Get Everyone In Here Right Now

The neat basement den of a prosperous suburban family. They've got all the home theater equipment, all the fine wood furniture. The XBOX and the PS3: look out. I'm worried I'll put my drink down somewhere I'm not supposed to, so I don't ask for a drink. A vast white carpet like fresh snow and it's strangely quiet, even with the couple dozen people milling around enjoying the Pabst and pixels.

John wears a stocking cap and flannel and reminds me of a few other acne-plagued scenesters I knew in high school. He's drunk and I can tell he's very sad by the way he earnestly pursues trivial conversation. Not sad like the scenesters I knew in high school, but a more acute misery; a fresh wound.

Later on, a storage locker. Six of us: Anna (whom I'd met the night before and was quickly losing interest in), Sim and Bridgette (the attractive couple with careful outfits), John, and Jason, whose mom was blissfully unaware her son was inviting friends to hot-box her storage locker. Before we light the bowl, John mentions someone named Warren---apparently he was always smoking, whether it be weed or cigarettes.

We need to smoke this bowl for Warren, he says.

We need to get everyone in here right now, says Jason.

20 more strangers, all of them friends, makes it abundantly clear that I'm the odd one out. Three pipes are passing around the room, filling the tense air with smoke like a censer carried around the pews. Sniffles, sobs. John is hugging Jason. It's only now that I realize that Warren passed away a few days earlier. I'm stoned and I'm in the suburbs and I want to be sincere but more than anything I'm just uncomfortable.

So I numbly sit and watch the video games and ponder the excruciation of my situation until it's okay to leave. I do some more pondering on the drive back to Chicago and when I go to bed I'm grateful. Happy Thanksgiving.

Yeah, I know, but it might be fun.

I feel a pall of loneliness radiate somewhere behind my eyes. Like a kid's fiberoptic wand at the fireworks show. But I have met this foe before and prevailed. I have allies. I have weed, and coffee. I have books and magazines. I have a laptop replete with videos, music and pornography to distract me. I have Tony Soprano and I have Diana Ross. And I have this. Writing this, here.

This morning I took Concerta for the second time in my life. I took two pills two hours before my Communication Law test.

Oncology Encyclopedia Online says: "Patients should not take two pills at the same time."

Essentially it negated my need for coffee throughout the day: It's more than 12 hours later and I still feel like I drank a pot. I think tomorrow I will take three.

I pondered on how my views on health have changed. Somewhere along the line I decided to stop worrying so much about which chemicals enter my temple. I found a pack of Marlboros at work today and took it. On my way home, my bike got a flat. I smoked two as I walked the remaining distance. I wanted to do something bad for me. Something I normally wouldn't have allowed myself.

Then after I finished them a car rode up and its passenger called me a motherfucker. I replied in same, but my outstretched finger-salute soon became a defensive guard as I was riddled with gas-propelled plastic pellets. I must have looked quite the fool chasing them on foot, my bike held aloft, shouting. They looked as if they were going to stop, and I had to reflect for a moment on what I would actually do if they came out. But no, the driver chose to be the bigger man.

The amphetamine, adrenaline, testosterone, caffeine, nicotine---take your pick, it was rushing through my veins and I released some of it when I saw a car by the side of the road. It's been parked in front of a body shop down the street from my apartment for weeks. An old blue sedan, or rather the carcass of one. Tires flat, interior gutted, engine removed, tape deck liberated. Stenciled along the side in pink block letters:

YEAH I KNOW BUT ... IT MIGHT BE FUN

A glance to my surroundings, and the U-lock comes off the handlebars. I turn to protect my face as I shatter the windshield. Side window. Deep dent in the trunk. Incredible, the ease with which merry destruction is wrought. I make a sound like a giant hole puncher and then crushed ice.

I'm bitter. Misanthropic Monday. I'm in control. I cleaned dishes, took out the trash. Made some rice and ate it, brewed some tea and drank it. I took a shit and I read a column in the Athens News called "The View from Mudsock Heights." Generally this prickly old dude champions the small-town, rural virtue of southeastern Ohio. This week Dennis E. Powell tears apart a "cosmopolitan" straw man from New York who asks Mr. Powell why he likes living in a small town.

Powell contends that what makes small towns great, what really makes them superior, is neighborly love. A strong community rises up to seal the widening gaps in public infrastructure. He cites the hypothetical of a flat tire. In Athens, "a half dozen people would stop and ask if I need help." In New York, they'd just hurl profanities at you. Maybe they'd shoot you with an Airsoft gun.

Fuck you, Dennis Powell. I've never encountered a place as alienating and hostile in all of big-city Chicago. Blame the college students if you want; I do.

Hope I did alright on my Law exam.

8 OU Students Arrested at G-20 Protest

The following is a piece I wrote for the Athens News about some crazy shit I was a part of in Pittsburgh last weekend. It's not comprehensive by a long shot, and it's edited for length. In the future I'll post something that articulates my thoughts a little better.

Silence fell among the paddywagon occupants as a uniformed figure came into view through the metal grate at the rear.

"How does it feel to be a terrorist? Y'all have no rights now."

The "terrorists" had moments earlier been chanting slogans at a rally on the University of Pittsburgh campus. They were gassed, pepper-sprayed, choked and beaten as a result of their efforts.

I shifted uncomfortably in the plastic zip-ties wound around my wrists and thought of the comfort I had enjoyed only a few hours earlier. After a march to Pittsburgh's City County Building, myself and nine other OU students were eating dinner in the city's Oakland area. We decided to attend one last rally before we headed home.

We arrived 15 minutes before the rally was scheduled to begin, but from the law enforcement assembled you would have thought we missed the party. SWAT, National Guard, and K-9 units all served as window dressing to a small army of police clad in riot gear. There were hundreds of these already standing shoulder to shoulder around the perimeter of the area, and it was all I could do to watch in awe as busload upon busload arrived to thicken the ranks. As I surveyed the scattered clumps of protesters---many of them undoubtedly U of Pitt students out to witness the spectacle taking place on their front lawn---I found it impossible to understand what warranted a show of force that would have made bin Laden wet his pants. Authority outnumbered dissent 2-to-1.

We want you to know that this is a peaceful protest, said a fellow protester with a megaphone. I want you to know that I respect each and every one of you.

He got about as much response as if the wall he was talking to was made of bricks and not police.

Minutes later a much louder, amplified voice boomed across the crowd.

"By order of the city of Pittsburgh chief police, I hereby declare this to be an unlawful assembly."

A wave of panic rippled through the masses as the wall of police began to advance, seemingly from all sides at once.

"Move back!" they thundered, nightsticks in hand.

The crowd thinned as it was harried through a gap in the police line. The bold remainder found themselves in the middle of an adjacent street. Hemmed in on three sides by what looked like a force mobilized for war, our backs were pushed against a nearby park.

"We! The people! Have the right to assemble!" chanted the four dozen-strong unlawful gathering.

The stoic ranks began to close in, forcing us to jump over a row of hedges into the park. As we left the streetlights behind and found ourselves in darkness, the atmosphere quickly changed from one of caution to fear.

People scattered in all directions. The police had entered the park. They themselves marched with purpose, but in as many directions as the fleeing protesters. It was the kindergarten playground again; a big game of cops and robbers, but with higher stakes.

My friends and I, in an effort to stick together, eventually found ourselves trapped. A solid perimeter of stony-faced officers wordlessly encircled us. Fear melted into despair in some and impotent rage in others.

"We want to leave," said one OU student choking back tears. "Tell us where you want us to go!"

Another was on the phone with her father, breathlessly describing the situation.

From somewhere in the impenetrable night another squad of riot cops came charging into the clearing.

"Get on the ground! Hands out!"

We all quickly complied. As my arms were wrenched behind my back and fastened together, I craned my neck to check on my friends. The one on her phone was lying prone, but with the phone still clutched against her face, pleading for help. The armored men were shouting at her, and one began to choke her.

"Hey, get your hand off her neck! She's just on the phone with her dad!" I shouted.

My reward was a boot on the side of my face, forcing it into the earth.

"Keep your head down!"

It was this moment, the sensation of a hard leather boot sole against my face, and an imposing authority figure leaning onto it, that stuck in my head as we were hauled to our feet and whisked off to jail. The scene replayed as we sat out the night in handcuffs, as we emerged from the jail into a cold drizzly Saturday morning, and as we made the trip back to Athens. Five days later, and I'm continually drawn back to this episode. I find it impossible to focus; the other issues in my life pale in comparison.

How does it feel to be a terrorist? Apparently, like this.

A Memory from Summer

I remember the way the bricks seemed to dissolve under the pressure of the water cannon. Like ice cubes splashed with warm water. Cardboard blocks stacked four stories high without mortar.

Here come a bunch of no-good window-breakers, joked the fire chief in impenetrable deadpan.

I couldn't understand what was going on for a moment. Windows were indeed breaking, but for no apparent reason---spontaneously it seemed. Hundreds of foot-square panels of glass, arranged in a grid across the side of the warehouse, began to fling themselves from their lofty perches, the steady rhythm they made as they shattered on the concrete pier below reminiscent of the water gushing from a gutter just after a heavy rain.

It was only once the window population of this hapless, charred warehouse had been decimated that I could see the no-good window-breakers: firefighters with long wooden instruments. Like the poles used to open tall windows in an old building. They had heavy iron hooks at their ends, which emerged, probing, from the side of the building like antennae.

The burnt-out warehouse, still smoldering, continued to be doused with water pumped by a fire boat anchored in the adjacent Chicago river. A mustachioed, portly chief in taxicab yellow armor told me they hadn't had the chance to use the state-of-the-art vessel in a decade.

Looking down from a bridge onto the scene, I could sense the enthusiasm with which the crewmen performed their duties. They ravaged the long-abandoned, newly-destroyed structure with the vigor of highly-trained marksmen bereft of a target for too long.

Down the river a crane surreptitiously loaded, one metal clawful at a time, a mountain of garbage onto a barge. If cranes are equipped with rear-view mirrors, he must have been watching the battle being waged. Trash to trash, the waste keeps cycling through.

Pestilence

When I first arrived at this apartment last January I found piles---mounds---of dead flies around the windowsills and heaters. After I cleaned the flies up, I was inundated with Japanese beetles, which look deceptively like ladybugs and leave itchy bumps all over your body if they get into your bedspread. As I stayed in the apartment into the spring, ants became a ubiquitous enemy. My guard was ever-vigilant lest I give a millimeter to the marching armies.

In June I scrubbed the kitchen and bathroom and removed all the furniture, handed the keys over to a sub-leaser. My return yesterday acquainted me with fresh entomological evil.

As I hoisted up the sliding door to my storage unit, I was flooded with a torrent of wasps, before I could even register their infernal death-buzz.

I didn't flinch. I just bolted, arms flailing. It was several moments before I edged back towards the unit, my forearm held out in front of me as a knight holds his shield as he enters the dragon's lair.

I hauled three car-loads of my belongings from the lair, venomous insects poised menacingly over each item. Silent, watching.

I wasn't stung once. Valor prevailed.

Hitching with Truckers

I find that most who make their living inside cramped cabins riding in straight lines begin to wax poetic as they describe home. Home for Tommy, a self-described half-Navajo ex-hippie, was a shack in the country he shared with his son and a half-wild dog, his closest neighbor two miles away.

He's always trying to get me to come over, explained Tommy. But I got 10 acres and I mostly keep to myself.

He gave the distinct impression his interest in companionship with his neighbor ended at the occasional hog roast.

Government once told Tommy and his friends to go and kill Vietnamese. Now it tells him maximum trailer weight and engine braking policy. The "hell no" philosophy of his youth seems to extend to his appropriation of a rural turf.

So he burns swine instead of flags, keeps junker cars on his front lawn and lets weeds lacking psychotropic qualities flourish.

My bus to Chicago stopped at a truck stop in Indiana on the way home. I saw a truck cab with a dreamcatcher hung over the mirror, just like Tommy's. I looked around but couldn't find the driver. I waited by the truck until my bus re-boarded.

Men In Blue

It's about cardinal past warbler on Cafe Luna's bird clock, which means I have canary and robin until I need to set down my coffee and head to school. Theft school; or as the courts call it, the Rush Theft Deterrent Program.

I doubt my education will have much practical value. Instead it will keep me from winding up like the poor transient trying to catch some sleep on the spare chairs adjacent to where I sit at the counter. I watch as three portly men ask the manager, "You want him out of here?"

I don't hear the response, but soon the diner is filled with the brusque jostling of said transient: a seemingly unnecessary conflagration. I'm reminded of yapping dogs behind a chain-link fence. One of them keeps saying, "Chicago police."

I stink-eye them as they leave. They're probably my teachers.