At some point, John convinced me that we should leave for a weekend trip to Chicago directly from his house Wednesday evening was a good idea.  I presumed him a capable driver and his parents outfitted us with dinner and a care package of iced tea and popcorn before we went west over the Appalachian mountains and into the west.  John and I didn’t have much overlap in musical tastes and he didn’t seem one to complain so as a last resort I started a 12 song play list of Beatles hits and promptly fell asleep in the passenger seat.  I woke up 3 hours later where he looked at me, then the radio and said “make it stop”.  My radio apparently defaults to loop for playlists and he’d now heard the set 5 times but didn’t want to break my radio by changing anything.

We arrived in Cincinnati at 7 AM and the number of sleep-deprived car members increased by one.   The drive across Ohio and Illinois was uneventful outside but inside the car I got to hear someone being fired, and then a recounting of their attempt to steal a cash register tray which was way better than anything else on my iPod.  Peter met us at around 10:30 AM, gave us a tour of his new apartment and I showered and changed before driving John, Suzie, and I to meet a fellow outside Chicago for lunch at Portillo’s, a purveyor of fine cased meats.  The call agent used rhyming announcements which made me wish silver, month, and orange were numbers and I had a mediocre Vienna beef sandwich as I talked with Ty about things while in a hypnogogic state.

John was made to volunteered to drive us back to Peter’s where I learned two things quickly:  He didn’t appreciate the wanderlust of my GPS and he does not enjoy city driving, where city is defined as within 4 miles of anything larger than a tool shed.  He did not enjoy driving around Chicago.

Back at Peter’s, we engaged in lively discussion:

After a nap, we started putting things into boxes.  We stopped putting things in boxes when we ran out of boxes.  There were many boxes.  Tomorrow, there would be more boxes, a box-like truck into which the boxes would be placed, and two boxy freight elevators to hold our then-filled boxes. Boooo……ooooxes.