This Rogue’s Town . . .

Lionel Richie and Kenny Rogers are doing a duet of "Easy like Sunday Morning" on CMT right now as I speak.  Need I say more?

By now it’s no secret that I enjoy a somewhat tortured relationship with my former hometown-that is, the one where my parents are presentally domiciled, not the one in which I was actually raised.  And I say tortured because a big part of me wants so desperately to like Chicago (the "Good Place" as the Jersey-bred JCA once sentimentally described it) more than I do.  And it may very well be that I like it enough, but does it seem wrong that I don’t love it? Many people do, it seems, and not just the usual suspects: seemingly happy-go-lucky whitefolk who by all sartorial indications go skiing on a weekly basis.  It’s always been a mystery to me just where it is they go skiing out here, it being so flat.  But that’s no matter.  There are others out there, of course, for whom this place is just as good.  There have to be.  Perhaps their experiences aren’t quite as salient from up here, in a tower above the earth purchased by pensions and profit-sharing and the overpriced sale of untold billions of little pills, but they’re there.  At least I imagine.

But maybe it’s never anything intrinsic to the place that makes it good but the experiences it envelopes and represents for those that reside therein.  It doesn’t take much for me to figure out just what it is about this place that places it a few (just a few) notches below "good".  Or Brick City for that matter.  And then Manhattan is not without its emotional gripes as well: too many ghosts, too many disappearances, too many mistakes.  Say what I will about Chicago, at least out here I am not haunted.  Then again, its hard to feel all that haunted in a place when it often seems that you yourself are the ghost; something relocated or subsumed by something else.  I see a little bit of myself in the sloping First Chicago tower, now crowned by Chase’s blue octogonal logo, or the venerable Marshall Field’s on State Street, going about its business as usual unconcerned with the truly denigrating name change (Macy*s Chicago) awaiting it in a few months. 

Conversely, you can’t haunt the places you’ve never really been to.  Somewhere out in that endless plat of streets and highways are places like the Green Mill, Kingston Mines, the Victory Gardens; places I studied from afar without every actually setting foot.  I’m sure they’re all good places, though now I can only guess.  It may have been mere adolescent posing: something I wanted only for the experience but never actually experienced because I lacked the wherewithall to really want any of it.  Then again, they may have just also been places I only wanted to go to because only my brother could get me in; would get me in if the opportunity ever presented itself.  This is a heavy thoughtload, I admit, one that arrives naturally from the upperfloor brooding of skyline life and in the wrong hands leads to the type of aureate turgidity espoused by people who think themselves eecummingsorsomeonelikethat but I suppose that’s
beside    the point.

Moving on . . .

There’s luckily a prescription for even this kind of sobriety of thought.  I got the gift of a little reprieve yesterday, when I joined Friendsters Mac (et soeur), Amy, and . . .  um . . . SelfishHedonist for a few hours of carousing in BoysTown, Chicago’s vestpocket gay ghetto.  Unseemly details aside, the emotional season is certainly ripe for steeping oneself in friends, frivolity, and ‘fiddich.  I ambled back to my parents condo at 3:30am and settled down into my bedtime tradition of the past five days: slowly lulling myself to sleep with the nightime jazz musings of WBEZ (WBEW over in Chesterton, WBEQ down in Morris). 

Lying in my bed, looking southward towards that vast, dazzling, electrifying grid extending (sometimes magically and sometimes defiantly) deep into the black prairie night, where the streets are numbered and the planes descend over Cicero, not Wood Dale, and I can only imagine-and not know-because I come from the opposite direction of things, I wondered again about the good place, and how a place that seems to go on forever and ever can come to be so restricting.  It was around this time that Etta James paid me a visit via carrier wave. 

A few weeks back I got messaged by a random on Friendster who wanted to know if I was really serious about Nina Simone covering Hall & Oates. Indeed I was, and the same goes for Etta’s soulful cover of "Miss You" by the Rolling Stones that played last night.  I had first heard it years and years ago, maybe my first six months in NYC, on WBGO; this, of course, was long before I’d attend law school but a few blocks from that station.  It’s music for the stillness of the night-a night you can’t experience so close to the ground I’ve made a haughty point of extolling all these years. This song itself is unremarkable: a downbeat blues cover of an uptempo bass-heavy original, whose subject matter (in that great Jagger-Ricardian tradition) seems to principally be about getting laid.  And longing too, but we don’t need to go there right now.  It took me away and brought me back all the same; to Manhattan through Brick City back to here.  Towers above the earth, from where you can see everything stretch out into nothing all at once, are good for this kind of music, if only their denizens seemed more inclined to listen. 

And indeed they probably do, though my Mother says she "loves NPR except for all the jazz they play at night".  Jazz, she says, is too noisy.  I told her it’s not about the noise but the fundamental lack of structure.  And lying there last night, mind swirling of Manhattan, Brick City, right here, and perhaps just a little residual Dewar’s White, I got to wonder when I’ll get around to maybe taking my own advice for a change.  But for now-for then, rather-I felt a little bit good looking out on this place.  For a change.  And I’ll take that.  For now. 

STOP IT, JC Penney!! STOP IT NOW!

In light of the events of the past week, and of the current locale of this present one, my Friendster horoscope is being uncharacteristically prescient.  To wit:

Feeling stressed? Take some time alone to pamper yourself and get back to basics.

In Detail

It’s just your nature to wonder, but when you do too much of it, it can easily turn to obsession. Keeping that in mind, might it not be time to stop worrying if there was a deeper meaning behind a comment a dear one recently made? You’re a natural-born detective, but some clues just aren’t worth following up on. And some folks aren’t clever enough to insert an actual meaning into everything they say.

a-EFFIN-men . . .

This time I took the wrong turn at sarvangaasana.  Ow!!

I read about Post-Marathon depression in that last fateful October issue of Runner’s World believing it some imagined malady of those far more autistic about the sport than myself.  I was wrong.  I’ve experienced these past few days the type of sustained lack of energy and drive that rarely ever follows a Gibson’s-free evening.  Sometimes it hits me like a wall, like First Avenue did as soon as I turned off from the Queensboro.  Other times it’s more prolonged and tedious; I trudge through the day in a fog feeling not unlike miles 22-23 in Central Park. 

Mind you, there are a few externalities at play.  For one thing, I’ve unwound from the past month of carb-loading by feasting almost excluslively on Halloween Candy and French Silk Pie imported from the Baker’s Square on Milwaukee Ave.  For another, I had a particularly trying visit by my mother, whose physical vitals are improving but whose emotional state has become particularly raw lately.  And for another at that, I’ll be spending an entire week with the parents in Chicago for Thanksgiving.  It pains me to say I’ve grown terribly weary of my former hometown these days.  And for the last, I await bar exam results within this week. 

I haven’t thought about the bar exam much since August; having not yet found a job, it simply won’t do me much good.  I do, however, think about the pencil I used on the New York subjects multi-choice that failed to erase roughly four changed answers.  I think about the MBE question on Learned Texts where I got the multi-state and New York rules confused.  I think about New Jersey, it’s lower pass rate, and how that was probably not the most opportune time to hit my stride.  Just like along Fourth Avenue, in Bay Ridge. 

I’ve remarked over the past few weeks about how simply too much is happening in too short a period of time, and yet not enough for too long all the same.  When you train for and run a Marathon you learn to appreciate the insignificance of time; that it will pay tricks on you and is not worth the effort most pay it in their day-to-day lives.  I learned that last Sunday, when I ran a race of 26.2 miles-well ahead of my own goal, far faster than any first timer has any business running-on the strength of a swift 10 K split and a record-matching half-marathon.  I didn’t micromanage time, certainly not on that long stretch of Brooklyn where I repeatedly turned 6:00-6:15 miles.  I, for the first time in a while, had to force myself to slow down not catch up.  So much trying to catch up, three years worth now, all of it requiring a belief that you’ve fallen behind at some point.  That never really happened, at least not until I crossed into Queens.  By then it didn’t matter, the race had finished and the Marathon had begun. 

I promised myself back in August that if I could break 3:45, I could do anything, and that no New York Board of Law Examiners could tell me otherwise.  I’ve thus far been proven wrong in one key area: I didn’t break 3:45, I broke 3:30 give or take a few minutes at that.  By my own logic, I’ve just purchased roughly 16 more minutes of anything to accomplish than what was available before.   

I’ve learned I can do alot in 16 minutes, like cross the Verrazano with a good quarter mile of Dyker Heights to spare.  I’ve learned it can carry me three hours and twenty minutes clear across the five boroughs.  And I now know what those three hours and twenty eight minutes can and cannot change. It can make me smile at complete strangers, for one thing, but it won’t probably won’t take away what my mother said to me the following day; that me, my dad, and my brother are the reason why she has cancer. 

And it ultimately won’t have any bearing on how things fall with bar results, but it did change one thing.   Perhaps not a change, but a revelation, and then not a revelation, but something I too easily forget.  It was written on a placard by a gentleman in Harlem.  And it said: "Walls have Doors"

As of this writing, it’s still true.

All I’ll say for now is that I’ve just learned a very important lesson about duct-taping my nipples.

If only I’d known about this in law school, I could have added substantially to my (still) glorious selection of hoodies.