On junkyards--with a little twist. Okay, make that a BIG twist...

Sometimes you just gotta do something nutty. (This word, nutty, will appear numerous times in this blog. If this word is somehow offensive to you, or if the sound of it is of the nails-on-the-chalkboard ilk to your tender eardrums, then I would advise you to hit your “back” button now, ‘cuz I’m a-gonna use it a lot.)

Have you ever heard of a place called Sycamore Speedway? I suppose you have if you live in this area, but for those who live in other parts of the country, it would please me greatly if you would allow me to paint you a picture. Or, at the very least, supply a few with my trusty and ever-present camera phone.

And before I begin mixing paints for my verbal palette, I’d like to hearken you back to a previous blog of mine, entitled “Junkyards,” in which I regaled you, O honored reader, with tales of my exploits at a local automotive recycling facility to replace the stereo in my cursed complete-piece-of-shit minivan. Along the way, I endeavoured to express my love of machines in general, and of cars in particular, and how it is sometimes heart-rending to see these objects, inanimate though they are, come to such an end after all the romanticizing we do. You know how we Americans love our cars. In fact, it would seem that the face of our country is much more sculpted by our love of the automobile than other countries, where roads and byways were marked more by the passage of hooves and carriages than Buick Roadmasters and Ford Thunderbirds and Chevy Biscayne wagons liberally papered with bumper stickers and full of screaming kids. And, if you look a little deeper, you can kinda tell that this beautiful sprawling country with which we were blessed was explored, and trails blazed, by brave men and women on horses, but the true population of this great land was done by—at first—the train, and, in a much greater capacity, the car.

So we love our cars, and our country is based on this love—drive-in theatres, drive-thru (notice how it’s never drive-through, but always thru? God, we suck) fast food joints, motels, billboards, parking lots, driveways, to say nothing of the culture—The Fast and the Furious, Dukes of Hazzard (MY favorite), blinged-out ‘Sclades, Navigators and Hummer H2s. Gas prices are through the roof, but you sure notice a lot of new Mustangs (hell, I dig ‘em), Dodge Magnum Hemi RTs with gas-suckin’ 5.7 litre Hemi V-fuckin’-8’s, and there is a lady who lives across the street from my folks who drives a Bentley Continental GT. That thing gets 10 mpg on a good day, and we wonder why we have to import crude oil from the Middle East?

I can’t say anything, though—I was raised a motorhead, and as such, I gotta find outlets to get my fix. Thank God for the bike. Other people have to get theirs, too, and that’s where Sycamore Speedway comes in.

I should preface anything forthcoming with this—ever since I was old enough to want anything, I wanted to drive. As soon as I was old enough to want to be something, I wanted to be a race-car driver. My dad used to race, and I wanted to follow in his footsteps. I didn’t know if I would ever make it to the Indianapolis 500, but I didn’t care. While my brother and his friends were out playing baseball and fantasizing about the World Series, I was driving my soap-box racer and dreaming of Daytona, or Le Mans, or Monaco. When I was seven, I spotted a go-kart for sale on the street and rode my bicycle home at top speed. I pestered my dad, who finally gave in, over the protestations of my mother, and at last I was driving something I didn’t have to push. I got right to work on practicing my apexes, my drifts, my heel-and-toe downshifts (I knew it was only one speed, but fuck it—I had fun) and my Le Mans starts, where you have to run across the street, jump in, fire up, and get underway from a dead stop. I asked for a helmet for Christmas one year, and a Nomex driving suit the next. I got the helmet, but Nomex is expensive shit for a someone who’s gonna grow out of it in a year.

Well, God’s got a plan for every one of us, and racing wasn’t mine. That’s okay—I’m happy where I’m at. But for all of us who dreamed of Grand Prix races and fell short, there are places like Sycamore Speedway.

Sycamore Speedway is a quarter-mile dirt oval about five miles due east of DeKalb, Illinois. It’s in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by cornfields and asphalt two-lanes for as far as the eye can see. As near as I can tell, no one lives within a mile of the place. That’s a good thing, because on race nights, huge stadium-quality lights blaze down from 100-foot utility poles, the bellowing of huge oil-fired beasts relieved of their exhaust systems rattles the leaves on the nearby corn plants, and, by the time two hours have passed since the first laps were turned, a fine blue haze composed of all the myriad fluids of which a vehicle is capable of burning off hangs motionless over the track, until the predominantly easterly wind comes up around three in the morning and wafts the noxious airborne mixture off towards Lily Lake, the next town over.

On Saturday nights, they run late-model modifieds, V-8 powered brutes that resemble regular production cars in the nation's new-car showrooms even less than NASCAR stockers do. They’re big and scary and fast, and since the track is dirt, they spend much of their time in lurid four-wheel drifts, flinging the track surface towards anyone stupid enough to sit in the front row. Nutty.

Friday nights, however, are another thing entirely. Friday nights are devoted to what is known as “spectator-class” racing. The rules are simple. Take any car you want, knock the windows out, remove the head and taillights, wire the doors shut, paint a number on and go racing. Most of the cars are big ol’ rear-drive behemoths—Lincoln Town Cars, Ford Crown Victorias and Mercury Grand Marquis, Buicks and Oldsmobiles, the occasional Cadillac, and a shitload of Chevrolet Caprices. Tell you how it is, my children—if you have ever lusted painfully after an older Chevy Caprice, like the old taxicabs and police cars, get one now, because they are a dying breed, and places like Sycamore Speedway are killing ‘em off.





If the big guys are too imposing for you, there is a class for compacts. Name something small and you’ll see it in there somewhere—Honda Accords and Civics, Toyota Celicas, Corollas and Tercels, Chevrolet Cavaliers, Ford Escorts and Tempos, Hyundai-this, Saturn-that, and the occasional Geo Storm or Plymouth Reliant. Tonight there was even a Dodge Daytona. They have no mufflers, and they snarl like pissed-off Chihuahuas, madly spinning their front tires on a dirt-track designed for drifting. Also nutty.



I feel like a spectator at a butcher shop, the old melancholy washing over me as I watch these tired old heaps fling themselves around the track at the cruel behest of the last masters they’ll ever have. And sure, they’re just machines, but somewhere in there is a Saturn SC2 that someone’s older sister saved and saved for, working two jobs just so she could make the payments, her and her friends blasting the stereo and standing on the seats with their heads out the sunroof on a gorgeous summer evening on one of the few nights a month she got to have off. Somewhere else, there’s a Buick Roadmaster or Cadillac Fleetwood that was the last car your grandfather owned, and wasn’t he proud when he pulled into your folks’ driveway in it, the paint freshly waxed and looking so deep you could swim in it? Somewhere in there there’s a taxicab that once carried a movie star, or a police cruiser that once carried an officer to the scene of a domestic dispute where he saved some poor woman’s life from the murderous hands of her ex-boyfriend. And now here they are, battling it out on this clay track out in Redneckville, trading paint and knocking fenders, and when that oil line springs a pinhole leak and the light on the dashboard comes on, the driver just pushes harder, hoping to take out that guy in the Pontiac before the engine locks up completely. In a way, it’s sad.

And, in another way, it’s a fuckin’ blast, watching that guy trying to limp that Cadillac into the pits on three flats, or seeing someone roll over three times in turn four and land on the wheels with the engine still running. I spend a lot of times in the stands thinking, “This is nutty.” There’s other interesting things to watch, too. I learned early on that rear-wheel-drive cars with independent rear suspension are bad ideas in a setting like this. Some schmuck in a newer Thunderbird got collected from behind by another guy in a high-balling Chevy station wagon, and got sent ass-first into the wall. When the smoke cleared, the guy in the Thunderbird was able to get the thing moving, but its rear end was completely destroyed, the rear suspension collapsed like an unlucky animal that has somehow gotten both of its hind legs broken in a trap. The Thunderbird, miraculously still moving, made its way off the track. Later I saw it lined up outside the car crusher at the rear end of the paddock. End of the road, babe. In a place like this, you want a nice, solid, live-axle out behind you.





Walking around the pit area is like stepping into a Mad Max film. There are battered cars of every make and model here, in various states of disrepair. There are also people, of course, but they seem to come from one vein of descent. Mainly, they’re males in their twenties or thirties, heads shaved, tattooed, smoking liberally and often with a keg of some Miller or Budweiser product within easy reach. I once saw a guy beat the absolute shit out of a Cadillac DeVille with a mostly-full beer keg. Every time he’d slam it down on the hood, or the trunk lid, or the roof, the keg would spew a fine mist of beer from the place where the tapper was supposed to go. Each time he did this, his friends would cheer lustily, which fed the gentleman’s enthusiasm. When he was done, he was drenched in beer, and the Cadillac was pretty thoroughly fucked. I can’t say as I’ve ever seen that before. Very nutty.

You have to be careful walking around out here, because it’s nighttime but, as per race regulations, all the cars have had their headlights removed. You step around a tree onto the gravel paths that pass for roads here, you hear a growl of unmuffled exhaust and before you can turn around, you’re street pizza. Beer and loud exhausts do not inspire moderation.



Walking around is all well and good, and sitting in the stands watching people go really crazy redneck stupid fast is fine and dandy, and checking out the occasional guy beating the crap out of a poor multicolored Oldsmobile Delta 88 two-door with a sledgehammer is mildly entertaining (see above), but after awhile even this scene gets old. Thank God for the One-on-One Drag races. Now this is nutty.

To drive in this class, you need a) a car, b) a helmet, c) proof of insurance, and d) a Social Security Number in case they have to drag your monkey ass to the hospital in the ambulance they keep on the premises. That’s it. The entry fee is $25, and you don’t have to knock out any glass, or paint any numbers on your car. My good friend Mike Honegger, with whom I went there, entered his 2000 Pontiac Grand Am. I drove there in the Dragon, so I entered that.

Hee hee.

All righty, stop right there. Stop stop stop. We all know and love the Dragon. No one more so than I, believe me. And I understand the sheer absurdity of racing the thing. It’s like asking my beloved Lois to pull a dog sled. It’s like asking your old asthmatic and emphysemic grandfather to help you shovel the driveway. Fuck, it’s like asking your grandmother to help you move the couch, for Christ’s sake. I know this.

But in the Dragon’s case, it also looks fuckin’ cool. ENTER THE DRAGON!

So I go up to the lady at the counter and I pay her my $25 bones and I sign all the legal waivers and I show her my helmet and my insurance card. Eventually, we get the call to line up by the paddock next to the track entrance gate. Mike and I stand there bullshitting and contemplating just how stupid we are. To be truthful, I am about to get out there in a car that is over thirty years old that looks like it just came off the set of the Brady Bunch, but unlike Mike, I’m not still making payments on my car.

A track marshall comes walking down the line, checking his registration list and marking each car’s windshield with a number from his red paint-pen. In front of me is a guy in a clapped-out Lincoln Continental Mark VII. His car gets the number 8. The marshall comes over to the Dragon. He gives it the eye, then fixes me with a bilious stare.

“Hey, all the Spectator-class races are over! You’ll have to wait until next week,” he says.

“I’m not here for the Spectator class,” I say, Mike deep in the throes of a snickering fit behind me. “I’m running in the One-on-One drag races.”

He looks at me for a while longer, taking a huge drag from his cigarette. After awhile, he replies with, “Are you serious?”

“Yes, I’m fuckin’ serious. Give me my fuckin’ number.”



“All right, all right. God,” the guy whines, painting a large red 5 in the upper left corner of my windshield. He moves on to Mike, who has recovered somewhat from his snickering fit.

We stand there waiting. Mike is a highly cultured guy, with refined tastes in beer and music. We both feel like cockroaches on a wedding cake. After awhile, we get the cue to head onto the track. Motoring through the gate, I catch a track marshall motioning frantically to me. “Helmet! Helmet! Seat belt!” I already have my seat belt on, but sliding my helmet over my head while behind the wheel of the Dragon feels as alien and out of place as anything I’ve ever done.



There are about ten cars entered in the One-on-Ones. The races work like this—two cars are staged at the middle of the front straight. When the green flag is dropped, it’s a race to get around the track to the starting point first. The loser gets the bum’s rush; the winner gets staged against the winner of another one-lap drag. The ultimate winner gets the trophy and the adoration of countless rednecks. The track marshalls do their best to stage the cars according to equivalent performance. Ahead of me, a Hyundai Excel takes on a Honda Accord and gets eliminated. It’s my turn next, and I find myself next to Mike. We find this is actually not a bad match-up; he’s got about the same horsepower, but he’s pulling half the ass. And remember, O Honored Reader—the Dragon’s got a big fat ass. To compensate, they put me on the inside.

As we are staging, I hear the announcer barking out our names over the P.A. to the crowd.

“We’ve got Mike Honegger in a 2000 Grand Am, versus Jay Oh—how do you say this?--Oh-lah-something in a—get this—a 1973 Ford Gran Torino Station Wagon! Give the guy some credit just for showing up in a heap like that!”

I look over at Mike; he is laughing his ass off. Surprisingly, it sounds like the crowd is laughing too. And that's fine with me—I know I’m gonna get my ass kicked, but who’s lame enough to show up on a racetrack in a car like this? Hey, if you can’t beat ‘em, do your best to make ‘em laugh and you’ll go out a star.

Remember, Mike is still paying on his car; I have no such inhibitions. When the green flag drops, I put my foot to the floor. The Dragon heels over, the whole thing leaning in a reaction to the torque of the big-but-slow V8 under the hood. If I can make it to the first turn before Mike, and keep the inside line, I may have a chance. I toss the old beast into the corner, trying to keep a handle on where Mike is, not wanting to trade his nice shiny red paint for some of my puke-green, but putting about on the port tack throws the Dragon into a sizeable list to starboard, and I forget about Mike and just concentrate on not cracking the wall.



Apparently I have boxed Mike out; he is forced to take the high road through turns One and Two; he reels me in on the back straight but not enough to take the inside advantage from me. He takes the pit exit and I line back up.



This time they have me up against a guy in an older Cavailier Z-24—one of the older ones with a V-6. It’s pretty beat up, but it still has license plates on it. It’s a daily driver, apparently, but way too big a piece of shit for the owner to worry about what happens to it.

We stage up, and the crowd is really yelling. I hear a guy near the front row bellowing “Gran Torino! HELL yeah!” as though he might ejaculate all over himself at any moment. The starter drops the flag, the guy in the Cavalier beats me to the first turn and the race is over as neatly as that. I try to salvage some dignity by hanging the tail out, but the Dragon is not powerful enough for that, and the OIL lamp flickers on the dashboard after a few seconds of trying. Oh well. It was fun, and the crowd seemed to enjoy it, but this tired old thing still needs to get me home, and I need it next week to haul some gear. I head for the pit exit. The Cavalier goes on to get beat by a guy in a Pontiac Grand Prix, and an eighteen-year-old kid smacks the wall in his mother’s Ford Taurus. Life is pretty good.

Hmm. Maybe I could get my hands on an old Caprice or something and go back next week, this time for real. I’ve done crazier things. I guess. Wait...well, I’ll get back to you on that. I’m sure there has to be something...

On where we grew up, and what it does to us...

Today was a weird day. It didn’t start out that way, but I didn’t wake up expecting the day to be normal, or weird, or anything. I’m laid off from the summer job, and there’s still a month or so before school begins, so I’m at the mercy of whatever comes my way.

I did actually have something planned; kind of an exception in the last week or so. Today I went into work to discuss some potential software on universal gravity with St. Francis’s IT guy. Went well, nothing fancy. I downloaded the trial of the package I wanted, and I futzed with it a bit. I liked it, I guess; well enough to give it a try this year.

Walked out to the parking lot, and as has been the case for the last month, in these strange dry days of constantly above-85 and few if any clouds, the bike was waiting for me.

[This in not another motorhead-style posting, as the last few have been, so you may read on, if you so choose, confident in the knowledge that I will not mention carburetors or drifting or wheelies or broken radiators. Nor will I post pictures of various things at 100 mph. Well, maybe one.]

So I climbed on and fired up the old beast, and I turned left out of St. Francis’s parking lot, and my brain switched on its little mental cruise control and I just went along for the ride. I found myself eventually in Winfield.

I don’t really have a hometown. I was born in Lombard; I lived in Winfield for a while, and I lived in Naperville for a while (though I try not to admit it—I hate that town) and I lived in DeKalb for awhile, and I’ve lived in Plainfield for awhile. I guess, though, that Winfield is the closest thing I have to a hometown, and I would move back there if I could.

I spent a lot of time just roaming the streets, the Moose popping and snarling and generally scaring the bejeezus out of pedestrians and motorists alike. Winfield is a small town, and it’s pretty quiet. It has a downtown area of sorts, but unlike most small towns like Hinckley or Sandwich or even Somonauk, where the downtown area is at least a couple of blocks long, Winfield’s is about a third of a block long, and it consists mainly of a small strip mall and a bar. Bikes are not a part of the overall Winfield picture. People stare. I did get back to my motorhead roots a bit by taking a nice high-speed blast up Summit Hill.



Summit is spooky going up, and even spookier going down. (It's important to note that the top of the hill is higher than it might appear in this snappy-snap, due to a trick of the light. The hill's actually in two stages--look about a third down from the top of the picture and you'll see it.) This is, incidentally, the hill I mentioned in a previous blog that my brother went down every day in his (soon to be my) MGB, catching enormous air and tearing chunks out of the asphalt on the landing as the suspension momentarily collapsed. You don’t get nearly as much air going up as you do going down, but today I got a little.

I guess the thrust of this particular blog came about as I was aimlessly roaming the streets, checking out the house I lived in and the schools I went to (Winfield has two—St. John the Baptist and Winfield Elementary—and I went to both-) and I realized how the places we live and grow shape the way we look at the world. In the grand scheme of things, I only lived in Winfield a little while, but of all the places I have lived, it seems that Winfield has colored the images in my head and my heart with the brightest crayons.

For example, in stories, or in songs, you often hear people describe how they were standing on the corner. In my head, whenever I hear that phrase, the corner I see is this one.



It’s nothing special; just a little corner in a small town next to a public elementary school. In my head, though, this corner is always at early evening in the summertime, where the sun is still up but mostly obscured by buildings or trees, putting a filter on the last minutes of daylight and softening the edges between light and shadow. I am standing on this corner, and usually I am looking at the little house across the street. I never knew the names of the person or persons that lived in that house when I called Winfield home, and I don’t now, but in my head I am standing on the corner waiting for someone to come out, and that person is a dear friend. I don’t know who that person is. Maybe someday I will.



Whenever I hear the word wall, this is the wall I see. It is the west wall of the gymnasium at Winfield Elementary, and it forms a corner with the rest of the building right here. I got the shit beat out of me a few times in that corner, where there are no windows. I also went back there a few times with friends at recess, just screwing around, and one of the things we always did was try to climb the wall using this odd column of bricks that poke out just a little. None of us ever succeeded.


You know that noise a hammer makes when it hits an anvil? If you can’t get a handle on it right away, listen to The Beatles’ “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and you’ll get the gist. Whenever I hear that noise, I see this:



Winfield Elementary has just about the same number of doors as any small-town public elementary school, I’d wager, but something odd is that each door has one of these—a combination boot-scraper and doorstop. They’re bad to be around when you’re getting your ass kicked, because once you’re on the ground, it’s pretty easy for your assailant to drag you over to one of these and start beating your head against it. But, when you’re bored, and all the swings are taken on the playground and you don’t want to wait in line for the slide and there aren’t any foursquare balls left and there’s still fifteen minutes or so left until recess is over, you can occupy your time quite easily with your friends Brian York, Danny Gray and Kevin Muto throwing rocks at one of these. The noise they make on the rare occasions they hit sound a lot like that.

Near the downtown area is a building on another corner. It’s a weird little building, and it currently houses a dentist. The building is constructed into the side of the hill that rises to meet the railroad tracks. What’s weird about the building is that it has a sidewalk along the front of it that is perfectly level, though the street is not. Even stranger is the fact that, when the sidewalk reaches the end of the building, it just stops, hanging out over three feet or so of empty space.



There used to be gravel at the base of this strange concrete cliff, instead of the nicely-manicured mulch beds there now. I once watched my brother attempt to jump his Murray off this truncated sidewalk. He hit the gravel and wiped out in an ugly way. He went off crying while his friends laughed. I gave them the finger and followed my brother home.

Winfield, though small, has its good sides and bad sides, like any town. I did not grow up on the good side, though I wouldn’t trade where we lived for anything. Most of my friends lived on the other side of the tracks, where the houses were nice and neat and backyards didn’t flood when it rained and raccoons didn’t live in the attic and snakes and woodchucks in the basement. If you crossed the crick in back of my house, you got to the scary side of town—ramshackle houses that backed right up to the tracks. All the bullies at school seemed to live on this street—Beecher Street. It dead-ended in a snarl of woods that also backed up to the Boy’s Correctional Facility at the DuPage County Complex on County Farm Road. My parents warned my brother and I to stay out of these woods. We obeyed--most of the time.

Even weirder was the fact that, right after the houses on Beecher Street ended and before the woods began, there was a scary industrial building, one story tall and about a quarter of a block long, that reposed back there like a sleeping wolverine. It was menacing in a dormant kind of way, because businesses came and went and never seemed to stay for long, leaving the building in what seemed to be a suspended state of decay. My parents told me to stay away from this place as well, because a lot of the older kids from this part of town came back here to do whatever drugs they’d found in their older siblings’ underwear drawer or drink the beer they’d persuaded some poor sap to buy them at the Winfield Liquor next to the bar downtown. They’d go in the alleyway between the building and the ten-foot-tall retaining wall that abutted the railroad embankment. I took a picture of this alley, but for some reason it didn’t come out.

That alley is still a scary place, and though I’m a thirty-two-year-old man (fuck, it feels weird just saying that) I still see that alley through the eyes of an eight-year-old. When you hear someone telling you how they got chased down some dark alley, I couldn’t have any less idea what alley you see in your head, but this is the alley I see in mine. It was always a dare among my friends—who’s brave enough to ride his bicycle all the way through from one side to the other? I did it a few times, shitting my pants the whole way. Even the graffiti was freaky—not spray paint, but somehow burned into the bricks in dagger-slash letters. I rode my bike through there today, and I made it maybe halfway through before I grabbed a handful of throttle. I couldn’t help it. Call me a candyass. And maybe if you visited this part of town today, or if you happen to live on that street, you’d see it a completely different way, and maybe the houses there are nicer and have been fixed up and the bullies have moved away and nobody does drugs in the alley behind the building and all the graffiti has been sandblasted and it’s all just as nice and innocent as you could hope for. My brain, however, has colored it a different way, and it seems that you can’t erase those colors, the ones in your head and in your heart; all you can do is wait for them to fade enough to use another color.

I went down my old street—Liberty Street. It’s one street over and parallel to Beecher, and it’s a dead end too; but unlike Beecher it dead-ends into a meadow. If you came up to me on the street and said that word, meadow, this one is the one I see. It was kind of neat, being able to walk out your front door and turn left and be in a meadow, even if it did flood when it rained.

My house was the last one on the left. Unlike a few others on Liberty, mine is still standing. Next door to my house used to be a little white house. An elderly couple, the Ziekerts, lived there. She was very nice and used to bake my brother and I cookies, but he was a total crabass. He died when I was ten or so, and from then on I mowed her lawn in the summertime. Strangely, and another example of the weird way Winfield lays concrete, the Ziekerts’ house was the only house on our street to have a sidewalk. Mine didn’t, and the house on the other side of Ziekerts’, the Wold’s, didn’t. What this meant is that the sidewalk started and ended in Ziekerts’ tiny yard, a three-inch-high cliff of concrete on either side. I learned the hard way that you cannot drive a lawn tractor with the blades turning over this cliff, or you will bend the holy fuck out of the blades on the sharp corner where the right angle of the sidewalk gives way to grass. The sidewalk is still there, though the house is only a ghost of a memory, and three of the corners are still sharp. One is nicely rounded.

Mr. Ziekert put a rock on either side of his driveway. One was pretty big; the other was fairly smooth, and over time, sank just deep enough into the ground to become a fairly decent jump for a kid on a BMX bike. It became for me a daily tradition on the way to school; I’d jump the rock and vault off the end of the sidewalk. When Mr. Ziekert was alive, he’d cuss me out whenever he saw me doing this. I’d give him the finger and keep right on pedaling. The Ziekerts are gone and their house is gone, but the rock, like the sidewalk, is still there.



I tried jumping it today on my bike, but it wasn’t the same, somehow. And anyway I went a lot farther into the Wold’s lawn than the last time I tried it twenty years ago. I don’t remember leaving tire tracks that frickin’ deep, either.

Liberty Street intersects with Church Street in a T. Church Street is aptly named, because at the intersection of Liberty and Church there is a church. Two of them, actually, but they both belong to the Parish of St. John the Baptist; the new church, built in 1983, in all its angular new-Catholic newishness; and the old one, built in 1906, and as gothic and glorious as you could wish for. I watched the new one being built, and on a dare I ran a lap around its inside perimeter after climbing through a window, only to find when I climbed back out that my asshole friends had absconded with my bicycle. But when you say the word church, it is the old one I see, with its gothic stained glass windows and its steeple complete with a cross that, up until about five years ago, had a pronounced lean.

I went inside and sat down near the back. I know this church like the back of my own hand, though it has been over fifteen years since I’ve sat foot in it. I know each creaky board, and I know that the sacristy on one side of the altar and the altar boys’ prep room on the other side are linked by a creepy tunnel that runs behind the altar, where the linoleum is peeling off the floor in big chunks. I know that the stairway to the balcony is blocked by a gate, but the gate is rarely locked, and even if it is, it’s easy to tickle. I know that the old pipe organ in the balcony, directly underneath the steeple, still works great, and I know where the power switch is, and when you flip it, the blowers that provide the air turn on with a lovely whoosh. I know these things, but I had forgotten them all until five seconds before, when I walked in.



I’m sorry the picture is so crappy; I wish it had turned out better, because it’s really the inspiration behind this whole blog. What you see is what I see from the very rearmost pew in the right rear of the church. When they built this guy in the early 1900’s, they did not know the meaning of the word restraint, and I could not be happier for it. The picture doesn’t show all the neat little details, but if you look in the area above the altar, you’ll see what I wanted to show you. Just above the altar, the wonderful vaulted ceiling is painted a deep blue. It is emblazoned with gold stars, and at the very back, two seraphim are doing homage to the Lamb. I didn’t show you this to throw my faith in your face. I showed it to you because, in my head, this ceiling is what I see when I hear the word splendor. That word is one of my favorite words, because of the image it paints.

A collaborative post...

Holy leaping Christ, there I am! How did this happen? Where did this come from? How do I get this off my Blog, for the love of Christ himself!


Very seldom do I get the chance to drink booze that comes from a glass bottle.
Truly a rare, yet nonetheless appreciated luxury. Hand in hand with such a gift is the fact that it's after 1:00 in the morning, yet the atmosphere is redolent of somewhere more like the deep south than the Rust Belt. As I speak, it is still 80 degrees, not a cloud in the sky, the stars are more than visible despite the brightly lit front porch and my bike is busily puking oil onto the sidewalk.




Where did this oil-puking son-of-a-bitch come from and how the hell did it get on my lawn! It may have something to do with the tall skinny guy passed out in my lilac bushes. Heads will roll, I tell you! This will not go unnoticed!


The evening is inspirational, the gin and tonic is flowing freely and there are still 12 cigarettes left in the pack I purchased not two hours ago. Ah, summertime.
Yet, at this point I am praying for snow for I am a fat man, nonetheless, and the heat wears me down like an oil-less motor and soon I will seize in hopes the right lubrication finds me and restores me to the proper specifications. What those proper specifications are, I haven't a clue, only it's pretty damn far from this point in time. Althought, I get the true feeling one more of these strange concoctions -- a FINE TASTING gin and tonic -- will give me all the lubrication I could ever possibly want to make it through the night. It makes me wish I were one of the rich and fabuluous, like a private school teacher, so I could, myself, buy gin in a glass bottle, instead of the cheap stuff that comes in plastic with a handle and scrambles the brain like a needless egg on a summer sidewalk. Do I need help? Damn right! The keyboard and screen are out of focus.

I've spoken at length about the unforeseen virtues of the camera phone. Now is the time, I suspect, to explore at length these virtues. Is it possible to catch the bright blue glow of a righteous fart on such a device? Just how detailed would a hairy ball-sack appear at such a low resolution? Does the fact that I've ingested four extremely strong gin-and-tonics preclude my ablility to ride a wheelie for three city blocks? Would the camera phone be capable of recording such shenanigans? Should we be thanking the Great Magnet for the luxury of contemplating such minutiae? And what would the cops think? One must consider that there is a retired cop--an extremely cool retired cop, true, but a cop nonetheless--living next door. Is it worth the gamble? The gin and tonics, in a collective chorus, say yes.

Did I say extrememly strong? Holy Christ, it must have been a moment of weakness. In fact, this is all a joke. I've been chugging water as a science project, but making myself think they were extremely strong gin and tonics. You must have seen straight through my sadistic plot, truely believing that a couple stiff drinks would send more over the bow, painting a picture of drunken debauchery and lunacy in the moment. BUT OH NO! It's just an act. In fact, I am all put together, never more solid, and thinking pleasant thoughts of heaven as I race merrily toward the morning, wishing upon another sunrise, never cursing its sadistic brightness. That would not be me. That's not my style. I welcome change, a new beginning, hence I am enjoying this mystery drink with cubed ice instead of cracked. It's risks like that I must take to appreciate the knowledge I have gained in such a tumultuous life and am that much further along because of it. However, let's not mention this is not mere tobacco in my pipe. I think this experiment may be askew a bit, but I say, "Fuck it," roll on and let's see if this locomotive jumps the tracks.

With this in mind, where will this rambling, screeching torpedo take us? Contemplating my Bjarne briar pipe, at present wafting the sweet aroma of Georgian Creme tobacco over the railing of my front porch, I wonder if a similar effect could be garnered from harvesting leaves from the oak tree in my front yard, pulverizing them to a fine moist pulp in the mortar and pestle and smoking them. Would I derive as much pleasure from such an act as I would from moseying on down to the Bull and Bear, an illustrious tobacconist where my buddy Charlie (the aforementioned retired police officer) now has gainful employ, and sashaying on out through the door with a fresh pouch of China Black? How about if had my buddy fire up my Oldsmobile and rev the engine until the limiter kicks in while I crouch behind it and snork up the exhaust fumes like a junkie? Where would that take us? What's the score here? What's next? Is it running naked through the streets of St. Charles while screaming like a fiend? Is it jumping into the car and trekking south to Tiajuana? Is it blasting through the border into Canada, loading up a trunkful of Prilosec and hauling ass back to the states with visions of vast profits coursing through the cerebral cortex? Is it another gin and tonic? I think the lattermost sounds most appealing, as it requires the least effort. Well, after waxing vengeful upon the spider who bestowed upon my neck this boil which appears, in profile, to strongly resemble Ethel Murman.

As of yet, I could not quite grasp exactly the one who my boil best resembled, but Ethel Murman, I never would have guessed. She was a friend of mine once, before her tragic end. She is the one who taught me that a moth who lands in an outlandishly strong drink in the middle of the night will learn a hard lesson and rest a decaying afterlife on the freshly painted boards of a front porch in the midst of suburbia. I really wish I could have saved the poor bastard but no matter how much I screamed and yelled, the idiot dove in, no idea the grave danger he was entering. We've all been there, thinking we know best, and walked away wishing we still knew less than we do at the moment. And yes, crushed leaves from a mightly oak delivers one helluva buzz, one so strong I wish I could keep it a secret and sell it to all the high school kids. I could be a millionaire, if it were not for my conscious which constantly screams, "One day all the world will know how fat and stupid you truly are, and that your boobs are bigger than most girls at the age of 16." Certainly, my man boobs are something of a bragging right, but are nothing in comparison to jumping into a bottle of tanqueray and swallowing every drop and possessing the true grit, spirit and balls to resurface knowing whole heartily that life will be a complete shit sandwich in a matter of hours. It's something truly amazing, pure joy converting itself into agony the one split moment you aren't watching.

And that, my friends, is the true rub. The rub nub, if you will permit me a small bon mot. As I sit here, on my front porch, smoking my pipe, fighting the gin-spins, cursing the worthless bastard of a moth who decided to commit hara kiri by dive-bombing my drink, I'm perfectly content. What will happen in a few hours? Will five gin-and-tonics preclude my ability to pilot a bellowing, oil burning beast through the darkened streets of suburbia without attracting the attention of the local constabulary? Will I make it home without cracking up? Will I be found in the gutter in Cleveland, lying next to an empty bottle of Four Roses and a strange device resembling a meat thermometer constructed entirely of Styrofoam? What will my parents think? What will my cat think? What will this do to my plans to run for State Representative in 2012? At this time, the only thing to do is piss over the railing and hope my girlfriend doesn't see the spider tracks in the morning.

I keep writing in hopes the deluisions of grandeur land me in the eyes of being cool when I know I will never be cool, I will only be me. I am perfectly OK with that, not fine mind you, since fine would lend an assumption that I was happy with the preclusion, but OK with, because I am OK with me. I could give two shits about you and what you perhaps thought of me since I can not theoritically, practically or just plain come through my cable modem and whip the living shit out of you. So your thoughts are mine and my thoughts are protected by my copyright. Jesus Christ, I sound like a mean drunk and I should probably write that. Since we are being honest with each other, I should lend my voice in saying a bottle and a half of gin leaves you to the point of not only praying that God himself take you in a bolt of lightning but leaves a bottle of Tums as a gift. One may never realize the importance of the words I have spoken just now until that horrible day where you may find yourself sitting on the porch next to me, vowing suicide is better than pain. Of course, I'll try to talk you out of it, but listening your gut implode upon itself, I may just agree with you and let you die. I guess it depends if you are actually the one who brought the glass bottle of gin with or simply pulled it out of my "Secret Reserve Cabinet," and sold it to me "As New." If that were the case, then I feel no guilt letting you know, that your glass was poisend with a horrible excuse for tonic (Liquid Drano) instead of Schwepes. Now you know the dire need for Tums. Let me just say, they are of no help for you, you are dieing a horrible death and only your God can turn this tide. Please, don't puke over the railing in front of me, crawl down to the lilacs on the side of the house, it shall save lives in the long run. Boy, oh boy, I feel like a true, red-blooded alcoholic for I am still conscious and should not be. This can come from only practice and practice does indeed make perfect. And here is proof there actually is a God, for I have run out of ice cubes or else I would be passed out on the lawn too. That would be hard to explain in the morning, mind you, because my pants fit very loose and probably would be around my ankles before I fell unconcious. And the cops around here have very little sympathy and sense of humor. Therefore, I preach, I am headed off to bed, in hopes the world is not spinning in reverse or I shall be perched over the railing again. And at that point, God, I take back everything I said that you may have interpreted as blasphemus, wrong and hedonistic, for you and your dad knows I am neither of the three. Peace be with you and I really hope I speak with you tomorrow. God help me. And please -- to the painters tomorrow, if the garbage can smells funny, I had little confidence knowing I could make it up the stairs to the bathroom. Sorry, again, and your paycheck will be duely noted. I feel sick and embarrassed, and to bed I go, dreaming of death before morning. Kisses and crosses, I should probably go to mass tomorrow, even if it is Monday. I only hope I do not erupt in flames. Sincerely -- uh, I forgot who the fuck I am. Shit! I may be in trouble tomorrow.

On killing time in stupid ways...

Well, it's been a little while since the last blog, and for that I apologize. Thanks to all of you who said something; that means a lot. To be truthful, I have a few brewing, but this one just kinda fell out of me.

I may have mentioned in a previous blog that I spend a lot of my free time on the bike. I don't know if you'd call me a biker; I mean, I ride a lot, and I even have a black leather jacket with all the zippers and stuff, but that's about where the similarities between myself and the typical biker stereotype end. I don't own a Harley, and I rarely ride in large groups, like the biker gangs you sometimes see riding in one large mass on sunny days. As a matter of fact, I ride alone most of the time. I don't hang out in bars or roadhouses with names like "Smokey's" or "The Broken Oar," and you will never see my bike lined up next to the rolling jukeboxes parked outside of Jimmy's in Naperville, big shiny trophy bikes whose owners spend three hours polishing for each hour of riding. No thanks.

Anyway, so my ass spends a lot of time on the bike. Where do I go, you ask? What do I do when I get there? A lot of times, there's no "there"--I'm just motorin'. I thought, if you're interested, that I would share some of the things I do and see when I'm out being the Great American Highway's guest.

For example, this evening I spent some time at my buddy Adam's house, enjoying a beer or two and kicking the absolute shit out of each other in Street Fighter. Simply fabulous evening, weatherwise, so I rode the Moose, and when we parted ways at 1:30 in the morning, I was still ready for some action. What is there to do around here at so late (or early) an hour?

Go trolling for Resurrection Mary? Why, isn't that funny; I had the exact same idea myself. Courtesy of that most wonderful invention, the camera phone, here are some action shots.



It takes a while to get all the way out to Justice, where Resurrection Cemetery is located. I took the expressway. It's kinda deserted at 2:00 in the morning, but...



...here's a random poor schmuck clipping along with me at 70 mph.



Here's someone else I passed. The speed limit is 65 mph, but not everybody goes that fast.



Hey, you have to find ways to keep yourself occupied when there's no radio to listen to. Here's what my speedometer looks like at at 30 mph.



Here's what my speedometer looks like at 100 mph.



Here's what my front wheel looks like at 30 mph.



Here's what my front wheel looks like at 100 mph.



Here's what my back wheel looks like at 30 mph. Yeah, by this time I'm a little bored. Riding on the expressway is kinda monotonous. I do not have a picture of my back wheel at 100 mph, though; that would be dangerous.

I won't bore you with the story of Resurrection Mary here; it's the quintessential Vanishing Hitchhiker tale. Mary is commonly seen on Archer Avenue, also known as Route 171, anywhere on the road between the Willowbrook Ballroom and Resurrection Cemetery. To get to that stretch of the road, you have to go through Archer Woods.



It can get kinda scary, not only because ghosts have been seen along this road, but also because deer populate the area in huge numbers. Deer are beautiful creatures, and I am content to watch them for hours. On this trek, a doe strolled out in front of me, totally cool, ears flicking leisurely, just a-moseying. I pulled off on the side of the road, not only because I was afraid of hitting her (Think about it--hit a deer in a car and it's a visit to the body shop; hit one on a bike and you're lucky if you're only in the hospital for a couple of days), but also because I just wanted to watch. She stood there in my headlight for a while, head up and ears pricked, legs so graceful and thin you'd think you could snap them between your fingers, eyes deep and liquid, reflecting my high beam in a shimmer of gold. She didn't spook until I shut off the engine, and then she was gone like a cool breeze.



Along Archer Avenue, right before the woods get really heavy, you see this. This is the gateway to Saint James Sag church, and it's known not only for its construction out of Lemont Limestone, the yellow brick that can also be seen in the Water Tower downtown, as well as Joliet Penitentiary of Blues Brothers fame, but also for the fact that a passing state trooper once looked inside the gates one night and saw seven robed, hooded monks standing (?) on the tarmac. At his shout, all seven floated away, much faster than a man can run. I take a peek in there every once in a while, but I've never seen any monks.

Riding a bike is usually great, but it has its drawbacks.



Traffic signals don't often recognize motorcycles, so you're often stuck at an intersection waiting for the light to change until someone in a car pulls up next to you. I waited at this intersection for about five minutes. Then a nice gentleman pulled up in a Toyota Highlander, and the light changed after about 15 seconds. Thanks, mister.

I got to Resurrection Cemetery without seeing anything, but weird things sometimes happens when you get close to the cemetery. Sometimes the lights in the mausoleum, known has having the world record of the largest area of stained glass of any building in the world, will flash on and off as you drive by. Trust me; with that much stained glass, you notice when the lights flash on and off at night. I didn't see any of that, but as I rode by I heard my cell phone, still in my pocket, make the noise it makes when you take a picture. Odd because a) it's not a loud noise and the bike is obnoxiously so, so there should be no way I should have heard it, and b) the camera function, or any other function, does not work when the phone is closed. At the next stoplight I checked and found it had taken two pictures on its own. They were just black, though, as you'd expect of a camera taking pictures inside your pocket.

Anyway, I don't always do weird macabre shit when I'm riding.



This is right up around Minocqua. Wisconsin. Beautiful black spruces, generally glorious countryside, but I'm here to tell you, do NOT ride a motorcycle way up north where you have no idea where you're going and get caught out after dark. Motorcycles have no map lights, so when you have to reference your directions, you have to get off and hold your little cheat sheet in front of the headlight so you can read it. Decidedly inconvenient.

On the rare occasion (too rare) I go riding with my brother and/or my dad. These were taken when creeping the old neighborhood in Winfield, Illinois.



Here's my dad on his Nighthawk. Yes, the look on his face accurately depicts the question he asked me at the next stoplight--"What the fuck are you doing?"



This is my brother Michael at a stoplight on his sweet 1975 Honda CB750 Super Sport. Okay, not really an action shot, but that thing is too damn fast to catch on film.

Can you believe that I used to think camera phones were stupid?