A Boolean argument was expected.

A year ago today, I posted a rant about Chicago’s movable bridges, and how their infrequent movement seems to lead to unreliable operation.  Upon further consideration, I have to change my tune.  Not that I’m retracting what I said.  I still contend that opening the bridges over the Chicago River more frequently than they do now would be less disruptive in general to street traffic.

But here’s the difference: I have come to think that this disruption is actually a good thing.

Sure, every time a bridge lifts there will be some people stranded, stuck on the wrong side of the river, impatient to cross and get on with their day.  So it goes.  In all the time I’ve lived in Chicago, I’ve never once been seriously inconvenienced by a bridge lift.  Sure, there have been times I’ve forgotten it was a lift day, or been surprised by an unscheduled lift, where I’ve turned a corner and discovered an enormous steel wall where I expected a clear passage. Each time, I adjusted my route and found one of umpteen other ways to cross the river and get to where I needed to go. So I can’t say I have a lot of sympathy for those who are too inflexible to find other options, or too uptight simply to relax and enjoy the show.

On Wednesday I watched yet another sailboat flotilla head out to the lake.  On this breezy, sunny spring day, there were plenty of people around. As the signal bells clanged, the gates closed, and the bridge raised to the sky, dozens crowded the railing along Wacker Drive near the Michigan Avenue bridge. Tourists raised their cameras.  Heck, so did some locals, seeing something different during an otherwise routine lunch break.  Down along the new riverwalk, people sat on benches to watch the “big event.”  At least half were locals; this was probably not their first time.

There’s a novelty to the movable bridges that doesn’t wear out. As old as the Michigan Avenue bridge is — its admirers will celebrate its 90th year next week — it remains a marvel of engineering.  It can be awe-inspiring (and perhaps a little frightening) to stand, as I did, underneath it as it opens. The near-silence with which its motors actuate the spans just adds to the stateliness of its movement.

One moment, you’re underneath a solid expanse of iron, capable of supporting untold numbers of buses, cars, and pedestrians…

…the next moment, you’re looking into the gaping maw of Lower Michigan Avenue, suddenly truncated and hanging out into open space, as the sky opens up above your head and the Tribune Tower, Wrigley Building, and other landmarks of the skyline are revealed.

Raise the bridges more often, and it becomes less of an event — a unique, uncommon occasion for people to experience together.  As often as I’ve seen the bridges move, I still find the first-timer’s exclamation of “wow! look at that!” to be contagious, and a joy worth catching.

Last week the following hand-written postcard was mailed to our home:

You have the ugliest front yard on [this street] — probably in all of Chicago.  Garbage all over.  Bottes all over.  Get your lazy Ukranian asses moving and clean up your garbage dump. It is repulsive.  All the other neighbors take pride in the neighborhood.  You are absolute pigs.

[All misspellings and emphasis — in purple highlighter, no less — are in the original.]

In what way exactly did you expect us to respond to this angry, hateful, anonymous missive?  Did you think we would leap up and run to the yard, tools in hand, and make drastic changes?  Tear it all up and put down a nice, even layer of sod?  Because truth be told, my initial reaction was to respond to your anger in kind, and decide that under no circumstances would I undertake any effort that might bring you any satisfaction.

Not that I would anyway.  You see, the front garden is not my bailiwick — it is under the direction of my septuagenarian mother-in-law.  You have attacked a senior citizen.  She is, far from being lazy, one of the most hard-working and industrious people you could meet, at any age.  Her gardening style may be a bit unconventional, perhaps, and her budget is limited, but her results have been both interesting and beautiful.  We offer to help, but more often than not she prefers to do the work herself.

The garden you see is not the result of laziness, it is a work in progress.  The “bott[l]es” you mention, unless they were the transitory garbage of passing drunks — a commonality of any urban environment, and something we clean up whenever we see it — were probably the Mason jars that she had upended over the shoots of tender perennials, as impromptu “cold frames” to protect them from late-season frosts.  Meanwhile, the area near the street — which is city property — is still recovering from the city workers who cut down a dead tree last year, but left the roots behind.  (And who got off their asses and called the city about that tree?  Yes.  We did.)

Sure, in early spring the lack of grass makes it appear as if nothing is growing there, but that could not be further from the truth. It’s late April now and things are changing rapidly. The ground cover is filling in neatly between plantings.  The hostas are sprouting thick and healthy.  A neat row of day lilies is getting ready to do its thing.  The rhododendrons are blooming now, and the roses will later.  All this did not occur without significant effort.

Is our front yard a boring, generic mass of lawn, like that of every other house on the block?  No — and I’m glad it’s not.  If you want dull, thoughtless uniformity, I know of more than a few suburbs that might suit you.

Your accusation of laziness, and your implication of unneighborliness, are without any merit.  Who has stood in the street in drenching rains, working to clear blocked drains along the entire block before the curbs overflow and dump rainwater and sewage into nearby basements — drains that have clogged with debris that remains in the gutters thanks to other residents who have been either too lazy, too self-absorbed, or too oblivious to move their vehicles on street sweeping days?  That would be me.  To my knowledge only one other neighbor on the block has even attempted to pick up what the street sweeper could not reach.

By the way, we are not Ukrainian; but would be proud if we were, for on the whole they have shown themselves to be good people who have been both friendly and welcoming to us.  This neighborhood is called Ukrainian Village for a reason.  If you have a problem with Ukrainians, you are most assuredly in the wrong place, and you need to go somewhere else.  The sooner the better.

I really only have one question for you.  Who has brought more ugliness into the world: my family, with our front yard filled with flowering plants; or you, with your hateful, insulting, race-baiting, poison-pen postcard?

Plenty has been written about Chicago’s disastrous parking meter deal, so I need not go into how the asking price was almost criminally low, how the aldermen were railroaded into endorsing the deal without even knowing its terms, how our new parking overlords are raking in more than a million dollars a week.

Instead, I have something to share that I noticed a few weeks ago.  To me, it illustrates in microcosmic form the parking meter deal as a whole: its purpose is poorly conceived, its ramifications are unclear, and ultimately it screws the citizens of Chicago.

It is an example of some typical signage, from the 2100 block of West Division Street.

The problem with these two signs lies with their arrows.

On the bottom sign, denoting the edge of a daytime loading zone, the arrow tells us in which direction the zone extends from this point.  This is the purpose with which motorists are familiar, having seen it many times at the edges of no parking zones and the like.

The arrow on the recently added top sign, however, tells us in which direction the nearest pay box may be found.

Because the two arrows appear on the same signpost, it is not unreasonable to infer that they have similar meanings.  Indeed, the arrows are not merely similar in appearance, they are identical.  The “pay box, thataway” arrow is the same size and shape as the “zone starts here, goes thataway” arrow.  Therefore these signs, in combination, could easily lead motorists to believe that the pay zone extends to the left, and that once the loading zone expires at 6PM the free-but-very-short-term parking spots to the right become free-and-stay-as-long-as-you-want.  (Or, at least until 8AM the next morning.)

I’m not being overly sensitive about this, or over-thinking it.  I noticed this signage in the first place when I overheard a group of women, having just parked their car in the loading zone after 6PM, debating this exact question.  They had come to the erroneous conclusion, and were about to walk off and get their evening underway.  Fortunately, before some random stranger (that is, I) could accost them and politely set them straight, one of the women noticed other, marginally less-obfuscating, signs on the block and convinced them to return and pay the fee.

The women seemed new to the neighbourhood, unfamiliar with their environs.  They probably were there for their first time to try out one of the trendy Division Street restaurants they’d read about in Chicago magazine or some such.  Lucky for them, one of their party was paying enough attention that they didn’t finish their Big City meal to find that it cost them upwards of $75 more than they had expected.

By the way, the icing on this cupcake is the fact that the pay box sign is pointing the wrong way.  The next available pay box in that direction — if in fact there is one — is at least two and a half blocks away, past the windswept open wasteland of St. Mary’s Hospital and Roberto Clemente High School, and across busy, seven-lane-wide Western Avenue.

It’s time for some simple arithmetic…

Amount of budget cuts announced by the mayor this week, in wage freezes and unpaid furloughs for nonunion city workers: $44 Million. [source: Chicago Tribune, 20 Oct 2009]

Amount the city will admit to having spent on the 2016 Olympics bid, despite independent estimates that go much higher: $50 Million. [source: New York Times, 8 Apr 2009]

Hmm. Those numbers not sufficiently coincidental for you? How about these…

Amount of the city’s FY2010 budget deficit: $550 Million. [source: Chicago Sun-Times, 15 Oct 2009]

Amount the city’s tax increment financing districts diverted in property taxes in 2007, the most recent figure available: $555 Million. [source: Chicago Reader, 6 Nov 2008]

Can anyone tell me what two plus two equals? Anyone?

I went looking for a particular book the other day, and started in my usual place: Amazon.com. Turns out the book is long out of print and somewhat uncommon, but of course Amazon had several used copies to offer, from various bookstores throughout the country.  Since I wasn’t looking for a pristine, mint copy, just one in decent shape, I spotted one that fell into the sweet spot of price and condition: “Very good” at $39.95.

Then I noticed that the bookseller, coincidentally, is an actual bricks-and-mortar shop here in town that I have frequented many times in past years.  Occasionally I’d pass by it and think, that place is great, I should stop in again sometime.  So when I saw the name in the Amazon list I figured, what the heck: I’ll stop in and buy it direct, get the book sooner and save the shipping cost.  And I’ll have an excuse to browse an interesting place and support a locally owned business.

The result: disappointment.

This afternoon when I walked in, there was a spirited conversation going on at the front counter between the proprietor and a customer, which sounded to me more like bickering than dickering.  They had clearly been at it for a while, and almost certainly this was far from their first time.  It wasn’t exactly ugly, just strained, and it cast an odd pall over the place. Meanwhile, as I looked around I had a sense that the place had changed.

This shop has long had a reputation as being almost impossibly cluttered, but this was usually considered to be part of its charm.  In the past when I’ve shopped there I would find interesting books jumping off the shelves at me (fortunately, only figuratively).  This time, however, it was as if everything had reached a state of calcification, as if even if I’d spotted a book I really wanted I would have been unable to remove it from the shelf as it would be fused with all the books surrounding it.

Then again, maybe that impression was just a side effect of the vibe at the front counter.  In either case, I grew impatient for the bothersome customer to finally leave so that I could ask the proprietor about my quarry.

And so I did.  He thought for a long moment, querying the catalogue in his head, and replied, “Ah, yes… I know the book.  I believe I have that for sale online.”

I nodded, agreeing.

He gestured none-too-vaguely at a massive pile to his right, giving me the sense that, even though their spines were not facing him, he knew exactly which anonymous book in that stack we were discussing.  “I believe I had that listed for $100.  It’s been up there for a while.”

I asked, “Was that on Amazon?”

“Yeah,” he said, brightly.  “Did you see it?”

I nodded again and said “I noticed it was you selling it and figured since I’m in the neighbourhood, I’d just stop in.”

“Did you happen to see what it was listed for?”

I pondered for a moment, not so much trying to remember what the price had been but debating whether I should try to lowball him.  I decided to play it straight.  “About $40.”

“Oh,” he said.  Then he went into some digression about how he might have lowered the price once or twice, because it wasn’t moving, and something about how his prices on Amazon are 20% lower because he has to pay their commission — which maybe I misunderstood, because that makes absolutely no sense.  Then he said, “Can you call me tomorrow?  I need to check on the listing first.”  He started to jot down a reminder to himself on the notepad on the counter.

“Well…” I hemmed slowly, “I’m going to be kind of tied up tomorrow…” My uncertainty was meant to give him the chance to change his mind, to decide that he was willing to sell me that book, and to take the few minutes needed to locate it.

I guess he didn’t hear me.  “Yeah, call me tomorrow, I’ll let you know.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said, and left.  Which really meant: not a chance.

The way I see it is this.  He tried to take me to the cleaners for a hundred bucks, for a book that I just don’t need all that badly.  I offered him forty, a more than fair price that he passed on — even though if I’d pulled out my mobile phone and punched up Amazon in its browser and ordered the book from him through that, I would have paid a few bucks more for shipping — but a considerably smaller portion of that same forty bucks would have made it into his pocket.

I guess he wasn’t really interested in the $40 cash I was ready to plunk onto his cluttered countertop.

No matter.  After checking out another used book store in the area (where I found a couple of very interesting items), I came home and ordered the book from Amazon.  My book is on its way… from a shop in Oregon.  And I won’t be back in that cluttered bookshop again — not so long as its proprietor has no interest in actually selling books.