Had a bit of free time tonight and wanted to catch up on blogging. Then I realized it’s July 4th, and I have this odd proclivity for writing on the 4th of July, usually something dripping with nostalgia. I just tried to fix the tags so you can find them all here although the two best reads (I think) were 2024 and 1997. I also had this entry in 2003 that was later anthologized in a book and at some point I removed it from the blog. I just looked at the book and it’s a slightly stupid entry because half of it was a review of the book Jarhead, and who cares about my throwaway thoughts about a book from 20 years ago. Anyway.

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Here’s one out of left field I haven’t talked about yet, and an explanation of the picture above. It’s 1991. I’m living in Elkhart, towards the end of a year in exile where I lived at home and went to IUSB, but desperately wanted to get back to the main IU campus in Bloomington. Since Memorial Day weekend, I’d been dating someone down in Bloomington. We talked on the computer almost every night, got a few long distance calls in at ten cents a minute, but otherwise kept this new relationship percolating between visits. She didn’t have a car, but I had this $500 diesel VW Rabbit and every other weekend, I’d leave work at midnight, drive four hours south, spend two days back on campus, then leave Monday morning and drive straight to work. I talked about this in my first book, I think. I used to talk about Bloomington a lot.

I know I’ve told this story before, but the 4th of July plan for that summer was going to be epic. I think it was a four-day weekend, and we planned a big trip to Chicago. This involved me driving four-odd hours to Bloomington straight after work, picking her up, turning back north, and driving another four hours to the windy city. We had a hotel booked somewhere near the O’Hare airport, and we planned to bivouac there, then explore the big town.

Trying to find the hotel with no maps and no information, we cruised around Schaumburg in this little rusty silver four-door diesel with the windows rolled down because it was like 90 out and it didn’t have A/C. And I turned off on a road that was all ground down for repaving, but this manhole cover and the concrete tube underneath it stuck up from the ground-down cement like a chimney. I aimed the little car over it, and that protrusion grabbed the exhaust of the VW and ripped it off entirely from the exhaust manifold. That little 48-horsepower four-banger suddenly sounded like a Panzer tank, and this exhaust system dangled behind the car, clanking on the pavement. I pulled over in a parking lot and wiggled the exhaust system back and forth to break it free of the car so I could drive. (See above).

That weekend’s plans completely changed. We racked our brains for any contingency scenario, and she realized she knew some VAX buddies who lived in Schaumburg. We somehow got ahold of them at a pay phone and they said we were welcome to crash with them for the night while we regrouped. This was a couple, Jeff and Pam, and this was at his parents’ house. I vaguely knew them by username, and maybe I’d casually met them in a computer lab or a VAX lunch, so the whole thing was slightly bizarre. We went to a neighborhood fireworks show; it seemed like this was a well-to-do suburb with several other well-to-do suburbs in the vicinity, so there were two or three different pro-grade fireworks shows on the horizon, too.

I wish I had any archaeology to remember the rest of the weekend, but we found a muffler shop somewhere off Golf Road that could do up the exhaust, and walked to a nearby motel where we crashed for the night. There was also a trip on the CTA from O’Hare to the city, where we went to the Marshall Field to look at that giant retail outfit in its prime. And we (for some reason) triangulated through Elkhart on the way back, and stayed a night at my mom’s. Then I brought her home, then left the next morning for work. For those keeping score, that’s Elkhart -> Bloomington -> Chicago -> Elkhart -> Bloomington -> Elkhart, all in a tiny little can of a German car with no A/C in a Midwestern heatwave.

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I was thinking of this recently, and it’s not because I love the 4th or I miss Bloomington. It’s because I found out she’s dead. I’d recently done my biannual-ish High Fidelity let’s-nose-around-and-look-up-exes thing for whatever damn reason. And when I pulled up her facebook page, the first post was from last December from one of her kids, announcing her funeral arrangements. Turns out she had a massive stroke in the spring of 2025, went in a recovery center, and never made it out.

This, of course, blew my fucking mind, on several different levels. I’ve never had an ex-girlfriend die. I have this box of memories of her, and they’re mired through this time distortion field. We probably started talking over email in late 1990 or early 1991, then started dating over Memorial Day. I returned to Bloomington in August. By December, the relationship was effectively over, although she didn’t officially dump me until we returned in January. That split was absolutely ugly, but we somehow started talking again maybe a year later. Bloomington’s a small town, and we had many common friends. We were on and off social until we both left in 1995. On a Boston trip that fall, I met up with her for brunch and an afternoon of wandering around record stores. There may have been a few pings after that, but nothing else.

The last seven months seems like it was a few weeks of time, but that seven months we officially dated seems like it was seven years long. So many things happened in that one semester, in my life, her life, our shared time together. And all of those memories are deeply intertwined with her. When I think about some detail of my computer job or how I was first learning how to program the NeXT or how I spent all my time fighting this 200-level physics class or how I stumbled through a group therapy experience for the first time, every one of those memories is somehow connected to the memories of her.

And to be clear, I’m not pining for her because it was all pleasant and wonderful. I think a hard aspect of this experience is the saying “don’t speak ill of the dead,” because this relationship was, to be as polite as possible about it, very… mercurial. We fought a lot. I’ll avoid details, but it got ugly. And now, I feel like an asshole even thinking about how much we butted heads. To be fair here, I am mentally ill, and I was not in a great place in 1991. But she knew how to push my buttons, and she did.

There was nothing to resolve post-1995, no need for amends or apologies or anything else. But the absolute finality of having someone dead bothers me in such a fundamental way. I always need to apologize, make things right. I’m always trying to think of the thing I can say to fix the situation, keeping arguments ruminating in my head for hours, weeks, months, decades. I frequently have these fantasy conversations with people from my past, thinking of what I’d say to somehow neatly wrap things up in a big bow, or correct the things I left broken years ago. And knowing I absolutely can’t do that now - that’s a new one to me.

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It’s a quiet 4th this year. Sarah went to Davis to help out her dad. I’m just about over a cold I’ve had for a few days. I went for a bit of a drive in Berkeley, and oddly ended up at the same Whole Foods where I was in 2024. I came back home, got out the new bike, and did a big loop, following the shore line down to the Park Street bridge on the east side of Alameda, crossing over, then crossing the island at the Jean Sweeney open space park, where I saw the people picnicking at the park shelter as I zipped past on the bike trail. Up at Alameda Point, I caught a water shuttle, the boat named the Woodstock, and that was my bike’s first water crossing. Lots of headwinds as I made my way west, but it was a good 13.5 mile loop, plus the short water journey.

I woke up horribly depressed for no reason, maybe from being alone on the holiday, or maybe the last residual bits of the head cold putting the zap on me. I hate to be one of those assholes that talks about runner’s high and how exercise helps, but of course riding the bike for 90 minutes did shake things loose. Part of it may have been aerobic exercise or the production of whatever chemical. I think a lot of it has to do with seeing the world at a different speed, looking at the things around me without being confined to a car. I always notice new details I don’t see when I’m driving. I’ve driven from that Park Street bridge over behind the Coast Guard base a million times, and I never noticed the little Hawaiian shack restaurant on Oak and Blanding, or the little Boathouse Tavern, which looks like a bar that’s half Bukowski, half Jimmy Buffett. I saw the sunken boats on the Oakland side of the estuary, and the million-dollar yachts on the Alameda side. It’s great to see the small details, and it’s something I need to do way more in the future.

Anyway, happy 4th.

I had to rip a few CDs last week, which is a rare occurrence these days. I don’t even have a CD player at this point, and have to dig up an external optical drive for my Mac once or twice a year when this happens. It had me thinking about the rise and fall of CDs in my life, which brought me back to my first CD player ever, the Toshiba XR-J9.

So, 1987. The Compact Disc was released in Japan five years before, and audiophiles had been buying them in the US, but not so much in Elkhart, Indiana. The whole idea of digital audio was a thing of awe, total science fiction. Lasers! The ones and zeroes captured in the studio remained ones and zeroes until right before they hit your ears, with no degradation, no distortion, no mangling through resistance-bearing wires and analog amps. Some magazine article said if you dubbed a cassette from a CD, your copy would sound better than the professionally-duplicated one you bought in a store. I can’t even remember the first time I actually heard or touched a CD, and didn’t know anyone who had a player. I had to have one, of course. But I couldn’t spend a grand on a Sony home player, and didn’t really have the stereo to match, which would cost a few thousand more.

At that time, I had a Soundesign stereo, probably from Wards or Sears, which had tower speakers, sat in a wood rack with glass doors on the front, and was a single piece for the receiver, EQ, and double tape deck, but had grooves in the plastic face so it looked like a stack of individual components. It wasn’t exactly high fidelity, but it was better than the Sears all-in-one I had in grade school and junior high. And it had a pair of RCA connectors for Aux In, tempting me to add more.

I was out of the house more than I was in it back in high school, so cassette was my primary medium. In my pedestrian days, I ran through $20 Walkman clones on a regular basis, whatever I could pick up at Osco Drugs on a discount. Once I graduated to a car, it had a no-name tape deck in it. For a while, I would buy vinyl and record them to tapes, but I mostly bought cassettes, or dubbed friends’ albums onto blanks.

Every time I went to any store with audio gear, I’d ogle the various components, thinking about how someday when I was out of college and rich, my first priority (aside from a Commodore Amiga) would be to buy some esoteric system with gigantic speakers, two dozen bands of EQ, a DAT digital tape deck (what happened to those?), and of course a reference-quality CD player. There was a store in the Concord Mall called Templin’s that was half instruments, half audio gear. (Oddly, they also sold Atari home computers.) This was the place where they had separate listening rooms where you could go in and see full setups like the one in American Psycho, thousands of dollars of gear that was absolutely unobtainable to me.

In the summer of 1987, I started working my first “real” job at the Taco Bell across the highway from the Concord Mall. And right around then, CD player prices started dropping. They were like $1000, then hit $500, then $400 or $300. And around the time my first paycheck hit my pocket, I was in the K-Mart across the street from my ‘Bell, and there was this CD player that was a hundred dollars. I absolutely had to buy in, and I did. (For reference, $100 in 1987 is about $285 now. I made $3.35 an hour dealing with drive-through abuse and refried bean cooking at TB.)

The XR-J9 was an odd little beast. It was about twice the size of a battery-powered Sony Discman of that vintage, but way smaller than a component home CD player. It was a weird mix of the two, though. Like a Discman, it was a top-loader; you popped open a lid and put the disc directly on a hub, then closed the door to get the laser to start. (Laser! I now owned a Class 1 laser! 3-beam pickup, whatever that means! It even had a warning label on the bottom!)

Unlike the portable Discman, the Toshiba ran on mains only, with no provision for a battery. It also had a fixed set of RCA cables coming from the back, which would plug into a home receiver. It also had a headphone jack and volume slider on the front, but unless you had a Honda generator with you, it was in no way portable. And those cables weren’t removable, which bugged me.

The controls were spartan: a power button on the front; the usual play, pause, forward, and back buttons. You pressed in a corner of the lid and then it unlatched and popped open. It also had a Display button, which I think toggled the time versus the time remaining that showed on the small LCD display. Some buttons had multiple functions. If you pressed Forward once, it would skip a track; hold it and it would fast-forward through the track, playing a sliver of sound every five seconds. This was amazing coming from the tape world, because I swear I spent half my batteries jumping around tapes, and this was instant. Random access! There was also some elaborate combination of buttons you could mash to access a “memory” mode where you could program up to 16 tracks in any order to get a custom playlist, which was a huge pain in the ass to do, and then it immediately went away when you opened the player. I would very occasionally do this when listening to The Police - Synchronicity so I could skip track 4 (“Mother”) because I never felt like it matched the rest of the album. (Now I think it’s the best track.)

The obvious problem after sinking a whole paycheck into this thing was that I now needed music. I think at that time, a tape was like $7.99 and an LP was $9.99, but a CD was $15.99. Each title was an investment. I went to Super Sounds, my favorite record store ever in the Concord Mall, and went A-Z through their three or four racks of CDs, trying to figure this one. (At that time, CDs were in “long boxes” which were the same height and half the width of an LP, so stores could use the same vertical racks for the new format.)

My first purchase was the most recent Iron Maiden album, Somewhere in Time. I was way too into Maiden at the time, and this album was a perfect storm for me: it was Iron Maiden; it had this futuristic cyberpunk theme; it was what I thought at the time was super-modern, ultra-technical sounding; it was digitally mastered; it was Iron Maiden; it was loud, but precise. It was also almost an hour long, so it was like twice as long as if I’d just bought a Boston album or whatever. I remember bringing the CD home, listening to the whole thing on headphones, and there was this one part on the song “Deja-Vu” where Nicko McBrain is playing this snare volley right before the chorus comes back in, and I could suddenly hear that he was also tapping out time on the hi-hat, which wasn’t audible on the cassette. It absolutely blew my 16-year-old mind.

Of course, I had no more money, so I had to go sling tacos and wait two more weeks to get something else. I don’t remember why, but I got the ELP album Trilogy next. A headphone listen also bewildered me. The first song starts with a beating heart, then Emerson doodling away on keyboards, which sounded incredibly crisp, compared to a muddy cassette. After two minutes, the rest of the band suddenly came crashing in, and the dynamic range demonstrated by the sudden change was incredible.

I can’t remember what was the third disc, but I did waver on whether I wanted the high quality of a CD or having twice as many at-bats by sticking to tape. By that fall when I started working at Wards and moved to weekly paychecks, I vowed to myself that I’d buy a tape every week, if not more. I pretty much stopped buying CDs for a while, until maybe my senior year, when I discovered the Columbia House and BMG CD clubs.

About twenty years later, the CD thing came to an end, with just shy of a thousand titles in my collection. I’d slowly been ripping things to MP3 when the 21st century started. Once the iPod hit, CDs became a temporary medium I used until I could rip the tracks to a hard drive, then became a backup in storage in case my computer died. On November 22, 2005, I made my first purchase on iTunes, and that was the beginning of the end. Now, almost everything is added from Apple Music or bought from Bandcamp.

(Oddly enough, the first track I ever bought online was Harry Nilsson’s “Remember.” The reason I suddenly needed to hear it again was a memory of the Michiana student TV show Beyond Our Control, which closed each episode with the song.)

That Toshiba lasted until maybe 1992, when it mysteriously died, stopped loading up discs. I bought a Kenwood portable player that summer (this was described in Summer Rain) and that unit suddenly became my main CD player for a few years until I bought a Kenwood 6+1 changer at the start of 1994. The Kenwood portable never really got used as a portable, because it drained AA batteries so fast, and this was before the anti-skip memory thing was out, so it was fairly useless on the go. I never considered CD as a portable medium, using the MiniDisc from the late 90s until the iPod showed up. I didn’t own a car with a CD player until 2007, when the format was dead. My 2014 car had a CD player that I think I used once. I honestly could not remember if my 2025 car even has one, and I guess it doesn’t.

All of this is so strange to think about, because that 1987 dream of someday having a gigantic reference system in my home is long gone. (So’s that desire for a new Amiga, but that’s another story.) MP3 wasn’t even a dream back then. I listen to 99% of my music on AirPods these days. I don’t have a room full of racks of CDs. I could afford to go buy any stereo I want, but what would I even buy? I bought a pair of near-field monitors for my desk literally a month before the pandemic started and I had to go to pure headphones for the locked-in-the-same-apartment 24/7 thing. I think I have two different Kenwood receivers in storage, and use a $200 sound bar in the living room for the TV. Music is still important, and I’m listening to stuff every day. But the technology has changed and the meaning of where it is in my life has too. Is that good or bad?

I saw a doc on Netflix the other night called How to Rob a Bank. It’s about Scott Scurlock, a bank robber who had a big run in Seattle in the mid-90s, hitting 18 (or 19) banks for a bit over $2M in 1990s money. It was a pretty generic doc, but had lots of footage of 1992 and 1993 Seattle that really brought me back.

I lived in Seattle starting in 1995, and the film ends in 1996. I honestly have no memory of this news story, but I didn’t have a TV or cable back then, and didn’t read a newspaper, so I totally missed it. But the stock footage, the establishing shots they used, that totally brought me back. It all looked like it was shot on a Hi8 camera, both a crummy quality but a way-too-bright color palette that makes it look far too sharp and vivid. I think I got a Sony Hi8 right around the time of the end of this movie - maybe the same month - and I regret not walking around Pioneer Square and shooting hours and hours of footage of everything and nothing.

Scurlock, aka “Hollywood,” habitually hit Seafirst bank, which was my bank. When I got my first real paycheck in 1995, I went downstairs from our office and walked in a Seafirst on Occidental and opened a checking and savings account. I got a special deal which was new back then: no monthly fees or minimum balance, but I had to pay to talk to a human. I could call their voice mail thing to hear my balance or make a transfer (this was before web banking), and I could use the ATMs or drop off a check. But for an introvert who hated lines, this was the perfect deal.

It also meant I was never standing in a bank lobby when a dude with a rubber nose and chin glued to his face jumped on a counter, waved around a Glock 17, and started screaming for the vault teller. This was a good feature to have, since Scurlock and crew used to repeatedly hit the Seafirst on Madison about a mile from my house, across the street from this classic red-roof Pizza Hut I would always visit when I needed a quick case of nostalgia and/or diarrhea.

The movie built up Hollywood to be this Robin Hood type who lived a vagabond lifestyle, traveling worldwide, living in a treehouse in the woods, writing poetry in his journals. What’s weird to me is he looked like someone I might know, like a friend of a friend of someone who went to Evergreen to study vegan architecture. He had this longish but not long hair, used to be a nudist and live in the woods near Olympia, but wasn’t like a hippy hippy. He seemed more like a weird libertarian guy who was a UNIX system administrator at Boeing and spent a lot of time on bondage groups in USENET news. I never really hung out with anyone like that, and he was a half-generation older than me, but I spent enough time in Belltown that I knew the type.

And I’m not saying I’m into a guy like this, but one of the reasons I’ve never gone back to Seattle is I’m sure Amazon has completely homogenized it, and the weirdo underbelly has all died out or sold out. I’m sure if I went to a cafe in  Fremont now, it would all be people talking about crypto or keto muffins or crossfit. In 1996, it would have been dudes in 79 different garage bands, perennially only two connections from making it. Like your refrigerator delivery guy was in a band that would share a practice space with an iteration of a band that split and half the members went to the first version of Lords of the Wasteland that later had a second iteration that became Mother Love Bone that became Luv C2 that became Mookie Blaylock that changed their name to Pearl Jam. Anyway.

It was also funny to see the doc throw in a quick grunge reference, even though Scurlock was probably totally unrelated to that scene. They spent about 90 seconds showing those crazy flannel kids, playing some unrecognizable music the film could clear without paying the Nirvana estate seven figures. “Hey, these kids hate corporate rock! They’re rebels! It’s the spirit up here!” Sigh.

Spoiler alert, Hollywood tried to go out big with a giant heist, and ended up in a firefight and chase, then killed himself before the cops could. It was on Thanksgiving in 1996. I was trying to remember where I was that Thanksgiving, and the funny thing is, I remember exactly where I was that day, because it’s one of my funniest meet-the-parents stories. I’ve always been hesitant to write about this publicly, but this was almost thirty years ago, and I have not talked to her in 25, so here goes.

I used to date someone who lived in a small town in Southwest Washington, a hundred miles south of Seattle, just before the Oregon border. This started in October, and we’d been trading off weekends, one of us driving to see the other. And Thanksgiving became the “let’s have dinner with my parents” weekend down there.

I’m always nervous in these situations, and this one was slightly amplified because she said her parents were very religious and pretty conservative, and I’m neither. We got there and they lived in a second-story walk-up at this boarding school where her dad worked, like a staff housing thing. Her dad was really nice, and the dinner was great, and I mumbled through saying grace, and then I answered the usual questions. Her mom was okay but sort of quiet, fair enough. She had two older brothers and they were cool, although I knew nothing about sports and sports was like their entire lives. I’d need to memorize some stats or figure out the name of the baseball team that played across the street from my apartment before I saw them again. (“Hey that Kevin Griffey guy, he’s like, pretty good, right?”)

After dinner, I got the big curve ball: her parents were moving. Tomorrow. And nothing was packed, and the house was crammed with decades of stuff and all the fixins from a big turkey dinner and a bunch of appliances that were going with them. And it was a second-floor walk-up. No elevator. And it all had to be moved and the apartment cleaned that Friday.

I’ve moved a bunch and I’ve helped people move, and I’ve been in some disorganized situations, but this was the most chaos I’d ever seen in this kind of operation. It’s impossible to help someone pack their stuff into boxes when you’ve known them a grand total of 37 minutes and you have no idea what is trash and what is treasure and there’s piles of stuff going back to like 1976. Hauling a fridge, a chest freezer, a stove a dishwasher, and a washer and drier down a set of exterior stairs was bad enough. But packing in all the assorted bric-a-brac was torture. They had a big U-Haul, like a 24-foot thing, and I think we filled it twice, plus a bunch of carloads of stuff.

They bought a new pre-manufactured home in a retirement community, which was pretty nice, although it made me wonder how much of it was assembled on a line in Elkhart. We got all the boxes off the truck, then realized the truck was parked in the yard in a small lake, except the lake was slowly getting bigger? We took a look and one of the sets of tires was parked directly over some main water connection to the entire little village, and had cracked it open. So their “Welcome, neighbors!” was getting everyone’s water shut off during Thanksgiving weekend. Fun stuff.

Anyway. Movie review concluded. Check out my Substack. Have a nice day.

I was thinking on the 4th of July about how I have this proclivity to write about what happens on the 4th of July, even though it’s not stuff about hot dog eating contents and apple pie and going to fireworks shows and wearing clothes made out of flags and whatever else. I’ve already written about this too much, but I’m bored, so here’s more.

The above picture is from 2002, when I flew from New York to Las Vegas, stayed at I think three? four? different hotels, and drove to Colorado in the middle of that. On the first night, I stayed at the Hacienda — not the old, classic one, but the hotel in Boulder City that’s now called the Hoover Dam Lodge. Horrible hotel. I got there late at night, and there was zero food to eat at the place. Passed out, woke up, tried to take a shower, and raw sewage started coming out of the drain. Drove to Colorado, got a speeding ticket in Arizona, and saw that giant asteroid hole in the ground. Stayed in Alamosa at a bad motel across the street from an AM radio station, and any time I picked up the phone, I could hear ranchero music on the line. Spent some time at the land, drove back to Vegas early, and ended up at the now-demolished Tropicana. I remember going out to see the fireworks and it was like 107 degrees at night and I stood shoulder-to-shoulder in this crowd in front of the MGM and looked over and saw someone who looked exactly like my ex-girlfriend from 1992. The other memory of that trip is that Rumored to Exist was waiting for final approval for production, and I think I got the email that week while I was gone.

In 2015, I had a solo trip to Vegas, although I was flying back on the actual 4th. It was even more hot on that trip, like 112 degrees out in the day. This was the trip where I put a case of Coke Zero in the trunk of my car at like 10am, and at noon, they all exploded. I got back to the hotel at like 5 and everything had evaporated. I stayed in the Hooters hotel, which was obviously a mistake. Interesting inflection point on a really bad and strange year, though.

I have a bizarre bathroom mirror selfie I won’t post from 7/4/20 where it looks like I haven’t had a haircut all year, which was true. I also for whatever reason went to Stoneridge Mall, probably for the air conditioning. I took a bunch of pictures of the recently closed Nordstrom. I can’t even remember the last time I went to that mall. I don’t even know if it’s still open. I think the last time I set foot in a mall was in Vietnam. (Once again, air conditioning.)

I just realized that next July 4 will mark 30 years since I left Indiana forever. I did the math the other day and next year also makes California the state I’ve lived in longest. I lived in Indiana for a total of 17 years, and I moved here in 2008, so, math.

In 2006, we went to Coney Island, which was probably not the best idea, because it was absolutely slammed with people. I remember hiding out in a McDonald’s watching the Space Shuttle launch, and this guy was filling a gigantic Igloo cooler with ice from the McDonald’s Coke machine, a cup at a time. I also remember meeting Sean Maloney, who was running for New York AG. He shook my hand and I had no idea who he was, except that it was like a hundred degrees out and he was wearing suit pants and an oxford dress shirt rolled up to mid-forearm like he was a tax accountant about to give a speech on fiscal policy.

In 2007, I went to an insane Rockies-Mets game in Denver. Highlights included the game going completely lopsided, like the Rockies were ahead by 167 runs. And also the giant purple dinosaur mascot slingshotted a t-shirt into the stands and it landed right into my fucking knee, which was injured and in a brace. For a long time, the Rockies had this habit of completely blowing out July 4 games, although now they are one of the worst teams in the sport, so I haven’t even paid attention this year.

All the other usuals come back to me. 1992, selling glowsticks, see also Summer Rain. 1991, Chicago with my ex, car broke, etc. It’s in the other story. 1995, move to Seattle, drive a U-Haul nonstop across the country with no sleep. 2004, I wrote a story about walking home from seeing a Terminator movie and said story got published in some anthology, but I can’t understand my own filing system enough to find it without wasting an hour of my time. Speaking of Summer Rain, I sent the masters to the publisher on July 5, 2000.

Anyway, nothing spectacular going on here last Thursday. We went for a walk in the neighborhood in Berkeley by my old allergy clinic and looked at expensive houses, then went to Whole Foods to pick up stuff for dinner. Had to dose both cats because it sounded like Fallujah outside, then I think I fell asleep at like 9:30. A life of excitement for this writer.

Day off today - I took a four-day weekend, no reason - so I headed to the mall in Pleasanton to buy a pair of pants. I have a wedding next month, and every pair of dress pants I own is comically large at this point. I got to the mall at about 10:37, and didn’t realize that it wasn’t officially open until 11:00. I went inside anyway, because the concourse was open, but half the stores were just booting up, the gates halfway open, lights off, employees setting up signs or counting down registers. It gave me an intense nostalgia flashback, of every time I’d opened at Wards thirty-something years ago, the usual crew of people I knew at every other store setting things up for the daily grind, walking to the First National at the main entrance to drop off last night’s take, stopping at the MCL Cafeteria for a cup of coffee before 10:00 came. The general vibe of a pre-opening mall really threw me back to the summer of 1988. I almost expected to go back into the parking lot and find my rusted Camaro waiting for me.

I got in my walk. I did not get the pants. Everything is now “stretch performance wool,” which is essentially spandex. Also, Macy’s is now JCPenney. JCPenney is now K-Mart. K-Mart is now largely gone. I don’t even know what Sears is.

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Speaking of “Amazon is taking over,” in some contrary news, it looks like Amazon is closing all of their brick-and-mortar stores. I actually liked the feel of the stores, mostly because they looked like a rip-off of Borders, albeit much smaller. I’m all but certain these stores were a sophisticated data mining experiment and nothing more. Even the stock on the shelves was a data-driven algorithm, which was bizarre and somewhat maddening for a person who doesn’t read Oprah books. I’m sure they’re doing a lot more of that with their Whole Foods stores now.

A happy coincidence: so, B&N in Walnut Creek closed around the same time the Amazon store opened. Now, Barnes and Noble is actually opening a new store in Walnut Creek right as Amazon is closing. They didn’t get the old location back, and I’m sure it’s a smaller footprint, but that will be nice to see. As I’ve said before, I used to think B&N was The Enemy, and it’s hard for me to root for them now, but I really don’t want to see the one by my house in Emeryville shutter.

Another odd coincidence, Morgenstern’s books reopened in Bloomington. I’ve written about my memories of Morgenstern’s a  while ago. It’s not in the same place anymore (I think the old strip mall location is now a FedEx) and Keith mentioned from his first visit that it’s nowhere near what the old one is. But at least there’s something, especially since the Borders and Barnes and Noble that jumped into town and killed the old location in the late 90s are now both gone.

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About the picture above: that’s from 1994, the day of Bill’s wedding. I’m standing in front of my old apartment at Colonial Crest, where I lived from 1993-1994. In another bit of dumb nostalgia, I just heard that Colonial Crest, which is now called The Arch, is being torn down and replaced with a new apartment complex, some 5-over-1 monstrosity with a dumb generic name and high rents for rich students.

I did some digging and what’s funny is that these apartments rent for only marginally more than I paid almost thirty years ago. I think we split a $500 rent on a 2br/1.5ba townhouse, and now they go for about $700. That’s saying a lot about the deferred maintenance issues of the place, because it was maybe about a C- in quality and value way back then. I’m sure the redevelopment is for the best, given the student population and need for housing and all that.

That said, I have a lot of strong memories of this place. Various pivotal relationship things happened here, and the start of my writing career happened here in apartment #144. I also didn’t have a car most of this year, and walked the two and a half mile route to school pretty much every day, rain sleet or snow. That long shot down Walnut or College is burned in my head, the zig-zag pattern I’d traverse to cross the northwest side of campus and get to Lindley Hall. All of this is different now. The computer science department has a new facility built where the old Brown/Greene dorms used to be. The long walk up to the UCS offices at 17th street where I worked used to be empty green fields; it’s now a giant dorm, built last year. The UCS office was completely redone into an alumni center. Everything has changed. Things change.

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Another weird one: they are renaming everything named Jordan on campus. Turns out former university president David Starr Jordan was really into eugenics, segregation, and racial purity. Problem is, IU spent a century naming damn near everything after him: a biology building; a river; a main avenue cutting across campus; a northern extension to said avenue; a parking garage on that avenue; a bus route on that avenue; a shopping center. The street is now Eagleson Avenue, or David Baker Avenue for the northern part. (Named after the jazz great, not the architect who coincidentally designed my current home.) The river is Campus River; the Biology building is Biology Building. I think people expect everyone to take sides on the woke/anti-woke thing. I agree with the name change. It’s just interesting to me, given the number of times I reference Third and Jordan in my first book.

Things change. People change. Pocket change. It’s actually odd how I never have change in my pockets anymore. Anyway.