Geolographal

I have no idea what the above word means. It came up at work, by accident. I think it is worthy of being inserted into the English language provided a suitable definition can be found.

I am open to suggestions.

Also, a couple of people have asked me about linking to this blog. Hell, link away! The more the merrier.

I could use a nap.

And also, more money.

And You Thought Columbus Day was Important

Or did you? I never really got the point of it. I mean, the guy was lost, and managed to find a place that had already been "found" by some twenty million Native Americans on two continents, not to mention a shitload of Vikings, and (if certain rumors are to be believed) even the Egyptians managed to swing by our neck of the woods a few times before old C.C. blundered his way over here.

But today we find an anniversary truly worth celebrating. Today we mark the end of oppression and tyranny, and the beginning of justice. For today, October 12, 2005, is the 146th anniversary of the Dissolution of Congress by His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Norton I.

Everybody understands Mickey Mouse. Few understand Hermann Hesse. Only a handful understood Albert Einstein. And nobody understood Emperor Norton.

Words to live by, my friends.

I'd Like Some Cheese With My Whine

So, I've got some stuff on my mind. Nothing major, really. The usual stuff people complain about in their blogs. Job issues, that sort of thing. But I realized that I have gone and done something really stupid, which limits my ability to vent the way I'd like.

I've gone and plastered my name and likeness all over this damn website.

Now, I have no real reason to assume that certain people about whom I would like to complain know about this blog, but really, how do I know that for sure? You guys remember that one chick? She called herself "The Washingtonienne" online, never published her own name, only used initials to refer to anyone else. She worked in some congressman's or senator's office, I believe, and she wrote about all of her crazy sexual escapades for the amusement of a couple of her friends from high school. But then, some journalist found it, and managed to track all of the clues in the blog to the source, and published it. The Washingtonienne, whose real name was Jessica Cutler, ended up losing her job. It was quite the little Beltway scandal.

So you can see why I hesitate to vent my frustrations the way I'd like to. Of course, I doubt any journalist would give a crap that I thought I was getting screwed over by the business I work for. And I doubt that I would be so fortunate as to receive a book deal and a spread in Playboy for my trouble.

But then, I haven't even STARTED whining about this play I'm in. Hoo boy. This one's a winner.

In other news, the Snizz's new album, "The ReBirth of Snizz," just dropped. I have heard it, and what can I say about it besides, "The Snizz"? Anyway, if you're interested in checking it out, I'm told that a quick e-mail to the Snizz's business partner, Walshington, I.C., who of course has nothing to do with me, will get you all hooked up.

So that's all the news that's fit to print. At least without getting me in too much trouble.

Look What I Can Do!

Sorry about that last post. It's been an unpleasant couple of weeks. But I'm feeling much better, now.

The whole Hurricane Katrina issue got me really down. I know, that is probably the shallowest, most trite thing anyone has said about it. But I don't really want to get into detail on it here, nor do I feel like making big political statements. I have strong opinions about a lot of stuff, but I'm not nearly as well-informed as I'd like to be. So I'm gonna leave the heavy political blogging to the people who do it well.

In the meantime, I'm gonna talk about stuff that makes me happy.

Some of you who have checked out my profile may have noticed one of my musical interests, the Snizz. The Snizz has a fascinating history, and I am proud to say that I played a small part in it. For those of you who have never heard the Snizz, well, all I can say is that you are missing out on some of the finest bad DJing in the land. He is really, truly awful, but he has raised his lack of talent to an art form all of its own.

Now, you too can follow the adventures of the Snizz at his very own website, The Weekly Snap.

Lastly, I just found out how to add links into the text of this blog. I hope it works. If you're curious how to do it, you can find a bunch of nifty HTML tips here.

Feelings of Insignificance

I haven't posted anything for a couple of weeks. No excuse for it, really. I just didn't have much to say. I was in a play that closed last weekend, and start rehearsals for another one next week. The Bears played their final preseason game last night. Their first play from scrimmage was a forty-seven-yard bomb from new starting quarterback Kyle Orton to wide receiver Mushin Muhammad. That was really the highlight of the game. The starters only played two series, and then it just got dull, dull, dull.

I had planned to write something brilliant about the plays I've been working on, and my whole theater hobby, which may or may not turn into a career, and blah blah blah. But I've done little this week other than watch the news, and I can't help but feel that anything I have to say about my life is just not that important right now. At the very least, it could wait a little while.

A few weeks after September 11, 2001, the Onion ran a headline that said something like, "America longs to care about stupid shit again." And I don't know what this says about me, but that pretty much sums up how I have felt about world affairs for the last four years. In the '90s, I was aware of politics and current events. I saw the headlines. I was reasonably well-informed. I knew that our government probably did some things that they should not do, and it was probably for the best that the general public didn't know about it. The worst thing anybody could say for certain, though, was that our President couldn't keep it in his pants. Hell, I know plenty of guys who can't keep it in their pants, and I never thought that alone made them bad people.

My point is that back then I didn't feel that the state of the world colored every aspect of my daily life. But I feel that way now. And I hate it. When I read about New Orleans, or Iraq, or Pat Robertson, or just about anything having anything to do with our current administration, I get a knot in my stomach and I can actually feel my brain tugging at itself, as if it is trying to force me to find something light and entertaining to look at. It's as though reading the daily news briefs on the Internet Movie Database will make the headlines in the Guardian a little less real.

So, to sum up, I just finished a play, which was good, and I'm starting a new one, on which the jury is still out. And the Bears' opening day is a week from this Sunday. Why should anyone care? I dunno. Maybe you'd just like something else to think about for a few minutes.

Rex Grossman Owes Me Seventy Bucks

Those of you who have clicked on my profile may have noticed that among my interests I included the Chicago Bears. I am a big football fan. I played back in junior high and high school, and I have been Bearing Down since I moved here. I am extremely fortunate to have a wife who enjoys the game as much as I do.

A year ago my friend Clayton managed to score two tickets to a preseason game against the 49ers. The Bears won, not that it matters in the preseason. We had fancy seats in the fancy section (the "Cadillac Club") which basically meant there were more opportunities to spend money than elsewhere in the stadium. To commemorate the momentous occasion, we made our way to the gift shop and threw down a big hairy shitload of money on jerseys. Clayton got himself a Mike Brown, I bought a Brian Urlacher for Mandy (my wife) and I got #8, starting quarterback Rex Grossman, Sexy Rexy, for myself. And all was right with the world.

The season started well. I was in a play at the time, but a number of cast members were also football fans, so a bunch of us got together at a bar near the theater every Sunday before our matinee to watch the first half. We also had a crappy television with awful reception in the theater's green room, and we would run offstage between scenes to get updates on the games. I seem to recall we lost the first game of the season in spite of a pretty fantastic showing, but then we beat Green Bay, which really was the pinnacle of the season. Then we played Minnesota. We should have won. Could have, in fact, but old Rex, in only the sixth starting game of his career, went down with a leg injury bad enough to sideline him for the rest of the season.

The rest is just depressing history. The Bears had one of the worst seasons in recent memory. We started three more quarterbacks, lost about half the starting lineup to injury, and managed to finish the season with a 5-12 record. The one shining light was the knowledge that next season, all of our starters would be healthy and ready to play.

And now, the punchline:

Last night, in the second preseason game of the 2005 season, Bears starting quarterback Rex Grossman BROKE HIS ANKLE in the second quarter, and will be out of the game for three to four months. Again, I am in a play, but this theater does not have a television in the green room, so I did not find out what had happened until this morning. Mandy is still in bed, and I can't wait to see her reaction to the news.

And to top it off, the Bears once again failed to pick up a veteran backup quarterback in the off-season, so we're stuck with one of the backups who sucked last year, and a guy out of college we just picked up in the draft. Granted, the draft guy, Kyle Orton, has looked pretty good so far this preseason, but he's been playing in the fourth quarter against other teams' third stringers, so we really don't know how good he is yet. But that doesn't matter. The first game of the season is still a month away, and I've already got a bad feeling about the whole thing.

And if Grossman doesn't manage to at least come back in November and finish the season on a high note, I am gonna start to feel like all those poor bastards stuck with Cade McNown jerseys.

You Bears fans know what I'm talking about.

Urban Heat Island

As some of you may have noticed, it's been a tad warmer than usual these past few weeks here in ... the world. Also, the number of hurricanes and tropical storms have almost doubled. But I'm sure it's nothing to be alarmed about. If there was a problem, our stalwart leaders in Washington, DC, would be on the case faster than--

Sorry, I couldn't keep that going any longer.

In the wake of this global-warming-induced drought, I learned a term I had never heard before: Urban heat island. An urban heat island occurs when there is not enough wind to disperse the heat energy absorbed by the asphalt and metal of large cities. These materials absorb the heat from the sun quickly during the day, but release that energy slowly overnight. If there is not sufficient air flow, the heat energy just accumulates, making conditions a little hotter every day. This is what happened here in Chicago in 1995, when a five-day heat wave killed almost 740 people.

When I first learned about this phenomenon I found, in my own self-centered way, that it made a decent metaphor for the way I handled my job. Until a few days ago, I worked in customer service for a company that specializes in foreign and independent films and documentaries. It sounds cool, but let me assure you it is not. It may have been cool once, back when it was the only place that did what it does, but now there is nothing my company provides that cannot be gotten faster and cheaper through Amazon.com. My company pretty much completely failed to keep up with the times, and now the only people who call are extremely pretentious film twats or people to old or too stupid to handle the Internet.

I sat at the same desk doing the same job for four years. I enjoyed it for a while because I dealt in movies, and how fun is that? But soon I learned that I didn't quite have the patience necessary to make this job truly enjoyable. The type of customers who called, combined with the shoddy way my company is run, made for a number of very stressful phone calls. Unfortunately, I was never able to just shrug off the frustration from one call gone sour before the phone would ring again. My patience was like the asphalt and metal of the city, and the customers would radiate heat that wouldn't begin to dissipate until the weekend. Occasionally, there would be deaths.

Metaphorically speaking, of course.

I suppose I got burned out. It reached the point where I felt my pulse elevate every time the phone would ring. I would slam the phone back into its cradle at the end of every call, no matter how the actual call went. Sometimes I would just stand up and announce to anyone within earshot that I had been sitting at this desk too long and I need to find another job before I killed someone.

For some strange reason, the managers decided it might be time for a transfer. They called me into a meeting to let me know that "some changes were coming down the pipeline." I would finish the week on the phones, then make a permanent switch over to our warehouse.

At first I was indignant. They gave me no choice in the matter. I stewed overnight, and was still simmering the next morning, until I completed my first phone call of the day. After slamming down the phone once again, I thought, Well, I don't have to talk to that asshole ever again.

I have been working in the warehouse for a week now. It is not air-conditioned. It involves a great deal of paperwork and heavy lifting. Occasionally trucks need to be unloaded. My dad will probably think I'm not living up to my potential, or some such thing. But I gotta tell ya, ever since I ended my last phone conversation with my last idiot customer, a cool breeze has been blowing, and my own personal heat wave is lifting. I think there will be more temperate days ahead.