Trabia Garden

I went to Kirksville Saturday. I got there a couple hours before Mac and MJ, so I tooled around campus for a while. It was eerie, walking through a dead campus. It’s unnatural to have a bustling location all to yourself. A few things were different from how I remembered them, too. It was just like when Selphie returned to her home to find everything damaged by the missile attack.

Wait, it wasn’t like that at all. But I did feel very detached, walking around. Having a return of some old set designs was another gimmick for May sweeps, but it did little to really serve the plot in my case. Still, it’s nice to get a few Easter eggs from the early seasons now and again. And the hero can do a little before-and-after comparative soul-searching.

I did not set foot in the music building.

Anyway, I got Sawyered into unloading a metric assload of furniture and boxes. After that, we had a quick bite and went to see At World’s End. Naturally, we walked on over to Too Tall’s Two after the movie. God I love that bar. I want to go back.

We did a few other things, but the most notable is our long-awaited “morbid curiosity” marathon. We started with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, and followed it with Superman III and IV. Wow. …WOW.

They both played out like a cartoon. Very, very bad when translated into film. I’m talking gloriously bad—except for the fact that they soiled the franchise. Seriously, in the time the actors spent on those movies, they could have done two good movies. That part wasn’t glorious.

Just because we had to know, we then watched bits and pieces of the commentary tracks of both movies. I have ascertained that, surprisingly, Superman III is actually worse than IV. I highly recommend the commentary track for the fourth film. The screenwriter basically insults the movie and apologizes for it right from the get-go. Apparently, the fourth movie was supposed to be an attempt to revive the franchise after the horrific disgrace that was Superman III. But the budget was cut dramatically during pre-production, and I believe the special effects company was actually going under. About 45 minutes of story was taken out completely, and what was left was poorly delivered due to bad, bad, bad choices—such as the costume design for Nuclear Man. Listening to the way the screenwriter described the original plans for the movie, it sounded like it would have been on par with the first two. That makes it all the more tragic. The world will never know what could have been.

Perhaps what is even more tragic is that we were painfully sober for the duration of the movies. Painfully sober. After drinking at Too Tall’s, we just couldn’t reach that elevation again for the movies the next day. I must be getting old. Or healthy.

Now I’m at Panera in the Columbia Mall, heading back to Kansas City.

This weekend marked the 30th anniversary of Star Wars. I’m wondering what all went on at Celebration IV, the three-day convention held in L.A. I went to Celebration II, which was held in Indianapolis just prior to the release of Attack of the Clones. Thirty years of Star Wars… incredible.

After walking around Truman State University, I keep wondering what if I’ll be able to visit BGSU this summer. It looks like a very unlikely possibility, since I don’t have a new job lined up to take a week of beforehand. When I do get around to driving that far east, I wonder who will be around? The summer has begun, and I’m swimming in a sea of Maybes.

My I.C. Caramel is finished now, so I’m going to get back on the road.

Always in motion is the future.