Hoyne was the home of my first real apartment in Chicago, a converted storefront we called the Bodega. The floors were so warped, my significant other at the time would laugh herself to tears rolling a baseball down it and watching it return to her. The wiring was so dangerous the old Lithuanian electrician the management company finally sent after three weeks of prodding started yelling “Is stupid! Is stupid!” when he got behind the outlet to see how it had been set up.

I was 23 and it was heaven. I found out a few months later that my great-grandparents were living a few blocks south when my grandmother was born. On Hoyne.

So it seemed especially fitting when I discovered that my street of stupid joy was named after a man involved in a story that now brings me stupid joy. I now bring you the story of Thomas Hoyne, who for 28 days claimed to be the mayor of Chicago.

…

That last sentence didn’t give Hoyne enough credit, but it sure got some folks to click past the jump. Hoyne was a powerful man from a powerful family.

Moving to Chicago at the age of 20 in 1837, Hoyne made his way as a schoolteacher and his fortune as a lawyer. He was Chicago’s first city clerk, organized the public library and served as the first president of its board of directors, was a justice of the peace, a U.S. attorney, a U.S. marshal and so on. He was the major donor who created Northwestern’s law school and the University of Chicago’s astronomy chair. His brother Philip (called “Uncle Phil”) was the region’s U.S. commissioner, a powerful position at the time.

Another accomplishment of Hoyne’s was nabbing more than 33,000 votes in his race for mayor in 1876. Every other candidate combined got 819 votes.

OK, it wasn’t at an election, but at a mass rally of his supporters.

OK, neither major party ran a candidate.

OK, it might not have been a legal election.

The year before, Chicago had signed onto the Illinois Cities and Villages Act, which moved mayoral elections from November to April and extended mayoral terms from one year to two. Mayor Harvey Colvin claimed this gave him another year in office. Others interpreted the act as starting two-year terms with the next guy.

Colvin’s duties required he call for an election in April. But he didn’t, instead holding onto the power he claimed the new rule gave him. Hoyne’s “election” of April 16, 1876, can be seen as more of a protest than some loony tunes 1800s shenanigans. The mayor wouldn’t allow a legal election, so Hoyne and his supporters held an illegal one.

Hoyne waited for Colvin outside old City Hall at the Rookery (same site as today’s Rookery, different structure) to demand he step down. He wouldn’t, and city council supported him by not certifying the election results.

But the city council election had gone ahead as planned, and the incoming council supported Hoyne, at its first meeting canvassing the vote (the technical term for what they had to do to make the election official) and declaring Hoyne mayor. Most of the city departments supported Hoyne as well, either agreeing with the Hoyne cause or because Hoyne appointed new department heads.

The comptroller and police supported Colvin. One side had the political support, the other had the money and guns. A police barricade around City Hall both kept riots at bay and entrenched Colvin in the office.

On June 5, the Cook County courts declared Hoyne’s election illegal, but ordering the city to hold a special election. The council called for the election to be held July 12.

Here’s where it gets special. Here’s where it gets lovely.

“Mr. Hoyne was besought to again become a candidate,” a later history of Chicago would write, “but he refused, saying he considered that he had already performed his duty to the public.”

Hoyne wasn’t a power grabber, or a wackadoodle claiming office he had no right to. He didn’t want the office. He didn’t want Colvin to claim it unjustly.

Monroe Heath was elected the city’s 28th mayor, replacing Colvin, the 27th. Thomas Hoyne, the namesake of my street of joy, either doesn’t make official lists or is put down with a footnote as “mayor-elect.”

But there is a bit to be said for Hoyne, a man who served the people not by taking power, but by keeping power from those who claimed it wrongly.

In August 1876, the city attorney retroactively declared Hoyne had in fact been mayor for those 28 days — not de jure but de facto.  It wasn’t in recognition of his claim, but so the city department heads he appointed could get paid.

More weird mayoral history

One of my favorite early stories on this site happened near Hoyne

He was in the McDonald’s where Western meets Milwaukee, a spot at the exact confluence of urban poverty and rich kids playing poor through their 20s. He was clearly amid the latter, but not above a quick burger no one has ever referred to as “artisanal,” “gourmet,” or “gastro-”

Despite his choice of meatstuff, he was a perfect physical specimen. Glamor muscles toned, tanned and tatted, he wore a tight black T-shirt to show off the same.

He looked the perfect median between salon and saloon, like he could either be heading to a stylist or a bar brawl. Fashionable yet tough. Coiffed yet ready to throw down.

Untouchable. Unstoppable. Like I assume his arm tattoos bragged.

Or, since he was wearing a T-shirt with sleeves just long enough to take three letters off, OUCHABLE and TOPPABLE.

That’s a funny thing I saw.

There’s always some humor in walking the streets. A muscleman bragging by error that he could be topped and would say “ouch.” Some sharp graffiti. A downtown store advertising that Vladimir Putin hacked their system to give out incredible savings.

A friend framed a photo she took of a chicken darting across a road in Pilsen. “Why?” she asked. “Why?”

It’s nice that life doles out the silly alongside the grim. It’s always pleasant when something takes your mind for the moment off tasks and trends and the news outside.

Even if it’s just to laugh at a muscleman.

A sadder tale of McDonald’s

I think I made him sad.

We met at the Bucktown mainstay Map Room, an early adopter of the fancy beer thing in an increasingly fancy neighborhood. The bar’s done well with its crowd, aged along with it. Fewer rowdy nights, more graying neighbors using the place to set up a laptop and do the coffeeshop thing with a seasonal winter ale from a Trappist abbey in Belarus or somesuch.

The young writer and I met and we ended up talking for over an hour on everything from URL domain registration to the role of art in society.

The story never ran.

I think it was probably just that he got busy and successful and the concept of transcribing an hour of tape recorded conversation was so daunting it kept getting put in the back of the line until it felt like a deadline had passed. I know my 2014 interview with the trans zookeeper was similarly fascinating and procrastinated into nonexistence.

One of the things we talked about in the vanished interview is vanished words. For those of us who write, work, live online, everything we do will vanish.

It will. Any thought of permanence is a lie.

It’s a function of using an evolving technology for things we have pretension of permanence. Please play me a Betamax tape. Please let me know what’s on that 8-track where the label fell off.

Aside from the flammability, water damage and occasional forced censorship that endangers all works (back up that climate data, government researchers), words and more visual arts had a built-in shelf life. A book is a book is a book. It might get misshelved, burnt or tossed in a closet, but there’s a feasibility to someone discovering it, dusting it off and revealing the words you felt good enough about to consign to paper.

Even if no magnets or server fires destroy the file, after a few years, this sentence will disappear forever.

I might decide to keep the paying 1&1 for my server space years after the project hits 1,001 stories and I get to stop working. But I’ll die someday and my kids’ kids’ kids will not feel like paying in perpetuity to keep great-great’s ramblings about commutes and hipsters alive. Hell, sometimes I don’t want to either.

Even if there are archives and the post-Singularity human/machine nonduality still reads html and the cobbled bits of CSS I toyed around with in the WordPress stylesheet for the Oulipo theme, how will anyone find this blog? There’s no chance for stumbling in the internet world, no equivalent of poking around dusty bookshelves at a yard sale, store or library and falling in love with what you find.

The machines deliver exactly what you’re looking for, maybe a suggestion or two they want to sell you on the side. Something specific will never be searched for. Something free will never be suggested by the customer preference algorithm.

I meant these to be inspiring to the writer in the wintery craft beer bar, but I think I made him sad.

I meant them to be inspiring because there is still good in the printed word. There is still good in the tactile. There’s good in ink and paper and that quality of being that creates something new rather than repackage, retweet, reblog and give a hot take on someone else’s idea. Writers and visual need to address the impermanence actors, musicians, dancers and gourmet chefs had to address long ago — remember thou art mortal.

We can still create knowing what we create is impermanent, I meant to tell him over a craft beer that would disappear forever once it touched my lips. But I didn’t, and his story never ran.

Preserving a lifestyle people tried to destroy

Preserving old news in plastic

Then a vein bulged in his forehead. His mouth pulled back in a grimace and hiss, he took two steps back and made a noise that was a combination of “Whoo!” and a deflating inner tube.

My cousin had tried Malört.

Malört is an odd-tasting wormwood-based shot that, while a product of Florida, has developed a strong Chicago following. It’s become a rite of package, the “shock shot” that, due to its strong flavor of rubber bands, grapefruit and human sorrow, has become a hipster shibboleth of Chicagoana.

So when my cousin Rob, also a product of Florida, came to visit, I had to make him try it.

“Nothing wrong with that,” said the bald, bearded bartender with the bar code tattoo covering the back of his head. “Except for the Malört.”

The main reasons to make people try Malört is two-fold. First, it’s pay-it-forward revenge on the person who subjected you to it back when. Second, it’s just hilarious. People always have really creative descriptions of the taste (“My taste buds are permanently altered! I wonder if I’ll still like chocolate,” was my favorite of Rob’s responses) and then there’s the bug-eyed wincey “Malört face” the shots constituents know.

An ex-bartender friend of mine claimed to have saved hundreds of patrons from Malört face over the years. He told me via email he always required informed consent from all those ordering it. No friends’ pranks or “Gotcha, dude!” on his watch. Consent is king when you’re good, giving and game with novelty booze.

It was a wonderful visit, and a great time spent with family. The next morning as Rob waited for the Uber to take him to the airport to head back to the land of oranges, Cuban street food and shots that taste like things people want to taste, we talked about the visit, we hugged, we pledged to see each other more often and said in a stilted but meaningful “guy” way how much we mean to each other.

“Malört’s terrible, though,” were among his last words as he walked out the door.

Read about more terrible drinks

Read about the greatest Malört shot I ever had

I was volunteering on a for-profit dig a few miles to the south, in the middle of a rancher’s land in Wyoming. But I hopped on the ATV, rode past prairie dogs and mud slicks and ended up in the dead-on sun of a Wyoming summer chatting with a lovely young woman who was gently dusting, chipping and dental-tooling away at one of North America’s richest deposits of duckbilled Edmontosaurus fossils.

“I can’t believe I’m touching something that has been here since the Flood,” the lovely-eyed woman said, ever intent on her work.

My dig was no purer. I was there on a lark, helping out a company that dug out and polished up triceratopses, pterodactyls and ammonites to sell to Leonardo DiCaprio, Nicolas Cage and other dino-mad millionaires. She was there for God. I was there for a week of free camping and a story to tell.

I kept my mouth shut.

I stayed and talked and mingled — it was an open house for the creationist dig, so they wanted us there to hear about how some fools thought the Edmontosaurus deposit was because bodies washed away in an ancient river got caught over centuries in the crook of some long-dead oxbow. Clearly, they were all washed to one spot at one moment when Noah braved the stormy waters above.

Some people laughed along at the foolishness about ancient rivers and gradual accumulation. I kept my mouth shut.

Back home a few weeks later, I made some calls based on names and gossip I heard at God’s dig. I ended up getting connected to a paleontology professor at a university in New Orleans. I could hear him tense when I said the name of the site.

A bit of prodding and poking. I can’t remember my exact charms used — eight years dulls the memory — but he opened up and told me the tale.

He had worked with the rancher whose land now hosted God digs. He had located the site in the early 1990s, one of the richest lodes of Edmontosaurus bones in the continent. And they worked hand in hand, side by side getting permits and agreements and transferring land in the pursuit of science until the morning they went to the local land office to transfer a deed and the rancher took the scientist aside and said the deal was off unless a portion of the dig’s research was dedicated solely to creationist pursuits.

The paleontologist laughed at first, then stopped. He tried to talk sense, reason, honesty or just the basic decency that they had worked together for years to procure the land for students and pen-in-hand at the land office was a lousy time to pull this switch.

The rancher was adamant. You can be proud of your lies when they’re for God. You can be proud when you’re just deceiving a scientist.

The paleontologist walked. Better to lose a site than lose all credibility. He was sad when he talked to me on the phone eight years ago, though. He was sad he didn’t get that golden chance to know the world better.

He took the high road. He kept his mouth shut. The creationist dig at Hanson Ranch still runs to this day, taking a lode of fossils that could educate us on truth and forcing, cobbling them into fake correlation of ancient lies.

I tell you this now because we can’t keep out mouths shut. Not if you care about the world. Not if you care about science.

I’ve mentioned this before, but since it’s three days to the deadline we set and we received exactly one didn’t quite-work submission, it might be time to mention it again: I’m co-organizing a fundraiser in support of science.

Science is under attack by an administration that thinks climate change is a Chinese hoax, that life-saving vaccines cause autism, that facts and data are things to be stripped from government websites and silenced from federal agencies if they’re inconvenient. They put oil shills at the head of the EPA and State Department, a dataless dilettante in charge of our schools.

They’re taking our facts. They’re taking our evidence and reason. And we can’t keep our mouths shut.

The fundraiser will have several local scientists — once  you share this with your scientist friends and they say “What a great idea!” — telling personal stories about the need to support a particular group. The crowd at a local bar then donates to the teller with the most moving tale.

Talk about water conservation to say why to support the Alliance for the Great Lakes. Share your research and tell the audience why the Natural Resources Defense Council needs the audience’s time and energy. Talk about Doctors Without Borders, Planned Parenthood, 314 Action — any group using science to improve the world.

A similar fundraiser I helped run earlier this year raised nearly $1,200 for local groups. It’s a drop in the bucket, but a single drop is how a flood starts.

A real flood, I mean.

Send your 900-1,200 word story (no longer than 10 minutes) and the charity you want to collect donations for to 1001chicago@gmail.com (questions go there too) no later than midnight April 15, 2017.

The reading will be the first week of May. Location will be posted once finalized.

Read here for more information.

– John F. Kennedy, Remarks at the Convocation of the United Negro College Fund, April 12, 1959

…

As a proud member of the FAKE NEWS, dishonest media and, most recently, enemy of the American People!, there is nothing I love more than hunting U.S. presidents.

Yep, we bag ‘em and tag ‘em, toy with them like cats playing with mice, if the mice were the most powerful emperors in the history of the planet and the cats were uninsured type-nerds with opinions on commas. You ever see that movie where Gary Busey and the guy from “Roc Live” hunt Ice-T for sport? It’s like that, but with Diane Sawyer bounding through the woods to throat-punch a terrified Rutherford B. Hayes.

This Presidents Day, our hunt goes temporal as I take this opportunity to FAKE NEWS and fact check the hell out of famous quotes by American presidents:

“I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and AAAAAH! TOO MANY SPIDERS!”

– Ronald Reagan, multiple occasions

What’s better about this one is that “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” while pithily outlining Reagan’s concerns about the role of government, just isn’t the most terrifying thing possible. Even if you’re fine with one spider, or seven, the very nature of the phrase “too many spiders” implies your comfort level with spiders has been breached.

How many is too many spiders? How many is enough? What is the proper number of spiders? Will the government want to help? You’ve got to ask all these important questions in geopolitics.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that ‘all white male Christian landowners are created equal.’”

– Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, Nov. 19, 1863

“All men are created equal” is a nice notion, but the Founding Fathers weren’t dedicated to it any more than they were dedicated to not wearing knee socks and puffy wigs.

“I am not a gerbil.”

– Richard Nixon, Press Conference, Nov. 17, 1973

No matter your thoughts on Nixon or his confirmed-but-unprosecuted role in the Washington Post-exposed Watergate scandal, or what exactly constitutes a “crook,” you cannot deny that our nation’s 37th president was not a small desert rodent with a cute widdle twitchy nose. He did not run on the inside of a giant wheel and only gnawed toilet paper rolls intermittently. Gerbils do not habitually worry the intelligence community by having a national scandal concurrent with depression, a drinking problem and access to the nuclear football.

“With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems, and also we’re going to lock up a ton of Asians.”

– Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, March 3, 1933

While it would be easier to correct FDR’s most-famous quote — “The only thing we have to fear is too many spiders” — it is more imperative to remind ourselves that the man who saved the nation from the Axis only saved a portion of it.

I remind you this with the giddy, smug glee that makes “the media” so unlikable. We’re a tribe dedicated to exposing comforting lies, getting the information out there even when it’s not what would be the most profitable or political. We will continue to fact check, to call any Oval Office denizen on his or her lies and misstatements.

Some will do it hatefully, some will do it with love. Not all networks, papers, sites, stations and journalists are created equal.

But as our current president heaps plaudits on those news sources that agree with him by virtue of their agreement and uses his office to discredit anyone calling his lies lies, there’s one last presidential quote I want to edit:

“No government ought to be without censors: and where the press is free, no one ever will. If virtuous, [the government] need not fear the fair operation of attack and defence. Nature has given to man no other means of sifting out the truth either in religion, law, or politics. I think it is as honorable to the government neither to know, nor notice, its sycophants or censors, as it would be undignified and criminal to pamper the former and persecute the latter.”

– Thomas Jefferson, Letter to George Washington, Sept. 9, 1792

Actually, I didn’t tinker with that last one at all. It’s perfect the way it is.

Read about Jefferson’s complicated relationship with the press

Follow me on Facebook — haven’t asked for that in a while

Here’s a story about a dog

It was one of those guy-joke e-mails. A bit sarcastic, but with a bit more truth in the words than anyone wants to confront. He’s sort of like that.

He’s one of those buddies who feels fresh and new and then you’re reminiscing about that time that thing happened and oh man that was hi-LAR-ious and you realize you’re talking about George W. Bush’s first term.

And he’s one hell of a crime reporter.

He’s the type of guy the supply-siders say they want. He struck out on his own, hustled, created a niche for himself and is in every way the example of what an entrepreneur should be.

But economic freedom and the ability to get his bum ankle checked out are likely going to be incompatible notions. Despite airy promises and pledges of a bigly yuge much much super-good repeal-and-replace, an American small businessman and entrepreneur is going to slog it at a 9-5 because the numbers don’t stack without Obamacare.

I’ve known the professor for longer than I’ve known the reporter. I’ve known her since freshman year of college. She’s happy and razor-sharp funny and always seems like she’s four coffees ahead of you. More energy in an hour than I have in a week.

Her PhD dissertation was on the role of black identity in modern German culture. When she’s in town and we grab those too-rare coffees, she confesses people treat her nicer in a land scarred by Hitler than in our home country. The usual American experience. Security guards lingering when she’s at the jewelers. Checkout lane smiles for previous grocery shoppers turning flat when they see her skin.

She’s doing the professor dance right now, the intra-national hikes between whatever universities will keep her on for a year or two ever-dangling that phantasmal carrot of “tenure track” for a semester before yanking it away.

She was teaching at University of Illinois-Chicago and at Northwestern and giving surveys by phone at night when she slipped on the ice. Her leg was shattered in five places. She’ll have a plate and six metal screws embedded in her body for the rest of her life.

Obamacare. She paid $5,000. She doesn’t know how much it would have been otherwise, just that the anesthesiologist alone would have been $90,000. February marked two years since the slip. We’re meeting for another coffee when she’s back in town this month. She’s walking there.

In the early 2010s, I went to the dentist for the first time in four years. They had to do so much work, they broke it into three visits. I had been working that whole time and had been self-insured that whole time. All I could afford before Obamacare was major medical.

We hear that there will be a replacement and it will be better somehow, believe me it will be the best bigly yuge. But we also hear it will be returning control to the economic forces that made freedom unaffordable, charged $90K for gas, kept me from getting fillings for the amount of time between Olympics.

I came not to praise Obamacare, but to bury it. And to hope that whatever the bigly yuge replacement will be, that its impact is even a fraction of what we’re losing.

I mean, it’s not a stage so much as a microphone at the back of an artsy-funky dive bar in Bucktown.

And the performers are readying.

I mean, they’re not professional performers with headshots and acting credits and feelings on “the theatre, darling” so much as men and women from the community who have stories to share.

And we’re going to take on the president-elect of the United States of America in the last few hours we get to say “-elect.”

Yes, this is post promoting an upcoming fundraiser I’m helping organize. Check out the event’s Facebook page for more info or just show up at Gallery Cabaret on Jan. 18 for “40 Hours to Trump.”

According to the comments on the DNAinfo story about the fundraiser, the event is “leftist fakery,” “fear mongering,” “mass hysteria” and proof that “Liberals are so easy to fleece out of their money.”

I don’t think that, of course. I think we’re going to tell people why we care about the groups we do, why we’re scared for these groups based on the political positions taken by President-elect Donald Trump and his incoming administration, then ask the crowd if they want to throw in a few bucks to help get these groups through the next four years.

The admission’s free, the beer ain’t, but the stories will make you crack your wallet open to help some good groups.

Our speakers will be raising money for:

• Planned Parenthood
• The Center on Halsted
• Catholic Charities’ services for undocumented immigrants
• A low-income school district’s unofficial aid programs for undocumented students
• Protest observer programs
• And Southside Together Organizing for Power’s mental health programs

It should be fun, but that’s not why Rachel Hyman and I are doing this.

We’re doing this because we wanted to do something. Not say something or feel something, type something or scream to the world “What the hell are you doing?” like the American electoral system is a toddler who decided doggie needed a haircut.

We want to help out groups that provide women’s health services, a queer community, a more robust, freer America or even just a fourth-grader in need getting a good breakfast so she can concentrate better in class.

So join us if you want to do that, call it “leftist fakery” if you prefer. But the American voters had their say and they picked… well they actually picked Hillary Clinton by more than 2.8 million votes but some slave-owners in wigs decided back in the era they thought viruses were caused by witches that our presidential races should be no more than advisory referenda in case the poor folks made the wrong choice.

So no matter who we the people picked, we’ve got our new president sneaking up next Friday.

Let’s get together on Wednesday and help a few folks and a few good groups survive that.

Read more about the event here

But before then, here’s how your words can help a few good groups survive the next four years.

What it is

Welcome to the Neighborhood is hosting a reading with a twist: We want your stories about nonprofits, charities, social organizations and other good groups working in areas the Trump/Pence campaign has targeted. We’re going to get them some money 40 hours before the Trump/Pence campaign becomes the Trump/Pence administration.

The fundraiser itself will be a spoken word/live lit things. While we love the live lit community, we’re also reaching out to people who have never told a story before a crowd once. Submit your 10-minute true stories about the groups you want to support.

You’re picking your favorite nonprofits/charities/social organizations and pitching them to the audience. Tell the crowd why they should become Planned Parenthood escorts, why they should donate to the ACLU, The Center on Halsted or the Union of Concerned Scientists — any group you want to promote, you can.

We want groups who work with immigrants, the queer community, women’s health, free speech, civil rights, science — any nonprofit, charity or social group working in areas the Trump/Pence campaign has targeted.

Given the Trump/Pence rhetoric, that gives you a wide range to work with.

Personal stories work better. It’s one thing to say The Center on Halsted is great, it’s quite a different thing to share how the group saved your life. And you are more than welcome to pitch groups you work for.

How it works

When people come in for a night of fun (7 p.m. Jan. 18, 2017, at Gallery Cabaret, 2020 N. Oakley Ave.) they’ll have a chance to “buy” poker chips. As many as they want to pay for. Then, throughout the night, they can toss those chips in different jars we’ll have for different groups.

A story about refugee rights move you? Toss a chip in the jar for that charity. Really inspired by a gay rights organization? Throw your chips there.

The chip count will determine how we divvy the night’s take.

And that’s it.

If you’re nervous about getting up in front of a crowd, we’ll meet with you, workshop the performance and get you to the point where you can get up there and tell a crowd why they should give their time, money and love to a particular organization. It’s not about you. It’s about putting money and volunteers toward good organizations in what could be their darkest time.

If that’s not worth a couple butterflies in the stomach, what is?

Email your submissions by Dec. 23 to 1001chicago@gmail.com and show up 7 p.m. Jan. 18, 2017, at Gallery Cabaret, 2020 N. Oakley Ave.

For more information, either read this or go to the Facebook event we set up for submissions.

I tell stories of a city, or at least the North Side, I grumble to myself when not feeling up to task. I tell stories of people and places and that time an alderman bit off another alderman’s ear.

I’m working on a project that, if all goes to plan, could be the first to quote both U.S. Appeals Court Judge Abner Mivka and Nadwuar the Human Serviette.

But is it wrong that the only story I want to tell today is the snow?

It’s lazy, cheap. I tweeted just yesterday to mock the TV news crews doing live remotes and breaking coverage of little flakes falling from the sky.

“Thank god for local TV news,” I wrote. “How else would I know it’s snowing? A window? Like a savage???”

But the night has waned, the pot and mugs now soak to get rid of the chocolate grit of the abuelita that was waiting for me after clearing the porch. It’s time for me to write and the only story I can think of is snow.

It’s beautiful outside. (Hacky.)

I feel safe and cozy in. (Trite! Lame!)

The flakes stream by my window casting a glitter into the night and blanketing the world in a shimmering canvas to write the day on. (Yes yes, Hobbes ol’ buddy. “Let’s go exploring.”)

Out the window, a thin young woman in a floppy hat chatters on a phone. Across the street, a man in track pants sprints as well as he can, either jogging or racing to catch a closing door. Their only story is snow as well.

Sleep comes piled under blankets, turning late-night cocoa into early-morning coffee. The darkness outside can now be pinned on late dawn, not early dusk.

I see the flakes starting again, or maybe they’re from last night, just blowing off my neighbor’s roof.

I made the right decision. This was the only story I wanted to tell.

Read about a blizzard, train conductor and bunny

Read about the alderman thing too