June 19th, 2015 § permalink
After two years of dating, Ryun Patterson’s girlfriend sat him down for The Talk.
“She took me to a restaurant, a very serious conversation, like ‘What is going on?’ And that’s when she told me that her dad has nine wives and is a sorcerer,” Patterson told me over pho soup in Little Vietnam. » Read the rest of this entry «
June 17th, 2015 § permalink
Narrated by the city of Chicago itself, 1953′s “City That Never Sleeps” is the story of a love triangle between a cop, a night club dancer and the guy who pretends to be a robot in the club’s storefront window.
And it just gets weirder from there.
June 15th, 2015 § permalink
I still say Lex Luthor is the worst businessman in modern cinema, but I knew, when I wandered in the hall of posters, shirts, metal music and film after film after film after film that I had found the right place to check. » Read the rest of this entry «
June 12th, 2015 § permalink
He was tired. Tired and premature old, with gray hairs nestling about his temples and a few scars on the right side of his face showing battles against time. » Read the rest of this entry «
June 10th, 2015 § permalink
A dragonfly zipped through the pre-lunch swelter.
It zipped by shuttered stores and tourists huddled around iPhone map apps, startled a young woman in short shorts and a jam-packed halter, licked between a rumbling Loop train above and a delivery van below to skim a construction worker jam-packing a grimy T-shirt near the chain link and tarp separating the dingy building and the street. » Read the rest of this entry «
June 8th, 2015 § permalink
It’s a little wire with a mic jack at one end and rubber earpiece at the other. It came a few days ahead of schedule in a padded manila envelope with a cloying note begging for five-star Amazon feedback rating (don’t worry, Markdown Mania — I did you right.)
And it scares the crap out of me. » Read the rest of this entry «
June 5th, 2015 § permalink
It was a birthday party years ago, one that hadn’t gone too well.
He was a local boy turning 26, an old friend who had quit a downtown ad job where he was popular and loved to start a new, yet-to-be-defined new life. He was in the process of losing touch with his old friend workmates. His new ones were transient and weird, also filling a lifting-and-hauling job while we figured our own next steps.
None of his old friends showed up at the bar that cold, wet night in an otherwise glorious summer. Only three of his new ones came. So in the wordless way young men have, the three of us decided to make it a night the birthday boy would remember.
Oh we drank. We drank and we talked and we yelled and we bought. The sole married one of the party soon headed home, leaving three men in their 20s spilling out into the night.
I don’t remember who decided to climb up onto the Bloomingdale Trail. » Read the rest of this entry «
June 3rd, 2015 § permalink
She swung the hula hoop around her neck as she talked, around her arms, curled it between her legs and whipped it back and forth so the LED displays would change and whirl and display technicolor patterns in the dark.
“It’s a Hyperion,” she said.
She bought the hoop online. $320. She was a young hippie type, maybe early 20s or late teens. Hard to tell in the jam-packed park lit only by the whoosh of spinning hula hoops, the distant twirling of fire and the light of a full moon. » Read the rest of this entry «
June 1st, 2015 § permalink
Through a jeweler’s glass, I stared at a monster’s stalk.
It was round and small, with a perfect hole in the center allowing me to fantasize it could have been along the lines of a spine. But it was a stalk of a crinoid, a sea lily, a tiny monster from before time, a stalked starfish waving in the undersea breeze to gobble up tiny life 330 million years in the past.
A horn honked behind me. I turned to see the wandering tourists and crawling SUVs of Michigan Avenue. » Read the rest of this entry «
May 29th, 2015 § permalink
She had a bewitching smile, an origami bird paperclipped to her head and a red stripe painted across her nose to look more like the protagonist of the video game Dragon Age II.
She didn’t know where they got the pig’s blood.
“I never asked and now I’m suspicious,” she joked. “We did just fire someone.”
With that and a smile, she turned away to put in my order for the pig’s blood drink at Geek Bar Beta. » Read the rest of this entry «
