PHOTOBOMB: One More Weekend in Chicago

“Now featuring special guests, my cousins from Florida.”

Who would have thought I was serious when I said last week that it was the second of three weekends driving many hours to Chicago? Hopefully you. Hopefully you figured I was serious, because I am nothing if not truthful on this blog. You can always trust me here, and should never doubt what I say, despite the many times I have done the opposite of what I said I would do. Because this one time I was telling the truth! I did drive down to Chicago a third time in a month at the expense of my car’s stability. See? Trustworthy!

To make a short story even shorter, some of my cousins that live in Florida came up to visit us in Chicago for the weekend, and in a move that is apparently as much of a genetic trait as anything else, they decided to jam-pack as much stuff as possible into whatever daylight they had available so that they could see Chicago and extended family in just a few days. Very much like I have done for my entire life. But despite their packed schedule, I was able to weasel my way in just about as much as I could without risking the wrath of my car’s failing support systems. And between me, Nick, my mom, my dad (briefly), some random guy who keeps showing up at my mom’s house, my aunt and uncle (also briefly), and my visiting cousins Shareem, Gaston, and Santi, we had a pretty great weekend! And I’m going to tell you about it, because what else am I going to do with my free time? Go outside? As if.

First things first: I have never liked Crocs. When I had them when I was younger, they made my feet very uncomfortable. They had this gross dusty, scratchy feel to them that rubbed me in every possible wrong way and completely aggravated my childhood self’s OCD-powered obsession of repeatedly touching uncomfortable textures to the point that I was physically revolted by wearing them. That is not an exaggeration. But I have now been enlightened because whatever I wore as a kid must have been either a cheap knockoff or had sat out in the sun too long, because these new crocs are wonderful. They were a gift from my visiting guests, and I have seen the light. They are comfortable, they are convenient, and they, miraculously, do not make me want to cut my own feet off in disgust. It’s a vacation miracle.

We started the weekend- no, correction, I started my weekend with them when Nick and I got to my mom’s house Friday night. I say “correction” because Shareem, Gaston, and Santi had already been there for a day at least, doing hiking and museums and some other stuff. Nick and I just happened to be late to the party because we hit lots of traffic for no discernible reason. But we got there and ate some pizza and chatted with the family that had crawled out of their holes in the ground for this momentous occasion, not dissimilar to cicadas emerging from hibernation. I am the cicada in this case. Don’t read too deeply into that.

Anyway, some of us later went to a tattoo parlor downtown that was having Friday the 13th flash specials, because that’s a thing tattoo parlors do, I guess, but by the time we got there, they were all out of tattoos and only had piercings left. This is because every tattoo actually exists on a sheet of paper that the artists then have to print onto your body, like faxes. Once a tattoo is used it can never be reused. Every person you see with a “live laugh love” tattoo actually had to get a slightly different variation of the phrase from Big Tattoo in order to have it printed forever on their body. Hence, “No Regerts” makes infinitely more sense. It’s kind of like Twitter usernames or NFTs. I will be forever jealous of the person who got the only legitimate tattoo of sexy Waluigi. I’m stuck with lusty Waluigi instead.

This is all to say that I got an eyebrow piercing, and have now become one of the men my grandmother warned me about. Oops!

The next day I was able to join my cousins on a trip downtown, where we went to the Field Museum and poked around in the dinosaur bones, ancient Egyptian tombs, and enormous, eldritch replicas of beetles that take up the better part of the basement of the museum. I have never once before been so frightened by soil. We did not get to spend any time in the Dead Zoo, the wing of the museum where they keep all their stuffed specimens of soon-to-be-extinct birds.

On a more serious note, the Field Museum’s exhibit on the history of the earth and its mass extinctions is perhaps one of the finest permanent exhibits in natural sciences museum history, and I highly recommend anyone with a passing interest in dinosaurs, human evolution, or the Cambrian Explosion to take a visit. It’s been in the museum for more than a decade now, but they just added a whole room all about SUE, their massive, almost-entirely-intact fossil of an actual Tyrannosaurus Rex. It is scientific information made accessible at its finest. Eat your heart out, NatGeo.

Following our Early Afternoon at the Museum (starring Ben Stiller), we took an architectural cruise of the city, someone that I haven’t done for, like, fifteen years. And it was pretty cool! I mean, I did just go on an architectural cruise of New York City like a month ago, but this is different. I (kind of) lived in Chicago! And I’m going to (probably) live there again someday! So it’s neat to learn more about this city that I love so much. Especially with fun people hanging around!

I couldn’t tell you what the hell I learned about it (art deco, verticality, hell island, something something warehouses), but it was neat to get a chance to take some pictures from unusual angles and locales that I don’t typically get around to much. And I forget, sometimes, how important the Chicago river is to the city’s development and geography. So that’s cool, too!

Of course, we drove Lake Shore Drive after that. A ten minute ride from the Gold Coast and all that. But the road was exceptionally busy, even by LSD standards, though it was also a Saturday evening so that’s probably got something to do with it. We took that drive from Buckingham fountain up to the end of the street, and then wandered off somewhere else because, let’s be honest, LSD is great and all but it’s, like, five miles long. Ok, maybe fifteen or twenty. So we had to find other ways to entertain ourselves besides driving into Lake Michigan, so we went to Superdawg, a drive-in favorite on the far northwest side of the city that my mom grew up going to, and then we assaulted Nick’s cat by forcing her to wear a bee costume that we got at a Goodwill. The other option at the Goodwill? Soccer balls that bounce back to you when you kick them. They had about fifty of the damn things at the store, and let me tell you something, no kid is ever both lonely enough and lacking the self-dignity to play soccer by themselves.

After that long but exciting day out on the town, we took it easy for the evening, because the next day, Sunday, we decided to go four-wheeling. Yes, Shareem, Gaston, Santi, my mom, and that random guy who keeps hanging out in my garage and buying me Chinese food, we all went up to Rockford, Illinois, to get on some ATVs and drive the trails. Rockford, mind you, is a town that really has nothing going for it except for the fact that it is almost in Wisconsin and therefore has better outdoor recreation opportunities than 80% of the state of Illinois. We didn’t even step foot in the city proper, just jumped off the highway and onto our all-terrain vehicles about as quickly as we could.

And we hot-footed it through the mud and the dirt to get our wheels off through the trees. Or, uh, something. I don’t know if there are terms or things for the sport of ATV’ing that we did, because I don’t know jack squat about it except for the fact that, hey, this is pretty fun! My cousins do/used to ride dirt bikes, I guess, so they were naturals at it. I am perhaps the most mediocre driver imaginable, but I somehow managed to make it out unscathed, which I’ll count as a win.

And after that, I made the trek back up to Minneapolis. And now I’m writing this post out here! What a weekend it was. I’m really glad that I got to spend some time with even more people that I care about. Which is crazy to me that there are so many of them. Like, I have more family now? Where do they keep coming from? Man, I used to have like, two friends, and now I’ve got cousins coming out of every which way. It’s a pretty spectacular miracle, all things considered. The world never ceases to amaze me.

And that’s my weekend! I hope you all make it back to Florida safely, and I can’t wait to see you all (and the cousins in Florida who couldn’t make it!) again. Next weekend will definitely not be nearly as exciting as these last couple have been, and I’ve got a week of work in between now and then, so I’ll see you all on the other side of Friday. Until then, good luck! And Good Night?