I was startled recently to realize how long it had been since I’d been in a proper used bookstore.

I’d been to Half Price Books in recent years, and they’re good and all. And I (briefly) checked out McKay’s here in my new city of Knoxville. And there are a few other used book stores around.

But to recall the sentiment of a U2 classic … I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

I don’t want to leave any doubt that there are a lot of wonderful bookstores where I could spend a big chunk of the rest of my days. Like Malaprop’s in Asheville, Union Avenue Books in Knoxville and 57th Street Books in Chicago. They’re all great bookstores and you should visit them, along with Tattered Cover in Denver and Powell’s in Portland and other great indie bookstores.

But I grew up haunting the shelves of musty and cluttered used bookstores, like Al Maynard’s Used Book Headquarters and Bright’s Book Exchange, both in my hometown of Muncie, Indiana.

I miss those stores, both of which have been gone for half or more of my lifetime.

Maynard’s bookstore, run by a kindly but cantankerous old guy on the second floor of a downtown building, is the place I revisit in my dreams. Maynard, who closed his store when the building was sold out from under him in 1982, posted a sign at the top of the stairs that you couldn’t help reading as you climbed the stairs. It read something to the effect of, “You just climbed 23 steps on your way up … shoplifters will miss most of those steps on the way down.”

Maynard’s store had the standard overstock of every used bookstore back in the day, including stacks of National Geographic and too many copies of “Gone with the Wind.”

But there were 1950s and 1960s and 1970s paperbacks – the good stuff, the kind you could smell when you walked through the door – by the shelf full and, incredibly, many, many old pulp magazines. A guy I know bought many of those old and crumbling pulps from Maynard when he was holding his going-out-of-business sale. So those old magazines, with classic horror and sci-fi stories wrapped in mind-boggling cover art, live on.

I want to walk through Al Maynard’s store again, four decades after it closed and the building was torn down.

Same with Bright’s Book Exchange. I fanned through one of my old paperbacks the other week and was startled to see the stamp for the store on the inside cover and it brought back a flood of memories of my fellow geeks and I hanging out and talking to Bruce and looking at his endless racks of paperback and comic books.

When I mostly got out of collecting comics, I sold Bruce my copies of the Marvel comics introducing the new (at the time) X-Men. I wonder who has those books now? Because they’re not there anymore: The store has been a paint store or something for decades. An archive search shows the last ads for the store ran in 1988.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking: I’m not just looking for a used bookstore. I’m also looked to feel the same way I did back then, when I could walk into a bookstore and find, for a buck or less, some overlooked or half-forgotten paperback horror or science fiction novel or a collection of stories that were probably originally published in one of those old pulp magazines and reprinted for a new generation to discover in the 1960s or 1970s.

And you’d be right.

No, it is not possible to go back 40 years, to when I had a less complicated life and old, used books were more easily able to divert my attention and a good day meant finding a book with a mostly uncracked spine, no dog-eared pages and yet that smell that comes only after a book has sat on the shelf for a while, waiting for a new reader.

But … maybe the next used bookstore I find will take me back to that time.

The question in my headline above is mostly facetious. There’s a lot of humor in “Cobra Kai” the Netflix series (which debuted on Youtube) and a lot of it – really, most of it – comes from William Zabka’s character of Johnny Lawrence, memorable as the psycho but ultimate sympathetic antagonist of “The Karate Kid,” “Rocky” director John G. Avildsen’s 1984 hit. In the movie, Zabka was pitted against Ralph Macchio as Daniel LaRusso, a newcomer to the San Fernando Valley. LaRusso is the sympathetic protagonist, of course, and turns for help and mentoring to Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, who becomes his sensei in karate and life.

The premise of the antagonism between Johnny and Daniel is how the “Cobra Kai” series begins, with Johnny down on his luck and Daniel riding high as a SoCal car dealer. The first season is told, to a great extent, from Johnny’s point of view as he reopens the Cobra Kai karate dojo and tries to get his life together, particularly when it comes to his relationship with his teenage son, Robby (Tanner Buchanan).

Daniel himself has a challenge, running the car dealership with his wife, Amanda (Courtney Henggeler) and being a good father to their children, Samantha (Mary Mouser) and Anthony (Griffin Santopietro). Johnny, unable to connect with Robby, rescues neighbor Miguel Diaz (Xolo Mariduena) from bullies who were much like Johnny was, Miguel turns to Johnny for not only a father figure but a karate mentor.

The first season plays out much like you would expect, with stuck-in-the-80s Johnny building his dojo and Daniel struggling to deal with his hatred of Johnny. From Johnny’s point of view, Daniel was the bad guy of the original movies, having humiliated him in front of his sensei, John Kreese (Martin Kove).

But after the first season, “Cobra Kai” morphs into something else entirely, which is what prompted me to question internet references to the series as a comedy.

At the very end of the first (of five so far) season, Kreese reappears at Cobra Kai and “Cobra Kai” turns into an over-the-top and addictive melodrama.

Over the course of those five seasons (hopefully a sixth is in the works), “Cobra Kai” becomes a mix of soap opera, karate-fu (as Joe Bob Briggs might say) action (almost non-stop fighting scenes) and character betrayals and reversals. With the threat of Kreese overshadowing the all-important question of who will be the preeminent dojo in the Valley, the engaging young karate enthusiasts who join the opposing dojos fight, switch allegiances and eventually support each other in an even larger battle against villainous Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffith from “The Karate Kid Part III.”)

Silver’s return pushes the stakes sky-high and the action even higher. Silver is like something out of a James Bond movie and makes Kreese look reasonable by comparison.

The resurrection of that character is the best example of what “Cobra Kai” does so well: continue storylines from the original movies and bring back actors who were memorable from those movies. Daniel’s trip to Japan with Miyagi in the second movie is recalled here with supporting characters joining the “Cobra Kai” cast, most notably Yuji Okumoto as Chozen Toguchi, who battled Daniel to near-death in the second film but returns here as a wise elder who helps Daniel and Johnny lead their forces against Silver.

The entire series is dotted with scenes flashing back to the first three movies (not yet including the fourth movie, with Hillary Swank, but fingers crossed for next season) that left me gasping that they had not missed an opportunity to revive a character or plot point.

To be clear, “Cobra Kai” is ridiculous. Karate fights break out in school hallways and crowded public places. There are some real-world consequences, including injuries and lasting trauma (notably for Samantha LaRusso, who suffers at the hands of rival Tory Nichols (Peyton List) and struggles to make her way back to beatin’ the hell out of people.

This is a crazy show and hugely entertaining. It makes Marvel storylines look restrained and reality-based.

But oh my goodness “Cobra Kai” is fun.

It was always someone else’s real estate

For an old guy, I like to think I do pretty well with technology. But after the last month of moving and setting up new accounts of various kinds – bank, cable and internet, the list goes on and on – I’m fed up with new account names and new passwords. Does that mean I won’t eventually settle into one of the other social media services? No. But I just don’t have the heart or will to do it now.

Twitter has always been odd as hell. Some of my most rewarding times on social media have been spent there, as well as some of my most frustrating.

But it was vital to me for reinventing myself after I left the newspaper industry full-time in 2019.

I had joined twitter in 2009 so I could tweet about Black Friday, which was still a thing back then. But in my hometown, Twitter has never been a mass media, so tweeting with a few hundred followers in those days was like hollering down a well. Pointless.

So for 10 years I used twitter like a lot of newspaper people: to tweet links to my stories and the stories of colleagues. To little effect, really, because Facebook sends many more readers to newspaper stories than Twitter.

But after slowing building my twitter reach to going on 3,000 followers, I took early retirement in 2019 and found myself wondering, “Now what?” That question applied to my use of twitter too. I didn’t have my own work to actively promote, but I could promote that of my friends and colleagues.

My writing partner and I were finishing up our third true crime book, “The Westside Park Murders,” that spring so that kept me busy. (The book was published by the History Press in 2021 after production delays due to the pandemic.) Then I began work on the first novel I’d written in nearly 20 years, “Seven Angels.” (The book won the 2021 Hugh Holton Award for Best Unpublished Crime Novel from Mystery Writers of America Midwest. It’s still out there, looking for a home.)

How does all this tie in to twitter?

I started using twitter not only as a way of promoting my own work, for sites like CrimeReads and, later, Daily Yonder and Gutter Review, but also making twitter friends with writers on the social media app. I actually have more twitter follows now than I did before I “retired.”

And we built a community. Not just the writers who i consider myself to actually know and who I speak with, but also some of the best and biggest writers, who I can exchange twitter pleasantries with. And not just politically active types but people who I know work to effect change.

Twitter lets a lot of people be themselves. That’s disastrous in some cases but infinitely rewarding in others.

I still think that twitter will survive, even if it goes away briefly. I think someone will rescue it and lift it up and return it to its status as the encouraging and infuriating place that it’s been.

I thought about tweeting this but decided to post it on this blog instead. Because twitter might go away and it is and always has been, like Facebook and Instagram and all the others, somebody else’s real estate.

We’re only renting space on social media, and it’s possible someone will come along and bulldoze that space.

But it’s possible someone will build a community all over again.

Because that’s what all of us have done all along. Build a community.

Some thoughts on “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” which I saw last night:

First, after seeing the “The Black Panther Will Return” screen at the end of the end credits – a bit of Marvel promotion that the studio has done many times – I wondered why more online reviews and news pieces hadn’t seized upon that. Marvel, where movies are planned out years in advance, announced something, a sequel or substantial reappearance, and nobody seemed to notice. I guess the return could be in the form of an appearance in the planned Wakanda series for Disney+, but it seems most likely the hero will return in the next couple of phases of big-screen titles, which builds to a pair of Avengers movies three years down the road.

I won’t get into spoilers much here, but wanted to note a couple of things.’

Director Ryan Coogler and Marvel were right to not recast after Chadwick Boseman died. It would have been disrespectful and unnecessary.

The sequel does pretty well with the daunting task of following an excellent film. Nothing could be as cohesive and impactful as the first film. But they did a good job.

The plot and battles are a little all over the map. But the character through-line is really well done. And the emotional toll of what happens to these characters is perfect.

Also perfect is the ending, including the sole end-credits scene.

The Wakandan characters were so fully-thought-out in the original film that there wasn’t much room for improvement here.

The new antagonist, Namor (played by Tenoch Huerta) makes a huge impression. I look forward to the future of this 90-year-old character from the Marvel comics.

Another good addition was Riri Williams, played by Dominique Thorn. Marvel does a good job introducing characters in secondary roles in big movies, ie Spider-Man and Black Panther in “Captain America Civil War.” Riri doesn’t leave that large an impression, but she’s the outside point of view in this movie and supplies a lot of the most amusing moments.

“Wakanda Forever” made a lot of money in its opening weekend, rightly so. The movie had an almost impossibly big void to fill and it mostly accomplished that.

So Twitter, where I spend too much time, is probably dying, strangled in the darkness by, well, how the hell do you explain what happened?

So I’m trying to diversify my online presence and part of that is posting more often on this here blog.

Over on Twitter, I usually do writing- and politics-related stuff. On Facebook I do personal stuff. On instagram it’s just pictures, usually, because what else are you going to do with it?

Before I urge you to scroll down and see several hundred pop culture posts, many of them dating to the heyday of this blog, the first half of the 2010s – well, I guess I’ve already urged you to do that now – I’ll make this post worth what you paid for it and note a couple of thoughts about the current crop of “Star Trek” series.

I’ve already mentioned on here that I love “Star Trek Strange New Worlds.” It really captures the spirit of the original series. I’m watching it a second time now.

“Star Trek Picard” is almost as good, but is not as light and deft as “Strange New Worlds.” I’lll be happy for the third and final season, though.

I’m still working my way through “Star Trek Discovery.” I love the cast and it’s taken an interesting swerve – 900 years into the future – and I’m beginning to get over how over-designed and distracting the Klingons were in the first season.

As a fan of “Star Trek” since its days in early 70s syndication, I’m just happy the show has a prominent place in entertainment again.