Loved the weather and hated to work today, so I skipped out to Grant Park — the long way, through Mill P, down past the massively rising Garden in a City tent, to Buckingham Fountain. While city workers made the fountain sputter on and off, cleaning out leftovers of clogging winter goo, I made comfy on a semi-shady bench and read Kerouac.

Yet another decades-late Beat statistic, my urge always to be elsewhere, my Ozone Park heritage, my fascination with Quebec, and my upcoming trip to San Francisco this weekend jelled in a breezy but pensive, homeless- and gull-punctuated afternoon. Though the big diff from the heyday of Paradise and Moriarty (much less Barnes and Ashley), everyone seems disaffected these days. There’s far more post-9/11 angst in me than I ever admit anymore.

How about you?

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