I grew up in Schaumburg, Illinois, and I still work there. At one time, Schaumburg could claim to have the largest mall in the world, Woodfield Mall.

During 2001, when the economy was strong, the state of Illinois was handing out landmark budgets to towns and cities with large groupings of commercial zoning. The idea was to increase tourism, I suppose. Towns like Naperville and Schaumburg were alloted large sums of money to build giant signs proclaiming the town's name. Schaumburg bought a giant rock to be engraved with "Welcome To The Village Of Schaumburg" in some fancy font or other. It was installed at Higgins & Route 53.

During the installation, the rock broke into three pieces. They glued it back together, and it broke again. The quarry they bought the rock from was all mined out, so they couldn't get a matching rock to replace or repair the sign. To this day, it looks goofy and Village Of Schaumburg look like chumps who waste money.

Earlier this year, the Village sent a notice to my office building to change our dumpster enclosure from chainlink to wood, or face sizable fines. So we did it.

The next month, they sent us ancient blueprints and charged us with installing 10 or 15 trees, mulching all sorts of spots, and a few other beautification-related demands. Our landlord managed to talk them out of most of it, but we still had to mulch and prune several of the existing trees. We got an incompetent landscaping company to perform these tasks, and now our property looks like a Tim Burton set. The trees were trimmed and branches cut off seemingly at random.

Schaumburg is suing a guy who convinced them to set up two art galleries. One was an indoor gallery inside an old barn, which formerly was a Women's Workout World. The other was an international sculpture garden, full mostly of Picasso knockoffs and substandard bent metal abstracts. Apparently he's commited fraud of some type. Personally, I blame Schaumburg. I've walked through the sculpture garden many times, since it's on one of my walking routes through the Prairie Center, and I like only 3 out of about 20 sculptures.

I was considering making a proposal to Schaumburg. All of the sculptures are by Scandanavian artists, and I thought perhaps they'd like to have one by a local boy. I draw tribal art, lots of animal skeletons and the like. I want to do one cut in wood about 10' tall, and grow ivy on it.

After all this shit going down I doubt they trust artists any more. Besides, they're now hurting for money and trying to induce whiplash in all of their industrial tenants by making outlandish requests, I don't know, to collect fines I guess.

I'll have to ply my trade alsewhere. I don't even know how to cut something 10' tall anyways.
2:09 PM - Bottle Rocket Fire Alarm