Dottie’s Diner on Stratford Road will be closing this weekend.

Open since 1990, the place still bears a strong resemblance to its predecessor of 30-plus years: Your House, a central North Carolina chain that operated from the 1950s through the 1990s. At least one location is still open, on Greensboro’s Battleground Avenue in a replica of its original building. Your House was a 24-hour diner, something of a knockoff of the Toddle House and Hull-Dobbs chains that were found all over the country in those days, and a precursor to the Waffle House of today.

I grew up eating at the Your House on High Point Road with my dad. We’d very often go there on Saturday mornings for waffles. My dad would meet his friends there in the evenings to sit at the counter, chat, drink coffee, and harmlessly flirt with the waitresses. In my early twenties, I’d go there with my own friends for the double cheeseburger that seemed so necessary at 2:30 in the morning after a night of drinking cheap draft beer somewhere.

I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this except to say that these little diners are the real 1950s diners, and not some gay-ass imitation with fake neon and old records nailed to the wall. A sizable portion of our male population once got a significant portion of its sustenance from them, and from places like these, and it’s sad to see these little dives go.

I’ll also miss it because it was one of the first places Mark and I ate breakfast in Winston on one of our first exploratory trips here last winter. And they have really good grits.

Some thoughts related to some recent semi-accidental lapses into the commercial radio universe while driving the 70-odd miles between Winston-Salem and Charlotte two or three times a week:

• Kelly Clarkson sounds like Pink being gang-fucked by Alanis Morissette and Melissa Etheridge wearing strap-ons. Which is an entertaining image on some level, but the music still doesn’t do much for me.
• 98.7 Simon: We play everything. As long as it’s “Wild Thing” by Tone Loc, over and over and over again.
• “Land of Confusion” by Disturbed: way to take a song that wasn’t very good to begin with (though it had a good video) and make it even worse. I was surprised to see that the name of the band wasn’t spelled “Disturbd” à la Staind. They were both hatched out of the same focus group, weren’t they?
• The above would have been less notworthy had it not been the only song played on the station we were listening to between 5 and 6 PM yeterday. The rest of the hour was filled with three boring people talking more or less about nothing.
• I’ll be missing this now that we’ve moved to Winston-Salem. But I may enjoy being reunited with this and this.

I’ve been hearing stories about the death of commercial radio for two decades now. I finally believe them. And I’m starting to think that killing it off quickly would be the humane thing to do.

I had no idea until this weekend that we have The Documentary Channel. It’s pretty cool.

Things are moving along nicely here at Murdering Stream Estates. We should be able to get most of the remaining odds and ends out of the Charlotte apartment in one more trip; most of what’s left there is the other half of my rather large collection of vinyl and a few small kitchen appliances.

Mark‘s office is set up quite nicely, while mine is awaiting a new desk, which may be chosen tomorrow. Yes, we each have our own offices, each of which is about half again as big as any single room in our old apartment in San Francisco. Mine should be very comfy as it also contains most of my old childhood bedroom suite, including the bed.

The washer and dryer, which had for some reason been disconnected and moved to the garage, are now in their proper places and again are functional, if a bit loud. The guest bedroom now has its bed, and the kitchen is fully stocked, with Libby Hill leftovers in the refrigerator.

I like our house.

Hank Hill to Christian rocker: “Can’t you see that you’re not making Christianity better? You’re just making rock and roll worse.”

Best “King of the Hill” quote ever…