Night smoldered beyond the café windows with the promise of rain, the promise of dancing, and the promise of anything a Saturday night might bring. I stepped into the café, uninterested in any of that! I’d had my fill of dancing, and well…it’s a different thing in Chicago than it is in Prague. It doesn’t feel right if you’re not doing it in a cellar—or dancing in Český Krumlov, with a guy in a wheelchair. And so with the promise of rain as my only mark of city-born interest that night, I listened to the door close behind me as something folk-influenced and generous with acoustic guitar wafted from ceiling-mounted speakers. I smirked at the hippie-acoustic cliché and wondered how many other cafes around Chicago were playing the exact same song at the exact same moment. Muzak, it would seem, has morphed into something digital and downloadable, but it isn’t Muzak. It’s internet radio, but like Muzak, it is innocuous, abstract furniture. It is designed to be the very background it blends into. David wasn’t working that night. But he was seated at one of the buffed aluminum tables, looking swanky in his white, pointy-toe shoes and black/white pimp-daddy ensemble. He didn’t notice me, even as he glanced up in my direction. He had that vague non-focus a guy gets when he’s surfing the net: doing homework, trolling for obscure notes on behavioral cognition. At least that’s what he was doing when I walked past him, and needless to say, his cuteness factor shot off the scale. Behavioral cognition? In a swanky coffee house in Chicago’s boy’s town? I wasn’t there to hang out with David, however. I’d only met him once, and at that time, he was serving coffee. I was there to meet Corey, to plan the weekend’s foray into photographic adventure. Corey sat one table away from David, engrossed in a book—he has a thing for true-crime novels and journalist-based fiction: in some ways, he’s Truman Capote’s evil twin, only not exactly a twin, and not evil by any stretch of the imagination. He’s as good a writer as Capote, and not a raving, flamboyant drunk on the verge of achieving that lovely shade of jaundice yellow to his cheeks. The coffee house was due to close soon. Corey and I were hungry, and upon thoughts of this, I realized that the night held another promise. Pork chops. Corey found them on sale. Somehow, weekend-special pork chops aren’t so mundane when considered in the context of students dressed like pimp-daddies researching behavioral cognition, or hungry writer-photographers greeting one another in a sea of Tracy Chapman Lite. As Corey and I sat and made dietary plans for the evening, I was entranced by the table we occupied. Starburst patterns played across its surface in odd, shifting fractal patterns. There was something holographic in the buffed aluminum and subtly-shaded light. I wondered if I could somehow break the table only to recognize each fragment as a perfect miniature version of the original table...could I break those fragments into even smaller tables, each with their inherent table-ness encoded in the starburst fractals on their diminutive faces. I wondered. I continue to wonder. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting. I'm feeling revived from last week, which means that I should be back to the galleries soon.