Hi! It's hard to type right now because my hands are 1) chapped as hell from washing and 2) cramped from the hours I spent in the cold today, riding my bike to different recovery clinics and homeless shelters in the city. It's cold as shit out, and the sky is doing a weird spitting thing that soaked my pants so completely I left a butt print on the chair at the last interview I did.
I'm partially job-shopping (yes, even now; capitalism doesn't stop until you're DEAD dead) and partially working on a story about the intersection of Chicago's two epidemics: opioid overdose + covid-19. This is the third time in my life I've moved to Chicago. The first year of the second time was also spent underemployed and on my bike, when I wasn't running, drunk, nannying, or writing on a blog I started that year on ~Blogger~ to remind myself that I could write, that I liked to, that I was good at noticing things. Sometimes it's hard not to feel like nothing's changed, other days it feels like everything has.
That year, I started volunteering at a place called Back on My Feet, which is a nonprofit running club that partners with transitional housing members. Two or three days a week, I woke up at 5, biked down to a halfway house a couple miles south of my apartment, and ran with a group of dudes in various stages of recovery / readjusting to life outside of prison. Different guys wanted different things: some to talk, some to not, some to hear what you had to say. Most had never run before, and like me when I started running, kind of hated it. One guy I'll call J had a similar pace to mine, and we began to fall into a habit of running our 3 or 4 miles together, down Ogden and across Jackson as the sun came up. He told me about his family back in Puerto Rico, his experience with addiction, his daughter, his tattoos, what he liked and didn't like about Humboldt Park. I told him about my brother who is an alcoholic. I don't remember the specifics of all we talked about, but I remember he was really funny, and kind, and that he ended up having to go back to jail for a probation violation and that I missed him.
That year, I started volunteering at a place called Back on My Feet, which is a nonprofit running club that partners with transitional housing members. Two or three days a week, I woke up at 5, biked down to a halfway house a couple miles south of my apartment, and ran with a group of dudes in various stages of recovery / readjusting to life outside of prison. Different guys wanted different things: some to talk, some to not, some to hear what you had to say. Most had never run before, and like me when I started running, kind of hated it. One guy I'll call J had a similar pace to mine, and we began to fall into a habit of running our 3 or 4 miles together, down Ogden and across Jackson as the sun came up. He told me about his family back in Puerto Rico, his experience with addiction, his daughter, his tattoos, what he liked and didn't like about Humboldt Park. I told him about my brother who is an alcoholic. I don't remember the specifics of all we talked about, but I remember he was really funny, and kind, and that he ended up having to go back to jail for a probation violation and that I missed him.
This morning at my first interview, the ED of the org introduced me to . . . J. We elbow-bumped instead of hugged, and I couldn't stop looking at him because he looked so good. He works for the org now, doing hard work and taking care of others as they take better care of themselves. He's got some new tattoos and looks a little older but still has the same crinkly eyes when he smiles. "I'm doing really good these days," he told me. "There were definitely some ups and downs, but I'm here." I told him I was so glad to see him, to know that he was out here and still here. I mean it. I'm glad you're all out here, too.
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