A little over a week ago, I stepped out the front door to meet a girlfriend for brunch. It was an unusually warm early Spring afternoon in Chicago, 60 degrees and sunny – the perfect day for baseball.
I had chosen to take the #22 Clark bus south to meet my friend at our chosen destination, a Scottish pub in the City’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. The Clark bus is one of those lines that seems to extend forever and goes through so many of Chicago’s key neighborhoods. Start riding at the northernmost extreme, and by the time you reach downtown, you’ll have passed through the trendy LGBT neighborhood of Andersonville, taken a gander at historic Wrigley Field, whizzed past the Chicago History Museum and landed in the thick of it all in Chicago’s Loop.
I boarded the bus at 11:45 AM, just in time to catch the beginnings of a crowd headed over to the Friendly Confines for Game 3 of the Cubs’ home opening series against the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Cubbies are an institution in the Windy City, one of the National League’s original teams founded in 1876.
Continue Reading The #22 Clark »
Maybe it all began with Don Henley and the Eagles singing about the Hotel California.
On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair,
Warm smell of colitas rising up through the air.
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light.
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim,
I had to stop for the night.
There she stood in the doorway,
I heard the mission bell.
And I was thinking to myself -
This could be heaven or this could be hell.
Then she lit up a candle, and she showed me the way.
There were voices down the corridor -
I thought I heard them say…
Welcome to the Hotel California
Continue Reading Hollywood on the Tropic of Cancer »
In a few days I hope to receive the first of the journals that my son is writing while incarcerated. We have conceived of and taken on a project that we hope will reach and benefit a much larger audience than just the two of us as we each write candidly about our drug abuse and specifically about our addictive natures and how they have irreparably altered our respective sane destinies. This is my first public admission. It has perhaps been the most difficult step I have ever taken.
It wasn’t the first time I had tried it or the last time I would regret it. But early in the winter of 1969 it became clear that regret would be taking a backseat to risk if I were to ever make it out of my teens alive.
So when my boyfriend slipped that frail needle into the raised blue arc of my fourteen-year-old veins, I smiled with compliant trust and a virginal anticipation endemic only to children and the clinically lost.
At that fledgling age, redundancy is unknowable and ignorance unimaginable. That any of us survived the repeated missteps of our youth at all is ample evidence of divine intervention.
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I’ve lived in Seattle for nearly nine years now, long enough to know that the stereotype of the grungy, forgetful vegan pot-head Pacific Northwesterner is only sometimes apt. But when my husband mentioned last week that his New-York loving brother was considering a job at Reed College in Portland, I blurted, “But he’d hate it there!,” my impression of Reed being that it’s comprised entirely of people fitting this stereotype and my impression of my hip, snappy-dressing brother-in-law being that he has little tolerance for forgetful pot-heads or vegans—though I could be wrong.
My wildly oversimplified notions of Reed are based on stories from a polyamorous, Utilikilt-wearing Seattleite I went out with once (before I knew he was polyamorous or owned a Utilikilt or that The Polyamorous Utilikilt-Wearer was yet another Pacific Northwest type) and from a guy I went to college with back East who had transferred to Swarthmore from Reed at the beginning of his junior year. “Jake Anderson”—a blond, Canadian hockey-player who I met in biology lab—had made the switch from the tiny West Coast college to the tiny East Coast one, he said, because his sartorial style—worn-out vintagey tweed blazers over worn-out old shapeless t-shirts—was “too preppy” by Pacific Northwest standards.
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“What can I get you?” she barely glanced his way as she asked, busy wiping the counter that stretched from one end of the diner almost to the opposite, stopping just a few feet from the anonymous glass door framed in dull steel that led to the street.
“Coffee to start,” he said, and watched her for a moment. Brown hair with some kind of gilt streak through it, gathered in a neutral colored net at the nape of her neck. Smooth skin, even her hands, the nails clean if a little long; they curved gracefully over her fingertips, unpainted. She wore no rings, he noted automatically.
He shifted his bulk (gotta lose this gut, he thought) onto the stool and looked the rest of the place and its inhabitants over, like the cop he would always be.
He knew his city, but he couldn’t remember if the food here was good or not. It had all the characteristics of his favorite greasy spoons…not quite as clean as the health inspector would prefer (probably slipped the schmo a buck or two to look the other way, those guys were all on the take), which made the food that much better. Clean a griddle too enthusiastically, in his humble opinion, the food started tasting like metal.
Continue Reading Chef’s Special »
This past weekend, while performing my daily sweep of The New York Times‘ columnists, I came across this interesting piece by Bob Herbert. I confess that I often find Herbert’s work to be redundant (“We are screwing the middle class!” – Yeah, but what else?) and downright dull, but this column hit me with the thunderbolt of self-recognition.
Herbert makes a provocative argument in slightly less than 800 words. We find a lot of ink these days devoted to America’s sinking ranking as a first world producer of competitive, college-educated young adults. But what about the ones who do emerge in four or five years, degree in hand? How are they faring when pitted against the challenges of real life? Herbert’s assessment is damning: “Students are hitting the books less and partying more. Easier courses and easier majors have become more and more popular. Perhaps more now than ever, the point of the college experience is to have a good time and walk away with a valuable credential after putting in the least effort possible.”
Continue Reading A Degree in Mediocrity »
Maria was exhausted. The store had been busy this Saturday with marathon runners and cyclists from today’s race. Even with four Kodak picture machines, there was a line since early this morning. Family members wanted pictures of their loved one at the 26-mile mark, a few blocks away.
Maria was doing much better than she anticipated. Only sixteen, she was a mother, a partner, and now had survived six months at the camera store. She got the job two months before the baby came and Mr. Ramirez gave her time off when Nicky Jr. was born.
Her Spanish was improving. Nicky worked with her every minute that they were together. Mr. Ramirez and his wife coached her as well, and many of the customers spoke only Spanish.
Things were hard at home now with the baby, but the young couple was surviving. Nicky worked second shift as a mechanic in one of the city’s remaining factories. He was so lucky to get that job right out of high school. The factory was close enough to his parent’s house, where the little family shared a basement apartment, that he could ride his bike to work.
Continue Reading Saturday Afternoon in Kansas City »
Now that the wide variety of political shenanigans that have come to exemplify the 2011 Chicago mayoral race have been exhausted, it seems there’s nothing left to do but wait for Tuesday’s electoral returns. At that point we may stop referring to former U.S. Congressman and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel as the “presumed favorite,” move beyond his Goliath campaign and start seeing the new CEO of Chi-town in action.
After all, there’s no way anyone could take him at this point, right? Rahmbo has five times more campaign funds at his disposal than nearest fiscal competitor, Gery Chico. His slick print ads and television spots depict the handsome, well-dressed former ballet dancer as a family man who cares about the middle class, ready to make the “tough choices” that will put Chicago back on the fast track to claiming its status as an affordable, world class city. A few of his TV plugs contain public endorsements from not one but two U.S. Presidents, current POTUS Barack Obama, as well as immediate predecessor William Jefferson Clinton.
Continue Reading Rahm the Inevitable »
I will not tell you where I live for a variety of reasons, but I’ll take you on a tour. Let’s start with Google Earth, narrowing in on central Baja California. As we get closer to the ground, the landscape begins to reveal itself with rugged mountain ranges, vast expanses of empty desert, and the deep blue sea. Lower yet, we can begin to make out the cacti and mesquite trees, and a single pixel at a high altitude becomes my home as you continue the descent. At the proper angle, you’ll see the pyramid roof sitting on the cubic stone house. Once there were some small fruit trees and openings on the lot, but now the trees are twenty and thirty feet tall and the property’s surrounded by magnificent stone walls. The space where my library will be is chaotic, with building materials and debris, but the rest of the garden is so beautiful that an artist from New York City made sketches of it to sell in galleries.
What you see from my patio is a profusion of potted plants. My wife is an obsessive gardener, and we made our own soil from compost and coffee grounds. My citrus orchard is its own ecosystem, probably unique for a fifteen mile radius. It is not natural to this area because of two things – soil and water. The water was relatively easy to obtain; just dig your line and connect it to the village’s water system, obtained by artesian well many miles away.
Continue Reading A Little House in the Middle of Nowhere »
Dearest Sirs and Madams:
I bring you fast news of this single, endless moment we share. The man himself—the Self-Contained One, the Unobjectifiable Object, the Unprovoked Entity—came among us of his own free will when we desired him most voraciously. The hunger inside us called to him, though he did not believe in hunger or its tyrannies, and he fed us the balm of his mind wrapped in the caress of his voice.
Eight questions he allowed; eight questions that would rise spontaneously from a single chosen mouth, each with its own perfect place in the eternal order. On this day of love he showered love upon us, asked us to shower love upon each other and become clean. Become the ones who scrubbed the world clean with the words trapped against our tongues.
He entered the hall. The silence descended, distended, apprehended. And the questions flew from my mouth, though from no mind I had ever known before.
Continue Reading Eight Questions for Master Hasbah »
