The orange lights are dimmed some on these short sweaty nights of summer. Leafy branches snake their way through tangles of cables suspended on pine stiffs, their long bows stretched in lazy arcs across intersections and alleys to buildings and light poles. The light dips and waves on the asphalt with each windy stroke. But night is never dark in Chicago, not even in the summer.

There are exceptions. Sometimes a block of streetlights will go out for no apparent reason. Biking or walking along you're struck by the sudden realization of what you take for granted: the omnipresent orange glow that smothers starlight and protects us from crime. Sodium lights turn overcast skies orange, cap the city with a painted ceiling.

Still, some neighborhoods have grown dimmer. Crossing Western Avenue from Humboldt to Wicker Park, the plants and flowers are tended, fenced in, clipped crisp. The lights attached to the new constructions and turn-of-the-century renovations are dimmer, too: dramatic lighting I call it.

The houses resemble movie sets more than neighborhoods. Tall cans fan soft white cones of light vertically on the brick facades, casting into relief dark shadows that hang like long swaths like fabric. The light is spare, the light is a wink. The light says: we are rich, the neighborhood has changed, you will be safe to move here, if you can afford it.

Ever since Ronald Reagan charmed the American electorate in 1980 with a soft-focus snapshot of America that resembled the early pages of a Penthouse pictorial, the prevailing wisdom has made blinding, idiotic optimism a prerequisite to political vision. Aside from a four-year sabbatical during the craggy Bush I years, optimists have made living in this country and participating in its politics nearly intolerable.

Nobody has taken this plague to such an extreme as the current brat-boy president. In policies both domestic and abroad, he has bewitched the American media with his vacuous, insincere smiles. Defeated in the polls or by news from Iraq, the president smiles away as he sics his cabinet on his challengers who rip on their patriotism and brand them "defeatist." And no matter the facts, how can the pundits on the Sunday morning shows dare question such optimism? Monsanto and Citibank and Disney won't have it! It might send the stock market into a tailspin.

It seems too that they have scientists to back them up. Smile research says that not only do your smiles make other people happier, but the act of smiling actually contributes to the manufacture of endorphins. Of course, exercise will jack you up with a far greater endorphin buzz than slapping on a Steve Martin record ever could, but who wants to sweat?

I was watching The Bridge On The River Kwai when it occurred to me: there couldn't be anything more un-American and nefarious to the principals of our constitution than this compulsory optimism. The movie satirizes the contradictions of war as World War II colonel Alec Guinness challenges his Japanese captor Sessue Hayakawa in the jungles of southeast Asia. Meanwhile British major Jack Hawkins leads a team of covert ops to blow up a bridge the two have been constructing as American cynic William Holden is forced to bear witness to the absurd ends of geopolitics.

Holden is the kind of American I want to vote for: he's smart and cynical, hard to sway but open to logic and ultimately a better judge of character than most. He has character. He's cool. Goddam it, America used to be cool! Aloof! Independent! We weren't weighed down by history; we didn't have all that much compared to the next country. And we weren't a military culture; its accompanying bravado seemed phony. It's the quintessential American attitude: tough, private and realistic, with a hair-trigger bullshit detector.

Holden played this character over and over again. He honed it in Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 and in Sunset Boulevard he was so jaded he was dead. Everyone remembers Paddy Chayefsky's mad performance in Network, but it was Holden who gave the film gravity.

In the current administration, cynicism is served up sour by our authoritarian vice-president, Dick Cheney, hunkered down in his DC office paranoid and insecure while his PR-president smiles his way through one disaster after another. If Holden were president, he'd be holding out as long as possible, weighing the situation carefully and then kicking some serious ass.

Sitting on a United Airlines flight to Omaha were three very little girls, clad from neck to toe in identical pink outfits. Their mother sat in the seat in front of me, on the other side of the aisle from them, issuing limp rebukes for their misbehaviors and holding an endless, inane conversation with a woman not next to her but two seats down, through a young man who somehow did not strangle them both.

The girls were blonde and pigtailed with scrunched-up faces and upturned noses. Their cheap pink clothing seemed chiefly to humiliate cherries and strawberries, which dotted the fabric in buoyant but ultimately depressing patterns. They were each a year apart, the oldest one five, but I assumed their age differences more like 9 to 10 months apiece.

All three were horrific but the one in my sight, on the aisle, was the worst. She slapped her sisters and wouldn't sit still and refused to buckle her seat belt during takeoff and landing. She sassed the flight attendant and sulked with great drama whenever her mother asked her to behave herself.

The girl's name was Fancy and she took part in beauty pageants. Her mother told this to the flight attendant, explaining away her meager efforts at discipline with the marvelous conclusion that Fancy was "strong-willed." The flight attendant replied that perhaps what Fancy needed was to be told she couldn't always get what she wanted.

The mother was unfazed by the flight attendant's wonderfully rude suggestion, oblivious as she was to the wishes of anyone over the age of five. She was a happy woman, overweight and neurotically rewrapping her shawl about her shoulders in an attempt to cover her doughy arms. Nothing could bring her down.

She reminded me of the dog owners waiting with their meticulously-groomed hounds at a dog show I attended at McCormick Place in Chicago several years ago. It was obvious these people understood the concepts of grooming and beauty, but were only capable of putting their energy into their dogs. With blond hair shiny enough for a Pantene commercial, golden retrievers sat patiently while their obese owners chain-smoked and ate fried food from the concession stand.

At what point do we let go of the reigns? Is the pressure of competition so great in this country that we need to prematurely abort our bodies and minds from this world and invest our energies solely into those we take care of? What is wrong with America? Why on earth, if I were to politely ask Fancy's mother to discipline her daughters so that everyone on the plane could enjoy a little peace, would I be the rude one? When exactly did the poles of this earth flip?

Like dogs and horses, children like Fancy need to be broken. I suggest prong collars, holding pens, convicts named Mac. I'm not like the rest. I don't blame the parents. I blame the children. And it is time we waged a war on this gross American luxury item known as The Child.

A bulldozer took down the remnants of the car dealership behind my apartment this morning: poles, fencing, trailer. When I moved into my apartment on the alley several years ago the red, white and blue banners glittered in the breeze under the bright floodlights, giving the sense that a perpetual carnival was going on just outside my door. But the banners fell last year and the flags are in tatters and all the cars are gone.

Would I have considered buying a car from those guys? Goodness no, but they were nice neighbors. They looked out for the girl downstairs and always greeted me warmly when I walked by. It's quieter now without the salsa music blasting all afternoon, the salesmen laughing to jokes, Coronas in hand. There are more condos than apartments on my street now. Their new owners are quiet. I never even see them.

The immediacy of a demolition never ceases to surprise me. A building I've walked by for years, a building standing for decades, disappears under the lumbering pluck of a backhoe. I pause to watch workers climbing through the rubble and spraying it down with water from a fire hydrant. Plumes of dust carry across the street like smoke. Wires are exposed, a broken chair, a kitchen like a diorama. And always the nervous-looking property owner presides over the affair, praying to himself that he gets his condos up and sold before the floor drops out of the housing market. He makes phone calls, climbs in and out of his SUV or BMW out front. The car looks garish, wrong.

This spring six houses on my street have been demolished. The debris has been cleared, foundations poured and cinderblock walls have gone up in a matter of weeks. Truckloads of bricks are carried off when the old building is disassembled, but only the fronts of the new three-flats are clad in brick. Inside, the drywall dents with a snap of the elbow and the canned lighting spotlights shiny new kitchen features that are sure to be out of style in three years.

Before I fled Ohio my friends and I used to laugh at the brand-new starter homes on the outskirts of town, their interstate backyards and treeless loneliness. I had no idea that such bland laziness would soon become the norm.

We drove through the sand hills of Nebraska, a child's landscape of blue sky, green grass and road. We drove through the Black Hills of South Dakota, where the air was crisp and the pine trees sweated their sticky sap. We drove through Badlands, where pronghorn watched us weary and tired from trying too hard to wrap our hearts and minds around far too much that can possibly be admired in a long weekend away from work.

I slogged through Moby Dick last spring, my mind alternately amused and adrift. Fascinating passages with drama and detail gave way to languid swaths of scientific explanation, its antiquated language lulling me in its obsolescence. But of course it's nuts to read such passages to gain knowledge about the natural world. Melville was writing of reason in the midst of the human social animal, the salvation it delivers in the face of madness.

The pacing was easy to discern. It was obvious the final confrontation wouldn't occur until the very end of the novel, but my movie-addled brain kept resisting this fact, hoping the white whale would make an early appearance with at least a small action sequence. It was that other leviathan, Jaws, that swam the same waters as the white whale, and not even the book version but the mechanical monster from the Spielberg flick. One of the sad ironies of growing older is the more you press yourself to employ a rational knowledge of the world in your day-to-day life, you're forever shackled by the pop culture references of your childhood dreams. Archeologists will always crack a bullwhip and Matthew Broderick and Dabney Coleman will always preside over nuclear brinksmanship.

We're adrift in a sea of distractions: work, friends, the internet and television. It wasn't until I found myself in the darkened hotel rooms of New Mexico, my girlfriend sleeping through precious daylight knifing its way through polyester curtains from outside, that I finally fell in line with the narrative. Contrasting with the miles of dry scrubland still coursing through my mind from the drives of the day before was the desert of saltwater described by Ishmael, and my pop culture flotsam soon drifted away.

Okay, enough with the nautical language. What made me revisit Moby Dick was a provocative article I stumbled across by Philip Rubio on George Mason University's History News Network. While the commentary posts following the article have rebuked him for his use of history to criticize the decisions of a current sitting president, I find his larger points fairly engaging. The article does stumble a bit in attempting to pin an Ahabesque mad quality on the current president, but at the same time even the most casual observer of recent history and current events has to marvel at the gross mismanagement of money and lives that the general population seems to be ignoring.

And it's there that the madness takes hold: not in our leaders so much as in us followers, entrenched as we are in our immediate social interactions, our national wealth tied up in economies we have little hope of understanding, let alone steering. And yet, carried along as we are how do we participate in this world, engage each other as the social beasts we are, when all our influences, all that we love, are driving us towards madness? Will there be sufficient opportunity at the end of the journey to abandon ship? And how do we recognize that moment when it comes upon us?

Over a year ago, a devil bedded down for the night in my right shoe. I forgot to shake him out before lacing up the next morning, and after a week of hard cycling up and down the lakeshore, he bit. My toes turned white and with each step a stinging pain burned inside the sole of my foot. One doctor sent me to another until a radiologist ran a wire of dye down my leg and diagnosed a blood clot. He offered me shrugs and aspirin and then sent me home to throw up.

I used to bike 30 miles without giving it a thought: ride out as far as you can and you don't have a choice but to make it home. That's all over now.

I miss it whenever I think about it, so my new discipline is controlling my thoughts. The devil sticks with me. I've lived months at a stretch in a state of barely-suppressed rage. Just the sight of someone taking their bodies for granted fuels my bitterness.

But when I think back on it the devil was with me well before he laid his teeth in my foot. He cheered me on and fed my ego as I tooled about the city, smug with my own power, cussing out drivers and pedestrians in a misanthropic ecstasy.

He's still with me. I take shorter trips that are limited to warm weather. I ride frustrated by my limits. The drivers grow more selfish: iSelfish, iSwerving, I don't give a fuck. Sitting high on monster truck thrones or sunk in the hermetically-sealed interiors of BMWs, I hate them in all sorts of new ways. But this hate brings me no fleeting pleasure.

So I ride at night, when they're home watching television or making love. The only ones out are ones like me, restless rovers drawing out the day, shaking it and forcing it to live up to the promises laid out by the magazine ads guiding our lives. At night the sodium lamps light the sky all crazy and there's room to weave, to do figure eights at stoplights or long wavy S's on the wrong side of the street.

At night I ride along Cortland where the landscaping is lovely-wrong, makeup on a pig. Off the street great doors hang open and reveal a hellish scene of Chicago's past, a diorama of noise laughing at my white headphones, my recreational activities, my service economy. Ash-gray men mix molten steel in the foundry. The devils work at night.

The city is exploding tonight. My dog lowers himself on the Persian carpet several feet from the open door leading to my porch, where pops rock through the alleys and along the boulevards. Nothing I do will soothe him. He endures the racket and so do I. Last year I drove north on Western Avenue at dusk, bright spectacles of light bursting above the roofs and treetops on either side of me. Men, teens, boys racing from parked cars, lighting bottle rockets and Roman candles over my route. I swept away debris with my windshield wipers. Not a cop was in sight.

It's impossible not to think about real pyrotechnics on a night like this. Half a world away teenagers not unlike the ones in this neighborhood ignite fuses on weapons I can't even wrap my mind around. The next day the pictures in the newspaper show the aftermath, but it's impossible to understand what was there before. How can our resistant hearts take in such destruction when despite our greed for beauty we cannot even comprehend a still photograph of the Grand Canyon? We have to be there, but only a few can be there, and God have mercy on them.

The great fireworks display commences downtown. Radio sponsors, wine and cheese. I've seen the rooftop view from this neighborhood: great plumes of smoke lit orange and red and green dance over the lake, casting the skyscrapers in a deathly silouette. It is a wonderful arsenal of bravado. It's an echo of reality, and by cold morning the cardboard wrappers have all washed up upon the beaches.