This Is Grand

An essay on the Bluffs

2009-05-06T12:59:00.000-07:00

So I’ve gone on a handful of walks in the Bluffs the month I’ve been back. One of the things I learned to love in Chicago was taking walks. Epic walks. The types of walks that induce strange looks from people when you tell them exactly where you went.

“You walked all the way from your dad’s place to the library? Jeysus,” people say in bemusement, even though the walk took all of about 25 minutes.

One of the most frustrating things about going for walks back here is that whenever I’m out on a busy street I’m bound to have a friend pass me in their car, pull up to the curb, roll down their windows and scream at me.

“Hey Schnick! Your car break down, man!? You need a ride!?” They’d yell, each showing genuine concern about my well being.

“Nah, man. Just out being pipedal,” I’d reply sarcastically.

All the while stacks of backed up cars are honking in annoyance behind them. The hilarious thing is that most times I’m out on these walks I’m listening to my ipod looking to the ground and can’t hear/see people when they do this. I can only imagine how confusing it is for the poor people in the cars behind them.

“Hey, honey. Look! The guy ahead of us is screaming at that poor fella out walking around for no reason!” The husband would say.

“Oh, dear. I hope they don’t get in a fight,” the wife would reply with fright.

The first of these aforementioned walks, I have to say, was pretty depressing. I started at my dad’s place on 26th and I, made my way past Thomas Jefferson High School, then on to 5th Ave. and took it all the way up to the library. Native Council Bluffians know this isn’t necessarily the nicest stretch of real estate in town.

It’s actually downright miserable.

A vast majority of the homes on this route were as dilapidated, if not much more so, than they were when I was growing up. And I remember them being pretty shitty back then.

Some looked unlivable, yet judging by all the porch dwellers, obviously had inhabitants. Sadly, many even had toys and children’s bikes strewn about the yard, leading me to believe there were packs of kids in many of these shanties as well.

Fifth Avenue may be one of the nastiest streets in all of Southwest Iowa. It’s cracked concrete sidewalks reek of hopelessness. Beat up cars that haven’t ran in years rest in backyards and tattered driveways. Front porches are used as closets for throwaway furniture. A boarded up Kum & Go has been tagged liberally with graffiti. If the city’s leaders had any balls amongst them, they’d raze block-long stretches of it.

Once I got to the library things got a little better. The new fountain the city put in at Bayliss Park was truly a great addition, no matter the fact that they spent probably more than was necessary. Same goes with the library. I remember all the groans that thing induced from people in the community when it was proposed, but in my opinion, it’s the best thing the city’s built since I’ve been born (even counting the casinos). It’s much cleaner and more relaxing than any of the ones I’ve been to in Omaha. Kudos to the city for getting that thing made (while thankfully preserving the old one as well).

On the walk back to my dad’s I became more contemplative. Why was my hometown such a dump? And why is it that so few people cared? It seemed to me the main thing that was lacking (other than higher education and household incomes, obviously) was simply taking pride in what you owned. It was obvious that few people seemed to care about maintaining the quality of their properties — and in a larger sense their community.

You don’t have to have to be rich to keep a decently manicured lawn. Or a porch that isn’t cluttered with trash. Or to get rid of the beat up old Chevy in your driveway. (This goes for landlords as well, because I know many of these properties are rentals.)

Many of the things that make Council Bluffs dirty in so many places could be fairly easily remedied. A fresh coat of paint on a house here. Some new grass in a yard there. Building quality affordable homes on the properties where previous ones have been condemned or torn down. Not exactly a massive undertaking.

What really kills Council Bluffs from a perception standpoint is that the west end is usually the only part of town people from Omaha — and casino going tourists — see. Especially now with the pedestrian bridge. This is certainly where all the Counciltucky jokes came from. Of course CB looks like a shithole to them. All they see are the gas stations, laundromats and used car dealerships that litter West Broadway.

Omahans are universally baffled when I take them down streets like Oakland and Glen Avenue, or past the Dodge House.

“This is so nice,” they’d all say in amazement as we’d drive past some of the stately Victorian homes on the East End. “I never knew parts of Council Bluffs looked like this!”

“Did you really think we all grew up in fucking trailer parks, asshole?!” I’d always want to reply.

Instead I’d say I told them so. That Council Bluffs has spots that are as nice as anything you’ll find in the Dundee, Field Club and Country Club neighborhoods of Omaha.

The second walk I went on was in my old neighborhood where my mom and step dad live off Oakland Avenue. In my humble opinion, Oakland is the nicest street in all of the Bluffs. Just about every home on it is nearly a century old and has been well maintained in that hundred years. Walking down Oakland and up Sherman (the street I grew up on) was like taking a walk back in time. So little of the place has changed over the years, and so much of it is still as tranquil, cozy and tight-knitted as it was when I was a child. My mom and step dad know seemingly everybody in the neighborhood. Most of the families that were there when I was a kid still own the same homes. It’s the type of place that would have made Reagan proud.

It was on this walk that I’d realized just how classic my childhood was. I walked four blocks to school every day in elementary. The neighborhood kids made a football field and baseball diamond out of an empty lot next to the cemetery on the top of the hill. Even back then, pretty much all the families knew each other, and had at least one child near my age. And there were numerous winding old alleys to discover and patches of woods to explore.

So many of my aunts and uncles live in the outlying suburban areas of CB these days and I can’t help but feel their kids are going to miss out on some of the best things that I experienced as a kid. Council Bluff’s hilly landscape provided us with seemingly endless acres of raw forest to explore. But pretty much all of the woods in the outlying areas of town have been ripped up for new planned communities.

Even many of the patches of woods in the city itself have been ripped bare for new housing developments as well. Two prime examples being the new homes behind Park Wild Apartments on Oak Park Road — which used to be rife with awesome mountain biking paths — and the new homes off Timbercrest.

Council Bluffs, when my generation was growing up, used to be a playground for your imagination. I remember all the quests my friends and I would have in the woods behind the Black Angel and the cliffs off Oakland Ave. The ridge on the east side of Madison Ave. could have been the Appalachians for all I knew. I’d spend entire days up there when I was staying at my grandma Yochem’s.

Before people started moving out to places like Forest Glen, we could pretty much ride our bikes to any of our friends’ house, or any local ball diamond for a sandlot game. These days I’m not sure that’s possible (even if they’re overprotective parents would let them). Do kids even play sandlot games anymore, or are they so involved with multiple organized teams they don’t have the time? (That’s another blog entry).

ANYWAY, the old neighborhood is still very much unique. Having truly soaked it up for the first time in years, it makes sense that I was so enchanted with the vintage neighborhoods of Chicago. I grew up in one that was pretty vintage itself.

The last, most recent walk, was from the library up Fifth Ave. (which actually gets nice when you head uphill, sort of a universal truth in CB; everything gets nicer when you head up a hill). And then to old Kirn Field.

That park is such a hidden gem. I remember when I was really young living nearby on Glen Ave. and being mystified by the cheering of crowds that seemed to emanate from the hill across the street from our house.

“Where is that sound coming from? Where are all those people at?” I’d wonder while playing in the front yard. Come fourth or fifth grade, when we’d have our annual city-wide track and field day up there, I realized there was actually a football field and track on top of that hill. (I may have been imaginative when I was young, but not necessarily bright).

Also, I’d somehow never realized, despite being somebody who is full of useless Council Bluffs historical knowledge, that there used to be a stately brick high school perched atop that hill until the mid 1930s. You’d think the fact that the street that led up to it was called High School Avenue would have been a giveaway, but again, I wasn’t the brightest.

The views from that old field, which is now a city park open to the public, are fantastic. You can see the old homes that roll up Park Ave. to Fairmount Park, the old brick water pump station at the end of Glen Ave. and the distant Omaha skyline. Being on it feels like you’ve discovered some lost hilltop relic that’s gone unnoticed by humans for decades. It’s hands-down the most scenic overlook in all of the metro area, and I suggest anybody that’s never been there to check it out this summer.

It’d be pretty sweet if that old school were still there, too. Of course, Council Bluff fittingly tore it down like they’ve done just about every one of it’s architecturally significant structures. (See Beno’s, the Strand theater, the Ogden Hotel and just about everything they ripped up to build the Midlands Mall).

After that, the property served as the athletic field for Kirn Junior High, which was right down the street. That school isn’t there anymore, either, as it burned down in the 70s. However, the old gym across that was across the street from it is still there, and it’s one of my favorite buildings in all of CB. I remember how much I loved practicing there with my YMCA league team back in junior high. It felt like we were in Hoosiers, except instead of Gene Hackman, we had Mr. Kenny, our paunchy, bespectacled junior high math teacher as a coach.

I hope that if anybody ever attempts to tear that building down, thousands march on City Hall with torches and pitchforks. I’ll lead the damn way, even if I don’t live here anymore.

Basically, the conclusion I’d come to on all these walks, was that while parts of my hometown were surely hideous, there are equally as many that are unique, historical, and worthy of taking a leisurely stroll through as anything you’ll find in Southwest Iowa or Southeastern Nebraska.

The place has potential. Especially on the west end along Broadway and by the pedestrian bridge. I mean, how the hell is it that the first businesses you see when you come over to Council Bluffs from Omaha is a gaudily painted cash loan for car titles shop and a laundromat? Nothing says “Welcome To Historical Council Bluffs” like those two eye sores.

Is it too hard to get a decent sit-down restaurant there instead of another Bucky’s gas station or Sonic? Even if it’s just a Bennigan’s or a Chili’s. As it is now, all that Omahans come to Council Bluffs for are the casinos, but do we really want those corporate monoliths as our primary destination?

Also, why the hell hasn’t somebody opened up a bar right on the far west end of Broadway to capitalize on the last call rush yet? Hell, all you got to do is name the place Last Call. You’d make a killing.

And don’t even get me started on Playland Park area by the new pedestrian bridge. Why the city hasn’t done a single thing with that property since the bridge’s inception makes no sense to me, or really anybody else I talk to. As it is now, all that thing does is give Council Bluffians easier access to downtown Omaha. Definitely not the other way around. I doubt many Omahans are setting aside evenings to walk over that bridge and do some shopping and sightseeing in Bluffs. They couldn’t even if they wanted to. The only thing down there is a run-down park that hardly anybody’s used in years.

However, just across the river in Omaha there’s high-rise condos, the headquarters of a nationally-recognized corporation, restaurants, shopping and, shortly, a baseball diamond.

I’ve heard Council Bluffs is simply waiting for the right offer, but what’s taken them so long? The project got the green light back in 2006.

I will give Council Bluffs credit for getting some rehab work in the Haymarket Square district along Main Street and the stretch of Broadway past North 1st St.

They’ve done a nice job putting some artwork along Main Street and fixing up many of those old storefront buildings, some of which are the oldest in town. Namely the Primmer Law building. I worked in the bike shop that was there for two years and today that building is practically unrecognizable.

The bar district on Broadway has grown exponentially since I was in college. There’s now seven bars in a two block stretch, making it where one can actually take a cab there, hit four or five decent bars, then catch a cab back home instead of having to drive all over town to find some action. Ten years ago, that strip had I think three bars, only two of which I ever really hung out at (Barley’s and Bada Bing).

If they were to put a little more back into the area surrounding the library and Bayliss Park — perhaps get a couple nice locally-run restaurant in there and get rid of and/or clean up Charlie’s Boston Boozers and the Quarthouse — the place could be a bonafide tourist attraction. You could start the day off with a trip to the Dodge House or the Union Pacific Museum, then grab a bite to eat and maybe a cocktail, and finish the night off with a walk around Bayliss Park. Sounds to me like a nice alternative to the Old Market.

Sadly, the city seems primarily concerned with developing the outskirts of town with big box stores and restaurant chains. (C.B. may not be getting the cue from downtown Omaha’s development, but it sure as hell is with the urban sprawl of West Omaha).

As much as I think it’s great that we’ve got a Hooters, a Ruby Tuesday’s, and a Buffalo Wild Wing’s (sarcasm), how great would it be if we could get something like another Pizza King or an Upstream on Main street, or a classy cocktail lounge or coffee shop on West Broadway to go with all the sports bars?

If the city keeps building more and more business farther and farther out of town (see JC Penney, Target, etc.) then we’ll wake up one day and realize that we’ve got nothing left of substance actually in town. A sad prognosis for a town with a historic city center that has a lot of potential.

Farewell, Chicago

2009-03-05T07:45:00.000-08:00

What had always drawn me to you — dating back to my first visit at 21 when I was covering the Big 10 football media day for my college newspaper — was that you were the perfect amalgam of toughness and sophistication. A city that had just the right dose of Midwestern practicality and East Coast panache; not too simple, not too snobby. For a boy with small town roots who wanted to experience the high culture of big city life, you were the perfect place to go.

And you didn’t disappoint. The magnificent skyscrapers, neighborhoods lined with vintage brick three-flats, hip dive bars that have been around since Algren’s days. All the restaurants — from the grimy family-run hotdog shops to the high-end steak houses — the museums, the art, the lake. I gobbled up every ounce of it.

You're truly a special city in a country that is sadly running out of them. One of the few classic American metropolises left. A place that still remains as unique as it was before the tentacles of corporate chains got their character-sucking grip on America (and like every city in this country, you're fighting a losing battle on a daily basis). There were probably 50 bars and restaurants within a four block radius of my apartment, and I can only count four of them that were chains.

Best of all, you're one of the few cities left in which it’s easier to not own a car. That alone was worth the price of admission.

I remember when I first moved in, my friends that had lived with you for years all told me that, over time, I’d take the all the architecture for granted. Instead of gawking at the high-rises in awe like a tourist, I’d motor around with my chin in my chest like a true take-no-shit city dweller. But I never did. Three years into it, I caught myself stopping on the sidewalk and glaring up at the Wrigley Building, the Sears Tower and the old print houses in the South Loop. After getting out of the Shedd Aquarium last Wednesday I stood staring at the lake and skyline for a good 20 minutes soaking all the beauty in one last time.

Things I’m going to miss most; day games at Wrigley, ambling through the Art Institute, afternoon cocktails atop the Hancock Center, schawerma sandwiches from Sultan’s, leisurely strolls through Hyde Park, the first 75 degree day of the spring when seemingly everybody in the city is at a beer garden by 6.

I spent much of my time wandering your streets by myself, yet somehow I never felt alone. And those times in which I did feel short of friends, I could stop off at the Old Town Ale House or the Charleston and feel like I had company, even if it was merely the character of the structure itself.

While the gravity of my decision to leave hasn’t quite set in yet, I’m sure it’ll all hit me on my on my first trip back. I’ll get that hollow feeling in my stomach you get the first time you see an ex with their new lover. When you realize that they’ve officially moved on, and they’re doing just fine without you.

There will surely be moments — a dull afternoon in Omaha or a confusing train station in Europe — where a pang of regret will shoot through my heart and I’ll miss how effortless and entertaining you were on a summer day, and I’ll wish I could go right back.

Until then, farewell, Chicago. Thanks for three of the best years of my life.

2009-01-19T22:50:00.000-08:00

It was as close to Planes, Trains and Automobiles as my travel life has ever come.

It was the first big Schnitker family trip we’d ever flown on (ahem - just in time for me to turn 30!). Sure, dad and I had flown some places, and Joni and the girls have flown some places, but the five of us had never flown somewhere together. Our yearly summer vacation consisted almost exclusively of boating trips to Table Rock Lake in southern Missouri.

That was it. Every single year.

But this year would be different. I’d been in Chicago for three years. Lindsey’s a senior at Iowa and preparing to graduate this summer. Kylie’s likely going to attend college in Arizona next year. The nest is emptying, so my step mom felt the time was running out for us to have a trip as a big ‘ol happy family.

(And of course, the Hawkeye football team decided to turn the ship around and win five of their last six games to clinch a berth in the Outback Bowl.)

And bless my step mother’s heart, she worked her tail off to round the thing up; booking the flights and the hotel, getting us five seats to the game together. Not an easy thing to do on short notice and with the few local (and all tiny) airways clogged with throngs of Husker and Hawkeye fans heading south for their respective bowl games.

With such short notice, there was going to be some kinks in the travel plans, first of which was driving to Kansas City — usually an easy way for Omahans to save a couple bucks — for our departure.

The drive was effortless, and we arrived with plenty of time to spare, much more we’d realize when we got to the US Airways terminal.

Which was where the less-than chipper counter employee informed us that our flight to Charlotte was delayed two hours because of mechanical problems (their fault), and that we were going to miss our connecting flight to Tampa. Which, in turn, meant we would have to wait and catch the first flight out of Charlotte to Tampa the following morning. Which would put is in Tampa at 10:30 a.m. ... just 30 minutes before the Outback Bowl kicks off.

Meaning we were going to likely miss the first half of the game.

This. Did not. Go over well.

My step mother’s neck began turning red. My dad turned from the counter, looked up and mouthed the words “mother fuck!” My sisters stood there semi-shocked. Sensing the tension, I stepped towards the back of the line.

Now I understand that flights get canceled and delayed all the time (perhaps more than the rest of my family, which does not fly nearly as much as I do). I get it. And I get that it does zero good to bitch and moan to the airline people about this. It is something they, like most unfortunate souls in the customer service industry, have practically zero control over.

BUT, this asshole was not working with us one god damn bit, despite the fact we’d pleaded to him that we needed to get to Tampa on time for this game. It was the whole reason we had even planned this trip. To miss the game, or any part of it, would defeat the vacation’s entire purpose.

And it would crush my step mother if this were to happen. Here was this trip she’d worked so hard to plan and spent so much money on; a little getaway with all the kids before the three of us were out of the house and possibly scattered across the country.

And now some shitty airline was going to ruin it all.

According to this prick, we absolutely did not have another choice in the matter, and as he booked us two hotel rooms near the Charlotte airport for that night, he assured us that our flight tomorrow would be on time.

Once things were sorted out I bellied up to the bar and ordered a drink. It was New Years Eve, after all.

The rest of the fam filed over looking glum and somewhat hopeless.

“I’m so sorry guys,” my step mom said, visibly upset.

We assured her that this was obviously not her fault.

While I was sipping on my beer, potential Plan Bs were running through my head. I whipped out my laptop and started checking for other US Airways flights from Charlotte to Florida. My logic being that if we could get somewhere close to Tampa tonight — Atlanta, Orlando, Jacksonville — we could rent a car and drive through the morning and at least know we were going to make the game. I didn’t have much faith in the airline at this point. What if the flight tomorrow morning was delayed? What if was canceled? We’d miss the game completely.

However, nothing looked too promising. Flights across the board were behind schedule.

(Also, as a Plan C, I started checking for spots to drink in Charlotte that night; damned if I was going to spend this Near Years Eve stuck in some Comfort Inn.)

However, our luck was appearing to improve as the expected departure time of our flight to Charlotte continued to bump up. Before we knew it, we were boarding the plane just a little less than an hour after it’s originally take off time, which would mean, if they made up some time in the air, that we could possibly still catch our connecting flight to Tampa.

We get on board and my dissatisfaction with US Airways continues as I realize they’re charging $2 for a bottle of water on the flight — and $7 for cocktails. Also, the flight attendants were total bitches. One of the older ones spent the last 20 minutes of the flight bitching and moaning about her day’s work to another attendant, which is fairly annoying when you can’t put your headphones on or get up from your seat.

I never realized how much I’d miss flying Southwest.

I must also add that this is where our lives connected with Bill, the large, somewhat dopey-looking Hawkeye fan who was sitting two rows ahead of us on the flight and whom my father had conversed with while waiting to board the plane. Little did I know then how much of an influence on this trip he’d make.

Well, the pilot had made up quite a bit of time in the air and it was looking like we were going to get to Charlotte about 10 minutes before our flight to Tampa was set to depart. Once we landed I had my dad and Joni hurry inside to see what gate that flight would be departing from, but since US Airways sucks so much, they didn’t even have the flight’s info listed on any of their monitors.

Bill and I, who’d had to wait for our carry on luggage, were trying to catch up with the rest of my family when he stopped and asked a US Airways employee if she could contact the gate our plane was at and have them hold the flight a couple minutes.

After a brief exchange, the lady said “Nope. Since it’s New Year’s they can’t hold it at all. Sorry.”

“What?” I said out loud. “What the hell difference does it make if it’s Near Years!?”

The lady turned away from me.

“What kind of idiot airline is willing to spend god knows how much putting us up in two hotel rooms for a night instead of holding a plane for five fucking minutes?” I ask, though the lady was clearly done listening to me.

Pissed, we storm off to the gate anyway just to see if by chance that lady was full of it.

She wasn’t. Our flight was long gone.

BUT, there was a flight to Jacksonville that had been delayed a couple of hours and wasn’t taking off for another hour or so.

The gears in my brain began moving.

“Hang on,” I said to my step mother. “Before we leave, lets ask this guy at the desk for the Jacksonville flight if we can possibly get on it. I’ll get on my Blackberry and look for some car rental places there and see if we can get a car tonight.”

She goes and talks to guy at the counter (who resembled Kenneth from 30 Rock in both visage and accent).

Turns out they did have room for us on the flight to Jacksonville, and the kind lady with Avis there would wait for us until our flight landed.

YES! We had pulled it off! We were going to get to Tampa for this damn game!

Drawbacks? For starters; the flight was filled with idiot Nebraska Cornhusker fans heading to the next day’s Gator Bowl.

Secondly, and more importantly, we were going to have to drive three hours across Florida and would not arrive in Tampa until 5 a.m. at the earliest. And the three bags we’d claimed would not make the Jacksonville flight (more great service from US Airways).

Being good wholesome Midwesterners that they are, my parents, feeling for poor Bill the Hawkeye, who’s stuck in Charlotte all alone, asked him if he’d like to come with us to ensure that he’d make the game.

He obliged, considering he’d never been to a bowl game before and was planning on turning back around and flying back home right after the game the following day. It would have totally sucked for him to get to the game at halftime, around noon, completely missing any tailgating, then hop right back on a flight home at 6 p.m.

At least we were staying down there for four days.

So Big ol Bill hops in the front passenger seat of the rented Chevy Trailblazer with the Schnitker clan and away we go.

Now, by all accounts, Bill seemed like a pretty reasonable guy. A bit goofy looking, but nice.

It hadn’t occurred to me until we got on the highway just how potentially awkward this could be. Yeah, he was a Hawkeye fan, and they’re pretty much all awesome in my book. But we didn’t know this guy from shit. What if he was crazy? What if he would say something wildly inappropriate to my sisters? The only comforting thing, I guess, was the fact that we’d just gotten off an airplane with him. At least we knew he didn’t have so much as a screwdriver on him.

It would turn out the only danger Bill posed was that he talked. And talked. And talked some more. He was like a Kenyan marathon runner of talking. Or better yet, he was like John Candy’s character in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Except instead of sell shower curtains as ear rings, he ran a business that removed unwanted animals from houses (which is actually just as bizarre).

As my dad was driving, he was so tired he could barely muster replies as Bill regaled him with stories about removing possums from attics and setting traps for coyotes.

But I suppose his stories did prevent my dad from falling asleep at the wheel.

Thankfully, Tampa is an easy town to navigate in at five in the morning and we found our hotel with ease.

We bid adieu to Bill, who had gotten a room at the same hotel as we had, and made our way to our room and crashed.

Eight a.m. came early, but it’s not everyday you get to tailgate for the Hawks in 80 degree weather in January, so it was no problem getting up after just a couple hours of sleep.

I had a beer in my hand by nine.

The high school buddies I’d met to tailgate who live in Tampa were still shitfaced from the night before, and all but one of them were kicked out of the game within five minutes of the kick off.

Which, coincidentally, was about how long it took for the Hawks to subdue the South Caroline Gamecocks; they had a two-touchdown lead with just under five minutes left in the first quarter.

The Hawks rolled and the game was a hell of a time, especially considering we’d found out just before kick off that the flight carrying our luggage from Charlotte to Tampa that morning — the flight we were supposed to be on — was...

Cancelled.

2008-04-04T16:51:00.000-07:00

Having finally seen it first-hand, it makes complete sense why real estate is so expensive in San Francisco; it's quite possibly the most beautiful American city I've ever seen and it's pretty damn small. You've got a lot of people that want to live in a finite landmass, which basically represents the two central forces that drive real estate values; space and demand. (I guess it takes being in a place like San Francisco to really see it tangibly.)

You can go on and on about how you'd never, ever live in a town where $1,000 rents were the norm. But until you've spent a weekend there, until you see the views from the Golden Gate Bridge, until you get lost in the immense gorgeousness of Golden Gate Park, until you spend a Saturday afternoon in Wine Country when the weather is so perfect don't even notice it, you can't honestly say that. I would literally need to double my salary to live as comfortably there as I do in Chicago, but I'll be damned if, as I was walking around Fisherman's Wharf and North Beach districts before I had to catch my flight back home, all I could think about was how I wanted to live there. No matter the cost.

Chicago's great. I've loved this town since the minute I got here over two years ago. But San Fran is a whole different level of urban delight. The culture, the views, the history, the vibrancy, the Victorian charm and the laid-back vibe of its people are all one thing. To top it off with the fact that it NEVER SNOWS (considering the winter we just got through and apparently aren't even really done with yet), I couldn't help but wonder what the hell I was still doing in Chicago while others were out here living this kind of life.

Sure, maybe this is merely a response to having just undergone the most grueling and unpleasant Midwestern winter in my memory. But I honestly doubt it. I guarantee I could go there in June or September — the two best Chicago months weather-wise — and still feel the same way.

With that in mind, here are some random observations on the city:

For starters, one of the first things I noticed was they have public bathrooms in the downtown areas, which is something I've always been annoyed they didn't have here. I mean, what a novel concept, to have public restrooms in a city of four million people. Sure, it costs quite a bit of money to keep them clean and functioning. But considering the number of times I've seen and heard about vagrants doing the deed in public here, AND, the number of times I myself have been stuck in the middle of the city without a place to go, I think it's something worth looking into. Besides, this city has wasted much more money on far less competent endeavors in its past.

Dig this: The BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) cars are carpeted! And they're not actually soaked in urine (or at least they don't smell like it).

There are quite a few homeless people, especially in the Civic Center and Tenderloin districts (btw, isn't the Tenderloin one of the most hilarious names for a inner city skid row there could be?). But they're a different breed of homeless people than what you find in Chicago. During my time in San Fran I was never once accosted by one of them. Nobody asked me for so much as a penny. In downtown Chicago, you can't go 30 feet without somebody hitting you up for some spare change.

They seemed a little more dignified than Chicago bums, and they certainly weren't as needy. They weren't hustling, they weren't begging. It's like they have either chosen not to participate in society the way the rest of us do, or our society turned our backs on them and, instead of pleading for our help to get back in the game, they're just like "well, fuck you then," and they go on scratching out their subterranean existences without our assistant.

There's also the fact that it's such a liberal city that it rarely cracks down on its open-air drug market (which is, oddly enough, smack dab in the middle of the city's civic district). So I bet many were so sufficiently stoned that they were too dazed to bother anybody.

Then there's the Haight Ashbury, which is a far cry from what it used to be in the late 1960s. Sure, you're still got some modern day hippies floating around, but things aren't nearly as grimy as they used to be. Haight itself is mostly lined with trendy clothing boutiques, bars and cafes. Hell, at the actual intersection of Haight and Ashbury there's a Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream shop. Really revolutionary stuff.

I guess that's how commercialism goes. It takes an area that used to be the epitome of the counter culture, and over the years it homogenizes it to look like every other "hip" intersection in an American city. Before long it'll have a Chipotle and a Starbucks across from each other.

Still, though, it's a unique place, if more for the interesting characters that frequent it than the actual buildings and stores.

Golden Gate Park is amazing. And it's massive. I thought I was going to walk all the way through it until I realized the damn thing was four miles long. I spent two hours there and only saw maybe an eighth of it. It's one of the few parks left in a major urban area where you can get truly lost. It also may be the best park to take a nap in I've ever been to.

Also, just upon entering it, I saw what was the most obvious weed deal made in public I've ever seen before. Some middle aged Asian guy wearing regular street clothes walked up to a young hippie looking guy with raggedy clothes, dread locks, etc. and just straight up asked him if he had anything. The hippie said "sure," grabbed something from his pocket, reached out and made the exchange in mid day light in a city park in front of about 50 people and with a cluster of cops no less than 100 yards away. Nobody acted as if anything out of the ordinary had just occurred. As I walked past I almost turned back and asked, “dude, did you really just do what I think you did right in the middle of all these fucking people?" You pull a stunt like that in front of 50 people in Grant or Millennium Park and you'll wind up in cuffs.

Wine Country was pure paradise. It’s not nearly as windy up there, so the temperatures are usually about 8 to 12 degrees warmer than they are in San Fran, which means it’s absolutely perfect. It’s funny how the best weather is weather you don’t even notice. There’s no breeze, no humidity, no clouds, it’s not hot, it’s not cold, it’s just … perfect.

The one thing that did surprise me though, as we were heading back down Highway 29 towards the city, was that there weren’t any highway patrolmen lined up along the road to pull over all the drunk drivers.

And so I suppose if I could make one general statement about what I found so endearing about the city — or maybe just the West Coast in general — was the people just seemed to operate with much more ease. People weren’t honking their horns in traffic. Bums weren’t on the hustle. Cops weren’t busting your balls. It was awesome.

But, just like everything else, it comes at a cost. If it didn’t, we’d all live there.

2008-03-26T23:00:00.000-07:00

So I get my haircut at this little place at Augusta and Ashland. I'm not even sure it has a name, all I know is that it's got a big red sign out front that reads "$6 Haircuts," which is about as cheap as you can find in my parts. It was the first place I went to when I moved to the city roughly two years ago. One of my co-workers at the Starbucks I worked at when I first moved here said he rode by it on the bus every day, so I figured I'd check it out. (He didn't actually go there, of course: he just told me about it. He was a gay, and gay men don't get $6 hair cuts.

Well, I've gone there about a half dozen times since, and every time I've gotten a fine haircut: certainly one worth six bucks. But the folks that work there speak VERY LITTLE English, and that always makes me a bit nervous for about the first five minutes or so, cause I'm never quite sure if they understand my instructions. If there's one person out there you don't want to misunderstand your instructions, it's the person working on your scalp with a a razor and a pair of scissors. It's not like ordering a burrito or telling a cab driver where to go. A mistake during a haircut is a mistake you'll have to live with for at least a couple weeks.

So, like I've said, it's all worked out fine so far. But if any of you see me one day with a bowl cut or a completely shaved head, you'll know it wasn't actually my idea.

2008-03-13T00:15:00.000-07:00

If Nelson Algren were to come back to Division Street from the dead, I imagine he'd be pretty disappointed. He'd see all the new construction condo developments that took the place of his beloved (or oft written about) Polish dives. The Jimmy John's where there used to be boarding houses. The Boundary, where there used to be a Tug and Maul. The wealth where there used to be reality ... and desperation.

That is, until he stumbled into Rite Liquors. Perhaps the last bastion of genuine tomfoolery, debauchery and misogyny left on West Division Street.

I enter the place frequently. To take cash out of its ATM, to buy vodka for my homemade cocktails, to buy mixers for said vodka in my cocktails. The place is the closest liquor outlet to my apartment. What can I do?

I walk by there in the morning and the drunks are outside. Smoking cigarettes. Spitting last night's built up phlegm onto the sidewalk. 10 a.m. ain't too early for them to start drinking. I know they're doing it for a reason.

But I walk in there, with my $2,000 computer. My $300 iPod. My fashionable (or at least recently washed) clothes. I look like a corporate schmuck to the just-off-the-clock postal workers, the lifelong degenerate drunks, the missing-teeth sluts. But I know who they are. I've met them all before. I'm just a guy from Council Bluffs, Iowa, for fuck's sake. They don't know they're nothing I ain't never seen before. But they look at me like I'm some kind of different breed. Like I'm really any different from them. And when I walk out of there, with my leather bag, my vodka, my Sprite, and my apparent spite for what they consist of, I just want to turn and holler "I could have very easily been any of you, but I chose not to be."

And I wonder if Algren would appreciate me for that, or spite me for it.

2008-03-02T22:04:00.000-08:00

Went for a walk along Division St. in the Goose Island area between Ashland and Halsted Saturday afternoon. Was hoping for a peaceful stroll to listen to a kick ass new 80s playlist I'd created the day before (lots of Peter Gabriel, Alan Parsons Project and The Fixx).

The weather was decent. I wasn't too hungover. I had the whole day ahead of me.

My tranquility was interrupted just a few blocks into the hike when I saw a purple basketball zoom past the left side of my head and bounce off one of the concrete columns of the Kennedy Expressway overpass I was walking under.

"What the fuck? Who the hell's throwing a basketball at me," I thought to myself, then stopped and turned around.

Three pre-pubescent black youths were standing about 15 feet behind me, and as I turned to them, they each stopped in their tracks and began pointing fingers at another one of the guys in their group. As if none of them did it.

I briefly thought of nipping this whole situation in the bud right away; picking the ball up and throwing it in the fenced in area of the underpass so they'd have to climb the fence and get it or leave it altogether. But I'm not that big of a dick head (yet), and I figured that would probably just exacerbate the situation.

So I just shook my head and continued on my way.

"If I ignore them, they'll leave me alone," I thought to myself.

Wrong.

About thirty feet later I feel something bounce up against the back of my left leg. I see out of the right side of my eye the same purple basketball bounce onto Division St. Since they aren't even throwing the ball that hard I didn't bother to turn back. I just kept heading east on Division.

"Well, this is going to get old," I thought to myself. There's virtually no residential areas in Goose Island, and considering the nearest batch of housing wasn't until Cabrini-Green about six blocks ahead (which was probably where they lived), I figured I'd be with these rascals for at least that long.

Things were peaceful for a moment after I crossed the first bridge over the North Branch of the Chicago River, but sure enough, a block later, I feel the ball bounce off my right shoulder and see it roll onto Division again. (I wonder what the people driving by thought of this situation? Did they think I'd done something to the kids to deserve this treatment? Or were they like "Ha, look at kids fucking with that guy. That's pretty funny.)

This time I couldn't help but laugh at how funny it all probably looked. And they saw me laugh, which was certainly not a good thing.

Then about 20 feet later, with much more force than before, I see the ball whiz past my left shoulder and bounce a nearby fence to my ankles.

"Do you want your fucking ball, punks?" I scream at them, while motioning like I’m going to throw it over the fence of the parking lot I’m walking by. "Do you really! Cause I'm gonna throw it over this fucking fence if you throw it at me one more time!"

They each step back and turn their shoulders to me to protect themselves.

"Stop throwing this at me! Damn!" I yell again.

Instead of pelting them with it like they expected me to, I just bounced the ball to the one in front whom I suspect is the instigator of this situation.

A minute later, I see a couple rocks skid past me on the concrete. Decent sized rocks that would have hurt had they hit me in the back of the head.

This crossed a line.

"Quit it you motherfuckers!" I turn and scream. "Leave me alone! I didn't do shit to you guys. I'm just trying to go for a fucking walk! Stop throwing that fucking thing at me."

As I step to them the one in front turns and runs and one of his friends — the one who's been in the rear the whole time — and scolds him.

"What are you scared of him for?”

I instantly thought of the last season of HBO's “The Wire,” which focused on the kids living in the gang infested areas of Baltimore (which look a lot like Cabrini). I thought about how those kids, at 11 and 12, were much harder than I was.

I thought of the little kid that shot Omar in the head.

I also thought of the fact one of these kids probably has a raw dog brother living in Cabrini that'd track come out and fuck my shit up if he found out I laid a hand one his little brother.

So instead of going back and roughing the kids up, I just let it die.

From there on, they pretty much left me alone. I was approaching the second bridge over the North Branch and off in the distance was a cop who had just pulled somebody over with his lights flashing (might have had something to do with that).

I turned back to the kids one last time. They were bouncing their ball around. They didn't even notice me.

As I turned back to make my way across the bridge, I felt old, perhaps as old as I have in long time.

This is who I am now. The old guy walking down the street by himself that kids throw shit at.

These kids didn't care that I was only 28. I could have been 88 for all they cared. All they saw in me was some white dude that was older than they can imagine being, who they can fuck with and won't fuck with them back.

That realization was more saddening than the realization that there are kids in this town that seem to have no qualms with throwing rocks at random people walking by.

Milwaukee No. II

2008-02-18T22:44:00.000-08:00

Made what is turning into an yearly mid-February trip to Milwaukee this weekend. All in all, it was a great time spent catching up with some old college buddies that — as we grow older and start start our adult lives scattered in towns across the country — I rarely see anymore.

The weekend consisted of mostly dude shit: Drinking, listening to music, recanting stories of the the stupid shit we did in school.

of course, by late Saturday night as we were all tanked, we ended up at a strip club. It wasn't necessarily one of those pre-meditated "fuck yeah, dudes we're TOTALLY going to the tittie bar tonight!" sort of deals. It was more like a buddy and I stumbled out of a bar and realized we were cut off from the rest of the group. He said he thought it'd be hilarious if we ditched them and hid out in a strip club for a while.

"Well, we're about ten feet from the entrance," I told him.

Next thing you know I'm hitting up the house cash box (that has an egregious $5 ATM fee) to get money to turn into singles to give to the sandy blonde on stage so she'll shove her tits in my face.

At one point shortly thereafter I drunkenly send a text to all my out of town friends that I smell like a Johnson & Johnson factory, which at the time made complete sense in my mind (strippers smell like baby powder), but fell flat to everybody else. Obscurity usually doesn't go over well after midnight.

Now lets not get confused here: I'm not a big strip club guy. They're fun maybe two or three times a year, usually when you're really drunk and around a bunch of friends who are either married or close to it. I think going to strip joints is ultimately an exercise in sexual futility (nobody ever hooks up at a strip club) and you wind up spending about three times what you would at a place where the staff is fully-clothed. (I'd say they're demeaning to females as well, but that's a pretentious slap in the face to these working girls who obviously don't feel that way.)

My hour there was pretty standard. Got a lap dance. Put about $20 worth of singles in the underwear of women I've never met before.

It wasn't until I left, and another wave of my friends came in, that things got crazy.

Throughout the evening, one of my buddies kept insisting to the girls that they give them a "sneak attack." I've personally never heard this term used before (apparently none of the strippers had, either), but I was told it was code word for when a stripper very briefly removes the article of clothing covering up the one private part of her body most state laws say you can't show in an establishment that serves alcohol.

"I can't do that! That's illegal!" one of the girls pleaded.

"Oh, come on, nobody will see it but us," my buddy replied.

"No way! My boss will see me and I'll get fired!"

So my buddy tosses out three more singles on the stage. The stripper looks down at them.

"OK, I guess I can do it really quick," she says. Then BAM, in one swift lift of the panties she exposed her holiest of holies to a bunch of drunk strangers. All told, this exhibit set my friends back a mere four bucks.

Ah ... shitty strip clubs: Where the dollar's still going strong.

As I heard this story later in the evening I thought to myself how crazy the world would be if it were that easy to get a girl to do something sexually.

You're making out with a girl on a first date and she's not letting you get past first base:

"No," she keeps saying. "You're moving too fast. Slow down."

Then you reach into your pocket, pull out a couple bucks and stuff them in her bra.

"What about now?"

"OK!" She says, then lets you play with her boobs.

You're having sex with your wife of ten years:

"Honey, lets mix things up tonight. Whaddya say you let me put it in your butt?"

"No fucking way!" She screams and slaps you from behind.

You pull your wallet out of your pants and make it rain on her back with a couple singles.

"Now whaddya say?

"Oh, sure! The lube's in the top drawer," she says excitedly.

This world is full of fucking weirdos

2008-02-17T21:14:00.000-08:00

About two months ago, a guy walks into the Starbucks at Paulina and Division a couple blocks from my place. He's was a decent-looking fellow: clean, well dressed, looked like he was of distant Eastern European decent. He steps in, looks around, walks straight up to me and goes into some spiel about how he works at the Drake Hotel downtown, but he's out of money or something and he needs money from me and he'll leave his wallet with me while he goes and does whatever it is he needs to do with the money I give him, then pay me when he gets back.

After listening to about 30 seconds of his bullshit I just tell him I'm busy with work and that I can't help him. And he leaves.

About two weeks ago, he walks into the same Starbucks, scans the place, then walks straight up to me and goes in with the exact same routine.

"No, man, I'm sorry," just as he goes into the routine.

He gets a frustrated look on his face, stammers for a moment, then leaves.

I look over with amazement to my buddy who I'm sitting working with.

"That guy just tried pulling that same stunt with me about a month ago. Can you believe that? What a fucking weirdo."

Less than a week later from that, as I'm sitting by the front window of the same Starbucks, I see him pull up and get out of a shiny new black Pontiac. It looked like about a $25,000 automobile. He walks right into the Starbucks and again, approaches me.

"Dude, you just pulled the same shit with less than a week ago!" I say incredulously.

This time, before he's able to get a frustrated look on his face and stammers for a moment, the store manager came out from behind the bar hollering at him.

"I told you before, damn it, I see you in here again I'm kicking you out. Get out!"

The scurveball shakes his head, goes back out to his shiny black sedan and leaves.

"That's the third time in less than two months that guy's pulled that routine with me," I tell the manager and another employee as they watch him leave.

"He's in here all the time..." one of them replied.

As I sat there watching him pull off I got the feeling it's some sort of weird compulsive thing. Where, like, the dude just can't resist trying to scam people. If he's out in public he can't help it. He doesn't even need the money. He could lead an otherwise normal life, just, whenever he leaves the house, he can't help himself from trying to get money from passersby.

It's pretty fucked up, and I bet he pulls the same shit again in the next couple weeks.

2008-02-14T21:56:00.000-08:00

Went out to eat for a nice Valentine's Day dinner Wednesday night at an Italian place in River West called La Scarola. It was fantastic. One of those tiny joints you see in the movies. One of the few restaurants I’ve been to lately where the ambiance and the food was exactly what I was hoping it would be.

Why is it, though, that every good Italian restaurant I've been to is about the size of my parent's living room? The Italians are big people. Why don't they make their restaurants larger? Mexicans, I get why they have small restaurants. They’re small people. But Italians? James Gandolfini would need his own room at this place.

The ambiance was great, although a bit overwhelming. It was as if you were listening to about a dozen conversations at once. And every minute or so somebody was bumping into the back of your chair or dragging their coat across the corner of you table.

There was also the celebrity factor, which made it even more interesting. Emily and I were standing at the tiny bar (which is inconveniently located smack dab in the middle of the place) when we looked over and saw this even tinier man who looked very familiar standing in line for the pisser.

"That guy is totally an actor … who is he?" I leaned in and asked Emily quietly.

She sat there for a moment thinking, then leaned in to whisper in my ear "That's Stephen Dorff."

Ah, ha! Then we spent the rest of the meal trying to remember what the hell movies Stephen Dorff was even in (it wasn't until I got on imdb.com the next day that I could actually figured out what: Blade was his biggest hit).

Moments later we get sat and I notice another very familiar short white guy a couple tables in front of me.

"Nah, that's not really him," I said to myself as I gnawed on some bruschetta. "He'd at least be wearing a collared shirt."

But when I saw the gawdy diamond earring he had in his right ear, I realized it had to be him.

"That guy nine o'clock from you is a pro basketball player," I whispered to Emily.

It was Jason Williams. White Chocolate. The dude that did that Nike commercial with Randy Moss and the Dukes of Hazard song in the background.

At first I was taken aback by how small he was (6-1) even for a point guard. He's rail thin, too. And dressed like a schmuck — he was wearing a long sleeve Heat T-shirt with his left arm out of the sleeve because he'd recently got a tattoo on it (I could see him showing it off at the table).

The attire at La Scarola is casual (come to think of it, Dorff was dressed poorly as well), but shit, if you were making $9 million a year like Williams is, why wouldn't you at least attempt to look half decent in public? If I made that kind of coin I'd be pulling some Tom Brady shit. (I'm sure there's a causal relationship, too, between how good an athlete dresses and the people that hang out with him: The dudes sitting with Williams reminded me of the types of average douchebags that hang out at sports bars back in Council Bluffs. Tom Brady hangs out with super models. Dorff, coincidentally, does hang out with super models.)

Of course, then came Valentine's Day. I'm not one of those anti-Valentine's Day guys. It is what is. If you're in a relationship with somebody it's just an excuse to have a sweet dinner and some good sex. (Or in my case this year, break up with each other). If you're single, then it's just another day you get to do whatever the fuck you want (such as go to the bar by yourself to pick up on desperate chicks). What's really the negative?

This Valentine's Day will go down as one of the two worst of my life so far, though. A close second to the Valentine's Day of 1998, when, at the age of 18, I hitched a ride from Iowa City to Peoria, Ill., to spend the weekend with a girl I was kind of seeing at the time. She wound up blowing me off pretty much the whole trip. She got super wasted at a party that Saturday night and ditched me for some dude who I think she slept with. Which meant I had to spend all of that night cooped up in her tiny dorm room (without a key, no less, so I couldn't leave the place and get back in). I didn't hear from her again until late that Sunday evening, after I'd already broken down and asked the girls from Peoria that gave me the ride if I could spend Sunday with them since I was so lonely. It's bad enough to have a girl you think you're in love demonstrate with absolute clarity that she could not give a tiny fuck about you. It's even worse when that forces you to call up a stranger and invite yourself to her Sunday family dinner because you're an emotional train wreck.

2008-01-06T20:46:00.000-08:00

I'd only gotten about four blocks from the greasy spoon of a cafe by Emily's apartment in Logan Square when it hit me like a knife in the stomach. I literally had to stop waling, for even the slightest move would have let something dangerous loose. Anybody paying close attention to me surely got a laugh while I leaned up against the wall with my ass cheeks clinched as tightly as possible, grimacing in pain.

I looked around, but didn't see a safe place to go rid of this disaster in my stomach.

Now, this is quite possibly one of the worst things about being in a big city; the lack of readily available public restrooms. Hardly any gas stations, fast food restaurants and drug stores offer easily-accessible bathrooms. This has a lot to do with them being abused by homeless people (damn homeless people, they totally ruin the public restroom concept for everybody else). The only exception being Starbucks, which universally offer bathrooms that are perfect for public use. They're never locked, usually pretty well-kept, and Starbucks' are usually so busy that nobody ever notices you walk in, use the bathroom, then walk right back out without buying anything. But the neighborhood I'm in is just outside the Starbucks-every-two-blocks section of Chicago, so I'm screwed.

It should be noted that I have qualms with being noticed during my serial restroom usage. Call me old fashioned, but I still feel a little guilty/awkward going into a place like of which I'm not a patron — a restaurant, bar or coffee shop — just to take a shit. It's kind of a standard I live by. I usually just hold it until I get home. Because you know what? People know what you're up to when you do such a thing. They notice. Hell, I notice when people do it. It's like this big taboo, though. We never acknowledge it. We all kind of just go about our business when it happens. When people walk into a place, go directly to the bathroom, stay in there for five minutes, then walk right back out without even pretending to buy anything. Sure, nobody walks out of the bathroom and says "hey everybody, I just took a huge smelly dump in there and most of you are going to have to smell for the next 10 to 15 minutes." But we all know that's pretty much what went down.

Well, as I was standing on the sidewalk in agonizing pain looking for an easy place to quickly dump my intestinal garbage, I noticed I was leaning up against a semi-dirty Mexican joint (the type of which there is about 4,000 in Logan Square) and thought "well, fuck the rules. This shit's gotta come out."

So I barge confidently into the joint, locate the men's bathroom, and head directly for it. Out of the corners of my eyes, I notice lots of innocent women and children eyeballing me. They see me utterly disregard the hostess, they recognize that I have not taken my coat off and surely understand that my presence at 2 Amigos will be felt (or smelt) for a much longer period of time than I was actually there.

Once I get to the pint sized john, I let loose, and let me tell you, it was glorious...a glory one can only feel when they release three pounds excrement from their bodies in less an a minute. At first I'm semi-impatient and consider trying to pull off one of those quickie dumps that you can be easily confused with really long pees, but the damage has already been done, so I decide to make myself comfortable and really let everything out.

After about five minutes it was all done, I cleaned myself up, collected my composure, and headed back out to face the crowd. Each of them (or so it seemed) took a break from their bean eating and chatting and looked right at me with chagrin.

They knew.

I almost wanted to say sorry, but what good what that have done? None. So I just kept my head down, headed for the door and hoped nobody recognized me.

2007-12-30T20:37:00.000-08:00

Just got home from Christmas the other day. I was back in Omaha for eight days, which, at the time I booked the flight, seemed like an eternity. I actually thought I might get bored being back that long. Turns out I barely had enough time to see everybody I wanted to see. As my parents dropped me off at the airport, it seemed like my dad just picked me up from it a couple days ago.

I could've easily stayed another week and been busy the whole time. Though my liver might have been too busy.

Like all nostalgic people do when they go home, the get ... nostalgic. Driving around you old haunts is always a strange feeling what you don't consider that place home anymore. I guess there were times back in Omaha where I thought it'd would always be home, that I'd never end up actually leaving. So it's weird to be back now that I have actually left.

While I'm completely happy in Chicago, there were moments where I caught myself driving through parts of midtown Omaha, looking at the vintage apartment buildings and quiet, cozy homes — quiet cozy homes I could actually afford — and I wondered. Would I be happy back there now? Could I do it? I've never really hated Omaha. Actually, I still think it's a pretty neat town. Some parts as neat as Chicago. And it's a really easy place to live. But that was part of the problem. It was almost too easy a place to live.

I realize now, that I've been away for almost two years, that it wasn't the actual town I hated, it was more the life I led when I was there. Drinking every night. Staying up way too late, on Monday and Tuesday nights, even. While I was having fun for every minute of the partying, I was always beating myself up inside. I knew I wasn't doing any of the things I really should have been doing: reading, writing, watching movies, learning something new, exposing myself to new things. I was out with friends at the bar at night, not writing, not reading, just burning brain cells. Then, of course, in the mornings I'd feel so shitty that I was taking my job, which was one that I'd wanted since I first moved back to Omaha, for granted. I was never fully focused and often too hungover to get any quality work done.

My life was a a mess, and I saw that it was a mess, and I moved to Chicago. And I have to say things have been better. Though when I go home I realize that old side of my comes back pretty easily. Whenever anybody calls and asks me to go out, I don't have the will power to say no. Once I do get out, I don't have the will power to shut things down at a reasonable hour. Come midnight doing shots, making calls, looking for the after hours party, even though I know I should just go home and call it a night.

I would always stay out late cause I was worried I was going to miss something. But now that I think about it, what the hell was there to miss? Pretty much every single after hours party I went to back home has been the same. I hustle to get beer before 1, find the party, after 15 minutes get bored at the party, then I call everybody we know to find another party that's hopefully better. And so on and so forth until I realize it's 4 a.m. and I haven't found shit that's worth doing so I finally go home. And I've wasted a night, and most of a morning, pretty much for nothing.

Which is what scares me about moving back home; I'm worried I'll fall right back into that trap.

But what scares me about my life in Chicago, I realize every time I go back home, is that I honestly don't think I'm going to make new friends like the ones I have in Omaha. I know that every time I tell people that they roll their eyes, pat me on the shoulder and say "oh, it just takes time." I know it takes time, believe me. But I've been here for almost two years and haven't even come close to meeting someone I feel as comfortable around as any of my 20 best friends back home. Back home I can go to about a dozen bars on any given night by myself and have at least one person I know to sit with.

In Chicago, I can't think of a single bar where I can do that.

It takes friends to get friends. The main reason I made so many new great friends in Omaha is because I'd met them through great friends I'd already had back home. I know quite a few people in Chicago, but only a small handful I'm really close with. Less than a dozen I actually talk to on a regular basis.

There's a part of me that feels back home with my family and friends is where I should be. After all, these are the people that I'm going to be close with for the rest of my life, no matter what. Why should I be apart from them?

But there's also part of me that felt I was missing something by being back home, and wasting something, too. So I leave and try to quell that in Chicago, which I think I've done.

I recently found out an aunt and uncle of mine are getting a divorce. One night while back in Omaha I was explaining the situation to a friend, about how my uncle (who is the in-law) still thinks he can stick around the house and live like nothing is wrong despite the fact he treats my aunt like shit. He wants to not have to love his wife, but still be with his kids every day. But you can't do that. You can't have it both ways, I told my friend.

"No, you can't," he said reassuringly.

2007-12-09T20:46:00.000-08:00

As I stood in line scanning the menu, I still wasn't sure if I was going to go through with it. The doubt that had been with me the entire walk to the place had swelled into genuine unsureness. My culinary routine is by no means sophisticated, but was this a line I was ready to cross? Was I really ready to embark on consumption of quite possibly the most ridiculous fast food menu item created?

Before diving in I needed some clarification on exactly what it was I'd be putting into my stomach.

"Tell me, what's the difference between the mashed potato bowl and the biscuit bowl?" I asked the fat black lady at the counter as it was my turn to order.

"The biscuit bowl comes with a biscuit," she said matter-of-factly and with a pseudo-southern accent.

That makes perfect sense, I thought to myself.

I stood there debating in my mind whether or not I should go with or without the biscuit. As a kid, I loved these guys' biscuits. And, hell, if I'm gonna put all that other shit in my body, might as well throw in a biscuit.

"All right then, gimme a biscuit bowl," I said with confidence.

The fat black lady turned plodded to the assembly line, grabbed a plastic bowl, plopped a glob of mashed potatoes and another of gravy into it and I turned away in semi-disgust. I was afraid that viewing the actual making of this dish would completely ruin any appetite I had for it. (Note: The kitchens of Kentucky Fried Chickens are not pretty sites, nor are the people that work in them).

I turned back when my order was ready and went to a booth and excitedly took the bowl of it the plastic bag, ripped its lid off and gazed at the pile of processed goodness in front of me.

Where do I start? Do I want a generous scoop of the top layer of corn and cheese? Should I dig deep for a healthy spoonful of mashed potatoes and gravy? Should I pluck out a tender morsel of fried chicken? Or should I pick off a fluffy piece of my biscuit?

I started with the biscuit and worked my way down. With each scoop I hoped for at least some level of level of transcendent flavor (sure, none of this stuff was made with an actually natural ingredients, but that doesn't mean it can't taste good.) But it never really came. Despite being filled with nearly a half dozen different menu items, everything seemed to taste pretty much the same. The biscuit was dull. The cheese had a much flavor as the shredded KRAFT shit you get at the store. The potatoes and gravy, which I remember being full of flavor as a child, tasted like mush. Only the fried chicken nuggets had any discernible taste. Mostly it was just a heap of salt and the seasoning KFC puts on seemingly all of its menu items.

(Another note: If KFC's food doesn't kill you by clogging your arteries with cholesterol, the high blood pressure from all the salt will.)

I wound up not even finishing the thing. Once I got to the bottom layer of mashed potatoes I'd seen enough. The stomach gurgling that continued through the night had already begun.

As I walked back out into the cold night I now realized there are three certainties in life; Death, taxes, and one should never eat at Kentucky Fried Chicken unless they absolutely have to.

2007-12-02T20:38:00.000-08:00

I had this big ol' rant written up about how tired I am of listening to sports writers gripe and whine about how shitty the BCS system. C'mon you idealistic dumbasses, I want to say to them, you know it's never gonna change because of the money that's tied up in the current system. And college football is arguably the most popular sport in the country right now, why do you guys constantly have to make it sound like it's post-season is so completely ludicrous? If it truly were, people wouldn't watch the San Diego Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl (Utah vs. Navy, Dec. 20 — if I'm by a TV that night, that's likely what I'll be watching, and most of you know you will be, too.)

I've never been a huge proponent of a playoff system, not so much because I'm fundamentally against it, but because I just don't think it'll ever happen — there's way too many powerful people and companies that make a lot of money off the current bowl system. The NCAA will continue to put those financial/power concerns over its fan's complaints (that is until those complaints really start to get loud, and this season could very well be the year it does).

BUT, once I actually stopped myself and thought about what a well-made playoff would look like, I was stopped dead in my tracks it was so beautiful. Just look at this potential first round of a 16-team playoff:

Tennessee at Ohio State
Clemson at LSU
Boston College at Virginia Tech
Illinois at Oklahoma
Florida at Georgia
Arizona State at Missouri
Hawaii at USC
West Virginia at Kansas

Imagine. Have one Thursday night game, another Friday night game, then the rest from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Saturday. I wouldn't leave my couch. Hell, 90 percent of the males in America would be glued to their TV sets for over 20 hours in a three-day period! It would make the first round of March Madness look like a junior high AAU tournament. And that's just the start. It goes on for four more weekends.

If the NCAA can get something like this formulated in the next year or two, I don't see how they'd lose a dime or a fan.

2007-11-28T22:18:00.000-08:00

Now it's the time of year where it really start to suck living in a city like Chicago without a car. You get home from work between 6-7, the sun's already down for about an hour, and it's so damn cold an windy out, once you feel the warmth of home, you don't want to leave it. So you spend the entire night cooped up in your tiny apartment.

Of course, you get bored out of your mind after a couple hours and something as simple as going to the bar down the street for a pint seems adventurous. But once you realize you've got to put three layers of clothing on just to step out the door, and that four blocks that was a leisurely stroll in June is now — with a below freezing wind chill — a frightful journey. So you end up not doing shit but lying around in sweatpants watching Family Guy re-runs, which seem to be aired non-stop between 6 and 10 p.m.

And if you do manage to make it out into the cold towards the bar down the street, you're cursing the decision the entire way.

If you think about it, you're kinda shit out of luck in the winter in Chicago if you're not a bar person (which might have a lot to do with the fact there are so many bar people in this city). There's really not a lot of places to go in the evening in the middle of winter. What kinds of indoor public places are open after 8-9 p.m.? Grocery stores, Borders and Barnes and Nobles, a few coffee shops and restaurants, of course (but you can't really entertain yourself at a restaurant for more than an hour without drinking). If you've ever wondered why there are so many bars in this city, or why there's so many old buildings that look like they used to be bars, winter has a lot to do with the answer.

(Here's an idea; somebody should build a giant indoor social area where, for a small fee, people can walk around, exercise, socialize, read a book, play catch, etc. Like a mall without shops that's open all night. Brilliant!)

The bottom line: you've got to find something to do, or else you'll turn into an atrophied recluse. A condition which I fear has already began to settle in.

2007-11-14T21:53:00.000-08:00

Just when I say I'm getting fully comfortable in this city and it poses me fewer challenges and headaches, I go on the walk from hell.

I only wanted to be gone for about a little over an hour. I was gonna walk all the way down to the Clark and Lake Blue line stop (about three miles) and take the train back home. Leave by nine, be back home in bed writing by no later than 10:30.

The walk downtown itself was uneventful. Taking back streets to look at some of the new homes I'd never seen before, I only passed a couple other human beings until I got to the river on Halsted.

Farther down the way, though, things got frustrating. I needed to get some cash for the train ride home since my cards were all empty, and I only had a buck and change on me. So I stopped by a CVS to buy something cheap and get $5 cash back (I'm tired of racking up unnecessary ATM fees and having to take twenty bucks out of the bank when I only need a couple. You can do that at drug stores.) But just as I rolled up to the place (9:03 p.m.), I noticed the lights shutting off. It closed three minutes ago.

Fuck.

Frustrated, I keep heading east thinking I'll see another CVS or a Walgreen's that's deeper into downtown, or at least a National City ATM (my bank). No luck. The Walgreen's by the train stop had just closed, too. I turned around to see if the White Hen catty corner from it is open. Nope. It's out of business.

Fuck.

I realize I've got a couple old CTA fare cards in my wallet and figure it's at least worth the try to see if there's enough money on them combined with the change in my pocket to get me home. I walk in, put the first card in and it says I've got 55 cents left on it. Hmm. I reach into my pocket, pull out the buck and realize I've got more change than I thought — maybe $1.45 worth. I pump the buck and change in and I'm ... five cents short.

Motherfuck.

Being a borderline tight-ass with absolutely nothing else to do, I figure I'll just walk around for a while and see if I can't find a nickel on the ground. There's so many business people flocking to downtown on a daily basis it can't take that long to find five cents laying around, right? Wrong. The panhandlers in this city have wiped its streets absolutely fucking clean of any lose change there ever was. I walked around for about twenty minutes and didn't even see so much as a god damn penny.

By now this was turning into a much lengthier endeavor than I'd originally budgeted it for, so I broke down and hit up the first ATM I could find for a $20 spot and went McDonald's for a soda to break it up. Went back to the train stop, put my nickel in to fill my card up to the mandatory $2 (all that work for a fucking nickel!) and headed down to the subway.

"Ah, home free," I thought to myself on the escalator.

I got to the tracks and I waited. And waited. And waited. Then waited some more. I had gotten to the train stop at 10:40, and I when I first looked down at the clock on my cell phone it read 11:10. I'd spent over two hours on this stupid walk, and spent 30 minutes waiting for this stupid train. I couldn't tell which pissed me off more.

It was as if the city was punking me. "Really?," I felt it was saying to me. "You've got living here down-pat, huh? Got it all figured out. No problems for you anymore. Everything's just a walk in the park these days, right? Well take this motherfucker!"

Just then I heard the low rumble of the north bound train off in the distance, and shortly after saw the gleam of its bright yellow lights reflect off the track.

I was overcome with a sense of relief. "Finally," I sighed to myself.

And as I boarded the train I coulda swore I felt the hand of the city patting me on the back like I was a young man that had just spoken up to his parents as though he new everything, and there was nothing more he could learn from them.

"Right buddy," the city was saying. "You're still our little bitch."

2007-11-13T22:31:00.000-08:00

Yeah, it's been a while. My excuse: a combination of being busy with other things and having nothing necessarily out of the ordinary happen.

Ah, who the fuck am I kidding: I was just waiting for somebody to post a comment saying they were actually missing these postings. (Thanks duke, whoever you are.)

All right, I'll be honest it with you. It's technically neither of those things.

If you haven't noticed, I've attempted to make this project a little more interesting than one of those ridiculously self-indulgent "here's what happened to me today" blogs. I've tried to focus only on the truly unique and interesting experiences I've witnessed during my time in Chicago. And I suppose what was initially intriguing about writing a blog journaling all my unique experiences in Chicago was because, well, so many of them were unique. Everything was new.

Now that I've lived here for almost two years, the uniqueness has began to wane. Rides on the train and bus are no longer fascinating trips in which I'm observing all the minute details of the folks I'm sitting with. These days they're usually just frustrating trips from point A to point B.

I'm finding it more and more difficult to discover new and interesting streets/neighborhoods.

I'm getting burned out on many of the bars I used to find stimulating.

I take the skyline for granted.

I can start to feel myself morphing from a wide-eyed and eager newcomer to a grizzled old "been there, done that" veteran. Though this isn't such a terrible thing. I mean, I'm not un-happy, nor do I love this city any less. I know the place like the back of my hand. The tragedies and challenges it poses to me are fewer.

The one thing I've truly began to notice with this city over the last couple months, what I think makes this place truly great, is that I feel ultimately comfortable here. This city has taken me and and made me feel completely at home.

In turn — like many a writer before me — much of the raw inspiration I roamed this city with a year ago has been siphoned, and the chronicles of its stimuli have become fewer and far between.

2007-10-09T20:03:00.000-07:00

Well, I guess there is one thing I forgot to mention about last weekend: The Cubs playoff meltdown. There really isn't that much to say about it. They were terrible, and nobody should be surprised about that. They had the worst record of any team in the post season, and had played miserably in Sept. (getting swept by the Marlins in the second to last series was a sign of things to come).

Regardless of the fact they'd fallen down 0-2 in the series and looked hopeless, I wanted to trek up the Wrigleyville to experience the Cub playoff phenomena (knowing this organization, it could be the only one they make while I'm a resident here, even if I'm a resident here for the next twenty years.)

It wasn't a crazy as I thought it would be. Clark St. was flooded, but it there didn't appear to be anymore people in the hood than there were during regular season games. Nor did there seem to be any general aura of excitement. It felt as though everybody already knew what was going to happen, and it wasn't something good.

It being a college football Saturday, the bars were doubly packed, so we ended up settling at a place a couple blocks away from the stadium that was packed, but not uncomfortable (I've seen it busier on random weekend nights).

After a couple drinks there, I decided to take a lap around the stadium before the sun went down to get a real glimpse of the atmosphere. As I walked out past right field on Sheffield I could feel the crowd noise crescendo. Something was starting to go the Cubs' way. As I reached Waveland there was a crowd of about a hundred or so that had formed in the front yard of an apartment complex in which someone had put a tiny TV in the window for passers by to watch the game. Everybody was staring at it intensely, including a dozen or so cops. It was the fifth inning (if I remember correctly) and Chicago had the bases loaded. The tension was building. With the bleachers to my back, I could feel it. Something needed to happen now.

But sure enough, as they had four times that game, Chicago quickly hit into a double play that ended the inning and pretty much squashed any momentum the Cubs had going their way. Silent and dejected, the crowd of onlookers turned and walked away. You could tell by the looks on their faces that was the final blow; next year was already on their minds.

I'd cozied up at another bar a couple blocks south of the stadium to watch the end of the game, and as each fruitless inning passed, the dispirited mob of fans leaving the friendly confines grew larger and larger. As I looked out at them I was glad that I'd not invested my entire life into being a fan of this team and that I could walk away from a defeat like this virtually unaffected.

It was beautiful fall Saturday evening, and there was a night of potential fun ahead of all of us, but nobody looked like they wanted a part of it. It was like they just left the funeral of a lost loved one, and wanted to do nothing but go home and try to forget about it.

2007-10-08T22:51:00.000-07:00

Once again, I've taken a nearly month long hiatus with this beast. Sorry. I've been working on a handful of other projects that have been taking up much of my free writing time. They've involved a movie script and features on Regina Spektor, Pinback, and Chicago rock critics Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot (hopefully coming soon).

As stated before, college football season has greatly cut into productivity. But now that the Hawkeyes are back to sucking, I can go without the hour I spent each day perusing the sports sections of every major Iowa newspaper for any Hawk-related story I can find.

Plus, for whatever reason, not much out of the ordinary has happened lately worth chronicling. Don't exactly know why. I guess it's because I'm starting to really settle into the city and am less apt to get lost, have awkward moments while lost or stumble across something I've never seen before that I think is really cool (which is the bulk of the content for this project).

But I went on another epic journey into Hyde Park Sunday night, and while it was largely uneventful (except for laying on the beach at sunset and gazing in sadness at the vintage brownstones in Bronzeville that have turned into slums), I had a strange and somewhat unsettling experience that I can't get out of my head.

At dusk I was walking back across the front entrance of the Museum of Science and Industry and two younger black kids were by its steps. One was sitting on the steps fiddling with something and the other was standing in front of him with his shirt pulled up around his face so nobody could see it.

As I approached, I was thinking to myself that something potentially awkward was likely going to happen. I didn't think that I was going to get jumped or anything, but I figured one of them would say something to me. Whenever kids are in isolated situations with no adults they know around, they're usually likely do something absurd or outrageous (which is exactly how my friends and I operated when we were the same age).

Sure enough, as I walked past, one of them grabbed some sort of elongated object that looked like a hair curler, stuck it by its crotch and began to make masturbatory motions with it as he walked with my down the sidewalk. After about 15 seconds of doing this silently (with his face still covered) he says: "Do you think I'm n#gger cause I'm doing this?"

I thought to myself 'Wow, slow down little man,' and replied with something safe like "uh, no, not at all."

"Are you somebody who hates n#ggers?"

"No, man. I'm just a guy out for a walk."

He continued to walk with me for a couple of feet, then told me in an innocent tone that he'd leave me alone cause I was a cool guy.

As I walked off I wondered to myself what would prompt a kid, no older than 14, to ask me such a thing. Do the majority of white people he runs into call him a n#gger? Does he think that the majority of white people consider him a n#gger when they walk by him? Was he just fucking with me in hopes that I'd say something stupid in reply?

Since I couldn't see his face, I couldn't really tell. But either way, I think it shows something that's pretty sad about life on the South Side, and even society in general. Kids are supposed goad older people with fart jokes and juvenile pranks, not ask them flat out if they think they're n#ggers. That's a little too heavy.

2007-09-15T22:38:00.000-07:00

I admittedly don't have another performance to compare it to, but I have to imagine that Wilco's show on Wednesday, Sept. 12 at the Pritzker Pavilion will go down as one of their most charming shows, if not one of their flat-out best ever.

As lead singer Jeff Tweedy gushed on stage after the first couple songs, it was perfect. The weather. The Crowd. The overall atmosphere. There isn't a better place in the city — and there may only be a couple more places in the country — to see an intimate outdoor concert than Millennium Park. The acoustics for the venue are world class (it sounded like the band was playing in your living room, and it should, considering how much money the city spent on the place), the views, of both the large stage and skyline behind it, are spectacular. And, unlike indoor rock clubs, you weren't uncomfortably cramped in on top of one another and inhaling unhealthy amounts of second hand smoke.

Apparently Tweedy and Co. have wanted to play this venue for some time now, and it showed in their enthusiasm. At times it seemed like Tweedy were a giddy child getting to play in his dream playground for the first time. Rarely is a musician's excitement to be playing a particular show so palpable (especially from and independent artist).

The band ripped through an epic set that included a lot of material off Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and recently-released Sky Blue Sky. Surprisingly missing were my two favorite songs off the album in-between those two releases, A Ghost is Born's Theologians and I'm a Wheel.

They also dipped heavily into Summer Teeth and a lot of their early material, of which I'm not overly familiar with.

Part of the reason I'm not overly familiar with that material is that I've always found straight forward alt country pretty dull, Wilco included. I've really tried getting into Being There and A.M., but I always end up just falling back on Yankee Hotel and select tracks from the other three albums they've put out since 1999.

That said, I was much more impressed by the early material live than I was with it on record. Live the material comes off more like assertive rock than the softer, watered-down way it comes off on record. The sound was bigger, the tempo was faster and the music just seemed to have more kick.

The tracks they played from Yankee Hotel were as mesmerizing as they are on record. With two different musicians working keyboards and synths, they were able to recreate the haunting sonic experimentation of the album (thought I bet much of that had to do with the acoustics as well — in any other outdoor venue much of that sound would likely have been lost).

Perhaps what was the most amazing aspect of the show were the three encores and 2.5 hours they spent on stage, which was by far the longest I've ever see a single band play. At one point Tweedy even asked the crowd, "Are you still with us?"

Nobody was going anywhere.

After a final encore that included "Casino Queen" and "Outtasite (Outta Mind)," Tweedy, with the same boyish excitability he'd been playing with all night, ran up to the front of the stage to grab his two sons, and as he jogged back across the stage with one of them in tow, tripped over some cords and both crashed to the floor pretty violently. But he quickly bounced back up and waved and smiled to the crowd (and probably his wife) to let them know they were all right.

With the adrenaline of putting on such a great show surely rushing through him, it would have taken more than a spill on stage to wipe the grin off his face.

Of course, as we all left and were done gushing about the awesomeness we'd just experienced, the conversation drifted to why there aren't more shows like this at the Pritzker, which is traditionally used for choral, jazz and orchestra performances. Wilco was only the fourth rock act to play the stage since it was built in 2004.

It doesn't really make sense that there aren't at least a couple decent mainstream rock shows that play there once or twice a month in the spring summer and fall. Sure, 11,000 people may not pay to see a hometown act like Wilco (The Decemberists brought more people, but again, it was free), but even if 5-7,000 showed it would be worth it, as I can imagine the city's still trying to pay the development off (it went hundreds of millions of dollars over budget). Bands like the Arcade Fire, My Morning Jacket, The Flaming Lips, TV on the Radio and Spoon would be perfect to see at a venue like that. They'd appeal to a wide age group, and it's not likely those bands or their fans would cause any serious damage to the pristine venue.

Is any of the park staff listening?

2007-09-13T21:22:00.000-07:00

I don’t know if it was all the movies that have been made about ten year high school reunions or the childhood memories of my father and stepmother talking about them as though they were some sort of social milestone, but I was expecting mine to be some sort of monumental thing.

All right, maybe monumental isn’t the right word. Maybe I was just looking for some sort of gratification. That on this date, ten years after high school, I could somehow gauge how much I’ve grown as a person by spending a weekend with the people I hung around with ten years ago. Cause, let’s be honest, that’s really why most people go to ten-year reunions; we want the people who knew us as awkward, insecure, pimple-faced adolescents to see how much we’ve grown up, changed, and turned into better people.

In our society today, right or wrong, ten-year reunions are sort of this litmus test as to whether or not a person you grew up with has become successful or not. I’m not saying this is fair or even correct, I’m just saying that’s the perception for a lot of people.

Cause let’s face it; odds are if you aren’t at least sort of your way to doing something productive by the time you’re 28, you’re not likely going to be, especially if you’re from small town Iowa. People in small town Iowa have usually chosen one of two paths by the time they’re ten years removed from high school; You have the people that have likely gone to college, found a job they like for the most part, have perhaps moved out of town, traveled a bit, some have gotten married and had kids, some have not, and they’re generally happy. Or you’ve got that people that didn’t get any education after high school, and in turn taken a job they don’t really like out of necessity, they’ve probably knocked up or got knocked up by someone before marriage, and in turn bought a house and car they probably can’t afford, they work so much to pay for the house/kid/car that they barely even get to spend any time with their family, and are generally unhappy about the whole scenario.

Those are the two camps of people have you have in Southwest Iowa. And I noticed people from the latter group usually do not attend high school reunions. I’m not sure why this is actually. It’s either because they genuinely don’t give a shit, or they’re aware of the fact they’re not happy, and they realize they’re lives are a mess and they don’t want the other people in their class who are perhaps more content judging them on it. (That also kind of goes back to the whole reason people hated high school in the first place, the fact that you’re being judged by your peers).

Basically it comes down to a security issue; People who are generally more secure in the contentment of their lives are more apt to attend a reunion than people who aren’t.

Needless to say, my reunion provided me with none of this aforementioned gratification. It was all pretty anticlimactic, really. Most everybody that showed had pretty much turned into the people I imagined they’d turn into ten years ago. For the most part, the guys I played sports with were either married with children and stopped having a social life, or obnoxious drunks working construction jobs. The bookish girls I worked with in newspaper and yearbook had good jobs, good boyfriends/husbands, a job in their field of study, and were generally happy.

The outcasts were still outcasts, though a couple had grown into pretty interesting people (which is usually the case; see almost every artist/actor/musician).

And of course, the attractive/cool girls that ignored me in high school still ignored me.

Nobody in our class (at least that showed) had gotten rich or famous. None of us had come even remotely close.

I suppose looking back on it we were a pretty predictable bunch.

The turnout was pretty low as well. Only about 50 people out of our class of 270 came. There were lots of people I was really hoping to see that were no-shows (mostly the guys I played sports with).

This, of course, was one of the most disappointing things of the whole weekend. I went truly hoping that I’d be able to get drunk one more time with a bunch of the guys I used to romp with back in the day.

There was never really that, “wow, so and so has really changed!” moment. In some respects, in an albeit vein way, I’d kinda hoped some of those comments would come my way. I’d changed quite a bit from my days as sort of an oafish, naive jock who had a very poor sense of style, did poorly with the girls and cared more about lifting weights than reading. Something I’m not necessarily ashamed of, but something I nonetheless wanted people to see that I wasn’t anymore.

That moment never really came. I got some compliments (and of course, I gave out lots of compliments — most everybody that I saw seemed to be doing fairly well for themselves). But there wasn’t that glorifying Hollywood moment were one of the super hot girls from my grade came up to me and was like, “Damn, Jeremy, you look great! And you seem so cultured and engaging! I’m filled with ache and regret that I blew you off in high school and now you’ve grown on to bigger and better things and I don’t have a chance with you anymore!”

But who the fuck am I kidding? It’s always that bullshit overly romanticized version of the way I think things should be that ruins moments like these for me.

Personally, I had really only two simple goals to accomplish at this point in my life: to be making a living off writing and to not be living in the Council Bluffs Omaha area.

Check on both.

(It should be noted that I have a firm understanding of the fact that these two accomplishments aren’t necessarily earth-shattering successes; I’m not trying to make it sound like I’m some rags-to-riches story by any means. I’m just saying that I accomplished the two very meager things I’d hoped to accomplish by this point in my life. Also, by making getting out of the C.B./Omaha area a goal in life does not mean I’m an effete snob that thinks still living back there would make me a loser. I just think it’s fairly important to me to try to experience as many new things in my life as possible, and making some place else my home for a while is a big part of that. I loved my time in Omaha and love my friends and family that still live there.)

Part of me had wished that some of my former teachers and coaches were there, too. That’s where the ultimate gratification would have come in; if my old football coach or journalism instructor would have been there to tell me that they were proud of what I had become.

Again, who the fuck and I kidding? Coach Wahl, last I heard, is in the midst of an epic mid-life crisis, and Mrs. Smoley probably doesn’t even remember me.

I suppose, all in all, it was a positive experience. I realized that, for the most part, the folks I cared about (those who showed and who didn’t) were doing pretty well. That thankfully, not many of us had passed (though the one most recent death was utterly tragic), that only one of us had been known to be charged with a felony (white collar crime, and it looks like he’s getting off on it) and that everybody seemed to be happy enough.

That got me to thinking. You know, they give all those ambitious, grandiose speeches at high school graduations in which we’re told that that the sky’s the limit, that we should shoot for the stars, and the world’s ours if we want it. Really, I think they should lower the bar on such speeches, or at least make them more realistic. The world’s a tough place. The majority of the people you graduate likely won’t become anything exceptional. The ones that do go out and get an education, and maybe land a great job, are still probably pretty insignificant. Almost none of us are going to change the world in any tangible way. But we can strive to simply be content with our lives, no matter how average or simple they may be.

Being around a group of people I sat through those ridiculous speeches ten years ago with, I realized that’s all that really mattered.

2007-09-04T23:24:00.000-07:00

On any given fall Saturday in Chicago I'm taken aback by the number of Hawkeye-clad football fans. To be honest with you, I sometimes wish it wasn't that way. That just means that it's impossible to watch a game comfortably at a bar with other Hawk fans. And I'm all for Iowa pride, but when you see some douchebag 22-year-old running around Lincoln Park drunk, screaming, hollering and acting like a hick fool with a backwards Kinnick hat on, you kinda wish you weren't wearing the Black and Gold, just for the simple fact that you don't want to be associated with such tomfoolery. (It's cool in Iowa City and at any away game, but when you're acting like you're at the game but you're not even in the town the game's being played, you look kind pretty stupid).

ANYWAY, the Hawks were in town playing Northern Illinois at Soldier Field, and the number of Hawk fans running around the streets of Chicago increased nearly ten fold. They were everywhere; walking on Michigan Ave. when I got off work, walking around Wrigleyville during the Cubs game Friday. If you were in the South Loop on Saturday, you would have had to pinch yourself to be reminded that you weren't in Iowa City.

It was surreal. And it was awesome. I tell you, if football games were decided by their fans' desire for them to win, or at least their showing up in droves, I don't know if the Hawks should ever lose a football game. This particular showdown was in a town hundreds of miles away from the University, Iowa was playing an Mid-American Conference foe, they were coming off a losing season and were no where near the Top 25, yet, by judging by the enthusiasm of the fans (and their drunkeness) you'd have thought they were playing in the Rose Bowl. It was a very unique experience; something they should do every couple of years or so, be it Northern Illinois, Illinois State or even Northwestern. (Shit, if Northwestern were to play in Soldier, it might actually feel like you're at a real college football game and not a really well attended high school one — thought 95 percent of the fans would be rooting for whichever Big Ten opponent they were playing).

The game was a blast. My dad and I somehow managed to score box suites, which are the way to go if you want to spend a hundred extra bucks. Why? Great views, air conditioning, and bottles of Stoli. You didn't lose anything in sound, despite being enclosed by windows (you could wind them open quite a bit.)

Some called the new Soldier the Mistake by the Lake, but as ugly as it looks from the outside, the views from inside are pretty stellar. There's not a bad seat in the house. And the concourse and passageways retained a vintage NFL stadium-like quality to them, despite being completely renovated. Not to mention when you leave the stadium, you're either viewing a harbor on Lake Michigan, the massive McCormick Center, The Field Museum or a spectacular angle view of the skyline. The entire stadium in surrounded by rolling knolls of lush green grass and well paved sidewalks. My dad, who's only been to Chicago a handful of times, was visibly taken aback by the experience.

There might not be a more beautiful place to go to and from a football game in the country.

Well, except Kinnick Stadium.

2007-09-04T17:45:00.000-07:00

Go figure. All the effort I put into trying to make these posts as insightful/cerebral/touching as I possibly can, the one that gets the most response is the one in which I'm admitting that I'm not trying to be insightful/cerebral/touching at all. Maybe I should go back to being a sportswriter.

(There were only three posts following the last entry, which is a pretty sad number to get excited over, not to mention two of them were from the same person. Refer to the going back to being a sportswriter line.)

Ah, but fuck it. This just proves that I'm not alone! College football brings most grown men to their knees, now matter how "intellectual" they try to convince themselves they are

Ahhhh, I love it!

To answer Duke...No, I don't have any credit cards you can borrow. And even if I did let you "borrow" them, the most the balance on them would allow you buy would be two tacos and mega mug at the Caddyshack. However, I would like to get my hands on one of those Dale Earnhardt jackets. You see those Facebook pictures with Arvell Nelson wearing one? What, is NASCAR apparel en vogue with thug fashion these days? Good god. Shit's come full circle. Next they'll be wearing Carhartt. Oh, wait...

RE: 7-5. Eric, where's your faith?

There's no such thing as a "guaranteed" win in college football, but there is such a thing as winning games you're supposed to, and I think there's 8-10 of those games on this schedule. The Big Ten is down this year (Michigan made that glaringly obvious), and while everybody is tabbing OSU and Wisc. as the No. 2-3 teams, I'm not sold. OSU loses lots on both sides of the ball, and Wisconsin didn't play anybody except an overrated Arkansas late in the season last year. Bielema is good, but he's not that good yet. That team will hit some road bumps this year, I guarantee it. Winning in the Big Ten isn't suppose to look that easy. And if you guys claim to know anything about Iowa football, you know we play historically well against Wisconsin both at home and away (except when Ron Dane is about to break an NCAA record).

This team will win no fewer than eight games, and could win as many, if not more, than 10. If they play tough and smart (like they haven't the last two years), they'll beat Indiana (tough for them to regroup after their coach's death) and Northwestern (these piss ants' two-year run is up). If Zook couldn't win with talent at Florida, how the hell is he going to do it at Illinois? With new head coaches, Minnesota and Michigan State are a couple years away from being formidable. I'm not even sure Minn's new coach knows who Floyd of Rosedale is. Purdue doesn't have shit coming back, and it's beginning to look like Joe Tiller is slowing getting as goofy as Lee Corso.

Penn State in Happy Valley could be the biggest struggle of the year.

And does anybody remember what happened the last time we played Western Michigan? Look it up. I'd back off the "guaranteed" talk around that one.

As for ISU, they could lose by 50 points to TJ and still find a way to give the Hawks a fit. I hate to admit it, but it's true.

I've been playing the old PS2 version of NCAA. Yeah, it never really changes. But then again, it never really needs to change as long as dipshits like us still dole out $50 for the new version ever year regardless.

2007-08-29T22:12:00.000-07:00

It's always difficult for me to focus on intellectual things this time of year. Why? Because it's college football season.

There's perhaps nothing else in this world that reverts me back to my unsophisticated 18-year-old ways with more ease than college football. Tonight I sat around my apartment watching ESPN's 24-hour countdown to the season's kickoff (yeah, that's right, a day-long pregame show...only on ESPN) on the big TV while playing NCAA College Football on the Playstation 2 I rigged up to the tiny auxiliary set.

That's a move taken straight out of the play book from my sophomore year of college. Pretty pathetic for a 28-year-old.

I've spent most of my days this week reading every story related to Iowa Hawkeye football I could find on the internet, all while also listening to all the Hawk-related podcasts I could find (I found only two on itunes, and they're both pretty amateurish, but I'm so starved for commentary at this point I'd probably still listen if it were a couple of 12-year-olds discussing how sweet it is that Iowa wears Nike uniforms.)

The fact that I get to take the Red Line to an Iowa game this year has made me almost catatonic with excitement. I'm so pumped for this Saturday's game at Soldier Field I don't want to do anything from now until then for fear that something tragic will happen that will prevent me from being able to attend it. Like getting hit by a car, shot in the leg or being abducted and tortured by fans from opposing Big Ten schools (or worse, Nebraska fans).

So forgive me if this blog is a little less cerebral, or even sparsely updated over the next couple weeks.

I'm busy being a jock again.

2007-08-21T22:58:00.000-07:00

I made a remark to a friend the other day that I'd been thinking it was just a matter of time before a panhandler/bum hauled off and punched me after I denied their pleas for me to give them money. I've become pretty immune to the whole phenomena and at times can come off as downright rude. On my way to work downtown, I'm approached by at least three — sometimes as many as a half dozen — panhandlers on Chicago and Michigan Aves. It gets old. I merely walk past them as though they don't exist anymore. There's a tinge of guilt every time I do it, but I just can't deal with them anymore. If you give these people a second, or even a glance of acknowledgment, they'll beg you all the way down the block.

This evening after work, however, I'm walking by the McDonald's on Chicago Ave. minding my own business and I hear a man screaming quite loudly behind me. He's yelling about how he wants to kick somebody's ass or something. I turn back (he's about 10 feet behind me) to see what the fuss is all about. As I do this we both make eye contact.

"Whatch you looking at Superman? You want some?" He hollers after I had turned my head forward. I can't see who he's looking at, but I'm positive he's talking to me.

He speeds up behind me.

"You want some motherfucker! I'll kick your fucking ass motherfucker!" He screams as hordes of people (tourists, 9-5ers, other bums) are walking to and fro.

He comes even closer, to the point to where he's screaming a foot away from my face. I continue to look forward, and am surprised that nobody I walk past pays even a slight amount of attention to what's happening.

Finally I turned to him.

"Leave me the fuck alone, man," I say lightly.

"Oh, you want some? You want some?" My acknowledgment only seemed to aggravate him more, so I continued to look forward.

As I do this I can see, from the corner of my eye, him lift his left arm like he's going to punch me in the face. This makes me pretty nervous. I could feel my heart start pumping quite a bit faster and I was overcome with that numbing rush of adrenaline you get when somebody tries to pick a fight with you.

I'm started thinking of what I should do if he does take a swing at me.

I could either a) punch him right back, b) grab him by the throat and drag him to the ground, c) push him into Chicago Ave., d) keep walking like nothing happened, or e) stop what I'm doing and holler for somebody to find a cop to arrest him.

After a couple more feet of him screaming obscenities in my face, I turn right down another street and he keeps walking ahead. And screaming. I can hear him yammering after walking a good 50 yards away from him.

As I made my way towards my bike I began to calm down and think about how fucked up that situation could have gotten.

It was one of those moments where you're brought up right to a line of tolerability and you're not sure if you want to cross it, because you have no idea how the other person will respond. Deep down, the whole time, I wanted to tell the guy to fuck off and shove him away from me, but this would have only angered him more, and who knew if he had a knife, or a gun, or was loaded with so much crack that he could have unleashed a Tyson-esque flurry of jabs on me before I even knew what happened.

So here's a lesson to all you other urban dwellers out there: If some random stranger ever fucks with you on the street, the best way to get them to leave you alone is to ignore them.

2007-08-20T22:35:00.000-07:00

Been fairly busy with work-related writings lately, and the last couple weeks have been fairly unspectacular. It's either been really hot and muggy outside, or rainy and muggy. Making any outdoor activity pretty un-enjoyable.

A couple interesting things happened, though, I suppose.

The Cubs, with their taking of this recent series with the Cardinals, took the lead in the NL Central. Honestly, I don't really give a damn about baseball. Haven't since I was in grade school. But I can't help but get a little excited about it this time of year in Chicago.

Sure, it was great when the Bears made the Super Bowl, but if the Cubs make the post-season, I think it'll have more of an effect on this city. The thing about the Super Bowl that sucked was that the weather was terrible. It was so cold that weekend that nobody could bear to spend more than two minutes outside. So unless you lucked out and got a table at a bar, you were literally left out in the cold. (Of course, it didn't help that they laid an egg during the game and ruined the tenor of whole evening. I suppose if they had won the streets of Chicago would have been overrun with fat, shirtless men despite the subzero temps.)

If the Cubs make the post-season, the coldest it's likely to get is in the 40s, which isn't enough to prevent even marginal fans like myself from making their way up to Wrigleyville during possible elimination games. The simple fact that there'll be actual series' instead of just 1-2 playoff games also means a Cubs push will likely have a stronger effect on the city than the Super Bowl. If they were to actually make the World Series, that would mean they could play upwards of five games at the Wrig. Each of them would bring borderline hysteria to any bar within 5 miles of the neighborhood. That's a hysteria I'd love to be a part of.

Also, saw one of the funniest/most random things I've seen on a Chicago street thus far. I'm crossing Division at Division and Ashland and there's this younger black woman (early 20s probably) is yapping away on her cell phone as she crosses the street about five feet in front of me. Walking the other direction is a haggard-looking older black man who's wearing that general look of irritation most homeless people have. Just as he approaches the girl on the phone in leans into her and screams angrily in her face, "I AIN'T GOT NO PHONE, BITCH!"

She turned to me as he passed; "Oh no he didn't!" She said.

"Yeah he did," I said shaking my head and chuckling.

(I feel compelled to mentioned that just before this happened another bum whipped his junk out next to the magazine stands by the vacant Pizza Hut at the intersection and started pissing away. Streams of people walked past as he did this [it was about 9p on a Friday]. Nobody broke stride or even paid an ounce of attention to him.)

2007-08-15T00:14:00.000-07:00

The other thing that frustrates me about the Pitchfork/Lolla comparison is the people that attend both, and how much they enjoy, or at least act like they enjoy, the show. The people that go to Pitchfork are people that read the stie regularly and listen to the music that’s discussed on the site (predominately under-the-radar indie rock). You don’t necessarily get the casual fan at Pitchfork. Which means you get a lot of very hip, perhaps overly self-conscious people who are at times a tad too jaded, and/or have too high of expectations for what a good musical performance is or isn’t. Therefore, they often times don’t look like they’re enjoying themselves at a concert at all. They just sort of stand there and look at the bands. I’m not gonna make some broad sweeping statement that the people that attend Pitchfork assume they’re hipper-than-thou because they know about bands that other people might know of (which is often what they are described as). In some of my friends’ eyes, I am one of these people. And I admit I often stand at concerts with my arms folded at my chest, probably looking bored out of my mind. I understand that people who really love music, and spend a great deal of time reading about, listening to and exploring new music, are likely to have high expectations for that music. And perhaps are more apt to be disappointed or at least not have their expectations met as easy as somebody who doesn’t. I too think about music in perhaps an overly critical way, and perhaps I don’t always have the ability to truly relax, let go, and enjoy myself at a concert. I get people who are like that. I really do.

But as a human being who also likes to have fun around other people, I must say that the crowd at Lollaplooza — while loaded with ex-frat boys, chatty, oft-annoying sorority girls, 35-year-old investment bankers and dudes that were only there to see Pearl Jam — as more enjoyable to spend three days with. Why? Because they allowed themselves to enjoy themselves. And they didn’t give a goddamn about the music snobs who sneered whenever they got bumped into. From my vantage point, the people that were really enjoying themselves at Lolla were some of the least cool-looking people there.

While discussing this phenomena with a friend, he pointed out to my why this is true. Many of the people at Lollapalooza had never even or heard of the bands they were viewing before. Bands such as LCD Soundsystem. They just stumbled across them while wandering about aimlessly, liked what they heard, and started dancing. They weren’t analyzing anything. They weren’t comparing the set they were currently seeing to the five previous ones from the same band. They weren’t thinking to myself, “Man, I wish I saw these guys after their first album came out,” or “man, these guys were so much better at the Empty Bottle five years ago.” They’re instincts were more primal; they liked what they heard and they reacted to it. That simple. I think there’s a certain beauty in that.

The conclusion I came to somewhere during the festival was this; it’s more fun to be at a concert with a person that knows very little about music who’s enjoying himself than to be at a concert with an overly critical hipster who’s not.

2007-08-13T23:33:00.001-07:00

Lollapalooza, in a microcosm, perhaps represents the state of the music industry as it is today. For the most part, the music’s good. There are acts as creative as American music has ever been (bands like Spoon, TV on the Radio, My Morning Jacket, Modest Mouse). But everything’s commercial. Almost all bands, even the groundbreaking ones like Wilco, are used to sell products. It’s the reality of our existence today. Even the most original/creative/critically acclaimed acts sell out to some extent. But the is, this influx of commercialism hasn’t necessarily effected the music. Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky has gotten lots of rave reviews. Modest Mouse, a band that is in many way the archetypal indie rock band, released its third major label album this spring, and some are saying it’s their best work yet (though some, like myself, strongly disagree).

So here we have this Lollapalooza thing. There are advertisements everywhere (each stage has its own corporate sponsor). Tickets were pretty pricey at $195 (though, if you break it down by band, you wind up spending a couple hundreds bucks less than you would seeing them individually.) The “Cabanas,” or luxury suites, were a little over the top, but set off to the side of each main stage, they were far from imposing. At $5 a pop, beers were more than what you’d pay at most Chicago pubs, but pretty much on par with other street festivals and similar outdoor concerts.

But the music, teeming with some of the most brilliant music being made today; acts such as LCD Soundsystem, The Roots, Kings of Leon, Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, Lupe Fiasco, the Black Keys — the music is as good as it’s ever been since I’ve been alive.

This festival gets a lot of shit from critics because of its corporate appeal, its expensive ticket price, its cabana hierarchy. But if you’re really there for the music, which is all that should really matter with a music festival, it’s a more than enjoyable experience. I spent upwards of 24 hours in three days at the thing, and left only wanting another day.

Reading the critics response (most annoyingly, Jim DeRogatis’), you’re led to believe that these advertisements were inescapable and that the rich Cabana-loungers flicked their cigar ashes on us proles down in the grass with pretentious glee. That wasn’t so much the case; I spent quite a bit of time looking up at those Cabanas and wondering what type of people it is that pay thousands of dollars for such a ridiculous idea, and honestly, it seemed that they were bought mostly by record industry or marketing companies associated with the fest that let their employees enjoy for a couple hours a day. The people in these cabanas weren’t the type of greaseballs in Italian suits I walk by at Rush and Division on my way home from work.

The thing is, I don’t like commercialism anymore than anybody else does. And I bet Perry Farrell still being affiliated with this behemoth has just as much to do with money as it does his love of music. But the bottom line is, as long as neither of those two things are actually affecting the way the music sounds, I don’t really give a damn. The stages could have been completely covered in AT&T ads, and if TV on the Radio still sounded like TV on the Radio, it wouldn’t have bothered me a bit. (In reality that ads on the stages were maybe five ft. by five ft. in size, and were barely noticeable.) Perry Farrell can talk as much about how he thinks this is the greatest show on earth, and that would should all be free of mind and eco-conscious (despite the fact we’re trashing a park and everything in the fest is sponsored), but as long as he gets off stage in time for Jim James to perform, I don’t care.

Without the corporate sponsorship (and even the expensive cabanas) the festival would have been even more expensive. Without that corporate sponsorship, they probably couldn’t have afforded Pearl Jam (and all of Eddie Vedder’s anti-corporate banter).

I realize, that as much as I may not like it, that the record industry has changed, and as expensive as it is to do things like put on a concert or a festival this size, corporate sponsorship is a necessity.

The indictment here shouldn’t be on the shoulders of festival organizers. Really, it should be on the concert promoters themselves. Do the math; To see just my seven of my favorite acts of the weekend independently would have cost me more than one ticket to Lollapalooza.

In Chicago, at least, Lolla is compared with it’s indie rival, the Pitchfork Music Festival, which takes place three weeks previous at Union Park west of downtown. Pitchfork is great. I love the indie ethos. I like the fact that three-day tickets are less than $50. I like the all-local vending. And, for the most part, I love the music. De La Soul, Mastodon, The Sea and Cake and Of Montreal were great. You want to root for the local guy, you wanna support the DIY ethic of Pitchfork. But if you asked for my honest opinion at which one I enjoyed myself more, I’d have to say Lollapalooza; even for the extra $150. Because the seven best bands at Lolla were better, in my opinion, than the seven best bands at Pitchfork.

Again, it’s all about the music.

Some lolla highlights

2007-08-08T14:35:00.000-07:00

Sorry it's been a while since I've posted anything. The weekend of Lolla I was busy being at the festival, hosting guests and staying out waaay too late. And I'm starting to get more freelance gigs that actually pay, so the blog gets neglected. I've got a couple lengthy takes on the palooza, and this is the first:

HIGHLIGHTS

The Rapture: Such a fun band. Critically doesn’t get the respect they deserve considering the number of bands out there they do what they do, but worse, and seem to get as much if not more attention for it. Not an ounce of pretentiousness: these guys just wanted to get people to dance, which they kind of did (at 3 p.m. it was a little too early in the day for dancing).

My Morning Jacket: One of the few band’s that’s given me goose bumps every time I’ve seen them play. I’m not sure any man in mainstream music has a voice like Jim James’. It’s captivating. Part of the reason it’s so isn’t just because it sounds great, but because you can really feel the emotion he performs with through it. He just gets up there and opens up those pipes as hard as he can. It’s amazing. They brought on the Chicago children’s orchestra to play the second half of the set, which I thought was pretty neat. Ending with a cover of Chicagoan Cutis Mayfield’s “Move on Up” was the perfect touch.

I also had the joy of catching James perform a short solo set at the kid’s stage. He performed Kermit the Frog's "The Rainbow Connect" and the Chipmunk’s Christmas song and as far as I could tell, without a single hint of irony. It might have been the most touching moment of the whole festival.

Kings of Leon: Very workmanlike site. These Southern studs just play their material as it sounds on record, and they play it well. There’s no fucking around, no banter, no jamming. If you like this band’s records, you’ll love them live. If you’re expecting frills, then look somewhere else. Eddie Vedder did come on stage for closer “Slow Nights, So Long” and bang the shit out of some tambourines.

TV on the Radio: These guys were gypped by a short set that was made even shorter because of the MMJ-Mayfield finale. But for 40 minutes I couldn’t keep my eye off them. They actually played about as much material off Desperate Youth/Bloodthirsty Babes as they did off Return to Cookie Mountain, which was a surprise, but not a disappointment. They reinvent their material so much live I felt like I was hearing new songs. They’re much more aggressive and up-tempo live than on record, which only makes the songs more riveting.

Peter Bjorn and John: This set was delayed about a half hour because of sound issueds, but once they got started things went fairly well. They didn’t sound as bombastic as I’d heard they were supposed to live (the played a down-tempo, acoustic version of “Amsterdam,” which I thought was dull), but this summer’s ubiquitous hit, “Young Folks,” was tight, as was “Objects of My Obsession,” which they performed with the most potency of any song during the set.

LCD Soundsystem: Probably the best act of the whole festival. It’s not so much that these guys do anything extraordinary on stage (frontman James Murphy pretty much stood at the mic the whole set). It’s that they do their thing so well, and what they do is so much fun. The sun was just setting on the first day of the festival, and the crowd, which was facing the orange tinged skyline, was dancing its brains out towards the end of their gig, especially when they performed “All My Friends.” I gotta see these guys next time they come to town, as they’re likely twice a good in club setting.

Interpol: It was towards the end of Saturday night and I was getting drunk and trying to plan a party for afterwards, so my attention was a little diverted. But there was nothing disappointing about this set. The songs were crisp and tight; these guys have put out quite a bit of solid material in just under five years, plenty to fill and hour and a half set with songs you know and like. They’re been-doing-blow-by-ourselves-all-night-and-we-hate-ourselves-for-it attitude transfers over to the live show well. The band looked as unhappy up there in their black suits as they sound on record.

Daft Punk: Rumors are swirling that the real two members of Daft Punk haven’t actually been some of their recent live shows. But who cares? The joy of this set wasn’t the people pushing the buttons, it was the atmosphere that was created. The light show, which progressed from Atari-like graphics to a full blown digital spectacle, was pretty cool. But you really didn’t even need to be looking at the stage to enjoy this show; just walking around the park downtown at night with hits like “Around the World,” and “One More Time” playing loudly was enthralling enough.

Spoon: I was pretty disappointed with the two previous Spoon shows I'd attended, but Britt and the gang brought their lunch pales this time around. I’d never before seen them put so much raw energy into a show. They’re not the most animated characters on stage, nor do they stray away from their album sound (which was kind of why they were dull before) but they did it with so much precision and fire this time around that I couldn’t help but sing along with them. You perhaps don’t realize that these guys have really not made a bad album — or even a bad song for that matter — until you hear them perform bits and pieces of their entire catalogue slive. The only thing disappointing from this set was the number of songs of their I love that they didn’t play, especially off the new album. I could have stood there and listened to them for another hour and the smile on my face would have gone nowhere.

Pearl Jam: I haven’t really gotten into anything this band has done since Vrs. came out, which seems like a lifetime ago. When I was 15 and 16, that and Ten were two of my favorite albums. I’d kind of grown out of the band over the last decade (unlike the majority of their fanbase, which still reveres them with God-like status even though its been years since they made anything that was as good as those first two records). That said, they are the perfect band to headline a festival like Lollapalooza. Their sound is big and anthemic, and after a decade of playing arena shows, they know what they’re doing. Hometown boy Vedder’s banter was genuine. He talked of how great it felt to be playing in the downtown of a city he used to walk around with his headphones on as a teenager. And how Chicagoans should boycott British Petroleum, who just last week announced they’re going to begin dumping more toxic waste into Lake Michigan, despite the fact that over the last 20 years much progress has been made in cleaning the blue cess pool up. And of course there was the anti Bush talk, which is just as much a cliché these days as it is profound, but at least it got lots of cheers.

Pitchfork story I mentioned earlier

2007-08-01T19:47:00.000-07:00

Here's the link.

2007-07-26T23:17:00.000-07:00

Made a quick stop in Iowa City for a night last weekend. I have to say it was the most refreshing trip out of Chicago I think I’ve made thus far. Could’ve had a lot to do with the lovely weather (it was about 78 degrees last weekend), and Iowa being a much more lush and bright state in July than it is in April, when I was there last.

The minute we crossed the border from Illinois, Nick, who was driving, got to going about how much he loved Iowa.

“You can literally tell the difference between Iowa and Illinois crossing the river,” he said. “It’s so much more beautiful over here. Everything’s alive. The hills are rolling. It’s just … more comfortable. I miss it.”

I agreed with him. I missed my home state on this day. It all looked … like home. I felt like I belonged. I wanted to pull the car over and just lie on my back in the grass and look at the big sky.

Of course, I pointed it out to Nick that we held the state with such reverence because we were no longer living there. It’s easy, especially in the summer, and when you currently reside in a bustling city, to look back at the small place your spent your simple college days and long for them. The truth is, we were both absolutely ready to leave Iowa City when we did. I didn’t want to spend another month there back in the summer of 2001. We looked back on it with romanticism, but if we were still back in Iowa City we’d be bitching about how we’d rather be living in Chicago.

The grass is always greener.

He agreed. Neither of us wanted to be spending our weekends hopping from Jake’s, The Brothers and Joe’s in our late twenties anymore. Chicago was home, and deep down we knew this.

But once we got there, there were moments that you truly missed the simple life. I’d walk by houses with a heavily wooded yard that stretched acres, and quiet streets where the only noise is the lady across the street tending to the garden, where children played freely in the streets. It was all so peaceful. I was envious.

But I also had to take into account that the tranquility of Iowa City was part of the reason I had to leave the place. It’s just too easy to live there. There’s no struggle. No sense of reality. Iowa City is the closest thing to a utopia I’ve ever lived in, and I started to resent that over the years. Nothing bad ever happens there. The town is progressive and tolerant. Almost everybody’s got a college education. There’s little poverty (mostly just the students), and even less crime. And it’s almost exclusively white.

Obviously, this isn’t reality. As much as I love Iowa City, I feel much more inspired in Chicago. In Chicago you see real life everyday. You see minorities. You see poor people. Every day you come across a scene where you come to the realization of how imperfect a place the world is. The closest thing to an unsettling moment you get in Iowa City is a downtown fight between two meathead frat boys.

On some levels I understand why it’s such a great writer town, but in other respects I don’t. Sure, the rent is cheap, you don’t need a car, and there’s a great talent pool to associate yourself with. But there’s never any sort of struggle. It’s such a simple life. How could it ever be inspiring? It seems the only thing you’d be capable of writing in Iowa City is how beautiful the world is.

But maybe that’s just me.

I stayed with my buddy Tieg, who’s carved out a nice life for himself in the ten years he’s lived there. He took me to a dinner party with some friends of his in the historic part of town. It was a little different talking with Iowa City people as opposed to Chicago people. Everything was more laid-back. The children were playing carefree in the yard. The neighborhood was dead still. People were just relaxing. No worries. No time constraints. It was like the scene from a Norman Rockwell painting.

My life in the big city has sort of conditioned me to look at this lifestyle as overly simplistic. Or to think that what I was doing with my life had more depth and importance than what these people were doing, just because I lived in a metropolitan area. But as I sat on the porch of that crickety old home (that likely cost a fraction of what one just like it would cost in Chicago) I felt a little ping of yearning for that way of life again.

Sorry, this went a bit long

2007-07-25T21:17:00.000-07:00

Went to see the new Michael Moore movie last night, and I must say it was better than I thought it was going to be. He’d taken such a beating from conservatives and the media after Fahrenheit 9/11 that I wondered if he’d come back with something that was as vengeful and pointed towards the Bush Administration. Of if he’d tell a story that focused more on the issue and the little people it effects than the big people that screwed it up (usually in his mind, Bush et al). I hoped for the latter and received it, for the most part.

Sicko starts by putting its focus solely on the people; the poor Americans who either can’t afford their healthcare or have been denied it because “pre-existing conditions” by the big, often times too-concerned-with-profit health care providers. We hear from a guy who saws off parts of his fingers and had to choose between spending $12,000 to get one replaced, or $60,000 to get both replaced (he chooses the one for $12K). We also see an elderly couple (in their 60s, not quite geriatrics ward elderly) forced to moved into their daughter’s basement because health bills after ten years of heart attacks (three from him) and cancer (once for her) forced them to sell their homes. They’d both had solid jobs, with health care, but after all the deductibles accrued, things go so expensive they had to sell their house.

I feel slightly obligated to put in my personal health care situation for a little perspective that it might have been nice to be mentioned in the film (to my recollection, Moore never once mentions the independent HC plans that exist today). As a technically independent employee, I don’t get work provided HC, but I do have a PPO plan with a relatively affordable premium ($75 a month), yet with an annual deductible of around $3,000. If I were to get hit by a bus tomorrow, be rushed off to the ER and had rounds of surgeries, theoretically, everything after $3K and up to $5 million is covered. Which, obviously, could be a good deal. Paying just $3K a year medical for an accident as opposed to hundreds of thousands is obviously better. Still, though, that $3K year in deductibles I’d have to pay would put me in a tough spot.

What I’m trying to illustrate here is that health care is possible to get in this country. The popular trend these days is getting a PPO (preferred provider plan) coupled with a health savings account, which is basically an un-taxable savings account that can be used to saving money strictly for health care bills. The goal of an HSA is to save up now for health care deductibles you might need to cover down the road.

If you’re like me: a young, single, non-smoking male with no previous illness or disease and has no children, you can get some relatively affordable coverage for something catastrophic. Which is something anybody with a decent paying job that doesn’t offer a plan should probably get in the current state of American health care. If something tragic were to happen without it, you could possibly be forced into an insurmountable debt. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t eventually have universal health care in this country, but I am saying that under the current circumstances, there are plans than can prevent truly massive expenses.

The problem, of course, is that people like myself are like the 99th percentile. Anybody with prior health issues or a family, having a plan like this wouldn’t necessarily be a walk in the park. This is where Moore steps in.

The film is fairly consistent with his previous docs; you get a lot of a one-sided, quickly edited scenes that don’t fully explain the complexities of the issue, and many times his perspective comes off as naïve. He spends too much time in the film asking simple/often humorous questions to people in countries that have universal health care (Canada, France, Cuba) than asking experts in the US why we don’t. I could go on and on about the specifics, but if you’ve watched a Moore movie, you get the picture; he points out the wrong way, shows us the supposed right way, but doesn’t do a great job of explaining why it isn’t so easy for the wrong to be right.

As typical with Moore films, is that he does a hell of a job finding sympathetic characters that can get to you. The people he uses appear to be truly screwed by the system. There were tear jerker moments in this movie.

The issue with relying so much on individual stories is that you wonder how much he’s relying on the anecdotal. Did he choose to follow these particular individuals because of their anomalous situations to make his point look more convincing? Where the dozen or so people he focuses on in the film really representative of the entire system, or where they just an unfortunate few that fell through the cracks? Was the table full or relatively affluent looking, mostly Caucasian table in France who gushed about how great their health care was really representative of the entire system? Are poor black people in France as happy about the system as they are? We don’t ever really know, and it would take a team of fact checkers weeks to find out.

The thing I admire about Moore, and the thing that keeps me watching his movies (other than the fact that I do think he knows how to craft a movie you can’t take your eyes off) is that I look at the bigger picture.

Let’s face it, if he were to have a pro and a con for every issue on health care, the film would have likely ran five hours long, been a total bore and probably not gotten anybody motivated to go home that night and do some research on health care in America. Unfortunately, nobody would have likely paid $10 to watch a CSPAN-style documentary, nor would such a film create such a stir with liberals and conservatives alike. Which is the quality function of Moore’s films: for better or for worse, they get people talking and thinking. I remember working with a bunch of high school kids at a JC Penney (I was embarrassingly 25 at the time) when Fahrenheit came out, and I remember how blindsided they were about the mere possibility that our government would maybe exaggerate some facts and invade a country that maybe they shouldn’t have invaded. Maybe some of Moore’s observations were overly simplistic, and maybe he proposes links that he can’t exactly prove, he at least got the mainstream thinking and discussing things they probably wouldn’t otherwise have.

Moore often gets categorized as someone who hates America, which I think is false.

Quick tangent here. The one one thing that annoys me most with the whole liberal/conservative argument is that whenever a liberal, or anybody for that matter, forces discontent with its country, conservatives will reply: “Well, If you don’t like it, then leave.” Which is about as anti-American, narrow-minded a thing there is to say to such sentiment. And I always find it funny when I think of how easily it can be turned against them. For example, how funny would it be for someone to walk up to a group protesting outside an abortion clinic and tell them if they don’t like legalized abortions, then they should move to Peru or Chile (where most abortions or illegal.)

Yeah, it goes both ways. Voicing discontent with your government’s policies is a right that both sides of the fence have. For some reason this never gets brought up. Conservatives bitch as much about America as liberals do.

Moore doesn’t hate America. The fact he keeps making these films centered on America seems to obviously prove the contrary. Why would he put so much time and effort into making films that exposes things he thinks his country does wrong? Moore could very easily afford to live somewhere else, but I don’t think he wants to. I think, deep down, he loves America, he just wished it treated its people better.

Which brings me to the aspect of each Moore film that has left me unsettled, and dissatisfied with America, is that at the end of every one of his movies, you’re left with the thought that this country doesn’t act with as much benevolence and kindness as it should. That’s where it hurts.

Why do sick 9/11 heroes have to depend on Moore to take them to Cuba to get health care they’ve been trying to get in the states? Sure, Moore had to exaggerate the quality of life in Cuba (Castro wouldn’t even have let this film be made there), but why did it even have to come that close? Why weren’t these people promptly taken care of in the states? In a country that prides itself on its freedoms, its altruism, its down-right wholesome goodness, people shouldn’t have to depend on a documentary filmmaker to help them out.

Every time I leave the theater after watching one of this guy’s movies, I feel compelled to do something really nice to a complete stranger. Sure enough, just a couple blocks after leaving the theater I happened upon a family in from out of town that was lost and looking for their way to the Blue Line and back to O’Hare.

“I’m heading right there, just follow me,” I said with a smile and guided them the four blocks down Lake to the stop.

“Thank you, sir,” said the father, who was surely feeling a tad embarrassed by the fact he’d gotten completely lost with his family in tow.

“No problem,” I replied as I walked through the turnstiles. “Safe trip.”

As I walked down the stairs to the train feeling like I’d done a good American deed I wondered to myself, “Where’s a Michael Moore film crew when you need one?”

2007-07-19T17:58:00.000-07:00

None of us could believe how many people were there. We didn’t realize the Decemberists, a still relatively-unknown-by-the-mainstream indie rock band, had an eighth as many Chicago fans as there were at Millennium Park last night. The Jay Pritzker Pavilion seats 11,000, but with the runoff crowd there looked to be close to 15,000 on hand.

Of course, the large attendance numbers likely had something to do with the fact that it was a free show and that the Grant Park Orchestra was backing them. The city puts on free shows free Thursday at the park, so I’m sure many of the families showed up on pure habit. And the fact that it was an orchestral show probably eased the tensions of those not familiar with the Decemberists come. I’m sure they figured that an indie band they’ve never heard of that plays with an orchestra can’t be too obscure.

There was nowhere to sit or even stand comfortably. The rain and subsequent umbrellas poking everyone didn’t make matters any better, nor did the extreme humidity. Standing in the crowd felt like standing in a bathroom in which a hot shower had been running on full heat for the last 30 minutes. It was so damp my jeans stretch from a 34 to a 38 in about 15 minutes.

But the sound was magnificent. No expense was spared for the acoustics of Millennium Park’s centerpiece (literally, the park went hundreds of millions of dollars over budget). The Decemberists’ epic, anthemic sound is tailor made for an orchestral show, and for the four songs we stood through, Colin Meloy and the gang pulled it off wonderfully.

But the sweat, the people, and our poor view (we could barely see the stage at all through all the umbrellas) were too much and we decided to run to a bar and have a couple drinks instead. Not a thing you think would be difficult in a city like Chicago, known for its abundance of watering holes. But finding a decent bar in the Loop is like finding a decent bar in rural Kansas.

The Loop is about the worse part of Chicago (outside some of the West and South Sides) to be thirsty for beer. Despite the fact it’s where the majority of the metropolitan area spends its workweek, there’s hardly a tavern in sight. We walked four nearly six blocks (west on Monroe, south on Wells) and we only found one place, and it was some creepy sports bar in the basement of an old apartment complex.

So Nick and I caught a Brown Line train back up to Old Town for a drink, which for me turned into five drinks. I had honestly intended on staying just for one, but each time I tried the leave the rain decided to pour down harder and harder, forcing me to turn back to the bar and apathetically order another round.

Finally, after about an hour and a half and a healthy buzz later, the rain subsided and I made my way out on the streets. After a couple blocks I caught the North Ave. bus and sat across from a young black woman who looked like an Alicia Keyes who didn’t have the luxury of being made over by a team of beauticians every day.

She had her hair in tight braids that split perfectly down the middle of her scalp. She was wearing a pair of worn Birkenstocks and black stretch pants that were so wet from walking in the rain that the bottoms of them dangled past the ball of her foot.

With every new passenger that walked passed the expressions on her face would go from one of genuine fright (tucking her head in her shoulders like a shy child) to supreme confidence (like the type of look a girl gets on her face when she says something like “Boy, whatch you lookin’ at?” It was strange.

I’d spend long glances at her wondering who this girl was and what was her story. People on the bus always bring out this side of me. Who were all these people that I’d spend 10-15 minutes of my day with? Where did they live? What did they do? When was the last time they had sex?

Between the times I was looking at her wondering who she was, I’d glace at my reflection in the window across the bus. I thought to myself, “Hmm, I’m glad I shaved this morning.”

When we got to Paulina, I reached up to tug on the chord to request a stop, but pulled back at the last moment. I was going to wait until I got to Damen so I could walk down Milwaukee amongst the artsy folk. It’s always a more interesting walk.

It should also be noted that during the Decemberists show there were two skinny dudes doing an intense interpretive dance in the aisle separating the seats from the lawn. They were sopping wet from rain, and a big black security guard with baggy pants stood there watching them curiously as though they were some foreign species. Nick and I thought they were minstrels hired by the band as some kind of a joke, but the girl by us informed us that they actually do this for every show at the park.

Pitchfork

2007-07-16T22:10:00.000-07:00

Of course, I went to it this weekend, like every other hipster/wanna be hipster/person who just likes indie music who lives in the Chicago area. I'll have a lengthy review a did for a magazine in town up later in the week.

My sentiments of it from this year were pretty much as they were last year: It was by-and-large a good time. Sunday was packed with bands I dig (Of Montreal, Junior Boys, The Sea and Cake, De La Soul). I was too fucked up to really pay any critical attention to what was going on Friday night and Saturday was pretty blah (partly due to the previous night's fucked up-ness). Maybe I'm just getting older, but attending a music festival not hungover is really the way to go.

The best part about it was that I had a press pass all weekend and didn't have to pay for shit — beer included. This is truly the way to experience concerts. No lines for the porta-potties, plenty of breathing room and access so close to the stage you can almost smell the musicians.

Of course, this will all make it more difficult for me to go back to being a prole at Lollapalooza in a couple weeks.

My only main gripe about Pfork is the crowd. Nobody really seemed to be having that much fun (except for maybe De La and Girl Talk). Only the really young kids were getting excited. There were too many jaded hipsters that just walked around looking bored the whole time (or maybe that was just the folks back in the VIP section). Hanging out at Pitchfork is kind of like hanging out at a really trendy dive bar: You feel cool being there, and the aesthetics are always interesting, but everybody's so uptight in trying look the part that nobody lets their hair down and actually enjoys themselves.

Oh, well. Maybe I'll reach some level of transcendence at Lolla.

A belated report on the Police show last weekend

2007-07-12T22:29:00.000-07:00

Jesse and I didn't have tickets. They were going for around $100, and even with brokers trying to frantically give them away at the last minute because when it came close to concert-time, they realized this show wasn't the hot item everybody thought it was be, we still couldn't find a great deal.

So we just said fuck it, walked over the Wrigley and hung around outside for most of the set. It ended up being more than satisfactory. The sound just beyond left field was perfect.

As far as the material, they played their Top 40 stuff almost exclusively. For the most part it sounded good. They tended to overplay some of the songs (Sting has adopted some jammy tendencies over the years.) But once they got the ball rolling, you really couldn't tell that it had been decades since they last played together. I'm not saying I'd have paid $100 to get into the place, but towards the end of the set I didn't start to feel an urge to find my way in there and see this reunion in person.

We wound up going to a bar just across Clark from the field and finding a seat next to its open windows and listening to most of the set.

After buying a $4 round of beers, Jesse and I looked at each other like we pulled off the coup of the century. Not only were we comfortably listening to the show for free, but we were paying less than half as much for drinks as we would be on the inside.

Given the cool vibe around Wrigley during the show (lots of people just out walking around or partying in their yards) and the fact that you can hear the acts for free, I'd say it's time the historic ball park started hosting more concerts. Of course, given the poor condition of the field after the two sold-out shows, it's not likely that will happen.

Dispatches from the Taste…

2007-07-09T22:24:00.000-07:00

Well, it’s still as fat and ugly as it was last year, perhaps even more so. But I can’t help but find this meat chute of a festival a bit endearing if not for the food, beer and free music but for the fabulous people watching. The Taste attracts all kinds.

There was a tall man in his 50s wearing a ten-gallon hat, Hawaiian T-shirt, shorts and full-sized black cowboy boots and not a hint of irony.

There was a man that looked like a fat handicapped version of my best friend back in Omaha.

There was a group of foreigners (British accents) in their early twenties who got swindled for a few bucks from a group of black teenagers peddling silly one-sheet poems that were supposed to benefit their youth basketball team (a frequent scam in Chicago — the “youths” looked to be about my age). I almost hollered to the foreigners not to fall for it, but I didn’t want to cause a fuss with the half dozen hoods that had descended upon them. So I just watched the poor couple confusedly fork over a couple bills thinking they were helping Jemaine’s basketball team get new Nikes. (Jemaine probably got a new pair of Nikes, all right, but it’s doubtful they had anything to do with a youth league basketball team).

(Note to prevent me from being accused of being racist: I used to suspect these guys were actually legit until one day I was riding the Orange Line to Midway next to an older black lady when a couple guys pushing the same poems. “Those damn kids go home with more money in their pockets at the end of the day than I do running that scam,” she groaned to me.

Of course I also feel obligated to talk about the music. On Saturday I had the exquisite pleasure of seeing Kenny Rogers live for the first time in my life. It was underwhelming (I honestly had semi-high hopes for the show — I don’t mind his First Edition material. Of course, that was decades ago). These days the man’s face is so bloated from recent plastic surgery that you can barely recognize him (he looked like someone who was abruptly awoken from a deep sleep, his eyes barely visible above his puffy cheeks). The set hit its low point when the old guy started rapping the Coolio remake of “The Gambler.”

Then there was John Mayer on Wednesday. I didn’t know how to feel looking at the flesh of a man who’d tagged more grade-A celebrity ass than I’ll even see in person. I didn’t know whether to hate the fucking guy because of it or give him props. He doesn’t seem as terrible a guy as his music is: I used to look forward to reading his music column in Esquire.

The set was largely dull. It took a back seat to the fistfight that broke out between a bunch of teenagers behind us and our looking in amazement/cracking jokes at the no-beer-drinking-yet-smoking-hot-blonde bible beaters that were standing next to us. Mayer didn’t play that fucking “Your Body is a Wonderland” song, so it wasn’t that bad.

In fact, to close the show he brought out local legend Buddy Guy and they closed the it with “Sweet Home Chicago,” a song that, under any other circumstances, gets a roll of the eyes from me because it’s so overplayed in this city. But standing with 50,000 other drunk Chicagoans on a perfect summer day with the skyline providing our shade, I must say I got a kick out of it.

2007-07-05T23:03:00.000-07:00

I realized just how late it was when the black man working the gate of the Grand and Milwaukee stop told me to have a good morning. I also realized that CTA employees must only nice between the hours of 2-6 a.m. — when nobody’s on the train — because at any other time of day they’d just assume not acknowledge you as a customer.

I stood on the deck for a good ten minutes with just another CTA employee sweeping the floor. He looked at me — in all my drunken haggardness — with a suspecting eye. “Looks like that white boy’s been up to no good,” is what I’m pretty sure he was thinking to himself.

He was right. I hadn’t been up to any good.

The train eventually came and I rode in it with two slumped over bodies and a middle-aged guy who looked way to peppy for the circumstances. He sat facing me, but I don’t think he even took the time to notice my presence. He looked like he was either just getting off from work at a convenience store or on his way to one.

The only think I remember thing on this trip is that perhaps riding the CTA at 4 a.m. is the most optimal time to do so. There’s no people. No traffic. No attitude form CTA workers. It was kind of nice.

Slightly related note: earlier on that night of the 3rd a couple CTA trains in the Loop were stalled because of a power outage on the tracks. The cars were packed the gills with people leaving the fireworks show on the lakefront that evening. For over an hour a couple thousand people were stuck in sweltering hot cars with no lights or air conditioning and reportedly were not given any notification as to what was going on by the CTA. Apparently people (some of them surely drunk) were getting mouthy and a few scuffles broke out, creating a possibly disastrous situation. Sure enough the next day the papers are flooded with angry citizens telling the story, and the CTA comes out, apologizes briefly, then labels the situation an “inconvenience,” and says it is pleased the way the situation was handled and that employees “followed protocol,” despite the fact they hadn’t bothered to tell their customers what the hell was going on.

It’s funny, while I was reading the myriad angry comments on the Tribune’s CTA blog tonight I was watching the film The Queen at the part were England’s frustration with the Royal Family not publicly acknowledging Diana’s death was about to boil over. Especially the scene in which Tony Blair informs her that one in four polled said the country should do away with the antiquated Monarchy. One local parallel stood out immediately: The frustrated Chicagoans who are tired of its transit system ignoring their pleas for improvement and treating them like second-class citizens. I bet if you took a poll of CTA customers today, you might get one in four saying the whole operation should be privatized.

Question

2007-07-04T22:46:00.000-07:00

Who is Duke? This is killing me.

2007-06-28T20:52:00.000-07:00

There’s an old steel mill smack dab in the middle of the North Side of Chicago, A. Finkl & Sons, which has been open since the late 1800s. It represents one of the last what was likely a slew of factories that sat along the north branch of the Chicago River before that section of town was redeveloped. Everything else along that stretch of Clybourn now has turned into a strip mall or condo buildings. The steel mill must still be turning one hell of a profit, because it hogs up acres of land that could easily be turned into tens of millions of dollars worth of real estate developments.

As much of an eye sore as it is, it’s kind of a neat thing to walk through at night in the summertime. If you go south on Southport straight through the complex you pass one of the pouring plants and you’ll notice they leave the building’s huge doors wide open. Almost every time I’ve walked past the place there have been a handful of onlookers — Lincoln Park or Bucktown residents out for a evening walk — watching in awe as flames and sparks fly while the massive melting pot does its work.

There’s also usually a handful of workers sitting outside taking a break, all of whom are tired and filthy beyond recognition. They look at you while you leisurely stand and stare in fascination at what is the bane of their grimy existence as if to say “If you think it’s so fucking neat, then why the fuck don’t you go in there and do it?”

The Trip: Denver vs. Chicago

2007-06-27T21:49:00.000-07:00

We spent part of one night in Denver, and while one surely can’t base a town’s true essence on what it’s like after spending a handful of hours there, I can’t say that I was overwhelmed. It reminded me of Omaha, in some fundamental ways (the way it was laid out, the traffic, some of the modern architecture downtown). And considering I only know one person in Denver, I’m not even sure I’d enjoy living there more than Omaha. Half of what makes a town is how many friends you have there.

As with most cities in America, you have to drive pretty much everywhere, which is something I don’t miss at all. It would be tough for anybody who has lived in a town where you can depend on walking, biking and public transportation to go to a city where you have to worry about driving and parking. (I must note that Denver is drastically improving its public transportation system, but it didn’t seem so prevalent that you could live there comfortably without a car.)

We walked around the 16th St. Mall district, which was a fair attempt at creating an outdoor urban shopping area that cuts through one main strip of downtown (and takes you straight to Coors Field, where the Rockies play). Except pretty much everything in it had been built in the past ten years and was sorely lacking any original, regional specific shops or restaurants. It stuck me as an area of town not many people that actually lived in Denver hung out at (Em said she almost never went there when she lived in Denver.)

I kept thinking of Division St. (my street in Chicago) and how in many ways it (and many other streets in Chicago) is a template for how many post-modern cities attempt to design a contemporary urban shopping strip. Except almost nothing on Division is a franchise of any sort (the glaring exceptions being Jimmy John’s and Starbucks — which are omnipresent even in Chicago). It’s pretty neat knowing you live in an area that represents one of the last living representations of what most American cities used to look like. Back when a neighborhoods and towns reflected the members of the community: when the people that ran the neighborhood bar, bakery and deli actually lived in the neighborhood.

Corner after corner in this mall we approached pockets of thuggish-looking young black men standing around, being mildly obnoxious. Sadly, the first thought that ran into my mind was “What are all these black people doing downtown?” Just as I caught myself thinking that it occurred to me why I was: Because Chicago is so segregated I simply wasn’t used to it.

Bear with me here, I’m just trying to be honest.

Any Chicagoan will tell you that when you walk around downtown during the day, you don’t see groups of thuggish young black men standing around being mildly obnoxious. You especially don’t see them hanging around prominent shopping districts. You see people coming and going from work and bona fide rogue homeless people panhandling, but barely anything in between. I’m not saying this is a good thing, I’m just saying that’s what it looks like.

It occurred to me today coming back from lunch why that’s probably the case in Chicago. Walking past the fire station on Michigan Ave. I saw a cop forcing a homeless black man on the street — a man who didn’t appear to be doing anything other than sitting there — to get up and move somewhere else.

(Also, just before I saw the cop asking this man to leave, there was another guy on the corner panhandling his ass off. “C’mon, all you people got your sodas, your ice cream, you coffee … and I ain’t got nothing. Won’t you help me out a little bit? I want some ice cream or a soda, too!” Just as we passed him I looked to my buddy Nick. “I wonder if that guy sees the causal relationship between the fact that we have libations in our hands and we’re walking to and from our jobs,” I asked.)

Now before Al Sharpton holds a press conference accusing me of insinuating that it’s only black people who loiter and solicit on public streets, I should note that we also passed packs of young white gutter punks. They were digging through trash bins on the busy street and eating discarded food straight out of them right in front of everybody. That, by far, was the most disgusting thing I saw while I was in Denver.

The Trip: Part II

2007-06-26T00:07:00.000-07:00

Which brings me to the funniest/most eye-opening story of the trip. Later that same day, after a big day of hiking, we wanted a good sit-down dinner. We drove around the outskirts of Estes in search of something that looked at least mediocre, yet found nothing, so we decided to head out of the mountains and into Loveland, which was about 30 miles away.

We didn’t have a map with us, so of course we wind up making a wrong turn that takes us out into aforementioned desolate housing division where people must never leave there homes (because we went about 10 miles through dense housing without seeing a gas station, grocery store or restaurant). We made our way back in town and headed out towards I-25 hoping that would yield at least something. It was getting late and we’d already pretty much relegated the dining experience to a chain of some sort. But the one that we were forced to (because it was the only one that was open) was quite hilarious considering the circumstances: Old Chicago. Here I am in Colorado, trying to get away from the city — away from pizza, pasta and plasma screens — and I wind up at a watered down rendition of what many of the bars in the very city I’m trying to get away from look like.

While this moment was tragically comical, it also shed a clear light on why chains are so prevalent there and many places in America (often touristy ones): Because we know what we’re going to get at them. And this isn’t always a bad thing. Case in point, the salad and nachos we had at Old Chicago were surely better than the ones we would have had at some locally-owned place in Estes. And the beer selection wouldn’t have been anywhere close.

In many ways the blame for the escalation of restaurant chains in America should lay on the shoulders of many of the locally owned joints, because they simply aren’t as good. I mean, in Chicago, that’s not the case — you sometimes have to go out of your way to find a franchise in this place. But Chicago is one of the culinary gems of all of North America. You go to a place like Loveland, Colorado or even my hometown of Council Bluffs, Iowa (were there’s less than a dozen independently run restaurants, almost all of which are poorly run) and people are gonna go to Applebee’s and Cracker Barrel instead. This is because the quality of food and service is almost always more consistent. Same thing with Starbucks, for instance. The brilliance of Starbucks’ scheme is that everything with that company is so regimented — all the way from the ingredients, from how they make the drinks and how they present them — that people know what they’re going to get almost every single time. The Carmel Machiato you order in New York will likely taste the same as they the one you order in Des Moines. If you go to most independent coffee shops, the quality and contents of you drink and the service that comes with it depends mostly what the particular barista that’s working that day. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes that’s bad. And when it’s bad you could possibly lose a customer forever. Starbucks, in all their ridiculousness, usually doesn’t let that happen. Apparently, neither does Old Chicago, cause the meal I had there, while it wasn’t necessarily transcendent, was pretty fucking good. (Sadly enough, it was likely the best meal of the whole trip — beer included.

So as I sat there munching on a Cobb Salad, sipping an import beer, watching baseball highlights on a plasma screen, listening to bad 90s juke box music, wondering why it was we had to drive 30 miles outside of the mountains to get a good meal, I realized that restaurant chains do have their place in society. And in some cases it’s not that bad of one.

The Trip: Part I

2007-06-25T00:06:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: I just got back from a brief vacation with my girlfriend in Colorado this week, so I’m going to break away from the Chicago theme for these next few entries. (Though in the end, I suppose I do tie in a Chicago theme).

Obviously, we chose Colorado for the mountains. I wanted to get away from the city for a couple days and Em wanted to go back to her old stomping grounds (she used to live in Denver). All in all, it was a great trip. We got a lot of cool things done in a short amount of time, an as vacations usually go, it went too fast.

While the front range of the Rockies is still one of my favorite places in the country, I was struck by the rapid development of the area and how much it lacked the sort of western/frontier panache I remember it having when I visited as a kid.

For those of you who haven’t been there recently, urban sprawl is gobbling up almost every acre it can from Fort Collins to Denver, and likely even south to Colorado Springs (though we didn’t go there). Heading north from Denver to Boulder, you pass a seemingly endless belt of strip malls. To use an Omaha reference point, it looks like clusters of Village Point malls stacked next to one another for miles on end. Each are filled with chains like Outback Steakhouse, Ruby Tuesday, AMC Theaters, Cheesecake Factory, Gap, Old Navy and lots and lots of banks. All ensuring that your experience out won’t be any different from say, the outskirts of Kansas City, Minneapolis or just about any other town in America.

In search of a place to eat one night (I’ll explain more later) Em and I decided to head to Loveland, a town that appears to be expanding as fast as any in the area. We wound up taking a wrong turn and drove through mile after mile of bland suburb … take that back, these suburbs were downright ugly. The houses and divisions all looked exactly the same. So much so that I’m surprised people who live there don’t mistakenly go to the wrong house every now and again. And of course, being in a barren part of Colorado, there isn’t a tree to be found: Just rows and rows of identical houses with empty brown yards.

As we drove passed we both wondered who the fuck would want to live in such a mundane environment. It made me depressed just thinking about the possibility.

This was all mostly disappointing for me because I remember the area having such a rustic mystique about it: Driving through it all as a kid I was able to conjure up visions of what it might have looked like when frontiersman, cowboys, Indians roamed and old saloons and ranches sat amidst the plains and foothills. It’s almost impossible doing that when there’s a new housing division being built in just about every place that you can physically fit one. Everything east of the mountains reminded me of West Omaha, the only difference being the vista.

Of course, once you get in the mountains they’re still as majestic as ever. That section of the Rockies is the personal favorite of all the mountain ranges I’ve seen and that includes Yellowstone, Glacier, the Canadian Rockies and everything I saw while living in Idaho. Rocky Mountain National Park has gone out of its way to preserve its original landscape, to the point to where they’ve pretty much taken down every man made structure ever built on its grounds not directly associated with the park service. The only issues is that, being such awesome park, it draws truckloads of tourists. You have to get pretty deep into it to truly feel isolated. Most of the hikes you go on there you’re within shouting distance of another human.

We stayed in Boulder one night, a town that, not unlike the areas surrounding it, is becoming more and more developed each year. The downtown area, which used to be filled with unique record, book and clothing stores and a slew of cool college bars, is now being overrun with new multi-use developments with a hiking gear chain or a Starbucks on the retail level and million dollar condos on the top. Sure, there were lots of hippies, yippies and vagabonds lounging about— as is usual with the hyper liberal town — but according to my buddy who’d been living there for ten years, the place was really starting to lose the very edge the majority of its transplants moved there to enjoy.

For the other two nights we stayed in Estes Park, a town that has managed to turn itself almost completely into a cheesy tourist trap for rednecks from across the country. (In all fairness, it could have been that way when I was there ten years ago and I just didn’t recognize it since I was sort of one of them at the time). If we could go back and do it all over again, we likely would have just stayed three nights in Boulder or one or two in Denver, because Estes had little to offer other than its proximity to the main entrance to Rocky Mountain National, which was where we wanted to spend most of our time.

We searched and searched for a respectable place to eat lunch our first day there and after walking through the whole town, ended up at some lousy café were I ate a $9 turkey wrap I could have made better at home. For some reason a preponderance of restaurants there were Italian, which I thought was a tad ridiculous. Who the fuck comes to the mountains and wants to eat Italian? Gimme some steak, pork, beans, corn bread. I can eat fettuccini all I want in Chicago. I came to the mountains for some old west comfort food for fucks sake.

2007-06-05T20:12:00.001-07:00

It’s surreal when you first see it: the tiny bungalow that housed one of the most powerful city politicians for over two decades. It sits there inconspicuously amongst a row of similarly dull structures, most of which have kids playing in their front yards. Its interior may the best kept on the block, but from the outside, nothing about the home says a legend lived there. The only thing that sets it apart from the rest of the block is the lone streetlight that looms out front over S. Lowe, right where the front gate opens to the sidewalk. Right where the limo used pick up former Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley in the morning.

It, perhaps more so than any structure, sums up the political weirdness that is Chicago. Here was this man, extremely influential on a national scale, and sometimes equally as corrupt, who lived and raised his family in a home smaller than the ones the majority of middle class America lives in. It’s surely a self-aware testament to his blue collar Irish upbringing. A symbol that, despite his rise to power and fame, shows he’s still a man of the people, a man who never forgot where he came from.

To me it was perplexing. This man could influence the outcome of presidential elections (see John F. Kennedy), get some of the biggest skyscrapers in the world built, get away with allowing his police to pummel innocent protestors while the whole world watched on TV. Yet all the while, he was living in that tiny home in Bridgeport that, when all seven kids were over for Sunday dinner, had to be a tight fit.

As I stood there looking at the place I wondered what the point of having power was if you don’t enjoy the wealth that goes with it. I’m sure he had wealth somewhere. While he never got caught taking so much as a nickel, there had to be healthy chunks of money made running that Machine.

Then again, maybe there wasn’t. Maybe he never did take a nickel. Maybe the influence was enough for him. And maybe, despite the racial inequities, the cronyism, the narrow mindedness — he represented a dying breed of American politicians that existed in time when you didn’t have to be wealthy to be powerful.

For better or for worse.

Some random occurrences from over the past week

2007-05-29T21:09:00.000-07:00

“What that fuck is that guy doing?” My roommate said aloud as he stood up from his desk alarmed and peered out the back window onto the alley. Behind our apartment are two parking gravel spaces and a slew of trash bins, which every night seem to draw the attention of vagrants.

“What the hell is that guy doing?” He asked again.

“Jeremy, I think there’s some guy smoking crack in the parking lot back here,” He said. Sadly, these types of things cease alarm me and I kept at my book on the couch.

“Wait a sec … is he … taking a piss?” Ryan asked again as he continued to peer out the window. “Fuck. Is he taking his pants off? … I think he’s taking a shit back there? Ha!”

I still don’t get up from my post on the couch, for at this point, I don’t even want to see what’s going on.

Ry stood there for a couple seconds until the guy eventually stumbled away.

“I think we just had a homeless guy take a shit in our backyard.”

The sun wasn’t even down.

Each time I take the back alley to and from the apartment I look at the corner the man may or may not have laid out a deuce and wonder if I should take a look and find out for sure. Over a week later, however, I’ve yet to build up that kind of courage.

The other day I was walking to dinner at a seafood place a couple blocks from our apartment and happened upon a drunken jalopy of a man staggering around the corner of Cortez and Ashland. Just before I walked past him he whipped his junk out and started pissing right on the apex of the intersection. He let a river of urine onto Cortez in broad daylight.

As I passed him and looked to cross Ashland I noticed a cute younger girl crossing towards my direction, the drunken jalopy of a man directly in her line of site.

“Oh, God,” I thought to myself. “I bet that’s the first thing she wanted to see when she got off the bus.”

Last week while I was riding my bike down Halsted — right through Cabrini Greens — I noticed some large middle aged women hunched over on the sidewalk with her right hand dug deep down into the front of her pants. She was either scratching the shit out of her crotch or masturbating intensely (I couldn’t figure out.)

Pedaling past on the street I could hear her deep moans of satisfaction: “Uhhhh. Uhhhhh.”

2007-05-23T22:35:00.000-07:00

It can be tough for a concert to live up the level of excitement you’ve expected for it with the one band you’ve likely listened to the most over the past two years, like I have with Kings of Leon. You’ve heard the music so many times that you’ve already created a fantasy for what it’s supposed to sound like live and how the crowd is going to respond to it. You have it set in your mind exactly what you want and expect to see, making it virtually impossible for the band to live up to your expectations.

This didn’t pose as a problem for these Tennessee boys.

They took the stage with quiet confidence and executed their contemporary southern rock to perfection. If you’re somebody who has spent the last two years listening to Aha Shake Heartbreak incessantly and have had numerous day dreams about what the album and the band would sound like live, well, this was it. At times fierce, at times loose, at times catchy … and on spot throughout.

Lead singer Caleb Followill didn’t say much to excite the crowd. Throughout the entire night I bet he uttered under five sentences, and what he did say was so hushed you could barely hear him. Everything they had to say on this night they said through their music.

Once the dense bass line and deep guitar chords kicked it everybody knew the opener was “Charmer,” and the crowd chimed in immediately. It was impressive to see a crowd for this band singing along, which they did throughout most of the evening. Normally that type of activity is reserved for guys like Tom Petty, Bono and Mic Jagger. Equally impressive was that the crowd had already memorized the chorus of the second song off the band’s new album that came out roughly a month ago. Hell, “Charmer,” isn’t even the album’s pre-released single.

To give a little perspective here, The Kings are huge in Europe: Recent release Because of the Times opened at No. 1 on the British charts, yet only topped out at No. 25 in the states. Normally standard fare for a band you don’t hear on the radio or see on MTV, but strange when taking into account new albums by fellow “indies” Modest Mouse, The Shins and Bright Eyes all spent their opening weeks in the top five. Judging by the enthusiasm of the sold out crowd at the Riviera, you’d think this band was one of the most popular in the country. It’s a shame and a mystery they’re not, but that’s a whole other essay.

This band, despite its member’s relative youth (bassist Jared Followill just turned 21) has churned out three full-length albums in four years. Which means they have enough material these days to exclusively play their up-tempo, concert-friendly material at shows, which they did. You heard all the rollicking tracks from Because of the Times (“My Party,” “Black Thumbnail,” and “McFearless”) and all the high points off Aha Shake Heartbreak (“Soft,” “Taper Jean Girl” and “Four Kicks”). They even threw in foot stomper “Molly’s Chamber’s” from debut Youth and Young Manhood.

“On Call,” the single off Because of the Times that I wasn’t initially sold on, took had much more of an epic feel live. So did “Knocked Up,” which kicked off the encore. The only downside of the night sonically was that things are almost too uptempo at times. The jangly hook on “Soft” was hurried and never quite achieved its groove quality. The same could be said about the chorus on “The Bucket.”

While the songs were performed live just about the way you’d hope for them to be (which is to say they sounded like they did on record) what really separated this show from the others I’ve seen lately was how much the crowd was into it. Lets be honest, sometimes the enthusiasm of a crowd can dictate how much fun a show is as much as the band on the stage. Lily Allen played her heart out when I saw her at the Metro a couple months ago, but since nobody bothered to do anything but stand and stare at her (which can, admittedly, be easy to do) the show was largely boring. The crowd at the Black Keys show I saw this winter acted like they were there because somebody told them to be, which is never a good thing.

Sure, a lot of the guys were wearing backwards hats, had their polo shirt collars popped and were fist pumping and spilling each other’s beers like obnoxious college buddies. At 28, I’m beginning to find such shows of youthful debauchery a little tiresome, but on this night it made me smile. For once I was standing with people that were letting their inhibitions go and actually enjoying themselves at a concert, instead of just standing there with their arms crossed. I enjoyed it so much that I got into the fist-pumping, beer spilling action myself. It was a fucking rock concert.

2007-05-03T22:33:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-05-01T21:20:00.000-07:00

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.

Parenting + CTA dependency = pain in the ass

2007-04-23T21:04:00.000-07:00

My plan to save time on the commute was falling apart before it even started. Granted, I didn't really have anywhere I had to be, I just didn't want my commute to take 45 minutes like it usually does. So while the Division bus stood still at the beginning of its route on Clark St. for a good 10 minutes before it finaly made its way to Clybourn and picked me up I was getting a little irritated.

When it stopped the very next block after I got on and made that decompressing sound CTA buses make when the driver engages the lift ramp I rolled my eyes and looked over my right shoulder to see what the hell the hold-up was now. Standing by the front door of the bus was a tiny Latino women holding a children's stroller that looked to be almost as tall as she was.

I thought to myself, "Jesus, this is going to take forever."

And it sort of did. The bus driver couldn't get the lift to work. For a couple minutes he kept flipping some switches on the dashboard, with more and more force each time, until he finally had to turn the bus off completely. He then left his seat (something I've only seen a bus driver do once or twice) and started stomping on the ramp (pretty high tech equipment on these buses), then sat back down and started the bus.

Then, with the help of a young man who was waiting at the stop with the Latino woman, the lift worked. (I guess all it takes to get CTA vehicles to work is a little muscle).

The tiny Latino woman, who couldn't have been but an inch or two over four feet tall, took a seat in the front of the bus and rolled the infant-laden stroller to a portion of the bus where two other riders pulled the seat up for her. The Latino woman was so tiny her feet didn't even reach the floor of a bus, which made it difficult for her to control the stroller as she held it with her right arm while the bus violently smashed over potholes (Division St. between Clybourn and Ashland is apparently not very well kept, which I imagine has something to do with its proximity to Cabrini.) After a couple of exceptionally rough patches it looked almost as if the stroller were going to tip over or at least come free from the lady's hand, which made me — and probably everybody else on the bus — uneasy.

Nobody wants to see an infant spill out of a stroller on a city bus.

After those rought spots two fellow riders got up from their seats to attempt to strap the stroller to the side of the bus with a couple belts that were likely placed there for that very reason. The tiny Latino looked at them and smiled graciously, but couldn't really offer any help. It would have taken her as long to climb out of her seat than it did for the people to eventualy tie the stroller down.

At that instant a series of emotions ran through my head. For starters, I was quite taken aback by the two bus riders who helped the lady out and the manner in which they did so. Never once did they flash her a look of annoyance or a look that asked "what the hell are you doing bringing a baby on a bus you can't control?" They just tied the child in, smiled and sat back down.

This all made me feel kind of like a piece of shit for having been annoyed by the fact it was taking so long to get the lady and her child on the bus in the first place.

Which in turn made me realize just how difficult it is to be a parent and have to depend on the public transportation system in this city: The looks of annoyance young (relatively spoiled?) professionals like myself that snicker when we have to deal with buses taking an extra minute or two longer when they board with their children or disability (even though we usually don't have anywhere he have to be). The often-times humiliating situations when you have to resort to the help of complete strangers just to get on the bus and make sure you child doesn't fall out of its stroller when you do.

Living in this city without a car alone can be difficult. Doing so with children would be something most of us simply couldn't do, whether because of hassle or pride.

But then again, the fact that people were more than helpful with this lady (the young man when she first tried getting on to the two people who strapped her child in). Even the bus driver — despite his having to turn off the bus, get out of his seat and stomp on the lift — smiled at the woman as she boarded.

It's good to know that, while having to depend on the public transportation in this town as a parent can be a humbling experience, at least some people are willing to help you out along the way.

A quick question

2007-04-23T20:16:00.000-07:00

If Chicago gets the 2016 Olympics, does that mean city officials have to add a fifth star to the Municipal Flag of Chicago?

The Library

2007-04-19T22:19:00.000-07:00

Something strange always happens when I go to the library.

I'll go there about once a week, usually after I've overstayed my welcome at the nearby coffee shop (they sometimes give you stink eye when you sit there for four hours and only buy a measly $1.50 cup of coffee).

The internet's free and it's usually pretty quiet. Usually.

Now, the one thing about libraries that's always miffed me is that its expected that visitors talk in hushed tones, but the librarians always talk with a normal volume. We've all got to whisper, but they can answer the phone like "CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY, HOW CAN I HELP YOU?" And they can carry one with fellow librarians like they're walking down the street together. I can't wait to see the looks on their faces at the moment I "Shhh" them.

Strange things that have happened while at the library:

One day a middle-aged female librarian working at the computer next to me while on on the phone had a breakdown and started crying loudly while the person on the other line presumably gave her a really hard time because she couldn't find a book he/she was looking for. That was awkward.

One time a large younger black man with bright orange hair (whom I'm pretty positive was not heterosexual) was blatantly staring at me. Every five minutes or so I'd look up from my computer towards him and he'd be looking right at me. When I first noticed him he was sitting a couple tables away. Every 10-15 minutes or so he'd creep closer to me, one table at a time, until he eventually made his way to the seat next to me. Of course, he stopped staring at me when he sat next to me. He just sat there reading his magazine and said nothing to me. I left a couple minutes later.

Another time some aging rocker type who looked like he'd had recently come across some hard times (his teeth were all over the place his clothes were caked in grease) was trying to pawn off some casette tapes (presumably as a donation) to one of the females librarians. He had a grocery sack full of them and judging by how she responded to seeing him, she'd been through this routine before. She dealt with him in the sort of faux-polite way that a librarian or a retail worker has to deal with the off-beat characters who frequent their places of employment. She tried to be helpful and answered his questions, but did so with a slight air of annoyance that normal people pick up on. He just kept on talking, though.

The tapes were classic rock bands like Zeppelin and the Who.

"This album, Led Zeppelin IV, is in my opinion their best work. Bonham's drumming is really great on this one," I overheard him enthusiastically telling her while she nodded her head mildly.

I was wondering to myself why, if this man was so passionate about the music on these tapes, was he giving them all to the library? And if he were looking to get rid of some tapes, why wouldn't he at least take them to a pawnshop or used record store and possibly get some cash for them? Perhaps, despite his currently destitute situation, he hadn't lost his sense of altruism. Which is quite noble if you think about it.

I, however, haven't been back to the library since, nor have I bothered donating any cassette tapes to it.

Enough with the honking people

2007-04-17T23:19:00.000-07:00

Surprisingly, very few things have annoyed me about this city thus far. I honestly can't think of one singular thing that has brought me chagrin every single day, except ... people unnecessarily honking their horns.

I bet the average Chicagoan hears at least a dozen horn honks a day. Some are succinct, such as a cabbie peppering his horn to grab the attention of a potential customer. Some are cautionary, like a bus driver letting a cyclist know of their swift, massive presence. And some are completely idiotic, like the people who lay on the horn at an intersection where somebody crossing the street in front of them had mis-judged the length of their green light and wound up stuck with their ass end partially blocking a lane of perpendicular traffic for the entire time it takes the light to change. These people are the worst.

Honking is like capital punishment: It doesn't work as a preventative tool. Yes, people who get ambitious and try to sneak through a yellow light and wind up getting blocking traffic are annoying. And they deserve to be honked at, if for no other reason that to let them know they fucked up. But to hold a sustained honk for 10-15 seconds is obnoxious and does not an ounce of good. Will the person blocking the intersection forever vow to never attempt squeaking through a congested intersection again? Probably not. Will your sustained honk peeve everybody within a 50-foot radius and wind up making you look like the jerk of the situation? That’s very likely.

A little advice to you drivers of Chicago: For starters, to the cabbies, when we’re looking for you, we usually see you. No need for the heads up toot. To the sustained-honking pricks: just stop. To the bus drivers: sometimes you guys sneak up on us, so in the instances you don’t think we see you, honk away.

These measures could make walking downtown 30-40 percent less annoying.

Our Lady of the Underpass

2007-04-11T00:15:00.000-07:00

For the most part, the Fullerton Ave. underpass of the Kennedy Expressway is much like the rest of those in Chicago: Unremarkable. Actually, that's putting it kindly. The thing is fucking nasty. Walking under it feels like walking through a huge gas station bathroom.

But the Fullerton Ave. one different. That’s because people think the image of the Virgin Mary has shown itself on its northern wall.

Most Catholics are familiar with the phenomena: People will think they see what looks like the outline of the Virgin Mary somewhere — be it an apparition, a peculiar formation of wood in a tree, a water stain in an underpass — and in thinking it’s some sort of divine sign, they’ll places flowers, light candles and hold vigils at the spot.

This particular imprint was first noticed in April 2005, and its popularity seems to have only grown in the last two years. I drove by it with my mother and stepfather this weekend and there were a dozen or so bouquets and candles lit in its honor. In the past I’ve seen folks go so far as to pull over in their cars and get out and take a look.

As for the image itself, well, thinking it’s actually The Virgin Mary is a stretch. It’s basically a calcium stain that from the perfect distance — about 20 feet directly in front of it — looks like the silhouette of Jesus’ mom.

The concept of such a thing having so much attention draw to it, and for that attention to continue over two years, is a bit intriguing. Who are these people that truly believe that this is some sort of heavenly mark? Do they really believe it’s such a thing, or are they just being dutiful Catholics?

What’s more intriguing, though, or at least what I wonder every time I walk past it is what happens when it starts to erode? Does the place lose all its supposed biblical significance? (Technically it shouldn’t). Or is such a spot timelessly important? Will people still bring it gifts five years from now?

What if the city whitewashes the walls of the underpass (like it does most of the graffiti-lined ones on the South Side)? Will there be a riot? That would likely never happen since Mayor Daley’s a devout Catholic, but I bet there’d be some uproar if it somehow did.

Will the phenomena itself just fade away? Will the people that honored her feel stilted by the fact that The Virgin Mary made a stop in their town yet not a fucking thing about their lives changed because of it? It’s been two years now, and I don’t think anybody’s really noticed any tangible acts of goodness derived from it. At some point will even the hardliners re-assess what this thing actually is?

What I’m getting at is whether or not the Fullerton underpass eventually go back to being as lifeless and disgusting as all the rest?

If so, then what does that say about divinity?

Jeremy in the White City

2007-04-08T23:58:00.000-07:00

Since finishing The Devil in the White City last summer I'd been meaning to take a trip down to Hyde Park to meander through the old fairgrounds. For those of you not familiar, The Devil in the White City is a recent best-selling creative non-fiction book about the World'sColumbian Exhibition that took place in Chicago in 1893 and the murdering spree of serial killer H. H. Holmes that went along at the same place and time.

In the research I'd done since finishing the book I found that only one of the original buildings from the fair still stands: The Palace of Fine Arts building, which now houses the Museum of Science and Industry. For the most part, however, the land where the fair took place remains undeveloped park. The Wooded Island still exists (as does the pond surrounding it). The Midway Plaisance is still intact (now serves as a recreation area for University of Chicago students). By no means did the area seem to be anything near as astounding as it was in 1893, but, for a history person like myself, walking where such an amazing place once stood seemed interesting nonetheless.

At the Garfield stop, I get off the green line, which, aside from the new pink line is the only CTA train I'd yet to step foot on. That's largely because both legs of it take you to two of the worst parts of town: The West and South sides. Immediately I'm met by a ghetto. There's abandoned buildings in just about every direction. I'm overcome with the sensation that I got off the train a stop early and that I'm going to have to drudge miles of slum to get to where I need to go, but I'm relived when Inotice what I assume is Washington Park ahead in the distance. For those of you who haven't been keeping up with Chicago's bid to host the 2016 Olympics, this is the park in which the majority of the games' facilities are planned to be built. An eyebrow-raising choice, considering it's merely blocks east ofEnglewood , ground zero for Chicago crime. Walking up to the park I notice a young black woman squatting up against a tree with her pants at her ankles presumably taking a piss. Now, it's about 1 in the afternoon on Easter Sunday, it's at a fairly busy intersection and two cop cars are resting on the side of the street just a hundred or so yards away.

This neighborhood has a long way to go before it's ready to host the biggest sporting event in the world.

In all fairness, though, Washington Park itself is serene and well-kept. As I cross over into the Hyde Park/University of Chicago part of town I'm taken about by now nice it all is, actually. Living up north all you here are horror stories about anything south. But from my vantage point, Hyde Park is a like a little oasis of old world charm is a desert of destitute. The Lincoln Park of the south side, if you will.

The architecture is amazing, especially the U. Chicago campus, which was built mostly after the turn of the century. It looks like the majority of the structures here (residential as well) haven't been touched since they were built. Refreshing, coming from Lincoln Park, a place so overloaded with yuppies and the ambitious developers that want to appease them that the neighborhood's majestic Victorian flats rarely stand a chance against the concept of a new cookie-cutter home.

I make my way through the campus on 57th St. and I'm dumped off at the entrance of the Museum of Science an Industry, which still remains one of the staggering works of architectural genius in the city. What's amazing about this building, or I should say the fair in general, is that the MOSE is only about an fourth of the size of the Liberal Arts Building, which was the main structure of the fair. Anybody that's been to the MOSE knows that it's pretty fucking massive. Trying to imagine an equally ornate structure four times its size mind boggling. (Wo is looking at the one-third scale replica of Daniel Chester French's Republic — the centerpiece of the fair — and trying to fathom how grand the original one was.) This all really makes you wish the buildings of the fair were preserved. However, most were burned down or destroyed in the recent years following the fire. Chicago's economy went back to shit after it closed.

From there I headed south along the lake shore and wound up at the 63rd St. Beach House, a structure that, while I was there, I'd assumed as also part of the fair. After doing some research back home later I found it hadn't been built until the 1919. Still, it's an interesting visit. The two-story structure sits right between the lake and Lake Shore Drive. It's still functioning and is quite busy during the summer months, but it was completely empty while I was there, which made it an even more enthralling. As I laid in its courtyard I felt like a rogue explorer who'd come across ancient abandoned ruins. As I peered through it's balcony pavilion off into a placid and blue Lake Michigan I felt like I was in a remote castle in Spain. There wasn't a person, car or building in my periphery.

I made my way back through the park, which was quiet and desolate. I only saw a handful of other people out during the day (again, it was Easter and the temperature was about 40 degrees). As I walked through the Wooded Island I imagined awe-struck folk in Victorian garb strolling about with me. Women in long dresses toting umbrellas, mustached men with derby hats and pocket watch chains attached to their waists. Excitable children in suspenders and socks pulled to the knee running in between them. In moments like these I'd give just about anything to travel back in time.

As it was, the only other humans I saw on Wooded Island were a group of twentysomethings who looked like they just got out of church.

I made my way back to the university, ate lunch at a cute little cafe filled with artsy college kids and dressed-up families. From there I went south to walk the along the MidwayPlaisance , which acted as the entrance to the fair. These days it's grassy indentations are used as makeshift soccer and field hockey fields for the U. Chicago students. Again, my mind wandered to what it would have looked like during the fair. Bustling with horses,carriages, wooded novelty shops. It was amazing to think that many of the magnificent university buildings directly to my right, as historic as they are, weren't even there when the fair took place.

About half way through the plaisance I head a couple blocks south 63rd (which starts to get sketchy) and make my way to the green line stop (which gets sketchier). There are massive empty lots filled with urban debris in this part of the city. It looks like an inner-city war zone. Of course, I'm the only white person in sight.

I want to head farther west on 63rd to walk past the intersection where H. H. Holmes' infamous death castle once stood. This was the macabre hotel he built just before the fair that was filled with bizarre torture rooms, a gas chamber and large kiln for him to kill and discard the buddies. I don't get that far west because the area now actually looks more frightening than it may have been in 1893 (theserial killer has been replaced by gangs). It's kind of a shame that of all the things that have changed in that part of Chicago since 1893, the one thing that's remained constant is a high murder rate.

Saw Rex Grossman today

2007-04-03T22:09:00.000-07:00

He was standing outside the Park Hyatt hotel at 800 N. Michigan at about 7ish with a dashing blomde (who I'll assume was his wife) in a fine suit. It looked like they were waiting for an hotel attendant to flag them a cab or for a driver to pick them up. Rex was leaning up against the exterior wall of the hotel with his back mostly turned to the sidewalk. He was bending over the blonde, who was looking out onto the street.

I recognized it was somebody I recognized right away — like a guy I went to college with or met at the bars a couple weeks ago — and I almost stopped and said "hey" before realizing that he was somebody I only knew from watching TV and reading the newspaper. It's kind of funny how, for a moment when you see a celebrity of some sort in real life your first reaction is "hey, I know that person," when in reality you've never actually met that person.

So I kept walking. I assume him having his back turned to the street was a conscious effort, as I can't imagine he's somebody who wants to be noticed in public these days. There's likely two different types of people who would say something to Grossman on the street: Annoying superfans who'll want to stop and talk with him, go on and on about how great this year's team was and ask him for an autograph. Or asshole superfans that'll tell him how much they think he sucks and that he should get the fuck out of town.

Either way he loses.

Though technically, judging by the hotness of the blonde he was with and the fact he can probably spend every night of the off-season at posh five-star hotels downtown, he still pretty much wins.

Fucking NFL quarterbacks. Even when they're pariahs in the cities which they play in their lives are better than the rest of ours.

Being a hipster isn't just a state of mind anymore...it's gotten geographical

2007-03-28T23:37:00.000-07:00

Ry and I signed a lease for an apartment smack-dab in Wicker Park last week! Woo-hoo! That's hipster ground zero for those of you who aren't into drinking ironic beer in equally ironic dive bars with vintage vinyl playing in the background.

I won't get into specifics in fear of the stalkers (how hilarious I'd care about revealing my address considering what I do for a living), so I'll just say the place is a block south of Division and a couple blocks west ofAshland. We'll be just a stone's throw from the Chicago bus (how we get to work) and the Division Blue Line stop.

What's really important is we'll be able to literally crawl home from four of our favorite bars in Chicago: The Inner Town Pub, Gold Star, Happy Village and theRainbo Club.

There were four criteria that played into our decision: price (had to be under $1,100), social location, location to public transportation and apartment quality/size. Those of you who actually see this place will realize quickly that social location was our top priority.

The apartment itself ain't much. Hell, you don't much for just over a $1,000 a month in one of the trendiest neighborhoods in the country. We got a living room and a kitchen (which are essentially the same room), two tiny bedrooms with barely enough room to put a bed, and a back deck with a slight view of the Near North Sidehighrises. As for appearances, well, it won't be mistaken for a condo in the Palmolive Building, but I've certainly lived in worse.

Overall, living amongst likeminded and similarly-aged artsy folk will be more enjoyable than our current situation, which is amidst spoiled DePaul kids and yuppie stroller-wielding thirtysomethings.

The only upsetting part of the situation was writing nearly $2,500 in checks for something we won't actually own. An act that has all the characteristics of an ass raping, minus, of course, an actual penis being inserted into your anus.

Oh well, at least we'll have cheap bars within stumbling distance to drink our egregious rent paying sorrows away.

The Tamale Guy: A Chicago enigma

2007-03-22T22:26:00.000-07:00

Who is he? Where is he from? Does he have a day job? Or does he make enough money of his bar-to-bar tamale sales to pay the bills? Who makes his tamales? Where are they made? Is he part of a larger tamale-selling conglomerate or is he a solopreneur?

I've seen only one other tamale peddler, a younger fella who looked a bit unseasoned in the ways of tamale selling. Who is he? Is he part of Tamale Guy's posse? Or are they bitter tamale selling rivals? Was he Tamale Guy's protege, but grew frustrated with Tamale Guy's technique and demanding schedule and decided to go out on his own? If so, do they purposefully avoid each other when they hit the streets? What happens when they do bump into one another? Is there a bar-clearing showdown? Do they have a tamale drawing contest?

Some random observations on Tamale Guy and his routine:

He’s sort of like a panhandler, only instead of asking you to give him something, he's asking if he can give something to you. However, like a beggar, he'll ask you if you want one, you'll say no, then he'll come back to your table less than a minute later and ask if you want one again. Just like when a bum will ask you for money as you walk into a convenience store, you'll say no, then he'll ask you for money again when you walk out of said convenience store moments later.

I mean, if you’re going to take the time to ask me for something, you could at least have the courtesy to remember my face 30 seconds later.

Also, Tamale Guy works with complete disregard of what's going on around him. I've seen him at concerts literally walk through a crowd, and mid-song, will bark out "Tamales! Tamales!" in everybody's faces, often out-screaming the band. When it comes to selling tamales, this man has no scruples. If Latinos didn't hold Catholicism so sacred, I wouldn't put it past this guy to hawk tamales in Mass.

Can you imagine:

"And now, we give to you oh Lord, thy daily bread..."

"Tamales! Tamales!"

He's got a lot of gumption, I will give him that. You hang out at the same place long enough you'll likely see him twice in one night. And I've seen him as far north as Irving Park, far west as Western and as far south as Grand, which leads me to believe this guy covers damn near the entire north side on a given night, sometimes twice over.

Which leads me to another batch of questions: What kind of car does he drive? How many miles are on it? Does he have a driver? Where does he park when he hits all these bars?

Since it's doubtful his English vernacular stretches beyond what's necessary to sell tamales, we'll probably never know...

St. Patrick's Day can kinda suck in Chicago

2007-03-20T21:24:00.000-07:00

This shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody who really thinks about it (apparently I didn't really think about).

It sucked much in the same way it would suck to be in Times Square on New Years Eve, Las Vegas for tip-off of the Final Four, New Orleans on Mardi Gras or South By Southwest — these supposed epic moments/events which we all at some times in our lives feel the need to be a part of.

As a society we're deeply intrigued by the concept of being there. We want to be there to somehow gain some greater perspective on life or the particular phenomena we've gone to experience or at least brag to our friends about it. This concept of being there is everywhere, from sporting events, to concerts, to family vacations in clichéd touristy destinations.

The trick is, being there (especially with these not necessarily imaginative experiences) usually means we're doing so with thousands of others in uncomfortable circumstances that frequently end up ruining — or at least slightly diminishing — the experience in some way.

Case in point, Saturday. Partying in Chicago — a predominately Irish Catholic town with a reputation for hard drinking — on a St. Patrick's Day that falls on a weekend sounded like a great idea. I figured it'd be a blast. A grand party. I wanted to be there.

However, being there meant standing in line for 15 minutes to get into a bar, then after finally getting in one, being practically dry humped by the guys next to me because it was so crowded, waiting 15 minutes for a Guinness, then eventually spending $20 for it because the disoriented server forgot who you were and that she owed you change.

Because of this I wasn't able to enjoy myself at all and, ironically, didn't get the least bit intoxicated.

It brought me back to the same question I had while standing like a sardine with 65,000 other hot, sweaty people while headliners the Red Hot Chili Peppers closed Lollapalooza last summer and trying to watch this year's Super Bowl at a bar in Chicago (all events I was hoping would be some sort of zen-like transcendent experience, but wound up being ultimately dissatisfying.)

What's the point of being there when being there usually sucks?

The answer to this question is creating our own there.

So next year on St. Patrick's Day, in order to capture the true essence of the holiday (which is getting sauced in intimate quarters while a band with bagpipes plays in the background), I'm going to grab some close friends, a couple CDs of Celtic music, a shit ton of beer and whiskey and bring them to my living room (which is what most authentic Irish pubs resemble anyway).

We'll create our own hoopla, likely have more fun, save money, and if a fight should break out, it can go on for as long as it need be.

I'm back (for those of you who were not reading)

2007-03-19T21:30:00.000-07:00

It's the beginning of Year No. 2 in Chicago and I'm back and promising this will be a regular blog yet again. I'll have at least three new posts per week for nobody to read.

I turned 28 on Friday, but any specifics on that would be too self indulgent and self incriminating to post here, so I'll stick with something safer and more abstemious (that means the opposite of self-indulgent).

The first ever column I wrote for a magazine in Chicago I was bitching about how difficult concertgoing in this town can be. While I have to say that a year later I'm not nearly as discontent with it as I was last spring (a higher paying job and better understanding of the CTA system have a lot to do with this) I still have some frustrations, such as the phenomena of shows selling out insanely early.

Apparently tickets to last week's two TV on the Radio gigs at Metro were liquidated months in advance. The Shins show at Congress sold out months ahead of time, too, and the Arcade Fire shows (all three of them) have sold out as well — and they're not until mid May (I've also heard of scalped tickets going for hundreds on ebay.)

This could mean a handful of things: The immense popularity of these bands I discovered years ago reinfocres my astute prophetic ability to predict what types of music the masses will fall in love. The booking agents for these acts need to do a better job of finding bigger venues for these bands to play while in Chicago. I should turn my back on these aforementioned groups, accuse them of selling out and find new, yet-to-become popular bands that I can wait until the last minute and still get tickets to (while impressing record store clerks with my obscurity along the way.)

OR, I, and everybody else who bitches about missing too many shows in this town because they don't secure tickets in time needs to, should get with program and start paying attention months ahead of time like the thousands of others who gobble them up.

The perils of personal theft

2007-02-27T22:33:00.000-08:00

The footprints of sand and dirt on the floor, the cigarette burn made they put through your shirt while digging through your closet, the fact they likely live in your neighborhood and know exactly who you are … these are the types of things that really creep you out when somebody breaks into your apartment and steals your shit.

The fact they stole the old computer and TV don't bother you that much (well, only if it's a 19 inch TV and a computer you don't ever use anymore, which was the case with me). They're technically objects that can be replaced. But the fact that some dirty cocksucker's hands sifted through your mail, perhaps looked at your bills, your pictures, read your letters, and maybe even took a piss in your dishwasher for some twisted shits and giggles … that shit really makes you want to bash some motherfucker's head in.

Yeah, for those of you who don't know, our apartment got broken into last weekend. Pretty much everything we paid over $50 for was taken (except, inexplicably, a Play Station 2 — those fuckers must really not be worth shit these days). My laptop and ipod, thankfully, were with me back in Omaha at the time, or the tone of this blog would be much, much more solemn.

The whole thing has the look and feel of a local job: Somebody who saw us leaving, or knew our coming and goings and the light patterns in our apartment well enough to tell if we were both gone for the whole weekend or just out on an epic weekend binge (which for us, actually happens quite frequently).

What makes that creepy is how the person who robbed the place might pass us on the street every now and again, who knows who we are, and every time he sees us he giggles to himself thinking about the time he broke into our place, violated our space and stole anything of value. Every time I leave the apartment these days I find myself looking around to see if anybody's watching me leave. (This is especially peculiar when I'm listening to Rockwell's greatest hits.)

Not an overly awesome scenario.

I suppose the two saddest things you realize after the majority of your personal valuables get stolen is (if you're a broke twentysomething like Ry and I) that the combined street value of your personal belongings likely hovers around a couple hundred bucks. (The obviously positive inverse of this is that you also realize none of your friends like you only because of your money).

And it occurs to you that your net worth is no about as low as its been since you were 15.

And of course, you feel sorry for your poor little DVD player which you found resting upside down in the middle of the floor neglected in the a chaos of thievery. I can't imagine its self-esteem is doing too well these days, knowing that in the eyes of a wanton criminal it wasn't even worth the effort to pick up off the floor and stuff into a bag.

Poor thing. We're going to get through this together, though.

I watched half the Super Bowl in dorm room!

2007-02-06T22:36:00.000-08:00

Up until as late as Sunday afternoon I had no idea where I would be watching the Super Bowl. A bar, house party or my living room were the options I could conjure up two hours before kickoff. Never in a million years would I have imagined watching it in the swank dorm room of three 20-year-old women I don't remember meeting, but this is before Jesse calls me.

"Remember those girls from last night?" He asks.

"Not really," I reply.

"I guess they're throwing a Super Bowl party and they told us we could come."

I vaguely remember talking to a group of younger girls late at a party the night before, but remember nothing about a Super Bowl party being discussed, or much of anything else, really.

"All right, I suppose we can stop by that," I tell him. Neither of us had any options at this point, and the "party" was just a five minute walk down the street from my apartment. I put party in quotations because, given the recent — how do I say it politely — lack of action at Jesse-recommended parties, I'm a tad skeptical.

My skepticism grew as we neared the address of the "party" and I realized that two of the buildings at the intersection were commercial and the other two were DePaul University dormitories.

I stop dead in my tracks we I notice that, in fact, the address we were given is a dorm.

"I am NOT watching this game in a fucking dorm room!" I exclaim, shaking my head with a smirk of disbelief.

Jesse mumbles something and stammers.

"We probably can't even bring beer into this fucking place!" I continue.

He scrambles for his phone to call the girls to see what's up with their place of residence. Apparently they assure him it's not really a dorm room and that we can bring beer in.

"C'mon, lets give it a try," Jesse says shrugging his shoulders. At this point I'm assuming that he thinks he's possibly going to get laid by one of these girls, and as any good friend should when a buddy thinks he might get laid, you go along with his plan no matter how cockamamie it may be.

And this planned proved to be quite a cockamamie one.

We get there and it is very much a dorm room, albeit an upscale one with actual bedrooms, a killer view of the downtown skyline and a fridge filled with beer. I only vaguely remember meeting one of the girls there the night before, so it's initially quite awkward.

We take seats on the couch and I scramble to think of things I could talk about with girls who are my little sister's age (it just occurred to me while writing that sentence these girls were exactly my little sister's age, causing me to clasp my hands in my face in even more embarrassment.)

It ends up being not as uncomfortable as one would think. The girls were pretty cool and seemed to genuinely enjoy the presence of Jess and I. We talk about football, school, general pop culture stuff. I realize that for the first time in my life I'm sitting in a room full of people who had all not only seen Brittany Spears' movie Crossroads, but actually liked it.

We left at halftime.

We spend about five minutes in the bitter cold waiting for a cab while two college-aged girls do the same about 50 feet to the west of us. I notice a cab with it's lights on approaching us from the East (which is closer to Jesse and I than the two girls) flag it down, it rolls to a stop just past us and we began to walk towards it, thus forming an almost perfect triangle with Jess and I and the two college girls at the base of it and the cab at the peak. Well, the college girls decided to walk towards the cab and wave at it as well, at which point I realize they're totally trying to cut us off, which they end up doing.

What's a guy to do at this point? I kind of wanted to throw a bit of a tantrum, teach these spoiled little DePaul bitches a lesson on cab etiquette. I mean, it was fucking five below zero and cabs were hard to come by. You don't steal somebody's cab in the middle February. And I caught his attention first. But being a gentleman, I graciously let them have it.

We both laughed.

"Jesus, I don't fucking miss college girls one bit," I say.

Four blocks later we finally find a cabbie and winds up telling us the best cab story I'd heard since I moved here. Apparently one night he picked a guy up who said he needed to go to Des Plaines then promptly passed out in the back seat. The cabbie assumed that since he didn't give him a precise address, this meant he needed to go to the suburb of Des Plaines, which is about a half an hour outside of the city. So the cabbie heads to the suburbs. Once he gets there, he shakes drunk guy in the backseat up to wake him.

"We're in Des Plaines, where exactly do you need to go?"

Drunk guy rubs his eyes, looks around.

"Des Plaines? I said I needed to go to a place on Des Plaines, not in Des Plaines."

Des Plaines is also a street that runs north and south downtown. Long story short, the cabbie winds up driving him all the way back to the city and doesn't charge the drunk guy a penny.

Well, we get to a dive bar which had the exact atmosphere I was hoping to watch the game in. Just a few old timers, one TV and tons of snacks.

Bears quarterback Rex Grossman had another one of his complete lapses of reason and does just about everything humanely possible to help his team lose a football game. He's fumbling the ball, throwing wild interceptions, tripping over himself. It's embarrassing. Reminds me a lot of my high school football days.

Needless to say, they went on to lose.

"I'm not that big a sports fan, but there's this douchebag I work with that's going to be totally pissed tomorrow," I hear one of the hipster bartenders says as we leave the place. Hearing phrases like those are why watching a football game at a trendy dive is better than watching one at a bona fide sports bar.

We luck out and find a cab quickly, which was the coup of the evening. Almost every pocket of bystanders we pass flips us off, presumably because we're in a warm car and their not (the loss and drunkeness might have had something to do with it as well).

One guy actually grabs his ball sack and spits on us as we cruise past him. An hour after I got home I received email from Jesse saying that he was getting flipped off and cussed at by every person he drove past on the way farther up to his apartment.

I think it'll be good for this town to forget about its Bears for a while.

The Bears and Jamba Juice

2007-01-21T22:39:00.000-08:00

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.

Subway Singer Supreme

2007-01-16T22:47:00.000-08:00

The dumpy black man with a Louis Armstrong mouth could sing.

As he belted out what sounded to be a church hymnal I'd never heard before, a tall lanky white guy in khakis and a black bomber jacket tossed a buck into the cup he had set in front of him. I thought momentarily about doing the same, but then remembered I didn't give the guy who did a spot-on Smokey Robinson last month, and this guy wasn't nearly as good as he was, so I should hold off and maintain my giving-cash-to-subway-singers standards.

When I saw him whip out a phone from his pocket though (and not a cellular phone mind you, but one of those seemingly ancient home phones, complete with a handset, cord and receiver), I knew this guy had some crazy trick up his sleeve (or perhaps another phone!) As he stood there silently holding it for a moment I was wondering where he would go with this and how awkward it might get. With subway singers, things can get awkward sometimes (i.e. the cracked-out dude at the Chicago Red Line stop that sings Walking to New Orleans over and over again completely off-key using a repetitive knee slap that he brings all the way from center field to keep cadence.)

I looked at the lanky guy in khakis and the short middle-aged women next to me and they were wearing the same looks of concern.

But when the guy energetically broke into:
"No New Year's Day
To celebrate
No chocolate covered candy hearts to give away
No first of spring…

I just called
to say
I love you…"

Well all took a collective sigh of relief and smiled. It was like one of those moments at a wedding reception when a drunken uncle grabs the mic from the best man during the best man speech and everybody gasps in horror thinking he's going to go on some drawn out tangent that ends up being totally offensive but instead says something heartfelt and succinct and the crowd takes a deep breath and thinks "Aww, wasn't that nice?"

For the first time in my almost-year in Chicago every single person standing with me at a train stop was smiling. The middle-aged women next to me started laughing, leaned over and said something about how sometimes on a Friday afternoon you need something like this to smile to.

I dug into my pocket and pulled out a wad of singles and dumped them into his cup. This guy didn't have the vocal range as the Smokey Robinson doppelganger, but he smoked him in enterprise.

Just before the roar the upcoming Red Line train drowned him out I heard "I Just Called to say I Love You" morph into some sort of imaginary phone conversation between loved ones.

"Naw baby, don't worry. I'll be home soon, I promise," he was saying into the phone. Those that had just walked down the stairs to the stop and had no knowledge of the context as to why this man was talking an obviously disconnected home phone would have likely thought he was insane.

As I boarded the train I myself was wondering the same thing, or if he was just an exceptionally creative subway performer.

Then I realized a critical element of being an exceptionally creative subway performer is being insane to some degree.

Which is kind of sad.

Sexercise

2007-01-15T22:50:00.000-08:00

Women I've never met are gyrating in front of me in more sultry ways than any girl I've ever dated has.

They bend their knees, rotate their pelvises with suave, run their hands through their hair, push up their breasts with their palms.

The husbands and boyfriends of these women are satisfied. I envy every one of them.

For an hour they stretch, contort, shimmy and sweat. Arousing music plays in the background.

There's a camera crew in from Toronto filming the session. They're shooting a documentary on the booty. They were in Atlanta last week.

"If you're shooting a documentary on the booty you probably didn't even need to leave Atlanta," I say. They laugh. They know what I'm talking about.

They've been following the instructor of the class around town the last couple days. The lanky camera man in cargo pants is getting gratuitous shots of the women bent over, he's not even trying to hide the fact it wants to see nothing but ass.

He's like me on my way to work everyday, except he gawks within an artistic context.

After a shoot the lanky cameraman retreats to the corner, giving a faux look of exhaustion.

"I hate my job," he says with a sigh and a roll of the eyes.

Mine could be a lot worse, too.

A word of advice to the guys: We've got it all wrong. The bars, the parties, Craigslist .. we're way off the mark.

Want to meet women? Want these women to think you have depth, sensuality and confidence?

Sign up for a dance class.

Sexercise II

2007-01-05T22:48:00.000-08:00

"All right girls, just pretend Jeremy's not here," the instructor said as the ladies in workout garb filtered in, the lights dimmed and the mood music came on.

"I'm used to women ignoring me, so it's no big deal," I reply. They all laugh and it makes me feel good. Making a girl laugh can be the best trait a man's got going for him.

They start the routine and it consists mostly of stretches that are supposed to release the stress involved with being a women, to "To turn their brains off and let their body move," the instructor tells me.

It all makes me want to fall asleep, but I tough it out, jot down notes and watching these women bend in ways I've rarely seen.

"Are you falling asleep over there?" the instructor asks me. "We were gonna let you sit in the lap dance chair, but I didn't think that'd be such a great idea."

"No problem, I'm doing just fine over here."

About a half-hour later, when the first hour's up, they take a recess and each of them sees me, remembers that there is a actually guy awkwardly sitting through this session, and they each shuffle past me shy and reserved.

The instructor asks me what I think so far.

"I get how this works on a sensual, endorphin-releasing level. Shoot, I feel more like a women already," I say. She laughs.

"Well, you haven't seen anything yet."

"Ready girls!" she hollers.

And as if they'd just robbed the sex boutique shop down the street, they each strut back into the room wearing cheap high heels.

One of them, a thirtysomething Asian women, switched into a bra and a thong.

I'm a bit taken aback at this point.

The music cranks up (it's the same shitty Buckcherry-esque sleaze rock I'd hear at a joint if I were paying to see these women strip) and they start working the pole. They've all got a routine down. They start by leaning lasciviously against the adjacent well, then saunter up to the pole, grab it, pull themselves up on it, twist around it in a sexual manner, slide down and dismount for the next girl to step up.

It's all much more erotic then I'd imagined. My palms are sweating. I've been to over a dozen strip joints, but because the women I was watching now were made with real body parts and mostly likely didn't have genital herpes, I was enjoying it much more.

I crack a wicked grin, because knowing that I'm the first guy that's ever been allowed to sit through one of these classes and knowing that I'm getting paid to do so is something I can't help but smile at.

I look over at the recliner across the room, what I assume is the "lap dance" chair, and I'm wishing I would have put up a little more of a fight to get to it.

As the girls are doing their thing I'm trying to sit there as professionally as possible. That is, staring straight at the ground when the look over at me, and attempting to hide my eyes under the brim of my hat even when they're not.

At one point the Asian women in a bra and panties has a Janet Jackson-esque wardrobe malfunction and what I swear was a nipple poked itself out to say "hey." The instructor was right there and had to see it, too.

Again, my eyes were diverted straight to the ground.

"Be a professional, Schnick. Be a professional, Schnick," I kept saying to myself, but my heart wasn't listening to me and my rapid blood flow forced me to adjust myself.

Then, just as things were getting real saucy, the music turned down and the dancing stopped.

"Great job tonight, girls. Great job," the instructor said, and they all discussed who would be in attendance for next week's session.

"Thanks girls, you were all great," I say as they shuffle out. My wit is met with giggles again.

I exchange some closing remarks with the instructor. She seems a bit nervous that I'm going to write something racy in the article.

"I promise, the story's going to be very straight-forward, I'm looking at this purely at the health and stress release angle," I assured her (obviously the article I'm referring to isn't the one on my MySpace blog).

As I said my good-byes she turned to me and said, "Now, if you see any of us on the street, just act like you don't know who we are."

"Yeah, especially me," said a tall twentysomething of Middle Eastern descent, who, from my vantage point, was the sexiest girl in the class.

I nodded my head.

"I'll do my best."

I grab my backpack, throw my headphones and find my way out of the building and onto the street, my senses still taut after what I'd just experienced.

As I'm standing at the first set of lights on the way back to my place I hear what sounds to be somebody hollering out my name over the music coming out of my ipod. I look around for a second confused, then notice that in a Honda Accord stopped at a red light at the intersection is the tall girl of Middle Eastern descent and she's waving at me to come over to her.

I take my headphones off and walk to her hesitantly (this was a woman that just a matter of minutes ago told me to ignore her if I saw her in public.)

"Do you need a ride? Come on, I'll give you a ride," she said, somewhat forcefully.

"No, I'm fine, I always walk" I reply as I get closer and try to turn back.

"No, come on, get in. It's too cold outside to be walking."

It was cold and I do live over a mile away, so I said to hell with it and got in the Accord.

We made small talk. She asked about my writing. I told her I tried to pick up whatever interesting assignments I could, which included this one. She told me she just moved to the city from the suburbs and was working in the West Loop.

"So, what do you do for fun around here?" She asked.

" "Be a professional, Schnick. Be a professional, Schnick," I reminded myself.

"Um, nothing really, I just, uh, kinda hang out. I like Wicker Park," I say.

She gets excited.

"So do I! That's my favorite neighborhood in town! Where do you hang out there?"

"Be a professional, Schnick. Be a professional, Schnick!"

"Umm, I don't know, uh," I stammer. Just then she pulls up to my street.

"I'm right here," I say abruptly and she gets kind of confused but pulls over.

"You should tell me where some good places are in the West Loop," she says.

"Yeah, uh, maybe I'll just, uh, see you around," I say as I grab my things and hurriedly exit her car.

"Be a professional, Schnick. Be a professional, Schnick!"

"Yeah, that'd be fun if we did," she says as I say good-bye and close the door.

I turn away, my shoulders dip immediately in frustration and I make the 25-yard walk to my apartment cursing journalistic integrity and the fact that I don't yet have a business card.

Hollaween

2006-10-30T21:05:00.000-08:00

Despite it being Halloween and all, nothing really excited happened in Chicago this weekend.

Waited 15 minutes for a cab outside my apartment Friday, which was the longest I’ve ever had to wait for one in my neighborhood yet. I suppose that’s notable. The fact that we were standing with my cousin who was dressed as the Unabomber is notable as well.

Made my first visit to the Suburbs since I’ve moved here on Saturday night and they pretty much exactly what I thought they’d be: Quiet, dull and full of strip malls.

Jesse and I got a ride back to the city later in the night from some friends of the people I knew at the party, which was notable for only two reasons: It was in a brand new Escalade and the two college-aged kids in the front seat (DePaul students) had seemingly been anywhere in Chicago except Lincoln Park and the Northwest suburbs.

When they asked me where I liked to hang out in the city I told them Wicker Park and the Ukranian Village.

“The Ukranian Village? Never heard of that place,” the driver, a thin, high cheek-boned blond who looked every bit of a spoiled private school kid, said.

When we got off 90-94 and I told him that to get to Wicker Park he needed to take a right on North Ave. As he did this he said to his buddy in the next seat, “I’ve never been to the right off the interstate before.” Which would likely mean he’s never once left the near north side of town, and he’d lived in here for at least two years. Remaining that sheltered in a city like this is almost impressive.

To prevent getting pelted by PBR cans while stepping out of the pimped out SUV in the middle of Hipsterville, Jesse (who was hilariously dressed as a sporty Kevin Federline) and I (a mailman) ducked swiftly into Estelle’s and proceeded to get drunk with Dale Earnhardt Jr., a member of the White Stripes and Mike Ditka.

Random notes on the 9 to 5, working downtown and spending lots of time alone

2006-10-23T23:17:00.000-07:00

There’s something eerie about working in a metropolitan high-rise these days. I’m assuming it has something to do with having images of jet liners flying into sky-scrapers and people leaping to their death to escape the ensuing flames being pounded into our minds.

As I looked out the window of my new office downtown in the 31st floor of the Hancock Center, I couldn’t get my mind off the fact that that this was the same sort of view many lot of the people who died on Sept. 11 saw last before they decided that jumping was the less painful way out.

As much as it is inspiring and cool to tell everybody back home (where the tallest structure is only half the Hancock’s size) that you work in a 100-story building, it’s somewhat unsettling to know you spend 40 hours a week in a place that is likely on many a terrorist watch list.

I spend too much time imagining what it would sound like if a plane crashed into the space above me or what the quickest way out would be in case one did.

That said, there are benefits to working on Michigan Ave., such as the ability to stop across the street at H&M to do a little shopping over lunch (something that will soon turn into a detriment I'm sure) and bumping into celebs like Oprah (who lives across the street) or Michael Moore (who I damn near ran into while turning a corner the other day) on the way home.

Actually, I don’t really give a shit about the celebrity sightings, it just sounds cool.

The people on the public transportation system honestly don’t talk or even look at one another. Or laugh when something funny happens. As I was leaving a train today my ipod fell out of my coat pocket and I said out loud something along the lines of “Ha! The hole in the pocket of this coat must be bigger over the summer.”

Nobody even acknowledged that words had come out of my mouth.

Collectively, these train riders form an odor of make-up, gum, perfume, coffee and cologne that is surprisingly repugnant.

Oh, and just a question here: When the agony of being alone disappears, does this mean you’ve found happiness or you’ve just stopped caring?

Day drinking turns me into a dickhead

2006-10-23T22:27:00.000-07:00

My roommate, my friend Jesse and I may have ruined the potential career of a young comedian Saturday night.

This past Tuesday my roommate and I went to check out the Chicago Underground Comedy showcase — an event that, from what I read online, was supposed to be and above average comedic experience — and there was one white guy with a mild British accent that was exceptionally bad. I won’t go into the specifics of his skit, as it was too painful to remember (he actually forgot the punch line of a joke he spent about five minutes setting up – sadly enough, he was the second “comedian” to experience this mishap). I’ll just say that it was the most uncomfortable live performance I’ve ever sat through.

I left the showcase hoping that I’d never see this man or any other of the performers that evening again, on or off a stage.

Then, as I’m standing at a Lake View bar with my roommate and Jesse four days later, I look over and see white guy with a mild British accent hitting on two women at the bar, applying a much heavier British accent than he was during his stand-up routine.

“Holy shit!” I say, tapping my roommate’s shoulder and pointing to the guy, “is that the comedian from the other night?”

“Wow, it is,” my roommate said after taking a strong glance at the man. “You should totally go say something to him.”

I’d been drinking since 11 a.m., so walking up to a complete stranger and humiliating him in front of two women he was obviously interested in seemed not that un-reasonable.

“I’m gonna fucking ruin this no-talent ass clown,” I say strutting past Jesse and my roommate.

I approach him and immediately point to his crotch and ask him “Do you come here often?” Which was a line from the lame, never-try-this-while-at-a-bar pick-lines portion of his routine.

He looks at me like he has no idea what I’m talking about, as do the two females.

“Don’t act like you don’t fucking know what I’m talking about dude,” I say, grinning and patting his shoulder condescendingly.

“I was at Gunther’s on Wednesday. I saw you bomb. It was pathetic, though not quite as pathetic as exaggerating a British accent to impress a couple girls.”

He does not budge and looks at me as though he still has no idea what I’m talking about. At this point I’m briefly overcome with the fear he was totally the wrong guy, had probably never done standup in his life and for all I know, could have been a completely respectable fellow — and here I am trying to make an ass of him for no reason.

But when I walk back to my roommate (who has been watching the entire episode) he assures me that he’s the right guy and he and Jesse go over to ridicule him as well.

The three of us should never drink heavily together again.

He ends up leaving shortly thereafter and the two girls came over to us before they left and thanked us for and exposing the poseur and getting him off their backs, as he apparently was creeping them out.

I assume he either went home to commit suicide or pen a self-deprecating non-fiction anecdote to use in his routine that may actually be funny.

The former scenario, obviously, makes me feel pretty sorry for what I did.

But the latter, strangely, makes me feel almost altruistic.

2006-10-18T22:48:00.000-07:00

Go figure. The first game following my declaration of Chicago Bears fandom they start playing like complete nincompoops. Rookie quarterback Matt Leinart and the Cardinals are shredding the much-ballyhooed Bears defense and Chicago quarterback Rex Grossman seems to be as concerned with giving the ball to Arizona defenders as he is his own teammates (he threw four interceptions and fumbled twice — an embarrassing a performance QB I’ve ever seen, and that says a lot coming from a Iowa Hawkeye fan.)

By halftime the Cardinals had a convincing 20-0 lead that appeared to be one the Bears would not be able to overcome. (Hell, they had something like two first downs in the entire first half!)

I remember thinking to myself “This is typical, the minute I start paying attention to them they begin to epically suck.”

After tuning into part of the second half I see only minor improvement (they kicked a field goal and scored a touchdown on a cheap interception return) so I turned the TV off when a girl from home called and went to my room to chat with her.

At one point about a half hour into the conversation I specifically remember her asking me if I wanted to get back to the watching the game, but since I enjoy talking to this particular women more than I enjoy watching pro football, I told her it was a blowout and that I wasn’t missing much.

I am a fool.

What I wound up missing was arguably one of the best Monday Night Football comebacks in the history of the program, and what was positively the most exciting and dubious Bears comeback on Monday Night Football ever.

For me it was the equivalent of the famous “Heidi Game,” a 1968 Monday Night showdown between the Jets and the Raiders in which NBC decided (with the Raiders down by 13 points and only 65 seconds left) to cut from the live broadcast to the made-for-TV version the classic movie “Heidi.” Except instead of watching an orphan girl prance through the mountains of Switzerland while the Raiders mounted a miraculous 14-point comeback, I was on the phone with the lovely girl I was dating before I moved to Chicago.

The second I hung up with her I waltzed out to the living room and turned on the tube to see what the final damage was, only to notice that the Bears had returned a punt for touchdown with two minutes left that sealed their improbable victory.

“HOLY FUCKING SHIT, THEY WON!” I scream at my roommate, who is, oddly enough, in his room talking to a woman from Omaha as well.

“No way!” He says and rushes out and stands and watches the replay of the go-ahead score on TV, telling the girl from Omaha to “hang on a second” as he puts the phone to his side and stands in bewilderment. (He had joined me on the Bears Bandwagon this week).

“Jesus, maybe we should go back to not caring about them, as they seem to do much better when we’re not paying any attention to them,” I said.

“No shit,” he replied.

So I’m faced with three options with this Bears team: I can either go-ahead with my full-fledged and obvious support (which, based on this week’s results, means they will likely blow the rest of the season and fail to make the playoffs), I can denounce the Bears and stay a Raider fan (a situation that has virtually no benefits) or I can secretly admire the team from afar (which means they’ll continue to dominate at their current rate and win the Super Bowl, though I will not be able to show any emotion or support along the way.)

Never before has a closet looked so glorious.

Dominated

2006-10-17T00:55:00.000-07:00

I had absolutely no intent on taking my shirt off, getting handcuffed to a fence and whipped by the team of dominas at Exit Chicago’s bondage night Thursday when I went to the punk rock club to research the event for a magazine I write contribute to in town.

The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind.

But after I asked if I could snap some pictures during one of their “sessions” the girls balked, pointing out that the folks who were being bonded might be less-than-enthused about the pictures of them in this position appearing in a publication.

“Well, fuck it then, I’ve got a couple friends here with me, how about you tie me up there for a couple minutes to do your thing, they’ll take some pictures and we won’t have to worry about it?”

The three of them looked at each other.

“Sure,” Miss Maya, the leader, said, “but you’ve got to take off your shirt and keep your hat on while we do it.”

I was wearing a black newsie.

“Really?” I reply, less enthused about the whole ordeal than I was 20 seconds ago.

“Yeah! If you want us to do this shit to you for free you do what we want you to do,” Maya replied. Dominatrix girls don’t take any shit.

“Fuck it,” I say, and peel off my sweater.

“Oooh, look at him, he’s a big bear,” one of them says as she rubs her hands across my omnipresent body hair.

So they handcuff me to a chain link fence in the middle of the bar and start whipping. Shortly thereafter I could feel them writing something on my back.

At first I was too distracted with self-consciousness to feel any pain. The whipping didn’t hurt so much, but the piercing looks of complete strangers was initually uncomfortable. They were just looking at me as though they were looking at a TV, like this was nothing out of the ordinary (which, for Thursday nights, it wasn’t) so after about 30 seconds I stopped caring. Nobody was laughing. Nobody was pointing. They were just casually observing me being dominated by three busty women in leather corsets.

Then a thirtysomething blonde woman rushed up to me out of nowhere and began asking me all kinds of personal questions. I’m not the most astute on picking up when I’m being picked up on, but I’ll assume this woman was flirting with me — an odd sensation when done while you’re shirtlessly tied to a fence in the middle of a bar.

She was gushing, asking me what I did for a living, where I was from, if I did this kind of thing frequently.

She was quite attractive and I remember briefly thinking to myself “Shit, if it means I’ll get aggressively hit-on by attractive women perhaps I should do this more often.”

Just as I was about to ask if she wanted to have a drink with me once I put my shirt back on and got down from this fence a man came up from behind, grabbed her arm and insisted she come back downstairs with he and his buddies.

“No!” She replied. “Look at him, he’s so cute! He’s adorable. And he’s from Iowa!” She hollered (I’d told her I was from Iowa — turns out she actually lives in Des Moines and was in town for the weekend.)

“Hey, let me introduce you to my husband,” she says to me as the man continues to tug at her.

Just then I feel a sharp burning sensation on my left arm and notice one of the girls has begun to pour hot candle wax on my shoulders and arms, something that’s never been done to me before.

“Mother fuck!” I scream in agony.

“Whatthefuckareyoudoingthatshithurts!” I reply, though now laughing at the absurdity of it all.

I hear the girls laugh devilishly behind me. I look forward again and notice the thirtysomething blonde has disappeared.

So they continue to pour wax on my back, and it burns but I get used to it after about drop No. 4.

Then they started tickling me, which is something I absolutely cannot handle. I began to giggle and prance like a little boy, attempting to bend my side so they couldn’t reach my tender armpits. Tickling is one of the most extreme forms of torture I’ve ever known. If I were ever put in a situation where my only two choices were to be shot in the head or tickled for an hour straight, I’d take the bullet every time. I simply cannot handle it.

I again hear the girls giggling, as they know they’ve found my weak spot.

In order to take my mind off the tickling sensation I chomped on my right bicep (the teeth marks lasted for two days). Sensing my extreme discomfort the girls kept at it more aggressively until they realized I couldn’t take it anymore. I looked over to my right and made direct, almost flirtatious eye contact with Miss Ammunition (she gave me her card afterwards) and she smiled. It was a smile that conveyed a “You think you’re some kind of Tough Guy journalist, but once we get you tied up, we can break anybody down” sentiment. It was the only part of the entire episode I found to be erotic in the least bit.

I still don’t understand how people get off sexually with this sort of behavior, but it was free and they didn’t leave any scars (though the next morning my bed was laced with candle wax crumbs and I had the words “Property of Miss Maya Mistress” written in black ink across my back.

I'm a pretty smart guy, but I don't think I'll ever undersand why women are attracted to certain men

2006-10-15T21:08:00.000-07:00

She was in outbound sales during the day, and once I told her I was from Omaha as well, she wanted nothing to do with me.

The inch gap of skin between her tight blue jeans and skin-hugging top teased the boys into giving her an extra buck per round. It allowed their imaginations to get away with themselves and dream that perhaps, if they played their cards right, acted cool enough and threw cash at her, they’d be allowed to view the territory that lie beneath it at a later date. Despite her semi-bored demeanor she knew what she was doing the whole time, and I appreciated her cunning.

Twenty minutes ago I overheard her tell the old man two seats down from me that she was from Omaha, Nebraska and I figured if there was ever a doorstep, this was as good as any.

“So, are you from here?” I ask as she picks up the ashtray and wipes the bar in front me.

“No, I’m from Nebraska,” she says.

“Where at in Nebraska?” I ask coyly, as I’m about 95 percent sure I know the answer to the question.

“Omaha,” she says.

“Ha, so am I!”

“Really? Where did you go to high school?” She asks with restrained excitement.

I put my finger over my lips and smile.

“Shhh, I’m actually from Council Bluffs,” I whisper, “don’t tell anybody.”

Note: For some reason I always say this to people I meet in Chicago who are from Omaha when they ask me that question, and I don’t really know why. But I suppose I do know why: Cause Omaha people are usually condescending to Council Bluffs people, and I say that to beat them to the punch and let them know that I know C.B’s a shithole and they don’t need to crack a joke about it. But honestly I don’t give a damn what any of them think about me being born and raised in Council Bluffs, as I’m actually quite proud of where I came from and the people I grew up with.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anybody,” she whispers back, and I get the vibe she’s pretty disinterested in the whole conversation as she looks over my shoulder when she says this.

We ask each other the standard questions: What high school did you go to? Oh, do you know so-and-so? Where did you work back there? When did you move here? What do you do here? — Until we realize, despite the fact we grew up less than 10 miles from each other and are only separated by one year we don’t have a fucking thing in common.

At which point she moves on to viciously flirt the group of guys sitting to the right of me (whom are all in backwards ball caps, sports fleece and arguing that the people who really got fucked over in the Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle crashing his private plane into a Manhattan high-rise and dying tragedy are the people that own units above from where the plane collided, “cause the smoke ruined all their shit,” as one stated.)

Valentine's Day let down

2006-10-11T22:45:00.001-07:00

You’d think there’d be at least something marking the spot were seven men were brutally gunned down in cold blood, but as my roommate and I strolled past the lot that used to be 2122 N. Clark St., there was nothing but a fence, row of trees and patches of grass.

On Valentine’s Day in 1929 a handful of Al Capone’s boys walked into the building that once stood there dressed as cops to bust up a rival gang members whiskey deal, asked them to line up against the wall innocently then proceeded to Tommy Gun them all to pieces. One of the most brutal gangland shootings of its time and even to date, it was dubbed the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Seventy-six years later, on a mild, blustery pre-Halloween Fall, the type of night where I feel compelled to seek out something macabre, the roomie and I stewed around the apartment restlessly trying to think of something cheap and mildly entertaining to take up the next couple of hours. I suggested we stop by the site where the murders took place not knowing anything about what stands there today but mildly curious about it.

We walked the 1.5-mile trek down Fullerton, to Clark, then south past Webster and passed a newly-built (i.e., after 1930 — this is a really old part of Chicago) retirement home. There’s a series of mid-rise apartments across the street and I’m imagining to myself what it is the people who lived there in the winter of 1929 thought when they heard a 30-second long machine gun from across the street that morning.

“Hmmm, just another day in a really fucked-up, corrupt, violent city,” they probably thought to themselves briefly and went back to their radio shows.

I’m utterly fascinated by history and wish to re-live it every day. Time travel, for me, would be the ultimate.

Well, on the even side of the street, like I said, there’s a old folks home and as we walk along notice that the first vintage building on the block is 2120 (it’s a non-descript 9-5 business), which meant that the empty lot just to the north must’ve been where the shit went down. So we stop and look at it expecting to gain some sort of interesting perspective (at least I was) but we don’t really. There’s no memorial denoting what took place there over 75 years ago. The lot is fenced off completely so there’s not getting access to it unless you’re a member or employee of the home.

We just stood there, leaning up against the fence.

My roommate says something along the lines of “hmmm, quite a few dudes died tragically ten feet in front of us.”

“Yeah they did. Pretty crazy.”

“Well, you ready to go,” he asked after about a minute.

I stood there for another moment as he headed down the street holding out hope that I’d hear the yelping of a dog or the faint rattle of gunfire (stuff some people have said they’ve experienced while passing the site.) None of this happens, of course. Shit like that never happens to me. The only time something completely inexplicable has ever happened to me was one time a block of cheese slid off the counter of a girl I was dating in Omaha at the time and flew halfway across her kitchen floor. Not quite as cool as walking past the site of one of the bloodiest gang murders in history and hearing the ghostly bark of the poor dog that was trapped in the building after the killings, but I’ll take what I can get.

A couple approached me from the north as I was leaning into the fence gazing at the empty lot, and assuming they knew the story behind the location I figured they probably thought I was some lame tourist or a paranormal freak. So I backed away and headed south past Clark Bar nonchalantly.

On Da Bandwagon (fuck it)

2006-10-09T22:16:00.000-07:00

I’ve never been a bandwagon jumper with sports teams, having always pretty much stuck to my guns since birth: The Iowa Hawkeyes for anything college, the Oakland Raiders in the NFL and St. Louis Cardinals for pro baseball.

Over the years, of course, my concern over the success of the Raiders and Cardinals has waned, as I pay much less attention to sports as I did when I was 12 (except for the Hawks, though — I’m still an insecure pubescent goon when it comes to them.) The Cardinals are solid (still alive in the playoffs, I think) but I don’t give two turds about baseball anymore. I used to worship the Raiders as a child, but these days they’re arguably one of the worst franchises in professional sports and show little signs of building upon that reputation.

So I’m in Chicago now and I start to notice this nifty little undefeated Bears team they got — the one that plays nasty defense like the fabled ’85 squad did, the one that’s finally found a way to put points on the board — and I’m thinking to myself that perhaps it’s time to make a change.

And you know what? Fuck it — I don’t feel the least bit guilty. There’s a lot to like about these guys. Coach Lovie Smith seems like a reasonable guy. The stout defense, and practically the entire team for that matter (filled with only a couple recognizable stars) perfectly personifies the blue-collar, 'it ain't all about me' spirit of this town. Quarterback Rex Grossman (finally healthy after four years) looks like he has more fun out there throwing the ball around than an eight-year-old at a Pop Warner game.

This is my kind of team.

I didn’t have tickets or anything, of course (they’re hard enough to get when they suck), and I’d slept through the pregame tailgating with a massive hangover, but I figured I’d go down the Soldier Field as Sunday’s game against the Buffalo Bills was ending to get a glimpse of what the hoopla of this 4-0 start was all about.

Basically every preconceived notion I had of what being around a Bears game would be like came to fruition. There were fat men in Brian Urlacher and Walter Payton jerseys raving about Da Bears in their South Side accents, and there were fat women in jerseys raving right with them. The scent of spilled beer and steaming brats was omnipresent. The entire crowd (with the exception of the scant Bills fans, who by the looks on their faces have already pretty much given up on this season) was in the state of bliss that only an intense football fan can be in when his/her team is off to an impressive 5-0 start and is quite3 possibly the team to beat on the way to the Super Bowl.

There was a moment which I stood up on the cub of the sidewalk to take in a glance of the panoramic view: the McCormick Place parking lot filled with tailgaters directly in front of me, Soldier Field’s Roman-like stone façade beyond it, a tranquil, sky blue Lake Michigan to my right, the bustling traffic of Lake Shore Drive to my left and the breathtaking Sears Tower-dominated skyline overlooking it all like a proud parent.

I felt the entire city was looking down on at me during that moment, smiling, patting me on the shoulder and saying, “This is why you moved here, Jeremy. Welcome.”

As I was heading back up north to catch the train a young guy (who appeared lethally intoxicated) looked over at me from across the street and pumped his fists in the air triumphantly. I pumped mine back as he began jogging across the street towards me keeping his right hand up in high five mode.

“I ain’t gonna leave ya hanging, buddy,” he hollered as he weaved in and out of traffic.

“Fucking five-and oh, man! Fucking five-and-oh!” He declared as our hands met in mid-air.

“We’re going all the way this year,” I reply, subconsciously referring to them as we.

At that moment my Bears fandom had taken on tangible form. I grinned.

Funny roomate story

2006-10-05T22:57:00.000-07:00

He and a buddy walk into a Gunther Murphy’s (Belmont & Ashland) and their brunette female bartender is wearing a shirt that says “Freshman Fifteen.”

My roommate says something along the lines of “that’s a funny way to commemorate your weight gain.”

“Oh, no, that’s not what this shirt means,” she replies nonchalantly and points to the fifteen names listed on it. “These are the fifteen guys I slept with my freshman year.”

Does she wear that shirt in front of dad? If so, how does he respond to it?

Hombres blancos perdidos

2006-10-05T22:39:00.000-07:00

The hard part about hanging out as far west as Cicero and Fullerton isn’t getting there from your Lincoln Park apartment. No, at a mere $10 in cab fare, getting there is easy.

What you need to worry about is getting back. Especially at 1 a.m. on a Wednesday morning.

I was drinking with friends who were in town for a night (the same band that was in town during my last entry — they’re now heading back home) at their friend’s home on Kilpatrick St., which is two blocks east of Cicero. After about six beers, three shots and some intense conversation I’d completely lost track of time and realized it was way past midnight and I hadn’t called for a cab home yet, which, if I planned on having one come get me anytime soon, I should have done at least a half hour ago.

I call an order a cab just as my friends that are staying at this house go to sleep and my other buddy in town (who wants to hit some 4 a.m. bars) and I wait out front of the house by ourselves for 10 minutes or so before we get impatient and decide to start wandering down Fullerton in hopes that we’ll intercept the cabbie on its way to get us or find another one altogether.

We wander.

Wander.

And wander some more.

Latinos in gaudy full-size pick up trucks whiz by staring at us — two lost white boys in the middle of Little Mexico — and I imagine they’re wondering to themselves if we’ve got enough money in our pockets to make it worth them turning back and jumping our asses.

Thankfully they choose not to.

After about 25 minutes and 8 blocks I dial 411 Directory Assistance and ask for any cab company in Chicago, but just as I’m connected to one I see a cab with its numbers lit up at an intersection across the street. I hang up the phone and sprint over to it — with utter disregard of my friend following ten feet behind — only to find out that he’s actually off duty and forgot to turn his light off.

“Turn your fucking light off then asshole!” I scream at him as though the last 25 minutes were all his fault.

Just then my phone rings and it’s the cab that I’d called for over a half hour ago.

“Do you still need a cab?” The lady asks, as though she knows most people who call for a cab at 1 a.m. on a Tuesday usually flake out.

“Well, at this point I’m just walking down Fullerton,” I reply.

“Good, cause we don’t have one to come get you,” she said.

“Great fucking service you’ve got there” I say and hang up on her.

I look back to my friend.

“Good thing we didn’t wait for that one, huh?”

I call 411 again and get another cab company, but end I grossly underestimating just how far east we’ve gotten and to tell her I’m standing at a street that is actually another mile up the road.

She says a cab will be there in five minutes, and in all likelihood was.

But we weren’t.

Finally, after about an hour and well over a mile there’s a cab sitting at a red light on Pulaski.

“God dam are we happy to see you!” I holler. He doesn’t respond.

“Where you going?”

“Kingston Mines.”

“Kingston Mines it is,” he says.

I look down at my cell phone and realize it’s 2:14 a.m. on Wednesday morning and I’m gonna have to try to get drunk all over again.

Hey, whinos, leave the bands alone

2006-09-26T23:04:00.000-07:00

My best friends’ band was in town last night and while there were numerous unique things to write about it — how good the show was in general, how it was neat seeing my friends playing at one of the best rock clubs in my new town, the excitement of having an all-access pass and actually knowing the guys in the headlining band — I’ll instead concentrate on the two moments awkward moments I remember being thoroughly annoyed.

As Chris (the aforementioned best friend) and I were walking down the street together after shoveling Italian Night Clubs from Jimmy John’s down our throats trying to catch up on what’s happened in our lives since we last saw each other two-and-a-half months ago, a bum approached us and began hassling Chris about what kind of music he played (the man had deduced that Chris was in a band by his interesting choice of clothing, I assume).

He told Chris if he gave him a buck he’d write a hit song for him.

This man wouldn’t let it die. He walked with us for almost an entire block before I literally had to grab Chris by the shoulder and we ducked into a thrift store to avoid me having to tell the guy to leave us the fuck alone. Had I not done so the guy would have seriously followed us all the way into the club three blocks up.

THEN, less than twenty minutes later, ANOTHER bum holding a stack of some rag of a monthly newspaper approached Pat (another guy in the band) and I and kept asking me to give him a buck for one of the papers.

I kept telling him I didn’t need one, tried to ignore him, but the persistent fucker wouldn’t budge. He just stood there kept begging me, asking me questions about myself and If I was a Bears fan while I was trying to have a conversation with Pat.

I wanted to say this:

Leave me alone MOTHERFUCKER! I’ve got a friend in town I only get to see once every three months these days and I’m trying to catch up with him, seeing how life’s treating him and whatnot, and you’re there hassling us to give you a buck for a paper that I can pick up for FREE at any bar on this fucking street! GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!”

But instead I simply explained to him that I knew I could find stacks of that same paper for free at any bar on this street and that it made no sense for me give him a dollar for a one.

“You’re an honest man, I trust you man, I trust you,” he kept saying over and over after handing me one of the papers, patting me on my shoulder and attempting to give me a high five with his cold, calloused hands.

After he finally left I looked down at the paper I noticed he’d taken a Sharpie and blacked out the part of the masthead that said the paper was free.

“Ha, he must’ve gone through that whole stack and blacked that out so nobody’d notice it was free,” I say to Pat laughing, somewhat endeared by the man’s acumen.

“Shit, if I had noticed that I’d have just given him a buck.”

It occurred to me then that if a person’s only experience in Chicago were to be walking around Wrigelyville on a random Fall afternoon (which for many people is their only experience in Chicago) they’d think this town had the most antagonizing vagrants in the world.

Heey boys

2006-09-24T22:21:00.000-07:00

I was getting tired of the vaguely Irish sports pubs of Lincoln Park and the often lifeless Wicker Park dives, so I decided we’d hit Boys Town for something a little more captivating and progressive. I’d only been to the neighborhood once before, and while I’m 100 percent hetero, thoroughly enjoyed myself.

My female friend from home who was in town for the weekend was game, so we went.

The first place we hit was sort of a sports bar for gay men, which meant there were a couple TVs showing the White Sox game, deer heads decorated in party hats, beads and glasses hanging on the walls (place was called Buck’s) and couples of burly men who looked like construction workers holding hands and kissing one another. Just as we walked in a tall, thin, stylish guy approached me and made a comment about my jacket. I couldn’t hear him and just muttered something and walked past him before my friend pulled at my coat smiling.

“What?” I asked.

“That guy just said he loved your jacket.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” she said, and began to laugh, “first guy at the first bar we walk into hits on ya. Hilarious!”

“He wasn’t hitting on me, he was just giving me a compliment,” I retort.

“Right,” she says sarcastically. She looked around. “He’s the cutest guy in here, too.”

I have to admit I was pretty flattered. If you’re impressing a guy you’re doing something right, right?

Throughout the entire evening as we hopped from gay bar to gay bar my friend kept informing me that I was getting eye fucked the minute we walked into every establishment (I could kind of tell myself, but not to the extent that she did). It was all going straight to my head. By the middle of the night I felt more confident and desired than I had on any night at any bar during the six months I’ve lived in Chicago.

And it made me realize that hanging out in gay bars is quite possibly the ultimate self-esteem booster, one that I could see myself getting used to.

All you really have to do is put on some semi stylish clothes and open your mind. (Of course, this doesn’t work for homophobe dicks who’d start swinging the second they felt they were getting checked out by another dude.)

It also occurred to me that this would be a perfect scenario to bring a girl you were interested in.

Now bear with me here: When you’re the object of attention in any social place it builds confidence in yourself and it builds worth in the eyes of the people you’re with. If you’re at a bar and getting looked at you feel good yourself and likely the person you’re with will see you as more appealing as well.

So let’s say you’re on a date with a girl and you go to a plain old hetero bar. Odds are, since men are usually the majority at hetero bars, and tend to gawk at every woman (not just the über attractive ones) that walks into the place with “I wouldn’t mind fucking you tonight” eyes, a woman at a bar feels pretty good about herself most of the time. She knows that there are men there who find her attractive thus giving her plenty of confidence equity that she can use as leverage with a guy she’s with. Most likely, the guy she’s with will also see her as even more attractive than he normally would since most of the guys in the bar are eyeing her as well. This builds up her worth in his eyes and makes the guy probably be more aggressive in going after her (guys like it when they notice every other dude in the bar is looking at the girl he's with. Women may think it makes us jealous — and sometimes it does — but for the most part, it's just as much an ego boost for us as it is them.)

At gay bars it’s the exact opposite. The men are the objects of desire here, the women are being virtually ignored (like many men usually are at hetero bars), and the girl, noticing the other men checking out the guy she’s with, will likely see him as more attractive than she did before because she sees other people thinking he’s attractive (even if they're of the same sex).

I know it’s kind of an abstract concept, and it would get pretty suspicious after a while if whenever you took a girl out you only went to gay bars (she’d probably just end up thinking you were secretly gay and get rid of you anyway) but I'd say it's worth a try at least once or twice.

I also realized that it’d be pretty easy to find sex every night of the week if you were gay man in Chicago. The last bar we went to was this sprawling club that was filled seemingly room after packed room with men. There were at least 500 people in the joint, less than a dozen of which were females. Working with those kinds of numbers how can you not, if even mildly attractive, go home with somebody different every night of the week? Couple this with the fact that men, on average, are usually less reserved about going home with somebody else every night of the week than woman are.

Hell, the more I think about it, gay men kinda got it made.

Totally off the subject note: I got hit by a cab for the second time that night, too. This time he was moving pretty fast and I almost completely rolled up on his hood before he noticed me and slammed on the brakes.

“Do you see that fucking stop sign jackoff!?” I screamed at him as I lifted myself up off his car and stood back on the street. I was walking across an intersection that’s a four-way stop, foolishly putting faith in the cabbie to my right that he’d stop at it, which he didn’t.

As I screamed at him the old guy just confusedly shook his head in a manner that reminded me of Kumar in the robbery scene at the end of Bottle Rocket.

“I don’t know, man...I don’t know, man…” he was mouthing.

2006-05-02T22:38:00.000-07:00

And I leave without bothering to ask him for the best train route back north.

I head west on Division for a few blocks, see a black man get slammed into the concrete at an intersection by undercover cops, cuffed and thrown into a police car all in less than a minute. “Impressive,” I think to myself.

Off in the distance, a few blocks later, I see the silhouettes of dark vacant buildings ahead that look like the remnants of Cabrini Green. There are tricked out cars driving slowly next to me on the street. After I walk under train tracks and notice no entry in sight, I decide to turn back and head up Wells because it looked safer.

A few blocks up on Wells I saw the signs indicating that I was in Old Town. This area is mildly familiar and I find a bar I remember stopping in last time I visited Chicago as a tourist.

I stop into the Old Town Ale House, a bar I visited on that last trip in town and remember being pretty sweet.

If it wasn’t for the girl bartending telling me the Clark St. bus ran all night I’d have just said fuck it and gotten a cab after leaving the Old Town Ale House. But since she seemed to know what she was talking about and I had ten more dollars left to spend in my pocket, I stayed.

“Ah… that means I can stay and have one more drink then,” I said after she let me in on this piece of information.

Having ten dollars in my pocket meant this: I could spend the $5.25 on a tequila rocks with lime, tip her seventy five cents, have two bucks for the bus faire home and have an extra two dollars to buy a half gallon of milk with which to make my Lipton noodles with for lunch before I go to work at 1:30 p.m.

So I stay for one more and I don’t feel at all guilty.

The Old Town Ale house is a now somewhat legendary literary dive bar located just around the corner from the Second City, Chicago’s renowned improv comedy theater that has produced stars Bill Murray, Chris Farley and Colin Mochrie. It’s a unique bar. Lewd 1930’s era paintings adorn the walls along with portraits of the regulars painted by one of the regulars himself. It looks like the place hasn’t been cleaned since Eisenhower was in office.

Behind me on the east wall of the joint, just over my right shoulder, is a poorly-drawn mug shot of Bill Murray. He’s smack dab in the middle of a row of former Second City performers. I only recognize about half the faces.

“How long has the current management run this place?” I ask the bartender.

“Actually just about a couple months,” she replies.

“But there’s a lot of regulars that still hang out here, right?”

“Oh yeah.”

“So people’d know if this used to be one of Bill Murray’s old hangouts?”

“For sure. He used to hang out here all the time. All those Second City guys hung out here back then. This neighborhood used to be a lot different than it is now.”

The Old Town district of Chicago, as it is now, is a gentrified tourist trap
for those not adventurous enough for the trendy clubs downtown. A chain movie theater sits across the street from the bar. Around the corner are a slew of roadhouse style bars that attract traveling meatheads and the petite, shallow women that follow them.

This bar I’m sitting at right now represents the last of the true old town establishments and that’s why I like it so much.

If Murray were to live in Chicago now, It’s not likely he’d be anywhere near this neighborhood if for any other reason than a Second City reunion or a rare nostalgic trip back to the old stompin’ grounds. I keep wishing he’d stumble in and pull up a seat next to me. The questions I’d have for Bill Murray: Stripes, Ghostbusters, Ground Hog Day, Mad Dog and Glory, Rushmore, Lost in Translation, Broken Flowers. The fuckers starred in three of my top ten. Then there’s the cameo in Coffee and Cigarettes where he serves RZA and GZA coffee. Classic.

“They stiffed me!”

But enough about Bill.

I toss back the tequila and hit the streets in search of this fabled 24-hour N. Clark bus, which I quickly find and realize it’s right next to the lake. This is problematic because it still gets pretty damn cold by the lake even though it’s been in the seventies all week and in nothing but jeans and a long sleeve shirt I’m drastically underdressed. I seek shelter in the buss stop but the bitter Lake Michigan wind whips in from the small gaps underneath the glass at the stop, so there’s nowhere to escape and this bus is nowhere to be found.

Instead of standing there in the cold I decide to head north up Clark and keep turning back every 15 seconds or so to see if the bus is coming. There’s a stop about every block so I figure I can catch up with it if I spot it early enough.

I pass a black guy standing outside a random building by the lakefront leaning up against the exhaust of a heating duct that’s blowing out a steady stream of warm air. Then I double back to him and the warm air.

“You waiting for the bus?” I ask him.

“Naw man.”

“Have you seen one pass recently?”

“Yeah, just a couple minutes ago.”

“Shit! Well, do you mind if I stand here for a minute and thaw out.”

“No problem, man. No problem.”

Who knows who this man is or what he’s waiting for: his girlfriend to pick him up, a shuttle bus to a late-night shift at work, crack. Or maybe he was just standing there because he had nowhere else to be in this was the only warm spot on the Gold Coast where some cop wasn’t gonna come shoo him away.

I stood there with him for a moment and engaged in awkward conversation. He seemed like an affable guy. Most of the guys you bump into on random street corners at 2:30 a.m. can’t always be described as affable. If I were racist and paranoid I would have walked by him without even making eye contact, but since I still have faith in mankind this man didn’t scare me.

But quickly lights appeared down the block that looked like those of a bus so I departed from the warmth and bid the man adieu.

The bus ended up not being a CTA bus but a hotel shuttle bus. This did me not an ounce of good so I kept on walking.

I walked, and walked and walked, still no bus. By now I was damn near the 1700 N block of Clark, which mean, if I were to angle north on North Ave I’d only have to walk about 12 blocks to get home.

After standing at another bus stop fruitlessly waiting with a speechless Mexican who looked like he was the morning prep cook at some ritzy Lincoln Park restaurant I decided that this bus business was for the birds and decided I’d hoof it the rest of the way.

Fresh blisters are forming on my foot cased inside a new pair of trendy boots I’ve yet to fully break in. The skin of my inner thighs are rubbed raw, so much so that I resort to walking in a manner in which they don’t rub together because the pain is so excruciating.

Instead of walking I’m now waddling up Lincoln.

I’m running on fumes of anger, embarrassment and determination at this point. I’m pissed because I’m sore and it’s late and I’ve wasted damn near an entire evening walking all the way from downtown to Lincoln Park. I’m embarrassed for obvious reasons. And I’m determined because I won’t let this fucking city, and all its enormity, beat me. A richer, weaker man would have given in, taken out another $20 from a White Hen ATM and flagged down a cab.

But not me. I won’t make it in this town by taking expensive shortcuts like those. I’ll run out of money and have to come crawling back home with my tail between my legs. I’ve got a few singles in my pocket and will be severely disappointed in myself if I spend a cent more than that this evening.

Cabs are whizzing by me, one every minute, as if to rub it in. There’s a group of cops ahead on Armitage giving a black man white looks to be a field sobriety test.

By now I’m flying and the streets are buildings are becoming familiar. I’m getting closer.

“Shit, this walk wadn’t that bad,” I say to myself as I turn left on George realizing I’d just gone from the one hundred north and west intersection to the 2900 north and 1300 west block. That’s a long fucking walk to make at 2:30 in the morning.

I fall face first down onto my bed and reach into my pockets to take out my phone, wallet and change. I’ve got four bucks left.