still crazy

My brain has started to function on a limited schedule, kind of like the electricity in Baghdad. Maybe not that intermittent.

Last evening I walked around Old Town in Chicago where the Hippies and Yippies used to congregate. It was a tourist destination, a sight along a guided tour. There were black light poster shops, head shops, tie die and macrame emporiums, beautiful people and Soul Men. It was teeming with '60s insouciance.

Today it's been gentrified. A couple of restaurants from those days survive, but mainly it's another grotesquely expensive parcel of real estate, liberated from the hands of the free spirits who once made it special.


It's very pretty. One oriented to images of the City of Big Shoulders, stock yards and the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre might be startled to experience all the beauty summer in Chicago affords. The lake front has always been spectacular. Bill Clinton's choice for the '96 Democratic Convention and the host to the '94 World Cup occasioned a high style upgrade to the boulevards and walkways all over the city, so that everywhere boxes and hanging baskets greet the eye with a riot of color.

'Sixty-eight seems a long time ago.