screen door summers

The Merchandise Mart was built to display furniture.  You could set up suites of rooms with like bedroom and frontroom sets and the buyers could come by and look them over.  Maybe that is where the idea of living your whole life there came from, maybe you could sleep in a different bed every day of the year. 

It was generally closed to the public and only wholesale buyers could enter.  Anymore you can stroll the two bottom floors, which are mostly tile shops and there is a pretty good food court, and most importantly a bathroom where somebody say, getting off the el train from Irving Park after having downed five pints of Daisy Cutter, can pause to refresh before walking the four blocks home, and then doesn't have to crash through the doorway towards the bathroom scaring the bejesus out of his kitties.

I'll tell you what is wrong with gun checks, they'll never happen, because it sounds like gun control, it sounds like jerking Old Betsy out of a law abiding citizen's hands, and that will never be allowed.  There was some kerfuffle a week or two ago after Orlando, the dems proposed a couple timid bills and the reps a couple still more timid and nothing happened.  Now we have the Dallas incident.  Nobody seems to be talking much about that guy's weapon, and let me say this about that.  If we outlawed

- And here I went to the google machine, what exactly was it?  You feel a little odd quoting from some site called Controversial Times, controversial to who?  Looked vaguely right wing to me and sure enough they are all about how it wasn't the AR-15, or any of those currently popular firearms, but it is a semi automatic -

semi automatics some hunters might have to aim more carefully before they shoot, and some sharpshooters would suffer the inconvenience of having to leave their rifle at the shooting gallery, and some nervous Nellies, who obviously aren't living right if they have that many enemies, would have to rely on lesser firearms to protect themselves, but those five cops would not be dead.

We haven't mentioned ahem, recent developments.  You know how I feel about these incidents, everybody gets all riled up, and then we have some national conversation, or maybe we just call for a national conversation,and don't get around to it, and some politicians try to score some kind of advantage, and then in the end everything kind of simmers down, until the next incident, and then everybody gets fired up and says how many more times.  As many times as you got Jack.

You know Blacks and Whites get along a little uneasily her in the USA, but we aren't the Serbs and the Croats.  Hopefully we don't become that way.

Gun sales do increase after every incident and every speech by Obama, or really any Democrat, but gun owners in the USA are significantly down over the past thirty years, so it's basically fewer people with more guns.



I remember the rags aline guy, or I think I do, traveling slowly down the alley throughout the screen door summer, his hoarse voice somehow melodious over the tweets of the birdies and laughter of the children, or maybe I just think I do.  Same difference I guess.  I also remember some guy coming around with a pony and a little cowboy outfit that the kid could don and have his photo taken on the pony, but maybe I just saw that in a movie.  Again, same difference.  Oh and the knife sharpener guy, he had a bit of a risque reputation as I recall, like the grinning milkman.


The Mom network.  I think Monday was washday and Tuesday was ironing, and I forget what the others were because I was a boy and I would never have to worry about that, I would have an uncomplaining little woman to take care of all that for me.  My favorite was Monday, washday.  Between the bungalows and the garages were backyards divided by short fences so you could see all down the line, and on Mondays every one of those yards was filled with billowing sheets and embarrassing underwear and it all smelled of soap, wonderful, just wonnerful.