My Full Name, Anagrammed.

I'm traveling today, so no progress on my Art Opening report or the new forum, so I decided to tell you my full name - in a way.

Here's the story, retold, copy/paste style from a message sent to a friend:

- - - - -

One night maybe 10 years ago or so, during my drunken-urban-artist-squalor years in Chicago, I went out with a verbal brainiac friend of mine.

We decided to head into a particularly dodgy part of the city - a neighborhood called Uptown. Uptown features, among many other things, one of the oldest speakeasy jazz bars on the planet (The Green Mill), a few dive bars you could lose an eyeball in, and very robust crime, poverty and homelessness rates. It's a haul to get there. public transit does most of it, but there's a good bit of walking, too.

We chose an exceptionally divey dive bar - it was more of a convenience liquor store lit only by the flourescent lights of its half-stocked coolers. Along one wall sat a broken down formica six-stool "bar." Anyway, that's where we proceeded to get hammered. Fucking blotto. And that's where my friend decides to play the anagram game on a piece of paper napkin.

Anyway, all kinds of fun happens from there. We befriend a couple of other patrons, I make out with a random black woman whose rightfully protective gay best friend intervenes. Eventually the bar tender tells us politely to move the party elsewhere.

We leave and decide to go over to the Green Mill, which in retrospect was a horrible idea considering their policy of audience silence while the musicians play and our inability to speak in a tone anything below outright shouting.

On the way, in a flash, I see one homeless guy dart around a corner, find an abandoned bottle, grab it by its neck, break the base of the bottle on a curb and find a hiding spot in the shadow of an inset storefront.

A swivel of my head revealed another homeless man, a quarter block away running after the first guy.

Oh Fuck. Oh fuck oh fuck.

"That guy's gonna kill that other guy!"

Justin, oblivious, says "what guy?"

"The guy that's hiding!"

"Huh?"

That's when I stop arguing and start running, screaming and waving my arms like a pelican attempting its first flight.

"HEY!! ... HEEEYYYYY!!! ... DON'T DO IT!!!! WE'RE CALLIN THE COPS!!! HHHHEEEEEYYYYYYYYY!!!!"

Nothing's changed. I can now hear the pursuing victim yelling his own obscenity laden rant, "mutha fucka I gonna kill you ain't gonna fuck wit me or nobody fuckin pussy ass nigga fuck".

I run straight into traffic, on a collision course with the crazy bottle guy, the pursuing attempted murder victim and four lanes of midnight chicago drunk drivers. "HHHHHHEEEEEEYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!" Flap flap flap.

Now, I don't know if it was me, the ensuing angry car horns, or something else. But right at the same moment, both homeless guys turn around and run in opposite directions. I dodge cars within inches and make it across.

By now, Justin has finally figured it all out and once we are reunited safely on the curb, he tells me that he thinks I saved at least one life that night and maybe more.

We head over to the Green Mill, where we are soon 86'd for the night.

The paper napkin anagram of my full name?

Stroll, Clink, Bleed.

Cool story! What is the anagram game?

Where you take every letter in your full name and rearrange it to spell other words.

My name is too long to even try to rearrange the full name into anything else. Is there an easy way to anagram something?

Cool, I've never thought to try that.

I want to get to Chicago sometime for their jazz festival. LA, have you seen any real good artists perform during your travels there?