Monday, November 10, 2008
Diary: November 2003.
This was one of those months that came at a generally frustrating time in life, and so I really only remember a couple specifically memorable events.
I was tying to direct the Nocturnal's production of Shelley's Cenci, but I was running into just about every barrier along the way... lack of space, lack of fund, unable to find a full cast; ideally I would have either quit my job to pursue these problems full-time or have aborted the project then and there. But I was saving up to buy an engagement ring, and I couldn't quit my job. And I was too stubborn to give up on the project.
I did run an evening-long workshop where we discussed Radiohead and J.M.W. Turner and how they could interface with the play. And politics. Like I said: all ambition and brimstone, but short of hope.
It didn't help either that I was a month into a yearlong temp assignment, which would turn out to be stressful by dint of intradepartmental drama, if not the workload itself. I was getting paid $10 an hour, which was more than I'd made before, but not much, and not a whole lot considering what I was paying in rent and student loans.
But wait wait wait wait wait wait wait...
I'm missing important stuff...
This was the year that I did NaNoWriMo for the first time and drafted a novel called Adrift on the Mainstream, which would become Hungry Rats. Now I remember -- there was a launch party at a bar on Irving Park and Ashland, where I ended up spending the evening talking with a topologist from the U of C. Later that month we met up with a girl at the Med and discussed our novels-in-progress. And my own was finished at 41,000 words, so I had to scribble out 10,000 words of gibberish to cross the finish line. So artistically, this was a very memorable month for me, even if (evidently) short on good cheer.
I was running a role-playing game too, based in an Inca-derived cosmology that abutted J.R.R. Tolkien. So that helped to alleviate stress.
When I went home for Thanksgiving that year, I told my mom a secret; that I was going to propose to my girlfriend. That was why I had gotten a McKinley Park Studio for $435.00 instead of the Art Deco apartment I wanted off Bryn Mawr.
Character building?
It wasn't a bad yet; it was simply very fraught with.
Where were you in November 2003?
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Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Diary: September 2003.
This was a very quiet month.
It was the last month at my lease at an address on the Eastside of Flint: Maryland Ave between Minnesota and Iowa. I'd been working at Angelo's all summer, hadn't really made any money, hadn't really lost any either, and I decided to take a break. I didn't have any major trips or plans, so this month was filled with exploring and writing.
First, I decided to explore Flint's legacy more closely than I ever had before. I did this a lot through the Motor Cities National Heritage Site, which is great because it marks off sites by significance and relevance without regard for how convenient or developed they are. I spent a lot of time tracking along the factories on the northern branch of the Flint River, along Hamilton Avenue, in Civic Park and Bassett Park, Chevy in the Hole and the Fisher Body plants. I took about two dozen rolls of film, which I still have lying around somewhere, waiting to be developed.
Second, I wrote and read. I was working on Rose for Urbantasm, and I made it almost to the halfway point of that section using a consistant fractal deployment, more elegant than any other I'd attempted to date. My computer wasn't working, but my mom let me work at the computer stations at the library where she worked. Sometimes she picked me up, and sometimes I took the bus, but most often I enjoyed the long walk: south on Franklin to Second Street, west through downtown and south to 12th, and then some route south on Fenton to Bristol. It took about an hour-and-a-half. On September 11th, I read at the Good Beans cafe, and several people from the UU church came out to hear me (no Catholic did, however). It was a start.
Third, I got ready to leave. My girlfriend left for Chicago toward the end of the month. I had locked down steady (if not good) employment with my temp agency back in Chicago... I had determined that I would only consider the Far North Side (Edgewater, Rogers Park, Uptown) or a Stockyards district (Bridgeport, McKinley Park, Canaryville). I would end up settling in McKinley Park, because it was the cheapest option, and I could save up money because I planned to propose to my girlfriend. On my last weekend in Flint I drove my parents car, listened to the Doors, got my license renewed, vacuumed and cleaned the house. My landlord told me he was sad to see me go. As I was leaving the city that night, I thought of a story, based in Flint, where a consciousness of the ghosts of past crimes would compell a character toward terrible and present crimes. This eventually became Hungry Rats.
Where were you in September 2003?
Labels: 2003, DIARY, September
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Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Diary: In October, 2003
Actually, for a moment of overlap... at the very end of September I vaccumed and finish cleaning out my house in Flint, met with the landlord and retrieved the deposit, and said goodbye to the 1600 block of Maryland Ave. I renewed my license, spent the night at my parents, and the next day my dad drove be down to Chicago. We ate at Salonica with my girlfriend (they were making their famous egg-lemon soup on this day), and while my sinuses were acting up, it was a nice example of autumn-perfect. They sky was all moldy cheese, and it was raining, chilly but not so much that I could see my breath, and the leaves were already falling and lying on the black pavement at the bottom of clear puddles as bright yellow jags. I said goodbye to my dad and he drove home to Michigan. I left most of my stuff in my girlfriend's dormroom, but I had made plans to couch-surf at my friends' Marina and Kaury's while I was looking for an apartment. Kaury and I stayed up late, drinking coffee and talking about Scavhunt.
This time, at least I had a job... good ol' Advanced Resources had been contacted by the Neurosurgery Department at Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation (NMFF) where I had worked the prior Spring. They needed some clerical help and agreed to take me on in that capacity.
I really took a couple risks that October, and they didn't entirely bite me. I wanted to expand my horizons and live somewhere different and new, by which I mean unfamiliar and old. I was set on either Bridgeport, Back of the Yards, or Canaryville, on the South Side or Edgewater Beach, Uptown, and Rogers Park on the North Side. After spending two weeks after work, from seven until ten, stumping from 32nd to 51st, and between the Dan Ryan and Ashland, I nabbed an unclaimed Bridgeport Newspaper and called about a place in McKinley Park, "right across from the Orange Line" at the very generous price of $425. This was important... I'd already turned down a beautiful apartment in an Edgewater Art-Deco masterpiece for $535 because I needed to save up for an engagement ring. The matter was that close in my mind.
The apartment and neighborhood were strange and wonderful and sullen and weird and perfect. 3613 was right across from the Orange Line... if you ever take the train out to Midway from downtown you can see it vividly as you pull out of the 35/Archer station, on the left, a third story window of an 1880s-ish tenement rising right out of an automotive body shop. The body shop owner, a cheerful and reasonable man named Gerald (probably my favorite landlord ever) showed me the studio, tiny but just rehabbed. I looked out over Archer Ave., and had a fine view of a the Orange Line and heavy freight tracks, as well as the Sears Tower and Aon building. My only complaint was the hard water, which with time left a gritty film over the walls of the shower. I filled out the application, and it was accepted...
The neighborhood was just as unusual and vivid as the apartment. On the south and a bit to the east it faced the massive remnants of the Union Stockyards, but these were visually removed by the Central Manufacturing Center, which was originally the nation's first industrial park in 1905. This sat on Pershing Road. Just north, oddly enough, was McKinley Park, one of the city's sub-flagship parks, a gorgeous half-mile long, quarter-mile deep piece with a lagoon and huge old oaks. The rest of the neighborhood was a mess of triangles and rectangles trying to make sense of the chaos that Archer and the Shipping and Sanitation Canal made of Chicago's grid system. See, in New York people can deal with such things. But it made an institutional wreck, and my favorite example was just a few steps down my own trapezoidal block. Three alleyways cut in making a triangular sub-block, a stomach of sorts, which consisted of one massive vacant lot, and one house. What the house's address was or how they got their mail, I can only guess. Nor do I know what they thought of having their house surrounded by three alleyways. Following Archer southwest led to Brighton Park and Archer Heights. Following northeast led to Bridgeport, Chinatown, and ultimately, the Hilliard Homes.
My apartment was also convenient. I was within two blocks of the park, a Jewel, a taqueria, a Unique, two diners, and the Orange Line. It took me forty-five minutes to get to work (and that was if the Red Line was moving slowly) and forty-five to get to Hyde Park. Unfortunately, nobody at the U of C has heard of McKinley Park, so I had few visitors. In a way, this was nice too. On one of the first nights, when my girlfriend helped me cart my things up from Kaury's and I was unpacking in sweaty stillness (it was in the eighties), Mark S came over to hang out. It was a fun time, but seemed distracted, and then a cat was run over out on Archer and it made the most hideous squalling sound as it died I'd ever heard.
That was the month when I got into baseball. It was under an unfortunate circumstance... the Tigers had just had their worst season ever, almost tying the '62 Mets. The Cubs, on the other hand, had made it to the Division Championship and were favorted to beat to Marlins and move onto the World Series. That was, of course, the year of Steve Bartman and other catastrophes. And while the Cubs have been gradually shuffled to the bottom of my list of likeable teams, they helped to jump start my interest in the game, which grew each year as I saw my team, my Detroit team, doing better and better.
Finally, preparations were underway for the doomed production of Nocturnal Project No. 2, the Cenci. It would really pick up steam in November, and I hung around UT, interviewing and recruiting actors, and reasearching the strange tryptich of Radiohead, Percy's Cenci, and J.M.W. Turner.
On the second-to-last day of the month, I went to Mercedes' Halloween Party, had some sweet vodka drinks, and made up with Sean, with whom I'd been arguing.
On Halloween I rode up to Irving Park for the kick-off to my first NaNoWriMo. I didn't know anybody there, but I did spend some time talking to a topologist from the U of C.
I thought I knew how I'd start my novel: Your tender toes never felt such wind but once.
Where were you in October 2003?
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