CHICAGO CARLESS

(Photo: “It’s that ABC news van again…”.)

[Ed. Note: A big shout out to my readers from the estimable Gapers Block today, and thanks for the coverage, JA!]

It’s generally not a good sign when the ABC news van is parked in front of your establishment in the middle of the business day. So it was on Monday, as I walked past the Randolph Street frontage of the financially troubled Macy’s on State Street and came face-to-face with this curiously parked news vehicle.

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(Photo: Chicago’s famous Ukranian Village “Shit Fountain”. For obvious reasons.)

For weeks now I’ve wanted to go there, against the better counsel of friends not the least of whom is Damned-to-the-Suburbs hip chick Val (”really, Michael, it’s not really necessary”). Hmm…what to do, then, when you’re still angry over your break-up, and you’re an opinionated native New Yorker, to boot?

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(Photo: I dunno, I think I look good in black…)

Yes, I did, and I’m glad I did it. It’s not like I had much of a choice. Long ago I drank the Kool-Aid, got sucked into the reality distortion field surrounding one Steven Jobs, and ended up on the road to owning what now amounts to 10 Macs in 10 years. This I figured out last year when I sat down and did a spreadhseet of them all (some of you Macheads know you want to know this: Performa 6360CD; iMac Rev. B; “Wall Street” PowerBook G3 Rev. 2; “Pismo” PowerBook G3; iBook SE Graphite; Power Mac G4 Cube; iBook Dual USB Rev. 1; iMac G4 flat panel Rev. 1; eMac Rev. 2; and MacBook Rev. 1–with all their hard drives named “Rocko”, sequentially numbered Rocko I through Rocko X).

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(Photo: Stick pre-kindergarten me and my grandmother in this picture and you’ve got every weekend jaunt we ever took into Manhattan from Queens in the early 1970s. Credit: NYC Subway Resources/Doug Grotjahn & Joe Testagrose.)

A few weeks ago, I sat down with my Korean foodie friend, (dammit I don’t look like Margaret Cho) Rozella, on the breakwater at Montrose Harbor and ticked off my personal pros and cons surrounding my impending move back home to Gotham. After four-and-a-half years in Hogtown, it wasn’t an easy cost-benefit analysis to do, even for a former urban planner like me.

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(Photo: Who doesn’t love eating over a garbage can and peeing in a porta-potty?)

My last Taste of Chicago (God-willing) was definitely the best. Protest though I did last year about Chicagoans’ proclivity to attend the Taste year after year although everyone rants how much it stinks, this being my last summer in Chicago, I decided to take one final opportunity to eat lunch over a garbage can.

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