Head cheese blog.

First things first: REMEMBER THE ALAMO.

More items from the past. These notes were written very early in my living in Chicago. In fact, I’d been there -- living in a fine apartment in a neighborhood called Andersonville on the North Side -- about five weeks. It got unexpectedly warm, and I hit the roads to see what I could see.

March 7, 1987.

A 70 F March day in Chicago: will I see the likes of it again this century? And it happened to be a Saturday, too. I skipped through some of the suburbs today like a flat stone on a lake, my mind wandering like unfenced cattle, wearing my green Reggae Festival t-shirt (a relic of an outdoor festival on the Vanderbilt campus in 1984). I wore it on footpaths, in a grocery store, at the Chicago Botanic Gardens -- actually near Northbrook -- in traffic on straight, crooked and unfamiliar roads, making it as far as Lake County. Drove by Northwestern, too. To think, I could have gone there. If so, where would I be now? Here? Would I have been a friend of Nate’s there, and met Rich through him, instead of vice versa?

March 10, 1987.

I don't think I'll remember this day for much, except head cheese. Head cheese, as I found out, is "a jellied loaf or sausage containing chopped and boiled parts of the feet, head and sometimes the tongue and heart of an animal, usually a hog." With a definition like that, who knows exactly what I ate today between two surprisingly good slabs of raisin bread, moistened by a little catsup.