rock over London. rock on, Chicago.

Obama signed some bigass spending bill today. but I didn’t read up on it, because it’s my day off, and it was too nice out to read the awful shit that happens in the news some days. last I heard before checking out last night was some asshole shot a bunch of people in Alabama and then turned the gun on himself. jesus. I want to go swimming.

the other night at work, we published a couple of stories about some recently uncovered Honest Abe Lincoln schwag. and we mugshotted some dauggerotype image I dug up online of him and … fuck it, I’ll skip the backstory. one of the editors pointed me to this really neat Web site, full of well-preserved photographs. the one above, I liked a lot. but there are dozens others.

lets develop an image problem
I’m getting fat.
it’s true. I went to the doctor last week for the back ache, and they weighed me. 162 lbs, dressed. but I haven’t moved a limb in two weeks, and I feel like everything I eat is sitting on me.
I’m developing a complex. it’s okay, I reckon, if I dress like a slob, as long as I’m in decent shape. this is how I’ve worked it out for myself. but if I dress like a slob and become a cookie dough-eating couch potato, then, well. I am a slob.
so I’m putting the kibosh on that shit as soon as possible. the back is about a day away. I want to go running now.

don’t get me started on the raccoons
this house is alive tonight. I can hear my neighbor crying, having it out with her boyfriend. he sounds pretty calm. something is scratching above and below my stairs. and it’s windy, it’s really windy out of the west. my bed lies head to the west, and the window at my right looks out on it. through a powerline and tree branches you get a decent sunset now and then. and the wind is keeping up a steady motor for me to tune out with, and it’s whistling. rattles the storm windows.

gossip
at a bar, I met a bartender tonight, who introduced himself as the only honest man in Charlottesville that he knows, and started telling me about his best friend who’s been slaying the bartender’s recent ex-girlfriend on the down low. he lives with his buddy, and she lives across the street, and he’s “gonna sucker punch him in the face. he’s not gonna know when. it’s not gonna be tonight, but bam, he’s gonna wind up with a broken nose because, hey, he’s my best friend, but that’s not cool, going behind my back. you know?
“but then I’ll be cool, we’ll be cool, because that’s what dudes do, if they’re cool dudes, is they get over it.”

“so this is what everybody’s always talking about! diablo! if only I’d known. the beauty! the beauty!”
- four days ago

after finishing the last book, I’ve started another. ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’. I’ve never read the whole thing. I laid out all weekend and read. it was great out this weekend, like summer already. hottest March 8 on record in Charlottesville.
 
the dominant picture on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper is a publicity still released by a film company. the picture shows a local product, who got his bound-to-be mediocre sex comedy movie made, and Hugh Hefner, who appears in the movie in a cameo. the cutline refers to Hugh Hefner as ‘the famous pornographer’.
we went with ‘famous pornographer’,because it is true to the letter. and oddly hilarious.

I’m flipping through the tube, seeing if anything’s on. nothing, nothing, nothing … oh. here’s ‘Captain Ron’. well, game on, Captain Ron. game on.
you know, the character Captain Ron really is the shit. some 40-year-old half-burnout with an permanent sun tan and a great job.
that character is based on some foundation of truth, which means someone out there’s a Captain Ron. someone has that job, and someone takes pictures of stars for a living, too.

movies
I got ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly’ on. Lee Van Cleef is a mean son of a bitch. and the opening title is, it’s. it’s great. and I don’t think Eli Wallach is Mexican, though he always seems to play one.
I don’t plan to use any of these muscle relaxers tonight. I’m not much for them. you take one, get lathargic, and then sleep a heavy, dreamless kind of sleep for nine hours, planted on your face. wake up feeling thick, bound tight.
doing the laundry the other day, I left an blue pen in my slacks. my bedspread looks like I killed a bunch of giant bugs on it. splotches of deep blue here and there.

books
finished ‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’. both wonderful and horrible. I read last year’s Pulitzer winner for fiction: ‘The Road’, by Cormac MacCarthy. Diaz is better. more singsong, maybe just as set in his ways, but less romantic, less grim. speaks more to me. ‘Oscar Wao’ lost its fatalistic bent near the end, if only for a second. it was nice, it helped.
so with that, I recommend it. if you’d like, you can borrow my copy. we’ll make a thing out of it. write your name on the cover. I mentioned this before.

movies again
also: saw ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ tonight. hadn’t seen a movie in the theatres for months, since the Batman sequel.
this movie, this best picture winner, I need to think about a little harder. I’d rather have focused more on it than squirmed around on my suddenly geriatric back. but it was good, I liked it. the soundtrack, I’d say, was killer. lots I didn’t recognize. and ‘paper planes’ by MIA.

the park
I got the window open, because it’s grown so warm recently. there’s a nice breeze coming in, despite it being early March. and though the sky was so blue today, tomorrow’s supposed to be even better. 
I’m nothing if I’m not cultured today.

… In the United States, conservatives have never bashed socialism because its specter was actually stalking America. Rather, they’ve wielded the cudgel against such progressive reforms as free universal education, the minimum wage or tighter financial regulations. Their signal success is to have kept the United States free from the taint of universal health care. The result: We have the world’s highest health-care costs, borne by businesses and employees that cannot afford them; nearly 50 million Americans have no coverage; infant mortality rates are higher than those in 41 nations — but at least (phew!) we don’t have socialized medicine.
– this Harold Meyerson guy in the Washington Post today

I didn’t get that job in DC. fuck. fuck. back to the drawing board.

went to the doctor this morning. they think it’s just a pull, or a minor tear. so, the professional opinion is: stay off it for a week or two, take this prescription and go get you some muscle relaxers at the pharmacy. oh, boy. I’m debating taking one before work; I gotta be there in an hour. the front page would look fuckin’ awesome if I ate a bunch of muscle relaxers before putting it together.

yesterday was a good day.
I read ‘Hop on Pop’ to a captive audience of third-graders at the elementary school down the way, and explained how reading factors into my life, what I do, etc. then answered about twenty minutes of questions, which, to be real, were pretty on topic for a bunch of 8-year-olds. like, one of them asked: “what happens if you take a picture of someone and put their name in the newspaper if they don’t want to be in the newspaper?” and I said something like, “well, then you’d be up shi… . you’d be up a creek without a paddle.”
it was legit. kids are great. I mean, I’m sure dealing with all of the administration, the paperwork, the occasional parent that you know is abusive, that’d be awful. but I think being a teacher would be a really cool job. I mean, you work with children all day. that’d be all kinds of fun.
afterward, went into work. it started poorly; after budget, I was convinced that the front page that I was responsible for was going to look awful. the story selection was shitty, and there weren’t any local pictures worth anything. my back continued to hurt, and Indiana lost to Michigan State in the last thirty seconds of the game. that was our national championship this year, had we won it. I was pissy for a solid 45 minutes after the game.
but, as the night went on, the front came together around a picture of foreign-born soldiers being sworn in as American citizens. a legitimately nice photo. earned citizenship by fighting in this man’s army. reminded me of ‘Starship Troopers’, this sci-fi book they made a popcorn flick out of about a decade ago. there’s a similar theme in it. interesting read. and they kill space aliens in it, if you’re into that. A1 turned out quite nice, I was pretty happy with it.
the night ended with a homerun, and then I came home, checked the mail. finally got paid for that editing thing for the USGBC. the manager hooked me up, gave me substantial bonus. but, apparently, the government will take a substantial bite out of it. that sucks.  but money is money is money, and I could use it. especially this month, god damn furloughs.

so. it’s been some ups and downs, a lot of news for me in the last days.

I was the last one out of work tonight.
it snowed here, and it doesn’t do that a lot. so school gets canceled, roads get shut down. production deadline for the newspaper gets moved forward, drastically.
this fell on the paper’s first official furlough day. so there was only the newsroom at work. everyone else who makes up the business had their first forced day off.
the city editor said to me at 8:15 pm, “what will people do without newspapers?”
I said, “get their news from blogs.” with irony, of course.
and she said, “but they’ll fuck it up.” the blogs, she meant.
and I was the last one out the door, turned the lights off at 8:45 pm. imagine that.

set up a doctor’s appointment. back was better today, but still hurt like a motherfucker for an hour or two near the end of the evening. might as well have someone look at it, better not to ignore such things. that’s only gotten me so far.

keep your head up, Josh, DePaul awaits.

I don’t think I got the job. that’s alright. it sucks, but that’s alright.
it’s March, and it’s snowing. I’m into that. it could stand to snow more often around here.

back is still hurting. may call a doctor on this. it’s giving me pain to sit comfortably, or stand for too long. I stood at work tonight and the last, and I can’t keep doing that.
I hate calling the doctor. I barely understand my health insurance, and I don’t like dealing with it. yes. as stupid as that is, yes.

on Tuesday, I’m set to read a Dr. Seuss book to a friend’s wife’s class of third graders. Read Across America. they need professional, young adult types. as flattered, but, let’s be honest, she must be hard up.
so I am going to shave, and tuck in my shirt. word!