I’m describing this as a political post because it ultimately is, even if I’m also describing my last week.

In the last several years I’ve worked in an oncology clinic in which four doctors visited with dozens of patients each daily, a box office in which the entire database of a sold-out season broke down a week before opening, and as a dishwasher with mafia style management and nightly fights in the parking lot.

It has been…

I’m coming off of the first 50% of the worst assignment I’ve ever held.

This assignment has combined the worst features of my assignment in Gynecologic Oncology (eg. frenzy, stress, overload, despair) with the worst features of my jobs this past summer at Angelos (eg.

I never promised to be much of a webmaster or photographer.

Some of these shots are underexposed, and I scrapped the worst, but my main intention in posting these is to help describe the adventure I had walking the inception of Route 66 on the night of June 23rd.

Evaporation, right?

It’s funny how you have to work for years sometimes to discover what’s been true from day one.

I’m giving up on this novel.

For now at least.

Not for good, I hope.

You see, in order to continue writing after I’ve been pulled away by other commitments for so long, I’ve had to go back an reread the three-hundred pages written in the two years I’d worked on the novel’s second revision.

I’m in a bunch of a bind right now.

Like anything, it comes from a bunch of assumptions I make about myself and the world in order to function, and then live by rigorously, even when they are contradicted, as assumptions will be.

OLD SPACE

Draw a dot.

Draw a ring around the dot.

Draw a slash through the ring and through the dot.

Divide the thing and fill it in with red or blue or green,

and cut it up into pie slices and eat them every one,

and run your pinky on the edge until you feel the groove,

then tighten, tighten, tighten until the core doesn’t move.

Before I could go for a walk from Chicago to Joliet along former Route 66, I had to get from work to 66.

A 2 mile walk, approximately.

I took some pictures.

Call this the “prewalk.”

PREWALK

Where I work.

I met Pam on the corner of 31st and Union (700 W), circa 10 PM last night, after walking down Archer to Chinatown, sitting for an hour, rereading Urbàntasm, sipping Green Tea and Hong Kong coffee, and chewing Pork and Shrimp Dumpling Soup, on the way home.

Time’s almost up, kids.

You’ve got until 11:59:59 Wednesday to email me a 1-2 page essay on the superiority of ninjas or pirates.

The price is good: an appropriate T-Shirt or fifth of fine rum/sake.

~ Connor

I hope to post the photos of my nightwalk tonight. I’ve got them transfered to disk, so it should be relatively simple.

Thursday was my last day at work. It went well; I stayed until 10 PM, to make it a 40-hour week.