Jeff Phillips's Blog, page 13

Self Centered Sweat-shine

Last night I dreamt that I was in High School. I was trying to be a big shot on the baseball team. I had a handicapped friend with severe cerebral palsy whom I was responsible for helping get around the school. In order to go to the baseball tryout I had to leave my handicapped friend in the locker room all by himself. I had to put him in a closet room to make space. I came back after the tryouts to find him missing. After panicking, the coach startled me as he emerged from a side closet within the closet. He reamed me for leaving my friend abandoned. He assured me that he was in a safe place, but he desired to teach me a lesson and that I needed to reach new moral grounds before he would have me a star on his team.

I awoke drenched in sweat despite the AC on full blast.

This morning on the bus an old lady got on, swiped her card. It flashed an insufficient value and the bus driver tried calling her back. The old lady waddled to her seat. The driver called over that she still owed a dollar on her fare. The old lady didn't hear. Finally the driver got the old lady's attention and she rose to swipe her card again only to be badgered by the bus driver. I searched my wallet for bills to help her out of this demeaning situation but had no bills. A lady sitting near the old lady retrieved a wallet to help the old lady but the bus driver told her not to because the old lady just didn't want to pay and didn't deserve the help. The old lady wound up riding without being forced to pay the dollar but certainly had to persevere death glances from the driver. I felt the bus driver's attitude unnecessary but didn't have the guts myself to tell her to knock it off.

28 Years Kicking out My Feet

It has been a bit since I've last posted. August was a wild month featuring a trip to Minnesota, a summer cold, a handful of live sketch shows with Wood Sugars, packing up the old apartment, moving into a new one, and celebrating yet another year alive and healthy. I haven't written a damn thing in a month, and I've gotten antsy. The novel is back in revision stages, some short stories are set in motion. My energy is back up to par for daily demands after rough little kick in the calves. All through August I felt a sense of gleeful complacency knowing that my girlfriend had some extra money and had booked some movers. My first time with that, have always bribed friends with pizza and beer to help us move shit in and out of a rented U-Haul. Which had always worked well despite having lots of shit, but we figured maybe we're getting too old to expect that sort of favor. So psyched for the movers we were, everything ready in boxes, cat locked in one of the now empty bedrooms with his litter box, food, water. Everything cleaned so it would be an easy empty and returning of the keys on August 31st, the last day of our lease. 


But then the movers did not show up. They were due between 5-6pm. At 6:05pm we called to see an ETA, assuming they were just running late. Traffic can sometimes throw curve balls. No one answered. We tried again. No answer. No call from them. The patterned ensued until about 7:40pm when we lost faith that they would show. Desperation flared, here we had all of this stuff, some big furniture pieces, and the lease soon to expire. U-Haul had no availability until  10am the following morning as August 31st is one of the biggest moving days of the year. Using my BlackBerry we found a moving company on Craigslist that was hoping to put our anxieties at ease. The guy manning the phone called out to a crew finishing a job to see if they didn't mind an extra gig. They were game. But there was some mis-communication between the amount of stuff we had and a fairly small truck was sent, along with three guys. We had asked for three. Half of our stuff was loaded up before the main guy realized they wouldn't have enough room, then he started to panic about time. Even though we asked for three hours he now wanted to be done in 1.5hrs. So ultimately they only helped us move our big furniture, and milked us out of a lot of money. My girlfriend and I made trips in her four door sedan, filling up all available space to transport everything else, back and forth. We wrapped this about 5:45am. I got 30 min of sleep, she got 10 min before the next work day. My body barely held itself through the next day after what was essentially an all nighter, with physical exertion on a muggy summer day. One of those experiences that reminds you to work out more prior to such an activity. But we had expected the moving company we had hired to show up! Even after confirmation the prior day! We were quite aghast at the gall of them not even calling, we certainly understand shit comes up, but communication is what separates the professional from the piss poor mother fuckers. Allstate Movers dropped the ball. When we got a hold of them the next day (we had left several messages and didn't even receive a return call the next morning) they acted surprised that we didn't receive our service. The receptionist then said one of their drivers had a seizure, which is terrible and I feel for him, but still, could they not have called to alert their clients? She was going to speak to her manager. We still have not heard from them. I wrote them a 1 star Yelp Review. So had 3 other people on the 1st of Sept, to vent them same thing happening to them on August 31st with a No Call/No Show from Allstate Movers. But Yelp has filtered all of reviews. Perhaps because there were so many on one day and it flagged it as perhaps one person really trying to ruin a company. In this harsh economic climate I wish all small businesses success, but Allstate Movers needs to close business because they have proved unable to deliver the service they advertise and have no problem leaving you hanging. 


I will end my rant with mention of one of the repercussions. Since we didn't have the 22 ft truck we required, we didn't have room to bring my bicycle. So I had to lock it up across the street on a bike rack, outside of a well lit condo building. Both a U-Lock secured the frame and front tire to the rack, and a chain wrapped through securing frame and both sets of tires. When I went to retrieve it a few days later to ride it home, it was gone. Someone had apparently picked the U-Lock. If you see someone riding a black Jamis Commuter 1, feel free to tackle and question. 


So the week covering my 28th birthday had a rough patch, a test of patience and stamina towards bullshit. But the good news is I am moved into a new apartment and I love it. The building has been around since 1907 and has all of the original woodwork, although refinished in 1999 to keep it all nice looking. No ghosts yet, you would think perhaps an old building in Chicago might have a few spectres but it's a peaceful parlour. I also got to see Pearl Jam at the PJ20 event at Alpine Valley Wisconsin. Despite rain on that Saturday I enjoyed the rock and roll, Eddie Vedder's wine infused melodic grunting and Chris Cornell's special appearance. I have come to love the music of Liam Finn. And I still found burrs on my shoes the next morning after stepping up to be my brother's friends designated driver, hopping fences and ditches to find his car parked in some remote lot, a marshy field in Wisconsin. I was crabby during the field romp as I was still sleep deprived from the moving fiasco, but the next day I appreciated the opportunity of running around under a faint cloud covered moon in rural lands. We all need the fresh air and dark night to boot sometimes. 


So 28 has given me a kick to the teeth in ways, but I'm hoping I've met my bullshit quota for the year, getting all of that out of the way, and onward we go to glorious year, kicking ass in good ways. 

Pink Vehicle

When I was a kid I would laugh really hard whenever I would see a pink car out and about. I believe this was not a ridiculing laugh, but a happy laugh. Whenever I see a pink car out and about these days, it sort of fills me with glee. This is an image I'd like to hold onto and chuckle to. I'm currently in the throws of gearing up to move to a new apartment and I find in the final stages of packing some sort of dust gets into my soul and makes me pissy. I'd rather be the child giggling at pink cars than the grump putting his life into recycled boxes.

Snot Seizure

This week I've been fighting a harsh summer cold. I caught the common cold. I flew back into Chicago from Minnesota after a trip to visit family, and I suspect the combination of recycled air on the flight with the delayed flight, putting me back in town very late and little sleep before the next prior workday, is what did me in. It got progressively worse throughout the week with long work days and several live Wood Sugars shows late into the night. It crescendo-ed Friday morning when I lost my voice completely. I took a sick day for the first time in a long, long time. Last night I took some NyQuil for a deep sleep. At one point I awoke to use the bathroom and could barely muster the coordination to get out of bed. It was as though the sleep paralysis feature of REM sleep hadn't worn off yet. Discombobulated I stepped out of bed and walked with jarred steps like a seizure gripped me. I reached for my water glass on my bed stand and pulled it to my lips. I didn't time it right. I turned it down much before my lips hit and rushed water down my chest and legs and on the floor and my feet slipped a little bit walking over the spill. I continued to walk like a cripple to the bathroom and peed sitting down to minimize more messes in this state.

I had a vivid dream in which I was training for an ice skating competition but was practicing upon the wood tiles of a basketball court. And I skated boarded home in a dream but in a similar discombobulated, nonfunctional, spasmodic, non-coordinated struggle as my journey to the bathroom.

The Week in Review

This has been one of those weeks that bull dozes time. Been a busy week with the day job and Wood Sugars shows, with of course some after show boozing that made the early mornings the next day a little rough to get the day flowing. Our MILF show on Wednesday had a great turnout, with a quite a few randoms. Thursday's "One Night Only Show" was a lower turn out but I had a blast. We all drank some red wine before the show. I feel a bit funnier, loser the roll with the give and take of comedy performance with red wine trickling in my blood. After we went to a bar called Simon's with a weird old Swedish feel to it. I liked it. I had a little too many cans of cheap Genessee beer, I hadn't heard of it before but it was on sale and my wallet is thin so I gave it a shot. It tasted nice. But I felt a bit ill the following morning. When I arrived home after intense thunderstorms crackled.

My screenplay of Whiskey Pike unfortunately did not make it to the finalist round of the Nicholls Fellowship I had entered it into. Out of almost 7,000 entries 350 were selected for the final round of judging. I was certainly bummed but I spent some time looking back over the script yesterday and I certainly understand its imperfections. At the time I had submitted it I felt jacked that it was quite incredible but with my latest review of it, a little time and space between my last tear into, I do find there are a lot of fluff moments. I have the piece littered with little transitions, montage between scenes to show travel, whiskey biz development, etc. And on closer inspection these things are really just fat which at the time I thought would build a swell visual sprawl of the old time, wilderness landscape. And when it comes down to it a lot of that stuff is understood. And I'm again reminded that film is really tied together with the most important moments.

So I spent some time reworking it, and in a way I've been wanting to do for some time. I'm definitely interested and determined to shoot this thing out in the woods in the 5 year plan. Whereas I certainly don't think this piece will necessitate millions of dollars, being essentially a period piece, it's going to have some costs. And with film, its like holding up a microscope to the detail, which requires more money to fine tune that set and costuming detail. But being a theatre guy, having spent a majority of my time in Chicago studying theatre and putting on plays, my biggest interest in the production is the element of performance. The characters, the dynamic between the Bowermaster family members and most particularly the rivalry between Shane Bowermaster and George the Brewer, incited the new impulse in me to extract and piece together the scenes which focus on these relationships to develop what can an intense theatre piece that can still translate under a low budget. With theatre such period elements of costuming and set can be more representational and with the right lighting can take you to that place with more punch of ambiance perhaps film even can.

So this is my latest experiment with the Whiskey Pike script, tentatively titled The Whisky Infused Boom of Shane Bowermaster. I know I've gone back and forth quite a bit on whether I want to do this as a play or a film or what not. Sure I'm flip-floppy like a politician here, but it is an ambitious piece, and I want to make sure I put some good thought into how I want to commit to the first production of the piece. My next motion is to begin work-shopping the piece with actors and work towards doing a public staged reading of it in the near future to really hone the project.

This week I've also been getting pulled into watching CNN and CSPAN and MSNBC to follow the whole debt ceiling crisis. It's been like a riveting soap opera. We'll see what the dramatic conclusion is. As of this writing I hear there is McConnell bill that is "close".

Congressional Suspense, life imitating novella?

Since Congress is playin' games with the debt ceiling and budget plans, I don't feel so bad about exploiting all of this to promote my novella...or I kind of do feel bad because because it seems the ground work is being laid for things to actually happen which play out in the year 2032 in Turban Tan. I bring this piece up because what I wanted to reflect upon in this novella, I believe is becoming more and more important to acknowledge. I'm certainly not saying Turban Tan is the most important book ever written by any means, but I am biased and believe it's important enough for you to take a risk on by adding it to your pile of books to read, maybe even setting gently on top and cracking into very soon. I appreciate you taking the risk and thank you in advance for putting up with my tooting this piece during the "tense" congressional showdown.  But hey, they have an agenda, I have an agenda. They want re-election, and I want my book to be read and enjoyed. 

To grab a paperback copy -> http://amzn.com/1449918026
To grab a Kindle copy -> http://amzn.com/B003156PWI
or to explore it a little more and what it's about -> http://www.TurbanTan.com
Get lost in a good book. Thanks!

Hissy Kitchen

I am a sometimes hobbyist chef. Occasionally I'll get the sudden to take the helm on the makings of dinner and experiment with various ingredients and food stuffs in the pantry, fridge and freezer. In this fashion I have churned up some good peanut butter chicken wings, flautas, among a wide variety of seasoned meats.

For lunch today I decided to make a homemade macaroni and cheese. In the process of grating the cheese, my hand slipped and the cheese grater flung to the floor, with it bits of cheese. This is one of those moments that sets me over the edge, into a hissy fit. I started slamming surfaces and proclaiming "goddamnit! I am done! I need to get checked out for Parkinson's because I can touch shit without fucking it up!" I soon cooled off and cleaned up my mess, proceeding on with cooking up my meal.

I realize I wouldn't last for one second on one of those high pressure cooking competition shows. My meltdown would be of epic proportions. When thousands of dollars are at stake to get those cupcakes out on time for the judges to rip apart mentally simultaneously while ripping apart with their tongue and saliva, dropping one utensil in the rush would be enough send my flying off the handle.

I'm normally a level headed individual. I'll stick to my hobbyist meal preparations and take it in perspective. After all, life is messy and probably meant to be that way.

Econo-Rant

I agree that solving the Federal Budget deficit and debt ceiling is a complicated algorithm. I'm surprised that congress really hasn't seemed to acknowledge the people's cries for job creation. I would think that would be a good thing for their fiscal problem. Get more people working, making income, paying taxes. Trickle down economics is a phony philosophy that has proven not to work, only serve the accumulation of wealth of a small percentage. Solving this economic crisis is simple, get people working. They want to work. The government gets more tax money (without even having to raise taxes) to start paying down it's debt, keep itself operating, and people start buying goods and services which will then increase revenue for business. But the U.S. congress does not serve the people. It serves Lobbyists. Congress doesn't care about job creation, doesn't want job creation, because that will cut into the gargantuan profit margins of the Fortune 500, which will cut into their campaign contributions.

I think we're getting to a point in time when dealing with supply and demand that the word profit should be phased out and replaced with benefit. Profit doesn't solve. What is the physical benefit of doing business on behalf of the business owners, the employees, the customers? The delivery of a need somewhere in the pyramid of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. What does the human body do with profit? What does the soul do with profit? Perhaps I am being too literal and melodramatic here, of course money let's you buy your basic human needs; your hot dogs and potato salad for dinner, your toilet paper, your medication, and the items at the top, the self actualization, your yoga classes, scuba diving trips, hang gliding adventures. But money didn't really create that scuba gear or your prescription refill...materials did, human labor did. Material and human labor are churned through and tossed aside without much regard in the current economy, but the value of a dollar, how dare we let that slip on the index.

Commerce and governance continues to run via an engine of bullshit. The population grows, needs grow, global warming continues to bring us stronger storms than we've seen in the past yet we continue to elect and place our faith in leaders that cling to old Politcal philosophies and deny adaptation to the above. We currently have no innovators in the law making body.

I am okay with the U.S. defaulting on its debts. I am okay with all of Europe defaulting on its debts. I am okay with the value of Yuan sinking. Because maybe then, and only then, will everybody be forced to rethink how we pay for shit. The laws of supply and demand are not as fixed as the laws of chemistry, they can be altered. Hell, we can synthesize chemicals, we can synthesize buoyant economies with smart management of resources.

A little innovation, because commerce and governance continues to run via an engine of bullshit. Let's think benefit. Profit doesn't have the same ring as it once did.

Body Temp

I went through a good chunk of my adult life being ill aware that the direction in which a ceiling fan turns makes a difference whether it sucks hot air up and out or if it pushes hot air upon you. A friend was over for dinner the other night and as we don't have air conditioning at the moment, my girlfriend and I were most likely naturally bemoaning our ceaselessly sweaty brows. He posited a simple, observational question on which direction our fans spun. We kind of disregarded it at first, like, what difference does it make, it's blowing! But he persisted and said let's try it. So we did. And we stood beneath its blow and felt the difference and he was a correct gentleman. So the day before the hottest two days of the summer (so far) we got it straightened out. Strangely I feel a touch of de ja vu on this fan directional knowledge, that it felt familiar somehow, that I actually did know of this fact and yet somehow over the course of my 27 years of brain collected information about the world, this bit had been squeezed to the far back of my awareness of simple, everyday inefficiencies. I can't help but feel embarrassed, as the next day at work I mentioned to my colleagues my new found nugget, as though I had discovered something radical about home economics. And they all nonchalantly proclaimed their previous knowledge of the fact. Everyone in the world knew of this trick except me and my girlfriend. And my girlfriend is a smart cookie. Although even more embarrassing is that subconsciously I knew of this fan directional shit and did not make any steps to ensure our fan correctness beforehand, two years in this apartment and these were not the first hot days we've suffered here. But a problem solved is a problem solved.

Something else we've been trying is filling a bucket of ice and setting it in front of a box fan and works a little like a makeshift AC unit. Certainly not as intense, but helpful.

I spend most of the day under the blast of AC at work, which makes the heat even more overwhelming at the end of the day. I'm wondering if air conditioning is making us wimpier as a species. Sure there's global warming, but mankind has survived through heat waves for hundreds of thousands of years, and a now a high day in the 90s shuts us down and in. Productivity slips....slips...slips, like the sweat of our pits. Going from extremely cool conditions certainly cannot be the best thing for the human body. A bit shock going on to the internal temperature regulation organs. I really think it fucks with our body's ability to regulate body temperature. Yet I won't complain about the high AC at work. In fact I highly look forward to go back to it tomorrow. Even if it puts recycled dust into my throat. My pits will be comfortably regulated by electricity.

A Nation Buried Alive Needs the Right Spiritual Spade, and That Spade is Not Money

I've been watching the show Cities of the Underworld on the History channel. It documents and shows underground tunnels and chambers of different historical focuses. Yesterday I watched an old one on a bunker in  West Virginia underneath the Greenbrier 5 star hotel. This was the place where congress would be rushed off to in the event of nuclear holocaust during the cold war. Once entering they would be stripped, showered and issued military uniforms, which set a weird image in my mind of old white dudes walking around in fatigues and how that would alter their partisan relations.

Today I watched one on Vietnam and the intricate network of tunnels below the jungles and a whole underground village under the coastal town of Vinh Moc. Dug out by bare hands. Thick clay. My girlfriend asked me if I thought Americans would rally together to dig out and cooperate on a safe haven. And I wonder if they would. I don't mean to knock on Americans necessarily, but there is their air of uncertainty about the degree of governmental and personal roles in shaping a nation and reacting to crisis. If a war were to suddenly land on American ground, our spirit as a nation of solutions and production is currently wounded, and I'm our resolve is in a doughy shape. I'm not talking about patriotism. There's plenty of that as evidenced by the rowdiness of 4th of July weekend. I'm talking about my worries of us as a nation of innovative adaptability. If you look at our congress, our lawmakers, everyone seems to clinging to old models. Republicans vs democrats. This worked. That worked. Well in the end you look at our economic situation, none of this or that worked in the long run. It's got us in a trench without the right tools to dig us out.

This is America. We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Yet I don't feel that confidence emanate from much of the American population. The old feeling of local comraderie seems to be thinning with the enlarged communications of the global population. And America is battered by big worries about business. Business complexities. The complexities that have popped kinks in a nation that has become a business.

America is a melting pot of creativity and as a people we need to get that jiving back whether Wall Streets wants to share with Main Street, whether congress can shift gears and become a little more solution minded or not. I want to see all of us people, not wait on the big business men to sprinkle vitality on us through paychecks, but to find a way to eat, and play and make things without the agreed upon nonsense of money.

I've read about various forms of community currencies popping up as experiments. I read about one example in Japan where say for example you help out a neighbor by picking up his kids when he's sick. You in turn get a token which you can redeem for goods or services in the community, say, get a cup of coffee.

My question to us is do we really want to let our cities and states degrade while money figures out what it wants to be for us? Or do we want to create or own local systems for providing basic human needs and joys in a fair and organized way to reward those who want to pitch in and contribute? I don't mean to harp on and denigrate Americans and world citizens, this really applies to the whole world, but what the fuck, this economic crisis is bullshit and we're all agreeing to this bullshit preventing us to think outside the cardboard box and get shit done.

A nation buried alive needs the right spiritual spade, and that spade is not money.