Chicago Piece 9,878,657,523

[My good friend Alana is leaving. It's a loss for me, and for the city as a whole, but now's her time to go. She asked me to contribute something to her goodbye zine, answering the question of what I would miss most about Chicago if I left. I'm not sure how I feel about the piece I wrote. It feels like a rehash and rearrangement of things I've said before, but I'm happy I was able to write something, which wasn't vert easy to do these past few months]

Asking what I would miss most about Chicago is like asking an amputee what he misses most about his foot. On some days it might be the change in gait or balance, on others a lack of tactile sensation, a feeling of asymmetry or unwholeness. There is no one thing I would miss most about Chicago, because I have never been more than a couple months without it. I am more Chicago than I am any other thing. I am more Chicago than Jew, or boy, or 5'8, or 25 years old, or DJ photographer poet asshole. I am more Chicago than I am Eric lab Rat or Eric M Strom. I am more Chicago than Chicagoan.


It is the reason I am mystified by hills and stars (both the celestial kind twinkling above cities as foreign and exotic as Luxor and... Peoria, and the kind that glow on the back pages of the tabloid rags that litter the subway). It is the reason I like house music and the blues. It is the reason I don't cry over spilt milk, whitewashed grafitti, and the notion that everything is impermanent, from art meant to be appreciated through the ages to skyskraper castles built to outlast anything the centuries have to throw at them.

It is a city that never changes and is ever changing. I could namedrop the grid and the fact that it keeps me from needing to develop any real sense of direction. The fact that if I travel down any one street from end to end, I will have a story to tell, two stories even: one from the trip and some other forgotten tale, jarred free from the morass of my memory by the sight of an old locale; and then there is the fact that somewhere along the trip, I will end up in one neighborhood that is completely alien to me, and one that looks exactly the way I remember Chicago looking, growing up in the 80s. And I'll truly miss all those opportunities to talk and talk and talk telling stories about my Chicago and me.

I try to stay true to a single guiding philosophy, that I cribbed from some book I read years ago. I have no idea what the book was, and I've paraphrased it for so long that I don't even know if it makes sense the way I say it: The greatest fallacy of man, is that he assumes cause and effect, and the laws of physics, that an object at rest will remain at rest unless provoked. Just because something has always been, does not mean that it will always be.

And I think that...

There will always be one more new John Kearney animal sculpture to discover. That Sharkula will always be on the street somewhere hawking demo tapes. That Bubbleland and Dulcelandia will always be colorful respites from the cold grey city, whether or not I give them any of my money. That the Disciples run this town and the Kings just live in it. That a Daley will always have a get out of jail card and a free ride to boot. That those odd diagonal streets, Chicago's first streets built over lay lines and Iroquois trails, will always be rich with weirdness. That my parents will always have their home in East Rogers, and Indian Boundary Park will always be Chicago's most perfect place: a fountain, a lagoon, and a wooden village that will all age gracefully and not go the way of its petting zoo or its tall, iron slide.

But just blocks from my namesake Maxwell street, razed eons ago by thugs and businessmen, I can order a hot dog and have it served to me with ketchup, and if a thing like that can happen in the City by the Lake, then truly nothing is sacred, and there is no such thing as forever.