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On the corner of Jefferson and Polk, South Loop, Chicago
I’m guessing that I attended the only party for Barack Obama’s inauguration where someone came out of the bathroom with his pants around his ankles. I watched the ceremony at my son Carter’s preschool yesterday. The group of three- and four-year-olds were amazingly patient and sat dutifully through most of the proceedings, but as the ceremony wore on, they started to get restless. During the new President’s acceptance speech, one little boy got up to use the restroom, and then hobbled back into the room to ask for help when he was finished, unconcerned that he was naked from the waist down.
Chicago Transit Priority
Photo by swanksalot
This essay also appeared in The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 3, edited by Lee Gutkind
I’ve been a little lazy about getting around town since I bought a hybrid car. When faced with a decision whether to drive or take public transit, too often I opt for the former out of sheer selfishness, rationalizing that since I’m using roughly half the fuel as everyone else, I’m allowed to drive twice as much. But now that gas costs north of $4.00 a gallon, promising only to go higher, that choice is no longer about a squishy, moral obligation to reduce consumption and preserve the planet. It’s starting to get expensive. And since I live in Chicago, a city with an extensive public transit system, I’ve decided to ride the train or the bus whenever possible. I might have been shamed into it because I finally got around to watching An Inconvenient Truth, but I figure that since I already went crazy replacing all the light bulbs in my house with compact fluorescents, it’s the next best thing I can do.
Familiar Rivalry
This piece was originally published at the Lovable Losers Literary Revue.
I’VE LIVED IN CHICAGO FOR NINE YEARS, but I’m a lifelong Cardinals fan. I grew up in southwestern Indiana, just a two-hour drive on I-64 across the flat, oil rig-dotted wastelands of southern Illinois to St. Louis. On summer nights, Jack Buck and Mike Shannon lulled me to sleep with their baritone calls of Cardinals games on the local radio affiliate. My town was split about 70-30, Cardinals to Cubs fans, and my best friend across the street was a Cubbie diehard. We spent muggy July afternoons playing out the rivalry in his backyard: Ozzie Smith and Willie McGee versus Ryne Sandberg and Jody Davis. Grown ups told us that Cardinals and Cubs fans weren’t supposed to like each other, but that was hard to believe. For us, it was more like a matter of taste: Coke versus Pepsi or grape versus orange, just a convenient way to divvy up the teams for pickup games.
When I went to college at Indiana University in Bloomington, I was in the minority for the first time. I met kids from the Chicago suburbs, northwest Indiana, Indianapolis, South Bend, Fort Wayne, and they all liked the Cubs. Cardinal fans popped up here and there, but for the most part, I spent my time with the Cubs diaspora, created by the universal reach of WGN.
Good Samaritans
Spend enough time around a three-year-old, and you get pretty good at answering the question, “Why?” I’ve taken the approach of answering Carter as scientifically and truthfully as possible, partly because the longer the answer, the more likely he is to accept it as fact and not ask me again. But it’s also a good test to see if I really know what I’m talking about. I like to say that the final exams for any kind of engineer, architect, mechanic, or technician should consist of a room of preschoolers, pointing at a machine and saying, “What’s this do? Why?”
Sticking to the Dream
This piece originally appeared at Gapersblock
CHICAGO IS ENJOYING A HIP-HOP REVIVAL. Kanye West took home three awards at last year’s Grammys, and his fire and brimstone performance that night also made him the only rapper since Tupac to imitate Jesus and get away with it. Stony Island native Common is releasing Be, the much anticipated return to the beats and rhymes soul aesthetic of his 1994 classic Resurrection, on May 24th. And the city’s underground veterans like All Natural and Do or Die have recently released new albums to greater exposure, basking in the glow cast by their more famous brethren. It’s a good time to be a rapper from Chicago. So where does a 26-year-old white kid from New Hampshire fit in here?
“The Chicago scene is definitely big enough for us,” says Adam Arnone, otherwise known as Adeem, MC for the hip-hop group Glue. The group has created a buzz on the underground rap circuit with their engaging live performances and a strong debut album, 2003′s Seconds Away. They hope to cash in on this momentum by releasing an EP called Sunset Lodge in late May followed by a full album, Catch as Catch Can, later in the year.