Yesterday

Hi Anna Banana

I'm having a nice day- I woke up nice and early four times until it was about 11am, then I got up and noticed it was thundering and raining out and decided right away that I was going to read for awhile on your porch, and I watched the mama sparrow feed the kids, and when she took off to get more grub(s) after she was satisfied the big ugly monkeyman wasn't going to munch her squealing brats daddy flew up from somewhere to make sure, too. I couldn't help but to notice that the sky was nice and dark just south but clearing up to the west, so I kept looking up from my book to check the progress of the dissipating storm, wishing I'd gotten up a little earlier because I could tell I had maybe twenty minutes tops before the rain stopped, and before I knew it, it did Just as I finshed reading the one and only graphic sex scene in the book between the only two characters in the book who might actually love each other. I could see Wave 2 was on its way but there was no way I was going to wait around for it, so I scooped up the keys you left for me on the counter, grabbed the bike and zoomed on up the the bike path, feeling lazy and fat and tired but happy that the sun was still hidden. Halfway to work the drizzle set in again and, and by the time I got downtown it was really coming down but I didn't mind at all, except that I wished I'd thought to bring my contacts over to your place last night but thinking's been a slow process for me lately for some reason. Waiting at the light on Jackson a couple in their mid-thirties crept up behind me and the man said "Excuse me, but do you live here?" and I looked around me and said You mean in Chicago? "Yes." Yeah, I do. He said "Do you know where the Hancock Observatory is?" and I said "Probably at the top of the Hancock Building" and the woman laughed and I noticed she was sort of pretty, with dark hair cut in a bob slicked against her face under the rain, and the man smirked under his banana republic baseball hat and said "Yeah, I know, but can you tell me where the Hancock building is?" and I pointed at it, it was the biggest building in the skyline from where I was standing except for the building that looks exactly like the late World Trade Center buildings in New York, but then felt unsure, and looked around south to make sure there wasn't a building that obviously prooved me wrong, but I left my arm pointed at it and when I looked back I told him There it is and told him to walk up Michigan till he got to Water Tower Place at Chicago St. They both said thanks and as I rode away to Columbia in the rain I tried to sum up the character of Chicago people as seen by outsiders looking for directions, and I thought If everyone's like me then they're generally friendly and want to help, if only to reiterate to themselves how well they know their city, but they can't resist poking a little fun at foreigners with jokes at their expense, and if the foreigners have a good sense of humor about the whole thing then everybody comes out feeling good about the encounter.

Love,

Pato

The Following Are Lies

I WROTE LOTS OF BLOG ENTRIES, ONE EVERY DAY THIS SUMMER, I SWEAR, BUT THEY ALL GOT LOST SOMEHOW, I DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED!
I DO NOT PLAY TOO MANY VIDEO GAMES.
I HAVE PLENTY OF ENERGY TO SINK INTO BOTH THE BAND AND THE PASSION FOR WRITING!
I DO NOT HAVE CONFUSED AMBITIONS.
MY LOVE HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH ALCOHOL IS NOT CAUSING ME TO LOSE SELF RESPECT.

Telemarketing pt 2

At first I went after the quirkiest jobs I could find. I figured at the time why the hell not, and in those early stages of the job search you feel like you have the luxury to be picky. There was this opening in the Blue Man Group's band. The Blue Man Group is a popular performance art show that originated in New York, featuring a rotating cast of three stony faced, silent bald guys dressed in black, whose heads and hands are painted gleaming, cobalt blue. Their show was interspersed with live music performances by the Blue Man Band.

The Blue Man Band needed and electronic zither player. I'd seen them once for free because a friend had been working as an usher at the theater. I closed my eyes and pictured the band playing in the loft above the stage, in the dark, illuminated only by black lights hidden from view. Two pairs of neon orange drumsticks arced over lime green voodoo skullfaces; shadowy demons whose glowing metallic bones strummed on oddly shaped yield-sign-yellow guitars writhed to rhythms somehow both moody and up-beat. Esoteric electrical devices bleeping and blooping along the perimeter. Nowhere in my memory could I locate something that might be called a 'zither.' I figured they made it up, and so my chances of playing it were just as good as anyone else's.

This is the letter I sent to them, along with my resume, which detailed the long list of call center jobs trailing behind me:

My name is Patrick van Slee and I'm a very good musician. I have no idea what an "electronic zither" is, but I want to play it for your band. I like to play in the dark under a black light, so that won't be a problem. Give me a call, and you won't be disappointed.

The Unified Theory of Everything

There used to be a time
When everwhere around me
I saw mystery
And at night,
When I dreamed,
I was like a spellbound detective
Sorting through clues
That manifested themselves to me as impossible landscapes
Of vivid color
And sensation.

But that was before I figured out
The Unified Theory of Everything
And now
I see
The motivation
Behind everything that happens to me
And the dry logic
Soaks up the mystery
Without solving it

Even now,
As I write this,
I'm performing a sort of experiment;
But like a baby
That touches its own reflection
In a still pool of water,
I distort
That which I seek to understand
By the sham attempt

Telemarketing pt 1

SO it was a couple of summers ago and I was just out of my first semester back into college. I'd worked for SBC for a couple of years up until then and I had some money saved up, so I hadn't had to work during the spring semester. But now I needed a JOB.
I poured through the classifieds in the Chicago Reader. Most of the listings offered what the job market always seems to have available- serving jobs for new food service places, legal assistants, and gobs of call centers for in- and out-bound telemarketing.
I hate call centers, in fact swore I would avoid them like moldy sausage for the rest of my life. I can't stand talking on the phone, for one thing. And those places have a way of turning everything you do while you're on the clock into a percentage value that can mathematically be translated into their profit equations, because you are jacked into their telephone computer system at all times. Thus can they monitor every single minute of your day with a guy surrounded by computer screens who sends you pop-up messages to go an have a chat with the manager. Things like going off-script, forgetting to say the company name multiple times, and even leaving your workstation to go take a piss become a number representing profit loss. I once had a supervisor sneak after me and follow me into the bathroom.

CELEBRITIES' LIVES ARE NONE OF YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS

Dream Ageein

It was cool, I was hanging from this window, trying to figure out how I was going to escape from these army guys who were chasing after me. I look down and the face of the building is brown marble, doesn't look like I can get a foothold- there are lots of angles and crevices but they look just a bit too sheer for me to sneak my foot in. Just then a man in a white shirt and a black tie finds me and closes the window without saying anything, confident that I've chosen my own form of execution. I dangle there for awhile, look down again, start to get scared, but then decide to slide down as gently as I can when I notice that the building tilts in an unusual way- I spit to make sure, to get a sense of the angel of the building with respect to the vertical pull of gravity, but the wind makes my spit arc as it falls, which tells me squat. I slide down anyway and whatta y'know! There is a very comfortable balcony conveniently located just below my feet somehow, and I drop myself into and smile. It's a wide balcony made of old, grey, weathered stone, cold to the touch because it's in the shade, pocked and pitted from acid rain and spotted with black dots of mold. There are thick columns that I can walk around, situated like crowded statues. I walk around them, marveling at the contrast of comfort between hanging around on this neat balcony and hanging on for dear life, dangling from a window. I'm feeling pretty safe here, guessing that the man and his army people are through with me, but then just as I think this to myself I remember just how thorough professional soldier-type people are, and I start to worry that they know about this sweet spot of mine... And then a whole bunch of these army guys come pouring through this big sliding glass door out onto the balcony and I try to hide behind one of the columns, even sort of walking around it to obscure myself from them as they walk closer but there are way too many of them, and I give myself up, walk out of cover with my hands up. One of the army guys points this huge machine gun at me right away but i'm like "No, Look!" with my hands, emphasizing that I've given myself up, and he looks really angry but I see he's not going to shoot me after all, which I don't really understand because didn't they just want me dead? I mean, the whole shutting the window thing, leaving me to plummet thirty stories to my death? But the Tie Guy isn't there, and the army guy with the machine gun walks around me and the other army guys sort of file back in through the sliding glass door again, really slowly. And the the machine gun guy puts his arm around my neck from behind and fumbles around with something, probably those plastic zip cuffs, and I sort of take this very deliberate step backwards and hook him around his neck and right arm and grab his right hand and point the machine gun at the other army men with my free arm, and I make him pull the trigger, shooting all of the army guys as they try to run back out onto the balcony. They come charging in like maniacs but my aim is straight and I shoot them all to death while my army guy struggles for control of the gun.

I just ate a free cheeseburger

Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum yum Yum

In the NY Times today

"In all, 118 foreigners from 32 countries are on death rows in the United States."

My Dream Pt. 4

There is a loud blast, and a fwoosh!, accompanied by the sweet, chemical smell of turpentine. Before I turn to see where the sound had come from, I notice that the from the ground plumes of oily, black smoke curl up towards the sky, and there are thousands of tiny fires peppering the landscape.
"It was those people," says a low, gravelly voice, and I know that it is the balloon itself that has spoken to me. "They fell like bombs to the earth, and now everyone burns." I turn around.
Sean is standing in the center of the wooden compartment, which as near as I can tell is roughly the size of my bathroom. His head is shaven and his face is dotted red with acne. His eyebrows are thick and black, and his eyes seem to have a sound of their own as I remember his voice clearly. He smiles at me and then looks upwards through the hole in the balloon and pulls on a long brass chain with links two inches thick, releasing a gust of whitish-blue flame with another fwoosh!
I knew it was a misunderstanding, I think. People like Sean didn't die. And people like me didn't- I knew it was all a mistake. I'm so happy. I'm so relieved.
"Why did you not go into the mountain?" the voice of the baloon says to me again. "You were supposed to."
"I tried," I say. My answer is half-hearted, obligitory. I am much more interested in talking to my friend.
"Hey, fucker," I say to him, giving him a punch in the ribs. "Where have you been?"
Sean says nothing, but he smiles that dry old smile of his that always preceded his obnoxious laugh, the laugh that sometimes would also precede an even more obnoxious scream. I used to wonder what was in that scream that made it so forgivable, how it was that Sean was able to wear his punk-rock-styled obstreperousness well. After he died, and all that amazing energy exploded into all of us, changing us, I came to understand that it was that his body, tough as it was, was unable to contain the abundant lifeforce he generated, and when from time to time he let it blow out through his superhuman vocal cords we all got to see just for a minute what it was to be Sean, and it felt good.

My Dream Pt. 3

I sink through the blackness immediately, the water rushing so quickly past my ears that I feel as though it digs a channel through them, eroding my brain and pouring out the back of my skull like a jet stream. Instinctively squeezing my legs against my chest with clenched fists and tight arms I seem to offer no buoyancy to the water, and sink deep and deeper, leaving the raft and the sunlight and the unexplored mountain far behind me. I expect to feel at any second the sharp tearing of my body against the rusted, twisted junk that I know litters all levels of the water. I expect to hear a fleeting crack and see an explosion of light behind my shut eyes just before I die.
But it is when I shut my eyes that I understand that this was never water at all, and through my eyelids I see that I am falling through the grey sky high above an intricate network of roads and cultivated farmland. I can barely suppress a scream as the sense of vertigo overtakes me, but the thrill of mortal severity my situation injects into my bones is wonderful, and I feel alive and clear-headed for what seems like the first time since my childhood.
All around me many others are falling as well, and I know that they each have something they are trying to tell me, if only they could manage to direct the course of their descent to coincide with mine. As they zoom by, limbs flailing, I catch bits and pieces of their message that they scream to me over the wind that howls in my ears. "...wwwASN'T ANYTHING YOU COULDA DOonne..." shouts a blond, middle aged woman wearing denim overalls. Her face is twisted into a mask of violent glee as she calls to me, her hair flickering above her, and her voice cuts off abruptly as she whips away from my field of vision. A fat man, also grinning maniacally, swoops toward me, his neck bent awkwardly as he tries to catch my eyes from slightly below. Streaks of blood course over his shiny, bald head, trailing from his nose and ears, and beneath the wiry stubble on his face his skin looks grey and dead. He opens his flapping jowls and I hear "...nnnoOBODY SEES IT THAT WAY But yoou..."
All the while we race toward the earth, and more of the landscape before me looks green and alive. The people spin by more quickly, each one seemingly more ecstatic than the last, though I feel their frustration at their inability to move close enough to me so that we may fall together and talk. Soon their fleeting voices blend into a wall of noise that ripples my attention, and then finally it becomes a single, wailing siren as if from a distant ambulance sweeping over the city where I live. No earthly sound has every caused me so much unrest as the type of siren that now penetrates into my dreamworld; it sticks in my brain like bacon grease. The sound disappears after only what seems to be a few seconds, fortunately, and I open my eyes to find that they are gone, and I realize that I am no longer falling, but standing in a small, wooden compartment, floating in a hot air balloon, still far, far above the earth. And someone is in there with me.

My Dream Pt. 2

The rock peninsula does not appear to be drawing any closer, though I am certain that a good deal of time has passed, and the swampwater churns gently as I am driven steadily ahead. As I realize this I find myself standing at the foremost edge of the raft. The displaced water slaps the wood, chills my bare feet. I look down at my toes curling over the edge and find that from this vantage point the water appears again to be dark and cold. I am suddenly aware of the thick, ominous space that spans between the bottom of my feet and the swamp's murky, unimaginable depths. It imposes itself on me, and I feel heavy, drawn into it. The blackness of it permeates throughout the limits of my awareness, eclipsing the warmth and lightness the ubiquitous sunlight of the open day had inspired. What I feel as I peer into it is not fear but a sense of desperation in the face of its strength and inevitability, though as I stare beyond my own warped, inscrutable reflection I am conscious of the paranoia and irrationality that bubbles over it.
Anxious to disembark, I lean forward, toward the stoic mountain, convinced that by doing so the speediness of the raft will be somehow increased. There are often moments in my day-to-day life in which my own brain betrays me by imagining in vivid, horrific detail the most tragic sequence of immediate events possible. Sinisterly, this internal tourette's usually deals with someone whose well-being I care for much more than my own. Sometimes it is as simple as playing out the immediate alternate future of a near miss, such as seeing my cat, Obie, suffering terribly, gasping for life with a crushed and ruined body after I have unsuccessfully avoided stepping on him. Other times, however... A CTA train rushing toward me as I stand waiting at the platform with my Anna... A moment in which if I were to push her only slightly she would...
Because I can not control these sickening images I see this as the darkest evil within myself, and it seems to me to be a curse that can hurt me at any time. A curse that intends to terrify me that one day I will succumb to the impulse in an instant of insanity that will destroy my life and the life of someone I care for forever.
It is this same curse to which I attribute the tendency of my dreamworld to take its cues from my immediate fears. In the instant in which I see the possibility of plunging into the dark water I find myself smacking its surface.

My Dream Pt. 1

I am standing on the waterline of a swamp. Behind me is a sheer, rocky, volcanic cliff wall that stretches off to my left, to the east, as far into the distance as I am aware. Around me the boulders are fused together and enormous, and their shadows are dark. The water immediately before me is black and still, but sweeping away from me it blends first into a deep, pine green, then grows more vibrant until it coagulates into an algaeic lime so rich it glows through the underbrush. As I scan the area of the swamp I see it ripple at the base of many thick clumps of tall, dry grass that waves in the breeze.
I find myself navigating a wooden raft between the weeds and around small islands that support gnarled, stunted trees. Though I am unaware of the specific position of the sun, it seems now to me that it is simultaneously early morning, midafternoon, and late evening. It is hot, and the heat strikes me suddenly. I remember the cool rocks at the shoreline, I almost miss the shade the cliff face provided.
The weeds have become sparse, and the raft now seems to move under its own power toward the pinnacle of a jagged peninsula just west of where I had been standing. It is there, I know, that I will find a cave, and a tunnel, and something like an ancient temple or pyramid buried beneath the volcanic mountain, which I will explore. I have the sense that this is a route that I have taken many times before; a secret route that I have often used to make my way from place to place. I am filled with a childlike thrill. I am happy.
As I float through the swamp images come to me of other places I have visited via this path. I see faces of cheerful people who wait for me there, of whose existence no one is aware but me. I miss them.

Monkeys

They sure are funny!

Be Frank

In response the growing anti-obesity sentiment in this country, we have this anti-anti-obesity backlash from a company whose food product is about as healthy as cigarettes. It features a big fat guy called Frank that eats franks and is frank. And they came up with a new word for "fatass." READY? Here it is: "Girthy." The words "Girthy is good," meaning "it's okay to be a great, big fatass," are emblazoned all over the CTA redline cars, thank GOD. I've always wanted to endorse a hotdog.

BE BIG. BE MEATY. BE FRANK.

AAAAHHHH!!!

This is the conversation I had to have tonight with my roomate:


Jason, would you mind if we moved your tape deck so I can fit the video
game system in there?

“Where are you gonna move it?”

I don’t know, somewhere else.

“Well, then, yeah.”

You mean, you do mind?

"Well, where are you gonna put it?"

How about your room?

“There’s no room in there.”

Okay, how about the closet?

“I’m not putting that thing in the closet.”

Okay, how about your other room?

“Maybe.”

Kitty Pillow

I figured out a good use for my burgeoning winter belly.

A kitty pillow!

Haha!

Guess what I'm doing right now...?

My Laundary!!!! HAhaha! Yeah!

Spiders

I'm supposed to be writing a seven page paper on NAFTA right now, but I don't want to so...
It actually wouldn't be that bad if I could talk about the EFFECTS of NAFTA, but I have to write about how it fits into a specific foreign policy model, and I'm boring myself to suicide even writing about it right now on this blog.
I wonder if other people live amongst as many spiders as I do. They mostly keep out of sight, but occasionally they figure hey he's never squished any of us yet and they forget to hide when I'm around. There's a big bastard of a spider just hanging out on the heating duct right above my head. Once or twice, while I was writing on my computer in the dark, a spider just lowered itself right onto my screen. There are webs EVERYWHERE.
I can't decide if I don't care about it because I'm kind of a Thoreau-inspired naturalist, and like I'm just not bothered by it and am in fact a kind of dirty elitist in the sense that I view my peaceful co-existence with spiders and filth as representitive of a healthy relationship with good old mother nature; or I'm just lazy. Everytime Anna comes over she talks about sweeping all the spider's webs down. She doesn't really mind spiders either, which is I guess lucky for me and the spiders.
Man, NAFTA is so boring. I wrote a song about it as part of a presentation I have to give tomorrow in class, and hopefully it will figure heavily into whatever I get for an overall grade, because the paper isn't going to be much more than some long quotes I ripped out of some books from the library stitched together with a whole bunch of bullshit.
I wonder if anyone else has ever written a song about NAFTA. It's pretty good, actually.

Obake

My cat loves me so much I almost can't even believe it. He sleeps in my bed every night, even though I live in a shitty, smelly, freezing cold basement. He comes to visit me in my little office area because he knows I will always stop to play with him a little bit and then let him purr on my lap while I'm working. He digs his claws into me because he can hardly sit still, he loves me so much. But he never digs too hard because he doesn't want to hurt me. He's doing it right now.
Here are the top ten reasons why he is the greatest kitty that the world has ever seen:

10: He can jump halfway up the wall to try and catch the laser dot, even though he's fatter than a big, white basketball.
09: He lets me cradle him on his back and play with his little kitty nipples.
08: He likes it when I tug on his ears.
07: When you scratch his chin, he closes his eyes and his nose bunches up on his face like a raisin.
06: He's a tough motherfucker, he can kill anything he wants to.
05: He loves it when I play piano or guitar and especially when I sing to him, and he just sits and listens.
04: His name is MONSTER, and he LIKES IT.
03: He thinks any space in between me and Anna while we're laying in bed is prime real estate.
02: He's way smarter than most of the people I went to highschool with.
01: His nose is fucking PINK.