Dry Ice Factory

The Big Time Brewery and Alehouse is celebrating its 20th anniversary this week. It was the first brewpub that I ever encountered, at least in Seattle. Since it's just a half block from my place of employment, I've gone there many a time after work, although moreso in the past. These days I'm more likely to drop by on the weekend to watch a bit of a game or read a bit of a book over a bowl of soup and a couple of pints. Back in the '90s I spent many evenings there pining after the beauteous bartender (originally a bar back), Hazel (originally Kim). Sigh. Had a few dates there with a woman named Kuleen, too, although she was more interested in basketball than in me. Probably more than anything I spent a lot of time there with AP and rondrummond in those days, taking abuse from Todd the bartender, who had a real fan club amongst the masochistic masses. He asked me to critique his poetry, and I was stupidly surprised to discover that he was an oversensitive pussycat at heart.

Anyway, tonight they are apparently dragging up old kegs from the cellar. Quite possibly it will be some ancient barleywine, which would be nice. I'll be stopping by after work. Friday is Alumni Night, with old employees showing up, and at this point it looks as though I'll be going with Hazel, after whom I no longer pine. Maybe she'll change her mind, however, because she wasn't invited and only heard about it from me on Monday. Rumor has it that Todd will be working the bar again, just like old times. Sunday from 2 to 5pm, pints will be only $1.75 apiece, which I believe was the original price when they opened in 1988. They're $4.25 now. I recommend the 666 Belgian Strong Ale, although this year's Old Woolly Barleywine will be flowing too. I haven't tried that yet. I hope to buy a couple bottles tonight to set aside for a rainy day in the future.

Happy birthday, Big Time. You've been a good shelter from the storm now and again.

According to the Seattle Times, the International District is experimenting with a night market in Hing Hay Park. The idea is to offer a traditional experience for immigrants and an adventuresome experience for hip young twenty-somethings who might come and spend some money.

Reading the article reminded me of our family trip to Asia in the summer of 1968, when I was still seven. We went to a night market in what must have been Taipei, and two details have always stuck with me. One was that there was piss running in the gutters along the narrow streets, and the other was the snakes in little bamboo cages in the market stalls. I have no idea how real these memories are. I have a lot of strange, disconnected memories from that trip -- a chaotic dim sum expedition in a restaurant in Hong Kong where little English was spoken, feeding the deer by a castle in Japan, topiaries in Bangkok, water buffalo in the Philippines, staring across the strait at Red China, which didn't look red at all. But snakes and piss are what stick with me from the night market.

I wonder if those are part of this experiment in the International District. Hing Hay Park is apparently considered a bit of blight, so perhaps the piss is already provided.

Well, I can't resist a gratuitous slide of me in old Hong Kong. 1968? I wonder if I saw Cheng Pei Pei and didn't know it!

So I asked John D. (see previous two entries) about the provenance of this photo of him and Sharee from the '80s, and he wrote:

'The picture was taken in downtown east Vancouver, on Railway St., right across from the warehouse where Sharee was living at the time. It was a great space, lots of punks living there (illegally, since it wasn't zoned for occupancy). They had some pretty good parties.

'I don't remember exactly when it was taken, if I had to guess I'd say spring of 1985. Somewhere around then, anyhow.

'The warehouse eventually (long afterward) got turned into 'Artists Live/Work studios', by which time the punks were of course long gone. I saw the results of the conversion about 5 years ago, visiting the friend of a friend who had bought a place there. It was disappointingly (if unsurprisingly) characterless, and the studios were a lot smaller than the space Sharee and her boyfriend had lived in. On the positive side, the elevator no longer smelled so much of rotting produce ... '

I replied:

'So I'm wondering whether the photo would have been taken in the spring of 1984, because that's the hairstyle she had when I saw her at V-Con in I think it was May of 1984, and when I saw her at the Worldcon later that year in September, she had her first mohawk. I think I actually visited that warehouse with her after V-Con in order to pick up some of her stuff. She had broken up with that boyfriend and was temporarily crashing in somebody else's flat. Your description made me smell the produce again ... '

I don't know, for some reason I'm amused by this method of dating a picture by the hairstyle, but I guess I do the same with my own. "Ah yes, that was 2007, when I had a full beard ... "

I'm not sure I'd ever seen this picture before it flashed across the screen in a slideshow at my niece's wedding rehearsal dinner last summer. That's my niece sitting in my lap at my brother's wedding at the parental home in Portland in 1983. As too often in pictures of me, I look completely wasted, but at least pleasantly so in this one. She looks like an elf child. I was the best man at the wedding, and she was supposed to be the flower girl. She chickened out at the last minute. I'm still in uniform, but she's looking pretty Mickey Mouse.

This was the year I lived with my parents along with my sister and niece while I finished my Bachelors degree and my sister worked on her Masters. One evening my niece asked if I'd be her big brother, since she didn't have a brother or sister. I said I'd be happy to be her big brother.

I'm pretty happy to have a copy of this photo now, which I just remembered to ask for last week.

This morning my brother updated me on the nephews' progress on their respective high school football teams (one plays on the varsity team, the other on junior varsity), and on the frustrations and anguish of watching your kids play in games. I was reminded of my own sports experiences as a kid, and of how I've forgotten why I lied to my parents about trying out for the basketball team in ninth grade.

( Playing in memory's court ... )

Today as I walked to work fuguing on the fanzine articles I've written about a certain someone (or someone certain, as the initials might have it), I happened by a process of free association to think about a joke I made in one of them about telepathic starfishes. I remembered that the joke was derived from something in Piers Anthony's science fiction novel, Macroscope, and thus I was reminded that Macroscope was -- horrors! -- a favorite of mine in high school. This, in turn, reminded me that the book was recommended to me by Reid, who was my best friend, off and on, during the period I lived in Salem, Oregon after my family moved back from Yap in the summer of 1970 until I started attending the University of Oregon in Eugene in the autumn of 1978. Perhaps because this train of memory arrived from a fannish starting point, it suddenly occurred to me that Reid and I did a lot of proto-fannish things together, although we certainly didn't know it at the time.

In a lot of ways, Reid was much more of a typical proto-fan than I was. He got into electronics at a very early age and knew how to build circuits. He learned how to program in Basic on the PDP-11 (or was it a PDP-12?) that our high school had, and he showed me how to play the Star Trek game on it, with the little star map printed out one move at a time on the scrolling paper. He got a Commodore 64 when it came out, although it appears that was much later, and all of this led to work in inventory databases and then system administration without his having gotten a college degree. He was also a big gamer and invented his own science fictional board games. He tried to get me interested, but I never liked games much. I collected comics instead.

He was an avid reader of science fiction, as I was, and we both loved Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tolkien. Indeed, we shoplifted their books as a team, which was of course all Reid's idea, ahem. (Well, that's what I told my parents when we got caught.) We used to create trivia quizzes for each other based on the books, with twenty to forty questions hand-written on lined school paper attempting to stump the other on arcane details of Barsoom and Pellucidar and Middle Earth. We both wrote pastiches of their work and of others, too. I think I may still have the Burroughs pastiche that I wrote in which Reid and I were ourselves transported to Barsoom, which I submitted to my favorite high school teacher, AK. (We really called him that, because we thought he was so cool.) He taught French as well as literature, and his droll remark about my story, written in red ink at the end of the hand-written manuscript, was, "Tu me blagues." As I recall this translated as, "You're kidding me." Oh, the scorn of the mundanes! He didn't think much of my Lovecraft pastiche either, as I recall, but I still loved him, and deservedly so. Reid and I both loved Macroscope, which is where this post began, and in Chemistry class we passed the time playing the pencil and paper game called sprouts that was described therein. That's almost enough to redeem Piers Anthony, isn't it? He gave at least two bright kids a topological game to hone their wits on. Not that it did me much good topologically.

Well, this reminiscence could head into some interesting personal territory from here, but that would be deep waters that I don't have time for at the moment. The main thing that struck me this morning was how much my life Before Fandom was already practice for it, at least in restrospect. (Part of the interesting personal territory would be why it didn't work out that way for Reid.) I'm a bit fuzzy on some of my proto-fannish history before I met carl at the University of Oregon and was introduced to fandom through him. I'm pretty sure I had discovered Dick Geis' Science Fiction Review before that (where amongst other things I read LOCs from my anonymous housemate, whom I later met through carl), but I'm not completely sure. It seems to me I had run into Elton T. Elliott before that too, because he also lived in Salem. Maybe I'd heard about him because of his contributions to SFR. If he contributed to SFR, that is.

Reid and I remained close throughout my college years, but we gradually drifted apart after I moved to Seattle. Last time we exchanged e-mail, years ago now, it didn't seem we had much in common anymore, except the past. But we were bright kids together, and we had tried to write a Tolkienesque/Moorcockish fantasy rock opera (my lyrics and his music) called Vilion Lastelf. (Still have the stuttering drafts of that around here somewhere too.) We didn't have the chops -- or at least I didn't -- but we were our own tiny fandom before we knew it, jamming good with Weird and Gilly and The Spiders From Mars.

In the comments to my previous post, I mentioned that I don't know of any words other than "predawn" for the period of time between first light and sunrise, whereas there are a number of words for the period right after sunset, including twilight, dusk, and, as holyoutlaw mentioned, gloaming, which is a word I first encountered in Donaldson's clenched Thomas Covenant books.

Meanwhile, numbat said that when he worked the night shift, he enjoyed the opportunity to see "the magnificent early morning skies." Here in Seattle, this is the part of the year when I see more magnificent early morning skies than normal, because the shorter days mean that I head off to work right around sunrise. I particularly love the Maxwell Parrish skies that are a cool, steady, translucent gradation of silver to infinite indigo still speckled with stars, and I love the loud, lurid, Technicolor coral-orange skies of flame.

My favorite magnificent early morning sky remains one I saw once when walking home from my girlfriend's apartment in Wallingford twenty years ago. As I groggily crossed an open field in a park, I looked up and saw a cloud stretched from one end of the sky to the other. A crescent moon hung above the cloud, and the sun was still just over the horizon below, so the cloud was lit silver on top with moonlight and gold underneath from the first rays of sunlight. All this in an otherwise clear sky of pale, pearly grey-green. It seemed as though I had stepped out into morning on an alien planet where everything was more painfully beautiful than on Earth.

Perhaps magnificent early morning skies are meant to compensate for having to be awake at such a godawful hour.