Yesterday I received a cryptic email. A woman (whom I'd never heard of) asked me, in a very conversational and casual tone, whether I could tell her when the alewives washed up on shore in Lake Michigan. See, she was planning a trip, and needed to know.
Dan was all, "Watch out! It might be spam!"
"Spam that asks me about alewives, knows I'm from Chicago, and signs its name?" I asked him.
"You know, it could be a phisher. Phishers can request your birth certificate with only the information blah blah blah blah blah!"
Turns out she saw this entry from 2004 in my old journal when she Googled 'alewives'. And it was the most potentially helpful link. Out of everything on the internet about alewives (which is apparently essentially nothing). Out of everything Google had to offer when it scrolled through 9 billion websites, one line about a childhood memory about beaches being smelly and the lake being unswimmable showed up on the third page.
Are alewives just a product of my imagination? Did I dream all those years when I went to the beach with my summer camp and the first ten or fifteen feet of water at the shoreline was thick with slimy dead fish bodies? Did I dream waking up (in my closed house three blocks from the lake) to a smell similar to being in the thick of the fish market in Biak? Have my feet invented what it feels like to walk across thousands of sand-encrusted fish parts, warmed and hardened by the sun?
I mean, Chicago is a big city and if I'm only one out of thirty who ever thought to write about this disgustingness and post it on the internet, that's just plain bizarre. It's even more bizarre that no scientific studies or anything bothered to mention exactly when alewive season IS.
Bizarreness aside, though (and this is really why I started writing this entry - it just got totally sidetracked), random communications like that are exactly what I hope will happen as I slog away writing about minutae all the time. Always, in the back of my mind, I'm hoping someone will Google, say, 'Wamena', and email me to talk about our experiences there, or maybe, say, 'airport', and ask about the conditions of travel within Indonesia. Or smaller things, like, 'Hey, I'm in Boulder, will you tell me how to get to that portion of the creek you mentioned where icebergs float like boats and birds inhabit them like settled islands?'
Aside from my innate need to document everything in my life so I don't forget it later, and the desire to keep in touch with online friends and keep online touch with real friends, I think that's the number one reason why I continue to post a journal publicly.
Uh, hint, hint.
Just kidding. I think.
Showing posts with label chicago. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chicago. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Saturday, October 06, 2007
You think when you're at the L station about that experiment where they planted the world's best violinist in a subway somewhere, on a train, in an alcove; the details are fuzzy, but it was somewhere where street musicians sit, and nobody bothered to stop and listen to him.
How much did he make? Eight dollars? How much is this guy making? He's sitting out in the open, out from under the alcove so the pigeons won't hit him. He's got a trumpet and a boombox and he's playing harmony along with Miles Davis as the marquee above him scrolls and scrolls ERROR, ERROR, ERROR…
At times you can't tell the difference between his tone and Miles' tone and he hasn't opened his eyes in minutes and
minutes, even when someone tosses change in his case and it makes a noise, echoing around the station like it does, as if someone had collared a lion with a bird-friendly collar and the lion had pounced.
He just keeps playing. He smells like sweat and grease and the train's coming in ERROR minutes and even so, even though nobody's going anywhere anytime soon, nobody's listening.
Nobody, that is, except the crazy people, and admittedly, there's a lot of them. But they're invisible to everyone except each other, and you, because you're watching, even though you don't show it. And because you are, so, maybe, is everyone else. That girl in all black except for her red torn fishnets and her electric hair, with her iPod half out of her ears. Maybe she's watching, maybe she's listening. Maybe her music's off. Her eyes are half-lidded and look, purposefully, drugged, and she wears a look that screams cool, but just because someone looks like they're listening to screaming death metal doesn't mean they are.
How can you, anyway? A tiny woman in a ragged brown headscarf is screaming that someone has lost her life. She's walking up to everyone in line: "Was it YOU?! Was it YOU?! Was it YOU?!" as they keep their eyes straight and step back behind the yellow line lest she attempt to throw them onto the third rail. "Was it YOU?!"
The trumpeter keeps playing and he has by doing so exempted himself from the interrogation, but that's really all he's gotten out of it. And you judge him like this because you don't know. Maybe he goes home and counts his eight dollars and smiles because he's a millionaire, or a participant in a social study, or both. Or maybe he did steal the tiny woman in the ragged brown headscarf's life, and he's become a marvelous trumpeter to hide it.
She'd never know. She doesn't ask. Eventually, when she's run out of everyone standing in the station except the trumpeter, she stumbles down into the stairwell and starts muttering, plotting.
When the train comes the conductor's head pokes out the front like a cuckoo clock, watching his charges flow like milk down the piss-covered stairs out into the street, and up the piss-covered stairs into the piss-covered train. And they're all smiling, too, except for the goths, who are happily looking sullen. The sun has come out, or come out as much as it can through the haze, and even the haze is slowly dissipating over the lake, which, from this station, you can see just a tiny blue square of through the buildings. All of this makes up for how disgusting everything is, and how bad everything smells, because even though you're not supposed to, you can crank open an emergency exit window and let the hot air flow in and swirl around the back of your neck, making you shiver and everyone else stare nervously at you.
The air coming in smells like hot dogs and pizza. It's what everyone assumes about Chicago because of the stories and stereotypes and it's true. What nobody bothers to make into a cliché is that it also smells like dead fish and the interior of baking hot cars. This is summer. In the winter it smells like metal and snow, but the extremes are set so far apart that when you're enmeshed in one you can't even envision the other. The closest you get is inside an ice cream parlour and they've got the A/C cranked as far down as it'll go, and you, in your shorts and your tissue paper that you call a top, or maybe not even a top at all, you sit there licking your cone and shivering, clacking your ankles under the table, and it hurts, it's so cold it hurts. And even though ten minutes ago you were sweating your way down the block, practically swimming in the trail you left, watching kids shoot each other with water guns from highrises and wishing you would drop dead so that you might have some relief, what with the blood cooling effects of death and all, you can't remember what it feels like to be too hot.
Until you step outside, and for the first five burning seconds you feel like nothing has ever felt better than that rush of hot, mildly decay-scented air. And then five minutes later, you can't remember what it feels like to shiver.
That's Chicago. Right now the dog beach is too disgusting to be believed, because the alewive have washed down the St Lawrence Seaway or wherever it is that they come from, and died. They're saltwater fish and somehow they end up in Lake Michigan, dead, and wash up right in Chicago. No tourism brochure will mention that one. You picture dogs and dead fish, and frisbees and tennis balls and the confusion that will so inevitably happen, and wait another stop, for the beach with what seems like hundreds of volleyball nets. A blanket of them, made from bouncing ponytails.
The beach is stinking strong but the water's filled with children, children who are too young to be grossed out by anything but old enough to stand past the dead fish line, which hovers somewhere around 5-12 feet out. Their parents shield their eyes and their minds with visors and sunglasses, safe on their beach spreads. Children have been swimming in the putrid water for decades and no one's been sick yet, but it's still difficult to watch, the brightly colored bathing suits stumbling and the chubby limbs lashing out, over and over, pushing and flailing the floating fish out of the way as they make their way deeper.
The backdrop is gray, gray, gray; the sky, the sun the strongest it's been in weeks and still struggling through a gray haze, the buildings silver, but what is silver but a shiny polished gray? Here the dirt sprouts up through the grass, not the other way around, brought to light by bikers too lazy to follow the curves of the path. They bounce and shudder over weeds, and behind them the gray flashes of cars on Lake Shore Drive throw reflections over their faces, their smiles as they look around them and think, what a bike path. What other city has this, a snake of a commuter highway, wide and tree-lined, winding around downtown and the other side fading away into the lake? What other city has this, the sound of the traffic swallowed up by the screams of volleyball and basketball players sweating with the lake on one side and fifty story buildings rising on the other?
People can ride their bikes to work along the side of an expressway, hear only the water, and arrive at work smiling. What other city has this?
You can feel it, even through the gray, the people smiling. There's a man with a hot dog cart, 89 cents per hot dog, and he's got a line of people stretching three deep all the way out to the end of the parking lot. He laughs, really belly-laughs, at things people say to him as he fixes their hot dogs, even if nothing's that funny. He's probably a little bit crazy. His belly shakes on his flimsy little stool and the whole line holds their breath for the crack, but it never comes. People sit down in line right on the hot asphalt, and jump up shrieking. Their bathing suit bottoms have melted so far they're practically translucent.
How much did he make? Eight dollars? How much is this guy making? He's sitting out in the open, out from under the alcove so the pigeons won't hit him. He's got a trumpet and a boombox and he's playing harmony along with Miles Davis as the marquee above him scrolls and scrolls ERROR, ERROR, ERROR…
At times you can't tell the difference between his tone and Miles' tone and he hasn't opened his eyes in minutes and
minutes, even when someone tosses change in his case and it makes a noise, echoing around the station like it does, as if someone had collared a lion with a bird-friendly collar and the lion had pounced.
He just keeps playing. He smells like sweat and grease and the train's coming in ERROR minutes and even so, even though nobody's going anywhere anytime soon, nobody's listening.
Nobody, that is, except the crazy people, and admittedly, there's a lot of them. But they're invisible to everyone except each other, and you, because you're watching, even though you don't show it. And because you are, so, maybe, is everyone else. That girl in all black except for her red torn fishnets and her electric hair, with her iPod half out of her ears. Maybe she's watching, maybe she's listening. Maybe her music's off. Her eyes are half-lidded and look, purposefully, drugged, and she wears a look that screams cool, but just because someone looks like they're listening to screaming death metal doesn't mean they are.
How can you, anyway? A tiny woman in a ragged brown headscarf is screaming that someone has lost her life. She's walking up to everyone in line: "Was it YOU?! Was it YOU?! Was it YOU?!" as they keep their eyes straight and step back behind the yellow line lest she attempt to throw them onto the third rail. "Was it YOU?!"
The trumpeter keeps playing and he has by doing so exempted himself from the interrogation, but that's really all he's gotten out of it. And you judge him like this because you don't know. Maybe he goes home and counts his eight dollars and smiles because he's a millionaire, or a participant in a social study, or both. Or maybe he did steal the tiny woman in the ragged brown headscarf's life, and he's become a marvelous trumpeter to hide it.
She'd never know. She doesn't ask. Eventually, when she's run out of everyone standing in the station except the trumpeter, she stumbles down into the stairwell and starts muttering, plotting.
When the train comes the conductor's head pokes out the front like a cuckoo clock, watching his charges flow like milk down the piss-covered stairs out into the street, and up the piss-covered stairs into the piss-covered train. And they're all smiling, too, except for the goths, who are happily looking sullen. The sun has come out, or come out as much as it can through the haze, and even the haze is slowly dissipating over the lake, which, from this station, you can see just a tiny blue square of through the buildings. All of this makes up for how disgusting everything is, and how bad everything smells, because even though you're not supposed to, you can crank open an emergency exit window and let the hot air flow in and swirl around the back of your neck, making you shiver and everyone else stare nervously at you.
The air coming in smells like hot dogs and pizza. It's what everyone assumes about Chicago because of the stories and stereotypes and it's true. What nobody bothers to make into a cliché is that it also smells like dead fish and the interior of baking hot cars. This is summer. In the winter it smells like metal and snow, but the extremes are set so far apart that when you're enmeshed in one you can't even envision the other. The closest you get is inside an ice cream parlour and they've got the A/C cranked as far down as it'll go, and you, in your shorts and your tissue paper that you call a top, or maybe not even a top at all, you sit there licking your cone and shivering, clacking your ankles under the table, and it hurts, it's so cold it hurts. And even though ten minutes ago you were sweating your way down the block, practically swimming in the trail you left, watching kids shoot each other with water guns from highrises and wishing you would drop dead so that you might have some relief, what with the blood cooling effects of death and all, you can't remember what it feels like to be too hot.
Until you step outside, and for the first five burning seconds you feel like nothing has ever felt better than that rush of hot, mildly decay-scented air. And then five minutes later, you can't remember what it feels like to shiver.
That's Chicago. Right now the dog beach is too disgusting to be believed, because the alewive have washed down the St Lawrence Seaway or wherever it is that they come from, and died. They're saltwater fish and somehow they end up in Lake Michigan, dead, and wash up right in Chicago. No tourism brochure will mention that one. You picture dogs and dead fish, and frisbees and tennis balls and the confusion that will so inevitably happen, and wait another stop, for the beach with what seems like hundreds of volleyball nets. A blanket of them, made from bouncing ponytails.
The beach is stinking strong but the water's filled with children, children who are too young to be grossed out by anything but old enough to stand past the dead fish line, which hovers somewhere around 5-12 feet out. Their parents shield their eyes and their minds with visors and sunglasses, safe on their beach spreads. Children have been swimming in the putrid water for decades and no one's been sick yet, but it's still difficult to watch, the brightly colored bathing suits stumbling and the chubby limbs lashing out, over and over, pushing and flailing the floating fish out of the way as they make their way deeper.
The backdrop is gray, gray, gray; the sky, the sun the strongest it's been in weeks and still struggling through a gray haze, the buildings silver, but what is silver but a shiny polished gray? Here the dirt sprouts up through the grass, not the other way around, brought to light by bikers too lazy to follow the curves of the path. They bounce and shudder over weeds, and behind them the gray flashes of cars on Lake Shore Drive throw reflections over their faces, their smiles as they look around them and think, what a bike path. What other city has this, a snake of a commuter highway, wide and tree-lined, winding around downtown and the other side fading away into the lake? What other city has this, the sound of the traffic swallowed up by the screams of volleyball and basketball players sweating with the lake on one side and fifty story buildings rising on the other?
People can ride their bikes to work along the side of an expressway, hear only the water, and arrive at work smiling. What other city has this?
You can feel it, even through the gray, the people smiling. There's a man with a hot dog cart, 89 cents per hot dog, and he's got a line of people stretching three deep all the way out to the end of the parking lot. He laughs, really belly-laughs, at things people say to him as he fixes their hot dogs, even if nothing's that funny. He's probably a little bit crazy. His belly shakes on his flimsy little stool and the whole line holds their breath for the crack, but it never comes. People sit down in line right on the hot asphalt, and jump up shrieking. Their bathing suit bottoms have melted so far they're practically translucent.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
There's one for yes, continue this, there's one for yes, continue this, and there's one for write about other people at a brand-new location God-knows-where, so I think I'm going to continue this, though maybe with interludes about other people such as this one:
No, actually, I haven't seen any other people for awhile. Chicago is big and cold and lonely. There's just something about a climate that prohibits sitting out on the lawn that makes people seem rude. They rush past you to get to their warm car, and who can blame them? but it still stands that they rush past you.
There's something about the sky being darker than the ground. Snow and a constantly threatening storm. I rush past people, too. I rush past them to get to Potbelly Sandwich Works, which, in my opinion, is a better destination than a warm car (even). I want everything on mine. The sub guys on the line behind the counter smile like they're welcoming you to their home, like they're inviting you to come sit by the fire and eat their homemade rabbit stew. If there's one thing I'll miss when I leave here again, it's the pride Chicagoans have in their food, and the concurrent fact, somehow, that they sell it for cheap. Maybe they feel guilty charging their honored guests. Who knows?
Okay, I was in Victoria's Secret, and I was there for two reasons: one, to buy a bra, and two, to give myself the most massive amount of culture shock possible all at once. The windows reared in front of me like giant horses with posters taped to their bellies, posters of stretched out women showing me ALL of their skin and tiny, wavy, shiny triangles of material in bright orange, bright pink, bright, bright, and the eyeshadow and their legs that were taller than me and curled around other women's legs that were also taller and me and I thought... how is this legal?
I didn't think this because I think it shouldn't be - legal, I mean - but because I've spent so long being the sluttiest person in Jayapura just by occasionally wearing V-neck T-shirts, and I'm so used to looking down at myself every 20 seconds to make sure that no part of my armpit is showing, because that would be provocative...
A girl next to me holding an armful of lacy, flowery bras started talking to me about how she wanted to buy ten of them, but... 'all of them seem to show up under my clothes! Look at the butterflies. The butterflies are definitely going to be popping out under something white. And under black? Do you think this lace beige pattern's going to come out under black?'
'I think so, I mean, look at it,' I said on complete autopilot, because nobody in Indonesia would ever talk about their bras showing under their clothes, or wear something that might threaten to be thin enough to show a bra. It occurred to me right about then that I don't remember how women are supposed to talk to each other, and it occurred to me stronger later when an employee insisted upon measuring me before I bought anything, at which point I fled in terror. I think I need more time.
No, actually, I haven't seen any other people for awhile. Chicago is big and cold and lonely. There's just something about a climate that prohibits sitting out on the lawn that makes people seem rude. They rush past you to get to their warm car, and who can blame them? but it still stands that they rush past you.
There's something about the sky being darker than the ground. Snow and a constantly threatening storm. I rush past people, too. I rush past them to get to Potbelly Sandwich Works, which, in my opinion, is a better destination than a warm car (even). I want everything on mine. The sub guys on the line behind the counter smile like they're welcoming you to their home, like they're inviting you to come sit by the fire and eat their homemade rabbit stew. If there's one thing I'll miss when I leave here again, it's the pride Chicagoans have in their food, and the concurrent fact, somehow, that they sell it for cheap. Maybe they feel guilty charging their honored guests. Who knows?
Okay, I was in Victoria's Secret, and I was there for two reasons: one, to buy a bra, and two, to give myself the most massive amount of culture shock possible all at once. The windows reared in front of me like giant horses with posters taped to their bellies, posters of stretched out women showing me ALL of their skin and tiny, wavy, shiny triangles of material in bright orange, bright pink, bright, bright, and the eyeshadow and their legs that were taller than me and curled around other women's legs that were also taller and me and I thought... how is this legal?
I didn't think this because I think it shouldn't be - legal, I mean - but because I've spent so long being the sluttiest person in Jayapura just by occasionally wearing V-neck T-shirts, and I'm so used to looking down at myself every 20 seconds to make sure that no part of my armpit is showing, because that would be provocative...
A girl next to me holding an armful of lacy, flowery bras started talking to me about how she wanted to buy ten of them, but... 'all of them seem to show up under my clothes! Look at the butterflies. The butterflies are definitely going to be popping out under something white. And under black? Do you think this lace beige pattern's going to come out under black?'
'I think so, I mean, look at it,' I said on complete autopilot, because nobody in Indonesia would ever talk about their bras showing under their clothes, or wear something that might threaten to be thin enough to show a bra. It occurred to me right about then that I don't remember how women are supposed to talk to each other, and it occurred to me stronger later when an employee insisted upon measuring me before I bought anything, at which point I fled in terror. I think I need more time.
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