I never really thought anyone other than the people who ran the House of Representatives cafereria took it seriously. I was wrong. As I was having my dinner last night, I looked up at the takeout menu and realized I was eating in an establishment that proudly served Freedom Fries.
I didn’t have any.
I drove to Roanoke, Virginia this afternoon. Roanoke is pretty. I’ve spent some time there in the past, but not a lot. We used to drive through a couple of times a year on the way to West Virginia when I was a kid. I had a weekend-long affair with a boy in a semi-dumpy 1940s motel there sometime in the mid-1980s. And my friend Duncan and I drove up there one afternoon from Greensboro to have dinner at the K&W, after which we drove right back.
This time I took a pretty good tour. It’s a cool place, one of those cities that was obviously much more important eighty years ago than it is now. It has a rather sprawling old downtown surrounded by some interesting neighborhoods in varying stages of decay, gentrification, or both, all set in a semi-mountainous backdrop. All in all, it’s a little reminiscent of Asheville, but without all the annoying hippie granola shit going on.
I like Roanoke. I may post more pictures tomorrow. It’s really nice revisiting these smaller east coast cities, many of which I largely ignored when I lived here before. Seeing them with my newer perspective — shaped by years of urban travel all over the country and by having lived in a major urban area — is like seeing them for the first time all over again. Seeing them in the daytime, while sober, enhances the experience somewhat as well. I missed a lot the first time around, although I wouldn’t trade my misspent youth for anything, really.
A visit from a friend I hadn’t seen in too many years, overabundant food at Libby Hill, obnoxious heat and humidity, mysqldump, The Young Ones, missing my boy, and a (finally completed) bout with insomnia have defined my week. Yours?
Note, please, that the last sentence was more or less a rhetorical request for information.
Happy birthday, Dan. Update your damned website…
This, via here, is making me all warm and squishy tonight and keeping me up later than I might have preferred. On early assessment, I am not surprised to see that we have a relatively obscure collection of books here at Murdering Stream Estates. I am very pleased to see that, at this stage in the import, the three most “popular” titles I own are all “Bloom County” collections. Somehow, that makes me feel a lot better about humanity in general.
There are still lots of tags to enter. And alas, Mark and I between us have over 150 titles without ISBNs, all of which will have to be entered manually rather than imported from our own book database.
Why, yes. Of course we have our own book database. Don’t you?