Searching for Clarity in a World That No Longer Makes Sense

I wish I had the words to describe the emotional exfoliation of a road trip to Chicago

"You know when you're sitting on a chair and you lean back so you're just on two legs and you lean too far so you almost fall over but at the last second you catch yourself? I feel like that all the time." — Steven Wright

I didn't have an expectation for traveling to Chicago, my home for thirty years, after the fall. I knew I needed to disrupt the new normal a bit in order to clean out the cobwebs in my brain and heading north to visit a few of my good friends in person rather than via a screen seemed like a solid plan. In the two months in Wichita I haven't had a lot of outside family social experience and the last four months in Las Vegas was that of a terrified hermit hiding from the inevitable truth of my absurd divorce.

As I've joked, in that divorce she got all of my money, my self esteem, my ability to trust almost anyone, and the entire state of Nevada. I got a crippled sense of purpose, a feeling that I've been duped for the entire last seven and a half years, and an unusual lack of optimism for my future. I think she received the better deal.

I packed a bag, hopped in my Prius, and booked a hotel in Springfield, IL as a weigh station of sorts, a night in complete solitude to gather myself and get in Chicago fresh. I wish I had adequate words to describe how a long distance drive on highways through multiple states elevates my mood and perspective. I recall road trips with my mom and sister when I was in the primordial stage of human life and how cleansing those trips were. It was as if all the world's problems were temporarily put on hold allowing my brain to reset and see them more clearly. It is the same today.

Monday morning I drove from Springfield to Chicago, to crash on David and Katie Himmel's couch for a week and, what? Hang out, tell my horrific story, get some laughs, drink and eat? I didn't know but I do understand the only way forward is through so through I headed.

As I went down Belmont Avenue to pick up my buddy Bob for lunch, I was surprised by the amount of dread and melancholy I found myself experiencing. As I went down that street I'd been down thousands of times, I kept passing places of note for my failed marriage. Restaurants I could remember we loved, shops I remembered going to for random gifts for her, even a street corner where we had a very funny conversation about her ending up with an amateur sociologist as a husband. I felt like throwing up. The vertigo of suddenly finding that the floor beneath is uneven and the feeling of trying to catch myself before I fall like a sack of hammers rising. These should've been good memories (or at least not bad ones) but the bile and sickness, the regrets of failure and how things went so terribly wrong, infected each recollection.

The feeling slowly started to pass and I pulled onto Lake Shore Drive. This was non-partisan territory, a stretch of road independent of her and it dawned on me that our time in Chicago was better in part because, while I was with her for the final five years of residency, I also had a life I'd built apart from her. By the time we landed in Vegas, she was my entire daily life, the center of my shrinking world. Back in this bizarrely magical city I didn't feel like I was home but I felt at home for the first time in what seemed a billion years.

Bob and I had a great day. He hadn't really been out and about since COVID took over the planet and this was his coming out party. We ate lunch at one his favorite haunts from back in the day of post-show drinks and after rehearsal meals. I noticed something strange as we drove to this dive. In an hour of driving in Chicago, I saw more randomly beautiful women merely walking on the streets, bundled up to buttress the emerging fall weather, than I saw the entire time I was in Las Vegas. I noticed a similar phenomenon in Kansas—I didn't see Wichita ladies as being attractive to me. Nothing outrageous but the feeling was the same as in high school when the girls I was familiar with were just cuter than the girls from other high schools. I suppose that familiarity and attraction was evident in Chicago for me.

Throughout the day I sometimes silently and sometimes loudly remarked on the simple comfort of the every day mundanity of the city—the sidewalks, the storefronts, the narrow streets, the elevated train. That night, we met up with Joe and Andi Dymond at Pequod's Pizza, home of my single favorite pie in the world. Beers and pizza and I found myself performing the part of myself as a that guy whose ex-wife was a prostitute in Vegas. I suppose the performance was better than revealing how I really felt which is somewhere in between hopeless and disgusted with who I had become.

The next day was my walkabout day. Grab the CTA train, head downtown, hit the big spots of the last decade plus of my Chicago life: Millennium Park, WBEZ, and the crew of Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me! It was during the walk to the park when the flood of memories and emotions converged and I realized the purpose of the visit. Why am I here, now? This is a search for clarity in a world that no longer makes a lick of sense to me. This is a pilgrimage to rediscover who I was so I can reinvent who I am to be. Having gone back home to Kansas, I was thrust into who I had been for my family and now I swam in the city I had called my home for over half my life to see myself through that lens.

I ran into my old boss in the park on the sidewalk. He was genuinely happy to see me and we rapped for about twenty minutes before he had to split for a meeting. Again, his talk of COVID layoffs and the very few people left from four years ago reminds me that, for good or ill, moving to Vegas at exactly the time I did was incredibly lucky. COVID in Chicago sounded much worse than COVID in Nevada and I look to the sky in gratitude.

I turned toward Michigan Avenue and started to Navy Pier to see if there were any WBEZ employees left who I might know and who might know me. As I strolled down that iconic street, I was recognized three times by random people (a poet I had worked with, a WBEZ volunteer from back in the day, and an actor who had performed in a show I produced before electricity). I also suddenly recognized something I hadn't before. The gravity was right for the first time in six months. That Steven Wright feeling of tipping backwards on the chair had become so normal I hadn't noticed that I felt like that all the time and here I was, in Chicago, and the ground felt solid and I relaxed.

When I arrived at WBEZ I was confronted with Advanced Security Protocols. Double doors where there had been none. I couldn't just swing up and say hi. I buzzed the HAL-like eye on the wall.

"Can I help you?"

"Yeah. Uhm... I used to work here back in the day and I actually don't know who might remember me. I was just coming by to see the place and maybe say hey to anyone left."

"I'm sorry but unless a producer has you on the list, I can't let you up."

"... does Heidi Goldfein still work here?"

"Yes. Let me see if she's in the building. Please wait."

Heidi popped out of the stairwell a few minutes later both shocked and thrilled to see me like she's suddenly presented with a ghostly image of the past but one that she is pleased to see.

We ran into a few others who knew and know me. Of course, I tell the story like a stand up comic doing a strange bit about his prostitute ex-wife. Of course, they are shocked and bemused and Steve Bynum immediately wants to get me up in a podcast booth to record the tale. After a brief tour, Heidi sends me on my way but wants to tell me in genuine tones how much my time at the place meant to her and that she feels happy to have known me. She also suggests I see a therapist with my recent trauma and I nod with the assertion in my mind that that will simply never happen.

How I tell the story and to whom is significant. What details get included or omitted has some importance that I need to ponder for a bit.

I walked back the way I came to catch the crew of Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me! and am recognized by two more random people I knew when I was either known or notorious in Chicago. I do not tell them the story.Tell them I left Vegas to help my family, the now ex-wife stayed, and I'm just visiting because a twelve-hour drive to Chicago is more doable than a thirty-six-hour trip from Nevada.

The WWDTM folks know the story but there are now people on staff who have heard of me but never witnessed the gale-force wind of my presence. I related my recent woe and watched their faces as I cracked jokes about being married to an underground criminal and how I escaped the Breaking Bad fate that was sure to come.

When you lead with your trauma, that's all new people will ever remember.

Do I want to seen as mostly the guy whose third marriage exploded in such a bizarre and spectacular fashion? I think the answer is 'no.' Time to put it away and save it for when I can get free drinks from the telling. Joe, for one, will be pleased to read this.

Tuesday night, I met Joe in my old Wicker Park neighborhood. We were meeting the fabulous Allison King for BBQ and rye whiskey (a tradition from when she and I both lived in the city) and I noticed a marked change in my demeanor. This was the hood the ex-wife and I spent most of our time together in the apartment above the bar on the corner. I parked exactly where I used to park. I walked Division and found none of the vertigo. I was relaxed and found some comfort in the familiarity. At the BBQ place, when Allison arrived, we ordered drinks and food and, after a couple of whiskeys, I found myself intentionally baiting Joe with politics. I was my old asshole self. The next day, I apologized. Joe is my (barely) older brother who loves me despite my nature. My excuse was simple: I've spent the better part of six months in a personal isolation so my skills in social interaction with humans is out of practice. We decide that a safety word to remind me not to spew political theory in a friendly setting will be "MEAT!"

The next couple of days, I spent time with a number of friends and drank and ate too much. I grabbed a beer at G-Man Tavern. Multiple beers at the Haymarket Pub & Brewery along with a cohort of friends who came out on a Wednesday night to hang and laugh. Joe and I spent a morning at King Spa in Niles, an afternoon sitting in a Bridgeport coffee shop working on our laptops, and an Orange Line ride to the Studebaker Theatre downtown to catch a taping of WWDTM. A day with David recording a podcast over breakfast, seeing a movie, running into another friend randomly in a city of 3 million, getting more BBQ with Rory Zacher, and playing with Himmel's son Harry for a few hours before snagging four hours of sleep and heading back to Kansas at 3:00am.

I also spent a lot of time just being in the city. I noticed the people who want to stand out, to be seen. Colorful clothing, hair dyed like Skittles on parade, music playing from their cars. I also noticed people who are determined to be anonymous in this bustling town, hoping no one really notices them and leaves them alone. Which approach will I take in my reinvention?

That's what this is. A reinvention. Not out of choice but out of necessity. I left Chicago in part to transform the life I had, the person I was, into something new and neon and desert-dwelling. I came back for a week to see what I was before that metamorphosis because who I have become following my time in Nevada—a broken, desperate cuckold with no hope for tomorrow—is not the uniform I want.

On the road back, I processed the experience. I'll be in Wichita for a while and there are so many factors completely out of my control I'll have to continue stumbling on the ground of uncertainty. I do know that I could come back to Chicago (if I could stomach the winters again) where I would stand out in some ways with a history or I could go someplace like Denver or Austin where I am anonymous and would need to build a brand new life from scratch. I feel more grounded, more myself (whatever that means), more focused. The place did its job in that I believe I have a bit more clarity and, while the world still makes little sense, my direction is clearer.