Accidental Historian

Passing Haymarket

Turn on the radio
Nah, fuck it, turn it off
Fear is your only god on the radio
Nah, fuck it, turn it off
-Rage Against the Machine, "Vietnow"

It's really too freaking bad I'm so damn busy right now.  I want nothing more than to write and I know exactly what I want to write about: Chicago.

Specifically, I want to write about that which defines the essence of Chicago.  It comes down to one word: Haymarket.

Yesterday was May Day.  Friday is the 126th anniversary of the Haymarket "Riot."  Yesterday's May Day labor rally and parade went right past the memorial at Haymarket Square, which was once a monument to the heroism of the police who opened fire in the dark on a (mostly) peaceful crowd and mostly managed to kill themselves.

Chicago was once the heart and soul of the labor movement.  There's a reason that Upton Sinclair set The Jungle in Packingtown.

Anyway, yesterday was May Day.  I posted this picture:




In a bit over two weeks, we have this:




NATO is coming to Haymarket.  I've already witnessed someone -- specifically someone with authority in the CFD -- connect yesterday's extremely peaceful and orderly May Day rally to the expected NATO rallies a "the insanity that started off yesterday."

I also received the official "It's Time to Start Panicking" warning from building services that include all the beefed-up security procedures and warnings not to associate with the protesters, lest they, I don't know, kill me or something.

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Meanwhile, yesterday morning I read "The Butcher of Anderson Station," a prequel-ish short story to Leviathan's Wake.  I read it right after finishing Mira Grant's Countdown, a novella prequel to the Newsflesh trilogy.  After that I started re-reading Feed.

I consider my recent reading choices extremely timely, here in the space between Haymarket and NATO.

May Day from 400 Feet

Power to the people!

Have Some Links

Ross Douthat, a/k/a "Ross Douchehat" 'round about the parts I frequent, wrote a book about religion in America.  I knew it would be terrible because, y'know, Ross Douthat.  He's a mendacious, obviously partisan intellectual lightweight to which the Grey Lady has tied itself in an ever-accelerating attempt to drag itself down towards obscurity.  I'd weep for what the NYT has become but, well, you make your bed...

Either way, Charles P. Pierce read it so that you (and I) don't have to:

Too much of the book is simply a culture-war text gussied up in a chasuble. Douthat is extremely bothered by people who claim to seek enlightenment from a "God Within," and outside the framework of preferred ecclesiastical constructs. (In this, he risibly cites Deepak Chopra and Elizabeth Gilbert — and Oprah Winfrey! — as somehow being American religious figures.) Can you find spiritual enlightenment outside of a formalized religious structure and, having found it, can you still be a Catholic, or a Jew, or a Presbyterian? An interesting question that Douthat simply ignores.

Jezebel takes a shit all over EHarmony.  Statistics compiled by OKCupid indicate there's an 83% chance somebody reading this is totally in to that sort of thing:

The "scientific" algorithm behind eharmony, for example, has never been tested against other algorithms to measure whether or not it makes any difference in the quality of relationships experienced by users. Basically, you might be better off just going to a bar and introducing yourself to a bunch of dudes who don't appear to have girlfriends. Or just playing World of Warcraft for awhile. Or just go onto OKCupid and find someone with a weird tattoo, for free.

I find this story fascinating, especially in light of the fact that I spent the better part of the day on Friday in a home that had been vacant for nearly a year. I also had to meet the new neighbors in a rather awkward way. The driveway in the empty house was the communal extra parking space, you see.

Interestingly enough, no one seemed to even think to point a gun at me. I also never had to show anyone my closing documents. I wonder why that is.  I've already learned some interesting things about being the new guy in a neighborhood and the difference between getting an apartment and buying a house.  Let's just say that I feel really, really bad for the Kalonjis and leave it at that for now.

And, finally, the Mittbot might have the nomination basically wrapped up, but he has a long hill to climb with the Republican base.

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Also, as a reminder, I'm doing a Walkathon on May 6th for the daggies and the kittehs.  I've been a bit busy lately, so I haven't exactly been working my ass off at fundraising.  Here's a link:

http://www.firstgiving.com/fundraiser/Geds/adopt-19th-annual-makinstridesforstrays-walkathon

I can apply for matching funds up to $200 through my company.  That means that anything you give will (potentially) be doubled!  Unless, of course, you give something that goes to dollar 201 or beyond, but as of right now that's not looking like it will be too big a problem.

Achievement Unlocked: Home Ownership

It took nearly a year.  There’s still at least three weeks of work to do before I can move in. I'm sure there are many, many stories to tell and there will be many, many more.

But, hey, I’m a 30 year-old, white, land owning male.  I get to vote even if they repeal the 19th and 15th Amendments.

So suck on that, everybody!

Now Begins the Spring of Our Discombobulation

So the tail-end of April and the beginning of May will be a crazy time for me.  As such, there will undoubtedly be (more of) a lull in the blogging.

I am hoping, however, to create some content over the next week that I can spread out.  There should, for instance, be some more iterations of "A Distant, Dreadful Star" in the near future.  So, hey!

If you're looking for something to do in the meantime, just go read some Charles Pierce.  He tends to say what I'm thinking, but in ways that are more erudite and hilarious.  And the bastard gets paid for it.

Meanwhile, if you need me, I'll be over in the corner, eating paint chips.




By the way, the names on some of these things are awful.  I mean, I think I'll be painting my kitchen Desert Lily.  Then I'll be painting the bedroom Tea & Honey, since Ralph Lauren seems to have gotten out of the paint game, so I can't go find a Tea & Sweets paint chip, but Glidden's Tea & Honey is pretty much the same damn thing.  But I could always do Lilting Laughter or Pueblo Sand.  But I just don't know whether to do the office in Aegean Mist or Caribbean Mist.  This is hard!

Randomness

So I was on the train into Chicago this morning having a Google chat with a friend who currently resides in Tokyo.  As Wil Wheaton has been known to say, I love living in the future.

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Curb Tacos

I can't decide if that's the band name of the day or the nickname for a horrible venereal disease of the day.

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"A Distant, Dreadful Star" hasn't gone away.  It just won't be back until next week at this rate.  I had written Part 11, but it's a jump and I suddenly realized that Part 10 couldn't just end that particular strain.  This is the difficulty in writing a long project based on, "Hey, this is a good idea!" followed by, "I totally know what the first six pages will be!"  It quickly falls apart if you're not on top of it.

Chances are I'll do an On the Writing of "A Distant, Dreadful Star" post pretty soon.  If there's one thing I love more than writing, it's writing about writing.

Things I Think You Should Know

I started my weekend by swapping out my iPhone 3GS for a Motorola Atrix 2.  Two things about the Motorola Atrix 2:

1.  It's friggin' awesome.

2.  That is all.

But, no, seriously.  I never wanted an iPhone.  The reason I got the 3GS is because my old HTC Tilt was literally discharging its battery before my very eyes.  The only AT&T Android phone available at the time was the original Droid, which did not impress me.  The iPhone 4 hadn't been officially announced yet.  We were still about six months from the first Windows Phone.  The 3GS, in short, was the only game in town.

I found the iOS and its attendant stuff both good and bad.  I loved it at first, but slowly got more and more frustrated with its limitations.  So once I learned I was in the renewal period and the Atrix 2 was available for a hundo, I jumped all over that shit.

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My iPhone 3GS is now getting a second life as an iPod Touch.  My iPod Classic tends to crash when I plug it into my computer, forcing me to restore and reload the damn thing from nothing.  It's deeply annoying.  But the iPhone is way smaller in terms of storage than the iPod,[1] so I'll probably use both, depending on the situation.

Also, for anyone who actually uses an iPhone or, I'm assuming, iPod Touch as an mp3 player, I've noticed that if I have a single album with multiple artists it splits the album up by artist.  The iPod Classic does not do this.  If I have an album with different artists I WANT TO HAVE THEM ALL ON THE SAME FRIGGIN ALBUM.  Anyone know how to fix this?

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I went to see Flogging Molly on Saturday.  It was a hell of a show, easily one of the five best main sets I've seen.  In no particular order, these are the best shows I've seen:

Flogging Molly, 2012 Green 17 tour at the Aragon
Green Day, Superpages.com Center, Fair Park, Dallas in 2010
Soundgarden reunion tour, UIC Pavilion, Chicago, July 2011
Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers, either the Gruene Hall show in 2010 or my first Joe's on Weed Street show, back in 2006-ish
Local H in West Dundee, IL back in, like, 2004.  Assuming the show was as awesome as I remember.

Also, this year the Flog is closing out the Green 17 Tour in Tempe, Arizona.  You know who else will be playing at that show?  A little Arizona band known as Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers.  Awesome.

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Meanwhile, you need to become acquainted with Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears.



This one might be a bit NSFW:



They bring da funk in the best possible sense of that word.

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Oh, and if you've been managing to read this blog without learning about the Lost Immigrants, you no longer have an excuse.  For the record, the Live & War in Texas selection?  I was at that show.

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[1]I bought the 32GB iPhone 3GS, which totally seemed like overkill at the time.  Now it turns out it's almost justified.

Do You Have $18 and an eReader?

I know what you can do with that combination of items.

For those who don't know, Susan G. Komen for the Cure is run by a bunch of assholes.  Specifically, it's run by a bunch of assholes who think that siding with the "and by 'Pro-Life' we mean anti-practically-everyone who's actually alive" crowd is a good idea.  As such, they've pulled funding from Planned Parenthood that PP was using to fund cancer screenings for poor women because, y'know, Planned Parenthood requires an abortion with every free cancer screening or some other such evil thing.

Fred Clark covered it in hilarious fashion here.

Scalzi is trying to do something about it here.  The best thing about Scalzi's plan is that if you participate, you also get Scalzi-related reading materials for your eReader.  There's a bunch of stuff I'd been meaning to buy, anyway, but hadn't gotten around to.  Now it's happening.

Bits and Pieces

So I made it back from San Antonio in one piece.  My complicated feelings about Texas are now even more complicated due to the fact that my feelings about San Antonio are extremely not complicated.  That’s one hell of a city.  I love the place.

There’s an interesting thing about Texas for those who don’t know Texas.  There’s no such thing as a single, monolithic Texas.  The place is just too big and too spread out for that.  Dallas/Fort Worth is like a crappy attempt at a big Midwestern city with a lot of overcompensation in the form of Texas state flags and pickup trucks.  Austin is a college town.  Galveston is a low-rent New Orleans or Mobile, Alabama[1].  Houston is a big traffic jam built in the path of hurricanes.[2]  San Antonio is a lot more on the Mex side of that Tex-Mex equation.  It just had a totally different vibe than the other Texas places I experienced in Texas and it had a vibe I really, really liked.

The Alamo is totally disappointing, though.  I was much more impressed with the Menger Bar, due to the fact that it’s where Teddy Roosevelt recruited many of the Rough Riders.  I raised a bourbon in honor of TR.  Because if I didn’t I’m pretty sure his ghost would have haunted my ass and I did not want.

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Anyway, now that I’m back and recovered, I’ll be returning to some form of regular blogging.  I’m also working on a couple of other projects that I’ll hopefully announce in the near future.  So there’s that.

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On the subject of projects, you might have noticed that the Dancing Monkey Project has, thus far, been naught but sound and fury, signifying nothing.  So far I’ve done one thing that ended up being completely and totally not worth writing about.  Then I spent a week out of commission.  And I can’t believe January’s not over yet, since I feel like it should be March by now.  Life’s like that sometimes, though.

I’ve realized a few things over the past couple weeks, however.

First, the absolute best thing you can do for yourself in a dating context is to simply put yourself out there.  It’s a pretty obvious conclusion, but one that I seem to have missed.  I did, however, recently find myself in a situation where there were a bunch of guys and a few women.  Most of the guys clumped up, put their heads down, and just kind of interacted with each other.  Two of us, however, talked to women.  Nothing came of it, but two of us had opportunity and the other guys didn’t.  So, y’know, duh.

Second, it’s deeply important to work on yourself.  I am the sort who would be referred to as his own worst critic in most situations.  This is problematic.

Due to a large number of factors I felt like I returned from Texas with my tail between my legs and have been, for all intents and purposes, damaged goods since my return.  That’s not really the case at all, but it’s been my self-perception[3].  It’s also the sort of self-perception that really gets in the way of getting anything accomplished or feeling really comfortable professionally.  I’ve gotten a lot accomplished since my return and everyone is glad to have me back, but I haven’t felt like I’ve really been bringing anything to the table.

While I was in San Antonio I admitted that was how I felt.  This is the first step towards fixing the problem.

That same night I had a dream.  In that dream I ran in to Her because she had started working in my industry.  We started dating.  Then I woke up thinking, “Srsly, WTF?”  It bugged me and when a dream really bugs me I figure it’s my brain trying to tell me something, so I picked at it for a while.  Eventually I realized that I had that dream at the same time I’d admitted to the damaged goods thing and I realized that no one has ever made me feel like damaged goods quite like she did.

When you feel that way you just kind of get locked in to a pattern of bad behavior.  Even if you leave a bad situation behind you tend to fall back in to the attitudes and patterns that put you there in the first place.

So…yeah.  Take that for whatever it’s worth.

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[1]I liked Galveston.  I liked New Orleans and Mobile a whole hell of a lot more.

[2]I did not much like Houston.

[3]Have you noticed that I’ve been doing a lot of writing about perception of late?

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