rock over London. rock on, Chicago.

it’s 2 am in California. time for a Mar update.

it’s definitely been a crazy couple of days. it’s friday morning and i’m getting ready to go to the bank. we have a tour of the city by foot. everything is beautiful. i went to the market to get an apple this morning. it was a fiasco trying to pay for it. he just handed it to me with change. he took pity on me.

anyway, i just wanted to let you all know quickly that the best thing i’ve heard so far is if i choose to take an internship with the ministry of economics, i have to sign a confidentiality statement in blood …

sounds like it may be getting a little too real for Mar over there already. will she hang tough?

Charles Schumer sleeps on a trundle bed in a living room with a congressman from Massachusetts. Durbin sleeps upstairs, and Rep. George Miller gets the big room.
what the fuck?

and about a mile away, Mike perfects a hash brownie recipe.
I’ve got to move to DC.

“we’re going to make those fags from Seattle eat our shit.”
that’s your Phil Conway, right there.
the prospects are intriguing, if Chicago wins, of course. they get either New England, who they played the last time they got that far, or Indianapolis. in which case, Northwest Indiana will be literally lit on fucking fire.
and of course, my dumb ass will be stuck out in this fucking desert. bad timing.
that’s okay.

but let’s get to the real stuff.
right about now, Mar is getting into Heathrow. is it Heathrow? Mike?
from there, she goes straight to Budapest.
and then, it’s on.
I talked to her today on the phone, on her way to the airport. they were on the Dan Ryan, mom and Mar.

“I’m looking at the Sears Tower. I bet Josh is in there.”
“probably is, yeah.”
“what do you think he’s doing?”
“probably reading the blog.”

Mike told her to watch out for neo-nazis. I told her to keep her head down. we’re awesome brothers.
today, you could hear the fear in her foice. she was starting to get a little shaky. she said she couldn’t sleep last night. so I broke it down for her like this:
first it was a summer in Minnesota pretending to be a french Canadien.
then it was a summer leading pubescent boys on canoe trips, and you’d never canoed before.
and now, it’s a semester in Budapest. foreign language, starting off by yourself.
she gets tougher and tougher, and she goes farther and farther.
if I had half the sack she has, I’d be twice the person I am today.
either way, the shakiness faded a little bit. there’s only so much you can do to aleviate stress over the phone, but she’ll be alrlight. she’s smart, and she’s tough as nails. and if she wasn’t a littler nervous, then I’d be wondering.

and that’s about it. nothing else has really been cracking, except it really is starting to feel like school out here. I don’t have any desire to stay here any longer than the summer, but by mid March, mark my words, the resumes are being let loose like a pack of fuckin’ hounds. I’ve got my routines. I know a couple of people. but I chose about as far from home that you can possibly go in the continental United States, and you can only take so much.
I’m not looking to start a life here.
until then, Greg apparently found a book just across the border. gets all sorts of sports. so I’m going to get to work on my gambling habit.

stay real, Mar.

I bought a mountain bike yesterday. drove out to Yuma to get it.
it has a shock. really.
the bitches just flock to me now.
I wanted more of a road/touring bike, but the roads out here, in a word, suck. I’m better off on this thing.
I rode it around town this morning early, when I woke up. I’m really looking forward to tooling around on the fucker out in the sticks, for miles. I need to get some headphones.
the bike also has me thinking Ragbrai. but I may be a little premature yet. someday. if I get in decent shape and get the fuck out of here, maybe this summer. if not, it’s not like I need anyone’s permission to ride my bike across a state.

big news:
right now, I’m working through some of the worst gas I’ve ever dealt with before. it just keeps fucking coming, man. I’ve never been warped enough to like the smell of my own farts, but I’m able to tolerate them. but these are unbearable. something must be done.

more newz: Chicago plays tomorrow. this is going to be a nationally televised embarassment for the Seattle Seahawks. poor bastards. Hasselbeck is going to lose all muscle function due to a primal flight reaction midway through the first quarter, and they’ll have to carry him off the field on a gurney. he will also have shat himself.
seriously. watch.
I’m going to watch the game tomorrow at the local sports bar, which should be interesting; it starts at 10 a.m. local time. fuck it; I’m still drinking.

last news: I’m revisiting “News and Tributes” right now, and it’s about what I remembered of it. average. handful of decent songs, a couple of bleeders, and a wonderful one (“favours for favours”). if you want to listen, don’t buy it. just borrow mine.

“mom and I went to yoga tonight. she wore your Less than Jake shirt. it was awesome.”
yes, Mar. it was.


back to Orthodox Christmas.
Aunt Nettie took her teeth out and set them on the table saturday night, and no one seemed to notice. I didn’t really, myself, but both Alisha and Mar were aghast, kicking me under the table: “Matt. Matt, check it out.”
in a bizarre way, I consider this normal behavior. Aunt Nettie has Alzheimer’s. therefore, it would only make sense that she remove her dentures for no reason and set them on the table. her senility is the most reliable thing about her. Mar, apparently, doesn’t see it. grandma saw it and freaked out. “god damn it, Nettie. that’s disgusting.”
the rest of dinner was delicious, in that carb-loaded and salty kind of way. at the actual dinner table, the family tends to split between the disheveled, ugly and democratic and the clean cut, attractive and moderate republican.
yeah, guess which side we roll on.
Bill normally sits on the other side, if only to hassle the stiffs.
“fresh fruit for sex.”
not. kidding.
afterwards, we went and saw “Children of Men,” which I’d give a solid C. got pulled over on the way home for crossing the center line on a curve, which took a half an hour of our time and resulted in a warning that got my name wrong. apparently, I ran into Porter County’s dyslexic deputy.
that night, Alisha and I slept in my grandmother’s room, as grandma is now fulltime in the La-Z-Boy. my aunt and cousins held it down on the kickass mattress I lifted from Galia when I cleared out of Bloomington.
yes. it’s at my mom’s house. talking to you. you heard right.

sunday.
the dog and I spent a good 40 minutes watching the chicken rotisserie turn. a few months of fast food and cereal will break you down like that.
mom always holds the Orthodox Christmas day dinner, which means they cook a ham, couple of chickens, and make more seven layer salad and chicken noodle soup than you would think humanly possible. these events, for the most part, draw the same crowd that shows up the night before. only this time, I just roll out of bed and the food’s there. it, fucking, rules.
the only fundamental, scene changing new arrivals for day two are my cousin George and his eternal fiance, Trisha.
I would try to describe George here, but a book could be written on the guy and it wouldn’t do him justice. I’ll keep it brief; he’s middle-aged, about 6’8″, perpetually unemployed, and nearly incomprehensible because of the rambling Minnesotan accent he speaks in (which makes no sense, as he’s lived between Glen Park and Portage his entire life). when I was younger and he was still living with his parents, he’d want to show me his computer games in his room at his parent’s house. I always found him unnerving – that sexual predator feel – but I don’t think he’s ever gone that far. he’s just socially awkward, and never, ever, learned how to handle himself around the opposite sex. makes my sister-in-law uncomfortable, as always wants a full body hug when he says hello or goodbye.
this is only the tip of the iceberg. but the point isn’t to discuss my second cousin’s tragic life. this is Orthodox Christmas territory.
George and Trisha – a quiet, unassuming, mousy woman who seems very nice – are always the first ones there, last ones to leave. I answer the door, they come in. after taking his shoes off, George tosses me his keys and asks me to get his sweatshirt out of the car for him. I interpreted it in two ways. he looks at me as his cousin’s kid, and it was kind of an alpha male kind of mood, like something I would expect one of my dad’s marine buddies to ask of me. but I’ve held a job for four months, which is about for as long as he’s ever held one, so I kind of have a hard time holding him in the same light.
secondly, I think he wanted me to see the sweet extended-cab pick up he rented and has been tooling around in.
it. was awesome.
Uncle Bill got mad at me when I suggested he go running in his free time instead of complaining about a lack of will power to lose weight. “just go.”
“oh, it’s just that easy, Matt. fuck you.”
“fuck you, it is. just get up, and go running.”
later, as most of sat around watching football, Alisha wandered off by herself to check her voicemail. George apparently cornered her, and asked her if she would sketch him a portrait.
which sounds absurd. and is absurd. but apparently, George had been looking at the framed charcoal sketches mom had a corner artist do of Mar and I in Chicago when we were seven and ten. he wanted one of Trisha, and had it in his head that Alisha is an artist.
maybe it’s her clothes. hippie.
either way, he gave her a wallet portrait of Trish and I got her a pen. I made sure Alisha didn’t neglect Trish’s ample bangs.
the result was absolutely hilarious. as we speak, I’m diligently working on getting a photo of it.

that night, I went out for a beer with Neil, Josh Bluell and Andrew. Andrew was kind of pissed that I bailed on meeting him at a bar after the movie the night before, but I had my reasons. when you spend only three days at home, you only have so much time for things. someone always goes away feeling burned on these trips.

then, it was over. Alisha took off after sleeping in an extra two hours. mom and Mar drove me to O’Hare, and we hit up White Castle on the way for lunch. mom had us listen to one of her dogs-barking Christmas albums.
Mar leaves for Budapest in less than a week. Mar’s staying real.

on the flight back, I got billeted with a bunch of marine recruits headed to Pendleton for basic training. the guy sitting next to me was very young, maybe 20. had that simple oil I-don’t-want-to-work-at-Jiffy-Lube-anymore look to him.
he asked me if you were allowed to smoke in California. he had heard that the entire state had banned cigarette smoking. I told him it hadn’t, and he was relieved.
I brought up Iraq, and how he felt about possibly having to go over there.

“oh, no, dude. I’m going to work in administration. I signed up for administration, so I’m either gonna be in San Diego or on the east coast, or overseas administration, which means Japan, and that’ll be pretty sweet. if you do administration, you never have to go to Iraq.”

two days later, Bush hints at starting shit with Iran and Syria.
oh, you poor, simple halfwit.

anyone else read this?

this was published days ago.

“The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.”

I plan on finishing my recanting of the unrelenting mayhem that was Russian Orthodox Christmas, but I just watched the Bush speech and it’s fresh in my mind.
this is an old-fashioned, stream-of-consciousness, blog-of-old rant. so get ready.

first things first: Iraq is fucked, hard, and it’s not coming back anytime soon. and there is very little that anyone will be able to do about it.
in 2003, when this war started and our elected officials yawned and greenlighted it, I didn’t do anything. I remember thinking, “uh, I don’t know of this is a good idea,” and then becoming enamored with the full-out flag-waving media blitz that followed. there was no oversight. there was no questioning. there wasn’t even any real reporting. it was just national masturbation, as we watched an action movie happen in real-time. CNN gave detailed reports on the types of attack helicopters American forces were using. there were detailed discussions about armament and firepower. Iraqi army units, which never actually appeared, were hyped up to mythic proportions. the Republican Guard turned out to be a boys club from the third world. and in the traditional war, America stomped Iraq like a bug.
this is nothing new.
then it got worse. it got worse. I didn’t like the war in the first place, and I bitched and moaned the entire time. and it got worse, and it worse. they caught Saddam Hussein, with a television camera appropriately on hand, and the Administration’s approval rating spiked.
Bush won reelection because the opposition party ran one of the most inept campaigns in the history of American politics, and Democrats let Republicans controle the debate. I think Paul Begala cried on cable news. Iraq got worse.
then Iraq held elections. and self-identified conservatives rallied around pictures of veiled Iraqi women with purple fingers. America stroked it a little longer.
it got worse, and worse, and worse.
Americans finally got fed up, only three and a half years later. they elected the opposition party during the midterm elections, who stormed the halls of congress with their bold promise not to offer any solutions at all to the fucking mess the American government created in one of the most backwards regions on the face of the planet.
Iraq got worse.
the Iraqi government executed Saddam Hussein after one of the most cartoonish trials since the Simpson case in December of 2006. fittingly, the execution was carried out in about as embarrassing a way as possible, with a bunch of dipshits screaming insults and namedropping hyperviolent militia leaders. America’s prayed-for propaganda victory went down the shitter.
worse and worse.
Bush just got off the tube, on which he talked about how he recognizes that Iraq is a batshit insane hellhole full of religious extremists. he said that Iraq is not open-ended. he also apologized and took responsibility for the clusterfuck he created.
well, to be honest, I don’t care that he apologized, or accepted responsibility. at all. what difference does it make that he accepts responsibility? anyone who’s more than a half-awake automaton already knew it’s his god damned fucking responsibility anyway, so the fact that he’s owning up to it doesn’t change a god damned thing. Bush is sorry and the buck stops with him. wonderful. Iraq is still a terrifying warzone.
the president then went on to quietly threaten Iran and Syria for meddling in Iraq’s shit. because since the American military has been able to calm Baghdad so well, opening up another front would only make sense.
immediately afterwards, Dick Durbin came out to give the democratic response. it basically went like, “America isn’t the Iraqi government’s 911 service, and they need to know that if they’re not accountable, then we’ll leave them to clean up the mess alone.” yeah, that’ll fucking show them. I bet that’ll really give them a kick in the ass, because up to this point, they haven’t been able to stomach the escalating violence and grisly sectarian reprisal killings while coddling poweful militias. but, fuck, if America leaves, then they’ll really be sorry!
the United States has succeeded in turning Iraq into something Somalia-esque, and the two prevailing options are 1) troop surge and 2) everybody come home and pretend it never happened.
god damn it.
this is what happens when you don’t hold your god damned government accountable. it goes off and pulls catastrophically boneheaded shit like starting a war on intentionally faulty pretenses, then gets bogged down in the mess it shat out. the current administration has so far – and boldly, I predict, will contine to – be completely and thoroughly inept at fixing this astronomical catastrophe its responsible for. and the Democrats, who desperately want to be the new Deciders, think we should leave.
leave. and fucking what, hope it goes away? what then? America leaves, and it basically dooms 30 million people to living in a living hell for the next decade. it sucks? we don’t like dead Americans? aww, too fucking bad. should have thought of that when we all went along with it, without a hint of objection. somebody tell Iraq we’re getting tired. come on, guys, ease up a lil’!
if this isn’t our god damned responsibility, then whose is it?
somebody say it’s the Iraqis. come on, you fucking assholes. somebody say it. and when you’re done saying it, explain, in detail, where all of your confidence in their ability to gain control of the situation has come from.

worse and worse.

fuck this. I’m making a grilled cheese.

this is a day old, and incredibly self-righteous. but it’s funny.

you get nothing until monday. I’m going to Valparaiso. nothing!