1,001 Chicago Afternoons

The button on my phone that snoozes the alarm.

The button again. And again.

The switch on a rotary fan. A window pane. Light switches, hangers, a plasticized book cover I brush against when reaching for a shirt. A plasticized business card that flutters out from the pocket.

…

Here’s everything I touched that was made of plastic one lazy August morning: » Read the rest of this entry «

The 606 is a biking/walking/jogging/strollering/cute puppying/sitting/reading/teen flirting/old couple laughing/sunset meandering path along a converted train line through Chicago’s Near West Side.

I had a book. And an empty spot of bench. And a summer night where the weather was so perfect air conditioning felt like sin.

So I combined the three. » Read the rest of this entry «

It’s a story that takes longer to tell than it took to happen.

A blink of an eye, the tick of a clock, the nervous lip-chew of a man who spoke broken English and it was done. I snapped the phone shut and told him as best I could that the ambulance was on its way.

It’s a story I’ve tried to forget, too. » Read the rest of this entry «

I opened the door and a crisply printed cardstock flier featuring a handsome, smiling, toothy lawyer in a suit fluttered to the porch.

He wants to be my judge.

A bit under five minutes into my walk, my phone rang. It was a Chicago Teachers Union member telling me nice things about one of the people who wants to be my state senator.

Throughout my brief stroll, fliers were crammed under doorknobs, signs were stuck in yards and zip-tied to railings. People wanting to be my judges, state reps, committeemen, water reclamation district commissioners — a mess of slogans and pledges and six-pointed Chicago flag stars.

On March 15, voters will have to make sense of this mess.

This guide can help. It won’t make you an expert, just cover some bare minimum stuff you’ll need to get through the next two weeks. » Read the rest of this entry «

The zodiac was ringed with a neon circle. The glass had silhouettes of Istanbul’s Blue Mosque painted below listings of services like tarot and palmistry.

By the door on the corner storefront on Western Avenue there was a gigantic painting of a hand, marked with all the creases and folds, bracelets and mounts the woman inside would use to tell who you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going and what will happen.

And beyond the stars, moons, neon eyes and other psychic emblems of this TARDIS-blue storefront, the mystic sat in a chair immediately behind the glass doorway, waving me in.

“All right,” I thought. “Let’s do this.” » Read the rest of this entry «

On the day before Halloween 2015, I learned what blood looked like.

I had seen blood before, of course. Scrapes, cuts, bleeds from shaving nicks on my chin to crimsoned hair matted with clots after a woman got into a chain fight at a DMV when I was 16.

But until the old woman lying in a heap a few steps north of my doorway, I had thought of it as a slightly brown-tinged oxidized mess.

Until the old woman dripping pinot onto the sidewalk, I hadn’t realized blood was so red. » Read the rest of this entry «

I don’t like it when people set out to create something beautiful. It reeks false to me, calculating and deliberate like a business card that says “Poet.”

So I didn’t expect much of the book tucked in the back of the twee coffeehouse gallery with the twee wall decorations, twee staff, tweely named arthouse sandwiches and overhead music that sounds like it should be playing in the elevator of a modern design collective in Brussels.

It was a light green bound notebook tucked amid the thumbed-over comics and abandoned paperbacks stuck in a corner for those who ambled into the shop with nothing to read.

“SHARE SOMETHING — thoughts, doodle, haiku, ideas, song, philosophy… HERE.” the notebook’s cover read. » Read the rest of this entry «

Crisp and cold has a smell, one you’ll never know until someone cracks open a hydrant on a hot summer day. » Read the rest of this entry «

500. Half a thou. D, to the ancient Romans. As close to the halfway point of the project as an odd-numbered goal allows.

So what should I write this milestone story about?

I decided to toss that question to the folks who made up the first 499, asking the people who got me this far how I should kick off the second half. » Read the rest of this entry «

It was a birthday party years ago, one that hadn’t gone too well.

He was a local boy turning 26, an old friend who had quit a downtown ad job where he was popular and loved to start a new, yet-to-be-defined new life. He was in the process of losing touch with his old friend workmates. His new ones were transient and weird, also filling a lifting-and-hauling job while we figured our own next steps.

None of his old friends showed up at the bar that cold, wet night in an otherwise glorious summer. Only three of his new ones came. So in the wordless way young men have, the three of us decided to make it a night the birthday boy would remember.

Oh we drank. We drank and we talked and we yelled and we bought. The sole married one of the party soon headed home, leaving three men in their 20s spilling out into the night.

I don’t remember who decided to climb up onto the Bloomingdale Trail. » Read the rest of this entry «