Take Your Son to Work Or Else Day

Kid, what kid?

     The saga of Adam LaRoche, who quit the White Sox this week after they told him he was bringing his teenage son Drake to the locker room too much, prompted me to write a column for tomorrow about the jaw-dropping kerfuffle. In researching it, I pulled up this column from a decade back, about taking my own kid to the paper.

     Thursday was Take Our Daughters and Sons and Transgendered Offspring To Work Day, or whatever they call it, and when my oldest boy begged to go, at first I flatly refused.
     "I'm not having you miss a day of school so you can sit in the newsroom and watch Nickelodeon for six hours," I said.
     If that sounds harsh, and not the warm, Iliad-reading daddy image I cultivate, the explanation is that he was just at the office three weeks ago, during spring break. Both boys were. This "holiday," to use his word, seemed artificial to me, something contrived, cooked up to spur the negligent, like Sweetest Day. I saw no reason to conform.
     But youth is about conformity. My boy whined and wheedled. He insisted that kids were supposed to miss school. Nobody would be there, just him, all alone in an empty classroom, the orphan boy.
     I held my ground — I can do that sometimes. Until the unexpected — he burst out weeping, and wailed how he didn't go last year because I was in Israel and didn't the year before because I was in Taiwan and now he'd never go. Confronted with his steel trap memory, I wilted, The Bad Dad.
     "OK, OK," I said. "Fine, go." I know you're not supposed to give in, and know that by admitting it I will hear from every reader whose parents weren't wavering milquetoasts like me, about how parental firmness gave them spine and ginger and allowed them to live through the Great Depression on grit alone. Good for you. I couldn't stand seeing him cry and yielded, figuring: How long is he going to want to be with me?
     I don't know what he's getting out of it — he's in the newsroom right now, watching Tom & Jerry. The Sun-Times isn't like TribCo, which is probably entertaining staffers' kids with jugglers and ponies and actors dressed up as Col. McCormick giving workshops about how to paint enemies red. Here, they don't even put out a salt lick.
     But I'm getting something out of it. Your children are a mirror of yourself. Going out the door in the morning, my wife suggested my son write something for the column, something about his school.
     "But what if I write something bad?" he said.
     "Write good things about school," my wife instructed.
     My 9-year-old replied: "I want to write about its faults."
     My wife looked at me and we both burst out laughing. "It must be in the genes," she gasped.
                        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 29, 2005

Technology nostalgia

The Lights of Other Days, by John F. Peto

     Glance at this painting at the Art Institute.  
     Not a famous work. Not "American Gothic" or "Nighthawks." Hung on a panel in a display of 19th century American design, perpendicular to the gallery, so I had to lean in to try to take a proper photo of it. 
     "The Lights of Other Days" by John F. Peto, a minor tromp l'oeil artist. 
     Still, the century-old work gave me pause, because he's doing something we like to do, and imagine is a modern emotion—rhapsodizing past technologies. In this case, the lightbulb, which had replaced the candles used for centuries, was about 25 years old and spreading rapidly. Peto gathered the dusty, tossed out candle holders and lanterns for one last group shot the way, for a decade or two, authors used to laud their typewriters, the whap-whap-whap of the keys, the thunk of the carriage return.
     Until they said, "Aw, the hell with it," and got a computer.
     You could see the nostalgia for a flame lit world. The soft glow. The romance.     
     But not so much that we still do it. We could. Candles are still around. You could light your house with them. But you don't, because it's bothersome and expensive and you'd end up burning the place down. That happened back then. 
     A reminder that nostalgia is a filter, a screen, that only lets the good part through. We remember the glow and not the burned down houses. 

You've been warned, honey

     Hey ladies!
     Put aside your mixing bowl of cookie batter, or lapful of tatting, or supermarket tabloid, or whatever inconsequential thing is occupying your tiny little attention span at the moment. Gather around. Old Uncle Neil has something important to discuss exclusively with my female readership.
     And no, this isn't another liberal cri de coeur — whoops, sorry gals, "cry from the heart" — over Donald Trump's raging sexism, his continual put-downs of women and descent into vulgarity. Yes, that kind of thing is infectious. No doubt part of the pathology explaining Trump is the unspoken male desire among his reality TV fans to get back to living in a man's world. Less worrying about bruising the delicate sensitivities of feminists. More seeing who can pee the farthest.
     To be honest, a Trump nomination, while steadily moving from impossible farce to inevitable tragedy, is in my mind still among the realm of Things too Awful to Imagine. And perhaps with good reason. The GOP establishment isn't frantic because of Trump's policy stands — they agree with him; they want a wall. No, they're frantic because in any half-sane world, Trump loses to Hillary Clinton.

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Killing kitties is hard

  

     City Council is considering an ordinance that forbids animal shelters, including Chicago animal care and control, from killing unadopted pets. The bill pushed by Ald. Ed Burke, the father of ill-considered ordinances, which makes me wonder whether all aspects of it have been thought through. Will it, like the plastic bag ordinance, make the situation WORSE, by jamming shelters with animals they can't get rid of?  What will become of the tens of thousands of animals that come into custody of Chicago and are not adopted? It reminded me of the time I slid by the city animal control center to watch them euthanize animals.

     Too bad you didn't stop by the Chicago Commission on Animal Care and Control and adopt that gray-and-white kitty I saw there the other day, because now Jennifer Harnisch has to kill it.
     And killing kitties is hard. They can't simply be put inside the big rolling blue metal cages along with the older animals and wheeled into the gas chambers. Kittens are too young; they have too much hemoglobin in their blood. Harnisch has to grab each kitty, individually, and inject it with an overdose of sodium pentobarbital.
     That isn't the tough part, however. Picking up kittens and injecting them is easy, physically—at that age they are so trusting, so affectionate. The tough part is thinking about it. Although, like anything repeated over and over again, it becomes routine.
     "You get used to it," said Harnisch, 26, who said she is "bothered but not haunted" by her job at the Southwest Side center. "It's still very hard. I try to zone it out and not think of the actual act I'm doing. I don't think I could bring myself to do it if I knew."
     That thought came back to me a lot. I don't think people know. Know, for instance, that the puppies they drop off, rather than being extra-adoptable (people love puppies) are usually killed the next day. They can't be adopted until they're fixed, they can't be fixed until they're 2 months old, and young ones can't be kept that long.
     Even in the new facility, built in the mid-1980s, with cheery red-enameled brick and clean interiors, there is room for only 600 animals.
     That sounds like a lot. But last year 28,314 dogs and cats, with a good number of rabbits, guinea pigs and the occasional strange beast (such as a Sonoran Sidewinder) were brought to Animal Control. Only 1,677 left through the front door -- adopted into homes. Another 1,318 were recovered by their anxious owners.
     And the rest? Do the math. The majority -- 25,319 -- left through the back door, dead, in big fiberglass tubs filled with thick plastic liners. Pull back the plastic and take a look. They appear to be sleeping.
     Putting them to death is relatively painless, supposedly, but still not pretty. The animals, in groups, are placed in one of three gas chambers -- stainless-steel cubes about 4-feet-square, with a sliding door of scratched and smudged glass.
     A worker stands in the next room and pushes a button, watching through two chunky glass blocks built into the wall. The process takes 25 minutes. Carbon monoxide, pumped from tanks, fills the cubes.
     The dogs yowl and scratch. They move even after they are dead. Eventually the chambers grow quiet, and the gas is evacuated. Then the bodies get dumped. The Department of Streets and Sanitation sends trucks to take them to the incinerator on Goose Island: 369,274 pounds of pets last year.
     Last week, the city announced an increase in Animal Control staffing and adoption advertising so that fewer dogs and cats are destroyed. Actually eliminating the practice seems impossible right now.
     To stroll through Animal Control is to pass from sweetness to horror and back. You have to steel your heart.
     There, in the break room, is Popeye, an adorable Boston terrier that is one of three pet mascots at Animal Control. He's missing an eye -- he was hit by a car and his previous owners, confronting the prospect of medical expense, abandoned him.
     There, in the room with the buttons that start the gas, is a guillotine with sheet-metal sides and a long, rusty-yet-sharp-looking blade that is driven down pneumatically. Not that they use it to put animals to death—it's only used in rabies cases, when state laws mandate that the brains be examined. The heads are sent to the Health Department.
     This all makes grim reading, but the executive director of Animal Control, Gene Mueller, didn't try to hang a lot of fancy tinsel on the operation.
     When I asked him how he rationalized his job, he said this:
     "I'm a veterinarian. I'm involved with animals because I love animals. I have the terrible duty for society of disposing of their mistakes. We try to provide a humane method of euthanasia for these unfortunate animals.To end up here is far better than being run over by a car or tortured or some other horrible fate."
     Hard to argue that. Hard to see what happens at Animal Control and then ignore it. Ignoring it is part of the problem. People have these romantic notions about animals. They don't want their pets neutered—oooh, too unnatural. They don't want them to be kept indoors. Oooh, too much like jail. They want them to experience motherhood.
     "What everyone thinks is, 'I can find homes for these six puppies,' " Mueller said. "What they fail to understand are the implications. First, they've taken six homes from shelter animals, animals that already exist and will be destroyed because they don't have homes to go into. Second, you have no control over what is done with those puppies. You give them away, each could have six puppies. The problem increases geometrically."
              —Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 11, 1998

Our M & M race for Senate

     Illinois became a state in 1818, and its first two senators were elected to staggered terms: Jesse B. Thomas, for six years, and Ninian Edwards for two, before running for, and winning, his second, six-year term.
     This kept the senate elections staggered, generally, and formed two tracks, like M & Ms racing at a Bulls game, and it's easy to view them as in competition.
     Spoiler alert: Track No.1 is winning.
     Track 1's Thomas proposed the Missouri Compromise that limited slavery, and Track 1, as we shall call it, has seen a pantheon of greatness—Stephen Douglas. Paul Douglas—and skill, such as Charles H. Percy, Paul Simon and his protege, Dick Durbin who, since 1997, carved out a niche for himself as, if not a name that will echo through history, then a no-drama workhorse twirling a dozen policy plates at once, bringing home the bacon to Illinois, year-in, year-out.
     But on Track 2....

     It's first occupant, Edwards, who as governor sent the Illinois militia to ambush Indian tribes, was forced to resign midway into his second term, after being exposed penning anonymous, unfounded attacks on a political rival.     

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Escape from O'Hare, OR, the Farmers' Revenge

     It's a 12 hour flight from Tokyo to Chicago. Which sounds unendurable. But with in-flight movies, it's really not that bad, particularly for a guy who doesn't see many movies. I never thought about movies, ahead of time. I brought books. But instead I binge-viewed; I saw more on this trip to Japan—six total—than I have in the theater during the previous year ("The Big Short," "The Martian," "Bridges of Spies," "Boyhood," "Spotlight" and an HBO documentary on Banksy's month-long art project in New York City. 
     So the flight over and back, not a problem.
     The hour after we arrived in Chicago, however....a little harder to accept. 
     There's just something almost cruel about stumbling off the plane, breathing the air of freedom, thinking, "Ah, I'm home!" then turning the corner to see this mass of humanity shuffling through our Sham Security Theater. 
     I've gone abroad many times, but never remember it being this bad.
     There were three lines, one after the other.
     The first was the longest, but that at least kept moving. This line was the line shunting citizens to the banks of machines where you scan your passport, declare that you're not bringing in drugs and sides of beef and such,, get your photo taken in the worst, low rez, exhausted picture of your lives.
    Say, 20 minutes.  At least you don't have to hunch over a form with a pencil anymore, which is more than Japan can say. 

    Once that line is surmounted, slip in hand, you are  then are shunted into the second line. Where you wait to hand the slip with the low rez photo to a customs agent, who eyeballs you, perhaps sniffs for the scent of decaying beef, then waves you on, where you get your luggage.   
     We were worried ours wouldn't arrive: they had paged us at the ticket counter at Narita just to make sure we really were owners of the luggage connecting from Kumamoto, which seemed an Ominous Sign. 
     But there it was, not in Malaysia at all, as we expected, but right there on the carousel, by the time we got to it. I grabbed my bag and was ready for the bolt to freedom, like a diver breaking the surface for the first gulp of sweet air, when we realized the only way out was to join yet another line, snaking around the baggage carousels, to get past the agriculture department, still looking for that beef. I watched a cute, twitchy  little beagle being led around the luggage, adding an absurd element. You want your police state to have German shepherds, not pugs. It was if there was a calliope wheezing in the corner.
      This cruelest line had no ropes to guide it, with people grabbing their bags from the carousel cutting in, as opposed to going to the back, the way suckers like me did. My brother started chatting with a Japanese businessman who was going to miss his connecting flight, and gallantly tried to intercede on his behalf.
    "What if you need to get to a connecting flight?" he asked a uniformed—I almost wrote "costumed"—employee.
     "It's a universal exit," he replied. "They couldn't care less."
      The people who heard that last sentence laughed, despite ourselves.
      "God bless America," I said. At least we're free to be honest about what a hash we make of things and how indifferent we are to the people we supposedly serve. We finally shoehorned by the agriculture guy, who took our low rez photo slips and waved us through.
      At that point, I phoned American Taxi, as I always do, and maybe five minutes later Cab No. 12 was waiting outside gate 5E to whisk me home, just like they said it would.
     I suppose that's the power of commerce as opposed to government. The feds already have my money, so any service they provide is nearly charity. American Taxi, however, wants my $30, now and in the future, and so have worked out a system where they  get what I need ASAP. 
    Not to slam the government, per se. We have Republicans to do that, and they've undermined the government, as if to prove their point. starving it of resources, so it is stretched and repurposed and multi-tasked, well, I suppose it could be worse and probably will be. And not to take anything away from the various Customs and Immigration and Homeland Security agents, who were doing their best, individually. Still, it's a sad commentary on our inability to get things right—I don't think we were ever required to pause more than 30 seconds at Narita when leaving Tokyo. 
     My brother summed it up best.
     "Thank God Chicago didn't get the Olympics," he said.  We could barely handle the regular arrivals on a normal Monday afternoon.


    

Flying home

     Well, the trip's over, and I'm flying home. I feel like I've been gone forever. My mind's too fuzzy to even try to write anything cogent.  But luckily I tucked away a little something, just in case.  Back to more substantial fare tomorrow.      

     So I took my 100 readers to "Romeo and Juliet" a couple weeks back. Everyone seemed to have a good time. One thing I noticed is the audience, which at the Lyric can skew toward the antediluvian, seemed considerably younger: college students. High school students, even. I assumed they were drawn by love of the romance of the familiar Shakespeare tale of romance.
    Or maybe not-so-familiar. 
    As we were leaving the lovely Civic Opera House, I overheard heard a young woman exclaim to another:
     "You didn't know they died?"

Japan Diary #6—Defending the castle

      KUMAMOTO—  Who doesn't love a castle? They look cool, first. They have this wonderful aura of protection. We all want to be safe within castle walls, secure against the danger and the enemies we know, or sometimes just imagine, are outside, trying to get at us.
     Arriving at this scenic place in southwestern Japan, a six-hour bullet train ride from Tokyo—I expected a rural nowhere—I was pleasantly surprised to find a vibrant city of 700,000, with a university and lots of bookstores, albeit selling books I can't read, and this edifice looming over the town.
    It's natural to head for the castle, to take a look around. 
    They give you a lot of history at these places. The 13 generations of Hosokawa clan shogun who held power here from when the castle was first built in 1607. Not that the building before us is that old — and I always sniff around for this detail when I visit these kind of places. Some sites hide it, but here they are fairly upfront. Burned in the Satsume Rebellion of 1877; the castle was reconstructed in 1960, which means we're the same age. 
      I'd say the castle is holding up better.
      That would be enough to chew on, just seeing a historic castle that is really a facsimile of a castle that what was once there. A sort of ghost castle. I suppose you could say it is the same castle, the same entity, in the way I'm the same person I was 30 years ago, except that my cells have more or less all been replaced with new ones.
     As I read my way up to the tower and down, pausing for that moment of frisson by the open air windows atop the thing, looking at that drop, imagining. Then I came to how the castle was burned down. Not by any enemy, though the enemy was both real and nearby. It was the defenders of the castle, putting some structures below to the torch, to deny their opponents access or a place they could set up artillery. Sparks from the flames they set were carried by the wind, swirling behind them and up the hill, and burned down the castle they were trying to protect. The castle defended them, but they couldn't defend it.
     Typical.  Whatever you fear, whatever you worry about, seldom can hurt you with the devastating efficiency you use to hurt yourself. The bogeymen the Republicans dread, from immigrants to Muslims to gays, are really only helping the country; the damage comes from the fires the GOP has been setting for 25 years, trying to stop their progress.

At first, the official story was that the rebel army burned the
castle down. The problem was, they hadn't arrived yet. 

     But let's not be political. You don't have to be an imploding political party to burn your castle. How many gun owners turn their guns upon themselves? Far more than ever thwart a criminal. How many good people break down fearing something they suspect is out there? The stress gets us far more than the things we're stressed about do. We're in a good position, safe, secure, behind the walls, but we don't accept it, and, trying for even more protection, burn the damn thing down ourselves, preparing for an enemy that might never come.
     
      
      

Respectable Republican Cloth Coat

    Today it has been one week since I left for Japan, and though there's much more to say, my mind simply balks at the prospect of trying to say it. Luckily, with Republicans crawling over Illinois, and Trump deciding he couldn't face the righteous wrath of Chicagoans, this column — which I wrote last month, but never posted —is of the moment.

     Waiting for the results from Iowa Monday, I found myself thinking of Pat Nixon's coat.
     If you recall, Pat Nixon was the tightly-wound wife of Richard Nixon, and her coat...well, I should probably just tell the story,.
     In 1952 Nixon was a senator from California—he was famed as a red-baiting hatchet man; think Ted Cruz, but with friends—running for vice president on the Republican ticket with Dwight D. Eisenhower. As the election neared, controversy grew over a fund that paid Nixon's considerable political expenses, trying to cover the state of California, his airplane tickets and Christmas cards and such. The fund had $18,000 in it, about $200,000 in today's dollars, a third more than Nixon received as an annual salary for being a United States senator.
     A pittance in today's world of SuperPacs.
     But enough to raise questions whether Nixon was ethical enough to stay on the ticket. The Republican National Committee bought a half hour of television time and Nixon took to live airwaves, shamelessly pleading for support from viewers, touting his middle class lifestyle:
     "We lived rather modestly," he said. "For four years we lived in an apartment in Park Fairfax, in Alexandria, Virginia. The rent was $80 a month."
     As for his wife.
     "Pat doesn't have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat."
     The famous ending shifted attention from the thousands businessmen were contributing to underwrite his political career to a particular gift.

One other thing I probably should tell you because if we don't they'll probably be saying this about me too, we did get something—a gift—after the election. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog. And, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was?     It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he'd sent all the way from Texas. Black and white spotted. And our little girl—Tricia, the 6-year-old—named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we're gonna keep it.

    The speech was genius  and it worked. The gullible public, choked up over a dog, wrote in to the Republican National Committee by the millions demanding that Nixon to be kept on the ticket, and he was. 
    When Nixon ran for president in 1960, he kept pushing his humble roots. Pat was never to appear in a fur, and he forbade Cadillacs from carrying him in motorcades.
     That was not a qualm for John F. Kennedy. He loved Cadillacs. He loved being rich, and had his own private plane, The Caroline, named for his daughter. Kennedy joked that his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had instructed him not to buy one more vote than necessary. "I'm not paying for a landslide," he had his father saying.
     Nixon lost to Kennedy, and while I don't want to paint a straight line between then and now, let's just say that if Donald Trump's victory in Iowa shows anything, it shows that our aversion to wealth has worn off.  For decades, Trump represented the worst gold-plated excesses of the super-wealthy, its shallowness and lack of serious intent. And now he won the Iowa caucus as a Republican. You wonder what Richard Nixon would make of this. He would be amazed. I sure am.

Japan Diary #5: Taking the Shinkansen

     KUMAMOTO— I flew over on one of the new Boeing 787s, and while I appreciated the accommodate-the-human-body-and-not-a-centimeter-more seating layout in economy, I was not awed. Even though you had all sorts of technology at your fingertips: the metrics the pilot was seeing, the clipping along airspeed—550 miles per hour. The fact that you were flying six miles up and it was 40 degrees below zero outside, a few feet to the left. 

     So interested, satisfied even. But not thrilled, not in the little boy giddy, look-what-humans-can-do way of seeing the Shinkansen bullet train pull up at Tokyo Station, of dragging my luggage above, nestling into seat, setting out my lunch, and soon clipping along at 174 miles an hour. 
     I wish I could explain to you how Japan, whose sclerotic economy has been in the toilet for the past 20 years, can maintain this national system of sleek electric trains, while the United States of America, self-proclaimed greatest country in not just the world but the known universe too, at least according to Republican presidential candidates, can barely field Amtrak, a wheezing tortoise slowed by pain meds. I've been on more than one Amtrak train, back in the day when I would still climb aboard, where the delay was longer than the trip itself. 
     We could never even board the trains the way they do here.
     "They're never going to make it," my brother says, as we stood on the platform. The digital clock reads 12:54. Our tickets say the train is to leave at 12:59. The train isn't even there yet.
     A whoosh of activity. Train rushes up, doors slide open, passengers stumble out, then others hurry aboard. A pause, then the train, all electric, takes off like a silent shot, sliding faster and faster. I check my cell phone: "12:59," turn it so he can see.
     "There goes that theory," he says. 

    This has not been an entirely happy trip. In part because of a jet lag that never went away: many hours staring at the ceiling. But the closest I got to joy was sitting on the Shinkansen, digging into a very good box lunch, pulling on an Orangina, watching Japan flash by. The nerve-shredded, exhausted gloom lifted, for a while.
     Another moment was arriving at Kumamoto, the city in southwestern Japan. I'm here for the birthday party of Kumamon, the town's mascot, a Quixotic quest that should leave me giddy, but doesn't. 
      The Kumamoto platform was completely bare of the bear decorations I half expected. No banners, no posters, no photos of birthday cake.
      "Wouldn't it be something if I had the wrong weekend?" I thought, darkly, on the escalator, going down. "Maybe there won't be any hoopla at all."
     At that moment I caught a glimpse of the giant head waiting below.

Japan Diary #4: More to it than just that bomb

     Hiroshima is a fun town.
     That will sound odd, almost sacrilegious to those who know just one thing about the 1oth largest city in Japan: that the first atomic bomb used in warfare was dropped on it at 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945.
     But there's more to it than that.
     I admit I was one of those The Place The Bomb Dropped people. Ten minutes after I dropped my bags at the RIHGA Royal Hotel (big, swank, with pillbox-capped bellhops muscling your bags into your room) I was hot-footing over to the Atomic Dome. 
      Like most iconic images you've seen all your life,  the building looked smaller than it had loomed in imagination. Just the shell of a modest building,  a 1920s trade hall made eerie by having Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped from the belly of the Enola Gay, explode 600 yards above it, so that the blast came straight down and the walls were preserved. 
     But after that, and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, some of the quietest room I ever walked through, jarring photos and melted glass bottles presented with a musty 1950a repetition and lack of modern curatorial verve. Lots of burned uniforms of middle school students—so many so it seemed a form of special pleading, as though to emphasize their own innocence; though I did note, with grim satisfaction, that one placard actually mentioned that Japan started the war, a rare bit of historical lucidity in a country often myopic to its own past crimes.  

      Touring the museum took 30 minutes. And then what? Turns out, there's great shopping in Hiroshima: which boasts an endless expanse of outdoor malls, with arching glass ceilings and colorful lights. There were candy shops and stationery shops, bookstores, department stores. My wife had expressed interest in fabric, and I popped into a kimono shop, where the roll of flowered cloth I thought would look nice on our wall cost only $2,500 — or would, for someone who could afford to buy it. It was so beautiful I squinted and tried to imagine that maybe it would be a noble husbandly gesture to buy the thing, and only the thought of my wife being forced to murder me when I came home and bury the body where it would never be found stayed my hand.  

      My brother, who is traveling with me, and I paused in front of a place offering oysters, and considered a pre-dinner snack. But then we noticed the place served "whale bacon" for 720 yen, and while curiosity made us take one step toward the place, moral revulsion made us decide we didn't want to patronize them at all, not even for oysters. A good call, as we found a branch of Ohsho, whose ethereal gyoza have ruined the crescent-shaped dumpling for me anyplace else. For dinner, my brother insisted we try something called okanomayaki, a local favorite that looked to me like glop: noodles and seafood and egg and barbecue sauce all mashed up on a grill. I resisted at first, but he prevailed. 

Okanomayaki,

    "Rarely do I have the chance to introduce someone as worldly as you to the a new food experience," he said, buttering me up. It worked. The stuff was great: Fumichan is the name of restaurant, if you ever get out this way. 
     Heading back to our hotel, we raved about how refreshing Hiroshima was after the dense chaos of Tokyo, and my brother paid Hiroshima the ultimate honor.
    "It's like Chicago," he said. 

Japan Diary #3 — Tokyo Subway

     Chicago has some 2.7 million people, using 102 miles of its L subway system.
     Tokyo has 13.8 million people and 121 miles of metro subway. 
     Do the math: five times the population using just 20 percent more track. It gets crowded. 
     Hurrying through the maze of stations, trying to get to the right line, the right track, is like being in an M.C. Escher etching come to life, with surreal masses of people flying in all directions, platoons fleeing up and down stairs, ramps, escalators. If I looked up and saw mobs pounding across the ceiling and walls it could hardly seem more otherworldly.

      It was amazing that no one seemed to be slamming into each other, yet somehow all the hurrying commuters slid around one another. 
     On the platforms, people form lines behind where the doors will open, and while I didn't see any of the famous "pushers" who used to jam people into the trains, I could see the reason they'd be employed. 
      About 100 people a year in Tokyo die by falling in front of subway trains, usually after drinking, and to try to cut that toll, a number of stations I visited had an impressive automatic gate system, where the track is completely walled off from the platform, with doors that slide apart a moment before the train doors open. 

     Other cities around the world have them—Paris is another—but American metropolitan governments don't find them worth the $ 1 million or so they cost for each station. Though about 50 people a year die in New York, putting it roughly on par with Tokyo, the idea of barriers there was dismissed.
    The Tokyo subway also has "Women only" cars, designated by pink signs, for women who want to ride the subway without being fondled by chikan, or "gropers." But only during the morning rush hour. I'd say we don't have those on the Chicago "L" because they're not necessary, but I can't state that with any authority. 

Japan Diary # 2: Rain

Imperial Palace grounds.

     TOKYO —The plan was to start Monday touring the city's Harajuku district, talking to the Lolita goths and costumed cosplay kids who hang around the bridge there about Japanese concepts of cuteness, for my article. 
    But it rained. The weather report had said, "Scattered Showers," but they never scattered. They stayed together, pelting down hard, all day. Really, it was like the opening scene of "Rashomon."
     So Plan B. I walked around the Imperial Palace, waiting for the rain to stop.  The place was utterly deserted, such a contrast to the unbelievable density of the Tokyo subway. Then, when I realized the rain wasn't letting up, I gave Harajuku my best shot but, it was raining, there too, and while there were shoppers, the street scene folk who usually enliven the landscape were staying dry. 
     Across the bridge is the Meiji Jingu Shrine, and since I was standing in front of the entrance, I took refuge there, and toured its gardens, contemplating my mission. I was rewarded with a conversation with a pair of garden guards about yuru-kyara—the official mascots I'm writing about—that helped focus my thinking on the subject.
    By 2 p.m., after ... eight full hours walking in the rain, with another few to go before it let up, I was steaming up my glasses over a bowl of hot ramen. I'm not sure whether it was the best ramen I've ever eaten, or merely the most appreciated. But either way, it brought me back to the room. I only slept an hour last night -- even though I had only slept an hour on the plane, my body still thought it was 12 noon, not 2 a.m. So a nap seems in order. 

Japan Diary #1: How about some pig's rectum with that?

     TOKYO—It's been so long that I've sat among smokers at dinner that I forgot that, in Japan, it's still a thing. It didn't bother me before, so didn't bother me now at this Yakitori bar in the Kabukichan area of Tokyo. In fact, it sort of added to the I'm-in-a-foreign-place vibe, to be among young people puffing away. The food was still good, hot from the brazier, impaled on flimsy wooden stick.s. I had all sorts of skewers — tomatoes wrapped in bacon, grilled asparagas with chicken, pork belly—I drew the line at the more exotic fare, such as sparrow, or pig's rectum. The drink to the left is a Nippon soda, which comes with a clump of ginger, and I found it tasty, in a gingery kind of way.

   The whole trip to Japan has been very low key. The flight, on a new American Airlines 787, was filled but not crowded or hellish. I slept for an hour, which gave me energy to last until ... well, it's nearly 10 p.m. now, or 7 a.m. Chicago time. I don't feel exhausted or jet lagged or anything. Maybe that's tomorrow. 
    If you look at the menu below, you'll see it's fairly cheap—110 yen make a dollar. The hotel is very small, but clean and modern and inviting, and also inexpensive; it set me back $80, a reminder that Japan has been in recession for a long, long time.
     Okay, the last thoughts in my head have drained out. A shower and sleep. 
     If you want something to discuss, consider one reason the Japanese economy is in such trouble is their population is dwindling—the place looked empty on the train from Narita, though it got denser quickly as we approached central Tokyo. It has no border with Mexico and far fewer immigrants (though much more signage, not only in English, but Chinese and Korean than when last I was here, so the place is certainly more multi-cultural). Remember that being anti-immigrant is not only morally wrong, but it's economically disastrous too. G'night.  
      
     

Japan is a strange place

Samuri armor, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

     About 2 a.m. Sunday, Chicago time, I'll be stepping off a plane at Narita airport in Tokyo, if all goes as planned. I decided, since I dredged up old columns on LA for my trip to Los Angeles last month, I shouldn't almost immediately subject you to a week of that regarding Japan, and would try to provide some fresh reporting in real time. But travel and jet lag being what they are, I thought, until I can get myself situated and both experience something noteworthy and find the opportunity to tell you about it, not to mention a Wi-Fi connection, that I'd set the scene with some thoughts from my last visit to Japan, a quarter century ago.

     The army of reporters swarming over Nagano, dazzled by the Olympic glare, seems to have lost sight of one noteworthy aspect of Japan: It is a tremendously strange place.
     Not to the Japanese, I'm sure. They grew up there. They're used to it.
     But to Western eyes — all right, to this Westerner's eyes at least — spending even a brief time in Japan, a few years back, was enough to fix it in my mind forever as somewhere between the Twilight Zone and Shangri-La.
     For instance: umbrella condoms. That's certainly not what they are called there, but that's what I called them. You go into a department store and there are huge rolls of long plastic sheaths designed to slip over your wet umbrella so as not to cause inconvenience while you shop.
     In the places without umbrella condoms, there was something even odder: big umbrella racks. People would leave their umbrellas at the front of the store, with a reasonable assurance that the umbrellas would be there when they returned. Strange, right? Like believing in the tooth fairy. They did the same thing with their shoes at the entrances to temples and certain restaurants. In my country, that practice would result in a lot of barefoot, angry people.
     Frankly, I got the impression that in Japan they could have numbered cubbyholes at the entrances of stores for people to place their wallets in — so the store could rub oil into the leather, or polish the credit cards — and not only would people do it, but the wallets would be there when they got back.
     Some of the weirdness was close to genius. I have deep, sincere admiration for Japanese bathrooms. Many are modular units — the entire room molded out of a single piece of fiberglass. Some toilets have the sink built into the toilet tank. When you flush, a spout of water automatically fills the sink, which drains into the tank. It's very clever; no dirty faucet handles to touch, and the water used washing your hands is then used to flush the toilet later.
     The system seems even more sophisticated when you realize that nearly every other toilet in Asia is a hole in the floor between two footpads.
     Not in Japan. In Japan, taxicabs have a mechanical device that allows the white-gloved driver to fling the rear door open for you, so you don't have to undergo the agony of touching something as dubious as a public vehicle's door handle. Not that I could afford to take a taxi in Japan, but the concept is still admirable, nevertheless.
     There is also something called Tokyo Tower, a giant television tower about the same configuration as the Eiffel Tower, but several times larger and painted orange (again, strange). Go to the top of Tokyo Tower, and you can see the entire city, though God knows why you'd want to, because Tokyo is a cluttered agglomeration of charmless architecture that looks like 100 downtown Dallases assembled together in a 10-by-10 grid.
     In Japan, they have graveyards for fetuses. I happened upon one next to Tokyo Tower. Each grave had a tiny stone statue of a baby. The mothers would knit little caps and bibs for the stone babies, and stick toy pinwheels next to them. Poignant. When the wind picked up, all these pinwheels started going. It was eerie, particularly when I got a translation of some of the messages that had been left at the graves. For example, people who were feeling guilty about an abortion wrote something like "Dear Baby — we're awfully sorry about this. Forgive us . . ." Supposedly the buddhist monks who run the place make a fortune.
     Service is big in Japan. That's one of its best features. Whenever I buy something in a store in Chicago and observe the listless clerk deigning to ring up the sale and fling my purchase in my general direction, I think about how they do things in Japan. I once saw a Japanese clerk run — run — to get an item for me. I stayed at a resort where dinner was brought by a woman in a kimono who crawled into the room on her knees, carrying the food on a lacquered tray. Try finding that at a Sheraton.
     I was in Japan to visit my brother, who worked at a firm there. And the oddest thing of all was something my brother's boss did. He arranged to take me out for a drink. It struck me as unusual, but I was game and went along. (Japan is a drinker's paradise. They sell bottles of scotch from vending machines on train station platforms).
     We sat in a hotel lobby, he, smoking away (everybody smokes there), me, perched on the edge of my seat, wondering what this all was about.
     As it turned out, he just wanted to get to know me. See what kind of family his employee came from. Determine whether I was on a mission to bring my brother home. Just a concerned, friendly employer looking out for the best interests of his company and his people.
     Weird, right?

                     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Feb. 8, 1998

Busy

     So, I said to my wife, sitting at a casual lunch at Roti on Randolph Street in Chicago one day last week: the trouble is, between fact-checking the galleys and writing the columns and the blog posts and getting ready for my trip, I just can't get a week's worth of posts ready ahead of time for Every goddamn day while I'm away.
    "So leave it blank," she said, in the tone someone would say, "Today is Tuesday."
    But, I continued, there's the promise implicit in "Every goddam day..."
    "'Every goddamn day' is a metaphor!" she almost shouted. "For life! The relentlessness of life. Not that you have to write every goddamn day..."
     Easy for her to say. She's not the one who has to watch the online trolls dancing in a joyous conga line around you, laughing and pointing. Or, worse, realizing that no one notices or cares. So my plan is to write from the road, or the airport, or train station, to keep you posted on my travels.
    Assuming it's possible. Japan is far away. Maybe their Wi-Fi won't like my laptop.
    Anyway, another busy day yesterday, between working on an advance column for the paper, proofing my galleys and getting ready for the trip, and today was the first day in two and a half years where I woke up and realized I had entirely forgotten about the blog. But I didn't want to leave you completely high and dry. I do have a promise to keep.  So here you go. I'll check in from Japan tomorrow, if I can. 
   

Flying into fear

     Paris. London. Rome. Jerusalem. 
     Sure, I'm an international traveler. Flitting about the globe like a luna moth—I'm off to Tokyo on Saturday—wearing a bespoke suit, crisply folding my International Herald Tribune in airports from Copenhagen to Hong Kong to Vilnius, stifling a yawn as I notice that my flight takes off in 20 minutes and I had better finish my espresso and amble over to the departure gate, wherever it may be ... 
     No, that's a lie. I'm a stressed out traveler, dressed in my sensible walking shoes,  one hand clutching the lump of my wallet through my clothes, the other my boarding pass, printed out at home 23 hours and 59 minutes before the flight's scheduled departure, using an elbow to nervously guiding my rollie bag, expecting Homeland Security to wrestle me to the floor at any moment, on general principles. 
    But I can aspire, can't I? Why should Donald Trump be the only one with carte blanche to shout down reality and substitute a more flattering image? If a crude, mendacious, gold-plated, blustering P.T. Barnum of a fraud like Trump can insist he's serious presidential timber, then I can pretend I'm Daniel Craig, picking a piece of lint off my lapel and nipping a martini as the hanger in Qatar explodes behind me. 
    I saunter into the airport with the ease of a duke, taking the morning air at his estate...
  
     To continue reading, click here. 

Blood on the tracks

    

    When I first moved to the suburbs, in 2000, I was fascinated by Metra, and did a number of columns on the rail system, such as this one, where I rode in with the engineer and talked about the toll pedestrian deaths take on Metra employees. There have been two this week on the northern lines, which seem like a lot. I also sat down with a Metra honcho to talk about odd questions I had about the rail service. Fans of irony will note that the official fielding my questions was no other than Phil Pagano, who nine years later would step in front of a Metra train himself, ending the complex hash he had made of his life. It was not only tragic and senseless, but an unfathomable insult to everyone who worked at Metra, because Pagano, of all people, must have known the impact such deaths have.

     'We're late," said John Appel, the engineer driving a 3200-horsepower Metra engine toward the city at 70 miles per hour.
      That we were. But just seven minutes late. Only railroads care about being seven minutes late. That's on time everywhere else. Heck, seven minutes late at O'Hare Airport is early.
     I was riding with Appel, in the control car of the 8:17 a.m. Milwaukee line from Northbrook. The engine was in the back, and we were in a little cab area tucked into the top of the foremost passenger car.
     My ride was something of a fluke. Ever since I began the commute in the city, I've been noticing what I called "Metra Mysteries," odd aspects of commuting that I couldn't quite explain. What are those piles of sand doing on the tracks? Why do the switches burn bright blue in winter? I had guesses but didn't really know for certain.
     I approached Metra, and they sat me down with Phil Pagano, the executive director. Pagano answered my questions -- we'll get to them in a minute -- then, in discussing the various ways frantic commuters risk death to avoid being late for work, said I should really ride with an engineer to see the Auto Thrill Show for myself. He wasn't kidding.
     "Right around the gates!" said Appel, pointing to a woman zipping her car across the tracks, maybe five seconds ahead of the train. He said he's had commuters cling to the outside of the train as it pulls out. One unfortunate woman attempted to get from one side of the train to the other by crawling under. The train pulled away, maiming her.
     "It's unbelievable what they'll do," said Appel. "So many horror stories. We all have foolish moments, but here it can cost you your life."
     Appel doesn't want to talk about the suicides, the people who walk to meet the oncoming trains. Metra gives you three days off, mandatory, when that happens, and offers the services of a counselor.
     "It's terrible," said Appel, who called his job "12 hours of boredom interspersed with three or four 10-second intervals of sheer terror."
      He would, however, talk about the time a semi-trailer carrying beer decided to back onto the tracks just as the train was racing toward it at 70 miles an hour. It was, needless to say, memorable.
     "The 18-wheeler wrapped itself around the engine," said Appel. "You never forget that sort of thing."
     Appel was suitably businesslike in discussing his profession. There is a pleasing sense of dignity, of seriousness of purpose and respect for the customer that has lingered in railroad employees while fading nearly everywhere else. I loved that, despite the fact that I was riding with the engineer, the conductor nevertheless insisted on punching my ticket. Otherwise, it would be stealing from the railroad.
     Before we run out of space, on to the Metra Mysteries.
     Q. Just before the train departs, the lights go out for a minute or so -- I think of it as powering up the atomic core. What's happening?
     A. "They're unplugging the train from standby electrical power," said Pagano. They have to do this before they power up the diesel; otherwise the 500 kilowatts produced by the engine's generator -- enough to power a block of suburban homes -- would "fry the system."
     Q. So what's with the piles of sand on the tracks? There can't be that many ill passengers wretching from the platform.
     A. "A traditional braking mechanism," said Pagano. Basically, the engines have reservoirs of sand which, if thetracks are slick or they're going a bit too fast, is dumped over the wheels to give them traction.
     Q. What about the burning switches out in the yard in winter, obviously to keep them from freezing; isn't that kind of low-tech?
      A. "These are techniques people learn through experience," said Pagano. "For a while, the industry went to hot air blowers, steam machines. Nothing worked like the gas switch heaters."
     Q. Anything that can be done about the cell phones? Can't users be forced to ride in special cars, isolated from the non-obnoxious riders?
      A. "We've come up with some creative posters," he said. "The biggest abusers of cell phones are lawyers. The things they talk about in public -- business and clients -- it's phenomenal." He said that experiments of confining them to special cell phone cars, where they can bother each other, have not worked. "They tried that on the East Coast, and the New Yorkers found the conductors have a lot more important things to do than monitor people's cell phone use."
      Q. I've noticed that a good number of my fellow riders start lining up to get off the train at Western Avenue. Are these the same people who bolt out of the Lyric Opera during the last aria? What's their rush?
      A. "It happens all over," said Pagano. "Every train, a small group of people want to beat the crowd. All you're doing is going to work."
      Q. I always notice all the coffee cups, ticket stubs and newspapers left behind by my fellow passengers. Don't they realize somebody has to clean up after them? Didn't their parents teach them anything?
      A. "The majority of people are conscientious," Pagano said. "There's no doubt probably a pretty significant group -- 30 or 40 percent -- who are, I wouldn't say slobs, but who leave their papers and soda cans behind."
      So now you know.
                      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 20, 2001

Vote early if not often

      Tuesday, March 15, is the presidential primary in Illinois, and for the first time in my adult life I won't go to the polls on Election Day.
     Not only won't I be voting, I can't.
     It's against the law.
     I'm tempted to let you chew on that a bit, like the old riddle that stumped people in slightly more sexist times, where the man and his son are in a car wreck, the boy is rushed into surgery, and the doctor there says: "I can't operate on that boy, he's my son!"
     Any idea? (About the voting. The doctor is his mom; you knew that, right?)
     The reason I can't vote March 15 — and good for you who got it — is that I've already voted, on Monday, Feb. 29, at the start of early voting. First time. I'm a creature of habit. I like dutifully marching off to the polls on Election Day. But I'm going to Japan in a few days, and while I'm supposed to get back March 14, I don't want to be stuck on a plane diverted to Guam, gnashing my teeth at the delay, tortured by the thought I'm missing my chance to toss a pebble on the scales for ....
  
     To continue reading, click here. 

Unstoppable

    I've heard from anxious readers, wanting reassurance. 
    Tell us, they say. Is Donald Trump unstoppable?
    The question is echoed in headlines. "Is Trump unstoppable?" asks a headline on The Hill, and dozens of other publications.
    Unstoppable? God no, Donald Trump is not unstoppable. 
    Stopping him is so easy that I'm certain it's going to happen. I try not to traffic in predicting the future, but you can take that to the bank.
    When panicked Republicans talk about Trump being unstoppable, they mean by other Republicans. And in that they are correct. Marco Rubio is punching too far above his weight to have any chance. And Ted Cruz is too universally-despised: with good reason, by the way. Given the choice between the two, I'd take Trump without hesitation. Better an erratic egomaniac than a laser-focused monster. One reason the GOP is so terrified of Trump is because his conservative beliefs are so recent and lightly held. He could get into office and go back to being a Democrat.
     But he won't get into office. Because Hillary Clinton is going to stop him. Not that Hillary is so great a candidate, mind you. Lots of baggage—the negative word for "experience"—and a personal style that is as careful and measured as Trump's is reckless and improvised on the spot.
     But as long as 51 percent of Americans haven't gone batshit crazy, to use the term that Sen. Lindsay Graham used last week to describe the Republican Party, then it's going to be Hillary.
     And I'll tell you when the moment is going to come. Trump's trademark activity is lashing out at people's personal characteristics, in a low, mean fashion. And Clinton's, remember, is restraint. So they'll be having a debate, and he'll lay into her for some physical trait, make some gross, leering comment, and Hillary Clinton will just look at him, her face frozen in cold loathing, and say something about how that's not the way Americans want their president to be. And then it'll be all over but the voting. 
     At least that is what I hope.