This. Fear of a blank page. Those polka dots were talking shit. Cat food again.


self-portrait, with floating heads.



self-portrait, nude, in the box store.



self-portrait, wet, in mouth of whale, with fish.

This web page is the work of
Marc Heiden, 23 years old, who . He lives in Chicago.

My voicemail cries out for you:
(312) 693-0455, 5pm-8am.

Projects:
Players Workshop (Term 3).
Hopefully less dizzy at some point.

Recent reading:
1 Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
2 Notes from Underground
Fyodor Dostoevsky
3 Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel
J. A. Schmoll Gen Eisenwerth
4 How late it was, how late
James Kelman
5 Family Values : A Sin City Yarn
Frank Miller

updated daily:
Corona Movies
Fametracker
Kempa
Kill Less of Me
Kottke
Memepool
Metafilter
Misterpants
Morning News
NBAtalk
randomWalks
Robot Wisdom
Salon
Suck
Weep

updated weekly:
the Onion (W)
Red Meat (Tu)
This Modern World (M)

occasional updates:
Exploding Dog
McSweeney's
Public Enemy
Static Flux
What Jail is Like

peeps:
Another Room
Penny Dreadful Players
Ron Rodent
Skinnyguy
WEFT 90.1 FM

art 'n resources:
Wes Anderson
Tim Burton
Douglas Coupland
Eatonweb Portal
HTML Help



b-side wins again 2001

010309 My most recent project was winding down due to lack of enthusiasm. Filling peoples' garbage cans with cups of water seemed like a good idea when I came up with it yesterday, but it required an awful lot of trips back and forth from the break room, and only the janitors will probably notice it anyway. So, new project. It began when I was asked to do some work that involved stapling, and one of the staplers jammed up on me. I was frustrated. This work was not making the world better in any way. No one would be happy to see these collections of paper, nor would they be wiser on the 18% chance that they actually read them, and boy, could my time be spent in better ways. The entire situation was composed of waste stacked upon more waste. So, responding to the assignment at its most basic level -- the lesson, you must waste -- I threw away the stapler. Initially the project was only a no-tolerance policy, throwing out each stapler if it jammed or stapled poorly. Four staplers passed on this way. I thought about it some more, though, about how the stupid things were constantly linking pieces of paper that should not be linked, and the irreparable damage that was doing to the notion of words in sequence, so I threw away a few more staplers. Now I am committed to the death of all staplers on this floor. It will be hard to get at most of the ones on peoples' desks, but I will do my best. I am very good at projects.

Are my workplace activities devolving into mere lashing out? How much longer before I walk into the bathroom and just pee all over the walls? Hopefully a little while yet.

I wish I knew some babies. I'm in the mood to play with babies tonight. I'd even clean their diapers. Strange mood to be in. Normally babies scare the hell out of me, because the feral ones look just like the other ones until they get their fangs into you.

Moments ago, I exacted a terrible vengeance upon the Keep In Room 1094 stapler.

This afternoon, I am working on posting my resume to various job sites. The theory could be advanced that I am shooting myself in the foot by titling the resume Super Monkey Ninja, but I feel like any potential employers should know what they're getting into.

This resume is never going to get me hired. I am too cheeky for my own professional good.

A lunchtime jaunt out into the world of oxygen and carbon-based lifeforms provided me with, among other things, the news that Jeff Beck will be performing at the Chicago Theater tomorrow evening. If he gets into town early enough, will he stop by the Weezer show tonight and play tunes with the fellows? Of course he will. How could he not?


010308 International pop star Michael Jackson arrived at London's Heathrow Airport on Monday of this week at the exact same time as I departed from it. London is a very large city, as anyone who can't read a map and is too deep in a paranoid fit to ask for directions can tell you, but it is clearly not a large enough city for Michael Jackson and me. Here is what he said while he was there:

"My father is a tough man, and he pushed my brothers and me hard, from the earliest age, to be the best performers we could be," Jackson, 42, told an audience of students and journalists, his voice faltering. "I wanted more than anything else to be a typical little boy. I wanted to build tree houses, have water balloon fights and play hide and seek with my friends. But fate had it otherwise...."

And here is what I said while I was there:

"Hey, fuck Derek Jeter, and fuck the Yankees too. Fuck all of New York. I'm from Boston. I work in the Yards," Heiden, 23, told various passers-by on the sidewalk and the subway, his voice tensed in a bad New England accent. "What the fuck are you looking at? I'm from America. I've got a gun."

Obviously, then, there are differences. I think they liked me more.

I have a new work-hobby that involves collecting as many bottle-caps as possible -- all of which read Sorry! Please Try Again, though I have no idea what was at stake -- and leaving them around my desk in conspicuous places, as if to say: were you hoping I would be at work on time? Sorry, Please Try Again!, or, were you hoping to get me to do some work for you? Sorry, Please Try Again!, or, do you think I will not destroy you in super-battle? Sorry, Please Try Again! Having assembled a decent collection after a dedicated Mountain Dew binge, I was shocked to find them gone when I returned from vacation. Angry, even. The new media guy thinks that the cleaning lady must have gone rogue and overstepped her authority. What's that you say, Flavor Flav? Get up get, get get down, x37900 (1) is a joke in your town.

I can't get at my webpage as I'm writing this. Ever since RCN / 21st Century Cable bought out my ISP, the service has been crap. I continue to use their service, though. Economic inertia wins again. In the preface to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the author takes time out to advise readers not to open an account at Chase Manhattan, claiming that they are a very bad bank. (2) I think that's awesome. Don't mess around with your customers, because they might turn out to be writers some day, and then you'll be sorry, as I'm sure Chase Manhattan is right now, because if the pen is mightier than the sword, a preface is like an atomic bomb, yo. (5)

In the bathrooms here, there are metal-plated signs that insist you must not 'dispose of bio-hazardous material in the commode'. That's fine by me, since I never have anything other than poop, toilet paper or bad chinese food to leave. Still, the fact that the sign is necessary is evidence of what a shady 'consulting' company this is. How is bio-hazardous material involved in anyone's job in the marketing department, let alone the covert disposition of it? If the sign wasn't there, I just know I'd constantly walk in on ad execs trying to cram trolls into the toilets and nattering on about horrible genetic monstrosities, and they'd definitely ask me to take over so they could get to their three o'clock, and I'd be stuck with troll duty every day.


(1) The extension for the Services Coordinator, according to the phone list in my cubicle.
(2) I have no love for their credit card division, although they have much love for me, judging by how many letters they send me imploring me to re-open my account with them. Appropriately, many of the letters come from a VP named J. Holmes. (3)
(3) This is appropriate because it brings old school porn star John Holmes to mind, he of the largest set of male genitalia on record, which ties neatly into what the credit card industry does. (4)
(4) Which is to say, basically, that credit card companies have low production values, holes in their narratives and amateurish acting. If you want to read anal penetration subtexts into my webpage, that's your own prerogative.
(5) And a weblog is a persistent case of mouth herpes for the second brigade's drummer boy.


010307 Do not ask me why I did not climb, for I had my reasons: in the city of London there is something called 'anti-climb paint', and while it is not widely used, and while you are warned of its existence by signs stating as much, and even though every wall bearing the paint had an interesting tree on the other side, there are some bluffs you should not call; step away, walk away, your family gatherings in the early 1980s were planned around sequels to The Gambler so you'd know when to fold.

If you have cattle, and your cattle are grazing, and you are in Chicago, it would be a bad idea for you to allow your cattle to graze on my lawn, because hoof-and-mouth disease is huge across the sea and, resentful of the beef-industrial complex's attempts at quarantine that kept me away from the ruins of a castle that I travelled very far to see and off the field where the battle of Hastings took place in 1066, I brought some grass back with me and left it on my lawn. I like you as a person, but I'm sick of your cattle habits.

By the way, the locals don't find jokes about hoof-and-mouth disease funny. I was working up this great routine involving some tofu catching it, but then I left, and fuck it, I mostly ate milkshakes and chips anyway.

While I was away, Beelzetron fired the crazy mail guy who would always talk to me about his latest sweater finds and criticize me for taking off my shoes under my desk. I can't believe they did that. He's gone, gone, gone. I was expecting them to replace him with a wise-cracking swinger from the Moscow office, because that's the sort of stunt they'd pull around here, or find some e-commerce solution involving farming mail delivery out to hordes of seven year-old urchins south of the border, but now there's just some other guy who delivers the mail and doesn't say much. I don't even recognize about half of the people here now. I nearly pegged someone in the head with a box of kleenex this afternoon. Will that get me fired? Good thing I'm so charming. I didn't mean it in a malicious way, but rather in an I was in this copy room first, and I decided I was going to use this copy room for the purpose of juggling boxes of kleenex, so you can wait your turn to do whatever it is you have planned sort of way.

I'm dizzy.

Here is one consequence of getting lost for long periods of time in the cold weather: your lips become chapped, so chapped they bleed, and you have to buy chapstick, which you then hold in your hands, ricocheting from flashback to present, not sure how to handle this situation: I mean, shit, no one's watching, mom's not around to yell at you, so eat the chapstick! But no, you have you get your lips sorted out. But it tastes like cherry! Fine, eat half. Mmm. Bluh. Ugh. Oh, you fool.

In the airport, the customs officer asked me why I had left the 'occupation' space blank. I left it blank because I didn't want to talk about it. What was the point of the question? Did they hope to catch someone who wrote down 'terrorist' as his occupation? Hey, don't ask me, I can't hear you from this side. The customs officer needed an answer (he was a needy creature, bad improviser, all take and no give) so, reluctantly, I pointed to the giant Beelzetron ads on the wall behind us -- one continent and several thousand miles away from B-HQ -- and told him simply that I played a part in that monstrosity. He was satisfied with my answer.

Mmmdibbub, mumbled the lunatic. He chose a seat across from me, as lunatics inevitably do, and noted: twernuhblernuh. I kept reading. Many more train stops to go. Muhduhbwat. I read the newspaper. Then he screamed:

ALCHEMIST!

I turned my head, startled. The lunatic smiled, satisfied, leaned back, raised his eyebrows and repeated: alchemist. He was quiet for the rest of the ride, aside from occasionally commenting bnuhguwuh as the train slowed to pull into the stations.


I know my rights. Give me back my damn pants.