Notes for a sketch on Chicago: Summer, 2003
(Excerpt from a longer entry at my blog page: here.)
Hot, stuffy, sweltering heat. The Dog Days of August, if I ever have seen them. Heat like a wet fiber-glass blanket laid over you in the middle of a massive black asphalt parking lot, sticky wet air with hints of storms that may come, but not for weeks. In heat like this, the small studio apartment that I have been calling home feels all the more close and stuffy, with the usual relief of walking in the door replaced by a furthering of the swelter of outside, but inside, gone is the gentle cross breeze that feels so sweet when it drifts by on the sidewalk, like a waft of a pretty girls perfume as she passes.
Couple these feelings with the detachment of not being in contact, at least not much, with anyone here that I know, Hans excepted. But his work schedule is such that he is not around all that much. I bear no grudge there, of course. Work is work, and play is play, and Hans is in the initial stages of a relationship that seems to be going well. Cant fault him for that.
But it means that Im mostly left to my own devices, which is fine. Im also left, mostly, with Hanss apartment all to myself, which is nice, too. However he has no land-line phone, he exists purely through his cel-phone, a method that suits him fine, but is odd for me to adapt to. I am left with the idea of having to go to payphones to track people down, or walk down the streets looking at all the nameless faces I pass, hoping against all odds that I will strike jackpot and stumble into someone I know.
Which is, I suppose, what I have been feeling throughout these past two days. A detachment from the ties that I had here in Chicago, a quiet anonymity, where I pass amidst a an unknown crowd, dodge through a faceless hive of people, glancing from person to person for a sign of recognition, a sense of memory, of having been here before.
And I have been here before, seven years ago (seven years! Could it have been so long?) Seven years, almost to the day, since I packed my few belongings into my dads old Toyota van (we called it the Toyota Tylenol then) and trekked across the flat, bleak tracts of Ohio and Indiana, arriving at the tender, nave age of not-even-quite eighteen, landing in a dorm room as small and hot and closely packed with things as this basement apartment I sit in now, with all the hope and possibility and fervor that a recent high-school graduate could come up with as he finally laid down to sleep that first night and thought to himself, Im on my own now. Whatever Im gonna do, Im gonna do it myself.
(Excerpt from a longer entry at my blog page: here.)
Hot, stuffy, sweltering heat. The Dog Days of August, if I ever have seen them. Heat like a wet fiber-glass blanket laid over you in the middle of a massive black asphalt parking lot, sticky wet air with hints of storms that may come, but not for weeks. In heat like this, the small studio apartment that I have been calling home feels all the more close and stuffy, with the usual relief of walking in the door replaced by a furthering of the swelter of outside, but inside, gone is the gentle cross breeze that feels so sweet when it drifts by on the sidewalk, like a waft of a pretty girls perfume as she passes.
Couple these feelings with the detachment of not being in contact, at least not much, with anyone here that I know, Hans excepted. But his work schedule is such that he is not around all that much. I bear no grudge there, of course. Work is work, and play is play, and Hans is in the initial stages of a relationship that seems to be going well. Cant fault him for that.
But it means that Im mostly left to my own devices, which is fine. Im also left, mostly, with Hanss apartment all to myself, which is nice, too. However he has no land-line phone, he exists purely through his cel-phone, a method that suits him fine, but is odd for me to adapt to. I am left with the idea of having to go to payphones to track people down, or walk down the streets looking at all the nameless faces I pass, hoping against all odds that I will strike jackpot and stumble into someone I know.
Which is, I suppose, what I have been feeling throughout these past two days. A detachment from the ties that I had here in Chicago, a quiet anonymity, where I pass amidst a an unknown crowd, dodge through a faceless hive of people, glancing from person to person for a sign of recognition, a sense of memory, of having been here before.
And I have been here before, seven years ago (seven years! Could it have been so long?) Seven years, almost to the day, since I packed my few belongings into my dads old Toyota van (we called it the Toyota Tylenol then) and trekked across the flat, bleak tracts of Ohio and Indiana, arriving at the tender, nave age of not-even-quite eighteen, landing in a dorm room as small and hot and closely packed with things as this basement apartment I sit in now, with all the hope and possibility and fervor that a recent high-school graduate could come up with as he finally laid down to sleep that first night and thought to himself, Im on my own now. Whatever Im gonna do, Im gonna do it myself.
-me
-me