Hot and unwanted
This week I had to take the Green Line to Police Headquarters to obtain a copy of the police report that will get me back the 35,000 American Airline miles stolen from my account by a woman who was going to fly from Dallas to Nashville. On the way down to pick up the report, which costs fifty cents, and can’t be emailed or sent in the postal mail because the Chicago Police Department, budget $93 million, doesn’t accept electronic payments, I kept saying to myself, remember $93 million miles, no I mean 35,000 miles, is a free flight, it’s a free flight, it’s a free flight. In the passageway connecting the Red Line to the Green Line I saw a carving of a Dimetrodon, thought of taking a picture of it, didn’t. I saw more normal non-white people in that passage than I have seen in Andersonville or my office in the Loop in the last 3 months. For a second I thought my racism had changed, that maybe I could be saved, maybe I could join the crowd. When I got to police headquarters beyond the lights of Guaranteed Rate Field I was behind in the security line a black cop who must’ve just gotten promoted because everyone kept saying congratulations to him, congratulations. I said congratulations to him too, now that I’m saved, and grabbed an Uber back to the Loop from the Starbucks on 35th.
By the library I saw two black girls breaking up with each other. One of them was sweating profusely and crying profusely and trying to run away but the one who was doing the dumping followed her, just couldn’t help herself I guess, trying to turn the crying face around and I heard, even though my headphones were on listening to “Evicted” the crying and sweating dumped woman say, leave me alone! let me go! Then I thought maybe I would follow her and say, you know, it’s over, she has been evicted from your heart, she is not returning. But that’s one of the things I’ve been trying not to do, because I’m getting older, like I’m trying not to pee outside of the bowl, I’m trying not to test the speeding Ashland Ave. car, am I ever gonna see you again, younger self? I certainly screamed at a few women, YOU NEED TO READ THE EMPTY CANVAS BY ALBERTO MORAVIA, but I never screamed at one, YOU NEED TO READ THE BREAST BY PHILIP ROTH. I’m sure a lot of guys, some of them are my best friends, they did that, though. Men have different tastes, not a uniform people.
Last night I was the most burnt out I’ve ever been from corporate life. In a trance I hopped on the Clark bus and rode down to Landmark to see a movie called Fair Play. It was not good. It’s also on Netflix so I can pick it up where I left, I left about an hour in, I might have stayed but there was this guy [in the theater] coughing the entire time. I peeked into The Creator which looked even worse. Someone was on a Total Recall phone when I got in there saying, “he’s an American.” They love saying shit like that in movies. The ticket taker was reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and I was like YOU NEED TO READ THE EMPTY CANVAS BY ALBERTO MORAVIA IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND WHO I REALLY AM. When I left the book was in her lap and the two other people who work at Landmark were talking to her about Scorsese and she was disagreeing with them. She wore high-top black Chuck Taylors, that was all I saw. I walked up Clark and smoked a Parliament I didn’t taste, caught the bus near the old Pete’s, which is now a local café that says no public restrooms on the door, which is not the kind of place I’d ever frequent. Tonight I want the eggplant dish from Chengdu Impression but I’m probably just going to have a Feed Your Head sausage with some cauliflower rice. Also I have a ticket to Mannequin Pussy and I should fucking go.
Freddie deBoer has got to be one of the most annoying people out here. He posted this overlong piece that makes Ellis’s White look thoughtful about how nobody should make fun of Matt Christman because he has a strange and terrible disease. Sorry about your wife’s incurable disease, Freddie, but this is the same Matt Christman who can’t help spitting Rockstar out of his mouth making fun of Beau Biden’s death. It got me thinking, and then Patrick and I were texting about this, what it means when a comedian dies. Do we weep or do we laugh? You see what I mean, how lucky I was I spent the week off Twitter. Other things Patrick and I were texting about this week is whether white men can say “negro” and if “wigger” is an offensive word. I think “wigger” probably is, but then again I think Astral’s “Hard R” is the “Cat Person” of our time, and I listened to Eminem this week after reading a piece on the beauty of “Stan” and a line of Eminem’s that hit different: “y’all act like you never seen a white person before” made me think of what a prophet Eminem was, how far ahead of his time.
The other night we were talking about how A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is one of those books that was completely new in its time but overtaken by all that improved upon it. I feared this was the worst thing that could happen to an artist. Weirdly, on Indiecast this week, this seemed to be all Steve and Ian were talking about, discussing the new Wilco, the new Animal Collective, the new Talking Heads, the new Replacements… the other night I met this sweet guy named Cliff during the Heartbreaking talk and we became Letterboxd friends, which was such a sweet social media thing to do. On the Clark bus back uptown from the movie I was thinking about Cliff and me when I saw this young white woman with dyed silver hair wearing a white surgical mask and nearing the end of Super Sad True Love Story. The woman across from me was black and wearing a butterfly shirt. I was going to make my new friend Cliff laugh by reviewing Fair Play with something like: “she is Anastasia Steele. He is Mr. Gray. Together they are in this movie called, turnabout is fair play.” But it’s not like I saw the end of the movie I hate taking what Lili Loofbourow called the “male glance” at things I haven’t finished.