Summer Breeze - The Isley Brothers

Yesterday, I was summoned to jury duty.

So here's how it goes ... I drive South on the Boulevards from Humboldt Park to Little Village. The Chicago Boulevard system is the best because you can drive fast and for the most part, you are completely ensconced in trees and optimistically sturdy original architecture from other centuries. It's such a calming stretch of road.

When it's warm out, young men will pull up beside you in large cars with big block engines or tricked out Japanese conversions. They will make kissy faces at you and then try to beat you off the line. I like to smile sweetly before I make them eat my dust. Hahaha! But that's at night. When going to jury duty it is morning, although I feel decadent because it is an hour later than the time I normally go to work and also the summer breeze makes me feel fine, blowing through the jasmine in my mind.

I am wearing beaded flip-flops, a kicky skirt and this grecian-style turqouise shirt I found at a thrift shop for 2 bucks. Wearing the flip-flops makes me feel rebellious and properly disrespectful, because as most anyone who knows me knows -- court makes me a gelatinous nervous wreck and I have to take my little power trips to get me through the day without screaming. I'm also wearing my under-the-sea-mother-of-pearl-and crescent-moon beaded necklace which matches the whole ensemble and I'm just generally feeling like sex on a stick.

I enter the strange nouveau art deco gothic courthouse, find the jury room, sign in, read my novel, watch an instructional video on good jurying, walk around looking through the floor to ceiling windows at the boulevard, the skyline, the factories and the female prisoners on the basketball court. I sit back down and read my novel some more. The jury director comes out at 12:30 announcing that we've all been sprung since all 4 scheduled jury trials have been cancelled. Hooray and boo! (Jury trials are becoming scarce in the US of A.)

I saunter through the sultry heat back to my car. The man walking in front of me smells very good. I drive back up the boulevards and pop into Streetside. I put my last 8 bucks on the bar and lovely Lindsey quickly and efficiently gets me buzzed while I manage to completely terroroize Emmanuel (god is with us now) with tales of a world gone mad. He shakes his head and his dreads rustle and whisper like a weeping willow in the wind and when he swallows his beer his adam's apple bobs up and down and we both come to the realization that in the end we'll all be dead or living on survivalist communes and we'll never get to meet anyone new.

I guess it was a fun experiment while it lasted.