Blockquote

“Car,” my brain said, “Car,” when I thrust my head into a downpour out the front door. “Car.” Precipitation at 8:10 a.m. trips the mechanism by which I grant myself advance pardon for driving my two mile commute. “Biked yesterday. Car. Four tires set stabler on damp asphalt than two. Car. Wet pants retard technical genius. Car. A responsible and valuable employee. Car.” When, with, yes, glee, I unlocked the driver’s side door from the distance of my porch I did not foresee my circular course. Parking was impossible. I doubled back to hoist my bike from the basement, as I should have from the start.

Not long ago I traveled 25 miles of northeastern Illinois twice a day from one small suburb to another. A sorry state, shifting my off-the-clock life to score advantage in a race to the fore of a half-hour bottleneck across the Fox River: closing the garage at six, eating at my desk to trim a lunch hour, leaving the office at three, asleep at nine: for a job that even at the highest wage I’d ever garnered promised neither challenge nor future: where “benefits” cost sotto voce a minimum eight weekly hours above 40. A two-year search turned up no better jobs near my then-home, the regional economy bent towards the skyscrapers 50 miles southeast.

But commuting is second-nature. So much of this country built to accommodate driving in turn came to require driving, and the few deterrents so far prove impotent to effect changes to the way Americans live and do business. A well-educated workforce holds $4.14 a gallon at Ashland and Grand a pittance against the riches gained in the shimmering district to the intersection’s east. In Chicago all roads lead to Madison and State, with most commuters setting out each morning towards this goal from distances far beyond my beloved West Town. Remote, frightening places. Winnetka. Naperville. Gary. Schaumburg. Wheaton.

While a suburbanite myself, I came to see few suburban economies capable of supporting their populations: distant communities peopled by urban expats dire to keep pace with a mass-marketed standard of living (HD, iPod, Starbucks) without the inconvenience of, you know, living near other people. With everything everywhere costing the same, and jobs supporting these prices rare outside urban centers, workers must leave their communities to buy the things the market demands they have, and which they most definitely want.

Relocating nearer the site of one’s work might be a viable solution to this problem, provided such a move didn’t require reconciling oneself to the volatility of living with others. If a man can stomach writing off three daily hours to bridge the salary his skills command and a domesticity free of human annoyances, he will. His earnings incommensurate with the economy of the place he rests his head, but to maintain his thin-veiled misanthropy, by the means at his disposal, he will.¹ Naturally I called bullshit and left for Chicago. Two and a half years in, I’m doing all right. Cut 46 miles from my day and have yet to turn ass-hat as a city driver.

Today I drove to work—calm, patient, but assertive—only to find Kinzie closed to parking for “construction” that didn’t actually happen. With the morning’s rain, everyone, like me, who could drive would, and as it turned out, did. Justin circled the building twice before accepting these cars wouldn’t be leaving their spots, turned back to Grand and came home. Then I hopped on my bike and wove through traffic. That was pretty awesome.

Chicago, this is your Sumatra Blend. This is your paper cups and napkins, your wooden stirrers, even your biodegradable corn-based silverware. This is your Equal, this is your turbinado with the natural molasses. This is your refrigerated plastic bottle of Diet Coke. This is your Tribune, Sun Times, RedEye, and the weekly rags. This is your compacted trash, your recycling—your paper, your plastic. This is your Amazon order, as well as your interlibrary loan. This is your Netflix. This is your five copies of Juno at the corner place. This is In Rainbows on vinyl. This is your iPod, Sony earbuds, Bose dock. This is your new laptop, and this is the new hard drive for your old one. This is your new tires. This is your city parking sticker, plate renewal sticker, the orange self-sealing parking violation envelopes. This is the chain to replace the one you wore out. This is your New York chain to replace your U-Lock to replace your worthless cable. This is your concert posters, and tickets, and band t-shirts, and the water bottles, and the trash bags for the water bottles. This is your bike map, street map, CTA map. This is the sod in your backyard. This is the flowers lining the sidewalk patio of the restaurant you like, the one that makes the neighborhood so great. This is your year-round fresh produce—your Salinas Valley lettuce, Sonoma grapes, Michigan blueberries, Georgia peaches, Florida oranges, not to mention your Mexican tomatoes, corn, peppers, and avocados, your semolina and rice noodles, your pork, chicken, beef, shrimp, tofu, your beer, vodka, your tonic water. This is your soap, deodorant, razors. This is your shirt, pants, socks, underwear, and shoes.

This is your three-day shipping, your overnight, your get it here yesterday. This is everything you buy and everything you make with the things you buy, everything you produce not from seed and by your own hand. Sometimes even the seeds. This is your Just in Time with machines measured by the ton steered by fallible beings tempted a few miles more before turning in, if not also by chemicals to enhance or dull or deaden. This is your desires and your demands careening off the Dan Ryan through a bus shelter and part-way up an escalator.

This, then, is your shock—short lived as shock is—and brief sympathy, and caution. They were people just trying to get somewhere. This is, still, complete oblivion to the role our own stupid, impatient little lifestyles played in two deaths and at least 21 injuries one Friday night in April in Chicago. This is our material lives trucked over the road at inhuman speeds to ensure whatever we order is available when we order it. This is us at the wheel a mere two or three times removed.

She was convinced I was incapable of relaxing—lifted my wrist shoulder height and released, the arm hanging an inch lower than where she let it drop. We repeated the exercise. “This time,” I boasted, but my plasticine muscles never gave to gravity. I’d pull down, late, and she caught me. “SEE?” she exclaimed. “Again,” I said, and again, and again, many times before the point was made in both our minds and I set out making a project of correcting the fault, trying and trying long after she’d gotten up from the table.

Discipline never has been a problem. On the other hand, slowing my life’s pace, lowering expectations of others to a reasonable, which is to say minimal, level, and living with gratitude for the most basic elements of existence (I have Plato’s four in mind) proved an overwhelming chore.

In high school I should have given my fists the release they ached for. Instead, I left my hometown peeved and boorish, a burgeoning misanthrope who won far fewer friends than I had opportunity to enjoy in college. The few who stood by through that passive agressive and domineering streak were truly a remarkable lot, a fact that by itself should have served to convince me of the warmth and benevolence creeping about. To the friends who weathered my moods I apologized long ago, but were contrition equal with letting down my guard, I’d have aced my ex-girlfriend’s relaxation test.

When I came to Chicago, fresh off three solid years of loss and loneliness like I’d never known—and I’d known severe loneliness, raised a mile from town by two-lane highway—it was with the explicit goal of rebuilding my life. Bit by bit it came together: friends who act their age, who read books; a comfortable apartment in an interesting neighborhood; steady work in a field I don’t abhor with people I respect; enough distance from my parents to really appreciate our times together. Forget for a moment the absurdity of self-realization; there’s value to gaining a modicum of control over one’s life. No piece of this new life came without my having determined to have it, and by the grace of God I did. Which perhaps defeats the case for will.

Anyway, discernment is a fantastic thing. Late this February I cancelled a vacation the logistics of which brought on more stress than three nights in Tampa could have solved. I stayed in Chicago with everyone I know and everything I enjoy, and kept the days off, and scheduled the first massage of my young life, still three years since any hands but my own worked my shoulders towards loosening. The fingers plowed so deep I ached for a couple days after. When that eased it left just a really nice feeling, and then the laughter. Hours of it, silly, seemingly unprovoked. I surmised, half serious, that the massage loosed joy stowed fifteen years deep. To think it would be buried today had I flown south.

And still the story gets better.

Within two weeks, the papers my sweat-damp fingers pried from an envelope “too large,” said my roommate, “to be a rejection letter,” gave notice of my admittance to the University of Chicago Divinity School, where I will pursue the sole course of study that’s made sense since my last bout with academic life. Upon completing the program I will have certain and incontestable claim to the title that eclipses all other academic titles, that title being the Master of Divinity. What spirits I might summon to my bidding and by what faculties are matters properly left to the distant end of attaining the degree.

For the moment my expectations take the more modest form of a stronger apprehension of Christian history and theology, in particular as these inform contemporary American belief and practice. My sensitivity to just how contentious the topic of religion is in American culture only provokes my desire to undertake its study. Like my namesake saint, whose other title I hope to avoid, I approach religion intellectually and regard its civic aspects with significant interest. There is something deeply fascinating about a nation that would grant its highest office to someone, in part, on the basis of his being “a good Christian man.” What drives this country, what fostered its birth and sustains and plagues it to this day, is as theological as it is rationalistic. I expect three years at the Div School will provide a fair start towards sussing out the nature of the American church/state relationship, Plymouth Colony to Trinity UCC. If I might help moderate the pitch of this discourse, I think that would be a fine thing.

All best left to the future. Five months forward I take up residence in a new apartment in a neglected segment of the city I love. Meanwhile this place slowly wakes from the wettest, most drawn-out season in my memory of Chicago winters. These mornings I open my eyes to sunlight warming the bricks an arm’s length from my bedroom window, me bouncing to the tune of my circulatory system on the box spring. There are long avenues to bike, beautiful women to admire, beaches to exploit, full meals to prep from farmer’s market produce, with good friends, on patios, pilseners within reach. At 27 years I am happy. And relaxed.

Thank God. It’s about fucking time.

Who paid five degraded American dollars to reference blockquote.org from the word vegan on The Big Word Project? I don’t know. Site co-founder Paddy Donnelly skirted a request to identify my anonymous patron, answering, “Someone must have bought it for you, lucky you!” The clues don’t sift to helpful details—someone who knows Blockquote is my site, knows I’m vegan, and has the audacity to anonymously link these two on a public site I have no stake in and no control over. I’m kind of grateful. I’ll get to that later.

The Big Word Project’s founders claim to be “exploring what different words mean to different people” is something more than disingenuous. In the search engine optimization game, it’s called “black hat,” a grab for unfair advantage in search rankings by playing to search engines rather than to users. Built to exploit the blood lust for PageRank, the site’s pitch is cynical and the business model predatory. To the site’s founders, every word means money. That’s “viral marketing” in Web 2.0 parlance.

Viral marketing is a means of transmitting commercial messages horizontally or “peer-to-peer,” as a virus spreads through personal contact. You find something online, you email your friends, they email their friends, wallets open, the rich get richer. Once mined consumer data pares our shopping to predictable patterns of activity, relieving us of the need to make decisions, gradually but surely blotting from our minds all illusion of personal choice and convincing us to yield our final freedoms to corporations already bent on owning us (that’s why it’s called “branding”!), viral marketers will sink their shiny little razor teeth into our necks and bleed us dry. They will kill us and they will kill themselves. Welcome to the end times.

Thanks to the hundreds who bought their snake oil, Paddy and friend Lee Munroe make out all right. Nevermind that Google punishes black hat SEO with a few algorithmic tweaks, or that The Big Word Project will fade to obscurity before March, 2008, is a yellowing stack of newsprint. At this writing, with nearly 2000 words registered at a dollar a letter and an average 4.5 letters per English word, these two are $9000 richer than they were on Monday. Notwithstanding his hatred for “predictability,” Paddy’s future in business is bright.

This post is the first of likely many on blockquote.org to use the word vegan. Whoever bought me the word meant well, I’m sure. It’s a strange honor to know others regard me high enough to warrant exclusive rights to the word in this arbitrary lexicon. I also thank you for the sudden spike in traffic to my site, which in some respects is nice. But I ask, please, next time you feel like dropping $5 on me, bear in mind that that much covers beer and tip where I drink, and I’d be real happy about that.

This morning I shipped a document proposing to set the course of my next three years. One month and a half from the go ahead to release the wheel, so long as I keep a foot on the gas. Reverse cruise control. My plans meanwhile:

1) Nap.

2) All this theory and I plow through fiction like sand. But you all who know me know I won’t stop, it’ll last maybe two paperbacks before I’m back collecting notes on the Reformation and Deconstruction and all. Make me read Faulkner again, hold me to it.

3) Maybe I’ll ask a girl out. Been awhile.

4) Coffee, the Times in print, chair in a street facing window.

5) I’m gonna get buzzed on good beer and I’m gonna do it more than once. Tonight whatever the Handlebar’s got on tap, then I owe myself a four pack of Bourbon County Stout, then we’ll see.

Wish me luck.

At 3am I woke freezing to find the batteries in the thermostat dead. The screeching drawers of an old desk yielded nothing from my housemates’ common property so I dug through my own for a pair of double-As, replaced them, and tossed in bed for an hour. My alarm didn’t rouse me on account of its newly dead triple-A. When I roused myself and checked the other clock, I figured if I was going to be late, I could be late. I showered a long hot shower and ate my oatmeal over email. I saw a coworker cleaning snow off his car. “I’m not going in today,” he said. “I’m going in late,” I said. He said that sounds like a plan. I stopped at a favorite cafe halfway to work for a green tea to go, and the barista said everyone has those days.

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