She shuffled from the diner counter to the vending machine against the wall.

“My dreams, they aren’t as empty,” The Who wailed from the radio as the woman fed the bills into the Lotto scratch ticket machine. “As my conscience seems to be.”

It was morning at the Huddle House Grill.

It’s a diner, a stock one called straight from central casting. A 24-hour affair with a counter, a few rickety booths and a glass front from which to watch the Brown Line end and high school students hustle north to Von Steuben, south to Theodore Roosevelt. As the woman in the hairnet bought dreams from a vending machine and Roger Daltrey narrated, a short-haired waitress clears a table and called from the counter to ask if I want a brand of hot sauce or the stuff they make there.

“The night guy makes it. They both make it, but mostly the night guy,” she said, walking up with an unmarked squeeze bottle of red. “It’s a 24-hour restaurant so they work 12-hour shifts.”

“And they still make sauce for the whole day?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Right?”

I put a daub of the hot sauce on my finger to taste. It was bright, spicy and delicious. I end up slathering my eventual eggs in it.

But the eggs weren’t there yet, and neither was the morning.

A rumbling, dangerous bass line started. Mick Jagger screamed that he wanted to paint it black and a tall, broad man who, if size can stereotype, looks like he played football in high school and still eats like an athlete in training, walked through the door smiling. He waved at the waitress and line cook and ordered a steak.

A woman whose stocking cap declared she’s a CTA inspector walked in and ordered a cup of grits to go, cackling and at one point bending over in laughter at what the person on the other end of her earpiece tells her. “It’s funny now,” she said, bracing herself on the counter as the waitress counted her bills. The inspector called the woman over to add the earpiece’s order to her tally.

High school students rushed by the window. They were fewer now, and late.

“Your friend’s here,” the woman said to the short-order cook.

He looked over his shoulder at the tall, heavyset man with the crisply cut gray hair and necktie walking up to the glass doors.

“He’s not my friend,” the cook said.

They greeted the man warmly as he came in, but he simply said “Number 2″ and sat down at the counter where he chatted with the cook in Spanish and demanded his favorite seat, favorite condiments, favorite type of the two maple syrups they had and, as the increasingly eerily appropriate radio playlist now playing Billy Idol shouted, “more, more, more.”

It was another boring morning. Another workaday life. Another tale of details and eggs and hustling students and the trains pulling in and out of the Brown Line terminus. The Brown Line doesn’t have two ends, like Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Purple do. The trains pull out, take a loop at the Loop and come right back here to pull out again. 4 a.m. to 1 a.m. each day — 5 a.m. on Sundays and holidays — a neverending neverending in and out past the Huddle House.

God, it’s beautiful. As fresh and bracing as the night shift hot sauce now bathing my eggs.

The woman in the hairnet and I looked out the window, ate eggs, watched the sun rise and dreamed.

Read another diner tale

Morning at one of Chicago’s last newsstands

Dancing among Rosty’s remnants

It’s not that you hate doughnuts, nor that you hate that there’s a doughnut shop right next to your office. And it’s not that it’s gotten to the point the guy with the short dreads at the doughnut shop always smiles when he sees you and asks you about your life in a way that lets you know he really cares.

It’s that you hate doughnuts and hate the shop and hate the guy with the dreadlocks who always wants to know how work’s going because your body is sloshing and lurching back and forth, your legs are made of fire and you still have like five more miles to home in a midnight ride on your bike.

I’m using a writer’s trick called “humor” here to make you picture the dad from Drabble when you picture me. I’m actually down about 10 pounds, although the guy at the doughnut shop is real and does ask why I don’t come by as much anymore.

The burny, noodle-y legs this morning are real as well, as was a midnight ride from downtown to Albany Park.

I had dropped off the carshare car from visiting a friend. It was the bar-time of River North, when the young and leggy and the old and wealthy come out to wander the streets between glossy trend restaurant and flatscreen-slathered sports bars. A few old mainstays – Rossi’s, Snicker’s, Mother Hubbard’s – look out on their new fabuloso competition, thanking the heavens they bought early into what would become a tacky display of people dropping dollars into what they think is class and wealth.

But beyond the land where waitresses’ uniforms are tight tank tops, I cruised on the bike. With blinking lights and clad in helmet, I blipped and beeped and wheezed through the night, through where commercial becomes residential becomes less-nice residential becomes another slip of trend and tank top becomes bungalow belt and a place that, for the moment, becomes home.

When I ride, I don’t think. I can’t. Thinking deep thoughts means getting hit by a pickup full of scrap metal. It’s the only moment of the day when the whirring of facts, figures, jokes and sentence structure that makes up my brain takes a rest for a moment.

I ride my bike because it rests me. I ride my bike because when I’m done my body screams for lean meat and vegetables rather than doughnut sprinkles and lethargy. I ride my bike because that lurching and wheezing and legburn at the beginning of the summer lessens as the days lean on. I ride my bike because it’s cheaper and fun and I don’t have to deal with local talk radio or telling a homeless guy sorry I don’t have any change.

I ride my bike because I’m me. And midnight racing of blinking lights and no thoughts other than the next turn are a part of me I never intend to lose.

The smell wafted full and strong from the box, but put in water it’s gentle and nudging. I like it more with each sip, but can’t explain the taste, either by experience or by ingredients. According to the side of the box, the ingredients in masala tea are tea and masala flavour, with one of those superfluous U’s countries that get worked up about cricket seem to employ.

At the end, it tastes like cheap chai I bought from a corner store.

The spot in Albany Park is a stuff store, a relic of a time when getting whosits and whatdats to your neighbors was an honest graft that could a few rooms for living, a book of family photos and maybe a kid or two to college.

The model doesn’t work anymore. Online ordering and increased competition has freed us from the tyranny of supporting our neighbors and building communities. We turned on each other for a few cents off.

The travel agent rides Uber while the taxi driver orders Amazon. The bookstore owner drowns her woes in CostCo Cheez-Its and the corner store operator uses the empty hours for Kayak alerts on the cheapest of fares. We cut each other out of the equation and there’s no way around it. The world’s hard when all those others don’t support us.

The stuff store was a ceiling-packed Middle Eastern affair. It offered the comforts of a dozen countries, familiar homeland snacks and spices from Turkey, India, places Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Jain and probably even a Christer or two.

The back half of the store was full of plates and teapots and silverware. Odds and ends. An everything store. There were rolls of ornate silver and gold paper, aimed to be cut like butcher sheets. My cohort fingered some silver curlicues. I still don’t know if it was for wrapping or cupboard lining.

I turned a corner and startled a man kneeling on a prayer mat flicking through an iPhone.

By the register stood an old man in a turban and long beard down to his chest. He called over a young man in a track suit, hair in a tight fade, to check me out. An old woman in gown and head scarves limped off slightly to help me get to the register.

I don’t know where to go with this story. It’s rude to call them America, when they don’t need my OK to be brown and Yankee. I can wax poetic about corner stores, but I book flights and buy bulk like the others. I don’t particularly plan to go back when there’s a whole city left of oddness and only 250 more stories to tell them in.

So unsure of a big, dramatic point, I’ll end this story with what I can: The store at Kedzie and Wilson is a well-run business with cheap prices and good service. Everyone was very nice and helpful and I was surprised both by the variety and the quality of product.

I like it as a store. I like it as a business beyond nostalgia for a Mom-and-Pop economy that I know more from movies than my own life. I hope a stuff store can last when everything’s a flick of a finger away from showing up at your doorstep.

Four stars out of four. Would buy again.

Read about a store that didn’t make it

And another

It showed up on the doorstep I use every day, so it was quite convenient for me. I guess I could have gone out and purchased a pie, or at least asked for a free pie from any of the many bakeries I know and trust, but this pie showed up on the doorstep I use every day in a convenient and consumable format.

It even had a fork and a little sign that said “Eat me.”

So I did.

And I got violently ill.

The next day there were several pies waiting on my doorstep. Whoever had been leaving pie on my doorstep had been paying attention to the type of pie I like. Some pies looked like sweet potato pie, others like creamy French silk or rich mincemeat. They were crafted to look exactly like the pies I already find the most digestible.

I guess I could have gotten sweet potato and French silk pies from the bakery downstairs from my apartment. I mean, I know and trust them and I was already on my doorstep. All I needed to do was double-click their doorbell to get pie I could trust.

But the doorstep pies were, like, right there.

Man, I got sick.

The next day’s doorstop pies fit my preconceptions of what pie should be so closely, I even shared them with my friends and family. I left slices on the doorsteps of everyone I care about with little notes that said “See? This is what I’ve been saying!”

Oh we got so sick. Sick for days this time. So sick that I almost didn’t eat the next crop of pies that showed up on my doorstep the day after and the day after and the day after that.

Almost.

About this time, I noticed all the other houses on my street were also getting morning doorstep pies. No one knew where they were coming from — the bakery downstairs had since gone out of business, unable to compete in the new market due to its archaic paywall model. But still the pies came and we shared them all.

When something showed up that looked like a pie my dad would like, I would sent it by post to my dad. He’d pick it up at the mailbox hanging on his wall. My friend from work knows I have strong feelings on lemon meringue, so whenever something showed up on his doorstep that looked vaguely meringue-ish, he would post it to my wall. A guy I went to high school with believed very strongly that modern PC attitudes were keeping custard pies from expressing their true superiority over fruit, nut and ethnic pies, so he was posting to everybody’s walls. I had to block him.

That means hit him with a block.

With everyone sharing and posting to everyone’s walls without checking the source of what they were posting, we became really sick as a society. Some good pies from reputable bakeries were still making the rounds, but whoever kept sending the bad pies was getting better at passing them off as good pies. And the bakeries kept going out of business because by now everyone expected pie for free.

Still, these things crafted perfectly to our pre-existing preferences get posted to our walls. We consume and share them without questioning, even though they’re poisoning us a just little bit more each time.

You might have guessed by now that these pies are “analogies” and we’re in what’s known as a “fable.”

Subscribe to one or more newspapers. Subscribe to multiple magazines, both in print and online. Support (and that means with money, not with your best wishes and hopes) nonprofit or donor-funded investigative groups like ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity, your local NPR or PBS affiliates or smaller local journalism startups in your community, like the Texas Tribune or, in Chicago, the Invisible Institute and City Bureau.

Pay money for information you can trust because your ability to make choices in life and in society depends entirely on an accurate understanding of the world around you.

And if something just shows up ready-made, free and tailored for your preferences, take a moment to wonder if that’s really French silk you’re about to shove in your mouth.

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Remember: You can’t trust something just because it’s printed, either

EDIT: A day after I posted this, I found out about the Knight Foundation matching donations for select nonprofit news orgs. Do this.

EDIT #2: Did you know “meringue” is the pie and “merengue” is a style of dance music mostly associated with Dominica and Haiti? I didn’t. Edited 1/21/18

He cocked his head slightly, looking at the work before him. It was a half-filled, gothic-style, yellow, lower-case b, the latest level of glitzy glam glowy graffiti beneath a railroad bridge turned trail in the woods of Gompers Park.

He leaned forward past the point where he could stand on his own. Planting his paint-smeared Chuck Taylors firmly on the rock jutting out from the little creek, he fell forward. This was the plan. He hit the wall, holding himself hypotenuse to the right triangle of underpass and water with his left hand.

Holding himself against the wall, he gently gently gently shaded back and forth, back and forth with the spray can, yellowing the innards of the half-filled b.

To the left of the yellow b, a completed blue s and o. To its right, the blue outlines of e and r.

His tag was Sober.

“It’s, like, irony because I’m never sober,” he said.

A dozen rocks over, his friend topped off the shading on his own tag, Hier.

In terms of narrative, it’s terrible that I’m not giving you a visual of Sober and Hier, but I want no part of getting them in trouble. Suffice to say they were young and male, one Latino and the other white. They nodded back at me when I gave a little wave from a foot-beaten path through the brush and forest.

Sober warned me about the mud when he saw me almost slip as I hopped from rock to rock to watch them.

They were pleasant and kind, breaking their worker silence only to grouse about running out of blues, the nozzle sticking on the yellow and other artist moans.

It was bright day and they worked unconcerned. No hustled, furtive gestures in the moonlight, one eye over the shoulder to avoid the steely grip of Johnny Law.

Their cans hissed among the chirping of birds, rustling of leaves, babbling of creek and the occasional roar of an O’Hare-bound jumbo jet.

Sober called it a hobby, said that when he can’t get out to paint, he uses markers and ink to write up the world. He had a quirked sideways smile when he talked about his work, but didn’t say anything of note.

He said “yeah” a lot, and “like.” He got into it a while back. He likes it. It’s good.

Sober lets the spray can summon the words he can’t. I can respect that.

A little girl, a little boy and a big splashing Labrador Retriever suddenly appeared. The dog headed straight for the water. The little girl, maybe about 4, and her brother, 6ish, started stepping from rock to rock in the creek.

“Why are you painting?” the little girl asked the taggers.

Leaning from her rock, she reached out and put her palm on an older, bright red tag a previous graffitist left on the wall.

“Is this paint going to come down?” she asked me, thinking I was one of the artists.

The parents watched from the train bridge above, their only concern that the little girl, the more daring rock-hopper of the siblings, would fall in the water and get her dress muddy. She did.

She scampered back up to the top of the bridge, muddy legs and all, to chiding parents, older brother and watchful Labrador. The family moved on, happy the kids had a nice time talking with the nice young men vandalizing the train bridge below.

A Wicker Park graffiti artist I don’t like

A hidden graffiti cavern in West Loop

Covert sculpture in South Chicago

A man turns covering tags into a father-sons activity

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It’s a place where posters for accordion-drenched Mexican Norteña bands get taped to the sides of Korean-language newspaper boxes. The walk west along Lawrence brings Ecuadorian restaurants, Indo-Pak grocery bazaars, barbershops with signs that say both “Se Habla Español” and “Free WiFi,” travel agencies with hand-painted signs promising low-cost trips to “India, Pakistan, Europe, Middle East, S. America & Africa.”

It’s a place where people work, live, breathe alongside each other.

El-Jeeb Hijab & Gifts has a window full of head coverings two doors down from the Admiral Theater, where women take their clothing off. One door down from El-Jeeb, a roomful of middle-aged Hispanic Christian men sit eating around a table at Sala Evangelica.

The smell of fried chicken wafts in from nowhere.

It’s a walk, a simple walk west. No reason, rhyme or campaign finance paperwork on this one of the 1K1 afternoons in the city. On a cold, bright day, taking sidewalk footpaths worn or chipped into wet ice, it’s just a walk west on Lawrence Avenue in Albany Park, Chicago, Illinois.

Across Pulaski, the signs blare into English with the arrival of a large, corporate chain plaza of Starbucks, Chase Bank, Petco. This side is called Mayfair, large orange metal pillars placed along the roadway say.

There’s the same diversity in Mayfair, the same mixture of Korean, Spanish and Arabic writing on the walls, of hookah bars and taquerias and State Farm and American Family Insurance agents with Asian last names.

But the streets seem wider here, the storefronts further spaced. It’s more suburban. Fewer businesses are shuttered.

It’s still the bungalow district, metal plaques shoved in the concrete claim. But the houses and families and increasingly large yards are back among the side streets. Developments start to line Lawrence farther west. Minty fresh apartment complexes and suburban-style townhouses that claim the neighborhood is the much more marketable Jefferson Park.

Chicago is a town of invisible barriers, where one side of the street gives friendly welcome to a person of your age/class/race and another seems angry and cold. Winding on worn paths in the sidewalk ice past lumberyards and jam-packed car washes, another barrier has been crossed. And another.

The walk continues past two highways and then past Cicero into the actual Jefferson Park, where the signs I can’t understand are once again in comforting Polish.

On this small side trip through Chicago, I saw a Plexiglas cow in the back of a pickup slathered in the Spanish names for cheeses. I saw a bakery with a massive Korean sign and a small English translation in the Gothic calligraphic font usually reserved for either “Thug Life” or “Chicago Tribune.”

An old Asian woman in a walker missed the bus. A young black man smoking a cigarette told me to watch the ice beneath an underpass. A white man with long strands of gray hair peeking from his wicking fabric ski mask waited for transit by the highway.

These are all people I will never see again.

On Feb. 22, 2015, I walked 2.6 miles from the Kimball Brown Line stop to the Jefferson Park Blue Line. I took the train back to write these lines in my own hipster haven of young artsy types where we tell ourselves we’ve found Chicago.

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Read about a place I passed on this trip

“When she was a little girl in Chicago, Grandma wondered why there were men pulling carts through the streets yelling, ‘Rex, a lion.’

“She later learned they were junk men calling for people’s rags and old iron. She told me some of those junk men became millionaires, from selling that old iron for the needs of WWII.”

My grandmother was born in 1921 and died a few years ago. She was 90. Great-Uncle Leonard out in Morton Grove remembers the rag pickers too, calling up and down the streets by their home at Lawrence and Sawyer.

“Rags! Old iron!”

It’s not an unknown phenomenon. A Chicago musician and journalist named Oscar Brown, Jr., wrote a song about the rag and old iron men in 1958. Nina Simone covered it.

Essanay, a short-lived silent film company based out of Uptown, did a short in 1910 called “Rags, Old Iron!” It’s about two kids selling rags to raise enough money to get into a nickelodeon.

Someone named a racehorse Rags Old Iron. Another person used it for a horror novel title. A third had it as the name of her sorta gothy Etsy shop.

A few more search results here and there. It’s the name of a quilt shop in New Mexico too. That sort of stuff.

Men wandering streets pulling carts, making their living off scraps, now only remembered in scraps.

Rex, a lion.

What won’t we remember?

Will history swallow those annoying clipboard kids asking if you have a moment to spare for the environment? Will some future grandchild look on with confusion when we try to describe those people who stand on medians holding signs directing people to tax prep places?

“No, no, Xenon Marslord Dailing, they would be dressed as the Statue of Liberty and hold up big arrows pointing people to Liberty Tax Service locations. Before the space war.”

I’m not talking about fads, nor am I talking about dying industries. We’ll laugh at cronuts and we’ll bemoan manufacturing. But we forget the rag men.

What silly, small, meaningless scene-setting details will be blurred in future recounting, petrified like a fly in amber in a few old references no one gets?

“What’s your quilt shop named for?”

“What’s that song about?”

“Why do you have a racehorse named ‘Dial-Up Modem’?”

The floppy disk in the corner of Word is just the “Save” icon. Many people never used a telephone that looks like the picture they press to call on an iPhone.

We’ll have to explain the video game “Paperboy.”

In the 1920s in Chicago, there was a little girl in Albany Park. Her name was Dorothy. Her memories weren’t gangsters and speakeasies, like the movies say they should be. Instead, they were just the little, human moments of life, the details blurred by time.

Like rag men pulling cart on the street, shouting “Rex, a lion!”

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Read more forgotten history

Listen to Oscar Brown’s original “Rags and Old Iron”

Listen to Nina Simone’s version

A description of the silent film

A sense of peace, a sense of joy, a sense of pride in the community, sure. Even the chives, tomatoes and spearmint planted in the little grassy area between street and sidewalk were there to vanish.

“Just for people to take,” said Nancy Leginski, 73, of the Jensen Community Organization. “There are hungry people in Albany Park.”

But the birdbath wasn’t there to be taken. So that’s what someone did.

“I think they probably just picked it up in the middle of the night and put it in their truck,” Leginski said as she sunk a trowel into the Avers dirt to pluck out weeds.

The missing birdbath is not the first setback for the three-year-old garden at Avers, one of three similarly tiny gardens the Jensen Community Organization planted along Lawrence Avenue in what would otherwise be those useless five-foot slips of grass between street and sidewalk.

Once, the city dug the Avers garden up to do work there. Once, it was Peoples Gas.

So setbacks are nothing new. Nor are theft and vandalism. Nor is gathing a dwindling, aging group of volunteers on weekends to weed, water and pick beer bottles and cigarette butts from the micro gardens along Lawrence.

“I remember this neighborhood back in the ’40s and people would throw their cigarette butts on the ground just like now,” said Leginski, who lives in the home her parents bought in 1941. “It wasn’t any different then.”

The group has planted four micro gardens so far — three along Lawrence and another five-foot, grass-slip garden at the founder’s former house. They’re planning two more back along Lawrence.

Then they want to tackle the trainyard at Kimball, “Turn it from an ugly place to a pretty one,” Leginski said.

Leginski is the de facto leader of the Jensen Community Organization, but still calls herself the treasurer. The president is and always will be founder Florence Stoller, who now lives in a nearby nursing home.

“As long as she’s alive, she’s president,” Leginski said.

A new volunteer named Pamela said she found out about the group from her Realtor. She’s been in Albany Park about two months, she said.

As Pamela told her story and flicked cigarette butts out of the garden with a trowel, Leginski crossed the busy Lawrence Avenue to help fellow volunteer Barbara Morton, who uses a cane, back across the street.

Morton and Leginski have been part of the Jensen Community Organization since it started 22 years ago.

“We were in our 40s, 50s and 60s,” Leginski said. “The same people are now in our 60s, 70s and 80s. We need young people.”

Morton struck up a conversation with two young men passing by. Soon, she and the other two ladies of the Jensen group had names, a phone number and two pledged volunteers. I asked Morton if she did that often.

“God did that,” Morton said, giving a little smile and pointing up in the air.

Morton sees the neighborhood getting better, which she credits in part to landlords having more of a stake in the community.

“Before, it was suburban people renting (apartments) out to whoever,” she said. “Owner-residents make such a big difference psychologically.”

As Pamela weeded and Leginski dug up a circle of earth, Morton said she felt the gangs that used to haunt Albany Park, covering its alleys and storefronts with tags and signs, were going away.

“Oh, Barbara,” Leginski said, shaking her head and dusting herself off as she stood. “There are a dozen active gangs.”

They are keeping at it, these ladies of the Jensen Community Organization. They’re keeping at it with trowels and birdbaths, with tomatoes for whoever wants them and beauty for any who see it. They’re keeping at it despite the cigarette butts and the vandalism and the gangs.

Actually, that last one’s not quite true. They are keeping at it despite the gangs, but also for them, hoping the little five-foot gardens of food and beauty help in some small way to make people see the neighborhood as a place to share, not turf to own.

“We’re trying to change their mindset,” Leginski said.

The missing birdbath was old, not much of a loss, Leginski said as she cut a hole in the donated liner under where the the birdbath once stood. She’s lying, of course. You can tell from her voice how much she liked it.

They’ll plant irises and petunias on the spot the birdbath once stood. The gardeners persist. Always.

But there is still room in that tiny little garden for a birdbath.

… maybe one of stone or metal, something heavy enough that it won’t be plucked away in the night.

… maybe something for birds and sun and a little bit of beauty in a neighborhood where people have been tossing their cigarette butts since the ’40s.

… maybe something donated, if I’m not being too subtle.

“Oh, can you put the word out for a birdbath?” Leginski asked me, perking up again after her lie about “no big loss.”

Who could say no to that?

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Contact me if you have a birdbath to donate

“Hold on. Let me check,” I said, flicking a 50-cent piece in the air.

The coin spun for a just a moment before landing in my hand. It was tails, so I sold my soul to the devil.

A zombie who had earlier been talking about his church group winced a bit as I took the contract from the devil’s hands. The devil’s girlfriend just looked bored and fussed with her angel wings a little. She would eventually take them off, saying they itched. The villain from “Jem and the Holograms” laughed and covered her mouth.

After I carefully signed “Harvey Dent” with my left hand (the bad side) and took my beer back from Catwoman, the devil and I reviewed our deal.

If I decoded the devil’s faux legalese correctly, I could get out of it at any time by ripping up the paper. Also, if a deity or deities wanted my soul, they would get it straight up.

It was either designed not to offend beliefs or else the guy was worried about accidentally ending up with the souls of a bunch of drunk folks from a Halloween party in Albany Park.

Today is Halloween, or really Child Halloween. Today, candy-soaked kiddos run from house to house or designated boring safe spot to designated boring safe spot yelling “Trick or Treat!” in costumes slathered in reflective tape.

The Saturday before Halloween, however, is Grown-Up Halloween. On that day, the adults hit the bars and parties for “treats” that are a little more alcoholic and “tricks” that are I probably shouldn’t finish this sentence.

On Grown-Up Halloween, the tawdry and offensive costumes come out, the “Sexy _____” for women and the “Recently Deceased Real-Life Celebrity _____” for men. Others are whatever was cheap, semi-comfortable and available as a kit at one of those pop-up Halloween shops.

Other revelers raid the wardrobe. A vaguely 60′s-ish dress gets passed off as Joan from “Mad Men.” A Bears fan puts all the gear on at once to become a “Da Bears” Superfan. A guy is Indiana Jones because he already has the hat.

But then there are the costumes that make me wonder. The reasoned, the fully fleshed out, the odd. Too intricate to have been thrown together. Too obscure and confusing to be random.

Why that costume? Why so much work? Are you trying to say something here?

Was the churchgoing zombie secretly worried about conformity?

Was the villain from “Jem and the Holograms” trying to hold on to a receding youth?

And what of me? What does it say that I dressed as Batman villain Two-Face, a creature of such indecisiveness he lives by pure caprice, ruled by whims no more meaningful or thought-out than the flip of a coin?

After the party, Catwoman, Poison Ivy and a “Plants vs. Zombies” plant and I hopped a cab to a show. When we spilled onto the trendy Wicker Park/Bucktown six corners at closing time, we were surrounded by dozens of costumes, dozens of fantasies, dozens of people saying “I want to be this for a night.”

Is there something unspoken and primal about members of a culture taking a night to become things we’re not? Or is it just slutty costumes, specials on pumpkin ale and me thinking about this way too late at night?

Is there something meaningful about Grown-Up Halloween? I honestly can’t decide.

Heads, yes. Tails, no.

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Read a Halloween tale of ghosts, goblins and Ringo Starr