God I hated Wrigleyville, there's something so mindbogglingly uninteresting about that area. You'd think it would be the MOST interesting area of Chicago, but then when you realize how mindbogglingly boring baseball is, and then factor in how astoundingly dull their fans are, it all starts to make sense.
When you first come to this city Wrigleyville seems like THE place to live, back then I loved telling everyone how close I was to Wrigleyville, i even sent out a bevy of postcards of Wrigley Field from an aeiral shot with an arrow pointing to my apartment when I first moved here. Then I moved away to Ravenswood for two years, during which every member of Schadenfreude was within a block of each other (fun times). Then I got an offer to live with some friends in, where else, Wrigleyville. It was almost a deal killer but since I was living with Mark Hanner at the time and the prospect of staying there despite the fact that his new boyfriend had just moved in seemed a bit awkward. So W*********** is was (I can't even type it). But my desperate hatred of moving led to me living there for 2.5 years, and so desperately did I hate moving that I spent a year and a half of that living with the roommate who no longer deserves a name but who shall forever just be called Devil.
But when living with Devil went South and the our slumlord threatened to toss us out based on the $1800 he owed, The Magnificent Steven and I had to find an apartment, I wanted to live somewhere I'd never lived and ended up living somewhere I'd never heard of. Evidently the area between Andersonville and Roger's Park is called Edgewater and I love it.
Wrigleyville was so uninteresting in every possible way, ALL the people in Wrigleyville look the same, and all the places you can go are just kind of there, no personality to them, no interesting origin or even intensely UN-interesting origin, and anything classic is faux classic est. 1998. Also freestanding ATM machines. And the way the meatheads swagger with their overly large chests, loud antagonistic speaking voices, and homoerotic way of physically communicating with the full irony of being a block from the gayest neighborhood in the midwest hits this very tense part of my brain which just makes my fucking cerebellum hurt. Every corner in Wrigleyville holds a bad memory of some form of desperation, and in my new neighborhood I'm so comfortable it's disconcerting.
In Edgewater nothing's trying to be anything but simple necessity for the people who have been here a while, it's a largely hispanic family neighborhood with an nice mix of the condo crowd who're all buying just south of Ridge in Andersonville, and of course middle-class like myself who's just here because Thorndale was too upscale. We picked the nieghborhood because that was where our awesome apartment was. I only discovered how cool it was later. Well it's not so much "cool" as it just "is." And compared to Wrigleyville THAT is fucking awesome. And once I really got into the neighborhood I explored the mysterious forgotten land EAST of the Bryn Mawr platform which contains a Bank One and a Starbucks, which I can totally utilize, oh AND I'm closer to the lake than I was in Wrigleyville, AND I don't live with the Devil, AND my apartment kicks ass, AND it doesn't smell like Cubs Fan puke. It smells like Working Class Husband Puke, which I will take any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Shit, I thought I had photo's of the 'hood in my computer. I'll post them tomorrow.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment