Your Daily '80s: Apathetic in Omaha, 1988

You're a young man in Omaha, it's 1988, and you just want the hell out.

You just want out of Boringsville, where it's just so . . . so . . . so . . . Midwestern. And not cool.

You're a young man in Omaha in 1988, and you want to see the world. Which, coincidentally, is Not Omaha. What do you do?

Well, you always can put together a punk band and get popular. Make a record album. Get noticed. Go on tour. Get big.

Real big.

Voila!


OR . . . you can become a theology professor. One way or the other, it's all good. And not necessarily in Omaha.

All of a sudden, it's 20 years later. Life is what happens between wanting to get the hell out of Dodge -- or away from cruising Dodge -- and coming back for the reunion show at the kind of Omaha club that was more or less unthinkable in 1988.

Oddly enough, the Omaha of 1988 was the one I came to. Fled screaming in the night to, actually.

It looked pretty good to me at the time -- I'm from Baton Rouge. (Ignatius Reilly may have had a point.) And everybody's always running from -- or to -- somewhere.