Free the Prisoner: Book Excerpt from "Fallout Princess"
Her freedom hard-won, her love finally secure, Gaia must sacrifice it all to rescue a friend falsely accused of kidnapping her. But to do that, she will have to face the warlord and his army of soldiers. Can she rescue him and still retain her new life?
Beach Love
We would wake up at 5 a.m. and run along the lake. Not on the running/bike path, mind you, but actually along the lake, in the sand. I was not the best running partner; I am slow as hell and I hate sand. After a few weeks, he asked me to stay at home, which I understood. I wasn’t helping him advance his training. It was annoying him. Annoying like having, oh, I don’t know, sand in your shoe.
Notes from the Post-it Wall — Week of September 9, 2018
The people who post how excited they are about the Christmas Season/Holiday Season in September are the worst kind of people. Slow your roll. Appreciate what’s in front of you. Be present. It’s OK to be excited and have things to look forward to but dial back your enthusiasm. No one likes an adult who gets giddy over something three months away like a puppy gets giddy over rolling around in its own shit.
I Will Let Go of Straws When You Let Go of the Bloated Corpse of Capitalism
Doing away with straws is the thoughts & prayers of environmentalism. It makes us feel like we did something good without having to put in any actual effort whatsoever.
American Shithole #25 — Can the Dying Mule Become the Butterfly?
We are still in the age of clutching things. We humans like to clutch. Our belongings, our pearls. Our ideas. Our instincts to gather and protect were selected long ago — so the idea that resource collecting is at the heart of our concerns today, is a tough pickle to swallow, compounded by the behavior’s hidden influence on all other human doctrine.
Identifying the Corpse on the Blue Line’s Third Rail
I turned around. There were wakes of glistening human coolant running down this woman’s forehead. They were almost as long as her airbrushed and bedazzled fingernails. It was too hot for a weave that thick. She kept tapping at it, itchy from all that sweat spewing out from the top of her head. The nails, the hair — how does she function in this kind of heat? There’s no way she worked a desk job, or any job that requires her to type on a keyboard of any kind.
You do?
“I see this shit all the time working for the CTA,” the sweaty woman said. “He’s just some gutter punk.”
The Minutes of Our Last Meeting – Bridgeport Neighborhood Watch Tackles Gang Violence
It’s my neighborhood. It’s where I live. I want to keep my friends safe. I want to keep my family safe and will, if they come back.
Required Watching: Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999)
Time for another installment of Required Watching where we knock you out of your comfortable routine of TV and movies to show you a documentary that's weird for the sole purpose of making you a better person. Knowledge is power.
The Suicide of Abigale Walters
Abigale Walters had been found in the morning by her young nieces and nephews on the couch. They couldn’t wake her, so they called their mother who called 911. When responders arrived, they couldn’t find a pulse. CPR was performed for over two minutes before bringing her back. They did not know how long she had gone without breathing.
I Believe… [The Positives of Trump]
…that if there is anything positive about the Trump presidency it is that all of a sudden, more of the citizenry is paying attention to the mechanics of governance and he's making every other president we've ever had look great.
The Lack of Hope Is the Disease
Oh, yeah? Another mass shooting? How terribly desensitized we’re becoming to this trend.
Real Life Ghost Stories: The Bodies Beneath Lincoln Park
The tour group walks through the rolling grass of Lincoln Park. The sun is too low to be seen through the jagged skyline of Chicago architecture. The sky is fading quickly into a sleepy black. As the people move forward, they are all too aware that beneath their feet lay long-forgotten bodies.
Notes from the Post-it Wall — Week of September 2, 2018
The greatest threat to the LGBTQ community is not Donald Trump or the Republicans or the Alt Right. It’s gender reveal parties.
Rib Of Twilight
He wanted to know if I had anything that belonged to her, or what kind of things did she leave behind? And that gave me pause, because I’d never thought of her, or her case, that way before.
Then the question for me got caught between that place where you consider what you might leave behind and what is left to you, which is kind of all the same thing. Like a big merry-go-round of belongings all changing hands from life to life.
American Shithole #24 — A Love Letter to the UK, Revisited
I penned this genuine, heartfelt love letter to the United Kingdom in the summer of 2016, quite possibly hours after the news of the Brexit vote broke. America followed suit a few months later, by instructing the world to "hold my beer."
Your Life, Your Music
"If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn."
— Charlie Parker
The converse to this Parker quote is that if it comes out your horn, it’s because you lived it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about bias these days. Looking into my own biases and parsing out where, exactly, the playing of my horn is exposing those dark areas of things I cannot get behind no matter how many strident, angry voices tell me to.
What comes out of my horn for some time in recent history is predicated by my experience, thus the quote.
The Minutes of Our Last Meeting – Citizens to Elect Rahm Emanuel – Now What?
We just put it in the bank until we’re ready to roll out negative Trump TV ads. Which is tricky, because we see them as negative, but his base applauds them.
The Graceful Failure of Mayor Rahm Emanuel
But what’s he really going to do? I imagine that he’ll spend the next three to eight months furiously beating his knob to a pulp jerking it to footage from the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots in Grant Park. You know, back when Chicago was a city he could get behind. One where the police policed. Maybe he’ll spend his days eating Arby’s sandwiches hoping to find a finger in his food. His finger.
I Hate You Because I Love You
Living with you is constant emotional pain.
I can't tell if you're passive-aggressive or stupid or both.
I Believe… [The Popular Kids Were Assholes]
…that our adoration and covetousness for fame is absolutely no different than the quest to be popular in high school. And the popular kids in high school were mostly assholes.
The stomach tightens and sinks.
The heart and lungs follow.
It’s a confounding reaction to a receipt of affection.
It’s familiar, and, therefore, oddly comforting.
But familiarity can be a curse.
A cursed reminder of what once went wrong when you were just trying to do things right this time.
This time it’ll be different, you say.
Why? You’re different, but what are you doing differently?