Well, hi there, everybody, and my apologies for being too sick to post an entry yesterday. (Don't worry - all will be explained below.) As regular readers know, my friend Alamar is in town right now, visiting America for the first time from his home in Germany. We're just starting day 6 of his trip, in fact, so I thought today I'd get some text, photos and audio up about how the first five days have gone.

Things started last Thursday, when I made my way out to O'Hare to pick up Alamar. A trip to O'Hare is always an interesting thing for me, because I fly Southwest exclusively when doing domestic traveling, and Southwest flies out of Chicago's other airport, Midway down on the southside, which means that I hardly ever see O'Hare. For those who are curious, the photo above is of the international terminal at O'Hare; oh, and I should mention that I actually took 10 or 20 photos for each one you'll see here today, which you'll be able to view in their entirety at my Flickr account at the end of the month.

Alamar's plane was something like two hours late; but fortunately I was able to find that out on the web before leaving my apartment, which means that I was able to adjust my plans so that I showed up nearly at the same time he did. (And speaking of cool little inventions that deserve more recognition than they usually get, which has been a running theme here at the journal over the last week - how much do all of us over the age of 30 love that we can access real-time flight information from home now? I can't even begin to tell you how much time I wasted in my youth, sitting around for hours in airports waiting for delayed planes, just because there was no way to actually access that information until you got to the airport itself. The kids can't appreciate this, I know, but old fogies like me do, I'm sure.)

Anyway, Alamar's doing as great as always, it seems, and was very excited to finally be in town. And I figured that Alamar would probably be in the same state his first day that I am whenever I go on international trips - jet-lagged, dehydrated and bewildered, that is - so we just had a laid-back first night of a couple of beers down at Holiday, a slacker tavern two blocks from my apartment. And unfortunately, that's when Alamar first realized how much beers cost here in Chicago ($4 to $5, plus of course a tip), which needless to say is much higher than prices in Germany (and of course with no tips there), so that distressed him a little. All in all, though, a pretty quiet first day.

So then on Friday morning I took Alamar to the Loop for the first time; we basically got out at the Lake red-line stop and then zigzagged in a southwestern direction across downtown. Our goal was Union Station, so that we could finally try to track down the information we need about visiting Batavia, a far Chicago suburb where the Fermi National Accelerator Lab is located, a sorta mecca for applied-physics majors like Alamar. Jesus, man, that suburban train and bus system sure is confusing... and as confusing as it is, it still never seems to go where I need to go, the one time every three or four years I have to go out to the suburbs. And sure enough, that's the case with Fermi as well - there isn't a single train or bus line that gets you within even two miles of Fermi's main visitor center.

I think what we're going to be able to do, though, is take a train line out to Naperville, and then a bus from the Naperville train station to the outer edge of the Fermi campus, and then walk the two miles necessary to reach the visitor's center. But alas, the bus we need doesn't run on Sundays, so our plans got all thrown off. So, the trip to Fermi is still on but we just haven't taken it yet, which means there's still time if you live in the Naperville/Geneva/Batavia/Aurora area and want to meet up with us for lunch or something while we're out there. Just drop me a line if you're interested.

So then after that it was up to Lakeview, to hang out at Intelligentsia Coffeehouse and to get Friday's journal entry written. And hey, check it out - the first photo ever taken of me actually typing on my Treo! (The photo is courtesy of Alamar, who by the way has an incredibly nice digital camera; I've never been able to take a photo of myself, of course, because duh, my camera's actually inside the Treo.) And that was fun as well, although nothing too much to report - just an afternoon of hanging out and shooting the shit.

So then Friday night Alamar and I headed out to a place called Trader Todd's, because my friend Kate decided that she wanted to have a karaoke party, and I guess this place is famous for its karaoke or something. And I looked up Trader Todd's on Google, and it said that it was down at Division and Dearborn (smack dab in the middle of the "date-raping frat-guy bar" section of Chicago, which should come as a surprise to no one), so we hoofed it down there by train, doing a five-minute audio conversation along the way about how Alamar's trip was so far going.

But here's something weird - Google's information for Trader Todd's turned out to be completely wrong, with the bar in fact located at Belmont and Sheffield, miles and miles away from where it said it was. And in all the years I've been using Google now, this is the very first time I've gotten just completely wrong information, which threw me so much for a loop that I just had to take a breather for a moment.

So eventually we ended up in the right place, and it was pretty much what you would expect - a bunch of trixie sluts with fake tans and fake boobs, a bunch of frat-boy neanderthals with their inexplicable obsession with all things Budweiser. And so that was fun for about an hour, just because I so very rarely actually have experiences like that up here; but as all of you know, that shit gets real old, real fast. So eventually we packed it all up and decided to head down the street to the L & L, a notorious indie-rocker dive bar at Belmont and Clark, much more to our liking. And again, along the way I jumped on my phone and recorded another audio report about how things were going, including some extemporaneous remarks about trixies from the now-trashed Kate.

But alas, once we got to the L & L we realized that Kate had actually forgotten her ID; and for some reason that I will never be able to figure out, the bars here in Chicago card people harder and more often than any other city I've ever been in, which means that Kate couldn't get in despite her actually being 41 years old. And we didn't want to ditch Kate, which suddenly meant that none of us could go to a bar; and since we were only a mile from my apartment at that point, and since I was already pretty drunk myself, I found myself saying, "Hey, why don't we just pick up some beer and all head back to my place?"

Which is exactly what we did, meaning that I suddenly had almost ten people in my studio (one-room) apartment, which is always an interesting logistical challenge. And that was crazy, as you can imagine; this photo above, for example, is the only one I took all night that doesn't display something like seven different illegal activities going on. And then once we were all nice and trashed, I pulled out my cellphone and did yet another audio recording, this time with my old childhood buddy Tom, who by coincidence lives up here in Chicago himself. And then finally around 4:30 in the morning I got everyone out, and then finally got to bed myself around 5 or 5:30. Whew!

Saturday was a quiet day for us, as you can imagine; hell, Alamar didn't even wake up until 2 in the afternoon. Unfortunately all the liquor and drugs from the night before really screwed with my system, so that I only ended up getting a half-hour of sleep before being up again for good. And so here's a photo of us meeting up with Kate again, up on Granville for a little lunch, but with me pretty much being a zombie the entire time.

Oh, but there's no rest for the wicked, I'm tellin' ya - that night, in fact, was the big exhibition by my friends in the Mud Queens of Chicago, over at the big Around the Coyote arts festival in Wicker Park. God, that was fucking crazy, man! The whole thing took place outside, right under the blue-line train, with indie-rock bands and all these costumes, and mud just getting flung about everywhere, and people screaming and yelling and laughing and applauding (including lots and lots of little kids running around everywhere - and why any parent would take their kid to see a night of hot female mud-wrestling is completely beyond me). Anyway, like I said, lots more photos of this coming at the end of the month.

After the festival, Kate and Alamar and I headed back to Holiday in my neighborhood, to meet up with a friend of Kate's named Heidi. I was just so fucking exhausted at this point, though, that I ended up ditching them all and going to bed. (Alamar stayed out with them, though, which I'm glad to see - it's always a good thing when a visitor is unafraid to go around town by themselves or with mutual friends they don't know that well.) And then on Sunday Alamar decided to take his first solo walking trip around the Lakeview neighborhood, while I stayed at home and continued recovering from the last couple of days. (He went fuckin' everywhere, too, man - from Graceland Cemetary all the way to the Lincoln Park Zoo and back, all by foot if you can believe that.)

Unfortunately it was at this point (Sunday afternoon) that I started feeling a whole lot crappier than I had before; and by Monday morning, I was throwing up every 30 minutes like clockwork, with not a single goddamn thing that could seemingly be done about it. Ugh. Jason, repeat after me - A 36-YEAR-OLD IN POOR HEALTH CANNOT PARTY LIKE 24-YEAR-OLDS IN PERFECT HEALTH. When am I ever going to learn this damn lesson, man?

Alamar, on the other hand, had a fantastic Monday - first he spent the entire day at the Museum of Science and Industry (which he was of course giddily excited about, not only because he's a physics student but also because of the complete intact German U-Boat submarine the museum owns), and then an evening at the Empty Bottle over on the west side, seeing some experimental band he's a crazed fan of called Nebula, which by coincidence happened to be in town the same time as him. ("I would go crazy if I lived in Chicago!" Alamar proclaimed at one point this week. "There are a hundred bands to see every single night of the week here!" Very true, and the remark reminded me of how excited I used to get over the same subject, back when I was living in Missouri and making weekend visits to Chicago myself.)

So here it is, Tuesday morning, and I'm finally feeling more like my usual self again, and have promised myself to take it a little more easy for the remainder of Alamar's trip. And so, let's see, what's on the horizon for us?

--Well, obviously we're going to finally take our trip to Fermi sometime soon, within the next couple of days, so please drop me a line if you're in that area yourself and might be interested in meeting up.

--And then also sometime this week, we're finally going to get our asses over to Neo, the biggest goth club in Chicago, because Alamar's a goth kid himself and wants to explore some of that here in the city. And all the people at the karaoke night got all excited about this as well (just how many ex-goths are running around Chicago, anyway?), so we've decided to make a whole little thing out of it; that is, we're all going to dress up in little goth outfits and the whole shebang. There's already something like ten of us planning on going out, so PLEASE drop me a line if you're in Chicago and would like to get all dressed up and join us! It will be spooky, spooky fun!

Oh man, and I have more to tell you, including some press passes Alamar scored for him and me to the upcoming Chicago Gothicfest this weekend, and a possible trip to Six Flags Great America this Friday. But as usual, I've run out of room, so it'll have to wait until tomorrow. Tschuss!