Category: Uncategorized

Unlike some friends who change cars the way I change socks, I haven’t owned that many vehicles over the course of my life.

My first car was a used truck; a 1976 Chevy LUV to be precise. I don’t think I ever named it. My mom had the interior reupholstered for my birthday the year after I got it. Twelve months later, after I’d moved out of my folks’ house, it was parked outside my apartment with the windows rolled down one evening (you could actually do that at one time) and a cat jumped in and sprayed all over the seat. I never did get the smell out.

Dorothy, a 1984 Toyota Corolla SR5, was my first new car, and the one that still shows up most often in my dreams. By far it was one of the best running and most reliable vehicles I’ve owned. It moved to San Francisco with me and I reluctantly sold it in 1989—shortly before the Loma Prieta earthquake—stupidly thinking that I could get around San Francisco without a car.

Jezebel, the car from hell, was a 1990 Mitsubishi Cordia Turbo I bought from a friend. Lesson learned: never buy cars from friends. Corollary lesson: never buy turbos. ‘Nuff said.

Baraka, a.k.a. “Red,” was a 1995 Mitsubishi Eclipse; it was the second car I bought new. It wasn’t the exact model I’d wanted (it was a RS; I really preferred the GS but couldn’t afford it), so we never really bonded completely, but without a doubt, this car had the best damn gas mileage of any car I’ve owned evah. I could drive from San Francisco to San Diego (540 miles) on a single tank of gas. Yeah, I’d be arriving on fumes, but I’d still make it all the way. After about 80,000 miles I was able to ignore the small things falling apart, but when the poor thing started having major transmission issues, I knew it was time to say goodbye.

Skittles was a brand new 2001 Volkswagen Beetle. I’d been jonesing for a New Beetle even before Red started falling apart, but couldn’t justify getting one. The Beetle was the first, and—as the Flying Spaghetti Monster is my witness—the last car I will ever own with an automatic transmission. I never had any issues with the transmission; it just wasn’t as fun to drive. A few minor problems with the cooling system at about 70,000 miles, replacing the battery twice and having to slap on a new set of tires was about the extent of problems/repairs. All in all, a very well made car and fun to drive, but ultimately it was too gay. Even for me.

And of course, there’s Anderson—the 2006 MINI Cooper I bought almost ten years ago. The honeymoon never ended, although he is definitely starting to show his age. Anderson is the first car I bought new and racked up 100K miles on. It’s also the first car I’ve really bonded with. The repairs haven’t been horrendous for a ten-year-old car: multiple replacement of leaking power steering lines, clutch at 60K (covered under extended warranty), three—maybe four—sets of tires (I forget),  front and rear brake pad replacements x3, engine mount replacement, passenger side strut replacement, control arm bushing replacement, battery x2, passenger seat airbag sensor replacement (once under warranty, and most recently under recall) and lastly, a starter replacement (because I ignored a power steering line leak that had been dripping on it). We’ve had some incredible adventures together and even though the knowledge that he now needs $3500 worth of “non critical” repairs that are never going to happen (the poor thing is only worth $3000 according to KBB) takes away some of the sting of saying goodbye, it’s still going to be hard for us to part ways when that inevitable day arrives.

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You can’t communicate with people who think they’ve got all the answers.” ~ Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials, on discussing issues with religious fundamentalists.

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Someone recently described the Republicans and the Democrats in Congress as the pets of the Corporatocracy. They said the Republicans were the dogs and the Democrats were the cats.

The dogs did tricks on command, would slavishly follow their masters everywhere, and would even die to protect their masters. The cats pretended to be aloof and ignore their masters, but still always came running when they heard the can opener.

That about sums it up.

Bernie Sanders, however, seems to be the exception.

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Something I wrote almost ten years ago. Sometimes I need to be reminded…

Several years ago, emotionally adrift after being forced to relocate to Phoenix and only months thereafter receiving a cancer diagnosis, I was beginning to feel that—if not literally (because even then I wasn’t going to cede my body over to a clump of cells less than half the size of a pencil eraser), then at least symbolically—my life was coming to an end. Everything had a “been there, done that” quality to it, and while I still had my long term support groups in both San Francisco and Tucson, I’d yet to make any new friends in Phoenix. I was beginning to wonder if was even worth the effort to try because at the time my long term prognosis—while good—was still not guaranteed. And furthermore, exactly how I was going to pull off meeting anyone with a plastic tube in my throat and a badly mangled self-image shadowing me everywhere I went was totally beyond my comprehension.

Fortunately, time does heal all wounds, and after a year or so I’d finally made peace with the plastic tube and everything it represented. My self-image was still pretty much in the toilet, but at least my hand wasn’t resting on the flusher any longer.

After receiving another year or so of positive reports from my doctor, I started realizing that yes, maybe my life really was going to continue, and that—coupled with a permanent job offer—started me thinking that maybe I could return to the land of the living and start making plans again.

As I began to end that self-imposed exile, it became abundantly clear that in many ways, my old life had ended in 2003. I look back on the Mark who existed prior to those events, and I scarcely recognize him. I know it’s me, but it’s like peering back through a past life regression—and to be honest, a whole lot of it wasn’t pretty. But still I am thankful for the Mark who came through that crucible and has grown from it.

Now that I was actually able to think about the future—about having a real, viable future—I started wondering what I still had to accomplish; what I still wanted to accomplish. And I also started wondering who were the still nameless, faceless souls that would unexpectedly come into my life and accompany me on this strange journey.

Out of nowhere, Cindy—one of those souls—entered stage right about a year ago, and until tonight over shared Mexican food, I’d all but forgotten what an absolute joy it was to cross paths with someone and suddenly realize you’re not meeting a stranger for the first time but actually reconnecting with a long lost friend.

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“Dear Aunt Sylvia,

First, thank you for the birthday card. Not that I’m admitting to being thirty-one, but if I hide the thing carefully (perhaps in the vegetable bin) maybe nobody will notice. I think twenty-eight is a much nicer age to be, and I have every intention of being twenty-eight for several more years. So you and I know the truth—so do we have to talk about it?

Now, as to the book. I’ve read it, and frankly, I’m not impressed. All right, so the poor broad is my age and not married. What does she expect, being a fat, ugly Jewish girl? She thinks maybe men grow on trees? Believe me, they don’t. I may be Jewish, but I’m not fat or ugly, and I know: men do not grow on trees. But am I going to kill myself over it? Am I going to stick my head in an oven? Am I going to slit my wrists? No, Aunt Sylvia, I’m not. I’m going to go right on doing what I’ve been doing. I’m going to pull myself together, put on a nice sweater, pretend it’s still 1965 and go out and find a man.

A man, you say? My nephew is going to go out and find himself a man? What have I raised? What kind of pervert did I nourish at my bosom?

That’s right, Aunt Sylvia, you got yourself a queer nephew. Now, before you go running off to make Uncle Hymie rip the buttons off his vest, stop and think. It could be a lot worse. I could be a child molester. Or I could be an exhibitionist, and spend my time flashing my schwantz at Haddasah ladies and making them choke on their chicken liver. How would you like that, Aunt Sylvia? So settle down, sew the buttons back on Uncle Hymie’s vest, and listen.”

And so begins A Fairy Tale, written under the pseudonym S. Steinberg by John Saul.

I stumbled upon this bit of hilarity while I was coming out back in the mid 70s. While the book itself hadn’t yet been published, a excerpt appeared several years prior to publication in Christopher Street, a magazine I’d serendipitously discovered in the periodical racks in the basement of the University of Arizona library. I can’t tell you how much my grades suffered as a result of spending too many evenings at the library—not studying, or even partaking in, um…other diversions (which I actually didn’t discover there until years later)—but rather spent pouring over back issues of Christopher Street and After Dark, tentatively taking my first hesitant steps into that dark, seductive world of the love that dare not speak its name.

When I found the book itself, several years later after moving to San Francisco, it was like meeting up with an old friend. I’d kept a xerox of the Christopher Street piece (in fact, I still have it), but here was the entire novel, fleshed out in full. It wasn’t called Tinkerbell is Alive and Hanging Kelp in San Francisco as the Christopher Street excerpt had indicated, and it wasn’t written by John Saul (or so I’d originally thought), but the minute I cracked the spine and started reading, I knew it was the same story and the same author.

Much like any piece of gay fiction from the era, it’s a little dated in places, and obviously written before AIDS changed the world, but so many aspects of our so-called lifestyle seem timeless. The difference between my first exposure to the prose in 1977 and now is that I’ve lived a lot of what’s in the book, or know people who have.

It was out of print for the longest time (I found my copy used), but it’s actually available again—as an e-book, no less. So if you’ve got a few dollars to throw away, it’s worth it to check it out. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

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Homemade Microwave Popcorn

• 1/4 cup of popping corn (generally $0.99 for a pound bag. This is enough to make at least 50 bags of microwave corn)
• 1 Teaspoon extra virgin olive oil
• Popcorn salt to taste (it has finer granules than table salt with the same taste)
• And the following tools:
• A stapler
• A teaspoon
• A measuring cup
• A brown paper bag, and—of course
• A microwave

Step One:

Measure out the popcorn and dump it into the paper bag. Carefully add salt and any additional seasonings you might want. Shake gently. Now add the teaspoon of olive oil.

Step Two:

Close the bag, folding it over twice. Secure with one stable in the middle of the fold. (Contrary to popular belief, staples will not arc in the microwave.) Shake the bag to evenly distribute the corn/oil/salt mixture. Place the bag, side down, in your microwave and nuke it until you hear the popping occurring at roughly 3-5 second intervals. (My microwave has a “popcorn” setting on the control panel. I find that is about fifteen seconds too long.) You might want to put a folded paper towel under the bag to soak up the oil that will seep through the bag.

Step Three:

Open the bag with care because steam will escape and you can get scalded. Pour into a bowl, serve and enjoy the taste and the knowledge that this heaping bag of microwave popcorn cost less than ten cents and isn’t full of unnecessary added chemicals and preservatives!

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The house remodeling I wrote about a couple weeks ago is nearly finished, and it’s looking sweet.

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Edgar Mitchell, one of just 12 human beings who walked on the moon, has died. He was 85.

“On behalf of the entire NASA family, I would like to express my condolences to the family and friends of NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement. “He believed in exploration, having been drawn to NASA by President Kennedy’s call to send humans to the moon. He is one of the pioneers in space exploration on whose shoulders we now stand.”

Mitchell died Thursday in West Palm Beach, Florida, according to NASA. His death occurred on the eve of the 45th anniversary of his lunar landing, which took place on February 5, 1971.

Mitchell, Alan Shepard and Stuart Roosa were the crew of Apollo 14, which launched on January 31, 1971. Mitchell became the sixth man to walk on the lunar surface.

He and Shepard set foot on the moon two separate times during their mission, spending more than nine hours collecting rocks, taking measurements and (in Shepard’s case) hitting a pair of golf balls. Mitchell also took a famous photograph of Shepard standing next to an American flag. All told, the two spent 33 hours on the moon.

Mitchell, who was the lunar module pilot, found the trip to be a profound experience, telling the UK Telegraph in 2014, “Looking at Earth from space and seeing it was a planet in isolation…that was an experience of ecstasy, realizing that every molecule in our bodies is a system of matter created from a star hanging in space. The experience I had was called Samadhi in the ancient Sanskrit, a feeling of overwhelming joy at seeing the Earth from that perspective.”

Fascinated and frustrated by the relationship between religion and science, he was very public about seeking links between the known and unknown, being a firm believer in extraterrestrial activity, and was convinced UFOs had visited Earth.

In one interview, he told Bloomberg Business that the 1947 Roswell incident, which to some people is evidence of an extraterrestrial crash landing, was covered up, saying, “It’s not just military. It’s a cabal of organizations primarily for a profit motive.”

The astronaut was born in Hereford, Texas, in 1930. A Navy pilot, he joined NASA in 1966 as part of the agency’s astronaut corps. He was well-qualified: besides having served as a test pilot and college instructor, he earned a doctorate from MIT in aeronautics and astronautics.

With Mitchell’s death, of the 12 men who have walked on the moon, seven survive: Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, David Scott, John W. Young, Charles Duke, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt.

Many have talked of their missions with joy and wonder. Mitchell went beyond, however: he believed we were all connected—to everything.

“We are not alone in the universe,” he told the Utica Phoenix. “We are just one grain of sand on a huge beach.”

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…who various countries consider the biggest threat to world peace.

BOOM!

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As I have lamented on this blog previously, one of the biggest regrets of my life was that I’ve gotten rid of so many things I wish I’d held on to.

The first of those things being the notebooks I’d amassed that were full of audio manufacturer literature from the 70s and 80s. I don’t actually recall at this point if I intentionally threw them out or if they were inadvertently left in a closet when fleeing an unfortunate roommate situation in 1989, but the fact remains at some point they disappeared.

The second of those things were the multiple notebooks of the floor plan/exterior elevation handouts I’d collected from Hallcraft Homes for the duration of my dad’s employment with the company. I believe I left them in Dad’s care when I first moved out of my folks’ house in the early 80s, with the intent of eventually getting them back at some point. Well, life happened and I’d all but forgotten about them (and the dozens of actual construction blueprints in our possession) until some time after he moved to the Bay Area and I inquired as to their whereabouts. “Oh, I threw all that stuff out after the divorce.”

Well fuck me.

My heart sank. Looking back on it now, I think his tenure at the firm (especially the last few years after they’d been bought out by a Canadian company) became increasingly difficult and when the opportunity presented itself for a purge of all physical reminders of his time there, he went for it—something totally out of character for my dad who seemed to hold onto every other thing in the world.

With the advent of the internet, I’d always fantasized what a great resource having all those handouts would be to current owners of the homes—if only for historical reference, and after his death I’d hoped against all odds that my sister would find a hidden cache in his things. Alas, no such cache was found.

Searching online for already published examples of those handouts has been a lesson in futility—until yesterday. With all the Phoenix history swirling through my brain of late, I did a search for “Hallcraft Showcase of Homes.” This led me to—of all places—the Sunburst Farms HOA page. Sunburst Farms was the first of several Hallcraft subdivisions with one- and two-acre lots. (Ben’s grandfather actually still owns a home in one of the east side developments.) On this HOA page there was a link to “Historic Documents” and on that page were links that sent my heart fluttering: Hallcraft Flyer 1, Hallcraft Home Plans 1, Hallcraft Home Plans 2, Home Elevations, Home Prices…

It wasn’t a treasure trove, but considering I’d previously only possessed three floor plans and an equal number of exterior elevation sheets, being able to add three more was like Christmas to me.

This morning, while I lay awake at 4 am again, another thought came to me: Craigslist! and I thought, “Fuck It! If I don’t put it out there, it will never happen.”

So now I have a “wanted” ad on the Phoenix Craigslist seeking these handouts; not to buy, but simply to scan or photograph in hopes of getting them all posted online. In the 1970s alone there were about 45 different single-family floor plans, and probably an equal number of townhouse/fourplex plans. The fact that someone kept a few—that I didn’t have—tells me that somewhere in Phoenix, in boxes at the back of closets and garages, my treasure may be lurking.

The images above are from yesterday’s discovery, and that particular plan was actually one of my favorites even though—god forbid as far as my mother was concerned—it didn’t have a separate dining room. That seems silly now, as I could easily see using the “family room” as a separate dining space since I could never understand the need for having a living room and a family room.

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I’ve fallen down an internet rabbit hole. This was prompted by waking from a dream a couple nights ago wherein I was in the studio of the interior designer my mom worked for in the 1960s and then wracking my brain trying to remember exactly where on Central Avenue it had been located. I can only assume that as yet another example of mid-century architecture it was leveled decades ago to make room for one of the new condo complexes that now line the Central Corridor—or more likely for the I-10 deck park tunnel. All I can remember is that it was on the west side of the street and the tall palm trees that used to line both sides of the boulevard were out front. There was also a small grass lawn separating the sidewalk from the studio itself. In case anyone is interested, it was called Kay Baden Decorators.

The last time I was there I couldn’t have been more than 10 years old.  They relocated to a small storefront in Biltmore Fashion Park shortly thereafter. The funny thing is, I can easily remember the smell of the studio more distinctly than recalling anything specifically visual in it—except that the front part of the studio/showroom was a dark labyrinth of furniture, accessories, and stuff—a lot of it completely inaccessible. In short, it was a mess. A fascinating mess for a young person to explore, but a mess nonetheless. (It wasn’t really a showroom; it was used more as a storeroom.)

While I was eventually able to file this unexpected memory and fall back to sleep, the first thing I did upon waking the next morning was to begin Googling for old pictures of North Central Avenue.

I still haven’t found anything that even remotely looks like what I remember, but it led me two two websites that have consumed me for the last couple days. The first is The Rogue Columnist, who is an amazing trove of Phoenix history, and has posted dozens of photos from the time when Phoenix was just a sleepy little desert town (or at least not the car-obsessed asphalt jungle it has become). The second is a discussion forum called How Do You Remember Phoenix? Stories from Long Time Residents. At 850+ pages, it’s going to take me quite some time to wade through it, but it’s already triggered memories of long-gone places that I didn’t even realize were gone until they were pointed out. This has emphasized how much I want to document places around town now—as mundane as some of them may be—to help future residents remember places that are just as likely to be razed in the future as Thomas Mall (just one example) was in the past.

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After we had gotten, in disco parlance, ‘sufficiently cocktailed,’ we’d head way downtown to the trashy gay nightclubs, places with names like Bullwinkle, Hotbods Desert Dance Palace, and our favorite, Sammy’s Steak House—a sleazy toilet that served neither steak nor any other kind of meal. The gay clubs played the best music—a combination of hardcore disco (Lime, Sylvester, The Twins) and dance-punk (New Order, The B-52s, The Thompson Twins) that drove us mad with pleasure. Here, in the ‘bad part of town’ at 2 in the morning, freaking out to DJ Hubert’s obscure Eurotrash mixes, we could forget the suburban strip-mall jobs and junior-college grind that awaited us on Monday. And Tuesday. And, we feared, forever.” ~ Robrt Pela

(I knew Hubert, although not well—and didn’t particularly like him. My most vivid memory of the guy—and one of the main reasons I didn’t care to be around him—was how from his perch in the DJ booth at HisCo. Disco about six feet above the dance floor and very near the club’s entrance, he’d lean over the glass divider and yell “Uterus!” at the female patrons walking in.)

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As a Phoenician, nothing makes me more depressed than endless sunny days.” ~ Jon Talton, The Rogue Columnist

While I haven’t reached that point again yet, I know it will eventually come, and I do remember many, many times before we moved to Denver feeling this way about life in Phoenix. I often remember waking up, looking outside and saying in as deadpan voice as possible, “Oh look, another cloudless sunny day.”

That being said, even when that inevitable day returns, after having spent four years in Denver, it will still be preferable to looking outside first thing in the morning and seeing that Mother Nature had dumped eight inches of snow overnight.

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US government policies on device encryption should be decided by the public and Congress, not companies like Apple, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said in an interview at the World Economic Forum being held this week in Davos, Switzerland.

Well of course he did. AT&T, probably more than any other company in US history has not only bent over for government spying, but actually spread their ass cheeks and lubed up for it.

And that, my friends, is why I will never buy services from AT&T.

And good luck getting Congress to listen to anything “the public” has to say. “The public” doesn’t own them the way AT&T does, after all.

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We’ve been watching this little place undergo a major renovation since shortly after we got back to Phoenix. It’s a couple blocks from our favorite coffeehouse, so we drive past it often. At one point it was gutted down to the studs (which was probably needed for a house of this vintage), but it’s now in the final stretch of being finished. I love everything about it—from the basic 40s-era design and the choice of colors to the walled front patio and the garage-turned-guesthouse in back—without even having seen the inside.

Ben and I would love to buy a place like this, or failing that at some point talk the current owners of our rental into selling us the place. I would love to do a makeover on it like the one above.

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It’s official. Apple has become Microsoft.

One of the things I really appreciated about Apple’s OS is that you didn’t have to reinstall it multiple times a year because something got screwed up. Apparently with their new all-encompassing focus on iDevices, no one in Cupertino really gives a rat’s ass about OS X any more—beyond giving it a shiny new coat of paint once a year so Tim Cook & Company can waltz out on stage and tell the faithful how magical it’s become.

Since upgrading to El Capitan some time ago, I’ve been having nothing but trouble with Apple Mail—to the point where I got Apple itself involved trying to troubleshoot why syncing wasn’t working with any regularity between the cloud and my Mac.

As mysteriously as the problem started, after several weeks it just disappeared, only to be replaced with Apple Mail using ridiculous amounts of CPU cycles and sending the laptop’s fans into overdrive while sitting idle. Fed up with these ongoing issues (and in no hurry to give up my iCloud email address because my life is tied to it),  I opted back into Apple’s public beta program, hoping against all odds that maybe this issue had been addressed and corrected in the latest beta since apparently I wasn’t the only one experiencing it.

Thankfully, after updating to OS X beta 10.11.3, Mail’s CPU gorging disappeared. I was a happy camper.

Then, about a week or so ago, I woke one morning to discover that an OS update had automatically downloaded, installed, and was prompting me to restart the computer. WTF?

Somehow, the developer (not the public beta, which to my knowledge still isn’t out) version of 10.11.4 had decided it was going to install itself on my Mac. I am not in the developer program, and after installation there was no record of it installing, other than the version number changed in “About This Mac.” AND NO WAY TO UNINSTALL IT.

It didn’t seem to break anything, so I just accepted this and resolved to live with it until 10.11.4 was officially released.

Well, lately my Mac has been randomly locking up—to the point where it requires a hard power cycle. I realize that using beta software comes with risks like this, but this particular beta I never signed up for.

When 10.11.3 was officially released last week, I attempted to install it over this bastard 10.11.4. Apple was having none of that. Apparently you can’t go backward unless you wipe everything and reinstall from scratch—which is exactly what I find myself doing this morning.

Thanks, Microsoft Apple.

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I believe in science. I believe in evolution. I believe in Nate Silver and Neil deGrasse Tyson and Christopher Hitchens, although I do admit he can be a kind of an asshole. I cannot get behind some supreme being who weighs in on the Tony Awards while a million people get whacked with machetes. I don’t believe a billion Indians are going to hell. I don’t think we get cancer to learn life lessons, and I don’t believe that people die young because God needs another angel. I think it’s just bullshit, and on some level, I think we all know that. I mean, don’t you? 

Look, I understand that religion makes it easier to deal with all of the random shitty things that happen to us, and I wish I could get on that ride; I’m sure I would be happier, but I just can’t. Feelings aren’t enough. I need it to be real.” ~ Piper Chapman, Orange is the New Black

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As I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed that lot of weird stuff goes through my head when I’m laying awake in bed at 4 am; stuff that wouldn’t have pinged my consciousness when I was younger. This morning, while still pondering the joint loss of David Bowie and Alan Rickman, I remembered reading somewhere that within 300 years of your death—unless you’re someone notable like Bowie or Einstein or Neil Armstrong—you will have been completely forgotten since anyone who knew you directly will have long since passed on as well.

I personally put that time frame at half that—or even less. Think about your grandparents. Now think about your great grandparents. How much do you actually know about them and their lives?

I know more about my material grandparents than my paternal. Even then, that knowledge is woefully lacking, and since Mom was an only child, once my sister and I pass on, that knowledge will vanish as well. I believe my grandfather was a chemical engineer. I know he worked in a white collar capacity at a paper mill for the majority of his life, and was recognized by the company for coming up with a new way of folding napkins for use in fast-food restaurants. Beyond that, I haven’t really got a clue. Was he in the army? Did he fight in World War I? How did he and my grandmother meet? Those are some of the things I probably should’ve asked Mom about when she was alive, but they were also those things that when you’re younger you really don’t care about. I have no idea if my grandmother ever worked—or if she did, what exactly her profession had been. As far as I know, she was a homemaker for her entire life (as was pretty common for women of that generation).

Going back another generation, I have no knowledge of my great grandparents beyond what I’ve seen in old photographs. If you even ask me their names I couldn’t tell you without having to look it up somewhere. My great-grandfather (or perhaps it was his father) fled Germany because—as family legend has it—he shot a deer in the Kaiser’s forest and the penalty if he’d been caught was death.

I know even less about my paternal grandparents. I think my dad’s father was a cabinet maker and owned his own business for many years in Safford, Arizona. I have no idea if my grandmother did anything outside the home. Their parents? No clue whatsoever.

About thirty years ago I realized how woefully inadequate my knowledge of even my own parents’ lives had been, so I asked them both to write short autobiographies. Dad took to the assignment like a fish to water; Mom never did come through with her story. Dad’s revelations and secrets were enlightening and helped explain many major and minor mysteries of his life, but like so many things, his written story has gone missing and I’m left with only my own memories of what he’d transcribed.

I think this lack of proper passing-on-of-the-family-story explains both my folks’ interest in genealogy as they grew older. Curiously, at least at this point in my life I do not share that interest. Since my sister never had children, when she and I are gone it will be the end of the line for this particular branch of the family and no one will be asking who my folks—or their folks—were or what they did during their lives.

And also since I have no children, I’ve pretty much resolved myself to knowing that at some point after I’m gone—like so many people who have come before—all my photographs, art, and possessions will end up at the bottom of a landfill or as curiosities in second-hand stores, offering some rare personal glimpses into life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

That’s why the here and now is so important. It’s all we’ve got.

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Once upon a time, any audiophile worth his salt owned (or at least wanted) one of these beasts. The thought being that a graphic equalizer allowed control over the entire audio spectrum instead of just at the ends, as the more common bass and treble controls afforded. In theory it allowed you to tweak specific ranges of frequencies to achieve the desired “flat” (i.e. uncolored) response from your audio source. Alternately, you could use the equalizer to boost or reduce frequencies intentionally for effect.

It wasn’t until the early 2000s that I actually had an equalizer in my system, although not nearly as impressive as the one above. And you know, I found it to be a complete waste of money. Maybe it was my already-aging ears deceiving me, but I found nothing really needed a degree of tweaking that couldn’t be accomplished with the bass and treble controls on my receiver.

Funny, that.

Anyhow, I was thinking the other night how I wish there was some sort of equalizer for life; something that allowed you to fine tune those areas that needed a little help. Increase employment or employment satisfaction, boost income, decrease fear and anxiety.

Sadly, no such device exists, not even in the darkest recesses of eBay.

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Honeybear’s, here we come!

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First Bowie, and now Rickman.

There truly is less magic in the world today.

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All I wanted to do was buy Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk and listen to it on my phone while I napped this afternoon.

But nooooooo! As is becoming more and more common, Apple was having none of it. The album was purchased and showing as downloaded on the phone, but where? It was nowhere; not under “recently added” or—god forbid—even under “Fleetwood Mac.”

This led me to say “FUCK IT,” and I got out of bed, giving up all thoughts of a nap.

On my Mac, Tusk was shown as available for download. So I downloaded it and plugged in my phone to sync.

Tusk still didn’t show up on the phone after the sync.  If that weren’t enough, for whatever fucking reason, all the album artwork on the phone disappeared as well—as has been happening with increasing regularity of late—and I’m getting really tired of it.

Because…

The only way to fix the missing artwork is to delete all the music from the phone (75GB worth) and then resync it. Do you know how long it takes to transfer 75GB over a USB connection?

Fuck, Apple…with each passing day you’re turning more and more into everything I hated about Microsoft, and it’s obvious you don’t give a shit. You’ve got more money than god and can live off the interest for the next thousand years, so why should you even?

I used to look forward to going to an Apple Store or receiving OS upgrades. Now I dread both experiences because I know at the store I’ll be met with attitude at best or insouciance at worst and OS Upgrades have become a question of “What is this going to BREAK?” (Much like it became with Windows.) Hell, I used to want to work for Apple, but no more!

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…from Cassini to get your mind off today’s sadness.

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