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.

“Man,” I thought. “That guy is drunk.”

He wasn’t.

My friend and I had stopped for a drink to dissect the wonderful movie we had just watched. She suggested a whiskey bar with a selection of fancy beers so we could talk out the film in comfort. Fancy drinks for a fancy conversation.

It was quiet when we entered. A few dates. A few out-of-town middle-aged men enjoying Chicago’s finest. Dark wood and comfortable chairs. I liked the place immediately. We sat at the bar.

A date left, body language signaling what their next step of the night was, and a young man toddled up. He had been in the bar already, just wandered with a Budweiser to the now-empty seat at the main stage, right by the bartender, right by the beer.

He was in his mid-20s perhaps. Young, handsome, black, skinny, small beard and short-cropped hair. And he sat, bobbing and rocking and making movements with his lips, singing to a song no one else could hear. I liked him immediately but couldn’t say why.

The night went on. The conversation about the movie (“Disobedience” — see it, Rachel McAdams was fantastic in it) spiraled out into one of those barroom talks about everything and nothing. We talked about why I hate Ferris Bueller and am learning to hate Marty McFly, about aging, about whether the movie we had just seen should have cast more Jews and fewer really goyish-looking brunettes. We talked about whiskey and beer and homemade lunches. And with every noun, adjective and gerund formation of irregular verbs in our conversation, the young drunk man with Budweiser after Budweiser nodded to that song of his.

When we got the check, I loudly asked the bartender to put one of his drinks on it. I liked the guy and thought it might spur a conversation.

The man didn’t move, just kept nodding. Then I noticed his eyes never met anyone’s. The bartender told him I paid for one of his drinks. The man blinked a few times, smiled and said, “Then I’ll have another Budweiser” before heading to the bathroom.

The bartender came with the check.

“I don’t think he understood,” the bartender said.

It wasn’t the words so much as the tone. The bartender said it kindly, softly and with an apologetic smile. He was trying to spare someone embarrassment. I realized it was me.

From the bartender, we learned that the man comes in several nights a week. Always alone. Always Budweiser. Always silent and smiling.

“He doesn’t talk to anyone,” the bartender said. “Just to himself.”

The man did come back and it apparently had clicked for him what had happened. Smiling broadly but still averting gaze, he held out two hands for my friend and I to shake. We did and he thanked us kindly, but he wasn’t the encounter I used to title this story. The moment I want to capture in whatever immortality these few pixels flashing across your screen can offer isn’t a man who has his own life, his own issues and his own troubles to handle. I wish him the best, but he’s not the story.

The encounter happened a split moment after the words “Just to himself.” The encounter wasn’t spoken, just a look on a face of a man slinging cozy drinks at a whiskey bar on a warm spring night. It was kindness. It was pity. It was a look of admiration I couldn’t ignore or explain. It was a sad, human, complicated gaze while a troubled man was using the bathroom.

The bartender looked at the empty seat and smiled sadly thinking of the kind regular with something wrong inside.

A hatch on the door will slide open. A pair of eyes will glare through.

“Password,” the eyes will say, or maybe they’ll just keep glaring, waiting for you to say what’s next.

You’ll say it. If you get it right, the door will open. Then the history begins.

Tomorrow night, I’ll be taking part in Chicago History 101: The Speakeasy Series, hosted by Patti Swanson of Chicago for Chicagoans, a pay-what-you-can nonprofit walking tour company designed to get locals more involved with their city.

Since November, the also-pay-what-you-can Speakeasy Series (suggested donation $10-$20) has brought local historians, tour guides and experts on this, that and the other to the Room 13 Speakeasy in Lakeview to learn about topics from Chicago’s bar culture to its history of segregation, from the old Great Central Market to queer history and the development of the skyscraper.

Tomorrow night is the last of the 2017-18 Speakeasy Series. It’s going to be a debate. And I’m in it.

We’re going to face off about such topics of note as:

• Should we tear down the Thompson Center?
• Are Chicago mob tours exploitative?
• Should we preserve/protect ethnic enclave neighborhoods?
• Should we re-reverse the river?

And the combatants in this Chicagoan scuffle, this Confrontation with Source Citation, this Battle Royale Municipale, this TIF-funded Thunderdome will be:

• Patti Swanson of Chicago for Chicagoans (tour guide and architectural historian)
• Vitaliy Vladmirov of Jane’s Walk Chicago (urban planner and Uptown enthusiast)
• Erica Ruggiero of McGuire Igleski & Associates (preservationist and industrial district specialist)
• Me of this (Patti was nice enough to describe me in an email as “journalist and political historian” so I’m going with that)
• Margaret Hicks of Chicago Elevated (tour guide, historian and Pedway-dweller)
• plus a few words from Leyla Royale of Atlas Obscura (tour guide and historian, former storyteller of the dead)

Tickets are still available. As mentioned, it’s pay-what-you-can, but you can’t get that password without RSVPing first.

It’s a great venue with some killer cocktails, so show up in your retro-chic finest and let’s get this Debate About Illinois State going! (OK, not all teases can be “Thrilla in Manilla” level good.)

It crept along the bakery’s inner edge, past the street-facing glass cases trying to lure wanderers with wedding cakes, curling around the side room where pickup orders happen any other day of the year, almost reaching to the dining room off to the back where people eat sandwiches and drink coffee any other day of the year.

But it’s not any other day of the year.

“I should have pre-paid,” I said, eyeing a man in a tan greatcoat who hopped past it all, picked up his box of pączki and left.

“Every year I am saying to myself I should do that,” the woman behind me in line said, chuckling.

The old Polish woman with the bobbed gray hair had been getting her Pączki Day pączki (pronunciation: poonch-key, singular: pączek, best flavor: prune, but Dinkel’s doesn’t carry that) at Dinkel’s Bakery on Lincoln Avenue for 15 years. The line this year wasn’t bad, she said.

“One year, it is so bad I am saying ‘Forget it!’ and turning right back around,” she said.

I have a confession. I have never done Pączki Day, Chicago’s Polish-inspired doughnut fest. At least never done it right. Past local news jobs had me cover the massive lines at local bakeries, but I’ve never been in them. I’d planned to, but then ended up grabbing a box at Jewel while late to work, or been too broke to make a thing of it and Margaret at the old job said “weird Chicago holidays” didn’t justify breaking into the petty cash fund, or I mixed up when Fat Tuesday was or had been hexed by a warlock. Various excuses.

But on Tuesday, I got up bright and early and, in a scene aped at local bakeries throughout the region, stood in a massive line at Dinkel’s to pick up my box of pre-ordered but not pre-paid delicious doughnuts.

The clock ticked toward work’s starting time. The line grew, even as the pastries flew out. Apron-clad workers rushed from the kitchen with replacement trays. People kept coming in the door, stepping in line and then goggling when told where the line really starts. The line grew. It was hectic. And it was wonderful.

The world hasn’t gotten smaller. If anything, the last few years have shown the true breadth of our divides. But the world has gotten same-er. I can order the same coffee and eat the same cheeseburger in every town on the planet, pull out the same phone and make the same jokes about the same movie we all saw.

“There’s no there there,” Gertrude Stein wrote about Oakland, Calif., a town that felt like nothing. But that’s not the trouble. Now it’s the same there everywhere, our culture and commerce so stultifyingly universal it can take a moment to recall where you are when the food, drink, music, TV, movies and online in-jokes are the same same same.

Except for weird shit. Except for odd local quirks that drag our rears to locally owned stores to spend money in the community on things that remind us we are a community. A Chicago pączek. A New Orleans king cake. A Pennsylvania fasnacht. Just little riffs on the concept of “Eat fat pastry before Lent,” but they’re our little riffs.

When a friend and I met for coffee later that day, each hoisting the gift pączki we had intended to surprise each other with, we didn’t talk about Polish heritages (we don’t have them) or Lent (we don’t fast). We talked about which locally owned store we spent money at. Dinkel’s for me, Orland Park Bakery for her.

Aside from the woman behind me with the accent and the “am saying” sentence construction, I doubt there was a single Pole in line at the German bakery.

“I’ve done Pączki Day since I was 2!” an Asian woman announced in perfect Polish pronunciation to the black woman behind the counter, who shared her Pączki Day memories in turn.

It’s a silly little tradition that snuck out of the Polish community into the region, but isn’t yet ubiquitous enough to become part of the uniculture of McDonald’s, Starbucks and Marvel movies. But I love it because it is silly. Because it is a meaningless little quirk that serves no purpose but to say that there’s a here here, to remind yourself you are in a particular place with a particular identity and particular traditions you have to explain to others while trying to convince them prune-filled doughnuts are actually a good idea.

They are. They really are. If you don’t believe me, you can find out for yourself.

You’ll just have to wait another year.

Read another story of Dinkel’s

Read how the pączki-hoisting friend keeps not dying

And just for fun, Jolanda, the slowest fucking turtle in the world

The “and many more” was for “Rust Belt Chicago: An Anthology,” which I wrote about in August and which conveniently ran out of pixels on the website before they could add my name to the list of contributors. While I am honored to be part of this collection of  pieces about life in 21st century Chicago, this is the writing equivalent of getting to play with your favorite band but seeing “and Guest” on the marquee when you pull up to the club.

But although I got the Professor and Mary Ann treatment in the marketing copy, it’s still a great book, mine was one of the five stories they chose to put online and you should totally buy it.

My upgrade to “prominent author” just came this evening, and you should totally put your money toward that too.

I alluded to this before, but on October 2, I will be participating in a fundraiser for the American Civil Liberties Union. The night will be sponsored by Third Coast Review and Kill Your Darlings. Check out this promo they just released:

We Read Banned Books: An ACLU Benefit

Prominent Authors Read Censored Works

Monday, 10/2, 7 p.m. @ Public House Theatre, 3914 N. Clark

WHAT: ThirdCoastReview.com (3CR) and Kill Your Darlings (KYD) Live Lit present CENSORED! We Read Banned Books: An ACLU Benefit to raise money for ACLU of Illinois and to conclude the American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom’s Banned Books Week, an annual celebration to support “the freedom to seek and express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular.” In two acts, prominent local authors will read from famously banned books. Censored music will also be featured, and local booksellers, including 826CHI, Haymarket and Belt Magazine and Publishing, will host tables in the lobby. The Public House Theatre has generously donated the venue space.

WHEN: Monday, October 2, 2017, 7-9 p.m. The first Monday in October was chosen to coincide with the new session of the Supreme Court, the judicial line of defense for the American Constitution’s First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

WHERE: The Public House Theatre, 3914 N. Clark St., Chicago, IL 60613; full service bar. Free Clark Street parking (no Cubs game); CTA busses; Sheridan Red Line.

TICKETS: Pay-what-you-can at the door; $10 minimum suggested. Pre-sale at 773-230-4770 or at the Public House Theatre’s website. Net proceeds benefit ACLU of Illinois. Patrons can pre-purchase event tickets and/or just make a donation in these amounts: $10; $35; or $50

 …

Eh?  Eh? Notice that.

No, not that it will be a great night in support of a wonderful cause. No, not that net proceeds will benefit the ACLU of Illinois. No, not that the CTA line said “busses” instead of “buses” so technically it means “makes little kisses.”

It called me a prominent author.

There are other “prominent authors” reading that night too, names like Bill Savage, Juan Martinez, Ignatius Valentine Aloysius, Ruth Margraff, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Ada Cheng, Andrew Huff, Ed Yohnka, Nancy Bishop, Emma Terhaar and Julian Ramirez, but we all know I’m the most prominent and, through my unrivaled mastery of the English language, the most author… y.

So come along, won’t you? I’m going to read about cannibalism, cross-dressing incestuous sex slaves and the other works of Shel Silverstein. As the night grows long and the CTA makes little kisses, we’re going to say words people in power tried to stop us from ever knowing. We’re going to support those who fight for our right to say words brought to us by banned writers like Shel Silverstein, Mark Twain, Sherman Alexei, Marjane Satrapi, Toni Morrison.

And many more.

I detest the way they imply an innate happiness at the simplest of things is the sole domain of those who can’t yet drive, vote or depreciate noncurrent assets using the straight-line basis. Childhood is magic, yes, but there’s an inherent plaint in such stories that it’s the only magic there is.

“Behold the child!” the stories seem to cry. “Behold his or her wonder at the world because you have to behold it in others because you’re clearly a boring old fart who understood the ‘depreciate noncurrent assets’ line in the last paragraph.”

The wonder is out there for adults to see. Granted, having a kid around helps.

The kid in question was a friend’s kid, age 5 and pretty darn awesome. His older brother was awesome too, but not as into running around the park during a barbecue to point out every cicada shell he found on every tree.

“Found one!” he’d yell before going back to scanning the tree. “Found one!”

When a tree was cashed, every shell spotted, he’d say “Let’s check that one,” point at a different tree and sprint over to it.

Last year, I wrote a story about a new noun of assemblage for cicadas. Nouns of assemblage are those oddball trivia terms for groups of particular animals or things — a pride of lions, a flock of sheep, a murder of crows.

I picked “a sadness of cicadas.” It reflected the longing their tymbal screams make me feel, the reminder that summer is waning and soon all will be slush, frost and lawn chairs holding parking places. But the point of this story from title on down is that I was wrong.

The inch-and-a-half bugs of bulgy eyes and tree-clogging exoskeletons burst where a spine would be weren’t a source of sadness, but one of unending wonder and joy. The chirruping beasties were a source of, yeah, happiness. Happiness in a 5-year-old boy that somehow became happiness in all who saw it.

I detest stories about the wonder of childhood, even though I just got finished writing one. But it’s not the boy’s happiness I’m writing about. I’m writing about the happiness I feel sitting at my desk with the window open, listening to trains and cicadas over the sound of typing.

The kid’s long gone. The barbecue’s two days dead. The boy and his brother are back home now, presumably finding more things to feel awe, joy and wonder about.

But still I’m here, awash in the happiness of cicadas. I sip my coffee, listen to the chirrup outside my apartment window and do other adult things. The wonder is mine now, even if it took a kid to point it out.

Read the sadness of cicadas

Read about another cup of coffee by a window

Read about a different flock of kids

Five autumns ago

Participants will read selections from a banned or challenged book, then share original essays inspired by the work. I have chosen to read my favorite children’s poem about familial cannibalism, “Dreadful” from Shel Silverstein’s “Where the Sidewalk Ends.”

The rough draft of my reading follows:

…

Dreadful
By Shel Silverstein

Someone ate the baby,
It’s rather sad to say.
Someone ate the baby
So she won’t be out to play.

We’ll never hear her whiney cry
Or have to feel if she is dry.
We’ll never hear her asking “Why?”
Someone ate the baby.

Someone ate the baby.
It’s absolutely clear
Someone ate the baby
‘Cause the baby isn’t here.

We’ll give away her toys and clothes.
We’ll never have to wipe her nose.
Dad says, “That’s the way it goes.”
Someone ate the baby.

Someone ate the baby.
What a frightful thing to eat!
Someone ate the baby
Though she wasn’t very sweet.

It was a heartless thing to do.
The policemen haven’t got a clue.
I simply can’t imagine who
Would go and (burp) eat the baby.

…

There are prettier poems from Shel Silverstein’s “Where the Sidewalk Ends” and I probably should have read from them. If I’m really going to work this crowd into a frenzy about the injustice of banned books, I should have read from something beautiful. I should have read to you about the place after the sidewalk where “the moon-bird rests from his flight / To cool in the peppermint wind.” I should have praised the hug-o-war or the language of flowers. I should have asked if you’re “a dreamer, a wisher, a liar / A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer” and invited you to come in.

Instead, I read to you about cannibalism and belched in your face.

“Dreadful” was one of the nastier poems that got the book challenged by the West Allis-West Milwaukee school district in 1986 and this poem was the specific reason the book was challenged in the Central Columbia School District in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania in 1993. It always grossed me out as a kid. Strangely, more for the loud belch than the image of a small child devouring an infant. But either way, this poem is straight-up nasty.

It’s the nastiness I’m defending.

Shel Silverstein is the perfect combination of poetic and nasty. He wrote some of the most beautiful and most disgusting words of our childhood and drew no distinction between them. He wrote the beloved Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue” and, years later, a sequel in which Sue becomes his father’s cross-dressing sex slave and you can Google that if you think I’m lying.*

Both the poetic and the nasty need protection. The ACLU exists for all. They fight for our words, and our right to share them, whether the ACLU is taking the side of gay marriage, trans rights, abortion rights, civil liberties regardless of race, creed or gender.

Or whether they’re defending Nazis who want to march in Skokie, Oliver North, Rush Limbaugh, the organizer of the recent Charlottesville rally in his case against the city for trying to revoke his permit. It would be a lot simpler to talk up the pretty words the ACLU defends and pretend the nasty, ugly and… dreadful don’t exist, but it would be a lot less true. And the ACLU would be a lot less vital to our survival as a society if it only defended the pretty.

I could stand up here and ask if you’re a magic bean buyer, read from Shel’s beautiful more poem-y poems, trigger nostalgic memories of the Unicorn, of a brontosaurus named Horace or Morris, or of Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Who Would Not Take the Garbage Out.

Instead, I stand here and defend the garbage. The garbage Skokie protesters. The garbage Charlottesville organizers. The garbage human beings whose sacred right to words the ACLU defends day in and day out because there is free speech or there is no speech.

We don’t defend words because they’re beautiful or eloquent or insightful. We defend words because they’re words.

One group has been fighting for these words in this nation for nearly a century and the fact they make no more distinction between the nasty and majestic than Shel Silverstein does is why I carry my ACLU membership card in my wallet, and will until the day I die.

Read a piece I read at the Paper Machete about cavemen

Read about a fundraiser I co-organized in January (It raised $1,200!)

Also, go to The Stoop. It’s the best damn storytelling show in town.

* I was not kidding about the “Boy Named Sue” thing

She yelled at him to knock it off, body language told. Head thrust forward, arms thrust out, elbows cocked inward in sort of a third shrug, third “I can’t believe you’re so stupid,” third “I might backhand you so watch out” gesture.

He laughed and laughed, so she swung her backpack at him.

They were young, and I don’t know if they figured out they’re in love.

It was after dark, but that comes so quickly this time of year. Bus stop by Lake View High School.

She swung her backpack, trying to hit him once, twice, three times. He laughed and leaped back each time, far enough to miss the swing, close enough to give her enough confidence to try again.

She swung and he laughed and I don’t know if they figured out they’re in love.

Whatever love they have is young and puppyish, but shouldn’t be construed as weaker for that. Young love is the stupidest and most tenacious of loves, the type that’s bringing you a smile right now as you cast back 20, 30, 50 years and think of a goofy-faced kid who once made you breathless.

Young love is equal parts romance and convenience. You look at what’s given and then find reasons to justify. If you’re an awkward stick of a kid in doofus gym shorts and there’s an awkward stick of a kid across the way who pulls off the gym shorts slightly better, the heart and hormones race a bit. Then you talk and cobble reasons this person makes your skin flush.

“What? You love this omnipresent musical act as well? You also liked this popular film geared to our demographic? Food, you say, is good? Never have two souls been so intertwined!”

I hope that doesn’t come off as cynical.

I believe you love someone and come up with the reasons later.

A few more swipes at the air with her backpack and the light turned green. The boy never stopped laughing the entire time.

She held out her hand. He stopped laughing and took it.

They walked across the street together, hand in hand. Each other’s future memories, each other’s future ghosts putting smiles on faces in 20, 30, 50.

Another story of young love

That being said, teenagers are jackasses

Everyone younger than me is

In part 2, I announced a podcast that I since stopped doing (I later halted the Patreon campaign too).

And now, in part 3 of Shameless Self-Promotion Theatre, I want to dress up all fancy, swill some cocktails all Gatsby and yell at you about politics.

On Nov. 1, one week before the election between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the “Me want Honeycomb!” monster, I will be giving a tutorial on how to steal an election at an underground speakeasy.

Go on, take a moment and read the link.

It should be fun, a mix of info from the Chicago Corruption Walking Tour and stuff I used to yell at my students when I taught.

It’ll teach you to gerrymander like Madigan, astroturf like Rauner, media like the Daleys, swiftboat like Bush and generally use grade-school math to mislead, obfuscate, confuse, disenfranchise and get yourself elected.

And the Room 13 speakeasy at Old Chicago Inn has some damn fine craft cocktails. This is pretty much as close as you’re going to get to being in a back room with Daley the First picking the aldermen and deciding if that Kennedy kid is up to snuff.

This election season has been an unrelenting fire hose of hatred, bile and the realization that about 5 percent of your Facebook friends have been horrible people the whole time.

Give yourself a night of fun this election. You’ve earned it.

Buy tickets at Atlas Obscura

Read about the politics of just existing

Read about the trickle down of corruption

And now about my 74-ton daughter

I made some Chicago ones up. A haggle of bocce players arguing in Croatian. A bindle of cotton candy sellers hoisting their wares on shoulder. A whisper of old Polish women riding the bus to church on a gray and misty Sunday morning.

I have a new one today. A sadness of cicadas.

The sadness of cicadas comes because the trees scream in August. The bugs, of course, are doing the screaming. They’re inch-and-a-half critters, drawings of horseflies done by imaginative and fearful children.

The insects arise from multi-year slumbers, take to the trees and scream.

This seems like is should be a scream of cicadas, a yawp or bray of the inch-and-a-half bugs. But it’s not. It’s a sadness of cicadas. Because their screams mean summer will die.

It’s ending, the cicadas scream. We’ve started a long and tawdry wane. The calendar knows it, the thermometer knows it, the trees scream it and you should know it too.

Your summer is half-life, the sadness screams. It’s middle-aged but more so. We’re past the meridian here, the leaves closer to fluttering down in orange and red than budding in the tender green.

They scream to let you know.

They scream over ball games. They scream over beachfront grilling and tree-lined walks, hand in hand with someone who might just might take you home.

Your empire of picnics, your streetlamp kisses that taste of sweat and red wine, they’re all coming to an end, the sadness screams.

The summer is closer to death than birth. Are you?

There are worse things than a screaming green tree. The insects sing their swannish song, but we’re hearty, long-lived mammals. Our mementos need not be mori just yet.

We’ve still got time, hope, dreams. Our summers last for decades, just shuffled in with winters and falls.

This isn’t ending, we tell ourselves. Our summers are eternal.

And a sadness of cicadas screams to tell us we’re wrong.

Where I talk about the nouns of assemblage

A winter setting at the same screamtree park where I first wrote this

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