My neighbor, my neighborhood, are no exceptions.
Alright, I don't mean bombing in the sense of war. I'm talking about getting a snoot-full.
I live in a very trendy? hip? active? yes!- active neighborhood in Chicago. There are a lot of bars and restaurants. This is a good thing overall except for the fact that everyone of them puts an outdoor cafe on the sidewalk and the availability of simple walking space has been chewed up and swallowed.
It's not entirely outdoor cafes that have taken up the sidewalk. There are 14 different varieties of parking, loading zone and tow zone signs, giant planters and public sculptures. And waiting to be seated outside, getting edified on the myriad of parking challenges and wondering "what the hell that big red thing outside of Burton Place is because it looks like a giant crab claw and does that mean they serve seafood, oh they don't!"- are gaggles of people. Tourists, the drunken-fist-fighting-tube-topping-$65 dollar-flip-flopping-shiny, happy post-college party crowd, the swarthy and sinister valet mob, the double-wide stroller yuppies in all their Northface fleece-laden entitlement who are teaching their kids to ride bicycles and scooters down the sidewalk while walking large pure-breed dogs, botox, boob-jobbed-cigar-smoking denizens of the Viagra Triangle who wander over to Old-Town for something different to do. They are chewing up the thoroughfare. Also idiot joggers, not idiots for exercising but for including Wells St. on their fitness route and bands of poor kids from the nearbye housing projects destroying the newspaper boxes and littering. Let's not forget them. Oh, and hostile, singing, poetry-reciting panhandlers that smell like pee. Them too.
Let's just say it takes 15 minutes on a sunny Saturday afternoon to get to Walgreen's 2 blocks away.
Here is a little diddy I wrote for the all female sketch comedy troupe I was in called BLAIRE. The song was an observation about a similar northside Chicago neighborhood where I often work and how all the small businesses, the charm and diverse ethnic food that used to be there has been replaced by one particular moronic, faux-ethnic, establishment. I will not name the specific faux-ethnic endeavor for fear of of being labled a faux-racist. Instead I will let the heavily veiled title and lyrics speak for themselves.
It's called "Irish Bar"
In villes of Wrigley
Where girls are jiggly
And beer flows flat from the tap
Lay me down
On that Lakeview ground
In a puddle of puke and crap
For I am drunk
A sodden slam-drunk
In my backwards baseball cap
Oh let me lie here
Oh let me die here
Bellied up to an Irish Bar
I take my Miller shite
My Marlboro lite
And I can't find my f***in' car
But worry no more
We'll just go next door
To another f***in' Irish Bar!
You get the idea.(Thanks to Annie Rubino for the language of the Miller/Marlboro verse.)
Back to the hazards of Old Town.
After gearing up for the regularly occuring obstacle course that is the block of Wells St between North Avenue and Schiller St, getting zen and focused with my with my game plan-BAM! I forget that there is an art fair, wine-tasting event or block party right outside my door and I find myself haggling with some dick-head frat-guy security guard over whether or not I'm going to pay 5 bucks to get in so I can go buy toilet paper and Splenda on the next block. Sometimes I argue but mostly I take LaSalle St.
Okay, I'm bitter, tired and have poor time management skills when I run errands or this wouldn't be an issue.
Despite the grousing in this post, I am not the psycho who keeps ripping out the flowers out of the flower boxes in front of Orso's and the frame shop. I'm always sad when that happens.
Honestly, I am lucky to live here. I could live in a lot worse places with war and land-mines tearing my community to bits. I could live in a blighted area with no commerce, with rampant street crime, and economic desperation slapping me in the face every minute of everyday.
It boils down to wishing my chunk of the city was a little quieter when I'm trying to watch "Hung" or "Design Stars" on On Demand while walking a brisk pace on my treadmill.
It's clear that I fit right in where I live.
Ghandi said, "If you want the world to change, be the way you want the world to be". So I am going to do what I want the chattering whiskey kitties on their cellphones blocking the 2 inches of free space in front of Subway and the delirious wino who is sitting on the stoop and singing loudly just under my window as I write this to do.
I'm going to shut the f*** up and move on.
