I'm sure you've all been wondering why I haven't been updating. ('Cuz I know that's really, really important to you.) See, you're just getting spoiled 'cuz I was on a roll there for a while there, crankin' out entries like there was no tomorrow. (Come to think of it, there wasn't a tomorrow, which means we aren't here, I guess.)
I had a couple of situations come up. The first was a half-biz/half pleasure trip to NYC, which maybe I'll get into later. ('Tho I don't wanna take away from my trip to Hawaii... two fucking years ago. So we'll see.) The other, well, is more bittersweet...
Welp. The day is finally here. After 11 years in the same ancient, crumbling building in the south Loop, I am moving my office.
I got no choice, as Robert DeNiro mooed in Raging Bull. (‘Tho he was talkin’ ‘bout the prospect of eating an overcooked steak.) The building will be demolished some time later this year. Rather considerately, my landlords have made me aware of this fact and requested that I vacate the premises before I meet w/ a wrecking ball.
Wrecking ball, how do you do?
Why Steve Forceman, P.I.! I’ve heard so much about you…
SMASH!
Dreadfully sorry about pulverizing your spine there!
Gurgle… Gleeargh!… Think nothin’ of it…
SMASH!
To be fair, my landlords are sorta like me n’ Bob DeNiro: they got no choice. It’s a situation you find all over the South Loop. Lead paint lurks. Structural instability looms large. This building has so many problems that rehabbing it would be a real labor of love. And love doesn’t make the world go ‘round. Money does. Landlord gotta eat too.
It’s sad. I have a lot of memories of the shit that’s happened in the building. Most of them are mundane—like that time the I brought a strange man up here for a nooner, and he turned out to be a large chinchilla—but y’know, that’s the stuff that really haunts you sometimes.
Truth be told ‘tho, I’ve know this was coming for such a long time that I can’t claim to be too aggrieved. For the most part, I’ve made my peace and am ready to relocate my place of business in the historic Pittsfield building—once, briefly, the tallest building in the world. My new office looks out on this bizarre art deco nightmare of an atrium. Most of my neighbors are jewelers or hair stylists. It’s got some character.
Still, while I’ve more or less accepted the change, I’m pissed off about all of the time I lost in moving. The whole process capsized whatever order I had established in my life. It’s set me back in my work and in various personal areas.
Waaah! Boo hoo! I know. Get over it. But the chaos is there, and it’s gotta be dealt with. And fortunately, I know exactly how to deal w/ it, ‘cuz I learned some relevant nifty tricks the last time I moved my office, which was located in this crappy building in Wicker Park.
In that case, I sought a change of scenery, but if I’d known where the move would initially lead me, I prob. woulda hesitated. It took me months to re-establish some sorta order in my life. But see, it all worked out OK, and in fact, I became a better & stronger person, entirely ready to and capable of dealing w/ this sorta shit.
And here’s how: Virtually everyone who encountered my personal chaos helped me out by pointing out how irrational it was for me to allow it to get to me.
See, around that time, a certain cross-section of my circle of acquaintances—the ones who tell you about every book, CD and movie ever profiled on NPR, but rarely read, listen to or go see any of ‘em, ‘cuz, like, who has that kinda time?—well alla them were into this book called Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by this genius named Mr. Burns. Woops! I mean Doctor Burns. Sorry!
If, say, you are like me and don’t really listen to NPR too much because you’ve always got music playing, or if by some other bitter set of circumstances, the Dr. Burns/ NPR boat sailed before you cleared the gangway—you might want to know something before you run out and buy Feeling Good: the book is less hip now. Still, it’s highly respected, I guess, and everyone I know who’s in therapy sez his/her shrink swears by it to some degree as part, if not all, of a therapeutic approach.
Now. I’m gonna pause for a moment to say that if you already know allllll about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)—and you prob. do, since like everyone I know but me is in therapy, and alllllllllllll of their shrinks dig the book, as I said—you can skip the next coupla paragraphs. If ya don’t, and ya care, here is my succinct, if maybe grossly oversimplified summary of the principles of CBT: you think stuff, which leads you to have feelings. (Not the other way around.) You think, apparently, in words, and a lotta the ones you direct toward yourself are mean n’ nasty and lead you to have, as they said in the 60s, “hang-ups,” which, as they said in the 60s, can be a “bummer.” Like maybe you say to yourself: “I am a big smelly bowel movement. I suck.”
Now the next precept of CBT is that these mean, nasty thoughts are irrational, so if you can just find the errors in their logic, you can charge ‘em like some Socratic Rambo—or would that be a Ramboian Socrates?—and shoot ‘em w/ yr. Bop Gun. Take that! BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA!!!: “I am not a big smelly BM, ‘cuz logic dictates that shit is not sentient, and I am—sentient, I mean—and therefore I can’t be shit. And plus I don’t stink. I know ‘cuz I sniff myself a lot to be sure, and I smell just like rosewater and the crystal clear saliva of Lindsay Lohan after a night of only light drinking. And but I also don’t suck. I blow.”
Ha! Thus CBT slays BM!
I’m sure you can all see what an incredibly powerful tool this is! Just don’t start entertaining notions (illogical ones, no doubt) that you seem to feel before you think, or that at the very least, you think too fast and in too high of a volume to pluck alla the nasty thoughts from whatever personal cyclone you may be weathering so that you can quarantine ‘em and go at ‘em w/ both boors: BOOM POW!
And refrain from telling yr. shrink, as one of my friends did, that he often seemed to think in images or sounds, ‘cuz if you do, even if you are as generally honest as he is, yr. shrink may brand you uncooperative, (as did his,) and then continue to take yr. money while doing nothing but telling you what a big smelly BM you are. Woops! We’ve come full circle. OK, so don’t do that…
Anyhoo, if you follow the rules, yr. naughty thoughts, (which, BTW, can be classified in various ways, like f’rinstance, “all-or-nothing thinking” or something like that, thus allowing you to select the appropriate weapon—auto, or semi-auto, recoilless, w/ a silencer, etc. Then you know what kinda glock to use in ushering yr. irrational thoughts into the Great Beyond.) Then you will be happy. Period. It’s that easy!
Whasssat you say? You already do that—I mean, argue w/ yr. mental demons and irrational thoughts? That you thought that that was just a normal method used by human beings for prob. pretty much forever to deal w/ their shit. And that sometimes it works, but that at other times, it just don’t. And that no matter how much you tell yourself, everything is cool, you sorta still feel like everything sorta sucks. Like, you can see how irrational yr. thoughts are, but somehow that just isn’t making yr. bad feelings go away? Well, are you in therapy? Maybe you’re just a little clumsy, and need a little professional help… Woops! Did my words make you feel bad?
So see, all my friends who’d read or been force fed Dr. Burns tried to help me see how I didn’t need to get stressed out by the time I’d lost in moving. From a CBT perspective, which is said to be the most effective method of psychotherapy available, BTW, an understanding of how irrational this pattern of thinking is should allow me to dispel it and replace it w/ a healthier pattern, e.g., “I am just as valid and entitled as everyone else and so deserve a newer spiffier office. And plus I will work more effectively in a new place cuz it won’t have all the pain-in-the-ass probs. my current office has. And I’ll be the best lil’ P.I., (not to mention the best lil’ human being) I can be!” And various other such Stewart Smalley-isms.
And then everything shoulda been hunky dory. Except it wasn’t. Feeling Good was not good enough. (Not for me & my Bobby McGee, anywaze. Actually I can’t speak for my Bobby McGhee. He dropped some bad ‘cid back in ’73, causing him to believe that I had a big donkey dick w/ which I wanted to fuck him—repeatedly. ‘Matter of fact, I did wanna fuck him—repeatedly. His smelly hippy flat-assed Spin Doctor-lookin’ self was just too enticing, like clouds gilt by sunlight and CO2.
But my dick’s teeny tiny. ‘Matter of fact, that’s where Roger Waters got some of the lyrics to “Comfortably Numb.” He overheard me soliciting the feral, semiconscious lovemaking of my Bobby McGhee, thusly:
“It’s OK. You may feel my little pin dick. There’ll be no more pain, dear. But you may feel start to spurt. IIIII-high have begun to comfortably come. Prematurely. In my BVDs. Woops. That’s embarrassing.”
Welp, Bobby tol’ me to fuck off. I said I already sorta had. He didn’t find that funny, pushed right past me, and drove off in our yak-smellin’ VW bus, leaving me stranded at the post-Dead show tail-gater in Topeka.
I never saw him again, nor heard him sing the blues. And to top it all off, Roger Waters steals my amorous poetry and makes, like, zillions of dollars w/ it. (Granted, he changed the words a little, but the, uh, thrust was still there.) And I never saw dime one. I tried to get ahold of him dozens of times, but Mr. Hollywood wouldn’t return my calls, natch. And like I’m gonna be able to afford a lawyer who can so much as scratch that impenetrable Wall Rogers and other celebs like him have around ‘em. Ha!
OK, so I guess I lied. I am not a better & stronger person, nor am I more capable of dealing w/ adversity thanks to Dr. Burns’s wisdom. Despite all of the Socratic cunning I’ve managed to muster, the amount of time I’ve lost in moving still pisses me off. There were some things I would’ve liked to’ve accomplished before the first month of 2007 was over. Not that any them were that urgent, but y’know there’s that psychological factor that travels w/ the passing of a calendar year.
Stupid to let your self be affected by something so arbitrary, but it does make you aware… Dust in the wind, baby. Time is seriously fucking limited. You don’t have much of it in the narrow span that is yr. life—and all that Percy Bysshe Shelley and/or Pink Floyd jazz. And what are doing w/ yr. time? Haha! You’re reading this blog! Mmmf snicker…
I know all you Eastern and quasi-wannabe-Eastern hippie types w/ yr. inscrutable wisdom would say that one gets the most from life when one accepts time, appreciates the present, doesn’t itemize it and worry over its passage into the past, doesn’t consider the ever-dwindling future.
And then you all go smoke yr. grain-fed, free range, kosher cow’s turd cigarettes. (With no additives, by the way, thus insuring the presence of lotsa little dead bugs n’ stuff inside yr. doobie & making it taste far less good than the brand name dung cigarettes that are derived from anemic, factory bound cows, who are fed nothing but other cows (who’ve become too sick to shit) and laxatives to make ‘em shit a lot (thus makin’ ‘em more productive n’ shit) into a trough alla time in which third world laborers are asked to stand, not just knee-deep in it, as it were, and work 23.78 hour long days @ 3 cents/hr., rolling scat into spliffs, w/ no health care, no day care, (which is fine w/ them, because their kids are workin’ right alongside ‘em—just one big happy family as the malapro-aphorism goes—as they must, ‘cuz they all owe their souls and the souls of 7 times 7 generations to the Company Store,) all of ‘em prone to diseases like typhus, bubonic plague, gout, cholera, carpal tunnel syndrome, the bends, the vapors, and anal warts, from working in such unsanitary conditions—all so you can have yr. Camel-Dung Lights, you wretched hippie-crite!)
OK, but this current move: Even when I am starting to make some headway, and it looks like I’ll be able to get back to biz as usual, unforeseen shit keeps coming up. So that what efforts I have made to establish order keep dissipatin’ like steam in the bathroom after a shower, when it’s a really cold day, and yr. willy’s all shriveled up, so you fondle it gently w/ yr. warm hand, snugly cupped, as you watch the condensation fade from the bathroom mirror, and you can see it, yr. Willy, teeny tiny and glistening w/ moisture, and you get all hot thinkin’ about what a fox you are, and how even you’d like to knock a piece of you off, but then you’d be missing a piece of yourself, & that’d prob. hurt, and like hook-handed Moulty of the 60s garage band The Barbarians, you’d only be able to dream of being “The Complete Man” thereafter. Whatta bummer.
Anyway, here I am, installed in my new office. And it sure is swell. It’s like paradise. Amidst the ceiling beams, cherubs do caper emitting trills, achingly beautiful, from reed flutes—heavenly airs that sound suspiciously like the main riff from “Just the Way You Are” by Billy Joel. Sunlight gathers in placid golden pools, like fresh urine in the navel of the Elder Beauty Goddess, a fat, clapped-out liver-spotted skank, after you’ve rained yr. love down upon her. (You stand to one side, sneering w/ exaltation—yes, sneering w/ exaltation—it’s possible—picture 2004 Cubs disappointment Corey Patterson just after he’s hit a game-winning “dinger”—as you zip up. And you wonder after the meaning of it all. Why must you piss on Beauty to show yr. love for her? What does that say about Beauty, you, humanity? And why does Beauty have to wear a visor turned backwards? Why must she be such a trend-hopper? (And the trends of several years ago at that?)
But my new place: whatta heaven! It’s like Valhalla minus the obnoxious, drunken Vikings, whoring and feasting and brawling around the clock, like the denizens of some Elysian frat house. (Talk about the Greek system! Hyuk hyuk hyuk!!! ) (And yeah, I know that I’m mixing mythologies here, but Greek, Norse. Whassa difference?) Except Vikings are sorta the raison d’eteet of Valhalla, so w/o them, it’d be kinda like Vegas w/o gambling or Flint, Michigan w/o urban decay, & like, what the hell would that be like? A vacuum? A quantum singularity? As cool of a place as a singularity might be to visit, Ida think I’d wanna live there. And I think my new office is prob. nicer than that. Even ‘tho I’m not gonna be living here. (Unless something really bad happens.)
Nevertheless, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 37 years on this earth, it’s that even Valhalla must be unpacked. And here’s one of those ironies that are just more pungent than a bad yeast infection: I’m unpacking my books, and sure enough, right beneath Infinite Jest, is a copy of Feeling Good. Can’t believe I actually let some asshole talk me into buying it. Or maybe some NPR-spawned CBT acolyte just palmed the fucker off on me, ‘cuz they were sure it was gonna fix their life and so, like, why couldn’t it fix mine as well? After all, my problems couldn’t be nearly as complex and oppressive as theirs, right?
Everybody’s an armchair detective. They all look at yr. data—don’t even need all of it—just like that cokehead fuck Sherlock Holmes. They observe and then solve you. That’s if you get their attention. AND yr. problems aren’t too depressing. They’re not gonna have much to tell ya if yr. problems are like, say, cancer or something. I hurl my copy of Feeling Good at the wall, its pages blousing out like the sails of some defunct armada. I’d run it through my shredder, if it wouldn’t take too much effort to rip out the pages.
Fuck you, Dr. Burns, and all the people you’ve brainwashed. Things aren’t always that simple, pal.
And fuck you too, David Foster Wallace, and that stupid sexy doo-rag you’re wearing on the back of my paperback Infinite Jest. I may envy yr. success and talent in writing—2 things I will never have, ‘tho I scrawl n’ type away. I wrote oodles and oodles of tons of pages yesterday, allowing emotional and cerebral chaos to further swallow me up. (Not to mention the barbiturates I swallowed.)
Go on chaos! Carry me away. But of course, you can’t always count on chaos—that being its raison d’eteet, after all.
Anyhoo… David Foster Wallace. Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you, sweetie—or sweaty—or whatever. What I envy you for is not yr. talent n’ success. Nope. I envy you for how fucking hot you obviously are, given the doo-rag-pic. I long to pull the damp rag from thine head, to watch thine oily, mottled tresses stream down thine be-stubbled throat. The apple there, left by Eve, I shall lick. Thy nutsack I shall clutch, gently stroking its loose skin, feeling it tighten in my hand—as ‘tho it had a life of its own—feeling its heaviness and heat. It is the House of thine Paternity.
Ah! But if only I could engulf those seeds w/ my body—becoming larger, until a great brood of lovelies, each w/ his—for there shall be no freakish she-children here!—own doo-rag—some green, some checked red, some bearing the ancient glyphs of long-forgotten civilizations, some portraying games of hangman, and some depicting terribly arousing erotic matter.
Tainted by my own imperfections, their Wallace blood will, nevertheless, cause them to rise up and march across the wounded earth to enact their destiny. And yours.
Meanwhile I’ll finish unpacking.
