'Second' City may be Ambitious...

Chicago, you are mediocre.... sure you're friendly,... gracelessly, but that's how so many people describe their first wife... for all your pretend edge, we can see right through to the fact that you compromised because you were pretty sure you couldn't make it anywhere else.. we can see that you have ambition but really no taste, that you like big and bold but are only comfortable with commoditized.. you wouldn't know good for real if it hit you like a winter wave from your crappy little fresh water pond which connects you to the happening trading empires of Sheboygan and Michigan City, oh joy, the cosmopolitan fervor of it all, like a modern Venice no doubt..
Your river running the wrong way is somehow a perfect symbol of what's happening to progress here..
Your cowed white men, shorn and shiny, shunned out of displaying even the slightest hint on sexual imagination or savagery in such an oddly feminine city, eager just to pretend to be everything a Disney shaped female imagination would want.

All your bleach blonds (Polish Chic, or Dump Truck Chic, as I keep thinking that they would do anything they can to not let you figure out their dad made his cash running dump trucks in the burbs somewhere) with their prized matter of fact-ness, the practicality that led them to this flat tomb of derivative and borrowed culture they so value (smells like fear, but sold as 'sensibility'), their accessibility a sad byproduct of the subconscious self loathing that goes with a life of compromise, and your old school tough guys, hanging their hat on the clubby-ness of presumed old school suffering Upton Sinclair style, while the union hall rocks fat full of no show cash, the defibrillators ready to try to keep another one on your rolls a few days longer, while the rest of your 'hip young crowd' tries to rebel without noise while still cherishing this sad basis as an origin. And lest ye forget your banal suburbanites, so proud of their flight from the south side or whatever pseudo urbanity they confuse with a sweltering Calcutta, or step up to the big burbs from someplace even more logical and less romantic (if possible, but beware it exists all through the Midwest!) but so eager to show not a lick of pretension (never thought you would miss it until now) as the bore you with banter born of an empty soul.. the Ned Reyerson of our Groundhogs Day in the Windy City...