THE LIGHT IN FRONT

I took off after recording the Detroit footage, and decided to stop about 3 hours short of Chicago to stay at a motel to soak up a bit of internetting. Shortly the next morning I completed the trip to Chicago, with absolutely no plans whatsoever except picking up my friend Hanna at the airport at 6:30 in the afternoon.

I had a fairly massive bag of laundry to do, so after a quick lunch it was off to see where my GPS would take me to get it done. A couple of missed calls by it (several closed places, and a few that had no coin-op service), I finally found one in what appeared to be a mostly Latino neighborhood. Got all my shit cleaned and ready to go, including the Silly Shoes, which by now had acquired a smell rivaling that of bigfoot’s dick. It’s the only drawback in what have become the raddest, most comfortable shoes I’ve ever worn in my life.

The cleaning (and finding a place to do it) took a hefty amount of time, and by the time I got out I basically had a chance to maybe catch a single landmark before 6:30 rolled by. I drove by the Sears Tower, where I had heard a new attraction had recently opened. Called The Ledge, it consists of a glass enclosure on the 103rd floor where you step in, look at the vast city below you, and immediately piss your pants in fear. Unfortunately, it was a Sunday, and there was a fair line of people waiting to go up, so instead I decided to go to Millenium Park and check out the amazing giant shiny egg there:

Called “Cloud Gate”, this thing was a fucking trip for sure, it was hard to stop looking at. And going underneath it and looking up was a hell of a mindfuck. Here’s a bit of it in motion, see if you can spot me in the reflections:

Right as I was shooting that bride and groom, I got the text from Hanna that she’d arrived in Chicago, and I took off to pick her up. Hanna was gonna come join me for an adventure in the South Dakota Badlands, which were still about 14 hours away, so after a bit of deliberation we decided to not stay in Chicago for the night, but instead drive as far as we possibly could through the night in order to be able to get to the Badlands the following day at a reasonable time.

But first, we had to get some dinner. We had a craving for Indian food (best fucking food in the universe), and bit of google mapping and a random pick later, headed to a Indian/Pakistani corner joint that seemed low key and delicious.

Two seconds after we stepped in, we realized this was a far realer deal than anticipated. Massive beards, kufis, zero women, and zero white people, this was an intensely Muslim eatery, with completely unpronounceable names for food made up of several different kinds of sludgey material. After an interesting and somewhat succesful attempt to communicate with the guy behind the counter, we picked a bowl of stuff that contained chicken, another bowl of stuff that contained lamb, and a plate of naan bread, and proceeded to stuff ourselves silly to our heart’s content. Blissful stuff, those dudes sure know how to make tasty amorphous food matter.

While on the way out, we checked out some newspapers and publications on a table near the door, where I caught a lovely 1/4 page ad for a conference titled “THE FALL OF CAPITALISM AND RISE OF ISLAM” with a picture of a scary looking Muslim castle on it. Um, maybe next time.

We set the GPS for Rapid City, SD, and took off into the night, heading north to Winsconsin. Around midnight, we decided to start shopping around for motel rates, found a reasonable spot, and crashed for the night. We still had around 9-10 hours to go the following day.

Little did we know we were gonna embark on a 4-day trip into one of the most surreal (and largely ignored/unknown) landscapes known to man, the Badlands of South Dakota. Massive storytelling coming up next.