Closed Do To Fire

At the end of my block, where my street meets Archer Avenue, sits a boarded-up shack. It used to be Hamburger Heaven Express until a grease fire shuttered it last year, or was it the year before? Time, as we all know, has gone haywire in the last four months. In any case, I usedContinue reading “Closed Do To Fire”

A cat called Johnny Depp

An email arrived from a man in Maine. He’d seen an article online about my pet portraits—likely this self-serving one, which is looking like my last meaningful contribution to the Chicago Reader. The man wrote about his rescued cat, Johnny Depp, who’d passed away some time back. It was only now that he could bring himselfContinue reading “A cat called Johnny Depp”

All Hack

This book came together quickly, though its gestation period was long. I’d been unsatisfied with my second cabbie book ever since it came out in 2014. The publisher turned out to be a crook and he hired an incompetent designer who butchered the book to such an extent it took three people to reconstruct the thing intoContinue reading “All Hack”