It won’t kill you to get out of the house

     Summer rain pelted my face as I stood on my pedals, flying down the gravel trail alongside the I&M Canal. For one moment, boom, the whole knotted mess just fell away — the virus, the masks, the mango Lord of the Lies, everything — and I was just a kid on a bike going through the woods in far southwest Channahon. Gliding through green leaves, past great blue herons and angular waterways that were part of history yet also right there.
     Or more precisely, I realized it was gone. That somehow the door to my electronic cage had swung open and I had slipped back into the living world. It took a bit of groping to reconstruct regular life: each day a carbon copy of the day before, walking the dog, meals, work, sleep, rinse, repeat.   

     How’d I get from that treadmill to a village in Will County? Looking back, they didn’t actually invite me. What the folks hyping Illinois & Michigan Canal — ”This outdoor museum, perfect for social distancing, is the nation’s first official National Heritage Area” — did was offer photos and a phone call.
     ”Please let us know if you would be interested in images or if you would like to speak with Robin Malpass regarding the Illinois & Michigan Canal National Heritage Area,” is how they put it.
     How about, I countered, we explore the area together? Like most men, I had a hidden agenda — to clap eyes on the I&M Canal, the pathway that led baby Chicago on its first tottering steps from being a few hovels clustered around the pointy log stockage of Fort Dearborn to the sprawling, skyscrapered, dynamic, carnival of a metropolis — on summers other than this one that is — we know and love.

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Damn you, J.B., for trying to save our lives!

      When pausing to photograph this distinctive sign in generally pleasant, rustic Channahon Monday. I did not consider the juxtaposition with the nostalgic tableau next to it: the classic Schwinn bicycle, its basket full of flowers, the sweet little girl statue.
    And then "J.B. PRITZKER SUCKS." In case you can't read the fine print, it continues, "THE LIFE OUT OF ILLINOIS SMALL BUSINESS."
     It was only later, looking at the picture, that the disconnect between folksy and hateful jumped out. Which is rather like what often happens when you meet people downstate—lovely folks, on the surface, but with a few odious beliefs jingling around their pockets like loose ammunition. 
     The sign doesn't go on to explain exactly how the governor is hoovering vitality from mom and pop establishments. No room and, besides, it's a given. It's assumed you know the problem is his closing down the state, more or less, trying to keep residents from dying of COVID-19.
     Can't the guy who posted the sign see what happens when you don't? 52,000 new cases. Tuesday. Isn't trying to tamp down that curve—surging up again—the kind of effort that even residents of this small community, 60 miles southwest of Chicago, can wrap their heads around. It's not like you need a Ph.D. to figure it out.
      Then again, I have a job, and my wife has a job. Maybe if we were sitting on our hands, day after day, watching our livelihoods shrivel and die and our life savings dwindle away, we might have a very different take on the matter. I don't want to be one of those guys sitting warm and dry in the boat, raising my hot tea and lemon to my lips, tut-tutting at how unseemly are all those thrashing about in the water, splashing in such an unseemly fashion. And those awful cries! Really. Can't they sink wordlessly? That's what I'd do in their position. Blow a few kisses at the governor as I expire.
     Or am I succumbing to that Democratic folk disease, empathy? Wear your fuckin' mask, Jethro.
     If I had presence of mind, I'd have pulled over and knock on the door (and no doubt been shot through it by someone in fear for his life; it isn't only the Right who can traffic in stereotypes). But I was already 20 minutes late—construction traffic on the Stevenson—heading down, and after I had been biking for three hours and just wanted to get home and eat dinner.
    Then again, I don't need to quiz the sign owner. This week the Sun-Times ran a story on the dozen or so death threats against the governor. The Illinoisans making the threats seem to be mostly the mentally ill, or the incarcerated, and not beleaguered small businessmen whose cupcake shops are languishing due to social distancing. The true nature of people come out in a crisis, for good and ill, and it is to be expected that along with the selfless acts of nurses and social service types there are bitter red staters just itchin' to shoot sumptin'.  Not to tell the governor his business, or make my colleague's work any more difficult, but myself, I'd squelch reports of death threats, just so as not to give anybody any ideas. 
     Think about how much you have to hate somebody to condemn him on a sign in your front yard. I like to think, no matter how extreme a situation I'd find myself in, I wouldn't do that. In fact, I don't have to assume. I know. For three years I've watched a liar, bully, fraud and traitor ripping at the foundations of my beloved country, which is worse than driving your bar into receivership. And yet not once found myself condemning him to passing cars. 
    Although, now that I think of it, I have put up a sign.  A neighbor had them printed up, and I eagerly bought one and placed it at the strip of forest along the edge of our yard. Here it is.

   

Virus mystery: The case of the missing Fresca

 

     It is not the most pressing question.
     Let’s get that said right away.
     Among the clamor of impassioned debates and thorny controversies, solving this particular puzzle is not high on anybody’s list. Not even mine, which is why through April, May and the first half of June, I stifled my curiosity, certain that even asking is the definition of privilege.
     The world in chaos — sirens screaming through the streets, a raging pandemic, flames of unrest licking the foundations of our deeply racist society, jobs shattered, the helm spinning. Envision a tumultuous landscape, smoke billowing, thick with cops in riot gear battling protesters waving signs, all noise and conflict and commotion.
     I raise a finger and clear my throat, “A-hem!,” and it somehow magically falls still and silent. All heads — sweaty, masked, soot-stained — swivel in my direction, and I inquire:
     “What happened to Fresca?”

     Because I really like Fresca and typically enjoy a can at lunch. Then Fresca just vanished from stores in March. But unlike toilet paper, it never came back, at least not to the Sunset or the Jewel or other stores near me. There must be a reason, right? If only there were an organization, a company perhaps, that I could ask . . . but who . . . who . . . ?
     Here is where 35 years of journalist experience comes in.
     “I’m a news columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times,” I began in my plea to the Coca-Cola Co. “I’m wondering where Fresca is and when it might come back.”

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Wear your damn mask: State of the Blog: Year Seven

  

O'Hare, Feb. 13, 2020

     Are you having a good pandemic? I mean, not dead, and nobody you know dead? Not yet anyway. Good, good, that's the important thing.
     And your job? Secure so far? Excellent. Mine too. Sure, it could change at any time. But that was true before COVID-19 burst out of whatever bat's ass or pangolin's lymph gland or wherever the hell it came from. In December. Times can change. Fast.
     Not round here, of course. We soldier on, immutable. Every ... goddamn ... day. I won't belabor the state of the blog this year. First, I realized—and file this under "Obvious, realizations of"—that I've been doing two summations each year. One at the end of June, since the blog began July 1, 2013. And another at the end of December. That's one too many.
     No number crunching this time, for instance. Spambots made that pointless. One day in January we had 246,583 hits, which is about 245,000 more than usual. I thought, fleetingly, of presenting that as some kind of triumph. Alas, it's not. I don't think the whirling Chinese techno-dervish or thrumming chip caused the spike benefited from my high caliber prose. Otherwise, we lope along as usual, doing about the traffic we did three years ago—somewhat shy of 2,000 views a day.
     Hardly worth doing, right? Though if there were a hall with 1,500 people in it, I sure would show up, and be amazed and pleased at how I had packed them in. So it shouldn't be different here, though of course it is. Perhaps tweeting this every day is the problem. Every attitudinal 40-year-old seems to have 200,000 followers on Twitter. I have 8,600 and am stuck there. Twitter feels like I'm printing the day's blog out, rolling it into a tube, sticking it in a bottle and casting it into the sea.
     Again, hardly seems worth doing. 
     But it is, because, well, if not this, what? What would I do instead? Watch television?
     I must like paddling my little canoe among the big tankers and destroyers and nimble racing sloops of the more significant communications efforts. Year Seven certainly has been personally memorable, with all that spine surgery in July—an oddly uplifting experience, sort of in the way Churchill once said nothing is more exhilarating for a man than to be shot at without effect.  And then in February I wrote about getting a new hip. Which I'm reluctant to even mention now—makes me sound old and falling apart. But if I have one overarching principle to this, it's "Be who you are." I think a lot of bad writing comes from people trying to be who they're not—better, younger, smarter, whatever.  A writer doesn't want to sit around vomiting out complaints and unwelcome personal details either. But I think there's a sweet spot in there and I hope that, on some days, I hit it.
     The pandemic arrived in mid-February. My wife and I were on our way to New York, and a JAL flight crew came by, all masked, and I stepped in front of them and snapped off a picture of the unusual sight and sent it to the city desk. Might be news. Turns out it was, though we didn't realize it quite then.
      My goal was to cover the story, best I could, and not just sit on my ass in Northbrook, and I was satisfied I carried my share of the burden. I had contacts at hospitals, and so brought readers there, into the struggle to fight the virus, first at Mount Sinai, then Roseland. I started working regularly with one of our excellent staff photographers, Ashlee Rezin Garcia, and that was a very rewarding and fun collaboration.
     Three days a week EGD features my column from the paper. The other four I'll repost old columns, or write a fresh essay.  Saturdays I tried for a change of pace, for something fun. If you remember, I used to run the Saturday Fun Activity, but got tired of sending out prizes. Then I shifted to the Saturday snapshot, usually sent in by readers, and that proved a lovely rest at the end of the week. In April, Saturdays were given over to an uprooted Chicagoan now living in Austin, Texas, Caren Jeskey, and her detailed and heartfelt reports have been a welcome addition to the blog—some weeks her numbers are better than anything I've written.
     What else? The University of Chicago Press asked me to write a book entitled "Every goddamn day: Neil Steinberg's Chicago." That seems a kind of significance. Though the title may be a little deceptive. It's not a collection of blog posts, but a quotidian history of Chicago in 366 dated entries. (Jan. 1, 1920 is the beginning of the Palmer raids, eager Chicago cops jumping the gun on the rest of the country. Jan. 2, 1900 is the reversal of the Chicago River, and so on). I've had a lot of fun working on it,  It's due in March, which probably puts it out in early 2022.  The neat thing about that structure is it is limiting, like haiku. You have to choose which episodes to explore. Some days there are three or four worthy candidates. I'm working hard to get the balance and tone right, and it speaks to the question: what is history? What stories do we tell and why do we tell them?
    Which is the same challenge I have here. Thanks for sticking around for seven years while I try to figure it out.  Thank you to the core dozen or two who regularly comment, and of course to my advertiser, Marc Schulman of Eli's Cheesecake. Thank you to John for birddogging all the typos. Thanks to Caren Jeskey—like the readers, I've enjoyed getting to know her—for all your hard work. Thank you Ashlee Rezin Garcia for allowing me to repost your marvelous and dramatic photographs.
     I remember, when I began the blog, reading somewhere that most people make the mistake of giving up too soon, and one should stick it out three years to see if it's going to catch fire. I've stuck it out double that plus a year, and success, whatever that is, still floats somewhere in the distance.
    Unless just doing this is the success. "You are the music," T.S. Eliot writes, in the last section of "The Dry Salvages"—I've been reading a lot of Eliot this year—"While the music lasts."

For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying.

     That sounds about right.

Statue savvy? Play to (not) win big prizes!

     Howdy folks, it’s time to play ... WHEEL ... OF ... DISASTER!
     Let’s get right to it. Give the old sinister circle a spin and see what comes up.
     Click click click click....
     What will it be? Raging Global Pandemic? Spreading Economic Collapse? Erratic, Ineffectual and Traitorous President? Ongoing Social Unrest? Murder of Chicago Children in Unchecked Random Violence?
     And it’s .... it’s ...
     Destruction of Civic Monuments. A good one! Johnny, a little background if you please.
     Thank you Neil. Along with peaceful protests following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis came anger directed at monuments to to the slaveholding South. First confined to Confederate generals such as Robert E. Lee, eventually far more laudable historical figures, like Ulysses S. Grant and George Washington found also themselves toppled.
     Thank you Johnny. Let’s get the round started. For $50, answer the following: On Friday, the president of the United States issued an executive order related to monuments. Did he a) Resolve to address the festering institutional racism that sparked these attacks on public iconography; b) Form a committee to investigate how the federal government collaborated with the defeated Confederacy to steamroll the rights of its newest citizens; c) attempt to knit up our unraveling rule of law by assuring citizens that we are all part of this grand, if flawed American experiment or d) promise to prosecute “to the fullest extent permitted” anyone caught damaging a public monument or statue? Suzy!

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Toilet paper wasn't our biggest problem

     You never did run out of toilet paper, did you?
     Or know anybody who did.
     Or hear of anybody actually running out.
     Didn't think so.
     I was saving that first line. I thought it would sound an elegiac note when this whole COVID-19 crisis finally was over. Kind of a chuckle over the panicky hoarding instinct that first ushered Our Year of COVID in. 
     Now that seems optimistic—the idea that it might be over. This year. Or even the next. Sure, it has to end eventually. One hopes. And we're blundering by. At least Illinois is coping, for now. But our national government, spurred by the criminal incompetence of Donald Trump, has booted the pandemic so thoroughly, allowed Red State government to kick the can, that who knows how bad it will get.  Call it a hunch, but I'm thinking: real bad.
     I hope I'm wrong.
     Until then,  the system operates pretty well. There is food at Sunset—and the above wry t-shirts, which I admired, though did not buy. It's the first epidemic souvenir I've seen. There will be more.
      But stowing away souvenirs seems premature.  Save the victory lap for after the victory.

     

Sahara in the Texas Sky

     Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey checks in.

    
     When my good friend Snezana was a child in Borovo Naselje, Croatia, she vividly recalls seeing a film of red dust on her balcony one day and her mother telling her “it came from Africa.” Snezana has been on the lookout for this red dust ever since. This past Thursday I sent her photos of a blindingly pink and surreal Austin sunset during yet another one of my COVID walkabouts, and her response was “Sahara in the Texas sky.” I had no idea what she meant, so I looked it up. As many of you know, a cloud of dust from the Sahara Desert has been projected by trade winds — winds that blow straight towards the equator — over 5,000 miles from the world’s largest hot desert (roughly the size of the United States) and this cloud is now doing its thing above Texas and other southern states. According to the National Weather Service the tiny dust particles scatter the sun’s rays at dusk and dawn, which accounts for the stunning sunset I was compelled to share with my friend.
     When I called her a smarty pants for knowing why, from Chicago, my Austin sunset was so special she said “I perk up when they talk about stuff like that on the radio. I never knew before that it provided nutrients to the marine life. What a planet!” I’ll have you know that Snezana is a brilliant and hilarious person but the last word I’d ever use to describe her is perky. Elegant, understated, sublime, low-key, quietly powerful, yes. Perky, no. It made me unreasonably happy to hear her use such excited language.

 This COVID crisis and the incredibly sad and scary uptick in cases in the obliviously irresponsible state of Texas I currently call home has me rocking and reeling. Not in that good way that the hundreds of teens at Pong Fest in Spicewood (just outside of Austin) gleefully swapping germs must have felt while they were doing so last weekend, but in that “how can I adjust to this new normal of irreverent souls killing others with wild abandon?” way. In the incredible confusion that is coming and going for many of us as we live through a plague, I absolutely cling to any and all moments of pleasure, such as experiencing a new image of my dear Snezana.
     Likewise, I have seen other friends and family members with fresh eyes since this crisis started. A couple of friends and I did an exercise together on Zoom called Authentic Movement that is described on its website as “a mindful movement exploration between a mover and a witness which encourages the development of consciousness.” As I watched one of my closest friends Debi move and express herself in a raw and unselfconscious manner on a little screen I usually reserve for Facebook and Netflix, I saw a side of her that I had never seen, and felt closer to her than ever. When several friends and I attended a yoga class on Zoom with my very first yoga teacher (from 1999), Shabad Kaur Khalsa of Spirit Rising Yoga in Chicago, my friends Debi, Laura Rose, Lynda and I shared a deep bonding experience that blew us all away. Zoom screens offer a strange intimacy that we may not have felt during less-present face to face interactions.
     A couple nights ago I hopped into House Party, an app that lets friends jump into virtual rooms together any time, day or night. When I get an alert, for example, that “Julz is in the house” I can hop right in and say hi to her, our faces in little squares. Others can join us, or we can lock the room. I joined Julz that night and it was as though she was sitting on a bench at the park, like when we were kids, and I just happened to walk by and join her. That night her sister Kim hopped in too, and we had a powerful conversation of women witnessing and showing up for each other that would not have happened pre-pandemic awareness of the immediacy of life. We’ve always needed each other and now we are not afraid to say it.   

     I have found other moments of deep contentment that come from being present, such as the one I shared in my EGD post Snail Eyeball at the beginning of all of this where I was able to capture a photo of a little eye peering at me when I had stopped to rest. If I had not been sitting still for such a long period of time in solitude, tired from the luxury of having time to walk miles and miles in the Texas sunshine, I might have missed that tiny black eye arching towards me. I would not have noticed the greenish smudge of slime under the picnic table had I been in normal Caren mode. Pre-COVID I was running myself much too quickly and I didn’t even realize it. I fancied myself chill. After all, wasn’t I the yoga and meditation teacher at a fancy spa? Wasn't I the sensible psychotherapist helping clients find themselves? Well yes, but now I can see how far away from mindful I really was. Staying sober from alcohol this whole time has also helped greatly — no fuzziness, no hangovers, no drama.
     Pre-COVID I was constantly distracted with all of the movies I wanted to see (sometimes I’d go to one a day) at local trendy theaters, with getting to clients' homes and even driving 25 miles in one direction to see one of them (I am never doing that again), with grabbing yet another cup of coffee on the run and sipping it as I diligently drove from place to place to get things done. Solitude and introspection have brought me to a screeching halt and I am grateful. I will do everything I can to stay out of the rat race as it was and practice a more sane and enjoyable way of life that I heretofore had not mastered.
     Today I walked nearly 8 miles and went from feeling positively unnerved by my impending move that’s coming up in a few days, during skyrocketing cases of COVID here in Austin, to calm, grounded and closer to fine. During this walk I spent a good amount of time in silence and also had conversations along the way with mentors and friends on FaceTime and Zoom. A sweetheart from my young adult days Diz and I have reconnected and laughed our butts off during a FaceTime call. I also noticed signs hanging from telephone poles reminding me of the ardent work ahead to do my part to end racist oppression, bathed my feet in a waterfall, and sat under a bridge.

   A few weeks ago I saw a water moccasin glide though the water under that same bridge. Would I have even known we have these terrifying and magnificent creatures so close by if a pandemic had not rendered me neighborhood-bound? I am not happy for this fatal virus among us. I am dismayed at the lack of intelligence and reason of non-mask-wearing anti-distancers, and beyond angry when I try to listen to what they feel is reason. All I hear is “I don’t care about protecting the lives of vulnerable people.” I am unbelievably scared, even panic-stricken, at times when I think about lives that have been lost and lives that will be lost.
     Some of you may remember my beloved landlord Angelo from the last place I lived in Chicago before moving to Austin? I told you of him in my second EGD post called Texas Recollection back on April 18. I shared that he and his wife Eleftheria were the kind of landlords one happily paid to be allowed to live in their peaceful abode. I am deeply saddened to tell you that we lost Angelo to this virus. I had written that if I could have rewound time that day (when I knew he was in hospice care but did not know he had died), Angelo’s wife Eleftheria would finally be able to give me the potted jasmine tree she’d be saving for years that was to be a gift at my wedding (something she always told me, but I never did get married). Angelo would be all scrubbed up in a fine suit at my wedding (had it occurred) and have a dance with me. Now that Angelo is gone perhaps it’s not too much to hope that Eleftheria may still give me that tree one day and I will believe, despite the realities of a pandemic and post-pandemic world, that all is well.