That’s not sarcasm, and it’s only a little snarky. It actually pleased me to park my bike among the concrete Duplo blocks slapped down by mismanaged ’60s architects to form the University of Illinois at Chicago.

It pleased me to watch the cosplay the pretty girls and pretty boys played in, knowing that within a few years, deep, committed women and men would put their selfies and fashion aside. It pleased me to watch lovelorn boys sulk and scowl, pleased me to see groups of friends who looked like grownups joke and tease each other the way kids do.

(It did not please me that the Jane Addams museum I had come to see was closed for renovation, particularly since I had just come from an ill-fated side jaunt to the closed-on-Mondays Chinese American Museum of Chicago. I really should have checked the hours first.)

I had come from a coffee shop in the Bridgeport Art Center, where I downed an iced latte with coconut milk and as much junk food as my body craved to keep up the calories. I was starting to flag in my massive bike ride, which if you’re just joining us started last Monday at the city’s southernmost tip and will wrap up on Halloween, when I reach the city’s northernmost.

If you’re just joining, I traveled the length of the city one day in July, and I’m still on the South Side. I’m not yet watching the awful, wonderful, awful college kids, and I’m not yet standing outside a locked museum in Chinatown. I’m still in the Bridgeport coffee shop.

One wall is lined with a DJ station and turntables, another has a drum set and a third has a massive screen set up to play 1990s console games. I play a few rounds of Nintendo’s StarTropics, which I loved as a child but now realize has boring, repetitive gameplay and no interesting characters.

Nostalgia lied, as it does.

The Art Center is a magnificent place, a former catalog warehouse now filled up with event space, artists lofts, a museum dedicated to maritime history and, I find, a funky coffee shop where dance music plays for two men set up on Mac laptops.

This isn’t the Bridgeport people think of, the self-imposed, self-imprisoning nostalgia of working men chopping hogs and climbing up ladders of Irish politics. That’s a wonderful nostalgia and staring at the former Bubbly Creek, I find myself longing for the mass employment we used to have. I long for jobs.

But it’s a false nostalgia. Bridgeport was racist, conformist, confining. The waters roiled with pollution — “bubbly” is not a good adjective for a creek — and those jobs vanished as the world changed. We don’t butcher hogs for the world, don’t stack wheat or play with railroads. Our shoulders aren’t big; they’re hunched over Mac laptops while dance music plays.

I turned off StarTropics, having my fill of repetitive gameplay, coconut milk latte and nostalgia’s lies. I rode off to closed museums, and found myself among concrete Duplo blocks and memories that, if not nice, were pleasing in their accuracy.

It pleased me that college students are still frivolous, irresponsible, brilliant, self-involved, fearful, charming and just awful, wonderful, awful human beings. It pleased me that UIC students are still as horrible as I was.

UIC was where my Chicago began, in a way. I wasn’t a UIC student, but sublet an apartment from a high school friend who had been.

We were both recent grads, thrust out into a world and told we were men. We were given an instruction book. We were given hundreds of instruction books, each with the exact opposite advice from the last one. Do this, do that, go here, go there, go to church, find a girl, find atheism, stay single. The world was our oyster, with our age turning everyone within earshot into a kibbitzing auntie giving us unsolicited advice and opinion on the exact proper way to shuck it.

I really needed to get out of my parents’ house, and Jeff had a sublet. So I came to Chicago.

Nostalgia lies and you grow out of the things of youth. I was pleased to discover college students are still like me when I was awful, but it was time to leave. I pointed my bike north.

It’s time for story #1,000 of 1,001. It’s time to head home.

I read a few more of the names into the recorder I brought with me that ride day in July, but I couldn’t find the good recorder that morning. What tape I have is minutes of crackling and wind. I make out odd words like “pine cones,” “birds,” “Symphony Shores” and “I ask why, but HUSBAND Harry Davies (1880-1949) won’t answer.”

I’m typing this in October and I can’t remember why I found the graveyard so loving.

If this weekslong ramble northward to wrap up the site has a purpose, it’s to find the city’s themes. I found labor and futility where the factories rot. I found community, home and hope in the neighborhoods older relatives have told me never to go to. And here, spurred by a graveyard at 71st and Cottage Grove, I found memory.

Or I found what I can’t remember.

I do remember the tree.

It was, and presumably still is, a large tree floofing out into hefty, weight-supporting branches only a foot or two off the ground. One long branch crooked horizontal for a length of close-enough parameters that a slightly chubbed middle-aged blogger wearing khaki cargo shorts over bike togs could sit in the tree, lay along the branch and stare at a pine cone-filtered sky.

I’m not saying I climbed a tree in a graveyard, Mom, but I’m not saying I didn’t.

As I sat in my tree, I talked into the bad recorder — not bad, per se, but so sensitive and un-windscreened whatever I said was lost between breeze and bird. I remember loving what I said into that recorder. I remember thinking this was good, solid, gave a sense of the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood in a way both accurate and avoiding the white tourism this bike ride risked turning into.

It’s just scratches and wind now, and I think that’s somewhat appropriate.

We live in lost history, with HUSBAND Harry Davies’ entire life crammed in that dash between 1880 and 1949. If we’re lucky, a few words spring through the noise. A name, a date, a moment caught on tape forgetting the fancy word for trees with needles. (It’s “conifer,” I remembered later.)

What better place to remember memory than in a graveyard?

Later, I’d head north. Later, I’d run into the line of crosses a Jesus guy put along Halsted to mourn Englewood’s dead. I ran that story early as #961. Later I’d ring through construction zones, try and fail to find the end of Bubbly Creek (ran that one early too) and ended up playing ’90s video games at a retro-themed hipster coffee shop in Bridgeport. That’s where we’ll pick up on Monday.

I guess Ida B. Wells is buried in Oak Woods Cemetery, the internet tells me later. And Harold Washington, Enrico Fermi, Junior Wells and Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The internet’s a wonderful thing, although I almost fell down a Wikipedia wormhole just now looking up pathologist-poet Maud Slye, forever sharing Oak Woods with the activist and missionary Nancy Green, who funded her antipoverty work by appearing as Aunt Jemima.

But I didn’t know any of that in my tree. I just knew pine cones and conifer needles. Birds, cicadas, airplanes and the honks of both car and the Metra Electric in the distance.

She taps her foot as she sits in the one barstool not sitting bottom up on a table. It’s morning yet, and the floors are still clean. The stools are still stacked. The drinking day hasn’t begun, so the young woman has a moment to tap her foot and check up on the world.

She is young and lovely, sharp and fashionable. The bartender has become a storied figure, a stock character of wisdom and patience for no real reason other than that writers used to like to romanticize booze, and they liked the guy who handed them each glass. But the rest of the service industry gets short shrift, although they’re just as savvy, wise and sharp.

Waiters are a stock character of bad romantic comedy, the slightly effete man working on an acting career when not plenishing water, apps or checks. Waitresses are sexual in these films, the object for the bad boyfriend to ogle and smack the ass of. But through some ’40s notion that Hemingway had any idea what the hell he was talking about, a bartender is seen as wise.

She taps her foot and checks her phone.

The brewpub is a Marz venture, one of the Bridgeport-area gambits of the Marszewski boys, locals who manage to pull off that rare trick of creating things both beautiful and soulful, both authentic and new. Maria’s Packaged Goods and Community Bar is theirs. So is Kimski, the Polish-Korean fusion joint from the Polish-Korean fusion Marszewskis. They also do the Co-Prosperity Sphere, Lumpen Magazine and Lumpen’s accompanying 105.5 on the radio.

The taproom sits at the end of Bubbly Creek.

At the end of Bubbly Creek, on a street called Iron in a town that no longer makes steel, the wet muck that slaughterhouses spewed and Upton Sinclair raked has been replaced with dryness. Gravel lots for city vehicles, trucks from a smatter of warehouses grinding white grit as they pile down the roads. There are fewer vehicles now, I guess. Fewer jobs, fewer ways to pay for kids by lifting and hauling and slicing pigs’ throats.

That’s what I’m told, at least.

The end of Bubbly Creek offers no access without trespassing into one of these places. I move north along dry gravel, seeking some place I can see water.

Standing on the bridge that crosses the creek, McKinley Park to the west and Bridgeport to the east, I stare south from 35th at these defining waters. This once-bubbling water of blood and grit meant Chicago, for all the horror and abuse and wealth and security it created. We took on the filth to provide the nation its breakfast meat. We got the fat-slick water, they got the sausage.

Now our south river’s south jut has no more idea what to do than we do. Are we robust or cosmopolitan? Are we the engine of industry or the height of fashion? Do we make the sausage or brunch upon it?

I don’t know, and Bubbly Creek isn’t saying. The once-roiling waters of filth and jobs are quiet, and still.

Tales of Bridgeport

Tales of McKinley Park

Old Joe of Canaryville

It was 2012, and I was talking to one of the puppeteers behind the Puppet Bike for a story on this site. Mike was a nice guy, really interested in the project so when we were done chatting under an Andersonville streetlamp, he suggested I should do a story about a man named Ralph.

From a little corner shop in Portage Park, his family’s old blacksmith shop converted to boat-building, Ralph Frese hand-built canoes. Modern, sleek. Classic, replica. He hand-molded birch bark, real or replica, to make traditional forms. He led historic recreations of famous expeditions while dressed as a French voyageur.

I should write about Ralph, Mike the cat-dancer said. It sounded neat, but with freelance hustling, dating and life, it was a few months before I reached out to Ralph.

He had died.

I think it was Mike, but it might have been someone working at the canoe shop in Portage Park. No matter the person, someone mentioned that a few of Ralph’s friends were meeting at the shop in a few days to finish up the canoe Ralph had been working on when he died. I asked if I could come. It ended up being one of my fondest memories of this site.

For hours, we talked and laughed and I watched the men turn birch bark into boat. At the end, I couldn’t bear to edit their “thousand stories of Ralph” down. I ended up posting their audio online so everyone could hear about prank-dumping Ralph in the Gulf of Mexico, German dads, an “addictive” shop and taking the pitch from pine trees to mix with bear grease lard and ash for traditional watertight Ojibwa birch bark canoes.

“He was no saint, that’s for sure. But he was a genuinely caring person, a nice person. And he was a person who liked to share his knowledge with people. And that’s where I came in. If it wasn’t for Ralph, I wouldn’t be doing half the things I’m doing right now,” a friend of his named Rich Gross said. “I’m the product of Ralph Frese, and pretty much everyone that hangs around here was the same way. It was addictive to hang around this place because there’s so many fun things going on, so many interesting people come in.”

That was five years ago. I wrote the story up and tossed it like a letter in a bottle into the void that is the internet.

Time passed, the shop was sold and torn down. I passed it a few weeks ago. Just another development over Chicago’s last blacksmith shop.

But someone found my letter. A few weeks ago I got a note on the site’s Facebook page from the manager of the Chicago Maritime Museum. At 7 p.m. tonight, the little Bridgeport ode to the water will host the premiere of “Mr. Canoe,” a documentary about the life and boats of Ralph Frese.

I never met the man. I missed his life and the only of his boats I saw were being finished by his friends as memorial. But I do remember fondly the experience of sharing a sliver of time with the people who loved him and hearing the stories about why.

This film might be the same experience for you.

There’s a place along Illinois Route 1 — Halsted Street to Chicagoans — where the dollar stores just become dollar stores, no extra security needed in metal and mesh. Then there’s a place further north where they disappear entirely.

There’s a place on Halsted where the churches have their own separate buildings, where the name of the pastor is put on digital billboard across from chain fast-food restaurants and gas stations, not painted on the side of a brick storefront in as close to Old English font as they could get with a can of spraypaint.

And then the churches disappear too.

People walk up and down and across these streets no matter the latitude of wealth. Old ladies pull shopping trolleys behind them and grumpy-looking men check phones for whenever it is that damn bus is coming. Young men wander aimlessly for something to do, whether they’re in Roseland, Englewood or up-and-coming Bridgeport.

Their pace is faster in the wealthier area. Their skin is lighter, too.

The barricade between the wealth and poverty seems to be moving south — the Englewood Whole Foods is up and running, feeding both mouths and fears of displacement. But the true boundary seems to lie at the Union Stock Yard Gates in a neighborhood sociologists have tried to call “New City” since the ’30s, but really we all know it’s Back of the Yards.

It’s tucked off Halsted, down an industrial strip that kept just enough food processors and manufacturers to smell lightly of bacon in the rain. Kidnapped on its own island in the roadway, kept for history but isolated enough that the damn thing doesn’t block traffic, the stone gates thousands of men walked through each day stands silently. No one walks through anymore, at least not unless they’re trying for a photo opp or to get closer to the firefighter memorial for a disaster I’ve never heard of.

These men slaughtered countless cows, pigs, sheep — whatever ritual sacrifice it took to make a city of millions bloom. Now their gateway sits in a corridor of bacon smell and metal firemen, a barricade between poverty to the south and the new bars and restaurants to the north.

People try to say there are no barricades. People try to say there’s nothing stopping others from crossing the invisible lines between wealth and poverty, between classes and cultures. It’s just a matter of gumption, moxie, hard work and belief in God and free-market capitalism.

I believe people can better their lot. I believe work can pay dividends. But I see those barricades bright as a noonlit sun. There is a line between the supermarket and the bodega, between megachurch and the mini one.

There’s a line where the trendy bars start and another where the dollar stores have razor wire.

Can those lines be crossed? Yes. Sure. Maybe. To pretend those lines weren’t built, that’s a feat I’ve never quite managed.

Now a tour of the North Side

And a look at the city from above

And a text-based roleplaying game about riding the CTA

Chicago looks like a Saturday night in Bridgeport as the sun dips down into the suburbs and the strings of bulbs flip on over a restaurant’s walled but open-air seating area.

It sounds like parties. It sounds like laughter of friends, the cheers of a tattooed crowd’s surprise birthday and the flirting of the various couples sprinkled throughout Maria’s Community Bar and associated Kimski restaurant touching and eyefucking their way through first, second, third, 85th dates.

Maria’s and Kimski have been feted and cheered by better writers than I. Half-Korean, half-Polish brothers Ed and Mike Marszewski have been hailed as the new faces of a neighborhood known more for racism and Irish mayors than for anything that could be described as “craft,” “artisanal” or any of the other adjectives food writers toss the family’s way.

In 2010, they took the reins of the family bar, an old slashie-style beer and shots joint and made it into a community center, an arts hub, a place for events and youth and culture but always steeped in Chicago.

The brothers later added Kimski, another Korean/Polish mashup, to provide counter service street food. Chef Won Kim whips up poutine with kimchi gravy, sausage platters with banchan sides, scallion potato pancakes drizzled in a Tamari sour cream sauce tasting somewhere between Seoul and Lodz for the new crop of foodies and drunks coming to, of all places, Bridgeport.

Maria still greets people walking through the packaged goods section to make their way to the bar. The crowd blends the young and beautiful seamlessly with the old timer crowd in Sox gear and beer bellies.

Is this what Chicago looks like? Is this how it tastes?

Chicago prides itself on being frozen in time. The “77 community areas” map on shirts and posters is a perfect replica of what ethnic groups lived where when the University of Chicago’s Social Science Research Committee decide to codify the town as a lark in the late ‘20s.

The neighborhoods Chicagoans pride themselves on are just a snapshot of where people lived when the committee did its thing in the Coolidge era.

I like the maps, even divvy the site by a drop-down menu of what I wrote where. But identity can stultify. Traditions of sausage platters, deep dish pizza and heaps of kraut on a Maxwell Street Polish don’t let you taste bulgogi beef sandwiches or pierogis flavored ever so lightly of the Insadong.

I worry about our love for Chicagoana. I’m worried endless rehashes of the exact ingredients and ratios for Chicago dogs, Polish sausages and Italian beef will kill the spirit of innovation that made them. There won’t be a new “Chicago-style _____” if we keep replicating the old recipes with the pontifical devotion civic pride engenders.

Maybe this scene of soy and sauerkraut is the new Chicago, a new flavor made not from slicing a city 77 ways, but by bringing things together you never thought would work.

Of course, there’s something to be said for Bridgeport dogs

The release party for The Lumpen Field Guide to Chicago Jagoffs went off without a hitch. At a packed-to-gills Maria’s Packaged Goods and Community Bar in Bridgeport, beer was drunk, tales were swapped, mayoral races were discussed and the lives, styles and habits of the biggest douchebags, dorks and jagoffs in the city were analyzed and critiqued.

Reading from the newly minted guide, speakers discussed the villains of urban life. They talked about dibs-callers, the self-appointed neighborhood watchers, the current mayor, jerk cyclists, jerk drivers, that guy who will not rest until every single human being on the planet has read, loved and fully digested “Devil in the White City.”

One particularly charming, handsome and virile human man (me) read a compelling piece about what a complete tool Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass is.

Every town has its dorks, tools and massive flinging wangs. A commuter who doesn’t understand personal space is as virulent on Chicago’s ‘L’ as Boston’s ‘T.’ The young and heedlessly fashionable are just as obnoxious in Wicker Park or Brooklyn.

Yes, there are breeds and habits that make our own jerks unique. The lazy charity-kateers who won’t help a cause but suggest Oprah might. The civic priders who hate the existence of NYC so much any mention of alleys, crime rates or the thickness of pizza results in a red-faced dissertation on why Big Shoulders beats Big Apple. Ronnie “Woo Woo” Wickers.

And then there are historical jagbags, from corrupt, murdering founder John Kinzie to modern politicos Emanuel, Rauner and Jackson Jr. The guide tells of Ventra, unelected school boards, street preachers, bike jerks, driving jerks, gentrifiers, teens on buses, people with large opinions on what “real Chicago” is and did I mention that charming, handsome man’s thoughts on Chicago Tribune columnist John “I give politicians catty nicknames for a living” Kass?

The night went fine and I bought a painting of former Chicago mayor and current historical jagoff William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson from the very non-jaggy Dmitry Samarov. I drank beer and got a verbal nod from journalist Kari Lydersen that she’s willing to speak to the class I teach. It was a fun night filled with funny, witty people, only some of whom might be jagoffs but if they happen to be jagoffs, they still have incisive points about the writing styles of certain Chicago Tribune columnists.

I mean, he called Ferguson, Missouri, a “lynching” of the white cop who shot an unarmed black guy. Come on!

As I stood on the Orange Line platform after cutting out from the party, watching what was either a mouse or shrew wriggle a hunk off a slice of bread someone threw on the rails, I thought about jerks.

I don’t know why it’s easier for some people to be rude than kind. I don’t know why some people are so lily-livered and sensitive that they think I’m a jerk in some settings.

Life is a spectrum, not of bad to good, but of tool to “That guy’s OK by me.” We’re all the villain in someone’s book, a saint in another’s and a background cameo supporting character in a third’s. I guess all we can do is put up with each other and be as open and honest about what ticks us off as we can.

Even if it’s John Kass.

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Read the piece that inspired one of my Jagoff Guide submissions (not Kass)

She walked up as I came in to use the bathroom. She seemed nice, so I ordered a hot dog out of guilt. We were the only two people in the restaurant.

The counter had various menus and a few copies of the Bridgeport News, a local weekly paper whose offices are on the next block. A cork board by the door had a few business cards for job-seekers, some black metal or punk band leaflet and a flier for a fundraiser for a Canaryville woman facing cancer.

I had come to the gourmet hot dog stand with the zebra-patterned chairs because the store across the alley was a Godzilla store. It specialized in Godzilla. That’s a story. Weird, wacky, lots of description, the ever-elusive question of why the hell people do things.

On my return from the bathroom, I asked if the place had been there long.

“Since November,” the floral-shirted woman making my hot dog said. “We were over on 36th before. 36th and Halsted.”

“How long were you there?”

“A year,” she said, her back to me. “It was a weird location.”

What a weird thing the Godzilla store would be. No one writes stories like that. No one but me.

“Weird?”

“There was no street traffic. No one goes down there. There was a tailor and a laundromat and a car wash. It was just dead,” she said. “After 35th, everything just dies.”

I wondered if I would play it cool with the Godzilla store man (I assumed it would be a man). I wondered if I would be cool or just walk up and say, “Hi, I want to write a story about your Godzilla store because no one writes stories like that.”

The woman pulled out a gigantic roll, a bolillo roll, she would later tell me. She put the dog on it and spread the ingredients, placed the pickles and the peppers. She was backlit as she dusted it with celery salt.

She went back to her solitaire and “Judge Joe Brown” as I devoured it, thinking about Godzilla and other stories no one writes. When I finished, she walked up to give me the receipt. I complimented the giant roll.

“I have to put it on there because they’re too big for a regular bun,” she said. “Nathan’s hot dogs, five to a pound.”

I went to the Godzilla store that no one writes about. WGN was there, doing a segment on the man. I had missed the story. I had absolutely missed the real story.

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On small moments