Today didn't start off great. Had a women call me pissed off about a story I'd written about her for my day job site. She said I should be ashamed of myself for what I do, said that if she ever gets assaulted by somebody outside of her home she's going to publicly blame it all on me, called me an asshole and hung up on me.

Later that night while trying to decorate my room, I break a piece of glass art my girlfriend made me a couple months back. It was a tiny fused glass rendition of the Chicago skyline, and it's one of the nicest/cutest things anybody has ever made for me. I stupidly put it up on the wall only partially fastened, took my hand off it for a second to grab another tack and CRASH, it shattered all over the floor.

Pissed, I grab my coat, my ipod and headed for a walk.

My apartment now is much closer to downtown that the last one, so if I walk a few blocks to the East I feel like I'm walking straight into downtown. When viewing the skyline from this distance (far back enough to get a panoramic view but too close to see its base) the skyline looks like an elevated mass, as though the buildings were on land at a higher elevation than where your standing. You feel like you're looking at a mountain with big buildings on it instead of a cluster or supertall buildings built from the same elevation you're at.

As I approach the great gash in the city that is the Dan Ryan Expressway from Milwaukee Avenue, the skyline exposes itself to me like the breasts of a well endowed woman unstrapping a front hook bra. I couldn't help but smile.

Seeing the beauty of this majestic urban horizon in real life made me forget about the glass version of it I'd just foolishly broken.

Well, we moved. After seven intense hours of lifting heavy shit up three flights of stairs we have a larger, brighter apartment in a much more interesting part of the city.

The first moment we could, Ry and I sprawled out on our furniture in exhaustion. However, we couldn't fully relax as there were sirens blaring from seemingly every direction for what seemed to be a good 20 minutes.

'Welcome to their neighborhood,' it seemed they were saying.

And so it goes with living in a trendier part of town. Being on the Cutting Edge means you're that much closer to the Shitty Edge. Due East, West and South of us things can get a sketchy. Nothing too alarming, just a lot more humanity. Walk down Chicago Ave. (which is just south of us) for ten minutes and you'll see plenty homeless people, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Ukrainians, yuppies, hipsters, really old women with walkers. Just about any form of human being you can imagine.

The thing about this neighborhood that's really strange is that you frequently find patches of rundown tenement housing scattered amidst brand new high-end condo developments. You'll see people who paid $500K for their home living next to Section 8ers with weight benches in their yards and beat up Caprices parked in front.

Just today on the way home form work I saw an undercover cop arresting a handful of young Latino males. It all went down right outside what looked like the only rental property on the block (some of its windows were broken out, there was trash strewn about the front yard). As all the 9 to 5ers were coming home from work in their SUVs they were slowing down, peeking their heads out of their windows to look at what's going down (probably hoping the cops will take the kids away the whole time).

As I walked amidst it all with my black leather computer bag and pink dress shirt (i.e., the young professional look) I felt, for the first time in while, that I didn't look just like everybody else in my neighborhood. Kind of refreshing.