EVANSTON, Ill. — I’ve arrived safely into the friendly confines of the Windy City (well, the Northwestern part of it), but leaving Madison was rougher than I’d like to admit.

After my all-evening chicken-binge at The Vintage, I had my worst night of sleep at the Madison Graduate. I had shrugged off the warning upon check-in that the July 4 weekend was “going to be a scorcher” at 89 degrees, but the sun wasn’t the main woe: it was the air conditioner.

Perhaps Wisconsin lakefront summers aren’t meant for handling high heat, but the air-co in my 4th-floor room along State Street was paltry at best. Even though the thermostat went as low as “65,” the blower in the room (a single vent, located above the bathroom door) was barely enough to feel on my skin. I sat in bed, unable to sleep, brushing sweat off my brow as I eventually conceded and watched the first half of “The Godfather, Part I,” on TCM until 2 a.m. (And then the Wikipedia wormhole about Don Corleone’s confidante Luca Brasi and the former pro wrestler who played him put me solidly to sleep.)

On Tuesday, my check-out morning, I woke up later than I’d wanted. I stepped outside to retrieve my truck, and only half of my sunglasses came out of my pocket — one of the spring arms had broken clean off, and I had no repair kit in my gear. I should not be surprised that the secondhand shades I got for $1.00 at a yard sale last month weren’t built to last, but it came at a really bad time. Fortunately, one of the arms still worked, as well as the nose pads, so I decided to embrace the moment and wear a fucked-up semi-demi pince-nez sort of UV eye protection.

I walked through the scorching morning sun to retrieve my car from the city-owned parking garage and pulled out, expecting to pay the advertised $8 a night. It ended up running somewhere around $30 a night. Apparently, the $8 nightly maximum came with some fine print exceptions, and leaving my truck there for all of Monday bit me in the ass.

Whatever. You gotta do what you gotta do, and I needed my truck at the hotel within the half-hour. The garage fare ended up being as expensive as the hotel valet parking option, so I wish I had just done that instead.

I got back to my hotel room and began to load the luggage cart, which was a trapezoidal tram about the size of a medium cooler. Each piece of my luggage fell off at least one time, and a stray Amazon package dropped back into the elevator as I exited on the first floor — and went to at least 5 other floors before coming back down with a group of people standing around it, questioning its presence. I wiped more sweat off my brow and picked it up after a half-dozen folks stepped over it without much concern.

Then my sunglasses (sunglass?) fell off again, clacking onto the floor as everyone watched me struggle not to say the loudest curse word ever uttered in Dane County.

Once I got the truck all loaded up, my pathetic sunglasses and I hit the road for a brief 2.5-hour, 150-mile jaunt to Evanston, heading east to the Milwaukee city limits and then tucking south to the outskirts of Chicago. I stopped about 45 minutes out from the city to grab groceries at a Jewel-Osco, a store I haven’t patronized since 1998 at latest. I got about 8 different microwave meals, because it’s nice to always have hot food on the ready, but it’s even nicer not needing to pay $17 every meal for gastropub fare in one of Chicagoland’s richest neighborhoods.

I grabbed more seltzer water and soda, and a 6-pack of Chicago’s own Old Style beer. I also grabbed a $11 bottle of sunscreen and dropped $10 on the least-offensive set of Foster Grant sunglasses I could find.

As wrestling icon Ric Flair famously exclaimed, “jumping on is a hell of a lot easier than jumping off.” But I had successfully jumped off of the Madison isthmus and its various money pits — and arrived in Illinois for 4 days of bougie, lakefront paradise.

Assuming I don’t break any more glasses.

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Other notebook items:

MEETING MR. NOODLE: In lieu of hunting down a formal fireworks show on July 4 — which was fine, because folks ended up shooting them off outside my hotel room window that night — I found some visual explosions of my own flavor at I/O (pronounced “eye-oh”) Arcade Bar, on the east side of Madison’s isthmus. They have an incredible selection of games, both arcade and pinball. Each machine is in incredible shape, especially considering how most of the standup classics are more than 30 years old at this point.

I met a bartender who also went by a preferred nickname. He was a thin Asian guy called “Noodle,” a title bequeathed to him in 5th grade for his likeness to the (female; entirely nonexistent) Gorillaz band member of the same name. I told him about my tendency to go by “Moose,” and he completely understood — in fact, Noodle had just legally made that his middle name last week. He bought me a drink and we enjoyed the evening.

I/O Arcade Bar is a place I’d recommend for any retro gaming enthusiast, even those with children — the facility runs a limited all-ages schedule on Sunday afternoons, so kids and teenagers alike can play on the machines.

A DIMENSION OF SIGHT AND SOUND: Something I particularly enjoyed this past weekend, when I was taking some breaks from the heat in my hotel room, was catching the classic Twilight Zone marathon on an obscure channel called “Decades.” I used to watch the Twilight Zone marathons on holiday weekends with my father, especially the ones for July 4 and New Year’s. Some of the episodes are nearly 60 years old now, but they’re still incredibly powerful, applicable doses of morality and the human condition we could stand to learn from today.

My viewing session began with “Time Enough at Last,” an episode so dear to me I’m considering getting a tattoo of Burgess Meredith with his broken glasses (maybe there’s a parallel to this post in here somewhere). Then came “I Sing the Body Electric,” an imaginative take on step-parenting as drawn from Walt Whitman poetry. And then I got to see a young Dennis Hopper play an actual Nazi in “He Lives,” which made me sick to my stomach the more I watched it and realized how easy demagogues are still able to worm their way into influencing society with cheap tricks and broad hate. Alas, it was a great way to kick back and take some personal time in the hotel.

Anyways, I’m in Evanston now. Gotta get back to doing my remote work, which makes the funding of this trip possible, but I’ll have an update from this coastal Shangri-La before too long. But first, I gotta get my reading glasses, which I left in my truck in the parking garage.

Take care, write soon — hopefully, I’ll have the eyewear situation figured out.

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-moose