Well good for you Beagles I thought after I read his post. They are always out to get us aren't they? We are no longer at the top of our game anymore and sometimes looking at oh popular culture these days with all those crazy social media and people somehow making a damn good living just by doing something with it, and the goofy looking people with the goofy names, why we don't even know what is going on anymore.
And that name, CRASHDOCS.ORG, doesn't that sound like something that a bunch of smart alecky lads in Lagos thought up? And why do you have to go to these guys to get the police report? Crazy Man crazy. I would have done the same thing Beagles did.
So I googled it just to read about their criminal nature. And shit, apparently they are legit. They work with the police even. What kind of world is this?
That credit union guy, maybe it sounded fishy to him too, or maybe he didn't care. If somebody thinks they need to change their number, better to be safe than sorry. Don't want to discourage this activity that likely saves the credit union big bucks.
In the hot weather I take my walks along the lake, less shade from the sun but that good old lake breeze makes up for that. But last week it was cooler than usual and I started walking west. Ukrainian Village. Did a lot of subbing in that area back in the day and it always seemed a pleasant neighborhood. Most of the residential buildings are two or three stories, chock a block with each other, allowing only narrow dark gangways of mystery. Appeals to my urban nature. Interspersed on the solid blocks are a bunch of those awful new two or three story condo buildings in unpleasant modern style, but plenty of those good old buildings are still hanging in there just fine. Just like us, good buddies.
Walking back on one of these walks I came by way of the Fulton meat market, hadn't been by there in a few years. Beagles, the son of a butcher I am guessing is familiar with the district. Big beefy guys with cigs dangling from the corners of their mouths hauling big slabs of beef out of humming refrigerated trucks and into squat old buildings whose big doors slam shut after them, and one suspects that all kinds of unspeakable things happen to the the slab of beef that the beefy guys slam onto some sort of steel table, but we sure do love that Italian beef when the bored teenage girl slaps it down on the counter don't we?
Anyway, that is not the way it looked twenty years ago. The expensive restaurants were moving in back then, something terribly cutting edge about having your glitzy restaurant smack dab in the middle of those grimy abattoirs. And right on the heels of the trendy restaurants came the even trendier bars with their hard-eyed purple-haired barmaids.
The guys with the beef on their shoulders were getting nervous. The big tough brute is no match for the snotty hipster with the big fat wallet.
And now the beefy guys are all gone. Randolph Street is nothing but restaurants and bars. In the streets to the north and south where the warehouses were are cloud buildings. I am speaking of that mysterious cyber space where it seems that everything is going on today. Nothing cloudy about the buildings. They are huge devoted to oh computer crap as we oldsters call it. The skyscrapers were built downtown because space was at a premium and you had to build up. But there is plenty of space in the old Fulton Market so these buildings spread out to cover whole city blocks, maybe about stories tall and ultra modern I guess, something science-fictiony about them. Mostly young people on the streets, doing the mysterious things that young people do these days to afford to live in those brand new condo buildings.
Who are these people? What is this city? To quote Ross Perot's VP running mate, the admiral. "Who am I? What am I doing here."
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