Summer's over.

I only say this because the feeling, the freedom of summer, has gone away, almost faded from the dusty pockets of my mind. I spent last week mourning this yearly death. Sure it's still summer officially, but really everything's over. All the real fun has jumped in its suitcase and sent itself down the road. And even as I still gaze at the dying sun, as if watching the sunset is only a summer time sport, I can feel the wind changing.

I took a long weekend a week ago in preparation of the end. Or in celebration. I'm not really sure. And while I was doing nothing of great value in particular, more signs of summer's demise came down the pipe.

The Lobo Theater, a Central Avenue institution in Albuquerque, shut its doors once again. There have been many deaths and rebirths of the Lobo over the ten years I've lived here. The first one occurred at almost the same time I arrived in town. The miraculous rebirth that time held on for a while. With $2 tickets and cheap concessions, the Lobo thrived on second-run movies and midnight cult shows.

I went to the first midnight movie of that rebirth. They were playing The Blues Brothers. A bunch of us prepped for the screening with lots of drink provided by some caring friend who had an ID. One friend christened the Lobo rest room with his own kind of nutritional restructuring, and I spent much of the night trying to get into a "theater chick's" pants. Oh yeah, the movie was great, too.

This ownership stuck through almost all of the 90s, I think. And while there was a bump in ticket prices (to $3), it was still cheaper than anything else around the UNM campus. And they had an added feature called the "Lone Lobo"--for an extra buck you got a popcorn and coke.

About a year ago a couple of movie fanatics (but not really business wizards) changed the Lobo. It became a first run theater, trying to sell $6 tickets to a theater with bad seats and bad sound. And, to add to the insult, there was no more "Lone Lobo" deal. I rarely went to a show there that had a crowd of more than 25. I think the best showing was for Run Lola Run, which ran for quite a while last fall. My last screening at the Lobo was for a local weekly's yearly short film festival (this was, actually, the biggest turnout I'd been to in forever--but I think it had more to do with the weekly's readership than the Lobo). I'll miss the Lobo, but I know that, unless they changed their pricing structure or fixed the place up, I wouldn't really have gone there much at all.

But the biggest sign of the dead season was the departure of the interns at work. For the last couple of months I've had a small battalion of 19-year-olds at my disposal. Along with doing quite a bit of work (it was a busy summer), we played racquetball, went on tons of lunches and coke breaks, squirted water guns and shot suction cup projectiles at my Destroyer Droid sitting on top of the computer monitor.

Our accountant called us a "clique," which surprised the interns who said they'd never been a part of an exclusive group in high school. And it did piss off a few people I work with because the interns tended to congregate in my office--most of the time for work, but also for all those late afternoon "work is over for the day" chat sessions.

I was moaning slightly about the loss of my little helpers to some friends of mine last week--and was immediately chastised. None of them get interns, squirt guns or toy crossbows to play with.

But I'll still miss the summer--it was a good one for me. And even though it hasn't rained as much it usually does, the heat will eventually cool to something a bit more tolerable. And maybe, very possibly, I'll even get back to talking about something really important--like the heretofore unsubstantiated allegations that there will actually be a presidential election this fall.

I can't worry about that kind of thing now, though. I'm still on vacation--all that serious stuff can wait till next week. Or later if I can help it.

Matt Worley took a trip to the infinite and found that it was really crowded, the lines were long and everyone dressed like tourists.