And they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them

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Poor fallow blog...I'll feed you.







How's that? Feel better?

Note: This Is Possible

A special message from the head office:

Do you remember that day when you ran for the train? No? You squinted against the sun to cross against the light and your eyes looked like root beer, flecking brown and yellow as they pierced the middle distance? Well, then you must remember that strand of hair you tucked behind your ear just before you stepped off the curb. Your right ear. Your left foot. ...No? Your lips looked like they did on your deathbed, a little pale though a little painted on, and I thought: these are the lips that ate, that kissed, that formed air into expression; and then they pursed in anticipation of the evening and what must be done in its fading light. No recollection, huh? That's fine. I'll remember for you.

Remember how you sat restlessly in Algebra class, your adultifying body struggling against the confinements of the desk? Your face as inchoate as the volcanic ocean floor, every labored shift dislodging discomfort, and potential. No? How about your voice, filtered like a chained animal's, curbed to a taut coil yet ready to speak, to answer against its weight? Wow. OK then, try this one: Remember how you would eat lunch, your shoulders tightly hunched, your arms a gate, on guard? You would quickly sneak food into your mouth, and chew as if with shame? You would save your milk for the whole meal and drink it at the end without a breath. Hmm. Later you became a minister and nurtured a whole community with your patience and dedication. Oh, THAT you remember. All right. I got the rest.

Remember when you sat alone at the bottom of the stairs, underneath Michigan Avenue, right outside Billy Goat's? You looked so despondent, or high. Did you know you looked high? Drunk at the very least, and at 7 p.m. Maybe that's why no one came to help you, even though you looked so in need. You sat at the base of those dirty stairs with your hands covering your face and your hair covering your hands and you looked like someone whose whole spirit had been crushed. Remember? You thought the entire world was lost to darkness; you were falling, alone, with no hope of redemption. And now you don't even remember it. See? Sorry to bring it up. But see?

Do you remember that train ride out to your parents? It was Labor Day weekend and the light had already turned. Do you remember you had that red-penny hair then, thinning? You wore those thick lenses, it was before the surgery. You were thinking, "Can I do better than this one?" And everyone who knew you was thinking that, too. You were still wearing the leather, it was before it looked like an affectation, or more of an affectation. Your mind was absent but wandering, you were thinking of a dish with ginger, and of Tammy from college, and who was the actor in that show? You breathed in and out forty-eight hundred times on that trip and the Earth rotated five thousand miles. We were idols then. False idols, but idols nonetheless. No memory? It's OK, it will always be OK. You just stay on that train, and I'll meet you there.

Banadir Restaurant: Detail

Located in the heart of the Chicago neighborhood known as Near Where Amy Lives, Banadir Restaurant serves delicious Somali food to cabdrivers 24 hours a day, except during Ramadan. Flavorful rice, vegetables and fruit drink for one low price. Friendly people and friendly service.

But writing about delicious food is like a novel about a happy family. It is boring. The story I must tell is about the washroom, and it must be told in pictures.


Fig, 1: East view. No more or less yellow than the other views. I do confess I looked in the cabinets. Upper: the usual collection of long-ignored construction and cleaning tools. Lower: more unidentifiable tools, and glops of blackened paper towel in the corners. Note the botanical feature: a woman was in here once.


Fig. 2: South-east view. The toilet worked, and that's all I care to say.


Fig. 3: West view. It says, in marker on the wall: "Please do not step on the sink. AND Don't put (used) toilet paper in the sink. Thank you." Initially, the mind boggles, but actually it's a religious thing, so judge not.


Fig. 4: North view: This door is what you touch after you have washed your hands. This is in the best case scenario.

All this being said, the food was very good. What? What's the matter? You don't go to a restaurant for its restroom, do you? Well I know I don't.

IN July

Free Translation

I do not know because the history attracts but that the present, do neither I understand because one is claimed with the history, but in the end seems to be that passed every time was better! Do neither I know because all today they complain that one must pay to touch! I am going to count you a history more than crap that live the TRICICLOSCLOS in an of so many adventures at night and stay up late, loads and discharges of teams, a history more than losers, bah! Idiotic people as we that raises the flags of the rock so that its life make sense! !!!. We had a show in Branches, one of those so many shanty town hidden, we arrive at sunset with desires of rockear and to touch.

I saw the sign

At the Modern Wing, 071209

It's the Culture: as seen @ The Wit

from the wall of the employee room at The Wit:

Words to avoid @ The Wit
yeah
you(s) guys
you know
sure
mmhmm.-
I don't know.
no
my bad
friggin'
shoot
fudge
"you know..."

USE
yes
my pleasure
of course
MADAM / MISS
SIR
"I'd be happy to"
functionality
may
assist
thank you
absolutely
certainly
gladly
"I can do that for you"

Data Loss

Winter retrospective

The Sphinx 2

The sphinx has seen them come and go. The strong and the wrong, the wise and the wicked, the haughty and the lowly. She has seen elegant structures and torrents of chaos. Great swirling embers of power, and heart, and loss. She has stood both outside the gate and inside the gate, and found them to be the same place. The sphinx has endured the chattering sandstorms of the ages, and has remained unmoved. In her defense, it must be noted that she is made of 270 tons of stone. The sphinx is mostly sedentary.

The sphinx has lived through alphabets and minarets, prophets and parapets; she has emerged smoothened and wizened and so free of fear. She has eaten the choking dust of memory and been fed. She has seen breadths of time lap against impossibly distant shores and even still, she has not yet seen everything. Why is there always something new? What fresh momentum moves these crossing currents, turns these driving wheels, dances these many, many feet?

It's worth considering that the sphinx may not know. Her tears are long dried, baking daily in the punishing heat. For all her years, what has she accrued beyond survey? Her untold wrinkles are untelling. What has she seen but the sights? The world is set in motion, adrift but alight, and our human countless nows weigh nothing.

Our time is weightless but our actions have force. We can run circles around the sphinx, but we can also run forward. Run ecstatic, run through the gates, run in time as though time could never catch up. No, the sphinx does not know. She will never blink or lift a paw. We are the ones, the sands that blow, and breathe, and build.

This Is Marketing 3

Business card, lobby, Beggar's Pizza, Blue Island IL


Banner ad, some old train, Union IL


Food vendor, Washington Park, Chicago IL


Website, Neptune NJ


Billboard, Baltimore MD

2008 Business Forecast - University of Chicago Graduate School of Business

After Slow First Half, U.S. Economy Will Grow in 2008

"A continued surge in exports and modest gains in business investment will support 2 percent real GDP growth for 2008, with about a one-third risk of recession that will be particularly acute during the first half of the year, said Michael Mussa, senior fellow of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. 'This risk reflects the danger that a number of things could go wrong and slow the economy below its stall speed.'"

"Marvin Zonis, professor emeritus of business administration, predicted that Democrat Barack Obama, senior lecturer at the Law School, will defeat Republican Rudy Giuliani for the U.S. presidency in November."

"'The next two quarters will be painfully slow, between 0 and 1 percent growth in GDP,' Raghuram Rajan, Eric Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance said, 'But barring a low probability default by a major financial institution, trend growth should resume by the second or third quarter of next year.'"

from Chicago GSB Magazine, December 2007

This Is Marketing 2

Come with me on a journey for a high-res picture of an office desk. Don't worry, it's for work. Ooh, here's one!

Sexy - It looks like money! Must know more.
Here's a product explanation:

Aha. It's an "office desk." You know, 办公家具. Who sells such beauty? Salama-Worldwide-Business, need you ask? Their slogan?

Couldn't have said it better, if at all. Must know more!
About us:

Perverse! But righteous. And curious. What other products might such a company offer?
Ooh, a wine cabinet:

It seems America has some catching up to do in the wine storage department.
Here, I've saved the best for last. Mmm, steel sheet soft bed. And the product explanation: so very true.

The Fundamentals of the Economy

We have

Welcome to the world and all of its gifts. Of skins and heart. Of caves and congress. Gently undulating flagstones that hold the rain and reflection, pine needle sprinkles, the cooling edges, the warmer front. Edible ice cubes in a drinkable drink. A moon that sees you in your bed and takes nearly a month to wink. A corridor of infinite direction and capriciously finite duration. The doors are infinitely ajar.

We have blades of grass that wave back at us and food that grows straight out of the ground. We have eyes that can see not only what is but what can be. We have coffee in the morning, pizza in the evening, and summer in the summertime. We have voices in our head and a song in our hearts. We have a rotating world and we sleep in shifts so the little ones will always be safe.

We have playing fields, most of them level, but all of them for playing. We have beckoning breezes that smell of heat, salt, winter, love or tortillas. We have fruited plains and fruity pebbles. We have made up questions so the answers will make more sense. We have sowing, ripening, and furrowing.

So here we have: a world of difference and a world of differences. A space and a space to dance. The brighter the sun, the darker the shadows. Don't forget the sun, don't resent the shadows. Don't forget, don't resent. Do. Don't forget to do.

thanks

but no thanks.

Welcome from October

the equator

We were learning about geography the other day, about physical boundaries versus political, when it struck me (for the first time) that the equator doesn't exactly exist. The equator is an imaginary line. Imagine! The borders of nations, like the borders of states and cities and etcetera, are imaginary as well. While we're at it, money is imaginary too, but through consensual hallucination, it is agreed upon to be real, though temporary. Like breath.

We take about six hundred million breaths in a lifetime. If eleven hundred people could breathe dollars for all of their seventy one years, we'd have a bailout package. It's like a t-shirt I saw on a corpse the other day: "Pain is weakness leaving the body." Do you feel stronger yet? Or are you pain-free, yet weak? I can imagine.

If you're anything like me, there was something in your childhood room that scared you. For me, it was a block, from the bin of blocks. This one wasn't a cube or conic or cuboid, but flat on two ends and oddly bent and unevenly curved in the middle. Once, in the throes of fever, I imagined that evil block filling my room up with gurgling otherness that flowed and pinned me tightly to the bed. Because I was a child, I never considered getting rid of it, though. Today, I see this block (as I write) and I see its long-dormant discomfort, the craft of its woodwork, and I see now it looks like a horse's front leg.

Physical boundaries are real, but vary with the changing landscape and are thus not entirely objective. Surprising! that the surface of the Earth, the solid ground you stand upon even now, is open to interpretation, while the imaginary lines of government are true, demonstrable, and held fast in the arms of the law. While we're at it, the law is real, temporary and consensual, but cops hate it if you call the law a hallucination. If you - Umm...I was just watching two women going through my recycling bin, picking out the aluminum cans. The fundamentals of the economy. Sorry, where was I?

If you're anything like me (though I do pray you are not), you are wishing fervently for things to stop happening. What is the deepest part of the ocean? Can I go there and hear nothing about anything, or will the other human-hewn waves, of radio and HD and satellite and cellphones sift their way downwards, where the information (sinking and clinging to the side of chinese Hannah Montana flotsam like the opposite of white blood cells) reveals itself to be a revolution of no reveal, late-breaking news both late and broken, unmissible and unmissed. Can we pour the emptiness, or fullness, of these days into this trench of deep, imaginary, sweet stasis?

Where am I going with all of this? Now you ask! OK, let's say you are holding a live wire and you wish to describe it. You hold it in your hands and it rattles your brain, melts the rings on your fingers, and rolls your eyes back into your head. Though you are robustly aware of an undeniable feeling of live-wire-ness, you'll likely have trouble coherently depicting this feeling. It's a lot like life. The experience itself has made unreliable your testimony of the experience.

It's sometimes said that your freedom ends where my nose begins. Personal boundaries are imaginary but certainly real. Personal space varies by culture - Latin cultures require less, European more. Cut me in half, though, and it would reveal more about me than about you, I imagine. The equator divides as it conjoins. But it doesn't properly exist, so no, it's not like us at all.