Old bathroom in a Pilsen warehouse.
Yoga Cows
There is nothing like women breathing in yoga. While they might not like you listening to them pee, they have few constraints about letting a little air through the lungs. Lying there in the dark, pretending to think about others or something spiritual, but all I can think of is my own life like laundry and leaving yoga so I can go do it. But the breathing women bring me back. They sound like so many comforting cows, eating grass and expelling gas. I can get into that. I can hang their lululemon pants up and guide their foot instead into a black and white bovine type get up. ‘Om.’ ‘Moo.’ The universal language of just being there. Of eating grass and shitting a ton and not caring who sees or hears you.
Lakeview sky on Friday.
Tuesday night sky in Pilsen.
Bathroom graffiti at Improv Olympic on Clark St.
To do violence is a choice. Choose peace.
—Church board at St. Agatha’s in North Lawndale. The church is hosting a civil disobedience training in preparation for final CPS school closing announcements.
At today’s photo shoot for Alex Carter designs. Wicked Pilsen designer who recently showed at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York.
A good woman brings men wilderness, not paradise.
—poet from Oak Park River Forest high school at Chicago’s Louder Than a Bomb poetry slam.
Bring Up The Bodies: For Christopher Hitchens
(Photo: Jamie James Medina, The Observer)
Dear Christopher Hitchens,
You died before Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies made its debut, so let me tell you about it. Anne’s out. Not only is she out, she’s down one head, which you already knew from English history, but still what a scene. Here’s the off with her head moment:
-the executioner calls out sharply, ‘Get me the sword.’ The blinded head whips around. The man is behind Anne, she is misdirected, she does not sense him. There is a groan, one single sound from the whole crowd. Then a silence, and into that silence, a sharp sigh or a sound like a whistle through a keyhole: the body exsanguinates, and its flat little presence becomes a puddle of gore.
I mean, come on. Talk about good writing. I bet that’s just how it was unless that wasn’t how it was at all.
So anyway, it’s all about Jane now (although we know what’s coming for her too) and I just bet you’d like the parts about Jane as well:
Is it possible that the masters drew from life, that they studied the face of some woman betrothed, some woman being walked by her kin to the church door? French hood, gable hood, it is not enough. If Jane could veil her face completely, she would do it, and hide her calculations from the world.
That Hilary Mantel does love a good comma.
Even Henry almost dies in this one. And practically everyone else dies at the end too, including that kind of effeminate boy Mark who openly admitted to having sex with the queen.
Not much on brains that Mark.
Ah, if only you hadn’t smoked so much Christopher. Although you do look so cool in every picture where you’re doing it. Then again, there just isn’t any way around death. Like commas in a Hilary Mantel book, death creeps up with a frequency that’s alarming.
Dead Pigeon
The big snow happened the day after I found this pigeon. Walking back the next day, I looked for some sign of its existence. Maybe it was picked up by men in the night or maybe it was buried under the white, its little pigeon corpse like some baby mammoth, perfectly preserving itself for some Field Museum of the future.
“And this is what they called a pigeon,” the robots will say.
Or most likely they won’t say that. Because the thaw is coming and the odds are good that this particular pigeon will be out with next day’s trash. A little body in a big heap.
I thought I wouldn’t be able to see it at all, there was so much snow. But then the tip of the wing poked out and waved hello.
