The river is cold tonight. The river is sluggish, but it has always been so. By natural inclination it must empty into the lake, but humankind has changed this. Its headwaters flow in accordance to nature. Here, where the streets lie in a perfect grid, the river’s flow reverses. It was the city’s original plan to keep the river (and its human-derived offal) from the lake. And so here, where the river is cold and sluggish, its waters flow backwards. The lake, to the east, is an invisible thing, a whisper of deeper black in light-tinged shallows that may aspire to blackness but never quite make it. There are no boats; it’s too cold for them, and so the lake, like the river, is dark and lifeless. What fish may swim in these waters have taken to the depths: a hard thing since depth is not a true Chicago-concept. The river and the lake are not the largest or the deepest. They define the city, however, and so it is no surprise to learn that Chicago’s history is only half-substantial. Like any youngster, Chicago looks only to the present. The future is a half-realized dream that lurks somewhere in the bowels of the subconscious. The past is something buried and forgotten, though fragments of it may find their way to the surface. What history the city claims is also sold to the highest bidder. On nights when the air is cold and clotted with lake-born exhalations, only the present exerts itself. It gleams in the colors of high-pressure sodium vapor and with neon, halogen, and incandescent light. It hums with traffic, leavening itself (here and there) with food-spices and gusts of warmth from restaurant doors. On these nights, deep in the grid-locked core of the city, the present is all that matters. It is a beautiful thing (though its beauty is inconstant and mutable, as only beauty may be.) It is safe—though only for a moment—to contemplate the river in its reverse-course, and the lights, gleaming like gems, on the face of murky water. There is beauty, and it is born in the buzz of electricity through excited gasses. Tomorrow, the sun will rise (though in winter, the clouds will simply lighten and take on their normal, unctuous gray.) And the city will be a different thing. A gray thing. A drab thing as appealing as the underbelly of a rat. The buildings that announce themselves with light in the darkness will serve men who can only dream of numbers. These men have no need of light, no understanding of it, and for as long as their influence rules, the city will stand, sullen and colorless. But as such men—with their numerical dreams—retire to their dwellings, the city will again live, will again throw its giddy light into the darkness and (as always) deny the perversions of those whose dreams have warped its very nature. This city—like others so young—makes its name in darkness, smearing it (paint-like) over the face of its narrow, sluggish river. *** As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope that this week is going well for you.