Chicago is a city of time warps. In areas of the downtown core, the ghosts of Prohibition exert themselves in rivets and in metal, in bridges and in the stark, granite flourishes of old-era skyscrapers. In regions south of the loop, another warp brings itself to bear at the exact center of human focus. It is a subtle thing, diffuse at its fringes but solid and implacable at its core. In walking from Hyde Park to areas south, you leave the twenty-first century, and as you continue southward, you leave Chicago all together. I experience this phenomenon regularly; often I am insulated by a bus or a train, but I am aware of the transition. If I visit Corey, or find myself with business anywhere but on Chicago’s far south side, I feel a sense of relief at the prospect of living in the twenty-first century, and experiencing it—in the city of my birth. Upon my return home, I leave Chicago’s northern reach, board a train (an odd distortion of Agara’s “Number-8”) and ride from the southwestern fringe of Lake Michigan into the Bedford-Stuyvesant region of New York in the early 1970s—long after the race riots, and the general decay that gripped the area. Then, buildings stood like teeth in troubled negotiation with the yawning gaps in between them. Now, on Chicago’s South side, a kind of Bedford-Stuyvessant “grunge layer” has been applied to nearly every aspect of reality. Vacant lots give shelter to rats and grasshoppers. Stores stand open for business with empty shelves. There is only one brand of cigarette available, and no one other than the African American inhabitants of the region will even touch the brand. Alcoholics and drug abusers panhandle while strung out prostitutes offer “companionship” for $2 and a cigarette. They’re nice prostitutes, however: they believe in Jesus, and only in the south side ghettos south of Hyde Park and north of Beverly is Jesus ever a part of a prostitutional sales pitch. If you’re a married man, you have nothing to worry about…they will keep their pants on because as South Side wisdom dictates, it’s not cheating if you don’t undress. When I took this picture, I sat in a truck, waiting for my father to return from a quick shopping run in the scrap metal yard just out of view here. There are “check cashing places” next to the liquor stores here: but no banks. There are motels. They charge by the hour. There isn’t much else in the area, and after dark, strange things wander the streets—I don’t know what they are. They’re not shaped like cats, and they’re too big to be rats. For those of you into Science Fiction, this picture represents what I imagine when I read (and re-read, and re-read, yet again) Samuel R. Delany’s brilliant novel, Dhalgren. It takes place in a post apocalyptic world. It takes place in an entire city that looks like this small stretch of Chicago’s State Street. And I’m proud of this picture (and it’s modification) not because I like the area in which I took it, but in that I saw it with my own eyes and survived to tell the tale. As I look at this image, I think of Delany’s cryptic opening to Dhalgren: “to wound the autumnal city, so howled out for the world to give him a name, the in-dark answered with wind...” In the context of all 800+ pages of rampant urban nightmare, that cryptic beginning makes strange and poetic sense. I think of the “in-dark” answering all questions with wind, whenever I imagine this part of Chicago. I wonder who built the unique "house" that centers the view here. No one knows. It stands on a street nearly as devoid of human residents as its own borded up windows imply. *** As always, thank you for viewing and reading and commenting, and I hope this is the start of a great week for everybody.