Downtown A-Town
by Scott Hardie on July 21, 2007
I can't write about why I spent the week in Atlanta because it's too confidential and work-related, but I can say that I had a good time around the margins of that event.
The first day was the only loss. I got so little sleep the night before (seemingly a part of every trip I take) that I spent it groggy and exhausted. I must have been Jonas Salk in a previous life because good karma is the only way I can explain catching my flight: Given 22 minutes to make it from my apartment to the terminal before the mandatory FAA cutoff, I checked into my flight with literally only seconds to spare. But after a long trip and getting checked in and finally eating something, it was already 4:30, so I took a nap and ordered room service and prepared notes for the event the next day. Hilton was good to me overall, but if I'm trying to sleep, no hotel is going to win my favor by repeatedly knocking on my door with "the creamer [I] ordered" and calling my room to ask me if I received it.
I did get out into the city on the other three nights, driving around and winding up at the Atlantic Station complex, a shopping plaza designed to resemble a small-town plaza, which inexplicably hosted a Gators party while I was there. Lots of UofF fans this far north? Rosa Mexicano tries really hard to impress you with a beautiful dining room and fresh guacamole made tableside, but at these prices, they to serve need larger portions of much better food if they want to stick around.
Taking a trip soon? Do yourself a favor and don't see a John Cusack movie about a haunted hotel room when you have nowhere to go but the Hilton afterwards. 1408 started out with an amazing setup, one of the most unnerving haunted-space descriptions I've seen in the movies (and I've seen a lot of ghost movies), but once Cusack got into the room it was all downhill from there. Harry Potter and Talk to Me were much better.
Driving around town, I fiddled with the radio a lot. Each of the four days, when I turned to the alternative station, the first song playing was an early Pearl Jam song from their first three albums. Apparently the catalog of "alternative music" was sealed forever around 1995. Is my entire generation really prepared to listen to "Better Man" and "Evenflow" until we have gray hair and liver spots? It seems we're headed that way.
Am I the only person whose primary memory of the Atlanta airport is sitting on the runway, either having just landed or waiting to take off? It's one of those busy airports where you glance out the airplane window and you're still sitting there, then you read your magazine for fifteen minutes, then you glance out the window and you're still sitting there, then you read your magazine for another fifteen minutes, then you glance out the window and you're still sitting there. No, please, don't open a second runway on our behalf! Waiting to take off at Atlanta is like that eternal wait to get through the single open checkout lane at Best Buy.
Though inundated with Michael Vick news, Atlanta struck me as a happy place: It somehow seemed as if every single person I met was in a good mood, greeting me in the street with a friendly smile. I'm sure there must be dirty, miserable parts of the city with economic depression and abandoned rundown buildings, but I didn't run into a single one in all my exploring. Even the traffic gridlock didn't seem to bother anyone. I didn't think much of the city before I arrived, but now I can't wait to return.
Logical Operator
The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »
R.I.P. Pam
Pam was a co-worker from the 2000s who recently passed away. Kelly worked with her much more closely than I did, sharing a cubicle space with her for years and getting to know her very well, though I had plenty of conversations with her too. She was always ready with a compliment or a joke or a homemade treat, and she was a source of light in a job that could be quite a grind some days. Go »Windbag
I don't know what Polaroids he has of whom, but somehow Tom Skilling has elevated himself to some kind of all-important weather-broadcasting god. When I grew up in Chicago, I watched him gradually get a bigger and bigger budget for his animated graphics, and gradually get a larger and larger timeframe to deliver his dull reports. By the time I left town, he had a whole 20 minutes of the hour-long midday newscast for the fucking weather, and boy did he find trivia to fill it: Average dew points across Cook County on this day in 1854, theta-e temperature predictions for every Cubs home game next season, you name it. Go »Feeling Lucky
Yesterday was my 13th anniversary of dating Kelly. We've been through many ups and downs together, and those downs have to do with why we're not married yet, but I love her as much now as I ever have. Here are 13 things that have been a part my life for less time than we've been dating: - The Internet. Go »Thank You Mario! But Our Princess is in Another Castle!
(link) Go »Downtown Disney
My mom's birthday present to me was a mini-vacation in Orlando, since we're too broke to take a real vacation. We weighed the options for a few days, theme parks vs small local attractions, and settled on something we had wanted to do for years, DisneyQuest and some of the Downtown Disney complex around it. I knew DisneyQuest had a lot of motion-simulator and interactive video games, but I didn't realize that the entire 5-story building is just one giant video arcade. Go »
