Take Two Aspirin and See Me in the Morning

That post i wrote about "that Damon's" just keeps needing addenda, it seems.

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away there was this cine-plex not far from my house. It always showed movies that had been out for a month or two already, but at a discounted price. I wouldn't develop a feel for the cinematic zeitgeist until much later in life, so my parents would take me to this "Super Cinemas" as it was called to save a few dollars, which was fine by me.

About the time i started developing an idea of the world beyond my backyard, the Super Cinemas closed down. There are two important points to take away from that statement. First, that while i might gleefully while away hours playing, say, SimCity 2000, a game which is entirely devoted to city planning, i had not yet developed any sort of sense of how my own city was laid out. That knowledge wouldn't truly develop until after i got my driver's license, but at least until middle school i had no concept of what lay out of sight of the property my parents owned.

Interestingly, men and women develop this knowledge in markedly different ways. The best link i could find at 4am though is this one. As i understand it, men tend to envision themselves as points on a map from which they might interpolate directions. Women, by contrast, find landmarks that they will necessarily follow to stay on path. Thus, a woman might take the long path from A to B to C (a known route) whereas a man might attempt to go directly from A to C believing that a shorter route exists. It might, or he might get lost; i'm not trying to claim one strategy is superior -- or even that the model is always accurate.

Secondly (remember when i mentioned two points?), i find it intensely poignant that the Super Cinemas closed around this point in my life. It had become something of a personal landmark, a place where movies happened. There were other movie theaters around, but until two modern cineplexes opened up i don't think i really "went out to the movies" nearly so often. It was an arbitrary, yet very concrete shift in my movie-paradigm. There was something mysterious about the Super Cinemas to me...behind the parking lot there lingered the remnants of what movie-going had been before me -- drive in movie screens(!). I had always hoped a movie might be shown on them at some point so that i could have the experience of this bygone cultural touchstone, but that wasn't in the cards for me.

I have since then attended a showing of a drive-in movie, don't worry.

My timeline might be off, but i think this all happened around the time my family moved houses to another side of the city. There's an odd coincidence.

Fast forward a dozen years. One of my close friends moved outside the city limits. I have by this time developed a fairly strong idea of WHERE STUFF IS around town, but since the Super Cinemas closed down i haven't ever been there, nor seen it on the way to anything. It was, after all, outside the city limits! Imagine my surprise, then, when the landmark to find the road to my friend's house IS the Super Cinemas!

Pretty cool, right? Ok, maybe not...but get this: A few days ago i was visiting with another friend from here at home. We call up and invite my above friend over, but he doesn't have a car he can take, so we jump on the road and start driving over. It's late at night and there aren't many lights on the road, but the Super Cinemas building is pretty big, so you can see it by the light reflected off the water tower just a bit further down the road. Much too far down the road, i realize we've passed the road i was supposed to turn on. Why, you ask?

The Super Cinemas, tenant-less for almost a dozen years, had finally been torn down.

Just like that Damon's that told me i had arrived, this Super Cinemas told me i had gone far enough. There are plenty of other landmarks i might use instead, but as chance would have it i had chosen THAT one. With it gone i had no idea where i was. That's some pretty powerful phenomenology, and by a building whose blueprint was probably photocopied for a hundred other locations across the States. So don't ever be superficial about your work. Who knows what effect on some little kid's life you might effect.