We have many pictures, so did not include all of them in the praxis proper - peruse the proof for the panopticon.

The Task

Those of you considering doing this task? You might think to yourself, "I could totally run a mile in, like, ten minutes! This task will be done fast!"

You will be so wrong that suns will dim and physics will bend, around the center of that wrongness.

The problem isn't the length of the string - the problem is getting the string over and around things in ways that a) keep it off the ground, and b) do not block the ingress or egress of buildings, garrotte passerby, or cause passing cars to veer into trees.

These two things are harder to fulfill at the same time than one might think.

Recon, Materials, and Nefariousness

If one is going to mark a trail with one mile of string, one has to measure a mile of string first, no? Mat Defiler headed to the Ace Hardware for some clear fishing line. Then she went next door and acquired 2000 yards of hot pink curling ribbon, which was on sale. Her bag was packed with everything else she'd need: the triathalon bathing shorts with the handy pocket, a pair of very small suture scissors, towel, goggles, park district card, camera. She biked up to Harrison park field house, hopeful: she would hide a length of invisible fishing line in her bathing suit pocket, along with the tiny shears, and measure one full lap of the Harrison Park pool with the fishing line. Then, she would slyly sneak the fishing line elsewhere, and measure 36 lengths worth of the hot pink ribbon using the initial piece of fishing line.

Well, turns out the Harrison park pool was mysteriously closed. Perhaps the park district officials had heard that some of the FOEcakes were hatching a dastardly plan to. . . GASP. . . mark an urban trail with. . . RIBBON, and they were determined to stop us. "With no pool access to measure the string, they will be unable to destroy our fair city with their labyrinthine ribbon shenanigans!" they said in their secret Park District headquarters meeting right before calling the strapping short haired man at the desk and saying "Quick quick, emergency pool closing this friday!" The FOEcakes would have to advance to Plan B.

After some e-mail back and forth, a few stressed out phone calls, and a rereading or two of the actual task description, it was determined that since it merely had to be NO LESS than one mile long. Some careful calculations helped us determine that our 2000 yards of pink ribbon was, in fact, a bit more than a mile, but not so much more that we would feel the need to shoot ourselves by the time the task was over. We would persevere. The pink ribbon would pull us through.

The Route

This is a collection of bits and pieces of our conversation, originally spanning about forty-five minutes or so, now spanning eight. There is no arc, sometimes people are muffled, and sometimes it is entirely unclear what is going on. But here we are, in all our verbal glory:



We carried this task out the evening before Journey to the End of the Night: Chicago. Our goal: start out in a residential neighborhood and end the string in Wicker Park. We were a little concerned about our ending point, as where else would the troublesome Park District Spies be lurking, other than Wicker Park? But we were determined, Park District be damned, there was no other way. We walked up Ashland and Down LeMoyne, ribbon in hand, until we came to a block that just felt right.

The Beginning

We started Spindle One in a friendly residential neighborhood, running the ribbon along the fence, and carefully bringing it over gates so that people could still get in and out.



We switched every once in a while to trees, and developed a good throwing technique to get the ribbon up over the branches and further off the ground. Throwing the ribbon was effective - so effective that we came to rely on it perhaps a little too much. This came back to haunt us later.

We soon developed a number of different roles for the praxis. Some of us switched back and forth between a few, but the roles themselves were pretty well defined:

Scout: Dela Dejavoo would head out about fifteen to thirty feet in the direction we were going, checking for trees, high fences, obstacles, and doorways, then come back with a recommendation for action. Also, it was the scouts job to keep her eyes peeled for Park District Spies.

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Thrower: This task fell most often to Julian Muffinbot, with Meredithian, and Ms. Goblinpants also making a good showing. It required a good eye, a good arm, and not hitting cars with the ribbon spindle.

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Stringer: Mat Defiler was a fantastic stringer, excelling at finding good spots to bring the ribbon to next. She was the backbone against which all other stringy activities were built. More importantly, she is tall.

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Monkey: Sometimes your string needs a high place. And sometimes that high place is not something easily reached by, say, stairs. Or an elevator. Or a Mat Defiler. For these situations you need a monkey. Meredithian clambered up trashcans, metal railings, and trees (an ability that would serve her well during Journey to the End of the Night, less than 24 hours later). Dela Dejavoo was also often seen atop objects, wrapping the string around that perfect outcropping.

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Documentarian: There were two cameras in play, and one audio recorder. Sparrows Fall did a lot of the photographs, though she occasionally got to climb something or throw some stuff around.

The hardest thing about this praxis was not letting the string touch the ground, which we struggled with constantly. We'd run it across some wide-open space, only to find that it was right in front of someone's door, or in a place where a cyclist could careen into it at high speed. And getting it up high was not easy. The average person is 5' 6". The average light pole or tree is... not.



Throwing solved this problem pretty often, after some experimenting with semi high places in alleyways, the FOEcakes finally got their first real challenge when crossing the first actual street (albeit a side street, but one with traffic nonetheless). The jubilation when Meredithian got it sailing through the upper bars of the light post cannot be described.

But sometimes the high point we needed to get the string around was the edge of a fence, or a nail sticking out of the eave of a building. Even our crackshot team of throwers could not manage such feats. This led to some pretty inventive towers of people:




(anybody know how we turn this thing rightside up?)

One of the coolest things was when we'd stretch the string across an entire street, and the bright pink line would almost be lost in the night sky. Draw it taut enough and the wind would catch at it, making the ribbon sing. The first time we heard it we thought someone was playing an instrument somewhere. We managed to catch some of it on tape:



The Incident

Little did Team FOEcakes know, the debacle at Harrison Park was not the last they would see of the evil Park District Would Be Undoers. (burst of discordant minor key music here . . . .)

A few people had seen us as we clambered up trash cans and threw ribbons up lamps, and several drunkenly called out to us. But no one gave us any trouble until we were walking by a house at the end on an alleyway just east of Wood. Here, the guy referred to henceforth only as JerkFace was out on his balcony and saw us walking down his street while holding pink string. His street. THE HORROR! He rightly shouted at us to cease and desist, to halt, and when we continued on he stormed off his balcony, into his house, downstairs, out of his front door, onto his front porch and declared he was calling the cops. Yep, he popped out of the front of nicely rehabbed house yelling semi-angry jibberish and then went through the motions of making a call. He talked loudly into the phone, "Police, police! There are six drunk girls . . . putting up string or something." We started walking faster (Mat was stringing all along -- she is hardcØre), but scattered in fright when we heard him describing us to the police on his cell phone. (FOEcakes would like to note that while we were not drunk, there were in fact six of us. Good observational skills, suspicious yuppie man!)

It's hard to describe how jarring this incident was -- we had been having a lot of fun and feeling a great connection with the neighborhood, and then JerkFace ruins the experience. Many days later we're still not sure why he felt so threatened by our little pink ribbon.

But, the fact was, he was a very suspicious looking JerkFace man, certainly a spy from the park district posing as a drunk guy in his own house. This could be serious -- it was already clear that the Park District was involved in a serious conspiracy, and that they had much more backing and resources than did the FOEcakes.

To avoid trouble with the law, the FOEcakes would have to be either somewhat strategic or very stealth. And after walking through quite a number of blocks with this six-some, it was very clear that "stealth" was probably not going to be the answer. We tied the ribbon to a nearby pole and split up with plans to meet up at a nearby Walgreens when the heat died down a little.

We took off in four directions. Meredithian and Sparrows Fall went one way, Dela Dejavoo and Mat Defiler went a separate way, and while Ms. Goblinpants and Julian Muffinbot attempted to head off together, Julian totally ditched Goblinpants and went off in some random direction. Eventually we did all reconvene at the Walgreens. At that point, we decided to leave a block of a few gaps in the string, coming back to reconnect after JerkFace would no longer be paying attention. After all, nothing in the task dictated that it could not be done in multiple sections and then tied together. And, too, this solution put off the problem of "how to get the string across Milwaukee avenue," which was, indeed, a bit daunting.

The El Tracks

We reached the El tracks and decided to start The String, Section 2, by following along them for a while, running the ribbon through the cross-pipes beneath the tracks and continuing along them until we got close to Wicker Park.



Since we were not fifteen feet tall, nor did we have ladders, long poles, or rappelling gear, that meant throwing. Throwing was a fun challenge, and we'd already had lots of practice earlier in the night.



There was one nasty side effect, however - when the ribbon spindle hit the ground, sometimes it broke. Clearly, the Park District Conspiracy had replaced the ribbon spindles at Party City with inferior, easily breakable, fake ribbon spindles. We managed to bust most of the end off of Spindle Three, which made unravelling it really easy... *too* easy. We moved along at a fast pace for a while, but then something else began to develop:



Doesn't look too ominous does it? Wait for it. We'll come back to it in a moment.

Sticking to the underside of the El tracks helped us cover a lot of ground rather quickly and avoid most people. I mean, it's the last place the Park District would hang out, clearly. But, as we were about to cross a street, we came to a lot of parked cars and people doing suspicious things in and around said cars. We tried to look like your average loiterer and blend in, fearful that the bright pink ribbon following us and glimmering behind us would give us away. It shot down from the El tracks into our hands like a thin but very shiny and colorful arrow.

We staked the area out; we watched several people get into one parked car and we waited for them to drive away… which they did not. (Eventually they got back out of the car and went back to the bar they came from. Wonder what they were doing, hmmm?) Another woman was sitting in her car alone, and looked unconcerned with us, but was parked right below the truss on the other side of the street we were going to toss the ribbon over. We didn't want to hit her car with the spindle.

It seemed like for every passerby that went on their way, two more arrived and just stood around, or dawdled. While waiting for the coast to clear, one pack of about three or four guys shambled from around the corner over behind some parked cars behind the building. They shouted “Hey, can we buy some crack?” Either Meredithian or Julian Muffinbot said “… Why do they think we have crack? Do we look like dealers? Or, what, crack whores?” Meredithian then mustered up her best 'selling it' pose:



We could not keep from laughing, especially when shortly after that, they all started to pee – which was why they had gone around the corner, I guess. We didn’t know there was a bathroom over there! Also, as they left the area - *without* washing their hands, I’m guessing - more and more of them came out from the shadows. It was like the tiny clown car of an outdoor peeing spot. We decided to veer very very clear from that wall.

Finally the lady in the car moved on, the gang of kids in the car doing… whatever got out and left, and the back of bar outhouse had a slow moment. We were able to move on. (And I'd like to mention; I suddenly feel terrible that I’ve always unfairly accused the homeless of being the reason some alleys reek of urine.) Very quickly we were on the street that would lead us to the park.

Wicker Park

We were almost into the park itself when Spindle Three broke down on us entirely. Yes, indeed, just on the cusp of enemy territory, the equipment fails. Coincidence? It chose to do this just after we had lofted it into a tree. No amount of tugging, strategic pulling, or poking with nearby sticks could convince the ribbon on Spindle Three to release nature from its grasp. For this job, we needed a monkey:



Meredithian got it down successfully, but our victory was a pyrrhic one. The ribbon had been sliding off the spindle since the picture you saw earlier, and the disease finally reached terminal stages:



We cut it, and Julian Muffinbot took the martyr's role of untangling it while we hooked Spindle Four up to the cut end, and began again.

We entered Wicker Park proper now, at which point we discarded the second part of our plan. The original idea had been to hang signs off the ribbon. Signs that said:

THIS RIBBON HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT

... OR THE SUTRO TOWER

We actually hung some of them up:



Then we thought about weird signs talking about towers, on inexplicable ribbons, that included googleable search phrases. And the risk of screwing up JTTEOTN wasn't worth the absolute coolness of tricking some players into running along our string for a part of the course. It was one thing that we had gotten ourselves into the crosshairs of the Park District's totalitarian plans. We weren't about to drag JTTEOTN in with us!

So we took them down again.

We did, however, manage to get Spindle Four over a giant-ass tree. Check that out - it's almost as cool as the light pole:



We also wove it all around the benches in the park, too.



While the others wound string from spindle 4 through the park, Muffinbot untangled the horrible rectal-prolapse string from spindle 3. She would like to note that while it may have seemed like the least fun job, she actually found it very therapeutic, having had a stressful week. It is very peaceful to sit in a park, untangling string, as it turns out. The untangled string was rewound onto a toothbrush that Muffinbot just happened to have in her bag, as it had been a free sample from the dental insurance company at her job.



Eventually, Meredithian and Sparrows Fall finished off the park string, while Muffinbot and Ms. Goblinpants returned to the Scene of the Incident, as it were, to link the two sections back up, using the untangled string wrapped around the toothbrush. We approached very cautiously, but JerkFace was nowhere to be seen. We found the string tied to the same tree, tied our next section to it, and continued on. At this point we sadly had to let the string touch the ground (making the completion less "ideal") but there was no way around it: we had a few blocks to go, not much string left, and no tall trees or street lamps located in useful locations. We had to take it down to street level. Fortunately, the toothbrush, unlike the spindle, fit through the holes of a sewer, holding the string down so it would not booby trap any cars.



And with that, it was done.

Park District Conspiracy, you could not stop us! You tried, with your wily ways and carefully planted drunken people, with your paranoia-inducing bureaucracy and pool closings, but we surmount your nefariousness!

We started this task at around 9:30 PM. We finished the last spindle around 2:30. One mile. FIVE HOURS. Holy jeebus.