Walkin' in Memphis

Put on my tan boat shoes and I boarded a plane...

My apologies for the long absence from the blog. I took a week's vacation, followed by a week of catching up with work mixed with continuing my new project (more on that later).

The wife's charge and their parents went to Californee for a week, so we took a week off and visited Memphis, Tennessee. Her godmother has a condo unit there (the same who let us stay at her place in D.C.), so with that and free airfare from her grandparents' stockpile of air miles, we had the means to stay for a week. Except for travel and having to drive around town, it was a truly relaxing vacation. We got to see a lot of sights, but we also took time to loaf around the condo watching TV and chugging beer.

We arrived on a Friday evening and took over an hour just to get our Hertz rental car. The first one had a malfunctioning rear door, so we had to wait for them to get another one. My GPS was helpful in getting us to the condo, but we missed a left turn in a very odd location, off an exit ramp from the freeway. Who the fuck puts an exit off of an exit? And it didn't even have a light, merely a stop sign, forcing people to wait for an eternity during peak traffic hours to make a left turn.

On day 1 we got to experience the most cluster-fucked shopping center this side of the Mississippi. Imagine narrow lanes, few stop signs or other traffic controls, buildings erected in random locations, a supermarket completely invisible from the main road, and hordes of shabby-looking store patrons milling about slowly and aimlessly with their urchins in tow, bumbling out in front of moving vehicles. We needed groceries and the Kroger in this wasteland of commerce was the closest supermarket. Upon entering we were immediately greeted by an unpleasant odor in the produce section, sort of like a combination of foods that should not be served together. It quickly became apparent that we were not in a very high-class establishment when we realized there was absolutely no wine for sale in the entire store, not even fucking Gallo. Plenty of beer, though. We were bewildered by the corner Starbuck's parking lot that was designed with a one-way traffic pattern that prevented motorists from entering through the side entrance and circumventing the drive-through lane to get to the spaces out front, because there was no lane passing around the drive-through like there is in every other fucking drive-through everywhere.

The rest of the first day was great. We chilled out in front of the TV, ate lunch, and went to our dinner cruise on a riverboat, which took us on a slow ride down the mighty Mississip' and served delicious pulled pork BBQ. We only had about 30 minutes of dancing before we returned to the dock, but we had a grand time nonetheless. It was on this day that I found out how far away the condo was from the center of activity (a good 7 miles). I would have to repeat this drive every day that we went downtown, in a city infested with police patrols. I noticed nearly nobody speeds in Memphis.

The following days were spent lazily taking in various attractions: the Pink Palace Museum (2 afternoons) with its IMAX theater, restaurants and bars on Beale Street, where we listened to Ms. Zeno, the Louisiana Mojo Queen, and the Sun Recording Studio. I loved that I was actually standing in the room where greats such as Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash recorded half a century ago. Most of our evenings were spent loafing around in the living room in our PJ's watching movies on the godmother's premium movie channels. The godmother joined us for a few days and was pleasant company, treating us to dinner a couple times and watching movies with us. By the last day, I knew more than ever that this is what I am meant to do with my life: hang out and do whatever the fuck I feel like, whenever the fuck I feel like it.

Saturday was a bitch and a half. After getting ass-raped by Hertz to the tune of $400 for the car rental, we scurried off to the airport to find a nearly empty security line, giving us nearly 2 hours to kill until our flight. Then we found our flight was delayed 30 minutes. No big deal, we'd packed a homemade lunch which we ate at a leisurely pace. The wife took some time to curl her hair in the restroom in preparation for our friend's birthday party that evening. Then it was announced that our flight was delayed indefinitely due to mechanical problems. This is what happens when U.S. Airways contracts with shitty little regional airlines (Republic Airlines? Mesa Airlines? Who the fuck is that?) who buy their 40-year-old planes from the scrapyard. After pitching a huge fit and threatening lawsuits, we were given a flight on Delta that would get us home at 11PM. We sampled some more BBQ at Corky's in the airport, had some beer and a few smokes in the Blue Note Cafe, and went on our merry way to Atlanta. My foot still hurts from having to haul ass from Terminal B to the end of Terminal C in Atlanta to make our connecting flight. We drank heavily that evening at our friend's party; we needed it after the day we'd had.

The week before and the week after my trip, I managed to squeeze in some time-theft at work to pursue my newest project/obsession: collecting digital copies of all of Carl Barks' Disney comic book work. I grew up reading many of his stories in reprints, but there are many more that I've never read. I discovered a website on which fans have posted scanned pages of every Barks comic ever published, including a few original versions of stories that were censored in later reprints. Little by little, year by year, I've been downloading JPG after JPG and converting them to multi-page PDFs, naming each file with the year and month of first publication, the abbreviated publication name and issue number, and story title, from 1942 to 1967. At this point I'm halfway through 1961. Ideally, I would carry these around on a device capable of viewing PDF documents. iPod Touch is one such device, but I hesitate to buy one since a new model rolls out practically every year. I'm waiting for something bigger than a meager 64GB. My Classic model has 80GB, for fuck's sake; I see no reason why Apple can't produce an iPod Touch with 128GB or more. My dream is to have an iPod Touch or iPhone with around 300GB on which I could store and transport my entire library of movies, music, comics, and photos. I want it now! But I fear such a large-capacity iPod won't be available for 3 or 4 years. I've considered settling for something like an Archos tablet, but I've read mixed reviews of its firmware. Plus I'm a sucker for Apple's interface, slick design, and seamless integration with my Mac. Please, Mr. Jobs, give us an iPod with enough storage that I won't have to pick and choose among my movie files. I want every single movie and TV episode I currently own on DVD in my pocket.

Speaking of digitizing and archiving, I've also been laboring little by little over scanning my family's photo albums. I'm only on the first one, the one that starts in 1974. Dear god, it's a task. I can only scan as many as 4 at a time, and have to peel the god-damned prints off the gummy album pages slowly and carefully so as not to tear them. The next step is to restore lifelike color to images that have yellowed over time. Then once I import them into iPhoto, I have to assign a date to each one so that they'll show up in chronological order in the photo library. This album is only the beginning; there is at least one more album with much older photos from my dad's family, and my mom has 2 or 3 albums as well from her own childhood. Add to that numerous other Polaroids and prints scattered around the house, as well as century-old prints, tintypes, ambrotypes, and daguerrotypes. The final result will be glorious: Every single surviving family photo stored in digital format, chronologically ordered, restored to true-to-life color, never to fade or corrode, all carried in a single palm-sized device.

While I'm collecting and storing, I'm also paring down my current archives. An unrepentant packrat nearly all my life, I still have all the schoolwork I did (at least on paper) since the 9th grade. This occupies the equivalent of about 4 filing cabinet drawers. Now that my parents are getting ready to downsize, I have accepted that it's time to send this monument to pointless academic busywork into oblivion. I can't honestly say that I'll ever need to view any of it again. Should I need to refresh my memory about any subject I ever studied, I have the internet at my disposal. I plan to save a few files, such as papers I've written (which could be sold online), handwritten notes from history classes (which contain amusing doodles), back issues of my high school newspaper, and miscellaneous collections of research. I expect this should occupy no more than one file box. I have already removed bank statements from 1998 through 2006.

The archives are only part of what I must purge from my childhood home. I also have boxes of miscellaneous crap I've accumulated, mostly toys & games. I expect I'll have to trash most of them, but I'm definitely keeping my TMNT action figures and my sister's Murder She Wrote board game.