Black (Humor) Friday

Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Mine was capped with a bottle of '98 Errazuriz Cabernet Sauvignon that was the wine equivalent of George Costanza draping himself in velvet.

Or was it velour?

Either way it was great wine.

While everyone's out shoppng I wanted to take time to share this with everyone:

Former FEMA director Michael Brown's new job.

Let's summarize this, shall we. Brown is starting an emergency disaster preparedness consulting business. He's starting a business so that people don't respond to disasters the way he did to Hurricane Katrina.

His balls must hang to his ankles because no one can be that clueless.

It's Unconditional... On My Part

So it was a relatively uneventful day. The Tuesday before a long weekend usually is. I checked out of work early this afternoon to cash the check and do some shopping. Mom's been laying not-so-subtle hints all year about how she's never had a real spice rack. She actually laid it down so thick that at one point during the summer I offered to buy her one if she could find out where the hell our baby pictures are stored. When she started crying about the pictures getting lost with all the constant moving I realized I went too far.

So I went to Macy Field's after leaving work to start pricing on them; Friday I head to the Spice House to see what they have to offer. The plan is to talk my brother and sister into pitching in on a bakers' table and I buy the spice rack. That is, if both of them are even speaking with Mom by Christmas. She's been giving them both the cold shoulder for a few weeks. While I'm certainly not a fan of what's been going down among the two of them, they're both grown-ass adults, ostensibly, and should be held accountable to find their own solutions to their problems.

My friend Harry comes into town for the weekend, as well. I'm hoping to pry him away from his wife long enough Friday to get our noses reddened on glogg at the downtown Kriskindlemart in Daley Plaza. Harry's daughter is almost a year old now and it will be nice to see how big Lily's gotten since the birth, and also to see if she's making the transition form a drooling mass of baby.

But back to Macy Field's. The first thing I did was buy a new wallet. I was looking for a nice passcase style one like the one I wore out (an aside: I bought my last wallet at a street festival in New York's Upper West Side after participating in Bike New York two years ago. It survived my capsizing a kayak in the Chicago River, long bike rides and countless sweaty nights behind the bar at HotHouse. When I started contemplating whether or not to piece it back together with duct tape I figured it might be wise to buy, you know, a real wallet. The new one is a Levenger horizontal trifold with lots of space for my identification/credit cards, two money slots, and a lifetime warranty. That was worth having to listen to the salesman expound [or blow smoke up my ass- he seemed really sincere] about how his nephew is United States Senator Russ Feingold). I stopped at the Down Town Dog store in the basement to get some treats for Emmy. Twenty dollars later- for a tin of mints and these organic treats- I headed to the subway for the ride home.

Emmy won't eat the goddamn things. She'll eat grass, pizza crust, and goose droppings in the park, but she turns her nose away from these new treats. I probably shoudl give her some time to get adjusted to them, but I'm not sure. I had that mint in my mouth trying to get her to take it from me and I think it left a blister on my lip.

For Those Of You Who Don't Think You have Anything To Be Thankful For...

Last week we were talking about terrible Thanksgivings. I relayed this story to the Chicagoist staff this afternoon. Basically it's about why I used to go out the night before with friends:

It was 1997, Mom was out running errands when I made it over to the
house (back then they lived directly between Marie's Riptide Lounge
and the pre-Note Blue Note on Armitage, so I could drink to sunrise
then stumble over to Mom's for biscuits and gravy at 5:30 on a Sunday
morning, but I digress).

Anyway, I arrive to find my stepfather passed out drunk in his
Lay-Z-boy with the football game on and the radio set to US 99. The
turkey is in the oven, which is set at 150 degrees. I check to see if
Mom had stuffed the bird; she hadn't, to which I breathed a sigh of
relief that there isn't a pool of bacteria growing in the turkey. I
pull the turkey out, stuff it, set the oven to 425, and place the bird
back in the oven.

Finished with that I turn around in time to duck a roundhouse punch
from my stepdad. He thought someone was breaking into the house.
When I asked who put the turkey in an oven pre-heated to 150 degrees,
he admitted that he did it because he was hungry. So I went to call
Mom but when I picked up the phone my brother was on the line chatting
on a 1-900 sex line. He was living in the basement and tapped
illegally into Mom's phone line.

Shortly after that Mom arrived with my sister in tow. Turned out that
the "errand" she had to run was to bail my sister out at the Wicker
Park police station for tagging fences with grafitti, which depleted
her of the rest of the food money. I went to the store, bought the
rest of the stuff on Mom's shopping list, and proceeded to sit through
the most uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinner ever.

Things have improved a bit. Since my stepdad doesn't drink anymore Mom doesn't allow so much as a non-alcoholic beer or sparkling grape juice into the house for fear it
might knock the old man off the wagon. I get to deal with the family sober.

Yay, me.

A Case of The Moondays

With god as my witness, I did not expect the Bears to even be competitive with the Panteros, let alone win the damn game.

They beat Carolnia like the proverbial red-headed stepchild.

It's a short week and I should be doing laundry, getting a post ready for Chicagoist, cutting into that work list I posted in the kitchen, anything but letting time slip away here. And yet here I am, wondering if the meltdown in the House of Representatives is an indicator that we may be on the verge of a total meltdown of the Democratic process.

Life Imitating Art

Truly Orwellian, eh?