Dry Ice Factory

As many of you will know, I just returned from a fifteen-day road trip in British Columbia and Alberta with an old girlfriend. I'm not going to use her real name here. If you know who it is, then you know; if you don't, you don't need to know -- and neither does Google. I'm going to call her Hortensia in this piece, because that's a pseudonym I used for her over twenty years ago in a fanzine covering difficult and intimate matters, as this piece also will. Please beware that some of this material is extremely personal and may be more than you want to know about me or her. Still, I will make every effort to be discreet about things that she wouldn't want me to talk about in a public forum, because it really isn't my place to tell her story.


The view from Nanaimo on Vancouver Island

Suffice it to say that the trip didn't go well, or at least was fraught and difficult, with plenty of good stuff mixed in too. First of all, I don't think Hortensia was prepared for how beat down by the chemo I am right now, and she admitted as much at the end. She was frustrated by and impatient with my lack of spark and my inability to retain information such as directions. We spent much of our time together squabbling and bickering like an old married couple, sparring over my mental slowness and her incredulous putdowns of my failures of comprehension. To say that the romance had long since drained out of our relationship is an understatement. It was already gone by 2009, but the old married couple description is meant to indicate that we are still plenty close in a lot of ways. You have to be close to someone to really get on their nerves, right?

Worse than that, however, was the clash of what I'll call religious beliefs. Hortensia has in recent years developed a fascination for certain shamanic practices and what I think of as a New Age approach to life and health. She hadn't gone as far down that road in 2005, when I decided not to marry her after having agreed to in the first flush of our love affair in 2003, but the difference in religious/philosophical outlook was one of the reasons I came to believe (and she agreed at the time) that we weren't compatible. Now she's *really* into it, and from the moment we checked into the airport hotel where we had a more romantic stay in 2003, she started explaining it to me in great detail. Part of it was that she had just been to the Amazonian jungle in Peru and participated in some ayahuasca ceremonies there, and she was eager to share the powerful experience she'd just had.


Hortensia had brought back Peruvian textiles depicting the ayahuasca plant and visions inspired by it

I've thought at times in the aftermath of this trip together that she was more interested in her healing process (she's trying to overcome trauma from her childhood) than in my health crisis, but I think it's more accurate to say that she rejects Western medicine and wants me to too. She believes that the shamanic practices she's following are superior to Western medicine, and she has in fact teased me that if Western medicine didn't cure my cancer, she'd drag me to the Peruvian jungle to try a different way. Well, by the end of the trip she was acknowledging that I would never let her do that. It spoke to the distance that had grown between us in the meantime.

I hesitate to get into an specifics about our disagreement, because I don't want to characterize her beliefs inaccurately or unfairly. To focus on the thing that probably set me off the worst, however, it seemed to me that she was saying that diseases such as cancer are caused by internal conflicts that we haven't been able to resolve. Thus curing the disease requires us to resolve those internal conflicts. To me this is blaming the victim. I mean, it's one thing to say that a smoker brings on their own lung cancer, but it's another thing to say that someone brings on their own breast or brain cancer. To me, it's even worse to say that it's up to the cancer victim to heal themselves by "resolving the conflict." I'll stop there, because there were other things Hortensia said that seemed outright bonkers to me, and I'm not ready to go there yet.

She told me that it was okay for me to dismiss her beliefs as "hippy bullshit," but it's my impression that I said things along those lines that really hurt her feelings. That's why religion, like politics, is such a dangerous topic to discuss. After all, she is pursuing these beliefs in order to deal with long-standing and devastating emotional pain that, among other things, she tried to self-medicate with heroin when she was in her 20s. By calling her beliefs into question -- by outright rejecting some of them as bonkers -- I was challenging the self-healing process that is bringing her so much relief right now. She is genuinely excited about the progress she's making, and I'm genuinely happy to see it, because I know how much she's been hurting all these years.

Which brings up another thing: Making up for lost time. She spent so many years lost to the world that she is trying to jam as much life and experience as possible into the time she has left. From my perspective it seems a bit manic, but I can also understand what's driving her. The agenda for this trip was largely focused on her connections and her needs, and in the past, when I've been less needy myself, this has been a recipe for grand adventures and new connections for me. It was still the case this time around.


Hortensia (wearing, it should be noted, my Oregon hoodie), Will, and Lorna on Gabriola Island

We spent the first week driving around Vancouver Island in a rented mini-RV visiting old friends Hortensia had made when she was living there while her mom died of breast cancer in 2009. We spent a night with her mom's friends Alan and Carol, which was a bit difficult because Alan is now as deaf as a post and Carol is starting to lose her short term memory. Then it was off to visit Lorna and Will on Gabriola Island in the Georgia Strait, which was a complete blast, because both of them are total sweethearts and were very responsive to my situation. Will invited me to come back and sail with him on his trimaran whenever I want. Lorna was very maternal and pampered me to the max. Unfortunately this was also where my emotional reaction to Hortensia really spun out of control, and I got so angry that I couldn't sleep one night. As I sat in back of the RV spinning through my 3AM despair, I considered returning to Seattle. However, the whole desperate flight-impulse made me flash back to 1980 when I first visited Hortensia in Vancouver, had sex for the first time in my life, panicked, and fled back to Oregon, leaving her feeling abandoned and distraught. I swore that I wouldn't do that to her a second time, come what may.


Hortensia repairs the sweat lodge

Fortunately this resolution calmed me down for our next stop, which was on the Cowichan reservation in Duncan. We stayed on the property of a medicine man who goes by the English name Fred. At Hortensia's request on my behalf, Fred had invited us to participate in a sweat lodge. I had never done one before, and here's what I wrote about the experience on Facebook:

'Did half a sweat lodge yesterday, lasting two rounds out of four. It was my first sweat lodge, and I had no idea what to expect, although I wasn't encouraged by Hortensia's reply to my question about what to wear: "Well, you're basically being boiled." [NB: After she read my post, she protested that she hadn't actually said that.] So it was incredibly hot and smoky, and it was so dark you couldn't see anything but the glowing rocks. I closed my eyes and felt claustrophobic and tried not to panic. Fred sat me by the door in case I needed to bail out early. The cool thing about that is that because I was one of the last people going in, Fred gave me the job of using cedar boughs to brush off the "grandfathers" -- the hot rocks -- before they were sent into the lodge. So even though my anxious state of mind meant I felt a little outside the ceremony, I still felt like I played my part. I enjoyed listening to the chanting and Fred's various incantations and speeches, and maybe I would have got more into it if I'd joined in the chanting. Afterward I chatted with a few of the participants, particularly the French-Canadian guy (Sylvain?) who had tended the fire, and that was a lot of fun, listening to the jokes and laughter and stories. He told me that one of the women who had participated was a former national Member of Parliament representing a district on the island. So it was an interesting experience, but I think I prefer to take my religious ecstasy served in the great outdoors of the rain forest, the reef, or the ocean beach.'


The sporty red car

After we left Fred's place, we left Vancouver Island, traded in the mini-RV for a sporty subcompact, and headed for Alberta, where I'd never been before despite the fact that my father was born there. This stage of the trip was all about visiting Hortensia's family. (She grew up in Edmonton after ten years in Melbourne, where she was born.) In fact, when she contacted me after my GBM diagnosis, she told me she'd already been thinking of visiting Canada this year to see Aunt Helen, because Helen's husband, Roland, had just died. We stayed at Helen's log house in the Canadian Rockies near Mount Robson, and it was gorgeous and peaceful up there, as it had been at Lorna's place on Gabriola Island. I'd met Helen (and Roland) at Hortensia's mom's memorial in 2009. Helen was another very maternal person who pampered me shamelessly, although she also put us to work staining spindles for a balcony that had rotted and needed to be reconstructed. After that, we headed to Edmonton, where I finally met Hortensia's big brother, Lyall, who was great. Wonderful sense of humor and sense of centeredness. He's married to a Thai woman and is a Buddhist. We also visited Hortensia's niece, Elizabeth, who had just moved back from Toronto with her four year old son, Dash. I'd met Elizabeth before, but not Dash, and Hortensia hadn't met Dash either. Hortensia and Lyall had dinner that evening with their cousin Wendy (Helen's daughter), but by that time I was completely wiped out physically and emotionally, and I begged off.


Helen and Hortensia


The spindles we stained


Elizabeth, Dash, and Hortensia

Hortensia was intent on pulling the family together. Elizabeth hadn't visited Lyall, Helen, or Wendy yet (only having moved back from Toronto a couple of months ago), and Hortensia exhorted her to introduce Dash to all of them. The family connections have obviously become more important to her, and the deaths of her mom and uncle, not to mention my cancer, have only impressed on her that the living connections can disappear before you know it. As with the shamanic healing practices for her PTSD, the focus on family connections are all about making up for lost time -- specifically that period when her drug addiction meant she lost contact with her family as well.

So the second week was physically trying because of the long drives involved. By the final day of the trip I was basically numb from exhaustion. It was also, perhaps pathetically, emotionally trying because it was all about Hortensia and not about me. I've really wrestled with this, because I would like to think I'm not such a complete narcissist. On the one hand, I think it was a good reminder that it's not all about me and that other people are dealing with serious problems too. I was also happy to see Hortensia becoming so family-minded, which I think is a very good thing. And again, the fact that she is feeling so much relief from her long-abiding trauma is incredibly good news. It was probably good for me to have the attention shifted elsewhere for a couple of weeks, just to break me out of whatever emotional ruts I may have fallen into. However, it's hard to deny that my immediate reaction to the stresses and strains of the trip, including not always being the center of attention, was to become a cranky, petulant, emotionally volatile pain in the ass. I was definitely on my worst behavior, which only added to my feeling that the whole trip had been a failure and a mistake.

With a few days to recover and gain some perspective through venting to friends and family, I'd have to say that a lot of this is an overreaction. However, the estrangement between me and Hortensia seems real, and maybe it was about fricking time. There's another side to all this that leaves me feeling horribly ashamed and pathetic: My need to cling to my old girlfriends so that I can feel that I haven't been a complete loser at the game of love. Well, I can only imagine Hortensia laughing her ass off at that. The reality is, my emotional neediness aside, whatever distance has grown between us doesn't amount to a hill of beans when you consider the strong connection we've established over the years. As she assured me at the Vancouver International Airport just before we parted, I will always be a major part of her life, and despite whatever grievances I now have, she will always be my first lover and the woman I came closest to marrying many years later. But I suppose we're both feeling more relieved than ever that we avoided the marriage trap. Who knows how much we'd be getting on each other's nerves if we really *were* an old married couple.


Old friends

ADDENDUM: I showed this to Hortensia before I published it, to make sure I hadn't crossed any lines. Here are a few of her comments, which I offer as a counterpoint to my complaints:

I certainly come off as inconsiderate and self absorbed. I'm sorry that is your biggest impression. I guess that after Lorna's I was pretty unsure how to relate to you and went a bit into action mode. My coping mechanism.

Actually, I was expecting it to be worse. I'm sorry you felt I didn't really connect to your situation. I didn't know how to connect when you reacted so negatively to me.

I'm sorry if you felt I put you down for not remembering stuff. I didn't mean to, and I need to look at that behaviour.

You didn't mention the bear and the elk, and, remember, the long driving in the Rockies was so you could see them. Alone, I would have flown to Edmonton and rented a car there to go to Helen's!

Many thanks to Hortensia for her graciousness in the face of my grievances.


The view of the Canadian Rockies from Aunt Helen's

For two days in a row I've left directly from work for a social engagement and not gotten home until late-ish. Both were related to the wedding of Andi Schechter and Stu Shiffman, which was held yesterday.

Amongst the group of people who came to town for the wedding were Rich Coad and Stacy Scott. On Tuesday I met them at John Berry's house (which I walked to from work because it's "just up the hill" from there), and we all went out for a beer and then to a Greek restaurant for dinner. It was a lovely, relaxed evening of stories and wisecracks and good cheer. Rich and I drank ouzo, and I reminisced about the time my brother and I were on Corfu in 1980 and met a bunch of guys from Lubbock, Texas, who bought a bottle of ouzo one night and invited us to join the party. We declined, but the next day we found the almost untouched bottle of ouzo at our hotel door. We drank it happily ourselves. Good times. Rich complained about the political correctness of modern fandom, and Stacy verbally rolled her eyes. John and I reminisced about the days when his street had only one restaurant, called the Surrogate Hostess and now long gone. Now the street is chockablock with restaurants and cafes and new condos. I got a ride back home from Rich and Stacy, and they came in to say howdy to Denys as well. They had never been to our house before, and of course talk turned to comic books once they saw Denys' massive collection. Fan talk.

Wednesday was the wedding itself, and it was at Burke Museum on the UW campus, so I just walked up there after work. Lots of folks were there, of course, including the winners of the Far Traveller Award, Mark and Priscilla Olson, who came all the way from Massachusetts. spikeiowa had brought badge ribbons in case there were badges, but we didn't need no stinking badges. Everybody was given a blue yarmulke, and most of us wore it during the ceremony. (akirlu was impressed that mine stayed on despite not being pinned to my non-existent hair.) It was the first Jewish wedding ceremony that I recall ever being to, so it was refreshingly different from past wedding experiences. A female rabbi presided over the lovely ceremony. I heard someone to my right entoning the Hebrew prayers along with her, and discovered later that it had been kalimac, remembering them from his own wedding twenty years ago. Carrie Root was in tears, and kate_schaefer eventually gave her a tissue. Afterward, Carrie thanked holyoutlaw for the tissue, much to his confusion. She hadn't seen who gave it to her, but thought it was him.

The meal afterwards was fantastic. I sat at a table with Denys and various old friends, but on my right was a woman I'd never met. It turned out that she has been Andi's massage therapist for twenty-odd years. I joked that most of the people at the wedding were either science fiction fans or therapists of some kind or another, since a number of Stu's therapists were there as well. In that aging crowd there were a number of other people who suffered from serious physical ailments of various sorts, and yet here we were celebrating a ceremony of connection and commitment against the tide of entropy, surrounded by the Burke's collection of fossils from ancient days indeed. There was music, and many smiling faces.

This will take a longer piece of writing to do the subject justice, so tune in to Chunga 21 (probably) if you want the longer version. The short version is that yesterday I went to Heronswood Gardens over on the Kitsap Peninsula to celebrate the wedding of Jessica Amanda Salmonson and Rhonda Boothe. The law legalizing same sex marriage went into effect on Thursday, and part of the longer story is the story of how that law was passed by the state legislature and eventually confirmed by popular vote. The S'Klallam Tribe, which had recently purchased Heronswood, donated the space and the ceremony to any same sex couples who wanted to get married on Sunday. Five couples took them up on the offer.

I caught a ride with John D. Berry and Eileen Gunn. Also catching a ride with them was Wendy Wees, who was one of Jessica's old girlfriends and whom I hadn't seen in decades, as she noted when I got in the car. Also at the ceremony were Marilyn Holt and Cliff Wind and a friend of Jessica and Rhonda's from Bremerton whose name I didn't catch but with whom I chatted at dinner afterward. We ate at the buffet at the S'Klallam's casino, with archaic cigarette smoke in the air.

It's hard to describe the emotions of the day. It was sweet and weird and epic and intimate. I felt like an eye-witness to history. There was a reporter from the North Kitsap Herald interviewing everyone about the blessed event. There was a jazzy Christmas song playing in the distant background during the ceremony. The officiant was a complete stranger who only met Jessica and Rhonda fifteen minutes before marrying them. Their vows were taken from the wedding of Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki. My wedding present was the fossil of a snail that I dug up by a train trestle outside of Salem when I was a young boy. Conversations with old friends ranged across the world and throughout time. One should always take the ferry to a wedding. My heart is bursting. Film at 11.

ron_drummond left a phone message a bit ago asking me to repost something he'd posted to a fannish list earlier in the day:

I've been living in a house on the banks of the Hudson River. The water is almost up to the ceiling of the basement, and it's looking like one or more of the dams upriver from us are going to break, so it's possible the entire main floor of the house will be flooded too. I got the books off of the bottom shelves of all the bookcases, and the two long wide flat boxes of Little, Big posters off the floor and onto a table top -- but it might not be enough. I had to leave to get some food and coffee in me -- electricity's out, and will be for at least three days, so no way to cook etc. Not sure where I'm going to sleep tonight.

In his phone message Ron said that when he opens the basement door, water is only about three steps down, but it hasn't gotten any higher in the past few hours. Whether the house gets flooded will depend on whether they release water from the dams upriver. Here's hoping that won't be necessary.

Last night I got together with wrdnrd and the_andy at Showa, a sake bar -- or izakaya -- in Fremont. I had mentioned it to wrdnrd when she posted about her love of sake on her blog. Suffice it to say that they know a lot more about sake then I do, and they gave me a primer over the first glass. The main thing I remember, other than typical alcohol content, is that the more polished the rice used to make it, the better the sake.

Showa is a cozy little place right above Chiso. As the website says, along with sake and cocktails they serve little food plates "like a tapas bar." We got a bowl of pickled vegetables and a couple of skewers of pork belly. I don't remember what the first bottle of sake was, but the second was unfiltered, so it was cloudy and sweeter than the first.

Conversation was good fun, and they told me about a couple of road trips, including the time they drove to Portland in their scooter and sidecar. Took ten hours. Oy. Crazy kids.

Well, more fun to talk about than to do, I suppose. I'd happily do that again. Showa was doing good business last night, so hopefully it'll stick around long enough for us to do a reunion tour.

Denys and I went to a dinner party at Marissa's yesterday evening. It was something of a blast from the past. It's probably been around a decade since I last did much hanging out with Marissa, I can't remember for sure. A couple of years ago she spotted me working on the traffic circle at the bottom of the hill, and we chatted for a bit. She was about to get married to an old childhood friend, about to move to Queen Anne. She suggested we get together for coffee and get caught up, but that never panned out. It seemed to me that the friendship was a thing of the past. Then suddenly out of the blue a month ago, she stopped by the house while I was away and told Denys she wanted to invite us over for dinner. Last night was the fruition of that invitation.

She had gathered a small group of people, as she always liked to do in the past. The only one I'd met before was Sue. Everybody was good fun, not exactly the kind of folks I normally hang out with, but smart and funny and friendly. The grilled shishkebobs were very good. They have a great craftsman on Queen Anne that they are working on remodeling from the studs up, and Marissa gave us a tour after dinner.

It was very strange trying to connect this party with the past. Lots of it felt very familiar. Marissa always liked to bring people from different circles together. I'm not sure if she was hoping to get caught up on the past few years or not, but it really wasn't possible under the circumstances. Maybe she preferred it that way, and it was actually fine by me too. She did ask me at the dinner table what had gone on in my life since the old days, and I just laughed and said nothing had changed.

It's actually hard to explain why it all felt so weird without going into more detail about Marissa's history and all the changes she's gone through. For one thing, she was a lesbian when I first met her, living in a boho loft down near Pioneer Square. Everything has changed. It's all good. I enjoyed myself last night. You live in a city long enough and old friends keep coming back around.

Don Fitch told me a couple of years ago that President's Day was about the right time to prune roses. I recently read a gardening page on the web that suggested that the time was right when your forsythia blooms. So I went out to prune the roses today, which is President's Day, and sure enough my forsythia has its first blossoms.

I spent a happy hour pruning the roses and the dead raspberry canes, preparing the way for new growth. As most of you will no doubt be unsurprised to hear, I am also continuing to rethink my travel plans for later in the year. Sharee's announcement of her marriage to Greg and their plans to attend Worldcon is making me even more dubious of the wisdom of my going to Australia this year. One of the things that's frustrating about this for me is that I also can't go to Corflu Cobalt in the UK this year because of travel plans with my family. That likewise cancels out the possibility of going to Eastercon instead. However, it just occurred to me yesterday that Novacon in November is another possibility.

One of the reasons I'm eager to get back to the UK in the near future is that reverendjim has indicated that he might be up for a trip to Belgium to drink damn fine beer in its natural habitat if I get over there again. So when I tossed my idea out to the Fishlifters to see what they thought, I was delighted to get this back from Mark. It absolutely made my day. (I hope he doesn't mind my quoting a private e-mail. Mark, if you do, just let me know and I'll take it down.) Mark wrote, "Much as we'd love to see you in Australia, there's something cosmic going on driving you down this path, I feel. I mean they don't coincide precisely, but your email was sent just before -- and seen by us just after -- we were talking in the pub about getting you to come to Novacon, in the wake of your email about coming to the UK some time and setting off on a Belgian beer odyssey with Jim. The general consensus was that if you do this you should take Tobes too -- and probably a film crew."

Which sounds like so much goddamn fun that I'm tempted to book the trip right now. However, I'm not going to make a hasty decision. I'm reluctant to give up on Aussiecon, because Australian Worldcons are a once a decade opportunity, and while going to the UK would allow me to visit British friends I had hoped to see in Melbourne, I wouldn't be able to see my Australian friends, including a few I've gotten to know through LiveJournal but haven't met yet.

Yet there's no denying that the recent developments Down Under make the emotional terrain much trickier for me. I'm not sure I'm strong enough not to be a burden on myself, on Sharee and Greg, and on all my friends. But who knows? Maybe this whole thing is making me stronger even now. All I know is that I love my friends, who are absolute rocks. I'm getting by with a little help from them.

daveon invited me over yesterday for beer, movies, and an excellent home-cooked dinner of Chicken Tikka Jalfreizi, Garlic Nann, Mushroom Bhaji, and something with spinach in it. Utterly delicious, eaten under the watchful eyes of his two Labradors. M. was at a networking gathering for women in business, so she didn't get home until later.

The movies were good goofy fun. First up was Destination Mars (2006), which is a low-budget, probably direct-to-video production from Dark Horse Comics that attempts to mimic the style of low-budget '50s sci-fi movies. It's somewhere in between an homage and a parody. The story is about a fleet of Martian flying saucers who come to Earth after the Martians learn of a planet-destroying weapon developed by an Earth scientist. The movie is very good at what it's trying to do, and the ending is perfect. It opens with a faux featurette about the lives of the cast and crew in the McCarthy era and beyond and about the discovery and restoration of the lone print of the film. At 80 minutes (including the featurette) it does not outlast its welcome.

After bouncing off a collection of sci-fi movie trailers and Vegas in Space (1991) ('The First All-Drag Queen Sci-Fi Musical Ever!'), we moved on to Roger Corman's Little Shop of Horrors (1960), which, no, I had never seen before. What an oddball little movie! I wasn't expecting all the Jewish humor and all the silly verbal humor. "It's a finger of speech!" Lots and lots of semi-vaudevillian shtick, which is both funny and just sort of ... odd. (What is the Jack Nicholson masochist scene doing in this story?) It's never all that interesting visually until the final chase scene across a landscape of old rubber tires. The tone is so close to off that I thought I wasn't going to like it at first, but a subtle silly weirdness got its tendrils in me ...

Anyway, thanks, Dave, for a lovely evening.

A fond farewell to ron_drummond, who should be on the way to the airport momentarily. Happy trails, old friend. See you in the ether when you reach the other side.

Last night Ron and I enacted an old ritual from the days when he lived in Seattle: pizza and beer at the Big Time. Good times! Totally mellow, like a fine aged wine.

Well, we had a reunion of the Carl Combine last night, with my anonymous housemate as the honorary host. It was just a few months over thirty years ago that three University of Oregon freshmen named Carl-sub-e, Carl-sub-i, and Carl-sub-pi drove from Eugene to Seattle to attend Norwescon, which was my first science fiction convention. Two of us were named Carl, so I was adopted as the imaginary Carl (thus sub-i). carl was Carl-sub-pi, the irrational Carl, and Carl L was Carl-sub-e, the natural Carl. Anyway, carl introduced us to my anonymous-not-yet-housemate on that trip, and we stayed one night at the house I would move into five years later.

So Carl L came up from Portland yesterday and took us all out to dinner at Kaosamai. After much head scratching, the Carls and I determined that the last time we'd all three gathered was at Robert G's 40th birthday party a decade ago when a whole bunch of the old Honors College gang got together in Eugene. But you know how these things go: we just picked up the conversation as though it had been yesterday. We still have a lot in common after all these years. For instance, none of us ever got married. Ha! (Not that Carl-sub-pi really has the option.)

Perhaps the most amusing thing about this reunion is how it came about. Carl L joined Facebook recently and found another college friend of ours, mlamprey, who pointed him to my LiveJournal. Then I tweeted carl. Well, okay, no, we actually just took it to e-mail from there. Anyway, this modern world, eh? Apparently it still has a niche for the Carl Combine. Hope you can join us next time, mlamprey! We can be dumb, wet, and plaid once again.