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I've lived in Wheaton three times. That's not a flex — it's a confession. This was never the place I saw coming for myself.

Wheaton is hoity-toity. That's not a criticism. It's a structural fact about how this place was built, who it was built for, and what it has always assumed about the person walking through the door. I know what kind of town this is. And I also know that most towns contain more than what they were designed to contain.

Which is why I'm here.

Every community has a concierge function — the person who knows where everything actually is, who's doing what, what's sitting on the bulletin board that nobody stops to read. In a hotel, that person has a title and a desk. In a zip code, usually nobody's doing it. I'm doing it here. Community concierge. I'm taking the word back.

60187, Today is what I find when I look at this town like I look at everything else: structurally. What exists? Who knows about it? Where's the gap between what's available and who knows it's available? I want the groups nobody announces, the history nobody explains, and yes — what you are doing that nobody knows about yet. The institutions didn't build everything worth finding here. You did some of it.

One more thing about how this is built: this site lives on Neocities. On purpose. No algorithm deciding what you see. No platform that can change the rules next quarter. No brand partnerships, no sponsored content, no engagement metrics optimizing for something other than you actually finding what you need. Neocities is indie web — small, weird, yours. That's the right infrastructure for a grassroots community project. If this is going to be underground and independent, it should be built somewhere that means it.

Here's my particular vantage point, since it shapes what I see: I'm single. I don't have kids. I'm not a churchgoer in one of the most church-saturated suburbs in the Chicago metro. The dominant Wheaton story has never been written for me. That's not a complaint. That's a diagnostic position. What I notice in a community will be different from what someone else notices — and different perspectives are how you build a complete picture of a place.

So that's the question I'm here to answer: where does someone like me belong in a place like this?

Join me while I find out.