It’s 50 years from now. Boston is an archipelago, Los Angeles is a bay, and New York is under the sea. But in Chicago, you don’t piss and moan about dibs on your street, rats in your backyard, or Cubs fans urinating on your porch. Those things are still aggravating, but you keep your trap shut because nobody calls us the Second City anymore. Compared to the rest of our continent’s erstwhile major metropolitan regions, we’re doing great, still high and dry above sea level. And every once in a while in January and February, when the E. coli take a day off, you can still swim in the lake.
I bet you don’t remember winter either. Barely, right? Now that’s just a few gray weeks when it rains every day (get your milk crates off the street for Christ’s sake!). You can’t go outside during the daytime in July anymore, but there’s still Major League Baseball, thanks to generous corporate sponsorship of each stadium’s state-of-the-art photovoltaic roof, with plenty of solar juice to fuel the air- conditioning and ice the Bud Light.
