A concept album and later musical by lyricist Tim Rice and the B’s from ABBA, it’s mostly known for cheesy ’80s chart-flare “One Night in Bangkok,” an ode to the sexy, seamy world of Southeast Asian underground chess tournaments.

And it was one of the possessions up for grabs at the estate sale of late, disgraced U.S. Rep. Daniel “Rosty” Rostenkowski, D-Illinois.

Dan Rostenkowski died in 2010 after a life that took him as high as the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee and as low as federal prisons in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and a Near West Side halfway house. His official Congressional vehicle’s license plate number was 8. His prison jumpsuit was 25338016.

Over the weekend, the Rostenkowski family held an estate sale — the second in as many months — to try and free themselves from the decades of the late man’s mementos. On Sunday morning, two friends and I found the barely marked door across from Pulaski Park in the former heart of Chicago’s Polish community and went to play among the last of his possessions.

The home was deliriously ’70s, from the paneling in the closed-off kitchen to the massive woodland mural painted on one of the walls. A floor-to-waist-high carpeted family room had been carved from the former Rostenkowski tavern that saw the family’s rise. As a sign of wealth, the walls were mirrored and there were two separate tube televisions positioned from the ceiling.

I learned Dan Rostenkowski liked albums, books and seemingly kept every plaque, trophy and honorary award any political group or golf tournament ever offered. He had so many boxes of his own political signs and buttons the estate sale company was giving them away free with purchase. He had his grandchildren’s Cabbage Patch dolls and his children’s Barbies up for sale with the lot. He had a weathered Chicago flag on a pike-topped pole, the stars and streams so aged the thing looked pink.

My two friends and I danced among it, marveled at trophies, pawed through albums, tried on Press Corps raincoats. One of the friends had been there the day before as well. He had picked us up never-worn sweaters embroidered with “Chairman Dan Rostenkowski Ways and Means Committee.” He bought Rosty’s personal kegerator.

We learned that Rostenkowski kept and framed critical articles. He had a large framed copy of an early ’90s political cartoon of him and the non-worldbreaking President Bush as Laurel and Hardy, with the “Another fine mess” swamp they drove the jalopy into clearly labeled “BUDGET” so as not to tax the Tribune readers’ understanding of metaphor. He had two separate metal plaques made of the same 1985 Jack Higgins Sun-Times cartoon showing “Rusty” turning his back on Chicago political infighting to go play golf.

When home, I found one of the many Rostenkowski labeled envelopes I picked up (because envelopes) was full of newspaper clippings about himself from 1959, his first year in Congress. It included two separate Inez Robb columns taking D.C. to task for exorbitant legislator salaries. It seems newspapers’ efforts to shame and chasten the distinguished gentleman from Illinois became his keepsakes.

At times pawing among the congressman’s life, I felt hilarious. We tried on “Ways and Means” hats and felt the heft of Rosty’s golf clubs.

At times I felt like the crones hocking Scrooge’s bedsheets in the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come part of “A Christmas Carol.” Here the charwoman. Here the laundress. Here the undertaker’s man.

A stack of low-digit license plates made me smirk. A built-in bookshelf designed for bound volumes of every National Geographic from 1966 to 2002 filled me with admiration. A wedding dress marked $75 made me want to leave.

The family wants to sell the building, one of the men from the estate sale company said. I found later it had been in the family for generations, was the home of Rostenkowski’s alderman father “Big Joe Rusty” and the family tavern. It was where two precinct captains were shot dead at 6:30 a.m. Aug. 2, 1938 as they sat in watch in a car outside, whatever message their deaths sent to Big Joe lost to the ages.

Heroes past, felons present. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

After our shopping spree, the three of us went to one of the few lingers left of West Town’s Polish community — an old pierogi joint just south of the triangle made of Division, Ashland and Milwaukee, nestled by a late night dance club and an early morning newsstand slinging Polish magazines and the Sun-Times.

Inside, we sat at the counter, across from the microwave, decorative blunderbuss and painting on the mirror of two pheasants. Under an Old Style chandelier hearkening to when blintzes weren’t the only menu item, the back wall was lined with peasant figurines, old clocks, pictures of John Paul II and two old political programs with Dan Rostenkowski’s face on them.

A gregarious, smiling, gray-haired mass of buzzcut and muscles whipped out a pad to take our order. My friend asked about the programs. The man’s face tensed and darkened. He looked down at his order pad.

“He used to sit where you’re sitting,” he said, nodding up at my friend momentarily.

My friend mentioned the estate sale. The man looked off at nothing happening in the corner and said he knew. He asked if we knew Dan Rostenkowski went to prison for a while. I nodded.

“I don’t understand those people,” the old muscle man said. “You have all that money, all that power. Why you steal?”

My friend started to say something the man interpreted as an excuse. The man cut my friend off, brooking no defense of the former neighborhood hero.

“It don’t matter,” he said. “You steal.”

He left to get our soup.

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Read why the license plates made me smirk

Read about a concert at the Polish Triangle

Read about the only other Chicago newsstand I’m aware of

It can be fun in day, with popping in old haunts and sitting in parks and on benches where you whiled away those heady, halcyon days of yore when dreams seemed like promises made by an ever-expanding future. Ah, youth! Ah, those days of… like two years ago.

Maybe three.

While days in an old neighborhood can be fun, nights among the old haunts make you feel like a ghost. The stores are closed. The shops won’t let you in. You notice how tired the cooks trudging the late-night taco dive look. It’s a cold, gloomy, lonely walk from the spot you dropped off the rental car to the nearest train station home.

You notice the changes, of course. Which places are new. Which ones stayed. Which long-empty storefronts have signs of movement inside or city-mandated paperwork slapped in the windows promising and detailing the work to come.

I smiled at one place seemingly filled with a future. Scaffolding surrounded the plain brick church. The sign painted over the white doorway still bandied terms like Iglesia and Dios.

It hadn’t been a church in years. I used to walk by and see oddest uses. A thrift sale some days. Grunts, whiffs, oofs and the drumbeat of Capoeira lessons other days. South American martial arts dance. A remnant of oddness in a neighborhood steeping like tea in incoming trend bars and white residents.

I walked past the church, smiling that whatever the future to come, it was bringing some of the past along with.

Then I looked back.

About five feet back into the lot, the entire building had been demolished. The façade, the history-bestowing, authenticity-granting façade triggering memories of Spanish-language church services and Capoiera grunts would remain.

I don’t know if there’s an official term for this, although Chicago Tribune architectural critic Blair Kamin once called it a “façade-ectomy.” It’s not exactly a facelift. That would be slapping a new skin on an old body. This is slapping a new body on an old skin.

The new condominium building the signs on the scaffolding promise will be new and modern and ultra-trend-ritz while wearing the skinsuit of an old church with history, heritage and community connection.

There’s an old brain twister called the Ship of Theseus. As recorded by Plutarch, the city of Athens saved the famous boat, replacing every board and rope as it rotted. Eventually, every piece had been replaced. Was it still the Ship of Theseus?

Luckily for the riddling set, a neighborhood – even an old one a ghost like me haunts when dropping off a rental car – is a where, not a what. You could replace every building and brick and it would still be the same place. No need to lie by peeling off a building’s face. No need to pretend you’re something you’re not.

But they did it anyway.

Here is still here, even if the luxury fancy-rich condo replacing the old Spanish-language church hides behind a false face.

Read about another false front

Read about the occult bookstore a block or so over

No stones or charms, no curses or skulls of curly-horned devils — those are all inside. The door has just a three-by-three grid with the numbers one through nine written in the boxes.

It’s called a magic square. The numbers are arranged so that no matter in what direction you add them up they come to 15.

4 9 2
3 5 7
8 1 6

This is the door you open to go inside.

Books and stones. Books and stones.

The stones on the tables scattered through the comfy store are for charms. Different quartzes with different functions, meanings and protections. Some on necklaces, some put in little bowls with cards explaining the rock and its uses.

There’s a large counter with a friendly man and a friendly dog protecting some of the more valuable spell books and herbs.

The books on the walls were spells and Bibles and Buddhas, guides to removing hexes and “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens.”

They were books on magic and religion and science and philosophy jumbled together in a way that made sense to maybe someone who was not me.

“Zorba the Greek” was tucked in among books on the practices of Christianity. A children’s photo book from 1984 on the space shuttle was stationed among astrological ephemerides, fortunetellers’ dry lists of tables and charts plotting out the sun’s, moon’s and planets’ positions for centuries.

And above it all, above the shelves and the signs asking patrons not to take photos without permission — jumbles, baubles, empty bottles and statues of gods and demons from a hundred religions.

“It’s a wizards altar,” the friendly man with the friendly dog said. “Although the word ‘wizard’ is too Western, conjures up images of Merlin.”

Each object earned its place on the altar by representing a different deity in a way “the magician working with it” deemed.

There were statues and relics, of course. Votive candles and blown glass jars.

But there was also a patriotically branded Budweiser tall boy can. There was a plastic souvenir model of the Liberty Bell.

“Do you see Darth Vader up there?” the man said.

I looked and, amid the gods and jars, saw a small plastic head of pater Skywalker screwed onto what looked like an empty glass bottle.

“He’s there because that represents Baron Samedi who was a loa,” he said.

Haitian Vodou in a “Star Wars” baddie.

The store started on State Street in 1920 according to their website, 1918 according to an official description added to a road trip website. The founder, a man named D. G. Nelson, used to do “face reading.” He would look at your face and tell you if you were a Cancer, a Virgo, a Gemini and what would happen to you.

The Occult Bookstore bounced around over the years, spent a long time at the Flat Iron Building before landing at its current home.

The man behind the counter telling me all this could have been anywhere between his 30s and 50s. Fit and healthy, he smiled with a relaxation in his eyes that most people don’t get. Ever.

He said he had worked there since he was 16.

I have an atheist love of religion, a refusal to draw a line between their created faith and the one you had created for you.

If anything, the cobbled-together faith(s) on the wizards altar is probably a purer creed, more direct and connected to the faithful than the inherited hand-me-downs that never quite fit anyone.

We say the Apostle’s Creed now because now’s the time we say the Apostle’s Creed. We wear a tunic because we wear a tunic. We daven here because of course we do. Of course.

Instead, this collection of gods, demons and souvenir Liberty Bells touches and is touched by those who believe.

“Occult” means hidden. It’s a technical term too. In a solar eclipse, the moon occults the sun. A particularly complicated way of taking atmospheric measurements by satellite is called “GNSS radio occultation.”

And hidden behind these books and stones, herbs, totems and Vader-on-a-jar is meaning. Meaning for some, not all. Meaning for the magicians who find it there, hidden behind a math-laden door in Chicago.

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A Chicago man hunts Cambodian sorcery

A mystic’s sweet lies

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.

My first call was to honorary nephew Roland, age 10, who appeared in #362: Uncle Go Paul and #237: On Dining with Children Where I Used to Get Shitfaced and who was the subject of #365: Why Write? A Letter to my Nephew.

He wanted to talk history, surprisingly focused on the 1893 Columbian Exhibition for someone who still makes up stories about robots.

“I thought you were talking about writing a fiction story, but I like, um, I can’t remember the name of it, but it’s the Ferris wheel. Because it involves the Fair,” he said.

“And if I were writing a fiction story?” I asked.

“The Cubs winning the World Series.”

“Did your dad tell you to say that?”

“Yes.”

His brother Milo, 7, suggested I write about boats.

“They would go boating!” Milo said.

The unnamed narrator of The Nut Hut Trilogy (#193, #196 and #199) is an old friend of mine who sat down for tripe soup and a chat about how she used to be the bait in a phony prostitution scam (read the stories — it’ll make sense).

“In keeping with my theme,” she said, she’s digging up the name of a church group she’s heard of that goes out to “minister to prostitutes, porn stars, strippers and other sex workers.”

Another longtime friend, fellow hipster striver Steven Gilpin, who made his musical debut at Schuba’s last month, was profiled in #140: Evil Twins back in 2013. He suggested I talk to the Chicago tamale guys, those saviors of hungry nights out who circle local bars with coolers full of hot, homemade tamales.

Puppeteer Stephanie Díaz, whose handmade constructions told the tales of Mariposa Nocturna: A Puppet Triptych in #424: Paper, Wood and Wire, suggested I profile the famous Chicago Puppet Bike.

However, this is the only of the ideas I already had myself, profiling the mobile puppet show in #66: The Kitties Dance to Country.

Geologist and paleobiologist Asa Kaplan of #484: The Man in the Dinosaur Hat sent this as a response, which I’ve decided to run verbatim because I’m pretty sure he’s messing with me.

“Hmm something about lightning bugs? Midsummer, I mean. Something in the middle of something.”

Joann Martyn, who each year celebrates the day she didn’t die in #444: Didn’t Kick the Bucket Day, took a different approach.

“You’ve profiled a lot of people and told us their stories, but what I want to know — how have those stories impacted you? How has your life changed because of these stories you craft and share with the rest of the world?”

The answer, of course, is that when I started this project, I was 6 foot 5 and so muscled I looked like an over-inflated Stretch Armstrong.

Martha Bayne was first featured in late 2013 in #251: Karen’s Stone Soup, which was about a fundraiser Bayne and her friends held for Swim Café owner Karen Gerod’s medical bills. Gerod passed away the next summer, much missed by the Noble Square community.

Although she didn’t appear by name, Bayne next showed on the site through artist collective Theater Oobleck, the focus of #344: The Most Sarcastic Child in Chicago Watches a Clown Show.

So it’s only appropriate that a two-timer give two suggestions, “one self serving and one a wild card.”

One’s on the Veggie Bingo event she holds at The Hideout (itself the setting of #473: Autophagy, or Why Progressives Lose). The event looks as insane as the name implies, and you can bet your kale and golden beets I’ll be writing about that soon.

Bayne’s other idea, which I might do as early as next week, is to “go to the corner of 500 N/500 W and then 500 S/500 E and report on the street life.”

Absolutely perfect. I think it’ll still work even if it’s not story #500 on the nose.

Sculptor, graphic recorder and one of Chicago Magazine’s Most Eligible Singles in 2014 Dusty Folwarczny also worked with the number notion.

“I think you should write about something that has to do with the number 500 and Chicago. Maybe it’s the address of where you interview, or how many bottles of beer are produced in an hour, or how many oysters are consumed at Shaw’s happy hour,” she said.

Dusty’s company Ink Factory appeared in #162: The Graphic Recorders and she guided me through the why of modern sculpture in #197: The Hypothetical Zulu Test.

Rachel Hyman, my co-organizer co-host in the Welcome to the Neighborhood reading series, suggested I do something lighthearted and fun, “Since you already took the meta angle with the last story.”

Yeah… wouldn’t want to get too… meta.

Hm.

I don’t think I’ll be writing about the Cubs winning the series, and technically every story I write is “something in the middle of something.” But I want to take this chance to thank all the people who have shared their stories with me over these last three years. And I’m looking forward to the people I’ll meet in the next three.

Now come back Friday for the completely original idea I came up with myself about boats that go boating.

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Do you know former South Side steelworkers? I’m writing a book on the mills and want to hear their stories. Email me.

Someone’s not doing their job.

…

I am currently at my parents’ house for Death to All Turkeys Day 2014. That house is located in not-Chicago, which makes it pretty hard to write a blog post about Chicago.

Therefore, you get the stray ones. The little bits, observations and lame-ass jokes that have stuck in my head over the years but were never enough on their own to make one of the 1,001 Afternoons. Enjoy.

…

I love July 4 because I sometimes need to know where complete and total assholes live in my densely populated urban neighborhood. July 4 is the night they set off flares to help me find them.

…

I was visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past Perfect. It had told me about the meaning of the holidays.

…

Today’s throwback Thursday is this status. Conceived in the past, written thereafter, seen a fraction of a fraction of a second before our brains register the words, read by the light the sun shed eight minutes ago. We fall a millisecond before our brain registers the motion; our stars are misfit versions of skies long-dead. Nebulae we see forming now died thousands of years ago, the Pillars of Creation a millennium-gone monument to destruction. We live in the past, our brains and light too slow to read what is now, only what was in moments before. The consolation of this is a brief instant of immortality: We’ll all die before our bodies know we’re gone.

Also, man can you BELIEVE our hair back then? O-M-G!

…

An ad at my Metra station said that three out of four teenagers believe having easier access to marijuana may accelerate teens in trying other drugs.

Nine out of 10 teenagers believe liking the same pop song means you’re soul mates who will stay together forever. Teenagers are stupid.

…

From the website of a literacy charity I was did not end up donating to: “The amount to our organization does not impact the amount of you’re benefit.”

…

Some children will grow up to be homeless people. (I never said they were all funny.)

…

Kim Kardashian’s main purpose in our society at this point is to give people a quick shot of moral superiority without them having to do anything. Somehow, the less you know/care about her and her actions, the better a person you are.

She’s “I don’t even own a television” for people who own televisions.

…

“I need to look professional. So I’ll wear a ribbon over my shirt. A big, pretty ribbon.” — The person who invented ties.

…

And finally, two incredibly nerdy things I have said out loud to other people. Click for explanation.

“I’m going to be swamped like Alec Holland.”

“Square my i because this shit just got real.”

Happy Thanksgiving.

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I have ideas swirling for stories. I never ate at Hot Doug’s or got my feet measured at Altman’s, both mainstays now closed or closing. I meant to do both, but never got around to them. Maybe I could write a nuanced reflection on opportunity cost on a somber, rainy night.

The white monster won’t claim that story. Something in its makeup won’t stick. Moving on.

I got a shave the other day. Full shave with hot towels and lather and a straight-edge razor wielded by a licensed barber skritch skritch skritching the hair off my face. It was at a deliberately trendy “punk” barbershop, you know the type. Tattooed rockabilly cosmetologists charging juuuust too much to get a clipper trim amid in-store rock music and walls plastered with CBGB flier reprints.

My barber – you have to be a licensed barber to shave someone’s face with a straight razor, he said – was wearing a Matt Forté jersey and tried to strike up a conversation about the Bears. I couldn’t follow.

I reclined and let him apply hot towel after hot towel as I tried to think deep, meaningful thoughts about life, manliness, self-image and rockabilly.

That might have been a good story, but I really couldn’t stop thinking about that Opera-themed Bugs Bunny where he tricked Elmer Fudd into the barber chair and sliced him up proper.

Glad to say my shave was excellent, but “Rabbit of Seville” (1952) ruined that as a story too.

Maybe the monster would let me sleep if I fed it some history. I’ve done that before – the Elevator Demon, Columbia Wheelmen, my century-too-late vendetta against volunteer urban planner Edward Paul Brennan (1866-1942).

I’ve got some good ones I’m working on. There’s Daniel O’Leary, the 1860s “Champion Pedestrian of the World.” And I own a 1970s restaurant guide that talks about how notorious bro-hub frat boy bar John Barleycorn once offered hamburgers for $2.05 and “Mixed highbrow media – art slides, classical music, and silent movies.”

But I would at least want to see if I could get the 1800s biographical pamphlet on O’Leary WorldCatted up from Tulane to the college where I teach. And I really want to find someone who remembers when Barleycorn was an arthouse joint.

Does it want a profile? I’ve got interviews with a trapeze artist, a storyteller and a burlesque dancer ready to go. The illustrator’s working on those, though. And I still have to set a time to meet with the guy who secretly carved a mermaid on the beach. I’m meeting the derby girl Friday. No go there.

So that’s why it’s night and I’m up with the glaring white monster known as an empty page.

The monster feeds on stories and shame, filling its gut on the latter when the former runs dry. It’s not the worst thing in the world, sitting on my comfortable couch in my snug apartment, listening to the rain fall as I work on my completely optional blog no one is making me do.

So that’s my story. That’s my image of Chicago I want to leave you with for this one of 1,001. Across this city, across this world, there are people trying to capture the real world to feed it to a monster.

Writers, reporters, poets, bloggers, comedians, anyone who tries to take this world of professional pedestrians, rockabilly cosmetologists, carved mermaids and Hot Doug’s encased meats and turn it into something that’s real and true.

Something that can fill an empty page on a somber, rainy night.

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He’s not yelling “Fuck! FUCK!” like he was a few minutes back. He isn’t weeping into a phone, shouting through tears “I want to kill myself. I want to commit suicide.”

The man in my front yard isn’t screaming anymore. He’s no longer yelling about Sarah.

…

I tell two stories about weeping in public. The first is about death. The second’s about a nun.

The first was at a hospital in the Quad Cities, a cluster of river towns on the Illinois-Iowa border. My grandfather was dying. He’s been dead 14 years now, to put the story in time.

I had bright green punker hair and no cell phone when he died. That puts the story in time too.

I went down from the hospital room to call my other grandparents, now dead themselves, from a payphone by the elevator. They asked attentively how Joe was. I tried to say “It’ll all be over soon,” but the words caught my throat. I couldn’t say “over soon.” I tried and repeated but the words couldn’t come.

I burst into tears. I wept and squealed and I couldn’t stop shaking. My grandfather on the phone, soon to be my only grandfather, tut-tutted and soothed and told me birth was fatal. A nice family heading up to the elevator stopped to ask the sobbing greenhair in the tight black band T-shirt if he was all right.

I couldn’t answer. I just sobbed and shook and to this day I can’t remember if I nodded yes or shook my head no.

Grandpa Dailing died that night. I keep a photo of us on my dresser.

…

The man in my front yard isn’t technically in my front yard. He’s pacing along the sidewalk in front of my fence, sobbing into his phone about wanting to die.

He’s young and thin, with close-cropped blond hair.

He’s on the phone, which I guess is good. He’s reaching out to talk. He’s saying he wants to go to the bridge, not silently walking toward it.

That’s good, right?

With weeping and bluster, he heaves himself on the grass by the curb to bury his head in his hands and tell the phone about Sarah. His pain is palpable, even from two stories up.

I’m watching him from a second-story window. I try to hide behind the wall so he can’t see me.

…

The second crying story is about the bitch nun. This one was at O’Hare, so more appropriate for a Chicago blog.

It was 11 years ago. I was 24 or so, and my hair was back to brown but with massive rockabilly sideburns I never trimmed.

I had just dropped a woman I loved very much off at the airport. The benefit of hindsight reminds me we fought all the time. And there was an age difference. And we lived on different continents.

But the benefit of memory tells me it was a woman I loved and who loved me, and it’s sad that it wouldn’t work out.

After goodbyes and kisses and more kisses and promises, I was alone in the terminal, waving at post-9/11 safety standards that would let me see her to the gate.

I walked to the railing by the elevator to baggage claim and I just wept.

It was worse than weeping for death, I later decided. My grandfather was 91 years old, lived by himself until the end, had his marbles and got to see his three estranged children together before he went. That’s fair and right. That’s how people should die.

This was unfair and not right. The girl and I loved each other, in that all-consuming, problem-ignoring way you only can while young. We were on fire together in a way no one ever ever ever ever ever ever had been before or after us, man. And we were meant for the AGES.

We lasted less than a year after that, but we gave it a go. We at least tried.

The perspective came later. I wept in O’Hare that day. Another elevator. Another uncontrollable breakout sob like the man on my curb right now.

Then, that fucking nun.

A nun, a full-fledged habit and wimple, Christ-briding, ruler-wielding, black-and-white Blues Brothers-style “Da Penguin” poverty-and-chastity Sister of the One True Mister n-u-n NUN walked by on the way to check in baggage for her flight.

Even crying, I turned my head to see her. She turned her head to look at me. Then a merchant of Christ and a servant in distress caught eyes.

She straightened herself up, pretended she didn’t see me and walked on.

…

I think you can see where this is going. I didn’t go out to comfort the man sobbing on my lawn. I’m not the kind family at the hospital. I’m the bitch nun.

The police came by. They flashed their lights and did their little beepy siren thing and parked just out of eyeshot east of my building.

Still on the phone, the man walked in that direction. I hope it wasn’t coincidental. I hope they were the response to a call he placed for help.

He seemed exasperated, having to walk. It was the last I saw of him.

I hope he got help.

I hope he isn’t off killing himself right now.

I hope Sarah runs far, far away.

But mostly I hope the person on the other end of the sobbing man’s phone was able to be the person the nun and I weren’t. I hope he or she listened and was kind.

There’s enough pain in the world to go around, I guess. There are enough psycho exes screaming on lawns and sobbing in airports that I don’t know what the nun or I could have done.

The man is gone, off to cops or more weeping — I don’t know which.

I wish I had done more.

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Read about a man who did reach out to strangers

Read about a woman who spread dreams

Read about the grandfather who said birth was fatal

Ten years ago tonight, my friends and I went out to get smashed at the Billy Goat. We did that a lot, in retrospect.

My out-of-town girlfriend was in town. We started to fight. We did that a lot too, in retrospect.

The drunken, rambling argument spilled out onto Michigan Avenue, then east down the river walkway. It culminated by the fountain designed to shoot a perfect parabola of water over the river. In practice, it pisses unfiltered sludge on any boat unfortunate enough to head underneath.

As I lay by the fountain’s edge, I asked my new ex what time it was. She told me. It was after midnight.

“It’s my birthday,” I said.

She said she was sorry we broke up that day.

Five years ago tonight, I was at a different future ex’s apartment in Wilmette or Winnetka or some other Wuh-sounding northern suburb.

She was relaxing on the couch, as was her wont. I was hunched over a laptop typing, as was and remains mine.

I wrote a story for the Windy Citizen, a now-defunct site that used to let me scribble for them. I wrote about being scared of turning 30. I wrote about half wanting to go to the girl on the couch and half wanting “to run down to the lake, rip off my clothes and dive in, howling at the moon as I paddle naked through the water.”

I wrote about how writing felt like splitting the difference.

Thirty-five years ago tonight, Joe and a heavily pregnant Diane Dailing went to sleep. Joe was tired. He would bug me for years after about getting him up at 5 a.m. the next morning.

Seventy years ago tonight, Cpl. John Dailing was a few days away from missing his second son’s first birthday. He slept in a cot in New Guinea, working by day in a munitions factory. He was an older recruit, part of the “fathers’ draft” passed by Congress the year before.

There were other Sept. 2s, of course. Ones I can’t remember, ones I don’t want to forget.

So let me tell you how I spent this one.

Tonight, Sept. 2, 2014, I went to a faux Irish pub in my neighborhood. It’s the type with dark wood, Taco Tuesdays and waitresses in booty shorts. I sat by an open window that let in enough light to read Doc Savage by and enough wind to scatter the tip.

One of the waitresses wore a low-cut tank top that said “yolo yolo yolo” in a typewriter letter font. She had a laptop propped by the bar where she would take notes on the digestive system for nursing school.

Two old men came in, ordered Heinekens, then started chattering happily in Spanish. They backhanded each other’s chests whenever they made a point. They laughed a lot.

I read my book, sipped beer and smiled.

I left to go home, where a woman I don’t plan on letting go ordered a pizza with me. She watched Colbert online until bed. I hunched over a laptop typing.

I played online, listened to Oingo Boingo, felt sad about news stories I read. It’s 10 minutes to midnight now. It’s 10 minutes to my birthday. Nine now. Now eight. I still don’t know how to wrap this story up.

I’m still the same self-pitying, dramatic, depressive fuck I was at 25, 30 and, for that matter, 18. I’m still terrible, just grayer and way more into bikes than I was.

Birthdays are just dramatic affairs for some, I guess. For some of us, birthdays are days we compare ourselves to who we were when we were younger and who others were at our age now.

For some of us, we’ll always come up wanting.

I’ve loved the people I’ve wanted to love, fucked the people I’ve wanted to fuck, drank good beer and listened to good damn music. That’s all I can offer for my 35 years and I think that’s fine.

It’s after midnight now.

“It’s my birthday,” I said.

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What is pertinent is the amount of writing the fourth grade requires.

My honorary nephew – I’m not actually a relative, just a family friend – is struggling. His mom asked “for a bit of ‘Uncle Paul’ assistance” in convincing the kid that writing is cool, even if it’s hard at first.

I’ll do that on my own time. But in this, my not-really-a-letter to my not-really-a-nephew, I get to write down exactly what I would like to say, with all the swear words and advice on women that entails.

Writing, my dear nephew, is the fucking best.

It’s a terrible living. Don’t go into it unless you’re truly obsessed. Hopping from newspaper to newspaper, scraping up any freelance job that will have me and watching my moral standards inversely correlate with the size of the paycheck has put gray on my head and very little green in my wallet.

But writing is not the same as being a writer. Whether or not you decide to become a professional writer (or, god forbid, one of those awful hobbyists who introduce themselves as “but really I’m a writer” at parties), writing will do you well in life.

So why write?

You should write because when you’re a kid, you have just as much emotion in you as an adult does, but you don’t have the language to talk about it.

A feeling unexpressed bulges out, makes you swell up like a shaken bottle of pop until you burst in bad ways. You hit your brother or start crying when you don’t want to and your mom and dad ask you but you can’t say why.

Writing gives you the language to let out the pressure before it gets bad. Writing unscrews the cap a bit at a time, letting little hisses of fizz out so you don’t explode.

You should write because I’ve seen you get frustrated trying to explain things. Writing slows you down, gives you more time to think about what you want to say.

You should write because people’s favorite books change, but their favorite sentences never do.

You should write because trying to describe the world makes you look at it more intently.

You should write because if you’re a writer in your 20s, you can be as moody as you want and some women will find it sexy. Like, really sexy.

Start with the first word, then the second, then the third. Don’t think, just put down every word that pops into your head as fast as your 9-year-old fingers can keep up. You can always take out the dumb stuff later. Just write.

Whatever you write is going to suck. You’re 9, for god’s sake.

But the next thing you write might suck a little less. And the thing after that might suck even less. You might not ever be great, but you are destined to at least be better at it in the future than you are now. That’s just how practice works.

Writing will help you express your emotions, organize your thoughts, become funnier, smarter and a more deliberate, perceptive person. It’s a tool you can use to make the rest of your life better, whether or not you get great at it. You don’t have to be a great writer to write any more than you have to be a great chef to make a tasty meal.

So pick up the pencil, my not-quite nephew. Put whatever’s inside that head of yours on the page.

For the love of god, write.

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Read more advice to the young’uns

Read about the English teacher who used to advise me

A couple. New place. A search for a new corner bar. A Stephen King-ish discovery on the level of a “pet sematary” out back or that you are the caretaker, have always been the caretaker.

“Hey, babe? Google Maps says we’re not in East Ukrainian Village after all.”

Google Searches. Yelp. Wikipedia listings of street names and boundaries. Sarah Palin jokes about being able to see East Ukrainian Village from our house.

An inevitable conclusion. An inexorable, unavoidable, undeniable, binding, doomed, pat, Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus Third Edition Copyright © 2013 by the Philip Lief Group conclusion.

“Huh. I guess we don’t live in East Ukrainian Village.”

A question:

“So where do we live?”

Neighborhoods. These little regional nicknames that rule our lives somehow. They act as shorthand not for lots and streets, but for people and crime.

In this shorthand, Lincoln Park will give you Trixies. Logan Square will give you hipsters. Auburn Gresham, poverty and a bullet to the head.

The reality is a lot more complicated. When I taught afterschool science programs, the best school with the brightest, funniest kids was at 115th in Pullman. Meanwhile, the instructors would give sympathy and advice to whomever got stuck with the entitled little Nettelhorst brats in Lakeview.

I’ve gotten kind smiles in Englewood, sneers in the Loop. Of these 1,001 tales, my favorite love story comes from Woodlawn. The biggest pricks, college kids from Evanston on a Lincoln Park pub crawl.

There’s no false equivalence here: Some neighborhoods will get you killed.

But each neighborhood has its own mixture of tedium and terror, pride and dismay, total douchewangs and kindly old ladies down the block. The ratios just vary. The ratios are what will get you killed.

Pill Hill, The Patch, K-Town, Bowmanville. Streeterville, Bucktown, Rogers Park, Roscoe Village. Englewood. The Gold Coast. A network of 77 to more than 200 nicknames. More than 200 little shorthands for “this is what the people are like there and here’s how likely it is to find a job or a gang.”

History clinging to some names, developer malarkey clinging to others. But the names are defined by one factor — what the people who live there call a place.

It ends like this:

So what’s it like not to know your neighborhood? Not to know where you fall on these varying mental maps except for the official community areas (and who goes by those, anyway)?

Your guess is as good as mine. We decided to call it Noble Square and went off to dinner at our new corner bar.

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That love story I mentioned

The college kid pricks