Mon 11 July 2011
I thought I heard human voices, but they were only echoes.
I like to swim out into the lake after dark. It's entirely against the rules, but then what isn't. I wade out past waist level and then swim laterally along the beach, keeping my body under water like a seal. I feel the rise and fall of the waves gelatinous before they crash on the shore. I smell the cool air coming from the many wild miles of lake between myself and Michigan. I hear the distant whine of the urban police car and the gentle rumble of the El train, echoing through the neighborhood. I see the lights atop the skyscrapers twinkle even when I see no stars. I try not to taste the water. I gasp for air between dogstrokes and remember those I've loved, miles afield and yet only a neuron away. I pause from swimming and plunge my head under water. Below the surface I find the self I had forgotten.
***
Summer in Chicago means girls in short summer dresses, tanned thighs and toned calves; Beagles smiling from leashes, strolling on bike paths; The jingle of the ice cream cart as the swarthy and smiling Mexican man sells rice milk popsicles to grown children in the sun; Firecrackers that crackle all night; Long strides on my red bicycle that exceed one hundred miles a week; Craft fairs and the spontaneous friends bought with pints of two-dollar Guinness, the liquid courage of karaoke; Muggy city-on-a-swamp heat fueling sexual heat and new lovers' first kisses; Flash mobs over the price of bananas and Cubs games, haggled from the Addison Street scalpers; Fresh mulberries picked before they stain the sidewalk; Skin darkened by the hours of afternoon beach reading. The Garden of Eden; Another Country — A Moveable Feast.
***
I made a new best friend and we almost moved in together — found a floor of a three-flat near the lake for less than a thousand — we could have hosted the best salons and offered up our living room floor for passing artists, bohemians or my own body when the parents came to visit and stole my room. I'd be living with a woman without living with a woman as we both brought home other women to our separate bedrooms on either side of the flat. Just off "my" room, it had the perfect windowed peninsular room for pensive study and writing, overlooking the narrow, maple-leafed street— that sadly all fell through, so in the words of Modest Mouse, "It's the truth, we all been wrong, we make it up and let's move on."
I got a new pal out of the experience even if my studio looks evermore drab and lonely. If I get one of these jobs by next Monday, I'll find a new place. If I don't, my landlady offered to move me down the hall.
Maybe another winter in Rogers Park wouldn't be so bad after all.
Tue 31 March 2009
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past
OCRACOKE, N.C. — You lose sight of land on Pamlico Sound, and I lost track of time. At that point where the last of the marsh reeds disappear on the southern horizon, and before the water tower at Ocracoke provides evidence to the north of a spit of an island in the Outer Banks, I realized I had fallen into a misadventure and would probably not be seeing my friends anymore that day.
In Chicago, the snow keeps falling in what has been the coldest winter of my life. It snowed again this past weekend, and Tom Skilling at WGN is threatening snow again this weekend. Imagine snow on Opening Day as it warms to a high of 41 degrees at Sox Park. Today, it's mostly melted but there are still little mountains of snow a-hanging around.
I escaped for eight days, headed down to North Carolina to see a good friend at Camp Lejeune and keep his wife company as she hobbles around on crutches, having blown her knee out on a bunny slope. He's in between tours of Iraq. It was important to me that I see him. And who doesn't want to a place with an ocean and a state that at least sounds warm, like North Carolina? It was a really nice time, before my misadventure on the North Carolina Ferry System.
We saw giant hovercraft come out of the sea and bear down onto the sand, practicing a faux Normandy invasion. The latest winter storms had blown black sand and fossils all over the beach. We ate venison steak and drank Irish beer. On the first full day there, we took a walk deep into the swamp with his dog, and the neighbor mutts panted along, under electric fences, past piles of bear shit and across mini-streams. When the water overtook the land, we paddled along in a canoe. Much of North Carolina's coast is endless swamp, a sandy soil where pine trees cover the dry spots. Beavers made it worse, flooding the land with their stick-built dams. Out of spite or out of ignorance, the dogs pulled at the beavers' dam with their jaws, ripping out the logs. The water gushed out. The beavers slapped their tails.
I landed in Raleigh on St. Patrick's Day, and it struck me as a coincidental trip toward origins. My family immigrated to Raleigh from Belfast, Ireland, 300 years ago, give or take. I had never been there, but I could see the history of the place. The beautifully old sagging brick buildings, the antebellum debutante feel of Meredith College, where I met an actual Irish girl on the day of green. (She was otherwise a disappointing lass, alas.)
And my friend taught me how to drive a stick shift so I could drive along the ocean. The ferry to Ocracoke Island takes 2-1/2 hours. I thought it would take less than one. I never realized how slow boats are, beating back all that friction of the nautical miles. There's a lounge on the boat and, half-starved, I raided the vending machine of its chips and its honey buns and its twinkies. Mostly people just sit in their cars. There was one attractive girl who kept wandering lonesome about the top of the ferry as the wind blew hard across the blue sea. I liked the way she fit inside her pants, but it was too cold to stay long in the wind, and her boyfriend waited for her in the truck, indifferent to the view.
I sailed to these Lake Michigan waters a year ago guided by a Polaris that no longer shines for me. I have only my own light to guide me from now on, and I don't know what to think about that. I keep reading back lines from Hamlet: There is nothing neither good nor bad, only thinking makes it so.
But isn't that a double negative? With one more credit, I'll have a master's from Northwestern University, the Big Ten's top university. I really like Chicago, actually, despite its terrible weather, and I live a solidly, writerly Nelson Algren type of existence. But I don't think I'm going to stay. I don't know. I have the ghost of faith that a couple of opportunities in San Francisco might come through. And so I may sail on, this time with the current. To a good harbor town.
The ferry left me off on Ocracoke, finally, and I raced the Corolla across the 14-mile island only to be denied passage onto the other ferry that would take me north towards Cape Hatteras and Kill Devil Hills. I had to wait another hour for another boat. The wind was whipping about on that unprotected island, but I took the time to gather seashells by the seashore. Another 40 minutes on a boat, and then I saw the sunset beside that famous lighthouse at Cape Hatteras, N.C., the one with the candy stripe of black on white. I drove far out of the way to avoid another ferry and got back to my friends' place. I arrived just before midnight. The next morning, I left their house before dawn to catch a bus to the airport, anxious to return to my Illinois home.
Fri 2 January 2009
Life in the lull
(this was a response to a Craig's List posting)
Oh, the lull — the life is passing you by, the better days that once that were, the greater story someplace else, the four walls of your existence bouncing echoes as the flashing blue-silver screen chirps anxiety and inauthentic characters.
Oh, I know the lull. You think you love the musty smell of a used bookstore cranny, taking pictures with your Nikon, catching that perfect angle of Sears Tower at night or a certain friend looking the other way, caught in thought as you attempt to steal a bit of her soul. Or his soul.
You think you like these things, you say you like these things, and so I ask, why don't you do these things? Are you waiting for the couch to blow a spring and jolt you upward and outward into the life that goes on all around you? Come out, come out, wherever you are.
Oh, but I know the lull is not so easy. You're a speed skater going around the frozen velodrome and your feet are fixed in grooves. You're the needle tied to an arm playing the same worn out groove and it's a hit from 2005. Even your favorite television characters have grown up and moved out and rejoined the living, left their silly fiction play with the product placement.
The lull, the vortex, the void, the limbo, the super-inertia of the gravitron, it's a hard thing to pull out of. You can only do it yourself, but I--I just might be able to throw an arm into the lull and try to help.
I live just north. Have you been to Armadillo's Pillow at Sheridan and Pratt? It's the best. Books cheap cheap cheap. And classic nooks crannies to go along with the classically quirky and rodent-like mascot. If you like, we could peruse together there...
Or just talk for a little while this way. You sound attractively interesting, if lull-bound.
From the other side,
This is Chris at 25
