The new season of Dark Matter just dropped on Apple TV+, with Jennifer Connelly as #2 on the call sheet. It’s based on a novel I should read, and it’s a dark little work of speculative fiction whose premise is: “What happens when a physicist gets jealous of himself?” Anyway, it’s good, and that’s beside the point.

What came to mind was the famous “ass to ass” sequence in the film Requiem For A Dream, a truly stunning, fantastic movie I have only seen once and never want to see again. On that same list is the film Happiness, with a Paul Thomas Anderson-esque ensemble cast, including the late, great Phillip Seymour Hoffman, but it is itself not a Paul Thomas Anderson movie (the film was written and directed by Todd Solondz). That is a film I will also never see again. A film I have only seen once, but wouldn’t mind seeing again, is Donnie Darko. I suppose I would put Memento in the same category as Darko.

My friend Yakov brooked umbrage at seeing Connelly, who plays our heroine Sarah in the 1980s fantasy Labyrinth starring the late, great David Bowie, play the tweaker girlfriend Marion of the junkie “protagonist” Harry in Requiem. In Labyrinth, she is the 16-year-old half-sister of the infant Toby, who is kidnapped by the Goblin King (Bowie), and she must overcome her resentment toward her half-brother and rescue him. A flop upon release, the film has become an international cult classic, and I was lucky enough to see it at The Castro Theatre before they gutted it (including the famous pipe organ). In Requiem, Marion is pimped out by her meth dealer – culminating in an unwholesomely prurient sequence involving a sex toy.

Yakov didn’t like that. He has always had a weird, subtle, prudish streak in him – we tease him for being a grumpy old Russian lady. When one of our mutual friends started dancing at a strip club, she encouraged all of us to come down and visit her at work. Yakov jokingly tried to cover her up with his coat. I was uncomfortable and bored, having already spent far too much time sitting at the bar at the Crazy Horse Gentlemen’s Club waiting for my roommate Arthur to finish his shift as the bouncer.

We’ve talked before on this Substack about the gnarly things I’ve watched without it affecting me too much (although that seems to be changing) – take The Pitt, for instance. In Requiem, Harry’s arm becomes gangrenous, and an EMT quipped, “Looks like he won’t be shooting up in that arm anymore.” It would have to be amputated. I just finally finished Killing Eve, years late, which is an endless stream of casual and creative violence. I do have a line, of course. The Saw franchise is just too over-the-top for me. And although a lot of it is fake, I sometimes wish I hadn’t seen Faces of Death or the much, much worse Traces of Death. There is a scene involving a lion that is… memorable. I was going to describe the scene, typed it out, and then decided that, you know what, I could spare everyone the details. It’s unpleasant and quite real. By the time Rotten Dot Com was a thing, I already had a modest collection of crime-scene and accident photos that I had slowly downloaded over a 28.8 baud modem in the BBS days. An online friend collected bestiality GIFs, and I will have plenty to say about him someday; I have seen them all. I am of the generation of Goatse and Tub Girl and all manner of gross-out voyeurism. If you don’t know what “Goatse” is, congratulations, and don’t look it up.

The reason I will not be watching Requiem For a Dream again is because of the character Harry’s mother, Sara, played by the always amazing Ellen Burstyn. She is a widow who spends all day watching television and is roped into a scam to enter a contest for a chance to appear on a game show. If this performance were just some obsessed old woman, it would be unremarkable. But Burstyn captures the sadness and isolation of Sara’s existence, her devastating denial of her son’s addiction, and the desperate hope she has while being cruelly strung along by the scammers she falls prey to – who take advantage of her sadness and isolation. The sadness is not overt. If you aren’t paying attention, maybe you miss it. I didn’t, and it broke my heart. It broke my heart, and for a moment, Sara reminded me of my mother.

I know that during and after the divorce, my mother wrestled with “ending it all,” and for that I will never forgive my father, love him though I do. In the lead-up to Mom’s memorial, my older sister Jenny took it upon herself to get Mom’s affairs in order. She was the only one, really; I stepped up once I stopped drinking to do what I could, but it was a fraction of the effort Jenny put in. Missy and Ryan had their own reasons for not being able to help with the administrivia of death. But Ryan put in considerable time being with Mom in the nursing home, and Missy gave her grandkids. It wasn’t for lack of desire to be helpful that we weren’t directly involved in the grueling details; among the three younger siblings, it was a lack of capability. In that way, Jenny was and is the superhero. If we are being honest, she might be the only one of the four of us who has been blessed with something approaching balance and sanity.

Jenny found the letters between Mom and Dad. He was unkind. I try my best not to be unkind, and I am ashamed when it bubbles up. Six decades in, I still remember unkindness being visited upon all of us. I worry about doing that to the Kid. You forget the good, but you never let go of the bad. You can paper over it, and all four of us have become experts at that. Dad’s edges have dulled, of course, and he’s not a monster, but he has done unforgivable things. He may never have laid a finger on her, but he hurt my Mom. And that’s what I saw behind Ellen Burstyn’s eyes, as Sara.

So I won’t be rewatching Requiem For a Dream.

Here we are, Sunday, not even noon, staring at a blank screen.

Mise en scene: The ladies are out getting mani-pedis, so I walked over to the 500 Club to sit at the bar and drink my half-caf toddy (words that have no business being strung together). Prez is working, so I’ve expended 20 jukebox credits to play “12 Golden Country Hits” in its entirety. This is an album that came out… (checks notes)... 30 years ago.

I have at least 1000 words about Ween.

Most folks, myself included, were first exposed to Ween by way of Beavis and Butthead, who famously lampooned the song “Push Th’ Little Daisies.” At the time, I thought, “That’s weird, and a little annoying.” Which meant that if I didn’t like it at the time, I would definitely love it years later when I began to appreciate the value of things that are intentionally weird.

I had put Ween on the shelf until 1997 with the release of the excellent film “Dream with the Fishes,” written and directed by Finn Taylor and starring David Arquette.

In it, our buttoned-up hero, Terry, is stopped from jumping off the San Francisco Bay Bridge by Nick, a mercurial spirit who enlists Terry to help him check off some items on his bucket list before terminal cancer kills him. The resulting adventure is at times endearing, dangerous, touching, and deeply sad. The “doing acid at the Monterey Aquarium” sequence is not to be missed, and there’s a fun little twist at the end. Or not so fun. Watch it and decide yourself.

The film also has one of my favorite soundtracks of all time, featuring Tindersticks, Nick Drake (whom I discovered while watching this film), the Squirrel Nut Zippers, and Ween. The song “Japanese Cowboy” is off 12 Golden Country Greats, which, naturally, has 10 tracks.

After releasing four LPs, GodWeenSatan: The Oneness, Pod, Pure Guava, and Chocolate and Cheese (which we will talk about in a bit), the band decided it would be fun to switch gears and team up with some of the session players who had previously worked with their friend and producer Ben Vaughn to record a Country Western album.

I remember buying the Dream With the Fishes soundtrack and thinking to myself, “Wait, this is Ween?”

Later, during the 25 years between 1998 and 2000, I really got into Ween for the stupidest of reasons.

In Coventry, there was a clique of folks who coalesced around a guy called Pyster, his friends, and their Porch. The Porch was about a 15 to 20 minute walk from Coventry-proper, on the corner of Goodnor and Superior, right across the street from Cain Park. There was a rotating cast of characters, including Kay Porter; then there were core members Tex, MacQueen, Tac, the Beauxmonsters Kathy, Beth, and Lee, Josh (now Jessica) and her brother Adam, Pyster, and myself.

One of the regulars was a woman who called herself “DarkMistress” on Pyster’s BBS, Doom’s Retreat, who was an ex-girlfriend. In real life, DarkMistress, A.K.A Heather, was not terribly dark. Before meeting her, I expected a mysterious goth chick. She and I flirted shamelessly on the BBS. Heather had mousey, dirty blond hair, warm blue eyes, and really nice legs. Pyster nudged the two of us toward each other, and in 1994 at the tender age of 19, she took my virginity. With Metallica as the soundtrack. Cringe, but it was what she was into. Of course, I was naturally gifted at sex… just kidding, it was awkward and bad, but she gave me a couple more tries before moving on. We remained very close regardless.

Tex married his sweetheart Rebecca, and later that night had to be talked down from the roof he was threatening to throw himself off. Years later, plagued by demons and drugs, he committed suicide by swallowing a bottle of pills. Somewhere I have a screen grab of his last “words,” what appeared to be him passing out on his keyboard at 4-something in the morning on IRC. Our mutual friend Stimmy called me while I was shopping for Christmas dinner supplies at the Potrero Safeway. I broke down crying in the freezer section. The first time I learned of someone’s death by suicide in a grocery store (the second was Jackie).

When things soured between Pyster and Tac, whose mother owned the house with The Porch, Pyster moved back to the west side of Cleveland. In spite of that, Pyster was spiritually a member of the Coventry flock, if not one of its ringleaders, and he would make the trek across the Cuyahoga to hang out with us. The river is not the only thing that divides Cleveland’s east and west sides: their cultural, economic, and racial makeup differs vastly. The west side and western suburbs are decidedly blue-collar, with a large enclave of Central and Eastern European workers. Germans, Czechs, Lithuanians, Poles, Hungarians, Ukrainians, and more. The east side of Cleveland, and the inner-eastern suburbs, were split between rich WASPs and African-Americans. After years of living among folks from Cleveland Heights, and Coventry in particular, Pyster started to notice the racist and Conservative-coded underbelly of the west side.

That year, Pyster and a few other folks ordered psilocybin spores from Canada by mail, and he started growing shrooms in his garage. The fungus was fecund, and he ended up with bumper crop after bumper crop. He’d sell some, but largely he liked to give it away to his friends.

On a hot summer day, maybe July, we gathered at the concrete steps called “Monkey Island” on the corner of Euclid Heights Boulevard and Coventry, the magical nexus of unseen forces, a powerful intersection of ancient energy, and the place we smoked weed and drank Old English out of styrofoam Arabica (air-a-BEAK-a) cups.

Pyster handed out sandwich bags with about an ounce each of dried shrooms.

“How much should I take?”

Someone said, “All of it,” and so I did, not realizing the error of my ways. It soon became apparent that I had made a grave mistake. Sweat was pouring out of every pore. The walls of Arabica were melting, and I saw all that shit people say they see on Acid but I never did (not on one hit, not on ten). The hated and feared Cleveland Heights cops came in for coffee as they walked their beat (often chasing us no good stoners around). I was freaking out.

“Dude, how much did you take?”

I told Pyster how much. He laughed and said, “Jesus Christ, all of it?”

“Ok, let’s get you inside somewhere.”

“Maybe Paco’s home.”

Paco is not his real name, of course. The rule was, if you got caught with anything by the police and they asked you where you got it, tell them you bought it off Paco. Every drug dealer on Monkey Island was Paco; it didn’t matter what it was: pot, acid, MDMA, and later on, cocaine. But this was Big Paco, the conduit for all the LSD that came into Cleveland Heights in the 1990s (by way of the Pittsburgh rave scene). Honestly, there’s no legal reason I need to protect Paco. One of the other Pacos snitched on him (he didn’t tell the cops he got it from “Paco”), and Big Paco went away for almost four years for LSD and MDMA. Paco didn’t fuck with coke, though. “Cocaine makes people flaky.”

Big Paco was right, of course.

Pyster knocked on his door, a first-floor apartment down Euclid Heights Boulevard. He didn’t answer right away, but we knew he was home. It was summer, and no matter how much we tried to practice marijuana “ops sec,” especially with CHPD beat cops routinely walking down the boulevard, it was just too hot to close the windows. Pot smoke drifted out of the living room and onto the street.

Big Paco was more of an honorary term, a sign of respect based on his position in the hierarchy of the kids than ran rave drugs and pot. We called ourselves the Local 69, and I was the bank… we kept the book and kept folks honest, and tried to set prices, but Big Paco, union be damned, would constantly undercut us.

However, standing at about 6’4”, he did cut an imposing figure as he darkened the doorway. Annoyance turned to bemusement as Pyster explained my predicament. Big Paco’s girlfriend, Little Debbie, peeked around the corner.

“What are you doing?” said Debbie, shooting Paco a look. “Come inside.”

In the end, Big Paco was happy to help. This is a man who has sherpa’d many a trip, and seemed to take great pleasure in it. One might think he wanted to develop new clientele, but taking into account the fact that he was happy to just give it away, business seemed an unlikely motivation.

“OK, buddy, let’s get you on the couch.”

Debbie covered me in blankets, which I didn’t mind even though it was 85º and humid, and Paco made me Sleepy Time tea with a capsule of valerian root added to calm me down.

“Listen to this, it will help.”

He slid his Chocolate and Cheese CD into the stereo and hit play…

Chocolate and Cheese became the soundtrack (or one of) of the 25 years between 1998 and 2000. At the end of an Acid trip, usually early in the morning as the sun rose, we would commemorate the moment with the song “What Deaner was Talkin’ About”:

The wash is out,
It’s hanging up,
And all I have is nothing,
Nothing to do,
Nothing to say,
I think I must be dreaming…
The sun comes up and I’m all washed out,
Is this what Deaner was talkin’ about?
I don’t think I’ll ever return again, my friend

In cuddle puddles on my living room floor at The Ford, I’d let the girl with the biggest blue eyes and the softest lips be the big spoon and we’d all sing along. I don’t think I’ve met a better kisser.

I don’t think Paco liked her, but it was probably because she snubbed him (she was also 16 at the time, to Paco’s almost 24). Her brother had gotten into heroin, and Paco definitely didn’t like him. The brother would be dead of an overdose fewer than five years later. He was a nice kid, and a relentless flirt. He also looked like an Aryan Jim Morrisson (the family was Swedish and Finnish, and it doesn’t get much whiter than that).

After the incident with the mushrooms, I became a devoted fan of Ween. The great irony is that I had always wondered what they were like when I bought the Henry Rolling Band CD, and they were name-checked in the liner notes. Henry Rollins also has a “Boognish” tattoo, which is the band's deity/mascot. The next year, I went to my first Ween concert at the Cleveland Agora, on the Mollusk tour. It fucking blew my mind. As one of their encores, their roadie came out to rip into a 10-minute “Hot For Teacher.” Deaner (né Mickey Melchiondo Jr.) was a guitar prodigy, and Ween was basically a jam band.

One of the things I dig about Ween is their fan base. I grew up in a well-to-do suburb, which meant that there was no shortage of Dead Heads at school. Between them and the Phish Heads, I don’t know which fan base I found more insufferable. They made up a sizable portion of the Ween fan base, as well, but so did punk rockers and metal heads and just about any subculture. So a Ween show brought together all of the “warring” factions of subculture: guys in Dead t-shirts sharing joints with chicks in Slayer shirts while peeps in Black Flag and PiL shirts “moshed” during the more lively numbers.

I’ve only ever tolerated exactly two “jam bands” in my life, and both of them are on the fringes of the genre: Ween and Built to Spill (who I used to see at least three times a year, and am seeing tomorrow night for the first time in years at The Chapel in San Francisco).

I have many, many, many Ween stories (spoiler alert: they all involve drugs), but wrapped in blanket like a human burrito listening to Chocolate and Cheese on repeat is the most pivotal.

I do have a pretty interesting story about letting a millionaire rave promoter (e.g., big-time club drug dealer) drive my Saab 900 to Philly to give Ween a bunch of free sheets of acid, sleeping in the car, then getting brunch before driving back to Pittsburgh the next day. But that’s another at least 1000 words.

This story begins in the summer of 2009.

My friend Gorgeous Paige had been priced out of Oakland. People like me started moving to the Bay Area in droves in the late 1990s, like locusts. Those who were interested in money and nothing else mostly settled in the South Bay. These were not cosmopolitan tech workers. The twinkling Paris of North America, the most beautiful city in the United States, held no sway on many of them. These are the cretins that don’t need art or music; they don’t need a good dive bar, the kind where you get to sit between a lesbian photojournalist, her sweet but stupid pitbull dressed in a pink sweater, and a guy in an ironic Meat Is Murder T-shirt who makes sculpture out of paperclips. These are the philistines who don’t appreciate a good burrito. But enough tech workers, for their own reasons, needed to live in The City, and slowly but surely we pushed people like Paige across the bay to Oakland and points further East.

In the city, we were locusts. We ate through so many things that made San Francisco cool and unique. We made everything more expensive. The taquerias started to get replaced by bars with foxed mirrors serving $45 pork chops. The music venues started closing as the tacky, boxy Five-Over-Ones popped up like mold on the surface streets. “Borg cubes,” my roommate Larry used to say. Then, we set our sights on Oakland and Berkeley, and the plague spread. Paige pulled up roots and headed north to the Rose City.

I’m a color reporter (Rose City on the 409)
But the city’s been bled white (white city on the yellow line)

I was fascinated by Paige. Obviously, she’s beautiful: full, curly hair, full lower lip, sleepy hazel eyes that shone green in the right light. In the days before tattoos were totally ubiquitous, she had eye-popping, colorful sleeves woven into her pale skin. But of course, this was San Francisco in the Aughts; everyone was beautiful. “In San Francisco, you can fall in love six times walking down a single block,” ldevil Nic used to say (to be fair, Nic was an infamous fuck-boy, he fell in love 20 times a day).

Paige had something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, though. She was very smart. She was funny. She was, she is, exceedingly kind.

So we kept in touch, even after she left, mostly using a “social media” platform that was very much of the times in the late Aughts: StumbleUpon.

The easiest way to describe StumbleUpon is “Internet roulette.” You sign up, tell it your interests, install the browser plugin, smash the “big money no whammies” button, and it will take you to a random web page. I was into some politics, some tech stuff, Sci-fi blogs (especially fanfic), and nudes. Really, I liked a whole pastiche of things, and to the extent to which there was an “algorithm” back in the day, it couldn’t make heads or tails of what I did and didn’t like. The great thing about Paige was her keen eye for nudes of the same kind of hot metalhead, skater, alt, bar-scene, and goth chicks that I was into.

I happened upon a real winner one day.

Black and white. She’s lying on her belly on the white floor of the studio. Sly smile. Bottle blonde, but the last time she dyed her hair must have been weeks ago; it looked straightened. She was propped up on her elbows. Fit, but she wasn’t a skinny little thing. A single black leather boot on her right foot, and nothing else.

Where was the left boot? To this day, the mystery remains unsolved.

But her tattoos were what caught my eye. They were all words, some like a typewriter, some decorative script. If you squinted, you could make out the opening paragraph of Lolita on her upper arm:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

I’d seen all manner of artwork needled into the skin of these models that Paige and I would send back and forth to each other. Some of them were elaborate, colorful designs taken from traditional Japanese or Maori patterns. Sailor’s tattoos. Faces. Cartoons. Angular graffiti script. Expensive-looking tattoos, cheap-looking ones. Weird ones. Stupid ones. But just words? That was, forgive me, a novel concept.

If a picture ever screamed “send it to Paige” to me, it was this one. I sent it with a note, “I think I just found the perfect woman.”

A few hours later, I get a notification. It’s a new reply for Paige. Five words: “Lol, that’s my personal trainer.”

Obviously, I needed to be friends with her. If only for the Nabokov quote, I would want to be friends with her. But being friends with Paige automatically makes you cool as far as I was concerned.

I don’t exactly remember everything about the first time the three of us hung out in Portland. Paige and I met Tasia at a cocktail lounge in the Pearl District. It must have been summer; the sun was still out. The bar may very well have been in or attached to a hotel, because it had an impressively high ceiling. I vaguely remember a cream-colored, maybe ceramic-tiled bar, fixed brass stools with leather seats, all using a swatch from a 1960s Italian movie: teal, ochre, mustard, oxblood, cerulean blue. The light came in through the giant floor-to-ceiling windows; you could see the glint of green in Paige’s beautiful eyes, and you could see mischief in Tasia’s beautiful dark eyes.

We all had a cocktail (or three), but it was clear that Tasia was there for the snacks. There must have been charcuterie; there may have been a ceviche. There almost certainly was foie gras. Tasia’s enthusiasm for a good appetizer is unending. Once, she had Kay Porter and me meet her at another bar just so we could experience their take on nachos, which replaced the tortilla chips with crispy fried chicken skins.

As the evening progressed, we got drunker and drunker, snacking at one bar or another along the way. Paige and Tasia decided that we must go to a strip club, but not the one that Tasia used to strip at in the days before becoming a trainer. Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, and Type-O Negative played while the girls twirled around on stage. Tasia judged them on their pole work. We bought Paige a lap dance. When we reached our three drink minimum, though, it was time to go. Tasia slipped a $20 into the cocktail waitress’s garter.

At the end of that night, we ended up at a dive bar called The Speakeasy in the Buckman neighborhood, just across the Morrison Street Bridge from Downtown. We shot pool; Paige and I did key bumps in the bathroom; we ate excellent $1 tacos. Paige walked me back to the Jupiter Hotel, where she deposited me back in my room, gave me a kiss on the cheek, and walked home.

Late the next morning, I awoke in bed lying on my stomach. I’d only gotten one boot off my feet.

The left one, of course.

That’s how I met my Personal Trainerpist.

This Thursday, August 6th, would have been Elliott Smith’s 57th birthday.

“Last week ended a little abruptly,” said Therapist Actual, about my last 1000 Words. I spent the next five minutes fumbling for an excuse.

“It was a tone poem, you know… like Holst or Saint-Saëns,” I pulled some late 19th, early 20th-century composers out of my ass. Franz Liszt is credited with inventing the term; Richard Strauss and Bedřich Smetana wrote some well-known compositions using the form. A tone poem is a single-movement piece of orchestral or concert music that tells a story, illustrates a painting, or evokes a mood without using words [Google].

I then went on to talk about Raymond Carver, because I’m so smart and well-read (just kidding, Caitlin had a copy of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love* in the bathroom). He’s famous for writing stories that go absolutely nowhere. Character studies. Reading Carver was very freeing for me because it gave me a built-in excuse to write in an unstructured way, which is Alanis Morrissette ironic since I have recently been working in slightly more formal confines: beginning, middle, end. Three acts, maybe five, more like a symphony.

(* There’s an excellent indie film called Birdman, where Michael Keaton plays a has-been action star who is trying to make a serious comeback by writing and directing an off-Broadway adaptation of Carver’s short story. Check it out.)

The conversation turns back to music; I have given myself homework for Therapist Actual.

“I need you to be literate in my music vocabulary,” I tell her. “It can’t be all Shostakovich all the time? I mean, my god, can you even imagine if it was?” Therapist Actual has played classical music, but confessed (my words, not hers) that she wouldn’t know a Pixies song if it bit her; my Personal Trainerpist quipped, “and you didn’t fire her on the spot?” Age has softened me…

The Allegretto from the String Quartet No. 8 (C-min, Opus 110) starts playing in my head; a sad, playful, subversive waltz in the middle of a work dedicated to the victims of fascism.

No, it certainly can’t be Shostakovich all the time.

“I’ll make you that mix tape.”

I have other, more unpleasant therapist-homework, which I presently procrastinate in favor of asking the question: what needs to be on the playlist I would give to someone who I want to understand me?

Around 20 years ago, give or take a decade, I put together a CD of music I thought was cool at the time (probably still is, of course); my aunt was still a school teacher. I think the idea was for her to use it as a conversation starter with students; I can’t quite remember. If a copy of it still exists, if it is still playable, I’d love to get my hands on it. I truly have no idea what might be on it, but I believe I might have put it together near the start of the Jason Isbell era, late aughts. Recently, I had promised her that I would produce a revised version.

So, Therapist-Actual and cool Aunt, this is for you.

This 1000 Words feels like I’m doing the blog equivalent of a “clip show,” which is a television show made up almost entirely of clips strung together with some light narrative because the writers went on strike or the effects budget was blown for the week. Stargate: SG1 was famous for these. Which isn’t to say this week will be “low-effort”; I will put some thought into it, maybe quite a lot, but I am not on the hook for telling any real stories.

Might as well start with good ole Dmitri:

The piece was written shortly after Shostakovich reluctantly joined the Communist Party. According to the score, it is dedicated “to the victims of fascism and the war”; his son Maxim interprets this as a reference to the victims of all totalitarianism, while his daughter Galina says that he dedicated it to himself, and that the published dedication was imposed by Soviet authorities. Shostakovich’s friend, Lev Lebedinsky, said that Shostakovich thought of the work as his epitaph and that he planned to commit suicide around this time. Peter J. Rabinowitz has also pointed to covert references to Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen in the Eighth Quartet.

My first exposure to the piece came from picking up a CD from Dad’s collection with a curiously gothy cover, Black Angels (Kronos Quartet). This was classical music like none I had ever heard before. The titular work, “Black Angels: Thirteen Images From the Dark Land,” jarringly pierces the air off the jump with shrill violin. It sounded like a swarm of wasps to me, or 10,000 crows, but, reading the liner notes, composer George Crumb meant to evoke a swarm of Army helicopters coming over the horizon, raining death down on the Vietnamese.

Black angels.

The album, altogether, is a treatise on the horrors of war, and yes, the Shostakovich fits squarely into that bucket. This was certainly not “your grandfather’s classical music.” I doubt it was my Dad’s cup of tea, but the recording was well-reviewed. If the Grammys were cooler at the time the album came out, it surely might have won (the album was nominated for the 33rd Annual Grammy Awards). For me, it was a whole new way of listening to music. And, coming from someone who never was interested in heavy metal in middle and high-school, it was metal as fuck.

Therapist Actual’s classical repertoire is, in fact, unknown to me. I know about her playing violin as part of a conversation about the Kid not wanting to play violin in school, perhaps to her mom’s disappointment. Mom insists that she play an instrument, and I tend to agree that music, the playing or appreciation of – the understanding of theory – is not just important, but essential. But I also remember how hard it was to try to learn piano or guitar, navigating the neon jungle of ADHD. I, too, started on violin in, I dunno, kindergarten, first grade? It was uncomfortable to hold the violin; I could never quite get it to make the sounds I expected; rosin felt weird on my fingers; and the idea of handling horse hair squicked me out. But the violin was chosen, more or less, for me, just as it was chosen for the Kid. We had a piano in the house, on which I would improvise for hours at a time, just noodling around. But when I got around to taking lessons, I just couldn’t concentrate on the Suzuki Method. I couldn’t bring myself to do the exercises. Like all other homework, I just couldn’t do it. My mind wouldn’t let me.

It’s become clear that this is how the Kid’s mind works as well, which fills me with anxiety for a couple of reasons: one, I know how hard that can make life and, two, I’m unsure of how to help her. So we have a household with two adults with ADHD (treated to some extent), and one child, apparently, with it as well.

It was around my sophomore year of high school that I ever heard the name The Pixies, a band that was well outside of any popular repertoire in 1991. But they were huge on the college circuit, and even before Nirvana exploded on the scene, I had already turned away from popular music in favor of college radio and fringe syndicated shows like Doctor Demento and Wolfman Jack. My appreciation of The Pixies solidified when I was sent to boarding school in Massachusetts. The student body was rife with art-scene types, and it being Mass, the locals were all well familiar with the U Mass Amherst college underground scene, which had as flagship bands The Pixies and Dinosaur Jr, both of whom went on to be massively influential, genre-defining groups.

Gen-Xers with a passing familiarity might recognize some of the more radio-friendly offerings by The Pixies: “Debaser,” “Gigantic” (a song about, well, dick), or “Where Is My Mind?” One of my dorm mates was a guy named Jef, and we’d frequently sing the refrain from a song called “Space (I Believe In)”: “…Jefrey with one F Jef-rey.”

Charles “Black Francis” Thompson, A.K.A. Frank Black, is the primary songwriter for The Pixies, and when I read somewhere that Frank Black chose lyrics not because they made sense but because he liked the shape of the sounds of the words, everything fell into place.

Got me a movie I want you to know
Slicing up eyeballs I want you to know
Girlie so groovie I want you to know
Don’t know about you but I am un chien Andalusia
I am un chien Andalusia
I am un chien Andalusia
I am un chien Andalusia
Wanna grow up to be
Be a debaser (debaser)

It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t have to. Black’s screamed, “scar tissue” vocals are the instrument. The ayyyys and the ooooos do the heavy lifting. Ayyyy am ooooon chaaaaain Andalooooosya!!!

Four kids from U Mass Amherst just goofing off, the only real virtuosity in the band was Frank Black, who could go from a growl to a shriek in the same song, managed to make magic by accident, and stumbled into greatness.

The second half of “All Over the World” is almost fugal, and for whatever reason the last refrains give me goosebumps:

All my thoughts
All I am
Are my thoughts
All my thoughts
I am all
What I’m taught

The Pixies are music for nerds by nerds, but cool nerds. Sonic Youth, an art-rock band that came out of the New York City “no-wave” movement in the 1980s, has both an aesthetic that bleeds cool but has its roots firmly planted in the fecund soil of being total dorks.

Going back to U Mass Amherst, and rounding out this trio of groundbreaking late 1980s, early 1990s alt-rock bands is Dinosaur Jr., a three-piece of guitarist J Mascis (a legitimate rock god), bassist Lou Barlow (who later went on to form indie darlings seBADoh and Folk Implosion), and drummer Murph. Famously, Dinosaur Jr. is considered to be among the loudest live acts in the world, and I can attest to that. Their “best of” compilation is called Ear Bleeding Country. J Mascis once stated in an interview that because he didn’t feel like he was good with chords, he taught himself how to play guitar first by soloing. Like The Pixies and Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr.’s prowess lies in their complete disregard for formality, probably unaware of the names or shapes of the chords Mascis would make up on the spot for those first few records. 1991 saw the release of the band’s first major-label album, Green Mind, also the first album recorded after Barlow was kicked out of the band. Like Doolittle (The Pixies) and Goo (Sonic Youth), both of those band’s respective major-label debuts, Green Mind remains rough around the edges… and loud. Which is why, upon my first listen, I was surprised by the penultimate track, “Thumb,” which remains one of my favorites. It opens up with a flute, it’s basically a ballad. It’s certainly not what you would expect from a band that contributed greatly to my persistent tinnitus.

There never really is a good time
Always nothing much to say
“Pretty good,” “not doing that fine,”
“Gettin’ up most every day”

I think that’s all we have time for today. The next installment will continue along the vein of “why is Chris basically half deaf now?” Featuring the dulcet tones of bands like Babyland, Nitzer Ebb, Front Line Assembly, Wümpscut, and Cop Shoot Cop.

In the meantime, enjoy this from the late Stephen Paul “Elliott” Smith, and also this cover of an Elliott Smith song by Seth Avett and Jessica Lea Mayfield.

I had this whole anecdote lined up about how a few friends and I crashed the bar at the 18th hole on Pebble Beach, on acid, and turned blue in the face trying so hard not to laugh when some Chad quipped to his mistress, “I’ll have you know, I parred this hole.”

There’s not that much of a story there yet, at least, not a cohesive one that I’ve put together; there’s a lot of extra context around it that needs developing.

So, I’m not sure what to talk about this week.

I’m on vacation this week from the ladies–the kid and her Mom are visiting Grandma in her summer home up in the mountains in the Carolinas.

“Is it mustard or vinegar up there?” In the back of my head, I think I know it’s mustard, but I have to make sure. It’s definitely pork, though, as is barbecue throughout the Southeast. You have to travel West along the Gulf of Mexico to get to the beef brisket in Texas. The roommate’s late father, Sunny, was a champion whole-hog smoker who, decades ago, at the roommate’s wedding in Florida, gave me the secret to his vinegar-based mop sauce (SOWse). Best as I can remember, the ubiquitous pre-packaged seasoning of Florida, Everglades Seasoning, was in it. Family friends brought homemade pickled hot sauce to the rehearsal dinner and the wedding, and Sunny taught me how to shuck an oyster.

“Bring back a jar of mustard BBQ sauce, please.” For whatever reason, a younger me looked down on mustard sauces, but over the years I’ve come to realize that you just can’t go through life being a “purist.” Besides, other than being a generation separated from South Georgia and Alabama (that’s vinegar country), I don’t have a horse in the race. The official BBQ sauce of Cleveland, as far as any East Sider my age or older is concerned, is Hot Sauce Williams, may its name be a blessing. Far as I could tell, the predominant ingredients were apple cider vinegar and reduced Dairymens red drink.

The Rust Belt, at least my corner of it, did have a certain distinct style of BBQ that tended to be sweet and sticky, somewhere in between a Kansas City and St. Louis sauce, but my roommate Sparky won some contests with a sauce whose base was Gerber Apple Sauce–the kind you give babies. The annual Rib Cookoff in Cleveland had a lot of beef ribs, which were cooked not quite to the point that it was falling off the bone; in fact, properly done, it was a little “toothsome.”

The thing to get at Hot Sauce Williams was the wings (WANGS), tossed into the eerily reddish eponymous sauce, and hot from the fryer. Hot enough to melt the styrofoam. Jil Siegel helped paint the famous pink sign on Carnegie in Hough, a name synonymous with “the ghetto” in Cleveland, where few spoiled white kids from the suburbs dared to go. This spoiled white kid from the suburbs wished that I had ginned up the courage to start hanging out in Hough before I did, in my late 20s. Unbeknownst to me, Hough had a thriving cultural scene that spanned Hard-Bop, Hip-Hop, and the Hardcore scenes. Down the road in the St. Clair neighborhood, the tragically hip lived in lofts built out of an abandoned elementary school called The Hodge School. Of course, there was a Hot Sauce Williams in Shaker, but that was Scott Mescudi’s Shaker, not my Shaker, quite literally on the wrong side of the tracks, south of the RTA Green Line.

Going back to Pebble Beach for a moment, I will mention that we made the trip down to the country club to visit our friend Celeste, who used to work at La Cave du Vin, on her last shift at The Lodge. By we, I mean Camel Jim and Zoya, who both lived in separate lofts at separate times at Hodge (before they started dating), and my friend Neophyte, careering down Highway 17 in his busted-up Toyota Corolla, Bitchass.

Jimmy earned his name from the job he worked when we all first met him, one of the infamous “Camel Kids” of the mid-1990s. RJ Reynolds, sensing an urgent need to replenish their supply of customers (consumers of their products had a nasty habit of dying from cancer), hired a marketing firm called KBA Marketing out of Chicago to come up with a devious scheme to snare the young and (tragically) hip. To be a Camel Kid, you had to be cool, good-looking, and you needed a car. Jim had all three. He and an army of hipsters would be dispatched to nightclubs armed with a trunk full of cigarettes to give out packs for free. Not all were recognizably Camel brands. Part of the campaign involved repackaging and rebranding Camel cigarettes: sliding boxes (Camel Slides), boutique specialty flavors (Honey Cut), and collectible tins. The campaign was wildly successful, and a boon to Jimmy, who used it as a front to sell weed and mushrooms along his route.

In that capacity, there were many nights when Camel Jim paid lip service to his errands and either planted himself in at La Cave or, if it was a cool enough show, the Grog Shop on the other end of Coventry’s main drag. This meant he had to offload cartons of cigarettes, which the bartenders were happy to take off his hands. At the time, I lived in an apartment whose name I barely knew (The Valentia?), and whose front door I almost never went through. Like The Ford, the black metal back stairs leading into the kitchen were the way everyone came in and out. I had to; I don’t think I even had keys to the front doors. We moved around behind the buildings, cutting through driveways, parking lots behind apartments, and to get to Marty and my apartment, up Dumpster Alley.

We were a convenient waypoint between La Cave and the Grog, and Marty was a (mostly) gracious host to the Coventry partynistas. Very often, Jimmy and a gang of cool kids would stop by in between the bars, and very often the cool kids would be at our place after last call. This was the era of good haircuts, Dandy Warhols, nose drugs, Basement Jaxx, chain wallets, black lipstick, and chokers. Marty would perch himself on a short stool next to his light table, like Spider-Man crouching on a ledge, holding court as the Prince of Coventry. His girlfriend Dalia, the prima donna of the Cleveland Ballet, was the Princess of Coventry, and our downstairs neighbor in all her black-clad glory, floating six inches off the ground beneath her feet, was the high Duchess, Jil Siegel.

Riki would come home and cry some nights.

By home, of course, I mean my apartment. Not her home, a studio in an Art Deco apartment building near Cedar-Fairmont, designed by one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s protégés. Her off-and-on boyfriend Prick Lou had taken up residence at her apartment, rent-free, and wouldn’t leave; so Riki would often come up the metal stairs around the back of The Ford and let herself in the back door, which led to the kitchen. At one point, my roommates, Arthur, Sparky, and I, would post a sign outside the door: “If your name isn’t on this list, don’t knock.” People would come over at all hours to party or hang out. Riki had keys.

I wished Riki would leave Prick Lou and date me instead, but I made do with her crawling into my bed at night. Usually, just to pass out. Sometimes, we’d do more than just sleep. Mine was the main bedroom, with an attached bathroom and shower. Most nights she’d kick off her kitchen clogs, strip off her whites, her sawtooth pants, and jump right in the shower. Once in a while, she’d fall right into bed, the smell of shallots in her fingers, her hair, somehow in her bra if she didn’t manage to get that off before losing consciousness.

She was our fourth roommate for all intents and purposes, and while she wasn’t my girlfriend, we would sometimes fight like a couple whenever I would privately confront her about her bulimia. It wasn’t that I was mean to her; in fact, the opposite, but I was frustrated and confused about what to do. I knew why she spent so much time in the bathroom. Sometimes the heaving sounded like keening, sad and haunting. Her knuckles and fingers were calloused, and her teeth were eroding from the stomach acid.

Everyone in that house cooked–I was the only one who hadn’t done so for work.

Arthur hadn’t been in a kitchen in a while, and after his stint as a strip club bouncer, he took jobs as a handyman and even, at one point, a locksmith and apprentice safe cracker. Now he handles priceless artifacts for the museum, sometimes traveling cross-country with the exhibits. Sparky cooked at the Italian restaurant next to the wine bar. My Dad and his bride loved to eat there. In fact, most of the upper-upper-middle class of Cleveland Heights loved it there. The wine bar and restaurant shared a set of bathrooms. Sparky would line up cocaine behind a roll of toilet paper placed on top of the toilet for the bartenders at the wine bar, but the wait staff at the Italian restaurant were all into heroin. It tickled me to no end watching my parents and their oblivious friends tuck into giant raviolo while the staff of Café D’Oro and neighboring La Cave du Vin snorted and fucked and every other restaurant cliché under the sun mere meters away. The food was pretty good, for what it was: a few big steps above red gingham. The Italian chef actually built a wood-burning stove for pizza long before that was standard practice.

We joked that being a line cook was just a cover job for Sparky, and that his main means of income was the weed and coke he sold around town, but if I were to do the math in my head, whatever money came in from that went right back out. We all got high on our own supplies.

The cooks, servers, and bartenders in Cleveland all eked by with just enough money (or often not enough) to pay their bills. One month Riki got stuck with a $600 East Ohio Gas bill, no thanks to the Cleveland winters and a poorly insulated century home a few blocks from the A Christmas Story House. But we all ate and drank like kings and queens, paying all of our discretionary money into what I liked to think of as a giant service-industry slush fund that never stayed in any one bartender, server, or cook’s pocket for too long. A bartender across town would barely pay for their meals at the restaurant whose servers all drank for free when they were on the stick. The cooks sold the drugs, that money going back to the bartenders, who tipped the servers, who bought the drugs. Everyone fucked everyone else, but there were shockingly few outbreaks of STDs. At best, most of us silently carry some form of herpes or HPV. Cancer will get those of us who quit the lifestyle and got sober, had kids, whatever. I’m sure of it.

In a very real sense, the service industry in Cleveland in that moment was like a family, ahem, warts and all, and I got let in despite only occasionally working at bars.

Just like each restaurant had a pre-service family meal, The Ford, with its three real cooks, Arthur, Sparky, and Riki, and me, often hosted the 4 AM family meal. We’d rotate. Sparky would bring home Cambros of soup and steal entire beef tenderloin sub-primals from the restaurant. He was happy to let me trim them. My specialty was the linguini, pepper, and sausages, to which I’d add the tiniest bit of cinnamon. When Riki was inspired to cook outside of work, there was no stopping her, and god help you if you tried. One of the things that frustrated me most was knowing that whatever she made and ate would end up coming back up. Some servers hid it better than others, but all her friends knew what happened when Riki disappeared after a meal.

Of course, bulimia isn’t so much about food, per se, as it is about control and dysphoria. That’s what I never quite understood at the time. And all of my “please just this once keep it down,” well-meaning “please get help,” or even “I’m afraid that you’re going to die,” was met with furious, defensive rage. Riki was a traumatized victim of being a woman in America and all the terrible things that sometimes come with it who happens to be fascinated with food. Despite the dark side of her obsession with food and dysphoria with her body, when she was in a groove, we could all see real joy when she set about crafting meals.

Riki taught me everything about food, and I was eager to learn it. She taught me what créme fraiche was and how to make it (in front of me now is a Pyrex full of heavy cream with a tablespoon of labneh stirred in, covered in cheesecloth, where it will sit for two or three days until it thickens). She introduced me to sweetbreads, which are neither sweet nor bread. If I didn’t have anything better to do, sometimes I would come to her restaurant, The Flying Fig, in the early afternoon. The sous chef, Jill Vedaa, whom I met when she worked at a lesbian bar down the road from the strip club where Arthur worked, would put me to work trimming the silver skin off pork tenderloin or de-beaking and denuding squid for the buttermilk-marinated calamari. After Riki’s shift, she’d often show up with a foil tray of savory bread pudding left over from service. The pudding, usually with wild mushrooms, herbs, maybe almonds, maybe Gruyère, was made from the incredible sourdough chef-owner Karen Small baked from a starter that is older than a few of my very good friends.

The pudding was often served alongside Karen’s famous brined, bone-in, double pork chop. This dish was magic to me the first time 23-year-old me tasted it. Still magic even after trimming the chops myself and preparing the brine at home; maybe even especially so. And as loath as I am to see the dish on menus around town in American bistros, if Chef Small, Vedaa, or Riki brought one out to me–not just any brined double chop, but Karen Small’s double chop–I would close my eyes and maybe cry, and every moment of the 25 years between 1998 and 2000 would come rushing to me.

But now, in this moment, in this era of my life, I don’t want it. The $45 pork chop has, for me, become an emblem of modern mediocrity in dining. There exists an entire strata of food, an entire genre, an entire price point which represents for me everything that went wrong in the intervening three decades. Give me a street taco with suadero or Bahn-mi from the sketchiest corner of the Tenderloin. Some days I wake up having dreamt of a bodega BECS, wrapped in foil, soft roll, American cheese stuck to wax paper, flat-top over-medium egg, and the world’s thinnest bacon, then a profound sadness washing over me as soon as I realize I’m not on Marcy Avenue. Then I remember I can hop on the L-Taraval and get pressed, thinly sliced beef tendon dressed in a little vinegar and scallions, a spoonful of chili crisp and a handful of cilantro thrown on top made by the uncle of the nice Chinese girl who brings it to the table alongside three different types of dumplings.

When Riki and I lived together in San Francisco, in that apartment on Valencia with Larry, things were falling apart. She would stack the dishes in the sink, then they would take up every surface of the countertops, then the table, spreading like a mushroom. When her eating disorder got really bad, she would shut down. She didn’t want to deal with the evidence–you’d think she’d want it to disappear, the reminder of the Whole Foods to toilet pipeline, keening in the bathroom, while Larry would shoot me a look that I learned to recognize as “deal with it or get her out of here.” Riki didn’t last long at Whole Foods, even though she was so excited about getting a chance to work in their cheese department. She’d come home crying sometimes too, “They’re all such evil cunts!” Riki was not a shrinking violet either; it must have been true. The ladies at the cheese department in the Van Ness Whole Foods must really have been cunts.

We’d been drinking. All three of us, all the time. I said something about the dishes. I was sick of cleaning up after Riki, and I was sick of watching her get skinnier and skinnier. Soon, plates were being hurled at my head.

“You want me to take care of the dishes??” Smash.

“I’ll take care of the fucking dishes!!” Crash.

“Are you happy, Chris? One less dish.” Bang.

She had nowhere to go, and I couldn’t be with her when she was like that, so that night I slept under my desk at my office with a half bottle of Jim Beam. There was a shower on the second floor, next to the workout room.

“Jesus, you look like you slept here, Neill,” said Fisher when he finally rolled in. We called each other by our last names; there were six Chrises at the office. Soon, everyone in IT was called by their last name. Frankovitch. Steczo. Flesher. Fite.

Fisher, sensing my discomfort, maybe noticing a slight tremor, asked me, “Want an Ultram?” I had a drawer full; we were mail-ordering generic Tramadol from Canada.

When I got home, Riki was still passed out. Larry had gone out. I cleaned up the broken ceramics. It’s a miracle Riki didn’t cut the shit out of herself. When she came to, she had no memory of any of it. We walked to the Kilowatt. Rinse, repeat. Larry didn’t say anything. A few weeks later, we got evicted.

I only put on a suit for a few reasons. I used to joke: weddings and funerals only. But I’ll put on a jacket and a tie to go to the orchestra or to eat somewhere really fancy. I got caught unawares the one time, when my friend Cameo called me to tell me her dinner date fell through: “You like good food, come join me, my treat. Maybe put on a button-down? I put on a black Dickies long-sleeve and took a cab to some place called Atelier Crenn. Chef obviously knew Cameo; they chatted about trips to France. Cameo introduced us, “This is my friend, Dominique.” She was rail thin, all smiles, talking excitedly about the parade of gorgeous food–bright colors, subtle, sublime, and big flavors. Bigger plates, not one exactly like the other, all handmade. The servers danced around us en glissade. She wrote out the menus each night by hand, each with a poem. I could tell Dominique was a fellow sensualist. She reminded me of Riki.

This was my second proper prix fixe. Crenn had just earned her first Michelin Star. A year earlier, a big group of us, a lot of us from Cleveland, made the trek to Yountville to go to The French Laundry; our friend Nathan instantly recognized the host at the front desk as the son of Cleveland restauranteur Paul Minnillo, who after 26 years of fighting to get Michelin to come to Ohio, threw up his hands and declared “fine dining in Cleveland is dead,” and closed The Baricelli Inn. Riki and a string of mutual server friends all came through the Inn. They all hated him and thought he was a genius. Chef Minnillo was the only one in Ohio to build a proper affinage at the Inn: a cellar to age cheese, proper cheese. Riki would come home from the Inn when we lived at The Ford, stinking of cheese. I liked it. I liked the smell of shallots on her. I joked with a stripper at Arthur’s work one time, “I have a shallot fetish.” I think she thought I was being serious. Maybe I was.

Riki taught me about cheese, too.

The French Laundry. Atelier Crenn. Blanca in Brooklyn, a 12-seat, Michelin-rated pop-up in the bowels of a red-gingham Italian restaurant named Roberta’s. Aska. Crenn again. Prix fixe was something I’d only heard of back when I lived in Cleveland, spoken about in hushed and reverent tones. Caviar and truffles, foie gras, tiny herbs I’d never heard of, Wonka-esque dots of sauce decorating hand-blown glass plates, and so much wine.

The day we caravaned to Napa Valley, I didn’t know what to expect. I’d only read about the food, a universally religious experience. The French Laundry Cookbook had such stunning photos: recipes developed by Chef Thomas Keller, transcribed into layman’s terms for mere mortals by Susie (mother of Adam, who also didn’t graduate in 1993) Heller. The food, of course, looked so much better in person. The chef’s biography in the cookbook was laid out by Michael Ruhlman. What were two Clevelanders doing working on a cookbook about the world-famous fine dining shrine all the way across the country? The Cleveland food scene gets around. The West Coast is rotten with us. Fine dining isn’t just dead in Cleveland; it migrated.

Every meal at The French Laundry begins the same way, with an amuse-bouche (mouth pleaser) of finely chopped salmon tartare shaped like a little scoop of ice cream sitting atop a black sesame touille cone filled with sweet red onion créme fraiche. Balanced on top, two perfectly cut lengths of chive. The salmon cornets came out as the servers coördinated twirling around us like dancing cartoon cutlery right out of Beauty and the Beast; I knew I was forever over the $45 pork chop. I could make a hanger steak at home, just as good as the $50 version at Harris’ Steak House, better even. I had learned from the best. I could spatchcock a chicken in less than a minute, if I was taking my time; debone it in five. What use is a $45 pork chop? But my god, The French Laundry. I’ll be thinking about that meal for the rest of my life.

I want my food to be high or low, but no middle. Some of the best chefs in the world admit to craving a Big Mac now and then. On the way back from dinner, after many hours of drinking with Yountville townies, my dinner date and I got off the 101 South in San Rafael to get fried cheese curds at the A&W Drive-Thru. She wasn’t Riki; I would have liked to take her, but we drifted apart when she stopped drinking, and I didn’t.

I should probably call Riki this week; it’s been too long. We could get tacos. Maybe I could be talked into going to a meeting: remind myself that sometimes it works out OK.

And like that, with a press of the delete button, we have set ourselves back to the first positions. Reset. I have absolutely no idea what to write about now that I wasted an hour and 580-odd words on songwriters (most of it was about how I think Figure 8 is Elliott Smith’s best record, an unpopular opinion). The debut album, Roman Candle, starts with its seething title track: quiet and slow-burning; Smith’s eponymous release, his second LP, sets the tone most associated with the artist, exemplified by “Needle in the Hay,” written about Heroin, probably before Smith ever did the stuff. But Smith is forever typecast as a baleful junkie who stabbed himself to death, not the McCartney-esque genius that penned haute pop like “L.A.” and “Happiness,” both from Figure 8.

Caitlin, who knew of and met Smith while she worked at Mordam Records, a Kill Rock Stars distributor, seemed to have some difficulty believing that DreamWorks SKG didn’t meddle in the production of the two major label releases, XO and Figure 8. The fact is, they just let Smith do his thing: tracks with a traditional 5 or 6-piece band consisting of lead and rhythm guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards; tracks with parts written for an orchestra (Smith was a classically trained pianist); a track with a chorus of backing vocalists–a significant departure from the 8-track Roman Candle. To the untrained ear, for instance, my 82-year-old Dad, songs off Figure 8 would be indistinguishable from songs from Plans or Castaways and Cutouts (to pick two random Pacific Northwest bands).

Of course, both Death Cab for Cutie and The Decemberists would be considered cry-baby bands by my friend Dawn, an unabashed hater, who deems anything more introspective than Linkin Park to be for depressed losers (me). I love Dawn, who is a fun road-trip partner, and we share an appreciation for Wet Leg, which is up my alley and her main thoroughfare. She passed out drunk on my couch once, and I put Iron and Wine on repeat, and I don’t think she’ll ever fully forgive me. It’s also her birthday this coming week (not “Each Coming Night,” ha ha), and I have multiple reminders because I will also forever be atoning for dragging her partner Ravi to a Ween concert with me on her birthday (she hates them too).

I was going to discuss the much-maligned New York Times list of “30 Greatest Living American Songwriters,” which contains some real head scratchers. No disrespect to Taylor Swift, who I will admit is a very talented songwriter, but Sierra Ferrell and Adrienne Lenker are by far better songwriters (in the Americana realm, at least). For pop, I find Chappell Roan more interesting. Dolly Parton for sure belongs on that list, as do Lucinda Williams and Willie Nelson, but where are Sam Beam or Jason Isbell? If the criteria to make the list are a tuple of output, critical reception, and some popular-culture “it” factor, why not add Phoebe Bridgers? Of course, I’d shove a lot of people onto my list, including 1990s hip-hop emcees from RZA to Yasin Bey. Missy Elliott is on the list, which I approve of, but Doechii belongs on it too.

Now that I’m tallying it up in my head, my list has probably grown in size to Top 100 Living American Songwriters because I’ll put folks like Ben Gibbard, Colin Meloy, Doug Martsch, and even more obscure songwriters like Rennie Sparks (The Handsome Family) on my list. It’s a big tent.

I want to someday discuss the “Industrial to Americana Pipeline” that took me from dance floor anthems like Nitzer Ebb’s “Join In the Chant” and earsplitting LPs like The Land of Rape and Honey (Ministry) or Extremeties, Dirt, and Various Repressed Emotions (Killing Joke) to Southern Rock Opera (The Drive-by Truckers), Odessa (The Handsome Family), and Revelator (Gillian Welch). For that, I mainly blame Larry McCarley, I partially blame Erich Lasher (a man whose tastes are dizzyingly ecclectic; he and I have been to Ween and Ministry concerts together, but he also hipped me to Southern Culture on the Skids, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, fronted by Anton Newcombe, a man born 30 years too late to be a hippy drug cult leader).

The Handsome Family is difficult to categorize. I would go so far as to say they are sui generis. They are husband and wife Brett and Rennie Sparks, and their body of work spans “what if Egar Allen Poe wrote country songs” to “this is a ballad about dumping bottles of antidepressants down the toilet and ending up in restraints.”

My conversion to Americana and alt country (Y’allternative) started to solidify in the 25 years between 1998 and 2000. By the time Larry came to live with me, I had picked up bar-scene darlings like The Supersuckers, Old ‘97s, and Lucero in my repertoire. After I started experimenting with baking, I remember baking two loaves of (maybe?) sourdough that I gave to Rennie when The Handsome Family played The Bottom of the Hill (which closes at the end of this year). I “dine out” on that anecdote. Since it was Larry that hipped me to them, I think that makes “twice-baked Larry” all the more poignant (tip: make sure you have a will).

When I started to really get into the woods on my first draft, it occurred to me how difficult it is to write about music and not sound like an asshole. It’s also impossible for me not to write about music, or at least insert music into stories, because music frames everything in my mind. Someone on the webbernets gramstainst toktiks mentioned that ADHD isn’t about not being able to concentrate; it’s about not being able to not concentrate on the wrong thing, which pretty aptly sums up my particular affliction of earworming myself.

Even if I could convince people to listen to everything I reference here (especially my therapist), it wouldn’t sound the same or have the same meaning. Because she never sped down Main Street in Waltham blasting the Pixies at top volume: your mouth’s a mile away, your mouth’s a mile away, your mouth’s a mile away. My aunt doesn’t have a frame of reference for the smell of cloves on a vinyl dress in a room lit by black lights while “Cuts You Up” by Peter Murphy plays. My friend Erika knows exactly what that sounds, smells, feels like. Drex knows about drinking Colt 45 at Horseshoe Lake with Dinosaur Jr coming out of someone’s car stereo. I know about sweating Maker’s Mark out of every pore sitting under the AC vent at the Grog Shop while Jason Isbell sweats Jack Daniels out of every pore standing on stage, taking drags from a Camel between songs, hollering:

In real life these things don’t happen much at all.
Too bad we all live the dream.
I’m realizing just how far I had to fall
and taking it home to go it alone again.

An hour later it’s me, Nikki, Stimmy, Isbell, and David Dondero all lounging around in the orange “green room,” chain smoking, pouring shots out of a bottle of whiskey we borrowed from the bar (”bring me a new bottle of Powers by Friday,” Kathy, the owner, would tell us).

Somewhere under all the graffiti of the orange “green room” are the archeological remains of a mural my roommate Marty painted when the bar was a coffee shop, “The Mocha Squad,” our team of heroes’ intrepid leader bounding into the air, tongue out, with a tiny paper square resting on it.

That’s another story, and it has a soundtrack too.

Let’s start with the week’s good news: confirmed bachelor Lindsey Graham has passed. They say it’s gauche to celebrate the death of a person as vile as Graham, so I will instead say that I mourn his life. Temu Roy Cohn. Someone quipped that they are going to have an open closet funeral. 10/10, no notes.

Pivoting clumsily to lives worth mourning, I passed two old haunts of my old self on the way home today in a Lyft from Oakland: Zeitgeist and the 500 Club. The 500 Club wasn’t my primary hangout, and so I never got into too much trouble there. It’s around the corner, and my friends and neighbors can often be found sitting at the bar in the afternoon, especially on the weekend, and especially especially during baseball season. The Giants (of baseball) have had one lackluster season after another, but this year was marred by performative bigotry from a handful of players who took it upon themselves to mark up the voluntary Pride-branded ballcaps with a reference to a bible verse about rainbows because heaven forbid they miss an opportunity to undermine the celebration of LGBTQ+ folks with their religious nonsense.

The 500 Club is, for fans of baseball, low-key a Rust Belt bar, and more specifically, the Detroit Tigers. My friend Anne is one of the people who frequently can be found nursing a beer on any given afternoon. Her unofficial spot at the bar is the corner near the jukebox. Andy “Prez” Jackson is also a Michigander from the Greater Detroit Metropolitan Area, although now he works only one shift a week: the Sunday opening shift. He was one of a handful of bartenders who survived a change in ownership; the bartenders who didn’t make it either left, skeptical that the new owners would honor their promise to keep the bar more or less as it was, or were the degenerate drunks who were pushed out. Luckily, the new owners, of the reviled tech-money class, held up their end of the bargain. The sticky, sagging floor was replaced, the worst of the crust and dust was removed, and the bathrooms (particularly the men’s urinal) were finally fixed. All the known coke-dealers were discouraged from setting up shop, and one or two were outright banned; their clientele (myself included) moved down the street with them. But otherwise, it was still the same old 500 Club.

Prez and I used to get into considerable trouble, but not at “the Five.” When I met him, in my 20s, he worked at a converted fire station down the street. Above the bar were live-work spaces for artists, then first-wave tech scenesters (think the “Mondo 2000” crowd). I considered myself a member of the latter, with close ties to the former. Below the bar was storage and laundry machines. We, that is, a special subset of regulars, and the staff would take turns some nights going down to the basement to “help” bring up cases or some other cover task. On the washing machine, there was a construction worker’s hard hat, under which would be hidden several lines of cocaine.

Years later, at an invite-only holiday party, I was surprised to run into the former owner snorting a line off the washing machine. He handed me a rolled-up $50 bill and, with a laugh, said, “Oh, I’ve known about the hard hat for a long time.”

The other bar I passed is the world-famous Zeitgeist, whose current owners did not exactly keep the bar as it was. Instead, in keeping with the spirit of the times (see what I did there?), they allowed a bad crowd to overrun and ruin the place: tech bros. They even banned smoking in the fenced-off beer garden, can you believe it?

At Zeitgeist, I was a very, very bad boy.

Zeitgeist would open at 9 AM every day, making it the second-earliest bar to open in the immediate area. When San Francisco was a more industrial sort of town, third-shifters would end their days at bars like The 500 Club (whose neon sign still says “Open at 6 a.m.”). The Five stopped opening that early long ago, but Clooney’s, farther down Valencia Street, actually opens at 6 AM. The place had what I would describe as “bad vibes,” and we’d only ever go there in desperate times to get bad coke from a dealer I refer to as “Plan D.” The last time I went to Zeitgeist as a professional drunk was not too long before COVID, with my roommate Caitlin, and our wayward, frequent couch surfer, Marianne. Sometimes she’d pass out in Caitlin’s bed. Sometimes mine.

I’ve had my heart broken before, but I’ve bounced back. In most cases, I've resumed friendships (or friendships with benefitships) with the people who did the heart-breaking. I don’t think any of them hurt me out of malice, not even the one who fucked a mutual friend in the back of my Saab: the bad lesbian who became one of a handful of repeat offenders as far as sleeping with me.

I’m more sensitive to rejection than other people, and it takes me longer to recover. Marianne is different, and I don’t think I’ll ever really recover. I don’t go a day without thinking about what she did. Zeitgeist put her in my head.

The three of us would roll in at 9 AM on a wrap-around, sometimes waiting at the door before it opened. The morning bartender was usually the guy who was voted San Francisco’s grumpiest bartender several years in a row. He would look at Caitlin, Marianne, and me and shake his head. Shots of Fernet Branca already on the bar before we even sat down.

“Up to no good?”

“You know it!” Caitlin was always cheerful about our wrap-arounds. 9 AM at Zeitgeist meant that we had been up all night drinking and doing cocaine, and we were there for the express purpose of meeting up with Judy (not his real name), the dealer who lived down the street. Scott, Marianne’s ex, lived in the SRO above the bar. Once in a while, if the timing was right, he’d make us killer breakfast sandwiches, as much as we could stomach in our condition.

“Oh, shut up!” Marianne would reply to any sass from the bartender, which was de rigeure for him. At our apartment, she took great pleasure in letting Caitlin and me know how small his dick was, and his brother as well. “My god I felt like I had the biggest pussy in the world!” Caitlin and Marianne were unabashed size queens who viewed “pulling dick from a bar” as a sort of game, with a tally that long ago stopped being recorded.

I was sweet on Marianne but no more than any other straight boy or gay woman or some gay men even that came within tractor-beam distance of her. She was catnip to boys. But I also had to live with her for significant chunks of time when she was between boyfriends and apartments, which was often the case. Despite eating our food, doing all our coke, stealing Caitlin’s clothes, and using all our toilet paper (“To stuff her bra,” Caitlin would say, even though Marianne was a DDD at her skinniest), I liked living with Marianne and loved her despite her flaws. We were a dysfunctional family, and Caitlin would always make it clear that she was our “daughter.” Marianne didn’t seem to mind. I’m sure she did, though, in hindsight, and I’m sure she would complain loudly about us to anyone who would listen, as was her signature move.

I worked on a keyboard, Caitlin… didn’t work, and Marianne floated from one waitressing or bartending job to another. At one point, she had her sights set on becoming an esthetician but quit. Our “beauty school dropout.” But her rank as a member of the bar-scene élite afforded her the opportunity to DJ from time to time, catering to a smattering of GenX and Xennial hipsters. She was a Xennial, born in 1982, and she lied about her age to get a bartending job, where, according to legend, she was subsequently fired after having her 21st birthday there. Marianne lugged an impressive, well-curated collection of vinyl with her (or left it in our garage when she ventured out into the world). She has impeccable taste: Stones to Iggy Pop to Romeo Void to Television to Wire to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and everything in between. It was always fun to sit in the booth with her, occasionally chiming in on what to play next.

Caitlin had “Beast of Burden” by the Rolling Stones as Marianne’s ringtone. I don’t remember the bar, but I remember her playing it and Caitlin exclaiming, “Hey! That’s our song!”

“Chris, we should have a song,” she said, arm around my waist. “Here, this next one is for you.”

She gave me a kiss on the cheek and dropped the needle on “Just Like Honey” by The Jesus and Mary Chain.

Sometimes I let it bother me, thinking about what she must say about me, but I try to just be amused by how petty she can be: faking stoicism in the face of my inner turmoil. So, really, I always let it bother me. Mostly because I have seen her be thoughtful, kind, and loving. She can be wonderful if she chooses. If she stays sober.

When I pass the places her ghost still haunts, I often imagine what would happen if I saw her there, saddled up to the bar, as I did the last time I saw her in real life. Caitlin and I took our sweet time getting to where we are today in terms of our sobriety, but Marianne was sober long before either of us, after multiple stints in rehab. Unlike Caitlin and me, she seems to really have a hard time getting far enough away from the event horizon. She keeps falling back in. What would I say to her? “I love you, you need to stop, you’re going to die. I don’t want you to die.”

She’d probably hit me with a barrage of perceived or imagined slights, knives out, and loudly. She is a mean drunk at the slightest provocation, and my mere presence would be an opportunity to lash out and hurt me again that she’d be unable to pass up, probably. In her internal narrative, she is the victim of a crime of her own creation, but someone else must be to blame.

It was my fault that she drank the entire time we were together that week in Cleveland. It was me who was the unreasonable one for finally snapping, after she disappeared the night before, opting to go home with a stranger rather than coming back to the hotel. It was me who was to blame when Caitlin took it upon herself to escalate the row Marianne started with her, telling Marianne’s closest friends and fiancé how Marianne had hurt me, lied to me, abandoned me, and, at the end of the day, stolen from me. And that’s just a taste of what she put me through.

Or she’d just ignore me, as if I had no worth, that our friendship had absolutely no meaning, and I was repulsive; because that’s how she made me feel. I don’t know which scenario is worse.

After passing these bars and getting dropped off at home from Oakland, I wandered into the bougie grocery store across the street. For a change, they let someone cool pick the music station (probably Millennial Chris, with whom I would share knowing anecdotes about a better time: the 1990s). I sang along to “Kiss Off” by the Violent Femmes. Moments later… “listen to the girl as she takes on half the world…”

I sang along, in the middle of the store, to “Just Like Honey.” I even allowed myself to feel nostalgic, choosing to remember better times.

It’s a really good song, our song.

Let’s see if I can try to focus on capturing this. Ben Gibbard is doing a lot of press to promote Death Cab for Cutie’s latest album, “I Built You a Tower.” (Which I just got in the mail but haven’t listened to yet.) He’s on some podcast I am watching on YouTube, and a good portion of the discussion is about process. I recall my friend Gordon “Gordonzola” Edgar commenting that no one wants to read writers write about writing, and I can understand where he is coming from, but I disagree; I think there’s an audience for “process stories” for writing as much as there is an audience for “process stories” about making music (I mean, look at Rick Beato ferchrissakes).

I also couldn’t help but notice that Ben is pretty low-key buff. I exercise, reluctantly, not because I want to do it per se, but because I know I should. And if I were going to be serious about fitness, I wouldn’t just exercise for an hour a week, but I’d do an hour a day, or two hours, take a day off, have a leg day and an arm day and maybe a core day. Ben Gibbard pecs and Ben Gibbard biceps are within reach, if I have enough love in my heart to put in the work.

Mostly, I hold myself to an hour a week because it’s an hour I get to spend (virtually) with my friend Tasia. She’s a person I can safely talk about big ideas and big feelings with, but we can also talk about trivial and absurd things. It’s fun to make her laugh, which is percussive in the way brass can be percussive in an orchestra, stabbing the air. And I can support her by contributing what I can afford for these training sessions. She makes a thing that I otherwise find to be a chore not only bearable but also therapeutic, in a way. Personal trainerpist.

Dedication to their form is what makes Ben Gibbard a brilliant lyricist, and it’s what makes Tasia a brilliant writer. In the latter case, I know exactly how much labor Tasia puts into her writing because we talk about it. I’ll forever compare myself to her and other writers I read and think to myself, “Well, I’ll never be that good.” If you’d asked my mother when she was alive, she’d, of course, disagree. I wrote a poem or short story that was published in an anthology when I was in first grade (I think), and for my Mom, that was one of her proudest moments. She loved to tell her friends, “My son’s a writer!”

I will say this: I think that might have been true even if I didn’t fully realize it, just on the merits of my ability to bullshit my way through essays and papers throughout school, frequently despite my lack of knowledge of the material. Or maybe I’m waxing romantic about a time I should not be nostalgic for in any way: school was hell, and I graduated with almost the lowest GPA one could have to actually earn a diploma, a year behind my class, having repeated my junior year in boarding school. Many stories there, a rich vein of discomfort, outright pain, and seeing and being part of things that were beyond my maturity and comprehension.

In other words, gold for a writer.

Still, the “imposter syndrome” is something I feel more intensely about writing on a bad day than anything else in my life (and I certainly have imposter syndrome for a great variety of endeavors ranging from work to “parenting” and everything in between).

Now more than ever, I feel compelled to write, to put in work, even if I hate it sometimes, to get those biceps and pecs from putting letter after letter on the screen. I was propelled into picking writing back up because of my need to make sense of the grief I experienced these last few years, as well as a need to grieve and make sense of those rudderless decades of my life; to sort out the good and the bad, to really think about and learn from my many terrible mistakes.

One of the curses, but also blessings, of the practice of writing digitally is that you can write a thing and never be done with it. I call it the George Lucas syndrome: he can’t stop tinkering with the original movies, A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. (As an aside, I hope I am at least a better writer than Lucas; the late Larry McCarley Jr. said of the show Andor, “Uncle George doesn’t deserve writing this good.” I do think Lucas was a good writer in the sense that he created a compelling saga and built rich, fascinating worlds, but he was and is terrible at writing dialog, and I will never forgive him for Jar-Jar Binks.)

It took me eight months to get my piece about Jackie to a point where I felt it was ready to put on the web. I immediately regretted it, second-guessing writing choices I had really struggled over for months, and I know I’m going to keep iterating over it because there are just some sections that I think are underbaked. But at its core, the piece is about the incredible heartbreak and hurt I felt when Jackie died, and I had already been suffering one loss after another for years.

Sitting down and really thinking very deeply and carefully about the bright and brief relationship Jackie and I had, and how lucky I am to have known such an incredible person, has helped me work through the initial shock and bewilderment I felt in those first few months.

The next heavy lift is writing about the loss of my friend YMJ in 2023. But it’s a different, and maybe worse kind of grief because that person is still alive, and that is a person I truly loved deeply, but to her I was expendable, easy to discard. I was taken for granted, taken advantage of, and really badly emotionally injured by this person, and I think about her every single day. It’s hard for me to imagine ever fully healing from those wounds, but maybe I will. The grief gets better, but like all grief, it comes and goes. It sneaks up on you, sometimes virtually out of nowhere. You find yourself on a bus, or shopping for vegetables, or walking down the street to get boba, or just standing in the shower when you become overwhelmed. You’re trapped in a moment. You relive it. You make up conversations in your head, and they don’t go the way you want. You lose arguments. You dread the idea of ever running into this person whose affection you still crave, wanting to hear apologies that will never come, affirmations of delusions… “I do love you, I didn’t mean to hurt you, I was wrong.” And you spend time blaming yourself, of course. Over and over, day in, day out.

Why put myself through writing it down? Forcing myself to listen to the voicemail, reading the texts and the letters, looking at the photos. Because I have to, because I will anyway.

I don’t think Ben Gibbard has any choice but to write songs and make music. I know Tasia doesn’t have any choice but to write. I know painters who have to paint, sculptors who have to sculpt, and poets who must write poetry to exist. Wallace Stevens, who wrote “The Snow Man,” quoted to me by Jackie, was considered one of the great American Modernist poets and was a business lawyer. This lifelong conservative turned down a faculty position at Harvard after winning the Pulitzer Prize because it would have meant leaving his job as vice president at The Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. Yet this man was compelled to write poems, beautiful poems, as if driven by some unseen force.

I have to write. I have to write about things that hurt, but maybe try to extract some humor and lightness out of it all. That’s the assignment. Make it make sense, find the silver lining, and forgive myself.

Here we go. Pride.

Every year, the lesbian from Wexford who lives downstairs puts on a block party. We live about in the middle of the block. Each year, a mix of her Irish friends (some from the big city, Dublin, a few from the country where she’s from, and some locals), and local capital-D Dykes descend on our garage (GAIR-age). The last couple of years, there’s been live music in the early afternoon, then DJs. Revelers, passers-by, people from the neighborhood, and even employees of the grocery store across the street stop by to dance in the street, drink from open containers, and mingle.

At 5:00 (that’s 17:00 for our friends from across the pond), with a vanguard of fewer and fewer Dykes on Bikes, the Dyke Parade begins. This used to be a much larger event, but mismanagement of funds and acrimony among members of the planning committee led to the official event’s cancellation a couple of years ago. This year, a sad smattering of lesbians and allies, barely stretching two or three blocks, paraded by. The mood was celebratory, but not like four or five years ago. If the parade started and you wanted to cross the street, you’d either be waiting a while, or you would take your chances playing Frogger, weaving through a dense, loud, and steady mob.

Stanchions and purloined traffic cones marked off an area in front of the garage going into the street, which was closed off for the day. By the time the early evening rolled around, a sizable crowd had gathered to dance to a mix of house, 80s, and disco favorites.

I, however, was saved from having to dance (a thing that I used to regularly do when I drank enough to forget about my bum right knee–another story for another 1000 words). I was too busy running up and down the stairs and over to the girls’ lemonade stand (the kid and her neighbor friend). The bougie grocery store across the street donated a box of sample Dandelion Chocolate bars, which the girls decorated with Posca paint markers to cover up the big red “SAMPLE” text blazoned across the wrapper. I think we gave away more than we sold; the girls gave me two bars, and I pawned those off to Johanna and her new boyfriend.

Johanna worked at the bougie grocery, where I would flirt with her every time I saw her. When she left the grocery store, I had to find a new crush.

“I flirt with everyone, really,” I said, “but I have favorites.”

“Who?”

“Lourdes,” which is not actually her name, “she’s gorgeous.”

“And fun!”

“I know-ah,” stretching the word into two syllables like my sassiest friends, because pride.

She’s very likely less than half my age, but I don’t feel particularly bad about it, my crushes these days are pretty PG; like I would have liked to have hung out with that person back in the day when I was in my 20s and basically living on the brutalist stoop that we called “Monkey Island” at the corner of Euclid Heights Boulevard and Coventry Road.

But it gave me hope watching her and her coworkers bopping to dance music in the middle of the street, filling me with joy.

My personal trainerpist tells me that not only is it healthy, but in fact crucial to have crushes. Several, even.

Tasia also told me that she doesn’t begrudge anyone for opting out of the pain, since I oscillate between deep sadness and anger at Jackie for leaving.

As evening gave way to night, gave way to late night, the party, including the audio-mixer and big ass speakers, migrated to the backyard. The Irish lesbian must have wrested control of the tunes for a while, because the worst music ever started blasting out at 140 decibels. Mind you, much of her playlist contains songs that, on their own and in moderation, are fine. Once in a blue moon, I love a “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” as much as the next kid that grew up in the 80s. It’s a classic, after all, and Tina Turner was a national treasure. Still is. Night after night, it makes me want to kill. U2, I fully hate now, but to be honest, I never really liked them in the first place, except for a few misguided pre-teen years. The Irish lesbian is so stereotypically into U2 and drinking that I feel racist describing it. She likes the Pogues, but it’s the same three songs (I’ll let you, dear reader, guess which ones; answers at the end).

The kid and the roommate usually go get a room at a hotel, but every hotel was nearly at capacity; getting a room that was up to snuff (think the Fairmont, Saint Regis, or the Palace, classic 4-star hotels in San Francisco) was cost-prohibitive. So this year, they found themselves in the same boat I am in every year: hanging out with the 72-hour party people.

The kid and her neighbor friend slept over in the living room at the front of the apartment, far enough from the backyard to be in the blast area, but not so far that they couldn’t hear it.

After someone with taste got the reins back from the Irish lesbian, in this case, her cokehead mechanic friend, the music went back to pretty decent house music–until I passed out after two Trazodone at about 1:00 AM. But I heard they carried on until 4:30. I wouldn’t be shocked if they weren’t out there all night. The house music went back up to 140 decibels sometime after 8:00 AM this morning.

(Confession, knowing full well they were all coked out of their minds, I may have offloaded some capsules full of powdered shrooms on whoever was left back there at midnight; they were taking up space in my pill drawer, which I need for actual pills.)

I spent the day wrangling the girls, which is as laissez-faire as one could imagine coming from the cool uncle. This got me into considerable trouble when I let them keep their lemonade stand running until after 5:00 PM (or 17:00 for those of you from across the pond), the one that the kid’s sleep-deprived mother wanted them to close at 4:00 (that’s 16:00, blah blah blah).

Bear in mind, the girls are eleven, with an age-appropriate work ethic. Of the several hours the stand was running, they were actually staffing it for maybe an aggregate of 90 minutes. They managed to pull in over $100, despite me lurking around scaring away paying customers. Today, the bougie grocery store brought over two jugs of fancy lemonade–they love me in spite of or because of my constant low-grade flirting with everyone that works there, regardless of gender or gender expression. Who am I kidding? It’s because of the two adorable eleven-year-old girls running a lemonade stand (and custom charm bracelets!).

When it came time to “strike the set,” as it were, the girls were once again either AWOL or stuck in decision-paralysis over how to actually tear the stand down. The mom of the other girl and I ended up doing the bulk of the work. The roommate was furious with both of us for getting the girls back home more than two hours than she wanted, and we both tried to take the blame for each other.

After the other kid and her mom left, the next crisis came when the kid lost her retainers; the roommate went nuclear. The kid has a habit of taking them out, wrapping them in a paper towel, and then putting them in random places. She was in tears because she couldn’t find them, and her teeth had started to hurt (she skipped the previous night). Despite wanting nothing to do with the whole process, I begrudgingly helped look. Nowhere to be found.

Of course, everyone knew what had happened. I just didn’t want to acknowledge what came next. The paper towel had no doubt been scooped up by someone and thrown in the trash. Let’s remember that the Irish lesbian downstairs hosted a block party followed by an all-nighter. Both recycling bins were nearly overflowing. Of the two landfill bins, one and a half were full.

The kid and I spent about half an hour picking through the recycling bins before giving up. I knew that I wasn’t finished. I toyed with the idea of simply footing the $1500 for a new set, but the retainers needed to go in tonight or the kid’s teeth would, I don’t know, do whatever teeth do without a retainer. I never had braces, so I never had to worry about it. Apparently, the teeth go back to their original, horrible, disfigured position or some such other highly urgent thing.

No, I was merely taking a break.

“Can you grab me some gloves and a flashlight?”

I was willing to go it alone and sift through the trash, but the kid insisted on helping out. This was probably for the best because I would have probably given up again. When I was ages 17 through 19, we’d hop into the large metal bins behind the Ameritech switch with leaf bags and scoop up as much as we could, but the worst things I would come across were coffee grounds and the occasional styrofoam to-go containers. Tonight, on the other hand, I knew what was in store, having put most of it (likely including the retainers) in the trash to begin with.

“Ok, we’re going to have to dump some of these bags out on the garage floor, so I’ll need the leaf broom and shovel to use as a dustpan,” I pronounced it GAIR-age.

The work was grim.

As I was picking up food that had been taken out of the fridge after being ignored for weeks and placing it into a new bag, occasionally throwing up a little in my mouth, I recalled a scene from the 1989 cult classic “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover.” The wife, played by Helen Mirren (who was and still is hot as hell), and her lover (Alan Howard) have to quickly hide from view or be found out. In an alley by the restaurant is a delivery truck. The refrigerator had stopped working a few days ago and was simply abandoned, full of thousands of dollars’ worth of seafood. Simply watching the scene makes me wretch, but don’t let that dissuade you from seeing the film. It’s an absolute classic, and as I said, Mirren is outrageously hot in it.

While I moved mostly food scraps from bag to bag, the kid pulled out any wadded-up paper towels and squeezed them with her gloved hand.

“Got it!”

“Thank Christ, go soak that in bleach.”

Oh, and the dog ate something that didn’t sit right with her, so evil shit has been coming out of both ends all day.

Later, as I took her out for (hopefully) her last walk, I spotted a drone hovering high above the street. As the English archers would do to the French before battle, I showed it that my fore and middle fingers remained intact by flashing a backward peace sign (later co-opted by punks and hooligans in the UK as a gesture of disdain). According to legend, the English archers were so good that when captured by the French, those fingers would be cut off and the Brits would be sent back to their camp as an example.

At the end of the block, near the entrance to Dolores Park, several police Explorers, a van (what a less enlightened me might call a Paddy Wagon), and SFPD officers on foot milled around threateningly, preparing to harass the kids hanging out on the hill. I walked up to the corner, screamed “FUCK THE POLICE,” and repeated the inverted peace sign gesture at them.

Because, fuck the police.

Then I got an ice cream sandwich. That’s my story.

(The Pogues songs are “If I Should Fall From The Grace of God,” “Dirty Old Town,” and of course “The Fairytale of New York.”)

Toxic Waste™.

It’s the name of a candy whose tagline is “hazardously sour candy,” in a class of candies designed to be overly sour: Warheads™, Super Lemon™, et cetera. I suppose this is the candy equivalent of high-IBU beer. And, in this case, I would go so far as to say that the candy is hazardously sour because the key component of anything sour is acidity. Lemons are sour because they contain a high concentration of citric acid. Acid is corrosive. Squeeze fresh lime juice on raw fish, and it chemically cooks it–ceviche. For a brief period during the summer of COVID in 2020, my roommate Caitlin set out to make candy, which meant buying the raw materials in bulk: citric acid, ascorbic acid, mallic acid, LorAnn artificial flavorings, and LorAnn commercial food-grade gel coloring.

(I became aware of LorAnn Oils after California banned “flavored tobacco products,” a measure I voted to adopt, neglecting to consider the fact that this included menthol. Overnight, my Kool Milds disappeared from the shelves of the bodegas, forcing me to smoke either cigarettes I had smuggled in from Ohio or, worse, simply smoking plain cigarettes. One night, however, in the SRO above a local dive bar, hanging out with the nice drug dealer, Chicken Dave, he showed me a trick he’d learned: inject the filter of a regular Camel Light with a tiny bit of LorAnn peppermint oil, et voilà, a menthol. Chicken Dave used a syringe, but I used toothpicks.)

In the fall of 2023, I ate so much sour candy that it peeled layers of skin off my hard palate and tongue.

In November of the previous year, I quiet-fired my therapist, Derek. Nice enough guy, although I always got the sense that he had personal stuff going on, a sort of sadness about him. I didn’t think the therapy was really going anywhere useful, and I knew that part of it had to do with the fact that I wasn’t opening up to him, and I probably never would. So, as my current roommate eloquently put it, I “emotionally raw dogged it” from the start of 2023 until, well, that September. I suppose that another big motivating factor to end therapy was that 2023 was the year I switched to Kaiser Permanente (and promptly switched back the next year), and they wouldn’t pay for sessions with Derek. I could exit guilt-free.

It’s not that I didn’t put in a half-assed effort to do therapy with KP. I signed up for an introductory session with a therapist, an older Chinese man who I got the sense wasn’t really listening to me; in fact, at times I felt like he was dozing off. And who can blame him, hah hah? But there certainly wasn’t any chemistry there, and that’s the number one thing you need with a therapist. I asked to try to get matched with another, but Kaiser denied the request because there wasn’t a “medically necessary” reason to do so. I explained that it’s medically necessary for me to have chemistry with a therapist at the very least, and was again rebuffed. At least with United Healthcare, my therapist and psychiatrist were providers working for an independent mental health care practice, and I imagine I could have switched my therapist without too much resistance. But I did like Derek.

So, emotionally raw dogging it was.

Derek and I started working together about a week before Jil died. I’d been reeling from the loss of Bobby to cancer in 2019, the isolation of COVID, losing my friendship with TRN in June of 2020 due to an egregious lack of judgment on my part, and my hospitalization in August. It gave Derek and me plenty to talk about, but I was still talking about it in 2022. I had gotten over the hump of those first two years of not drinking (a milestone I would have never believed possible), and, as I said, jumping from $40 a session to $190 didn’t seem to be something I needed to do.

Fast forward to September, 2023. I was in the unfamiliar territory of a new kind of hurt, and it was about to get worse. To give you an idea of how bad things had gotten, on the plane back from Cleveland, I began hatching the idea to get my first-ever tattoo. It was going to be the Aimee Mann lyric, “it’s not going to stop till you wise up.” That bad. Aimee Mann tattoo bad.

I knew I was going to need professional help and pronto–no matter the cost. The therapist didn’t even have to be good, per se; I just needed someone I could blubber incoherently at (because eventually my friends would get tired of listening to me gripe). Everywhere I looked in San Francisco, I saw the ghost of a living woman who I thought cared about me, loved me, who hurt me more than anyone ever has. Weird, trivial things would set me off, unavoidable things: Southwest Airlines planes flying overhead, walking around Dolores Park, Washington Square Park, past Foreign Cinema, and even past Good Vibrations (which is a super cute store, if you are ever in the market for sex toys–something I don’t foresee in my future).

I asked my friends, and a few people recommended TwoChairs.com, where I spent $225 a session to have a millennial therapist tell me, bless her heart, that I can snap myself out of a panic attack by eating a Warhead™ or some other sour candy. Tore my poor mouth to shreds because I was always in a state of high anxiety. I don’t know that I would call it a panic attack, but I would get to the point where I felt like I couldn’t breath, I’d want to cry, and my head would hurt from working overtime trying not to. I’d get like that and stay like that, spiraling around and around until it was just impossible to function. In the first few weeks after I got back from Cleveland, I was barely eating, but I put it back on and then some–I am not blaming the candy, but I also don’t believe in coincidences.

Anyway, two therapists later, I can talk about it and think about it without losing my footing. I think about it every day still, but it doesn’t sting as much. And no one is telling me to eat any candy. I bought these Toxic Waste™ candies on my own volition at Daiso, and so far, the kid has stolen more of them than I’ve managed to choke down. Toxic Waste™ is truly unpleasant (as I avariciously eye the plastic “barrel” they come in… maybe just one?).

I’ve always been a Super Lemon™ guy anyway. Which is another story, and a much more fun story.

1. Jackie

Starting in the late aughts, I would take the Amtrak Coast Starlight up from San Francisco to Eugene and Portland, Oregon, a couple of times a year. Kay Porter moved to Portland a few years later, and what with our birthdays being two days apart, I figured that was as good a reason as any to take the train up in the spring of 2014. I hadn’t seen Kay in almost a decade.

For this trip, I slept in the spare room at my friend Lisa’s starter home in southeast Portland. She worked from home as a web designer, giving the two of us latitude to take long lunches or for her to bow out of work early so we could explore the Rose City.

If I worked at all while I was in town, it was barely. I could get out of Lisa’s hair during the day, and I spent some time running around with Kay in her neighborhood. Kay lived in the Alberta Arts District in northeast Portland, and in many ways, it reminded me of the neighborhood we both lived in nearly 20 years earlier in Cleveland Heights, called Coventry Village.

“I like this part of town; it reminds me of home,” Kay mused, as we smoked cigarettes on her porch.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, for one thing…” Kay stopped mid-sentence.

She waved at an elderly Black woman in a sunflower-pattern dress, a giant purse, a wide-brimmed velvet Sunday hat, and flip-flops, who smiled and waved back. “Hello, dear!”

When Kay lived in Coventry Village, she was at the northernmost end of Coventry Road on the East Cleveland border. I had also lived in a couple of apartments in “North Coventry” (Coventry Road north of Mayfield Road, a busy, undivided highway that starts at University Circle, shoots through the northeast suburbs, and goes all the way out to Interstate 271). There, we were in the minority.

I’d often heard Portland referred to as “Whitelandia,” for its reputation as a city of well-meaning lily-white liberals. The great irony about Portland’s demographic makeup and that of its surrounding small towns and rural areas is that, in the latter case, the population’s whiteness was by design. “Hippies with guns,” my pot-grower friends used to say, but in reality, preppers with swastika tattoos surround all of the liberal major cities in the Pacific Northwest. Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a hotbed of white supremacist activity, is a five-hour drive from Seattle. Spokane is notorious for extremists as well, and even Eugene, Oregon, was considered to be a “sundown town” as recently as the 1980s.

Kay always had interesting friends, and Jackie was no exception. She was intense, all of 4’9” of her, and shared Kay’s spritely, mischievous spirit: crude, chaotic, fun, and a touch volatile. The two met in kitchens and shared a proclivity for, let’s say, coarse speech. Kay reminded me of my little sister, Missy, in many ways. The biggest similarity between the two was that you would be wise not to ever cross them: zero to stabby in under 10 seconds. I got a keen sense that Jackie was this way as well. Someone I’d much rather have backing me in a fight.

Kay, Jackie, and I set out around the city, mostly in the Alberta Arts District, that day. It was difficult to get a word in edgewise. Jackie overflowed with enthusiasm for all manner of unexpected things.

“Chris, you need to buy this Afro-Caribbean fusion album,” eyes wide and smiling, peeking out from behind some vinyl she was holding up. “It will change your life!” As we made our way through rows of record crates, Jackie spotted three or four more albums from wildly different genres that she guaranteed would also change my life. In bookstores, she picked up anthologies she’d read and read poems to us as we browsed. In the second-hand shop, Kay and Jackie made up backstories for random items: where had an item traveled? Who were its owners? What was its name, and what other objects would it form a gang with? Every once in a while, Kay would pick something up, feign terror like a Victorian spiritualist, exclaim, “Cursed!” then place it back.

The next day, my time in the Rose City had come to an end, but before heading back to Union Station in Portland, Jackie, Kay, Lisa, and I grabbed one last meal at a long-gone little bistro called Grain and Gristle. Over scrambled eggs, smoked trout salad, and shaved fennel salad, I watched with bemused detachment as Jackie flustered Lisa with a florid stream of scatological anecdotes. Kay, Jackie, and I were already well warmed up with mid-day cocktails, but Lisa abstained, clearly suffering from the aftereffects of going out with me the previous night for the third night in a row.

Outside the restaurant, Jackie suggested we commemorate the occasion with a photo of the two of us, taken by Kay, posed in front of the restaurant. Jackie quickly slid next to me and put her arm around my waist as we stood side by side, pointed to her cheek, and said, “Give me a kiss goodbye!”

As I leaned in to kiss her cheek, Jackie turned toward me, placed her hand on my neck, and found my lips with her slightly parted mouth, our tongues briefly touching, then whispered something in my ear that made me blush.

I liked Jackie.

I was back in Portland as summer drew to a close. My siblings, brother-in-law, step-mom Ann, and I met up for my Dad’s 70th birthday. Ann booked a house near the eastern edge of the Alberta Arts District, on the advice of my sister, who was familiar with the area from staying with friends whenever she and her husband traveled down from Seattle.

This was an encouraging development for me, since I was within walking distance of Kay. As luck would have it, I managed to score a reservation at Beast, the restaurant opened by the late chef Naomi Pomeroy, which was a few blocks in the other direction.

Pomeroy was one of the chefs who helped popularize the “head to tail” movement, showcasing often-neglected cuts of meat, such as pig’s ears, trotters, tripe, and various organ meats not typically associated with fine dining. Working in restaurants as sommeliers, both my younger and older sisters knew of Pomeroy, and to form a buffer (and escape hatch) between the rest of my family and me, I invited Lisa and Kay.

Secretly, I hoped the chef would be at the restaurant. A magazine photoshoot featured a photograph of her in a red blouse with rolled-up sleeves, colorful tattoos, and pretty, intense blue eyes, in a field on a farm, with a suckling pig slung over her shoulder. I was a little bit in love.

Alas, the chef wasn’t there. They never are.

Flanked by Kay and Lisa, the three of us giddily discussed, picked apart, and ate every morsel brought out to us over the course of two hours at Beast, passing our entrées between one another. I was not surprised when Ann and Dad made less adventurous choices—fish and chicken, respectively—compared to the wild parade of cheese, charcuterie, rich share-plates intermingling with brightly popping salads and roasted late-summer vegetables, and the most gorgeous tomatoes I had seen all year that circled among the three of us, my sisters, and my brother-in-law. My brother, the youngest of the siblings, was an even pickier eater than my father and stepmother, and still marveled at the pageantry of it all. He had the hanger steak.

My older sister Jenny and I started playing a game years ago to be the first to whip out a card when the bill came. I knew that in order to beat Jenny, I had to get my card to the server early in the meal. I was up against Ann and Dad, too, who would probably try to pay for his own birthday dinner, but neither of them had any idea how cutthroat Jenny and I had become in performing this weird flex (if they were even aware that it had become a competition). I quietly worked my debit card out of my wallet, under the table, out of view. I made eye contact with our server, and with a tilt of my head, beckoned her over. I bent conspiratorially to slip her my card, and she leaned in, glanced at my sister, and whispered, “She left her card with the host.”

Got me this time, sis.

Except for the birthday dinner, Ann was in charge of the itinerary. I had dubbed her “the cruise director” for her penchant for mapping out the day, running a tight ship. Ann helped to organize a wine tour of the Willamette Valley, starting with a very small winery owned by an affable retired IBM programmer named Ken Cancilla, who only produced a total of 450 cases of pinot noir and chardonnay each year, some of which were bought by both of my sisters for their respective restaurants. The previous year, Dad and I met him on an impromptu road trip, the same trip on which we stopped by King County Airport, better known as Boeing Field, after spotting a Dreamliner in the wild. The wine tour sounded fun, so I didn’t necessarily want to stay out too late, but I also wanted a nightcap with Lisa and Kay. Kay announced that Jackie would meet up with us at the Alleyway Café and Bar, right down the street on Alberta.

I really liked Jackie.

A breeze kicked up as the August air cooled while we made our way past shops, galleries, and all manner of hip restaurants serving Thai, Italian, Japanese, French, and American bistro fare. An unfinished pine picket fence enclosed the beer garden, with loose white gravel on the ground and picnic tables beneath pergolas festooned with stringed lights.

Jackie, all twinkle-eyed and brown against her white linen dress, red canvas belt, and Converse, swirled the ice around an otherwise empty tumbler and looked me in the eye. “Vodka soda.”

“What kind?”

“Doesn’t matter, nothing from the well.”

The vodka soda is a drink taken for effect, not taste. Unlike the stuff the kids these days drink in cans—which I liken to La Croix with a splash of generic booze—a call vodka soda is usually more vodka than soda. It’s a drink that doesn’t break the unspoken law of a good dive bar: no cocktails over three ingredients, and ice is one of them.

“Tell them it’s for me,” Jackie said, meaning she’d probably get a double and be charged for a single.

Lisa helped me carry the round back to our picnic table: an IPA for Lisa, IPAs for Kay and me, with a Powers chaser, and Jackie’s vodka soda. The fact that Jackie immediately saddled up to me, putting her hand on my knee, seemed to please Kay, who clearly was not-so-secretly hoping the two of us would hook up.

When it was time for the next round, Lisa demurred. She had to work in the morning and had been out drinking with us enough times to know that you quit while you’re ahead or suffer the next day. Kay went to the bar to get drinks and came back to find Jackie and me liplocked, her thumb brushing my earlobe, her warm hand on my cheek. It’s those little extra details you never forget: the way a person draws your face in for a kiss. The faint smell of cigarettes and vodka on her lips.

“You two!”

Kay jokingly chastised us, but I could tell she was pleased with herself for arranging this “chance” encounter.

I was transfixed by Jackie’s smile and her eyes, catching only every third word over the din—that is, until she started to slur and lose coherence. At first, I thought maybe she had even more of a head start on drinking. Kay and I were both well warmed up from wine and Fernet at dinner, but I’d been drinking with Jackie enough times to know that even at 100 pounds, she could put them back with the best of them.

“Girl, you’d better slow your roll,” Kay said. “Can you get her some water?”

Jackie had trouble sitting up, so Kay took her drink away while I helped her walk to the bar for water.

“I think she’s done for the night, anyway,” the bartender said. “You’d better get her home.” By the time Kay came over to help, Jackie could barely walk, and it took the two of us and the bartender to help her to a bench on the sidewalk, out in front of the bar.

Even though Kay didn’t live too far away, she went to call a cab to take Jackie with her. “No taxi driver will take her in that condition,” the bartender said.

We began to suspect Jackie had been drugged. I dialed 9-1-1 to have an ambulance come check on her. Who could say how much of what drug was given to her? Could it stop her heart? Damage her brain? The bartender waited with us for the ambulance to arrive before returning to the bar.

The EMTs lifted Jackie onto a gurney, rolled it into the back of the ambulance, and drove off.

Kay and I sat in silence on the bench. I took a drag of my Kool Mild.

“Jesus Christ,” Kay said finally. “I need a shot.”

“Me too.”

Two tumblers landed with a thud in front of us, a generous pour of Powers in each.

“You guys did the right thing calling 9-1-1,” the bartender said. “These are on me.”

Kay and I clinked our glasses and sipped. There was way too much whiskey in the glasses to pound them back. She turned to me. “Hey, do you see that?”

“See what?”

Kay motioned toward the bar.

“Look at the bottles.”

Brass fixtures bookended glass shelves adorned with rows of top-shelf liquor: dozens of whiskeys, some so fancy a pour probably cost $50, tequilas in cleverly blown glass and ceramic bottles, all manner of amaro and cordials, all lined up in front of foxed mirrors running from the bar all the way up to the ceiling.

I was more bemused than angered when I finally saw it: the colors were too saturated, the light refracted off the textured glass a little too brightly. When I picked up my tumbler, a tracer followed the glass as I watched the light reflect off the whiskey, and I felt a familiar sensation of dry salivation. I swallowed slowly and muttered, “Fuck me,” realizing I had been dosed.

I didn’t know if it was boredom, or the revenge of a jilted ex-lover with an axe to grind and a pocket full of club drugs, or just random, bad luck—and I never would. What I did know, however, was that I was probably, definitely not going to make it to the Willamette Valley the next morning, and that I was going to have to have an uncomfortable conversation when I got back to the rental.

“Do you need to go to the hospital? Should someone file a police report?” My stepmom’s genuine, well-placed concern was met with a resigned, “No—and what’s the point?”

“Oh, I’ll be fine. I’ll be up all night, but I’ll live,” I offered. “It’s not the end of the world—I’ve done this to myself on purpose once or twice.”

Several dozen times, not that anyone was counting. I certainly stopped trying long ago.

Once in a while, when I was living with my mother after high school, I would sneak in, still tripping, hoping to avoid having to talk to her in that altered state. Mom usually dozed off in front of the TV, and if we had any conversation, I was fairly certain she never remembered it.

I never wanted to have this conversation with my Dad, certainly not like this.

LSD is difficult to describe to those who haven’t experienced it, and it’s different for everyone. I certainly have known people who claim to see all manner of wild things: dragons, floating talking cats, the skin of people around them shimmering in iridescent light, like a shark’s skin. Some people heard things: bells, voices, or the sounds of waves.

I never felt any of that, not on one hit, not on ten. Things just became clearer; I became smarter. Colors were sharper, the sun was brighter. My friends and I would put “Akira” or “Tetsuo: the Ironman” on mute in the background, listen to COIL, and talk shit for hours about everything and nothing.

Sometimes I would get “couch-locked” with friends, just listening to music, like the last time I ever did acid, not long before COVID. I went out to walk in the park, but only got as far as around the corner, just at the base of the pedestrian bridge that crosses 101. If you march up the hill, you get to a community garden overlooking the city to the west, where you can see both bridges, and the San Francisco Bay to the east, the Oakland Hills staring back at you.

I got as far as the spiral ramp leading up to the bridge, lying underneath on my back, listening to the album “Mezzanine” by Massive Attack. I felt the presence of others, folks walking their dogs, the unhoused with their Safeway carts, and god forbid, any neighbors I knew. That was a conversation I didn’t want to have either:

Hey, how are you? Me? I’m just counting the veins in this flower petal, tracing them from the capillaries at the extremities to the grand rivers feeding back into the stem; like how some of the clusters of capillaries look like little subdivisions complete with cul-de-sacs and little petal people drive their petal cars into the petal garages while their petal kids run around in the streets and backlots. No, I truly don’t want to hear about how ugly you think the paint job the new neighbors put on the home they bought three doors down: it’s gold and lime and periwinkle, and I think it’s beautiful. Your house is grey.

I stood up, turned right around, went home, and put on the Steely Dan album “The Royal Scam.” I texted a friend to come over and dosed him too. I told him about the flower people. We dug through my record collection, putting on random sides. He came across my beat-up copy of an Afro-Caribbean fusion album, “Afreaka!” by Demon Fuzz. “This album changed my life!”

God help you if you catch yourself in the bathroom mirror. Minutes seem like an agonizing eternity as you examine your face: Is that really what I look like? Who am I to other people? All of this is controlled by a wrinkly bag of grey goo inside a skeleton…

In hindsight, I should have just walked back to Kay’s, so at least I would have a trip buddy to listen to records and make art with, like old times.

The next day, the rest of the family embarked on their wine tour. They arrived at Cancilla and ended up staying the entire day, the cruise director’s clipboard be damned. As I came down from my involuntary journey, I made my way that afternoon to the farmer’s market and produced one of the prettiest salads I’d ever made when everyone came back.

Our “meet-cute” had been abruptly interrupted, and it may well have been the last time I’d ever see Jackie if fate hadn’t intervened nearly a decade later.

Kay stayed on in Portland for a few more years. Older and wiser, she came to see herself as a sort of protector of the artists and outcasts that she and I used to be when we were in our 20s. She was a fierce, steely-eyed Aries, and she would cut a bitch if anyone fucked with her friends.

Kay met Paris, a musical genius from Indiana by way of Cleveland who struggled growing up as a closeted gay Black man. Paris had been through a lot of difficulties and personal tragedies. The two were thick as thieves in no time, and she helped him move to Portland, where she hoped he might find a chosen family he felt he belonged to.

Portland, especially the Alberta Arts District, was like San Francisco in the 1990s: it had become too cool not to be ruined. The speculators came in, building their tacky Five-Over-One mixed-use luxury apartments just down the street from Kay, and the invading hordes fleeing the Bay Area drove up the rent and priced Kay right out of Portland.

Paris bounced around between Portland, Cleveland, and Indiana.

Kay bounced around between Nashville, Brooklyn, and then back to Cleveland.

At some point during the COVID lockdown in 2020, Kay moved into a converted barn in Willoughby with her latest boyfriend.

When it was finally safe to travel back to Ohio, I spent most of my time near Mom’s nursing home at a Courtyard Marriott just down the street; it was close enough to Coventry Village, close enough to Dad and Ann, but not at all close to Willoughby. To spend time with Kay, mutual friends either needed to fetch her and drive her into town, or we needed to caravan out to Willoughby to see her.

I would have liked to have seen more of Kay, but the logistics were tricky. I only saw her once in September of 2023, during a two-week sprint of a vacation in Ohio that had, at one end, my 30th high school reunion, and at the other, a wedding.

Kay and I both went to Shaker Heights High School, but she was a few years younger than me, so we never met until a mutual friend introduced us at a house party in 1993.

A fifteen-year-old kid in army boots and a black peacoat, radiating a Lydia Deetz vibe, Kay sat cross-legged on the floor of the bedroom while people milled about and smoked weed. Mr. Bungle, Primus, and the Beastie Boys floated out of a small boombox in the corner of the room.

Yo, I rock a house party at the drop of a hat
I beat a biter down with an aluminum bat…

I was a little too high to socialize, so I sat next to her, sensing a fellow traveler.

“Check it out,” she said, turning her sketchpad toward me, “Zooper-Chris!”

Try as I might to comb my hair back straight, the Cleveland summer humidity always seemed to curl a lock of hair that fell on my forehead, like Clark Kent. Kay drew me flying through the air, fist out in front of me, with a “C” on my chest instead of an “S.”

Later that same night, I lay on the lawn with the world spinning like a top after too much Everclear.

In September 2023, I had been done with everything for almost three years.

I sobered up
I swore off that stuff
Forever, this time.

Deb, Drea, and I piled into Deb’s SUV and drove from Coventry to Willoughby. We met Kay and our friend Arthur at a “Mexican” restaurant called Barrio, a small local chain, whose popularity escaped me, for tacos and beers. Arnold Palmers for me.

When you are in your 20s and doing lots of hallucinogens, you might miss the odd little edges around a person’s mannerisms that hint at mental illness. But those edges sharpen with time, and Kay could be noticeably detached from reality, especially after a few drinks, taking on a childlike affect.

Kay was telling us about a conversation she had with a squirrel that day. “You are a good animals, Zooper Chris,” she said, nuzzling up to me at our window table at Barrio. “I loves my good animals.”

“I love you, Kay,” I said, giving her hand a squeeze and quickly exchanging a worried glance with Drea. “You’re a good animalses too.”

After dinner, Kay, Drea, Debbie, Arthur, and I walked around Willoughby.

Northeast Ohio has been having warmer Septembers, but the air cooled just like that night in Portland on the way to The Alleyway. Trees rustled in the breeze.

Kay told us that her boyfriend’s family had money. He bought a shuttered brewery. He had stocked it with a couple of upright arcade games—mostly just the cabinets—for $5,000 each, but he neglected to buy essentials for the barn. Drea and Deb didn’t like him, and Art just thought he was a doofus.

Later, Kay’s friends filled me in on other things she said that concerned them: hearing voices, seeing things that weren’t there, paranoid delusions.

That Thursday, September 14, 2023, the ill-conceived tryst between me and my wedding date Marianne finally began to unravel beyond repair. The beginning of the end of a 22-year friendship; that woman left me a voicemail the next day that hit me in the heart like a shotgun. It took me over two years to start to recover. I’m still recovering, and I never will fully.

That same afternoon, I got a voicemail from Kay. It was muffled, but it sounded like Kay wanted to hang out. It sounded like she said she understood if I couldn’t make it to Willoughby.

I never made it out to see her.

Around November 2023, Paris went missing. Flyers were posted around Portland and Eugene, posts were shared on Facebook and Instagram, and Kay was in a state of helpless panic for over two weeks, fearing the worst.

When Paris was found frozen to death on the porch of an abandoned squat-house on the outskirts of Portland, the worst was confirmed.

Kay, the protector, Kay, the mother-figure, had failed to protect Paris, even though he lived thousands of miles away. She was powerless to keep Paris from becoming homeless or from getting caught up in opioids and alcohol. Kay blamed herself anyway, and I knew too well how that felt.

You feel helpless, and it hurts.

Kay was despondent.

I was heartbroken.

We both felt like life had somehow cheated us.

In the cold liminal space between Thanksgiving and Christmas, holidays that should bring joy to all but instead bring deep, deep sorrow to many, Kay and I spent a lot of time consoling each other.

Kay and I talked about the many tragedies we had both seen unfold with alcohol at the center. After a years-long rift with Jackie, Kay had reached out to her to help find Paris. Kay and I talked about that crazy night at The Alleyway.

“She’s sober now, too,” Kay said, “I should put you two in touch, I know how much you like Jackie.”

Kay, ever the imperfect match-maker, failed to let Jackie know I’d be reaching out:

me: “Hi Jackie! It’s Chris, Kay sent me your number (I hope that’s OK). I would love to catch up, sounds like you and I have a few things in common.”

Jackie: “Hope this doesn’t sound too unfriendly, but I don’t remember who you are. I’m not sure why Kay gave you my phone number maybe she was feeling impulsive?”

I reminded her of the incident at The Alleyway and sent her the photo of her stealing that kiss from me outside the Grain and Gristle. A fated kiss.

Jackie: “Holy fuck Chris Jesus... Thank you so much. I’m sorry I didn’t save your number. Thank you so much for getting a hold of me. Thank you and please if you want to chat later or talk I really appreciate you reaching out. Thank you.”

I was glad to be put back in touch with her, and even more glad to find out who Jackie really was under the fun veneer of a line cook who liked to flirt and party. I think she talked like a sailor when she was nervous, but that gave way to someone who was insightful and articulate.

When we finally had a chance to talk over the phone, it felt like the call lasted hours. We had each lived a lot of life in the years since I watched her ride away on a gurney that summer night in Portland.

A few days after Christmas of 2023, my phone rang. My friend John was calling, and I don’t think he’d ever once called me before. If John and I wanted to talk, we were both on Slack for friends who used to live in Coventry. I picked up anxiously; these days, phone calls from old friends out of the blue were rarely good news.

“Kay is gone.”

There was a pause while I tried to parse what those three words could possibly mean, and all I could think to say was, “Wait, what?”

Details were slow in coming, but Kay suffered a sudden heart attack a day after Christmas.

She was 45.

For me, a bad few months had just gotten much, much worse.

In the space of a couple of weeks, Jackie and I would FaceTime pretty frequently. She was every bit as intense as I remembered, except now we had serious things we could talk about. “Why so serious, Chris?” Jackie would tease me. We’d make fun of ourselves and the predicaments we had found ourselves in when we were drunks.

But when Kay died, I knew I needed to be around someone sober for Kay’s funeral. Impulsively, I invited Jackie. I was on shaky ground, and I needed an insurance policy.

On the eve of her flight out to Cleveland, she left a voicemail:

“Chris, it’s crazy bad out. I don’t know if I’m going to make it. I don’t know if it’s safe. I’ll try; I really want to go, but if I can’t make it, please understand.”

My heart sank when I heard the voicemail. A rare snowstorm swept through the Pacific Northwest, covering Portland in snow and ice. The schools were closed. The airport had almost closed. When I called Jackie back, I got no answer. Her plane had left—but was she on it?

I watched the flight plod across the map from PDX to MSP, and only when she was on the ground at 11:35 local time did Jackie call me to let me know she was, in fact, on her way.

She flew out of a snowstorm and into an ice storm. Bitter cold had refrozen the previous week’s snowfall after a brief break, blanketing the surface streets with invisible ice. The snow came in sideways. The people foolish enough to drive around drove sideways, too, skidding on the ice, moving slowly enough to be lapped by pedestrians.

Near the bottom of Cedar Hill, Case students, nurses, and doctors walked out of necessity.

On the way to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport to pick up Jackie, Dad announced, “We’re not getting on the freeway,” Dad said. “The best I can do is drop you off at the RTA station and hope the trains are running.”

I waited for the train on the platform, wet with footprints in the dirty slush that came in on people’s boots. At the far end, an old man smoked, and I remembered carelessly stomping out my cigarette butts on the wet concrete. When I got on board the westbound Red Line, I pressed my face against the glass. I watched the city pass by: abandoned factories, broken glass, ravines littered with car parts and trash, run-down houses, and off in the distance through the snowfall, I could see the fires coming off the smokestacks in the industrial part of town.

When she finally walked out of the terminal, Jackie ran up to me and hugged me. Involuntarily, I let out a shudder—half sob, half laugh—as I buried my face in her hair.

Jackie and I held hands on the ride back, dusk starting to fall on the city, big clumps of snow now coming down softly. Kerosene burned off the smokestacks in the industrial part of town, bright and orange against the sky like wet granite.

Ann picked us up from the train stop and took us up Mayfield, wheels occasionally slipping against the slush, to the American Foursquare home where Jackie and I were staying.

Although she told me she would sleep on the floor if she needed to, I offered her the larger room. Jackie insisted on taking the smaller of the two bedrooms, tossed her luggage inside, then walked into my room and plopped down on the bed next to me.

“What kind of visit are we going to have?” she said, her face close to mine. She didn’t wait for me to answer before she started to kiss me.

I tried to remember if I’d brushed my teeth. I pulled away, furrowed my brow. “Is my breath okay?”

“You’re fine,” she said with a smile.

I looked into her eyes. “Maybe…”

“…Maybe we shouldn’t?” she said.

On the phone, we talked about the damage people do to each other, intentional or otherwise. We talked about “attachment styles” because I had been terribly hurt by Marianne in September, and three different people, including Jackie, told me to read Attached.

Me: Anxious. Jackie: Avoidant.

We struggled to find anyone we knew who was “Secure.” These archetypes were not etched in stone, however. I subconsciously scuttled a relationship with a nice woman because I didn’t know how to deal with someone actually liking me: Avoidant. Sometimes Jackie could be Anxious, cracks forming in her bravado and self-sufficiency as she would try to hang on to a relationship with a lover who had moved on.

We both sat on the edge of the bed for a while.

“You can still sleep in the bed with me,” I offered.

“I don’t like to cuddle; I’m not a cuddler,” Jackie said. “If I’m going to sleep in this bed, I’m going to have sex with you.”

“Okay. Yeah, that’s probably not a good idea, then. Separate beds.”

Jackie nodded.

“I have a 6:00 AM meeting every day,” Jackie said. “Non-negotiable.”

“Oh, yeah. Sure. Definitely.”

“I’m trying to be serious about my 90-in-90,” she said, squeezing my hand. Ninety meetings in as many days. “You can join me on the Zoom call, maybe!”

“Maybe…”

An actual maybe, not a Midwest maybe—which is a no. Even though they help a great many of my friends, Twelve-Step programs are off-putting to me. I’ve been to enough meetings between my sisters’ stints in rehab, Al-Anon meetings for me, and the one time I took a meeting with One-of-Many-Rachels years ago after she got out of rehab.

For a brief moment, after she went to her room to go to bed, I imagined Jackie straddling me, back arched. My hand on her hip, my thumb in her mouth, the weight of her, the warmth of her. The smell of her. Jackie didn’t wear perfume; she just smelled like… Jackie.

I put it out of my head.

We set a boundary—the right boundary—like adults. For the rest of the trip, I forgot about hooking up with Jackie. It was easier than I thought it would be.

I loved Jackie to the moon and back, and right then, I needed her. I needed as many friends as I could get, because I felt like I was losing them faster than I was making them.

I was the first to wake up in the morning.

I got to Cleveland a few days earlier, and I had been in the cold long enough to need to buy a cheap pair of gloves to keep the wind from making my fingers feel like they could snap off. I carefully made my way to the coffee shop at the end of the street, on Coventry Road. In the winter, sidewalks become treacherous, uneven sheets of ice. Everyone walks across the tree lawns, and when those get too icy, simply across people’s lawns. In San Francisco, unless it’s really raining, the hood of your hoodie is purely ornamental, but as the snow crunched under my boots, I drew it up over my ears. The morning was the warmest it had been in three days, finally in double digits.

Not knowing what Jackie might want beyond drip coffee, I grabbed a variety of muffins and bagels. I scrambled some eggs, and she ate half of an everything bagel.

“This is a good bagel!”

“It’s probably because there are more Jews in Cleveland Heights than there are in Oregon,” I quipped. I looked it up later: ninety-three thousand between Shaker, University Heights, and Cleveland Heights; fifty to seventy thousand for the entire state of Oregon.

Of course, 6:00 AM in Portland is 9:00 AM in Cleveland. It hampered any plans I could make with Jackie that morning, but it was nice just to be in the dining room with her. She warmed up the room.

I helped her get set up for her Zoom call on my laptop, and I watched with curiosity as the meeting progressed. Jackie interjected from time to time, always insightful, always thoughtful. The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions were recited. A passage from the Big Book was read. I recited the Serenity Prayer along with Jackie, a simple prayer I had committed to memory decades ago:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen.

When the day of Kay’s funeral came, a layer of luster came off Jackie. I was anxious that throwing Jackie into the deep end with Kay’s Cleveland friends might have been unfair to her. It was self-serving, for me, because I needed Jackie around, but was I taking care of her needs? I could tell the experience was strange for her. However, Jackie looked me in the eye to thank me for bringing her along, even though she, too, was bewildered as to exactly why.

The weather had finally cleared up, and it was a balmy 38 degrees. Jackie liked to walk everywhere, so we talked about possibly walking the mile downhill to Wade Chapel in Lake View Cemetery, where the funeral was held. Arthur’s wife owned the house we were staying in, and he arrived and insisted on driving us. “Don’t be a hero,” he said, pointing at my salt-caked boots. “You’ll ruin your shoes.”

Jackie let out a chuckle.

The family filed in first, and Jackie and I filtered in to stake out a pew near the back. Kay’s chosen family, mostly from Coventry, filed in next. Jackie was sandwiched between me and my good friend Bruce, who, at one point in the ancient past, greeted the people he loved most by biting their necks. Kay always bit back. The ritual is about tribal membership—who is in the wolf pack, who isn’t. These days, Bruce and the rest of us have updated our thinking on personal boundaries and consent. A bear hug suffices.

Jackie, in awe of the elaborate Art Deco murals and Tiffany stained glass in the chapel, leaned over and whispered in my ear, “This is a baller cemetery!”

Soon, the chapel filled past capacity, standing room only in the back, more than 500 people showing up, as if for a royal funeral. Kay is royalty, as far as most of us are concerned. And there she was, in a brass urn, to be placed in the glass mausoleum at the top of the hill next to her mother, who died young as well—reunited in ash.

Kay’s younger brother rented a mansion on North Park Boulevard in Shaker Heights for the family, where we gathered after the service. A couple of Kay’s friends were the first to venture up to the third floor to escape the glum milling around below. Word came down that they had stumbled across a game room with a billiard table, and soon all of Kay’s Coventry friends made their way up there to shoot pool and talk shit. I watched as Jackie held court at Kay’s memorial that evening, sitting on a big leather couch in the center of the room, bright-eyed and warm, charming everyone who came near her. Jackie made everyone she came into contact with feel special.

“Chris, let’s check in on each other,” Jackie said as we packed our things to leave. “I mean it—I’m going to call you every day if I have to.”

“I hope you do.”

Our gates were at different terminals on opposing ends of Cleveland Hopkins. We hugged and split after making our way through the TSA central checkpoint.

I had been struggling. I was in a lot of pain. Kay’s death was an unexpected blow, and Mom was continuing to fade away. But the worst pain I was experiencing came from the feeling of rejection, betrayal, and abandonment I suffered from Marianne the second half of my trip to Cleveland the previous September. Jackie urged me to be kind to myself, “I hate seeing you in this pain, my sweet friend.”

Jackie would talk about her frustrations with her recovery process. She would talk in vague terms about friction with her roommate at home. She told me that she worked at a booth at the Portland State University Farmers Market on weekends, selling fish.

“You’re a fishmonger? That’s rad.”

“I’m a fishmonger!”

“PSU is right down by the hotel I always stay at whenever I come to visit,” I told her. “One time, I bought morels for $16 a basket, which I figured was a pretty good deal, thinking the basket weighed a pound. Turns out I paid for four ounces.”

“Oops!”

“I don’t know why I bought them; it’s not like there was a kitchen in the hotel room. I wish I knew you were there… maybe I walked right by you last year!”

“I doubt it,” she said, “I haven’t been working there for long.”

I never really dug too deep into Jackie’s addiction history. What happened? When did things come to a head? When did she make that first step (”We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol–that our lives had become unmanageable“)? I knew she started dating an older man whom she met in the program. I knew she went to Vegas and did mushrooms. I think she relapsed, at least once, but I didn’t press her on it. She’d tell me more details if she wanted to.

After a while, the calls started to slow down. Daily became weekly, weekly became once in a while.

I went back to Cleveland in April of 2024 to see Mom before she passed.

Mom had continued to waste away, and her dementia had accelerated to the point that sometimes she didn’t know who I was. Irene, her card-playing buddy, had died that winter, and Mom didn’t really have much to hang on to.

The previous year, Ann bought Mom an animatronic toy cat that purred when petted. Mom called it “Meow-meow.” It made me want to cry every time I looked at it.

The last time I saw my mom, I got Wendy’s and hand-fed her little bits of the hamburger and sips of Coca-Cola. I pet Meow-meow and said goodbye:

“Love you, mwahs!”

About a month later, the phone rang. It was Jenny. Phone calls are never good news these days.

Mom died on May 24, 2024, at age 79.

I had to go to Cleveland two more times that year: Dad’s 80th birthday and Mom’s memorial in October (we siblings couldn’t find a time that spring when everyone could be in Cleveland between work, layoffs, kids, and life; besides, Mom didn’t like to be rushed).

Dad’s 80th birthday celebration fell between Mom’s death and her funeral in October, and, as usual, Ann dove headfirst into making all the plans. There was some internal debate among the siblings as to whether this was a good idea, but Dad only turns 80 once. Ann herself was reluctant, given the circumstances, but we all agreed to go ahead. Jenny could take care of some of Mom’s effects while in Ohio.

Ann rented a house down in central Ohio, in a town whose name I have already forgotten, near Mohican State Park. As children, we stayed in the park proper, usually in cabins along the Mohican River. By the time it was decided that we should go, it was too late to get enough cabins to accommodate all four siblings, Jenny, Missy, Ryan, and myself, my brother-in-law, Mike, my sister’s two young children, Bea and Odin, and her tireless friend Stacy, who, like my personal trainerpist, Tasia, provided emotional support for Missy.

Ann had an itinerary in mind, naturally, which, if past is prologue, would be difficult for the rest of the family to faithfully execute. Tossing a toddler and a kindergartener into the mix effectively took the cruise director’s clipboard and set it on fire. I joked with my roommate that it was usually dangerous to have all the siblings under one roof. The previous time that happened, the year before, my younger sister had a small meltdown and didn’t talk to the rest of us for almost a day. This time, however, we were a unified front when long-repressed resentments toward our stepmother boiled over.

This reunion ended with everyone retreating to lick their wounds, mostly Ann, whom, in my never-ending quest to be rewarded for diplomacy, I had to reassure. This was my role in the dysfunctional family unit: healer. I suspected that was Jackie’s role as well. Whenever we would talk, Jackie would take great care of me. She always listened to, really listened to, everyone she encountered. It’s easy not to have to focus on healing yourself when you are busy healing everybody else.

Sitting in the airport on my way back from Dad’s birthday, I had a mini-meltdown. Something had reminded me of what happened to me in Cleveland the previous September.

I tried to reach out to Jackie, but she had “gone to ground.” Sometimes I wouldn’t hear from her for days. I gave her space; we all need to retreat sometimes. Eventually, Jackie would surface, even if just to tell me, “I’m having a hard time; please don’t take it personally. I love you.”

I’d tell her I loved her, too, and even if she wasn’t responding, I would drop an occasional encouraging word to her, “Have the best day!” “I love you so much!” “Call me when you can. I hope you are having a beautiful day.”

On September 17th, 2024, at 2:19 in the morning, Jackie sent me “I Confess” by The English Beat.

I texted her back later that morning:

me: “banger.”

Jackie: “I think I’m on my way to being a hateful cunt. Keep your distance please.”

me: “🥺…”

Jackie: “Yeah B-O-O-H-O-O I’m over (&in)my own bullshit.”

me: “i love you and hope you can call me when you are ready. i miss u.”

Later that day, Jackie sent me a poem by Wallace Stevens:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

In January, Jackie went to ground a little longer than usual, and, out of concern, I reached out to Debbie, who, in turn, reached out to a mutual friend of Kay and Jackie named Michelle.

“She does this a lot,” Michelle said, “it’s frustrating. I’ll let her know you are worried.”

She called; we talked.

“I relapsed, Chris.” I could hear the shame in her voice.

“Jackie, I understand what a motherfucker this thing is,” I paraphrased Jackie’s words for the thing that makes people like us buckle and crumble under its weight. “I would never think less of you because you drank. Never. I love you no matter what.”

“I know, I just don’t understand why sometimes.”

“Jackie, I spent years trying to quit. Years. I’d go a week or two, a month at the most, then I’d fuck it up, and I just gave myself permission to go back to it. I was a failure; I might as well just drink until I die. I got in my own way. That voice that tells you that you’ll never succeed, that you might as well give up, you can’t let it win. That voice is an asshole, fuck that voice! Right in the butthole! You might tell yourself you aren’t worth it, but you fucking are. Don’t let that motherfucker win.”

Things had been hard, but she was doing better. She talked, I listened. I talked, she listened. She told me she loved me. Whenever I talked to her, she insisted that I be kind to myself. I told her I didn’t want to be a burden. I told her to be kind to herself, too. I didn’t like hearing her get down on herself, and I reminded her of how much she did to help people and how special she was.

I took the train up the coast at the end of March 2025 for my birthday. Kay’s birthday was April 2nd, and I promised Drea and Debbie that I would walk over to her old house off NE 15th and Alberta to take a selfie.

I wanted to see Tasia and Lisa, of course. Mostly, I wanted to see Jackie.

I texted her a week before to invite her to dinner.

Jackie: “I really appreciate the invite, Chris. I’m walking through some major depression symptoms right now, makes it hard to want to socialize. I hope you don’t take that personally. It’s just not something I’m able to do right now.”

On the train, I pressed my face against the glass.

At points along the route between Eugene, Salem, and Portland, Oregon, I lose cell signal. I have an ancient Sony Digital Walkman, a vintage iPod Color Classic 160 GB, and some music saved to my laptop. I’d listened to “Starfish,” by The Church, three times already, so I cued up “To Perth, Before the Border Closes,” by Julia Jacklin:

I loved it there.
That city held me.
Don’t you know that everything changes?

Although it is only early afternoon, as the train follows the river, the embankments are steep enough for the trees and earth to block the sun; the greens and blues in the ravines look like a forest at dusk.

As Portland approaches, tents, campers, and vans begin to pop up along the tracks, or the detritus of previous encampments. I am reminded of taking the RTA in Cleveland with Jackie, watching the ruins of modernity pass me by. Unhoused encampments give way to warehouses and industrial buildings, brought to life with vibrant splashes of colorful graffiti. Art abhors a vacuum. Soon, we are upon the river and the bridges.

Earlier that month, Jackie and I talked about my coming up to Portland to visit. She had been excited, and we had made little plans. Jackie wanted to show me Mt. Tabor, where she’d walk almost every day. “It’s beautiful up there.” We were going to go to the Japanese Garden. I was going to take her out for donuts.

Portland has the best donuts in the world: Blue Star, not Voodoo.

I texted her one more time,

me: “We don’t have to do anything fancy. I’d just like to see you.”

Jackie: “I’m not available to hang out, Chris.”

Another birthday came and went. I felt cheated by life once again as I rolled out of Union Station past the bridges, and the river, and the graffiti-covered warehouses, the encampments, and the dark, enchanted forest, the silent pines.

When she called me a week later, she wanted to apologize, but I just wanted to soothe her. The call was shorter than I would have liked it.

I didn’t know what I could do for her, and it made me feel a little helpless.

That June, I messaged,

me: “Wanna chat later this week?”

Jackie: “I don’t know. I’m just feeling really angry, and I don’t really want to talk when I’m like this, sorry.”

When Jackie got around to calling me later that month, I told her I worried about her.

“Whatever is going on, I don’t care what time it is, I want you to know you can call me,” I said. “Just please check in with me.”

Seventy thousand bees suddenly showed up in my backyard while we were on the phone, so I shut the window and narrated as they swarmed between the trees like a loud school of fish looking for new digs. Jackie saw it as a good omen.

I sent her the video. Thumbs up.

We talked briefly at the beginning of August. I sent her a text later that month:

me: “Hey! It’s Wednesday! Hope you are having a good Wednesday. Love you.”

My phone showed that it was read on August 27th.

Over the next month and a half, I’d rattle off the occasional text, little niceties, tell her I love her, tell her I hope she’s having a great day.

Unread.

I even called and left a voicemail toward the end of September. I tried again a week or so later, in October.

I was riding my bike to the grocery store after the October 18th “No Kings” protest in San Francisco when I saw that I got a message on Instagram from Michelle, who checked in on Jackie for me last winter.

I wasn’t able to check the message until I pulled up to Rainbow Cooperative.

Michelle: “Hey Chris,
I’m so sorry to tell you this, but Jackie died in September. I remember Debbie asking me to check on her on your account last winter. I just recently found out. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.”

Jackie committed suicide on September 14th, 2025.

September 14th.

She was 43.

If you are having thoughts of self-harm, or know someone who is, please reach out.

https://988lifeline.org/

Nothing this week. I’ve been writing about my trip to the hospital in 2020 because, well, I ended up there for most of last week. First, for an emergency cardioversion, then later, an out-of-control infection. Unbeknownst to me, I was walking around on Tuesday morning with a fever of 103.7º. To the extent that I was able to write, I was focused on polishing the first chapter of my memoir.

Maybe I’ll put out a teaser. I sent my sisters a copy on Friday (they both feature in this particular story) and joked that I would make 50 edits by Monday (more like 100).

I was also inspired to have Claude write me a program to convert PDFs into little booklets (out of laziness and the lack of a reasonably easy, free tool that does this).

https://github.com/und1sk0/printshawp

I also had it write me something that would easily get me in arrears with Meta, so I won’t link to that, but if you are like me and have a gazillion followers on Instagram that you suspect are just bots and scammers, HMU offline.

Story time.

My nadir for the first year of the COVID shutdown can be traced to a single moment.

Caitlin and I had been fighting about who was entitled to whose vodka for the last couple of weeks. I would have a couple of fifths of Svedka delivered almost every morning, usually along with a pack of Camel Lights and some mixers. I’d share with Caitlin sometimes, but sometimes I just needed a little more, so I’d finish the vodka, leaving none for her.

I took to hoarding entire handles of vodka that was “my” vodka, and some for Caitlin. Eventually, she switched over to rum. There were enough differences in our drink preferences to maintain an uneasy truce. I loved red wine, as did my coworker Ari, and we’d virtually cheer each other in our morning meeting once in a while. Caitlin could not drink red wine without immediately getting heartburn. Other mornings, it was cheap California sparkling (though I found some drinkable Cavas and Proseccos under $30). I enjoyed some beer, as long as it wasn’t the godawful carbonated Pine-Sol passing as IPAs, but Caitlin had no tolerance for any of it, save the occasional cidre.

I could write a thousand words about how much I despise “West Coast IPA,” a bastardization of a perfectly respectable style of beer that, in the 1990s, was quite pleasing; just bitter enough, malty enough, and light enough to make for something I could drink more than twelve ounces at a time. I bowed out way before the two parallel “hold my beer” movements in craft brewing kicked into full swing: who can make the beer with the highest alcohol-by-volume (ABV) and who can make the beer with the highest international bitterness units (IBU). The winds had shifted, and I knew craft brewing would race headlong into, ultimately, its own demise.

For the non-drinkers (or casual drinkers), let’s talk about bottle size taxonomy. You will hear “fifth” a lot, and that’s 1/5th of a gallon; that’s also about 750ml, if you want something that sounds fancier than “oy guv can I ‘ave a fifth of Gilbey’s innit?” The next size down is a 375ml, or a “pint” (with an asterisk). Because “a pint is a pound the world around.” But if you went to a bodega and ordered a split of Jameson, you’d not get your half pint of whiskey; 187.5ml. A split is a tiny bottle of Champagne. Going the other direction, in the war between the Brits and everyone else, mainland Europe wins the next sortie: one size up from a fifth is a liter. The largest size you can get in most shops is affectionately known as a handle: a bottle so big it comes with a handle; a jug; quite a lot of booze. Technically, 1.75L, it’s often (incorrectly) referred to as a half-gallon.

The weekend of the 15th of August, 2020, started like any other: with a fifth of Svedka, a pack of smokes, and 32 ounces of orange juice. I had been alternating days, probably pacing myself, but I got another fifth the very next day, Sunday the 16th. I am not sure what I was thinking: “Maybe it would be ok, I can tough it out.”

By “it” I mean detoxing, unsupervised, on my own, out of some stubborn sense of “I know better, it won’t happen to me.” I tossed and turned Monday night, uncomfortable in my own skin.

The first horseman of the alcoholopolypse is: Insomnia.

Because alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, it affects wakefulness. A glass of wine before bed can help a person fall asleep because alcohol interacts with a neurotransmitter called Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid (GABA). Alcohol increases the activity of GABA in the brain, which in turn suppresses brain activity. Modern medicine advises against nightcaps, however, because alcohol disrupts the natural equilibrium of the body’s sleep rhythm. As alcohol is processed by the liver, the effects of alcohol on GABA receptors decrease.

When a person drinks heavily, their brain begins to make adjustments to the bombardment of GABA and GABA-agonists by shutting down some receptors. It takes more and more alcohol to achieve the same effect, in other words, “tolerance.” But under the hood, something even more dangerous is happening. As a compensatory measure, the brain ramps up its glutamate system, which is what “excites” the brain. Prolonged, chronic alcohol use has thrown this entire ecosystem out of whack, and the brain is slow to respond to the sudden removal of alcohol.

It starts as not being able to sleep without having a few drinks, and a few more drinks, and maybe a few more because now you are fighting shut-down GABA receptors and an overactive glutamate system.

Maybe you drank enough to get to “sleep” (to black out), but first thing in the morning, your brain doesn’t have anything fueling the GABA pipeline, and all of a sudden, the glutamate system takes over. And it’s excitable.

Second horseman of the alcoholopolypse: The Shakes.

Your hands might tremor. They might tremor visibly. You feel queasy inside, like your body wants to jump out of its skin. And why wouldn’t it? Look what you are doing to it, you monster.

There are a couple of ways out of this predicament, but the easiest is to just add enough alcohol to calm the tremors. Hair of the dog.

Monday the 17th, I must have had maybe just enough booze lying out to absorb the brunt of that weekend’s delirium tremens, but for whatever reason, I didn’t re-up on Tuesday, August 18th.

A friend of mine talked me into buying an Apple Watch years ago, and I had been tracking steps while going out on Ingress missions or doing personal training sessions with Tasia over Zoom. By then, the young, polite, quiet Chinese kid who lived in the detached unit behind our neighbor Will had moved out. Caitlin nicknamed him “sorry, sorry,” because he would always apologize whenever we’d come down to the garage while he was doing his laundry, or pass him on the stairs. He worked over at Zynga, which is about a 15-minute walk from our front door, and he would often ride his bike (making it about a three-minute commute). His real name was Alex, and when Alex started dating another young Chinese programmer, the lovebirds flew off.

When I started doing training sessions, they were in the living room, but Caitlin and I would be in each other’s hair. On days when I’d be trying to be sober, she’d be sloppy drunk by noon, and come into the frame to babble at Tasia. I moved the training sessions to the garage, using paint cans as weights and sweeping leaves off the poured concrete floor so I could get on my back and do core work.

After Alex moved, I just took over that apartment for sessions. And work. Later that fall, I would even have therapy in the tiny 1br; a lot of what I wanted to talk about with the therapist was about Caitlin, and the walls were thin.

If I had to wager a guess, I weighed 430lbs in August. Walking up San Bruno Street on the other side of the 101, I would easily reach 140 or more beats per minute, according to my watch. Tasia carefully calibrated my workouts so I wouldn’t be above 120 for too long, which meant downtime between sets. Tasia and I were slowly losing our minds that summer, so we’d fill the dead air with our fears and our heartbreaks, but we would also try to hold one another up. The training was just as much about exercise as it was about mutual emotional support, which is why I would refer to Tasia as my Personal Trainerpist.

GABA dysfunction and the blending of hours and days together in the purgatory of the COVID lockdown meant I was often up and running before 7 AM. I had already been working a while when 10 AM rolled around, and I was feeling withdrawal pretty intensely; I knew something wasn’t quite right, my heart was pounding through my chest. I took my pulse on my watch, and it was around 137 bpm. I mentioned this to Caitlin, who suggested I go to the hospital.

“I don’t want to take resources away from COVID patients. I’ll wait a few minutes to see if it goes down.”

I would ride my bike behind San Francisco General Hospital whenever I’d leave the house to get fresh air, get away from Caitlin, and play Ingress. Behind the hospital were parked big refrigerated semi-trailers, backed right up to the loading docks. I could only assume that was for overflow if the morgue ran out of room. I could ride down the middle of Potrero for blocks at a time without having to drift over toward the green bike lane by the curb.

Half an hour later, I re-checked my watch. 143.

“Dude, go to the hospital,” said Caitlin, in a voice that to me had become like fingernails on a chalkboard.

“Maybe if I get in the shower for a little bit, I’ll feel better. Little hot water to relax my muscles.”

Every hot tub, steam room, and sauna in California has a long list of warnings. Don’t go in a pool if you’ve had diarrhea recently, don’t stay in more than 15 minutes, and the big one, people with heart conditions and hypertension should stay out.

I can’t say I felt much better under the hot water; my watch suggested that, in fact, I had made things much, much worse. 178bmp.

Tasia in text: “Go to the ER Right. Now.”

Caitlin, “I told you to go to the ER, you jackass, now get the fuck out of here.”

The third horseman of the alcoholopolypse: Trip to the ER.

Leon picked me up in his Lyft at 12:37 and dropped me off at CPMC Mission-Bernal (but I still call it St. Luke’s); I picked the hospital because it is not SFGH. Not that SFGH isn’t a world-class level-1 trauma center, but because it’s busy. (And possibly out of network.) The hospital I picked was a coin flip between St. Luke’s and Brutalist Hospital (Davies Medical Center on Castro). I quickly won over the gay nurses at Davies with my pathological flirting, and they took great care of me. Story for another day. St. Luke’s was a little closer, and Caitlin told me the food was OK.

I didn’t account for the fact that the hospital was under renovation. The emergency department was tucked away behind what felt like a maze of half-open side streets. Sweating, I told Leon, “You can let me out right here, this will be fine, I’m sure.”

I walked around the construction trying to make heads or tails of the signage, wondering to myself if anyone has died looking for the goddamned door. I walked up two outdoor flights of stairs to a plaza, then back down to the other side to find the entrance. My heart was averaging about 160bpm.

I’ve found a few things a patient can say in the emergency department that will bump them up the list. When I was at Davies, it was sharp abdominal pain, like a burst appendix. It turned out to be a bladder infection from sitting in a resort hot tub, one of those “bromide” ones. Folks, do not get in the hot tub if you’ve had diarrhea! The gay nurses asked me several times if I was sure I hadn’t had anal sex recently. “Oh, sweetheart,” I replied, “my sex life is not at all exciting, it’s practically non-existent!”

The second thing that will bump you up is complaining of chest pains. Within 5 minutes, I was hooked up to the decapus, the ten leads that attach to the little stickers that get placed around your chest and belly when you are given an EKG.

The technician spun the screen around to me, “There it is, clear as day.”

I puzzled over the squiggly lines, but I could definitely tell that my EKG was not normal.

“I can’t diagnose you, your doctor will, but do you see how the peaks and valleys seem to be spaced out in random intervals? Three in a cluster over here, then a long gap, then another beat, more irregular beats, and on it goes,” he explained. “You, my friend, are most likely in atrial fibrillation.”

The fourth horseman is death.

Not only is it already Sunday, but it’s also 16:01 Sunday.

I feel like I need a break.

A couple of quick random thoughts:

Thursday is my weekly 1:1 with the boss, a deeply cynical man who is fond of saying, “It’s a miracle every time our product works.” We’re tech support. Glorified, fancy, but at the end of the day, just tech support.

Thursday morning, around 7 AM, he changes our 1:1 to 8:30. Panic sets in.

“Sorry, I can’t do 8:30, maybe 9:30?”

No lie, I really can’t do 8:30. The kid has to get out of bed, I have to make her lunch (lunch is free regardless of income, but she’s picky and I suppose I can’t blame her; when I was that age, however, I loved the garbage food they served). Dressed and ready, then I gotta walk her to the bus stop where the other kids and parents wait for the orange school bus to take them up the hill. Nine out of ten times, it seems, we make it by the skin of our teeth. Unfortunately, I’m slowed down by being back in AFib, despite an ablation back in December 2024.

The last few times I was called into a surprise morning meeting with the boss, I was shown the door.

“Tomorrow’s fine,” was his response. So I slept fitfully, with my cortisol spiking. In my mind that night I turned the wheels trying to line up the tumblers. How much money could I line up, and how much runway did I have? How long would I wait to tell my roommate, whose response I dreaded more than the actuality of once again not having a job?

Earlier that week, our new hire in Dublin resigned. He hadn’t been on the job more than a few weeks. He was smart, but he’d already taken five “sick days.” Who knows what was going on with him? When I would miss that much work, it was usually the “Irish flu.” (I’m allowed, I’m part Irish.) This guy didn’t seem like a drinker, but it got me thinking: how obvious was it to my coworkers that I was a degenerate drunk? I mean, the coworkers I didn’t party with or score drugs for?

I once got fired for being drunk on a conference call, obviously drunk, in the morning, after partying all night. Ironically, it started with the fifth of whiskey my boss bought me as an attaboy. He wasn’t the first or the last to ply me with alcohol: my alcoholic boss from the south of England liked to come by and drop off bottles of Basil Hayden to me during those first few months of COVID. I think he, like me, was going stir crazy and wanted to have just a few socially distanced minutes of interaction with someone other than his girlfriend.

Friday morning, I woke up doing my best performative “everything’s fine.” Would I make my case? The cruel irony is that just Wednesday night, I sent an email to a company that was recruiting me, turning them down:

We just had a team member resign (no notice, just “see you later, good luck!”). As much as I don’t love my current job or the pay, I will not hang my team out to dry. (This would not be the first time that scruples have gotten in the way of career advancement.) I’m going to have to pass for now. If something changes in the next few months, I will reach out and touch base. I know this is a disappointing development for all, but I can’t in good conscience leave [COMPANY] when they’re already down in headcount.

Did I just fuck myself out of a job? And about to be unemployed?

I packed my headphones and work laptop in my backpack. If I were going to be let go, I would be let go outside the prying eyes and ears of my roommate. The kid, astutely aware that I was packing my laptop, asked me why. After ignoring her through a couple of iterations of “why are you taking your laptop,” I just said, “I thought I might sit at a coffee shop and get some work done.”

That morning, my skip-level manager, the director of customer success, or whatever the fuck it is, commented on a piece of code I had checked in for review and approved another. In addition to being a 1:1 day on Thursdays, that was also the one day a week I got a chance to do real work, project work, and I wondered if they were going to fire me, maybe they wanted to milk me for an extra day of writing tools and scripts.

9:30 came around, and I was set up outside Maxfield’s Coffee Shop on Dolores, a plastic cup of overly bitter cold brew (no one on the West Coast seems to be able to get it right). It had started misting, which basically happens when you are in the fog and little droplets of not-rain start to appear. Headphones on. Zoom meeting joined.

“What’s on your mind?”

“I’ve already talked to everyone else,” a good sign. “There’s going to be a small change coming up about how our team is going to run from now on.”

Thank. Christ.

“You and Sally (the Kyrgyzstani in Miami) will be focusing on infrastructure integration, and Alex and I will be working on the remote-agent and private cloud piece.”

Sure, whatever, dude. Just, like, don’t ever call an impromptu morning meeting.

I was also going to talk about a tale of two Emilys, but that will have to wait. Also, I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea to chat with the therapist (who I like and is $25 with insurance) about them. The one who died and the one who is succumbing to mental illness, and I can’t do anything to help her.

Next time, then.

San Francisco, late September 1997.

Noise, AKA und1sk0, called it the “ominous cloud that looms over SF,” and it reminded him of watching Neo-Tokyo and its twinkling lights rising out on the horizon as Kaneda and Tetsuo sped down the freeway on the outskirts of town. The lights from downtown San Francisco lit up the grey sky as the city came into view just around the bend between San Bruno Mountain and Candlestick Park.

The Mazda Miata owned by AntiChrist, or antix, was, of course, too small and had only two seats, so the three of them rode in rhost’s green Toyota Corolla hatchback up I-280 to hang out with Lexicon Devil, or simply ldevil, at his office in a converted warehouse at 177 Stillman. With the Transamerica Building and Sutro Towers as beacons, San Francisco had a contemporary feel compared to the tiny, drab outline of the downtown Cleveland skyline, all three of its buildings, plunked down in the midst of a sprawling expanse of soot-covered Rust Belt industrial hell. The bejeweled City By the Bay rising out of the fog every morning could not be any more different than the ghost town that noise called home for 22 years. Even at its oldest, downtown San Francisco was new: very little of Old San Francisco survived the 1906 earthquake and ensuing fires. Birthed like a phoenix after the fire, the City healed. The City rebuilt.

The Schmidt Lithograph Building’s clock tower stood watch over SoMa, an area of the city that had supported light industrial business with small factories and warehouses. In the 1970s, the area’s unused former factories and warehouses gave way to converted lofts, artists’ workspaces, and, by the mid-1990s, the first of an endless wave of tech industry offices.

As they exited the highway at Bryant, you could see the Organic, Inc. sign with its stylized orange leaf logo lit atop the building at 520 Third Street. The company is famous, or infamous, for pioneering the banner ad. Construct dot net, where ldevil worked, was a different kind of Internet design firm specializing in bespoke, avant-garde campaigns for companies that were too hip for run-of-the-mill 2D banners. Construct’s designs allowed users to interact with the web in “3D” using a platform called VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language). Underneath the freeway that led to the Bay Bridge, you could miss Stillman if you weren’t paying attention. A few blocks west is Market Street, dead on a Friday night, and to the east a smattering of clubs, like the Hotel Utah and Trocadero Transfer (or just the Troc), and underground warehouse parties out past Brannan. The Graybar Electric superstore and driving range would be demolished that year to make way for PacBell Park. Rhost found parking easily on Stillman.

Antix turned to the backseat and said, “Noise, we need booze.” Flush from an $836 payout from a short-lived contracting gig in Sunnyvale, it was his turn to buy. The three walked around the corner to Maz Liquors. Noise only had about $27 in cash on him at the time, more than enough to buy a handle of Finlandia Cranberry, Camels, and Newports.

This was noise’s first trip to San Francisco. His first time seeing the ominous cloud. His first time feeling the chilly night air, easily 15º colder than when he left the apartment antix and rhost shared in San Jose. Despite knowing antix and rhost for years, noise had only just met them in person that summer. A Saphardic Jew, antix, a native of southern California, was nevertheless taunted for being a Mexican by the teenagers who hung out all night on the illegal teleconference calls, or k0nphz, that the three frequented. Noise was called f1shl1ps (or worse) due to his large lips, and rhost, the wallflower of the three, wasn’t remarkable enough for a nickname. This would be the first time antix and rhost met ldevil in real life, the self-styled leader of a clique of Internet Relay Chat users who called themselves [S4t4nz K1dz] or simply [SK].

Noise, on the other hand, knew ldevil pretty well “IRL,” having driven from Cleveland to Milwaukee to meet the summer after noise graduated high school, while ldevil was still 15 and living at his Mom’s apartment above the bar she worked at. Even at that age, ldevil was a tall, good-looking kid with Manic-Panic electric blue hair who started an illicit affair with a woman who called herself tnalp. The name “tnalp” originated from an accusation by a local eccentric in Cleveland, who called herself Sheba and was convinced that tnalp was a CIA plant. Plant backward: tnalp. For all intents and purposes, ldevil was a feral child who taught himself how to program and spent his nights online, eschewing the faux-gangster tracksuit look of his destined-for-trouble younger brother.

A couple of years later, after the divorce, and after moving into a two-bedroom apartment in Cleveland Heights with a hacker who called himself Erik Turbo, or just erikt, tnalp would have her door knocked down by the FBI. She wasn’t a CIA plant.

[SK]’s original membership consisted of founders Lexicon Devil and a guy from Denver called Radikahl, Rebel and elastic from Michigan, antix, Side-Winder (SWinder) from New York, the Silver Serpent (ssperent), _fool from Pennsylvania, and noise. Sinner, erikt, and a few others rotated in and out, the latter getting booted out for his involvement with tnalp. Beefs and drama, especially with a much more infamous and dangerous group on IRC who called themselves the Br0th3rh00d 0f w4r3z, or simply [BoW], became serious rivalries, which spun off into elaborate revenge plots, which contributed in no small part to law enforcement, the FBI, Secret Service, and even the Royal Canadian Mounted Police getting involved.

At 16, ldevil dropped out of high school and was emancipated from his mother. He moved in with a collective of artists and technologists who called their flat at the University of Wisconsin the “g33kl4b.” Seeing the shifts in the wind, ldevil pulled away from IRC, and from [SK], and booked for Manhattan at age 17.

Noise hadn’t seen ldevil since taking a road trip to Manhattan, where ldevil was helping out with the networking: laying down actual cables and wiring up routers and switches, and web design for the “What Is Jazz?” festival at The Knitting Factory. Noise waited in the basement of the club for ldevil to finish, drinking the beers set out for bands in the green room, and bumped into Soul Coughing’s M. Doughty. This must have been late 1996.

Noise, ldevil, and a few others had commandeered the IRC server at a University in Poland, a country whose modest Internet footprint in the 1990s was “pwn3d” by [SK] for the sake of having vanity “.pl” email addresses and a server connected to EFNet, which connected IRC users around the globe. They used the server to exchange messages in relative obscurity. Noise lamented his living situation with Sinner in the South Bay.

“What the fuck are you still doing in that shithole, anyway?” It was clear that ldevil held Sinner, and the entire South Bay, in contempt. “You need to move to The City. Get away from that loser.”

Antix, rhost, and noise rounded the corner back onto Stillman.

“Was it 155? 175?” Noise started drafting a message on a Motorola 2-way Pager when a door in the middle of the block opened, and a tall woman with candy-red hair and a red, Chinese-style silk dress appeared silhouetted against the light. Drum and bass floated out of the cavernous office space, and the three could see desks set up around the room with Silicon Graphics workstations next to bare steel girders, lava lamps, and a skate ramp.

Noise offered the black plastic bag with the vodka.

“I’m Chris,” he said, and pointed to antix, “that’s Eric,” then to rhost, “and Brian. We’re here to see Nic. Who are you?”

Unsure of what to make of this motley crew, the woman said, “I’m f0nem. Come on in.”

Last week, Mike “Sinner” Goober (let’s say that is his last name) popped into my head as I approached the 30th anniversary of my moving to the Bay Area. That was in 1997, so I still have a year and some change.

I have two things that popped into my head just now, and I might talk about either or both. The first one is about how I basically held the company I worked for hostage when they threatened to fire me. They had been paying me $5 an hour, which was basically minimum wage, to administer the following servers for a local Internet service provider (IYKYK):

• A Sun SparcStation 20 running, I think, Solaris 2.5.1

• A Sun Sparc IPC (that was our DNS server)

• A Livingston PortMaster, and a bank of, I don’t fuckin know, USB 28.8k modems

• A Cisco 2501 router, on which hung our single, probably partial T1

Five dollars an hour. This was probably late 1996 or early 1997, before I made the move out west.

Anyway, I took a bunch of acid with my friends (a couple of them worked with me, and took great pleasure listening to our asshole boss sweat over the phone), logged in, saw that they had changed the “root” password (that’s the superuser in Solaris), and hacked it out of spite. Then changed the password on them, because fuck you, that’s my fucking pizzabox (that’s what folks called the SparcStation line of products, because of their shape).

By the way, both of their “servers,” the SS20 and the IPC, are really desktop computers, and the IPC was hilariously underpowered even by that day's standards. But it’s not like DNS is important. I digress.

Sinner wasn’t in Cleveland at the time, but we were chatting on IRC, competing to see who could hack root faster. This contest basically came down to who could type faster, since we both knew where the proverbial exhaust portal on the Death Star was: “/bin/eject”.

The program had but one purpose: take whatever removable media you had mounted on the main filesystem, unmount it, and eject the media (floppy disk, tape cartridge, or CD-ROM).

Any user needed to be able to eject a CD. Remember, this is a multi-user desktop computer (more importantly, it’s a “shell” server, ISP users could log in and interact with the Unix OS to check mail, hop on IRC, et cetera). Perhaps one needs to, in the course of whatever it is one is doing with the thing, insert a CD. In the background, under the hood, all sorts of shit is happening that requires special privileges, which the operating system automatically handles for you. But for some reason, Sun Microsystems, in its infinite wisdom, decided there needed to be a command specifically for ejecting the media, and it needed to run as root.

Of course, you don’t want to give root to everyone. That’s the superuser, and as you might have already gleaned, you can get up to all sorts of mischief if you have access. So this eject program is blessed with a special magic power: it can run as root to do that one thing.

You don’t need to know all the technical details, but it turns out it’s pretty easy to trick the eject program to execute arbitrary code, and because it executes that code as root, you can do everything root can do just by making eject drop you into a command-line prompt (that program is called a shell, or “/bin/sh”).

Fun.

Sinner, I, and hundreds of other bored teenagers had spent quite a lot of time breaking into all manner of systems we had no business gaining access to. Some of us genuinely spent the time researching and programming little bits of code to exploit vulnerable software like /bin/eject, but most of us just copied other people’s work. I was in the latter category most of the time, a class of so-called hacker derisively referred to as “skr1pt k1dd13s.”

My thing was social engineering: calling the phone company, pretending you work there, and telling them to turn a phone line on or off. Friends of mine didn’t pay for phone lines because the phone company’s billing department didn’t know the lines existed; they were just loops to the local central office (CO) with a dial tone but no associated billing information. A “test loop.” POTS. Plain Old Telephone Service. Subscribers had classes of service, Line Class Codes (LCCs), assigned to their phone lines.

Most of the time, mine were 1MR, single-party measured rate, or a residential phone line. Out in the sticks, users often were wired up to “party lines,” where two, three, maybe four subscribers shared a single loop. 3MR. There was another class of service for business subscribers: single-party measured business rate, 1MB.

POTS lines could have customizations tacked on called Custom Local Area Signal Services, or CLASS features. CW, call waiting; 3WC, three-way calling; CID, caller ID. Those cost extra money. Unless you talked someone into turning them on for you.

You had to know the terminology. Different types of (central) office equipment had different administrative interfaces. RCMAC for Western Electric switches; SERVORD for Northern Telecom DMS. Ameritech used a ticketing system for work orders called WFA, “Work Force Administration.” Everyone called it “woffa.”

Not only did I never pay for my own local loop and CLASS features, but I never paid for long distance either. That costs extra as well. In the days before flat-rate long-distance (inter-exchange) calling, as people now have on their mobile phones, calls that left their local calling area (Number Planning Area or NPA) had to pay tolls, just like you would if you were driving down the turnpike.

A subscriber could choose which long-distance carrier they used, and, of course, the big fish was AT&T. There were also MCI and Sprint, along with a handful of boutique carriers, but AT&T, MCI, and Sprint were the big three. In telco terminology, your long-distance carrier was your Primary Interexchange Carrier, or PIC. Each PIC had a numeric code; for instance, AT&T was 288, because on a phone keypad 2 is “ABC” and 8 is “TUV.”

A lot of people didn’t realize that you could select a different carrier on a per-call basis, different from your PIC, by dialing 10, then the PIC code. This was called a tenex code. If you wanted to call your gay uncle in Rochester, but you wanted to use MCI, you would preface your call with 10222. For a laugh, we would trick people into calling long strings of numbers prefixed with a tenex followed by 911: “Hey, could you call 102-889-1123 for me?”

Getting set up with a free phone line involved dialing up the telephone company’s internal work orders call center (and if you didn’t know that number, you just social-engineer that as well), and rattling off some gibberish like this:

“Good afternoon, John Draper, out of Fairmont-32 today… D-R-A-P-E-R… The silly* code? CLHGOH32… Charlie Lima Hotel George Oscar Hotel… Looking to plug some stuff into Servord. How ya doing today?... What do I call you?… Nice to meet you, Gracie… Oh, you aren’t kidding! It is hot today, and half these vans don’t have any AC. Yeah, I got about an hour left, and I’m trying to get through putting up some test loops before I gotta get my kid to his little league game… Oh god no, they are doing terribly, but they are too young for it to bother them, I think… Yeah, just turned 8… Anyway, I’m over here at aerial E097-0812… E as in Echo. Yeah, that’s the outside loop. That should be terminating on OE LEN 011-1-22-37… Right. Pair 0812. Thank you. No, I did mean LCN, sorry. DMS, duh. 011-1-22-37. That’s going to be a, uh, 1MR… Sure. Take your time, Gracie… No, I don’t mind it, it’s all the same to me, though. Half of the east side is #5e, the other half is Northern Telecom. Last year, I was out at that big Siemens in Brecksville. Class 3… Mostly indoors, unless some joker with a backhoe who can’t read comes along and cuts the fiber… Great, what’s the DN? Hang on, gotta find my pen, oops. OK, one more time? 216-321-5588. Great. Hey, just for fun, let’s throw 3WC, CID, and CW on it?... And PIC it to 288. You’re the best!... Yeah, they say it’s going to cool off later, but last night was just swampy, so we’ll see… Oh, I hope so too! But you know, they just love being out there swinging their little bats. You have a great rest of your day, Gracie! It was nice chatting.”

(* CLLI codes are the Common Language Location Identifiers, which designate central offices, cell towers, routers, switches, and so on. CHGOH32 is Cleveland Heights, Ohio. The full code at the time would have been CHGOH32DS1, designating the location code as a Northern Telecom DMS-100. That’s a local exchange that only serves local traffic. They call that a Class 5 office. Toll calls are routed over trunk lines to aggregator switches of varying sizes. There are far fewer outbound trunks on a Class 5 than there are subscribers: a Class 5 with 30,000 subscribers might have 250 outbound trunks. We can talk about the Mother’s Day Outage at a later time. Fascinating stuff.)

If I were feeling vindictive, I could change someone’s LCC to a DTF (dial-tone first, not down to fuck). Got done to me a couple of times. Harmless fun until it wasn’t.

But that’s another story.

Sinner was a grifter.

He and I took turns getting fired from contracting jobs in the South Bay, the summer of 1997. If he worked at all, who knows?

His Datsun would stall if you didn’t keep your foot on the gas pedal when she was stopped. He let me borrow it all the time to drive to, honestly, I don’t remember where. Nowhere, I guess, that’s where all the highways go in the South Bay. Trying not to stall at the spaghetti junction of CA 82, CA 85, and CA 237, infuriated at the Bay Area drivers who don’t know how to speed up on the on-ramp. I was 22, in a wrinkled button-down, trying to get a job, barely employable.

One of the jobs was a contract for a company I have long forgotten the name of, but I got hired because I knew how to write M4 macros for Sendmail. I wasn’t given any real work soon enough, I had no patience, still don’t, so I hacked a bunch of their servers and then told my manager about it. I was only trying to be helpful. That job lasted less than two weeks.

Never try to be helpful in a contracting job.

Sinner hacked into a porn site that was hosted back in Cleveland in the building I would someday work in. He downloaded all the files and gave them to his wife, Alix, as a birthday present. A girl I went to high school with was on it, which was less titillating than I thought it would be. She wasn’t doing well. I never mentioned a word of it to her.

It felt like nothing Sinner did was on the level, even mundane things. In 1995, he lied his way into a red-brick three-story telephone central office, a Class-5 Ameritech DMS 100 called Fairmont 32, even though it was on Lee Road. We posed as Case engineering students and followed the switchman around with glee as he explained the workings of the Western Electric Panel Switch, which was originally installed in the 1920s when the office was built. The term “hunt group” comes from the line finder that looks for a terminal when the local loop (that’s your handset to the switch) is closed. Prior to these mechanized switches, women in smoke-filled switchboard rooms connected calls manually: “Operator, give me Fairmont 32 8745; Give me Garfield 1 2323, I need a patio enclosure.”

The line finder and hunt groups were bridged by a vertical, metal mechanical pole that connected terminals on the first floor to loops on the third. “Monkey on a stick,” they called it.

The switchman explained that in the late 1960s, the Ohio Bell upgraded Fairmont 32 to a Number One Electronic Switching System, #1ESS, a stored program control switch with a 200 kHz CPU and 64x44-bit magnetic memory on 4x10 ½ inch metal cards; he gave us a few, but Sinner, who couldn’t help himself, boosted several more. In fact, he grabbed all sorts of outdated telco junk, but I was more interested in the history of the switch I had dumpster-dived so many times after 2600 meetings on the first Friday of every month.

I grew out of jumping into dumpsters. Sinner just graduated to more serious crimes.

In hindsight, we could have just asked for a tour. The switchman was just excited to talk about the storied red-brick Class 5.

He lived with me in my first apartment, in East Cleveland, and one month spent the rent money on a frequency counter so he could scan nearby radio frequencies; we could listen in on police radio traffic, but we could also easily listen to nearby cordless phone calls. East Cleveland was a fascinating place to be a phone voyeur.

We knew Alix from an early, text-based communication platform called Internet Relay Chat. She was 15 when I first met her, two years younger than me, and barely 18 when Sinner moved to New Pfalz and knocked her up.

At their wedding, we broke into an NYNEX van to steal the orange lineman’s handset (or buttset, because it would hook to the lineman’s belt with a carabiner and hang where a fanny pack would go). It had a special keypad that produced in-band DTMF (Dual-Tone Multi-frequency, or touch tones) that your standard home handset couldn’t (A, B, C, and D). It came with plugs and alligator clips you could attach to bare telephone lines or clip to the terminal posts of the Intermediate Distribution Frames that lined streets in the grey-green utility boxes stamped with Bell System logos.

He stole the NYNEX-branded lineman’s helmet and gave it to Alix as a wedding gift.

She grew to hate him, and I don’t blame her. He was a shit father, never around, and drunk when he was. She threw herself at me when we all lived in residential hotels in Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and Campbell, moving whenever the rent was due.

“You can fuck her if you want, I don’t care.”

When I wasn’t working, I was stuck with her all day. I love Alix, I really do, but I felt weird about the idea of sleeping with her. She eventually wore me down. Still, the whole thing felt deeply wrong: Sinner going out to maybe work, maybe not, leaving his horny wife and their infant alone with me. It was one of the many reasons I booked out of the South Bay the minute I actually made it up to San Francisco. Santa Clara in the summer was hot, dry, dusty, and there was nothing to do.

After I moved to San Francisco, mutual friends would take me down to San Jose from time to time to do acid and drink. That fall, Sinner finally found an actual apartment in Campbell, and I came down for Alix’s birthday. I didn’t feel so guilty this time with Alix while Sinner was passed out drunk in the next room.

I don’t think he was ever really interested in being a husband or a father, and if he ever was, the novelty of it wore off quickly; the two of them were holding each other hostage in a tacky 1970s apartment complex with an empty pool. They fought constantly.

When he lost that job and that apartment, they moved back to New Pfalz to live with Alix’s mother. Sinner had no intention of staying and fled back home to Canada to avoid child support.

Alix changed her name to Lucille. We exchange memes on Instagram.

I should visit her, but she lives in Texas. It’s Austin, though, so it’s not off the table.

Gasa Garden.

I’d been hanging on to the key since I took it back sometime after 2018, keeping it charged, until November 7, 2020, when MJKingSF finally re-captured it for the Frogs.

Drex had been living in Chicago for a while, and in October 2014, I met up with his soon-to-be fiancé Alyssa, and my old roommate, Marty, at a Barcade in Logan Square for Drex’s 40th birthday. Standing outside in the crisp autumn air, smoking cigarettes, Marty said to Drex and me, “You guys gotta download this game.”

“Oh, I don’t play phone games.”

I thought back to a few years ago when I had one of the co-founders of a well-known online game company in the late aughts, his girlfriend, and my friend over for cocaine and whippits. They had a marquee game that rolled out on Facebook, just then exploding onto the scene, and all of my friends and I were obsessed with it: growing and harvesting crops, expanding our farms, and eventually, for a tiny bit of money, you could buy special crops and bling for your farms.

“This is different,” Marty explained, “I’ll show you.”

Drex and I huddled around him while he showed us his screen. At the center, a cursor, set against a black streetmap dotted with white, green, and blue hubs with eight symmetrical spokes, spaced unevenly around the screen. Some of the hubs had blue or green lines coming out of them, depending on the color of the hub, and the area of any triangle of hubs of the same color glowed dimly. Blue or green.

“What am I looking at?” ventured Drex.

Marty tapped the screen with his thumb and middle finger, pinching them together to zoom out and show more of the map. It looked familiar.

Pointing at a street on the map, then to the northwest, Marty says, “OK, so this is that street. What street is this, Drexletron?”

“North Milwaukee.”

“And this,” pointing to the nearest blue hub-and-spoke, “this is the barcade.”

Marty taps on the hub, and up comes a sort of card with a picture of the bar, and a bunch of shit I didn’t understand.

“This right here is Logan Square,” as Marty spun the map around with his fingers.

Drex taps on another nearby hub on Marty’s phone. The Illinois Centennial Monument comes up, with a photo of a carved eagle atop a single Roman column.

“How do I move?”

“Install it, both of you. Here, I’ll send you an invite. What’s your email address?”

The message pops up in my Gmail, and I click on the link. The game loads and asks me for my “Agent name.”

About 20 years earlier, I finally got accepted into a BBS in Phoenix called Unphamiliar Territories (UPT), run by a hacker known only as Invalid Media. I had run afoul of a group of Canadian hackers called the br0th3rh00d 0f w4r3z, or more specifically, their mercurial and skilled leader, known only as u4ea. So, I had to come up with a new handle, or nickname. The name “The Undisco Kidd” sprang into mind, which I shortened to und1sk0, and it has stuck with me ever since.

As soon as I typed in “und1sk0,” the screen went black, then an introductory video started:

Welcome, Agent.

A discovery has been made.

A mysterious energy source known as Exotic Matter, or XM, has been found. Its origin is unknown, but its power is seemingly unlimited.

Two Factions are racing to control it, and the future of humanity hangs in the balance. The Enlightened seek to harness the power of XM to evolve mankind. The Resistance seeks to defend humanity against what they believe to be a hostile takeover of the mind.

The world around you is not what it seems. It’s time to move.

A screen popped up entreating me to “choose wisely” about which faction to join when Marty grabbed my phone.

“We can skip all this bullshit. You guys are joining the Resistance.”

The blue team.

“What if I want to join the Enlightenment?”

Marty rolled his eyes. “You don’t.”

“Sounds like a bunch of dumb hippies,” interjected Drex.

“¡Viva la revolucion!” I quipped.

Marty took us around the block, guiding us to the white hubs, called “portals,” so we could capture them. You see, the portals emit the mysterious XM that you can only see with your “scanner” (that’s your phone).

“I’m out of, what are they called?”

“Resonators.”

“Right, resonators.”

Resonators were little crystal-like things that you deployed to any white portal, which denoted that neither faction had control of it. There were eight resonator slots at the far end of each spoke, and Drex and I took turns deploying and capturing portals, turning them from white to blue.

Blue, resistance. Green, enlightenment. Blue good, green bad.

Marty taught Drex and me how to “hack” the portals to shake gear loose. Our inventory refreshed, we soldiered on. Within minutes, Drex and I had accessed Level 2 and were given weapons that were twice as powerful as the Level 1 weapons were, but still not powerful enough to do much damaged to the handful of well-fortified Enlightenment-owned portals (green). After about forty minutes, we’d managed to hit Level 3.

“It’s fucking cold, and I need a drink,” said Drex.

“So, where else can I play this?” I asked.

“It’s all over the world.”

“I bet there’s a fuck ton of shit in SF,” said Drex.

I could tell he was as excited as me about this new little real-world, real-time game of capture the flag.

Scoring in Ingress was logarithmic. You start at Level 1 with 0 AP (Action Points), gain access to Level 2 at 2,500 AP, Level 3 at 20,000, Level 4 at 70,000 AP, and so on until you finally reach the game’s highest level, Level 16, at 40,000,000 points.

A feature of Ingress was in-game chat with other Agents called COMM. You could broadcast messages to your team, or you could message all the Agents in your area in cross-faction (X-FAC) chat, the latter ranging from light, polite banter to run-of-the-mill shit-talking and, at the far extreme, threats of physical violence. Depending on where you were, the local chat could be very toxic.

The real chat happened outside of the game, on third-party apps, independent of oversight by the game’s creator, Niantic Labs. I knew these chat groups existed, but I was told the minimum Agent level they would accept is Level 5. It had taken a couple of weeks of casual play to get me past Level 4, but at 150,000 AP, Level 5 seemed like a long way off.

And you had to meet in person to be let into the group.

In Chicago, the map was fluid, and by the next day, I received notifications that my portals were being attacked, ultimately destroyed, and then recaptured by the Frogs (ENL). Frogs bad, Smurfs good.

Back in San Francisco, to my delight, the entire northeast corner of the city, its most densely populated area, was a solid mosaic of blue triangles. You earn AP to advance yourself in the game, but to advance your team score, you capture Mind Units (MU): each shaded triangle is a “field,” and the population under the field falls under the influence of the team that has captured that territory. Niantic uses real-time data collected by smartphone users, statistical data, and inference to calculate exactly how many MU are under a particular field, and adds that to the team’s tally before a checkpoint is recorded every 5 hours. At the end of a 175-hour septicycle, the team with the most MU captured over all 35 checkpoints “wins” that cycle.

There are some in-game “laws of physics” that govern how links and fields behave. Primarily, you can’t cross any link, and secondly, you cannot create any new fields while under another. However, you could capture fields on top of other fields, and recapture the same amount of MU you would otherwise have captured were there no field there in the first place. This served as a sort of score multiplier for a faction layering fields one on top of another: capture a field with 10 MU, then capture another field on top of it with 11 MU; now you have 21 MU. But you can’t just link any two portals, first you have to hack a portal key, which allows you to access the portal remotely, either to throw links or to defend the portal against attack.

Although you only receive a fixed amount of AP per field, creating a field was the most AP an Agent could earn in a single action. In COMM, I was coached on how to maximize AP gathering through fielding, and the local Smurfs, the San Francisco Resistance (SFR), had a particular fielding strategy that would yield the most high-level Agents as quickly as possible: micro-fielding.

I later learned that this strategy vexed and annoyed the local Frogs, who were interested instead in capturing as much MU as possible and winning cycles. Large blobs of micro-fields were difficult to mow down, since you had to go from portal to portal and expend precious inventory, Exotic Matter Pulse weapons, or XMP.

Still, these blue gardens took significant effort to maintain, and were destroyed far faster than they could be created. The Smurfs had to strike back, and so went the smash/build circle of life. At one point, a senior player gave me a piece of advice that stuck with me: “We are building mandalas in the sand.”

After what seemed at the time to be considerable effort, I finally made it past Level 5, and my only remaining barrier of entry was meeting an agent in person. Agents worked in the shadows, their identities unknown; you could walk past one and not know it (except that after a while, I started to recognize the telltale signs of Agents walking around, eyes on their phones, furiously tapping, always on the precipice of walking into traffic or off a pier).

As luck would have it, the nearest player to me was a guy I knew from the Kilowatt, a bike-messenger-turned IT support engineer named Cliff, whose nom de guerre was “boomboxnation.”

“Show me your phone,” he said, and I flashed my scanner. Later that night, I received my SFR Slack invitation.

After what seemed like an eternity, I finally reached Level 8 (1,200,000 AP), “halfway” to Level 16 (40,000,000 AP), giving me access to the most powerful gear, level 8 resonators, level 8 XMP, and so on. That was when SFR started putting me to work, and I gladly accepted.

The local Enlightenment liked to create large fields, with links stretching hundreds of miles, to capture MU in the millions (or, depending on how you stacked the fields, hundreds of millions). Our ground game was to prevent this from happening, which meant taking day-trips with teams of local and regional players to places like Point Reyes Lighthouse, the Marin Headlands, Angel Island, and not-so-glamorous locales like Stockton or Pittsburgh-Baypoint to destroy links coming off fire-hydrants painted like Santa, or Churches in the middle of residential neighborhoods. Sometimes it would be a trailhead for a bike trail, and I remember hiking in Pacifica, the ocean stretching out in front of me, and the full, brilliant April campo di fiore carpeting the hillside in purple, orange, pink, yellow, red, white, and lush green.

When the regional Resistance went to throw these large fields, Big-Ass Fields (BAFs), I would come along, or hang back and run intel or dispatch on secure chat channels (usually Telegram), monitoring enemy activity in the region, and calling out the throw orders to players who couldn’t see the whole map (I could, because I could view it in the browser at intel.ingress.com).

“ShabbyChef, you are clear to throw to the Baby Whale Skull portal in Pigeon Point; Dorkus hold for my instruction to throw to the Berkeley Pier.”

Performing certain actions or reaching milestones in the game earned you medals. Deploy 2000 resonators, and you get your Bronze Builder badge. At 200,000, you get the Onyx version. Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Onyx. Like leveling up, these medals became increasingly difficult with each progressive level.

One of the more elusive medals was the Guardian badge. That represented how many successive days an Agent held onto a portal. Earning it with portals in a city was next to impossible; the turnover for some portals could be half a dozen times an hour. I’ve stood caddycorner from an opposing agent “wargressing” over the same portal until one of us ran out of bursters (XMP) or resos. That’s how I met my first Frog in real life, an affable 4’8” Chinese-American woman called Pam who went by “wallbounce” in the game. (”Because I’m a spaz!”) Pam was my first Frog friend, but in general, there was mutual disdain among most players in either faction in San Francisco.

The rivalry was so palpable that individual players would beef frequently, and one team would “grief” the other by either quickly destroying anything they built over and over or denying opposing players points. Some of that is run-of-the-mill game play, but often it was personal. One of the favorite things to grief an opposing player out of would be their Onyx Guardian.

To earn that, you need to hold on to a portal for 150 days. The challenge of successfully denying someone of their Guardian, preferably at 149 days, is that there was no obvious way to know which portals a given Agent had held for the longest amount of time. You could see on the map who owned what, and if you wanted to be meticulous, you could take out each and every one in a city by finding them, but an Agent with keys to recharge a portal could be, potentially, 4000 km away. If I took a portal in the South of France and gave a key to an Agent in France, they could recharge (RAY-sharj) it for me. Because the charge range is tied to the Agent level, I gave keys to my original Guardian candidates in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, to a senior player who would charge them for me.

On the 143rd day, just a week from my Onyx, a player for Philadelphia came along and destroyed it. It was the “Euclid Golf Historic District” historical placard, on Scarborough and Dennington, and it was not exactly on the front lines of battle.

I had been specifically targeted, I felt, and I was going to get revenge, if not on that player, on the Frogs in my area.

There are various ways to cheat in Ingress; the most common are spoofing your GPS location or using multiple accounts. Spoofers would level up Agent accounts they created, then sell them, or sell gear they had farmed with spoofed accounts.

There was no tolerance for this by either the Frogs or Smurfs in the Bay Area; spoofers were considered the lowest of the low, and because of the portal density of San Francisco, with well over 10,000 portals, it was a honeypot for spoofer activity for accounts for sale.

It was the Smurfs that had devised the most clever but also most devastating way of cheating, however, designed to sniff out Guardian portals and destroy them just shy of 150 days. The Frogs swear that they didn’t do this as well, but considering the number of 149-day takedowns they pulled off, they must have come up with a version of this method as well.

The theory behind the cheat was relatively simple, but the scale at which the Smurfs pulled it off was massive and global.

It goes like this: in COMM, player activities are recorded and broadcast. So-and-so captured this or that portal. So-and-so attacked a portal. So-and-so destroyed it. Captures, resonator deployment, modifications, thrown links, and fields created all scrolled by on COMM in the scanner, which went back about a week before the messages scrolled off into the void. You could set your scanner range to pick up activity from 5k to 1000k from your location, but if you loaded the Intel Map in a browser, you could capture even more activity on COMM.

Someone logged in to the Intel Map using a Node.js program that scraped events and pushed them to a database. Multiple “listener accounts” from multiple co-conspirators fed into the database, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, going back to shortly after the game launched in 2012. The database and its associated tools and users were code-named the “Broker’s Guild.”

It was cheating because, legally speaking, it violated Niantic's terms of service, which forbid reverse engineering and data retention. Other tools that both teams used (and both contributed to the codebase), specifically a browser extension and app called “IITC,” tiptoed up to this line but did not technically cross it. Besides, the code was open-source, and a number of Niantic employees who also played the game may or may not have contributed. (https://github.com/IITC-CE/ingress-intel-total-conversion)

In order to know how old a portal is, you simply had to look for portals that were captured but not destroyed, a database query: show all the portals with a capture date but no destroy date within this geographic area.

Because this system recorded every single action, every exchange of chat, you could, if you wanted to, stalk the movements of an individual Agent over time. You could tell where a given person was on any given date. Chtorran was in Los Angeles on the 17th of July, 2016. Catalytic was in New York City last February. In October 2014, und1sk0 was in Chicago.

Unaware of the existence of this tool, Agents would be dispatched by the Agents with access to go hunt Guardians. I was given the oldest portal in San Francisco, Gasa Garden, which was amazingly 638 days old, as my target.

It was summer, so unseasonably warm (”the coldest winter I ever knew was summer in San Francisco,” the famous words Mark Twain never uttered).

The portal was in Visitacion Valley, a part of the city I had never been to before. The southeast corner was a no-man ‘s-land, Hunters Point, Bay View, India Basin, and the radioactive shipyards where paint was sandblasted off Navy ships towed back to the Bay after being placed near atomic test sites in the Pacific. Mostly, people were warned away for racist reasons, the same reason people tell you to stay out of Alphabet City, East Cleveland, or Gary, Indiana. “You’ll get jumped… You’ll get murdered!”

It was the very end of the southern 2/3rd of the SF MUNI 9-San Bruno route, which stopped two blocks west of my apartment. Northbound, the bus came down Potrero, turned onto Division, then 11th Street, turned onto Market, and continued all the way to the end, on Steuart Street. That leg I’ve traveled many times. Southbound, I’ve gone as far as Silver Avenue, after the bus takes a jaunt past Cesar Chavez (which will likely be renamed) onto Bayshore Boulevard. After that, it might as well have been going to Mars.

Guess I was going to find out. Silver Avenue roughly marks the border between Bernal Heights, with its tony hilltop houses, and the Portola neighborhood, an enclave of working-class Vietnamese and Latinos. San Bruno tracks alongside the 101, to the east, Silver Terrace, Bay View, and Hunter’s Point. Near the end of the line, the 9 turns west into Visitacion Valley, through middle-class homes owned by a couple of generations of mostly African-American families who moved to San Francisco in the 1940s to do the dangerous work of shipbuilding and plant roots.

As I reached the very end of the line, rows of what I recognized as army barracks appeared, turned into public housing. I held my phone out to find Gasa Garden, and discovered that I’d have to walk through what I hoped was a communal courtyard to reach the sign for a community garden just on the other side of a fence that separated the barracks from Glen Eagles Golf Course in McLaren Park. An old man tending to a small Weber grill regarded me curiously, but not with hostility, and I smiled and waved back.

At the fence, my scanner drifted a few meters in one direction, then a few meters in another, due to the lack of GPS location precision on commercial handheld devices like smartphones. I didn’t have to necessarily reach the portal to do damage. At the time, at Level 14, I had access to the best weapons, and although the maximum distance to the center of a portal to interact with it directly (deploy, hack, et cetera) was 40 meters, XMP 8 could do damage to a portal 160 meters away.

Within seconds, I peel each resonator off the portal, and it blinked out of service, turning white. I stood there for a few minutes, though, hoping my scanner would drift within range. Finally, it did, long enough for me to hack it and get a key, then deploy a single resonator, claiming Gasa Garden for myself.

One-hundred forty-eight days later, someone came along and destroyed it, denying me my Onyx Guardian.

I finally got it, but at the time, I had no idea which portal earned me the badge.

In 2018, the Broker’s Guild, the Resistance’s online database of nearly every action performed in Ingress from 2012 until then was uncovered, scores of players were permanently banned, and a few were taken to court for DMCA violations. Because of rampant cheating on both sides, the Guardian badge was shut down, although the Enlightened remained coy about their obvious use of a similar, or perhaps even the same, tool. If you had earned one, you got to keep it. But from that day forward, it was no longer available.

Even in spite of that, and in spite of Gasa Garden being destroyed within inches of the finish line, I still liked to go out there from time to time and capture it.

Viva la Resistance!

I was telling Christa about “The Algorithm” putting Adrianne Lenker in my path.

Last year, before 2025 Wrapped, it became untenable to support Spotify in any way, not paid, not with advertisements, not by sharing links, nor playlists. I downloaded, somewhere, the lists that I had worked on with a couple of friends. EJB and I had a sort of free-form tape mix that we each contributed songs to, and since the name of her hair salon in Seattle was “Cuts You Up,” she, of course, beat me to the Peter Murphy. My friend Nicole and I shared a playlist of the saddest fucking songs we could think of (as of, I dunno, 2015), both of us agreeing that “Upward Over The Mountain” by Iron and Wine was possibly one of the saddest:

Mamma, remember the night when the dog had her pups in the pantry,
Blood on the floor and fleas on their paws, and you cried ‘till the morning,
So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten,
Sons are like birds, flying always over the mountain

It’s a pretty good list with the usual suspects, peppered with some slightly more obscure gems. The Handsome Family has several really good sad songs, but I think “So Much Wine” made the list; it’s a song about a couple in a doomed relationship that circles the drain with booze:

I had nothing to say on Christmas Day
When you threw all your clothes in the snow
When you burnt your hair and knocked over chairs
I just tried to stay out of your way
But when you fell asleep with blood on your teeth
I got in my car and drove away
Listen to me, butterfly
There’s only so much wine
You can drink in one life
But it will never be enough
To save you from the bottom of your glass

Phoebe Bridgers does an excellent cover. Every year, she would release a Christmas EP covering a Christmas-themed song. “My Ghost,” by The Handsome Family, also makes it on the list, and let me tell you, that is the feel-good hit of the summer.

Before this devolves into a playlist, which it will, I’ll get back to Christa and I.

The kid is at a sleepover birthday party down the street, and my roommate, sensing an opportunity to be alone for a few hours, urged me to “make dinner plans.”

I texted Christa, who is one of the few people I occasionally hang out with outside of the small circle of mostly the roommate’s friends or the kids’ friends’ parents. When I want to hang out with my friends, it often involves getting on an airplane or Amtrak.

When I didn’t hear back, I just decided, fuck it, I’ll go see “The Hail Mary Project” at the Kabuki-8 in Japantown.

Christa messaged me back while I was on the 22-Fillmore, and I told her I intended to go to the 6:15 PM showing and had already bought a ticket. She couldn’t make it, but offered to get us tickets to “The Drama” instead. I had time to kill, so I sat at a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant in Restaurant Row on the second floor of Japantown Center.

After I had one too many pieces of sushi plus an Ube-melon Pan, a madcap misadventure ensued: Christa, thinking I was at home, went to my apartment to pick me up; meanwhile, I’m at AMC Kabuki-8 when I look at the ticket she sent me, which says AMC Metreon-16, which is downtown on 4th and Mission. I race over there, and when Christa calls to ask where I am, it turns out she bought tickets for the Kabuki, so I race back. It’s now 30 minutes after show time, which means I have missed 20-something minutes of trailers and the first ten minutes of the movie, the so-called “meet cute” between Robert Patterson and Zendaya.

I guess you could categorize “The Drama” as a sort of dark romantic comedy, a game of “what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done,” reveals a shocking secret, and hilarity ensues. Alana Haim is the main supporting female role, and she is great. I keep meaning to listen to Haim, because they are always fun to watch in interviews on the late-night talk-show circuit, but I never do. And now that I’ve mentioned it, I probably won’t right now because we have to get back to our playlist.

There were a few minutes of silence while we worked our way back into the lobby, where I quipped to Christa, “I’ve fucked up worse.” Still, watching the characters crash and burn in that slow-moving trainwreck sort of way that a good comedy of errors creates was a little cringey at times. In the best way.

I have definitely fucked up worse, though. Boy-howdy.

Adrianne Lenker’s “Live At Revolution Hall” was one of the albums released this year on Record Store Day, which I picked up last Saturday. I picked up live albums by Bill Evans and Ahmad Jamal as well, “Tusk” (the Fleetwood Mac album) covered in its entirety by Camper Van Beethoven, MC 900 Foot Jesus, Sisters of Mercy, The Moderns Lovers’ eponymous LP, Thievery Corporation, Zeni Geva with Steve Albini, a couple of Wilco albums, and a Primal Scream EP for the roommate.

What I didn’t get was anything she asked for. I knew I had to get to Amoeba Records on Haight early, and they open at 11 AM, so I was there by 11:05. The employee staffing the line outside the door announced that they were out of “menus” and that you could either shop in the regular part of the store or come back at 4 PM. I walked around passing out fliers for Faye’s Video & Coffee. It’s the time of year when SF Gate, our one remaining weekly newspaper, runs its “Best of the Bay” election. I got suckered into paying $10 to go to the Counterculture Museum by a young lady with the most beautiful eyes.

After killing sufficient time, I came back to Amoeba to pick up the scraps left over (see: above), to the tune of several hundred dollars more than I planned to spend. In my 20s, I would withdraw $200 from my checking account and leave my debit card at home to cap my spending. Now, foolishly, a couple of financial institutions have extended lines of credit to me totaling three times what I take home in a month. Still, I pay my bills on time, but between Zepbound, records, and living across the street from the most expensive grocery store in San Francisco, it’s going to be a tight squeeze for a while.

At night, I have regressed to needing music to fall asleep, too. My brain is too noisy with regrets and arguments with people I will never speak to again (that I still lose), and I need a distraction. The album “Starfish” by The Church is probably my most-played album of all time. I’ve listened to it hundreds of times. It’s what I consider to be a perfect album: it’s moody and intellectual, with great, atmospheric guitar riffs, singer and lyricist Steven Kilby’s soothing baritone, and simple, hooky basslines, all coalescing into ten wonderfully mellow songs. The standout lyric from that album, for me, comes from the final track, “Hotel Womb”:

Morning comes again
And she’s lying by my side
She’s got the face of a widow who’s been following me
The body of my bride
I paid $80 for this wedding ring
I couldn’t take it off if I tried

The last song I will mention is something that I heard, by chance, in the middle of the night when I woke up to pee, a little waltz called “Rises the Moon” by Liana Flores. It’s a really good sleepy-time song.

The Handsome Family is husband and wife Brett and Rennie Sparks. They are fun to watch because they bicker gently on stage. I once made them a couple of loaves of bread and delivered it to them after their show at The Bottom of the Hill. Rennie writes books of short stories and poetry, answers email personally, and writes lovely handwritten notes to go along with the books, merch, and albums I have bought over the years. I just love them.

Peter Murphy is the former lead singer of the highly influential post-punk (okay, okay, “goth”) band Bauhaus, named after a minimalist architecture movement from the early- to mid-20th century. Among The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus is considered to be a progenitor of the “goth rock” movement.

Speaking of goth, this song is a fucking banger. Me and Mike Mutti (requiescat in pace) used to play this all the time on Saturday afternoons at Delirium. I’d load up the jukebox and he’d let me drink for free.

The Modern Lovers is proto-punk. I got hip to them from a band that used to busk in Harvard Square, when I lived in Weston for boarding school.

MC 900 Foot Jesus scored a hit with the song “If I Only Had a Brain,” which came around the era of blending free-Jazz, spoken word, and hip-hop. I didn’t give them much attention until my friend FUALI played this fucked-up spoken-word story, the opening track of their LP “One Step Ahead of the Spider.” The cover art is by graffiti artist Greg Contestable, but to me it evokes the artwork for “The Court of the Krimson King.”

If you think I wasn’t going to sneak Elliott Smith into a post that mentions “most depressing songs,” you’re nuts. This is from a short film called “Lucky Three,” and it’s tough to pick which one I like the most, so here’s the whole thing:

This song is so good: