I like Chicago.  I chose to move here.  I did so because it is relatively liberal, its residents are generally friendly, the City has terrific arts and culture, is relatively affordable, and is built on a human scale.

However — and I think this is unfortunate — Chicago is best known for its dark side.  There are a many reasons for this.  Chicago is a very down-to-earth place.  It doesn’t have a distinct, flamboyant style as Los Angeles and New York do. The City is an amalgam of distinct neighborhoods; these are individuated in a way that the City as a whole is not.  Also, while Chicago’s arts and culture are robust, they are not usually locally distinct except, historically, in architecture and popular music.

Of course, the biggest reason is that Chicago is politically rotten.   It exemplifies more than any other American city other than New Orleans one of H.L. Mencken’s innumerable great lines: that “every election is a sort of advance auction in stolen goods.”

As blogger jossip.com notes:

The reason Chicago politics is so corrupt is because, in modern American history, it’s never not been, which makes it very difficult to clean up. Especially because every politician who says they’re going to try and straighten Chicago out ends up lying and cheating worse than the pig who came before him.

Curiously, there’s relatively little effort to hide the filth. One feature of the City serves as a metaphor for this: alleys. Chicago is full of them; they run behind almost all residential streets.

Chicago doesn’t so much hide its dark side as compartmentalize itself.  The nicer elements of the City are displayed most prominently, but the trash cans are always on view in the back.

The Catholic Church is ancient and pervasive, and Pope is a unique job; one of the few that has endured sufficiently to be simultaneously archetypal and manifest.  Ultimately, the appeal of the Catholic Church is incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t in it. But even I can see that there’s a gap wider than the Sea of Galilee between the institutional Church and many of its members and clergy. Although I have met many Catholics whose commitment to social justice was profoundly impressive, I have never seen much evidence of this in the institutional Church.

Over its long history, I think of the institutional Church as a yo-yo banging around between manifest intolerance and intellectualized compassion.  I don’t expect much from it.  If its interest in the poor went deeper than theology, it could have hocked the art collection centuries ago.  But I do think the Pope, if only for public relations reasons, should try to present himself as empathetic.

Ratzi’s previous job was head of the successor organization to the Office of the Inquisition; he is a man who is more pillar of salt than flowering pomegranites.  As Pope, he’s a public relations disaster.  I suspect the Peter, Paul, Luke, Matthew and John Principle has kicked in.

Ratzi’s list of public misfirings is getting to be as long as the Old Testament.  He reversed the ex-communication of a Holocaust-denying priest, and later defended his action on the basis of  Church unity.  He suggested that condom use increases the spread of HIV in a region where something like 1 in 4 people are infected.  A few years back, he stated that homosexuality was “intrinsically evil.”

 But his biggest hit was in 2006, when he quoted an unfortunate Medieval remark about Islam:

 Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

Just for fun, let’s ignore the fact that the institutional Church is equally guilty of “spreading by the sword the faith.”  Could he not have been aware that making anti-Islamic comments wasn’t going to play in Peoriastan?

The destructive effect of Ratzi’s public comments seems to be cumulative; almost each utterance receives a more dramatic negative reaction than the last.  This leads me to hope he will learn to keep his mouth shut.  Otherwise, God only knows how far he is likely to slide down his present slippery pope.

I am an unrepentant, elitist tea snob.  Good tea is like using Directory Assistance: once you’ve developed the habit, you won’t go back to the phone book, no matter what it costs.  I love quality tea, green and black, and I spend a lot of money on it. I am so fond of tea that I would consider marrying an exceptional Lapsang Souchang if it weren’t for the language barrier.

To anyone with a taste for fine tea, the flavor of Lipton tea, particularly its original formulation, is simply awful. As my friend Yew, a costume conservator, notes, “the stuff is undrinkable, but it’s a very good dye for giving textiles an aged look.”

Bags are to tea what instant is to coffee.  No tea bags are particularly tasty.  Twinings isn’t wonderful, nor is Bigelow or Celestial Seasonings or Tazo or any of the others. But none of these match Lipton’s original for supremely rotten taste. I’ve searched the Internet. I know there are people who like the stuff. But I suspect that’s only because they haven’t been to Todd and Holland for Darjeeling Castleton Estate I Flush FTGFOP.

What I hate about Lipton tea isn’t just that it’s awful or that some people like it.  I hate that it’s so pervasive, particularly in places in which it has no right to be.  I don’t know how many times I’ve had a lovely meal somewhere, and been served Lipton tea afterwards.  Why is it that restaurants and hotels that take such obvious care with food don’t pay attention to the tea they serve?

You may be surprised to learn this, but I am a very tolerant person.  For example, I’ve been known to sit through entire Andrew Lloyd Weber musicals without even a testy comment.  Well, I did it once.  However, even someone like me has limits to his saintly endurance: Comcast, Lipton tea and Pope Benedict XVI.

Large corporations can be irritating, inept, unconscious, short-sighted, greedy, and duplicitious.  Less frequently they can be charitable, forward-thinking, competent, and progressive.  I’ve certainly had positive experiences with companies: T-Mobile and Apple, for example.

Then there’s Comcast.

At my darkest, I think of Comcast as the Caligula of corporations.  But this is unfair.  For example, there is no evidence of a horse in senior management.  A more apt analogy: In The Brittas Empire, an old BBC sitcom, a character named Gordon Brittas destroyed the lives of everyone around him through charming incompetence.  In my experience, Comcast’s services often don’t work properly, its customer service is politely inept, its technicians are incompetent, its systems are Kafkaesque, and it shows little to no awareness of, or interest in, the problems it creates.  If it were not a virtual monopoly in most of the places it operates, I don’t imagine they could stay in business. 

Apparently, I’m not alone in my contempt.  According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, Comcast had the lowest satisfaction rating of any corporation or agency in the United States in both 2004 and 2007 – even lower than the Internal Revenue Service.  Just type “I hate Comcast” into Google and you get 757,000 hits.  It’s no wonder a woman in Virginia went to one of Comcast’s offices with a hammer and smashed up the place.

Observed on the Internet:

• When in Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, don’t miss Big Bone Lick State Park.
• The National Park Service discusses the Eastern Cottontail Rabbit next to a link to “Civil War Defenses of Washington.”  I’m not sure on which side the rabbits fought.
• The New York Times notes an increase in feral rabbits in Florida.
• In 2008, Chicago hosted an International Reunion of Playboy Bunnies.
• Lady Bunny, who describes herself as “Dusty Springfield meets Don Rickles,” is packing them in in Tel Aviv.
• Results are in for the Skating Club of San Francisco’s Bunny Hop Competition.

Last night, a friend and I watched video of Sonia Sotomayor. The Supreme Court nominee recently injured herself, and is hobbling around Washington on crutches.

“What do you notice about her legs?” My friend asked.

“She’s wearing pantyhose on her good side.”

“If you’re a woman with a broken leg, do you wear pantyhose on the other gam, thus looking professional but visually incongruent, or do you forego pantyhose all together, thus looking visually harmonious but inappropriately casual?”

“I’ve never thought of that.”

“Of course not.  You’ve never been a woman with a broken leg.”

“Neither have you.”

“True.  But I watch analysis on Fox News.”

I spent the fourth of July at a party in the faculty ghetto of a Midwestern college town.  Overheard:

So after he died, I had to clean out the house.  That’s when I found the box of scabs.  They were individually mounted like butterflies, with dates and details of each injury.

Of course you should take my advice.  You are the prince of a great deal, but I am the king of everything.

I saw that he was chewing gum at the bar, but I didn’t think anything of it.  However, after we’d finished, I discovered I had Juicyfruit in my crotch.

I mixed Guacamole and Ranch Dressing, then poured it over the Brussels Sprouts.  I call it Guacojones.

Dead Words, my first mystery, is Tales of the City swatting black flies with Agatha Christie in the Maine woods. It is the first of at least five mysteries planned featuring the same central character, Cummings Flynn Wanamaker. 

Cummings – named after e.e. Cummings and Errol Flynn because his father liked wordplay and his mother liked swordplay – walks into his Manhattan condo to discover his partner, Terry, being murdered. The murder is never solved, and a clue points to Horeb, a village in rural Maine. Cummings is determined to find out who murdered Terry and why. He takes a job in Maine as a program officer for an arts philanthropy, Panegyricus, and moves to Horeb. Murders begin in the village the day he arrives.

The head of Panegyricus, Birdie Wordsworth, has an annual performance art event/lawn party. This is a funeral for words that have fallen out of use. Birdie invites her friends and colleagues to her farm for cookies and lemonade, and buries five words on a cemetery on her property. The year’s words are: bardolater (a lover of Shakespeare); frippery (finery); lorgnette (opera glasses); snollygoster (a shrewd, unprincipled person); and addecimate (tithing).

Cummings attends the event, and soon finds a connection between the dead words and the murders in the village. He eventually discovers the solution to his partner’s murder, and how it links to the others. The ending is hilarious and horrifying; a slightly fictionalized version of a forgotten crime that occurred in a Maine about twenty years ago.

In addition to Cummings, some of the book’s major characters – many of whom will recur in subsequent books — are:

• Feenie Malaga, an artist. (”Mother had her issues. I was named after Phenobarbital.”)
• Orchid, an octogenarian free spirit who distributes condoms at a bath house and plays Scrabble in five languages.
• Kimball Ledgard, the metrosexual son of a wealthy diplomat, whose fifth wife has just left him for a mysterious man in a Winnebago.
• Officer Bernier, a former Marine and current Batesham police officer who crochets antimacassars for his squad car.

This novel, written as Ezekiel Weaver, is my first, although I have written successfully for theater, television, and radio under my birth name. The New Yorker said of one piece, “…an interesting portrait of contemporary marriage…theatrical and lively-minded.”

I like to think I’m theatrical and lively-minded, to say nothing of tempestuous and droll.

I am currently marketing Dead Words, and at work on the next book in the series, No Applause. In that one, everyone gets tired of swatting black flies, and moves to Chicago.

During a web search, I found an August, 2007 article by Avis Yarbrough, The Rabbit Population in Chicago Has Grown.

According to a spokesperson for the Chicago Park District, the “rabbit problem” dates to the early 2000’s when Mayor Daley decided to change Chicago from an “urban landscape to an urban forest, the perfect habitat for rabbits.” Does this mean that boosting the rabbit population was a policy decision?

The Park District also notes that bunnies in Chicago have a “lack of natural predators,” including that “there are not many people in Chicago that hunt” them. Indeed. Our many citizens with weapons are far too busy shooting each other.

So, what is the Park District doing about the bunny problem? They’ve hired a company to catch them and release them in the suburbs.

For many years prior to moving to Oak Park, I lived in Horeb, a small village in Maine. This is a primary location for my mystery novels, Dead Words and No Applause.

Horeb, founded 1762, current population 2,612, is on Merrymeeting Bay, about twenty miles from the ocean. It has grown in the last twenty years, recently exceeding its previous population peak – 2,382 – achieved in 1850 as a result of Maine’s then-thriving seafaring economy.

The Civil War, in which 237 Horeb men served and more than 30 died, as well as changes in the shipping industry, eroded the town’s fortunes.

Today, Horeb’s residents are dispersed among 34 square miles of woods and farms – and former woods and farms – that radiate out from the village proper. The village itself is tiny (population perhaps 250).

The primary past-times in Horeb are drinking, gossip, and eco-consciousness. At one neighborhood Christmas party, a sloshed neighbor told me in pornographic detail about an ongoing affair between the man next door and our hostess. The next year, we discussed geothermal energy.

I had a long relationship with a college professor there, Augustus. After we split up, I decided 12 years in the woods was enough. I moved to Chicago, a city I’d always liked.