1,001 Chicago Afternoons

I was pleased to discover college students are still awful.

I want to write about four men of Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian or some other ethnicity that meant their words sounded like Klingon head colds. They hid from the rain under the small alcove created by the locked glass doors of the laundromat that went away more than a year ago. Despite the building owners’ window-posted [...]

“You and me got the right idea,” she said, gesturing with her cup of coffee at mine. I don’t know why our coffees set us apart from any of the other readers, phone flippers, gabbers, joggers, dog walkers, socialistas strolling with equally beautiful and fashionable friends, fat guys sitting like lumps looking at the water [...]

Never mind how I got it, but I have a bit of Tribune Tower. 

She likes punk, industrial, new wave, goth, the macabre. Long black streams of mesh trail from the ceiling in her Pilsen artists loft. She has a framed photo of designer Alexander McQueen posing with a skull on the desk and a pair of brass knuckles suspended over the kitchenette sink. She’s done seven clothing lines [...]

I have a neighbor who doesn’t know my name. He does, sort of. He knows it now and again, “Paul, right?” I say yes. He asks the same question about my wife’s name. I confirm he got that right too. I don’t mind that he barely remembers me. I mainly know him because of Rocky, [...]

“No, no,” the slim woman said, looking out at the scattered crowd eating pizza and toying with microphones in a far Northwest Side rental hall. “Stay where you are. Do not break the stillness of this moment.” No one did, not the microphone tinkerers, the laptop typist nor the woman running line-by-line through a Braille [...]

When I started this site my worry was getting to my goal. Now I’m scared I’ll get there too soon.

The sky above exploded in whites, reds, blues, crinkly crinoid yellows that shimmered over its reflection in a darkened lake. The concrete below shook and rattled with every car that sped by just feet behind us.

Happy Halloween. Let’s talk zombie voters.