The coffee comes from my cup, the smoke comes from a man in jean jacket and spendy fashion version of combat boots one picnic table over  from mine. We’re all at picnic tables in the backyard-turned-patio of the house-turned-coffee-shop in the Puerto-Rican-turned-hip enclave of Humboldt Park.

I’m here now on the last afternoon.

It’s not the last afternoon of my life, of course, nor is it the last one of the afternoon-themed blog you’re reading right now. It’s the last afternoon when the calendar’s about to equinox or solstice or whatever it does and even the pedants fighting it since Labor Day have to admit summer’s over.

The sound right now is wind, traffic and the gentle tripping of keys. I think I hear a train.

Summer is over.

It looks like summer, with bright skies, white-on-blue clouds as puffed and candyflossed as a child’s drawing of sky. It looks like summer on T-shirted forearms and tanned faces and bikes woofing in and out of traffic like a shuttle on loom.

But the feel is off. The air is warm, but with that cut in it that feels like it will get colder, like this moment is the last one. Summer is on its way out this September 21, this last afternoon before equinoxing or solsticery or whatever it is that makes autumn arrive.

“Sumer is icumen in,” a 13th-century springtime hymn declares. “Lhude sing cuccu!”

“Summer has arrived. Sing loudly, cuckoo!”

But sumer is outcumen out today. We don’t sing hymns to seasons’ change, and I wouldn’t know a cuckoo if I saw one.

Across from my picnic table, one of the ones painted in faux graffiti to create the comfort and homeyness of knowing you’re cool, a friend talks to Sox Park, asking what time he should arrive Sunday for his guest to get special handicapped arrangements. A woman in a hooded sweatshirt flicks and tinkers at her phone. A man who looks as old, weary and formerly on-trend as I do has headphones on ears and laptop on a special easel designed for Apple products.

This is our hymn to summer’s passing. This is our cuckoo’s song. We sit outside at picnic tables to squeeze every outdoor moment before the weather chases us in. We drink coffee and lounge in the passing sun.

And we enjoy our last afternoon.

More about autumn in Chicago

A visit to Chicago’s southern tip

The Harold Washington robot

Letters, birthday cards, photos of people I had forgotten about and of people I won’t ever be able to. Trinkets and trophies hard-won but now more a matter of storage space than personal pride.

I’ve googled some people from that shared past, disparate present. Of course their photos are lovely and their web presence curated. Of course no one posts the moments of whimsy and maudlin and floating, aimless sad. No one of this crowd but me was dumb enough to put anything but happy things online.

So I went to my happy place — the Chicago public transit system.

I like the train because it’s the best place to be alone in the city. Our shared social contract to avert eyes and pretend the others don’t exist gives makes the crowd our most-private spot. Wordlessly, we enter a covenant to be wordless. Together, we playact loneliness.

The privacy and shared delusion we aren’t heaped in a 2.7-million-strong anthill has increased with technology. Wires in the ears and eyes on the screen have outpaced books and the view from the trains that sail above trees as distraction. I partake, of course, texting and communicating with the people I love, but when I truly want to feel alone, I watch the crowd.

There’s always one or two of me on the train, people who out of curiosity or motion sickness can’t bear to bury themselves in books, magazines, folded but increasingly small newspapers or phones. There’s no rhyme or reason, no type of people watcher.

Sometimes I see a party girl cliché scan the room with a poet’s eye, or a heaping hulk of muscles, gang tats and fear sneak out a peaceful eye-smile that would fit a bodhisattva. Disturbed old men and little children can be fascinated by a leaf outside the window or the shirt of a person in the corner, while people whose garb was assembled to scream “ARTIST” bury themselves in whatever the newest version is of Angry Birds, Candy Crush or 2048.

I cast no aspersion on the people who use technology to reach their loves, or escape the minotaur of boredom stalking the transit map. My stranger-watching is no deeper, no less deep. Their pixels are as much a part of this world as they are, and it makes no matter who chooses to gaze on what, whom or which and when I think that, I feel better about the old photos from the dusty box.

The lines I read and reread in college — for enlightenment and to woo nerdy women, two concepts nondual at the time — floated into my mind.

“All this is full, all that is full. From fullness, fullness comes. When fullness is taken from fullness, fullness still remains.”

It doesn’t matter that my life pointed one way and a long-gone stranger’s has pointed another any more than it matters that this woman’s phone screen is turned to this and this woman’s to that. All this is full. All this is life, and the train rocks me to a nod-off sleep as I head toward the work I chose.

Quinn

It was over the summer, when the news was full of Springfield’s budget stalemate and Chance the Rapper had made a publicized talk with Gov. Bruce Rauner to talk school funding. State-level politics was as hot as it gets, so Quinn Tsan was waiting to hear the reaction to a series of bills, mainly House Bill 4004, which would close tax loopholes that had protected corporations since the 1930s.

“I was sort of waiting for kind of a public hurrah, kind of a rallying around these important bills,” Tsan said.

And she waited.

After the news landed with a wet thwap on the pavement, Tsan, a Chicago-based musician and dancer, took to the internet. She and some filmmaker friends made a video in 24 hours explaining why people should care about HB4004. The reaction to that video, and to a video they made about a different bill a few weeks later — it received 25,000 views in a day — gave Tsan an idea.

“From those videos, I really saw that there was attention and people were digesting this information when it was presented in this way,” she said.

Maybe she didn’t have to wait for someone else to care.

Kacie

Kacie Smith had her own problems. She was working two jobs and held meets of people who would gather once a week (technically twice a week — she had an a.m. and a p.m. group) to talk about how to get involved in politics. Not “When’s the next rally?” but the dirty nit and grit of calling legislators, learning about upcoming bills, seizing volunteer opportunities.

“It was just a complete nightmare trying to figure out what was happening at the state level, what any of these bills meant, or which ones had traction, which ones had steam,” Smith said.

Although ILGA.gov has a robust list of pending legislation, to know what it means, you have to talk the talk. A bill bound for passage is indistinguishable at first glance from one that’s going to die in Rules. A measure that will revolutionize the tax code is presented in the same staid blue-and-black text as one honoring a local Eagle Scout. An actual future law looks enticingly like a shell bill that’s going to be scooped out like a Deviled Egg to have some new, soppy mishmash slapped inside.

“I think [the state website's] fine if you’re looking for something really specific, or you know what you’re doing, or you’re a lawyer, or you’re working on a particular problem. I think that seems to be what that website’s geared toward — people who are in the industry so to speak,” Smith said. “But for people like us who are just citizens, who are just constituents, it’s really difficult outside of maybe the partisan version of whatever your specific legislator wants to tell you.”

The Hole

The news, Kacie found when trying to compile meeting notes for her group, was catch as catch can. An important piece of legislation might be ignored in favor of some Rauner vs. Madigan yelling, news coverage as incisive and relevant as a Macho Man Randy Savage wrestling promo.

National issues drown out local issues, Chicago coverage drowns out the rest of the state. Sometimes a story would appear out of nowhere and tell a tale, but with no way to track it after. No bill name or number for an interested civilian to follow up on after the reporter moved on to the next story.

Legislators were more helpful, but as trustworthy and unbiased as, again, a Macho Man Randy Savage wrestling promo. They are true believers in their cause, which make them the last people one should look to for objectivity.

So that leaves us with a governmental body that affects our lives on a daily basis, but one lost between what we can see down the street and the 24-hour air raid siren of news blasted from D.C.

“It’s a really big hole and I think that it’s the most crucial hole, that if folks actually knew what was going on in this state we could see some big turnaround,” Tsan said.

“Some Shady-Ass Shit”

There are others names that deserve equal dropping here — Stephanie Krim, Christopher Church, Devin Soule, to drop a few — but Quinn Tsan and Kacie Smith were the ones who sat around a heavy wooden table with me on Saturday morning in a snow-frosted city to sip tea and talk about politics, Illinois and State Matters, the 501(c)3 they formed to help educate you, me and everyone else about what’s going on in Springfield.

They’re going to make a series of videos, split in two categories. One slate of films will cover individual, upcoming bills that will affect how Illinoisans live. The suggested bills have been and will continue to be collected both from the public and from legislators on both sides of the aisle, one of the ways the group tries to keep their personal politics out of their political project.

“We’re trying to put together metrics that allow us to take some of our personal preferences out of it,” Smith said. “So looking specifically at how much money a bill costs or saves the state, how many people would be affected by a bill, and requiring a range of not only topics but also a range of geographical relevance in the state. So not only doing things that relate to Chicago.”

Although Tsan and Smith identify their politics as progressive or liberal, State Matters is staunchly objective, focusing on education rather than advocacy.

“State Matters in particular is not about convincing people that they should be fighting for one bill or fighting for another,” Smith said. “I just want to convince people to actually be able to be engaged in state government.”

Of course, Springfield’s inhabitants help the leftists stay neutral.

“Coming to Illinois and seeing the Democratic Party in Illinois, it’s not necessarily something that I’m getting out of bed rooting for every day. So I act feel much better in Illinois being able to say we’re not going to be partisan because Democrats do some shady-ass shit,” Smith said, laughing.

They hope to get 10 bill videos out of the next legislative session. The session starts in January and they hope to get the first videos online by March.

Media Snobs

The second category of video will be basic civic education — “straight-up Schoolhouse Rocks, but not,” as Smith put it.

They’ll be a series of primers on terms and topics that come up in legislation, but ones people might be too sheepish to admit they don’t know, or ones people think they understand but really don’t. Can people have a truly informed opinion on the pension crisis if they’re shaky on what a pension is?

“In terms of the educational videos, there’s a lot more room for a lot of humor and a lot more room for style,” Smith said. “Whereas the legislative bill videos are going to be a little bit dryer and a little more straightforward.”

The video team is looking to a number of sources for inspiration. Vox Media for one example, the Khan Academy’s educational programming for another. “NPR meets Broad City” is a term the video team has bandied about. Eventually, the goal is to be able to farm out different videos to production teams across the state to put the best person with the best topic. Animation to explain one issue, interviews for another. The only constant is that the videos have to look good.

The videos have to look great.

“We as a society are media snobs now,” Smith said. “Even if it’s good information, if it doesn’t look slick and professional, I think we kind of tune it out.”

The endgame is prosaic, not rallying in the streets or tipping the halls of government, but making political education and involvement as commonplace and rote as a billionaire-owned newspaper used to make it.

“They have coffee, they find out what’s happening in Springfield, they go to their job, they come back, they write an email, they tuck their kids in, go to bed, do it again the next day,” Smith said. “And then it’s just a part of our life, engaging with our government is easy enough that it can just be a normal, casual part of our life.”

Songs to Civics

You’re reading a blog post about an unfunded 501(c)3 with some fantastic damn ideas. Of course this is going to come to a call for money.

State Matters is pursuing a number of more traditional fundraising sources — grants, donations, etc. — but right now it’s all volunteer. They meet for free, brainstorm for free, research for free, talk to legislators for free, make video for free and Quinn Tsan has been driving back and forth to Springfield, Illinois, for months for free.

They have a Kickstarter. Donate to it. You’ll feel better.

The funding source for Tsan’s trips has been her music career. Not just gigs, but the unglamorous grunt work that separates a pro from a dreamer. Scores for movies, backup vocals for others’ dreams. And of course the bartending gig. She’s making a go of it in music “a couple hundred bucks here, a couple hundred bucks there.” And then she converts every note and chord into gas tank fill-ups down to the state capitol.

If the Kickstarter makes its goal, they’ll use the money to:

1. Get a research director. First volunteer, eventually paid.

2. Subsidize Tsan’s trips down to Springfield for legislative sessions and outreach to legislators. She’s essentially paying out-of-pocket to be an embedded Statehouse reporter. As romantic as converting songs to civics might be, it’s not sustainable.

3. Video production. Make those videos outlining nerdy topics works of art that engage the viewer with the political process in the best way they know how.

Billionaires’ newspapers won’t teach civics, officials are all too keen to teach their party’s version. Instead we have volunteers. We have videographers and bartenders, lawyers, organizers, artists, animators, a research director post they’re looking to fill and a musician-dancer who needs a break on trips to Springfield. Help them out, huh?

Or you can wait for someone else to care.

Read about a group dreaming of science, not civics

And one turning video into social representation

Why I don’t trust true believers

And an explainer video I did a long time that I should mention is absolutely not what they’ll be doing because their videos will be incisive and professional and mine was cobbled-together nonsense but somewhat funny and I got in a few Garrison Keillor digs before it was relevant

He came in the back, as requested, and glanced at the three men laughing loudly about 19th century dry goods magnate Aaron Montgomery Ward and hung out in his room for a bit.

He was cool.

Last night, I participated in the inaugural episode of an upcoming podcast. I don’t know how much info Javi wants shared — the name, the target launch date, etc. — but I’ll post a link to the podcast here and on the 1,001 Chicago Afternoons Facebook page when it’s up.

It’s a podcast from tour guides, which is going to be more fun than you realize. It’s people paid to be charismatic and engaging about stuff they couldn’t give two whits about (the height of Sears Tower, Mayor William Butler Ogden, all the mob movie crap the tourists gobble up) grabbing a beer and cutting loose about the things they do care about.

When not trying to explain our banking system to old Japanese ladies or trying to convince the French that American coffee is not an affront to God, which it absolutely is, tour guides are as a rule:

• Personable
• Funny
• Foul-mouthed
• Oddly passionate about municipal history
• Drinkers

An open secret about tourism is that a surprisingly huge percentage of what you hear is bull, either lies the guide heard and believed, last-minute improvisations when you blank on what year a building was built or gigantic whopping tales couched under “some say” or “the story goes.”

People ooh and ahh and snap pictures and hopefully don’t write research papers based on what they hear.

The podcast Javi — that’s Javier Dominguez of Shoreline Sightseeing, ask for him by name — leans into that. Each episode will have Javi and two other local guides trying to lie to each other’s faces. For the inaugural episode/test run Javi, I and Ben — that’s Ben Archer of Shoreline, the crime tours and every other guide company you can think of, ask for him by name too — took turns telling our favorite true historical stories, filling them with balderdash and blatherskite. Then the other guides try to separate the entertaining truth from the entertaining fiction.

The theme was Thanksgiving, so when the episode debuts, prepare for some truth and lies around Black Friday, the history of prayer and the expulsion of the Potawatomi from Chicago.

And then we all tell tour guide horror stories.

Taping the episode was a blast, three men crowded around a laptop on a dining room table in a Humboldt Park two-flat. The polite roommate eventually tired of his room, so when you listen always envision an increasingly weary man with earbuds eating pasta on the couch in the background.

That’s how podcasts are, and blogs and YouTube channels and all other forms of media created by amateurs with laptops and dreams. It’s not a newspaper typed up at a cluttered desk, or a play set before a crowd, or a guitar solo twiddled in the corner of a sweaty bar on dollar draft night. Our art comes from living rooms and bedrooms with roommates eating pasta and, when alone, varying levels of pantslessness. We type, talk and sing into our screens, imagining an invisible audience clapping at our every word.

We’re at a point where art is designed by the amateurs for increasingly targeted audiences. Maybe no one else will enjoy our hilarious tales of Aaron Montgomery Ward, but for others, that’s exactly what they need.

So let’s leave this story here, with three grown men goofing around, enjoying each other’s jokes and sharing the stories they love with a room full of the invisible.

Read a random story from the archives, likely written while pantsless

He was right on Western Avenue, talking to a man and a woman I recognized as either living in the building or working at the barbershop on the ground floor. I had seen them milling about before, that’s what I can say.

The machete had a metal blade the length of a forearm and a long blue handle. The couple didn’t flinch or move when he pulled the machete. The woman took a suck from a cigarette and put her free hand in her hoodie pocket when the man pulled the blade from the cart.

He wasn’t being violent with it or with them. He was just showing off his machete.

“Very detailed,” I could swear the woman said as the man re-secreted his weapon.

…

A few months ago, amid baubles and holiday cheer, I saw an attractive young woman carrying a Klingon bat’leth down Michigan Avenue. It’s a long fantasy weapon from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Remember the awkward-looking curvy thing the guy with the messed-up forehead would swing around on TNG? Bat’leth.

I didn’t stop her to ask. I had Christmas shopping to do.

…

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a post about every time I saw someone walking down the streets of Chicago with a freaky-big mystery weapon. I don’t have a third story for the trilogy and I already worried my poor mother enough with the first one.

I guess my observation wasn’t that they were blades — one for a man forced by economics onto the street to defend himself, the other presumably for fending off Romulans (they have no honor).

My observation is that the city was blase about the oddity.

They could have been blades, or a funny shirt. I could have written this story about every time I’ve seen someone running down the street skipping and singing. But the result would be the same. People would walk by, maybe give a look, maybe not and move on.

I don’t know if this makes me happy or sad, if it’s funny or just a bland annoyance. We live in a world of machetes and fantasy weapons hidden in plain sight.

We live in a world so delightfully weird it became commonplace, just a brief glance at the strange and dangerous while going about your day.

More on noticing the world

A woman who coordinates her bicycle and prosthetic leg

A goose of just win

Leaning forward, his hands bracing himself on his knees, he wheezed a bit, his large body still recovering from the effort of opening the door and coming in. His walker rested on the sidewalk outside.

I slid past him to get the six-pack I promised a friend.

The man was large, white and reeked of street life. His walker outside was laden with bags of what I could only assume in the best of times would be considered junk. A hobo’s shopping cart for a man without the ability to push one.

His face was fat and gin blossomy, a bloated W.C. Fields nose with pores deep enough to fall in. He wore layers of long shirts that hung around him and a grimy pair of sweatpants that sagged down below him.

The combined effect looked like robes, a flowing fluttering parody of the Arabian Nights, a genie wishing only for a plastic bottle of cheap vodka at a late-night liquor store.

He pulled himself from his corner by the lemon-lime pops and limped over to the register. He leaned on the counter to brace himself when he got there.

He dickered over the price of vodka while I searched the fridges for a six-pack that, despite my moralizing, would also get consumed by people who didn’t need it.

Cheapest vodka located by the two young guys behind the counter, the man pulled out a fold of singles and started counting the amount. He asked for a plastic bag. The two young guys shot each other a look, wary of which one would break the news to him.

“That will be seven cents,” the young guy closer to the man said.

“What?” the man demanded.

No one had told him about the bag tax.

In an effort to squeeze the populace just a little bit tighter under the guise of environmentalism, the city of Chicago recently ended the ban on plastic bags, replacing it with a seven-cent per-bag tax for either paper or plastic. It went into effect Feb. 1, despite the consternation of journalists, voting groups and the occasional rummy looking for a spot to hide his street booze from the cops.

“What am I going to put it in?” he asked.

The two young guys explained in as few words as possible the tax, the start date, all that info. They pointed at the copy of the ordinance they had laminated to the counter for situations, just like this where someone didn’t believe the late-night liquor store wasn’t the one trying to screw them.

“Who did this?” the man finally demanded.

The young guys looked at each other.

“The mayor, man,” one said.

“Do you got a gun?” the man asked. “And one bullet? I’ll shoot him myself.”

The mood was jokey. Don’t worry Rahm, you’re not in any danger. But it was a dark joke, a bad one. He tossed a quarter on the counter as defiantly as one can get with small change. He shuffled out the door, toward his walker, still fuming and muttering about shooting the mayor of Chicago.

A puffed indigo coat wrapped around the little boy.

His light blue eyes wrapped around the workers in the middle of the street.

He was maybe 2 or 3, swaddled like tamale filling in stocking cap, puffed coat, mittens hanging by strings and the other accoutrements an observant mother makes her kid don before heading outside in January.

She was taking him to the day care a block down, I’m guessing. The mother was tall and swaddled in her own long, brown coat and stocking cap. The little boy had stopped his walk when he saw city workers parked in the middle of Western, the childhood fascination with machinery and men in hardhats dawning mid-walk.

The mother stood maybe 20 feet away, watching her son watch the workers half-descend into one of the manholes whose cover they popped by the little pizza place and ‘L’ station.

She smiled a bit at her enraptured son, waiting for the childlike sense of wonder to subside so she could get to work on time. She made those oversized “Let’s get on with it” gestures to the air, hoping to mime her son into action.

But the boy kept watching the truck and noise, holes in the ground and hardhats.

I didn’t like being a kid. Any nostalgia for childlike wonder or whimsy is replaced by confusion that people kept making me, like, do stuff when all I wanted was to sit in my room and read about dinosaurs.

The little boy, though. The little boy was happy.

It wasn’t envy I felt. We live in a magic world where, if you’re not amazed 20 times a day, you’re visiting the wrong websites. There’s science and art and magic and wonder and history, all around you every moment of every day.

The kid just gets to see that wonder a little more than we do. Everything’s new to him.

The mom noticed me as I neared. She gave that little “What can ya do?” half-smile parents of uncooperative children give strangers. I liked her for that. She seemed sweet.

She walked up to the boy, put her hands around him and cooed that it was time to go. He looked confused — kids are magical, but also dumb as crap — but complied.

It wasn’t that she pushed him away from the magic, whimsy and hustle of the street. She just knew he’s young enough that he’ll see something new and magnificent no matter where he goes.

Read about another moment of kids

Go to this live lit storytelling fundraiser tonight

For the rest of us, those who take more than one stab at existence and who tire of any activity with a cover and two-drink minimum to watch state school theater majors laugh harder at their own jokes than the audience ever will, we like to be a little more prepared.

So in the vein of my Bare Minimum Voting Guide from the primary, a six-step plan that will get you voting like a champ in no time. *

1. Register to vote — yes, you still can

Although a legal battle funded by the conservative Illinois Policy Institute tried to take it away from us, same-day and Election Day registration still exists in Illinois.

This means if you’re reading this before 7 p.m. Monday, grab two forms of ID (one of which shows your current address) and haul ass to an early voting location to register and vote in one fell swoop. Here’s a list of acceptable ID and here’s a list of early voting locations. Go! Run!

Even if you don’t make it today, you can still register and vote on Election Day. This is important. Anyone telling you or implying otherwise is lying to keep you and your vote away from the polls.

To register to vote on Election Day, find out where your polling place would be using this link right here that I’m padding out with extra text so it’s easier to click on if you’re reading this on a phone hi Mom lorem ipsum dolor sit amet blah blah blah the link should be big enough to click on now even if you have big stubby sausage fingers blah.

Then take those two forms of ID (one of which shows your current address), go there between 6 a.m. and 7 p.m. tomorrow and vote.

2. Plan your day

I’ve got to give it up to the vice president of my heart, Joe Biden, for this reminder on why it’s so important to have a plan detailing where to go, when to go and how to get there. (Sorry, vice president from 1949 to 1953 Alben W. Barkley. You had your chance.)

Given that everyone in this city wants to give a big ol’ slap of civics to the face of a certain cantaloupe-hued hobgoblin, lines are going to be long. As the New York Times recently illustrated in a surprisingly horrifying video game, long lines are a weapon in the battle to suppress your vote.

Plan ahead so your vote doesn’t get suppressed. Plan ahead so no one can use your disorganization to suppress someone else’s vote.

To figure out where to go, go to this link right here that I’m still padding out to be easier to select if you’re reading on a phone because this is probably the most important link in this story, type in your info, click search, find your name off the list that will pop up, click that and then you’ve got everything you need. Location, address, even a little Google Map showing directions from your house.

To figure out when, that’s up to your schedule. I’m voting before work (6 a.m. line outside a North Ave. photo studio — whoo civics!), but if you can’t make it then with kids and such, guess what? Your employer is legally obligated to give you up to two hours off, paid, to vote.

I’m not saying they will. I would be very surprised if every manager and supervisor in the city of Chicago was aware of Illinois election law, but if you tell them by the end of work today and they don’t give you the time off tomorrow, they’re breaking the law.

Any person entitled to vote at a general or special election or at any election at which propositions are submitted to a popular vote in this State, shall, on the day of such election, be entitled to absent himself from any services or employment in which he is then engaged or employed, for a period of 2 hours between the time of opening and closing the polls; and such voter shall not because of so absenting himself be liable to any penalty; Provided, however, that application for such leave of absence shall be made prior to the day of election.

You can find the law at this link right here. Do a search for “10 ILCS 5/17-15″

[EDIT: As xkcd reminded me to remind you, if you're in line when the polls close, they have to let you vote.]

3. Get your cheat sheet

Democracy is an open-book test. Of course you can write down your list of candidates you prefer. All those judges and Metropolitan Water Reclamation District commissioners tend to blur together.

To find out what candidates are on your ballot, go to that big link I keep padding out blah blah blah, type in your info, select your name for the list and select the tab that says “Sample Ballot.” Click on the link and a window of boring-looking referendums, competent politicians, Trump and infinite judicial candidates will pop up.

There you go. That’s you. That’s the ballot you yourself you you you will see, not the ballot your neighbor who is in the same Senate district but in a different judicial subcircuit or state representative district will see.

This leads us to the next step.

4. Learn what the hell you’re talking about

You know that machine you use to post on Facebook that you don’t understand politics?

Use it to understand politics.

Google. Type in names. I know you’ve got a phone, tablet or computer — you’re using it right now to read me rant about civics and how annoying I find improv comedy. Use it for something better.

As I wrote before the primary, “Only read reputable sources, ones you’ve heard of before. If you Google candidate Jane Gomez and the top two results are a Chicago Tribune editorial and JaneGomezKillsJobs.com, go with the Trib. The last one has a political opponent’s purse strings behind it.”

[EDIT: Don't trust something just because it looks like a newspaper either, as Wednesday's story illustrated.]

Find out which judicial candidates are dedicated public servants and which one is facing criminal charges and had her law license suspended because she and a judge friend decided it would be a hoot if she put on the judge robes and started ruling on traffic tickets even though she was just the clerk.

Her name is Rhonda Crawford. She’s facing a Class 3 felony charge, a Class A misdemeanor, had her license suspended and she is going to win the race because everyone is too busy complaining online about how the media ignores important stories to read any of the hundreds written about her.

She won a primary during all this. We flip our collective lid over non-email non-investigations on the national level but we’re so uneducated on local issues someone won a primary while under criminal investigation.

Two people did.

5. Oh god the judges

Yes, there are a lot of judges on the ballot. And since every candidate this year ran as a Democrat, they all knocked out their opponents in the primary. They’re all running unopposed so are going to win no matter what you do.

[EDIT: There are races in Cook County's 12th and 13th judicial subcircuits, but they're in the suburbs so I'm not counting them. Masthead don't say "1,001 Palatine Township Afternoons."]

Not knowing how to vote for judges is what got us in this mess. So learn this now, remember it next primary when you can again have a say.

Every election, local bar associations (groups of lawyers) rate all the judicial candidates based not on their politics but on how good they are or will be at being judges. Who cares if they support gay marriage if they’re ruling on DUIs? What the hell does their opinion on a flat tax matter if they’re deciding if you or the ex get your kids?

You want judges to be fair, impartial, intelligent, knowledgeable of the law and, guess what folks, there are tons of ways to find out if that’s the case.

I like the Alliance of Bar Associations for Judicial Screening’s ratings list because it’s made up of the recommendations of a lot of smaller bar groups, but the Illinois State Bar Association and the Chicago Council of Lawyers go into a lot of detail on the good and bad of the candidates.

They’re all at VoteForJudges.org, so look around. Comparison shop.

Someday you could be in a room where one of these people is deciding your fate. You can’t choose what they decide, but you can pick people who might be good at the job.

6. Other stuff

Don’t vote for Trump, that referendum about road money is bull, do your “I voted!” Facebook brags if ya wanna but they don’t really impress me and voting has and always will suck.

Yeah, it sucks. I want sleep, not a 5:30 a.m. arrival at a North Ave. photo studio.

But we don’t do it because it’s fun. We do it because it’s the bare minimum for participation in society, as vital to our civic hygiene as bathing is to our personal hygiene.

Vote. And don’t show up unprepared, trying to improv your way through the election.

The prep needed for a modern election is simple, free and available using the device you’re reading this sentence on.

If you don’t take the 40 minutes needed to prep for this race, you’ve joined improv comedians and people who never bathe as the last chumps I want to be stuck with in that line tomorrow morning.

How Illinois Democrats gerrymander

How Illinois Republicans suppress votes

Watching polls in the primary

The Bare Minimum Voter Guide

With all this trouble, why vote at all?

* Because there’s, like, literally no time. The election’s tomorrow. Go!

Pseudo-speakeasies, modern burlesque and of course craft cocktails are the thing across Chicago’s nightlife.

We want to imagine ourselves hobnobbing with the Dil Picklers, dancing to Louis Armstrong all night at the Sunset Café. (We don’t picture ourselves getting shaken down for protection money or forced to use the colored person entrance to buildings, but Prohibition is far from the only era to get a romantic whitewashing.)

Being a person who knows actual history, I’m aware that most cocktails weren’t a sign of class and style so much as sugary attempts to stretch out what little booze they could get. And Ben Hecht fabricated many if not most of his 1001 Afternoons in Chicago stories, so feet of clay all around here, folks.

To slap your joy with the open palm of reality, I gathered several friends and forced them to try and rate two nasty, noxious and just-as-authentic-as-a-Sazerac Prohibition-era craft cocktails.

The Yegg

To one-third brandy add two-thirds Port Wine and the yolk of an egg. Sweeten with powdered sugar or syrup. “This baby will ‘hold you up’ no matter where you are going,” says Judge, Jr.

This drink comes from 1931’s “Dining in Chicago: An Intimate Guide” by John Drury. In it, Drury never explained who Judge, Jr., was or what “hold you up” means in this context but after tasting this mix of sugar, raw egg and the finest port the liquor store down the street offers, I think I can firmly say Judge Jr., Judge Sr. and possibly Judge III are in hell now.

Yegg reactions:

Lisa: “Tastes like I could strip wallpaper with my breath.”

Nick: “It tastes like how I imagine every snake oil tonic sold in the 1920s.”

Drew:  “I’ve had worse, though I can’t remember when.”

Benji: “Starts sweet, turns sour and weird. Malörty.”

But the line of the night goes to Devin (who also writes a really kickass blog you should all read).

Devin: “I think we can all agree everything was worse back then.”

The Berries

Here’s your new thrill. Get ready. Take 3 tumblers of white rock or ginger ale. Three-quarter tumbler of Bicardi [sic.]. One-half of Grenadine. Juice of a large lemon and some sliced oranges and much ice. Mix well in pitcher and serve cold. We call this the Berries. It’s a snappy and serious minded drink for this weather, and it gives a lot of pleasure to the gang.

The Berries came from the inaugural issue of The Chicagoan, a 1920s Midwestern literati attempt to recreate the success of The New Yorker by basically making an almost identical yet crappier version of the magazine.

Gorgeous design (“not quite as good as The New Yorker in its heyday” is barely an insult), but uneven and, to my eyes, pretentious writing never really gelled with the rough-hewn cow town. It limped along from 1926 to 1935, still insisting well into the Depression that what people really wanted were stories about mink coats and polo matches.

The phrase “the berries,” as we know from Chicago’s The Flapper magazine, was slang for something great.

Here it’s used to mean a tooth-stabbingly sweet concoction I described as “Grenadine with a drink attached.”

Berries reactions:

Lisa: “That could be Capri Sun” and later “That’s what teenagers drink and then throw up and then think they’re drunk.”

Nick: “The Mike’s Hard Lemonade of the 1930s.”

Colleen: “That’s not bad. Sweet as shit.”

Benji: “Doesn’t make me want to kick a kitten like the other one.”

Conclusion

I never planned to try the Blue Blazer from 1930’s “The Savoy Cocktail Book,” as it includes line “ignite the Whisky with fire” and I want to get my security deposit back.

Nor do I plan to make wine and whiskey “mellow and mature” by electrocuting it, as 1928’s “Giggle Water” recommends.

Romanticizing ‘20s drinking is like romanticizing drinking when you’re 20. Sure you had fun, but it was more about where you were than the quality of what you could get your hands on at the time.

I do enjoy a good Whiskey Sour, and a well-made cocktail can be a thing of joy, but I would like to close this with a quote. Well, a quote and a swig of mouthwash because it’s been two days and I can still taste Yegg.

I’ve heard this attributed to H.L. Mencken and I’ve heard this attributed to Frank Sinatra, but here’s the line as I see fit to replicate it:

“A drink should have no more than two ingredients. Ice counts as an ingredient.”

Meet a professional cocktail writer

What do you do with a thousand empty bottles?

He told his piece to the crowd thick like lichen on every free surface of the tiny tavern. He gave stats on Latinos with PhDs. He talked about dodging gunfire the night before he defended his dissertation.

He backtracked and repeated himself. He laughed at his own jokes and sometimes talked so close to the mic I couldn’t understand him. He was unpolished and unprofessional.

It was the greatest storytelling event I’ve ever been to.

It’s called The Stoop. Every month, storytellers Lily Be and Clarence Browley gather people whose stories they want to hear.

Some are professionals — comics, writers, performers in the growing live lit community. But where any reading at any bar can fill a slow night with the pros, The Stoop gathers… people.

The stories at The Stoop are the stories you want to hear. Not polished pieces that, when the sparkling wordplay and staggering presentation are removed, boil down to “We broke up and I’m sad” or “Society needs work, man.” Real stories. Human stories. True stories.

Like dodging gunfire the night before a dissertation.

Or going bananas while working security at a heavy metal show, despite being the smallest guy on staff.

Or not being ready to go down a waterslide.

That last story was told by one of the folks who stood for the open mic segment. In testament to the mood Be and Browley have cultivated, the open mic was smooth and fluid, comfortable and just as entertaining as the main acts.

I’m going to harp on that for a moment. I’ve organized live lit events for the last two years and have been reading at them for three. Storytellers and writers can be lovely, hilarious people. They can also care about nothing more than proving that their soul is the most riveting to expose to the world.

Other performers be damned, audience be damned, time limits they agreed to before Printer’s Row but then took 20 damn minutes to read from their stupid book when they knew the limit was 10 minutes in order to get all the performers in be damned as well. What matters to some is forcing strangers to feel your struggles are harsh and your soul beautiful.

To create an open, welcoming mood in a performance space that attracts this particular type of wordy exhibitionist takes skill, of course, but it also takes an underrated amount of hard work. Be and Browley made it look effortless.

I’ve interviewed Lily for the blog before, getting all the whys and wherefores of her storytelling journey. You can read that for the backstory, The Stoop Begins.

But now I want to leave you with a scene:

A tiny tavern with murals on the walls, Christmas ornaments dangling from the ceiling, a small stage with the name “Rosa’s” in cut-out red cursive on the back and people of all ages, all incomes, all races and at every scattering along the spectrum of gender and sexuality standing in front of a crowd, sharing whatever it is they have to say.

The night supported City Bureau; find out what they do

On readings and book guilt

My upcoming readings

And, just for fun, Chicago’s Pimps of Polka

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