Tag: nostalgia

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85-0813

Yesterday, I drove out to Atwater to the Castle air museum. I’d been there almost ten years ago, but wanted to go back to see a recent acquisition sitting in their restoration hanger: an F-117A stealth fighter.

I know, the F-117 isn’t really a stealth “fighter” – it’s really more of an attack aircraft. And the ones going out to museums aren’t really stealth anymore. The Air Force is demilling the planes as they usually do when they go to museums, but on the F-117 it involves tearing off the radar absorbent skin, plus any other still-classified bits. But still, I’d never seen one in person, and I had the day off, so I decided to take a two-hour drive out to see it. And of course the whole thing became an exercise in deep thought and wondering what the hell I am doing with my life. Bear with me here.

* * *

I have an odd relationship with military aircraft. I was born on a SAC base similar to the former Castle AFB, where B-52s loaded with nuclear weapons waited for the end of the world to start so they could fly over the north pole and make their contribution. But my dad finished with the service when I was a baby, and I have no recollection of living on base. He also seldom talked about his service working on bombers when I was a kid. This isn’t how these planes got loaded into my brain.

When I was in junior high, I started learning more about planes from my friend Derik. I’d built model railroads for a while, and shifted to planes. I became completely obsessed with 1/48-scale plastic kits of various military aircraft, from WW2 fighters to modern jets. All of my lawn mowing money went to the Kay-Bee toys in the Concord Mall, where I bought as many Testor’s paints and Revell planes as I could get my hands on. I probably was stuck in model building mode far too late into my teens. I think at the age when I probably should have been interested in sports and girls, I was burning my hours on models and computers. Getting an actual car and having to move to 1:1 sanding and painting on my bondo-laden Camaro pretty much broke me out of it, though.

I have very fond memories of spending hours and hours in my basement sitting at a card table, cutting pieces from plastic sprue, listening to Rush albums on repeat, and inhaling fumes from glue and paint. There was something meditative about it, I now realize. Mindfulness is now a billion-dollar industry, filled with apps and motivational speakers and self-help books and seminars promising to get us back to the place I was at in 1985 with an F-15 kit sitting on the table. Everyone’s knitting and doing puzzles and painting, and every doctor I go to tells me I need to do something to calm the hell down. So I think about that time a lot. But I also feel a certain shame in building model planes, because I don’t want to be a fifty-something dude obsessed with what’s the best Tamiya scale aircraft, especially when the military is patrolling our domestic streets. Models also take up space I don’t have, and I never have time to do anything anymore. But all of this is still bouncing around the back of my head, making me think too much.

* * *

The drive to Atwater took about two hours. It’s funny because once I start to approach Modesto, the scenery reminds me a bit of Indiana. It goes from densely-populated city to rolling suburbs to almost nothing but farms. Driving on the two-lane California-132 through farm fields and long rows of crops looks so much like the grid of roads in unincorporated Elkhart County, an unnamed road every mile separating the farms. The one difference is it’s not corn and soybean here; it’s almonds, olives, or grapes. But it still feels like it’s the late Eighties and I’m cruising around for no reason, or maybe driving down to Bloomington. I have a 1989 playlist on my phone, which is an absolutely embarrassing list of tunes I would have been listening to at that point in time. I put that on, and even though it was almost 40 years later and I was in car with rear-view mirrors that have more computing power than most companies had back then, it still felt like I was back there.

* * *

Castle has a nice collection of planes. Some of them are pretty faded and worn by the winds and sun of the central valley. They’re trying to get the money together to build a large indoor facility for some of their collection, but until that happens, many of the exhibits are pretty beaten down by the elements. One of my favorite planes ever is the SR-71, the black stealth-looking super-fast spy plane that looks more UFO than jet. They have one at the front gate, and it’s restored and in decent shape, but it does collect dirt and mud from the storms and general agricultural debris that floats around the central valley. The other thing I wanted to get a shot of was the B-52D they have there, but it’s currently being repainted. The plane was pretty faded out when I saw it last in 2016. Right now, it’s sanded and a mix of primer, bare metal, and little bits of stray paint, and is getting redone in stages. Glad they’re getting it done again, but no photo ops yesterday.

It was oppressively hot yesterday, in the 90s but the sun made it seem even worse. I did a quick loop and took some pictures, but there wasn’t much time to loiter. I asked the people in the gift shop about the restoration facility that contained the F-117, and they gave me directions; it was in a hanger in another part of the former base.

Castle got BRACed in 95, but you can still see the remnants of the old SAC base: a giant parade ground in the middle; streets named after bombers in one direction, plane parts in the other. Stratofortress Drive has a big county human services building on it; Turbine Drive has remediated concrete pads on either side of it. Early 80s base housing that looks incredibly like early 80s base housing now contains a Korean Airlines pilot school. One runway remains, with a Christmas tree apron from when SAC had nuke B-52s on call hanging off one end. But half of the jetways are now set up for Google to test Waymo cars, this track with a maze of little loops on it, all marked with various lines the robot cars can read, I guess.

I drove to the restoration hanger, a giant WW2-looking building with room for maybe four big planes inside. It’s not open like the museum, but it’s vaguely open to the public. I talked to a guy who seemed a bit guarded about me visiting to take pictures, but we chatted for about an hour about the situation with the F-117, and how the restoration is going.

First impression: the F-117 is much bigger than I expected. I thought it was a little sportscar thing like an F-16, but it was parked next to a giant flying brick of a Navy F-4 and it felt almost comparable. It sits very high up on the gear, which are borrowed from the A-10. The museum’s plane had all of the skin stripped, the tails removed but sitting next to it, one of the engines on a cart. The leading edges and engine inlets were all gone, with the start of reconstructed pieces and cleco temporary fasteners temporarily holding them in place.

The plane looked both futuristic and but also very dated. The outside lines were all sharp and the design looked very Star Wars, but one look in a landing gear door or open panel and I could see this was straight-up 70s tech, wiring and hydraulics that were all lifted from old F-16s or F-18s. The really touchy stuff like the IR targeting gear were all missing. They had the actual canopy, which has some weird gold layer in the glass to bounce radar waves, and they got a weapons bay trapeze, which nobody else has. Their cockpit is largely intact, at least from the outside. But the secret guts inside were all missing.

This particular plane had done two missions in Just Cause and then 35 in Desert Storm. They had a sign set up by one of the two weapons bays with various pictures and autographs of pilots. 85-0813 was nicknamed “The Toxic Avenger” and had an art plaque for that. It obviously wasn’t panted on the outside of the stealth plane, on the absorbent skin. I looked inside a weapons bay and could stand on the ground upright without hitting my head. The inside looked like the guts of a late-seventies F-15A, with conventional wires and hydraulic lines mounted to the dull gray riveted skin inside. The bays also seemed shockingly small when I was up close. They typically carried only two bombs and no advanced pods or radars like modern planes. Apples to oranges, but that little sports car F-16 I mentioned could easily haul three times as much weaponry plus a gun and loads of advanced avionics and targeting systems. Sure, maybe no stealth, but it was strange to actually see the size comparison.

* * *

Another odd callback to my model airplane days. Back when the stealth fighter was a known thing but nobody had seen it yet, Testor’s came out with a model kit of it, and it was in a Tom Clancy book and a popular video game. There was this rumor that the stealth fighter was called the F-19, because McDonnell Douglas came out with the F-18, and then Northrop built the prototype F-20, so obviously F-19 was skipped for the secret plane. It wasn’t, and the Testor’s kit was just a made-up plane that looked little like the actual F-117, with smooth manta-ray wings like a sci-fi spaceship. Of course I bought one and built it, and that was the stealth fighter in my mind. When the plane was first unveiled four or five years later, I was shocked that it was the same plane, or that it even could fly. It was so surreal to come back to this 40 years later and actually touch one of them, albeit with the matte black skin missing.

* * *

On the drive home, I thought about this visit a lot, and about my obsession with this stuff. It pains me to write about this, because I’m stuck between two things here, and don’t belong to either. I mean, I spend a lot of time wandering around closed military bases for some reason, and a part of me thinks about how we spent trillions of dollars in the last 80 years, and for what? To tear it all down and leave behind superfund sites in the middle of nowhere? There’s the argument about deterrence, or projection of power, or “bringing freedom” to places like Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, which are all currently not very free.

I can’t really talk to my leftist friends about any of this. To them, these are all machines that were made to kill. America has spent 25 trillion dollars since the end of World War 2, building up a massive nuclear force that was later dismantled; invading countries that were later abandoned; stockpiling weapons for a Soviet invasion that never happened. It’s hard for me to argue against that, but it’s even harder for me to fetishize these machines when I’m talking to these people.

On the other hand, I feel like I can’t talk about that side of things with right-leaning folks, because it feels like betrayal. I feel like, according to them, I’m supposed to have unwavering loyalty to the military and to the government. And I generally feel a respect for those who served. But I don’t fully support what we’ve done or what we’re doing, especially with what’s going on now.

And I think the bigger thing I can’t talk about is that this money wasn’t wasted per se. The military is a great social experiment in a way the right won’t freely admit. It’s an experiment in socialized medical care, desegregation, a shared housing system, a government system that feeds, clothes, and educates six or seven million people. Although I’m sure the top end of companies like Raytheon or Lockheed get the bulk of the trillion dollars a year spent on building arms, but some amount of it eventually trickles down to the factory workers assembling the stuff. None of this justifies overthrowing countries or killing people. But it shows that there is the capability to spend massive amounts of taxpayer money on actual things to provide for people.

Anyway, all of this makes me think about hobbies and what I do and what I waste my time on. And I think there needs to be some change at some point. But I also realize how burned in this stuff is, and how I can’t wake up one day and say, “OK I like trains now.” Not sure what to do about that.

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The death of the prince of darkness

So, Ozzy Osbourne died on Tuesday. I’ve been thinking about this all week, because these celebrity deaths are increasingly odd to me as they become more frequent. And Ozzy’s a weird one, because of his intersection with culture and life in general.

I was too young to be into Black Sabbath as a kid. Their first two albums were released before I was born, and I think I was in the first grade when Ozzy’s first tenure with the band ended. I didn’t have an older brother who could have turned me onto them, and our town didn’t have an AOR radio station, so I had zero exposure to even the basics like “Iron Man” or “Paranoid.” As his solo career unfolded, I also had no exposure to his music. When Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman hit, my local Top 10 station (the only non-country/non-religious FM station in the area) was probably pumping out Men at Work or Phil Collins.

My first memory of Ozzy was during CCD classes at my Catholic church, where I was relegated during Sunday mornings to prepare for first communion. One of the kids in my class was explaining Ozzy to us: the long hair, tattoos, running around without a shirt and maybe some horror movie makeup on. He bit the head off a bat, or maybe a dove. I was fascinated by this, even though I didn’t know a note of his work. It was similar to how I was amazed by the band Kiss, not because I liked the music, but because of the costumes, the makeup, the pageantry of the whole thing. It was more like a cartoon than music, and at the age of nine or ten, that was awesome. I remember sitting in class, sketching out pictures of Ozzy biting the heads off of birds, done entirely from this other kid’s description, without having actually seen any album covers or live footage.

We got MTV a bit after that, and Ozzy entered the general zeitgeist, although I don’t exactly remember any of his music or videos. He played at the big spectacle of the Us Festival, and maybe his antics were covered by Kurt Loder in news segments. I can’t remember them actually playing any Ozzy or Black Sabbath videos – they were probably too busy with Michael Jackson and John Cougar Mellencamp – but it seemed like Ozzy was ever-present anyway.

I don’t remember actually listening to a Sabbath or Ozzy album until I started hanging out with Jim Manges in maybe 1986 or 1987. His parents were evangelicals who forbade him from any hard rock or heavy metal, and he’d often stash tapes or D&D books at my place. He was also very into the “satanism” of early Sabbath, although it was mostly a reaction against his parents, and Black Sabbath wasn’t really satanist. We used to listen to tapes of Sabbath a lot when driving around in my car, although it was often “nice price” tapes instead of the big albums. One in particular was the Live at Last album, which was a horrible near-bootleg released without the band’s permission, an odd mix of poorly-recorded tracks and an album cover that looked like it was done on a Commodore VIC-20.

In high school, I fell into early thrash metal, and stuff like Metallica, Megadeth or Anthrax seemed like a generation past that of Ozzy’s solo stuff, and at least two beyond Black Sabbath. It’s odd for me to listen to Bark at the Moon and then Master of Puppets back to back and they seem twenty years apart, but it was more like three years. I was too obsessed with “new” stuff and didn’t have the time or funds to go backwards through the older Sabbath catalog when I was a teenager.

When No Rest for the Wicked came out in 1988, it was a bit of a twist. At that point, Ozzy seemed like a bit of a relic, but No Rest had a fresh sound, catchy tunes, and this amazing new guitar player Zakk Wylde, who was some kid genius, only a few years older than me. That album got some heavy play in my last year of high school, even though it was competing against Metallica’s And Justice For All and the first Guns ‘N Roses album in my tape player. Same goes for 1991’s No More Tears, which featured a ton of songs written by Lemmy from Motorhead. But aside from this brief blip, I mostly thought of Ozzy as this elder statesman in the world of metal, and focused most of my attention on death metal or whatever else I was obsessed with in the mid-90s.

* * *

Fast-forward to 1996. I’m in Seattle by that point, and Ozzy was mostly off my radar. He’d “retired” and he had an album or maybe two I’d never even heard. Black Sabbath was fully in the back of my head, having listened to the first six albums pretty repeatedly over the years. But I did not keep track of anything of Ozzy’s solo career in years.

It’s a Friday, and I’m at work. There’s some ship party going on, free champagne, catered appetizers. This was at the point in tech where this happened like every week. I’m not a fan of champagne and the food was usually crap, but it meant I could waste an hour of time doing nothing. I was talking to a few people about how Ozzy was playing at the Tacoma Dome that night. The general discussion was “Ozzy is touring? I thought he retired? He’s still alive, right?” We all joked about going, in the same way one would go to a monster truck rally at the Kingdome as a goof, just to see who would show up.

Later that night, I was sitting around trying to write, and thought maybe I should go. Ozzy wasn’t going to be around much longer, right? I figured his career was beyond over, and I’d never get to see him again if I didn’t go. I called the Tacoma Dome to see if there were still tickets – you couldn’t look it up online and had to actually call the box office, and they said sure, tons of tickets. So I got in my car, hit I-5, and headed down there, well after the first opening band started.

This tour was sort of a mini-festival with three opening bands, all of them notable: Biohazard, Sepultura, and Danzig. I got to my nosebleed seat maybe during Biohazard’s last song. Sepultura was decent. I always joke that Danzig opened and closed with “Mother” because he was at that point in his career, but he was decent. And then, Ozzy.

I didn’t really know what to expect. I thought this might be the dreaded “rock star karaoke” performance where he stumbled through the lyrics on a teleprompter with a completely disconnected live band, and then after maybe a few greatest hits, we’d get hit with the “here’s a song from my new album” and have to struggle through 45 minutes of that before an encore of a Sabbath tune or two. This was absolutely not what happened.

First off, Ozzy’s band was tight as hell. Joe Holmes from David Lee Roth’s solo band was there, a very underrated guitarist. Mike Bordin from Faith No More was on drums, and future Metallica bassist Rob Trujillo rounded out the lineup. The band was not only totally together, but it was very energetic and not phoned in at all. Bordin is an incredibly kinetic player and frantically banged through the set at combat power. Both Holmes and Trujillo jumped all over the stage, climbing up on amps and coming back down again to the front. The playing was incredibly tight, and they pushed ahead at a fast tempo through the whole set.

Second, Ozzy really put on a show. The stage had two giant video walls and before they started, there was a video montage that put Ozzy in various movies, like a parody of Pulp Fiction, then him interviewing Princess Diana, then him in the Beatles, then him and John Travolta in a Saturday Night Fever/Crazy Train mash-up, then him in a duet with Alanis. (There’s a fan-shot video of this here.) They then did a montage of Ozzy videos and live footage that completely pumped up the audience, and by the time he finally hit the stage and the lights came up, everyone was on their feet screaming.

Did he play old songs? He played no new songs. After screaming for everyone to go crazy, they immediately launched into a blistering version of “Paranoid” and it went on from there. He played a half-dozen Black Sabbath songs: “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” “Iron Man,” “Sweet Leaf,” basically an entire greatest hits album. “War Pigs” was absolutely awesome, the last song in the main set. Video footage of Vietnam choppers over jungles played on the big screens, spotlights going across the crowd, 20,000 people all singing, and Ozzy basically doing calisthenics on stage, screaming at everyone to get out of their fucking seats while he was doing jumping jacks and running laps to this absolutely frenetic version of the song.

I can’t find an exact setlist, but looking at ones online, he only played the song “Perry Mason” from his last album, then a dozen of the biggest songs from his solo career: old stuff like “Crazy Train,” “Bar at the Moon,” and newer hits like “No More Tears” and “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” (The setlist was different than the video above.) What was amazing is how into the performance Ozzy was. I mean, if I was him, I absolutely would not want to play “Iron Man” for the ten millionth time, especially after having like 20 albums after that. But he was absolutely elated that 20,000 people showed up to see him, and we were all doing him a favor by being there. He was more than happy to play the classic hits everyone wanted. Between every song, every chorus, every verse, he was telling everyone how much he loved them, how much he wanted us to get crazy. He had squirt guns and buckets of water, and everyone got drenched like it was a Blue Man Group show. He mooned people and ran around like a madman, dumping bucket after bucket of water on people in the front rows.

The show was absolutely incredible, by far the best live event I’d ever see. Ozzy was just such a showman and made every person there feel like they belonged. It was so high-energy, it was absolutely infectious.

* * *

That wasn’t his retirement tour, obviously. That format of multiple opening bands became the Ozzfest, which went on for decades. A few years later, he gained a completely different audience and morphed personas with his family’s reality show. He had a second (or third, or fourth) life in the 00s and later.

I guess what I find odd about all of this is how Ozzy has this ability to be ever-present and weave his way through life without being directly in it. I can’t remember the last time I bought an Ozzy album, but when I searched my books, he’s mentioned dozens of times. It’s very similar to when I drew that picture of him without actually seeing him. The title “Ozzmosis” is very apt in a way. And that makes it harder to imagine that he’s gone. It’s a lot like how David Lynch is gone, but he’ll never feel gone, and that makes it both easier and harder to reconcile his death.

Anyway. I got a big smile watching that old concert footage, and that’s all that matters. Glad he went out on top, and was able to make so many people happy like that.

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My first CD player

I had to rip a few CDs last week, which is a rare occurrence these days. I don’t even have a CD player at this point, and have to dig up an external optical drive for my Mac once or twice a year when this happens. It had me thinking about the rise and fall of CDs in my life, which brought me back to my first CD player ever, the Toshiba XR-J9.

So, 1987. The Compact Disc was released in Japan five years before, and audiophiles had been buying them in the US, but not so much in Elkhart, Indiana. The whole idea of digital audio was a thing of awe, total science fiction. Lasers! The ones and zeroes captured in the studio remained ones and zeroes until right before they hit your ears, with no degradation, no distortion, no mangling through resistance-bearing wires and analog amps. Some magazine article said if you dubbed a cassette from a CD, your copy would sound better than the professionally-duplicated one you bought in a store. I can’t even remember the first time I actually heard or touched a CD, and didn’t know anyone who had a player. I had to have one, of course. But I couldn’t spend a grand on a Sony home player, and didn’t really have the stereo to match, which would cost a few thousand more.

At that time, I had a Soundesign stereo, probably from Wards or Sears, which had tower speakers, sat in a wood rack with glass doors on the front, and was a single piece for the receiver, EQ, and double tape deck, but had grooves in the plastic face so it looked like a stack of individual components. It wasn’t exactly high fidelity, but it was better than the Sears all-in-one I had in grade school and junior high. And it had a pair of RCA connectors for Aux In, tempting me to add more.

I was out of the house more than I was in it back in high school, so cassette was my primary medium. In my pedestrian days, I ran through $20 Walkman clones on a regular basis, whatever I could pick up at Osco Drugs on a discount. Once I graduated to a car, it had a no-name tape deck in it. For a while, I would buy vinyl and record them to tapes, but I mostly bought cassettes, or dubbed friends’ albums onto blanks.

Every time I went to any store with audio gear, I’d ogle the various components, thinking about how someday when I was out of college and rich, my first priority (aside from a Commodore Amiga) would be to buy some esoteric system with gigantic speakers, two dozen bands of EQ, a DAT digital tape deck (what happened to those?), and of course a reference-quality CD player. There was a store in the Concord Mall called Templin’s that was half instruments, half audio gear. (Oddly, they also sold Atari home computers.) This was the place where they had separate listening rooms where you could go in and see full setups like the one in American Psycho, thousands of dollars of gear that was absolutely unobtainable to me.

In the summer of 1987, I started working my first “real” job at the Taco Bell across the highway from the Concord Mall. And right around then, CD player prices started dropping. They were like $1000, then hit $500, then $400 or $300. And around the time my first paycheck hit my pocket, I was in the K-Mart across the street from my ‘Bell, and there was this CD player that was a hundred dollars. I absolutely had to buy in, and I did. (For reference, $100 in 1987 is about $285 now. I made $3.35 an hour dealing with drive-through abuse and refried bean cooking at TB.)

The XR-J9 was an odd little beast. It was about twice the size of a battery-powered Sony Discman of that vintage, but way smaller than a component home CD player. It was a weird mix of the two, though. Like a Discman, it was a top-loader; you popped open a lid and put the disc directly on a hub, then closed the door to get the laser to start. (Laser! I now owned a Class 1 laser! 3-beam pickup, whatever that means! It even had a warning label on the bottom!)

Unlike the portable Discman, the Toshiba ran on mains only, with no provision for a battery. It also had a fixed set of RCA cables coming from the back, which would plug into a home receiver. It also had a headphone jack and volume slider on the front, but unless you had a Honda generator with you, it was in no way portable. And those cables weren’t removable, which bugged me.

The controls were spartan: a power button on the front; the usual play, pause, forward, and back buttons. You pressed in a corner of the lid and then it unlatched and popped open. It also had a Display button, which I think toggled the time versus the time remaining that showed on the small LCD display. Some buttons had multiple functions. If you pressed Forward once, it would skip a track; hold it and it would fast-forward through the track, playing a sliver of sound every five seconds. This was amazing coming from the tape world, because I swear I spent half my batteries jumping around tapes, and this was instant. Random access! There was also some elaborate combination of buttons you could mash to access a “memory” mode where you could program up to 16 tracks in any order to get a custom playlist, which was a huge pain in the ass to do, and then it immediately went away when you opened the player. I would very occasionally do this when listening to The Police – Synchronicity so I could skip track 4 (“Mother”) because I never felt like it matched the rest of the album. (Now I think it’s the best track.)

The obvious problem after sinking a whole paycheck into this thing was that I now needed music. I think at that time, a tape was like $7.99 and an LP was $9.99, but a CD was $15.99. Each title was an investment. I went to Super Sounds, my favorite record store ever in the Concord Mall, and went A-Z through their three or four racks of CDs, trying to figure this one. (At that time, CDs were in “long boxes” which were the same height and half the width of an LP, so stores could use the same vertical racks for the new format.)

My first purchase was the most recent Iron Maiden album, Somewhere in Time. I was way too into Maiden at the time, and this album was a perfect storm for me: it was Iron Maiden; it had this futuristic cyberpunk theme; it was what I thought at the time was super-modern, ultra-technical sounding; it was digitally mastered; it was Iron Maiden; it was loud, but precise. It was also almost an hour long, so it was like twice as long as if I’d just bought a Boston album or whatever. I remember bringing the CD home, listening to the whole thing on headphones, and there was this one part on the song “Deja-Vu” where Nicko McBrain is playing this snare volley right before the chorus comes back in, and I could suddenly hear that he was also tapping out time on the hi-hat, which wasn’t audible on the cassette. It absolutely blew my 16-year-old mind.

Of course, I had no more money, so I had to go sling tacos and wait two more weeks to get something else. I don’t remember why, but I got the ELP album Trilogy next. A headphone listen also bewildered me. The first song starts with a beating heart, then Emerson doodling away on keyboards, which sounded incredibly crisp, compared to a muddy cassette. After two minutes, the rest of the band suddenly came crashing in, and the dynamic range demonstrated by the sudden change was incredible.

I can’t remember what was the third disc, but I did waver on whether I wanted the high quality of a CD or having twice as many at-bats by sticking to tape. By that fall when I started working at Wards and moved to weekly paychecks, I vowed to myself that I’d buy a tape every week, if not more. I pretty much stopped buying CDs for a while, until maybe my senior year, when I discovered the Columbia House and BMG CD clubs.

About twenty years later, the CD thing came to an end, with just shy of a thousand titles in my collection. I’d slowly been ripping things to MP3 when the 21st century started. Once the iPod hit, CDs became a temporary medium I used until I could rip the tracks to a hard drive, then became a backup in storage in case my computer died. On November 22, 2005, I made my first purchase on iTunes, and that was the beginning of the end. Now, almost everything is added from Apple Music or bought from Bandcamp.

(Oddly enough, the first track I ever bought online was Harry Nilsson’s “Remember.” The reason I suddenly needed to hear it again was a memory of the Michiana student TV show Beyond Our Control, which closed each episode with the song.)

That Toshiba lasted until maybe 1992, when it mysteriously died, stopped loading up discs. I bought a Kenwood portable player that summer (this was described in Summer Rain) and that unit suddenly became my main CD player for a few years until I bought a Kenwood 6+1 changer at the start of 1994. The Kenwood portable never really got used as a portable, because it drained AA batteries so fast, and this was before the anti-skip memory thing was out, so it was fairly useless on the go. I never considered CD as a portable medium, using the MiniDisc from the late 90s until the iPod showed up. I didn’t own a car with a CD player until 2007, when the format was dead. My 2014 car had a CD player that I think I used once. I honestly could not remember if my 2025 car even has one, and I guess it doesn’t.

All of this is so strange to think about, because that 1987 dream of someday having a gigantic reference system in my home is long gone. (So’s that desire for a new Amiga, but that’s another story.) MP3 wasn’t even a dream back then. I listen to 99% of my music on AirPods these days. I don’t have a room full of racks of CDs. I could afford to go buy any stereo I want, but what would I even buy? I bought a pair of near-field monitors for my desk literally a month before the pandemic started and I had to go to pure headphones for the locked-in-the-same-apartment 24/7 thing. I think I have two different Kenwood receivers in storage, and use a $200 sound bar in the living room for the TV. Music is still important, and I’m listening to stuff every day. But the technology has changed and the meaning of where it is in my life has too. Is that good or bad?

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How to Rob a Bank

I saw a doc on Netflix the other night called How to Rob a Bank. It’s about Scott Scurlock, a bank robber who had a big run in Seattle in the mid-90s, hitting 18 (or 19) banks for a bit over $2M in 1990s money. It was a pretty generic doc, but had lots of footage of 1992 and 1993 Seattle that really brought me back.

I lived in Seattle starting in 1995, and the film ends in 1996. I honestly have no memory of this news story, but I didn’t have a TV or cable back then, and didn’t read a newspaper, so I totally missed it. But the stock footage, the establishing shots they used, that totally brought me back. It all looked like it was shot on a Hi8 camera, both a crummy quality but a way-too-bright color palette that makes it look far too sharp and vivid. I think I got a Sony Hi8 right around the time of the end of this movie – maybe the same month – and I regret not walking around Pioneer Square and shooting hours and hours of footage of everything and nothing.

Scurlock, aka “Hollywood,” habitually hit Seafirst bank, which was my bank. When I got my first real paycheck in 1995, I went downstairs from our office and walked in a Seafirst on Occidental and opened a checking and savings account. I got a special deal which was new back then: no monthly fees or minimum balance, but I had to pay to talk to a human. I could call their voice mail thing to hear my balance or make a transfer (this was before web banking), and I could use the ATMs or drop off a check. But for an introvert who hated lines, this was the perfect deal.

It also meant I was never standing in a bank lobby when a dude with a rubber nose and chin glued to his face jumped on a counter, waved around a Glock 17, and started screaming for the vault teller. This was a good feature to have, since Scurlock and crew used to repeatedly hit the Seafirst on Madison about a mile from my house, across the street from this classic red-roof Pizza Hut I would always visit when I needed a quick case of nostalgia and/or diarrhea.

The movie built up Hollywood to be this Robin Hood type who lived a vagabond lifestyle, traveling worldwide, living in a treehouse in the woods, writing poetry in his journals. What’s weird to me is he looked like someone I might know, like a friend of a friend of someone who went to Evergreen to study vegan architecture. He had this longish but not long hair, used to be a nudist and live in the woods near Olympia, but wasn’t like a hippy hippy. He seemed more like a weird libertarian guy who was a UNIX system administrator at Boeing and spent a lot of time on bondage groups in USENET news. I never really hung out with anyone like that, and he was a half-generation older than me, but I spent enough time in Belltown that I knew the type.

And I’m not saying I’m into a guy like this, but one of the reasons I’ve never gone back to Seattle is I’m sure Amazon has completely homogenized it, and the weirdo underbelly has all died out or sold out. I’m sure if I went to a cafe in  Fremont now, it would all be people talking about crypto or keto muffins or crossfit. In 1996, it would have been dudes in 79 different garage bands, perennially only two connections from making it. Like your refrigerator delivery guy was in a band that would share a practice space with an iteration of a band that split and half the members went to the first version of Lords of the Wasteland that later had a second iteration that became Mother Love Bone that became Luv C2 that became Mookie Blaylock that changed their name to Pearl Jam. Anyway.

It was also funny to see the doc throw in a quick grunge reference, even though Scurlock was probably totally unrelated to that scene. They spent about 90 seconds showing those crazy flannel kids, playing some unrecognizable music the film could clear without paying the Nirvana estate seven figures. “Hey, these kids hate corporate rock! They’re rebels! It’s the spirit up here!” Sigh.

Spoiler alert, Hollywood tried to go out big with a giant heist, and ended up in a firefight and chase, then killed himself before the cops could. It was on Thanksgiving in 1996. I was trying to remember where I was that Thanksgiving, and the funny thing is, I remember exactly where I was that day, because it’s one of my funniest meet-the-parents stories. I’ve always been hesitant to write about this publicly, but this was almost thirty years ago, and I have not talked to her in 25, so here goes.

I used to date someone who lived in a small town in Southwest Washington, a hundred miles south of Seattle, just before the Oregon border. This started in October, and we’d been trading off weekends, one of us driving to see the other. And Thanksgiving became the “let’s have dinner with my parents” weekend down there.

I’m always nervous in these situations, and this one was slightly amplified because she said her parents were very religious and pretty conservative, and I’m neither. We got there and they lived in a second-story walk-up at this boarding school where her dad worked, like a staff housing thing. Her dad was really nice, and the dinner was great, and I mumbled through saying grace, and then I answered the usual questions. Her mom was okay but sort of quiet, fair enough. She had two older brothers and they were cool, although I knew nothing about sports and sports was like their entire lives. I’d need to memorize some stats or figure out the name of the baseball team that played across the street from my apartment before I saw them again. (“Hey that Kevin Griffey guy, he’s like, pretty good, right?”)

After dinner, I got the big curve ball: her parents were moving. Tomorrow. And nothing was packed, and the house was crammed with decades of stuff and all the fixins from a big turkey dinner and a bunch of appliances that were going with them. And it was a second-floor walk-up. No elevator. And it all had to be moved and the apartment cleaned that Friday.

I’ve moved a bunch and I’ve helped people move, and I’ve been in some disorganized situations, but this was the most chaos I’d ever seen in this kind of operation. It’s impossible to help someone pack their stuff into boxes when you’ve known them a grand total of 37 minutes and you have no idea what is trash and what is treasure and there’s piles of stuff going back to like 1976. Hauling a fridge, a chest freezer, a stove a dishwasher, and a washer and drier down a set of exterior stairs was bad enough. But packing in all the assorted bric-a-brac was torture. They had a big U-Haul, like a 24-foot thing, and I think we filled it twice, plus a bunch of carloads of stuff.

They bought a new pre-manufactured home in a retirement community, which was pretty nice, although it made me wonder how much of it was assembled on a line in Elkhart. We got all the boxes off the truck, then realized the truck was parked in the yard in a small lake, except the lake was slowly getting bigger? We took a look and one of the sets of tires was parked directly over some main water connection to the entire little village, and had cracked it open. So their “Welcome, neighbors!” was getting everyone’s water shut off during Thanksgiving weekend. Fun stuff.

Anyway. Movie review concluded. Check out my Substack. Have a nice day.

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27

This blog is now 27 years old. On April 11, 1997, I made my first post here. This seems like it was both 20 minutes ago and about 167 years ago. I know I burn a lot of cycles on anniversaries and numbers, but felt it might be a good time to riff on a few things.

This blog was originally called Tell Me a Story About the Devil, based on some dumb joke between me and Ray Miller. In 1997, I was only a few years into being A Writer, and spent most of my time scrawling in various spiral notebooks when I wasn’t either working or actually writing books. I spent all day in an office, scrolling through the nascent web, trying to find stuff to do when I wasn’t doing my job.

This was definitely in the era of Web 1.0, because the term Web 2.0 would not be coined for two more years. The Information Superhighway was still figuring itself out, and had not been completely destroyed by commerce yet. There were roughly a million web sites in existence. The term “blog” would not be invented for another eight months. Google was about a year away.

Back then, I would fixate on a few different sites like CNN, which I’d reload and reread a dozen times in a row. But I would also go into AltaVista (the Google before Google) and dig for content. A lot of definitions of Web 2.0 call it the “participatory” web, but if you were around last century, you might think of Web 1.0 as participatory, but just not by regular civilians. If you had something to say, you’d be on GeoCities or Usenet or hand-coding your own HTML. And people did. And I burned a lot of cycles searching for people who carved out their own personal sites. I loved it when I’d find a “web journal” where someone documented a long trip or pet project or the day-to-day in their life. Before blogs were blogs, this was the web.

And in 1997, I decided I needed to do this too. I mean, since 1992, when I first created what was then called a “hyplan” I tried to think of what cool stuff I could do on the web. Should I publish a magazine like the heavy metal zine I photocopied and mailed to people? Should I write a choose-your-own-adventure with hyperlinks between the pages? Was there some kind of hypertext novel in my future? I had the technology, but never had the idea or plan.

But I decided to chronicle my writing process, and maybe eat up my lunch time at work. I figured if I created a framework, I’d eventually hit a cadence with the thing. So I did.

* * *

What’s funny is that in the first implementation of this thing, I’d inadvertently invented the static site generator probably ten years before Jekyll existed. This was way before I could even think about database-driven CMSes. This is basically how it worked:

  1. I would telnet into Speakeasy.net, which was my dialup provider, which gave me a shell login.
  2. Fire up the emacs editor.
  3. Press Ctrl-x Ctrl-j, which ran a hit of elisp and opened up a text file in the right directory with the filename containing today’s date.
  4. Write. This was not done in HTML, and it was seven years before John Gruber started talking about Markdown. Just plain text.
  5. Save the file, and run a little C program, which would generate the index pages and other junk. The output directory was on the live host so there was no staging or mirroring or file transfer.

There are like 19 problems with what I just described. And there are at least two or three things I probably should have named, expanded, and sold.

Anyway, that was all fun, and I kept writing and publishing. The mechanics of the site slowly improved over time. I switched from plain text to HTML. I figured out a way to slap a commenting system on the site. I got rid of the frames layout (ugh, remember that junk?) and added rudimentary CSS to the thing. Finally in 2009, I gave up and moved to WordPress.

What’s funny is I’m actually half thinking about moving back to a static site generator. I’m sick of WordPress and I use Next.js at my real job. I keep thinking about making the change, but with so many posts here, it’s a monumental task. Yeah, I’m sure you Hugo apologists can break out a StackOverflow post from ten years ago that explains how to export WordPress to Markdown with a script written by a teenager in his mom’s basement in Latvia, and it will waste at least a week of my time and still mess up every post containing an image that was written on a Tuesday. I could do that, or I could sleep. I’ll think about it.

* * *

The thing about this blog is it’s still hard for me to explain what I do or don’t do here, and even with a million and a half words written over the last few decades, I still can’t. I rarely wake up in the morning with an idea of what to blog, and when I do, I often find I already wrote about the same exact thing ten years ago. Travel stuff is obvious, as are big life events. But there’s also a lot of self-censorship involved. I can’t talk about my job. There are people who I don’t want reading about my private life who militantly stalk me to find out about my private life. I have issues with persona. I have little interest in writing reviews. What do I write about?

I journal a lot, in a lot of places. I still write on paper every day, usually a page or two in a Moleskine diary. I use Day One pretty religiously for day-to-day stuff and dream journals. I use the Notes app to jot down ideas and things to do later. I freewrite and do the actual books-and-stories writing in Scrivener. None of those are public-facing, so where those end, this begins.

I think the thing I’m almost comfortable with now is this being about nothing. Part of blogs being essentially dead as an art form is nobody asks me anymore. In 2002, you had to focus your blog, have an elevator pitch, be niche, because everyone was chasing a book deal with their blog. I don’t know if people still do this. I don’t know if people who got seven-figure deals to turn their blog in a book had a one-and-done publishing career and owe seven figures of an advance. None of that was why I blogged, and none of that is why I still blog.

Anyway. Old man yells at sky. It’s been fun so far, and I’ll keep doing it. I’m not sure I’ll make it another 27 years, but we’ll see.

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52

I am fifty-two today.

I’m trying to think of what the number 52 conjures in my head. A deck of cards, obviously. Games of “52 pickup” which we “played” with my little sister. The B-52 bomber, which my dad worked on when I was born on a desolate Air Force base in the middle of nowhere. The number of weeks in a year. The number of hostages Iran freed on my 10th birthday. Denver is at 5200 feet. (Well, 5280.) It is the fifth Bell Number and the third untouchable number. There are 52 white keys on a piano.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I like even-numbered ages. I liked 50, and did not like 51. 52 sits better with me, but it’s also solidly in my 50s. And 52 sounds way older than 50 for some reason. I do like the even number. And I dislike odd-numbered years. Unfortunately, there’s only 19 days where both my age and the year are even. Age is just a number and time is an abstract concept, but I do like a good even number for some reason.

* * *

I am getting old. 52 is old. I mean, we all are getting old, but this year, I look in the mirror and… yeah. I’m no longer young. When I was in my 40s I could sort of pass for 30s, but now I’m definitely in my 50s. I had to get my driver’s license renewed, and I don’t recognize the guy looking back at me. I look seventy. Not having hair anymore really does it. Things are happening to the skin on my neck that no face cream will fix. The eyes are not the eyes of a thirty-something. I shouldn’t care about any of this. I do.

* * *

I am going to Las Vegas for my birthday this year. I’m writing this before I leave, so it’s autoposting while I’m already there. This is the first big trip to Vegas in a while on the actual day of my birthday with Bill, Marc, and a few others. I think the last one like this was 2011. I don’t know what Las Vegas will be like post-pandemic (or during pandemic? I don’t know what their cases look like these days).

I’m staying at the Mirage this time, and maybe the last time, because it was bought by Hard Rock and it’s rumored that it will be completely gutted this year or next. I can’t remember if I’ve stayed at the Mirage before. I’ve been there a lot, and I know I stayed at Bellagio before. (2006?) It’s amazing that at one point, I knew enough about this to write a book, and now it’s a bit of a blur. And I generally don’t stay in hotels with casinos anymore. The last few times I was in town, I decided I needed a kitchen. So this time, I’m back to the regular grind of being on the strip.

A few plans this year: Penn and Teller, Bouchon. There will be steak. I’m not sure what else, but it will be good to get out of town for a few days and see friends.

* * *

A lot of amazing people left in their fifty-second year. Zappa. Houdini. Christopher Reeve. Chris Cornell. Luke Perry. Bob Ross. Grace Kelly. I’ve now outlived Shakespeare, Napoleon, Proust, James Gandolfini, Roger Maris. I’ve outlasted Alois Alzheimer and don’t have his namesake disease (yet). I’ve lived longer than Walter Reed and haven’t stayed at his hospital or caught yellow fever (yet).

Whenever I make these lists, I’m grateful I’m not on them, but it also makes me think about how these people are old, and I don’t even feel like an adult half the time, let alone an old, fully-formed person. I have a healthy dose of imposter syndrome when I think about this, and it’s deeper than thinking I haven’t accomplished enough. It’s this uncanny feeling: I am not an adult, am I?

* * *

Any time I make one of these posts, there’s always some forward-thinking statement about what I want to do in the next year of my life. I do a bit of that in my end-of-year summaries, and the two are almost back-to-back posts, so there’s a lot of redundancy there. (Also, I’ve already broken the no-Taco Bell goal.)

Year 51 was grim and not entirely happy. And I obviously want better than that in year 52. Otherwise the goals are the usual: write more, read more, do more, be more. So I will do that.

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Denver

Hello from Denver. I’ve been out here for a week, for the first time in a dozen years, and… it’s weird. Weird doesn’t start to explain it.

So I lived in Denver from 2007-2008. Made a few work visits back in 08, and I think I came out maybe two more times for Rockies games. I haven’t been back since except for the occasionl layover in the airport. I had to take a week off, and wanted to get out somewhere to take some pictures and do nothing, and after the usual searches of prices versus temperature versus infection rate, I landed on taking the week in Colorado.

This whole trip has been a weird deja vu experience. I sat in the baggage area and had flashbacks of every time I ever flew home, going back to the first time I flew to the city in 2007. Got my suitcase, went outside and breathed the rarefied air and gazed out at the big sky and fluffy clouds that looked like they were floating ten feet above the ground, and I felt like I’d been gone for a week and was back. Something about the look of the place, the way the light comes through the sky, the way the air tastes, is totally unique in my head, always brings me back to that specific time of my life.

I got the rental car, headed out on the highway towards my hotel in the tech center and realized everything was different. They built a train to the airport. They built apartments everywhere. They built shopping centers everywhere. There are new giant towers of tech industry where there used to be empty fields. It’s like when I go back to Indiana and the bones are the same but everything has decayed, but the opposite. Some of the highways and such are in the same place, but everything else has grown.

* * *

One of the reasons I came out was to work on school stuff. So part of the stay has been hanging out in this residence hotel and banging out papers. I’ve written three, and barely started a fourth. Not into talking much about this yet, except to say I’m incredibly rusty and not in the zone yet. First, I haven’t written anything in six months, but I haven’t written sourced scholarly papers in… a while. 1993, maybe? So, it’s taking me about an hour a paragraph to knock out 16-page papers, which is not ideal. Didn’t I used to write thousand-page books?

The other reason was the photo thing. I got a new camera before I came out, a Canon EOS 5DS. It is a monster of a camera, weighing about double my old DSLR. Full-frame, 50 megapixel, weather-sealed, dual-card, and none of the nicey consumer features like a built-in flash or a selfie screen or a Wi-Fi adapter or anything. It’s a beast, and honestly, I’ve been fighting it the whole trip. I’m not used to any of the settings, and I’m constantly screwing up metering or getting depth of field wrong, because it responds completely differently than my old body. So I’ve shot a few thousand shots on this trip, but I’m not super happy with much.

* * *

I’ve been specifically avoiding various nostalgia points, because I don’t want to completely deep-six myself mentally. I did see my old apartment Sunday; I went on a long walk with a photographer friend, and went in loops around the ballpark area and the 16th Street mall for like eight miles. The more I walk around Denver, the more I see that either I didn’t get out much, or things have totally changed. And the areas where I did spend time are completely different. I used to work down in Meridian/Lone Tree, and all I used to do is drive to work, drive to Taco Bell, drive to Target, drive home. And that area was nothing but the Target, the Taco Bell and a few other fast food joints, and lots of barren land. I went down there, and it’s now a sea of condos, and a new train station and pedestrian bridges and lots of parks and sod and outdoor sculptures and the whole nine. So I lived here, but I didn’t live here.

Lots of other photo ops. I drove down to Garden of the Gods. Drove to the Air Force Academy. Hit air museums in Pueblo and at the old Lowry AFB. Went to Idaho Springs and walked around the old mining town a bit. Three or four malls were visited. Also met with a coworker (only the third time this has happened in a year) and did a big lap at Washington Park. Weather’s been decent, other than a freak hail storm when I was in Colorado City, so the walks and photos have been nice.

* * *

Had a really weird deja vu last night. I was walking around this area after dinner. This part of the DTC is all residence inns and empty condo buildings, with the occasional warehouse or factory, so it’s a great walk to take at dusk. Something about the weather, the heat, the air, the darkness, gave me this exact time travel portal, and I felt like it was a night in the summer of 1989, a late night after working at Wards all day, in the air conditioning from 10 to 9, then hitting the air that was a hundred all day and was then 80 after sunset. There was always such a strong feeling of… I don’t know, a mix of loneliness and possibility. Like I was the only person alive in the town, mixed with an uplifting feeling that something big was going to happen soon, and this was the temporary lull before it did. I don’t know how to explain it more than that, except I would get fleeting flashes of the same thing in the summer of 1992, the summer of Summer Rain, and that was one of the real motivating reasons to write that book.

And I’m thinking about that, too. And I should write more. But the sun is going down in about 20 minutes, so maybe I will go take another walk.

Flying out tomorrow, then it’s back to the grind. Stay tuned for more pics.

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The backpack

backpackMy nephew is graduating high school and going to Indiana University to study computer science in the fall, which has set off all sorts of nostalgia triggers for me, as I think about when I made the same journey 247 years ago. My sister updates me on various registration and orientation events and visits and whatnot, asking questions on what dorms are better and where you’re supposed to eat lunch on campus and everything else. I love talking about this, although most of this has changed. Computer science is now in a new modern building that’s built where part of my freshman dorm was, and every restaurant and store I remember has closed or changed names ten times. But the bones are still the same. Kirkwood is still Kirkwood, even though Garcia’s, Spaceport, most of the record stores, and even McDonald’s are long gone.

I was shopping for various graduation gifts, and one of them he wanted was a laptop backpack, which is my forté, given that I buy a new bag about six times a year (in the Before Times, anyway) and I’ve got travel coming up and I’m probably due again. But that got me thinking about my backpack I had for my entire IU journey, as pictured above. There’s a story behind it, of course, and I’ve probably told it nine times, so buckle up for #10.

* * *

OK, so when I was a freshman (and this still happens, apparently) there’s a series of events leading up to matriculation, culminating with class registration. That takes place in the summer, maybe in July. This is a bit of an evil trick by IU, because what happens is you go there and they reserve blocks of typical freshman classes, like all the hundred-level math, English, and foreign language classes. They run a special registration and hold your hand and you get all the classes and time slots you want, and it’s easy-peasey. Then when you have to register in the winter for the next semester, you find out that the entire process is horrible, and registration dates are based on how many credits you’ve completed, so you’re dead last in line, and every good class is taken and you end up with an 8am basket weaving class.

Anyway. I had to go down to Bloomington for this thing, and it’s usually a parent/child event, where your folks take you there, and they go to various orientation things that convince them it’s a good investment and their child is safe and whatever, while the new student goes through registration, takes any assessment tests to test out of foreign language or learn how much math they really know, and sits through some orientation things where guidance counselors tell you how important it is to study. Also, some people in specialized programs met with advisors, and music students did their auditioning.

I did not go there with a parent. Every time I write anything about my parents on here, I get in trouble about it, even though I have lived on my own for almost twice as long as I lived with them, so I’ll shut up about it, except to say I had to figure out how to go there by myself. I was 18 and had a car, so whatever.

IU had a deal for registration where they opened up Foster dorm like a hotel, and you could rent a room for some ridiculous amount, like eight bucks a day including food. So even though I had a day and a half of stuff to do, I rented a room on the top floor of Foster-Harper for the entire week. My plan was to drive down the four hours and change, get the registration over with on the first day, and then just hang out all week.

One thing that really stuck in my head about this visit is that it was the only time I had my old Camaro in Bloomington. The Camaro era and the Bloomington era had no overlap, except for that one week. Those are two heavy nostalgia eras, and it’s bizarre to me to think about driving around the IU campus and going to College Mall in that old car. It’s like thinking about Helen Keller and Jimi Hendrix hanging out together. (Technically possible, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen.) It was a bizarre colliding-of-worlds that really stuck in my head.

I loved that week. Bloomington in the summer is always awesome, and I got to explore all those record stores and restaurants and booksellers and everything else off campus, plus wander around the big limestone buildings and wonder what it would be like in a matter of weeks when this place would be my home. If I could re-live any part of my life to experience it again for the first time, I think it would be that week.

I met a lot of music majors during the stay in Foster, because they were all auditioning. That was great, because people come from all over the country to go to IU’s music school, so I was staying up late every night, sitting on the rooftop deck of this nine-story building overlooking the entire campus from the north. I met musicians from places I’d never been, from Boston and Vermont and California and Washington, and we’d stay up there in the cool summer air and wait until midnight when they would turn off the main library outside lights. I didn’t know if all of college would be like this, but I hoped it would be.

(And oddly enough, I had a brief but spectacular relationship with someone who lived on the same floor in Harper a few years later. Another colliding of worlds, and some late nights there, but I was too busy to watch the library lights.)

* * *

So during that visit, I was super amped to buy my books at the bookstore in the student union. I don’t know why, but I really wanted everything in hand and ready to roll for August. (I was the opposite later on, especially when those book costs added up. I remember taking this SPEA class on public management in 1993 and never buying the book.)

I went there with this new friend named Susan, from Dyer, Indiana. (It was always important to find out where people were from, and figure out where that was. “Oh, you’re from Auburn? Isn’t that right down the road from Kendallville? They have that speedway.”) I had my schedule, and could buy like half my books. And while I was at the store, I bought some other IU paraphernalia, like some notebooks and pens, and a backpack.

The backpack was this gray thing, with an IU logo on the front. It was made by Caribou, a company in Chico, CA that made bags for L.L. Bean and others. It was a bit of a knockoff of the JanSport bags that were popular in the 80s, made of 100% nylon. It had a single main compartment with a wraparound zipper, a smaller front zippered pocket, and a pair of very non-ergonomic, barely-adjustable shoulder straps with like a millimeter of padding in them.

Like I said, I used this backpack for the entire time I was at IU. It held maybe four or five textbooks, plus whatever I could cram in the front pocket. That usually held the cassettes I needed to get through the day in my walkman. I usually wore this slung on one shoulder, unless I was on a bike. It was one of my trademark items, as stupid as that sounds. I always had three things with me: my leather jacket, my walkman, and this backpack.

It’s odd to look at it now, compared to modern bags. It’s so small, with no organizational compartments or sleeves or dividers. This was the pre-laptop era, and it was meant to carry books, a few pencils, and nothing more. There were none of the creature comforts that backpacks developed in the 90s and beyond. There were no ergonomics to the straps; there wasn’t a side sling or any other handles; the bottom was not weatherproofed; there were no cell phone pockets or cord management solutions. There wasn’t a side pocket for a water bottle, because this was before we were told to always carry water, and before most people drank 300 ounces of soda a day. It’s so simplistic, and it’s amazing I used it for so long without complaint. It’s even more amazing it still exists.

I can’t think of the last time I actually used this bag. There was a gap of a half-decade between when I went to school and when I had to start carrying a laptop everywhere. By then, I was in New York, and messenger bags were a thing, so I moved on to one of those. I still have it for some reason, probably because I can’t throw it out. I have a lot of stuff like that.

* * *

Also, a spoiler alert. Another reason I am in this fit of nostalgia is I’m going back to school, starting this week. All virtual, so no backpack needed. More details on this later, although this might also mean my already scarce posting might get worse.

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Finger

There was an interesting post that came up recently about the history of the unfortunately-named finger command in unix here. This jogged a few memories for me, because I remember finger as being the early precursor to blogs, web pages, and social media platforms.

Back in the days of unix and logging into mainframes and big workstations through terminals, there was a program called who, which listed every user currently logged into the machine. That was cool, except when there were hundreds of people on a machine and it quickly scrolled past in an indecipherable flood of text. It would show you a few brief details about each user, like how long they were logged in, or what program they were currently running. This was, in a very primitive way, similar to the little green dot next to a name in a messaging program, that tells you if the person is online or not. (Or maybe they never logged out, and their terminal was sitting idle overnight in a locked office.)

The next level of granularity was finger. If you were logged in and typed finger jkonrath, it would show a bit of info about that account, like that user’s home directory, the shell they used, and where they last logged in, or how long they’ve been logged in. That can lead to some stalker-y situations, but this was decades before anyone really thought that through.

One cool feature about finger was that if you had a text file named either .project or .plan in your home directory and they were would readable, they would also be displayed. The former was a one-line thing, and the latter could be any length. I think the original intent when this was written back at Stanford in 1972, you’d set your project to “AI Lab, Compiler Division” and your plan would be something like “I teach M-W-F in the basement of the science building. I will be on vacation June 1-9. Contact Dave Smith for questions.”

I first got a unix account (ULTRIX, actually) at IU in December of 1989. One of the first things I was absolutely infatuated with was the idea of coming up with a perfect plan file. I was 18 and of course had Big Thoughts I needed to tell the world, probably involving dumb song lyrics or movie quotes. I think for months, the only thing I used my account for was setting a new plan file and playing the text-based Tetris game someone installed on there. But it was almost like a really rough social network, sort of.

At some point, a CS buddy (it may have been either Brad Ramsey or Jesse Martin) told me about named pipes. A named pipe was a way of creating a file that really was a redirect to a program. I don’t remember how this worked, but they showed me a way to create a plan file that actually ran a script which did a who command, looked for the person who was running the finger command, then print some cute message like “hey $username quit spying on me” and output that to the pipe. It worked great, as long as the person was on the same machine, which was almost never the case. (I forgot to mention: you could run a finger command to any other machine that had a finger server running. So finger jkonrath@gnu.ai.mit.edu would also work on my burner account over there.)

Most undergrads and casual users were over on the VAX computers at that time for their general email use, and that VMS system had some half-baked implementation of finger that didn’t entirely work right, or didn’t support plan files, or something. VMS had its own arcane commands, like the much less sexy SHOW USERS/FULL and the like. This led to Sid Sowder and 19 other people (including me) writing their own VMS utility programs to meld together the disparate systems into something more usable as a social network, way back when Mark Zuckerberg was probably still learning to read.

That’s all another story I’ve told before. But one tangent on it is that I wrote a replacement for the finger command, sort of. The thing was, we needed a database to store various things about users, like preferences and login times and dates and whatever. So I wrote a program for Sid called XINFO, which was a horrible Pascal database program where his utility program would stash login information. Then I wrote a couple of different client programs that could hit this database for information, like an XFINGER command which was everything the VMS finger command wasn’t. And one of the biggest draws to Sowder’s program was a WHOIS program that was all neat and pretty and would show you where your friends were logged in from and so on. So yeah, maybe I should have filed a patent on this and sued everyone. Or maybe I should have gone to classes and studied instead of doing this.

The plan thing had an interesting connection to present. Back in like 1992 or so, the Computer Science department installed this thing on their server that at first was touted as some king of super-finger doodad. It was a server that would show your plan file, but let you put graphics and markup text in it. It called these a HyPlan file. You would write them in this weird markup language which was apparently called HTML, and then people all around the world could use a special program to read your HyPlan and click links on it and go to other HyPlan pages. This was called the “world wide web” and of course I thought it was a stupid fad and made a dumb HyPlan that I think had a gigantic uncompressed audio file of like three seconds of a Cannibal Corpse song that would play when you clicked on it. The name HyPlan became Homepage and was forgotten, and thirty years later, people are using a distant relative of that same system to try and sell me boner pills. And once again, I should have gotten in front of this early and maybe patented selling books on the web or something.

Anyway, the finger command still works if you’re on a Mac. Maybe I should go back to just updating my plan file, instead of upgrading WordPress plugins every 17 minutes so this site doesn’t get hacked by Russians again.

Categories
general

Failing networks, forts, film

It’s Sunday again. Time to try to type something here.

Every time I log into WordPress, it has a failed update and 19 plug-ins that need to be updated or were updated. It doesn’t matter how long ago I last logged in. I can log out for five minutes and this happens. I think I’ve been clear that I really do not like WordPress. But I’ve also used static site generators, and I’m not into that, either. And I’m definitely not paying yet another monthly fee to switch to something else.

I think Facebook’s about done, too. A lot of my friends have fled, and right now, it’s doing this transient thing where it does not give me notifications on anything I post. It doesn’t tell me if someone reacts to a post or comment, and won’t tell me if someone comments on anything I write. It’s essentially useless now, at least from a dopamine hit standpoint. I’ve looked at going to Twitter, but Twitter seriously gives me PTSD. It’s just a wall of text, people screaming at each other whatever’s in the front of their head that second. I can’t follow the threads and cannot deal with it.

So, here we are.

* * *

I was thinking the other day about how obsessed I was about forts as a kid. I don’t even know if kids do this anymore, but I was really into the idea of getting a bunch of lumber and building a treehouse or a lean-to or a clubhouse or some other structure. Maybe this was from Hardy Boys books or Cub Scouts or something, I don’t know.

Part of this involved tree climbing, finding the perfect tree to scale. I had a tree in my side yard as a kid with a perfect branch sticking out at a 90-degree angle at maybe five feet off the ground. It was very easy to grab onto the branch, pull myself up, and sit there, thinking about how if I had a few boards, I could easily build a platform up there. It was also the right height to reenact the Empire Strikes Back scene of Luke letting go of the antenna on the bottom of Cloud City and falling. I think that tree died when I was in college, or maybe after. Anyway, I never built anything on it.

(It’s weird how a lot of the big trees from when I was a kid are not there anymore, but the area is still fairly wooded. Trees that were twigs when I left thirty-some years ago are now giant. I don’t know if this is natural progression, a tree disease, or some failure underground that happens when you put houses and septic tanks and roads in the middle of a woods and disrupt the root systems. Also, I don’t know why Amazon or Google haven’t named something “Cloud City,” except maybe Lucas would sue them.)

There was a lot of vacant land around my subdivision as a kid. Part of this was that the entire township was mostly farmland and woods, until they plowed it up in the sixties and seventies to plop down tract housing. The subdivision was done in “phases” and random plots were sometimes left open and then developed later. So for example we had “the woods” that was three lots down from us, and it was simply an empty wooded lot with a trail blazed through it so you could cut through and go to the next road over. A few years later, it was cleared out and another identical ranch house popped up there.

But there were larger chunks of land that were our stomping grounds, especially when I got a BMX bike and was more mobile.  A large chunk of land east of us extended back at least a quarter mile, maybe fifteen or twenty acres in the form of an isthmus surrounded by the Elkhart River. A series of trails cut through the thick woods in this area, and between the ages of about ten and twelve, my neighbors and I were constantly trying to find ways to build forts in this area.

I remember a lot of primitive lean-tos and pits dug in the ground and then covered with fallen trees. Sometimes, someone would dump some construction material and we’d find a decent piece of lumber or two. We never got very far with any of these, and I now realize we must have been annoying as hell to whoever actually owned this land.

* * *

A year or two later, I met my friend Jim, and he had an actual treehouse, I think built with his dad’s help, probably from leftover boards from when they built out three bedrooms in the basement of their ranch. There was a woods behind Jim’s that was rife with potential building material. That area had a lot of old houses that were destroyed by a tornado in 1967 and then left to nature to rot. Also, construction crews would sometimes dump junk out there, because there’s no harm in pouring motor oil, PCBs, and asbestos into the water table. This was the eighties in Indiana, who gives a shit.

We’d drag this stuff back to Jim’s and nail it into his treehouse, concocting grand plans of adding extra stories, rooms, stairs, hidden passages, and everything else. I built out a set of three rooms underneath the main platform, and Jim was building a drawbridge and a third floor on top of it. It was like we were constructing our own Winchester House in Jim’s parents’ yard.

Anyway, Jim’s dad got sick of his back yard looking like an M.C Escher masterwork built from garbage, and ordered Jim and his brothers to tear it all down. Shortly after, Jim got sent away to his first stint in juvie or rehab or some lockdown Christian reprogramming center, because he was probably either getting high or hiding shoplifted D&D books out in the fort. And by that time, I’d moved on to the Commodore 64 or something else.

It’s weird for me to think about this now, because I now see the connection between this and the desire to build a house out in Colorado. And I guess why I waste so much time on Townscaper.

* * *

Not much else is going on except I’m still trying to figure out this trip, which is the week after next. I thought about bringing a film camera and a dozen rolls of film just for kicks, but I don’t want to deal with the TSA and hand-checking film, especially given the current airport situation. I need to minimize the amount of hassle while things are still on edge, and probably just carry a single camera and maybe a spare lens.