The Urban Backpacker's Quarterly / Joseph Dunphy's Livejournal Comments

Found my sheet of passwords ...

chicago_journal — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 20:08:15 GMT

... in a box with some of my other papers, after a move. It was that time, so Livejournal made me change something. In the email that I was sent to let me do so, came these words

"But even if it was an intruder who was trying to find out your password, laugh at his failure: this letter came to your address, not at his."

I don't know why that's so funny, but it is.

Peeking Through

chicago_journal — Fri, 17 May 2013 18:34:05 GMT

Chrysanthemum Show, Lincoln Park Conservatory, Chicago, 2007. No, these aren't held, any more, sad to say. They were a wonderful photographic subject. The good news is that locally, gardening has become more of an art form over the years, so at least I'll have some flowers to photograph, if none that have been breed in as interesting a way.

Sort of Italian, sort of ...

chicago_journal — Fri, 17 May 2013 18:24:08 GMT

Yesterday, as a change of pace, I thought I'd have some chicken. I've been buying these little "chicken tenders" at the Jewel, and no, they are neither breaded nor frozen. They're the little flaps of meat found inside of the breast, and Jewel (which has a store brand) and Purdue seem to be in a price war. That's not as implausible as it sounds, as Jewel is just the local face of a national chain, which includes something called "Albertson's" out West. Really, different name, but it's the same store, with the same items going on sale at the same time, as if we and San Diego were in the same climate and getting food from the same harvests. We're not, not exactly, but today the bigness worked to the benefit of the customers (for once), as the price of those tenders had dropped to just a little over three dollars per pound. There is no waste in this item, although there is an unsightly vein running across it when it is raw, which has what is for us a virtue - the rich are disgusted by the sight, and so the price of the item is not driven up by their fondness for conspicuous consumption.

I took about 1.2 pounds of the tenders - yes, at 6'7" I am a large boy and need that kind of protein - and very lightly browned them in olive oil, giving them a good, heavy sprinkling of coarsely ground black pepper on each side. How heavy? Think of the sesame seeds on a bagel. Maybe a little heavier than that. What I would end up with was peppery, but not incendiary. I cooked the chicken in the oil until the surface was opaque, and then threw in two thinly sliced cloves of garlic, which I cooked soft, then two anchovies, which I mashed and melted into the oil, followed by one small, 8 ounce can of tomatoes

(throw in boos and hisses from the food snobs living in warmer climates)

which I had drained and chopped, and a little fennel seed, maybe a little under a tablespoon's worth. I cooked this until the tomatoes softened, and then added a little dry white wine (maybe 1/2 cup), 12 pitted kalamata olives, and a lighter sprinking of thyme (maybe 1 teaspoon), cooking all, briskly, until the wine had almost entirely evaporated, a small amount of moderately thick sauce remained, and the tenders were done.

This took about three minutes, which, aside from the relative low cost per pound of meat, was the virtue of this. The weather was pleasant, yesterday - bright sunshine and 82 degrees, away from the Lake - and I didn't want to squander that indoors, cooking, when there were still blossoms on the trees and the birds were back. The dish was a pleasant one, and the black pepper definitely added something, in a way that nicely rebutted an old bit of misinformation my high school biology teacher had passed along, when she insisted that black pepper and ginger had the same taste, just with different aromas, each giving little more to a dish than its heat. Maybe if they've been allowed to go stale, this will come close to being true, but in the right sauce, black pepper reveals a very definitely flavor of its own, much as ginger does when shown the same respect.

Underpass

chicago_journal — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:50:07 GMT

Entering the underpass to North Avenue beach, in Chicago, going under Lake Shore Drive, which is on the other side of the fence to the left, just inches away. The John Hancock Tower just barely manages to poke above the trees near the center of the frame - note the building with the twin antennae.

Nobody's talking

chicago_journal — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:33:50 GMT

I find that I've been running into myself a lot, lately - I'm finding old comments of mine that I had forgotten making, in discussions that never saw another comment, again. One of them expressed amazement that with a "recession this big", that a community focused on unemployment hadn't seen a post since 2008 - and now, it hasn't even seen a comment since 2010.

Yes, I'm hearing an echo, too, Robin. My reply, at the time:

"(Laughs, because somebody called this a recession)

Robin, for so many of us, the hardship isn't news, and it isn't recent. People have been thrown out of the job market for any reason or no reason at all, by the millions for years, decades in some cases, and never really been let back in, a fact barely disguised by the creative misuse of statistical methodology. To say nothing of a remarkable definition of employment - if one has been out of the job market long enough, one is no longer legally unemployed, even if one never sees work again. Just think of it - if all of civilization were wiped out, and we were all reduced to scrounging through the ruins for canned goods, within something like 6 months, the US would legally have full employment. One can't say that people didn't know about the fraud, as many times as it had been exposed, but as long as they could hold onto the illusion that hardship was something that only other people would have to endure so those with money could enjoy a slight cut in the cost of the goods and services they purchased, it was a fraud most of those not yet excluded were glad to endorse.

The only thing novel about this era is that well to do, old boys club belonging job applicants are having a hard time, too, as are the members of the overindulged, under-worked and remarkably callous generation Y for once, and both would seem to be discovering that the rest of us don't really feel like turning the other cheek and pretending that we care about their misery. Why should we, when they spent so many years visibly gloating about ours? It's a depression, it's going to get worse, and it serves the American people right.

As for our own misfortunes, while one does well to remember that one has been done an injustice, one does not do well to become obsessed with that fact. One speaks of it, and having spoken of it a certain number of times, tires of the subject and moves on to discuss others, which I suppose is what most of us have done."

When this July 4 has come, that comment will be three years old. In that time, what, exactly, has changed? What ever changes, really, other than that those who have been arbitrarily locked out of life have become a little older, and life for them a little worse? Obama, like his predecessor the Shrub, has managed to become a two termer in spite of having accomplished nothing of positive value domestically, something that all successors will notice. One could listen to the silence, perking up one's ears trying to find the faintest sound hinting of discontent in a meeting place, and hearing nothing because nobody was there, conclude that there was no discontent to be had, but that would be a foolish mistake and a dangerous one.

The lesson that the poor and downtrodden have learned is that any attempt to win fair treatment for themselves and to achieve real change through political means is futile. Amongst the electorate, those who have not yet been reduced to destitution will not listen, and those who have are not heard. As for the politicians, what happens in every election in which power changes hands? Having spent the campaign promising to change any number of genuinely obnoxious policies with which their opposition has been credited, on entering office, the party thus returned to power swiftly forgets every promise, and why would they not? They did exactly the same thing the last time they took power, and the same electorate they betrayed the last time returned them to power, again. But then, what else could the electorate have done, even if it had been more fair minded, on the whole, than those who supposedly represented it?

Though there seems to be little in the way of enforcement, any more, there is such a thing as anti-trust law, and one sort of outcome it is supposed to prevent is the rise, not just of a monopoly, but of an oligopoly, as well - a market in which just a tiny handful of "competitors" remain. In such a market, competitors don't really tend to compete so much as they tend to "cooperate", to use the politically correct weasel word for what, since the time of Adam Smith at least, had been known as "collusion." An industry in which only two competitors remained would present us with an extreme sort of oligopoly, one which, until very recently, would have been responded to with real concern, because, one might gather, control over the manufacture and sale of ball bearings would put too much power in only two sets of hands, and such power would surely be abused. But we were and are to give no concern to the far greater concentration of the power to be found in Washington, in just two sets of hands - the two parties - than we are to the lesser concentration of power that would be seen in the ball bearing industry, to cite the example I just gave? How could that have ever seemed like anything but madness? Does not the madness not become even madder when the collusion associated with oligopolies, far from being hidden, is frequently brought out in the open, renamed "bipartisanship" and highly (if not at all surprisingly) praised in the corporate press, to the applause of an easily and willingly duped public?

The notion that is brought forth, when righteous anger over the lingering injustice of the current state of affairs is to be smothered and silenced, is that we live in a supposedly free country in which we can just vote the bums out of office. But how are we to do that, exactly? The only choice we really get, in practice, is to replace the current bums with the other bums they had replaced, just a few years before, which might seem like a solution if one has long term memory issues, but which really is not. Each party in this political oligopoly can see that there is no need to serve the voter, much like those favored by a two company economic oligopoly can see that they need not serve their customers, because those who are left discontented can do no more than flop back and forth. With only two places in which they may settle, those who keep flopping must inevitably return. Those who do not serve, need not serve at all in order to see the return of that which they were supposed to have to compete to ever have. It will return to them, a free gift granted to them through the indifference toward those who were supposed to be served, of their supposed competitors. Nothing ever changes, because for those setting the rules, nothing ever needs to - or at least, so it would seem, to those sitting in the wrong places.

Frustration is not a synonym for acceptance. If it were, Tsar Nicholas and King Louis XVI would have lived on to see their old ages. Frustration merely tells us that those who have been frustrated have given up on trying to achieve fair and responsible change through peaceful means, because they've learned that these means never work.

There have been crude attempts to deflect this awareness through the popularization of such New Age nonsense as "The Secret" and the so-called "Law of Attraction", giving a pseudo-spiritual finish to the older and even more tired secular nonsense of Norman Vincent Peale and his "power of positive thinking", as those excluded and mistreated have, once again, been blamed for their exclusion and mistreatment. The excuse for this, when this line of rationalization is attempted, comes as a realistic assessment by the downtrodden of their own present situation is portrayed, not as a clear eyed view of reality, but as a mere expectation that molds the reality that is being viewed. If only the downtrodden would expect that they would be treated well, then they would be. If the unfortunate lost souls expected good fortune, they would get that good fortune - or so goes the claim. The claim is based in superstition, if it is sincere at all, a superstition that can only be sustained through willful blindness. Who, in most seasons, has been more optimistic than the possessor of a freshly minted degree, or more thoroughly crushed after a few years of futily looking for work, as he found for himself just how worthless even a solid degree could be in the new economy, to those who lacked personal connections? What common sense should have told us all is confirmed, over and over, in a way that should never have been needed, at all.

Think about it: If "the law of attraction" were valid, then why would the word "disappointment" even be present in the language? When would it ever have come into use? What we are left with is a philosophical position that represents such a bizarre break with easily observable reality, as to force one to recall the heavy use of narcotics to be found in those to be found on the Left, and the equally heavy abuse of alcohol to be found among those on the Right, as one tries to imagine a way, any way, in which anybody could even so much as respect such a position, much less adopt it. Such is the reality of American politics - one who attempts to discuss anything seriously will often find himself in the position of being the only sober man in a room full of drunks and stoners. Go into a dive bar, some time, and take a good luck at the tidy looking fellow sitting there with his $3 glass of soda. He's not having a good time, and he's probably not going to be back for a while, even if he has nowhere else to be.

This pitch was not going to work, no matter who the unemployed were, and those scientists, mathematicians and engineers who, we are assured, America desperately needs to import, are to be numbered among the long term unemployed. We look at a fallacy that a high school drop out should be able to see through, and expect a PhD in Physics to overlook it, altogether? "Don't pee on my shoes and tell me that it is raining" is a sentiment that resonates at any IQ level - all that one achieves, through such a transparent attempt at the manipulation of the oppressed, is their enragement. Let's go out and do our best to take a group of people who know how to build thermonuclear weaponry or worse - and believe me, there is much worse - and leave them feeling violated, insulted and enraged? Good plan, folks. Good plan, indeed.

The downtrodden will respond to this unceasing provocation in various ways. The steelworker who is reduced to homelessness, thwarted and stepped on enough, might eventually pick up a tire iron, and find a few skulls conveniently close at hand to ... but Livejournal doesn't want us to describe such things on their space, so I won't. But this is reality - there will be a backlash, count on it, and the longer anger is bottled up, the more violent it will become when it is finally released. This is the stuff of which violent revolutions are made, and when I say "revolution", I mean "revolution" - not something the giant foot stomping epidemic of the 1960s, but the real, bloody thing, complete with destroyed cities and mass executions. I, for one, would be just as glad to miss that, or should I say, would have been glad to miss that? Take a good look at what's left of our major cities, and at the rate of random violence on our streets, and then get back to the question that some of us keeping asking.

"How do people manage to know things without knowing them?"

Seriously - would you take a stroll through a slum wearing a suit or otherwise displaying signs of relative wealth? It's a bad choice so familiar as to be the stuff of familiar jokes, is it not? Some of us need to wake up and see that the revolution has been going for some time, and it is spreading. Of course, the Far Right will try to sidestep that point, as it usually does, by distorting the argument.

"So, you're saying that muggers are noble freedom fighters?"

No, I'm saying that muggers are thugs, but guess what? So are revolutionaries, by and large. That's why one really doesn't want to be around when a revolution happens, and why sensible people will wish to do what they can, to make such events avoidable - they don't bring out what is best in Man, and usually, all they do is replace one mess with another mess. Again, to be serious - you know that you'd be leaving more than your wallet, and possibly that suit and clothes in the slum, don't you, especially if their were an east of the Mississippi hellhole like Gary, Indiana? Your blood would be on the pavement, your teeth would be on the sidewalk, and various body parts would have an excellent chance of being left strewn here and there, with chalk outlines around some of the larger pieces of what remained, and a sheet (if one could be found) over what used to be your head, because as much as the cops might try to look like tough guys, there are some sights that a human being can never really get used to. Anybody who had spent much time in a real major city would know better than to take the hike I described. What one would encounter would be the sheer, raw hatred the dispossessed feel for the rich, or even anybody they mistake for the rich.

The belief of the Far Right seems to be that the best answer to the problem of a continuing, simmering insurrection is to expand the insurrection's base of support, by reproducing the conditions that created it, elsewhere, as well as one can. It's a fascinating bit of reasoning, it really is - exactly the kind one would expect a drunk to conceive - and anybody with so much as an ounce of sense should see exactly where it is leading. One just has to drop the romantic blinders and stop thinking of revolutions as being something that must be noble and beautiful, to see the looming danger. When all of America is one vast slum, outside of a few gated communities, how long do these people imagine that the gated communities will stand and survive - and who do they imagine will come to their aid, when the enraged mobs close in?

Will this happen next week? Probably not, but there's nothing good happening on the way down to that end. Our frustrated factory workers will, as I've said, likely resort to brute force in the end, if current circumstances don't see a satisfactory remedy, and so, in a sense will the aforementioned scientists, mathematicians and engineers, although our brand of brute force is considered a little more respectable in most settings. As a group, we've been very, very loyal to this country, but loyalty, like patience, has limits, and when the loyalty is demonstrably failing to be reciprocated, patience runs out at least a little more quickly than it otherwise would. As I've said elsewhere, like a lot of people in these fields, I renew my studies, refreshing and updating knowledge that has grown rusty, with one goal in mind - emigration. I'm giving up on America. There's no sense in doing anything else. Life is never going to get better here, and it's steadily getting horrifically worse, and let's be honest: there's not much left to miss. In so many ways, the Americans, in general, have gleefully tossed each other under the bus and then proved astonished when they've found themselves crushed under the wheels. Even were I accepted as an American, as a poor one, I wouldn't have much to look forward to, here, and, of course, I'm not, for reasons to be explained later and elsewhere - reasons that would apply for more than a few of those in these fields.

My bit of good news is to be found in reports that India is now importing skilled labor. My incredible lack of skill at foreign language acquisition had, for a while, seemed to eliminate emigration as a realistic ambition, but now, perhaps, it is not. I now have something to work for - and most people in these fields, unlike me, are actually very good at learning languages, making emigration, for them, an even more viable option. This raises the question of what will happen when the United States goes to war with one of the countries to which its technical talent has been driven. The answer is that the United States will lose the war, badly, and that at some point, one of those wars will probably end in the devastation of the lower 48 states, and quite likely the outright annexation of outlying territories like Alaska and Hawaii, as the ability of the US military to defend those territories fails. Some people will dance around the points and questions raised by this very likely scenario, but I'll address them directly, without evasion, telling you nothing that nobody else in these fields isn't already thinking.

If I truly emigrate to a country, then there, where I find myself, I am an immigrant, and like any immigrant, I owe my loyalty to my new country, not to my old country. In my own case, if I should be able to find a job overseas someday, that's not such bad news for those in Chicago, because India is a friendly country, but not everybody is going to be going to India. Some of them - generally the ones who aren't Jewish - will be going to places like Iran, as long as they can pay their bills by doing so. As what's left of the American people, some day, look at the smoking craters that will be found where some of their major cities used to be, no doubt the word "traitor" will be thrown around a lot, and the technically trained will be turned on - giving us another good reason to move - but these complaints will be without justice, because America will have done this to itself. An emigrant who is driven forth by the callousness (or outright hostility) of his former countrymen owes nothing to those he leaves behind, for he was nothing to them.

That, Robin, is why some of us don't bother to post to forums like that one, any more. Does one bother to do repairs on a car before one junks it? America's only real enduring value, at this point, is likely to be that of the cautionary tale its history will become, sooner than some would expect. If we still held any real hope for the future of this country and our chances to have real futures in it, then maybe there would be some point to trying to remedy that fatal flaw in our system of representative government, and get more "third parties" going - so many, that someday, people would wonder why they were called "third parties" - as difficult as that would be, with third party candidates being so easily excluded from the ballots as they are, and so unlikely to ever take office in a system without runoff elections, in which a candidate with only a minority of the electorate supporting him can take office as long as they are a plurality. There would be a lot to do, and a lot of frustration in the attempt to get it done, but at least there would be a point to making the effort. The sad news is, there isn't.

There is no point to trying to work with people who will toss one to the wolves at their earliest convenience, and then feel proud for having done so. The effort isn't just one that would call for us to surmount a seemingly endless series of barriers, before we even got to the point of being able to hope for some paltry reform in order to make possible something that we really should be able to take for granted - the chance to work. It's more of an epic quest to get to a place that doesn't exist, a fool's journey, because the American people, as a group, don't mean well and probably never did, as the indigenous inhabitants of this country would probably, rightly point out. One can work to get a bad politician replaced, but when what needs replacing is the electorate, itself, there is only one sensible solution to that problem.

One moves. Humanity is far from perfect, but it's often better than this - and the people in Bangalore won't force you to read the news from back home. Just as well, because there's probably not going to be anything in that one would want to hear. Not that there should be. When people are destroyed by their own vices, vices which they refused to overcome, mankind should rejoice in their downfall, for only through this can the cause of virtue be served - and if some of us can finally manage to afford to eat on a regular basis by serving such a worthy cause, all the better.

Cul de Sac at North Ave and Lake Shore Drive, Chicago

chicago_journal — Wed, 15 May 2013 19:52:21 GMT

North Ave. does not quite meet Lake Shore Drive, ending in a cul de sac separated from the drive by a few feet of concrete at the least, and the entrance to the underpass to the beach for a few feet.

The non-representational white statue you see in the center of the cul de sac is no longer there, having been removed a few years ago. I couldn't tell you why, but this is not unusual - public art in and near Lincoln Park is usually only on temporary display.

Welcome / Why this blog exists

chicago_journal — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:41:24 GMT

I've created a blog called the Urban Backpacker's Quarterly, which will primarily be a local blog, about the experience of living on a budget in Chicago. Yes, you're hearing from a poor person, for a change. As I write that blog, I'll visit other blogs whose subject matter relates to what I'm writing about, and sometime post a few comments. Some of those blogs will be on livejournal. I'll write about those blogs and the discussions on them, here, and maybe add a little more material on top of that.