Washtenaw Magazine Archive

A cold one-way street lit by liquor stores and refracted houselights shining from the windows of parked cars, and not knowing where to turn you spin into a full-to-brimming parking lot that is no wider than a cinema screen. In the cracked pavement you think you can see the tendrils of Detroit reaching up into the air, weak but determined to rise from the dry underground channel and into the fresh air of Ypsilanti. You, the former driver, and current walker, go a short way between bumper-stickered Japanese cars and minivans, and jingle open the door of the former gas station, now a coffee shop operated by bearded men with patches on their sweatshirts. You converse, you purchase and sit with a cup on a low couch, and find a stack of magazines with plastic protective covers clipped over each one.

You find, here, OMNI, a 1988 issue of the science and science fiction magazine discontinued in the mid-1990s. Every other page shakes with the pen-lines and brushstrokes of a determined illustrator, who in pigment and ink imagined how things might be. Things will be, might be, space-bound, extra-planetary, sun-powered. They will be volcanic and star-borne, acrylic as well as watercolor. This was a time when computers--and so, the future--were linked with blocky, ungainly letters and numbers that looked nothing like newsprint or handwriting.

And in the earlier pages of OMNI, a reader writes in to complain about Isaac Asimov's assertion that the struggle between Communism and Capitalism is based on a trifle, a petty difference that can already be seen through.

The magazine, free of stains and oil-splotches, has been entrusted to the proper keepers. You leave it on the table knowing that it will always be archived there, as long as this shed stands and is filled with that coffee smell associated, for so many of us, with thinking and scheming.