Nebraska is a very simple place. There’s not much to worry about when it comes to crime, or weather, or economic disaster. However, these are all benefits of there being nothing to do and nowhere to go. The reason nothing bad happens in Nebraska is the exact same reason people laugh at us for being a boring fly over state with nothing to do and nothing to look at: there isn’t anything that would cause excitement or tragedy. Nebraska is an empty void. Nothing.
Part of Nebraska’s emptiness is that there aren’t enough people to find much of anyone who has similar interests as you. The only kind of person you can be absolutely certain you will find in Nebraska are football friends. And I don’t mean the kind where they actually use their foot, I mean the kind where they slam into each other like a bunch of barbarians!
Thank you, James for the useful line. And much like The Nerd, I am a nerd. I’m not that physical, although I maintain a lean shape. My interests are in technology, rather than athletics. And I have a particular interest in history; not the history you learn in school, but the mundane, the history of the Everyman before my time. And what happens when you cross the streams of my interests? You get vintage computers.
Now that I have a job with acceptable pay, for the first time I have the money to go places and do things. So I booked a flight from Lincoln to Chicago to attend Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 17, or simply VCF MW. I had seen LGR’s video on the previous year’s VCFMW, and I was stunned by what I saw in the video. I knew I just had to go, so I showed the video to my dad, and he was interested enough to accompany me on the trip.
I woke up at 3AM on Friday the 9th, took a shower, ate the last of the sandwich stuff I had in the fridge (It was only one sandwich worth anyways) and we headed off through the mostly empty streets of Lincoln to the most 70s looking building I know of on the city: LNK airport. Built in 1974, LNK is a beautfiful time capsule of mid century archetitecture that is currently having an expansion built, part of which involves rennovating the hell out of the old part of the terminal, making it all modern with monotonus white walls. Balls. Aside from my dad, my mom was our showfer, so we didn’t have to pay for parking. Both of them noted how busy the airport was for only being five o’clock in the morning, and apparently most of the people were going to Denver. We both got through airport security smoothly, boarded air plane and took off at 6:17 AM. The first thing that I guess sort of counts as a culture shock is how fast the airplane accelerated once it got on the main runway. I had thought from movies it would be slow to take off, but it wasn’t too dissimilar from a roller coaster.
The flight was surprisingly short, actually. Aside from the short time I spent staring out the window before I got bored with that, I only finished two episodes of The Computer Chronicles I had saved to my iPhone from the Internet Archive before we were already over Lake Michigan, circling around to land at O’Hare. Second culture shock about going to Chicago: I had never seen a picture of the concourses at O’Hare before I got there, and honestly my first thought was that it looked less like an airport and more like a Japanese shopping mall. I have no idea why, as I have never seen a picture of a Japanese shopping mall, but nonetheless that was my first thought. You will probably note throughout this article my culture shocks don’t seem particularly shocking, and that’s because they didn’t really shock me. I would see something entirely novel and think -maybe say out loud- “Hey, that’s pretty cool!”
After some brief exploring we got on the blue line to downtown. Now, The only trains I had ever been on before was the California Zephyr from Hastings to Holdredge in 2016, and the Durango-Silverton line back in 2006. So, something I didn’t expect about urban rail lines is how they are on the inside. The blue line from O’Hare to Monroe honestly seemed to take as long as the flight.
First impressions of the platform at Monroe is that it seemed to be made using the same construction methods as the lockers under the concrete bleachers at my old school; the one that was built in the 1920s. Up the stairs to the ticket booth part or whatever you call it was pretty cool looking as far as I’m concerned. You just don’t see anything in Nebraska that looks this gritty, and honestly I thought it was pretty cool just how seedy this station looked. It was like the music video to Michael Jackson’s Bad mixed with The Matrix, with large craters in the filthy concrete floor and grimy tiles that were supposed to be white. I know this isn’t how places are supposed to look, but remember that Nebraska is honestly a facade is most places. It’s too clean, there are no hoods in Lincoln. I prefer it that way, but a change of scenery and culture, even if only passing through was exhilarating, especially as I grew up on movies that looked like this.
Making our way to surface it became clear immediately what a skyscraper is supposed to look like. Nebraska’s tallest building tops out at 634 feet, so seeing buildings where you actually have to look straight up AND move your eyes up to see the top was pretty interesting. So, with the entire city to explore but only about six hours to do so, what’s the first place we went? McDonald’s, per my request of course, because I’m really the reincarnation of Vincent Vega. I had never gotten anything off the breakfast menu before, so I just got what my dad got: a sausage McMuffin. It was perfectly okay. Though strange thing about the McDonald’s is that it only had two single user restrooms. At least they were unisex so you could use either one, but man was that a wait.
Now, the only thing my dad and I really wanted to do was visit the Art Institute of Chicago. That didn’t open for a while, so I came up with idea of visiting a Ferris Bueller filming location: the parking garage where they dropped off the Ferrari. Sadly it seems it was demolished at some point and replaced with a different parking garage, but at least in the bright side there was a Walgreens on the ground floor. My dad bought a bottle of water, and since I already had a full Hydro flask I bought a Strawberry and Dark Chocolate KitKat and a box of Bottle Cap candies. At the very least we checked out at about the same geological location where the Ferrari pulled out.
I found out in late March of 2023 that apparently we had the wrong parking garage and the correct one was kitty corner from the garage where we were standing. I can't recall why but we were having a lot of trouble using the Internet on our smartphones, so we were very confused. The funny thing is the picture below has been on this page since it was created, and ironically I don't have to change it because it's still fitting! It was originally intended to show "Welp, the original parking garage is gone, but here's where it would have been." but now says "I have no idea if I'm in the right place." Shut up, it's my picture, I can change the canon if I want!
Onwards to the Art Institute! We went a little out of our way to get a picture taken from the bottom of the Willis Tower (God speed Sears, we hardly knew you… and your air conditioners.) and then walked through downtown Chicago. I pointed out to my dad that the buildings seemed to be too tall, as the entire downtown was in shadows at that hour. In fact, for once being the tallest building in the world, the "Willis" Tower barely seemed any taller than the buildings surrounding it. Including the McDonald’s we ate at, I counted four McDonald’s, all downtown. Take it from one of those damn tourists, we expect deep dish pizza from Chicago. The fact the vast majority of restaurants downtown were chain restaurants, such as Subway, Starbucks, Jimmy John’s, and of course McD’s, it was actually kind of disappointing. Fortunately when we got to the hotel we got real deep dish pizza delivered.
The Art Institute was great, no question about it. Got the famous Ferris Bueller pose taken with the statue, and also saw some paintings I had never seen or heard of before. Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes' El Maragato series from 1806 looks like an early shit post, and my dad and I joked that Frans Snyders' Still Life with Dead Game, Fruits, and Vegetables in a Market (1614) was a “still death” portrait. I guess in a way we ended up contemplating the art a bit. I would say the Art Institute was the highlight of the trip from a visual standpoint. I know this is barely any info, but it's a hard experience to explain. If you're ever in Chicago, make the Art Institute a priority and see for yourself. You won't regret it.
We took the Blue Line back from Monroe up to Rosemont, as our hotel was closer to there than O’Hare. However, we were basically stranded at the station because Uber was not working for some reason. We don’t know if was a glitch or an outage, but we were stumped on how to get to the hotel for a good half hour. Eventually we took the Blue Line back to O'Hare, wasting another ticket when we could have stayed on the train for free. My dad signed up for Lyft, and within ten minutes we had a 2022 Tesla taking us to the hotel.
The hotel looked very 1960s, and it seems to be a modern throwback rather than outdated, though I personally wonder if the entire reason they went for such a retro aesthetic was to match the popcorn ceiling that would have been too expensive to replace. The smart TV sucked ass, by the way. Judging from the response time from the remote the TV’s CPU seemed to be clocked somewhere in the kilohertz. By the end of the trip we were just listening to a jazz radio station. As stated before, we got ourselves some deep dish pizza; pepperoni and cheese with the cheese under the sauce, and went to bed.
Argot
Page created: Sunday, Sep. 11th, 2022
Page last modified, Wednesday, May 24th, 2023