I stepped out of my work offices at Vita Corp. just as the clock ticked off 5 o’clock. Walking out the front door onto Spring Street, I could either head towards Flower Street and towards the subway, or just stand in the bus stop at Fifth Street, waiting for one of the many crisscrossing busses to take me home, down towards Interstate 101.

Was it a dream? A drug-and-alcohol induced hallucination? Actually, it was the set of the movie “The Island,” which is currently filming in Detroit and utterly clogging the downtown area centered at Fort and Shelby with detours, gawkers, and goofballs hawking their amateur movie scripts to anyone who is willing to pay them attention. The crew replaced real street signs with those of a future Los Angeles, set up giant pressure cooker-looking devices on corners and created huge signs for nonexistent corporations. In addition, they briefly took over the Michigan Central Station and a few other areas around town. Details here, here, and here.

Perhaps we should be proud that when Hollywood filmakers want to make a movie about futuristic ruins, they don’t bother creating sets, they instead go straight to modern-day Detroit. Then again, perhaps not. It was either irony or folly to see the film crew set up collapsing scaffolds next to the United Artists theater, basically creating fake ruins to sit next to real ruins.

Speaking of drugs and alcohol, it’s gonna be a week before I’ve caught up on sleep, having spent nearly the entire weekend awake and out partying, celebrating the end of a grueling election season that made workdays horrible for us journalism types. Friday night’s bar crawl ranged from north end (La Dolce Vita) to downtown (Bookies) and some spots in between (Third Street Saloon), followed by a liquor store stop so we could stock up even more. Saturday, on about four hours sleep I managed to drive way deep into Macomb County to play late-night hockey, skate my ass off, shower, then grab my girl and a couple friends and head down to Lager House to see the truly incomparable Lee Marvin Computer Arm play a sonic assault of a show, then straggle home as best as we could and stay up all night.

Sunday, I sat on the couch and slipped in and out of sleep as the Lions game unfolded on TV, making my semi-consciousness a merciful happenstance, considering the dreadful performance by on-again, off-again Joey Harrington.

The effects of all that fun are hitting me now, as I sit at a work computer on Monday morning, suffering immensely from a variety of physical concerns, most centered around utter fatigue and dehydration.