Post #900, or what am I still doing here?

You may not believe it; I know I didn’t; but this is my 900^th post here at The Passing Parade.  I hadn’t planned to do the blogging thing for so long, but I guess I have, and it seems to me that the occasion calls for me to do something special. The problem here, as I see it and maybe you do too, is that I have nothing special to say now.  Not having anything to say is a problem for me, as I am not a politician. Politicians can rattle on for hours without saying anything in particular or even knowing what they are talking about—the career of Mr. Biden serves as a shining exemplar of this great truth—but for me to write about something I actually have to have something to say about it.

Okay, I was going to go on about how I had nothing to write about, but as I write this at 1:30 pm Eastern Standard Time here in the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread there is an elderly non-Turkish speaking Puerto Rican gentleman singing Silent Night in Spanish while dancing what appears to be his version of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from Chaikovski’s The Nutcracker right in front of me.  We must have a policy against this sort of thing, but I’ve gone through the staff manual more times than I can remember these past few days and I have not noticed any prohibitions against this particular bit of weirdness.   Actually, the staff manual could use a good updating; there are no prohibitions, for example, against copulating in the stairwells, giving birth in the ladies’ room, or dying in the men’s room, all of which have occurred in the years I’ve been here. I am not sure when we became Apeneck Sweeney’s favorite hangout, but I am sure this is not the sort of thing we ought to be encouraging hereabouts. It frightens the taxpayers and makes them wonder what other sort of nonsense we are wasting their money on.  This still, however, leaves the problem I have right now, although it appears that I won’t have this problem for much longer. Our Nureyev manqué is running out of steam; there seems to be only so much en pointe work a deranged Latino man in his sixties or seventies can do in untied ratty sneakers before gravity and a cannabis induced lack of coordination start to kick in; and I think the time has come to invite him to take his artistry outside, where the cops can tell him to knock it off before he starts scaring the various and sundry passersby, their kids, and the family dog.

It is now later and the interruption is gone. He did not want to go; balletomanes are a contentious lot, especially when they are stoned out of their gourds and ballet is not the only thing they are mane about; but his performance had degenerated from the beauties of classical ballet into something approximating a synthesis of modern dance and Friday night wrestling, and we will not put up with that sort of thing here. He also began to sing O Holy Night at the top of his lungs, which are not in tune and are not likely to be anytime in the near future, which contributed greatly to my decision to ask him to leave.  At this point, I really don’t feel like continuing to write this or anything else; I have a headache.  Frankly, at this point, I am not certain who is stranger: our geriatric premier danseur noble, who is certifiably nuts, or me, for continuing to work in this environment.  There must be something in the water, or maybe I just lack imagination. 

Chicago values

Chicago politicians have values? Really? I mean, seriously, who knew?

CHERRY SWEATERS AND FISHNET STOCKINGS: I don’t, as a rule, write these little screeds while I am work; the public is not paying me to write, but to do the librarian thing I do so well; nor do I usually write this stuff directly on the computer; I usually write them out in pencil at home first and then type them up, editing as I go along; but as I bat this thing out at 4:42pm EDT on 24 August 2007 (yes, there are only four shopping months till Christmas) there are three men sitting here in the reference room of this egregious mold pit arguing about the models in Vogue magazine. I suppose that there are more tiresome things for three men to argue about; they could, for example, argue about the designated hitter rule (two of them are for it, one is against. Full disclosure: I am against it as well) or about the price of tea in China or about local politics; but they are refraining from these obvious topics and arguing about the models in Vogue instead.

The fly in the ointment here, as I see it, is that all three of these gentlemen live in the same halfway house down the road from here and they all live there because they’re all clinically nuts, which is not a term the American Psychological Association approves of, but does mean that this conversation is not merely loud (I've noticed over the years that crazy people think that sane people are hard of hearing; I cannot explain why this is so), but in many cases it makes literally no sense. Trains of thought are derailing in this room faster than their medications can lay down new lines of track and Aristotelian logic is taking a beating so bad that philosophy departments from one end of this our Great Republic to the other will have to put the subject on the disabled list until next school season. You cannot, after all, construct a suitable syllogism when your major premise is that God is love but not when he is covered with marmalade (no, I didn’t ask about the theological details—I didn’t even want to think about whatever disturbing experience brought this to this guy’s equally disturbed conscious mind) and your minor premise is that I was a pizza delivery boy in Chicago back when Gina Lollobrigida was wearing fishnet stocking and feeding calzones to the fish in Lake Michigan; they are still arguing about what the logical conclusion to this must needs be as I write, and if they arrive at a solution while this dump is still open I will let you know posthaste.

The really important thing here, as I see it, is whether these guys are nuts for arguing about something that bears no relationship to objective reality, as those of us who do not live in one of the local halfway houses understand that concept, or am I nuts for staying here in the place and listen to them bicker about it? The world wonders and frankly, so do I.