Nine Hundred Sixty Minutes of Solitude

Saturday night I got home from work at eleven pm. That night I had been a super-host at the restaurant, acting as a human-spoof to the 300+ customers who had amassed at our entrance all wanting a table. A human-spoof is a hundred or so dryer-sheets packed into a small opening, such as the front entrance to a restaurant, who filters the bad smell of hunger into the sweeter smell of anticipation. Thats all well and good but the experience of soaking in so much hunger left me spent.

I got home and invited E & C, two of my housemates, to watch the rerun of Saturday Night Live that was coming up on NBC TV at eleven thirty. No no, said E, why don’t we watch the finalized documentary about my uncle in Michigan who has been dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder for the past four + years? Hell ya! I replied. The film is titled, “Moving On After 9-11” and it will be shown in the upcoming spring film festivals. Very inspiring. I don’t want to talk too much about it because it is still under wraps, but this documentary definitely inspired me & triggered my mind to blaze an unexpected trail through brain-wire wilderness:

When I moved to Chicago I was eighteen years old and knew no one in the Midwest, nevermind the city. I had my desktop tower and monitor (the same set I currently use) shipped out to the address that I planned to be inhabiting. Upon arriving by automobile in the Windy City I had yet to sign that lease however, so things were still very much up in the air. That would become a trend. Signing the lease I found myself very much up in the air. On the top floor of a newly apartmentalized building in the South Loop, a building that used to house printing presses, on Federal St. which used to be called Printer’s Row.

My computer arrived a week after my human body, and setting it up became my first priority. But because I was in a large shared space waiting for the other roommates to arrive I didn’t dare order internet for the group, so my computer, fully assembled, remained offline for the next couple of weeks. The funny thing was, atop this high-rise only blocks away from the Sears Tower, the only web pages that my computer could display were those saved in the cache. And what was saved in the cache were the headlines from September 11, 2001, the day that I packed up my childish things and mailed them off to adultland.

So without any friends, city-knowledge, street-smarts, without a street attorney to guide me, I sat pretty much alone on the top floor of Printer’s Row in downtown Chicago, staring at the New York Time’s front page from Sept. 11 and it’s images of the twin towers spewing black smoke from twin holes in their top floors… and I waited. The meditation period from that point to the regenerating now is what “Moving On After 9-11”, the documentary, had me consider. Safely now, from my off-city-center apartment with my street attorney skills, city-knowledge & friends… but the 2001 webpages remain somewhere in the cache.

I worked brunch Sunday morning, only got a couple, at most three, hours of sleep after watching “Moving On…” with E & C. Very tired I was, yet the people helped me get by. The brunch people are kind and very chill. Brunch is my favorite shift of the week. Unfortunately, my human bizbox has the habit of crashing after working Sunday morning to afternoon, and that must be stopped. Yesterday I came home and went to my room and got into bed but did not let myself fall asleep, trying hard to reverse the trend. I downloaded raging hip hop anthems and read the news.

In the evening I got out of bed and socialized with my roommates, who had ordered pizza. I chomped on a couple of slices and waited for Tiger Woods to eventually win the playoff that gave him the Buick Open 2006 Tournament Title. That actually jazzed me up for a couple of minutes; the Beauty’s pizza and the Buick Open. “Tiger Woods wins Buick Open!” I shouted to the neighborhood. Then came the warm exhaustion jets. With the live PGA tourney of the day finally over, (CBS schedules live sports before 60 Minutes every Sunday to torture early-bedding seniors & brunch-serving street attorneys) I watched 60 Minutes…

60 Minutes yesterday was all about getting people drugs. The opening segment was about a drug that the President had seemingly called for in a previous State of the Union address plan, BioShield, in which he had called for the drug makers to make a drug to help out those suffering in the event of a nuclear attack on an American city. So this drugmaker had made this drug to help people suffering acute radiation poisoning or whatever, and now the snide, molish looking man that Bush appointed to oversee this BioShield, has ordered like 50 units or something and the drug maker is going out of bizness and no one is going to get the drug. Ho hum, right?

Saturday night Chef EZ at the Grill poisoned me with acute radiation poisoning. More accurately, he poisoned my coolo, which now suffers extremely acute (just the area of the coolo) heat-based Hell Night radiation poisoning. EZ did this by preparing me a brisket burrito with spicy red beans slathered in salsa-barracha sauce. Knowing that I could not say no. In fact, I cannot say no to a brisket burrito and wolfed down this brisket burrito in less than a minute and it was a mighty log. The hot sauces used went undetected by my taste bud impaired unfiltered Pall Mall sucking mouth, and now the full wrath (medically speaking, acute salsa-barracha radiation poisoning) plagues my coolo to this minute.

So obviously that segment of 60 Minutes held my attention. The next one was about, I don’t know, and the final segment covered a fat opera singer who had her stomach stapled, which was basically 60 Minutes opportunistically grabbing at all its basest audiences in one big grab: fat people who love tv, rich people who love opera, and old people who know foreign languages. But I a member of all those groups and so the opera segment had me rapt. Plus, every time I hear someone on TV say the word “opera” I think about how it sounds like “oprah”. In fact, we were flipping channels at the commercial between the opera segment and Andy Rooney and someone on another channel stated that, “Oprah is not a journalist,” which really had my head ringing.

Speaking of ringing, Andy Rooney showed the world his cell phone at the end of last night 60 Minutes. Coming as a surprise to no one the device looked like one of the jungle radios used during the Vietnam War and probably has a backpack accessory that even Andy was too red-faced to display on national TV. That cellphone will probably sell for at least one million duckets on Ebay. A purchase I would happily place were I a ducketinaire.

Make a long story short I went to bed real early last night. Right after 60 Minutes ended I watched a show on PBS that took strong-willed dogs and placed them in training programs to become working dogs. The show was striking because it included a British woman screaming bloody hell to stop this long-haired sheep dog from biting sheep. “Hyehhaaaaaaaaah!!! No!!! LIE DOWN!!!!!” all in a fantastic British accent with taunting fat sheep looking on. At 9PM I went to sleep and woke back up at one PM Monday afternoon. Thats how long it takes to fully charge Andy Rooney’s jungle radio.

My 16 hour dreams were of the apartment I live in now. It was a bunker and no one used the ground floor, which other than a couple of couches remained empty. By exiting the top floor window I finally got out onto the roof and realized that where I was living was in fact downtown in a city, but under the ground. My apartment had been built under a mound in the middle of a city, some kind of park… Not sure what that one means, but if anyone has an idea please contact my bizbox.