I love gutless ego, OK?

Learn all about me in this character assessment.

I spent the last 3 years trying to decipher "Look Sue, I've got Legs!" Up there is the best I came up with.

Steam Tunnel Incidents: revisit

If you love it, they say, set it free.
You can bolt the door behind it
And check the peephole periodically
And watch it face the rain alone.

One morning when there's no scratch at the door
You might just poke your head out to see
That your puppy isn't there anymore
dripping and whimpering obediently
You may find yourself an accessory
To a vicissitude of the worst degree
It ceased to be a dog and turned into me

If they ever ask you where I went
Conjure up a steam tunnel incident
A fable of my failure to repent
An admonition to the impudent
That way I’ll always be the instrument
Of your impassioned self-aggrandisement

You always could spin a headline
I won't begrudge you that.

Periphery

I said I'm sorry
You wanted to know for what
For being in your way
You're not was the answer
Probably the true answer
Truly the wrong answer
In your way was somewhere at least
Where you'd see me
But I'll be here in the periphery

Fortune Cookie

This is a poem I wrote yesterday for a special lady. It was performed to kind responses last evening at LooseLeaf Lounge's Open Mic. Thanks to the Get Born Poetry Series for hosting!

Fortune Cookie

In my wallet where I've heard
Other guys keep dollar bills
I've got dozens of tiny slips
Of Wisdom
I collect 'em
Every time I make a pilgrimage
To shrines with names like
Lucky Rooster
Five Happiness
that place where the Marquee tells me
WE ARE ALSO HAVE FUN FOOD, YOU ARE NEVER ATE BEFORE
And they mean it! But I digress
Check out the folks I can quote, let's see
Confucius, the Buddha, Sun Tzu, Lao Tzu
Pretty much all the Tzus
Actually
I think this one's from Dr. Seuss
Now that I really look at it. But Hey!
Brains don't do it for ya?
Check out my other credentials
I got 'em right here
I'll soon come into great wealth*
I'll travel to many countries*
I'm always loyal and hard-working*
I'm great with children and animals*
It's like a Chinese Laundry list of
Character references
On top of that I'm makin' a phrasebook!
For when we get to Beijing
I already know hello, how are ya, Happy Birthday!
And can I borrow a Phillips-head Screwdriver?
But look I know, I know
And if you can't wait around
Until my fortune cookie fortunes come true
I'll trade 'em all in just to be here with you.*

*Refrain (yell it out if you know it!)

Untitled Philippic

I wrote this in response to the follow-up commentary to a post on this guy's blog.

What?

Because I am a modern thinker...that's why. I don't need ideas.

The United States is ideologically conservative. You'll disagree with me, sure, because that's what Righties do. Each of us is sure s/he's the most progressive little dream-chaser out there, but it just ain't so. Fundamental to our value system is that we deserve to be left alone. Our collective motivation for "change" is to change other people into getting off our backs.

Functionally, though, we're as Blue as the balls of a high school A.V. Club. We know that what is good for Goose is not always good for Gander or Maverick or Iceman, and we deflect any request for firm policy off of the Holy Shield +5 that is individualism. Experience and circumstances are different for each of us, we rationalize, so how can one set of rules apply to everyone?

This duality breeds an entire people of noisy evangelists to the Church of Rights who refuse to formalize anything without a dizzying algorithmic tangle of carefully manicured caveats and corollaries. The only thing the Jekyll and the Hyde in each of us can agree on is that everyone else needs to get onboard with us so that we can live in peace.

The modern American says: "When the realization strikes everyone that there is only one way and that way is different for each of us but if we're all taught to follow our 7 billion paths in the same direction to our infinite and personal destinations, everyone will be happy and they'll have proved me right all along. Meanwhile, whereas circumstances are different for each of us and no one has ever felt the same experiences I've been made to feel, how can I be saddled with all these expectations and limitations by a system that doesn't even know me?"

The rational respondent, if there were one, could only answer thus: "Your narrative voice is passive. You aren't even the protagonist in your own sniveling. How can I trust you to take care of yourself when you insist that you are being taken care of by yourself? Infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters churn out volumes of argument that the distinction is purely semantic, but it's not! It's paradigmatic! You refuse accountability for your own existence. Live and Let Live is a cruelty in a world full of you."


"Be the change you wish to see in the world," mused the wise and venerable refrigerator magnet, but it proved a lousy leader: it stayed a refrigerator magnet and a single-issue demagogue. All it changed was us--into a nation of self-righteous, magnet-quoting hypocrites.

Pollution

Merriam Webster Sez:

Pollution: 1: the action of polluting especially by environmental contamination with man-made waste ; also : the condition of being polluted.

Pollute: 1 a: to make ceremonially or morally impure : defile b: debase 1 pollutes language — Linda C. Lederman>2 a: to make physically impure or unclean : befoul , dirty b: to contaminate (an environment) especially with man-made waste.

I was reading Cecil Adams yesterday. This guy is one of my favorite minds in the reality industry. If you're too lazy to click on the link above, the question he fielded this week was (briefly) whether a scooter or a car contributed more pollution to the environment. He gave a much more elaborate and balanced answer than I've ever seen from one respondent before and I was pleased. Due to the space constraints of his column, though, there are some things he left out:

Scooters create far less traffic pollution, parking pollution, and Hot-Rod-Magazines-on-the-Newsracks Pollution, and there is almost no pollution from camo-hat-wearing rednecks drinking Stroh's while watching scooter racing.

On the flip side, can anyone truly measure the damage caused by the eye-pollutant designs and paint jobs of the most popular scooters? They zip through the neighbourhood like carnival-coloured dildos...uncannily resembling the pricks riding them. The superior sneer of the high-handed scooter owner, the glut of free-trade bazaars in local churches, the spoken-word performances--are these any less contaminant than the most stifling vehicle exhaust?

Imagine a world without motorized vehicles of any sort. Everyone has to ride bikes. That'll wipe the smug expressions off of the faces of the cycling elitists who'll have to come up with something else to condescend about. On the other hand, without an SUV to potentially squash the same asshole who comes whizzing past the stoplight, slams into Adam the pedestrian in the crosswalk, and screams for the pedestrian to pay attention, how is Adam supposed to have any hopeful daydreams of karmic relief?

Without greenhouse gases and the environmental encroachment necessary (or at least fun) to build vehicles, there'd be no sidewalk pollution from Greenpeace activists and their desperate enthusiasm. The occupational vacuum created, though, would no doubt cause an immeasurable increase in art students polluting the world with crappy Holga photography and even more open mic nights. Is that a better world by anybody's estimation?

We humans never really think about what we're asking for: a world without pollution is simply fallacious. The removal of one contaminating source simply opens the doors to the prevalence of another. The same way the city's eradication of huge numbers of rats in Edgewater gave rise to the supremacy of entire battalions of predatory and unnaturally large squirrels, making the earth healthier is just going to pave the way for more, longer-living, healthier people expressing themselves. And if you truly search your heart, I think you'll agree that nobody wants that.

Just Kidding

The Theatre Blog is called Pheidio Eimi. Mostly I decided to amp up the pretention a little with some Ancient Greek.

So tune in soon for more entirely directionless, semi-literate swill from everybody's favorite puppy-to-smother.

Alright, 18 hours is up.

With one vote against (from the honourable representative from Lincoln Square), 7 billion abstentions, and two votes for (one from the Chair and another from the Chair's Stupendous Coiffure) the ayes have it. From now on this'll be a theatre blog. I'm gonna archive the previous posts somewhere to be read aloud in the event that my funeral begins to stagnate.

I'll compromise with you, though, Honourable Tony. I'll cross-post everything with a Halcyon flavour to the company site. Gravy?

I'm thinking about repurposing this page to be a theatre blog. I know, I know, there aren't enough of those, right? I want to be writing about theatre, and I'm afraid folk who want to read about theatre won't have any time for the other scribble. The rub: Trepanation Drill is the coolest title I can think of for anything. So. Taking a vote. Theatre blog or unchannelled meanderings?

You have 18 hours. Vote early, vote often.

Steam Tunnel Incidents

If they ever ask you where I went
Conjure up a steam tunnel incident
A fable of my failure to repent
An admonition to the impudent
That way I’ll always be the instrument
Of your impassioned self-aggrandisement

This is a little fragment that keeps kicking around my head. I think there are 16-20 lines before and 2-6 lines after this part, but I don't know what they are.

Help?

Michael Jackson Finally Gets Nose, 8 Babies He Always Wanted

Some people think this nutty monster looks like Angelina Jolie.

I respectfully disagree.

I was fine with this Thing for a long time and I reserved judgment till I read all the stuff out there. I didn't buy into the spin and I gave the Thing a chance to prove herself...that is, until the Thing's publicist submitted this statement to USA Today.

I'm calling for universal intolerance for this woman and her 14 hopeless bastards.

She says she's being unfairly judged because she's a single mother. I say she's being unfairly accommodated because she's a single mother. If there was some grinning idiot standing next to her in the newspaper picture and saying "Yeap! Me an' the missus is jest pleased as punch, ain't we momma?" you would roll your eyes and skip to the crossword.

And now she wants to raise them Christian? First of all (Pat Robertson can use this for free), every Arab witch that ever used Satan's Magic to conjure up 14 abominations and spat in the face of Holy Wedlock has used that "I'm raising them Christian" line to avoid the righteous retribution of the Inquisitorial Rack.

Seriously though, any individual or firm that donates any cash, product or service to this woman should be denied a tax writeoff and probably audited just for good measure. If Suleman ever uses a dime of public funding to get a master's degree to pay for her 14 brats, her transcripts, exams and homework should be made public record. If she applies for a job, her applications and interviews as well as those of her competing candidates should be available for scrutiny and comparison. Any company that gives her a book deal or a TV show before her kids have turned 25 (and been thoroughly evaluated) should have its whole imprint boycotted.

Any mother in the natural kingdom, faced with an unsustainable litter of whelps like that, would do the noble thing and eat at least one or two of them for the good of the pride. I don't see any reason why we should accept anything less from this one.

News in Brief

Check this out.

-The link above shows a worldwide poll to determine how the world would vote for the US president. I just rolled across this, although of course it's months old. I don't want to spoil the turnout if you haven't seen it, but guess what, Mack? Macedonia loves you!

-Everyone in Chicago should come check me out in Verbatim Verboten every monday through the 23rd at 9pm. It's filthy and raucous and I'll be doing Shatner and Elton John and hopefully Christian Bale, among others.

-Max Cola from the Jewel-Osco is the best thing you can get for a quarter. I'm gonna have a baby or at least a fish and name it Max Cola Dodds.

New Year's Resolution for me, and for everybody else.

I hope everyone had a lovely Pork and Sauerkraut, or its Kosher or Vegetarian or Pescatarian or Vegan or Cheap or Non-Sauerkraut-Based alternative. In ringing in old Twenty-Ought-Nine, I have resolved to say "Ought-Nine" all year. I've shamefully neglected to call the previous years of this decade the "Ought-Somethings" and hang my head for the eight-year oversight. It's going to be 92 years till I get the chance to do so again, and just in case something comes up and I forget, I'm gonna try to do my part to compensate.

My resolution for everyone else, but mostly for the media outlets, is thus:

STOP sending me a headline every time the world's oldest person dies. It happens like every week, and it's damned depressing. What do you expect? It's the oldest person in the world! If you send me a message every time the world's ugliest person gets laid, or every time the world's stingiest person writes a big charity check or when Amy Winehouse has moment of thoughtful lucidity, THAT's news. But you journalists out there, cramming my frontpage with your "World's Oldest Person Dies Yet Again (Can She Be Stopped?) and your "Sky Still Blue, Scientists Report" and interrupting my soap opera to tell me that "Linkin Park Worst Band Ever" are not doing me any favors.