So someone stole my bike on Saturday, while we were upstairs assembling the bed. Otherwise, I have everything I need now.

So I spoke too soon. My parents are coming this weekend, even though the long distance means they'll be spending more time in my dad's truck than in Chicago.

Still, ho ho ho. I've never felt so materialistic.

For those of you who've stopped checking, I observe that Alan has posted again. Temporarily deprived of an RSS reader and starved of content, I've been checking his website every few days, manually, like some sort of caveman -- and I was shocked to find a new entry. I'm also annoyed that he mentioned his declining English skills; the improvisational spelling was funnier when I could pretend he wasn't aware of it.

And since I asked Alan to make a list, here's what he and Graham each dislike about China. Compare, judge, enjoy.

The rest of this post falls into the category "I've been reading a lot lately." Consider this the bracketed text for longer sermons.

I finished a collection of magazine articles from 2002 yesterday, one of those "The Best" books, and right now I'm working on a collection of sci-fi stories with the charming title The Best of the Best. It's one of the better anthologies I've read, certainly in the quality of its selections (I finally respect William Gibson's cyperpunk), but also because the editor doesn't insist on giving away the end of each story in its preface.

Call me crazy, but the plot of a given story does interest me just as much (or more!) as the craft with which it was written. Analyze the story in an afterword instead of trying to get everyone to fall in with your interpretation right off the bat.

I've finished a lot of good books in my spare time. A historical sci-fi anthology, out of date and poorly edited in this case -- but it included Roger Zelazny's incredibly moving "For a Breath I Tarry," which you can also find online for some reason. I'm tempted to offer my own version, with a subtler ending: I approve of all but eight words.

And there was The Many-Colored Land, an enjoyable book despite the unreliable characterization and embarrassing typos, e.g. "a barrel of bear." Ben recommended it earlier this summer, and I picked it up cheap. It's part of a "Saga" though, and I'm reluctant to sign on for three or four more books.

I finished Insomnia, and now I'm tempted to read the Dark Tower series, to which this could be considered a prequel. I read The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, who everyone knows as the guy on The Simpsons with the bag on his head. That book has some great potential Illuminati groups in it (I think I'll make W.A.S.T.E., the underground Post Office), and it's shockingly easy to read, almost too shallow.

I've also had to give up on several books. Joseph Heller's God Knows is just awful, and I formally apologize to Ann of Stillwater for ever recommending something so turgid and irritating.

The Once and Future King, which I'd been curious about since seeing it in X-Men 2, is one of those children's books that's so self-consciously cute I can't stomach it. Worse than re-reading The Hobbit a few years ago.

I'm still working on Emergence, a nonfiction book Graham lent me, but the author is what they used to call a hedgehog, and so far I don't find his idea that interesting or earth-shattering.

Though I'm tempted to, I'll probably refrain from checking out any more sci-fi once I finish this anthology. I've probably read 2,000 pages of the stuff in the past week, an achievement that doesn't strike me as life-affirming. This is grad school, after all, and I should be concentrating on finding my concentration -- which is very unlikely to be science fiction. But what, if anything, do I want to spend the rest of my professional life reading?

I haven't heard from my parents, which I assume means they're not coming this weekend. Another week then. With the possible exception of my computer, what I want most is a chair.

And of course I'm too cheap to buy a new one.

My interactions with the natives have been limited. The Hyde Park neighborhood seems to be mostly black, though I did once wander into a posh Jewish neighborhood I can't seem to find again. Another time I bumbled my way to a different cheap grocery store -- part of my ongoing quest to buy a cheap sack of potatoes -- in what was recognizably a bad neighborhood, far from my apartment. Standing in line with a handful of groceries I realized they only accepted cash or ATM cards, and left emptyhanded.

I should note, before you get the wrong impression, that the (very) suburban neighborhood I lived in for a month in D.C., a place I stubbornly and incorrectly refer to as Brooklyn (after my subway stop) was predominantly black as well. So this isn't entirely new.

It is a bit more of a culture shock this time around, which probably testifies to the dearth of interaction between me and my neighbors in Brooklyn, a place where my only outdoors activity was walking to and from the train station twenty minutes away. I remember a surly Metro operator, an old religious woman, and a smart-mouthed little girl.

Should I say culture shock? That seems a little un-P.C. to my ears, maybe because I've had too many classes with Prof. Goldgar and tend to think of culture as the sum total of works and performances in a given language... but subculture shock sounds too cute and condescending, so here we are.

(Somewhere, Republican scientists, having perjorated the label "P.C." into oblivion all-too-quickly, are working on a term for the P.C. that dare not speak its name. Otherwise how can they fight what they can't name, what no one will now own up to?)

Culture shock aside, I'm getting used to the casual street-level interactions -- people in big cities are constantly without watches, cigarettes, directions, change -- which always come when I'm in a daze. I'll hear my voice and it's a shock; I never got into the habit of talking to myself and for now, who else is there?

When I get my bike I'll be hermetically sealed from the pedestrians, and Hyde Park will fade a little, background again.

Though I'll admit to being a bit nervous around the groups of blacks, muscular twenty-somethings, who hang out on some of the corners, I'm familiar enough with big anonymous cities to know that no passerby cares enough about Our Bold Hero, individual, to do him any harm. Each to his own world, and all that.

Sometimes a couple will walk by, speaking this fast and accented English I can hardly understand. They called it African-American Vernacular English in linguistics, but personally I think that title is absurd, and a bit racist.

Whatever I'm hearing, it amuses me on occasion. I swear I've never heard so many occurrences of the lexeme "play" in a single conversation as I did the other night.

Other times it's frustrating. I had no idea what this teenage kid was asking me the other day, and he had to repeat himself three times before I realized he was if I had a transfer. I don't know whether that was AAVE or his accent. If the later, I didn't realize there was a strong Chicago accent.

Of course I stick out like a sore thumb on occasion. When I was lost in the bad neighborhood a little boy scornfully addressed me as "Des Moines," an epithet from outta nowhere. On Sunday, having walked ten blocks to the One-Stop, the best grocery store I've found so far, I soon realized I was the only white person there.

Most people didn't care -- there was a big sale and we were all excited, friendly, celebrant, even though it was only grocery shopping -- but in line a man asked if I was from the university, and when I said yes he nodded as if that put everything in order. Outside I transferred everything to my satchel for the walk home, and as I transferred box after box of Jiffy Corn Bread mix (6/$1) a thin, bearded man outside the store noticed and started ragging on me in what was unmistakably a friendly way.

"Jiffy Corn Bread!" He shouted, exuberant, "You gonna make some corn bread? Did you get any greens, sir? Got any greens in there?"

I chuckled a little, and he moved away after imparting a quick blessing. I was blocks away before I started wondering what qualifies a vegetable as "greens," and I spend a while kicking myself for not asking him such an obvious lexigraphical question. And "collared greens," if that's how it's spelled?

Similarly, during a brief exchange with some older women near the potato display, I'd refrained from asking them for a quick and easy sweet potato (35 cents/lb!) recipe, figuring that the harmless question was much too racist.

So it might be really embarrassing to laugh out loud in a library. It was this Penny Arcade comic, a reaction to Microsoft's latest Xbox 360 announcement, that had me tittering like a schoolgirl. To my shame and horror.

Will Our Bold Hero buy the system, with all that fairy gold he took from the mythical land beyond? Very unlikely.

Noodles and dumplings last night. I am quickly becoming a dinner genius, just as I became a breakfast genius when I started buying Total (which lays claim to a ridiculous amount of vitamins) and Honey Bunches of Oats. There seems to be a critical oversupply of Honey Bunches of Oats. It's on sale everywhere, sometimes in weird varieties I'd never heard of.

Oh, and I saw a car accident.

It was weird. I'd spent a few hours in the library and even gone up to browse through the books. The UChicago has several libraries, many of which contain the same books, so until I figured out the system (earlier today) I had no idea why I couldn't find what I was looking for.

Looking for Ralph Ellison (but really looking for Joseph Heller, had I stopped to think about it) I stumbled upon a bunch of Prof. Dintenfass' books quite by accident. Donated by Saul Bellow, apparently. I'm not in the mood to read them now, just not interested enough by the titles I guess, but maybe later.

Anyways I kept browsing and was hit with a wave of depression when, time after time, the books were not where they should be. I finally left the darkened library a half hour after closing (the Seeley Mudd library is a fortress in comparison) and walked home. I'm about fifteen minutes north of campus, a bit further than I'd like but, oh, just wait until my parents come with the Rockhopper!

An SUV ran the stop sign into a busy street and was flipped on its side right in front of the local fire station and an idling patrol car. No one seemed to be badly hurt, but the crash was magnificent. Brought me back to those lazy Sundays, keeping a loose eye on NASCAR. Except this was less than a block away.

Well, that cheered me up, and I was high as I kite right through to my noodles and dumplings. I don't know if it was relief that, without the Deathtrap, I'm exempted from such dramatic mishaps, or just a bit of schadenfreude at the thought that other people, most people, have more serious problems than I do. Maybe it was the thought of participating, even tangentially, in something important.

I suppose it's all a bit morbid, or creepy. I confess that I felt a bit guilty about feeling good after an accident, but I can't really come up with a good reason why I should. No one got hurt, the careless driver got the worst of it, and there were emergency personnel literally right there, ready to respond.

Looking around, I got the feeling that my reaction was hardly atypical. Maybe this proves Graham's theory (or was it Manney's?) that innocent bystanders are the most guilty people of all.

So I arrived in Chicago, safe albeit less than sound after sitting next to a genuine schizophrenic for eight hours on the train. It was interesting listening to his muttered rantings. There was something about a dead-as-a-doornail black man -- there were a lot of imaginary corpses, in fact -- and something about the military with their helicopters. Enemies all around him. Twenty-two in that train car alone, by his own estimate.

Also, to no one's great surprise, religion came into the mix. There's a golden tape recorder getting all of this down, and (he must have got a glance at some pages from Insomnia, the book I was reading) people read trash and it makes their minds trash. Most memorable of all was his question, seemingly directed at no one in particular: Are you 11,492 years old?

That's the most exciting thing to happen to me so far, of course. As I should have expected, I don't really have anything to do here in Chicago. The MAPH program doesn't start until September. My computer and bike are still at home, to brought here by my parents at their earliest convenience. I've run out of cash, and I'm even starting to run out of books. Though I am in a library right now, so that's probably not a problem.

I've spent most of the past few days making the apartment livable. It's weird the kind of things I've had to buy. A shower curtain, a water filter (the city water smells and tastes so strongly of chlorine that I can hardly stomach it otherwise), a trash can. Stupid things I'd never have thought of.

I had a bit of an adventure yesterday, retrieving two of my bags from the Amtrak station because my train had been an hour late on Tuesday and there was no time to both get them and get to the Housing Office before it closed. (I hopped in a taxi moments after exiting the train and made it to the Housing Office with about five minutes to spare.)

Hauling my bags seven blocks to the Metra station, because I wasn't going to piss money away on another taxi, I had three beggars offer me their services. Except, naive country boy that I am, I mistook them for good Samaritans (even the one who needed both money for a train ticket home and heart medicine for his sick daughter was momentarily convincing) and was in each case ultimately put in the awkward position of being asked for money I didn't have for services I didn't need.

The last guy helped me sufficiently that I was guilted in to giving him 40 cents, the change left after I'd bought the train ticket and really the last of my walking around money. I renew my objections to the institution of begging.

Ah, Chicago...

Josh left for Germany yesterday, somehow dropping him off last night makes my departure seem so much closer. I was on deck, now I'm up.

If all goes as planned I'll move into my new place on Tuesday. Kinda excited.

Kids patronize you with "sir," adults patronize you with "bud."

Manning the counter in my dad's health and wellness store while the real employees are at the county fair. We have a wide selection of vitamins and supplements, but people keep asking for crazy stuff.

Like oil of oregano. And Celadrin, which can apparently turn your arthritic sores into delicious wine.

An irritatingly precocious kid asked me a while ago if I was bored. I told him I wasn't, though I don't think he believed me. I'm not sure I believe me. Are broadband internet access and a good book really all it takes to entertain me for eight hours?

No, don't answer that. The book, by the way, is Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, sort of a high-art version of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Illuminati fans can rejoice.

(English geeks can find an amusing takedown of The Da Vinci Code here. And there's even a condensed version for those of you who prefer pretty pictures.)

I really shouldn't write about how much I like a book before I finish it.

Sometimes the ending isn't that important. Murakami, who I often describe as my "favorite author," tends to end his books with a disappointing (and, in the case of Norwegian Wood, mind-boggling) sputter. P.K. Dick suffers from Chris Carter syndrome and seems to decide how to end a story about halfway through the climax, yet I read seven of his books before finally deciding to cut myself off.

I guess I grew to expect mediocre endings from those two, and figured that the ride was still worth it. Enjoying a new novel by a new author only to discover, in the second chapter, halfway through, ten pages from the end, that the book wasn't worth reading... that's a crushing blow. It's the literary equivalent of finding out she gave you a venereal disease.

I remember the stunning disappointments. Dave Egger's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius — a book so awful that theologians believe a negative reaction to it constitutes indisputable evidence for the existence of the human soul — has a magnificently witty prologue that gave me high high hopes. Lucky Wander Boy, which I gushed about here, had a series of alternate endings reeking of authorial cowardice.

There's really no lesson here that wasn't already obvious. I like Foucault's Pendulum, really like it, even though I wouldn't have checked it out had all public library copies of The Name of the Rose — which Prof. Ternes emphatically recommended — not mysteriously disappeared.

Still, I am only 70 pages in. That's a measure of my enthusiasm, but I suppose it's also a warning.

Over the years I became fond of striking deals with the Deathtrap, a '91 Plymouth Voyager that my mom bought new in January of that year. Just get me to Lawrence, just get me home, that's all I ask.

For weeks I'd been asking the Deathtrap to get me to Chicago. It was quite honestly my final request, as I hadn't been planning to use the van there at all. Public transportation and my old Rockhopper should be enough to get me around, I reasoned, and rather than apply for parking I could just leave the Deathtrap at home and fly back and forth from grad school.

In hindsight my detour to B-town was ill-advised. It meant an extra sixteen hours of driving, time enough for an incredibly inconvenient malfunction.

And sure enough.

Four miles from Curtiss, a Wisconsin town that the AAA agent at first tried to assure me did not exist, I pulled to the side of the road with an overheating engine. The Deathtrap had been overheating a few weeks ago when I drove to the Cities for Carry-Out's wedding, and again earlier that day as I left Appleton for good with all of my worldy possessions, but in both cases I attributed the fault to the stiffling heat, hilly terrain, and a foolish decision to use the air conditioner.

In fact, I'd added coolant two weeks ago, rightly figuring that I was running low. But since I was in a rush to get back to Appleton, I added it to the overflow tank ("reserve tank," I thought in my ignorance), indicated by the red arrow, rather than wait for the radiator to cool down and pour the fluid down the proper hole, indicated by the green arrow.





Unbeknowst to me, my new coolant wasn't doing anything in the overflow tank. While talking about coolant systems with the tow-truck driver, who was driving me to a place in Chippewa Falls in case I needed to catch a bus home, I realized the error of my ways.

Once we stopped I added coolant right to the radiator and turned on the van. I decided to drive, and for a while things went well. Or differently, at least. The Deathtrap now had a problem with stopping: it would die at any stopsign or stoplight.

B-town residents may remember that I had this same problem several summers ago and it simply went away. So I kept driving. Right before the entrance to 94 in Eau Claire, the car struggled to maintain speed and then stalled. There was pope smoke and a vague burnt rubber smell, I opened the hood expecting to see flames.

I was relieved and thought I could fix the problem. If it wasn't coolant maybe it was oil or transmission fluid, though both were at acceptable levels. I topped them off, but that was the last time I drove the van. I'd just witnessed its death throws. It had driven 217,653 miles, about half of those with me behind the wheel.

The second tow truck brought me to St. Paul (where I wouldn't need a hotel) but got very lost trying to find the place AAA had directed us to. After half an hour of looking I called for directions to a new place, which turned out to be in Roseville. Spent the night at Dylan's and got a ride back to the place on his way to work the next day.

But they didn't have time to look at the Deathtrap. I had it towed a third time, to a place on Riverside Avenue. The guy said he'd call me after he was done looking at it, but he didn't (perhaps he felt like padding his hours to justify the $90 bill for the estimate), so after exploring the neato bike paths along the Mississippi River for about an hour and a half I went back to find the van already serviced.

It was not worth fixing. As my dad had prophesied when I first told him about my car trouble, I'd burnt a hole in the radiator and fryed the engine. One of the cylinders was misfiring and the guy said there were a number of other things going on that made the Deathtrap a lost cause. I called AAA for a fourth tow (towing is free for distances under 100 miles) and went out to a place in Savage, where they concurred and offered to take the van for salvage.

And that's the picture at the top of this post. The Deathtrap sitting in the yard, with everything of value removed. I waited for a few hours (thank you, iPod) until my dad came to retrieve me and drop off the title, and 33 hours after I'd left Appleton I was finally home.