Phoenix of Love

Here’s a story for you. Harold Hartley is a sales representative for a Detroit steel company. Every Monday, he catches the disastrously early 5:45am Northwest Airlines flight to Indianapolis to work with a major client there. Every Thursday, after three and a half long days of hard selling, he topples into his coach class seat [...]

This is Diversey.
The slightly agonized swoosh of opening doors.
The verbose drunk man sitting behind me keeps talking, with hardly a pause, about the Super Bowl; how he keeps getting caught drinking on the job; how people should be allowed to do what they like on the weekend, because they deserve it, after all, don’t they? [...]

Every time I ride the bus in Chicago, perhaps because I’m such an occasional rider and don’t have the a fully developed set of city blinders, I notice things. As the tired, miscellaneous crowds squash themselves further and further back into the bus in response to the driver’s shouted exhortations, these glances shoot back and [...]

There’s an almost universal disregard for speed limits on American freeways. I was thinking about this recently while driving a thirty-mile commute to work. Every road seems to have a certain “natural” speed, and nearly everyone driving along that road gravitates towards that speed regardless of the speed limits that are posted. If a police [...]

It occurred to me today that it could be tremendously beautiful just to drive straight in one direction from the center of the city into the country, going from the extremes of urban order and chaos into the calm autumn void of the most remote countryside. There is such a vast contrast between those two, [...]

Driving down the highway on my way home today, enjoying the sudden fall colors, I began thinking about how strange and utterly different it looked.
Turns out it looked that way because it is strange and utterly different.
My first piece of evidence: not more than a quarter of a mile down the highway, I stopped for [...]