Everything I know about Chicago.

When I was in middle school my family drove through Chicago. 

“I think we’re near the apartment you grew up in,” my parents said. Actually one of them said it, they didn’t talk in unison. But I don’t remember which one specifically so I'm just using "my parents" in a general sense.

“Can we drive by it?” I asked. “Can we see it, just from the car? Just so I can imagine where I come from and what it was like where I lived as a baby?” 

“No.” my parents said.

Still not in unison.

Reasons I shouldn't go running today

Please choose three of the four excuses.
○ It's snowing.
○ My knees feel sort of loose. Is that a thing?
○ Maybe I should stay home and watch tv so I know more about pop culture.
○ My hair looks too good to mess up.

No spoilers please

Things I think about when I’m washing my hands in a coffee shop bathroom and notice a $1,000,000 bill sitting next to the sink:

I bet it’s an ad for something.

Once at a street fair someone scattered ads shaped like $100 bills. They looked so realistic that I put four in my pockets. I'm not sure what I was planning on doing with them, but when I dropped one later a stranger ran through four lanes of busy traffic to return it. I pretended to be as happy as I would be if someone handed me $100 I'd dropped on the ground, instead of as happy as I would be if someone handed me an ad I'd dropped on the ground. I did a great job.

This bill looks way more realistic.

Is that what a million dollar bill really looks like?

If million dollar bills really existed, people wouldn’t carry suitcases full of money. Why would you carry a suitcase full of money when you could fold a million dollar bill into your wallet with your ice cream scoops punch card?

Maybe they carry suitcases full of money because there aren’t many million dollar bills in circulation.

I’m not touching it.

Maybe I should touch it. Just with a paper towel.

Maybe God left it here for me. Because I've been so good lately. It seems like a weird thing to do, but it seems like the sort of thing you’d expect from someone who invented scabs, bananas, sex, and those fish that just look like bummed-out piles of fat.

Or maybe it’s some sort of promotion the coffee shop is running, where if I turn it in to the front desk they’ll give me a year's supply of coffee and all the internet I want. What a strange promotion, and what a strange choice of bill to use. A twenty would have made a lot more sense.

Maybe a million dollar bill is normal. Maybe most people who come to this coffee shop are super rich, obscenely rich. Maybe they had this in their pocket to buy a Mazarati for the ride home. If they did they would have more than a suitcase worth of money left over.

I have been washing my hands for a really long time.

Here are pictures of a few things. A blobfish, a very strange photo of the cast of Ocean's 11 at an air base in Turkey, and the treehouse I would build if I had picked up the money. I'm not looking up if a million dollar bill exists because I want to it to stay a surprise.