[Chicago] Central Hearing Facility

• Where people go to get hearing aides, and have them recalibrated and such.
  
• For people who need to vent in some safe anonymous place, yet know they’re being heard.
  
• In a land where all are deaf, strange hearing mutants need only one place to be cared for.
  
• There is a huge alien under the city which has taken it over, making sure all systems are running smoothly. The closest approximation to its ears are under this innocuous building, the only place where those on the surface can petition it.
  
• He’s not clairvoyant; it’s just that his hearing is too sensitive for him to live in an unbuffered space. In exchange, he helps the police and their more clandestine fellow agencies when needed, braving the chaos of all the sounds in the city to bring them leads.

This post brought to you by the building across the street, and by the number 10.

[Chicago] CTA

I used the CTA last night, taking a train on the Brown line to a bus to get to the fish place (mmmmm…. fish) near Skokie.

( random public transit observations )

Good Morgan’s is a combination fish store and restaurant (in the sense that they’ve got a couple of tables; I get the impression more people get take out than eat in). I was there once five years ago and had an amazing whitefish sandwich. I got another one, which wasn’t quite as perfect as the one I remembered, but it can be hard to live up to memories, and it was pretty darned good (especially given how hungry I was…). The woman behind the counter was chatty, so I talked (well, listened) rather than read my way through my meal. When she heard I was planning to walk back to the train (the bus I’d taken stopped running in the evening sometime), she said it was too cold, too dangerous, and so on for me to do this (rather like some suburbanites feel about Boston, actually; I didn’t think it would be an issue), and she’d give me a ride to my hotel. I was very surprised, and when she insisted, didn’t argue overmuch. Paying it forward….