Chicago

        It’s nearly eight in the morning and I’m hung-over in the Chicago union station.  Cow is buying our tickets for the train back to Lumbard somewhere and I’m left here in a sitting area surrounded by thousands of people trying to get to work.  They look like Chihuahuas to me, they are alert, jittery, their movements are chaotic. It's as if s if at any moment they will stop dead in their tracks and shake until they pee.  I hate Chihuahuas, they have such high stress levels, just being around them makes me anxious.  That’s why if I were a dog, I would be a pug.  Pugs are lazy, have trouble doing simple things like breathing or walking, and are mind bogglingly adorable.  
        I think I hate Chihuahuas because my grandma forced me to hate them by having at least 3 of them yapping within a foot of her at all times.  She has three Chihuahuas at the moment, one of which is so old, it's jaw has literally fallen off (she feeds this one soggy dog food).  She has potty trained them to poop only on her rugs, and pee only on her furniture.  She lets them outside to go pee sometimes and they just look at her like she's crazy, then come inside and unload their pancake breakfast on her divan. 
       Being in Chicago is like sitting in my grandma's living room for days.  I love my grandma, and I love this city don't get me wrong, but it's overwhelming.  Cow and I came here for my friend Kiley's wedding.  Kiley is my first friend to get married and it makes me feel old, whats next? Soon my friends will start procreating.
        I met Kiley in high school Geology class.  This was during the time when I dated fabulously beautiful girls and treated them as show horses, leading them by the reigns down the hallways as a trophy of my sexuality. "LOOK, I'm not gay I have a girlfriend!"  My facade was deteriorating though because rumor had it that I was the impotent gymnast boy who broke up with girls when they wanted to get sexual.  Kiley knew this and promptly declined my request to make her my cover girl. 
       I came out shortly after Kiley turned me down and I began cereal dating boys. We quickly became friends once we discovered that we liked to stalk our ex's, a past time bonded over many drive-bys and countless stakeouts.  She and I would drive past my teenage heart throb ex-boyfriend Doug's house and listen to Kelly Clarkson and Nine Inch Nails albums while wallowing in our single self pity.  Kiley was my friend I went to when I needed cheering up,  I'd like to think I was the same for her and since we were perpetually down about something we spent a lot of time together. 
     She is the one that invented shopping cart bumper cars.  In an effort to get me pumped back up for a night of debauchery, she drove to the Grocery store parking lot in her green Cavelier, aligned the car with a shopping cart.  Her bumper tapping the back of the cart, she floored it.  After bringing the cart to a minimum of 35 miles per hour she slammed on her breaks, sending the cart hurling into a median or building.  This turned into a regular thing, hitting up parking lots with those plastic kiddy carts, with cartoon faces on the front. 
        It's weird that she's getting married now.  It's weird because I don't know her anymore, the Kiley I know is frozen in time four years ago, the last time I saw her and lived in Illinois.  She came over to help me pack when Brian decided to make me homeless and loveless.  She printed off mapquest directions to my mom's house in Kansas, and she hugged me goodbye.  Kiley is still that girl to me, not the engaged woman who deals with insurance information for a living.  I'm scared to see her, I'm scared to see my old friends, I'm scared that they wont match up with the images and memories I have of them.  The wedding is in two days, that's how long I have to mentally prepare myself, in the mean time I'll try and enjoy Chicago. 
      Cow and I met up with out friend Caffy last night and she took us to a party.  We each drank the two 40oz malt liquors we bought before getting a cab.  Everyone at the party seemed to have forgotten what a shower was, because not only did they smell like suffocated farts, but they looked so dirty that if you put a white glove on and swiped a finger on their foreheads your finger would be black.  Not a normal black either, a brownish sick black, like the dark due that grows on damp tree trunks.  Which is why now, at union station, my head feels like a mastodon just put on platforms and stomped on my temples until its hoofs were raw and bloody.         
        Something about having a hangover makes me a little more observant than usual, perhaps because my brain is slowing everything down.  The two lanes of human traffic moving in opposite directions down the thin hallways of this train station, though chaotic, is slowed down almost to a stop.  I can see the panic in the faces of people who are late for work or people who are having an inner battle about what type of coffee to get at the Dunkin Doughnuts across from where I sit.   People look panicked here.  I’ve met some really nice people, but for the most part, the population here can’t seem to keep up with themselves.  Like their bodies are moving forward, but their spiritual self is five feet behind reaching out, begging for a rest.  
        People have no concept of personal space here either.  I’m in a food court thing surrounded by tables and I’m watching perfect strangers sit down to eat their breakfast with perfect strangers.  They don’t make eye contact with one another, or acknowledge each other, they just sit and stare at their food until it’s gone.  No one else seems to matter, it’s just them, and a chair.  Like the moment they sit down they get to simply exist with the solitude of their thoughts. Like most moments though, they are fleeting and hard to hold onto.
I just watched a woman sit down across from him and as if her head was made of led, slammed her cranium on the table to take a power nap.  The guy just looked up from the book he was reading, looked at his new table guest and slowly lowered his eyes back to his literature.  
        Cow is perfectly content.  On the train here he looked like a kid going to Disney Land, his fingers pressed against the train windows and his breath fogging up the glass with his excited respiration.  There is a weird tension between us, something brought to the surface by sitting in a car together for 8 hours and not speaking.  He read psychology magazines and I thought about things to talk about.
        It started to rain last night, we stood under an overhang by the sears tower, smoking while the rain slithered through skyscrapers.  Rain is different in a city like Chicago.  Traffic, construction, voices, they are all silenced by the fall of rain.  The city calms when it rains, becomes quiet and muffled. Like the static of an old TV.   We ran to the nearest store and bought umbrellas.
        As Cow walked in front of me his short legs moving at an exhausting pace, I started to get the faint feeling the reason for the strange tension between us was that we were frozen in time.  The Cow I loved exhisted back in Kansas City, over a year ago.  I didn't know the person walking infront of me, I didn't love him.  He stopped and was standing in front of me looking at the city lights which casted a dramatic contrast over his face, and in that moment I saw the same face I fell so hard for almost two years ago.  A face that was younger and less aware.  Like most moments though, it was fleeting and hard to hold on to.  We continued, two pugs walking forward in a city full of Chihuahuas.