NP: Office, A Night At The Ritz

I wake up to WBBM Newsradio at around 7:30am every morning, and the half-hour is when they hit the top local news, as opposed to the national CBS stories on the hour.

As a result of this, one of the first stories I've heard twice already this week is the Jeanette Sliwinski trial. This is the the model/stripper who tried to kill herself by plowing her car into another vehicle at a stoplight in Skokie. She survived, but the three local musicians in that other vehicle -- who were out getting lunch from their jobs at Shure.

While I'm not as angry as Chicagoist's Tankboy about this case, I did at least know Doug Meis well enough to have had a couple of conversations with him here and there at various clubs, and know quite a few people who were good friends with him. So it's been weird and surreal waking up to people talking about him, Michael Dahlquist and John Glick -- although I feel I have to point out that their names have been mentioned at least once in the two and a half brief segments. That seems important, as I don't like even entertaining the notion that this is all about Sliwinski.

I still have my 3Friends flyer up in my cube at work, for whatever that's worth. I still think about how stupid and senseless their death was, and how utterly random. I don't even know that there's any sort of lesson you can take from it -- look in your rearview mirror more often? I like to think that I keep myself open to unlikely behavior in traffic, but even that has its limits. Adding the more personal grief of those closer to the victims is something I can't even quite comprehend.

Anyway, these men haven't been forgotten. As for the trial, I guess I'm with Dahlquist's father Paul, quoted in that Sun-Times article saying "I'd like to see it resolved in some way that she'll never forget."