"We really do need to have this discussion"

     Friday's post "Is there a right to die?" was about the frequent torment of  those coping with the end of life. It drew a lot of reader response. This email, from a woman in the Western suburbs, seemed to embody a number of the issues I was trying to address. Rather than read it and drop it down the electronic well, I thought I would share it, not because it is extraordinary, but, just the opposite, because it reflects what happens all too often to people at the ends of their lives and to those who love them. We can do better.

     I had to take over complete care for both of my parents when Dad had a stroke following about three years of colon cancer treatments. The stroke put him into the hospital, and while there, the doctor declared that it was time to call in the hospice angels (not what he called them, but what I think of them as.) At our first meeting, the hospice nurse recommended I get Mom tested for dementia, and my life changed dramatically from that point on.
     But I had to find a place to keep Dad safe immediately, since Mom was unable to care for him at home. She'd been starving herself and weighed only about 80 pounds, so was in no shape to lift him to provide any of the physical care he needed. So I found an assisted living place fairly close to their house in the city. What a dump! Once he moved in there, they put him on a floor of people needing intensive care, since he was bed-ridden. He'd lie in his dirty diaper for hours, fruitlessly ringing the bell, but no one ever came to take care of him. I don't blame the caretakers, but the administration who felt that the inadequate number of caretakers was just fine for the amount of people living there. Anyway, I'd visit Dad and take him on the elevator, down the three flights, so he could have a smoke out front. I found out the male night nurse was stealing his cigarettes. And when Dad would roll himself in the wheelchair down to the elevator, they'd ignore him for hours, leaving him sitting there sadly, and he wasn't allowed to go down to go out front by himself. Sigh.

     After only a couple of days, Dad started asking me hopefully each time I'd visit, "Did you bring my gun with you this time?" I told him I wasn't about to do that. He assured me that he'd take care of things himself, that all I had to do was bring it. I pointed out that they'd know someone brought it to him, and I loved him dearly, but not enough to go to jail for having helped him to commit suicide. For fear that Mom would shoot me as an intruder, I brought my husband with me, and we removed both guns and turned them in at the local precinct. Judging by the behavior of the cops, they never made it into the lock-up, but were probably "lost," then sold somewhere as antiques.
     I moved Dad after only about a week, and the assisted living place refused to refund the 1 month I'd prepaid for his care, insisting it "wasn't their fault" that I was moving him. I didn't want to fight that battle, so I never told Mom about that. I moved him to a place close to my home in the suburbs, and convinced Mom she had to move there also to care for him. Once there, he told me he tried to swallow his pillow, then his blanket, trying to kill himself. No good. Then he tried to swallow his own tongue...that didn't work either. He was an atheist, so he yelled at any religious folks that tried to visit him in his last days. He lived for 2 months after I moved him out here. But he kept telling me to "Leave the door open, and tell that old sod, the Grim Reaper, to get his ass on down here, since I'm tired of waiting for him."   

     Dad had been a carpenter for 50 years. Up until the day of his stroke, he walked many miles a day to the local Dunkin Donuts, for coffee and for the exercise. He'd been an accomplished ballroom dancer, and told me once, sadly, that in his dreams, he could still dance. And the greatest humiliation of his life was having total strangers, young women, changing his diapers. The only thing worse would have been if I did it. If I could have helped him to an assisted suicide, I would gladly have done it, to make his last days less miserable...especially since he kept telling me thatif I really loved him, I'd help him to end things. He was ready to go from the time they told him he'd be bedridden for the rest of what life he had left. He told me he hadn't taken many of his prescriptions because though they were supposed to extend his life, he wasn't sure he would like the kind of life they were going to extend.
     We really do need to have this discussion a lot. People should be able, when they're legally compos mentis, to make the decision that they're ready to go, and to die in their own time, and not have to wait around, suffering and/or bored.
     And as both of my parents had done for me, I prepaid for husband's and my cremation, so all our kids will have to do is make a single phone call, and things will be taken care of. As a society, we don't like to think or talk about death, though it's a certainty for everyone. It's time we started acting like adults, not frightened children. We need to discuss these issues openly. and hopefully without giving equal importance to the views of some religions, when we don't all believe in the same things.

Memo to Kraft Employees: Courage

   A decade ago, when the New York Daily News ran my column, I would fly to Manhattan to root around for material. Taking a break from working here, I'd go work there, an irony that was not lost on me.
     "What kind of idiot," I wondered, aloud, looking up from my keyboard in a windowless office, "takes his vacation from being a newspaper columnist in one city to go be a newspaper columnist in another?"
     That would be me. We not only love our jobs, we become our jobs. Which makes sense, since we do them so much.
     To even contemplate losing those jobs is hard. It's like thinking about dying. Worse, because when you die, you're no longer here. Your woes are few. But the unemployed have lost their livelihoods — a freighted word — yet continue to live these suddenly frantic, diminished existences, dog-paddling in the frozen slurry of the jobless, desperately looking for a ladder or a rope out before they drown financially and emotionally.
     During the past decade of recession that risk is a palpable menace for many, a thing in the bushes, sometimes quiet, sometimes growling. Thousands saw the dark thing stir reading the June 29 Crain's, whose front page story is on the mass firings coming to Kraft, which is merging with H.J. Heinz next month.
     "The layoffs will be swift, proceed in waves and cut deeply," Peter Frost writes in a story that must be twisting guts among Kraft's 22,000 workers, nearly one-third of whom can expect the ax.
     Since sarcasm is so common in this business, I should stress that I am not gloating. My heart breaks for those Kraft folk, happily selling cheese and pickles and salad dressing. The company is based in Northfield, not far from my house. I pass the headquarters all the time; it seems so sprawling and secure, like a college campus or a military base. A newspaperman expects to live a haunted existence but there's no joy in realizing those selling Jell-O are also crouched on shifting sands. Is no one safe?
     The shadow of the destroyer approaches Kraft. What does an imperiled employee do? Scan the horizon for a new job. Not a lot of sails there. Clear the decks. Cut expenses. Batten down hatches. Prepare for the storm.
     Then you wait, the low level terror of uncertainty eating at you. What to do? How to brace, mentally? Look back to the person you were at 17. What would that idealistic teen think of you now, in agony at just the thought of being cut loose from the Miracle Whip team? Gather your courage. I believe it is not the financial instability, bad as that is, so much as the blow to our identity that we fear most. To fight that fear, remember that we are many things beyond our jobs: husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. Parts of us that can't be taken away with a memo.
     You need to practice pumping yourself up in the way your job does now. When the atmosphere of your corporation is gone, you'll need to exist in your own little spacesuit of self. It can be done. Seneca has two relevant thoughts. First, do not run ahead to embrace woes. They may never come; then you're worrying about nothing. Or if they do come, then you suffer twice, first in anticipation, then in realty.
     Second, view it as a test of your mettle. Seneca asks: What's the point of being a good, strong person if you never face difficulties? Do you really believe that you are only able to cope with life when it goes well, when the paycheck ka-chings into your account and the head of the Shake 'n Bake group singles you out for praise?
      The Daily News sacked me out of the blue. They never even told me I was fired; just stopped running my column one day. I found out when puzzled readers asked where I had gone.
     It still hurt, even though I still had my regular job here to fall back on. Maybe that's my advice to Kraft employees. Start stuffing that mattress with savings, with job applications, with freelance work, with spiritual enrichment. Something to make the stone floor less hard when you hit it. Seneca be damned, I've been preparing too. At least I've come up with a line.
     When a flailing axe gets to me again someday, I plan to smile enigmatically and say, "Now I am rich in time."

The State of the Blog: Year Two

    Sophomore year is always tough.
    The dewy newness of the freshman is gone.
    The confidence and wisdom of junior year—maybe spent abroad, exploring new worlds—is still off in the hazy future, provided you can get across the long bridge of hard work between here and there.
    The first week of my sophomore year at Northwestern I got in a fight with a member of the varsity basketball team and spent about three months sorting it out in mediation. Then came what is considered the worst winter in Chicago history; 90 inches of snow fell. "Extremely brutal" is how one news organization put it.
     I toughed it out. 
     So it is with the second year of this blog, which I've come to refer to in tweets as EGD, which ends today. I'm tempted to call it my "fiscal year" but that would suggest this is an economic endeavor, and it really isn't. We did sell more ads this year than last—not only Eli's Cheesecake, which repeated its generous support in November and December, but the Ashman & Stein law firm, Bridgeport coffee, and Chicago Mailing Tube. The latter two paid in product. "I am rich in coffee," I've said, on a number of occasions, scooping dark, oily beans into the grinder for the morning pot. 
     How did I do? The numbers are up. Year One brought 385,679 hits, or 1,056 a day. Year Two brought in, as of Monday night, 499,423 hits—half a million by the time you read this— or 1,368 hits a day, a smidge more than 25 percent improvement. I'm not a businessman, but 25 percent is a good gain for the year.
     Statistics can be deceiving, though. Yes, January was my best month—51,000 hits, and it seemed a milestone to pass 50,000 hits a month. But thousands of those were spambots -- I could tell by seeing the garbled come-ons that land in my spam folder. They latch onto certain posts for reasons mysterious. I can't tell you how dispiriting it was to notice action regarding a certain post—"Hey, lots of people are clicking on my Rocks for Fun report on that strange pasty cafe in Wisconsin. It must have gotten linked to by some Wisconsin tourism site!"--only to realize it's the work of robot web spiders hunting dupes.
     The bad news seemed to outweigh the good, as befitting sophomore year. Poster sales sagged. I sold about 30 the first year. This year I sold 8. I do plan to fill a tube, jump on the Divvy, and put them up on the boardings around construction sites in obscure parts of the city. But haven't gotten around to that yet.
     There is value that can't be measured. Not to other people; I'm not the one to judge that. But to me. When I wrote about Amanda Palmer, the singer, the paper was going to give it a full page, then ended up with a very unsatisfying 700 words. But I ran it full strength, 1,500 words, on the blog, and would have felt terrible were that outlet not there (Palmer's husband, the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, not only retweeted the post to his millions of followers, but sent me a nice note, which felt like validation).
     I will admit somewhat sagging both in energy and in spirit. In the spring, I finished my next book for the University of Chicago Press, or more precisely, got about as close to the end of the year-long Zeno's Paradox process of securing the 80 or so legal permissions I need to print all the poems and songs and such that I quote without being sued. That, and the big piece for Mosaic, the London science and health web site, plus the column, plus this — it suddenly felt like a lot, and the endless spring of verbiage that I've been filling into jugs for years suddenly seemed a bare trickle.
    Some days are very quiet—or the dozen people who hang around the comments section are always jabbering away, but the greater world is generally completely indifferent. And I begin to wonder if I'm creating a product—essays of a thousand words or so—that isn't wanted anymore. It's an antique form, like a villanelle, a dead fashion, like top hats.
     So time to hang it up? The blog can be cut loose, like an iceberg breaking away from a glacier, to drift off melting in the vast ocean of the Internet. I've created this little island of my work, but like Tom Hanks, I'm going to die here if I don't lash together a raft and try to get myself back to civilization.
    Not yet. In looking over the past year, trying to figure out whether the writing was something to be proud of, or just more Internet crap, I stumbled upon this post from Jan. 20, "These are not dark days," about the state of the newspaper. I had forgotten I wrote it—six months of writing will do that—and read it with simple interest, as if it had been written by someone else. I was impressed by its candor—difficult to assess the place you work at—and thought its Churchillian conclusion, "Never give up," might be apt here. It's not that I can't quit. I think I don't want to, not yet. This is still fun, most days, and still growing, robot spiders be damned. 
    And the bottom line is, this does have a purpose, to have a platform up and ready in case ... choosing his words carefully ... others platforms I'm on becomes unavailable. You don't stop painting the lifeboats just because the ship is still sailing, for now.
    Also, a million hits is out there, sometimes in November at this pace. Like 50,000 hits a month, that seems something worth getting, ignoring the hard fact that a photo of Kim Kardashian's ass will do a million hits in an hour. 
     I can't write anything as dramatic as Kim Kardashian's ass, apparently. But I can try. And I'm a big advocate of that. "For us, there is only the trying," T.S. Eliot wrote in "East Coker" "The rest is not our business." 
     That sounds like a plan. So I'm going to try for a third year. Maybe junior year will be for me, as it is for so many others, when suddenly everything snaps into focus and the point of this endeavor becomes clear. It sure ain't here to sell posters.

Is Chicago a wheel city?

 

London Eye

     I've been to London, and seen the London Eye, and dismissed the 450-foot tall Ferris Wheel on the banks of the Thames, as many Londoners do, with a shudder of revulsion, as an out-of-place monstrosity that fits in the city of Christopher Wren like a steam calliope at a formal church wedding.
     That goes double for the Ferris Wheel at Navy Pier. which manages to be underwhelming and garish at the same time. At 150 feet tall, it rises to the height of a 15-story building. Which might be a big deal in Omaha. But the city that created the first Ferris wheel, at the 1893 World's Fair, could have done better.
     That one was unique in the world; this one is a nostalgic parody, a feeble homage, like those Al Capone bus tours.
     I rode it again last summer, in my role as benevolent tour guide, squiring a young country cousin. As we inched upward, in the wheel's slow rise, a view unfolded almost identical to the view you get standing on the pier, except you're $8 poorer.
     Perhaps it's thrilling for 4-year-olds. Otherwise, put it in the classic Chicago tradition of fleecing the greenhorns.
     To better accomplish this task, the Navy Pier folks announced last week they are replacing the wheel with a bigger one.
     First, a confession. My grumpiness on this topic must stem from my being in that time of life when things once thought permanent are suddenly wearing out. We have a lovely Herendon sofa, bought at enormous expense at Marshall Field's in the early 1990s. The fabric, a thick, rich green material, depicting ferns, like something from a medieval tapestry. The sofa seemed destined to last the centuries and end up displayed behind a velvet rope in a gallery.
     Instead it's battered and threadbare, banished to the TV room, the split cushions hidden under blankets. Put it out on the curb and nobody would touch it.
     So clock hands are spinning, calendar pages fluttering to the floor. And now the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier — which I watched being built as a metro reporter—has seen its day and will be torn down in the fall. Not because it is worn out, thank God, but because it isn't big enough and the cars are open.
     Again, a disconnect. The cars being open is the only bare value you got for your eight bucks. Yes, you were being taken 1/8 of the way up the Willis Tower. But at least you were outside. There was air and a tiny frisson of acrophobia.
     Now riders will be sealed in heated and cooled cars, so the tourists packing Navy Pier can seek escape by taking Ferris wheel rides in February.
     Is there a demand for that? I can't tell. Navy Pier's popularity is a puzzlement to me. I can't write about it without mentioning a strong memory from the late 1980s: walking the length of the pier's dark, desolate, abandoned ruin, thinking, "They're turning this into some tourist Mecca? That's crazy. Nobody's going to come here."
     The most popular tourist attraction in Illinois. Mobs of tourists rush past the Art Institute and Millennium Park to get in line at Bubba Gump Shrimp. Again, maybe this is age talking. When the boys were small, back in the 1990s—the last century!—we did enjoy the Children's Museum and the Winter Garden. But for the past decade, the only time I visit Navy Pier is when I'm rushing, late, to go on the radio at WBEZ, way the heck at the end of the pier. Pushing through this dense, milling crowd of Iowan families as they waddle from McDonald's to the teddy bear factory, the air cloying with the scent of sugary nuts, it's all I can do to get to the station without having my eye put out by a churro.
     They're building a bigger Ferris wheel. Question: If ours is 150 feet tall now, and London's is 450 feet, and Vegas' 550 feet, and New York is building one 630 feet, how big will the new Ferris wheel at Navy Pier be? 300 feet? Maybe 500 feet? Or 700 feet? If the wheel were proportional to our civic self-regard, it would be 1,000 feet tall.
     No, 196 feet. Only a little bigger. How that's worth the $26 million it'll take to do is a mystery to me. But then again, the whole darn thing's a mystery to me.

"We really do get it right sometimes"

John Fliszar and Mark Ketterson

     There will be a lot of hoopla today at the Gay Pride Parade, and rightly so. The Supreme Court deciding to recognize the basic humanity of gays and lesbians is a cause for celebration. And up until late Saturday I was going to post a festive look at the parade.

     But I got to thinking. This is an important moment, yes, for wedding vows and sugary cake and love. But it also represents a serious acknowledgement by society, one that is a few thousand years overdue. 

     To underscore that, I'm reprinting a column I wrote in 2011. At the time it was given most of front page of the Sun-Times, because it was surprising that the Navy would treat this gay vet's husband with respect. Treating a deceased vet's spouse with respect was news. Now it's the law of the land. Look how far we've come in four years. Today the only strange thing is that anyone could be against it. But people are. Remember, all Republican presidential candidates are vowing to fight this overdue show of human decency, to one degree or another. Victory doesn't mean the battle is over, because there are still those who would take it away. They'll fail, but that doesn't mean they won't have to be vigorously opposed. Not today, today is for celebrating. But soon the work continues.

     John Fliszar had a heart attack in 2006 and was rushed to Illinois Masonic Medical Center.
     "When I was in the emergency room with him, he asked me to promise him, if he died, to make sure his ashes were interred in the Naval Academy," said Mark Ketterson. "He loved that place. He very much wanted to be there."
     Fliszar, a Marine aviator who served two tours in Vietnam, survived that heart attack. But last July the Albany Park resident suffered another one that killed him at age 61.
     Hoping to fulfill Fliszar's wishes, Ketterson contacted the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis and told them that Fliszar, Class of '71, had wanted to have his ashes interred at the USNA's Columbarium, a serene white marble waterside crypt next to the school's cemetery.
     The memorial coordinator asked about his relationship to the deceased. Ketterson said that John Fliszar was his husband.
     "They were always polite, but there was this moment of hesitation," Ketterson recalled. "They said they're going to need something in writing from a blood relative. They asked, 'Are you listed on the death certificate?' 'Do you have a marriage license?' "
     He was and they did, the couple having been married in Des Moines when gay marriage became legal in Iowa two years ago.
     Ketterson sent a copy of the marriage license. That changed everything.
     "I was respected," he said. "From that moment on, I was next of kin. They were amazing."
     The USNA alumni association sent Ketterson a letter expressing condolence for the loss of his husband.
     The USNA says Fliszar's interment followed standard operating procedure.
     "His next of kin was treated with the same dignity and respect afforded to the next of kin of all USNA grads who desire interment at the Columbarium," said Jennifer Erickson, a spokesperson for the academy. "We didn't do anything differently."
     Shipmate magazine, the publication of the USNA's alumni association, ran Fliszar's obituary. It noted his two Purple Hearts for "having been shot down from the sky twice in military missions." It noted "for the rest of his life he would joke about his 'government issued ankle.' " It noted "his burly but warmly gentle manner." It noted he was "survived by his husband, Mark Thomas Ketterson."
     "The word 'husband' in the obituary has created a bit of a stir," said Ketterson, a Chicago social worker. "I've heard from a number of officers. It's been amazing. This has not been absolutely confirmed, but I think I'm the first legal same-sex spouse who planned a memorial."
     The memorial service was held in October, in "the beautiful, beautiful Naval Academy chapel," said Ketterson. A uniformed officer stood in the back and played taps.
     "They did the standard military funeral, a wonderful service," said Ketterson. "Since I was the designated next of kin, they were going to present the flag to me, but I deferred to his mom. She gave it to me."
     One of the groups Ketterson heard from afterward was USNA-Out, the organization for gay graduates of the naval academy.
     "From my perspective, attitudes and actions are changing at the Naval Academy and certainly at the alumni association," said Brian Bender, chair of USNA-Out, observing that while he "can't speak for the Navy as a whole, we do interact with active-duty Navy folks, and they check in with their chain of command."
     I tried to find someone who could speak for the Navy as a whole, but with whatever era replaces "Don't Ask, Don't Tell'' still in its infancy, well, let's say that Navy communications specialists are not jostling each other for the chance to address this subject.
     While the public generally approved of the official end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell'' in the U.S. military, the details still need to be worked out. The thorny issue isn't ending the costly and counterproductive practice of forcing gays out of military services—that cost $40 million a year to enforce and deprived the armed services of thousands of qualified personnel. A bigger challenge is the question of entitlements: Who is a survivor? Who gets military benefits?
     A marriage certificate was the key that let the USNA know how to treat Ketterson in relation to his husband's service. Gays in the military and gay marriage are thought of as separate issues, but without legal gay marriage, or at least civil unions, how can the military know who gets the folded flag?
     Such practical concerns were far from Ketterson's mind when he and Fliszar got married after dating for six years—"because I loved him and he asked me," Ketterson said, adding that the USNA alumni he's heard from have made grieving more bearable.
     "It's been some months. I'm still doing mourning," Ketterson said. "As a gay man who grew up in a military family, getting communications from USNA, having heard from alumni who say, 'You will always be one of us'—that's powerful, and healing."
     "One of the e-mails said that I was a 'trailblazer,' '' said Ketterson. "I didn't blaze any trail. I buried my husband."
     That said, he still finds himself marveling at how it all unfolded.
     "I am a patriotic American, but I know this is not a perfect world," he said. "The point is, when the chips are down, when the issue was patriotism and honor for a veteran, they were wonderful. Whatever their private feelings, they made me proud to be an American. We really do get it right sometimes."

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 30, 2011

Why the Gay Parade is not only fun, but important. Still.

     On Friday, the Supreme Court recognized the right for gays to marry throughout the 50 states. Make sure you don't miss the laughable legal somersault John Roberts does in his dissent, basically saying that acknowledging this Constitutional right deprives each state the joy of crawling toward that realization on their own. Boo-fuckin' hoo. 

     Sunday is the Gay Pride Parade, and while the ruling guarantees it will be an extra joyous one, at some point someone will ask, "Hey, now that this right is finally won, do we really need to march?" 

    I'll field that one.

    Short answer, yes, as laid out in a column about the 2011 parade (which, sharp-eyed readers of my Chicago memoir, "You Were Never in Chicago," might recognize as the parade that appears at the end of the book).

     When I told a neighbor that I would be riding on a float in Chicago's 42nd Gay Pride Parade Sunday, he grinned giddily, fluttering his fingers in front of himself and trilling an effeminate "hoo-hoo!" noise that I guess was supposed to be an imitation of a gay man.
     And some wonder why there's a parade . . .
     I didn't correct him or challenge his thinking. "Gee Biff, that offends me and offends the dignity of gays, lesbians, transgendered, bisexual and non-determinate people everywhere." That isn't my style. Too timid. I even may have laughed along, shamefully, caught off guard by this sudden ugliness, and stymied by the conviction, had I argued, that rather than shift his view of gays ("Gosh Neil, thanks, I just never thought about it in those terms...") I'd just tar myself as a humorless ideologue in the thrall of the gay agenda.
     Which I'm really not. To be honest, I couldn't care less about other people's sex lives, and it also shocks me that there are those who do, passionately, feel that the Lord God Almighty is ordering them to stick their big bazoos into the personal business of others.
     Don't they know their history?
     It didn't start with gays, you know. Remember bastards? It's a general, low-level insult now, but once it was a specific legal term—a man born out of wedlock—with implications regarding his right to inherit property and marry. The rules are in the Bible.
     "A bastard shall not enter in to the congregation of the Lord," Deuteronomy 23:2 tells us, "even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord."
    Society doesn't fret about bastardy anymore. Ditto for divorcees. Things change.
     Gays are next in line to be let off the Bible-based hook, and it's been fascinating these past 20 years to see them shedding their pariah status. As with previous biases—against blacks, against women—the iron law began to melt. When I joined the paper, we wouldn't list a gay partner as a survivor in an obituary, not even if they had been together 30 years. It was policy. Kind reporters would get around that by quoting the survivor as "a longtime friend." AIDS changed that; with so many gay men dying, denying them this final shred of dignity seemed pointless and cruel. And now New York State is allowing gays to marry.
     Among the first people I talked to Sunday after I joined the throng pouring from the Belmont L station was Kelly Cassidy, state rep from the 14th District. She told me that someone had broke into the warehouse where the parade floats were stored last night and slashed the tires of 51 floats. I replied that this had to be a hate crime.
     "It's hard not to think so," she said. "After the huge victory in New York, with so much to celebrate . . . The first parade had no floats. There were no go-go dancers. We don't need floats to have a great parade."
     The vandalism discouraged no one whom I spoke with. The general opinion is that Illinois will follow New York in legalizing gay marriage.
     "It's going to be coming soon," said Jacob Meister, founder of Civil Rights Agenda, an advocacy group whose float I rode on.
     I thought of the Nazis who had gathered outside the dedication of the Illinois Holocaust Museum, unwittingly underscoring the need for such a place. Ditto for the slashers—a grim reminder that gay people don't march in the street once a year because they're exhibitionists. During the AIDS crisis, they were marching to save their lives, and now they're marching to insist that those lives and loves have as much worth as anybody else's.
      Seeing the parade from a float was pure fun. The whumping Lady Gaga music, the sea of waving, smiling, joyous people—gay and straight, young and old, every color, everyone having fun. I waved and clapped and yes, shimmied a bit. How could you not?
     Correction: not everyone had a good time.
      "Repent heathens repent!" a man yelled through a loudspeaker. "God hates all of you! Jesus Christ hates every single one of you! Homosexual sex is demonic sex! You're demons!"
     This wasn't the Westboro Baptist Church, but the Street Preachers, sort of a Westboro Wannabe. A bearded man among them asked me if I believed what the speaker was saying.
     "No," I said.
     "Why not?" he demanded.
     I paused, thinking. "It's like what Louis Armstrong said when asked to define jazz," I said. "'If you have to ask, you'll never know.'"
     That seemed to puzzle him, but I walked away and left him in his confusion. My job isn't to take every idiot by the hand and try to make him see the light. That said, the next time somebody does one of those pinky-lifting lisping bits, I'm going to assume the most steely glare I can and say, "That's not funny."
     —First published in the Sun-Times, June 27, 2011

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

    Can you make out the guy in the above?
    Here, I'll blow him up for you. 
    There, that's better.
    A hooded figure.
    A monk perhaps.
    Certainly a clue as to this solid building.
    Maybe you've seen it.
    I didn't notice it until this week.
    And I pass the place all the time.
    Which is one thing I love about Chicago.
    All this hidden stuff.
    Hidden in plain sight.
    I won't wax nostalgic about the extra care these older buildings show. 
    No hooded figures above the windows today.
    Economics, laziness and I suppose a bit of cowardice.
    Who would have the courage to put hooded figures on their buildings today?
     Mysterious men who could represent anything.
    Enigmatic gentlemen
    Whom we could project our fears upon.
    Enough noodling.
    Where is this? What building? 
    If you know there's a 2015 poster in it for you.
    Place your guesses below.
    Good luck.