Mostly Washington this week, then Chicago. On Monday, I got the only sickness I’ve gotten for a decade. Not the one you’d think! It’s what I call “Dave’s Flu,” a 24-hour demon that starts with aching in every joint and proceeds to total sinus clog. I take only one treatment for this, one pill of Zinc and one of Vitamin C. Ice cream, which I don’t usually appear in the house, materializes in the freezer.
The bug tossed me around until Tuesday night, and then died off. I kept working, newsletters about abortion and fentanyl, then a wedding of my fiancé’s friend in the west Loop. I’ve spent around two weeks working in Chicago, relaxing just a little, almost none of that time downtown. We stayed in a chain hotel near a seller of antiques from less fortunate cultures, called “Primitive,” which probably would have bothered her had she noticed.
I had my usual fun and created my usual problems. One good habit I’d drilled in recently was putting my jackets on hangers as soon as I got home. No more backs of chairs — this would be my hanger era. I followed this rule in Chicago, and wore a power blue linen coat that nobody’s stopped me from wearing. Problem. I’d never trained myself on a new, complementary rule, to take the jacket out of the hotel room’s closet on the way out. No weekend off is complete without a new chore.
And an argument, too. We called a few times to find out if the service staff (who we’d left a tip for, but for wholesome reasons, not favor-seeking reasons) had found the jacket in the room. After one call, I thought about how the hotel clearly wasn’t full, and we called back so I could ask: Did anyone check into the room?
“No, sir, the hotel is not at capacity, and—”
“Great, thanks!” I said, enthusiastically. “Then it’s fine.” Real enthusiasm! Unless the stupid thing could float away it was going to stay in the closet, and I didn’t need to think about it until I figured out how to pay for shipping it. But to my fiancé, it sounded like I’d “cut her off,” and this started a conversation about why I cut people off all the the time.
Here is my perspective. First: I don’t cut people off the time. That would be insufferable, the kind of thing you get a reputation for, just know that I don’t. Next: I do cut off conversations, as everybody should, when the person on the other line has just told me what I wanted. I learned the American way of friendly patter, too, but I want my goods-and-services transactions to be friendly and to end quickly. I’ve read enough of my transcribed interviews to know that I don’t interrupt people enough. Our sentences don’t spill out like a monk’s calligraphy on goat-skin. People ramble, people change their mind mid-thought, people over-talk because we’re told that it’s polite.
That’s what happened, along with my correct opinion. Rest of the weekend was fine. The photo above’s from a visit to the Art Institute, squeezed in before a wedding that used a “30 Rock” joke as a hashtag (#ABlackffairtoRememblack) and stopped when the groom got behind the drum set to play “Hey Ya.” Ask me my least favorite wedding songs, and I won’t say many before I get to “Hey Ya.” But in this context? Sure, it worked.
Early in the night, it struck me that this was the last wedding either of us was going to until our own. (The last time we’d be waiting for luggage together at the airport before then, too, a stray thought that turned out romantic.) We agreed moments into dinner that we’d need a planner to figure out all the obvious logistical things that we hadn’t factored in, and wouldn’t want to do live on the day. But I’m not going to bore you with that, and already delayed this because I was so annoyed about the jacket.
Hang on. I forgot to mention that there was “unrest,” to quote Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson, a few blocks from our hotel. The usual: Teenagers seeing a social media invitation to hang out and do whatever at Millennium Park, teenagers getting into murderous brawls. Baile el sabado; cuerpo el domingo. This happened on Saturday night, when we were at the wedding venue about a mile away, and we heard and saw no trace of it. But it was exactly the sort of crime that had transformed politics here, exploding in one of the places that residents don’t want tourists to be scared of. At the Art Institute, the walk up to a modern art room funded by Ken Griffin (but now without his collection) offers a grand view of the park and the Jay Pritzker Pavilion. We took it in, and a few hours later kids were shooting each other there, and a few hours after that the new mayor admonished that it was “not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.” We were already gone by then.
The Best Thing I Saw: Strong week for this, thanks to the Chicago flights and their smooth 90 minutes off the ground. “Turn Every Page,” a 2022 documentary about the working friendship between Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb, was what I usually call a Coffee Table Doc — a beautifully put together tribute to something us college-educated midwits love, making us a better appreciator of the work by watching it. But it was quietly very good, especially the Gottlieb portions. Caro’s interviewed all the damn time, and has heard the same damn questions, which which hear too; Conan O’Brien tells one crowd not to ask Caro when the fifth volume of the LBJ book will come out, and a More of a Comment Than A Question putz in a later scene asks Caro when the book is coming out. Gottlieb, whose daughter directed this, is less frequently heard-from, which is a shame, because he’s a raconteur, the kind of guy who’ll quote Shakespeare to answer a question for a movie filmed by his daughter. “My role with Bob is what Cordelia says is her role with King Lear. It’s to love and be silent.”
The best movie (not film) we saw was “The Parallax View,” which I’d been putting off for years but threw on when I realized we were home from the trip with 100 minutes before “Succession.” You never doubt how it’s going to end, which denied me some of the joys of the twisty plot, but let’s say it together: “They don’t make these movies for adults anymore.”
The Best Thing I Read: Easy, the Seamus Heaney translation of “Beowulf” that I’d grabbed in Wisconsin last month. This was a hit at the time, big enough that the copy I plucked off the Half-Price Books shelf had identical siblings, but as Heaney writes the received wisdom about this is that it’s “written on official paper,” too dry for the modern YA-enjoyer. This is wrong. (That’s the point he’s making, too.) All the bones and gristle of modern fantasy is here. This is a theme as I read the Big Books I’ve put off for years, that we’ve let some grad student who had a bad time with text classify it as “boring” — Henry James, Saul Bellow, anonymous Old English epic author.
Didn’t get through much else. Finished “The Root of All Evil,” a collection of Grant Morrison and Mark Millar’s “Swamp Thing” run, which starts with Alec Holland smoking DMT and gets a little duller after that. Finished “The 120 Days of Simon,” an indie comic I’d bought maybe 10 years ago, a mostly tedious story of the author’s sex and drug journey through Scandinavia illustrated like an 8-bit video game. Bought a copy of “Tombs,” the new Junji Ito collection, at Graham Cracker’s in the Loop, and read that while I was — sorry to bring this up again — not remembering my jacket.
The Best Thing I Heard. “All the Stars” was an unusually good theme song, especially for a Marvel movie, and I remembered how much I liked it when the married couple used it as their “meet Mr. and Mrs.” music. But Ahmad Jamal died this week and nobody’s topping him.
Sorry for the delay. This week all I know is that I’ll be in Iowa for a while, and it’s never hard to write timely in Des Moines.
I liked the recurring regret over the jacket, it was a nice way of recreating how your train of thought was working over those few days.
I was never much of a talker early on in life and as I got more comfortable with it there were times where i couldn't shut up. I eventually learned not to cut people off or jump on their last thought for reasons you so aptly put.
Always love 30 rock references since most are burned in my brain.
Glad you finished the beowulf book, I actually am gonna check it out having enjoyed it in high school and still enjoying modern fantasy today. I got a buddy who is getting into swamp thing for boring 'dc franchise to be in theaters' reasons, so i might check that one too.
Looks like the week was good (but for the jacket, sorry) hope the next week at the slipknot album is better.