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Whatsay We Have Us a Ribbon-Cutting Party
October 12th, 2007
WELCOME to MIDDLECOAST.US! This site is the instrument with which I will be transmitting news, thoughts and observations of life here on our treasured third coast, including life in the giant, whirring parking ticket press known as the City of Chicago. It is a beautiful city, and a great place to live if you like to take a beating, and will surely produce many enjoyable cannonballs for your reading pleasure. If you’re not yet very familiar with what a blog is, I can tell you that in this case, it’s an unrelenting discharge of random thoughts, careless judgments, and non-sequiturs gushing from my head like diesel fuel from the splayed gut of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
The “blogosphere,” as it is known, is populated with established, well thought out blogs that execute their daily entries with dignity and poise. I, on the other hand, will be entering the blogosphere ass-first and shallow, creating a colorful ball of streaking wreckage. And as the crackling debris rains grimly over the internet for months, it is my hope that like any other great catastrophe, it will be hard to look away. There will be some political incorrectness and naughty language here and there, so if you’re that mildly retarded lady in the Pooh sweatshirt who’s currently forwarding me another smiley-laden internet hoax in 16 pt. Comic Sans, get your eyes back on your Adorable Kittens calendar, because this could get dicey. In fact, you are the subject of a category called “Cute Attack!” where I will be making sport of you.
As I commence to disfigure the face of the Web like a frontier-era pimp punishing a whore, I need your help. All I’m asking you to do is come visit this site every 10 minutes or so for the next 15 years. Ok, maybe once or twice a week, which is not nearly as often as you visit your watersports and bukkake sites, but it’s just as informative. My aim is simple: to make you smirk, think, laugh, minimize your browser in a panic when your boss walks into the room, and Allah willing, build a growing readership of thankless strangers. I will write every weekday, time permitting, and I will promise to stay clear of the keyboard if I have nothing interesting to say (read: don’t feel like writing).
So click around and please let me know if the site reacts fatally to input, because me + php coding = monkey + beaker of nitroglycerin. Leave a comment if you like. But most importantly, bookmark (or subscribe to) this site and check in on it every once in a while. It takes some dedication. Unlike your habitual gay truckstop bathroom hookups, blog reading is not simply a one-time affair. It’s a dedicated, loveless marriage between you and an unreciprocating machine, held together by feelings of obligation toward me and lack of work at the office. Seriously, you have to keep coming back for it to work, like radiation therapy. The prognosis looks positive for you.
Lord knows we could all use another long term commitment that doesn’t pay shit. This one’s on me. Let’s get this party started, it’s gonna be epic…
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The topics will be split into the following categories: Manic, Depressive, Politics, Religion, Music, The City that Works, Lake Shore Drive-by (road rage), The Internets, Headlines, Cute Attack!, Left Coast Watch, Right Coast Watch, OMG…GUEST AUTHOR DAY!, Monkeys, Bitching, Bitching & Moaning, Teenage Dance Party, Lucky Gold Star Chinatown Story!, Pirates of the Inland Ocean, and Clusterfuck USA. The ‘helterskelter’ button will pull a random post from the archives.
Be Afraid.
October 15th, 2007Spooky season is upon us in the cold heart of this frightening country. We take our chilling October ritual dead serious here on the middle coast. New Orleans has its formidable haunted history, the eastern seaboard deserves reverence for its witch burnings and legendary axe-brandishing debutantes, and Los Angeles deserves a kind of incredulous head shake for its inexplicably high carjacking rates. There are places in this great nation that take the prize for being scary the whole year-round, such as the Bible Belt and Berkeley, CA. But when it comes to Halloween, arguably, we in the Midwest hold in the highest reverence this spine-chilling tradition, and execute it with the least remorse.
As the grotesquely bloated harvest moon hovers over the bucolic landscape like a sucking chest wound in an otherwise perfectly good body of stars, we begin to drool reflexively as a timber wolf does just before turning a deer inside-out. The leaves rustle on the ground, and scarecrows silently gather outside the city for an apparent invasion. Heavy pumpkins adorn balconies in a city known for its deadly porch collapses. Highly flammable bales of hay and dried corn stalks gather around the entrances of bars in a city known for its club fires. This is some seriously scary shit. We don’t screw around up in here.
With no disrespect for my friends on the Left Coast, I can say categorically that the stairs and doors that lead to nowhere in Sarah Winchester’s mystery house do not hold a Scooby Doo flickering candle to a City where we begin to discuss our Halloween costumes in July. In fact the movie Halloween, filmed in the Golden State, (clearly evident by the emaciated palm tree trunks lining the sidewalk) is set in a fictional town in Illinois. Hollywood can only hope to dream.
The Right Coast, with it’s lurid and fascinating colonial past, simply doesn’t have the kind of dedication we do. I welcome your protests and have high regard for your spookiness, but let’s face it, this is the city of big shoulders and no head.
NYC, sure your river is dirty, but our river is not only dirty, but literally bubbles with with the ghosts of thousands of century-old livestock carcasses. Goddammit, that is commitment.
Expect some downright scary posts in October. It’s go-time here. We are the Hog Butcher to the World and It’s been a long time since we’ve limited ourselves to hogs. So put the fucking lotion in the basket.
The Widowmaker
October 16th, 2007
The el stop by my house, the Francisco stop on the Brown Line, is one of only a few street-level el crossings in the city of Chicago. I have affectionately named it The Widowmaker, for its insatiable thirst for human blood. It took a young man from Milwaukee most recently. He was a gate jumping bicyclist who did not realize that your chances of surviving the lion habitat at the zoo are exponentially better than to challenge the Widowmaker. It looks like a charming, miniature train crossing, as if from a train set, complete with a little dinging bell. That’s its rattle.
Sometimes she tears up a car, trying desperately to get at the person inside. It’s not a train crossing as you know it, where you feel there is some predictability. The Widowmaker is a living, breathing hunter. You can look both ways and there is no train, but as soon as you step under that gate, she will be there for you, and in a flash of silver you’ll be gone. When the Widowmaker unhinges its jaw and claims a man, they shut down the Brown Line for hours while they untangle the sinewy mess from under the train. Alligators and serpents also like to lay motionless for hours after feeding.
But I’m not saying the Widowmaker is a remorseless killing machine that must be stopped. In order to get yourself tore up, you have to drive around, bike around, or duck under a gate. Like the misunderstood shark, the Widowmaker plays an important role in our ecosystem, and should simply be respected.
The Francisco stop has a street-level sister, the adjacent Rockwell stop. The quaint station and its surrounding shops are known as Rockwell Crossing. I prefer Rockwell Crushing, since it too seems to enjoy killing people.
The City just shut the Widowmaker down for 7 days for “improvements.” Maybe they’re sharpening the gates and hardening the front of the train.
OMG it’s our 1st CUTE ATTACK!
October 17th, 2007
Today’s Cute Attack! image: Puppy in a bucket
Today I’m fantasizing about: Feeding pink marshmallows to a baby panda while Shirley Temple sings the My Pretty Pony theme to me.
OMG! IT’S THE 1ST CUTE ATTACK on middlecoast! is this the cutest puppy you have ever seen?! 
it looks like he is driving a lil car! LOL! i sure hope he doesn’t get a little truck driver’s sunburn!!! why can’t i make the Comic Sans font on this thing, it would be so much cuter! 
forwarding emails like this are how my sense of self-loathing manifests itself! LOL! i truly hate myself! look at his lil paws, i just wanna eat him up! i lock myself in the bathroom and eat chocolates and my husband doesn’t know! shhh! i’m mildly retarded, and i never leave my house in Round Lake Beach because i love needlepoint and computers! i bet his lil doggie tag says “i am the cutest puppy on the planet, yes i am!” ROTFL! k gotta go watch QVC now, BYE!!!
A Machine Out of Control
October 17th, 2007
Goddammit i love Chitown politics. This Lakeview Alderman rallied to pass the nanny-state “no-cell-phone-while-driving” law. Then he got a ticket for talking on his cell phone while driving. Then he made a call and got the ticket fixed. Then a cop hand-delivered his license back to him at his ward office.
If you’re not familiar with the Chicago political machine, imagine a giant makeshift robot, made of sharp, rusty metal parts, held together with duct tape and operated by starving hyenas and monkeys wearing hats, careening rudderlessly into a crowd of innocent people. Yes, there are also some good people in the Machine, but how could anyone be expected to wrest control from a pack of monkeys wearing hats. Those things are vicious.
We might be just about ready to burn this town to the ground again and start over.
Holy Macaroni, Another Cute Attack! Already?
October 18th, 2007
Today’s Cute Attack! image: Frumpy puppy and ‘lil baby chick.
Today i’m fantasizing about: 4 baby pandas piloting a barge loaded with pure white sugar down the Choco-sippi river.
OMG so i know it’s real soon to do another adorable animal picture, but LQQK! 
the puppy is saying “I love you sooo much!” and the chick is saying “we’re bEsT fRiEnDs!!!” it makes my heart swell with joy! actually my doctor says the reason my heart is enlarged is because of my sedentary lifestyle and incredible intake of dutch letters. those things are so yummy! but when i see pics like this, i don’t have to think about all that icky stuff! i’m very good at escaping in my mind, mostly because of my undiagnosed depression.
i just want to nestle that lil chick right in the elastic band of my jeans and forward some baby polar bear pictures to every single address in my contacts. doing stuff like that is how i replace my sexuality, which i said goodbye to when i was born again! fun!
today is one of those days where i just want to turn off the bathroom lights, light some Glade scented candles, fill the tub to the brim with American Girl dolls and luxuriate for hours. Calgon, take me away!!! 
but the reality is, if i don’t get on the phone with QVC right now, i’m gonna miss this hummel. bye!
Repent. Here Comes the Datastorm.
October 18th, 2007In a little over a year from now, television will be making the the big switch from analog to digital broadcasting. A deadline has been set so that the FCC can sell the analog frequencies freed up by the migration to digital. This means that if you are watching broadcast TV (rabbit ears) on a set that is over 10 years old, you have to throw your TV away or get a converter box. This is no big deal to us, since your TV is probably already digital ready, and all porn channels are provided through digital cable or satellite providers. But that doesn’t mean that this switch won’t be EXTREMELY DANGEROUS to the population.
When you undergo a large-scale shift in technology, you have to ask yourself, is there a potential for disaster, and can i come to some kind of paranoid, technophobic conclusion that there is? As a responsible citizen, I asked myself that question, and through a sequence of disjointed fantasies, I’ve come to the conclusion that we are in very serious danger.
Listen, since well before I was born, since the days before I Love Lucy, television has been broadcast using soft, warming analog RF radiation. Analog TV signals are silent, colorless, odorless, and weigh almost nothing. The wave is a long, sweeping series of peaks and troughs, like surf gently kissing a beach 20 million times every second (Precisely 578-584 million times a second if you’re watching Nancy Pender’s enormous yap on Fox32 Chicago. The woman looks like a goddamn basking shark sieving a cloud of krill). An interlaced analog signal produces a soft, nonthreatening, shitty low-resolution image which we’ve grown to associate with soft, shitty things like The Courtship of Eddie’s Father and The Banana Splits.
Now i might not be “qualified” or “informed” or even “sober right now,” but I can tell you what a world of digital television will look like. How? Well it doesn’t take a brain scientist to figure that the world will be a very different place. My theories are based on some very science-ish things and various whatnots, so don’t you question me, you pretentious snob. This isn’t one of your two-way, elbow patch and pipe “discussions.” Let your homosexual lover “skepticism” take a vacation, because it will be too late by the time facts roll in. Call me an alarmist, call me what you like, but this is serious…
Imagine black clouds of 1’s and 0’s, swarming like locusts. Rivers would choke with data. The vicious wave of information would knock out stop lights, cause power outages, and destroy the banking system. Data of this type could skeletonize a cow in seconds, while redundant packetized information would eat through fallout shelter doors like tiny drill bits. Relatively secure triple-DES encryption would make it virtually impossible to defeat the onslaught. The only way to survive the swarming datastorm would be to get in your car, close all the heat vents, and drive into the refrigerated superdome stadium where the cold will calm the savage swarm while Richard Widmark and Jose Ferrer exchange witty repartee.
Of course, eventually, a race of super-intelligent marmots would establish a despotic government, which would ban all electronics, and require the surviving humans to live in indentured servitude. Once the space ships were ready, and the marmots departed for the planet Glaxnor V, the humans would be left to pick up the pieces and figure out what went wrong.
It’s a chilling vision of the near future, yes, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared. I for one, am not going to spend any time preparing for it. Because there’s a good chance it won’t go down exactly the way i described it. And because it is also possible it will be an uneventful migration of infrastructure that you won’t even notice, and your picture will just get a little better. Whatever.
Bring Your Bomb to Work Day at O’Hare
October 19th, 2007
The TSA recently tested the performance of the Down’s children they hire to do screening at O’Hare, and 60% of the disguised fake bombs they hid made it through. Granted, they disguised them “creatively,” but isn’t that what a screener does?
So, 100% of flyers have to surrender their nail clipper and shampoo, but 6 out of 10 travelers could bring, let’s say, a Baby Alive doll with blasting caps for eyes and a diaperload of Semtex, as long as your carry-on fits in that disused size-checker box thing that’s lying on its side at the gate.
What kind of gross mismanagement has me piling all of my most tasteful and most non-explosive accessories into a dirty tray, while the x-ray belt is spitting out contraband like some kinda I Love Lucy dynamite factory? Is this acceptable air travel? It is if you usually travel vertically, with hundreds of feet of wiring loom trailing behind you.
How in the world could such a lovely group of surly people with a sense of entitlement, nonexistent basic interpersonal skills, and a bad attitude produce these kinds of low scores? In the City of Chicago? It’s awesome that the TSA is hiring in Chicago like Chicago hires in Chicago.
The TSA claimed that the tests were very difficult, and the bombs hard to detect. Though I’m sure Al Queda would be polite enough to clearly mark a device, I don’t think the TSA should be so quick to rest on that notion. But I’ll consider forgiving this kind of performance, to get my mind off the guy in 17A who just got sucked through that hole. And as my pilot tries to land the airplane using only the throttles, though it’s hard to see just about anything with the hydraulic fluid in my eyes, I see now why you gave me all the fucking attitude and went all ghetto on me that time I forgot I had a nail clipper in my carry-on. I hope you’ll forgive me someday.
It Puts the Tithing in the Basket
October 23rd, 2007
I was accosted this morning by a pair of Mormon missionaries. They work in pairs like a SEAL demolition team. You have to be quick on your feet or get sunk. I immediately cut them off by telling them that my cousins are LDS (true). While they were still on their heels from my confident use of the term “LDS,” I hit them with some small talk, asking them where they’re from and how they like their mission so far. I stepped on their pitch and hammered away at them until they broke off their assault. It worked. They ground to a halt like a CTA escalator. But no man escapes without the pamphlet hand-off.
It is a picture of Jesus. Not just any Jesus. Arrestingly handsome, Wonder Bread Jesus. Blue-eyed Gap ad Jesus. Windswept hair, cut chest, bust out your vibrator Jesus. Funny thing about the LDS’ers, all their images of JC are this guy. Apparently Jesus was not an olive-skinned Jew from the middle east with a carpenter’s hands, but a divine hottie with an open invitation to the Playboy Mansion and the keys to Depp’s maison. You know this guy’s got a freakin’ club under that robe too. The men want to be him and the ladies want to do him. Who wouldn’t worship this guy?
In the marketing world, this is called libido advertising. This is some top notch branding. Ya gotta give those folks credit for putting McSteamy in the Tabernacle and accepting tithing (garnishing wages?) in the presence of his divine hotness. We could all learn something from their savvy. Do you think the Asian chicks think of Buddha while they’re putting fresh batteries in the Jackrabbit? Focus groups and market surveys say no. Wrong demo.
When it comes down to it, Mormonism is really just one big girls’ night out at the Sugar Shack. Can anyone break a five?
Pirates of the Inland Ocean #1: The Hungry Sea Takes 3
October 26th, 2007
FROM THE DESK OF CAPTAIN HAROLD VISCOUNT BULLCOCK, LEGITIMATE SHIPMASTER AND HOLD’R OF A LETTER OF MARQUE WHICH I ASSURE YOU IS NOT COUNTERFEIT
Me fellow Hearties and Admirals of the Black,
‘Twas a sad day on the angry Middle Sea Wednesday. She took three sail’rs in a tragic stroke of miserable luck. ‘Tis not me intention to make the seafarers the subject of derision or merrymaking, for they were able seamen, but ’tis my charge to report on all such matters where the central oceans are concerned.
The men was moving their pink to winter port, when the sea pitched afresh in angry swells without benefit of warning. A swab went o’er the gunwale, and her Cap’n attempted to reclaim him, but in the thrashing, the vessel was made to prang broadside onto a breakwater what was put there by the Commonwealth. Three men be lost in the wrenching corpse of the sloop. This Captain’s ink runs thin this day with tears for fellow sail’rs lost to this temperamental whore of a lake.
All ye Cap’ns on the Western and Eastern seas who be thinkin’ this here be nothin’ but a lake, ye be either madder than a drunken frigate bird or dumber than a cold can of hail shot. Whilst ye dreift on yer warm salt sea with the dolphins playin’ ’round yer bowsprit, here there be 10 foot chop, all haphazard-like and unaimed, an’ hungry frigid seas tryin’ to haul ye down to Davy Jones so a sturgeon can put its caviar in yer eye socket. Here there be monsters.
In other news, I caught that hornswagglin’, grog blossomed son of a whore deckhand Mr. Tibbets behind the helm an’ beat ‘im to death’s door with a belaying pin. What on account of his inability to play a square game of Barbadian dominoes. Lost me a full 12 doubloons and some silken fineries thanks be t’that lowly Jack Tar. Ye know the value of makin an example of a hornswaggler, me fellow corsairs. I love the belaying pin, rightweighted like a club an’ all o’er the place on the goddamned deck, what makes for a quick beatin right now when yer angry an’ not a second later when yer head is apt to cool. The confused sea and October windlessness here in the Doldrums have shortened me temper considerable like. The workin’ about the face was without point I suppose, what since I summarily hung him from the yardarm anyway. He’s been swingin’ from the hempen halter for nigh three hours and one half, an’ a persistent gull seems to have found his eyes.
I went on a marauding mission last week, looking specifically for allspice, ambergris and silks, but wound up killing four jet-skiers. Got three of ‘em at once with a single grape shot canister from the long 9, an’ keel-hauled the survivor for his whining. Came away with a Tag Heuer time-keeping watch an’ a golden necklace with a charm that spells the word “Player.” I don’t understand it much, but I’m sure I can melt it down to make a tooth. ‘Tis no great spice plunder, but at least ’tis four less waverunners. The things are like noisy little porpoises that got into a cask of rhum an’ be runnin ‘roud me ship tryin’ to fuck each other. Goddamn devil dolphins.
Well I best be leavin’ ye as it’s lunch time here on the quarterdeck. You’ll ne’er guess what i’m havin’. Hardtack. Woo, big surprise. Always hardtack. I hold me pistol to me head while I eat. It’s that good.
Slowly going mad in the Horse Latitudes without wind for 38 straight goddamned days,
-Capt. Harry Bullcock
Greetings faceless robotic overlords. HERE IS A FLUFFY TAG CLOUD to sate your insatiable thirst for indexable information. I hope it will please you. Please don't eat me.
