DUDE NAMED "THIG"

Back when I was in high school, I'd walk down to the loop, the central business
district in this fair town, after the grueling hours were over. The streets
totally vacant, no one around but the last few suits, getting off work, scurrying
to catch the late train, or the streets and sanitation guys driving around in
their trucks, cleaning-the curbs. The lovely home bums waiting-on street corners,
trying to get some change or sell newspapers. It's the way that the business
district in any big city gets after five p.m., this weird but pleasant eerieness
sweeps the streets, like the world just ended and you're one of the only people
left alive to see the buildings dark and abandoned . . . these, tall monstrous
buildings that were-so alive five hours ago are now sleeping and desolate. It's
the perfect time to be in this area.

Me and a friend would meet up, we'd walk around, under the elevated train tracks,
talking and putting up stickers, occasionally talking to the winos, and
afterwards we'd end up in the basement of Ronny's steakhouse on Van Buren eating
mashed potatoes and drinking-cheap wine on a cold autumn night, Ronny's is an old
hole-in-the-wall joint right underneath the El tracks, and it's a remnant of an
age when this area, the south-loop, used to be Chicago's old skid row, dotted
with cheap restaurants and-tacky liquor stores with vertical marquee-signs out
front. The area is now of course, high class, and ol' Ronny. decided to "move on
up" and raise his prices, so screw 'em.

During these early evening strolls through the loop, we'd often end up stopping
to read the stickers that, people put up in the newspaper boxes. For some reason,
the downtown area was one of the only areas where stickers didn't get taken down.
I've come across stickers that I put up two years ago, and TIE (RIP), a well
respected graffiti writer from SF still has stickers up in some of these old
newspaper boxes. Chicago destroyed all it's other illegal public art, but for
some reason, left it's downtown alone. Blackhairs from the art institute,
graffiti kids, art students, all had stickers up around the loop, and they all
made for in interesting read while walking around.

One sticker I started seeing up EVERYWHERE was a crudely written sticker, written
in ball point or plain old sharpie that simply read "THIG". I started seein it
everywhere. Christ I hated that shit at first, it was scribbled like a
four-year-old's handwriting, and the more I started paying attention, it was
fucking EVERYWHERE. It was haunting me, but the more I started thinking about it,
I started LOVING it, I began to respect whoever it was that was doing it. He was
up everywhere  and obviously didn't give a fuck if his stuff looked pretty and
acceptable or not. He was just OUT THERE. "HERE I AM. Like it or not, this is
me."

During one of our MD20/20 and mashed potato dinners in Ronny's,	I mentioned it
to 25, "You heard of that guy?" he asked me as we sat in the basement drinking
and drawing. "Hell yeah I heard of him, he's fucking everywhere!" I replied.
"Yeah, he sold me his tape." THIG -- the Chicago 1egend. The more I talked to
people about him, I learned that he was indeed a model citizen. He'd smoke lots
of weed, and get blazed as fuck, and walk around putting up his turd stickers and
trying to hock his shitty rap tapes to complete strangers. He was like one of the
few redeeming qualities that the city had left in the wake of it's "renewal." The
legendary THIG.

Always outside, always immersing, himself in public life, I nominate Chicago's
very-own hip hop soldier, THIG, as Loitering Is Good person-of-the-year.
Soo many-graffiti writer  have given up, so many people have chosen to stay,
inside, to remove themselves from the public sphere of the city, and thus
depriving the city of some of the much needed life that its streets so direly
need. Yet Thig's ass is ALWAYS out there, it's a fact that I have come to rely on
whenever I'm back in this town. You walk into a blue line train boom! the
whole back of the train is plastered in his four-year-old handwritten, scribbled
stickers. His rap tapes are brilliant, especially if you're someone who doesn't
normally listen to hip-hop. A free-spirited, often stoned outta his mind, denizen
of the city, and yet personally, have never met him and I hope I never do. It'd,
ruin the picture that  the streets have painted for me.

His tapes compliment his presence in the city. Unlike most rap, it sounds
somewhat unpretentious. He's one of the few rappers that I've heard use the words
"art" and "fart" in rhyme. It goes in and out of incomprehensible gibberish,
mixed with drunken laughing, rhyming about nothing in particular over beats that
come out of a rusty, mechanized assembly line. THIG is a post-modernist and he
don't even know it.

I like that, that anonymity. That guy probably, has no clue that I'm sittin here
at a typewriter , writing a couple paragraphs about how I appreciate that he's
out there. He doesn't even know who I am. never met him personally, and I don't
know much about him save for the fact that he smokes lots of dope, writes
graffiti and likes making rap tapes. . .

That's the way it is in a city, though, and it's a fact which I appreciate a lot.
These relationships between strangers that gradually form, you don't even have to
go out of your way to, meet someone, you just walk out the door and walk down the
streets and meet strangers just by hanging out outside.

This is the importance of PUBLC SPACE. It's about being part of this great
self-enacting story that's unfolding, It's a story which is kind of funny and
fucked up, a story that can be beautiful that it could make a cop smile, a story
that can be so sad and frustrating that it'll drive you mad. It's a story about
love for life, a story with a million different experiences a day that are
opportunities to learn something new. It's a story that describes what it really
FEELS like to be alive and breathing, with the sun on your face and the air in
your lungs. But most importantly, it's a story about relationships between
complete strangers, bringing people together who have seemingly little in common
with each other.

So, if you run into THIG tell him I said hello, and don't mind him when he hits
you up to buy a tape.