Chivalry is Not Dead

I was off to work this morning, awaiting the bus at Sedgwick and Scott per usual. CTA is still a twat if ever there was one, but how else am I going to get to work, bike? Fuck that. As much as I'd love to start each day of my rewarding, soul-enriching job with an ass crack full of sweat, I can't bring myself to do it. Besides, you're playing with your life if you ride your bike to work in Chicago. Between the cabbies who collectively think that Khartoum rules apply and bus drivers who are too busy sexting their baby daddy to check their mirrors, it is not a matter of if but rather when you are being scraped off LaSalle Street. My neighbor does it most every day sans helmet, but he is tall, dark and handsome, so I think people give him a wide berth because of that. And come to think of it, why the fuck am I going to work anyway? Total coward move showing up there everyday, ON TIME no less. Pussy if ever there was one. A real man would have told them he was resting his balls on their chin long ago. But long ago is also the same era when I was actually a real man.

Moving on. While I awaited my chariot for the poor a man teetered by slowly on a bike, a well-known crackhead chasing him on foot. He finally stopped the bike and in very modern business-like fashion asked of her, "Bitch, what the fuck you on my dick fo?" The negotiations finally under way, she replies "Man, you know the fuck I need!" Shrewd as an Arab trader, was she. "Show me that paper first." The buyer in the transaction pulled out what appeared to be some local currency that had been wadded up and stored inside of a cat's asshole for a week while the apartment was being swept by looters. "What dis look like mutherfucker?" The proprietor of the bicycle pharmacy inspected the balls of negotiable bills with the care of a diamond dealer. You simply cannot teach this shit at Wharton. And here is what I would refer to as a teachable moment: The dealer pulls out his hand brandishing numerous pills and says, "Alright bitch, which one you want?" Chivalry is NOT dead! He was well within his rights to swat the unsightly bills from her hand and tell her to come back with her shit together. He could have very easily sold her the fucked up looking pill that his pit bull tried to eat until he kicked him in the balls causing a saliva-soaked pill to ricochet off his baby's face. But no, as a sign of good faith for producing actual paper money and not a handful of urine-soaked pocket coins or some menthol cigarettes and some Jujubes, our salesman allowed this misshapen maiden to choose the pill she wanted and not the one he most wanted to rid himself of. Remember this the next time you are trying to decide whether or not to hold the door for a woman. The manners must have been contagious as the woman bade him "Thank you" before nearly crawling back to her abode to--we assume--swallow that pill along with a 22oz pounder of Steel Reserve and all her childhood dreams.

I'm unsure of what exactly he sold her. From a short distance and in broad daylight--as these co-conspirators could have given a flying fuck where they were or who was watching--it appeared to be pills of some sort. I assume oxycontin but really the sky's the limit. It could have been crack I guess. However, what I know of crack production it seemed the items in his hand were of too clean a line to be rocks cut from home-cooked cake with a Stanley knife. So I'm going with oxycontin. But I'm sure it could have been something else, something really cool that I don't even know about. That is what a sack of shit I've allowed myself to become. I don't even know what drugs the kids are doing these days. Sure, I know about those really fun-sounding bath salts that make you shit your pants and suck blood from the neck of HIV-Positive vagrants, I'm not that out-of-touch. Marijuana is still there and never going away. Kids are probably still doing coke and I think I've read where heroin is so hot right now that even kids in boring fucking places like Naperville are overdosing on it. But maybe there is some new shit where if your girlfriend huffs it from a burning pan and blows it into your eyes your dick will glow and you can screw for hours without joy or any hope of climax? And how sad that I don't know shit about it. Cycle of life I guess. Pretty fucking depressing when pondered. Although offered a couple of times I've never tried oxycontin. It seems like a pretty kick-ass time. Everyone I've ever seen on it is having a blast laying half-off a sofa in a puddle of their own drool with their eyes rolled back in their heads as an overly loud infomercial blares away in the background. But as awesome as that obviously is, I was too scared I would have such a great time that I wouldn't wake up....ever. Yeah I know, but to be honest I'm just not a carpe diem kinda guy. Oh well, world needs straight alcoholics too.

Hey, Thanks for the Ciggy Hit Fucko!

Walking to work this morning from the bus drop off.  Feeling pretty, pretty, pretty fucking sprightly this morning if I do say so myself.  For maybe the 5th time since her glorious birth, my daughter awoke only once in the night, allowing me nearly 7.5 hours of sleep.  5-6 has been the norm.  I had a nice workout at the gym.  Even did a weight check, and my fat ass has dropped a couple of pounds of baby weight.  I know I didn't carry the baby, but I've been eating for two regardless.  So I'm fairly well prancing east on Adams toward the office.  Then, much like the randy teenagers who have been fucking like rabbits with reckless abandon for several months only to see a + sign appear on an at-home pregnancy test, my perfect world came crashing down around me.  Positioned in a most lazy, partially-standing pose, was some fat, bearded, stenching vagrant.  Due to the tendinitis in my foot and my innocent nature, the fight-or-flight message being blasted out from my brain was lost in translation.  End result was my taking, full on broadside, a giant ciggy smoke exhale.  Right to the fucking Chevy Chase brah.  I coughed and stumbled to the side as if shot.  I cast a menacing glare in this crumb-bum's direction, but he was oblivious to anything occurring in the world outside of his cigarette and the Bachman-Turner Overdrive concert from 1974 that plays continuously and loudly inside his head.  Just this dirty, shit-eating grin, staring right past me.  I was just a cunt hair away from beating the shit out of him right in front of rush hour pedestrian traffic.  And by "beating the shit out of him", I mean "storming away furious, fantasizing that I was one of those guys who just punched people in the face".  At some point during those fantasies I usually remember that I'm 5'6", and a pussy.  But c'mon bro, you've got to be fucking kidding me???  A heater blow right in my grill at 08:15 in the a.m.  What a fucking penis.  Ruined my whole morning.  I don't intrude on your morning routine by spraying you with Lysol and hitting you in the face with a bar of soap, so why you gotta fuck with me?  And great way to spend your pan-handling money dude.  A $10 pack of nutritious, delicious, refreshing cigarettes.  I don't understand cigarettes.  It is well documented that I am a great hater of cancer-sticks.  I have many friends and relatives who smoke, and I've got nothing against them personally.  I just don't get it.  Cigs don't get you high or drunk, they are expensive, they taste like shit, they are hot, they make your mouth taste like cat hair, and turn your fingers yellow.  Oh, and they kill the fuck out of you.  I think that covers all of their many attributes, all positive.  Anyway, fuck that vagrant and the invisible horse he rode in on.  It made me wish my friend Gerald still lived in Chicago.  He was a famous bum pugilist.  Just because you shit in an alley didn't protect you from his fists.     

Life is a Zero-Sum Game

I will not attempt to torture the reader or myself with the full explanation of what a zero-sum game is. This was a particularly painful epoch in my past during my Economics major training. My professor was an in-the-closet homosexual, and also a sadist, who took out his frustrations of not being able to live freely and happily as a gay man on the students who paid him to teach them. It was not teaching, it was sadistic torture. So in layman's terms, a zero-sum game is that in which gains are offset exactly by losses, and nothing is created or destroyed. As I crossed from the west side of LaSalle Street to the east side at Adams, where my building is located, I was accosted as I am most mornings by a local vagrant. I don't know his name, but I think I know his game. He is white, has a long ponytail (which I suspect is a George Carlin-like "skullet") flowing from beneath a military beret. He usually wears combat fatigues. His face looks like someone put a brush fire out on it with a pitchfork. And also, his legs are both amputated at the knee. He tries to play the wounded Vietnam veteran who has fallen on hard times angle. I don't personally buy it, but if he can get away with it, then kudos to him. I speculate his amputations are more likely the result of shooting smack into his toes one too many times, then ignoring the stench of gangrene in his lower extremities as he chased the dragon through Honolee. But if he wants to tell people he lost the legs 50 clicks up the Danang, I'm not going to stop him. Some sample greetings (and these are real) that I have received from him are as follows:
"Good morning, have a great day sir"
"Hummnnnnaaa farfffallffffelll mmmiiinnnnggggeeeennie"
(and my personal favorite) "You're all a bunch of fucking CUNTS!"
So you never know what you are going to get. As I pass him most days I think, "I am glad I'm not that dude". Today I decided that line of thinking is erroneous. I have a warm home, a wife, a dog, regular meals. But I also have payments to make, schedules to keep. Oh, and I walk into a building each morning to sit at an ugly desk and whore myself out for 8 hours of soul-crushing white collar labor for people who don't care if I fuck off and die on my way home tonight. Meanwhile Ron Kovic out there in the wheelchair doesn't have steady meals, unlikely has a warm home or a wife. But you know what? He doesn't have to pay shit. No one squeezes his soul through a cheese cloth each day so that someone he's never met can make more money than 1,000,000 people together would not have need for. He's out there doing whatever the fuck he wants all day, and all he has to do is figure out how to get high every 12 hours or so. So I guess you could tell him that I have a comfortable condo and a car and a designer mutt. But he might, very fairly, fire back "At what cost?". Touche Ron Kovic, touche. And now I know, it all evens out. For my seeming glut of comfort in domesticity, he has an equal but opposite overabundance of freedom. And this is why life is a zero-sum game.