Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago.
I don’t even want to consider this, but the evidence seems compelling.
I’m concerned that with each passing year, the typical Chicago winter is exacting increasingly brutal tolls on my ability to be creative. This year, especially, with its constant and frustrating baits and switches, giving us days of sunny and seventy and then a week later dumping inches of leftover snow. The weather has been spikes and valleys of Fahrenheit, the gloomy days made all the worse because we can still remember the sun.
My wife keeps making casual comments about moving to Los Angeles. I don’t want to move to Los Angeles. I’ve been to Los Angeles a few times and every time I went I felt as lonely and unable to breathe as I would expect myself to feel on the surface of Mars.
I have no problems with the other three seasons in this city, but I can’t deny that once my body physically realized that the winter was ending, it flipped a handful of switches in my brain, and suddenly I’d finished revising In The Eye of Ivan, suddenly I’d written the first draft of The Final Night of the First Intention.
I always said that I liked living in a place where the seasons noticeably change, but I’m no longer sure that I can deal with the way certain of those seasons linger. As befits my monkey mind, perhaps what I need is a place where the climate exists in a perpetual state of nexus; what I need may be a region constantly about to be spring.
It’s just a hypothesis right now. I’m sure that the issue of my continuing inability to find stable employment is a huge factor in exacerbating my feelings of inadequacy, so it might not just be the cruelty of winter in Chicago. But I love living in Chicago. Even when I hate living in Chicago I love living in Chicago.
On the other hand, I felt much better, and wrote much better work, being jobless and in autumn than I did while being jobless and in winter.
It’s a thought. It’s a thought I don’t want to keep having. I’d like spring to arrive now, and in a less ephemeral fashion, so I can go back to being the victim, so I can forgive Chicago once again for hitting me. Dr. Jekyll, I presume.
Creative Control 