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I fucking hate this city. Hate it. But as for now, I love more than hate it. I’ve been to places I hate, Detroit, Kenosha, Muncie Indiana, and these places bring out a pure hate in me, not this bittersweet Chicago hate I deal with daily. Besides, I love this town, totally love it. The stones that the buildings are made of, the cranes constantly changing the skyline, the beautiful rust eating away at the steel that holds up are bridges and trains.  The amazing garbage. The endless amazing garbage. Big beautiful piles of crazy giant steel rivets and ornate pieces of furniture that get grass and weeds to grow right through them and bleed into the earth. Blood and rust. Mountain ranges and thick forest and great plains, all man made yet taken back by nature with unbelievable speed. Shapes and faces and messages forming out of all these piles. Nowhere else are so many beautiful things passed by millions and never noticed. People will travel the world for a chance to see the beautiful things this earth gives us, but somehow don’t notice the perfect sunflowers that grow naturally out of piles of bottles and hubcaps. The way the light of dusk backs up the lights in buildings and on streets. The endless faces and animals carved into the stone of buildings and the way the fog and rain and snow and sun and electricity constantly change the way they all look. The street kids kind of get it, the real ones anyway. The ones who make art because they have to, not the ones who simply write their name for other “writers” to see. The good ones give and give to this city. Blue and green designs on brick and metal, eventually fading into the natural state that all things in this city fade into. If they can survive mayor Daley and his Graffiti Blasters, the team that unknowingly united the street kids under the banner that supersedes any crew posse or neighborhood. Unity under the banner “Buff Capital”. Just one more verification that if you’re a pussy, you’re in the wrong town. 

We survive epic brutal winters, summers so hot and humid that walls sweat and old people die, and short beautiful springs and falls riddled with floods and storms and power outages. So if it’s Chicago streets you want your art on, if you survive the elements and avoid the gustapo police department, chances are your work still won’t last long enough to be seen by anybody but the Graph-blastas. But until the street kids regulate themselves, Daley will prevail, and the toys with balls of steal and the skills of mentally deficient shaky handed children will ruin the art form completely. One “snack” at a time. Thing is, you can’t even be mad at “the man’, who would be alright with an uninvited asshole coming into your home to spray carve and burn misspelled meaningless words into your walls windows and furniture. Faceless pussies that hide and run, white suburban art school faggots with misplaced anger and never ending beef with each other. Artist fighting each other has never made sense to me, fighting for art, however, does. I have spilled blood into these streets, my streets. I have bled my own as well, and the one thing I do know is that people who hide are people without spines. It’s the blood we spill that turns all this stone and metal into life. All the blood and rust around us makes this city alive. People built D.C people built L.A. and Atlanta and Indianapolis, but Chicago built us. And you know before long if you belong, the city will tell you. Anybody can come over, set up camp, come and go, but some of us are Chicago, whether we like it or not. As for me, I want to leave so badly some times I can barely stand it. But the truth is, I get as far as the burbs and it becomes quite apparent that I have left the place I belong. I become aware that I am on someone else’s turf, and that I need to get my ass back to Uptown.