Phthursday Musings: Falling About

This past weekend the kid and I traversed southeastern Wisconsin to find ourselves on the outskirts of Invention City at a very much still there Rocky Rococo:

The last time I was at a Rocky Rococo, The John Laroquette Show was still around, Tom Foley was still the Speaker of the House, and the Rolling Stones were just starting their Voodoo Lounge tour.

It was surreal, in large part because it was so much the same as 30+ years ago. I mean, shoot, the phone number out front doesn’t even bother with an area code.

For those of you who have missed out: Rocky Rococo is a Wisconsin-based pizza chain. The pizza is pan and square and available by the slice. Rocky is a ridiculous character with round sunglasses, a big nose, and a bigger mustache. The Rockford Rocky Rococo opened at some point in the first half of the 80s and, I guess, closed in the second half of the 90s. But there are still 30 of them dotted across Wisconsin, and a lone straggler way out yonder in Minnesota.

Every generation gets to a point of feeling like things are changing so fast blah blah blah and yet it’s legitimately weird to encounter things like this in the wild which are so boldly of the particular time of my own childhood and which somehow haven’t changed. Even if we walk into a Beef-a-Roo in Rockford, it doesn’t look like it used to!

I’ve been reading Preservation for several years - it’s the magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation - and an interesting theme over recent years has been the question about when something becomes “historic”. Now, I’m not so over the top as to declare the Rocky Rococo in Racine to be a building of historic significance, but… I do think I would consider a laundromat like my grandparents’, if still around, to reflect significant architecture of the period. And this in turn makes me wonder. What if that square pizza place is still there in twenty years and somehow still looks the same? Can the 11th or whatever outpost of a regional chain restaurant become “historic”?

The question is superficially silly but I think underneath it there’s an interesting question about what it means for my generation, and more so for younger generations, to think about whether the things around them are from their childhoods, or what exactly. I think every generation can be detached, but the detachment is something a little different starting with Gen X.

For my son, I’d argue that the aesthetic of the day is one of vigorous newness. Starbucks probably isn’t going away, but for him it’s probably always going to look “new” and “classic” all at once… immediately identifiable but also not especially of a time or place.

Yeah, I think about wacky things like this, and a lot of you do too!

This week’s Phthursday Flag is that of Port Washington, Wisconsin:

This is a relatively new flag, adopted in 2022. But it also feels kind of like you’re watching someone play an updated version of Missile Command, complete with a shade of blue that didn’t exist when Missile Command was introduced.

I realize that’s supposed to be a lighthouse, and I reckon that makes it kind of a cool lighthouse, but it seems more like a fireplace than a lighthouse. A fireplace on a diving board.

None of this is to say I dislike it! I think the color combination is striking and I do sort of see the story of this port jutting into Lake Michigan. Let’s just say though that nobody was flying a flag like this when they put up the Rocky Rococo in Racine.

At some point while writing this installment my freaking laptop stopped working properly. I’ve got a Lenovo ThinkPad bought specifically because I WANT A RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON and would you believe THE MOUSE BUTTONS STOPPED WORKING and so I’m kind of limping through this now.

Seriously, I want mouse buttons on the laptop. Otherwise I need a mouse, because I make such heavy use of right clicking, and double clicking the trackpad only seems to work about 14.9458% of the time. Admittedly this is a First World Problem but I’m on a laptop many hours a day and I don’t like having to carry a mouse with just to do what I want.

This to me is a prime example of how Big Tech these days just does not seem to care about what users want. My primary work laptop - a not-inexpensive Dell which is supposed to be developer grade - has a lousy trackpad and only one USB port which means walking around with it is an adventure because I need a mouse to be able to use the thing and I also need to have a hub dangling from it to be able to use the mouse.

I did not intend to go on a rant of any length about enshittification. Alas. I’ll stop there.

I wish I was more into Halloween.

I like having orange and purple lights all around and I like friendly spiders and big ol’ pumpkins and the general idea that things should be fun. I like having candy around even if I’m not going to eat more of it. I like seeing the kids out trick or treating. I like seeing neighbors go overboard with decorations even if I don’t like the decorations themselves.

I’ve rarely worn a costume in the last 30 years though, and when I have it’s usually just been thrown together. I feel like if I can’t do a really good job I don’t want to do anything more than the bare minimum, and then I feel like I can never do a good enough job.

I actually have a GREAT idea but among other things it really requires I lose about 15 pounds to pull it off successfully and I’m definitely not motivated enough to do that just for a Halloween costume. Also I’m pretty sure I’d scare people too much. No, I’m not going to give any hints here!

This general idea that if I can’t do it really well I don’t want to do more than the bare minimum actually pervades a lot of my thinking. Not all of it… it’s weird, there are plenty of things where I feel like doing an OK job is just fine. But this hang up is what keeps me from, say, trying to do the abstract art I’ve been thinking about. It’s like, if I don’t feel confident doing something that I’m super pleased with, I don’t want to set myself up for disappointment, or whatever. And for some stupid reason this is even how I approach Halloween, or at least the idea of a costume.

The other problem of course is that I never want to do anything simple. Like, instead of being a judge for Halloween, I’d want to be Judge Harry T. Stone, and how exactly would I do that, and who would even know what was going on? Would I carry around both a gavel and a magic wand? (Well, maybe I can do that…)

I’ll tell you who I envy. I envy the people who, when the time comes, they just get out the decorations, and they have at it. I can never seem to do that. I can get things done in fits and starts but I can’t get into the headspace of I’m not resting until all this crap is all over the roof for the whole world to see. To put it another way, I can never turn the decorating into an event unto itself. I dare say that for a lot of people, the day they decorate is even better than the holiday itself. I’m really intrigued by that kind of thinking.

Maybe I should have just bought 40 gourds at the orchard stand this past weekend and let my wife shake her head in confusion…

Speaking of Gourds, the Beyond Yacht Rock guys did a “favorite Napster song” episode last week, and they got #1 exactly right:

This gem circulated on Napster and other services but with the band identified as Phish. I knew better all along because I was the weird guy who already owned the EP:

If you’ve never heard it and you’re not sufficiently intrigued yet… yes, it’s a cover of Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice”. But it’s not remotely what you expect. The Gourds

Very thinly related to this, on the way back from Wisconsin I at first was playing whatever Bandcamp claimed the weekly picks were (pro tip: they were weird) and then I played “shoegaze classics” from Spotify while trying to explain what shoegaze was to a largely disinterested party.

In a slightly different timeline I could very easily have gotten deeply sucked into shoegaze. And it occurred to me that it’s not too late! So what if I missed out on Slowdive the first time around?

Next week… maybe… it will finally be time for the big baseball recap, to coincide with the World Series starting up. I’ve got a whole lot of pictures and recaps to pull together and, well, I don’t want to do it only OK, I want to do it really well, so either it’s going to happen really well or not at all!

Luckily I have another half peck of McIntosh apples on hand to keep the energy going. Happy autumn!