August 2011. Hoffman Estates, Illinois. I’m waiting for my annual checkup at the glaucoma doctor’s office, reading a back issue of Chicago magazine. The small waiting room is about three-quarters full. As usual, I’m the youngest patient in there, by a couple of decades. An…
It was August 1998. I’d been living in my “garden”-level apartment on the Far North Side of Chicago for only a few months, and I still wasn’t sure that random individuals wouldn’t be trying to climb in through the windows on a regular basis. I…
cross-posted at Artful Mistakes I started last week seeing a movie with a friend about caves, and ended the week scrambling around inside caves with a totally different crowd of people. Sometimes, life just works that way, creating its own themes. Welcome to Cave Week. Watch…
There she blows!!! We spent the first couple of hours moving up and down the coast snacking on guacamole and chips. We hadn’t seen a single whale and things didn’t look good. “We probably won’t see any whales today,” my daughter said. A minute later…
. . .What would you think? Who would you expect to have written it? Without resorting to Google, Yahoo, or your search engine of choice, read the following, then please post in the comments section who you think said this. In the interest of transparency,…
Her bath was spiked with water from the ocean, gathered for her in barrels by the one-legged captain. The captain was well know for both his seamanship and his romantic entanglements and she was freckled and fair and famous mostly for a profound lack of modesty, but a…
A Sixth Anniversary Redux (Email written less than six months after Katrina. Lest we forget how things were for thousands of us trying to take action in a void of all but insane planning committees.) A commission, unelected, refusing individual input from citizens, has been…
Okay, so we all love the Pogues. Tunes that get stuck in our heads and have us bopping around all day wanting to drink with friends and sing loudly. But somewhere an Ad Man is laughing.
Memory is such a boring word, but remembry sounds frenchy and exercises your mouth. Re-mem-bree. Say it out loud. Isn’t it fun? You know it is.
1. Sundry ships are crossing the seas, bringing us to the new wild shores. On each ship a cook, a baker, a captain, a whore. I swab the deck—wiping the footprints of each away in what I hope is a fluid and efficient motion….
A Short History of Why Good Stuff Happens to Bad People ONE David Simon, creator of The Wire and Treme, said in a recent interview with Bob Edwards that America is a “prisoner of short-term gain”. I thought this a most elegant summation of the…