THE GREAT GADFLY:

No Losers, Only Winners

I try to read on my bus ride to work. I'm typically unsuccessful.

On my morning ride to work I pass what used to be a head shop, around Broadway and Surf, which was called "Smokey Joes". It looked like a store which was inspired by Cheech & Chong movies and Pink Floyd albums, or maybe a place opened by a married couple of Deadheads to attract other assorted freeks and loaders in the neighborhood, circa 1977. The outside brick wall adjacent to the shop was adorned with a "Keep On Truckin'" style mural, and the shop window was always haphazardly decorated with various light-up ceramic mushrooms, blacklight paintings of skulls, clusters of incense packets with faded labels, et cetera. Maybe it was a drug front, but I would like to think it was a front for nothing worse than maybe pot or acid. I would like to think that if it were indeed some kind of a front, the owner took great pride in customers returning to the shop with a slacked-eyed grin, reporting "that was some really prime stuff, man."

I would like to think Smokey Joe cared about his clientele, in his own ramshackle cornershop kind of way.

This shop was closed down earlier in the year. The shop was cleared out of its psychadelic tchotchkes, and the "Keep on Truckin'" mural was covered in white paint.

It's a cellphone shop now, filled with bright red and silver globe chairs, and matching pre-fab carpeting.

Later in the bus ride, I pass the Lincoln Park West building, which appears to be comprised of moderately upscale apartments. Right next to this building, there appears to be a residence for homeless mentally ill people. Every morning I keep an eye out for an ancient black man with no teeth, who does a jolly shuffle down the street, waving at passers-by as his tortoise-like tongue darts out of his mouth with glee. Every morning it seems as if he's gotten a little bit farther down the street as my bus passes him.

I love passing this area, and watching the residents of Lincoln Park West cope with their neighbors. This morning, a perfectly coiffed Reese Witherspoon replicant clutched her Kate Spade to her trembling, brittle torso as a hulking bun of a man barrelled past her, a big dirty blue blanket wrapped around his shoulders, flapping like a comic book cowl in the a.m. exhaust fumes of this morning's workday commute. A translucent man with eyes like tombstones sat on a decorative granite orb, rocking back and forth like a willows, as a nearby portly woman in gauzy matching separates looked on with disdain, averting her eyes only to check her precious batik for possible stains.

I try to read on my bus ride to work. I'm typically unsuccessful.