slingin lingo in chicago

Holy hiatus, Batman.


A little disclaimer before I begin: this here lingo is not being slung from Chicago as the title of the post suggests, but instead from a basement hostel in Harlem.


And now to begin.

So to take advantage of the recent blog traffic -- perhaps slightly inflated by the visitors who stop by to peep the Megan Fox shots -- slinginlingo is currently undertaking a late summer promotional tour, which started a week ago when yours truly hopped on a flight to Chi-Town. Over the next month and perhaps longer, I'll sell some SL merch and just generally bask in the glory and adulation of fans of the blog.


And I had a lot of dignitaries and VIP lined up for this tour. I had set up a drive thru of Chicago by the Mayor himself with his own personal autocade, followed by a brief address to our adoring readers in Millenium Park and a key to the city presentation. I was humbled to say the least. I hatched and rehatched my speech on the flight, fine-tuning it with puns the masses have come to love, and underlining or highlighting important words deserving of inflection. I took it all quite seriously.


However, the mayor never arrived and when his cavalry did, they did not believe I was who I claimed to be. Turns out, a minor blunder the Saturday before I left Yellowknife, deflated the tour -- the kid chipped his front tooth -- and holding up a picture next to me, the Mayor's chief of staff did not believe my mug belonged to herbiberous. Instead, they grabbed some kid who was getting off a flight from Tel Aviv. So it goes.


So it was up to me to hook up somewhere to stay. Embittered and battered, I crumpled up my speech, tossed it in the garbage and looked to just enjoy myself and forget about slinginlingo, the cause of such embarrassment.

Through a divine act, my hastily scribbled directions to a downtown hostile proved nearly perfect and after a three-minute walk from the 'L' I was laying on my bed.

I wandered around that night, soaking in the city and then made it my mission the next to see a Cubs game. I picked up a ticket in the bleachers and, last Tuesday, I was officially a bleacher bum in Wrigley Field and had a grand ole' time -- although I had to leave during the seventh inning stretch, as they got a goofy former Cub to sing "take me out to the ballgame." -- that honour had been promised to me as part of the whirlwind tour.

The Cubs won! The Cubs won! I met some folks -- a slew of old ladies and a couple young ones -- at the game and we took the party from the crazy bleachers to the crazier streets surrounding Wrigley. Basically, each corner around the stadium is just piled with bars, which keep getting seedier and cheaper, the further away you get, like four streets deep. There were people dancing and making out to songs popular in the mid-1990s on the dancefloor, so I felt like I was back at the Monkey Tree.

Brief aside: Americans don't dance, they fuck with their clothes on. I went to a party on Friday and I saw couples dancing for like a half hour and they hadn't even looked at each other. I could see a girl leave and imagine her coming back to the guy and him not recognizing her. Then she'd turn away and he'd see her backside and say "ohh snap!" and run after her, seeing it was the booty he'd been rubbing away on for thirty minutes. There was one couple where the guy literally had the girl bent over with her hands on the floor. As a man who knows a thing or two about the dry-humppety-hump -- I'm not nicknamed 'DH' on the slo-pitch team for nothing -- I thought I'd step in and let this young man know some of the side effects of that sort of intense dry rubbin'. But experience is the best teacher. I'm sure there were a lot of folks with swollen members walking around Saturday.

Anyways, we kept the party going to downtown, where I left those I was with and proceeded to aimlessly hop from jazz bar (jazz is dead btw. The bar had four white guys all wearing horn-rimmed glasses playing to a room full of white-haired white people, with their tour bus idling outside. When a creative artform is institutionalized, it dies. Or it was just a shitty club.) to duelling piano bar (a new level of hell) to whole in the wall dive to Billy Goat Tavern underneath the Tribune Building. It's a sweet place and over the course of four days, I became a regular. The tavern is adorned with the by-lines of all these old reporters and it has some damn delicious burgers -- although if you order a single cheezeborger, the man behind the counter nearly cries and pouts and tells you the double cheezeborgers are the best.

Saw many a site. Don't want to bore you with goofy details. Saw a White Sox game and had to leave during the opening pitch, as again, that was supposed to be me throwing it out. Apparently, the Chicago Blackhawks were more important.

I'm at a loss for a paragraph to tie all this together now. With the promotional tour all-but-obliterated, I really am aimlessly travelling and I find when I'm out on the street walking around, I really don't have any important destination I'm seeking. I've stumbled upon some good times and some healthy shenanigans, but at the same time, I feel there is a lot I'm not seeing. I'll try to elaborate at a later time. This common room is suffocating with people and sound and I'm sweaty.

Maybe when I have a sane second, I'll think of something more revealing about Chicago.

Brief aside: I never realized to what degree technology has completely taken us over. I'm going without my cell phone, iPod and laptop and walking the streets of Chi, I swear, a good 60 per cent were immersed in conversations or texting away as they went from place to place. And even in the hostels, EVERYONE travels with a laptop now. Just five years ago, I made fun of a girl who was backpacking Europe with a laptop. It didn't seem to me like she was roughing it. Now, I feel as if I'm lacking something very important.