Got Beat Up By A Chocolate Frosty

Pseudo Spring day, I went for a walk. After awhile I passed by a Wendy's, and this day feeling fairly Spring-ish, I wanted an ice cream cone, a Frosty would do. 

So I went in, dropped some pennies on the sugar sticky floor by mistake as I filled in for the tax on top of the dollar, found a window seat and ate some spoonfuls of this treat. 

After some twenty spoonfuls I got a rush of brain-freeze, and a sort of tightening in my throat that was sort of painful. I paused in my indulgence. Then I laughed. Haha, I got hurt by a chocolate Frosty. Harsh swallow. This Frosty hurt me a little bit. 

After I finished, disposed of the cup, and left I started thinking, well yeah, this Frosty could actually hurt me some day in the form of diabetes if my endocrine system should so choose to spike me with this. 

Americans are getting bullied by Frosties everyday, or more-so, taunted by our sweet teeth and left astray and poisoned by one of our own organs. 

And it begins with what I put into my belly, which becomes a soluble in my blood, I know that, so I teeter between conscientious eating and snacking on tasty junk. It's a battle with craving. It begins in the mind, so before I go and give myself a blood disease, or technically an insulin miscommunication disease, I must reckon, I got a bit of mental one. 

Therapists everywhere should keep in mind, sometimes a Frosty isn't just a Frosty.

Control Experiment

As I've delved more into learning how to code, my dreams have taken on a more intense sensory fabric. A couple of lucid dreams have weaved an occurrence. 

But mostly just intense: the other night a book was released, supposedly written by aliens that went into the future a few years from now, found out the U.S.A goes bankrupt, because of Medicare. This book becomes the rage and incites a civil war. I forget which side I fought for but at one point in my dream I was pushing a cannon strapped with bungy cords to a shopping cart.

Last night, I was hanging out in a primordial geographical mess. Canada used to be a mountain in Mexico, but was picked up and flattened up above the U.S.A. Some farmers and fisherman were pissed because of the ocean displacement. Ooh, there's a theme, eh? In the two dreams mentioned, U.S.A. and people pissed are common threads. But these are things I live around day-to-day, so of course they will be absorbed and become backdrops.

As I first started to learn HTML a few weeks back, I'd of course cram lessons and do exercises in the evening before bed. My dreams brought me to a bright red brain machine in which I had to solve puzzles to maneuver through it. But this is life right? We learn to program ourselves and make our way through a blue/green sphere and overcome problems in order to keep on moving around on it?

Time to go meditate, and program my brain to redirect around conditioned responses to stressors, such as anxiety or glum dumpiness.  Time to teach myself to further look at the problem as beautiful. That bright red brain machine was fucking gorgeous.

TailEndO'Winter

Sun's peaking out more: makes me want to brush off the cold rusted and rutted parts of my functioning. I've started learning a couple of things.

SPANISH! I have a base of this: 3 years of Honors and 1 year AP from High School. Largely unused over the past 10 years. I'm over being a monolingual. I'd be interested to read and even write in other languages. I've long been interested in what I've heard about Samuel Beckett writing in French under the aim that writing not in his native tongue would force him to truly think about each sentence. Within a year I'd like to attempt reading Don Quixote in espanol. I've lot of work to do here to get to that point, though I'd like to drum up some follow through and get on a roll to where every couple of years I'm finding myself fluent in another language, in particular ones with different alphabets that throw me into a different body of linguistics altogether, thinking it through from scratch. Though a challenge then becomes practicing these once learned; finding, creating, and maintaining opportunities to employ speaking and writing with them.

WEB DEVELOPMENT: As I find myself interested in language, I've become intrigued in the aspect of using language to create things and functions. In a way, this goes hand in hand with my exploration of self as a writer. Stories are a bit like apps: language frames sensory triggers that pull from a reader's memory banks, experience, imagination, and into participation. This may seem an over simplification, though both are different mediums for utilizing the power of language to set in motion an experience.

I designed a board game as a gift for various family members this past Christmas. I'm hoping I can attain the skills to adapt it into a web game of sorts. I'll keep you posted on that one via the long term.

With this TailEndO'Winter rolling by, I'm also getting outside and walking around the city more. My legs and cardiac health dig that about my current pseudo rejuvenation of mind and body.

Lucid Slap

I've been wayward from posting, but I've been stricken with the common cold. It started in my throat, as though a switch had been flicked and boom: sore throat. The virus then toured around my nasal passageway, chest, sinuses, in that order. You know the story.

We launched our Pungent Parlour reading series on the 19th of February, and had a solid turnout, people are excited to come back to it, Gapers Block did a fine mention of our fireside ambiance, and we are booked for 3rd Tuesdays of the month going forward at Black Rock Pub and Kitchen. We're jacked to have a regular thing, so we can get off on oral lit. We had a wide variety of pieces; some humorous personal essays, some violent-esque, intense short stories, a fantasy story. I'm excited to see the range each future month to come.

On another note, I had a lucid dream last night:

I was elected senior class president. The sky was light purple, there was ice on the streets and hills, but we gathered in some stone tiled square where the weather was warm, like a pocket. From there we got on a bus, a nice bus with tinted windows and seats lining the walls facing in. I saw between two girls, J####### and A######. J####### was talking about some aspect of credit card processing. It excited me and I said "I can talk all about this, in the future I work in the credit card processing industry!" And I sort of realized, I wasn't back in high school from the future, I was dreaming. I decided to test reality. I reached out suddenly and slapped both girls on the cheek. They didn't react, and this was some how proof to me that this was a subconscious rendering. Whoa, shit, a dream. I looked out the bus windows at the ornate marble architecture of the town square were riding through and felt a weird rush, like I've stumbled on something big. And I realized the Godlike fabric of the dream was aware that I was aware, and it was tugging me out...

I drifted back to drowsy wakefulness.

I want back in to this lucid dream thing, it has been awhile since I had one. Might be time to pull out my "Lucid Dreaming in 30 Days" book be like a dude who's suddenly into camping who reads how to survive in the wilderness books, but with dreamland.

The Holo-bard

As I recently put in motion plans for a new monthly reading series, I've had a little more pep in my step. When doing The Liquid Burning series I enjoyed the feel of a regular community of writers, a place to try out new work aloud. I've been thinking about the oral tradition, Homer, mythologies, campfire stories. Some of my own writing, I think, benefits from the live experience. One of my short stories in particular lends itself better to a performative reading, a piece called Nagasaki Lagoon has done quite well piquing rapt crowds and rousing laughter at various readings but has had trouble finding a home in the lit journals.

I've been a bit of a homebody over the past year, and I do enjoy being a homebody, because I like my home and pitter pattering around like a fogey doing my own thing, minimizing occurrences of feeling rushed out the door to something, but I do feel the urge to get out a little more, and enjoy the thriving literary community in Chicago. 

I recently read Dave Eggers' A Hologram for the King. I actually skipped out on hitting up a meet and greet with him at Book Cellar in Lincoln Square this morning, so much for me getting out more! But this was because I did get out quite a bit last night, attending my photographer friend Zach's studio launch party (the free wine, beer and some African wine of sorts that was beyond strong did me in) and another little party downtown right after at the Hard Rock Hotel where my friends Chris and Candace were using a Groupon stay and celebrating their recent engagement; hotel room stocked with hard liquor. And I was supposed to go to another housewarming party after that but I was in no shape. So in all fairness, I decided not to breathe fumes on Dave Eggers. 

In his book, an IT company bids to do such services for King Abdullah's Economic City in Saudi Arabia. Their premier product; a holographic teleconference system. I've been fascinated with where holographic technology may develop, and how that, combined with motion sensor video game technology can make way for some radical virtual reality systems. True, we're ever usurping real life experience with digital varieties, and I do regret this sometimes. However, I am interested in how a virtual reality system could foster risk taking to be practiced later in the outside, real arena. Dreams are thought to serve a similar purpose; a hypnogogic playground where actions don't have consequences.

I'd be curious in how the development of holographic technology could expand the literary experience and preserve an author's live readings for a long, long time. This could never replace the in face experience of an actual reading at a bar, cafe, or bookstore. No, what excites me is instead of YouTubing your favorite writers and their taped readings, let's pull up a holograph of George Saunders in your living room! As live lit is booming in different cities, there's a resurfacing of the oral tradition, and as technology continues to expand capabilities, it'd be rad to see such technology complement the storytelling experience, exploring new varieties within mediums,  though not replacing them. Let us conjure the likes of modern Homers to haunt digital pathways.

The Pungent Parlour

For a bit, my friend Aaron Cynic and I hosted a reading series called The Liquid Burning of Apocalyptic Bard Letters. We mostly just called it The Liquid Burning. It started when I released my novella Turban Tan, I was looking to do some readings, and I knew Aaron from the days when my old roommate Alicia would participate in zine readings in various spots throughout Chicago; storefront apartments, the old MoJoes coffee shop before it moved to West Belmont, before unfortunate ownership issues and its closure. I teamed up with Aaron because I felt his writing and mine would mesh well thematically, a apocalypse/dystopian reading. We grabbed some other readers, my friend Ian Randall, I think Marcus Gilmer read at that first one, so did Donny Rodriguez. I don't think I read from Turban Tan that night, I think I read my short story about sewage backed up on the streets of Nagasaki. We enjoyed ourselves, enjoyed the wide range of pieces and each's take on apocalypse. We wanted to do it again, we wanted to keep the theme. 

For a year we did it at Matilda Baby Atlas, where we had done several Three Leaves Theatre fundraiser performance parties. It was the most colorful basement bar imaginable. Supposedly it was haunted - I learned of this several years after we had to move our reading series to Black Rock Pub & Kitchen after a redesign of Baby Atlas and a shift in direction made it a dance club. But we came to like Black Rock, it's wood paneled and fireplace warmed back room was perfect for a little gather of literary performance.

I think we did The Liquid Burning for 2 years or so. We had some good turn outs, some intimate ones with us gathered round the fireplace reading to each other, those were also special. We even one time had a noise musician whose large amplifier, on its lowest setting, shook the building and I thought that would be the end of our show, but no, we did a few more before Aaron and I each respectively had chock full life plates. Occupy Chicago was ignited, he was covering it for a variety of outlets. I became obsessed with revising my novel Votary Nerves, and moving apartments, and trying to close deals at my sales job so I could afford to contribute to mine and my girlfriend's household. The monthly Sunday kept falling on some sort of a Holiday (excuses, excuses), then 2012 rolled around, the time when an "apocalypse" themed reading series would have possibly thrived. But we let it run its course. I kind of wanted to move onto new themes, after all having a monthly reading series is a great motivator to create a new piece and share it, to hear it, and I felt like stepping outside of that kind of zone. 

I've been wanting to do a new reading series for some time, and damn, the year flew, we all felt it. But my friend Jeremy Solomon - who read at quite a few Liquid Burnings, been in many of our Wood Sugars live shows, does his own stand-up comedy, has written some novels - and I joined forces, got our shit together, and have something new going on at Black Rock Pub & Kitchen. Drawing on elements of a salon, we're keeping the themes a little more liquid than the apocalypse tones of the Liquid Burning.

To any in Chicago interested in checking it out at some point, please follow our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/PungentParlour.

And interested in getting involved? We're doing this monthly and want to rotate in a nice variety of writers, please do drop me a line at jeffphillips dot thirdleave [at] gmail dot com.

The Race Against Time

Last Thursday January 10th, I missed my bus. Did the bus tracker, it would be 12 minutes. Might as well walk the 15 minutes to the L stop. So I walked. The bus I would have been on, had I waited, arrived at the L stop vicinity a slight half minute after I did via walking. I crossed California Ave and it's good I crossed when I did, because if I had been on that bus, I would have been plucked up over the hood of a tan SUV that squealed around from the northwest intersection of Milwaukee Ave.

The SUV proceeded to push the petal going north. My first thought was, what fuck, you in such a hurry to get through a yellow light you'd run somebody down? A stream of 5-10 Chicago Police squad cars rounded the corner in pursuit, some unmarked cars in there too. Sirens pulsing, sight and sound of chase.

As I entered the L station some State Police cars raced up to join them.

While I waited for the ever delayed Blue Line, a fire engine went up to take care of some sort of business. This was some 5 minutes after the first fury of wheels.

An exciting morning. The news wasn't saying much for awhile into the morning. Though some people on Twitter mentioned Police helicopters in Lakeview, and @Marcusgilmer tweeted a pic of the crash at School and Paulina - http://twitpic.com/bu26dl. That was it! There were the ramifications.

I thought, well that's feasible, from where I saw it at, not too far from that intersection, and  at it's speed, it would crash without a doubt within minutes. Then I read that the pursuit began on the west side of Chicago, around 4300 West Altgelt. Early reports said the SUV was pulled over for a routine traffic violation. Shots were fired at the police then it took off. So, it travailed quite the distance, and amazing work on the part of the driver to have avoided crashing sooner! I wonder if the driver had any prior getaway experience under their belt. I later read that it wasn't a "routine" traffic violation they were fleeing, but an attempted break-in of someone's van. More up-to-date story here, more specific "information" versus my frazzled eye witness glimpse - http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2013/01/10/roscoe-village-hit-and-run-crash-leaves-one-critically-injured/. 

They didn't want to do time so they fled. Given enough cop cars accumulating in this race, over the course of time, the perpetrators did not beat the buzzer. Time wins every time. 

My morning commutes have been pretty tame since.

Read-Head

I spent much of last year reading, and plan to spend much of the coming year doing even more of it, so I've laid down some reflections.

I wasn't much of a reader when I was a kid. I avoided it when I was younger so I could play baseball, other sports, make believe in the woods, etc. I didn't have the attention for it, I suppose I was restless. When I was 10 I got into the idea of making movies, and messed around with my parent's camcorder. At this time I learned that a film director was a profession, and I decided that was what I wanted to be when I grew up. I shot a bunch of little movies, some comedy, some sci-fi, creating space ship sets in my basement, some clay-mation. Mostly these were made up as we went a long, though in early high school I started to experiment with writing a variety of short screenplays, some shot, though many remained as exercises in writing the form. When I was 16 I acted in my friend James N. Kienitz Wilkins' movie Fight A Force of Friendly Fire. I had heard some actor interviews talk about "method acting" and I was curious, I investigated this "technique" some and decided I would try some method acting out on this film. I feel with some surges of intensity I alienated some friends, though it was a rush, I was addicted to it, I decided I had more fun acting, being on screen, on the stage, so I decided more so than a film director, I wanted to be an actor. 

These days I focus more on myself as a writer, though I do some acting from time to time, mostly in our Wood Sugars projects. But my time exploring film and acting was an important period to put me on a path to explore myself as a writer. Some of my writing experiments began as a way to develop new material to act in or shoot on film, such as my early collaborations with Daniel Mac Rae. It was a great experience to act in new material he was writing, and see his pieces progress through various drafts along side the rehearsal process. I learned a lot about writing from him. 

The relationship between reading and writing is a tight one. Most accomplished authors when imparting advice to writers mention they should read, a lot. To be a serious writer, is to be serious reader (as paraphrased from many different authors). The reason may be obvious. Writers create using language, and reading is important in building up a command on language, in exercising the imagination. Some times painters have to stock up on paint. I also think it's important to actively engage in the form you enjoy creating in. If you don't enjoy reading, then how do you expect anyone else to enjoy reading what you're writing.

As mentioned, I didn't read a lot as a kid. I had spurts though where I enjoyed it. In 5th grade I enjoyed Goosebumps and Michael Crichton. In 8th grade I wiggled my way into an Honors English class, as most of my friends were smart kids and I wanted to fit in. My teacher, Mr. Berry, however changed the way I thought. Mr. Berry seemed to have a bohemian past, on his wall was a banner "No Matter What We Study, Everything is Connected." I remember many engaging philosophical class discussions. Each week we had to write "lit logs." They were a sort of informal book report, where we'd write a letter to a classmate, they would respond, all in conversation about the books we were reading outside of assigned class reading. The vibe of class discourse, for perhaps the first time in my life, got me thinking, or attempting, to think deep, to really examine human nature, the meaning of life. I was also going through puberty, so maybe my brain was also going through complimentary changes. Through writing these lit logs, though on a weekly basis I didn't have the time or reading speed to finish every book, I found myself genuinely curious about books, and had a blast talking about them. 

In high school, well, I spread myself thin with sports and extra curricular activities, and making some movies, that I barely read what was assigned for class, though I did make every effort to. Many evenings I'd fall asleep with a book open. 

I started to take reading seriously again in college. Many of the great actors seemed to be voracious readers. Dustin Hoffman, Richard Burton, Al Pacino, Tom Hanks, Johnny Depp, Sean Penn, all seemed to mention literature throughout various interviews. Tom Hanks I believe kept an active book list on his MySpace page. I felt that, to further myself as an actor, I should probably deepen my "sensitivity to language." Naturally, in theatre school we read a lot of plays. I read some novels and poetry on the side, trying to correspond reading choice material to parallel an acting role, to perhaps expand my understanding of a character perspective or time period. For my role in Magnets: Hyena Daniel Mac Rae recommended Cormac McCarthy's Child of God and Outer Dark, as well as Irvine Welsh's Marabou Stork Nightmares. Such books buttressed a visceral thought process and inspiration toward bringing the character Jerry Thompson to life. This, over the years, led to my interest in authors as artists, just as for a long time I was quite interested in various actors, or film directors before that. And this of course led to my urge to throw down more writing of my own, and not just as material to shoot. I found a thrill in language sometimes being its own means to experience a story. I began to see literature as a mind expanding drug. Words, stimulating imagination, put the author inside my head, while at the same instant, I was put inside their's. 

I have a lot of writing goals for 2013. Though as active as I want to be as a writer, I want to be even more active as a reader, pushing myself further, eating up more pages than I ever have. One, because I quite enjoy it. Two, because I'd like to keep growing as a writer, and as a person (reading has been linked in brain studies to increased empathy). I also find; the more actively I read the more fluid word choices feel as I write.

I will be writing some more about my reading. Much in the vein of those lit logs, some posts here may be, not as a book review or a book report, an exploration, a further dialogue about literature. I remember watching Martin Scorsese's documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies where he showed clips and talked about the movies that inspired and influenced him. I'd be interested to do something similar here with novels and short stories and essays as I continue my own journey through the creation of literature.

Essay, Essay

I've dusted off high school, I think. I've come to love the form of the essay. Partly in thanks to George Saunders, George Orwell, Mark Twain, Daniel Pinchbeck, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Terrence McKenna, Tom Bissell, as well some of the live lit events in Chicago, I've discovered a peck in my tastes where the form serves as a fresh foray into the mind and experience of another. Like a documentary, yet through language play. High school, college, formal school in general can sometimes make us bitter to the form. The pressure of deadlines, grades, assigned topics that bore us, these things drive the idea of an essay into a negative crevice. 

As I've played with various personal essays, though selfish and self indulgent, and a myriad of subjects that intrigue me, I find myself reminded of the power of it. Sparked is an obsession to continue exploring the creation of my own little essays in the coming year. Like the Roman dude in the Little Caesars commercials running around saying, "pizza, pizza!" there is a little writer dude in me revving me up with "essay, essay!"

As a quick call back, there are some posts here on The Igloo Oven that I am quite proud of, and would like to bring them back to the forefront for a tiny bit, so they're not digitally buried as time moves onward. In 2013 I aim to knock out more that I'm proud of, and hopefully an evolution of these experiments. 

• Burning Ink - an experiment in the woods; writing and fire.
• Gross Harris - reflections of a door-to-door sales gig.
• Poon Men - cheating in sports when sci-fi becomes everyday.
• Blood Doper, Midnight Toker -the power of red blood cells.
• Planets as Pluckers of Vibrations of Soul - are gaseous giants pointless satellites in the circle of life?
• Elephant Conquest - juvenile instincts take hold in politics.

Through the Last Synaptic Assignment

The end of times comes easy to our imaginations. Doomsday is ascribed to political discourse, relationship strife, petty incidents of inconvenience. Just the other day I accidentally dropped a hot dog on the floor of my kitchen and it was not a pretty scene. A rare hissy fit in the face of stress built from the day. The fiscal cliff fades to a joke as my rushed dinner rolls around in the mud I tracked in from the cold, December rain.

Here I am, December 22nd, 2012, writing. The end of the world did not happen. We may all be subtly both relieved and disappointed. Apocalypse is a cultural fantasy. It amounts to a wiping out of debts financial, emotional. All baggage blazed to ash. Start afresh in a new dimension. Though the prophecies were not taken seriously at large, I think most, if not all, of us can admit to thinking about the what ifs at least for a flash. I recently read 2012: The Return of Quetzlcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck as a pseudo reflection. The book explores the origins of the prophecy through myth and various interpretations by thinkers on the fringe. My take away is: I hope this date does transition us into a new Golden Age where creativity, rationality, and good will can merge into a way of life that is invigorating, refreshing across a wide spectrum of social class, seeping into behavior and policy organically through a cultural shift in value. We’re all hungry for something better suited to all of us, and frustrated, because we still cling to old perspectives on how to solve problems, even problems posed by new technology that may not apply to old frameworks. A greater change may come our way when we all lay exhausted from ideological battle, and our interactions slip to the slap happy, and we decide we like it there better.

The evening of December 20th I joined a friend at his holiday party. Enjoying beer in the 11 o’clock hour I found that time had slowed. I had checked my phone at 11:01pm. When I felt like it had to be getting well past midnight and I should be getting on home, I found that it was only 11:17pm. When I then felt as though, shit, it must be passed 1am, it was 11:40pm. I wondered, hey, maybe this is it, the final hour, rolling time into a slowed tube of perspective, my last synaptic assignment of consciousness? 

The next morning I awoke, December 21st, my commute was quiet, strangely so. Ah, a travel day for most with Christmas around the corner, easily explained away, though it had a flavor similar to the opening of The Walking Dead. I got out of work early, went home, read in my lazy boy until I felt sleepy. But it was an odd type of sleepy, and almost felt as though consciousness itself was just draining away from my cells. I once had a dream about the end of the world, where the universe technically expanded so far that it snapped apart, but instead of it being a violent experience, it was quite peaceful. Vision, sound, touch, all senses just faded as though the body was a biological movie projector reaching the end of a reel, no longer conducting the electromagnetic wavelength of experience. And it was actually beautiful. As I sat in my chair, feeling this ooze of sleepy, I thought on this old dream, and again wondered, is this how we go? 

I awoke from a quick nap maybe 15 minutes later, though it felt much longer. Groggy, I got up and wandered around my apartment. It was dark out, the neighborhood still, my girlfriend not home from work yet. It had that feeling at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey where Dave existed as an old man in that white lit home. What was that feeling; mystery, relaxation and loneliness melted into one new sensation? 

I picked up my phone to text her to see when she’d be home, but in looking at my recent text history I couldn’t find her name at first. And I briefly wondered if I awoke into a new dimension, and she had gone to another.

She arrived home 10 minutes later and my life went back to normal. The slow oozing of time squished back into the fast flow we’ve all grown used to. But the reprieve from being too tightly conscious of time as fixed rhythm, as I sensed in that hour at the bar, in the cat nap on my chair, is a taste of what we all may need to recharge our batteries, and help us recover from those moments where we feel so rushed from modern life we drop our hot dog on the floor and it rips doom into our tempers.