To repeat a tweet: it's normal to be tired and depressed, but what is so annoying about this campaign season is being energized and depressed.

So what will you do tonight? I know exactly what I will do tonight, if all goes well. Pizza at seven. I'll do a podcast at 8 PM. When it is done, I will listen to the rest of the show until 9, and then I will listen to an old radio show that isn't a favorite, but gives me something to listen to while I do some rote work. (Probably "Let George Do It," a middling-quality detective show that features the exceptional and tragic Bob Bailey.) At 9:30 I'll clean up the 35 clips I recorded over the week - stingers, ads, little bits of strange audio. At 10 PM I will pour a rye and watch the B&W movie, but since it's a bad one I won't pay strict attention. It'll be on the second monitor, freeing me up to do some layout work on a site that's going to be up . . . in October. At 11:30 I'll go downstairs and watch TV, and around 1 I will have ice cream.

I live for this day. Because nothing is due tomorrow. And if you think it's silly to be writing sites so far out, well, I'm also chipping away on a site that won't be out until 2017. It's a lovely, sad project about 1960s houses, based on a catalog containing over 50 styles of ramblers. Lovely because of what they represented; sad because the very idea of people living in these one-story stand-alone houses in the suburbs, as we all know, contributed to the destruction of everything good and decent, or something.

No: sad because I can't stop projecting stories on every one of these pictures, and while they're happy stories the culmulative effect is sad, because in the end it's about moving out and moving on.

Each house will have its own 300 word short story.

I keep waiting for my house to show up.

Something occurred to me on the drive home, as I was casting about for a way to justify spending so much time on things that are old and gone: Everyone has a favorite bygone time. Right? It's a mixture of mores, architecture, music, fashions, a time you think you understand. Maybe you understand a little; maybe you do understand a lot, but realize there's no way to begin to total up what you wouldn't understand. No matter how much you prepared for a time-travel trip, I'll bet the actual experience would be completely disorienting - if only for the fact that the sheer amount of unmediated reality flooding your senses would be hard to shut off.

You'd get used to it.

Then again; maybe not; I'd love to go back to the Fifties, but I think the impression I'd get after a while would be boredom. You can only go so many times to the drive-in for root beer and a Teen Burger and sit with the window down and jangly rockabilly coming out of the tinny speakers. I don't think I'd ever get tired of walking around small-town Main Streets in their glory, but how much fun would it be to think this will all pass away for day after day?

Same thing applies to today, of course- nothing lasts forever - but we will most likely be spared the spectacle of total dissolution, and just experience change as it usually operates, a sleight-of-hand game, one thing taken away and one thing added.

Anyway. When I got home I wrote -

It's the people who identify with the past that keep us grounded; it's the people who identify with what we can do in the future that keep us hopeful; it's the people who identify with this moment right now and little else that make the most trouble, because they have no interest in the past and no idea of a future beyond a series of moments filled with sensation.

But I'm not sure I think that's right.

People have been working in tall buildings for a long time. But I don't think we'll ever get used to this:

There was panache to his actions; he seemed to be enjoying himself. You'd have to. No one would take this job if they didn't like it. Be a tough life if you didn't like it. Every morning, you wake up with dread. Every night, you go to bed knowing it'll all happen the next day again.

You are spared any progress photos on the building I did last week. It added a few floors. Let's go elsewhere downtown and see what's happening.

The AC Hotel has topped out. It's all very mysterious.

I've never seen anything sheathed every step of the process. It's been hidden since they put up the second story. You might be wondering how well it plays with the Lumber Exchange next door.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA oh, you kidder. On the other end of town, the hotel by the stadium is going up fast. Really fast. It's always a bit disconcerting to see how flimsy a stick building looks like before they enclose it in brick.

There's another building coming on the lot to the north; it'll be offices, and the chances for any retail in this complex on this site seem scant. Which is wise, because they'd die in a year.

We'll put the Little Things cues aside for a while. As I mentioned on Monday, this is Lum & Abner month. Why? I've no idea. It's not something everyone likes. It's something most people forgot. But there's a lesson in the music cues.

For example: here's the 1940s opening. Three rings, a little dialogue with regional peculiarities - I' grannies, I' dogies - and the wheezy organ theme.

			1942.

In the late 40s, a disastrous decision was made: the show would move to a once-a-week half-hour comedy, and drop the long serial plots. You can understand why they did it - big sponsor, night-time slot, less work, more actors. Something new! Big push! Out of the serial ghetto and into the big leagues!

It killed the show, more or less. At least it mortally wounded it. Here's the opening; instead of Abner's usual contribution, he just adds his trademark sound of incomprehension.

			Huh?

Since the shows were now much more complex, they needed music cues to move between scenes. Like this:

			Protuberating

The malapropisms got worse, too. It just wasn't funny anymore. You may note that Lum mentioned "Ben Withers," who was a character held over from the old show. They eased him out after a dozen episodes.

It didn't last: cancelled after a year. But we'll get to that.

Lum & Abner's 1935 Sponsor: Horlicks!

			It's just malted milk, for heavens sake

That's a lot of ad. They changed daily, too.

This week's Bob & Ray sketch: another episode of . . .

			One Fella's Family

"Dampened Spirits." Again, this is a ridiculing parody of "One Man's Family," with its interminable home-spun family tales.

"You ought to have those teeth tightened."

		The name and the album art tells you this isn't exactly something the label intends to top the charts. It'll do. It's 1977. Nothing matters.

Well, that would be all, except there's 1960s catalogs below, AND I forgot this month's recap of 1937 Holidays from the Homemaker's Guide to Regular Excretion. You know, this thing.

Screedblog returns on Tuesday, and will be most Tuesdays. Once a week. It's already written.

Have a jack-dandy weekend, everyone; see you around.