november-december 2008

Finding old journals randomly scattered in Gmail account.

Sunday, November 23, 2008, 1:43am

There are a few things I want to write about. First, my “date” with Patrick James Thomas Connolly* [*not really his name]. I was not sure if it was a date, and probably would not have thought it was one except that when two heterosexual-seeming people of opposite genders meet for a movie together, it is usually considered a date. Even if one of those two is gay and 28 and the other is straight and 50. I’m so tired I don’t even want to go into it right now. How we met. We chatted at Kafka on the Shore. He pretended to recognize me. He told me I had a nice voice. I was easily flattered. He then wrote to say he was on the nominating committee for the Screen Actors Guild awards, and he was going to see Spike Lee’s latest film the following week. I love movies, especially free movies, so I said yes. I met him at the movie theater wearing my sweaty balaclava, and then we sat next to each other for half an hour and had boring small talk: “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” and I probed him about acting. He tended to go on too long without anything interesting to say. I asked him about SAG and he gave me a longwinded and uninteresting history of the three major actors’ unions. It would be more appropriate for me to go on a date with his 23 year-old son. He told daddish jokes about that son, who had been in boot camp for the FBI, and who was also named Patrick James Thomas Connolly, jokes like “This is D.A.D. Patrick Connolly calling for P.F.C. Patrick Connolly, Jr.,” which I laughed uproariously at. I don’t want to have sex with him or touch him, but I am so desperate and lonely and horny right now that I’m afraid I’ve drastically lowered my standards for human contact. I kept telling myself that it was not a date, and that I was merely expanding my social horizons by making older friends. But we did some friendly hand-on-the-shoulder touching and I felt uneasy with the intimacy. What am I doing, prolonging small talk? I feel like sort of betrayed myself. I overenthusiastically suggested that we see another movie together – because I feel excited about watching more movies, as part of some special SAG nominating committee thing – and I hope he didn’t interpret it as an invitation to touch my vagina. I feel weak to be approaching this friendship with such a utilitarian frame of mind. Let’s be honest: if he didn’t have these movies, if he couldn’t tell me about the acting business, then would I be interested in being his friend? No.

Today I weatherproofed the house but bought the wrong materials. The foam I bought was both too wide and too thick. I bought Gorilla Glue to glue the broken handle of a mug back together, but while the glue was setting, I broke the handle off another mug. Yes, it happened just that way. There was a bomb threat at the Division blue line station. I couldn’t believe it. There were police vans and police tape everywhere. I ate a slice of pizza sitting alone in Pizza Metro, watching Italian men jeer at Juventus soccer club on TV and Mexican men preparing an acre of chicken breasts for roasting. Then I spent most of the day indoors, avoiding people. I guess I will read some briefs now.

I can’t even remember who you are.

Friday, December 5, 2008, midnight

Have mostly been writing on the blog but it’s nice that my Internet is not working for a change so I can write in my journal. Thirteen degrees out tonight, real feel two degrees. Ouch.

Heidi convinced me to go out to see Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings tonight at the Old Vic, which is right off the Red Line stop. She had free tickets from some Ticketmaster promotion, so I agreed to go. Before we headed up, we went to Jimmy John’s for BLT for me and veggie sandwich for her dinner. I really like Heidi. She’s down to earth and funny. She likes to abbreviate words or add articles before them to make them sound folksier. Facebook is “the Facebook,” and “by the way” is not just “BTW” but “bee tee dubs.” It can be charming. We got to the Vic earlier than anyone else, met up with Heidi’s friend Christie, and ran into Heidi’s former college classmate Fathia (Favia?) and her sister Lupa – or something – both had exotic pollsyllabic names that I was unable to make my tongue pronounce. They were both very nice, especially Fathia, the younger sister, more hyper and six inches taller than her older sister, the U of Chicago English lit doctoral student (soon to be dropout! I congratulated her). It was nice to make small talk. We chatted about their impending move to Buffalo. They were rabid Bills fans and Fathia said “FUCK YOU!” when I said “Go Niners!” The 49ers beat the Bills this weekend, apparently. They laughed at the oreo cookie shaped and sized cell phone dangly I bought Heidi (and Nilofer) back from California.

Then it got to be close to seven and the music started, and we all pressed close to the stage. We in fact got right up to the stage in the end. There was a scare where two skinny hipster hos (they looked like they were from Williamsburg, and given that the band was from Brooklyn and one of the ladies appeared to be the drummer’s gf, it’s a possibility that they were actually from Williamsburg!) elbowed us out of the way. One actually kicked me the second time she stole the spot, but eventually we jawed them aside. Anyway, we had phenomenal places to stand. The opening act had a name I didn’t catch, but they said that their album name was “Make The Road By Walking,” which for any public interest lawyer who knows Brooklyn is a very unfortunate name. But I guess that there is not much overlap between public interest lawyers from Brooklyn and white soul music fans? There were an all instrumental act – trumpet, tenor sax, hollow body Gibson, bass, drummer, and percussionist mostly on tambourines and congas, and sometimes a flautist – and they were tight. It’s fun to watch soul live, because the syncopation makes the performance of the music a feat rather than a bore. I forget after watching inert rock musicians that there is much more to performance than just lifelessly and expressionlessly striking your strings with a plectrum.

After the instrumentalists performed for a while, a singer, Charles Bradley, came out to sing a few numbers. He was amazing. He had a puffed out perm like James Brown and looked to be in his late fifties or mid-sixties. The first time he came out, he was wearing jeans cinched with a big belt buckle, a white collared shirt, a denim vest, and an ebony bead choker with an ivory bust of Nefertiti hanging from it. When he came out at the end of the evening, he was wearing a gold lame track suit! He sang with a grimace and fell shaking to his knees and once attempted a jump into the splits. He screeched and cried, and crossed his heart several times and clasped his hands in prayer, looking to the mezzanine level.

Then Sharon Jones came on. She’s probably in her late forties or mid-fifties. She came out wearing a tube minidress and stood directly in front of our spot in the middle of the stage and I looked straight up at her face and tried to avoid the view of her upper thighs that she offered us. She pranced all around the stage. She shouted directions to her band (“Take it down!”) and they were instantly responsive. She was dynamic and obviously in the moment, saying things like, “Now wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, I’m feeling not right, I got some tension, I need to strut. Watch me strut, I’m gonna strut!” and she’d put the mic in the stand and strut halfway across the stage. I can’t describe how engaged she was. This may have been the best show I’ve seen in my life. The best performance!

She kept pulling men on stage to dance with her to dramatize her songs – one about kicking a man who could not keep an erection out of her life was especially funny – and clearly the people who went knew what they were getting into. One young man staked out front row center right at 7pm, an hour before the concert. He was dressed like Will.i.am in the “New Day” video and he was pudgy around the middle and he danced badly. Actually, most people danced badly. One urban DJ-dressed young man — colorful Nike high-tops, baseball cap with a flat brim, baggy hoodie - danced like he was trying to stomp cockroaches. An older gentleman got so swept up with the naked sensuality of the soul performances that he all but rubbed his nipples on stage. Four flavorless gals danced like Jennifer Annistons on stage - afraid to take their hands out of “snap” position, too stiff in the hips, guitar face — in their matching long Gap cardigans. During one amazing part of the show, Fathia and an Asian woman and a three-hundred pound, six-foot-five transwoman wearing a black beehive and a flapper minidress covered in tassles were called on stage. The transwoman whipped around and got sweat on everything, and danced with huge motions and moued at the audience. I was happy to note that no one seemed aghast, just delighted. All the singers made mention of Obama, or change, and Silk Johnson, an amazingly lewd soul singer in his 70s or 80s came out wearing an Obama beanie. He also clutched the mic between his legs and asked us, “How many times you wanna watch me do my thing? Twenty-one?” and then he thrust his pelvis twenty-one times to twenty-one hits from the band.

If P. had not lowered the boom today (in a long email detailing how we were coming in too late!), then I would have gone to the follow up show at the Cubby Bear instead of cabbing it home with Heidi, but I have to be in chambers at 8:29 a.m. tomorrow, and I’d better start getting responsible. I’m going to take an Ambien tonight — the first one in over a week. I’m proud of my restraint!

Sunday, December 07, 2008, 2:53 a.m.

Even though P. lowered the boom on Thursday by telling us we had to start coming in at 8:30 a.m., I am still on the 5 a.m. until (GASP) 2 p.m. sleep schedule. Maybe it’s just because I spoke to Harry last night for two hours. It was probably the nicest conversation we’ve had. I feel a little looser and more comfortable with him, so I ventured to making some jokes. We laughed a little, which is better than not laughing at all. I said, “Tell me about all of your life.” He said, “Well, at work this week, I was very busy.” And I said, “No, tell me everything that’s happened to you in 37 years.” He said, “Well, that will take another 37 years! And when I get to the end you’ll probably have forgotten the beginning, so I’ll have to tell it to you again!” We laughed. Embedded in this conversation was also a suggestion of longevity, and maybe a suggestion that it would be nice to tell each other long stories over years. Which is an absurd thing to say, which is why I thought it would be irresponsible to continue corresponding with Harry for any length of time — the impossible promise-turned-threat of futurity — but which is where I find myself leaning toward now. What happens when you turn two aging lonely single people toward one another? They do stupid things, like correspond between Regensburg Germany and Chicago Illinois, as if there is anything but heartaching and bellyaching to had in the future. What I do like about trying to maintain a relationship — typing the word gives me pause, but I guess there’s no better substitute — with a German man is that all the cultural cues that I would have for an American man or woman are absent. If someone says to you, “I went to Brown, I grew up in Seataucket, Long Island, and I like Death Cab for Cutie,” then you can probably guess a lot about their background, their social mobility, their income potential, their interests, their politics, etc. But when someone says to you, “I went to Fachhochschule Muenchen and graduated in 1995 and live in Regensberg Germany and work as a civil engineer managing the import and export of hazardous wastes [which Harry calls “dangerous rubbish”],” then you can’t judge them as quickly. Which pares away a lot of my bullshit, I find. The prestige hunger just cannot be satisfied, so I just have to make do with what I know: he’s sensitive and caring, he’s smart enough to speak several languages fluently and hold a conversation, he lives alone in a small city and sings in an all-English choir on Sundays, etc. I think about that last factoid often, because it says good things to me. A thirty-seven year-old single man opts to sing with a local choir on Sundays—many bachelors his age would not choose to do so. Anyway, it’s interesting to think about. Probably this is just me projecting my loneliness onto anyone who will pay attention. I have a hard time distinguishing my desperate need for companionship from a genuine connection with another person. As I have said, my standards are low. But is that cruel, and is Harry not just someone who meets only a low standard? You get the point.

So I woke late. And futzed around the house. And I thought I might not leave the house at all today. I bought a guitar off Craigslist. The nice young man drove to my house and I tested out the guitar. The pickup was not working, so I got it only for $160. I told him if the pickup didn’t work for a silly reason, like the batteries were dead or something, then I would mail him a check for the extra $20. He just seemed so nice and so dismayed about the setbacks with the guitar that there was no reason not to reassure him. I may just send him the check anyway, so that he feels better about humanity.

Bridget called around 7 p.m. to invite me to a party. I was so delighted and relieved when she called, because I was feeling so lonely and ready to Ambien myself until the next morning. I was talking to Nikki at the time, which was a nice thing to do, and which made me feel a little better about myself. It's great how talking on the phone works so well to cure the crushing loneliness. There’s so many ways to stay in touch now. It’s so easy to opt into them. But it was extra nice when Bridget called and said there were two parties. She and Raul picked me up at 9 p.m. in their little red Bug and we drove to the first party, an auction for a local magazine called “AREA Chicago.” AREA stands for “Art/Education/E something/Activism,” which should tell any observer what kind of politics it has. The party was in some detached coach house that was basically an empty raw loftish space inside, with plywood holding things up, holes in the ceiling, stands made of gallon plastic bottles strung together. The people attending the party were young, cool without being hipster, activisty, and smart. It reminded me of the kind of thing that Laura and I did when we first got together, like we were at Charas or an anarchist gathering or something, and I was really happy to be there, even though reading through some of their literature made me feel like a capitalist imposter. You know, because woodblock prints saying things like “You don’t have to do evil to survive” with pictures of big hands pushing down the little guy no longer really appeal to me, though they once did, and they seemed to appeal to the people there. But Bridget and Raul are very down to earth, so I felt safe and unjudged in their presence. Weirdly enough, my downstairs neighbors were there! We had a pleasant chat and I met Laurie. It felt like a moment of connection because I know something about them now —they are activisty hippies and maybe we can get along. There was a grey cat with white socks darting around between people’s legs.

About twenty services/goods/offerings were auctioned off. Bridget and I spent $60 for a linoleum block cutting lesson (so I can make aforementioned holding-the-little-guy-down prints). I was prepared to bid up to $200 for dinner with Bill Ayers, but the winning bid was $450, and I was just not going to spend almost a month’s rent for dinner with that old not-terrorist dude. B and R were hilarious in their bid to win the two hour videography offering (for their wedding). They were engaged in an intense bid-off with another person, and each time they were outbid, Raul would look very serious and say, “Bridget, no. Bridget, no. Bridget . . .” and then something would possess him and he would scream out a higher number. “Bridget, no. Bridget . . . ONE HUNDRED!!!!” I think he was trying in earnest not to continue bidding but was too stirred by the competition to stop himself from putting out the highest figure. It was hilarious to watch. I didn’t really talk to anyone else, except one woman who looked in my face and said, “Karen?” (to which I said, “My name isn’t Karen, but you can call me that”) but it was nice enough to see all these intelligent young people here in Chicago. I was wondering where they were. That’s not supposed to be mean. I just meant that I haven’t been looking the right places for my kind of scene.

Then Bridget and Raul drove us up to Damen and Cortland, to a bar called Lottie’s that I initially wanted to leave as soon as I saw. It was packed with Trixie/Chads. I whispered to Raul as soon as we got in that there were only white people at the bar. He said that meant that people would think we were the ones serving drinks, but that we should just take their money and run. Bear in mind it got down to 8 degrees tonight so I was surprised that people went out at all. But when we wormed our way down to the end of the bar where Bridget’s friend was having her birthday party, it became slightly more tolerable. Again, there were some nice, well-educated youngsters there that made me feel like Chicago might actually have the kind of active and interesting life forms that I prefer. That makes me sound like HAL, but that’s sometimes just how I feel when I’m lonesome here. I got roped into a long, one-sided conversation with a man who had just finished up his dissertation in history — studying alternative social movements in Germany between 1880 and 1970 — who talked at length about his studies. He didn’t speak loudly enough, so I couldn’t tell which side he fell on — democratic institutions prevent or give rise to fascism — and then he paused, expecting a response, and I couldn’t decide which position he had taken so I didn’t say anything at all, and then he said, “Oh, did I talk too much about a boring subject?” which is what grad students say when they realize you’re too stupid to comprehend their scintillating research, so I was a little annoyed. He also later said, “The Holy Roman Empire was one of the thirteen signatories to the Treaty of Westphalia — that, you know, is the founding document of international relations, and it began a new world ordered on agreements between nation-states —” while staring me down. He said it just like that, with the “you know”s and the m-dashes. I wanted to shake him and say, “I KNOW WHAT THE TREATY OF WESTPHALIA IS YOU FUCKER I TOOK A CLASS ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AT HA-HA-HARVARD SO FUCK YOU,” but I didn’t, because I am polite and pleasant. So I guess I didn’t really like that guy, but at the time I was talking to him, his style of being extremely condescending and dull was so familiar that I didn’t even notice how irritating he was until I just started typing now. Man do I dislike that grad student way of being. But he was friendly. He asked me how my job was, and I had almost nothing to say. I mean, what do you say? It’s challenging, I like it, I read the law, and so I am doing something infinitely more practical and meaningful than what you are doing, you twat, so shut up, and stop asking me questions like you care, because you don’t actually care about what I do, and I’m not going to tell you about the Gehring instruction or the elements of a settlement agreement contract under Illinois law or a Markman hearing. You know? You don’t care, and I don’t care to tell you. That’s a nice thing about my job. It just exists, and there’s nothing really to say about it.

Oops, this inadvertently became a gloat about the superiority of my profession over the life of the mind, but that is just my insecurity talking, that’s not what the evening was like. We spent maybe 2.5 hours in the bar. I spent most of it talking to Raul about sports. Raul is hilarious. He loves watching sports for the gossip, the human interest stories. I was really happy I came out.