Dry Ice Factory

Brig, Matt, Molly, and me

I've been trying to take it easy since I got back from Canada, but I had one more bit of traveling almost as soon as I got home. My old college friend Carl L. was getting married to his old love Kari in Portland on July 23rd. I was feeling so wiped out I almost decided not to go, but then I asked myself, "When will you get a chance to see Molly again?" So it was the reunion of old college friends that inspired me to jump on the train to Portland.

Molly was basically my first girlfriend, and amongst other things we lived in the High House with Carl in I believe 1981. When Carl and Kari visited me on my previous trip to Portland, Kari and I figured out that I had actually first met her at Molly's wedding in the 1980s. Molly was instrumental in bringing Carl and Kari together both back then and in their more recent reconnection. Molly is a writer too and a very good one, and I always expected that she'd have sold a novel by now. We talked about that and about how career and children got in the way, but she also told me that she had finally, after years of trying, found a publisher that was willing to look at one of her manuscripts, so I wish her all the best on that front.

I hadn't seen Molly since our old college friend Brig got married, oh, maybe fifteen years ago? I hadn't seen Brig since then either, and I didn't expect to see him at Carl's wedding, since I had asked Carl whether he'd be there and Carl had said no. Well, it turned out that someone else couldn't make it, which opened up a seat for Brig in the tiny pioneer church where the wedding was held. Brig is someone I went to high school with, but we didn't become friends till we went to the college. It turned out that he was throwing a party later that day for a bunch of old high school classmates and I was welcome to come over and play if I wanted to. I didn't want to. For one thing, it sounded like they would be drinking more heavily than I was up for at that juncture, and for another I'm really not very interested in my old high school classmates. For me high school was a semi-traumatic experience that I happily left behind. Brig was from a social group that I think enjoyed the high school experience much more than I did.


Carl and Kari dance at the post-wedding reception

The wedding ceremony was beautiful and very romantic, telling the story of how Carl and Kari have renewed their love over the years while other things came between them and marriage until now. Carl is my age (mid-fifties) and this is his first marriage. Kari was married once before and has a 19-year-old daughter (who sang "Amazing Grace" at the ceremony, alone and a capella, which I thought was extremely brave of her). I found the ceremony a little uncomfortable, especially coming in the wake of my trip to Canada, because the love story presented was very similar to the one that Hortensia and I tried to tell when we almost got married following our reconnection in 2003.

Still, I was very happy for Carl, who is a total sweetheart in my books. I hope he and Kari can live out the rest of their days together, happily ever after. I don't know Kari nearly as well but really enjoyed chatting with her on my previous visit to Portland. She seems like a pretty grounded person with a good sense of humor.


Me and Molly after all these years

It was great to see Molly too, although it inevitably inspired other thoughts about my so-called love life and What Might Have Been. She and Matt have two children, Patrick and Isabella, who were both there as well. I believe Patrick is in his early 20s and Isabella is about to graduate from high school. I look at Molly and Matt and think I couldn't have done what they did. I couldn't have been a father, or at least I never wanted to be one. Why not? Why did I go down the path I took, in which I developed occasional uber-romantic infatuations which rarely developed into any kind of real relationship?

My sister and I have discussed this several times, and she, who has also mostly stayed out of realtionships, says it's a preference we have. There's something to that. I've said before that I don't want a co-pilot. I don't want someone with whom I'm constantly negotiating decisions. I want to be independent and do whatever the hell I want to do without argument.

But there's more to it than that too. There's the romanticism. The idealism. The impossible desire for connection with the perfect soulmate. The resulting disappointment and loneliness. I've learned to live with the loneliness, because the alternative has been self-hatred, and fuck that noise. But there doesn't seem to be any resolution of the conflicting desires -- for independence and for romantic submission -- even at my advanced age.

So the old thoughts and feelings tumble through me endlessly, and the nostalgia of a reunion with old friends stirs up ancient dilemmas.

This January was the 30th anniversary of my move to Seattle, and this has of course got me thinking about how much things have changed in that time. I was 23 when I moved here, and so the weight of life experience now leans more on the after-Seattle side of the balance than the before-Seattle side, although things that happen during your formative years tend to have more weight than things that happen once you're more settled into a routine. The four years I lived in Micronesia from age five to nine had a disproportionate impact on my consciousness. Yet the Seattle years more than hold their own, even on the scale of formative experiences. Maybe that's because I was a late bloomer.

( Deep dive into the history ... )

A Facebook post by reverendjim and a lovely letter of comment on Alternative Pants from Mike Meara have reminded me that a year ago on this date I was in Antwerp with Jim and pingopark. We were dripping wet, because we had been walking around in a storm. pingopark and I were looking plaintively at Jim, who was examining the guidebooks to see if there might be any interesting pubs open on a national holiday, since the ones we had come to Antwerp to visit were sadly closed. He settled on Paters Vaetje, and we had found our haven from the storm.

Mike pointed out (albeit in a kindlier way) that I looked like a zombie in all the photos of me in Alternative Pants. Indeed, it's true. Here's one (not in the zine) of me looking like a zombie in Paters Vaetje. It may not appear so, but I was one very happy zombie.



Meanwhile, happy Novacon to those of you lucky dogs who are able to attend. Cheers, y'all!

Ten years ago on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, I woke up and, unusually enough, didn't smoke a cigarette first thing before getting out of bed. In fact, I didn't smoke a cigarette all day long, and I haven't smoked a cigarette since.

I don't remember when exactly I started smoking. It was a fitful, gradual process that probably began at rock concerts in my senior year of high school, bumming my first smokes from my best friend, Reid. I know I was a regular smoker by the time my brother and I traveled to Europe two years later in the spring of 1980, because he tried to bribe me into quitting while we were over there. I blew smoke in his face, and for some reason he didn't beat the shit out of me. I did quit a couple of other times over the years, including once for over two years after I moved to Seattle in 1984. I blame my old girlfriend Robyn for my fall off the wagon that time. She was a party smoker and would smoke one or two at the bar when we went out. That looked like fun to me, so I started smoking one or two at the bar too, and before long it was back to one or two packs a day.

It's been so long now since I was a regular smoker that it's hard to remember what it was like. Part of me doesn't want to remember. The other day I was trying to remember if I used to smoke in my parents' house when I visited. I know Mom would've let me, but was I really that inconsiderate? I feel ashamed of how much second-hand smoke I subjected my friends to over the years. It was also such an unconscious habit that there aren't really a lot of memories associated with it. The one smoking-related moment I pulled up this week in anticipation of the anniversary was from the lead up to the first Gulf War in 1991 when Robyn and I were marching in a protest that shut down the northbound lanes of Interstate 5 downtown. Why is this memory so clear? We sat down on the pavement of the freeway with the other protesters, and I lit a cigarette and handed it to Robyn. She took a drag, handed it back to me, and said, "I'm glad you're here with me." I guess it was the intimacy of the shared cigarette amidst the excitement of the protest on that audacious public stage that burned it into my memory. It felt like a movie moment.

I probably still have a scrap of paper around here somewhere with the scrawled note, "Nicotine has me by the tits." I was fatalistic about my ability to kick it. When my nephews came along, they were subjected to the new anti-smoking propaganda at school, and they used to harass me about my smoking. I guess another thing I'll always remember is when the family was flying out to Yap in December 1998. We flew through Seoul, and when we landed there I made a beeline for the exit so I could have a smoke after thirteen hours of deprivation on the flight. My nephews came with me. The younger nephew was five years old.

"Why do you smoke?" he asked.

"I'm addicted," I said. He didn't understand the word. "My body needs it," I explained.

A couple of days later his mother told him to stop sucking his thumb. "But my body needs it," he explained.

Yap was actually the excuse I used to finally quit for good. I had told myself sometime in the '90s that I would quit when I turned 40, for health reasons, but when 19 September 2000 came around, I couldn't do it. Nicotine had me by the tits. But my brother was planning to go out to Yap with his family for six months in 2002, and I wanted to join them for part of that time. Money was tighter for me in those days than it is now, and I knew very well that I was spending over a thousand dollars a year on cigarettes. So in May of 2001, I determined to quit smoking so I'd have more money for Yap. I've never looked back.

When I quit for two-plus years in the mid-'80s, I used to have intense dreams about smoking. Typically I'd be smoking in my dream and feeling terribly ashamed -- afraid that somebody would catch me. I don't remember dreaming about smoking when I quit ten years ago, but then again maybe I've just forgotten the dreams. There's a folk mantra out there that the process of quitting goes in stages of threes: three days to go through nicotine withdrawal, three weeks to get it completely out of your system, three months to escape the cravings, three years till the danger of backsliding is past. The mantra helped me at the time, and if I still have any cravings for a cigarette, they are very few and far between.

I don't miss cigarettes. I apologize to you if I made you share my smoke in the past. I pat myself on the back for ten years of freedom.

So as I was writing about Joanna Russ over the weekend, I thought it might be cute to find the paragraph of hers I'd mimicked and post it along with my version. So last night I pulled out the ancient folder containing the story I did this for, "Singularities". It smelled of mildew, although the paper all looked clean. Notebook paper with handwritten text, typewriter paper with typed text. There was the Seal of approval that carl had drawn for me when I was feeling down about the quality of what I'd written. And here were two different versions of the paragraph I had based on Russ. Loooooooong paragraph. Starts off well, but uh-oh, quickly becomes pointlessly weird and stilted. So I looked at the second version, which takes it more in the direction of the story I wanted to tell. Well, there's more story there, the weirdness is more pointed, but boy is it stilted and disconnected and inhuman. I read the first paragraph of the finished story, and it was so horribly over-intellectualized that I immediately stopped. This was bringing up bad memories.

So I pulled out the slightly-less-ancient folder that contained the novella, "Recognition", which was the longer version of the same story that I wrote after I moved to Seattle. Started reading the first paragraph, which was completely different from the original opening -- and boy was it horribly precious and confusing and over-written. I looked briefly at the notes that Victor wrote after he read it, and his first point was that the shifting verb tenses was a bad idea. No shit! What the hell was I thinking?

I put the folder away, and I spun out. I got really upset. I had to leave the house. And I was surprised by how upset I felt. I thought I'd put my dream of being a great writer behind me. I thought I had found a niche of amateur journalism that made a lot more sense for my personality. And I think I have. What I didn't realize is that moving on didn't mean those old feelings of failure, disappointment, and self-loathing from the era of trying to write fiction had been resolved. Wow. I can't say I missed those feelings! What a cesspit.

So I went down to the Pacific Inn and ordered a two-piece fish and chips. I drank a couple of pints of fine local beer. I watched NBA basketball for an hour and exchanged quips with the bartender, Bobby. And I went back home, and I read a few pieces from Dave Kehr's collection of movie reviews, and everything was fine. Ugly feelings back in the folder, back in the file cabinet.

I know this is kind of a cheat. There's more I could say about why I failed as fiction writer, and particularly about how over-intellectualized I was as a young man and how much work I put into learning how to feel (one of the insights I gained from reading Russ was how much work it is to feel clearly), and how much help I got from my friends (and from a counselor) doing so, how much I still fail on that front (c.f. romantic relationships). How much the learning process led my writing in a different, less ambitious, direction that is a much better fit for who I am. And there, that's my outline of a deeper self-portrait. I feel rattled even saying that much. Funny where a little fond nostalgia for the old days will lead you.

I've been walking to work along the Burke-Gilman trail for over twenty years now. (Eventually I'll get there!) Over the years I've tried several times to remember where it was that a certain old friend of mine used to live back in, oh, 1986 or so. It was an apartment with a balcony just up the hill from Lake Union, and we had some crazy good times in that apartment, back when I was still doing my best to live the rock'n'roll life style. Memory said it was on Eastern Avenue, but every time I've looked at the apartment buildings on Eastern Avenue in these past twenty-odd years, none of them have looked familiar. Eventually I concluded it was actually on 1st, because a couple of the apartment buildings on 1st looked more or less the way I remembered the building looking.

So this morning on the walk to work, I was thinking about my little black address book, because I was wondering whether I should take it with me when I leave for Mexico tomorrow morning. The answer to that question was No, but in thinking about the address book I started thinking about how I don't use it as much as I once did, because I now have an address database on my PC that I use more often. And I was thinking about what addresses I have in my address book that aren't in my database, and whether I should transfer them.

Then I got to 1st and went through that whole thought process about my old friend's apartment again, as I have occasionally done in the past. I looked at the apartment buildings, and a couple of them looked like likely candidates, but which one was it? And it suddenly occurred to me, because I had been thinking about it for other reasons, that my little black address book is so old that it might actually have my friend's old address in it. So I pulled it out of my bag, and sure enough there was the old address. It was crossed out (along with four or five subsequent addresses for the same old friend), but I could still see that the address had been on Eastern Avenue after all.

Well. This illustrates the process by which false memories are formed, for one thing, because I really had convinced myself that the apartment had been on 1st. But because my current job is all about databases, it also got me thinking about how if I'd transferred all the current addresses from my little black book into my address database and thrown the book away, all the historical addresses would be lost, and I quite likely never would have gotten rid of my false memory. Not that it matters much, in this particular case! Yet I immediately realized that I'd already overwritten addresses in my address database a number of times, and I began to wonder how I could replicate the historical aspect of my little black book. Well, obviously I would need date ranges on my address records. So I started thinking about the best way to configure the date ranges, and about how to replicate the crossing out of old addresses so that I didn't use them by mistake ...

And I realized that I am sooooooo ready for a vacation in Mexico.

This movie made me sad, and not just because it's a sad biopic about a young girl from a dysfunctional family who was chewed up and spat out by the music industry. It made me sad because it reminded me of my best friend in junior high and high school, Reid, who wore platform shoes and colored sunglasses and ostentatious rings and did his best to act like a rock'n'roll badass in the backwater city that is Salem, Oregon in the mid-'70s. He was a musician and composer and was so good on the piano that he earned the grudging respect of our classmates, along with their contempt and ridicule. They called him Elton Reid, because he loved Elton John. He was always in trouble with the school administration, always in trouble with his parents (his father was a judge), and he and I got arrested twice -- once for egging the house of a girl we thought was cute, and once for shoplifting science fiction paperbacks and rock albums. He'll never get a cheesy biopic made about him. He was just another talented guy going through a hellish adolescence who ended up supporting a family working 9 to 5.

It made me sad because it reminded me that I was in my mid-20s before I tried to reinvent myself as a cool rocker punk dude, and reminded me of all the insecurity and unhappiness behind that attempt, and how I wanted to stand out, be recognized, be somebody, and ended up just another confused face in the crowd -- "It's easy to see that you are one of us/Ain't it funny how we all seem to look the same?" How many stupid things I did to try to have a good time (mostly involving drugs of various kinds), how many good times were had, how little ground was gained through it, how distant it all seems now. How I'll never again go home with Robyn after a hard night of exhilarating slamming on a concrete floor in front of a tiny stage. How fraught with unhappiness and confusion even going home with Robyn always was.

It made me sad because it reminded me of another best friend, Tami, who loved Joan Jett, who was the member of the Runaways who didn't get chewed up and spat out by the music industry. I always thought Joan Jett's music was total cheese, but Tami thought she was the bomb and made me see it too. We saw Joan play Rckcndy with the Gits after Mia Zapata was murdered, raising money to pay for a private detective to investigate the murder. They called themselves Evil Stig for the night. I'll always remember Joan Jett reading the lyrics from Mia's notebooks, as they stumbled through ferocious versions of the songs. I'll always remember the air of anger and intensity and amazement of that show. Joan Jett earned major respect from me for doing that. Only this morning I remembered that after the show Tami somehow got us onto Joan Jett's tour bus out in the parking lot. I can't remember if we saw Joan Jett herself. I felt out of place and uncomfortable and just wanted to get the hell out of there. And these memories are sad because Tami and I ended up heading in different directions and that friendship has been stone cold dead for five years.

So this isn't very much about the movie, which is an average biopic with good music and a couple of good acting performances. It starts in 1975, and I have memories.

Because she's at sea and can't stop me, I'm posting another picture of Sharee from the batch of scans I got from Andy Porter yesterday. All the pictures are from the 1980 Norwescon, and most of them are of her in costume, like the one I posted yesterday. This is one of two non-costume shots. It looks very '40s to me, and not just because it's black and white. The hair style and jacket look old-fashioned to me too.

It's hard to think about that era without thinking about what a stupid child I was at that age (an older man of nineteen), but I guess we all have to learn the hard way. And what did I learn? That I'll always be stupid about certain things! I just have a cognitive bias that way. The unknown known, as Michael Dobson put it in a recent Facebook post about risk analysis. Appropriately enough.

So in March 1979 the Carl Combine traveled from Eugene to Seattle for Norwescon. It was my first science fiction convention. Our surrealist spirit guide was Carl-sub-pi, the irrational Carl:




( More Carls below ... )

Last night I realized that this month is the 25th anniversary of my move to Seattle and into this house. I moved here in January 1984. I can't remember what the date was, but it was pretty soon after New Year's, maybe the 4th.

I've lived in this house for over half my life, which I figured out this morning has been true for a year now. Bizarre. I moved a lot when I was in college, as you do, and when I graduated and moved up here I swore I'd never move again. So far, so good.

For the most part, it has been just me and Denys, who has lived here just over thirty years. When I first moved in, paul was still living here. After he moved out, Steve moved in briefly. By the time he moved out, the $320 rent we were paying didn't seem like too much for two people to handle. The only other person who has lived here since was Denys' foster son (if that's the right term), Daniel, who moved in for a couple of years after his mother died of cancer.

Denys and I are perhaps an odd couple, but we've obviously worked out pretty well as housemates. We bought the house sometime in the mid-'90s. I can't remember the year, but it was right when housing prices started to climb sharply in Seattle, thanks to the tech bubble. We were still paying $320 a month rent, because Norvin never raised it, but we knew that the window on affordability for us was closing. I have mixed feelings about home ownership, since I'm not much interested in maintenance or home improvement, but it does keep the rug from being pulled out from under us. Fremont is a great neighborhood, and I've always liked living here. When sneerpout visited in 2001, she said it looked like I belonged here.

Perhaps even more scary is that next month will be my 20th anniversary at the University. I started there in February 1989, still looking something like the icon on this post. I wrote about stasis in the '90s recently, but this longevity of home and workplace are more like stability, I think. Putting down roots. Well, at least Denys and I have been able to provide basement space to a variety of friends who needed temporary long-term storage.