My 5 Favorite Things This Weekend...

DIARY

before I get onto Serious Stuff.

#5. Sharing guacamole and chicken and shrimp and sipping nuclear martinis in the stormy shadows of Cate's apartment, at her birthday party, with friends and acquaintences. We shared stories of the strangest people we'd ever known; the people they'd tried in vain to seduce, the dieties they'd allegedly personified, and the giant chickens they'd engaged in fisticuffs.

#4. Standing in the solarium at Blackstone during role-playing, with Meridith, Jessica, Dan, and Laura, and watching a massive storm with spectacular lighting crawl over the battlements and towers and steeples of the University and the Midway. Rolling many dice.

#3. Reading Martin Esslin's essay on Pinter's "the Dumb Waiter" with Colin and Maggy. We sat in small, dark room in a dirty basement reading about a play set in a small, dark room set in a dirty basement. Maggy saw a mouse. Together we filled in blanks about the dangers of routine, and the risk in setting up sanctuary in a space you have not prepared yourself.

#2. Walking from McKinley Park to Hyde Park, 6 miles and one on the bus, in 90 minutes... watching the children play in the street in my own neighborhood, by gas stations and tenements and brick bungalows... absorbing the strange smells of the stockyard district... watching the CPD stalk warily back and forth across 35th in the shadow of Comisky... finding myself misplaced in the Ida B. Wells projects and mentally tossing coins to decide which direction to walk... admiring the post-apocalypse at Ellis and 41st... longing for the crumbling manors of North Kenwood... contemplating the restored manors of South Manor... and the forced march through Hyde Park to arrive, to my surprise, on time... and moments before the storm broke.

#1. Later the same night, in the heat of the storm, and surrounded by lightning, climbing with Dan and Colin and Sonia and a Scavvy up some back ladder onto the roof of a Hyde Park tenement. We bellowed and yelled and danced. We were instantly soaked. We were surrounded by the skyline and sky.

~ Connor