There’s a story behind these drawings, written by me, and included in the fantastic new anthology The Post-it Note Diaries, edited and illustrated by Arthur Jones. Check out this line-up of contributors: Andrew Bird, Arthur Bradford, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Daniel Engber, Jonathan Goldstein, John Hodgman, Starlee Kine, Chuck Klosterman, Laura Krafft, Beth Lisick, Marie Lorenz, David Rakoff, David Rees, Mary Roach, Kristen Schaal, Jeff Simmermon, Andrew Solomon, and Hannah Tinti. HOLY MOLY, I AM IN A BOOK WITH THESE PEOPLE. And couldn’t feel more honored. A bunch of us teamed up for a big ol’ book-release party in Brooklyn on September 27 and there are more events on the way, including a special Halloween show at the Hideout in Chicago, which I’ll be posting more details about soon. Come out if you can!

]]> http://www.thisisdavidwilcox.com/?feed=rss2&p=746 0 http://www.thisisdavidwilcox.com/?p=729 http://www.thisisdavidwilcox.com/?p=729#comments Thu, 02 Jun 2011 07:03:28 +0000 Wilcox http://www.thisisdavidwilcox.com/?p=729

He was indeed the fattest man who’d ever been in my section. The hostess wasn’t exaggerating. She’d asked me to bring a chair because he couldn’t squeeze into any of the booths, but looking at him, I worried he might need something sturdier. A love seat, perhaps. Or a baby elephant.

The fat man looked me up and down. “You must be new,” he said. I told him I’d been on the job three months. “Ah,” he said. “That’s about how long I was off my diet.”

I offered him a menu but he pushed it away. “I always get the Frito Pie here,” he said. “But I’m watching my weight these days, so I’d like you to do something special with it.”

I asked what he had in mind.

“Make it a double,” he said. “Double the chili. Double the Fritos. Double the cheese.”

A small pastry box sat on the table before him. He opened the lid with one hand and reached for a scone with the other. “These are irresistible,” he said, bringing the scone to his lips. I expected him to devour it all at once. Instead, he unrolled his napkin and laid the scone upon it. “Best saved for later.”

I took the fat man’s ticket to the kitchen and stepped outside for a cigarette. A double Frito Pie. The normal serving is a thousand-calorie gut-buster of steaming flatulence and heart failure. And here he wants it super-sized. The very idea made me nauseous. Or maybe it was the nicotine. I still wasn’t used to smoking. I’d picked up the habit only recently because the other servers said it would boost my metabolism.

By the time I went back inside the fat man’s order was ready. “It wouldn’t fit in a soup bowl,” the cook explained, lifting a Dutch oven up to the pass. A lump formed in my throat. As I reached for the clay handles, the cook grabbed my wrists.

“It’ll be over before you know it,” he said.

I took a deep breath. The cook crossed himself. Then I made my way through the dining room.

The fat man stood up as I approached his booth and motioned for me to join him. I slid onto one of the benches. He sat back down and scooted beside me. His chair whimpered. Our knees knocked beneath the table.

“That smell is intoxicating,” he said, luxuriating in the Frito Pie’s aroma. For several long moments he seemed to forget I was even there. I noticed he’d removed the silverware from the table. That’s never a good sign.

I grew fidgety and briefly considered running for the door, but my nerves drew the fat man’s attention. He fixed me with a ravenous, dreamy-eyed look and positioned the Dutch oven directly beneath my chin. Then, before I could say anything, he dunked me in. My nose and mouth were instantly clogged with ground beef and corn chips. It was difficult to breathe. I ate frantically so as not to drown. This did not please the fat man.

“Eat slower,” he insisted. “Chew each bite 20 times.”

He gently massaged my scalp as he steered my head this way and that. The cheese was starting to congeal around the contours of my face. Whenever I moved, it peeled away like latex.

“Shlurp,” the fat man demanded. “I want to hear you shlurp.”

I shlurped and swallowed, over and over, as loudly as I could. At one point chili juice went down the wrong pipe. I coughed it up, then shlurped and swallowed it right back down.

By then the fat man was applying pressure to the back of my head, signaling me to speed up, as if I were a horse and he were a rider digging his heels into my sides. Thankfully, the Frito Pie had broken down into mush. I inhaled what was left in less than a minute. Like shotgunning a beer.

I came up for air. The fat man was hyperventilating and twitching with excitement. Next thing I knew, he was standing over me, grunting, pulling my hair until my mouth turned skyward. He snagged the Dutch oven by one of its handles and hoisted it high in the air. “Toss it back,” he squealed, pouring the remaining scraps down my gullet. “Toss it back like a pelican.”

The rest is fuzzy. I remember lying slack-jawed in the booth for quite some time while the fat man flicked chunks of buttered scone into my mouth. Every so often he reached over with a napkin and delicately dabbed away the crumbs and saliva from my chin.

Eventually the fat man spoke up. “Pay at the register?” he asked. I must have told him yes, though I don’t recall doing so. He stuck a twenty in my shirt pocket as a tip and patted me on the back. “See you next week,” he said. And with that he was gone.

I passed out for a spell. How long, I’m not sure. I came to when the hostess tossed a glass of ice water in my face.

“You all right?” she asked.

A clock on the wall said 9:40. My shift wasn’t scheduled to end for more than an hour. I needed to throw up and change into a clean shirt, but I couldn’t muster the energy for either.

“Are you all right?” the hostess repeated.

I told her I was fine, that I just needed a few minutes to pull myself together.

“Well, whenever you’re ready, there’s a diabetic at table five who wants one of everything on the dessert cart.”

Illustrations by Arthur Jones

(Many thanks to Sye Williams, who allowed me to reproduce his photos here. Hire him sometime!)

MITCH CARRICART (28)
Real Estate Agent
6th and Spring

Right after I graduated from the University of Idaho, I was recruited to  sell single-family tract homes 45 minutes to an hour outside of Los  Angeles. I’d never been to LA before, never got to live in or experience  a big city, but as soon as I visited, I wanted to move here. So I put in  my time and eventually got offered a job selling lofts downtown,  which I’ve been doing for four or five years now. I just wanted to live  and work in a more hip environment with a younger crowd, a cooler  crowd. And I wanted to be able to walk everywhere: walk to the gym,  walk to the grocery stores, walk to the bars. More importantly, walk  home from the bars.

I’m at Staples Center three times a week when it’s in season. Even  more if you count LA Live. A few weekends back, I went to see Dierks  Bentley at Club Nokia on Friday night; a 1 PM Kings game and a 7 PM  Clippers game at Staples on Saturday; and then on Sunday, a 5 PM  Dodgers game followed by a 9 PM Talib Kweli show, again at Club  Nokia. Which is not an atypical weekend for me. I love doing that  stuff. It’s probably why I don’t have a girlfriend, but there you go.

There was initially a lot of skepticism when I first started selling  property downtown. A lot of people had a hard time envisioning what  the neighborhood could be. And I’d always tell them: the east coast  has 200 years on us,  but we’ll get there. And slowly but surely, we  are. I’d say the majority of all the most popular restaurants and bars that people go to today have been opened within the last three years. But still, it’s taking too long. Way too long. I know it’s partially because of the market, but it’s gonna take two years to fully build the area out anyway: start now so when the market recovers, it’s there. Especially since by then, we’ll hopefully have street cars and a football stadium down here as well. To me, it’s the Field of Dreams thing: build it and they will come.

ERIC OLSEN (33)
SARAH WRIGHT (27)
Actors
3rd and Spring

We bought down here about eight years ago, after spending time in  New York and Chicago and really being drawn to that sort of urban  setting. This guy, Bill Stevenson, was redoing the Douglas, and he  offered a tour of the penthouse. The floors had holes that went all  the way through but the bones were beautiful: bricks from 1890, 23-  foot ceilings, Douglas Fir hardwoods. The corner window looked  out over the LA Times building and city hall. It was beautiful, a  really magical space. But at that point there were still people  sleeping in the building, crazy paraphernalia everywhere. At 5 PM  the neighborhood became a ghost town.

At first, the question we got the most was, where do you buy  groceries? And trying to talk friends into coming downtown, they’d  be like, why would we come down there? But we own cruiser bikes  and skateboards, so whenever we’d have people over, we’d open a  bottle of wine, then ride over to Little Tokyo, eat the best sushi in  town, and maybe cap it off at Staples Center with a Clippers game.  Spring Street used to be a tent city; now there are all these amazing  coffee shops and restaurants everywhere. These young  entrepreneurs — like Ilan Hall, he won Top Chef and now has one  of the best restaurants downtown, the Gorbals — can open  something without worrying they’ll get kicked out in three months  because they can’t afford $14,000 a month in rent. You’ve got  thousands of people coming down here for the Art Walk every  month, so the businesses are getting tons of exposure. It’s all finally starting to happen; we were just ahead of the curve.

We almost bought a second space down here. We’ve put in offers. It looks like we’re probably going to move to Malibu instead, but we’ll never get rid of the place we’re living now. We’ll keep it forever. It’s like our B-minus version of SoHo.

SODA MAN (33)
Freelancer
5th and Broadway

I’ve lived all over. The ghetto, Compton, Watts, Long Beach. I  stayed on Skid Row for three years and I’ve been in this hotel, the  Hayward, for eight years, so that’s 11 years downtown, I guess. It’s  pretty unique, you got a lot of people down here, new people every  day. It’s never boring. You got rich people right down the street  from poor people. Used to be a lot of people drinking on the corners,  smoking, selling drugs, hanging out. But now, from like, Los  Angeles and 5th up to 5th and Broadway, it’s clean. Skid Row used  to go all the way to Pershing Square. You could sleep in Pershing  Square. Back then it was like a hell, but now it’s like a tourist  attraction.

I think Mayor Villaraigosa and them should be ashamed of  themselves, putting all this money into something and not creating  any sort of improvements or opportunities for the lower class  people, the natives who were here before. Because the poor people  five streets away aren’t welcome. A lot of the building owners tell  their security guards not to let what you’d call “undesirables” — or,  in security language, 1099s — even sit down on a bench. I don’t  know, maybe poor people need their own space on the moon or  something, because if you can’t be on the streets, where do you go?  You can’t go nowhere. Either you’re loitering of you’re jaywalking.

And these rich people need to show a little compassion. Buy  somebody a loaf of bread or something. It’ll make them look better than wasting hundreds of dollars on iPhones or spending 10 dollars on a cup of coffee or wearing skinny jeans, trying to be cute and fit in. Maybe 2012 is the year they wake up. Maybe some sort of cosmic ray will come into the planet and make ‘em say, you know what? Let’s stop being selfish, let’s stop saying, I’m a millionaire, I bought a couple lofts down here, thinking about opening me a restaurant and getting rich, dying, leaving the money to my kids who didn’t work for it. It’s a messed-up cycle and it needs to end.

And on that note, let the boat float.

CHELSEA DEBO (19)
Model/Artist
7th and San Pedro

I moved here from Toledo seven months ago. I was flown here to  shoot the cover of a book and I just never went home. My  apartment is the cheapest thing in the world. I would have taken  it by myself except my roommates needed a place.

None of us are into the Hollywood thing. Downtown is mostly  artists, people who do music or paint or whatever. Hollywood’s  mostly models and actors and whatever else. The gentrification  downtown, though, it’s almost becoming too much. This  homeless guy who sells weed on my street, he’s been in the neighborhood 40 years, and he says I’m the first white girl he’s ever seen living over here. It’s like it’s so super diverse now that no one knows how to act around anyone else.

I’ve seen a lot of crazy things: drugs, prostitutes, pimps, homeless people, tents everywhere. You can’t really walk around at night. It’s scary, but a weird kind of scary. Like in Toledo, people will actually accost you, you’ve got stabbings and kids dying and there’s a huge meth problem. The whole midwest is like that: kinda hopeless and done. Here, as bad as it is in some ways, not much ever happens. And I guess that’s why it feels like there’s a chance things might improve.

CALIXTO HERNANDEZ (39)
Bartender/Musician
La Cita, 3rd and Hill

Something you hear about LA a lot is that it’s a culture of  amnesia, because businesses and buildings are turned around  so quickly. And it’s kinda true. This bar, La Cita, it’s been  around 40 years, 50 years, which is ancient by LA standards. So  no, the city doesn’t have that Old World feel, or even that east  coast feel. But there’s still a lot of history here. Pre-United States  history. The original name of the town was El Pueblo de la  Reina de Los Angeles; there’s always been a strong Latin  American culture. And downtown is one of those areas where  you can still really experience it.

One good thing about what the new owners have done with La  Cita is they’ve let it retain the daytime crowd it’s always had,  which has been predominantly Latin American blue-collar  dudes. And they’ve added to that a younger, hip, more affluent  clientele that comes in at night. So it changes over. And in a  way, it’s weird, but I feel like a liaison, because I’m native  Mexican and I speak Spanish and as I’ve gotten to know the  crew over the years, they’ve come to accept me. They’re like, oh,  okay, he’s a real paisa, he’s a real Mexican, we’ll go order beers  from him. And I would love it if everybody always hung out like  that, but there is this stigma where a lot of the guys think there’s  a language barrier, or that people think less of them or  whatever. Still, on the weekends, we’ll have cookouts on the  back patio, maybe one of the Mexicans or Salvies or  Guatemalans will have a birthday, or one of the hipster regulars, and there’ll be food for everybody and everybody’s cool.

I wouldn’t say downtown’s the epicenter of culture in LA, but it’s starting to have that feel. It’s vibrant. I live one bus line away, in Echo Park, and when I go out at night, I find myself coming down here a lot more than I used to. I just wish public transportation would run later so people could get home from the bars safely, without worrying about DUIs. I mean, how much money is it really going to cost to keep the red line running two hours past midnight, you know?

I suppose if it had been a story about the Gush [caution: tread lightly with that link], people might have been more taken aback.

Unless you live in the area or you’re a devoted fan of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, the recent closing of Philadelphia’s Hot Potato Cafe likely won’t mean much. For me, it’s the sad conclusion to a bizarre turn of events involving my friend Brian McManus, a guy I’ve known half my life and who Ramsay once claimed, to my great amusement and disbelief, “has the power to make or break restaurants.” Turns out Ramsay was right. At least about the “break” part.

Kitchen Nightmares, in case you’ve never seen it, is basically a makeover show for incompetent restauranteurs on the brink of Losing It All. They beg Gordon Ramsay for help, he mocks and humiliates them, then rebuilds their operation from the ground-up: new menus, new merchandising, new decor. Each episode culminates in a successful grand reopening, replete with hugs and smiles, at the end of which Ramsay returns the kitchen to the hands of those who made it such a mess in the first place. Who often proceed to ruin it all over again.

Hot Potato Cafe (try to guess the specialty) was the rehabilitation project at the center of KN’s third-season premiere. In business since 2007 and unsuccessful from the start, the proprietors blamed a good chunk of their misfortune on a scathing review my friend Brian wrote for the Philadephia Weekly under the headline Spuddy Hell. I can’t pretend to know why the producers of KN ultimately choose the restaurants they do, but in this case, I have to believe Brian’s review was a not-insignificant factor, if for no other reason than it afforded Ramsay the opportunity to mutter the words “spuddy hell” under his breath over and over again. Which he did. As often as possible.

It’s a strange experience, listening to a group of desperate women and an internationally renowned chef on a network television show refer, in hushed, fearful tones, to a shadowy figure they know as The Critic, realizing it’s the same guy who, the last time you saw him, took you to an all-black go-go club down the street from his house in west Philly called Cousin Danny’s Exotic Haven, where you both stood out so severely a woman actually looked you dead in the eye and said, “Evenin’, officer,” and where you both got so intoxicated you thought it a good idea to follow some of the other patrons to an “after party” they invited you to — at least until your friend’s wife heard the plan and wisely told you both to get the hell home.

Even stranger is watching your friend and the wife who saved both your asses appear on that same network television show, as the staff of a restaurant he once savaged anxiously awaits word on whether or not he likes their revamped potato soup, the first bite of which is So Very Dramatic the show stretches it from the end of act five, through a commercial break, into the opening moments of act six. That’s right: your friend eating soup is a cliffhanger. Unbelievable.

I’m not sure how many times I texted Brian when I watched the show air the first time, but I know I did so whenever something cracked me up — and I was cracking up a lot. The best part was when he said he liked the soup, then sheepishly smirked, shrugged his shoulders and, looking down at the table, said, “It’s so potato-riffic.” Because that moment — the body language, the smart-ass tone of voice — was classic Brian. And there it was, in the midst of absolute ridiculousness. I know for the women who ran the Hot Potato Cafe this all must have felt very life or death, but from my vantage point, knowing The Critic as I do, it was impossible to take seriously.

Brian wrote a glowing review of the new Hot Potato Cafe shortly before the Kitchen Nightmares episode aired, but in the end it made little difference. Eight months later it shut down for good. I’m not saying Brian could have done anything to prevent that; after all, if Gordon Ramsay couldn’t save the place, no one could. But the fact remains: as years pass, whenever those ladies think back on their failed enterprise, the role of The Critic will loom large. And I guess in that sense, the Brian they know is just as real as the Brian I know — the Brian who spent most of his 20s doing stuff like this:

Turns out he’s not just a guy who can wreck your living room. He can also wreck your career.

With all the recent hubbub over Cordoba House and Koran burnings and such, I thought about this year’s anniversary of 9/11 more than usual. Typically, when September 11th rolls around, I really only think about one thing: that it’s my friend Paul Koob’s birthday. I know a lot of people out there have a birthday that falls on 9/11, but to my mind, Paul carries a particularly heavy burden, for if he fails to celebrate by eating a whole deep-fried red snapper from El Barco, the terrorists win.

I’ve always taken it as a given that for anyone capable of processing news and feeling even the slightest twinge of humanity, 9/11 was a shitty, shitty day. Shittier for some than for others, granted, but still, that collective shittiness, the sheer enormity of it, was what supposedly “united” us. It was a profound event that deeply affected everyone on an individual level despite the fact that for most of us it was also completely distant. Most of the stories from that day aren’t stories of loved ones in peril or the immediate effects of the attacks themselves. They’re stories of grotesque normalcy, of routines carried out in the face of abject horror or otherwise completely disrupted. And for the most part they always end the same: “it sucked.”

That’s not to say personal accounts of 9/11 are inherently tedious. When I think of tedious, I think of someone trying to make sense of a dream they can barely remember. (Some people believe hell is nothing more than a room with a chair; I believe hell is a room with a chair occupied by a Jungian.) But personal 9/11 stories are, by and large, unremarkable. It’s why when you hear the average person talk about their 9/11 experience, it’s only natural to drift off into thoughts of your own. Not because theirs is so boring, or yours is so unique, but because they’re so strikingly similar. People all over the world — people you’ve known your entire life, people you were introduced to just last week, people you won’t meet for years — went through the same thing you did, on the same day, at the same time. It was a moment so rampantly personal it couldn’t be anything other than impersonal. Something that, terrible as it is, belongs to all of us.

Of course, these are things I can say because enough time has passed. The shock has worn off and in its place lies perspective. Which I guess is why I find the current wave of anti-Islamic fervor coursing through certain segments of our populace so utterly perplexing and distasteful. When I look at gatherings like those that took place over the weekend — the Park51 protest in New York, the 9/12 Rally in D.C. — all I see are people clinging to that moment nine years ago when the news first hit. When there were few explanations. When it was perfectly acceptable to be consumed by your own emotions. When it was okay for everyone to feel like a victim.

But we no longer live in that moment. And now, whenever I see a photo of someone at Ground Zero hoisting a posterboard placard with two badly drawn towers collapsing beside the words “3000 Dead” and “Never Forget,” I feel like that person is inappropriately trying to shove their version of 9/11 down my throat. I mean, who are the 3,000 I should never forget? Among them were foreign nationals, illegal immigrants, liberals, socialists, homosexuals, and atheists — not to mention Muslims. Are they worth remembering, too? Or is the number all that matters? If so, what’s its significance? What is the number, exactly? The magnitude by which the values we all supposedly share were debased? What are those values? Who defines them?

Like I said, when someone forces their personal 9/11 experience upon you, it’s only natural to drift into thoughts of your own. And this past weekend, that’s exactly what I did. Specifically, I spent some time revisiting something called The Official Unwound Food Diary, a journal I kept during the final weeks of September 2001 while working as a roadie on what would eventually turn out to be the final tour by Unwound, a band from Olympia, Washington, that was not only one of my favorites musically, but personally. They were dear friends. And when 9/11 went down, they’re who I was with.

We’d been on the road a little longer than two weeks. Seven of us piled on top of one another in an eight-passenger van so crammed with merch and equipment we had to buy a special luggage compartment we affectionately called The Burger to transport stuff on the roof. On day two we’d found out the hard way that the van’s fuel gauge didn’t work. On day three we’d killed eight hours in a Target outside of Fargo while the mechanic down the road worked on the van’s differential. Later that night, at a club in Minneapolis, Sara, Unwound’s drummer, had her hand crushed in one of the van doors about an hour before she had to play (which she still did). That’s basically how the tour was going. It hadn’t been catastrophic, but it hadn’t been smooth sailing, either.

The morning of 9/11, we were in a hotel in Northampton, Massachusetts. We’d just had our first night off, which we spent at the movies (a few of us went to see Ghost World; the others, if I recall, went to see Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back) and in our rooms, drinking bourbon. Dave, the soundman, woke us up with the news. He did so by banging on our doors yelling “We’re under attack!,” a statement that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when you’re half-asleep in New England. Then there was the TV, and phone calls, and beer at 10 in the morning, and finally a reluctant decision to drive to Boston, where the band was booked, ironically enough, at a club called the Middle East.

(The Middle East show didn’t take place in the end, but six years later, some dudes who’d had tickets decided to stage it themselves, in Brooklyn, with CDs and cardboard cut-outs. There’s even video documentation. As a gesture, it’s slightly sweet and mostly weird.)

The next day we were routed for Manhattan and the annual CMJ Music Marathon, which was supposed to have just gotten underway. It was one of the biggest shows of the tour, at Irving Plaza with Clinic, who were just starting to take off in America. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. We stayed in Boston, wandering aimlessly from record store to museum to restaurant to bar wondering all the while just what the hell we were going to do next. Go home? We were thousands of miles from Olympia, in an unreliable van that got ten miles to the gallon, and rumors were flying everywhere about fuel shortages and gas stations demanding a king’s ransom for a fill-up. Could we even afford to go home? What about finishing the tour? Was there a tour to finish? What if the next week of shows were canceled? What if they weren’t? Would anyone bother showing up?

It sucked.

In the end we never really made a decision. On the 13th we got word from the band’s booking agent that the show at Maxwell’s in Hoboken was on, so we went. We spent the day directly across the river from Ground Zero, close enough to see and smell it, but still a world away. The next night, there was a show at the unitarian church in Philadelphia, where everyone seems to play sooner or later. After that, the Black Cat in D.C. Before we knew it, we were back on tour, as though nothing had ever happened.

I’m not sure what originally inspired the food diary. Boredom, most likely. I do remember that the first few times I pulled out my notebook and asked everyone what they’d had to eat that day, there were incredulous chuckles, as though I couldn’t possibly keep it up. But it quickly became this thing we all took *very* seriously. The entries took on ridiculous levels of specificity: “13 jelly bellies”; “3 discs of bison jerky”; “weird ice cream with strawberry topping”; “couple sips of egg drop soup”; “Thelma and Louise smoothie”;  ”pretzels, salt removed”.

At the risk of overstating the value of the food diary, I dare say it as much as anything contributed to us pulling through the weirdness of that time — because it was exactly the sort of stupid inside joke a bunch of friends on tour were supposed to come up with. It felt normal. And it opened the door to us getting comfortable with humoring ourselves again. Soon enough our jokes were about the cancelation of CMJ and why Osama bin Laden had been so determined to ruin it. Maybe he couldn’t get a VIP pass. Maybe he was sick of hearing about the Strokes (the most hyped band in the world at that time). Maybe Jessica Hopper had refused to do publicity for him. (That one was my favorite. Hi, Jessica.)

And that’s my personal 9/11 story. You know what’s special about it? Absolutely nothing. It’s odd and sort of funny and cute in its way but it’s also nearly identical to the story you’d hear from anyone else who was on tour at that time. And there were many of us.

Shared experience, even an ugly experience, is a wonderful thing. It tightens bonds. It provides us with insight about people we might never have imagined understanding. It reminds us we’re not trudging through life alone.

But shared experience, by its very nature, is something you can’t own. What you went through, what you felt, what you learned from it all — the only person to whom those things matter is you. Because everyone has their own narrative. And the risk you take in asserting yours is somehow more truthful or important is being reminded that you’re wrong.

So when I talk about September 11th, I talk about Paul Koob’s birthday. I talk about food, I talk about jokes, I talk about my friends. All that other stuff, the bigger stuff, I keep to myself. I quietly observe.

Put another way: a bullshit survey prompted a guy who pimps bullshit for a living to call forth the Chicago media to listen to his bullshit, which one of the city’s dailies then reported, in the most bullshit way possible, as the bullshit it is, even though reporting it to begin with is bullshit.