That tornado last week hit the south side of South Bend. I think it was an F-2, and touched down right across the street from Ray’s old apartment at Irish Hills, which is just a touch east of where Scottsdale Mall used to be. It hit a daycare center dead-on, completely destroyed it. Luckily it was a Sunday, and nobody was there. No other real damage, except a few people with uprooted trees and broken lawn furniture and whatnot. Lots of idiots recording the funnel clouds from a hundred yards away for Facebook likes.

It’s weird because I very specifically remember that exact location. I used to drive from IUSB to Scottsdale mall every payday (I’ve told this story a million times) and that drive involves going straight down Ironwood from the school, then hanging a right on Ireland, and driving about a mile to the mall. Said tornado was just to the left of that Ironwood/Ireland intersection. The entire route of that drive is crystal clear in my head — not just the landmarks and the scenery of the drive, but how it felt to make that drive on a Friday morning. I remember very specifically listening to a Helloween live album one morning, and I have no idea why that specific trip stuck in my mind. But when I made the same trip last December, I instantly remembered that morning, for some damn reason.

I’m starting to have a lot of stupid even-number nostalgia lately. Luckily, I have no concept of time and can’t remember at any given point if it’s April or June or May or what. I passed my 30th anniversary of graduating high school. I don’t remember the specific day; I could look it up, but whatever. It was in May, I guess. So there’s a bunch of 30-year marks that hit in the next few months, none of them worth celebrating, but all of them being an annoying little itch in the back of my brain I can’t really scratch.

(I don’t know if my class had a reunion or not. I would not have been able to attend, but I wonder if I’ve moved enough times that I’ve fallen off their list, or they’ve all banned me on Facebook, or everyone’s too busy with their grandkids or posting speculation on a new Chick-fil-A location in Elkhart.)

There’s also a lot of 20-year things coming up, because that’s when I left Seattle and took my big extended trip across the country. I wrote a book (more or less) about this trip, and I often think that it needs to be unfucked and put into context and heavily edited. I just re-read the Chuck Klosterman book Killing Yourself to Live, which is ostensibly about visiting the death sites of rock stars, but is 80% about his own shit knocking around his head during the deep introspection that happens when you take weeks stuck in a car alone to drive across the country. This made me go back and read my trip book (which used to be online, but I pulled it down long ago) and it’s so wooden and horrible and so far off-brand there’s no fucking way I could publish it without a complete rewrite.

Someone is supposedly coming out with a new Commodore 64 for Christmas. This company had a mini-64 which looked cute and played all the games on a modern TV set, but the keyboard was fake, and you had to plug in a USB one. And although I did play a lot of C-64 games, I think the main reason I would want one is to screw around with programming it. The thing is, I can run an emulator on my computer, and this re-release is nothing more than some system-on-a-chip Linux computer that’s running the same emulator, most likely. It will be neat and cool, for like fifteen minutes, and then I’ll get bored of it. And not only do I have that emulator on my computer, and a Raspberry Pi that has that emulator, but I have a real C-64 in storage.

I think one of the reasons that doesn’t interest me as much anymore is the time constraint issue. When I think back to 1985 when I first got a Commodore, I must have spent hundreds of hours a month fucking around on it, playing the same four games over and over, typing in programs from Compute’s Gazette, and trying to write my own games in BASIC. Now, it takes me a major scheduling coup to get more than an hour to waste time on something. That’s why I tell anyone I know under the age of 18 the same thing: either get a $100 guitar and practice scales and modes until your fingers bleed, or memorize every programming book you can find, while you still can remember things. Burn that shit in, because there’s no goddamn way you’re going to memorize anything once you hit 40.

I took the next week off, because the last two months have severely burned me out. No plans or trips, just trying to write and not work. We’ll see how that goes.

Apropos of nothing… I can’t believe they rebooted New Coke because of a TV show. They’re rebooting everything, but owning the biggest marketing disaster of the century proves we now have the collective memory of a goldfish. Ford will be bringing back the Pinto next year, I’m guessing. If you really want New Coke, open a Pepsi and leave it on the counter for a week.

I thought for sure I’d already blogged about it, but I do have a weird tie to the Ford Pinto. On August 8, 1978, a trio of teenagers were killed about a mile from my house in Elkhart when their Ford Pinto was rear-ended by a van and exploded. They could not escape from the car because the bent-up frame pinned the doors shut. The fuel tank also had a defect which later got the cars recalled; the girls’ parents would get a recall notice six months after their kids died. Elkhart County would sue Ford for homicide; they lawyered up with James F. Neal, Watergate prosecutor who was later known for defending John Landis in his helicopter issue trial and Exxon after their Valdez problems. Anyway, Ford got off. I don’t remember any of this (I was in the second grade) but one legacy is that there are a series of emergency pull-offs on the side of US-33 near Concord Mall. (The accident was caused when the girls stopped in the right lane to check if their gas cap was still on. The van driver had dropped their cigarette and was trying to find it on the floor.)

I used to walk the side of that road occasionally, especially when I worked at the Taco Bell there. That stretch of road had incredibly high concrete curbs on the shoulder, and no sidewalk to speak of. Occasionally, there would be a dirt trail, or maybe four or five concrete squares, none of them anywhere near level. The shoulder was always filled with debris: pieces of exhaust, flat tires, nuts and bolts, and rough gravel that looked like landscaping rock. I remember trying to ride a bike on the shoulder to a doctor’s appointment in the summer of 1993 when I was home. I had a flat tire within the first mile, had to turn around and push the bike home.

…Fell down a horrible Rush k-hole while Sarah was in Japan last week. Watched the 2010 documentary for the tenth time (or whatever) and then the new one, Time Stand Still, which was problematic for me. It’s a good documentary, but it’s so sad. And it makes Neil look like a bit of an asshole for wanting to quit, and maybe that’s true, but it’s bittersweet. Part of me thinks they should have hung it up after Test for Echo, after Peart lost his wife and daughter. I personally didn’t like the studio albums after that point, and although the live albums are interesting, they’ve released so damn many of them this century. (Seven, for those keeping track, plus various live sets and tracks on reiussues and box sets and whatever else.) Anyway.

Was thinking about this, and an odd factoid: I’ve seen Rush live three times, in three different states, in three different decades. (1988: Chicago; 1994: Indianapolis; 2002: New York). So I haven’t seen them 167 times like some of the people in the documentary, but that is an oddity.

I think I mentioned I was insanely busy with work, and that was true - I think I had to work like 20 days in a row, usually a dozen hours at a time. I know this because my work VPN cuts out and makes you log back in after twelve hours. Anyway, that’s done, so I’m back to average busy for a minute, and I take off the first week of July, but have no plans. It depends on the weather; maybe I will go hike somewhere, or maybe I will just sleep.

The weather got super hot for a week (in the 90s, which is very unusual here) and then it dropped back down to normal, 60s/70s and no rain. I’ve been walking outdoors pretty much exclusively and have cut out the mall stuff for the time being, which is good, because it’s been getting incredibly depressing. I should be taking pictures, but I haven’t. I have the same roll of film in my Vivitar that I put in there while away on vacation (and come to think of it, I brought it through security a couple of times, so it might be fogged now) and my digital cameras haven’t been out since Vegas. I keep thinking about buying a new DSLR, but then I remember I’m not using the one I have.

Went walking around Alameda today, the old location of the Navy base, which is all either abandoned or in the middle of redevelopment. Today I walked an area just above Seaplane Lagoon, a flat paved rectangle on the water, maybe half a mile long and a quarter-mile deep, nothing but cracked asphalt and seagulls smashing oysters on the concrete piers. There’s a large open area just east of where the airfields were. The airfield is fenced off completely, a “nature preserve” that is slowly melting back into the environment. I saw a parade of import tuner Fast and Furious types in lowered Hondas with blacked-out windows and those farty-sounding mufflers driving circles on the square miles of pavement at the edge of the base. There’s also a bunch of distilleries and wineries using old hangers and airplane maintenance buildings, and their parking lots were filled with people out for a Sunday of relaxation and tastings. At some point, I should formally research all of this, where things were, what’s zoned for what, what’s under construction. And bring a real camera. Maybe a project for my week off.

I was listening to Van Halen’s greatest hits on the way home, and let it play too long, and now I have the Van Hagar song “Poundcake” stuck in my head, so I need to go work on getting that unlodged.

• I don’t have anything new going on, because I’ve been swamped at work since I’ve been home, and probably will be for the next month. Thank godzilla the baseball season already ended for me a month ago.
• I fell down an insufferable k-hole last week and ended up reading a conspiracy theory page about how John Denver’s death was faked. I don’t remember the exact reason why, but the author had an incredible number of reasons, some theories implicating the NTSB, a map and a series of diagrams, etc. I’m not going to link to the page because I’m sure it would just cause trouble. I’ve found that even if you 100% agree with people this far gone, they will say you’re wrong. It’s like expecting to win an argument in the comments section of a small-town newspaper.
• Since I’ve been back, I’ve been re-reading a bunch of different music books. I have no idea why. Actually, I think it’s because I watched that Netflix docu-drama The Dirt.  So I re-read that, the Nikki Sixx book The Heroin Diaries, Our Band Could Be Your Life, the first Chuck Klosterman book, and I’m reading the David Byrne book now. This is apropos of nothing; I am not planning on writing a music book. I’m just bored.
• I first read The Dirt during a horrible bout of food poisoning in 2005. I ate some warm mayo from the Quizno’s on St. Mark’s (long since gone, as is everything else there) and became horrifically sick for three or four days, couldn’t hold down water, super-high fever, hallucinations — good stuff. My now-wife-then-girlfriend came to my apartment for the first time to give me gatorade since I couldn’t get out of bed, and she left me with a copy of the Motley Crue book with me for some reason. So I read the 400-some pages in a fever dream, and somehow remember flashes of it, but not the whole thing. Reading it now made more sense, but it’s pretty dated, and the band went through another complete cycle of fall-apart/get-together/quit since then. (Or maybe two, I don’t keep track.)
• There is a new Elephant Man book out, and I bought it, because apparently I have to read every book about Joseph Merrick that comes out. This was written by a genealogist who is distantly related to the guy who ran the freak show Merrick was in. It was much more about the genealogy of his distant relatives and completely avoided talking about any of his medical prognosis. So I didn’t find it that interesting and only skimmed it, which I hate saying because the author was very thorough with the research.
• There were some interesting bits in the book though, about Victorian history in general, which I should know more about, but of course I don’t, because lazy. One thing was a line about how the religious school system back then was designed to give god as hope to the lower class so they would ignore the insufferable misery of the economic system. That puts the Indiana public school system’s slow slide into parochialism into perspective. The other thing was they had a long run on the anti-vaccination movement of the mid-19th century, which is also timely.
• I am still writing but I have nothing anywhere near complete. I have two untitled books like Rumored that are in the 90,000-word range but need serious work and some kind of structure or flow or whatever. Also a short story book that’s maybe 60K words, same thing. And then another 300,000 words of… stuff. Hard to pull this all together.
• I have been hemming and hawing about writing a book about malls. I have a blank manuscript, a general outline, and I know what I’d write about. But each time I try to get started, I get a few thousand words down, and it feels so wooden and boring, I can’t do anything further. And aside from the fact that this is so off-brand that only three people would read it, I would get an endless amount of shit from the “NO YOUR WRONG WALMART IS AWESOME” crowd, or people who have somehow forgotten that K-Mart was always a shitty store. I don’t want to argue about it, so I don’t care.
• I have been avoiding malls as much as possible, but the weather has been bad here, so I have been walking there on weekends. The most upscale mall I go to, Stoneridge, is a bit of a mess now, and very depressing. The big Sears closed, and Simon is in a zoning fight to tear it down and build some kind of “activity center” thing there, with a movie theater, gym, upscale grocery, and a few other retail spots. Probably a good idea, but who knows if it will happen before the next crash.
• I also should probably avoid retail groups, but I can’t. I also can’t stop reading this Elkhart group, which is humorously bad. Every single post about anything ends up becoming about how Elkhart needs a Chick-fil-A. Every time they raze an old decrepit building to leave it a vacant lot (i.e. weekly) someone chimes in that it’s going to be a Chick-fil-A. Never mind that CfA has no plans to expand in Indiana for the next two years, and posts a list of all future store openings, and even if it were expanding, there probably isn’t enough traffic in Elkhart to support it, it’s still posted about fifty times a day. And I’ve yet to see someone spell it correctly.
• The JoAnn Fabrics in the Concord Mall left. I think Kay Jewelers did too. Also the Fitness USA across the street couldn’t negotiate a lease and closed. I think it’s now down to under 20 stores. Still not sure of the end game here, but when your mall is 75% vacant and the highest-traffic thing is a pizza-by-the-slice place, that’s not good.
• I still have not sorted through my Vegas photos, and haven’t been that enthusiastic about it. I don’t think anyone uses Flickr anymore, so I’m not sure what the point is. I post one-offs on Instagram, so I guess that’s good enough for now.
• A tornado’s rolling through northern Indiana right now. Hope you folks are in your basements.

I’m back from a week in Vegas. My allergies have gone full tilt since I returned yesterday afternoon, and I really should rail about ten Benadryl tablets and go to bed for another week, but I should probably write a dumb bulleted list of everything before I forget it.

• As I mentioned in my last post, this trip was extremely unplanned and I did little research, except to book hotel/plane/car, and plan on writing all week.
• I did not write all week. I probably got less writing done than if I stayed home.
• I stayed at the Candlewood Suites, which is about a mile east of the strip, at Paradise and Flamingo. This is an odd location, because it’s an okay walk to the central strip, but there’s a lot of nothing between the two. It’s also about a quarter-mile north of the Hard Rock. There’s nothing north of there, unless you want to see the back of the Wynn golf course. You really don’t want to walk east of Paradise.
• The hotel itself was nice, fairly updated, had a kitchenette and a nice desk and all that. But the toilet ran constantly, did this weak little half-flush every 174 seconds that eventually drove me nuts. The big plusses were no resort fee, no charge for parking, decent wifi, and no casino. Also, I could make oatmeal every day for breakfast, instead of going to a resort diner and eating 1700 calories of pancakes for $47.
• Every single thing in Las Vegas is now a weed store. Everything. Okay, maybe not really, but the ads are everywhere. I can’t find an exact number, but I think Vegas has twice as many dispensaries as Oakland. And everyone sells CBD oil, every gift shop and gas station that has knock-off Chinese Vegas shirts for three for ten bucks. Every billboard is for weed or Jesus. Every taxi cab is fully wrapped in weed ads. It’s sort of bizarre how the gold rush has struck there.
• I walked an insane amount on this trip, something like 40 or 50 miles. Way over 10,000 steps a day. There was a day of 25,000, which is about a half-marathon. Had a minor foot injury one day - ingrown toenail cut into the next toe, sock full of blood, etc. But I got it patched up and had no issues after that.
• Tons of food. I found out quickly that the best way to handle things was OpenTable reservations, especially since you can now convert their points to Amazon cards. So even if I just wanted a seat at a bar at 11 in the morning, I’d make a reservation. Places of note: the Hofbrauhaus place on Paradise and Harmon (hard to go wrong with Bavarian sausages and waitresses in dirndls; Gordon Ramsay’s pub in Caesar’s (scotch eggs are so good, Waygu steak is also top-notch); and Wolfgang Puck’s bar in MGM. Ate way too much on this trip, and gained three or four pounds, which isn’t good, but the food was worth it.
• Went to the Neon Boneyard, an outdoor collection of retired neon signs from casinos and hotels. Great stuff, although once you walk the loop and take your pictures, that’s like fifteen minutes total. Really weird to see signs for casinos which I used to go to all the time.
• Walked around downtown on Fremont on a Monday afternoon, which was depressing as hell. You really need to go at night when it’s lit up. During the day, it’s all old people who don’t want to deal with that liberal bullshit down on the strip, and homeless buskers. It’s a great place to watch old women on mobility scooters with oxygen tanks chain-smoke. I went to the giant White Castle there out of a fit of nostalgia, and quickly remembered why I hadn’t eaten White Castle in thirty years.
• Went to I think every mall in the area. The casino malls were no-brainers; you cut through them to use the air conditioning and avoid the pile-ups on the strip. The mall at Caesar’s is the highest-grossing mall in the country, and every few years, they say “fuck it, we need more” and basically Control-C Control-V the whole mall and double it in size. It’s about an expansion away from lapping Mall of America for size. It probably makes three times as much per square foot already.
• Meadows Mall, just a bit north of Vegas, and Galleria at Sunset, down in Henderson, were both well-managed, orderly, large malls that had few vacancies, lots of national brands, and very little soul. Galleria has the biggest JC Penney I’ve ever seen.
• And then there’s the Boulevard Mall. Holy shit, was this bizarre. So it’s a million and a quarter square foot mall, four anchors, all dead. The interior has this crazy early sixties art deco look to it, but they’ve gone sideways on filling the mall. For example, the first floor of Dillard’s became a Goodwill store. The upstairs is now a telemarketing call center. A Circuit City became an Asian grocery store. A JC Penney got carved up into an indoor go-kart track and a laser tag arena. A bunch of stores became an aquarium. The top floors of a Macy’s is now office space for Anthem Blue Cross. A bunch of the stores in the mall are various local Filipino-related businesses. There’s an imitation Cinnabon. There’s a store that only sells Mexican potato chips. They were blasting slow jazz at excruciating volume through the concourses. There were 19 different kiosks selling CBD oil. The whole thing was just sensory overload, so confusing.
• I didn’t go in, but the Liberace museum - the original one - is now an escape room. The new museum is now a Mexican catering hall.
• This was the first* time I’d visited Vegas in the spring — I usually visit in either January or during the summer. So it while it would be hot in the late afternoon, it was actually cool in the morning, and would require a jacket. It only got unreasonably hot one or two days. It also rained on Tuesday, a crazy desert rainstorm where it dumped an insane amount of rain quickly, and suddenly nobody knew how to drive.
• (* I actually just realized I was in Las Vegas overnight almost exactly twenty years ago, when I moved east. That was my first real visit, outside of an airport layover. But I don’t think I was even outside. I pulled into the Luxor, ate at the food court, fell asleep, and then left the next morning.)
• I went to the SLS casino, which used to be the Sahara, and saw Eddie Griffin. That was a weird one, and I went on a lark, because no other comedians were there all week. It was maybe a 200-seater, and I had tickets about a row of tables back from stage. He’s working on a new hour for Netflix, taping this June. It was a bit sloppy. Maybe he drank too much, maybe he didn’t care about a Wednesday night show, but he did a little over two hours, and I think he’s about halfway to getting that hour done. There was some good stuff, but very uneven. (What’s even funnier is reading the Yelp reviews of uptight white midwesterners who were offended by his show.)
• Saw Blue Man Group at their new spot at the Luxor. I think this was the seventh time I’d seen them — three in NY at the original Astor Theater, and three in Vegas. I know it’s corny and not cool and whatever, but I like going, like the drumming, and like the sound and music. I don’t like how many people try to video the thing, even though they tell you not to video the thing, but everyone’s the center of the universe these days.
• Drove out to Valley of Fire, but this was the hottest day of the week, and with the heat and the altitude, I was pretty much done after about 30 minutes of walking and climbing around. Also, people climbing all over that famous red stone arch and taking selfies, even though there are a thousand DO NOT CLIMB signs all over it.
• Went to the Pawn Stars pawn shop. Of course, none of the people from the show were there. They have opened a little plaza next to it, built from steel containers, filled with various little shops. Chumlee has a candy store, which is a tiny little room with some pick-a-mix bins and about as much candy as a typical Kroger grocery. I guess he works there sometimes, though. There’s also a CBD oil store, of course.
• I should be don’t-ask-don’t-tell on gambling. I didn’t do much of it, did okay, let’s leave it at that.

Overall, a good trip, although I wish I would have done more writing. Also dreading a week of emails tomorrow morning, but not much I can do about that.

1. I have this horrible urge to switch this site from WordPress to a static site generator. I’m most familiar with Jekyll, but I also know it would be slow as hell on a site with 1200 long posts. Maybe Hugo. Maybe this is a stupid idea, because it would involve typing metadata by hand and screwing up tags in every post. But it means I could use a regular text editor instead of this piece of garbage in WP. And I could work offline. And I wouldn’t have to worry about break-ins constantly, because WordPress is basically a virus injection device that happens to have a blog engine in it.
2. I have to take a week off next month. I spent a lot of time researching places to go so I didn’t end up sitting around the house like I did when this happened in November, but I just narrowly missed the window on deals, and airfare is stupid expensive right now. I had about a dozen potentials that I was running the numbers on, and either because of price, distance, weather, or comfort, they all fell out, and I ended up booking another Vegas trip.
3. I haven’t thought much about it or planned anything yet, but I mostly want to be able to write, take pictures of ruin, and have a car so I could drive out to surrounding areas easily. I also wanted a kitchen. And this seems counterintuitive, but I hate daily maid service. I spend all morning waiting and wondering when my work is going to be interrupted by housekeeping. So I booked an extended stay hotel, similar to the one I had over Christmas. It’s about a mile east of the strip, has a kitchenette, and no daily housekeeping. No casino, no spa, no magic show, no attractions, but also no resort fee, and free parking. That’s as far as I’ve gotten with the trip planning.
4. I did spend too long shopping for a new laptop bag, because the one I got for free at a 2009 Microsoft trade show has finally fallen apart. After much hemming and hawing, I got this one and it seems good.
5. The GNC at Concord Mall closed. And it wasn’t part of GNC corporate shuttering stores because they’re going bankrupt or whatever; it’s because they are moving the store a mile or two south, into the strip mall next to Wal-Mart. I found this sad for weird nostalgic reasons, because I had a girlfriend in the summer between high school and college who was a manager there, and I was working at Wards that summer and when we both closed, I’d go over there to meet her and we’d drive around the Michiana desolation all night, looking for 24-hour diners or places to park. That was a big backdrop to a book I’ll never write about that summer. And that was thirty years ago this year. Ugh.
6. I went to Hilltop Mall in Richmond and they are starting renovation (or not) and have half the stores in the mall covered in plywood and sealed off. It’s really eerie - check my Instagram for a better look. This mall is sort of trapped in time, with a lot of Seventies look to it, lots of brown tile and brick. That will all be gutted and it will be turned all white and generic like an Apple store. I don’t have deep nostalgic feelings for this mall, but I do have a weird connection, and it will be sad when it’s blanded up.
7. I think my weird deja vu connection to this mall is that it partially reminds me of the old Scottsdale Mall in South Bend, the double-decker design with the open top deck, and the general decor. I used to go to Scottsdale every other Friday morning when I got my paycheck at IUSB, and I have a lot of strong memories of wandering the halls when it was completely dead in there during the day, and Hilltop has a similar vibe. (Scottsdale is long gone, demalled in the early 00s. Very little about it online, too. I already know about the deadmalls post and the South Bend Tribune slideshow.)
8. I am getting really sick of the whole dead mall thing. Part of it is the inevitability of change that I have to disregard when I pine for the old days of malls. Part of it is that almost everyone in social media groups about malls are absolutely insufferable. Part of it is that many of them hold this MAGA-like belief that we need to go back to an old time that didn’t really exist. It’s all just depressing to me, and I need to get past it, but I can’t.
9. So yeah, I’m going off to take a bunch of pictures of dead malls in Vegas. And I will walk all of the non-dead malls underneath the casinos. I think if you walked the perimeter of every floor of every Simon mall in Las Vegas, you’d essentially walk an entire marathon, except it would be air conditioned to 61 degrees and full of people drinking yard-long frozen margaritas.
10. I’m also stuck on the idea of buying a new camera before I leave, and I need to shut that shit down and burn through the large cache of film I haven’t been shooting all year.