I watched a documentary a bit ago on the Baltimore Colts marching band, which I guess continued to exist after the Colts left town for Indianapolis in 1984. (It was part of ESPN’s “30 for 30” series. I find that even though I don’t like or understand all sports, I love pretty much any well-done documentary about sports, and all of these have been excellent.) The story itself was interesting, but what caught me was the 1984-ness of it, and the fact that I only peripherally remember football coming to Indiana. (I only remember it at all because my mom still bought my school clothes for me when I was in like the 8th grade, and she got me a Colts shirt, and this was the season when they went like 4-12, and dressing your kid in a Colts shirt and sending them to school was a virtual death sentence, probably two steps worse than dressing them in blackface and a Confederate uniform and dropping them off at an inner-city.) But some of the footage pulled my memories back to that time window for whatever reason, that era when I was in junior high and the EPCOT center was brand new and the future, and everyone thought “The Superbowl Shuffle” was cool as hell.

I guess I don’t think of the difference between network TV news now and then until I see old newsreel. I don’t know if it’s the timely look of the reporters - the hair, the clothes - or if it’s something about the production values. Like, when it was the late 80s/early 90s, I don’t remember thinking “this looks horrible”, but now when I go back to a TV show of that era and see everyone with the giant, giant glasses (like I had) and the sweaters over their shoulder and the generated graphics that look like they were done on a ColecoVision, I think “what the fuck were people thinking?”  I never turn on the TV news now and think “wow, this looks 100% different than it did last week”, but then I see a clip from 1995 and it looks like it could have been produced on 1947 equipment.

There are a couple of things I immediately think about from that period. One is the Fiero. I don’t know why, but I really wanted a Fiero when they came out in 1983. It was like the future of cars to me, and the way they marketed it, they made perfect sense: the slick design, the EnduraFlex body panels, the Italian-style mid-engine, only two seats. I didn’t care that you could only carry one bag of groceries in it, and I didn’t know anything about the engine fires or the fact that the whole drivetrain was cobbled together from the leftovers of a Chevette and a Citation, and performed accordingly. I just remember getting a glossy brochure when I saw one at the Concord Mall, and I memorized the thing, wishing that after the four years or so passed when I got my license, I’d somehow magically get the money to get such a cool and futuristic car.

The Fiero shared the philosophy of a sports-only car like the Corvette, the “fuck you, family man - it’s a two-seater”, and it had the styling of the Pontiac Trans Am, the Knight Rider car, but in a smaller cousin. And this was an era when people in Detroit were trying to put performance back in cars. Every coked-out Miami Vice wannabe person rich off of Reagan-era stock market rapings was going out and picking up a Ferrari. And the big three were coming off of a horrible decade where performance cars were all but killed by wimpy engines and EPA guidelines and DOT requirements. But Delorean was trying to win people over with his future (albeit underpowered) car; the Knight Rider third-gen F-body was on the road; and the high-end Vettes were getting into fuel injection and computer controls that would usher in a new era of performance. It was the start of a good time.

Another consumer mind bug that caught me back then was the Apple IIc. I had a love/hate relationship with the Apple; my schools always had them, and when I got a crack at them, they were always great, but they cost an insane amount of money, at least compared to the Commodore and Atari computers built up around the same 6502 CPU. But then Apple released this new machine, essentially a portable “all-in-one” version of the II line. And once again, I got a slick multi-page brochure booklet, maybe at the mall, maybe at Templin’s Music, which sold some computer stuff (although they mostly stocked Atari gear.) The brochure was part an implementation of Apple’s Snow White industrial design language in the form of a pamphlet, and part the genius marketing philosophy Apple was hacking out back then. And for whatever reason, I pored over this book, and tried to count out the number of lawns I’d need to mow to get one of these things to myself.

The genius of the IIc was that it heavily advertised itself as a “portable,” but it was, at best, a “luggable.” The computer did seal in everything that came with a IIe into a single eight-pound unit, maybe two or three times the size of a large laptop, but that didn’t include the power supply or monitor. Back then, they announced a small LCD screen that would sit on top of the computer, and had the same snow white design.  It didn’t solve the problem that you had to haul around a giant power brick and be within arm’s reach of 110 AC (or bring along a Honda generator).  Also, from everything I’ve heard, those LCD screens completely sucked.  But those shots of the IIc plus LCD looked absolutely mind-blowing to me, especially since I spent forever hauling around my Commodore and earlier Aquarius, jumper-cabling them onto my dad or grandma’s TV sets on the every-other weekend divorced child shuffle. In fact, the Commodore was infinitely more portable than the IIc, but the Apple looked like a cleaner solution. And it had a floppy disk built into its side, which was a first at the time.  (And yes, I know they made a luggable version of the C-64 with a built-in monitor and 1541 drive, but that was way out of my price range.  And a quick look at eBay shows that they still are.)

I never got a IIc.  I spent a lot of time on the IIe and IIgs at school, but never even saw a IIc during that timeframe.  Years later, when I worked at Wards, this girl Michelle had one, and once she talked me into coming over to tutor her on BASIC for some class she was taking at IUSB. Of course, they were using GW-BASIC, probably on the piece of shit Leading Edge computers I’d later have to maintain when I worked at IUSB, and she had the Apple IIc, which was just different enough BASIC-wise to throw off the whole damn thing. We sat in her bedroom, hacking away at it, and I don’t remember how I felt about the computer, although it wasn’t a slam dunk like the brochure made me think.  (And there’s part of me that thought this tutoring session was about more than just computer tutoring, but I was so stupid about the opposite sex back then, even if she chained me to a wall and started raping me, I’d still be like, “wait a second, we could use a GOSUB here and save five lines of code.”)

I never got a Fiero, either. When I lived in New York, I would occasionally see one on eBay and wonder if I should jump on it. The interiors look really dated now, the boxy gauge panel, the 85 MPH speedo. Most people bought these things either to become donors for some kind of kit car (Ferrari, Lambo, etc) or to drop a V-8 into and completely fuck up the balance of the thing. I still wonder about doing a full restoration on one, keeping the sleek exterior body but maybe transplanting in some 21st century powerplant and a real suspension system, plus a cool digital dash and some modern sound system bits.  And then I start thinking about buying a 1970 Z28 and a 2011 Camaro, and taking the body of the ‘70 and putting it on the fuel-injected, 4-wheel ABS, all-modern electronics chassis of the 2011.  And then I remember that I drive about 40 miles a month now, and even vacuuming the floor mats of my current car is way beyond my patience level, let alone some extreme welding project involving $30,000 of shit I’d have to scrounge off the internet or at junk yards across the country.

And now I need to close the damn eBay window, and stop looking for a cheap SX-64, or even worse, a cheap PSOne monitor and C-64 innards in order to roll my own C-64 laptop.  It’s better for me to fire up x64 in an emulator window and get bored of it after ten minutes.  Or even better, I could shut off all of this and actually WRITE.

I don’t know how I remembered it, and managed to do the time calculation correctly, but last week, about five minutes before it happened, I suddenly realized it was the day of the last Discovery Space Shuttle launch.  And my Roku box now has the NASA channel (which will be essentially useless after this mission, except to maybe watch some scientist drone through a powerpoint on why some speck of dust on a telescope’s long shot is relevant.)  So I fired that up, and watched the stack sit on the pad down in Florida, and waited for the countdown, and thought about that stupid Rush song, but also thought about how I watched the very first Shuttle mission as a kid, and now I’d be watching one of the very last ones.

It’s pretty cliche to talk about how we’d all have jetpacks by now or be able to go out to LaGuardia and catch an American Airlines flight to Mars three times a day in 2011.  I spent a lot of time in those pre-Shuttle years as a nerdy kid reading every single book I could find about the Apollo and Skylab.  And it always disappointed me that the era right before I was born had tons of launches, capsules that orbited the planet and launched to the Moon and back.  And in my childhood, we had a space station made out of leftover junk from moon missions that only got any name recognition whatsoever when it finally fell out of the sky.  Meanwhile, the evil Soviet empire was sending cosmonauts up there constantly, living for years in those Soyuz orbiters, eating tubes of borscht in zero G and laughing their asses off at us Yankee bastards.

The Shuttle was a big deal for me as a kid.  I spent all of my time playing with a Millennium Falcon, thinking that if the Space Shuttle got off the ground in ‘81, by the time I got my driver’s license in ‘87, they’d have a ton of those things in the air like Southwest currently has crappy Boeings criss-crossing amongst second-tier airports, and by the time I finished college and entered the much-distant 21st century, it would be no problemo jumping on a high-speed train to O’Hare spaceport and getting on a commercial flight to the moon for a long weekend.  So I was riveted to those early launches, the long delays and the shaky cameras from a distance.  I guess they flew the tail end of the Apollo missions when I was a baby, and Skylab and that joint Apollo/Soviet flight went up in the early 70s, but the grade school didn’t drag out the giant wood-encased TV on a cart from the AV room for those ones.  This was live, and real, and we all stared at the video footage of this tiny airplane-looking thing shoot an insane amount of white smoke and orange flame as it crept upward from the Florida swamp and into orbit.

We watched a couple of those launches back in the 4th or 5th grade, and then it seemed like a Shuttle was going up every other month.  It was really 24 missions between the start and the loss of the Challenger, but they had four Shuttles going at once, and it pretty much fell out of the news unless you dug for it.  This was long before the days when you could fire up google and point your browser to all sorts of time-wasting distractions detailing every small aspect of manned space flight; typically, the Elkhart Truth would run a paragraph or two per launch, buried somewhere after the local bowling scores.  To get any real news, I had to go to Osco Drugs and hunt down a copy of Omni magazine, which typically included a ton of articles on mind-melding and peyote experiments and whatever the hell else they used to write back then.

I didn’t think much about the Shuttle for a while, but when I was a sophomore in college and bored out of my mind at IUSB, I discovered usenet news, and spent a lot of time reading the sci.space newsgroup.  The one thing I loved about it was this guy Henry Spencer at the U of Toronto who posted endless amounts of news about the space program.  I probably have a bunch of floppy disks somewhere in storage - the 5 1/4 type of floppy disk - that contain endless numbers of those usenet posts.  I remember poring over those Shuttle news reports, that showed details of the schedules, what was sitting at what pad, what was being assembled, and so on.  And I remember being excited as hell when a nameless OV-105 started appearing on the list, as parts and pieces of the future Endeavour arrived at Rockwell.

The Shuttles kept flying, and after those evil Soviets became our pals, we started swapping Cosmonauts and Astronauts, and Americans hung out on the Mir, and eventually they found a way to hang a Shuttle off the side of that firetrap and give the Russians some hamburgers and Pepsi to go with their caviar, porn collection, and frayed combustible wiring harnesses.  But around that time, I realized how the whole space exploration thing was under attack from both sides of the aisle, and how we’d never dump the money in it to get any man to Mars, let alone this man.  The left-wingers saw that NASA budget as a bottomless money pit that went to defense contractors; the right-wingers didn’t like the idea of non-Jesus-related science research or the flight of any space hardware we couldn’t use to kill brown people from orbit.

So yeah, you boomers got golf on the moon, while us GenXers got a nearsighted space telescope, a couple of exploding Shuttles, and too many Mars landers and orbiters that blew up or crashed or otherwise went MIA.  But not only that, but the children of the 60s had this whole legacy put forth that had to do with a space race.  They had a President that pulled out of Marilyn Monroe long enough to say, “God damn it, we’re going to put a man on the moon even if it kills us”, and even after the CIA/Mafia/freemasons/Scientologists/aliens blew his head off, everyone still followed the order and put a damn man on the moon.  Nowadays, if the President took a 31-minute lunch break, he’d come back to find some bastards dismantling and defunding every single thing he tried to do.

And honestly, I know almost nobody is interested in drinking Tang and crapping in some adult diapers 86,000 miles from home in zero-G.  But space exploration is more like a side effect of a well-fed science research and education program.  When we had an arms race and a space race, we also had an education race to produce scientists and engineers to build weapons and technology to send men into orbit.  Education means a higher quality of life.  Take a look at a place like Liberia where there’s absolutely no education and kids live in shitholes (LITERALLY shitholes - they use the beaches as toilets), snort heroin, eat human flesh, and fight in wars at the age of twelve.  Then look at a country like Sweden or Finland, which has excellent education and an overwhelmingly positive quality of life.  Here in the USA, we now gravitate between not giving a shit and wanting to completely remove all education, especially science education.  And a country with more education not only has a bigger talent pool for jobs more technically advanced than ditch digging, but it means companies who want to attract top talent are going to have an easier time when said employees can send their kids to a decent school.  And people with kids tend to want to buy houses in good school districts, which means the prices of those houses goes up, and property taxes are based on home sale price.  That’s why you can buy a house for $18,000 in my old home town of Elkhart, Indiana.

So now I’m sad as I watch blurry streaming video of the Discovery tethered to the ISS, knowing it’s pretty much the end of the line for this stuff, at least in my lifetime.  Bleah.

Forget Libya.  Forget work.  And forget anything you normally ignore, like family, friends, or the federal agents who have been sitting outside your house in an unmarked Crown Vic for two weeks. It’s time for all of us hardcore baseball fans to become obnoxious assholes and statistics wonks and get ready for The Draft.  Pitchers and catchers have reported to spring training; every lard-assed 5’-11, 330-pound designated hitter has declared that they lost between 30 and 50 pounds this off-season, which drops their body mass index from morbidly obese to obese.  It will only be a matter of time before you are eating $8 hot dogs and drinking $10 beers (unless you are a Phillies fan, in which case you will be vomiting $8 hot dogs and $10 beers onto the kid sitting in front of you.)

You have only matter of weeks to spend untold amounts on every Bill James-related annual book of figures and memorize a decade or more of two dozen statistics for a thousand players (minus the 40-man roster for the Pirates, because seriously, you aren’t going to pick a single one of those fuckers, especially when they’re playing for Clint “every plate appearance is a bunt opportunity” Hurdle.)  Time to try to remember how to calculate the career park-adjusted average cup adjustments per plate appearance (CPAACAP) and why it’s important when picking your second-string utility players.  And don’t forget you’ll need to go to all of the baseball reference sites to argue if MLB rule 7.08 (a) (1) applies if a batter reaches first base and then gets abducted by aliens, which would obviously skew a century of statistics on baserunning.

To some of us, the fantasy baseball draft is more important than Jesus, as it should be.  Because if you’re right about Jesus and the second coming and you’re one of the 16,000 who goes to heaven, it doesn’t mean shit if you aren’t able to rub it in the faces of your friends who get left behind.  Most of the appeal of fantasy baseball, aside from the ability to burn man-years of work at your desk while appearing to actually do work, is its power to humiliate and denigrate your peers when you win a bullshit statistical category like steals or saves by stringing together a bunch of has-been bench players who barely made the team in Kansas City, while your friend who got A-Rod in the first round of the draft gets to mope through the first two months of the season while he is benched for ‘fatigue’.  This is why it’s important to get the edge, to figure out ways to dominate the competition, and how to ridicule your friends by taunting them with pictures of multimillion dollar a-list players with genitals crudely sketched near their mouths and/or anuses in Microsoft Paint.

I’ll cut to the chase.  Here are a few things to keep in mind as you get ready for the draft.

1. It’s important to remember that while MLB players are scrutinized with constant drug tests that can fire up a false positive if a fan in a five dollar bleacher seat happened to take a cold medication last winter, it’s completely legal for fantasy baseball managers to imbibe in any sort of legal or illegal theraputic or recreational drugs.  There are a whole new breed of powerful nootropic pharmaceuticals available over the internet, although garden-variety street hallucinogenics can do wonders for your memory retention.
2. If your league’s software offers an auto-draft option that populates your roster based on the picks of every other person using the software, do not use it.  Auto-draft is for pussies and cowards.  You’re also basing your picks on what the majority picks, which is a lot like saying “I’m totally fine with George W. Bush serving another five terms, as long as a majority of mouth-breathers and idiots can agree on it, too.”
3. Use all of the time allotted for your picks.  For example, if your software allows you two and a half minutes to pick, even if you have the name of a player right in front of you and it only takes a single mouse click to add them, wait until 2
   has elapsed on the clock.  This makes it much more of a urine retention showdown for the other players, especially if you’re drinking.  (I’m assuming you’re planning on either wearing a catheter or adult incontinence undergarment, which is what all good pro gamblers use when trying to wait out lesser-bladdered players at a casino table.)
4. Most draft strategies have to do with filling your hitting positions first, then moving on to pitching.  Also, most so-called experts in the field will advise against picking closing pitchers until the end of the draft.  This means it’s typically very easy to fill all of your pitching spots with all of the best closers in the sport at the very start of the draft.  This kind of hoarding won’t help you in offense, but it means nobody else will get a closer, and you’ll be able to deal.
5. Just like it’s possible for certain AL East teams to buy World Series wins, it’s completely possible for you to buy a fantasy baseball victory.  I was in a league that strictly prohibited monetary bribes, but found a loophole that enabled me to have both Cy Young winning pitchers and an all-Silver Slugger offense, simply by giving away 23 iPads during the course of the season.
6. If you are in a league in which you don’t know the other players in real life and your main tactic is violence and intimidation, make sure your user ID is not linked in any way to your physical mailing address.  There’s nothing worse than threatening every other owner and then waking up to flaming bags of shit on your doorstep for the next three months.
7. I publish a weekly newsletter for fantasy players that grades and orders each player’s propensity for going apeshit insane and losing games due to drug use, parole violations, Guitar Hero-related injuries, or DUIs.  It’s a must-have for planning ahead during the season.  Contact me for more details.
8. For internet-based drafts, it’s absolutely imperative to have a backup internet connection and a UPS or backup generator, in case of any loss of connectivity.  I typically have a second OC-768 Optical Carrier connection installed the week before a draft to ensure I have a constant 39,813.12 Mbit/s connection to all of the statistics, video, and pornography I might need during a draft.
9. Be prepared to ditch any planned strategy at a moment’s notice and blindly grab every player based on maybe hearing their name once on SportsCenter.  Even the best planned wars involve a complete breakdown in command.

Hopefully, these tips will help you form an iron-clad strategy for survival.  Let me know of any other strategies you may have developed, and I’ll see you on opening day.

I went to LA this weekend.  It was a quick mission - we flew out Saturday afternoon, flew back Sunday night.  Just long enough to get a taste, and to get the cats pissed off that we abandoned them (although we had someone feed them; it’s entirely a psychological game to show us who’s boss.)

So we stayed in Santa Monica, which is probably one of my favorite parts of LA.  I know a lot of people hate LA, especially New York people that feel that paying far too much for the privilege of bedbugs and living in garbage somehow defines character.  New York has its points, and I’m glad I did my time there.  But I really do love LA, and just seeing the people and walking around in the sunshine and looking at that crazy mix of old neon signs faded by the barrage of UV rays mixed with the modern glass and steel architecture.

We were at a hotel right off of the beach, and yesterday morning, I got to take a nice walk and snap some pictures and see a bunch of stuff I recognized mostly from playing Grand Theft Auto.  It’s always weird to have that geographical reference in your head, where you know “hey, you can walk under this pier here, because sometimes I hide under there with a shotgun and kill hookers, and the cops take forever to get here.”

I took this picture of Hot Dog on a Stick, which for some reason showed up in the two posts previous to the trip, so there’s some weird synchronicity/conspiracy thing going on.  This is the original location, on Muscle Beach, and it’s missing the “on a” on its sign, but the cashier is wearing that weird rainbow uniform and fez hat.  I didn’t stop and get one, since I had just finished a giant breakfast at the hotel, but maybe I should have.  I try to limit my consumption of hot dogs to when I’m at baseball games, and corn dogs, from a nutrition point of view, are absolutely evil.  But sometimes, you have to.

HDoaS is primarily a west coast phenomenon, although there are some locations scattered across the country in malls.  I first remember seeing them in a Beavis and Butthead video, where some emo punk band was wearing the rainbow uniforms.  Years later, I remember seeing one at the Lloyd Center mall in Portland, which is one of those weird mid-century malls built in the early 60s when indoor malls were a new thing, and this was built to be the biggest mall in the country.  I think Simon owned it when I was going there (mid-90s) and I always liked it because I was really into shopping malls at the time and it reminded me of all of the Simon malls of the midwest.  (I never liked to shop, never bought clothes, and the record and book stores in malls have always sucked, so I’m not sure why I was so damn fascinated with malls at this period in my life, but I was.)

Later, when I lived in New York, I found it damn near impossible to find a good corn dog, frozen or fresh.  I think since then, it’s become easier, but I spent many an hour scouring the poor excuses for grocery stores in Queens, trying to find one that had any corn dogs in their freezer case.  And a frozen corn dog is always crap, because you microwave them and they split and the casing gets all moist and soggy, or you bake them, which takes forever, especially if you have a piece of shit oven that doesn’t work because you’re renting your apartment from the mafia and they don’t even keep the hot water on half the time, let alone service the appliances.  So when I was coming out to Vegas two or three times a year, I was happy as hell when a Hot Dog on a Stick opened at the Fashion Mall and I could go to their food court and eat them until I got sick and swear off cased meat products entirely, until my next visit of course.

But LA, man I missed LA.  I went back two years ago for a trade show, but spent all of my time answering stupid questions under fluorescent lights, and didn’t get to wander around.  This time, we had a car, and drove all over the place, up PCH and around the twists of Sunset and through Bel Air and the giant gated communities and houses where billionaires still had lawn jockeys, and into the strip where we passed the Comedy Store and the Rainbow and the House of Blues and the Whisky and all of those places memorialized by big hair bands of the 80s.  And we drove through our old neighborhood in Playa Del Rey, and through the Bellona Wetlands, and past my old Ralph’s and my old Pavillions and my old Fatburger and my old gas station and all of this stuff that made me miss 2008 and the summer I lived there.

So now I am back to 52 and rainy, and wish I had two million dollars to buy a nice beach house and watch the joggers and eternally fit rollerblade past, and peck at writing all day.  But it’s Monday and time to work, and go find the 2011 baseball schedule and figure out when I can catch the Rockies down at Chavez Ravine, although they are something like 2 and 22 at Dodger Stadium in the last couple of seasons.  But their horrible road record against LA is outweighed by Dodger Dogs and Vin Scully and a chance to spend another weekend down there, so it’s on.

Something like 87 years ago, my friend Ray Miller had a zine.  A zine is like a tumblr account, except it’s on dead trees, and instead of pictures you take of yourself with a cell phone camera, it has words on it.  His zine was called Metal Curse, and it was essentially a way to get to meet bands and get free crap from record labels before it got into stores.  And in Indiana, it was a way to get things that never showed up in stores, because the absolute best music store within 50 miles of my house was a 45-minute drive away, and was only marginally better than buying CDs at Wal-Mart.  Also, at this point in time, most of my peers were extolling the virtues of an artist that largely advised us to stop and observe an occasion known as “hammertime,” and the only way you could talk to anyone interested in any music not designed in a government laboratory for sale at malls was to write a letter to some dude in Sweden or Japan, and the only way to get in touch with these people was to read a poorly-photocopied publication ordered through the mail.

In my second year of college, I went to IUSB, a commuter college that was mostly parking lot, and I hung out with Ray a lot, mostly driving around, skipping classes, and listening to thrash metal bands like Helloween and Napalm Death.  He did three issues of his zine and was starting to pick up steam with it, getting more self-produced demo tapes in the mail to review.  Back then, zines had reviews of albums or demo tapes, interviews with bands, and news updates about bands, usually a giant bulleted list of who was releasing what or where they were touring or who broke up or whatever.  But there wasn’t much else as far as content.  You couldn’t really have cool pictures, because they didn’t photocopy well, and every picture turned out looking like a black and white thermal map of Uganda taken from a plane window. Outside of NASA, digital photography didn’t exist, and even if you had a decent camera, good luck getting it into a show.  Most of the zines out there were also not well-crafted literary journals honed by intellectuals either, and sometimes the writing was funny, but 90% of the interviews out there asked the same exact ten questions.  Zines weren’t known for their in-depth editorial content.

I wasn’t a writer back then.  I helped teach a writing class in the English department, oddly enough.  But that mostly involved telling people they had to press Shift-F7 to print, and walking distressed students through the procedure involved when underlining words in Norton Textra, this horrible WordPerfect clone we used.  I studied computer science, and spent all of my free time trying to learn C and write games and whatever you did to waste time before the web was invented.  (Tetris, I think.  And downloading crap from anonymous FTP sites.)  I took one writing class, and the teaching assistant either liked my stories a lot or wanted to sleep with me; looking back at what I wrote then, it must not have been the stories, but you should have seen the glasses I used to wear back then.  But I didn’t consider myself a writer, and certainly didn’t do it in my spare time for fun.

At some point, I suggested to Ray that I should write an advice column for his zine.  I don’t know if I asked him to do it, or if I just wrote it first, but I had this idea of a fake Dear Abby sort of thing.  I think I subconsciously ripped off this idea from a free newspaper I used to read in Bloomington.  Or maybe it was because one of my parents gave me a copy of Dear Abby’s Guide to Sex for Teenagers, and I thought this was the funniest damn thing I’d ever read, and wanted to write something just as humorous.  One night I fired up that cyan-on-blue screen of WordPerfect 5.1, and cracked out a handful of fictional questions mailed in from readers.  I don’t know what inspired me to come up with the name, especially because now it takes me years to name anything, but I called the column “Dear Death.”  It probably had to do with listening to that Metallica song “The Four Horsemen” 58,000 times a week.

I gave Ray a laserprinted copy of the column, and he put it in issue #4.  At the time, he used this GEOS program instead of Windows, and did the whole zine in its word processor, then printed it out on his dot matrix printer, so that one page looked an order of magnitude better, and he rushed out and bought his first laser printer.   If you were born before 1990 and have no idea what a dot matrix printer is, I wouldn’t even recommend going to a museum and looking at one, they are such huge pieces of shit.  I spent most of my tenure as an IUSB computer consultant un-fucking these Epsons where the tractor feed wheels would get jammed, and the ribbons would gum up or get unspooled, and some deranged bored housewife type would keep jamming it worse and worse until it involved stripping the whole thing into tiny pieces and realigning every little piece.

Anyway, #4 turned out great.  I didn’t do a column for #5, but then wrote one for the next seven issues.  Luckily, those seven issues took like a decade to put out, so I had plenty of time to come up with new ideas.  I did five issues of my own zine during the timeframe of Metal Curse #6 and #7 (although mine was way shorter and had less stuff in it) and some time after #7, I started calling myself a writer and chipping away at my first book. But these columns pretty much mark the start of my writing career.

Metal Curse had 13 issues as a print zine.  Ray recently resurrected it as an online site, and has started with a lot of new reviews, plus he’s slowly bringing online the back archive of old stuff.  And part of that is the Dear Death columns, which means you can go read all of them online.  The writing is much different than what I do now, and I don’t really listen to that much death metal anymore, so it’s both embarrassing and interesting to look back at this stuff. Anyway, you can check out my columns at http://metalcurse.com/index.php/dear_death.