CHICAGO CARLESS

(Photo: Different bridge, same exodus: my experience on 9/11. Credit: Joseph Rodruguez.)

An annotated version of the following entry is cross-posted on my Huffinton Post Chicago byline.

Today, with the world again awash in retrospect, I usually prefer to be blogging about about courtesy, or kittens, or one of any number of safer, happier, topics. Seven years on and I had originally thought not to mark the occasion again. At some point, we just have to emotionally let go inside, or we destroy ourselves. In the end, while I feel no need to make a pilgrimage to a dusty construction site in Lower Manhattan, I still feel a need for words. I wrote these particular words in 2006, to mark my experience of the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Here’s my story from that day…

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(Photo: And I am led once again to the same conclusion…but not the one I expected. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory.)

Last month, I accepted the job offer of my life in New York City. Today, I turned it down. At long last, I admit it. I am hopelessly in love with Chicago. I’m staying right here.

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(Photo: Where I’m from, the more things change, the more they stay the same.)

[This entry is one in a series of dispatches from my recent trips to Gotham.]

I don’t remember being here, yet nothing ever changes here. I’ve spent almost four weeks staying with friends in New York City; it’s almost as if I’ve already moved and settled in (even without a job offer and apartment lease yet). So much has changed in the four-and-a-half years that I’ve been away. Residential and commercial development is sweeping the Big Apple the likes of which I’ve never in my life seen. Housing costs have become even more astronomical than ever. Funky neighborhoods have become sadly Eastablishment (good-bye, Park Slope), while former slums have become exclusive enclaves (hello, DUMBO). It’s hard to realize that this is my home.

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(Photo: An honest look of shock as I sit amidst one-third of my surprise 37th birthday party.)

[This entry is one in a series of dispatches from my recent trips to Gotham.]

I turned 37 this month in my hometown. And while August continues to merge into seemingly one exceptionally and unexpectedly long trip to Gotham to interview and apartment hunt, it was turning 37 that I found most informative. Purely for narcissistic reasons. Essentially I was smoked.

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(Photo: No-Entry sign at Love Canal, NY. This was a NYSDEC fiasco, too.)

[This entry is one in a series of dispatches from my recent trips to Gotham.]

What was I thinking? The first day of the first of my interview trips to New York City this summer, I wore my interview clothes from before my crack-of-dawn airplane ride, to my arrival at 20-year-best-friend Peter’s house an hour after I literally walked out on my planned interview at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. Before I left NYC in 2003, I knew NYSDEC to be somewhat less than a class act. I’m surprised at how short my memory has become during my tenure on the shores of Lake Michigan.

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(Photo: As a matter of fact, we have been posing on this corner for 21 years.)

[This entry is one in a series of dispatches from my recent trips to Gotham.]

So I’m GLYNYing again. This past spring, I chronicled the sudden and miraculous Internet reunion of my 1980s cohort of Gay and Lesbian Youth of New York (GLYNY, pronounced “GLIH-nee”). The nation’s first-ever gay youth peer support group, GLYNY was founded in New York City in 1969 as a splinter cell of the historic Gay Liberation Front.

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(Photo: Some people rest their lives upon the silliest of foundations.)

[This entry is one in a series of dispatches from my recent trips to Gotham.]

You never know the characters you’ll run into in a Rego Park laundry room. Doing my mid-trip laundry with Jen of the mountainous bosoms (Babs’ girlfriend of 20 years–and I was there the day they first held hands), I had already rediscovered one of the less happy denizens of Queens Boulevard apartment building basements. Back in Chicago, I never saw any insect as big as an NYC water bug. True to form, it just wouldn’t die, no matter how many times I whacked it with an industrial dustpan. It eventually took several strikes from a broom handle to stop its four-inch, double-antennaed form from wriggling. Wriggling enough to walk, anyway.

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