One critique I have recieved is that I do not blog often enough, so I am going to try and get it closer to once a week. Buzz is kicking my ass in submissions, but I stay busy: rabble rouser, webmaster, graphic artist, site architecture and financier of this project.

When I sit down to think about what to write about, I usually just let it fly off the top of my head. Whether it is personal, political or punk, I have to think about it for a while. Do I take on the shills in the mainstream media? They blame liberals for everything and project victimhood on George Bush and dismiss all his critics as sour grapes, bush-haters, or (my favorite): socialist-communist-fag- loving-liberal-godhating-babykilling-democrats who hate our nation and love terrorism!

If I take them on, which hypocrite do I go for? There are so many to choose from in our liberal media. I see Tucker Carlson has another show on MSNBC. What happend to his Unfiltered on PBS? What happned to Crossfire? So Tucker is on his third program and Donahue is still not on any show on any station. Too bad we don't have more liberals on the liberal media.....

Or I could write about all the punk rock shows I missed in the last few weeks. The Adicts, one of my all time favorite bands played a Tuesday night here in Chicago; like a wuss, I missed that one. I choose instead to save myself for the GBH show, since I had an interview lined up with Colin and I had passes, so I tell myself, 'I'll go to that one!' and two days before the show, it was cancelled due to low pre ticket sales. They expect punks to buy tickets in advance? Then my other favorite band the Subhumans was playing Sunday. Yes! I make up for the other two by going to that one on Sunday! Only, as the saying goes, as old age comes, so goes the mind and I spaced that one out completely... so no new band profiles to add to the site. Nothing to see here... old punk losing his mind, move along, move along.

I know! I'll write about dreams I had! I have the most vivid dreams sometimes. Sometimes thay are prophetic other times they are just bizare juxtopositions of differrent times in my life, a part of my childhood home in the 'burbs, my college life at the cross and my adult life in Chicago. Sometimes I wake up screaming. Like I did last week. I dreamt my son was crawling out of his crib over and over again and I was stumbling to grab him and failing over and over again. Two days later, my son, after waking up at 2 am from a dream crying and screaming, crawled out of his crib after I had conforted him and placed him back in after he fell back to sleep in my arms. Young todlers will do this I am told, so my wife and I are preparing to upgrade his room to a big boy bed.

No the dream that is still sticking to me happened last week. I described it to my parents, my wife, Buzz and Laslow. I come from what I consider an expanded nuclear family. A traditional nuclear family, as the sociolgists tell us, is a father, mother and 2.2 children and throw in a pet for good measure. But I come from a broken home. My father left my mother when I was four years old. I was raised by my single mother who worked two shifts as a waitress, my aunt fed me lunch and my grandmother(nonnie in Italian) watched my infant brother and I at night. Both my parents eventually remarried and my mother gave me two half siblings that I love like my own blood when I was in high school and college. At one time I had four sets of grandparents. It was nice. I got a slice of life not visited by most kids my age. I got the big city life with my dad who lived on the north side of Chicago. My brother, mother and I lived in a town called Brookfield, the town with a zoo, located in the butt fuck burbs. I hate the burbs and everything to do with suburban life, except for the zoo. My grandmother on my father's side lived on a farm in rural Leland, Illinois. It was a real farm, with tractors, barns, cows, horses, corn and soy beans. The farm has been in the family for over 200 years. Fricking old, huh? But this dream was about my ailing grandpa who is 89 years old and is slowly getting weak. My grandfather was a strong Italian man. Tough. Temper from hell, but he loved me like no other.

My grandfather taught me almost everything I know. Cars, electricity, plumbing, building, fixing things, etc. He was the original recycler before it became vogue. As a child we would drive around and literally garbage pick junk that people were throwing away. Sometimes we would score antiques, but most of the time it was scrap metal and paper. We would bundle it up in his station wagon. He always preweighed everything before we went to the scrap dealer and got payment for our junk. Every now and then they would try and rip us off with a dishonest weight, but my grandpa would rip them a new asshole if they tried. "Weigh it again!" he would bark. Then we'd run off to the bank to deposit our bounty. My grandpa would keep this ledger, that was like dead sea scrolls. He still has the same ledger bundle of paper to this day, with its previous line scratched out and his new amount recorded below the previous amount.

Today, he lives in an assisted living home with my Nonnie. The years of saving have paid off and he is able to enjoy what little time he has left without worrying about taking care of his house, etc. He is very weak and is no longer the bad ass he was in his youth. In my dream, he was wearing a pin stripe suit and looked healthy and robust. We were walking up cascading staircases and all of a sudden he bolts away from me taking two and three stairs in stride at a time. He was screaming "Look at me, Mikey, I feel great!" He was coming to the end of the hallway, where the hallway meets the corner of the building and turns to the right. He suddenly collpased in the doorway at the bend, clasping his heart. I am screaming at him, "Grandpa, you have to take it easy, your heart!" I kept telling him: "Your heart! Your heart!" You see, his heart is only pumping at 10% of it's capacity. He's had several heart attacks, and some mild strokes, but he is completely there and is fiesty as ever, just a little slower in his delivery and deaf as a doorknob. I helped him to his feet and grabbed him around his waist and gave him a big bear hug. Then I told him how much I loved him and I started crying, it was so real and life-like that I started crying for real in my sleep. It was at that moment right before I awoke, that he pulled me away from his chest and looked me straight in my eyes, and said, "Don't ever break up your family."

I woke up bawling my eyes out like a big fucking baby.

Coming from a broken home this hit hard. My wife and I are at each other's throats lately. The stress of working, the stress of being apart from each other for 13 hours a day. The stress of money, the stress of the future of this country under fascist rule. It is taking its toll. Sometimes in arguments we bark at each other that we should get divorced. My grandparents have been married to each other for over 65 years. Sixty-Five fucking years. I will be lucky if I live that long, but to be married to one person for that amount of time is incredible. My grandfather taught me a lot. Even in my dreams, he is still teaching me.....