On my birthday I gave myself a gift: a commitment to merry indifference. To the professional past, anyway. I just stopped thinking of myself in terms of what I used to do and dedicated myself to the things I will do next. And then I got a cold.
Or so I thought. You can’t really tell until it gets its claws into you. There’s a point of “yep, got one” that cannot be denied, and then it’s just a matter of consuming so much zinc you have the blood chemistry of a decorative fixture on the Hindenburg. (I am certain I have used a variant of that line before.) The itchy throat has many different types of sensation, and I usually know that a cold is en route when it’s pitched down low in the windpipe. A scratchy back-soft-palate is probably not a cold. If it does indeed manifest in ways that makes you know it’s time, you gripe a bit, knowing you have to suffer the coming of the cold and the strong patch, then the interminable diminution of nasal symptoms. I don’t think I’ve had a full-blown cold for five years. Hail Zinc.
It was cool over the weekend. Autumn breath behind summer’s mask. Disconcerting and bracing: This will be a constant, soon enough. The grass is green and the sun sets at a stately August pace, and the crickets chirp. But soon.
LATER
As it turned out - as it always turns out - I did not have a cold. I did have an hour-long convo with Natalie, the best birthday present. Of course the two are not mutually exclusive or related in anyway. I did not have a sprained foot, but I did have a geranium. Makes no sense. We talked about all sorts of things personal and artistic and work-related; imagine being in your first year at an ad agency and watching Mad Men. It made me think about the only newspaper show, Lou Grant, which I don’t remember at all, aside from the characters. And I don’t remember anything they did. The photographer was a wild man! The guy reporter was sarcastic! The Gal Reporter was brave but vulnerable! Crimes were solved! Did they solve crimes? No, they probably exposed things, since that’s what papers did. Ruthless, unblinking application of scrutiny and suspicion, uncovering all the corruption and lies.
Sigh
Well, it was the 80s. There was a movie in the 90s - The Paper, right? Last gasp. We had no idea.
I was driving down the usual route doing the usual errands, and was slightly surprised to see . . .
The kebab / pita joint finally coughed up its lemur. Or gave up the ghost, if you must. We used to frequent it when it was called something else, but stopped because everything took forever and orders were frequently wrong. After a while you give up.
This will mean little to most of you.
But those of us up here may recognize the tell-tale arches of an old Zantigo's. It was (and is, in revived form) a fast-food Mexican chain, swallowed by Taco Bell a long time ago. But if you know the barest outlines of an old franchise's style, you never forget.
I was street-viewing in Kearney, Nebraska yesterday, and saw this:
That could only have been one thing.
There's such nostalgia for the old Pizza Huts these days. The red-and-white check tablecloths, the dark red plastic cups, the Tiffany touches, the slightly-sticky parmesan cheese shakers. Everything but the pizza, it seems. Why? Because the last generation to experience them is looking back at Halcyon Carefree Youth. Maybe you worked there in high school, or took a delivery job in college. Maybe you can walk in that side door on the right and know exactly what everything looked like inside.
I worked there. Two locations. One in Fargo, one in St. Louis Park. Neither exist today.
I'm curious about the soft-drink sizing. S, L, and P.
P?
Oh: right.
I seem to recall a story about a Pizza Hut that recently redid itself in the old style, and how people loved it. There's a subreddit devoted to 80s fast food, and the commercials seem as if they're from a different civilization. We made fun of them at the time - all that ridiculous cheer - and no one really believed that a trip to McDonald's would be full of such ecstatic gustatory experiences, but now we would like to be there thank you very much and we promise we will be grateful, because we know it all had something, and we miss it. I mean, we'll survive. But we miss it.
The one thing I remember the jukebox playing at the St. Louis Park Pizza Hut: "Smoke From a Distant Fire." I hated that song. The cook was always going on and on about how well it was produced. So clean. Eh. I couldn't stand that stupid rhyme: your eyes have a MIST / from the smoke of a DIST
TANT FIRE
Every time it got on my nerves.
And it's "pitcher."
Tired of drinking Four Roses? Try this, which also has no relationship to a rose whatsoever.
"Claims use since Dec 26, 1933."
That's some finely aged stuff, right there. Really, we didn't make it right after prohibition was lifted! It was . . . in Canada, that's it, Canada. And we brought it down. Legally!
We start with the stars, suggesting a space opera:
1959 Cheapie. John Agar. Say no more. It’s an earnest little thing and it’s not entirely bad.
Guess what’s brought us to a perilous point? Why, atomic testing. Sometimes it has deleterious effects on a particularly personal level:
If you’re thinking “they wasted John Carradine in the opening sequence?” No. He comes back from the dead to intone the words of the Invisible Invaders, who are mad at us for reasons and intent to invade. Their secret: they occupy the bodies of the dead! The reanimated corpse of Carradine shows up and tells one guy, an anti-nuclear-testing scientist, that Earth it has to surrender. This doesn’t go over well.
So dead then come back to life and get on the phone and tell everyone to surrender.
That doesn't go over well either.
The Scientists join up with John Agar, doing a good job as a military guy, and head into the bunker. The TV cameras show the horrible hordes heading towards their three-foot-thick walls:
No one in the bunker seems surprised that they’re being narrated, and in the past tense.
Of course the Scientists come up with a way to stop the world-wide plague of dead guys running stock footage of things blowing up, and Agar has to go capture a zombie who’s possessed by an invisible alien. They have to figure out how to make him visible. Meanwhile, according to the stock footage, Earth is almost done for.
They discover the means of killing the aliens: sound! We must make a sound gun! And so:
It works! And then everyone learns a lesson that had nothing to do with the means of defeating the aliens, at all.
Actually, everyone was fighting fires on their own territory, no one was working together, and four guys in a concrete closet figured it out, but sure, go with that if it makes you feel good.
That will do for today, Bleat wise; Matchbooks and a Diner await. See you around.
