So there Nicole and I were, sitting there in the beer garden at the Northside and drinking. We had earlier remarked on the police car parked across the street that was both in front of a fire hydrant and too close to the corner. If only they’d managed to also park it 24 inches from the curb, they’d have hit the cop parking trifecta. But I digress.

There was this illegally-parked police car sitting there for some time. After a while, a couple of cops come out from somewhere else in the Northside. One of them is a young, clean-cut, pretty healthy looking type, and the other was what you might call a ‘classic’ Chicago cop: old and paunchy. And, as it happened, drunk, too. If he’d got into a fight with someone, he’d have hit the Irish stereotype trifecta, too. As soon as he cleared the threshold of the bar, he lit a cigarette. He then proceeded to fall off the curb and to stumble across Damen, because he was that loaded.

(Click for a larger, but no less blurry, version.)

He leaned against the car long enough to unlock it and let his (apparently sober) partner in the other side. He then backed way out into the intersection and drove away down the side street. Only a quick last-minute correction kept him from crashing into the cars parked on the other side.