ON THE AVENUES: Bunker mentalities, bunker abnormalities; bunker dreams, bunker screams.

Ian Anderson wasn’t waiting for Altamont to bring the 1960s flower-power era of peace and love to a close. His band Jethro Tull’s single “Living in the Past” was released in May of 1969, while the disastrous Rolling Stones show in California didn’t occur until December.

Lyrically it was a bit of a rejection of the swinging fashion of that post-Beatles, slightly hippy idealistic period," Anderson told Mojo. "There were a lot of people talking pompously about love and peace and revolution and, you know, people then as now were quick to jump up and scream and shout, but they're not actually really quite sure what they're stamping their feet about."

Happy and I'm smiling
Walk a mile to drink your water
You know I'd love to love you
And above you there's no other

We'll go walking out
While others shout of war's disaster
Oh, we won't give in
Let's go living in the past

Once I used to join in
Every boy and girl was my friend
Now there's revolution, but they don't know
What they're fighting

Let us close our eyes
Outside their lives go on much faster
Oh, we won't give in
We'll keep living in the past

Oh, we won't give in
Let's go living in the past

Oh no, no we won't give in
Let's go living in the past

To be truthful, “Living in the Past” isn’t a favorite song of mine, although it’s hard not to at least appreciate the wit behind a pop ditty with a 5/4 time signature.

As it pertains to the general sentiment of living in the past, there are at least two ways of looking at it. Living in the past might imply harmful obliviousness to the present, in the pejorative sense of one who cannot function owing to obsessive veneration of what’s dead and gone.

Conversely, the condition of living in the past might be more benign, perhaps even constructive; the sort of optional reverie with an on-off switch that allows a guy to take a trip down memory lane without waking to find the rose-colored glasses welded permanently to his head.

Such is my state of mind lately.

I forever strive to avoid being the sort of old white male who regards high school or college as the acme of his life. At the same time, there is a strong urge in my cosmos to relive youthful travels, and to contemplate how they played out -- or, with the luxury of a few hours to waste, what might have been. For instance, I wish I'd been into bicycling in the 1980s.

The COVID-19 kinda-sorta quarantine has produced plenty of hours appropriate for principled time-wasting of this magnitude, and I’ve been happy to use them to continue my ongoing project of digitizing long-ago travel slides. With the viewing of these images, most of them unseen for decades, living briefly in the past almost is inevitable, and I’ve given in to the urge.

It transpired five years ago during my period of post-NABC redundancy that I finally completed a fairly detailed written narrative of the 1985 trip, my first overseas journey. This was published over a period of months at the since-mothballed Potable Curmudgeon blog, and it also came about prior to the digitalization era.

This means I probably missed a few things. Consequently, now that all the 1985 photos are at my disposal, I’ll be revising and reposting this narrative, with visuals, here at NA Confidential. I've not decided exactly which day(s) of the week will be devoted to the series, so stay tuned.

While the 1985 remix project unspools, I’ll be diving into the banker’s boxes filled with detritus from the 1991-92 stay in Slovakia (I taught English at the university hospital there), and composing a narrative about those months abroad -- with photos, which I’m scanning right now.

In short, an hour or two a day of living in the past, then returning reluctantly to the present mass breakdown of human reason, otherwise known as the pandemic: covidiot, covidiocracy, covidiocy … covoodoo, covid-cuckoo?

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Those Louisville-area restaurateurs and bar owners who believe they’ll be back i the thick of it in a few weeks -- of course not even the Shadow knows how long it really might be -- have started dipping tentative toes into the murky, swirling waters and asking their customers via social media what the future looks like.

How can bricks ‘n’ mortar restaurants and bars help make diners and drinkers feel safe while dining and drinking on-premise, as opposed to cruising a drive-through window or utilizing curbside carry-out?

The answers have been instructive.

A good number of respondents want limited seating, perhaps by reservation only, and lots of spacing between tables.

Masks, gloves and PPE for staff would be great, and maybe a designated person to run food orders who isn’t the same server touching pens, body parts and credit cards.

And isn’t it time you paid these people a living wage? After all, they’ll be unionizing, anyway, unless Trump unleashes the peaceful militias on them.

From an owner’s perspective, these visions combine to suggest half the customers, twice the employees, a larger payroll, higher post-pandemic food costs reflecting new regulations all the way up the food chain, and renewed criticism by rigged bots on detested Yelp if the cost of any single menu item is raised a buck.

To be fair, many other diners and drinkers have been supportive without reservation or any conditions whatever, repeating a variation of this: “Just unlock the doors, and we’ll be back as before.”

It’s a very good idea for restaurateurs and business owners to be canvassing folks this way. There's going to be a lot to learn, and two-way communications are a must.

As a long-term employee of the food and drink sector, a chronic worrier and a semi-professional cynic, it seems unlikely to me the hoped-for-return to normality will be normal at all. Adaptation is being thrust upon us, whether we’re ready for it or not.

Here are three (of many) obvious challenges:

1. Consumer expectations and the cost of implementing them, and not merely as these costs pertain to money. There’ll be psychological ramifications. For all of us in the hospitality industry, Yogi Berra’s perverse maxim always has been our business model’s objective (paraphrasing): That joint is so crowded that no one goes there any longer.

How will Yogi's observation fare in the post-COVID world? 

2. The time frame for the re-instituting of temporarily suspended regulatory regimes, especially as they pertain to carryout alcoholic beverages, but also in matters like parking (for curbside) and other “wartime” statutory relaxations. More to the point, if things worked fine while these were relaxed, is there even a valid case to be made for tightening them yet again, or might this be the long-awaited opportunity to purge the book of useless rules?

I know the correct answer, and am utterly pessimistic it will be implemented.

3. For those operators in New Albany, retail as well as food service, struggling for the remainder of 2020 to cope with all the other obstacles to rebuilding, trying their best to get their groove back, surprise! The 800lb Sherman Minton construction disruptions are waiting to crush them for the second time … in less than a year.

If COVID-19 doesn’t disable enough independent local businesses, INDOT is standing by, eager for someone to hold its beer.

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A parting thought.

Maybe it’s the relative silence, but just the same it’s been a while since I've heard so many engines revving, gears shifting and tires screeching. As other cities close their streets to automobiles to facilitate outdoor social distancing during the pandemic, it comes as no surprise that New Albany’s streets are reverting to their previous wilderness state of high-speed, pass-through, dangerous raceways.

What I’ve noticed about life in this time of pandemic is that for the majority, stress and uncertainty don’t guide us to cool, analytical thinking about revolution, reinvention or reexamination.

Rather, they merely enhance the defaults already wired into 350 million noggins. If in January you regarded 40 mph as a proper speed for Spring Street, you’re now traveling closer to 50. If you waited for the light by blocking the crosswalk, you’re now halfway into the intersection. If you used your turn signal once in a blue moon -- well, you catch my drift.

The coronavirus continues to act as an amazing societal truth serum, extracting stupidity, weakness, cupidity and avarice with a degree of precision seldom seen in our lifetimes.

Understandably, living in the past becomes a steadily more appealing option when the present is frustrating and the future unclear, but I know there’s no choice in the matter, and one simply mustn’t remain in the Great Before.

I’ll be back in Deaf Gahan's Na Na Land as soon as the 1991 scanning’s finished … can you keep a light on for me?

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Recent columns:

April 9: ON THE AVENUES: #VoteEwwNoMatterWho, or when being realistic means being radical.

April 2: ON THE AVENUES: Pandemic, pornographic, pecksniffian. Just three random words until the booze kicks in.

March 26: ON THE AVENUES: It's a tad premature to sing the healing game.

March 19: ON THE AVENUES: If it's a war, then the food service biz needs to be issued a few weapons. We need improvisation and flexibility to survive the shutdown.

ON THE AVENUES: Ladislav's language, 1989 - 1990 (Part 2).

Ostrava, 1989.

Having resolved to resume contact with my Czech acquaintance Ladislav in the post-Velvet Revolution, pre-Internet winter of 1989-90, I counted myself fortunate to still have his postal address. It had somehow survived unscathed when most of my belongings were stolen in Madrid the previous November. In January, I took pen in hand to congratulate him on the wonderful transformations in Czechoslovakia.

In those archaic times, mail could take ten days or more each way, back and forth across the Atlantic, and so it wasn’t overly alarming when no immediate response was forthcoming. Perhaps the seismic shift in Czechoslovakia had impacted the recovering country’s mail carriers, or more likely, Ladislav’s obvious connections to a now discredited ruling order were such that he wasn’t in a good position to answer.

Granted, there’d been almost no violence during a remarkably peaceful, orderly changeover in Czechoslovakia, hence the revolution’s “velvet” descriptive tag, and yet … who really knew? It was a long way off, scores were being settled in various ways, and communications were not instantaneous like today. Even phone calls could be difficult to place to a country where the totalitarian structure had routinely monitored them only a short time before.

Twice more in early 1990 I wrote to Ladislav, each time enclosing souvenirs from Indiana and Kentucky, including American beer coasters for use in his Tiki Bar, but still there was only silence in return. Soon an entire year had passed since our chat, and the usual stressors of everyday living gradually displaced the glories of my 1989 journey to Europe. Back into the workaday grind I sank, and memories of Ladislav grew increasingly dim.

One day in July, my roomie phoned to announce that the mail had included a letter from Czechoslovakia. Upon closer examination, the return address was mysterious, and the message inside, written by an English-speaking friend of Ladislav’s daughter from a small town near Ostrava, was unexpected.

She thanked me for the letters and gifts, but regretted to say that Ladislav had died of a heart attack, aged 65, in July – of 1989! Remarkably, his sudden death had come less than a month after I departed Ostrava for a wedding in Prague, and then to Moscow.

I was crestfallen to realize that he had been denied the chance to witness the change he’d been so sure was imminent. With sadness, I drove to Sportstime Pizza for a few rounds of Pilsner Urquell as an impromptu memorial.

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Still reeling from the bad news, I arrived home the very next day to find yet another letter for me. This time it was a big manila envelope from an organization called Education for Democracy (EFD), and inside was the information I’d supposedly requested, which was fine, except I’d never, ever heard of EFD and assuredly had not asked for anything to be sent to me, but just the same, quite soon my heart was racing with excitement.

This unsolicited letter described the outline of an unprecedented opportunity for Americans to volunteer for placement in Czechoslovakia as conversational English instructors. No licenses or credentials were required, although previous teaching experience of any sort was a plus. It was a development made possible by the cooperation of American and Czech academics, who sought to take advantage of the Velvet Revolution’s opening by bringing people together ... to learn and speak English.

The words, the ideas, the sentiments – all of it had been discussed with Ladislav that night at the Tiki Bar in Ostrava, with shots of Havana Club in hand. Now with the providential mailing spread before me on the table, my immediate reaction was to thank Ladislav profusely for referring me to the organization, and yet there was a small, nagging problem: He was dead.

Not only was he dead, but he had died five months before the abrupt success of the Velvet Revolution made the EFD program and others like it possible. He could not have known, and yet there was no rational explanation for the unsolicited mailing. It made me pause. I’m not the sort to believe in ghosts, but there are exceptions for everything, and this one handily fit the bill.

My lethargy jolted, I wrote back to Ladislav’s daughter, thanking her for telling me about his death, and then phoned the EFD office (in Mobile, Alabama, of all places) to put my name on the list. Planning immediately began for teaching English in Czechoslovakia in 1991. It was to be the fruition of a dream for me, and in my addled mind, albeit irrationally, I knew Ladislav was the man to thank for it.

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In the end, rationality was restored, in the form of a telephone call a week or so later from a Floridian with whom I’d stayed in touch after we traveled together in a group to the USSR in 1987.

A teacher himself, he remembered that I’d been a substitute and had an interest in the East Bloc, and when he caught wind of the EFD program’s advent, he’d taken it on himself to send the organizers my address. In turn, they’d forwarded me the manila envelope, and its arrival a day after learning of Ladislav’s passing was a mere coincidence, nothing more.

But as you can imagine, it always will be more than a simple fluke to me. These events rekindled my fighting spirit, and for the following twelve months, working two jobs and saving as much money as possible, an expedition took shape.

In early September, 1991, I was on the ground in Košice, the second largest city in what now is independent Slovakia, almost the farthest point east in what was then Czechoslovakia, and a very long way from both Prague and Ostrava. My assignment was to teach English to medical personnel in the city’s university hospital.

And so, Ladislav, here’s a tipple to your memory. It’s a shame you didn’t live to see it, but the plot worked out just the way you predicted.

Thanks.

(This story was originally published in October, 2011. This winter I'll be digitizing the slides from the time of the teaching gig in Košice)

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Recent columns:

November 28: ON THE AVENUES: Ladislav's language, 1989 - 1990 (Part 1).

November 21: ON THE AVENUES: Rest in peace, Kevin Hammersmith. Eight years later, you're very much missed.

November 14: ON THE AVENUES: The famous mishap in Madrid, November, 1989.

November 7: ON THE AVENUES: Pay attention, students, because voter turnout went UP in New Albany.