreography revolved around a particular set of lyrics: the lines, “Get up get up get up get up, let’s make love tonight/ Wake up wake up wake up wake up, ’cause you do it right…” from Sexual Healing by Marvin Gaye. [here, please imagine Helen demonstrating the choreography. It is, I can assure you, spectacular.]

I remember looking out at a sea of horror-struck faces. The woman in charge of the show came running out from the wings, frantically shouting “Thank you! Thank you very much!”, swatted the stop button on the stereo and hustled us offstage. I couldn’t believe it. Of all the terrible acts, we were the only ones who were cut off in mid-routine. I cried for weeks. It was years before I figured out what was wrong with that routine.

Total radio silence on the c-d front lately, largely due to the move, but also partly owing to the fact that I have a real, live job again. At least for the next eight weeks or so, I’ll be trucking my ass out to United every morning prior to 9:00. Unthinkable, you say? I might have said the same, but here I sit, surrounded by concrete oceans of parking lots and low-rise warrens of corporate greige. The good news is that the project promises to be fairly challenging, which will keep me awake and hopefully not bored. Hell, I might even wind up posting more, just in a desperate effort to momentarily forget that I am basking in fluorescent light and wearing actual fit-for-public clothing instead of loafing about my flat in my underwear, reading the drudge report and catching up on my blogs. But I digress.

The most eventful tale from the first weekend at the new casa happened on the street about a block away. Phineas, Brenda and I were wandering from one locale to the next during our impromptu Saturday night bar crawl when we came upon the biggest bar brawl I’ve ever seen this side of a Sam Peckinpah film. Out on the broad sidewalk in front of Phyllis’ Musical Inn, somewhere between ten and fifteen men were beating the everliving shit out of one another. Alerted by the sounds of breaking glass and the meaty thumps of fists on faces, we stopped about a block down the street and gawped for a few minutes before ducking through the alleys to avoid the fray. The cause of the fight is still unknown (to me at least), but I will say that all the players looked eerily alike (at least from a distance), what with their jeans and white wifebeaters and short sleeved (bowling?) shirts and indie-rock black hair. It was like a big bunch of Brian Setzer impersonators suddenly declared war on, say, the Strokes. Anybody know what was going on there? Do fill me in.

In other news, speaking of the new place, I feel a need to express my love for it again here. Unpacking is 90% finished, painting’s about halfway there, and it’s starting to look like the rockstar pad I’ve always dreamt of. You should come to the housewarming, really. It’ll be fun.

Congratulations to Andreas and Ian on their new venture, which has recently caught the attention of both the Guardian and the Globe and Mail. Now if only I could finish any of these books I’m ostensibly working on…