As Chicago leans into the turn towards fall and Midnight settles into a loping gait, we’ve oiled the bike chains and taken to waking up earlier, exploring farther, surprising ourselves in a city of straight lines and warm nights.
Chicago is the industrial, chemical smell of commercial laundromats and the ubiquitous sight of taco joints with their faded red, white and green paint. It’s bike tires popping in the heat and their owners taking refuge in the lake. It’s pulling up next to a big woman on a big motorcycle with Satan’s Something-or-Other on the back of her vest and her friend on the back glancing over and saying, “Wanna race?”
Chicago is yesterday’s strongman, drinking a High Life and waving from his porch.
Chicago
by Carl Sandburg
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders
The city of the big shoulders, Chicago is also a town of small bars, places where people talk to each other and pet each others’ dogs while they watch the game. It’s a city of workers, a city of families. A city of hot nights, sweat that runs down your armpits, a city of beers and ball parks. A city of backwards hat Harleys and used bike stores, a city of ingenuity and bootstrapping. It’s a city of pink, electric-light-lined donut shops, third wave cafés and thai joints with homemade menus stapled together. There are enough weirdos here to have good improv and jazz scenes, and it’s open enough to have the first officially recognized gay village in the United States. Enough weirdos to reassure the ‘normal’ people of their own normality, even as that line blurs and marches slowly towards more acceptance. There’s the guy that does Frank Sinatra impersonations at block parties, the tour guide at the Lagunitas factory that tells you a few too many times how much they all enjoy getting high, the guy joggling his way down the street on a Wednesday morning. That’s juggling while jogging, for the uninformed.
There’s not as many McDonalds as you’d expect for such a candid realization of American industry, but then there are a lot of hispanics here that probably account for both some of that industriousness and the prevalence of burritos over big macs. I don’t hear anyone complaining about either, but I haven’t watched enough televised news lately to remind me of all the groups I’m supposed to hate.
Junebug
We were jumping russian bar with the tent flaps open the other day when we heard a yell from a car in the street. “Oh DAMN, girl! That’s some crazy shit you be doing!” When Mason came out for his hand to hand act a lady in the audience leaned over to her neighbor and said, none too subtly, “Now that’s a whole lot of good looking!”
The shop owners are friendly and unhurried on the weekdays, the parks are full on the weekends. There are Farmers Markets all over the city where you can buy your food from a person instead of from a store; and there’s even been an initiative that lets those on financial aid double the value of their dollar when spent at Farmers Markets.
It’s still segregated, the most segregated city in the US, practically if not by official decree, although there’s enough evidence of public policy having created these segregations in the not-too-distant-past to make you wonder if America really has become more accepting, or whether it’s just become more cunning at how it maintains the status quo. If you’ve got your ear tuned to the right frequency you just might be able to make out the low hum of corruption that runs beneath any conversation about politics here, the resigned acceptance of back room dealings and dirty money that almost still sways the policy decisions of the windy city. The chalkboard in the kitchen at our directors’ house is ever-changing, except for one quote that’s been there for the entire 5 years since I first came to Chicago:
“The only effective answer to organized greed is organized labor.” -Thomas Donahue
I think we could probably say something similar about organized hate. You don’t necessarily have to be the one spearheading the solution, but participating isn’t so tough- it might be as simple as doing something positive with your community of choice.
Here’s mine:
