I found this in an anthology my friend gave me. Thought this board should see it.


There's this beautiful, testosterone-inspired feeling you get sometimes when you're coming into downtown on the Brown Line and you see the skyscrapers so tall and strong they look like they're still growing--but not organically, because WE are building them--that we have killed God. We are unstoppable. We need no one. We can drive eighty in a thirty-five mile per hour zone and run every red light and spurn our seat belts and no one can touch us.

Try! you want to shout when you get this feeling. Try to kill us! Destroy our city and we'll build something even bigger and taller and stronger! We'll come back thicker and darker!

Kick us, hit us, cut us, see our red blood and know what makes us strong. You cannot destroy us! We are Americans! Better yet, we are Chicagoans--meaning we are nothing, we are human. You scattered us and split our tongues and gave us different religions, but we are all here now and we know the truth now: we fuck each other and make colors You never conceived. We agree on nothing but power and love and hate! We have killed You!

We build spires a thousand times the size of the Sistine Chapel and Notre Dame and for love and power and hate!

And when you're coming into downtown on the Brown Line and you get this feeling and it is past six when the sun goes down early in the winter but the city is bathed in orange, you want to shout to the heavens: You gave us darkness and we said, "Let there be light!" You gave us a chill and we made ourselves warm!

We are Chicagoans; we are human; we are alone!