I’ve been living in this city for sixty-two years, and I want someone—anyone—to explain to me when Chicago decided it was too good for regular coffee. I walked into the diner on Halsted last Tuesday, the one that’s been there since before the expressway, and the kid behind the counter asked me if I wanted oat milk. Oat milk. In my coffee. I told him I wanted cow milk, from a cow, ideally one that lives in Wisconsin and doesn’t have an Instagram account.

He looked at me like I’d asked for a glass of motor oil. Then he said they were “transitioning away from dairy.” Transitioning. The diner. The one with the vinyl booths and the health code grade taped to the window with packing tape. That diner is transitioning.

Back when I started at the Dispatch, you could get a cup of coffee for eighty cents and nobody asked you a single follow-up question. You didn’t have to specify a size using Italian words. You didn’t have to decide between seven different kinds of milk squeezed from seven different plants. You just sat down, somebody poured coffee into a mug that was already on the table, and you read the paper. The actual paper, by the way, not a phone.

Now every third storefront in the West Loop is a “wellness concept” with a name that sounds like a prescription medication. They sell twelve-dollar smoothies in jars and the jars don’t even have lids. I saw a grown man carrying one on the Blue Line last week with both hands, like he was transporting a newborn. Meanwhile the train smelled like it always does, which is to say, not well.

And the anxiety—lord, the anxiety. Everybody’s anxious now. It’s like a civic hobby. People pay money to sit in rooms and breathe. Breathing rooms! When I was anxious, you know what I did? I went to work. I shoveled the walk. I yelled at the alderman’s office about the streetlight on Lowe Avenue that’d been out since the Clinton administration. That was my meditation, and it worked, because eventually they fixed the light.

I’m not saying progress is bad. I’m saying that somewhere between 1996 and now, Chicago went from the City of Big Shoulders to the City of Big Feelings, and nobody asked me if that was okay. We used to build things. Steel things. Now we build “community spaces” that are just empty rooms with exposed brick and a succulent on a stool.

My neighbor’s kid just got a job as a “brand storyteller.” I asked him what that meant and he talked for eleven minutes without answering the question. That’s not storytelling. That’s filibustering. I’ve been telling stories in this paper for thirty years and not once has anyone called me a brand.

Look, I love this city. I love it the way you love a relative who keeps making terrible decisions—loudly, and with a lot of unsolicited advice. But if somebody could bring back the diner coffee without the interrogation, I’d consider forgiving the rest of it. Oat milk. I swear on Ditka’s mustache.