I thought about her the entire drive home, more eager with each mile

Past the church and the steeple, the laundry on the hill
The billboards and the buildings, memories of it still
Keep calling and calling

All coffee is not created equal. Some varieties blow others away, they haunt you in the night when you can't reach them. I drank enough Dancing Goats coffee on Saturday to put a coma patient on its feet. Hey, if you had an udder full of that stuff you'd be dancing, too.

Two years since I moved away and all it took to make me feel at home was seeing a few familiar faces when I didn't expect them. I sat in front of Strawberry Fields for an hour and saw the same people I used to, employees and customers both. It was the same around town, people I knew on sight just as I had left them like shop-window mannequins. The bicyclist who had cancer. The cooks and busboys at Ihop. Champaign was like the bedroom of some abducted child whose parents won't move anything in the room in case their baby comes home. A little dusty, but essentially as I had left it. Steve told me the best story I've heard in a long time, and I'm totally going to steal it for something.

It's been proven, mathematically, that CU has the hottest women anywhere. The background hum of above-average beauty is punctuated by women that make you hear "Back in black" when they walk by. Sit downtown for any length of time and your palms will grow hair from thinking about the women on the streets or in the cafes. That's the afternoon traffic; wait until nightfall and the bar crowd hits Neil Street. You might as well call the ambulance at sunset. Earlier, if the university's in session.

The drive up to CU felt like twenty minutes instead of three hours, but the drive home seemed to last forever in all the right ways. The Divinyls and Poison on the rockbox, and Joe Cocker as I pulled up to the apartment. K wanted to tell me about the giraffes mating at the zoo. I cut her off before I got a description of the giraffe's erection; I just couldn't deal with it then. It was too much for one day, too much to stay awake through, too much to live through. I'm not sure I did.

Road trip

I broke free on a Saturday morning
Put my pedal to the floor
Headed north on Mills Avenue
Listen to the engine roar

When I go on a road trip, music is essential. My mix for years has started with "This Year," partly because I always take off on Saturday mornings, partly because I've spent the last three years telling myself that I will make it this year if it kills me. I'm packed for a drive to Champaign today. I've got three half-full notebooks, a pack and a half of smokes, a well-used card deck, and a quote from Osip Mandelstam. And this is definitely the earliest I've ever woken up to go to a coffee shop.

Rock the place.

War... War never changes.

I'm reserving judgment until I see a full version, but it's clear this isn't the Fallout I love. This mutant version might be good to newcomers, the howling interlopers at Gamestop likely to purchase one of the console releases of this irradiated abortion. Those of us who set out from Vault 13 have more refined, more esoteric tastes. Fallout and it's sequel were essentially pen-and-paper rpgs - of the first order - with single-player campaigns played on a computer, and that drew a unique crowd. Fallout began life using GURPS, for fuck's sake. There is even a translation of Fallout from the screen to its rightful place on the tabletop.

Look, when I leave my home behind to wander the radioactive waste in search of a water purification chip to save my subterranean bomb shelter, I want to do so on a hexagonal map. Should I have to engage some ne'er-do-well in combat, we would battle in a civilized fashion, each performing a limited number of actions then allowing the opponent to do the same until one of us is looting the other's bloody corpse. We would not run helter-skelter through the ruins firing at anything that moved at any time like goddamned savages. The wiki says there are action points, but from the footage I can't see how they are used. Maybe you can sell them for a bottle of Nuka-Cola.

It does have great atmosphere, and I definitely could get used to the Pip-Boy 3000. I'd like to be wrong about how disastrously this will play, I really would. I think that, like Star Wars and Indiana Jones, the gap between installments is too long now, the expectations of fans too high. Anything less than the perfect memories within our hearts will be seen as failure.