a letter, not a story, about chicago in March
I took a walk today. A walk! In Chicago! The first real walk -- the first stroll for stroll's sake -- I've taken since I got back, on almost windless, sunlit streets, almost like you'd get in a normal city where people actually lived, but a bit colder. One of the freaky things about Chicago to me is the way it will suddenly, technically in the middle of the city, turn into something that is not a city at all, and then in a minute turn back to city, all too city. You walk down Fullerton, falling slightly apart what with the imminent sale of Los Recuerdos ("For sale: nightclub and real estate") but keeping it real with the Missionary Mission of Jesus Christ, Inc., and when you see the highway passing by you in all its diagonal glory you take a left, join a couple of girls rolling along in extremely tight jeans as they make their way under the highway overpass. It still feels a little open, a little spacious, but gritty, city. Then you take a right on Elston and suddenly you are in Park City Mall, the enormous shopping mall outlet hell near my parents' house in the part of Pennsylvania that didn't really need to destroy its gorgeous Amish farmland to build concrete blocks of consumer exhaustion but did.
After a while of this -- as you consider whether you need electronics, household goods, pet supplies -- you take a right and are plunged into something pukifyingly precious, so precious in comparison to where you just were that it seems not quite real, all mauve silk babydoll dresses and bureaus out of Anne of Green Gables, with names they probably paid some designer fifty thousand dollars for before the thing even opened. And then there's a section of nothing in particular -- also a Chicago specialty -- and all of a sudden you are in the land of red and blue hair glued straight up, signs advertising piercings and tattoos, girls with something between a purse and a bike messenger bag standing outside, flicking a cigarette, rolling their eyes into the cell phone: "I'm like right outside of fucking Filter, like where the fuck are you?" I slip inside of fucking Filter to see if my temporary roommate is there (he said he might be) and run almost literally (in case you thought leaving hyde park meant, like, leaving hyde park) into his ex-girlfriend.
And then finally out, and back up Milwaukee, through something a little broken-windowed, a section of the sidewalk run to mud, a man standing by his bike at a pay phone outside a White Castle yelling as the El kachunks by but in a way that makes it clear that he's not yelling because of the El -- there's a cadence and intonation to cursing that you can hear even when you can't make out the words themselves. But it gets livelier from there, until it almost seems like a neighborhood, and the girl in the Mexican grocery is nice, and across the street there are six dollar haircuts, and there are kids playing basketball at the do not enter end of my block, and in the apartment the cats are draped pretty much where I left them, and my roommate is taking a nap.
It's not exactly Whitman, this feeling, it's not exactly ecstatic; but it's heightened, it's the feeling you get from a city, from life and lives teeming and streaming and paying no attention to you, your one small square of home anchoring your movement through it, with the comfort of feeling that anchor and the excitement of knowing that everyone else is anchored somehow else, somewhere you don't know about and in some other way.
After a while of this -- as you consider whether you need electronics, household goods, pet supplies -- you take a right and are plunged into something pukifyingly precious, so precious in comparison to where you just were that it seems not quite real, all mauve silk babydoll dresses and bureaus out of Anne of Green Gables, with names they probably paid some designer fifty thousand dollars for before the thing even opened. And then there's a section of nothing in particular -- also a Chicago specialty -- and all of a sudden you are in the land of red and blue hair glued straight up, signs advertising piercings and tattoos, girls with something between a purse and a bike messenger bag standing outside, flicking a cigarette, rolling their eyes into the cell phone: "I'm like right outside of fucking Filter, like where the fuck are you?" I slip inside of fucking Filter to see if my temporary roommate is there (he said he might be) and run almost literally (in case you thought leaving hyde park meant, like, leaving hyde park) into his ex-girlfriend.
And then finally out, and back up Milwaukee, through something a little broken-windowed, a section of the sidewalk run to mud, a man standing by his bike at a pay phone outside a White Castle yelling as the El kachunks by but in a way that makes it clear that he's not yelling because of the El -- there's a cadence and intonation to cursing that you can hear even when you can't make out the words themselves. But it gets livelier from there, until it almost seems like a neighborhood, and the girl in the Mexican grocery is nice, and across the street there are six dollar haircuts, and there are kids playing basketball at the do not enter end of my block, and in the apartment the cats are draped pretty much where I left them, and my roommate is taking a nap.
It's not exactly Whitman, this feeling, it's not exactly ecstatic; but it's heightened, it's the feeling you get from a city, from life and lives teeming and streaming and paying no attention to you, your one small square of home anchoring your movement through it, with the comfort of feeling that anchor and the excitement of knowing that everyone else is anchored somehow else, somewhere you don't know about and in some other way.
posted by blahgstein at 8:57 AM
1 Comments:
so when's the next installment?
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