rock over London. rock on, Chicago.

I applied for an internship in what the advertisement described as “rural Hawaii.”
oh, if there is a god…

hey, speaking of god, I watched a documentary called “Marjoe” yesterday about a disillusioned evangelist preacher.
Marjoe (Mary + Joseph) was exploited by his crackpot parents from an early age; they had him preaching by the age of 4. he would perform marriage cermeonies and faith healings and save people, and of course, ask for donations at the end of each meeting. it was that kind of shit; he would get idiots speaking in tongues and rolling on the floor and talk about the power of Jesus healing up peoples’ cancers. probably convinced some to skip out on medical treatment.
when he grows up (where the documentary picks up) he continues on as a preacher after a stint as California hippie. it’s all he knows how to do, even though he really doesn’t believe it. he apparently doesn’t believe in God, and recognizes that it takes a special kind of uneducated hick to drop a twenty in a hat at a tent meeting, but none of that stops him from raking in bank. he discusses buying land in the Brazillian jungle with his fellow preachers, and hangs out with free-love hippies and smokes pot, impressing vapid pussy with stories of little old ladies, rolling around on the floor and shaking, after he pulls the demons out of their heads with his bare hands.
he acknowledges that what he does is wrong, but he considers himself “bad, but not evil.”
okay, I’ll give him that.
he doesn’t know if he can keep up the charade, and would to say what he really thinks every time he starts a sermon, but he soldiers on. gotta make that bank, man.
after the documentary came out, he was exposed as fraud – well, all evangelists are frauds, but now he was recognized as one – and he moved onto a failed music and movie career. now he organizes celebrity golf tournaments.
great. he came clean. fine. he exposed born-again Christians for the hacks they are. but there are lots of people out there who are broke, who need to make a little money, and not all of them trade in something so patently false as this asshole.
in short, people should throw rocks at his car.

I worked at the deli this morning at 11.
at 10:50, I rolled over to find my phone. I had decided that I absolutely needed ten more minutes of sleep, so I was going to call in and tell them I couldn’t find my keys. they didn’t answer, so I got up, put on some pants and found my keys.
turns out, I was ten minutes late anyway. when I pulled into the lot, the delivery driver and the shift manager were just standing around out front.
I parked and got out of the car, and that’s when I got a good look at his face. it was raised and pink on one side. didn’t look good. at all.
“jesus christ, man. did you get hit by a bus?”
no. he had poison ivy over roughly half his body. his dumb ass didn’t realized he had it, scratched himself ridiculous and made it worse. he had smeared calomine lotion over everything, too, making it look pretty bad.
and he had lost his key. and we were supposed to open in twenty minutes. so everything was working out perfectly.
as he was covered in infectuous blisters, and his job is to handle food, I had to do everything for the first hour. sucked.

and now my foot itches, and every little itch I want to scratch, I don’t scratch. cause what if I got it myself? sweet fancy Moses, I don’t need a posion ivy outbreak.

Italy won.
that’s what you get, Zidane, you dipshit. go sit down.

I applied for a paid internship in DC, one that required writing samples. so I sent in a couple of links, and I realized too late that I had sent the same link twice.
that kind of shit kills me. like shooting yourself in the foot. the same fucking link twice? I spent fifteen minutes reading over my cover letter and resume, and I can’t cut and paste a link correctly? god damn it.

I applied at business that publishes a firearms magazine in San Diego, the American Chemical Society and the Washington Times.
the Washington Times are owned by my main man.

time to see how the other half lives.

I wrote this a night or two ago. and I didn’t publish it, cause I wanted to write more, but then I hit the end and found nothing else to write. so I decided to save you all from my waxing poetic, and kept it to the bloated thousand-odd words it already is.
right. all of my allegory and metaphor will be saved for another day.
so where was I?

part two

I looked up at the house out of the passenger’s side window. double garage doors on the bottom took up the entire front span of the building. they were cracked white, showing rust, and judging by the build up of dirt at their seams they hadn’t been lifted in years. Alisha wasted no time. she was out of the car and around the corner, into the back yard. at first, I had thought she was unsure if this was the place, but she seemed pretty convinced now.
the only door to the place was on the side of the house, near the back corner. just past it was the yard. place was overgrown and had a little bit of litter thrown about it. a stray cat watched us from his side on a folding chair. “my great grandfather used to keep a lot of cats, especially after he retired,” Alisha said. “he had two by fours up the side of the wall from the upstairs window so they could come and go.”
her grandfather still keeps cats there, she had told me. after his father had died in 1983, they hadn’t bother to sell his house. they just left it as it was; they didn’t maintain anything. just cut the phoneline and stacked things in it. put down a couple of litter boxes and about eight bowls of food, and went by to refill it every few days.
so it’s literally a cathouse. no one there but the cats, Alisha had said.
so she tried the door. the screendoor’s outer handle was snapped off, but her grandfather had put a slice in the screen so the lock could be easily opened. so she finagled it, and lo and behold found that he also keeps the key to the deadbolt in the door. just leaves it in there.
so she opened it. and we went inside.
“yeah, it definitely smells like my grandfather in here.” I think, though, it smelled like everyone’s grandfather in there. engine oil. sawdust. must, paint. like my grandparent’s basement in Glen Park before they moved out of it. full of tools, rusty nails, cheap preservatives. lots of black cherry cola…
these are the things I remember from visiting Indiana before we lived here. coming to Indiana, when I was still in single digits, was a little bit wild. I never fully remembered everything about my previous visit, and that made the midwest and Gary a permanently foreign country. I wasn’t allowed to go outside very often as my grandparents’ house was in the hood – the land of liquor stores and vacant buildings. the place where they’ll put a born-again-christian revival ministry in a failed Pizza Hut.
so instead I spent my time rooting through my grandparents’ house. all sorts of hidden treasures to find. supposedly, my grandpa had come into the posession of a bloodsained Japanese imperial flag, circa 1943, which was lost somewhere in the attic. my grandmother was decidedly ethnic, staying up until 1, 2 am during holy week to make Russian Easter eggs with candle wax and dye. she always had some slavic looking iconography lying around that I didn’t understand, regardless of what church I’d been christened in. and motorcycle-riding Uncle Bill had lived at home for a few different stints, so that meant if I looked hard enough I’d find guns, ammuntion, pornography or a combination of the three.
these are the things I thought of, just by the smell of the place and a few glances around this new dark room.
then Alisha turned the light on.
the stair landing leading up to the house was right in front of us, and the garage was to our left. Alisha grabbed the hem of her dress and walked up the flight on her toes, her heels not touching. she moved slowly. it was very quiet, in that way that makes you think something’s wrong. that maybe someone, as absurd as it would be that someone would be in there, that maybe someone was home. that we were disturbing something. that maybe there was a great secret somewhere in this house that we shouldn’t or weren’t meant to find.
she opened the door, and I waited. for her to faint, or for the axe to come around the corner, for her to laugh or cry or speak. light filtered in from an upstairs window and dust danced around her heels.
“come here and see,” she said.
Alisha’s grandfather is the definition of a packrat. garbage bags full of crushed aluminum cans. boxes of hinges. decades-old on-sale laundry detergent. reupholstered furniture. lumber. old bell jars. spools of wire. a salon hair dryer. scattered randomly and thoroughly throughout the house. every room’s floor space was filled to near maximum capacity. deer trails pushed through stacked furniture.
cabinets held glasses that her great grandfather, a Kurdish immigrant, once used. cloudy silverware was still in the drawers. picture frames hung sideways on the walls. the ancient refridgerator with the engine gutted from it.
the occasional feral cat watched us anxiously as we picked our way through the fallout. we explored boxes upon boxes of newspaper clippings and photo albums. Alisha’s family history, scattered before our eyes.
in the living room, I found a stack of ancient postcards, with pictures of cigar Indians and palm trees and local landmarks that read with things like,
“hi dad, am ok. weather warm. fish biting. -marvin”
an entire family, kept in forgotten boxes on a forgotten street in a forgotten town.
in the garage, Alisha showed me the Model-Ts buried in boxes of whatever you can imagine. blueprints to incomplete buildings. dust.
everything I touched, I put back in its place. it wasn’t mine to disturb, and I’d have nothing to do with the reprecussions if some angry owner who wasn’t her grandfather came to ask a toll. this seemed like a real possibility at the time.
coveirng a window near the door was a soft felt rendition of a stagecoach fighting indian raiders in the painted desert, all set in a tasteful wood frame. Alisha saw it first as we left.
“I want that. I’m taking it with me.”
but I wasn’t having any of that shit. “no, we don’t touch anything. we’re not supposed to be in here.”
and that’s kind of true. but I only said it to keep her grandfather’s nerves at bay. in truth, it was hers to take. she had as much a right or more to that god-awful stagecoach scene than anyone else, and she would have appreciated it. but we turned the lights out, and locked the door.
creeped me out, man.

my interview could have gone worse. I’m not getting that job, but that’s okay. valuable learning experience. moving on…

part one

we were late to that wedding on Saturday. by about two hours. traffic in Chicago is a motherfucker.
we traveled in two cars because there were six of us. we left the reception early, me and Alisha, and drove back into the city on the Stevenson expressway.
we took 41 into Indiana, as all other options (the tri-state tollway, the Ryan) are under construction and congested to shit. 41 has it’s share of lights, but it also runs right by the lake. if you want to see south Chicago, it’s not a bad call.
when you cross the Calumet river up there and enter Indiana, you’re in the northwestern-most corner of the state. it’s right under the Chicago skyway bridge, and it looks like something out of a union rep’s idyll. the Inland Steel yard is maybe two miles from there, as is an Amoco refinery. the road, which is busy, is covered in grime, and the tobacco shops that spring up along the border to beat the higher taxes in Illinois are all brighltly painted concrete. it’s very midwest-chic – or, it’s what I think of when I think midwest. I’d imagine a lot of people think cornfields. Nebraska. that kind of shit.
fuck that. Nebraska sucks.
Alisha’s grandparents on her father’s side live in Whiting, which is immediately inside the state border. Whiting isn’t very big; as a city, I’d say it’s probably got ten or fifteen thousand taxpaying residents, but it’s a very urban environment. it’s tucked between Chicago (and a small slice of Hammond) to the west, more Hammond to the south, Wolf lake to the southwest and East Chicago to the southeast.
when people refer to northwest Indiana, they oftentimes call it “the Region.” that means, Lake and some of Porter county. I was at a bar a couple weeks ago with some kids from Schererville, which is in Lake county and due west of Valparaiso. I must’ve mentioned being from the Region, and one of them scoffed and said, “that’s not the Region.” what dickless doesn’t know is that “the Region” actually originally referred to only a couple of square miles in the far northwest corner of the state, mainly places like Hammond, Whiting, Robertsdale and the like. now, Valpo, sixty miles from the loop and surrounded by cornfields, has as much claim to “the Region” as anyone does.
either way, it’s an interesting area. Hammond is the kind of working class city that occasionally produces a savage high school football team or makes the national news for being the home of a serial killer. East Chicago is known far and wide as one of the most politically corrupt cities in the continental United States.
and Whiting?
Whiting is the town that time forgot. by and large, in a heavily industrialized area that is also urban, Whiting is surprisingly white. the town itself is very well-maintained; 119th st, which serves as the main drag, still looks like what it probably looked like in 1955. storefronts, barbershops, people pushing strollers and shit. it’s like someone pressed pause a couple of decades ago.
the real reason, though, is that the neighborhood association banded together and refused to sell property to minorities. this has recently begun to slip, as the local latino population has begun to grow, but it’s 2006, and the length of time that racial prejudice held sway definitely deserves a nod. so way to go, guys.

so this is where Alisha’s grandparents live. her father grew up here, in a big, white victorian house with a front porch and lattice work. it’s across the street from a Episcopalian church that plays the St. Charles’ chimes on the hour. her grandfather, back before retirement, worked as an engineer for Inland, which is the closest steel mill. I’m not going to pretend to be intimately familiar with Inland – my family by and large worked in US steel’s Gary yard a few miles farther east – but to an outsider looking in, they’re all the same. steel mills are cities unto themselves. they’re fantastically huge, relics from bygone eras of prosperity when the mills still employed most of the area’s workforce. now that they’ve cut back on shifts and positions, they’ve made places like Gary and the surrounding cities uninhabitable ghost towns. packs of dogs roam the streets. drug murders go unsolved. the roads are bad because there’s no money to repave them. white flight. economic depression. high crime rate. it’s not so much scary as sad, watching what was once a thriving area denegrate. this is a concentrated area in Indiana where everything seems to be crumbling, like a slow-motion earthquake.
all of this makes Whiting’s holdout all the more astonishing.
Alisha’s grandparents don’t tend to enjoy visitors, so when she wants to see them, she more or less has to just show up unannounced. she’ll call five minutes ahead of time and say, “I’m down the block. let’s go get lunch and catch up.” otherwise they’ll claim they’re busy, or the house is a mess, or that now isn’t a good time.
so she phoned a few minutes ahead and didn’t get anyone. when we arrived, there wasn’t a car in the driveway. no one was home.
she was visibly upset, and as her relationship with her grandparents is a complicated one, I did my best to both comfort her and keep my mouth shut – mostly acchieved the first by doing the second. and after a quick tour around the neighborhood, she got behind the wheel and headed down 119th st. towards the lake.
she hung a right on a sidestreet and slowed down to about 15 mph. said her grandparents’ kept a second house that had been in the family, but she hadn’t seen it in years.
“my great grandfather lived over here somewhere. on the right…” to the right the block was long and full of homes, and on our left was nothing. just tall grass, and beyond that the Amoco refinery and Lake Michigan. she kept her eyes on the houses, which had turned into a quieter part of the neighborhood of two story homes that came right out to the curb. they made the most of limited space; these lots don’t have much time for yards. what room they have is devoted to Virgin Mary statues and rock garden-style bushes. stuff that’s easy to maintain.
we reached the end of the block at Indianapolis ave, and she hooked two rights to go down the block’s opposite side. we were about halfway down the street when Alisha focused on a red building with a two car garage that came almost into the street. the sidewalk in front of it was piled high with clipped tree branches. couple of windows were broken on the second floor. it had all of the “no trespassing” signs in all the right places. no one lived there, it was obvious.
“that’s it,” she said. she pulled the car onto the sidewalk and killed the engine. we probably could have parked in the street, though. this street, like most of Whiting on Saturday evening, was dead.

part two later. I’m going to sleep.