Prologue
Every once in a while, I need to get really drunk, stock up on French magazines which I will read very, very slowly, and enjoy some of the juxtapositions of urban life, like a bistro serving quality moules au vin blanc next to a sex shop with glory holes in the peepshow booths. And so I my thoughts eastward to Chicago.
Chapter One: And So it Begins
When I first pondered spending St. Patrick's Day in Chicago, I immediately discovered that my first choice of transportation, the Megabus, once famously described as a “rolling prison”, was nearly fully booked with fellow drunks heading to check out the big green river. Looking at my scant options, I began to question how much fun I'd have on an overnight run from Chicago to Minneapolis on a bus full of hung-over students who'd been wearing the same vomit-covered clothing all weekend. Greyhound takes several scenic detours through the wilds of Wisconsin before meandering it's way into Chicago, and Ice Cube & Dr. Dre and the rest of the good people at Northwest Airlines wanted entirely too much money. Don't even get me started on Amtrak's hideously expensive service from some inaccessible spot in Saint Paul that leaves at bizarre hours to better service potential passengers traveling from Milwaukee to Spokane. So I drove the whole way, amidst surprisingly heavy but eager traffic, with large alpha packs of cars topping 80 mph the whole way, conveniently clearing the speedtraps ahead of me. I made great time... until I hit 290, and everything stopped dead.
Traffic waves rippled through the stalled cars with enough frequency to allow us to dribble forward into the city, bit by bit, but it reminded me of one of the two reasons I hate driving. Virtually every accident I've been in has involved either drunk driver, or more often in heavy, stop-and-go traffic, some guy will be following me too close for a half mile, then when I eventually have to stop quickly I have a full second or two to look in the rear view mirror and think, “He's going to hit me this time.” Seriously, the only person who's hit me without making the same scrunched up “Oh shit!” face was so drunk he drove off without realizing he'd practically ripped a wheel off my car. After a couple minor accidents, and a period of weeks waiting for a tailgater's insurance to figure out that I wasn't going to give up, bang out the dents, drive without tail-lights, and accept the trunk flying up everytime I hit a bump, and leave them alone, I'm sick to fucking death of idiot tailgaters, and it completely stresses me out anticipating another tailgating accident. (You ever notice how people with smashed up front ends are always tailgating somebody? Isn't Darwinism supposed to solve that problem?) So then on the Kennedy, the car full of kids in front of me actually collides with the car in front of them, with a nice audible clunk, which did a lot to enhance my calm as I pictured two guys getting out of their cars to inspect the damage and possibly fight it out, with no way for me to get out of the lane. Next time I'm parking in Elgin and just taking the Metra, FFS.
I also like the Illinois plan to get people to use open road tolling and I-pass: get rid of all the automated coin baskets at the remaining one cash line and make everyone deal with the oldest, slowest cashiers they had on the payroll, so you get stuck behind some guy in a Tesla roadster trying to break a $100 bill with a cashier who dates to when the tolls were 5c and still only keeps nickels in her cash drawer. “$99.05, $99.10, $99.15, $99.20. Have a nice day sir, and enjoy your stay in the Land of Lincoln. That's right, we're #1, sir.” Next time I'm paying in pennies, and fuck you. That's what you get for trying to bully me into paying $50 for an I-pass for my one trip a year down I-90.
Chapter Two: Tale of the Goat, pt I
I had a particularly goat-laden St. Patrick's Day, for better or for worse. You could tell it was going to be a wild day when it was only noon, and a trolley full of already heavily intoxicated people started throwing green beads at our all-male group. (Although we are a devastatingly sexy bunch.) After skipping across the green river (apologies to CCR) we stopped for a bite in Billy Goat's. Personally, I had no idea that the “cheeseborger cheeseborger cheeseborger” place from SNL was a real place, but apparently it is, and it's conveniently located on Michigan Ave by the Tribune building. Well, not so much on Michigan Ave as under it on the lower level of the street. You've got to love a place that's so much of a dive that it's not only located on a subterranean street, but it's below street level on that street as well... walking down the stairs I was expecting to see the King of the Mole People behind the grill. It's easy enough to know you're in the right place, because the whole cave it's located in smells like their greasy cheeseborgers. I also have to compliment any restaurant with the balls to name itself for an animal that wandered in the door, just to taunt the health inspector. Although the same goat did lay a hex on the Chicago Cubs, so I guess they were smart not to wonder what a goat was doing loose in the city and throw him out. It does make me wonder how many of the Mexican places named Cucaracha applied a similar principle. When I open a restaurant, I think I'll call it the Ravenous Escaped Circus Lion, that should keep the dine-and-ditch crowd on their toes.
Our merry band spent the rest of the afternoon at a place whose name escapes me, probably because I only heard it referred to as “The Creepy Gay Bar”, which certainly turned out to be on the nose. I don't recall ever being that hammered that early in the day (but I do remember trying to justify it by figuring it was five o'clock in Iceland) and that may have colored my perceptions of the rest of the afternoon. It was at TCGB that we met the Sultry Sisters, two fine, upstanding yet hard-drinking women of Reubensian proportions, one of whom was wearing a “Shake your Shamrocks” t-shirt and a brown thong so small it was poised to snap off and go flying across the room every time she shook her shamrocks, which was often. After downing a lot of Irish car bombs and stirring green dye into everybody's drinks with their stinky pinkies, they seemed to set their sights on the two people least likely to go home with them, got ditched by their group, and left in tears, but fortunately it was only 5 o'clock, so I guess they had time to regroup. I knew it would end badly when they started taking pictures and demanding more sultry poses (hence the name), so I slipped into a couple of their group photos with a big grin so that a week from now they'll look at them and wonder “Who the fuck is that?” Also noteworthy, the guy in that group who knew PJ for an hour before confiding to me, “That guy's so bi-curious I can't stand it.” A strange place... hand towels located over the bathroom door like some dirty secret, and a long wait for a drink because they run out of glassware and you have to wait for somebody to finish theirs. Seriously, I spent so much time waiting for my frisky witch (that's a drink, not a Sultry Sister) I could have gone to Crate & Barrel and bought them another set of shot glasses to complement the eight dirty ones they had floating around the room.
Chapter Three: Don't you wish your girlfriend was an actuary like me?
I remember a very blurry, spinny Mexican restaurant with some decent crab cakes, but seriously, after drinking vodka and sambuca all afternoon at the Creepy Gay Bar, dinner is really just a big swirling blur. My inebration was to come to a sudden halt, as on a lark, we hit the most depressing strip club experience, and that includes the dirty, sticky East Dubuque scene with pimply, pot-bellied trailer trash shuffling around in their worn underwear. I understand keeping things clean to keep your liquor license, but these girls went a bit too far. Much as I love the fine products of the 3M corporation, the giant swath of scotch tape over their nipples was a little more creepy than erotic, like Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs was back in the dressing room shouting “It puts the tape on it's skin!” It's also been a while since I saw a woman in big ol' granny drawers pout sexily... actually I've never seen that. The real attraction was the girls on the other side of the stage, who fully clothed were more interesting, flopping out on the stage with dollar bills. Until they came over and spoke to us. One was a little too interested in the professional details of one of our group (a distant coworker), and trying to look him up on her blackberry so she could send emails through the corporate network with the subject “Hey, I'm the girl from the strip club!” With those networking skills, this is definitely a person who's going to climb far up the corporate ladder. When she asked repeatedly, “Who's your boss?” I think the answer I was waiting to hear was “Tony Danza, now fuck off.” Christ, was she going to call our mothers next?
The real buzzkill was French-Canadian actuary. Do you know what that is? Because she's convinced that it's a great mystery which drunk men at a strip club would like it explained to them in detail. She single-handedly took me from happily smashed to hung-over, and that was just watching her bore other people, since she could tell from one look I was obviously beneath the mystery of the actuarial sciences. I tried hinting to her that her friend should put her crackberry away and drop the subject of work since the two of them didn't quite pick up on the obvious awkwardness, but apparently I didn't phrase it in the form of a risk-management equation so she didn't quite get where I was heading with that. The only one who was interesting was their pimp, who came over to make sure they were keeping in line, and confessed to losing control of them from time to time, like when crackberry was flopped on her back on stage waving singles. Pimp-girl was alright, and the only mathematical science and humanities cross-over I've ever met besides myself, and actually had real shit to talk about besides “Who's your boss and how do I contact your office, dirty boy?” By the way, pimp was her choice of words, not mine. Well, okay I was the one who called her pimp-girl, but I said it to her face when I noted that she was their pimp and she cheerfully agreed. When my associates made a dash from the creeping claws of the Canadian actuary, pimp-girl apologized to me for the fact that her friends had apparently bored mine so much that I had to leave. I miss pimp-girl, she was like the only normal person I met all day. Okay, so I met her pimping financial sector workers in a granny-drawer strip club, not too normal, but she's about the only person I met all day who didn't say something so stupid as to have me wondering what the fuck spaceship she climbed out of to get there, like casting Stockton, California (pop 300K) as a grand metropolis and world city.
Chapter Four: Tale of the Goat, pt. II
With visions of actuaries and sugar-pimp fairies dancing in our heads, I followed my confederates as they exited the club and bolted down the sidewalk, presumably to make sure we weren't followed, for instance by an trench-coat clad actuary holding a boom-box over her head blasting Celine Dion. From the club we hit a party with an african theme, serving west african food, and some sort of fiery wine that instantly restored my alcohol buzz from the French-Canadian snow drift that actuary buried it under. Seriously that stuff was still burning my throat ten minutes after I drank it. As an uninvited tag-along guest, I figured I'd break the ice and show some respect to the nice people whose party I was crashing by enthusiastically exploring their exotic spread of food. One largely undisturbed dish was full of goat meat, so I dug in figuring that getting myself a heaping pile of goat would show sufficient polite interest in their culinary theme for the whole posse, and apparently the goat wasn't circulating too fast amongst the other party-goers either. It wasn't bad, although the spongy and tasteless yams could have used some sauce or something. Oddly, our hosts said they suspected their Nigerian grocer substituted potatoes for their yams, which was appropriate for St. Patrick's Day, but speaking as a proud Irish-American and de facto potato expert, if those weren't yams I don't know what the fuck those Nigerians did to those potatoes. I polished off my rice and goat, but that giant yam was a beast. This is the party where I learned Stockton (California's 13th largest city) is a major metropolis on the order of San Francisco. Nice view of the city from the balcony, a fine preparation of goat meat, and people who say weird things when they're drunk, definitely a recipe for a great party.
The only problem with getting hammered at noon is you want to go home and crawl into bed way too early, so it ended up being an early night, strolling back to the welcoming environs of the Marshall Field Homes. Okay, they aren't so welcoming, and it's more of a good block, bad block situation, but there's a lot of good blocks. Not so good, the guy who leaves a cut-out of John Cusack in his van window to startle passers-by. That had me treading suspiciously towards every corner expecting John Cusack to leap out with a boombox over his head... I know that movie wasn't even set in Chicago, but after his adaptation of High Fidelity, I keep picturing John Cusack wandering around Chicago voicing his inner monologue to vacant point in space. Although that may have been the goat talking, since I was up half that night sweating and disoriented... that fucking goat was kicking, man, it was kicking. Now I know why my vegetarian ex-girlfriend was so smug about it: no Billy Goat, and no dealing with shady Nigerian goat meat merchants. Not me, though... I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more goat.
Chapter Five: These are a few of my favorite things
Fortunately my entire trip wasn't taken up by sambuca and goat fever dreams, and I did manage to hit some slightly more intellectually stimulating places besides the sociological experiment that was the Creepy Gay Bar. Saturday morning, PJ and I took a trip down to the south side, to check out the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. I discovered a couple interesting facts that morning, such as the fact that if you're going to head through a rougher part of town like pretty much everything that surrounds Hyde Park, do it in the morning, because as it turns out, the crackies, the bangers, and snap, crackle, and pop and whoever the rest of the shitheads are who bring the sketchy neighborhoods to life don't get up that early. I also learned something when I ordered some eggs sunny side up at a diner, and got a box labeled “Sunni”, specifically I wouldn't have expected Sunni style eggs to be served with bacon, but apparently in Hyde Park they aren't that observant.
On the more intellectual side, the Museum of Science and Industry turned out to be one of those places that I would have thought was the greatest place on earth when I was eight years old. It's not so bad now, and there's a pretty impressive collection of history and science on display. The captured U-Boat on display I'm sure would have been fascinating had they let me go into it, unfortunately I wasn't too into waiting four hours for a tour. Also on display was Bodyworks, which is fascinating yet also astoundingly creepy. I could have done without the high school tour groups snickering at the penises and blushing and fidgeting at the sight of the splayed vulvae, but it does work as a basic test of maturity and intelligence, judging by the dolt repeatedly asking his girlfriend if various things were “Like, you know, real”, since he apparently missed the entire premise of the exhibit.
I also discovered a fine Chicago museum that I've never been to before, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, tucked into Columbia College. The main exhibit in the first floor gallery was titled “Sex and Food”, both of which (along with football and film) near the top my list of my favorite things. That was a memorial to Robert Heinecken, who did some pretty fascinating stuff, piecing together images from magazines and other media to create new images. One whole wall was an actual professional guide to posing and shooting models, with illustrative polaroids, which in that context, became quite unnerving in its lack of human empathy and strict, cold rules of presentation in creating a single, consistent image of women, all in pursuit of the one true way to sell underwear. When shooting a woman in a sexy french maid outfit, there are apparently strict rules as to where she can put her hands to be sufficiently naughty but not sexual, and she has to stand in front of a mirror. Period.
Other works that I found really engaging were this landscape composed of blown up film frames of the profile of a reclining woman's body, mixing and matching and repeating parts of her body as necessary to create a continuous landscape. And also a whole wall of Heinecken's magazine excerpts in which he creates shots of women in lingerie, only the lingerie is cut outs of other images of naked women. So a woman is doing a very coy, catalog pose wearing a tastefully cut negligee, only it appears to have a print on it of another woman's breasts and vagina, with wandering hands visible on the negligee-woman's body. One was striking in that the implied print of her nightgown was a man's body, with a woman's arms around his waist and her head firmly held to his groin in a very dominant act of fellatio. That's what keeps these models modestly covered, these provocative shots of other women's bodies... when you're looking at breasts that aren't hers, that poses questions about the whole eroticism of the experience and who I'm really looking at. But that may have just been me. There's also a twinge of Silence of the Lambs to these shots of women symbolically wearing other women's bodies... there are a lot of provocative subcurrents in these photographs.
The second floor featured these large, beautiful prints of rooms from Japanese love hotels, rooms constructed around creating a space to explore or indulge a particular sexual fetish. Each one was photographed without any human presence, just an empty space with strange fixtures fitting the theme, like tiled walls and a sterile examination table, a carousel with pictures of smiling children painted on the wall, or even creepier the Hello Kitty room, with the ubiquitous restraints. The final gallery had a similar focus on erotically charged empty space, showing huge blown-up shots from Larry Sultan's Valley collection, a series of photographs of houses in the San Fernando Valley that were being used to film porn movies, but focusing on the space around the actual production. A few images have wild, fantastic, pornographic sex going on, just barely caught in the frame of an architectural study of a fireplace with a rough stone chimney climbing up the wall. Other shots capture some of the performers just in this lavish house, naked and waiting, half asleep, curlers on their hair. All of them were just beautiful exposures of these homes, and removing the normal residents to replace them with the manufactured sexual energy of porn stars, gives each home an eerie alien sharpness, like an archaeological dig of the ancient home of the porn stars. Very strange, but exquisitely beautiful photography.
I also found later that afternoon how bored to tears I am with the Chicago Art Institute. I didn't really dig too deep, popping in on a lark, so it's a bit unfair, but I can only look at so much Chinese pottery. There are fifty rooms of European paintings, but there's that problem with American museums and European art where they only get the stuff that somebody managed to smuggle out in a balloon, or in the case of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, a shitload of Courbet that they must have come by when during the many years the frogs were still pissing on him, before they gave him his due. The rooms full of various assorted paintings all strike me a bit like in Futurama when Dr. Zoidberg goes to a gallery, plunks down some cash, and says “One art, please!” There is some great stuff in the Art Institute, like some Magritte and Delvaux they hide away in a corner, although some of it seems to have been removed since I was last there. It's probably just me, but I wish for instance some of the stuff tucked away in corners and hallways got a little better presentation, like put the art deco building exteriors into a room where you can linger over them, not in a hallway, because that's something that the museum could really do better than anybody else. There's art everywhere, but it's all just kind of there, like “Here's your art, now fuck off.” On the other hand, I may have just been in a bad mood when I got there, and there was a special exhibition featuring Cezanne and Picasso, and I wasn't paying more money for #&%$'ing Picasso.
The Museum of Contemporary Art may be the most uneven museum I've ever seen, because in the two times I've been there, they've had something really cool and then some godawful installation on the whole first floor. The last time there was this dominating, dinosaur-sized skeleton in the atrium, towering over me, but of this completely alien animal, looking nothing like the bones of any dinosaur I was familiar with. It turned out to be the skeleton of a housecat, reproduced on a massive, terrifying scale. That was pretty fascinating to look at that, but then the whole first floor had these dark rooms with dark, charcoal drawing animated films of houses turning into coffins or something like that, just bizarre. This time the first floor had all these giant, wall-sized pieces of styrofoam with foot sized holes gouged in them, and this carpeted wall with scratches in the carpet. I have no idea what that was about, but there was an exhibition on the top floor of the history of photography with examples of a few different people's work, and a fair bit of that was pretty striking. I'm glad I found out there was a top floor this time.
Chapter Six: "One day you'll realize there's more to life than culture... there's dirt and smoke and good honest sweat!!"
Museums aside, I discovered a couple other things about Chicago on Tuesday, like that it is definitely one motherfucking windy-ass city. That day the sun was shining and it was warm out on the sunny side of the street, too hot to bundle up for the usual midwestern March weather. This was great until I hit Wells on my way to Noogie's and this icy draft was careening down the street turning me into a frostbitten Marcel Marceau. The weird thing it was just on Wells, not on any other north-south street. There was another weird icy wind blowing off the lake down Chicago Ave, again, just on Chicago, not on any other street. I also thought I should check out Argyle St., which a guidebook assured me was good for about half an hour of window shopping or sitting down for some noodles. I think they may even be overselling it at half an hour, on a neighborhood that extends for about a block each side of the pagoda that sits atop of the Argyle el station. Argyle does have this odd character of being the shadowy reflection of Chinatown on the other end of the red line, composed of several Asian subcultures (Vietnamese, Thai, et al) united all being sick to death of explaining that they're not Chinese. And thanks to Argyle, at least somewhere in Chicago there's doctor's office, pharmacy, and video rentals, and a florist all located in the same storefront. All they're missing is tanning booths and a dermatological oncologist. I like how that street also has the “gunshots fired, shit going down” blue lights flashing in the middle of the day, always a sign of high class.
I have to give some props to a couple fine Chicago eateries, first off Noogies-*, which makes a fine swiss and mushroom omelette, with some really great fresh fruit and fresh squeezed, pulpy orange juice. However they only take cash, so those who only ever carry the currency of countries they're not in will go hungry. (They did think to put an ATM in the doorway, for anyone who uses modern electronic banking and doesn't keep their money in the form of Nazi gold hidden under their mattress.) Then there's Ping Pong, a good Thai restaurant with some nice dishes to share, and some nice ginger beef that I planned on sharing with nobody. Screw the people I'm eating with, that's why I ordered soup as an appetizer: nobody else can swipe some with their chopsticks and deny me my gluttony. To get quicker service from the ladyboys who serve as waitstaff (seriously, our waiter was pre-op and proud of it) I recommend wearing a flamboyant orange scarf of some sort. It was worth the wait, especially when they started projecting Kung Fu Hustle on the wall. A curious advantage of foreign films in a noisy restaurant: I can't understand the Cantonese dialogue anyways, and the subtitles don't make me strain to hear the soundtrack and feel like I've gone deaf the way closed captioning does.
Chapter Seven: John Carpenter's Escape from Oldtown
After a few days of sweating out goat meat and generally stinking up my friends' guest bedroom, they finally managed to shuffle me out the door, muttering under their breath “Did you lock the back door so he can't sneak back in?” It was then that my troubles really began. After dropping my hosts of at their respective banks (“Seriously, before I get out, did you leave anything behind? Because we'll mail it to you, just for god's sake please don't eat another plate of goat and show up at our apartment.”) and bidding adieu to the Pecuniary Pair (as they will now be known unless I think of an even dumber alliterative nickname) I set sail for home.
This should have been easy enough, except I'm a total idiot with no sense of direction who frequently spaces out while walking and driving and then wonders where the hell I am. The top of my list of electronics should definitely be a GPS unit with an increasingly aggressive voice telling me “Turn around, you... stupid... moron.” So instead of getting right on I-90 in downtown Chicago, I took a scenic detour to the west side. After I passed the United Center, it was several minutes before a nagging voice in the back of my head was able to interrupt my reminiscence of the Chicago Bulls of the late 1990's... seriously, what happened to all their role-players after Jordan retired? I know Bison Dele got murdered, Steve Kerr went to San Antonio, Luc Longley made the clever decision to sign with a team running a full-court offense he couldn't keep up with, but guys like Jason Caffey were never heard from again. Seriously, that was a big stable of guys from this dominant organization with championship experience, and then not even Rodman or Pippen could carve out another niche anywhere. So you see how I could get a ways past the United Center before it occurred to me that I was way, way, way out on the west side and the highway I was looking for was pretty obviously way, way back downtown, and I'd driven right over an interstate without noticing it. Actually that was probably good, because it gave the rush hour traffic another hour to clear, so it only took another 40 minutes to get past O'Hare. The blue line with its frequent stops, 15mph and 6mph (?!) zones still blows by traffic, incredibly.
The trip down featured bright sunshine, dry pavement, and a lot of speeders anxious to get down to the big city and get their drink on, the trip back a growing downpour and enough rain and gloom to make me miss at least one toll. Another benefit of open road tolling and putting the signs 30 feet before the toll, it's easy to accidentally blow past a toll and not see you have to get over to pay until it's too late to do it without risking a catastrophic pile-up, all so Chief Illiniwek can collect his 80 cents. (I know the Chief doesn't exist anymore, but it's easier to spell than Governor Blagojevich.) I wondered if they'd really ever get me unless I got pulled over in Illinois for some other violation while driving the same car, not likely given the fact that I'm actively looking to avoid driving the whole way in again. But I'd like to think of myself as an honest soul, and I don't want guilt and apprehension looming over me because of an eighty cent debt. So I tried to pay it online, which requires that I tell them exactly which toll it was... short of driving 400 miles back and taking a picture, I have no clue what the toll plaza was, and helpfully, the toll website itself notes that due to open road tolling construction, their own maps are out of date and do not necessarily show the actual existing toll plazas. I decided to take a guess and hope they have the requisite imagination to put together that a car with MN license plate GOA-TSE (not my actual license plate) skipped the Heavenly Hills toll plaza and somebody with the license plate GOA-TSE paid a toll online for the Melifluous Meadows toll plaza, and don't send John Cusack to my door with a badge and a boombox over his head playing “Fulsom Prison Blues”. Seriously, if I went to the trouble of paying 80 fucking cents online and Illinois still somehow got after me over that missed toll, I'd go on such a furious rampage they'd have to wheel me into Joliet wearing a Hannibal Lecter mask.
Deep into Wisconsin comes that point for a Minnesotan where you know you're getting close to home sweet home, because everybody forgets how to fucking drive. People switch off the cruise control and start creeping into your blind spots, accelerating and decelerating at random, camping out in the left lane and making everyone duck between semis in the right lane to get around them, and you think, “God I haven't missed these idiots at all.” I love Minnesota, but my god we're shitty drivers (I include yours truly Mr. Scenic Detour Past the United Center in that statement as well). But then, in the rain, the fog on the St. Croix river rose high enough to cover the bridge as I came over the hill into the St. Croix valley, which was a pretty cool sight, and it didn't seem so bad. Until some idiot tailgating me in the middle lane tried to pass me on the right, and nearly plowed into a semi trying to squirt through the rapidly closing gap between us, before zagging back behind me into the far left lane that was MOVING FASTER THE WHOLE TIME. Any moments of serenity I seem to enjoy are tragically shortlived.
Epilogue
All in all, I had a great weekend in Chicago, relaxing and revitalizing, and I am deeply indebted to my gracious hosts, who were actually still far too polite to irritably shove me out the door after a few days. I sampled goat meat, and will continue to tend towards lamb when dining on caprinae. The Museum of Contemporary Photography I think should join Europa Books as a requisite stop on every future Chicago trip, just like how you can't use Phil's hot tub without streaking the Muffaletta. But I will not buy a #$@&'ing I-Pass!!
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