True Crime Series

Instead of leaving all the wonderful stories of serial killers, dramatic shootings of high school students, or police chases that would put John Woo to shame in the pages of my notebooks from my City News Days, these stories will become part of the Picayune beginning today.

Sheridan Road Serial Killer

I was nearing the end of my mid-shift coverage of the North Side while camped out at Area 3 headquarters (also known as the 19th District of the Chicago Police Department) at the corner of Belmont and Western.

The overnight editor paged me, and I called him back to hear, “You better not screw this up. We got a tip from the ME’s (Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office) that there’s a death investigation in the apartment building where someone else was killed only a month earlier.”

This was an actual tip that a creative reporter had to weed out of people to make a story out of. I couldn’t just show up at some address with my pen, tablet and digital recorder in hand. I had to corroborate the tip through beating the street and shooting the shit with cops who were working that night. This is where I figured out how good a reporter I was.

The apartment building was around 7000 N. Sheridan Rd., placing the crime scene in the Rogers Park District (24). Luckily, a grandpa-like captain was working that night that I had a good relationship with. He would tell me anything that he had in front of him and he always made my job easier. So I call him up and act like I’m making a routine check on his neck of the woods for the typical murder and mayhem that night.

“So what’s going on tonight?” I ask after the usual introductions and pleasantries. “Any robberies, any…investigations?” Investigation was the key word, as homicides are often classified as death investigations until it can be determined that they are suspicious.

“Well, yeah,” said the captain. “They got a death investigation up on Sheridan. And looks like they sent a crime lab van up there.” I could tell he was reading to me right off the paper in front of him.

"Oh yeah?” I ask, trying to hide my excitement. “Where’s that at?” And then the captain confirmed the address.

Bingo.

That was what I needed: confirmation of the address and that something suspicious enough to need a crime lab van had happened there. So my editor sent me to the scene around 1 a.m.

I parked behind a building near the scene, not knowing that it was the building in question, and that cops were already wandering around inside with flashlights. I came around the corner of the building onto Sheridan Road and then realized that it might be smart to wear my press badge. It would probably prevent me from being arrested for appearing out of nowhere at the scene of the crime in the middle of the night.

A group of men I guessed to be detectives were standing in a group near the entrance of the building. As I approached, I noticed that there were three squad cars, two unmarked police cars and the crime scene van at the scene. The odd thing was that not a single light from any of the cars was flashing. There was no police tape roping off the area, no onlookers gawking at the scene, no noise other than the normal silence of the night. People didn’t seem to know that a serial killer had struck the same building twice in a month’s time and the police wanted to keep it that way.

…

Due to a shortage of column space on the page and people’s need to not spend all day reading blogs, the rest of the story will be continued next week.

Adaptation

“The high for today will be about 42 degrees. It’s currently 41 and you’re listening to…” broadcast the radio station at around 4:15 a.m a few days ago. This was the beginning of January for Chicagoans; a mild streak of weather in what can often be the harshest season for this Midwest giant of a city. Business this week was back to booming at the coffee-chain-that-shall-remain nameless. More people were out and braving the Icelandic 40 degree temperatures and even buying frozen and iced drinks (much to the chagrin of my co-workers). People were enjoying the atypical weather.

But not two weeks earlier the city was crippled during the even rush hour by a furious snow storm that unceremoniously dumped at least 8 inches of powder in about four hours. From about 4 p.m. on, blustery winds and blinding snow delayed commuters on their way home. Some driving home on the Eisenhower Expressway reported a four-hour commute that night. I drove downtown to pick up something from my store that night but ended up staying downtown because of the traffic and storm.

Like all who live in this great city, I had to adapt and change my plans for that night. I had planned on going back to my apartment on the northwest side and accomplishing some things that night. But an estimated three-hour tour home on LSD convinced me to stick it out where I was. So I decided to call some friends who were close by and catch a movie. It’s not like I would be going anywhere soon so I adapted to the situation.

Adaptation seems essential to anyone’s life, since nothing ever goes as planned (And even if it does, one must still adapt to things going better than planned). Your checking account is overdrawn; you have to adjust your spending and finagle a plan to correct your account. You figure out that the profession you studied in school is not necessarily what you can succeed at doing. God deals you some kind of malady that cripples your body, mind or confidence. So what do you do? You learn to adapt.

Why? I adapt because I’ve seen what happens to those who can’t. Some revert back to some remedial stage of life and take some dead end job that has not hint of challenging them. Or they give up on using the gifts that God has endowed them with and accept something lesser. Or sometimes they feel it better to take their own life. And while I can understand how someone could get to such a place in life, I am enraged when I see such a situation. I am enraged at God for letting such a thing happen and I am enraged for whatever other reason I can assign for a suicide. Even if I know that these reasons are nothing more than me grasping at straws to try understand something that is incomprehensible.

So many people I know get used to some kind of support system and rely completely on that system, whether they know it or not. And then when they graduate from that stage of life and move out of a certain environment, they feel like they’re drowning because they don’t know how to sustain themselves without that old environment. Sometimes the solution is to just keep treading water. Eventually, the person may be able to see their situation and learn a stroke that will help them to swim on to the next stage of life.

But sometimes the best adaptation to a situation is to stop treading water. Some people need to be brought to the end of their own ability and begin sinking down into the water. Getting to such a point leaves a person one option: hope that something outside of themselves can help save their life. As they sink further under the surface and the water seems to get darker, a person can look to God and pray for some miracle. And then the person begins to feel a strange sensation on the sides of their neck, much like Harry Potter while in an underwater game in the most current installment of that series.

Something begins growing out of their neck and they can’t help but suck in the water that is pressing all around them. Gills appear on their neck and then they open wide their mouths against all their instincts and fill their lungs with water. They slowly begin sucking in water and their lungs somehow grab the oxygen out of the water and keep it flowing through their veins.

An astounding adaptation has occurred that leaves the person in awe that they can breathe under water and in awe of how inventive God can be.

New Startup Publication Peaks After a Year

So it's already been a year that the Beach Picayune has been in circulation. And thanks to the solid readership and advertisers who kept the Pic going during a time when the printed page seems to be on the out.

A new year brings new offerings and outlets for the Pic. A plan is in the works for readers to subscribe to the Picayune and receive new issues via email. Keep reading for details. And a new look is also under construction by the New Look Development Department.

Future issues that will satiate the insatiable appetites of the Pic readers include:Adaptations, a review of the book Blue Like Jazz, Reflections on Qtting Journalism, City News Days and further flashy, but never, never trashy, content on the Pic's younger sibling publication: www.xanga.com/Sonofa3.

SAVE CITY NEWS

Chicago will have to expunge a word from it's dictionary at 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 1, 2006: Scrappiness.

And yes, that is a word. And, yes, it is 12:01 a.m. not 12:01 p.m.

The idea of scrappiness originates from the New City News Service, an institution in Chicago journalism for the last century. And this idea will disappear when the service, formerly known as City News Service, electronically sends out it's last story on it's news wire sometime late that Saturday night. The service will be halted because the Chicago Tribune, who owns the City News Service (CNS), is cutting back on some jobs. There was something about CNS providing too much competition with the Trib's internet news services.

City News will define scrappiness for another 12 days but then after that, it will be hard to find some other source to take up that title. CNS has been an historic (yes, it's 'an' rather than 'a') training ground for journalists for decades. Mike Royko, Seymour Hirsch and Kurt Vonnegut were all alum and can credit CNS with catapalting their careers as a columnist, investigative reporter and novelist, respectively. Maybe catapalting would be too yellow a term for these journalists but they can at least say, "Yeah, City News taught me a few things." One of those things would be the importance of checking and rechecking facts. A CNS motto that emobies this principle is, "If your mother says she loves you, kick her in the shins and and tell her to prove it."

That's scrappiness.

And so would City Newsers racing around the city, beating five other newspapers, four t.v. news crews and a 24-hour radio news station to the scenes of breaking stories. Fires, police-involved shootings, bad car accidents, press conferences, etc. One legend has it that one reporter was passed on a tip from the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office that someone was murdered in an apartment building on the northern tip of Sheridan Road where only a month earlier someone else was found murdered a floor below. That reporter called up the kind, grandpa-like Rogers Park District (24) captain who told him that there was a crime scene investigation van sent to that Sheridan Road apartment building. Well to make a long story short, that reporter got to the apartment building before even the freelance videographer with multiple police and fire scanners in his car could (Check future editions of the Picayune for the full story).

Times like that were how CNS, a not-for-profit organization since it's restructuring in 1999 when it was revived by the Tribune, educated it's reporters in the old school methods of fact-finding. City Newsers wouldn't Google some address of a fire, they would know the general area after studying their official city street guide and be able to tell you the right way to get there. City Newswers wouldn't call up a random detective from Area 3 , which emcompasses the Rogers Park neighborhood, and ask about another murder in the aforementioned apartment building. They would shoot the shit with the 24th District captain and then bait him with, "Any investigations going on?"

The Tribune will be losing out on a great source of scrappy reporters who truly know the city when CNS stops broadcasting. All other news outlets will also be without the nitty-gritty, just-the-facts-maam, everyday dolldrums of reporting that followed the smaller crimes and kept track of bigger criminals all the way through the judicial process. All will be losing very cheap labor that does all the dirty work of hanging out in police stations and bond court hearings at 26th and California to know what's going on.

My 11 months there, though ill-fated, were some of the most formative and education of my life. I don't regret them at all.

It's too bad some other news agency, say Medill News Service or some other institution, can't pick up the work of CNS. If this newswire was saved, people would still be able to trace knowledge and scrappy reporters back to their home at CNS.

Afraid of the Dark Pt. 2

I was reminded again of how much a person's dark side can define them and help make them real.

I got an education over Thanksgiving of one of the most unpretentious but popular musicians after viewing Walk the Line. I came to see why Johnny Cash earned the name of the Man in Black. He was a normal man whose journey through the dark side began when he and some buddies tried to cut a record. The studio owner, who listened to Cash and friends play an old gospel song, stopped them halfway through the song.

He told Cash that their song was just another version of a gospel hit that everyone else has already sung. Cash asked if the owner was opposed to them singing a gospel song. The owner tried to explain what he meant but then asked Cash this: "If you were lying in a ditch somewhere with five minutes left to live, what would you say to God and anyone else who would listen?"

Cash paused and then began playing, a slow, dirge-like song called "Cry, Cry, Cry," one of the first hits that launched his career. The record owner knew that sometimes rehashed gospel songs wouldn't connect with any but a small group of listeners because they had the tendency to ring hollow. What gospel songs said about God was great but what they sometimes left out was the humanity, the pain, the darkness that so many people could identify with.

The owner didn't want Cash to be afraid of the dark. And to the benefit of the world, Cash didn't shy away anymore. Walk The Line show Cash's journey into drug abuse early on in his career and Cash's later music completes the portrait of the Man in Black, a man who lived in darkness but was still able to be redeemed. Some of Cash's greatest music were his four American Recordings, which were pointedly dark.

Cash was a better man for having ventured down the darker pathways and even into his own dark soul. He knew sin in his heart like a father knows his son and he was all the better a believer because of it.

COMING SOON

Due to a sprained ankle suffered while chasing down and apprehending some young punk who stole tips from the coffee-chain-that-shall-remain-nameless, The Beach Picayune was unable to be published for the last month. The editorial board regrets this lapse in coverage but pledges to return the thankless work of publishing the Picayune.

The Editorial Board of the Beach Picayune

Afraid of the Dark Pt.1

(This may seem like it was written in fast forward mode.)

I was scrubbing my dirty bathtub with Clorox bleach cleaner on Saturday. I had a good start to my day with two cups of Arabian Mocha Sanani and my compartmentalized time with God.

I had a rock station playing while I scrubbed. A dark, pulsating industrial tune began playing and I recognized it as "No. 1 Fan" by Garbage. " I would die for you...I would cry for you...I would crawl on hands and feet until I bleed." The words were acidic, gothic and disturbing but the music was entrancing.

I remembered then how much I like darker music like Garbage, Linkin Park or any other secular band that honestly devles into the darkness of this life. I can't get enough of this darker music. I confess that most of my regular digest of music now is not produced by someone who follows Christ. And I'm okay with that.

Naturally, there are dangers to such a diet at this. The constant hopeless messages or depressing conclusions could easily begin to convert one's ways of thinking. A friend of mine realized this and is fasting from secular music for his health (see Trent's blog on the list of links further down the page).

But there is a tendency in Christian music to be afraid of the dark. Afraid of those honest but dangerous expeditions into the treacherous land of human emotion and experience. Sadly, there are followers of Christ who have adopted the ancient idea that the spiritual life should be more important the physical or human life. The messy, the torturous , the mindfield that is our God-given emotions are ignored or suppressed with zeal. And much to the detriment of a person's entire being.

I know this lifestyle all too well, having zealously pursued it for a period of time. But thankfully, I matured in my understanding of theology, humanity and where and how those two things intersect. I am thankful for a high school english teacher, with his long hippie hair and his own rock band, for getting me hooked onto Led Zeppelin. I am thankful for those trepidations first steps of buying a Moby CD and a Radiohead album. I am thankful for the realization that my human emotions need to be included in my spiritual life and should be explored in order to benefit my spiritual maturity.

And not all of my bridges from the world of Christian music have been burned; only about 81% percent of them. Those 81% were bridges that led me away from music that simplified too much; that formulaized too much; that was too afraid to venture out into the unknown territory of emotions. The remaining passages still receive traffic when a band can creatively or honestly sing of the spiritual life and man's eternal crusade to be redeemed.

Christian music that isn't afraid of the dark sits right beside other musicians, like Ben Folds or Ray Lamontagne, who aren't either.

Angst-Fueled Thoughts Lead to Spiritual Revelation

So it was 11:30 p.m. on some weeknight and I was restless. I had an aching to be out doing something late at night again. Being a reporter during the graveyard shift had left me with the need to be up when only a small percentage of the population still is. To be out and conscious while the rest of the city sleeps.

I realized that this sort of restlessness, this angst, is the perfect subject for a blog. It would be a great intro to catch a reader's attention. It's a vague feeling that surely someone else has had and can relate to but, like me, is not quite sure how to put it into words.

So I ask a friend if she knows a coffeehouse that's open all night besides the well-known anchor of Old Town at Piper's Alley, the collossus of coffee, the ever-present espresso pedler, the coffee-chain-that-shall-remain-nameless. This fell0w night-dweller knew of a place: the Pick Me Up Cafe on Clark. I drove there only to discover a line of people waiting to be seated in the not-so-reflection-inducing, sit-down restaraunt atmosphere. I felt a little out of place walking in with a black leather journal, a legal notepad for blog ideas and The Shipping News, by E. Annie Proulx; the materials necessary for reflection and digestion.

This is a good illustration of angst-driven restlessness, that need for reflection and connection with God. People can relate to this common experience.

So I settled on the haven that vampires, homeless men, chess players and procrastinating students can all agree on: the coffee-chain-that-shall-remain. I drove another few miles and parked up the street, only to find that on this night, it was closed. Apparently, a power-washing crew was super-scrubbing the floors to remove the grime that builds up on a continual basis on the floor.

This was a realistic portrayal of a struggle or a Pilgrim's Progress-like journey that readers can be drawn in to. Will the faithful (but Angst-filled) Christian find that much-needed time of reflection and contemplation? Will he be able to not settle for that coffee-chain-that-shall? Will there be some resolution or spiritual revelation?

I was out of options and I've already driven all around town. I gave up and headed back to my apartment. A Burger King with an open-late drive thru got my business that night. I ate my pre-fab Hershey's Pie on my back porch that night and just enjoyed the night sky.

And then I realized that I could have some spiritual revelation on my back porch. I could come to the conclusion that the only place to sooth my restlessness was in fellowship with Christ. Or I could remember that I didn't need a pre-fab atmosphere, or as some would call it the "Third Place," in order to sort through thoughts and see how my faith fits into my present life.

And soon enough, I'll have written enought to satisfy my readers with more angst-fueled thoughts that lead to a spiritual revelation.

Donnie Darko enthusiastts-Start drooling

I've done some research on a very well-made but confusing movie. Here's a buddy of Eberts' take on it and a writer from Christianity Today's Books and Culture Magazine.


http://us.f1.yahoofs.com/bc/3f838842_1414c/bc/essays/Donnie+Darko+essay.doc?bf71AUDBC1Y83Ghx


http://us.f1.yahoofs.com/bc/3f838842_1414c/bc/essays/DonnieandtheBunnyman[2].doc?bf71AUDBd5ItWXhn

These are great if you're a fan or wanting to just figure out what the movie was about.

Wisdom from the Past

I've been re-reading a journal I've kept that's covered the last two and half years of my life. I've found some pretty strong stuff that's encouraging and challenging.

It seems it's always good to remember the past, for all it's struggles and joys, because the past defines who you are and how you handle the present. On a less philosophical note, you can also learn from your mistakes and, hopefully, not make them again.

Here's some excerpts:

"A friend's words came back to me (concerning worship): Even if your not truly in it, you're speaking words of truth (and that means something). 'Half of everyone else in the room probably didn't do their devos this morning either.'

"The idea of God using us in spite of ourselves seems to connect here. Like the whiskey priest in Greene's The Power and The Glory. He was drunk half of his life and he still had to be a priest to so many people. He had to give last rites, communion and hear confessions and baptize hundreds while he himself was far from being right with God. He was distrusting of the guy with the two yellow teeth (instead of loving); he was a coward when it came to his duty (instead of bravely performing his duty); he merely went through the motions of doing mass for a few small villagers (instead of faithfully putting all the meaning into the acts and truly talking to God).

"Even me writing this page and a half on the subject could be evidence. I'm writing up a storm on my 'bad day'. But, as I remember more, I always write more and can think with more clarity when things are wrong. But I have to write everyday, whether or not I think I have time. Writing is just as important as reading my Bible or praying..."
....
"And last night I talked to (a guy who had left stuff on my floor at school). Another friend had given me the idea and all I thought to ask about was his stuff. But when he answered, he seemed so relieved and encouraged. He even went through the 'I was gonna call you' routine. He told me about his year and how it was rough but refining. I felt bad for calling him about when he was going to pick up his stuff. But he was still encouraged and flattered that I called him. Call me the whiskey priest again."

A King's Religion

Wes Craven grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist home. Stephen King grew up in the Methodist church. Who woulda’ thunk it?

Although I’ve yet to see some ripples of that upbringing in Red Eye, Scream or Nightmare on Elm Street, I have seen them in a novel by King and in his memoir On Writing.

It made me seriously consider where King’s life may lay; but only for an hour or so. I finished Desperation and then realized my delusions of spiritual grandeur. King may be been brought up in the as a Methodist but the ripples of his rearing didn’t flow into what I wanted to see in his novel.

Like countless other believers, I wanted to see some sense of spiritual truth in some celebrity to make my faith seem more real, more authentic. As if some celebrity could truly authentic anything except the shallow vacuousness of celebrity. But I read between the lines to find it anyway.

Probably not since The Stand has King written something so overtly religious as Desperation. The premise is easy: a cast of random characters is imprisoned by a devilishly supernatural cop in a small mining town where something sinister was dug up in the mines.

The leader of the survivors is a pre-adolescent boy named David Carver, who, a year or two earlier, had a conversion experience where his prayer of faith miraculously healed a friend who was deathly ill. David had then had regular meetings with a priest to dialogue about faith. That faith is what makes for some dramatic, although sometimes silly scenes in the book.

All of the survivors were locked away in prison cells when David had a vision, or heard a voice direct him to a bar of Irish Spring soap in his cell. So he stripped down, soaped up and began to slip through the steel bars. And somehow, miraculously, his head was able to squeeze through as well. He said later that God directed him to the soap which enabled to escape the prison and find keys to free everyone else.

The oddest scene was in an abandoned theatre where all the survivors had holed up to escape the cop. People were looking for food and found a sleeve of Ritz crackers and a couple of cans of sardines. Before devouring the only food everyone had had in over twelve hours, David thought of asking the blessing on the food. After quelling objections from some of the people, David prayed and asked a blessing. Then one person began passing around the bag. Somehow, everyone was able to take from the sleeve of Ritz and all received a can of sardines. Somehow, the brown paper bag never ran out of sardines and crackers.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or get upset at that. Or if I should really do either.

So there were some other religious imagery scattered throughout the novel but they all seemed to be disconnected and disjointed. They didn’t flow together in some bigger picture or prove to work together to make some kind of religious point. They were merely plot devices without any meaning.

This can only be expected considering how King writes. He prefers to not plot out his stories but only try to develop his characters. This isn’t a horrible way to write but then the story can almost seem aimless.

In spite of the aimless imagery, King did have a little redeeming theology that was worked into the story. David Carver and another of the survivors, a cocky writer surely to be modeled after part of King’s own personality, came to the conclusion that God can be cruel but refining. This was the one redeeming facet to the seven hundred pages of horrific and Texas Chainsaw Massacre-like gore.

Another revealing passage on King’s religious beliefs came in the middle of On Writing. King was hired to move some furniture to make ends meet during his early writing career. He was in the trailer home of the mom of a girl that gave King the idea for writing Carrie. Inside the trailer was an ugly crucifix:

“Dominating the trailer’s living room was a nearly life-sized crucified Jesus, eyes turned up, mouth turned down, blood dribbling from beneath the crown of thorns on his head. He was naked except for a rag twisted around his hips and loins. Above this bit of breechclout were the hollowed belly and the jutting ribs of a concentration-camp inmate. It occurred to me that Sondra (the girl who inspired Carrie) had grown up beneath the agonal gaze of this dying god, and doing so had undoubtedly played a part in making her what she was when I knew her: a timid and homely outcast who went scuttling through the halls of Lisbon High like frightened mouse.

‘That’s Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior,’ Sondra’s mother said, following my gaze. ‘Have you been saved, Steve?’

I hastened to tell her I was saved as saved could be, although I didn’t think you could ever be good enough to have that version of Jesus intervene on your behalf. The pain had driven him out of is mind. You could see it in his face. If that guy came back, he probably wouldn’t be in a saving mood.”

Prayers...

Here's a couple prayers I put together for a congregational prayer section of my church's service. It was great to be able to write it out and organize it all.

May 2005
The Lord will roar from on high and from his holy habitation utter his voice; he will roar mightily against his fold and shout against all the inhabitants of the earth. The clamor will resound to the ends of the earth, for the Lord has an indictment against the nations, he is entering into judgment with all flesh, and the wicked he will put to the sword.
O, Lord, how mighty is your power and your wrath for none can stand against your holiness. Yet in your complexity, you are everlastingly love.
The Lord is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression. He will pardon the iniquity of his people, according to the greatness of his steadfast love, just as he has forgiven his people, from Egypt until now.
Your love draws even the most unloveables to You. You pardon our sins without keeping record. Your complexity knows no bounds and we are blessed to understand what little our finite minds can grasp. The only way to comprehend what we can of You is to hold all your abilities and characteristics in tension through the wisdom from your Spirit. It is through that tension that we can fathom our lostness and your grace; our being redeemed but not yet complete; your coming to earth in our decayable flesh and your perfect, final return. It is in your complexity that we can understand how you cursed a fruitless fig tree that withered away to its roots yet fully restored the withered hand of a shamed man at the synagogue. Your fury, love, wrath and grace are wonderful things.
We ask for a glimpse of your greater plan of redemption so we can know how to better serve you in our short time on earth. Help us to see the people you’ve placed in our lives that need to hear Your truth and give us courage to speak that truth.
And lastly, blanket us with your wisdom so we can continue to understand all your complexities and how they all fit together in a giant plan that we will probably never be able to view as a whole in this life.



Aug. 2005
It seems that we are always the prodigal son returning to our loving father with our heads held low in shame. For we know how righteous and holy You are and how much an affront our sin is to you. It seems like just yesterday we had squandered the grace and mercy you cloaked us with when we returned the last time and are again in need of redemption.
But what this repetition has made us forget is that your forgiveness and love are the same as the last time we came trudging home. Your unceasing, unconditional love is there, waiting to rejoice at the sight of us confessing our sins and admitting that we can’t save ourselves. You are eagerly awaiting the moment when you can kill the fatted calf in celebration of our returning to you. You never grow tired of forgiving us and giving more grace for us to be the holy people we ought to be.
Thank you for the joy and hope we have in being loved by you. It is so easy to be overwhelmed by the guilt of our sins that we forget the true nature of your love. We forget that your grace exists to help us to be more than human and to exhibit your holiness. We forget that the joy and peace with our sometimes turbulent lives is what can attract other to you. The true happiness in spite of our humanness is what calls people to find where our hope comes from.
We ask that we understand and remember the joy that comes from being forgiven and are able to exhibit that joy to all those you bring into our lives.

Between a rock and loving place

I've found myself hanging out a lot with the comrades from the coffee-chain that shall remain nameless. I almost preferred their company to that of my local rock, my body of Christ one weekend.

I know what should be my base, fuel and reason for existing. And I know what acceptance and friendship are. And I know the bonds that are forged through the fires of trial, the pains of incompetant co-workers, and the shared sufferings of peddling the world's most expensive coffee.

It's seeming that in order to truly be Christ to them, I've got to be a friend to them. The picture's a little fuzzy right now but I seem to have glasses on that are helping me to be far-sighted and know what I'm being a friend for (besides just being a friend for friend's sake).

Traffic in Humboldt

I heard the sing-song happy music broadcast out of a scratchy speaker outside my apartment and knew that my local ice cream truck was driving down my block. I grabbed a handful of change from my change mug and dashed outside to catch the truck that would happily coat my mouth with lactose-based soft serve.

Luckily, a hispanic kid had flagged it down and was getting a banana boat ice cream cone. I asked for a Boston Shake when it was my turn. As I waited for it to be made, I had to breathe in the exhaust fumes that sputtered out of the truck. "I bet if you stand here long enough, you could get high," I wondered.

But then I also remembered having a conversation with someone about another way to get high from the neighborhood ice cream truck. It began with the observation that the truck had been out one night around 1:30 a.m. Now I know that only naughty children are out that late but I'm sure that those same naughty children may be able to get some naughty treats from the possibly naughty ice cream truck. And none of those treats would be lactose-based.

If the truck is as naughty as it seems, then it is only one of many ways to traffic naughty treats in my neighborhood. Through careful observation ( not even as a reporter but as a person who spends hours sitting on his apartment's front steps in order to get clear phone reception), I've come to realize that all I'd have to do to get high would be to talk my neighbors.

I can ride up on a bike and nod to the right person and he would leave his place of holding up the steel gates by the sidewalk and exchange whatever I'd like. Since I don't have a bike, I could drive up to another section of my block, say 'Hey' and another guy would hop into my car while I drove around a couple blocks and made a transaction in the privacy of my car.

If it were a few months ago, I could have just walked around near my place and looked for small dime bags stashed out in the open so no one person would be caught with them. They would be lodged between the post and wire mesh of a fence on the sidewalk, hidden in a hole between the edge of a sidewalk and the ground (where hopefully the rats wouldn't find them) or even in the cylindrical cones used to prevent people from reaching around to the nob on the inside of a steel gate. The tactical officers from the Shakespeare District station somehow caught on and searched my street for all the little nooks and crannys that hid the naughty treats.

I pondered all this as I sipped my shake and realized that I'd soon be saying goodbye to this neighborhood. I began to feel an odd sensation in my head after downing half of the Boston Shake. I probably wouldn't be able to run after the ice cream truck in my new neighborhood of Lincoln Square. And if I did, I'm sure they wouldn't serve the same tasty treats as my current neighborhood. My motor synapses seemed to be slow in functioning and I felt like I was wearing someone else's heavy perscription glasses. Everything began to be funny, even Saturday Night Live. There would be no more late night fixes from the ice cream truck...or was it a whale? I know it was big and blue and had eyes painted on the side. I wonder if the truck could fly like the Magic School Bus and play "What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been" by the Grateful Dead.

I'm sure gonna miss those Bostson Shakes.

Another Enthralling Entry....

Coming Soon!

The Coffee Master

Due to recent circumstances at my local coffee-chain-that-shall-remain-nameless, I have stepped up to the plate to become the barista that can. The master barista that glides around the espresso station in an effortless flow of arms, milk, espresso and plastic lids. If you slow down the security tapes to half-speed, you can almost see my arms pump four squirts of mocha into the medium cup while simultaneously marking the cup with a script only decipherable to the most-trained super-barista.

Our manager has up and moved to NYC where people apparently are more willing to pay bigger bucks for his artwork. Another senior barista (who preceded me by only a few weeks) who would have taken the spot had to move back to Oregon for surgery on a cist near his spine. The 50-some-year-old employee who is a 7-year veteran of the company, was forever banned from the barista station for slapping the hand of a customer who reached into the station to get something.

So who is left? The guy hired nearly two months ago that is to be the center of the all that is the coffee-chain-that-shall-remain in our River North neighborhood. After a few days on stepping into the fray of employees at registers calling out drinks and customers gathering around like zombies waiting for another taste of blood, I am the sole Barista.

It is I who must use his innate attention to detail to magically make an iced, decaf, triple tall, sugar-free vanilla, two percent, extra hot latte appear out of thin air from behind the mechanized monster call the espresso machine. It is I who must battle the monster with my keen hearing and mutli-tasking ability to catch the scalding hot shots in labeled cups with syrup and other extras (even a freakin' packet of Sweet and Low) while finishing them off with the correct lid and cardboard sleeve (correctly labeled with the dreaded company logo). All the while never running out of steamed non-fat (not skim because skim could be confused with soy) or whole milk and never having the machine stop to have you empty out the spend espresso pucks, refill the espresso bean hoppers and never missing the next three drinks being called out by the company "partners" (as all employees are called in this communistic company).

And if by chance, I shall one day defeat this mighty monster, I can one day be called a shift supervisor (or if I can learn to swallow enough corporate BS) even Coffee Master (which is the communist term for asst. manager).

Top __ Reasons you shouldn't have signed the lease on your apartment

10. A bald musician named Frank lives in your basement with a ten-piece drum set.

9. You have to go to that a neighborhood fruit stand to drop off your rent money.

8. Your landlord tells you that if he didn't like you, he'd have charged you three hundred dollars more for the place.

7. You realize your garden apartment actually was used as an interrogation room for the mob but the landlord added another window and a bathroom since those days.

6. The two squad cars and police sergeant who greeted you at your first viewing of the place now know you by name.

And I'm out of funny reasons so five is all you'll get.

 

Moody Over Margaritas

"How many people have to kill themselves before Moody does something?"

A friend of mine posed this question not too long ago while she and another friend of mine joined me at an outdoor patio of a restaurant.

It was the first sunny day that dried up the April showers and began to usher in the May flowers. The breeze bustled through the patio and made me wonder how heavy the margarita glasses on our table were. They were holding their own so they must be heavy enough.

Each of us were halfway through our tequila and lime drinks when my friend (whom I hadn't talked with in over a year) asked, "Did you know Clark Stacy?" (See $%&*& $*#!)

It seemed that she had traveled to Europe one summer with a school trip. She got to know Clark well and took the above photograph while traveling over there.

All three of us knew Clark and all three of us knew depression. We vented about all our frustrations and then came the million dollar question I began with.

Is that too harsh? Too over-dramatic? Some could not even conceive of an institute that trains the next generation of Christian leaders as being responsible for the suicide of one of it's trainees. Yet some would cast the blame no where else.

We dialogued about frustrations over the loss of Clark, the culture of evangelicalism and our alma mater. It was an odd sort of therapy session that lasted for almost two hours. Even as the sun disappeared behind some buildings and the breeze brought back the all too familiar chill, we kept talking and chomping down on the guacamole and chips we ordered. All the other customers had retreated into the restaurant to warm up.

The chill outside reminded us that it was not yet the longed-for summer. We were inbetween seasons, having lived through the sunless winter and rainy spring but still waiting for the deliverance of summer. We were in an inbetween period where we had to persevere for the better that was to come.

My friend only lived about a block from the restaurant and invited us over to see her place. She mentioned earlier that a friend had given her an expensive bottle of tequila as a gift and that she didn't want to just open it to drink it alone. This seemed like a worthy occasion so she opened it.

"So what are we going to drink to?" she asked. "You're supposed to drink to something."
"How 'bout surviving?" I said.
"That sounds good," said my other friend.
"To surviving evangelicalism," she said.

We raised our shot glasses with a clink and let the warmth of the liquor remind of the coming summer.