However, I do sometimes miss the long drives to and from home… although I drove the same route every day, there was something different every day. Different cars, different people, different posters, roadworks. There’s something relaxing about a long trip, something refreshing in allowing your mind to idly drink up what your eyes see.

Instead, I’ve grown intimately familiar with a fifteen minute journey across the West side of Chicago. There’s few things I see that I don’t recognize immediately, but mainly I am reading an old book– Big tony’s chicken and fish shack, the unique pattern of decay in a few buildings, the thriving ironmonger in the hollowed shell of a factory. Brach’s candy plant, a red brick mountain closed a few years ago, serves as an odd reminder of a failed relationship. The towering housing projects where “Candyman” was filmed are in the final stages of being torn down.