Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Diary: In October 1981.
I don't remember a thing.
Where were you in October 1981?
3 comments.
Diary: October, 1991.
I was in 7th grade, and had recently auditioned for, and cast in, the Junior High Drama Club's inaugural production of The Wizard of Oz. I was to play the Wizard. The play quickly became my new social group and, between that and band, I must have asked five or six girls to go out with me. They all said no, and I learned that an assembly-line approach to dating is not efficient. For some weird reason it gives people the impression that their individuality is incidental.
At this time I was also reading Dracula by Bram Stoker, and devouring it. The book filled me with suspense and while it took maybe a week to get through the first section by Jonathan Harker, I read the rest in just a few days. I called it my favorite book, and read my Dungeons and Dragons Ravenloft supplements to get a better sense of Vampires. Ravenloft talked about the "gothic" which was a word I understood in a palpable, visceral sense more than any particulars:
Gothic was a location afflicted with limited light.
Gothic was cool and beautiful and lonely.
Gothic was old; a broken and decrepit relic of something that had once been powerful and inspiring.
Gothic was windy and autumnal.
These were my happenstance impressions based on the sound and shape of the word and whatever associations and imagery I had built in on my own. A few years back, when I reread Longinus' theories on the submlime, I'm amazed how close I got to grasping the "gothic" in '93, just by chance, and knowing nothing about the Romantics or about Germanic tribes and the legacy of the Roman Empire.
At any rate, my 4th hour Skills for Adolescents somehow got into a debate about the existence of God, with me taking on the "nope" view. Mr. Gromak had, of course, spoken in my favor, saying that I thought about things seriously – that I was reading Dracula, "one of the classics," (in fact, he knew this because he had told me to put it away after catching me reading it in class). The other kids took this as proof of some sort of satanic inclination, and harassed me until I started crying and ran from the room (drama queen that I am was). Mr. Gromak chased me out and assured me that I wasn't a satanist, and I remember after school I walked over to my grandmas, throwing walnuts through the holes in the chain-link fence.
I learned my lines.
I made lists of girls I could date and thought about how much I really really wanted a girlfriend.
I pored over Ravenloft and thought about this "gothic" thing.
Where were you in October 1991?
2 comments.
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?
1 comments.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Diary: In October 1984.
I remember essentially nothing.
I was six years old and in 1st grade at the Valley School, in Gail's class, and finally taking a few steps toward reading. Steps further into arithmetic. I would have been into dinosaurs, and drawing a lot of pictures of them, but I was also increasingly fascinated by space travel. I presumably fought with my little sister a lot. My friends from school were Brian, Scott, Andy, and Aashish, and I went to visit Brian in Flint Township at one point. I was also friends with many of the kids on the block. This might have been the year I went for Halloween as a Dinosaur... in fact, I think that must have been the case, because it was probably the next year that I went as a witch.
I wish I remembered more.
Where were you in October 1984?
2 comments.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Diary: In October, 1999.
September 1999 had been a big month. I want to say that October began a few days after my Flint friends – Josh, Sarah, Sam, Mitch, and Bree – had headed home and I went down to the Pit for a ginger ale with Cynthia and Armand.
Wracking my brain, I cannot remember all of the classes that I took that quarter. I think I was taking a Biology sequence. Not one of the Nat Sci sequences (because I fashioned myself a badass), but nothing for geniuses either. It frustrated me. Biology classes always do. I think I took a G.S. Hum criticism course as well. Not the one with Ted Cohen (that was my Fourth Year), but the one with Herman Sinaiko. Maybe.
Certainly Claudia Allen's Playwriting class was the most memorable. I was listening to the Lords of Acid's Voodoo U nightly, but then the new Tori Amos, To Venus and Back came out, and I added it to my rotation. It was somehow less abstruse than Choirgirl Hotel, while also being meatier and more supple. With songs like Lust, Suede, Spring Haze, and Concertina, I never figured out why so many of my friends considered it a bomb. The last was partial-inspiration for a scene of the same name that I wrote for Claudia's class. Rachel Silverman acted it out, quite effectively, and this might have been the academic high point of my entire college experience. I still have it, somewhere.
This week, whatever week it happened (Fourth Week) was the key to my Autumn Quarter. See, you all think that I'm silly for giving the years names, but it really vied for a long time with a system similar to the British habit of naming eras after their monarchs. I'd develop long-term, hopeless crushes on unattainable girls, and while I was already naming years, I often thought of them in terms of these romantic unfulfillables. It wasn't fair to me, myself, since it inevitably overshadowed my own achievements and other experiences. It also meant that I was putting humans up on pedestals, which is, ahem, unwise. During the summer I fell hard for A.S., and during winter break, I fell almost as hard for A.H. In Chicago, my crush for S.A. was not mild, but certainly gentler and less encumbered by delisions of reciprocity. It's probably part of the reason that I had such a productive quarter, as well as why that autumn was slightly less memorable than the months before or after.
The whole thing with S.A. started in the Playwriting class when Rachel read my "Concertina" piece, and S.A. asked if I was a Tori Amos fan – if the piece had had anything to do with the song. That was the moment when the crush started off, and I consulted with Armand and began various dorky strategems of my own.
I wasn't a complete romantic wash, however. I'd had encounters the prior summer, in sufficient numbers to have a bit of experience and know what I as doing. It was just that I could never evoke the response I wanted from the person I wanted. An example of this happened walking back from the Reynolds Club one night early that month, when Armand (?) and I ran into AJ and one of is friends. As we walked back to BJ, Armand talked to AJ and I talked to his friend. We hit it off and she followed me back to my room where we talked for another hour or so. She explained that she was bummed because October had always been a good month for her romantically – 100% of the time in fact – but here it was the 15th and there was no sign of anything happening. I commented that, well, if Halloween rolled around and none of the fish were biting, she was free to stop by.
You should never say something like that if you don't mean it from the core of your being.
I could flirt and even deliver pickup lines, but if S.A., for example, wasn't interested, then all of the flirting in the world wasn't going to make a difference. On the other hand, I went (in a bit of a cowardly way) to hide in Armand's room on Halloween, because a housemate (Ed) had told me that the "October Girl" was looking for me.
This was before our dorm became haunted; that was to happen in November.
And speaking of Armand, the most exciting weekend of the month really revolved around his 21st birthday, Halloween, officially (this might have actually happened the first weekend in November?). He was one of the most popular people in the dorm, and so unassuming that four of us, individually and independently, decided to throw him a surprise party. We ended up combining our plans with the effect that I don't know if Armand's ever fully recovered from that weekend. On Friday Lisa M. and I were to ride to Minnesota with him to visit his friend at Carlton College (since nobody had planned anything for his birthday). We took the Red Line up to Wrigleyville (during which I got into an argument with a Scientologist) and borrowed Lisa's brother's car. From there, we drove north toward Wisconsin, taking a detour to Rockland where we were to covertly rendezvous with Ben, Liz, and Armand's friend (whom we had arranged to transport to Chicago). I was to make contact with the second group, but they had been delayed, and I had to leave on the pretext of snatching a cool looking sign. An hour later, the connection finally happened. Armand was relieved just enough to not be angry with us. The next day, we threw a party at Ben's apartment, and after hanging out there for several hours, I took Armand out to the Checkerboard for some Blues. It started a great new tradition, in fact, cut short only when the Checkerboad closed due to missed rent payments (though I believe it's open again in Hyde Park now). The lounge even had their own driving service; an old man in a beat up Buick brought us back home.
Other things were going on, of course. I had spent most of the month readying my proposal for Artaud's Cenci for University Theater. I made at least one or two trips to Canaryville. There was certainly one night when Irinia, Bela, Lisa, Liz, Ben, Armand, Chris, and I all made a picnic dinner and ate it in the grass on Stagg Field. We threw a frisbee, and tried to jump high enough to touch the goalposts, but we couldn't.
Where were you in October 1999?
2 comments.
Monday, October 08, 2007
Diary: In October, 1987.
In October, 1987.
I don't remember anything about October, 1987, really.
Actually, I do think I can scare up at least one memory with some reliability:
I would (I believe) have been a Wolf Scout in Cub Scouts in Flushing. This means that this would have been the month where I fell victim to an overactive imagination and got scared by thoughts of the headless horseman at a pumpkin carving Cub Scout meeting. Prompting my mom to go to bat for me: she was talking on the phone about it after I had gone to bed.
I believe gymnastics had been attempted and abandoned, and figure skating was in full swing. We would have had the Disney Channel at this point, but not a Nintendo. I don't think we'd gotten the computer yet, but we did have a VCR. I would have been aware of Santa Claus (but evidently not the Headless Horseman). It was two years before the paper route and almost a year before discovering Dungeons and Dragons. Victor from church was not a friend at this point but Justin was (a situation which would reverse). My best friend, though, was Jeff from across the street, and now that we'd joined forces after years of war, we could terrorize the younger Teslars a block away. Well, okay, "terrorize" might be a strong choice of words.
I can place a lot of contexts here: what had already happened or what happened yet. But 1987 was long-enough ago that I don't remember anything specifically. Except that cub scout meeting, and my mom on the phone.
Where were you in October 1987?
1 comments.
Monday, October 01, 2007
Diary: In October, 1995.
The randomization of these accounts of months has been weird lately... they almost seem to be pointing toward an actual narrative.
If you like you can pick up here from September 1995, and the huge house-wrecking party described at the end of that entry actually happened in October.
At said party I played my electric clarinet. What this meant was that I electric taped a microphone to the bell (with the effect that notes went way flat), plugged in my amp, and ran up to stary playing. As long as I could continue without losing breath, the feedback distorted in a way that would have worked nicely onstage with a rock band. Unfortunately, this ghettoish setup was as sophisticated as I ever got.
Compared to roucous September, October was a month of meditation and recalibration. I borrowed Vitalogy from Greg and listened to it practically every night. Some days, I'd listen to "Immortality" a few dozen times in a row in my room. There was a lot of lying on my back on my bed and staring at the ceiling. I drove with my sister to Sunset Hills in Flint Township and drove around, studying and exploring the crematory grounds, obelisks, and mausolea. I wasn't a goth. I wasn't obsessed with death. I was intrigued by autumnal decay. This was, after all, the coldest year I can remember. The leaves had started turning in late September; they fell in mid-October. Michigan wouldn't really warm up for good until late May.
I was changing in other ways as well. I had really come to a point from which procrastination was no longer possible. Through tenth grade, I'd drawn pictures in class all day, came home, and listened to music all evening. I also had plans to go to Northwestern University at best, and the U of M at worst. These two lifestyles were becoming quickly incompatible... I'd taken the college prep course at high school, and both Algebra III/IV and Chemistry were ready to hurt me if I didn't pick up the pace. Northwestern wouldn't love a few Cs and Ds in meat-and-potatoes classes my Junior year. So I was studying pretty hard every night – a change from the intense fits and starts that had gotten me through other years – and while Chemistry continued to suck hard, I gradually brought Algebra under control. I think my mom was impressed that I was finally doing homework without coercion. I started writing poetry, and my Creative Writing teacher said, "Connor, this is amazing."
Northwestern held an information session in Grand Rapids, and my parents drove me out there. We sped up and down the hills and the trees were spectacular, veiny redshot and orange. We spent the afternoon with my grandma, and stopped at a particular scenic view where I noticed graffiti left by an exchange student from Flushing. On other days, Paul and I would go to my grandma's house to watch a cable-only special on the war in Bosnia. We were also planning an educational theater workshop series. I spent a lot of time on the phone with Brandi. Mitch and I talked about starting a band, but we never really got it together. I spent most evenings at home.
Toward the end of the month, though, something had developed. My heroes, the Smashing Pumpkins, were preparing to release their first album in the over-a-year since I had discovered them. It was a double album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and it was the biggest news in Alternative music since Kurt Cobain has lost several pounds very quickly. From my own unbiased perspective. I was picking up my brother and sister from junior high when I heard Bullet with Butterfly Wings for the first time. I was pulling in my driveway when I heard 1979. I had to get this album on the day it came out. I had to. But I didn't have a job or any money. I would receive some money for bringing home good grades, but my parents hadn't received my report card yet.
On the week before it came out, I listened to Gish, Pisces Iscariot, and Siamese Dream especially, putting myself in the proper spiritual frame of mind to be up-to-speed and fully receptive.
On the night before it came out, the debut concert at the Chicago Riviera broadcast via Simulcast, and I listened from my parents' Saturn, parked in our garage in Flushing, Michigan. I huddled in the cold with a tape recorder perched on my lap and watched the carbon light streak through slats in the wooden walls. I went to bed at about one in the morning.
The next morning I borrowed $20 from a classmate. The moment that school was over I bolted down to Best Buy and bought the new album. I took it home and listened straight through, reading the lyrics as I went. My brother and sister got home from their music lessons. Somewhere in the house, there was an argument about responsibility or something. My room was a mess. The light was on, and it made a contrast next to my windows as the sun went down and even the Poplars outside went purple and black. The songs that impressed me the most that night are – for the most part – not the songs that impress me today. I liked "To Forgive" and "Cupid de Locke". I still like "In the Arms of Sleep." I wasn't particularly impressed with that album on the first listen, but it continued to challenge me, and still challenges me twelve years later.
A week later, right before Halloween, my friend Mitch tried to get me to skip school to go into Flint with him. I didn't. I was worried about being caught, and anyway, I felt like I was catching a nasty cold. In fact, I was in bed most of Halloween night with a headache and a stuffed nose. But that's okay. I was way too old for trick-or-treating anyway.
Where were you in October 1995?
1 comments.
