Barnabas Monkeypants

(Although Kristen is feeling a bit strange, nothing yet.)

One of the best things about living in a large city is that there is always something going on. One weekend it will be a big music festival (blues, jazz, rock), the next it will be a gigantic picnic stretching several blocks in a neighborhood (or in the case of Taste of Chicago, several acres of waterfront park), and the next will be some parade.

What all these things have in common, of course, is that we go to none of them. For that I put the blame sorely on my shoulders. You see, I hate crowds, and what these spring and summer events do is bring people out by the tens of thousands (Lalapalooza, which was a couple of weekends ago, had more than 250,000 people dancing and vomiting for three days, which is about 249,950 too many). Some of these people are kind and considerate and just want to either listen to the music or eat some hot dogs or mingle with friends.

Most, though, just want to be obnoxious and make your life miserable by being rude, inconsiderate, smelly, drunk, and patently unaware of how to act in public.

(Last weekend was Halsted Market Days, a 2-day festival in the Boy’s Town section of Chicago. One of my co-workers went and was talking about how so many people were crammed together, it looked like one flowing amoeba sliding about. He loved it. I would rather gouge my eyes out than be part of an amoeba.)

For the most part, we’ve been able to avoid all these events and the mass of people and traffic that go along with them. If something is in the Loop, we go nowhere near the Loop. If something is in Lincoln Park, we avoid it like the plague.

This may be a problem this weekend. Starting today is the Chicago Air and Water Show, which is in its 430th year or somesuch (yes, they were celebrating this junk even before the Wright Brothers). In it, thousands of people will flock to the lakefront so they can watch the Blue Angels or Green Devils or whatever fly over, sonic booms rattling every window in the city (the cats love that, I’ll tell you what).

This will surely clog up Lake Shore Drive, which is an 8-lane highway (of sorts) that runs from the top of Chicago (where we live) to the bottom. In the middle of the city, about 40 blocks south of us, is the hospital where Kristen’s going to be giving birth (any day now! honest!). But eight lanes mean nothing to festival goers. Because these lemmings (I call them with love) tend to not know the ins and outs of traveling in the city, with plenty of people swooping across lanes to get to an exit, impatient drivers honking and swerving so they can get one car ahead, and others who decide that even though everyone else is driving 30 or 40 or 50 miles per hour, they should drive 20 (or 80).

So what I’m asking Kristen is this. If she’s going to go into labor this weekend, I’d like it if she kindly does so between the hours of 11 PM and 9 AM, where traffic will be mostly clear.

If she was able to hold out so I could get my free ice cream, she’ll be able to work this out as well.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 9:12 am and is filed under Kristen, Worry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.