Fish Lake III: End of the Journey

Randall met Kit Prug in the Fish Lake lodge, coming out of the bathroom where he'd accomplished his natural thing despite having the door of his stall kicked and rattled by some rotten little kid with muddy socks and no shoes who's father kept opening the lavatory door and asking him if he'd finished yet, loudly so as make Randall feel bad for using the stall for such an extended period of time. The little kid with muddy socks had kept saying no to his father and knocking on the door of the stall and shaking it and peeking underneath to make sure there was really someone in there, and Randall had enjoyed taking an abnormally long time.

He came out and smiled at the father with the fish lake lodge baseball cap and the weaselly eyes who didn't even look at him and walked through the big empty dining room and wondered if they were still waiting for him on the boat moared secretly in the weeds where the people on the dock couldn't see it because the Cap'n preferred secrecy and not paying fees for anything or if they'd given up and cast off and gone back out on the lake, leaving him to drink in the lodge all alone the rest of the day. As Randall enjoyed this daydream he passed the little store in the lodge and saw the Cap'n purchasing more cheap beer, and he sighed and sat down on a bench cut out of logs like everything else in the lodge so as to give visitors that old-timey camping feel when they came to purchase their candy and bait and beer and post-cards and plastic mounted singing fish, and the other person sitting on the bench was Kit Prug, who turned to Randall and said hello.

"Nice day, isn't it?" Kit Prug said to Randall. "If you like it a little rainy."
"Most people don't," Randall replied, trying to be funny because he felt threatened. He noticed that Kit Prug had a fairly large nose and cheap sherlock holmes-type hat.
"Yes indeed, they don't. Mostly they don't," replied Kit Prug, staring off into space. Randall tried not to keep looking at the sixties-style illustration on Kit Prug's t-shirt, a blonde pinup holding a coca cola. He usually avoided men who wore t-shirts or had tattoos of beautiful women. Did they want other men to look at them? "I have a theory," Kit Prug finally continued, "that people who like rain like it out of dread of outdoor events."
"Like agorophobia," Randall said.
"No," Kit Prug said. "Because they fear having to participate in any kind of sports or social events where they may be tested, and the rain causes postponements."
"I like outdoor events," Randall lied.
"You say that because you like rain?" He suddenly seemed eager, eyes sharp and glinty with excitement. "I thought so. I can read people. It's my gift." He said the word, 'gift', with a shiny far away look in his eyes. Randall's stomach, the seat of his consciousness, roiled with alarm. It looked as if the stranger in the silly hat might continue for some time.
"Looks like my friend is ready to go," Randall said, standing and pointing at the store with an apologetic smile. The Cap'n was examining the singing carp toy with a thoughtful, discerning frown. He appeared to be looking it over for a price tag.
Kit Prug looked back at him without speaking, somewhat sheepishly, as Randall hurried into the store and was immediately confronted by the short but powerfully built woman behind the till.
"Was Kit bothering you?" she asked sharply.
"Oh, no, not at all, I enjoyed our talk," Randall stuttered. She appeared very capable of embarassing confrontation and violence, and Randall feared both and had always found rain to be a blessed relief, especially in the summertime, on school days, and felt the urgent need to do his natural thing again.

On the way out of the lodge with the Cap'n clutching his new carp and cursing the overcast sky, Kit Prug accosted them and handed Randall a business card that would not change his life except for a few awkward social encounters where it provided a slightly amusing story.

Fish Lake Strikes Back; Fish Lake Oddysey Part II

Randall decided not to immediately tell the Capn or the others about having to do his natural thing. He knew that eventually he would have to tell them about it, because nature is relentless and the need for the natural thing would only get worse, and the only way he could avoid having to eventually tell them would be if they all suddenly decided to give up on the fishing and tear off back to shore before he was compelled to tell them about it, or perhaps if one of them suddenly felt the need to do their natural thing, and would not be reticent about it, would be a sort of champion of the natural thing for Randall's sake, without ever knowing that they were doing it for Randall's sake, but thinking they were only doing it for their own sake...so that Randall would not have to tell everyone about his need and would also not have to feel beholden to any possible natural thing champion.

And of course that would not happen, because it had never happened, in any of the many instances where Randall as a member of a group in a situation where restrooms were inaccessible except by concerted group exertion and unhappiness and where as a result Randall's need for his natural thing had manifested its amazingly inconvenient self like a secret baby that cried and cried to Randall and that he kept trying to shush, and never in all those circumstances had any champion of the natural thing declared themselves and always the baby had cried and cried louder and louder and shrieked and howled and finally Randall had been forced to clear his throat and mention that he would probably have to do his natural thing at some point in time not too distant from the present.

Didn't anyone else ever have to do their natural thing? Was everyone else in the world clanging around with innards of steel? There had to be others in the group, Randall decided, who had their own babies to quiet, their own imperative need to do their natural thing but who maybe had their own reasons to keep quiet. Maybe they were congenitally unable to inconvenience a group of people with their own biological situation, like the famous astronomer who died of ruptured bowels rather than tell the king he had to use the bathroom. Perhaps all this time that he'd been suffering humiliation and guilt for the intrusions of his natural thing, there'd been others in the groups, suffering irreparable internal damage, slowly but quietly, and to whom his announcement of his natural thing had been a blessed miracle, an unbelievable deliverance from unfathomable levels of self-induced mortification and discomfort. Why, they might secretly worship him as their champion of the natural thing, who feared no level of mockery and scoffed at the cruel jibes of the bowelless, willing to go to any level of debasement, to be the butt of a million tasteless jokes, in order that some quiet sufferers might get unearned relief.

Randall felt a burst of glowing pride, tears started in his eyes, the internal weeping grew faint, and he began to rise proudly to his feet. He had a declaration to make.

"Sit down, what are you doing? You're rocking the boat!" said the other Passenger sharply.

"You need another beer?" said the Capn. "Take it easy, I'll get it."

"I have to go to the bathroom," said the First Mate.

Fish Lake Oddyssey; Un Novellette

Whenever Randall thought of Fish Lake, he thought of the trees, lots of them, crowding against the shore as if they were about to jump in, like pilgrims at the banks of the Ganges, or Ganghes, or however it's spelled. But they didn't jump in - they were trees, and were hardly about to start moving around, why did he have such thoughts?

The trees also reminded him of the time that he'd been out on the lake with his father and had to go do his natural thing, and when he told his father his father couldn't believe it, and sighed and looked up at the sky for some kind of sign, maybe for an angel to descend out of the sky and hover over their boat and tell him that it was all right if he wanted to hold his son over the edge of the boat and let him do his natural thing into the lake, nobody was watching... But no angel came down and his father grumped and told his older brother Rick to pull in his line, and his older brother Rick cried "What? Why?" and when he heard why he lunged across the boat to slug Randall in the arm and their father squawked and tried to karate chop Rick's arm and missed and stumbled and hurt his shin on one of the planks they had to sit on and he made a sound like a tire hissing and then he took off his hat to smite Rick and missed and caught his thumb in one of the little hooks in his fisherman's hat just like the TV show dads.

"Ga-Ah-Ah!...Rick!" he hissed between his teeth. "Just pull in the line!"

They pulled in their lines and then their father picked some things up and put them down in other places, and moved his tackle box, and manuevered their fishing poles around and shook his head and grumbled and picked up one of the fishing poles and put it down somewhere else and he told Rick to sit back down and he told Randall to move a little left and Randall looked at him and he told him to move again and Randall moved right and their father told him to move back and he leaned backward and their father made a sound like a tire hissing and told him to just stay where the hell he was and then he told Rick to sit back down and he made Rick move the cooler down below his seat and then he told Randall to hold on and he crouched by the motor and unhooked something and pulled something down lower out a little and then he pulled on the cord and the motor didn't start so he did it a few more times, and his hat fell off and his hair stood up in a manner undignified for a man with receding hair and Randall tried very hard to stifle a laugh and Rick hit him and the motor started for just a second and then it stopped and Rick stood up again and told their father that he had to choke it and their father suggested something else he could choke and told him to sit back down. But he did apparently choke it because then the motor started and he revved it up and checked something and told Rick to sit down and told Randall to hold on and the boat started off with the motor revving and roaring like they were going 100 miles and hour but they were doing about 15 but Randall found it thrilling and enjoyed the spray of water but only too soon their father let the motor die down and they drifted.

Randall could see the trees of the East shore only twenty yards away, slowly drifting closer and closer. Their father had a paddle out and was sweating and huffing and splashing and the boat moved very slowly toward the trees.

As they approached the trees and the shore, Rick let fly a remark suggesting the possibility that there might be bears in the trees, and suggested Randall carry a couple rocks in with him.
"There's no bears," their father said, gasping and panting. The approaching trees took on a looming, darkening aspect as Randall considered the possibility of the bears. They were a few yards from the shore when Randall suggested that he'd rather go use the bathrooms in the lodge. Their father responded by swatting Rick with his own baseball hat, an impressive maneuver that caught both boys by surprise by its misdirection.

"Rick! Go with him!"

Their father clambered up to the front of the boat and hopped into the shallow water and held the boat by a rope and told Rick to climb onto a nearby rock and Rick clambered onto the rock and Randall asked if he could move the boat around the rock so that he could hop onto the shore and his father assured him that they couldn't and told him to climb out and Rick shouted for Randall to hurry and Randall asked if they could move around to the other side and his voice took on a higher pitch that signified panic and his father spoke soothingly and held out his free hand to give him a boost and Randall ended up clambering onto his father's back and putting a shoe into his kidney and scrabbled onto the rock and up the slope to where Rick had already turned and started into the bushes and told Randall to go over to the other bushes and no he couldn't use the same bush and Randall found a bush and began to do his natural thing and looked up and could see another fishing boat clearly through a gap in the trees about twenty yards away.

Now adult, Randall smiled and sighed at the memory and shook his head when Captain Lance asked him what was so funny and tugged on his pole a little and looked out over the lake and dug on the natural beauty all around him and reflected on the bittersweetness of memory and the past and time and smiled at the First Mate and the other Passenger tossed back another big gulp of his Cold One and realized that now all of the sudden he had to do his natural thing.

Dream 1: Mickey Mouse is Real (from Hagenart's Five Favorite Dreams)

This dream occurred during a family party at my parents' home. I believe I was living at home at the time, in 1991. I had to use the bathroom, and went downstairs to use the restroom in the basement. My nephews were watching TV and trying to pull the arms off a stuffed gorilla which I'd given to my mother for Christmas a few years previously. I went into the bathroom, and discovered that whichever nephew had previously used it had not flushed the toilet. Sharply annoyed, I flushed the toilet and imagined dropping the nephew head-first into the bowl. As I used the bathroom, a plastic sword emerged from under the bathroom door.
"Who's that?" I said. Then I heard a thud like someone's forehead hitting the door, and the sword slid free, a foot or so forward from the door. A moment later, a tiny hand reached under the door jamb, trying to reach the sword, unsuccessfully. I flushed the toilet and grabbed the sword, gently poking at the tiny hand with its tip. The hand retracted with a squawk.

When I emerged from the bathroom with the sword in hand, no nephew was in sight. I walked down the hall to the family room, where all three nephews were watching TV. "Whose sword is this?" I asked. None of them replied. I put the sword on the table at the end of the room and walked back down the hall to my bedroom. It occurred to me as I walked down the hall that the sword belonged to Mickey Mouse. I laid down on my bed and realized that it had been a long time since I had taken a moment to sit or lay down and do nothing. It had been days, maybe weeks, maybe months. It felt good to lay on the bed and do nothing and not think about what I should be doing. At that moment it occurred to me that Mickey Mouse had given the sword to me. It was getting dark outside, but I did not turn out the light. The room became dim, and at that moment I realized that Mickey Mouse was as real as I myself was. I realized that all the characters in all the cartoons were real. I felt that I myself was a cartoon. This realization gave me profound peace.

I eventually walked back down the hall and saw the nephews running up the stairs. My sister was calling for them get in the car. I looked for the sword on the table but someone had taken it. I assumed one of my nephews had grabbed it, but when I went upstairs and asked my sister about the plastic sword she furrowed her brow and looked confused. "I don't think so," she said. "I don't know."

That night I dreamt that had an enormously long right leg and that my right foot had giant wheels like a tractor and I skated everywhere on it. The tall witch on the tricycle could not prevail upon me and everything I touched turned to plastic.

Interpretation:
The nephews symbolize family fertility, nature, and also filth and bugs. The plastic sword represents the sterile beauty of commercialism. I claimed the sword as a mission to protect the world from all monsters that can be killed or scared off by dull-edged weapons. The bathroom indicates my tower, my refuge of strength and security. The toilet was not flushed because nature is unreliable and has terrible manners. Mickey Mouse is real. My intense vision-like moment of crystal realization symbolizes what a great idea might feel like to a genius like Einstein or Archimedes. The plastic sword's disappearance indicates that I have sneaky nephews. The giant right foot in my dream symbolizes cool ideas that may someday be possible with advances in prosthetic technology.

The Foothill Dark Wooden Box (From 6 Migrations; Relocations That Possibly Ruined My Life)

Eventually I moved into a horrible dark wooden box on Foothill, near a gas station and the liquor store and walking distance from a supermarket. The dark wooden box had fake dark wood interior panelling with such an extraordinarily unpleasant texture that I couldn't bear to touch it or even come within two feet of the walls, the decorating of which I left to the spiders.

While living in the box and working at an architect's office I experienced a brief spasm of relatively lucid thought and decided to quit my job and pursue my dreams of becoming an artist for as long as I could live off my credit line. I pursued those dreams by long morning walks, feverish hours of artistic composition, and occasional trips to the liquor store. I sustained those dreams with regular trips to the gas station's ATM for hits to the old Available Cash Credit Line.
The long morning walks became longer and longer, extending into the early afternoons; the feverish hours of artistic composition became desultory evenings, and the occasional trips became middling to frequent to some cherished friendships with the staff and other regular customers of liquor store #51.
The regular trips to the ATM and the artistic dreams and the walks and everything else ended all at once on one afternoon when I discovered that credit card companies can change their mind about your credit line whenever they feel like it - unlike a savings account, which they can only change their mind about once. So I had to go back to work.

My landlord at the dark box on Foothill was an incredibly vigorous and healthy man fifty years my senior named Chuck (name changed, I don't know why, I'll never see him again and he'll never read this). Chuck originally lived one floor above me and was always running up and down the stairs on his way to the gym where he vigorously pumped iron and told people how happy he was to be divorced. He was especialy happy to talk about the joy of his divorce with the fifteen or so college-aged young women who lived directly above my dark box and across the hallway from Chuck. He made fast friends with all of them and dragged his telescope over to their apartment and helped them with various furniture moving and handyman type projects. He eventually became the apartment manager by complaining to everyone about how badly run and organized the complex was and blaming it all on the previous apartment manager until she'd left and he'd been chosen by whatever mysterious process stupid rich people have to choose their underlings and flunkies.

The fifteen or twenty or so young women who lived above me made an incredible amount of noise all the time by synchronizing their television, stereo system, vaccum cleaner, and mindless screams of youthful abandon to reach maximum volume at unpredictable intervals throughout the course of the day or night in order to fully establish their presence in the ears and minds of all the apartment dwellers in the complex and the surrounding neighborhoods, all in the hopes of someday being discovered by some big shot in the Noise business who would hear them and appreciate their decibelic potential and pay them money to keep people awake all the time.

But they didn't bank on having a creepy unemployed neighbor downstairs who always wore bathrobes and never shaved and sometimes staggered upstairs to knock on their door and smile apologetically and creep them out and after a few visits from el creepo they gave up on the noise business. But they schemed revenge, and eventually managed to insinuate to Chuck that the peeping tom that some of the tenants had complained about might be the creepy unemployed guy in the bathrobe who lived below them.

So one day as I returned from my daily walk, sweating and tired and wondering how it could be that I could walk myself half to death every day and still be gaining weight, I ran into Chuck, who just happened to be coming out of the apartment complex and poking around the front lawn and making as if to be examining the grass or something like any normal apartment manager would pretend to be doing so as to arrange a chance meeting with a tenant that they had some kind of vague problem with.
"How you doing, Andy?" Chuck asked me. I replied something or other, I liked Chuck all right and actually kind of welcomed having any human to talk to as my life was somewhat hermit-like at the time, but I had no interest in anything he said and couldn't think of a single thing that we could really ever say to each other because I thought he was a moron. We talked for a bit and then he told me that some of the female tenants had complained about a peeping tom. He shook his head angrily. "Boy, I'd like to catch the guy doing it," he said. "I'd hit him. I'd punch him right in the face." He made a significant look to me, as if he'd said something that only I in the whole world would find meaningful. He also told me the peeping tom had been seen in a baseball cap. He went on for a while and then left me to go prowl around the lawn again.
Only later did I realize that he might have suspected me of being the peeping tom, and that he might have been trying to scare me into making some kind of admission, or into guilty sweating or something. By the time I'd realized that he'd caught the actual peeping tom, or thought he had, and confronted him in front of the complex so loudly that I and several others came out of our apartments to see him shaking his fist at a much taller and younger man, threatening over and over again to "knock you right on your back." I was glad for Chuck to have found the villain, but the possibility of violence unnerved me enough that I crept back into my dark box.

Eventually after having to get a job and actually look at my finances I decided that I couldn't afford to live in the dark box anymore. Chuck told me to make sure and clean behind the oven and fridge and described the complicated and physically stressful process whereby these appliances might be moved away from the wall so that the black disgusting substances that tended to accumulate behind heavy appliances could be cleaned out with various chemicals and abrasive devices. He told me that if I cleaned behind these appliances that I would surely get my full $300 deposit back except for the $25 fee which was not refundable.

The friends who'd agreed to help me clean the dark box ended up watching a Karl Malone movie on old channel 20 and didn't come by until it was dark and I'd exhausted myself by looking through some of my personal papers and giving myself philosophical vertigo over the vanity of existence. They came way too late to help with the cleaning so we vacuumed a little and tried not to disturb the spiders on the fake wood walls and then we decided to go get some dinner and we got in my car and pulled away and saw a little boy carrying a gas can.
My friend Brian said we should stop and help him and I said something about Nature's Way and kept driving because I was still bitter about them coming over so late. We didn't clean any after dinner either and we drove to my new home which was Brian's couch.
Chuck probably still felt bad about suspecting me of being the peeping tom, so he only deducted $30 from my deposit and must have cleaned the back of the oven himself.

Relocation 5: South Temple (from 6 Migrations; Relocations That Possibly Ruined My Life)

At some point my friend Amir talked me into moving in with him and another roommate in their house on South Temple. "You can't live with your parents forever," he told me.
"Well of course not," I agreed. "Eventually, I will die."
Amir took me to see the house even though I remember that I'd already decided, or I should say my girlfriend at the time had already decided, that I would move in with them.

It was one of those classy old style pioneer type houses with an ornate wooden railing on the stairs and a very convenient toilet in the laundry room. An indescribable smell permeated the house, a kind of grand old house moldy-wood type smell mixed with spilled beer mixed with garbage. It reminded me of places I'd visited as a child that I'd been glad that I didn't live in. The smell did, not the house. Well, the house did too, but since I was never able to experience the house without the smell, except on the very last day after we'd cleaned it for the first time, it's difficult to judge fairly, except to try and imagine how the house looked in my mind while standing in an open field far away from it.

I don't remember much about visiting the house with Amir when he was trying to talk me into moving in even though I was already going to, except that we went upstairs and took a look at the bedroom where I would be moving in and I met the guy who was moving out. I don't remember him at all, but I remember he had all these comic book style illustrations on the walls that I thought were really cool - mostly elfin people with swords - they were copied from Japanese comics. For some reason those illustrations and the guy's furniture made me view the room as hip and an adventurous place to live.
But he took all his illustrations and hip drawing tables and I moved in and filled the room with my banker boxes of books and papers and junk and baskets of clothes. And the bunk bed, the only furniture left in the room when I moved in because it belonged to the landlord, and the previous tenant had told me it was cool to sleep in it because his girlfriend liked to sleep in the top bunk. I thought he was referring to some kind of hip sexy stuff but I didn't get it.

I hated sleeping in the bunk bed because I didn't want to sleep on top because I am afraid of heights and I didn't want to sleep on the bottom because I couldn't see the top and I produced several horror movies in my mind that featured demonic little ghost kids lowering their evil little heads over the side of the top bunk and grinning at me like the little kid my brother and I met when I was young and church-going and my brother dragged me to do his home-teaching with him and the family we visited was a prominent family in the ward and they had three sons and the youngest would jabber to us in a satanic tongue and run around the room in a pcp-related state of agitation and he swatted his older brother's head with a ruler and the older brother glared at him for half the lesson before he took an entire fisher price parking garage and brought it down on his little brother's head and my brother and I were speechless with shock and also with half expectation half dread for some kind of supernaturally evil reaction from that little brother but he only screamed and cried and the father looked sadly at the older brother as if he'd said something mildly out of line.

Another anxiety was the window of my bedroom which they told me not to open but I did because I like the fresh air and I suffered an invasion of box elder bugs from the tree that grew against the house, and I shut the window and breathed the rancid stale air of the house but during their mating season they kept coming in through the cracks between the molecules of the window and they kept coming and dying on the window sill and then the floor around the window and I bought raid and I sprayed the window and the floor and the room stunk and I thought maybe I would sustain brain damage from the fumes and I took to sleeping on the couch which smelled like beer but the dining room at the end of the couch had a giant painting by the landlady of two frogs kissing over a fiery red background which I did not sleep well under. So I went back upstairs to sleep.

The kitchen gave me anxiety because it stunk and I could not eat from my roommates' plates because I suspected them of being bad dishwashers and leaving their plates crawling with germs, and when I discovered in the course of my first week that the kitchen had no microwave but had a nice stove (which Kevin [name changed] demonstrated for me by lighting the pilot light and at the moment he crouched down with the match in his teeth I knew I would never be using the stove) and then also I knew that 75% of all the meals I liked to prepare for myself I would not be able to prepare because they required food irradiated by microwaves. So I ate mostly peanut butter sandwiches and beer, which helped with my anxiety quite a lot.

And at another point Amir achieved a girlfriend, an amazing coup for a man who'd come to this country from Malaysia to study engineering and ended up sleeping mostly under his desk in the engineering building at the U or on the couch at the band house, an incredibly filthy house lived in by the members of two local rock bands and the least particular of their girlfriends whom I happened to know because one of their girlfriends who was too particular to live there also happened to be dating myself at the time along with several other people, which is how I met Amir.
Who in any case finally met a girlfriend of his own, who moved in with him/us and ignored Kevin (name changed - no actually that might have been his name after all) and I until Amir went on a trip for a couple weeks and she began wearing exciting clothes and talking to us more and two-timing Amir with a creepy guy in a cowboy hat. She told me about Detroit and her brother who would only sleep with virgins, which mathematically tended to keep his relationships to a short overall average duration. She told me that Detroit was segregated and her family lived in the white part but she wasn't like that because of Amir, who her perverted brother didn't like and spoke of with racial epithets.
She eventually broke up with Amir and he eventually gave up looking for jobs in America because his student visa expired after he'd made friends and slept on couches and under desks and received a Master's in Engineering and given up his religion for booze and loose women, and after all that he cursed America and moved back to Kuala Lumpur to live the good life.

But this is all getting ahead of myself, because the landlady who refused to put in a sprinkler system and watered her lawn the "natural way" with a hose in one hand and a cigarette in her other hand and who enraged her South Temple neighbors with their BMWs and million dollar houses by never fixing up her house and renting it out to loser college guys finally decided that enough was enough and she gave us until the end of the month to move out, which coincided with Amir getting on the plane for Malaysia - almost. Actually he wouldn't be getting on the plane until a week after we were kicked out. So he planned to go stay with his ex-girlfriend for a week, in Detroit, and then take the plane back to Salt Lake in order to take the plane to Malaysia.
"Will you have time to hang out in Salt Lake before you get on the plane to Malaysia?" I asked him.
"Why would I do that?" he asked me, honestly puzzled.
So we had a party on the last night before we cleaned the house and moved out the next day, and Kevin (I guess that was his name) and Amir and I bought tequila, and we discovered that the liquor store sold margarita mixes that were 17% alcohol, because the tequila was already mixed in, which we purchased to mix with more tequila. We also bought juice and fruit and vodka and other cheap liquors and mixed jungle juice, which I'd never tasted but an hour or so before the party started and at least two hours before any guests arrived, I tried some of the jungle juice and was surprised at how delicious it was, so I poured myself a tall glass of it, and Kevin and Amir also poured themselves a tall glass. It was like punch.

We had a few more tall glasses, and then eventually guests started arriving, and about 15 minutes into the party I was drunker than I'd ever been in my life, and about 30 minutes into the party I made offensive remarks to a woman at the party that I'd worked with at the time, and about 45 minutes into the party I felt sick enough to stagger upstairs and try to take a nap. And by about an hour after the party had begun I'd crawled out of my room and barricaded myself in the upstairs bathroom, where I spent the next six or seven hours hyperventilating over the toilet in a desperate effort not to throw up, and ignoring the repeated pounding on the bathroom door from party-goers who'd not been able to find the laundry room, or didn't know the laundry room had a toilet, or who'd tried to get into the laundry room and found someone else using it. Eventually the pounding grew more faint, as people began to give up on the upstairs bathroom or began to leave the party.
Amir got so drunk and sick that he began to pack for his trip in the middle of the party, dragging luggage from his bedroom downstairs, through the mass of people and out to Kevin's car. I later heard, from Kevin, that he'd been sick the first time in the middle of the dancing, then on the stairs, then in the laundry room, then his garbage can, and all over his sheets. He'd slept on a bare mattress that night. Thinking about my time in the upstairs bathroom, and reflecting on the number of people who must have been going through the laundry room, I couldn't help but feel a little guilty as Kevin told me this story, all the while he staggered around the house helping me clean the next morning, still terribly pale.
"I'd take Amir to the airport, if his stuff would fit in my car," I told him.
He told me he'd already taken Amir in. Amir had wanted to leave an hour early, and they hadn't been able to wake me up even though they'd knocked on my bedroom door. "You must have been passed out," Kevin said.
"Oh yeah," I said, or something like that, remembering how weak I'd felt that morning and how it hadn't been too difficult to keep my eyes closed and ignore the knocking, even when Amir had opened the door a crack and said my name. But it was difficult to meet Kevin's glassy, bloodshot eyes, and I was relieved when he turned away to lift his side of the couch.

Dependent in Denver (From 6 Migrations; Relocations That Possibly Ruined My Life)

After living comfortably at my parents' home for a few years, I lost my head and moved to Denver to stay with my brother. I think I may have done so because I felt bad about mooching off my parents when I had so many brothers to help shoulder the burden. I also had some vague notion that to be a writer I should go out into the world and suffer a little. Not too much, just enough to stir up some good press, maybe.

My brother Michael (name changed) had just graduated from law school in New York, and gotten a job in Denver from some big firm that would eventually fire him for sleeping in his office during his lunch breaks, or maybe it was for telling people he could sneeze at will, I couldn't remember for certain. But at the time I moved in with him he seemed to be doing all right. He had ESPN and some folding chairs and lived in an apartment building for old folks in a predominently gay district near downtown.

The apartment building attracted mainly old folks because it had a supernatural tendency to stay a little too warm all year long, whatever the outside weather. My brother never even turned on the heat, and usually left the windows open, even when it snowed.

As a result of his massive lawyer-level salary, my brother could afford to keep well-stocked with Uncle Ben's beans and rice, which he would prepare for us every night after coming home from an exhausting day of sleeping and sneezing at will. He would spoon my share into the only bowl and eat his share from the pot with the serving spoon while watching baseball games and baseball highlites and baseball recaps and baseball highlite recap shows on ESPN.

Since I'd moved in with my brother to "get some writing done", maybe finish a novel or two, I would spend part of my afternoons typing gibberish with an old typewriter I'd borrowed from my girlfriend, and trying to avoid calls from a groupie I'd picked up from my brother's church group who would call me from her work incessantly all day long whenever she'd come across information about jobs, or magazines that accepted submissions from freelance writers, or apartments in the Denver area - it was all fairly annoying. I appreciated her efforts on my behalf, but I couldn't understand why she had to keep telling me about them.
"Spare me the details and don't call me until you have something concrete," I wanted to tell her. But I didn't, because frankly the novel just wasn't working out, and the phone calls were a bit of a relief from having to pretend to work on the novel and giving myself stomach pains because I hated it so. "Thanks, I'll have to check that out," is what I told her. Then she'd chatter on about it.

Then sometimes after an hour I'd get up and walk around the nearby park which was apparently a famous pickup place in Denver but which I didn't ever realize at the time except there were a lot of cars and people on bikes and I did see a naked man with a turban on his head, reading a book and taking a terrible risk of sunburn and possibly skin cancer in later life.

Eventually I got bored with the trying to write a novel charade and got some temp jobs which were not nearly as impressive to tell about as the failure to write a novel but which paid slightly more and got me out and about. My favorite temp job in Denver was at mailing business in their printer room because my job was to watch a gigantic printer print things and if there was a problem to go see Mr Gonzales and tell him. Mr Gonzales was a nice enough fellow who waxed his mustache and seemed embarassed to have to give me things to do. I went to lunch the first day and when I came back from lunch I couldn't remember how to find the printer room and so I wandered around the office looking and the office was all one floor of a building all around the elevator and it made a full circuit around the elevator with no dividing walls, and I kept going around and around and seeing the same people with every circuit there were more people looking up from their work to stare at me as I passed and with each circuit the mild curiosity of the stares turned to confusion, and the confusion to consternation, and annoyance, and hostility, and finally to uncontrollable laughter, and then I began to panic, and sweat uncontrollably, and I decided to get back on the elevator and go home and then I ran into Mr Gonzales who seemed somewhat embarassed but smiled a confused smile and I told him I was lost and he pointed to a room in the corner where the printer was.

My almost favorite job in Denver was through a friend of the groupie, helping models dress at a fashion show. It sounds like an absurdly fantastic job for a young man, and I can't quite remember why I turned it down. It might have been too early in the morning or something.

I eventually met the groupie's circle of friends and decided I didn't like them very much, and the groupie eventually got a job writing comedy for Bill Marr (name changed slightly). Jeff (name unchanged) got fired from the law firm and we drove back to Salt Lake together. He asked me if I finished the novel and I made some uncomfortable jokes and he asked me if I remembered how much I used to throw up on family trips when I was a kid, and I told him I did. Then he told me that the fellows who lived next door to us in the apartment building in Denver had been a gay couple who thought we had been a gay couple as well, and had been shocked to learn we were brothers.
"Are you sure they were gay?" I asked him. "They were always wearing baseball caps and talking about the Giants."
He told me that gay people often wore baseball caps and were sometimes San Francisco Giant fans. Then he asked me if I'd had any trouble from people when I walked in the park near the apartment. I told him about the naked man in the turban, and he made a pained look, and told me he was sorry I hadn't finished the novel.

12th East; Beginning of the End (from 6 Migrations; Relocations That Possibly Ruined My Life)

I moved into a duplex on 1200 East and around 600 South in my last year of college, it was near enough the university that I could have walked but I usually drove anyway, because I didn’t want to waste my parking pass and I worried that the manager of the duplex would do something strange to my car if I left it on the curb. He wasn’t a violent man, but he used power tools after midnight, and seemed to prefer to do his yardwork at around that time as well, and carried a fake gun wrapped with duct tape around with him and I therefore knew him to be not entirely reasonable.
But I knew that Waylon (name changed) wasn’t a violent man because if he had been I surely would have perished at his hands a few days after I’d moved in and poured a vat of spaghetti down the garbage disposal in the sink that had no garbage disposal and clogged the pipes and brought in Roto Rooter and I apologized to Waylon for the disaster and told him I would in the future make certain to pour the spaghetti down the drain with the garbage disposal, and he looked at me and I asked him; “which sink is the sink with the garbage disposal?” and he looked at me and then he pointed at the one that I’d poured the spaghetti down and I told him that I’d poured the spaghetti down that sink.
“Uh oh,” Waylon said. Then he installed a garbage disposal in the sink I’d poured the spaghetti down and he showed me the switch that I hadn’t been able to find the previous day after I’d poured the spaghetti because it hadn’t been there the previous day and I’d looked all over the kitchen for it like a defragmenting robot because I’d never lived away from home and could not conceive of a kitchen sink without a garbage disposal unless it was a sink that had another sink right next to it with the garbage disposal. Waylon flipped the switch and the disposal roared and he smiled at me like I was a child. “Hello,” he said beatifically, because he said that when he didn’t say “uh oh.” And I smiled and never poured anything down either sink but water as long as I lived there.
I shared my half of the duplex with a law student or maybe he was a pre-law student but he’d gone to school in Oklahoma for some reason, and learned how to mimic a southern accent there for Hook-up purposes and I can’t remember his name for sure but it may have been Sergei (name changed). I had some troubles with Sergei because all the women I knew seemed to like him a little too much and because he and his large hulking cousin would sometimes get drunk and pick up the Plymouth Champ I drove at the time and put it in places awkward for me to drive out of and in the morning they would be too sick to put it back and I would have to call my girlfriend and ask her to come get my car out of the tree.
I didn’t last at 12th East because I began to realize that with the move I’d taken my first few baby steps out from my mommy’s apron strings and out into the big real world and it felt horribly wrong, and Sergei began to remind me of my brothers and Waylon began wearing a salad bowl on his head and a lead apron whenever he used his PC and one day my girlfriend told me that it was almost a year since I’d moved out on my own and I began packing my dice and my stolen sci-fi paperbacks and my reams and reams of notebooks with secret notes and a few rotting shirts and moved the hell back home.

Relocation 2; Down to the Basement (from 6 Migrations; Relocations That Possibly Ruined My Life)

For most of my youth I had to share a bedroom with my older brother Jeff (name not changed), and in that time developed a powerful and ultimately destructive urge for a privacy denied me by the overpopulated conditions in our family. I would have been a much happier child, I'm convinced, if I'd not had any siblings, and my parents had confined theirselves to a single birth event in the late sixties and concentrated on the challenges and obscure rewards of raising a single creative genius.
But, like Finwe, the King of the Noldor who couldn't be content with the one genius child (Curufinwe), and had to remarry that Vanyar woman and spread his brood through half of Valinor, my parents chose the evolutionarily safer path of multiple offspring, thinning the family gene pool considerably.
In their defense, and unlike the foolish Finwe, they'd already had four other children when their genius came along, so it would have been somewhat difficult for them to make the one-child decision at that time (but not impossible, as I've pointed out to them on several occasions).

So I had the four older siblings, and there were only the four bedrooms in the house, and Jeff and I were the youngest and by the remorseless illogic of primogeniture forced to share the last bedroom. Trapped in cramped lodgings with a domineering and intrusive older brother, I sought privacy in the last refuge left to me; my own mind. Thus at the very beginning of my life's journey, I diverged into a disastrous path, and developed the habit of interior monologues and dialogues, and interior tribunals, and interior shouted debates that has rendered me unfit for most social intercourse and any meaningful employment.

Of course I exhibited few symptoms of the condition at the time; my nightly prayers tended to go on for a while, so much so that I often fell asleep in mid-prayer, especially after I'd begun giving the prayers on my bed, under the covers. Jeff would wait patiently while I prayed, until he could hear the sound of snoring. Then he would leap out of his bed and slug me in the arm until I came out of my religious stupor.
My only other symptom was a tendency to sleep under blankets tucked in around the entire perimeter of my recumbant body, from head to feet, after an indescribably difficult and time-consuming self-tucking procedure.

About the time I turned eleven, the twins went on missions and left us with a wealth of bedrooms, and Jeff moved downstairs and I was left with my own room, my own empire, a space of my own to mold as I saw fit. The exhilaration of my sudden accession to all that power went, I am ashamed to say, to my head. I forbade any other family members to enter the space, especially my mother, and remodeled the room along strange, fascist lines. The blue of the carpet was declared by my Ministry of Truth to be ocean, and nobody - including myself - could walk on it except by putting books and papers down as stepping stones. The closet was declared to be an evil area, the room's slum, where I was afraid to be at night but enjoyed the occasional tittillating excursion through by the safe light of day.
Sensing my peculiar dread of the closet with an older brother's uncanny instinct for the younger's weakness, Jeff would often hide in that closet and wait for me to return home from school. After I'd had time to retreat into the safe, privacy of my room and relax for a few minutes, he would leap out of the closet to enjoy my harrowed shrieks.

Eventually the twins returned and Jeff went on his own mission. The twins took no interest in acts of terror against my room-state, and I enjoyed a long spell of peaceful detachment from the rest of the family and the world in general - except for school. I molded an army of clay soldiers out of the insulating clay my father sometimes took home from work, and equipped them with screws and razors and sent them out on murderous errands throughout the room, looking for a fight. Usually they ended up hacking each other to pieces. I had an old nerf mini-basketball that I sometimes played with that the soldiers worshipped as a god. I would speak through the nerf mini-basketball to give them their orders.
I also instituted sports leagues for the room, with sports pages full of stats and scores that I would generate by rolling dice and writing down the results. Sometimes my mother would knock on my door and ask if she could come in and I treated her like a foreign reporter that could topple my regime by seeing my secret sports-score generating technique or seeing that the god my soldiers worshipped was a nerf mini-basketball and telling everyone, so when she knocked I would shout and plead with her not to come in and would try to hid the dice and the notebooks full of numbers and the nerf and the soldiers and walk around the room nervously while she came in with my laundry and occasionally pointed at some strange appurtenance in the room.
"Why are your books all over the floor?" she would ask, and I would sullenly answer some lie and try to get her to leave and assure her that there were no human rights violations going on and everyone could vote whenever they pleased.
"I'm reading them."
"Are those little clay men?"
"Yes."
"What are you doing with them? You need to clean those sheets. Help me take them off"
"No! Wait! I'll tell you everything! Let me get the sheets! I'll talk, damn you!"

Like Hitler in the bunker, I took to spending longer and longer periods of my days and weekends in my room, brooding over the wrongs done to me at school during the day, plotting some kind of dark overthrow, imagining secret weapons to turn the tide, postulating the existence of extraterrestrial intelligences that might possibly be induced to invade earth and destroy Washington DC and take my school and my brothers away in flying saucers.
The room, denied competent cleaning for long periods of time, became dingy and subterranean in appearance, despite being on the second floor, with grimy walls and dusty shelves and dark blue cowboy drapes always closed and, truth be told, a strong odor. I'd become an adolescent.

This dreamlike existence ended with a terrible onrush of events: My grandmother moved in with us, and I was moved kicking and screaming down into the basement with my older brothers, and forced to share a room again (albeit a more clean and spacious one). This cataclysmic event shaped and confirmed my world-view not unlike the expulsion of the Israelite tribes from Zion. And as the Israelites lamented at the rivers of Babylon, so I lamented in the shower my expulsion from the room - for as long as I could before my brothers would pound apishly on the bathroom door and howl for me to finish the shower.
And as the expulsion of the Jews from Zion confirmed the words of the doomsayer prophets and won the allegiance of the backsliders wholeheartedly to Yahwism, so my expulsion from the room won my wholehearted allegiance to the path of living inside my head and ensured that rednecks and troglodytes would persecute me for my views and flick spitwads at the back of my head in school.

My grandmother turned out to be a tower of ancient wisdom and taught me about life and coaxed me out of my shell and told long annoying stories over and over and kept doing the dishes all the time when she couldn't see the dirt on them and so my dad had to sneak into the kitchen at night and re-clean them all except when he was irritated at her and would clean the dishes during the day loudly so that she heard and he could tell her she hadn't cleaned them well enough. Once a balloon from my mother's birthday party drifted around the house on the heating vent currents and crept up behind her while she was doing the dishes and scared the bejesus out of her when it touched her shoulder.

Relocation 1; Granger to Millcreek (from 6 Migrations; Relocations That Possibly Ruined My Life)

My parents moved my family from Granger to Millcreek when I was 4, and I don't think I've ever been the same. I lost everything and everyone, and thereafter, for the rest of my life in the cool, cruel world of Millcreek, I was always an outsider, always "The New Kid...not the cool new kid with the BB-gun, but the weird new kid who plays with his toy trucks."

In Granger I had a best friend, Lance Martin, (name changed) who once pushed me off a rock wall and made me scream with terror so loud that his mother dropped her cigarette and ran outside and dragged me into her kitchen and berated me for screaming like a girl. She made me sit at the table and think about it for a while, then she sent me home.

Another time, I pressed my face into the Martins' screen door and Lance smacked it with his open palm. I didn't scream this time, I ran to my own mother and told her about Lance hitting me and she dragged me into the kitchen and made me sit at the table and think about it, and then she sent me back out to play with Lance, who berated me for whining like a girl.

In Granger I also met the love of my life, June Sorensen (name changed, I think), who never berated me for behaving like a girl, as she was a girl herself and approved of such behavior. Once June, Lance and I were jumping around in the bed of a pickup and Lance belted me in the stomach and June, mortally offended, knocked Lance down and kicked him over the tailgate off the end of the truck and Lance's parents laughed so hard the tobacky leaked out of their nostrils.

I also had a dog in Granger, named Slick, an evil dachsund with a pointy face who bit me on numerous occasions but managed to fool the rest of the family with his pious front and silky bark. I avoided him whenever possible, but my brothers would drag me out to the backyard and make me throw a ball across the lawn and Slick would rush over and seize the ball and return it dutifully to my feet, then wait hovering over the ball with his filthy nose dripping all over it, gazing up at me with those dark, red-rimmed eyes, malevolently a-glow, communicating in the most visually eloquent terms his intention to sink his yellow fangs into the spongey flesh of my fat little hand at the moment I reached down to lay hold of that wet, slobbery tennis ball.

"Take the ball," my brothers would say. "He wants you to take the ball and throw it."
Slowly I would lean down, bringing my eyes, wide with fear, down closer and closer to his, until our noses were only centimeters apart. Slowly I would reach out with trembling hand, expecting with the faith of a missionary the treacherous snap of his jaws over my palm, and as I put my hand on the ball, the very faintest kind of growl would reach my ears, from deep in his throat, a growl so faint that only myself and only because my ears happened to be inches away from the source could hear it, and I would feel an icy chill along my spine as I took the ball and heaved it across the yard as quickly as is four-year-old humanly possible. And Slick's dark little eyes would twinkle at me, and he would race over and grab the ball with an extra relish in his bite.

And I would throw the ball a few more times for him, and then my brothers would throw the ball, and then Slick would seem to suddenly lose interest in the fetching, and my brothers would horse around, maybe play a little football, knock each other down while Slick barked joyfully, and then Mother would slide back the patio door and call out that it was dinner time, and we would go inside to eat, and then Father would say; "Somebody call in the dog," and one of my brothers would call to the dog and then tell me;
"Go out and call Slick," and I would go back out through the screen door and look around the yard for him, and call out;
"Slick!" and at that moment I would feel his little teeth sink into my calf as he sprang out from where he'd been hiding behind the barbecue by the patio door, and I would scream with terror and my family would drag me into the kitchen to berate me and make me sit at the table and think about it.

But lo! On the day we moved and were packing and putting boxes in a truck and I stood wandering around the yard with my Batman cape on, I heard my father call for Slick and say to my mother; "where's his collar?" and at that very moment I saw his collar on the cement step by the back door and I reached for it and thought to give it to my father and receive some kudos but also at that very instant for the first time in my life I had a vision of the planar pentoidals from beyond the stars who spoke to me and asked me how it was going and mentioned that it would be a shame if someone adjusted the collar so it was two holes bigger and loose enough that a dog might pull and twist it off and run away at the very time the family was about to permanently change address...

Much later my brothers and sister and my parents would often ask me if I remembered Slick, our old dog, and I would say I barely remembered him, and I would ask whatever happened to him and they would sigh and say that he got away and ran off just as we were getting in the truck to drive over to the new house, and we lost him on the very day we moved. And I would sigh, and say what a pity it was, as my eyes took on a faraway look...

And much much later I was visiting my parents and my mother asked me if I remembered Lance Martin, and I said barely, and she said she'd been talking to his mother and she asked about me. "He's getting married next month," she said.
"Oh really?" I said. "To who?"
"A girl in the ward...June Sorensen..." She took the wedding invitation off her desk and handed it to me. There on the invitation was a picture of the happy couple, neither of whom I recognized, but there on the lawn far behind them and barely visible, the unmistakeable form of a dachsund rampant on the field of green, eyes glowing red with hideous import...

I got lost on the day we moved into the new house, my parents found me one street down, disoriented and weeping, sitting in the gutter in front of the house that I thought was our new house. As I saw my mother and got up to walk over to her, a car pulled up to the driveway and stopped for me. The woman driving the car turned to her daughter; "Hold on a sec, Honey, we have to wait for this little girl."

Crisis 6: Every Community Radio Station Will Eat Its Children (From 6 Crises: Memoirs of a Membership Coordinator)

My last few years at the station resembled the early history of the Soviet Union, with myself playing the part of Kruschev, the earnest, well-beloved member of the Politburo who couldn't understand why people kept getting arrested and why Comrade Stalin's eyes twinkled whenever he was asked about it and why anyone would want to live in Moscow anyway...

Of course the station never controlled a country of millions, but the staff and volunteers would fight over whatever the station did control just as tenaciously as if it was a large country of millions, and would intrigue and scheme and complexly maneuver as if cabinet posts and dachas and nuclear weapons were at stake...

But what was really at stake was Air Time. Air Time is a special thing when it Belongs to You, when you sit in the chair in the on-air studio and for 60 or 180 or 240 minutes have absolute power over everything that people hear on that bandwidth, and people know your name, and they know your music, you are an absolute monarch and the listeners are your honored guests and the musicians are your glittering courtiers that you call up at will, to entertain your guests...well, obviously it's good for the ego.

I'm not saying it's a bad way to be, to love the Air Time. It takes a certain personality to really love it, to love the absolute control and the attention and to pour everything they've got into those 180 minutes to make it as perfect as it can possibly be, and it just so happens that those kind of personalities don't get along with each other or usually anyone else. They especially don't get along with anyone who tries to tell them what to do with their 180 minutes of absolute monarchy, ie the staff.

I myself experienced the rush of Air Time on a few rare occasions. Many things had to go wrong before I would be shoved into the studio; the usual program host would call in sick or drunk or confused, which happened fairly often, and if Stan had some time, usually at least a day but sometimes only a few hours, he would call his usual reliable substitutes, volunteers with flexible jobs or no jobs or who had no show and would take any opportunity to get on air or who were just good soldiers and soft touches and really wanted to help him out of a jam, and if that small handful of reliables every once in while failed him and then he would ask Annette the PA Director and if she had meetings he would with an extremely sour look on his face go in an do the show himself and on the rare occasions that everyone was gone Stan would poke his head into my office and with his voice cracking with weariness and strain and on the brink of quitting he would say; "You feel like doing Global Gumbo?"

And a part of me would weep and another part would secretly revel in the glory until about two songs into my stint I would realize with 40 seconds to go in the second song that I had no idea of what to play next and then I had to go on air and then the phone would ring and at that point I would surrender the glory and begin methodically searching the world music CDs on the rack for long tracks, the longer the better, that I could use to fill the time and establish a calming space for myself to enjoy the show without having to open and close the CD players and fiddle with the switches on the big board every two minutes like you have to do when you fall prey to the cursed 3 minute track rule of Good Radio Programming that the staff teaches to all the new young volunteer djs because they're suckers! After a while I began to relish the opportunity of creating the Perfect Global Gumbo program, consisting of eight 15 minute tracks by Krishna Das or David Arkenstone with some Peruvian flutes thrown in for variety.

We had years of staff solidarity after Linda and Bart had been driven out, and the krcl board members were our friends and fellow-travelers and sometimes difficult to tell from volunteers. This was the Old Board I'm talking about, very similar to the High Elves from the First Age of Middle Earth, the aging hippies who started the station and were still around and still on the board 20 years later and remembered Betty back when she was just another staff flunky.

For Example. At one point or another Betty decided to put the kibosh on a monthly live-remote that the station did from a local bar ("private club for members and their guests," in on-air speak). I'd helped with the remote a couple times and enjoyed it because I never had to do anything but help Brad, (name changed) one of the engineers, with the equipment and Brad didn't need any help with the equipment so I didn't really have to do anything but watch Brad work and then sit with Brad and eat free bar food with him and try to shout conversation at each other over whatever live music we were broadcasting that night. I enjoyed helping until for a reason which I'm ashamed to say I've completely forgotten, I had a falling out with the owner of the club, the man who'd provided the free food. Anyway, for a while we didn't speak to each other and when he'd come strolling into the station with his miserable little monthly donation that was far less than the business we'd provided him with the free advertising, he'd do so in stony silence, and I would receive the payment without thanks.

This feud had nothing to do with Betty's decision, I'm sorry to say. She just thought he should be buying underwriting or paying more or something, I didn't really pay attention. She took the issue to the Old Board, and angered many members of the greater KRCL community, who waxed very poetic about all that the live broadcasts - from that particular bar in particular - had done for Utah and humanity and civilization in general. And no one waxed more rhapsodic and poetical than the owner of the bar, who happened to have many friends on the Old Board, and who had actually once been a member of the board. And Betty suffered an adverse vote. The live remotes continued.

Betty took the adverse vote to heart, to a degree that surprised me - she described it as if it had been a physical beating. It was to be the last adverse vote she would endure from the Old Board or any board. Steps were taken, Term limits introduced. The Old Board voted itself wearily, gratefully, out of existence, and joined Gandalf on his faire Elvishe boate, which did gentlye sail out of the intermountain West.

The Staff vs. Board fight thus eventually ended with the Board conceding greater disinterest, leaving the Staff to fight the Volunteers, and some of the staff to fight some others of the staff, and some of the volunteers to join some of the staff when fighting other staff but not the staff person they happened to be auditioning with for a weekend slot, and some of the volunteers to fight other of the volunteers especially the volunteer whose show had followed theirs for ten years and who they had had to see every week and use the microphone right after and who left their CDs and crap everywhere and who therefore they didn't talk to and hadn't spoken to for years of coming in every week and not talking to in icey silence for so long that there were armed guards and dogs and electrified fences and searchlights along the boarder between the two programs and any incursion of even 20 seconds or so of one program into the time slot of the other resulted in alarms and lights and exchange of gunfire and tanks rolling and generals dragged out of bed and hysterical phone calls to the president from submarines and secret airbases.

All of which made for great stories at the staff meetings, with Annette doing her dead-on imitations of preposterously outraged volunteers and Stan and Betty and Barbara and Anita and I howling with laughter and shaking our heads sadly and rolling our eyes heavenward over those crazy feisty volunteers...

Until the staff itself began to grow increasingly impatient with Betty's long-time monopoly of power, and began to complain to each other and intrigue and rage impotently, like heirs of some rich miserable old miser who've put up with the old man for years in the common belief that he can't last much longer until they start to notice the wrinkles in their own reflections and each wonder my god am I going to spend my whole life waiting for him to drop? And staff groups formed and re-formed and drove a Development Director out and people began to quit and the staff complained to the board president and he wept and shook his fist at the sky and said something would be done and the board, which had long since been effectively gelded and could no more remove Betty than a bunch of Cardinals could remove the Pope, met with Betty and advised her to be more careful about who she hired in the future...

At some point in all this intrigue I realized that I was actually not Kruschev, I was in fact a spy, a double-agent working among these commies and talking about peace and flowers and world socialist utopia, yuck yuck yuck, oh those aging hippies, and then going off to report their plans and secret codes and military numbers to my secret masters in some secret base underground somewhere...

Even if I had no secret masters in a secret base I could still be a spy and make careful reports of everything I saw in the hopes that someday highly-developed super-wise beings would come along who would find my notebook and peruse the reports and use the knowledge gained therein to take over all the community radio stations and lead the country and the world into an era of peace and cultural awakening through community-supported local media outlets...

Crisis Resolved: I got another job and thereafter interacted with my friends from the station in a more relaxed and carefree manner without having to spy on them.

Crisis 5: Stress-Related Weight Gain (From 6 Crises: Memoirs of a Membership Coordinator)

I gained a tremendous amount of stress-related weight while I worked at the station, not because I had a stressful job, which I didn't, but because of my stressful personal financial situation, from which the job at the station became a gentle refuge where I often fantasized about sleeping in the premium closet and stowing my clothes in one of the boxes in the upstairs office and saving on rent.

I seriously considered this move for a while (and I wouldn't have been the first staff member or volunteer to live at the station, not by any means) but never acted on the impulse because the late night shows were so loud and because even when I wasn't living at the station I tended to keep a lot of my things there, in the premium closet; coats, a change of shoes, a laminating machine, prints, a supply of magnets, photo paper; card-tables; the old 10 x 10 canopy and frame that I used to vend my wares at art festivals - essentially the entire infrastructure of my personal art business, and people would often ask me suspiciously if I was living at the station when I wasn't and I realized that it would give me no satisfaction to begin living at the station when everyone thought I already lived at the station.

At the time I began at KRCL I'd been living in a friend's apartment downtown while he roamed the country in search of a woman. It was a temporary situation because with his looks and charm and funky car it was only a matter of time before he found one, and then he would return in triumph and I'd have to vacate the apartment and move on, which is what eventually happened, and I had to move in with another friend and her 17 dogs in a tiny house out by the freeway. Then I moved again, back in with my parents', which is a wonderful place to live if you want to save money because you pay no rent and can't go on dates.

Eventually I moved out of my parents' house amidst the tears of my beloved mother into a room in a house in Sugarhouse and all this moving combined with my complete financial collapse and all the free food I horked during the Radiothons induced a great deal of stress-related weight gain and my health began to fail but I managed to stem the tide temporarily by eating only one dinner per night, but that only slowed down my inevitable physical collapse, and I went from stealing Large t-shirts from the premium closet to stealing XLs, to the sober contemplation if never actually actualizing the possibility of stealing XXLs.

At which point I felt ashamed and thought of all those people who'd actually donated money to wear those t-shirts and had looked so proud and happy when they'd come by to pick up their t-shirt because we'd never sent it to them in the mail like the phone answerer who'd taken their pledge at the radiothon had promised they would. And when they'd come in and tell me that I'd shake my head sadly and look at my computer and frown with concentration and smile ruefully and suggest something to the effect that the wonderful people who came in to answer the station's phones during Radiothon hadn't checked the right box on the pledge form and it couldn't be helped because they were fantastic radio activists and we loved them like family but they were so wiggy from all the drugs they'd ingested in their youth that it was a miracle if they managed to put even one legible piece of crazily scrawled data where it belonged on our unavoidably complex pledge forms.

Speaking of pledge forms: At some point in my KRCL career I'd gotten a little wiggy myself from Doctor Pepper or Diet Coke in the vending machine, and I'd actually volunteered to be the one to design the radiothon pledge forms for some Radiothon and ended up doing it every Radiothon thereafter. I began the task believing that I could make those radiothon pledge forms, which the phone answerers filled out when taking pledges during radiothons, so simple and easy to follow that even if one of our on-air volunteers stumbled by accident into the green room during the fundraiser and answered one of the phones, they could milk all necessary data necessary from the caller and record it by following the natural flow of the boxes and arrows and bold-lettered statements on the form with unswerving obediance.

It never entirely worked. I began by boldly slashing at the form template with a red pen, eliminating all sorts of wasteful fields like the "have you donated before?" box, and enlarging necessary boxes and embolding the scripted parts like "Is your Mommy home? Do you have her credit card?" so that the phone answerer's eye would be drawn and their mouth impelled to speak what had been written.
But I ran into trouble when I brought the rough draft to staff meetings and asked for imput and Betty would try to add thank-you gifts and Stan would add address fields and Carlita (name changed, actually applies to three different Business Managers who held the jobs at different times during my term) would fret over the credit card info and try to put in all sorts of tiny little check boxes for installments and special codes and actual names on the cards and will this card really go through? and Annette (name changed) would offer some completely bizarre suggestion or not even pay any attention to the form at all depending on her mood, and I would pound the table and demand total obedience to my form and say that the whole point was that the form should be simple and stay the same every radiothon so people would learn it - and Betty would try to trump me by saying that if I really wanted the form to be used the way I wanted I should train the office managers which meant that I would have to attend the office manager meeting which she knew I most certainly would not do.

Eventually I would be defeated and they would get some of their changes and we'd change the form and get it re-printed just in time for the radiothon's first day to end, by which time the true radiothon pain had begun for everyone because months before the radiothon I'd say we couldn't add any thank-you gifts after I'd printed out all the cards for the thank-you gifts on the day before the radiothon began, because it took too long to re-print the cards and I'd have to add thank-you gifts to the database system but first I'd have to add the thank-you gift codes to the database system and by the time I reached that point in the explanation I'd get impatient and throw up my hands to heaven and say; "It's just too hard! We can't do it!"

So everyone on staff would agree and nod their heads sagely and Betty would tell me, sternly, not to let people talk me into adding thank-you gifts after the radiothon had begun. "You tell them no," she'd say to me, wagging her finger. And everyone would agree and on the day before radiothon I'd print out the cards, and usually end up re-printing the cards, and finding some number codes doubled up, and re-printing, and then realizing that I hadn't counted the codes correctly and now I had too many of one number and none of the other, and re-printing, and I'd usually stay up until 9 pm or even 10pm on Friday night before the Radiothon...

And the next day the Radiothon began, and by the time I dragged myself to the station at 11 or so and the radiothon had been going for hours the panic had begun to set in, the first show hadn't made goal, and nobody could find the cards and Betty would come running to me and ask me where where the thank-you gift cards...
"We had to write some up for the book-set"
"For what?" I'd cry.
"Gene brought some book-sets to give away. Don't worry, we won't give them a number so it won't offset your...'system'" and as Betty would say 'system' she'd make quotes in the air and cross her eyes like to say "Coo-koo! You and your crazy system!"
And I'd find all these cards that Betty had cut out from construction paper with strange numbers and codes that had nothing to do with the cards produced by the database, and then Betty would tell me she'd already used the concert tickets that they'd set aside for the afternoon program, so we'd have to use the ski passes that she'd gotten in the mail this morning, and I'd pound the table and complain and weep but the radiothon had begun, and Betty had that sharp, focused but deep-within-herself look in her eye, like a cougar chasing a rabbit out onto a highway and never even registering the semi bearing down on it because the rabbit was right out there only a few paces away, almost within chomping distance, so sweet and white and succulent...

And everyone on staff would have the same look in their eye as one show followed another with their financial goals and nervous volunteer host who'd been reassured over and over again that radiothon totals would not effect the status of their show but that everyone had to pull together and a few months before they'd yanked the global music because it was struggling and nobody listened and it never got any pledges at radiothon anyway, and so the host and the staff would beg and implore people to call in with pledges and the hours would go by and they hadn't got hardly any calls at all and maybe they should offer one of the ski passes or maybe a CD set, Yes! A 3-CD set, what a brainstorm, that would work! And the staff would run into the on-air booth where the volunteer sat sweating and directing nervous jerky glances at the clock and trying to look calm and they'd tell the desperate, imploring volunteer that they were gonna pitch 3-CD sets and that would get the calls rolling in!

And above the on-air booth and miles away in perspective I'd be sitting in the Development office and Betty or Stan or Anne or Carlita would bring up a wild tangle of pledge cards stained with coffee and smuged inkstains and tell me they'd offered a 3-CD set, or a rope-tow, or a wooden flute, or a tye-dyed parachute, and written it on the form itself because they ran out of construction paper to make cards, and don't worry about mailing it because the volunteer host offered, on-air, to bring the gift to the donor's house next week (Sometimes they forgot). And from my peaceful aerie above I'd shake my head sadly and roll my eyes and ponder the sterile beauty of the original conception of my pledge form and the carefully numbered cardstock thank-you gift cards I'd printed and wonder what in the hell people were getting too down there...I usually listened to CDs up in the office, so I wouldn't be disturbed by the desperate pitching on-air...

Every once in a while I'd saunter down and cast a quick, shuddering glance at the motley group of phone answerers they'd dragged in from some lunatic commune south of Price, and then at the frenzied, sweating pitch-coordinator and volunteer host through the door of the on-air studio, then I'd hurry back to the kitchen before anyone saw me, on a quick foraging mission for any stray doughnuts and soft drinks and maybe leftovers from the free lunch or dinners that were provided for the whole Radiothon...

Crisis Resolved:
I suffered a number of existential panic attacks which frightened me into cutting back on the food and drink because I thought they might be heart attacks even though doctors told me they weren't heart attacks. And I ran so low on money that I had to stop eating at Wendy's for lunch. Everyone remarked on the weight loss and asked me how I did it and I told them I took pills.

Interlude II: Selected Staff Meeting Notes 2003 (From 6 Crises; Memoirs of a Membership Coordinator)

Crisis 4: People Keep Bugging Me (From 6 Crises; Memoirs of a Membership Coordinator)

One of the more negative aspects of a Membership Coordinator's job is other people; other staff members, mainly, but also sometimes the on-air guests who come in through the wrong door; ie the office door, ie the door by my office - instead of the right door, ie the back door, ie the door I never have to see or think about.

I made it a point to be as rude and unhelpful as possible to any musicians who came in through the office door - I despise musicians generally, they tend to be completely uninteresting in person and would always, always, ask to use the bathroom and when I would direct them to the bathroom on the other side of the building - the public bathroom - they would inevitably stop and use the private bathroom, the bathroom two steps from my office door, the staff bathroom, operated and maintained by the Membership Department - MY bathroom; my refuge, Fortress of Solitude, Sancta Sanctorum...One of the main reasons I stayed at the station as long as I did.

But that was the permanent new station, not the temporary new station, which had only one bathroom except for the secret bathroom upstairs that only myself and the homeless fellows who rented the personal storage units ever used. They often used the station's bathroom, downstairs, because the storage facility and the station shared a hallway and when Annabelle (name changed, I think, because I can't remember her actual name) the manager of the storage facility and the building as a whole would hand the fellows the keys to the secret bathroom upstairs they would walk down the hall and turn right and at that point her detailed instructions to them for reaching the upstairs secret bathroom probably got a little murky in their poor addled heads because the station's bathroom was actually on the route to the secret bathroom...so they usually stopped and used the station's bathroom...And often locked the door behind them when they left...So that often we on staff thought that someone was using it when someone wasn't...

But to be honest, the bathroom situation at the temporary new station was an improvement over the bathroom situation at the old permanent station on 8th South, because at the old permanent station we shared a bathroom with Community Action Program (name not changed, I think). Actually, we didn't share a bathroom with CAP because they used their own restrooms inside their offices - they let us use their client bathroom - so we shared a bathroom with the CAP's clients, which were predominantly homeless people. So you can see why I loved the Membership Bathroom in the permanent new station, and called it my preeeesssshusss, and why I hated it when Musicians used it.

But on to the crisis, beginning at the temporary new station and continuing at the permanent new station, wherein my boss, Betty (name changed) became obsessed with the time I came in to work every day, and brought it up every time we met to evaluate my job performance and come to think of it every staff meeting. We both agonized over it. She would bring it up and I would shake my head sadly and she would ask impertinent questions about my personal wake up rituals and I would make up things to tell her about them and shake my head sadly and she would say that bosses out in the Real World weren't as lenient about tardiness as we were here at Hippy Central, and I would shake my head sadly and wonder where she thought I'd been getting my paychecks from before I started working at Hippy Central.

Of course, if I looked deeply within myself, and I often did during private moments (see sancta sanctorum, notes, above), and looked my inner self squarely in the eye and told myself what I thought and asked my inner self how that sat with him, I would realize that I never came to work on time because I never got up in the morning on time, and I never got up on time because I kept myself up for hours with my nighttime rituals but also because also because I didn't want to get up on time because I hated most of my job...

IE everything but the radio spots I got to voice and write, of which we only did 5 or 6 a year but into which 300 to 360 seconds of on-air announcement time per year I would put about 95.5% of the total mental effort I put into my job per year -

Every 6 months Betty would bring up the pre-thon mailings and tell Stan we had to do a promo, and Stan would ask me if I wanted to write a promo, knowing that he recorded about ten announcements every day, for various programs and public service announcements and underwriting announcements and was always asking different volunteers to come in and voice them, and I would say yes, kind of off-handedly, like I'd try to fit it in...

And then I'd fret and think about it, and try to think about other things, and then after a few weeks, and after Stan had recorded about 100 little 60 second announcements since he'd asked me to write the one promo, he'd come to me and ask me if I'd written the promo and I'd say it was mostly done and he'd say we had to record it that morning and I'd tell him I had to finish it and we'd have to do it tomorrow and he'd say no, we had to do it that morning and I'd pound my desk and curse him and plead for more time and he'd say after lunch was fine...

And I'd begin writing and re-writing the one-page of dialogue and re-think it, and erase it all and re-write it again, and by 2:30 that afternoon Stan would saunter by my office and tell me we had to record it and I'd say it wasn't done and he'd say "just bring what you got" and we'd go back to the recording studio and he'd look at the print-outs that had my little hand-written notes all over them and he'd frown and say; "I can't read this...what's this?" And I'd try to re-write a few lines there in the room and Stan would look at it again and frown and shake his head and look at his watch and roll his eyes and tell me to get behind the mic and ask me to read some of it and I would and he would look more and more perplexed and finally curse; "Someone's been messing around with my levels again!"

And he'd curse the nameless volunteer who'd fiddled with the dial that had a sticky-note written by Stan on it that said "Do Not Touch This Dial" and he'd stand up and fiddle with another control thingy and sit down and ask me to say something into the mic again and I would and he'd look at his watch and finally shrug and go out of the room and shout up into the Development Office for Cathy and she would say; "Is it ready?" because she knew nothing was really written and he'd tell her we were ready and she'd come down and she'd read her part with high energy and enthusiasm and I'd kind of mumble and Stan would frown and adjust his knobs and tell us to go again and Cathy would look pissed and shout her stuff and I would ponder the nuances of the script that I hadn't really written and try to bring some real feeling to the whole idea of a person asking someone else for a pre-thon donation and Stan would tell us to do it again and again, and Cathy would look pissed and just kind of mumble her part and look at me confused and ask what the point was and we'd have an argument and Stan would roll his eyes and look at his watch and then he'd just say; "that's fine. But mention the address."

And I'd curse and plead and pound the table in the studio and say the address wasn't important, so Stan would record Cathy mumbling the address, and then I'd have a fantastic idea for a joke, and write the joke at the end, and describe it to Stan and Cathy, and we'd record the joke at the end, and Stan would scowl and tell us we were two seconds over and I'd curse and plead and pound the table and say the two seconds weren't important and Stan would look mortally and permanently offended at the notion that he would personally as a radio professional ever stoop to engineering a 62-second radio announcement, the sloppiness of it would revolt him like a turd in his hat and he would sooner die than put it on...

And he'd poke around with the sound file, and have me re-record some of it, and then Cathy would look at her watch and say she had to go and I'd plead with her to stay and she'd leave and Stan would roll his eyes and tell me he had to cut the punchline of the joke, which would make the joke not a joke and I'd throw my hands up to heaven to plead with Jesus to come down and denounce him before all the angels and plead and pound the table and he'd tell me it didn't matter because I'd mumbled the punchline anyway and then he'd suggest another joke and I'd wince and suggest something else that would add ten seconds to the running time and there was just no possible way and I'd suggest we re-record and we'd fumble around and I'd begin to see spots and experience angina symptoms and claw at the studio door like a trapped animal and then Stan would shrug and say he'd slap something together and tell me I could go and I'd wring my hands and look at him suspiciously and try to see what he was doing and he'd get annoyed and tell me it was fine...

And later by 5:00 or so after I'd hung around the studio door trying to mentally disassociate myself from the announcement and hope I never heard it played on air Stan would call me in to listen to it and it would be so altered from the original script that I'd seriously wonder about Stan's sanity or my sanity and I'd stare at the crumbled, damp scraps of the script in my hand and avoid Stan's eyes while it played and try not to say how much I hated it, and Stan would shake his head and tell me it was funny, especially the part before the joke, and he'd go back in the studio to slap together about 15 underwriting announcements before he went home, and I'd stagger back to my office and Cathy would come by and ask me if I'd put the mailing together and I'd tell her no because I was a broken man and couldn't possibly try to fiddle around with that damn database program at the moment and she'd look pissed and frustrated and near tears and stomp back up to her office on the second floor, and two weeks later we'd record another one and then I'd take a welcome rest for 6 months before the next Radiothon.

Crisis Resolved: Betty told me that my shift was now 9:30 to 5:30 instead of 9 to 5, and after this move I was seldom more than 15 minutes late.

Crisis 3: No One is Nurturing My Personal Creative Vision (From 6 Crises; Memoirs of a Membership Coordinator)

We moved to the temporary new station on 500 West by the Homeless Shelter sometime in 1999, I think. I'm a bit hazy on exact dates, but I think it must have been 1999 because I think the tornado that wrecked the Sun and attacked the Delta Center (In Vain, Unbelievers!) occurred in 1999.

I remember the day well, and as a fascinating digression I will tell the tale of my own brush with the Power of Nature embodied by the human fear reponse: That day I walked out the front door of the station and down the stairs into the tiny parking lot that had been fenced off from the gigantic parking lots used by our neighbors and walked to my car. I think I may have been retrieving my lunch or some change or something. As I walked to my car I noticed that there seemed to be a bit of wind, and rather large bits of garbage, papers and leaves and such blowing around in our parking lot.
I glanced across 5th West at the Homeless Shelter, where you could sometimes see the fellows wandering around in the small bit of lawn under the grim blank wall that was the west side of the Shelter on the other side of the street. There were a few trees growing in that bit of lawn, against the side of the wall, under which the fellows at times reposed.
As I looked, I noticed that the trees were swaying back and forth in the wind with a surprising radius and speed of motion for plants of that size and wooden firmness, and then observed one of the trees falling all the way over onto a car parked at the side of the lawn.
Somewhat startled by this, and noticing a great deal of movement to my left, I turned my head north to observe a maelstrom of flying pieces of garbage of unusual size and disturbing heft right across 200 West not a few dozen yards away from me...
I have no memory of running back up the steps and through the front doors of the station and all the way down the long hallway by the admin offices and around the bathroom and down the rest of the long hallway past the green room all the way to the break room about a half mile into the building in about 2.5 seconds, but I must have done that because that's where I came to my senses as I hyperventilated out of my system whatever ancient, potent hormones had gripped my brain and energized my legs, now shaking and weak from the effort of carrying my 240 pound frame at near Olympic speed out of harm's way.

Also sometime in 1999, right before the Spring radiothon, an ugly financial crisis had reared its head, and the board had complained and Bart, the GM, had resigned, and the board had made Betty the GM, and Linda had resigned, and Betty had made Cathy (name changed) the Development Director and my boss. I approved of these changes, even though I liked Bart a lot. He'd been suspicious of me, but I tend to judge other people solely on their quality as entertainment, and Bart had been terrifically entertaining for me personally, taking me into his office for long rambling discussions, taking me and other staffers to a local bar that offered a "Lingerie Lunch" (I won't describe it), and enthusiastically complimenting me for my new haircut (shaved my head for various personal reasons, but I averred it was in admiration for his own shiny pate).

Later on, the board treasurer, Natalya (name changed) discovered after much investigation the whereabouts of a not-insignificant amount of money (about 10% the station's operating budget) that had been mis-laid. This considerably improved the station's financial outlook, and gave Betty quite a boost at the beginning of her tenure as GM, but Natalya convinced the rest of the board that the GM - or any one person - should not have sign-off authority for checks on the station's account. This meant that all checks - and staff paychecks - required two signatures, and meant that at least once every two weeks someone from staff, often myself, had to drive around town looking for a board member to sign some checks. I'm sure that Betty regarded this as a somewhat obnoxious degree of oversight - I certainly did because I hated driving around after people, and felt she was being punished for the mistakes of previous GMs.
Since then, with experience with other non-profits, I have come to see the wisdom in this level of board oversight. No GM or Exec. Director should ever have single-signing authority over checks drawn from donated funds. But at the time it was a pain in the bum.

I also experienced in 1999 another of my periodic spasms of anguish over my rights to creative expression in the workplace. By which I mean I didn't like my job duties, which I've already described, and wanted the opportunity to "create", as they call it in school. I don't think I voiced these desires to anyone else on staff, choosing to express my restlessness and discontent by pretending to sleep during staff meetings and hiding the windex from a certain OCD volunteer who'd called me "an insect" when I'd walked into the on-air studio during her show.

Crisis Resolved:

I experienced the ego-fulfillment and narcissistic joy of hearing my voice on the radio, begging for listener money in 60 second spots engineered by Stan and conceived by Cathy as an attempt to increase mail-in donations by casting me myself as a bumbling but loveable, heart-in-the-right-place type of character that I found hilarious until I realized that nobody thought of it as a "character" as in something made up. Then I stopped finding it hilarious, but I kept doing the spots, and I finally understood the people you see on TV and in sporting events that dress in the funny animal suits and jump on little trampolines and don't seem to ever understand or maybe care how despised they are because no one sees your face.