Do you like me? Do you really, really like me?

Hi, friend! If you know me well, you know that I'm the manager at Myopic Books here in Chicago. If you have visited the store recently and had a good shopping experience, I'd like to ask a favor of you.

Do you have a Yelp account? If so, and you like the store, write a nice review of us, pretty please? There is a kreepy kustomer griping on our Yelp page because we kicked him out of the bookstore a few weeks ago. Why? He was using a bar code scanner on our merch, and we don't allow that for a bevy of reasons. It's sleazy, distracting to other customers, and sleazy....just general bottom-feeding. So, after refusing him his purchase, we gave him the heave-ho. Now he's made it his personal mission to make us seem like a crappy group of people. We aren't, right? This guy is bogus! He even mentions stealing from another local business that he doesn't like. We don't want people like that shopping in here, and we're usually pretty nice to people who don't try to dick us over.

So, will you help us counteract this dude's campaign of hate? Leave us a nice review on our Yelp page here, if you feel so inclined. If you hate us, that's cool too. Just don't leave a review. Kidding!

Hateful spawn "We are the chasm depths"

Hi. Are you on Twitter? I'm all over that shit like TruckNutz.

Won't you follow me?

Twitter: Jrhardcore68

Storming jackboots!

Do you have a copy of the Grinning Death's Head demo tape that I could burn? Pretty please? Hit a dude up!

Well Come On, Let the Provin' Begin

I have seen my future. I give you city rock:

Can you think of more examples? Let's get on this, people!

I made it to the rabbit zine

I actually have some new writing for you!
Go now!

Some major life changes might be afoot, people. Like maybe I can afford to go here every now and then?

"Lost Wisdom"

If you like good writing, what are you doing here? Go to this blog instead. Sam McPheeters is really good.

http://loomofruin.blogspot.com/

So hold me, mom, in your long arms. Your petro-chemical arms, your military arms, in your electronic arms.

UPDATE**UPDATE**UPDATE**

www.Change.jr.bookstore.gov is on the way.

Short post today, longer blog about Election Night rally coming soon. Really, promise, with photos by Josh, etc. I'll stop watching the Abrams Star Trek reboot trailer and looking on the internet for photos of my future haircut, and get to work. Etc.

I hear there are some folks looking for advice about following along with Obama's political reading...and I am here to help.

Any wader boots wading into Lincoln-alia begins with his own masterful speeches and writing, and the best place to start is Right here. I have a nice Modern Library Classics hardcover copy of this volume printed in 1942. From the temperance address to the Cooper Union speech to the second inaugural, it's all here. Includes a short, serviceable biographical essay.

For a good in-depth one volume Lincoln biography, I'd recommend the David Herbert Donald, here.

The President-Elect has also been boning up on the New Deal. The best one volume jam on the Roosevelt years all things considered (recent scholarship, readability, ease of finding) is probably by David Kennedy, from the Oxford History of the United States series. Here is all the info.

Last, but not least, is what I'm reading right now. I'm probably overdoing it with a mighty three volume Depression/New Deal spectacular, but I have a hard time reigning it in sometimes. Arthur Schlesinger Jr's combo meal covers basically everything from 1919 to the eve of WWII. It's stylishly written and hums with liberal vibes. Just like the rest of the universe right now!

I do not mean to say we are bound to follow implicitly in whatever our fathers did.

So, I'm going to see Celine Dion at the United Center tonight. Should be rippin'! Got free tickets from Hopper. Thanks girl! I heard she (Celine, not Hopper) does a tits-up cover of Father Befouled's "Excrement Pastorous" on this tour, right after the Wayne/Juice Newton medley. The segue from "Danke Schoen" into "My Short and Curlies--Slowly Unfurling" must be heard to be believed!

NOT!!!!!!!!

I'm totally going to the Obama rally. As in, I got tickets up in that piece. Josh and yours truly will be in line in a few hours...he's taking the snaps, I'm providing the freaked-out nervous vibe and Rahm Emanuel bumperstickers. A comprehensive review of the night's festivities should be forthcoming soon. They are serving hot chocolate tonight the Trib reports and it's 70 degreez!?!? That shit is out to Lunchables. Oh, and did I mention that change is coming to America?

SPEAKING OF CHANGE PS I JUST JOINED NETFLIX WHAT UP WEST WING SEASON ONE WHERE MY TOBY ZIEGLER AT?!?!?!?!

No Dreams Breed In Breathless Sleep, or 4th (5th) on the list?

Unprecedented blogitude, keeping you current!

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Along with a cast and crew of thousands, I'm nominally house-shitting for next door neighbors Bob and Anne while they are getting their vaca-y on in South America. Very occasionally hanging out with their cats Steve, Charles and Chicken, and watching some free cable. Cable is terrifying. I came over this afternoon, turned on the box, and got the fear.

1) MTV's richest crib havers: a DJ I've never heard of in a house the likes of which I have never seen with a swimming pool filled with water "imported from the Bahamas". He used the term imported 3 times in the 10 seconds I viewed. I clicked over to CNN.

2) Lou Dobbs telling me that Mexicans are going to come and eat my family, steal my jobs and give me salmonella poisoning via electrified grapefruits. I clicked over to VH1.

3) I Love The Oughts. 2006? Michael Ian Black talking about Michael Vick and dogfighting and a Nelly Furtado song. Do I remember that? NO! IT WAS 3 WEEKS AGO!

TV off. That was less than 30 seconds of viewage, and I have not turned on the damn thing since. No, instead I'm reading some Howard Phillips Lovecraft in my own living room and giving blog. But just across the hall, roaring like the screaming banshees of Cthulhu, the Comcast box awaits me.

Kewpie dolls and urine stalls will be laughed at the way you're laughed at now

Note to our California friends: the robins are from the White Lodge, the owls are from the Black Lodge, BOB travels by electricity. It explains all the weird slow-mo shots of ceiling fans and random light flashes when things get creepy and surreal. Just a theory, but a good one, I think. I have a lot...of theories. I spent more than three months in 1990/91 thinking Deputy Andy was the killer! Following The Giant's clues might lead you to that conclusion.

Speaking of the Black Lodge, who else is livin' in one? The Man From Another Place dances out from under my couch. Boy oh boy, summer seems to have gotten off to a hard start around here. Flux, move-outs, holy rollers, day in day out like Ian Curtis sez, too much fast food, not enough sunshine, shoes getting dirty, pants getting holes, no decent parties, people are getting married in droves, the White Sox are tanking, the "John Adams" mini-series was kind of rotten, I still hate coffee, LOST is off the air...I got more litany than the Pope.

That's why I downloaded the Let It Be re-issue a few weeks back and play it constantly, even more than I did when I bought it as a know-nothin' Blackburn College freshman who had just gotten laid (and summarily quite ruthlessly dumped) for the first time. Even if the entire damned record wasn't a perfect construct of adol-leased life doom and post-teen twaddle and middle-20's ennui and deepening-into-thirties WHAT THE FUCK it would still put a corncob pipe sized lump in your throat if you, say, happened, for the first time, to run into it on the street corner one day as you were blowing off some scheme or bumped into it when you went out on your windowsill to smoke at, like, 5 in the AM when the dawns early light smacks of an interrogation room. It would stare you in the face and embrace your failures and the revoked lease on life you are using as toilet paper and say, hey! HEY! Gary's got a boner! And you would laugh and say "he does indeed! I forgive everyone! Boners!"

And then you might try to figure out how exactly Westerberg was able to channel Carl Fisher from Blitz AND Billy Joel, and you would fail and keep listening and realize failure is engraved on the turd-encrusted esplanade walked by all the faithful and faithless alike, and that the subtle empathy of "Androgynous", which sounded like a put-down to you for years was actually far from it and in fact a kind of very powerful medicine, cure/armor that kind of carries you for weeks in it's wake, in a surprising manner, and you want to tell people (friends, acquaintances, parents, government officials, minor and major deities) here is a song so catchy and sure and it's not saying "don't touch my jewelry" or "I don't love you any more" or "I'm gonna come on your face" or "your enemies deserve the worst your rage can fathom" or "Hold on while I count my amazingly huge stacks of money and BTW feel free to admire the prestige/honor/self-satisfaction/microwave burritos it buys me"...or something like that. Records are so great! I forgive everyone!