Chicago has a soul. The city lives, breathes, and moves around the people who live and work there. The people themselves may not have souls, and many of them will give a lifeless, into-the-air stare when you see them on the El. The city springs to life from dawn til dusk and again from dusk til dawn, and the people are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. You may be here, and they might be too, but you don't see their souls or sense their souls or feel their souls, except at Wrigley Field, where the most hardcore people have brought their souls and left them there, hoping to one day find them again when the team is actually successful. That day won't come, but the place breathes because of those souls. Other places, namely at some of the night clubs, people didn't really have souls to begin with.
Fast forward 10 years: they live in Naperville. They drive expensive cars like they escaped the lunatic asylum, they raise obnoxious children, and they do whatever they can to hurry you along and thrust you away in contempt if you don't do it the way that they like. There is no soul to Naperville because very often, there are no souls to its people.
I work in Naperville. I live with this every day.
But it's not just Naperville. It's hard to find people that care about anything but money in much of the area. It's hard to find people that are anything but surface, people who have no substance and no purpose but to keep up as best they can with the Joneses. There are people that care here, but they are getting harder and harder to find. You have to dig for them like weeds in a garden. The rest of them, you look into their eyes and you cannot see a thing and you cannot feel a thing.
You should not have to find a soul among weeds.
You go downtown in Chicago. The buildings have character, they have a life-like feel. And you wonder if the people didn't leave their souls behind there sometimes to give the buildings that life.
When I walk around the buildings, I feel living, breathing things. It truly scares me that I don't get that same living, breathing feeling from many of the people. If there was a city that "The Matrix" was based on, it was probably New York, but you could make a case for Chicago.
Sometimes, the people are just not there.
The city of broad, lifeless shoulders.
I am getting sick and tired of the lack of substance. I cannot stand walking past the advertisements for the latest fashions and gadgets. I am getting sick and tired of walking around and feeling like the only thing that's real and alive are the monochromatic buildings. I will never stop being that person who needs to connect with people to really live, and there is a strong disconnect from this region. You get the feeling, looking at these people that they really are like that Oasis song, "Part of the Queue." You could understand how one could feel lost in this city.
And I'm having some trouble just finding some souls in this town.
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