i need the eggs.

even though my arms get tired.

About two years ago, I became obsessed with the fact that I was from Chicago. Not Chicago-proper, I’m a kid from the suburbs like most others, but my parents raised me to understand the city. I’ve known my way around the downtown area for as long as I can remember and I’ve been receiving speeches about gentrification of my parents’ old neighborhoods for even longer. Since beginning skating about 10 years ago, I’d take the train into the city to skate all over every weekend. This was well before I was 16. While I was still in those primitive, formative stages. When everything anyone suggested was a good idea. Hair dye. Breaking laws. Meeting strangers. Learning by failing. I was running, heart beating, fingertips spurting crimson, alive.

Once I got into tattoos a few years back, it seemed natural that I’d get a Chicago skyline. Or a Chicago flag. Maybe a combination of the two:

Stretching from the lower left part of my stomach around my side, and to the lower left part of my back, I wanted the skyline of Chicago as viewed from Lake Michigan. I wanted the lake to be the sort of blue that looks like a cross between blue, purple, and nothingness. Then the skyline in the thinnest black line possible. I wanted the buildings filled in with the pattern of Chicago’s flag, light blue and white striped with red stars, as if the skyline had been cut out from it. I wanted the Sears tower to run parallel with my forearm, so that when I hung my arms at my side, the tendons in my veins would mirror a pinnacle of human achievement. I wanted the Northern side of the city wrapping around my backside, the rich areas stabbing into my bloodstream from the behind. I wanted the Southern side stretched across my abs, the side of the tracks that my father worked his way out of, muscling every inch of the way.

I had the money saved. Then I got into another school. Realized that I’d be moving to New York. It was quite possibly the only other city in America that convinced people to have its outline permanently engraved into their bodies.

So the plan was off. Postponed at least. I’d be living in New York City soon, and couldn’t afford to go throwing money around like that. I went. I lived. It’s expensive here. Tattoos were off for a while.

It’s ten months later and now I have the money again. Continue Reading »

I’m twenty-three and live in New York City. I wake up at 7:30 a.m. By 7:45, I’ve had a cup of coffee and am showering. At 9:15, I’m on the train. At 10:00 a.m. I’m in the office or at a meeting. At 2:00 I take my 1-hour lunch break where I usually end up at 1 of 6 or 7 standard eateries. After work, I go to class. I drink an extra cup of coffee at 7:40, halfway through class. I’m home by 9:40, homework and other work until 1:00, then I sleep and do it again.
On the plus side, I’m being productive. All of those things that your parents told you to do: move out, get a higher education, get a job, be self-sufficient, I’m doing that. I haven’t even been charged with any sort of crime in a few years. No, I’m still not allowed in Canada for a few reasons, but the rest of the world is my oyster (I blame that whole debacle with the Canucks on G.W. anyway). I’m eating healthier and agreeing with my parents when they call and voice their opinions on what I should or shouldn’t be doing.
I’ve had food poisoning, 106 degree temperatures, broken bones, concussions and countless full-day hangovers in my life. I can say right now that nothing has made me feel more sick than looking at the average day I’ve just described.
I’m tearing my life apart lately. I’ve begun riding my bike into work again. Now, I hop on a track bike (fixed gear, no brakes) and ride my way through Brooklyn and Manhattan through rush hour traffic. I’m quickly getting known for pounding on cab windshields and crosstown hustles that rival bike messenger paces. I sit at work extremely sweaty (not to mention smelling worse than bathing in Subway water) all day long and allow myself a full hour of free time for cruising blogs and watching dumb cat videos on Youtube.
I’ve been staying up late again, casually drinking at night. Whether it’s coffee or alcohol, sitting on my stoop, giving hard looks to the drug dealers who walk past. Let them come, I’ve been looking for a reason to throw fists.
I ate fast food twice in a row. Hell, I made a specific trip to Washing Square Park in order to go to an especially disgusting fast food joint that can usually only be found on the west coast or in the fatter southern portion of the country. I don’t care that it’s chicken, the breading on whatever went into my mouth that day was more pig lard than anything.
Today I slept through my alarm completely. Continue Reading »

i spend a lot of time on-line as well. i like to pretend it’s not too much.

Macaframa

A group of San Franciscan Track Bike riders who do things right and make everything pretty. The movies are especially notable.

be quiet or be killed.

This girl and her friends take pictures that make me want to forget the world and run to the mountains. Or to the outskirts of Seattle, where they live.

Heave Media

Chicago-based music and culture website. Great reviews, honest articles, and a crackpot team that even puts out a VodCast. You might even find something by me.

We wear sunglasses.
Jeremy is in shotgun and Brett drives.
It is snowing and dark and a lit joint is glowing like the man’s nose on that board game
Where you pluck plastic organs from cardboard cut-out limbs.
No blood.

The mountains are familiar, Breckenridge,
Family vacation, 1998
When my brain was tainted
Before I wiped it clean and white with grass and chemical swirls.
But no blood.

I stand outside in the cold
Flicking a lighter at a gas station,
Filling up the tank under flurries of powdered sugar.
Brett laughs,
Jeremy laughs.
A man in coveralls asks me why the long face?
I show him the soft side of my hand where I’ve tried to give myself an ink injection with a Bic.
Blue ink, no blood.

He’d come stumbling back into our rented condo,
My mother asleep and sister in the shower
He reeked of what I’d thought was fuel,
Intoxicating stench.
Said he’d used a bag of oranges so that I wouldn’t bruise, no marks,
No cuts, no blood.

As they funnel back into the car they still laugh and I finish my smoke.
The coveralls tell me to “take care of that” glancing at me over his shoulder as he walks away,
Like I have something on my face.
Brett passes a six-pack of beer into the back seat and I ask if we can stay here for a few minutes.
The metal edge of the cap pulls a single layer of skin from my palm but
no blood flows.

My sister had asked what had happened to my eye
“Don’t worry,” I’d smiled, “No blood!”

Jeremy becks, “Come on, let’s get out of this shithole.”
I finish the bottle off and throw it across the street
Listen for the inescapable shatter.
“No blood,” I say, shutting the door,
“Drive.”

I received a phone call last night. Late. Very late. It was an old friend. Who am I kidding? We dated. Seven years ago. Back then, the day after I broke up with her, I walked on crutches into the place where I’d always gotten my hair cut.Lisa was the name of the girl who cut my hair. It was a “salon” type place. I always felt awkward going there because it was the sort of “salon” that existed in a brown brick strip mall on a cloudy street sandwiched between a 2nd run movie theater and a Wal-Mart. There were always lots of women my mom’s age and less well-to-do, eyes blue-shadowed and bright red-lipped in that way that you only see in documentaries about people in trailers but then you walk two steps off the beaten path to the salon where the girl works who cut your hair since you were a baby and you realize “these are not trailer people, these are my neighbors and their shadow blue eyes do not want me here.”As I was saying, I walked in, on crutches, one arm still in an air-cast (that’s a type of cast that isn’t really a cast, you can take it off, but you shouldn’t because then you may unsettle things and you’ve clearly unsettled enough recently) and Lisa, now full-time cutting hair, part time designing images on a computer, and modeling at car shows on the weekends, looks me up and down. Her mouth drops open, scans from the cast around my ankle to my arm and to the top of my tousled hair that I haven’t touched in weeks.

I’ve only been that vulnerable in front of her once before then and I don’t think it counts. You can’t really help but be vulnerable when you are four months old and a strange girl in her late teens is swinging sharpened blades around your head snipping here there and your father is sitting next to you both looking around here there and up and down her here there. But I can only assume. I was four months old.

She says out loud, “The first time you can drive yourself here, and you stumble in looking like that?” I am sixteen with messy hair and two casts on. I am a wreck. There is no way for me to be more awkward.

I follow her to the back. As if the clientele isn’t giving me enough strange looks, the normally friendly girl who does nails looks at me like I’m going to split apart any second. I tried that once. That’s how this cast is on this arm. That’s why I haven’t been able to have my hair cut, the stitches had to heal. A two-story drop will hurt you just enough to make you look like you will split apart at any second. Continue Reading »

This was found in SoHo. If you know what the area is like these days, you’ll agree that more people should be looking for this.

Original Photo.

I sit where he did once.
In a booth, drinking coffee and eating a muffin (banana nut $1.65)
His words are tattoo’d on my arm ($120.00)
And I wear sunglasses ($6.00 from a vendor on St. Mark’s) that were his trademark
The waitress smiles as I order another ($2.25, though I’ll tip her more)
I dig in my pockets and offer her more of my loan money (far more than I need).
He screams at me (digitally, I know these are just zeros and ones streaming into my headphones ($65.00))
“HOW DOES IT FEEL?”

Sorry, Bob, I’m afraid I still don’t know.

My Writing. His Illustration.

He was head over heels. For a moment he thought to himself, “Have I lost control?” but quickly dismissed the idea, knowing from all of the movies and songs that “if it seems so right, and it feels so right, then it has to be right.” It’s gotta be right. He was able to see the night’s sky, stars for the first time in months.
Just a few hours earlier he’d left the valley behind, citing that he had a little extra cash, though his hands were deep in his pockets and held on to nothing. “Of course you can take my bike. Just don’t let anything happen to it,” Chris had said, scratching at the beard that wasn’t so much a beard as well-defined laziness. Daniel pulled at his hair and said, “Thanks, man, thanks a lot. Really,” his foot tapping, looking down at where the motorcycle’s tire touched the cement flooring of Chris’s parents’ garage. Daniel pulled on his hair in front of his face, silently cursed himself for his bad habit, and wobbled over to the bike. “I mean it, man, I won’t put a scratch on her. Don’t worry about it.” Continue Reading »

My name is Mark. I live 797 miles away from my home. Almost 1 year ago I moved from Chicago, where I spent the first 22 years of my life, to New York City.

This blog is a chronicle of my attempts to communicate over such a vast expanse of space. So many different sounds build each other up and break each other down when you deal with such different places and such different people.

I invite you, openly, to interact with me. To tell me I’m wrong. That I’m right. That you love something. That you hate something. That you’re more interested in something. Comment, e-mail me, call me up. Interact. The closer we get to each other the less destructive interference will exist.