Thursday, November 29, 2007

brrr

Ok, I know why I moved away from Chicago in 1997. It's because it was fucking cold. And guess what? Ten years of global warming have not changed the fact that it is still cold as a motherfucker up in this piece.

Today I went to visit my grandparents in their suburb, Morton Grove. I really find the name unappealing and random. It's basically a little burg sandwiched between Skokie and Niles. But if you're unfamiliar with Chicagoland then this fact makes little difference to you. Anyways, I thought I had the route down when I left the house, but I was so so very wrong. And the cold cold fact of that became apparent to me while I was waiting in twenty-something degree weather for buses that just never came.

The worst was when I confused the end of the line for a bus route and ended up in the middle of nowhere on the other side of Skokie Sculpture Park. Ordinarily, and in much warmer weather, I would've been pleased to discover a random sculpture park in the middle of suburban wasteland, but today it was creepy to see a gigantic head rising from a landscape that resembled a golf course. The beacon of light in this cold darkness actually turned out to be a mall. I remembered from my journeys to Morton Grove from the far northside of Chicago ten years ago that the right bus stops at that mall and so hiked past the Olive Garden and through the parking lot into it to wait for the bus.

While I was in the mall, still all bundled up, some G'd-out suburban teenagers who were obviously cutting school to "chill" in the food court laughed at me. And I thought, "wow, I really am in the suburbs and I really did just get laughed at." The last time I was laughed at by teenagers in a mall I was a teenager and it pissed me off. This time I took sort of a bit of pride in it. Aah, how times change.

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