5 minutes ago, the IOC slammed Chicago to the mat with a first round elimination from the bid to host the 2016 Olympics.

We lost.

The sputtering, half baked, shoddy journalistic shreiks of "Why?" will come. America is still fighting 2 wars. We've yet to make back all the friends we've lost over the past several years. The speculation will fill at least one news cycle. Maybe more. But then there is this:

We lost. Lost big.

And the reaching for a vision of Chicago, the painting of a picture yet to happen, a future to make us all just a little bit more alive?  Not today.

 We lost.

In every single ward of the city were meetings on the Olympics and the sweep of opinions was epic. Monumental. Everyone had an opinion and everyone voiced it. Even if that opinion was indifference--it was a strongly voiced indifference. "Chicago" never, ever, ever, thinks one thing.

Even now. In the wind blown cloudy silence of a gray October day; all the partial truths of who pays, who is included or not included, who flies first class and who doesn't, what kind of a dress Oprah wore to the parties; the infinite roiling simmering stew that is this cross roads of our country is quiet for just a moment.

Because we lost.

The homeless woman who passes my house every morning, a house I couldn't afford if I were to buy it today, she pulls her home behind her in a grocery cart, head down, gray hair matching the tone and texture of the day, she looks up for a moment and we nod to each other.

A cement truck rumbles by. Squirrels chatter.

It's quiet right now. We lost. In the first round. And no one can quite believe that.

An el train rumbles by. A Chicagoan watches the train. A Chicagoan knows that there will be all sorts of folks who are glad we lost, all sorts of folks who will be sad. And everything else in between.

All those who shreik and analyze and name call, and find facts to fit the point they want make, all those who wonder: "Did Al Capone cause this? Or maybe it was Oprah's fault? Or Can the President survive all this? Or any other of a million other silly, sad or pathetically un-informed questions---all of them are quiet for a moment in the wind that swirls off the lake and throws our fates to the indifferent stars.

We lost. So we bring out the big guns. Algren.

"It isn't hard to love a town for it's greater and lesser towers, its pleasant parks, or its flashing ballet. Or for its broad and bending boulevards, where the continous headlights follow, one dark driver after the next, one swift car after another, all night, all night and all night. But you never truely love it till you love its alleys too, Where the bright morning faces of old familiar friends now wear the anxious midnight eyes of strangers a long way from home.

A midnight bounded by the bright carnival of the boulevards and the dark girders of the el.

Where once the marshland came to flower.

Where once the deer came down to water."

We lost.

So we go down to the waters. Breathe in the air of that always changing second hand sea. Look to the sky.

And then go back to work.

Because there is still lots to do.