Nothing hits the spot on a meat-free Good Friday lunch than the vegan chili over at The Bottletree Cafe. Sitting at the bar, though, it was more than bean-and-cheesy goodness that assailed my senses.It was a sudden onset of generational identity crisis.
On one TV, the newscasters were talking about North Korea increasing its capacity for enrichment of nuclear materials. The flatscreen on my right was showing a DVD of The Muppets take Manhatten. And I was reading Bill Bryson's "The Lost Continent," a rambling but extremely humorous look at why the United States in 1988 (when the book was written) was so much worse than the United States was in the 1950s, when he grew up.
So I was reading about how much Bryson misses home milk delivery, hearing about Kim Jong Il inching closer to being able to destroy our planet, while watching puppets run and roller skate through Central Park.
And, of course Bottletree was the perfect venue for such strange nostalgia, with its vintage lunchboxes and records on the walls. There was a Clash of the Titans lunchbox on the wall that I could have sworn showed Vince from Entourage.
And, since I clearly don't know how to make sense of the juxtaposition of ultra-modern cool, fears of nuclear annihilation, Bryson's crotchety whining and early-80s puppeteering, so I'll leave you with some money quotes from "The Lost Continent." Bear in mind, these were written in the late 1980s.
On Detroit: "We are talking about a tough city - and yet it is still a rich one. What it will become like as the American car industry collapses in upon itself doesn't bear thinking about. People will have to start carrying bazookas for protection."
On Manistee National Forest: "Michigan is shaped like an oven mitt, and is often about as exciting... Towns were rare and mostly squalid - scattered dwellings and ugly prefab buildings where they made and sold ugly prefab cabins, so that people could buy their own little bit of ugliness and take it out into the woods."
Good times.