031.) Sweet Home Chicago, Part IV

(part III)

Utterly despondent over my leaving the Art Museum, I went without much feeling to Millennium Park.



The faces on The Crown Fountain weren't working properly, yet they did occasionally "spit" all over the little children hanging out beneath them. The girl sitting beside me on the concrete bench had been talking at her cell phone since before I'd arrived and since I'd sat down she'd said good-bye three times. The water puddle on the bench next to me was creeping ever closer, facilitating my decision to get up and take a walk.

I first went to the Cloud Gate, managing to feel only slightly nauseated as I sauntered around and under the giant metal bean.

Heading east, I soon arrived at Jay Pritzker Pavilion. Because words can never express the sheer wonder and interest of the concert venue, I will not attempt description.

The Lurie Garden, however, I can and will paint with words. A cozy, beautiful place possibly created by Muse herself, the garden somehow deflects the noise of the city. A trickling stream winds its way through the garden, refracting the sunlight overhead like a thousand diamonds strewn against pale silk. My feet clomped beautifully against the wooden footbridge.

Were it possible, I would have divided myself in half and spent my time equally between there and the art museum. But I could not. Disappointed, I trudged back to The Crown Fountain. No, I did not cross the BP Bridge. Perhaps I should have, but with my luck I would have found myself hopelessly lost.

So, after gathering our things, we proceeded down The Magnificent Mile.

The Magnificent Mile is magnificent. Hundreds of restaurants and stores, the latter of which boast a wide array of goods at ridiculously high prices made even more ridiculous by the sales tax.

I'm not usually one for shopping, either, but I did stop into H&M. It was overcrowded (mostly by teenage to twenty-something women on the ground floor, mothers with children up the funky steel staircase at H&M Kids), but by this time I wasn't very surprised. The queue at the dressing rooms, however, did shock me. And the pleasant heart-attack waiting for me at check-out? Please!

One t-shirt, one black corset dress and one corset-like tank top. Three items set before the rude gay man (or, rather, the rude man who just so happened to be overtly homosexual) running the register to the immediate left of the middle register being bombarded with piles and piles of clothes (trash bag after trash bag after trash bag) handed over by an apparently very, very wealthy blonde girl.

I say wealthy because my three items, which had totaled a mere $60 or $70 in my rounded up calculations, came to a demented and completely deranged final amount of over $100.

The rude cashier sighed and rolled his eyes melodramatically when I asked to put back the tank top. He did not wish me good-bye.

With this episode playing in my head, I only went to one other store because Apt Teacher's son insisted that we stop by the Disney Store. I bought an Eeyore mug from the clearance wall. It's so cute, that mud. It says "Smile".

In doing all of this without much hassle, we were due to get lost next.

Apt Teacher wanted me to see Navy Pier. For whatever reason, we hadn't stopped by after the Shedd Aquarium when we were on that side of the city. Naturally, we walked up hill and down dale without finding a way to cross traffic. Hope was all but dead when we stumbled upon a group of nurses just off shift.

To get to Navy Pier we had to go underground. Literally, underground. Through a dark, dank tunnel.

From what I witnessed there, it wasn't worth the effort; Navy Pier is nothing like Coney Island. After a few pictures with the bronze statue of Bob Newhart (which is sodding awesome and made up for the less than spectacular experience just beyond the gates of the pier) and some dinner, a ride on the Ferris wheel and a quick look around, we traveled back to the heart of the city.

I stepped inside a record store whose name I've forgotten (though I'm sure it had something to do with a pineapple. Maybe a banana). I do know that it smelt warm, as most small record stores tend to do, and it had a balcony. Alas, I could not go to the balcony because I was soon pulled back outside by a frantic Apt Teacher. She was waving the Metra schedule in her hand.

Our train home left in eleven minutes.

We were 25 blocks from the station.

Running ["as if the very whips of their masters were behind them"], we arrived at the train station with only a minute to spare before our train left.

And then Apt Teacher could not find her ticket.

But we did get on the train and some time later (I don't know how long. I know I didn't fall asleep and yet that ride back is nothing more than a black hole in the universe of my memory), quite a bit later we were tossed out in Kenosha.

Then, of course, we got lost on the way home.

Driving through the yawning maw of the night, empty roads all around us, trapped somewhere between Kenosha and Milwaukee, I thought I'd never see my bed again.

I did. Eventually. Some 18 hours after the Chicago Trip of 2006 began.




All in all, Chicago is nice. It's very clean and [some] of the people there are lovely. The culture is absolutely amazing and there are enough things to do in a one block radius alone to last one person a lifetime.

If I were deaf, I would love Chicago.

I, however, am not deaf.

030.) Sweet Home Chicago, Part III

(part II)


My near death experience hadn't done much to heighten any sense within me; I was escorted across the street by the nice folks on scooters with only one thought ping!ing around inside my skull. That thought was not "Jeepers creepers, I've just cheated death" - oh, no - but "I'm a wee bit peckish".

Off to food it was, then. My companions and I continued on to Michigan Avenue, passing by an area slowly evolving into some type of festival. My hunger the ornery Viking that it was, I did not stop to ask what the street was being prepared for. I walked on, passed the south wall of The Art Institute of Chicago, and came on on The Magnificent Mile.

The first thing I noticed about the Mile was how loud it was. Sirens sounding ceaselessly; people talking on their cell phones or to each other, or both; cars sitting idle on the congested streets, horns blaring.

The second thing I noticed about the Mile was how many restaurants lined the place. These numerous restaurants stood like books on a library shelf.

Apt Teacher, her son and I went to the only familiar place: Subway. We had to cross the avenue to get there, merging with the migrating herd (and I do mean that with the purest sincerity) of people converging on the crosswalk.

I looked to the cars waiting impatiently in their stagnant queues. Why didn't they walk, or take the few hundred buses dotting the sea of pavement far as the eye could see? They'd get to their destinations more quickly. Yet they sat in their cars, bemoaning the city and its people. They were still sitting in their cars, bemoaning the city and its people, when I entered the long, impossibly narrow Subway and ate my lunch.

Those cars were still idling in the street as I migrated back across and went into the Art Museum.




I won't sit here and explain how much I in love with that place I am because that would take days to do. I will say that my mind boggled at the amount of artwork within, that the photography exhibit I visited was exquisite and that I still own the "Ghastlycrumb Tinies" shirt I bought at the gift shop.

I wanted to chain myself to one of the benches and never leave.

028.) Sweet Home Chicago, Part II

(Part I)



When we finally arrived in Chicago, I could not wait to get off of that Metra train. As I pocketed my ticket (which perhaps I should not have done) I watched Itchy, the checker-shirted red-head who'd sat way too close to me for comfort, leave his seat - giving me a spectacular view of London Calling.

The middle-aged punk rocker, wearing a black t-shirt so small the design printed on the fabric was hopelessly and grotesquely disfigured, stuffed his book into his bag. This simple, mundane act is only worth mentioning because of what he had to remove from the bag in order to return the book.

London Calling had been traveling on the Metra line since Kenosha with a little pink bunny rabbit in blue pinstripe pajamas. If that poor bunny hadn't looked so bedraggled, if London Calling hadn't been an overweight balding man too much in love with the eighties for his own good - I might have laughed at the absurdity of the situation. Unfortunately, the oddity playing out before me was of such magnitude that all of the neurons in my brain began to fire at once, leaving me a twitching mess.

When eventually I did get over the episode, Apt Teacher, her son and I ventured out into the train station.

There was a moment there, as we wandered about aimlessly in a sea of jabbing elbows, clicking heels and generally rude souls, when I had been absolutely convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that I had entered Hell.

(source)

Or at least Purgatory; we were lost (and not for the first time on this long trip).

By some stroke of luck we were able to find our way to the surface of the train station and into the jarring noise of the street. Never have I been surrounded by such noise. Never before or since have I been attacked - brutally raped and pillaged - by such NOISE.

The taxi we scurried into gave us no relief because, while the noise was quelled if only minutely, the stench of the vehicle was enough to subdue even the Headless Horseman.

That cab smelt of all kinds of death - none of them good.

Saying that the inside of that taxi was rank with the horrid stink of urine does nothing to convey the sickening strength of the odor. Saying that under the horrific smell of urine was something softer but no less terrifying - fecal matter, decomposing flesh? - cannot possibly explain to you the nightmare of that taxi ride across town to the lake. To this very day, over three years later, I still find that stink haunting me.

I fell out of the taxi, gasping-grasping-hacking for the sweetness of lake air.

Apt Teacher debated the fare, accusing the taxi driver (rightly) of driving to the Shedd Aquarium the long way in order to bleed us of our money. She relented for fear of the driver taking off with her belongings still in the trunk. He did begin to drive away without giving back her change.

Finally rid of that man, we walked to the side entrance of the aquarium because it's a bit difficult to wheel a child-filled stroller up an impressive set of stairs.

After waiting in line with all of the other people who either could not or would not ascend concrete steps, I got my admittance

( I apologize profusely for the eye-straining blur to these photos)

and headed inside.

It's a wonderful place, the aquarium, with a lovely Pacific White-sided Dolphin show that I was unable to watch because of the three idiots in front of me. Orange Cornrows (a female, mind), Pink Bra Straps and her most charming loverboy Mid America Bank. Splendid people, them, flailing about and talking loudly throughout the entire show.

I did, however, walk down and over to the Beluga whales. Funny-looking creatures, but how they ooze affection. Had I a camera at the time, I would have taken many pictures.




After the aquarium, having bypassed the Field Museum due to lack of time (I was most unhappy about this), we took a stroll along the lake. I nearly froze to death, while inland the temperature hovered close to 150 degrees.

I was also nearly run over as I crossed the street en route to Michigan Avenue. If it hadn't been for the trio of city workers on scooters, screaming into walkie-talkies about the dysfunctional traffic lights, I would have been ended far too early.

027.) Sweet Home Chicago, Part I

I really should be working on my novel, but instead I am sitting here listening to an old Sister Hazel song (and no, I don't know either - I think it's the infectious beat), bobbing my head enough to rattle the notion in my skull of writing about the trip to Chicago I went on once upon a time.





By "once upon a time" I mean a good three years ago.

I figure I should get it down in one place (rather than the twenty piles the bits and pieces are scattered now) before I completely forget about it. Not that that would be a horrible thing...




(The following has been complied from the nigh unintelligible scribbles in a notebook, a letter to a kid I once thought handsome and whatever flecks of memory I could scrape from the mementos I was able to shove into an overstuffed handbag.)




"I've been awake since 4.27 in the morning, not so much excited for this not-so-much a senior trip but, I suppose, dreading it. This outing to Chicago was all my idea, and what I wouldn't give to simply shove my foot in my mouth and go crawl under a rock."

So began my deplorably written letter to Anarchy (in the USA) on the morning of 6 June, 2006. I sat on the concrete steps in front of my house, half of my brain still asleep and the other half wondering what in the world I was doing up so early in the morning. Yes, the Chicago trip had been my idea - but I was the only student actually coming along with the teacher and her son. Why hadn't the outing been given up as a bad job? Why weren't we instead heading over to a wild night of fun and greasy pizza at Chuck. E. Cheese?

Sitting there, fretting not only about me (an East Coast native who's spent more than half of her life in small-town Wisconsin) going to a big city, but also about the ants wending their way ever closer to my backside. I don't like ants. Fact is, I might be slightly terrified of ants and the thought of even one of these tiny bug crawling on me -

I turned back to my letter, "... in efforts of forgetting the fact that the only big cities I've been to I can't remember, I was too young". This worked quite well - until my teacher pulled her car up to the curb.




(It might behoove me to stop here and clarify. For reasons I shall not get into (for it's a very long story but essentially: I left public high school after my freshman year because if I didn't I would have done some very drastic things, then tried a homeschooling program which was fulfilling college level stuff but also horrendously expensive, so - ) I spent a year in what I lovingly call The Graduation for Dummies Class. Through this course I received my high school diploma. I also was gifted with a wonderful teacher who completely made up for all the inept and indifferent schoolteachers I'd ever had. Said teacher was like the cool older sister who actually wanted to do things with you.)




Packing my letter into the handbag I had converted to a seam-splitting harbinger of all the useless things I would soon find out I didn't need, I got into the car and settled in for the long ride to the Metra station. In Kenosha. An hour and a half away. In a car with a rattling object in the dashboard and a silent radio. The latter was easily dealt with, for my teacher was the complete antithesis to me - she liked to talk. So, as I sat shotgun and listened to her speak over the soft snoring of her sleeping little boy, I looked out of the window at the rising morning along the highway.

There is nothing to look at on the highway, at least not on the one we were traveling down. Just cars and concrete and maybe the backs of vanilla buildings; it was a very long car ride. I counted one Wendy's restaurant - three counties south of where we started and five short blocks from the Metra station.

The station was sterile in the absolute purest sense of the word; there was not even a peanut packet to be found for sustenance. We should have stopped at the Wendy's we'd passed, but then again I wasn't hungry. I was tired, having woken up at 3.00AM and having woken up at 3.00AM my stomach was doing that thing it does when I'm forced to wake up anytime before 6.00 - it cramped.

With a cramping stomach and a mind screaming out ravenously for sleep, Apt Teacher, her son and I walked to the train platform. This platform was not, as you might be imagining, like something out of the Harry Potter series. There were no brick walls or magical creatures, nor even handsome trains. No, this train platform was on the roof of the sterile station we had come through. I wondered briefly how much time would have to pass before the roof gave way in a wondrously grisly display of steel, wood, and asphalt.

I wondered why there were no guardrails around the roof-top platform.

I wondered which one of the small children in the growing crowd would be the first to play "Touch the Face of the Speeding Train".

Once on the speeding train (settling into the second level), "I almost feel like Jonathan in Bram Stoker's Dracula, on his way to certain madness and severancy to the undead". I was sitting right above a man who insisted on picking at his teeth in a very nasty way, and to the left of another who had stared quite intensely at me while getting into this particular train compartment (a man who looked a little too old to be staring at Russian moon-faced (then) 19-year-olds). The same man who out on the platform had been keen on breaking the things packed so tightly in his bag.

That man had a complex, I think. He was all jazzed out in London Punk: Doc Martens (and has anyone else ever found that a tad bit ironic/amusing/[insert adjective here]?), cargo shorts, black beret and a t-shirt three sizes too small. London Calling, as I named him, was studying a book I've been reading for the past two years.

"I'd try to look at that tiny shirt of his, see what band is so important his beer gut needs to be unmasked, but that might draw too much attention".

If it hadn't been for fear of London Calling thinking I was attempting to hit on him, I would have chanced leaning over those two seats between us. I would have dealt with the almost absolute fact that when the train stopped I'd fall to the floor and break something; I was far too tall for the tight quarters of the second story. With my feet hanging down through the railing, I'd nearly clonked the conductor in the head when he came by to check tickets.





I made a remark in my letter to Anarchy (in the USA) about our third stop (Lake Forest, Highland Park - all during which Half-Suit, a man nestled across from us and wearing half a suit conversed with Apt Teacher about things which I did not pay attention to, though at one point I did care enough to learn that Half-Suit was actually Cooky).

Our third stop was Glencoe, Illinois.

"Glencoe. What the hell kind of name is Glencoe? Sounds like some sort of

(Cooky is married and a big cell phone talker. He commutes to Chi-town from Kenosha, works at Palms)

steroid company or something. It even has a stone marker.

(Cooky grew up in West Bend. London Calling looked at me again when I noticed "Glencoe, Ill., home of the best 'roids this side of Barry Bonds's ass!")

Now leaving

(picture: ripped and overly tanned dude, head the size of the Universal Studios globe. Big Smile)

"Glencoe!"

(tink tink of light against bleached and veneered teeth)

for Winnetka. Sweet ol' Winnetka."

I looked over what I had just written. Drunk on lack of sleep, I thought it was the wittiest thing I'd ever read in my life. How wrong I was.




(I inserted that dismal display because the shame might remind me to never think too highly of anything I do again)




Shortly after this, a man in a checkered shirt sat down in the seat immediately to my right. He scratched his head quite frequently. I pondered whether or not I should be worried.

Apt Teacher's son then had to pee. Badly.

And some guy began talking rather loudly about expanding bowels and other things one should never speak of outside of the doctor's office or morgue.