#109: My Dinner With André

I met Chase, Peggy, and Marge at Union Stripe just as Happy Hour was in full swing and turning into the dinner pre-symphony and theater rush. Because Marge and I used to work there, the hostess treated to the front table in the window facing Woodward Avenue.

#108: West Forest Knight Rangers

I must have dozed off grading stacks of midterm exams for Intro to Urban Social Policy 101, the giant lecture course for which I served as a teaching assistant at Warren Woodward University. They were handwritten in those lined-paper exam booklets, and each one was like deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls. My job was to assess each one fairly, and discern which students had studied for the exam but froze up under pressure, and which were just bullshitting with a lot of filler material. One student scrawled, “I think the planners of the modern cities did a really good job using modernity to plan modern cities”—What the hell did that even mean? And why would anyone taking a college course in city planning ever bother to write such a trite tautology? Another wrote, “Le Corbusier hated the cramped medieval city; he wanted to replace it with apartment blocks and green lawns. Except that people liked their traditions, so Corbu just built overpriced houses for rich people on the outskirts of Paris instead.” I couldn’t tell if that was brilliant and insightful, or just gobbledygook. After three hours of this kind of rubbish I had to close my eyes to relieve my splitting headache.

#107: Ms. Megatronica and Ponty Polverizzo

Of all the Hypothetic jargon and fantastic visionary concepts swirling around in my head, not to mention the actually disorienting experiences I’d experienced over the preceding several months, something about the comic book story Chase Bradford had created stuck in my head. It was his name for the villains in the title of his story: “Ms. Megatronica vs. the Garnookian Butt Worms of Rott.” It reminded me of something I had read somewhere, but I couldn’t exactly place it at first.

#106: Drawing Board Booty Call

On my way out of Chas’s apartment building the next morning, who do I run into on the landing at the foot of the steps but Peggy, the rich white Grosse Pointe girl slumming in Detroit and studying literature at Warren Woodward University, returning from her escapades out on the town. The look on her face told me immediately she knew the kinds of sleazy things Chas and I had been up to the night before. “How is the undiscovered genius, anyway?” she asked dismissively. “Haven’t seen him crawl out from under his rock lately.”

#105: Blank Book of Dreams

A week before the start of classes, the WWU Student Bookstore was already abuzz with activity. Warren Woodward University, being an urban school, was a very different campus from Arbor State, which was set off in the remote, bucolic woodlands of Michigan west of Detroit. By this time of year, athletes would have already returned to Ann Arbor, and for the past two weeks been jogging around the Diag like troops of marines, whether male or female. By now, one week before the fall semester, regular students would have already begun moving back into dorms and apartments. State Street would be swarming with freshman and returning upperclassmen hunting for textbooks at Border Worlds Used and Slightly New Book Store, filling the bars and restaurants and movie theaters, and generally looking to get laid.

#104: Postcards from the Edge of Forever

Tuesday was too grey and rainy to think of flying up to Royal Oak in my newly-dry-cleaned Ms. Megaton Man uniform—aside from my general aversion to use my Megapowers for merely everyday tasks. I had just read an article about acid rain and feared it might be the one thing that could undo the indestructible Quarantinium-Quelluminum fabric and my Grandma Seedy’s costuming handiwork.

#103: Call for Papers

The week before school started, I attended an afternoon orientation for grad students in the urban theory and social planning program, after which I got a buttload more textbooks and readings for the recitations I’d be teaching. A recitation, in case you don’t know, is a class connected to one of those big lecture classes taught by a professor for hundreds of students in big lecture hall a couple times a week. Then the teaching assistants, grad students like me, go over or “recite” the material in smaller breakout sessions in regular classrooms on another day for about twenty students at a time.