Medusa's

I spent an all too brief part of my day on the streets of Chicago trying to revisit one of the best parts of my teenage years, and CRAP! I could squint and briefly put it all together, the sights, the sounds, perhaps the location-- and then...
it was gone.

I have dim recollections of the times I spent hanging out in Chicago, riding the El trains, drinking and peeing in alleyways with street people and teen prostitutes, wandering the streets of Boy's town and blowing my mind at Medusa's. Why, when I spent so many days, hours wandering a place, can't I remember it, picture it, figure out where it was?

Sadly, wonderfully, it was to be the most interesting and formative times I'd experience in my life (in retrospect); nothing has come close in my travels near and far. I've been to many *strange* places and circumstances since, but none have been remotely as fantastic.
Having used up my quota for cool at so early an age, I've spent the balance of my years as a bored cynic, doomed to wander the dregs of humdrum Summerfest crowds in dismay, looking for a glimmer of the beautiful strangeness I was so briefly a part of... bummer.
No photos exist, no one remembers it, I have no contact with old friends who took me there-- more chapters of my life that have no witnesses, more places from my past that have been erased from the face of the planet, without a trace.
Ah! Melancholy...
But here's a snippet I found, something to remind me of the 3rd floor video room where we'd take a break from dancing, drink an Orangina and smoke cigarettes, and make out with a guy (or two). I can still hear the echos of feet on the old wooden floors, the smell of the smoke from stinky clove and tobacco cigarettes, the deep vibration in your head and gut of the music coming at you from all angles, the excitement of being somewhere so odd:

Horrifically blasphemous, I know, fo shizzle why it took so long for me to give God and church a try...
p.s. I discovered that there is a WORLD out there this weekend... a world that finds me witty and funny and likes me as much as I like it back. I am both amazed and overwhelmed with the knowledge of such-- I wonder if it missed me?