Today is the second St. Patrick’s Day in 4 days. Perhaps worn out from the excesses of Saturday, tonight’s celebrations are much more subdued. It’s so warm – 70 degrees! – that after I went to yoga I sat in Wicker Park, at a stone table with a chessboard set in the center, for an hour, writing and writing and writing until there was no light at all. I wasn’t the only one there – people had poured out of all the surrounding apartment buildings and graystones to be outside and feel the air. People in green T-shirts sitting on the grass.

Leaving the park, a stranger said to me, “Enjoy it – it’s only going to last two more days.” Chicagoans are so aware of the forecast.

“Don’t say that,” I said. I still believe that if you ignore the weather, it doesn’t exist.

“You know it!” he said. “You’ve got your preparedness and everything,” referring to my jacket.

It’s true that I never leave my house here without some kind of jacket, but it has less to do with preparedness and more to do with laziness. I’ve never learned to check the weather, and if a winter in this town didn’t get me to start, I don’t know what will.

Yesterday, after dying the river green and watching Chicagoans drinking the river dry, I went down to Chinatown-Cermak and saw a woman in a punk-rock concert trying to set someone’s plaid T-shirt on fire with a cigarette lighter. I met someone at the concert who had quit his job to see this band, years ago. I left before they played.

“Long after Burnham’s death, Frank Lloyd Wright told a lecture audience, “Thanks to Dan Burnham, Chicago seems to be the only great city in our States to have discovered its own waterfront.” Chicago, Wright said, was the most beautiful city in the country, and he gave the credit for this to Burnham, whose architecture he could never abide.”

– Paul Goldberger in the New Yorker on the centennial of the Burnham Plan of Chicago

Chicago: the smell of burning hair in the hair dryer.

After our February respite of clear sidewalks, snow is falling outside like it’s making up for lost time, and the wind makes it look like smokestack currents from a snow-manufacturing plant.

I hear the foreman yelling, “More snow! We have to make more snow! We can’t keep up with the demand!” and his boss allowing him to go into overtime, to manufacture snow day and night, day and night, until Chicago’s inexhaustible appetite for snow is once again satiated.

On the way home from Star Lounge, I saw a man come out of the corner grocery store and hurry down Rockwell. He was still wearing the sweat pants he’d slept in and scrunching his face under his hat, carrying a cold gallon of cold milk in his right hand and holding both gloves in the left. I hope the rest of his breakfast proceeds without interruption.