I made pasta Sunday night, plus tomato sauce from scratch. This was highly unusual since, for the past 4 weeks, I haven't had the time even to refill an ice tray, much less manually nourish myself. However, the re-inaugural Off-Off Campus summer season ended Friday (to the tune of 120 Flav-R-Ice popsicles, all given to the audience for free), so suddenly I have time, and a kitchen in which to spend it. So I threw on my lobster apron and put Rod Stewart's "Every Picture Tells a Story" on the record player and proceeded to chop a few cloves of garlic onto every surface of the kitchen except for the cutting board. The portion of sauce I prepared mysteriously reduced itself by 75% after an hour of heating, but I compensated with microwaved frozen meatballs and a cold bottle of Goose Island Summertime on the porch. (The view from our porch, thinks me and Hannah, looks like Brooklyn, which stems only from our mutual pop imagination of what Brooklyn must look like. That includes large Hispanic women hanging laundry from the porch and old men in white tank tops drinking beer in low slung chairs.) Out on the porch I met a few of our neighbors, who always seemed to me like very serious economics students. They turned out to be science majors, but still very serious; at least they were taking very seriously the salad they were preparing.

My bike, Walter, was stolen last Friday. I've been rendered pretty impotent without it. So I spent all of this week visiting bike shops all over town. According to the The Chicago Bike Shop Database, there are 148 bike shops in and around Chicago. Did any of them have a used Raleigh mountain bike? No. But Chicago Craigslist did, that is, if you consider Winnetka, Illinois a part of Chicago (I don't). I drove there anyway, and bought a bike that's pretty close to the one that was stolen (it is not, as my smartass girlfriend suggested, my actual stolen bike). It's about 2" smaller than I'd like it to be, so I don't know if I'll keep it. For now, though, it is a welcome guest in my house.

Because of this ordeal, I've developed an addiction to Craiglist, and yesterday I cashed in on the addiction and bought this Yamaha piano keyboard with a volume control stuck on "Jesus Christ That Is Loud" for 1 Andrew Jackson. The guy who was selling it was moving to Portland. "Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon?" I asked. He kinda laughed at that, and then didn't answer me at all.

I think I want to start a theater. Interested?