Anecdotes

Ironic things said in my presence that made me laugh so hard that they have stayed clear in my memory ever since:

 

"I don't know, I never talked to anyone in my communications class."

This was said by a girl in our Dungeons and Dragons group back in the eighties. It was said in complete seriousness. Three of us started laughing uncontrollably. The others did not understand why.

 

"When I see someone driving the speed limit - I get really suspicious."

This was spoken by a policeman at our weekly poker game. My laughing was on the inside this time. But the thought that the speed limit is a law so ignored that obeying it is cause for suspicion makes me laugh to this very day. Whenever someone gets on their high horse about how something needs to be just so, so we don't create a nation of scofflaws, I always flash back to this. Not to mention that I was playing poker, an act of illegal gambling, with a cop. If we didn't have so many stupid laws, we'd be better at obeying the ones we do have.

 

"You know how many of those I pull out people's eyes each year?"

Same poker game - though I don't think the same day. Spoken by an Ophthalmologist, speaking about dashboard St. Christopher statues.

I'll skip the diatribe on religion and let you draw your own ironies on this one.

Back when I was first diagnosed. Long before I came to terms with it. Before any of it began to settle into my psyche. Before it had registered enough for even denial to set in, I ended up in a Zoo in Memphis. I had been driving back from Tulsa, my mind working more on sifting this news into piles than driving, and I ended up parked with a Diet Pepsi in my hand and little memory of deciding to get off the highway.

Across from the convenience store was a sign for a zoo. See the elephants: 28 miles - turn right.

I took it as an order. I didn't want to drive anyway.

At the zoo, I skipped most of the animals. I went to the elephant pit. A large pit in the ground with several elephants. At our level a fence - much like the ones used to keep people from jumping off bridges and overpasses; curved toward us at the top. The pipes separated enough to allow our hands through to touch the elephants trunks which were all of the elephant that could reach that high.

I now know enough about elephants to know that if one were of a mind to, it could have ripped those guards clear off with their trunks, or sucked most of me through between the posts; if it were of a mind to. But these were gentle creatures, happy for the peanuts, leaves and bananas the zoo sold us to feed to them.

I shouldn't say us, I had no money to buy food to give to the elephants. All my money was locked in pouch, hidden in the back of the truck. There was a lot, it had been a good show, the last really good Tulsa show if I remember correctly. I had left the small bills in my wallet, but that was 4 or 5 states ago and now there was less than $30 in there. I had planned on using a credit card to get in, but it turned out they didn't take them (remember when not everywhere took credit cards?) but I didn't have to go all the way back to the truck because I had just enough to get in with enough left over for another Diet Pepsi.

But now I had pennies in my pocket and an elephant is feeling up my arm looking for the food. My attention is on the feel of the elephant and the look in its eye. I've got one hand on a bar juggling support with holding onto an almost full cardboard Pepsi cup. The other hand and arm is thrust through the bars try to stroke the trunk that is looking for the food. My eyes are below staring at the animal's eye. You can actually see the confusion.

Suddenly my other hand is wet. Another elephant, slightly smaller has reached up and swiped my Pepsi. It tucks it into its mouth, container and all, spilling remarkably little. With its truck it removes the crushed plastic lid from somewhere inside its mouth and drops it on the ground - the rest of the container I guess it considers edible.

I am distracted cleaning the mud from my hand, and looking to see if any of the personnel saw that as several signs warn of not feeding the elephants any outside food. While technically I did buy the Pepsi in the zoo, I'm pretty sure that is not what they meant.

The first elephant has wandered off in search of better suppliers. I slowly walk along the cage toward the exit of this part of the park. The smaller elephant follows me. I walk back and forth, the elephant (I remember naming him, but don't remember the name. Let's call him Lenny) walks back and forth with me. I reach my hand in and Lenny gives me more of a hand shake than a food search.

I don't see confusion in his eye (you can only see one elephant eye in a single view) I see serenity. I stroke his trunk, Lenny strains to give me more trunk to stroke. I sit, to more easily reach lower. Lenny rubs mud all over my lower arm. I dislike dirt, I hate mud, at this moment I don't mind. Our eyes stay locked. It could be the end of scene of a very strange love story if there were the right music and credits.

I get lost in the peace. So lost, I am startled when an employee tells me the zoo is closing in fifteen minutes.

I say my goodbyes to Lenny - wishing I had some money to buy him some bananas - he certainly missed out on the extra feeding by spending his afternoon with me.

I reflect on the magical quality of the afternoon as I drive for about two hours before it gets darker than I like for driving and I use the travelers coupon books to find a place to stay.

That night I sleep like a baby until I awake in the middle of the night to discover the back of my neck is frightfully sunburned.

When I was a wee lad of 5 or 6 we lived in the Campgrounds in Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard. As far as the Post Office was concerned we lived on Lincoln Ave. Lincoln Ave starts as a drive way and ends as a thin grassy path. The whole thing is maybe 30 yards long. Our cottage - 3 Lincoln Ave - was where the drive way met the path. Where the path ended was Louise Bugbee's cottage. Louise, who must be well into her 90s by now, I'm told is still alive and well on the Island.

Back then, I was what has usually been described to me as a 'colorful character.' I have vague memories - of what I hope are dreams - of constructing people traps using bricks and ropes and trees. Louise wrote a column in the Vineyard Gazette and quite often they were about me under the code name Dennis the Menace. Unfortunately I don't have any of those clippings to share, but the one I do have not only mentions my family but gives you a really good feel for this wonderful lady.

In my last few months of doing conventions I’d stop at the Waffle House at exit 108 of  I-4 on the way out (my morning newspaper ritual even back then). One of these times a new waitress caught my eye. She didn’t have the dull listlessness that sets in after a few months in a pointless thankless tedious job and it made her shine like a jewel in that dingy place. She was friendly and we talked where business permitted. At that time only Shaun knew I was sick so she knew nothing of this. One day on my way out to some show she joked about getting her a gift. Gifts fly fast and furious at shows as everyone wants DVDs and few merchants have anything I’d want to trade for. So when the opportunity came to trade for a heavy feeling mystic pendant, I took it. I told, Karina it was for success and self-fulfillment (who knows what it really symbolized (Bokononism again)). A few weeks later her eyes had begun to dim, and it was clear a higher up was riding her pretty hard and she was upset about it and unhappy in her work. Now at that time I was just starting up DreamShare Vacations, and the eBay business was doing rather well. So the next time I was in I wrote my number on a card with a note saying if she wanted a job to call (I’ve always been a bit shy about trying to steal help away while within the business itself).

Later that day I get a call that wakes me from a deep afternoon nap. “You offer my girl a job?” a voice says. “Karina?” I ask still trying to wake up. “No, what kind of job is it?”

Now, I hadn’t really put much thought into that. I just knew I had positions, she seemed to have that spark of a real person, and she was unhappy. I don’t quite remember what I said, but he responded with “Step off” and hung up the phone.

Now I had taken to thinking of myself as more or less sexless as that was no longer in the cards, and I was still a long way from acceptance of my disease so a lot of self-pity was still in my thinking. But when I thought through the situation, of course there was almost no other conclusion that she could draw from summing up that prior month than that I was hitting on her. The situation bothered me only in that I had completely missed the obvious pattern.

I left Waffle House alone after that, but oddly she ended up cooking at Gram's for a bit. We didn't talk much, except in passing.

In February of '79, I'm a junior in High School. I'm not quite sure where I am living, but I'm still seeing "Uncle Bob" on weekends. One of my School chums, Chris Wade, gets it into his head to drive to Mardi Gras. Andrue Carr and I sign on board. There may have been others, I can't remember. I got in a big fight with Bob about going, but mainly he was mad about not having a say, and when I finally left it up to him, he gave his blessing. In truth, I would have gone anyway. The night before the trip, it snows hard and gets real cold. The radiator on Wade's Oldsmobile freezes and ruptures. We wait on pins and needles to see if it will get fixed. A day later the car is fixed... the boats have stopped running due to the snow storm.

Long story short, we never made the trip. Had we made the start of the trip, we would have gotten stuck in the worst snow storm Baltimore had ever seen, or has seen since. Even people (one it turns out was my mother) with decent cars were stranded for days. I can just picture three teenagers with far too little money, and island sensibilities stranded in a faraway city. Funny, how things turn out, still I always felt gypped out of my Mardi Gras. And while I have been to the French Quarter a few times in my life, I never did get my Mardi Gras. And no with the great PC-liberal-infection sanitizing everything, even if I went now in that last possible trip, it wouldn't be the same at all.

Okay, since I have just written about Bob, I have to tell the Oyster story, even though I don't think I can do it justice.

At this time, I am working at both Le Grenier and La Patisserie. I think I am living in the basement of the Cottage, which makes me 16 or early 17. And this day I mention the non-existent Oysters to one of the waiters, John. On our next off day we drove to Bob's (who I don't think was home) and down to the pond's edge and went about oystering, filling the three bushel baskets we had with us. For those that don't know, oysters are very jagged shellfish that attach themselves to rocks (and each other). I remember that my hands got irritatingly nicked and cut up during this time. I also remember that we polished off a bottle of white wine while we toiled in the hot sun for a few hours.

We stopped at his house in the campgrounds, got cleaned up, bandaged and dressed. Stopping only for more wine we proceeded over La Patisserie. The restaurant was only open for breakfast and lunch, and so by 3 in the afternoon was free for our use. While the staff cleaned up for the day we shucked the oysters (doing more damage to my hands, but alcohol numbed the pain.) John also grilled up some French baguettes with garlic butter. The oysters, or course, were for eating raw on half shell - we islanders* being purists after all.

When everything was ready, with oysters piled high on several platters, John and I moved out to one of the tables on the front porch of the restaurant and settled in to enjoy ourselves. The sun, the exertion, my age and the alcohol all combined to make one very blotted teenager, and John was feeling no pain either.

This restaurant is on the tail end of Main Street and gets a fair amount of foot traffic along the narrow sidewalk. So you have to picture, a kid and an a slighter older man almost hidden behind a pile of oysters making drunken overtures to passing strangers to come and join in our feast. As you might expect, even in the more trusting days of the late 70s, we have very few takers. Still I remember that day as one of the more pleasant of the time period.

*To a true Islander, I'm not one - arriving there as I did after my birth.

Bob Dutton appeared in my life my Sophomore year of High School. He had moved to the island from Poughkeepsie, NY. My earliest memory is that we both started laughing uncontrollably during our English teacher, Mr. Hazelton's class on dangling modifiers. "We saw two caves walking down the road," started us giggling. Each sentence built on the next, and every time one of us would regain composure a glance at the other - struggling not to laugh - would set us off. I'm sure it was disruptive but we couldn't help it. From there became fast friends.

His mother and father would later thank me often for befriending Bob. I can't imagine that he would have had much trouble making friends, he was much more out-going than I was. Well actually I was rather out-going too, but in a less positive way.

At this time I was living* with my mother at the Circuit Avenue house. While Bob's house was less than a half mile away, we had to circumnavigate a swamp and a field of poison ivy plants taller than our heads to get there. As neither of us ever got poison ivy we both assumed the plants to be non-functional, but one day my nephew Lance followed us and got blotches head to toe. Bob lived in a very nice house in Hart Haven right on the shore of Farm Pond.

Bob took a strong interest in the theater, plays and such. He credits me with getting him started in this, I remember it the other way round. Regardless he quickly became a major force in our High School productions, and later in the community. I tagged along a bit and was beginning to enjoy small roles despite being terrified of being before a crowd. On the community level "Uncle" Bob destroyed that ambition before it ever got started by making it impossible for me to keep my rehearsal obligations.

I remember that one day we discovered that the section of - beach doesn't quite describe it properly - land that met the water at Farm Pond, which is brackish because it joins the ocean via a channel under the road that separates them, contained Oysters. Being the then good citizens that we were still, we went down to the Town Hall to get an Oyster Permit. We were informed that there were no oysters in Oak Bluffs.

"So, if we found some we'd be able to pick as many as we wanted?"

"Yes, but there aren't any."

And off we went to pick several bushels.

I have many many memories of Bob over the years, and hopefully I will remember and recite more of them here, as he probably did more to enrich my High School years than any one.

Oddly Bob lives only about 40 minutes from here, but I have not been able to reach him. There has been a lot of procrastination on my part, but every thing I try - phone numbers have changes, emails stop working or message are never returned. Seems horrible to be this close and not be able to share my life with my old friend. From what I hear from back home, others are having the same problem.

* I think here I am forced to abandon the fallacy that I moved out when I was 13 years old. I am certain that I was at Circuit Ave at this time, so I must have moved out at 15.

Telling the story of Neltje's beach brought another memory to mind I had forgotten about. She would throw parties at her house on Pauls Point, and my mother being a close friend would attend. There were a few of us children dragged along as we had no other place to be. I don't remember any of their names or faces, but I do remember one of them realizing once that no one was watching us and we got really really drunk, I think for the first time (I would hope, I was about 10 or so.) We wandered up one of the hill's (hill, cliff, beach, acres of grass, this place had it all) paths where someone was singing and playing guitar at a huge rock. Playing really well. I don't remember much beyond that, whether any one noticed we were blitzed or whether there was repercussions. Mostly I remember the singing.

I was recently surprised that my mother was not familiar with the phrase "happy place" as in "go to your happy place."

I have two "happy places" and I think they are both from roughly the same time period; the early seventies.

My "Uncle" Bob use to have a small out-board motor boat, named the Seainme. As a teenager I would take the boat (I think I had permission, but a hint of memory makes me think I might not have) out on the Lagoon and putter about. For a while I got into the feeling of rowing, and as I often believed back then "anything worth doing as worth overdoing" and so would occasionally row myself to exhaustion. My memory is of lying, spent, in the bottom of the boat, with the warm sun beating down on me and the gentle lap-lap-lap of the waves against the thin metal hull as I drifted. It was remarkably peaceful.

My second "happy place" also involves water, and another Uncle, but this time a real one. I only saw my uncle Charlie a handful of times in my life, but I always enjoyed his visits. Goodtime Charlie, my mother occasionally refers to him as. In my youth he would come to the island and he and I would go shopping for a large picnic. I don't remember if it was always at Neltje's but this particular year it was. She had a large yard on Pauls Point and beyond it a stairway down a straight drop cliff to a small beach. The water was shallow for quite a distance and here and there trickles of water ran out from the cliff digging tiny channel down to the water. On this day I lay in the water building a fort and damn of stone and rock where the stream met the shoreline, trying against impossibility to stop it's flow. Once again the warmth of the sun, the sound of the ocean and the tranquility of the moment combine to imprint a perfectly peaceful sanctuary in a small quadrant of my mind.

My family used to have a lot of trouble buying me presents. I don't talk a lot (wouldn't know it from this site would you?), don't have any hobbies, have few interests and what I want I tend to buy. That makes present picking tough. To make matters worse, when I am in the Christmas spirit (about one year out of two) I put a lot of effort into finding the right presents. I know that the intention is the important thing, but that is sort of the point, When I receive a present that screams, "I don't know you at all": it depresses me. I'm not one to be ungrateful enough to actually say anything, but that's the computation that goes through my mind.

I don't remember exactly how it began, but somewhere along the line I thought it would be a good idea if I invented a hobby, so my family had something to focus on. How it came to be Coca-Cola collecting I do not remember. I don't even drink Coke - I have always been a Pepsi man.

And sure enough, relieved my family leapt on the Coke Collecting idea. Then a weird thing happened. My brother gave me several old bottles for Christmas - I'm guessing this was in 2001. These bottles were interesting in that they had the year and town they were created stamped on the bottom. It turns out this was the custom of the time. And suddenly I was interested, my fake hobby, became a real hobby. And working conventions I was occasionally able to obtain some very interesting pieces (my coke money clip from the 1904 world's fair, a world war one army token good for a coke, etc) and the history that went with it.

I stopped collecting when I left the circuit, but I still have a nice collection, and had a fine number of wonderful Christmas presents and memories.

I'll do my best to try not to sugar coat any of this.

Over the summer of 1980, with the help and force of my "Uncle" Bob I lost a lot of weight. When I returned to Nasson in the Fall this opened up romantic opportunities I was not accustomed to dealing with. I was still with Crystal. But she was a townie, and I had a twofold fear that my college friends would hassle me about this and also that one of them would try to steal her from me. Conflicting and irrational fears, but I never grasped what she had seen in me and she seem to have no wish to be part of my college life anyway. So I kept her a secret.

Funny thing is I really loved her, but when opportunity presented itself, I managed to split my life into two sections. Compartmentalizing they call it. Supposed we men are very good at it. I know I was. I don't even remember ever feeling guilty about it. The best way I can describe it is that I was like two people, and one had nothing to do with the other. Not an excuse, just my state of mind.

Back at Nasson I started dating Debbie M. I didn't love her, and I filled her head with all kinds of lies and drama. I wasn't trying to be cruel, just trying to make the pieces hit together. I was flattered by the attention. Even there I did not stop, I still continued my lusting after Debbie Ford and Becky McCrellis.

Then Crystal died and I just shut down. Pain, loneliness and guilt just overwhelmed me. And I had no one to talk to about any of it. I just pulled away from everyone. I started being more openly a dick, trying to spread my pain around would be my guess. My drinking and pot smoking increased dramatically. Most of the rest of the year is in a haze.

By the winter of 1980 I was in pretty rough shape. My best friend (although I did my best to sabotage that relationship as well) Tivey was transferring to the University of New Hampshire and that's what must have put the idea in my head to get the hell away from Nasson. I'm not sure exactly how I came to be at Keene State University, but in Spring of 1981 that's where I was.

I ended up at Carle Hall. They had overbooked the rooms for that semester and three of us ended up sharing a lounge. I think one later moved out. It was actually a cool arrangement. We had two exits, a kitchen and a lot more space than the rest of the students got. Back in Maine, pot had been decriminalized (I remember Dean Mac making a room inspection of our dorm. One room was given over almost entirely to growing pot plants. The Dean's reaction was "nice plants kid.") but over the border here in New Hampshire it was felony. Still it wasn't any harder to get and a steady supply flowed through our dorm. While the drink of choice at Nasson was beer and cocktails, grain alcohol was the order of the day at Carle Hall. My descent in oblivion deepened.

I'm sure I must have had and gone to classes, but to be honest I don't remember attending a single one or even what I took. At least one must have been computer related because I do remember spending a lot of time in the computer room (terminals hooked into the PDP-11 mainframe at UNH). But mostly I remember partying, playing D&D and lots of 3am trips across the train trestle to Dunkin' Donuts.

One night in early March we were enjoying a large game of Bullshit (or maybe Mexican. A drinking game with dice in any event.) with punch heavily infused with grain alcohol. At some point late that night 4 to 6 of us went wandering around the dorm, very wasted. After a while something drew my attention to the fire alarm. Over the years, as early as second grade, I had been witness to the pulling of many fire alarms, but had never done so myself. Impulsively I pulled the alarm and we scattered. I managed to get back to my room and did an impressive job of appearing to be getting up in response to the alarm when the RA came in to oust us out of the building.

It turns out pulling a fire alarm is also a felony in New Hampshire. But My RA vouched for me, I was off the hook.

Unfortunately, we had made a lot of noise prior to my pulling the alarm, and one of us was a man with a loud and distinctive voice and personality. Sorry I don't remember anyone's names from back then. I remember him being a largish jock type. But apparently the school did not like him already and they were pinning this on him. My fellow floor mates suggested that I turn myself in. They made the point that I was a good student (see, I must have gone to class) with no record of problems. I would get a slap on the wrist. Where as my friend would get expelled. More important to me was that I had done it, and while I had no qualms with getting away with it, I wasn't about to let someone else get in trouble for my acts.

At the meeting with the Dean, he expressed surprise that anyone would come forward*. And rather than going easy on me, he said he was going to make an example of me (an example for others not to come forward willingly, I guess.) I was scheduled for expulsion. It occurs to me now, that he might have thought I was lying, trying to protect the guy they wanted to expel. Regardless, it did not go well. Within the rules of the school I had a week to plan and mount an appeal. I filed my intent to do so, but mostly I partied.

Days later there are about six of us smoking up a storm in my room, when a knock comes on the door. "Open up. Its Dean <forgotten>". Now we had several people on our floor who were good with voices, and I was rather high. I crossed the room and opened the door. There stood the Dean and the RA. I glance behind me, everyone else has fled through the other door leaving just me and a lot of pot and paraphernalia. Learning quickly from my example, no one manned up.

Suddenly another potential felony on my head. Time to be elsewhere. I drop the appeal, I am officially expelled and so am past the deadline to be off-campus.

My mother says she helped me leave. I really don't remember that, and if that is the case I can't figure out how I ended up staying at Sarah Young's place just off campus back at Nasson. But that's a story for a little later on.

*I've run into this a lot in my life. Take it from me, nobody expects you to man up, and when and if you do don't expect any mitigation for doing so. If fact expect scorn and harsher punishment. Still it's often the right thing to do.

Years ago, I'm going to guess in the early 90s, I was involved in an auto accident. It wasn't a serious accident but it involved a lot of cars.

I was on my way to Middleboro to visit my sister. It was deep winter, probably right around the beginning of the year. As I rounded a curve on route 28, I hit a patch of black ice and the car skidded of control. While I must have been near the speed limit at the time, it all seems very slow in my memory. I don't remember being scared either. It was more like an amusement park ride as the car slowly glided in whatever direction it felt like going. As round the bend came more fully into view, I saw several vehicles scattered across both edges of our side of the highway, all pointed in various directions. I had time to turn the wheel in a variety of directions, and press the brakes in various combinations with the wheel turnings. It was the most curious sensation, feeling these actions have no effect on the operation of vehicle at all. I might as well have been driving the car in a stream.

I slid off the left side of the highway, bounced like a bumper car off the auto already occupying that spot, and then slid clean back across the highway to the right hand side coming to rest directly under the sign that announced I was 1 mile from my destination. Leery that another car could be coming at any minute I hustled out of the vehicle. There were nine cars and about 16 people. No police had arrived yet. Only one man was injured; his eardrum punctured when his airbag deployed. We commented amongst ourselves that none of us had been wearing our seatbelts.

When the police finally arrived the policeman asked us, in what sounded to me like a sarcastic tone "You were all wearing your seatbelts right?" We, of course, admitted that we all had been.

Since that time mandatory seatbelt laws have spread to all but one state (New Hampshire, bless it's soul "Live Free Or Die"), despite the clear evidence that they only help in head on collisions, and are actually detrimental in most other angled collisions. And as I can infer from my accident, only the dead and unconscious (and possibly the very dense, I suppose) will be proved to have not been wearing seatbelts in an accident, which really makes me wonder about the value of the accident statistics showing the effectiveness of seatbelts.

I have two friends who I know for a fact were saved because they weren't wearing seatbelts. One was thrown from a van that flipped end over end when the rear axle snapped. While she is an a wheelchair, I can extrapolate from the fact that van ended up being 3 feet tall, if she had been secured to the inside, she'd be in a pine box now.

What bothers me most about the seatbelt laws is that they were the first of the Mandatory Common Sense laws. A regulation to stop me from evaluating for myself what action to take in a situation that effects only myself. I find these laws offensive and repugnant, and wherever possible I will flagrantly disregard them.

What brings all this to mind today is that the Supreme Court has upheld the Wisconsin's Right to Die law (actually they upheld that the Federal government was wrong to try to overrule it.) You might not immediately see the relationship between the seatbelt laws and this, but really it was the government trying to tell me that I am not allowed to decide for myself if my life is no longer worth living and what risks I am allowed to take..

Mostly this seems to derive from two schools of thought: The blanket belief that human life is sacred, and the knowledge that at times most people feel pretty hopeless about their future.

Let me state categorically, should it ever come up in any discussion involving my life, I do not believe that there is anything sacred about human life. In fact I believe that the vast bulk of the problems facing us as a society and a species spring from the fact that there are way, way too many of us on this planet.

The second point has some merit, but none that can't be overcome with a few requirements for counseling and a waiting period.

So, it is my hope that legalized suicide will reach whatever state I am in, when my condition progresses to the point that my quality of life makes it no longer worth keeping this body around.

I mentioned that I called Becky "Noodles". I never liked my name, and glommed on to any nickname I was given. I've had scores of them: "Boom-Boom", "Topher" and "AC" being the most prevalent. Boom-Boom became Boomer, AC became Ace and some people still call me Topher to this day. Growing up you only heard the name Garth as the villain in science fiction shows. Then Star Wars came out and suddenly I was Garth Vader. SNL's "Wayne & Garth" didn't make things much better. Then Garth Brooks came along and saved the name.

But before that, it was all nicknames. And as such, I also liked giving people nicknames. Some went nowhere, but some stuck. I was equally happy if it was a name that everyone started using, or if it was special nickname that only I used for a friend. I can't remember if I stuck Mary Main with "Mouse" or if Tiv did, but I definitively pushed it into public use.

BTW: The theme of nicknames runs through Ascendancy, which is posted on this site somewhere. In it I lifted several nicknames in part or in whole from my friends at Nasson. Both the name Mary Main and Mouse are used for a central character. The character herself bares no resemblance to the real Mouse in any way. Hollywood & Woody were real people in my dorm, the character they share names with are not. Alex, the character I identify most with, is based in part on me (more so in the unwritten parts) but is still mostly fiction.

Carol Huff got the nickname Snowflake. I find it in some of her letters to me, but I don't remember using it much. In retrospect, Firefly would have worked better.

It wasn't until after college that Becky got stuck with Noodles. I visited her several times in Maine, and on one of these trips she wasn't feeling well. I gave her a kiss when I left and she remarked that it must be like kissing cold noodles. She hated the name, which of course made it stick.

The subject of impulse control came up recently, as I nearly broke my hand in two separate events over this Christmas holiday. Once destroying a printer (it made the mistake of acting up at exactly the wrong moment), and a few days later having no effect at all on an optical mouse. This brought to mind a handful of similar events from the past like the one related below.

In telling a friend of this, I mentioned that I have never struck a human in such a frenzy. But while writing the blurb below I realized that wasn't true. I have a memory, surprisingly clear, of back in what would either be first or third grade (during second grade I was in Tisbury, and this was in Oak Bluffs.) I was in the street that circles the Tabernacle, at the lower end where one would enter from having walked home from school. This is almost exactly the opposite end from where I would leave the circle to get home.

I think I was with two or three kids from my class and one older boy I knew. The older boy, 4 or 5 grades ahead at least, was teasing me in someway, I think playing keep-away with something of mine. I remember getting very frustrated and then whacking him as hard as I could in the head with my metal lunchbox. I ended up cracking his skull, although there were no lasting injuries.

The kids with me were horrified, I remember being slightly surprised by their reaction. I like to think I had no concept of the possible consequences, and I hope that that was true.

In a possibly related anecdote, one of my methods of blowing of steam in the past has been going to bars and goading men into hurting themselves trying to hurt me. While I am not strong, I did have the advantage of being sober, and being more agile than I looked. While I didn't do anything to them by force, clearly malice was my intent. These are the only other acts of physical violence toward people I can think of.

During part of my high school years I lived in Tisbury. There was a youth center there to give us kids an alternative to vandalism for entertainment. It had a pool table and air hockey table (the more I think about it, I think it was some sort of shuffle board table). It was the latter (air hockey or shuffle board) that I enjoyed playing and would spend a lot of time challenging others to.

One evening Jennifer Dunham challenged me. I've always been very competitive with games and played all out as I normally would and I beat her handily.

When I left the center she followed me. I'm not sure where I was living or heading, because I went to the baseball field behind the old Post Office. She caught up with me there, and much to my surprise started kissing me. While I don't think this was my first kiss, it is the first I actively remember. She had been going out with my nemesis (I had a few) Gary, so this was an extra perk. My memories of the times that follow are very pedestrian and don't make a lot of sense.

I think we were together for about a month. I remember going off island for the weekend to Emil's, knowing that it would be over when I got back. But I don't remember why.

Despite being broken up we went to both Junior and Senior Prom together. Starting a life long pattern of being on oddly good terms with my exs.

Jennifer later went on to write an extremely good angst filled book of poetry.

Jean Dupon (it's a French name, and I am unsure of the spelling) ran and probably still runs Le Grenier, which if I am

remembering correctly means "the attic". It was a semi-fancy - for Tisbury, MA - French restaurant on the second floor above La Patisserie near the end of Main Street. His then wife Robin ran the downstairs during the day and was hostess upstairs by night. In 1977, I was the dish washer.

It's my earliest memory of hitting something irrationally. I don't remember what I was so frustrated about (I remember very little of the 70s and before clearly, a handful of shadowy memories.) I do remember that I liked Jean very much, and his prep cook Pete was very nice to me. But something had my pissed and I struck out in anger at the ice machine. Having virtually no upper body strength, I must have put my considerable weight behind it, because I was shocked to see that I had seriously dented door to the ice machine (which was not a flimsy door by any means.)

I quit and stormed out. The next day, Jean called to see if I was coming back to work. I haven't been given a lot of second of chances (In fact the phrase "we're going to make an example of you" became a running theme in my life for many years.) and for some reason I was grateful for this one beyond reasonableness. It is still a pleasure to run into Jean when I am on the Island.

More digging through the forgotten corners of my life. I discovered a journal I wrote, for 78 pages in '85.

I became for a short time obsessed with gravity. This journal begins (with typos corrected) "Of all the forces that we are aware of in the universe, gravity stands unique in our lack of understanding. Every other force that we can detect, we can emulate, generate, block or negate. We can turn matter into energy, manipulate and re-combine sub-atomic particles. We can generate all forms of energy and light. But gravity we can only affect as a function of it's relationship to matter. Alone of all forces, we do not really begin to understand gravity. We can not generate gravity (other than by assembling clumps of matter), we can not block or negate gravity. We do not know what the speed of gravity is, or even if such a term is relevant. All we know of gravity is of it as a property of matter. Nothing else."

 

I tried to read my journal, full of mathematics I can not longer come close to comprehending. As with most obsessions in my life, I apparently got bored when I would have had to make the transition from learning to doing. I always had the hubris to imagine I could find an idea that others had missed but not the drive to actually attempt finding it. Sixty-five days this one was granted. Some very interesting ideas, from back when my mind tackled such things almost effortlessly, dumped in a bin and forgotten even now while I look at it.

 

And as far as I am aware, nothing has changed in our fundamental understanding of gravity in the intervening 20 years.

I'm trying to sign up for Google's AdSense. Not to spam you (although it would be nice if this site generated the $12 a year it takes to keep it going, that way it could actually run for ever <g>), but I just have to see what kind of content the contextual ad parser will generate for this random assemblage of ideas. I can't even imagine.

They have to approve the application and since they only ask for the opening page which only contains a hidden link to the real site (it's not ready to be public yet by a long shot) they might not approve me. If so I'll have to try again later, when this directly linkable. But I'm really curious.

One story is just associating to the next today. The nail through the foot reminded me of this one. The reason should be obvious.

When you are living on your own in your early to mid teens there aren't many jobs you can get (I think nowadays there are laws to get in your way on almost all parts of that), one was dishwasher. I worked as a dish washer for at least 6 places I can think off (The Boston House, the Ocean View, The Seafood Shanty, The Harborview (shiver), La Patisserie and Le Granier- also one I can see in my mind but can't think of the name of).

These were all small restaurants and with the exception of the Boston House the working crew had a jovial relationship with each other, in that we joked a lot, and talked and to some degree knew and liked each other. The Boston House was run by Jane Brown, who was so bad with her employees that she us all at each other throats and working there was one of the most horrible and tense work experiences of my life (and I worked for local government for a time).

But this is not a story about the Boston House, this story takes place at the Ocean View.

Unfortunately the names of the cook and his assistant are lost to time, but picture the Skipper and Gilligan and age Gilligan 30 years and add alcohol. Its a pretty close approximation.

One day, it was a holiday, Halloween I think. My school friends had made plans to play a game we called the Hunt. We'd hunt each other with squirt guns filled with water and food dye. Years later Paintball would be invented, but this was 1977. The plan that night was to play in the Cemetery across from the Oak Bluffs Elementary School (the same one I attended). But I had to work. I wanted badly to get out of work early.

The chef wasn't budging. He said we were too busy and there was no way they could do without me. I was trying teenager logic. With one of the large cooking knives I twitched it sharply toward my foot saying "well if put this knife through my foot you'd find a way to get by."

Unfortunately the knife slipped from my wet hands and speed toward the floor and straight through my foot.

The chef stared at me with a mixture of disbelief, humor and fear. I think to this day, he thinks I did it on purpose. I never did get to play Hunt, I spend the time in the Emergency room instead. I don't remember getting fired for this, but I can't see how I didn't.

My mother was a nurse when I was younger. An LPN, I don't think that designation exists any more. Licensed Practical Nurse, it was a tier below an RN. There is downside to have a parent in the medical profession. They've seen it all. No matter what happens to you, doesn't phase them. This leads to another one of the moments burnt on my psyche.

I was maybe five or six. We were still living in the Campgrounds. In fact we probably hadn't been there full time very long at all. Next to our little cottage was a much bigger house that would house many different people over the years. Most of them are vague vague memories that feel should be sharper, I'm forgetting important people. I know a number of artists lived there, and the people that would go on to be my Optometrist lived there for some of the time we lived next door.

Next to their house was a tiny little park. Just a fenced in area with a bed of flowers at one end a small flowering tree at the other and maybe 30 feet of grass in between. The fence was metal poles stuck in the ground about every 6 feet with the same type poles stuck through circles affixed at the top of each vertical pole. The whole thing was maybe 3 feet high.

I liked to hang from and swing on the poles. One day I finally learned to swing all the away around. This was a conquering of fear and an achievement of strength. I was quite proud. When my mother returned home, (her boyfriend Paul was with her, I remember for some reason) I was eager to show off. I got her attention, and started a spin. My hands slipped off and I plunged neck first into the ground.

It knocked the wind out of me. This had never happened before, and I was terrified that I could not breath. In my TV inspired imagination I picture a TV mother worried for her son and trying to sooth him. In the reality of my mother the nurse, I got a "You'll be okay."

This is tied in my mind with a memory years later, I was probably 15 (that can't be right, I wouldn't have been living at home, maybe I was twelve) we were living at the Richmond street house. This was early on while it was still in the beginning stages of repair and there was lots of wood out back. I stepped on a board and had a huge nail go through my sneaker and clean through my foot. My mothers reaction was to pour hydrogen peroxide on it and make sure than my tetanus shots were up to date. No coddling. I did learn to take care of myself, and survive just about anything, but I do wonder what it would have been like to be coddled occasionally.

During the summer after my first year of College, I was back on Martha's Vineyard. I was employed at one of the few jobs I would ever do working for someone else: unloading boxes for the Edgartown Market. One afternoon went down to South Beach on my lunch break. I don't remember how I got there, as this was still many years before I belatedly learned to drive. I probably hitchhiked, which was still a fairly safe and dependable form of transportation on the Island back in eighties.

The topography of South Beach was such that it got waves. Always. Not big waves by the standards of other places, and certainly not a place that anyone came to surf, but big for the Island. I used to love to stand waste deep right where the waves would break. They'd throw me, and there would be confusion coupled with a lack of control for a handful of seconds and I loved that feeling. Wham, tumble, struggle for air, then struggle for control of the body. Then back into the breakers. Repeat.

This particular day was great as the waves were a little bigger and faster than usual. Endlessly I was thrown, righted myself, and returned as fast as limited stamina would allow me too. One big wave caught me and threw me high, instead of sucking me down. I skimmed near the surface and was thrown back into another swimmer enjoying the same activity but from a slightly safer point further away from the breakers. I hit sideways across her legs and my neck snapped back. There was a pulse of pain, and I had the wind knocked out of me. I must have become disoriented because I remember people helping me out of the water.

Now out of the water I felt tired and sore and so I returned to work (hitchhiking again, I'm guessing). Once at work, I lifted a carton of orange juice (funny that I remember that detail) down in the cold storage locker. I got the carton about a foot off the ground and my whole body spasmed and locked up. I had to wait, in intense pain, for a what seemed like forever (but luckily wasn't in reality very long, it could just as easily have been hours.)

I was taken to the hospital, and x-rays revealed that I had hairline fractures on the first and second cervical disks of my spine. I was put in a neck brace, that - being invented by the Marquis de Sade himself - would have fit in just fine in almost any horror movie. I had to wear this device the rest of the Summer. It was a hot August, and we did not yet have air-conditioning. My neck never did heal quite correctly, and it gives me a near constant low-level pain, that I don't really notice except on the rare occasion that a masseuse or chiropractor makes the pain go away for a spell.

Some would look at this from the point of view that I was very lucky. A little more power, a slightly worse angle, and I'd be paralyzed for life, or dead.

Or course a little less power, a slightly better angle, and I would have continued swimming and been none the wiser.

If there is a curse to seeing things from all angles it is that I am a Glass Half Full/Half Empty/Too Damned Big/Broken/Never Existed/Overflowing kind of guy.

When I was young. Arlo Guthrie use to come to the Island and perform at the Tabernacle. The Methodist Campgrounds in which I lived at the time was a series of circles and the Tabernacle sat at its center. It was an open air building, having a roof but no walls. While I don't remember ever listening from my cottage it seems like I should have been able to do so. We lived that close. But I do remember, fondly, lying on the grass outside the Tabernacle listening to Arlo, summer after summer, spinning his stories and singing his folk songs (often intermingled into one event). Arlo could tell a great story.

Not long after I got my iPod, I discovered you could spend a lot of money 99 cents at a time. One of the best purchases I made during that time was a series of live recordings of Arlo. Listening to them today has, to spin cliché, turned my frown upside down. Both listening to him speak and sing, but also the echoes of the past that doing so conjures up.

That reminds me; on my tombstone:

I don't know when the idea of a tombstone became important to me. I'm not spiritual, I don't believe that there is anything more after the body fails (although I have seen enough in life to believe quite strongly that there is some force out there, beyond our understanding. But I also firmly believe that we have no possible way of knowing what it's intentions are, if in fact it has any.) and in fact I'll be very pissed and probably screwed if there does turn out to be some kind if afterlife.

But somewhere the idea that something should mark that I existed, has become important to me.

I leave no kids behind, my relationships have died or moved on to other greater loves, and of my family only Lorne will be around to occasionally tell the censored tale of his crazy Uncle Garth.

Ultimate Universe (perhaps my biggest mark on this planet) is already slowly turning into a mecca of bad links in Google.

That is the idea behind this website. That I can present myself in a thousand little snippets of memory, and other things that together make a hint of me. That with a little planning it can be setup to exist as long as the internet (This presents some challenges - but it's my kind of challenge - and if I fail I won't be around to know about it <g>).

So the tombstone as physical marker and pointer to the website; the final receptacle of that which is me.

On my CDS site (www.dyingnotdead.com) I had joked about the insanity of placing an honest personal ad for myself.

But in the spirit of my new declaration of both not caring what people think (there should be some freedom in dying, it's high time I started reveling in that at least) and in striving to enjoy myself more, I did just that last night. I placed a personal ad on Craigslist. Completely honest. I put it in the Platonic section. Even linked in the CDS site. Haven't gotten a response yet (and honestly who would answer an ad like that?) but suddenly the site has tripled its hits. So at the very least, this might be a way (with a little modification) to promote the support group.

Either way, I'm proud of myself for putting myself out there.

 

There are some people that really drag out the comedian in me. I become very quick witted, and seem to come up with great one-liners, quips and comebacks. Most people would be very surprised to learn that. In a questionnaire, Tracy once responded to the question: Is your boyfriend funny? with "Not really."

I've tried to figure out what qualities in a person bring that side of me to the forefront. Being a good audience definitely helps. Carol Huff comes to the head of the list in my mind when I think people that make me funny, and she was a great audience. I could get her laughing endlessly, and it came so easily. But it wasn't always cheap laughs; she made me comical. Next on the list is my late nephew Lance. I once devoted a Thanksgiving at my Grandma's to trying to make sure that Lance eat nothing (both ironic and mean given that he was a beanpole and I was a round ball.) The moment something went in his mouth, I'd make him laugh. Ever see Cranberry sauce come out someone's nose? I have.

Which brings us to Lorne, and the reason for this short walk down memory lane. Lorne (and the connection I skipped is that Lorne is Lance's brother and very high on the list of people that make me become funny) is coming to visit in January. It's a bit of pity visit, as I have been in a foul, self-pitying mood ever since my Christmas plans got all screwed up. But however it has come to be, it will be great to see Lorne. He is more like a brother to me, than my real brother is. Due to my coming along much later than my siblings, Lance and Lorne were much closer in age to me. I was more like an abusive older brother that wasn't around that much. Lorne is by far my favorite relative.


Bear

When I was a teenager I was psychic. Either that or I was insane. Or both I suppose. At various times in my life I have firmly believed each hypothesis. One thing is certain, one or the other had to be true. As a kid it was stronger, I knew what people were going to say. I often knew, what they were trying very hard not to say. It bothered people and I learned to keep it to myself most of the time. By puberty it had weakened a lot; I almost never got thoughts, but I felt what people were feeling. As an overweight strange child, a lot of what people were feeling toward me was disgust or discomfort. This did not add to my self-esteem. I also picked up a lot of feelings that others were having near me that weren't directed at me. At school I was bombarded by the hormone driven angst and desires of the hundreds of teens around me.

Insanity or talent, my perceptions fueled how I interacted with my environment.

By the time I was in college, this talent had both weakened and focused. I rarely got anything at a distance any more. But by touch, I could sometimes get words again, and feelings and emotions were as easy as feeling my own. I don't know if my subconscious was just really good at picking up on the body language, but I was rarely wrong, and I was much more vocal about my talent. Very few doubted my abilities after knowing me for any length of time. In college I also learned to Push. I never got good at it, but in the right circumstances I could push an idea into someone's mind. I would do it as a parlor trick for my friends. "Sit with us," I'd say under my breath just loudly enough for Tivey to hear, staring intently at the back of a cute girl who barely knew us, but was well out of earshot. She'd look around, and come sit at our table. As I say, this had about as much power as effecting a mental coin flip. I certainly couldn't make anyone do anything they didn't want to, but in uncertain situations I could nudge the uncertainty a little.

At Nasson, there were several people I could never get a reading off of. Michael Tivey and Debbie Ford, being the ones I became closest to. You might think that not being able to read them, I'd fear the worst, but oddly it worked the other way; I was allowed to imagine the best. There was also Liz McCutchen, I had known her from the Island (she said, I have no real memory of this). She was so beautiful, I had a huge crush on her, and I could read her from across the room. She had no recoil from me. There were no romantic feelings there toward me, but I was a normal person to her, and I loved her for that.

She tracked me down and emailed me last year. Unfortunately it was very soon after Tracy and I broke up, and I was still pretty fucked up. I think I tried to say too much too soon, and she never wrote back again. Which is a pity, I always enjoyed talking to her. She found my email through the Nasson website. She isn't on it, and later a hard drive crash took her email address from me, so I guess conversation was not meant to be.

Anyway, digressing again.

Thanksgiving weekend, 1983, my talent which had been getting stronger, if more limited, since college, shut off like someone had flipped a switch.

I never realized what a large part of my senses it was until it was gone. So many social skills I had never learned. You don't need to learn body language if you know what someone is feeling. A thousand reactions, to a thousand inputs, all second nature and now gone. It was like going blind or deaf, except that people make exceptions for the blind and deaf. I once described it as feeling like I was a little tiny operator deep down inside a giant unfeeling robotic shell. Some of that feeling exists to this day.

So whether I went sane, or lost my abilities, either way I collapsed in on myself. I could barely deal with the world. I can't remember how it came about (as I never shared any of what was going on with my family - a running theme I hadn't really noticed until I started work on this site.) but I ended up living with my brother and his family up in Dorchester, MA. I went on a few job interviews for computer jobs, but my people skills were now shot and I was really starting to come apart; withdrawing more inside.

Ever have a moment that is burned in your mind, but you know meant nothing to anyone else involved? Since I was a child I had never talked to my family about my talent. The waves of fear that would come off my mother when, as a youngster, I would show off had squashed that early - I think my mother had a lot of secrets, and the thought of a kid that could read minds was not a pleasant thought for her. (Newly hatched alternate theory: my mother had lived through a mentally ill husband and sister, maybe it was having one more mentally ill dependant that terrified her.) So over a couple of days I gathered up my courage to confide in my brother. When we were alone, with tears streaming down my face, I laid out my story and how empty and unworkable I felt. And in a moment I will never forget, Brad gave it no thought, threw out some single sentence Zen dribble and went on about his day. I never opened up to him again, and I'm sure he has no idea why. It's one of those stupid moments that effects lives beyond any reason that it should. But I was cast adrift, and I never forgave him for at least thinking of throwing me a lifeline.

Brad has rights to many more markers against me (I was a VERY screwed up teen, and while I've had to extrapolate most of it and I'm not certain what is fact or fiction, as I can not recall a great deal of my teenage years if a fraction of what is said is true, I'd hate me if I were him), than this simple incident I have against him. It kept either of us from trying very hard to patch things up. He came to Thanksgiving on my trip North just before my getting ready for Thailand. He was very pleasant and I am grateful to have seen him one last time.

I went to school at Nasson College, Springvale Maine (if you are looking on a map, look for Sanford because Springvale is about six streets square). It was not my first choice of colleges. It was in fact my back up (just in case) school. I really wanted to go Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I had a deep love of math. Math wasn't about opinions, it wasn't about pushing an agenda as fact. X equaled X, period. The answer was provable and if the teacher was wrong, that too was defensibly provable (this was a problem in many of my other classes as I was - and am - deeply conservative in my thoughts on social and financial structures, and here I was going to school not only in Massachusetts, but on Martha's Vineyard; short of Harvard this was THE liberal stronghold east of LA. Not a good place to be a thinker with strong opinions and a problem with authority.

I'm not only digressing, but I've gone so far a field I've forgotten what I was going to write about. I guess it was that I ended up at Nasson (named Playboy's Party School of the Year in 1973, but I did not learn this until after I had been there a spell. And while it wasn't the strictest school, it's party school days seemed well behind it.).

Nope, whatever snippet I was going to tell has left my addled brain. I will tell you instead that years later, during my convention working years, I worked a convention at Rensselaer. RPI sits like a head on top of a huge pimple. The hotel I stayed at promoted itself as being a 1/4 mile from the center. What it failed to mention was that that quarter mile was straight up. I would love to have access to those stairs now that I'm trying to get "back" into shape. Having those suckers to run everyday would do it in no time.

I went to High School on the beautiful Island of Martha's Vineyard, which was made locally famous by the filming of Jaws, and would later be made famous again as the vacation spot for Bill Clinton while he was in office.

I am grateful that I went to school in the era that I did. My class was right on the cusp of when they started changing schooling from being about teaching the students, to being about sucking as much money as possible from the Government tit while warehousing the kids. In my senior year of High School it was very obvious to everyone looking at the younger schoolmates that the life and spirit had been drained from these students.

I have always tested well. They gave me three IQ tests during high school (I was a problem student) and my results ranged from 163 to 168. I did, however not do well particularly well in most my classes. I remember several teachers telling me that I did not apply myself. This was certainly true. I don't remember my S.A.T. scores. I'm sure they were good, but not spectacular. Certainly nowhere near good enough to overcome what my "permanent record" must have looked like.

Were I now, the I I was back then, going through school today I am sure I would be shot up with Ritalin, and quite possibly jailed. As it was I was moderately praised, marginally tolerated, and frequently detained. And once I had to go to court  - and deservedly so.

I spent 3 years working for Scientology. I think there were a lot of useful applicable ideas there, but like most large organizations - no matter how good the ideas, the organization itself has become corrupt.

One of the quotes that has stuck with me over the years I think has special application in these last days of bread and circuses. I tried to search on the web for the exact quote but couldn't locate it, so I may (given my memory and the time gone by, its a safe bet that I am) be mangling this badly. The idea however comes across crystal clear:

"In a Republic the people elect representatives to handle the day to day operations of maintaining and shaping the law. Thus the government can be thought of as the collective irresponsibility of the people."