My brother was always the inspiration behind my writing craft. Even when I was eight years old, he would write his own Choose Your Own Adventure books on the kitchen table. He drew creepy clowns on pieces of notebook paper. All of his stories were written in cursive.

What still strikes me about my brother is that he has a breezy way of telling a story and picking out exact details and writing them on a dime. He works as an advertising executive here in downtown Chi., and while he may not dabble in words the same way I do, he certain still has a sharp eye that I always remembered. He has writers eyes. He knows what makes a story work. I still admire this about him.

I'm going to post a blog for him today, on one of his experiences at work involving his newest client, Motor City Casino. Correspondence below.

Fromm Jimmy:
Funny thing at work today....our agency is shooting a commercial for Motor City Casino. I get a call at work that they need extras. They were shooting at Reserve right down the street since 7AM this morning. Account Director and myself go over and they lead us up stairs. Cameras, crew and lights and the whole sha-bang on the dance floor. There was a 20K a day, rail thin model we hired from LA and girls and guys from some local talent agencies, basically wanna be models. Hot girls and a bunch of idiot guys. There was a Russian model that Cummings would have married. I got thrown in the mix and had to shake my stuff. Funny doing it sober and during the day. I'll make sure you see the video when its cut. It will be airing in the greater Detroit market after the first of the year. By the way, Account Director had to work behind the bar as a barback because he was too short!

--
On another note, I am throughly enjoying his latest gift to me, "The Bad Guys Won!" It's a historical account of the seed-bag 86 Mets. The Scum Bunch always sat in the back of plane and threw grapes at people and smoked cigarettes. Doug Sisk was such a dirt bag. I can't wait to give a full review

Season of Change ... Five years in the Making

Fall's nostalgia is creeping in and will soon set in full boar. I noticed it Monday night, walking out of Dana's house in on the outskirts of Milwaukee, scurrying across Bluemound Ave. to get a toothbrush I had forgotten. I was wearing my coffee-brown cardigan, the one with tan flecks wooven into the cut, and its tie was snugged around my waist as I thought of a time five years ago when everything that I know in life right now was so very new. The fact is most of what I know and who I know about myself formed from that very watershed fall season of 2001, when not only me, but the entire world was changing. For a moment I felt very sad, not because I necessarily wanted to be in that moment again, but because there was an innocence I remember holding onto at the point, the creeping notion of something in flux--a transition, if you will. It was a time when I started sitting in a downtown music lounge--alone--after spending hours sitting at a folded card table on the outskirts of a common council meeting in places with names like Sussex. I attended a Town of Waukesha board meeting in a small room filled with angry residents talking about trash pick-ups ... and they were really angry, so much so I felt like I was in a movie, or a state even outside of my own.

I look back upon that fall season five years ago and realized in many ways, it was my own birthing season--birthing season for the music that moves my soul (I am of course speaking of house music, which I would never truly understand until 2005, but in 2001 I realized what it was starting to convey), birthing season for myself as a young woman finding her way through pitfalls of romantic perils and the first time falling in love. When I say falling in love I am talking in terms of the real verison--the notions beyond three-month courtships, distant admiration and interludes involving too much alcohol and too little sleep. All of it first shined its light on me during that glorious, tulmutous season and on its five-year anniversary I can't help but feel its a tug a little bit more with the creeping closeness of cooler days. There is a notion of moving forward and a notion of never going back. Jesus, would I want to? I just don't know.

Looking for Zoe Lane

I met Zoe Lane in my dream last night on the second floor of my old elementary school in Cicero, Ill. This school was Lincoln School. My mother was substitute teaching that day and we had just went to lunch. I was roaming the newly remodeled hallways, reminescening on the past, when I saw Zoe in the second floor hallway--outside the classroom located directly across from my fourth grade classroom--having a close-talking session with a blonde, wavy-haired boy. The boy looked as if he had been crying. I can't recall what they were talking about exactely, but the boy had been in trouble and Zoe had to repremand, as badly as it seemed she didn't want to repremand. She was doing it out of obligation, because if she didn't repremand, she was not doing her job as a teacher eventhough I would come to find out she didn't like her job as a teacher.

So she takes the boy to the other side of the hallway and sits him in this desk chair, plastered with a big sticker that reads Beloit College (my college I attended). It is at this time I walk down the hall and approach Zoe, who seems a little a befuddled and in need of a cigarette. Zoe is a woman my age, with curly, aburn hair and a husky, slightly-Irish looking face. In my dream, she is wearing a brown-beige pant suit with very faint dark red pinstripes intersecting into one another across the tweed. She has a slightly raspy voice and a slight whimsical smirk. She is very easy to me, a person that in my dream I want to hang out with after work. I am almost eager from the start. As the boy is sitting in this desk chair in the fall with tears in his eyes, Zoe is creening her eyes into a dark classroom (Mrs. Holman's old classroom, I recall) and looking for another teacher who is not Mrs. Holman, but I suspect a colleague her age.

"Damn, I wonder if (can't remember teacher's name here, but she calls her by her first name in the mysterious lingo we came to know when we were in third and fourth grade) has any cigarettes?"

The room is dark and she begins shuffling to her own classroom. "I'm scared to go back in thier," she finally says. I ask if she teachs fifth grade and she says, "no kindergarten" which makes sense because the boy in question looks about five years old. I ask her why she is scared and she says she doesn't know what to do, so instead we sit down against the wall on the floor of the hallway (where we used to line up our snow boots) and she tells me how she doesn't even like to teach--she doesn't know how and she is working on "the next big thing," which I remember something involving a vacation home. Suddenly she jumps up and runs into my old fourth grade class room across the fall which is buzzing with activity. As she does so, my old Lincoln School principal Mr. McDogual comes down the hall with a group of kids and asks to see my ID. I tell him I don't have it because my mom is substituting and I went to lunch with her and when I got back I ran into Zoe and we were chatting. Zoe rushes back to the scene and gives Mr. McDogual her ID as he peers at her with these eyes that imply she is going to be trouble. "What are you doing leaving your students?" he asks. And she answers something along the lines of "I didn't know ... I don't know..." as she's looking for words, I am forced to leave but remember thinking, I'm going to leave my business card for this woman so we can hang out. I am going to leave in the office.

As I walk away I ask her "so, what's your name, your name?" There was this sense of urgency in my voice, as if I knew I didn't get her name then I would never get it. And as she walks away she turns back and says in her cigarette voice, "Zoe ... Zoe Lane."

I don't know why I wanted to hang out with this woman so badly. Perhaps there was something that felt really tangible about her. She had this easy comfort and honesty. She didn't like her job, but she was doing what she had to do. And she looked tired and amused and warm. She felt like a friend, or someone I knew.

Every time I return to my elementary school in my dreams (always Lincoln School) it's the same but different. Something is always remodeled. The floors are always retiled or waxed. But the classrooms reman the same, lit up in the same flourescent light that always glowed like cancer, especially on the rainiest of cloudy days. The same paper cut outs of presidents and occupations (doctor, nurse, fireman) still hang on clothes pins from a fishing line strung across the room. And the smell is most memoriable, always. The foyer usually remains unchanged, I think out of respect.

When I leave Lincoln School I am late for a 2 pm appointment. The clock on my Jetta reads 2:23. I am upset and try to find the number to inform my client. I am not mad that I stayed later to talk to Zoe. I was thinking her kids would be getting out of class at 2:30. I was thinking she only had a few more minutes left.