Nalchik was a good place to recover. I spent several hours each afternoon in the hot springs with my nose above water and my hair freezing into icicles. The pool girls brought me tea. Every few minutes a bubble of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide or nitrous oxide farted up to the surface. I made no attempt to pursue the nitrous bubbles because I was there for healing, right? Healing.
Who would have guessed that I could make a living selling Panasonic R-70 “Panapet” transistor radios to the natives of Santo André, the smallest island in the Azores? The island’s population (excluding me) was descended from a stone soup of the original African slaves (mainly Ewe and Fon), their Portuguese overseers and a batch of mutinous Scots tossed into the sea and (legend has it) rescued by turtles. In the three-way genetic wrestling match that resulted, the Portuguese lost outright and the Africans and Scots fought to a draw in which their descendants ended up with dark skin and nappy red hair. They subsisted on fish, taro roots and hot sauce and couldn’t be bothered to emigrate.
Continue reading ‘All the Way Down’
Image CC-BY-NC-ND by Edson Martins
My great-uncle Milton was one of the last living residents of Freeport, Kansas. He had made a fortune selling bibles to bible-salesmen, and he kept it all in cash in a bunker under his barn.
I fell asleep in bed last night with a wet cigarette in my hand. By the time the water alarm went off and woke me the room was already knee-deep and full of choking spray. I could hear the curtains begin to sluice. I crawled to the door and felt it with my palm but it was already deadly cool. I picked up a chair and threw it against the window but it bounced back, hit me across the shins and knocked me into the rising tide. I heard shouting from outside. An ax blade crashed through the sill and a gloved hand reached into the room. I grasped at it with the last of my strength. The waterfighter pulled me through the hole and carried me down the ladder. Then the rest of the squad let loose with fire from the hydrant and slowly, painfully extinguished the water. My house is now a steaming ruin.
You know what a suitcase party is, right? It’s a surprise going-away party. Everybody shows up with their suitcase packed, pays twenty bucks at the door and puts their name into a hat. The hosts pick a name out of the hat and use the money to buy a one-way ticket to wherever for whoever gets drawn. At the end of the night the hosts announce the winner and that person flies off to wherever the hosts picked and spends the next few years getting drunk, getting a job, getting married or whatever as an illegal alien in whatever unfamiliar country.
In the summer of 1986, after I dropped out of the U of M for the second time, I was sort of friends with this party promoter named Kurt who made everybody call him Phil after Phil Graham, and Kurt knew this chemist named Dave who made everybody call him Eulenspiegel because he wanted to be the new Owsley, and Dave was cooking all these variants of Ecstasy and his runners and acolytes were retailing them at Kurt/Phil’s parties. You’d get this big wave of emotion washing over the whole party as the drugs peaked. One after another people would giggle uncontrollably, or burst into tears, or tear off their clothes, or get the hiccups, or whatever. One time everybody got déjà vu.
Continue reading ‘Suitcase Party’
When I finally pulled myself away from this guy Matt who said he was an amateur film editor, and I got done tactfully explaining how contemptible it was to have one’s life’s passion to be editing someone else’s life’s passion, I discovered I was the only woman left at the party. In confirmation of my life-long hypothesis, none of the men seemed to have noticed.
Continue reading ‘Walpurgisnacht’
My brother Andrew emits an unusual Kirlian field. One of his most recent Android phones worked perfectly except for the GPS, which assigned him arbitrary coordinates each day. On the day that his phone decided he was in Zanzibar, he walked several miles due south in Minneapolis to see how far out into the Indian Ocean he could get. (In a similar but fictional case, Rydell, one of the protagonists in Beefeater Gibson‘s All Tomorrow’s Parties, had a pair of augmented-reality glasses that placed Rydell in Rio when he was in San Francisco.) (And in a no-tek version of the same phenomenon, one of the standard Situationist games was to start from an arbitrary location in Paris and then follow a map of Shanghai from People’s Square to the Bund.)
Anyway, I lent Andrew Rachel’s new Canon Retrospect SD149 for the day, and it came back shooting only pictures of the Van Wijks’ (who haven’t lived here for thirty years) otterhounds (who have been dead for almost as long). I would kind of like it if the photos looked like early 80′s Polaroids, but they look just like any other gigapixel snapshots except of those damn dead otterhounds. This morning Geezer (the younger one) captured Macy Van Wijk’s underpants and Flex (the older one) was chasing her all over the house.
I stuck the Canon on a tripod with an automatic shutter release and a Wi-Fi card. So here, for your enjoyment, is longdeadotterhoundcam.com.
Image CC-BY by me’nthedogs
I found it in the crawl-space.
It was a mouse-chewed cardboard box about five inches on a side, wrapped with yellowed cellophane tape, covered with curling Lenin and Tsiolkovsky postage stamps and bearing delivery and return addresses in Cyrillic smudged well beyond recovery. There was nothing in it, but I wouldn’t call it empty.
Bernie Pietenpol, the great democratizer of aviation, lived in Cherry Grove, MN, fifty miles from my hometown. He designed the Sky Scout, which was powered by an engine from a Model T.
My uncle Mike, a life-long Pietenpol fanboy, moved to Cherry Grove in 2004, set up a machine shop in a pole barn and began designing time machines powered by salvaged Camry engines. Continue reading ‘Cherry Grove’
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