1,001 Chicago Afternoons

There are few things pleasant about public transit and the new inward-facing CTA trains managed to eliminate them all. » Read the rest of this entry «

“BORN ON THE PRAIRIES OF CENTRAL ILLINOIS; SELF EDUCATED, HE BECAME IN HIS PROFESSION THE FOREMOST SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATOR WRITER AND TEACHER OF HIS TIME” » Read the rest of this entry «

I think the turning point was when the guy swept up the beer bottle. » Read the rest of this entry «

On the windy grass outcrop bulge created by the funnel pull into Diversey Harbor, a shirtless man kicks the air next to a cast aluminum and steel eagle. » Read the rest of this entry «

Clink. Clink.

One of the old men leaned against a tree. Another pulled an arm back underhand, then swung something forward. The five or so men all followed the something’s path with their heads.

Clink. Clink. » Read the rest of this entry «

It really was a dark and stormy night.

The wind tried in vain to whip up leaves that had been tamped and damped by the icy streaks of rain that tore through the sky in brief, flickering bursts. But the leaves lay wetted and dead, slicking the lamplit streets and sidewalks of Chicago, Illinois. » Read the rest of this entry «

The orange-hatted, slender-jeaned young man with the “I-care-for-nothing” groovy hipster mustache gave a little cheer in spite of himself when the seal made it on the rock. » Read the rest of this entry «

It’s Labor Day, the last day many of these taut bodies will blade and bike past the stone-and-cement shelter just south of the North Ave. Beach, but the chessmen don’t care.

The chessmen will talk and joke and look at girls when one king falls, but until then, all the men sit alike, legs crossed, staring at their boards. » Read the rest of this entry «

He smiled — and apparently ate — like the Buddha.

It wasn’t his Buddha-smile that attracted me to the strange, enormously fat man propping himself on the iron railing guarding the collection of beachside shrubs between the bike trail and condo blocks. It wasn’t the shirt colored what people who’ve never hear of clouds or pollution call sky blue. It wasn’t the big, black suspenders and comically undersized dog which both seemed to have no purpose other than to make the huge man seem huger. It was none of those things that attracted me to this beatific Ollie Hardy sunning himself along the shrubs and sand.

It was his silly-ass boater hat. » Read the rest of this entry «

The Salmon swim against the current.

Even if you dislike the pun, you can’t deny the men in their zipperless Amish pants, homemade jerseys and flat-topped caps fight against the now. You can’t argue that Never Wrong the umpire with the foot-long feather sticking off his stovepipe hat avoids the present. Lightning, the 18-year-old baseman swatting runs with a cudgel that comes up to my rib cage, walks off from the modern. » Read the rest of this entry «