— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses,” 1842

I was lying on the bench slide
In the park across the street
L-A-T-E-R that week.
My sticky paws were into making straws
Out of big, fat Slurpee treats.
An incredible, eight-foot heap.

— Len, “Steal My Sunshine,” 1999

…

The battle is done. We fought, we clamored, we howled with joy or pain and that one time I got a turkey. But the Chicago Media Bowling League season is done and I never have to listen to Canadian alt-rock duo Len again.

For those who follow me on this blog, Twitter, Facebook, know me or have occasionally just stood on the train next to a bearded man growling to the air about “damned hipsters,” “jukebox bullies” and “just frickin’ play some Queen, man,” I have been involved for the past several months with the Chicago Media Bowling League. For 16 weeks of bowling and some time off for the holidays, it was a chance to fraternize with my coworkers, network with my peers, see old friends, make new ones and feel really old when I mentioned to one of said coworkers that Fireside Bowl used to hold punk shows and he looked at me, blinked twice and said “How?”

And at the end of the path, a prize above all others — a replica fantasy broadsword called “Swords Terkel,” perfect for mantlepiece, office or battling orcs in Mordor. (Editor’s note: The softball league prize is called the Kup Cup — these are some quality Chicago journalism puns here, people.)

Every career path is plagued by a desire to define itself — doctors are like this, lawyers are like that – and I don’t want to fall into that trap. Journalists, reporters, editors, photographers, designers and the other tattered hangers-on to a once vibrant industry aren’t any particular way or another. But people with the time, ability and willingness to spend October-March in a wonderfully old-school North Side bowling alley downing Schlitz tall boys and glancing for the door awaiting the Christ-like second, third, eighty-fifth coming of Tamale Guy (“And they did all eat, and were filled: and they took up of the fragments that remained twelve baskets full.”), they tend to be of a breed.

They’re fun-loving, beer-loving, some are top-notch competitive bowlistas/os, others are there for a lark, and they/we tend to be a bit snotty about the tunes.

Last season, the musical situation was annoying, but predictable. The Onion, AV Club, Chicago Reader or any other Chicago media outlet team clad entirely in band T-shirts would show up early, load up the jukebox with cash and own the air for the night. If you wanted to play a song, it would either come up on the rotation approximately two hours after you left for the night or you could pay twice as much and the machine would play your song next. People who didn’t like critically acclaimed pop music of the early 2000s might be put out a tad, but the incentives were lined toward good songs.

This season, to steer our shoal of journalists to a more noble pursuit, the organizers instituted a Skip Jar policy. If a song you didn’t like came up, you could run to the counter where the mustache guy took shoe sizes, toss two bucks in a bucket and mustache man would yell “GOOOOOOD-bye” into the loudspeaker and immediately stop the song. Your song didn’t come up next, you just got the joy of having a man with a mustache scream at industry colleagues that their musical taste was so bad you were willing to pay good money to end the pain.

At the end of the night, the money was donated to charity. A different one each week and there were some fantastic groups in there. I’m not downplaying that.

But over the weeks, as the pins fell in the alley and the Schlitz cans toppled at the bar, the creeping realization of new incentives came. Like invasive species entering a new biome, like water finding and widening a hole to make new rivulets, like a bunch of bored journalists who suck at bowling realizing hearing mustache man yell “GOOOOOOD-bye” was actually pretty fun, slowly the crowd turned toward a new source of life, sustenance and joy.

Why play music you like when you can play music everyone hates?

And the jukebox warfare began.

There was the night when someone loaded up the jukebox with Kidz Bop versions of Platinum-selling pop tunes of the early 2000s. A coworker of mine struck back with the album Guster put out in 2003 where they replaced all their lyrics with meow sounds to screw with Napster downloaders. Kid Rock’s “Bawitdaba” (sample lyrics: Bawitdaba da bang da bang diggy diggy diggy. Shake the boogie said up jump the boogie.) became a mainstay.

And Len. So much Len.

Len on repeat. Four, five Lens in a row. An entire bowling alley of Fourth Estaters groaning amid the clatter of pins and cans as the canny synthpop tempo — as relentless as the breaking of waves on a rocky shore and as inexorable as death’s sweet sorrow — would crash and crescendo into the song of summer 1999 and boppy Canadians dancing on the beach.

“I was lying on the grass on Sunday morning of last week, indulging in my self defeats. My mind was thugged, all laced and bugged, all twisted round and beat, uncomfortable three feet deep.” (Followed by the scamper of little journo-feet across the alley and the mustache man rebel yell of “GOOOOOOD-bye.”)

Then crescendo, clash and clatter, “I was lying on the grass,” scamper of feet, “GOOOOOOD-bye,” crescendo, synth, “I was lying on the grass,” scamper, “GOOOOOOD-bye,” “GOOOOOOD-bye,” “I was lying on the grass” “GOOOOOOD-bye,” scamper, crescendo, synth.

Those were the last five months of my life.

But now the season is done. Swords Terkel is in the grasp of its rightful claimant, 2018 season champ the Chicago Reader. Our team has nestled into its comfortable 14th out of 16 seat. All is right and proper.

The Lenning of League Night raised money for charity. I can’t deny that. But the same dollars would have happened if you had put a bucket by the bar to catch journalists when they’re drunk, happy and just got a bunch of singles in change. It’s possible to have charity without the pain of a pop song I once like played over and over as punishment by people who get a giggle out of spending more money on being annoying than you’re willing to spend on music that’s actually enjoyed.

I might be too busy next year to spend every Tuesday bowling — life’s happening on the Dailing end. So I know it’s up for me. I’m making sure I’m not in too deep. I’m keeping versed and on my feet. I know it’s done for me — not something hard to see. Keeping dumb and built to beat.

If you steal my sunshine.

You know you want to listen to it now

An ode to Tamale Guy

Explore the archives

There was no pressing need to dump the cheese and slather the mayo inside the cup so quickly, but after years of standing on street corners doing just that, that’s how fast he did it. He shook out the squeeze bottles of hot sauce and chili powder quickly as a matter of course. He grabbed a steaming ear of corn on the stick, carved off the kernels as per my request and tossed away the naked cob quickly because quickly is how it’s done.

And when the man with the mustache, dark baseball cap and radio slapped with a “This American Strife, From Englewood, Chicago” sticker handed me a Styrofoam cup of elotes from the cart parked on Milwaukee Avenue, he did it quickly.

The best tamales come from someone’s grandma or a guy walking through bars with a cooler. The best tacos come from storefronts where the “Open” sign is more prominent than the name. And the best elotes come from men with mustaches selling food from a cart on the first walkable day in Chicago.

In a better world, yesterday would have been considered ugly. It would have been cold and windy hot-tea weather. Blanket weather. Do a crossword puzzle and fall asleep in a chair weather.

But for Feb. 27, a dip into the 50s with a slight breeze felt glorious, and the city knew it.

Bars tentatively opened back doors to winter-hid patios. Men with presumably unlicensed food carts quickly dished elotes, chicharrones and other culinary delights. A few stores even ventured to prop their front doors open, justifying the move as luring foot traffic, the breezes sweeping clear a winter’s worth of dust a side benefit.

And people walked. Kids ran down the street. Grown men stood and chattered. The young and fashionable of this current cool kid hot spot had to try a little harder not to let a smile show as they aloofed their way down the sidewalks.

Logan Square has a feeling of a last hurrah. Each walkable day sees a few more cool bars, a few fewer taquerias and bodegas. Botanicas where witches tell fortunes and sell candles with saints and virgins on the bottle sit next to luxury dog grooming pet emporiums, organic and natural of course. A greasy spoon with a Spanish name and everyone speaking Spanish is next to a boutique with a French name, where I’m guessing no one speaks that tongue.

As for the block after block of empty storefront, it’s not hard to guess which cultural lane their inevitable tenants will fall in.

It’s been like this for years, of course. I’m offering nothing new by crying gentrification. My only addition to this tale happening across the city is a challenge.

Eat an elote from a cart. Buy a taco from a place where the “Open” sign is more prominent than the name. Buy a beer at a somewhat scary dive bar where the people turn out to be really nice. We can talk and whine about gentrification and neighborhoods not being as cool as they were when we were immortal 20-somethings, or we can be active citizens spending our money to build the community we want to see.

I don’t know how much $2.50 worth of corn in a cup will stave off developers’ millions. When money sets its eyes on a neighborhood, it tends to get what it wants. But I’m under no obligation to help. I can support small, local and delicious.

In part it’s for them, in part it’s for me. I want walkable days to come with the taste of elote, while they still can.

The place was designed for the young, the beer pong table and oversized Jenga tower attested, but at this early hour it was inhabited by the old. The guys at the bar talking wildly and broadly to pack in as much mock drunkness and youth as possible before their wives call them home for supper, old. The white-haired drinker at the end of the bar, silent but for the occasional gloomy sigh as he stared into nothing, real old.

And the bartender was old, thick Chicago accent that caused me to code switch into my own Chik-kahgo Guy ever so slightly as I ordered a beer to wash down my pita-meat.

I nestled by a window to watch snow glimmer over neon and sexless forms wrapped in scarf and hood hustle down the sidewalk. This was it. This was the place. This mixture of old men in a young bar, of desperation on a poor slip of a rich neighborhood, this sandwich ne’er before seen in my lifetime was a perfect, patented, ready-made 1,001 Chicago Afternoons story.

But first I just need to check something on my phone. 

After years of holding out, I finally caved to the world and got an iPhone. I was tired of group texts coming in jumbled and out of order on my little square gizmo where the keypad snapped out. There were other reasons — I get lost a lot — but the group texts were the big one.

Two separate friends quipped “Welcome to 2008″ when they found out.

I still don’t like it. I don’t like that coworkers who have had iPhones for years didn’t believe me about some of the stuff in the Apple terms of service (they sell your physical location in space), I don’t like how much I paid to fund violence in Africa through coltan mining, I don’t like how every conversation about privacy and the melding of corporations into the sphere of personal relationships ends up with two blinks from the other party and “You can turn off location services.”

And I hate that I cannot put this thing down. Even when trying to eat a burger-on-a-pita at a bar that screamed “story.”

I tried to daydream about the office workers hustling home past snowy windows and sent off a work email instead. I tried to linger over the taste and texture of a really difficult sandwich to eat and ended up checking Twitter. I texted my parents instead of talking to the white-haired old man and I wondered why friends kept telling me a machine that gives a constant stream of access to the president’s thoughts, words, actions and policies would ease my life.

I would put down the phone in disgust, vowing to envelop myself in the real world, then find it in my hand a few seconds later. I’ve checked it four or five times just since I started writing this story.

Beer and structurally problematic sandwich finished, I decided to take the long way to bowling league. The snow shimmied down the skies, glinting in streetlight like cracked glass. It was beautiful and broken, everything I love about a city.

The bus arrived when the app told me it would. I got on board and found a spot among men and women, boys and girls all hunched over checking their own devices. Bowling was typical. Attention and energy lags and by the third game it’s more a matter of keeping myself entertained while my team hunches over their phones, occasionally mentioning something new that popped up about the governor’s race.

My boss got a strike while playing HQ Trivia. Ball in his right hand, phone in his left. The pins erupted. This was the second time I’d seen him do that.

After bowling, I walked in the snow to the bus stop. An old man with a sturdy brown face and kind eyes poking between scarf and hood joined me. He pulled out his phone and I watched the snow.

I do know everything they saw in Chicago last night was quantifiably better than what I saw.

Their texts and bleeps and bloops were messages to dear loved ones, jokes with good friends. They were listening to the music of artists who inspired them. They educated themselves about gubernatorial races and felt the warmth of puppy photos when I was eating an ungainly sandwich and trying to psych myself up to talk to an old rummy. The life you choose on screen absolutely is better than the one splayed out before you with no rhyme, reason or search function.

But it’s my world of old rummies and weird sandwiches. It’s my world of watching pins topple and wondering what bus patrons are thinking. The kind-eyed man at the bus stop communicated with the loves of his life. I watched Ubers blacken and mush the snow on Western Avenue.

If I had been glued to my phone while I rode the bus home, I would have missed when a face-tatted white boy whose eyes said meth and pain smiled and stooped to pick up a piece of paper an old man dropped. He was the only one to help. I would have missed the teen boys’ laughter behind me, and would have missed each flake I saw glisten among neon.

I don’t want to lose this world but I keep picking up my phone to find a better one. I don’t like that at all.

Above the bowling alley: xylophone.

It was media league night at the bowling alley. We were losing again, Chicago Magazine was having more fun than anyone else again, The Onion was bullying the jukebox again. As it was the last bowling night before Christmas, the playlist had been rife with Christmas tunes. As they were The Onion, the Christmas tunes had to be cool.

Run DMC’s “Christmas in Hollis,” The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” — any of the more-recent-than-a-Boomer’s-childhood stabs at a Christmas classic the radio stations play once before saying screw it and launching into “Frosty” for the umpteenth time.

The tinkling xylophone above simulated the fall of snow and the jingle of sleigh bells. Lightly, softly, delicate and precise before Dave Davies crashes in with a punk-infused electric guitar. Mick Avory pumps the blood into the tune in pulsing drum. And Dave’s brother Ray launches into that stoking, whining, sung-just-a-half-note-sharp but absolutely perfect rock vocal screaming that he always knew Santa was his dad.

“Didn’t they play this before?” I said to the air.

“I think the last one was a cover,” the captain of the Rivet Radio team replied.

It was The Kinks’ 1977 “Father Christmas,” which is simply put the greatest Christmas song ever made. Not just better than “Christmas Wrapping” or any of the other modern songs that meet the Chicago media bowling league’s fine, hip standards, but the greatest Christmas song that exists.

My Christmas present to myself this year (beyond titling a story with an X to finally complete the A-Z story index after an infuriating half-decade — please don’t let me know if it’s actually a glockenspiel) is using this Chicago afternoon to explain why.

All Christmas music falls in one of only a few categories:

• Religious music but about baby Jesus instead of adult one
• Hook from a 1960s TV special
• Songs about having too many birds (this one admittedly is a small category)
• This is sad
• I’m drunk
• Shut up, child, or Santa will bring you nothing
• Here’s what Christmas is like in this very specific location (Hawaii, a 1950s urban area where the bells are silver, an 1850s rural area where the bells jingle)
• Hooking up, but in winter

Each category contains multitudes. The hooking up category can include “Winter Wonderland,” “Last Christmas,” “Christmas Wrapping,” and “Let it Snow.” I’m drunk is everything from Big & Rich’s “Drunk on Christmas” to “The Boar’s Head Carol” and “Here We Come A-Wassailing.” And we have of course “Blue Christmas,” “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and that nuclear weapon of depression “The Christmas Shoes” for the sadness category.

(Seriously, take a moment to listen to “The Christmas Shoes.” It’s a testament to how Christ wants you to spend your last possible moments with dying loved ones shopping instead.)

And of course, a song can be any combination: sad and religious (“The Christmas Shoes”), drunk and religious (“Good King Wenceslas”), a hookup threat to a child (“I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”) or a sad, drunken winter hookup in a very specific location (“Fairytale of New York”).

But then there is “Father Christmas,” which is better than all of them, although “Fairytale” is a close second. Not only does FC rock, take a read at these lyrics:

When I was small I believed in Santa Claus
Though I knew it was my dad
And I would hang up my stocking at Christmas
Open my presents and I’d be glad

But the last time I played Father Christmas
I stood outside a department store
A gang of kids came over and mugged me
And knocked my reindeer to the floor

They said
Father Christmas, give us some money
Don’t mess around with those silly toys
We’ll beat you up if you don’t hand it over
We want your bread so don’t make us annoyed
Give all the toys to the little rich boys

Brilliant.

Now this isn’t being contrarian. This isn’t me thinking it’s somehow clever or subversive if bad things happen at a good time — i.e., children beating up Santa. That’s simple laziness, the “Family Guy” of creativity. What’s brilliant about this song is the message: Charity needs to be for the world we have, not the one we want.

The narrator is instantly set up from a stable family that’s well-off enough to have a present-laden Christmas. As an adult, he plays Santa for children repeatedly (the last time he played Father Christmas). He’s a good, likable person, spreading joy and material possessions just like he’s been told since birth are the twin meanings of Christmas.

Then he meets a gang of street kids who don’t care about any of that. Christmas joy like reindeer and Santa are knocked to the floor, and presents are for “the little rich boys.”

But give my daddy a job ’cause he needs one
He’s got lots of mouths to feed
But if you’ve got one I’ll have a machine gun
So I can scare all the kids on the street

OK, these children are not the “Christmas Shoes” kid. They are frickin’ sociopaths. Sociopaths in need, but sociopaths. And an introduction to the second dad of the story. Also a caretaker like the narrator’s father, but without the resources to stuff the house with presents and with a wink and a smile pretend a magic elf did the deed. They don’t need toys from Santa any more than I need My True Love to fork over 184 birds.

When the song seems veering into tragedy, it becomes simply beautiful.

Have yourself a merry merry Christmas
Have yourself a good time
But remember the kids who got nothin’
While you’re drinkin’ down your wine

After being the victim of a violent crime, his concern is the social inequality that brought his assailants to that point. Jesus — baby or adult — teaches about loving sinners and hating sins, but the Kinks’ narrator transcends that. He doesn’t see his assault as a matter of sin and souls, but about the unjust distribution of resources that brought him to a wine-infused holiday party and them to rolling Santas in an alley.

He has no illusions about the people his stolen money ended up helping, didn’t pretend they’re sweet-eyed little saints who just want to buy their dying momma some footwear (seriously listen to “Christmas Shoes” — it’s awful). Decades before “privilege” became the topic of every third tweet, the Davies brothers recognized theirs and gave a toast to the kids who have nothing, even the ones who beat up a department store Santa Claus.

With that, I give you the world’s greatest Christmas song, one worth playing twice at media league bowling.

Listen to some Chicago street musicians’ Christmas song

He trailed off, glanced around a bit, swirled his mug of coffee, sucked some air in through his teeth and let out a frustrated ah as he tried to find the end to the sentence.

“They’re living things.”

He’s 29, lives in a garden apartment in Logan Square. He’s thin, with a thin-cut plaid shirt and a thin tie that he seemed to just be wearing even though it’s the weekend and he has no real need to.

Sam Feinstein is a professional bookbinder.

You can’t tell it from his thin tie, ruffled shock of brown hair or glasses. The clues are in the space itself, tables ordered with stacks of leather and gold leaf and chisel-like finishing tools dating as far back as the 1800s. By the garden apartment’s bay windows, a long metal blade pole lopper juts out from a 1,000-pound cast-iron board shear, the reason he lives in a garden apartment in the first place.

“I knew I was getting it, I knew I didn’t want it to fall through the floor to kill someone, so I figured a garden unit is probably the best way to go,” Feinstein chuckled.

He’s a good bookbinder too. For the Newberry Library’s exhibit around the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Feinstein was the top pick for a new, modernistic binding of an art book inspired by the Bad Quarto version of Hamlet. Dr. Jill Gage from the Newberry spoke the world of him when I talked with her in May, noting almost as an afterthought that he’s 29 and working in a centuries-old field. His skill, not his age, was the novelty.

With hundreds of tap tap taps of a heated chisel-like finishing tool, Sam Feinstein merges gold and leather in intricate networks of dots, lines and words.

It helps with the pain.

“I was going to school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — this was in 2007 — and I was riding my bike to school one day and got hit by a van. Suffered a concussion, broke my right wrist and, you know, was a bit banged up,” he said. “And that was the onset of ‘chronic intractable post-traumatic headaches’ is what they called it. So basically since that day I’ve been in constant pain.”

He tried to stick with school, but his studies — Latin, Greek and French for his Classics and English Literature double major — made his headaches worse. He had to drop out of school and move back to Chicago to find a life “working with my hands instead of working with my head.”

Online in 2009, Feinstein found out about a school in Boston that taught fine bookbinding.

“I thought, ‘I like books,’” he said.

As the North Bennet Street School only accepts eight students a year and requires a portfolio, Feinstein started teaching himself bookbinding. It appealed both to his nature and his new medical need for manual work.

“I identify more as an artisan or as a craftsperson than an artist, and definitely not an artist with a capital A,” he said.

“It’s kind of a way for me to be part of a larger group of people who are making design decisions and having some sort of artistic license. Who made the paper? What kind of paper is it? Who wrote the book? What’s their philosophy? Who did the illustrations? Why did they do the illustrations the way they did them? Who was the publisher? Who did the letterpress printing? There are a lot of different people that create what a book is, so for me working within the parameters of being respectful to everyone that’s already put time and effort into this object — one of the things I try to do is access that. What’s the essence of the book and how do I convey that in the binding?”

For example, as a personal project to protest the recent presidential election, he decided to rebind a copy he owned of Bernie Sanders’ book “Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In.” He eschewed his usual golden intricacies in favor of blind tooling, where dark impressions are made by pushing heated tools into wet leather. It creates an elegant, simple, durable object.

“It really wouldn’t make too much sense to do a bunch of gold tooling on a book by Bernie Sanders,” he said. “It’s for and of the people.”

If he’s rebinding a historical text — he’s rebound books from as far back as 1505 — he considers his job to make the binding consistent with the book’s era, not its content. If he was hired for the artistry, his first step is to do a deep read.

“I’ll read them, I’ll take them in, I’ll do sketches, I’ll write down quotes that I really like,” he said. “My creative process is something like that: reading the book, taking it in, digesting it, cutting it to pieces, putting it back together and then ultimately making some sort of decision as to what I want to do with it.”

He’s constantly asked if his field is dying in the age of e-readers and online content. He knows it isn’t.

Ours is.

For this website, I have to keep paying 1&1 Internet domain registration every month for the rest of my life so the 727 stories I’ve written so far don’t disappear. Once I die and my autopayments stop, everything I’ve done will never have existed.

I’ve been working on a local history research project constantly hampered by a decision Wrapports LLC’s former CEO Michael Ferro made in 2014 to delete the Chicago Sun-Times’ online archives as part of the Sun-Times Network rollout. I can still go to the microfiche room at the Harold Washington Library to look up old issues, but the newer ones that relied on the site are just gone. Right now, I can get a Sun-Times article from the 1890s but not one from the 2010s.

But the book, the endurable, mockable, endless object will exist.

“El corazón del libro nunca deja de latir.”

It’s a quote Feinstein likes from Spanish bookbinder Emilio Brugalla, who died the year Sam Feinstein was born. Brugalla was a legend in the small field, and Feinstein calls him his favorite bookbinder.

It means “The heart of the book never stops beating.”

In a basement apartment in Logan Square, with leather, gold and a 1,000-pound cast iron shear, Sam Feinstein will tap tap tap away, brush off the gold leaf excess and create something that will exist centuries after this sentence disappeared in a digital haze.

Watch video of Feinstein talking about his work for the Newberry

She finds beauty in a bus tour

They find beauty in an all-POC web series

She finds beauty hawking poems on the street

So let’s spend the night before making it just a bit better.

Welcome to the Neighborhood, the ad hoc literary reading series in which I take credit for Rachel Hyman’s ideas, is coming back with a fundraiser benefiting Chicago-based charities that will be hurt under Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence.

The night — tentatively set for Jan. 19, the night before the inauguration — will have different readers telling true stories that culminate in positive, concrete calls to action to benefit local nonprofits.

The readings aren’t going to be about safety pins and how Trump makes us feel. The night is entirely about getting dollars in the coffers of groups that are going to have a devastating four years. LGBTQ charities, women’s health initiatives, organizations working for immigrants, for free speech, for access to justice, for civil rights, against climate change — any local group working in issues the new administration has targeted is fair game.

Right now the plan is for readers to pick local charities and audience members vote with poker chips for how we divvy the night’s take.

It’s absolutely fine, even preferable, if you work for or are connected with the group you pitch to the crowd. Tell the personal stories that illustrate why these groups are so important.

No storytelling experience? No problem. We’ll workshop your stories with you well before the event to get you comfortable and ready to share with the world.

Here are some examples of the type of stories we want, although your submissions will determine the particular charities involved:

• Lessons learned from being a Planned Parenthood of Illinois volunteer escort and why others should participate.
• How Center on Halsted saved your life.
• Why LVEJO fights climate change in communities of color.
• When you first realized the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights could help your family.

What we don’t want:

• Explanations of why Trump’s policies are dangerous. (We know.)
• Calls to rally/protest. (You should be doing that anyway.)
• Calls for gestures of solidarity. (Safety pins and declarations of allegiance are indicators you’re ready to start the work. We want the work.)
• Standup sets about our Cheeto goblin shriveled-tangerine-stuffed-in-a-moldy-tangerine hairpiece overlord. (We know.)

We don’t have a venue lined up yet (hint hint for any readers with access to a swank bar with a stage), but Rachel and I want to get the submissions rolling in while we plan.

Send your 900-1,200 word story (no longer than 10 minutes) and the charity you want to collect donations for to 1001chicago@gmail.com (questions go there too) no later than midnight Dec. 23, 2016.

No one I know has much rah, rah or sis boom bah after this election. We’re tired, hurting and just a bit broken.

And that’s exactly where the next president wants us to be.

So let’s turn our anger into positive action. Let’s get out there and help these groups survive a presidency that has targeted them. For the love of hell, stand up on your own two feet and let’s get something done.

Tell your friends and share the Facebook event we set up for submissions.

Marc from the office got a strange, quirked look on his face. He turned to the others clustered around the table.

“Who would buy a tamale from a-”

“Tamale!” I yelled, walking up from the ATM.

The Cubs won the World Series and, electorally, orange is the new black, so I should be through the looking glass on surprises this month. But somehow it managed to shock me that none of my coworkers had ever bought a tamale off a tamale guy.

My coworkers at the paper looked around incredulously at each other. It was media league night at Fireside Bowl and our little cadre of courthouse reporters had clustered a table as we lost badly and repeatedly to a local news blog that rhymes with schmee-schmen-schmay-schminfo.

My bowling team coworkers are nice, if young. They talked about bands I didn’t know. I had to tell a different coworker a few weeks earlier that Fireside Bowl used to host punk shows. He scrunched his face and said, “How?”

It’s forgivable to miss bands, old punk venues or any number of other time-sensitive cultural norms. I never went to a Fireside show either — I stay the course on being an out-of-touch nerd.

But it’s not OK to have never bought a Ziploc baggie of tamales some dude made in his kitchen and carted around in a cooler to various bars.

The tamale guy tamale is not a cool thing. It’s not artisinal or organic. It’s not from a cool food truck with an agile social media presence. It’s not locally sourced except that the source is quite possibly the dude handing you the baggie of tamales when you’re four or five sheets to the wind.

It’s a person trying to make some money by filling a need. And filling it deliciously.

The tamale guy tamale is simple, but calling it that seems patronizing somehow, as if the Mexican-American who made it just wasn’t aware Mexican food would be better stuffed with dino kale, saffron and trendy ingredient du jour (I think it’s bone marrow this week).

It’s simple because it’s a tamale. It’s simple because, honed through centuries, there is no better way to make a tamale than corn flour and meat steamed in a corn husk. Sure, you can add some tricksy ingredients and charge $15 for three, but that doesn’t make it better. It just makes it $15 for three.

I devoured the whole baggie myself. One coworker seemed intrigued, but is a vegetarian. One was familiar with the idea of tamale guys, but said I “look hungry” and moved her hand back as if she’d lose a finger if she got near me.

The others just looked a bit horrified I was eating something made by a guy instead of a kitchen staff.

Across the city, legions of tamale guys court the bars and bowling alleys with little red coolers of delicious food that supports their families. I don’t need bone marrow to get behind that.

Listen to me read a children’s book about Wicker Park (it’s track 2)

A different comestible-based street hustle

Past the gamut of Snickers and other impulse buys, the line of punks continued back through half the Walgreens, petering out by the premade turkey sandwiches.

“Did a show just let out?” I asked four sweaty white teens whose brand-new Streetlight Manifesto T-shirts hung limply over their scrawn.

“Yeah,” they said in unison.

“I picked the wrong day to need toilet paper,” I said.

They laughed.

Streetlight Manifesto is an American ska punk band from New Brunswick, New Jersey formed in 2002, Wikipedia tells me because I’m 36 and stopped caring about bands at roughly the moment they formed. I listened to an album of theirs on YouTube once I got home. I would have liked them, when I cared.

As I picked up the most on-sale toilet paper, dish soap and dishwasher liquid the Walgreens offered, I had to dodge little spots and clusters of sweaty punks raiding the Gatorade and eying the six packs they wished they were old enough to buy.

Lavender hair and red lipstick for the girls. Scrawny bowl cuts for the zit-clad boys. Dabbles of conversation heard in the air about how to head home, about pulling fast ones on parents, about good nights had and good nights yet to come.

Earlier in the night, I had been sipping middle to highfalutin ginger ale at a backyard barbecue birthday party with some of the roughest scumbags I know.

I don’t mean this in the way that everyone thinks their friends are a rowdy bunch. (“Did you see Tony? Man, he once stayed out until eleven!”) I mean that these are fascinating, complicated people whose stories might blow the little ska punk kids’ minds. Various levels of sin, various levels of legality, various levels of how much each of these people could physical hurt you.

We talked about gardening. We talked about the marinade used on the chicken. We talked about plans for the future now that we realized that rougher days are past and we actually do have futures.

My nasty, tattoo-clad bunch talked about ways to keep bunny rabbits from nibbling at the lettuce.

I’m not putting on airs over the children swarming the Walgreens after a show. I don’t know them, and I’m sure some have struggles and depth not immediately apparent while rushing for sports drinks in matching band shirts.

But what’s next, little ones, is a few years of sin. You’ll make your parents worry, you’ll break some hearts, you’ll lose your taste for novelty. You’ll never in your life care as much about bands as you do right now.

And someday you’ll be the one getting toilet paper at a Walgreens, the taste of natural ginger ale still on your tongue. And you’ll look on a crowd of kids wearing shirts from a band you never heard of, and you’ll shake your head thinking, “If they only knew what’s coming.”

Just like someone a bit down the path is shaking their head right now, looking at me.

Read about some teenagers who gave me hope

Read about others who took my hope away

Join my campaign to declare myself a sandwich

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It was dark, and I had my worries when sidewalk construction on two massive condo blocks dipped the pathway into the street. On our way out for the night, I had seen confused bikers use the walking path to ride. Under the dark, I was concerned they wouldn’t see us in time.

Over the dark air, the sound of wind chimes filled an otherwise empty road.

“Where is that coming from?” Tommy asked.

We looked up at the condo blocks on the uprise. They were still skeletal — concrete bones and a few plastic sheets to keep the workers from getting too windblown.

One of the condo buildings was a bit further in the process. A few of the rooms on the lower floors had already been glassed in and a pun-laden URL plastered on the outside advertised both the condo’s proximity to the trains and that ‘L’ rhymes with “hell.”

And the sounds of chimes swept over it all.

“Yeah, where is that coming from?” Devin asked.

Gentrification is a misleading word for a nasty state of affairs. It’s a broad blanket thrown over everything from trendier bars to line-of-paint bike paths to the systematic encroachment of the moneyed class on black, brown and otherwise disenfranchised communities.

There is real harm in pricing people out of their homes. There is real harm in using the dollar and the tower crane to crack communities.

Too bad no one thinks they’re the one doing it.

Too bad two people can look at a new bar, restaurant, apartment block or bike path and one will see the destruction of a way of life, the other new jobs and a place to take that hot chick from OKCupid for drinks after work.

But whether the new coffee shop is seen as a small, locally owned business or the first wave of a white tide, no one will look at a massive tower of condominiums tinkling wind chime into the darkness as anything but capital G Gentrify.

“Where is that coming from?” I wondered.

Logan Square was terrible when I lived there. There were a lot of gangs around, I would hear gunfire, the house next door burnt down suspiciously and a lady a few blocks up got acid thrown in her face by her husband’s girlfriend.

But every night, three or four generations would gather on their stoops to laugh and tell stories in Spanish. Little children would run and play as old abuelas tut-tutted to get inside once it got dark. I would buy the best empanadas I have ever had from an illegal food cart run by a lady who would smile in recognition and greeting because she spoke no English.

I was the first wave on that one. Sorry.

We did figure out what the wind chime sound was coming from the condo blocks. Thick canvas straps dangled from the concrete skeleton of the less-finished building. The wind was blowing the straps, which tinkled and traced against the concrete.

The building itself was singing into the darkness.

Some will hear the chimes as a dinner bell calling “Come and get it” to all passersby. To others, the chimes will sound as stately and grim as church bells, tolling a death knell into a windy spring night.

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Hear the mystery of Logan Square’s “T-Shirt”

And the solution to the mystery of T-Shirt

The lights were overly bright and killed all mood, all illusion we were anywhere other than a well-lit storefront during regular shopping hours.

It didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter the promised wine evaporated between a roomful, it didn’t matter the bookstore was as bright and moodful as a 1990s Toys ‘R’ Us. It didn’t matter that the door gave a loud electronic ding whenever real shoppers came in, making a meerkat moment of a dozen heads swiveling at once to scout the new intruder.

None of that mattered because we were there to rule the world.

We ruled through words, through our thoughtful listening to the poets before us. We ruled by being oh so clever. Oh so attentive. Oh so literary.

That’s all a reading/gallery opening/poetry slam/three-act play is, really. A chance to be bigger, better, smarter than.

For the worst, it’s a chance to be bigger, better, smarter than the others outside who don’t go to events cultural and sublime.

For the best, it’s a chance to be better than they were a few hours before.

An Iranian-American poet stood to read seven poems from a recent compilation of Iranian poets. Each was from a different writer; I didn’t know if he was one or if he had been the translator.

Some were good, some were bad, one made a few in the audience wonder what Persian phrase had become “ooh la la” in the translation. An idiom that in English means “big farter,” the poet/translator would say after the reading.

The Korean poet came next, reading a line at a time in her birdsong language, each stanza read back by her translator in my comparatively guttural tongue.

We in the audience smiled and laughed and golf course clapped when appropriate. I was transfixed by the Korean women and one or two of the lines from Iran. Others had different responses. The permutations of who liked which of a dozenish poems and thirtyish attendees are too many factorials to figure for a pleasant night of birdsong verse.

A woman a row up from me wrote long passages the whole time in a bound journal of bespoke handmade paper and a scrawl so tiny and perfect it looked like a font.

Others squirmed and fussed. Others sat rapt.

Others still eyed the room, seeing who was there to see that they were the type to go to readings. This was the minority, and a few cut out early. The room was mostly full of love and a genuine desire to be there.

They wanted to hear poets’ words, and poets who don’t get poeted very often in this country. A Korean woman wrote of her whorish way with a pen along the banks of her hometown river. Persians from Tehran to South Bend shared their scattered words and lines, busting the big farter notion that all from a country must think and act as one.

And for a moment these words all tumbled together into the same spot. For a moment, a bookstore in Logan Square was the conflux where the languages and cultures swirled together to, for a moment, create something new and precious and, after a moment, gone. Evaporated to the room like a bottle of grocery store white.

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A woman sees a ghost on a dust jacket in that same store