QUALITY CONTROL

Regarding the state of my health, after throwing away some garbage Sunday night, I got dizzy, my neck had a feeling in it that is always hard to explain, sort of like an entire wishbone on an angle, but that's still not quite it. Anyhow. I passed out. Fell flat on the driveway, my head must have hit the edge of a crack.

RIGHT-HANDED COMMENTS: BRIAN KEENE

I finally got off my ass to do some more sketches.

CHICAGO CITY LIMITS

I have a smaller version of this photo, retrieved from a back-up hard drive. I've been going backwards and deleting a lot of my Facebook posts and came across this shot from September of 2011. Still not great, but better than the one I had. They had just torn down Schmidt's Pharmacy and now there is a CVS in the vacant area to the left.

The Chicago sign is long gone, there is a metal post for the 383/385 buses and a few trees and grass. For those who know my Four Cities Plaza situation, consider this photo to the NE. Clockwise would get you SE-Hometown, Due-South-Oak lawn, and West would be shitty old Burbank, where I'm about a half of a mile past the left side of this photo.

What a sad little sign, though. CHICAGO. That's it, nothing to see here, move along.

#emmagonzalez A FORCE OF NATURE WHO SPEAKS FOR THE DEAD

CARCOSA

I'm just now watching TRUE DETECTIVE's first season on Amazon Prime. When it first aired it was in early 2014 and most of you reading this know that February of that year involved my living on little or no sleep, watching my father in a hosp[ital bed after two brain surgeries, and shoveling ninety inches of snow just so we could get more than one car into our driveway, or an ambulance, should it have been necessary. Which it was.

Anyways. It is almost exactly four years later as I am typing this after first hearing the mention of Carcosa on the show. And I recognized the name right away, because of my love for the work of Ambrose Bierce. He wrote a story about a mythical town that might actually be removed from reality in the sense of death or just a simple slipping through the cracks of day to day history. Wiped from existence, washed up on Carcosa. "An Inhabitant of Carcosa". So I'm intrigued as to where this is headed.

There was an incredible bookstore in Evanston, just north of the city, Bookman's Alley, which closed in...2014. Huh. No, it closed in September of 2013. Good. My brain didn't burst. It was an incredible place. I have a 1947 edition of Nelson Algren's THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM that I bought for $20.00. And this very good edition of THE COMPLETE WRITINGS OF AMBROSE BIERCE, a third printing from 1952. $15.00, marked down from $40.00. 

As I was taking a photo of the Table of Contents, I saw that Bierce also wrote a story with the title "A Holy Terror" which is close enough to THE HOLY TERROR to make my brain pop after all.

63rd & Ashland

WHAT I SEE WHILE I'M TYPING THESE LAST FEW NIGHTS

Burbank, South Stickney Sanitary District, Cook County, Illinois: 3:45 today

Fuller Street

I just think of the first photo. Somebody has to walk under that sign almost every day. Then, through the viaduct, unless you were going to walk down a glorified alley. I have the first photo as my main screen right now, because there are a lot of days where I walk into this room like I just passed the Fuller Street sign.

A BLAST FROM THE PAST

This was in 2012.Sadly, the cafe is no longer there.

BURIED IN THE SNOW (to the tune of "Riders on The Storm")

Just screwing around here. The alternate cover for the alternate book: RAPID TRANSIT thirty years of short fiction. My face on a photocopier at Kinko's because I'm classy, and a bit of manipulation by Mark Braun.