One Day in September, great movie. It's a documentary about the hostage crisis at the 1972 Munich Olympics, where eight Palestinian terrorists took several members of the Israeli team hostage. They sneaked into the Olympic Village at 4:40 am on Sept. 5 and took twelve Israeli athletes hostage, two of them shot to death in the process with one escaping. About 20 minutes later the terrorists' spokesman, holding a grenade, met with police outside the building where the hostages were being held and demanded the release of over 200 Palestinian prisoners. He gave a deadline of noon, at which time he said the hostages would be killed. Upon learning of the situation, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir made a statement saying these demands would not be met (the vast majority of the prisoners were being held in Israel). German officials personally offered the terrorists' spokesman "an unlimited sum of money" to release the hostages; this was turned down. Then one of them offered himself in exchange for the hostages, which was also refused. Meanwhile Olympics officials decided the games would continue.

As the noon deadline approached hostage negotiators pleaded for more time, falsely saying they were waiting for an answer from Israel on their demands. The deadline was extended until 5pm. At 2:15 a plan to ambush the terrorists by delivering food failed, when the spokesman himself carried the food into the building. At 3:50 the Olympics Committee finally suspended the games. As 5 o'clock approached 24 German police volunteers prepared to storm the building. But the plan was abandoned at the last minute, when it was realized the terrorists had a TV and were watching preparations for the attack live. After the deadline passed the terrorists altered their demands. They now wanted an airplane placed at their disposal so they could fly, along with the hostages, to a friendly Arab country. Hostage negotiators agreed, knowing they would never allow the terrorists to leave the airport. They made preparations to attack the terrorists as they made their way to waiting helicopters to take them to the airport. But when the terrorists' spokesman made a walk-through of the route to the helicopters he spotted police readying for the assault and demanded they be bussed instead of walking. So buses now transported the group from the building to the helicopters, which then flew them to the airport.

Meanwhile German police had made preparations for an ambush at the airport, with policemen dressed as a flight crew aboard the airplane and five snipers (none with special training) outside near where the helicopters were expected to land. Five snipers were chosen because it was assumed there were only five terrorists. But as the terrorists had exited the building back at the Olympic Village it was realized there were eight of them. But no changes were made to the assault plan and the snipers weren't told, none of them having radios (or protective gear, scopes or night vision devices). As the helicopters were en route to the airport the police flight crew aboard the plane voted to abandon their mission and left. German police also forgot to move available armored cars from the Olympic Village out to the airport.

When the helicopters arrived at 11:30 pm several terrorists got out to examine the airplane and found no one aboard. When they ran back to the helicopters the snipers opened fire, hitting only two of the terrorists. Twenty minutes later police finally called for the armored cars, which took another hour to arrive. About 12:30 am the German government announced that all the terrorists had been captured or killed and the hostages were safe. But this was an incomprehensible lie and fighting was continuing at the airport. More police finally drove onto the airfield and joined the fight, shooting one of their own snipers and a helicopter pilot. At 1 am with most of their comrades dead or wounded, two terrorists turned to the two helicopters holding the hostages, blowing one up with a grenade and spraying the other with bullets. All the hostages were killed. Three of the terrorists were captured alive.

The following month an airplane was hijacked and a demand was made for release of the three Palestinians by the German government. They quickly complied, without consulting Israel. It is speculated the hijacking was staged, with the German government eager to avoid future terrorist incidents by ridding themselves of the three prisoners. Israeli agents eventually killed two of the surviving hostage-takers, with one surviving to be interviewed for this documentary.

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I can't finish Twain's The Innocents Abroad. (Boucher, you've got more fortitude than me.) It's an account of his travels through Europe, Egypt, and "The Holy Land" in the late 1860's. I enjoyed it a lot right up until he reached The Holy Land. But his endless and unendurable recapitulations of biblical events, chapter after chapter, just begged me to put the book down. Now for those who know me and might be inclined to assume I can't persist because the subject of the narrative suddenly became religious, I must tell you the fault lies entirely with the author and his obscure offhand renderings of ancient events in the Middle East. I can't speak for the typical Twain fan of the nineteenth century, but I think I can say of today's reader that no one but a religious scholar could push through his chapters on religious terrain and possibly follow his esoteric references. Herewith, a representative excerpt from Chapter XXIV of Volume II: The Bedouins--Tatterdemalion Vagrants:

We went back to the valley, and rode to the Fountain of Ain Jelüd. They call it the Fountain of Jezreel, usually. It is a pond about one hundred feet square and four feet deep, with a stream of water trickling into it from under an overhanging ledge of rocks. It is in the midst of a great solitude. Here Gideon pitched his camp in the old times; behind Shunem lay the "Midianites, the Amalekites, and the Children of the East," who were "as grasshoppers for multitude; both they and their camels were without number, as the sand by the seaside for multitude."

Now what the fuck? Really. But every chapter not having to do with the Mideast is great.

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Miranda and I just got out of Wedding Crashers at Cheap Flicks. Cute, but the whole thing lost some of its flavor for me when Vaughn and Wilson started falling for their respective targets. Nice cameo by Will Ferrell, and appreciate the brief flurry of tits towards the beginning. Also cool they worked in John McCain and James Carville. Domino, which we saw a few days ago, was unforgivably stupid. And bear in mind I'm saying this about a film starring Mickey Rourke and Keira Knightley's tits.

Gradually finding my balance in the "office" at the jewelry store. Just a matter of familiarizing myself with the routine, getting comfortable with the policies and paper shuffling. So much better than being on the sales floor. Fucking sales. And especially now with the mall being so empty and so few people even wandering into the store. I just don't have the knack for amoral bullshit that goes with convincing some twit she'll find fulfillment in an overpriced bit of shiny stone. That's not to say I'm not amoral. I just can't sell anything.

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Parents dropped me off at my place about 9 last night. Immediately collapsed on the couch and struggled to stay awake while watching the rest of Inside Deep Throat. Good documentary but not enough clips of the film it was about. I've never seen Deep Throat and am disappointed to find that Netflix doesn't carry such an undisputed classic. Later on Miranda welcomed me home in the manner to which I've become accustomed. No deep throat, though.

Actually woke up early (!) yesterday morning, my last day in Lake Placid, to make a final survey of Main Street's shopping opportunities. Went right back to With Pipe and Book to have a last look around. Chose a couple of rum-flavored cigars from the humidor and retrieved the shop's other copy of Starling of the White House from the basement. When the woman behind the counter bagged my cigars she included a nifty box of matches with the store's name and address on it, and a picture of a pipe and book on the opposite side. Later I intentionally tucked them into a bag to be checked at the airport, not wanting them confiscated if I tried to take them aboard. I was to find when I got home that evening that minions of the Transportation Security Administration had randomly selected my bag for a search, and stolen the matches out of the cigar bag. In its place they thoughtfully left a letter explaining what they'd taken, along with two others in different pockets of the bag with more general statements regarding the search. Assholes.

Took a short walk up the street after leaving the bookstore, glancing around at all the other local shops in which I had no interest; many of them offering kitschy arts and crafts or antiques. Approaching the front of the hotel an elderly man in a parked car waved in my direction, and I guardedly returned the gesture not sure if he was waving at me. As I got closer I realized he was waving at me and must've been at the wedding reception the night before. He rolled down his window and thanked me for the book I'd given him, and I realized who he was. I mention this only to illustrate how little my brain cares to retain, even from as unusual an encounter as the one I'd had with this man the night before; like what he looked like. But my short term memory occasionally surprises me with a flash of retention, usually involving someone or something to do with breasts.

Eventually hit the road, nice scenery flying by, and I drifted in and out a bit as my early morning caught up with me. Flight at the airport was delayed a little and I alternately wandered around, read, and watched the football game on tv. The couple from our table the night before (the heteros) showed up for their flight at the gate next to ours and we chatted a little. Flight was uneventful, couldn't get any dvd's to play on my computer. The Detroit airport was depressing, everyone rushing around trying their best to look busy and important. People suck. On the drive back we stopped in Ann Arbor for a sidewalk dinner at this Greek place my parents had been to years ago with, coincidentally, my cousin whose wedding we'd just attended.

Read that night that a boat capsized on Lake George in New York, which we'd passed twice going to and from Albany, killing 20 elderly Michigan tourists while we were waiting for our flight.

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When we were talking about your Quixote tattoo earlier today, Andy, and I made reference to a Polish theater poster of a Camus play, this is what I was thinking of. Maybe slightly more complicated an image to render into a tattoo than I'd considered. (The title's obscured; it's Caligula.)

A Sept. 21st Guardian interview with Gore Vidal, as he prepares to leave his Italian villa on the Amalfi Coast where he's lived for over thirty years. http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/biography/story/0,6000,1574752,00.html

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On Monday, Sen. Joe Biden (DE) made a speech at the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy's national convention on the subject of the Supreme Court and the confirmation process. Biden is a member of the Judiciary Committee and is an adjunct professor of constitutional law. He's also an announced contender for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, and my personal preference. Below are links from two sites to video of that speech.

rtsp://video.c-span.org/archive/sc/sc072905_biden.rm

http://www.acslaw.org/video2005/video/stream/19/rm

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Was at the Lansing Mall for a couple days of classes related to my new job. Just got back tonight. Decided to stay at a hotel for the duration when I realized I'd have to be there at 10 when the mall opened. Reveals something of my priorities, that I paid at least as much for a hotel room as what I earned for being there in the first place. All that for an extra 45 minutes of sleep each morning. Even then I was late my first day.

Tuesday after some trouble I eventually found the only two used bookshops I was to visit. But by the time I arrived they were both closed. Today the class finished a little early and I drove to Curious Book Shop next to campus. Didn't leave with anything; couldn't quite talk myself into a thick history of Norway. Then to Archives Book Shop down the street, where I had just enough time before close to discover a couple of postcards of Frogner Park in Oslo. Don't know why exactly I was drawn to things Norwegian at each stop. Nostalgia maybe.

Was consistently depressed about my situation for the duration of my short visit to our capital, more so than has been the norm recently. Didn't drink anything while I was there, which was perhaps a mistake.

Frogner Park (though not my postcards):

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I'm presently sampling a mixture of Dr. Pepper and Captain Morgan's Parrot Bay Mango on the rocks, perhaps the first time this outrageous concoction has ever been imbibed. I propose to memorialize Sean -- who, having left the West Michigan area, is now effectively dead to me and all his other local cohorts -- by naming this outrageous mixture after him, in a weak moment of premature nostalgia brought on in no small part by the aforesaid drink. So, to Sean. A word of warning, though. I'm starting to develop a slight stomach ache as I drink and type, learning a lesson several girls must have taken to heart well before me: while Sean tastes weird but is still generally palatable, swallow too much of him in a single sitting and you may be prone to fits of vomitting.

Cheers.

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Vindicated in my dismissal of Updike by Gore Vidal! From Views from a Window: Conversations with Gore Vidal:

Paris Review, 1974:   How about some of the younger writers? What do you think of John Updike, for example?

Vidal:   He writes so well that I wish he could attract my interest. I like his prose and disagree with Mailer who thinks it bad. Mailer said it was the kind of bad writing that people who don't know much about writing think is good. It is an observation that I understand, but I don't think it applies to Updike. With me the problem is that he doesn't write about anything that interests me. I am not concerned with middle-class suburban couples. On the other hand, I'm not concerned with adultery in the French provinces either. Yet Flaubert commands my attention. I don't know why Updike doesn't. Perhaps my fault. [moi: I didn't love Madame Bovary but I read it years before suffering through Rabbit, Run and many years before discarding Toward the End of Time, and found it much easier and more enjoyable.]

Daniel Halpern, 1969:   To go back for a moment to style and content, you, then, make the distinction with John Updike between what he says and how he says it. You enjoy his prose but lose interest in what he is saying.

Vidal:   Yes, but I would say that with my interest in language, in style, I can certainly read him with a degree of pleasure if not profit, whereas somebody whose subject matter theoretically is a good deal more interesting, like Bill Burroughs, I can hardly read at all because of that cretinous style he's put together.

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A few choice excerpts from Evan Wright's Generation Kill, his record of the battles of a platoon of Reconnaissance Marines as they moved north into Iraq as the front line soldiers of the March 2003 invasion:

• "Who's the fucking retard who sent us into that town?" Person asks, spitting a thick stream of tobacco juice, which catches in the wind and mists across the faces of several of his buddies standing nearby. "That sure tops my list of stupid shit we've done." Trombley is beside himself. "I was just thinking one thing when we drove into that ambush," he enthuses. "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I felt like I was living it when I seen the flames coming out of windows, the blown-up car in the street, guys crawling around shooting at us. It was fucking cool."
• The Hispanics in the platoon refer to the white guys as "cracker-ass fucks," the whites refer to them as "muds" and to Spanish as "dirty spic talk," and they are the best of friends.
• "Hey, it's ten in the morning!" says Person, yelling at two farmers dressed in robes in the distance. "Don't you think you ought to change out of your pajamas?"
• Before First Recon's campaign is over, Captain America will lose control of his platoon when he is temporarily relieved of command. Already, some of his men are beginning to fantasize about his death. "All it takes is one dumb guy in charge to ruin everything," says one of them. "Every time he steps out of the vehicle, I pray he gets shot."
• A teenage boy and girl walk ahead on the trail, holding hands. "Kind of cute," Colbert observes. "Don't shoot them, Garza," he adds. As they roll past the hand-holding teens, Colbert and Person wave at them and start singing the South Park version of "Loving You," with the lyrics "Loving you is easy 'cause you're bare-chested."
• "It should be a little acid," Person says, offering his own medical opinion. "And burn a little when it comes out." "Maybe on your little bitch asshole from all the cock that's been stuffed up it," Colbert snaps. Hearing this exchange, another Marine in the platoon says, "Man, the Marines are so homoerotic. That's all we talk about. Have you guys ever realized how homoerotic this whole thing is?" Just before sundown, Marine artillery batteries, dug in a few kilometers ahead, begin to pound the city. As darkness falls, Colbert's team excavates Ranger graves by the Humvee. The ground trembles as a column of massive M1A1 tanks rolls past, a few feet from where the Marines are resting. Out of the darkness, someone shouts, "Hey, if you lay down with your cock on the ground, it feels good."
• "They shot one of my Marines in the stomach out there." He gestures toward the field. "We fired back. Blew a donkey's head off. We didn't see nothing else."
• The only action they saw occurred on the night their perimeter was overrun by camels. Espera and his men opened up on them with machine guns. "After three weeks out there, no sleep, living in those holes, I was fucking hallucinating," he explains. "We thought those camels were fucking Hajjis coming over the wire. When we lit those motherfuckers up, it was fucking raining camel meat. It was a mess, dog. Motherfuckers even did a story on it in the L.A. Times."
• "Yeah," Person says, a note of belligerence in his voice. "When I get back I'm gonna start a gay club. I'll call it the Men's Room. There will be, like, a big urinal with a two-way mirror everyone pisses against. It will be, like, facing the bar, so when everyone's drinking there will be, like, these big cocks pissing at them."
• "Oh, my God!" Person laughs. "He's got his bayonet out." Captain America runs across the field ahead of his Humvee, bayonet fixed on his M-16, ready to savage enemy forces. He turns every few paces and dramatically waves his men forward, like an action hero. "He thinks he's Rambo," Person guffaws. "That retard is in charge of people?"
• Traveling the world as a Marine has opened his eyes to stark differences between the way Americans and those in less fortunate parts of the planet live. "All these countries around the world, nobody's fat," he says. "Back home, fat motherfuckers are everywhere. Seventy-five percent of all Americans are fat. Do you know how hard it is to put on thirty pounds? A motherfucker has to sit on the couch and do nothing but eat all day. In America, white trash and poor Mexicans are all fat as motherfuckers. The white man created a system with so much excess, even the poor motherfuckers are fat."

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Netflix subscribers are invited to rate movies they've seen by clicking on a number of stars, one through five, for each film. These ratings are then averaged and displayed for other subscribers. I see that the number of movies I've rated yesterday reached 1,111 and for good or ill I thought this warranted a mention.

Miranda's been extra nice to me the last couple days as it's become clear she infected me with some kind of bronchitis-like awfulness. Thank Christ I've got a couple days off to suffer through what I hope is the worst of it.

Went through a rough patch recently as I was reading Jimmy Carter's memoir and also listening to Madeleine Albright's. There was an extended stretch where they were both recounting their involvement in peacemaking efforts regarding the Israeli-Palestinian clusterfuck, and I nearly had to kill myself. I can't tell you how sick I am of hearing about that hopeless fucking religious real estate dispute. I wonder if I screamed loudly enough that my deity promised my people the greater part of some beachfront property on the Mediterranean I would be taken seriously.

Current Mood: sick

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I laugh every time I pass this. It's on Capital Ave. NE just south of Bailey Park, in case you want to visit it yourself.

Current Music: tv: Family Guy

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Got a good movie from Netflix the other day, the PBS Frontline documentary Ghosts of Rwanda, about the 1994 genocide. During 100 days of state-sponsored ethnic slaughter over 800,000 people were massacred while the UN and foreign nations did virtually nothing. The death toll on 9/11 and subsequent response offers some perspective. We lost 3,000 in one day and retaliated by going to war against Afghanistan and then, for good measure, Iraq. The Rwandans lost an average of 8,000 per day for 100 days and the UN responded by pulling out most of its troops, along with thousands of caucasians, and the remaining handful of soldiers were told not to intervene. (This was just after the Black Hawk Down nonsense in Somalia.) The Canadian general in charge of the UN peacekeeping mission, Romeo Dallaire, published a book about his experience called Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, which I've not read. But I can recommend an excellent book about acts of 20th century genocide and America's responses to them, including Rwanda, called "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, by Samantha Power; for which she won a Pulitzer.

Current Music: film: Battle of Britain

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Spent a nice couple days in and around Youngstown, Ohio this past weekend. We were meeting up with one of Dad's sisters and her husband, Sally and Edison, and my brother Pat and I came along. Dad grew up in Youngstown and usually goes back at least once or twice a year. We stayed at the Inn at the Green, a nice 19th century bed & breakfast I've stayed at once before. They have a nice bookcase of well chosen volumes I spent time browsing through, and a very pleasant reading room in which to lounge and enjoy them. Also a decanter of some kind of liquor was available round the clock.

Sunday, the first night, we attended a small dinner party at some relation's nicely appointed home. A rare clean break with my father regarding the artwork on display; I liked it, he hated it. There was a black guy there, which momentarily confused me until I realized he was serving drinks. There were I think nine of us, but the hostess's brother had apparently been asked not to join us for dinner and generally stay out of our way; he helped cook and serve the meal. The next day we met up at the fantastic library down the street from the b&b and had lunch at the cafe there, and I browsed the basement bookstore. Found three books in short order: Views from a Window: Conversations with Gore Vidal; Woodrow Wilson's Own Story; and Burke, Disraeli and Churchill: The Politics of Perseverance.

Drove around Youngstown, got lost, toured the wonderful Mill Creek Park where Dad used to play when he was young. Went by his grandfather's house and saw the low stone wall he built. Then onto Dad's childhood home, which unfortunately has fallen into some disrepair.

Visited the graveyard where we have a few relatives, including Dad's parents.

Then dinner at this awful local country restaurant, near an antiques shop where a few years ago Mom and Dad met Martin Sheen. Got back to the b&b and then went out again with Dad to a couple bookstores we'd passed on the way back. He bought me a biography of Marcus Aurelius, a book I'd been searching for for quite a while. Said goodbye to Aunt Sally and Uncle Edison that night, as they would be off to Maryland early the next morning and I am not a morning person. All the same we had to be up and checked out by 11. Had brunch at the library cafe again and again I left the used bookstore with something, this time Thomas L. Friedman's Longitudes and Attitudes: The World in the Age of Terrorism. On the way home we hit an outlet mall in Fremont, Indiana, and then had dinner at a charming but sadly empty restaurant down the road called the Herb Garden.

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Bought a great coffee table for $50 at the IKEA in Schaumburg outside Chicago on Saturday. Assembled it myself, thank you very much.

Recently finished Chances of a Lifetime: A Memoir by Warren Christopher, Clinton's first secretary of state. It was okay, didn't knock me down. His description of his trip to Taiwan in late 1978 is eye-opening. At the time he was Carter's deputy secretary of state and traveling to Taiwan to "put the best face on U.S. termination of official relations and removal of its official representatives from the island" as part of normalizing relations with mainland China. Having arrived at Taipei airport, he writes: "As I moved toward the embassy car with U.S. ambassador Leonard Unger for the drive to my hotel, I wondered how the Taiwanese government planned to top what must surely have been one of the most hostile official welcomes ever extended to a visiting official. The answer came sooner than I'd anticipated. Outside the airport grounds our car turned onto a road lined with an angry, jeering mob of about twenty thousand people. As we moved through the middle of the crowd, eggs and ripe tomatoes began to fly at us from both sides of the road. Following these relatively benign missiles came cans and rocks encased in mud. Within three or four minutes, every window in the car was shattered, Leonard Unger's glasses were broken, and we were both nursing cuts from flying glass.

"As the car inched down the road, the protesters moved in and surrounded us. Some held bamboo poles that they jammed through the car's broken windows, forcing Unger and me to perform a panicked limbo dance in the backseat. Next, demonstrators jumped on the bumpers and fenders, violently rocking the vehicle, while hands grabbed at us through the windows, attempting to pull us into the mob. We looked around for help, but none was to be had. The Taiwanese police in the vicinity did nothing more than stand quietly, staring impassively at us and the surrounding chaos." Nixon had a similar experience in Venezuela in 1958 when he was Eisenhower's vice president. It's almost impossible to imagine something like that happening today, with all the security and stage management that goes into official trips.

Also Maureen Dowd's compilation of Bush related NYT's columns, Bushworld: Enter At Your Own Risk. Entertaining but I wouldn't recommend it unless you're a Dowd fan. There's a lot of repetition of themes from column to column, phrased slightly differently each time. The single passage that stayed with me was from a November 6, 2002 column entitled "Under the Ramadan Moon": "The tragedy that shook this country, and spurred ordinarily tame Saudi papers to run blaring headlines criticizing the government, was the fire last March in the Mecca girls' school. Started by a teenager's tossed cigarette butt, the fire killed fifteen girls after the mutawwa, the religious police, stopped rescue workers from saving students trying to escape without scarves and abayas." I thought I remembered having heard about it at the time but I wasn't sure if I was confusing the memory with an episode of The West Wing. That kind of religious horror is enough to make you want to write off an entire nation.

Current Music: movie: No Way Out

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Current Music: movie: Three Days of the Condor

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We found the Powell's on North Lincoln after giving up on finding the one on South Wabash. It was my first Powell's experience. It was the size of a small Barnes & Noble but with large sections devoted to subjects like Marxism, literary interpretation and Rome. Fantastic numbers of books by academics on subjects so arcane you know they'll never sell. It was a refreshing change from the typical mainstream offerings. I came away with two books, Bertrand Russell: A Political Life by Alan Ryan, and Professor Wellstone Goes to Washington: The Inside Story of a Grassroots U.S. Senate Campaign by Dennis J. McGrath and Dane Smith. (Obviously my selections weren't all that odd.) Then we hit one of the omnipresent Starbucks for an empty infusion of caffeine and cobbler. Back at the hotel room now, we've decided to just chill tonight, watch some tv, maybe hit the bar or 24-hour cafe downstairs. As I'm writing, there's a maintenance guy in here disassembling our tv because the pay-per-view isn't working.

Last night we hit three bars downtown with Marc and a friend of his, Tavish, Jacqueline's, and The Closet. Incidentally, hot Asian lesbians at The Closet, but mostly guys. The other two were nice too, but no Asian lesbians to speak of.

The car. Oh my fuck. We borrowed Miranda's mother's car this weekend because mine needs some maintenance and I didn't want to risk a long trip with it. It's a late model VW Jetta and it is absolutely the worst car I've ever had the misery to drive. The only city in which it might have been more agonizing to experience the awesome shortcomings of this vehicle is Detroit. Driving up slight inclines (not even full-blown hills, just short rises) with the pedal to the floor in 5th gear it actually starts slowing down. And it takes for-fucking-ever to accelerate. The gears on the stick shift are located in an odd arrangement, and are positioned both too close to each other and unless very deliberate attention is paid to which gear you're attempting to shift into, you'll hit the wrong one and stall. It's also a diesel and gives one the sensation of driving the world's smallest, most incompetently engineered semi. After driving it for a few minutes, the only thing that keeps me from aiming it at the nearest wall or oncoming car and destroying both it and myself in a sweetly satisfying auto-da-fé, is the knowledge that I probably couldn't get up enough speed to do any real damage. (How's about that clever usage of "auto-da-fé," huh?)

Current Music: tv: The Chronicles of Riddick

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Miranda's continuing efforts to bankrupt me have culminated this weekend in a nearly triumphant trip to Chicago, from whence I am penning this missive. We got in on Friday night and drove around downtown for about two hours looking for a hotel. Yea I know, book before you leave. Get fucked. The only one we saw, a Holiday Inn Express, didn't have any non-smoking rooms left. Well we saw another one, too, but given the look of the people milling around out front, I was sure if we popped in there I'd just waste what money I have left on dirty pussy and cheap crack, which seemed to be on offer in plenty. We ended up about 10 miles west of town at another Holiday Inn. So already our plans to drop some coin on a nice room in a swank hotel downtown were queered.

Miranda's done sewing the conveniently torn hole in the front of her denim skirt, so I guess we can leave our room now. More later, we're off to IHOP and Powell's.

Current Music: tv: Episode I

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