Notes from the Post-it Wall | Week of August 16, 2020
There is rarely a situation I won’t put myself in. You get a better experience at the zoo by being in the cage.
It’s Election Day in Chicago: A Deconstructed Love Story
It’s election day in Chicago, which means it’s the day citizens of this Third Coast Second City bring out their dead to partake in the American right to screw themselves at the polls.
Since its incorporation on March 4, 1837, Chicago has been the place for people who want to be punished. There are the winters, the Cubs and the Bears, the Daley Family, the pot holes, and, of course, the crime. And by crime, I mean the politicians and the police. Yes, the city has its positives, too. There’s the lake and its shoreline, the architecture, the Blackhawks, Stephanie Izard, the excitement of not knowing whether the improv show you’re about to see is going to be incredible or give you cause to wish for a swift and vicious cancer to eat you and every player on stage alive.
Chicago, we don’t deserve better — we’ve done this to ourselves for almost two hundred years — but we should want better. And if we’re as tough as we brag to be, we can have it.
The Graceful Failure of Mayor Rahm Emanuel
But what’s he really going to do? I imagine that he’ll spend the next three to eight months furiously beating his knob to a pulp jerking it to footage from the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots in Grant Park. You know, back when Chicago was a city he could get behind. One where the police policed. Maybe he’ll spend his days eating Arby’s sandwiches hoping to find a finger in his food. His finger.
How do you want to be defined? By one action? By some opinion that could evolve? By a mistake, regrettable only with hindsight? Or by the sum of your parts? Okay, do that for other people. Start the trend.