Shiny New Garbage

Hey! Remember in early 2012 when I vowed to be "the kind of old man who visits the old neighborhood and looks around all disappointed in the world and says, 'That's where such-and-such used to be'"? I'm doing it! I'm really doing it! In an ADVENTURE TIME meeting the other day, Kent Osborne, of all people, sitting there in faraway Burbank, told me that something shady is going on with Manuel's Tavern, my old neighborhood watering hole in Atlanta. "That's where we saw Mark McGwire break his home run record," Kent reminded me. The way I remember it, Ward McCarthy and I were sitting with our backs to the TV screen and Kent kept trying to get us to look. Why didn't we look? I think we were just being jerks. I emailed my brother-in-law for more details about Manuel's. He says they're selling the property, which is going to be turned into some kind of "mixed use complex" (I'm not sure he used those exact words), but supposedly after everything is torn down and rebuilt Manuel's will remain in some refurbished form. Huh! Atlanta is kind of famous for "refurbishing" things right out of existence and replacing them with shiny new garbage that wouldn't fool the world's biggest chump. And I even wrote about Manuel's in a fancy "favorite bar" anthology last year. Now it's all a lie! Just like when I wrote a "think piece" about ice buckets and then months later there's the "ice bucket challenge." Everything I write immediately becomes obsolete. Like the time I had to change a Heath Ledger reference to a Joaquin Phoenix reference to a Zac Efron reference to no reference. Ha ha, everything is pointless. Boo! Boo to you, world. Boo, say I. Boo!