,... $$$$ $$$$T""P$$$ba, ,gd&P""T&bg. ,gd&P""T&bg. gggggggggg $$$$ $$$$$b d$$$$ $$$$b d$$$$ $$$$$b ggggggggggg """""""""" $$$$ $$$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$bxxP&$$&P """"""""""" $$$$ $$$$$$ T$$$$ $$$$P T$$$$ $$$""""" " """" $$$$$$ "T&$bxxd$&P" "T&$bxx$$$$$' " """""$$$ """ """""" """ ggg "Champaign Revisited" ggg $$$ by -> Oregano $$$ $$$ $$$ $$$ (* HOE E'ZINE RELEASE #910 -- 11/29/99 *) .,$$$ `""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""` 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. [--------------------------------------------------------------------------] [ (c) !LA HOE REVOLUCION PRESS! HOE #910 - WRITTEN BY: OREGANO - 11/29/99 ]