And I continue to feel like I'm living in a dream.

I can’t read a damn train schedule. I fumble around the station with my things, rushing to make the 11 a.m. out of Chicago to Milwaukee, only to realize there isn’t an 11 a.m. In fact, there isn’t a train for two hours so it looks like I’m going to need to kill time. First instinct: get coffee. Second move: start reading in the most beautiful location in proximity—the Great Hall of Chicago’s Union Station. I decide to check my internet feed quickly when I notice that Natalie’s status from just moments ago announces her arrival in Chicago, so I call her. Not only are we in transit through the same city, but we’re both at Union Station. I run outside to find her getting her nicotine fix with her latest boy toy, so unfortunately named, Hubert. I almost don’t recognize her along the river walkway. She’s dressed the same as always, the latest rebel fashion, but she's thin, much thinner than Nat had ever been. Her hair looks great, a reddish brown, with natural waves and a swoop bang. I just can't get over how tiny she is.

 She’s been out of rehab for about a week now, and we’ve been in contact since. As of the 9^th, she’d been a month clean of dope. Within 2 minutes of me sitting beside her, she exchanges a few words over the phone. Key words—$20 bucks a bag, dubs, pick-up, good shit. I knew it. I should’ve fucking known better. In Chicago to see her Hubey?? It's more like a flock to the heroin epicenter of the U.S. because she can't lay off the dope. Most people don’t know this, but heroin has never been such a problem—it’s the new hip thing to do in the Chicago suburbs. It’s already taken lives around me, I had to watch a friend seizure over a Skype conversation from an overdose, and now, my best friend since our awkward middle school years, can’t get clean. I’ve never heard a heroin success story, and I know very few people who’ve made it out of addiction successfully. Do I begin disconnecting myself from the emotional attachment I have to her? Or do I become proactive? I want to expose this very serious problem for exactly what it is: a destroyer of families, friendships, a person’s happiness, and ultimately their life. If anything happened to Natalie, I’d absolutely die.

Now I sit and wait for the train. Maybe I’ll get another coffee. I don’t really have the stomach for food right now.

THIS THIS THIS

Our reason is quite satisfied in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand of us, if it can find a few arguments that will do to recite in case our credulity is criticised by some one else. Our faith is faith in some one else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other,—what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We want to have a truth; we want to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives.

--William James (from The Will to Believe)

Drain City

Matt took me and T.J. into the ghetto last night. We all hopped out of the Lexus, stepped around to the trunk, took our backpacks out, put them on and strode down Capitol as if all in one motion.
Matt, looking serious as ever and staring straight ahead said, “On three, you’re following me over this wall. One, two… whoa shit that’s higher than I expected,” and yet, he still leaped over the concrete barrier.
I didn’t hesitate to follow him over, and T.J. immediately behind me. Instantly upon hitting the grassy riverbed, we heard sirens. Not one of us thought we were in trouble. We’re in the ghetto— the last of their worries should be a couple Upper East Side kids trespassing. And we we’re right. An ambulance pulled up right where we had jumped over. It seemed the perfect distraction; no one would notice the three of us slinking away into the Milwaukee drain system.

With boots on and lamps in hand, we quickly tagged and entered one of the 8 by 10 foot rectangle drains. After miles, we came across a knife here, some spoons there, a Walmart gift card, and some guy named Rashid’s driver’s license. It’s seemed this drain was a bummer; we hadn’t intersected with any others or found anything worthwhile. Matt flashed his bright light one last time before we turned around, and both Matt and T.J. let out an excited giggle (what we refer to as “geeking out”).

It was an intersection where three drains united. We chose the route down the 12-footer, and by this I mean a round pipe 12 feet in diameter. It wasn’t as big as the drain we refer to as “Pillar” but it was still breathtaking. Within minutes of walking we could hear the roar of another drain emptying into ours. Sure enough, a few pipes were emptying into the 12-footer and in one of the rarest, most “gnarly” forms.

It was a drop shaft, made entirely of brick, and at the very top near the manhole, it was cream city brick, the oldest in Milwaukee. We climbed the service ladder up into another drain about 10 feet above. We reached similar shafts 3 more times before the higher drains were too small to explore.

Of all events last night, the most exhilaration I experienced was from the tallest drop shaft we climbed. Heading back out, it’s like shimmying down next to a man-made waterfall. Ya know, the beauty of drains is that it’s always between 60 and 70 degrees. It doesn’t smell like some might think; in fact, for a stretch of drain I was overwhelmed with the scent of laundry detergent. And lastly, there’s no one around; at least, no one but whom you invite. And while you’re down there, you feel like the only people in the world.

It’s utter darkness, black nothingness, that we walk through and leave behind as we stroll with our lamps. It’s as if these places don’t exist until we decide to invade them.

I ought not glamorize this too much. It’d take away from the sanctuary it is if people began flocking to all the city’s drains at night. I’ll just make the safe bet that this doesn’t sound as nice to all of you as it does to me.