Market Days 2005 take 1

One of the highlights of living in Chicago is Market Days, or the idea of what market days should or could be. It is this street festival in Chicago that happens once a year, down Halsted Street, in "Boystown" (West Coast Dana coined the name years before it became popular). Marketdays has the makings of a good time. Its summer, the streets are closed off for two days and nights, you can drink, and smoke, eat and shop, for over 24 hours. The boys, work out at the Baly's at Century Mall all year so they can wear their shorts low and their shirts off. For me it has always been a guilty pleasure, I can drink all day, look at boys and hang out with friends... that is in theory.
When I moved back to New York, I promised myself that I would come back to Chicago for Market Days, and party. So Here I am in Chicago, marketdays (MD) is over, and alas like most of them before, the thought of the Side show, was again so much more promising that the reality of it (the story of my life).
I must say that it was really good to see my friends, I had great times, laughing at silly things that at the time were so funny but you would have had to be there to get the joke, I was able to have Sunday Brunch, a ritual of my Chicago life that is absent now it was even good to go shopping on the Mag Mile. There is always that person that you run into that make you fell good about staying in the sun all day because that is the only time that you will run into them.
The thing with days like these is that there is a group of folks that you have to coordinate with to get anything done, so that can be a drag at times. The low point was when the group decided that it was time to eat, I could have kept on drinking, and looking at the strippers at Cocktail, and that we would travel by taxi, to a restaurant, for burgers...think about that, we left a street fair, you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a stand that was selling burgers, to get burgers.
I also felt like I looked good this MD. There have been years that I have been there and felt as if I was the ugliest fattest thing that was in the throngs of people there, but on the eve of my 40th birthday I must say that in a crowd of buffed, shirtless, shaved bodied men, if didn't feel like going home and hiding under the bed in a room with no mirrors.
I actually missed Chicago for the first time since I left, and truthfully, it was a little more emotional for me to leave than it was the day that I moved.
Funny huh?