Yep, that’s me from 11 years ago. Something my Chicago blogging brethren probably don’t know about me is that, like windy citizen Jasmine Davila, I’m one of the Interweb’s charter bloggers. At the beginning of 1999 I began scribing the Brooklyn local site for (I can’t believe they still exist) About.com. For most of the following three years, I wrote weekly articles about life in the “Mother Borough,” as I liked to call my former NYC home. I used to have an archive of all my old content, but a hard drive crash in the early 2000s put an end to that.

Or so I thought. Tonight while goofing through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, I ran a search for my former About blog. I can’t believe I didn’t do it sooner. I can’t believe the site was right there all along. That link takes you to the archive that blew my mind tonight. Clicking through years 1999, 2000, and 2001 will bring up lots of content I barely remember writing.

Actually, I barely remember writing so much of it. But it turns out I was as prolific a blogger back then as I have been in the past five years with the more than 600 posts that currently populate the pages of Chicago Carless. I covered a lot of ground familiar to regular readers of this blog: city hall silliness; public art controversies; public transit; tech issues; profiles of local residents. I truly had forgotten Chicago Carless was not the first time I had been an online urban gadfly.

Much more amazing to me, though, is the tone and tenor of the posts. Many of them are still there in the archive. Though I never truly believed I could write well until I began writing Carless, I’m amazed that the online voice that has become so familiar to me from being a Chicago blogger was right there all along back in Brooklyn.

Best of all, the one post that was my favorite from my years as the “About.com Brooklyn Guide” was right there, too. “Stoop-Sitting for Singles.” It was my most popular post from my Brooklyn blogging days and for years I have regretted losing it. I’m thrilled to have found it again. Here’s an unedited peek at the blogger I was more than a decade ago, shared with the joy of finally realizing that the writer in me has been there all along…

___

STOOP-SITTING FOR SINGLES
by Michael Doyle, Your About.com Brooklyn Guide
Dateline: 09/04/99

I admit it, I never use my backyard. And if you’re single, neither should you. Who are you expecting to meet back there? This is Brooklyn, and we have some of the most interesting and eligible people walking down our streets. Love – or lust – might be waiting for you on your very own front steps if you’d just take the time to sit there. You know of other people who’ve met their Ms. or Mr. Right out on that urban porch. Here’s how to improve your chances of it happening to you.

Before we begin, don’t fret if you live in a building without a stoop. If you grew up here, you’d know that real New Yorkers will sit on anyone’s stoop, at least until they’re chased off (and how often does that happen?). So do like us natives: go find a pleasant stoop. Keep in mind that your chances of being shooed away will lower dramatically as the number of doorbells on the building rises. Now, on with the show.

First, step selection is prime. Blow this and you might as well go back inside. You want to be able to make eye contact with passersby. If you like to hold court near the top of your stoop, this will never happen – although you will see everyone walking by, no one will see you. Savvy stoop-sitters opt for the second or, ideally, third step up from the sidewalk, easing the flirtation process for all concerned.

Those in the know also know not to wear sunglasses. I don’t care how bright it is out there. If your eyes can’t be seen, you might as well migrate back to the top step. Wear a cap, instead.

Next, bring along reading material that telegraphs your personality, or that you think would be read by the type of person you want to meet. If you want him to know you’re gay and available, be there with the latest issue of Out. If you want her to share your interest in finance, you better be sitting there with the Wall Street Journal. Just remember, these are tools of the hunt. Read, certainly, but notice the people passing by as well.

You’ll no doubt want a beverage out there. Avoid beer. It’s illegal to drink it on your stoop, but, more to the point, it ain’t attractive either. Think water, or soda, or coffee. A real glass or ceramic mug will tell people that you live in the house attached to this stoop, but a plastic travel mug or a cardboard cup with a lid will keep the ants and leaves out of your liquid refreshment.

Sitting on the stoop so far is you, your reading material, and your beverage. Unless you’re the owner or sole resident, try not to spread across the width of the stoop. Make yourself noticed, but always make sure you leave a path for your neighbors to go up and down.

You shy pies out there won’t like this next piece of advice, but it’s essential. Smile at people. Even better, say hello like you’re the official greeter for your street. Be friendly. You’ll be surprised at how many people will smile and say hello back. And those who are really interested will pause to talk. And there you go, you’ve just met someone on your front stoop. If it works out, I expect an invitation to the wedding or commitment ceremony.

Finally, for those of you with lots of junk and a yen for instant gratification, there’s a sure-fire way to practically guarantee tons of immediate and friendly conversation: have a stoop sale! You’ll turn that spouse hunt into a money-making endeavor and the worst that can happen is you’ll end up with uncluttered closets. Just remember, the above rules still apply. Don’t block the entire width of the stoop with your junk. Do prominently display those items which personify your interests and personality (history buffs, make sure those Civil War biographies don’t go unnoticed; Mac addicts, plop that aging Centris on the front table).

Of course, while many Brooklynites have hit the jackpot of romance on their front steps, your results may vary. If at the end of the day all you have to show for your stoop-sitting efforts is a sore bottom, it’s time to get up and go for a walk. First, to Junior’s to take-out one of their legendary cheesecakes, and then back home via your nearest video store.

Sorry, for the fork and VCR you’re on your own.

###

(Photo: Part of the wall of patron photos at the now-closed Lido’s Caffé.)

Last month on Chicagosphere, I wrote a popular post about how social media helped save a financially struggling local business. Unfortunately, social media wasn’t enough to save a popular Oak Park coffee shop. Lido’s Caffé, the home of a longstanding coffee klatsch that germinated on Twitter–my coffee klatsch–succumbed to the ailing economy last week. Yet in the shop’s failure is a lesson in online community–and how to translate it to real life.

Founded in mid-2008 by three fifty-something friends who wanted to open a business to retire on, Lido’s Caffé was a breath of fresh air in downtown Oak Park. The eponymous Lido Petrucci, his life partner Louise Mihalik, and friend Jan Louis, along with sneak-attack singing server Tina Pekovich, dished out more than Italian coffee, sandwiches, and gelato from dawn to far past dusk at their Marion Street café. They made their customers feel welcomed–to the point that several nearby regulars seldom ate in their own homes. It was, in fact, a feeling of family.

In September 2008, my close friend, local corporate trainer and chef Christopher Mahoney (yes, Pastry Chef Chris from this very blog), a former Oak Park resident, suggested we start a game night for our combined city and suburban friends. The same week we came upon Lido’s, which immediately felt like home to me, thanks to it’s New York-style Italian café vibe. We decided to replace games with coffee and gelato, and the next week, what came to be known as our Tuesday Night Coffee Klatsch was born.

(Photo: A gelato case to be sorely missed.)

A month into its existence, a Twitter follower of mine, Emily Culbertson (also of Chicago Carless fame), sent me a curious tweet: “Was that you at Lidos when I was just in there buying a banana?” It was, we met, and from then on the coffee klatsch was shouted out on Twitter, every week like clockwork. Tuesday nights at 6:30, Lido’s Caffé. In 16 months we barely missed a week. Sometimes we were a dozen people and sometimes just a pair, but in that time probably 50 people came through to share caffeine and real-life community with us, most of them organized from Twitter, then herded to the café in weekly emails.

I’ve written a good deal about our group here on Carless. For some reason, at Lido’s we felt safe enough to share the most bizarre and amazing stories amongst each other. (Read for yourself, for example, about the evening of the cocoa condoms, or why you should never initiate a high-speed chase from the Wisconsin police.)

I guess we always knew it wouldn’t last. Marketing was never strong at Lido’s. I blogged about Lido’s on Gapers Block and created a Twitter account for the café, but it was never put to any great use. As you might expect, there was never a Facebook page, either. The economy–coupled with the inertia of Oak Parkers to have their evening fun outside the village–eventually dealt the death blow. As 2010 began, the cafe announced its impending closure.

(Photo: Lido’s counter in 2008.)

As a testament to the power of Lido’s to foster community–both online and offline–immediately, college students who worked at the café and several interested regulars mounted a fundraising effort to help Lido, Louise, and Jan make the rent. But the proceeds from local indie bands and ad-hoc art auctions aren’t enough to stave off a persistent landlord who isn’t in the mood to play Let’s Make a Deal.

We held our last Tuesday Night tweetup at Lido’s on January 5th. Petrucci cried when we gave him a card signed by us all. In it, we thanked him for the real-world warm welcome that helped a disparate group of people, many of whom had never met in person before meeting on a Lido’s Tuesday night, become–in the best and most honest sense of the word–friends.

To our great surprise, the Oak Park Leaves newspaper chronicled our final Lido’s tweetup, as well as the reasons behind the café’s closure. And with that, the “Cheers of cafés” closed, and 16 months of community building may have gone with it.

(Photo: Pastry Chef Chris, grinning from ear to ear, with regular and occasional coffee klatsch participants.)

And that’s when we all realized the miracle that Lido’s had wrought for us. No, sadly, social media was not put to good use by Lido’s owners in order to save our beloved weekly home-away-from-home. Instead, Lido’s had given us a safe haven for turning electronic Twitter acquaintances into real-life friends on a regular basis. Every month, sometimes every week, Lido’s Caffé was the catalyst for alchemizing the virtual into the real. We wouldn’t have been so emboldened to so regularly take that step into the real world with each other without the home we were given by Lido, Louise, and Jan.

We’re an itinerant coffee group now. But thanks to the community building of the past 16 months, we remain a group, regardless. We even had newcomers at our final coffee klatsch at Lido’s. And this week, we had newcomers again in our temporary January home, Noble Tree Coffee in Lincoln Park (2444 North Clark Street.) I’m sure we’ll bounce around a few more times before we decide on a permanent home, and I know we’ll never recapture the magic that was Lidos.

But we’re proud to realize that we’re the moral of the story. There’s a miracle in social media. The miracle is the people on the other end of the keyboard from you. The ones you’ve tweeted and direct messaged forever but whose faces you’d never recognize on the street. Don’t miss an opportunity to meet them in person. Create those opportunities, if you can. Because the point of social media is the social, not the media. Media comes and media goes. But if you’re lucky, social endures.

May you be as lucky as we were.

(Graphic: Not your father’s Apple Macintosh. Daring desktop image included with Microsoft’s new Windows 7.)

This post is part of my “I’m Not a Mac” series, chronicling my controversial migration away from Apple Computer after 15 years as a Mac user. Find other entries in the “I’m Not a Mac” series archive.

[Welcome to my readers from MacSurfer's Headline News, Applelinks.com, and Low End Mac. Don't hate--trust me, I'm as surprised at my decision as you are...]

I am a future Windows PC user and that is that. After a 15-year relationship with all things Apple, I’ve finally had it with the Steve Jobs “you’ll use your computer they way we tell you to use your computer” method of customer relations.

In June, I blogged about my effort to pare down my electronic lifestyle. In a bid to make it easier for my ADHD self to manage the sea of information in which I swim–or sink–on a daily basis, over the summer I did what most mere mortals dream of doing: I migrated to a single email address and telephone number. I dumped my Vonage number, along with Apple’s Mail and iCal programs. In their stead, I routed all my calls to my iPhone and let myself succumb to life in the Google cloud.

My past four months of being a Gmail and Google Calendar user have been transformational. The ability to manage my mail, appointments, and address book seamlessly whether on my laptop or mobile phone and sync most of those items in real-time made life a lot easier for me. It also made me wonder at length why I had to use third-party solutions to do so.

Sure, I could have paid an annual subscription fee to use Apple’s MobileMe syncing service. But that wouldn’t have changed the fact that Google’s web apps are more robust than Apple’s desktop counterparts–not to mention free. That got me thinking about all the times in the recent past I’ve felt hampered by Mac software.

Having owned about a dozen Macs in the past 15 years, I long considered myself a staunch Apple evangelist. But being a Mac user was a lot more fun before the platform became mainstream. Back in the days when the media was still placing bets on when Apple would finally keel over and die, there was a sense of camaraderie between computer company and user. Right up until Steve Jobs made silver the new beige, the almost holy triumvirate of Apple, Macworld magazine, and a largely professional user community vibrated with the sense that if we all stayed on each other’s side, computer miracles would happen.

What seems to have happened, instead, is that Steve Jobs decided to make the needs of occasional home users more important than the needs of savvier, longtime Apple adherents. Since the company began concentrating so wholly on attracting PC converts, Mac software solutions have turned into what in August Wired magazine termed good-enough tech. As long as college users could figure out how to play mp3s, soccer moms how to schedule car-pool days, and grandparents how to use email, Apple could garner more market share.

Apple’s solution to accomplish all this: creating a suite of closely interlinked programs that met the basic needs of average users–and not much more. Sure, those users might end up so deeply enmeshed in an Apple-only universe that they might never again consider living life without an “i” in front of it. But how else to keep them buying expensive, Apple-branded hardware?

Although I have long been a power user, relying on my Mac to work, play, and manage most aspects of my life, the above paragraph described me for years. Especially after the even more hermetically sealed iPhone hit the market. Sure, I wanted real-time, platform-agnostic control over my email, the ability to manage my own photo folders, and access to “un-approved” software on my mobile phone. But once you’ve drunk the Apple Kool-Aid, it’s really hard to yank the computer company’s weedy tendrils out of the firmament of your daily life.

Much as Apple likes to market itself as the answer to allegedly closed-minded Microsoft, to a regular Mac user, when it comes to using your computer it can often feel like it’s either Apple’s way or the highway. It’s one thing to regularly ignore the needs of users by releasing software and system updates that just as regularly break popular third-party applications and add-ons (back in the days of camaraderie–when Macs were still fun–this didn’t happen with such regular frequency.)

It’s quite another to tell users that if they try to put unapproved software on their $400 cell phones (via iPhone OS jailbreaking), you may render their phones permanently inoperable. For what reason? Spite? Control?

More likely, for the mere whim of it all. Earlier this year, the Times of London ran a rare exposé on the highly secretive Steve Jobs. After recounting that Apple tried to get the story killed twice, the article referenced multiple sources familiar with Jobs to come to one conclusion about him: that he’s a raging narcissist. The paper noted that Job’s likely personality disorder could be what makes him such a strong industry leader. Yet it could also explain why any use of Apple hardware or software not personally touted by Jobs or his lackeys at a press event ends up impossible to pull off without putting your warranty–or purchase price–at risk.

I’m glad Jobs finds using Macs exclusively in his approved, cripple-ware ways so fulfilling. I, however, don’t. The ease of use I felt with Google’s software solutions motivated me to perform an ongoing audit of all the Apple software I regularly use. I wanted to determine whether third-party applications might better suit my needs.

As it turned out, in almost all cases the answer was a resounding yes. Since June, I’ve dumped the hard-to-customize Safari and its overly-simplistic RSS reader for the highly extendable Firefox browser and the equally robust NetNewsWire. I replaced Pages (and Word) with GoogleDocs. I ditched the standard Mac application launcher and switcher, the Dock, for the infinitely more useful DragThing. And at long last, I retrieved my 15,000 photos out of iPhoto’s sealed library and put them back where they belong–in a hierarchical folder archive categorized by me and now ably browsed with Picasa.

I deferred to the ease and utility of iTunes. But that’s about it. I now have the most platform-agnostic software suite I’ve ever used on a Macintosh. And that got me thinking even further. If my electronic life has been rendered easier by such a significant shift away from Apple software, what would happen if I made the ultimate switch of all? But it’s not like I’m foolish enough to go near the universally panned Vista or the by-now aged Windows XP.

And then surprise of surprises, last month Windows 7 was released to rave reviews, including Wall Street Journal Mac fanboy Walt Mossberg calling it as good as Mac OS X. That pretty much sealed the deal for me. I loved being a Mac user when it felt like Apple loved me back. But if there’s one thing I hate, it’s feeling like I’m being used. In this case, I feel used by Steve Jobs who must assume that no matter how marginalized he makes longtime users feel in his cripple-ware quest to increase market share, they’ll always stick around.

Sorry, Steve. I’m out of the magic Kool-Aid. I no longer feel compelled by your patented reality distortion field to make your company any additional profit at the expense of the daily ease of use of my own computers. You know, the ones I paid for, own, and frankly have a right to use however I see fit?

In the near future I’ll install Windows 7 on my Macbook in a virtual environment to get up to speed on how the modern PC platform works today (after all, it’s been a long time.) Then, thanks to Apple’s 2005 shift to Intel chips, Windows 7 will become my main Macbook operating system. And if you hadn’t guessed by now, after that my next computer will be a PC.

My iPhone isn’t left out of my back-migration, either. Apple’s heavy-handed control of the applications I’m “allowed” to use on the device–not to mention two years of frustrating-to-nonexistent AT&T signals in major cities across America–won no points with me, either. I’m shifting my calls to a nifty, new, platform- and device-agnostic Google Voice number. That way, when I break my AT&T contract and buy a new open-source Verizon Droid, my callers won’t notice a difference.

But I sure will.

(Photo: “This better not be going on your blog.”)

When Overly Frank adopted olderly Ryza from PAWS Chicago earlier this month, the cuddly interaction between Oklahoma expat and 11-year-old feline made me realize how much I’d been taking my own lifelong companion for granted. His life, that is.

Camões never saw the now-ongoing love-fest coming. For nine years, my Portuguese-monickered danger cat and I have been through a lot together. So many apartments. So many times around the futon chasing a ball of string. So many broken Christmas tree ornaments.

Our relationship is like my ADD attention span, the times I really focus on him come and go like the weather. He deserves more. I do too. Trouble is, my family history doesn’t have a lot to teach about long-term relationships.

It’s no surprise I recently shared with friends the realization that I have no idea how to enter and sustain adult relationships. I call it “The Lonely,” the place I end up inside myself when I’m trumped by my ADD and my codependence. I sit there waiting for my Higher Power to lead me to more stable ground and remind me that the true definition of love is not something I learned in childhood.

Growing up in New York, I never knew my father–either one of them. Not the Irishman with my last name in the black-and-white portrait who allegedly died six months before I was born. Sure as hell not the Puerto Rican border hidden away in the family album with Brillo hair and crooked fingers not at all unlike my own.

A native Manhattanite, my Spanish mom married the Irishman and moved to Queens to get out of her own family’s house and find independence. That’s probably why she raised her kids white-bread American, never teaching us the language of her birth. Imagine her surprise when the Irishman dropped dead of alcoholism in 1964 and a short while later her mother came to retire in the attic apartment.

You’d think she’d have already learned to roll with the punches when she went to the doctor suspecting cancer in 1969 and learned of her unexpected pregnancy. She’d later tell me she cried knowing that it wasn’t a terminal illness responsible for her bodily changes.

By the time I was born–six years after the Irishman died–my brother and sister, both a generation older, were already in the advanced stages of drug abuse and alcoholism. My mother should have known better than to entrust them with the secret of my origins, but given the Irishman’s own addiction, she already had a long head start on codependence, herself.

But my Spanish mother was Catholic enough to feel ashamed at having a child out of wedlock, so a family and a neighborhood were sworn to silence. She sent the upstairs border with whom she had shared what would turn out to be the last sexual experience of her life away and put a dead man’s name on my birth certificate.

I wouldn’t learn the familiar man in the family album was my real father until the age of 24. When the truth finally came out, my mother told me she never loved my father and, after all, my brother and sister weren’t ready for a new one, anyway. She also told me they’d been blackmailing her with the knowledge of my origins for my entire life, seeking money, approval of their eventually uninterrupted drunkenness, and silence for illegal actions. (I remain to this day the only person I know who can claim to have played as a pre-teen on bales of pot hidden in the family house by my sister’s drug-dealer boyfriend.)

When my mother died in 1996, shortly after I fled the family household for the sober urbanity of Brownstone Brooklyn, I thought that was that. Before the funeral, out of resentment at how they had manipulated our mother, I hadn’t had a discussion with my siblings in years. And even then, the closest my sister got to talking to me was the heckling she did from the first pew while I was delivering my mother’s eulogy.

Still, in my mother’s death, I thought I had finally escaped the clutches of my emotionally devastating family environment. As regular readers of this blog know, however, it would take many years of soul-searching, a move across country, and a lifetime of failed relationships for me to realize how damaging my upbringing had actually been.

Damaging enough to keep me from looking for my real father until my thirtieth birthday. Social Security death records told me I’d started my search eleven months too late. Digging through my mother’s effects shortly after, I came across private notes he sent to the woman who didn’t love him. I don’t remember how long I sat there reading and re-reading them.

In my father’s handwriting, they all made one thing clear: he loved her. But he was shut out. He eventually moved to Orange County, California, where he died in Santa Ana on September 29th, 1999. His name was Angelo Oropesa.

Before she died, my mother told me every time she looked at me, her breath was taken away by how much I resembled him. The few photos I have of Oropesa show him with children–my unknown half-brothers. From time to time, I poke around the Internet, seeking them. I probably always will. I doubt I’ll ever find them.

Last week, I went looking again. That search proved surprisingly fruitful, if in an unexpected manner. I ran my own siblings’ names through the Social Security death index.

I learned my sister has been dead for three years.

I doubt she ever let herself be happy. I doubt up until the end at the age of 56 she was ever sober for long. And I doubt my brother was sober enough to try and find me to let me know. I’ve spent many years building an information isolation from the two of them to protect me from their madness. Still, I’m eminently Google-able.

What really strikes me about my sister’s death, though, isn’t the late notice, but the lack of emotional impact the news has had on me. I feel sad that I don’t feel sad at her passing. The most I’ve been able to muster is a sense of sorry when I picture how she must have lived the rest of her life. At one time, I loved her dearly. But I made peace with the destruction my family inflicted on itself a long time ago. And I let go of them a long time ago.

Eventually, no doubt, I’ll find my brother in those death records. In the passing of my family members, what’s truly remarkable is how resilient their ghosts have been. I wish I had the same ability to let them go, too.

Much as I wonder how well “Michael Oropesa” would have fit the face at the top of this blog.

(Photo: Who are these people I write about, anyway? Tai Chi in Nob Hill’s Huntington Park, on my April 2006 visit to San Francisco.)

It had to happen sometime. I’ve finally created a comprehensive list of the friends, colleagues, dates, and various miscreants I’ve featured here in the virtual pages of CHICAGO CARLESS for the past four years.

By now, the dramatis personae are numerous, and even some who appear regularly on this blog have had trouble keeping track of the backstory. So to help out readers–and, er, subjects–old and new, I’ve put together an A-to-Z guide to this blog’s ongoing Cast of Characters, with a synopsis for each and a link to a Google search that will pull up every CHICAGO CARLESS post where they appear.

If I’ve left anyone out, let me know. If you’d like to be left out, you probably should have remembered those three magic words my loved ones have come to rely on over the past few years…“Off the record.”

Click through for the CAST OF CHARACTERS.

(Graphic: Apparently, the “new news” is on the blogosphere.)

A new report on the state of local news released today named CHICAGO CARLESS among the top-20 community-centric websites in Chicago. Oh. My.

Authored by grassroots media-relations training organization Community Media Workshop and commissioned by the Chicago Community Trust, the report, The New News: Journalism We Want and Need (PDF link), examines the state of online community news in Chicago, in the face of declining local coverage by the city’s traditional daily newspapers.

The report identifies 60 local websites dealing wholly or in part with the dissemination of Chicago-centric news and ranks them based on five individual criteria including number of RSS subscribers, number of monthly visitors, average visit length, and Google and Alexa page ranks, as well as a subjective criterion that assesses elements such as transparency, uniqueness, and use of social-media tools.

What’s truly notable is the number of local blog sites in that top-20 (although I am proud to be the only memoir blogger to make the list!) The full list includes:

1. Chi-Town Daily News
2. Windy City Media Group
3. Gapers Block
4. Progress Illinois
5. Windy Citizen
6. WBEZ Chicago Public Radio
7. Chicago Parent
8. Catalyst Chicago
9. Chicagoist
10. Midwest Business
11. CTA Tattler
12. The Beachwood Reporter
13. NewCity
14. Chicago Defender
15. District 299
16. The Chicago Reporter
17. The Urbanophile
18. Chicago Carless
19. 600 Words by Esther J. Cepeda, and
20. Marathon Pundit

I won’t retread Monday’s justification for having written this highly personal blog for the past four years. But I will point out this post from April, where I cautioned print media to look to the blogosphere for tomorrow’s journalists. And columnists, for that matter.

I’ll hold off on the “I-told-you-so’s” just long enough to do a happy dance for me and my fellow apparently opinion-leading local bloggers.

Then again, maybe I won’t. Collectively, we local bloggers have been trying to point out to traditional media our growing influence for a long time. Some outlets get it. (Witness the Tribune’s ChicagoNow.) Others not so much. For them, journalistic hubris will be its own reward. Likely in the form of a footnote on Newspaper Death Watch.

Me, I’ll stick with the approach that works. Writing from the heart about the local issues I care about and reaching out to my community of readers in a spirit of transparent debate. That, and never thinking I have an exclusive license on the truth or other shape-shifting forms of alleged objectivity.

On the blogosphere like nowhere else, the medium truly is the message. Bully for Chicago’s blogosphere today.

For more about the Workshop’s new report and what it means for local bloggers, see my full coverage today on CHICAGOSPHERE.

Huzzah.

(Graphic: Celebrating four years of a blowhard blogger in a windy city.)

In June 2005 when I told my then-boyfriend, Devyn, how jealous I was that he had a blog and I didn’t, I never expected to end up downtown Chicago’s official firebrand blogger. Back then, Devyn had Looper, a celebrated photoblog of downtown Chicago architecture. All I had was memories of the late 1990s, when I wrote About.com’s Brooklyn home page (my content long since removed.)

Having recently moved into downtown Chicago from the suburban pastures of Logan Square, I knew if I launched a blog, I’d have something to write about. After two years in Chicago, I was firmly in love–and falling even deeper for downtown. I always say I do my best thinking when I’m peeing. One good flush and the URL came to me: chicagocarless.com.

That’s how this blog was born, emerging out of a magical combination of envy, obsession, and and an over-full bladder. Four years later, Devyn is a happy New Yorker and Looper is no more, but this blog and my love affair with downtown Chicago are still going strong.

In my first anniversary post of June 2006, I tried explaining my civic affection. For this blog’s second anniversary, I mulled a move back to NYC (happily aborted later that summer) and reviewed the string of unexpected public relations successes that gave me a new career.

Last June, I celebrated a spiritual awakening that turned my life–and my heart–right-side up for the first time ever, sharing my journey deeper into Buddhism and my ongoing recovery from codependence and attention deficit disorder. At the time, I also performed a sweeping overhaul of CHICAGO CARLESS (though for four years my all-caps branding has remained), making my third anniversary post a couple of weeks late.

So sue me, but this year I’m getting a jump on the blog’s fourth anniversary (technically, my first post was June 27, 2005–and on Blogger, yet.) Let me tell you, it’s been quite a year.

Not long before last year’s anniversary, I broke up with the (happily still-friended) Pastry Chef Chris. Guilt and missing him almost turned me into a suburbanite to help him keep his apartment. It took a lot of urban hiking to clear my mind of that near disaster. New bylines on the Gapers Block food beat and at Huffington Post Chicago helped out, too.

Safely remaining a Chicagoan (what on earth would I have called this blog anyway?), I headed towards harvest season doing my best big-mouth blogger. I performed my first celebrity interview (with Food Network star Sandra Lee), fell head-over-heels for Cincinnati, Ohio, braved a tornado warning for the hot wings of doom, told the newspaper industry why it was dying, waded back into the downtown noise controversy, and scored a coveted golden ticket for the Obama election night rally.

My mouth was shut a few times, too. During the latter half of 2008, I also said good-bye to my codependency recovery friend, John C., who took his own life, worried about my own chances for happiness as a codependent and ADDer, and suffered an unexpected medical emergency (that I literally blogged from the bottom up.)

The best of last year came over the holidays, though, when I got the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless to monitor the Chicago Transit Authority after I blogged at length about the CTA’s mean-spirited winter homeless harassment policy–winning major citywide press coverage including studio interviews on WBEZ, WVON, and Out of the Loop Radio and an article on page 8 of the Sun-Times. (Huzzah!)

I celebrated those holidays with my close friends, though I didn’t miss my chance to call out Macy’s State Street for its cost-cut, trailer-trash Christmas windows.

And then the claws really came out. I don’t wonder why–I ran long and fast away from my recovery group after John C. died. Trouble is, I needed to be there. For evidence of that, witness the unfriendly rants about friends and dates that opened 2009 on CARLESS aimed at Gino Vesuvius, Mikey Stickler (et al.), Cincinnati Jamie, and Gay O.J.

Heck, I even let the beloved suburban hip-chick Val have it. She wasn’t mad though. After all, who wouldn’t love a Seussical rhyme about buying your first vibrator?

I was on less, er, shaky ground taking Blago to task for his media-relations cluelessness–and telling you how to be batshit bonkers like him.

Or taking Intelligentsia Coffee to task for raising its pricies just for funsies (for which I won a guest spot on the nation’s most popular LGBT podcast, Feast of Fools–now Feast of Fun.)

Or asking the CTA who stole the Washington/State ‘L’ stop, and blasting da mare for moving Ron Huberman to Chicago Public Schools. (It’s with a mix of amusement and horror I note my follow-up post about Ron Huberman publicly outing himself in the Sun-Times remains the most popular page on this blog.)

If I only I knew the fall I was about to take, myself. In February, after thanking Pizzeria Due for helping me become a Chicagoan, I met and fell in love with my very first Chicago native. I gifted him Brooklfield Zoo Mold-A-Ramas, so it must have been love.

But two months of hanging around with me and my friends were followed by a painfully unexpected disappearing act, leaving me to muse about the power of fear to persistently wreck the lives of closeted gay men, as equally as I mulled over the technical definition of borderline personality disorder.

Why, it was enough to drive anyone into rehab. That it did me, straight back to my codependence recovery program, where for the first time in two years I finally found hope (and catapulted my way into Step Seven, to boot.)

Personally, that’s kind of where I stand right now. The past year has brought me back to recovery, where I’m finally learning when and why to say, “Yes,” to the men in my life. And, more importantly, when and why to say, “No.” (God, I wish I had a time machine to go back a few months and use that new skill set.)

I’ve explored that theme in the video blogging I’ve been trying out this year, most notably in my opining on the annoying circle of life I always seem to be caught in. Finding my power also made it more fun to meet two new Seattle friends who helped drag me further out of my shell on a recent Chitown visit.

My new-found self-worth helped me reconsider my professional relationships, too. Not only have I shaken my client tree and let a few nuts fall to the ground and roll away, but being brave enough to share my opinion about the future of print media in general and the Chicago Tribune in particular led to the highest-profile blogging byline I’ve ever been offered.

June 2009 arrived with an invitation from the Trib to renovate their old Chicago’s Best Blogs column for their new ChicagoNow group-blogging project. After I said yes, I went to the bathroom to think up a new name, and now I’m the scribe of CHICAGOSPHERE: a blog about good local blogs.

All in all, this isn’t the story I’m used to telling on my blog birthday. There’s been no pulsating religious epiphany, no life-altering re-affirmation of civic pride. No over-arching through line. If nothing else, there’s at least been some significant personal and professional growth.

In fact, what there has been is a year in my life. That’s what I set out to chronicle four years ago–not merely the story of life in downtown Chicago as some people expect to read here, but the story of my life in it. The ups and downs, the loves and losses, the bravey and the fear, for all to see.

I write my story on CHICAGO CARLESS because it helps me make sense of my life. My friends will tell you, that’s never been my forté. I share the happiness because sometimes I have a hard time believing in myself, and I share the gory details because I know how alone they sometimes make me feel.

I regularly receive email from readers old and new who tell me how often they feel the very same way, and thank me for helping them feel a little more brave and a little less alone. You reading my words has the same effect on me. This blog is a two-way street and I’m grateful for that fact.

So from the bottom of my heart, thank you for journeying with me these past four years.

Now buckle up, folks. After all, you know me well by this point. God knows where we’re headed next…