On Saturday, Singular and I rode our bikes down to the Taste of Chicago. I Tasted a BBQ buffalo burger, a fried chicken wing from Harold’s, fried okra, deep fried dill pickles, and mustard-fried catfish. At the risk of sounding like Humbaba, MMMMMMM!!!!! Being from the south, even my baby food was deep-fat-fried. Singular had a slice of Lou Malnati’s, contender for best deep-dish in the mecca of deep-dish, which puts it high in the running for best deep-dish worldwide. I think it’s the crack in the crust. She also had some sweet fried platanos (not as good as my grandma Dolita’s) and some French Vanilla ice cream from the Zephyr booth.

Mmmm…. food.

Afterwards we stopped by the beach to take a quick dip and get some sun.

Sunday was a house-wide grill-out. There are ten or eleven people living in the three-flat at any given time, and this was the first floor’s annual croquet picnic, with a smattering of guests from the other two floors. The folks on the first floor are rock stars, so they invited about 30 of their rock star friends, which meant we were kinda out of place among all the heroin-skinny, sleeve-tattooed guests. I dunno, man, every time I’ve hung out with that crowd, they’ve not been the friendly type to just talk to anybody. The attitude I encounter from most young folks in Chicago is one of agendaless friendliness, like everybody already knows everybody else and just haven’t gotten their name yet. Not these rock stars. I always get asked, “So, what instrument do you play?” and not “do you play an instrument?” They seem shocked that I don’t play one. Sure, I think everybody should play an instrument, but I don’t think one’s value as a person hinges on it. I’ve got other means of creative expression. People ask me if I’m an Artist and I say, “no, I work for a living.” I’ve got a job that I love, and all these rock stars were talking about how much it sucks down in the pool department at Menard’s. It’s like Hiro realizes in Snow Crash:

Hiro is a talented drifter. This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him as recently as five years ago. But in the bleak light of full adulthood, which is to one’s early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He’s broke and unemployed.

The actual neighbors themselves, however, are quite nice fellows. One of them, Paul, has a comic that is much more developed than mine, having produced it for sixteen years now. I recommend you give it a perusal, at hamsterman.com. Once the snooty crowd left, a few genuine folks sat on the back porch, toasting “Chicago summers”, and had a good time.

Today, I told E. Victor that we would not be renewing the lease. Brooklyn is moving on, having a philosophical opposition to living in the same place for more than a year, and so is Guadalupe. So Singular and I figured that yeah, it’s a lovely place, but it’s not the only lovely place in town. So we’ll be finding an apartment of our own rather than trying to fill two empty rooms. Apartment-hunting is so exciting! Each place is ripe with possibility, and when you find that perfect flat you tremble with excitement and hope nobody else puts down a deposit first. I’ve lived with Singular longer than I’ve lived with anyone else besides my family and we seem to compliment each other well, so long as I restrain my velvet-heavy decorating style to one small corner of our home and leave the rest up to someone with “taste” and “class”, whatever those are. We each do the chores that the other hates. We save music that the other can’t stand for times when they aren’t around. We have a lot of fun.

Fun is, after all, the pudding on the pop of life. Without it, all you’ve got is a flat stick.