skip to da lou, my darlin'

back from a few days of hometown relaxation and report that the visit was a good one. made a very good decision to avoid the holiday traffic on friday night and hit the shoeland with Mole in search of cheapy sandals. emerged with three new pairs and some socks and headed home to puff before seeing our second performance by Mucca Pazza, the incredibly nutty marching band i stumbled upon via Redmoon Theatre last week. hit the road early on saturday morning and had a super easy drive down, slightly under five hours in the car. at MeMaw's insistance, i went through my remaining buckets of adolescent memories in my old bedroom closet and sent a good garbage bag's worth out to their death. Mole is eagerly anticipating going through the surviving boxes of notes and scrapbooks from back in my day. should paint a funny picture of Agent99 as a young lass.

visits to da lou are becoming more vacationesque the longer i'm away because there are always so many new restaurants emerging for me to try out. i met Bojangles, his new man Goliath, Neesia, Gnosis and MamaSun @ 1111 in lafayette square. wish i'd known they had such a cute patio when i made the reso, but our indoor dining was fine as well. had a great plate of veggies in balsamic that were really delish. afterward, we headed over to AMP, a newer addition to the manchester road corridor in the city. this was the most interesting incident of my weekend journey, by far. i was perched at a hi-top w/ Bojangles and Goliath when this girl came over to the table and told Goliath that she'd met him at a party before. as she's chatting with him, i realize that she and i went to high school together (this is a hilarious phenomenon in da lou, truly the smallest of small towns u.s.a. as far as seeing people you know everywhere.) we're catching up a bit when she tells me that someone else at her table wants to talk to me. i roll over there and this guy announces that "we just love your nose!" now, i always have trouble with this odd compliment becuase the abuse i rolled with throughout childhood in regard to this snoot is extreme, so as an adult, i'm always suspect of these weirdos who dig the button nose. laughed it off and kept catching up with my old acquaintence, during which i'm getting an odd vibe from this nose dude and am overhearing random snippets of convo he's having with Bojangles about me. imagine my utter suprise though when Bo was leaving, he whispered in my ear, "that guy and his wife want you to go home with them! they both think you're really hot and he's been bending my ear about you!" you know, it's all fine and good to try to drum up your own bedroom fun, but going about trying to orchestrate it by creeping around my friend and bugging him about whether i'd join a threesome or not is not the method i'd recommend to get me interested. nor is wearing a baseball jersey while you're out, much less one advertising a former client of mine. no backward baseball cap and the girl was pretty alt-y looking, but still they were not at all my type. as i was leaving, nose boy hailed me over because he wanted to introduce me to his "very hot friend" who appeared to be a very gay man to me, so i'm uncertain how this third wheel fit into their plan, but i knew i wasn't gonna be the fourth.

after my escape from the bar, i reconvened with Neesia, Gnosis and MamaSun for a few hours of puffing hilarity. Sun wants to do a documentary on our Hair experience. can't wait to see the can of worms that endeavor will open up.

rounding things out with a family birthday bbq on sunday is pretty blase' compared to being solicited for small group sex.

i will be in da lou again in three weeks' time for sun and pool. i will not be having group sex with any of that house's inhabitants.

make mine oktuba

Neesia recently blogged about adding a magical extra day into the week and christening it "oktuba". these days spring up like brigadoon when you're not expecting them. a sudden urge to give yourself a day of rest? call it oktuba. i stumbled into my own little eighth day of the week yesterday after making the error of trying to drink some wine on wednesday evening. LadyB had a little bbq to send her back to africa after a recent wedding visit. though i've long ago completely lost any and all urge for alcohol, for some reason, when i spied that bottle of sauvignon blanc chilling away, that was exactly what i wanted to quench my thirst. we were sipping out of those little juice glassy italian wine tumblers and i had a few which i'm sure could not have equally more than three glasses in standard stemware. my tolerance has obviously lessened and really, i feel now like alcohol is simply a toxin in my system in light of the constant nasty side-effects that spring up without voluminous intake. Mole was elected to drive us home from the 'burb wonderlands and even with a large glass of water and multiple aspirin, i still woke up with a ringing head and shrieking stomach. after attempting to fight off the ills, i decided it best to stay in for the day and thus, an oktuba was born.

it was a simple yet extremely fullfilling day. Mole joined me back in bed in the later morning and we napped with WeeBeastie being an absolute lamb while nestling under the duvet with her canine family unit. headed over to the montrose dog beach where WB had a small altercation with a very young chocolate lab. he really wanted to play with her and had her scooting around like crazy to avoid him, culminating in a series of indignant barks and nips after he was swatting her face like a fly. the dog beach is a place for WB to socialize with people -- not a bunch of sloppy dogs. they ain't her people. during our drive home, we passed through three blocks of a movie set, thick in filming mode of some scenes on a cta bus downtown. might be the keanu reeves/sandra bullock thing that my friends watched being filmed outside their apartment in wrigleyville. later, we continued oktuba with a series of money-making endeavors. within a few days of posting on CL, we managed to get rid of that monster a/c i'd been lugging around with me since i departed da lou, Mole's smaller a/c and the cable box that gave me the bootleg for a year or so. $220 richer, we decided to end our oktuba with dinner @ lula cafe in logan square. delightful organic foods in small portions = yum yum. Mole and i determined that we would be the best at being independently wealthy. we could entertain ourselves for years exploring and leisurely spending our days. he truly is the best company a gurl could ask for.

recent weeks have been giving me the blahs again about chicago, until i received a bit of a perspective lesson from Neesia. he and his friend Gnosis were visiting from da lou last week and stayed with us for a couple of days. we were standing on my back porch checking out the skyline and Neesia was expressing his amazement that a city like ours exists in the thick of the midwest and how wonderful it was to be in a city that actually *is* a city, alive with arts, people walking and taking public transportation to and from things to do. as often as the congestion and heavy traffic has been driving me nuts as of late, i had to step back for a minute when he said that and acknowledge that yes, i am very lucky to be living here. it's expensive and a royal pain to get around at times, but it's still thriving with alot of people who don't want a stagnant lifestyle. i'm fortunate i took the step to leave my hometown when i did and that the trials i've faced while shoving my way through these last four years have been worth it. what price can you put on your life's happiness? it's trite, but it's true. chicago hasn't made me happy every single day, but it was the best move i could have made out of da lou. this city will not be my permanent residence and in fact, it could be part of my past as quickly as next year. but it's still greater than many evils i could have been tangled up in. and regardless of SanFranPushy's edict that nothing compares to the ocean, having this enormous lake in our backyard during the summer is the very best thing about enduring eight months of hideous cold. more beach, please.

2003 to present

two years ago, the days leading up to our introduction found me laying low and watching alot of covert cable in the river west abode i maintained solo. discovering the marvels of public access channels in chicago brought me to "talkin' sheet", the show which found a small group of streetsmahht sistahs lounged out on a plywood island in the center of a stark soundstage. these queens of sheba hold dominion atop a big ass sheet, hence the show name. they jaw on about anyone who's pissing them off, their drama, world events and periodically somebody's kid races through the set to a chorus of "boy, get yo ass off that sheet!" it rivals "local league bowling with dwayne dowd", certainly. religious programming is always rearing up on the access and i stumbled across a gem one night that somehow managed to co-join christianity and ufo's into one singular sing-a-long. human cast members occasionally intermingled with the giant alien puppets and racially mixed ventriliquist dummies who were subsequently waving their jesus *and* alien freak flags simultaneously. a human hippie tells the story of seeing his first ufo in burbank, california in 1967, the prayerful puppets rapt with attention. next up: the dummies testify about their alien abduction experiences and everytime this poor man tries to talk, the spacemen puppets keep interrupting his ass to sing songs about the bible. and yes i did see a dummie identified as chip the black boy onscreen. yes i did. it was in the midst of these viewings that i first spoke to him, the man i would come to call Mole. while lamenting the lost trimester i wasted on Ick, i was ready for a good experience to come my way. it's so odd to acknowledge how we met because we'd both been skeptical in the past, but i must label us for one thing we undeniably are -- the internet dating success story. may or may not seem conventional by today's standards, depending on your viewpoint, but i still find it amazing that we stumbled upon each other via the online freeway, and also that we lived so close to each other already. with just one mile separating our places, he directly north of me, we've often mused that we may have crept by each other on the streets before we met. Mole's neighborhood and my neighborhood were the same. did we steal glances in front of the bookstore and keep walking? i think there was a familiarity, an ease, when we met that seems to have lingered between us. this native chicagoan charmed me by knowing that cape girardeau was located "to the back of the shoe at the bottom of missouri." from our first date @ the silver cloud, we were in each other's back pocket. after a mere six months, the aforementioned ease held court as we made the decision to share a home. it never felt like we rushed needlessly, it's just always seemed like the right thing to do. even now, i'm still excited to see him at the end of every day of work and i feel slightly adrift on the rare occasions we don't sleep next to each other. as i begin to mentally categorize some events as happening a few years ago, the further back my partnership with the Mole seems to take root and the more i ponder if there still might be some personal merit in getting married. no need or concern for hurry, just noting the possibility again. a romantic like the Mole can do that. two years ago, i found the right man to adore, and we're still on the journey together. it has beginning written all over it.