Best Memoir of a Mancation

The day's second dispatch from the borrowed workspace...

Come, let me tell you the tale of the trip Jared, Lars, Brigham, Jeff and Collin took to Gettysburg. It is a tale of travel, brotherhood, history, museums, battlefields, and discoveries! (also, some of it was in 3D)


We departed several Fridays ago and this was our chariot, Jeff's boss's Jeep Cherokee, which he happened to be babysitting and we totally had permission to drive it to Gettysburg. Also right by our car: The Fire Bus.



Jared came prepared with tapes n tapes to make our time in the Jeep more pleasant.


Ah, the open road!


After some time of journeying we stopped at a Ruby Tuesdays for dinner. It was not good, but we would certainly eat worse before the trip was over.



Somewhere in the neighborhood of midnight or later we arrived at the Gettysburg Best Western. Built in 1790something (no, really) this hotel had probably been remodeled a few times since then and met our lodging needs quite well.


Treats were shared,


Teeth were brushed,



and then tracks were laid.


Also, one thing about this trip was that pretty much at any given time someone was either humming, singing, or harmonica-ing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. (especially during showers) Here Lars plays the harmonica. Who is Lars, you might ask. I have never seen this Lars before, you might say. Well, Lars is our awesome new buddy. He's Australian, he's married, and he's a successful fashion designer. (see? Lars doesn't work for this company, he IS this company) He imparted so much wisdom upon us throughout the trip it was like having a cool grandpa who happens to be about your age.


In the morning, the morning broke and with it came the hurricaning of the East. This is our Gettysburg Best Western.



Breakfast was eaten at the Lincoln Diner. When I said we'd eat worse a few pictures ago I was not referring to the Lincoln Diner. We had fun there.




Jared took his He-Man breakfast to the next level.


Still ravenous, Jared negotiated his way into a bit of Collin's grub.


I ate this, what a classic & classy diner breakfast.


And in the bathroom I spotted some graffiti that I think we can expect to see more of in the near future...


And then we headed for the Gettysburg Military Park. The weather was not good, so a lot of time was spent in the excellent new Visitor's Center/Museum.


This is me. I sure wasn't in a lot of pictures before now.


Good job, Utah!


Way to go, Illinois!


The Gettysburg Museum really beat a lot of humility into me, perhaps it's an understatement, but the Civil War wasn't fun for anyone. I especially liked the quotes they had here and there amongst the exhibits. It's great that there's such an astounding wealth of information available on this dark time. Thank goodness for journals, letters home, and newspaper columns, that's all I have to say.





Also, I liked the flags and musical instruments.




Having logged numerous hours in the museum, we headed for the field of battle. The rains remained intermittent and the winds occasionally very strong, but learning was our mission and we would not be held back.

Our first stop was this one monument, shoot, my mind is blanking on for whom it was meant to honor. Pennsylvania, maybe? An especially tall and broad Confederate soldier was waiting for us there and he taught us much.




The monument had an uptop...


And you could go up to the uptop if you felt like receiving a battering from the elements.



From up there you could see an encampment of re-enactors who weren't scared off by the hurricane.


From there we drove about the "park" visiting monuments and rocky ledges where terribly awful things happened 140-some years ago.






As we drove swiftly along one of the park's outer roads I spied a friend in danger and ordered Jeffrey to stop the vehicle for in the middle of the road there stood a noble Eastern Box Turtle unaware of his perilous position.


If you didn't know I had an Eastern Box Turtle (er, Tortoise, I mean) of my own when I was a younger fellow named Sherman (after the tank, or, more accurately [and fittingly], after the General) who ran away from home one day. He was a magnificent pet and it was a thrill (surely you can see that is not a forced smile that I wear) to hold one of his kin in my hands, to watch its head move around just like my old buddy moved his, to feel the strength of his legs as he kicked middair. It was a thrill and and honor and an absolute highlight of 2008 to spend some time with a tortoise again.


This dent in the bottom of the shell meant he was a man-tortoise. (figure it out yourself if you must)



The last time I saw street-turtle he looked just the same as Sherman did the last time I saw him. If you think making this post didn't turn me a little wistful then you are a fool.


Last stop in Gettysburg, the cemetery and the monument where Lincoln gave his famed address.



Back on the road, we stopped at a Red Robin.


Here's a picture from a happy time before our especially bad (cold) meal was served to us. This is the worse meal I referred to so long ago. We filled out two unhappy "How'd We Do?" cards and there would have been more had they left more at the table.


Hours later, we returned to the city, stronger and wiser than ever before, bonded by an experience that tested our mettle and our manliness.

This post is dedicated to the memory of our friend and brother Lars who is no longer with us.


(he's home in Australia is what I'm saying)

Best Of Course It's Terrible News

A dispatch from a borrowed workspace...


When you don't have a computer you don't find out that David Foster Wallace killed himself until way too late but still it seems like the DFW news has been slow to leak and slow to circulate. What awful news, how awful, I don't know, consider the endless number of people I've recommended A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again to. And I recommend it again! How I wish the internet would reveal to me the hiding place of a full-length copy of that titular essay for me to link to! If you want to know what it is to write a perfectly almost-perfect piece of creative nonfiction, get that book and read that essay.

Anyway.

Once in California I went to a reading by Mr. Foster Wallace. He was so much dorkier than I had expected (from his jacket-photo) but his talent was undeniable. I never (or haven't yet) conquered Infinite Jest, but I did do The Broom of the System, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster, and perhaps some others. Quite possibly he could outwrite just about anyone in whatever form you might choose: essay, article, short-story, novel, tome, criticism. More talented than Michael Phelps in his own sphere I dare say.

So it goes.

(I think my Mom will understand the picture, maybe Mike Lemmon, too.)

Best Fun While It Lasted

Very soon I will be computerless again as my time of babysitting Collin's imac has ended. It was wonderful to be able to see you all again and I hope new MacBooks are announced before the end of October and also that the money I have saved stays saved so that we can be together again someday.

If I could have, I would have blogged about these things:

1) How my brother Greg made a CD and they've been playing it on Chicago's most respectable rock station.

2) How I went to Montauk last weekend.

3) How I read two big comicbooks yesterday, one of which was great--Identity Crisis. Wow. I had heard good things and now I'm on the bandwagon.

4) The trip to Gettysburg that I'm about to take.

5) Probably some other things, too.

Ok. That's it.

Best Something The Broker Isn't Telling You

This luxurious (yet empty) Soho loft features "4400 SqFt (of) sprawling space" with "a perfect layout of 3 bedrooms and 2.5 Baths, 15' Ceilings, 80 SqFt Private Balconies, OriOriginal Corinthian Cast-Iron Columns, Tin Ceilings, Wood Burning Fireplace, Exposed Brick Walls, Laundry Room, Central AC, Sound insulated landmark windows, Wired with Category 5 Cable and has a private 200 SqFt storage room." The building includes "Audio/ Visual Intercom Security, Alarm Theft Detection System, and Oversized Private Key-Locked Elevator. Ideal SOHO location between Crosby st & Lafayette."

Also, Heath Ledger died here.

It can be yours (to rent) for only $26,000/month.

The Listing.

Best Little Victories

I've celebrated my sort-of two-year battle with Against the Day by reading lots of shorter (a very relative term here) books. These are what I've conquered since August 8th:

The Incredible Change-Bots by Jeffrey Brown

I picked this one up from the comic book store a week before finishing Against the Day to be my reward for finishing. This thick little comic (book) is an excellent parody/homage to the Transformers and Go-Bots as they were in the 80s. Basically, if you invested an large amount of your afternoons to catching the Transformers cartoon or thinking about how lousy the Go-Bots were in comparison, you will really like this book and it will have you giggling from the first page and laughing out loud plenty of other times. In short, try as you might, you will probably never do anything as brilliant in your life as writing the Incredible Change-Bots. (and I don't say that as an insult to you but as praise to Mr. Brown)


Word was out in July that the script to Quentin Tarantino's next movie, a rock 'em sock 'em World War II tale, had leaked onto the internet. After a little poking around it was mine. It's a 168 pages, which I understand to be on the long side for a script. For the first 99 pages I was not entertained or intrigued or anything...mostly I rolled my eyes a lot and found myself sympathizing with the Nazis, which I'm pretty sure was NOT Tarantino's intention. BUT at page 100 it suddenly got interesting and the final act was pretty fun, so I'll make sure to catch the last hour on USA or TNT in 2011. There's a great twist to the plot at the end and it would be totally awesome if I spoiled it but I won't. Yet.

Joysprick by Anthony Burgess

This is the second book on Joyce by the author of A Clockwork Orange I've read this year, and in this case, by read this year, I mean finally finished, finally. I bought this book in 2004 while on the Sea adventure detailed in this ancient post and I've battled to stay committed to it ever since. Not that I didn't love it! The book (as the cover says) is "an introduction to the language of James Joyce" and, to me, that is fun. Burgess really knows a thing or two about our language's finest author since Shakespeare and reading this book I could just feel by brain swell with excellent new Joyce insights. There's one particular thing I caught on to that I'd like to share at a later date...like maybe next Sunday? Perhaps.


The Third Man by Graham Greene

My dad gave me this one while I was in Chicago after he had finished it. It was fine. I'd like to see the Orson Welles movie that it was written for.
A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon

I listened to this book on my ipod during an especially thrilling document review project I was on. When you go to the library to pick out audiobooks really you're just choosing from a bunch of books about submarines or spies or harnessing your power within, so when I saw this one, I grabbed it because I was familiar with Haddon. He wrote this kind of popular book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which I did not like at all (I thought it was like a Disney Jungle Cruise tour through autism) but at least I recognized his name. This book was good for listening, if I had been reading it I probably wouldn't have finished it. It's the tale of a wacky family dealing with an impending wedding and it's okay, especially if it's the only thing you've got to fill your brain during long long days.
Mr. Strangelove by Ed Sikov

I remember when I was a kid talking with my Dad about the Pink Panther and how Peter Sellers was dead and my Dad told me that even though Sellers was funny he wasn't a very happy or nice man. Funny I've remembered that my whole life. Anyway, this biography of the actor really drove home the case that Sellers was definitely not a happy guy...but it's fun learning about people's lives, right?

Before reading this book I really couldn't name that many Sellers movies, just Dr. Strangelove, the Pink Panther movies, the Party, and the Mouse that Roared...turns out he was in a LOT more movies than that, but more interesting than the movies that Sellers made were the movies he did not make. Did you know that he was to play Captain Hook alongside Hayley Mills as Wendy and Audrey Hepburn as Peter Pan in a live action Peter Pan? Or Leopold Bloom in an adaptation of Ulysses? Also, there was going to be another Pink Panther movie, The Romance of the Pink Panther, and a Blake Edwards movie called the Ferret, a spinoff of the Pink Panther movies featuring Inspector Clouseau.
Hegemony or Survival by Noam Chomsky

One of the first things you learn by listening to this book is the meaning of "hegemony" and the pronunciation of the word. The next thing you learn is all the bad stuff that Chomsky believes the United States has been up to for the past 100 years. I'm interested in Chomsky as a voice of dissent and its sort of fun to hear him out and wonder how he could be so famous for this sort of thing and his work in linguistics...but eventually, it all washes off me like water off a duck. It was fun, though, to hear that everything the United States has done in the last fiftyish years has been to help it get to a point where it could dominate space weaponwise...that's what's next, says Noam, America having all the missiles in space and no one else.

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

Excellent author, enjoyable little detective tale with a really neat twist to the story that you'll figure out by the second or third chapter (at the latest) that the outside of the book doesn't let on to at all...in fact, I feel awful for telling you that there's a twist to the book. Now you'll be suspicious from the first page. I recommend this one for an airplane ride.


Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me, Edited by Ben Karlin

Recommendedish by a few friends and featuring essays by familiar comedians and writer, this little anthology is pretty entertaining, but the writers probably should have had a meeting where they checked with each other to see what they'd all be writing about because there's plenty of stories in here that are a bit too much alike. But there's a few real charming ones...however, you can probably get the most enjoyment available from this book by just reading the names of all the essays in the table of contents, that's where the majority of the cleverness lies.

Best I Don't Usually Take These Sorts of Pictures

Just the other week, or, yes, almost two weeks ago we went to Central Park to watch Moonstruck. A few minutes into the movie this gentleman shows up and causes a commotion insisting some people make a space for him on the bleachers behind us. Later on, a second commotion occurs when a fellow sitting behind him asks him to move or knock something off, one of those sorts of things. But when the movie was through I noticed the bleacher people all descending from their seats with great care so as to not step on or disturb the fellow for, at some point, he had curled himself up and drifted off to dreamland. I suppose this means he must have snuggled the feet of a stranger or two. No free movie is without its price.