As I cling for life on a rocky outcropping off the Yellowhead Highway, it will be your shining faces I see. It will be your tears I cry. Our fingers will fail and we will fall together, forever.

Yes, I am the 943,812th person between the ages of 18 and 35 to move away from Juneau in the last five years. By Nov. 30, I will have a new life in Chicago - one filled with Italian sausage, Polish vodka and delicious, spreadable wine-cheese.

Juneau is the best place I have lived. And when it's 20 below in Chicago in the middle of January, and I'm hustling for that assistant manager position at the Chuck E. Cheese in Berwyn, I will think of Southeast Alaska often.

• Favorite drinking establishment: 22-way tie. I've never lived anywhere where so many bars have so many distinguishing characteristics. Matter of fact. I have never lived anywhere where I've hung out at the bar every day, if not every other.

When I take that first sip of the vodka tonic, I can feel a chemical change inside my body, a sense of wonder. That means I almost assuredly have a problem. Thank you, Alaska!

• Favorite bathroom: Fernando's, 116 North Franklin St. It's been a while since I've had their burrito, but the last time I made it to the restroom it was like walking into Babylon. Raised seat. Potted plants. Just a pleasing experience all the way around.

• Favorite pronunciation of the hard-a: Weld Royal, KTOO. I've never met Weld, and that's partly on purpose. I like to listen to the voices on the radio and imagine what these people look like, what they do in their spare time. Listening to Weld, I simply have no idea if she's even real. That's why she's the best.

• Favorite inexplicably controlled intersection: Glacier Avenue and Highland Drive. I thought for sure I would die here one day. Come to think of it, it's a miracle a dozen people don't die here every day.

Any way you approach, your view is partially if not totally blind. Drivers going north or south on Glacier have a stop sign, but neither direction on Highland does. Factor in that between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. the street is filled with 500 clueless high school kids walking every which way at once, and you should have a recipe completely for disaster.

• Favorite musical performance: Sweet and Low, 12:13 p.m. Sunday, April 18, 2004, Centennial Hall. I have no idea who these girls were, but their ramshackle 13-minute set at the 30th Alaska Folk Festival managed to encapsulate everything about music I hold dear. I'd been up for about 47 hours, my skin felt like it was being eaten by gnats and somehow I was volunteering with the microphone setup. These two girls showed up and created a caterwaul so joyous and tuneless, I think I saw a 62-year-old hippie comb his hair.

Thank you, Sweet and Low.

• Favorite hate mail: Nothing makes a journalist's day/week/month/life so much as a finely crafted, vitriolic slice of hate mail. I received some real winners after writing about the ladies who sell butt plugs. But the best was from an animal-rights lover, who e-mailed on June 20, 2007, after an outdoor piece about David Miller and Bill Adair hunting a leopard in Zimbabwe.

"Now, after writing such a news breaking winner, you can move on to other great stories out of Juneau, like MAN TRAPS BEAR BY THE LEG," he or she said. "Good job anyway, keep up the fine work and who knows you could some day be writing for such greats as AMERICAN HUNTER MAGAZINE or HUNTING BIG CAT MAGAZINE. ... Don't bother to write back, just sit around and gloat over your first big one. Congrats."

No, thank you.