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The Hogs of Entropy 0910
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ggg "Champaign Revisited" ggg
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$$$ (* HOE E'ZINE RELEASE #910 -- 11/29/99 *) .,$$$
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Prelude
=======
I want to dispell a Hollywood myth. In the old films we see the
train pull out of the station and the last passenger runs for the door
and gets on at the last second. Here is what really happens. Once a
train gets moving, it gathers speed rather quickly and after just a few
seconds, no matter how fast you run, no matter how loud you scream, no
matter that all your luggage and your wallet and your coat are on the
train, and no matter that you got off "just for a second, I swear," to
make a phone call that you "had to make," there is no way to get on a
that train once it starts rolling.
The guy, a young college student, looked to me like he had a
chance. In fact for about seven seconds I thought he made it. (Count
out seven seconds that is a long time.) He ran past my window toward the
train door. I thought he made it, but then my window caught up and
passed him, he was well down the station platform, yelling, the full
force of his stupidity had not hit him. Next train to Champaign would be
in four hours, but who knows how long it would be till he got back his
luggage and coat and wallet.
Reconstruction of the Half-Remembered City
==========================================
I struggle here for a proper metaphor to capture how I feel about
Champaign eleven years after graduating. In the cab on the way to the
hotel where I'd spend my miserable weekend, as we came down Green Street
into Campus Town the first feeling was the movie Back To The Future, Part
Three. The old respectable shops and eateries of my youth were replaced
by bright neon. Murphy's, a quiet little pub, that felt out-of-the-way,
now became a bar with big windows and drink specials welcoming everyone
in, not just the seniors and grad students of who used to be the only
frequenters. The White Hen, now Home Town Pantry was a solid wall of
neon beer signs, where was the quaint place we used to buy chips and soda
at before we went back to the dorms to watch Cheers and Hill Street
Blues?
But that metaphor gave way to the scene in "It's a Wonderful Life"
when Jimmy Stwart sees the Bedford Falls turned to Pottersville. After I
got to the hotel, settled in, made some phone calls, I went for a stroll
and every change seemed bad. My favorite bar was now a place that sold
crystal dragons and unicorns, the mighty Co-Ed cinema was now a clothes
shop. The McDonald's became a Korean Restaurant. Wendy's, now closed
and dark and forboding, though this could have been predicted even in my
day due to their horrendously gaudy wallpaper.
But once I had given up and resigned myself to the town, what it
finally felt like was Planet Of The Apes when Charelston Heston sees that
he has been in his beloved city all the time and that there was no going
back, all was destroyed. How could you do this to my beloved town, how
could you make it so horrid?
No lines in front of the bars Kams and CODs? This was 9:30 on a
Friday night. Could things change so fast and far in just eleven years?
I feel like an old foggy, when I pine for how things were better. But
there were other factors that made me feel even more out of place.
Everyone out this Friday night was one of the beautiful people,
the guys were from cologne ads and the women from the covers of beauty
magazines and I was did not fit in.
I went to the R and R Sports Grill where I had my very first
whiskey sour my sophomore year of school, a drink that is now my standard
on those occasions where I go out drinking. The music was loud, not just
blaring loud, but painful. Yet people came here to hang out and (of all
the impossible things) talk with their friends. There was a drink that
was frequently ordered which was an oversized pitcher of a reddish
liquid, into which is thrust a plastic shark and five straws. This is
how kids get drunk, they do silly things, it is a game. To me, drinking
is more a recreation, friends together, a few pitchers of beers in a bar
with a ball game on in the background.
When I walked back to the hotel and got snide remarks and looks
from the beautiful people I saw that this is not my world.
Somehow after college I thought that I would always fit in with
that world, that if given the opportunity I could still stay up till 3
a.m. and I would always know how to have fun as I did it in college. But
here I saw that I was no longer part of that world. I've moved on. That
made me not just sad, but I felt out of touch in a way that really stung
me. Here for the past 11 years I saw the college way of life as a
fall back, as a safety net. Now I see that the rope has been untied from
the dock and thrown onto my boat, set adrift to look for a new port to
call home.
Hotel Blues, Part I
===================
I would like to have a story about the hotel being a nightmare and
cruddy, or, alternatively, a tale of swankiness and luxury, but the hotel
room was nothing special.
The only bad part was the bugs on the ceiling, these quazi-
lady bugs minded their own business constantly rearranging themselves
like living constellations charting out a constantly changing cosmos.
What surprised me most was a full kitchen in the room. It even
had a microwave oven and a stove with two full-sized burners. I
questioned the need for all the cabinets, can people really stay long
enough in the hotel to have the need to fill them all?
I Am A Zombie
=============
I'll note the weekend as a disaster. I had planned on seeing so
many people and doing so many things but lack of sleep really killed me.
Saturday I made it to a play written by an old BBS friend of mine,
Midget Caesar for those few Hoe readers who remember, a couple of IRCers
came along, but with only four hours of sleep I was as useless as a
heroin fiend, and maybe less lively.
I went to sleep on Friday night at 2:00 a.m. and woke at 6:30 a.m.
And that was that. Part was worrying about meeting people, part was
worrying about not getting enough sleep and part was worrying that I
should have brought sleeping pills like the last time I was on vacation,
in Florida.
I spent nine hours, before the play, trying to get just two more
hours of sleep. I went out at 9:30 a.m. and bought some sleeping pills
but they did not put me to sleep, I cannot nap during the day. A fatal
flaw.
Hotel Blues, Part II
====================
Somehow it is more depressing to be alone on a Saturday night in
a hotel in a city not your own than it is to be in the familiar
surroundings of home.
I look out my eighth floor window and the city is alive, lights
shining out fun and excitement, and flesh, people in couples walk the
streets.
When I walked back to the hotel from the play I saw countless
people grilling on balconies and porches and the music was loud and
upbeat and the beer flowed with the laughter. I was the only one not
having fun.
I have the TV turned on, but the sound to mute. TV completes the
hopelessness.
Sad thing is that even if someone had asked me to do something
tonight, I would have declined due to my lack of sleep.
I dug my own grave and now I lay in it.
The Man Show pops on the TV and I feel better, I can now wallow in
my own filth.
Galileo
=======
Galileo sits on top of the highest building in Champaign, staring
out onto the darkness which is filled with twinkling lights.
Cars below are toys from this height, and the people running in
the streets their movements follow statistical probability rather than
the randomness it seems with street level viewing. In Galileo you can
see far, I imagine giant smoke stacks in the blackness and lights,
factories churning out product that is only used in other factories,
which in turn do the same, none of these faceless buildings ultimately
making product for public consumption.
I get a beer and sit in a table off by myself, just glad to be
around other people, even if I must keep my distance.
The Blank Spaces
================
Among the side streets, away from the main quadrangle, away from
the buildings where I had classes, away from the areas I know intimately,
are the fringe buildings, buildings I passed hundreds of times as a
student 11 years ago. Each of these buildings take me by complete
surprise. I know them in most cases, I know their name and I am baffled
at how I can remember. It is like finding a past life through hypnosis,
and I fight to fit each into my current picture of campus, a picture that
I did not know had so many blank spaces, whole parts of the map that were
missing.
But the strangest part is that I know that I entered most of these
buildings at least once. Didn't I see the movie "Princess Bride" in that
church with my computer friends? Didn't I go in that building when I
needed to get a stamp on a form when the school computer dropped my
entire load of classes two weeks into my Junior year?
Now that I've noticed these buildings again and completed the map
again, will these buildings be part of my thoughts when I think of
school? Perhaps when I come back in another 10 years they will be more
distant and all I'll remember is that 10 years earlier I had a vague
recollection of them. All the original associations will be gone.
Quad
====
Lincoln Hall is locked. Halloween morning, 11 a.m., Sunday, my
last day in Champaign.
It is probably for the best that the door is locked. The foyer,
where I just now tried to gain entrance, was the high point of a doomed
relationship. It is said that the only lasting love is unrequited love.
Here, eleven years later, I still think of the girl who meant so much to
me back then. And the girl who means so much to me now.
I am on the main quadrangle of campus, where 70% of classes take
place and it is all the same as I remember it. The best way to describe
how I feel about it is to say that it is like looking at it while drunk.
It feels everyday, but just a little removed from everyday. There is a
slight distortion or sense of the unreal, like seeing the Eiffel Tower
after having seen it only in photos all one's life.
All the buildings are exactly how I remember them, perhaps a bit
more majestic, the quad is built on a grand scale.
Since it is morning only a few people stroll around, I am left to
imagination and memory to picture what it is like with the crowds of a
school day.
The clock at Altgeld Hall (my favorite campus building with its
twists and turns and dead ends and secret passage ways) rings out, its
bells so comforting, they make me feel as though I never left, never
missed a step.
I'm going to go sit on the grass and read. Lots of time to kill
today.
Okay, now i go to the grass.
Blight
======
There is a new blight in campus: sidewalk chalk. This is not just
kids drawing dirty words on the sidewalks of the quad, these are
multi-colored ads ten feet wide, for businesses or for plays or concerts,
one even for a "semi-formal."
I do not approve.
Last Thought
============
My last thoughts are pretty straight-forward. In my mind I had
downplayed my time here at the University, I told myself that what is new
and current must be best and strongest. But spending these extra hours
here I see that what I did in my term here, be it good or bad, be it
productive or wasted, it is that which belongs to me. The University is
a great heritage and I value now even more my time here, and though I
still know people who go to school here, I cannot keep up this
celebration of the new, I accept my time here for what it was and there
is no way to recreate it. The current generation owns it now but they
too will pass it on.
Here, now, I have a feeling of boundaries set up which I did not
expect. Buildings I cannot enter, students only. Bars where I not only
feel out of place but where I am unwelcome. Even the Follet bookstore
which sells textbooks I can't buy for classes I cannot take.
The final note here is that what I have drawn upon for my touches
with youth is not the University of Illinois as it currently is, I had
thought that was where the strength came from. Instead what I draw from
is my time here, which ended 11 years ago. It is my choices made back
then and my memories that shape how I am now, and not the youth who live
that life today. This is their day and good luck to them, for this too
shall pass.
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[ (c) !LA HOE REVOLUCION PRESS! HOE #910 - WRITTEN BY: OREGANO - 11/29/99 ]
