What Happened To Numbers Five Through Eight

Interview. Continued from yesterday, where I ramble on and on and end abruptly with nary a conclusion, nor lesson, nor moral. So thanks, Sarala, for your questions and fun.


5. You like lists. Write me the two following lists:

Ten Reasons to Live In Chicago [the number is irrelevant]

• Kuma's Corner: I know, I know, I talk about this place all the time because every single bite, every sip, every sound at this restaurant blows my mind. The menu itself, like the actual physical listing of food and drink in ink on paper, is subtle discourse at its finest. Plus it's delicious.
• Wrigley Field: I don't give a fuck about baseball, first of all.  The bars surrounding Wrigley Field are populated by people that are the exact opposite of me and what I value in life and human beings in general. But just one day at Wrigley Field is enough to sustain the other three-hundred sixty-four. Half the fun of Cubs games is reveling in the frenzy of the stadium and the neighborhood that houses it. Shit sings. Fuck the Cubs, fuck baseball, fuck teams, fuck the organ, fuck hot dogs, fuck Old Style. Look at the fucking rooftops...the entire city is there and watching. Can they see me? They can see me. And I'm a part of it. There's intoxication built into the bricks, and once you've caught that swell you forget that they can see you, and when did the turbulence kick in? Fuck, turn it up, turn it up, turn it up. And it hums.
• Experience middle child syndrome from the viewpoint of a city in a nation. Geographically, spiritually, emotionally, chronologically. Watch our struggle for recognition from the inside, feel the city surge with hope even after it gets collectively kicked in the balls and just goddamn refuses to stop wishing that someday, somehow, if we whine enough and start enough fights, we'll get that respect.
• Smell the despair and lean on its shoulders, because Chicago is a lonely place, filled with lonely people who really, really depend on each other. Is it weird that I love that? Does anyone else feel that about this place? The corruption of soul, the crooked pride, the brothers that grow from it? No? I feel that here. It's neat.
• Food. Hot dogs, deep-dish pizza, chili, sliders, foot-long Italian beef sandwiches.  Grease, clogged arteries, heart attacks. Cholesterol on a stick.  Mow like wow.
• This town has more bars per block than any other city in the country. Some town in Wisconsin wins the bars per capita contest, but around here, you can't walk more than a block without passing some place to sit and get drunk.
• The fucking glory of summer in Chicago cancels and exceeds the depression of winter.  Now, I love the winter.  But no one else does, so I'm alone in my happiness, which grows into depression.  And to further amplify my conviction: I hate the heat, but it's worth it in Chicago. There's just so much shit to do and not do and lounge and avoid and act and live, it's great.
• Honestly, the changing of the seasons is essential to the feel of the city. It's impossible to fully appreciate good weather when you've never been through the bad. In a town where the air temperature, exclusive of wind, has scale of 130 degrees to play with throughout the year, you're on your toes.

Ten Reasons To Get The Hell Out Of Here, Like Tomorrow [see bracketed follow-up of previous list]

• Fuck this fucking weather.
• How can one stay in shape or get in shape with consistently giant portions of fatty goodness? I mean, sure, I could start like, running or something. Or walking briskly. Or getting off the couch. But it's so hard when there's all this eating to be had.
• Daley, you corrupt motherfucker: fill in these potholes fucking right now, or I'm just gonna sledgehammer the entire street.
• This town's elevated subway system is entirely designed to discourage ethnic diversity, because the neighborhoods with the least white people are the neighborhoods where they didn't build any trains, making transportation much more complicated for people who live near or within those neighborhood patches. Like me. Even though my neighborhood consists nearly entirely of old Ukrainian men. Whatever.
• Wrigleyville
• Hipsters. Hipsters and their superior bullshit, the name-dropping and the condescending accompanied smirk, their smarmy hair and their "skinny" jeans (fuck you, they look stupid on everyone) and their cultural stranglehold and worship, misuse, and abuse of irony. How they stand there at concerts, too placid and cold to react to the music. How everything I like is automatically bad (fuck you, I like Walking Tall) because I don't have plastic fashion glasses and intentionally clashing but slightly complimentary patterns to my clothes because of my carefully-constructed quirkiness. 
• Even worse: the people who emulate the hipsters, the recent converts from the high-class neighborhoods who show up and dress like the hipsters and live in their hood, adopt the elitist personality and then they don't have anything to be elitist about, and they all copy each other and don't care about shit all unless it's their scene or their image or whatever they hear on The Daily Show (I should add: I love The Daily Show. I watch it every day. Stop trying to pawn it off as your own ideas.  We're all on the internet.  You cannot fool us). They're going to drive me to genocide.
• Stop building banks where there used to be hot dog shops, because all you're generating is really, really angry drunk people.

6. You wrote in a recent post: "Never start an argument with an ignorant bastard who thinks his business parking in the middle of the road for several minutes during rush hour is far more imperative than the flow of traffic." This kind of behavior is one of my pet peeves. I once posted about it. I'm in your corner but I need your advice. Should we both sign up for anger management classes?

I've been pretty good about controlling my anger lately, actually, which is one of the reasons I did not get out of my car yelling like fuck-all at that guy the other day. When you grow up all sorts of Italian/Irish/Catholic, every little thing is taxing your sanity. With this background in mind: I gave up fighting for Lent last year, despite the fact that I'm not Catholic anymore, but because I feel shamefully guilty about everything. I gave up nothing this year. Possibly pride.

So, yes. Either anger management, or Catholicism.


7. The big debate in my house is Mac vs. Windows. Which do you pick?

Well, I'm a Mac fan, because my laptop is the shizznet. This has risen not from actual computer literacy and shrewd technological experience, but an unrelenting devotion to anything supported by Justin Long.


8. Do you tell many people you know about your blog? Do they read it and what has been their response?

A shit ton of my friends know about the blog, and about five of them read it regularly. I'm guessing it's because they are self-obsessed and yearn to see their names in print, as am I. Even though my name is not on here. And neither is theirs. But they satiate my ego splendidly, and I'm pretty sure they think I'm the fucking bees knees, which is like the most daft expression ever, due to the excessive quantities of knees per bee.

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