Wendy McClure

Author and Professional Obsessive.

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The weekend and beyond

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You have better things to do than stalk me, but I’ll make it easy and let you know that I’ll be at the Touch and Go Fest for most of this weekend, especially Saturday, when I’ll be a volunteer beer-ticket-seller. The volunteering is on behalf of Literacy Works, a fine organization which believes in the power of learning. Learning and beer. While I work I may be wearing my Fuck Macy’s T-shirt, since Saturday is the day the Marshall Field’s name dies. (And yes, I know it’s just a department store and I almost never shop there anyway, but at least half of my earliest memories of Chicago are set in the State Street store, so do not underestimate my hoary nostalgia for this stuff.) Anyway, I’ll be volunteering at the fest until about 3 PM, at which time Chris will insist that we go see The Ex perform. (Which is a band, not a person. And not, you know, a band I used to date, or a band made up of people I used to date, which would be a nightmare, since they’d probably write songs called “She Always Interrupts Herself (And Goes Off On Some Weird Tangent)” and “Too Much Diet Coke.”)

And hey, I’m doing a Ragdale Residency again. As of next weekend I’ll be there until the end of the month, writing some new stuff. I wrote part of INTNM there in 2004, which was helpful because I was trying to finish the book, but this time, I don’t have any kind of deadline. To be honest, I’m sort of terrified. I want to work on new things, but I also want to play house with my boyfriend and watch Robot Chicken. But it’s only two weeks, and I have nothing to be afraid of except the contents of my head, right?

Happy camp and the last of the Bad Times

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I liked camping. The camping we did this past weekend wasn’t “real” camping, where you take nothing but pictures and leave nothing but footprints; it was the sort of camping where you take nothing but the beer-can chicken your hosts offer you and leave nothing but dubious initials on the “high score rankings” screen on Atari Pole Position in the campground game room. A-S-S is #1! Other snickery activities of the weekend included playing that road trip game where you read signs aloud and add the phrase “under the sheets,” except we used the phrase “in your ass” instead. Our favorite sign in this game was Pack Hot Dogs, Not Firewood. I’m sorry.

Wow, if the number of comments is any indication, you all really love to talk about the Bad Times. I have only a couple points to add to the discussion: first, that after some painstaking research I’ve determined that any Dominick’s that’s a just plain old Dominick’s and not a Dominick’s “Fresh Store” (in other words, a Not So Fresh Store), has a remarkably high incidence of Bad Times. Second, I believe that the misery experienced in Wal-Marts and KMarts is simply par for the course for those stores and should not be characterized as Bad Times phenomena. THAT IS ALL.

More Bad Times and other bitchiness

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Wow, I almost forgot to tell you about my Bad Times at a CVS! It was in the parking lot at the Western and Elston location one night a few weeks ago. Chris and I were stopping there on our way home. I’d started to pull into a parking space when I saw an even closer spot along the side of the building, and directly across the aisle from me. For some reason I decided I HAD to park in that spot—that I would be a total chump to not park there, considering that all I had to do was coast straight ahead five yards or so. There were no cars in between, only open space and a single pigeon puttering around. I pulled ahead a few feet and stopped.

“I’m waiting for the pigeon,” I told Chris. Somehow it hadn’t flown away yet. There were parked cars on either side, so I couldn’t just drive around the pigeon. I rolled forward—slowly—and stopped again. Now I couldn’t see the pigeon.

“It flew away, right?” I asked Chris. “It had to have flown away,” he said. I pulled ahead into the parking spot and turned off the car. I had a funny feeling, though, and sure enough, when I looked back there was a crumpled ball of grey feathers right where I’d driven.

We got out and just stood by the car and stared for a minute. “How did I manage to kill it?” I said out loud. I was a little stunned. I wanted to blame my car. Maybe my Subaru Forester was a big clumsy killer, I thought, just like the halfwit in Of Mice and Men.

“Don’t worry about it,” Chris said. “It’s the city. It’s a dead pigeon.”

Another couple had come out of CVS and were walking to their car, which, as it turned out, was pretty much right next to the dead pigeon. The man had just walked over to the driver’s side when he spotted it a few feet away. He stopped, rather dramatically. “I think you just took out a bird,” he said.

I nodded. “Yeah, I guess so,” I said. “Weird, huh?”

But the guy just stood there, frozen with either horror or disgust. He opened his car door as if to get in, but then froze again. Definitely with digust. “God,” he said. He shook his head. “God,” he said again. The woman who was with him waited on the passenger side of the car. “Honey?” she said. “Let’s go.” The man looked at us one last time. He actually sighed. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

We could feel him glaring at us through the windshield as he started his car. “Does he think I ran over that bird just to ruin his day?” I asked Chris. “He thinks that, doesn’t he?”

“Good for you,” Chris said, and then we went in to shop at CVS. Though we have yet to determine whether this incident makes this CVS a Bad Times CVS.

In other news, USA Today liked my book just fine last year and thought us bloggers with book deals were just peachy, but apparently Stephanie Klein’s book sucks so bad that the rest of us now suck in retrospect. Awesome! Thanks, Stephanie Klein!

(Also, I hope Carol Memmott writes more publishing trend sidebar pieces about books written by people who got their start writing things that totally weren’t even books. Like maybe she can write about all those journalists who only got their book deals because they’re journalists, and who don’t make the USA Today Best-Selling Books List because, in the end, they’re nothing but journalists who can’t write anything as good as The Kite Runner or The Clique #6: Dial L for Loser (A Clique Novel) and therefore ought to go back to journalism, where they were “bigger” anyway, according to the latest hypothetical un-statstical non-data she’ll totally forget to cite.)

Side note 1: I’m going camping in Michigan this weekend, so any comments left after tonight may not appear on the site until Sunday night or Monday. Though, hey, if you’re a disgrunted Stephanie Klein fan, maybe you’ll just leave a multiple one-star reviews on my Amazon page just like you did with my friend Jen Lancaster’s book.

Side note 2: You know, I haven’t even READ Stephanie Klein’s book yet and I don’t know if I will, though if USA Today reporters are going to equate blog books with self-indulgent suckage, I’d sort of like to know what I’m being blamed-by-association for, so maybe I will read it, though when I do, maybe I’ll keep my mouth shut and stay out of all this.

Side note 3: Wow, I think I need to calm down. Let’s all watch this highly amusing video ad for John Hodgman’s book, shall we?

Notes on the new place

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We’re figuring out that settling in isn’t just a matter of putting things in place. It’s more that you do about 85 percent of all the stuff you want to do, and then you develop whatever blindspots you need to not give a shit about the other 15 percent. That’s where I’m at right now–my mind seems to have grown little mental calluses over things like the sight of extension cords, and blank spots on the wall, and the closet in my home office, which is a crap avalanche waiting to happen. But who cares? I love it here. The days have a whole new shape here.

The neighborhood is weird in a good way. Sometimes it feels like I’ve fallen into some pocket of time filled with sensory details from my childhood neighborhood, with the overgrown, softly crumbling alleys, and the cicadas, and the wide wide front steps of houses, and the little copper stamps in the sidewalks. I mean the side streets are like this; it’s different along Lawrence Avenue. You really can’t trust an Albany Park business unless it has at least nine signs (all in different fonts) (and this doesn’t include the window lettering) neon, and/or a strobe light. The only dollar stores worth going to are the ones you can still see imprinted on your retinas when you close your eyes. It’s awesome.

The only trouble with this place is that there’s no really good bar within staggering distance. Any local readers who live west of Rockwell know of anything? There’s a few places right around Rockwell, but that’s still a pretty long, er, stagger. Which is not to say that we like to drink until we are cartoon characters with hiccups and little bubbles around our heads. Not all the time, at least.

Speaking of old-timey depictions of drunkenness, our friend Phineas has been drawing hoboes and this one is one of my favorites.

Summertime, and the living is… well, getting easier

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This has been the first time in weeks that I haven’t needed to give my time and energy over to moving boxes or houseguests or column deadlines or IKEA pilgrimages or I Love The 70s or grotesque, soul-withering heat. For the next three hundred words or so I’m devoting myself to YOU, the people.

Hello! How are you? How are your walls? Do you have stuff hanging on them? Do you have stuff on your shelves, too? How did that happen? How did you do that? Did you ever know that you’re my hero? And everything I would like to be? We’re definitely making progress, but it’s taking awhile. Right now, we’re at the point where almost everything with a power cord is plugged in where it needs to be, and all the electronic displays are sentient and unblinking. However we keep buying power strips, which baffles me. I mean, X is the number of things we need to plug in and Y is the number of available wall outlets, and in the course of changing apartments, X remains constant, at least for now, and Y, thank God, has increased, AND YET, this means that Z, the number of power strips we need, somehow increases as well. I mean, first the logic was: if X > Y, then Z, right? So why is it now X ≤ Y+Z = EVEN MORE FUCKING Z?

But of course, I’m glad we moved. Here is a list of totally mundane things we have in our new place that I did not have the pleasure of experiencing in my old building, and, in a few cases, my entire adult life thus far:

  • Garage space.
  • A bathroom exhaust fan.
  • An open-air back porch.
  • One of those sprayer thingies in the kitchen sink.
  • Three-prong receptacles in every outlet.
  • Water pressure. No, really.
  • Enough room to comfortably walk around the bed.
  • Basement storage that is clean and dry and well-lit and does not appear to have been dug out by Jame Gumb.
  • A laundry room that can be reached without having to go outside and through the alley.
  • Lights in the (get this!) CLOSETS.

See how easy to please I am? I know this might sound totally absurd to those of you who live in suburban areas and/or newer buildings, where everyone has central air, and remote-control windows, and wet bars in every cathedral-ceilinged walk-in-closet. But for the city, and for an older building, what we have is pretty good.

I didn’t have a chance to link to it before now, but I have to agree with Mr. Walter’s letter in response to my NY Times piece about the Eno Incident (the news of which also somehow managed to reach The Guardian, as well, so you really ought to be pleased with yourself, O Unknown Rossi’s Jukebox Prankster). I feel I should add that while “Thursday Afternoon” is best experienced in a quiet environment with a quality sound system, Here Come The Warm Jets is best listened to in a new apartment, while cooking dinner, on the quality sound system your boyfriend somehow managed to set up and get all plugged in.  Or so I learned last night.

Change of address

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I keep meaning to tell you I moved. WE MOVED. On Sunday the Starving Artists came and got my stuff and put it in the truck. They would have put Chris’s stuff in the truck had there been enough room, but apparently I have an astonishing amount of stuff. I mean, I don’t hoard used tinfoil or collect Franklin Mint chess sets, but still all my things could fill an eighteen-foot truck. So they unloaded the truck here at the new place and then got Chris’s things and brought them up the three flights. It took about seven hours.
I’ll write more later. I’m still too tired to think straight. See Flickr for more!

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