So I'm sitting outside the other morning journaling in my moleskin notebook and sipping on a coffee. It's one of those summer mornings during the week where it's quiet, even on the street, because people are at work or in offices and not journaling on a sidewalk cafe in the beautiful August weather.
I'm in mid-sentence trying to get thoughts on my page when a guy sitting next to me says:
"People don't do that anymore, you know?"
I look over. At his feet his a wrinkled face dog. It has brown eyes and it's panting with its collar loose around it's neck. I look up. A guy in his mid forties and backwards hat is holding a small coffee cup in one hand and the dog's leash in the other. He's looking at me then glances at the notebook on the table that I'm writing in.
"I'm sorry... they don't do...?" I ask smiling and then smiling at the dog.
"People don't write. You know, write write. They write emails and they write text messages and they write on laptop, but you never see people writing on pieces of paper... in notebooks. How old are you?"
"I'm twenty-five."
"Huh." His voice sounds a bit older than what he looks like. Think car having trouble starting in the winter... mix that with probably years of having to drink in bars that allowed smoking and then add a bit of his own smoking to that. "I think it's great. I just think it's great!"
We talk for awhile. He tells me he was a writer, too. He went to school for it and that his parents wanted him to do something practical, like teach. He decided to go the other way and for fifteen years he freelanced. He had something accepted to the New Yorker when he was twenty-eight and when he was thirty he wrote for Rolling Stone. When he turned thirty-five his partner of ten years needed to move to Chicago and in that he lost many of his writing gigs because "New York is better than Chicago. Writers just don't make it in Chicago. Trust me. Chicago sucks."
Now, living in the city you learn a few things: 1) Birds will poop on you wherever you walk. So just be prepared. 2) You will probably see more homeless people than you ever thought. 3) Those homeless people, at the end of the day, are actually richer than you... change adds up! 4) You will hear a lot of your neighbors having a lot of sex and 5) you will meet people that will say things that you either choose to trust or choose to scoff at.
I choose to scoff.
"We'll see." I laugh as I took my pen and put in between the pages I was writing in. "I seem to be doing OK so far..." I start to put my things in my backpack.
I wasn't offended. I'd be lying, though, if for a second I didn't get that gut feeling that dropped like I was plunging off a cliff. Sure. New York does have things Chicago doesn't have. But what Chicago doesn't have in big named magazine headquarters or publishing houses or overpriced bagel shops... it has in belief.
You can dis Chicago all you want, but I won't listen to you talk shit about a city that has offered me so many opportunities that have let me continue to believe that I have what it takes to make it out there.
Besides. Chicago only sucks if you suck.