Good for mittens, scarves and, yes, garroting

 

     July. Peak summer, at last. A long holiday weekend ahead. Escapist book season is here. What are you reading, and why?
     Being a journalist, books are constantly pitched at me. Most are easily allowed to fly past without swinging. “This book is a must-read for all who want to understand the current crisis of identity and the importance of reaffirming European and in particular Swiss democratic traditions...”
     But “On Skein of Death” by Allie Pleiter caught my attention, for two reasons.
     First, it’s a mystery set in a yarn shop. You might recall that five years ago, staring into the abyss of the Donald Trump presidency, I took up knitting, hoping it might be a distraction from the gathering disaster.
     Knitting proved harder than expected and I soon gave up. But not before several visits to Three Bags Full, the local yarn store, which seemed a perfect setting for a mystery. That might require some explanation. Whenever I visit a cactus show at the Botanic Garden, I amuse myself imagining that the quiet, pale succulent society members, when not in public hovering over their beloved prickly pears and saguaros, are privately at each other’s throats, riven with conflict, betrayal and death. Something like that.
     Second, the author lives in a western suburb.
     Pleiter grew up in New England, came here to go to Northwestern, as a theater major, then ended up in fundraising. She started writing professionally on a dare.
     ”The bulk of my career is in category romance,” said Pleiter, who has written 50 books and can have four in the works at any given time. “I’m such a passionate knitter. I’ve been putting knitting characters in my books for years. It’s part of my brand.”
     A yarn company was looking to start a knitting-based mystery series.

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Kamala CRUSHES our freedom with border chaos! State of the Blog, Year 8.

Northbrook street repair crew, July 29, 2020

     Can things be going great and you don't even know it?
     I sat down to assess the State of the Blog as its eighth year comes to a close, and eight years just seems an impossibly long time. Every ... goddamn ... day.
     Then again, a lot's been going on. This past year Donald Trump was dragged kicked and screaming from the stage, but not before his clown coup gave us a taste of worse to come. COVID dialed back from raging lethal lockdown to semi-controlled openness, at least for the moment. The decent and somewhat effective Joe Biden was ushered into power.
    On the home front, both our boys graduated law school, snagged brass ring jobs and are studying eight hours a day for their bar exams. I finished my next book, based on this blog, suggested by the University of Chicago Press, which is not generally known for its vanity projects. I enjoyed writing the book and it was enthusiastically receive by the academic readers, and is steaming toward publication in the fall of 2022.
     So why the sour-stomach sense of dread? Well, there is the Tribune, cashiering its top columnists. My reaction was not, "Hooray, I'm still here, I win!" Rather, dark foreboding. Alden Capital kneecapping their own paper by way of hello is bad enough, but it made me look at the crop of new columnists coming up. Or rather, look for them, not find any, and realize: there isn't one. It's almost as if writing a column is not a thing anymore, as my kids would say.
     How did the Washington Post put it, in sending off the Tribune's Mary Schmich and the nameless drudges who left with her? "But columns like Schmich’s are becoming nostalgia items. While people still write about cities, the classic metro newspaper column is fading as fast as the sound of a bundled bag of newsprint dropping on the walkway each morning."
     "Nostalgia items." Ouch. Does that sting because it's true? Or because it isn't? Maybe the operative word here is "classic." If the classic metro newspaper column is Mike Royko, whom the Post lights a candle for, sitting in the Billy Goat in front of his vodka tonic, talking to an imaginary friend then yes, the appetite for that kind of thing has dwindled, and rightly so. Times change and we change with them. But looking back over the past year of EGD, it seems a lively reaction to a difficult time. Yes, I'm biased. But it's not just me. The numbers are up, at last: over 81,000 readers in June, up from 72,000 in May (Blogger, which doesn't change for the better, no longer offers a month-by-month breakdown. And those numbers seem to be people, not robots. That's improvement. Closing in on a million readers a year.
     This past year (EGD debuted July 1, 2013) began in the COVID summer of 2020 with what turned out to be the most popular column of the year, "Virus mystery: The case of the missing Fresca." With Chicago in flames and people dying and no end in sight, picking the topic seemed embarrassingly unimportant. But the Internet rewards not only malice, but triviality, and if you typed "What happened to Fresca?" into Google that column came up first. I heard from grateful readers across the country, and it was so popular that my bosses did something highly unusual: they asked for an update, which ran in August, "Fresca's back: Mystery of its absence solved!"
     In September I wrote a column I was even more proud of, "A do-it yourself colonoscopy? Sign me up." I might not be sitting in a basement bar talking to Sam Sianis, at least not anymore. But I am the guy who wondered "Who opens the jar?" I can live with that.
     In October, Ashlee Rezin Garcia and I visited a vast Amazon procurement center for "Amazon robots, workers speed stuff to you."
     One thing about my column that I believe sets it apart is that it is a bit more writerly than most. Certain forms present themselves. In November, summing up the never-ending shock of the Trump administration, writing a single run-on sentence seemed the way to go.
     Researching the book pointing me toward a number of columns. Perhaps my favorite was in December, after learning The American Bee Journal was based in Chicago for decades and is still going in downstate Illinois. That led me to look into the apiary situation, resulting in a piece with the legendary—to me if no one else—opening sentence. "But how has COVID affected beekeeping in Illinois?" 
     The day of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, I wrote about the lingering echo of the Civl War and saw a flash of what was to come:

     The Lost Cause marches on, as we will see Wednesday, when Congress faces another ego-stoked rebellion: Donald Trump’s insistence that his clearly losing the 2020 presidential election in the chill world of fact can be set aside, since he won the race in the steamy delta swampland between his ears.

     In February, I reflected the city's souring view of Lori Lightfoot, "Mayor needs less hope, more responsibility." In March, I drove down to Springfield to get my Pfizer vaccine. In April, I indulged my curiosity for obscure medical conditions by attending a Zoom therapy session for men with paruresis. In May, Ashlee and I reunited for dinner at a billet house in Aurora with three teenage hockey players. In June, my family bid farewell to our cat Gizmo. The column began, "Gizmo was a naughty cat..." and varied that phrase throughout, prompting one reader to observe that I should have included, "Gizmo is a lucky cat," for being so well tended. He's right.
     Then again, I have a way of either ignoring good luck, or analyzing it to death, and the bottom line is, while American society shatters and journalism crumbles, my platforms remains intact. I am lucky, employed, read, and grateful to be able to do what I do. No stopping now; the blog has to chug on to a decade, at least, of solitary mornings, tossing up this ball of words, batting fungos into the weeds.
      Solitary, but never alone. Caren Jeskey, our Austin Bureau Chief, who had her own notable year, quit the loathsome conservative hellscape of Texas to return to pleasant, cool, comfortingly blue Illinois. She carries the ball every Saturday, and I'm grateful to her. I tried to let Marc Schulman off the hook this year; I figured, he'd sacrificed enough. But he insisted on running his Eli's Cheesecake ads on the blog for the seventh holiday season, which was very much appreciated. I have a cast of regular readers, who enhance and correct what I do. Thanks particularly to Jakash, who has fixed 100 errors. And thank you readers. I sure would feel stupid writing this stuff if nobody read it. Love and gratitude to my wife Edie, who never misses an opportunity to say, "I don't know why you bother with that thing." It's complicated, honey.

GOP tries to sucker punch U.S. history

Muhammad Ali at the 1966 Bud Billiken Parade (Sun-Times Photo)

     Chicago is a boxing town. Or was.

     That shouldn’t be news, but I suspect it is, to some. The three most important heavyweight champions of the world in the 20th century all lived in Chicago. Jack Johnson bought a home for his mother on South Wabash Avenue in 1910, then moved in himself in 1912. Joe Louis lived at 4320 S. Michigan Ave. and won his first title at Comiskey Park in 1937. As a teen, Muhammad Ali won his first fights as a Golden Gloves champion here and later lived at several locations on the South Side.
     I could share inspiring tales — the luxurious life Johnson led, the silver spittoons at Café de Champion, the club he owned on West 31st Street. Louis’ humility in the face of global fame. How Ali would stop his Rolls Royce and shadow box kids on the street.
     Pause here, and consider how learning about this historic connection makes you feel about Chicago. Proud? Happy? Eager to know more?
     I hope so. Because I left out something crucial. Johnson, Louis and Ali were — stop the presses — Black. Their race was in no way incidental to their athletic careers and personal lives. Just the opposite; it was pivotal. Because of his race, Johnson was at first prevented from fighting for the title; he had to go to Australia to do it. Johnson was then vilified for winning, and for dating white women. He was hung in effigy at State and Walton streets.
     Louis had to act humble, trying to avoid the trouble Johnson got into. When named Cassius Clay, Ali was initially sneered at by the public as a poetry-spewing clown. After he found his Muslim faith and changed his name, white America refused to use it, as if he wasn’t a man who could call himself whatever he liked. Nobody objected to “Bob Dylan.”
     Does the second, racial element of my boxing tale wreck it for you? Make you feel small? Or does it, as I believe, enlarge the story, nudging it from a mere gloss toward the complexity that real history demands?

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Say goodbye to all that.

      
     My Air Pods Pro were acting up, the right one anyway. So I jumped into an Apple support chat, and was walked through a few tests by a friendly human—at least I think it was a human—somewhere in the world. The problem was not fixed, and he—she? it?—suggested I make an appointment at my local Apple Store. Which I did, on the spot.
     Ninety minutes later I was walking through Northbrook Court, or what's left of it. Formerly a lux shopping mall, now a ghost town. Empty storefronts displaying items from those few stores still in business, or crafts from charities. A few marginal businesses—custom t-shirt shops and such—that would have never made the cut in the mall before.  The was some life: a few knots of teens wandered about, or sat in the massage chairs still set out. A quartet of old ladies playing cards. And a line of people outside the Apple Store. A helpful associate, Tom, took my Air Pods for further tests, and told me to come back in 20 minutes.
     Wandering the place, we came upon the shell that once held Lord & Taylor. Never a department store that resonated with me, neither the Cleveland institutions of my youth, Higbee's, Halle's, The May Company, nor the apex of Chicago shopping, Marshall Field's, nor its competitor, though I thought of it more as a handmaiden, a subordinate, Carson, Pirie, Scott.
     It was rather in the realm of stores from other cities—Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus—that had outposts here. There was something feminine about Lord & Taylor. A women's store that also sold men's clothing.
     So it wasn't with grief that I stepped into the void where Lord & Taylor used to be. Rather ... a disassociation. Something less than shock, more than indifference. A quiet hmm, oh yes, all these big department stores are going away. A whiff of exploration, of stepping foot on another planet, of realization, discovery. This was happening while those boxes were piling up on the front porch. Those were the death of this, hastened by the COVID virus. I went shopping at exactly one clothing store over the past 18 months, just recently, a Father's Day visit to L.L. Bean in Old Orchard. Honestly, it's hard to imagine being in a situation where a plaid shirt won't do. I still have my tux, but if I had to put it on to appear at the fancy Neil Steinberg Tribute and Award Dinner at the Drake ballroom, I'd think twice about going to the fuss. Why bother? Who'd care anymore? Who could possibly care? All that seems so long ago.

Could Florida condo collapse happen here?

                   Baths of Caracalla, by Aegidius Sadeler II (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Humans are by nature cautious. We are the descendants of those who fled at the snap of a twig, not those who shrugged and told themselves, “That can’t be a saber-toothed tiger coming; I’ll just keep eating these delicious berries ...”
     Even today, when we read stories of tragedy, the tendency is to try to distance ourselves from whatever bad thing is going on: that’s far away, happening to very different people under very different circumstances than our own.
     Which is why Thursday’s collapse of the Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, with some 150 residents missing, buried in the rubble, can be so terrifying to Chicagoans who live in apartment buildings: it’s hard to dismiss as a Florida phenomenon.
     “I have a bad feeling in my gut about this and those sort of buildings in Chicago,” wrote one reader who lived for years in a high-rise on Sheridan Road. “Chicago has the additional worries of corruption of inspectors and building materials quality in addition to the weather concerns.”
     That’s quite a charge, and I wouldn’t pass it along if I didn’t remember “Operation Crooked Code,” in 2008, when the feds probed bribery in Chicago’s buildings and zoning departments, coming up with a dozen convictions.
     Immediately after the collapse, the Department of Buildings pointed out, “Chicago has one of the strictest building codes in the country.” Correct, if disingenuous. The issue isn’t whether those strict codes exist, but were they enforced when a building was constructed? Or did the inspector look the other way?

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Flashback 1997: Gone fishin'—though it's hardly a lazy day

The Surveyor in 1997 (Photo from Sun-Times files)

      I'm going out onto the lake for a story later this week, which got me thinking about previous episodes of aquatic reportage. This is from the brief period when I was the environment reporter, and my 12 hours on the Surveyor probably constitutes the most physically unpleasant thing I've ever done for a story. When I phoned the fishery ahead of time, I remember asking if I should bring a lunch. "Bring a big one," Larry Champion said. "Because we're going to eat it." I scoffed that I had watched autopsies at the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office, and was made of stronger stuff. But he was right. The lake was so rough, at one point I clamped my eyes closed and tried to wish myself ashore. It didn't work.

     Just after 4 a.m., and Captain Larry Champion is walking through Joe's Fisheries, the last commercial fishing fleet operating out of Chicago.
     "I'm going to wake up my Indian friend," he says, going to where his first—and only—mate, Jerry Kingbird, a Chippewa Indian from Minnesota, sleeps in minimal comfort.
     Together they load ice into the Surveyor, a 48-foot steel bulldog of a boat. "Fleet" is a grand term for the three battered and aging boats Joe's Fisheries runs. Today the Surveyor, built in 1944, is the only one venturing onto the lake, leaving the dock at 1400 W. Cortland in search of the elusive chub. The stars are still out. The lights along the river throw gold on black water. Somewhere, a siren.
     "We shouldn't get our butts kicked half bad today," says Champion, 29, waiting for the lake locks to slide open. The day before, 10-foot waves forced them to turn back without hauling in their nets. The state inspector who rode with them in the raw weather is a no-show today.
     The Surveyor is fishing for bloater chub because chubs are the only fish allowed to be taken commercially. The inspector was there to see how many non-chubs ended up in the boat's net. Perch were legal until last spring, when the state banned taking them, citing low populations.
     "It's hard to make a living just on chub," Champion says. "Fishing has gotten so political."
     Once the lighthouse is passed, the water springs to life. Lake Michigan is the roughest lake in the world, and today eight-foot swells rock the boat like a toy—one moment the pilot's window looks up at the sky, the next, down at churning water. Jets of spray explode through the scuppers, as the boat rolls 40 degrees to either side of horizontal.
     "It's like a washing machine out there now," Champion says. "But by this afternoon, she'll be all right."
     The chubs are waiting 12 miles from shore, a churning world unfamiliar to shore-hugging summer boaters. The downtown skyline is a faint thumb-long strip of grey stubble.
     At 7:40 a.m. Champion cuts the engines to half speed. "See it?" he yells to Kingbird. Metal doors are slid back. A yellow buoy is hauled in, then an anchor chain, then two and a half miles of monofilament net.

Bloater chubs (Sun-Times photo)

     That's a long net, hauled in a few feet at a time, by a winch called a lifter. The process takes five hours of non-stop effort. The fish come up in twos and threes. About 90 percent are dead—the net was set six days previous—and have bloated up (hence the name, "bloater chubs"). Some are very dead; split, spilling their viscera. It is not pretty.
     A yard-wide steel table runs the length of Surveyor's lower deck. Champion stands near the front, by an open hatch, and as the net comes off the lifter, he pops the chubs with a spike to deflate them and free them from the net. Kingbird lays the nets carefully in a dozen black tubs.
     Because the nets are set at a certain depth—about 225 feet—most of the fish are chub. One in 15 or 20 is a stray trout or burbot. Other things do come up, occasionally. Champion once hauled up what seemed to be a human thigh bone. What did he do? He makes a thumbing motion, over the side.
     The record for a bad haul is five fish. A good day is 400 or 500 pounds.     "Some days there's only water in your net," says Champion, paid on commission. "Like a salesman; you don't sell no shoes, you don't make no money." Still, he always wanted to fish.
     "As a kid I thought this would be a great way to make a living," he says. "I don't have to deal with the public, out here by yourself with Mother Nature. But now it has become so political."
     Champion would like to be able to fish for perch again—something vigorously opposed by the state's army of 800,000 sport fishermen.
     "Perch should never be open again for commercial fishing," said Henry Palmisano, an advocate for Chicago sport fishermen. "We don't commercially fish anything other than chub, and that should be it."
     At 1 p.m. they pull up the second anchor chain and buoy. Now it's time to put the net back. Champion turns the boat around. He and Kingbird don big rubber gloves. The net, having come in the front, goes out the back, over an inverted U-shaped "spreader," zipping out at five feet a second.
     Champion stands at the boxes and feeds out the nets, chub scales flying off like iridescent snow. As soon as one box empties, Champion kicks it away and yanks the next box over. Kingbird stands by the spreader, trying to keep the net open wide. Neither speaks. Neither wears a watch or buttons or rings— once the net caught on Champion's watch and yanked him off the boat.
     The net takes 40 minutes to go back into the water. "Now it's boogie time," Champion says. With the autopilot steering the boat toward Chicago, the two pour the fish onto the steel table and begin gutting with chub knives. The boat pitches and rolls. Champion once cut his finger to the bone.
     They get back to Joe's Fisheries about 4:30 p.m. -- nearly 12 hours after they started.
     Fishing chub is an exhausting, smelly, dirty, wet living, but it's still a living, and the fishermen plan to do it as long as they can. "This is the only thing I've ever done and the only thing I'll probably ever do," Champion says.
     They weigh their catch back at the fishery—565 pounds of chubs that, after being smoked, will fetch $3.35 per pound wholesale. All in all, a good day.
      —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 17, 1997

Gerald Kingbird (left) and Larry Champion unload chubs onto a scale for weighing at Joe’s Fisheries. (Photo for the Sun-Times by Phil Velasquez).

Northwest Side notes: Why are we so irritable?

      

     Coincidental that both Northwest Side Bureau chief Caren Jeskey, and I were both thinking of Indian spiritualism yesterday. Hearing Prime Minister Narendra Modi suggest that India needs to make more toys, I was musing how cool it would be to have an elephant-headed Ganesh the Remover of Obstacles action figure, maybe with various outfits, like Barbie, and whether Mattel could offer a line of various Hindu deities. Or would that be sacrilege? Meanwhile Caren was thinking of Gandhi and the ideal life. Although this is not the first appearance of his grandson in EGD: I met him seven years ago, and posted the link in her report below.

     How can we get along as a city, a nation, as a world, when we can’t get along with the people next to us? Partners, neighbors, family, colleagues? The person in the next lane on the road? We honk and weave and forget that there is a person in the other car. Perhaps even someone we know. It’s lost on us in those heated moments that the very person we are flipping off (literally or in our minds) may be the same person we hang out with at the dog park.
     What is is about us that makes us so irritable towards others? No wonder we can’t seem to come together on grander levels such as creating a harmonious world community. Will we ever learn to share resources and work communally? In a me against you society few are happy. Where has the art of forgiveness and compromise gone?
     In 1991 Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson Arun Gandhi founded the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence (https://gandhiinstitute.org). They offer “training in skills such as Nonviolent Communication, meditation, cultural humility, and experiential interconnectedness, and foster responses to systemic violence… through projects focused on urban agriculture, racial healing work, and restorative approaches to conflict.”
     You may have heard that Gandhi is said to have abused his wife. Here is what he has to say about it in his autobiography: “I forgot myself, and the spring of compassion dried up in me. I caught her by the hand, dragged the helpless woman to the gate, which was just opposite the ladder, and proceeded to open it with the intention of pushing her out. The tears were running down her cheeks in torrents, and she cried: 'Have you no sense of shame? Must you so far forget yourself? Where am I to go? I have no parents or relatives here to harbour me. Being your wife, you think I must put up with your cuffs and kicks? For Heaven's sake behave yourself and shut the gate. Let us not be found making scenes like this!’”
     “I put on a brave face, but was really ashamed, and shut the gate. If my wife could not leave me, neither could I leave her. We have had numerous bickerings, but the end has always been peace between us. The wife, with her matchless powers of endurance, has always been the victor… The incident in question occurred in 1898, when I had no conception of brahmacharya. It was a time when I thought that the wife was the object of the husband's lust, born to do her husband's behest, rather than a helpmate, a comrade and a partner in the husband's joys and sorrows. It was in the year 1900 that these ideas underwent a radical transformation, and in 1906 they took concrete shape. But of this I propose to speak in its proper place. Suffice it to say that with the gradual disappearance in me of the carnal appetite, my domestic life became and is becoming more and more peaceful, sweet, and happy.”
     One of the original feminists, though it took him a while.
     Per Wikipedia, “Bramacharya is a concept within Indian religions that literally means to stay in conduct within one's own soul. In Yoga, Hinduism and Jainism it generally refers to a lifestyle characterized by sexual continence or complete abstinence.”
     Our desires often trump our goodness, our intentions, our permanent values, our purity. We work to stay balanced, to not go overboard, and to ease into a life that makes sense for us. Where we can have fun and express ourselves, but we also temper ourselves where needed.
     Enter the popularity of yoga. There are eight limbs in this ancient practice. The physical practice, asana, is but one limb and the only limb most Westerners study. The others involve our attitudes towards ourselves, others and the environment, and our meditation work. Yoga sutras lay this out for us. The second yoga sutra states that yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. What does this mean? To me, it means that we reach a place of equanimity. We can see the good and bad in the world. We can see what we like and don’t like about ourselves, our relations, and the world around us; yet we learn to respond creatively rather than reacting harshly.
     Being human is not easy. Facing mortality is not fun. We will all decline and then die, yet we take ourselves so seriously. Our egos rear up and say “me!” “Mine!” “I want!” If we are able to, we can throw money at and manipulate the world to appease our desires. When that happens we get accustomed to having what we want when we want it. The problem with that is that others can leave us. Money sources can dry up. Even if they don’t, if we do not practice kindness, compassion, and restraint, our so-called loved ones may not love us all that much.
     I believe the key to happiness is radical self-care and authenticity. If we are rested, pain-free or coping with pain in a healthy way, and using tools of self-soothing rather than checking-out and neglecting ourselves, we have a better chance at leaning into our mortal lives with grace.
     I have not mastered this, but I am seeking to get closer to the place where my priorities are in order and I can keep things simple rather than rallying against the world, or resisting the reality of my human existence. From this place, I can see myself clearly and then make plans to live the best life that I can live. If we all lived our best lives I bet we’d get along with each other better.