Tomorrow, we're going to Chicago for the week.
I'm really excited. In addition to visiting both SAIC and UIC, It will be a great chance to wander aimlessly around wicker park, visit Katerina's, hit reckless records, go to Hi Rickey's, Lemmings, and all my other favorite haunts.
I am excited. Nay, I am euphoric. It will be nice to have a week away from here, even if I will miss the cats.
Today, Rob and I went to Binder Park Zoo. Like just about everything else in Western Michigan, it was a sore disappointment. We paid $8.00 a person to get in for a "zoo" that had less than twenty animals, many of which you could see by looking out your back window. (Raccoons and the like.) They had all kinds of foliage to make it look like there was a lot of roaming space for the animals, but if you looked closely, there was wire all around, which didn't leave much room. There was a bald eagle which excited us until we saw that it didn't even have enough space to stretch its wings. The monkeys looked utterly miserable and the lemurs were packed in so tight that it gave me claustrophobia.
We followed a swamp trail thinking it would show us more critters, but it was about three miles of Louisiana swamp re created in the middle of Michigan, with lots of bugs and signs pointing out (literally) plastic animals.
It was quite the rip off, especially with all the freeway billboards showing pictures of giraffes and lions and the like. We did see a cheetah, which was the most emaciated cat I've ever seen, made the strays in Rome seem fat and living high on the hog. He also seemed totally miserable.
It was a stark contrast from the Lincoln Park Zoo, which has a wide assortment of animals and, with one or two exceptions, they all seem happy and with ample space. At first, Binder Park Zoo was a source of mockery...one more thing in Western Michigan that we could make sarcastic jokes about...but as the afternoon progressed, it just made us angry. They had no business calling it a zoo. And we couldn't help but feel sorry for the poor animals, in substandard condition getting gawked at by mostly slack jawed yokels.
Afterwards, we went to Video Hits Plus, where we had ice cream and coffee, then played air hockey...always a good time.
On the night before the Chicago jaunt, I think back on how I felt about that city before I left. It really is funny how your perspective changes when you leave a place, and how you really don't understand the values of things when you're there. It's really amazing the things you miss. Sometimes it's certain places, a lifestyle, or just the way stuff feels.
Well. I've moved a lot. It's funny how that affects your view on things. I don't miss Austin or San Francisco. I'll never miss Milwaukee, and don't feel any great impetus to return to Philadelphia. I think besides Chicago, the only other place I've felt a real compelling urge to return to is Tucson. Maybe it's a certain character, a certain soul if you will, of a place that just kind of sticks with you. No matter how many bad memories, no matter how many frustrations, it has a certain fondness in your memories, and a certain sense of completion about it.
Is returning a good thing? Is this fondness and attachment something that should be indulged? I don't know, but it's worth being explored.
I guess Rome had that for me, too. That's why I'm so eager to go back. That sense of comfort, that sense of belonging to the place that is so seperate from the people, that sense of history and imagination, where if you were to create a fictional character based on yourself they would live there.
A lot of my friends want to leave Chicago. I can't say I blame them. In the right situation, it can create some of the happiest memories you'll ever have but in the wrong situation, you want to run as far away from it as possible, forget the nightmarish hassles and frustrations. And I can relate to that. But I know now that it's all a case of the right situation. And the fact remains that those crusty old buildings, and the sound of an el train at 2 AM still feel so much more like home than these bland strip malls, these farm filled highways and countless truck stops, antiseptic apartment complexes and mind numbing homogeny could ever hope to.