That Burning Smell is Me Thinking…

I had a dream one night about a tree that I passed by everyday. I never really noticed it too much until I saw apples growing on it, then I picked one and bit into it. It was the sweetest apple I have ever had!

I had this dream this past summer when I was in the middle of making some life changing decisions. I have interpreted this dream in a few different ways, but mostly for me it means finding unnoticed potential. Often I can overlook great things in my familiar surroundings. I can also easily overlook great things about myself. It is always good to be reminded about the extraordinary around me.

I call it Stroller Tyranny. Parents with big sport utility strollers trying to run me down. I know raising kids is hard, but must you also sneak up behind me and run me down with your monster truck stroller and then yell at me for being in your way?

You are in my way! Get out of the way! I experience that often in Chicago. When I first moved here I noticed that there are a lot of car horns honking. People don’t like to stop. Walking down the sidewalk we look straight ahead, dodge obstacles and then tell people to move.

When I lived in Dallas, I had to drive everywhere and get stuck in traffic. I hated traffic. The other cars were just in my way and stopping me from getting where I want to go. I really hated to drive and longed for the day when I wouldn’t have to drive anymore. I thought that day would never come.

I live in Chicago now where I don’t drive anymore, I barely ride in cars and I ride the bus, train and bicycles. I have been amazed how my mental health has improved since I stopped driving. I don’t have to live with the stress of bad drivers and horrible traffic. I love how I can just be a passenger and be able to read, enjoy music or write while I travel. I think American cities should help people get out of their cars. It improves quality of life in so many ways.

Think about the last time when you were out in a rural area and there was no traffic noise. You could hear birds, cows, bees and the wind blowing through the trees. Nice, huh? I know we will never make cities as quiet as the middle of nowhere, but if we were to rethink our cities in a way to make car travel rare and help make public transit quiet and efficient, then we would do much to improve the quality of life.

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Right now fluffy snow flurries are slowly floating to the earth right outside the window of the tea café I am sitting in. They look nice against the backdrop of the old neogothic church across the street.

Here in the café, there is an old man yelling at some imaginary friend sitting across from him. It is like a little bit of Uptown has come to visit me. In Uptown, people walking down the street talk to people who aren’t there, and they are not wearing cell phone headsets. When I am in other neighborhoods, I automatically assume people talking to nobody are crazy, until I see the headset.

I stick a finger in my belly button, and pull out a bit of lint everyday. It doesn’t matter what color shirt I am wearing, the lint is always the same dark gray color. I was thinking about saving it and someday making a hat out of it. It would be a great achievement of frugality, and kind of gross.

Maybe I could start a belly button lint recycling initiative. I am sure many people have belly button lint that they need to get rid of and we are unnecessarily putting tons of the stuff in the landfill every year. I wonder what other stuff we throw away that should be recycled?

I was at a café this morning and they were playing bouncy dance music and I looked out the window and saw an older woman walking down the sidewalk perfectly in time with the music. It was one of those moments that pass by quickly and I realize that in a city of almost 4 million people, I was the only one who saw it.

In other news, the little iBook is dead. I am now using Darren’s old PowerBook. I came home and ripped the hard drive out of the iBook and transplanted it into the PowerBook. I am making plans to get another computer. I am seriously thinking about getting a MacBook.

I am doing my laundry right now. Actually, I am sitting here typing on my laptop while a machine does my laundry for me. If it was 100 years ago, I would actually be doing the laundry and my hands would be too busy to type anything, if I could afford a typewriter. Did typewriters exist in 1907?

Anyways, I have thought about clothes lately because I sometimes take for granted the amazing thrift shop located just a few blocks away from where I live. I buy all kinds of nice clothes for less than $10 a piece. Last Sunday I found a pair of Doc Martens for 8 bucks! The insoles I bought for them cost almost twice as much as the shoes. I had been needing some good work shoes.

I have been looking at the price tags on clothes in certain stores on N. Michigan Avenue and I am shocked that people would pay $700 for what really doesn’t look like more than a half decent athletic jacket. I thought the price tag was going to say something like $300.

A friend of mine said the average African survives on about a dollar a day. Think about it. Instead of paying $700 for a jacket, someone could buy a perfectly nice jacket for $200 maybe $300 and put the rest of the money to better use.

Maybe we should just use the money collected from federal luxury taxes for direct aid to people in desperate poverty?

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and instead of going back to bed, I stay up for a while, sit in my chair and think. It is very peaceful in the wee hours of the morning making a good opportunity to let my mind wonder and contemplate life.

Usually I write ideas down or type them into my computer if they seem important or amazing and then I read them the next day. Sometimes I have come up with ridiculous things, but very often I can have great moments of clarity. Some of the things I think of are as mundane as reconfiguring a computer or rearranging the furniture. Other times I have decided to change my life’s course.

I usually don’t spend more than an hour thinking and contemplating in the early morning hours. I sleep more soundly afterwards because I have more peace of mind.

DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. This in no way reflects my work ethic, just my warped sense of humor. OK? Good.

INTRODUCTION
Not many people choose to wash dishes for a living, it just sort of happens. When we were young and were asked what we want to be when we grow up, I am sure not many of us responded with, “I want to be a professional dishwasher!” Usually many people find themselves washing dishes because it is something easy to do and it is a steady paycheck.

PART ONE: The Day’s Beginning
When starting out your day, it is important to get organized. Make sure the dishes are stacked according to shape and breakability. Stack the metal kitchen pots in the most haphazard way as possible to be sure that they will fall over when someone barely breaths on them. Then the breakable stuff should be located close to this precarious pile of pots so that when they fall, they will break the fragile bowls and plates in the most spectacular fashion. This will insure that you have fewer dishes to wash.

After sweeping up the broken dishes, it is time for a long smoke break. Make sure you smoke a minimum of two cigarettes. If you don’t smoke, then you should start. It is a great excuse to get out of the kitchen and go out to the sidewalk and watch people act stupid.

PART TWO: Looking and Sounding Busy
After your break, it is time to catch up on the rest of the days dishes. This time try to make it seem like you are being more careful. Make sure the machine is running at all times even if it means putting only one item on a rack at a time and sending it through. Next make sure you make lots of clinking sounds with the dishes, the more noise you make, the busier the boss will think you are.

After an hour of this charade, it is time for a trash run. Collect all of the trash cans and consolidate them into as few cans as possible so you wont have to make multiple trips to the dumpster. Put fresh can liners in the empty cans and put them back and take the full trash cans to the dumpster. Don’t forget your cigarettes, you will need to smoke at least two of them while you are out behind the dumpster. This would also be a good time to indulge in some of the alcoholic beverages that you stole from the bar and hid inside the trash can. Before you return to work, rub a little garbage juice on your apron to cover up the alcohol smell.

PART THREE: Closing Procedures
After the trash run, it is now time to think about closing the kitchen for the night. The best method I have found to get out early is to just sweep stuff under the tables and ovens. Nobody ever looks under there and you can sweep it out of there during the slow times later in the week. Mopping at the end of the day is optional; it is best to wait until the kitchen is really busy so you can have a good laugh watching people slip on the wet floor.

After you have “cleaned” up and drained the dish machine, it is time to go home. Congratulate yourself on a job well done!

Yesterday I summoned up the courage to aim a propane torch directly at the delicate circuitry of my beloved iBook. I had the dreaded Apple G3 iBook logic board failure which involves the ATI Radeon 7500 chip working itself loose with normal case flexing.  I tried a trick of putting shims in the case to push the chip back in, but the problem kept getting worse.

I read online that the soldier on the bottom of the chip needed to be reflowed. To reflow the soldier, one has to heat the chip up hot enough to melt the soldier, thus re-establishing contact. Some people have a fancy work station to do this with, others use paint stripping guns, I used a propane torch. Fortunately I had extra iBook with the dead video problem to practice on. I fired the spare iBook up after it cooled down and it worked! I decided to do it to my main machine since if I accidently fried my main iBook, I could use the other one as a backup.

So now my iBook is working great and I put the other iBook back together and am going to sell it to a friend. Good times.

I was sitting on the bus this morning watching the traffic signal at the intersection ahead of us change from red to green and back again six times before we moved an inch. I was thinking about how I wished I was riding a bicycle down the lakefront path freezing my ass off and feeling alive.

Cycling in the winter sounds harsh to many people, but the big challenge sometimes can be trying not to overheat. It is hard to convey the feeling of winter riding to those who haven’t done it because many folks have a hard time getting past the cold aspect of it. Beating the cold can be part of the attraction. I miss it.

Every day I am on the El train crawling along or on the bus sitting in the traffic, I long to be riding down the path and breathing the free air. Riding a bike to work sometimes feels like I am getting away with something, it is almost subversive. It is like I can have more fun in the morning before work than some people will have all day, and I can do it everyday.

So next next Wednesday I am going to look for a bike. I keep thinking about it all the time.

Last night I killed a mouse.

I woke up around 2am to pee and when I walked into the bathroom, I saw a mouse trying to jump out of the trash can. So I carefully picked up the trash can and dumped the mouse into the toilet. The poor little thing was swimming around trying desperately to get out. I tried to flush it down and it swam so hard that it didn’t go down. So I grabbed the plunger and tried to force it down. It stayed in the plunger. So I waited for the tank to fill up and tried a combination of flushing and plunging. Success!

I am sure it had a wild ride down the sewer!