In fairness, I was a bit grumpy going in...

My friend Caroline was interviewed on BBC radio yesterday about her new book, In Search of Adam, with which most of you are already familiar. If not, click the link above and go find out more. I was curious to hear how she had done with the nerve-wracking interview process, and she had expressed concerns on her blog about how she would fare.

Due to a glitch with the BBC website (or possibly just because I'm on a Mac) I was unable to fast forward through the broadcast, so I ended up listening to approximately 2 hours of streaming broadcast from Manchester's morning show, complete with traffic updates, news, and a slew of other interviews before Caroline finally came on. That's more radio than I've listened to in years.

I was pretty sure I had the right broadcast because the host (Heather Stott) mentioned periodically that there was going to be an interview at some point with a woman who had been discovered and awarded a book deal through a "cyber-scout." While I knew that this was obviously a hook for the press when dealing with Caroline's book, I hoped that she would prove a little more knowledgeable in the actual interview.

My dismay and apprehension deepened somewhat as I listened, as the chatty radio personality interviewed another author early on in her program, and clearly had never so much as glanced at the books the woman had written. She seemed more interested in whether the author ever followed people through bookstores to find out if they were buying her books.

Finally, Caroline came on, and Ms. Stott waded into the interview about how she had been discovered through her blog, and how magical and wonderful that seemed to be. I felt terrible for Caroline when the host revealed that she was completely unaware that the book was already out, waiting in bookstores for her listeners to purchase.

Had she (or anyone on the staff for the show) done any research at all?

For all her nervousness beforehand, Caroline came off as cool and confident. Her book has some pretty dark themes (although I should confess to being one of apparently very few of the bloggers I know who have not yet read it—I plan to read it very soon) which were somewhat incongruent with the perky morning program, but she managed to intergrate these things pretty easily into the conversation. She even managed a preliminary plug for her next book.

I suppose I just wanted to blog about this because I was proud of Caroline, and because I was angry with the interviewer (possibly irrationally, as radio is not something I tend to enjoy) for not having prepared other than the "author discovered through blogging" angle. I've been interviewed on the radio before, and once choked so badly that all of my remarks about a play I was in were edited out of a segment on NPR except for one moderately intelligent bit. I know how strange it can feel for one who is unaccustomed to such a thing, and I thought she handled herself gracefully.

Fever

When I first noticed on Thursday that instead of just generally feeling crappy, I might be legitimately sick, my first thought was about the good timing. On Friday, the new Michael Chabon and a collection of Miranda July stories were due to arrive, and a day or two of enforced bedrest sounded pretty nice, all things considered.

That was before the fever.

Friday arrived, and so did my books, but it brought with it a wobbly, sweating unpleasantness which felt an awful lot like the sensation I had in London, the one that made me stay an extra day abed in a foreign country.

The dude from Pink Floyd got a sensation of his hands feeling like two balloons. Peggy Lee also had positive reports from a similar illness. I, however, feel like absolute hell. I've only had a few moments of genuine lucidity, and haven't even been able to read the dust jackets of my shiny new books. And I shake uncontrollably whenever I emerge from underneath my winter comforter, despite temperatures in the 80s.

Anyway, that's where I've been. Still haven't broken the fever, so that's where I remain, should any of you be wondering where I am.

150°

At a Dunkin' Donuts waiting for a cup of coffee, an impatient woman joined the line behind me and ordered a large coffee. The woman who took her order was new, still in training, and had some trouble with the cash register. The trainee then asked several times what the woman would like in her coffee. The woman ordering the coffee eventually made a glottal sound like a tiny cough to punctuate the beginning of a short burst of sigh.

"Jesus!" she said. "I shouldn't even be in here. I work at Starbucks!" She threw two singles onto the counter and looked around nervously. She did not seem to notice that I had begun to laugh at her.

*****

Today, at an entirely different Dunkin' Donuts (I like their coffee, OK?) I called my friend Micah, with whom I would be working for most of the afternoon, to see if he wanted me to pick him up something.

"I was just about to call you," he said before I could explain the purpose of my call. "I'm on my way to Starbucks. Want anything?"

I like coffee synergy.

Two days ago, Micah owed me $45. Yesterday, he owed me $50. After I bought him the coffee this afternoon, the total rose to about $52. I do not like where this is going. Especially as the person I know who might most easily break someone's leg is none other than Micah. I can't imagine he will let me hire him to do himself harm should he fail to make good on his financial obligations to me.

Plus, it'd be terrible if word got out that I'm not charging him interest.

To get Micah to smile like that, I just said "look stupid" over and over again in a very soothing tone, like I were giving direction to a small child. I think this shot was immediately after "OK, good, now: stupider."

*****

I think I saw some corner boys in my neighborhood today, standing blithely on the corner. They stood more or less facing one another, but angled so that together they had a nearly 360° view of the surrounding area. They didn't seem concerned about anything in the world, except for the fact that they were clearly watching all sides for trouble. I hope it was just a coincidence, that they were going about some other business. It's not like I don't think there are drugs for sale in my neighborhood, but I'd rather not have such openness about it so near to my home. That's the kind of behavior that usually leads to stray bullets prematurely ending the life of one of the local children, or the teachers at the school up the block.

Or me.

*****

I was up in Wicker Park, where I took a couple of pictures. One of the Double Door (on the Flickr page in color and then again in black and white because I couldn't decide which one I liked better) and the one at right: a currency exchange which was advertising a current temperature which was off by well over a hundred degrees.

To provide an illustration of how hot 150° would really be: when making a latte or a cappuccino, the milk is supposed to be heated with the steam wand until it reaches 140°. That's as hot as you can go without burning the milk.

I was at the same currency exchange many years ago on a first date. I hadn't had a chance to get my paycheck into the bank, so I brought it with me, and this place was the first stop of the date. They refused to cash it (it was for too much money, or so they claimed) and I was forced to ask her if she could pay for everything we did. I cannot recall ever seeing her again.

Spent a chunk of time browsing the stacks at Myopic Books, one of my favorite bookstores. The store is crammed with books on several floors. It is simply lousy with books of all types and vintages.

The fiction section—which starts on the rickety "balcony" and continues on the first floor—requires a map and a guide to navigate properly. There are cats roaming the aisles, or sleeping on the ledges. It is a terrible store to enter in hopes of finding a specific volume, but, as my friend Craig pointed out, it is a wonderful place to come across a book. I came across a couple of books for myself, and bought a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Palm Sunday for Craig, because I think he'll really like it.

"Hey, that's the dude who died recently," he said as I handed it to him.

"Yes," I said, somewhat wearily. "The very same...dude."

*****

Still have not quite untangled myself from the Dayworking. I expect Monday will end it, though. I hope Monday will end it. Should any of my coworkers or my supervisor log in to check my blog, I would really like to be done now, please.

Craig asked me what I was doing at work today. I told him it would be really difficult to answer the question without going into a lot of detail about what it is I actually do. Craig, like most people, has no clear idea what tasks I actually perform for money.

"I half expected you to say 'graphic arts stuff,'" he said.

That's certainly going to be my response next time.

*****

I have no intention of showing you pictures of all the people I mention on this blog, but I happened to have some fairly nice portraits of both Craig and Micah on hand.

*****

How have I been blogging for this long without ever using "coffee" as a tag?

This oversight has been corrected.

Mild at heart

I remember a night, a summer night on a rooftop in one of the more upscale areas of the city. Summer 2001. We ended up on the rooftop.

We began in an apartment in the building. An apartment or a condo, hard to say. A very tall building with many floors of identical tiny apartments or condos. It felt like we were in a kennel.

Our hostess had mosquito netting over her bed. There on the seventeenth floor of an air conditioned high-rise: mosquito netting. I made fun of her a little for this and she did not seem to know I was making fun of her. She gazed blankly back at me as though I were speaking a language she could not understand. She blinked lanquidly as I spoke to her.

In addition to her decorating taste, our hostess had a desire that I desire her. I don't think it went any deeper than that. I think she just wanted me to burn with jealousy if she spoke to other men. I did not. It was easy for me to do, as I did not really find her appealing on any level.

It was a party of sorts, in the tiny apartment. The apartment and then the building's swimming pool. Some of the partygoers had brought swimsuits, and they cavorted in the warm air and the water until we were chased away by the building's security personnel. When they chased us from the pool was when we went to the roof.

I had brought a book with me to the party. I did not bring the book to be antisocial. I had brought the book along with me when I was under the impression that the party was merely a relaxed poolside gathering. Water holds no appeal for me. I thought I would read and sit in the sun and watch the women play in the water in their bikinis. This seemed an excellent way to pass the time.

The gathering became a party only through the virtue of people not leaving, and other people showing up. It was very organic.

I did not know most of the people at the party. I had been brought along by a former roommate. I knew her, and she knew all of the others. All of the others knew each other as well. My roommate did not stay by my side to ensure I was mingling. It would have made me feel terrible if she had.

There was a coat of coarse gravel all along the rooftop. A woman asked me why they put gravel on rooftops. People sometimes assume I will know things that are obscure. I guess I give off that vibe. I wear glasses, and I was carrying a book. Perhaps that's all it is.

I told her it was so that no one could sneak up on her, throw her off. I told her it was for her own safety, and that it gave her a fighting chance should an assassin appear here on the roof with a desire to do her in. She moved away.

I ended up on the periphery, perched on the concrete ledge of the building with my limbs wrapped around the guardrail. I was looking down at the other rooftops and the streets and the twinkly lights of the city. There were no twinkly lights above. There is far too much ambient light in Chicago for a body farther than the moon or the sun to have a hope of being visible. And yet we have a famous planetarium. Go figure.

I was looking down at the lights and thinking about a PJ Harvey song. I was thinking about the pretty woman I had failed to talk to that afternoon. I was thinking about a dream I had, and the book I was reading. I was thinking about the lights as I looked out upon them from my perch atop the city.

I could hear the laughter and muffled shouts from the others on the rooftop who seemed to me as though they might be on another rooftop entirely. It was very late at night, and each cry from a reveller brought a loud "shhh" from another.

If I leaned forward, I could easily visualize my own death. I could feel the wind of the fall.

A reputation besmirched...

"I can not help but cry. I am standing in a puddle made from my own moon topple rejection tears. *wipes snotty nose with palm of hand* But I'll be ok soon though. Don't you go worrying about the heart break that you have caused. I will console myself with a trip to Woolworths." —Caroline, in reply to comments posted both here and on In Search of Adam, which is her site.

Caroline is an author, whose book is not her blog and is coming out soon in lots of places that aren't America. Go read her before her book becomes a phenomena and she hires underlings to do her blogging.

She asked me not to post this, as she is worried I will tarnish her reputation as a serious blogger. She finally granted me permission, provided I bill her simply as "Steve." So go back and read again, substituting "Steve" for "Caroline" and changing the gender pronouns where necessary.

Oh! You LibraryThing!

Been goofing around with LibraryThing, which is a nerdy delight. Basically it allows you to enter all of your books and keep an online library.

Once you get all your crap in there, though, it can also make recommendations based on the books you have, scanning other folks' libraries with similar tastes to tell you what you might be missing. They have an interesting feature called an "Unsuggester," which tells you which book you are least likely to own based on one you have.

So, yeah, basically, it's mostly a colossal waste of time. It'll generate little random things like the one I put in the sidebar. Most likely each of you is seeing a totally different collection of book covers. Imagine!

So I've put in 300 or so of the books nearest my desk, using a "CueCat" bar-code scanner I ordered for this task, which adds the books automatically (when it recognizes the book). It seems to have some trouble getting the correct edition cover in there, but there's a ton of user-supplied artwork you can use to get it right.

Anyway, I thought some of you might find this interesting enough to check out. It is possible that this is merely a side effect of how tired I am right now.