I’m familiar with fog. I’ve seen it on countless occasions. I saw it in Prague, on my birthday: I watched as it transformed the city into something of it’s post-card twin. I saw it in Český Krumlov. It was a daily occurrence there, a thing so regular you could set your watch to it. Fog—in the Czech Republic—is a moody and hypnotic thing. In Chicago, fog was always something else—always less than impressive. As a child, I’d see clumps of it in parks or vast, open spaces as only you can get near the peripheries of the Windy City. I’d see thin, broken clots of it downtown or in the more densely-populated areas. It was never an impressive thing, never distinguishable from the exhaust of automotive exuberance. It would linger in forest preserves, marking accidental compost heaps. Two weeks ago, things changed: Chicago fog became something else. It grew up. It turned thick and treacherous, and stranger than any of that moody stuff you’d find in the Czech Republic. It rolled in at night, and so it carried an odd, hepatic orange glow tinged here and there with headlights, flashing neon, and the color-shifting glow of traffic signals. Two weeks ago, Chicago vanished for a short time and I imagined that the city was redesigning itself, shifting subtly here and there: changing its face. This was not the case. Chicago remains as it was, but on that night two weeks ago, the fog implied so much, while obscuring everything. As I walked home from the end of my public transport journey, I marveled at the spooky silence of my neighborhood. In late night hours things are always strangely quiet, but on that night, the fog seemed to delay what sounds reached my ears. It was thicker in my neighborhood than up north; this is not surprising as the South Side of Chicago habitually engenders heavier weather than the northern stretches of the city. The fog had become a tactile thing here. It clung to clothing, moistening the material of my coat and the fabric of my jeans. It was an impenetrable, noiseless mass, colored in the strange orange of pressurized sodium vapor excited by currents of electricity. It lingered. And by day, even as the sun struggled to burn it away, it remained. The day eventually cleared, though clouds colored the sky… …and two days later, it returned. *** This is one of the few pictures I have in the area surrounding my current place of residence. There really isn't much to see here, but when that absence of reality is cloaked in fog, things tend to look better. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you're all having a great week. I hope to catch up on viewing and commenting as the weekend arrives.