nostalgia gone horribly wrong

The 44th anniversary of Mt. St. Helens blowing its top

It happened on May 18, 1980. I was 15 years old and remember being up that Sunday morning and hearing the screen door at the front of the house rattling, which struck me as odd, as there was no wind. A few minutes later, the Seattle station KOMO-TV (Channel 4) broke into whatever show was airing with a Special Report (kids, ask your parents what Special Reports were), confirming the volcano had erupted. Later that summer, we travelled through parts of eastern Washington, and I was able to scoop up a jar of roadside ash and a piece of pumice that had been ejected. I thought they were extremely neat at the time.

Sadly, I don’t know where either went. I know the rock at least made it with me to Vancouver, but that was in 1986–only six years after the eruption. I suspect it just got lost in one of my many moves (it strikes me that my parents only moved twice after hitting their 20s, compared to the million or so times I did).

I always thought volcanoes were cool when I was a kid (along with the other usual suspects, like sharks, dinosaurs and roller coasters), but this local-ish eruption (about 300 miles away) really brought home to me how destructive they were. The images of the devastation are ones I still vividly remember, and I read everything I could find in magazines and newspapers (kids, ask your…well, you know).

I came across this stunning pair of photographs on Mastodon, one taken just before it erupted, one shortly after, from the same vantage point. The post-eruption shot really does look like a moonscape.

Before:

After:

One way or another (I did not expect this)

Generally, critics seem to agree that Blondie’s best album was Parallel Lines, released in 1978. It featured a number of hits, most famously “Heart of Glass” but also “One Way or Another.”

The Midnight Special YouTube channel has recently started uploading a bunch of clips from the show, and I watched the performance of “One Way or Another”, curious to see if it was actually live (though The Midnight Special has a reputation for showcasing live performances, sometimes you would get a mix of live vocals/recorded instruments or recorded vocals/live instruments or just a big old bag of fake everything). In this case, the song is actually performed live and just over a minute in, it cuts way from the band to a couple dancing in that funky 70s way they did back then. And I thought, “Is the guy wearing see-through pants?” and the answer is yes, yes he is. I did not expect this.

It looks supremely silly, of course, and it’s also a cop out because he is not wearing underwear underneath, but what appears to be a pair of shorts or a swimsuit. He could have at least worn a Speedo.

As someone who was already a teen back in 1979, I can verify that see-through pants were not a big thing. Big hair was a big thing.

Here’s the video, so you can see him shake his booty in full glory (two other things: He and the woman act like they’re “fighting” each other, but it was the 70s, so who knows if they were acting or high on, uh, life. Yeah. Also, the song takes kind of a weird turn for the last minute and a half):

My unfinished classic childhood novel no longer needs to be finished

Because someone has already written it, minus the plural. The only thing I missed was the local town corruption–but maybe I was too young and naive to imagine hearty mountain folk being bad.

For reference, here is a post that contains the unedited and glorious text of my original version: CLAWS: The Complete and Uncut Edition

Party like it’s 1994

I found my 1994 driver’s license. It recalls that all-too brief era when I both had hair and a beard with no gray hair in it. The hair and beard are both pretty much gone now, but their memory lives on in this tiny, blurry photo in which you can still clearly see that I look half-asleep for some reason. I remember the blue hoodie like an old friend.

(I attempted to clean up the image a bit in Affinity Photo–it actually looks a good bit better now, believe it or not.)

WoW Report #2

I never actually logged back in and the three day free trial expired.

This concludes my return to WoW.

I’ll next have a look when they launch the “classic” server expected this summer. With lots of grind and all the rough edges lovingly restored, this promises to be a good bludgeoning of nostalgia. I think it may be worth one month’s subscription.

Melancholy and Google maps

I’ll expand on this later, but Google Maps and its street view mode, is incredibly handy for scoping out a place ahead of time (assuming the street view is recent enough to be reasonably accurate).

But you can also use it to travel back in time, in a way, by using a slider to select previous street view scenes, some stretching back 12 years. This may not seem very old, but Google itself only existed for eight years prior. It’ll feel like looking at ancient history in a hundred years, when everyone is driving flying cars.

These snapshots in time can also produce a sense of nostalgia or, in my case, a kind of melancholy.

I used street view to travel around my hometown of Duncan. I last lived in Duncan in 1986–32 years ago as I write this–and while I’ve visited numerous times since then, the frequency of the trips has dwindled over the years and my last visit was in 2011. So I turned to street view to see how it looks now.

Some things are virtually unchanged. The Duncan Lanes bowling alley is still there. All of the schools I went to are still standing, though some have been repurposed. But other things are gone. The 2009 street view shows the small building that housed Paks Grocery, owned by the father of one of my school friends. By this point it was no longer a grocer. By 2015 it was gone altogether, replaced by a new residential complex. I have distinct memories of going there to buy candy and gum, goofing off with friends, and it is odd to think I can never step into the store again.

The same is repeated around the town, with many businesses and places I recall fondly replaced with new buildings and businesses, or, more depressingly, reduced to nothing but a vacant lot.

It’s a reminder of the eternal march of change, and underscores how precious memories are. The Duncan I knew in 1986 is long gone. Where the McDonald’s that opened in 1978 was a major event, the area is now home to every chain store and restaurant you can imagine. The Duncan I grew up in is not preserved in amber, but in my memories and the memories of others. Every time I forget a little detail, another piece of the Duncan I know is gone forever. It kind of bums me out.

Also, the city has way more roundabouts now.

More on this in an upcoming post.

CLAWS: The Complete and Uncut Edition

A year ago I wrote about my unfinished epic CLAWS which is a mash-up of Jaws and Grizzly, written when I was 11 years old and busily imitating everything I liked.

I finally went back and scanned the story using OCR software, cleaned up the stuff that didn’t translate (there was a fair bit. The OCR program either doesn’t like the font used by my old portable Smith Corona typewriter, my writing style as an 11-year-old or probably both), but left in all of the typos to preserve the “you are there” feeling of reading a story written by a kid who wasn’t going to let spelling stop him from unleashing his creativity.

It is one of the worst things I have ever read. It is the worst thing I’ve read that was penned by my own hand. At times when I was re-reading the story, I became convinced it was a parody. I fancied myself quite the funny guy even back in elementary school, so it’s a plausible theory, but in the end, I think it’s just terrible writing lapsing into self-parody.

There is a temptation to do an annotated version that would offer commentary, sort of like you get with movies on DVD/Blu-ray/holographic projection where the director tells you what he was thinking for each scene, but in this case, it would be more, “What was I thinking?” period.

An example of that would be the introduction of the character Jim Fuller, described thusly:

He came up to Jim Fuller, a tall negro officer.

This was written in 1976, remember, not 1876. My defense here is that a) my mom described blacks/African Americans as negroes and b) eventually I got to the point where I gently corrected her on it. She was simply reflecting her own upbringing and I was doing the same, neither of us realizing the word might have evolved into a derogatory term, though I came to discover this on my own.

For now, you may “enjoy” this unfinished tale by clicking on the zipped file below (inside is a standard ePub document but WordPress won’t allow direct uploading of ePub files. I feel bad because the extra step of having to unzip this just to inflict it on yourself seems a bit cruel). Don’t read it late at night because you could end up having nightmares (over how horrible it is).

CLAWS

As a fun (?) experiment I ran CLAWS through the Hemingway editor and it’s not as bad as I thought, which nicely demonstrates how the Hemingway editor won’t actually stop you from committing terrible acts of writing if you are sufficiently motivated/unskilled. It reminds me of the Homer. Sure, it’s a car and it does car-like things, but would you really want to own one (unless you were Homer)?

The Homer

Here’s the Hemingway editor summary:

CLAWS Hemihgway summary

I was in grade 5 when I wrote this so was clearly aiming the story at my peers.

Dodged a bullet on the adverbs and passive voice tasked me even then. Some things never change. If there was an assessment to determine “sentences are painful to read” I imagine the website would have crashed.

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CLAWS ~or~ How an 11 year old tries to write a blockbuster novel

While rooting through my old school junk (so old it pre-dates the internet, compact discs and tipping more than 15%) I found a story called CLAWS that I wrote using my Smith Corona portable typewriter. I typed it out on small-sized paper to make it look like a paperback. Maybe I had a dream of binding or stapling it all together when done to further enhance the illusion. I dreamed big back then.

CLAWS was inspired by Jaws and more importantly, by the 1976 Jaws ripoff, Grizzly. Basically it was a monster movie as written by an 11 year old. I considered myself pretty good at spelling but apparently I was not so good at hitting keys on a typewriter. This would be reinforced twenty years later when Mavis Beacon caused me to curl up on the floor in a fetal position, vowing to never touch anther typing program ever again.

What I’m saying is there are a lot of typos, even just on the first page included below. This is what happens when your spelling checker is an actual dictionary and your delete key is waiting for you 15 years in the future. I give myself props for getting “its” right, though.

Reading it over, I’m struck by the staccato, Hemingway-like prose, sentences delivered like quick machine gun bursts.

The year was 1956.
It was an April morning.
It was a savage animal.
But would this stop the beast? No.

Too bad so many of the sentences appear to be in random order. Or maybe I was making a statement on the unpredictable nature of nature.

It’s like watching someone throw clay then realize that “throw clay” is an expression, you don’t literally throw it, so they go pick up the clay bits from the other side of the room, come back to the pottery table and then fashion together something that has all the required elements of whatever it is they’re making (probably an ashtray), but with everything about it just slightly wrong because let’s face it, they already threw the clay across the room, they’re probably not destined to make great art here.

CLAWS: Terrifying. And that's just the typos.
CLAWS: Terrifying. And that’s just the typos.

But man, did I ever know how to end a first page. How it fought to live in man’s civilization? You have to read on to find out what happens. I picture CLAWS trying to fit in at boarding school. “He keeps mauling the other students,” Miss Pennington said. “It’s just not proper.”

My thoughts on the Internet from March 6, 1996 (warning: kind of dumb)

Personal journals are always an embarrassment of riches. No, that’s not quite right.

Richly embarrassing. Yes, that’s it.

As I’ve mentioned previously I kept a journal for a short time in 1996 (age: 32) and on March 6 I had this to say about the Internet:

Meanwhile, I’ve got a two month trial membership on Mindlink and I’m trying this whole Internet thing out. While it’s great for e-mail, the World Wide Web (WWW) is, as an information source, kind of like leafing through a magazine which has pages that can only be turned every five minutes. In a word, slow. I’ve already found files on the Web and then switched to Mindlink’s BBS to download the file in half the time it would take to get piped through the Byzantine host of servers on the Internet. Although it is immensely popular and overhyped (see Time Capsule Note, above), I think the WWW is something that will truly be practical and convenient at about the same time video phones are practical and convenient. When hell freezes over, you say? No, but give it another five or ten years (remember, the video phone is one of those ideas that was thought up decades ago that still has not moved one inch closer to being an everyday thing. This, in comparison to other devices that have become common sights in this end-of-century world we live in: baby machines, personal heli-cars and robot servants to clean up after us.

Yes, I called it “the WWW” and predicted it would be practical in 5-10 years instead of realizing I just had a crappy ISP and a dial-up connection to match. Two years after this was written I got my first cable modem and learned that the Internet actually stayed on all the time!

While we still don’t have baby machines, you have to admit that personal heli-cars would be a terrible idea. Look at how poorly people drive in two dimensions, never mind adding a third. And we do have robot servants now if you count the Roomba.  We just needs dozens of other special purpose robots now that vacuuming has been automated.

In conclusion, my ability to predict the future, especially when it comes to technology, is pretty spotty.

I was right about the 8-track tape being a dead format, though.

1980: The Year of Living Garishly

1980 is when the movie musical Xanadu came out. This was only a few years after Grease — which was a huge hit, so naturally musicals came into vogue again and not surprisingly most were crap. Xanada featured Olivia Newton-John, Gene Kelly (!) and the music of ELO. Sure it was high concept nonsense but I was 16 and didn’t know better. I recall coming away from the movie having rather enjoyed it.

Tonight, for reasons unclear to me I visited YouTube and checked out a number of songs from the movie and yikes, it’s terrible! Yes, the ELO songs are still great but they stand on their own quite nicely. In fact, it’s better if you close your eyes and skip the whole looking-at-the-video part of them. This is a musical that makes Grease look like a masterpiece and that one wanted you to buy Stockard Channing as a teenager.

Horribly dated, horribly shot, campy, kitschy but only somewhat self-aware of it, I get the feeling the actors had fun shooting this and Gene was content to pad the inheritance for his kids but if you can watch this with anything less than your jaw hanging open, unable to articulate how horrible it is, you’re a better person than me!

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band may still be worse, though.

Here’s the clip for All Over the World. Out of context I haven’t the foggiest what exactly was going on here. I think they’re picking out clothes for something. You know how that goes.