I finally had to give in and abandon the last vestiges of my official existence as a Californian. I think I could have kept it up indefinitely: the Cal DMV sent me a renewal form for my vehicle registration to my Chicago address, and a number of my friends down here manage to keep their California driver’s licence, expired Oregon plates, or Virginia voter registrations. This requires a certain amount of being on the ball with official correspondance, and I left off renewing the Mazda’s registration until it was too late. So now I have an Illinois driver’s licence, a Chicago sticker in my front window, and Illinois plates. The last of these really hurts. Goodbye, 3SZM346, only a few months after I finally memorized you so I wouldn’t have to keep walking back to the car to fill out campsite registration forms. Hello, FIBdom. The middle word in that acronym is Illinois, and the other two reflect general perceptions in surrounding states about the driving attitudes of people from this state, particularly the northeast corner of it. My own perceptions can be summed up in two slightly less offensive words: Terrible and Aggressive. No concept of following distance, complete ignorance of the function of turn signals, and total incompetence in intersections. It’s so bad the city actually hires people in yellow jackets to stand in major intersections and keep them from getting clogged up by people whose definitions of “yellow” are somewhere in the near infrared.

Political take-home message: you can be an unmitigated jackass, and the city will still take care of you.

City Hall is a beautiful building, though.

(cdm|FIB)