On the night I spun like a drunken dervish on Belmont and Something, I captured quite a number of neon-intense shots. I captured a number of taxis too, but that’s to be expected. It was a busy “Pre Pride” night, after all, and Boys Town was in the mood to party. At the corner of Belmont and Something, I felt a strange sense of displacement. I know that area intimately; I remember walking with friends, giddy on whatever moods ruled our nights back in those days. I’d just graduated from Columbia College. I worked as a tutor in the school’s Writing Center: providing assistance to various students enrolled in various English classes. Most were ESL students from Poland and from France, from Spain, Italy, and China. The friends I enjoyed were fellow tutors and former Writing Center students either on the verge of graduation, or already graduated. We met every Thursday night. We called ourselves The Thursday Club. We’d always found some reason to wander the eastern stretch of Belmont Avenue. We always found some reason to gorge ourselves on food and beer, more food and milkshakes, and then dance the calories off at Smart Bar or Metro. I didn’t have a camera in those days, and so I have few pictures to commemorate those times. The Thursday Club has disbanded, for the most part, though I’m still in contact with one other member. She lives in Eugene, Oregon now. We chat as regularly as we can, and though she’s not a photographer yet, she’s a writer, and (as soon as she catches the photographer bug) she’ll probably become a Renderosity Photography Ninja. She’s already visited the site on a number of occasions; she’s already seen the galleries. As I spun on the corner of Belmont and Something, I remembered the Thursday Club, and it’s various members: a motley crew of urban adventurers, including a pipsqueak Frenchman who everyone decided was too cute to walk around fully dressed. We never coaxed him into streaking through the city, but that thought crossed our minds regularly. He lived close to Belmont and Something, and as Corey and I ambled east on Belmont Avenue, we passed what used to be his apartment. As Corey snapped pictures of park benches and bus stop workings, I spun on the next street corner, blurring myself into a strange overlap between past and present. It was a Thursday Club night, though I was the only founding member present. It was a Saturday night, but none of that mattered. The mood was the same: giddy and free. Giddy freedom is a hard thing to come by in Chicago: the city is business as usual and so there is little time for anything other than…well…business. On Saturday night, however—last Saturday night—as I spun and snapped photos, Chicago’s business mask slipped, just a fraction of a millimeter as Belmont Avenue and Something Street became a near linear blur on my camera display screen. Traffic slowed, and people gawked, and I laughed at the idea that, for once, a pipsqueak Frenchman (a really gorgeous pipsqueak at that) was not responsible for the traffic snarl, as he sang some heavy metal anthem in searing off-key glory. Later, as I looked at the blurs I’d captured, I decided to tweak a few of them. This is the second blur: a neat aggregate of linear streaks in all of the colors of the Saturday Night. I liked the original version enough to keep, but I tweaked a version as well…doubled the number of image layers and shifted the upper layer. Tweaking photographic captures is one of the simple pleasures in my life, and as I digifiddled, I remembered the Thursday Club, and heavy-metal short guys who never pronounced the letter “h.” I remembered Corey, crouched a bit too close to a stinky garbage can, buzzing with night-flies, as he caught a line of benches, and his own odd stares from the passenger windows of passing cars. As always, thank you for viewing and reading and commenting.