Xcargo 97Q2: The St. Louis Thing

Welcome to Xcargo 97Q2: The St. Louis Thing.

So what, you ask, the heck is that?

Ah, I answer, so glad you asked. It is a collection of essays and other stuff I wrote in the second quarter of 1997, which was Long Ago and Far Away, and I was a lot younger. And you maybe weren't born yet. But, heck. You got the job done eventually. So, congrats.

Anyway, at the time I was doing an ezine called Explosive-Cargo, or Xcargo for short. An ezine was a sort of precursor to the blog, It was a short, informal publication that went out via email to anyone who wanted it. And, Explosive-Cargo, a.k.a. "Xcargo," was my ezine. It was sometimes comic, sometimes political, sometimes very personal. It was also relatively successful as ezines went. I had something like 1000 readers, not counting pass-along, by the time I stopped doing it.

For no particularly good reason other than that I'm a raging egomaniac (and proud of it), I've been gathering up all my old Xcargo columns and publishing them as little books. This particular book contains all the stuff I did in the second quarter of 1997, or as much of it as I could locate. Now and then pieces have gone, well, missing. I'm sure they're fine. Probably on a nice farm. Prancing and dancing and just having a grand old time. You betcha.

Anyway…the following is called "The St. Louis Thing" because it contains, in addition to lots of other stuff, one of my infamous multipart series, this one about the great city of St. Louis.