The Bears and Jamba Juice

So the Bears are in the Super Bowl. My first year in this town that's more obsessed about its Bears than Nebraska is its Huskers (which I thought didn't exist anywhere else) and they're heading to the big dance.

And it's great. I like these Bears. Grossman has a mild case of mental retardation, Urlacher's probably raped a couple of chicks and Tank Johnson's a gun fight waiting to happen, but I dig their style.

However, Chicago isn't in quite the stitches I thought it would be in ending it's 21-year Super Bowl draught. (From what I heard when the 1985 squad made it this far the city practically shut down for two weeks.)

After the game I hopped on the train downtown and walked around the Rush and Division area. Nothing much was out of the ordinary, really .. there weren't anymore obnoxious drunk recently graduated meatheads, viagra popping middle-aged traveling businessmen and bimbos then there normally are.

Aside from the two guys in a Mitsubishi flying down State street with a shirtless dude hanging outside the passenger window screaming "Go Bears!" you wouldn't have known that the town's most beloved sports franchise had just won it's biggest game in over two decades.

Maybe I was just in the wrong part of town, though. Perhaps I should have gone father down in the South Loop, near Soldier Field. Or up north to Wrigleyville (even though that neighborhood's sports habitat is based on an entirely different team.) But the Gold Coast just wasn't hopping. Mother Hubbard's, the King of the cliché sports pubs in Chicago, didn't even look open.

So I walked around a little bit longer, talked on the phone, hoped that somebody didn't pop out of a dark alley and mug me for my ipod (something that, the more and more long late night walks I make in this city, is just bound to happen.) Eventually I end up back on the Red Line and head home disappointed in the fact that I didn't get to witness any Bearhysteria.

However, when I stepped onto the train I noticed that half the car was decked out in sailboat hats made from pages of The Reader (what I mean by sailboat hats is that they looked like little paper sailboats you made from paper as a kid). There was a wiry, literary-looking guy in his late twenties excitedly folding newspaper pages into tiny little hats, handing them to complete strangers and the complete strangers were (despite the fact their hair was done or they had other hats already on) putting them on their head and smiling about it .. even the out-of-touch old people and the stylish young professionals. I assumed that this was in some way related to the Bears victory, though I'll admit it's a pretty abstract way to celebrate the winning of a football game. Very hip, ironic and funny, though. Sort of like the Daily Show of NFC Championship victory celebrations.

I thought it was great and couldn't stop grinning the whole time. I love train car solidarity.

When the train stopped at Fullerton, though, I stepped to get off two drunk college kids decked out in Bears garb barged into me, screaming "Bears! Bears!" and stumbled into the car. The peaceful, benevolent football celebration was likely to come to an end now.

As I walked down the stairs of the stop I wondered how the two factions of celebrators would get along. Would it be like the recent Colbert/O'Reilly show swap (and by that I mean cordial and generally placid) or would it get ugly? Would the drunk kids start making fun of nerdy-looking hat making guy? Maybe call him a faggot? Or would they put one of his hats on, smile and go along with the joke like everybody else?

I will never know.


In a completely unrelated-to-this-story note, I've found the new Ninth Circle of corporate fast-food chain hell: Jamba Juice. Wow. They take unnecessarily chipper, ridiculously vigorous and extremely annoying customer service to a new level (making Starbucks a distant second). And what's the deal with their drink names? Mango A-go-go? Peach Pleasure? Orange A-peel? What kind of grown man wants to walk into a public place and ask "Yeah, can I get a medium Orange Dream Machine and two large Strawberry Lime Sublime's please?"

And what the fuck is a free power boost? And if it's free then why don't you just put it in the goddamn drink without you having to ask us first?

I can imagine what a job training session would be like with me if I somehow managed to stoop that low on the food service chain again and have to work at a place like that (after all, Starbucks wasn't that long ago.)

"Now, for every transaction you have to ask the customer if they'd like a free power boost," the Jamba Juice Manager said to Jeremy.

"I've got to ask EVERY single person that comes in here and orders a drink if they want a free power boost?"

"Correct."

"And every single one of your drinks has an extremely gay name?"

"Correct."

Jeremy takes off his Jamba Juice hat and apron.

"Uhhh, I'm not gonna work here then .. sorry."

And he leaves.