Stickybuffalo.com

I think I disliked Crocker Park from nearly the first moment I ever heard of the place. Certainly before I had ever been there, and possibly before I even knew much about it.

And I recognized that this was a knee-jerk, prejudiced reaction on my part; I knew that I had no real reasons to back up my contrarian revulsion at the local gushing about how great and how wonderful and “oooh, Crocker Park!” At least, not immediately.

Even after living in northeast Ohio for six years, and visiting Crocker Park probably four or five times, to be honest I’ve remained slightly uneasy about my negative stance. I still loathe Crocker Park and all it represents, mind you. It seems completely fake, phony, superficial, short-termist and shallow; the epitome of the most disgusting aspects of American consumer capitalism, suburban sprawl, etc.

If you haven’t guessed, yet, Crocker Park is a shopping center. Though, naturally, its boosters claim that it’s so much more than a shopping center: it’s “A brilliant mix of known retail stores, spacious office buildings, great restaurants, luxury apartments, relaxing green spaces and even whole neighborhoods of single family homes [...] where big city energy meets small town charm.” I say it’s a fucking shopping center with extreme delusions of grandeur, meanwhile. (more…)

When high school ended for me, fifteen years ago, it pretty much ended. Which, I suppose, makes me an anachronism in yet another way these days.

I mean, out of a graduating class of 70-some, I have remained in occasional contact with exactly one person. Otherwise, I saw a few people during my first years of college, but by the later years there I hardly even saw the other AHS grads who were enrolled at Iowa State. (ISU’s student population is about five times that of my entire hometown, of course.)

Since then, we’re talking “count on one hand” number of encounters with the people I grew up around. The occasional mention of someone or other has reached my ears while visiting family, but on the whole, I have no idea what’s happened to those people in the past fifteen years.

Which was probably not unusual, up until a few years ago… now, apparently, most people go through life digitally linked to pretty much everyone they’ve ever known since they were old enough to walk. I suppose that in a sense, my nonparticipation with this new social paradigm could probably be considered both cause and effect of my absence from Facebook; I’m in the dark about my high school classmates because I’m not on Facebook, and I’m not on Facebook for reasons including a feeling that I don’t really need to be electronically haunted by some sort of ghost-relationship with dozens of former associates for the rest of my life.

(With the passing of years it seems like many of the smart-remarks in Jennifer Marks’ delightful pop song “High School Reunion” seem instead rather presciently applicable to Facebook; “…if I wanted to know about your life, I would’ve called you on the phone, I would’ve let my fingers do the walking…”)

And yet I’m planning to attend a recently-announced 15-year reunion. (Which, naturally, was announced and is being organized on Facebook, and only came to my attention via roundabout means. I wonder if this is what it was like being one of the last people without a telephone line.) (more…)

I’m ba-aaaaack!

Lovely week in France. Various adventures, more than one of them down to the craptastic quality of modern air travel.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the ability to leave home and be in Paris what, 14 or 15 hours later all told? That’s pretty fantastic. (The Concorde could beat that, but then the whole Concorde program is “up on bricks” like the plane I saw at DeGaulle airport, and of course I never would have been able to afford it anyway.)

But really it isn’t even so much the time of travel as the shittiness of dealing with the nuisance factor of everything. Goddamn security theater, goddamn lost bag, goddamn lines. On returning to the United States, I had to wait in three fucking lines at Philadelphia: the first was for customs, the last was for security even though I’d already gone through security in Paris (obviously this wasn’t good enough), and the other was for… I really can’t even see a pretend point to that one. Basically we lined up once to get our little custom form stamped, and then had to line up again to hand the stamped form over to another official. Uh…?

Oh well. It was still a magnificent week. If nothing else, the glorious weather alone would have made up for nearly anything. I can’t imagine much better weather for sightseeing at any point in the year, really.

Thank you, state-funded higher education and creative-worker talent market for making this possible. (more…)