At first I thought that my wife’s plane left on time because she lied to the ticket agent. Packed the bag yourself? Yes! (Even though I helped.) In your control at all times? Yes! (Even though I brought it downstairs and stowed it in the car.) Anyone ask you to carry anything? No! (Even though her sister gave her three packages to take to the family in AZ.) Turns out my wife answered the last question honestly, and said she had three packages from her sis. Whereupon the ticket agent drilled her with a dirty look and asked the question again. And this time she said, well, no.

Thus secure, the plane left on time.

Of course, I couldn’t say goodbye at the gate - as a non-ticketed passsenger I was a potential security threat, even if I’d cleared the watchful gaze of the rhuemy-eyed drones watching C4 and box cutters roll through the X-ray machine. There’s a new security machine atthe airport - a gigantic beige device that looks like a CAT scanner. It sits in the middle of the ticketing hall, and completely obscures the fabulousl 60s-era inlaid marble map of the planet on the floor.

Grimly symbolic, that. Note to self: kill bin Laden.

Went home to begin the weekend of freedom. To give you an idea how it went: I woke at ten AM this morning, which sounds sinful and indulgent until you realize that I went to bed at four. I was almost proud of myself when I finally gave it up last night - I felt like someone who picks up a basketball after ten years and finds he still has the stamina and the skill to compete. I’ve always preferred to approach the sunrise from the opposite direction, just so I can get the drop on it if need be, but this was ridiculous. The entire weekend was like this - every night an aimless stroll through one hobby after the other, every morning the slight sense of shame for having stayed up so late, and the odd sensation of a quiet breakfast without Elmo or Ollie or Gnat amusing herself at her table.

The weekend had a few moments of fun, but most of the time I felt like a drifting ship waiting for the anchor to hit bottom or snag on something solid. Jasper went into Coma Mode, and hardly stirred all weekend. I played exactly 30 minutes of the game I’d procured (Bloodwake, which Sucksmuch) then wandered to the computer to work. Finger aerobics. Annnnnd tweak and scan and code and write and tweak and scan and code and write. It wasn’t a bad weekend. If you had a third leg, an extra, and it was gangrenous, and anesthetized, and you spent the weekend sawing it off, it would be like this weekend.

One bright spot. Saturday I did something I haven’t done since - well, since the last time I had four or five days alone. I just drove around town, looking at Things, whittling a hard block of time down to a soft pile of shavings. I prowled through the Nokomis neighborhood, looking at the old houses grand and small, the small commercial nodes (the strip malls of their day.) Threaded through the side streets, slowing to pay respect to old grand churches and noble bungalows. Saw some signage from the 50s or 60s. I never get over to this part of town - it used to be part of South Minneapolis, but the freeway cut this part of town in half, and now it's like a twin who was taken from your home at childhood.

As much as the League of Interminably Concerned Citizens bemoans the impact of the auto on cities, my car enables me to tour vast swaths of the old town when I please, see neighborhoods I’ve not seen in years. What would have been an afternoon’s journey on a clattering trolley is now a 20-minute jaunt away - and instead of shivering in the underheated streetcar, I had my individual climate controls, a stereo capable of reproducing the sounds of the finest concert halls of Europe, and a hot cup of coffee as well. (Liquids are forbidden on buses today.) See a street that has an interesting house? Hang a left. Pass an interesting store? Stop on the spot, not wait to be excreted ten blocks down the line. God bless the car! Savior of the urban experience!

Heh heh.

I used to do this when I was single and bereft. I’d just drive. There would be a vague objective - oh, I’ll go across town and, uh, buy some cigarettes; they have those Carltons I really like at that gas station on Broadway - but usually I was just in a wandering mood. So it was Saturday. I ended up in old neighborhoods where I lived long ago; visited Theater Antiques, an old movie theater converted in a small mall of expensive detritus for credulous yuppies (I believe that’s the actual slogan.). I always find something. This time it was two enameled lighters for my haphazard Zippo collection, and a copy of CONFIDENTIAL from 1960 for a later Flotsam Cove.

Then back through Uptown, so named because it is south of everything else. Really. There’s a big movie theater that has UPTOWN on its mast - hence the name of the neighborhood, but it still makes no sense; in the 30s when the theater was built, the city was not only mostly to the north, there were only 24 blocks to the south before you ran out of city altogether. It’s like calling Peru “UpCountry.” Perhaps the theater owners heard about the concept of a pole shift, and wanted to get ahead of the action. It’s one of the never-mentioned peculiarities of Minneapolis: downtown is up from Uptown, and Uptown is down from downtown.

I lived there in the 80s. Had a one-bedroom between the lakes; $300 a month. In the summer you could hear the revellers up the street in the outdoor bars; once a night a train would come through a block away, which was good - all Serious Young Writers need to live close to a train in their 20s, to make them feel part of the Gritty World Beyond. The apartment looked out on The Mall, a grassy expanse that ran from Hennepin to the lakes, so I had a nice park view from my working window. I shot a prize-winning TV show there, wrote my first novel there, wooed my wife there. I loved that apartment. (My wife remembers it as an absolute sty.) Nine years after I left Uptown I would walk past a store window and see a puppy; yes, Jasper is an Uptown dog. My friend the Giant Swede lived in Uptown as well, as did half the other strenuously single people I knew. Loved it, loved it.

But. Then came the Day the Bar Closed, which seemed to signal an end to our golden youth. The Old Library Cafe was the liver-pounder of choice for our circle. It was housed in a Carnegie Library, which made you feel good; there’s something about drinking within sight of Ionic columns that ennobles the effoft. Its outdoors bar was the prime fleshpot of the time; you went to the beach during the day, got brown, then went to the Old Library at night to be brown around other browned people. I met absolutely zero (0) people there, because my social clique was the staff. Yes, yes, I know - this is the surest sign of a loooooser, the sort of fellow who chats up the waitresses because he knows they have to talk to him. But. I had a friend from a TV station where I worked who also waitressed there, and she let the others know: I was ex-waiter myself, the Giant Swede was an ex-bartender, and we were okay guys, and good tippers. Hence our table was the Island of Relief. The waitresses could swear, complain, be nice without worrying that it would be taken the wrong way, and if the boss wasn't looking they could sneak a drag.

Looking back, I see this was the last time my social life would be tightly braided with Server Culture - I wasn’t working 9-5, but I was on the professional track, such as it was. The Giant Swede was working for a defense contractor, and since he was buffed out, nine feet tall, had an Arnie buzzcut and Raybans, the womenfolk in the waitress work regarded him as an unusually hip manifestation of the Reagan administration. We both dated the women who worked there, with the usual tiresomely messy results, but it made for an interesting summer. Then one day a woman skated over on Rollerblades and struck up a conversation with the Giant Swede, and no more did he date the waitresses. (They have two kids now.) I met my wife a few months after summer’s end, and when I introduced her to the Giant Swede, we all met at the Old Library’s indoor bar. A few months later the place closed for good. Its work was done.

Bars close all the time, for the usual reason - shifting tastes, cooked books, coke habits in the office - and this provides you with a marker, a milestone, the sense that something’s over and it’s time to move on. I pity the people who hang out at financially sound bars, who never find the door to entropy suddenly padlocked. They never get the boot. There's something to be said for standing stunned outside your favorite bar and asking: what now? Where should I go/ And hearing a small voice saying: go home. Go home.

So I drove past my old apartment. Had an 80s station on the radio, and I was actually listening to the songs instead of mentally fast-forwarding through them and changing the station. Every Breath You Take, check. Always Something There to Remind Me, check. I listened to them as if this was all there was, as if these were the last notes of today and the first notes of tomorrow. It’s necessary to revisit the songs of your heedless youth, if only to affirm your lurking suspicion that it’s All Gone To Hell since you were a youngun. I mean, what if “Shout” by Tears for Fears is really a great song, and you wouldn’t know because you’ve changed the channel every time it came on for the last 15 years?

I’m here to report that it’s not a great song, but now I’m sure, instead of just suspecting it. But now and then it’s good to stay with, say, “Don’t You Forget About Me,” particularly if you can put the Brat Pack out of your mind, and especially if you’re charging up the road to Jasperwood, and as that drum riff crashes in you look up and see the stone eagles atop the water tower blazing in the sunset. You’ve just toured a hundred years of city history and a score of years of your own small story, and now you’re home. And this place is better than anyplace you’ve seen today.

All that missing is your family, which is everything in the world.

Although you do have the Buckaroo Banzai DVD to watch, so let’s not get too tragic here.

404s? You ain’t seen nothing yet. I’m sure the site is just a mess, given that I’ve been uploading for a week here and there, suffering disconnects and timeouts and hangs of all manner. But at least there’s now a custom 404 page (although the last time I tried it, I got a 404 telling me the 404 page could not be found.) In any case - the site is now firmly seated on the Texas Server.

Take a look at the main page - I love that picture, and it’s a little beefier than before just to celebrate the slightly wider pipe and more generous bandwidth allotment the site now enjoys. Just don’t go nuts! Portion it out! I beg you - if folks could confine themselves to visiting one section per month, I’d be happy. It’ll keep the site from shrinking down to three pages and an apology, anyway.

This site is hosted by a private party, for which I am deeply grateful. But it still costs money, so don’t think I rattled the tin cup and plead poverty and spent the scratch on Xbox games. It all went into the site, and to show my gratitude I’ve added old sections gone lo these months - and added a new pop culture site as well, Matchbook-O-Rama. It’s a straightforward site - just pictures from my matchbook collection, nothing more. There are many sites like this on the web, but most I’ve seen are rather . . . bad. The site just has six pages now, but it will suffer a weekly update, along with Flotsam Cove.


Theory: Star Wars reflects no cultural mood, no shifts in taste and temperment; it’s a noisy fairytale, and stands outside of the culture that produced it. Star Trek, on the other hand, always reflects the zeitgeist, for better or worse. The first show was gung-ho New Frontier cultural imperialism leavened with the instructive and often chastening lessons of multiculturalism - i.e., Earth had much to learn from other cultures. And it often had much to teach them, too. The second iteration was static, hopeful, diplomatic, PC, and in retrospect I don’t find the average episode too compelling. Unless there are Klingons or battles. Deep Space Nine was the post-Soviet version, an embassy in the Balkans. Voyager was typical 90s: the great exploratory mythos reduced to one small ship crawling home on hands and knees. Now we have Enterprise, which I am enjoying more than I had hoped, and which seems to be unapologetically American. Last night I watched an episode Tivo’d earlier n the week, and caught this exchange:

Reed, the bitter British munitions expert, is lamenting that our favorite lanky boozehound warp theorist and pig steward Zeph Cochrane launched his first warp-capable ship from Montana, and reed says the word “Montana” like a Frenchman would say “Velveeta.” Trip, the can-do Suth’ner, gives him the needle: “Ah don’t remember no Europeans figuring out how to invent a warp engine. No Brits, no Eyetalians, no Serbo-Croatians . . .”

I thought of this today when I came across a story in British newspaper about the new addition to the Spooky gunship: laser beams! They shoot through schools! the article seemed to suggest; the title called them Death Rays or something like that. (As opposed to other bullets, which the British newspaper writers no doubt regard as “owie pellets.”) So we’re on the way to inventing phasers: great. Good for us. I’m glad we have these things. I want our enemies to know we have death rays. But I would also like our allies in the newspaper world to act like grown-ups, and realize that we have not made these things because we are hideous bloodthirsty lunatics who might go all cowboy on everyone and do something unthinkable - say, break off relations with Arafat after we caught the PA smuggling in a radiological weapon to Tel Aviv. I’d also like them to remember that the DoE, thanks to the Argonne lab, invented a surgical laser which will save more lives than the Death Ray will ever take away.

One of the things I loved about the original Trek was that the Captain was an Iowan, for chrissakes. I think that spirit is present in the new show as well, which will make it unpopular among the smart set in Europe, and the object of much cassette-smuggling in Tehran. Also of note: when faced with death, the two character polish off a bottle of whiskey and discuss the Vulcan officer's butt. Works for me.

Weekend of Freedom Movies:

“Jeepers Creepers” was advertised as a smart stylish horror flick, one that breathes new life into a tired genre, etc. Not bad - kept my attention, although it had a few irritating lapses. (Minor spoilers - shouldn’t really surprise anyone.) It had a demonic bad guy, which was disappointing. The minute the villain turned into an Unearthly Thing from . . . from Unearth, I guess - anyway, it became less scary. Norman Bates is always scarier than Satan. You can reason with Satan.

Second, it contained a tired cliche: the soulful psychic Black woman. Specifically, a fat Black woman. You never have a skinny Finn who has visions in these movies, or a middle-aged Ukranian. It’s embarassing, and insulting - ah done sees you in mah dreams! Jesus.

Then I watched “Outland,” or “High Noon” in outer space, as it’s been called. That was the pitch, anyway. (Some day if I ever get an audience with a studio exec, I want to pitch my idea of a high concept adventure movie. “It’s ‘Die Hard’ in a skyscraper!’” And they’ll love it.) If memory serves the film did not do boffo BO (Stop! Don’t go searching! I’ll do it myself. Okay, it made $20,000,000, which isn’t bad.) While the DVD is horrible - the print is so blurry it appears to have been smeared with Vaseline - it has some extraordinary set design and nice model work. (No matter how detailed the model or good the cinemetography, however, a third of your brain is always saying, in the voice of a know-it-all 11 year old girl who thinks this is silly, that IT’S OBVIOUSLY A MODEL.) The set design dates the film, though - you can tell you’re looking at a late 70s / early 80s film, if only because the computer terminals have such crappy graphics. What was wrong with these people? Why did they think that people would use wire-frame models and 8-bit images in the future - to say nothing of black screens with green letters that all made bibity-bibity noises as they fled across the screen?

The film had one winking moment I enjoyed: Connery runs out of a room to go fight the bad guys, and he bolts through small swinging doors just like those in the saloons of Western cliches, and of course the camera lingers as the doors swing back and forth.

The big robot horse in the next shot was too obvious for my tastes, though.

Kidding. There’s a review on IMDb that sums it up well:

" This movie is strange for the singular reason that it isn't great but you can watch it multiple times and never seem to get tired of it. "

Agreed. And in that spirit: ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you back to this site as it was. And then some. (Hint: matchbooks.)