And I couldn’t stop laughing.

Down some water. Laugh. Dip among traffic. Laugh. Cram an energy bar and stop by the tampon boxes, fast food wrappers and museum-pimping statuary that pool along the spot the Roosevelt Road bridge overlooks both river and the vacant Rezkoville and I laugh laugh laugh.

July. Bike ride. Entire length of the city just for funsies and to end the site on a high note. I’ve been posting about it for a week and a half in stories I wrote between August and early October. You’re all caught up.

This is story #1,000. This site will end on Friday. I will miss it greatly. But I’m not ending, nor is Chicago.

I found crime here. I found death and sex and sin and kiddos playing piggy on summer days in the park. I wept and shook here and I laughed and shook here. I got drunk and kissed girls and took boat rides and played croquet. I wore spiked leather bracelets in one life and neckties in another. This town rattled and made me.

North through the skyscrapers, north through the trendy bars, north through gay neighborhoods and wealthy ones and ones where the poverty bleeds and bubbles from the soil itself. North.

The stories, by god the stories. The people I met! The people I didn’t meet! I’ve talked to dancers and magicians, politicians and thugs and drunks. I hit this city with all I had and at the end I told so, so few of its tales. This city threw itself at me and I gave it a pittance, my thousand stories trickle and tinkle against the ocean this Chicago throws back each moment.

In June 1921, Chicago Daily News reporter Ben Hecht debuted “1001 Afternoons in Chicago,” a daily column slicing life in the first quarter of the 20th century. In the preface to the book version, editor Henry Justin Smith recalled the “haggard but very happy” Hecht turning in the first few columns.

“It was clear that he had sat up nights with those stories. He thumbed them over as though he hated to let them go. They were the first fruits of his Big Idea — the idea that just under the edge of the news as commonly understood, the news often flatly and unimaginatively told, lay life; that in this urban life there dwelt the stuff of literature, not hidden in remote places, either, but walking the downtown streets, peering from the windows of sky scrapers, sunning itself in parks and boulevards. He was going to be its interpreter. His was to be the lens throwing city life into new colors, his the microscope revealing its contortions in life and death. It was no newspaper dream at all, in fact. It was an artist’s dream. And it had begun to come true. Here were the stories. … Hoped I’d like ‘em.”

By 1925, Hecht was sick of it. He had written a deliberately smutty novel called “Fantazius Mallare” as a test case on American obscenity law, and American obscenity law won.

He was fired from the Daily News in 1923 but had with a group of friends from the Dil Pickle Club arthouse scene started the Chicago Literary Times, an inspiring, brilliant drain on time and funding. Writer pals were calling about easy money and literary fortune in New York, and Hecht was ready to submit.

These are the final lines of the last 1001 Afternoons in Chicago story, “My Last Park Bench,” in which an older, weary Hecht stumbles across the younger version of himself.

“I catch a glimpse of him following me with his eyes, excited, damn him, over the mystery and romance which lurk in every corner of the city, even on a cinder-covered bench in Grant Park. Let him sit till doom’s day on this bench; he will never see me again. I have more important things to do than to collect cinders under my collar.”

I didn’t know when I started that Hecht was a liar and fabricator, a newsman conman of the era for whom Truth and Fact formed a Venn diagram, and none of it mattered so long as the words sang. He ended up in Hollywood, his gift for witty lies finding a more appropriate setting than a newspaper page.

I just knew I wanted to try what he claimed he was doing.

Since April 2012, I never missed a scheduled post day and, aside from some clearly satirical stories about mascots, Santa Claus and the brainstorming session for “tronc,” I never made up a word. What you read from me over these last six years is Chicago in the 20-tens as seen through my lens and microscope.

Hope you liked ‘em.

I was laughing when I hit the graveyard.

I made it. I made it through my self-assigned task. I made it through Chicago and I made it through, Chicago. My throat was dry and my legs burned white like charcoal ready for meat. But I was laughing.

My side trips and roundabouts added almost 20 miles to the route. Had I stuck to the path, I could have gotten there at 30. Instead the app tolds me I took 49.86 miles to get from Burnham to Evanston, plowing through that town between.

I’m not done yet. Not with my 1,001 stories, not with my half-century ride. Just a touch more to go.

I turned the bike around and headed back into the city, aiming my aching bones, burning legs and slightly chafed uppity bits toward the Howard Red Line stop. Nothing left in me, I slouched toward Bethlehem to be born.

A CTA worker came out of her glass cage to greet me.

“No bikes on the train,” she said.

And I laughed.

…

Read a few of my favorites:

The Rabbi’s Machine is Missing — Whatever happened to Chicago’s last typewriter repairman?

The Human Addict — A begging addict talks about being treated like a person.

Old Joe of Canaryville — Joe sits in his shop waiting for customers, as he’s done for 68 years.

Nuns in a Cash Register Store — Another bit of Chicago is lost.

The Nut Hut — Over soup, a woman recalls her role as a professional tease in a prostitution scam.

Party at Uncle Fun — Customers, staff and Uncle Fun himself say goodbye to the well-loved Belmont gag shop.

The Murderess Down the Block — I find out a 1920s lady gunner lived a few houses over from me.

The Most Sarcastic Child in Chicago Watches a Clown Show — Clowns from Theater Oobleck and El Circo Nacional de Puerto Rico win over a very sarcastic child.

The Steelworker’s Mermaid — How four sculptors hid a seven-foot mermaid for 14 years.

Mama Olaf — An immigrant tale of love and tripe soup.

Miss Sweetfeet Breaks — A breakdancer talks about the need for more B-Girls.

Light and the Rocket — A child I knew just killed a man.

The 16th Artist — One man’s arts center aims to revive Englewood.

The Rabbi, Harry Potter and Too Many Corpses — A rabbi has to tell a little boy some bad news.

Whatever Happened to the High Priestess of the Flappers? — In 2016, I wrote about the head of a 1920s clique of teen glamour girls. In 2018, her granddaughter reached out.

I’m not here to talk about bullying in media, or about liberals who use people of color as proof of purchase for ideology.

I’m not here to join the chorus of thinkpieces saying the Chicago Reader’s cover using a lawn jockey to symbolize black voters is really about this and that is really about that. This is really about what Adeshina Emmanuel said it was about — racism both overt and covert, a decision-making process that put a bully in command and the media’s desire for black men’s voices so long as the black men say what they’re expected. I have no words to add to that.

My sole purpose in this non-thinkpiece thinkpiece is to remind Chicago writers how to use a metaphor.

Metaphors and satire are tricky beasts, but an easy fix for stuck writers. How better to get people to care about your issue than by drawing comparison to things people already care about? Half your work is done.

When the Reader’s recently and rightly ousted executive editor Mark Konkol wanted his package on J.B. Pritzker to have more emotional impact, he stole the emotional impact of a racist symbol. The Chicago Tribune’s Kristen McQueary did the same thing a few years ago, stealing the emotional impact of the thousands of deaths Hurricane Katrina wrought to sparkle up an otherwise lackluster observation that corruption is bad.

The math is that if A = B and B sort of equals C in a way that’s enough for a quick-hit op ed in the local news, A = C.

It can be handled beautifully. “Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real,” Nelson Algren wrote about the city of Chicago. “Therefore I repeat, let no man talk to me of these and the like expedients, ’till he hath at least some glympse of hope, that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice,” Jonathan Swift wrote in a surprisingly touching essay about eating babies.

But it can be screaming contests of who can elevate what to which, who can raise the stakes the highest the fastest with a ding ding ding You Won the Prize!!! bell for the person to scream “IT’S LIKE HITLER” first.

A metaphor should clarify. It should illustrate a nuance or thought that would be lost in a mere repetition of fact. It can be silly or cruel, ugly or ridiculous. But if it doesn’t add insight, it’s a needless word. As the good book says, omit it.

Be clear about what you’re saying in a metaphor, particularly one based on real events with real human suffering attached. There was no particular woman who had her face cracked, no actual babies Swift was ready to salt and fricassee. But people did die in Katrina and the Holocaust. Jockey statues depicting black men as subhuman servants still dot lawns today.

Writers of Chicago, if you do feel a need to poach others’ suffering to prop up a lackluster thinkpiece, at least get the messaging right. In the artist’s own words describing Konkol’s vision, “As a Democrat, Pritzker indeed needs the black vote, and he puts all his weight on it in a most disrespectful manner.” In the illustration, what Pritzker is putting his weight on is a cartoon lawn jockey. He’s not leaning particularly disrespectfully. He’s leaning on a thing that’s not worthy of respect.

If the intent was to reveal racism, it did. But when an editor brainstorming a symbol for black voters arrives at imagery of servitude, degradation and stereotype, the racism revealed wasn’t J.B. Pritzker’s.

McQueary’s tepid response to poaching the emotional weight of Katrina deaths carried similar problems.

“And I am horrified and sickened at how that column was read to mean I would be gunning for actual death and destruction,” she wrote.

No one thought you were calling for the skies to darken, McQueary. They were horrified and sickened that you would use human death to score points toward your pet issue.

A metaphor can intensify, but its sole purpose cannot be to intensify. That’s just swearing with imagery. Konkol’s editor’s note about the conversation on race he wanted the Pritzker package to spur said “Hell, it should hurt, like a punch in the gut.” That’s the very reason it should have been avoided.

If you punch someone, the human response isn’t to consider whether your argument is logically compelling. Convincing people your argument is logically compelling is the exact point of an article.

People who are punched double over, then they fight back.

Adeshina Emmanuel did fight back. He fought back with logic and reason, compelling arguments and, yes, metaphor.

“When I look at that cover it feels like I’m that red-lipped lawn jockey and Konkol is the powerful white man on my back,” he wrote, tossing off in 24 painful, beautiful words the nuance and power a editor lost his job for trying to mimic.

Konkol is gone, by the way, fired in the wake of his first and only issue. His legacy will be that cover. He’ll be back in Chicago media someday, I’m sure.

When he does pop up at some digital-only, subscription-based community aggregator model with a GoFundMe no one drops by, I just hope he’ll have learned the final, main and to an extent only lesson on metaphor:

You can’t punch hard enough to make a bad idea good.

It was large, made of a plastic that apes leather, and bright. Crayon-bright blue on the Green Line.

It couldn’t have been the gleaming white sneakers either, the ones bedazzled with the line of rhinestones that curled into two little hearts as it snaked across her metatarsus. She tapped one foot gently, almost nodding it as the train pulled out of the former manufacturing district that’s now the spot for the hottest of hot restaurants.

It couldn’t have been the blue jeans with the six metal buttons pulling each cuff into the perfect skinny cut either.

No, it must have been the piece of cloth on her head that makes her hated.

It was an al-amira, the internet tells me. That’s the type of Islamic head covering where there’s a close-fitting cap and a scarf over her hair, not the one that’s all scarf or any of the ones that cover her face.

She picked through a thin book, her eyes testifying how enwrapped she was with the contents.

I wanted to talk to her, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. I wanted to apologize, beg for forgiveness for things I hadn’t done because of what’s about to happen in Washington.

What would I say? “Hi, I also see you solely as a representative of your religion rather than as a unique human being exercising your own agency but it’s cool because I’m nice.”

She’s a person, not a shot at white liberal redemption. She’s a human reading a book of curled Arabic script with a little cloud cartoon on the cover, nodding her toe on the train the night before a man who pledged her harm takes the oath of office.

I have engaged with Trump supporters before, both online and in person. There seemed to be an ignorance or disbelief his stances are what they are. One guy online was convinced Trump only wants to deport undocumented immigrants who commit crimes, even though getting them all out is the second step on the 10-part plan listed on Trump’s campaign website.

A woman at a party seemed completely unaware Trump called for the war crime of retaliation on NBC news. She must have said “Better than Obama” like 10 times during that conversation.

She’s Mexican-American, which confused the hell out of me.

The general Trump party line I’ve come across has been they don’t think he means what he says, that the guy just gets carried away and really likes working a room.

In other words, their greatest hope is that the person they believe should hold the office of president of the United States of America either isn’t in control of his actions or lies to their face with regularity.

He said what he wants to do. He said it multiple times, in multiple venues and in multiple formats. He said time and time again that he would use his office to violate this woman’s rights because of her faith, said he would create a database registry, demand faith-based ID, ban the entry of Ishmael’s children in ways he’d never consider for Isaac’s.

“I would certainly implement that. Absolutely,” he told NBC about a Muslim registry and you can watch the video here if you deny it.

He would direct law enforcement agencies to spy on mosques and Muslim communities, praising an NYPD program shuttered after lawsuits, civil unrest and one FBI official saying it jeopardized national security.

“From what I heard, in the old days, meaning a while ago, we had great surveillance going on in and around mosques in New York City,” he told MSNBC and here’s that video if you think I’m a liar here. It’s at 6:25.

He told Yahoo News he would consider warrantless searches of members of this woman’s religion.

“We’re going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule,” he said and here’s that interview.

This man of power has pledged and pledged and pledged to use his office to categorize, surveil, list, search and break this woman with the blue purse, the one with button-cuff jeans, tapping a rhinestone-clad sneaker on the Green Line.

If you think otherwise or are mentally hedging your bets, you’re wrong. You could be a liar, or maybe you’re a dupe. I don’t care which. Stupid is just as dangerous as mean.

The point’s not if this program or that program will come to pass. The point is the voice that said all these things is a few hours away from saying “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

He will be in history books and on classroom walls as children recite the pledge. He will have access to our records, our military, our law enforcement, our rights as human beings and he has told us very clearly and repeatedly which humans he thinks get to have rights. His hate earned him the keys to the nation.

All the woman tapping her foot and reading Arabic on the train gets is a nighttime ride toward the Loop.