I used to walk filthy into Dominick's and nibble the samples on the way to the bananas and bakery in the back. My legs, mostly nude, would begin to get cold in the hyper-conditioned supermarket air as I fingered the chocolate bars of the checkout line. I would read their nutrition facts, as if someday I expected them to involve less saturated fat.

Soon, outside again, I would lean my bag between my bike and calves and lie on my sweaty back on the Illinois Avenue park benches. Like the ribcage of a firm lover, their smooth hard slats would press into my spine as I squinted behind my sunglasses, smashed my banana inside an asiago cheese roll, and felt the sun bake my sweat into my tan.

Now my skin is pale and chlorinated... my legs sparkling clean, cold, and unsweating... and I'm hungry... for bananas... for cheesy bread... for summer.



_

At dawn, the stretchy crotch of my long underwear hangs low between my frigid thighs and the tips of my toes against the chilly floor go white as Greta's winter fingers. In my drowsy shower-steam fictions I wander the aisles of HPP carrying giardiniera peppers.

Though the steamy clouds of daybreak are nearly scalding to my toes, once they roll up to my face and away from me they instantaneously crystallise against the frosty windows of the bathroom. Still dreamy, I contemplate chocolate bars with names like Renew and wonder if today will be the first day I buy a black and white cookie in the checkout line.

Soon though, I'm awake and clean, and the little cashier has vanished along with his dark sparky eyes. Instead, in his place I am met with snow, miles of snow rolling out across the lake. It's dotted with tents and remnants of bonfires, but Lake Mendota is still too expansive in its winter garb, and I miss the summer.

My arms feel strangely as if they are full of bottles of peppers while I bike to work, and when the fluorescent whine of my office raises the roots of my body hair, I drown it in the deep, clean bass drums and broad swooping instrumentals of sunny sweaty summer music festivals long past. 

But my toes are still so cold.


_

With leaky yellow gloves plunged deep into scalding, soapy dishwater mayhem, I explained the photon as the boson of electromagnetism to the levitating eyebrows of an all-too-skeletal bohemian man as he munched cookies in my kitchen. He brushed orange-chocolate crumbs onto his threadbare flannel while he probed my dishwashing brain for the fabric of the universe. His big grinning eyes were limitless and engulfing, their curiosity infectious.

But I'm full up with these intense, involved experiences, and occasionally recall a pace of life that was more realistic, a flow not quite so  erratic or all-consuming. Instead of the bumpy lumpy stop and go chaos of work/school/co-op intensity, I daydream myself into the avocado smoothness of a past life. If I concentrate, I can feel the sun from the windows during that first felafel summer in the sunroom, cozy best friend stories across the island in the kitchen, and the lotus-like pull of boxed wine with jewish boys and philosophers... until slowly my heart is warm and light again. Joyful and refreshed, it is a tender, rich, velvet avocado... and the world is my garlic, my jalapeño, my cilantro...



_

Madison is saturated with sweatervesty, hair gelled, overpriced espresso miel gargling frat sympathizers. They are matched one-for-one by sweatpantsy, swoopy haired, mascara laden, milk-fed midwestern women who wear furry australian boots as if the Australians know more about snowtrudging than Wisconsinites. Among their numbers is the occaisional wire-haired, electric-eyed, rope-belted socio-intellectual outlier. Despite his peculiarly soothing solidarity, my indented contour cauchy integrals and I still feel vaguely displaced here. We know a better place to study, and so often daydream of a pair of those square chairs in a 3rd floor window on the southern wall of the Reg, gazing over our knees at the sheets of snow that crack and slide geologically slowly down the orange rooftops, over the faces of gargoyles.


_

I raced south on LaSalle past Ohio into a familiar cloud of Blommer chocolate smell. Soft bubbles rose in my chest as my heart simmered with a steamy fondness that melted the snowflakes in my eyelashes. My 27c's wobbled fast over the waffley grating above Chicago's frigid black river, and I wondered how it's possible for so many people to love this place from the superheated, hermetically odorless interiors of their cars. What melts their hearts if not the cocoa in the icy air?

Are you simmering them too?


_

Last night we made food in a kitchen that we would later overwhelm with bounteous overfull bike carts of bright, crisp peppers, okra, prickly pears, and mangoes. A bike guy grated sweet potatoes and asked me if he should chop another onion.
Of course, the answer to 'more food?' is always yes at Loth.
So he braved some tears and said he couldn't remember the last time he'd cried. I smiled a low smile. Even as I routinely stirred the rice pudding and retrieved orange peppers from the fridge, I could still secretly feel freshly dried salt in my lashes and a familiar rainy sensation in the back of my throat.
I was simultaneously present and distant, tremendously serene and schizophrenic cradling so many vegetables in my hands and so much chicago in my brain.



_

... to enumerate the details that I would miss about my life in Chicago.
Though you knew that, didn't you, before you asked...

I'd intended to take photos of gargoyles and to pen odes on black squirrels and DivSchoolBiscottiCrumbs until I'd honored it all. I'd dreamed to record for safekeeping my love for botany pond and for smokers outside the Reg and the quiet naked heat of the sauna between swimming and snow.

In this enumeration though, I was paralyzed midway by my humbling recognition of the substandard foresight that allowed me to begin it as a countdown... as if the subject were finite.



_

Sometimes I spend midnights at the lake, watching Chicago's million streetlights flicker, and the buildings are skyscraper people who dip their fiery toes into the cold black lake.







_

Dish Depth.

Perhaps no slice of any substantial depth has ever been socially consumed without stirring up a certain familiar chain of inquiry. During any event of its contemplation, the same philosophical concerns arise and are grappled with, familiar sides are taken and well rehearsed debates are engaged in. Its mere entrance upon the scene necessitates that at some point, the merits of the slice are inevitably lauded, its construction dissected, and its legitimacy challenged. Does the term deep dish conjure the same connotations as 'stuffed'? If served in New York is it still Chicago style? Is this cholesterol casserole the perpetrator of tremendous fraud or the mere victim of misnomer? Are toppings still toppings if they're on the bottom? Is crust in the middle still crust even though its not crusty? These are immortal, unanswerable paradoxes, but such noble quandaries must be faced. In the same way that we must ask ourselves who we are, how we came to be, and what happens when we no longer walk the earth, we must also be brave enough to wonder, are we meant to eat it with a fork, or with our hands. After all, if we had no excuse to debate about the pizza, chicagoans would only talk more about the weather, and we know well enough by now that there are only a finite number of ways to say still cold.



_ 

Last night, by what was no doubt a case of mistaken identity and overwhelming good will, I found myself milling around the finely tailored suits of a few hundred rich politicos of Chicago, drinking the free wine of activists, Pritzkers and dignitaries.
A very handsome man stood up at some point. Though sleepy and having no doubt had a little well deserved wine, he was deftly spoken and his egalitarian eyes seemed to intentionally pause to meet those of each other person in the room.

 

One spine-straightening comment at a time, he reminded us that he belonged to Chicago, and that the fight is not yet half over. Our fierce urban optimism will be required for many months to come, he said, and we stood, sighing inaudibly, silencing phonecalls from friends until too soon he concluded his audacious hope, decided to shake some hands, wink at the wide eyes of a misplaced twenty-something in quirky earrings, and retire for the evening.



Soon, one of the many men with a curly ear wire emerging from his suit would stand between she and her bike. She would be told to stand back, move back, don't approach the man leaving the building and stepping into the large vehicle.



But our future president has nothing to fear from this girl or her bike, no indeed. They quite like him, I think.



_

Hautepeculiar masqueradventures in the urbandoned desolaprairie industrojungle.










_

jumping bean.




_

Say you're desperately in love... crazy, wild, incomparable love...
My question for you is, do you allow your lover to pluck your beard hairs while you're on the train?

In the wee hours of the morning the two of you sit down on the CTA, a mass transit system full of strangers and schizophrenia and inebriation, and the love of your life whips out her tweezers, gets all up in your face, and starts plucking hairs out of your chin.
Is this okay with you, in light of your undeniably priceless love?

There is a little mexican man in Chicago who says... si.


_

peanuts
peppers
water
boy
bike
bed
boy
breakfast
physics
boy
bike
ice
slide
butt
bruise
bike
pier
tundra
carry
bike
detour
beer
walk
surprise
friends
hugs
samosas
beer
phone
family
dosai
sauces
spices
piscola
biryani
beer
paneer
avocados
beer
coffee
cake
ice cream
champagne
scarf
car
home
bikes
stranger
avocado
boy
bed
bathroom.




_

Saw some hardcore real-life frostbite today.


(parents at large will be relieved to know it wasn't mine)
(... and vindicated to know it was, in fact, the direct result of biking too much in the winter... )




_

Most of the lake was fairly calm and empty, and despite the snow the other day and the icy burn in my lungs, there was no ice on the still water yet. Lonely without geese to chase, I rounded the corner at 51st and where the water was choppy along 49th street beach, bobbing up and down, getting spashed by the surf, dozens of ducks were crowded into the only waves in sight.
I stopped on my summer sunbathing rock and wondered, do they like the waves more because the motion warms the water... or because the chop is more exciting? These ducks... were they cold, or righteous?

mankind may never know.



_

I chuckled in my underarmor outside Istria at the absurdity of the notion that 9 in the morning might ever have anything to do with you, and beamed a little with nostalgia when I hoped that I never know what you look like awake at that hour. When that day comes, too much will have changed about the world.

And so it was with a chuckle that one small, silent, thoughtful cup of coffee later I ran the rest of a loop around hyde park. Well before I reached the blinding sparkle of lake Michigan, the crisp blue morning sky and yellow fall leaves had already elbowed their way into my cloudy head. And it was with this borrowed clarity that I ran past the alarming love between a doughy newborn in a pumpkin hat and its tired, fuzzy father until my footsteps startled a flock of black birds (starlings, are they called starlings?). They flew over my head like some sort of colloid, and when I looked up at them (I swear to you, I don't make this stuff up) there was a big, bright hyde park parakeet in the middle of their black cloud, oblivious to his own greenness.

So, Sam, thank you so much for being exactly who you are, or I might never have been reminded that there's no room for stormy thoughts in a neighborhood full of parakeets and babies and love and lakes and leaves.



_

...our lithe mash of bibulous tessellation was familiar, and our dubious careening was what it had been when I met them all, when one day we walked to the point discussing tattoos and weighing our coolnesses against each others'. But, to this beat we now tiptoe the precipice of goodbyes, aware only of the mad, infrangible heartbeats we still have for each other, our unspent love grasping at the people we understand the best before we face the fictional friendships of our futures.
Some of us will embrace each other in the throes of this bodacious furor, but others will go home to colder beds, pinioned to our pillows by the tremulous promise of fresher heartbeats.


_

Drenched in the shivering wetness of October in Chicago I biked with no hands and looked up into the slant of the rain glinting in the streetlights. It hit me cold and fast in the eyes and though I secretly feared the slickness of the wet black street whizzing beneath me, I trusted gyroscopic conservation of momentum with the faith of someone much less cynical, and, overcome by a characteristically irrational refusal to blink, I submitted to rainy blindness.
A tall man's cool shoes pedaled fast behind me and he called out that I should play the drums. Through the raindrops I recalled warmly lit grins out of the cozier haze of recent nights and my wet arms drummed the fast air fictitiously to no music at all until, beneath the layers of cold soggy cloth and skin, something very warm began heating up a very tender nook just behind my sternum.
And we biked on.


_

After a more cognizant review, I realize this was way cheesy, so I'm sparing you, behind ( an lj-cut. )