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After spending most of the previous day touring Chicago’s most beautiful historic churches, I have every intention of using Monday for writing and planning out the next phase of my trip.
But in the morning, I am struck with the impulse to walk into the city. I’m close to downtown, and unsure of what the parking situation will be on a weekday, so I decide to head out on foot. I’m not gonna lie, it’s partially because I saw this in my feed this morning:
Let’s go NOTICE SOME THINGS!
It’s unseasonably warm for this late in the month of October, and the sun is shining in the early hours of the day for the first time since I’ve arrived. It’s a perfect day to stretch my legs and see the city up close.
After a 15-minute walk, I grab a breakfast sandwich from a little corner bagel place. An assortment of cops come through. It’s a busy place. An adorable little Asian girl in a double stroller makes intense eye contact with me and raises up her package of snacks as if to offer me one. She is incredibly serious about it. I grin back at her and thank her, but demur.
The coffee situation in the bagel shop doesn’t look great, so I skip it. I start searching my phone for nearby coffee shops. I finally find one that looks like it has my kind of vibe, so after melting the inside of my face on the scalding-hot sandwich, I punch in the address and start walking.
En route, I find myself wishing I had something to write with. The problem is, I’m downtown, in a dense retail environment. There are no office supply or stationery stores, mostly just restaurants, punctuated by the occasional boutique. It occurs to me that cafes could make a killing selling journals and gel rollers to people like me, but I’m not betting on anyone else having thought of that. Instead, I walk several more blocks past the coffee place I staked out in search of a drug store. Inner-city areas always seem to have these, even in the most unexpected downtown areas. And they tend to offer a surprisingly wide variety of goods. I figure there’s a good chance that if I find one, I can pick up a notebook and pen.
Sure enough, there’s a Walgreens a half a mile down the road, past a Voodoo Doughnut shop, a Hamburger University, and a dozen other places besides. I find the appropriate section of the store, and after deliberating over how much I want to carry around with me for the rest of the day, I select a pocket-sized pleather-bound journal with an elastic strap and a two-pack of Sharpie 0.7 S-Gels with black ink. With those in hand, I circle back towards the coffee place, go two blocks in the wrong direction, and have to double back again. As I finally approach the spot, I notice some art on the brick wall that I hadn’t seen on my way past the first time.
Two red-stenciled typewriters are painted side by side on a background of congealed black paint. The one on the left has a piece of paper coming out of it that says, “I love when you look at me like a safecrac….waiting…th…cli….” It looks as though it’s a printed sheet of paper wheatpasted onto the wall, with the bottom right corner torn off. My brain automatically begins sliding letters into place, Wheel of Fortune-style, and I finish the sentence: “I love when you look at me like a safecracker waiting for the click.”
The paper on the right-hand typewriter says, “And then your face lights up, and I know I’m in.”
The artist’s name, WRDSMTH, is printed in small letters beneath.
I absolutely love stuff like this. Rough-edged. Poetic. Beautiful. Romantic. Unapologetically, gratuitously designed to inspire.
Life is art, and art reflects life. Just past this wall-art tableau, I see an inset door, absolutely plastered with stickers from top to bottom. There is no window in the door, no way to see beyond it of any kind. It feels like the entrance to some kind of speakeasy, but there’s a sign to the right with the name of the shop and an arrow that says ENTER. I search for the handle through the visual clutter, and when I find it, I open it up and step inside.
Expecting to immediately emerge into the warm and inviting ambience of a hipster coffee shop, I am instead presented with a graffiti-laden stairwell with an eclectic assortment of overhead light fixtures emitting the soft, warm glow of Edison bulbs.
Fortunately, the door just ahead and to the right is clearly marked: Sawada Coffee.
Hopefully, the second door is the charm.
When I finally enter the space, it’s not at all what I was expecting. The pathway to the coffee bar is an uncluttered stretch of worn wooden floor planks. A high counter with stools lines windows elevated a full floor above street level, but the seats are mostly full. I head in the direction of a small mob of beanie-clad baristas conversing behind the counter, and order a plain latte. They grind the beans and heat up the grouphead on a chrome-plated La Marzocco and get to work.
While I wait, I turn and look over the railing into what I can only describe as a kind of food-hall pit. If the coffee bar itself is elevated, the eating area is at or below street level in what appears to be a formerly industrial space.
The room is dingy and loud, even at midday, the large space filled with long wooden tables arranged around an active bar, this one stocked not with coffee, but alcohol. Strings of even more Edison bulbs hang from the ceiling like a glittering web spun by some drunken, giant arachnid. There are hundreds of these lights, but somehow the room is still only dimly lit, even with midday light coming through frosted windows along the side wall. It’s a truly cavernous space.
I realize that it has roughly the same atmosphere as a beer tent at Munich’s Oktoberfest.
As I make my way down the steps into the eating area, Pearl Jam’s Evenflow blasts through unseen speakers somewhere overhead. Steel pillars attached to I-beams that run the length of the ceiling are tattooed with a patchwork of even more stickers. The walls are black-painted brick, worn through to show the whitewash beneath in so many places it looks intentionally distressed. Hard to tell in grungy, lived-in spaces like this just how much of the wear and tear is calculated artifice.
If it’s a created aesthetic, I don’t care. This place is perfect. The exact vibe I was looking for. A place to write and drink good coffee — and the coffee is in fact quite good — awash in a sea of ambient noise from which no individual strain of conversation stands out over another. Alone to think within the energy of a crowd.
I find a spot and sit down, and spend a few minutes trying to pry the tiny rubber ball off the nib of the pen. I write down some thoughts, pausing to look around and drink all the details in. The coffee goes too quickly, so I sip on ice water as I find myself wondering why I’m already hungry again. The breakfast sandwich was only two hours ago, but I suppose I’ve been walking for miles. Hidden on the far side of the room, behind the boozy bar, is a place called Green Street Smoked Meats, and the smell is tantalizing. I pull out my phone and try to get some reviews, but the internet is terrible down here, so I turn around and ask a pleasant-looking young woman typing at a laptop one table behind me if she knows what the Wi-Fi password is.
“I think it’s ‘ilovecoffee,’” she says, sounding uncertain but offering the information without hesitation.
“All one word,” she continues. “All lowercase.”
I thank her and try it out. I get a connection message. I turn around and tell her she was right, and thank her again, and she offers a genuine smile and a small exclamation of delight in return.
The meat place has great reviews, and they’ve got Texas-style brisket and hot links, both of which I love. I order both with a side of elote-style corn, and wince at the price when they ring me up. But I’m not going anywhere for a while, and I need to eat, so I cowboy up, grab some pickled onions and Carolina Gold-style sauce in a little plastic thimble, and take my tray back to my seat.
I eat slowly, savoring the food. The lines in my little journal are crammed so close together it’s hard to write between them, and my hand, unaccustomed to anything but typing, starts cramping up. People come and go.
A denim-clad couple in their 60s sits down next to me at the long table and begins an upbeat conversation in German.
A group of young 20-somethings who look like D&D nerds sit at the table right in front of me. One of them is wearing a surgical mask, and I reflexively cringe. Young couples sit at various locations, chatting over lunch.
A woman in her late 20s makes exaggeratedly expressive faces at the girl sitting across from her. I can’t hear the story, but it looks from the reactions she’s getting, it’s both sad and funny.
A table full of police in tactical vests are talking and laughing over their food. When it’s time for them to get up, they look too full to move.
At the bar, a woman in black gym attire who is such a tapestry of plastic surgeries that I can’t tell her age struts up to the bar directly into my line of sight and orders a drink. She is heavily tattooed, and her artificially inflated breasts spill out of a top that looks designed to be more of a display shelf than athletic support. Her lips are so Botox-stuffed that in profile, she looks uncannily like a duck, and resist movement when she speaks. It’s impossible to discern whether she might have been attractive under all the augmentation, but she certainly seems to think so. I guess she paid enough for the delusion that she’s entitled to it.
After finishing my lunch, I down another cup of water and head out. It feels like fall today, but it’s still unseasonably warm for late October, and the golden afternoon light casts long shadows across the tree-lined streets. It’s unbelievably picturesque, and I drink it in as I meander slowly towards my lodging, Siri quietly announcing walking directions to me from the pocket of my hoodie as I go.
I stop here and there to take in details. A glimpse of the Sears Tower as I emerge onto a new street. A carved figure of a tailor on a building labeled as the Tailor Lofts. Fall decor on the steps to a rowhouse. The bright yellow leaves of the ever-present honey locusts illuminated with a golden, otherworldly glow. An old plastic sign on an abandoned dry cleaning business. The red pressed brick façade and terracotta ornamentation on a mixed-use building in the Classical Revival style. The Greystones so characteristic of Chicago’s urban center.
As I approach one of the endless trees, I notice something reflective at its base, half-covered by a scattering of little oval golden leaves, and stop to take a look. It’s a thin strip of metal, and I can’t tell if it’s a heavy-duty bookmark or some kind of ornamental plaque. But then I notice the message engraved on its surface:
“The best is yet to come. Be confident in whatever direction you choose to go, for behind you are those more proud of you than you will ever know.”
This is meant for you, I realize, and I stop for a moment in wonder at the way these messages keep coming to me in the ways I least expect.
Figuring out the next stop on my journey was at the top of my to-do list for today, but I’ve been procrastinating. I’ve been so uncertain of whether to press on, or begin the return journey back towards my family, if not my home.
I finally arrive back at the parish, and realize this is the first time I’ve gotten a good look at it from the other side of the street. It’s a striking building, and I snap a few photos before stopping by the garage to grab the hard case with my drone. I get a couple of halfway-decent shots of the city from the garden, but the Windy City is living up to its name this afternoon, and my remote control starts warning me that it’s unsafe to fly. I land the little quadcopter and go inside.
After a late night gathering photos and editing video, I sleep in. When I rise, I make a breakfast of sausage, eggs, and coffee while talking to Fr. Michael in the kitchen. Then it’s back upstairs for another day of writing, typing out my experiences of the previous days before the details fade.
Another day of putting off the decision of where to go next.
In the afternoon, I head out to Arlington Heights to meet Johnathan “Bearded” Blevins for dinner. I had checked my GPS in the morning to see how long it would take to get there, so I’m surprised to discover that at three in the afternoon, with the addition of just a little rain, the time has doubled due to traffic. I’m going to arrive at the steakhouse half an hour late, and I text apologetic updates along the way.
“I have till 6:45,” he texts back. “Take your time. Already eating bleu cheese stuffed olives, though.”
“As you should be,” I reply.
Not a great way to make a first impression.
Blevins and I have interacted online for years, and we hit it off right away. We’ve discussed getting together at some point for quite a while, but never got around to making it happen. Aside from those interactions, I don’t know a lot about him. The list can more or less be gleaned from his bio and his tweets: he’s a Catholic dad, bourbon and cigar enthusiast, Detroit sports fanatic, and professional gaming streamer who uses his online presence at times as a means to evangelize.
Well, that and the fact that he’s the older brother of Ninja, one of the most famous and successful Twitch streamers in the world, with a following of millions. But the truth is, I would never have heard of Ninja if I hadn’t run into Johnathan, and as the oldest of six, I have a built-in bias for older brothers anyway.
I enter the restaurant and see him across the room, and immediately throw him a salute. He stands to greet me, and I’m surprised to see that he’s roughly the same height as I am — I’m 6’4” — and I realize you never get an idea of someone’s height when you mostly only see photos or videos of them sitting down. He grabs my extended hand and gives me a bro hug, and says, “Alright, let’s see if it’s true that you should never meet your heroes” at the same time I say, “I’m gonna hit the head real quick, it was a long drive.”
I don’t process what he said until I walk away, and feel like I already fumbled the ball.
Heroes?
What?
I come back to the table at around the same time as the waitress arrives. He’s almost to the bottom of a dirty martini, and I order the same.
“Vodka?” she asks.
“No. Bombay.” I say.
“Our first disagreement,” he says, shaking his head. He reminds me that one of our first interactions was over the proper liquor to use in exactly this drink. It’s the only disagreement we’ll have over the next two hours.
The dinner is phenomenal, and it’s a total splurge. We each get a ribeye — me a tomahawk and he the Koji-aged cowboy.
“I was going to wait to tell you this,” he says, “but I have a surprise for you. I mentioned on my Twitch stream today that I was meeting you for dinner, and the audience donated some money to cover this dinner and to give you whatever is left over.”
I’m floored by this, and don’t even know what to say.
“Please pass my thanks along to them,” I say.
He tells me stories of people he told about our dinner meeting who were fans of mine. He tells me he’s been following me since he was a teenager, and that I taught him a lot about the faith.
I had no idea.
“Dude,” he says, “there are so many people out there who love you.”
I’m genuinely touched by this remark. I’ve felt unworthy of love for so long, it’s hard to remember feeling differently. It has only been over the past few weeks that I’ve stopped repeating the lie to myself that I don’t deserve it.
We talk shop for much of the dinner: how weird it is to be kind of internet famous, what’s going on with the Church, what’s going on with my situation, what’s going on in his life, the questions we each have about how to live the right way in the world we inhabit. He’s very intelligent and attentive and poised in a way I can’t help but respect, and I feel the groundwork being laid for a longer-term friendship — the kind that can only really be born from an in-person meeting like this.
He has a hard stop just before 7 because he has to bring a child to practice, but we stop on the way out and ask the hostess to take a photo of us.
“Make sure you crop my nipples out!” he yells, drawing laughs from some folks walking in. After we’re finished, I turn to the people waiting for us to finish by the door and apologize.
“I’m sorry,” I say, “we’re very important.”
They laugh again.
As we head off to our respective cars, he yells to me, “I’m a dad. Text me when you get home!”
Such a great evening. 10 of 10, would do again.
After I get home, I stay up late again, trying to work through more things in my life I can’t figure out. I’m two days shy of a month away from home, and I still have no idea whether I’ll ever be welcomed back, or if this is my life from now on.
I spend the night dreaming about things I can’t quite remember, but every time I wake up to go to the bathroom or grab a sip of water there’s something there, just out of reach.
I sleep in again, then head downstairs to the kitchen to make coffee and heat up my leftovers from the previous night. I’ve still got a few ounces of steak and some killer scalloped potatoes and crème brûlée corn, and I’m going to enjoy every bite.
Father Michael sees me in the kitchen and stops in to chat. When I’m done eating, he heads back to his office and I go upstairs to plan the next leg of my trip. During my Chicago walk, two days prior, I’d seen a sign that felt like a little shove:
I haven’t been using it much on this trip, but I decide to bounce some of the things I’m trying to figure out off of ChatGPT. I mention that I’m not sure if it’s time to go back to Raleigh, even though I feel like I haven’t finished mining the gold from this trip.
Its reply kind of took me by surprise:
You’re in the “temptation to return to Egypt” phase.
Every myth and scripture has it — the hero escapes bondage, but the desert is lonely, so he’s tempted to go back to slavery because at least it was familiar.
The fact that you’re aware of this pattern means you’re already in the middle of that story arc. You don’t have to know what’s next yet. You just have to stay the course long enough for meaning to emerge from the movement.
I press it for more on that. In response, it says:
When I said that, I meant this: in almost every archetypal journey — Exodus, the Odyssey, even Christ’s forty days — liberation isn’t a clean break. The moment the chains fall off, the loneliness sets in. The wilderness is where freedom first feels like loss.
It’s the in-between state you’re living now: you’re out of bondage, but you haven’t yet reached the new homeland. You’re sleeping in strange places, unsure where you belong, missing the structure you once hated because at least it was structure.
That’s the “temptation to go back to Egypt.”
In those stories, the desert is never punishment. It’s the incubator for identity. It strips away the false dependencies — the approval, the illusion of safety, the need to be seen through someone else’s eyes — until the hero can hear the quiet voice that says, “I AM.”
Not as theology, but as self-recognition: I exist, I’m here, I’m real.That’s the part of the myth you’re walking right now.
I decide to bite the bullet and just go. My resistance feels like something that needs to be overcome.
As I begin plotting out the trip, I notice that I’m suddenly feeling really run down, like a cold is starting to settle in. I’ve been a bit like this on and off for the past couple of days, but this is worse, and I hope it’s not going to turn into a full-blown man cold. I don’t need this trip to end with me dying alone on the side of the road, wallowing in misery and buried in Kleenex.
But, I decide, I’m not going to let it stop me. There’s something out there I’m meant to discover, and if I go home without it, I stop the journey short of its true purpose.
I finish up my planning, do some laundry, and get some more writing done. When I realize it’s 7:30 PM, I realize I’m running out of time to find some Vietnamese Pho — the soup I always reach for when I’m getting sick. The only place I can find that sounds good is a hole in the wall up in Little Saigon. It’s 11 miles away, and I don’t want to go out, but I really want good soup.
I call in an order and head out. I’m going to get there right before they close. I’ve never gone to the East side of the city, up along Lake Michigan, and I’m falling in love with the architecture, especially at night. Chicago has all the big city vibes Manhattan does, but with a lot less traffic and a lot fewer people. There’s no way I could have made this trip in 20 minutes in the Big Apple.
I realize with irritation that I forgot to stick the memory card back in my dashcam. I’m enjoying the scenery so much I’m actually glad I went. I guess this part of the trip won’t wind up in a highlight reel. This part is just for me.
When I arrive at the restaurant, I’m met by a tiny Vietnamese man in a baseball cap who looks like he’s been smoking since he was three. He seems to know my order, but I can’t understand a word he’s saying.
Then he calls out the price.
“$22 dollars.”
“What?” I ask, surprised. “It says on your website that it’s $13.95!”
He laughs, and it comes from somewhere deep within him. Somewhere eeeevil, like the froo-eets of the dev-eel.
“Website 15 year old!” He cackles again.
I reluctantly hand him the cash and tell him he needs to update that damn thing. I need my soup, and I need my sleep.
Tomorrow, I head into the metaphorical desert. I need to be ready for whatever I find.
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Iowa, perhaps?