I’m currently consuming two food items of great nostalgic value.

The first is the Hormel roast beef and mashed potatoes microwave meal kit. (It probably has some other more markety name, but I threw out the package already.) It’s a vaguely oval plastic tray with a peel-off lid, and it’s one of the most perfect meals ever designed. It needs no refrigeration. It’s a hot meal. You can put it in a backpack easily. It is hearty. It only contains 3 grams of fat. And it’s the kind of meal that I could eat regularly without getting bored of it.

My first memory of eating these constantly was when I worked at the Wrubel Computing Center in Bloomington one night a week. I’d trudge across town from my Colonial Crest apartment to the 10th and the Bypass building. It usually took an hour to walk there, an hour to walk back, the weather was usually shitty, and for the entire shift, maybe one person would call with a problem. On the walk, I was armed with the Konrath walkman, the Konrath black leather jacket, and a backpack of food, and usually a book to read. (I think I was working through Henry Miller’s Rosy Crucifiction trilogy for a good chunk of that semester, although I also remember re-reading The Grapes of Wrath in there, too.) Almost nobody was in Wrubel after five on a Sunday night, except for the machine room operators like Robin, who spent most of his night changing tapes and talking to me about Jimi Hendrix or chili. So I ate many a Hormel meal kit at a desk while bitnetting people on an outdated Mac IIsi.

(I’m pretty sure I wrote a short story about this, although it’s probably horrid. One of the things I tried to describe was the feeling of being isolated in this strange envoronment where I had to walk through a sterile, all-white machine room to get to my desk, and it always reminded me of something out of 2001. There was a very specific smell to the environmentally-controlled space, more than just a clean air conditioning smell. I recently ran across the same smell when I was in a hospital getting an X-ray or MRI or something, and it was one of those instant time machines that I always babble about.)

I must have bought my Hormel kits at the Marsh grocery store up the road from my apartment. And that’s the drawback to these Hormel things: not all stores carry them, and that adds to the nostalgia. I don’t think I saw the things once the entire time I was in Seattle, because if a store carried Hormel, they had the cans of stew, and maybe chili, and that’s not the same. The Duane Reade drug store by my old place in Astoria would stock them, and every time I went there, I bought all of them. Last night, I saw them at a SuperTarget, so I bought a half-dozen of them. I feel like Mel Gibson’s character in Conspiracy Theory, who always had to buy a copy of Catcher in the Rye every time he saw it.

The other food item on my desk is the 8-ounce glass bottle Christmas edition Coca-Cola. Those of you who knew me back in college knew I had an unhealty obsession with Coke. I collected bottles from around the world, I read books about the company, and I had one of the earliest web sites about the beverage. I had this shrine of cans and bottles from China, Japan, Italy, Greece, Poland, France, and a dozen more countries. And of course I drank the stuff every day.

When I moved to Seattle in 1995, I was in a really weird place. I had friends at my job, but I spent a lot of my weekends alone, going to movies by myself, going to malls and looking at stuff I couldn’t buy because I was broke. I didn’t have a TV, and I was basically living on changing phone companies every few weeks, and selling CDs I got from Columbia House. I didn’t even know how I would try to date, and by halloween, it was getting dark at like 4:00 every day. I was feverishly writing Summer Rain and thinking back too much to my days in Bloomington. I didn’t want to go back, but I wished the present was different.

I used to drive to Southcenter Mall a lot, just to look at stuff and look at people, and that got even more interesting once the xmas season started. Malls used to have a hypnotic effect on me, and I enjoyed going even if I didn’t need or want anything. (This isn’t true anymore, for a million different reasons, which can all be summaried as “I’m getting old”.) I was going back to ELkhart for the ‘95 santa day, and had to gather up a few presents for the family with that month’s check from MCI thanking me for the switch. And when I was at Target, I saw they had a bunch of six-packs of Coke, in little bottles, with Santa on the label.

There’s debate about Coke in glass, and Coke with cane sugar, and I don’t care anymore about the non-HFCS version, but I do love a beverage in a glass bottle. This has become a big fad as of late, and many hipster doofuses in New York were paying top dollar for Hecho en Mexico Coke. But back then, aside from a trip to Europe or Latin America, the only way to do glass was the xmas bottle. I picked up two six-packs, one for the shrine, one for the fridge, and drove back to my tiny little studio apartment at 7th and James.

I’m almost certain I probably drank that whole six on that Friday night. I used to stay up all night writing, and listening to the same six CDs. I had one of those Kenwood 6+1 CD players (this was long before the days of MP3), and of the 6 always-loaded writing CDs were the soundtrack to the Naked Lunch movie, the first Tori Amos album, and the first two Nine Inch Nails albums. There were also two new age or jazz albums, maybe some Windham Hill artist like Shadowfax, or Chick Corea. All stuff I’m half-embarassed to listen to, but it worked, and I’m not in the “I’m more metal than you” mode anymore, so fuck it.

Anyway, I got another six-pack from Target last night, and just drank one. It reminds me of that whole Seattle xmas season, listening to one of those Windham Hill solstice albums, looking out into the darkness outside my patio, the big sky gone black, the Kingdome and the SoDo neighborhood just past the ribbon of I-5. I don’t get nostalgic about event-driven Christmas celebrations anymore, the opening of presents, the driving to grandma’s in the snow. But those little touchstones of nostalgia are something I always enjoy, and it’s even better when it’s something I can pick up for a few bucks at Target.

If I had to pick a smell to describe my first week of college, it would probably be bleach. Not straight-up chlorine though - that crystallized blue powder stuff that’s in a blue box and you pour into the machine, regardless of color. The cheap cardboard box split apart when I pushed my thumb into the spout thingee, and I had to pour the remaining powder into a bag. For weeks, the only thing I could smell was the pleasant chemical odor of a laundry room, and that’s the smell that always transports me back.

18 years ago, I loaded my crap into my dad’s truck and we drove south to my new home. The whole back-to-school thing always held a certain allure to me: brand new bluer than blue Wrangler jeans, the new Trapper Keeper, a collection of pens, pencils, erasers, and whatever else I could con my mom into getting me at G.L. Perry. Later, after years of the same classroom, the same teacher, and the same 30 like-aged kids, I got to pick classes, and see new people as the periods progressed in the day. Later, I looked forward to the new crop of freshmen, and more specifically the new crop of freshwomen, hoping maybe one of them wouldn’t think I was a doofus. (No dice. And this was before being a doofus was cool. Dressing like Beck back then would certainly get your ass kicked.)

But college was an entirely different beast. First, my parents generally didn’t give a shit about what I did or didn’t have for school after about the fifth or sixth grade. But suddenly, it was like they were sending me off to war. They read checklists and compared notes with other parents, and actually studied those stupid lists that dorms sent containing what you might or might not need. I got a microwave and a little fridge. All types of foodstuffs and laundry supplies and showering equipment and personal care products got socked away, like I was planning a voyage to the New World in a leaky boat.

So I had all of these gadgets and supplies. And don’t get me wrong, these were not all-out kits designed to last me forever. When I say personal care products, I mean a three-pack of Dial, a bottle of Prell, and a tube of Crest, not the complete Bliss for Men catalog. And a lot of it was cool, but I also found that I didn’t need a lot of it, and could have used other stuff more. For example, I didn’t need food, because I lived in the dorms, and we had a meal plan. I probably should have brought a TV. I guess a computer cost more than a semester of tuition back then, so that would be too much. Also asking mom to pack the 100-count thing of Trojans would not have been a great idea. (Actually, buying the 100-pack would have guaranteed that I never got laid, ever, and that everyone else on my floor would scamper over when the third base coach was waving them in so they could “borrow” one. Not that you’d want the borrowed condom back. I mean, unless you’re into that sort of thing, and there’s nothing wrong with that I guess.)

The big thing that made those first few weeks magic was that everything was completely new. Not only had I always lived under the reins of a parent, but that also sets a precedent for the general paradigm of your life. You wake up in your parents’ house; you go to school; you come home for a minute; you go to a part-time job; you sleep at your parents house; repeat for four years. When I got to college, there was no structure, no predefined pattern. You stayed up all night, you got up super early, you had cereal for dinner, you went to a girl’s place to “study”, whatever. It seems trivial to think about it, but it was like throwing a bunch of Amish into a battle in Vietnam.

It’s no secret that I completely fucked up on this structure shift. (Probably the only thing beneficial that came out of this was that I hunted down a copy of _Slaughterhouse 5_ from the main library, because someone told me I would dig it, and I read the whole thing in a night and planted a little seed in my brain to come back later and write.) But the first few weeks of it were pure magic: going for walks at midnight after studying, hanging out in other peoples’ dorms, sitting in the grass outside of the union reading. And everyone was new, different. It was commonplace to get in an elevator and ask someone else their major or their hometown. I can’t imagine doing that in real life, but in the first month I met people from hundreds of cities. There were lots of people from Indianapolis, but I’d meet freshmen from North Manchester and South Bend and New Albany and Shelbyville and Paioli and Terre Haute. I eventually learned enough geography that I could usually figure out where a town was without thinking. (“Munster? That’s next to Hammond, right? A guy in my Spanish class is from there.”)

Back to gear: when we moved into the dorm, there was a “welcome pack” for each person in your room. It consisted of a bunch of trial sizes, like shampoo, razors, and Advil. It also contained both a NyQuil and a Scope, and allegedly if you drank both real fast, you’d cop a mighty buzz. But this was the beginning of the era when companies found it really profitable to prey on college students, and this collection of stuff was the first step in that direction. We also got a lot of desks in the union with people from Bank One and the credit union and of course all of the credit card people, and they lured in freshmen for that first dip into the world of plastic. I know that know this sector is huge, and every possible company is out there ready to tattoo their logo on your forehead when you come in as a freshman. But in my four years of high school, the most we ever got were DARE book covers and maybe pencils from the National Guard, so that freshman blitz was like a goldmine to me.

I forget where I was going with this, other than to think a little about 1989. Oh shit, I remember! The bleach was actually detergent - Cheer. Blue box, I think they only sell the boxes in laundromats these days, and the liquid in the store. But if you find a box in the store, rip it open and take a deep whiff, and that’s September, 1989 for me.

I’m in a Perkins in Elkhart, and I’ve barely seen anything here, but it’s all very weird. Let me see how much I can explain before my food arrives.

I left Elkhart, or at least stopped calling it my home, when? 1989, when I graduated and went to college? 1991-ish, when I returned the second time and vowed to never come back? 1995, when I moved to Seattle? I don’t know. But I guess the 1991 date is when I stopped spending any regular amount of time here. And I haven’t set foot in Indiana since 2004, partly by coincidence, and partly by design. So it’s been long enough to make it seem like an alien experience when I return.

I got into O’Hare and got my rental car by about midnight last night, then pointed it east and headed toward the toll road, hoping I could still figure out my way around Chicago and to Indiana with no major incident. The toll road was eerie, driving with nobody around, counting the exits and wishing I could go to bed.

Right after the University Park Mall zipped past, I exited on 331, and took the route home I’d normally take from the UP mall, on Cleveland road. The second I pulled up to a railroad crossing, the gates went down and a 200-car train inched by. I joked about this in Summer Rain, but it really happens to me every time I get here.

I drove down this stretch of road with only farmland on either side, and remarkably it was still farm. I used to max out my car here late at night, because there are no intersections for miles. Then my friend Peter got killed there in 1991, so I stopped. The old drive-in movie theater - a gas station, and what looks like a Super Target or a Wal-Mart going in. The Pleasureland Museum - still there, but I couldn’t tell if it was closed or not.

Nothing really changes in Elkhart. A lot of the same businesses had the same signs that they did in 1985, the same displays, the same paintjobs. They build new subdivisions of prefab houses in the outlying areas: Goshen, Napanee, Granger, Simoton Lake. But they’re the same subdivisions they built in Dunlap in the 70s, just different trim and formica and sunroom options. And when they build a newer and more expensive and further out subdivision, it means the old ones won’t get updated and won’t get redone and essentially get trapped in time, to wear their 1970s aluminum siding forever.

Some stores go under. The old Templin’s music, where I bought many a pair of guitar strings in the day, is now a Mexican furniture store. The Taco Bell where I worked is now a crack Chinese place. I used to spend a lot of time at this Perkins, but back in 1989, it was a few blocks south, and the last-gen design of Perkins buildings. The new one is nice, but it isn’t the old one. (This one is currently filled with a gaggle of high school girls basketball players, which might be enticing to jailbait enthusiasts. As for myself, it sort of freaks me out that they were born after the last time I was in a Perkins.)

I thought Denver was a bit conservative, but this place makes it look like a hippy ashram chanting in a drum circle. Two out of three cars have this Jesus license plate that you can tell was designed in spite when the JFreaks here lost that ACLU case about the ten commandments. There are are churches everywhere. The Concord Mall now has a sign that says “Great Deals, Family Values.” (Does that mean you can’t sodomize the workers at Pretzel Time anymore?) This is the one place in the country where I feel Nicole Ritchie thin. When I walked out of the hotel, there were about two dozen people chain-smoking like you’d suck on a bottle of oxygen if your spacesuit exploded and you hadn’t breathed in five minutes. Lots of magnetic ribbons, and I haven’t seen a single Kerry/Edwards or anti-Bush sticker yet.

I saw both “de-malled” malls, Pierre Moran and Scottsdale. Back in the old days, they turned strip malls into malls by enclosing them. For whatever random reason (*cough*Wal-Mart) malls have gone into the toilet, so someone got the wise idea to break apart the interior spaces, and turn them into a huge parking lot with a bunch of freestanding big-box stores. This makes it much easier to shop, because you have to either move your car six times, or carry a lot of stuff in the rain and snow. Both malls look even more deserted, but it’s obviously some liberal conspiracy and we all need to pray to Jesus to make sure the local Panera and Dress Barn keep in the black. (Wait, I mean they are making money, not that we want african-americans shopping there.)

The biggest change I see is that all of the trees have doubled and tripled in size. When I drive by an old dentist or insurance agent and see a giant oak stretching way into the sky, I remember when it used to be as tall as me. Driving past houses and streets, it seems like I have the angles and distances and setbacks burned into my brain. When I cross Prarie on Mishawaka, I know in my head exactly how far it is to the u-pick strawberry place, even if it was plowed under and turned into a medical clinic. The occasional bodega where a video store used to be throws me off but it’s usually in the same building, just a different sign.

I spent the day with my sister, nephew, and niece. It was the first time I’ve ever seen Belle, and she is already mobile and stealing her brother’s toys at any possible chance. I always think the kids are cute, until a few hours later when Wesley runs down a row of toy trucks in Target and presses the sound button on every single one two dozen times, producing this cacophony of sirens and explosions and jackhammers, and I realize there’s no way I could do it for five days, let alone 18 years.

Not making much progress on this food - I better shut down and go back to my little Holiday Inn Express and see if the TV channels are just as bad as they were 30 years ago.

P.S. The waitress handed me my check and it said, in giant, curvy, girly cursive, “God Bless!” at the bottom. I still gave her a tip.

P.P.S. Re my previous entry about thunderstorms - I am back at my hotel, and just saw the most monumental t-storm I’ve seen in a while. Very close strikes, loud as hell booms, and the kind of bolts that arc from sky to ground (okay, vice-versa) in such a way that make them look like scratches etched into a tinted window. There was even a five-second power outage that really reminded me I was in Indiana.

I can’t believe my first car did not have air conditioning. I mean, I paid $300 for it, and I’m sure if it did have AC, I would have disconnected it to get a faster 0-60 time, because that and a loud stereo were about all I cared about then. But I was thinking about the fact that I spend all day indoors in the AC, and I go into our enclosed garage and get in the car with AC, and sometimes it can be days before I’m exposed to the outside air. That’s great when it’s 95 out, but it’s also weird, which made me think about life with no car AC.

That Camaro had an all-black interior, and no pleasant new-car smell anymore, so getting in after parking for an afternoon in the sun was never pleasant. And the only antidote to the summer sun was opening the huge side windows, and maybe running the vent fan setting, which worked about as effectively as crepe paper body armor. But I spent a lot of damn time in that car back then. And I remember driving down Cleveland Road, the back way to Mishawaka from Elkhart, thinking about how the soup of hot air would flood the car every time I stopped at an intersection.

The Camaro had no AC. My first Escort had no AC, but it also had no right side, so it never got hot. My Turismo had AC, but it was disconnected when I got it. Also, that car lasted a school year and blew up before the summer, so I never needed air. VW: disconnected air. Mustang: it had AC, but it was almost out of freon. If you drove a long roadtrip, it would spin enough to produce some cold, but otherwise it was useless. So that’s almost a decade of cars without AC, and then my second Escort (no thanks to Evergreen Ford) had a very good AC system, and the new car smell that made you want to keep the windows closed.

New car smell, by the way, is carcinogenic outgassing from the plastic. What’s good is bad.

I still have many fond memories of driving around in the summer, though, in that huge black beast of a car. It’s so strange: my current economy wagon-thing has more BHP than my Camaro, and weighs half as much, and gets maybe twice the milage if not more. And I was always horribly broke back then, making something like $100 a week if I was lucky, and there probably hasn’t been a day in 2007 that I had less than my 1987 net worth in my wallet without even trying. But my brain still goes back there.

I still have this conflict that I want this time right now to be the same, or bigger than what was then. Like when I’m 50, I want to be thinking “man, back in 2007…”, and I probably will be, but it’s easy to overlook that. (Hell, sometimes the right song hits the shuffle on my iPod and I’m thinking back to 1997, and I have absolutely no intention of ever going back to Seattle, and I have no desire to revisit any part of my life back then.) And the part that gets me is that I don’t want to ever write another Summer Rain, or dick around with short stories trying to capture some long-ago part of my past. But when I start thinking about these things, I do want to write them down, or use them as source material. It’s so tempting, but it’s also not what I want to do anymore.

I went back to “book three”, which is tentatively called The Device, and I keep yo-yoing between that and some other random project of the week, but I know I need to finish this first. I’m 65,000 words into it; it’s three parts, with the first one done, the second one getting there, and the third pretty mapped out. What I have now is pretty basic and doesn’t have the thickness or level of weirdness Rumored does. But the first draft of Rumored didn’t either - it took seven major drafts and about five years worth of work to get it there.

The zine deadline is tomorrow, and it is 16,500 words short of #11’s length. Maybe there will be some last-minute additions, and I guess I have to write an introduction, which is like a thousand words. But shit, I can’t keep waiting. I will just widen the margins or something.

It’s fall. The weather’s cool, I’m wearing my leather jacket every day, and I’m listening to Type O Negative’s October Rust album a lot more. That album, and Metallica’s Master of Puppets always remind me of the fall, like listening to Pink Floyd reminds me of being depressed in high school. I used to say fall was my favorite season, and it mostly still is, except I hate it in New York. There are no trees, it’s when everyone gets sick and inevitably I get sick, and I hate dressing for the cold, then boiling in the subway, then going back to the cold, and eventually making the cold even worse. The one thing I like about the fall is that I usually leave town for a week. And one of the best parts of New York is that it’s very easy to leave, with three major airports right in my back yard.

Earlier this week, it came up that I’d be in Germany for Halloween. When I thought about it, I couldn’t remember the last time I was home for Halloween. Turns out it was in 1996. For prosperity’s sake, here’s a list of where I was for all of the rest of the 10/31s.

1995: Boston. I went for a trade show, maybe Internet World. I was there for a whole week, staying in Cambridge, and pretty much every night was a blackout-level drunken rampage. By about the 30th, I was sick as fuck, and we had a big party on the 31st. I bought a bunch of dayquil and took way too many of them, and thought they weren’t working enough, so I took double that, and by the time we left for the party, I could pretty much see through walls. A woman was dressed as Catwoman in the whole leather costume (before the Halle Berry box-office bomb) and every guy in the place was hitting on her with the same typical pick-up lines (“I’m batman”, etc.) Someone dared me to try something fucked up, so I went up to her and told her that I had all of the Batman toys from McDonald’s and the batwoman one worked the best in the bathrub. She sort of freaked the fuck out. We then went to a gay bar, possibly called the Ram Rod, and checked out the most bizarre Halloween costumes you could possibly imagine. Like, I saw a dude dressed up as a nun in a mini-skirt. Then we flew home a day or two later, and I found that you should never, ever fly with a head cold.

1996: Seattle. I was home. I was also horribly depressed, and did nothing.

1997: Elkhart. I went home for xmas the year before, and it was a total waste of time and money to pay highway robbery rates for mid-December flights. So I made a pre-emptive holiday visit. This was the first time I ever saw my nephew Phillip, and it was the last time I ever saw the inside of my old house in River Manor.

1998: New York. I still lived in Seattle, but I visited Marie in Washington Heights. Went to tapings of Conan (back when it was still funny) and the Daily Show (also when it was still funny.) We watched the parade live on NY1, and it was funny because this guy was with someone dressed as Mickey Mouse, and when the reporter asked where Minnie Mouse was, the dude said “Oh, she’s fucking Goofy” on live TV.

1999: Bloomington/Cincinnati. My uncle died, and I decided to go to the funeral, which involved renting a car and driving about 13 hours to Ohio. I drove all day on Friday, and then the funeral was very early Saturday morning. They blew through the viewing, mass, and burial, had a meal, and all of my relatives scattered, leaving me there at about noon, with nothing to do. I called A and she told me Bloomington wasn’t that far of a drive, so I headed west. I caught up with Bill Perry for a bit, then found A. The plan was to go to a party where a bunch of former UCS geeks would be. But first, I bought one of those rubber halloween masks with a wig glued to it, so nobody could figure out who I was. Had a great time.

2000: Ithaca. I dated this girl from Cornell for a bit, and took the train up to spend a week with her. The train was slow, uncomfortable, boring, and while I was in the bathroom taking a piss, the door flew open, and the entire car saw my junk. I stayed at a Best Western or Motel 6 or something, next to a Wegman’s. Every day, she went to classes, and I said I was going to be editing my book. Instead, I wandered around on foot, spending as much time in the grocery store as a homeless guy looking for warmth. I broke up with her shortly after that, but not because of the Wegmans, the hotel, or the train; it was just a bad idea for a 29-year-old on the verge of a midlife-crisis to date a 21-year-old who is going through all of these “what am I going to do when I graduate” issues.

2001: Las Vegas. This was the weird, post-9/11 trip where nobody was in town, I rented an Audi TT and got a speeding ticket, and not much else.

2002: Las Vegas. On this trip, I was a little bit sick, had this huge money snafu because the Stardust took a huge deposit out of my debit card, and I went for one of the longest walks in my life. And crap, I just realized I got home on the night of the 30th, so I guess I was in New York.

2003: Las Vegas. I was wrong again - I actually got back on the 29th for this trip, so I guess this whole theory is fucked up.

2004: Indiana. I was the only person in New York City that didn’t believe that John Kerry was going to sweep the election with 100% of the votes, and I decided to leave town and avoid the shitstorm. This was also another pre-emptive holiday strike.

2005: Amsterdam - Once again, my memory has failed me on this, because we actually took this trip on the 9th. On Halloween itself, I was in the middle of moving.

And that’s it. Time to go watch Six Feet Under.