Jeff Phillips's Blog, page 8

The Golfers

I was thinking about golf today because it's been so niceout and I like walking across greens. I also had a dream last night that I wentto Hawaii to play golf. I'venever been to Hawaii and haveonly played golf a few times in my life but this sounded nice. And I thoughtabout how understandable it is that businessmen take such a liking to the golfcourse over the years, especially if they work in an office with florescentlights. 
And there's this vision among some young hipsters that people who likegolf are snobby rich assholes.
And perhaps there is a businessman on the golf course rightnow who is a nice guy, has worked hard at his job and earned his ability toafford the country club membership, but lately he has been made to feel likeshit about himself by people waving angry signs outside the building he works,claiming an absolutism that investing is evil. And so he's in a bad mood whenwe he eats lunch at the country club grill, he's started to internalize what abad person he must be, and leaves a shitty tip and the waitress takes a pictureof this and it floats around social media. And on his way home he listens tothe radio and Michael Moore makes mention to the fact that "he makes his moneythe old fashioned way, he makes things." And the businessman thinks, wait aminute, didn't Michael Moore get to make things, films, because a studio INVESTED in him, and his films made money, profit, from his particular niche,and because of this, they've continued to invest in his films and he gets toMAKE more things? But investment is an evil? Michael Moore is talking that up? MaybeMichael Moore should work a day job and make his movies via crowd funding, likeKickstarter, so he can get as far away from investing as possible.
Here's a shitty metaphor. The anger of our times needsto drive the golf ball at the hole, target itself at solutions. As opposedto chopping up the grass and pissing on lawns because they think someone is abad man because they work in the world of money. Frustration isn't eloquent. And as a result it pushes a cycle of thefortunate to retreat into their miserly side and this is reinforced again and again and they lose the ability toreason around it. And we hate them more. And then they hate us. And then we hate them more. 
I don't believe the Obama administration is perpetrating classwarfare. But class warfare is getting stirred from the ground up, it's makingthe air dirty. And for a hot moment I was like,yeah, class warfare, I'm for it! Because I don't have lot of money and I gotexcited at the notion of shaking things up. But then I pictured a nice guytrying to earn enough in his investment portfolio to retire and take his grandkids on a golfing outing someday, somewhere nice. And I'd like to someday achieve something of the likeand not feel like shitty person for accomplishing such a pleasure. I'd like to somedayto get deep financial backing on a movie project and I hope I don't turn around, likea Michael Moore, and disrespect the act of someone else allocating money on aventure. There are some out there who are wicked in their practices within thefinancial sector, and they should be dealt with if they refuse to learn theirlessons. But absolutism and generality in rage will not create meaningful change, from the top, nor from the bottom. The anger, the resentment must get more specific. The super rich don't need sticking up for, but when middle class members get lumped in and confused as must-be robber barons, the unbalanced equation requires a new variety of questions. 

Sound Idea

I was thinking I'd like to someday invest in an amusement project. Like the grooves of a record, it would be something wild to create a slide with embedded sound patterns, so they vibrated as your butt dragged down with gravity. Or a vinyl track that belted out as you sprinted. Or such grooves at the bottoms of skis. A hockey puck that chanted as it drifts atop the ice towards a goal. Perhaps it's good innovators haven't run wild with this in their products or we'd all be going nuts with superfluous reverberations. 


At the very least, I'd like a banister made of such so I could be rambunctious and go down the stairs in style. Or if tired from a day's work, languidly drag my hand across it for a melty drawl.

WingFest 2012

Last Sunday we at Wood Sugars did another video at WingFest (see last year's here) so we could be in attendance via press passes. The video we shot is top secret for the time being. I can't talk about it. I was really proud of myself because I had the opportunity to be in the chicken wing eating contest and I was very tempted, almost did it, but I decided not to because I thought it would be in the interest of self control and my acid reflux. I thought it would be more fun to taste wings gracefully, not shovel them into my mouth, but there's this weird energy at WingFest, lots of lines, and people hungry buzzed  from tailgating and so you already got this animalistic urge infecting you to push through lines for meat. And you fill up your paper basket with wings and then you chew them apart one after another. You don't care that you have wing sauce on your face, and people wear white t-shirts so they can show off wiping off their wing sauced fingers on their white t-shirt so you don't feel so bad about licking your fingers down and then wiping them off on your jeans. I probably should have just done the wing eating contest because I was still kind of hurting later, might as well make a show of it! 
I'm a glutton, I really am. Most of my posts here have to do with food because food is a big driving force of my life. They say you should go after your passion as a career, I probably should have been a chef. Jeff the chef.
I need new hobbies so I can write less about food. I am shoveling popcorn in my face between writing sentences as we speak. I need a new hobby like storm chasing. 

The Glass Fro

Today I got a hair cut. I went a long way for this hair cut, into the kitchen to ask my girlfriend to do it for me. I'm a cheapskate and haven't paid for a hair cut in probably 3 years. Usually I shave it in the summer time, and then let it grow into a mangy fro over the winter time. Until summer time. It was starting to get annoying and frizzy. Eliaz of Wood Sugars made a comment to me over a month ago about white guys with fros being distracting on film, based on what he received from someone when he sent press releases out about our film Ctrl Alt Delete. In the reply the person said "tell Jeff to get a hair cut." Although to be fair that was something we shot a year ago now, and I have indeed cut my hair since then. Yet it's grown back, thick and quick. I was also having a hard time fitting my winter hat over my head. The mass of hair pushed up and rode the thick stocking fringe above my ears and the lobes would grow cold when I was out and about. 


I wrote this piece when thinking about chopping my hair off. And thinking about winter. Those cold days when your freshly showered hair freezes. Not that we've had many of those in Chicago this winter. I have no real attachment to my hair other than I'm lazy about it and like seeing how far I can let it go. When you finally cut it, it's refreshing. I read it at You Me Them Everybody's 8x8 at the end of January.



The Glass Fro

I awoke at the spark of dawn. That red perk. Over the horizon. Taunting me to wake the fuck up and join society. And reminding me how frigid the weather had become. I reached up and rubbed my hair as I yawned. As I usually do. I snapped off a frozen strand. I dug my finger tips further into my scalp. The surface of the follicles were beyond an icy temperature. Seemingly iced over in whole, I snapped off more strands. I cringed at a sharp pain that gouged into my head. Blood smeared my cool, jittery hand. Snapping off another, the same throb ran deep. Blood ran down my forehead, into my eyes. I went and stood in front of the radiator to thaw out.
Fifteen minutes later my hair was still of this thick, smooth texture. Frustrated I snapped off strand after strand, tears running, blood joining them in a salty cheek stream. My fist ground around the hair clumps and they cut into my palm. It dawned on me these weren't ice crystals but little shards of glass. Bending down to look at my reflection in the oven window I saw my head was actually layered with the messy snarl of glassed over afropuff.
With a dirty fork sitting in the sink I began to scrape into the roots to give myself a proper hair cut. Thenastiest cut of my life. Looking back in the oven window I could see what looked almost like wet bangs and freshly showered long girl's hair. Yet as my eyes adjusted to the dark reflection I was reminded of theallusion, reinforced by the iron taste touching my tongue.
Shards gathered on the floor as I continued to snap and break it all up. It looked like a pile of wool gone bitter and berserk. With the heel of my foot I crunched it up and cursed the morning's sardonic surprise.

Green Guy's Fire

I went for a walk. Passed by a Mexican grocery up the street. I felt the impulse to stop in for fresh produce and concoct. I grabbed tomatillos, jalapenos, onions, cilantro, limes, garlic. I chopped it all up, boiled up the tomatillos til they burst, strained and ground it all up. My eyes stung and teared up from the onions, man, this onion was potent. My girlfriend felt it in the other room. My cat, sitting on a kitchen chair, had reddened eyes. Potent onion fucked me up, I stumbled around feeling drunken. Then I ate the green sauce using restaurant style tortilla chips and it had kick! I'm a white guy, so I'm sensitive. It got sinuses running. It cleared em all out. I read that spicy stuff gives you an endorphin buzz. I felt it. I felt drugged. I felt good. I kept going with my chips and the green sauce. Periodically I blew my nose. I drained what must be ten pounds of snot. I feel really good. I'm going to dig into this green sauce every day this week and lose another ten pounds of old angry snot that's been weighing me down and I'm gonna float. 

Little Bucharest

My girlfriend has class Tuesday nights so we decided to do our Valentines dinner early. We cruised through Open Table, wanting to try something different. We found Little Bucharest, up the street from us on Elston. It looked fancy, and Romanian food is a different cuisine from our usual Chinese/Thai/Sushi or Mexican dine out excursions. I arrived on time for our 7pm reservation but snow decided to hit Chicago for a change this winter season, delaying my girlfriend in traffic. I was chilled from the windy, precipitating walk. As I sat at the table alone, I got the feeling the waitstaff thought I was being stood up. When she arrived, all was a good time. I had shrimp wrapped in a leaf, on a bed of garlic couscous, tasty, complex, filling! The owner was making the rounds, he saw my clean plate and tried to mess with me "why don't you like my food what's the matter with you...hahahaha!" Then he pulled out a bottle of some kind of clear liquor, I think it was ouzo, and asked to bless my girlfriend. She politely passed as she was driving and we already had some wine. I was feeling adventurous. So he drained a considerable splash of it into my mouth, wrapped his arm around to hold a cloth to close my mouth until I swallowed it all. It burned. But it was good. He made the rounds to do this to others.
Before we left he mentioned they have free limo service for groups of six or me. So we'll be lining up a triple date. I enjoyed the ambiance of the place, very jovial. Not only was it a meal, it was an experience. It made me think of a lingering urge I've had to spend some time in a European village, where there perhaps was only one eatery. And the townsfolk gather there to feast, and drink, and have a splendid time. Elation. No worrying. Spirits in the darkened light above protein and fermented beverage.

Opinion Jungle

The internet has no shortage of opinions. It's released the flood gate of opinions. Scroll through twitter, facebook, blogs, you got your overdose of opinions. I've been guilty of this too. I've spouted off plenty of my own opinions as if others would savor reading them, and I apologize for any arrogance there.

I've become annoyed with opinions. Everyone is trying to out snark one another, like we're experts. In fact real experts are too busy to opine all over the internet. I just don't how interested I am in judgment. That's the thing. This throng of opinionaters that think they're throwing down fresh commentary are really, when it comes to it, just judging. We have too many judges out there. Live tweeting is the worst.

And here I am judging and writing about opinion. New habits die with difficulty. I read a quote by Aaron Sorkin recently, "I am all for everyone having a voice, I just don't think everyone has earned the microphone. And that's what the Internet has done. " And it makes me think about my own and what I've done to earn it. If I have. When I will have earned it. In the meantime, thank you for reading this blog if I haven't earned my voice. Though I am close to the dirty thirty. I think being a person throughout three decades must be worth something.

This is all very presumptuous of me.I ate a lot in the way of greasy foods this week, fried chicken, etc and wound up feeling depressed. My computer has been running really slow, like my arteries. Perhaps my Popeyes chicken gave my computer heart disease too.


I was going to write a post here earlier this week but my computer has been acting shitty and I got distracted trying to optimize its performance and so I didn't wind up writing the post. I forget what it was about but I feel it would have been the most brilliant thing.

This morning while waiting for the train a woman was scratching away at lotto tickets. I was hoping she'd win, rooting for her. It would be great to see her jump for joy at a life changing cash prize. I take it she didn't win. She stomped her feet at some lingering pigeons. Man, usually I'm not very quick celebrate other people's success. I get too envious I guess. But I was hoping to be selfless and get excited for a complete stranger getting lucky. 

CPS Flaw

This morning I read an article in the Huffington Post about how CPS has been losing millions to teachers that are cashing out at retirement on unused sick and vacation days. Now, my girlfriend is a hard working teacher, and I'm usually quick to defend against any suspicion of teacher perks, however this seems like a gaping flaw. I understand the idea of rewarding teachers that don't take advantage of days off, but let's remember sick days and personal days are designed to protect teachers (or any worker for that matter) against losing salary when unexpected life things come up. If they have to use them, they're protected, they get paid. If they don't use them, well, then they still get paid. In no other industry can one cash out on unused sick or vacation days. And as a result, CPS is paying out millions when that money can be used to not lay off teachers. Or to hire more teachers. Or to pay teachers more when they start teaching an extra 90 minutes a day. Award teachers for doing more! Not for just fulfilling expectations of showing up to work when they can. 


And in knowing a teacher intimately, every teacher knows that missing a day actually creates a lot more catch up work. There doesn't necessarily need to be an incentive to deter teachers from taking a sick day. Last week my girlfriend was out sick on Monday and spent the rest of the week catching up. 


Teachers get bashed enough by politicians, and I hate to add any more criticism to the field, however I felt the urge to throw down my thoughts that this act of cashing out on unused sick days is an inefficient way to reward the hard work of teachers. I'd rather that money be used to help balance the budget so that teachers don't continually face the fear of getting RIFed each spring. 


But we don't have to worry, Rahm Emanuel just found out about this and he's not happy. The King of Chicago will certainly have his way with this. 

Why I'd Be a Bad Candidate for An Acid Trip Right About Now

If some one were to hand me a box wrapped with left over X-mas wrapping paper with a few tabs of acid on the inside, it would be a terrible idea for me to partake in the contents.


Last night I had a dream my bath tub was infested with bugs. Long, wiggly, snarling, hybrids of ear whigs, tube worms, and leeches. I would see these everywhere if I took a tab. 


Yesterday I helped solve a technical issue with a client. The client was of course stressed, passing on the whole man who kicks dog syndrome of hand me down agitation. So of course not wanting to lose a client I took the whole situation seriously, to the point of paranoia. Now that the issue was resolved yesterday, the paranoia lingers that the error will re-present itself, laughing in my face. I can't seem to stop thinking about it, thus compelling me to keep checking in and probably bugging the shit out them. 


Today I went to a Mexican grocery to get stuff to make my sick girlfriend soup. Hordes of kids ran up and down the aisles. I couldn't make a step with out feeling myself spun around with their sprint made wind. At the check out the clerks were munching on apples and I couldn't understand what they were saying to me. I felt dizzy when I left. In fact, I'm feeling some congestion fill up my cheek bones with a visit from the winter depression witch doctor. Oh boy, it's true, I have felt pretty damn jolly this winter season up until this point. I need to lay out on a beach drinking canned beer with limes crammed in, soaking up the 10,000 IU of natural radiating vitamin D. My Wood Sugars counterparts are in Hawaii with their family right now. My girlfriend and I are planning an exotic trip to Milwaukee in the spring, so they can feel the pay back of jealousy. 


Clearing my head would be a good thing, and granted an acid trip would do an intense job of it. But I think instead I will compete with myself on the Wii, blaring classical music on vinyl, while sitting on the lazy boy recliner, pressing my lower back up against my heated massage pad. 


For the record no one is pounding on my door bearing gifts of LSD. And if they were, then this post would actually wind up being a misguided farewell letter blaming the end of my coherence on hybrid bugs ruining the place where I take long, hot showers.


Whenever I feel stressed, I find it reassuring to stop for a moment and remember that I am not a presidential candidate. Since everyone these days is apparently an expert on politics and character, a presidential bid is just asking to have your guts kneaded by bony hands. 

Dropping the N Word

So I did the reading at 8x8 at the Hungry Brain on Monday and it went pretty well. In my story I read, one of the characters gets accused of calling another character a "nigger." I was nervous about reading this one, and thought about swapping it out with a newer short story among some of my recent ones but this one seemed funny and since 8x8 is a mostly booked with stand up comics, I thought I should go with funny to keep the night giggly. My other recent stories are darker, twisted, not that this one isn't but it has the most laugh out loud absurd touches. So I read it, and one of the stand up comics, Will Miles, is African American, so I got even more nervous but I didn't bring other copies of my stories so I had to stick to it. And as I said, it actually went well. Someone said he got a laugh out the n word part.  


As you can see I have a lot of inexplicable white man guilt. 


I once did a play in college, about African American fraternities. It was how I met Donny Rodriguez and became good friends with him and eventually got involved with Wood Sugars. I started off playing a small part, and my character had a line that involved the n word. And I couldn't say it convincingly. I remember taking up half an hour of rehearsal because I sounded like a clunky dork trying to say it. And the cooler, smoother, natural I tried to say it, the more it just sounded dorky. Eventually the lead actor quit and I asked to take on the role. The director thought about it for a week and wound up throwing me the role because he probably didn't have any other options, the show dates were getting closer. He must not have marketed the casting announcements to the right demographic as evidenced by my getting to play the lead role in a play about African American fraternities. And we didn't use black face. 


I had a good time Monday at the Hungry Brain, enjoyed all the other acts, and wound up drinking 6 beers. I think maybe I have some liver fat clogging up the detox process because I woke up feeling like shit on Tuesday. For lunch the next day I went and got myself a shit load of breakfast food. See the thing is, and why I don't go out to bars too often, is drinking gets money flying out of my wallet. Such as in ordering drink after drink. And the next day almost dropping $15 including tip on weekday brunch to inject protein and grease into my queasy digestion. I'm giving myself a 3 beer maximum for a while. I hate losing steam the next day and getting crabby. An ineffective crab is not me at my best.