I’ve known this for years, and now I’m not going to do it.

It came to me 15 years ago when I was riding the Blue Line home from a 4:30 to midnight shift hauling kegs and swabbing decks on a tour boat. I looked around at the motley nighttimers on the train and thought “Alone together, tunneling through the dark.”

That was going to be how I ended these 1,001 stories I’ve told, but now I can’t.

I’ve known for months how I was going to end this, but now I’m not going to do that either. I brought a little red notepad to the hospital, excused its presence by filling it with to-do lists about diapers and Vaseline, but really it was to write this last post the first night you were in the world, my little boy.

But I can’t do that either. The thoughts of a man sitting alone in a neonatal intensive care unit along the banks of Lake Michigan, listening to machines connected to suffering babies ping and beep, praying to a god he doesn’t believe in that the docs were doing right by his wife a floor above — those thoughts should not be preserved.

Alone together, huh Sam? You and me in that darkness, hoping the little ones around us all make it.

You’ve been home two days now, little boy. It’s August. Some people I know and some people I don’t will read this in November.

But for the three of us, it’s forever August. It’s a sunny summer Sunday morning. You’re sleeping in your mother’s lap and we’re watching a documentary. Cicadas sing for us through open windows.

The worst thing parenthood does is make you think you’re profound. It tricks us. Just because what I feel now is laden with a heft I didn’t feel a few days ago doesn’t mean I have anything to say.

I have a good baby I think is great because it’s mine. My love’s not deeper than any stranger’s for his or her own offspring. Those new-parent tales of diaper mishaps and weird faces the kid makes are still insufferable, even if I’m the one telling them.

And I’m telling them.

I tell stories. That’s what I do, kiddo. I just got done with 1,001 of them. They were for you. They were always for you, I just didn’t know it.

The good stories, the bad stories, the funny ones, the raunchy ones and the ones that make me cringe to read now — all yours. They treated me well, but I’ve gotten what I can get from them.

“Yet here, poor fool! with all my lore. I stand, no wiser than before,” Goethe’s Faust wailed at the end of his own studies.

I never read “Faust” — I saw that quote in a comic strip. Your dad’s a bit of a fraud there, kid.

Alone together.

So are we alone in this city, tunneling through the darkness with just enough proximity to keep us from feeling lonely? Or do you, your mom and I form something that means we’re never alone?

I don’t know, Sam, and it’s too bright a Sunday morning to waste time wondering. I’m going to close this laptop now. I have better things to do.

There’s so much I want to teach you. There’s so much I want to share with you. And it all starts here in this city by a lake.

Thank you, Chicago. Thank you for all this.

-30-

What does it mean when you remember someone as young? How young? Younger than me? Younger than the composite age of my aggregate readership? Younger than my prejudices of someone too damn fool to listen to good music and respect their my-aged elders?

Sometimes, it’s easy to describe someone as young. Brian was young, too young to need the quad cane at least.

He looked about late 20s, early 30s, but the cane screamed older. It was one of those four-footed medical deals, the transitional step for grandfathers between limping and a walker. But Brian wore it well.

He needed it clearly as he hobbled across LaSalle downtown on a bright, sunny weekday when the employed scuttled toward destination and deadline.

Brian had nowhere to go.

He wore a Cubs hat and long black hair in a messy ponytail. His gait was looped and pained. His attitude beatific and open. He looked at me and smiled when we stopped at a light.

“I like your…”

Here he pointed at his temple, an indicator both that he liked my sideburns and had momentarily lost recall of the word “sideburns.”

I smiled and thanked him in that loud, broad way people use when they want to advertise to the world how open and kind they are. We walked across the street together, traded names and chat. I mentioned a few people who find my ridiculous ’70s muttonchops ridiculous and ’70s. He scoffed.

“You’ve got to live your…”

He lost recall of the words “own life,” but I knew what he meant. I walked to work with a smile on my face.

A few days later, I was heading home, the other end of the workday scuttle. No broad open smiles or beatific air, just frustrated, annoyed commuters smelling of sandwiches and sweat. As tired, annoyed and reeking of that day’s lunch as the rest of the train, I hopped off at my stop and hobbled home.

Steps from my door, a little girl and her mother walked by hand in hand. The little girl saw me and my bright blue plastic sunglasses. Her eyes and smile grew wide.

“I like your sunglasses!” she said, pointing to her temple to show me where the glasses would sit.

“Thank you!” I said in that overly loud sing-song adults use when talking to strange children.

I was 10 steps from my front door. I passed those steps with a smile.

It’s obvious why we don’t do this: It’s creepy as hell from anyone but an evident innocent. There’s a reason the train is full of people wearing earbuds that aren’t playing music. Unlike Brian, my words to a passerby would come off as condescending more than appreciative. Unlike the little girl, if I had paid compliment to a stranger of the opposite gender it would come off as more lech than charming.

But there are those who cast that open air, who simply feel like honesty. When those who can say something nice do, it adds a spot of light to finish the story.

They have biker and shave-culture memorabilia on the walls and stacks of Hells Angels zines next to vintage ’70s Playboys. They have a “pint club” where you can pay $20 for a year of free beer, plus smiling, tattooed men who take as much time as it takes to make sure you’re perfectly happy.

No appointments, cash only. When you walk in, you sign your name on a chalkboard and they call you in turn.

This is how we get haircuts in 21st century America. And I wonder if the smiling man with the thick blonde ponytail, the man calling my name and brushing off my chair, knows we live in the city that shaped how the nation cuts hair.

In 1893, A.B. Moler opened the nation’s first barber college along Wabash Avenue in downtown Chicago. The first of what would be a franchised chain of barber schools across the nation, the Moler system was how we think of barber training today, and how the ponytailed man spreading an apron over me made the shift from operations management for supply-chain companies to barbering. Short-term, for-profit trade schools with students practicing on volunteer heads seeking free or cheap cuts.

Prior to Moler and his fast-growing chain of barber colleges, becoming a barber meant working an apprenticeship. Now instead of a five-year term sweeping hair, shining shoes and hauling garbage, potential hair-shorteners were trained up in two months on everything from scissor anatomy to human anatomy, with (eventually) tips on basic chemistry and contracting pores with galvanic current.

When that first school opened, two things were happening: the economy was tanking and barbers were trying to improve their lot.

When they weren’t surgeons, barbering was considered a servant trade — think “Barber of Seville” or “Marriage of Figaro.” Haircut? You had a guy for that. And in the U.S., that often meant a slave. Freed slaves would often carry these skills and their willingness to do work wealthy white people deemed low-class into their own shops. Soon immigration played, and between 1850 and 1860, immigrant-owned shops (mostly owned by Germans) surpassed the number of black-owned shops. But they failed to win over wealthy whites, instead scraping by working long hours churning out shaves and haircuts for far less than two bits.

In 1861 (and yes, this is relevant), The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies unified, making what we call Italy. And oh man, things got bad. Italians — many of whom already knew barbering — flooded to America starting in the 1880s, willing to work for cheaper rates, for longer hours, in worse conditions than the Germans.

In the 1870s, Barbers’ Protective Unions started popping up in cities across the nation. In 1887, a group of these small unions, which had been affiliated under the Knights of Labor, formed a nationwide barbers’ union, the Journeymen Barbers’ International Union of America. A year later the JBIUA affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. It boomed from 50 members in 1888 to 1,300 in 1891 to 11,600 in 1901. They sought better standards and better wages, and some later members would speak longingly of a national standard price for haircuts.

1893 brought both a national depression called the Panic of 1893 and the nation’s first barber’s college. At 435 Wabash (312 S. Wabash, roughly that big ugly red CNA building, under the modern street plan), A.B. Moler promised to teach a trade in months at a time when people couldn’t afford to take long apprenticeships.

In short, Moler offered a cheap crash course in haircuts, flooding the market with semi-qualified snippers at a time when the industry was looking to professionalize and unionize.

“Cincinnati is flooded with cheap shops, cheap prices and long hours,” wrote a 1915 letter to Journeyman Barber magazine. “This evil will never be eliminated until there is some definite action taken against the Moler Barber College and all its branches.”

“As soon as matters are settled in our new office at Cleveland, Ohio, we will lay before the Postmaster General all matters connected with the Moler system of Barber schools and will seek to have them denied the use of the mails for what we consider is nothing more nor less than a ‘bunco game,’” read an 1899 letter to The Barbers’ Journal magazine.

“Brother Anton made a few remarks about the Moler barber graduates and the way they hustle for Connecticut as soon as they get their diploma. These graduates do not have to pay any license fee in Connecticut until they have been in the State three years, and as a good barber from outside does not care to put up $5.00 when he can get just as good a job for nothing, the Moler graduate jumps in and gets a job — pretty soft for him,” Journeyman Barber, 1912.

“The profit of this excursion will be devoted to fight the Montreal barber school, a branch of the Moler barber school…” from 1905.

A barber battle brewed. On one end, the barber unions who saw theirs as a skilled trade and heritage to protect. On the other, a growing chain of chop shops churning out barbers who needed to get out there and make a living through the scissors as soon as possible. It’s the same argument over for-profit colleges today, from the shadiest Trump U. to Phoenix, DeVry or The Art Institutes (absolutely not the School of the Art Institute of Chicago but they really love when people confuse them). Are they providing low-income people access to a trade when the traditional route is too expensive, or are they scams taking poor people’s money and shoving them a diploma saying, “Yeah, kid, sure. You’re a barber (or designer or IT professional) now”?

The solution for barbering became licensing. Here too, Chicago was at the fore, with a JBIUA union rep so incensed by the “schemed system” that made students “believe that a six or eight week course would sufficiently fit him for a first-class position, or make him a practical and competent boss barber” that he decided to do something about it.

“In 1896 I visited the big school in Chicago to investigate their system — or lack of system — and I found it even worse than I had anticipated,” the rep wrote. “I then wrote an article for our Journal, describing the school and advocating laws to provide for examination and licensing of barbers. That was the beginning of the agitation for license laws.”

The unions fought hard to get states to make barbering a licensed, regulated profession, and A.B. Moler fought back, lobbying against licensing bills across the nation.

“The details of the fight would make too long a story to attempt to give in these columns, so I will simply say that the opposition came from Mr. Moler of barber school fame and A.W. Stark of Milwaukee, and though I despise these human parasites as I do a reptile, still I must credit them with conducting a shrewd campaign and striking at the right time and place,” ran one account of the behind-the-scenes battle at the Wisconsin state Senate.

Minnesota became the first state to regulate barbers in 1897. Other states followed suit and Moler lost other battles, although he managed to get on board with licensing and, by the 1920s, make it sound like he had been on board the entire time. (My guess is the chance to chart national standards that kept students paying for two years instead of two months helped change his mind, but I’m a romantic.)

The ponytailed barber and I talked about regulation, about how the shop with the rock ‘n’ roll overhead and Hells Angels on the walls is a place you can get a proper, official, Illinois-licensed shave (although no one would notice if a shop did unlicensed shaves, as he said there are only two swamped regulators watchdogging every barbershop and salon in the state). We chatted about the barber school that let him shift careers to find the one he truly loved. We chatted about license applications and fees and about how much it would cost to join the “pint club,” which I’m totally going to do, incidentally. Going to a real barbershop rather than a Hair Cuttery, Great Clips or other cheap churn chain is one of my affectations, one I don’t plan to lose.

But I didn’t know then I lived in the city that made it happen how it did, and wherever I go to get my ears lowered, Chicago shaped how it’s done.

Read about a Canaryville shop where Joe’s been cutting hair since the ’40s

Or the barbershop conversation about Chicago Man

Why I write about haircuts

Another affectation of mine

And Chicago’s equally weird creation of the ray gun

As I write this, it’s early-mid August. My wife and I are in the “any day now, any moment now” phase. She’s sprinting like a madwoman, running every errand, cleaning every surface, complaining all the while that she’s being lazy and lumpy. She’s like that. Good enough is never enough. I admire that in her.

But since we don’t know the moment she’ll get a pain and I’ll get a call, I don’t want to schedule this story yet. I don’t want to look back on the moment of my daughter or son’s birth and have it be the day I posted a story about the hate sign dangling lazily in the first neighborhood my child will know.

My neighborhood is lovely. It has tree-lined streets and older homes. I talk to Julio when he’s out walking Rocky and we ask each other how our wives are — mine due to pregnancy, his due to illness. There are parks and restaurants, great bars and the little independent coffee shop where I get my morning dark roast and bagel. We heard the roar of the Cubs’ World Series win from my then-girlfriend’s window. Hell, the mayor lives a few blocks away and you know that fancy boy wouldn’t live anywhere but in the plushest of plushness.

The morning was lovely too. The barista with the nice smile got me my coffee. There was a scruffly little dog outside and I smiled nicely at it.

I looked right, then left to cross Montrose to get to the train station. That’s when I saw the sign written in block letters on a white bed sheet and hung from the Metra overpass.

“I ♥ WHITE BABIES”

I also love white babies, one in particular that I haven’t met as of this writing but will probably have changed 10,000 diapers of by the time this posts. But we know this message isn’t one of love, but of sheer simpering hatred, a giggling, sniping rodent who took our presidentially ordained culture of smear and used it to justify an attack by omission.

“I ♥ WHITE BABIES”

It was the morning commute, so the sign had been timed for attention, the same as the Patriot Front/Blood and Soil fliers littered at two of my coworkers’ suburban Metra stops a week and a half earlier. Like a herpes outbreak, white supremacy is having a flare-up. Like a herpes outbreak, it’s always there under the surface.

An older woman was standing on a grassy corner across from the overpass. She was on her phone. I walked down the block, crossed the street and talked with her. She was angry, flabbergasted and getting a busy signal from the ward office, which wouldn’t open for an hour.

“I’m surprised to see this in Chicago,” she said. “I guess I shouldn’t be.”

Her name is Becky and she’s my neighbor. Same street but a few blocks away. I’d never seen her before and might not again, these tree-lined streets we walk not always conducive for coincidental run-ins.

Our only memory of each other could be calling the ward office, 311, the Chicago Police, the Metra Police and my wife, who went online and messaged the alderman and ward committeeman.

Becky left a message with 311, but the ward office doesn’t have voicemail. I got the city cops who said to call Metra cops who said they’d send someone by. My wife won the day, getting confirmation about nine minutes before I typed this sentence that the committeeman sent the ward superintendent to take “I ♥ WHITE BABIES” off our morning route.

She said the ward super took a photo to confirm the sign was down, and the committeeman sent it on to her. White Chicago’s racism was invisible once more.

But there’s a rodent in Chicago and it’s probably one of my neighbors. It’s probably one of the neighbors of the little white baby my wife is about to bring into the world.

The rodent scampered above a piss-stained underpass in the night, unfurled a banner saying the secret words it didn’t have the spine to say in daylight and skittered off, giggling and high-fiving itself to own the libs.

Good job, coward. Congratulations, you paper tiger.

Even under the cover of darkness, the simp was not human enough to say the words it meant. Congratulating itself on coyness, excusing a lack of spine, guts and scrote as wordplay, it said what babies it loved with a nod and a wink to the babies it didn’t. Black babies. Brown babies. Babies of every shade and color aside from the Ku Klux Klan whiteness one of my neighbors celebrated under cover of night were not loved, the sign means.

The thing, the it that, infused with the spirit of Donald Trump’s America, hung this banner scampered away from it like a sun-shocked gerbil. In its effort to prove itself racist, it proved itself coward as well.

The sign was as beautifully made as you can get with bed sheet and Sharpie. The letters were uniform and had been blocked and kerned correctly. The rodent took time to do it right.

I love my neighborhood. I love Julio and Rocky, I love Jen and her wife Andrea a few floors up in my building. I love our Indian American alderman, who in 2018 is still the only Asian American ever to sit on the Chicago City Council, and the ward super who climbed a train bridge to rip down a sign. I love Becky now too, an old white woman enraged to the point of action by hate speech she could have just breezed past. This is my home. This is my community, and by the time you read this, the community and home of my own white baby.

I stood with Becky on a grassy corner, wondering how many of my neighbors walking by saw the sign and nodded at it quietly.

The racism of North Side versus South

The better side of North Center

The museum of the Pullman porter

Sometimes they’re dirty.

Sometimes they’re actually streets and once in a while they’re made of wood.

But I sing the alley electric.

Chicago came not to praise the alley, but to bury it. In garbage, in recycling dumpsters idiots keep putting plastic bags in, in rat patrol signs and plastic rat traps that appear to be Raid Hotels for the Templetons, Remys, Rizzos, ROUSes and NIMHbys of The Windy Second City On The Make, and, yes, a spot of pee when you’re coming back from the bars and home is just a liiiiiiitle too far away.

Chicago has 1,900 miles of alley, the city tells. For comparison, there are 4,000 miles of streets. If my math’s right, that means for every mile of street there’s 2,508 feet of alley. For every foot of road, there’s 5.7 inches of dumpster and rat trap.

We are the alley capital of America, sayeth a 2015 Curious City I would love to summarize here but even if you add a bunch of dumb jokes to someone else’s story it’s still plagiarism in my book I’m talking to you Jezebel and Gizmodo and that whole crowd.

But I praise the alley not for facts or figures but because the kids down the block had their dad spray paint a pentagonal home plate for Wiffle ball. I praise it because of the basketball hoops on odd garages and the old man down my block who spends weekends with the garage door open, tippling light beer and tinkering lovingly with his classic car.

I praise the alley for every hidden place it reveals, and for keeping our streets from being lined with garbage. I praise it because, dang it, that is in all cases the fastest walking route and at least the most interesting on bike.

A man was stabbed to death in the alley across from my office. He tried to take that shorter, faster route late at night and his family will pay for that forever. A secondary road map designed to hide all that’s ugly will catch ugly things. Rats crawl in alleys. The homeless die there. The same dark corners that preserve old painted signs and graffiti that glimmers with shine and promise can hide other things as well.

But people die in the streets too. And blaming an action on a feature of infrastructure incorporated into the city’s DNA since I&M canal commission hiree James Thompson platted an alley behind every not-yet-Chicago road in 1830 (OK, I’ll summarize the Curious City a bit) is a spurious bit of puff. Blaming a murder on an alley would be like blaming my neighbor kids’ love of Wiffle on the structure. An alley is a place both are made easier, but not the cause of either.

So I praise the alley and watch for the dark corners. I avoid the neighborhood pee and the downtown cigarette butts flicked from lips of office drones. I cut through on bike and foot and watch rats skitter by, knowing their equally diseased cousin the pigeon prowls the open air of more public avenues.

I like alleys because they feel like secrets and like the other half of what we are. The streets are what we try to be when we want to feel pretty. The alleys are who we are when we’re at home.

Read about a cabbie’s lies

Read about a Beverly bookshop

And about the time I found “The Jefferson Davis Coloring Book” in the alley behind my apartment building

Remember Templeton? “Charlotte’s Web”?

Her hair is the color of a wheat field, pulled to ponytail for convenience sake. She looks about my age — late 30s — but could be older with the smile subtracting years.

The espresso is rich and bitter. The croissants are bold and buttery, and at least the one I bit into oozed with molten chocolate.

As the order comes up and I ask if the French café and the French school are connected.

“No,” she says, with slight annoyance, and the smile drops, I presume from the constancy of the question or the assumption that her French and theirs must mingle.

To wander there on a sunny morning, you have to wander past a storefront Buddhist temple. The red doors are open — a rarity — and a waft of incense thickens the air along the street. A woman wanders out, her face as straight and annoyed as any worshiper putting in their Sunday morning obligation.

From inside those open doors, a clacking pairs with the incense. Some ritual, I guess. A clock-like, constant clacking of wood on wood as the reverent stand facing the incense, clack-maker and three serene Buddha. Each has a rainbow halo behind it, buzzing circles of neon lights shooting like a Republic serial ray gun from the Buddhas’ heads.

Before that, we crossed the line of bars, closed for the morning, a street for revelry and stumbling at night, now the parade grounds for dashing young white women in prim ponytails and workout athleisure wear carrying their Starbucks coffee cups down the road.

Here, a gay bar where the old-timers grow grayer each night. Here, a dying restaurant where the Hispanic family looks longingly for the customers who used to buy tacos and overstuffed burritos.

Here, home.

And Stanley’s Fresh Fruits and Vegetables is up for sale.

It seems odd that my wife and my morning adventure of coffee and croissant brings to mind a discount grocery store four miles to the south, but it does. Did. I wrote about Stanley’s before, 700 stories and a lifetime ago. It’s one of those weird, wonderful oddities a big city offers — a place that buys up produce too ripe for the mega-grocers and sells it for a pittance.

But it’s in the blast radius of the massive Lincoln Yards development the mayor wants to drop upon the city. The project’s an A-bomb of wealth, blasting everything poor and weak and human out of the district.

Two miles away from Stanley’s, Mr. Ping Pong has closed.

It was a combination U-Haul rental shop and ping-pong competition space I swore I was going to write about someday. I swore I’d get to it in these 1,001 stories, but I kept putting it off. I was busy. I’d done too many stories in Ukie Village already. I was tired and, hell, it’s not going anywhere.

Then it went somewhere. Rent got too high. Another odd little spot closed.

So many places I’ve written about have closed. Pen shops, book stores, diners, little gardens old ladies thought might fight gangs, bars. Corner spots mowed down as everything becomes nicer and more efficient and wealthier and more… Rahmish. We’re living in Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago because he refuses to live in ours, and it’s not getting better.

I’ll cherish the smell of incense and the laughter of old-timers smoking outside the gay bar while I can. I’ll savor the smiling woman’s baking and the sound of children chattering in French as they walk past clacking temples while I still can. These are the quiet moments of the nook I call home. My sounds would be the knocking of ping-pong balls if I lived another place, the morning rush of grocery shoppers if I lived another. My sounds are no better, they’re just mine.

The future will be nicer. Convenient. Wealthy. And as homogeneous as rice in risotto. When the profitable businesses drive out the poor ones and the hyperprofitable drive out the ones that just get by, all our quiet moments will sound the same.

I mean, she has other questions too.

Why would anyone send those in the first place? Why did the one guy who joked about how easy it would be for “some creep” to send her penile photography respond to her reply with his own cockshot and the word “Bam!” Why do men think their perfectly functional appendages have some sort of alluring aesthetic value as well?

But the photos sent unsolicited by virtue of being a woman on a dating site where the penis is as soft as the ice cream we were devouring, that’s a puzzler too.

Each year to celebrate the end of school, my teacher wife celebrates Milkshake Day. Part celebration, part limiting herself to one Margie’s Candies visit a year so she doesn’t blow up like slow-motion footage of Mount St. Helens, Milkshake Day is as traditional a kickoff for summer as Memorial Day, beach grilling or people online screaming that Chicago is a violence-laden hellhole.

There’s an ever-changing cast of attendees — at first just her, then I joined the roster, now a collection of people who happen to be free the day of including the friend who was sharing online dating woes because if my wife had been telling me about all the creeps she meets on dating sites, I’d have more questions than why the guy said “Bam!”

Over the last several years, I’ve never lived more than a few blocks from a Margie’s Candies. There are only two locations, so that’s an accomplishment. It has been a hot-day treat, an unthreatening meeting spot for blind dates, a space to show nervous out-of-towners that Chicago isn’t a violence-laden hellhole, or if it is at least it knows a good sundae.

The Margie’s on Western — the original location, not the Montrose Avenue site of Milkshake Days — has been scooping homemade ice cream since 1921. The decor and vibe of both locations has stayed firmly in the ’20s, with some nods to the century since, like old photos of when the Beatles visited the Western shop (they had Atomic Sundaes) or posters and fliers of upcoming plays, school fundraisers and local events.

Everyone comes to Margie’s on a hot day. A woman with a half-shaved head and a sleeveless T declaring gender dead as a concept waited patiently behind a family straight out of a 1950s sitcom. All races, creeds, ages waited in the snake-through-the-shop, sprawl-to-the-sidewalk line.

The shop stays the same, more or less. The crowds change. Their styles, genders, races, tastes all grow more diverse and free. But the sweet, cold taste that once fueled talks of sock hops and going steady now drives conversations about getting unrequested cock photography sent to handheld computing devices.

I wonder what people will be talking about on Milkshake Days 40 years from now.

Letters, birthday cards, photos of people I had forgotten about and of people I won’t ever be able to. Trinkets and trophies hard-won but now more a matter of storage space than personal pride.

I’ve googled some people from that shared past, disparate present. Of course their photos are lovely and their web presence curated. Of course no one posts the moments of whimsy and maudlin and floating, aimless sad. No one of this crowd but me was dumb enough to put anything but happy things online.

So I went to my happy place — the Chicago public transit system.

I like the train because it’s the best place to be alone in the city. Our shared social contract to avert eyes and pretend the others don’t exist gives makes the crowd our most-private spot. Wordlessly, we enter a covenant to be wordless. Together, we playact loneliness.

The privacy and shared delusion we aren’t heaped in a 2.7-million-strong anthill has increased with technology. Wires in the ears and eyes on the screen have outpaced books and the view from the trains that sail above trees as distraction. I partake, of course, texting and communicating with the people I love, but when I truly want to feel alone, I watch the crowd.

There’s always one or two of me on the train, people who out of curiosity or motion sickness can’t bear to bury themselves in books, magazines, folded but increasingly small newspapers or phones. There’s no rhyme or reason, no type of people watcher.

Sometimes I see a party girl cliché scan the room with a poet’s eye, or a heaping hulk of muscles, gang tats and fear sneak out a peaceful eye-smile that would fit a bodhisattva. Disturbed old men and little children can be fascinated by a leaf outside the window or the shirt of a person in the corner, while people whose garb was assembled to scream “ARTIST” bury themselves in whatever the newest version is of Angry Birds, Candy Crush or 2048.

I cast no aspersion on the people who use technology to reach their loves, or escape the minotaur of boredom stalking the transit map. My stranger-watching is no deeper, no less deep. Their pixels are as much a part of this world as they are, and it makes no matter who chooses to gaze on what, whom or which and when I think that, I feel better about the old photos from the dusty box.

The lines I read and reread in college — for enlightenment and to woo nerdy women, two concepts nondual at the time — floated into my mind.

“All this is full, all that is full. From fullness, fullness comes. When fullness is taken from fullness, fullness still remains.”

It doesn’t matter that my life pointed one way and a long-gone stranger’s has pointed another any more than it matters that this woman’s phone screen is turned to this and this woman’s to that. All this is full. All this is life, and the train rocks me to a nod-off sleep as I head toward the work I chose.

For context, in the May 4 story #923: Simon Pure about meeting a friend’s baby for the first time, I accidentally wrote that we were putting “grilled unions” on the hamburgers instead of “onions.”

…

Touching story today – truly. You are going to be a fantastic father. Just one question about the cannibal barbecue – are you grilling couples in relationships or whole labor organizations?

I edited that, woman.

Not in my version two minutes ago.

Refresh from the cache. Control F5

…

Meeting my mother and talking to her are two wildly different experiences. You see her intently gardening or knitting — so much knitting — and you expect a pleasant chat about, like, crumpets or something. But then she opens her mouth and starts talking about the Women’s March or her recent exhibition of sculptures based on pre-Columbian trophy heads.

But she is motherly and kind, sweet and funny. She nags me when she feels I’m not doing enough creative writing and she always wants the best for me.

…

So do you start them live like lobsters?

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When I broke my arm when I was 12, she ran back in the house, grabbed some frozen peas to use as a cold pack and raced through the streets to get me to the hospital, explaining to me that if the police pulled us over for running red lights, they’d probably give us an escort to the ER.

When I told her I was going to ask my then-girlfriend to marry me, she said “That would be my dream!”

When she was telling my wife about my late grandfather’s insect collection, she whipped out a five-inch rhinoceros beetle as example with no warning.

And she makes fun of me for accidentally implying we were grilling up Local 305 to top our hamburgers.

…

Not a good first experience for an infant if you don’t mind my saying so

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Mom, you’re weird, very funny and I’m told you’re where I get it from. I love you very much. Happy Mother’s Day, and if you’re ticked I shared your cannibal text messages, wait ’til you see what I’ve got lined up for Dad in June.

The Dailings visit an art museum

This one has my sister in it too

A mall with a door clown

They hid from the rain under the small alcove created by the locked glass doors of the laundromat that went away more than a year ago. Despite the building owners’ window-posted plans of a luxury bar/restaurant deal filling the space, new suitors never courted the corner lot once the poor people clothes washery was ousted.

Now it’s a glass-walled corner lot, vacant but for the Halloween costume shop that stops by in September. It not being September, the lot’s only purpose is to provide a small alcove for orange-hoodied construction workers to hide from the rain.

I want to write about the homeless guy camped on the corner by one of the two 7-Elevens flanking my office. It’s the one where I once saw a roach crawl in the coffee machine. The homeless guy outside of it, I’ve seen more than once. He’s the one with the smart eyes, the just-off but still coherent eyes. The hungry eyes.

I had no change, walking up checking pockets and making sure to make eye contact and address the man directly because that’s what wussy liberals like me do. We don’t fix the problem, just telegraph that we’re the good ones. But I figure the guy gets treated like a guy for a second, so that’s all good too.

He asks me to buy him something. Feeling rich and bored, I say sure and end up paying Chicago rates to buy a bum a pack of smokes. I get it. Tobacco is an appetite suppressant.

I want to write about the pretty lady I saw on the train, or the prettier man who looked like he spent more time on his clothing. I want to write about the rain drying on my suit lapel or the humid wind gust that feels hot and cold at the same moment. I want to write about the globular white fella I saw the day before sitting on the outside seat of a crowded car so no one could sit near him. He put a FedEx document envelope in the window seat as women stood around. I’m like 80 percent sure the blobby man with legs spread into the aisle was a right-wing political operative I used to know during suburban days.

I want to write about all these people, but there’s no point or purpose. There’s nothing but a recitation of images, sounds and smells — scene-setting for a scene that never unfolds.

The homeless man just said thanks for the Newport 100s. The construction workers hiding from the rain only spoke words I couldn’t gather. I didn’t ask the seat-lump if he was Hastert’s old flack and, if so, what he’d been up to since that whole… thing.

I want to write about the things that mean so much to me, but know they mean nothing to you.

Sure, you might like a turn of phrase, and if Camp or Casino read this they might guess which flack I’m talking about. But it twinges that I’ll never get across what the sound of Polish, Klingon or Ukrainian sounds like from an alcove. You’ll never know why I bought the smokes or what “pretty girl” looks like to me.

You’re walking through your Chicago today, and your Chicago isn’t big conversations about the meaning of existence, or stunning revelations of whatever news means to you. It’s sights, sounds, meaningless recitations. It’s your homeless person, your train companions, your construction workers in their language.

I hope you see how beautiful it is. I hope you see only the boring get bored. And I hope your own walk among the walking crowds breaks and lifts your heart each day, and that you find someone to tell.

Three true things

Treating guys like guys

“Haircut journalism”

The sound of rain on concrete