A Day in the Life, Part VISweet Home Chicago?

And then:

The anti-climax.


A return to the city with the highest sales-tax in the nation; the worst postal system of all major cities; and government corruption that serves as a backdrop for Gotham City.


[Not to mention, the astoundingly empty apartment.]


But it's not all bad. There are free festivals. Bike trails galore. Forest preserves, a beautiful skyline and storms powerful enough to transform downtown into a land of Oz.


Monday night, for example, the Lightening Detection Network — who knew such a thing existed?! — recorded 90,000 bolts of lightning in northern Illinois (essentially, the Chicagoland area).

That's a year's worth of lightning in a single night. And I'll tell you — it was an amazing sight (terrifying, even) to witness.


But this summer, otherwise mild, has had its share of freak storms... including one early June that ruined countless pieces at the Printer's Row Book Fair and sent a friend and I running for cover (but not before we helped a few sellers try to protect their goods).

Sirens were wailing all around us,



And by the storm's end, sellers were offering books as discounted prices — or discounting them altogether.


And I thought there was something strangely... poetic... in this juxtaposition of a syllabus and a trash can...

and a mysterious foe.

Particularly in a land I can never quite call home. A city I at once love and hate with equal ferocity. A land I refer to, in my loneliest moments, as the city of Cold Shoulders.

(With apologies to Carl Sandburg.)

But this is it. This is where I have been, and where I am. It's where I go at the end of the day, and where I return after vacations and camping trips and — yes — a 3,000 mile sojourn to the Pacific.


But, why, then, cannot I not refer to this place as "home"


And actually mean it?