Tag Archives: forwards into the past

which reminds me…

according to the “universal chart of telling when things actually happened” that i made several years ago, in late 1995 i lived in a rooming house in west seattle with a couple of crazy people, one of whom was Regan Fraser, older brother of Brendan Fraser, actor in such movies as “George Of The Jungle” and the Mummy series. at the time (and, to a certain extent, still), i was more or less ignorant of the exploits of brendan, so i wasn’t as “wowed” by my brush with the sibling of a star as i might have been otherwise, but it was pretty memorable anyway.

at the time, i was working as a micro$lut, doing the evil bidding of the great Gates himself. i had lulled myself into a false sense of security, because, even though i was working at microsoft headquarters (i never actually had an office on campus in redmond, but i had several “off campus” offices), i was working in their mac division, and never actually worked with windoesn’t until several years later.

this was back in the dark ages, when you could actually telnet to different servers, and, for the most part, there was no email spam, in part because it was before the discovery of the Word Concept Virus, which was capable of being sent over email. prior to the word concept virus, you actually had to have physical access to the computer, and install viruses from a disk, for them to be able to propagate… in other words, computer security was light-years away from where we are now.

when regan heard that i was working with networked computers, he came to me with a bold plan to get both of us filthy rich — or something — a prominent part of which involved me gaining access to his “rich brother’s” bank accounts over internet.

fortunately for me, i was just at the beginning of my realisation that i was, deep down, a computer geek, and also i was a rank newbie when it came to internet — i had survived perfectly well up until that time using a sneaker-net when i had to share documents, and i was just beginning to imagine why i would ever want anything more than that…

so i “tactfully” told him that, while what he proposed was likely possible, he was talking to the wrong guy when it came to actually cracking a computer and stealing stuff.

later, after i had moved into my own apartment, i heard, third-hand, that he had actually been arrested when it was discovered that he had broken into his “rich brother’s” house, stolen some credit cards, and had actually gone to a bank with those cards, claiming to be his “rich brother”… i never actually confirmed any of this, but reading through the tale of master foo reminded me of my experience with regan fraser…

coincidence, or… ?

through a series of events so unlikely that the only place it could have happened is the internet, my memories of a long-forgotten friend has surfaced, and i’m only partially sure of what the right direction to head would be in this case.

while browsing my RSS aggregator, i found an article through MetaFilter about "The Truce On Drugs" which mentioned (along with many other things) a guy from humboldt county named Mikal Jakubal.

a long time ago, when i was living at The Madhouse, in bellingham, another person who also lived there for a short period of time, was this guy who was described by one of the founders of Earth First as “a walking action”. to say that this guy was an “environmental activist” is sort of like describing Mickey Mouse as “a cartoon animal”. it was through him that i learned about my love of doing things like destroying logging machinery that i find deep in the woods, driving metal spikes into the old-growth trees that i come across, picking locks and other less specific kinds of general mayhem.

the name of this person was mike jakubal.

whether or not these two people are the same person remains to be seen (actually, if the picture on his web site is anything to go by, my guess is that the probability that they are the same person is no less than 75%)… but, at the same time…

WEIRD!!

eric

eric and i were good friends for a long time. we met back when i was seeing kitty, in the early 1980s. i don’t remember exactly what circumstances brought us together, but eric was living in the house of a friend of kitty’s (alan?) and because of the fact that we were both brass players (eric played french horn) and both enjoyed cannabis, we became friends.

later on, eric was playing french horn with kenyth in the stairway (excellent accoustics), and i started playing along with them on my flute, and we liked it so much that it became the Stairway Jam, which is the miscellaneous and ever-changing group of musicians that met and jammed in the stairway (and, later on, elsewhere) for 25 or 30 years, but only performed in public one time — which was the “Free Money Concert” where each of the audience members was payed 10¢ if they stayed for the entire, 1½ hour performance… we only had to pay one audience member, a fellow named Ken Yanik, who had fallen asleep during the performance. every other audience member (and there were quite a few) left before the concert was finished, and before we revealed how much we were going to pay.

but, eventually, eric met my older-younger sister*, and my sister turned him against me. i don’t know exactly what she said (although i have a pretty good idea), but eric’s behaviour toward me got worse and worse, until there was a major “scene” at the stairway jam one evening, eric left the group for good, and i haven’t seen him since.

that is, until today. i responded to a linkedin request from Amy Denio, a musician whom i have admired for a long time, and while i was responding to that, linkedin suggested that i may also know Eric Barcus… as far as i can tell, this is the same eric as the one to whom i am referring, although i can’t be 100% certain, because the last time i knew for sure, kathryn and eric lived in bellingham, and he wasn’t a computer technician… the problem is that if it is the same eric, any message i send to him is likely to be responded to with the same kind of emotional outburst that i experienced at the stairway jam, these many years previously, and i’m not sure whether i want to experience that or not, regardless of how good a friend eric might have been at one time. UPDATE: nope, it’s not the same guy.

the one thing i do know for sure is that linkedin is getting more and more brash about advertising the fact that they know a lot more about people than the people, themselves, probably realise… 😐

Continue reading eric

Jaymes Douglass Fyrr

i met this guy when i was in my 3rd semester of college. in 1979, i lived in stack 6 at fairhaven college, with a bunch of crazy people for the first two semesters, and between the second and third semester i moved into stack 4 with another bunch of crazy people, one of whom was jaymes douglass fyrr (not his real name). before i lived there, the suite was inhabited by a bunch of crazy college guys adolescents whose idea of a good time was pouring beer down their gullets until they were so wasted that falling out of the third floor window didn’t faze them (really). after they were kicked out moved elsewhere, the suite became the realm of me, my roommate reuter, st. gordy and his roommate (whose name i don’t remember), st. fred, and jim and his roommate (whose name i don’t remember).

jim and i got along the way suite-mates who were from two totally different worlds would be expected to get along – i.e. we were civil, but he didn’t get to know me very well, and i didn’t get to know him very well – and when the year ended, jim went back to his parent’s home and i did “something else” (i didn’t get along with my parents, even then). when fall semester 1980 came around, i had to choose a new roommate if i wanted to live in the dorms, and jim needed a roommate for his apartment in buchanan towers, so i said what the hell.

during the fall semester, we got to know each other quite well, but then it turned out that he didn’t pass a class he needed to graduate, so he dropped out and went back to his parents’ house and i got another roommate, randy (who is a completely separate story).

fast forward a few years to 1983, after my son was born. i was living in a big apartment on the side of sehome hill with my son and his mother, the PHBFH, and we got…

a phone call from jim, who had planned on going back to school, finishing the class that he needed and getting his degree. what it came down to was that i had an extra room in my apartment, and jim needed a place to stay for spring semester. once again, i said what the hell.

it was considerably different this time, compared to the last time we were roommates. jim didn’t want to do his own laundry or cooking. we had meal tickets and “saga” in the dorms, but that was a long time ago, and it got really tense when he asked the PHBFH to do his laundry. also, at the time, jim was getting really cranky and mean, so when he graduated, we asked him to move out.

i should have known then that he wasn’t the best person to hang around with, but i have had a tendency to “forgive and forget” in the past (now i’m just as willing to forgive, but if you slight me, i’m definitely going to remember it), and it wasn’t too long before i was sharing a house with him again. st. gordy owned a house on state street and jim already lived there when i moved in. at the time, i was transitioning between the print shop and the music shoppe, and jim stepped into my vacant position, thus making the transition somewhat easier. for a while we worked down the street from each other, me at the music shoppe and jim at quik kopy, and we would take our lunch break at the park down the street and get stoned. by 1990, jim was developing, what i considered at the time to be, a very unhealty relationship with the “mom and pop” of the “mom and pop print shop” at which he worked (which was part of the reason why i left originally, as well: they were scary people), which was making his crankiness and meanness even worse, and by 1994, just before i moved away from bellingham, jim and i didn’t spend an awful lot of time with each other, simply because he was so disagreeable to be around.

then, in 1995 i moved to seattle, and i didn’t think about jim that much, because i was going through my own little hell, living at 5 different locations and having 3 or 4 jobs within a year before things started to settle down, and in 1996, i got…

another phone call from jim…

it seemed that his toxic relationship with the “mom and pop” had blown up, and he had been fired from the print shop, at which point he got a job at “the other print shop” in town and promptly gotten fired from that, because he was mean to the customers and kept coming to work drunk. he asked if he could come and stay with me while he got “cleaned up” – which i took to mean that he wanted to get sober and get a job. at the time, i was flush with my first successes in the computer industry and, despite my better judgement, i said he could stay with me for a couple of weeks, until he got his feet under him.

the first night he stayed in my apartment, he asked if i had any beer, which i didn’t… so i went out and bought a 6 pack, which – even now – usually lasts me a couple of weeks. i drank one and the next day, i got up and went to work. when i came home, there were no more beers in the house, and jim was complaining that we didn’t have any beer.

at that point (because my father was an alcoholic) i got straight to the point, and said that there wasn’t going to be any more beer, or anything else alcoholic to drink, in the house, and if he didn’t like it, he was welcome to leave… which, after a few days, he did. he didn’t go far, though… i actually caught him sleeping in the bottom of the main stairway in my apartment building, on the “fire escape” level, below the bottom floor, and told him that he couldn’t stay there – actually watched him pack up his stuff and leave twice before he went somewhere else.

it turned out that he had copied my key before he left, though, and when he left, he went back to bellingham, where he met a lady i had worked for, named almitra, immediately prior to moving to seattle (or, it’s possible that he knew almitra before coming to seattle, and conspired with her to get a copy of my key. i’ll never know for sure…), who convinced him that i had stolen her computer – in reality, she had given it to me in lieu of cash payment, but that, too, is another story. i can just picture them, both soused to the gills, and jim saying “i have a key to his apartment, we can just go in while he is at work and steal it take it back…”

which they did.

it didn’t take much sleuthing to determine who had my computer, and so i went to bellingham with st. gordy (who is a fairly big guy) to find him. the first place we looked for him was at st. gordy’s house, which had been gutted by a fire and had been posted as “unfit for human habitation” by the fire department… and, naturally, we found jim living in his old room, as though nothing had happened. in fact, he was incredulous that we had found him at all, but he didn’t have the computer… it wouldn’t have done him much good anyway, because the electricity (which was the original cause of aforementioned fire) had been shut off.

at first he wouldn’t tell us where it was, but… have i mentioned that st. gordy is a pretty substantial fellow? jim was a predictable drunk, and caved almost immediately, and soon we were on our way to almitra’s apartment. after a tense interaction with almitra, which involved st. gordy and the police, i learned what the phrase “possession is 9/10ths of the law” means, and left without a computer. fortunately (or not, depending on your point of view) i had encrypted the entire disk, so the only thing they could do with it was totally wipe the disk and start over… with no fonts or a typesetting program or anything other than a blank operating system. jim actually called me a couple of weeks after, to try to wheedle the password out of me, but i refused.

i have never seen him since then. about once a year for a while i would get a “i’m sorry, do you still want to be friends” email from him, which i ignored. then i had my brain injury and i stopped hearing from him… i guess maybe he thought i had died, or something, which would have been fine with me.

i got email from him again about this time last year: “remember me?” i wrote back “yeah, i remember you.” and haven’t heard from him since.

this story leaves out A LOT of detail, and merges some of the details together, to save having to go out on long, meaningless tangents in order to explain relatively minor events… but that’s basically my side of the story. if jaymes douglass fyrr finds this via google or something and wants to respond, i probably won’t delete it.

1984

the night of saturday, 31 december, 1983 to sunday, 1 january, 1984 was one in which i had the late night shift at the college radio station, KUGS-FM 89.3. the show was called “The Radio Program That Doesn’t Exist” and, as “The Voice In The Night”, i played a mixture of offbeat album rock and extremely bizarre stuff like the shaggs and the passion and transfiguration of a post apocalyptic eunuch.

but this particular night i had something special in mind: the David Bowie classic, Diamond Dogs. and i timed it precisely so that the song 1984 started the moment the new year happened.

i don’t know if anybody else remembers this, but i was just listening to 1984 and i remembered this…

Someday they won’t let you, so now you must agree
The times they are a-telling, and the changing isn’t free
You’ve read it in the tea leaves, and the tracks are on TV
Beware the savage jaw
Of 1984

They’ll split your pretty cranium, and fill it full of air
And tell that you’re eighty, but brother, you won’t care
You’ll be shooting up on anything, tomorrow’s never there
Beware the savage jaw
Of 1984

Come see, come see, remember me

We played out an all night movie role
You said it would last, but I guess we enrolled
In 1984 (who could ask for more)
1984 (who could ask for mor-or-or-or-ore)
(Mor-or-or-or-ore)

I’m looking for a vehicle, I’m looking for a ride
I’m looking for a party, I’m looking for a side
I’m looking for the treason that I knew in ’65
Beware the savage jaw
Of 1984

Come see, come see, remember me

We played out an all night movie role
You said it would last, but I guess we enrolled
In 1984 (who could ask for more)
1984 (who could ask for mor-or-or-or-ore)
(Mor-or-or-or-ore)

1984, 1984, 1984, 1984, etc.

giant metal chickens

this may be what a “meme” looks like when it is in the early stages of formation…

i have seen references to giant metal chickens in three different places around the web during the past couple of days. while i am pretty sure that two of them aren’t, one of them may have been in reference to a band called Giant Metal Chickens, but i’m not sure, and i can’t find the link now, which, in itself, is enough to raise my suspicions. and one of them was a client and friend of mine, who posted pictures of a giant metal chicken which may or may not have been her own personal giant metal chicken, in high point north carolina…

giant metal chicken - high point, NC

bizarre…

which brings up another story…

my first semester of my first year of college was spent living in the dorm, first with a guy named josh, and then with a guy named joe. around the end of that first semester, i found, not a giant, but certainly much larger than normal chicken, made out of aluminum foil – for all intents and purposes, a “giant metal chicken”.

of course this chicken ended up in my dorm window, where it was the object of much amusement and derision from the other people who lived in the dorm, and at the end of the semester, joe asked me if he could take it home with him. he assured me that he would bring it back at the beginning of the next semester, and, as we were all moving out of that particular dorm anyway, i figured that if he took it, that would mean that i wouldn’t have to explain why i had a giant metal chicken to my parents, who were already under the impression that i was more than a little strange anyway.

naturally, when the next semester started, joe didn’t have my giant metal chicken. apparently his dog ate it.

and they thought i was strange…

forwards into the past!

another highlight from the genealogical information that i got yesterday is my great great grandmother Martha Ann (Mattie) Solomon‘s death certificate. according to what i can gather, contrary to “family rumours” that have been creeping around since i was a kid, she was not a native member of the Creek tribe. however she was murdered by an “insane woman” in 1938, shortly after my father was born…

weird! 😮

busy, busy, busy…

i belong to the Rudraksha Bead Societies Club email group, and this message from Anil Kumar came through in a larger discussion about the Himalayan Academy.design, typesetting and computer wizardry

I have been reading from Himalayan Academy and their various sub websites, almost regularly for the past few years and the information available is simply amazing. The monks keep updating it on a regular basis. You can follow their daily blog which they call TAKA on the below link:

http://himalayanacademy.com/blog/taka/

For Modern day Mystics who want to know the significance of this Giant Crystal Shivalingam ( also known as an Earth keeper Crystal), they can follow the below links,

http://www.thegreatcentralsun.com

http://www.thegreatcentralsun.com/almitra/book.php

Almitra Zion also had visions of this EarthKeeper Crystal apart from Gurdeva Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami who then deputed her to procure the same.

i did quite a bit of typesetting and design work for almitra zion from about 1989 or so until 1995, ending soon after i moved from bellingham to seattle, and posted about my interactions with a lady at the fremont sunday market who was using the "Words Of Power" cards in the past, but here is an independent, third-party recognition that almitra does, in fact, exist, crazy as she is.

i met almitra during the time that i was working for the advertising company in bellingham and doing work “on the side” for an esoteric book store. the owner of this book store put me in contact with someone who, she said, was “opening another ‘esoteric’ book store” in a different part of town. that person was almitra, and i worked with her until i moved to seattle, doing sign painting, making labels for the book shelves, designing and printing flyers and pamphlets and doing advertising design, including a number of advertising magazines, as well as artistic design for these crazy cards that she wanted me to print for her in 1992, which had her “intuitive” meaning for the individual letters of the words. they were actually sort of hillarious, in a sad kind of way, because her “intuition” frequently told her what words meant, but only if they were spelled in her own “intuitive” way, and i had to inform her on a number of occasions that a particular word wouldn’t work, because the dictionary disagreed with her “intuition” and if i spelled the word the way she wanted to spell it, she would end up looking like a pompous, uneducated moron.

she never actually paid me with money. she gave me a fairly large african drum, and a lot of promises, but it was only after i told her that i wasn’t going to do any more work for her that she offered me the computer that she had bought to do the design work that i had been doing for her. it was an acceptible offer to me, since i was in the business of doing typesetting and design work, and, for the time, it was a pretty attractive computer – a Mac LCII. in return, i completed one more magazine for her, and then informed her that i was now living in seattle and couldn’t do work for her any longer.

shortly after i moved to seattle – once i had actually got an apartment of my own – my former-friend jim came to visit for a couple of weeks, ostensibly because he wanted to “get straight” after pretty much losing most of his life to bottles of cheap, fortified wine. i later learned that he was working with almitra, and one of the reasons he came to “visit” me was so that he could get a copy of my key, which, after i realised that staying at my apartment wasn’t going to help jim “straighten out” and threw him out, he proceded to go back to bellingham and give to almitra, who used it to break into my apartment and steal my computer back… and then he had the gall to email me a couple of weeks later because he couldn’t break the password that i had set to restrict access to the computer and he had to ask me if i would give it to him… which, of course, i wouldn’t, and laughed at him for his delusion that i would… 😐

apparently, she’s got a web site (designed by her son, who was approximately 4 years old when i was working for her), and she’s actually selling the "Words Of Power" cards in an online revival of the original central sun brick and mortar shop in bellingham – she says that it also operated on kauai before that, and it well may have, but if it was, it was very likely a "hippie tarot readings and esoteric doodads at inflated prices" shop run by a post-adolescent psychotic who thought she was a healer, because that’s pretty much what it was when i worked for her in bellingham.

these people must be members of my karass, because as hard as i try to get away from having to associate with them, they keep on showing up, whether i like it or not…

wump

i look unusuali look unusual.

when i was growing up, my parents took offense at the fact that i wanted to look unusual, and they tried very hard to get me to look more like i “fit in”. because of the fact that they were my parents, and i had very little control over the things they were requiring me to do, i complied. also, i am very much aware of how negatively “looking unusual” was portrayed by my parents, in an attempt to dissuade me from looking unusual. they always said that if i looked unusual, people would not want to hang around with me and it would affect the “opportunities” i would be presented.

the way i looked at it then, and the way i continue to look at it (because i still cannot see why there should be any other way of looking at it), is that if the fact that i look unusual means that people will be more hesitant to hang around with me, then i probably wouldn’t be that interested in hanging around with those people to begin with. it’s better that people who wouldn’t hang around with me for superficial reasons be repelled from me to begin with, because if they were not, I would be repelled by them when something superficial came up in which they weren’t interested. if people are going to be repelled by my unusual appearance, then if i looked more like everyone else, i would be forced to associate with people from whom I want to get away. only people who are willing to look beyond appearance get to know who i really am. everyone else just thinks i’m a freak, and that’s the way i like it.

i am especially that way when it comes to “work”. at this point i don’t have a “job” in the traditional sense, but if i had to wear a uniform, or dress a certain way every day in order to “fit in” and make a living among people i didn’t get along with, i would go mad very, very quickly. i’ve barely been able to get by in “corporate” jobs in the past, even under the best of circumstances. i’ve only had one job from which i was not fired, and i’ve only had one job that has lasted longer than two years in my entire life. in a lot of ways i feel like i wasn’t cut out for what “normal” people do every day, and my experience with “jobs” pretty much reflects that.

update

i got an order for 1000 postcards through a recommendation from a long time customer. i’m probably going to get a special order for a kilo of incense from somebody who doesn’t want to pay via paypal, so he’s sending me a checque, which will probably add around a week to the amount of time that it will take until he gets his order.

i got two emails within a comparitively short period of time from a former friend turned raging alcoholic. i’ve gotten three or four emails from him in the past 10 years, and suddenly i get two emails from him within a week. i also have a copy of the last letter i sent to him, almost exactly ten years ago, that starts out with the phrase “you’re delusional, and you’ve been that way for quite some time now.” and goes downhill rapidly from there. i’m glad i’m so obsessive about keeping personal correspondence, otherwise i might not have remembered that this is the same guy who stayed in my apartment for a week right after i had moved to seattle from bellingham, in 1996, and proceded to make a copy of the key to my apartment, so that when i finally threw him out because he was an irresponsible drunken bastard, he came back and cleaned out my apartment while i was at work, and then was surprised when i showed up at his residence in bellingham with the cops… or the fact that he, then, proceded to accuse me of stealing his cheap stereo and rusty scale, which i hadn’t seen in years… the same guy who tried to guilt me into shutting up by asking questions about me finishing my degree, and my relationship with my God and gurudeva…

i wrote a terse email back to him, but i’m not holding my breath.

thanks to xydexx (who falls into the category of people i have known for 25 years or more… scary, isn’t it?)

“You know how sometimes people on your friendslist post about stuff going on in their life, and all of a sudden you think “Wait a minute? Since when were they working THERE? Since when were they dating HIM/HER? Since when???” And then you wonder how you could have missed all that seemingly pretty standard information, but somehow you feel too ashamed to ask for clarification because it seems like info you should already know?”

FIRST NAME: salamandir
AGE: older than dirt
LOCATION: seattle area
OCCUPATION: brain injured, tuba playing freak with a taste for fire
PARTNER: yes.
KIDS: one and done.
BROTHERS/SISTERS: two sisters, one brother, haven’t seen or spoken with any of them for 25 years or more.
PARENTS: mother and father both living in bellevue. haven’t spoken with them in a few years either.
PETS: currently, four dogs, three cats, a parrot and a snake. soon to include a litter of puppies.
THREE TO FIVE THINGS GOING ON IN MY LIFE: 1) [REDACTED] 2) one of the bands i play in is getting more and more frustrating because the only language that all of us speak in common is music, which makes organising things like rehearsals and concerts almost impossible. 3) none of the bands i play in have a gig on new years eve. wanna hire me?
CLOSE FRIENDS: a very few people that i’ve known on and off for 25 years or more, a somewhat larger number of people who i’ve known for 20 years or less, and nobody in between.

also, ROTFLMAOWTIME

forwards into the past – my experiences with goat island

path to fishtownmy finding the articles about fishtown the other day has caused a great deal of uproar in my feeble, damaged brain: very strong, detailed memories that don’t seem contected to any particular event combined with a general uncertainty about the whole period of time in question leaves me wondering what actually happened, and when.

these are things that i know concerning fishtown and goat island:

the first time i went to goat island was between 1982 and 1985, but i think it was around 1982. i’m not sure why i was going to fishtown specifically, but i apparently knew some people who lived there full time, or something like that. there was also talk of starting an “intentional community” (read “hippy commune”) on goat island, since it had a convenient abandoned gun emplacement that could be used as “temporary” (read “permanent”… it was huge, and mostly underground, thus dry and relatively warm) dwelling place. my sister kathryn and her boyfriend (who eventually became her husband) eric were planning on going as well, but due to some conflict with eric (which were quite common at that time), they ended up going to goat island separately, camped on the other side of the island, and i never saw them. i went with randy, and we spent two days trying to get to goat island. the first day we parked along the side of the road, basically in the middle of nowhere, outside of la conner, and hiked in to bald island, which was accessible by a rickety foot bridge. that night we camped on the bluffs on the west end of bald island overlooking shit creek (ship creek? my guess is that they were trying to be polite on the poet’s web site… 🙂 ) and got a ride with bex into fishtown the next morning. the second night we spent in robert sund’s cabin, which was a lot nicer than sleeping on the rocky ground. there is a drawing inspired by robert sund’s “wind letters” which i had seen there in my sketchbook. also there is a picture of a completed "wind letter" that is in my workshop at this very moment… that’s how profound an impact this place had on my consciousness. in the morning of the second day, singin’ dan and red dan and randy and i set out in one boat and bex set out in another boat, and we rounded goat island (because of the jetty, we couldn’t get to where we wanted to go directly). i was astounded to see a two-story house on the mud-flats. somebody had bought a 40 foot barge, moved his whole house onto it, and then parked it in the mud to the west of the island, where he made all the money he needed for the whole year by shoring up the monsterous pleasure boats belonging to obscenly rich people who figured that they could go anywhere in a boat that was given to impacting the bottom of the bay when the tides went out. we spent at least a week on goat island, with the conflict with eric escalating all the time. i remember singin’ dan impressing me with his knowledge of native plants and their uses. we built a huge fire in one of the abandoned gun emplacements, which burned for three days, and made a huge pot of stew with rabbits and wild cabbage and onions. we were going to return to fishtown through the fish-hole in the jetty, but we didn’t time the tides quite right (it’s difficult to approximate time when you haven’t seen a watch or a clock for a week), so we went into la conner instead, and from there we got a ride back to our car.

i also went to goat island with katharyn and ezra, when ezra was a tiny baby… maybe that was the time with the conflict with eric, i’m not sure… anyway, i remember it was during a break from the tech school, and i rented a canoe from the university boat house. we parked at the end of the road outside of la conner and had a straight shot from sandy beach to the island, along the jetty. because of the fact that i had timed it correctly, we hardly even had to paddle, the tide just carried us out with it – which was a good thing, because of the fact that we had ezra, we had a huge boatload of diapers and stuff, plus three people – well, two people and a baby – in a canoe that wasn’t really intended to hold more than two people, or one person and his camping gear. i remember, on the way there, we had, literally, an inch or less of freeboard. one good wave would have swamped us and abruptly ended the trip. i don’t remember that much about that trip (it is not at all surprising that a camping trip with the PHBFH would not stick in my memory), except for the fact that we made it and didn’t drown or lose anything important, like the baby. there is a list in my sketchbook, dated 850621-23 that appears to match what memories are there, but i seem to recall ezra being much younger, as little as 6 months old, at the time, so there may have been multiple visits with katharyn and ezra.

i went to goat island at least two more times. once with randy and jenny, where we actually canoed around in the area where the people who owned the house made their money. because of the fact that we were in a shallow-draft boat, we were able to go exploring in a lot of areas that are inaccessible otherwise. i remember we came up on this small island, and someone coughed (there was a fair amount of pot smoking going on), and, instantaneously, the sky all around was filled with great blue herons that had a rookery on the island. i got a feather from one of the nests that i still have, on the desk in front of me, at this very moment… 🙂

the last time i went to goat island must have been around 1985 to 1986 or so, and it was with jim. i don’t remember anything about how we got there, or how long we stayed. i do remember that jim was so afraid of appearing “gay” that he camped on the other side of the gun emplacement from me, in a place where we were not even in visual contact. it rained that night, and we moved further into the abandoned gun emplacement to avoid getting wet, and i remember trying to get warm, and rolling around in my sleeping bag, which i had parked next to a doorway, in the pitch dark of the night, and not being able to find the doorway i had gone to sleep next to… and then, in the morning, i discovered that i had rolled all the way across the underground chamber, diagonally, until i was next to the doorway that went out of the room on the other side, which was about 50 feet away. it didn’t rain the next night, and i slept under the stars, and during the night i found a watch on the ground, under a bunch of pine needles and leaf litter, that was probably lost by a previous camper.

i don’t know what ultimately happened to fishtown, and i probably don’t want to know. i also have no idea what ever happened to the people i knew there, with the exception of robert, who has since become both a noted poet, calligrapher and artist, and dead. after corresponding with frog hospital, i learned that bex and red dan are still in and/or around the mount vernon/edison/sedro-woolley area. he doesn’t know what happened to singin’ dan, though… oh well. it’s a shame that it had to end in whatever way it ended – i seem to recall logging and/or bulldozers and people with huge quantities of money who wanted to “develop” the area in 1988 or thereabouts, which was when i was in the middle of the failed bus project… another person i knew from that place and time was mauldiwarp moongate-climber, the person from whom i bought the failed bus project, but that’s another story… 🙂

another enjoyable evening at chumleighland

101030 monster mash posterso ¾ of Snake Suspenderz went out to Cholmondleigh-land (his actual site is here, but he’s got some sort of infernal device on his site that keeps crashing my new version of firefox – konqueror does okay, however, which makes me wonder what is really the problem). all in all, a quite enjoyable evening, although the hippie ineptitude factor seemed to be working overtime: we were consistently running late, and it wasn’t until 10:00 or so that we managed to get the live show over and start on the films. i managed to be able to break moe away from her homework and brought her along as well, which made the evening all the more enjoyable. we were joined on stage by the inimitable master payne and, of course, the reverend himself, although he didn’t “ascend a stairway of machetes, barefoot” because somebody ripped off all his machetes, so instead he walked a pathway of broken glass, barefoot. since the last time i was there, he has actually finished the rail-pup (a self-propelled closed-circut railway) which was even more fun in the dark – you’d be barreling along blindly, cranking to beat the band, and the track would suddenly curve and you’d be riding on two wheels trying not to fall over… not like the last time i was there, when the track wasn’t finished yet, and if you didn’t watch where you were going, you’d plunge off the end of the track into the undergrowth…

chumleigh and i have been doing what we do, more or less, for 35 years or so: in 1978 i was playing with a dixieland band, and we were playing for the last official “Fat Tuesday” celebration in seattle. unbeknownst to us (at the time), there had been a major riot in pioneer square the night before, so there were mounted police in riot gear everywhere, and most everyone else was sticking to the edges of pioneer square, and acting very dodgy, and here we were, this small band of incredibly young musicians playing happy music in the square, very surreal. then this guy came up to us and introduced himself as reverend chumleigh, and wondered if we had a job or worked anywhere, and offered us a job playing at the alligator palace in la conner. i was the only person that had graduated from high school at the time, but i didn’t know where la conner was, and ended up in bellingham. i didn’t actually meet him again until much, much later, in 2008. in the mean time, i worked as a fish packer, a migrant farm worker, a typesetter, spent two years in a tech school, and then worked as a musical instrument repair technician, as a typesetter (again) and as a computer geek before i had a brain injury and realised that what i really wanted to be doing all along was music, whereas chumleigh was playing with the flying karamazov brothers, being involved with the beginnings of the oregon country fair, and building a reputation as one of the biggest names in vaudeville…

definitely makes me wonder what would have happened to me if i had known where la conner was, back in ’78…

ETA: in poking around, looking for links to the alligator palace, i found this article from Frog Hospital, about fishtown, a place that i visited in the early 1980s, and another article, about robert sund, whose cabin i stayed in the first time i visited fishtown… which, while it doesn’t have much about chumleigh, brings back a whole bunch of memories…

40 years of inspiration

everybody is jumping on the bandwagon, which is normally something that causes me to examine my preferance towards something a lot more closely, but in this case, i think it is justified: doonesbury’s 40th anniversary.Doonesburythis was one of the first appearances of a character that i haven’t seen in a loooong time, named Bernie. i don’t know what ever happened to him, and as far as i can tell, there isn’t any mention of him at Slate (which is what you get if you type in www dot doonesbury dot com), but Bernie has been an example of what i wanted my life to be like ever since i first encountered him.

mark slackmeyer and i had a rocky relationship at first. when he appeared on the scene, i was around 10 years old, and i was intent on not becoming one of those long-haired drug-taking hippie-radicals that were all the rage in the 70s… but then, a few years later, i went to college and my parents rented out my room, which meant that, when i came home between sessions, i had to sleep in the garage – mark slackmeyer spent at least one summer in his parents’ garage, for similar reasons. and as i got a couple of years into college, and discovered cannabis, LSD, and other “drugs” there came to be even more similarities between me and mark…My name is Mark, I smoke marijuana.i have all of the original doonsebury books around here somewhere… these two were scanned from the second one, called “The President Is A Lot Smarter Than You Think”.

creeping up on the past

the further back you go, the more dramatically my memory fades, but because of my injury, i have a significant gap in specific memories between about 1985 and 2003. because of the fact that i was not taking very many pictures during that period, i don’t remember much, but i recently came across a whole bunch of negatives and slides, the earliest of which were taken in the late 1970s, before i graduated from high school, and the most recent were taken when i lived in mt. vernon, which ended in about 1994.

nataraja music service 1983 this is Nataraja Music Service in 1983, right after i moved back to bellingham after graduating from the tech school.
ezra this is ezra, approximately 1989 or 1990, aged 6 or 7.
dome my dome… <sigh> i lived in this dome for a couple of years before i moved to mount vernon, around 1990. it was this which resulted in my being a dome fanatic to this day.
antique flutes i took a whole bunch of pictures of a bunch of antique flutes that i worked on between 1985 and 1995. i also took pictures of one of the bent flutes that i rescued.

i’ve put a whole bunch of pictures up, but i only linked to a few of ’em.

we’re making an emergency trip to portland tomorrow. whee…

from my sketchbook

the only way we can worship anything other than God is when we worship something that is a result of some occurance outside of our bodies. we are created in the image of God and we are given life by God and God dwells within us. when we worship something that is not within oujr own bodies, we worship the creation and not the creator. when we worship something within our bodies that is a direct result of occurances outside of our bodies, we worship our creation, but not God’s creation. our creation has been called the “ego” – that part of our personality that is a direct result of society. it is that part of our personality that wants us to think that we created ourselves. it is that which is spoken of in Isaiah 47.10 “for thou hast trusted in thy wickedness: Thou hast said none seeth me. Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee; and thou hast said in thine heart, I am, and none else beside me.”

the ego is that part of our mind that “thinks” and “knows” from learning, and is ignorant of reality outside of itsself. the God that lives within us is that part of our personality and thinks and knows from intuition or inspiration. its true source is cosmic learning, the accumulated experiences of the creator, which lives in all of us at the same time. this is what is spoken of in Philippians 2.5-6 “let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God.” the “mind” spoken of is the mind of the cosmic creator. Jesus, himself, didn’t have a personality of “Jesus,” because he was totally the Personality of the Divine Creator – so much so that he had the abilities of the Creator as well. John 5.30 “I receive not honor from men.” if we worship Jesus, we worship the body, and not the Mind of the Creator which lives within the body. this is the meaning of the crucifixion: Jesus’ body was just a vehicle for the mind of God, which lives forever, with or without a body. as Jesus said: “Behold, the Kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17.21)

weird…

when i lived in new york, probably 1971 or thereabouts, a whole bunch of my music classmates and i were transported to a theatre in downtown buffalo, new york, where we took part in an experimental music recording for some artist. i don’t remember anything about who the artist was, or what the recording was ultimately used for, but what happened is permanently etched on my mind: we were taken to the balcony, directly in front of the stage which had a whole bunch of stripped down pianos, and a bunch of what looked like large metal junk piled on it. there we were each given a small bucket full of tennis balls, and encouraged to be very quiet, and throw the tennis balls at the pianos and metal stuff. specifically, they told us that noise from the tennis balls was encouraged, but noise from our mouths was not. it was an occasion that was enjoyed thoroughly by everyone, and they collected the tennis balls and re-distributed them to us at least three times. then we all got on the school bus and went back to the school, which was in williamsville, a suburb of buffalo.

why do i bring this up, apart from the fact that it’s an interesting bit of trivia about my life?

i was poking around on wikipedia today, and i found this, which is in the first part of the article abut Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno. in the article, he was being encouraged in a project “Piano Tennis”… “after collecting pianos, they stripped and aligned them in a hall, striking them with tennis balls.” (wikipedia).

my family moved to the buffalo area in 1969. according to wikipedia, brian eno graduated from the Winchester School of Art in 1969, and he was in london in 1971 when he joined roxy music, so the probability that the artist that made the “experimental music recordings” that i took part in was not brian eno is pretty high, but i would be willing to bet that it was someone who saw eno’s performances at the winchester school, or someone that had heard about them…

anyway, i was so intrigued by the whole process that when the school i was attending had to “throw out” a piano that was “broken”, i persuaded the music teacher to let me have it, and i took it apart and wrote a piece of music for the “prepared” piano-harp in 1973, not long before we moved back to seattle.

beep

the dogs are really concerned that moe hasn’t come home yet, and i’ve had to close the blinds on the front window to keep zorah, the “watcher”, from barking at EVERY THING that she even THINKS might be someone driving up the driveway, which, of course, causes magick, the “alarm”, to bark uncontrollably, which causes stanley to fly off his perch which causes lucy to try to herd stanley… so it’s been a busy time, so far. i also have to give magick medication and food twice a day because of her dental work. so far i haven’t missed, but it’s been getting later and later each day, because i don’t remember until later and later.

a couple of times in the past two weeks i have had the idea that i had to go somewhere to do something, but by the time i had finished up what i was doing enough to actually go wherever it was, i had not only forgotten where i wanted to go, but what i wanted to do once i got there. today i went out to the post office, to have a picture laminated (which they didn’t do, and actually ruined the picture in the process), to goodwill to drop off two bags of clothing and to the mobile home guys to get the dimensions for the lumber i need to buy for the floor, but i didn’t do whatever it was that was important to do while i was out, because i couldn’t remember what it was… 😐 i’d start writing stuff down, but i can never tell what’s important enough to write down, and besides, writing stuff down requires finding a pen or pencil and a single place that i can write stuff like that, that won’t get lost or misplaced. i have 3 sketchbook/notebook/”moleskine”-like things that i used to write things in all the time, but now that i’m using the computer for most of my communication and scheduling, finding a place on my desk to put the notebook and write stuff down usually takes clearing off the desk a little bit, and by that time i’ve forgotten whatever it is that i was supposed to write down.

the dangly thing that i’ve had hanging from the rear-view mirror of every vehicle that has ever been in my possession since 1984 – when i thought i had bought a school bus from a woman named Mauldiwarp Moongate-Climber (which wasn’t entirely true in reality, however that is another, long, pointless story that i’ll save for another time) – finally broke. now all i have left of the school bus (which never actually worked reliably enough to travel more than 5 miles or so before it overheated) is a small handfull of glass and wooden beads, a chipped crystal drop from a long-ago chandelier, a fish made out of abalone shell, a small bell, and a broken piece of leather strap. that and the fact that i am currently listening to It’s My Life by The Plasmatics seem somehow related…

mump & stuff…

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) was born on Nov. 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. my ancestors from that time period were from the area around knob noster, missouri which is about 150 miles southwest of florida.

whoopie…

in spite of my desire to avoid the news in general, sometimes it slams you in the face and forces you to pay attention. this happened 20 minutes away from my house, but after a similar incident in seattle not too long ago, which put the whole state in an uproar, as though the two apparently unrelated events were cause and effect. my personal opinion is that there are very good reasons to get that angry with police officers in general, and they are not “completely innocent” regardless of how good they seem to be from time to time, but if nothing else these kinds of things are further indications that the world is, in fact, going to hell in a hand basket and there’s nothing that any of us, as individuals, can do about it except to sit back and watch in horror. of course, as a society we could do something about it, and there’s always that chance, but i don’t hold out much hope that we’re all going to be able to, literally, change our minds about so many things all at once. some of us could, there is no doubt, but getting most, if not all people to just change their minds like that is almost impossible. i’ve been told, by people i trust, that it’s going to get decidedly worse before it has a hope of getting any better at all, and that’s the primary reason that i simply don’t pay attention to the news most of the time. it’s not that i don’t care, it’s that i’d rather spend my time thinking about more positive things.

i have a rehearsal tonight, a rehearsal tomorrow, a rehearsal wednesday, a rehearsal thursday, the lenin lighting at the center of the universe (except that music will be provided by the Fremont Philharmonic, not the yellow hat band) on friday, the drawing jam at the gage academy on saturday and a free day sunday. then it’s the same thing again except that there’s also a free day a week from friday and an acupuncture appointment followed by two performances of alad’din a week from saturday and another one a week from sunday. my guess is that it’s going to be a couple of weeks of carefully conserving and spending spoons, otherwise there’s likely to be a meltdown before then.

demons

i have probably always been a computer geek, although for a long time i resisted being labeled as such because i was too interested in music, but my father has been a professional computer geek electrical engineer for as long as i have been around. one of the first “computers” i ever played with was actually a “dumb terminal” that had a big foam recepticle on the back of it to plug the phone reciever into so that it would do stuff more than just look and act like a selectric typewriter.

i saw my father at the Seattle Art Museum the other day. i was there for a performance of La Banda Gozona – where the consul general for mexico in seattle gave a long winded speech in spanish that i couldn’t understand – and i saw my father taking pictures. i was wearing my reading glasses, so i didn’t get a good look at him, and he disappeared before i could switch to my distance glasses, but i’m sure it was him. i find it very odd that, in spite of our differences, my parents haven’t spoken to me at all since my injury, and didn’t come visit me in the hospital when there was a chance that i would die… but i digress.

anyway, when i was first actively learning about computers, back in the late ’70s, i would frequently ask questions of my mentor, jim, and every now and then i would ask him a question which doesn’t really have an answer. questions like “why is it that when i tried X process, it failed, but when you tried exactly the same X process, it worked?” or “why is it that i send an email to X address and it never gets there, you send an email to X address and it takes two weeks to get there, and someone else sends an email to X address and it gets there immediately?” obviously there is some answer to questions like that, but often they are technical enough that even the experts might have difficulty explaining it, especially to someone (like me) who doesn’t understand.

when i would ask jim a question like that, he would get all quiet, look around mysteriously, and whisper “demons”…

he could have easily said “i don’t know” or “go look it up” or any one of a number of other perfectly rational responses, but that wouldn’t have made anywhere near the impression on me that blaming all my unknown computer problems on “demons” would have.

of course, i later learned that the electronic mechanisms that make things work inside computers are called “daemons”, but my impression is, even now, when i have wholeheartedly embraced the label of “computer geek”, that it still makes a fair amount of sense.

fast forward to a few days ago. i have just completed what i hope will be my last host provider switch for a LONG time, but i still have to figure out why the control panel on the new host works slightly differently than the (exact same) control panel on the old host: i set up a subdoman – przxqgl.hybridelephant.com – which, when you hit it with a browser, loads pages found at hybridelephant.com/przxqgl. it used to be that when you looked at the browser, you saw przxqgl.hybridelephant.com, but now, when you point your browser at przxqgl.hybridelephant.com it automatically redirects to hybridelephant.com/przxqgl and when i remove the redirect in the control panel, my browser gives me a “redirect error”.

so i wrote to tech support. he wrote back to me almost instantly, saying that he had gotten it to work, and that i didn’t need the redirect in the control panel.

… wait, what?

anyway, it works… and i keep thinking about jim and his “demons”…

break from break

so i’ve been emptying out the pile of boxes, sorting them out and putting them away in their new places – which is where the box of sketchbooks came from, and i’ve only succeeded in scanning 12 of them, so i’ve still got a lot more to go, but i came across this box of folders, and one of the folders had newspaper clippings. i’m not exactly sure when i stopped collecting newspaper clippings, but i haven’t even had a subscription to a newspaper in almost 20 years, so you can bet that there’s some stuff that has been buried and ignored for a loooooong time.

jugglers

including this one, which was taken in 1981, during my 2nd year of college. i remember being out juggling and this guy skulking around surreptitiously taking pictures of us, but he wouldn’t say who he was. then, when i was taking the ferry home (i lived on lummi island at the time) one of the ferry crew, who knew me as the guy who moved out to lummi island because if i had stayed in bellingham i probably would have been arrested, made some comment about how i couldn’t keep my picture out of the newspaper, and when i didn’t know what he was talking about, he showed me the front page of the paper, with my picture on it…

the really interesting part is that i only knew one of the other guys that well. barry was a jeweler who made The Sacred Object for me, a couple of years later. our juggling thing was sort of a random thing that more or less coalesced into the monday-wednesday-friday that we told the guy with the camera, but really, apart from juggling, we were all more or less strangers.

a sigh of nostalgia…

i backed up, reformatted and reinstalled my os9 mac, and i realised that i may have just shut down mac os9 for the last time ever this evening…

i’ve been a mac head ever since the term was coined, way back when. my first experience with a computer that wasn’t running some form of UNIX (yes indeed, i am that old) was with my father’s trash-80, the year i graduated from high school. i got pretty good at manoevering around the proto-DOS interface and programming in BASIC, but my first experience with the technology with which i actually made money for a significant portion of my life was with a Lisa – the proto-mac. the first computer job i had was typesetting for kwik-kopy printing in bellingham with a mac plus, a floppy disk drive and an 80 mb hard disk which i thought was an electronic black hole into which i could throw documents forever and not fill it up. that was back before the operating system used Hierarchical File System – HFS – it used MacFS instead, which meant that you could only have one window open at a time, and no files larger than 20mb. it was back when the mac os was free, and you could get the latest version by taking 4 floppy disks to your local mac dealer. i remember being one of the first geeks in my group to figure out that the mac was more than just a platform, and that it would be an ideal thing if you could get the mac os to run on anything. it still hasn’t happened officially, of course, but it’s closer now than it has ever been before. it wasn’t more than 5 years ago that i was working at essentially the same job, only with a much more modern computer.

so i installed os 9.2.1 on my aqua G3 desktop with a G4 upgrade, and shut it down, and i believe that it could be the last time i ever shut down a mac running os9.

the end of an era… 8)

bellingham &C.

bellingham yesterday.

the banda gozona gig was cancelled, but i went through mount vernon anyway, to check up on a couple of places i used to live. the house on thillberg road has been completely replaced with a new, bigger house. from there i drove up through sedro woolley and then across to chuckanut, and then north on chuckanut to bellingham. i was alarmed to see how much development has gone on on the outskirts of mount vernon. the places that were big open fields full of cows and swans when i lived there are now seemingly endless tracts of identical, cheap-looking houses, with more on the way, almost all the way out to mud lake (which is now, ironically enough, called “clear” lake). there has also been a fair amount of development in sedro woolley. also, the building south of sedro woolley that had the “Talkie Tooter” sign that i always used to wonder about has a bright, new, spiffy sign that says Rothenbuhler Engineering, which is a lot less confusing… all thanks to internet (which didn’t exist when i actually lived in mount vernon).

Kamalla & low rider

so anyway, i got to bellingham about 1:00 and smoked a bowl or two with ken and kamalla, and then we went up to the college where they were having a low rider show in red square. when i wanted to have an event that involved driving on red square, the people in charge said that red square was “too unstable” to drive on, but the low rider show was a whole bunch of cars parked all around the fountain. i guess when i wanted to do it there were “political” reasons for preventing me from doing so, and that was the excuse they used. the low rider show was a bunch of people from various low rider clubs from seattle, although i did see one or two cars that said they were from bellingham, and a bunch of “cholos” (kamalla’s word for them) – hispanic/mexican culture folks – but hardly any actual WWU students, which i thought was rather unusual. there were also about half the cops in bellingham, apparently because they were worried that there might be some racially motivated violence from the large quantity of black and hispanic (read “not from around here”) people. of course there wasn’t any violence, and there were a bunch of dancers from mexico that were performing to a CD of the same music that i had originally thought i was going to perform in mount vernon.

then i went out to drive around and “reconnect” with the town that i lived in for 15 years before moving to seattle, getting married and having a brain injury. i was really surprised to discover that i remembered where things were that didn’t really make any difference (like Current Industries, one of the places i used to work), and that i remembered all of the secret ways to get various different places. i ran into darol, who was out on a bike ride towards lummi island. i saw this guy from behind who had stopped to pick up some litter by the side of the road and when i drove past him, i realised that it was darol, so i just pulled over to the side of the road and we chatted for half an hour or so. after that i drove around in the lummi reservation, past the lummi island ferry, and back through marietta.

then i went back to “the land” and went to a jam at kenyth’s. he was very surprised to see me, because nobody had told him that i was going to be there, and even more surprised when i said that i had an amp that i wanted to plug my long flute into, until he realised that it was me, who has the capability to play the trombone very quietly, playing into the amp. apparently he was worried that it was going to be some blasting noise that he was going to have to play with. silly kenyth… 8)

i got home around midnight. even despite the fact that the gig in mount vernon was cancelled, overall i would say that my visit to bellingham was a lot of fun and i had great time, and i am going to have to find an excuse to go visit again a lot sooner than i did the last time.

this morning i got verbal confirmation from the SSDI folks in baltimore that my claim for disability has been approved… finally… after 4 denials, three years of waiting, and – HELLO! I HAVE A HOLE IN MY SKULL! there’s no word on how much they’re going to give me yet, or when it’s going to start, but it’s a small step in the right direction.