The Hardest Day

“It never fails to astonish me. You’re alive, you’re dead. No drums, no flashing lights, no fanfare. You’re just dead.”

— Margaret Houlihan, M*A*S*H

Yesterday morning, I noticed a weird raw spot on the side of Uggy, the semi-feral kitty who mothered our boy Evinrude and who has spent much of her life living under our deck. By nightfall, it was visibly swelling and we decided we’d better take her to the vet in the morning to get it checked out.

This morning, the damn thing was the size of a golf ball. Hoping it was just a cyst or an abscess that could be drained, we took her in to the emergency clinic.

The news wasn’t good. It was a tumor, and it was moving fast. The vet said it ran deep, too, and that to surgically remove it would probably take out a big chunk of her pelvis. In addition, she had a serious heart murmur suggesting some other underlying problem. The vet figured that, left untreated, she had maybe a couple weeks left, and given her outdoor lifestyle, we feared that she’d likely disappear beneath something in my dad’s junkyard to die and we’d never find her again. There really were no good treatment options. So we made the hard call.

I’ve never had to do that with one of my animals before. They’ve always spared me this decision.

I have no idea where she came from or what she might have endured before she showed up here in the Bennion Compound, very young, very afraid… and very pregnant. I’ve long suspected that someone dumped her and she just got lucky in finding her way to a friendly port. I think she basically had a sweet nature and wanted to be loving but whatever she’d gone through made it hard for her to trust anyone, and you could only get so close to her. But she trusted me, at least more than she did anyone else. She was on my lap at the end, one of the very few times she’s ever allowed that.

Tonight I’m struggling with the idea that she trusted me and I basically gave the order to have her killed. Even though I know it was the right, best thing I could do for her. And I’m also wrestling with whether I gave her the happiest life I could have, if I was too impatient with her, if maybe I didn’t trust her enough. Ultimately, I just wish I’d had more time… time with her, time to be good to her, time to make the final decision.

Anne and I both want to thank the compassionate staff at Copper View Animal Hospital for making this as easy as possible for both Uggy and us.

Rest in peace, Mama Cat. Wherever you are, I hope you find all the cheese you will ever want, and that your boys Hannibal and Jack are there and you’re all finally able to get along.

May122021

In Memoriam: Tawny Kitaen

“She was gonna be an actress
She was gonna be a star
She was gonna shake her ass
on the hood of Whitesnake’s car.”

— Bowling for Soup, “1985”

I don’t know whether you could legitimately say that Tawny Kitaen — who died unexpectedly last weekend at only 59 years old — was any kind of actual star. She was indeed a model and an actress who worked pretty steadily in the ’80s and ’90s, enough for her face to have become familiar, but she never appeared in anything really significant. Off the top of my head, I can think of only a guest shot on Seinfeld as one of Jerry’s never-ending rotation of girlfriends, and she was a series regular on the short-lived attempt to revive WKRP in Cincinnati for the syndication market. (Her character was somewhat analogous to Loni Anderson’s role on the original series, a DJ whose intelligence is constantly underestimated by those around her because of her looks.) Sadly, she was probably as infamous for her domestic problems — she was once arrested and charged with assaulting her second husband, baseball player Chuck Finley — as she was famous for any of her work. Well, aside from those Whitesnake videos that the Bowling for Soup song refers to; for better or worse, doing the splits on the hood of a Jaguar for a heavy metal band really is her claim to fame.

Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here; it’s not my intention to disparage her. The truth is, Ms. Kitaen’s sudden demise has troubled me far more than I would have expected, and I’m trying to sort out in my own head exactly why. I’m not sure if I feel bad that a woman who had a tumultuous life died relatively young, or if it’s because I associate her so strongly with a particular time and place, and with the person I used to be in that moment, that her death feels like another totem of my youth toppling.

Like most everybody else, I suppose, I first became aware of her in the fall of 1987, when the video for “Here I Go Again” was in heavy rotation. It was my first quarter as a freshman at the University of Utah. I had a screwy schedule those first few months, with a big block of empty time between my morning classes and one that I could only take in the evening. I probably should’ve spent those unscheduled hours studying or writing my first novel or doing something productive, but I had just turned 18 and I was feeling more than a little overwhelmed by life at that that point, so productivity wasn’t really in the cards. I ended up killing most of that free time in the student union, either playing Gauntlet or parked near a giant projection TV that more often than not was set to MTV. I must’ve seen that Whitesnake clip a hundred times in the three-month period before Christmas break. I already knew the song from hearing it on the radio earlier that summer, and I liked it quite a bit — the lonely romanticism of the lyrics appealed to my budding self-image as a brooding loner in the Byronic mold, and I dug the heavy guitar-based sound of it — but the visual element provided by the video, i.e., the gymnastic lady in the flowing white gown… well. That appealed to me on, shall we say, an entirely different level.

She was beautiful, yes, but in an unconventional way that started with a great mass of shaggy red hair that begged to have the wind blowing through it… or your hands buried in it. Her mouth was a bit too large, but her smile was dazzling… and contagious. (She actually presaged the coming of Julia Roberts, who had a similar energy with her mass of unruly red hair and her too-large-but-delicious megawatt smile.) The thing that really struck me about this girl, though, was her eyes in a shot toward the end of the video. She’s now in the car with Whitesnake’s lead singer (and Tawny’s future husband #1) David Coverdale, and she gives the camera a sideways glance as she sings along to the chorus. Her expression is playful and sly, intelligent and forward all at the same time. She knew exactly what she was doing with that expression, and it was sexy as hell. And yes, I developed an instant crush on her. Just like a lot of other young people watching MTV in 1987.

In those days when I had no love interest of my own and desperately wanted one, I dreamed that I might find someone like her (or hell, maybe even the actual her, because if you can’t aim high in your fantasies, where can you?). She became an aspirational figure to my 18-year-old self, a rock-and-roll goddess who felt like someone you might actually know. That image was reinforced by her part on The New WKRP, where I at last heard her voice and learned her name.

Later on, when stories came out about her whaling on Chuck Finley with a high-heeled shoe, she became less aspirational than a cautionary tale. So she was one of the crazy ones, it now seemed, the sort of unstable woman you heard about in skeezy movies that often starred Michael Douglas and that I now most definitely did not want to find. The very energy that had made her so damn sexy a decade earlier had curdled into something dangerous.

A few years after that, there were stories of her struggles with drugs, an arrest for possession and then another for DUI. Rehab, followed by appearances on reality TV, plastic surgery, a face that no longer looked quite like the same person, a downhill trajectory that was all the more depressing for its utter familiarity. We’d seen it before, hadn’t we? Nothing special here, just another fading starlet turned trainwreck. But I am a sentimental slob and seeing my old crush brought low like that stirred up my protective instincts. Whenever I’ve thought about her in the last 15 years — which admittedly hasn’t been too often — I thought I’d like to put my arm around her and somehow make everything all right for her. Condescending? Paternalistic? Yeah, maybe. But I remembered the playful rock-and-roll girl with the megawatt smile and I wanted to somehow put her back together. I don’t apologize for my feelings.

And then… she died.

A rumor went around Twitter on Friday night that something had happened to her, and I felt a pang in my gut. Anne and I had just seen that Whitesnake video a few days prior and I’d wondered what Tawny Kitaen was up to these days. I hoped that her fall from grace hadn’t finally ended in the way those falls so often do: an OD, a suicide, perhaps a body pushed beyond its limit by years of bad choices just… stopping. But there didn’t seem to be any corroboration of the rumor, and if it wasn’t on TMZ, it wasn’t for real right?

Confirmation came Saturday afternoon when I took a break from a landscaping project to glance at social media on my phone. It was true; she was gone. Cause is yet to be determined, but when it is, I won’t be at all surprised if it’s one of the possibilities I just mentioned. Standing there in the yard, leaning on my shovel, I found myself thinking about the warm golden light of a fall afternoon slanting through the wall of windows on the south side of the union, and about the sheltered dark corner where the big TV was set up; I thought about the drama that had been going on at home at the time, how school was an escape for me; and I thought about the endless stream of three-minute musical fantasies that had filled my downtime with dreams of sex and glamour and fast cars and a world where wind and smoke machines made everything look so much cooler than my mundane existence. I thought about being 18 and lonely and, yes, horny, and how anything seemed possible and how it felt like there would always be time for everything. And I thought about a woman only a few years older than myself who I’d always hoped might actually like me if our paths had crossed. A woman for whom time ran out too soon, whose big claim to fame is one of those three-minute fantasies she made decades ago, and I thought about how damned awful it is that life is a process of everything you love gradually diminishing.

And then I put my phone down and went back to work because I had a project to finish, and the daylight was fading. And I found myself humming a song from 17 years ago that’s about missing a time that had been 19 years before that, an unlikely hit from a band with the unlikely name of Bowling for Soup…

Apr252021

On Men Growing Older

“I don’t think I’ll ever reach the stage, however old I get, that I won’t turn to look at a see-through blouse.”

— Sean Connery, as quoted in Sean Connery: From 007 to Hollywood Icon by Andrew Yule

Mar222021

Happy Birthday, Bill!

I don’t think I realized how long it’s been since I last checked in around here. Assuming anybody is still following this blog and still cares, sorry. I hope I didn’t worry you. There’s nothing’s wrong. I haven’t been sick or anything, just busy… and perhaps filled with a touch of fatalistic “what does it matter” ennui. But I don’t want to talk about that right now. Instead, let us observe our silly annual tradition of wishing the one and only William Shatner a very happy birthday. The actor who portrayed my childhood hero, Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, turns an incredible 90 years old today.

Ninety.

That’s difficult to believe, as he remains more engaged with the world than many people half his age. He’s active on Twitter, for one thing, sparring with trolls and fans alike on a daily basis. He’s still working, too. The image above is from his upcoming movie Senior Moment, in which he stars with the equally iconic Christoper Lloyd. (The trekkies among us will no doubt remember that they previously worked together in a little thing called Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, way back in 1984.) Judging from the trailer, Senior Moment will probably be the sort of thing that’s best described as “cute,” a by-the-numbers exercise in life-affirming treacle. I don’t have very high expectations for it at all, but I think it’s admirable that Shatner has found a starring role at this stage of life, and I hope it’s a success for him.

And here’s an interesting project that was just announced today, no doubt to coincide with his birthday: Shatner has become the “brand ambassador” and will be the first subject of a new service called StoryFile that will use recorded interviews and AI technology to create interactive video simulations of people that others can converse with, just as if they were talking to the real person. I’ve had a look at the company’s sizzle reel; it seems entirely plausible, and they have a lot of interesting potential applications in mind. But the one I’m really intrigued by is the idea of creating a legacy, some hint of a person that will remain after that person is gone. Journals, photographs, personal possessions, even film and video can only go so far in giving you the sense of an actual person, but one of these StoryFile simulacrums could capture an inkling of someone’s actual personality. It reminds me of the old Max Headroom concept, where a computer-generated TV personality was created from a scan of someone’s brain. Of course, that was more akin to downloading someone’s mind, which this isn’t. But some of these AI chatbots are getting pretty difficult to distinguish from actual human customer service agents. If we could create that level of realism… well, like I said, I’m intrigued. Where I never got around to having children, the idea of living on in even a video simulation form is… appealing.

I know start-up companies with these grandiose, would-be revolutionary ideas are a dime a dozen. StoryFile could easily be vaporware, this year’s version of that Mars One debacle a few years back. But like I said, I’m intrigued. And I love that William Shatner, 90-year-old William Shatner, is involved with it. He is still a role model to me in so many ways… still curious, still engaged, still grappling with the human adventure. I aspire to that.

Happy birthday, Bill.

Feb042021

The First Film You Remember Watching

30-Day Movie Challenge, Day 1: The First Film You Remember Watching

My earliest movie-related memory — hell, one of my earliest memories period — is of going with my mom and my great-grandmother to an old-fashioned, single-screen neighborhood movie house across the street from where Grandma lived to see The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams.

If that title sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking of the weekly television series that ran on NBC for two seasons from 1977-78. The series was spun off from the feature film of the same name, which believe it or not was one of the highest grossing films of 1974, despite being G-rated and starring a virtual unknown named Dan Haggerty, whose biggest role prior to that was a bit-part in Easy Rider. Grizzly Adams was an independent film made on a shoestring budget by a Utah-based production company, filmed on location around my home state and loosely based on a real 19th-century mountain man. I couldn’t find much information about the film online, so I can only guess its success was a quirk of its timing. Its story of a man wrongly accused of murder escaping into the wilderness and living in harmony with nature struck a chord in those days of anti-authoritarianism, back-to-the-land lifestyle experiments, and the nascent environmental movement. A film with a similar premise, Robert Redford’s Jeremiah Johnson, had come out only two years prior, and the “Crying Indian” PSA and the related Keep America Beautiful campaign two years before that.

Now, I was all of five years old when Grizzly Adams was released, so I’m sure my memories of the film itself are conflated with the TV series that followed. But I do have a vivid impression of the experience of seeing it. I recall that the movie theater — the Murray, named after the city it was located in — was just a short walk from Grandma’s tidy little house with the Chinese red kitchen. This is the only time I remember going to the movies with her, and in my mind, I sat between her and my mom, feeling warm and safe and loved as I munched my popcorn.

I also recall having a bit of an obsession with the Grizzly Adams story for a while, which seems incongruous given my lifetime affection for science fiction. (I know I was already watching Star Trek by ’74, and the following year, Space: 1999 as well.) But something about Grizzly clicked with me… possibly the fact that I recognized the landscapes where it and the spinoff series were filmed. I remember having this weird notion that Grizzly and Little House on the Prairie — which I also watched during my wholesome Utah childhood — were both taking place right now, er, that is, then, in the 1970s, contemporaneously with the shows’ airing. I knew they were only TV shows and that actors only pretended to do the things they did, but I also believed there were real analogs of the characters living in the mountains that I could see from my living-room window. That if I were to go up there somehow, I would run into Adams and his companion Ben the bear, and the town of Walnut Grove with all its inhabitants just the way they appeared on my screen every week. It probably didn’t help my confusion when a real-life mountain man came riding up the street in front of my house one summer, bound for Idaho where he intended to live off the grid, in communion with nature and by his own terms. He was on horseback with a pack horse following behind, and he was wearing a Bowie knife as long as my young arm on one hip and an honest-to-god six-gun on the other, just like those guys on TV… but that’s a story for another time.

As far as I can determine, the Life and Times of Grizzly Adams feature film has never been released on any home video format — the TV series is available on DVD — and I haven’t seen it, probably, since that day with Mom and Grandma. I know there’s a copy of it on YouTube, but I’m half afraid to look at it. Better perhaps that it remain a sweet memory unsullied by low-budget reality.

My great-grandmother died decades ago, in the late ’80s, I think, and her little house, along with its entire neighborhood, was demolished and replaced by an apartment complex where a friend of mine lived for a time in the ’90s. Weirdly enough, the Murray Theater is still standing, although no movies have been shown there in almost as long as Grandma has been gone…

Jan302021

30-Day Film Challenge

We’re 10 days into the Biden-Harris administration and, for now at least, civilization seems to be holding itself together, so I feel like it’s okay to begin doing some frivolous, nonpolitical blogging again. I don’t know about you, but I could use the break.

As I mentioned at the end of the last year’s 30-Day Song Challenge, I’ve also come across a 30-Day Movie Challenge. How can I resist doing that one, especially considering how well the Song Challenge worked at prompting me to post something on a fairly regular basis?

Now, I’ve done a lot of “list of favorites” type entries over the years, and it seems like the same films just keep coming up over and over in those. So to try and make this a bit more interesting (and a lot less repetitive), I’ve decided to impose one big restriction on myself: no films from the Star Wars franchise. And I’ll also strive to avoid using any of the movies that I blather about all the time, although that may be a bit trickier to pull off. We’ll see what I can come up with.

Here’s the list of categories:

Jan242021

This Land of Hope and Dreams

It’s been slightly over 96 hours since Joe Biden took the oath of office and became the 46th president of the United States.

Four days.

And while it may be unrealistic and even unfair to expect much of a change in only four days… the world today feels very different to me than it did last Sunday. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say… I feel very different. I have literally felt my body unclenching little by little over these past four day. Relaxing. It’s been rather like what I experienced after I was diagnosed with high blood pressure and diabetes; as the medications took effect and I returned to something resembling how a normal human body is supposed to function, I was surprised by how different I suddenly felt. You know how people describe getting angry as “seeing red?” Well, before my blood pressure was regulated, before I knew it needed to be regulated, I literally did that. It was as if a red lens dropped over my eyes whenever I got irritated about something. And I never questioned it because I thought it was just something that happened to everyone. But now it doesn’t happen anymore and I understand that it was a warning sign. In short, I never realized how bad I used to feel all the time until I started to feel well. And the same type of thing is happening now that Trump is gone.

I’ve spent the last four years feeling angry, constantly angry, every single day. Every day, there was a new outrage, a fresh source of irritation and loathing, as the wanna-be mafia don in the Oval Office and his team of deplorables — yes, I said it; Hillary was right on with that description when it comes to the likes of Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Rudy Giuliani and all the other scumbags that comprised Trump’s inner circle — kicked the supports out from under everything that progressives value and have fought so hard to build over the last 90 years. Those feelings ramped up in the two months following the election as the hardheaded narcissist refused to concede and his sycophants in Congress and on the TV talking-head shows spread the Big Lie that the election was somehow rigged. (If that was true, if the Democrats had really pulled off some kind of massive conspiracy to swing the election in their favor, does it make any sense at all that we wouldn’t have arranged for an overwhelming majority in the Senate as well? Come on… ). And then on January 6, as the barbarians raged through the halls of the Capitol building — our Capitol, We the People’s Capitol — with their Confederate treason flags and their ridiculous cosplay outfits, my anger became white-hot fury, and then as inauguration day approached, I had a sick certainty that something was going to happen…

And then it didn’t. No assassination attempt, no car bomb, no riots. Biden and Harris just took their oaths and before the fireworks flew that evening were already busy at work trying to undo the damage the previous administration has wrought. The whole tone of business changed almost instantly. We have press conferences again and a press secretary who wants to work with the media instead of antagonizing them. We have scientists back in charge of the pandemic. Trump toadies within the civil service are being invited to leave. It’s all so… I hate to use the word “normal,” because I hesitate to believe anything will ever be normal again, but the news has become so… quiet. And competent. It feels like the grown-ups are back after an unruly school class has trashed their room.

Now, I’m not a fool. It has been, after all, only four days. Biden has an ambitious agenda and is confronted with a hell of a lot of fires to put out, and logic and cold experience dictates that he’s not going to be able to do all of it, or even most of it. The Republicans are already pushing their usual disingenuous bullshit around the concept of “unity” (i.e., that “unity” means “do it all our way or we’ll scream that you’re not serious about healing the nation”); Mitch McConnell remains intransigent about blocking the Democratic agenda any way he can (“promise not to nuke the filibuster or I’ll filibuster!”); the MAGA nation is still out there screaming about election fraud and socialism; and the media is already doing their part to undermine a Democratic president by publishing stupid shit like that article about Biden’s Rolex (am I supposed to feel a burst of class-based outrage that he has a nice watch and a classic Corvette when the previous occupant of the White House craps in a gold-plated toilet?). So while rolling back the most egregious of Trump’s activities with executive orders of our own feels mighty damn satisfying, any genuine, long-lasting progress is going to be an uphill battle to achieve. I know all of this. And I know that Trump himself is still out there, too, lurking somewhere in the shadows, along with all of his shallow-gene’d, cokehead, would-be dynastic offspring, waiting for their chance to lurch back into the light and stir the shit up again, if not incite another coup attempt.

But you know… we’ve had four glorious days of not having to hear about him or hear him, of not having to see his ugly little sphincter-mouth all over my social media newsfeeds, and that has really been enough for now. His absence has been blissful luxury.

(Incidentally, I know this entry is considerably less… measured… than my usual political posts. I usually try hard to not deliberately provoke my conservative friends. But I can’t hold it back anymore. The last four years have tested me, and tested this country, almost to the very limits of our endurance. And I’m tired of playing nice just to avoid an argument. So, while I don’t wish to hurt, anger, or fight with anyone who might be reading this, I’m also not going to muzzle myself. Not anymore, not on my blog. You don’t like the tone? Take it up with Donald Fucking Trump, the worst president this nation has ever endured, may he rot down there at his ticky-tacky Florida compound.)

In closing, I want to share Bruce Springsteen’s performance from the Celebrating America special that aired on various networks and platforms on inauguration night. As with so many Springsteen songs, it aches with a world-weary melancholy, but there’s a hard, warm little kernel of optimism at the center of it. That’s where I am right now, where I have been since the morning of January 20. It’s not going to be easy for Joe Biden… but I do believe he’s going to move heaven and earth to try to make things better. And after the last four years of selfish exploitation and creeping authoritarianism, he’s going to look like goddamn hero for it.

Grab your ticket and your suitcase
Thunder’s rolling down the tracks
You don’t know where you’re goin’ now
But you know you won’t be back
Darlin’ if you’re weary
Lay your head upon my chest
We’ll take what we can carry
And we’ll leave the rest

Big wheels rolling through fields
Where sunlight streams
Meet me in a land of hope and dreams

Jan202021

A Moment’s Respite

Joseph R. Biden is now the president of the United States.

I feel like an anvil has been lifted from my head.

And yet… you know what I keep thinking about today? There’s this one particular moment in the old Empire Strikes Back radio drama made for NPR back in the ’80s… what’s that? You don’t know about that? Well, if you’re a Star Wars fan who hasn’t heard the radio dramas, you really owe it to yourself to seek them out. You wouldn’t think that movies with such a strong visual identity and relatively little dialogue could be successfully adapted to a strictly audio format, but these work extremely well, thanks to strong scripting by the late Brian Daley (who wrote the early tie-in novels about Han Solo and Chewie), original music and sound effects from the films, and some very talented voice actors, including Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels, and Billy Dee Williams. The radio dramas actually deepen the familiar stories in a number of interesting ways; I personally prefer the radio version of how Leia came into possession of the Death Star plans to what we see in Rogue One.

Anyhow, in the Empire adaptation, the Battle of Hoth takes up an entire half-hour episode, ending on a terrific cliffhanger as the Rebel base falls and our heroes are forced to run for their lives. The action builds and builds, with Leia in the command center barking orders, artillery fire rattling the base, the music swelling, and then a distorted voice comes over the comm system: “Imperial troops have entered the base! Imperial troops — ” There’s the sound of a blaster shot and a burst of static. Han Solo tells the princess this is it, they’re out of time. Leia gives the evacuation order, and there’s even more commotion, a klaxon ringing, controllers shouting, the music rising…. and then a sudden moment of silence. The only sound effect is of dust falling. It’s like the story is pausing to catch its breath… and then the music returns, insistent, more frantic than ever… the sound effects come back with a roar of blasterfire and explosions as Vader’s theme pounds out… and then the narrator gives us the closing blurb about the Rebels struggling to keep the light of freedom from going out forever… cue the closing credits for that week.

Well, friends, today feels to me very much like that moment of silence during the radio version of the Battle of Hoth. The story has paused, the dust is settling, and we’re all letting out a collective exhale. But the pandemic is still raging; the QAnon cultists and white supremacists and anti-government militias are still out there, and I don’t expect they’re going to just melt back into the shadows; the Supreme Court is now solidly conservative, and Mitch McConnell is no doubt already scheming a way to gum up Biden’s agenda; and there is so, so, so much damage to repair. And I expect the battle against all of that to fade back in as soon as tomorrow morning.

But that’s tomorrow. For now, let’s just… exhale. And enjoy the quiet sound of dust settling…

Jan192021

24 Hours

Tomorrow at 12 noon EST (10 AM where I am), the Trump presidency will be formally over. (Actually, I think you can argue pretty convincingly that it’s been over since election day; certainly, Trump hasn’t made any pretense of actual governance since then, preferring instead to sulk on the golf course, pursue quixotic lawsuits, and of course incite a failed coup attempt.) The miserable trainwreck of the past four years, which have felt more like 400, will finally, at long last, be over. In my head, the countdown clock is now running.

However, given the ominous threat of more MAGA shenanigans, as well as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic necessitating a socially distanced inaugural ceremony unlike any in living memory, I find myself imagining a very specific countdown clock, with a very specific sound effect…

Dec312020

Lileks on the Awesome ’80s

It’s been a long, long time since I checked in on James Lileks. Longtime Loyal Readers may remember that name. I used to refer to him quite a bit here on Simple Tricks, back in the days when blogging was a going concern and we were all linking to each other in a big happy ecosphere… before the dark times… before social media.

I read his Daily Bleat regularly in that halcyon age, and I even aspired to model my own blogging efforts on the sorts of things he was doing. Then came The Lileks Incident, when something I wrote about him here got back to him. He slagged me pretty thoroughly, made me mildly famous for a couple days, and I was startled when his not-inconsiderable fanbase was so… unforgiving. It was probably pretty mild compared to the corrosive shitstorm that’s commonplace nowadays on Twitter, among other places, but at the time, I found it pretty difficult to take, especially where I felt like I’d been misunderstood. I contacted him, explained my side of it, we exchanged apologies, and that was the end of it. Except… I’ll be honest, the whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth and shortly thereafter, I just… stopped going to his site. It was a big internet after all, and there was lots of other content to eat up my leisure time without any lingering embarrassment or resentment. C’est la vie.

It’s a shame, too, because in those early, heady days of the blogosphere, when people were homesteading themselves an online presence and declaring themselves and all their weird interests, it was easy to feel like you knew someone, like they were a friend, even if they had no idea you were even reading their stuff. Lileks had felt like a friend. I had emotional investment in him, in his interests and daily life, in stories of his daughter and his dog and his problematic backyard water feature. When he turned on me, even if he felt justified in doing so… it hurt. And for a long time after I stopped reading the Bleat, I felt like I’d lost a friend. Even though I knew he barely knew I existed. It was an important lesson in how this brave new world operated, and how harsh it could be.

Earlier today, I was going through a very old folder of bookmarks and came across the link to his site. My curiosity bloomed almost immediately. It’d been nearly a decade, I think, since I last read him. Was he even still out there anymore? Did I dare take a look? Although I’d always admired his writing ability, his turns of phrase and his sense of humor, his politics were not entirely compatible with my own and I frankly dreaded what the Bleat might have mutated into during the Trump years.

To my relief, it appears to be pretty much what I remember: close examination of architecture, pop culture, bits of ephemera, the details expounded upon for laughs and yet somehow he zeroes in on a kernel of truth about the way things were and how they are not that any longer, and what a shame that is. One new addition to the site soon caught my eye, something he’s calling “The 20th Century Project,” which consists of scans of old magazine ads, catalogs and other ephemera, organized by decade and described in his particular sensibility. Naturally, I turned to the subset of material from The ’80s first. Here’s his introduction to that decade that is so near and dear to my heart:

Yes, it was awesome.

Also, terrifying! Any minute now, nuclear war. Oh, and by the way, sex is fatal now. That said, it was everything you remember, or everything you heard, and so much less.

… think of it like a story told in a smoky bar with streetlights slanting through the venetian blinds. That sounds rather 40s, I know – but it was also very 80s, and we loved it, because it seemed as if we were back to one important basic lesson: the classics weren’t dead. We could bring them back to life at the same time we made up new ideas, and it all fit together. America was BACK! Also nuclear dread and deadly STDs, but you got your win and you got your wang.

I stand in awe of how he captures so much what made the ’80s “the ’80s” in so little verbiage, whereas I would probably carry on for another 2000 words without every managing to say anything. Nuclear dread, STDs, and bands of light through venetian blinds… that’s exactly how I remember it.

Yeah… I still want to want to do what he does, even as I watch the digital tumbleweeds blow past the weatherbeaten porch of this old platform…

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