welcome back (again)!

ah, that was a nice vacation. i did some traveling, got a lot of work done, and did a lot of reading. i just finished nelso algren's "chicago: city on the make," which was beautiful. i loved it. algren captured the feeling of chicago perfectly: the long stretches of desolate industrialism in the back-of-the-yards, the rain streaked windows of the el on a cloudy morning, the jumping blues clubs on the south side. and even with all the heartache and hardship in this town, we still love it and cannot leave it. as algren wrote, "and never once, on any midnight whatsoever, will you take off from here without a pang. without forever feeling something priceless is being left behind in the forest of furnished rooms, lost forever down below, beneath the miles and miles of lights and lights. with the slow smoke blowing compassionately across them like smoke across the spectrum of the heart."
do yourself a favor and read it.
next on my list is "maggie cassidy," jack kerouac's loveletter to the first girl who broke his heart. i picked up this one because i was reminded, when climbing up the skyline divide a few weeks ago, of kerouac's philosophy that "you can't fall off a mountain you fool." right, now you try to remember that when you're 6,000 feet up.