Chicago, first impressions

It's been a number of years since I've been to (as opposed to through) Chi-town. It's a beautiful city. But it stinks. I live in a rather smaller community than the city proper, and I'd forgotten the smell you get when several million people all do their shitting and perspiring together. Right now I'm at a party thrown for a friend's 30th birthday. As you might expect, it's totally way lame. All that's happening is chatting and drinking and dancing and craziness. That's all.

As an aside, let me also point out that vegan birthday cake is both delicious and inedible. It takes about four delicious bites for the stomach to climb up through the esophagus and slap the tongue because it feels like someone is taking a spade to your guts. So that's kind of a mixed blessing.

We're not really by downtown here, so it's not more than normal hum-noisy, and the cool breeze forty feet off the pavement makes the humidity bearable, finally. This season is a roil of thunderheads and quick hail strikes, a bathwater toss of warm rain and then clear evening skies.

I'm glad to know that there are people whom I don't yet know whose life-paths are as tortuous and knotted as mine.