Chicago lost 35 degrees in the course of a 15-minute storm yesterday. What started as white-skied heat and a fussy south wind turned into the welcome sound of thunder, the plastic click of hail hitting windows. A dandelion grows from a crack in my window ledge. Branches are still mostly budded, and what little leaves there are can't catch the wind, like boys missing pop flies with their first ever mitts.

It's the season of wanderlust. I bought Easy Rider on my lunch break so that I could watch the Byrdsy, Bandy musical sequences of Wyatt and Billy dancing their bikes around each other like gnats through basalt fields of Arizona and the Painted Desert and Monument Valley.

In my mailbox Friday were travel brochures I'd forgotten I'd ordered: maps and guides from Montana and North Dakota, Yellowstone and Teddy Roosevelt National Park. It's the time of year I long to drive the slow rise and fall of Highway 2 in Nebraska, the sand hills distilling the land to its simplest features of blue sky and green rolling hills like a children's drawing.

But it's time to be patient. I wished for a lake breeze yesterday. The city was boiling over. In the Black Hills it's still snowing. In April enjoy the shoots and be surprised by insects. Pick up trash, or better yet sit quietly and don't make any.

A few months ago, in a fit of anger, when the path from my front gate to the back steps leading to my apartment was a trench of pee-stained snow, I threw a small, green, biodegradable bag containing three ingots of my dog Stan's shit over the chain-link fence into my neighbor's empty yard. I was probably sick. I was sick most of the winter and walking a dog twice a day in drifts and slush with mean winds blowing in my face made me a bitter coward. I couldn't make it to the dumpsters in the alley. I didn't feel like it.

It's been two weeks since the last snow, an oatmeal mush that melted in a day but still left Chicagoans a bit crestfallen. The neighbor's empty lot is greening up little by little. The ivy-covered two-flat is abandoned but its owners, a mother and son or two and a couple more toddlers, came by last weekend to tidy things up. They left molding lawn furniture in place, a planter with a dead tree in it, a plastic doghouse in the shape of an igloo with enough lichen and soot on it to look like it was carved from limestone.

And they also left the bag of Stanley's waste, hermetically sealed from decay by the impenetrable cornstarch bag. It's been frozen, thawed, rained on, baked by sunlight, but it's still in the same shape as when I tossed it onto a bed of snow three months before.

Labels: chicago, geology, trash

There's something gratifying about seeing an honest-to-goodness robin with an honest-to-goodness earthworm in its mouth, as I spied from my porch in the neighbor's yard this afternoon. It's positively springlike. Perhaps it would have been a more convincing performance had the bird been tugging it out of the earth, but the soil in my neighbor's yard is made up mostly of garbage—a fair amount of which I've tossed over the fence through the years—and a snarl of goldenrod roots that are just now sending up their shoots.

It's still cold here in Chicago, but I look at blizzard warnings across the plains and count my blessings. Today the sun shone all day. Western Avenue was a blocked artery. The pneumatic wrenches from the tire shop at the near end of the alley snapped and whirred in clipped conversation all day. I open my eastward-facing door to check the weather and am slapped with an icy wind, a whisper of glaciers skimmed from the lake and into the unzipped coats of dumb, hungry Midwesterners like me.

For the third time this winter I'm sick. Yes, it's still winter; snow is predicted for Monday. Wisconsin's getting smacked around again. Is this the same cold I picked up in January, the one that lasted three weeks and traveled like a flea circus around my pulmonary system? Or is it the stomach virus I initially attributed to a trip to Wendy's that woke me up in the middle of the night in shivers? This one's in my lungs. All I want to do is sleep. I'm woken up by heartburn. My skin hurts all over. It's another cold and the cold won't go away.

In the annals of depressing things I'm not sure if there is anything more depressing than "ethnic" food prepared for white people. At a bar in Lakeview last night I ordered the special, fish tacos, and got three Van de Kamp fish bars glued to flour tortillas with greasy white cheese and a curiously orange "ranch" sauce. Needless to say, I ate all three.

On the other side of town, I imagined a shudder running through my friends at Super Burrito Taqueria (aka, my other kitchen). The lights flicker, the soccer game dwindles to a white speck in the middle of the TV screen, only the sizzle of carne asada popping on the giant range. There are a billion amazing taquerias in town. Why on earth would anyone tolerate anything as debilitatingly stupid as the little cup of Pace picante the Lakeview bar served with its chips?

The worst of it was the table next to us peopled by East and South Asians digging in to their own selections of corn-syrup saucy, ConAgrafied grease pouches from the menu. People! You have a culture! Use it!

Labels: food

Drunk on Clark Street, we heard a burst of laughter like a rope ladder dropped from the third floor open window above. Nyiah said, Let's go. I said I was pretty tired.

But I followed her through the unlatched chain-link gate, past the coiled garden hose and the pots of bare soil and up the back stairs, a dozen layers of gray paint cracked and coating the hand rails, the steps, the ceiling. We'd traveled those steps before, the ubiquitous intestinal passages of Chicago apartment buildings, but there was no one above expecting the likes of us to walk through the door.

With nervous smiles we made our way through the scouts, clean-cut boys and girls smoking cigarettes and talking in that familiar metropolitan twang about their sex lives, about their habits, about themselves. Too self-absorbed to mind the strange, straight couple six pints to the wind inserting themselves where they didn't belong.

Everyone's in front, suggested a quartet of girls playing cards in the kitchen, a bright Home Depot display of bland conformity, its granite countertops littered with Miller Lite bottles. We grabbed a pair of props and ventured down the hardwood hallway toward the noise, where a roomful of sirens were immersed in an incomprehensible game of plastic cups and beer.

I'd been there before, in high school, in college, in every swollen, bacchanalian ritual of banal self-congratulation that people have forced on me throughout my life. It didn't matter that I was the only male in the room. I was raised polite, and at midnight this tame gathering was coasting on cheap beer, a boozy breath all the admittance necessary.

What was disappointing? That nobody cared? That they were all nice? That three dozen white dykes didn't root out our ruse? Send us tumbling down the stairs and Leave me battered and bloodied in the alley?

Or was it that three dozen white dykes hadn't invited the likes of us in the first place?

Last July while I was walking my dog I watched a man pull up to the lovely, overgrown berm around the corner in a little white pickup with green serif lettering on its doors. He pulled a mower out of his bed, revved it up to a crabby roar and razed all that was green to a flat, sick, brown, buzz-cut. Pollen and dust clouded the street, insects didn't know what to do. I gave him the finger.

Even that meager stretch of earth endured, though. Nobody came back to butcher the plot the rest of summer. Clusters of verdant greenery bloomed untouched, a few feet from parked cars, in beds of dog shit and decomposing Walgreens bags. A lovely and rare sight in a city that pays little heed to the demands of sunlight and water.

Over winter, I watched the cracked and dried stalks poking through drifts, reminding grouchy commuters steadying themselves with outstretched arms and leather-soled shoes over shiny ripples of ice that the world is not dead, just dead tired.

Spring, pissed and cranky, is slow to rouse around here. It sits bolt upright in March, as if waking from a bad dream, then crashes deeper into folds of cold rain and snowflakes for the next month and a half. We shed layers when we know better, pretend it's warmer than it is, watch for the buds on the trees and the dormant grass to grapple and bury the garbage that's settled between rooty knots over the winter.

The berm around the corner was choked with garbage. I listened to hell in my headphones this weekend as I poked it clean with my King Tongs, sidestepping turds and dragging the detritus of American happiness out from the earth that was slowly claiming it. Joyous logos, garish graphics, foil and polyethylene. Plastic straws. Kill plastic.

I filled the dumpster. It took three hours, gray clouds cracking to sunlight. I couldn't imagine a more enjoyable thing to do with my time, head down, working for no man's land, dog hitched to the fence-post, kids on bikes waiting for my back to turn before they tossed their White Castle goblets to the ground.

Labels: garbage, plastic, sadr city

It's a tough thing to get called out in teeball time and time again for being unable to hit the ball out of the infield. Our team, the Hurons, had the worst record in the league and my being platooned in far right field meant that I was the worst player in the league.

To give myself some credit, my father had bought me a brand-new fielder's glove before my inaugural season, a nice gesture except the fact even Andre the Giant would have a hard time squeezing it shut, so saddle-stiff was its leather. Couple that with my natural propensity to daydream and an acre or two of clovers that desperately needed searching for mutant variations, and my teeball career was not off to a good start.

A month into the season, my batting average stood at a solid .000. The coaches were indifferent and my father was mostly at the golf course, so, idiot that I was, I turned for advice to my mother, a woman who not only threw like a girl, but also sewed like a girl and cooked like a girl and talked like a girl, etc.

Her advice was simple: "Once you make contact with the ball, just put your head down and run as fast as you can."

It made sense, but a cursory reexamination of the text reveals a phrase that was to be my undoing, for on that sultry summer night I did swing as hard as I could, and I did run as fast as I could and I did put my head down. And when I couldn't find first base, I lifted my head and found myself standing midway between first and second, nearly in my clover patch, both teams laughing at me.

Labels: advice, humiliation, self-loathing, sports, teeball