the world has turned and left me here

shoot the evildoer

Friday night Yun calls me at 10 pm and tells me she can't go to Chicago. Well, this is a big bummer & threatens to derail the whole Chicago trip of me Mark & Yun. After giving her grief Mark & I decide to hit Chicago anyway the next day, just the two of us. The other possibility was to languish in despair & boredom in Lincoln for a whole three day weekend.

On the way through Iowa Saturday morning we stopped in Adair, Iowa, where I bought a local newspaper. I also bought a strange ceramic sculpture for Jake which we had laughed and wondered about on our way to see Ben Folds nearly a month ago. It consists of a policeman, kneeling, holding an unidentified stick (american flag minus flag?), gun in holster in belt, while a blue-eyed angel rests her hands reassuringly on his shoulders. Yes, she seems to say as together they gaze off in murky ceramic reverie, shoot the evildoer.

The rest of the trip out there was uneventful (no pulling away with the gas pump still attached this time). Aside from the fact that I got my first speeding ticket. The cop asked me to come back & sit in his patrol car while he filled out the form--they now have computers in there that run Windows XP, that much I saw. I had on a purple shirt & a hawaiian lei, which I considered taking off because of the gravity of the situation. But decided not to.

On the cop's dashboard, a little sticker: "Excuses will not change the consequences." Well, neither will hawaiian leis I figure. Shoot the evildoer anyway.

Logistics. We planned on staying at Hostelling International Chicago, which is right downtown. They were full up & had been for a week. Next time, my advice is to call ahead to this place, and as before park in $5 a day parking just south of there around 800 South Wells St. Instead we ended up at Arlington House, a hostel near DePaul University north of the downtown. There's a redline stop about five minutes away & it is in a nice part of town. About a 15 minute ride to downtown from there.