Buckaroo Bonsai Across The Harvard Club

After I dropped out of Mizzou I moved in with my girlfriend in Chicago and got a job tending day bar at the John Barleycorn Memorial Pub on Lincoln Ave. A couple weeks in, this high-octane blonde walked in dragging a couple of friend-zoned geeks, one of whom owned the local Jag repair shop.

Turns out they were members of the Chicago Society for Space Studies, which met in the planetarium one sunday afternoon every month. Since I had read about Gerry O’Neill as I was dropping out, even tried to no avail to talk the speakers’ group to have him come to Mizzou, I was chuffed.

There I met a kid who was a chem major at Chicago, and a couple years later I ended up sneaking in the back door there myself. This guy was in the Doc Films group, who did all the on campus movies, and I saw a lot of weird movies. One day, we took the train into town and went to th ‘premier’ of Buckaroo Bonzai at at about ten in the morning in a theater somewhere near the Hancock building.

We were the only people there.

When I moved to Boston, I hung around sometimes with some finance guys I met at Chicago. We were in a video store and I told them they hadda see this movie they hadn’t heard of. So we pop this thing in the VHS and it lasted about fifteen minutes. Their eyes glazed over.

A few years later I was in full cypherpunk stoke after hanging out with a writer for Datamation, or something, and went to lunch with these same Chicago finance guys.

Their eyes glazed over after I tried to explain this internet thing to them. I started the Digital Commerce Society of Boston the next day. Cypherpunks in suits at the downtown Harvard Club for lunch.

The ganglia twitch.