This just fit the color scheme [or at least it did when this page was in reds and yellows]. I took it upstairs at the Kennedy Center when we were there for an Alvin Ailey dance performance a few nights ago.

“Kyrgyzstan, like many other former Soviet states, allows voters to choose the option of voting against all candidates in a race. If a majority of voters take that course in a particular district, a second round would have to be held.” [ABC News]

Now wouldn’t that provide a mandate? Something like 24% for Kerry, 25% for Bush, and 51% for “Don’t Let the Door Hit You on the Ass on Your Way Out.”

The worst part of having a bad memory has nothing to do with practicality. If it were just a matter of forgetting to pay bills on time or standing up my friends at the bar once in a while, it would so much more tolerable. My friends would understand. They would forgive me. The utility companies would tack a couple of dollars onto my next bill, and life would proceed as usual. But this is not a matter of being merely forgetful. No, this is a pathologically poor memory, a rusty bucket of self that empties out faster than it can be refilled. If I don’t pile up reminders around me, vast swaths of my past just fade out of existence.

Unfortunately, I can’t stand clutter, so I have to find figurative ways to avoid literal piles of junk littering my desk and collecting dust in the corners. I have a filing cabinet, that contains, for instance, my medical bills from a car accident in 1994; the cancelled check from the purchase in 1996 of my first vehicle, a 1985 GMC Vandura 2500, from my uncle, who was selling on behalf of my other uncle, who had just died; ticket stubs from almost every movie I’ve seen since 1998 or so; the ticket stub to every concert I’ve ever seen; gas receipts from my band Sweater Weather’s 1995 tour; my tax returns from 1994 through 1997, which document the years I made less than $5000; and so on, because I genuinely fear that without such triggers, my memories of these times will fade so absolutely from my mind they they will become irretrievably lost.

My computer, more than anything else, becomes my crutch. Like many people, I save documents, photos, and emails in an intricate and multilevel hierarchy, and like many people, I forget where I have stashed things. But I am diligent. I have saved almost every email I’ve written or received since I got my back-to-college Mac LC in 1998. (Email didn’t exist when I had the Apple IIc I bought after saving my lawn-mowing money from the summer before eighth grade, otherwise I would have saved those too). Being a member, apparently without being asked, of Generation X, my primary means of corresponding with my friends for the past 10 years or so has been via email. I think my last letter on paper was written over three years ago, and I rarely keep a journal. As a result, it is essential to me to keep backup copies of these emails, because they form the only record of substance of the day-to-day issues, dreams, questions, conversations, arguments, reflections, and advice that constitute my life thus far. So every couple of months, I copy the whole clump of them (105 MB, largely without attachments, at last count) to a new location for safekeeping. To keep things simple, I have also taken the folders of people with whom I no longer regularly correspond out of the email program I use and save them elsewhere as well.

In the process of copying everything over to a new backup hard drive a couple of days ago, I somehow forgot to copy that old-correspondence folder to the new location before I deleted it from the old, and in the time it took the progress bar to go from left to right, I lost at least three years of letters to and from everyone I knew between 1998 and 2001. Gone the letters from Dawn, Melanie, Brooke, and Farrell, the four young ladies with whom I spent most of the meaningful moments of my last two years of high school and every summer of college (the first time). Gone every single letter to and from my mother, who died in 2000. Gone . . . well, that’s just it. I can’t even remember what else was in there. Some inconsequential stuff, some receipts, sure. But it is conceivable that there is a lengthy correspondence with a friend whose existence I can’t even bring to mind right now. There’s at least one ex-girlfriend in there, maybe two, though I can only remember having one during that time. It’s possible there were more. No emails from my dad, because he never used a computer; I have both the letters he ever wrote me on paper in the filing cabinet.

Have I ever mentioned that there was a letter from my mother waiting for me in my mailbox when I returned home to New Mexico after her funeral? She must have written it the day before she died. The envelope was very heavy in my hand before I opened it. I had just come back from so much emotional wreckage and was trying to get my mind and heart back in order, stuffed back into tiny compartments so that I could return to the business of being a student, and there it was. Her last words to me, posthumously delivered to my hand by that harbinger of portent, the United States Postal Service. I opened the envelope carefully and drew out the single sheet of paper, unfolded it, and saw nothing but the garbled black lines of an inkjet printer that had run out of ink. Out fell a phone card. There was a small Post-it note attached, which read, “Well, I guess the printer’s out of ink, so I guess I’ll just send this now and write more soon. Love, Mom.”

And so now, crutch gone, I have to maintain my memory of those people and the times we shared on my own. It’s Woody Allen’s retention of War and Peace after his speed reading course. “It was about some Russians.” Their words are already long gone, and I’m left now with just the gist of what they might have said. Or did I read that in a book? I can never remember.

And why is it so important to me to document the tumultuous twenties of myself and my friends? Because I think we were on to something. We fought hard against growing up prematurely, against the importance of owning things, against accepting at face value what we were told, against the bland asphyxiating comfort of the suburbs that spawned us. But Dave Eggers already wrote a much better book about it than I could muster, so perhaps our particular words are disposable after all. Had it been available, we could have all saved our breath and just talked about Halo 2 instead. Or Buffy.

Oh, and before I forget: Today’s my 31st birthday. Happy birthday to me.

Update (3/5/2005 11:10 pm): Within about an hour of each other, I finally found an old backup I made of the missing emails, and I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I highly recommend. It came out when I was in the Czech Republic, so I missed it the first time around. The emails were stashed in a zipped copy of a disk image of the home directory of my old computer. Eternal Sunshine was delivered to my door by Netflix. Why do I obsessively save old seemingly useless things like that? Just in case? Whatever the reason, I’m glad I do. Words do not always evaporate and become lost. Things we say do have substance, if occasionally only as magnetically aligned particles.

The Guardian reported today that an unmanned British research submarine was lost under an Antarctic ice shelf last week. I was reading the article, science blah, lost blah, yada yada yada, had almost hit the back button, and then I notice way down at the end of the article, in the second to last paragraph, after they’ve mentioned the little human interest details like that the researcher really likes snow peas, that this 21-foot-long sub, which had successfully completed 382 missions, was powered by 5,160 D-cell batteries. Now that’s science! Forget the ice shelf. I want to know about more stuff that can run on thousands of Duracells, like a car. If you fill the trunk with batteries, can you drive to the moon?

A friend of mine sent me a link to one of those feel-good sites that warms your heart.

Photos That Will Never Make the News.

I counter with these. They don’t make you feel so good.

Under Mars 1
Under Mars 2
Under Mars 3
Under Mars 4

It’s not so much the photos that bother me. While they are disturbing, we’re pretty naively deceiving ourselves if we think people aren’t dying in gruesome ways every day over there. What really disturbs me are the captions. Tuckova is right. “Does this death make me look fat?’ Disgusting.

Update (2/21/2005 11:57 am): I finally tracked down some information about the website they’re posted on. The Australian first reported that the website is “being used by American soldiers to post grisly pictures of Iraqi war dead,” but that’s apparently not true. Glider says:

At present UnderMars is pushing out 26mb/s of data and climbing fast. To put that into context, that's approaching three hundred gig a day or nine terabytes a month of transfer. Expensive! I've cut the resolution and quality of the images slightly so they're about a third the size, which I hope will halve my bandwidth. If anyone has 100+ mb/s of bandwidth they are able to donate for this (about $5k a month), please contact me. I will keep the site online as long as possible but if the bandwidth continues to climb I will not be able to afford to.

It's rather disturbing reading what people have to say about me and the site. It's interesting that I've rarely gotten flack about posting pictures like this if they're accompanied by an over-the-top paranoid antiwar rant (nor does antiwar.com, which posts such images centrally on a daily basis), but if I post them sans-politics, to show them as is without politicizing, suddenly I'm a bad guy... People need to see these scenes as they are seen at the time, not as tools of one set of pundits or another.

One of the biggest problems with war is that it's hidden behind a thick political and media filter where each "side" twists it to broadcast their own message. However, war is not fought by the media or the politicians or even the corporate CEOs that profit from it — war is fought by the commoner, and it is the commoner that suffers through war. It is the common man's story that must be told if the uninitiated populace is ever to see war for what it is.

You can read more at his site, here.

Oh, and as for the captions,

I have presented the captions as they were given to me and have not censored or edited them. I do not know what motivated their titling, nor have I asked, nor do I intend to. My goal is only to record them. These are extreme experiences and I make no claim to understand the feelings involved.

At 23 I was living with five of my friends in Chicago’s south Loop in a loft converted from what had once been a used car dealership. The car dealership had relocated into the buildings next to and across the street from ours, leaving the building at 2255 S. Michigan open for musicians, artists, and thespians who needed a cheap live/work space in which to practice their respective crafts. Our space was about 50' x 50' with 20' ceilings. Part of it had been lofted out, so a laundry room and a row of five bedrooms formed an L along one wall with the kitchen and living-room above. The space itself was cinderblock and concrete, and the living spaces were rendered in bare lumber. Thinking we’d spice the place up when we moved in, we decided to paint the whole thing maroon with the hulking support columns hunter green. That turned out to be a little overwhelming. Three of us had saved some money and bought some recording equipment, with the help of about $10,000 in insurance settlement money from when I’d been hit by a car while riding my bicycle on a long straight country highway at dusk. Diode Recording Studio were we, though Kevin and Adam never really liked that name.

At the time, the folks from Atavistic/Truckstop Records lived on the fourth floor, and a whole bunch of theater kids lived right above us. They always complained about the noise. (At least three bands regularly practiced there, not to mention the bands who came in to record in the studio. Kevin’s band Traluma liked to practice at 9:00 Saturday mornings. I always wondered, and never really got a good answer: What the hell kind of rock band practices in the morning?) We had built the most soundproof room possible on our budget, a freestanding room with double layers of drywall and a raised floor, covered on the outside with pink remnant hotel carpeting we bought at the used hotel furniture store down the block. The loft cats, “Crazy Legs” Lloyd and Mara (and later Diablo), loved to chase each other up, down, and around that oversized kitty playland. Have you ever seen a cat scale a nine-foot carpeted wall, stop halfway up to defend its rear flank from attack, and then continue up? It’s an impressive sight. Picture the Globe of Death turned inside-out. Well, until Lloyd got too fat to make it up in one try. Then it was like Marlon Brando trying to remake A Streetcar named Desire after he looked like Don Corleone.

I sound nostalgic, but I should point out that not all was lustrous in the loft days. We were all flat broke. Adam was working as a courier (driving a Chrysler minivan while it still ran, transitioning to bike messenger after the van died). Scott, Ian, and Jason worked in record stores. Kate worked at Starbucks. Kevin delivered groceries for Peapod, and his occasional freelance graphic design made him the most solvent of the lot. I worked for lengths of time up to—but never more than—four months as an apprentice woodworker, convenience store clerk, bike messenger, van courier, record store clerk, and driver for a fly-by-night asbestos removal and demolition company. Everything else hovered in the $5.50–$6.50 range, but that last one actually started at $11 an hour for 60-hour weeks. In order to avoid paying time-and-a-half for all those extra hours, the owner had set up three companies (ACES Maintenance, ACES Environmental, and ACES Asbestos), so employees usually got, for instance, a 40-hour paycheck from ACES Maintenance and a 20-hour paycheck from ACES Environmental, until someone finally turned them in to the Illinois Labor Board and we all got two-year retroactive overtime back-pay checks. Unlike many of my paychecks, that one didn’t even bounce. My savings from a year at that job, in combination with the money I got from selling the recording equipment, financed my first two years at St. John’s College (with the help of tens of thousands of dollars in student loans that will finally be paid off in 2022).

The Harold Ickes Homes were three blocks west of us, and that meant that I walked outside every month or so to find my van window smashed and some inconsequential thing of little value stolen. Once they stole nothing but some dubbed cassettes. Not much pawn value in those, maybe one rock at most, but about $100 in auto glass replacement costs (more than three days’ take-home pay in those days) for me, not to mention losing my only copies of several irreplaceable indie rock records on now-defunct labels. (But just now, while trying to remember the name of Shudder to Think’s first album on Sammich Records, I discovered that Curses, Spells, Voodoo, Mooses has been reissued after being out of print for 10 years! My copy should arrive in 3–5 business days, they say.)

So anyway, those days in Chicago were fine times. I played in a couple of bands, recorded a couple of records, played shows at the Empty Bottle, the now-defunct Lounge Ax, and the Fireside Bowl, went on tour a couple of times, lived the whole indie-rock life. It was great, despite having zero buffer between me and poverty, facing the choice at the end of every month whether I more urgently needed food or gas. But soon I owned up to the fact that I was at best a mediocre musician, and it became clear that the recording studio would never earn enough to support itself. When the Borders Books in Lincoln Park went union in 1996, it inspired Jason and me to try to unionize the Tower Records where we worked. We contacted the UFCW and held secret meetings once a week at a coffee shop a mile or so from the store. It soon became clear that few of our coworkers were interested in changing the status quo, and as the long gray miserable frigid winter of 1997 dragged itself through February’s slush—much as every long gray miserable frigid Chicago winter does—I got tired of kicking that same dead, dead horse and got the idea in my head to get the hell out.

I decided to move to the southwest, where I assumed the winters would be less long, gray, miserable, and frigid than those I knew. I’d never been there, knew nothing about the area, but figured it was probably better than where I was. And I decided to try school one more time (having had three majors and dropping out of the University of Illinois twice before living in the loft). Using my mom’s Mac Performa and dial-up connection, I looked for schools in the southwest and stumbled upon references to a tiny liberal arts college nestled in the mountains above Santa Fe, NM called St. John’s. When I read about their seminar-style great-books curriculum and education-for-education’s-sake approach, I knew I’d found my new home. Months later, in the fall of 1998, after the application essays had been written and accepted and the plans made and the arrangements arranged, I loaded all my crap into my 1985 GMC Vandura 2500 (which I’d painted black with semi-gloss acrylic house paint and a brush), filled my 44-oz. trucker mug full of Amoco coffee, and hit the road.

The sky is always blue in Santa Fe, NM. I’m not making this up. On average, there are over 300 sunny days per year. Average annual precipitation is less than 10 inches. I just went back in January for a visit, thinking I’d take a break from Washington, DC’s winter for a couple of days to bask in the blue skies and warm winter days of Santa Fe. C. had arrived a few days before me, and told me over the phone about the 60-degree afternoons and the walking around town in a sweatshirt. But the morning after I arrived, we got several inches of snow. It looked like this (click for larger picture).

Later that day, from my vantage point on C.’s parents’ front porch, it looked like this.

But the next evening, from the same vantage point, looked like this.

And later, somewhere else, it looked like this.

Look, if we’re going to pull this off, you need to remember one crucial thing: Under no circumstances are you to refer to me by my real name when we’re in there. Do you understand? In there they know me as Ben, and in there you call me Ben. It’s for a good reason, so quit asking stupid questions and listen. I’ve been working on this for a long time, and I can’t have some goofball mucking it up. Got it?

What if I have to pay with a credit card? No, of course my credit card doesn’t say “Ben” on it. Shut off your stupid question hose. It’s not like this is an official thing. The Feds ain’t paying for it. I just stumbled into this thing, and now I gotta keep it up. It’s too late to go back. What, after all these months am I just going to tell them, “Hey, you know, hate to break it to you, but my name’s not really Ben”? You crazy? I gotta keep this up. You with me?

I don’t pay with a credit card. Ever. I always pay cash. They call me Ben, I answer to it. It’s real simple. You talk to me in there, you call me Ben. Don’t go calling me Ben every time you say something to me, like “Hey Ben, you want a soda? Tough morning at the office, eh, Ben?” Not like that. Ease it in a couple times, that’s all. When we’re standing at the counter, ask me a question, use Ben, once, that’s it.

I don’t want to get into it. It’s complicated, it’s been going on for months. It’s like you’re walking into the middle of a movie and asking a lot of questions. If you’d been there on time, you wouldn’t have so many stupid questions. Now it’s half over, they found the guy with the gun, and you’re asking why the girl is crying. Forget about it. Just come in there with me, call me Ben, and that’s it. I’ll tell you on the way home. Right now, I just need a goddamn sandwich.

Katya had the same problem, you know. Katya, you know, the blonde who works for Steve. They thought her name was Latoya, but she did the smart thing. She told them right off, told them Latoya’s not her name. It’s Katya. Me, I wasn’t so smart. I didn’t say anything. I let them call me Ben that first day and it stuck. Next day, I walk in the door, and that Chinese guy making the sandwiches says, “Hey Ben! What can I get you?” It’s already too late. Now I’m frickin’ Ben. And I work right next door, so I’m in there all the time. After them calling me Ben for two or three days, what am I gonna do? I can’t correct them. Why wouldn’t I have done it sooner? “Hey, I know you been calling me Ben all week, but that’s not really my name.” Yeah right. I’m playing some joke on them? It’s not funny. A joke’s gotta be funny. Now it’s been months. I’ve been Ben for months in there. I can’t change it now. I’m gonna look like some creep.

And what the hell, it’s kinda nice being Ben. When I go in there, I ain’t me. I ain’t got that crummy job, I ain’t got that nasty bag of fleas at home. I could be anybody. I could be a Fed. I could be a senator, porn star, you name it. Hell, I could be the king of frickin’ France for all they know. Left my crown at the soirée, that’s all. Hell, I could drive a Cadillac. Now wouldn’t that be something? Me in a Cadillac?