1,001 Chicago Afternoons

The little boy was padded and bundled so much he looked more like a blue Nylon starfish with a stocking cap than a child.

But this little starfish boy waddled and toddled at that freaky-weird speed 2 year olds can sometimes get and he ran right up to touch the pretty red light.

His father came after to scoop him up and make sure his nose was wiped, but for a second there was nothing but the beautiful smile of a child who has found something pretty to touch. The eyes were wide in joy as the little starfish boy touched and touched that sparkling red light from the atheist A at Daley Plaza. » Read the rest of this entry «

I recently came across a piece I wrote in 2009 for an early version of the Chicago Underground Library arts blog.

Now known as the Read/Write Library, the library is an amazing place where I used to volunteer, trying to figure out how to classify zines in a database and taking occasional forays into what I insisted on calling “liblogging.” (They tweet at @TheChibrary, a pun I came up with that went over a little better.)

The arts blog was going to follow Chicago’s creators and social innovators. I wanted my contribution to be a dry run for this site, a chance to get a little limber at the literary journalism before investing in this project.

The piece is a bit cringe-inducing to me now, but not a letter has been changed since I sent it off in ’09, even the typo about “a billions dollars.” So let’s take a trip to 2009, when a city was trying to figure out what to do after the International Olympic Committee told it to fuck off. » Read the rest of this entry «

The windows were ads. They were always ads. » Read the rest of this entry «

“So I turn left here?”

“Yep. Left here.”

“Do they have a green when I have a green?”

“No. I don’t think so. No.”

“I just want to know who I have to look out for.” » Read the rest of this entry «

I won’t be able to celebrate Ben Hecht entering the pantheon of great Chicago writers tonight. I’ll be working.

I won’t be able to dress up in 1920s garb (although I think I wouldn’t have anyway) and dine and drink and listen to live readings of Ben Hecht’s works tonight at The Cliff Dwellers Club. » Read the rest of this entry «

“Now watch as I zoom through the crowd,” the man with the motorized unicycle said before doing just that. » Read the rest of this entry «

So I was at the Grant Street Metro Transit station, waiting for the Blue Line to Fremont or, if the spirit moved me, hop over to the Black Line to Banacaville. » Read the rest of this entry «

A short-brimmed fedora can also be called a “trilby.”

The three men standing by the potted trees in the little courtyard with the pigeon-covered Sioux on a horse at Michigan and Congress were all wearing them.

And one two three, all the trilbies started to nod. » Read the rest of this entry «

“Can anyone tell who this is?” the gray-haired librarian said, holding up a thin, purple sheet of plastic with two mussed-up faces burnished in.

The two middle-aged ladies and I shook our heads. I guessed “The guy from ‘The Hangover,’” but it was not Zach Galifianakis. The librarian, a smiling man with a plaid shirt and a CPL lanyard hanging around his neck, waited for a few more guesses that never came.

“It’s Harold Washington,” he said. » Read the rest of this entry «

Sitting on a stool on a round platform in a storefront window at the foot of the Clark Street bridge, I locked my eyes on the plastic owl as commanded.

“T-minus three, two, one,” a shaved-head man in jeans and a black T-shirt said.

Then I started to rotate. » Read the rest of this entry «