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Art you should know: Watercolor tattoos by Amanda Wachob

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Amanda Wachob is a New York-based tattoo artist whose method gets rid of the black border around a tattoo, opening the piece up for a softer, blended look with fluid lines that resemble watercolor paintings or gestural paint strokes. (Watch her and other pros talk about the watercolor tattoo movement here.)

By Amanda Wachob

If you want her to ink you next, good luck. Her waitlist is supposedly years long. Luckily, there are plenty of other ways for you to get your eyes on her work.

She prints hyper-close images of her skin tattoos on to silk canvases, and collaborates on super cool projects, such as the Skin Data project with neuroscientist Maxwell Bertolero. The pair recorded the time and voltage of her tattoo machine’s power supply as she created several tattoos, and they made images based on the data that resulted. I also really dig her collaboration with conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll, called HOLÉ. Participants wore an article of clothing with a hole in it and the artists then “filled the hole” with tattoo ink as if to say “all holes can be fixed permanently.”

By Amanda Wachob

In Amanda’s Bloodlines series, she tattoos a subject with meaningful shapes in a non-permanent water line. The body will eventually heal the tattoo and dissolve the mark into the skin, the energy of the symbol also absorbed symbolically into the person.

And while her specialty is skin, don’t miss her work on fruit. Tattoo artists practice on plant rinds before moving on to human skin. I’m particularly smitten by her lemon tattooed with the word “tryst.” What a great word, especially to betroth the bitter, beautiful, impermanent lemon.

The one piece of Bourdain’s writing I keep near my desk at all times

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You know how they talk about finding your people, your soul tribe? The type of soul tribe Anthony Bourdain belonged to felt like it overlapped with the soul tribe I belong to, if you were to venn diagram it all out. He was my favorite kind of person—so sour and cantankerous and sharp-edged, but he had more heart and intelligence and perception in that quick-witted tip of his tongue than most people can hope to have in their whole bodies. I loved him, and his writing will go down as one of the best of a global American generation.

His suicide was a real punch to so many of our well-fed guts. He represented the type of American a lot of us want to be: Open minded but opinionated, humble but confident, idealistic but realistic, brave in the face of bullshit with a keen eye for spotting it (his rants against Donald Trump’s idiocy were the most recently hilarious/ cathartic). He also, in a lot of ways, represented the type of writer every modern writer wants to be. Bourdain’s style was impeccable, and he was a master storyteller.

I keep this excerpt from a piece he wrote for Lucky Peach #5 at my desk. It’s a perfect example of his ability to tell stories, even when they weren’t his, with humor and heat (which is what, I’m assuming, made him so great in the kitchen too). I’ve kept this piece in my desk drawer for a while now. I pull it out and reread it sometimes, mostly when I need a reminder that even the most basic piece of writing can tell a great fucking story. And it’s better when it does.

That Bourdain no longer is out in this world somewhere, learning, eating, meeting others, means there’s one less good and powerful voice speaking for so many of us. A good and powerful voice that was also incredibly entertaining. God speed, my man.

THE HEAD OR THE FILLET

By Anthony Bourdain

“Back in the day, when wealthy merchants used to travel across China in caravans, they were, from time to time, set upon by organized gangs of bandits and highwaymen. These enterprising free market enthusiasts would ambush columns suddenly and without mercy, quickly slaughtering guards and escorts, then stripping the members of the party of any valuables before killing them. The head man, however, they always saved for last.

Dragged kicking and screaming and begging for his life from his litter, forced to kneel on ground still soaked with the blood of his bearers and entourage, he would find himself at the feet of the chief bandit. The Chief Bandit, inevitably a fearsome-looking fellow, would offer the trembling merchant a whole cooked fish. Steamed, grilled—it didn’t matter. But it was always whole.

‘Eat!’ the Chief Bandit would command, pushing the fist in the direction of his prisoner. There would be a hush as the other bandits took a break from looting, disembowling, post-mortem violation, or any totemic preservations of remains they might be engaged in to move close to the action for what was clearly a Very Important Moment.

If the terrified merchant’s fingers or chopsticks moved straight to the fish’s head, tunneling into the cheek, perhaps, or tearing off a piece of jowl, there would be much appreciative murmuring among the Chief Bandit and his colleagues.

By choosing the multi textured, endlessly interesting mosaic of flesh buried in the fish’s head, their captive proved himself to be a man of wealth and taste. Clearly a man such as this possessed more wealth than what he and his caravan were currently carrying. This man would no doubt be missed by his family and his many wealthy friends, at least some of whom would likely pay a hefty ransom. The bandits would spare his life in the reasonable expectation of future gain.

If, however, the merchant chose instead to peel off a meaty chunk of boneless fillet, the bandits would jerk a cutlass across his neck immediately. This nouveau riche yuppie scum would be worth only as much as he carried in his pockets. Not worth keeping alive—much less feeding. Nobody would miss this asshole. The minute he chose fillet over head he proved himself worthless.”

My list of books to read this month

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“The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self Love”

By Sonya Renee Taylor

Sonya Renee Taylor is a slam poet whose movement of radical self love started in a conversation she had with another woman before a slam poetry competition. Sonya’s friend shared an intimate secret: She didn’t always use protection when she had sex because she was disabled and felt like it was too much to ask. Sonya responded, to her friend as much as to herself, “Your body is not an apology.” This new book is an exploration of that idea, and it takes great steps to clearly define the differences between radical self love, self confidence, and self acceptance. Through stories and prompts, the book asks readers to examine how they might give greater radical love to their bodies and, in the process, the bodies of other humans around the world.

“Best-interest buying is also about reducing the harm our purchases cause other bodies. What are three ways you can reduce the harmful or exploitative outcomes of your purchases?”

 

“Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic”

By Sam Quinones

This 2015 book by journalist Sam Quinones foresaw the way the 2016 election would shake down, at least in terms of the desperation so many small- or medium-sized towns were feeling to change something, anything to stop the devastating slow build of addiction in their communities. Moreover, this book is an incredible, concise look at how we got in this mess in the first place. From interviews with families who lost children in addictions that began at, of all places, the doctor’s office, to the families in tiny Mexican villages who started running heroin to the States as means for their own survival, to the advertisers and doctors whose cartoon-dollar-sign-eyes added to the trouble. This book reads like a thriller, even though it’s nonfiction, and is thoroughly researched: Quinones spent decades covering crime and Mexico for various print journalism outlets. I highly recommend this book, and if you’re in Chicago, try to read it in the, um, next few weeks, OK? At 6:30 pm on Monday, June 25, City Lit Books in Logan Square is hosting a book club circle about “Dreamland.” See you there!

 

“Imagine Wanting Only This”

By Kristen Radtke

A good friend of mine recently recommended this book, which came out last year. It’s a graphic narrative memoir (how cool are all those words strung together as one thing?!). At a funeral for Kristen Radtke’s uncle, she drove through an abandoned mining town. She was so moved and curiously crushed by the sight of its emptiness that it inspired a journey that took her to many other deserted places around the world. Her black and white illustrations further compound the story’s deep dive into the murky black depths of grief, loss, and loneliness. What’s left of us when we’re left behind?

Learning the art of restraint

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It’s midday. I’m in Indiana at my mother-in-law Rosie’s house. Justin and I have come to spend a few days with her and, since we’re here and all, use her garage.

I need to paint 20 frames for an upcoming gallery show and the thought of me, Jackie “Oh, Did I Make That Mess?” Mantey, painting anything in our small apartment’s even smaller dining room nearly gives Justin a panic attack. (Poor guy had just recovered from some hives, which started not long after I decided to hand wash the dishes, a process that involves me swirling around and brilliantly reconfiguring whatever gooey gunk is decorating them. Then giving myself a huge pat on the back.)

So here I am, an Indiana artist for the day. I stand in my temporary studio, its regular vehicular tenants parked in the driveway to soak in some sun. I’m wearing ratty clothes, my hair high in a messy bun. Before I start painting, I take a minute to look around the subdivision. It’s a weekday, but children are playing outside. Summer vacation is in full swing. In fact, it just started, and so the cut grass still smells good and the hot blacktop still feels electrifying, even under tender bare feet. Popsicle brain freeze, sunburns, scraped knees, skulls shattered by the diving board, et al. The whole grab bag of other playing-outside maladies haven’t ruined anyone’s fun just yet.

I wave with my paint brush at a Sidewalk Boy rolling past on his scooter. They’re so cute when they’re pre-pubescent. 

With that, I set about painting all of these frames a color called Hawaiian Luau Pink. I used to avoid my penchant for pink. It’s so feminine and totally not as cool as black, which I also like but not as much as I love pink. Choosing pink for these frames signals an acceptance of the part of myself that embraces traditional girlishness. It’s not the “girlishness” that bugs me. It’s the “traditional.” My experience is that people who like things done “traditionally” usually suck giant Hawaiian Luau Pink balls.

Rosie comes out to help me at one point and we have a great time. Listening to music, talking, painting, enjoying the breeze. Art-making offers a physical experience for creativity that writing just can’t. When you’re writing, your fingers and mind are working a mile a minute, but that’s about it. I like using my body to express something. Holding the frames tilted until my arms shake, just so I can get the right stroke angle for the paint brush. Pushing needle through a piece of paper until my pointer and middle fingers are calloused. Yes. More. Please.

One coat in and the color is is looking pretty dynamite. The rough wooden surface of the frames is taking the paint exactly like I expected, like I hoped it would. It’s seeping into every curve and splinter, acting as a highlighter, letting the old barn wood, which all the frames are made out of, tell its own story—just a little more fabulously than it would “traditionally.”

But I decide the paint’s soaking in pretty deeply as a base. A second coat is in order. The physicality and repetitiveness of going over one coat of paint with a second is even more therapeutic than the first go-round. Dip. Slow. Paint. Twist. Dip. Slow. Paint. Twist. As I finish dressing frames 18, 19, 20 in their second coat, I keep eyeing frames 1 through 10, which are nearly dry. Can I do a third coat? Should I? I really want to. Painting is so fun. I’m not tired yet. I’m not bored. This is giving me peace. I want to do another round.

An argument about whether or not to do this—because they really look pretty perfect with just two coats—swirls around inside me, like Sidewalk Boys circling their skateboards around the floor of an empty pool. My brow is furrowed when Rosie joins me in inspecting the frames. She confirms my suspicions: One more coat and the messy roughness of the frames would be overtaken, lost in the Luau, swimming in too many layers of pink. The story of the frames, of the work inside them and the wood than comprises them, would be drowned out.

I take a deep breath and agree. Put the paintbrush down. Watch the neighbor kids play.

Published: Chicago Writers Association’s Write City Review

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Check it out, friends! My artwork has made its debut in the, fittingly enough, debut publication of the Chicago Writers Association’s Write City Review. It’s so exciting to see my name and work in there that I could burst. I know this isn’t a big deal, like, at all, and I’m used to seeing my journalism bylines, but having my creative writing and embroidery published is a rad new development that feels awesome and I’m totally humbled by it.

Eeeee, let’s celebrate! Get your own copy at Printers Row Lit Fest or join the Chicago Writers Association today.

A lunch date

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There’s nothing quite as satisfying not having to spend an hour conducting polite small talk to catch up with an old friend. It’s the best: To just jump into the good stuff, like no time has passed. I felt like that yesterday when I traveled up to Evanston to see my friend Colleen and her husband, JD, who were visiting Chicago from their Ohio home.

I met Colleen my freshman year of college. My attraction to her was immediate. I was pulled like a magnet to her creamy red hair and her rebel with a cause attitude. She was the first girl I ever saw effortlessly live this balance of I-don’t-give-any-fucks and I-give-the-right-kinds-of-fucks.

On her dorm room wall, she hung a list of things she believed about herself and about life. It bullet-pointed her trust in feminism and a belief in the power of the American vote (she was a Political Science major, of course). I had never seen an 18-year-old care about these things, and the earnestness of it tapped directly into the earnestness of my own self. I didn’t know you could make lists like that! I want to make lists like that!

Her music collection was the stuff of kids I’d only seen in the indie movies, and she had a beta fish. Like, before everyone had a beta fish. Before beta fish even knew they were beta fish. But there he was, captured potential swimming blue and bright right above her desk.

We quickly became friends that fall semester. Partying, studying, talking. She introduced me to Fiona Apple’s full albums and my now favorite band, The Distillers, gifts of which I think I can only adequately repay by giving her my first born.

One breezy afternoon that first college fall, we decided to go to the piercing shop in town for a nose piercing (for her) and a Monroe piercing (for me). My Monroe didn’t last very long. I took it out for a job interview at a pizza shop. I didn’t get the job, and lip hole closed up almost immediately. But before that happened, it led me to Carrie, my other best friend from college.

Carrie says she first saw me late one night while we both waited for the bus outside the dorm where Colleen and I lived. Carrie was also a resident there but on the first floor; Colleen and I lived on the second and, with so much stimulation sparking those first exciting few months, going to another floor might as well have been going to Mars.

At that bus stop as the full moon watched, it was her turn to be pulled to me like a magnet, my Monroe stud a pin in her heart’s map. She even called me Marilyn until she learned my real name. She loves to tell me she had  an instant friend crush on me, just like I did her when I finally met her. Just like I did with Colleen.

Sophomore year, when I got my first byline in the school newspaper (a recap of a visiting speaker event), Carrie clipped out the entire 1,000-word story and hung it on her tiny dorm mini-fridge like a proud parent. It stayed there, taking up all that magnetic real estate, all year long.

That gesture. That support. It meant everything to me as I learned to trust myself, in writing and in life. 

Nearly 14 years have passed since that fall. I’m sure our lists of things we believe now would be unrecognizable to those tender, ruby-faced selves, furious as bees trapped between window and screen.

We have life partners and careers and real pets now instead of beta fish watching overhead. But every time I smile and my Monroe dot scar sets like a dimple, I think of that fall these women and all they taught me.

I think about how I’ll forever love them with an 18-year-old’s earnestness.

And just like that it’s June

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I’ve been looking forward to this month all year for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Justin and I bought all our summer clothes in, like, March. We’ve been excited for summer.

Our New Year’s resolutions included going out more in our city when it’s nice outside and to spend more time together doing fun stuff. It’s not that we don’t spend a lot of time together, it’s just that sometimes, most of the time, life adds up and that free outdoor festival sounds like a monotonous, mountains-away drag when you can just nap in each other’s arms with the fan on at home. And just like that your life is a “16 There’s Still Time For You” song without a hint of irony.

We do watch a lot of TV together. Sometimes, most of the time, I’m reading while we do this. (Unless, of course, it’s an episode of “Dawson’s Creek,” which we’re re-watching from start to finish… If you’re looking for a hint of irony, you won’t find it. That show is like mysterious candy. Still. Even with the shitty new theme song.)

Fun fact: Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli—I learned this while reading—says time isn’t real and there are “actually no things at all. Instead, the universe is made up of countless events. Even what might seem like a thing—a stone, say—is really an event taking place at a rate we can’t register. The stone is in a continual state of transformation, and on a long enough timeline, even it is fleeting, destined to take on some other form.”

Cool cool cool.

Can I use that as an excuse next time I miss a deadline?

A few years ago at a backyard barbecue, a friend’s birthday party, one of the stoners, mid-bite of his veggie patty, told me that déjà vu is something we experience when we are in the exact place we should be. Like, the universes have aligned, man. I responded that I hadn’t had déjà vu in a long while and felt deathly depressed so perhaps he was on to something. Then we did some fire spitting and went home.

Even if time is a fluid human concept, there’s no denying the extent of which its very-very-realness impacts the lives of us non-physicists and/or potheads. It’s the great equalizer. The thing of which we never seem to have enough of, gently slipping through our well-worn fingers.

That’s why I’m also looking forward to this summer: I’ve been buying myself some time.

I’ve been working extra jobs since January in an effort to save up enough money to comfortably take this summer off from professional gigs to spend time on myself and my personal writing.

It’s my favorite aspect of freelancing—you decide how much work to take on, which means you can overload yourself to the point of exhaustion in order to reach the promised land of free time. When you freelance, you can be as successful or unsuccessful as you want, depending on how hard you’re willing to go.

The night before this all-hallowed summer season begins, I’m sitting in my apartment watching the national championship spelling bee. We meant to turn on the Cavs vs. Warriors game, but had the wrong station.

Have you ever watched a championship spelling bee before? On the screen are these perfectly precociously adorably brutal children being 1,000 times smarter than you despite the fact that you’ve got them beat by several decades during which you could have been studying the dictionary.

Nerds.

(Nerds I will happily freelance for one day when they run the world.)

Fun facts:

  • Arrhostia is an evolutionary product or trend that appears to be more or less pathological, such as the immense size attained by certain dinosaurs.
  • Kanone is a person who is an expert skier.
  • Carmagnole is a lively song popular at the time of the first French Revolution.
  • Soubresaut is a straight-legged jump from both feet with the toes pointed and feet together, one behind the other.
  • All of the above are words 12-year-olds knew or almost knew how to spell. (RIP Enya.)
  • Jackie Mantey still gets stuck spelling commitment. (Indeed, spell check just corrected that for me.)

It feels like just yesterday Justin and I were watching the Cavs play the Warriors at a nearby bar as Cleveland clinched its first championship in what felt like forever. It wasn’t yesterday, but it was two years ago.

Maybe I’ve been thinking about time so much because just like that, I’m 32, which is the age you officially start eye rolling 25-year-old Millennials blaming their ennui on a “quarter life crisis,” just like I did seven years ago. I’m such a Millennial, I Millennialed first, kids. Get off my rent controlled apartment’s avocado-strewn lawn.

Even LeBron “The GOAT and Still Smashing Records” James has been fielding questions from reporters about whether he feels his age will slow him down. He’s 33.

(Note: LeBron once felt a million years older than me, as did the characters on “Dawson’s Creek,” but, as I realized today after watching the jaunty little senior prank episode, I realized they were mere seniors in high school when I was a freshman. … See? Time. The great equalizer. Now we’re all just grief-stricken and stumbling and thoughtfully passive adults who can have reunion features in Vanity Fair.)

Truth is, I don’t give a shit about Roseanne being cancelled. And I watch “The Handmaid’s Tale” not because I think it’s important as a cautionary social justice horror story, I watch it because it’s cathartic. Seriously, watching June try to disassociate her mind from her body after being brought back to Gilead tapped into some deeply buried relate-ability. Growing up girl around people in power who condescendingly make you feel like your body is not your own, and with boys trained in this environment to treat you like shit, your mind can start to do the same thing. (I know it’s not the same as being raped systematically after being kidnapped, but we also don’t have intergalactic battles but empathize with and see ourselves in Luke Skywalker, so let a girl have her indulgences, OK?)

But most of the trauma I’ve experienced in my life happened to me a long time ago. Time (and sobriety) has healed its residual wounds and I’ve found ways to demand better—from men in my life and society as a whole. I, in essence, feel in control of myself and my reactions. I feel like I can help others going through the same thing and I try to, which is half of the healing process anyway.

So now, I’m living in the flow state of life’s ebb and flow. Things are moving forward but mostly I feel as if I’m waiting. For what? Can I really just not enjoy the peace? Do I always have to be on the lookout for what’s next? Is that a survival technique?

Or have I been conditioned to do this? To move so fast? Haven’t we all?

Apropos, here’s something else I recently read.

It’s a passage from Henry Kissinger’s article in this month’s Atlantic about human society being unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence. Titled “How the Enlightenment Ends.” Yikes.

He writes, “Inundated via social media with the opinions of multitudes, users are diverted from introspection; in truth, many technophiles use the internet to avoid the solitude they dread. All of these pressures weaken the fortitude required to develop and sustain convictions that can be implemented only by traveling a lonely road, which is the essence of creativity.”

He has a point here. (Honestly, this was one of the few points I could understand in his essay, which is why I will not be running for president in 2020 and neither should you. We all need to just hold on to our tits and wait for those spelling bee kids to graduate from Yale.) But it seems reductive for me to blame all my dread about time’s passage on social media’s speed.

Markers of time: Reading google reviews of cereals to find the one that contains the least amount of sugar and the most amount of fiber but doesn’t taste like cardboard that’s been sitting in the puddle behind the Dumpster. (Check.) Walking the long way around the park as to avoid the packs of primal high schoolers spraying pheromones in each other’s direction. (Check.) Hating social media but knowing it’s not so black and white an issue/ experience as to sign off of it entirely. (Check check check.)

If everything, as the mad physicist says, is in a constant state of transformation, what is happening to me during this unspectacular time?

You know what I think might be contributing to my worry about time, too? The fact that I feel really good right now. So good, in fact, that  1) I have nothing else dramatic with which to soak up my brain cells, so left to their own devices they plan ahead, and 2) I wonder why I don’t have more of the things I want in my life yet. Where’s the house, the couch, the baby, the book, the MFA?

See, this is why I can’t truly hate Kim K. It’s so human—steadfast transformers that we are—to want more than what we have, despite having just earned some incredible things we wanted for a long time (i.e. a wonderful and supportive relationship, Chicago residency, stable work-from-home/ work-from-anywhere/ choose-your-own-adventure lifestyle, sobriety).

Trying to balance ambition with the gift, the privilege, of living in the present is tough.

The best Pinterest wisdom I’ve found about defeating jealousy, which can often drive our ambition, is the imperative to not compare yourself to others and instead compare your current self to who you were yesterday. With that in mind, I’m my life’s god damn Karthik “Commitment” Nemmani. (Winner of the 2018 national championship spelling bee. And actually he won spelling “koinonia,” which means Christian fellowship or communion. Congratulations, Karthik. I’m totally not j-e-a-l-o-u-s.)

So far, my best life advice is to always check the store-bought strawberries for mold before popping one into your mouth (a lesson hard won by experience) and to remember this too shall pass, even the calm and especially the time.

It just that ugh, sometimes, most the time, the waiting fucking sucks.

It’s only when life’s ebbs start nudging you in the gut again or throwing you upside down, head first, seatbelt off, into the next roller coaster ride of your life, that you appreciate how nice, soothing even!, it was to just stand in line.

As I write this, I realize I’ve had a lot of déjà vu recently, which could mean I’m exactly where I need to be. That’s a nice thought. Too nice though. Instead, this is the though I’m more likely to when I experience when déjà vu strikes: WHY IS MY BRAIN REMEMBERING THIS SEEMINGLY UNIMPORTANT MOMENT OF ME EATING MY FIBER RICH BREAKFAST? IS SOMEONE ABOUT TO DIE??

As the Cavs and Warriors went the locker room for half time, Justin and I looked at each other. We had planned to go out to a bar to get some food and watch the second half of the game. But our mutual look said that sounded like not as much fun as it sounded five hours ago.

We ended up staying in. After all, we have all summer.

Five things I’m loving this month

Jackie Mantey 1 Comment

“Good Thing” by Leon Bridges

Leon’s new album “Good Thing” is *the* sound for summer 2018. Though, I’d probably make that sentence work for whatever season he released it in. This is modern soul music at its sickest. Start with “Bad Bad News” and just try not to let those hips swing a lil.

Online video workouts

I’m always looking for workout ideas to supplement my runs in the summer, when I prefer to run outside and avoid the sticky, sweaty, suffocatingly indoors indoor gym. DoYogaWithMe.com is a great resource for free yoga sequences led by expert instructors. I like this one for core strength and stretch.

I also recently found this series between Nicole from the blog Pumps & Iron and Hyatt Place. Nicole shows you how to do quick, easy indoor workouts inside Hyatt hotel rooms. (Five stars for a smart branding opportunity, Hyatt!) I’m still working my way through all of these, but this five-minute pyramid workout is a great place to start.

@concepttalk on Instagram

Published by sister site Neon Talk, Concept Talk posts old photos of retro products, interiors, and ad concepts. The visuals are rad and really weird, which is a nice/ often-startling change of pace between all the baby pics in my feed. Follow Concept Talk here.

“Little Fires Everywhere” by Celeste Ng

Everyone I know who likes to read has been raving about this book since it came out late last year. It was one of my options for a Book of the Month Club selection, but I picked another title, not yet knowing how good/ beloved this book would be! Thus, I’ve been waiting for it from the library for montttths.

It finally came in on Friday. I picked it up on Saturday. And I finished it on Sunday.

This book is so good! Not only is it fast-paced, pumping with mystery, and beautifully written, I loved that it told so many women’s stories and explored empathy-as-moralistic-value—that complicated, perilous thing—so well.

I also loved how gently she delivered the recurring theme of seeing ourselves in other people, or imagining our lives reflected in that of others’ experiences (and all the ways that seeing can take shape).

Time Magazine’s The Vault

Time Magazine’s cover story by Steven Brill was titled “How Baby Boomers Broke America,” but the real point of his examination of how the last 50 years led us to our current state of affairs is not about pitting one generation against another. In fact, it’s not about pitting political sides against each other either. It’s about how the unprotected have been pitted against each other in an effort to surreptitiously further protect the already protected.

That, rather than a split between Democrats and Republicans, is the real polarization that has broken America since the 1960s. It’s the protected vs. the unprotected, the common good vs. maximizing and protecting the elite winners’ winnings.

Read the full article here, the hit up this page called The Vault, where you can see all of Time’s cover stories from the past few months and click the links to read them directly.

Notes from a Chicago Saturday morning

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I take the long route to the bus stop to stretch my legs and simply be outside. The brick house on the corner has its windows open, jazz puncturing the screen. The helicopter seeds dance in the early morning breeze. The music sounds how waking up before 9 a.m. makes me feel. Adult, aware, kinda sad, mostly hopeful, prone to chaos.

**

Apartment for rent. They’ve bumped the price down from $1,400 to $1,100 a month and put up a black and white computer drawing of the floor plan. They call it a “loft” but it’s just your garden variety studio garden apartment with one cool window. And two exits. All apartments here are supposed to have two of those. Just in case. Chicago is also adult, aware, kinda sad, mostly hopeful, prone to chaos.

**

I wait for the bus to pick me up, determined not to check my phone again to see how long my wait will be. It was six minutes, like, five minutes ago. I stand with my bookbag at my feet, craning my neck down the street like a child waiting for a beloved parent to pick her up from school.

**

The Chicago public transportation system is my favorite thing about this city, occasional pee smell, long waits, and deranged passenger aside. I sold my car as soon as I got to this city. In a place like nowhere-but-everywhere-at-once, a place like Chicago, independence takes new forms foreign to me before now.

I go to the back of the bus, where the seats are elevated and I can watch everyone inside and everything that passes by. In grade school, the cool kids, which meant the older kids, always got first dibs on the seats in the back. You could share secrets and candy and/or/sometimes kisses better back there. I used to ride home from elementary school with high schoolers. I was always in the front but would try little ploys to reveal my maturity to them, with a subtlety that belied my desperation to be like them.

In third grade I became proficient at writing in cursive, which seemed so elegant and adulty to me. So adulty, in fact, I would sit on the edge of my bouncing, hot plastic seat and write in my notebook little stories using cursive’s curly cues. The story I was writing didn’t matter. What mattered was that the older kids who got off the bus before me, with their perfume trail and confident stomps, would take note of my writing and think, “Oh she knows cursive! That means she must be of a certain age! Shall I invite her to the back of the bus tomorrow to tell her all my magical secrets?”

Imagine feeling like you can’t wait to grow up. Try to remember how far away where you are now once seemed.

**

The library smells like books and coffee. The air tastes like poster tape and the back of a stamp. It just opened and is yet to fill with the heavy exhaust of exhausted humans. Libraries are the last real place you can be indoors as long as you want and use the restroom one/two/five times without someone asking you to leave or pay for something. Well, except maybe now Starbucks.

As I walk to the bookshelf of holds, where tomes peer toward the entrance like kids waiting for a beloved parent to pick them up, I pass a little boy who is sitting at the public computer. I catch him staring at me and I smile. He is dressed in red gym shorts and a black tee loose around his belly that’s the shape of childhood, a malleable shape of something arrived too early waiting for its moment to stretch out and settle in.  

He reminds me of my husband, what my husband may have looked like as a boy, and I recall a quote from a documentary we watched together once. “Adults are just children who survived.” Maurice Sendak said that, I think.

I pass the boy again as I leave and wonder if he’s pulled up the news site he’s looking at in hopes someone like me, maybe me specifically, the cool old woman in the halter top who smiled at him, will notice… Will notice and will think, “That gentleman must be older than I thought, what with his well-curated morning news perusal?! Perhaps I shall invite him to the back of the bus and teach him cursive.”

**

I take the 80 bus three neighborhoods east and get out one mile from my next destination. I start to walk.

A man passes me and says, “Beautiful girl on a beautiful day,” and I don’t hate it, despite the “Everybody Dance Now” blaring from the phone in his pocket. That’s not a euphemism.

Another man passes me talking on his phone. “Is it diaper time?” he says to the person on the other end. I pretend he’s not talking about a kid and giggle.

Women in sundresses.

Dogs with dopey grins.

Breezes with a lick of lakeshore’s chill.

Sweat softening every place where my skin melts into fabric.

Summer has officially begun.

**

I was reading recently about lobsters fighting for dominance and how, when one loses very badly, his brain basically dissolves, unable to cope with what has happened to him and adjust to the new state of things. I think of this passage as I watch a woman wearing a trashbag push a shopping cart down the sidewalk. The neighborhood I currently live in has a man like this who’s always hanging around a particular intersection, usually screaming indecipherable things. Justin and I call him Yelling Guy and we and the other neighbors generally let him go about his business of scaring people who haven’t been there before and walking harmlessly up and down the street. I wonder what monster melted their brains, who or what hurt them.

**

The first fews months of college, which marked my first extended stay away from a place I spent 18 years of my life, I kept seeing people I thought I knew walking around campus. On the quad, in the dorm, right outside class. “Oh it’s so-and-so! What are they doing here?”

My mind connected these strangers’ facial similarities to people I’d seen all year long, every year until now. It was like seeing ghosts.

I used to live in this neighborhood where the 80 bus has deposited me. I see some of the same people: the woman who lives in the brownstone walk-up doing her daily walk, a family herding its toddler sheep to temple, the cashiers at Walgreen’s. I keep an eye out for the weiner dog in the weiner dog-sized Cubs hat, a staple of these sidewalks.

**

And there! Right as I’m about to head to the bus back home, through the windows surrounding the bar stool where I’m finishing up lunch, I see him. The neighborhood weiner dog who wears the Cubs hat. A fan favorite. A happy boy. A good boy. Tongue out, saying hi with a waddle-wobble strut that teeter-totters his little body left to right like a puppy pendulum: Same. Old. Same. Old. Different. Older.

**

My time spent watching the hatted weiner dog and sitting in the good feelings of my good fortune of having spotted him in this neighborhood overrun by regulars and tourists alike, I remember I packed some shoes to take to the cobbler up the street.

I hand over my heels and sign my name on the receipt. It’s the only time I write in cursive anymore.