8.08.2025 - Weekly Digest
Good times in Olde Chicago Towne so far. Nice to be somewhere familiar but also reliably weird for a while.
Reminder: anyone who offers to recruit 10 readers for Without a Gun gets a free paid subscription for life. Say the words and we'll make it so. I'm not going to bother you about it or track your progress. Why? Because I love you, and I trust you, and I know you would never deceive me or let me down.
That came dangerously close to a rickroll. Time to close this thing for a day or two.
Bye!
8.05.2025
I bring to the pharmacy clerk's attention the qualities of the wrinkle spray I'm purchasing:
So you can fake it, she says
Exactly, I've been traveling a lot and this stuff makes it look like I know what I'm doing
I have to get some of these
I grabbed the last three bottles, sorry, they're hard to find. I don't know what's in the formula and I don't want to know
She laughs
I don't need a receipt, thanks, but now you know my darkest secret
It was easy, writing dialogue, when I lived here before. Some days every interaction is Bananas Foster. In environments like this you soak up conversations. Every trip outside is a full immersion bath. At Walgreen's I let the noise take me for a few seconds and it was dystopian and perverse. All the chatter at the registers and kids yelling and playing in the aisles and announcements over the PA that associates were needed in the bath and body aisle, in the analgesics aisle, in the foot pain department.
Late afternoons when I returned to my apartment in Logan Square and after I walked the dog I'd lie down on the couch and fall into a black sleep but in the few minutes before I passed out I heard soundscapes just like this, as if I were receiving telepathic transmissions, only no one was saying anything important. Like I was standing in line at the pharmacy. Residual noise repurposed for coherence. Sometimes in languages I recognize but do not speak.
8.06.2025
Imagine living in Chicago in 1900 and not knowing they're turning the river around. You step out of your wooden shack onto your modest but well kept patch of swamp and the thick bubbles of suet and offal are flowing the other way. You think you must've lost your mind. You look at the empty bottle of Swedish liquor in a swamp bush and say a curse. That's what you get for hanging out with Jeppson. Vague recollection of his bootleg operation, lead and copper tubes all over the place, hot steam vents bursting from the walls, heavy Norsemen hauling vats of foul vaporous syrup through the miasma. Imagine it whether you want to or not. This happened to someone, a Slav I'm calling Brat and the trauma he suffered from this episode was carried forward in time on his genes. His great grandkids are all kinds of fucked up, swimming backwards, speaking in nonsequitors, working not for money but spending their money for the privilege of work. Some of them are in politics and the rest are to be approached with caution indeed.
8.07.2025
The dog poops twice as we gaze upon the president's house. Okay former president. But current house, no capital H. From a time when having presidents seemed like a good idea. Far as I can tell this dog is the only one with any good ideas. She sets up shop on the lawn, sphinxlike, watches the perimeter for rats. Comes inside from time to time to breathe heavy and get some reassuring pets. Rubs her face on the corner of the couch. She stays hydrated and eats more carrots than I ever have. We could all learn a lot from this dog, is what I'm saying. At the unofficial dog park she's relaxed. What kind of mix is she? one of the dog owners asks. I think she was made in a lab, I say. I've never even heard her bark. She's just chill, he says. That's how they are. A young woman with dirt on her face like she's been working in the garden wants to know if the dog is a Malamese Terrier or something. I'm bad with dog breeds, plants, and the makes and models of cars, I say. She reminds me of my Malamese, she says. We'll go with that, she's a Malamese Lab.
8.08.2025
I think the most disorienting thing about being in Chicago is that I always know where I am. Yeah it's a grid but I have an innate sense of placement in this city. The sun rises over the Big Water and sets on the other side. Most addresses are on simple x-y coordinates and if you're in the know you know which avenues run on an angle or curve around all silly through your hood. I will say it's odd being down here where there's an actual East Side to things; everywhere I lived up north if you went any further than the end of Navy Pier you were either on a boat or wet. Four blocks between bus stops. Eight blocks to a mile. The red and blue and green and pink and yellow and brown and purple lines of the CTA map reliably fixed in my medulla geographica. Been here almost a week and haven't left the South Side. That will be remedied tomorrow when I go back to the neighborhood where I lived the longest, where I have a lot of sweet and painful and some violent memories, and where I expect to be slammed in the face by the change in landscape. As I deserve for never being from anywhere anymore.