Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Tag: indiana

  • Indiana

    I just spent five days in Indiana for the pre-Christmas Christmas with my side of the family. It’s a split trip, with this second week in Wisconsin. We flew into Chicago on Monday, then rented a car and drove out to South Bend for the first week. It’s always weird to be back. The area…

  • Failing networks, forts, film

    It’s Sunday again. Time to try to type something here. Every time I log into WordPress, it has a failed update and 19 plug-ins that need to be updated or were updated. It doesn’t matter how long ago I last logged in. I can log out for five minutes and this happens. I think I’ve…

  • Life and Death of the Pierre Moran Mall

    I watched the Jasper Mall documentary a few weeks ago. It was interesting, but there was something bugging me about it, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. A few days later, I figured it out: Jasper reminds me a lot of Pierre Moran Mall in Elkhart, Indiana where I grew up, but in…

  • Holes

    I’ve been back from Indiana for a while, but I’ve been thinking about something I can’t exactly shake, something I saw during my drives around old stomping grounds. This was further drilled into my head when my pal John Sheppard came out to Michiana for a day-long Konrath Reality Tour leading all through Elkhart, Mishawaka,…

  • End of 2018

    I’ve been back from Indiana for a few days now. Been slightly sick, working on unpacking, cleaning, resetting, all the usual crap before I get back to work on Wednesday. The trip was probably my longest visit to Indiana since I left in 1995. I was there from Friday night to the following Saturday morning,…

  • Hello from the former 219

    Exactly thirty years ago, to the day, I was here. It was Christmas Eve. We closed at five. I was telling people we had no Nintendos. I probably worked forty hours that week. I’d listened to the same four-hour loop of taped holiday Muzak at least ten times. Mariah Carey was still waiting tables, so…

  • Indiana, travel, suitcases, quarries

    I’m taking off for Indiana tomorrow morning. Haven’t been back in three years; I’ll be staying for eight days, which might be too many, especially in the cold. I’m done with work until the second, so today is full of last-minute errands and packing and whatnot. I had to replace my suitcase today, which broke…

  • Toys R Us

    I was not a Toys R Us kid. No, I wasn’t one of those weird religious kids who weren’t allowed to play video games, and I didn’t have hippy parents who thought GI Joe was promoting war. TRU just wasn’t an option for my corner of Indiana. Like I mentioned in my previous post, K-Mart…

  • Death of the Concord Mall, Redux

    Almost two years ago, I wrote a long eulogy for the mall of my childhood: Death of the Concord Mall. This was after I heard of plans of the de-malling of the forty-something shopping center. Well, plans have changed. Here’s an update. First, since I last wrote about this, more stores obviously closed. The christian book store…

  • KONCAST Episode 8: Joshua Citrak

    http://koncast.libsyn.com/episode-7-joshua-citrak In this episode, I talk to writer Joshua Citrak. He is the creator and co-host of the podcast Hangin’ With Old Lew. We discuss: the Raiders and North Korean Juche; the nuclear war, wildfires, and hurricanes trifecta; the Elkhart connection; post-industrial Binghamton; the rise and fall of IBM America; the synergy between nuclear holocaust…