So last time I left off I think I was talking about Chicago and some of my thoughts on it. Maybe this blog will be called "Thinkin' of U Chicago" or something kinda gay and artsily titled because that's kinda how Chicago was, Gay and Artsy and just full of great stuff and stuff I didn't like and gosh it's so easy to make comparisons, but let's start by talking about how easy it was to DRINK there.
Fun fact: Chicago is basically synonymous with Al Capone, a prohibition-era gangster who liked to shoot a Tommy gun and wear striped suits and kept the streets of Chicago flowing with liquor and violence, along with consummate corruption. He apparently had a safe underneath the city that contained his secrets which Geraldo decided to blow up sometime in the early 80's, creating a big fat red herring of a moment when he left everyone to wonder if we could ever trust the news media ever again.
FAST FORWARD: It is the 2000's and you now have a city steeped firmly in a strong history of alcohol; when I moved to Chicago in 2009 it was rated as the 10th drunkest city per capita, and the drunkest "Big City". In Chicago, you can drink pretty much anywhere at any hour, legally. Summertime, the laws become even more lax, as street parties become rampant and the cops seem to be only present only when things truly seem on the precipice of getting out of hand. I moved to Chicago where, by Chicago standards, I would be considered a teetotaller: I drank at most once or twice a week. It was very hard to keep those kind of standards in a city where 5 a.m bars were in every neighborhood, premium imported and domestic draughts could be found for 2 dollar specials everywhere, and pretty much everyone I knew loved to drink. It was like living in a city of alcoholics who had found their perfect city. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think everyone in Chicago is an alcoholic, it's just that the ease of availability of cheap booze 24/7 and a superb public transportation system made it very appealing to go out and get drunk A LOT more than I ever wanted to. But shit, it was a ton of fun.
And that's what is great about Chicago: it is a FUN city. A million things to do every night! And it's all within 5 miles of you. The only problem is for about 4-5 months of the year you don't want to go out; the wind whips around you like an annoying mosquito that won't quit and it is FUCKING COLD. Everyone is very connected to social media and it makes it very easy to find several things within your neighborhood to do, but the weather makes it very appealing to sit at home on your laptop and eat comfort food while you wonder how the fuck it got dark at 4:15 pm.
Sometimes I don't think I really should have moved there. I visited once when I lived in Nashville (another not-so-smart place that I moved to on a whim) and decided it was better than living amongst honkey-tonks and rampant institutionalized racism, so I went. And it was really great for the first year or so, especially the first three months of Summer when I got to crash on a friend's couch and pretty much just party all summer long and live off of my savings I had made back in Tennessee. It was especially wonderful, too, because I had made pretty much zero friends in Nashville in a whole year and ended up making like 50 (or at least facebook friends) in Chicago in a matter of weeks. And that's when you begin to realize that Chicago is really just a largely populated city that begins to feel like a small town that is also drowning in booze.
My first scene that I fell into was a group of friendly people that liked to drink and have bbqs and liked to have a fun time, but there was a certain shallowness I felt after repeated hangouts with the scene, so I branched out by deciding to go out on my own and try and meet some people. The first person I met unaffiliated with the aforementioned group (let's just call them the "late 20's hipster group") was a 19-year old kid with a fake ID I met dancing at Beauty Bar. He invited me back to his place and drink boxed Zinfandel while I lamented to him how the first girl I dated (from the late 20's hipster group) had gone completely bonkers on me and had started stalking me at a street festival. He lived in a big art gallery which was amazing to me since I was living on a dirty couch in a rat-infested box in Ukranian Village and I immediately assumed he was rich (he wasn't, he just had lucked across the deal of the century in terms of loft space). For whatever reason, he came out of the closet that night to me, which wasn't that big of a deal except he told me later that I was like the 2nd person he had ever formally admitted to being gay to, which made me feel pretty special and kinda felt like this secret bond we had in the ensuing months when I was going to art openings at his space.
Anyway, through him I ended up meeting a whole ton of art students who drove me completely up the wall, but fortunately his roommate shared the same passion for art school-bashing and was older so we became bros for the summer. I remember that time being this weird combination of coming down from a lingering insomniatic depression (due to Nashville being such a horrible, horrible place for me to live), riding bikes, sweating through a lot of Hanes tank-tops, discovering lots of new places and becoming fully steeped in the Chicago Swagger and Attitude that permeates the pores of the city.
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Chicago is filled with brick and its really brown and there's not a lot of nature. You kind of feel like you exist in a box inside a box inside an unfathomably large box. There's really no other way to describe it except for that it is crazy. It is nestled smack dab in the middle of the country, in the midwest, with no oceanic coast to be see for thousands of miles. There's something about that confining nature that keeps you a little bit more comfortable with going through the motions of the rat race and losing your ability to dream, but that could be a personal thing since, after all, Billy Corgan did come from there. And Wilco! And, I don't know, Tina Fey spent a lot of time there, along with pretty much any other famous, quick-witted comedian.
And that is one of the things I loved the most about Chicago. People are so fucking fast in the way they think. And it's really just a survival mechanism you develop once you get there. Need to get across the street while a deluge of insane commuters are trying to beat the 5pm inner-city gridlock? THINK FAST! Need to figure out how to make it to your friend's sketch show in 15 minutes while you're riding your bike against traffic and you literally have no time to call, text or ask anyone for directions? THINK FAST! You learn pretty quickly how to make things happen. It really is the entire thesis of Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" and the entire exegesis of improv rolled up and tucked into the city's entire ethos: You Don't Think, You Just Do. And it all somehow works. And you still are alive at the end of the day.
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