from Wheaton, 1 month

Caribou Coffee, on a street called Front, shelters me lately from the hot stickiness that rolled into town a few mornings ago and decided to stay for the summer, apparently.

“We’ll try to gatcha some eer condetionen in here for yeh” is my best attempt to write in the flat Chicago accent of my landlord, who informed me of this lacking amenity on Monday. I assured him that I wasn’t concerned, because I wasn’t. And amn’t.

Not knowing anyone in a city gives you an excellent reason to watch people, should you be the type of person who feels that one needs a reason for that. There’s a woman on a motorcycle at this intersection that I think could beat me up. I stretch and realize that this 24-year old t-shirt has some horrible pit-stains that I’ve been showing off like this all day, if anyone was watching.

When I ride my bike home, I usually practice riding with no hands. I often think about buying ice cream from a little shop along the way, but I haven’t yet. I’ll pass the clock tower, and campus, and the train station, and then I turn up a hill, and pass the ladies standing on an empty lot, protesting the unfair labor practices of a construction company. I wave. They wave.

I don’t know what I am becoming right now. Perhaps that’s always the hardest thing to discern. I know that my Greek notebook is peerlessly organized. [Seriously, it has no peer in this respect, I feel.] I think a lot about cheese. I write everything with a fountain pen. I drive much slower than the speed limit and hardly notice. There’s an uneasiness to my tranquility that I’ve caught out of the corner of my eye, but when I turn my head it’s only ever a bird or a flag or an old man waiting at a train station.