Chicago Fire Quotes

You don’t know anyone at the party, so you don’t want to go. You don’t like cottage cheese, so you haven’t eaten it in years. This is your choice, of course, but don’t kid yourself: it’s also the flinch. Your personality is not set in stone. You may think a morning coffee is the most enjoyable thing in the world, but it’s really just a habit. Thirty days without it, and you would be fine. You think you have a soul mate, but in fact you could have had any number of spouses. You would have evolved differently, but been just as happy. You can change what you want about yourself at any time. You see yourself as someone who can’t write or play an instrument, who gives in to temptation or makes bad decisions, but that’s really not you. It’s not ingrained. It’s not your personality. Your personality is something else, something deeper than just preferences, and these details on the surface, you can change anytime you like. If it is useful to do so, you must abandon your identity and start again. Sometimes, it’s the only way. Set fire to your old self. It’s not needed here. It’s too busy shopping, gossiping about others, and watching days go by and asking why you haven’t gotten as far as you’d like. This old self will die and be forgotten by all but family, and replaced by someone who makes a difference. Your new self is not like that. Your new self is the Great Chicago Fire—overwhelming, overpowering, and destroying everything that isn’t necessary.

...I have to tell you that I'm not all that comfortable with the idea of spending the rest of my life sleeping next to somebody who's got the power to fire me if my underwear doesn't make it all the way to the hamper." She repressed a smile. "I'm sympathetic to your problem, but I'm not selling the team just so you can be a slob." "Somehow I didn't expect you would.

From time immemorial we’ve been cleaning up after male messes. When a man does it for a woman, it’s called being rescued. When a woman does it for a man, it’s housework.

A true Chicago dog looks like someone fired a bazooka at a vegetable stand, then scraped the remnants off the wall and slathered it on a tube of meat.

It’s more common for people to get fire tattoos. Symbols of passion, transformation, change. But I wanted smoke because it’s what remains. After the fire, after everything is destroyed, you’re left with smoke and ash. You’ve gotta make somethin’ out of it.

Christ, back in Chicago, we don't make bicycles any more. It's all human relations now. The eggheads sit around trying to figure out new ways for everybody to be happy. Nobody can get fired, no matter what; and if someone does accidentally make a bicycle, the union accuses us of cruel and inhuman practices and the government confiscates the bicycle for back taxes and gives it to a blind man in Afghanistan.

White ducks have big orange spatulas for feet. But will they kick over pancakes before they burn? No! They like their flapjacks flavored like The Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Are you telling me that men are compelled by the mere fact of their gender to choose violence as their first resort?” “Partly. It satisfies our sense of justice, it makes us feel good, and it always improves our odds with women.

You don’t know anyone at the party, so you don’t want to go. You don’t like cottage cheese, so you haven’t eaten it in years. This is your choice, of course, but don’t kid yourself: it’s also the flinch. Your personality is not set in stone. You may think a morning coffee is the most enjoyable thing in the world, but it’s really just a habit. Thirty days without it, and you would be fine. You think you have a soul mate, but in fact you could have had any number of spouses. You would have evolved differently, but been just as happy. You can change what you want about yourself at any time. You see yourself as someone who can’t write or play an instrument, who gives in to temptation or makes bad decisions, but that’s really not you. It’s not ingrained. It’s not your personality. You personality is something else, something deeper than just preferences, and these details on the surface, you can change anytime you like. If it is useful to do so, you must abandon your identity and start again. Sometimes, it’s the only way. Set fire to your old self. It’s not needed here. It’s too busy shopping, gossiping about others, and watching days go by and asking why you haven’t gotten as far as you’d like. This old self will die and be forgotten by all but family, and replaced by someone who makes a difference. Your new self is not like that. Your new self is the Great Chicago Fire—overwhelming, overpowering, and destroying everything that isn’t necessary.

Memory" I’ve memorized all the fish in the sea I’ve memorized each opportunity strangled and I remember awakening one morning and finding everything smeared with the color of forgotten love and I’ve memorized that too. I’ve memorized green rooms in St. Louis and New Orleans where I wept because I knew that by myself I could not overcome the terror of them and it. I’ve memorized all the unfaithful years (and the faithful ones too) I’ve memorized each cigarette that I’ve rolled. I’ve memorized Beethoven and New York City I’ve memorized riding up escalators, I’ve memorized Chicago and cottage cheese, and the mouths of some of the ladies and the legs of some of the ladies I’ve known and the way the rain came down hard. I’ve memorized the face of my father in his coffin, I’ve memorized all the cars I have driven and each of their sad deaths, I’ve memorized each jail cell, the face of each new president and the faces of some of the assassins; I’ve even memorized the arguments I’ve had with some of the women I’ve loved. best of all I’ve memorized tonight and now and the way the light falls across my fingers, specks and smears on the wall, shades down behind orange curtains; I light a rolled cigarette and then laugh a little, yes, I’ve memorized it all. the courage of my memory.

Falling in love with you was the easiest thing I’ve ever done. Falling is easy. Staying that way is hard. But I’ve been choosing hard all my life, so why the hell would the life I make with the woman who completes me be any different? I love you like a madman. You’re the air I breathe, my next heartbeat, and I’m never letting go.

Wyatt Fox. It suited him. Clean, masculine, not a syllable wasted. Like James Bond, if 007 included cowboy-marine-firefighter in his stable of personae. Fox. Wyatt Fox. License to thrill—and send your panties plummeting.

He was the hottest guy she had ever seen, so out of her league they hadn’t invented his league yet. It was like Future League of Hot Guys We Can’t Place Because They’re Too Fucking Hot.

She pushed him back to the desk, poking his chest. “I may punch you, bite you, crush your nuts between my thighs. It’s going to be the best hate sex I’ve ever had. And your survival is not my first concern.

There are two kinds of guilt: the kind that drowns you until you're useless, and the kind that fires your soul to purpose. ​— ​Sabaa Tahir, An Ember in the Ashes

...a single tongue of flame shooting out the side of the O'Learys' barn. (Where the fire started)

Simply calling the Great Fire an accident did not satisfy some people, most notably the local newspapers. They demanded a culprit--

The fire was barely fifteen minutes old. What followed was a series of fatal errors that set the fire free and doomed the city to a fiery death.

I’m just a simple guy. I love beer, sex, and hockey. I hate liars, Sting, and art that doesn’t have people in it. - Luke Almeida

Pucker up, Hollywood. By the time I’m finished with you, the neighbors are gonna need a cigarette.

Molly Cade, you could be wearing a White Sox shirt, a Yankees thong, and a Packers Cheesehead and I would still want to do you.” She sighed. “Such a romantic.

That’s right, baby. Scratch me up. Make your mark. I wanna look at my body later and know who I belong to.

Who needs the fairy tale when crazy, messy, sexy reality with the woman I adore is a million times better?

Don’t you ever mistake my wife’s submission to me as anything but a reflection of my utter fucking devotion to her. I would crawl through fire and broken glass on my hands and fucking knees if she told me to.

What would it be like to be caught in the emotional crosshairs of a man like Luke Almeida? To belong to him, body and soul? The prospect warmed her some. Scared her more. With Luke, she suspected there would be no half measures.

Watching him walk over, Alex mused that Eli Cooper was the sort of man who knew how to use his physicality. Beneath his handmade shirts and tailored suits, a street fighter hummed through every loose-limbed motion. But that impression did not extend to his face, which was structurally perfect. Skyscraper-high cheekbones. Superhero jaw. A mouth that should have a government warning. There were no signs of past trouble with a jealous husband or an abandoned girlfriend. No one had ever broken his nose. No one had busted his lip. Strange, because her first instinct on seeing him was to roundhouse kick him into the next millennium.

She should pull away, even though she had begged for it with her smart mouth. She should punish him for every crime he’d perpetrated. For being too good-looking, too sexy, too everything. But the kiss was like him—just too damn good. Warm and brutal, providing answers to questions she never knew she had. He teased with his tongue along the seam of her mouth, seeking that last nudge of acceptance as if it was his God-given right. She parted her lips, and like a predator hinged on her threshold, he took.

To my past self, we did better when we knew better. It’s okay to let go.

I know, Marine," she whispered in answer to his unspoken affirmation, and then, like always, their bodies finished the conversation

If I'm all alone, then the standard for sanity is up to me entirely.

It didn't get much more patriotic than sex in a Chevy on the Fourth of July. God bless America.

So this was where jock straps went to die.

She leaned in, a tip she had read today on HuffPo’s Love & Sex section. Boobs out, smile wide, voice low. Being sexy was exhausting.

Knowing what she did to him made her feel powerful, just as knowing what he did to her made her feel weak.

They’re a slow-moving lot, reporters. Slothlike. Weighed down by all that righteous indignation about the freedom of the press and the public’s right to know, not to mention the liquid lunches they see as their constant due. Go out now and you’re playing right into their grasping, ink-stained hands.” He cocked an ear to the door. “I’m doing my best to protect your reputation here. It wouldn’t do to have a serving wench caught in a compromising position with the lord of the manor.” “You don’t have the cleavage to make a good serving wench, Eli.

She stood almost a foot shorter than him, but that had never been a problem, given most of their conversations had been horizontal. The years had filled out her curves, and she wore those few extra pounds of plush well, especially below the flare of her hips. The ass that dethroned JLo, or some shit. Her shapely figure had its own press corps. A woman like this was built to be bedded, and often.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture

She is Joey fucking DiMarco, Cosa Nostra royalty, and your fucking boss, you smug little prick. You only get to work, walk, breathe, live, and die at her say so, do you understand me?” Romeo’s eyes bug out. He tries to nod, but Max has him pinned to the wall by his throat, his feet dangling an inch off the floor. “Don’t you ever mistake my wife’s submission to me as anything but a reflection of my utter fucking devotion to her. I would crawl through fire and broken glass on my hands and fucking knees if she told me to. If you ever disrespect her like that again, I will rip out your fucking tongue and use it to choke you to death. You got that?

Expected a bit more skin, Almeida.” She punctuated that with a pointed glance at the shorts area. The man had promised Speedos. “Think Chicago’s seen enough of me, don’t you?” Chicago might have, but Kinsey most definitely had not.

That voice. It couldn’t be. She turned. The Marine. Her brain tried to compute the man before her. The same uncompromising blue-gray eyes, but more distant. The same fit body, but more space filling. The same rugged features, but more bearded. Bearded!

An asteroid or comet traveling at cosmic velocities would enter the Earth’s atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn’t get out of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, and the temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the surface temperature of the Sun. In this instant of its arrival in our atmosphere, everything in the meteor’s path—people, houses, factories, cars—would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame. One second after entering the atmosphere, the meteorite would slam into the Earth’s surface, where the people of Manson had a moment before been going about their business. The meteorite itself would vaporize instantly, but the blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth, and superheated gases. Every living thing within 150 miles that hadn’t been killed by the heat of entry would now be killed by the blast. Radiating outward at almost the speed of light would be the initial shock wave, sweeping everything before it. For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling of catastrophe would be a flash of blinding light—the brightest ever seen by human eyes—followed an instant to a minute or two later by an apocalyptic sight of unimaginable grandeur: a roiling wall of darkness reaching high into the heavens, filling an entire field of view and traveling at thousands of miles an hour. Its approach would be eerily silent since it would be moving far beyond the speed of sound. Anyone in a tall building in Omaha or Des Moines, say, who chanced to look in the right direction would see a bewildering veil of turmoil followed by instantaneous oblivion. Within minutes, over an area stretching from Denver to Detroit and encompassing what had once been Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, the Twin Cities—the whole of the Midwest, in short—nearly every standing thing would be flattened or on fire, and nearly every living thing would be dead. People up to a thousand miles away would be knocked off their feet and sliced or clobbered by a blizzard of flying projectiles. Beyond a thousand miles the devastation from the blast would gradually diminish. But that’s just the initial shockwave. No one can do more than guess what the associated damage would be, other than that it would be brisk and global. The impact would almost certainly set off a chain of devastating earthquakes. Volcanoes across the globe would begin to rumble and spew. Tsunamis would rise up and head devastatingly for distant shores. Within an hour, a cloud of blackness would cover the planet, and burning rock and other debris would be pelting down everywhere, setting much of the planet ablaze. It has been estimated that at least a billion and a half people would be dead by the end of the first day. The massive disturbances to the ionosphere would knock out communications systems everywhere, so survivors would have no idea what was happening elsewhere or where to turn. It would hardly matter. As one commentator has put it, fleeing would mean “selecting a slow death over a quick one. The death toll would be very little affected by any plausible relocation effort, since Earth’s ability to support life would be universally diminished.

Most guys would be happy to have a woman so vocal about her desires,” he said in a voice several degrees huskier than before. “Half the time, we have no clue if a woman is enjoying herself.” “Really?” “Not me. Just trying to represent for my maligned gender.

Christ, back in Chicago, we don’t make bicycles any more. It’s all human relations now. The eggheads sit around trying to figure out new ways for everybody to be happy. Nobody can get fired, no matter what; and if somebody does accidentally make a bicycle, the union accuses us of cruel and inhuman practices and the government confiscates the bicycle for back taxes and gives it to a blind man in Afghanistan.” “And you think things will be better in San Lorenzo?” “I know damn well they will be. The people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!

to the left, pushing hard into John just as he fired at us. John swerved the squad away as if he could somehow avoid the gunfire. The man fired directly at us, but he was probably over fifty yards away, and the buckshot load rattled harmlessly against the side of our car as we sped north on Larrabee. We

Don’t you ever mistake my wife’s submission to me as anything but a reflection of my utter fucking devotion to her. I would crawl through fire and broken glass on my hands and fucking knees if she told me to. If you ever disrespect her like that again, I will rip out your fucking tongue and use it to choke you to death.

Zangara was the assassin who fired five shots at Franklin in Miami in 1933, seventeen days before his inauguration. MacGuire was the American Legion official at the head of a plot to depose my husband in 1934 and install a military dictator. Zangara killed the mayor of Chicago instead of my husband; MacGuire’s coup folded and was disappeared

The Marikana tragedy calls to mind earlier instances of violence. At Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 1, 1886, and then at Fourmies, in northern France, on May 1, 1891, police fired on workers striking for higher wages. Does this kind of violent clash between labor and capital belong to the past, or will it be an integral part of twenty-first-century history?

Two Types Excitable A woman was depressed and distraught for days after losing her pen. Then she became so excited about an ad for a shoe sale that she drove three hours to a shoe store in Chicago. Phlegmatic A man spotted a fire in a dormitory one evening, and walked away to look for an extinguisher in another building. He found the extinguisher, and walked back to the fire with it.

I would have unleashed my secret weapon.” She leaned in and whispered, “Operation Feel the Beard.” “That’s your secret weapon?” He felt his beard every day, and he could say with 100 percent certainty that it was fairly low on his list of ways into his good graces. “I think you’re overestimating the beard, Hollywood. Now if you were to feel another part of—” She felt his beard. Sweet effen Christmas.

Christ, back in Chicago, we don’t make bicycles any more. It’s all human relations now. The eggheads sit around trying to figure out new ways for everybody to be happy. Nobody can get fired, no matter what; and if somebody does accidentally make a bicycle, the union accuses us of cruel and inhuman practices and the government confiscates the bicycle for back taxes and gives it to a blind man in Afghanistan.

I’ve got you,” he whispered. With strong hands, he raised her body, her lips to his, and the resulting union streaked through her like fire. Their mouths might be made for sniping, but mostly they were made for this. Better they should be used for this. A perfect melding of lips and tongues, the tangle so sweet, the chemistry so right. I’ve got you. For the first time in what seemed like forever, someone had her.

Weather patterns in the Pacific were not human-driven, but the futures market in Chicago was. The world had shifted so rapidly from subsistence agriculture to a market economy that price fluctuations sent ripples throughout the system, destabilizing entire regions. Traders could now set off starvation halfway across the world with the touch of a telegraph key, sucking up grain supplies in India or the Dakotas and sending them to Europe, where prices were high. It was the dawn of “price famines.”174

One of my favorite stories is about a newly hired traveling salesman who sent his first sales report to the home office. It stunned the brass in the sales department because it was obvious that the new salesman was ignorant! This is what he wrote: “I seen this outfit which they ain’t never bot a dim’s worth of nothin from us and I sole them some goods. I’m now goin to Chicawgo.” Before the man could be given the heave-ho by the sales manager, along came this letter from Chicago: “I cum hear and sole them haff a millyon.” Fearful if he did, and afraid if he didn’t fire the ignorant salesman, the sales manager dumped the problem in the lap of the president. The following morning, the ivory-towered sales department members were amazed to see posted on the bulletin board above the two letters written by the ignorant salesman this memo from the president: “We ben spendin two much time trying to spel instead of trying to sel. Let’s watch those sails. I want everybody should read these letters from Gooch who is on the rode doin a grate job for us and you should go out and do like he done.

A few months later, in December 1969, the Chicago police conducted a pre-dawn raid on a Panther apartment. Approximately one hundred shots were fired. At first the police claimed that they had responded to the fire of the Panthers, but it was quickly established by the local press that this was false. Fred Hampton, one of the most talented and promising leaders of the Panthers, was killed in his bed. There is evidence that he may have been drugged. Witnesses claim that he was murdered in cold blood. Mark Clark was also killed. This event can fairly be described as a Gestapo-style political assassination.

Riots, thievery, and homelessness set the rich against the poor. During a wildcat strike at Chicago’s Pullman factory, workers were ordered to accept a 20 percent wage cut. In response to the outcry that followed, William Howard Taft—later elected president and eventually named chief justice of the Supreme Court—wrote offhandedly to his wife: “It will be necessary for the military to kill some of the mob … enough to make an impression.”4 The press encouraged such callousness: the Chicago Tribune once urged homeowners pestered by tramps to spike handouts with “a little strychnine or arsenic” and poison men as if they were vermin.5

Think of Chicago as a piece of music, perhaps,” he continued. “In it you can hear the thousands of years of people living here and fishing and hunting, and then bullets and axes, and the whine of machinery, and the bellowing of cattle, and the shriek of railroads, and the thud of fists and staves and crowbars, and a hundred languages, a thousand dialects. And the murmur of the lake like a basso undertone. Ships and storms, snow and fire. To the north the vast dark forests, and everywhere else around the city rolling fields of farms, and all roads leading to Chicago, which rises from the plains like Oz, glowing with light and fire at night, drawing people to it from around the world. A roaring city, gunfire and applause and thunder. Gleaming but made of bone and stone. Bitter cold and melting hot and clotheslines hung in the alleys and porches like the webbing of countless spiders. A city without illusions but with vaulting imaginations and expectations. A city of burning energies on the shore of a huge northern sea. An American city, with all the violence and humor and grace and greed of this particular powerful adolescent country. Perhaps the American city—no other city in the nation is as big and central and grown up from the very soil. Chicago was never ruled by Spain or England or France or Russia or Texas, it shares no ocean with other countries, it is no mere regional captain, like Cincinnati or Nashville; it is itself, all brawn and greed and song, brilliant and venal, almost a small nation, sprawling and vulgar and foul and beautiful, cold and cruel and wonderful. Its music is the blues, of course. Sad and uplifting at once, elevating and haunting at the same time. You sing so that you do not weep. You have no choice but to sing. So you raise up your voice and sing of love and woe, and soon another voice joins in, and you sing together, for a while, for a time, perhaps a brief time, but perhaps not.…

Well, feminine, but not too feminine, then.” “Careful: In Hopkins v. Price-Waterhouse, Ms. Hopkins was denied a partnership because she needed to learn to ‘walk more femininely, talk more femininely, dress more femininely,’ and ‘wear makeup.’” “Maybe she didn’t deserve a partnership?” “She brought in the most business of any employee.” “Hmm. Well, maybe a little more feminine.” “Not so fast. Policewoman Nancy Fahdl was fired because she looked ‘too much like a lady.’” “All right, less feminine. I’ve wiped off my blusher.” “You can lose your job if you don’t wear makeup. See Tamini v. Howard Johnson Company, Inc.” “How about this, then, sort of…womanly?” “Sorry. You can lose your job if you dress like a woman. In Andre v. Bendix Corporation, it was ruled ‘inappropriate for a supervisor’ of women to dress like ‘a woman.’” “What am I supposed to do? Wear a sack?” “Well, the women in Buren v. City of East Chicago had to ‘dress to cover themselves from neck to toe’ because the men at work were ‘kind of nasty.’” “Won’t a dress code get me out of this?” “Don’t bet on it. In Diaz v. Coleman, a dress code of short skirts was set by an employer who allegedly sexually harassed his female employees because they complied with it.” It would be funny if it weren’t true. And when we see that British law has evolved a legal no-win situation very close to this one, a pattern begins to emerge.

The temperature was in the nineties, and on hot nights Chicagoans feel the city body and soul. The stockyards are gone, Chicago is no longer slaughter-city, but the old smells revive in the night heat. Miles of railroad siding along the streets once were filled with red cattle cars, the animals waiting to enter the yards lowing and reeking. The old stink still haunts the place. It returns at times, suspiring from the vacated soil, to remind us all that Chicago had once led the world in butcher-technology and that billions of animals had died here. And that night the windows were open wide and the familiar depressing multilayered stink of meat, tallow, blood-meal, pulverized bones, hides, soap, smoked slabs, and burnt hair came back. Old Chicago breathed again through leaves and screens. I heard fire trucks and the gulp and whoop of ambulances, bowel-deep and hysterical. In the surrounding black slums incendiarism shoots up in summer, an index, some say, of psychopathology. Although the love of flames is also religious. However, Denise was sitting nude on the bed rapidly and strongly brushing her hair. Over the lake, steel mills twinkled. Lamplight showed the soot already fallen on the leaves of the wall ivy. We had an early drought that year. Chicago, this night, was panting, the big urban engines going, tenements blazing in Oakwood with great shawls of flame, the sirens weirdly yelping, the fire engines, ambulances, and police cars – mad-dog, gashing-knife weather, a rape and murder night, thousands of hydrants open, spraying water from both breasts.

The fire started inside a barn. It was tiny at first, a glowing dot, some wisps of white smoke. But then flames reached up. They grabbed hold of a pile of hay. Crackle! Pop! And then, Boom! Towers of flame shot up, higher, higher, punching through the roof, reaching for the sky. Voices screamed out. “Fire! Fire! Fire!” Alarm bells clanged. Firefighters readied their horses and raced their pumpers through the streets. But it was too late. The flames blasted a shower of fiery sparks into the windy sky. Like a swarm of flaming wasps, they flew through the air, starting fires wherever they landed. Shops and homes erupted in flames. Warehouses exploded. Mansions burned. Crowds of panicked people fled their houses and rushed through the streets and along the wooden sidewalks. They screamed and pushed and knocked one another down, desperate to get away from the choking smoke and broiling flames. But there was no escape. The winds blew harder. Flames shot hundreds of feet in the air, spreading across miles and miles. And in the middle of it all was eleven-year-old Oscar Starling. Oscar had never felt so terrified, not even two years ago, when a killer blizzard hit his family’s Minnesota farm. He was trapped inside a burning house, fighting for his life. He’d made it down the stairs, desperate to escape. And then, Crash! A ball of fire and cinders crashed through the window, and the house exploded in flames. And suddenly, Oscar was in the fire’s ferocious grip. The flames clawed at him, seared him, threw him to the ground. Smoke gushed up his nose and into his mouth. But the worst was the blistering heat, the feeling of being roasted alive. Was this the end? Oscar had never wanted to come to this city. And now he was sure he was going to die here.

Many of us, the children of middle-class Manila, were fed on Catholic guilt and raised under the bright sun of the American dream. We went to church. We went to school. We recited the rosary every night and ate no meat on Good Friday. We hung tinsel on plastic Christmas trees, studied John Steinbeck, memorized the beatitudes, and measured our skirts a polite three inches below the knees. Money was tight, but there were books. When my mother’s girlhood collection ran out, she sent me to my grandfather and his numbered bookshelves. I lived for most of my adolescence on rafts floating down the Mississippi, inside little houses on prairies, and around wood fires in the New England and Chicago and London of my imagination. I was Meg Murry. I was Jo March. I was Scout and Mowgli and Anne Shirley and Lyra Silvertongue and for one glorious summer Sherlock Holmes, with my father playing my indulgent Watson. My

I select the right practice gun, the one about the size of a pistol, but bulkier, and offer it to Caleb. Tris’s fingers slide between mine. Everything comes easily this morning, every smile and every laugh, every word and every motion. If we succeed in what we attempt tonight, tomorrow Chicago will be safe, the Bureau will be forever changed, and Tris and I will be able to build a new life for ourselves somewhere. Maybe it will even be a place where I trade my guns and knives for more productive tools, screwdrivers and nails and shovels. This morning I feel like I could be so fortunate. I could. “It doesn’t shoot real bullets,” I say, “but it seems like they designed it so it would be as close as possible to one of the guns you’ll be using. It feels real, anyway.” Caleb holds the gun with just his fingertips, like he’s afraid it will shatter in his hands. I laugh. “First lesson: Don’t be afraid of it. Grab it. You’ve held one before, remember? You got us out of the Amity compound with that shot.” “That was just lucky,” Caleb says, turning the gun over and over to see it from every angle. His tongue pushes into his cheek like he’s solving a problem. “Not the result of skill.” “Lucky is better than unlucky,” I say. “We can work on skill now.” I glance at Tris. She grins at me, then leans in to whisper something to Christina. “Are you here to help or what, Stiff?” I say. I hear myself speaking in the voice I cultivated as an initiation instructor, but this time I use it in jest. “You could use some practice with that right arm, if I recall correctly. You too, Christina.” Tris makes a face at me, then she and Christina cross the room to get their own weapons. “Okay, now face the target and turn the safety off,” I say. There is a target across the room, more sophisticated, than the wooden-board target in the Dauntless training rooms. It has three rings in three different colors, green, yellow, and red, so it’s easier to tell where the bullets it. “Let me see how you would naturally shoot.” He lifts up the gun with one hand, squares off his feet and shoulders to the target like he’s about to lift something heavy, and fires. The gun jerks back and up, firing the bullet near the ceiling. I cover my mouth with my hand to disguise my smile. “There’s no need to giggle,” Caleb says irritably. “Book learning doesn’t teach you everything, does it?” Christina says. “You have to hold it with both hands. It doesn’t look as cool, but neither does attacking the ceiling.” “I wasn’t trying to look cool!” Christina stands, her legs slightly uneven, and lifts both arms. She stares the target for a moment, then fires. The training bullet hits the outer circle of the target and bounces off, rolling on the floor. It leaves a circle of light on the target, marking the impact site. I wish I’d had this technology during initiation training. “Oh, good,” I say. “You hit the air around your target’s body. How useful.” “I’m a little rusty,” Christina admits, grinning.

Next, it was time to tell my brother Mike. “Hey, Mike!” I announced. “Guess what?” “Wh-wh-wh-what?” he asked. “I’m staying here! I’m not moving away!” I said. “Aren’t you excited?” Mike thought for a minute, then asked, “C-c-c-can you drive me to duh fire station now?” Finally I broke the news to my oldest brother. A resident of Chicago himself, he’d been looking forward to having a sister nearby. “Have you lost your f*&%#ing mind?” he said. He’d never been one to mince words. “Yes,” I conceded, attempting to defuse him. “I do believe I have.” “What the hell are you going to do back home? You’ll shrivel up and die there, it’s so backward!” To my commodity-trading, world-traveling brother, any city with a population under three million was backward. “What’s the story with this guy, anyway?” “Oh, you don’t know him,” I said. “We’ve only been going out about a month or so.” My brother’s practical side came out swinging. “You’ve only known him for a month? What the hell does he do?” “Well,” I began, bracing myself. “He’s…a cowboy.” “Oh, Christ.” My brother exhaled loudly.

In 1968, at fifteen, she turned on the television and watched chaos flaring up across the country like brush fires. Martin Luther King, Jr., then Bobby Kennedy. Students in revolt at Columbia. Riots in Chicago, Memphis, Baltimore, D.C.—everywhere, everywhere, things were falling apart. Deep inside her a spark kindled, a spark that would flare in Izzy years later. Of course she understood why this was happening: they were fighting to right injustices. But part of her shuddered at the scenes on the television screen. Grainy scenes, but no less terrifying: grocery stores ablaze, smoke billowing from their rooftops, walls gnawed to studs by flame. The jagged edges of smashed windows like fangs in the night. Soldiers marching with rifles past drugstores and Laundromats. Jeeps blocking intersections under dead traffic lights. Did you have to burn down the old to make way for the new? The carpet at her feet was soft. The sofa beneath her was patterned with roses. Outside, a mourning dove cooed from the bird feeder and a Cadillac glided to a dignified stop at the corner. She wondered which was the real world.

This means, a woman might think, that the law will treat her fairly in employment disputes if only she does her part, looks pretty, and dresses femininely. She would be dangerously wrong, though. Let’s look at an American working woman standing in front of her wardrobe, and imagine the disembodied voice of legal counsel advising her on each choice as she takes it out on its hanger. “Feminine, then,” she asks, “in reaction to the Craft decision?” “You’d be asking for it. In 1986, Mechelle Vinson filed a sex discrimination case in the District of Columbia against her employer, the Meritor Savings Bank, on the grounds that her boss had sexually harassed her, subjecting her to fondling, exposure, and rape. Vinson was young and ‘beautiful’ and carefully dressed. The district court ruled that her appearance counted against her: Testimony about her ‘provocative’ dress could be heard to decide whether her harassment was ‘welcome.’” “Did she dress provocatively?” “As her counsel put it in exasperation, ‘Mechelle Vinson wore clothes.’ Her beauty in her clothes was admitted as evidence to prove that she welcomed rape from her employer.” “Well, feminine, but not too feminine, then.” “Careful: In Hopkins v. Price-Waterhouse, Ms. Hopkins was denied a partnership because she needed to learn to ‘walk more femininely, talk more femininely, dress more femininely,’ and ‘wear makeup.’” “Maybe she didn’t deserve a partnership?” “She brought in the most business of any employee.” “Hmm. Well, maybe a little more feminine.” “Not so fast. Policewoman Nancy Fahdl was fired because she looked ‘too much like a lady.’” “All right, less feminine. I’ve wiped off my blusher.” “You can lose your job if you don’t wear makeup. See Tamini v. Howard Johnson Company, Inc.” “How about this, then, sort of…womanly?” “Sorry. You can lose your job if you dress like a woman. In Andre v. Bendix Corporation, it was ruled ‘inappropriate for a supervisor’ of women to dress like ‘a woman.’” “What am I supposed to do? Wear a sack?” “Well, the women in Buren v. City of East Chicago had to ‘dress to cover themselves from neck to toe’ because the men at work were ‘kind of nasty.’” “Won’t a dress code get me out of this?” “Don’t bet on it. In Diaz v. Coleman, a dress code of short skirts was set by an employer who allegedly sexually harassed his female employees because they complied with it.

Information or allegations reflecting negatively on individuals or groups seen less sympathetically by the intelligentsia pass rapidly into the public domain with little scrutiny and much publicity. Two of the biggest proven hoaxes of our time have involved allegations of white men gang-raping a black woman-- first the Tawana Brawley hoax of 1987 and later the false rape charges against three Duke University students in 2006. In both cases, editorial indignation rang out across the land, without a speck of evidence to substantiate either of these charges. Moreover, the denunciations were not limited to the particular men accused, but were often extended to society at large, of whom these men were deemed to be symptoms or 'the tip of the iceberg.' In both cases, the charges fit a pre-existing vision, and that apparently made mundane facts unnecessary. Another widely publicized hoax-- one to which the President of the United States added his sub-hoax-- was a 1996 story appearing in USA Today under the headline, 'Arson at Black Churches Echoes Bigotry of the Past.' There was, according to USA Today, 'an epidemic of church burning,' targeting black churches. Like the gang-rape hoaxes, this story spread rapidly through the media. The Chicago Tribune referred to 'an epidemic of criminal and cowardly arson' leaving black churches in ruins. As with the gang-rape hoaxes, comments on the church fire stories went beyond those who were supposed to have set these fires to blame forces at work in society at large. Jesse Jackson was quoted was quoted in the New York Times as calling these arsons part of a 'cultural conspiracy' against blacks, which 'reflected the heightened racial tensions in the south that have been exacerbated by the assault on affirmative action and the populist oratory of Republican politicians like Pat Buchanan.' Time magazine writer Jack White likewise blamed 'the coded phrases' of Republican leaders for 'encouraging the arsonists.' Columnist Barbara Reynolds of USA Today said that the fires were 'an attempt to murder the spirit of black America.' New York Times columnist Bob Herbert said, "The fuel for these fires can be traced to a carefully crafted environment of bigotry and hatred that was developed over the last century.' As with the gang-rape hoaxes, the charges publicized were taken as reflecting on the whole society, not just those supposedly involved in what was widely presumed to be arson, rather than fires that break out for a variety of other reasons. Washington Post columnist Dorothy Gilliam said that society in effect was 'giving these arsonists permission to commit these horrible crimes.' The climax of these comments came when President Bill Clinton, in his weekly radio address, said that these church burnings recalled similar burnings of black churches in Arkansas when he was a boy. There were more that 2,000 media stories done on the subject after the President's address. This story began to unravel when factual research showed that (1) no black churches were burned in Arkansas when Bill Clinton was growing up, (2) there had been no increase in fires at black churches, but an actual decrease over the previous 15 years, (3) the incidence of fires at white churches was similar to the incidence of fires at black churches, and (4) where there was arson, one-third of the suspects were black. However, retractions of the original story-- where there were retractions at all-- typically were given far less prominence than the original banner headlines and heated editorial comments.

In the last few weeks we have been provided with fresh examples of American hypocrisy. In Augusta, Georgia, six blacks were killed in racial violence that followed a protest against the inhuman conditions in the local jail. All of them were shot in the back, some as many as nine times, and possibly four were bystanders. At Jackson State College in Mississippi, highway police fired into a crowd of students, killing two and wounding nine. There is no evidence to prove the police claim that they were being fired on by snipers, but there is evidence which indicates that the police fired on the students with automatic weapons. And finally, there is the report from the Chicago grand jury that the killing of two Black Panthers last December did not result from a "shoot-out" between the Panthers and the police, as the police had claimed. All the available evidence points to a police ambush in which the Panthers were murdered. What are black Americans to think when such events are forgotten almost as soon as they happen, while the death of young white students is made into a national tragedy? The answer is obvious, and, sadly, it is one that we have known all along: that in America the life of a white person is considered to be more valuable than the life of a black person; that the killing of a white student thrusts a lance of grief through the heart of white America, while the killing of a black is condoned or rationalized on the grounds that blacks are violent and thus deserve to be killed, or that they have been persecuted for so long that somehow they have become "used to" death. My own feeling is that the word "racism" is thrown about too loosely these days, but considering what has happened in the last few weeks, I these days, but considering what has think it accurately describes much of what goes on "in white America.

On August 16, 2012, the South African police intervened in a labor conflict between workers at the Marikana platinum mine near Johannesburg and the mine’s owners: the stockholders of Lonmin, Inc., based in London. Police fired on the strikers with live ammunition. Thirty-four miners were killed.1 As often in such strikes, the conflict primarily concerned wages: the miners had asked for a doubling of their wage from 500 to 1,000 euros a month. After the tragic loss of life, the company finally proposed a monthly raise of 75 euros.2 This episode reminds us, if we needed reminding, that the question of what share of output should go to wages and what share to profits—in other words, how should the income from production be divided between labor and capital?—has always been at the heart of distributional conflict. In traditional societies, the basis of social inequality and most common cause of rebellion was the conflict of interest between landlord and peasant, between those who owned land and those who cultivated it with their labor, those who received land rents and those who paid them. The Industrial Revolution exacerbated the conflict between capital and labor, perhaps because production became more capital intensive than in the past (making use of machinery and exploiting natural resources more than ever before) and perhaps, too, because hopes for a more equitable distribution of income and a more democratic social order were dashed. I will come back to this point. The Marikana tragedy calls to mind earlier instances of violence. At Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 1, 1886, and then at Fourmies, in northern France, on May 1, 1891, police fired on workers striking for higher wages. Does this kind of violent clash between labor and capital belong to the past, or will it be an integral part of twenty-first-century history?

Over the years, many have pinned the blame for the Great Chicago Fire on Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, which, it has been said, kicked over a lantern in the O’Leary barn, igniting the infamous fire, which “destroyed thousands of buildings, killed an estimated 300 people and caused an estimated

Grief is not as heavy as guilt, but it takes more away from you.” Veronica Roth, Insurgent

Do you know what an atma is?” he asked me. “A soulmate.” His full lips curved upward, and my heart stuttered. “Do you know what a soul is?” “The concept that our true form is inside us somehow, but it isn’t a physical being,” I said, narrowing my eyes at him. “Magic,” he said simply. “Demons are beings made of magic. Once we were angels, but over time all magic corrupts. It slowly drives us to insanity. To darkness. Unless we find and bond with our atma.

Zangara fired five shots. One of them hit Chicago mayor Anton Cermak, who was shaking hands with Zangara’s intended target. Cermak died. The target, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was sworn in as president two weeks later. Within months of his inauguration Roosevelt transformed the U.S. economy through the New Deal. John Nance Garner—who would have become president had Zangara hit his target—opposed most of the New Deal’s deficit spending. He almost certainly wouldn’t have enacted many of the same policies, some of which still shape today’s economy.

Way back in 1903, Wright's sons John and Lloyd, accompanied by Catherine's mother, attended a Christmas season play, Mr. Blue Beard Jr., at Chicago's Iroquois Theater. Just as an octet took up the first strains of “In the Pale Moonlight,” a calcium lamp exploded, engulfing the whole stage in flame. The fire spread everywhere. In the ensuing panic, more than six hundred men, women, and children died horribly, including everyone in the balcony. Mrs. Tobin was barely able to save herself and her two grandsons. John wrote, “I shall always remember the expression on Dad's face when he learned that we, all three, were safe and unharmed.

The saloon is burning fine. Everything is going up in smoke. Broun and I, we hold on to each other. We see Jo Davidson running to the fire and we nod at him politely. Money makes a big difference, you know. "And then we hear a cry. I recognize Schneider and I see him break loose from the crowd. He runs back into the burning saloon, a fireman after him. Broun and I, we stand and watch. He is probably gone after one of his kids. But I count the kids who are all in the street and they are all there. "Then Schneider comes out and the fireman, too. And they are carrying something. Broun falls against the delicatessen store window and groans. And I close my eyes. Yes, it is the picture. "Schneider sees us and comes rushing. He is half burned up. But the picture is not touched. He and the fireman hand us the picture. As for me, I turn away and I lose command of the English language. "'You boys trusted me,' says Schneider, 'and I remembered just in time. I remembered your picture. I may not be an artist, but I don't let a masterpiece burn up. Not in my saloon.

He is too much. If I let him, he would consume me. Just like fire feeds on oxygen, he would take everything I have left and leave me a broken shell. Regardless, I am drawn to him anyway. I feel him in every part of me, reaching for my very soul.

Heat blooms beneath my skin. His possessiveness is a red flag for me, at least it should be, so why does it make me feel so powerful and protected? Why does the thought of belonging to this man make me feel safer than I ever have in my life? Not to mention the fire in his eyes when he says things like that makes me want to wrap my legs around his waist.

Here’s an example of the 1/3/1 + 1/3/1 structure from my article, “8 Soft Skills You Need To Work At A High-Growth Startup.” It takes a certain type of personality to want to work at a startup — and the crucial qualities of startup employees you decide to hire. When I was 26 years old, one of my closest friends and I decided we were going to start a company. He was still in the process of finishing his MBA. I had recently taken the leap from my job as a copywriter working in advertising. And every few weeks he would fly to Chicago (where I was based), or I would fly to Atlanta (where he was based), and we’d trade off sleeping on each other’s couches while brainstorming what our first step was going to be. We called it Digital Press. I’ll never forget the day we decided to make our first hire. He was a freelance writer recommended to me by a friend — and we were in the market to start hiring writers and editors (to replace the jobs my co-founder, Drew, and I were performing ourselves). We asked him to meet us at Soho House in Chicago, ordered a bottle of red wine to share, and “interviewed” him by the pool on the roof. He was a fiction writer with a passion for fantasy and sci-fi (not business writing, which was what we needed), and we were young and inexperienced just hoping someone would trust us enough to follow our vision. We hired him — and fired him two months later. The last thing I want to point out here is that you can actually make the 1/3/1 + 1/3/1 structure move even faster by combining the last sentence of the first section, and the first sentence of the second section, into one singular subhead. Here’s how it works: This first sentence is your opener. This second sentence clarifies your opener. This third sentence reinforces the point you’re making with some sort of credibility or amplified description. And this fourth sentence rounds out your argument. This fifth sentence is both your conclusion and the first sentence of your second section. And this sixth sentence clarifies your second opener. This seventh sentence reinforces the new point you’re making—with some sort of credibility or amplified description. And this eighth sentence rounds out the second point of your argument. This ninth sentence is the big conclusion of your introduction.

What went wrong? Lasko and his team spent ages thinking about risk, but they never shifted their perspective from thinking of the Great Chicago Fire Festival as a unique project to seeing it as “one of those”; that is, part of a wider class of projects. If they had, they would have spent time thinking about live events. How do they fail? One common way is equipment failure. Mics don’t work. Computers crash. How is that risk mitigated? Simple: Identify essential equipment, get backups, and make contingency plans. That kind of analysis is dead easy—but only after you have shifted to the outside view. Notice that risk mitigation does not require predicting the exact circumstances that lead to disaster. Jim Lasko didn’t need to identify when and how the ignition system would fail, only recognize that it could. And have a Plan B if it did. Recall what Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1758: “A little neglect may breed great mischief.” This is why high safety standards are an excellent form of risk mitigation and a must on all projects. They’re not just good for workers; they prevent little things from combining in unpredictable ways into project-smashing black swans.

They are so absorbed in their virtue that they are easily bamboozled.

We do not see fire; we rarely see coal or oil. We’re frequent flyers but we have no idea about the size of the bonfire that could be ignited with 20 tons of jet fuel. We buy our airline tickets online but we never have to check in the oil barrels that will carry us out into the world. Take the time I went to a two-day poetry festival in Lithuania, a journey of around 1,750 miles, the same distance as Chicago to Los Angeles. A barrel of oil holds about 42 gallons, so a single airline passenger burns through about three-quarters of a barrel on such a flight: up to one gallon every 60 miles.

Grief is not as heavy as guilt, but it takes more away from you.” Veronica Roth,

By 1950, cornbread mixes abounded, many the products of local or regional companies. The Chicago-based giant Jiffy, with its sweet flavor, began to make inroads into southern pantries.

Christ, back in Chicago, we don’t make bicycles any more. It’s all human relations now. The eggheads sit around trying to figure out new ways for everybody to be happy. Nobody can get fired, no matter what; and if somebody does accidentally make a bicycle, the union accuses us of cruel and inhuman practices and the government confiscates the bicycle for back taxes and gives it to a blind man in Afghanistan.” “And you think things will be better in San Lorenzo?” “I know damn well they will be. The people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!

You should see the way the two of 'em look at each other when they don't think nobody's watchin'. 'Bout to set your eyeballs on fire.

I got into a situation with a crazy person named Ben because I had the loss of a damaged person named Alex hanging over me like a dirt cloud over Pig Pen for what had ballooned into a six-month funk. Alex’s frigidity, after the sex-free final year of my doomed relationship with Patrick, plus all the time invested and the chocolate-chip scones downed in their respective aftermath, honed me into the perfect vessel for Ben’s brand of crazy. Alex was Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, I was the lantern he kicked over, and Ben was the Chicago Fire.

According to science/religion/philosophy, there is a part/piece/place in our body that is the source of our energy. It has no end or beginning. It is the concentration of everything that we are made up of. It is our version of the Chicago-fire that burns us down, only to make us emerge from our ashes like the Phoenix. It makes us who we are. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been named yet. They can’t find a word in any language that can explain the sheer beauty and infinite power that it holds. They must have never met you. If it were up to me, I would have named “it” after you. You.

Compounding her misery was the fact it was the worst day of the year for a singleton : Valentine's Day. Whatever. She preferred to see it as the Day Before the 50% Off Truffles Sale at Frannie May

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RESISTANCE TO CHANGE? “The canal system of this country is being threatened by the spread of a new form of transportation known as ’railroads’ and the federal government must preserve the canals. . . . If canal boats are supplanted by ’railroads,’ serious unemployment will result. Captains, cooks, drivers, hostlers, repairmen, and lock tenders will be left without means of livelihood, not to mention the numerous farmers now employed growing hay for the horses. . . . As you may well know, Mr. President, ’railroad’ carriages are pulled at the enormous speed of 15 miles per hour by ’engines’ which, in addition to endanging life and limb of passengers, roar and snort their way through the countryside, setting fire to crops, scaring the livestock and frightening women and children. The Almighty certainly never intended that people should travel at such breakneck speed.” The above communication was from Martin Van Buren, then governor of New York, to President Andrew Jackson on January 21, 1829. In 1832 Van Buren was elected vice president of the United States under Andrew Jackson’s second term. In 1836 Van Buren was elected president of the United States. It is also interesting that the first railroad into Washington, DC, was completed in time to bring visitors from Philadelphia and New York to Van Buren’s inauguration. Sources: Janet E. Lapp, “Ride the Horse in the Direction It’s Going,” American Salesman, October 1998, pp. 26–29; and The World Book Encyclopedia, Volume 20 (Chicago: World Book—Childcraft International, Inc.), 1979, p. 214. 2

Yellow mustard, onions, chunked tomatoes, sweet pickle relish, peppers—whole, of course, and pickled—a dill pickle slice, and a pinch of celery salt. Just like I remembered. A true Chicago dog looks like someone fired a bazooka at a vegetable stand, then scraped the remnants off the wall and slathered it on a tube of meat. I

One cannot examine the actions of the Secret Service on November 22, 1963, without concluding that the Service stood down on protecting President Kennedy. Indeed, the 120-degree turn into Dealey Plaza violates Secret Service procedures, because it required the presidential limousine to come to a virtual stop. The reduction of the president’s motorcycle escort from six police motorcycles to two and the order for those two officers to ride behind the presidential limousine also violates standard Secret Service procedure. The failure to empty and secure the tall buildings on either side of the motorcade route through Dealey Plaza likewise violates formal procedure, as does the lack of any agents dispersed through the crowd gathered in Dealey Plaza. Readers who are interested in a comprehensive analysis of the Secret Service’s multiple failures and the conspicuous violation of longstanding Secret Service policies regarding the movement and protection of the president on November 22, 1963, should read Vince Palamara’s Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect. The difference in JFK Secret Service protection and its adherence to the services standard required procedures in Chicago and Miami would be starkly different from the arrangements for Dallas. Palamara established that Agent Emory Roberts worked overtime to help both orchestrate the assassination and cover up the unusual actions of the Secret Service in the aftermath. Roberts was commander of the follow-up car trailing the presidential limousine. Roberts covered up the escapades of his fellow secret servicemen at The Cellar, a club in downtown Ft. Worth, where agents, some directly responsible for the safety of President Kennedy during the motorcade, drank until dawn on November 22. He also ordered a perplexed agent Donald Lawton off the back of the presidential limousine while at Love Field, thus giving the assassins clearer, more direct shots and more time to get them off. Also, although Roberts recognized rifle fire being discharged in Dealey Plaza, he neglected to mobilize any of the agents under his watch to act. To mask the inactivity of his agents, Roberts, in sworn testimony, falsely increased the speed of the cars (from 9–11 mph to 20–25 mph) and the distance between them (from five feet to 20–25 feet).85 No analysis of the Secret Service’s actions on the day of the assassination can be complete without mentioning that Secret Service director James Rowley was a former FBI agent and close ally of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, as well as a crony of Lyndon Johnson. Hoover was one of Johnson’s closest associates. The FBI Director would take the unusual step of flying to Dallas for a victory celebration in 1948 when Johnson illegally stole his Senate seat through election fraud. Johnson and Hoover were neighbors in the Foxhall Road area of the District of Columbia. Hoover’s budget would virtually triple during the years LBJ dominated the appropriations process as Senate Majority Leader. Rowley was a protégé of the director and one of the few men who left the FBI on good terms with Hoover. Rowley’s first public service job in the Roosevelt administration was arranged for him by LBJ. The neglect of assigning even one Secret Service agent to secure Dealey Plaza, as well as cleaning blood and other relatable pieces of evidence from the presidential limousine immediately following the assassination, seizing Kennedy’s body from Parkland Hospital to prevent a proper, well-documented autopsy, failing to record Oswald’s interrogation—all were important pieces of the assassination deftly executed by Rowley.

Even the most egregious captive state, bound and gagged on her damp bunk, felt eerily familiar to her. With nothing to do but lie there and think of things, she reflected that captivity took many different forms. A woman under the domination of her father or husband was as much a prisoner as a hostage on a boat. She had merely traded one form of servitude for another.

A radical, who stood on top of an abandoned piano to declare that the fire was the friend of the poor and urge the crowd to help itself to what it wanted, was suddenly quieted by a well-aimed whiskey bottle.

Was the Chicago Fire the deadliest in U.S. history? The Great Chicago Fire is remembered because it destroyed a four-mile swath of one of America’s most important cities. But it was not the deadliest fire. Amazingly the deadliest fire in U.S. history happened the very same day as the Great Chicago Fire, about 250 miles to the north, in Peshtigo, Wisconsin.

What can I do to get you out of your shirt today, Luke?” Her voice held a husky, wheeler-dealer tone, the kind of voice for which he was likely to do anything. He imagined that voice whispering in his ear, issuing wicked orders, making him hard as steel.

Alexandra, I can handle my own fucking cock." Stitch that on a pillow.

Major Negro population centers like Chicago’s South Side were represented as shining fortresses. Smaller neighborhoods and enclaves were marked with towers or oases. Isolated hotels and motels were inns with smiling keepers. Tourist homes—private residences that lent rooms to Negro travelers—were peasant huts, or tree houses, or hobbit holes. Less friendly parts of the country were populated by ogres and trolls, vampires and werewolves, wild beasts, ghosts, evil sorcerers, and hooded white knights. In Oklahoma, a great white dragon coiled around Tulsa, breathing fire onto the neighborhood where Atticus’s father and Uncle George had been born.

I had heard such predictions all my life from Malcolm and all his posthumous followers who hollered that the Dreamers must reap what they sow. I saw the same prediction in the words of Marcus Garvey who promised to return in a whirlwind of vengeful ancestors, an army of Middle Passage undead. No. I left The Mecca knowing that this was all too pat, knowing that should the Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them. Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline. Once, the Dream's parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that went them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves. I drove away from the house of Mable Jones thinking of all of this. I drove away, as always, thinking of you. I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos. I saw these ghettos driving back from Dr. Jones' home. They were the same ghettos I had seen in Chicago all those years ago, the same ghettos where my mother was raised, where my father was raised. Through the windshield I saw the mark of these ghettos - the abundance of beauty shops, churches, liquor stores, and crumbling housing - and I felt the old fear. Through the windshield I saw the rain coming down in sheets.

open prairie. For hours, Oscar had been

He’s asked me to marry him,

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray