Spent Saturday evening combing through the wreckage of my memories via Google Maps. (If you choose the right music for such an exercise, you’ll be so fraught with nostalgia that you’ll think Dan Fogelberg stepped into the room with his suicide machines.)
The house in the upper left is where I spent a great many of my preschool, kindergarten and first-grade days. It’s the same house my mom grew up in. My favorite thing about it is the heated floors. I vaguely recall watching some 1970s prime-time TV shows there.
The house on the right used to be orange. Now, it’s decked out in a Stalinist shade of grey.
Third on Memory Lane is a house I liked quite a bit (below). I recall a lot of TV and premium-channel movie-viewing there too — Battlestar Galactica; Rocky III; Salem’s Lot; and my favorite — Galaxina…
Several years into the future is a dreary apartment tower (right, below), whose walls were filled with cockroaches. I would go to class, and if I left my kitchen sink full of water, I’d come home to find several drowned roaches floating about. I would taunt them by turning on the stove burners. This apartment also had a “Norwegian”-style bathroom (shower head arbitrarily sticking out of the wall; drain on the floor; light switch not far from the shower head). I was subleasing the unit from a young Republican guy.
Directly below was where I watched a lot of Jagad Guru on TV. The place was owned by a student-ghetto slumlord, and, importantly, it was located near a damn fine liquor store and a cop bar called the Caribou Tavern.
Last on the list is a place I shared with a performance artist (who eventually found himself ensnared in some sort of plagiarism scandal) and others I had zero in common with. Not a whole lot of fond memories there. My room had previously been occupied by a snide Marxist dweeb; I think his more irritating personality traits remained long after he left. Trapped in the curtains maybe.
