I can't win for losin

Aweeeeeeee. Did you miss me? No? Screw you then. J/k, much love to the three of you. Where to begin. There is way too much to say. I made it out to Pritzker pavilion yesterday. First time ever. Some peeps from work said that some blues guitar guy was gonna be out there and invited me to come along during lunch. Good call. Great weather. The music was alright, it was blues, solid, good musicians. The guy’s name was chainsaw Murphy or something. He was pretty good. He’d say, “I’m gonna play the blues for you now, like my mama told me to.” I wish my mama told me to play the blues. Maybe she did, I just wasn’t listening. “Jimmy, play your blues.” “Naw, I’m gonna go ride my skateboard and listen to punk rock.” She wouldn’t let me get a skateboard. That’s how I ended up this way. Pritzker was cool though. The sound was pretty awesome, I wish I would’ve caught that hum show. I’m wondering if they will use Pritzker at all for Lollapalooza. I’m hoping. They issued the lineup for lolla, well the schedule. Some tough conflicts like always. I kinda had hoped to see Lady Gaga. I guess I don’t mind her music and would like to see her production. Won’t happen though, I’d much rather see the strokes. I saw them at HFStival in DC, and they were prolly the highlight. I dunno much about Phoenix, other than it will prolly be an intimate gathering when they go up against Green Day on Sat night. I could be wrong though. Sunday is a bummer as Soundgarden goes up against Arcade Fire. There are a bunch of other minor conflicts, but there always are. Life is about choices.


And now for something completely different. I was reading the Gartman letter yesterday and he had a bit about how some youth soccer league in Canada has added a rule. It’s a rule to control scoring and avoid lopsided games that demoralize one team. This rule is that if you win by more than 5 goals, you lose. Gartman is a right winger, and he went nuts about this new rule. A lot of people flew off the handle and said “well the game will just flip, the bad team will try to score on themselves to insure victory and the good team will try to defend the bad team’s own goal.” Hence, nothing really changes. Reactionary rhetoric. I think in reality what they are trying to do is say, “when you have a comfortable lead, like 3 goals, put in your b team and call off the dogs.” There’s probably a better way to do it than to say “if you’re too good, instead of winning, you lose.” I’m reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand right now, and I’m sure she’s spinning like crazy over this one. Penalize the over-achievers and reward the under-achievers, the basic premise of the whole book is how this is pure evil. I’m only like .25 through the book, but I don’t think it holds a candle to The Fountainhead. Maybe I need to reread the Fountainhead and that’s not very good either. This book is basically propaganda and every character is a caricature designed to embody some political viewpoint. It’s kind of annoying. I guess it’s ok. I’m still reading, it’s engaging, well-written, and the characters are well-developed even if they are a bit cartoonish.


The subject I really wanted to talk about today is… bums. I’ve seen some interesting bums lately. I don’t think it’s funny that these people are down on their luck, but I guess I’m just wondering what their deals are. Kinda like everyone I see. Seriously, I do wonder what everyone’s deal is. Some people I can just guess, typical suburban dude, trying too hard to look cool, probably doesn’t make as much money as he wants people to think he does, etc. Those people are boring. I wanna know what the PDA couple’s deal is, the physically challenged guy, and bums. For now. So today I’m walking to work and I walk by a mcdonalds. Right there by the door, there was a pile of newspapers and a bum sleeping next to them. Then it dawned on me, he was a newspaper salesman. I have to say that sleeping next to the pile of papers you are trying to sell probably isn’t gonna move you up the corporate chain, he did look content though. Oops, I didn’t mean to imply he was a bum, sorry, he was a newspaper salesman. Do you guys like to lamp? I know I do. When I see somebody lampin, like steady lampin, I gotta give props. So I’m walking to work the other day. It’s like 730am. I’m just getting over being very sick. And I see a guy, a bum, sitting on the steps of a business, hot tix type of ticket business that wasn’t open. The guy was lampin. He was sitting there. He didn’t look happy and he didn’t look sad. He had an undefinable ethnicity, maybe Caucasian, maybe Latin American, he had a beard, long hair w/ receding hairline, salt and pepper, undefinable age, maybe 40s-60s. This bum was sitting there, at 730 am, drinking a half pint of vodka. The bottle had like 2 ounces left maybe. This was a textbook, dictionary definition, postcard, quintessential bum. And he was lampin.