Spring Cleaning

The recent cold snap has got me dreaming of Spring. There are always a few miserably cold weeks during any given Chicago winter, but they always seem to be so brutal that no matter how many times you've gone through it, you never really get used to it. I know that I'll hate March when it comes, because that month is an evil bitch. She teases you with promises of Summer, while holding cold, rainy days over your head, leaving you stranded for weeks at a time without sunlight.


Back when I was an undergrad, I was getting ready to actually finish my degree. (I say actually, because it took me like seven years to conclude what most people do in four.) One of the required courses was 201, Professional Writing. Luckily for me, I took it with an open minded professor, who taught classical literature and creative writing. So while the rest of the class was wrestling with clunky words like "stated", "provide", and "furthermore", I was writing poems and short stories. At the time I was unemployed, had just broken up with a girl I really liked, and was getting ready to move back in with my parents. Taking his class as a creative writing course was as much about earning credit to graduate as it was about writing as an expression.

One of the things that Dr. Hull would have us do at the beginning of class is spend 15 minutes "just writing". He didn't care what we wrote, if it made sense, was interesting or even if it was pretty prose. "Just write," he would tell the class. "That's the only way that you will get good at it." So the class would sit in concentrated silence, keyboards clicking, laboring to "just write" for those 15 minutes, three times a week. After our time was up, he would pass out a sheet of paper with "flourishes", clips of what we had written in the previous class that he liked.

I set up City of Progress as the next step for me when I was still thinking about what I would do post-Chicagoist. Obviously, this isn't my post-Chicagoist blog. In fact, aside from a few friends and my parents (hi Dad!), nobody really even reads this site. Which is fine with me. That's given me the freedom to write what I want to write. And it's given me an excuse to write a little bit, every day.

Those dreams of Spring have made me want to do the things people do in the early months. Namely, open up the house, step outside, and do some cleaning. While it's far too cold to even think about kicking the doors open and do real cleaning (although there is some light picking-up scheduled for later today), I thought I would do some verbal Spring cleaning. So, in the spirit of Dr. Rick Hull's Professional Writing 201, here's some clips from unpublished posts that I wrote just to write:

So we walked down Western looking for a different restaurant that someone told us about. Which we couldn't find. Seriously, we got to Ohio before I suggested we turn around. At this point the movie was starting in about 15 minutes, and we had pretty much decided that we just wanted to eat dinner and drink at a bar and be left alone.

Last winter when Margaret Lyons wrote a piece for TOC, I went with her and we took both a revolver and a semi-automatic handgun class. I grew up with guns: my father was a duck hunter and trap shooter, so I learned about guns, safety and sport early on, as did my sister (although she never went hunting with us, she did come out and learn to shoot). As I got older and my father got more involved in the union, there was less and less time for hunting and sport shooting. Consequently, it had been about 15 years since I picked up a gun. Regardless, I had no experience with handguns.

I'm certain that there was some B-School calculus in a marketing department somewhere at Walgreens Corporate HQ that put this product on-line. And I'm certain that running to Wags for a little lube and some rubbers is something that red-blooded Americans do all the time. But I'm also reasonably certain that if you're doing an internet search for a specially lined plush throw to protect your dry-clean only Italian leather duvet from lube, spooge and santorum, you aren't clicking through Walgreens website muttering to yourself "I know it's in here somewhere". But who am I to judge?

Image via Michael DaKidd