Word count: 1091 | Reading time: 5 min read
Pretzel Logic
Our technology is lagging behind, but the view is fresh.
I have learned that they don’t call my new neighborhood Old City for nothing.
Since City Paper relocated down to Second and Chestnut, away from the hookers and the junkies and the drag queens that made 13th Street the moveable feast that it is, I have been propelled backward in time.
No Web.
No Internet.
No phones.
And my daughter has scarlet fever.
Anybody have any leeches?
I wouldn’t call our old digs on 13th Street ultramodern.
Not even close.
Dan Rottenberg put it best when he described our former location as a firetrap in the heart of the tenderloin.
He was referring specifically to my hovel of an office, which on its best days resembled the bottom layer of the city dump.
It wasn’t much, but at least I enjoyed the amenities of modern journalism.
A telephone and instant access to cyberia.
I never realized how much I came to lean on T-1 lines and browsers and other new-age hunkajunk until the last three days, when, thanks to our move, my communications have reverted to tin cans tied together with string.
To begin with, the phone company, in all its wisdom, managed to patch people calling my old number into a line that rings in another dimension.
One not of sight and clearly not of sound.
People who tried to reach me heard the phone ring and ring and ring, something very eerie in this day of answering machines and voicemail.
Not that it really mattered. Even if the phone company hadn’t screwed up, I didn’t have a working phone, one of those tree-falls-in-the-forest conundrums.
And that wouldn’t have mattered much, except that my wife was trying to reach me to tell me that my daughter had somehow contracted scarlet fever. When she couldn’t reach me by phone, she e-mailed me with the news, a bizarre concept in itself considering that I and everyone I talk to thought that Scarlet Fever went out with Scarlett O’Hara, the Scarlet Letter and the Scarlet Pimpernel.
To give me the news, my wife would have been better off trying to reach me by pony express, because the e-mail system wasn’t hooked up yet.
Regardless, my daughter, thankfully, should be fine.
I, on the other hand, am still in the midst of suffering from Web Jones, that delirium tremens-inducing malady that has prevented me from cruising the ‘Net, checking out the latest baseball trade rumors and way-out conspiracy theories.
I want to know if Gary Sheffield is coming to the Mets.
I want to know if Drudge has anything about Monica Lewinsky’s connections to the Trilateral Commission and MKUltra.
And, all joking aside, I want to hear the minute we start dropping bombs on Iraq.
Normally, the second a disaster takes place around the globe, there is a race to inform me between the American Reporter (an amazingly swift and well-reported cyber rag) and my old psychic buddy SOLLOG (Sun of Light, Light of God) who, on his planet, is suing me and the Washington Post a trillion dollars for libel.
The winner, at least in terms of the what and the where, is usually SOLLOG, who must be hardwired into Wolf Blitzer’s brain.
SOLLOG, however, then counts backwards to explain how he predicted each time a volcano erupted, a plane fell out of the sky or some whackjob with a bomb took out a bus.
A little nuts, but you get used to it.
The American Reporter generally follows quickly with an account from the scene, explaining how it really happened and what it really means. Joe Shea has put together a really fine band of globe-trotting pencil-necked geeks who can file from anywhere and more often than not score a big scoop on Peter Jennings and other overpaid lemmings.
And now, in Old City with no ‘Net access, I am blind.
Where I once could see.
A temporary and ironic price to pay for progress.
I have to say that Old City is a very nice place, with a vibe that drives this city like a bass drum.
Artists, studios, music and water is a fine mix. All spitting distance from where Franklin and Jefferson rapped about a new nation.
Quite a change from the tenderloin, where the most creative stuff took place in the alley behind Franny’s Place.
Now, I look across at the Khyber and New Mexico Grille and Sassafras and Brownie’s and Live Bait, which I am told now hates our guts, to which, I can only say, welcome to the club. And just around the corner is where a newspaperman named John Dunlap printed copies of the Declaration of Independence and sent them around the world.
And let me not forget my soon-to-be-new psychic pal, Sister Maria, who owns Readings by Sister Maria. It is just one of the city’s many storefront palm-reading parlors which all offer to save your soul if you plop down a C note for a holy candle or such.
If Sister Maria is all she claims, she already knows I am writing this.
If not, she’ll have to wait until the paper comes out to know that I say howdy.
My new view shows me the juice that flows like nowhere else in Philadelphia.
At any given moment, a guy that does sculptures will come in and survey a spot for a favorite from his collection. A woman who makes Star Trek desks out of discarded metals will wander into the office and start building a masterpiece. A guy like Al Paris will greet you with a plate full of cookies that he just whipped up in his oven downstairs at Rococo.
A far cry from the babbling lunatics and rancid-smelling Popeyes that used to come calling.
But there is something to be said for lunatics and Popeyes. I have, since October of 1993, acquired a fondness for the tenderloin.
I will miss Franny’s Place, and I take this opportunity to inform them that, as hip as they might think they are with their penis bagels, some Jewish baker long ago beat them to the genital-looking baked goods punch with the bialy.
I will miss the Chinese wagon and its gas-inducing greasy egg rolls.
So long, Mama Angelina’s and your tasty sausage subs.
Take it easy, Chris from Food Delight, which has, in my mind, the best fried chicken of any Korean joint in town.
And goodnight, Lipstick Lady, wherever you are.
