Washing the Endtimes El Camino, as the Hours Grow Short.

 

"Sic Transit Mundus"

"So Passes the World"

The El Camino is freshly bathed. It seems to be running fine, maybe a little too much timing..It was good for a 40 foot scratch on the pavement in front of the house. All is ready. as the golden idol of the evil orange king has been erected in Florida.  Gasoline approaches $7.00 a gallon. Food is becoming scarce. Blatant racism is on the rise. Trump is ravenous. UFO files are being released. The Mariners are mediocre again. The sign begin to align and the hour of the El Camino of Armageddon nears.The foolish old man who tends the El Camino, the un-amazing idiot wizard, has covered it in Martian Sanskrit as was foretold by the ancient ones. Will the last of the dinosaurs be called into service? Is it needed to transcend reality?  Or will it just remain in it's barn?

Thoughts on my "Once -A-Decade" Re-Reading of my Favorite Pulp Science Fiction Novel "The Sirens of Titan" by KV

I first read this book when I was probably fourteen or fifteen, at the suggestion of my brother. Instantly , I felt I had found some sort of pathway in the darkness that I could follow. Weird, funny iconoclastic and schlocky fun. "The Sirens of Titan" became a very important guide book to me, which is strange because ultimately it is just classic American paperback pulp of the 1950s.  I don't know how many times I have read this book. Twelve times? I read it  about every ten years now but when I was young it was always on my reading list or nightstand. "The Sirens of Titan" is really everything I ever wanted in a book; lurid sci-fi, memorable and weird characters that are half Twilight Zone comic book and half heros of a Greek tragedy. Weirdos, Invasion from Mars, "Kazak' the hound of space, the Chrono Synclastic Infundibulum, a lonely Alien from Tralfamadore waiting for spare parts for his saucer. Vonnegut was a huge influence on my life in High School and College, through probably his novel "Slapstick". After that he was just making house payments and telling interesting stories at lunch counters to who ever was listening. Sirens of Titan was always my favorite. It is truest to the Kilgore Trout world KV created and still very moving for me. The moral at the end is that we are all used to some end by an indifferent universe, but at least we are useful. The worst thing imaginable is to never be used at all.

When I was a young man, I wanted to write books like this. I wanted to have these images flow out of me into others. As a crumbling husk of an old man I read this book wistfully and wonder what happened. Re-reading this in my sixties, on vacation to France, it pushed all the same buttons as it did to the shy, fourteen year old in his bedroom in Redmond, WA, but instead of laying out a dazzling map to the future, it showed a chart of a small, now abandoned, theme park that I didn't build. As with everything in this stretch of life, regret and disappointment hide behind every tree and bush.

Once again, the Theme Park of our Ancestors barely noticed my Pilgrimage.

 

My favorite person and I went to Scotland, England and France. It was swell. Many good times. 

The Town.

Thurber, Montana...

    Thurber has a population of roughly two hundred. Most of the buildings in the small downtown are old, from the 1890s or early 1900’s, and while updated, their charm is intact.  A block of brick two story buildings, squat next to the main street, (actually Montana Highway 51, Thurber's connection to the rest of the world) their store fronts are mostly silent. Dean’s Cafe and Lounge still manages to open for the lunch crowd and if there is interest, for happy hour. The city hall/police station is newer, probably 1930’s and sits squat in it’s utilitarian pride across the road from the 1960’s interloper, the Food Giant grocery store with it’s garish lights and signs. At the end of the block is the heretic- a 1980-’s KFC. The main economic powerhouse of the community sits down by the train tracks, - Superior Knob and Hinge- two old, hulking red brick warehouse and factory buildings, smokestacks and with commerce happening, trucks loading. Behind Superior Knob and Hinge is a chaotic auto wrecking yard and homeless encampment. A too idyllic small church sits downtown off an alley. Somber old homes huddle conspiratorially up the hill. A water tower declares the town's name and zipcode. A train station constructed by a dead dad completes downtown. A vertical cliff leads up Mount Wyola, covered in brush and trees, and violated by a train tunnel. Thurber really is a place to me. And that’s a quandary.... the town of Thurber, Montana does not exist. 

    Sometimes I wish it did, so I could dramatically leave it behind, with all it’s terrible beauty and hard fought life lessons, taught by tough but fair, larger than life characters of the over ripe American West. I wish I could say I came from there, and fled in my late adolescence in a stolen Buick Riviera and never looked back, but I didn’t. I invented it, like a fictional city in a novel, except Thurber is 1/87th scale plastic. Thurber is an HO Scale model railroad town that has haunted me, in several incarnations, for over fifty years. It is the place I wish I had grown up in. It is the place I wish I could leave, but instead it seems it is the to where I have returned, in the sunset of my life, to make some kind of amends. Its difficult to leave the small minded, shitty, little town you imagined that you outgrew, when it can stay dormant in an actual physical box in your attic for over 20 years and emerge directly into your frontal lobes like a hit of crystal Meth.

I brought most of it down from the Siberian gulag of my attic in my 64^th year of my existence, during the second reign of the mad orange King. I felt very keenly, the need for the reassurance and peace of my old town. In as much as I have invented myself as an adult, I guess, I really feel like I am from Thurber, MT. How I got to this point is a depressing short story in itself. As a lonely, weird and creative kid, suffering the loss of a parent, model railroading saved me.  As an adolescent not fitting in it was a crutch that made me feel like I was part of something.   Then as a new father, terrified of the future and my responsibilities, it was the building of a safe community for me and my family, if only in miniature. Now, hopefully as an old man watching the real world start to burn at the edges, it may be an escape. The total invention of a community that is in some ways perfect and accepting, is also ultimately a 3-d miniature rorschach test of your needs and desires, and probably about your inherent and undiscussed bias. It’s a hobby with a minefield attached.

As I look out over this literally small town, that I have rearranged a hundred times like any good civil engineer and obsessive fiddler, I have both a quiet satisfaction in my home town and a strange contempt for it, and myself for not engaging in the real world. Its a problem. Best to give you the whole history here. I grew up in the late sixties and early seventies, semi-rural. Our house was down a quarter mile driveway and fairly isolated. My siblings were all older, the next older than me by eight years, I was the youngest and a mistake, but much loved. I had no nearby friends to play with, so I developed weird obsessions. I studied the US Presidents. I made elaborate paper sculptures of them and other famous Americans (don’t call them “dolls”-my artistic bent made me susceptible to being called “faggot”, a terrifying moniker for the era, more on that later). I washed out of the Cub Scouts due to inherent awkwardness (possibly laziness as well). Little league was interesting but I was the kid picked last on any sport. Being sort of strange and emotional, I was a challenge to my parents who probably hoped they were past that difficult part of child rearing before I arrived. Maybe as therapy, my Dad got me interested in model railroading. I think he really wanted to build a full on HO Scale rail road but needed his 10 year old son as a beard, or possibly he just saw me flailing socially and decided to do something, but my hobby was born. We collected train cars and engines, experimented with track layouts on our pool table, and built models together. It was a great time for me. My dad was a fun adult to be around. We decided to build on a standard 4’x8’ sheet of plywood in the “REC room” of our basement. About a year into the build, my dad died. Eleven years old, lost and grieving, I carried on. The layout exploded to 11 feet x 5 feet. When we moved after dad died, we had to find a house big enough for the “damn train set.” We moved to a suburban neighborhood and my train became another weird millstone around the neck of an uncoordinated and mercurial nerd. Hobby shops were my happy place. My town was built and torn apart. I would go though periods of intense involvement working on it, followed by months of trying to pretend I never heard of it, ashamed that I had spent so much time on it. The new friends I made thought it briefly pretty cool and then really nerdy, and then it would quickly become a joke or insult. Looking back, my train and town was like a beloved dog that I would kick until it ran off, only for me to welcome it home again, with it willing to take me back without reservations. The train went into storage and the main layout was destroyed when I was in college. Boxes of ‘train stuff” followed me into marriage, stacked in storage units and eventually our basement. After the birth of our first son, terrified of the future,  the awkward kid I once was demanded his town back. I rebuild Thurber in my basement, better than ever. I realized something by then, what this hobby was and wasn’t and what it meant to me.

My college degree is in Film and Television. Orson Welles memorably called movies “the biggest electric train set any boy ever had.” Keith, a filmmaker friend, actually made a short film (partially inspired I think by my post fatherhood train layout) about two men who worked different shifts at a hobby shop, with an in house train set,  with conflicting views of their ideal town they wanted to live in.  One man had very staid conservative views (much like my town) and one had wild, fairly hilarious views and they were constantly changing the layout to suit themselves. Curiously it prophetically predicts the Red-Blue divide of America by at least a decade. Filmmaking is a very similar creative world making, though very much a collaborative and very expensive one. My wife Laurie and I  made a feature film “Milk of Amnesia“ before the post natal train set. It was a semi failure that lead to much self examination and some regret. The need to re-create the world to control perfectly instead of repairing or improving some small piece of the tangible, flawed, uncontrollable real world is ultimately escapism as cure for isolation. I still love films, and thought that in my imminent retirement I would again direct a feature but the expense and relative epic grandeur of film making in comparison to the infinitesimal town of Thurber makes me hesitate. Never say never, Who would have guessed I would have drug my childhood down from the attic? A movie is immersive in ways trains can never be but its hard to live in a movie they way you can inhabit a train set. There was a classic Twilight Zone episode where a man and a woman wake up in a town occupied by lifeless manikins and staged perfect houses with a self driving train circling the town. Of course they are earthlings captured to be in an alien child’s train set. Same idyllic perfection and unchallenged patriarchal values on display. 

The 1950’s post war world that permeates Thurber and most layouts and popular culture depictions of train sets, not unlike the Andy Hardy white bread depictions of hometowns in the movies of the 1930’s to 1960’s.  My inclusion of the Food Giant, KFC and the wrecking yard is a reminder of practical concerns and imperfection. The homeless encampment is an antiseptic reminder of an economic underclass. In reality, a town in Montana of Thurber’s size and demographic would be overwhelmingly Trumpian Fascist, potentially toxically racist and the very economy I have constructed would have withered and died, and been replaced by Walmart and opioid addiction a generation ago. I still feel drawn to the perfection of the image even though I know its a Trump damaged, trickle down nightmare in reality. I should let it go but can’t. My most internally discussed building in Thurber is the church. An overly perfect stone chapel which would look comfortable in New England, or OLD England for that matter, it seems out of place and time even for the outdated, unreal timeline of imaginary Thurber, yet... I can’t let it go either. Its off the main street nestled in trees, I even tried shortening its too tall steeple but it still imposes it spell over the town. I feel like there must be some redeemable soul to this world view left behind by my grandparents. The more damaged real world becomes, makes letting go of the perfect, miniature, imagined one impossible.

The name “Thurber” comes from a friend of my dad, Roy Thurber, a large, chain smoking, out spoken man with a buzz cut, thick black rimmed eyeglasses and was the first person to give me an actual dollar bill for my birthday. Roy and his wife Louise were regular visitors to our house. My dad thought Roy was hilarious. Roy and my dad were both WWII veterans and much of their conversation was about that time of their young lives. I remember Roy and my dad cleaning handguns at the kitchen table. Later I found out that visiting my parents was pretty much the entirety of Roy and Louise social life. Roy seemed like a fine specimen of vanishing American to name an imaginary village after. I think he would have been pleased. As for Montana, I am a proud graduate of Montana State University the only film school in America where you can minor in horse shoeing. Montana of the 1980s seemed fairly magical, and filled with smart funny people. Now it seems to be full of angry people who blame a litany of others for their problems while their state has been parceled into vacation homes for costal elites. Where else could Thurber have been?

My interest in miniatures actually predates my interest in model railroading. My parents and grandparents would take me to the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle once a year or so. It’s a great museum, filled with oddities and strange exhibits. One corner had the most amazing doll house with the most anal compulsive recreation of reality I have ever seen. It was like a fever dream. There were mercifully no dolls in evidence, jut a two story, open walled, turn of the century mansion with exquisite, perfect miniature furniture and furnishings. The absolute and precise scale and functionality of the furniture and the table ware and the linens was mind blowing. Even thinking about it now, fifty five or so years later it captures my imagination. It was amazing, and I would always spend much of my visit to the museum gawking at it instead of the exhibits on lumber mills or famous local sports stars of the past. However I knew it was wise not to linger, and leave before I was missed. Even as a small child I was careful not to show too much interest, as it was a “doll house” and the inevitable label of faggot or sissy lay like an open bear trap nearby. I remember that feeling with great sadness now, knowing that bullies have made so many lives unlivable, sometimes through nothing more than name calling. Other kids had it worse and I do not want equate my mild terror at being labeled with the shocking treatment I watched kids endure in those days. I sincerely hope the victims found their own imaginary towns.

I have long been drawn to absorbing hobbies that require commitment to building something, and once having it presentable and reasonably perfected, I let it sit as some kind of totem. With the achievement done I loved to just look back at it and not touch it again. Even though I am just a noise maker on a guitar, I made two electric guitars that sit around catching dust (they were a gas to build, and sound great.) In my driveway sits a pretty nice 1981 Chevy El Camino, with a very interesting art paint job. It runs great and I could tinker on it endlessly but it sits because it reached it’s hobby plateau and because gas is approaching $6 a gallon. My most rewarding artistic endeavor by far is my painting. Untrained and pretty much devoid of obvious natural talent, I have been painting for the better part of forty years. It too however is a victim of, once it’s painted, it goes on the pile and is never seen again. Trains seem almost like a better bet for satisfaction.

I do have a confession. While seeing the low tech, post industrial vision of a tiny locomotive hauling box cars in circles does inspire some kind of strange glee in me, (echoing the neanderthal burn outs with my El Camino,) its the civil engineering and creation of the town that's the thing for me. Its admittedly a sacrilege. The town is really supposed to be the supporting player, in service of the small electric marvels on the tracks. But the ghost of the Museum of History and Industry dollhouse feebly makes itself clear. It’s like only enjoying baseball for the uniforms. This time I am not spending much time on the intricate track layouts, basically it’s going to be all Thurber.

Creating a time warp city, in a bubble is probably weird. The strange escapist vibe is undeniable, but also very attractive. It’s a place you can fully understand and control. All the variables and uncertainties are yours to control. It can be any era or temperament. I think in my town it’s 1979 and its mid May.  I have picked the house I would live in. I know that would go to Dean’s Cafe for happy hour. I would drive the 1955 green Ford pickup. My life would have a pleasing beginning, middle and end. Is that so wrong? My friend John had an intricate fantasy life in the years after his wife Lorraine died. John went through a world building fantasy involving the 1950’s actress Beverly Garland and the almost forgotten TV show “Decoy: Police Woman” from 1957-58. Decoy was shot on location in New York, where John is from. John would spend hours on Google maps searching out the locations of each shot. He developed a character for himself (an Asian American Police Photographer) and a relationship with Beverly Garland’s character. His fantasy, was intricate and frankly, sort of heartbreaking. It helped get him through a rough time. It’s not so weird to retreat into a world that you can control the wild variables of life. It’s possibly even helpful. I took control of Thurber and turned a 1920’s brick building into the ”Manchurian Dragon” Chinese Restaurant and Jazz Club- a cool hipster dive bar for John ( I told him Beverly Garland could be the bartender.) Dean’s Cafe is inadvertently named for my brother, who’s name I could spell from leftover signage letters. I named the wrecking yard “Wild Bill’s” after my other brother. My wife has a cool thrift shop downtown. I am adapting the town to hold my real people. Hey, if I gotta live there…

As part of the Rorshacht test, what do you do if the world is small minded, lacks diversity and plays up staid conservative values that you don’t actually necessarily still embrace? The town I am building reminds me of the film “Forrest Gump”, the virtues of being stupid, accepting your place and ultimately not making waves will bring happiness. Not what I would really choose if I were the one making the plan. Sometimes, it plainly feels like I am not. Spending hours in the late afternoon in the studio, it’s easy to get depressed (God, I hope this is not “sundowning” yet,”) and feel like it is not turning out to my expectations, that it is spiraling out of control, into the strange mutant tiny tumor that will drag you down. Then you find a better spot for the Food Giant and your mood brightens like you had found a new vaccine for polio.

Still, I find myself, at times, embarrassed by my exuberance at the project; like I am dressing BRATZ dolls at the apocalypse. I will go up to the train set, four and five times a day and “putter” productively for an hour at a time and every time I will reach a maximum tolerance and flee quickly, like I was exposed to radioactivity. It is possible that I am still channeling the shame of my youth for my hobby, or that I am some how connected to my father’s unfinished business with it, I don’t know. Something about it, makes me feel very dislocated from reality, as I very perfunctorily add new features to Thurber.. It hurts a little. It feels vaguely like looking at porn or something, a highly forbidden thing that I need to apologize for, profusely. A frivolous idiocy. I sent a photo of “Wild Bill’s Auto Salvage” to my brother, and he immediately understood and appreciated his placement. He, being a Bernie bro, I added a “Fuck Trump-make America normal again“ banner to his sign, but I couldn’t help wondering how the other residents of Thurber might react. I am 64 years old, I am long past giving a goddamn shit what other people think, but in Thurber...It might be different. What might imaginary people think? Have I brought the real world crashing into Eden? Is that a bad thing, or is that exactly what is missing?

My concerns about my obsession so far are outweighed but the sheer joy the craft has brought me. That can’t be bad right? Well, maybe.  You probably have thought, “oh, this old guy has a retro weird hobby, and that’s nice in a ‘Parade Magazine’ kind of way’” but I kind of feel that doesn’t tell the whole story. I feel both guilty and in a hurry to get this finished. It’s like I am not fully in charge. My son asked me today how things were going in the studio and I told him it was like laying in the fetal position and screaming. I feel in a rush. Nothing is as perfect as I would like but I can’t stop myself from pushing on. My history has inertia. The image of my dad patiently helping his awkward youngest son with a train set haunts me like no imaginary town could ever could. It’s a growing singular obsession, with the requisite perfectionism and frustrations but, more importantly,  it is an opportunity to complete a task started when I was 10, and I don’t want to make it a crisis. I have moved the town, not yet a fully functional layout, up to my tiny painting studio, away from my wife and family, where it somehow feels less of a burden to normal family life and hopefully not like hiding bottles of liquor to an alcoholic. I am really enjoying my time with it. I am fully aware that I am creating an unattainable fantasy, like a caterpillar creates a cocoon. That might be unhealthy, it also might save me, the way it did in my childhood.  

I am not from Thurber, MT.

Thurber, MT is from me.

It all gets worse.

 Epstein. The carnival of awfulness. I have a very hard time understanding how it all got so...horrible. I keep adding to this nightmare painting. Now featuring Pam Bondi eating the redacted Epstein docs. What larks!

Oh yeah. 2025 Burning Elf....

In happier times...

The Startling Descent Into Nightmare

With the speed of an automobile crash, and the slow motion that follows such trauma, we have found ourselves being swallowed whole by the thick, addled morons and idiots that have always been here with us. We should have seen this coming but didn't want to admit it. The same fools who ran the Confederacy and the 3rd Reich are here again for another act. It's here now and we will have to fight it. Victory is not guaranteed. How I hate this timeline.

Koa, Beloved Wonder Cat

  

    Koa, the strange wanderer that chose our family, moved in to our home and made it his kingdom, has left us. Living in our front yard (or so we thought) in 2016, Koa became legally part of our family in 2017, when the family across the street gave him up to us. They were a recently blended family with a new dog and Koa would have none of that. He removed himself to our flower bed where we called him "Dirt Cat" and thought him a skinny stray. When we had an old couch on the back porch covered in a tarp, he made that his home base. We became friends and began feeding him, and he would graciously give and accept affection. After we took him to the vet for injuries from a fight, we learned his name and where he was from. They were very nice people and were embarrassed about his plight, and when we asked if we could keep him they were immediately receptive and appreciative. His name "Koa" was for a striped Hawaiian wood which he could abstractly be said to resemble in his gray and black stripes. He quickly became the center and focus of our lives, with a clear and interesting personality, a very loving nature and frankly high intelligence and communication skills.  I have never seen a cat so capable of telling you what he wanted, it was like talking with a non English speaking child, he let you know fairly clearly what he wanted, sometimes seemingly waiting for you to catch up with his clear commands. All four of us became close personal friends with Koa, who was the #3 cat in our herd to start, but quickly rose to outshine the geriatric orange cat brothers Yugi and Rufus. In comparison, he was comparatively exotic to the older cats as he was fully 'indoor-outdoor". While Rufus and Yugi were stuck inside for their entire lives, he roamed the neighborhood at night, occasionally getting into scrapes  and having carnivore adventures that he left on the doormat for us be astonished by. Yugi died from a heart attack (we think) and Rufus became lost without his brother, in kitty dementia and loneliness. Koa stepped in to remind him of what kind of animal he was  with the occasional head lick and platonic snuggle. They were friends at arm's length, which was a theme for Koa, as his favorite thing in the world was to sleep on his chosen human's arms or hands. We will remember his daily trips to our gravel driveway, turning around insistently to guarantee humans were obediently following, for him to fall dramatically on his back to writhe like a larval grub, waiting for some one to rub his belly. We called this "grubbing" and it became a household verb. Throughout his tenure as top cat in our home, his independence and personality shown through any demands for domesticity.  He slept outside on most nights, preferring a padded (later heated) cabin we built on an outside deck chair with old blankets and a plastic BBQ cover. His cabin was waterproofed and fully cozy, and he ruled from his throne with a satisfied smile. He was a great cat. A great friend and loyal family member. As the years rolled on, he retained his defiant but loving personality but became a little more retiring, sleeping inside after a run in with raccoons, and the loss of his hearing. He may even have become completely deaf as he didn't seem to respond to noise anymore, his kidneys gave him some trouble but still he prowled our yard with authority of a lion. He began to yowl on the porch in the sunshine some days, maybe in happiness, or maybe asking one of his human pets to join him for a nap.

    As I write this, (through more tears than I can remember for some time), it is important for me to say that Koa became the absolute best animal friend I have or probably will ever have. I really felt that he understood and loved me. His loss is more keenly felt than I could have imagined. We spent our mornings on the back porch together, we had long, what felt like conversations, which I know were really more just companional monologues listened to by a lovely cat who knew how to hug your arm. Koa was the only animal that  I was in daily contact with who was never a pet; he was an equal who happened to live in our house on his terms. By choosing us it was implicit that he could also choose somewhere else should he have wanted. He wanted us.  His loss is more like a very close friend or blood relative rather than a subtraction of livestock. I am proud that at his passing, aided and abetted by me, who didn’t wish to see the brave feline pirate of 22nd Ave Sw reduced to a drug dependent, mangled caricature of a house cat; he was brave and fearless. As with many beings with huge hearts, his physical heart failed him. Congestive heart failure was his downfall.  He now sleeps with the worms, in kitty Valhalla where someday he and I will sit together again, on the ethereal couch and talk and nap in a sunbeam. My heart is sore and empty but embraces the love he left behind. I love you Koa: good night friend. None of us are far behind…

Downwards and Further into the Breach.

 

The weirdness continues unabated and we have begun the spiral of despair.  Behold, my painting, "Transfiguration" I don't find this fun to look at but it was cathartic to paint. 

Someday this will be over, right?

Vashon Island Film Festival: Sort of like your next door neighbor runs your film in his backyard.

 Milk of Amnesia runs at 10:00 AM on a Sunday morning. Well, it runs anyway.

Broken Toolbox Drawer.

 I don't sleep well. I wake up and lay in bed for hours, mainly worrying about my kids and about politics and often about small meaningless things that during daylight hours I would laugh at their insignificance. In additive, I get less sleep than I should. It makes for  groggy days with poor decision making skills. Today, I took an hour long nap at 10:00AM. This also creates a fertile environment for depression, and anxiety. i was getting something out of my toolbox drawer this morning, and the drawer jammed, it would not close. They are narrow drawers and the lower drawer's  contents (chisels in this case) can shift and stop the upper from being pushed in.  In my sleep deprived state, I could not figure the problem out and while if  I thought about it, there were several things I should have done to attempt to clear the blockage. I didn't.  In a fit of cloudy thinking and negative impulse control, I destroyed it and yanked the stuck drawer out by the roots. A flashlight and a screwdriver would have revealed a chisel handle had popped up and blocked the upper drawer. The toolbox is not an heirloom or that important to me, but my lack of mental problem solving is. I don't know where this will take me but it makes me sad.

The real matter at hand is not a broken tool box drawer, it's much more than that. I am to turn sixty four next week and the overwhelming feeling is that I have missed the target and sailed far out into the stratosphere. As long as I can remember I have felt like I was outside watching the real party take place from the window on the sidewalk. Everything was so close but not for me. I can not go back and slightly correct my trajectory or when or if the shot was taken, I can only watch as the intended target drifts ever farther away. I am not an idiot, I know I have it good, but it is bittersweet to look back with regret.

Another Requiem for a Friend. Good Bye Erick

     I have known Erick Larson for probably thirty years. We worked together at Alpha Cine Lab, a motion picture film processing lab (and dysfunctional family), and again at the also strange and endlessly creative American Production Services (later Victory Studios). While we were never close friends, we always checked in with one another with psychotronic film suggestions and various cinema related discussions. We knew many people in common and Erick was always good for an interesting perspective and a encyclopedic knowledge of film. He and Mike Phelps developed and ran a well known film series, "Shining Moment" that brought the obscure and the wonderful to many screens in the Seattle area. Erick had a wry sense of humor and a very temperate personality. It was easy to talk to Erick Larson, he was good people.

    In one of the hard to understand challenges that the universe seems to throw arbitrarily at its residents,  Erick developed Multiple Sclerosis. Like his rugged Nordic Viking ancestors, Erick doggedly went about his life, determined to continue his life's work. He hung on, living independently in his cool  Belltown apartment, working, and running films for appreciative audiences. One by one, gravity and his body forced him to give up things he loved, one by one.  His girlfriend Dee, who is a kind and old soul, stood by his side throughout, as his life changed. It was unfair and disappointing to watch. When he could, he kept his even Erick temperament, but I am sure it was brutal to experience. Much happened to him in the last few years but, to be concise, eventually it just got difficult. May 8th, 2025  he let go.

    My last few visits with Erick, were in the hospital and at the Kline Galland home. Because I am a superficial person we mostly talked about movies and the old topics we knew from many drop ins to his office at Victory. We watched  "Die Hard 2" on the hospital tv making Bruce Willis jokes. He seemed to be letting go even then, in retrospect, but he still enjoyed even a bad film. The next time I saw him was May 7th, he was at Kline Galland home, where he had lived. He was unresponsive but the TV was on the movie channel, an awful 1965 Jimmy Stewart film, "Letter To Brigitte ". I gave him a running play by play monologue on how bad Jimmy Stewart's hair piece was, and a critical review of Billy Mumy and Brigitte Bardot. Like I said, when faced with mortality, the best I can do is superficial movie jokes. Dee came in the room and he lit up. It's good to know, that when faced with your final passage over the bridge, love is the last thing you know.

    Erick, you really are good people. See you down the road.

Bonfire for a friend

    On March 21st 2011 a self declared Christian Prophet named Harold Camping declared the world would end. Based on his personal bible study and some kind of magical numerology Harold Camping came up with this date, that interestingly coincided with the Jewish holiday of Lag baOmer.  Lag baOmer celebrates the end of a horrible plague that killed many students of Rabbi Akiva and memorializes their loss but also the survival of the living and great teachers, so it's a little sad and a little relief and waking up from a sorrowful time.  Not being Jewish, that is probably a very poor explanation of someone else's holiday- please forgive my reader's digesting of an important commemoration day. Traditionally it is celebrated with bonfires. On March 21, 2011 I had a celebratory bonfire to mark Harold Camping's arithmetic error and our survival. It rained but it was very cathartic.  It really appealed to me to celebrate both survival and the great teachers who have come into our lives. I also like to burn stuff.  Lag baOmer for 2025 was a couple weeks ago on March 15, 2025, so I missed it.

    A couple days ago I found out my college friend, and kind, generous, decent human being, Jerry Weible was in the ICU in Tacoma waiting for a heart transplant.  It is one of those often repeated but very true cliches that people with the biggest hearts are the one who are cursed with this sort of malady. Shocking, because while I knew he had heart issues in the past, he and the equally wonderful Lynn had been at our house a month or so ago and everything seemed great. I gave them one of my favorite paintings (see above photo). Lynn made an incredible coffee cake. All was right in the world. Jerry had been a martial arts instructor, and was in excellent health in his youth, so such betrayal of his physical body is especially unfair. He is, right now, as I write this in surgery- not transplant, but a preliminary surgery that will put in a pump system to get him through until a heart is available. My dad died in heart surgery when I was 10. I don't take such things lightly. 

    I declare a Lag baOmer for my friend Jerry. (I know that that isn't the way it works but...) I am going outside and starting a bonfire, hopefully in celebration of survival, possibly in memorial, but also in recognition of a good friend who is also a kind of teacher, a person I admire and who has helped me be a better person. Unironically Jerry: thoughts and prayers.

    Addendum: Strangely the fire seemed hard to light and harder to keep lit. Usually my fires are pretty much rip snorting  maelstroms, but this was not; smokey and low burning, wet wood and unenthusiastic flames. I don't know if that bodes well or ill or indifferent. I finally put it out at 2:29 PM. At 6:30 PM we heard from Lynn that Jerry had come through pretty well and was doing fine.

Oh yeah..Burning Elf 2024 happened...

    Another fine Burning Elf was had on December 30th,k 2024. Well attended, and our liquor cabinet depleted, many humans wished for and hoped to fully forget many things. The elf bore a slight resemblance to Elon Musk.

The Waking Nightmare of the New Normal

 

   I try very hard to not consume corporate news, or off brand internet news or too much sub-reddit conspiracy drivel, but it's no use: the Tangerine Burlesconi still exists and he is president of the USA and we are heading for the cliff with vacant stares and mouths agape. The idiotic, anachronistic uniquely American two month delay between election and inauguration was like a shot of novacaine to the brain: it couldn't be that bad, could it? It could. It is. It will be. My efete, useless defense to the Trumpanze Term #1 was to make and remake this sign which, was in turn, painted out and then torn down by Trumpinistas. Sadly, the message stays the same. More sadly, it seems that this carnival ride will be more dangerous than the first and the circus may burn to the ground before the clown can exit. 

Scotland with Curmudgeon

 Spent 2 weeks in Scotland, probably the closest thing my people have to an ancestral family homeland. I went with my 73 year old brother Bill, who had not left Washington state in many years and had never been to Europe ever. It was pretty great.  Of course  Trump was nicked in an assassination attempt, Biden dropped out and Kamala Harris-mania began while we were touristing.  It will be well remembered . I did bring home a case of Scottish variant Covid that spread through my house upon my return.

Rolf is Renewed. I am Mortal.

    

Some vandal jackass thought Rolf should have sharpie colored shades. It's fine. It means it is considered an established part of the neighborhood, that needs to be rebelled from.

Lars Fujikawa, in his desperate confinement due to his spiralling ailments had me and my fine sons repair the ROLF NESLUND MEMORIAL in the tiny, almost non existent Pigeon Point Gateway Park. His statue had been stolen for the second time and his plinth cracked and made useless. I made use of the old concrete base of the original post and poured a 200lb base with a 3" concrete infused steel post and built a (very ugly ) masonry column. I did learn not to fill masonry with cement until the masonry has properly set, which any special needs child of 4 could have told me. A new and quite attractive head was cast at the cost of the original mold which finally succumbed to age and over use. In the end Rolf was finished and secure. This is the kind of thing that both invigorates me and also makes me question my motives and life decisions.

As a personal side note, on my 63rd birthday (how did that happen?) I was walking to a neighbor's to pick up the ROLF plaque and I had an "event" where in I almost passed out. Having never fainted in my life, it was fascinating ; everything got dark around the edge of my vision and reduced to a tunnel like matte. I remember thinking, "oh, I am going to sleep now..." and then my legs fell out from under me. I caught myself and never hit the pavement but was on the way.  Atrial Fibrillation? Head rush with too much caffeine? Evil spirits and dark humors? Being a complete idiot I shook it off and finished the plaque project and then went home where a nice telephone nurse and my beloved Laurie got me to go to the emergency room. Not the bad stuff- no heart attack or stroke yet, but  I need to see a cardiologist. It sort of happened (with variations,) again the next day. 

Being old sucks. 

Civilization's Nite Lite in a Grim, Dark Room

 Laurie and I went to the Seattle Symphony today. We heard Bach's "Goldberg Variations" played by Vikingur Olaffson. It was very moving. It was inspiring and hopeful. It was beautiful. I kept thinking it was like the night light I had as a child that when I was afraid I would look at and remember that as long as the light was still on, I was and would be okay. Art and things like the symphony still operating are like that to me. I am starting to feel old, that the center will not hold. I take afternoon naps.  My joints and neck hurt for no reason. I have very little work. The last act begins. That is why something like a symphony concert can become such an amazing afternoon for an old man.

...Of course for every positive moment there is a moment of chaos. Laurie and I saw a downtown tweaker strip his clothes off and walk down 2nd Ave fully bare ass naked. It is a sad and beautiful world,

The Theme Park of Your Ancestors Beckons (and is totally indifferent)

     My beloved and I went to France-Holland-Germany (in EUROPE).  It was swell. I am unable at this time to speak anything but junior high level English so my communication with the locals was guttural pantomimes about food and bodily functions and asking if they spoke my sad and solitary language. While it was uniformly fascinating, it was also utterly indifferent to our presence, other than to accept our credit  card. I wish I had deep thoughts about our trip. It was nice to see countries not wholly consumed by MAGA politics and the orange pestilence, and strangely behaving as if the public welfare was important. Just the intricate dance of the bicycles in Amsterdam alone was enough to make you wish humans at home could simultaneously think of the greater good AND their own interests equally.

    One Saturday night in Paris stands out.  Laurie and I were tired but in search of food. It was hard to figure out the Google maps (a possible sign of being really old) and the streets at 7:00 pm were packed with beautiful young people . It was like Las Vegas or Coachella. I am not sure if I have ever felt more old or out of place.

Photo credit LAURIE SANDER - Quimper, France

Attempting to see things in a positive light.

 I am triying , valiently to see things in a less negative, and futile way. I am old but not dead yet, but i do not need to constantly see everything as a score on the misery index. I am drinking less and striving to be cheerful. So far so good.