the epic of the Red Line at 1 am

This week went fast. no idea where it went or what i was doing ... all i know is, i got an email while at work from my friend Zack saying he had ordered a pound of sushi tuna and what was i (and Rachel) doing for dinner. well, Rachel had an appointment, but i was quick to take up the offer of fresh fish and avocados. i made it there by 6:30, and Zack, his roommate Roman, and I set to work slicing and dicing. in short order we had delicious, nutritious sashimi. oooh, it makes me happy. dinner devolved into conversation, and i kept saying, oh, i should go soon, and then suddenly it was midnight.

oops. the last Metra train northbound departs Zack's station at 11:35. i wasn't getting home quickly and easily.

so i set off for the El, for the Red Line. Zack lives south of the Zero line in Chicago, on the south side of the loop, so i had a long ride ahead of me.

I made it to the platform just fine, quickly made friends with a friendly man who, for once, was not obviously insane, and worked on the crossword puzzle. I thought it was taking an exceptionally long time for a train to come, and then one came ... southbound on the northbound track. then another one came ... southbound on the northbound track. after half an hour, a northbound train finally came. then life started getting surreal.

I sat and knit, since i didn't want the deep distraction of reading when there were so many crazies around, so all i had to do was listen to the people around me. Behind me, a crowd of about 5 extremely drunk twentysomething boys were calling each other "vagina" and "pussy" for being so drunk. I got really offended, and if i hadn't been boxed in, i probably would have gone up to them to say that they were all clearly homosexuals or they wouldn't speak of female genitalia in such a derogatory way, and that they also had to be gay because no women would want them. but i just sat there and listened. Then a dozen Spanish-speaking, hip young people got on, and eventually they made friends with some dumb Americans and explained that no, it wasn't really Spanish but Catalan, which is a dialect, and that they weren't from Spain but Andorra ... i always forget that Andorra exists. Then the enormous angry black man comes through - i don't know if one of the drunk vaginas actually did something bad to him or if he just thought so, but this guy told the boy that he wasn't interested in that shit, you faggot, mumble mumble ... REPUBLICAN!! that was my favorite moment, that beautiful chain of logic that said "you are so gay you must be republican."

They all (the drunk boys and the Andorrans) all got off at Addison, leaving me with some new neighbors - three young, very urban black girls, one of whom had squeezed in next to an extremely scrawny pasty boy who looked twelve. The girls looked late teens at least. It turned out that all four of them were college students, he at Loyola and they at community college, and then they had a disarmingly adult conversation about the value of the dollar and the current political climate ... who talks about that at 1:30 in the morning after being out at clubs??? after the boy got off at Loyola, the girls switched over to talking about their night, which they had spent at a lesbian dance club - they talked about how arousing it is when a girl has good freestyle hiphop skills and about the different girls who were good and not so good.

So, 1:35, i get off the red line at Howard. I think i'm safe, that the last purple line runs at 2. it's me, a small knot of Northwestern students, and the obligatory homeless red-line riders, waiting for the next train south. then the CTA man shows up and tells us the last purple line ran at 1:30 and we need to get off his platform. so began the next chapter of my epic, the mile walk home from Howard. a mile didn't seem that far to my sleep-deprived brain. so i set out. i almost ran into a woman sobbing so hard she could hardly stand, had a dreamy interlude of walking and then a sharp awakening when i found myself in the Irish Catholic cemetery at 1:50 am. i made it home safely, took a shower, and went to bed at 2:30. when i got up at 5 my hair was still wet.
but right now i feel great! i'm sure i'll crash in a bit, but until then, i'm still having fun. hearing phantom bagpipes now and again, though ...