The Flaccid Paramount

Even though my friend and former roommate Matt Marsden lives around the corner from me in the Humboldt Park neighborhood in Chicago, I rarely see him these days. We have both become workaholic hermits and rarely leave our apartments. When I do manage to walk the few blocks to his apartment, he bombards me with his latest record and book acquisitions, as well as the new treasures he has pulled out of the trash. Matt is a lifelong garbage collector- not a mentally deranged packrat piling fecal encrusted newspapers to the ceiling, but rather a  junk aesthete . All of his garbage "bits", as he likes to call them, are meticulously arranged throughout his apartment- animal skulls, toys, rusty mechanical parts, old bottles, desiccated bats occupy every square inch of wall space. It's a wonderful claustrophobic museum packed into a typical Chicago apartment, although even the facade of the building is unique for the area's streetscape. Resembling a miniature castle, comp...

The smell of bagels is permanently lodged in my olfactory memory bank.  It is a smell that I have been neglected of since I moved to Chicago from New Jersey years ago. A few months ago my girlfriend brought home some bagels. I had grown to loathe bagels and I ignored the bag she plopped on the kitchen table...thinking it was a batch of Chicago bagels...essentially an inedible and tasteless mass of Wonderbread shaped in an "O". But soon a familiar smell wafted past my nose. It was a smell that brought back waves of memories and a healthy rumble in my stomach...those are BAGELS! REAL BAGELS! It is a very distinctive smell- doughy, slightly sweet that's always accompanied by the scent of a well-worn paper bag. I have a very nostalgic and emotional relationship to bagels. In high school, I had a group of girlfriends that worked at my town's bagel shop. It was a dumpy little strip mall storefront that just had the bare essentials- bins of bagels, a couple pots of coff...