Tuesday, July 15, 2008

no sleep, no record shopping

[10 July]For the second time two nights in a row, I have woken up absolutely wide awake at 3 am. It’s amazing how wide awake you feel when you don’t want to be wide awake at all. It seems to me I have never been so wide awake! This must be something akin to ‘I have never felt so alive!’ Anyway so this is my 4th day in Chicago, and the day my conference actually begins (though not until the afternoon).

There is no doubt now that it is jet lag, but the extreme warmth of this most unpleasant room in a major hotel chain is another factor, and so I have set the air conditioning to arctic.

[13 July]I am extremely tired, overtired some might say, and feel like I am doing a high-wire act which will end all of a sudden when I run out of money and I crash into the street below. But it’s OK. I won’t really crash. Bill Meyer took me out to a place called the Velvet Lounge on Friday night to see Fred Anderson play saxophone with a marvellous band. It was marvellous. (that is my review).

[14 July] A few months ago I had a dream that I was in Chicago and I forgot to do any record shopping. Damn! Anyway here I am in Chicago and I have actually done no record shopping. When I went out with Bill M on Friday night I said something to him like 'oh yeah, where are the record shops?' and he said something funny like, 'exactly', which was a great 2008 music enthusiast's comment, and I applaud it. But he told me and I then forgot/neglected to do anything about it. Tonight I remembered and there is a Reckless Records up the road a long way from where I am - it might take half an hour on the L etc - but what do I want? And why do I want to spend money in that way? Wait till NY. Maybe something will seize me and I will become myself again. Meanwhile I am just happy here in front of the computer eating my swag from Trader Joe's - a 'Strawberry Smoothie' (actually, just a juice drink, not a milk drink), some Organic Tortilla Longboard [corn] Chips, Dried Dragon Fruit, Dried Bartlett Pears, bagels, and an apple. I still have a bag of chilli dried mango from my last Trader Joe's visit, but I ate the Banana, Flattened today - it was very nice (whole dried squashed banana AND NOTHING ELSE). Come to think of it, that was pretty much all I did eat today - weird. And a bagel this morning. Then I went off to Schaumburg, a place described to me (fairly accurately) as an edge city but which I had to look at for its space use. Its use of space, nothing to do with outer space exploration, incidentally. I took the Metra to Schaumburg because I had figured out how to take the Metra by this stage, and I like it (it's not the L, it's a separate network that takes you much further throughout Chicagoland, with a very cool interior arrangement of upstairs and downstairs, see pic)
Every time I rode on it, I was upstairs. Today, going to Schaumburg, I travelled in sight of what I assume was a mother and early teenage daughter, daughter had a rubber baby which they were taking turns cuddling, sometimes daughter would cuddle the baby and mother would put her arm around her/them. I'm not judging anybody, just reporting, I don't think anyone was I N S A N E and besides I was probably the only one there who had purchased chili dried mango and was going to Schaumburg to look at spaces. It was hot out there, by the way and in a way desolate. I wasn't on my I heart suburbia kick today, somehow, though parts of it will haunt me in a compelling way.

I have run out of salsa, fuck it.

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