For anyone who cared about this blog I just wanted to let you know that for the moment we are closing down here at 30daysofanything. It’s a concept I still care about and want to pursue, however recent events have limited my ability to do things. I was all set at the beginning of the month to chase down this month’s theme (the Tshirt is still in bits and pieces from last month, for the curious. But parts have been sewn together) and my job gave me what might be the most awesome perk of all time; working the morning shift. In the 6 or so years that I have been in the culinary profession I have primarily worked nights. As a result my family was forced to make due and so…I saw them rather rarely.
With the advent of this perk of great awesomeness, my free time has been severely limited. Now I pretty much have 2 hours a night free time before I start questioning whether or not I’m going to be able to get up at 6 in the morning to be to work by 7 or 8. So, when I have too many projects and too little time my natural inclination is to freeze, and do nothing. It’s less of an inclination and more of a rule with me.
As such I have be forced to prioritize my extra endeavors. Sadly, 30daysofanything falls below the yellow line.
For the curious, what has risen above is (other than my precious family time) the novel I’m 20ish thousand words into, World of Warcraft with my beloved gamer of a wife, and my other project that I must do…because there is $1000 dollars at stake. I mean, of course, my other blog “The1kwager“.

So, farewell….but only for a little while. Perhaps I’ll pick up again when the Wager ends.

Pax,

W

Pictures in next post.

See, I made it through all that without a groanable “Iron Man” joke.

Pax,

W

Pax,

W

So the Celticness will have to wait until that’s over, at the bare minimum. But it shall be done…eventual like.

W

“ Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst… And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life…”

To all who have been a part of my memories, for good or for ill and to the creator: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

W

The urban planning was something to admire, on occasion. Huge apartment buildings would be grouped in a half moon around a public market/shop center which was near an amphitheater. I still remember the market so vividly. In America it would have been quickly shut down. Meat carcasses hung in the open air, flies buzzing around. The smell of dead things blended with jasmine and rose, all evened out by the scent of sandalwood. One stall hand 4 shallow tanks. 1: very fresh and alive fish. 2: The same kind of fish but less enthusiastic about being there. 3: fish in the throes of death. In between 3rd and 4th tanks was a pan full of oil. 4: Fried fish.

Sunday morning worship. We went to a small local church and sang with a congregation. The same music, different languages, singing all to one God. The pastor of the church spoke and our guide translated. There they don’t call him “God” as if that’s his name. They say “The God”. It blows my mind. We Americans are so nonchalant about it. We throw it around and no wonder people end up with this idea of “oh, all gods are one, blah blah blah”. When you call him “The God” that’s a statement.
Some of the girls take play with the younger kids in nursery and afterwards. I see her tickling and playing tag with impish glee. She notices me noticing and I remember my heart warmed so much with the certainty that it would last forever and never grow cold.

Taking the train out of Hong Kong and into mainland China. Communist China, where we could be arrested for proselytizing. Our first trains stop we got out to stretch our legs and take a look around. People boarded the train without shoes, their feet covered in mud. Vendors and beggars surrounded us. Off in the distance I see a lone skyscraper in a valley surrounded by hundreds of shanties. Someone asks our guide to explain. He tells us that the ultra modern skyscraper is where everyone living in the huts work.

At our last stop we board a bus, take head counts and drive into a larger town after passing field upon field that seems barren though the people still plow and tend it. It’s late summer. Anything that could have grown should have been poking up past the earth. We stop at a restaurant. From the lobby it looked more like a massive bank. Hundreds of square feet of marble and one black lacquered desk with a single attendent. So much bare space, the walls deadened the sound rather than echoing it. When the group is called and ready we are taken to an even more massive room with large round tables seating 15 people a piece. The place is opulently appointed. Red walls with gold fixtures, the carpet deep and lush. In the center of each table is a large lazy Susan upon which the waiters place the food. After having seen the poverty of the people at our train stop this seems like such a waste. Communism’s great divide between rich and poor became so evident. On the surface it is all about class equality, but socialism is nothing but the Rich stay rich and the Poor remain in poverty begging for the scraps the Rich are willing to give them.

I remember a public garden, as gorgeous as it was old. The benches were carved stone and wearing away. Lining the paths were stone lanterns that didn’t appear to be retrofitted with light bulbs. It was the kind of garden park that was aesthetically over grown. Nature took its course but was held back in areas to be pleasing to the eye. That park was were I had my first “Historical” geek out. There was a red stone wall hundreds of feet high and broken at the ends. I happened to see our guide and asked him to translate the plaque and it read that the wall was from nearly 100 BC. My chin dropped and all I could do was stare. The wall took on a different dimension in my brain and I saw it beyond its veneer and considered its past. To be near something that old was simply magical. In later years that geek out, the gob smacked inability to move or function like a normal human being, would be out done as I stood within arms length of the remains of Ponce De Leon. I’m fairly certain that if I ever traveled to Europe I would die of a full fledged geek out induced embolism.

Bible Village: The told us that the village was 99% Christian and so remote that the communist government didn’t care. So, naturally, a bunch of white kids were just enough spectacle to entertain them for a few years. It was a small village. Actually it was probably exactly the size you think when I say the word village. People lined the streets selling their wares and we were shocked that tobacco was for sale (home grown). We thought they said the village was 99% Christian. *gasp*. To us, at such a young age, smoking was a sign of moral decay and rot. How could anyone claim to serve God if they did that? Ah, evangelicals. *lol*. As we drove through the village we saw children and adults carrying bamboo cages on their shoulders and knew that the puppies held in them were not the family pets. In fact, we were later told, when we ate there those weren’t pork ribs we ate. I’ll let you fill in that blank.
Their church was the most beautiful I had ever seen. Parts of it had collapsed and trees had grown through, roots forming the pews, the branches and leaves covering making it’s own shade from the elements. Looking back on it I realize it was probably the best place in the world to worship. Years later when I would read the Jewish Mystics, who declared that a field or orchard was the best place to worship because you would be among a sea of worshipers since plants do nothing else but worship God, I would think of that chapel. Even now somehow I am craving it.

I would be remiss if I did not recount the one hotel that we stayed in during the whole trip. We walked into something…slightly less upscale than a motel. It had multiple floors and beds so we weren’t all that picky. All of us waited in the lobby while the leaders spoke with the man behind the desk. There were two other men lounging in chairs in one corner. Suddenly the two men pulled their legs and feet up into their chairs and continued conversion. The man behind the counter interrupted our leaders and came around carrying a club….which he used to beat a very large snake. He picked up the now dead snake and flung it into the adjoining room…which may have been a dining room or the patio. Looked more like a dining room in my memory.
All things sorted we were shown to our rooms. I remember being irritated because in the night as we unpacked and got showers and bedded down for the night we could see people in windows across the way observing us. For HOURS. Silhouetted by the lights behind them the watched us, fidgeted, and continued to watch. When we woke in the morning (after being pestered all night with a pimp knocking on our door asking if we wanted girls or drugs…) we looked across at where the people had been and realized they had been living in a decrepit building that was falling down around them, parts of the building had crumbled away years ago.

W

Hong Kong 1994/5/?

Sitting in the borrowed white van we had used to get all the luggage from the church to the airport. The two of us lag behind as the others sweat, carry, load. She in the very backseat, I in the one just in front. Stomach in knots, palms sweaty. Say it. Just say it. The worst she could say is “No”. It feels like the threat of death, disconnects the brain and tells us to run or not make a move. Weeks before, a new girl was mentioned as coming to our church and she leaned over and said “Just so you know, you’re mine”. It wasn’t enough to inspire bravery and tell her how I felt. The threat of “no” is a curse upon twitterpated males the world over. It’s a wonder couples get together at all. Say it. Just say it. I note how the midnight sun is starting it’s almost descent, the shadows long and magical seeming. We verbally dance around the issue. Tango dancers at their farthest points of orbit around each other. I mention that we should probably help the others. It feels like a lie, but not a lie. There’s no other place I’d rather be at that point, alone with her in a church van on the tarmac, hope in the air. I make a move for the door, she puts her hand on my arm. “I’m not going to say it for you. Just say it and get it over with. I promise, it’ll be good.” I ask. She says yes, it’s about damn time. And we move on. I was always an awkward boyfriend.

Tokyo, Airport. Spent the previous 10+ hours in nervous hand holds under blankets, chaperons eyeing us regularly, making sure no hanky panky was going on. We land in Tokyo and as I step off the plane I’m taller than everyone there, colored differently, different dialect, different customs and the strangest sensation washes over me; home. It was a feeling of home like I had never felt before or since. I’ve been back to my parents place, back to my home town but none of that comes even close to the feeling I had in Tokyo. To this day I wonder if it would be the same, if it was a freak occurrence and what it would be like to live there. Looking out the windows of the airport at the lush green grasslands, the mountains off in the distance. For a moment I felt as if I belonged nowhere else. The sound of the language molded easily to my ear and I imagined that I could understand them. We were all shuffled to a lounge where we could all be held and accounted for. The girl and I met the only other couple on the trip. I can’t remember her name but I remember he was called Ben. He was tall, long hair, surf boarder looking guy with a granola sensibility. We were also introduced to the girl’s mother whom we would later refer to as “The Dragon Lady” because of her militant attitude regarding keeping couples apart.

Hong Kong at Night. It was the biggest city I had ever seen from the air at night. The city blocks and highways bled neon and halogen streams that gave the city all the appearance of a circuit board. A quarter of the way around the world. Stepping off the plane and into the baggage claim area the humidity and smell of the city leaked in past the air conditioning and automatic doors. Hearded into buses I studied the city as we passed. A city at night shows it’s true face. I’m always amazed by the difference between a city at day and a city at night. the cracks, seams, and alleyways filled in with black. It seemed early dawn from the light pollution. A lady lit incense and gave up an offering in the gutter out front of an apartment building in the most technologically advanced city in the world. Ludites among the bleeding edge technology, I muse. A story idea flits through my head about Cyber/Techno spiritualism. Someone pops open a window and the night air floods in. The first full smell of the city. I still find it difficult to capture. It is a scent that belongs to China alone. The closest I can get is exhaust, citrus, wheat, decomposing meat of the markets, jasmine, and a hint of something sharp and sweet. Just thinking about it my nose flares reflexively trying to grab on to it though it’s some 15 years or so gone. Smells can be such an indelible stamp upon the memory.

The next morning, waking earlier than the others as new lovers often do, to stand outside the girls’ “dorm”, hoping she’s just as eager to start the day. Oh say it like it was man, not the excuses you used then. You wanted to know if she was just as excited to see you. Breakfast was a roll that I’ll never forget. As large as my two fists together, sweet, filled with some sort of honey cream at the center. We started out upon the town to get our bearings. A small walk away from the compound was a station where we would daily catch a series of trains that would take us about the massive island of Hong Kong. The train was crowded and the daily commutes became the best part of the days. Since we walked together we were often next to each other and once on the train crushed into each other. It didn’t take long til we kept an eye out for where The Dragon Lady would be on the train and sneak kisses and twining arms and hands together. We caught a glimpse of the other couple doing the same and laughed.

Once deep into the city we were given a time and place to meet back to join up with the rest of the group. It never takes long at all for a youth group to scatter. I take in the city, the smells, the sights, the noise. Bamboo scaffolding half way up an ultra modern skyscraper. It’s still the best metaphor for Hong Kong that I can think of. The stores, the variety. Walking into a scarf store that she wants to take a look at. The first item we see is 460$. We walk out realizing it’s not a place we were welcome. No wonder the ladies behind the counter looked at us strangely. We lose track of time eventually and make our way to the harbor at a speed that induces blisters on our feet. The sun sets and the buildings of the harbor compensate with artificial light. I stop and take in the scene as the girl runs on ahead. The traditional Junk boats alongside yachts dot the edge of the harbor and I’m suddenly struck by the beauty of that place. Even without her next to me it was the most romantic place in the world. She runs back to me, drags me by my hand and we realize that all around us, on the benches, are couples making good use of the romanticism of the harbor.

And this is where we have to stop….for now.

I’m pretty sure I have enough memories for a second installment, I just need to ruminate. After writing these memory pieces I always have a good forehead smack later when I realize I’ve left out elements or could have included others. Memory is a strange thing.

As always your comments are greatly appreciated.

W

Leah. Man, it’s been so long and so far away that I had to take a moment to remember if that was really her name. Time has a way of blurring the edges, and fading the lines.

It was about eleven or so in september 199….6 I want to say, when I got the call. I had been sound asleep on my girlfriend’s parents couch dreaming of something. Even after I woke up I couldn’t believe that I wasn’t dreaming. For some reason the lights looked different, everything felt different. My girlfriend put the phone in my hand and told me it was Jamie calling, there was some kind of emergency.
I couldn’t understand why Jamie would be calling me about an emergency. I mean, she had parents and a boyfriend. It didn’t make sense through the fog that seemed to fill my head as thick as cotton, but I took the phone anyway. Jamie told me that there had been an accident and Leah had died.
I did what you would expect; gasped, choked, denied, WTF’d, howed, whyed. It didn’t seem possible. Of all the people we knew, as Dustin would later accurately say at her funeral, Leah was the safest of us all. She’d be the one hesitating, taking the time to say “Uh, I don’t know about this guys, counseling us against whatever fool thing we were bent on doing at any moment.

I first met Leah during a Live Action Role Playing game we held every week or so. I’m not even sure how she got included. Back in those days we were just happy that people we came across were interested in the things we were and included them without hardly a word about it. She just showed up.
When gamers get together and a new female enters the area everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, automatically has a crush on her. I was the pseudo-leader of this little group and so everyone tried to pump me for information about her when I was just as clueless as them. So I took a few of the popular questions and as we walked to our LARP venue I walked with her and asked a few of them. Oddly, now that I remember it, they were mostly wondering if she was a virgin or not. That is REALLY a strange question now that I think about it. Later on during the night a few of the guys asked me that one again and I tried to blow them off and out of some sense of duty I talked with her for about an hour again before I actually got around to asking her. She looked at me with this “Aww, isn’t that cute” kind of look and she said “Why do you want to know? Are you asking for yourself?”. Busted. And that was the way with her. Often she just cut through the BS and called you out on it. Laughed as I choked and stuttered on my own words. She answered anyway, and I kept the answer to myself though she fully expected me to tell the others.
Now, Josh was and is an amazing individual. To this day he is one of the few people that said “Hey, Will. We’re storming the gates of Hell itself.” I’d reply “Heck yeah, let’s do this”. His mere presence inspires trust, and warranted trust, and you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’ll protect those closest to him. It was from him that I began to understand honor. He was bedrock steady in his values and wouldn’t budge. Sure, he was a drinker but, man…he’s one of the few people that i have ever been able to count on. Some of the most life changing conversations, though he wouldn’t realize it, happened when we were hanging out on the front porch after a rough night smoking the morning’s first cigarette. I’d whine, I’d complain and he’d cut through the BS the most blunt but sociable way he could and I valued that.
It so happened that Josh and Leah fell in love and of all the couples I’d ever seen happen together i couldn’t have been happier for them. People throw that line out so much that it becomes so devoid of meaning. Honestly. I couldn’t. Have been. Happier. They meshed better than we thought possible. She brought him out of his grump, softened his edges, and made him smile more than I have seen him smile….well…sober. He worshiped her, made her feel like a princess, like she had a strong tower to run to, that whole cliched harbor in the storm. When a man can make a woman feel like that she loses her worry and just….blossoms. Damn I sound so like a cliche machine, but it was true. It made me realize how wrong my own relationship was.

“Nobody’s told Josh. You have to tell Josh.” Jamie had been making noises into the phone for probably a full 5 minutes but those two sentences were the only thing that penetrated through the denial and resulting grief.
“Wait, what? Why me?”
And she said (and I kid you not, this is verbatim),
“You’re the only one who can tell him something like this and not get hit.”
I realized in an instant that was probably true, and drove off into the night.

When I told him, he didn’t believe. He thought it was some stupid joke, maybe Kevin (Jamie’s boyfriend who had been there at the accident) was on drugs, but it couldn’t be true. So we drove around town looking for Kevin. We didn’t find him and didn’t want to bother Jamie so we decided to meet at Jamie’s the next day and sort it all out. Somewhere between that night and the next morning, Josh found out that it was true. She had died and nobody called him to let him know.

Our group of about 15-20 all called in sick at work or school and met at Jamie’s house. I kept counting heads and seeing who was there and trying to figure who wasn’t and made those phone calls. I’m not sure how many packs of smokes we went through that day but it was the most I ever smoked by a damn sight. Slowly the facts came out.

Leah had an argument with her father which wasn’t all that uncommon. I mean we were teenagers. Someone had offered Leah a place to live if she moved out and she called Kevin and DJ to help her move her stuff. They loaded it, Leah exchanged some terse words with her father and they were off. My hometown is pretty much built on the side of a mountain so anywhere you go there’s a hill to go up. So they drove DJ’s van up one of the streets and it stalled on them, just died, right there on the middle of the hill. Instead of just backing it down the hill they decided to try and push the van. 2 tons of van…uphill. This is where Leah would have normally said “Uh, no.” but for some reason she didn’t that day. She and Kevin took the back of the van while DJ pushed from the steering wheel. The van, predictably, began to roll back knocking Kevin and DJ out of the way but drug Leah under and down the hill for four blocks to rest just outside of Jamie’s house. She was DOA. Kevin and DJ were pretty much out of their minds with grief.

Everything else up until the funeral is kind of a blur. Tears, smokes, alcohol. I remember one of the guys, who remain nameless though his request is just over a decade old, grabbing me and taking me out to the spot. He didn’t talk while we were there, but he took me with him out of the view of everyone else in the house and he balled like a baby and just spilled his heart out right there. We smoked one down passing it between us, and he told me he had to tell someone how he felt but to never tell a soul about it. We walked back and went into the house like nothing ever happened. There were a couple moments when someone would say how they felt and I’d catch him looking at me like I’d told or something. His feelings just happened to be the same as others.

There are other things I could recall, but I’ll close with this.

I remember the day of the funeral. We were meant to be “Honorary” pallbearers (the guys and I) and the adults were shocked that we wanted to actually be the ones to carry the casket. It only seemed natural to us, and so we told them there really was no discussing it, we were going to do it.
The service started and we filed in past the body. The mortician did what he could for her, but the scars were clear as day to anyone who knew her. I remember walking to the casket and people around me talked about how she looked asleep etc. Now I think how ridiculous that was but then I was dealing with something else. That close to her I felt this deep, dark, emotional void that I had never experienced before. I could feel absolutely nothing. Not grief, not anger, not even a passing sense of “oh, it’s such a shame”. It felt as if all those emotions were getting sucked away into a void, like some spiritual black hole that I assume death is.
After the service we carried the casket to the car. I was so nervous that I would drop my end or someone else would that I became more focused than usual on the task at hand. I remember being extremely aware of the strength of my grip, the balance of the casket on my shoulder, the left right left halted pace that I made to match the others. The trip from the car to the grave was the same.
We laid roses on her casket, we cried, and we walked away to the reception.
Halfway through the party we pallbearers realized that we hadn’t actually seen the casket go into the ground and we unanimously decided to pile into a car and see if there was still time to help with that.
As we pulled up we saw the caretaker of the graveyard leaning on a shovel talking to the mortician, shooting the breeze next to the unlowered casket. The caretaker was a grizzled old man with more opinions than tact, but he told us it would be alright as long as we were careful. We each grabbed a rope and I became interested in what the ground under her would be like. The ground in SE Alaska is as rocky as you can imagine. Below her coffin it was no different, but with an inch at least of water.
We paused there after wiping off our hands and sighed.
“Damn shame” the caretaker said. “Just goes to show all you have to do is one stupid ass thing and you’re dead. Hope you boys are more careful in life.”
I looked over in time to see Josh go red in his tux, and Brian grabbing him by the arm to take him away.
In the woods behind the graveyard live a group of transients. People come for the salmon season at the canaries and don’t have much of a place to live. Way back in the trees we could see movement, laughter, and music.

As George Harrison said “Life goes on within you and without you.”

W

Like most people my age, my first computer experience was at school on an Apple IIe. To this day I’m not really sure what the e stood for, but it was amazing. Back then not even the teachers really knew how to operate the computers and so they’d just leave us in the library staring at the monochrome screens. Sometimes the computers worked, most times entering a line of command was beyond the teachers.

The first computer my family actually owned was a V-Tech Laser 128 . I can’t remember if we actually bought it new or got it used like we did all the rest of the computers. I’d like to say I remember pulling open the box, pulling out the squeaky styrofoam bits that form fitted to the console and opened the anti-static bag getting a whiff of that faint “New ‘puter” smell. Most likely, if it was new, my parents didn’t even let me near the dang thing.
The Laser 128 was an amazing work of reverse engineering by Vtech of an apple computer. Playing around with that computer was the first time that I had ever encountered “Edutainment”. There were typing games, spelling games, and such. Back in the 80′s it seemed amazing, and we hadn’t quite caught on that we were actually learning things while we played. I remember that my favorite game we had was a race car game that taught you math. My parents have a picture of me sitting there playing it while my brother (8 years my junior) sat in a chair next and “watched” me play. I HATED when he would “watch” but my parents forced me to be civil…most of the time. I remember the frustration of playing the game poorly, which was enough to put me in a mood….still is actually. On top of it you add a brother who desperately wants to play and his main method of communicating this is trying to grab the mouse out of my hand and/or cry then you have a bit of a recipe for disaster which the older brother should “know better” when his impending fit ensues. To be fair, in retrospect, we were both pretty passionate gamers from the start.
Now, I want to point out that my first computer was a Laser 128 and the 128 corresponded to the amount of RAM in the system. 128 kilobytes of RAM. That’s 128,000 bytes of ram. The computer I own now, probably a good 20 or so years later, has 2 gigs of Ram. 2 million bytes. I’m just saying.

After that computer we moved on to a used Commodore 128 that came with a bunch of floppy disks (most of which was pirated software now that I think on it) and it was amazing. Most importantly, if I remember correctly and I’m fairly certain that I do, it came with a modem. (It may have been when we went to the IBM standard kind of computer. Regardless this is where we will move from the actual box of the computer and into Cyberspace.)

It took me a while to figure out how to use the modem but once I did there was no turning back.

When we moved into a new house it became clear that all three of us siblings were going to need our own separate rooms. Sadly we moved into a 3 bedroom house, and so I moved into the basement. The worst decision my parents made, and the one that secured me as a big gamer and internet nerd, was that they put the computer in my room, right next to my bed. I remember long late nights that I spent awash in the computer screen glow with two pillows on top of the modem (Tutorial for the young: modems used to make the most God awful sounds to dial and connect to a number. For an example click Here Ah the nostalgia of that sound.) The day I discovered bulletin boards a whole new world opened up for me.

Back in the day Bulletin Board Systems (bbs) was where all the future online gamers got their start. In fact without those early iterations we wouldn’t have MMORPGs today. Basically a BBS was a sort of primitive home page that someone kept on a server in their home. It would accept calls and stored the games, forums, and hosted chats. Here’s the kicker….it was ALL text. This was in the Dark Ages of the Internet when the only way you could get pictures was by fashioning them out of combinations of letters and numbers down a page. We were lucky we could make text different colors or the picture of the Bar Wench in Legend of the Red Dragon would have been even more weird looking than it was.

So, yes. All text based adventures and games, and people flocked to this. Most BBSs were local phone numbers and run by guys who just wanted to do it as a hobby. Pure Geeks, as I call them, meeting with other Pure Geeks. My distinction is there because now even jocks who play on an XBOX can be considered geeky. Psssh….please. And your time on the site was limited, unless you paid the owner directly. As a result I had to plan my play time. 15 minutes on Legend of the Red Dragon and then another 15 minutes on Trade Wars (a sci fi game in which you played a trader. Had to work the market, defend your planet, upgrade your ship…was amazing…and text. ) Sometimes other people would engage you in chat if you were both on at the same time.

And then, with my buddy James, we wondered what else we could do. We had just gotten done watching Hackers. And somehow we had gotten ahold of a certain….let’s just say Government phone number for a data a line. And we dialed it. And we were greeted with the “home page” and prompted to put in a username and password. It was during the Clinton administration so I tentatively typed in “BubbaClinton” and then paused trying to think of a password. In one moment the whole situation took perspective and we realized we were about to try (and certainly fail) to access a government site. Fear and anxiety took hold and we didn’t just hang up and dial a different number, we shut the computer off at the power strip.

It must have been in High School during that dreary time in the morning between when you shuffled your body to school and school actually start that I heard a couple of my friends talking about something called SLED and Resort. Middle of spring and they were talking about Sleds? So I decided to ask and they gave me the information.
As it turned out SLED was the Statewide Library Electronic Doorway, a site that you could use to access library articles, internet databases of that sort. Terms like ARCHIE, MARMOT, and other acronyms seemed interesting but there was another layer to the SLED. If you put in the proper command line you could access a subsection that took you to something called Telnet. Telnet in and of itself was fairly impressive. It was a real time chat program but instead of chatting with one person you could chat to a whole room. Again, all text based. From this simple structure people evolved this into MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) in which people created whole worlds and communities.
One of the most popular of these was called Resort. A typical day at Resort would start with you entering your user name and password. You were then set into the first “Room” of Resort which was the Lobby. A screen of text would describe the lobby to you, tell you who was in the Lobby, and where the exits of the Lobby led to. One let to a steam room, another to a pool, others game room, etc. It was here, in the realm of telnet, that the modern internet acronyms (then referred to as leet speak) were born. LOL, ROTFL, IMHO, etc etc all were born in the crucible of TELNET conversations.
There were other Telnet sites that took different tracks. One of my favorites was called “Dark Shadows”, or was it just called “The Shadows?” Can’t remember. Anyway, I found out about it because I was very into the White Wolf roleplaying game “Vampire: The Masquerade”, upon which Shadows was based. Maybe it was Shadowlands….Well I know one person can and will correct me.
At anyrate, they had taken Telnet and created a whole world in which to play the roleplaying game. They even got the dice mechanics in there for each power etc. It was upon this sort of framework that modern MMO’s, such as World of Warcraft, were built. It is nothing more than Telnet with graphics and automated dice rolling. The downfall of Shadows as a telnet came because of the owner and proprietor. Just thinking about this I get low level anxiety and rage, but here was the story.
So in vampire there are two opposing factions; The Camarilla and the Sabbat. Basically the Camarilla are the good guys and the Sabbat are the bad crazy vampires. After a while and a few wars between the two factions we began to notice that the dice rolls seemed a bit skewed. They were all automated so it wasn’t like “My word against yours” on my dice rolls. It seemed that the dice rolls oddly favored the Sabbat players, of which the owner was one. So, we began to make a stink about it. It went back and forth for ages. They claimed the rules of the game, as set out by White Wolf, were naturally skewed that way, we said fine, perhaps but then it wouldn’t be a dice issue but a powers issue, etc etc. Real nerd rage kind of talk.
And then one of the Admin (not the owner) snapped. They cracked the passwords and got into the guts of the game and found that our suspicions were indeed valid. He made it so that the owner was banned (don’t ask me how) and the owner basically said “Screw ya’ll” and wiped the server. Which is sad because it was the most amazing Telnet I had ever played upon, and served as my gateway drug once World of Warcraft came along.

I have telnet to thank for 2 things. 1st it was where I met my Best Friend I’ve Never Met, R. 2ndly it allowed me to continue my friendship with my friend Z.
Z and I met at a high school drama meet where all the attention was flowing towards these two individuals who are still easily the most charismatic people I’ve ever met. Basically everyone was crowding around them and Z and I kept getting bumped out. So, Z and I being the people we are, said “Screw this, you look cool lets go over here and hang out leaving the lemmings to their own devices.” What followed was an amazing friendship that I still cherish the memory of to this day. Things happen, people move, we get busy and we drift apart as we get older. For a few years, however, I had the most amazing friendship with Z. We had met in person, but after she went back to her home town we met regularly on Telnet. On the server she frequented they had a fairly unique system where you could actually build rooms of your own. On top of that you could connect your rooms to other people’s rooms or build rooms together. I can still see the “house” we built out of text together in my mind’s eye. If heaven is the places that were real to us in life or we wished were real (as in “What Dreams May Come”) then that is where I prefer to live in heaven.
I remember Z sent me one half of a Mizpah which i held on to for many years. We met again after I lied to my parents about winning a contest at work that paid for a flight to Z’s town, and so we met up again. I can still see in full Technicolor that weekend and the moment when, in her parents basement so cold that she had to wear fingerless gloves to type, we sat down together and logged into the Telnet server. She layed the two pieces of the mizpah on the desk and slid them together. Z chatted with her boyfriend at the time and I soon got bored since she was the one I mostly chatted with anyway. After writing that sentence I’m struck at how amazing that weekend was and how much we shared despite it being a purely platonic relationship. But then again I’ve always had more friendships with girls than guys anyway. Guys bore me, generally speaking, and I have little patience or interest in the machismo games. We met once after that, years later, and it was as if we had never parted. We still catch up over chat once a year or so.

For me the world changed one day when I saw a commercial for AOL, one of the first internet providers, and they were talking about the internet and showing pictures ON A COMPUTER SCREEN that came from some other computer. I was enchanted and went on to Telnet to ask how I could get on this internet. I still remember the response that followed. “Lol. You ARE on the internet already.” I could FEEL the paradigm shift occur and over the next year I downloaded Netscape and began to make the internet a daily part of my life. Over the relatively short span of a 20 years the world has changed so much that, when I’m not busy being an active part of it, it boggles my mind. While the kids get to enjoy it and naturally and integrated it into their lives to where they don’t know any different, I was there when the world first changed this way. For me it wasn’t such a cataclysmic change as it may have been for the previous generation because the modern internet merely built on the frame work of what I was used to already. World of Warcraft is ultimately a text based adventure on Telnet in Hi-res.

W

Even among Christian bands my parents were cautions. Anything rock oriented, such as Stryper for instance, or sounded like the lead singer was angry or…just constipated, ie Petra, the viewed with a heavy dose of concern.

The one bright spot in this time period was the day my father got ahold of and forced me to listen to Don Mclean, he of “American Pie” (the amazing song that Madonna defiled with a remake, not the move). It was mind blowing. From there my father moved me into the entire catalog of songs from the soundtrack to the film “American Graffiti”. Such is my legacy.

About that time you would have thought that I would have discovered the Beatles. Alas…..not so much. My first introduction to the Fab Four came in the form of little miss lady B we’ll call her since she might not appreciate being talked about like this.

For the first time in my life, and only time ever, I had the delicious problem of being infatuated with two girls both who seemed to like me a fairly decent amount to make it worth pursuing. I bounced between the two for a while, just hanging out nothing risque…remember sheltered home, trying to make up my mind. I primarily found B entrancing because she was so different from any of the other girls I knew. Of course I only realized that many years later. She was basically the only hippy i’ve ever gotten along with. Her world of mandalas, Nag Champa, henna, scarves, and an open view on the world was simply intoxicating. She lived on a house boat which was about the coolest thing I’d ever heard, and was very into the outdoors. B was, I’m fairly certain, the first person to ever utter the words “What do you mean you’ve never heard the Beatles?”. Hanging out with her on her houseboat she popped in an album and started talking about her ex boyfriend who she was still so very into, but had to move on long distance relationship and all. It must have been “Rubber Soul” because when the song “In my Life” came on she picked up the phone, dialed his number and let it play to the answering machine and repeated the line, afterwards, “I loved you more” and hung up. It was the single most unrestrained, wild thing I’d ever seen anyone do. In between admiration and infatuation I was crushed and moved on. I was easily wounded back in the day and the simplest act held only a single meaning to me. I’ve adapted and moved on, so don’t look at me like that. Ok, moving on.

From there the next incident of Beatles exposure is known in some circles as “The Yellow Submarine Incident”. I know one person in the council has just smiled/laughed/and or snorted.
It was an average day in Sunday school, we were hanging out hopped up on coffee (which was new to me then) and donuts, listening to our very much beloved Sunday school teacher talk when she mentioned the Beatles song “Yellow Submarine” which she somehow connected to scripture. Let me say that the fact that she could tie some scripture to “Yellow Submarine” surely should get her into the Sunday school teacher hall of fame. Most of us in the classroom had apparently never heard the song “Yellow Submarine” and so couldn’t make the connection. So, our dear teacher decides she’s going to teach us “Yellow Submarine”.
It bears repeating….we’re in Sunday school in a small conservative church. Most of our parents have protected us from the Beatles and our teacher bravely, and passionately I might add, decides this is what we need to learn that day.
I’m not sure if there was ever an inquiry or and sort of reprisal, but among the ten or so of us that were there that day she is still our hero. Well, for other stuff, not just for that. So it goes…

After that point I went through kind of ignoring the Beatles. I mean they still weren’t a big deal to me. And then I met Stacey. The only good thing about my two year relationship with her was that she had a two disc set called “The Beatles: Live at the BBC” that I simply devoured.
The first disc on the album was mainly small interviews that bookended the songs. The songs themselves were some of their classics but mostly on the first disc were covers they did of songs that influenced them. Their covers are still, in my mind, some of their best work. The snippets of interviews between revealed them to be just 4 normal guys, not some godlike music super heroes. It also revealed how amazing the Beatles were live. One of the songs the announcer stops bursts in near the end of the song just because he wanted to prove to the people listening that they were really live because they were so spot on to how the recording sounded.
Of all the things that I should have slipped into my boxes when we split, that was at the top of my list. Sadly, I just played it constantly over those two years and was the good guy.

Over the next few years I thought about getting some of their albums and did buy “Magical Mystery Tour”, but was disappointed with it. It didn’t seem to be the best they were capable of. So, not know which albums to buy, I stayed away from them. Until a year or so before my daughter was born and the Beatles album of number one hits came out. I mean how can you go wrong with that. Again, mind blown. I loved that album so much that while Ms. Sweet was pregnant I put my big headphones on her belly and played it on a regular basis for our little fetus. After Isa was born and she’d get all fussy and just pissed at the world I’d turn the cd on and she’d calm down and start smiling. To this day the music of the Beatles still effects her. We heard the song “Never Dance with Another” and she, never having heard that one before, was compelled to try and sing along. It was interesting. She doesn’t do that with any other music.

A few years ago or so Cirque Du Soliel created the show “Love” that used the Beatles as a soundtrack. Instead of just taking the songs as they were they had Giles Martin, son of the original engineer who worked on all the Beatles albums George Martin, and his father go back and remaster, remix and then they started playing with the songs to help them blend together as a whole musical piece. The result was astounding and easily the best Beatles recording. It included songs I’d never heard before and an acoustic version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” that George didn’t think sounded Beatlesy enough. It is such an improvement over the original one. So, I absorbed that.

Just the other day I purchased, as a reward for completing 30 pages of my novel, the game “Rockband: The Beatles”. When it had first come out I rented it unsure of whether or not I wanted to commit to a purchase. Certainly half of it is a game, but the other half of it is a multimedia experience of rare and unseen/unheard materials. Simply astounding. There were songs on there that I was amazed to have never heard before. “Dear Prudence”. I found myself enraptured by that song so much that I sing it to wake my daughter most mornings. Not to mention there is the feeling that you are playing along with the Beatles as they go from “The Cave” to Budokan, to Abbey Road. Silly I’m sure, but fun none the less.

So, what do I mean to say with this list of moments in time when the Beatles seem to pop up? Basically I’ve come to the conclusion, over a few conversations and bottles of wine, that because I came to the Beatles later in life the songs are more important and full of meaning. In a way they’ve popped up in my life when I needed them, their words were sometimes the words I needed to hear and often the words I needed to say. This has been true when I needed to decry a world that doesn’t make sense, I needed to find a way other than the usual to tell my wife I love her, and when I needed to coo my daughter to sleep. When I needed to understand a universal love their words were there as were the actions of George Harrison (who when tensions were at their highest and Ringo nearly left the band he decorated Ringo’s abandoned drum kit with flowers. When Ringo returned he saw that act of love and kindness and decided to stay).
It is a FULL life that they expressed in their music and it took four of them to do it. Honestly, you don’t get much of the same bang for your buck when you buy music from contemporary artists and I wonder why that is. Certainly they were luminaries in the truest sense and it has been a pleasure to live in a world that knows them so well.

W