Your Book...About chicago (Excerpt #1)

This book features 5 essays about my first three months in Chicago. Here is the intro for the book's third essay called, Next in Line.

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What is it to become a man? Is it having 2.5 kids, a white picket fence, and a dog or two? Maybe it’s going through a life-threatening trial, putting your life on the line in some ancient ritual passed down from generation to generation? Or, is it just turning 18 and graduating from High School? Three years ago I told myself I had become a man. I had just transferred to a new college, one where months beforehand people were telling stories about me, setting the stage of my coming like I was a messianic figure. A mythology of who I was, the land in which I came, and what I was about to bring were spread like legends of old, passed not from campfire to campfire but rather dorm room to dorm room. I had just turned 20 and when I arrived on the campus of Michigan State University that late summer of 2005 people knew me as Vandermolen, founder of Lombardo Barnyard, creator of the tongue-in-ear sexual maneuver known simple as “The Vandermolen,” and the kid who pooped into his own pants and cared to tell about it. When I arrived, I was already a legend.   

I had been planning for this moment all summer long, sewing together bits of cloth to become what I would call fashion, and penning a book with friend and co-owner of Lombardo Barnyard, Nick Jarmo. I had been planning for it, but I never could have imagined my arrival would be more like a homecoming than a first day. I was greeted with hugs, invites, and within the first week I was a grand prize in a raffle – people could win a date with me, Nick Vandermolen.

With little effort on my part I was MSU’s greatest student, bringer of sweetness, harold of Alpena, the seventh charka. With in the first month I gave them the Transformation Fashion Show. By that time, I felt as if I had them all in my hands. Some were models, others I tricked into getting me snacks, some were reporters, and all were witnesses, an audience to cheer my name, to clap, to sing, to praise me. There were over 70 people in attendance; sitting upon freshly mowed blades of grass, flowers bloomed and the sun beamed down on all of our faces, the sky beamed a blue hue that has yet to be reproduced. They honored me with each transforming fashion I presented to them. When my clothes were ripped off revealing sackcloth and my beard and hair were cut off, for the finale of the show, they gasped just like I knew they would. Finally, when I turned to symbolically drown in a fountain that was peering over my shoulder the whole show, they ran for me, only to see me beat death and arise from the dyed waters of the fountain. In the end they all danced in the fountain as if so happy that I had arrived, that I had become a man.

And that was the day I had been working for my entire life – that was the day I became a man. As least, that’s what I thought at the time. Over the next few years adorning fans, which in my mind I numbered in the thousands, dwindled to only a handful of childhood friends. The idyllic childhood dreams I was promised were never achieved, and the confidence, aura, and fortitude I saw in so many men, didn’t develop. Instead, a negative condescending attitude, a realized naive lack of understanding, a cynical look on life, and a propensity to complain began to develop. Over the course of three years the fervor that had pushed me so far had fizzled and in its places were the ashes of a childhood I burned alive to become a man. Now in Chicago, having left the few friends I still had, a church I loved, and what was left of my family, I find myself alone in an empty apartment, where I sleep in a closet using a towel as a blanket and a sweatshirt as a pillow; jobless, friendless, and slowly losing weight, I sit here on the carpet trying to once again become the man I thought I had become years earlier...

Your Book...About chicago (Excerpt #2)

This book features 5 essays about my first three months in Chicago. Here is a section of the book's fourth essay, "The Evils of Modern Society: Vol 3; The Metropolis (or) The Quixotic Utopia."

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“It is no more spooky than the selective yogic trance of the average city [Metropolis] dweller, which allows himself to walk in mindless indifference through incredible noise, filth, pandemonium, misery, neurosis, violence, psychosis, rape, burglary, injustice and exploitation, screening it all out and concentrating only on robot-repetition of his assigned role in the hive-economy.”

Robert Anton Wilson

Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati[i]

(1977)

In the arid deserts of the American Southwest mountains pierce from the earth, pointing to the skies above us. Standing awestruck under the cool shade of such grand magnitude we can yell, "Wow, look at what God has made!" In the Metropolis, where tree and soil has been replaced by iron and concrete, the shadow of the modern skyscraper blots out the sun. Standing between these concrete palisades we look up to find where the sun has gone, instead of clouds we see the razor's edge, where concocted alloys shave at the heaven's outer edge. We can't help but freeze and think, "Oh my God! Look at what man has made." 

What once man strived for, and soldiers died for, and explorers left all for, has been paved over, replaced by coffee shops, corner liquor stores, and banks where everyone can find “wealth” in adjustable rate loans. The time of going out, has been replaced with a culture obsessed with moving up. Where are the wild men in the metropolis? The man who left home looking to live off the land, taking nothing more then a rifle, a coonskin cap, and a dream to survive only on meat - Elk, Deer, and Bear? The metropolis has replaced this man with a gaunt metro man, voice two octaves too high from years of wearing pairs of ball-scrunching skinny-girl-jeans. Where is the Cattleman? The entrepreneur who knew the difference between a steer and a stud, this farmer and businessman was moral, treating the farm, the farmhands, and livestock all with dignity and respect. The metropolis has done away with this man and created instead a short-haired GQ man. Having, business suits pressed at only the most expensive Chinese owned dry cleaners, suits tailored at only the most trustworthy Jewish tailors, and shoes shined by only the most prestigious of black homeless street-corner shoe-shiners, these GQ men are described as our modern man. They work in real-estate, investing, insurance, or banking, and instead of making food, they create interest to feed their own personal fattened (golden) calf. Where did all the women go? The mother who could hem and sew, butcher and cook, the caregiver, the lover, the fire builder, the stew stirrer - the Mother. The Metropolis has perverted these little women turning them to something most heinous. These less-then-girls walk always with Latte in hand. When moving from one boyfriend’s house to another, they need more then one U-haul to carry all their make-up, hair products, facial soaps and cleaners, diet pills, Cosmopolitan magazines, birth control pills and coffee makers. Never able to stand still, either from too much coffee, or soreness from the previous nights illicit sexcapade, they can be found in a club grinding crotches on some other woman or man, texting at a coffee shop, or shopping for any number of extra expensive, extra provocative haute couture. There was a time when even presidents wrote of the wondrous American wilderness, the rifle, and the smell of freshly cooked game. Now presidents, the north on our moral compass, don’t come from the land, they come from the Metropolis.

The American Dream of the Wild West, great outdoors, and the white picket fence is gone and in its place is America’s reality, the Metropolis...

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[i] Wilson, Robert Anton, 26.