ozma914 | Entries tagged with chicago

Seven years ago, I swore I would never, EVER drive in Chicago again.

Last Saturday, we drove to Chicago. Again.

It was for the same reason as last time, to see The Cure in concert. The Cure's music is ... well ... it's been called post-punk, gothic rock, new wave, and alternative. Robert Smith has fronted the band since the late 70s, so I assume it wasn't all that at the same time. Oddly, while I don't care for those types of music, I actually like The Cure. Not the way Emily does. Not "we have to go to Chicago to see them play". No, sir. But I love my wife, and proved yet again that I'm willing to put my life on the line for her.

The venue was different from last time, giving me the hope it wouldn't be as far into the city.

It wasn't as close. It was closer. We actually drove between the skyscrapers at one point. We experienced our version of "The Suicide Squad".

The place is called The United Center. As I understand it, some sports-ball team plays in it when concert season is over. The Bills, or the Bulls, or the Boobs, something like that.

We got the nosebleed seats, but I didn't realize how literal that was. Our seats were in the very last row of a stadium that seats 23,500 people (sold out), and to get there we had to buy rock climbing equipment and hire a sherpa. It never occured to me that anyone would put in sections so steep that your toes are at the level of the next fan's head, which I'm sure has caused a fight or two. The place had to have been built in the 50s--no way would authorities allow such a fall risk these days. If I'd slipped on the top step, I'd have kept tumbling until I bowled over the drummer.

(I checked: It opened in 1994. They probably had some celebratory hang gliders launch from our position that day.)

And the band? Well, the band was great, but I wish I'd brought my telescope. They looked like little Polly Pockets, if you remember those. Kind of micro-dolls. There were two big TV monitors beside the stage, but we could barely see those either, especially once the questionable smoke started to rise from the audience.

As you can see from the above photo, we actually had a seat right in the center. Cool, right? The crowd is shining their cell phones to bring the band back for an encore. I don't know what encores are in other places, but this was more like the halftime show.

The Cure started a little late, and after that "encore" we walked out to the parking lot, got in the car, and ... sat there. Driving to the venue had been a lot like the asteroid field in "Star Wars V: Crazy Drivers Strike Back". So we decided to let things clear a little, and the more we thought about it, the more we let things clear.

We were, in fact, the last car through the exit gate. On purpose.

Surely, by well after midnight, both the concert crowd and regular traffic would have regained some measure of sanity, right? RIGHT?

Chicago driver are insane.

Not "bad". In fact, many of them are quite good in a NASCAR kind of a way. Sure, they may arrive with their cars covered in dents and scratches and pedestrians, at a speed that nets them a good 9 mpg gas mileage, but they'll get there fast.

Base, drums, amplifiers ... much calmer.

I had to drive 15 mph over the speed limit just to keep from being rear-ended. Even then, every few minutes something would streak around us like an F-15 doing a flyover. Then it would veer across three lanes, pass someone else, and dive back across the same three lanes without ever touching the brakes.

In heavy traffic. Well, it probably didn't seem heavy to them.

I'd like to speak specifically to everyone in the Chicago area who drives a Dodge Challenger. We saw the rear-end of several, because despite my instincts, I had to keep my eyes open. You people, you're crazy. Nuts. Looney-tunes. The fact that any of you survive is proof of guardian angels.

Typical Chicago Driver Enjoying the Mayhem.

As for us, there were only a few times when I had to stand on the brakes and swerve into another lane. Emily may have screamed, I don't know. I did. The rest of the time my death grip stayed on the steering wheel, my head on a swivel, and my stomach in my mouth.

We got home around 4 a.m., and after we stopped shaking slept most of the day. Then we woke up with a concert hangover. That's a real thing.

Then, the next day, Monday, my muscles remembered they'd spent six hours so tense you could bounce a quarter off them. Not to mention the three hours in the stadium seats, which were actually comfortable for the first hour. (Yeah, my ears popped on the way up, but nobody dropped a car on me.) Ironically, after all that sitting over the weekend, on Monday I couldn't get off the couch.

I'm glad Emily got to see her favorite band, and I'll take her again--if they ever come to Albion.

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Remember whenever you don't buy a book, another driver is born in Chicago. Oh, the humanity!

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In 1906, the Chicago Cubs won 116 games, a Major League baseball record. They lost the World Series to the Chicago White Sox but then won the next two, becoming the first team to appear in three consecutive World Series.

Their last big win came in 1908. It was all uphill from there.

71 years ago, in 1945, they got into the World Series for the last time. During game four Wrigley Field officials ejected Cubs fan Billy Sianis, who had two box seat tickets: One for him and one for his goat. Apparently one of them stank. When he was thrown out Sianis declared, “The Cubs, they ain’t gonna win no more”.

And they didn’t.

And that, kids, is why the Cubs being in the World Series is such a big deal. You want to make history, but you don’t want to make it the way they did in the last century.

The Cleveland Indians haven’t won the Series themselves since 1948, but the Cubs have them beat by twice as much. I have to root for the most underdoggie of underdogs. Incidentally, my wife works in Steuben County, Indiana, which is exactly halfway between Chicago and Cleveland. Apparently for decades, late at night in Pokagon State Park, you could hear the sound of baseball fans’ dreams shattering.

So, how long has it been for the Cubs?

The last time the Cubs won the World Series was also the year Ford rolled out the first Model T. It was the year of the first commercial radio transmission.

That was only five years after the Wright brothers took to the air for the first time. In 1908, Cellophane was developed. It would be five more years before the zipper was invented.

No one had ever heard of the Titanic, which wouldn’t sink for another four years. Arizona wasn’t a state, not to mention Hawaii or Alaska. No one had ever heard of Wheaties, Wonder Bread, traffic lights, or bubble gum.

The guy who played the first Doctor Who was born in 1908. That’s the longest running science fiction TV show in history, although TV hadn’t been invented yet. In 1945, the last time the Cubs went to the World Series, Doctor Who wasn’t even a gleam in anyone’s eye.

In 1945 the microwave oven, Slinky, and Tupperware were invented—the first modern, room-sized computer wouldn’t come around for another year. 1945 was full of history, as the Allies won World War II and the atomic age began.

The last time the Cubs went to the series, we did not yet have the bikini, disposable diapers, kitty litter, Velcro, or the TV remote control. Al Gore had not yet invented the internet, which is fine because there was no personal computer, microprocessor, or RAM.

I found all this on Google. They didn’t have Google. They didn’t even have the milk carton.

So yeah, it’s a big deal. How big of a deal we’ll find out in a few days, but be warned, Cubs fans: So far as I know, the goat never forgave them.

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There’s No Cure for Chicago Driving

This first appeared in the 4County Mall, in print and online:

http://www.4countymall.com/single-post/2016/09/10/No-Cure-for-Chicago-Driving

SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

I thought I’d seen bad traffic. I thought I’d seen crazy drivers.

Then I went to Chicago.

I’m a small town boy. When I was younger, my idea of heavy traffic was Fort Wayne, which is about half an hour from my home. With a population of 250,000, Fort Wayne is the second largest city in Indiana, which isn’t saying much—but the fact that most of Indiana is not city is one of the things I like about it.

Years ago I drove to Atlanta, Georgia, and got a new definition of heavy traffic. We arrived during morning rush hour, an ironic term considering I could have walked over the jammed-up cars without ever touching the ground—and gotten there faster.

About ten years later, I had the occasion to drive U-Haul’s largest truck model through New York City, while towing a car on a trailer. It was two months after 9/11/01. Naturally, I got waved to the curb the police, who at that point were looking over every rental truck that came along.

The irony, though, is that the proximity to 9/11 actually made the experience easier. The cops were friendly, and other drivers gave us space—whether out of that temporary sense of brotherhood, or the fear that I might be carrying a load of ammonium nitrate, I couldn’t say.

Then there’s Indianapolis.

In all fairness, Indianapolis is the 14^th largest city in the U.S., and the second largest in the Midwest, so there’s bound to be traffic. But it’s also the Crossroads of America: Indiana has more interstate highway than any other state, and more converge on the capital than any other city. Whole families have been known to drive onto the 465 beltway, and never be seen again.

I used to think that was the worst this side of Los Angeles, a city I have no intention of every driving in.

But Indy’s only the second largest city in the Midwest. Then there’s Chicago.

My wife wanted to go see The Cure, which is an English rock band, or post-punk, or new wave, or possibly gothic rock. (I’m post-pun, myself.) It’s not normally my kind of music, but I like them okay … or at least I did, until they made me come to Chicago.

By the time we got to the concert venue in the shadow of downtown, I was clenched in a fetal position in my seat, eyes squeezed shut, whimpering and clutching at the dash. This was an especially bad thing because I was the driver.

But I don’t want you to think Chicago drivers are bad. That’s what I thought at first, until therapy for my PTSD. After several flashbacks, I realized the problem isn’t that they’re bad—it’s that they’re very, very good. Like, NASCAR good. It’s the only way to survive.

Yes, there are cars there; the camera couldn't capture anything going at that speed.

You see, Chicago traffic is the same bumper to bumper gridlock I found in Atlanta, except they don’t sit there unmoving—they continue driving as if they’re the only ones on the highway. Go watch a NASCAR race right after the start, before the first ten or twelve cars have crashed, when they’re all still jammed up and fighting for position. I’ll wait.

Yeah, it’s like that.

I saw drivers who knew their off ramp was coming, so they dove all the way over into the left lane to get ahead of other cars, then swerved across all three lanes of traffic, including that semi in the center lane that was blocking their view of anything in the right lane, and … right onto the off ramp, easy as a Blue Angels jet flight.

If someone ahead is going 60 and they’re going 90—they just keep on going. The guy in front will speed up, or get out of the way … or he won’t. Whatever. Orange cones aren’t a warning, they’re a challenge. There are signs that say: “Accident reporting lane ahead: If you get into a crash, for God’s sake, don’t stop at the scene.”

Where I come from, everyone wants a car. We passed Chicago’s train depots, where people without cars were relaxing in the knowledge that an hour waiting for a train beats two hours drinking yourself down from the edge after the evening drive home.

When the concert let out, we stayed in the auditorium until the only people left were sweeping up or throwing up. Then we went to the parking lot and sat in our car, shaking quietly, until the security guy pointed out we were the only people left and could he please go home now? He took the train. It was 1:30 a.m. when we finally took to the streets.

"Maybe we'll get lucky, and the zombie apocalypse will strike before we have to drive."

The traffic was exactly the same. It might as well have been 5 p.m. on a Friday.

We had to make a left turn to reach our off ramp, but there was a delay ahead and, if we went through the light, we’d end up stuck in the middle of the intersection. So we waited like we were supposed to, and a car load of laughing Chicagoans passed us on the right, cut off the oncoming traffic, and stopped in the middle of the intersection. Then a taxi passed them on the right, and they both stayed there, blocking the cars that had the green light, until eventually they could move on.

We almost abandoned the car right then and there. A few day’s walk home? Good exercise. But we eventually made it out of that insane city racetrack, vowing never to come back again even if Robert Smith personally invites us to play drums for The Cure.

And why did we decide to man up, brave the insanity, and drive on instead of walking?

Well, what are the chances of a pedestrian making it out alive?

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Slightly Off the Mark

Finding The Cure for Chicago traffic

The Cubs Goat Gets Its Goat Got

No Cure for Chicago Driving

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