One of the guys I follow on Instagram (yes, it's still a thing, but who knows how much longer it's going to be around) collects photos of fast food joints—especially Jack in the Box—from back in the day. While his collection is not limited to Phoenix, he grew up here the same time I did, and has a lot of shots from that time period and so seeing them brings back a lot of memories.

Can you imagine?

Journal

Friday, 24 July 1998

Thank god it's Friday. I've made it through another week.

I've no major plans for the weekend. The weather continues to be hot and humid, not exactly the kind of stuff you want to be out in.

Today's paycheck is the first one from which I'm going to be able to transfer a significant amount of into savings—$225. It's the first step in getting myself back to San Francisco.

I'm getting really tired of coming home every day to zero messages on the answering machine. I guess it just drives home the fact that most of my friends are in the Bay Area.

Derek  at work has grown a goatee. At first I didn't like it, but now it's all I can do not to go up and lock lips with him. Wouldn't that surprise his little wife? I wonder if it—the goatee, that is—tickles when he's snacking on her. (I'd pay to see that, if only for the chance to see Derek naked!)

As I write this, I'm listening to the second St. Tropez album, Belle de Jour. My favorite song has just started, a wonderful piece called, "Hold On To Love". It just plays me.

Eric, my boss, will be gone all next week. This is weighing heavily, and for the life of me I don't know why. He left a not-insurmountable list of things to do in his absence, and yet instead of really enjoying my Friday night relaxing, I find myself already worrying about what needs to be done next week.

I made the horrendous discovery around 11:30 last night that during my NT installation last week, with all the shuffling of directories across disks that I had inadvertently wiped out at least one, and possibly more, image directories. "Movies" was completely missing, and along with it, all the attendant sub-directories including Blade Runner, I Think I Do, Lost in Space and god knows what else. I was able to reconstruct a lot of it (everything before April was archived on a CD I burned) by the time I finally collapsed into bed at 1:30 a.m., but the rest remained to be gleaned off the web today at work.

I think I've restored most of what was in those directories, but since I don't honestly remember exactly what I had to begin with, it's kind of difficult to say for sure.

This loss prompted me to find a backup program—any backup program—that would work with NT. I'd remembered downloading a Win95 backup program off the Internet while at St. Mary's, and thought that they also had an NT version available as well. The hardest part was remembering what it was called!

A search via Infoseek turned it up—Novastor. And yes, there was a version available that worked with NT 4.0. It's now installed at home and works fine.

The rest of the NT setup is working fine as well. I finally got rid of the annoying error messages that were cropping up in the Event Log, and now all that remains is buying a new SCSI card for the scanner and installing the new software (ordered yesterday) to go along with it.

Oh…by the way…one of the users downstairs has a Jibber Jabber still in the original box that she's going to sell to me. I offered her $20, and she said, "Are you serious?" I told her I was, that I really wanted one of those dolls.

And here's one for the record books…a dream, that is:

Let's call it, "I fucked Lee Chaffee in hyperspace."

I had gone to see Lee. He had been distraught and despondent for weeks, and I decided to see what I could do about it. When I got there, his room was a disaster and he was almost in tears. I asked him what had been going on, and he said, "She's no better. You'd think after that surgery and the threat of cancer she's change, but she's still the same," referring to his mother. Apparently she had been making his life rather difficult.

"What about believing in the magic of life?" I asked. "What about your faith in all things unseen?"

"It's all bullshit!" he said. "What magic? I see no magic whatsoever."

He was standing there with his arms crossed. I walked up to him and said, "You need a hug." He shook his head no, and at first refused to uncross his arms. When he finally did, and returned the hug, it was if I'd opened a tap. He was sobbing uncontrollably.

ZAP! I was gone. I found myself standing in a dusty roadside café somewhere in the desert. I wasn't exactly sure where I was, other than I knew I wasn't on the plane we commonly call reality. There was a motley group of customers in attendance. I turned around to leave, and ran into Lee, who was coming in through the small foyer.

"Sorry I left so—abruptly," I said.

"That's okay," he said. "I didn't want you to see me like that anyway."

We both walked in and sat down at a table. About ten feet away, sitting in a booth, a guy who looked like a truck driver leaned over to us and asked, "You boys know where you are, right?"

"On the dream plane," I said, "or more precisely, the upper astral."

"Smart boy!" the guy replied, and went back to the conversation he was having with his friend.

Lee looked surprised, as if he hadn't known where we were. "Magic," I said to Lee as I looked at our surroundings. It may have looked like a dusty southwestern café, but the menu items were anything but southwestern. A large sign on the wall advertised, "Rigel Burgers," and other things that I don't precisely remember that were decidedly un-southwestern.

From there on, the dream got really strange, because Lee and I started making out—wrestling, more like—on a bed which had suddenly appeared in the middle of the café. We ended up having a definite exchange of energy albeit without any real "sex" involved. That seemed to finally cheer him up, and we went outside to leave.

At the adjacent filling station, Lee was busy putting gasoline into his sister's Bronco. (I was kind of surprised that he thought he needed gasoline, much less a truck, to get back home.) I walked out, wearing a bright red shirt. (I may have been wearing it all along, but I only noticed it out in the bright sunlight.) I had just gotten a pin made that I'd attached to the shirt, and wanted to show Lee before we left.

"What are you hiding there?" he asked as I walked up to him. I took my hand away and "I fucked Lee Chaffee in hyperspace!" was written. The attendant got a good laugh out of it, although Lee was decidedly unamused. "Where'd you get that?" he demanded. "Inside," I said. "You know, you can get anything here." The whole situation was so funny (mainly because Lee, who had always been my "teacher" in all things metaphysical was being so slow on the uptake, but also at the absurdity of the situation) I started laughing out loud—both there and back here in three-dimensional reality—so much so that I woke myself up.

I guess that's about it for now. I suppose there's more, but I'm already all over the map and getting tired.

The desert radio tower in Pahrump, Nevada that beamed Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell across the continent for a generation.

I miss the golden days of the face on Mars, Open Lines, whatever looney outer space conspiracy Richard C Hoagland was cooking up, Linda Moulton Howe and the UFO nonsense, and of course the C Crane radio because Y2K.

That was when late night conspiracy radio was at its finest, before it descended into paranoid racism.

January 1984.
My future husband was six months old when this was taken. Let that sink in.

 My freshman yearbook photo.

The Top 10 Songs that year…
1. Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree, Tony Orlando and Dawn
2. Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, Jim Croce
3. Killing Me Softly With His Song, Roberta Flack
4. Let's Get It On, Marvin Gaye
5. My Love, Paul McCartney and Wings
6. Why Me, Kris Kristofferson
7. Crocodile Rock, Elton John
8. Will It Go Round in Circles, Billy Preston
9. You're So Vain, Carly Simon
10. Touch Me In the Morning, Diana Ros

Yes, I'm old.

 My sister and I, 1980

I ran across this picture the other day and it took me back to high school…

I believe it was during our junior year that Richard got his own truck. Shortly thereafter, along with Steve and Joe, the four of us started leaving campus for lunch and hitting the McDonald's that was about three miles away. (Such things were allowed at the time without parental permission—the horror!—but not having a car limited the off-campus dining options to the Diary Queen Brazier down the street.)

At the time, my folks were giving me five dollars a week for lunch. This covered eating in the school cafeteria and maybe a couple trips to the Dairy Queen without a problem, but once we started eating at McD's every single day (Richard loved it) and McDonald's raised the cost of a Big Mac from 55 to 65 cents, I started running short of funds.

I finally convinced them into bumping me up to $7.50 a week, which then covered our daily excursions.

Now $7.50 might buy you one meal at McDonalds…

While it's been proven that our memories are categorically unreliable and subject to change, I still find it amazing at what seems to come washing up when you're lying wide awake in bed at 4 am.

Take this morning for instance. For no particular reason whatsoever, a memory of sleeping in my great aunt's attic came flooding back to me.

Like we'd done every other summer since I was a baby, my mom, my sister and I went back east to spend a couple months with my grandparents in upstate Massachusetts. In 1968, we deviated from the usual pattern of flying into JFK where we'd meet the grandparents and they'd drive us to the house. That year, we flew to Green Bay to meet the grandparents there and spend a few days with my great aunt; my great aunt who never married. (In some families it runs, it other it gallops; just sayin'.)

The bits of that trip that stand out to me are odd to say the least. I'd recently developed a childhood interest in human anatomy, thinking one day that I'd grow up to be a doctor. I had books, I had plastic models (having received The Visible Head as a birthday gift about a month before our trip), but of all the anatomical models that I had or wanted, the one that always seemed to elude me was The Visible Woman. (The Visible Man was the one that started me on this particular path about a year earlier.) Guess what I found in Green Bay?

After having built the model, I showed my mom (who I remember being in bed, laid up and recovering from something flu-like) and she wondered if she could see "where she had her surgery." Surgery? "Down there," she said.

Now this is where memory selectivity obviously comes into play. I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever of my mom having gone into the hospital for a hysterectomy—unless it happened concurrently with me coming down with a major flu three years earlier; something that sidelined me for what seemed like weeks and explains why I remember my Dad's mom being around for an extended period.

Anyway, back to the attic. I can recall the smell vividly—and the fact it was only marginally a bedroom; rough-hewn wood floors, exposed wood joists (and surprisingly for Wisconsin—even with it being an old house—no roof insulation whatsoever). There was a lot of stuff stored in there along with the two twin beds and I loved the energy of the place, but there was one there item that totally creeped me out—to the point I had to have my mom remove it so I could sleep: my recently-deceased great grandmother's cane that had been propped up against the dressing table on the other side of the room.

My great aunt was also a collector of glass. The window sill of the south-facing dining room was covered with various transparent, sparkling items of every color you could imagine. When the sun hit, the effect was magical. I remember being especially enamored of two aquamarine birds, and asked her if I might have them. She said yes, and I immediately took them upstairs. I don't know what ever happened to them; they might've made it the rest of the journey to Massachusetts and back to Arizona with us, but I think it far more likely that my Mom made me give them back before we left, claiming there was no room to pack them for the remainder of the journey.

Another memory of that trip was one particular bath—and it stands out only because of the smell. It was my first exposure to Dial soap. To this day, the smell of Dial invokes the memory of that bath in that bathroom that was just down the hall from my great aunt's kitchen. Funny thing, memory and how it is so intimately tied to our sense of smell.

I remember nothing of our departure from Green Bay, and only bits and pieces of the drive to Massachusetts. I know we crossed the Mackinac Bridge and drove through Michigan into Canada. We came back into the US at Niagara Falls, and of course stopped there to take photos. I remember it rained a lot, and I did a lot of napping.

 

I know we must've overnighted at least once on the drive (at a Howard Johnson's no doubt), but I have no real recollection, nor do I remember anything of our arrival at the grandparents' homestead. I do know that once we got there it was a busy summer—only because I have pictures to jog those memories.

 

It was my first time fishing (there was a small pond on the property), and the summer included a trip to Old Sturbridge Village, the completion of my first 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and more than one fancy lunch with friends of my grandmother on what seemed at the time like a palatial estate (bitch had an olympic size swimming pool in her back yard)…

 

And one more memory of that summer that will probably fall under the "TMI" category…

Driving back from our weekly grocery shopping in the neighboring town, I was riding in the back seat of the car by myself, listening the radio playing reports of what was going on in Woodstock (yes, it was that summer) and my mom and grandmother were discussing how wrong the Vietnam War was and how Mom and Dad had agreed that they'd personally pack me up and ship me off to Canada if I came of age and the war was still going on. I was thumbing through some magazine they'd picked up on the trip and ran across a picture of a young, shirtless, and very hirsute Burt Reynolds. I had no idea who Burt Reynolds was, but I knew I liked what I saw and before I knew it I had my hand down my shorts and a short time later ended up some some very soggy underwear…all flying under the radar of the people in the front seat.

Or so my memory would have me believe.

Always the classy bitch…

I used to have hundreds…