Early evening — A few minutes more and he’ll be late. The trucks are thinning out on Cermak and the sun is setting over the western skyline of factories and the jail.
At Loomis, a man stands slight but firm, oddly missing multiple walk lights. From where our man is walking, he doesn’t seem to be looking at anything special. In the thrum of the road his sound figure is a perfect reflection of the LED banner that advertises owner-operator trucking contracts above our man’s head.
The blogman on his way to Bridgeport pauses to watch this dark blue silhouette. He wonders what this human statue could be thinking, but he gets no closer than the other side of the street. The blogman feels the jump of reflection in his chest, or perhaps recognition puts it more acutely.
“That's something I would do,” he thinks.
Standing as if nothing substantial might come his way, the stranger is blurred in the descending dark of the evening. In our own blogman’s mind, projections expand —reworked images of book covers, postcards and albums, the commercial romance of the 20th century city he imbibed as a youth. Images that were already out of date in his yearning time.
“How much effort,” he thinks, “do we exert, conjuring these interior images in order to consume them while the 21st century city folds by—a landscape marked by obsolescence and chain link fence?”
“How much time do we spend shoplifting the sold dreams of the moderns while our own are wiped away first thing in the morning?”
He is far down the industrial stretch of Loomis now, our blogman—not able to match the silhouette’s conviction. His commitment to stand silently and wait for a purpose to appear.