Thursday, May 20, 2004

less wracking

Wow, just spent twenty hours in bed recently, that was really something. Goes a long way towards not being sick, I find. I always leave situations like this half hoping and half fearing that the world has undergone some sort of massive transformation in the intervening time, but as it turns out, no things are pretty much the way they were.

While watching the very good final episode of Angel the last night I was reminded again of how hilarious local news promos are, in Chicago anyway. "Hip-Hop is increasingly popular in the suburbs: Harmless trend, or dangerous influence?" Wow, that would have been some hard hitting investigative journalism in 1991. Oh wait, no it wouldn't have.

I noticed that today was the sixteenth anniversary of the Lori Dann shooting. A crazy woman walked into a grade school in Winnetka (one of the north suburbs near Evanston) and shot a bunch of kids, one fatally. This was long before the late 90's shootings and I guess had quite an effect on the national psyche, or at least the north suburban Chicago psyche. One of my best friends (whom I didn't know at the time) was at a neighboring Winnetka grade school and has occasionally referenced the craziness of the incident. Why do I bring it up? Because I bitterly remember it as my first brush with current events related censorship. My own grade school class was doing some kind of short play about a couple of outlaw cowboys who break into a frontier classroom and hold the kids hostage, and the kids, I don't know, outwit them or something. I was told by the teachers that the grownups decided to cancel the play because it would "make too many nightmares come back" (which come to think of it might make a good horror movie tagline) about the tragedy. I was only ten years old but I vividly remember stammering "But they're COWBOYS!"

I know the Abu Ghraib story has been pretty much mined to death in this 24 hour news cycle world but I've been meaning to post this link for a couple of weeks. It's a cartoon by my friend Paul Czarnowski. I went to high school with Paul. He was a couple of years older than me so we didn't know each other as well as I would have liked, in retrospect. But he introduced me to the Onion, ten years ago, when it was only available in print form. And he had beautiful rock hair. He doesn't have it anymore, but he's still beautiful.

It occurs to me that this cartoon, portraying the commander in chief in a negative light, might play into the accusation leveled at me by my friend Twinters. Twinters, who calls herself "Theresa", called me a "bleeding heart liberal" in the comments section a few days ago. She's Rockford Republican Royalty you see. (Good luck on your interview today by the way, darling) So it occurs to me, I think I only have three or four regular readers: Fritzie, Tuohy-Buoy, maybe John L's still out there? (I may not like Bush but I share his habit of assigning cute nicknames, John gets the short end) I always strive to please, so I'd like to ask my readers, would you like to see more liberal political content, or more conservative? Because like any ambitious writer I am completely willing to sell out and embrace any convictions my public demands. Please let me know!

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