not that there really is a problem, its just nice to start posts with declarative answers.

the problem is that i havent written anything first thing in the morning on this shit. the problem is i started taking no for an answer on this trip. the problem is that this isnt sixteenth century hanover where people dueled for a living until the black man showed up and made swiss cheese outta people so they went to guns cuz the brotha was deadly with the sword.

the problem is the pen is mightier than the sword but the bullet is mighter than the pen and the edjumacated lawyer is mightier than the bullet.

the problem is the press cares what the public thinks about them which is why the public only reads the paper for on average 2 minutes a day, aka when theyre taking a crap. the problem is the public only listens to the president on average of 20 seconds a day and not-to-secretly thinks hes full of crap.

the problem is the people really dont think that they can do much better.

the problem is that the best people seriously care what others think and the worst people couldnt give a shit what people think and the inbetween people get squooshed by the worst people and the best people pity not love them. the problem is the republicans arent the worst people but the leadership of the GOP are the worst people because they lie not about huge things like wmds or tapping our phone lines but about sexist things like hillary clinton will make the terrorists think that they can just fly planes into buildings even though they did that with rich white men on duty.

the problem is that we dont have an ammendment that says the people can impeach the president at any time. the problem is that we dont have an ammendment that says the people can impeach the congress at any time. the problem is that theres not an ammedment that says one day a year the congress has to appear on local tv for eight hours straight, ok fine they get an hour lunch break, to take non stop questions from the public, followed by a state-sponsored vote of confidence or no-confidence and if they fuck up there gets to be a new election two months later.

the problem is that people are having too many kids and kids distract you worse than hos do worse than jobs do worse than sports do worse than driving while cell phoning does.

the problem is that this bears game starts in two hours and my buddies have been tailgating since freaking 8am and i still havent taken a shower yet and its sunny out but the weatherman says its gonna start hailing during the 4th quarter. so the problem is what to wear cuz if you bring a jacket and a hat capable of protecting you during the hail and it turns out to be sunny and 75 degrees then youre all tied up with bullshit but if you play it cool and then it starts hailing then everyones all look at that idiot with shorts and a busblog tshirt on.

therefore the answer is to shave the hair off your chest and paint a big 34 on your body so that if the hail comes you just drink a shit ton of beers, take your shirt off and smile pretty for the camera and die of exposure.

because the answer has always been if youve gotta die somewhere it should be at wrigley field or if that fails soldier field with your fingers smelling of a girl from lake forest who didnt even know you existed yesterday.

sox still suck. youd think after waiting close to 100 years to win their world series, sox fans would be satisfied with going back to their lives as plumbers and garbage men and bottle collectors and street cleaners, but apparently some of them have decided that this is the time to rub it in that their cross-town rivals were snake bitten by injury. class act all the way which is why michael barrett is so beloved on the north side for bashing the sox catcher in the jaw for being the bitch that he is.

the other day some loser sox fan googled “sox suck” or some shit and found the world famous busblog and took offense at the obvious and tried to pick me apart for growing up in the suburbs and for being a loyal cub fan. i suppose when you live in the worst part of town and root for one of the most disrespected teams ever youve got nothing else to do other than start virtual arguements about zip codes and which colors you fly.

i saw his post on his blog and ignored it because that sort of shit bores me, but when he commented on this holy blog i had to reply and then he replied and because i have to wake up early tomorrow to tailgate and then enjoy the bears regular season home opener, i figured id post our dialogue so that you’ll see that decades after moving away from Chicagoland aint nothing changed other than Comiskey being uglier.

the gentleman first quoted this line from my post about driving halfway across the country and being greeted for the first time with toll roads, of which i wrote: fuck richard daley jr. fuck the white sox. and fuck tolls.

to which he commented: Who asked you?

which i then said:

from the look of things, dan, thousands more a day than ask you.

poor sox fans, always jealous, always ignorant, always pissed off at something.

hell if i rooted for a team who played in the crappiest park, who had the dumbest fans, and the lousiest tradition in baseball i guess id be constantly bitter too.

and then he wrote:

Bitter about what? Having a World Series and a future? The Cubbys and their group and their North Side transplant fans will always be second best in this town.

And what would you know about Comiskey? You’ve never been there. You couldn’t find the place if you tried. Try again, sparky.

unfortunately for the hapless fellow i had been to Comiskey, plenty of times. the old Comiskey, back when it was dubbed Chicago’s Largest Saloon because it served hard alcohol and attracted… people interested in going to the city’s largest saloon. i was just a grade-schooler at the time, but those memories never left me and solidified my allegiance to the Cubs. not because i didnt enjoy drinking, i just didnt enjoy being around people who couldnt drink and thought that the designated hitter was something worth paying money to see.

so i replied

if you actually read the posts that i wrote here before you opened your big yap youd see that i live in LA and i am traveling around the country and i have made my way back home to the town that i grew up in, a place i left 20+ years ago.

with that said, you are the epitome of sox fans: delusional, bitter, and jealous that the Cubs are loved by people all around the world and the Cubs fans are loyal and clearly the #1 team in Chicago.

as for your obsession with finding places in chicago without a map. what are you a cab driver?

anyways its always been easy to find Comiskey without a map: roll down your window and follow the scent of shit and vomit. as you get closer you’ll notice the undeniable aroma of spread open ass and there you’ll find Sox park.

nose bloodied, but sack emptied thanks to his sister, he rolled off her and asked:

Isn’t that everybody’s story? Is your hometown even chicago? Or some burb? Come on now—be honest.

[in reply of the Cubs’ world-wide and city-wide status of being Chicago’s #1 team:] Hardly. Just as in the days of Lee Elia, cubs fans are almost entirely full of shit. They actually thought Mark Prior was a good pitcher and that Kerry Woods was the Messiah. And now they sit, firmly in last place while the White Sox (which coincidentally, have real fans that are really from Chicago) are enjoying some relative success this year. Not quite the ya know….World Series from last year. But better have won one in ’05 then…wait…when was the last Cubs series?

[in reply of how to get to US Cellular Field aka Comiskey Park:] Like I said brother. You definitely wouldn’t come South of Madison to say that. Posers like you try it once in a while, and end up getting their asses whupped.

Ignoring the fact that he doesnt know that Kerry Wood doesn’t put an S at the end of his name i ended the discussion thusly:

Ass whupped? like the one Michael Barrett delivered to your guy?

Look, i didnt come into your blog and start talking shit, you came to mine with all your bullshit about “omg i live in THE CITY i am therefore cooler than you and i root for a team that took 95 years to win a pennant while your team is taking about 100, therefore my team despite its criminally insane history is better than yours who are beloved.”

i realize that these are the days of Sox fans pounding their chests and believing that their cocks are bigger than Cub fans’ but the difference is Sox fans are just cocks.

Why on Earth would i be ashamed of going to school in Hanover Park, IL 60103 from K-12? did i have any choice in the matter? would i have rather grown up on the South Side? you’re the faker if you’d say yes to that.

but i did have a choice of which team i pulled for and from day one i was a Cub fan and those were the days when they spent more time below .500 than above it, and i took shit from loser sox fans then as well as loser Lee Elia. when he said that, me and my buddies ditched school, got $5 bleacher seats and let him know the idiocy of a manager taking out his frustrations on the fans.

so you can have your pathetic stadium that nobody talks about, you can have your projectile vomiting fans that no one except gang members and rednecks want to associate themselves with, and you can have your Black Sox and midgets and shorts and bowl haircuts in centerfield.

theres a reason theres a shower in Comiskey you know, its because i was dead right about how to find the way to your beloved park, its because the best way to find sox park is to roll down the windows and follow the stench or simply drive south and look for the horseflies.

as for going south of madison to talk shit about the sox, same would happen to you if you came up to clark and addison,

only difference is you’d simply get your ass beat outside the cubby bear, while if i went down to your neck of the woods, i would first get offered crack from your uncle-father or suckysucky from your momma. so i suppose in that sense the south side rulez.

yay you.

and now you know why i left the day after highschool and rarely return. because most days here are like the day after highschool.

either way, enjoy the pics i took of Wrigley Field on a Friday afternoon as real fans enjoy their team despite that team being 30 games below .500 – an image you see nowhere in the major leagues during the last weeks of the regular season, particulary if the team is on free local tv, and especially during a year when their three best players were hurt for a huge chunk of the season and their best pitcher was recently traded away.

what sox fans hate about cub fans isnt just that wrigley is a gem among gems, nor that harry carey jumped ship and had his best years on the north side, or that Sammy Sosa didnt produce shit while a southsider and then hit 500+ homers for the cubs,

the white sox fans hate cub fans because the white sox will always be in the shadow of the cubs whether the cubs win or lose, not because babe ruth called his shot at wrigley or because of the famous scoreboard at wrigley, or the ivy, or the neighborhood, or the billy goat, or the organ, or day games, or the tradition of throwing the ball back, or the lack of drunken imbeciles doing the fucking wave,

its because there are no finer sports fans in the entire world better than cub fans. no one has taken more shit, been dealt a worse hand, or put up with more rotten luck than us and we only become more loyal and attract more well-wishers. meanwhile the only people who root against us are our jealous neighbors to the south, and our inbred rivals in st. louis.

theres a reason why after bill veeck sold the sox he returned to the bleachers of wrigley and took off his shirt and drank beer with his wooden leg. because rich and poor, black or white, anyone who truly loves sports knows that theres only one place to watch baseball in chicago: 1060 w. addison.

you can come home again, but be prepared to remember why you bailed.

more interviews with these fellas on LAist

chicago. the guy who said you cant go home again clearly didnt have google maps. hi, im in my mommas house. its 455am and i hafta wake up in a few hours to go to wrigley field.

i shouldnt have accepted the generous offer from one of my busblog readers to meet him at the park and hang out with him in the bleachers because i havent had a good night’s sleep in weeks, but how often do i get to go to the greatest park in the world to see my favorite team? decades maybe? yes, decades.

and i have nothing planned for saturday and i begged my mom to let me sleep in then so she will allow it. however you know a phone will ring or a vaccuum will get turned on or neices or nephews will arrive or the planet will explode which is probably why my body forced me to pull over this evening in wisconsin as the sun set to grab 4 winks and instead gave me 14.

yes all these instances where i entered a rest stop to actually rest only afforded me 4-5 minutes of actual shut eye, but today for some reason when i was hoping for only 10 minutes of z’s it turned into 150 minutes of zzzzzzzzzzzz’s, totally fucking up my travel plans and making me arrive in the windy at 1am. thus here we are 4 hours later, ive finished my work for most of tomorrow’s LAist and leaving the best for last here i am writing tomorrows blog post tonight. or something.

hi america.

i got a very sweet phone call from an x as i drove through madison tonight. i told her that i had not been kissed during this entire journey so far and she said you forgot to pack your mojo, i picked up your mail this morning and i saw it on top of your cd wallet and your pumas. she told me she’d fed ex it tomorrow which is killer cuz i wondered wtf was happening.

this morning i woke up early and took a looong shower and packed up and went over to the mall of america where i interviewed some people and wasnt all that impressed by the largest mall in the world. for some reason i was expecting more. still i bought some cool toys which i will send to africa to impress the kids over there and then i went to chipotle and worked for about two hours and hit the road.

minnesota truly does have all those lakes and they seem to end as soon as you cross the border into wisconsin. i seriously saw a 10 foot cow in the dairy state as well as some buffalos. the rains have made everything super green and the sun made everything so pretty. i bought a bunch of cheese for my friends back in LA but the lady said are you crazy you cant mail that shit. and so i guess i will have to eat it all.

getting into IL i was greeted with the first toll roads on the journey. when i lived in frisco i didnt mind paying $4 or $3 for the bridges because you could always see people on the bridges painting them and whatnot but $1.60 for two miles of roadway? i didnt understand that concept. here i had driven 3,000 miles for free, why was this ugly stretch of illinois highway costing me anything? and then two miles later they asked for another buck, and then as i exited off the 59 they asked for fourty cents.

fuck richard daley jr. fuck the white sox. and fuck tolls.

somehow i made it to the town next to the town where i grew up and i had no idea where i was. i called my mommy and i said omg Streamwood Lanes! the bowling alley where i learned my secret skill. it looked so modern. there i knew where i was. i turned down lake street past the little league where i learned my not so secret skills and soon i was home. it was warm, my mom was waiting on the porch, the dogs were barking when i pulled up into the driveway and the neighbors turned on their lights to see what the commotion was but i was so tired i pulled out my .38 and shot one of their porch lights out and you could hear the kids whisper so thats him.

jimh redid my banner

im still in minneapolis. yesterday i basically took the day off from driving around the world and instead drove around town.

i found myself on the freeway trying out my new camcorder thats also a pretty great still camera. everything was going well until i saw a copper in the median who looked at me as i passed, turned on his party lights and peeled out behind me.

as i said in the previous post, my emotions rarely make their way to the surface, but there they were again. what is it about this town? my heart started beating like mad, i tried to shove the camera in my bag and then hide it under the seat but i was driving and i started to swerve and i realized i was causing more reasons to arrest me.

clearly driving while filming is illegal and reckless and exhibit A would be the film of me alone in the car filming the gorgeous fields of corn and the amber waves of grain. so i wondered how i could quick erase the disc but i barely know the camera so i just slowed down to the speed limit and waited.

and there he approached in his car

and he went around me and he then cut in front of me and he pulled over the white minivan ahead of me.

and at that point i wondered how many times i could thank God in one sitting. and then i wondered how much the ticket would have been and i said God you saved me at least $300, so i will spend that on my momma when i get to IL tonight for her birthday.

needless to say i went straight to my motel room where it was safe.

there are three places where you can stay on the road a)with hot babes b)in corporate hotels c) in wild card independent weirdo motels

call me crazy but my favorite by far is c.

im in the best room in the strangest motel in town and i love it. it feels like im in someones converted attic. like where greg brady lived in the final season. like where youd say you’d put the exchange student from peru if you actually had such a dude.

there are not one but two murphy beds in this shit. the phone never rings. the tv has 60 channels, the little fridge makes very little noise, the shower is dirty but the stream is perfect and the water gets hot.

somehow i havent messed up the room at all which is bizarre because i can mess shit up in seconds.

i got a lot of LAist work handled today. some of it was actually killer behind the scenes shit with one super famous rock club that wants to work with us all the time. i was pacing while on the cell phone like a real mogul, it was funny. when i looked in the mirror when it was over i saw a sorta good looking dude and i was all wtf.

tomorrow i will be in my home state where some very nice people are trying to get me not just Cubs tickets but Bears tickets too.

yesterday i was thinking how i should have brought a joint or two with me for these late nights where i would like to fall asleep easier and write something trippy in my secret blog, but i ran past a “drug checkpoint” on the freeway and it was pretty nice to be able to tell the troopers that its sorta against the spirit of innocent until proven guilty when you just start pulling over people and seeing if theyre breaking the law. how about pull over people after they break the law.

people talk shit about castro, but america is so incredibly commie during these last few hundred days of bush its sorta creepy.

everything started out ok. i woke up, drank some apple juice and checked out of the comfort inn on time.

and then before i knew it i was in jail!

because my mother had the misfortune of having me as her first born, shes used to all of my antics, but in order to save her the heart attack: yes mom that is your boy in a utah jail, yes thats my profile mug shot, yes those are handcuffs.

but thats not the scary part. in fact, that was the fun part.

ok nothing in here is true, right? ok. the scary part was actually being in the general population with the inmates. after being given a tour of the amazingly clean and organized and modern facility, i was led down a hall with my old friend who works at the prison. she showed me the laundry room and the grate in the drunk tank where people puke and shit and piss. i got to talk with a lot of the really nice people who worked there.

and then i found myself in the actual room where the inmates live. its not really a room, its more like a shared space where the men watch tv and play checkers when they are let out of their cells. yes i was terrified. yes i was flanked by my friend and two other deputys. and yes the inmates were on their best behavior since it was the opening day of the NFL, but still i was totally afraid despite my xbi training and obvious superpowers.

it was explained to me that the gentlemen in the orange suits on one side were sorta low-risk inmates. in fact a few of them looked far too young to be in the adult prison but i was assured that they were all over 18. then i was shown a smaller area where the men had on gray uniforms. they had been seperated because they were in the clink for child molestation or other similar crimes that made them at risk if they were put in with the other inmates. for some reason i couldnt even look at those men in the eyes because it disgusted me so.

even though everyone obeyed the rules and kept themselves behind the tape on the floor they could have easilly rushed us as a group as we were outnumbered, but fortunately the outcome of the cowboy game interested them more than getting in a few cheap shots on a visitor and a few deputies before the retaliation would occur.

the scene was very much like the tv show Oz except a much smaller version. glass doors, two floors of cells, cable tv. what was different though is these men had no weights to use, no real outdoor facility to walk in, and no magazine pictures or anything that i could see that resembled personal effects. also they slept in rooms that housed about 6-8 people.

at this point i thought the tour was over. and i was very relieved when we left what i considered being in the bear cage at the zoo – except on the wrong side of the moat. but oh no, linda had another space to show me, the high risk inmates. the gang members and real offenders. and the scariest of all was on the phone and lit up when he saw her and waved with a big smile. linda, of course, had met him when she was on the gang floor at the bigger, scarier prison.

so of course we went in there. what was different was the cells only held one or two men and those doors were not see-thru because, it was explained, these much harder prisoners would crack the plastic/glass, so their doors were made of very thick steel.

i was told that my superpowers would not probably work against them.

there were telephones everywhere but the only access to the Internet was with the guards and could only be used by them. to me that would be torture.

when we finally get out of there i was completely scared straight and no one had said a thing to me negative or frightening. just being there was enough. very little place to walk so men who wanted excersise paced 40-50 feet while they talked to their buddies.

then the beautiful nurse appeared. incredibly beautiful mind you. i asked her if these men ever said anything untoward to her and she said nope. that they know better. the entire thing was fascinating to me and i never ran out of questions.

infact they told me that Paris Hilton did not get preferential treatment as i had assumed when she was processed and released in an hour and a half for her DUI, that most people who only blow a .08 and are reasonable and have someone to drive them home can get out in an even shorter period of time if theres not a waiting list of other offenders ahead of them.

after a long lunch i left salt lake and drove through the mountains and across a lot of Wyoming and took a few breaks to close my eyes and attempt to nap at rest stops but couldnt so i kept driving, occassionally calling someone on the phone to stay awake. the goal was Cheyenne by midnight and thanks to the 75 mph speed limit (which meant 85 for most of us) i was able to get here by 12:15am.

i was starving and i drove up the main street but nothing was open as it was sunday night. but i kept driving and there i found the taco smell.

then i worked for four hours for LAist and now its 527am and i guess its time for bed. the lesson of the day: dont go to jail.