There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Geno Petro (page 1 of 4)

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Two Turtle Doves (revisited)

I was weathering a Category 1 hangover the day my big fat Vice President dropped by the office and found me asleep at my desk. He’d come to personally deliver my Christmas bonus (a twenty-dollar bill stapled to a battery-operated Rudolph necktie) and to spread some holiday cheer to the few remaining insurance salesmen who hadn’t already quit to pursue more lucrative door-to-door opportunities. To this day, I can’t figure out why the fat man just didn’t pull my plug right there on the spot.

“Wake up Slick,” he said between clenched teeth. “Tiz the season of our discontent. You got a punch bowl around here?”

I didn’t answer, unsure if I could even open my mouth without hurling. My girlfriend had given me the boot a few days earlier and I’d been on a 24/7 gin-soaked tear ever since.

“No? Then put on your new necktie, get your sorry ass over to K-Mart, and buy one,” he said. He then ripped the crisp twenty from the blinking fabric, crumpled up it in his hammy fist, and bounced it off my forehead. “There, you can use your Christmas bonus to pay for it.”

I should have resigned right then and there but instead, I kept my head, splitting as it was, and did as I was told. I was the lowest ranked sales manager in the worst selling region in the country and it was only a matter of time before everyone…including the idiot standing before me…went down in corporate flames. You see, I may be a lot of messed-up things, but quitter isn’t one of them. Especially when Unemployment Benefits are at stake. So I got in my car and dashed to K-Mart, necktie flashing all along the way.

Twenty minutes later I found myself hovering in Housewares, neck sweating, head pounding, hangover slightly downgraded to tropical storm status, when a short, plump elderly woman approached me with a fistful of coupons. Alvin and those irritating chipmunks were singing that insidious song over the PA system.

“I want to file a complaint,” the woman said. “You don’t have the Sunbeam Foot Soaker in stock. And it was Read more

My Pettiest SM Peeves

I’m a Chicago real estate blogger  who resides in a glass house (okay, an MCM high rise) so throw ’em if you got ’em.  A little collateral stone breakage comes with the territory in this Midwest cranny. Regardless, here are a handful of Social Media miens that tick  me off on a daily basis. In no great order:

1) Stock Photo Images On A Realtor’s Blog
My take: If you’re going to offer up something to the SM gods that even faintly smells literary, have the decency (imagination?) to snap your own accompanying picture. (Unless of course, its a really cool shot of a vintage car or dog.)

2) Blogs In A Box
My take: Come on fellow ‘bloggers,’ we all know you don’t write that crappy content about real estate minutiae that you plaster on LinkedIn and Facebook every other day. (“6 Factors Homeowners Should Consider Blah Blah Blah.” ??? Yeah right. I saw three different Realtors with their names on some re-tweaked version of that one the other day.) It’s pretty obvious you’re paying some vendor $1.26 per copy to re-brand these thinly-veiled press releases, ‘newsletters,’ and USA Today column fillers. Grow a brain, please.

3) Proprietary Use Of The Word ‘Professional’
My take: At least once a month I get dissed because my shaved headed, sun shaded profile picture is ‘unprofessional.’  It’s all in the POV, folks.  See, to me it looks like everybody else on LinkedIn appears to have gotten the Glamor Shots Jos. A. Bank Funeral Director Discount. If you think your shizz is so self- important then try this: unsubscribe from the SM platform for a couple days and see how much the rest of the buttoned-down world doesn’t notice.

4) Facebook Profile With Your Name But Your Child/Grandchild’s Face

My take: Someone please explain???

5) Facebook Pages Of Dead Dudes Acting Like They’re Not

My take: Keith Moon and George Carlin immediately come to mind. No shit, Keith even wished everybody a ‘Happy Friday’ last week and he kicked it back in 1978. Look it up.

6) Bully Commentors, Distressed Diplomats From Angola In Possession Of My $20 Million (US),  & All Other Web Crawling Spamsters
My take: Bite me.

G.

 

 

Geno Shrugged

I recently bought the book, How To Write A Sentence (and how to read one) by Stanley Fish, but it still didn’t give me what I wanted.  What I wanted was assurance that all those tricky uses of semi-colons and parentheticals, gerunds and so on, that I mastered during my state college educational stay, were still in literary vogue. You know, in case I ever publish something besides here.

I’ve been receiving The New Yorker in the mail every week or so for the past twenty years so,  in theory, I could probably learn as much in those volumes (and saved paying $19.99 USA for the Fish book) if I ever did more than simply browse the cartoons, movie reviews, and fluff essay pieces–Sedaris, Larry David, etc– and then immediately stack the latest issue neatly on top of the previous issue with tiny alleys separating each pile, on the floor, next to my bookshelf. My wife keeps threatening to scoop up the whole multi-tiered lot and haul them to the curb, all 1,000 or so cleverly covered magazines,  but I beg her otherwise. To reconsider. A modification, perhaps

“Since I failed as a real estate developer,” I tell her, “At least allow me to construct a pulp fiction/non-fiction skyline on my own office floor.  As of this morning the stacks most closely resemble Omaha, Nebraska, from a bird’s eye view. I suppose that’s a city.

And to be truthful, I really didn’t ‘fail’ as a developer because I never actually jumped in with both feet (I know, two ‘ly’ adverbs and a cliche in a single sentence but in case you missed it the first time: state college. Hel-lloo!) and I never lost any other people’s money. I guess I could have been a bit more ruthless and turned a buck or two but we’re talking about residential real estate and in the end, somebody has to eventually live there. At least, that is, until the banks stop merely threatening and actually figure out a way to first scoop it all up…and then haul it all to the curb.

Wheeere’s Johnny?

   I happened upon an HGTV re-run the other morning while waiting, impatiently, for the French press water to boil. I stood before the ubiquitous 42 inches of plasma in our kitchen (itself, a residential multi-plex food prep/family room, laptop wireless docking station, and occasional espresso/dessert/wine/tapas bar for ourselves and the ever present house guest, or two, or six…) and recalled a simpler domestic time, back in….

The Day

   In the 1960s, the Petro family kitchen was barely big enough for two grouchy adults, three kids, and an AM radio. Our infrequent household guests were offered Maxwell House and served spaghetti and meatballs on big clunky plates. We had one army green rotary telephone attached to the wall, used mostly for sending and receiving bad news. When it rang, everyone’s heart dropped.

   Our dearly beloved Emerson TV/HiFi cabinet was reminiscent of a thick mahogany coffin. It had its own dedicated wall, in it’s own dark paneled viewing room beneath one of my mother’s oil paintings. The setting was proper, solemn, and predominately prime time. Back then, ‘wireless’ meant, well…it meant there was simply never any wire when you needed some. It was more of a bad thing than a good thing. You know what I mean. 

Reality Bites

   I steeped the morning nectar and settled in to watch an older segment of  House Hunters. At once I was cyber-sucked back to a virtual real estate WTF of a housing market long since past; a pseudo-realistic scenario starring three perfectly staged, non-foreclosed, dream homes, a deer-in-headlights couple with one in the oven, and a Stepford wife Realtor named Roxanne.   I laid back, clicker loose in hand, and unwillingly suspended my post-housing bubble disbelief.  I gazed on as my iPhone pinged an endless wave of inedible Spam (the even worse kind).

   Roxanne, the star of this particular episode, was strikingly unfamiliar. What is with all the famous nobodies on the tube today? If you’re a casual, part-time channel surfer, as I am, then it’s even more confounding.

Where’s Johnny?

   Back in the Day you had your Lawrence Welk, your Walter Cronkite and your Johnny Carson. Three totally Read more

Waiting for Higgs Boson

Dark matter can be a bitch.  And I mean this in the politest of ways; a mere postmodern posing of the generational Petro/Girard  family tenet, ‘in a hundred years it will all be over.’  Anything after that, please, draw your own conclusions.

I’m speaking as a  self-actualized moving part of an economic algorithm (and every time I use this word I must ask, ‘is this particular rithm an Al Gore  invention?’) that I was born into—with about the same amount of choice I had in the decision whether or not to crawl from my mother’s womb (yes, I was a breech birth baby) several decades earlier—the end result of a totally nother flawed rhythm method.  I have become cyber-morphed with the last four digits of my social security number, a randomly assigned superfecta I’ve lately grown to loathe…

“Excuse me. What was your name again?” I ask the voice who finally takes my call.

This was my second twenty-two minutes on HOLD in the Michael Bolton Greatest Hits audio loop queue of the American Express Blue Card Department. By this point I was looking around my office for a blunt object to off myself with. (Excuse the non-participial modifiers and occasional tense shifts as I’m a bit rusty at posting any thought that requires more than 140 characters these days.)

“It is Jess-ie, Mister Petro,”  the voice answers.

I instantly think of my deceased father, a passing memory still fresh in my mind; the other Mister Petro, forever with a faint whiff of expensive cologne and a seemingly wise and vast financial demeanor. (And that Mister Petro survived a real economic Depression.)

“Thanks you very much today,”  the odd voice, not from this hemisphere, adds on cue.  “How  may I assist you?”

“Hmmm. You don’t sound like a Jessie,” I say, looking to cyber-bully an over-matched, out-sourced CSR.

“Thanks you very much, Mister Petro.”

I swim back in space and think of my father and me playing  golf under the lights back in old Charlotte, many years earlier; that little Par 3 course on a swampy lake  just off Independence Boulevard. At once I  smell the honeysuckle fragrance and imagine the chatter of  the late night crickets…I recall the real Mister Petro as a much nobler man than I find myself Read more

One Turtle Dove

The Glass Ceiling

I remember the moment I decided to stop wearing a suit and tie in public—forever. It was a couple days before Christmas and I dropped by the K-Mart to pick up a punch bowl for the office party.  I was looming  in Housewares when an elderly woman approached me with a fistful of coupons.  Alvin and the Chipmunks were singing that insidious song through the sound system.

“I want to file a complaint.”  She said.

“I don’t work here.”  Me.

“You’re not the manager?”  She asked,  insistent.

“No. I’m not the manager.”  I replied, perhaps a little snippy.

She glared up at me like…well…like I was lying.  More than anything, I hate being implicated in an aspersion when I’m innocent. I’d rather receive three french hens every day for a year from someone I don’t truly love than be deemed a liar (unless of course, I actually am, in which case, I will simply deny until totally boxed in).

“This is an Italian suit,  lady. You need to find someone with a name tag,”  I continued, perhaps a little prideful.

“That lady over there said to ask  you. That you were a manager.” She pressed.

We turned our attention to a  squat woman in a burka, a rare sight in Richmond, Virginia in those days.

“That lady over there doesn’t speak English.”  Me, perhaps a little too loud.

“I speak better English than you,” the lady yelled back across the aisle.  “I speak five languages. How many you speak?”

Oh yeah.  One of  those days.  A blue light siren began twirling above my head and something inaudible was announced over the speakers, interrupting  the chipmunk falsetto drone. I froze as a wave of shoppers began scurrying  in our direction; something about cutlery.

“You don’t have this Foot Soaker in stock.”  The elderly lady shoved a coupon under my nose as the herd surrounded us.

“I know I don’t, ma’am…Because…. I. Don’t. Work.  Here.”  Me.

“She deserves a rain check,”  Burka lady. “It’s false advertising if you don’t. Bait and switch.”

“Yes. Bait and switch,”  Elderly lady.

Bait and Switch!”  Somebody yelled from the mob. “Bait and Switch….

About that time an employee approached me and ask Read more

For the Cosmic Record

When presented with an ultimatum my first inclination has always been to go for the ‘or else’  end of the proposition— a defiant tendency that was pointed out  to me by more than a few black-hooded figures in charge of my early catechism. This probably explains  the abnormally high pain threshold I lug around to this very day. (Go ahead,  smack me across the knuckles with a ruler the next time we’re doing math together and see for yourself  how little I seem to care.)  I’m convinced this emotional dereliction has to something do with a mutated gene strand that skipped a few low risk taking generations in my inherent DNA.  Clearly, I was breech born under a bad moon.  I am a Virgo, they say,  but not by much.

In the late 1960s, when the Age of Aquarius was recruiting the deflowered masses of my wayward generation, I found myself stalled,  hesitant to beam up to the mothership.  Manned with my own back alley (hearsay, to be sure)  knowledge of that dirtiest of deeds,  I actually did the arithmetic and concluded that  my parents must have lost the rhythm on, or around,  Thanksgiving Dinner, 1955.  Born in the late afternoon on August 23rd  the following leap year (and exactly three complete trimesters to the dinner bell hour later), I concluded that  had my mother only pushed a little harder during labor,  I could  have been a Leo.  But then again, if everyone hadn’t started drinking Cold Duck in the morning exactly nine months earlier, I probably wouldn’t have been…. at all.

So hence, I mentally celebrate—in my sick,  sick head—two birthdays every year:  The day of my most  probable, mathematically correct Conception (Thanksgiving dinner, badda-bing),  and…. August 23rd, that so-called celestial cusp I barely missed by some late breaking water.  When someone asks me what astrological  ‘sign’ I am,  I simply spew out  my theory as posed above… and they usually go away.  It’s my own ultimatum of  sorts,  I suppose, to anyone who tries to get too close.  After all, I did come out feet first and tend to veer a Read more

The (last) Amend

The Notion

In my dream I’m always gasping for air; as if the trillion or so cubic inches of ozone I’ve already blown through in my lifetime somehow counts for nothing.  I awake, step over the dog, and scramble downstairs in my boxers in search of a physical remedy to a metaphysical dilemma. Something is bothering me and I can’t quite place my finger on it. Life is short and, on this crisp autumn eve, I’m clearly too underdressed to even be considering my last breath.  Our fifteen-year old cat follows close behind, his own mousy demons no doubt,  in tow as well.

‘Dear God, please don’t let me die with money in my portion of the Charles Schwab account,’ I think as I root through the herbal medicine cabinet,  next to the dishes, above the microwave.  ‘That’s what the Prudential life insurance policy in the house safe is for,’ I obsess. It’s an odd recurring thought, I realize. Just being forthcoming.

We keep no real drugs in our house.

Ginkgo Biloba, Paranil, Senna, Licorice Root. Green Tea, White Tea, Black Tea…where the fck is the Alka Seltzer?

Over the years I’ve developed an internal ON/OFF switch of sorts; a requirement for any man whose livelihood  simultaneously hinges on rejection yet somehow also depends on the act of a total stranger purchasing something of considerable value; house, condo, etc…. every month. It’s an Acceptance thing, I’ve learned. This emotional circuit breaker has, for a long time,  assisted me in affairs of the heart,  finance,  most of  the Deadly Sins—Fear, Greed, Anger, etc… not to mention social and personal guilt.  And in case you haven’t  been following the box scores at home this season,  I’ve been in the OFF mode for a while now.

thankyouverymuchhaveanicedaybiteme….next

Over time I’ve learned to appreciate  the next ‘Next‘  in life—I just haven’t learned not to  eat Mexican food before retiring for the evening or found a way to avoid the night scares that have startled me ever since that stupid monster began squatting in my childhood closet at 39 Vineyard Road in Levittown.  And as my Life flickers before me this particular night, Read more

WhAcK JoB (and other freezer burned ideas)

Finally,  a bloggable thought!

Let me attempt to serve up something  palatable on the fine tapas Chinette as I poke through the  leftovers in the upstairs icebox. I know, it’s been a month of Sundays since I’ve broken literary bread with the family.

Hey, what’s this here?

Some freezer burned Zig Zigler?  Better check the expiration date on this mentally recorded morsel: 1976?  Hmmm…perhaps I’ll just let it thaw and feed it to the hounds with the dry food…

Insert  frosty Beta into Radarange and press PLAY

‘So there’s this Chinese bamboo tree that doesn’t grow an inch for four years, barely pokes its stem out of the dirt, then, in one amazing swing around the Sun, in year five,  it shoots up ten feet…..’ and  so I paraphrase the Zig man and countless other soap box derby wearers. It’s an old story.

I’ve tripped across many versions of the above Eastern yarn over motivational time and space; some prophets claim seven years for the phenomenon, some claim five, still others  declare overnight! The same question is always begged….does a bamboo tree (Chinese or otherwise) really grow ten feet in any amount of time (save a little daily watering) after laying  dormant for 1500 days ?  And if so, why?

Oh hell, we’re all pretty smart dogs around here. We all know why.

Personally, it took this mutt over thirty years to complete and submit for publication, a written project that was greater in length than a thousand words and didn’t involve an iPhone snapshot. The notion struck me like a branding iron as I sat at my desk  completing the final U.S. Copyright  and Writers Guild of America keystrokes (along with credit card info, of course) into my tired machine.  I can only hope that after 60 days and nights of finger pecking toil (not to mention the 30 years below the soil), what I sent off , paid for, copyrighted, and registered, is even worth stealing.

So anyway, here’s a sample of what my bamboo tree just sprouted:

SCOTTY takes two more shot glasses off the tray and hands one
to CAT CHOW who reluctantly accepts the offering.

CAT CHOW
So, do Read more

A Sailor Jerry Moment

tattoo

The base anticipation that precedes any journey to a new destination is always more vivid for me than the denouement that accompanies the physical descent to earth.  With rare exception (perhaps Paris and maybe Vegas), the image I conjure up in my two dimensional mind beforehand always seems to fall somewhat short of the real 3-D deal.  On our first trip to Maui, for example,  my notion of grass huts  and Woody Wagons clamped with surfboards was quickly dashed the moment I spotted a Costco and a  Wal-Mart just steps from the arrival terminal. It was raining  ukuleles that day and the lone, Port Authority hula dancer was, how shall I say… Samoan? I was expecting something a bit more, I don’t know….svelte?; like the subject of one of  those Sailor Jerry tattoos I threaten to get stenciled across my chest every 120  lunar cycles or so—-pure 1950’s  South Pacific paradise-of-the-mind stuff. I think we  bought our own leis for 8 bucks each at the gift shop, rented a Taurus from Avis, and called it a day.

And it’s not just Hawaii. The same holds true for Jamaica—or as I like to call it, The Bangladesh of the Caribbean, with its human squalor, smelly ceviche,  and over-abundance of  muddy water. Even the Antiquarium in Boscoreale, Italy, beneath the shadows of a nearby looming housing project,  is sequestered by a string of barbed wire and discarded heroin needles. Not that I don’t enjoy myself abroad, mind you. I’m an enthusiastic traveler, to be sure. The foreign landscapes that ultimately unfold just never fully mesh with the spatial images dancing around in my head before touch down.

Alaska was pretty spot-on but to be honest, I wasn’t expecting  too much from that particular latitude. And while I did not get a tattoo while docked in the port of  Juneau,  I was presented with a  shiny new Rolex Datejust in our cruise ship cabin later that evening.  Since I’m clearly never retiring from anywhere,  my wife decided to give me my ceremonial timepiece a few decades early— for my 50th birthday.  Just so you know, Read more

Face Down in Iceplant

To pluck a petal from the bloom of  friend and  recondite commenter, Don Reedy, I’ve been ‘face down in a slope of iceplant’  for 30 days. Yes, iceplant.  (I’ll let the man himself expound a little later but allow me to tempt you with the essence of his yarn—- it involves a houseboat in San Diego, a Belushi Halloween costume (including handcuffed briefcase), and a lost weekend somewhere in the bowels of the 1980s. Un huh.)

You see, I too have been on a pastoral  quest  of sorts this month and  presently find myself scurrying through the  Bloodhound shadows to slip this flimsy piece under the Big Dog’s door before the triple witching hour tonight—June’s last breath.  I take a peek around the literary pound and am relieved to  find that my WordPress password is still active and that my name and mugshot are still posted on the BHB sidebar.  Only a handful of  hours remains between me and blanking an entire month on the hallowed front post page. Hopefully I’ll push Publish before the final strike of Midnight and keep the holy streak alive.  Admittedly, I’ve been remiss in my self-imposed dogmatic duties.

So this is what has gone down since I last posted Mother Nature is not a MILF on May 30th (an essay written mostly on my iPhone that netted a total of 6 unique comments including a few of my own trite responses). I pooled my talents, sunk my literary savings into a mental Ponzie marketing scheme, and found myself  nearly wiped clean from the blogarian grid as I danced 30 days straight ‘with the one who brung me’ to this economic station in life to begin with—real estate sales.  Eleven of them to be exact.  I’ve never done eleven of anything in a single month much less an activity involving commission checks with accompanying deposit slips.  And now, after eleven hard money contracts written and/or Closed in June, I come crawling back to my digital workspace on knees and elbows on this last day of the month, famished and thirsty for Google juice; mind, gut, and Adword Read more

Mother Nature is not a MILF

Now the hard part—fabricating an essay that somehow pertains to real estate and ties in with the above catchy title; one that popped into my head while hydroplaning through a stop sign in a downpour earlier this month.  At the next red light I quickly texted the lofty thought to myself  expecting to come up with an accompanying  point (and several hundred additional words) once I made it safely back to my desk—my writing desk that is. Not my selling desk. I have a separate hard, cluttered surface for each, you see.

More accurately, what I’ve set up are creative stations for each side of my brain;  right brain/writing desk,  left brain/selling desk.  And it’s not hard to tell when I’m performing the wrong  creative duty at the wrong desk, either; I basically suck at whichever task is at hand, I’m always running  behind schedule, and I don’t make any money.  Anyway, that  Mother Nature idea was almost three weeks ago.

So tonight  I was reading  Jeff Brown’s latest post (and most of the 100 or so comments that were bound to ensue) when finally, the ideal segue hit me.  Transparency!  Why not try and give that clear concept a whack myself since, as hard as I tried to think of a comment to insert, I had nothing intelligent to add to Mr Brown’s already lengthy thread.  Perhaps  instead, I could unveil a few secrets of my own that the BawldGuy might feel are nobody’s fiscal business.  Actually, I  agree with him (and his grandparents) on this one but I happen to be sitting at my selling desk  in boxer shorts now so…. down they come.  Ah transparency.

* In 2006 I earned more income selling real estate than the combined government salaries of the Vice President of the United States and a typical  City of Chicago Streets and Sanitation worker on the ‘no show’ payroll.

* Last year, according to the cover of Parade Magazine, I basically matched dollar for dollar with the average preschool teaching assistant in Youngstown, Ohio (Fail perhaps, but not quite Perish).

* So far this selling season, I’m keeping  signing Read more

A quick, random thought

It’s not that I couldn’t somehow get my hands on a late model Ferrari if I really wanted one (and I doubt I’m any different than most happily married men of my demographic in this regard). After the divorce, I’d simply have to move in with relatives, liquidate whatever is left for 100 pennies on the dollar, then slap down the balance on American Express between billing cycles, that’s all. With the proceeds I could probably score a pretty decent off-lease, if not road worn,  Enzo Berlinetta…in the least desirable color—with stock rims. I’m just saying.

I want one, but ideally…I want one 20 years ago.  (Actually, I’ll just take the 20 years ago and you can keep the Ferrari and this whole real estate business.)  A 32 year old Realtor in a Ferrari is a Bad Ass but a 52 year divorcee old living at home with mother is….well, just plain sad—especially when forced to park a high mileage phallus behind her Subaru in the driveway. (God how I hate that Freud.)

So this middle-aged guy zooms into my rear view mirror on the freeway entrance ramp last evening, hesitates for a double-bump tach rev,  then screams past me on the right in 1st gear. He was neatly tucked into a couple hundred thou of  handcrafted, precious scarlet metal and buttery cowhide.  His straw gray, combed-over tonsure hovered in the breeze above a sun-chapped bald spot. A rose gold Chopard watch, with matching cuff links, deflected all remaining rays of Envy as he dissolved into the North Shore Chicago smogset.  Judging from the pink gold blur, I pegged his left wrist alone at around 50 grand. Clearly, our little speedster’s got more jack than any man knows what to do with. His engine sounded like an amped-up Joe Satriani guitar riff in the dusky ether.  His license plate read RAINMKR. I’ve been behind this ass clown before.  He used to double park his banana cream Bentley at a renowned Viagra Triangle watering hole during happier hours. Must have gotten a divorce. If he got a red Ferrari then somebody got a house. Read more

End of Daze

2542_54709363669_669028669_1333750_5640720_s2 As winters go, the current capricious season has been as tolerable as any I’ve experienced sober since being administratively abandoned here 14 years ago against my will.  So what if I left a smarmy sales vice president waiting (with 45 life insurance presentation kits and a slide projector) in Baggage Claim 7 at O’ Hare International for an ‘inexcusable amount of hours’ on a cold March morning  back in 1990-whatever.  Big whoop. I figure the suited puppet is corporate milk toast by now anyway so I have  no regrets in that regard. A year and a half later I had my real estate license and thirty days after that, I sold my first multi-unit building for condo conversion. ‘God forbid’  the ass clown would ever think to spring for a cab. Thinking back on it now, that’s what he  most likely had to do.  I just don’t recall it being mentioned in my Fed Exed severance package that so quickly followed.

And what I’ve concluded since that liberating (if not sentimental) six-figure parting of  the ways is this: If ever there was a super-imposed bordered, semi-landlocked example of urban, bi-polar personality disorder just waiting to spit in the face of cabin fever, it exists in  my fair city, Chicago, between the months of November and April, pick a year.  And, as is the case of  so many frost-bound salesmen who have come and gone before me, my own personal demons continue to appear in a variety of veneers (with mere weather and  spirited drink being the least seductive of my temptresses anymore).

My final hours in corporate America began to un-tick in the following way one blustery weekend a millennium or so ago. I had been sitting on the same Viagra Triangle bar stool since Saturday morning when Last Call was finally announced.  I allegedly paid another unwilling patron to help me locate my car and drive me home. When I hit the pillow and cold crashed on the bed hours later it was the break of daylight the following Sunday. I needed to be out the door in exactly 24 hours Read more