after a few months fermenting in the crock...

the last time i wrote here i shared lew welch's chicago poem
yesterday i found some words in my journal from my time in chicago...:

wednesday may 2nd. 6:30am at sheffield and addison waiting for a craigslist ride to madison who never showed...

I have to be hard, hardened to live in this place.
if i care about others, i'll deplete myself.

in this city the poor are spat upon.
 ignored, told they are stupid
and dangerous and sick and wrong
 thrown into jail if they don't get killed in the streets first.

the sound of the el
is the sound of my ribcage cracking
tears of shock and pain leak
from the corners of my eyes
and i weep for the lost everything

for the four of us waiting in a tunnel
deep under the surface of the streets
for a monster to swallow us whole into
its belly
for the operator who spends every night

it is this cleaving
this separation
which makes us unsafe

how do you go out to dinner when so many go hungry?

------------->and Dear you, oh longtime
                 woodlawn englewood garfield park
                      lawndale west humboldt resident---
what do you dream of?
what is your tree of life?

It's alright to cry, crying gets the sad out of you!

i wish it were a joke
but this year, that is 2012, has been a bumper year for awful (mostly situational)
i would like to say, inelegantly, eloquently
i'm having a terrible time

but i cried and cried and cried on the phone
about my deep down, bone threaded awful
and i said like a thousand things that didn't make any sense
mostly about how i feel unappreciated, which now, I guess, makes sense
and now i feel sort of okay, y'all

do you remember when we had shame day?
and everybody put their faces in the chopped onion to make themselves cry?
and it was sort of hilarious/great?
slight nervous breakdowns and thanksgivings are different
but hey!
it's alright to cry!
it'll make you feel floaty and nice and the words will come tumbling out and you don't have to listen, you just have to talk and maybe you'll know something you didn't before.

it bears repeating

I lived here nearly 5 years before I could
meet the middle western day with anything approaching
dignity. it's a place that lets you
understand why the bible is the way it is:
proud people cannot live here.

the land's too flat. ugly, sullent and big it
pounds men down past humbleness. they
stoop at 35 possibly cringing from the heavy and
terrible sky. in country like this there
can be no God but Jahweh.

In the mills and refineries of its south side Chicago
passes its natural gas in flames
bouncing like bunsens from stacks a hundred feet high.
the stench stabs at your eyeballs.
the whole sky green and yellow backdrop for the skeleton
steel of a bombed-out town.

remember the movies in grammar school? The goggled men
doing strong things in
showers of steel-spark? The dark screen cracking light
and the furnace door opening with a
blast of orange like a sunset? or an orange?

it was photographed by a fairy, thrilled as a girl, or
a Nazi who wished there were people
behind that door (hence the remote beauty), but Sievers,
whose old man spent most of his life in there,
remembers a "nigger in a red T-shirt pissing into black sand."

It was 5 years until I could afford to recognise the ferocity.
friends helped me. then I put some
love into my house. finally I found some quiet lakes
and a farm where they let me shoot pheasant.

standing in the boat one night I watched the lake go absolutely flat. smaller than raindrops, and only
here and there, the feeding rings of fish were visible 100 yards away - and the blue gill caught that afternoon
lifted from its northern lake like a tropical! jewel in its ear
belly gold so bright you'd swear he had a
light in there. his colour faded with his life. a small green fish...

all things considered, it's a gentle and undemanding
planet, even here. far gentler
here than any of a dozen other places. the trouble is
always and only with what we build on top of it.

there's nobody else to blame. you can't fix it and you
can't make it go away. It does no good appealing
to some ill-invented Thunderer
brooding over some unimaginable crag.

It's ours. right down to the last small hinge it
all depends for its existence
only and utterly upon our sufferance.

driving back I saw Chicago rising in its gases and I
knew again that never will the
man be made to stand against this pitiless, unparallel
monstrosity. 

it snuffles on the beach of its Great Lake like a
blind, red, rhinoceros.
It's already running us down.

you can't fix it. you can't make it go away.
I don't know what you're going to do about it.
But I know what I'm going to do about it. I'm just
going to walk away from it. 

maybe a small part of it will die if I'm not around.
feeding it anymore.

chicago poem. by lew welch. someday i'll write my own.

The Smudge

I want to start a band called The Smudge. It makes a good movie title too, but I don't like art house flicks as much as some people. I think The Smudge has a good ring to it. I can see it now - it's a foursome of mixups who just barely get along. One has spiky hair, one has a minor facial tic, they would all be pretty pretty if they'd just smile more. Their armory includes a 7-string bass, assorted horns, jazz drums, theremin, lots of kazoos. They play a mix between klezmer-punk and downbeat post-club (heavy on the bass effects there), with the occasional third-wave ska break throne in for shiggles. They're so different, an early critic writes:

It isn't the manic energy that makes The Smudge stand out; not the way they tip closer and closer to disaster and then pull back with a grin; it isn't the moment they switch out of a long, banging, bowel-shaking paean to some ancient devil and into a rapid-fire celebratory horn solo that makes you wonder where you've been all this time, although that's closer - it's that they're just having too much fun, and they know that you know that we're all right there with them.

I'm ready to get this show on the road. In my fantasies The Smudge starts in the basement of the doxy lounge, practicing once or twice a month. It starts to take off when friends of the smudgelings keep coming to practice uninvited. leli p monster quits his day job and ditches his farming plans in favor of equipment, publicity, a van. These semi-humble beginning become part of the The Smudge's origin myth, later to become a rock-group biopic (think Stone). Reviews on the movie are mixed.

Eventually the group breaks up, moves on. They never sign a major record deal - they don't need to. Rather than rely on 10% of the profits off of millions of people, they run everything themselves, living off of shows and handmade merch and cds sold to thousands of trufans across the country. Later they sign with two different indie labels and tour Europe, but the ethic remains. About their strange brand of success one critic writes:

They were never a household name. Then again, the naughts and tens were the end of the era of household names. Sure, they had their adoring masses, but I'd say the best way to measure the success of The Smudge is in their influence. One out of every three people who saw The Smudge in those early days ended up a free thinker and a fool, in the best sense of the word.

I've been thinking about fools a lot, ever since a great conversation with teemz in the doxy kitchen. I hope that when I get invited to speak at some (hopefully worthwhile) event because of Smudge-related fame, I stand up and talk about what it means to be a fool in the modern age. Tmo said: "The fool stares into the void and laughs".

big changes

holy shit, lots has happened in my life.

adele dumped me for someone else. ouch.

i'm over it. yay!

i'm moving up to the northside - hot damn! high time! should i come out to the west coast? should i tour the us/world with my erstwhile, prodigal baobuddies? yes but no. i still have a life here in chicago (booooo).

az where are you?

anyways, the new andersonville place is going to be beautiful. and life is going to be beautiful. and a LOT less stressful. fondest to all, and if you're in the mood for a housewarming, still live in chicago, or wanna reconnect, well it'll happen soon, i wanna see you, and also i'm going to come out west some time in the next coupla months.

ps post #400 woot!

love

leli

Here's why I can't leave Chicago.

Lake Michigan is my o(w)nly site for prayer
July August
my frenzied festival of religious ecstasy
water warm enough to wade into
and let slip
murmured, stored up slights
at night
the edge of the world seeming
the land dropping off
and me far enough out
that I see no one

and the things I speak to the lake
it holds
today I beg
to be strong
not because I have learned not to get hurt
but because I am simply strength
and I apologize
the cigarette smoke the only burnt offering I can produce

long walk there
long walk home
bearing the penance of walking alone in the dark
bearing the heavy looks from those not alone
bearing the lashes of concrete on my bare feet

Lake Michigan holding me
and all my whispered promises
vows dropped in its terrible depths

and if I could I would drink the whole lake down
but the summer storms
have pushed the river beyond its boundaries
and shit has washed up in my temple
my eyes swell with bacteria every time I put my head in
but I can't leave
because the lake knows everything about me

this is not a blog post

blue day,

rue day,

i-want-to-moo day.

i've been meaning to post about camp trans but i don't quite know how, yet.

cats shedding,

vodka in the afternoon.

humid air and

sidewalk stares.

even when the bathrooms at work are always empty, choosing between the one down the hall and the one further down the hall is still an existential conflict.

sometimes revolution makes me happy

and sometimes my bone marrow aches with sadness for everything that is wrong.

(today is among the latter days.)

and yet

my garden flourishes

gabe and vlad have been sleeping with me

the lake is cold and bright with just a bit of a vomit-like skin

and i got free condoms from 5710.

anyone interested in going to pittsburgh with me for the G20 protest, september 24 & 25?