A New Birthday

Liam is so obsessed with his birthday, mostly for the attention he gets and the presents he dreams about getting. He bugs us everyday, asking us when his birthday is and how many more months does he have to wait. But today, we have a new day to celebrate. My son became a Christian last night. He's been asking Katie about it for a couple of days. When she was reading the story of Lazurus he told her he wanted to be baptized. Katie said that usually you become a Christian before you get baptized, so he said he wanted to do it. Katie knelt down with him and prayed a prayer with him and explained to him about forgiveness of sin and Christ's death, and repentance. Then Liam asked Christ to live in his heart. Just a simple prayer, then a quiet celebration of his new birthday, January 28, 2012. I cried when I heard it, it is beautiful that our son is responding to the soft nudges of something beyond himself and that his decision to follow Christ was organic and has altered the course of his life. I have so much hope and thanks for the promise God has for my son's life.

Cottage Industry

It has finally snowed here, two times in a week's time, about six inches.Here in Galewood there is a little cottage industry, shoveling snow for money. Maybe people are too busy to shovel their own snow, that is certainly the case with grass during the summer. So, kids in the neighborhood capitalize on this fact, and have been shoveling in the dough, at five bucks a pop. Yesterday i saw a crew of cousins, shovel four homes in the time I shoveled mine.

This morning I saw the same kids coming home from work on other blocks. I also noticed a few middle age and older men roaming around ringing bells on this block and the one to the north. I called one man over, " Are you trying to get shoveling jobs?" I asked. "yeah, I haven't got a job yet." he said. I said , " those kids over there are charging $5 and getting all of the jobs." " I charge $10, I got a family." clearly annoyed that I had stopped to talk with him, " you got a job for me?" " Sorry, I just shoveled my place." i replied. He walked away.

To me, this is a small picture of the economics of the city. Low skill jobs are scarce, there are too many competing for those jobs, wages are depressed based on the fact there those that will work for a fraction of cost that labor demands to take care of basic needs.

Riis Park Sledding Hill

Just went sledding with Liam at Riis Park. This hill is slightly better than Humboldt Park's. You can still see the skyline and the decline is at a steeper angle, so you fly. Some teenagers were sledding with Pam cooking spray sprayed on the bottom of their sled. Awesome! We had a fun time

I Choose....Galewood

The move from nomadic society to an agrarian society took place when these wanderers were able to position themselves in the perfect location near a surplus of food, water, and shelter to survive. Once that place was found, they made a decision to settle down; to grow families, to grow societies. Two blocks west of Narragansett, on the shore of an ancient freshwater lake, we now find our family having chosen the very same...

I choose being ok with driving everywhere. I choose being ok going to the Brickyard, and going to Jewel, Chipotle, Lowes, Target, Walgreens, Chase, McDonalds, Verizon, and Starbucks. I choose having to worry about my lawn and how loud my kids are getting, I choose not to worry about not sending my kids to the local school or going to the local church, I choose living in a neighborhood where I don't have to start everything from the ground up, I can come alongside individuals that are and have been fighting for the neighborhood for generations, I choose to focus on growing my family here, I choose not have my family live through another drive-by, I choose not worrying about selling out, about moving from a "more real" neighborhood 3.4 miles east. I choose not to feel guilty about my freedom to choose and that I have everything I need to survive here. I choose not to coast on my lessons from my past, but grow. I plant my family on this fertile land and will harvest, here.

Could it be?

I've been raggin' on my new neighborhood in the last couple of posts, but I actually have simmered down. I am open to liking, not just surfacy liking, but actually open to the fact that I may someday love living here.

Where do you live?

"Galewood. " " Where's that?!

The Soundtrack of my Hood

Noise is comforting, it gives you reference, it creates a narrative of your immediate world. Scientifically, noise is sound waves or vibrations. The vibrations are detected by the ear and turned into nerve impulses that are understood by the brain. Hearing requires sensitivity to the movement of molecules in the world outside an organism. Neighborhood noise gives sensitivity to movement of life in the community outside of your home.
I think the soundtrack of Keystone gave me comfort. Fire engines, police cars, abulances, salsa, bacahata, banda, and hip-hop blasting, someone yelling up to a window, Le-o, Hec-tor, cars hitting the speed bump at full speed, the faint hum of North Avenue, Pulaski, or Grand Avenues, the F-word punctuating every conversation, all of these sounds ever so comforting and piquant.
I was scared at how quiet it was around my new place. Silence is scarier than a gun shot, silence stirs up the unknowns, the what if's, the turn my back, the who's theres. It was so quiet that you could hear crickets during the day. As days went by I longed for some drama on the street, maybe a curse filled fight, or a dope fiend passed out on my lawn, nope just landscapers mowing lawns, that is all you see and hear around here, landscapers mowing lawns. The soundtrack of my hood, Galewood, is crickets and lawnmowers. This doesn't comfort me, it gives me a reference of what I'm dealing with here, and it is surely a narrative of the lack of life outside my home.

One Month and 3.4 miles Away

Tomorrow marks one month of living in our new neighborhood. One month and 3.4 miles from my old life. How did we leave the most intense, stretching,fearful, courageous, painful, and exhilarating seven years of living we ever had lived. I don't know if I can tell my last few months of my time on Keystone it went from horrible in June to beautiful by the end of September, I think I will have to have to get into that at a later time. However, Katie and I had come to the point where all the doors were open to go, and we felt peace about stepping forward. Here we are now, in our Chicago bungalow, in Galewood. Both Katie and I are feeling different emotions about being here, I guess the perfect phrase to sum up our life here is, now what?

True Chicago: Jewel bag

Any True Chicagoan,when needing a plastic bag, will inventively request a Jewel bag, named for the Jewel-Osco grocery store. Jewel bags are used to throw out garbage and junk, best practice is to double Jewel bag it then throw that into a Jewel bag that you stuck into your plastic garbage can or waste basket, because lining your can with a Hefty cinch bag, with Febreeze, is for yuppies.

No True Chicagoan will pack lunch in a Tupperware container or a thermal insulated lunch bag, no, a True Chicagoan uses a Jewel bag, with a sammich wrapped in aluminum foil or paper towel, a banana, and a can of something or other.

Jewel bags are the favorite of old ladies, hence the nomenclature, bag lady.

Hang out in any Polish or Eastern European neighborhood neighborhood and you'll notice the Jewel bag as people walk down the street.

The Jewel bag, the True Chicago carry all.

This block

The pillars that hold my house are no more crooked than my neighbors. The gutters accept both fresh water and waste. I now know that the block's blood is hustler’s blood. The twin sidewalks of the 1500 forever keep two sides, two faces.

Are You A Christian by Nelson Algren

"Nothing but Sunday morning services can dissuade the hunter one moment from the prey."



Are You A Christian?

It’s still an outlaw’s capital—but of an outlawry whose colors, once crimson as the old Sauganash whiskey-dye, have been washed down, by many prairie rains, to the colorless grey of the self-made executive type playing the percentages from the inside. Under the pale fluorescent glow.
We’ve abandoned the neighborliness of the Middle Border while sharpening its competitiveness—to lend it a bloodier, more legal edge than the Middle Border ever knew.
For in the time that Dwight L. Moody went about these streets straight-arming strangers with the simple and terrible question, “Are you a Christian?” the answer was simpler and less terrible than now.
Certainly the thief calling himself John the Baptist wasn’t one even though he left a religious tract at the scene of every tract. Even though wearing the ministerial black with the Come-to-Jesus-or-Else collar. For he also wore a bright red bandana about his dirty throat and never a shirt below or beneath at all.
Either you were or you weren’t. John the Baptist wasn’t one and the bumboat pirate called Black Jack Yattaw wasn’t one either. Nor was Paddy the Bear nor Cooney the Fox nor Duffy the Goat.

Nor Red Jimmy Fitzgerald, who conned Charles Francis Adams out of $7,000, and Hungry Joe Lewis, who took Oscar Wilde for another small fortune in that same unchristian year.
Nor speckled Jimmy Calwell nor Saffo the Greek nor Jew Kid Grabiner. Nor Fancy Tom O’Brien, the King of the Bunko Men; for he murdered Reed Waddell, the inventor of the gold-brick fraud.
Nor the little monster named Mickey Finn, who openly advertised the horror he had devised for the simply pleasure it afforded him to hear some curious innocent order it with his own lips—just before being spun off the stool and into the alley behind the bar. To wake up with the cats looking at him. If he wakened again in the great world at all.
But the Mick was the last of the true infidels.

By the time Hinky Dink Kenna came along you had to cut in closer to answer the reverend’s question. For in The Hink the border apache became a working citizen, a property owner assuming civic responsibilities, commanding a ward-wide loyalty and professing some sort of faith or other come Sunday morning. A hustler’s hustler, part philanthropist and part straight brigand, The Hink sought his personal salvation in the ballot box.
Like the city that bred him, he had a heavenly harpist on his bedpost as well as a hustler’s imp stoking the furnace: when hard times came he fed and sheltered more hungry and homeless men than all the Gold Coast archangels put together. And felt frankly outraged when the archangels accused him of trading free lunches for votes at his Workingman’s Exchange.
He’d paid fifty cents in gold cash for every vote he’d bought, he let the archangels know—but what about the missions that were buying blackened souls in exchange for blacker coffee and the easy promise of a heavenly throne? Why was it less noble to pay cash here and now? Let the Gold Coast archangels answer him that.
Those same pious Gold Coasters who took the Righteous Horrors at the nightly carnival put on by the First Ward cribs—while secretly pocketing rents off those same terrible cribs.

Yet in standardizing the price of the vote The Hink did more to keep the city running on bitter winter than did all the balmy summers of Moody’s evangelism. Not even to mention Lucy Page Gaston’s command that the Chicago Cubs stop smoking cigarettes immediately.
Who came out the truer Christian in a hassle like that?
For always our villains have hearts of gold and all our heroes are slightly tainted. It always takes somebody like The Hink, in whom avarice and generosity mingled like the hot run and the cold water in his own Tom-and-Jerries, to run a city wherein warmth of heart and a freezing greed beat, like the blood and the breath, as one.
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Somebody like The Hink’s Bathhouse John calling on the city, in the name of its little children, to ban the sale of the deadly coffin nail from within two hundred yards of every schoolhouse. Thus earning himself, a buccaneer to his balbriggan underwear, the sanctimonious applause of the Tribune:
By this measure he will drive from the school areas the petty peddlers in death who have been inviting the children to ruin.
Applause which The Bath acknowledged grandly, bowing first to the left and then to the right, in a wondrous tailcoat of billiard-cloth green, lavender trousers, pink gloves and a cream-colored vest flaring with diamonds—to the greatest rogues’ circus ever pitched under a single tent.

For all his strutting piety in Lucy Page Gaston’s name didn’t stop him for one moment from leading his harlots and hopheads, his coneroos and fancy-men, his dips and hipsters and heavy-hipted madams—his “willing hands and honest hearts” as he termed them—to flaunt their soiled banners at the Annual First Ward Ball.
Out of their dens and out of their dives, out of their traps and curtained parlors—most of them carefully masked—The Bath led his willing hands and honest hearts with his victory over the tobacco trust in his pocket. And, in the other, plans for a private zoo. What did his take from the cribs have to do with whose little children anyhow, The Bath would have just liked to know.
The fact being that The Hink and The Bath were the first of the big-time operators. Both living on to see their territory taken over by the business tweeds who put a stop to free lunches as being unbusinesslike.
The Hink and The Bath being the first to suspect that appeals to Civic Loyalty were appeals to empty air: that the place had grown up too fast to be conscious of itself as a unified city requiring any loyalty beyond that to the American dollar. “The cult of money which one encounters here does not spring from avarice or meanness,” one European observer put it quaintly, “but making money is the only aim one can set oneself in a city wherein the dollar is the spiritual denominator as well as the financial one.” The Buck alone lending purpose to the lives of the anonymous thousands living in anonymous rows along anonymous streets, under an anonymous moon.
And sining the old crossroads hymns of Faith Everlasting can’t help any more, for you can’t call anonymous souls to the Lord. He doesn’t know who they are.

And the Lord Himself couldn’t get some of them that far out into the light anyhow. They’d think Here Comes That Tuesday Night Lineup Again.
You can live your whole life out somewhere between Goose Island and Bronzeville without once feeling that, the week after you move, the neighbors are going to miss your place. For it isn’t so much a city as it is a vasty way station where three and a half million bipeds swarm with the single cry, “One side or a leg off, I’m getting’ mine!” It’s every man for himself in this hired air.
Yet once you’ve come to be part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.
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Jane Addams too knew that Chicago’s blood was hustler’s blood. Knowing that Chicago, like John the Baptist and Bathhouse John, like Billy Sunday and Big Bill, forever keeps two faces, one for winners and one for losers; one for hustlers and one for squares.
One for the open-eyed children of the thousand-windowed office buildings. And one for the shuttered hours.
One for the sunlit traffic’s noontime bustle. And one for midnight subway watches when stations swing past like ferris wheels of light, yet leave the moving window wet with rain or tears.
One face for Go-Getters and one for Go-Get-It-Yerselfers. One for poets and one for promoters. One for the good boy and one for the bad.

One for white collars as well as blue, for our museums like cathedrals and our cathedrals like museums, for the windy white-and-blue miles of our beaches, the Saturday night moonlight excursions to Michigan City, the afternoon at the zoo washed into mists of sunlit remembrance by a sudden warm, still rain; and for that night-shaded honkytonk where Sherry Our Shivering Sheba shook the long night’s last weary shake to twenty empty tables and one middle-aged pimp wheedling a deaf bartender for a final double shot.
One for early risers, one for evening hiders.
One for the White Sox and none for the Cubs.
One for King Oliver and Louie Armstrong improvising half an hour on end at the old Lincoln Gardens Bandstand, for Baby Dodds and Dave Tough and all the other real-gone senders, sent-for-and-gone too soon, who brought jazz up the river from New Orleans, made it Chicago’s music and then the world’s.
For the soldiers and the sailors and the far-from-home marines, who’ll tell you, no matter where you’re from, that it’s the most open-handed town in the country for any far-from-home soldier.

As well as for old soaks’ goat’s nests, backstreet brothels, unlit alleys and basement bars: for tavern, trap and tenement. For all the poolroom tigers in checkered caps who’ve never seen a cow, and all the night-club kittens who’ve never seen a cloud.
For white-lit showups, dim-lit lockups and the half-lit hallway bedrooms, where the air, along with the bed, is stirred only by the passing of the Jackson Park Express. For all our white-walled asylums and all our dark-walled courtrooms, overheated district stations and disinfected charity wards, where the sunlight is always soiled and there are no holiday hours.
For hospitals, brothels, prisons and such hells, where patronage comes up softly, like a flower.
For all the collarless wanderers of the hose-and-wagon alleys of home.
It isn’t hard to love a town for its greater and its lesser towers, its pleasant parks or its flashing ballet. Or for its broad and bending boulevards, where the continuous headlights follow, one dark driver after the next, one swift car after another, all night, all night and all night. But you never truly love it till you can love its alleys too. Where the bright and morning faces of old familiar friends now wear the anxious midnight eyes of strangers a long way from home.
A midnight bounded by the bright carnival of the boulevards and the dark girders of the El.
Where once the marshland came to flower.
Where once the deer came down to water.
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Wheeling around the loop of the lake, coming at Chicago from east and south, the land by night lies under a battle-colored sky. Above the half-muffled beat of the monstrous forges between Gary and East Chicago, the ceaseless signal-fires of the great refineries wave an all-night alarm.

Until, moving with the breaking light, we touch the green pennant of the morning boulevards running the dark-blue boundary of the lake. Where the fortress-like towers of The Loop guard the welter of industrial towns that were once a prairie portage.
It remains a midland portage. No railroad passes through the city. Passengers shift from one to another of half a dozen stations. Freight trains are shunted around belt lines. But the Constellations overhead begin to lend it the look of a mid-world portage, with all the sky for its ocean–port.
The city divided by the river is further divided by racial and lingual differences. The Near Northside, centering around the comical old humpty-dumpty water tower which survived the fire, is, for example, almost as different from the Near Northwest Side, just over the bridge, in manners, mores, vocations and habits of speech, as Bronzeville is from Rogers Park.
So if you’re entirely square yourself, bypass the forest of furnished rooms behind The Loop and stay on the Outer Drive till you swing through Lincoln Park. Then move, with the lake still on your square right hand, into those suburbs where the lawns are always wide, the sky is always smokeless, the trees are forever leafy, the churches are always tidy, gardens are always landscaped, streets are freshly swept, homes are pictures out of Town and Country. And the people are stuffed with kapok.

For the beat of the city’s enormous heart, at the forge in the forest behind the towers, is unheard out in this spiritual Sahara. Where the homes so complacent, and the churches so smug, leave an airlessness like a microscopic dust over the immaculate pews and the self-important bookshelves. The narrow streets of the tenements seem to breathe more easily, as though closer to actual earth, than do these sinless avenues. Where Reader’s Digest is a faith, the Reverend Bradley is a prophet, and nothing but Sunday morning services can dissuade the hunter one moment from the prey

The Hustlers by Nelson Algren

In the words of Nelson Algren, Chicago has always been a hustler town. My neighborhood ain't no different.



The Hustlers
To the east were moving waters, as far as eye could follow. To the west a sea of grass as far as wind might reach.
Waters restlessly, with every motion, slipping out of used colors for new. So that each fresh wind off the lake washed the prairie grasses with used sea-colors: the prairie moved in the light like a secondhand sea.
Till between the waters and the wind came the marked-down derelicts with the dollar signs for eyes.
Looking for any prairie portage at all that hadn’t yet built a jail.
Beside any old secondhand sea.
The portage’s single hotel was a barracks, its streets were pig-wallows, and all the long summer night the Pottawattomies mourned beside that river: down in the barracks the horse-dealers and horse-stealers were making a night of it again. Whiskey-and-vermilion hustlers, painting the night vermilion.
In the Indian grass the Indians listened: they too had lived by night.
And heard, in the uproar in the hotel, the first sounds of a city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to roll boulevards down out of pig-wallows and roll its dark river uphill.

That was to forge, out of steel and blood-red neon, its own particular wilderness.
Yankee and voyager, the Irish and the Dutch, Indian traders and Indian agents, halfbreed and quarterbreed and no breed at all, in the final counting they were all of a single breed. They all had hustler’s blood. And kept the old Sauganash in a hustler’s uproar.
They hustled the land, they hustled the Indian, they hustled by night and they hustled by day. They hustled guns and furs and peltries, grog and the blood-red whiskey-dye; they hustled with dice or a deck or a derringer. And decided the Indians were wasting every good hustler’s time.
Slept till noon and scolded the Indians for being lazy.
Paid the Pottawattomies off in cash in the cool of the Indian evening: and had the cash back to the dime by the break of the Indian dawn.
They’d do anything under the sun except work for a living, and we remember them reverently, with Balaban and Katz, under such subtitles as “Founding Fathers,” “Dauntless Pioneers” or “Far-Visioned Conquerors.”

Meaning merely they were out to make a fast buck off whoever was standing nearest.
They never conquered as well as they hustled—their arithmetic was sharper than their hunting knives. They skinned the redskin down to his final feather, the forests down to the ultimate leaf of autumn, the farmer out of his last wormy kernel of Indian corn; and passed the rain-swept seasons between carefully skinning one another.
One such easy skinner listing his vocation lightly, in the city’s first dictionary, as Generous Sport.
Mountain grog seller and river gambler, Generous Sport and border jackal, blackleg braggart and coonskin roisterer, Long Knives from Kentucky and hatchet-men from New York, bondsmen, brokers and bounty-jumpers—right from the go it was a broker’s town and the brokers run it yet.
It’s still the easiest joint in the country in which to jump bond, as well as for staying out of jail altogether. The price commonly being whatever you have in your wallet. If the wallet is empty a fifty-cent cigar will usually do it.
Indeed, the city’s very first jailbird got a pass from the city fathers. An antique stray named Harper was knocked down, under the local vagrancy laws, to George White, the Negro town crier, for a quarter. And legally led away by White at the end of a rusty chain.

When antislavery feeling forced the Negro to let the white escape, George wanted only his two bits back. And couldn’t collect a dime. So each nigh scandalized the darkness by crying his loss instead of the hour. He never got his two bits back, but he made a hundred dollar uproar over it. Every hour on the hour. All night long.
The joint is still in an uproar. Every hour on the hour. All night long.
When the Do-Gooders try to quiet it down they only add drums to the tumult. The village squares arrived too late for a firm toehold.
In 1835 they declared a “season of prayer” and wrested two outlaws right out of the devil’s clutches—yet the devil seemed not to miss the pair at all. So they tossed two harder customers into the pokey.
And still nobody cared.
Then they fined a brothel-keeper twenty-five silver dollars, and the battle between the Pure-of-Heart and the Brokers’ Breed was joined for keeps. The ceaseless, city-wide, century-long guerrilla warfare between the Do-As-I-Sayers and the Live-And-Let-Livers was on. With the brokers breaking in front.
Broke in front and stayed in front despite being crowded to the rail on occasion.
Not that there’s been any lack of honest men and women sweating out Jane Addams’ hopes here—but they get only two outs to the inning while the hustlers are taking four. When Big Bill Thompson put in the fix for Capone he tied the town to the rackets for keeps.

So that when the reform mayor who followed him attempted to enforce the prohibition laws, he wakened such warfare on the streets that the Do-Gooders themselves put Thompson back at the wheel, realizing that henceforward nobody but an outlaw could maintain a semblance of law and order on the common highway. Big Bill greeted his fellow citizens correctly then with a cheery, “Fellow hoodlums!”
The best any mayor can do with the city since is just to keep it in repair.
Yet the Do-Gooders still go doggedly forward, making the hustlers struggle for their gold week in and week out, year after year, once or twice a decade tossing an unholy fright into the boys. And since it’s a ninth-inning town, the ball game never being over till the last man is out, it remains Jane Addams’ town as well as Big Bill’s. The ball game isn’t over yet.
But it’s a rigged ball game.
Once upon a time, when Thirty-fifth Street was the far Southside and North Avenue was the limit on the north, something called the Law-and-Order League shut the Sunday beer halls, and the Beer-on-Sunday Party won the subsequent elections in a walk. A horde of horrified Ohio spinsters thereupon counterattacking the halls by praying at the bar rails, pleading with the drinkers to kneel beside them.
There is no record of anyone getting sawdust in his cuffs: this was 1873, and thousands who had come to rebuild the ruins of the great fire were carrying ragged banners crying BREAD OR BLOOD on the streets. Sunday was the one day of the week the working stiff who was still working had to himself. So he just dipped his kisser deeper into his stein, wiped his moustache tidily and ordered another. He knew he wasn’t getting any eight-hour day by kneeling for it.
Indignantly then in their hundreds the women marched to City Hall to demand legal prohibition of Sunday beer—and got turned down there cold. Working stiffs and out-of-work stiffs alike booing them gently back to Ohio.

After times had picked up again a Reverend Gipsy Smith, dressed like midnight itself, led twelve thousand black-gowned and black-tied saviors, carrying flaring torches and half-stepping in funeral march tempo to the menacing boom of a single drum, up and down the midnight streets of the old Levee.
The piano rolls stopped on a single surprise chord, the little red lamps blinked out together, the big drum called “Come to Jesus or Else,” and the saviors cried in one all-accusing voice, “Where is my wandering boy tonight?”
“He ain’t in here, Reverend,” some awe-struck sinner answered earnestly—and the little red lamps flickered with laughter, a piano roll lightly tinkered a jeer, and the revelry crashed like window glass with one deep-purple roar.
And roared on all night long.
“We have struck a blow for Jesus,” the reverend announced without changing his shirt.
“A church and a W.C.T.U. never growed a big town yet,” Old Cap Streeter contradicted him flatly. “Hit’s still a frontier town.”

Where the gouging and the cunning and the no-holds-barred spirit of the Middle Border still holds as true as rent day.
For despite the Girl Scouts and the Boy Scouts, the missionary societies and the Bible institutes, the Legion of Decency and Lieutenant Fulmer, Preston Bradley and the Epworth League, Emile Coue and Dwight L. Moody, there’s no true season for salvation here. Good times or hard, it’s still an infidel’s capital six days a week.
And with a driving vigor and a reckless energy unmatched in the memory of man. Where only yesterday the pungent odor of stewed dog trailed across the marshes, now the million-candled billboards, weaving drunken lights in the river’s depths, boast of Old Fitzgerald, Vat 69, White Horse and Four Roses. Where only yesterday the evening crow crossed only lonely teepee fires, now the slender arc-lamps burn.
To reveal our backstreets to the indifferent stars.

Tear Down, Move On, Abandon

"Utilitarianism is the sibiling of capitalism." I like this quote from a blogger I read recently. She was discussing abandonment of cities and structures that one may see in cities like Detroit. Once a structure, neighborhood, or city has passed its good use, we decide tear down, move on, or abandon. In two weeks my friends and I are going to travel to Braddock, PA. I town of 30,000 in the 1950's and about 3,300 today. It has lost 90% of its population and it has no tax base; some say capitalism has left Braddock. In the face of almost complete abandonment, of any place, how do we respond?

True Chicago Vacation: Wisconsin Dells

The only kitschy place in American that hasn't been taken over by hipsters. I've never read about the Dells in Chicago Magazine, the Red Eye, or the Reader. This place is a true Chicago vacation spot. If you cant go to Disney, but you want something fancier than Six Flags Great America, head 3 hours north on I-90 and get off when you see the Great Wolf Lodge.

True Chicagoans Don't Have Peanut Allergies

True Chicagoans don't have peanut allergies, they don't eat soy nuthin', they eat gluten, raw!

Neil Diamond and a Chance of Meatballs

On Friday we celebrated Liam's first week of school by attending an outdoor movie at his school, Mitchell. There is nothing better than elementary schoolers jammin' to Neil Diamond's greatest hits such as Coming to America, Thank the Lord for the Nighttime, and Cherry, Cherry. All that was served up with the main attraction, the whip smart comedy, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. So much fun.

Impunity

As a teen, the attention I would get from suburban or out of town girls with mere mention that I was from Chicago was always nice. I never abused using my status as a Chicagoan, born and raised, as a way to get together with girls that were looking to slum with some guy they thought grew up in a bad neighborhood. I didn't grow up in the hood, I grew up on the nortwest side. However, if you really wanted a girl from out of town to like you, you would answer yes to the following question: Have you ever been shot?

I would always say no, and look at those girls with disdain, I wasnt going to play the bad boy. I couldn't stand the stereotype of Chicago being a negative place to live; too many of my friends and neighbors had left me back in the neighborhood because of this stereotype. Guns never affected me or my friends where we lived in city.

I was scared of gangs; I made sure that I never wore certain colors, or a hat turned to the side, even for fun. It had been etched in my mind as a young boy that even playing around could get you shot.

My elementary school gym teacher scared me with a story of a student using sign language and gang bangers shooting him because they though he was flashing gang signs. If someone started with me, I would never dream of giving them any push back, in my mind, anyone could pull out a gun and shoot me, anywhere. Through this all, I stayed far away from gangs and anyone affiliated with gangs, never saw a gun, never heard a gun shot.

When I moved to North and Pulaski with Katie, Eric, and Emily, we were discouraged by some about the violence, we were given slack from some about choosing to live here because our future kids could likely get shot.

None of those things have ever happened, but neighborhood kids warned us about certain parks, they informed us about the gang territories and how kids from our block were trapped because they would get jumped or harrassed if they walk in any of the four directions. They were kids however, we were adults, we knew the statistics; the likelihood that we'd get shot was slim to none. We would walk around the neighborhood with impunity. In our head, there were a few priveledges we had enjoyed from not growing up around here, one of which was the priveledge of thinking we could not personally be touched by the violence that affects so many others in our community. on Labor Day we snapped back to reality.

The whole house went to Kedvale Park after our wonderful Labor Day Party. Eric, Eleanor, and Edith, Katie, myself, Liam and Ava, Charlie, Luke and Faith. I made a mental note of the three thuggish teens scheming on the side of the park house, when we arrived. I made a note of the neighbor kid smoking weed with another boy and about six girls in the middle of the park, I took in the basketball game to the right of me, the soccer game to the right of that. I watched my Liam and Luke ride bikes around the perimeter of the park, saw Ava crawl to the swings, Katie went after her.

The largest one of the thuggish boys call to one of boys smoking weed. They went north on Kedvale through the park, the neighbor boy put out his blunt on the concrete, met up with the two others, they walked up to the cul-de-sac, red and black covering their bodies became a blur next to a red, abandoned Honda. The largest boy leaned against the side door and pop,pop, pop pop pop, pops burst out towards Grand Avenue. Once I realized what was happeneing, everything turned into slow motion; the basketball players disappeared, the soccer players were one with turf, everone grabbed a child and headed towards the back of the field house.The shooting was over, the only one walking with impunity was the trigger man. He brushed past the crowd of victims as if nothing had happened. We called the police, the park cleared out, we walked home silent; somehow we managed to convince all of the children that everyone was running from fireworks to not get burned. Almost every child bought the story.

I don't like stories from people about the gun shots they hear every night or how they know someone who got shot or has been killed. I don't care for individuals that intentionally move into the hood and try to compare notes on who has experienced the most effects from gun violence or who has experienced the most trauma, as if that makes them harder or better than another person. I will not be that person to act as if this is, my, neighborhood and no gang banger is going to scare me into keeping my kids from that beautiful park. Nor will I be that person that gives into I told you so... thinking by others. If this incident has taught me anything is that I can't walk this neighborhood proud or haughty, feeling comfortable and street smart enough. The greatest reality check for impunity, is a good old fashion random act of violence.

First Day of School

Well my dream of having my children walk to school like i did will not come true. I am proud though that Liam will be among the third generation of students in my family attending the CPS. I am glad that the public schools here in the city still has something to offer my children and that we haven't given up on the system. I am excited for Liam and Ella starting school together on Tuesday, I plan to take the morning off to take him to his first day at Mitchell. I hope to give him some token or object to mark the day. Maybe a watch, time is ticking, they grow up so fast, but look forward to the next 12-18 years of this journey.

Whip it! Whip it good!

I haven't been around the block much since Katie and the kiddos have been in Wisconsin. A lot of craziness happens around here that most wouldn't flinch at someone OD'ing on the sidewalk, or shots ringing out, or someone getting beat down while children play. I have rarely seen my neighbors shocked at an event over here, until today. No one could have anticipated a bicycle riding pimp, pulling out a bull whip, and slicing the noggin of my neighbor. No one.

Happenstance is Dead!

There use to be a time when you could happen upon some place and be in awe, to really feel like you had discovered a gem, that only you knew about, and you could be able to, only if you wish, share it with those that were in your life, the ones who could appreciate and cherish the place as much as you did. You could have your own little close knit community of those in the know. Today, that is gone.
Last week I received a stack of Time-Out Chicago magazines. The overwhelming amount of in the moment, what to do and where to do it information that was in these weekly magazines blew my mind. The competition between bloggers, tweeters, zines publishers, yelpers, online site barkers, and app developers to mine the city for the most events and most obscure places dwarfs the oil industry's search for new oil fields. The new peak oil worry should be one's ability to stumble upon something or someplace.
On Friday, I went to St. Paul, Mn., I brought the previous week's Time-Out, the magazine sent out four writers to live and breathe the Twin Cities for four days. What came out was an itinerary that leaves nothing in the Cities to be discovered. How cool am I going to be traveling to Minnesota, to eat Hmong food in Frogtown, St. Paul, going to a farmers market at the history museum, taking a kayak excursion to Minnehaha Falls along the Mississippi River, taking the light rail to a Twins game in their new stadium, and ending the night in the diviest bar, for Zombie night, in the Lyn-Lake area of Minneapolis, the "Wicker Park" of the Cities. I have just consumed an intentionally manufactured experience by people hired to create a false sense of happened upon.
I guess if you have the money and know how, you have the ability to capitalize on these happened uponed experiences. I am also overwhelmed by the those in Chicago that have parlayed the money for the Olympics into a full blown effort to exploit unknown or uncharted areas by tourists or local consumers of the next dive bar or cool shot for Flicker. These monied individuals have financed something called Eat, Pray, Love Chicago, and a full on army of individuals from the Department of Tourism and people that do not live in those 77 neighborhoods, have done a very superficial job of giving neighborhood history, landmarks, and cool places to visit from their limited perspective. In the past, the definition of place was gleaned from individuals that lived in that place over a period of time. We should ask ourselves, who defines meaning and history of where I live. Today, place and space is being cheapened and sanitized for the next quick fix. I can say I've been somewhere cool and edgy because the Reader or that blogger did the dirty work of finding it in the first place, I can experience a far off place, or a dangerously hip place in the ghetto without being there because it has been geo-tagged, or made virtual via Google Earth or streetview. I can miss out of visual and spiritual minutiae of a place because my hand held device augments my reality of that place, it acts as my viewmaster overlaying and mashing restaurant, accommodation, travel, historical information, and other people's You Tube, Facebook, Yelp, Twitter, Four Square feeds so that I have all the data about that place, that may have originally taken decades to define, all ready and for me to consume, without any conscience effort, in minutes' time. What do we do when every quiet, corner of this city and world has been shared? What will be left to discover?

Wow, I Haven't Blogged in a Long Time

I haven't blogged in almost three months, lots has changed in those three months. Officially, I started up the guerilla historical society. Currently we are closing in on 800 fans, not bad. I love that we have been able to play with the whole idea of "place" and what defines a place. What has defined a place throughout history has been something gleaned over time by individuals living there. What we have attempted to do is define this place, North and Pulaski, oh by the way, this area was never called North and Pulaski, just by creating the Facebook page and by getting it out in cyberspace, we have just created the definition of space and place in time, not in the historical sense of the fixed, gleaned definition, but through the medium of the social networking site we have created a fluid, working, ever changing, wiki-nition of this place. Right now our fans skew in the 45-65 range. Through their comments, and online interactions with each other, a perception of this neighborhood's history has been conceived based on their recollections and experiences during a certain time period. However,as time goes on, as online demographics of our fans grow and change, the definition of this place will morph and mutate. Is this good or bad, I don't know, it is very new. Our hope is that the definition that arises in dynamic and maliable enough that we can bridge the gap between all people that have been affected by this space and place through time.

Butt Face

I have a serious penchant for potty humor, it makes me laugh. So, a month ago Eric and Emily went out of town and left Eleanor with our family. I came up with a fool proof plan to make Liam and Ella laugh. I invented "butt face". I squeeze my face cheeks together, and blow. It made such an exquisite, wet farting noise that both Liam and Ella almost peed their pants. I kept doing it and doing it, and they almost threw up laughing.
Now I haven't heard or seen Ella copy this invention at her house, maybe she has forgotten, maybe her parents scolded her when they saw her imitate it. Liam however, still loves it to this day. Initially, it had made me laugh so hard , but upon reflection I have realized I have created a monster. Think of what it may be like for your child say and imitate "butt face" in church, how about the doctor's office? Not funny, actually now that I think about it, I'm imagining Katie have to embarrassingly explain "butt face" to the pediatrician, "butt face", "butt face", "butt face", ha ha. Actually, sorry Katie (snicker, snicker). So now, we're trying to redirect Liam by convincing him to say "fish face" instead of "butt face". So far, it's been a half-ass success.

What Are You?

Being half Puerto Rican and half Ukrainian with a Serbian last name sounds like it has its perks, but you're not accepted by Puerto Ricans because your not "Puerto Rican enough", Ukrainians bug out because you show up with your grandma at their Orthodox church and they're thinking, get this Puerto Rican guy outta here. Serbians don't know how to handle you and you don't know how to handle them because you dont look, talk, or act Serbian, you're only Serbian by last name( my dad was adopted). I get "are you Jewish, I thought you were Greek or Italian or something, don't you have a Polish name, you can't be Hispanic because you don't speak Spanish, what are you?" The truth is I'm none of these things, I'm a Chicagoan, true, bleedin' baby blue and red. This is the only one identity I can hold on to, without insecurity, with confidence, without having to explain and justify. As a Chicagoan I am just me.

Fwd: Logan Square Blogger Entry #3

Here's an excerpt from The Logan Square blogger: "Gentrification really pisses me off. I mean how can we maintain the diversity of Logan Square with its cool bodegas, Spanish speaking Latino residents, many of whom make below the median income, and the great dive taquerias and places to get the famous "jibarito". People have the right to stay in the neighborhood with out young professionals taking over. The Latino, Spanish speaking couple that live under me have told me numerous times how they lament the loss of their friends of ten years over the last year,in our two unit building. With globalization transforming our cities, young,white, urban professionals are taking neighborhoods,like mine, which are up for grabs, with cheap rent, awesome gritty bars and greasy spoons that my friends like to hang out in, and turning them into another Starbucksville or bland anywhereland. The Latinos,those that speak Spanish, and those of lower median income, making less than $24,000, of this neighborhood, need to fight against this influx of, for lack of a more appropriate nomenclature, yuppies.

Ugh, I'm glad I got that off my chest. The injustice of gentrification just incenses me, so glad that I am on my toes, trying to totally be aware of how other people do things and just aren't aware of the unintended consequences they have on other people's lives. Well, I am off to a rally of sorts, I'm taking my old rusty, trusty, Schwinn to a bicycle themed art installation at my favorite coffee shop in the whole of Logan Square, New Wave Cafe, there I'm sure I'll find a bunch of homies that cuncur, as we embibe PBR and eat elotes and taquitos."

Rearview Sunset

My friend Brett Champin published a book. It's called Rearview Sunset- A Novel.

Demolition of a Cabrini- Green highrise

Check this out.


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Izens Shoes

Izens Shoes is one of the only original shops still in business here on the North and Pulaski strip. If you need shoes, dress or gym shoes, this is a place I encourage you to go. It still eeks out an existence with Payless and Footlocker across the street and the $10 dollar bootleg shoe place on Grand and Pulaski. Those of you that romanticize mom and pop stores, this is the real deal, and needs to be celebrated.

Mr. Izen's Story:

"My grandfather, Samuel Izen, came to Chicago from Russia with his 17 year old son Julius around 1903. They opened a very small shoemaker's shop on the near south side in the vicinity of Maxwell and Halsted Streets. He lived in back of the store to save money so that they could send for the rest of the family - my grandmother Peltie and the children Rose, Max, my father Morris, Molly, Ben and baby Libby.

"My father and mother opened a Florsheim shoe store on North Avenue near Crawford (now Pulaski Road) in 1923. The businessmen in that area flouished because the Pioneer Trust and Savings Bank on the corner was one of two banks that remained open during the great depression. IZEN'S SHOES is still in that location. It retains the Izen name even though it is owned by people who bought the business from our family."

- Author unknown

Auto Show

I usually wouldn't go to the auto show, but I went with Liam. If there is any place to realize Liam's fantasy of driving an automobile, its the auto show. It was two hours of climbing into and out of cars and messing with buttons, lights, and the radio without anyone yelling at him. Liam also loved riding up and down the 50 foot tall escalators through McCormick Place. The whole day was kid led, no adult agenda, I loved it,and so did Li.

St. Liam

Liam busted out with a little theology today. We were sitting at the kitchen table is when and I asked him what he learned in school today. He said" sin is when you kill a lamb". I laughed and asked him what else he knows about sin, " he said when you have sin in your heart you don't go to heaven with God" and " when you don't have sin in your heart, you don't go to heaven either". I told him that is when you do go to heaven. Soon, Katie came over and I asked him to repeat his knowledge of sin. Katie gave him a good definition, " Sin is when you do something that God doesn't want you to do, when you sin you say I'm sorry, and God forgives you." We asked him to try it.Then, knowing that he can't have pop, Liam sipped the straw from my Subway beverage, and said, " Sorry, God." We laughed and told him that he couldn't just do what he wants then ask for forgiveness, when he wants to do something he knows he shouldn't, he should tell himself, no. So, he went for my pop again, and before I could shield him, he said no. He proceeded to pretend to be tempted and deny himself about five times. Pretty funny, I realize that I can't just expect Liam to pick up concepts about God or morals only from his Baptist preschool, or from Sunday School, we are the ones that should be molding his spirtual life and understanding first, this is an awesome task, difficult when I may be childlike in my own pursuit of God, but necessary nonethless. Thanks Liam for you theological pursuits and insights.

Happy V-Day

I love when majorly famous people fall. The saying goes, "pride before the fall". John Mayer and Kanye West exemplify that saying.It serves as a reminder of how human we are. And while it is great to see those guys get their just desserts, it also serves as a reminder to me that while I am not a famous a hole musician, I too am an a hole a lot of the times. My self centered attitude is not far off from those dudes, and it takes saying something things stupid, or many things stupid, to realize how much you hurt people and to be really able to listen to them about how your actions and attitude affects them, without getting defensive.

So I want to put it out there that that time came this today, I just finished fighting, then talking to Katie, and came to realize how much I need to work getting over myself and really putting her and the kids as a priority. Katie just puts so much of herself into Liam and Ava, and managing our families' life , and I mean I just don't get it; and I get ticked off when she asks me to take out the trash, pick up laundry, spend to talking to her about her day, or get off my butt and do something, and I'm wrong. I need to reject my passivity for the sake of my family and my relationship with Katie. So here is my love letter to for all to see, I recognize what I need to do to get our lives on track for this season in our life and I commit to doing it.