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
