To be fair, I’m not entirely certain I fell asleep at Protomartyr’s late-night gig at Subterranean on Saturday. I know I was on the balcony listening to Joe Casey’s melodic groaning and wailing. I know I was watching the crowd of punks below pushing and hopping and yelping along to the music. I know the bass and drums were as tight and precise as a German watch.

Then I know I was leaning on the railing. And I know I could feel my eyes getting droopier and heavier and that late nights aren’t what they were for me. And I know my mind started to wander as it does right before I doze off. And I know anyone who saw me would just think I was really interacting with the music on a deep, emotional level if I just let my eyes close for just a…

And I know the concert ended. Lights went on, a line at the bathroom and then out into the nightlit streets of Wicker Park.

In fairness, it had been a day. I started it by burning my foot with molten plastic (I blanked and put an electric tea kettle on the range), then celebrated my foot with a bike ride, walking tour, party, other party I couldn’t go to and finally punk show where the doors opened at 10 and the opening act kicked off at 10:30. It was after 11 by the time Protomartyr stepped up to kick the crowd into frenzy.

I rocked and got into the music and all that good stuff. I joked with the friend who brought me and, if it was in fact sleep I fell into leaning on the balcony, it was only a seconds-worth. I did well for a man at the point where mid- becomes late-30s.

I wouldn’t have felt bad if it hadn’t been Protomartyr.

Frontman Joe Casey formed the band at age 35. No stage experience, tons of stage fright, he got on board with a group of 20-somethings to create a band that screeched the noises he wanted and has been at it for years since.

The show is an experience. Guitarist Greg Ahee, drummer Alex Leonard and bassist Scott Davidson are the traditional Detroit rock set. Late 20s, slightly shady, dressed and coiffed like they’re going to either sell you meth or a Christmas tree, but either way you’re going to meet them in a parking lot at night.

Then comes Casey, striding in with a suit jacket and slacks looking like the high school guidance counselor who sits backwards in a chair to look cool and relatable.

Then he opens his mouth and I don’t know if it’s punk or post-punk or rock or whatever category in the Russian nesting doll of music genres it falls in, but it’s original and sharp and savvy and I want more more more.

Even if I’m such a fogey I have a hard time keeping my eyes open.

I didn’t have enough energy to attend a show that a man three years older than me was putting on. You put me in my place, Protomartyr. And I thank you for it.

We live in sunsets now, and warm nights of sushi and wine on patios. We live in texts from friends letting us know of impromptu get-togethers after.

That’s it, right? Life’s like this forever now?

It’s not summer in Chicago. The calendar says spring, so spring it must be. But a hot flash in the air has baked the world, turned it golden. Sun shines, the birds sing and the street musician on Grand and State brought out the electric keyboard because he’s pretty sure it’s not going to get rained on.

Shorts are out, and T-shirts. We have to re-learn to look for whooshing bikes when we cross a street, re-teach ourselves to keep eyes above the necklines.

And nights taste like drips of sweet wine, luring us to wander neon streets for ever and ever and always.

For always.

It’s a story I’ve written before along this endless, deathless cycle of spring, summer, fall, the darkening time. It’s a story I’ll feel each day I realize I want the world to live like this forever.

I want the world to be warmth, fresh food and nights with friends. I want the world to be bike rides and T-shirts.

In a few months, when I tire of sunburn prickles and sweat in uncomfortable places, I’ll want fall again. And then I’ll want snowballs and radio carols.

But for now, all I want is warm nights on patios. All I want is for this to be the way we live now.

In praise of fall

A scene of winter

Bikes and the scent of chocolate

She had mid-cropped hair bleached to a sandy platinum, the perfect color for her to have.

She wore the perfect big glasses, the perfect wafting dress, the perfect marigold top that an ingénue in a 1930s MGM romp would giggle over and say, “This old thing?” She didn’t giggle or act a part, though. She was just a woman riding a train to work — pretty, but giving me thoughts more of the calendar than the bedroom.

She was perfectly, perfectly 22.

My goal’s not to objectify this woman the way the way writers my age and gender tend to — couching their intent through plant-related adjectives like “blossoming,” “flowering” and, worse, “budding.”

I don’t know this person. I don’t know if she’s nice or mean, a brilliant poet or a sort of dumb mathematician. I don’t know her hopes and dreams or if she really can’t handle dairy. Heck, I don’t even know if she’s actually 22.

I’m not trying to turn her into an object. I’m trying to turn her into an idea. And that idea is possibility.

Glancing at this person with the hours of coiffing designed to look effortless and the demeanor that hasn’t yet seen the slings and arrows of mundane fortune, I saw possibility given human form.

She might meet a guy or girl and run off to suburbia for a house full of kidlings. She might stay in town, growing weary of streets and smog but addicted to the electricity the city casts at night. She might move to Brazil and become an accountant or decide a house full of pet lizards all named Chico is a preferable fate to having to learn all that Portuguese and double-entry bookkeeping.

The point’s not that this freedom better. I hated the rootlessness of my 22, when I was the one glowing with youth at the Blue Line stop in Wicker Park. I like things now, when I’ve taken a few more steps toward the choices I want.

She didn’t seem happy or comfortable in her skin and 22ness. That was perfect too. She’s stepping into a swirling, dividing hedge maze that could take her to kidlings or lizards Chico, Portugal or just to a commute downtown. It’s natural that she looked a mixture of scared and confident, poised and anxious.

I silently wished her well at being 22, or whatever age she might be. I wished her well at youth.

Read a poem about Wicker Park

In which I wish another young woman well

In which I was wished well, but didn’t get it until later

It ruffles a few sheets of construction paper taped to the walls, souvenirs from the cast party for Sam Bailey’s web series You’re So Talented. “You’re so…” was printed, leaving party attendees to fill out the rest.

Bailey only kept the snarky ones, the ones where her friends jokingly called her trifling, bougie, thirsty, mediocre.

All the walls in the small studio are covered in taped images, whiteboards and Post-Its. Outlines for a someday future season of You’re So Talented, photos of actors and artists for inspiration, dry erase diagrams of odd film-ese.

Past the note-strewn desk and table, past the mismatched chairs, the coffee maker, array of snacks and not-well-hidden bottle of Scotch, one section of the wall is devoted to Bailey’s upcoming web series, set to start filming in August and debut in early 2017.

There are taped-up stills of Bollywood films to nail the South Asian movie color scheme, pics from indy arthouse fare like “Pariah” and “Obvious Child” to inspire on lighting, framing or other technical details. And there’s a line of headshots of the new series’ cast.

There’s not a white face among them.

What the World Looks Like

Bailey’s new project, Brown Girls, will solely feature actors of color. No white people will appear in the show, even as extras.

The show, which is funded by local arts grants and an ongoing GoFundMe campaign, focuses on a Pakistani-American queer writer in Pilsen and her best friend, who is black, getting through their mid-20s, with all the talk of sex, love, art and job troubles that implies.

“They don’t shy away from talking about their race when it’s necessary to the conversation, but I think any art that’s done by a marginalized people becomes a political statement,” Bailey said.

Race will be there, of course, even when not discussed. The music the characters listen to, the clothes they wear, the art they see, the food they eat, the color schemes of the Bollywood stills taped to the wall. It will show women of color living the lives they live.

The revolution of Brown Girls, Bailey said, is simply “the act of existing.”

The series is the brainchild of 26-year-old writer Fatimah Asghar, a Pakistani-American poet from the East Coast who is of Kashmiri descent. The decision to cast entirely people of color was in part a reaction to the over-representation of white people in media, from sitcoms to film.

“That’s just so not what my world looks like at all,” Asghar said. “It’s really not what the world of a lot of my friends looks like. I wanted to kind of drastically change that by just being like, ‘Well what would happen if we did a show where this was the rule, where all these roles were played by people of color?’”

Inspired by Asghar’s real-life relationship with her best friend, only the two main characters were written with pre-determined races. All the other characters were written with the knowledge the eventual casting would be a person of color, but not designating which race that character must be.

The point, Asghar said, wasn’t to check off a list of every race and make sure everyone got in. The point was to create real, believable, human characters.

“People of color are multifaceted and complicated and aren’t just reduced down to what their race is,” she said.

Bailey said another underrepresented aspect of life the series will show is how different communities of color interact with each other.

“It’s not like all black people, it’s not all Pakistani-Americans, it’s not all Latinos, but it’s all of them sharing a space together,” Bailey said. “That’s my group of friends, that’s Fati’s group of friends, but we don’t get to see it a lot, often, in media.”

Staggered

Bailey’s previous web series, You’re So Talented, detailed the lives of a young black woman, whom she played, and her two best friends, another black woman and a white man. This will be the 27-year-old Logan Square native’s first series where her role is entirely behind the camera.

Bailey extended the philosophy behind the cast to the crew. The entire production team is either people of color or queer. She said she was “staggered” by the response. She had to start turning people away from the project, even though the pay was less than what they could get on other shows. They just wanted to work in that environment.

Similarly, Bailey and Asghar haven’t been able to accommodate all the actors who have approached them. They pledge future roles in future seasons or include them in party or other group scenes.

A 10-minute-an-episode web series simply doesn’t have enough space for all the actors they want to highlight.

“I felt guilty that I couldn’t give them more roles to work on,” Bailey said.

There has been pushback on the concept, like when a line producer who went to a script readthrough in March asked to talk to Asghar after.

“She said, ‘I really think you should include white people in the series’ — and she was a woman of color — but she was like ‘I think you should include white people in the series because it won’t get picked up by major news channels or a network series. If there’s no white people, there’s just zero percent chance this is going to happen,’” Asghar said, chuckling. “I was like, ‘I don’t care.’”

Most of the comments have been positive, but calling for more diversity in everything from sexuality to gender to race and body type.

“I had people go like ‘Could you make sure there’s brown plus-sized girls? Can you make sure there’s Asians who look like that?’ I was like oh my God, I want to, I so want to, but how do we get that in 10 minutes?” she said. “It shows how much people are dying and thirsty for that representation.”

The main concern Bailey and Asghar have as the air conditioner chuffs its best effort into the photo and Post-It laden studio space, is that they can’t do enough.

The story of a friendship between African-American and South Asian women coupled with the Latina queer love interest told by an entirely minority or queer cast and crew can’t check all the boxes, can’t include all the actors they want to work with, the races and cultures they want to highlight, the worlds they want to show.

They have to content themselves with making art.

“The story is very intimate,” Bailey said. “It’s very personal. It’s very beautiful, very multi-layered. It’s very feminine. It’s very brown. It’s very all these things, and that’s enough for me. But if anything, it shows me there’s that much more to do.”

Learn more about Brown Girls

Watch You’re So Talented

See Fatimah Asghar’s work

Read about another working artist

And about a lost friend’s last canoe

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He wore light khakis. He wore a checked button-up shirt under a cardigan under another cardigan.

He looked around, his fine mustache twitching, and found a spot. From his canvas bag advertising the Environmental Law and Policy Center, he pulled a folded-over copy of the New York Times. He pushed his thin bifocals up on his nose, twitched the ‘stache a time or two more and proceeded to read the Times, article by article, in order.

…

She sat on the bus in one of the inward-facing seats. She was young, Latina, very very cool.

She was old enough for a septum piercing and tattoos, young enough to retain a thin patina of acne. She toyed on her phone, did Millennial things.

She wore a jean jacket with the sleeves cut off. On her arm, a tattoo.

VIII XVIII XX

That was it. No accompanying illustration, no design or pattern. Just those 11 letters grouped into three Roman numerals.

VIII XVIII XX

8 18 20

A code? An address? High school locker combination forever scrimshawed into her flesh? I ripped through the possibilities as the Division bus bumbled through the bottleneck on Goose Island.

When the bus neared Wicker Park and she made moves as if to gather her bag, I asked.

She flashed a broad, full smile as she told me about VIII XVIII XX. It meant 8/18/20. August 18, 1920.

“It’s when women got the vote,” she said.

…

The man with the kitten shirt is not who I want to be.

He was a stumbling drunk, even compared to the other stumbling drunks of Wrigleyville after a Cubs game. Among this tide of blue, one young guy walked (stumbled) in a dangly sleeveless T-shirt screen printed with the faces of dozens of kittens.

It was a hip shirt worn hiply. He wore a hip hat of hip-cut curly locks. He trod with hipness, dipping between sidewalk and roadway as his leisure and Wrigleyville’s foot traffic dictated.

Hiply, he slammed his fist onto the trunk of a limousine for no reason, continuing his walk as if nothing had happened.

The limo driver yelled something at him from the front seat, but the man kept walking down the road, not looking back at the man whose livelihood he had just damaged for funsies.

The limo driver was a short, somewhat tubby Middle Eastern man dressed in a uniform all of black. Bright-polished black shoes, pressed black trousers, ironed black short-sleeved dress shirt. He got out of the car, watched as the kitten-shirted man continued his hip march and then inspected the damage done to his job.

The kitten man had dented the trunk. For fun. For no reason.

The black-clad limo driver grumbled a bit, got some well-deserved condolences from Cubbie-clad onlookers and then went about doing his job.

…

The world seems angry, full of noise. It seems a place of loud declaration, rancor and yelling, one where my opinion is just as valid as your fact. Sometimes it seems like our culture celebrates willful ignorance as purity of thought, hotheaded backlash as purity of emotion.

But then there’s a white-haired guy on the train reading the entire New York Times, article by article.

Then there’s a young woman on the bus who has such a deep abide for her forebears’ struggles she had a date needled into her skin.

Then there’s a man who stays calm and professional even when damage is done on a lark.

I want to be informed. I want to respect the past, when the past deserved it. I want to show grace under fire.

I still worry about cancer and racism, about the orange-skinned hateball running for president and about when it’s appropriate to tell people on Facebook to Shuckup about Hodor. But there are people walking these streets who show, not through words or speeches or loud declaration, who they really are.

And who they are is who I want to be.

Support 1,001 Chicago Afternoons on Patreon

Three True Moments in North Side Chicago

The Bare Minimum Voting Guide

Just a reminder that there are only a few days left to vote for me as the best bahn mi sandwich in Chicago

And a young woman holds CDs.

“Would you like to buy my poetry?” she asked.

The stack of CDs in her hand — not her band, not her hip-hop, not bootlegs of “The Dark Knight Rises” like the last guy I wrote about hustling discs on North — was poetry, recorded spoken word edited with music and sound. Poetry with the name of the album hastily Sharpied on the disc, poetry in a green sleeve with a black square of construction paper taped to the outside and a self-designed logo more tenderly handwritten in silver marker.

Poetry.

“Thank you for stopping. It’s been a long day,” she said, a little too weary for 20 years old.

Janelle used to be a paralegal. She hated it.

Now she spends a couple hours a day on that street corner, working the crowd with her boyfriend’s words. They collaborate on this. He used to have an officey-type job he hated as much as Janelle hated her paralegal gig.

Words were their passion, not office work. So they quit.

They did it, just walked. Both of them.

“We traveled a while, formed a publishing house,” Janelle told me as the workers and green-clad future drunks filed past us on the street.

The house is called called JAT. Their shared initials. Now they sell CDs on the street, ebooks online. 10 bucks a pop for lines of thought with a construction paper and silver Sharpie logo taped to the outside.

“There are so many people here who are like freelance writers or artists or, or glassblowers,” she said. “We want to show them you don’t have to do what you’re told.”

The poetry on the album is good. I’m fussy about poetry, fussy to the point of snobbishness, but I liked it. Lots of stuff about entrepreneurship versus hustling, and naturally about following your dreams.

The title of this story is taken from track 6.

I hope it works for them. As tempting as it is to harp on their age, I won’t chalk their move to naïveté — the verse on the album alluded to lives a lot harder than anything I’ve ever had.

They quit their jobs and sell albums by the train station. I won’t call them heroes and I won’t call them fools. Whatever definition of success they’re working toward, it’s different than mine, than the Trump assassins’, than the green-clad drunks’ or the weak-voiced old man’s, shaking his cup for passersby.

Whatever their definition of success, they’re working toward it. I hope they get there.

See their site

The last guy I wrote about selling discs on North

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Read the original stories from the teaser:

Hunter of Magic

Goodnight Wicker Park

The Smell of Magic

Cockroach on the Factory Floor

A Blue (Line) Christmas

Miss Sweetfeet Breaks

The Evidence of Leather

Goodnight overpriced, ridiculous bars.

Goodnight lingering odor of weed.

Goodnight jackass on velocipede.

A goodnight to Wicker, where coolness is king,

Although it’s been a good decade since this place was The Thing.

Goodnight Milwaukee Avenue bike rider clog.

Goodnight gutterpunk and your bandana-clad dog.

Goodnight dueling donut shops, each trying to richen,

“Glazed” by putting Rosie back in the kitchen.

Goodnight old time dives, seeing their way out,

In favor of artisanal microbrewed stout.

Goodnight hip new spots that could see a way in, yo,

Each opening trumpeted by DNAinfo.

Goodnight Proco Joe. (Hey, is it Pro-koh or Prah-koh?)

And goodnight to Big Star and its sad, whitewashed taco.

Goodnight buildings. Goodnight lights.

Goodnight dwindling number of local non-whites.

We Columbus your culture, we foodie your food.

But say “gentrify” and we consider you rude.

“Resistance is futile!” yells craft cocktail Borg.

“Now go fund my band at Indiegogo dot org.”

Our discernment is wee;

Our entitlement, mondo.

Goodnight furniture store.

Good morning, new condo.

Goodnight Margaret Wise Brown. Sorry I screwed with your text.

And goodnight Logan and Humboldt. Sweet dreams, ‘cause you’re next.

Comment on this story

Indiegogo campaigns are hipster nonsense, but Patreon, however…

A poem about Christmas

Five poems about mayoral campaign finances

A rhyming bit about a very expensive unicycles

It was a column that ran July 20 of that year, entitled — at least in my world-weary used bookstore copy of the Royko collection “Like I Was Sayin’” — “’California Burger’ Can Drive You Nuts.”

In the column, Royko and an unnamed friend stopped in a fern-laden early ‘80s California cuisine restaurant for lunch.

“Hamburger,” I said to the waitress.

“With or without pecans?” she said.

“With or without what?” I asked.

“Pecans,” she said.

“Uh, maybe you misunderstood me. I asked for a hamburger.”

“Yes, I heard you. With or without pecans?”

It went downhill from there.

Royko couldn’t figure out if you ask for pecans well-done, he couldn’t get Velveeta on top and, when he had to ask for mustard, it was “that brown, French kind” instead of “honest, yellow American mustard, which is the only mustard you should put on hot dogs or hamburgers.”

He described the burger when it came as a challenging mess the size and shape of a baseball, inedible not because of its taste because he couldn’t get his mouth around it.

And then he noticed everyone around him was eating their hamburgers with forks and knives.

There are many gray areas in life. Some things can’t be called right or wrong.

But it is wrong to eat certain foods with knives and forks. Ribs, hot dogs, fried chicken, egg rolls, and hamburgers—they should all be eaten with hands.

To eat a hamburger with a knife and fork is as unnatural as drinking a shot and a beer through a straw.

The column concluded with Royko stopping in for a real hamburger and some sanity at the Billy Goat, that downtown haunt of Royko’s known as a newspaperman watering hole and for the Saturday Night Live cheezborger cheezborger cheezborger skit (Royko spelled it “chizbooger”).

When he joked with owner Sam Sianis about putting pecans in the burgers, Sianis grabbed a bag of beer nuts and slapped it on a hamburger.

“OK, you got nuts in your chizbooger.”

Ah, sanity prevails.

The column, like much of Royko’s writing, had an undercurrent of class war in it. There was a defiant Us vs. Them through it, the real Chicagoans represented by Sianis and Royko facing off against the pecan-shilling waitress and “a wan young man at the next table… sipping white wine with his hamburger.”

So I wonder what Royko would have thought of the burger at Small Cheval.

Small Cheval is a new spot in the Wicker Park/Bucktown area in a freestanding Milwaukee Ave. storefront that seems to have a new restaurant shut down every few months. It’s an offshoot of Au Cheval, which both Bon Appetit and the Food Network recently crowned best burger in the nation.

The name Au Cheval, despite literally translating as “by horse,” is apparently French cooking slang for having an egg on top of something, like the egg is riding a horse. Whatever. If Royko can have his burger at the Goat, I can eat at Small Horse.

But would it past the Royko test? If we’re using hamburgers to draw the lines in the class war, where would Small Cheval fit?

The mood in the burger shop on Milwaukee was the deliberately crafted version of socially acceptable punk common to the West Town area. The speakers blared bass-heavy dance music at a level that made everyone inside shout, that old restaurant trick to make a place appear jumping.

Among the shop’s stained wood — apparently a holdover from the last place to go out of business there — you wait in a line to order both your burger and your beer. I guess getting a second drink would require a return trip. I stood slightly annoyed as the couple in front of me chatted and gabbed with the woman taking the orders and pouring them drinks.

It’s perfectly normal to chat with the bartender, but having the bartender also be the only person taking food orders meant I was worried the seat I wanted would be snatched up while the couple deliberated whether to do a round of shots (they eventually did).

The only person there other than me with any gray in his hair was bussing tables.

The burger was fantastic. Greasy and fatty and falling apart in my hands. I was a bit annoyed when I got home from Small Cheval to find out from Yelp that they do their burgers differently than they do at Au Cheval. My incredibly tasty meatfest was not the best in the nation. Still a damn good burger amid the young and stylish screaming over bass.

So what would Royko think?

My guess is he wouldn’t like it.

Royko’s best trait was his sense of justice, evidenced in every line of his masterwork “Boss.” His worst trait was a crabby old “Get off my lawn” sense of Chicagoana, as if any resident who disagreed with his fictional native Slats Grobnik about the slightest detail of burgers, beer or pitching pennies was a wrong-headed interloper.

He spoke for the neighborhoods in the era the condos went up and that’s fine, even noble. But it meant neither Small Cheval nor I would pass Royko’s sniff test.

The dedication to, almost recreation of, old timey might have stirred a sense of belonging in Royko, but I doubt it. The sense of Americana created with burger, beer and shot was too deliberate at Small Cheval. They would have tried too hard for Royko’s taste.

We’re still the waitress and wan young man at Small Cheval; the difference is styles now crave beer and meat over white wine and pecans.

I can’t compare a burger at the Goat with one at Small Horse. I love them both (slight preference for the Billy Goat because, bejeebus that Small Cheval burger was rich — my digestion is working double-time right now), but they’re not even trying for the same thing. One’s a quick and easy bite, the other’s haute cuisine disguised as a burger-and-shot joint.

But it was a solid, greasy, American burger, even if the mustard was brown and French.

And it didn’t have pecans.

Read a story of the Billy Goat

Read another story of the Billy Goat

Visit Small Cheval

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How to 1,001

I haven’t been able to go to the dentist in years. The economy wouldn’t let me.

RRRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHHAAAAAAHHHHHHOOOOOO went the drill, hollowing me out for the first of too many fillings.

It’s not that I hadn’t worked since 2012, when I decided to quit a job I’ve referred to before as The Coming Darkness. I’ve worked a lot. Two, three jobs at a time sometimes.

I even had a full-timer, once. 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year (unless I wanted to go without pay during a vacation), directed labor in office with hours set by the employer using computers and other tools provided by the company alongside full-time employees paid to do similar jobs, but who, unlike me, had HR protections and full benefits, including not having to relieve the company’s taxes by covering the Social Security and Medicare pay-in through the self-employment tax.

You know, things that would probably get me categorized by the IRS as a common-law employee rather than the independent contractor they claimed if I filed an SS-8 and an 8919 and flipped the office block the double bird as I peeled out on a dirt bike and did some sick wheelies while a crowd of IRS agents and ‘70s-era Skynyrd groupies applauded how awesome I am.

Anyway, the point is I did what was outwardly a full-time job, but did not receive the benefits legally due a full-time employee.

I’m not alone. There are at least 109,000 Americans in that situation. Those are just the ones the Department of Labor caught in 2014.

RRRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHHAAAAAAHHHHHHOOOOOO.

I also taught journalism at a wonderful university, which has taken me to heart as much as a university can an adjunct. I feel trusted, respected and appreciated. The student speaker gave me a shout-out in her commencement address. I’m on first-name basis with the associate dean.

I’m not trying to make a living off this, just make some extra cash while keeping involved with an industry that crumbled away around me.

I’m an adjunct. I don’t need to pay the self-employment tax, but I don’t get benefits. There’s a set amount I get paid per class, with a bump if I earn a Ph.D. If there’s not a class for me, I don’t work that semester.

I’m not alone. There are 1.4 million Americans in that situation. That’s 76.4 percent of American college and university instructors, a recent study found. A report by the U.S. House surveyed many who reported living below the federal poverty line.

I’m not trying to make a living off this. Others are.

RRRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHHAAAAAAHHHHHHOOOOOO.

I’ve written for newspapers, magazines, websites. I was an editor at a legal trade magazine. I liked everyone there a lot, and they liked me. The magazine abided by the rules for freelancers, but didn’t have the funds to keep me.

Freelancers come and freelancers go. Job by job, no work but what you hustle.

I’m not alone. There are 53 million Americans in that situation. That’s 34 percent of the American workforce engaging in some form of full-time or moonlighter freelance, according to a study commissioned by the Freelancers Union and Elance-oDesk.

It’s called “the freelance economy.” The study called it “independent, exciting, potentially risky, and rich with opportunities.”

I call it work that bosses don’t have to pay benefits for. I call it disposable employees who can’t go to HR if they’re being mistreated and who sure as hell couldn’t go to the dentist.

RRRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHHAAAAAAHHHHHHOOOOOO.

I had insurance the whole time. I paid out of pocket for major medical. I could get some care from a hospital in the event of a traumatic accident.

Now, with Obamacare, for 20 bucks more paid a month to the same insurance company, I can get regular, preventive care from a doctor and dentist, just like one of you.

The doctor found me fit as a fiddle. The dentist found that my years not able to get dental care left me with five cavities and plaque so bad I needed to space out my cleaning over two days.

RRRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHHAAAAAAHHHHHHOOOOOO.

We chose our lives, yes. I chose whatever fun mess this existence has turned out to be.

My friend Kim chose to turn her Ph.D. back toward academia, and is doing the adjunct slog. She broke her leg this year. Obamacare fixed it.

My friend Nick chose to be a journalist, and is stringing for a certain World’s Greatest Newspaper while looking for full-time work. He signed up on Tuesday while we worked at a coffee shop.

If you don’t like Obamacare, think it’s a socialist nightmare hellscape or just a bad use of funds, there’s a simple, easy and effective way to get rid of it:

Get our bosses to give us health care. Give us a better deal.

Compete.

Later, the dental hygienist went to work on my sensationless left side with a high-pressure water drill that sounded like a 33 1/3 of humpback whale song played on a 78.

AWWWWOOOOOOOOOWWWWOOOOOOAAAAHHH.

More thoughts on the worker

More more thoughts on the worker

I think communists are dumb

Talking to teachers in the 2012 strike

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